The Backpacker's Handbook

2012 and the Shape of Things to Come: Witches’ Moon, 2 Feb

Kit Herring — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 19:14:14 +0000

I am no more superstitious than the next person but when I see this in the sky I have to wonder. The photo isn’t the best but I can count on two hands the number of times I have seen this effect anywhere in the world.

West Harwich, Massachusetts

You have to click on the photo to see and appreciate the bigger version.

The World at a Glance

Kit Herring — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 04:25:17 +0000

I came across this old piece of paper recently, begun in 1976 and tracing my life’s travels. There are many more lines to draw.

The Cook Islands: Aitutaki’s Lagoon

Kit Herring — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 19:59:47 +0000

The atoll of Aitutaki is generally recognized as one of the Pacific’s most beautiful. Flying to the island is a real treat, even when the weather isn’t perfect.

1) The first corner

2) Now more appears in the airplane window

The landing strip is a newish addition to the original airfield built by the Americans in WWII.

3) Ready to land – pic shot thru the cockpit door

Of course, the real joy in experiencing the lagoon isn’t to found from an airplane window. You have to venture into it by boat.

4) The sea’s colors are a swirl of azure

Great snorkling is to be found around the rocks at its edge, too.

5) Playing with snorkels and masks

Lastly, the motus, or small islands that circumscribe the reef, are wondrous uninhabited deserted islets, where the only sounds are the whistle of the wind through the palms and the calls of the tropic birds.

6) Honeymoon Motu, so named, it is said, because 40 years ago a Canadian couple decided to get married here. To the right, behind Honeymoon’s sandbar, is a different motu, Maina

7) Another view of Maina

8) Diana, as close to paradise as a modern person can reasonably hope to find herself

The Cook Islands: Return to Aitutaki

Kit Herring — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 14:23:56 +0000

We returned to our favorite island recently to welcome the New Year. The island retains its charms, although the first event we witnessed was a full-fledged tropical storm.

1) Blowing a gale on Dec. 28

The cabin shook and a storm surge brought the lagoon waters to within a few feet of our house.

But the weather cleared with little damage. Except the beaches were full of broken coral from the reef that has washed in with the waves.

2) Beachfront

The island has recovered nicely from the ravages of Cyclone Pat two years ago; we can only hope that history doesn’t repeat itself too soon.

3) An outrigger on the lagoon

Algeria: Exploring Timgad

Kit Herring — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 00:23:51 +0000

Few people visit Algeria anymore because of internal strife, but I hitchhiked across the country in 1975. Theses are some recollections of the country’s greatest archeological site, the Roman city of Timgad, as they appear in my novel, Descending the Cairo Side. Here was once an African center of empire; today the ruins are empty and forlorn:

When I arrived at the nearby modern Algerian settlement, I found that accommodations were scarce. The only lodging proved to be a rather expensive hotel. But I checked in, not wishing to camp in the open. In the lobby I found a map of the ruins.

After securing my belongings and now in a state of bemused contentment, I headed for the ruins, glad that a whole Roman city lay waiting for my investigations. A man at the gate collected a pittance as an entrance fee. It would have been interesting to see if the daily receipts even paid his salary. Certainly, there was not a single other tourist on site. I was completely alone at one of northern Africa’s premium archeological wonders.

The foundations of the town lay ahead, but no buildings stood higher than about three feet. I was somewhat disappointed, thinking foolishly that I would wander the streets of a nearly intact city. This was a naive fancy, of course. The ruins had been picked over for centuries as a source for quarrying stone, and no doubt looters and grave robbers had long ago stolen anything of value that could be easily removed.

1) Overview of the ruins

I walked down a broad boulevard in the center. The dun-colored stone remains were, in their subtle, discreet fashion, magnificent. A sense of orderliness and tidiness stood out. The city had been planned, much more carefully than were any modern population centers in North Africa. It seemed that the whole thing had been built from a central design. Streets were laid in a grid, and the map I had showed the various public and private buildings, although it would have been hard to discern the function of most of the ruins. On the surface, all was a jumble.

It didn’t take long to tire of picking through the low walls. There weren’t any interesting artifacts lying about, of course, and little in the way of artwork. I was surprised at how fast boredom set in. I felt like an unsatisfied and jaded seeker of lost history.

2) Trajan Gate

Yet the scale of Timgad was impressive. The stone-paved streets covered the better part of a square kilometer. Sitting down on top of a crumbling wall, I consulted the map again to see if there were other interesting spots. I had noticed, about a quarter of a mile away, a large structure that looked like a fortress or a castle. It had a non-classical architectural style to my unpracticed eye. What was that?

The structure loomed over the ruins like a giant crashed bird. It was constructed differently from the rest of the city. Although much larger than any other of the stone remnants, it seemed, at this distance, to have been put together from cruder materials. I decided to have a peek. It required a walk outside the perimeter of the Timgad ruins. I read on my map that the fort dated from Byzantine times, which would account for its stylistic singularities. It loomed more and more imposingly as I approached it. As advertised, it indeed was a kind of primitive castle. There was a wide entrance, some twenty feet high, which once may have supported huge wooden doors.

The interior was dark. I pressed on, entering the portico, feeling my way through a great central hall. The fortress was made entirely of small, roughly hewn rocks. Its lines were severe and utilitarian. Above me the ceiling faded into the darkness. Abruptly I tripped over a loose stone in the path, and a loud surprised noise emerged from my throat. Without warning, a great host of bats swooped down from the recesses of the bulwarks, twittering and screeching their eerie cries. I ducked instinctively as they swirled and swooped around me like miniature dive-bombers. It was quite unnerving and I panicked, looking for a speedy exit. They flew through my hair, brushing against my face. I had a flashing thought of rabid animals covering me with tiny painful bites and sprinted for the exit. The bats decided not to follow, but I continued running blindly for a hundred yards, finally coming to rest on the base of a column. The cries of the bats were still audible from within the gloom.

I panted, staring back at the Byzantine fort. This was not part of the bargain. God, bats! I looked around the area for a time, bewildered. The fun had gone out of this expedition. Making my way back to the ruins in the city, I attempted to busy myself studying the vestiges of Roman life, but my curiosity had taken a blow. It felt as though I had been rejected by this place, that it had no connection for me. I kicked a few stones around a small plaza, trying to decide what it all signified. I considered what I knew about Roman history. The usual schoolboy facts. Great conquerors, leaders, civilizers. But the stories from my youth no longer seemed relevant. An idea occurred to me, courtesy of the attacking bats. Maybe the Romans were precursors of a continuum of evil in Europe, proto-nazis from the ancient age. What had they accomplished in subduing and controlling their piece of the known world? Surely, their art, literature and culture counted greatly in the progression of human knowledge, but in the final analysis, their ruins were haunted places, the abodes of night creatures. They enslaved vast regions and peoples in their quest for dominance. The glories of their conquests had long withered, leaving nothing but relics of brutality and fear that gave proof to the lie about empires.

The legions of Rome represented a great leap backward for humanity. The modern history books had it wrong. I walked away from the archeological site, toward the modern town of Timgad, vowing never again to set foot on Roman territory.

PHOTOS COURTESY OF WIKIPEDIA

Nepal: A Trek through Gorka

Kit Herring — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 15:43:24 +0000

In 1982 my parents set out on a trek to the village of Gyamapasal in the Gorkha district of Nepal. This was not an area favored by tourists. Their destination had been determined by my mother’s old friend Preb, a Wellesley graduate (1945) who had eschewed the wonders of modern civilization in exchange for a Peace Corps job teaching the village’s children. My mother, Peg, reported that Preb had indicated in her correspondence that she was hungry, and she asked them to bring extra food. They were happy to comply.

Below is a selection of photographs from the trip, beginning with the village itself.

1) The school in Gyampasal, with Preb’s house below

2) Preb with her students

The trek there, a journey of several days, had its own unique rewards.

3) Nepali girl-watching. A universal human pastime, I would say

4) Peg enjoying some impromptu music en route

5) Another village

6) Always in the background, the Himalayas

7) On the road with Preb

8) Friendly locals

9) Details of old house

10) Planing wood the old-fashioned way

11)A nice farm with terraces

I’m not sure if conditions have improved over the years in Gorka; it’s a region we never seem to hear much about. Undoubtedly Preb left memories in Gyampasal about how kind Americans can be. That’s all we can hope for anyway.

12) On the edge of the world

Nepal: Kathmandu, 1976

Kit Herring — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 15:18:20 +0000

Descending the Cairo Side - a novel of the traveling life

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I still smile when I think of the bus ride to Kathmandu from the Indian border. Traveling with my good friend Tony and a Tibetan refugee who lived just outside the city in Kathmandu Valley, we made good time in a rickety bus that climbed through the foothills with slow but terrifying disregard for the safety of the passengers. We drove through temperate evergreen forests and wondered at the sudden change of climate.

At one of the passes we stopped for chai and it began to snow. I was dressed in thin cotton space pants and sandals; Tony wrapped an African sarong around his shoulders for dubious warmth. He had never seen snow before and it was a marvelous sight to watch him as flurries came down. He was as entranced as any four year-old might be in similar circumstances.

We were hungry – the bus ride that carried us perhaps 150 kilometers took hours and hours. I procured from the chai stand a package of Brit-style tea biscuits and so began a craving for the things that never seemed to go away. At one particularly hair-raising junction we got off the bus and observed another conveyance that had fallen off the road. Fortunately for the passengers, rather than rolling several hundred meters straight to the bottom of a plunging ravine, that bus had caught on trees that grew horizontally out from the face. We hoped that the people inside had been able to extract themselves without serious injury and clamber back to the road. No telling how long they may have waited there for another lift.

1) Himalayan foothills near Kathmandu, mostly deforested

And so we arrived at the end of the day. We bid a temporary farewell to our Tibetan friend and sought refuge in the precincts of Darbar Square and the old city.

2) The old city, Kathmandu

We found an inexpensive hotel a block from the north end of the square and began our explorations. Kathmandu in those days was a city replete with sights, sounds, and smells of old Nepal and Western influence covered the ancient landscape with but a thin layer of modernity.

3) City life

Restaurants that catered to the tastes and pocketbooks of travelers abounded. You could still buy hash cookies and other delights for the mind at many of the small eateries. One famous place, Aunt Jane’s, was purported to serve great home-style American chocolate cakes. The only time I checked it out I noticed the staff washing dishes on the floor of the squat toilet. I’d had enough gastro issues and promptly departed.

Mysteries abounded. One of the temples of Darbar Square was reputed to have been carved in great antiquity from the trunk of a single tree.

4) An ancient temple

The great spiritual significance of the Kathmandu and its place in both Buddhist and Hindu realms was not lost on us. We tried to take the energy of the valley and we tried to learn more about ourselves and the world at large. It’s difficult to calculate whether we succeeded or not. So many years later memories of Kathmandu have faded, to be replaced mostly by deteriorating photos and our own advancing years.

Oddly, mental images of the bus trip remain fresh.

5) More evolved minds than ours preceded us

Photos by Ken and Peg Herring, early 1980s

Nepal: Bodhnath

Kit Herring — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 15:35:19 +0000

I was working on some slides for my mom recently and I came across her wonderful images of Bodhnath, the wondrous Buddhist temple near Kathmandu in the valley of the same name. When I lived in Nepal’s biggest city I frequently rode my bike to Bodhnath, to become part of the endless procession of people walking around the stupa, to watch the rural Tibetans make the pilgrimage, and to generally soak in the vibes of such an ancient and holy place.

1) Bodhnath from above

The temple’s history is obscure but the site is very, very old, dating to the early centuries of the first millennium.Schwanehal mirror

2) Close by

During my very first visit I was puzzled. I knew there was one certain way a person was supposed to walk around a Buddhist temple, from my reading of the TinTin book, Tintin au Tibet while a boy. But which was the correct way? Clockwise or counterclockwise? I couldn’t for the life of me remember. Like the young idiot traveler I was, I started in the wrong direction (clockwise) to the horrified looks of the throngs who were circling the stupa. I quickly stopped and turned in the opposite direction. The story sounds humorous now, but at the time I was mortified by my own insensitive behavior.

3) Kids

Photos courtesy of Jack McGory

Mexico: Another Fine Day in Ciudad Juárez (Guest Writer)

Kit Herring — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 11:52:17 +0000

My good friend Sergio Sandoval-Goodfellow has been at it again. This is fresh news. For those of you who wonder if the name is a nom de plume, the answer is, “Perhaps.”

Sergio enjoys sending boxes of gold bars around the country via UPS, so you can deduce his line of work from that salient bit of information.

I work in Juárez and go back and forth a lot … sometime daily, sometime weekly, sometimes monthly. Since the Troubles have begun most of my friends tell me not to go: others ask me if I’m not afraid, and yet others tell me about cousins that have disappeared or fathers ransomed. I always reply that I’m not afraid but cautious. I like to know where the trouble is to head the other way.

1) Rick Perry is not very popular in Juarez, either

I fell in love with Mexico in my youth. I travelled all over and was invariably greeted by people with an open open heart. They are generous so you should be generous too. Yes, you had to be careful about transitos, policemen and bureaucrats looking for a little extra … una nada … una mordida … but if you learnt the dance, learnt how to “show respect”, you didn’t have to pay.

Today I was about to enter my office when one of three men dressed in something close to municipal police uniforms lounging out side mad the off-handed comment “Gabacho ó mexicano”. Concerned that I was about to be “levantado” I did not pay him the attention he felt he deserved. They surrounded me and the same one pulled at my clothes and became abusive. At no time did he ask for id or act like a policeman. He expressed concern because I didn’t show him the respect he felt he and his uniform deserved and then launched into a series of diatribes about the “Migra” and how the “Migra” mistreated everyone. Did he ever get out of the wrong side of the bed! Needless to say, he then wanted in to my back pack which he searched and on finding nothing of interest gave it back and then accused me of trying to hit him with the said back pack. At that point I started banging on the office window in the hope that someone inside would look out and see what was going on. No such luck. Everyone was in the back. Then it’s up against the wall, on with the hand cuffs and into the police pick up. Meanwhile I yelled to a couple of people on the street that I have been saying “Hello” to for the last ten years but they made themselves scarce. Who can blame them!

Switched hand cuffs and off to see the judge at Calle Oro and Deiciséis de Septiembre. Down the stairs to the basement. Hats off and stand over there. Then over to an unlit passage with a camera and I was asked my name which while easy in English is difficult in Spanish so it took time but no photo. Then it was “Over there, next to the other Guero”… We chatted – if that is the word – and discovered that we knew people in common.

2) The door on the left in shade is where those in custody enter the cop shop/courthouse on Oro y 16 Sept

I did my best to stay detached. I wish I’d learnt to how to meditate. If it was ever the time, now was the time! Anyhow, it would all work out in the end.

Ten men were called up in a bunch and dealt with. I couldn’t hear what was going except the judge berating them. The “other guero” was called up and the judge didn’t like his story. Well, more than that, he didn’t like his attitude. They were both trying to speak over each other. No facts were established nor … Well nothing was clear. He was sent into the doctors and then disappeared with a glimpse thru another door. Ten or twelve other men and the woman associated with the “Other Guero” were called up. Again I couldn’t hear what was going on other than IDs were being asked for and given or not as the case may be. He said something to the woman and she hurried out the IN-door. The judge began to curse them out with a “chingada aqui and a chingada alla”. They all look appropriately repentant and were sent to stand against wall.

When it was my time before the judge I listen to his monologue; observation of his relationships with other “clients” made it clear he didn’t like to be interrupted. It was his courtroom and that’s that! Once I nodded acceptance of his ground rules, we had a back and forth while I explained what had happened, how the policeman had behaved and how I was quite concerned about being kidnapped. He then lectured me that there were forms to follow, procedures to follow and how I should respect the proper authorities to which I cautiously agreed. We almost parted friends.

He signed something and again it was up against the wall. Then into see the doctor who checked me out as best she could from a distance of roughly ten feet. She asked me my age, a couple of basic health questions and if I had been beaten. No I hadn’t. No bumps. No bruises, not even a heavy hand. And again, over against the wall. Then one of the policemen waved a paper in my face and sort of pointed to the IN – door.

Another policeman opened the door and I hoped up the steps into the light again. May be it was four hours from start to finish. I was lucky. I still had what little money I started the day with. My camera, my … my everything. Yes, I was very lucky!

Then I headed back to the office half-concerned and half anticipating that I would run into the Terrible Three but no such luck. My office mates asked me for names but I never looked at or for the name tags of the Terrible Three and the police in the tank didn’t have name tags and neither did the judge. Neither did I look at or memorize the number of the pick up that took me to the tank. I’ll do better next time. Whoa … I don’t want a next time.

All of this because a cop was rude and, evidently, wanted to stick it to a gabacho! Moral of this story … don’t be a gabacho and if you run across a cop with his head up his ass, don’t let him know you know, because he’s the only one that doesn’t know because he’s up to his eye balls in shit.

If I was lucky, what happened to those that weren’t so lucky?

USA: Dreaming, Cape Cod

Kit Herring — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 16:13:17 +0000

We started a trip to the East Coast in fine style, sailing with my brother off his home port near Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The boat, a 30′ Alden Priscilla, is a fine example of why fiberglass never should have been invented.

1) Warm weather at last, on the foredeck of Odyssey

Inevitably I took the helm and relished the feel of the wind on the sails as transmitted through the hull to the tiller.

2) At the helm

With a following wind at 10 knots, what more could I ask for?

The next day we made our way south to Cape Cod, to the town of Harwich. Some years ago we found a delightful (and inexpensive, relatively speaking) place to stay, the other side of the road from Allen Harbor.

3) The front of our motel, the Harbor Breeze Inn, is an old house

We had come to the Cape to visit my mom, who lives in Harwich, but we were prepared. My brother gave us a bottle of exquisite wine, and it held a place of honor on our room’s TV shrine.

4) The shrine and the bottle

Alas, only my wife Diana thought it prudent to drink but that’s ok, I can live vicariously when necessary.

Every day we went to the beach. Twice we went with my mother. The first time we parked ourselves at the yacht club, where we saw across the channel the most god-awful plastic contraption, appropriately named Speculation.

5) Speculatively, I’d say the owner is a banker?

Never mind, we hung out in the shade and watched sailboats come in and out of Wychmere Harbor.

6) I’d say this guy was cheating

We returned to the Yacht Club the next evening to see the full moon.

7) Moonrise over the entrance to Saquatucket Harbor

That night even the mosquitoes were respectful.

We also had a picnic at Fort Hill during a blustery day. We decided to stay in the van to eat.

8) A fresh wind in Eastham

Other days were calm and hot. The beach at Harwich Port mirrored the heat and the sky.

9) Sailboats frolic

Our connection to this place is a strong, physical thing, a continuing presence in our hearts.

Cape Cod endures as we hope that we shall, too.

10) Wandering back roads at sunset

PHOTOS BY KIT AND DIANA HERRING