Beaches, VWs, La Paz Diary

(about 10 days ago)
Things have spun in a new direction. A hundred miles after i last wrote i had a day feeling a bit fed up, lonely i think, and with my mind only on getting to la paz as fast as possible, past a stretch of coast notorious for its paradise-like beaches and scallops lining the ocean floor for the chasing. And past two offers of floor space- an ageing couple from santa cruz, she a yoga teacher, he a musician, and a couple of english guys with kayaks on the back of their truck- who i could have stayed with and had a lovely time. I decided i needed some company before i went to sleep and decided to cycle the 89 miles to the santa cruz couple. I missioned hard but the sun was setting and it would have been hard to find their place in the dark. then an old, scruffily hand painted VW lovewagon (the original type) drove past waving at me and beeping their horn. i waved and shouted like a mad man and they stopped. an intense italian ex-sports teacher running from the madness of europe (i have met a few europeans doing the same) and his punky mexican chica, an artist and a jewellrey maker, heading to cabo san lucas to make some dollars.

two days and an increasing friendship later and they are building the fire as i watch the afternoon shadow slowly climb up the cactus-clad islands across an azure-blue bay, sitting in a hammock writing this.

I am fortunate to have been travelling a while now and am able to have an instant easiness with people who are doing the same. they instantly offered to drive me to la paz, and thought god had sent me when i produced a bottle of strong cane-sugar liqour and the makings of a single spliff out of my bag by the firelight yesterday. it looks likely that i will swap my bike for their digital camera (it will be my 4th of the trip; they are so fragile)... money is only important if you haven't got any.

I am about 300 miles short of my fairly arbitrary goal of la paz, but i think i have cycled around 750 miles pretty much solidly from LA, and over 1200 from santa cruz. so i am happy. one thing i have learnt on this trip is, where possible, to just figure out what i WANT to do and do it, rather than thinking too much about pride or what people will think. and of course what i want, like 99% of people in the world, is to have a happy community around me, so it fits the whole revolution thing perfectly.

and so for the next few days i am going wherever these cats in the VW go until we reach la paz, which is pretty beach orientated and is fine by me. i am remembering all the projects i am doing that got sidelined by 8 hours of cycling a day- relearning all my mbira tunes with the correct timings, being proactive with the espanyol, doing somersaults underwater and startling little fishies.

Wish you were here

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Two days later

At the end of a 30 mile dirt road at the bottom of the Bahia Conception (bay of conception) we were expecting our paradise. Instead we found someone else's paradis-' big american houses around a beach with powerboats and a feeling like we weren't welcome. Nico, the italian who had just performed a series of miracles driving the 25 year old VW van over terrain a Hummer would have had trouble with, was visibly furious. Fortunately the man in the single fishermans hut set back from the beach pointed to the next bay north, and here we found what we were looking for- a beach deserted enough to be teeming with wildlife. Dozens, if not hundreds, of pelicans screaming and diving like spitfires, making the most of the itinerant squid, who are in turn feeding on the shrimp that are, apparently, in season. Shells of lobsters, sea urchins, spiked puffer fish and all manner of beautiful crustaceans litter the beach. And it is HOT.

Nico and Erica have swept me up into their own trip around Mexico, at least as far as la paz, and I ask no questions as we drive from beach to beach.

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A few days (is it a week?) later, La Paz

We reached la paz after a few more white beaches and complete, full spectrum sunrises and a big drama about 70 miles away between the couple that involved Erica storming out of the VW and walking along for a while claiming she was leaving. Gandhi said not to judge people's bad points, just to learn from them, and i learnt that listening is a very important part of communication. We also spent a night in the VW outside an amazing little restaurant made entirely of stone (very unusual here) and i gave an impromptu mbira concert to the family that ran the place, which was really really nice. They had a big collection of National Geographic special books from the 80s and 90s- a special on the american railroads, one on gypsies around the world. filled with pictures representing other worlds. a fascinating insight into the fascinating insights people have in the more remote folds of the world.

I was expecting la paz to be a port/administrative town, but what i found was a really amazing, bustling town about the size of scarborough -which straight away made me feel at home- with a great mash of mexican and western influences ( it was colonised 3 times by various spaniards who couldn't handle the heat); a cool arts-music scene running through things (last night i went to a concert at the music institute' a mozart piano concerto, lizst and all sorts of original pieces), super friendly people and, at the south end of the bay, a big old marina filled with americans and new zealanders who could potentially give me a ride across to the mainland.

I am attempting the next level of hitchiking' that of hitching on boats. The last few days i have been opened up to a whole new world- groups of people my age learning how to work with boats, getting some cash together to get a boat, and then living basically for free (except food) as the boat is both ones house and transport, and the wind is the fuel. Life becomes one big conversation about boats and projects, followed by a party. The first day, whilst hanging out at the marina vaguely asking people if they knew anyone going to the mainland i met a few of these guys who have a big black sailboat anchored out of the harbour. They are 6, aged 25'30ish, a french captain, his beautiful australian girlfriend, a santa cruzian (they get everywhere...), a tree climber from arcadia and a guy build like a brick shithouse from oklahoma. we bonded over woodie guthrie and that night, under an almost full moon, i took a kayak from the beach and paddled out, clarinet and calabash on my back, to their boat for a big old jam session, greased with both white and brown rum... my first night in la paz and i could not have asked for anything more.

i woke up the next morning to find that the boat's radio, which i was going to use during the morning 'net', to radio all the boats telling them what a hard worker i was and could they please take me to mazatlan, was not working, and had to kayak hard to someone else's boat to use their radio, which i managed. i was dead funny having to do a cold'sale of myself on the radio to around 50 boats full of people, but i think i did ok.

The rest of the day, and the day after i just sat in the kind of communal spot, literally just sat, and read and kicked it with the sailing people passing through. The most chilled hitchiking i have ever, ever, done. There are some stereotypical rich republicans with loud voices, but by and large everyone on the marina is really cool. one guy with a Slayer cap told me that he had been backpacking for years and then realised that sailing was actually just glorified backpacking, just as cheap (if you know how to maintain boats), with a guarenteed soft bed and cooker, and almost always in beautiful places. My mind swirls like a ferrero rocher advert with the possibilities.

No ride has been forthcoming though, having said all that. Apprently it is the wrong time of year and people are coming TO la paz, not leaving it. I will give it a few more days and, if nothing is forthcoming, try and get onto a big lorry with my bike and hitchike onto the ferry that way. I think i am going to try and keep my bike for a while-it makes so much difference in a built up area having a bike- i have seen so much of la paz so quickly on the bike, and an afternoon of cycling and looking around allows you to figure out where the necessary stuff is and also get further away from the tourist areas and into the 'real' town.

and it is fiesta time here also. jesus (pronounced 'hey zeus' en espanyol) did something important this week a long time ago (i was going to say it is Ascencion but thinking about it it can't be) and there is free live music, church bells and families in their finest walking along the seafront at dusk. at one such concert i think i was re'baptised' or at least somethign similar' by some very passionate people who had english mastered only slightly better than my spanish, but when they put their hands on my head and almost wept i got the message. one of them said 'welcome to the family' and i said 'thank you very much'. Then i went busking and made 60 pesos in half an hour, and felt blessed :)

Not too much to say in the desert

I know it has been a while since i last wrote. I hadn´t seen a shower, never mind an internet connection, in over 10 days. I have tried a couple of times to write down what has been going on, my cycle through the baja, but my mind has been empty. here is what i tried to write the other day:

It is just after dawn at a roadside cafe about 1-3rd of the way down the Baja California in Mexico. Trees are few and far between and the birds are clinging in choughs to one of them, their varied and excited singing the only thing breaking the silence of the sun´s movement up over the horizon. The 4ft dry sticks of cactus that make up the perimeter fence have 20ft long shadows. I have come to the conclusion this morning that i smell really bad. My groove lately just hasn´t been one that has involved washing, but i think perhaps now is the time. I have been cycling. Each day i wake like this at dawn, pack my shit up, eat a little and then just go. This part of the day is by far the best for cycling as it is not too hot and my body is rested form 10 or 12 hours of sleep and ready to eat up some miles. I cycle most of the day and think about nice things and watch the countryside change around me and try to explain to myself what i am seeing. First the road to San Diego, filled up with lycra-clad weekend cyclists, surf shops, fast food chains. Beautiful beaches. Then across the Mexican border to Tijuana, which i stayed in for all of an hour as I wanted to get as far away from the border, and at the same time higher and more varied chances of trouble, as possible before i slept. Then the cosmopolitan, americantouristcentric lands along the coast, the smell of barbequing beef and cruise ships docked in the harbour. Then seeing the density of people thin along with the vegetation, until finally 3 days ago a big ass hill took me up into the High Desert. I watched an entire ecosystem change in a few miles. Trees became shrubs, shrubs became cacti and huge boulders, lumped on the hard sand like beached whales. Towns became pueblos and pueblos became single ranches and cafes clinging to the desert. Every 30 miles or so there will be one of these squat little buildings, perhaps with a few trailers behind. Here a family will be basically chilling, kids running around, hot food, beer and random odditiees on sale -sun glasses here, cds there, elephants carved out of marble somewhere else, waiting for one of the few cars that drive by to stop and for slightly disorientated, desertified locals, truckers or tourists to eat and drink.

It is at these places that i find myself in the afternoons and where i eat a big meal and then ask if i can camp on their land. they always say yes and never charge me, but for a few days now none of them have offered to show me where the washroom is, and i don´t like to ask because i am not paying for my spot, so, well, i haven´t washed so much. And now i know that i need to do that in the next day or two.

But in this rhythm, smelly or otherwise, i have covered around 400 miles from LA down to where i am now, a place with a name almost totally irrelavent, at the junction of the only highway that crosses the baja with ha dirt road down to a beach.

Perhaps you can see from how i am writing that i hven´t spoken to anyone in a meaningful way a few days. My spanish is good enough to eat and sleep but not to describe, let alone explain. A week ago I went off the highway down a dirt road to another beach and spent 2 days with a friend of mark´s named Allen, a man who used to raise horses, koi and a monkey in san diego but for the last 18 years has lived alone in a backwater in mexico. He grows things, reads all day, has beauty in every direction and a big pool table in the middle of his large, one roomed cabin. He described it as paradise. I could see myself doing this in 40 years and it scared me. I couldn´t resist his book collection though, and am now travelling with a total of 8 books, which is totally ridiculous despite the fact that some of them are small. But when am i going to get my hands on a copy of woody guthrie´s autobiography, or an amazing compilation of parables from various chinese and japanese people (if i told you they were zen monks what judgements would you make?)... and who can refuse a william blake compilation when someone gives it to you saying that ´he had the most insight on the world out of any writer´. So as the evenings draw in and when my tent is up and ready i slip a few of these pages under my skull and the day rounds itself off nicely.

Yesterday was different though- when i pulled into my afternoon cafe i saw another bike sat outside and my heart smiled. Here was Juan, cycling from argentina to alaska. Cycling north, against the prevailing winds, with a donated bike and trailer after the one he started with got washed away in the tsunami that followed the earthquake in chile. Spanish. Top man. The cafe itself was the front end of a ranch that streched back into the desert, with maybe 2 dozen completed jigsaws on the wall, the most intricate and faded of which was what can only have been an ivy clad countryhouse from somewhere in Somerset.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/47339411@N04/5513388929/in/pool-1359126@N23/,

The uncle was playing the accordian, and i got out my clarinet and we played a while. he wanted to teach me two songs, the second of which was super simple but i just couldn´t get the timing of it right, at least to his ear, and much repetition and frustrated laughter ensued.

And now, with the shadows of the poles down to 5ft and the uncle and his shy cattle'herding son with coffee come to say buenos dias, i will go. I wanted to write a blog post but i guess communicating, like any skills, gets a bit rusty if it isn´t used for a while... the desert has sucked away my words.
____

now it is a few days later, and i am in an oasis village named san ignazio with tortillas in my belly and the sweatsalt out of my hair. here i have been sitting in boats watching whales- it is extraordinary- they come up to the boat and poke their heads out and allow you to pet them like a horse. their skin is like the arm of an expensive leather sofa. their eyes are as deep as the eyes of horses. the barnacles on them are gross and beautiful at the same time. i met a yoga teacher from santa cruz with a street musician husband who invited me to stay with them in their place two towns along. i will be there the day after tomorrow. after that, and another 300 miles of road, things are still a bit up in the air; maybe to max's friends' spot 300 miles south on the mainland, maybe directly to belize to do some scuba diving. or maybe somwhere to learn to surf properly. or maybe follow the whispers of ayawaska ceremonies in costa rica but, as i keep saying but totally failing to do, today is the most important day to think about and the stand next door sells tacos and margharitas, so i will be off.

Le Canyon Grande

mexicoI am woken from my nap by a lusty gust of wind on a maroon-bleached rock about ½ a mile from the bottom of the grand canyon. It is hard for me to even begin to describe the view. Billions of years of water erosion and weathering and a criss-crossing of fault lines have led to a 270 mile long, 2 mile deep gash in the deserts of arizona, exposing layer upon layer of all different types of rocks of a million hues and patterns. As the sun moves across the sky the rocks shine and shimmer as though they had a thin layer of oil coating them. Desert plants, some that seem to have come straight out of a dr.seuss book as well as sages, cacti, mini-cottonwood trees, cling steadily to the dusty earth. It is fabulous.

I came to 'Phantom Ranch'- a series of cabins and dormitories for the people who make it down to the bottom- for the first time 2 weeks ago with Kelsey and her blood comrades and ended up jamming hard for two nights with the guys that work down here. The place is accessible only by 9 mile hike, muleride or helicopter. The workers, therefore, are people who like being away from the 'real' world and enjoying the simple pleasures of life- hiking, climbing, talking shit, playing music, singing loud and drinking lots of whisky (they call it 'ambition'). They have a bumper sticker on their fridge 'phantom ranch- where someone you are boning is also boning someone else'. I had just started playing some songs with the girl behind the bar who had a guitar, then later the cook picked up another guitar and opened a bottle of jack daniels (which doesn't taste any more like whisky here than it does in england) and we were rolling. The next night more musicians appeared and they invited me to come back whenever I wanted. So I postponed my continued cycle south and, after visiting Jono and Jeff for the last time, hitchhiked the 600 miles from the californian coast to the arizona desert.

I was a little nervous. I had only hitched up and down the california (dreamin') coast in america, but this was a different story- I would have to pass through bakersfield and barstow- two big ass industrial downs with a reputation for crystal meth and, well, not much else. Crystal meth is a huge problem here. Made it bathtubs from such ingredients as bleach and cough mixture and giving a high something like crack, it has the potent combination of being cheap, readily available, highly addictive, and hugely damaging to ones body. Apparently THE most damaging drug (the second is tobacco...). Your teeth fall out, your skin becomes pi
tted and discoloured, it twists up all your vital organs and the comedown makes people real nasty and violent. It is (surprise surprise) most prevelant among working class people and native americans, and in places like the central valley is endemic. I got a ride from a guy going to Modesto who was going to visit his kid for christmas- the mum was a methhead and he had to prove she was in order to get custody of the child, making him deeply unpopular with all her friends, who were also his old friends. That was going to be a hard christmas.

Anyway basically I didn't want to be stuck overnight in one of these towns, nor did I want to hitchike out of one of these towns that are notorious for being very difficult to hitch out of (probably because everyone things you are a methhead). The solution? Maximise my chances of getting rides quickly by play on public sentiment with a huge, boldly colour union jack sign about the size of two cereal packets. Jono's totally ace girlfriend colleen had the skill and patience to execute what is easily my best sign ever, and it worked a TREAT. A whole convoy of army trucks passed me and each one gave me something between a salute and a wave, which I duly reciprocated. And then I managed to get all that way in just THREE rides, as well as recieving two chicken burgers and a bed for the night before the final ascent into the national park that the canyon is in. It was almost too easy and I recommend this to anyone without too many nationalistic scruples.

The hitchike before the one here though- from Los Angeles to San Luis Obispo, only about 150 miles- had in contrast taken 2 days and was very slow going. It took hours to get out of Malibu, the home of Pierce Brosnan, Olivia Newton John and, ironically, the rolling stone himself bob dylan (I know all this because we eventually got picked up by a guy who delivers firewood to their mansions). It had taken 3 hours on buses just to get from one side of LA to this bit, right on its western tip, and I was slightly disheartened to find another hitchiker in the only decent hitching spot. We greeted each other. With a bum's grey beard and cap, this 66 year olds clear light blue eyes weren't, in my opinion, enough to stop him giving of the impression to potential rides of a slightly odd homeless looking guy, a sure fire way to be stood waiting for a ride all day. It didn't help that he carried with him two huge, decrepid looking grey blankets and the fact that he didn't really seem that bothered in hitching at all, vaguely pointing his thumb at passing traffic, not smiling and not looking at the drivers in the eyes- something I have found a total necessity in saying 'hey, I am a sound human who you would like to pick up'. Eventually we agreed that he would sit behind a bush while I thumbed a ride and then would try and get him a ride as well.

After a while this worked, and in this manner we moved together for the next 24 hours. In that time I didn't quite work him out. I realised that he didn't really have much of a desination at all, and was just waiting around in California until winter was over and he was able to go back to Arizona. He mumbled that he had been kicked out of his curch for challenging its leadership and he wanted to basically start his own chuch based on 'liberal principles' that had something to do with gay marriage. He would seem on the edge of madness when he talked but then would occasionally look at me with his piercing eyes as though he could see exactly what was in my soul and would smile as though what he found vaguely amused him. We spent the night together (after I told him I would kick his ass if he tried any funny business) in a riverbed near ventura amongst reeds and willow trees and in the gathering darkness I read him some of jacks poetry, which at the time seemed perfectly apt. Some white men of that age- 45-65- are the ones who control america. Those that have fallen on the other side of societies' line between success and failure are some of the most tragic people I have come across. Make money or be outcast, that is the american way.

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a week later.

I just got back from the canyon. 3 nights turned into 5 and the colour of the rocks got more vivid as the time passed. On the 3rd day an aged and wise couple took me up a deer trail to a series of flats that native americans used to call home. the rocks made a natural amphitheatre and they told me that this was the place they have scattered the ashes of several ranchers who have died down in the canyon. i duetted on my clarinet with thebirds and heard my runs bounce off the surrounding rocks to create otherworldly echoes. though this whole trip was in no way meant to be a 'spiritual journey', so many people i have met along the way have wanted to talk to me about their understandings of the things we can't percieve with our five senses. the friars in san miguel, my chinese family talking about their christianity, strangers on trains with wide and piercing eyes... and it could be denied that the two people i was with on the flats were full of something of another place, though maybe this was just some intense knowledge from their travels. he said that the spirit world did exist; there was no doubt about that. she asked me if i had ever equated the feeling one gets when you go to a place that you think you just shouldn't stay in too long, or meet people that seem to suck your energy or, conversely, that you have an understanding with that doesn't need to be spoken of and indeed can't be. and yes, of course i get those feelings, all the more when i am free from day to day worries and can think clearly... nah, i can't really explain properly what i mean...

on the last night the ranchers had their annual winter ball, and the brie, stilton and homemade chocolate truffles tasted all the better knowing they had been hauled down by mules just for our pleasure. so did the vodka for that matter. after only minimal cajouling i found myself wearing a superwoman outfit, complete with tutu, a viking horn helmet (with only one horn) and an american flag used as a sarong. we danced to old country tunes and classic funk (they have a record collection that hasbeen building up over the last 50 years, complete with first pressings of most of the beatles albums, grateful dead, hendrix, yes, all that fine stuff) and the packers, the guys who ride the mules down, most of whom have been cowboys all their lives and have the handlebar moustaches to prove it, sat in the corner nodding along with their whiskies. i slept once again in a hammock in their garden with orion and his belt lit up as if in a theatre along with the huge intensity of the milky way out to the east. it was a great night.

the next morning my vague hangoverbadmood propelled me up the side of the canyon into what turned into a hailstorm and then a gentle flurry of snow. nicole, a park ranger, dropped me off at the edge of the national park (it is illegal to hitch in national parks in america) and within 20 mintues i was in the back of a jeep with a menonite (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mennonite) couple on their honeymoon heading to san diego, just a couple of hours drive from where i wanted to to be back in LA. perfect.

Santa Cruz

It is just after dawn in lompoc, a town of strip malls and one big mexican barrio on california's central coast. The town is surrounded by hills to the south and fields to the east, with the sea west and vandenburg airbase, where the US government launches all its intercontinental balistic missiles from, to the north. I sit in the growing patch of sun in the garden of my old friend steve, who is still sleeping after a heavy night of 'magic cards' (apparently like pokemon cards but for adults) and try to weave some cogent and interesting thoughts out of these last joyful weeks.

After san fransisco i headed south to Santa Cruz, where i had spent a dreamy year in 06/07 learning to play jazz, climbing trees and eating burritos (and beginning this blog). I was a bit worried that the nostalgic bubble might burst when i got back there and that i would find the trees i lived in chopped down and my friends doing shitty jobs. Fortunately that wasn't the case- though most of my cats had moved away, a couple of key friends were still doing their thing, activism was still yielding results (check out - http://scsolidarity.blogspot.com/2011/01/11811-demand-letter-delivered-at-secret.html - for an action and cheesy photo i got involved in whilst there) and, after a good dirty crawl in the woods i found my old spot, now a little overgrown but still with the same trees in the same places. I even found my old tarpaulin that i made a shelter out of that had been used and now abandoned by someone else, and jack told me that my 10 gallon army water container that i myself had found in the forest was now being used by one of his friends. Beautiful stuff.

As i sat there though i did feel something of what john steinbeck calls a 'mystical sadness', i can't put it more succinctly than that so i hope you know what i mean, i sat there with my mbira and several oranges and realised that if i was ever able to really live this life again- the sun, the surf, the forest, the huge quantities of free food, the musicians, the proximity of san fransisco- and just a week in santa cruz made me want to- i would have to come back either for a phd (which, if you get into one, you get PAID to do, unlike masters') or get married to someone to get a work permit, and commit myself for at least 3 or 5 years. This would of course mean not being in england and among the cold and the fucking conservative party but also not realising the plans i have for music and system-jamming there and all the amazing people that have been shaping me like a stone in the north sea and who i am not sure i could handle saying proper goodbyes to. So i guess the sadness is that at some point soon i am going to have to make a choice, and as lucky i am to have that choice, it still closes down lots of paths. Twice i have been picked up when hitching by english guys who have settled here, and both times i have wanted to be like 'but what about all your friends you left behind!!!' but i know if i did they would just shrug and my friends are worth more than a shrug.

What a funny word 'shrug' is when put down twice in the same sentence.

But hold on, i mentioned jack. I said goodbye to jacklast time just before i left america as he headed into the hills to make fire breaks (done with no machinery and is very hard work) and write poetry. At the time he was the darling of the santa cruz beat poet scene, and his tall, adonis like frame would tense up and jerk around with his hands and his words as he congealed mixed up thoughts into questioning sentences and animal-metaphors. He was not overtly political though, and when he helped me build my place in the woods i remember seeing him as a young person with huge potential for the world.

I found him again, 3.5 years later, in a garage that was called the 'office' on the east side of town. In 3 years he had quit the beat poet scene as too cliquey and found the best expression of his need for freedom and happiness in the anarchist movement. He had lived in the forest for 2 years, gone train hopping and was now one of the key organisers of Santa Cruz Solidarity. We spent a night in his place in the woods... after 30 minutes of walking and then crawling we came upon what can only be described as a hut with a plastic roof, containing a raised bed, desk, gas ring, supplies of canned food... a veritable palace compared to my old place; rat proof and water proof. A bottle of jack daniels (which tastes no more like whisky in america than it does in england) was found and we discussed our independent political journeys over the last years. And we had basically got to the same point, expressed in different terms- the need to build communities and reach out beyond the usual activist groups, the struggle to balance fighting hard in this shit system with building a better one outside it, maybe, MAYBE, knowing that this whole thing is soooo small in the paradigms of space and time that we can put our whole heart into it without worrying about it too much... and we talked about how to find Freedom.

This cheered me up no end, as did jamming and busking hard all over town and beach with percussion wizard Moises, as did the process of 'building' (i.e. Watching whilst max and macneil actually built) a beautiful and strong bicycle out of a ridgeback touring frame that max had given me. We did it at the bike church, an amazing bike workshop based on anarchist do-it-yourself principles- you buy a membership and then can use their tools and expertise and massive collection of spare parts to repair or build your bike. If you don't have any money you can work for credit (probably the only place in america where you get paid $10 an hour for sweeping floors) and buy your bike that way. After 3 solid days in the church, one test ride and one broken chain, the bike oozed power and confidence, with front and back pannier racks, 27 gears, foothold thingys and even reflectors.

On the last night before i left i took moises to see the Wailers (as in bob marley and the...). It said they were playing the whole of Uprising and i expected a load of wizened old men with dreadlocks at their knees playing some dirty dub reggae. I was severely disappointed. Out came four singers, all young- one who looked like bob, one who sounded like bob, and two ladies- with keys (playing synth horns) and just one original wailer, the bass player. They did poppy rearrangements of only the most well known tunes and were for all intents and purposes a cover band. And i got so smampfed that when a beautiful mexican girl who i had been talking to earlier came to dance with me towards the end i COULDN'T REMEMBER WHO SHE WAS, never mind what her name was. She watched my face as it dawned on me who she was and was suitably let down and unimpressed. Fucking schoolboy error and another message that says 'come on ben, you know you are a fool when you get too high, EVEN if it is at a wailers gig and the guy dancing next to you keeps passing you his pipe'

that night was a full moon. In the morning i ate some porridge with dumpstered papaya smoothie (i had made the most ridiculously delicious asparagus soup out of a sack of dumpstered asparagus the week before), checked all the screws on my bike and started pedalling south. Destination: Los Angeles.

San Francisco (is great)

in chinatown
i eat roast pork stuffed buns
as men and women peer at aubergines
looking for deep purple

chasing the Beats
jack and allen and bob
i read poetry in City Lights
earnestly,
it does nothing for me anymore and I
feel aged and sad

mostly sun, some rain

Christmas Eve
Old Pharoah Sanders plays Yoshis
Sits down between solos
Jeff has named his baby Sage

surfers like seals
ride waves under the golden gate
deep enough not to hit
the stone wave breakers

jazz and water and hills and democrats

in the dusk i busk
and make only cigarettes and smiles
which is better than dean moriarty

Riding High

I want to give you a detailed account of my 3 days hitchhiking 700 miles down the west coast of america from Portland, Oregan, to San Fransisco. It was full of wonderful people, beautiful trees, a mountain range and at least one ride with a beautiful lady in a vintage Cadillac (the type of car that normally roars past and you think 'now that would have been a cool ride'). I really want to, but alas, in this part of the world December is harvest time for the Sacred Herb of a million momentary insights, and almost every other ride would, in the first few minutes, pipe up with 'hey man, do you get high?'
'er, well, yes, i have been known to, though be warned i get a little silly sometimes'
'no worries dude! here, i grew this myself. have a suck'. and so i would take their psychedelic-painted glassware and inhale the homegrown until the cherry dropped through the filter and the road became as Allen Ginsberg would have it- beautiful, smooth, hysterical starving naked, and as grounded and cyclical as an mbira tune.

We would have huge, succinct and groundbreaking conversations as we drove south, and occasionally our eyes would meet in the rear-view mirror and the message was clear, and then sooner or later my ride would say 'so this is where i turn off... where do you want dropping?' and i would fall out of the car, clutching my bags with a stupid grin on my face and a bead of sweat on my forehead, and within a second have forgotten all but the most basic of messages.

but those basic messages were pretty pungent.

my second ride, just after i took a photo of a burnt out house that still had that sweet-sick smell of burnt hardwood, was a man in a knackered old volvo with a greying beard, who almost immediately launched into a tirade about how he had been unemployed for 18 months and the government weren't giving him the benefits he was entitled to. he said he was only going 5 miles down the road 'but do you like a little smoke? wanna come up the hill to my friends' place and smoke a bowl?'

the house was long and perched on the side of the hill, overlooking the road we had come off, a pig farm (the biggest recycler of waste food in Oregon), and the Cascade mountain range in the distance. The inside of the house was furnished warmly, if a little threadbare, and a few late-middle-aged country folk with beards and chequed shirts smoked and sat and talked.

When I get invited back to peoples homes when hitchhiking it is nearly always- no, always- by people without much money. Perhaps they have less to fear. (Khalil Gibran- 'Is not dread of thirst when your well is full, the thirst that is unquenchable?') And there comes a moment when they look at me, after the initial storm of friendship, where they ask me basically 'so who the fuck are you anyway?'. And after i show that i am not a snob, nor a voyeur, nor some rich college kid slumming it (though maybe i am all three), the truth of them, and to a good extent the society they live in, begins to boil the lid off the pot.

these guys, like tens of thousands on the west coast of america, are long term unemployed. living with relatives or friends, losing their pride, angry, frustrated, with just enough money to fill up their gas tanks and eat. these two had been welders, and when the recession hit their boss stripped the factory clean and sailed off in his yacht to mexico with the words 'i could keep the factory open but... why bother?'. bastard. in order for them to get state benefits they need to apply for 3 jobs a week, but the only jobs going are for things they have neither skills nor desire to do. they don't qualify for free healthcare because they earn 17 dollars a month more than the threshold, so this guy can't afford his diabetes medicine and the gov't won't give it to him free because they consider it a 'non life threatening' illness.

Another guy I who picked me up said his occupation was 'dealing drugs and repossessing cars'. The first bit is self explanatory, the second astounding: basically, loan companies give unemployed people a list of other unemployed people who have defaulted on their car loans and are hiding their cars so they aren't repossessed. On a commission only basis, the former seek out the latter, chat with their neighbours, call them up and pretend to be someone else to get their credit card details, spy outside their houses, until they find the car and grass them up to the company. Poor people turned on poor people for commission.

whilst waiting at a particularly dodgy junction (hitchhiking is a legal grey area should the cops come. being caned out of your tree is multicoloured but certainly cause for problems) a man with a forrest gump accent and buck teeth said hello. turned out he was a vietnam veteran and wanted to tell me that all politicians are 'freakin' liars'.
'even obama?'
'yes'
'what did obama lie about?'
'he promised free dental treatment to all veterans. we aint got it!' .

obama made a promise, and he didn't keep it, and thus he is a liar. forget pragmatism, to people only deal in politics when a canvasser comes hassling them at election time, a promise is a promise. this guy was as jobless as all the others i had met, only he had toothache too.

Of course, there were exceptions. I got a ride in a old old truck with a man who looked like the guy in the opening scene of disney's aladdin (the one with one tooth) who made enough money harvesting and selling mistletoe (door to door) to pay his taxes for the year. 'they love it' he said.

Another guy used to be the saxophonist for legendary zimbabwean musician thomas mapfumo (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh09mGhTQhE) . He basically told me that if I loved music enough to want to be a pro musician i should DEFINITELY NOT become a pro musician, because it sucks the joy out of music and there are so many sharks...

but back to the house on the hill. they had no TV or cable- it had been cut off- but reasoned 'it is only bad news anyway'. a car drove up and honked its horn outside. it was an old friend who had come to pick up one of the ladies who was there 'whos that?' asked my ride
'oh, thats bob'
'why doesn't he come in and say hello?'
'he just honks his horn and stays outside. thats what bob does these days'. bob, i guess, had a job. the note of resignation was rich in his voice.

i had a sack of presents- pass the parcel- that i had wrapped and was giving to people randomly on the way down. I gave one to each of my hosts in that house, and as i left realised i had left the sack inside. I went in and almost bumped square in to a lady in a dressing gown. she looked drawn, was shaking, and clearly used to be very beautiful. i said hello and goodbye and she looked past me at the biscuit tin and said 'well,', and she paused for a moment, looking for the words. 'enjoy your travels', she said. there is no way i can describe the tone that she said this in, but if i was to pick apart those 20 seconds and 3 words i would have said that she had waited in her room for me and my friends to go. that she was addicted to crystal meth (sooooo many people are here. it is a insipid, highly addictive, cheap and gnawing drug). that she hated being stuck in a random house on the side of a hill. that she saw me as some kid who had never experienced what she had experienced and that the men i was with, for whatever reason, made her skin crawl. Yeah, i have described it pretty badly there, but i guess what i am trying to say is that the recession in america is so much more stark when you get behind the numbers and headlines and bickering in the senate and realise that many, many people are having their lives destroyed by these bastard, selfish, sub-human bankers. the environment is not immune either...



the nights i spent in my sleeping bag, in my survival bag, under various trees, just warm enough and just dry enough to enjoy my surroundings and sleep well. on the last morning i poked my head out of the bag to see a huge flock of birds in V formation flying towards the rising sun.

if you want to know a place, to know its people, the solution is simple: learn the language and go hitchhike. I mean it. It is 99.9% safe (if you are a girl by herself i am not sure but it has been done plenty). I cannot overstate how much I learn from it and confirm to myself over and over again that people are more kind, wise and wonderful than we are ever given credit for. but if you want to write a blog about it, perhaps stop saying 'why not?' after a couple of bowls...

The Wonderful Sound of the CInema Organ

My friend James Grunwell, genius of the soundboard, has just finished his album on which I am sampled in a couple of tracks.

www.myspace.com/thewonderfulsound

It is certainly worth a listen...

Black Water

I have a new answer to the question, 'Why do you smoke?', when asked gently and with the slightest intonation of mock incredulity from all sorts of well meaning people.

“So I can meet ex-soldiers in airport waiting rooms” is the new answer.

And in part, it is true. Yes, I am addicted, yes it gives me a perfect excuse to have 5 minutes break from everything else that may or may not be going on at that moment and collect my thoughts (Graeme gets the same effect by going outside and eating a carrot very slowly) and yes, smoking a lazy, fat, filtered rolly after joyous sex makes one feel a peaceful joy so clear and distilled one sometimes feels like buddha himself is sitting smiling on the cherry. But perhaps best of all, when outside pubs or in coach rest stops, or, as I was the other week, in an airport transit lounge with a poky, overpriced cafe for a smoking room and no local currency, smoking is nothing less than a passport for the comradly exchange of knowledge.

Stupidly I didn't notice his 'Blackwater' cap (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqM4tKPDlR8), just that he had a friendly face and there were no empty tables so I would have to break into the thoughts of one of these single men staring into space. The etiquette of striking up a conversation with sound people during smoke time can be complex. With less wise people (as a rule), they will either talk and talk if given the simplest prompt, or be too shy or suspicious to say anything at all. However, the most interesting people are neither verbose nor lack confidence, but may well be locked in their own thoughts that you have no right to disturb. One must, therefore, probe gently and thoughtfully, leaving enough silence for them to take the initiative if they want, and not asking the same boring questions, beyond the classic opener 'where are you headed?'

Middle to Aging men are the most difficult to crack. I guess they have seen too many egotistical young men ramming about like they are the first generation every to break free of their home town and ready to tell everyone about how extreme their lives are, or ask personal questions without cultivating a fertile bed of trust for them to be answered fully. The first salvo of politeness told that he was living in the Phillipines and on his way to Singapore for a few days. His accent was British, and he dressed like a man who dislikes airs and graces. To me this, and his greying hair but fit body, meant he either worked in the oil industry or used to be in the army.

Silence as we both sucked on our cigarettes and tried not to catch each others' eye, even though we were sat directly across a tiny table as though we were on a date. 'You working down in the Philippines then?'. This, on balance, was unlikely. 'No, I work away.' I hesitate. 'Doing what?' 'Security'. 'Ah, one of them'. I look at him as if I have met men like him before, which I have. Security, in this context, almost certainly means working for a private security company in Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria, or another place where western companies are enforcing things down the barrel of a gun, with enough money to bring ex-military men out of retirement.

We sit in silence a while longer. My cigarette is finished and I get up to go, not wanting to show that I was there for anything more than a polite chat whilst doing the necessary business of smoking, but as I leave the smoking cafe I realise that I was so strained at being polite and wandering how to get the bottom of this man I didn't even enjoy the cigarette, and it would be a long time before my next one. So I went back inside and sat down again. It was as if he was waiting for me. 'Want a beer?' he asks.

3 beers and some chain smoking later we have established our bed of trust, first through rugby, then me by laughing at his vaguely xenophobic jokes and using what I know of the army to ask the right and respectful questions, him by implicitly showing he was well aware of the shitty state of the world and who was to blame, namely the capitalist system. He grew up in south shields (Near newcastle, about 150 miles from where I grew up) and had no choice but to go into the army (well, the other choice was to stay in a town slowly but surely collapsing in on itself as the docks and mines closed one after another). He was good at what he did and became a Marine (and justifiably proud of it). When he left the army there was nothing left for him in his home town except his mum; his friends had all left. He could settle somewhere else in England but where? Kent? We both laugh. So he moved to where the living was cheap and easy- south east asia. First Thailand and then, when he married a Philippine lady, the Philippines. He spends 8 months of the year working and his child is in Chinese school because it has 'good discipline'. Does he want his son to join the army? He would hate it if he did- it is a meaningless and hard life he says, being shouted at from when you wake up to when you go to bed by people you consider idiots, and lots of the time just sitting around scratching your arse. And unspoken is the bit about having to kill people you don't know and having them try to kill you. He wants his son to have a profession. Does he want to go back to england? No chance.

Here is a man that I can relate to just as well as a fellow activist, a fellow lefty musician or really anyone. I can respect him more than I do a well-meaning and intelligent woolly liberal, a regimented socialist or even some of the people I spend time with in London. Yet in terms of my world views and my lifestyle we couldn't be more different. Racism, prostitution and killing people- and risking your own life- on behalf of a western government or corporation I cannot condone and never would participate in. I had to laugh at jokes that weren't funny and say things that were only just truthful to keep the his confidence in me and the conversation alive. I wanted him to like me. A lot. In contrast, a lot of people I encounter, likely the majority, I couldn't give a floating shit what they think of me, not because they aren't nice people but because there is no reason to care, they can take me or leave me; I don't need them to validate me.

And this is kind of funny, though I was a bit too drunk to think about it properly on the long flight to vancouver. The SOAS crowd is wonderful, stimulating, loving and I feel superbly lucky to be a part of it, but sometimes when the real love ins happen, when the woolly jumpers are out and the food is delicious and the hugs last minutes and the love is being proclaimed in song and dance, something inside me curdles and a voice in me is shouting 'but what about all the people who can't have this? Who are being beaten down by the system every day and have been numbed and frustrated by a stupyfying mass media and the chasing dog of poverty? Doesn't this all feel a bit …. missing the point?'

And here again is a great moment to go outside and smoke a fag, but the question remains. When I go back to scarborough no-one wants to hear about what I am doing in London. Why would they? I know for sure lots of these guys would think what we do for fun in London is a bit lame and hippyish, whilst I know my friends in London would be uncomfortable, not to mention bored, getting hugely wasted, watching TV and causing trouble in Scarborough.

This has been proven more than once. A friend came down to London around the time of the climate camp in trafalgar square and was going to stay at my house. He is a totally amazing guy with proper northern working class values, one of them being that he speaks honestly and bluntly, and another is that once he starts drinking he likes to get very drunk. He had made it, with his girlfriend, to the 'wave' climate demo, but lost his girlfriend (who showed up at my house the next morning at 4am) and wandered to my house the next afternoon, having spend the night walking the streets of london in the pissing rain and eventually crashing out in one of the spare climate camp tents in traf square.

Nevertheless, it was great to see him, I showed him my Hackney locale and, as I was invited to a 'dinner party' at a friend from SOAS's house I brought him and his girlfriend along, a little nervous that they might not feel quite at home. At first my fears were proved totally wrong, as he talked and talked and people laughed at his jokes and everyone noted how delicious the food was and my other friends, whilst I think a little unsure of what to make of him, were well trained enough in the middle class art of politeness to keep everything running smoothly.

How about this for a way to define the class system in england in 2010 (fuck the 'how many sugars you put in your tea' business): when working class people have alcohol, they all chip in on a given night and then keep drinking it until it is finished. Middle class people, on the other hand, keep alcohol in their house 'in case' it should be drunk and I guess it is the done thing for the host of a dinner party to have more alcohol, and choices of alcohol, than she expects to get drunk.

As my friend, and his girlfriend, and me (partly in solidarity, partly because I began to feel I might need it) drank and drank and finished the wine and moved on to the whisky, an imperceptible change came over the party, a slight tension in the polite voices. He was dominating the conversation, I guess expecting that if someone had something to say they would interrupt him and that would be fine, but no one did, and his stories started to only attract silence to them, rather than laughter. It was time for some external stimulation, and I suggested we take the whisky and go to the canal.

We take the whisky and go to the canal, and now the canal air freshens our senses but keeps our intention. He asks 'Now, I wonder if anyone can tell me, we have just had a delicious meal in a beautiful house that, I am speaking honestly, I am jealous of, yet you guys decided to sleep last night in a shitty tent in the middle of trafalgar square, and for what? Can anyone explain this to me?' He meant it as a question, perhaps a goad to a debate, perhaps to air a feeling that everyone sensed he was feeling anyway, but no one answered him. I wish I had had a diplomatic word or two but the whisky was on me like a carebear and all I could do was giggle at the situation. There was a silence that he I think interpreted as everyone (about 5 others, apart from me, he and his girlfriend) turning against him. I giggled a bit more. “Well,” liam said, “now I feel like I want to talk about whats been on telly recently, but I bet none of you even have TVs do you?”. None of us did. It was time to go, and we did.

This is what I am talking about. And if I am really going to analyse it and be honest with myself, I would acknowledge that am in the fortunate (mostly) position of having experienced both a middle class life and a working class life in my formative years. My grandparents lived in a real nice semi-detached house that I lived in 0-5, and then 11-18 I got a scholarship to study at the local private school. The family of my mum are well educated, intelligent and mostly teachers or similar (and lovely). so I knew how to behave like one of that type of person (I hesitate, perhaps too late, to call this middle class). On the other hand, after my grandmas place I lived in a really shitty flat, the rest of which were rented to families who had either just come off the streets, out of drug treatment centres or prison, and it was not an uncommon site for me to come home from school to see fire engines outside the flats, or find used needles and condoms in the garden where I played football, etc. My mum worked 3 jobs, we holidayed in youth hostels not hotels and I learnt the value of money early, working in a chinese takeaway as soon as it was legal for me to do so and learning to deal with racist pissheads who wanted a chicken curry with none of your weird chinese shit. I also played on the streets from a young age and spending time in the houses of these friends was always just like another home (if you have no idea what I mean, think of the feeling that JK Rowling is trying to portray in the Weasleys' house).

An on and on. So from a young age I could see the comfort, contradictions, false politenessess and blindspots of the middle class way of existing, but at the same time knew the the kind of future that many of my 'working class' friends were likely to end up doing- working in a factory, being a waitor or a middle manager, joining the army. This was to me stultifying and meant I would be working my balls off for the man and releasing my frustrations in chemicals and mind numbing media, as some of my friends who are equally as gifted as me are now doing, and anyway it was expected at my school that everyone would go to university. And so I went to university, paid off my overdraft with that glorious job at SOAS, and in a way I have no doubt became co-opted into the middle class way of existing. Indeed, that is openly what the tories had in mind when they created the scholarship, the 'assisted place', that got me to go to private school. Much, in fact, like the Chinese did with their system of civil servant tests (ever wondered where the slang 'Mandarin' for high ranking civil servant comes from?).

So now, sometimes, just sometimes, I feel like I don't really belong in either place. Not in a dramatic 'lets have a walk in the rain and think about it' way, just like sometimes I have too much of one and need some of the other. And certain things in each depress me. And the most depressing thing about it, demonstrated in the story of liam above but something that has happened to me more than a few times, in America as well as England, is that people of the same age, from the same place, who take the same drugs and listen to the same music, cannot communicate with each other in meaningful ways. There is distrust, a feeling of inferiority on both sides and no way to get things started. With exceptions of course, but not enough to mean that we don't go into the next decade with the class system as rigidly in place as it has ever been, except almost self-enforced through culture.

So, and here I write amazed I can bring this ramble to anything approaching a coherent conclusion, that is why it feels so good for me to travel about like this, to have the ability to choose who I talk to, to make the most of the conversation and to understand that a wise man is a wise man, no matter whether he works for blackwater or not, and it is up to me to find a means to bring him on board with the struggle (though, frankly, I wouldn't know where to start).

And yes, I know smoking may kill me, but it is less likely to kill me than going to Afghanistan as a mercenary which, I found out when we were really looking each other in the eye, was where may friend in the Blackwater cap was going. And I only know that because I smoke.

What can i say about china?

What can I say about China? Maybe that it has taught me that trying to be objective is pretty futile.

First of all it must be said that I arrived in China with some history- or rather I didn't as my first encounter with china was its border police, who searched my bag and confiscated my 'penguin history of modern china' for reasons that i will explain in another post, along with my totally 'legitimate' version of a national geographic map of china. 'legitmate' in the sense that it does not show any borders seperating china from tibet, taiwan or East Turkistan (also known as china's Xinjiang province). , and so actually in my opinion quite illegitimate, but when in rome one should not piss on hadrians' wall.

Incase you don't know, tibet was, until the 1950s, largely cut off from the rest of the world, mostly because it was surrounded by the himilayas. Through a mixture of threats of force, actual force, twisted ideology and a knack for convulted logic that would impress even henry kissinger, china moved its troops in and forced the dalai llama to escape to India. Since then it has been systematically destroing tibetans' language, religion, environment and way of life in a search for what Hitler would have called 'lebensraum', as well as timber, gold, water and numerous other resources (all the gold, silver and bronze for the 2008 beijing olympics came from tibet.).

They justified it by asserting that the Dalai Llama was at the head of a feudal and oppressive regime and the people of tibet, with the help of the great peoples' republic, must be liberated (hence why those of you at soas still see the Spartacist League's mad posters denouncing the dalai llama in support of china). As the process for finding the new Llamas involves being in tibet, yet the Dalai Llama is in India and the Panchen Llama is either in Chinese custody or dead, tibetan buddhism as it is has been for centuries will die along with the current incarnation of the Dalai Llama.

Taiwan is a less well known victim of the 'one china' policy. The people that Mao's red army beat to control chinafrom 1949 were the nationalists, under the bloody tyrant Chiang Kai Shek. When he realised the game was up he moved what was left of his government and army to Taiwan, where they were safe and had the backing of America, and had a good shot at massacring a few thousand native taiwanese in the process, in what is a largely unknown episode of history in the west.

At first , in the context of the cold war, many western nations and the UN refused to recognise the new rulers of china, and remained (with stunning blindness to actual facts) with diplomatic ties with Chiang's KMT. When, from the 50s-70s, countries and the UN began to recognise the CCP's china, taiwan was conviniently bundled in with the new china, even though it has its own government, borders, army and language. only 23 countries now have official diplomatic ties with taiwan and the US is not one of them, even though they are about to sell 66 fighter jets to a country that they doesn't officially exist. but we always knew that capitalism is bigger than god. in the current asian games being held in china (in the city I am now in infact, guangzhou) the taiwanese team has been renamed 'chinese taipei', and there is fuck all the taiwanese can do about it.

so i knew about these things before i came. i knew china did not have free press, that its super economic growth was really ruining the environemnt on a massive scale. I also knew from various brief encounters with chinese people in the UK (at my secondary school, letters from my chinese cousin, working in a chinese takeaway for 8 years, ) that chinese young people seemed totally apolitical with strong consumerist tendancies and a strange addiction to kitchy toys, cartoons and boy bands. I also knew, however, that half my blood was chinese, that china is one of the oldest and most culture rich societies in the world and that chinese people, whatever else they are, are determined, strong and hard working.

so what i am basically saying is that i am in no way claiming to be objective here, but at first i really did try. Confucious, whose teachings later became confucianism, was around in a time of huge upheavel, destrution and bad governance in china. He advocated, as far as i can explain, harmony and respect within the family unit and the self, which then lead to harmony and respect in wider society. he emphasised five specific relationships

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confucianism#Relationships -

father/son, husband/wife, friend/friend and so on, with each, with the exception of friend/friend, there was a heirachical relationship but one with mutual respect. so, for example, a good confucious son had a duty to do whatever his father told him to, but the father in turn must be wise in what he told his son to do. when this is reflected on wider sioceity, it means that people should unquestionably follow their rulers, and the rulers should be benevolent and just. he also advocated a kind of non-interference in things, letting events take a harmonious path whether they seemed right or not.

when the CCCP first came to power they wanted to get rid of all religions, confuncionism included (even though it isn't strickty a religion, more of a philosophy), but in the last 20 years or so the government have realised that a kind of pseudo confuncionism, twisted neatly to fit in the CCCP's shifting ideology, could infact be useful in pacifying its people with a vague nod to philosophy and shared chinese cultural identity whilst also using the word harmony in such a way to mean 'not rocking the boat'. hence the key message at the beijing olympics was 'harmony', and talking about tibet or whatever was definitiely not harmonious, and therefore against chinese wisdom.

Imagine this pervading philosophy in today's china, added to the fact that the generation who hold the most social and financial power, say 35-55 year olds, went to school at the time of the cultural revolution

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_revolution#1966

and if they were taught anything at that time, it was to do as the party said on fear of death.

And now the party is telling them to MAKE MONEY and BUY THINGS with beautifully subtle propoganda, so that the engine of the massive chinese economy can keep growing, eating everything in its path.

What does this manifest into as i travelled about china? Huge new infrastructure projects (there are many many new train lines and toll-motorways being built, all elevated about 2o metres off the ground, and the huge concrete pillars are everywhere), thick layers of smog over cities big and small (in Hangzhou it seemed a perpetual dusk), advertising in every nook and cranny, strange recorded voices coming out of loud speakers in tourist areas saying things like 'please be civilised for the benefit of everyone' and 'one small thought leads to a great leap forward for society'.

On the other hand of course part of what i am saying is inevitably coming from a western set of ethics that can't really know what it is like to be hungry for years and years and how one would react when there is suddenly an opportunity to change. I know this but i also have seen what this brand of capitalism looks like 20 years down the line, and, crucially, whether it makes people happy.

But of course when talking to anyone, like almost anywhere in the world, you learn and the person is lovely and everything is fine, but as a nation, well, can't say i have pride to be from china.

The home of my grandfather

i have fastforwarded a month and a few thousand miles as writing retrospectively seemed a bit retrospeculative and so 'here' now means hong kong and 'now' is the here and...

things were going dead steady here and i didn't have much to write about but then we have had a right time of it in the last 10 days or so, visiting the city in which my biological grandma grew up and then the village in which my grandfathers first wife lives, and then in the last few days a little jaunt to the excellent nation that calls itself taiwan (and china calls 'chinese taipei'- bastards)

here no-one really tells me what is about to happen, where we are going or who we are due to meet until things present themselves, which totally confuddled me at first but now i quite enjoy. my dad will say we are 'going for a walk' and then we will end up in the flat of some friend or relation and 20 members of their extended family, a loud TV, a few old people amiably shuffling about in their pyjamas and various carcasses that we are presented with and which we eat whilst everyone watches and comments in cantonese on my chopstick technique (which now i have got DOWN). This happened in my grandmas city, when we stumbled into a bustling flat full of 4 generations of cooing family, the space full to the brim of love and laughter and an electric mahjong table. it was so very nice in contrast to all the garish commercialism and fake nokias on the streets outside and the matriach of the evening's initial gambit was 'your cousin ate 7 crabs. here are 7 crabs'.

The TV in the background showed the opening to the Guangdong (city in southern china and centre of the chinese shoe industry, and hence full of loads of duct-tape holding african importers) Asian games 2010. Like the Beijing olympics and the shanghai expo, the ceremony was an orgy of syncronised dances, huge structures and computer enhanced fireworks. this is the china that its government wants the world, and perhaps even more so its own citizens, to see. it took its place among reports of the development of the 'prestige project' of super fast railway building, chinas purported dominance of the Seoul G20 and the odd man run over by a steamroller that constitutes domestic 'news' coverage. but let me hold my critique of china for another moment and get on with it...

The next day we visited the graves of my grandmother's parents, set in sparse grassland an hour out of the city. they were in seperate locations, each one marked with a large circular double ring of concrete (in a figure of 8 shape- the size of the circles denotes the prestige of the family) with a small, tightly engraved tombstone at the head of each, as well as a little plinth to burn offerings (anything burnt, including cash, goes directly to the deceased in the afterlife), all conforming to feng shui principles. My great grandfathers' grave showed his first and last names, his home town, and a few apparently untranslatable sentiments. My grandma's, on the other hand, does not have her own name but only those of her children and her married name, as is/was the custom. Indeed the character for 'woman' in chinese can be seperated into two constituent parts 'son' and 'good'. hooray for the wisdom of confunctionism.

Nearby a small village temple with beautiful carvings and incense lit by invisible worshippers felt much more sacred than the huge statues of buddha or jesus in other, larger places of worship i have visited. across china there are small buddhist shrines and temples (as well as numerous shrines to local deities in houses, shops, restaurants) and for me it is the human peace that is found in these places that gives it the aura. i am perhaps slowly realising that my lack of belief in reincarnation and the worshipping of anyone precludes me from calling myself a buddhist, but the buddha's doctines certainly hold a lot of weight as a way to live a hearty life.

my fondness of the way the chinese flavour their pigs also is a bit of a barrier, and that night i felt like obelix as the huge family of the night before joined us in a 'farmers restaurant' and helped me eat a medium sized pig (and three chickens, and loads of wild veggies, and tarrow covered in sugar), just out of the underground oven. i knawed and sucked and drank lots of beer and then was presented with the brains of the pig, which tasted quite a lot like the fatty cheeks of the big fish of the other week, except a bit more, er, porky.

chinese people have been through many years of turmoil and food has been scarce for lots of people, lots of the time (one history book i read stated that in the late 1800s there were reports of mothers swapping babies with each other so they wouldn;'t have to eat their own), and so it makes perfect sense that they have developed ways of making every bit of nearly every animal into a tasty dish. in addition to that pig brain i have eaten pig ear, pig grotter, congealed pigs blood, ducks blood, chicken foot soup, shark fin soup, giant snails, frogs, peppered horse leg, dog (i didn't ask if it was pedigree), turtle, terrapin, pidgeon, sand worms, salted rice worms, jelly fish, hammer crab, razor clam and, the most curious delicacy of all, the foetus of a killer bee, which i watched being taken from its little hive cocoon and which was like a sack of pollen-scented jelly in the mouth. the dog thing is quite interesting, as it is a delicacy in the same cities in which the economic boom and love for all things western has compelled affluent city folk to groom, love and cherish these cat-sized dogs that are no use to anyone and treated like children. and in restaurants fish kept carefully for feng shui purposes swim next to equally beautiful fish waiting to be chopped and steamed and served with ginger and spring onion. i will leave the analysis/judgement to you, but suffice to say i am visibly putting on weight.

the next day we headed and to my grandfathers village, tucked away on a side road on the edge of a rapidly-growing city. This was the part of my whole trip in china that i had been looking forward to most. According to my dad there are only three surnames in the village, leung (the one i would have been if i had taken my dad's name) is the dominant one, and in theory we can be traced back to the founder of the village who was apparently quite a legend. my grandfather, not thinking i could handle village life, had booked us into a hotel, which i was a bit gutted about, but i persuaded them over a sumptuous welcoming banquet, which it must have taken several people all day to prepare, that we should all stay in the family home the next night.

there were loads of things to be picked apart from what i saw that night and the next, even though no-one spoke a word of english and didn't even seem to understand my scantily-toned mandarin. my granddad seemed much more at home here than alone in his hong kong flat- he was the oldest and this was the house he was born into, with big photos of his mother and father on the wall. he was clearly orchestrating the event of our homecoming (my dad hadn't been there for a few years either) and everyone seemed to be really pleased to have him, and us, there. i sort of picked up the backstory - my grandfather, who was in the nationalist army (the one defeated by mao) had an arranged marriage to his first wife but then for some reason had left after only a few months and married my grandma, and then they had escaped to hong kong when the nationalists were defeated. he had 6 children and worked as a coolie (dock labourer) and night porter for up to 20 hours per day to feed my dad and his siblings.

for 30 years contact between hong kong and china was almost impossible (if someone in china got a letter from hong kong they would be questioned by the police and often charged with spying, which could lead to execution), but after 1979 things became easier, and in the 80s he returned to his village to find that his first wife, whom he had abandoned, had stayed single, looked after the house (living on handouts from other villagers), apparently waiting for him to come back or waiting to die. it must have been a pretty emotional moment when he found her there. he then proceeded to rebuild the house (it was, i was told proudly, the highest house in the village for a time) and support his first wife, and returning every few months just like he was doing now.

his first wife was super pleased to meet me, and did as old people seem to do- ignore the fact i don't understand what they are saying and just talk at me animatedly. which was great and after a while i did the same back. the women here seem so much less reserved and more intuitive than the men, at least to me.

she was tiny and hunchbacked with a kind of cackling voice, and her and my grandfather seemed to really enjoy each others company. so i was seeing this, i was seeing how my father acted in his home village, i was doing some intense environment absorbtion and seeing how village lift ticked, compared to zimbabwe and india (details different, themes so similar). i try to stay away from cliche and over romanticisation but it is hard cos they are often true- by and large people struggle and are happy unless they are hungry or lovesick, and the conversation is of things that can be touched and kissed and eaten, and an unquestioned god/diety/ancestor that is just there and must be revered. things make sense- the village is centred on a huge banyan tree and a well, with irrigation ditches leading to fish ponds around the village. people wake up at dawn and eat at dusk, and everyone, regardless of age, helps to move the rice from field to plate. old people are respected because they have the most wisdom, and if people are angry they shout and fight and then get the fuck on with whatever they have to do.

unlike mugabe though, the chinese authorities at least paid off the people it took land from. cities are only allowed to build on 'new' land on the edge of cities, which makes the farmers who have been there generations and then sell it to them suddenly landless, with some money, and with the new status of 'city dwellers' rather than 'farmers', which allows them a far greater freedom. it seemed that everyone had used their money and freedom to build taller houses and indulge more readily in their tobacco pipes (which had to be direct decendents of the opium pipes that were ubiquitous in china before the commies).

my insistance on staying at the home on the second night paid off, and my dad was the happiest and least stressed i have seen him the entire trip, talking a bit about his childhood and what is important to him as we sat by the fish pond outside the house with beer and mbira. it also meant i could get up at dawn with my good friend henry, who joined us for this trip, and watch the village swing into action. suddenly the little rivers at the side of the fields made sense (buckets were used to water the plants... ). a man with a stick tried unsuccessfully and it has to be said very comically to herd a gaggle of gabbling geese across a road. the market, on a bridge between our village and the next, salted fish, repaired bicycle tyres and stared blankly at the two strangers passing by. posters of mao could be seen in the odd living room, but peoples' attention was clearly much more focused on the rice grains drying on the concrete basketball pitch and the greying sky that would force them to sack it all up again.

like much of my trip- no revelations, no massive emotions, but a slow absorbtion of a culture and a family that is no longer abstract. and lots and lots of food.

Super Best Friends Train

45 hours in
we sit

a china teapot
4 tomatoes, 2 fat-fingered cucumbers
and the three of us

the lady, 74, the kindest eyes in town
the man, Anselmo, salting and cutting
a language of 3 common words

cramped and happy in coach 3
____

On the 76 hour train ride from Moscow to Almaty, capital of Kazakhstan, I experienced a little of what train-hoppers used to tell me about in America- after the initial day or so time kind of swirls into the swaying of the carriages and ones mind kind of seperates into two- the totally immediate and apparently insignificant (taking out the pips of a pomegranite with a knife one by one) and the totally abstract and memory filled. The two trigger each other off. The middle bit- normal reactions and appetites and logistical worries- seems dulled and inaccessible. Superb.

As described in the previous post, I was sharing an open carriage with around 50 other people, split by little walls with beds attached, with bedding and hot water provided. I got on and offered some peanut brittle around, which was refused by everyone as always seemed to happen, but in the process passed on 2 bits of information implicitly: 1. i don't speak the same language as you 2. i am not a threat and quite messy when I eat. The man across from me, Anselmo (so called not because that was his name, but because he reminded me strongly of the heroic character with the same name from Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls), gestured to the crucifix around his neck and that everything we had was to be shared, and proceeded to pull out a flatbread, tomatoes, cucumbers and a film canister filled with salt. The lady sat next to him, who by the end of the journey was scoulding me in Russian like I was her own child, brought out a jar of honey with little bits of lemon in. Bloody genius.

Anselmo was one of those men who have clearly had huge and varied experiences and no doubt their faire share of hard times, but have learnt through them to be totally humble, generous and straight up loving to the people and the world around them, and as a consequence his step was light and his eyes sparkled like a magician in disguise. It is to meet people like him (even if we don't have a shared language- if we did this blog post would be much longer for sure) that I travel.

Through silent observation, shared food and tea and us talking to each other in languages that made no sense to the other but were significant anyway, and the fact that the whole situation was pretty unique anyway, we created an atmosphere that i can't in any way convey here in words but that was totally magic. Summed up in our silent, sunset mind-reading tea ceremonies.

The rest of the carriages were dominated by young families and males who I can only guess were either businessmen or migrant workers, or both. We communed in the smoking end of the carriage and on the regular and long platform stops. These were highlights too- each few hundred miles a new and more elaborate collection of food hawkers- platform goddesses with boiled eggs in their arms and chilrden at their ankles.

A myriad of gastronomic delights. Breads stuffed with minced lamb, steamed dumplings with carrot and spring onion, cartloads of melons big as fat babies, huge dried fish, paper cup-fulls of sunflower seeds that left their mark on the carriage floor... and at stops further east the saliva-inducing smell of lamb being roasted over charcoal... and as we travelled east the faces of the hawkers were slightly different, and I couldn't tell you the point at which everyone suddenly looked a lot like my reflection in the mirror but it happened... or was that a dream?

The scenery also kept slowly melting into itself- first forest, then low hills, then a slow but sure decrease of vegetation from trees to bushes to slow-waving straw-coloured grasslands, to tiny bushes clinging to the now yellow soil, to the cracked and moon-like landscape of the roof of the Kazakh steppe; the huge expanse of land that still sustains only the odd herder and contrasts with a white to azure sky that picks little holes in the mind if you look at it for too long

snow and sun
suffocate in turn
leaving yellow stalk grass
husky and mute
the trees hunchbacked
the foxes cunning

This is where the USSR used to do their nuclear testing back in the day. There was a whole deep day of this out of the window and i have to say it is one of the best days i have had on my whole travel so far. On the morning of the 3rd day we woke to see the landscape change in reverse as we went down the other side, a popping in the ears barely perceptible, and the back of the journey broken. It was around this time that i really started chatting to the uzbek with 5 gold teeth and the russian

the russian extra
freckled
fat scars like lips on his cheeks
intense, soft eyes like shifting dunes
rimmed with lichen

he is determined to tell me his story
of why the barely enclosed rage
of a thousand men returned from war
bubbles clear under his skin

through tone and gesture alone
and a single mobile video of his victory
in an army-fatigued bare knucke wrestle
i glimpse and grope
at a shared history:

every other man in our
70km/h train circle of men
wore the uniform of the red army.
a belarussian with bright blue eyes
has lenin's head tattooed on his shoulder

___
Towards the end of the journey I was invited to gamble with cards by said russian. I declined but went to watch. As soon as I sat down with him I realised there was some tension going on- everyone else seemed to have left the vicinity of him and he kept looking down the corridor. Eventually he got up and disappeared, and a moment later two massive Russian police, who i didn't even know where on the train, passed by in the direction he went. I sat for a bit and then went back to my own seat, with my new mama clucking her disapproval... later I found out that everyone thought the russian was trying to cheat me out of money and the police, with no evidence, had tried to get a bribe out of him anyway. At least this is what i think happened from the gesticulations of various people.

______

We reach the border late at night
Around the tran huge banks of lights
Dogs and barbed wire
Glimpse memories of the iron curtain

Inside the carriage
we sit silent and sleep tense
Starched uniforms in control
the secrets of luggage brashly rummaged

My visa is not in order
I don't and won't know why
The old lady pleads my case with conviction
My passport is stamped and we go

____
I have just read this post and i think i have failed to capture the moments of it. Maybe i have partly forgotten it myself. Early in the morning of the 4th day we arrived to another sunny city and everyone got off sharpish without saying goodbye.

Moscow

In all honesty I could not remember a single thing about the train from Riga to Moscow, except that we arrived at the border at 2130 on the day before my Russian visa started, and that it was left to my fellow passengers to argue fervently on my behalf until the robust female Russian border guard sighed and stamped my passport and people mumbled receptive acknowledgements when I grinned and mumbled a thanks (the border people were still nearby) to the general company.

Fortunately I wrote some stuff down and reading it back now after spending a total of 220 hours on trains as far west as riga and as far east as shanghai, i can say that what i wrote contained themes that echoed along the desolate expanses and uncountable scrag-ends of cities (coming into the outskirts of a city on a train is sort of like sneaking up behind it when it hasn't got it's makeup on) out of the window, and the cosy and time-paused warmth of the carriages.

The first was the physicality of the train itself. The 'Moskva Express' was a huge hulk, much wider and higher than British trains and with a little step ladder to get into the carriages, which even the most dainty of local old ladies swung up neatly. Each of the 'hard sleeper' carriages was split into open compartments containing 6 beds in sets of two across three sides, with the top bunk folding down during the day and the bottom one being the seating. At the end of each carriage was a coal-fired boiling water dispenser, a list of times of station stops and a little room where a conductor sat, responsible for the safety and happiness of his carriage. The train tickets are much cheaper than planes (maybe 1/3 of the price) but take much longer, so as a consequence the carriage is made up of the type of people who know the value of things, young and old, that I find are by far the most wise and interesting.

The train rolls on, and to my left the gathering darkness of the forest outside the window slowing brings into focus the reflection of f an old man with eyes like he has been in Douglas Adams' Total Pespective Vortex. Opposite and above is curled a woman of about 50-60, who earlier gave me a gherkin and whose wrinkles are squashed into a spiders web by the hand supporting her head. In the middle of the night I awake badly needing a wee as the train slows into a station. I arrive at the toilet just as the conductor locks the toilet (so no-one shits down onto the tracks in the station) and engages me in a discussion of the premier league, , but now i REALLY need a wee in an irrational way that happens in the middle of the night when you stand up quickly and I tell him as much, but as there is a copper on the platform I cant piss under the train and then I resolve to piss in a ... well to cut a long story short i ending up pissing all over my pants and the floor of the guard's washroom and thank the god of chamberpots that it is the middle of the night and i can waddle my steamy crotch back to the triage area of my bed without the whole carriage thinking that i was incontinent.

I arrived in the sunshine at Moscow's Leningradski station at 7am two days later. After getting completely lost, having de ja vue (all the major stations look EXACTLY the same and i kept finding them and thinking i had been there already) and stomping round the wide and traffic-filled streets of Moscow all day, I met my couchsurfing host Dima at the end of a Metro line at which a Kyrgyzstan national thought that I was his countryman. This mistake potentially explained a lot- people had been rude to me all day (pushing me out of the way on the metro, closing the metro ticket counter in my face when I finally got to the front of the queue) and Russians- especially in Moscow- are known for their dislike of people from the further reaches of the former USSR. Something akin to Mexicans in america. I didn't know whether to feel better for this revelation or worse.

Dima and Roman (Dima's flatmate who had just hitchiked to massive distance to the Ukraine and back, only spending 4 hours in the Ukraine, just for kicks) were perfect hosts, showing me the sights (we sneaked into a beautiful piano lesson in the Moscow conservetoire until we were noticed and kicked out). They lived in an old soviet apartment block and ate the suitably russian meal of smoked mackeral and boiled potatos on my first night. On the second night I saw the couchsurfing 'community' in action, going to a 'Banya', like a Turkish bath with sauna, steam room and ritual flogging with hot leaves. It was very interesting, a members of the small, young, middle classes of Moscow with expats, students and one other surfer, a french girl from Brittany on her way to Mongolia. Later Dima showed me some totally hilarious videos of Boris Yeltsin behaving like a drunk teenager on youtube- they were well worth looking at and made me think he was probably the greatest ever russian leader.

Moscow is certainly beautiful in the extreme- huge, historical and supremely detailed buildings, leafy parks with statues, metro stations with chandaliers on the ceiling, oil paintings on the walls and gravestone-sized slabs of marble on the floors. This, and my couchsurfing hosts, are about all I found positive in this imposing city. The people on the whole were unresponsive to my parkbench greetings. Prices were comparable to London and all the public toilets cost the equivalent of 50p. People were dressed immaculately and showed the wealth they had, or were in the throes of base poverty and sleeping on the metro circle line. Money was clearly the dominent father, son and holy spirit. Fat men dressed as Lenin and Stalin charged 50 roubles for a photo with them, competing with a monkey dressed as a baby (same price) and every multinational food outlet you could imagine for the tourist dollar. Russian police imposed huge on the spot fines for visa irregularities that had no basis in fact. The Courgettes were pumped with so much water to make them bigger that my 8-egg omelette i made for the next train ride didn't stick together.

But no mind- i scooped it dripping into a cut off yoghurt container and got on a train that would take me the longest distance yet- over 3000km and 72 hours over the Kazakh steppe to Almaty.