Reflections on the Road: Excerpts from a Manuscript

This installment of my "Reflections on the Road" column draws from the manuscript I've written narrating my experiences traveling for 14 months overland from Beijing to Istanbul, way back in 2003-04.  Tentatively entitled Sixty-One Weeks: A Journey across Asia (this will probably be changed if it gets published), I've recently secured an agent who, I hope, will one day find a publisher.  In the meantime, here is a small sample drawn from four separate sections of the manuscript.  If there seems to be interest, I may do this once or twice more in the future.

_________________

Balram and Nitu, travel agents in Kathmandu, Nepal

Traveling, when done well, is nothing less than learning to love -- loving things like adventure and change, yes, but even more learning to love people with names like Mustafa, Flora, Yangyang, Sikander, and Balram.  It is learning to love places in all their complexities and contradictions, beauty and horror.  It is learning to love our connectedness -- that no matter what the religion, war, language, or worldview, we are, when all is said and done, neighbors in a world we share.

                                                                                   -- From the Introduction

__________________________

Clothes and human remains, a reminder of the sad history of Cambodia, continue to emerge from the soil in a field outside Phnom Penh.

The April day in 1975, in which the Braves beat the Astros 2-1 at Atlanta's Fulton County Stadium, was not a good day for Loung Ung.  This young girl -- this child -- cried because April 17 also saw the Khmer Rouge, a communist force supported at various times by Vietnam, China, and the United States, take power in Cambodia.  In a matter of hours her world turned upside down and became injected by the potent reality of evil.  Her family fled Phnom Penh, and in the months and years ahead they would be separated.

            They adjusted to their hell as best they could.  Gone were the days of Loung sitting in her father's lap, of her older brothers flirting with girls, her mom putting on jewelry.  Overnight they were introduced to a world where they would battle starvation, grow accustomed to death, and celebrate abnormal occasions like having an extra portion of rice.  They would work in fields that produced food that could nourish them; however, they were not allowed to eat it.  The produce instead was sent to China to pay for the Khmer Rouge's weapons.  The punishment for taking a bite was a beating or execution.  On at least one occasion, while they sat in their hut on the brink of starvation, they heard the parents of a beautiful teenage girl wailing in a neighboring hut.  Two Khmer Rouge soldiers had stopped by to request the "help" of their daughter, explaining that the government needed her for a few moments.  The parents could do nothing as she disappeared into the darkness to be raped.

                                                            -- From Chapter 13, "Entering Cambodia with A Book"

______________________

Coffee beans dry in the sun outside John's Guesthouse on the Indonesian island of Sumatra

At first there were no people in sight, but eventually a tired-looking woman stuck her head out of a home.  Based on the name "John's" painted on the wall, I knew this was the guesthouse I had heard about.  She disappeared back into the house and soon her husband stumbled onto the porch looking sleepy or, more likely, stoned.  It took John a few minutes to come to, but when he did he gave me a concise overview of the arrangements: "sleep" in the room attached to the house; "piss" anywhere in the yard; "shit" in the outhouse.  Next he pulled out a box of pictures and postcards, which came from places like The Hague, Colorado Springs, Sydney, and Prague, and he spoke about the glory days of tourism in Sumatra.  He also pulled out a guestbook. The entries stretched back to the early 1990s and the pages were stained and worn.  I thought of the country's political upheavals, the terrible Muslim-Christian violence in the Malukus, the violent birth pains of East Timor, the Bali bombing, and the September 11 attacks that affected not only U.S. cities but even distant hamlets like this.  All these events had chipped away at John's livelihood.  He was thirty-six years old, but he looked about fifty.

                                                        -- From Chapter 16, "Where People Know your Name"

__________

One of about 400,000 rockslides I came across during the week I traveled illegally through eastern Tibet.  That number could be an exaggeration...but it didn't feel like it.

Captain Ahab was chasing after Moby Dick at the time, not making his way to Lhasa.  But whatever.  Had he been telescoping his gaze straight to the police checkpoints on the horizon, crouching low as falling rock pelted his bus and threatened to smash through the windows, watching in horror as the flashing lights of a government vehicle pulled to a screeching halt right in front of him at two o'clock in the morning on the edge of a military garrison town he had so carefully tried to sneak through...yeah, he would have jumped up and said the same thing as he said then: "Oars!  Oars!...grip your oars, and clutch your souls, now!  My God, men, stand by!"

            Like whaling, traveling illegally through eastern Tibet has nothing in common with, say, a week at the Cancun Marriott.  I could have gone a much simpler way -- legally, by joining an expensive group tour, or by flying into Lhasa rather than passing through territory deemed off-limits to solo-travelers.  But that would have been contrary to both the spirit of adventure and my modest desire to avoid paying the Chinese government for permission to visit a land which, since the 1950s, they have governed with a heavy hand.  So I went the way I did and after four days and five nights arrived in Lhasa.  Part of this time was spent sleeping in boarding houses or waiting for a ride.  Fifty-three hours of it, however -- roughly the same number of hours it takes to drive from Miami to Seattle -- was spent in actual motion.

            But I am getting ahead of myself.

                                                         -- From Chapter 26, "The Road to Lhasa...and Beyond"

___________________________

Ritsuko, the young Japanese woman I met at the Uzbek/Turkmen border post and would travel with for three days.  She was in the midst of her own solo journey through Asia and Europe.

After dinner I walked back to the room, which Ritsuko and I were sharing.  I quietly sat on my bed.  As I took off my shoes, I looked across the room at Ritsuko sleeping and remembered that earlier in the day she had answered my question where are you from? with the word Hiroshima.  The stillness of her body now haunted me.  This morning I had woken up expecting that at day's end I'd be sleeping in a room alone, knowing no one.  Instead, I had been introduced to a daughter of Hiroshima, and I had even come to share a room with her.  The room was small and dark, but a street light threw enough light onto her bed that I could see the slight rise in her body each time her lungs pulled in breath.  Never before had I watched, in a closed room, the breathing of one who comes from Hiroshima.  I had been tired when I walked in, almost numb to pain, but no longer.  I looked for the air she was breathing and the thing that made her body want to breathe it in.  The air seemed so fragile now, so vulnerable to forces that might want to take it from us.  I was nearly overcome with the desire to protect the air she breathed, to fight all that might wish to take it from her.  But I felt powerless, too.  Our world is too full of forces that walk like a brawly drunkard into a china shop, teetering this way and that, so that soon we might all lie broken upon the floor.

                                                        -- From Chapter 41, "They Call it a Transit Visa"

IF INTERESTED IN READING A CHAPTER IN ITS ENTIRETY, CLICK ON "Entering Cambodia with A Book". 

IF INTERESTED IN MORE EXCERPTS, CLICK ON "Reflections on the Road: Excerpts from a Manuscript (II)".

___________________________________           

		Joel Carillet, Gather Travel Correspondent
	Joel's column, "Reflections on the Road," is published every other Thursday to Gather Essentials: Travel. His articles, based on extensive travels in Asia and the Middle East, seek to shed light on humanity, both our own and that of others.   They aim not merely to entertain and inform but also to develop a sense of connection between the reader and the world. Joel's writing and photography have appeared in several magazines and newspapers, including the Kansas City Star and Christian Science Monitor.  Currently he is seeking an agent for a book manuscript entitled Sixty-One Weeks: A Journey across Asia. When not on the road, he happily calls Tennessee home. Keep up with Joel's article series by joining his network, or subscribing to his content.