MYANMAR-BANGLADESH-THAILAND: NOVEMBER 26, 2019-JANUARY 15, 2020

2019-11-26   TUESDAY - SARASOTA-CHARLOTTE-ATLANTA-LOS ANGELES

“Don't drink anything red on an airplane “

You can get there (Los Angeles) from here (Sarasota) but it won’t be easy, or fast, or convenient. It is cheap---$20 plus some semi-senescent frequent flyer miles---and Al Gorithm, American Airlines’ Itinerary Planning Masochist in Residence, resents it. Al outdoes himself. For 18 hours we zig and zag from south to north to south again to go west. The journey is not without rewards. AA's other minions take pity. I get my wheelchairs to speed me and my protesting foot tendons through the vast savannahs of Charlotte and LAX airports. I feel quite royal, but refrain from the ‘one elbow, two wrists’ wave perfected by those Queens across the pond. Why gild this lily?

All of the wheelchair caddies are people of color, some with accents, all kind and helpful, especially LaShauna and Hala. All the passengers but one are white, and depend on the kindness of these strangers. I hope they remember that when they vote.

The planes are stuffed with people heading off to families gathered around turkey immolations. They help lift oversized holiday suitcases, switch seats for families, laugh, snatch conversations with their seat mates. They ooze courtesy, respect, politeness, maybe inspired by the mythology of that first Thanksgiving, and safe here from the deranged world outside. In the spirit, I give a pass to the loud Texan behind me, strewing “ma’ams" and dropping consonants as he lifts loads and greets passersby. His voice is so big it wears a cowboy hat.

There is ‘food’ for purchase on the long trans-continental leg, though not enough for every passenger. Al Gorithm is a realist. There won’t be many takers for these challenges to good taste, even at 35 thousand feet. Stomach out votes Tongue. Our neighbor is a chatty flight attendant who promises to get us two. The ‘Grilled Chicken Sandwich with Gourmet Chocolate Chip Cookie’ sinks below our expectations, buoyed a small bit by that cookie. Flight Lady mishears my drink request.  Cranberry Juice morphs into Bloody Mary Mix, ice cubes struggling for air in the viscous stuff, a thick, deep red happily confined in its plastic glass, or so I think. Outside the atmosphere burps. Inside, the glass wobbles, totters, sidles to the edge of the tray, leaps.  The bloody, bloody, Bloody stuff misses the cookie. But not my headphones. Or, my seat. Or, my lap. Or, my pants. Or, my shirt. This is not the look I have in mind for my next royal progress, through LAX.  I am very wet, and very, very red. A heap of soggy paper towels and lots of rubbing get me from ‘Foot of the Guillotine Red’ to ‘Pepto Bismo Pink’ to ‘Tequila Sunrise’ to ‘Please Don't Ask Blush’. I remain sticky.

Flight Lady walks by, looks down, doesn’t have to ask, though she adds a snippet. “Don't drink anything red on an airplane “and walks on.

We land at LAX. I exit our flight dampish with a soupçon of Bloody Mary Mix embedded in my shirt. I’m a jigger of vodka short of a walking cocktail. I reconsider that career move. Sucking on my shirt tail will blow that ‘almost one elbow, two wrists, royalty coming through' image.

But, ten minutes in LA and I’m ready to say: The hell with it: Get me that vodka. Now.

But that's another adventure and another story.

2019-11-27/28 WEDNESDAY/THURSDAY - LOS ANGELES-TOKYO-BANGKOK

“Please wait for me. I will be happy to help you.”

Six hours and 21 minutes and 3,392 miles after leaving LAX we cross the International Date Line at 30,000 feet and leave November 27 a whoosh behind us, at 559 miles an hour.

It's about 8pm, Thanksgiving Eve, back in Florida. In front of us, Tokyo is 17 hours ahead of Florida, late morning on November 28. We are time travelers, future bound across time zones down below, already there up here in our exquisite time machine, All Nippon Airways Flight 145. We have 2100 miles and 4 and a half hours still to go. After that it's 3 hours in Tokyo's Narita Airport and another 2889 miles and 7 hours to Bangkok. By the time we get to bed in Bangkok it is 24 hours since we left our hotel near LAX and 46 since we left Florida. The 8 hours overnight in DAYS INN near LAX are an ineffectual blip.

ANA has this ‘Queen for a Day' thing licked. Check in Lady leads us to designated seats near her station to await my chariot, bows, and upgrades us to bulkhead seats. She's Japanese and too polite to notice the slight whiff of Bloody Mary. Ditto Chariot Lady. We descend the jetway first, upstaging the First Class passengers, to 3 deep bows at the top and a dozen as we board. I have my own exquisite guide to our seats through cloud soft grey. Only the Japanese would design so subtle a space. Nothing jars. Kabuki performers in white face over swirls of color deliver the safety instruction in stylized mime. I applaud silently for a replay, get sidetracked by the dozen flight attendants handing out ‘oshibori', warm face towels, rice crackers, and green tea.

Eleven hours later, as ANA 145 drops into Tokyo and November 28, my attendant delivers a hand- written note “Please wait for me. I will be happy to help you”, reminds me to keep seated and wait for her until everyone has deplaned. I do. The note has a happy face. She guides me out, turns me over to my Tokyo Chariot Lady, thanks me for flying ANA. And bows.

I look forward to the seven hours and 2889 miles to Bangkok. I am not disappointed. I wait for the safety show. The kabuki actors strut their mime into my memory. Warned, I settle into safety behind my seat belt and wait to be spoiled.  Our tickets claim to be Basic Steerage but from a more felicitous and passenger-friendly future beyond the imagining of most western airlines. They treat passengers as infestations.  Here at ANA I am a guest. I fantasize. Does First Class get private lessons in Japanese? Massages?  A personal geisha to sing for the men? and a….my mind blanks. There is no male equivalent of geisha for women. It sure isn't ‘geishO’ and gigolo misses the whole point of the geisha. Ladies, protest!

 The 12 bows usher me out the door into Bangkok and into the care of a smiling young Thai man who wheels me down the Fast Track. My elbow and wrist twitch as we pass the First Class passengers. Chariot Guy turns us over to a cabby. We are on our own

We have flown 8381 miles since LAX this morning…yesterday? It is after midnight when the Cab Guy knocks on the wooden door of Pimthong Place.  Julia greets us with watermelon and bananas. We don’t care or know what date it is.  There are orchids.





2019-11-29 FRIDAY – THAILAND-MYANMAR

“I will make different food for you every day.”

Julia was 2 years old when I came to Thailand the first time. Now she runs a small hotel in a garden, not far from the airport. Well into the morning she covers our table in the garden with small plates, each with a pair of treats. Coconut pudding wrapped in banana leaves, custard with corn kernels or crescents of green onion, sticky rice steamed in bamboo, baked egg casserole…

Thai food and I have a long history.  Julia`s food is another time machine, taking me back to 1965.

I was on break from 6 months of brain-numbing intensive Mandarin in Taipei, traveling across Southeast Asia under a saggy backpack for as long as my money lasted. Near broke, I lived in a Bangkok temple for 2 weeks, sharing a floor with the recent crop of university students nearing the end of their mandatory 3 months with the monks. It was a lot less austere than it sounds. The guys were a hoot, their affection for monastic life, shaved heads, and saffron robes---this was the Age of the Beatles, Aquarius, floppy hair, and Tie Dye---nudging its sell by date. They, the monks, and me heaped onto straw mats to watch the American TV pseudo-western Bonanza, dubbed in the soft, gentle, rounded syllables of Thai that smoothed the hyper-macho angularity of the cowboy posings. I got more out of the Thai boxing shows, whirls of lithe, levitating, lethal kickers. The monks cheered, jeered, applauded the muscular mayhem.

The food was delicious. Forrest Gump would have understood the menu. The monks collected food every morning from the faithful, piling it into the bowls they carried on their rounds and serving it out to us when they returned to the temple. We never knew what we would get. The curries were delicious, though less successful as topping on the chocolate donuts one neighbor added most mornings.  Those first tastes sealed a deal. Thai food has never disappointed me.

That was a half century ago. The tongue remembers, here under the bougainevillea in the garden of Pimthong Place. “Aroi mahk”, “delicious”, pops out of my language locker where it has sat, unused, for almost half a century, surprising me even more than it surprises her. There is something about this place

Julia's husband greets us on his way to take the only other guests, a sweet Russian couple, to the airport. He is a retired professor of architecture and design. It shows. The place is beautiful. The floors and furniture are teak, no longer harvested, and so aged and smooth, patinaed with use. He rescues it wherever he finds it. The doors are from a “horse house". He rubs his hand across the grain. “I love wood.”

Three of Julia's 4 dogs join us, one a rapturous eruption of kisses and squeals, her usual shtick. Her usually aggressive brother accepts an ear scratch. “He never does that.” Julia takes a video to show her husband.

There is something here.

We'll be back in January for 5 days. Julia piles our packs into the bed of her pick-up and drives us to the airport…and plans our return. “You cancel reservation you make with Booking online. I charge you much less. We will go to the big market over there.  I will make different food for you every day.”

Once again, we are home.

2019-11-30   SATURDAY – MYANMAR: YANGON

“Jingle bell, jingle bell, jingle bell rock"

I don’t know what I crave from Yangon, perhaps exotic meanderings, perhaps rickshaws and jasmine, but I know it is not the turgid traffic jam, mega pollutomobiles and scrawny taxis oozing through canyons of neon-lit high rises that got us from the efficient and brittle airport to Backpacker B&B last night.  There is no ‘place’ outside side the windows of Mr. San’s taxi.

But, I am wrong.

In the morning we walk down and out of Backpacker. The people on our street have soft, open faces, gentle, and composed. Most of both sexes are strikingly beautiful. Many wear longyis, floor length sarongs, wrapped tightly around the slender women, and the broad-shouldered and narrow-hipped men, sweeping the air softly as they walk.  Their smiles are easy, starting in their eyes. Some wave,

We walk down our street, turn right onto a bigger one. Straight ahead, past the ladies selling watermelon and pineapple, is gilded temple, Sule Paya, center of old Yangon. Between us and it is a whirl of traffic, spinning around the traffic, and flung out to all parts of the city. We cross with the crowd, circle the pagoda at a much slower speed. By the door a man squats in the shade by a cage of sparrows. They chirp. He smiles and throws his arms into the air. Message received: buy one, then let it fly free. The Buddhist faithful do, to gain merit. Inside hundreds of images of the Buddha sit in the quiet, barrier to the noise of the traffic outside.

There are minarets down a narrow street. The mosque is white, barren of images. There is violence against Myanmar's Moslems in the far north. I wonder if they are safe here.

The stalls on Bookseller Street are ecumenical, trash and treasures all welcome. We browse the browsers. Two women in long robes are Moslem. The guy in a long robe has a floppy fabric bag and a shaved head…a Buddhist priest. Some women sweep by in their longyis. Others are in trousers. As are a few guys. Most, even the young ones, are in longyis.

Down on the major road we pass the colonial era buildings, imposing, European, ungainly in the tropics, but built to last, and outlasting the Empire and arrogance that inspired them. Now they face the Independence Monument.

The Baptist Church is surpassingly triumphant, and ugly. A glance is enough. Then, a loudspeaker parts the sapping heat with a LOUD chorus of “Jingle bell, jingle bell, jingle bell rock". Colonialism dies hard.

We have been walking for hours. This is the ‘cool season', so Yangon is…hot. Flattened by the heat we escape it in a Moslem tea house. It's crowded…but only with men. Some have been to Mecca We are welcomed. The waiter gives us a menu in English. We have black tea and a heavy pudding thick with coconut.

People smile at us on the walk back to Backpacker.

 Our cravings are in good hands.

2019-12-01  SUNDAY -  MYANMAR: YANGON

“Can I help?”

Two brothers carried 8 hairs of the Buddha across the mountains from India and built a simple shrine around them on a hill above the Yangon River. 2600 years later that shrine is the Shwedagon Pagoda, one of the holiest sites in Buddhism. The brothers might recognize the site and the devotion that flows around it. Like all of us they would stop dead at the glory of it. It covers the hill now, over 100 acres of it. The central shrine over those 8 stubbles is over 300 feet tall. All of it is sheathed in gold, an estimated 50,000 pounds of it, encrusted with rubies, emeralds, sapphires. How do you top an already gilded lily? With a 72-carat diamond, and at the very top. Such is the description.

We visit this morning to see for ourselves, early, before the sun turns the pavement around the pagoda into a griddle under our bare feet. Nay Nay, Backpacker Desk Clerk and Fixer Extraordinaire, finds us a cab, negotiates a fair price (2500 Kyat, about $1.60) for the trip across the city and tells Cab Guy to drop us at the south entrance. “There is other temple 5 minutes near there. You can see 2 temples today.”  His smile launches our day, then he runs back up into Backpacker.

Cab Guy turns and says “nin lau a", “hello", asks us where we are from. And smiles.

The ‘other temple’ is gilded and quiet. Anywhere else it would THE place to visit, but.Shwedagon is across the road. ‘Nuff said. We take off our sandals. Sparrow Man gestures to a spot near him, then to the birds. We haven’t seen anybody free the birds, so we pass. He smiles anyway. The birds are non-committal. I suspect they are trained to fly right back to the cage, a renewing resource for Sparrow Man. Their freedom may be an illusion, as is all life and desire to Buddhists.

Inside, rows of Buddhas, faces free of worldly concerns, are gifted with flowers and the slow, gentle, hands-together bows of the faithful. It is one of my favorites of all human gestures, supple, graceful. In a flurry of mobiles a family asks to take our picture, quietly, with equal grace.

Shwedagon has embraced its fame. The ‘Special Entrance for Foreign Guests’ offers free bottles of cold water and free maps. We check our sandals, stored for the duration in numbered bins. There are elevators to the top of the many, many stairs. We ascend. To paradise.

The pagoda is a sweep of grace etched against the blue sky, dominant,  nescapably lovely. As outsiders to the faith, we follow the advice of a friend of mine: “Be like the  mother of the bride. Wear beige and stay in the background.” It's easy in this rainbow crowd, all in rippling Sunday best. Many carry offerings of flowers, real, or folded paper, origami in extremis. People mill or lounge on the steps of the many side pavilions. A young student asks where we are from and we chat while his look-alike siblings, parents and an auntie or two beam brighter than the gold.

I search for the place where other Thursday-borns like myself can pour water in offering for a good life, come up dry. The map promises a telescope powerful enough to bring that 72-carat diamond down to earth. We haven’t quite perfected how to wander without looking lost. “Can I help?” and a smile follows from an elegant young man in impeccably folded longyi, and traditional shirt, white, long-sleeved, and with a thin band as collar. His sweetness distills this day for us.

The photo exhibit has close-ups of the rows of emeralds, sapphires, and rubies embedded in the gold far above us, green, blue, and red ice cubes never melting in the sun. That 72-carat ‘ice’ at the top dwarfs them all, as it will eternally.

Eyes now resting down below, we join people lounging in the shade of the pavilions. The light is faintly golden. Young couples walk by hand in hand, longyis close, fathers carry and kiss babies, bald monks poke cell phones, children ring the temple bell.

Behind them the wall of gold is in full sun. Shwedagon the artifact matches its description.  That gold we capture in photos. The rest?  Beyond golden.

2019-12-02  MONDAY – MYANMAR: YANGON

“I teach myself"

Jet lag just won’t let go. It has been 3 days since we spent 40 plus hours in planes and airports to cross 12 time zones---and wind up halfway around Gaia's considerable girth--- from Florida. Three pm here is 3 am there and way past our bedtime on our body clocks. Yesterday at 3pm Eyes drooped and gave it up to gravity. We woke at 10pm, aka 10 in the morning on our confused internal clock. And stayed awake through the Yangon night, our internal morning and afternoon.

By 7 am local time today fatigue and fuzziness sabotage the plan of the day, to take a ferry across the Yangon River into rural Myanmar.  We spend it ‘home’ at Backpackers, first slouched over breakfast on the terrace, 8 floors into the hot sky, then over alternate hits of fresh fruit Juice and coffee. Below us and to the south, traffic on the Strand separates the river from the orderly march of the grand British constructs of colonial Rangoon, Burma, stately, rigid, imperial, colorless, Queen Victoria in stone.

Back here, one street up, the real city begins. Old Yangon is a jumble, colorful by intent, faded and peeled by the fierce sun and demanding rains of the tropics. It’s ‘lived in’. Plants, laundry and ‘stuff' clutter the balconies. Back behind them, away from the air and light and breeze it must be hot and dark. The streets are an escape, for everyone.

We walk ours to afternoon curries, and drink cold sugar cane juice, (mine cut with basil and chilies, Dennis’ with lemon and ginger, both delicious) through bamboo straws.

 Nighttime is fantasy. As the Earth’s spin takes Yangon’s time zone out of the heat and light, we join other folk from Backpacker in a cheapie van ($1 each roundtrip) to return to Shwedagon at night. Floodlit against the black, it is searing fantasy. We wander for 3 hours, watching the crowd, all of us softened in gold light, almost silhouettes.

A young man chats us up in superb English. He's a graduate student concentrating in Burmese literature (“not literature translated into Burmese, but literature written in Burmese”). Soon he will enter graduate work in a Buddhist university and will shave his head, “like a monk”. He is from the far north of the country, near the Himalayas, where the mountain landscape squeezes the ethnic groups together.  “My father is Shan, my mother is Kachin.“  I ask him how he learned such excellent English. “I stand in front of a mirror and speak. I teach myself.”  We say goodbye to catch our van.

The jet lag is releasing its hold, our bodies know what time it is. We droop. Tomorrow we have to get up at 04:30 (THIS time zone) to catch a plane north to Loikaw, way off the tourist trail.

We will have no mirror other than the people around us.

2019-12-03 TUESDAY –  YANGON-LOIKAW

It’s 05:30. Yangon is just shadows as we leave it, but the dark keeps the road to the airport empty and the heat at bay. We’re headed north, into the cool. A little after 8, Myanmar National Airlines drops us down through morning light onto the patch of airfield at Loikaw. There are only 4 flights a week. Ours is a semi-event. There are some vehicles parked on the grass. Cab Guy spots us—we're the only foreigners--- tries a price. 6000 Kyat (about $4). I smile, hold up 4 fingers. He laughs, holds up 5. I laugh, bend one of the fingers to half-mast. He laughs and stands it back up. I nod. Deal made. 5000 it is. And so we ride into tiny Loikaw.

Myanmar's ‘Big Four’ destinations of Yangon (for Shwedagon Pagoda), Inle Lake (floating villages, and fisherman who paddle with their feet, standing up), Mandalay (irresistibly romantic name), and Bagan (thousands of temples across thousands of acres of jungle) get all the attention. Few travelers get to Loikaw.  Perfect.

And we are right. Loikaw’s wide plain is fresh in the morning light, green, slightly gilded by the low-lying sun. The town is awake, but there is no hurry on the roads. Our hotel is at the far end, neat, with a small- town elegance, staff in longyis, and...“Do you speak Italian? I thought you might with your last name. Don’t be surprised. I speak Italian and French fluently.”  And English, perfectly, with no accent other than that of a highly educated, cosmopolitan, sophisticated, man of the world. And so Terence is. He’s Burmese by birth, and all of those and more by everything since.

And unstoppable.

“Sit down. How long will you be? Have tea. I will get you sorted. Today how about a drive about locally? Tomorrow you can go outside the area. Where are you going next?” (I'm voting for the bathroom, but Terence is on a roll.) “Inle Lake? Good place. Go by boat…”

Once again, we have lucked out.

At noon he turns us over to Shine (that is how his Burmese name looks and sounds when written in Roman letters) and waves us off. Shine chews betel nut, speaks very little English (dog, market, shoe, good, and wait are 5 of his accomplishments) and is completely sweet.  He has a super-annuated mohawk do, grown out fuzzy on the sides and bristle-moppish topside. He also has a spectacular blue tattoo wrapping one muscular arm. Aha, thinks the anthropologist, Myanmar has 137 ethnic groups. Those locks and tats must be significant in his. There is no way to find out from smiling Shine. I get the story later.

Shine, smile, and tats give us the Grand Tour. The pagoda perched atop a needle thin crag has spectacular views over the town (and where “shoe" and “wait" come in handy). The town is low-rise, a comfortable, stumpy, colourful meander along its narrow river. Right below our sacred aerie is a wooden building just big enough to host a sign: ‘LOIKAW TOURIST INFORMATION”. The sign is new-ish.

“Market" says Shine and off we go, passing “dog” on the way, now four words down. Shine finds a place to replace my watch band (1500 Kyat, or $1). Back deep in the market, Nut Lady presides over rows of roasted and raw nuts and seeds. We moan appreciation of the crunchy roasted peanuts.  Two batches--measured by the empty soup canful---cost under a dollar, cheap munchies for the long bus trips coming up. Nut Lady throws in an extra handful and does it again when we snarf up a double batch of a mix of roasted soy and other beans.

We wander from nuts to spices. Spice Lady has ‘em all, of every hue and fragrance, even two bins of dusky, unglamorous, crinkled ‘szechuan peppercorns’, not really of the pepper family, though they carry the name, spicy step-children. I breathe in over both bins. Shine follows, points to the one on the right. “Good”.  We head home.

Terence is at the ready. “Where did you go? Did you like it? Shine is very patient, isn't he? This is his son. This is his wife….”. Tin Tin Nahm is also Terence's assistant. She is gorgeous. The little boy is adorable as 4-year-olds can be. Shine grabs them both. And shines.

The tats? The answer to my question comes back from Shine via Terence from Burmese into English. “I got it because it looked pretty". I point to the other arm, still bare. His grimace is eloquent.  

Sometimes you don’t need language.

2019-12-04  WEDNESDAY – MYANMAR: LOIKAW  

“Don't lose your family.”

“It’s only 40 percent”, says Terence's friend, Mary, our guide for the day…it's also only 8:30 in the morning, but a quick snort of millet wine, the preferred fuel ‘de this and every jour', is a rite of passage for early morning market goers here in the cool hills outside Loikaw. Booze Lady gets ‘em right off. She is the first stall in the market, ready with that first hit of Morning Market Millet Hooch. She watches us up-end the black laquer cup, approves the bravado. Her stuff is good! She spills more into the cup, but Mary cuts us off with “40 percent” to us and  “be zu bing da de” (“thank you")  to Booze Lady.  

We get only 3 stalls into the market. The Munchies Ladies are frying up batches of something round and crispy dotted with little black things. They are rice croquettes with chopped chives, crunchy on the outside, soft and oniony on the inside, worth the clogged arteries. The first batch demands a second. We eat our way down the alley, through the munchies on offer.

Terence has done well. Patient Shine is driving. He sticks to the car while we are in the market. Mary walks with us and gifts us with her culture. She is 43, married only 7 years, with an adopted daughter. Like 60 percent of the people in this state of Myanmar, she is Christian, specifically Roman Catholic. “That's why my parents named me Mary. There are a lot of us Marys.” She laughs her rippling, joyful laugh. And leads us on.

I'm hunting for a longyi. Dennis spots it hidden amid many folded over bamboo poles on the wall behind a Burmese lady, legs wrapped in a longyi, and a Kayin dowager, neck wrapped in brass rings. We're learning the language of longyis. Men's longyis have vertical stripes. Women's stripes go sideways. (I will refrain from potentially unwise speculation about that.) The latter outnumber the former 100 to 1.  Mine is one of about a dozen, marooned on the far left by the ocean of ladies’ longyis in front of us. It's red and black, definitively striped and handsome. It costs 5000 Kyat, just under $4. Mary approves. Red is the preferred color of the Kayin, her people. “People will know you got it here.”

Mary is a deliciously knowledgeable, ecumenical, aware companion. In the afternoon we drive far into the valley. She brings us to visit with village women who greet us with gracious nods of their heads from atop the stack of brass circles that ring their necks. The ‘rings’ are one long coil, replaced when a longer coil is needed to increase the number of ‘rings’ as a woman ages and passes through stages in her life.  Most get the first coil when they are 5 or 6 years old. And no, their heads won’t fall over if they uncoil the rings. The neck muscles are weakened, not atrophied.  Uncoiled, the women wrap a scarf around their necks for additional support.

There are few men in the stilt houses we visit. They are in the fields, or away working. The households earn from our visits. They volunteer for the program and visitors rotate among the families to spread the monies. The women are seniors, well-ringed, and to me, composed, and dignified, dowagers to the manner born. They laugh easily.  One charmer laughed when we asked her if she liked having visitors, then… “I can’t go to see you, so you come to see me….and it is easier than working in the fields for old people.”  The one man at home sits with his wife and sings for us the song he sang to court his wife ages ago. Then they sing a duet for us. Dennis’ printer does its magic, drawing wide eyes and laughs from even the most composed of these elegant ladies. One laughs. “I didn’t know I have so many wrinkles.”

We talk family. The ladies have many children. One has 12, and many great-grand children. Girls leave when they marry and live with their husband's family. Boys bring their wives. Maybe they move away. The youngest son never does. He stays to take care of his parents. Families gather whenever they can. There are festivals just for that. Mary’s many sisters are always visiting. It’s important. “Don't lose your family”.

It's late afternoon when we drive into the hotel courtyard. Terence leads the whole staff out to greet us. I get a lesson in longyi wrapping, several in fact. I don’t get the fold quite right---we blame the added bulk of my belt--- but everyone approves the smart stripes. We take photos, mixing, matching, mixing again so we're all included. Then Mary and Shine say goodbye and drive off.  We follow Terence inside. He captures us with more stories. There is beer. It's almost as good as our Morning Market Millet Hooch.

This day will follow us. When I look into the mirror I see the faces of everyone we have met on our trips. Terence, Mary, Shine and his tats, and the lady with rings on her neck join them.

I won’t lose my family.

2019-12-05/06 THURSDAY AND FRIDAY – LOIKAW-INLE LAKE AND NYAUNGSHWE

Boat Guy’s charm and character are a tsunami, not to be resisted.

In looks and style he is the love child of Barack Obama and Rocketman, Sir Elton John. The wing-worthy flappers on both sides of his head are proof of the former. They are studded with rhinestones, asymmetrically, 7 on the left, 3 on the right, and bridged by plastic rims and great dessert plates of glass, yellow and thoroughly unapologetic. Elton.  For sure.

The grin is totally his. We’re hooked at first sight.

Amden waves us into his narrow skiff and launches us into a stream that will lead us into Inle Lake. Nyaungshwe and our digs for the next 3 nights are at the far tip of the lake, 8 hours to the north. We wobble a farewell wave to Terence who had ridden with us for the hour trip from Loikaw, and we're off.

We string single file in Amden’s narrow wooden boat. It's about 6 people long, and one and a half people wide. We fill our chairs. They fill out to the gunwales. The gunwales rise a foot above the water. Maybe.

Inle is a huge mirror, miles wide and stretched long in its valley. The mountains and clouds that drip captured rain into the Lake float again on its surface, rippled doppelgangers. It’s a thin sheen of water over deep mud.  Water lilies root in the mud, and send flowers upward, great balls of crimson or white petals, floating on the green surface. Amden captures two, splits the stalks, ties the ends and drapes us in crimson.  Later, we watch women strip fiber from the stalks and spin it into thread, seven times more expensive than silk.

There's too little depth for an outboard motor. Inle boats whip the surface with blades that skim the surface, edge on, whipping it into great plumes. We use something smaller, but upended, in our kitchen to blend soup in the pot.

Our wake nestles against the ‘floating villages’, which seem to float, but rest on tall stilts. and their floating gardens, which really do float. Tomatoes are in season.

We stop at a temple of hundreds of small shrines and one languid reclining Buddha, then putt-putt on to the ‘alcohol village' gift-wrapped in a forest of poinsettia. The booze is good. At the ‘pottery village’ I give 2000 Kyat for a straw hat made of 6 segments that collapse flat. I don’t need it, but $1.35 is a cheap price for genius.

We come to Inle for its fishermen. They fish standing at one end of their narrow canoes, arms casting their nets. A paddle, anchored in one armpit, and cradled by one leg, moves them across the water. The action is silk, the silhouette more avian than human. We see many. A few return our waves.

The 8 hours pass quickly. Nyaungshwe is raucus after Inle. We say goodbye to Amden, and almost capture that grin. Tomorrow he will head back south. We stay here, with a bit of him.

The tuktuk drops us at Inle Cottage, on the edge of town and away from the one main street and the one traffic light. Our cottage is through a garden, perfect coda to this day.

We eat in the dim light of the night market, then sleep long and well.

The next day we float again on Inle Lake, with ‘Donny’, for the fishermen. We don’t need anything else.

2019-12-07 SATURDAY – INLE LAKE AND NYAUNGSHWE

Linn Htet (that ‘H’ is not a typo) covers our table with our two curries (potato, and chicken), soup (leaves of Chinese  cabbage, pale jade and white, crisp still, in clear broth), bowls of rice, and small saucers of accompaniments, six or seven, tangy, salty, spicy, sweet, dry, crunchy, reddish, greenish, goldish, leafy, mushy, chunky, powdery, smooth. Lunch is beautiful, greeting all our senses. We salute it with tall glasses of mint tea and honey. The mint floats green in the clear tea, above the honey, of local bees and flowers, a clear garnet a shade deeper than the rose water lilies on the Lake.

Linn Htet’s place is popular. The food is good, and cheap (our lunch was about $8). It’s on a corner with walls that slide back, open to the rambling goings on up and down Nyaungshwe's main street, the one with the town's only traffic light.

We, eat, drink and watch. Nyaungshwe tells us its story. The town is a forgiving realist. Travelers bring business for the boats and everyone else. Chunked into the real stuff of this small town are narrow doorways under ambitious signs that specialize in the traveler stuff, access to bus, plane, and boat tickets to get ‘em outta town.  ‘Them’ are the descendants of Sixties hippies, in the same drag I saw on their ancestors in Southeast Asia in 1965, minus the tie-dye, plus the cell phones…and money. The Grand-hippies are much less colorful. The Burmese are sweet. The ‘vibe’ is calm, peaceful, perhaps a worthy descendant of the Sixties.

The complaints about unwise demands on debilitated tendons from Right Foot are mollified by the long sit with curry and nostalgia at Linn Htet’s, so we chance a walk back to Inle Cottage along the canal that links Nyaungshwe to the Lake and away from the low-key fray of the town.  Half-way back, Right Foot changes its mind. It’s not a hard sell. A sign offers ‘iced coffee', a new event for us in Myanmar.  The two ‘baristas’ are young, and beautiful in the soft sweet way of their countrymen. And they brew some potent stuff, iced, in tall glasses.  We sit on a narrow balcony hanging over the canal, nursing coffee and tendons.

Myanmar flows by, going elsewhere, leaving us with memories.

2019-12-08 SUNDAY - INLE LAKE-MANDALAY

“Maybe”

We're on the road to Mandalay.

Bob Hope and Bing Crosby had Dorothy Lamour and her sarong for company  ‘On The Road to Mandalay’ in that eminently silly, wildly imagined 1940's movie. I think elephants were also involved. We have 4 Burmese guys, one Burmese ‘Auntie’ of clear and undisputed authority and possession of the prime, First Class, seat, next to Driver Guy, 3 Europeans, and us, tightly wrapped against the morning chill, tucked with little imagination into a white mini-van, nary a sarong or pachyderm in sight.  Bob, Bing, and Dotty got there and back in 100 minutes, all in black and white.  We’re 30 minutes in. 450 to go. In living color.

We ride the length of downtown Nyaungshwe past our favorite restaurant, Linn Htet (that ‘H’ is still not a typo), past the travel shops, and Grand-hippies on their cell phones.

Our minibus crosses the canal that connects Nyaungshwe with Inle Lake proper and we leave the Lake.  Outside Nyaungshwe the road is a Slinky, tight curves swooping around the mountains, then diving back onto the plains. The mountains are ancient forests, deep-rooted, anchoring the hills against the soil-leaching, voracious rainy seasons. The plains are goldish with rice stalks, the bounty of the rain, now winnowed, dried, stored, cooked, white canvases for spice-painted curries.

The road is good, two lanes by design, as many lanes in fact as the traffic can manage. The towns soft-buzz in the laid-back way of the tropics. The strings of shops slowly nibble at the roads, flat spaces open to all. Dogs get it. They sleep wherever they want, furry potholes in reverse.

Lunch stop is “20 minute”, stretched to as long as Driver Guy needs for lunch. We will get to Mandalay ‘Four clock. Maybe half’.  

I like ‘maybe'. It absorbs imponderables, adds latitude. It's not so popular in our Western cultures, where it suggests indolence, inattention… insult, even. It’s more popular in the southern regions, where we tend to travel. It’s a scoff---no, a shrug--- at perfection. And so, it skirts disappointment. “Maybe” makes contentment.

So, three hours, maybe three and a half hours. Maybe more. We get there when we get there.

The view flying past the windows is luscious. In very living color. Bing, Bob, and Dotty, eat your hearts out.

Jumbles of tuk-tuks, taxis, lorries, motorcycles, bikes, and pedestrians announce Mandalay. We breach the city limits a few minutes shy of 8 hours, no “maybe" about it.  The city's streets are a grid laid across the flat plain, all numbered 1 to Whenever north to south, and, again 1 to Whenever east to west.  Addresses are easy, clear blips on graph paper, and Google Maps, so many streets in that direction, so many in that one, clear route between Here and There. Mandalay has 1,000,000 people. They are all between Here and There, walking, scooting, driving, biking, riding (often doubled up, or tripled, or once, sextupled), but courteous, gentle, and smilng, of course. If this were Italy every intersection would spawn centuries of vendettas. We arrive at Golden Mandalay, uncursed, and exactly at the blip on the corner of 19^th and 60^th.

Golden Mandalay is a fantasy, a bit Disneyland, a lot ‘Bilbo Baggins Meets LSD’. We love it immediately. Mr. Soo walks us down the squirrelly path through the garden into our cottage. The interior of Cottage 101 is definitive proof that LSD and gold paint are not a good combination.

Maybe ‘in living color’ is not always such a good idea.

2019-12-09  MONDAY – MANDALAY

“Inside"

We are ‘templed out’.

The first seven thousand of Mandalay's finest temples get our attention. Most are glorious golden flowers, folding around serene Buddhas, kind-faced above bowed faithful, and peaceful places. They are beautiful. We are Outsiders. The subtle differences of belief, affection, and history that make each temple special to devotees, soar beyond us. We see the beauty, and then, by Temple Seven Thousand and One, our attention wanders. Right Foot has had enough of bustling barefoot across stone and concrete. Even sporting an almost natty ankle brace in all-purpose black, RF’s limp and sidle have become wince and stagger.

There are wonderful things. The layered roofs of the many buildings that contain the Royal Palace stack golden shape onto repeated golden shape, sweeping eyes upward, leaving us royally diminished down below. Inside our feet slide across smooth teak floors. We make no sound, are insignificant.

The Buddha in Mahamuni Pagoda is the oldest in Myanmar. It was carved during the lifetime of Buddha. Maybe it is a portrait. That gets our attention. Even Right Foot goes along. After more than two millennia the face is still clear, round, peaceful, and gold. Scholars suggest that the historical Siddharta, the Prince who became Buddha, would have looked more ascetic. No matter. The faithful come and add gold to the body below that face.

The Shwe In Bin Kyaung Monastery leaves the gold and glitz to the royals and the temples. It is all dark, aged teak, carved, subtle, restful after the assertions of all that gold. Of all seven thousand, it is my favorite.

We ride from glory to glory with Mindon, Taxi Guy Extraordinaire. Mandalay's sights are spread out over the gridwork across the plain and culminate high up in the aerie of Mandalay Hill. The street signs, even the numbers, are in Burmese script. This is no territory for winging it, even with four good feet. We have three. Mrs. Soo and Right Foot suggest we hire a taxi for the day. For 35,000 Kyat (about $24) Mindon enters our life.

Mindon's English is a patchy pick-up of snippets and approximations harvested from 10 years of driving travelers around Mandalay. Burmese is a rolling, rippling language that to my ears doesn’t stop too harshly for the starkness of consonants. Mindon doesn’t stop for them at all, turning English into a smooth soup of vowels. Think southern American English after that fourth bourbon-laced Mint Julep. But we get by, and then some. Mindon is helpful, genuinely helpful, not fawning, and completely sweet, Our best travels are not in places but with people. Mandalay Day One becomes Mindon Day One.

Today’s tour is Mindon's ‘Inside', inside Mandalay, all laid out in photos of the itinerary on a laminated sheet. The flip side is ‘Outside’, into the countryside. It promises a short ride across a river, a longer one in a horse carriage, the world's longest wooden bridge, hours in rural Myanmar, and more Mindon.

We sign on. Pick up is 9am.

2019-12-10  TUESDAY – MANDALAY

“Outside"

Burmese pancakes are good.  They are a bit burnt-sugary and crispy on the outside, tender inside.  The tea and coffee are dire impersonations.  Breakfast is again on Golden Mandalay's covered terrace overlooking a canal covered with tiny luminous plants, shiny green. Soo and Company ran out of that gold paint lathering the walls inside our cottage, sparing the aged bamboo railing out here. That glows on its own.

Mindon arrives at 9. By 9:30 ‘Inside’ is behind us. Mandalay is a leafy city, trees lining many streets, green trim to asphalt, but a city. ‘Outside’ the green wins. The roads are an afterthought, slim grey strips through ripe landscapes.

U-Bein, ‘The World’s Longest Wooden Bridge', is a lovely place. Most of the shallow lake it crosses has been absorbed by the dry season, but there is enough water for the fishermen and their nets and their slender skiffs, backlit by the early sun, silhouettes. The other end of the bridge disappears into the distance, black etched on silver.  Up close, several women walk this way, sheltered from the low sun behind them under lotus-pink umbrellas, silhouettes, too, dark framed against pink, pink against blue sky.

Mindon drives us further ‘outside'.

By noon we are eons away from the city, and snug against the Irrawaddy. We convince Mindon to join us for lunch spread across a bamboo table on the banks of the river. Our reward is photos of his family, his 4-year old son splendid in golden ‘temple clothes'. Then, we're on our own for a few hours, prepped by Mindon about what we should pay for putt-putt and click-clack, our next two modes of movement. We leave him and the photos on the shore and descend to the banks of the river. The whoosh of the buzzing water-whipper, bigger brother to the ones on Inle, putt-putts us and a few other travelers across a wispy channel of the Irrawaddy to the narrow peninsula of Inwa. It’s the only noise.

Inwa is horse country. We swap ‘whoosh power’ for real horse power and climb into Carriage Number 029, chosen for no good reason other than to get all the many, many other drivers to ignore us. The driver charges what Mindon said we should pay. The road is dusty. The ride is bumpy, the only springs are in the horse's muscles. Quiet wraps around the clack of hooves, the clicked instructions from the driver, and the snap of the thin bamboo switch that reminds the horse where to go. There are temples, small local ones, most empty at mid-day, the gilt a bit tarnished, but cared for.  Fields crowd around them, nuzzling. Near one, half a dozen men winnow rice, throwing it into the air and fanning it with wide flat baskets to blow away the chaff. It falls, golden. Cows watch with contented bovine befuddlement. It’s a lived-in place. Quiet.

Then, the Chinese tourists arrive, first a trickle, then a wash, then a tidal surge of shouts, screams, yells, sheer noise.  Do they travel in any group smaller than a province? Do they have any tone of voice below megaphonic? Why do they carry cell phones? That normal tone of screech can surely cross unaided even the great distances of China's immense landscape. Given that tourism is probably a new experience for many Chinese from mainland China, some latitude is fair, but we have learned to leave when they scream in. We do. The screeching carries, but Number 029 outpaces it. We return to clack, click, and swish. Then to Mindon, the river, and Mandalay.

The day ends as it began, ‘inside’…permanently.

2019-12-11  WEDNESDAY - MANDALAY-BAGAN

The Might Irrawaddy pushes us southward from Mandalay at dawn. This water, gift of the glaciers and snows of the highest Himalayas, once crystal, has dropped thousands of miles, and now, aged cloudy by the silts of the hills of Tibet, India, Assam, Bangladesh, Myanmar, will carry us a hundred or so more, unremarked  flotsam, on its way to the sea.

Dawn becomes day. We sip coffee the color of the water.

Earlier, in the dark just before dawn, Mr. Soo hands us a bag of breakfasts, walks us a last time through the plant jumble and ‘Hobbits Go to Disneyland’ fantasy of Golden Mandalay, and turns us over to Mindon's smiles…a day well begun. For us. It is already old for the monks who are making their rounds to the faithful, collecting gifts of food for the day. In daylight the monks are beautiful. Just before dawn, they are burnished shadows.

We say goodbye to Mindon. He is Mandalay for us.

There are about two dozen of us on the ship. It could hold more. Tourism is sickly these days, even now in the cool of the high season. We have our choice of sloping rattan chairs.  We are the only native speakers of English and easily the oldest passengers aboard.  Four robust guys playing cards at the table in front of us are very tall, umlaut their vowels, and speak perfect English. I’m guessing they’re from The Netherlands, or, further north in Europe. Seven jolly Russians on the starboard side sound like a dozen, genial, but they wrinkle the morning quiet.  One woman is well into reciting all of 'War and Peace’.  On one breath. She takes another and launches into… ‘Brothers Karamazov’?  I'm thinking to suggest crime and punishment. There are some undefined and under-dressed young women topside in the sun, becoming more blond. Other ships that pass us going up-river look as empty.

Breakfast is efficient. The coffee is hot water barely colored by a swish of Brown Crayola. The Mighty Irrawaddy looks richer. It grows wider, still smooth and brown, and sluggish, its fall from the Roof of the World a distant memory. Flat green fields rim our horizons. Narrow fishing boats are dark slices on the water, low and tight to the river. In some places the banks are meters high with fertile silt washed down by the Spring thaw in Tibet. On top are green fields.

We pull over about noon for a walk through a pottery village. One person spins the pottery wheel with rhythmic kicks. The other builds large pots used to store water and cool it as it seeps through the porous clay and evaporates. I test one. It is damp and very cool on my fingers.

Lunch is tasty, stewed chicken, sautéed green beans, rice, and vermicelli. The coffee has improved to two swishes of a brown Crayola. Maybe-Dutch Guys make do with beer, lots of beer. The Russians throw a birthday party for one of them, toast exuberantly, and extravagantly, and sleep the afternoon away, saving the rest of ‘The Brothers K.’ for another trip.

 At 16:45 we bump gently at the jetty at Nyaung U. We have ridden the melted snows of the Himalayas down the Mighty Irrawaddy.   We are in Bagan.

2019-12-12 , 13, AND 14 THURSDAY, FRIDAY, SATURDAY  - BAGAN

“Religion is more dangerous than nuclear"

“That is not God. God is here.”

I can't reduce Bagan to words.

The scale, in size, time, history, expression, beauty is immense. Imagine that all the world’s  great religious shrines are in one place and that place stretches miles in all directions, to the horizon, no view without roofs, towers, spires, red, white, gold, cast onto the landscape by history, pride, delusion, longing. Then burnish it with the light of the setting sun. Bagan eludes language.

The history here is a jumble of dynasties, kingdoms, some petty, many great, all builders, 300 years of Myanmar's greatness.  We are lost in the details, overwhelmed by the size, names, genealogies, intrigues, stories.

Began is a potent blur with some points of brilliant clarity. The Shwezigo Paya affects us even more than Yangon's Shwedagon. The proportions are…just ‘right’. The faces of the hundreds of Buddha images we see in the many, many, many temples are as varied as any hundred of human faces are, some happy, calm, distant. One is unapologetically goofy. I can’t imagine a Christian shrine with a goofy Christ, yet, like the man who became Buddha, he had a full human life, surely with silly moments.

There is ‘something’ here, as there is, rarely, in the world’s great places, and we respond to it.

We survive being swamped by Bagan thanks to another of our lucky happenings. “My name is Aung Aung like The Lady, Aung San Sun Kyi". Aung Aung spots us on the road in front of our hotel and offers us a day in his car for 35,000 Kyat (about $23.50), 10 000 Kyat less than our hotel does. We stay with him for 3 days.

Aung’s father died young. His mother remarried. There were 10 children. One died. He left school in the 8^th grade…“but I read like 10 grade” and hasn’t stopped reading since. His English is enthusiastic, frequently erratic, and often brilliant, his sentences cobbled of great inspirations. How else to describe one that includes the Chinese classic ‘The Art of War’, Trump (he is NOT a fan), and ancient Greece?

Aung shows us the great temples first, including his favorite, Amanda, with the 4 sitting Buddhas facing North, South, East, and West. We lose him in the crowds outside sublime Shwezigo, chill out over fresh squeezed sugar cane juice, get help from Sugar Cane Juice Lady, a ride from another Taxi Guy, and hook up again back at Oasis Hotel. He apologizes, we laugh about it, move on.

We do not visit all 3,000 temples. (Right Foot begs to differ.  It is sure we have.) Many temples are active, alive to the villages around them. (Clue: stucco covers the brick, is newly white, and there may be gold.)  These are our favorites.  Most are lost in their own stories, mumbling to themselves, special to historians, photographers, and ‘laundry list tourists’, checking twice as they go.

Aung's choices for us are good ones.

He is good with the small things, inspired.  One day he takes us way out of Bagan to quiet Salay and its wooden monastery, traveler-free. It is luscious, carved dark teak and home to serene standing Buddhas, androgyny rounded to feminine, elegantly swathed and caped, Catwalk Buddhas. These are lovely, but I miss the purity of the classic Buddhas.

Lunch---chicken curry in coconut milk, fragrant rice, onion ring tempura, banana cake, and fresh tamarind juice---on smooth spans of dark teak in a quiet garden overlooking the Irrawaddy is pure wonder for the senses.

In a village of women weavers, men do other things. One rotates a huge pestle squeezing oil out of the peanuts in the mortar. The residue in the shape of the mortar dries in the sun, food for the cattle, humped, and huge, resting under a tree. We envy them. Tiny unsalted Myanmar peanuts are delicious. And native here, of this place. I suspect many of the finished garments the weavers have on offer are not. They have the tainted, ersatz look of Chinese mass-produced repurposed dead dinosaur schlock, poisonous. Weaver Lady is honest.  “This I weave. That I not,”:

Twice Aung leads us to sunsets. Once is from a low hill, a minor bump only, but high enough to see farther across Began to scores, maybe hundreds, of temples, orange brick, or white stucco, or gold leaf, picked by the sun to glow against the green plain. And once is from a boat on the Irrawaddy, as another day departs, behind the grey blue mountains, leaving short-lived spills of gilt on the river.

Aung leaves us with thoughts, not so short-lived. We ask him about religious strife in his country. He says “Religion is more dangerous than nuclear". “You can control nuclear, but never control religion.”. “People see religious things. Think that is God. That is not God. God is here.” And he points to his chest.

Yes, there is ‘something’ here. Thank you, Aung.

2019-12-15  SUNDAY -  BAGAN-YANGON

“Hi!!!!”

JJ Express Number 17 toots out of Bagan at 9am, right on schedule for our 9-hour ride back to Yangon, way southeast across the flats of this part of Myanmar. That's about $1.33 an hour, cheap, and a bargain.  The bus is comfy. The wide, cushy seats recline way back without causing irremediable orthodontic damage in the row behind. There's free water.  JJ offers three classes of bus. Number 17 is ‘’2x2’ ('aka the ‘Economy Special’ in the flying cattle cars we usually ride in, but much better than any of that blighted ilk). One class up, the ‘Royal Bus' has TVs. That’s probably foreign tourist territory.

Were the only foreigners ‘down here’ on Number 17, and hooked on watching Myanmar wake up on the other side of the huge cinemascope windows. This is not rice country, with great sheets of water, or eye-searing green.  Palm trees, corn stalks, bushy peanut shrubs promise food, if not that kind of beauty. Number 17 shares the road with the bicycles and motorcycles---many electric---that keep Myanmar moving.  Inside, Myanmar is immoveable, stretched out across double seats, sound asleep.

Across the top of the windshield, inside, so we can read it the whole way, is ‘Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven’. I never have parsed that, linguistically or theologically. Down here, ‘in earth', I am happy the driver is awake and has his eyes on the road.

Most of the way we are on a divided highway, two lanes in each direction, clear sailing across the flat landscape. We stop once about two hours in at a rest stop with ‘facilities’, a cafeteria, and a popcorn stand offering 4 flavors. After that we stop once for the driver to explore the possibilities on offer behind some shrubs. I don’t drink much of the free water.

It’s Sunday. Yangon traffic is not the turgid molasses swamp it usually is. Still, our $10 cab ride takes almost an hour to cross the city to Backpackers’ B&B. Shwedagon Pagoda is floodlit, golden supernova in the night sky. It's little sibling, Sule Pagoda, marks our neighborhood. We walked around it on our first morning here. We know our way from here, could walk to our digs. Taxi Guy drops us at the door.

Upstairs, Nay Nay, omnipotent Desk Guy, remembers us with a big “Hi”, bigger smile, and a close hug. Then he gives us a receipt for our one night stay, arranges a cab for the morning trip to the airport, shows us to our room, finds a  screwdriver, origami-folds his slight frame onto the floor, and repairs the slider to the bathroom. Then ‘He Who Can Do Anything' unfolds, snaps upright, and waves us a radiant good night.

We love this place.

2019-12-16  MONDAY  - YANGON-BANGLADESH: DHAKA - PART 1

You can’t get there from here.

Leaving gives clarity. On the way to the airport we notice how green New Yangon is, park-strewn and refulgent with bougainevillea. For a short time, straight ahead, tall trees frame golden Shwedagon, in green below, blue above. We don’t mind the traffic. We want to remember being in Myanmar.

But not leaving it.

We get to Yangon International way early. Flights before and after ours to Dhaka are listed on the big departure board. Biman Bangladesh Airlines Flight BG-61 is AWOL. Ladies at the check-in counters gesture ‘thataway' and tell us “soon", as in “it will be posted soon and you will check in soon”.  ‘Thataway’ looks and remains abandoned. The clock ticks away. It’s two hours to lift off. The flight should be posted. There's a crew polishing the floor and fiddling with those posts they use to corral passengers. But, there are no huddles of people hauling trunks and staring at boarding passes. We are suspicious, but innocently hopeful, bordering on delusional. Maybe we're the only passengers. We try the counters again. There a new Counter Guy. He is unequivocal. “Oh, Biman hasn’t had any flights here for months.” Ask the Information Desk. Sorry”.

Information Desk is at the other end of the airport.  Information Desk Ladies aren’t up to snuff on recent abandonments at Yangon International, and don't quite buy our ‘Bye-bye, Biman, bye-bye’ story, but want to be helpful. They rummage for a Biman contact number, come up empty for any way to reach our fugitive airline . “Go to airline office. Downstairs. Get pass.”, gesture ‘Thataway’.

 ‘Thataway’ is at the other end of the airport, back where we started. Downstairs requires a security pass. We find the Security Office, then trade passports for a pink guest pass, find the elevator, and descend into the nether regions of “Downstairs.” A map shows all the airline offices. We run our fingers across the map, several times, coming up blank for Biman the same number of times. I hear the theme from ‘Twilight Zone playing in the shadows.

We attract a small crowd, all more up to date on absconded airlines than the Information Desk. They know the score.”Biman not here anymore. Try Information Desk.” And then, curdling any remaining shards of hope, delivers the coup de grâce: “There are no flights on any airline from here to Dhaka anymore. Never.”

You can’t get there from here. The Twilight zone theme gets louder.

We need to tell friend Obaidul in Dhaka that we won't be arriving in 3 hours. We need to find another flight that gets us there before tomorrow afternoon---via wherever--- when our boat leaves to sail to southern Bangladesh.  Dennis suggests we call American Express to do their magic, get us on another flight, and, by the way, put the screws to Biman.

Airport free internet gives us 30 minutes. Dennis has used his with emails. Email to Obaidul takes 2 minutes. He is on it in a snap “I will look for flights". I zip through Kayak, find some, via Bangkok, or Kolkata (né Calcutta), or some place in China with many ‘Z’s in its name. I should have booked then.

But, we have faith. Let the minions at American Express do their magic and find us a flight.  It will be faster, right?  Too many minutes go by explaining what we need: “2 tickets one-way Yangon to Dhaka. These are the airport codes. And we only have a few minutes of Internet time left. Please hurry”. Amex Travel Lady is sympathetic, but has her script to follow, assuring me she is there to help, and asking 412 ways to identify myself before freeing her fingers to do their magic. Or try to. “Sorry sir, there are no flights between those two cities in our system.” “Thank you for calling American Express.” “We are happy to help".

Oh, goodie. Amexco has misplaced Myanmar and Bangladesh.  Not only can we not get there from here, there is no ‘here’ here and no ‘there` there.  Amexco has hired an honors graduate of, the Department of Alternative Geography of Trump University. Or, we are in the Twilight Zone. No difference.

It gets worse.

2019-12-16  MONDAY  - YANGON-BANGLADESH: DHAKA - PART 2

Ooooookay. The futile search for Myanmar and Bangladesh has used up our free Internet minutes, so we can’t search for tickets on our own, (and, yes, we don’t think to buy a local SIM card, duh). We need to find the ticket counter. This is an airport.  Surely, we can buy a ticket. There are no signs. Information Desk Ladies will know. Thataway. At the other end of the airport.

We follow the rut we’ve worn in the marble back across Yangon International. The Ladies are of course expecting us. We’re slightly overdue for our check-in. We ask where we can find the Ticket Counter, prepare for another safari to the other end of the airport.  A look passes between them and they point over my shoulder. The Ticket Counter is right behind us, labelled ‘Ticket Counter’ in a 50,000 point font.

Ticket Lady gets our problem and is on it, looking for tickets to Dhaka today, via wherever. And on it. And on it. Ticket Lady Two joins her, stares at the screen, and stares, and stares, dead giveaway that this ticket search may be ‘an episode’, heading for something bigger, deserving capital letters. Then Ticket Guy One wanders by. Glances. Stops. Eyebrows raise. Yep, we’ve become a Genuine Ticket Episode. By the arrival of Ticket Lady Three, Ticket Episode is now an Airport Event, The Great Ticket Search of 2019. Note the uppercase. There are onlookers behind us and a semi-irate Korean man next to us trying to cancel his ticket to Paris, but paying attention to the disaster taking shape next door, compensation for missing out on croissants.  All Ticket Folk are lined up in support of Ticket Lady 1 and The Great Ticket Search. They apologize. “The connection is slow". Ya think?!!

Thirty minutes in, the system burps, spits out a flight on Thai Airlines at 5pm via Bangkok for $400. Each. Our tickets on Biman cost $401 For two. Gulping doesn’t help. We nod. She's on it. And on it. And on it. We consider how long it would take to walk to Dhaka.  “Sorry sir, there is now only one seat. Business class. Very expensive.” We don’t ask.

We start over. Its efforts at extortion rejected, the system goes glacial, then forgiving. Somewhat.  Thai Lion Air has 2 seats at 19:45 via Bangkok, getting to Dhaka at midnight plus 30 minutes. “Better price". “Better” is $1188. For 2. That’s more than what we paid for two of us to fly 16 thousand plus miles from Los Angeles to Bangkok. And back. Dhaka is a couple of hundred miles west of Yangon. The extortion continues. It's $4 a kilo just in case were a gram over the 7-kilo allowance. It’s the only option Ticket Lady, Et Al can find that gets us there before the morning of the day after tomorrow. We gag, but nod. I detect cyber-smirks. The travel fund will be totally nude. But we'll be with friends who will help us laugh. It’s a Moslem country. Beer will not be an option.

Ticketed and impoverished, we visit the Ladies of Information Desk, for a final thank you.  Now, 1188 dollars too late, they tell us we can buy more time on the airport internet and sell us a bundle.  For 66 cents.

I can't help myself, gotta know. In a masochistic flurry I find tickets to Bangkok tonight for $88, and a second set of connecting tickets from Bangkok to Dhaka for $250. It takes me three minutes. I am not masochistic enough to do the math.

We land in Dhaka fifteen hours after saying goodbye to the staff at Backpackers, and fourteen after our first foray ‘thataway’ across Yangon International. And twelve hundred dollars poorer for 2 no frills flights so lacking in frills I keep checking if they had wings. Bangladesh Immigration involves several ‘thataways', though shorter ones, fifty dollars, and a slow appreciative read of our ten-page itinerary by Immigration Guys. We're the last passengers they process and they walk us to the exit. We get to our hotel at 2am.

Myanmar is solid in our memories. Bangladesh is right outside those windows. We sleep.

By the way, the above is the abridged version.

2019-12-17  TUESDAY  - DHAKA

“Your country?”

Our reunion with Elfie and Luis over breakfast at 8am is raucous, not ‘horde-of-Chinese-tourists’ raucous, but getting there. It almost prepares us for Dhaka

This city stuns all the senses, smacks us with visual cacophony.  A thick, rumbling, jumble of cars, taxis, buses, shops on wheels, tuk-tuks, bicycles, motorcycles, munchie- wagons, rickshaws, mobile department stores, and pedestrians oozes through the narrow streets, filling them wall to wall, a lava flow of life, incandescent with color, sound, smells. (But not heat. Dhaka in mid-December is cool on our faces.) The buildings forced to the street side must be empty. All seventeen million of Dhaka’s people are on the street, this street. 

We’re overwhelmed. And smitten. I wouldn’t want to live here, but what an Olympian feast for the senses.

On wheels and feet we thread through the city behind bouncy Obaidul, tour organizer.  I had developed an image of him from our hundreds of emails, efficient, responsive, helpful. The 3D version is all that plus a Jiminy Cricket energy, part bubbly teenager, all responsible adult. When he gets excited his voice jumps an octave.

Banggladesh is the third largest Moslem country in population. Islam is flexible here, tempered by the lushness of Asia. The government is secular. The current Prime Minister is a woman. We visit a mosque, then a Hindu temple. Some women wear head scarves, a few are ‘covered’. Most wrap in variations on the theme of long and flowing, shimmering head to foot in yards of color. We see some in western dress. Few men in the city wear the traditional longis so common in neighboring Myanmar. I miss the grace of those long, soft artistries. Here, the men disappear in the whirl of the women.

Old Dhaka is ripe with ‘sights’ worth this one day. The schedule is full, but thwarted.

The five of us stop traffic.  Everywhere people politely ask “Your country?”, smile at our responses (USA, Austria, Singapore) and then “Photo please" . Charmed, we oblige, are snapped and  ‘selfied’  in all permutations of us , them, alone, in groups, with grandma, with  the peculiar little boy over there, with kiddies not quite sure if they want to be involved in all this with these funny looking people, so pale. Teenagers---especially the girls---are very sure. The guys hang back, the girls wade right in. Stunning ‘my name is Annie’ sorts out her family, siblings and anyone in sight for their photos. I'm not surprised the Prime Minister is a Bengladeshi woman. 

Me and Dennis, bearded like many older Bangladeshi men, and clean-shaven Luis, are mere adjuncts to the wonders of tall Elfie with her silver hair, and young Singaporean Cassandra in blue jeans. We are all swallowed gently by the smiling sweetness of Bangladesh. It’s fun being a Movie Star, nexus of photo op traffic jams. For a while. Bangladeshis are charming, polite, warmly and genuinely kind and friendly. It's hard to break away from such a welcome, but Obaidul starts waving with both arms and pointing to his watch.

We have a ship to catch.

2019-12-18  WEDNESDAY   - TO BAGERHAT AND MONGLA

Last night we wander through the cloth market to our ship. It's after sunset.  Dockside in Dhaka is like street side in Dhaka with ships, ferries, dinghies, sniffs, canoes, wheelbarrows, added to the traffic mayhem, and edged with gangplanks and the sludgy river.

Dozens of river ferries stretch way out into the river, long, tipsy skyscrapers.  Our 6 single cabins are 2 levels up from the narrow gangplank, portside, far down the ship at the stern. They're the length of a single bed and 2 feet wider. Martha Stewart might throw a splash of color here and there. We plunk our backpacks. The cabins are comfy, efficient, clean. The fan and electricity work. Toilets are back ‘thataway’. Most are ‘slump and dump’, a few are kinder to aching knees. All start out with toilet paper, a good intention eventually sabotaged by reality. ‘Be Prepared’, I say. Good advice.

We are adopted by three sweet young men on their way to holiday on the far southern coast. (Dennis, Elfie, and I will follow them down there on our own after we say goodbye to Obaidul and Luis in a few weeks).  Sale is the spokesguy for his silent, shy partners. “Come, see everything from up there on the roof". The guys watch over us, lifting cables, holding doors. From the prow the dockside is a sepia collage fading invisible beyond the lights from the ship., slightly dangerous, slightly romantic in the way of 1940's film noir tropic fantasies. The guys walk us back to our cabins. We're neighbors. Then Selfie-buddies.

Deck Class passengers stretch out on mats one level below ours, paying $3 to our $12. We all get there at the same time, dawn today.

Barisal dock at dawn is the road company version of Dhaka at dusk, thinned out, but still chaotic. We thread through it quickly and leave the city.

The landscape is the floral doppelganger of the raucous city.  It crowds the road, pushing at the horizon and the sky.  Tall banana leaves, ragged flags of the plant kingdom, shimmy in the breeze, translucent scimitars of green between us and the heightening sun. The winter gourd vines are still young, roilling and scrambling over the nipa palm roofs of the roadside houses, all big floppy leaves, and too new for buds. Leaves of the taro plants are already green hearts, wide across as an arm's length, nature’s umbrellas.

The 15^th century mosques and 17^th century Hindu temple are open spaces in the green, lovely, and both visited by people of both faiths, And us, all barefoot. Right Foot is tolerant. It fits.

Cassandra asks for a’ potty break'. Our driver pulls over by a cluster of palm leaf houses. There is no question if strangers can use the toilet, at the back of the garden, traditional, surrounded by nipa palm leaves and closed off by a piece of cloth hanging from a string. There is no question that we are welcome, or that these kind people will offer us tea and hospitality. Off to one side they fry up rice munchies, gently dust them with spice, and package them for sale in the market.  They give us as many packages as they can carry, their livelihood. They are delicious. We offer to pay. Unthinkable. There is no charge for hospitality. Dennis takes and prints photos. These they will accept, a gesture from us. Obaidul suggests it is acceptable within the rules to give a small gift of cash to one of the kids. It is accepted. We leave, visitors from another planet, welcomed.

They have their photos to remember this day. We have far more.

There are people in our country who dismiss the rest of the world as “sh*thole countries” and their inhabitants as “thieves, murderers, rapists, terrorists". To them I say. “Stop looking in your mirrors. Look here.”

2019-12-19 AND 20  THURSDAY AND FRIDAY -  SUNDARBANS

The southern half of Bangladesh slips gently into the Bay of Bengal, the landscape more liquid than solid, a waterworld. This is the Sunderbans, the world's largest mangrove forest. We will float through its green canyons for two days, just the 5 of us, plus Obaidul, and a crew of two, plus cook, and two captains, young brothers. We sort out our cabins below, the others in cabins with bunks. Dennis and me crawl into the low one under the bow with portholes both portside and starboard. Then we all go topside for ‘milk tea, not sweet’.

Bengal Tigers live here. There are 100. Nowhere else in the world are there so many. This is their last stand. They survive on the abundant Spotted Deer. And on the occasional human. One of our crew survived a tiger attack. He was asleep in his small fishing canoe, a defenseless snack for a hungry feline. The tiger pounced. Other fisherman scared it off.  He carries his injuries still, too weakened to fish, but a good addition to our boat crew. He helps us when we climb from our boat into the canoes we use to move silently through the mangroves.

If we're very lucky we might see a tiger. At a distance.

We float and wander in one of the planet's magic places. On land, for wildlife walks, we have a guide with a rifle (see above paragraphs). We don’t need it. It doesn’t work, anyway, for which all are thankful…details on request.

In the canoes we are quiet.  Monkeys, mongooses, other fuzzy scurriers, ignore us. The Spotted Deer do not. They freeze. The males have wide, spikey, horny, headdresses, over-developed tiaras, fit for audiences with the Queen, but spectacularly unfit for negotiating dense jungle. Tiger food on the hoof? The brilliant Kingfisher tribe swoop, and flash the sky, emerald, turquoise, ruby, soaring against the mangrove green.

Back aboard the ‘Ghanchil’ (Seagull), Captain Two brews ‘milk tea' and we sit on long benches around the narrow table, almost filling the deck.  There is a roof to block the sun, but the sides are open to the Sunderbans. Cook does magic in his tiny galley. He rolls out dough for fresh roti both days. Then barbecue over a fire on deck. His fresh cucumber and tomato salads are cool refuges from the fragrant heat of the veggie, chicken, or fish mixes, all heaven to the nose and tongue and eye.

We paddle and putt-putt through Sunderbans for two days, up and down fingers of the sea grasping the last wisps of Bangladesh as it slips into the sea. And the last refuge of the tiger as it slips into legend. We see tiger tracks and deep claw slashes on a tree, but never a tiger. It's a wild place.

That’s enough for us.

2019-12-21  SATURDAY  - TO KHULNA

We're freezing.

I’m not sure I get the hang of this tropic thing. Isn't it supposed to be warm down here in these latitudes drooping south towards the Equator?

It isn't. We are seriously under-dressed.

Bangladesh is a famous exporter of cloth and clothing. (Read the labels in Walmart.) Surely, we will find something here in vibrant Khulna, throbbing utility stopover on our way north to Bangladesh’s historic---and colder---heartland.  With Elfie, Cassandra, and Luis as fashion consultants we plan to cruise the men's shops across the neon strip of the main drag of Khulna's swirling downtown for something warm, light, backpack squishable, and cheap. If warm, light and backpack squishable they will come home with us and replace our current down jackets, close to their last molts. If just warm and cheap, they’ll stay behind.  Elfie’s down jacket comes along for ‘show and tell’ in case we need help to span the language gulf.

First, we need to cross Khulna's main drag.  It is a major athletic event, this Running of The Pedicabs in Khulna. It almost warms us.

The Shop Guys recognize blue is not our normal color.  They scope Elfie's sample and are on it in a flash, kind as always, no language needed.

Their shops are filled with the latest fashions for Young Bangladeshi Fat-Free Stud Muffins. We are several decades beyond, well into Loaf-hood. The Shop Guys are endlessly and genuinely helpful. They strip their racks and unpack their shelves. We get close, managing 2 or 3 of the criteria, skirting squishable, but never including cheap. Or the right size. 

Bangladesh produces clothing. It must export all of it. We find only Chinese imports, in Chinese sizes. My size 36 waist cannot be accommodated by Chinese size ‘XXXL’.  Size ‘S’ is a chopstick cozy. The Shop Guys have unforgivably lithe frames (Chinese size M or L), but don’t comment on ours, at least not in English.  In the last of a half-dozen stops, the heaps of Chinese also-rans cover the counters, and we draw a final blank. Quadruple XXXXL, aka The Great Wall, is not available.  Shop Guys apologize, start to reconstitute their exploded store. They are, like all the people we meet in Bangladesh, sweet and genuine.  And they smile. We're not so cold now.

We say goodbye, slip out into the neon, and probably into local legend.

Via Cassandra’s SIM card Obaidul promises shopping success, and rescue from frostbite. Tomorrow.

2019-12-22  SUNDAY  - TRAIN TO RAJSHAHI AND PUTHIA

“Who you like? Trump? Obama?"

We watch through the windows. They are aged by wind, monsoon, and dust. What we see is green, but hazy, and impressionistic.

Puthia is a ramshackle, crowded town, tired, dusty, unremarkable now, worn out by its history. ‘Everyone’ has been through here and left a mark. Now we are here, blips in its history, leaving nothing, gaining much.

Gods, humans, animals, and improbable beings, mixtures thereof, cover the terracotta walls of an exquisite cluster of small temples. They stare out of their vignettes, sedately or acrobatically, theological whimsies to contemplate. The artistry is sublime, as befits the private chapel of a queen, now dead a century or more.

There are no human or supernatural figures at the mosque, no distractions. The purity is restful. The call to prayer from a minaret further away fills the silence.

At a temple there are stands selling the usual religious stuff, and lots of kitchen ‘stuff’. “Who buys kitchen stuff at a temple?” says Elfie. I spot a white metal ladle I must have. The seller weighs it. It’s mine for 52 Taka, about sixty cents. Now, Elfie knows.

Bangladesh's biggest Shiva Temple is far more ancient than the mosques, but it remains important to local Hindus. Women visit its giant black stone ‘lingam', or phallus, to implore fertility or to assure a good marriage. It is the largest in the world, almost as tall as we are. Size must matter. There are kids everywhere.

They are playing at cricket on a wide dusty field that leads to a broad, and most European looking palace, pinkish, and worn, a remnant of the British Raj.

We are unmissable and irresistible.

“What your country, man?”says he.  “America, man.” Replies I.   ‘Man’ is maybe 4 feet tall, all grin and chutzpah, clearly leader of the pack waving and posing behind him. He pops the question we get everywhere. “Who you like? Trump? Obama?"  My answer passes muster, gets the usual thumbs up. In this case, a whole forest of them. And we get invited---no, commanded--- to play cricket with them.

Right Foot buys me a pass, but Dennis is game. Having long ago accepted that all of our US national sports are and always will be a mystery to me, I am, however, up on cricket, thanks to Obaidul. Here is my take. Somebody throws a ball. Somebody Else tries to hit it with a bat. Wherever happens Another Somebody Else makes up a number. That's the score. Everybody else drinks tea. They do it all over again, finding new numbers until someone gets dirty, or they run out of tea. Then they take their bats and balls and all get naked in the shower.

Dennis plays a good game. He doesn’t hit any balls. The score is either 3 or 407. Everybody is happy. We take lots of selfies. There are no showers.

‘Man’ and Company have upstaged the monuments a bit. People always do.

We're still cold. At night, as promised yesterday, Obaidul and our driver, Mubarak, come through. Mubarak knows exactly where to go. It takes about ten minutes, most to squeeze through the crowds to home in on ‘Clothes Street’.  From a pile of coats on street stand under garish flood lights, Mubarak extracts not one but two down jackets stamped ‘XXXXL'. They fit, are warm, and cheap, 500 Taka, about $6. Each. Done.  Obaidul finds one for 400, less than $5. Done. Mubarak just smiles.

I don’t know what the cricket equivalent of ‘home run’ is, but we've hit one again, as we have every day from Day One.

2019-12-23 - MONDAY  - MAHAVIRA

“Grandfather…”

We are in the heartland of ancient Bangladesh. For much of it little has changed under any of the great kingdoms---Buddhist, Hindu, Moslem, British, and Pakistani---that ruled here.

The fields still stretch in patches, brilliant yellow bursts of the mustard seed crop, close to harvest. One rice crop is now flat and golden drying in the sun. Those fields are stubble. The bumps amidst the rice stalks are goats, munching leftovers from the harvest. The next rice crop is thick in the seed beds, green velvet, plush. The villages are dense places, tightly packed houses of mud walls, bamboo, straw, wood, the possibilities of nature, nothing wasted.

Obaidul knows a house where we can get fresh ‘popped rice’. The ingredients are heat, sand, straw, a special kind of rice...and skill. Our hostess heats sand in a metal pan over a wood fire, throws in a handful of gold rice. It pops immediately, white, the gold husk flung aside. She sweeps the rice and husk into a basket sieve with a straw hand broom, its edges roasted brown. From the sieve she pours the white ‘popped rice’ into our hands. It’s warm and almost sweet, delicious.  Chicken, ducks, and geese will get the chaff. We have tea, leave a gift, thanks, and the village. It disappears into the green.

From thousands of villages like this one, ancient Bangladesh built greatness.

The great monastery at Mahavira was the largest south of the Himalayas, a center of Buddhism for South Asia. The walled city of Mahastangarh is the oldest in the country, already rising high over these fields when Cleopatra and her Romans we’re frolicking along the Nile. They are mostly rubble now, scattered across the plain, red brick against green, but in some places still monumental, massive, many stories high.

There is enough here in rubble, long stretches of fallen walls, and roofless rooms to fill in the blanks, at least for me. I sense the great city beneath the feet of the many Bangladeshis here on holiday, Moslems and Hindus visiting their shared Buddhist past. They scatter over the layers and staircases, the women brilliant in yards of cloth, soft gems set against the brick.

The young guys are very much into the universal ‘Watch this' mode of the muscle-rich, brain-poor ‘guy on holiday’, teetering on edges and leaping gaps. I bend to take a photo of a tiny relief close to the ground. From high above I hear “Grandfather”. Way above me, arms waving a significantly expensive mega-camera, and feet flapping a significantly unwise number of inches over the edge of the rubble is a husky, suicidal adolescent in launch mode, ready to jump the twelve feet down onto hard rubble to get the perfect shot of that ‘rara avis’, the ‘Screaming Tourist’ in full alarm mode, screaming “no, no, NO”. Friends and arms prevail, yank him from the edge. He waves, disappears, reappears seconds later down at eye level, all smiles, camera ready, charming, honestly delighted.

I don’t even mind that for the first time in my travels I have been upgraded from ‘Uncle’ to ‘Grandfather’. Not much, anyway.

2019-12-24  TUESDAY  - RIVER ISLAND OF JAMUNA TO DHAKA

The rivers rule here, creating a landscape of great beauty, but...

The man walks across the dusty courtyard and rubs his hand along a muddy line on the wall of his house. It's almost to his shoulder, over the heads of his two sons. This year the river flooded that high. Twice.  Twice it covered their fields, drowning their crops. Twice they started over, with seed kept dry in the rafters. He shrugs. There is no other place where they can rent land so cheaply, so they risk the river's caprice.

The place is a sandbar, a ‘char’, in Bengali, an ephemeral place in any language. Char villages are common in Bangladesh, chancy, hopeful adaptations where land is scarce, the edges between river and sandbar blurred.

The man has rowed us across the river to this one where he and his 3 brothers and their families live on land rented from someone far away and borrowed from the river. We jump onto the sand.  Rice fields go right to the shore. The farmers add more rows of seedlings as the river drops in the dry season. The char looks substantial. We can’t see across it. We walk up the slope past beached canoes, then through the fields where the chars grow lentils, and other crops, for food and to sell in the market on shore.

Our boatman, his brothers, their wives and kids welcome us in the wide courtyard in front of their houses. Boatman’s two sons stick close to him, but smile at us. The women hang back, but are very up for photos, especially selfies. They bring out plastic chairs, then tea and ‘biscuits’ (aka cookies, wafers, crackers)., We leave photos, and a small gift. These people have little that is permanent. They give their gracious hospitality freely.

The ride back to Dhaka is long. We break for lunch in the town of Bogra, then follow Obaidul to line up outside a ‘sweet shop' for an ‘Obaidul Surprise’.  Later he unwraps it after rice and curry in a roadside eatery and spoons it out of its terra cotta bowl. We meet dessert nirvana. Bangladesh ‘curd’ is to mortal yoghurt as the Hope Diamond is to tinsel. It is insidious perfection, the apotheosis of milk. We are addicted at first taste, helpless junkies.

Our curd fix can only last so long.  We are wiped out as the long day drags to an oozing close in the traffic jam of Dhaka. Sweet Obaidul says he has another surprise for us. Can he come by in a few hours,  just before midnight? We beg off, too tired. Tomorrow? He nods, but his eyes do not. (Spoiler Alert: he gets his moment!)

2019-12-25  WEDNESDAY  - DHAKA TO SRIMANGAL

“May my son wish you Merry Christmas?”

Obaidul’s brother-in-law joins us at the Dhaka train station “to help us get on the train". This suggests we are in for a ‘cultural learning experience’. We are.

Lesson One: we, plus a village of  Bangladeshis and their bags and trunks, and dozens of children can fit through a 24 inch door--- at the same time--- providing there is one guy yanking from above and a brother-in-law cum full back/bulldozer pushing from behind, laws of physics be damned.

Lesson Two: Remember to smile. That elbow in your gut or regions further south was not intentional.

Lesson Three: Reservations are a fiction. Obaidul has booked the 5 of us reserved seats in a six-passenger compartment. He enters first, to scope the landscape. The compartment is occupied by a family, spread generously over our seats. Obaidul kindly moves them on, negotiates with neighboring compartments, a commuting diplomat moving people from here to there, and back again, until we 4 all have seats.

Lesson Four: the minimum number of people you take with you on a trip is everyone you ever knew. Our compartment mates spread over the other two seats in acceptable and flexible configurations of husband, wife, son, daughter, mother, mother-in-law, cousin, friend of the family, friend of the cousin of the mother-in-law’s neighbor, and so on up, down, and across the family and village relationships essential to comfortable travel.

Lesson Five: Get over it. Smile. Have some tea.

Five hours later we are in Srimangal. This is tea country, mountainsides covered in coiffed rows of the world's second loveliest crop. The beauty hides great ugliness.  Women pick the tender new leaves, tossing them into sacks on their backs.  In 8 to 10 hours they are expected to pick 20 kilograms. That’s 44 pounds. They carry that load on their heads to the weigh station. For the day's work they are paid 102 Taka, about $1.20. IF they weigh in at 20 kilos. If not, they are docked. For anything over 20 kilos they get 5 or 6 Taka. That’s 6 or 7 cents. I take photos of the women until Obaidul tells me this. Then I can't.

“He says Luis looks like Donald Trump.” And Obaidul laughs. 40-ish Luis doesn't to us , but he is Caucasian, not female, like Elfie, or bearded, like me and Dennis, so close enough among the choices now on offer for people who don’t see many foreigners.  We’re in a mixed village of Bengalis and tribal people, most Moslem, some Christian, off in the hills. “Even here people know about him. ”  Like everyone we meet here, they are gracious. They don't hold it against us.

“Welcome. Where are you from?  The guy waves at us over his stock of snacks and munchies. His English is excellent. “I have a friend in California. He was Peace Corps.  He taught me English.” This reminds us of what We the People can be.

After dinner, we gather for Obaidul's surprise…and he delivers. In the doorway is a pile of gift-wrapped boxes double wrapped by long arms stretched to the limit and topped by a delicious grin, with a side of something heavy in a bright pink. Paper flies. Each of us has our very-own tiny pedicab, brilliantly painted with wildly imagined design and color, just like the real thing. These are wonderful, wonderful gifts. Obaidul beams, then delivers the coup de grace out of the pink side order. We have two bottles of  ‘champagne’…local-style, so non-alcoholic grape juice with aspirations. Can it get any better?

It can.

A knock on the door stops our feeble but enthusiastic shared excursion into a Christmas carol about 30 seconds in. The little boy barely tops his father's knee. “May my son wish you Merry Christmas?” He may. And does. There's enough ‘champagne' for all of us. There is no alcohol, forbidden to Moslems, so even the tiny messenger gets his sip.

And people ask us why we travel.

2019-12-26  THURSDAY – SRIMANGAL

We get around the hills by ‘Father and Sons Tuk-Tuks', always at the ready on the path below our hill-top cabins in the forest. Father is a garden gnome Santa Claus. I swear he twinkles. Sons are sturdy, wide-shouldered, with the handsome broad faces of the indigenous peoples of these hills.

Younger Son, Oolie, stays with me when Right Foot opts out of hikes in the national park. I miss out on the aerial acrobatics of the rare gibbons, but a dog adopts me, I meet a professor of history, some armed guards, and a man working with the one million Moslem Rohinga refugees from  neighboring Myanmar, “We already have so many people, we can’t take them. But we have to take care of them. It’s the right thing.” The refugees are Moslem. He is a Christian, the kind I recognize, and in short supply much closer to home. I don’t see the gibbons, but am not short-changed.

Tea in all its avatars is the deal here.  Most famous is ‘8-layer tea'. A concoction of 8 different flavored and colored teas (honey, cinnamon, ginger, yada yada yada) it takes half an hour to assemble so the colored layers don’t mix. They do as soon as I tip my glass. As the song goes “Ya gotta have a gimmick.” This one packs ‘em in. We're non-committal, but respectful.

In the late afternoon, Oolie and I sit out another hike, this one to the birds in the marshland. He teaches me to recognize the Bengali numerals 1 to 10 using the license plates on the tuk-tuks and cars sitting empty of birders. 1 and 2 look a little like their counterparts in our Arabic numerals. Zero is zero, so that’s three of the ten down. The figure that is a perfect 8 is actually 4. The perfect 9 is actually 7. That’s five down. Four looks like a lowercase block letter ‘b’. Six looks like a crescent moon facing East. Five looks like the crescent moon had too much to drink and is listing westward. That’s eight down. Three and nine confuse me. Eight percent is not a bad score on my first test. Then the sun sets, and my lesson boards drive away.  Oolie and I wait in the dark alone for the flickering lights far away across the marsh to reach us.

A handicraft fair plus amusement park plus food court is the hot spot in town tonight. We join the hordes. The kids head for the rides with Dads. Moms head for the heaps of saris and shawls. Red is a big seller. I detect the sleazy hand of China. 

I'm still looking for something squishable in jackets.  At the pile in ‘Men's Wear’, Jacket Guy dives deep and tosses me two down jackets, one a bilious magenta flattering to no known human pigment, and sporting a thorough lack of panache. The other has a hood, a size not hidden in an excess of Xes. and is eminently backpack-squishable. The label says ‘UNIQLO’, but it lies. The jacket is black, but I’m not fussy. It’s 300 Taka, about 4 dollars. I’m definitely not fussy. Should I bargain? Obaidul sets me straight. “Bob, come ON. Its 300 Taka.”

It’s time for my bulky, heavy, non-squishable $6 bargain courtesy of driver Mubarak a few days ago to move on. I lay it over Father Tuk-Tuk's shoulders. He doesn’t get what's happening for a nano- second. He looks down at the jacket, runs his hands down the zipper, then looks at me.  I nod. His whole being twinkles.

And me? Guess?

2019-12-27  FRIDAY – BACK TO DHAKA

There are goats munching at tidbits along the tracks, but they scamper when the train pulls into Srimangal station.  They know the mayhem to come.

As do we. We grab our bits and pieces, prep our elbows, abandon our Western notions of public courtesy, hurl ourselves through the crowd to the doors and onto the train, human bowling balls rolling a strike, and smug about it.

Too soon.

 Obaidul’s diplomacy is hopeless before the demographic explosion that has claimed our compartment. We make do, 3 of us on one side. Elfie is on the other side in one seat. A guy, three women, a teenage girl, her 2 sub-teen sisters, and 2 young brothers, maybe 3 and 5, take turns, never less than 5 at a time, filling the other two. The sisters are lovely. The little boys are beyond that, and thoroughly defeat any churlish notions when the smaller one extends his arms upward asking Luis to lift him into the bunk high over the seats, foreigness ignored.

Part of a shared, if crowded, landscape, we sip tea and settle down for the long ride back southeast to Dhaka.

Hours later, down the street and around the corner from our hotel, we find curd.

2019-12-28  SATURDAY – DHAKA OLD CAPITAL SONARGAON

“Are you Japanese?

The mansion is abandoned now, not quite a ruin, still holding on to details of great beauty. Most are bits of faded trim along the balconies hanging over the ballroom. Some are washes of color on walls protected from the monsoon and graffitists, both indiscriminate vandals. There are dozens of these mansions in the old city outside Dhaka. For decades these were showplaces for the wealth of Hindu merchants.

Holiday crowds from Dhaka fill the one narrow street now to see the ruins of the tiny town of Painam Nagar. Similar crowds created them. The monstrous anti-Hindu rioters before, during and after Partition divided the Indian sub-continent by religion did not see beauty here, only ‘other’. The last of the Hindu families were driven from here in the 1960's. Aung Aung, our articulate reflective driver in Myanmar got it right. “Religion is more dangerous than nuclear.”

Today Hindu families return as tourists.

Back in Dhaka Obaidul and Mubarak get us to the ticket office for our river trip back south on January 2. By now we are familiar with the complexities encrusting arrangements here. People are unfailingly helpful, want to get it right. Ordering a simple meal for 5 people when there are only 2 choices (chicken, beef) on the menu and we’re all ordering the same one (chicken) can take many minutes, leading inevitably to “that was chicken, right? And 5?”

The Boat Guy is taking no chances, double and triple checks. We need 3 tickets down on January 2 and 2 tickets back on January 7. Boat Guy needs the day of the week, too. Calendars flip, days revealed, a Thursday and a Tuesday We want seats topside, above the water line. We settle down for the long haul, but things go quickly. BG invites me behind his desk to pick our seats.  There aren’t many free on the seat map, but I pick 3 nice ones next to the windows on the side facing the middle of the river. Obaidul provides a contact mobile number. I provide a passport. Inevitably…”That's January 2, right? 3 seats?” The printer provides tickets. Boat Guy provides envelopes. Obaidul checks the tickets. They’re for tomorrow, December 29. Sunday. This explains the dearth of seats. We start over.

By evening we are in curd withdrawal, seriously in need of a fix. And of money for our dealer. Our wallets are empty. I do not have good history with ATMs. The neighborhood one has money but isn’t cooperating (My fault. It involves an excess of zeros. Please don’t ask). The ATM guard points across the road with the universal fluttering hand flips meaning “just keep walking, it’s thataway…somewhere".  A passerby clarifies, in excellent English, ”about 600 meters". Down and back that's nudging a mile. Right Foot twinges. Tongue reminds him. “Yo, down there:  no money, no curd.”

‘Thataway' starts on the other side of the street/traffic jam/deathtrap. Now fluent in Bengladeshi ‘traffic-ese' we have perfected our technique. We arabesque and pirouette fearlessly across the road. On the other side we open our eyes. 

We head ‘thataway’. By about 400 meters we are away from neon and into heaps of pipes, scrap metal, mechanical stuff, not promising ATM territory. We turn back. I have the handle on those rampant zeros, give ’our’ ATM another shot. Unforgiving, it is now out of money. There is another one right next to it, which we (OK, I ) swear wasn’t there before. It is working, has money, appreciates my restraint with zeros, rewards it with the hum of cash.

Tonight's curd fix held tight, tomorrow's cash well-stowed, next week's boat tickets date-assured, traffic safely arabesqued, we head home. Smug. Dhaka has used up its quota of surprises for us today.

The fluent passerby of the ‘600 meters thataway'’ passes by again, waves, asks “Did you find it?”.

Then in the clear bright light of all that neon he says--to me-- “Are you Japanese?”

You can’t make this stuff up.

2019-12-29 – SOUTH TO CHITTAGONG AND THE HILL TRACTS

An hours after US-BANGLA Airlines drops us in Chittagong, my card pops out of the ATM slot. I take it. Money pops out of the cash slot. I fumble with my card. There is a click. The ATM sucks my money back into its maw. It eats my money.

2019-12-30 AND 31 MONDAY AND TUESDAY -  THE HILL TRACTS -BANDARBAN

This is another country.

South Asia and East Asia meet in the lush Hill Tracts of eastern Bangladesh. The faces tell the story, and do so in dozens of languages with roots westward towards India, eastwards towards Myanmar and northwards towards faraway China. This is mountain country, barely connected to the rest of Bangladesh. There are political issues that cloud our access. We require permits to cross into it. Boyish soldiers, draped in camouflage and assault weapons, check on our progress, write our details, wave us on.

The feet of the mountains are deep below the surface of the lakes …and so are hundreds of villages of the Hill Tracts tribes. The lakes are human-made, sacrificing ancient places of the tribal peoples ‘for the greater good.’ The homes of the wealthy and politically powerful never seem to be in the way of ‘the greater good’.

The landscape around the lakes is extraordinary, but our boat putt-putts over graves.

Our third day we drop out of the hills. Driver Mustaq is slalom master of the corkscrew descent to the Sangu River.  It is well past monsoon and high-water season. The river, starved, now rides its course way below villages that line it. The steep banks, hidden under high water, are gardens now, sloping walls green with new crops. We ride the ripples of the river past people bathing in the shallows. They wave. Boat Man pulls up below a village of the Marmar people. We slip and climb up the steep bank, then walk along the flat path through the village, past the Buddhist temple and the monk in orange robes. The houses are on bamboo platforms on stilts. Life is at eye level. A man weaves a basket, too busy to wave. A woman looks out through her door, nods, and goes back to the clack-clack rhythm of her loom.

We are a blip, maybe, in their day. They are much more in ours.

Our Boat Guy is big. We pass on Dennis’ $6 warm jacket and my semi-good shoes. I can get by with just sandals. He smiles.

At night exuberant SriLankan-Aussie, Apasara, the only other foreigner we have seen for days, adds a fourth continent to our group, and joins us all for Bangladeshi ‘champagne' in a welcome to 2020.

2020-01-01  WEDNESDAY – CHITTAGONG AND BACK TO DHAKA

We spiral down out of the hills. Mustaq has a genius for careening around blind curves. By now we trust him. Eyes stay open. 

They are not prepared for Chittagong.

The landscape is post-apocalyptic, Mad Max with waterwings.

Chittagong is the biggest port in South and Southeast Asia after Singapore. It has a specialty. It eats old ships. The stripped carcasses provide over 90 percent of the country’s steel. The ecological cost is unfathomable.

Beached in shallow water, the ships are naked, behemoths, vulnerable. They balance on their keels, at sea deep below the surface, now exposed, stories high above our puny boat. Most are partially stripped, some just piles of innards, jumbled over oil slicks. One is a new arrival, untouched. We get close to its single propeller and rudder and have a ‘Titanic moment’, a flashback back to the scene in the film just before the ship dives. Titanic's propeller was cinematic, clean. This one is slick, but not pristine, patina-ed with memories of the sea. I wonder how many it has ridden, and why the ship is here. And what its next incarnation will be. Maybe something airborne, free of the sea. It’s halfway there high above us.

Obaidul’s brother invites us for excellent coffee in the Dhaka Yacht Club. We never do figure out how he manages that, but he can, so “Why not?” as Obaidul says a dozen time a day. We close our 18 days with a toast.

2020-01-02  THURSDAY – FAREWELL AND BACK SOUTH  ON OUR OWN

We'll follow the same route down to Barisal we took 2 weeks ago, this time in the daytime. We all have window seats in two-story seat rows, with lots of overhead storage. I slump into H6, deep, wide, cushy, airline’ business classy’, best seat in the house .for the show unfolding in the row in front of me.

A family of 3 adults---I'm guessing, son, Mama, and Dad --- takes 20 minutes to work out how the 3 will sort into their 3 seats. 3 people. 3 seats. Not hard. Wrong.  Tickets shuffle, then people shuffle, then tickets again, then people again. Mama is not happy. Mama squawks. Dad shrugs. Son moves everybody again. Mama is not small, a full pedicab-load of swirling cloths and attitude, and not easily moved. I’m thinking forklift. They shoehorn Mama into a row by herself, right back where she started. Things are quiet for a few seconds until Son sits down next to Dad. Mama begins. I don’t understand Bengali, but I have some experience in ‘Motherese'.  “Him you sit next to. Me who pushed that big head of yours out of this body for sixteen hours of suffering…Me you abandon...” Son sighs, gives up, moves. They are back where they all started. But now Mama is in charge.

We are on the Ganges, the great sacred river of Hindu India, in its final push into the sea through Moslem Bangladesh.  Some of this water may be from the great Brahmaputra River. If so, then I have ridden on 5 of Asia's greatest rivers, the Yellow, Mekong, Irrawaddy, Ganges, Brahmaputra, all spawns of the Himalaya snows. Billions of people live because of these rivers.

This one spreads as it flows south, embracing its end, so wide now we can’t see the shore or any of those billions.

Six hours later, Barisal dock is a clog of pedicabs, tuk-tuks, baggage, and touts.  We see our hotel name on a tower high over the mayhem an easy walk just down the road. The Rodela is clean, cheap ($20 for a double), and has a rooftop restaurant with good food, and fresh-squeezed orange juice. The fried dumplings are magnificent. We meet the kitchen crew and are immortalized in 700 selfies. We're the ones without the aprons and chef’s hats.

Hot water would have been nice. It was on the menu for the room, so to speak, but not available.

We perfect our whirling arabesque through the traffic mayhem, trying it with eyes open, and follow a side street down past a floodlit minaret. The street is draped in Christmas lights that hang over it, electric stars. The real ones are the other side of the grey murk that passes for air in Bangladesh cities, invisible. 

The street throbs with food stalls, hawkers, and shops. In one I find the same Italian ripoff rubber sandals Obaidul had, and for the same price he paid. Shoe Guy juggles 3 pair, in sizes 41, 42, 43, suggests 42 and the deal is done.

I'm guessing we’re the only foreigners in town tonight. We're certainly the hot show. Whenever we stop, the crowds join us, always friendly, kind, curious, and always beginning with “your country?”, and following with a big smile. We are adopted by 2 young guys and shanghaied off to try the local curd. It’s not the purist version, but topped with ricotta-like cheese, puffed rice and a cup of tap water, the latter never a wise choice. (Spoiler Alert: we survive.) The guys speak rapid-fire English, proud of their first conversations with foreigners. The words trip out and over one another. Plans erupt from the flow for the guys to join us at our next stop, 5 hours south in Kuakata on the Bay of Bengal. They get semi-finalized via late night messaging back at the Hotel Rodela, but come to naught, rained out in a ‘dry season' deluge.

There’s a street festival, or riot, or demonstration, or party for a very large family on the street outside the hotel until midnight, free entertainment. LOUD, free entertainment. It could be worse.

And is, the next night.

2020-01-03  FRIDAY  BARISAL TO KUAKATA

The 8-foot mangey gorilla should have been a clue….

Remember that Marx Brother movie in which they keep stuffing people into that tiny stateroom until it explodes? Charge $2.50 for the 5-hour version and dub it in Bengali. That’s our bus ride south to Kuakata and the Bay of Bengal. There isn’t room even for the ashes from Groucho’s cigar. I think I might be briefly engaged to the guy with a henna rinse on his beard who shares knee space with me.

“It never rains this time of year” promised Obaidul.  Kuakata hasn’t listened. The city is drenched in torrents above and mud below. My rubber sandals are packed away. The leather and cloth ones on my feet wish they were. We grab the first electric tuk-tuk we see, show the driver the name of our hotel. He nods and heads off in exactly the opposite direction promised by Google which shows a direct route, 2 kilometers straight down the beach. Twenty minutes later we're nowhere near the water. The tuk-tuk is all out of tuks and we're out of the tuk-tuk pushing it through deep wet sand. Out of the mire, it coughs a hopeful tuk, then a second. Ten minutes later Tuk-tuk Guy crests a hill and the Bay of Bengal fills the horizon. The ‘hill’ is a dike, berm, defense against rising sea levels. The rain isn’t helping. He stops a few minutes down the berm and points inland. “Hotel". There is a gate, a path, a sign, and an 8-foot gorilla. Can cement get fleas and mange? We skirt the scrofalous road company King Kong and follow the brick path past tin shacks, decaying lounge chairs, and collapsed fences.

The place looks like the set for a Stephen King movie. I scare up two clueless teenagers who have no idea who we are or why we are there, in any language, and definitely not in English.  We have had reservations via Booking.com for 2 months for a two-story, two room guest house with ensuite bathrooms in each room ‘set in a lovely garden on the beach’.  The kids lead us past unsuccessful trees and a swamp to a one-story tin shack, with two rooms, and an outhouse off to one side, accessible through the rain. It's perfect for the ‘derelict camp with chain saw murderer’ scene in the m ovie.

That’s the good news.

Inside, the 12-inch fluorescent tube is dim, but not enough to hide the sodden and sagging ceilings. Blackened, dripping, and festering they have pulled away from the walls. Ostriches could flutter through those gaps. Mosquitos are a lot smaller.

The ‘caretakers’ and we share no language. We mime eating. They shake their heads. We mime pushing the keys on a cell phone. They produce one. Obaidul to the rescue, even though we are no longer on his tour. We call him. He tells them we need food or will eat them. And we want tuk-tuks.  They make some calls. About 8 o'clock a guy appears out of the rain. He speaks English, sorts things out and leads us to the promised two-story story guest house. The same set designer has been busy here, but with a few flourishes, all upstaged by the old deposit of shit in Elfie’s toilet.

Leaving is not an option, in the rain, in the dark.

We do get food, and it’s not bad. It's 9 o'clock. We’re in for a long night.

The bed is big, family-size, and pseudo comfy. The mosquitoes are too big to get through the ceiling gaps.

The 8-foot mangey gorilla should have been a clue...

2020-01-04 SATURDAY – KUAKATA

He pounds my head with his fist…

There is breakfast. The Clueless Two mime driving a tuk-tuk and point up the brick path to the gate. Rescue!

Two electric bikes await on the beach. We nod, committed. The guy from last night tuk-tuks up offering a ride into town, but we stick with the electric bikes. A nod is a contract. We climb on. Dennis’ driver sings as he drives us down the beach, a straight run of 10 minutes. The bikes whirr. We get off only once to push.  Imagine a tricycle with a platform mounted over the two back wheels. Imagine two of them, loaded with luggage and three foreigners, appearing out of the morning mists from the beach at the end of Kuakata’s main drag.  Cleopatra’s entrance into Rome between the paws of that giant sphinx got less attention.

Last night's guy offers us HIS hotel. We are skeptical, but “Why not?” Kuakata Guest House is balm. It’s small, spit-polished, bright, the rooms are large, with 2 double beds, two armchairs, a desk and chair, clothes rack, sofa, coffee table, and big bathroom. There is hot water, TV, AC, huge ceiling fans, and WiFi. Big windows the width of the room overlook a garden. The Guest House is set back from the road, and quiet. Cows moo in the front yard. It’s lovely. Manager Helal gives us a discount “because other place last night and you foreign guests from America”. Our spacious double costs $24. (We never do find out how or why he turned up at ‘other place last night’ or this morning.)

Hot showered and cleansed of the taint of ‘mangy gorilla land’, we practice traffic arabesques until ready for Kuakata’s streets. But, there's only one, and the traffic on it aimiable, not voracious. The speed is one click above amble. The singing bike driver from this morning waves as he whirrs by, heading inland, empty.

Four barber shops in a row, all open to the road, and right in front of us, are too much of a suggestion from the universe to ignore. I need a beard trim badly. My mustache has become a strainer. Bangladesh is beard territory. All the guys have ‘em, from Stud Muffins on up. I will be in good hands.

Barber Guy looks me over, waves me to the chair, does a toreador twirl to drape me in cloth, neck to waist, and gets to work. He is a shear artiste. I swear he cuts each beard hair individually, short on the sides, longer on the chin, arched across the mustache, the sharp snap of his long narrow shears working sculptural magic…miracles in my case. I look great, move to get up, but he pulls me back into the chair. He rubs a white powder gently onto into my face, waits. It turns brown. He adds another ungent, a white paste, pulling, pinching my cheeks like an old Auntie who substitutes face violence for a name. He does not tell me I am “sooo cute". He massages my face, rubbing off dry skin---and my suntan. He adds oil, and works my scalp, pulling my hair tight, then rubbing massaging my scalp. He pounds my head with his fists, gently. I sink into canine devotion to those ‘good hands'. Dennis is getting the same treatment in the next chair---plus back and shoulder massage. They serve all 3 of us hot coffee. The total hedonism costs $12 for the two of us.  Selfies are inevitable.

Primped and primed we continue down Kuakata’s main---and only---street seaward. We walk down the thick ripples of sandbags stacked to protect the beach end of Main Street from increasing high tides. This is ‘Lounge Central' for sun-hogging dogs and families of goats who always know the best places. They don’t acknowledge us. There's not a baaaa or a tail thump. Or a selfie.

The Bay of Bengal is not blue, or even close. It is the color of all the soils the great rivers grab in their fall from the Himalayas. The beach is the same color. It is a gentle slope into the Bay, solid then shallow liquid, both grey. People splash, knee deep, the women in saris or the long dresses of Moslems, the men in rolled up long pants, or longyis, the kids fully dressed. Some young guys have discovered knee length colorful ‘surfer shorts’, on and off the beach.

For 40 Taka each---about fifty cents--- we claim spots on long wooden loungers facing the Bay, due south. The next landfall is Antarctica. A boy rearranges our umbrellas as the sun moves west towards sunset.  The long rows of umbrellas and food carts anchor color to the beach. Saris, shawls, and the yellow tee-shirts of the beach photographers move color against the grey, then towards us as we are discovered. The photographers---10 Taka a shot---find us first, huge Nikons primed to go, but second fiddle to tongues trying out English. Whole families crowd around, the women not shy, the kids not sure. The selfie is the universal solvent.

Back on Main Street we stop for tea. Tea Guy is so staggeringly handsome Elfie decides one month in the ‘Hunks of Bangladesh Calendar’ will not be sufficient. We dedicate a whole year to him. Thus, Calendar Guy is born. We expect to drink a lot of tea.

2020-01-05  SUNDAY  – KUAKATA

The beach loungers call, Sirens of the Sands. We answer.

Well lounged, we climb up the sandbags, nodding at the goats. They don't have cameras. They ignore us. At the top, Dennis’ singing Electric Bike Guy offers a us ride back to the hotel...”no money".  It’s tempting but…were headed up Main Street for our afternoon double dose of tea and Calendar Guy.

2020-01-06  MONDAY KUAKATA

It’s our third day. The Lady and Her Two Husbands are looking familiar to folks along Main Street.  They wave at us. Electric Bike Guy always stops to say hello and offer us a ride. Today, he throws his arms in the air and twists them. Other Electric Bike Guy has had an accident. But...he’s OK. News delivered, he whirrs off. All Barber Shop Guys wave us in, wrap us in selfies and order in paper cups of cappuccino. The latest prints are big hits. Two white-plastered customers, mid treatment, watch in reverse through the wall of mirrors, “?lleh eht tahW" clear on their faces under the mud.

Lady And Her Other Husband walk through the ripples and climb into a canoe, then into covered   boat  and wave across the silvery water. They’re off to see giant red crabs and muck around in the mud.

I head home to nurse a rebelling digestive system that has sent an ‘Evacuate!!’ order through my nether regions. To quote Mrs. Wolfowitz from ‘The Big Bang theory ‘ “It’s like an upside down volcano in here. Who knew one tukas could hold so much water!”

Extra underwear might be a good idea.

I head back up Main Street, the leftover wide space between rows of open stalls selling, making, cooking, serving up anything anybody needs, Kuakata's  al fresco Walmart.  Nether Region rumbles No, no, and really no!”  at the red pomegranates, stalks of bananas, bins of apples and oranges, and tea shops and restaurants.

My Bengali does not run much beyond basic food words, useless and ill-advised in my current condition. ‘Underwear’ is linguistic terra incognita. A shop with rows of flapping ‘surfer dude’ baggy shorts suggests familiarity with the right part of the anatomy.  I reach into my pants and pull out the waist band of my current version. Clothing Guy is on it in a flash. He's a jolly sort inside the hennaed fringes of his long beard and spiralling head scarf. He looks at me and delivers his judgment. “Big".

A lot of him jiggles inside his robes, Super XXXXXXXL and growing, when he hops up on his counter, swivels on that abundant fulcrum and soft lands on the other side in a pile of plastic bags. He bends. Arms disappear. Bags fly. He unties one, pulls out a snazzy pair of jockies in black and green, with a questionably placed red racing stripe. He stretches the waist band. “Big". Big is relative. Waists on the local fauna----present henna-ed company aside--- seem to top out at about 30 inches. I look dubious. He dives again, roots around, surfaces, unties another bag.  It must be his personal stash. The shorts could wrap the Hindenburg. I go for the first pair, with the racing stripe, plop down the 100 Taka, and walk out with my one buck Bangladeshi Butt Huggers.

I crave an apple, buy two, eat one, and retire to Kuakata Guest House within a quick stumble from the bathroom and wait for apple pectin to do its coagulating magic. It’s a gamble that doesn't work. Nether Regions keeps dealing itself Royal Flushes.

But, I have insurance, one buck's worth.

2020-01-07 TUESDAY  -  KUAKATA-BARISAL-DHAKA

It's time to go.

The Lady and Her Two Husbands walk down Main Street to the Barisal special express bus. Only the Husbands get on. The Lady stays on in Kuakata for a few more days to breathe. The air here is clear, not the sludgy goop of Dhaka…and there's a lot more tea on offer at Calendar Man's tea shop.  She’s a wonderful travel companion. In a week she'll join friend Renate in Myanmar, our Nile felucca buddy from last year.  Plans flitter about Pakistan or southern Ethiopia in 2021.

We have 3 hours on the Barisal express, then 3 hours on the streets of Barisal waiting for our 7-hour shuttle back up the Ganges to Dhaka. The Nether Regions have planned well over night.  It takes them a dozen trips, but they are empty, ready to appear in public. I buy a banana as insurance, Instant Cork for 7 cents. The method of use is up to the purchaser.

The bus has reserved seats, all in neat rows, one person per seat, so we avoid up close and personal ‘kneesies’ with strangers. We settle by the windows. The rains have washed the dust from the landscape. It glows under the clear sky, flat to the horizon with rice, bumpy and polished green where the bananas and mangoes grow. At stops, foodsellers hop on, balancing 3-foot wide flat baskets on their head loaded with the morning specials. Popcorn Guy dispenses his fluff in small doses he pops out of a huge clear plastic garbage bag.  Local popcorn is yummy, with just a dusting of salt. Tongue casts a vote, vetoed from Below.

In Barisal a guy in the bus gets the driver to drop us at a good spot for the docks, hops off with us, finds an electric tuk-tuk, arranges the destination and price, waves, and hops back on the bus. We will miss the sweetness of Bangladesh.

On the boat, nervous Sammy chats with us in perfect English, grammatical, sophisticated, precise, and clever. He and his Mom are heading to Dhaka for the ‘English Olympiad’.   He is nine years old, will turn ten on January 10.

Halfway through the trip he brings me a guava and some oranges because I'm not feeling well.

Yes, we will miss the sweetness of Bangladesh.

2020-01-08 AND 09  WEDNESDAY AND THURSDAY   DHAKA THEN BANGKOK

We lounge in our hotel above the traffic, but not the noise or the smog. Dhaka is concentrated, pungent, exciting, dense, and best squeezed through quickly. I catch up on blogs, there is lunch, then night, the 2:30 am flight over Myanmar, dawn in Bangkok, a minivan between airports, a local cab to Pimthong Place, and Julia's big hug.

“I miss you. Have coffee. You in same room?  Or other room?. No stairs. Better for foot. ” You like Masamun curry for breakfast?  I have mango for you.” We go up the stairs, into the treetops, cross the porch, even height with the papayas, pass the orchids, and unlock “same room".  We're home.

The Masamun curry (“Julia recipe. Cook 8 hours. Very little hot”) jump starts our sleepy taste buds.  The sauce is dark, not light as in other versions we have eaten, and pineapple replaces potato. How can chicken cooked for 8 hours, even at “very little hot" still be moist? It is.  “Julia recipe" is sublime. We tell her so. She shrugs “of course”. Thick slabs of mango wash it down. It’s not mango season yet, so they are a mystery. She laughs. “Julia find". (Later we see some in the market. I still don't know where they come from.)

There is business to get sorted. Thailand is famous for making clothes overnight. We want to get our multi-pocket travel vests copied before they dissolve. My $3 Bangladeshi squishable down jacket needs a new zipper, the thin back-up travel bag needs a new handle, and Dennis wants to convert a pair of travel pants from pull on to zip up. Julia puts her husband, Ko, in charge.

Our neighborhood is miles away from the tourist-clogged parts of Bangkok. ‘Farangs' are rare here unless they are bivouacking at Julia's. We are the ‘farangs du jour'. Local prices should be real.

We turn right out the door, pass the dog dozing in the middle of the ‘soi’  (lane), turn left, then left through the roundabout circling a shrine. “Hindu mixed with Buddha, so Buddha has 4 faces.” Says Ko. And he laughs. He teaches design at the university. This shrine isn't one of the neighborhood's finest aesthetic moments.

Ko waves at a pair of huge round eyeglasses in the shadows of the covered sidewalk.  We step up from the street into the shade and meet Sewing Lady. She is a munchkin, round from bottom to top, a soft pillow setting for those glasses. Her shop is a wide spot on the sidewalk with a view of the shrine, just a table, a sewing machine, a low cabinet, and a pile of plastic bags. We ‘wai’ in greeting, hands joined, heads bowed. The glasses slide a bit on her round nose. Ko shows her the pants, jacket, bag, and explains what we need. She up-ends, rolls into the bags, surfaces with a handful of zippers. Two are perfect matches for the pants and jacket. Come back tomorrow, or maybe later. A ‘wai’ and we leave her in charge. There's no need to talk price. She's a neighbor. It will be the right price.

We’re not so lucky at the tailor shop on the main drag, new territory for Ko. Tailor Lady has good material, counts pockets and zippers, shakes her head, floats a figure. In the stratosphere. 2000 Baht, 70 dollars. Ko’s eyes roll, slightly. We head home. Julia thinks we might find new vests in the night market clothing stalls, or in the second-hand piles.

Ko drops us at the night market. We walk back home with 2 new plastic belts for our travel pants, 2 charger cords in Raucous Red for our phones, and 3 cotton bandanas we wear as neck scarves to keep our shirt collars clean. There are also munchies, luscious coconut custard miracles. They do not make it home or spoil the dinner Julia has for us.  But, first…“Show me. Show me". Julia approves the dark blue bandana with elephants. “Sawee mahk", beautiful. No jacket? There's another market to try. Tomorrow. “Now. Eat".

2020-01-10  FRIDAY -  BANGKOK AND THE ROYAL PALACE

Too many people. By a factor of 10.

Today we play tourist at the Royal Palace and Emerald Buddha. They are in the core of the old city, far away from our neighborhood, on the other side of the ring of skyscrapers of new Bangkok via a long and complicated route---if we take public transportation. Julia spoils us with another breakfast banquet and is on it.  “Too hot. I call Über. You take taxi back.” The trip into the city by car is direct and still takes an hour and a half.

Three Chinese provinces have gotten there first.

The audio tour is excellent, but we can't see any of the detail up close. Above the hordes, the exquisite golden spires and roofs promise grace, a welcome to something specifically Thai. Down here, we could be anywhere. The place has the atmosphere of a stampede…at a theme park. We need to breathe, and escape way before the audio tour’s final comments.

Refuge is The Textile Museum of Queen Sirikit, empty. We watch an interview of Her Majesty. Her English is perfect, poised, rich in content. She describes her first meeting with her US-born future husband, trombone player and would be concert pianist. “He was late. He kept me waiting. It was hate at first sight. But not for long.“ They became a potent team, deeply loved and respected, a focus of loyalty and political stability.  She was a great beauty then. Now she is 87, a widow, Queen Mother to her son, the new king.

Pulled back into Thailand by this quiet place, we decide to skip the inevitable hordes at the Temple of the Reclining Buddha and look for lunch.

“Come in" says the grandma. The picture of ‘pork with basil, rice and egg’ makes it a no-brainer. We add sweet Thai tea with milk, and then mango smoothies.  Very satisfied from eye, to tongue, to tum for $8, we thank Grandma with a ‘wai', “kup khun krahp” (thank you), and “arroi mahk” (delicious). She ‘wais', beams, and laughs.

Julia's “You take taxi back” is easier said than done. Our neighborhood is way beyond the city, a 2 hour round trip. Cabbies don’t want to come back empty. They start at 1000 Baht. We start at 400 Baht. One jolly dude bites at 600, about $20, calls Julia to get the address right, and zooms us out of the old city. Bangkok’s traffic is famously maligned as congealed and impossible….by people who have not been to Bangladesh. It's swish and neat to us. There are no tuk-tuks, cars stay in clearly marked lanes, and there are traffic lights. And it's quiet. No one rides the horn, or even beeps. Bliss.

We hop out short of Julia's, right by the Hindu-Buddhist shrine of dubious aesthetic merit  and hop up to Sewing Lady's lair. She dives into her stash, surfaces with pants and jacket. The pants are done, just need a fastener. The jacket awaits its zipper. We ‘wai, wave, and head up the street to home.

Julia has promised us different food every day. Tonight, it’s huge prawns languid in a coconut, lime, basil broth. She has plans for us tomorrow. “Julia close website. Nobody can come. Tomorrow we go to market. Eat fried chicken.”

How can we be so lucky?

2020-01-11  SATURDAY -  BANGKOK – MARKETS

“Like my name? Julia, too?”

Last night’s soup was celestial, like eating flowers.

Thai Julia’s food is too good not to conjure up that other Julia.  She loves the stories, and our gravel- throated impersonation. Her own laugh is deep. She sings mezzo-soprano in a chorus. I’m surprised they can keep her still long enough. Ko is the opposite. He is reserved, still, considered. He laughs easily about his design students, worries they want to follow the rules, not be free. “You must be a good teacher.” And I mean it.  “He always teach. Talk, talk, talk.” And she flaps her hands. Ko just laughs.

In the morning Ko is off to class and Julia herds us into her pick-up for a run to the morning market. She parks across the backs of 2 cars blocking them in. “No problem. I not lock car. They push.” She leads us through the market then up stairs of a steep bridge to cross a ‘klong'. The narrow canal is the main street linking the wooden houses of this neighborhood way far from downtown. They used to be common all through Bangkok, once dubbed ‘the Venice of the East' with over-enthusiastic Western chauvinism. They may still be. A woman paddles her knife thin canoe past the stilts that hold the houses far above the low water of the dry season.

Julia grew up here. “Everyone know me".  She rattles the door of her grade school, but it’s locked on Saturday. We climb over a pile of recycled beams of teak and up a staircase into a wide, open space. “My friend gallery. Open soon.” The walls are blocks and strips of the old teak, a rich dark brown, not smooth or flat. Ko rescues old teak. I wonder if these walls are his hand. They are still empty. Almost. A portrait of the new king and his loved father covers the wall at the top of the stairway, the only color, not art, but legitimizing the art that will be here.

“Ok, I shop now. You walk home. Go that way.” Julia flutters off. We know the way. There’s no hurry

The backs of houses on the klong open to a covered passageway, part sidewalk, part street, that ties them to other houses on dry land.  Some are shops. A few serve food and drink on a scatter of tables. We sit in one, cool and quiet over the water. The proprietor rushes over, smiles, rushes out, turns down the passage, returns with a plastic menu in English, shared property along the klong.  ‘Cha yen' , Thai ice tea,  sweet, with condensed milk, is less than half what it was downtown, and more soothing in the quiet.

This is the Thailand I remember from my first days here 55 years ago.

Almost home, we wave again at Sewing Lady. She’s wearing 2 sets of glasses, round on round.

Later, Ko shows us her handiwork, perfectly zippered, buttoned, and velcroed. For 270 Baht, $9.  She called to tell him it was ready. He picked it up for us. Still later, on our way to the Night Market for munchies we stop, ‘wai', thank her with a genuine ‘dee mahk, sawee mahk’, very good, beautiful. She thanks us with radiance.

Dinner in the Night Market is spicy pork. One bite and our mouths are volcanos. The ice-cold Singha beers have no effect on the lava of the chilis. Rice deadens it a bit to merely incandescent. Even our tears are hot. Cucumbers or dairy are the only remedies. Chocolate-covered popsicles at the corner 711 save us from street side self-immolation.

Julia and Ko welcome us home. We climb our stairs.

Bangkok---55 years later--- has new memories.

2020-01-12  SUNDAY -  BANGKOK

“ATM"

We were warned ahead of time.

Julia has our day planned. Today we meet family, aka the daughter. And because nothing happens in Thailand without the catalyst of enchanted taste buds, Julia has called ahead to Ko’s favorite restaurant (“He come 2 , 3 times a week!)  for fried chicken, in the style of Isan, in northern Thailand. We know it won’t be that simple. It isn't

The chicken comes first, two platters of wings in a deep red sauce, with the sweet, pungent, limey, slightly stinging genius of the best Thai food, teasing, then rewarding every resource of the tongue. The salads come doubled, bean sprouts, basil, mushrooms, tomatoes, peanuts for crunch. ”No spicy for Dennis. Spicy for me and Bob.” Ditto the bowls of sauce, layering for balls of sticky rice.”.  The drink of thickish green tea sweeps the tongue clean of the flavors, primes It for the next seduction. Then we get to the soup. It defeats description. I have no words for such flavors.  We hang on to them, banish the green tea. Over our moans, Julia promises “Easy to make. I give you spice to take home.” 

Julia wants to go to a market. She taps Jo’s stomach four times “ATM, ATM” and laughs. He shrugs and dispenses. That’s how we learn he has paid for lunch.

At night, she brings us mango with sticky rice, enough after the feast at noon. “Good, na!”, adding that “na" as she does. It kinda means “pay attention to what I just said", or "right”.

Perfect. Na.

2020-01-13  MONDAY -  BANGKOK – OUR LAST DAY

“Julia iron bone!”

Julia’s arm is swollen. She holds it up, shrugs, tells a story of falling over a chair, and is off to the hospital. Kpo is driving because she can’t manage the manual shift in her car.

Hours later she calls us for dinner. It’s heaven. We slurp huge spoonsful of the soup and stab the large shrimp and balls of pork and spice floating in it. Julia holds up her thickly bandaged arm. “Julia iron bone! I cook, no problem”.

We give Julia and Ko a wonderful old weaving we found in a Kahin village near Loikow, Myanmar, and a picture of us with woman who wove it. Thailand also has people with the brass neck rings, but Julia isn’t up for it! She does drape the weaving over her shoulder. Ko, the designer, approves.

We ask to settle up. Julia floats the bill across the table. It has only the room charge. The rest? “You friends now”.

Hugs are not sufficient.

2020-01-14 AND 15 TUESDAY AND WEDNESDAY -  BANGKOK-JAPAN-HONOLULU-LOS ANGELES-CHARLOTTE-SARASOTA

Ko drives us to the airport at 4 in the morning.

“You come back, not as customers, as friends.” Then he drives off in the dark.

26 hours, 9 time zones, and 10,000 miles later we land in Los Angeles. The short night in the Days Inn doesn’t make a nick in the jet lag. Three more time zones, and 3000 more miles don’t help. Our friends Deborah and Don don’t mind ferrying two zombies home to Nokomis.

I have rehearsal at the opera house in 22 hours.

We leave for Africa in 10 weeks.

Jet lag?