For my 60th birthday, family and friends offered me Maxine.
Would Charlene be jealous?
Here are three entries. You can judge for yourselves.
They are:
Motorcycling in Heaven.
Not at all the same. Very different.
Adam's Ribs.
Thursday, April 4, 2019
Travels with Maxine
For my 60th birthday, family and friends offered me Maxine.
Would Charlene be jealous?
Here are three entries. You can judge for yourselves.
They are:
Motorcycling in Heaven.
Not at all the same. Very different.
Adam's Ribs.
Motorcycling in Heaven
This past summer, Marie-Do and I went on a motorcycle trip up north. It began with two friends, so four of us on three bikes. Pierro of Sum Kai, La Cage du Coq – the greatest French restaurant east of Metropolitan France: https://www.facebook.com/La-Cage-Du-Coq-580617518744632/ and Marie-Do’s very good friend Prune, of Sacha Inchi.
The trip was fascinating in itself and it gave me
much food for thought, especially where it opened comparisons with bicycle
travel.
The first blaring difference was the ease of ascent.
Now, ascent is a strange word. My very own ancestors used to use it to describe
spiritual heights - שִׁיר המַעֲלוֹת - but what is missing when you are sitting
in your armchair and you hit the words Song of Ascents is the notion of effort.
The same is true on a motorcycle. Since I am not an off road motorcyclist, the
only effort I put into the entire trip was articulating my right wrist so as to
pump more petrol into the carburetor.
Question: was it a pleasure? Answer: yes.
And yet I was unhappy with the speed. Landscapes
moved too quickly, villages ran in and out of each other like a wet water
colour; the kaleidoscope of impressions was an inhuman pace. The English
phrase, ‘can’t see the forest for the trees’ comes to mind although in the
opposite direction.
For even though I could see the forest, I could not
see the trees. There were too many of them and I was passing just too quickly.
On a bicycle each tree is an individual, especially when you are sweating on a
dirt track going up hill; each shrub and flower – even when they are being
cursed in the drama of effort – has its own essence and personality.
On a motorcycle this is simply gone, erased, washed
out of existence.
Likewise, landscapes lose their meaning. Hills,
valleys, plains…even their very beauty seems to lack relevance.
Just in case
one can think I am not grateful for the experience I am adding some photos.
 |
Flooded paddy
|
 |
A place near heaven
|
 |
On etait jeunes, on etait beaux
a Sanakham
|
 |
| Breathe Deep |
 |
I hear you say, what can make me feel this way?
|
 |
| Song of Ascents |
 |
| My girl! |
 |
Tender valley
|
Not at all the same. Very different
There are other differences, of course.
One is the noise. On a bicycle you are faced with
silence. The gentle clicking of the gears and the sound of rain water draining
into a rice paddy. On a motorcycle you have the drone of the motor, the heat of
the motor and the vibrations of the motor. There is a partition, which is
neither false nor contrived, between oneself and the surrounding reality.
Oh, the lung searing joy of climbing. The rest you
take half way up a hill. Your toes clamped solidly on the pedals. Counting the
strokes in Japanese; a vestige of karate training.
But I think the greatest difference is my contact
with the population. All throughout that trip and others I took on my own in
that monsoon season, I was constantly reminded of a book I read when I was an
adolescent, Life Is With People by Mark Zborowski. The book talks about the
life of my own, as my grandmother lived and talked with me about it, in the
shtetls of Eastern Europe before our culture was burned off the face of the
earth.
Life is with people, indeed, and the greatest joy of
cycling in Laos is the contact with the people. You enter stone-age villages
and are called to partake in a meal, tired and dirty and hungry you enter a
hamlet and are given hospitality in an old wooden house that looks on the brink
of collapse; children climb over you at dinner time and others peak in through
the windows. You stop to rest in a village temple and a monk turns on a fan to
cool you after bringing you a cold glass of water boiled with herbs. In a
motorbike repair shop you borrow tools to make an adjustment and receive grease
soiled smiles…
It is said that everything has a price and the price
you pay is being tired and hungry, dirty and thirsty; it is feeling your
muscles straining and your knees weak and pained from the effort. But the
reward! Ah the rewards.
On a motorcycle my contacts with the population were
limited to the guy who fills up your tank, the restaurant owner and the
guesthouse owner. I know it is not like that for everyone. There is a brilliant
photographer here in Vientiane named Albert Leeflang who manages to get off his
motorcycle and experience the Laos as I love to live it, but for me this is
impossible.
You can see his work here: https://www.facebook.com/albert.leeflang
The long a short of it is that after coming back
from this motor trip, and another I took on my own to Xiang Khouang Province, I
decided that the sum of all these differences was worth writing a book about
and so I am currently working on an opus called Bibliomancy.
The book has no beginning and no end. Like a cycling
trip it will take me where it wants to go and I am content to tell the story of
my trips with all their wonderings and wanderings. I sat under an old house and
let my thoughts run wild; I stirred my morning coffee with an old lead spoon...
That is the order of Bibliomancy; it takes me where it wants to go… and I am
surprised by its will power and stubbornness.
In Medieval times there was a form of divination in
which a needle was stuck at random in a Bible. Where the pin hit was the
prophecy for the seeker, a sort of sharp edged Y Ching and probably just as
incomprehensible.
That then, is what Bibliomancy will be about; pick a
card…any card.
 |
Mist makes the traveler long for the valley
|
 |
Stopping for a pho
|
Adam's Ribs
On the Second of
January, 2019… on my parent’s wedding day anniversary, I was returning to
Vientiane from a trip to the unforgettable Elephant Conservation Center with my
nephew Steven.
We had left
Sayabouri and were about 60 km from Paklai when a dog decided to commit suicide
by running under my front wheel. Steven had my motorcycle and I was riding
Marie-Do’s and he had gone ahead of me so I found myself in the delicate situation
of being thrown from the bike onto my back in the middle of the road. The motorcycle
had pinned my left leg so I couldn’t move. I was lucky that no truck was
tearing down the road just behind me.
Pain and shock. At
first I could not speak, only moan. Opening my eyes I saw a little girl crying
being rushed away by her grandmother. The sight must not have been pretty, I thought.
Was there blood?
Fortunately not,
other than a few scrapes. The villagers lifted the bike and pulled me to safety
at the side of the road. One man thought it was a great idea to apply Tiger
Balm to my open wounds. It was not. Other people helped as they saw fit, not
allowing me to lie down, helping me take off my shirt in search of more open
wounds upon which to inflict the Tiger Balm…
Eventually a
scooter with a sort-of side car contraption came and took me to a pharmacy
where I was injected with a pain killer.
To make a long
story short, I left the motorbike with some people who lived at the side of the
road and hitchhiked to Paklay where there were my nephew, a comfortable hotel
bed and a hospital.
Photo credits of
the Paklay Hospital to Steven Hyman…
Five broken ribs
and two months later, I returned to that village to get the motorbike to take
it back to Vientiane. I took a bus to the village but had no real idea where I had
left the bike.
I was walking on the street trying to piece the place
together in my memory when someone stopped and asked me in Lao if I was indeed
the falang who had that accident two
months back. He then took me to where I had fallen and to the family who had
taken care of, and mended, the motorbike with extensive applications of Scotch
tape.
It started at first kick! The people were happy to see
me, even though it clearly meant the loss of the use of the motorbike.
They immediately set to cooking and slaughtered a
chicken in my honour to prepare lunch. They invited all the neighbours who had
been involved in my rescue, including side-car man and Tiger Balm guy!
People often ask me, ‘why Laos?’
Well, this is why Laos. Because in this beautiful land
live the kindest, warmest, most gentle and generous people you would ever want
to meet.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)