by Rolf Potts
The fog parts like a curtain and we pass low flat mesas full of sandstone caves carved by the eons. I know if I were to explore them I would find artifacts that hold stories from centuries ago. East of the mesas, rolling flat lands give rise to the Tres Virgines, three active volcanoes, named for the inhabitants of an old folktale. They sit in a perfect row, descending in height from the one nearest the highway, all mighty vents from the lungs of the planet. Archaeologists have speculated that when they last awoke, tens of thousands of years ago, they spewed molten lava up to 100 miles, all the way to the Pacific Ocean, from whose tidal waters on a clear day you can see the hazy outline of the tallest volcano.
Just north of San Ignacio we stop for a military checkpoint where a cardboard soldier holds a sign warning against drugs. An officer with a clipboard climbs into the bus and struts up and down the center aisle, not really looking for anything; more an act of machismo than a search. Outside a sniffer dog scratches at the baggage compartment and after an amused soldier looks inside, we are waved on.
People are moving about the bus, stiff and sore after the long night. The driver puts a movie on the overhead screens and cranks the volume up to rock concert level. It is Snakes on a Plane with Samuel L. Jackson, a very bad B movie that makes me realize that a good movie is not about to be playing on a public bus in the rural deserts of Mexico.
We round a hairpin turn and from the tiny valley below us the adobe-tiled roofs of San Ignacio come into view through the date palms. It is a tired and sun-worn village whose main industry is cement brick and whose people appear to live in slow motion. The town sits astride an impossibly beautiful river full of egrets and herons that contribute to the town’s casual aura. Two hours to the west, gray whales have annually migrated into the lagoon of the same name for centuries.
We pull into the dirt parking lot and I spot Jorge leaning against his van, waiting for me even though we are three hours late. He has one cowboy boot on the bumper above a “Jesus loves you” decal and his arm rests on the bullhorns mounted on the hood. He still wears the aviator shades I gave him two years ago. It is stifling hot under a van Gogh sun.
A stray dog barks at a swirling dust devil and I stare up at the familiar sign over the bus office.
I smile as I read, “Bienvenido A San Ignacio.”
I am back.
James Michael Dorsey is an award-winning author, explorer, photographer, and lecturer who has traveled extensively in forty-five countries. He has spent the past two decades researching remote cultures around the world. He is a former contributing editor at Transitions Abroad and frequent contributor to United Airlines’ Hemispheres and Perceptive Travel. He has also written for Colliers, The Christian Science Monitor, Los Angeles Times, BBC Wildlife, World & I, and Natural History, plus several African magazines. He is a foreign correspondent for Camerapix International, a travel consultant to Brown + Hudson of London, and a correspondent for the World Explorers Bureau. He is also a fellow of the Explorers Club and former director of the Adventurers Club. His latest book is Vanishing Tales from Ancient Trails. His stories have appeared in nine travel anthologies. He is a nine-time Solas Award category winner and a contributor to The Best Travel Writing, Volume 10.
CHRISTINA AMMON
Yuan Fen
Big world, opposite sides, but still we meet.
This time, the Biotruck broke down near Bidor—a small, dusty Malaysian settlement lined with unremarkable storefronts. As I kicked around the parking lot of the mechanic shop, I asked myself: Why can’t the truck spring an oil leak at the Taj Mahal or Angkor Wat?
The “Biotruck” was a twenty-two-year-old school bus my partner Andy salvaged from a scrapyard and converted into an RV. It ran on waste cooking oil. Everything in it—the lights, the sink, the countertop—was cobbled together from cast-offs. Our plan was to drive it around the world, but progress was slow. When you’re traveling in a bus made of garbage, things go wrong on a regular basis. Breakdowns become a way of life.
I surveyed the lay of the land around the auto shop: a fruit stand, a hardware store, a hair salon. For the next few days I’d be exiled from the truck as it filled with eager mechanics, oily rags, and expletives. The most helpful thing I could do was to keep out of the way.
Bidor appeared to be the Middle of Nowhere. Of course, the last time I’d thought that (during a breakdown in the Malaysian port town of Galang Patah), we ended up on a Dionysian jag with influential journalists and local politicians celebrating us—and the Biotruck—with champagne.
I needed to give Bidor a chance.
What’s interesting about breakdowns isn’t what goes wrong, but the question of how to get rolling again. A disintegrated fuel filter can throw you at the mercy of strangers. Who will help you? You invariably meet people you would never have met otherwise, and often walk away with the sorts of strong friendships that get forged under duress.
In this case, the truck had quit abruptly on the highway and Andy had to guide it onto the shoulder. While he poked around under the hood, I spread a blanket on the roadside grass and, setting up our laundry hamper as a backrest, resumed reading the literary megalith that is Shantaram. The day dimmed, the mosquitos bit, and I started to worry that we might have to spend the night right there. Thankfully, two laughing Chinese mechanics from Kim Lim’s Towing happened to drive by, and stopped to give us a hitch. That’s how we got to Bidor.
I am fairly useless in breakdown situations. It’s not that I lack the brain power to figure it out, or that I’m too girly to get my hands dirty. It’s just that I’m completely uninterested. Car parts, to me, are so boring. Thankfully, Andy feels otherwise. “It’s like having a conversation with the engine,” he explained.
Days passed while he carried on heated chats with the fuel filter and the injector pump. I filled the blank hours drinking tea and submitting myself to inane distractions—like having my hair flat-ironed—just so I could wait out the brutal Malaysian heat in the air-conditioned salon.
It felt wrong. While poor Andy was covered in grease, I was strolling around the parking lot all day with great hair. So I went over to a fruit shop, deciding that I would bring refreshment to the oily crew. I selected a few mangos, bananas, and a watermelon. I knew the counter space in the Biotruck would be covered in wrenches, so employing a clumsy mix of English and charades, I asked the owner for a knife and a cutting board. I sat down and chopped the fruit on a mat near the register, balancing a plate on my knees while runnels of watermelon juice ran down my arm. The owner’s son set a box by my feet to catch the peels, her husband came over to watch and soon, cutting up the fruit became a family effort.
Mr. and Mrs. Fatt owned the fruit shop. The morning after our collective fruit-slicing session, they idled their car up to our bus and asked us to breakfast. We sat at an open-air Chinese market, poked breakfast dumplings with chopsticks, and did our best to make conversation. We must have done well enough, because they took us out to dinner again that night.
We got on with them well. They were fun loving. Mr. Fatt liked to tease, and in return his wife delivered regular impish punches to his arm. During the next few days, while the Biotruck was in surgery at Kim Lim’s shop, we started hanging out at their house: watching TV, using their shower and internet connection. They showed us a nearby waterfall, and we waited out one long hot afternoon in its mist. Before long, Mr. and Mrs. Fatt began to feel like family, and that dusty block of Bidor storefronts started to feel like home.
At last the Biotruck was repaired. On our last night, they took us out to dinner. While we sipped from our beers, Mr. Fatt pulled out a pen and a napkin. He scribbled out a single Chinese character and drew a big circle.
“Yuan fen,” he said, pointing to the Chinese symbol. Then he retraced the circle. “Big world, opposite sides, but still we meet. This friendship is a special privilege.”
Much later, I would look up the meaning of yuan fen. I began to love the word for the way it filled a gap in the English language. It
explained a phenomenon that I had often experienced, but lacked the verbal tools to articulate. I think “chemistry” might be the closest word we have.
Simply put, yuan fen is the binding force that brings people together in a relationship. The amount of yuan fen you share with someone determines the level of closeness you will achieve. It’s not just about proximity; you can live next door to someone all your life and never get to know them. This just means you have thin yuan fen. On the other hand, you can fall madly in love with someone, but just can’t stay together. “Have fate without destiny,” is the Chinese proverb used to describe this tragic condition.
The meaning can get more complicated. Some believe that yuan fen is tied to past lives and karma. As another Chinese proverb goes: It takes hundreds of reincarnations to bring two persons to ride in the same boat; it takes a thousand to bring two persons to share the same pillow.
But for me, it is enough that yuan fen explains how sometimes people who meet get along or don’t get along, why friends become friends, why lovers become lovers, and why relationships sometimes break apart. It puts a word to why there are people I’ve lived near for so long, yet consistently failed to maneuver the conversation past a “hello” and yet managed to make a heart connection halfway around the world.
Yuan fen explains how Andy and I should break down, find Kim Lim’s shop, and intersect with Mr. and Mrs. Fatt—people who don’t speak our language, live thousands of miles away, and run a fruit stand in a dusty little “nowhere” town called Bidor.
Christina Ammon has penned stories for Orion Magazine, Hemispheres, the San Francisco Chronicle, Condé Nast, and numerous travel anthologies. She is the recipient of an Oregon Literary Arts Fellowship for nonfiction and organizes the Deep Travel writing tours in Morocco and Nepal. When not traveling, Christina Ammon lives in Ruch, Oregon where she writes, sips wine, and paraglides. For travel tales and workshop information, visit her blog at www.vanabonds.com.
THOMAS SWICK
Warsaw Redux
Tracing personal history from an uncommon Cold War birthplace.
In summer, Warsaw smells of linden trees. The remembered scent greeted me promptly, as even the street leading in from the airport is lush with leaves. They help soften the blow of gray apartment blocks.
Jurek parked in front of one such building on a tree-lined boulevard in the neighborhood of Mokotów. We took the small elevator up to the third floor, where his wife Monika greeted me warmly. In the kitchen, supper was laid out on the table and the windows were open to a view of the prison. Gazing out I thought, as I always do when taking in that scene: What a strange place for one’s wife to have been born.
April 6, 1952. The previous year Halina Matraś had been accused of espionage on behalf of the Polish government-in-exile and, though pregnant, sentenced to ten years in Mokotów Prison. That summer her sister came to take the three-month-old baby away. Little Hania looked so sickly that, on the tram, outraged mothers hurled abuse at her aunt. Halina was released after five years, during a period of de-Stalinization, but those five years took a heavy toll.
I learned some of this when I met Hania in London in the summer of ’76, and more when I came to Warsaw two years later—a few days before her mother died. One of the last things to make her laugh was the story of my going to the store to buy water and coming back with a bottle of clear vinegar.
More successful at job hunting, I found work as an English teacher. After six months my visa expired, and when I requested an extension I was asked to become an informer. (My own small, sour taste of the system.) I refused, which meant quitting my job and leaving the country. But, thanks to the birth of Solidarity, I was able to return in the fall of 1980. Hania and I were married that October in the Old Town, and I stayed for two years—teaching English, learning Polish, and gathering material for my first book.
In the morning, the guard gazed out from his corner tower. Over breakfast I told Jurek, who is Hania’s cousin, of my desire to visit the prison. Hania had gotten in touch with a retired professor who had written a book about female political prisoners, and had been a prisoner herself. Jurek, to my surprise, thought that a visit wouldn’t be impossible. But more immediately, he said, there was an event in the park next to the Hotel Bristol, as today marked the twenty-second anniversary of the first, free, postwar elections. And, like the scent of linden trees, the Polish passion for remembrance came back to me.
Le Méridien Bristol, Warsaw’s most elegant hotel, sits, appropriately, on its stateliest street. In the early ’80s I had used Krakowskie Przedmieście—with its reconstituted grandeur—as a refuge from the drab, dilapidated city beyond. Leveled by the Nazis, Warsaw was rebuilt by the Communists—about as horrible a fate as any city could have. Though the Old Town, and my favorite street, were painstakingly made to look their former selves.
On recent visits, having seen more cities, I had begun to think of Krakowskie Przedmieście as possibly the world’s most perfect street. It is infinitely cozier than Fifth Avenue, and much more varied than the regimented Champs-Élysées. In the space of only a few blocks it contains all the classic elements of a great urban boulevard: shops, galleries, bookstores, restaurants, cafes, gracious apartment houses, baroque and neoclassical churches, historic palaces (including the president’s), a grand hotel, a fine university, diminutive parks, and heroic statuary, honoring, among others, a prince, a poet, and an astronomer. Krakowskie Przedmieście is more than a thoroughfare; it is a capital, and a culture, distilled to their essence.
On this bright June afternoon it looked better than ever. (The nostalgia that normally accompanies a return to a former home is magnificently tempered when that home was formerly Communist.) I walked with summery crowds past sidewalk cafes in a soothing but puzzling calm—until I realized that there was no traffic. The perfect street had found the perfect solution (at least for the weekend).
The park next to the Bristol was furnished with poster boards, and tables of books, devoted to the distant late twentieth century. Mock voting stations had been set up in honor of the anniversary; I grabbed a ballot that asked if fans should be allowed to attend an upcoming soccer tournament. It was cheering evidence that the national delight in absurdity—an essential in the past for keeping one’s sanity—had not disappeared. I checked “Nie” and dropped my ballet into the box.
A small bookstore behind the hotel sold postcards with black-and-white scenes from the Polish People’s Republic. There were now guidebooks devoted to walking tours of old Communist-era landmarks and I found it encouraging that enough time had passed for Poles to acknowledge (if not embrace) the vestiges of that time. One postcard showed three peasants in overcoats, each holding a piglet. I bought it to send to Hania, who, because of work, had been unable to come.
Heading toward the Old Town, I came across a bench with a button at one end. I pushed the button and unleashed the Grand Polonaise Brillante, Op. 22. The writing on the bench, in Polish and English, informed me that it had been from the building across the street, in 1830, that Fryderyk Chopin had left Warsaw on a stagecoach to Vienna, “never to return.”
Krakowskie Przedmieście—its treasures now with musical accompaniment—began its descent into Plac Zamkowy (Castle Square). Protestors clamored around King Sigismund’s column, speaking through megaphones and waving Syrian flags. Asking around, I learned that almost all of them had come to Poland as students and decided to stay. They provided a new twist on an old theme—“Niech żyje Syria!” they chanted, “Long live Syria!”—and proof of Warsaw’s international status.
Noemi sat at a sidewalk café on Plac Konstytucji, a monumental, Stalinist-era square now softened by umbrellas. Even its reliefs of heroic workers and teachers had taken on a kind of period charm now that the ideology behind them had been sent packing.
Noemi was the daughter of friends of a friend, a pretty young woman with dark hair and brown eyes and almost unaccented English. She had recently graduated from Jacek Kuroń High School, a pri
vate institution named for one of Solidarity’s leading lights. There had been 16 students in her graduating class. Now she was looking for a summer job, not abroad—as generations of Poles, like Hania, had done—but in her hometown.
“I used to hate Warsaw,” she said, with that universal teenage belief in the superiority of elsewhere. “Then I went to Ottawa. The grass,” she said with disgust, “was cut so perfectly.”
She reflected for a moment, then continued. “Warsaw might be a mess, people may be angry, but they say what they think.” I thought of the mothers berating Hania’s aunt on the tram. “They don’t care what people think of them.”
She sipped her strawberry smoothie, sitting in an armchair that looked as if it were on loan from a prewar apartment. She told me, as if revealing something shocking: “Young people don’t read. I read and I’m a weirdo.” When I asked her about the Copernicus Science Center, she spoke matter-of-factly about the exhibit that indicates which sexual position is best for use inside a small Polish Fiat.
Then, before heading off on her job search, she invited me home to meet her parents. “Polish hospitality,” she said smiling.
But I had a full plate. The following day I met Kasia, the daughter of friends of mine who lived in Philadelphia. The country’s robust economy has brought back quite a few Poles who had immigrated; in this family’s case it was the children—both Kasia and her sister—not the parents, who had returned (at least for a while).