Lost Travel Notes

Posted on 27. Jun, 2009 by Kerry Banks in International

I could not find the notes for the blog I wanted to write. But as I was rifling through my old journals I paused to read some of the entries. There are descriptions, snatches of conversations, personal observations and other bits of doggerel. Strange how something like that can instantly put you back in a place. I have sifted through and selected some stuff that looked interesting. Meanwhile, I continue to search for those lost travel notes.

Courtesy of {link:http://www.flickr.com/photos/mekin/} timekin on flickr{/link}

Jakarta, Indonesia: It is midnight and we have just arrived in the Indonesian capital. There is only one taxi in the airport parking lot. It is an aging black wreck, unadorned by any company logo. The doors are fastened shut with rope. The driver is asleep, his bare feet sticking out the window. His radio is playing a Pat Boone song: “Love Letters in the Sand.”

Yogyakarta: Watching a performance of Wayang Kulit, or shadow puppet theatre. Ethereal shapes slide across the cotton screen, flickering in the glow of the oil lamp. Two realms of existence. On the other side, ancestral spirits with nervous insect profiles, elaborate as lace, bow and fight and make love or grow to giant size or vanish.

Yogyakarta at night: Kerosene lanterns, clip clop of horse-drawn carriages, becak drivers pedal past, flags flapping in the wind. Gamelan music, street performers cracking whips, doing gymnastics. Skull mask lying in the street. Each passing westerner is like an alarm clock, waking all the slumbering becak drivers. “Hello. Hello. Where you go?”

Nandi, Fiji: Our taxi driver is giving us a free tour of town. We pass a wrecking yard. “Ladies driving school,” he says. We pass a McDonalds. “American High Commission,” he says. I ask him if there any poisonous creatures here. “No. All friendly and non-poisonous. But if you want to see poisonous snakes and spiders wait until November and I will take you to parliament and show you where they sit.”

There seem to be only two types of weather reports in Fiji. “Fine” or “Mostly fine.”

courtesy Fenst, flickr.com

Moscow: My guide tells me, “We have the unpredictable history. We have the unpredictable past.”

Inside Night Flight, a famous nightclub, I gain a flash of insight into what it is like to be an attractive woman. Night Flight is stocked with young prostitutes. I am sitting at a table surrounded by 12 of them. Twenty-four eyes trying to hook my attention. If you return their stares, then they look deeper. There is a hunger there.

Quebec City: While eating at a toney restaurant, Diane mentions that she attended high school with Pamela Anderson in Courtney, B.C. “She had brown hair and brown eyes. And she had small breasts. I know because she was on the volleyball team and we shared the same change room.”

New York: Sign in a city taxi: “25 cents extra for an argument.”

Acapulco: The humidity is withering. It takes the starch out of anything you put in your pants pockets—matches, Kleenex, business cards all reduced to rubble in a matter of hours. Clothes stick to your body and turn dark and splotchy from sweat like you are leaking from bullet holes. My yogurt capsules are mutating.

Holland-America Cruise Ship to Vancouver: Riding the elevator: The electronic voice intones, “Going down.” The guy standing beside me says, “I hate to hear that phrase when I’m on a ship.”

The Norwegian captain makes his daily address. “We are now sailing past the beautiful sceneries of Juan de Fuca Strait. We have these beautiful sceneries every day.”

Williams Lake: At the Stampede Parade the floats and entertainers include The Rose Lake Miocene Swine Club and the Vernon Girls Trumpet Band. The Babine Lake Traditional Dancers are wearing Airwalk sneakers, high heels and sandals. Someone shouts, “Look at those chainsaws!” The Squaw Hall float is an old palisade with a country band performing inside. The float is followed by a bunch of Elvis impersonators. Walt Cobb, the local MLA, cruises past. An onlooker shouts, “Hey Walt, hope it’s your last term. You idiot.” Cobb replies, “Where is my gun when I need it?”

Hong Kong: List of fish dishes in the Jumbo Floating Restaurant: Black Dragon, Spotted Grunt, Green Wrasse, Horse-Head, Pink Garoupa, Whelk, Silver Coat, Oil Crab.

Barcelona: Many of the women here ride motor scooters. Some ride them in slit skirts. Very formal. I saw one today with sheer black stockings that went down only as high as her ankles. A strange and exotic touch. How do I meet them? Something else … Most of them smoke.

Chichen Itza, Mexico: It is about 7 p.m., just after a rainstorm. Eerie yellowish light, wriggling lines of ants, and a metallic taste to the air. Thunder rumbles in the distance as we approach the old church. Three black vultures sitting on the white crosses rise up and flex their wings.

Holland: I am learning Dutch expressions. Take the phrase, “To rush headlong into something, to butt in.” In Dutch, this is expressed as Met de klompen op het ijs komen. “To go on the ice with wooden shoes.”

There are meat hooks affixed to the roof gables of the homes in Amsterdam. They use them to haul furniture to the upper floors because the stairways are too narrow. The house were built narrow because the amount you paid in taxes depended on wide your home was. The wider it was, the more you paid.

The Dutch public transport system sells special tickets for dogs.

Dunedin, Florida: I’m drinking beer at my hotel’s Tiki Bar. It is Happy Hour. The sunset is a simmering palette of magenta and orange, smudged with jet contrails. There is a woman sitting across from me with a “Bad Mama” tattoo. Her boyfriend has the words “Born to Lose” tattooed on his bicep. There other bikers crowded around with bandanas and tattoos. But none of them are riding choppers—they are riding bicycles, and raising money for charity. The tattoos are decals.

Kenya: A young guy leans in the car window and asks to bum a cigarette, “Share the cancer,” he says.

The frogs outside our hotel at night sound like a series of rusty drawbridges slowly being opened.

Rule of the land: Outside the game parks everyone walks. Inside the parks, no one walks.

courtesy digitalART2, flickr.com

Our guide, Mustafa, tells us about cheetahs. The adults have to teach the young to hunt. The mother will sometimes drag a crippled impala in for the young to play with. After the cubs make their first kill, the mother leaves them forever. Mustafa saw this happen once. The mother stared from a distance at the scene. When the deed was done, she tilted her head back, let out a loud wail, then loped off towards the far horizon.

Title image by retro traveler; flickr.com