It's midnight. The light's been out for over an hour when we realize that none of us are able to sleep in the steaminess of our room in Bako National Park. Lev resurrects the ghost of Aruba (oooooooo!) and thwacks me in the face with a pillow. Z mumbles something and pretends that he's actually been able to sleep. I give up and take a sleeping pill. They lie awake until the storm breaks with (purportedly) torrential rain; I hear nothing.
I wake up a little before 8:00 feeling refreshed. Z and Lev are not so thrilled to greet the new day. I help Lev out of bed by putting a large, black, leggy insect on his pillow right next to his face. It does wonders.
We pack up and head to breakfast as the sky above us rumbles and drips. As we eat, a bearded pig does laps around the cafeteria. They are large beasts resembling dwarf bison that have somehow managed to get the contents of a can of salmon catfood stuck to their faces - their noses are pink, drastically bare compared to the hairiness of their faces, and tubular. And almost prehensile. In a word: strange.
It's low tide, so we walk a long way out to our boat, across mudflats crawling with a variety of crabs and some kind of worm in a round shell that flops around looking exactly like a caricature of large sperm. The sky is immense and grey over water that is flat and grey-green. It's hard to tell where sky and water meet. Thunder rolls from the green cloaked mountains across the sea. It begins to rain, big juicy drops that quickly soak us as we motor back to the bus stop.
The bus stop stinks. I can't see what it is that we're sitting next to, but I'm pretty sure it's been there a long time. Back in Kuching we check into the hotel with the fantastic showers and go out to eat. I get "fast food", otherwise known as buffet: a combination of coconut chicken with Indian spices and crisply cooked Chinese-style vegetables. I love Malaysia's international approach to cuisine.
After lunch, we set off in search of souvenirs and a taxi. The clouds have cleared and the temperature has soared. We find the latter, piloted by a man named Chin Chin Min, who has a triangular face and crinkled eyes. He takes us to Semonggok wildlife refuge. As we pass through the gates it begins to pour. And I mean POUR. We sit under an awning and wait for 3:00pm to arrive: Orang Utan feeding time. The world's most boring public speaker gives us a pianissimo introduction to the Park and its inhabitants. He says things like, "It's very dangerous to have [mumble mumble mumble] so be careful of the [mumble mumble mumble] and whatever you do, don't [mumble mumble mumble]." It's a very instructive speech.
After a short walk through dripping jungle, we see an Orang Utan. He is big and, we later learn, named Josh. After gorging on papaya, oranges and bananas, he lazily leaves the platform by deftly climbing a rope and swinging from vine to vine. He seems too big to achieve such quietly graceful movements.
Back at the hotel, we all fall asleep, naps punctuated by three really loud explosions. Perhaps someone is holding a microphone to a backfiring tailpipe? Or are they mining right outside our window? When I get up I check: No, Kuching is not on fire.
We splurge on a great meal and a bottle of wine that is not made from banana or papaya. Lev orders the organic chicken and is served an entire chicken in a delicious tandoori-like sauce. My lemongrass chicken comes with a mound of vegetables including broccoli. How I have missed broccoli! We finish with mud cake the ingredients of which are chocolate, chocolate, chocolate and chocolate. In chocolate sauce.
Suitably junked up on sugar, we head to a bar. It's ladies night: yay, free drinks! But, boo, apparently only if you're Asian. They try to charge me about $4 for half a glass of tonic that was held next to a bottle of gin. I try to send it back; they relent and give it to me for free.
We sit and try to figure out the social dynamics of the bar. We fail. No matter what we do, we are apparently doing it wrong. I dance anyway, and slowly as everyone in the bar gets more drunk, they loosen up. Soon I have not one, not two, but three stumblingly drunk women grinding themselves against me. I extricate myself and we move to another section of the bar where the women are able to stay on their feet without grabbing on to me. The music is a mix of Chinese pop, Bollywood, and 80's & 90's hits. I figure out the dancing rules: Grab and grind. There are no introductions; all those people I thought were couples have probably only just met. It's like 10th grade all over again.
And that is how the day ends: me and Lev sweatily dancing in a packed nightclub on Borneo. I just have to laugh at the absurdity of it all. This is my life.
May 28, 2006
May 12, 2006
May 04, 2006
A Slice of Pai
I'm sitting in an internet cafe under a fan, sweating like a pig. That's because it's 39C - inside, under the fan! It's gotta be well over 40C on the street.
It cooled down here for a while when Cyclone Mala stirred up weather in the Bay of Bengal causing a grey and intermittently raining sky to settle over the Pai valley. On the evening of the second full day of rain, a globular insect with flapping lacy wings hatched. Swarms of them filled our room, appearing from nowhere. They flew down my shirt and got tangled in my hair as we hurridly hung our mosquito net. A big, spotted gecko set up shop outside our bathroom window, grabbing excitedly at insects on both sides of the screen. At dinner, the chair by the light remained unoccupied - the air around it frothed with life. Nearby, frogs, toads and geckos chirrupped drunkenly. And then, as suddenly as they appeared, the insects were gone, though their brown winged carcasses littered our bathroom for days afterwards until the ants carried away those I hadn't managed to wash down the drain.
The rain cooled everything down and made the earth smell like it was growing. The river rose, the sandbanks disappeared, and we sat inside playing cards, reading, eating pad thai and discussing whether the clouds on the horizon were dark enough to signal rain or light enough to signal a break in the weather. Break it eventually did, with a spectacular day of brilliant blue sky and skudding puffy white clouds. The blue was so blue it hurt the eyes, and yet the clouds kept the sun from heating everything up excessively. That was a few days ago. Now we have flown rapidly past excessive heat and are into a whole other category of hot. Hot wind. Hot ground. Hot bicyle seat. It's even hot under a fan with a watermelon shake in hand. Everything's hot - it's the Grand Unified Theory of Hot.
I rode home last night at about 11:30. Riding fast, the warm air felt comfortably cool against my skin. I rounded a corner onto our street and was caressed by the scent of jasmine. In the sky, a yellowing crescent moon sank through a patch of wispy clouds. I was so carried away by the beauty of the moment that I barely managed to swerve in time to avoid riding over the flat and very dry toad that's been sitting in the middle of our street for days.
And that's what life is like. Beautiful this, beautiful that - and mind the dead toad.
It cooled down here for a while when Cyclone Mala stirred up weather in the Bay of Bengal causing a grey and intermittently raining sky to settle over the Pai valley. On the evening of the second full day of rain, a globular insect with flapping lacy wings hatched. Swarms of them filled our room, appearing from nowhere. They flew down my shirt and got tangled in my hair as we hurridly hung our mosquito net. A big, spotted gecko set up shop outside our bathroom window, grabbing excitedly at insects on both sides of the screen. At dinner, the chair by the light remained unoccupied - the air around it frothed with life. Nearby, frogs, toads and geckos chirrupped drunkenly. And then, as suddenly as they appeared, the insects were gone, though their brown winged carcasses littered our bathroom for days afterwards until the ants carried away those I hadn't managed to wash down the drain.
The rain cooled everything down and made the earth smell like it was growing. The river rose, the sandbanks disappeared, and we sat inside playing cards, reading, eating pad thai and discussing whether the clouds on the horizon were dark enough to signal rain or light enough to signal a break in the weather. Break it eventually did, with a spectacular day of brilliant blue sky and skudding puffy white clouds. The blue was so blue it hurt the eyes, and yet the clouds kept the sun from heating everything up excessively. That was a few days ago. Now we have flown rapidly past excessive heat and are into a whole other category of hot. Hot wind. Hot ground. Hot bicyle seat. It's even hot under a fan with a watermelon shake in hand. Everything's hot - it's the Grand Unified Theory of Hot.
I rode home last night at about 11:30. Riding fast, the warm air felt comfortably cool against my skin. I rounded a corner onto our street and was caressed by the scent of jasmine. In the sky, a yellowing crescent moon sank through a patch of wispy clouds. I was so carried away by the beauty of the moment that I barely managed to swerve in time to avoid riding over the flat and very dry toad that's been sitting in the middle of our street for days.
And that's what life is like. Beautiful this, beautiful that - and mind the dead toad.
May 02, 2006
The Memoir I Didn't Write
I just finished a book called All the Fishes Come Home to Roost. It's the memoir of a girl who is moved to an ashram in India when she is 7 years old. Both Z and I got a little creeped out by how similar it was to my own life. Her parents even considered naming her Arwen Evenstar, settling on an unpronounceable Indian name instead. Lucky me, I got both! Perhaps smarter than me, the author opted to change her name.
It's certainly been an interesting read. I've been thinking a lot about what it was that the ashram wanted us to believe and what I actually do believe. Realizing that it was all about relinquishing this material and illusory world in the pursuit of a higher plane of existence explains the poverty that I grew up in. Things like gym shoes and jeans didn't matter, but chanting every morning did, even if it made me late for school.
Some of the things Rachel writes about could have been lifted straight from my past: Accounts of spiritual experiences via a guru's photograph; plays full of humor usually involving people dressed in drag; endless cheek-pinching; interpreting all events as the will of someone; drinking water by pouring it from cup into mouth without touching lips to rim; and parents who were no longer speaking to one another.
There are some notable ways in which I had it much, much better than Rachel. For example, I had other children to play with, and I didn't have to attend a Catholic school full of abusive teachers. Also unlike Rachel, my time in India was full of freedom. My days were mainly my own, and Mum tells stories of me not coming back to the room until after 10:00pm, ridiculously late for a 7yo. I guess I ran a little wild.
And yet, in the background was the ashram and those beliefs. How did washing a statue bring someone closer to god? And waving lights at a chair with a photo on it? Z says that he feels like he has no idea what my upbringing was like; I guess I'm a little lost as well. I was involved until I was about 18, and yet have a really hard time describing Siddha Yoga when asked. Like most religions, I feel that it had a great heart but poor execution. (Another similarity with Rachel's story: Siddha Yoga claims not to be a relgion but a "practice".) Devotees obsessed about things that just didn't matter, that were beside the point, like how many times to wave the tray during puja.
In the end, I'm left with a low-level frustration with all things ashram. I don't know what it was all about, I no longer believe any of it, and yet it did form me, my beliefs and my childhood reality. I wish I had been clever enough to question it at the time; perhaps that would have resulted in more immediate answers. Now it's like assembling a jigsaw puzzle in which the pieces are my quirks and beliefs, but the picture was lost long ago.
So if you, like Z, are curious about my upbringing, I recommend reading All the Fishes Come Home to Roost. Subtract the abuse and about two thirds of the really freakish characters and you get a good approximation of what my childhood was like. Even I have to remind myself that it really was that weird.
It's certainly been an interesting read. I've been thinking a lot about what it was that the ashram wanted us to believe and what I actually do believe. Realizing that it was all about relinquishing this material and illusory world in the pursuit of a higher plane of existence explains the poverty that I grew up in. Things like gym shoes and jeans didn't matter, but chanting every morning did, even if it made me late for school.
Some of the things Rachel writes about could have been lifted straight from my past: Accounts of spiritual experiences via a guru's photograph; plays full of humor usually involving people dressed in drag; endless cheek-pinching; interpreting all events as the will of someone; drinking water by pouring it from cup into mouth without touching lips to rim; and parents who were no longer speaking to one another.
There are some notable ways in which I had it much, much better than Rachel. For example, I had other children to play with, and I didn't have to attend a Catholic school full of abusive teachers. Also unlike Rachel, my time in India was full of freedom. My days were mainly my own, and Mum tells stories of me not coming back to the room until after 10:00pm, ridiculously late for a 7yo. I guess I ran a little wild.
And yet, in the background was the ashram and those beliefs. How did washing a statue bring someone closer to god? And waving lights at a chair with a photo on it? Z says that he feels like he has no idea what my upbringing was like; I guess I'm a little lost as well. I was involved until I was about 18, and yet have a really hard time describing Siddha Yoga when asked. Like most religions, I feel that it had a great heart but poor execution. (Another similarity with Rachel's story: Siddha Yoga claims not to be a relgion but a "practice".) Devotees obsessed about things that just didn't matter, that were beside the point, like how many times to wave the tray during puja.
In the end, I'm left with a low-level frustration with all things ashram. I don't know what it was all about, I no longer believe any of it, and yet it did form me, my beliefs and my childhood reality. I wish I had been clever enough to question it at the time; perhaps that would have resulted in more immediate answers. Now it's like assembling a jigsaw puzzle in which the pieces are my quirks and beliefs, but the picture was lost long ago.
So if you, like Z, are curious about my upbringing, I recommend reading All the Fishes Come Home to Roost. Subtract the abuse and about two thirds of the really freakish characters and you get a good approximation of what my childhood was like. Even I have to remind myself that it really was that weird.
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