Ramayana Matters

Our last three days in Bangkok were a flurry of activity. One of the highlights was a five-hour long bicycle tour through the busy markets and Buddhist temples, navigating through alleys so narrow and congested that had we wandered there on our own, we probably wouldn't have dared to venture in. Bangkok was introduced to us a city of marketplaces: weekend markets, night markets, floating markets (the Chao Phraya river used to be Bangkok's main trading artery), Chinatown markets, wholesale markets, flower markets, etc etc. Dave writes in greater detail about our bicycle adventures on his blog.

Wholesale flower market

Though Buddhism is Thailand's official religion, Thais also believe in spirits. Every other city intersection seemed to feature a spirit house, to which people brought daily offerings of flowers and food. Certain large trees were also decorated and worshipped; later we heard that every time a new house is built, a displaced spirit needs to be pacified by construction of a new shrine outside of the house's shadow. Garlands of yellow flowers are in such high demand that an entire section of the wholesale flower market was dedicated to their assembly and sales. Need to pass a test? Have bad fortune and want good fortune? These occasions undoubtedly call for extra offerings to the spirits.

Placating the tree spirit

The Wats themselves--the Buddhist temples--were plentiful and magnificent. It was not uncommon to see terrific poverty and squalor next to the tall white-washed walls and gold-plated doors of newly renovated temples: eerily similar to the experience of walking down Market Street in San Francisco, with all the new skyscrapers going up right above the homeless. We also walked through many neighborhoods of malls and hotels and office buildings and middle-class single-family Thai and Western-style style houses with garages and backyards. The different areas flowed easily into one another, extensive networks of alleys and courtyards dissecting each city block: to get a sense of each area, we quickly learned to go off map and follow our noses. Every populated alley and large intersection seemed to feature several food carts selling barbequed meats, noodle, rice, and egg dishes; carts offering instant coffee espressos (sugar and condensed milk optional); spirit temples; 7-11s. It seemed common for families to keep chickens and turkeys in their compounds. There were also many dogs and cats roaming around, none of them lacking for food: let's just say that Thai spirits were generous and ready to share.

A window of almost every store, restaurant, or semi-official establishment (including cabs and tuk-tuks) featured King Bhumibol (also known as King Rama IX) and/or other members of the royal family. Thailand is a constitutional monarchy, ranked currently 135 of 179 in the Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom index (somewhere between Afghanistan and Russia). A perceived criticism of the royal family is a punishable offense for both locals and foreigners alike. And who would want to criticize His Majesty? He's a very photogenic presence and a natural model--as evidenced by hundreds and thousands of images of him we've glimpsed during this trip--a photographer himself, and from what I understand a talented poet. And he takes after the best: in the late 1790s his ancestor King Rama I created Thailand's greatest epic, Ramakien, by compiling and rewriting certain episodes from the Hindu Ramayana. His son Rama II adapted the work further, apparently construing a happy ending. (The very name of Thai Kings, Rama, at least in English, comes from Ramayana, but this business is very complicated--as are Thai naming customs.)

This business of Ramayana/Ramakien gave me a great deal of hope: it instantly made Thai culture feel approachable. That is, I could simply read the Ramayana (with a great deal of footnotes) and then study the Ramakien, and this would give me far greater understanding of the Thai imagery and symbolism. As it was, Dave and I soon learned to spot references to these epics. The galleries of Wat Phra Kaew (the temple attached to the Grand Palace and housing the Emerald Buddha), for example, retold stories from Ramayana. And so did many paintings at the Contemporary Art Museum, MoCA Bangkok, one of the city's newest museums.

In every country we visit, Dave and I usually try to look up the contemporary art scene. Prior to this trip, we'd heard from my brother Kostya and Dave's colleague that Bangkok boasted a vibrant community of artists: a recent feature in the New York Times made this official. Vibrant art community there might be, but not at MoCA, Bangkok. Let's just say, I made a googling mistake. And from the photographs and the TripAdvisor page the building itself looked very respectable. Dave and I braved an hour and a half-long trip by two trains and a bus to the outskirts of the city--to find ourselves nearly the only visitors roaming the five floors of exhibit space. The art... well, it was very clean and featured many contemporary takes on Ramayana/Ramakien. Temporary exhibit #1 showed off His Majesty's own photography.

Best of MoCA: Dave with Dali wax sculpture

Actually learning to take the bus in Bangkok proved useful. The very next day, Dave and I got embroiled in another adventure. I suppose, if one were attributing blame for these things, one could say that I made another googling mistake. I looked for a good walking tour, and every walking tour I was finding seemed to be at least four or five hours long. Finally, I discovered the tour that claimed to take only two and a half hours and was free to boot (I assumed the guides operated on tips--we had taken a tour like this in Sydney). The webpage gave the time and location; so I figured we'd just show up. In the worst case scenario nobody would meet us, and we'd put together our own tour: we had the map and an idea about what major Wats and palaces we still had to see.

Dave wasn't feeling well that day. He'd caught a cold a couple of days earlier and was powering through it. A tuk-tuk delivered us from our hotel to the historical center. The day was particularly hot and humid, probably the hottest day of the trip so far. The location was a large park right outside the gates of the Grand Palace. The free tour guides were nowhere to be seen, though we combed the park back and forth in several directions. Dave approached a respectable-looking Thai gentleman carrying an orange umbrella and asked him if he might be a tour guide or if he'd seen any tour guides.

The man shook his head: he was a lawyer, teaching at the nearby law school. Where were we from? he asked. Oh, California. His uncle was in California, in Southern California. What did we want to see in Bangkok? Grand Palace and all the main Wats were closed this morning because of an important Buddhist ceremony, but he could point out some temples on our map that would be open and that we had better see. We'd have to go by tuk-tuk--these temples were further away. But we could get a "governmental" tuk-tuk, with white and yellow license places, and the whole route would cost us 40 Baht (a little over a dollar). There was also a great silk store on the way that was running a special promotion. The man raised his orange umbrella, and after a short while tuk-tuk materialized. We thanked our new friend and climbed aboard.

In fifteen minutes, the driver deposited us at a small temple outside the perimeter of the old city. We weren't entirely disoriented--we had a map and a working smartphone, and we'd spent several days roaming the city at that point, and had an idea of its geography and layout. There were no other visitors at this temple. The security guard seemed very curious--how did we hear about this Wat; most tourists don't know about it, though it's a very important Wat--one of the members of the royal family had been a monk there, and the family gave the money for the temple's upkeep. The story sounded familiar--I had read about a temple like that, and so Dave and I looked closer at the Buddha towering over us. The security guard was sweet and wanted to know how long we've been married--we must've been on our honeymoon... Then, he recommended a shop where we had to go after this Wat, a shop selling gems and jewels, rubies, sapphires, with a 600% discount.

Confused at a Wat

Dave, I think, was suspecting a scam from the moment we got into the tuk-tuk, and had he not been affected by the cold, he wouldn't have let things go this far. I refused to believe that we were being scammed--so elaborately and bizarrely--for as long as I could. But then when the tuk-tuk driver insisted on taking us to that store, I had to admit that we were being taken for a ride--that that's where the expression "being taken for a ride" probably came from.

Getting out of it all was awkward. We were in the middle of nowhere. The tuk-tuk driver had called all of his friends, and there were something like eight people meeting us at the gem store (to make the place look more popular, I suppose?). The idea was that we'd go inside and buy things. The scam was apparently so popular (and effective) that it was outlined, step-by-step, in all the tourist guide books we'd read. Still it was hard to believe how many people must've been involved. On the other hand, we decided, this was probably not that different from being talked into attending a time-share presentation in Las Vegas. In both cases we didn't actually have the money on us. In Bangkok, we were down to our last few hundred Baht, and we needed them to get to the airport later that evening. So we apologized to the tuk-tuk driver--we felt bad embarrassing him in front of all of his friends--and walked away.

We visited the Grand Palace and the Emerald Buddha--both sites turned out to be open. (It took us that entire day to unravel all the stories that the scam artists had told us about Bangkok--and I'm still not sure about some of them: do, for example, differently colored license plates on tuk-tuks mean governmental vs. private?). Getting out of the downtown area proved nearly impossible. With so many tourists needing a ride, the cabs refused to turn on the meter--they preferred to charge a flat fee for at least twice the amount what the meter would cost. Though in the US dollars the difference amounted to that between $4 and $8, not getting cheated became a matter of principle with us that afternoon. Armed with the smartphone, we could take a bus where we needed to go for less than a $1. Except we couldn't: in the mid-afternoon, the city suffocated with traffic, and the right bus never came.

None of this spoiled our mood one bit. We were having fun. Dave had sweated out some of the congestion in his chest. We bought a coconut and visited another museum that afternoon--Jim Thompson's House. Then Dave took a nap and I explored the Bangkok Art and Cultural Center, a proper contemporary art museum (also an art school and a shopping center for books and new age gifts), displaying very creative and high-tech works of art, integrating variety of media, engaging with artists around the world, and reflecting on contemporary social themes beyond the Ramayana/Ramakien.

Cutting the coconut

That night, after Dave woke up refreshed from his nap, we packed up our bags and headed out again to while away a few early morning hours till our 7 am flight. At 3 am we found ourselves at a supermarket in Patpong, shopping for Sriracha and tamarind snacks to take back to San Francisco as souvenirs. Then we took the metered taxi to the airport, and spent our last half hour before the flight at duty free shops, sampling the rice crackers these shops were promoting: all the same brand, but different flavors. (There must've been a dozen shops in a row running the same promotion--that's a scary amount of rice crackers.) We passed out the moment we got on the plane and slept all the way to our layover in Tokyo.

Round ping-pong table at Bangkok Art and Cultural Center

Happy 2014!!

Our New Year's celebrations started on the evening of December 30th, when our friends Olga and Ron caught up with us in Bangkok. They had spent two weeks in Hua Hin on the Gulf of Thailand, playing tennis with ladyboys at the resort next door to where Serena Williams was also practicing (they got a picture with her).

We share fun history with Olga and Ron. Olga is the baby sister of my classmate Lena; she'd moved to Helsinki, Finland for work about a decade ago. One summer she and her boyfriend Ron spent three weeks traveling in the US, and they stayed with Dave for a couple of days in San Francisco--I was visiting St. Petersburg then. Ron proposed to Olga during that trip, and a year later Dave and I partied at their wedding in St. Petersburg. Here's Dave's blog about that epic party. So we knew we were in for something special when we'd heard they'd be in Bangkok this New Years.

The morning of the 31st we shopped. We had to come up with "smart casual business" attire for the evening--not easy after packing to wear only bathing suits (us) and tennis clothing (them). Each of us except Dave needed extra items of clothing. Dave and I spent the day at the MBK mall, a mix between a department store and a crazy Shanghai-style knock off market; seven floors of big and little shops. We got lunch at the food court for something like $3 total.

In the afternoon, the four of us reunited and boarded a former rice barge redesigned as a dinner-cruise and circulating up and down Chao Phraya River, the major water artery in Bangkok. The dinner started with a round of Mai Tais and deteriorated from there. The embankment was a surreal combination of old-style wooden lean-tos, deteriorating European-style buildings from the end of the 19th century, and super-modern construction. As the sun set, all the Buddist Temples (and an occasional church) on the shores of the river lit up, and here and there people started setting off fireworks. Olga and Ron taught us Thai for "thank you," and we were all extremely thankful to everyone around.

Wat Arun

We returned to shore around eight o'clock and taxied back to Siam Center, the mall district. December 31st and January 1st, though not a part of Thai traditional calendar, were observed by the locals as the "Western" New Year--everyone on the streets and in the malls was wishing Happy New Year to everyone else. We were heading to Red Sky Bar at Centara tower, and the way there seemed to lie through floors and floors of the shopping mall. Dave photo-bombed a bunch of selfies. We shared a couple of Mrs. Fields cookies (also spotted in Bangkok: Dunkin Donuts, Krispy Kremes, Starbucks, Coffee Bean, etc etc). We kept taking escalators up. At some point, we passed a multi-story movie theatre and a hotel, and kept climbing. Finally, we found the elevator and rode that the rest of the way to the top of the city.

Centara Mall

It was around nine when we finally made it up; we were among the first at the bar. We could see crowds starting to assemble below, a Times Square-like mess of people armed with glow sticks and noise makers--of which, by the way, we had our own, and we put them to good use. From another view, we could see into a courtyard of a giant Buddist temple--hundreds of people praying together. We'd heard from our cooking teacher May Kaidee that the local Buddhist temples scheduled extra sittings for the Western New Year.

Midnight praying

Little by little, the crowd around us gathered: a cosmopolitan crowd. There were some businessmen from Iran and India, and right next to us were three guys from Kuwait--Dave and Ron were fascinated, and made conversation. They came to Bangkok for one day only, to party and drink: they couldn't drink alcohol in Kuwait. At some point of the night, Dave said salam alaykum to them, and one of the guys responded with: "Can I take a guess about something? Can I wish you shalom?" Then everyone joined the conga line.

Panorama of Bangkok from 56th floor

After New Years and fireworks, the dancing started. It was easy to lose track of time. At some point after this, the bar was closing, and I lost my purse, and then my purse was found by the hotel's security; then we somehow ended up on Khao San road (which, my brother Kostya had warned us, was the most touristy place in the city), and Dave and Ron were ordering pad thai... And finally, Olga and Ron had to go to the airport and we all rode the taxi out to Suvarnabhumi Airport, where we put the two of them on the non-stop nine hour flight to Helsinki, with promises to see each other again soon.

Happy New Year, everyone!

Arrival to Bangkok; protests

Did you know that Thailand's capital is listed in the Guinness World Records as the longest place name? The official name is a paragraph long and translates as "City of angels, great city of immortals, magnificent city of the nine gems, seat of the king, city of royal palaces, home of gods incarnate, erected by Visvakarman at Indra's behest." City of Angels for short: Krung Thep.

Dave and I arrived to Bangkok on Monday evening, and after dropping off our bags at the hotel, roamed around Siam Center, a neighborhood of shopping malls and department stores, lit up and decorated for Christmas and New Years. Instantly we fell for the beat of the city. Street vendors were selling shirts, watches, bags, trinkets, food: noodles, various meats on sticks, savory and sweet pancakes, fresh pineapple, watermelon, papaya--peeled and diced, packaged in plastic bags for easy snacking. Thais practice the art of fruit carving, and even at street carts the pineapple and watermelon were prepared in intricate geometrical patterns. After a week of eating little other than fruit for dessert, Dave and I grew googly-eyed at all the sweet options around: doughnut shops, smoothie and milkshake cafes, ice cream and frozen yogurt stands, bakeries selling pastries, pancakes, brownies, cupcakes, tarts, jellys. We shared a cream parfait and a brownie at one of these shops and, sated, returned to the hotel to sleep.

After five days of sleeping on the boat, we continued to see fish in our dreams, and as we assumed horizontal position, the room seemed to rock about us. All our senses were off. The boat's motor and the sea waves had been a loud and constant noise on board, and now the hotel seemed too quiet. Our room smelled of cigarette smoke even though the hotel staff assured us we'd been assigned to a non-smoking floor. The room also seemed cold: the air-conditioning wouldn't let us set the temperature higher than 62 F, and we had to ask for a second blanket. Used to the boat schedule, we fell asleep promptly at 9 pm.


The next day we explored the city on foot. Our destination was May Kaidee's Vegetarian Cooking School, where we'd booked a cooking class for that afternoon. On the way there we passed a large gathering of people singing and partying on the street, and later figured out that this was the protest we'd been seeing on TV.

Protesters at the Democracy monument

We'd intended to avoid the protest, but having walked into it accidentally, later we returned to the area and walked through it for a few blocks. The protesters set up tents all along a boulevard ring that encircled the center of the city. A canopy shaded the central area: protection from the sun. There were individual tents for sleeping and shared communal tents where water and foodstuffs were distributed, also medical tents, tables with water buckets for washing dishes, portable toilets on the perimeter. Each major intersection seemed to have a stage; speeches and music performances were also filmed and broadcast on the large screens all along the street.

This musician went from singing Dylan's Knocking on Heaven's Door to a Chinese song

Anyone seemed welcome and free to join the party; there were plenty of casual onlookers besides us. And on some blocks this protest did feel like a party: people waving flags, munching on rice or soup, singing, smiling. Other blocks seemed more somber: here people sat or lay down on thin plastic blankets spread on the asphalt, possibly meditating or listening intently to the speakers. As we went on, we noticed that some blocks were barricaded with sandbags, though this was done discreetly enough and allowing plenty of room for all the gawkers to pass through.

A friendly young man gave us a word of warning: "Make sure you go to your hotel by 10 pm," he said. He didn't explain what happened at ten, and we weren't curious enough to find out. It was only 6 pm or so, and we'd seen enough. We veered off to look at the royal grounds. Later that evening, we had plans to meet up with our friends Olga and Ron who were arriving to Bangkok that evening, and we wanted to rest and catch up on email. A lot of email had accumulated during the five days offline.

Check out Dave's blog for his stories and photos!

Professional diving and the tsunami

The six diving guides aboard Oktavia were all single men between their late twenties and mid-fifties. Of them the only local, Aey, came from a village about 70 km away from Khao Lak. Thai government requires foreign-owned businesses to hire a certain percentage of locals: a good thing, and yet, though we were told Aey was an excellent diver, the company didn't seem to know what to do with him. His English wasn't strong enough, English being the lingua franca among divers. Snorkeling together, Aey and I communicated mostly in diving signs--wordless gestures for "turtle," "eel," "Okay."

One of the guides, an expat from Europe, gave us a glimpse into the life of a nomadic diving guide. Each location had a particular season: the Andaman Sea season, for example, lasted from November to May. Guides who had been at it the longest, and given a measure of luck in establishing the right relationships, could get hired for the entire season. This allowed them to stack seasons and after Andaman, go, for example, to Egypt, where the season was from May to October. Sometimes there could be an unfortunate overlap, where Egypt's season might start a few weeks before the Andaman's ended: but that wasn't the worst problem to have, a problem of over-employment. In addition to Aey, two most senior diving guides on Oktavia were hired for the season; three others, including the speaker himself, had short term contracts for Christmas and New Year's trips, and their reemployment depended on the number of tourists booked for the following weeks. A short-term contractor established a base in a town like Khao Lak, and every couple of weeks went around all the diving companies to drop off his resume. And sometimes that strategy worked out, and at other times, he would run into the company owners and managers at the local pubs, and that worked just as well.

This was a very particular lifestyle, infinitely fascinating to hear about; it seemed singularly suited for the single men who didn't mind remaining single. The opportunities to settle down existed in larger cities and year-round tourist destinations, long-term gigs at dive shops, teaching beginners. Many of these men had done stints on land in the past, but opted for the nomadic life on the sea. If there were any women guides on the live-aboards, they were certainly in the minority. (I've yet to meet one.)

For Dave's perspective and pictures, check out his blog: http://blog.bewilder.com/2013/12/dec-29-2013-disembarking-oktavia-for.html

Due to their exposure to nitrogen, divers are not allowed to fly for twenty-four hours after their last dive. Dave and I spent one night in Khao Lak, where Oktavia had dropped us off. This coastal village was one of the hardest-hit areas in Thailand by the 2004 tsunami. A ten-meter high wave that formed after an earthquake in the Indian Ocean washed over the Similan Islands, destroying much of the sea floor and corals there, and then crashed into the mainland, wiping all the coastal hotels and local dwellings. Somewhere between 4,000 and 10,000 people died. The township designated the memorial to the tsunami: a large police boat that had landed a mile into the shore.

On our ride from Khao Lak back to Phuket airport, our driver turned out to be a former dive guide. He'd spent nearly fifteen years on the live-aboards in the Similans, and he'd been out at sea when the tsunami hit. They had no radio or any other kind of advance warning before the tsunami. Half hour before the wave came, the sea changed color. From blue it turned yellow: the wave was sucking up all the sand from the sea floor. The crew canceled all the dives for the day and returned to Khao Lak. Being in the deep, they hardly noticed the wave onboard--nothing beyond the normal rocking. Upon returning to town, they found total devastation, levels of damage "like you wouldn't believe," our driver said.

The police boat memorial (img from Wikimedia Commons)

In the decade since the tsunami, Thai government invested into the system of advance warning towers all along the coastline to give the people a bit longer notice. We saw two of these towers on the Similan Islands; solidly constructed and equipped with large antennae, they inspired confidence. And the corals, our driver said, were recovering much faster than had been predicted. They were possibly not as colorful as the corals of old. Manta rays and whale sharks became much harder to spot in the last ten years. Why was this? The water temperature seemed colder. The fishing industry did its damage. The whole world was changing.

Aboard Oktavia

After two days of travel from San Francisco, Dave and I boarded MV Oktavia at the port in Khao Lak in south Thailand, on the Andaman Sea. Oktavia, the largest live-aboard diving ship on the Andaman, was headed to the Similan islands for five days. Experienced divers prize this archipelago for the biodiversity in the coral reefs on the eastern side of the islands (protected from the Indian Ocean) and the larger marine creatures that also prey there: the barracudas, manta rays, whale sharks, moray eels, sea turtles, octopi, cuttlefish, sea snakes, scorpion fish.

During the five days on board, Dave more than doubled his diving record. I snorkeled three-four times a day, and thanks to the experience of my guide, Aey, was able to spot nearly as much as the divers: though I didn't see the bottom-feeders, the cuttle fish, the octopus, I got very friendly with the turtles, the barracuda, the schools of fusiliers, and a few eels. For more pictures and stories, check out Dave's blog.

Sunrise on the Similans

Boarding the ship for five days was a disorienting experience. Though Oktavia was large for the area, it was about three times smaller than the previous ship we'd stayed on (when two years ago Dave dove in the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Australia). It had three passenger decks (including the dive deck and the rooftop sundeck), and filled to maximum capacity for the Christmas holidays, housed twenty-two passengers, six diving staff, and six boat staff. The co-owner of the company, an expat from Sweden, supervised the departure in the port, but didn't himself go on board. All six of the boat staff were locals and also one of the dive staff--Aey, assigned as my snorkeling companion. The rest of the dive guides were expats from Serbia, Germany, Belgium, and England. They were well matched with the passengers: one German couple, a French couple who lived in Singapore, a Swiss man, an Israeli woman, one couple from Hong Kong, one couple from India, a man from Korea, and four couples (one with teenage daughter) of American military stationed in Okinawa. And us: Dave and I had traveled the longest to get to the Andaman. We were also the least experienced. Most people on board had clocked hundreds of dives over many years; diving for them was a weekend activity. Dave held his own and earned the advanced PADI certification during this trip, allowing him to go on deeper and more adventurous dives. I came up with a dozen new answers to the question why I didn't dive (none of them very good).

Gearing up

The indoctrination to life on board began on dock. We were asked to put our shoes in a large crate--they were promptly stowed away somewhere, and we didn't see our sneakers and flip flops again until the end of the five days. From then on everything we did--hanging out at dinner, going to the bathroom, to our cabins, to bed, we did barefoot. Boat rules (shoes are a liability when it's rocky) seemed combined with Thai culture: Thais take off shoes when entering living quarters. At the airport in Phuket, I watched as a cleaning woman took off her shoes before entering the women's bathroom to clean, upending all of my notions of hygiene. At a public bathroom on one of the Similan islands, the entrance to the bathroom was blocked by a deep basin for feet: day-trippers were encouraged to leave their shoes on the beach, and rinse feet on both entering and exiting the bathroom. Thais also don't use paper for wiping, and so every stall was outfitted with a special hose for washing up. Luckily, there was plenty of toilet paper for the foreigners on the boat, though it got pretty wet, especially on the first day or two: bathrooms on the boat also served as shower cabins, and after every dive or swim we used them to rinse off the salt water. This, I supposed, helped to keep the bathrooms clean. I stopped cringing on the third or fourth day aboard.

The divers meant serious business. The amount of time they could spend underwater was strictly regimented by their exposure to nitrogen; within that they maximized their diving opportunities. At 7 am people assembled in the common area for early breakfast (toast and/or cornflakes with bananas, Nescafe or Lipton tea) and dive briefing. At 7:30 am they started putting on their gear and set off for 45-60 min underwater. By 9 am they were back and the breakfast was served: bacon, chicken sausages and nuggets, eggs. Fruit--pineapples, watermelons, apples, lychee, bananas--was available with practically every meal.

Divers at briefing

At 10:30 am, the second briefing began, and by 11 am the divers set off for the second dive of the day. That was followed by "snack" at 12:20 pm--the most desserty meal of the day. One day this was rice porridge with coconut milk; on other days we had pancakes, fried bananas. After an hour-long break, the third dive commenced around 2 pm. Lunch was served at 3:30 pm--a heavy meal with fried pork or chicken and a Thai curry and coleslaw. The chef always made a veggie curry for Dave, one of the two people on board who didn't eat meat.

After lunch, divers were given the long two hour break. On the two first days, the crew organized shore trips: the ship's dinghy took us to shore of Similan islands 4 and 8 (the largest). We went on short jungle walks, spotted some very rare pigeons that looked a bit greener than city pigeons (fish people are NOT bird people), mingled with large crowds of Russian day-trippers, and lingered on the beaches of fine white sand. On the other two full days at sea, the boat was moored away from inhabitable land, so one time Dave went snorkeling with me. Snorkelers, he confirmed, saw the large picture: like getting the bird's eye view of the landscape that divers were able to explore in greater detail.

The last dive of the day took place just before or just after sunset: the sunset or the night dive. Divers were equipped with flashlights and took off around 6:30-7pm to look for crawlers: the shrimp and the crabs and other shellfish that could be easily spotted when the light reflected from their eyes. For me, this was a reading and writing break: I took notes for future stories. The social dynamics between all the passengers and the staff of the diving boat were fascinating; the mixes of cultures and languages and occupations and social classes all brought into play as people were forced to mingle in the constraints of the diving ship. More on that to come.

Leaving on a night dive

The divers returned to the boat in time for dinner, served at 8 pm sharp. They shared a beer or two (alcohol and diving don't mix; after drinking a single beer a diver is disqualified for the rest of the day), exchanged pictures they took during the day, and then quickly dropped off to their cabins, dead tired, to sleep. 

Leaving Koh Bon

Writing That Risks Reading

Litquake's approaching! An amazing festival of hundreds of readings and thousands of authors, all taking over San Francisco for one week, from 11th to 19th of October. I'll be reading as a part of Writing That Risks anthology release party, on October 17th at Alley Cat books. Come hear my alien story and the wonderful and surprising work of my fellow authors.

Pride Weekend

On June 26 the US Supreme Court made the historical decision to repeal DOMA and lifted prop 8 ban on gay marriages in California. On the same day, Russian Federation Council, the upper body of the Russian government, approved the law against "Propaganda of Nontraditional Sexual Relationships Among Under-Age Children." Sex between men was a criminally prosecuted offense in the Soviet Union, the law was repealed only in 1993. That law had been created in 1933, supported by the rhetoric of "recruiting into homosexuality" and equating "pederasts" with "foreign spies"--the rhetoric that's being recycled today. Under the new law, punishment for foreign citizens "promoting homosexuality" is steeper than for Russian citizens, it includes arrest and deportation. Putin is yet to sign this new anti-propaganda law into action, and already news reports that two women seen hugging on St. Petersburg subway were escorted out; in Moscow two women kissing at a restaurant were asked to leave. A small protest took place in St. Petersburg this morning and resulted in more arrests and physical violence. At the same time as the law against "propaganda" was approved, another law passed that made it illegal for gay couples to adopt. This Pride weekend, I'm thinking of all of my friends.

More fun stuff!

The super secret NYRB Salon (a book group where we read books published by New York Review of Books) is no longer as secret -- there's now a Facebook group, where we can post meeting dates and book titles. We meet first Sunday of every month, in the evenings, at Dog Eared Books in the Mission. If you are in the area at the proper time, stop by whether or not you've read the book. The discussion might make no sense and give away the ending, but at least you can pick up more fun books!

On April 25th, I'll be reading my work at the release party for Eleven Eleven Journal's 14th issue. This should be a fun event, as I'll be performing alongside several local poets. Time and place: 8 pm, at LeQuiVive Gallery in Downtown Oakland (1525 Webster St.). This event also has a proper Facebook invite page here. My story "Survivors" that has appeared in the magazine has also been performed by actors at Action Fiction!, and so I don't know if I should read it again. They're giving me a good chunk of time for the reading, so maybe there'll be time for that and for something new as well.

Small Press Love Fest

On February 23, 2013 (the day before my birthday), I'm participating in this reading event -- Small Press Love Fest, organized by three local and one New York-based magazines and publishers: great weather for MEDIA, Ambush Review, Corium Magazine, and Red Bridge Press (who is publishing a story of mine in an upcoming anthology). This will take place at Alley Books in the Mission, and will be a midday reading, after which it is oh so convenient to move the party to some bar in the neighborhood and to continue talking lit and new media.. Also, birthday. I have in mind three bakeries whose chocolate cakes I want to sample.

Last day in Rio

January first in Rio was a day of rest. We woke up after noon and whiled away a good part of the afternoon at Marcelle and Davog's, blogging, packing, having a leisurely breakfast. Marcelle made eggs and heated more cheesy puffs--our daily nutritional requirement of pão de queijo. Marcelle had lived in San Francisco before, and she mentioned that there's a store in the Mission that sells Brazilian staples. We googled it immediately: Mercado Brazil, ten blocks down Valencia Street from our house. The word is that the cheese that goes into these cheese balls is unavailable outside of Brazil, but Parmesan, cheddar, and maybe even feta can be used to achieve a close texture if not flavor.

The shopping for edible souvenirs was one of the things we'd hoped to do on our last day in Rio, but every convenience store and supermarket was tightly shut after last night's festivities. Some luncheonettes, juice bars, and regular bars were still open (one per neighborhood), but I'd hoped to stock up on manioc and tapioc flour goodies and fruit and nut products in some kind of packaged variety. The modern art museum we'd been hoping to visit was also closed. Our friend Alex had better luck--he'd gone to the Sugarloaf that afternoon, and not only were the cable cars running, but also he encountered very little lines and spent a lot of time hanging out at the top, enjoying the view. Dave and I meantime made our way to Leblon beach, where Dave disappeared into the sea for a while, and I hung about watching the sun set behind a mountain that looked like a Saint-Exupery drawing of a hat (or a python who swallowed an elephant). Later, we met up with Alex for dinner. He had been considering traveling on to Ilha Grande in the next couple of days, but decided to stay in Rio: Rio's huge, and there are lots of things to see and do. Dave and I had a flight to catch that night (for some reason, most of our flights in South America had departure times in the middle of the night) and were parting with Rio with a feeling of many things left to be explored, to come back to.

As I'm writing this in the series of flights and airports on the way back to San Francisco, here's a partial list of things I will miss about Brazil: the one hundred degree heat that makes it Ok to drink three or four servings of crazy cool tropical juices a day, and eat fruit with every meal; the slovenly pace of pedestrian traffic downtown Rio that reminds you that you're on vacation, and--what's the rush?; reading in the hammock on the veranda at Marcelle and Davog's (there's really no better way to read than in a nice, sturdy hammock); the ease with which we made new friends despite the language barrier; the Amazon, of course--I can already tell that the Amazon will form the bulk of the narrative we'll be telling about this trip; seeing Dave wear his white straw hat, dance samba, and sip juice from the coconut.

New Years in Rio de Janeiro

Happy 2013, everybody! A mathematician I know, once upon a time my brother's classmate in grade school, shared this nerdy fact on Facebook: 2013 is the first year since 1987 to have all digits different from one another. "So there's something special about this year," he wrote. Possibly because its lack of repeated digits, the number looks odd in every sense of the word, like making fire by striking a piece of iron against a flintstone. The lack of symmetry is slightly off-putting and at the same time feels exciting and daring.

Dave and I met the New Year at the beach in Copacobana with about two million people who flocked to Rio from Brazil and all over the world for the occasion. It was at the same time the most laid back and festive New Year's party we'd experienced. We spent most of the night lying around on the warm beach, surrounded by the bright lights of the beach-front hotels and cruise ships facing off with the hotels from the ocean. Dave took a couple of dips in the warm water; I abstained until after midnight. We sipped our drinks and chatted, half listening to the music that carried from the stages set up to our left and right, and messaged friends scattered in various parts of the beach, making vague plans to meet up later. Between all the electric lights, we could see the stars; I recognized the easily identifiable Orion's Belt, and looked for but did not positively find the Southern Cross.

Dave called his parents from the beach--it was still a few hours till New Year's in Philadelphia, and they were getting ready to go to a party. Earlier in the day, I'd called my parents, catching them about half hour after New Year's in St. Petersburg, where they were partying with their friends. My brother and his girlfriend, they reported, were celebrating New Year's in Sochi, in the south of Russia--the place hosting the next Olympics (the winter Olympics before the summer Olympics coming to Rio). Dave's brother and his fiancee celebrated in Seattle, Washington. 

My mother, when I called, was excited to hear from us, and asked if in Rio everyone was wearing white--and they were. Most people weren't wearing all white outfits, but rather something white--a shirt or shorts or a skirt, but many local women wore white dresses clearly reserved for this occasion. White in Brazil is the color of peace; other colors of the rainbow mean different things: yellow is for money, red is for passion, green is for good health, and so on. Vendors in the city and on the beach that night sold color-coded flowers, cotton candy, hats, glow-in-the-dark drinking glasses. Even the color of the underwear you pick to wear for New Year's carries symbolic significance. The tradition of throwing white flowers in the sea at midnight is an offering to the goddess Yemaja of the Yoruba religion, the goddess of the sea, who looked over the African slaves as they were brought to the Americas. Her worship is very much alive in Rio alongside the Catholic traditions.

After midnight, we met up with Alex, a friend of my Israeli cousin Jenya (who now lives in Germany). Alex and his wife Tanya live in San Francisco, not far from us, but he was spending his holiday in Rio, and after texting back and forth for a while we met up and walked over together to a party on a small beach between Copacabana and Ipanema. The crowd there was mostly in their twenties and thirties, the music was low key, and at three am many started drifting off to sleep right there on the beach, tired but yet unwilling to return home before sunrise. Dave and I met up with Marcelle and Davog (our hosts), had another drink, and chilled until we couldn't chill anymore. We left the party before everyone else and still didn't get to sleep before the sun was up.

The local superstitions around how to properly welcome in the New Year are elaborate and varied, but one of the few that we tried to follow was to jump over seven waves in a row, making a wish each time. We had changed into our flip-flops for this (after my adventures with footwear this week, my feet are still plastered with band aids, and I'd been sticking to wearing tennis shoes with socks). On the second jump, I managed to lose both of my flip flops in the water. Dave leaned down and fished both of them out of the tide. We continued jumping the waves and making wishes, and later, in better lighting, we saw that the pair was mismatched--the two flip flops were of different colors, although of the same brand and size. We took this for a good sign. In the words of Kozma Prutkov, a Russian 19th C equivalent to Monty Pythons, If you want to be happy, be that.

Making friends in Rio

Rio de Janeiro is laid out similarly to San Francisco in neighborhoods sandwiched between high hills, except everything in Rio is on a grander scale. The hills are higher, the neighborhoods are more spread out, there are more people everywhere, the extremes between poverty and wealth seem more pronounced. Going from one neighborhood to another takes longer, and what we should've figured out our first day here, but didn't catch on until the third, is that the best way to tour the city is by picking a neighborhood and sticking to it.

Another way to think about Rio is as a movable feast, the party crawls each night of the week from one neighborhood to another. Marcelle and Davog lent us a couple of guidebooks, and one of them--a guidebook for party-goers--has very specific suggestions on where to go each night of the week for music, dancing, or chilling out, and each location is rated based on whether it's favored by singles or couples and how easy it is to hook up there. We've spent two nights in Lapa, once on a happening but fairly low-key Wednesday night, and the second time on the full-on Saturday night. At midnight things were just starting to heat up, people were streaming in, the clubs packed and long lines of people waiting to get in. Davog had recommended a dive bar with great samba just off the main strip, and it just so happened that there was a Beatles-themed club next door, with a Brazilian cover band working through Abbey Road. We hung out at the samba bar and listened, and then danced a little bit with the crowd, but also each of us alternated in running upstairs to the Beatles club to get snippets of "Something" and the medley. Around one thirty in the morning, we decided to start making our way toward the apartment, but walking out onto the main strip got sucked into the crowd of happy drunks. Bands played on every other corner, and New Orleans-style, the party extended up from the street to the second-floor balconies and windows full of half naked men and women drinking and dancing. My feet were troubling me but no matter--we danced, rather than walked, on our way toward our neighborhood, Gloria.

Yesterday, we dedicated ourselves to hitting some of the main tourist attractions in the city. We visited Museu da República, a 19th Century palace that was used as a seat of Brazil's government during the short-lived republican period, and where much beloved president Getúlio Vargas committed suicide in 1954 shortly before the control of the country was taken over by the military. The room where he slept and where he'd killed himself is perfectly preserved and on display on the third floor of the museum, and is quite interesting, but most of the exposition is signed only in Portuguese.

After briefly touring the museum, Dave and I settled on a park bench outside and read a few Wikipedia articles on Brazil's history. Brazil's transition from colony to independence seems to have been without a precedent, with Portuguese court escaping for a while from Portugal, running from Napoleon all the way to Rio, which afforded the colony an unprecedented status of becoming the imperial center for a while. We read until our eyes started to get heavy from history overload and, meantime, the park bench where we had sat down was all but requisitioned by a small crowd of the local elderly who were gathering for some sort of a concert or a game event. We left as people were arriving and bringing more chairs and benches that they set up right in front of the bench where we had unwittingly sat down.

Our next destination was one of the most touristy places in the book, the Sugarloaf mountain. There are two popular mountains in Rio that all the guidebooks recommend to visit, the Corcovado with the statue of Christ the Redeemer and Sugarloaf, without the statue but with a cool cable car ride to get to the top. The cable car station was within reasonable walking distance from where we were. It was six p.m. when we got there, and it was nine-thirty p.m by the time when we finally got down from it. In the middle, there were about three and a quarter hours of standing in lines and fifteen minutes of sightseeing and taking photographs. The views from the top were undoubtedly cool, but maybe even cooler was the sight of helicopters taking off from a pad halfway up the mountain, and also seeing the airplanes turn around and go in for landing at the domestic airport located on the other side of a long beach from the mountain. It's rare to have an opportunity to see an airplane from the top down.

After we finally were released from the mountain, we found a lovely dinner spot in a nearby neighborhood called Urca. The restaurant, Garota Urca ("an Urca girl"), was packed, with younger people hanging out outside drinking beer, and older and hungrier people eating inside. After a short wait, we got a table, and then saw a couple in their eighties looking for a seat. Dave wanted to give them our seats, and we ended up sharing a table with them and chatting away all night. Maria and Osman spoke English far better than we could pronounce the few Portuguese words we'd picked up. They had traveled to fifty countries around the world in their fifty-nine years of marriage. They had three kids, one of whom was a conductor of an orchestra in Recife, and another managed the local yacht club. Maria was a pianist herself--retired, but playing the piano at the local church on Sundays, and Osman was a doctor, a nutritionist--which was undoubtedly why they were at this restaurant on a warm Sunday night eating chocolate ice cream. They wanted no other food or drink, they said (although Maria ended up drinking beer and snacking on shrimp dumplings), but chocolate ice cream. The craziest part of this lovely experience was that Maria and Osman insisted on paying our bill at the end of the meal (Dave and I shared a half tuna and onion, half banana, cheese, and cinnamon pizza). They wouldn't take no for an answer, and we had no choice but to concede. We did ask them for their mailing address so that we know where to send souvenirs back from San Francisco.

On our way home to Marcelle and Davog's it started to rain--our first rain outside of the Amazon. We went to the bus stop, but ended up getting a cab. This we also figured out by day three--cabs are relatively inexpensive and much faster than any other means of transportation in Rio.

On the importance of proper footwear

Yesterday was our first full day in Rio and altogether we did about five or six hours of walking. Some of this was at a super slow pace, like when we visited Instituto Moreira Salles and the Botanical Gardens, at other times we walked rather briskly, like the one time we had to run for the bus, or when we rushed to get to the Gardens an hour before they closed. Later, we walked from the Botanical Gardens neighborhood to Leblon, then crossed into Ipanema, then took the metro back to the Center and partied in Lapa. For no explicable reason, yesterday was also the day when I decided to skip socks and to try wearing my flats barefoot. Within a couple of hours, I got blisters all around the rim of the shoe, and by the time we were leaving the Botanical Garden, I could hardly walk. Fortunately, every convenience store in Rio seems to sell flip-flops (especially Havaianas, the popular local brand), and so I ended up buying my second pair of flip-flops on this trip.

I lack the proper savvy when it comes to wearing flip-flops. The trick seems no less difficult to pull off than wearing high heels. The native Californians seem to have it down and could probably upstage Brazilians in a flip flop wearing contest--I've seen people in San Francisco wear flip flops through near-freezing rain and on hikes in the mountains. That's just not me. Until Rio, one pair lasted me for about eight years--the only place I usually wear flip flops is in hotel bathrooms. Within an hour, somewhere between Leblon and Ipanema, I slipped and stabbed my big toe with what seemed to be a piece of my own toe nail. With some surprise, Dave and I watched as blood pooled all over my brand new snowy white (!!) flip flop. Luckily, Rio seems to be as well supplied with drugstores as it is with flip flop shops (and actually sometimes these are one and the same store--which makes sense, seeing just how precarious of a proposition this footwear is). All we had to do was to cross the street and walk into the nearest drugstore, where we were immediately provided with antiseptic and band aids, and even a sink to wash off the blood. The whole transaction cost us four reals, or about two dollars--the cheapest thing we've bought in Rio yet.

Instituto Moreira Salles, by the way, was a very cool museum. It was founded by Walter Moreira Salles, a wealthy Brazilian banker who died in 2001, and is presently managed by one of his sons and other members of the family. Apparently, branches of this institution are located in several Brazilian cities. The one we visited yesterday housed an exhibit of drawings, sculpture, and films by a prominent South African artist, William Kentridge. The exhibit was very well translated to English, and as I started reading descriptions of some of his artworks, I quickly realized that a lot of them are owned by the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco. In fact, Kentridge had a show there as recently as 2009--but of course we had to come to Rio to see it. Much of his art comments on Apartheid and the work of the Truth Commission; he also seems to reflect more generally on the issues of the environment, loss, change, and the task of art itself. In his animation videos, he quite deftly manages to combine drama with humor, and so his art seemed very accessible and thought-provoking. My guess is that Salvador Dali was one of his major inspirations, and also possibly Soviet animation techniques--at least, there are definitely interesting overlaps between his animations and some older, hand-drawn Soviet cartoons.

For more details on what we're doing in Rio, check out Dave's blog.

Arraial do Cabo

Arraial do Cabo is a beach-side municipality about one hundred seventy kilometers east of Rio, still a part of the State of Rio de Janeiro, or RJ, a place where the big city folk go away for the holidays, the New Years and the Carnival, surrendering Rio's beaches to people coming from far and away. ("Arraial," by the way, in Portuguese sounds something like "Ah-high-ahl," the two "rr"s giving a sound that has absolutely no roll in it.) It's located on a picturesque arrow-shaped peninsula, sandwiched between two long beaches on either side. The point of the arrow is a mountain, and there are more beaches located around the point of the arrow, some of these accessible only by boat. Several competing companies in town provide boat beach tours. The boat drops you off on each beach for about thirty minutes, then picks you up and takes right to the next beach.

(On Wikipedia, Arraial has a stub page in Volapük, not to speak of an extensive article in Portuguese, but the English page is there merely to inform us that the town's population was 26,390 in 2005 and that "n 1960 a documentary film was made directed by Mário Carneiro and Paulo Cesar Saraceni about the local fishing industry.")

We came to Arraial by bus, normally a three and a half hour ride that turned into six hours for us due to heavy traffic--all the people clearing out of Rio for the holidays. It was a pleasant enough ride in a comfortable, air-conditioned bus that made enough stops for us to replenish our fruit, nut, and cookie supplies. Otherwise, we alternated between napping, blogging, and reading. The first thing I did when we got off the bus was to buy flip flops (I'd been getting away walking around in my tennis shoes, but here that wouldn't be right). Then we bought ourselves a tapioca-coconut treat drenched in sweetened condensed milk and marched to drop off bags at our hotel. It was hot but felt fresher than in Rio. The town's two big beaches were visible from a high spot in front of our hotel, and they beckoned to us with their fine white sand.

Dave had made arrangements with a diving company for the morning dives, but the night dive was proving tricky to arrange. He'd hoped to finalize it in person, but the six hour ride complicated matters. For one reason or another, all the dive shops in town (and we saw many), refused to take him on a night dive. Some claimed that he didn't have the right certification, others said that they only offered a night dive as a part of a training course, and one said something that google translated as "our captain is very strict." So, no night dive, but a lovely walk on the beach, watching the sun descend and night spill into fog, and the moon come out, full and bright, between the clouds. We dipped our toes into the water: it was cold. Not freezing, like in the Pacific Ocean around San Francisco, but cold enough for us to turn us off on swimming that night, no matter how hot we'd been by day. Anyway, the air had cooled significantly, and walking around in not much more than my bathing suit and my new flip flops I felt almost, if not quite, ready to shiver.

We had dinner at the hotel restaurant and in the morning the breakfast spread was so good that I took note of the name of the chef--Marcelo Poppe. Apparently, he'd studied with the chef at a restaurant in Hotel Copacabana, and his specialty seems to be cakes. The breakfast featured no less than eight or nine different varieties of cakes, including a savory meat pie. There were mini donuts and other types of pastries, including pão de queijo that I'm growing to love. There was fruit and fruit juices, and more kept coming throughout the morning. After I dropped Dave off at the dive shop, I briefly walked through the town and returned to the breakfast table. The way the cakes were laid out on the center table seemed like an expression of somebody's childhood fantasy. I tore myself away from it when the time was nearing check out, and I still wanted to swim in the Atlantic.

I didn't linger on the beach. I went into the ocean, allowed myself to be bounced around by the waves (the waves were towering over my head and the undercurrent was quite strong), and then returned to the hotel to take a shower and check out. I whiled away the rest of the morning and early afternoon in the hotel bar, writing, planning out a couple of stories I want to write when I get back to San Francisco. The hotel bar stayed closed until 2 pm or so, when the first weekend customer asked for a shot of rum and a couple of bottles of beer. The hotel staff spent a couple of hours working, on and off, on building a giant tent that would shade all of the bar area. It was a Friday, and that night every room in this hotel was booked. The staff was clearly preparing for a giant party that would last through the weekend and then on until the New Year's day.

We're readying to celebrate New Year's, too, but in Rio. After Dave came back from his diving excursion (he'll post pictures and stories on his blog here), we returned to the bus station and three and a half hours later disembarked back in Rio. It was still sweltering hot here, but not as hot as the day before. On the bus ride back we passed a huge crowd somewhere in the vicinity of downtown--something that looked like a festival or a giant demonstration. No idea what that was, but we're starting to picture what New Years might be like.

First day in Rio

Two days ago when we arrived to Rio the weather was sweltering hot. It was at least ten degrees Fahrenheit hotter than the jungle, and almost as humid. Typically, Dave revels in hot weather while I become sluggish and moody, but after the Amazon it seems like we can be Okay anywhere. (I know that this feeling might be short-lived, but I'm riding it while it lasts.) We met our lovely Airbnb hosts Marcelle and Davog, and after some puttering about their apartment went out and spent the second half of the day exploring Rio on foot. We didn't have much luck that day finding anything our guidebook and our friends recommended, and everything we did find was already closed. No matter--getting lost is quickly becoming an art in today's world where google maps chart every major metropolis the world over. We enjoyed meandering about the downtown neighborhoods of Rio, some in greater states of disrepair than others, occasionally stopping to replenish our energy with traditional pão de queijo--a cheese pie, some dried banana, cookies, and nuts. When we reached the top of the hill of Santa Teresa neighborhood, Dave took a power nap on a bench that stood there seemingly for that exact purpose. Little did he know that a few hours later we'd be climbing back to the top of this same hill, lost again on our way home.

We wanted to find the music scene we'd heard about and also a nice place for dinner, but as it turns out, Rio is a huge city (yes, yes, this should've been clear before we set out) and google is not an entirely reliable source of information in Rio (especially since we can hardly read Portuguese). Eventually we had some pizza--but it was a sardine pizza, quite good!--and a couple of drinks in a random place in Lapa. There was music there, but the band stopped playing five minutes after we ordered. It was simply that kind of night. So we occupied ourselves with people watching and making more plans, none of which came to transpire because shortly after leaving the bar, we made another wrong turn and found ourselves hiking up the same mountain we came down a few hours before. And did I mention that Rio was sweltering hot?

Finally, we made it back to Marcelle and Davog's place, took showers, and fell asleep. I woke up around 5 am from the heat. Our hosts have a hammock on the balcony next to our room, and I stepped out there to see if being outside made any difference. It didn't. Air-conditioning isn't very common in average houses in Brazil, and the overhead fan wasn't doing much damage. Dave blissfully slept. I washed my face and lay down again--to read on my Kindle. Eventually, I dozed off and slept on-and-off until 7 am. When we met our hosts for breakfast, they'd already picked up the morning paper with the weather report: apparently, Dave slept through the hottest recorded night in Rio. The temperature reached at 42 Celsius or 107.6 Fahrenheit. It felt like an achievement to not only experience this but to do so with pleasure. And we did--we are--having fun with it all.

O Rio, Rio

Thanks to two early Soviet authors, Ilyia Ilf and Evgenij Petrov, probably every Russian over thirty years old has dreamed of setting foot in Rio de Janeiro. The dream is not a particularly specific one--to a Russian raised behind the Iron Curtain, Rio stood for everything exciting and beautiful that existed in the world completely inaccessible to Soviet citizens. The plot of Ilf and Petrov's great satirical novel, The Twelve Chairs (1927), is predicated on the main character's dream to escape USSR for Rio. Here's a clip from 1976 Soviet movie where great Andrei Mironov terribly overacts and sings an ode to Rio: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIc08Hm_jL4. "O Rio, Rio, there's sun and music all around--there's everything one needs for happiness, except... me--I'm not there."

In the 1920s, when Ilf and Petrov's character Ostap Bender dreamed of going there, Rio was a rapidly expanding city - then still the capital of Brazil. The swamps were drained, the population increasing rapidly, great theatres, hippodromes, and hotels were built--the famous Hotel Copacabana opened in 1923. Advertisements for the city must have circulated in all the European newspapers and made it all the way to Soviet Russia--"perhaps I trusted the brochures and pamphlets too much," sings Mironov, impersonating Bender. The lyrics are from the 1970s, but the 1920s novel is the close source material. Rio was the ultimate destination, a combination of a Wild West spirit and Euro-style luxury. Ostap, a Quixotic character of sorts, never got to Rio. Today we are a million miles removed from the era of the Iron Curtain. None of this is at all relevant to our contemporary experience of Rio, and yet I find that it still needs to be mentioned and remembered. The Ostap Bender Rio connection.

Four days on the Amazon

After a night in Manaus, Dave and I spent four days and three nights in the Amazon. Dave did a lot of research ahead of time to find the right tour company to take us into the jungle. Many of the companies seemed to offer very similar packages, and Dave was frustrated trying to differentiate between them. Finally, he settled on Gero Amazon Tours because our guidebook credited Gero for giving back to the community and for being very conscientious about the environment. When we got to Manaus, one of the guides picked us up from the airport and drove us to our hotel--we were booked to spend one night in town before heading out into the jungle. One of the first things we learned about the operation was the Gero was a man, the owner of the business, and that currently he was away from the area, visiting his parents. Later, it came out that he went to visit his mother in another part of the Amazon--in the process of getting his business off the ground, he hadn't seen his mother in over twelve years.

In the morning of our first jungle day, we got picked up at the hotel and driven to the port of Manaus on the Rio Negro. From there, we took a boat to the "meeting of the waters," the place where two great rivers, one that originates in the mountains of Peru and another that originates in Columbia, come together to form one great Amazon. The rivers are so different in their current, depth, temperature, and consistency that they flow side by side for six kilometers before the waters mix together. The line in the water is very clear, it's like stepping from a shaded area--the dark Rio Negro--into the light, the mud-colored Solimões river. Solimões carries more sediment than Rio Negro, and therefore supports more biodiversity within its waters and in the surrounding jungle. From this cross-over point, the boat took us upstream on the Solimões, to a small village of about hundred familes. There we boarded a bus, and our guides drove us for about an hour down a paved two-lane road--an Amazon highway--before at some point turning onto a dirt road for another twenty or so minutes. The dirt of the dirt road was of bright red color--thick clay, and the scenery was mostly family houses surrounded by plantations and farms (not at all the jungle the way we'd imagined it). Most of the houses in this area stood on stilts because in the high season the river rises about 12-14 feet. In the river itself we also saw houseboats--houses built on top of giant logs. These logs, we learned, are quite expensive and anyhow, cutting down big trees in the Amazon can now lead to very large fines and/or jail sentences. The farms that we passed varied from multi-hectar banana plantations to cattle farms to patches of land with overgrown fruit trees. The level of income seemed to vary significantly. On the way, our guides delivered passengers they had picked up in the village--a woman with kids and groceries, another single woman, coming back from work in the village or on the plantation.

At the end of the long bus ride we reached another river port, this one even smaller than the one before--it took us a few days to realize that it was a different river that, perhaps, connects to the greater Amazon in high season, but not necessarily. From that point on, another twenty-minute speedboat ride deposited us at the lodge at the end of what the guides called "a lake," but to us looked like a thin water channel hidden in the grass. There are two seasons in the Amazon, the wet and the dry. It started to rain bigtime on the day of our arrival, but the water had been rising steadily for a few weeks already. It reaches the high point at the end of June and beginning of July. Then it slowly starts to dry up, and in October-November, the guides told us that they had to walk for about a mile down the clay path at the bottom of the lake to get to the lodge.

Altogether our trip to the lodge took about four hours (no walking required). We were about 100 kilometers south of Manaus. We arrived to the lodge two days before Christmas. Gero was away--for the first time since the lodge had been built--and everything the guides did had a slightly improvised quality to it. Not because they didn't know what they were doing--all of them grew up on the Amazon, and some even came from this very same lakeside community--but because they regarded Christmas as their biggest holiday of the year and were preparing to party. Gero's absence clearly shook them out of their routine and added looseness to everyone's mood. Christmas was the guides' favorite holiday of the year, and they were ready to party.

It took us a few trips up and down the river to understand something about the spirit of this lakeside community. At first, focused on trying to spot all the toucans, hawks, vultures, and colibri flying around, caimans hiding in the grass, and in the muddy water dolphins, piranhas, and flying fish, we hardly even paid attention to the houses that stood high up on the shores, each on stilts, each with a motor boat or two pushed into the mud at the makeshift dock down below. Returning after an evening dolphin-spotting trip, we noticed that some of the houses had Christmas lights lit up. A few months before, the government had connected this community to the power grid by running a line from one of the central villages. Before that, some of the houses--although not all--used generators for power. They had electric light, fridges, TVs, satellite dishes, cell phones (although cell phones don't work in the jungle, but they still use them to store pictures and videos), but no computers yet because no Internet, and no power tools of any significance that we noticed. (Of course, these will come in short order).

The shores of this lake seemed to be populated by various members of the same family--or maybe a few several families. Our guide pointed out two churches standing on opposite shores, one Catholic, one Protestant, both looking quite new. There's a small school for the little kids and Gero and the guides are planning to build a bigger school for the community this year. To get to school, the bigger kids right now have to take the boat to a village about 30-40 minutes away, and they only can get there when the water's high enough (approximately January to September).

On the second day (or was it still the first day?), trying to hide from thunder and lightning that hit us in the middle of another monkey or sloth-spotting expedition, we took cover in a "jungle bar"--a floating house, whose owner runs a bar and something of a general store for the village. Our guide led us in the purchase of beer and proceeded to play a few rounds of pool with the bar owner and a couple of other guys whiling away the rainy hour. The general store carried corn chips, baby powder, deodorant, products of feminine hygiene, jars of Spam, breakfast rolls, frozen hot dogs, instant coffee, tape, raisers, band-aids, and in addition to beer also sweet wine and rum. In the corner of the room stood a TV set covered that day by a cloth, but on Christmas day--on what became an obligatory stop-over at the jungle bar for our guide--we saw it uncovered and playing a DVD track that seemed to go along with the music.

Christmas in Brazil is celebrated by a big family dinner on Christmas Eve and a public show or a party (in Rio) on Christmas day. (The Christmas Day spectacular in Manaus was, oddly enough, produced by an Orlando, FL-based entertainment company, Hardrive productions). Because the guides were partying--and our guide, the charismatic Lucivaldo, best of all--we got invited to an after-dinner Christmas Eve party at another local bar, in the middle of what is quickly becoming a new village--right next to the new school and the Catholic church. The family who runs this bar was also celebrating the birthday of their mother, grandmother, and probably a great-grandmother, who turned sixty-six. The centerpiece of the party was a giant red and white Christmas/birthday cake and crazy dancing to the music off a CD that contained about five or so tracks, repeated on a loop. An hour before midnight, the family members started to toast the matriarch, and it immediately became clear that to reach the age of sixty-six is a very significant event in this community. Lucivaldo told us that she was among the five or six oldest women here. She was crying the whole time as she was receiving congratulations, any several of her family members broke down in tears in the middle of their speeches.

It's hard to remember in retrospect what we'd expected coming to the Amazon. Probably, the endless jungle. The crazy cool and scary animals. The great river, as big as the sea. The tribal people living deep in the jungle and drinking ayahuasca. There's lots to say about all of that, and in much greater detail than I'm able to do at the moment. It's clear that the Amazon is changing rapidly and unstoppably. After leaving the jungle, in Manaus airport, we met a man who works for an American company that's drilling for oil in the Amazon. On the other hand, the guides who grew up in the area, told us that as of seven or so years ago, the new government created stricter laws targeted against people who were messing with the old growth jungle, and not only did the government establish the laws, but they also started to follow through and prosecuting people on the environmental charges. Yes, we spotted as many empty beer cans and plastic bottles on the sides of the river as caiman and sloths and monkeys put together, but Lucivaldo told us that every year in the dry season he and Gero's other guides survey the grounds and pick up all the metal and plastic that they can find. It was weird to me, by the end of the third day, how much at home I felt in the jungle--and that despite the heat and humidity, and the rain and the constantly damp clothes, and the mosquitoes, ants who found their way to pieces of candy and chocolate at the bottom of my purse, and the potentially dangerous animals. The Amazon felt not altogether different from the Russian countryside where I spent my summers growing up. But this is a topic for another time.

For Dave's experience of the Amazon and Brazil, please read his blog here: http://blog.bewilder.com/. He's got more stories to tell and he's also got photos!

From SF to Manaus

Travel day yesterday. We crossed a couple of continents and landed, after a brief stop in Panama City, in Manaus, the city that advertizes itself as--and probably is--the gateway to the Amazon. The city largely owes its existence to the rubber boom at the end of the 19th Century, when the industrialization of production of rubber created immense fortunes, and also when a lot of local population was displaced and forced to work on the plantations. We didn't know any of these things yesterday and are learning everything as we go along.

Little things strike me as we travel. The airport in Panama City resembled nothing more than a Los Angeles Grayhound station: everything about the airport, for example, the bathrooms, is similar to a US airport (all the toilets and the sinks, for example, are likely made by same company), but slightly shabbier. In front of the gate, we were surrounded by families with dozens of children, all munching homemade snacks and sipping soda. Possibly because most of our travel is to Europe, we expect the foreignness (in practical terms) to start right away as soon as we cross the border; here, even if the announcements were made in Spanish first and English second, the sense of being abroad was for me largely lacking. We didn't leave the airport in Panama City, of course.

The airport in Manaus is more like a giant warehouse (and still nicer than Pulkovo, that cramped and smoked through gateway to St. Petersburg)--not particularly fancy, but functional. It took us less than fifteen minutes to get our passports stamped and receive our luggage. Then we battled with the ATM machine to receive local currency in the amount that we need (more than it was willing to give us). A guide from the company that will take us to the Amazon today met us at the airport and delivered to the hotel--an unexpected and lovely bonus.

As soon as we got to the hotel, and after spending another half hour checking email, we went out. It had gotten dark early, but it was still balmy. The presence of the forest is felt everywhere in the city. We walked the straightest way possible through downtown to Teatro Amazonas--the main attraction, a salmon pink neo-baroque theatre built by the rubber barons. There was a show in progress on the theatre's magnificent staircase--a rehearsal of a Christmas spectacular. A bunch of bored kids in angel wings danced to the right and to the left, and wiped off sweat from their foreheads after every move. We satisfied ourselves with enough feelings of strangeness and foreignness for one day by getting funky-flavored ice creams (acai was one flavor I tried) and returned to the hotel.