Crossing the street in The Republic of Georgia and meeting locals

I slept in late.  I was tired from the culture change.  Mama Nasi cooked eggs; a black and white T.V. blared in the background of her small kitchen.  Her friend was there; they gossiped about men.  They kept saying “chilovek,” (man) and then would laugh.  I went to the bathroom and realized that the newspaper beside the toilet wasn’t for reading.  The plumbing was not strong enough for the paper to be flushed, so it went into a bagless plastic bin beside the toilet.  My immune system was either going to strengthen, or be taken down like a swatted fly.  I took a step outside into the human jungle known as Marjanishvilis St.  The street fired with action, cars and people dodged each other; markets thrived with fresh produce.

I walked down the street like an urban virgin.  Concrete sidewalks had challenging terrain features; half caved in manholes accompanied Swiss cheese topography.  I walked down the main street, Rustavelis Gamziri, to the central square.  A five-lane roundabout surrounded the square.  Ladas and BMW’s raced for victory in the surreal Tbilisi 500.

I attempted to cross the street was almost flattened.  I put my head down in defeat, and walked briskly back to the sidewalk to take a time out, and develop a better game plan.  I leaned against a building and studied the masters.  Most people simply flowed across the road while cars swerved insanely closely to their bodies.  I took a deep breath and gave it another go.  I thought I had the knack of it but I got rigid.  About half way across the street I stopped as a car almost clipped me with its mirror.  Once my momentum was lost, so was I.

It reminded me of instances when you are walking down a busy street and someone comes head on.  You go left, they go right, you correct, they correct, and as you both get closer you finally swerve the right way and just barely miss hitting each other.  In the game of Georgian pedestrian, the actions are much the same, except a speeding hunk of steel is your opponent, and the consequences are more than a bumped shoulder.  I eventually reached the other side; honking horns blew out my ears.  I learned that it’s simply better to follow a local like a goose flying in a v-pattern.

I interlaced side streets like a kid on a scavenger hunt.  I looked attentively, and found treasures.  I gazed left and proceeded down a quiet street.  The contrasts were severe.  It looked like a collection of meteorites had landed the week before.  Steam came up from the sewer grates and played as smoldering evidence of the strike.  An old burnt out car rusted into a crater with its wheels torn off.  Trash piled to my left and right; half the windows on the buildings were smashed out.  I walked with awareness, keeping a tight frame on my surroundings.  The skies darkened and a downpour began.  I saw shelter under a balcony and ran over to it.  An older man sought the same coverage; we both stood there without speaking.  He looked at me and noticed my foreignness.  I looked at him and noticed my foreignness.   We both looked straight out at the downpour.

The man and I were stuck in a small place together, and I was happy to stand next to someone from such a different world.  I peered to my left down narrow-street that crashed into a step hillside.  On top of the hill was Kartlis Deda.  The statue of mother Georgia towered mightily over the city.  She looked like a futuristic diva, and possessed the ability to make me feel powerless.

After the downpour stopped, I continued walking.  I cam across a few small Georgian and Armenian churches.  I didn’t feel like pulling out my camera because I didn’t want to draw attention to myself.  People looked at me with curiosity.  My movements were dissimilar, and I didn’t flow like water across the street.  I felt like things could go wrong at any time if I let my guard down.

I crossed the Mtkvari River.  On the other side was a huge statue of a knight on a horse with a giant sward in his hand.  The Metekhi church stood behind it high up on a hill.  I walked up to the church.  I turned around and looked out over the city.  Off in the distance up on a plateau was crass evidence from Soviet times: a television broadcast tower that shot up towards the heavens.  It looked like something out of the Jetsons, but with an intimidating edge.  The brown Mtkvari River flowed below.  Cars zoomed around the roads with the nimbleness of ants.

I proceeded back down the hill, over the bridge, and into an Armenian church.  Inside the church I had an English conversation with middle-aged lady.  Communicating in English felt refreshing.  Most Georgians speak a few languages, but English was rare.

A young man entered the church, and he spoke some broken English to me.  He had a slender physique and was dressed in black from shirt to shoes.  His straight black hair parted to one side leaving most of his forehead exposed.  He had a thick 5 o’clock shadow on his face and a wide smile that made his eyes squint.  His name was Grigori.  Two of his friends—Alex and George—entered into the room and joined our conversation.  They were proud of Georgia and happy that I decided to come to their country, but also a little confused.

“Why you not want spend time in France or Italy?” said Grigori.

I replied quickly, “I heard Georgia had an interesting history and fascinating people.”

Their smiles enlarged.

We sat and drank coffee while talking about Georgia.

“Peter,” Alex said.  “You like to hear us sing?”

I nodded my head and smiled.

“Follow, upstairs.”

I followed Girgory, Alex, and George upstairs to a small room.  George sad down and started playing piano.  Alex and Grigori chimed in and they all sang together in Georgian.  They passionately belted out a song with skill.  Grigory went very low with his voice while Alex’s voice was at the opposite end of the spectrum.  George kept the two together while playing the piano beautifully.  They sang a handful of songs.

“What you think?” said Grigory.

“Wow, you guys are amazing.”

“Would you like come to my church?” Grigory said.

He pointed out of the window.  There is it, other side river, not far,”

I shook my head and agreed.  I said goodbye to Alex and George.  Grigory and I left and walked out on the street.  I felt satisfied to have already met a local who wanted to show me around.

“Peter you like Georgian food?”

“I’m not sure Grigory; I haven’t had it yet.”

“Ok, come with me!”

Grigory picked up the pace on the sidewalk and walked down a staircase the led to a basement level restaurant.  This would have been an impossible find on my own.

“Peter, you like Kachapuri?” Grigory asked me like it was a common worldwide dish.

“I’m not sure what it is, but I’ll try it.”

Grigory ordered me Kachapuri.  It came out piping hot and was a dish of fresh doughy bread with egg, cheese, and butter in the middle of it.  It was about a foot long on a large plate.  Grigory also gave me a drink that tasted like a fruit/ginger combination.  When we were done, Grigory refused for me to pay for the meal.

“Peter, you are my guest, and guest don’t pay when with Grigory.”

We walked out across the wide Mtkvari River and up a hillside.  Girgory crossed the street—I sprinted up to him so I could stay on his heels.  His tall lanky physique got gumbi-like once he started crossing the road; his torso gyrated on a different plane than his hips.  His neck had the ability to crane out into the traffic (like go go gadget neck) to get a better view without moving his feet.  Cars weaved around us closely.  Grigory broke through fresh ground like an icebreaker; I stayed closely within his wake.  His hips gyrated back towards me as a mirror almost smacked his midsection.

When we got to Grigory’s church he introduced me to the father and a few other men in the clergy.  Grigory had a high position in the church and lead the daily prayer and song.  I sat in one of the back pews as a spectator.  Dim light showed signs of wear; deteriorated walls made it high up to the stained ceiling.  The offering bin came around, and everyone dug deep into their pockets to add to it.  The older lady next to me put in a single coin in, and passed it on.

I won’t be returning from Georgia and Ukraine until the 20th of July.  Next Motley Planet post wont happen for a while since we will be capturing footage from high up in the Caucasus Mountains, the Black Sea coast, wine country, or the capital Tbilisi.  If anyone knows anyone at the travel channel let me know.

Tajikistan Part 1

One obstacle lays in font of me…getting through another layer of ex-Soviet-bureaucratic bullshit that still roams the region.  It is the bizarre bureaucracy that denies one from taking a picture of a thirty year-old Russian-made Tupolev 134 aircraft that was outdated before the invention of the camcorder.  Bureaucracy thicker than peanut butter that breeds a ridiculous mentality as if some piece of top-secret aircraft technology will slip past the authorities and into foreign hands exposing Tajikistan’s national security.

Click on picture to see close up

At 7:00 a.m. I had done the naughty…I had taken a picture inside of a sensitive area, the Kojand International Airport.  The place was so sensitive that the paint was peeling off the walls and the toilets were backed up.  I had to take pictures.  High on the wall was a big map of the world.  World cities were labeled in Cyrillic, and Washington DC was lying somewhere around western Tennessee.  I snapped a few pictures of the inside of the airport and of the planes out on the runway.  As I was getting my last photo I noticed a security agent watch me and quickly come my way.  With him came two other officers who collectively encircled me and assaulted my senses with morning-coffee and smoke breath.   I managed to hold onto my digital camera even as the authorities demanded it.  I simulated the action of deleting my pictures in front of the police, ensuring them that the picture of the map and the planes was gone.  But I managed to keep a few.

Taking a Central Asian flight was something I had to accomplish.  Just looking at what I was about to do gleamed of excitement.  I stood on the tarmac in line with an incongruous group of Tajiks.

Loading the plane, in route to Dushanbe, Tajikistan

In front of me was the ubiquitous businessman seen at all ports of travel in Central Asia…his suit was one size too small, displaying an unhealthy gut that stretched his shirt at the seams. His mustache was thick enough to hold its own microclimate.  Next to him was a mother in traditional dress with a colorful headscarf with her three children.  Behind me was a man with standard issue Central Asian gold teeth and a four-foot long dagger in his hand.

Once inside the aging aircraft, I found my seat.  It collapsed backwards under my weight and rammed into the man’s knees behind me.  I looked back to apologize but instantly received the same treatment as a man sat down in front of me.  “Ouch!” I yelped as the metal frame of the seat pushed through the worn padding of the seat back and dug in right below my kneecaps.  After pushing his seat forward and pulling my knees out of the man’s back, I inhaled.  I breathed in the scent of decaying potato chips near my feet.

Safety warnings? Forget about it.  Buckle up? Useful if you want to play pretend.  And “buckling up” was a bit of an oxymoron anyways, since the seatbelts were broken to begin with.  Close the overhead bins?  Not unless you brought your own doors to close them with.  Luggage was out in the open and ready to fall on someone’s head, with the right amount of turbulence.  The man with the dagger sat down next to me and laid it across his lap.  Naturally the pointed end of the sheath pressed into my leg.  I looked to my left and saw a wide smile filled with shiny gold teeth.  The sword was beautiful, and I later found out that the man was going to sell it in Dushanbe.

Ancient Russian made Tupolovs in the runway

Perhaps a shot of vodka before take off?  That’s just what I did, along with everyone else except for a few children under the age of ten.  Svetlana, the imported Russian stewardess, paraded along the isle in a short skirt holding a tray of vodka like she was on the runway in Milan.  All of the Tajik men were uniformly checking Sveti out.  She seemed to like her bit of stardom.  Sveti upped the sway of her hips according to the number of eyes she lured in. The engines fired up and it was like the plane itself was an alcoholic, shaking fiercely with delirium tremens.  The decibels of the engines echoed between my ears, and the vibrations jostled my teeth.  After some “tests,” like bringing the airplane up to speed and then nailing the brakes to see if they worked, we lifted off and zigzagged parallel to the mountains, gaining enough elevation to get over them.

Khujand International Airport, Tajikistan

As we hovered over the dramatic landscape, I looked out at the gigantic and remote range of the Fan Mountains, snow-capped from a recent storm. This beauty was interrupted by the loud noise of the broken door between the pilot’s quarters and the cabin swinging back and forth and banging between the two walls.  Halfway into the flight, I felt some beads of sweat forming on my forehead, and I noticed that the passengers around me were wiping their faces with sweat rags.  The airplane had no overhead air jets. Vodka-fueled Tajik businessmen looked to be making the most heat; they were the sweatiest.  We encountered some bumps as we crested the high peeks.  In my buzzed state I was concentrating on overhead baggage shifting around above me.  I was curious about what bag would fall on someone’s head first.  Who let the flies out? I did not know, but they were everywhere, landing on my sweaty head and buzzing around my face.

How about some weightlessness?  Upon descending, the pilot put the nose down and my stomach quickly ended up in my head.  We came into the capital city of Tajikistan, Dushanbe, with lots of speed and the pilot pulled up seconds before kissing runway to a silky smooth landing.

To be continued…

Tajikistan Part 2

In the last post I had just completed a most interesting flight over the Fan Mountains in Tajikistan.  The quick adventure led me to the obscure and mysterious capital city of Dushanbe….

I deboarded the plane and stepped onto the barren tarmac.  The clouds were low and the weather dreary.  As a group, we collectively made our way across the tarmac to a locked barbed wire fence and waited at the edge of the runway.  Airport security eventually let us out through the fence, which denied us the experience of walking through the airport.  I was let loose in Dushanbe.  Even though I had done of research and knew the civil war in Tajikistan was over, I was skeptical and cautious of the city.  I flashed back to a travel website I stumbled across weeks earlier in Uzbekistan as the words of warning bounced around in my head: “For the moment a trip to Tajikistan requires a good briefing on the political situation and as much help as you can get.”

Luckily, Umid in Tashkent had given me the phone number of his cousin.  I found a phone near the front of the airport and dialed the number.  I had come a long way from St. Petersburg and my Irena experience and knew exactly how do dial correctly (this took place in an earlier experience in Russia).  But after multiple tries with no connection, my lifeline was up.

The streets of the city looked alien as my eyes opened wide with the phone dangling in my hand.  This was a new jungle, and the reality came quickly that I was in Dushanbe on my own.  I had no place to stay and was quite hesitant of the security situation on the streets.  I asked a few people walking by if they knew of any hotels to stay in.  Nobody had any viable information. I flagged down a taxi and told the driver to take me to the US Embassy.

Lush tree lined streets of Dushanbe

A taxi dropped me off near a heavily fortified building with a small American flag erected above a drab cement wall.  I entered an oasis of normality in a strange land.  Embassies are always a bit odd, and the more obscure the location they are in, the more artificial they feel.  The foreign world of Tajikistan was put on hold for a moment as I walked through security into an American environment. The embassy had a nice outdoor courtyard with tables and chairs.  On the table in front of me was a two-day-old Wall Street Journal and a packet of Fig Newtons.  I looked out at a few Americans sitting down.  It was a strange feeling; I hadn’t seen anyone from home for a long time.  I started speaking English with a guy from Maryland named Jim.  It felt so refreshing to speak to a native English speaker, and for the first time in a long time I was speaking normal sentences at a quick pace.  Even though my Russian was at a basic comfortable level to get by in Central Asia, I had spent my last couple of months saying things like, “I live California.  I travel from Europe.  I go Southeast Asia.”

My appearance brought attention and a few other embassy workers came up to me and asked me questions about why I was in Tajikistan.  “Traveling through,” I responded in a normal manner.  They looked at me, puzzled.  “Traveling through…you mean you work for an aid organization in Tajikistan?” said one of the women in a quick voice, acting

Mosaic on side street

like she had found the answer.  “No,” I responded.  “I am en route to the Pamir Mountains in Eastern Tajikistan…then I’ll take the Pamir Highway up over the mountains to Kyrgyzstan.”  She looked at me, confused.  “Well we can help you get a flight out of the country as soon as possible, if you would like,” she said as she failed to understand a word that came out of my mouth.  “I would highly recommend that you leave Tajikistan” she continued.

I realized quickly that the embassy workers were completely sealed off from the country.  During my fist couple of hours in Dushanbe I had already experienced more freedom of movement than they had ever been exposed to in the country.  Because of the close proximity to Afghanistan, and the volatile situation there in 2003, the embassy workers all had their own convoys and bodyguards.  For security reasons they moved around quite frequently to different living quarters. Their view of Dushanbe was limited.  They tried to be helpful but didn’t have many answers for me.  “How much is a hotel?” I asked.  “How much for a taxi to the center of the city? Where is a good place to eat?”  All I received were shrugged shoulders and slowly shaking heads.  After talking with some of the Tajik locals that worked at the embassy I found out that there was a lack of hotels in Dushanbe and of the few operating, they were quite expensive at over $100 a night.  With only $1500 to last me until China, there was no way I could survive in the country at that rate.  Tajikistan didn’t have one ATM machine and I still had to travel through Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan.

I also received some bad news about my travel plans in the country.  Even though I had a Tajik visa, travel to Badakhshan in the far east of the country required an additional layer of paperwork and permits.  I had a visa for Kyrgyzstan, which was my next destination, but I had to get there by getting to the far east of Tajikistan first.  My Uzbek visa had run out, and my only other options were Afghanistan and Turkmenistan, which were in the wrong direction.  The embassy workers told me that the document I needed would take at least two weeks to obtain, if I could get it at all.  Again, the offer of finding a flight of the country was repeated by the same woman.

Tajikistan is broken up into three different states.  The state of Badakhshan is in the far eastern part of the country, bordering Afghanistan and China.  Badakhshan is the province that is the most off-limits, as it is the number one heroine route out of Afghanistan.  Badakhshan almost broke loose from the grip of Dushanbe the capital, plagued by civil war a couple of years earlier.  The violence had since seized; nevertheless, the sensitivity between the two regions was still very high.  As a result, authorities questioned all outsiders and their reasons for going to Badakhshan.  Mine was to go over the Pamir Highway, a two-day journey over the mighty Pamir Mountains that maxed out with a view of the 24,500 feet Mt. Communism.  Being a high conflict zone, a special permit was issued to allow travel to this region—one that I had yet to obtain. 

Edgy ferris wheel ride in Dushanbe

►

I had worked too long and hard to get to this little outpost of the world called Tajikistan to turn around. The thought of quitting and taking the easy airborne route out, to a more stable and developed Kyrgyzstan, shot cold chills up my spine.  It reeked of absolute failure and brought my mind back to my first bike race as a teenager.  It was a grueling event that tested the limits of my fitness and my mind.   I dropped out when I was pushed to the max and I took the easy option and told my legs to stop pedaling.  For a split second I felt good because the suffering was over, but after that came the repercussions of my decision as I watched the others continue the race from the sidelines.  I knew that I could have stayed in the race if I just pushed harder.  That feeling of failure marked me at a young age and resonated deeply and uneasily within my psyche.  I was determined not to ever experience that feeling again.  I knew I was capable of making it in this exotic land.

Valishey at work

Unwilling to give up on the country, I sought out the organization that had sent me the letter of invitation that granted me my Tajik visa in Tashkent.  I took a cab across the city to a small government building that was next to the crumbling Afghan embassy that was wrapped in barbed wire.  This was the place that I had been calling for weeks from Uzbekistan (story in another blog that I haven’t posted yet), trying to get my Tajik visa.  It was also the only place that would allow me to go to Badakhshan.

I walked into the agency and asked where Gafan was, the one man who made my Tajik visa a reality, and the only man who had the power to issue the permit I needed.  Dressed in a suit, a  slender, good-looking man with a secure calm demeanor informed me that Gafan would be back in an hour.  Valishey was his name.  Valishey and his son entertained me for an hour.  I talked to Valishey about the US and Tajikistan and then I kicked around a soccer ball with his young son in the parking lot behind the building. I asked Valishey if he knew of any places to stay in Dushanbe. He gave me a puzzled look but got on his phone and made some calls.  Eventually, Gafan came.

Gafan was a proud, stoic man who got to business right away.  “Documentation,” he said firmly.  He continued with the queries, “Where are you going? Why are you going there?  Do you know anyone in Badakhshan?”  After twenty minutes of questioning, he said, “come back in a week, we should have your permit.”

Valishey gave me the bad news.  He couldn’t find any hotels to stay in that were under a $100 a night. He told me to wait as he made one more call.  Afterwards he hung up with a smile.  “Pete, you can stay with me, my wife and child will go to stay with family while you are here.”

At Valishey's pad before a night out

“Are you sure, Valishey?” I responded.
“Yes very sure.  We don’t meet many foreigners, so I would like to take you in.”  He smiled.  That evening Valishey and I watched Russian MTV and drank Russian beer while eating a tasty dinner of chicken and french fries in his apartment.

Hanging out with a shepherd in the Fan Mountains

The week flew by.  One day we went for a hike high up in the Fan Mountains.  Another day was spent at the fun park in the center of the city, riding on decrepit and aging rides that creaked and moaned with fatigue.  Valishey and I spent hour after hour walking around the beautifully tree-canopied streets of Dushanbe.  We relaxed in the park talking about subjects ranging from politics to food.  We laughed a lot.  And we also managed to go out every night of the week to a different dance club.  Our friendship became tight in a short amount of time and I was feeling quite comfortable in Dushanbe, forgetting that I was waiting for

High up in a mountain village

a permit.

But the day finally came.  Gafan gave the green light; I had received my documentation to go to Badakhshan.   Now was the fun part…the forty-five minute flight through the mountains to get to the town of Khorg in Badakhshan.  In Soviet times, pilots were awarded a “danger bonus” because of the difficult task of actually flying

Valishey

below the high peaks of the mountains and through the small valleys.  Back in Kojand at the hotel over a week earlier, it was Vlad the pilot who had told me about this flight.  I remembered that night in the hotel when Vlad and I were watching TV together and the topic came up.  In his relaxed state, his eyes perked up with excitement, saying that this was his most exciting route to fly for Tajikistan Airlines.

To be continued….

Tajikistan Part 3

In last post I flew into Dushanbe, Tajikstan and ended up at the American embassy in hopes of a suggestion in finding a hotel.  The only bit of advice I received was that of getting the next flight out of the country.    Finding a hotel turned out to be a challenge but then I luckily met Valishey who took me in.  We had a blast in the city all week long….

My special permits to the other side of the country came and it was time to leave on the only flight in the former Soviet Union where pilots were awarded a danger bonus for the sheer magnitude of the mountains and the possibility of stray fire from Afghanistan.

The weather had to be perfect for the flight to depart; unfortunately it was unstable, with different fronts moving throughout the region.  Three days of cloudy weather had fallen on Dushanbe.  Three days of getting up from Valishey’s apartment at 4:30 a.m. and hugging him goodbye. Three days of the Tajik Airlines representative saying “Nyet (no in Russian), come back tomorrow.” Three days of walking back to Valishey’s place and knocking on the door asking to stay another day.  It was possible that this plane wouldn’t leave for weeks, and I didn’t have that much patience or time left on my visa to wait it out.

To my luck, on the fourth day I found another person in my same situation. I was attracted by his foreign appearance and his inquisitive, “what’s next” look as the airline representative said, “Nyet,” for the fourth consecutive day.  I approached him and opened up a conversation.  His name was Giovanni and he was an Italian journalist in route to Afghanistan.  Giovanni told me that he had never gone into Afghanistan from this direction, but he heard that we could take a 19-hour jeep ride to Badikshan.  He invited me along.  Valishey was with me on this morning and escorted us to the part of the city where taxis and jeeps were waiting to be hired out.  We gave each other a strong hug and said our goodbyes.

Giovanni offered to pay the full $125 for the journey and said it was complements of the Italian Prime Minster Silvio Berlusconi, who owned the Journal Panorama that Giovanni worked for.  Soon after Giovanni, the jeep driver, his son, and I started the long mission to Badikshan in a Russian made UAZ jeep.

Russian jeep personalities go something like this: comfort an afterthought, personality bullish, and designed for vodka consumption when the fuel runs out.  The driver was a small Tajik guy with wide, round brown eyes and a mischievous smile.  He looked wired and alert, and happy to be hired for the day. We soon called him Schumacher (after the German Formula 1 racer); Schumacher took this comment as a compliment and drove faster.  Schumacher’s son was a lanky young teenager who had a blank face void of any emotion.  He looked like he had gone through this routine dozens of times before and posted up in the back seat with me.  He brought out a thick shirt out of his bag and wedged it between the seat and the door, kicked his shoes off, and laid his head to rest.

Hours rolled by.  My conversation with Giovanni was interesting and timeless.  At the age of fifty-six Giovanni was rife with gripping stories.  With a youthful face, bright blue eyes, and thick grey hair, Giovanni told me about his experiences covering wars all over the world for the past twenty-five years.  In Iraq, he’d survived the bomb that hit the Palestine hotel where the press was staying. His Spanish roommate died in his arms.  He told me about occurrences in Afghanistan, Chechnya, Kosovo, Somalia, Colombia, and Israel. 

Giovanni was a well-spoken man with a positive and acute energy radiating around him.  Apart from writing for Panorama he had published five books.  For all of his accomplishments, Giovanni showed no sign of arrogance and he had the ability to speak as well as listen.  He  was a family man with a wife and three children.  But Giovanni looked more like a calm, sophisticated, seasoned cigar smoker than a journalist who was about to step into the grit of the Afghan heroin trade.  Tajikistan, he told me, was the number one exit route for heroin out of Afghanistan.  The heroin journeyed through the roads of Central Asia to Russia, Western Europe, and the rest of the world.  Since the overthrow of the Taliban, heroin production had rapidly increased, creating a strong economy that was funded by  transit of the drug.

Hours of bouncing along the mountain road passed by.  I broke out of conversation and looked to the left at the Pamirs shooting straight up towards the heavens.  The scenery changed drastically from the lush tree-lined streets of Dushanbe to the barren, mountainous back dropped landscape.  The air was much drier, there were fewer people, and the vegetation was scarcer.  Like a broken bottle on the beach, the Pamirs came from nothing and rose to sharp jagged peaks—that made the Alps look tame and minuscule.  Mystic dark red rock cliffs with giant swirl formations were embedded into these massive peaks.  Clouds grouped and swirled around the summits dictating different climates miles above us.

The dirt road got narrower and the light flatter as we bounced along in the jeep.  Schumacher’s son was sound asleep to the right of me in the back seat.  His head was snapping around to the cadence of the rough terrain.  But it was obvious that he had done this before as his head whiplashed back and forth occasionally slamming against the padding he had already set up against the window.

Giovanni was up front scanning the wild landscape curiously with squinted eyes. Boulders that had fallen from high above lay smack in the middle of the road.  To my right, was the edge of a cliff that dropped and fell for what looked like an eternity into a raging river below. Fog began to creep in as we ascended into the snowline and clouds. The UAZ geared down and growled like it knew of the demanding climb ahead.  The temperatures plummeted. I pressed my face to the misted window and noticed another destroyed Russian tank, a relic from the Russian/Afghan war.  I had seen at least five such demolished tanks during the day.  The locals had found some way to push the heavy tanks off of the road.  It was evident that these heavy machines were a struggle to move because they were pushed just far enough so they were out of the way of traffic.  Not an inch more.

The tank we were passing had its tracks blown off.  The hatch on the roof was wide open, as if the Russian solder took his chance at an escape just days ago.  The road became tighter and my ears popped for the second time with the elevation change.  Schumacher’s Tajik music was blaring.  It was the fourth time we had heard the same tape.  We hadn’t seen a person for a long time, and only saw eerie clues of human life.  Schumacher slowed the UAZ down to a crawl as the light from his headlights illuminated a white wall of fog in front of us.  We ascended for hours on the cramped road winding back and forth along the mountainside.   Eventually the VAZ summited the snowcapped pass with the light so flat that the sky reached down to the earth and the earth fused up to the sky.

The long tedious process of descending brought us out of the snow and back to a warmer climate.  Another raging river carved into the mountainside, the fog thinned, the windows cleared, and darkness was now upon us.  We came to an abrupt stop in the road as the brakes of the UAZ squeaked and the tires skidded.  Schumacher and his son got out of the jeep.  Giovanni looked over his left shoulder towards me and gave me a puzzled look.  The lights of the UAZ were still on as we watched father and son turn over random rocks on the side of the road.  They would kick the rocks over and then get on their hands and knees, fastidiously moving their fingers around in the dirt where the rock was.  This weirdness went on for some time.  Giovanni and I watched closely until all of the rocks in our vicinity had been moved to the point where it looked like there were twenty bowling balls in the road.

I opened up the door and stepped out into this bizarre scene with curiosity.  “Schumacher, what are you looking for?” I called loudly over the sound of the jeep’s motor.  His bugged eyes slowly pulled off the dirt road and looked at me.  His face was stressed and worn.  Schumacher opened his mouth and responded, “A ring.”  “A ring?” I thought to myself.  Who would leave a ring on the side of the road, under a rock in the middle of nowhere? “You are looking for a ring?” I asked, believing that I might have misheard him.  He nodded his head and turned away kicking over another rock.

I thought back to the embassy in Dushanbe where the woman questioned my presence in Tajikistan.  When I told her why I was there, she still was unable to understand my reasoning.  She just couldn’t comprehend that I was in Tajikistan voluntarily.  Maybe I was thinking like her.  Perhaps I was unable to get around the notion that Schumacher was searching for a ring on the side of a mountain road in the middle of nowhere.  Maybe that was something they did here.  I tried to expand my mind as much as possible to understand this reasoning, but I fell short.  I knew there had to be more to it.

Giovanni and I later pieced the clues together and figured out that it wasn’t a ring they were looking for, it was heroin.  Since we were on a highly volatile drug route, this was the only conclusion that made any sense.  Even though Schumacher was paid top dollar for the trans-country journey, he was probably making a lot more coin transporting heroin.

I got back into the vehicle and sat for some time as this mystifying experience continued.  Central Asian/ex-Soviet strangeness had come to me in many forms throughout this journey, and I had started to understand that anything went in this part of the globe.
I pressed my ear close to the window and came across one constant in a land full of abnormalities.  Through the door and over the sound of the engine I could hear the sound of the river.  Water was raging over the boulders, swirling in eddies and then continuing onwards with force cascading over large drops of elevation.  I zoned out for a bit to my upbringing spending time on the river with friends fishing and swimming.  The sound was so familiar.

Suddenly I looked to my right.  Schumacher and his son were coming back to the vehicle with a look of accomplishment. It appeared they found what they were looking for.  “Did you get the ring?” I said.  “Da!” (yes in Russian) he responded with an excited and mischievous smile.  Schumacher stepped on the gas and we pressed on through the night.

To be continued…

Tajikistan Part 4

In last episode of Motley Planet I left the capital Dushanbe with the intent on getting on a flight to the other side of the country.  After days of foggy weather which resulted in a grounded plane,  I realized flying was not an option.  This is when I met Giovanni the Italian journalist who invited me along to travel to the other side of the country on four wheels instead.  This was by far the most exciting and extraterrestrial road trip of my life!

After the long descent, we entered a small town at the bottom of the mountains stuck in darkness. We crossed the Panj River that raged through the center of the village. Life was evident, but electricity was not.  Dark outlines were the only visible features of the human bodies.  The streets were active with profiles of people walking around in all directions crossing the street and on the sidewalks.  Youth and elders could only be distinguished by posture and not by wrinkles.

There were no gas stations in Tajikistan, so the process of filling up the tank took over an hour.  The system usually went like so:  A gas truck would drive through town and people would fill up jugs during the short window of service.  I don’t think there was any regularity to these visits; therefore, some people made an income off of selling gas to people who’d run out or to travelers moving through.  Giovanni and I followed Schumacher around as he knocked on doors and asked people if they had any gas for sale.  We were both carrying four empty, two liter bottles.  It seemed like they all knew Schumacher.  Eventually, we knocked on the right door and managed to fill up our bottles multiple times after draining them into the gas tank.

The road got rougher and I found myself looking across over the river to the moonlit landscape of Afghanistan.  Snowcapped mountains reflected light from the almost full moon that hanged high over us.  The air was crisp and clear.  Schumacher asked us if we were hungry and stopped the UAZ at a remote shack on the side of the road.  An older couple emerged with smiles and hugged Schumacher.  Giovanni and I followed the couple and entered the small structure that was lit brightly with gas lamps.  We sat down on an ornately woven Tajik carpet to warm hospitality and a simple meal of yogurt and bread.  The woman poured black tea for us into decorative china with pride and elegance.   I was astonished by the fact that my dinner view was of Afghanistan.  Giovanni was fascinated by the border; he pointed out to me how easy it was to get heroin across the river. With our stomachs filled, we exchanged many smiles with the older couple and pressed on.

On the Afghan side of the river, an occasional light would appear, powered by a generator.  Giovanni told me this was a symbol of wealth, someone who was profiting from the heroin trade.  On the Tajik side, hunkered in to the side of the mountain were Tajik and Russian troops waiting to catch those who were smuggling the heroin.  They were hidden well, but as we came around a bend in the road, our lights shone brightly on a dozen soldiers in black tucked behind some large rocks.  They had AK-47’s over their shoulders and stared at us as we passed by. They were waiting for the drugs to come across the water.  Heroin was transported across the river by swimmers braving the snowmelt, or it was floated across in tires. The Panj River was the dividing force in this trade and getting it across safely meant everything to the Afghans.

We came around a long left-hand bend in the road.  Half way through the turn the jeep stopped following the road and went straight running over melon-sized rocks and some fragile desert flora.  Schumacher fell asleep at the wheel and almost crashed the UAZ and us into the river!  The VAZ came inches from the water’s edge and rested up against a bolder.  Giovanni and I were fine, but Schumacher and his son weren’t speaking.  They were exhausted.   I woke Schumacher up: “Schumacher what are you doing?”  Schumacher said one word, “Spot.” (sleep in Russian). I quickly assessed the situation.  A game was being played with drug smugglers across the river trying to move heroin, and Tajik and Russian troops waiting to stop them with firepower.  Each side was anticipating the other’s slip.  This was not a place to fall into rem sleep.  I walked out of the UAZ and opened up Schumacher’s door.  I grabbed his small body by the arms and moved him to the back seat with his son.  He shifted in with ease, as he was limp and half asleep.  I sat in the drivers seat with adrenaline pumping through my veins, turned off the repetitive Tajik music we had been listening for the past fourteen hours, and hit the gas.

Schumacher and his son were sound asleep in the back seat, collapsed on each other.  The road was empty and straightened out as it got away from the river.  We entered a huge valley; mountains on each side towered up towards the brightly lit, star-filled sky.  Aspen tree leaves rustled in the gentle wind.  The UAZ cruised along quietly and comfortably as I concentrated on keeping the big floaty steering wheel straight.  I was relaxed by the fact that Schumacher’s hectic music had been overthrown and eliminated by the new DJ Giovanni.  Geographically, we were in the middle of nowhere, a world away from any ocean or city.  Dushanbe was the closest substantial population, and it was a fifteen-hour drive away.  An hour went by without any sights of mankind.  The river seemed to have been the conflicted area; now that we were away from it, the cat and mouse game of heroin trafficking was no longer evident.

A dim light caught my right eye.  I looked up to the rear view mirror and noticed another vehicle on the road far behind us.  The light grew closer and closer until its high beams were glaring in the rear view mirror of the UAZ.  The vehicle tailgated just feet from the bumper of the jeep as we were speeding along at 55 mph.  I kept pace; my heart rate accelerated. Then the vehicle picked up speed, turned out from behind our bumper, and passed us.  My eyes relaxed as the high beams dissipated into the darkness in front of me.

But then the car slammed its brakes forcing me to immediately push the squishy brake pedal to the floor to a screeching halt.  Giovanni’s and my body were thrust forward towards the windshield until the seatbelts caught with a loud click and brought us back.  Schumacher and his son thrusted into our seats with force and groaned.

The commotion stopped.  Our headlights captured thick dust  in the air.  Faint outlines of three large men illuminated through the dust of our low beams.  It looked like the fog machine from a Hollywood movie was cranked up with mysterious lighting.  We could only see dark outlines of the men.  As they come closer out of the dust, unclear profiles turned into a stark reality. The light intensified on the three big men with AK-47’s hanging over their shoulders. They walked towards us with authority and urgency. Giovanni looked tense.  At this juncture, I felt that I was at least going to lose my $1500, my passport, and Schumacher’s jeep.  One of the men stepped up to my door and banged hard on it, motioning for me to get out of the UAZ.  He couldn’t see through our dirty windows to get a clear view of us.  His lips were pierced and his eyes had an aggressive look.

The men were incongruously dressed.  The man banging on the door was wearing a large black coat.  It sounded like the glass was going to shatter.  One of the men was wearing a tanned sheep skinned jacket and the smallest of the three wore a white t-shirt.  They looked well fed and serious.
I took in a deep breath, unlatched my seatbelt, and stepped out of the UAZ.  I knew they weren’t Tajik police or Russian army since they were wearing either uniform.   It was probably a regional militia that controlled the stretch of road we were driving on.  We were now in Badikshan; the Tajik government didn’t have much control of the region.  Most likely this group was collecting fees for transporting heroin over their territory.

Schumacher and his son were still sleeping.  All three of the men surrounded Giovanni and me with their guns pointed at us.  The man in control opened his eyes and was speechless.  I could smell cigarette smoke on his breath; steam came out of his mouth with every deep exhale.  It was obvious Giovanni and I were not from his high school.  His aggressive and hasty movements froze.  His authoritative presence relaxed and his shoulders dropped as it became evident he was shocked and befuddled by the situation of Westerners on his doorstep.  We were not the usual types in this part of the world.

I saw an opening of weakness and confusion, and decided to take action.  I put my hand to my heart and said, “Aasalaamu Aleikum” (the standard Muslim greeting: “peace be with you”).  He gazed at me and loosened up his face even more.  He responded, “Wa alaikum assalaamme” (and upon you be peace).  The two other men around him unclenched their positions and lowered their automatic rifles down near their hips.  Everyone started to smile out of the oddity of the situation.  The men smiled because Giovanni and I appeared to be two aliens planted on their soil.   Giovanni and I smiled because Ak-47’s weren’t pointed at our heads anymore.

I cracked a bit of dialogue in Russian about traveling, girls, and drinking; I’d found this to be popular in other conversations.  Tajikistan is primarily Muslim, but the Soviet Union made all men above the age of ten enjoy vodka and beer.   Instantly, they loved my comments and they laughing from the gut.  The leader of the group had a loud and deep based laugh that vibrated my eardrums.  Warm saliva spackled my face.  His round face lit up and his bushy mustache swayed around to the movement of his upper lip.  Perhaps my grammar was off, or it was my accent, but whatever I’d said, it worked well.

Giovanni and I laughed out loud with newfound confidence, only because the tension of the situation was dissolving and our futures were improving.  The three guys, who had moments earlier pointed AK-47’s at our heads, were now three guys who wanted to be our friends.  I felt confident that my $1500 and my passport would stay with me.  Schumacher would keep his jeep for another day.  After spending some bonding time in the wild mountainous surroundings, we all exchanged high fives and hugs.  “Atletchna!” (“excellent” in Russian) the men kept on saying.  “Atletchna!” they said and roared into laughter as we got back into the jeep.  “Atletchna,” I fired back with excitement, like elementary kid who just got accepted by the cool guys.  The men smiled and gave us thumbs up.
I am convinced that in this part of the world ninety-five percent of the people there want to you to have a good time and speak positively about their country.  Being isolated, landlocked, and poor, most Tajiks never make it beyond their national borders.  Actually, most never make it beyond their small, localized, region in their small country.  They are proud people with history and tradition.  This for the most part this is all they have to hang onto.  And by meeting outsiders like us—which is very rare—they firstly want you to feel welcome with waves of hospitality, but secondly want you to bring a positive message to the West that is not based on bad politics or poverty.  They want a good voice to get to the outside world which seems like another galaxy away.  A world that is developing and moving quickly ahead while their world is crumbling behind.

I looked out at the wildness of the landscape, a universe away from my upbringing.  A cool breeze rushed over my face.  The three men sped off into the night;  their taillights became distant and then disappeared into the darkness.  It was just us again, removed from everything, hidden deeply in the Tajik night.  Giovanni and I smiled deeply at each other; no words needed to be spoken.  The stars were beaming and I looked up at the raw magnitude of the Pamirs with awe.  Forces were at work that I had no control over.  Giovanni and I got back in the jeep and sped off towards Khorog in the heart of Badikshan.

We reached the lights of Khrog just before sunrise.  The road trip of a lifetime had ended.  Schumacher and his son awoke, not because of a noise or light, but because their bodies knew exactly how many miles had passed by.  Schumacher couldn’t find the address of where Giovanni was staying, and for the first time Giovanni lost a bit of his patience.  He couldn’t speak any Russian, so I had to translate the details of his accommodations in Russian to Schumacher.  Schumacher had no clue where to go.  After nineteen hours of driving, we were turning circles aimlessly and reaching dead ends on the few back streets of the town.  Eventually, we found the place which was a small building with no lights on.  Giovanni said I could sleep there for the night.  I crawled under the heavy covers and reflected on my outrageous journey from Dushanbe; the experience had exhausted me completely.  I closed my eyes and free fell into sleep as my toes dipped down into the earth’s mantle.

Next up, dropping Giovanni off in Afghanistan.

Tajikistan Part 5

Last episode I just finished the most adventurous road trip of my life.  I was now thicker into the unknown of remote southeastern Tajikistan.

I woke up to a clear sun, deep blue cloudless sky, and a rugged mountain vista.   Khorog is a very secluded mountain town.  It is the capital of the Badakshan region, with a population of about twenty thousand people.  Sitting across the powerful Panj River was Afghanistan and a different world.  I spent some time lackadaisically walking around the city.  There was an impoverished but happy vibe to the place.  I was told by a few people that in Soviet times, in an attempt to populate the area, the government would award a gold medal and a new car to any Russian mother who could birth fifteen babies.  Being the far outpost of the Soviet Empire, Moscow wanted to populate the area as much as possible in order to create a foothold in its wild borderland with Afghanistan.  Since the collapse of the Soviet Union most of the Russians had gone back to the motherland therefore the town was mostly made up of  Tajiks.  Being here gave an amazing prospective of how huge and diverse the Soviet Union was.  Moscow in every way felt like a different world from Khorog.
The economy was pretty much shot in Khorog and the town was drip fed by different philanthropic groups that floated through the region.  The Aga Kahn foundation was the prominent force that kept the citizens of this remote region alive.  Despite this dark reality, daily life in Khrog totally surprised me.  Most of the women dressed with fashion and pride like they were in a cosmopolitan European city.  The Pamir girls were attractive and stylish.  The number of people who could speak English was astonishing.  And the education level seemed to be fairly high with most people speaking two or three languages.  People were proud of their small city and many told me how they loved living there and wouldn’t want to live anywhere else.  Of course many were in search of more money, and it seemed like everyone had a family member who had moved and now worked in Moscow and was sending money home.

The only place that had Internet access in town was closed because the power was out.  So instead of making contact with the outside world, I played basketball with some young kids.  Giovanni was writing at his place.  He told me that night that he would be hiring a car to take him to the southern border town of Ishkashim.  From there, he would be entering Afghanistan.  He invited me to come along for the journey.
We left Khorog early in the morning along with a new Schumacher and his friend.  Shortly, we were driving out in the mountainous desert landscape.  The road went south and ran alongside the Panj River with Afghanistan on the other side.  We went through some small Tajik villages.  A few older ladies sitting on the side of the road were selling cigarettes, Mars bars, and beer.  In Afghanistan the landscape was remote with no signs of infrastructure. The fist signs of civilization emerged above the river as I saw a woman in a loose-fitting conservative red dress with a long headscarf wrapped around her head and hanging down her back.  Next to here was a dog outside of a mud hut.  I was sitting in the front row looking at Afghan life in awe.  I had seen and heard much about Afghanistan over the course of the previous two years.  September the eleventh and the Afghan war had dominated U.S. media.  But this open lens, far away from the fighting, was one that I hadn’t looked through yet.

A well-beaten path carved into the steep hillside connected open farmland and Afghan villages together.  They did not have the luxury of electricity.  Sparsely spaced mud huts became more frequent; some of them had pyramid formations of hay on top.  Mostly, I saw people just working the land, many dogs, and sheep. The deep blue/green Panj River was raging as I looked across it to beautiful farmland and stunning mountains that were shooting up to 20,000.  It was two worlds mashed up against one another with a river splitting them apart.  Tajikistan seemed modern because of the fact that it had power lines, a paved road and packaged food.  It perplexed me how big the former Soviet Union was and how many cultures it had brought together into one empire.  The Soviets had done an amazing job of bringing infrastructure out to such a far outpost of the world.  Even in the most-worn out and tired towns there were bus stops with ornate colorful mosaics of Soviet propaganda.

The daylight, heavy with sunshine, brought the spirits high and hid any levels of danger that  might have been present.  But the route we were on was volatile.  We were getting closer to the Afghan border crossing where Giovanni told me  lots of heroin was being shipped being transferred through.  Schumacher added, telling me that often times the drug would be affixed to the chassis of trucks or inside the rims of cars. To thwart the heavy flows of heroin out of Afghanistan, the Russians had set up military checkpoints along the roads to check every vehicle and register every person who was traveling through.

We stopped on the road to incongruously spaced piles of sandbags that were meant to keep a vehicle from speeding through.  Schumacher informed us that we had to go and check in with the Russians.  He parked the car and we walked out to a gate that had a small military base behind it tucked up to a steep barren hillside near the river.  We waited for a long time until some disorganized soldiers came out and asked for our passports.  One of the solders wore a dirtied white tee shirt and camouflage pants.  His shoes were untied and his mannerisms were completely unprofessional as he slovenly shuffled towards us.  He came across like he hadn’t taken an order for a long time; I could not imagine him marching in any coherent way.  The base looked more like a prison than anything else; it became obvious that the living conditions were poor.  A few hard structures were present, but apart from that there were only worn out, green army tents.  A fire was smoldering under a clothesline that was drying uniforms.  Schumacher told me that the Russian solders that were on probation were stationed in Tajikistan.  He said that aside from Chechnya, these were the worst conditions within the Russian army.

The Russians were there to stop to the heroin trade, but it appeared as if they were there taking part in it.  The soldiers seemed to be on heroin themselves as their actions were blank and drifty from afar.  I imagined that being posted in a place like this for an extended period of time would make anyone use the drug.  Despite the heroin usage being high at the base, it was evident that they were happy to see us as they came closer and noticed that we were new faces.  They were excited and took a lot of group pictures with Giovanni and me.  Afterwards we ate a little lamb that was cooking over the fire and one of the solders gave me his AK-47.  The pictures continued as they put me in a Russian army coat and strapped the AK-47 over my shoulder.  They all huddled in for a group shot.
Our paperwork was taking a while to be processed.   Giovanni started telling me about the time he was in Chechnya and had to get through checkpoints to get to the capital city, Grozny, where the fighting was happening.  It was forbidden for journalists to pass through the checkpoints, but Giovanni knew how corrupt and disorganized the Russian army is.  He knew that most of these soldiers had not talked to their parents, wives, kids, or girlfriends in months.  So, Giovanni had one strong point of leverage—his satellite phone.  Every time he would get to a new checkpoint and was told to leave by the Russian soldiers he would bring out his satellite phone as a bargaining chip.  Surrounded by hell, the soldiers would do anything to talk to their loved ones for just a few minutes.  They would line up to use his phone, and after they made their calls, they let Giovanni through. This tactic got him through nine checkpoints and to the front lines of the war in Grozny where no other journalists could reach.

Giovanni’s story cemented the reality of widespread disorganization within the Russian army as we collectively hammered back a half full glass of vodka.  I was starting to get a bit of a buzz on and laughed out loud as I looked at the Russian army coat over my shoulders, the AK-47 that was strapped around me, and the emptied glass of vodka in my hand. At this point, it seemed like our paperwork hadn’t been processed yet because the Russians were more interested in seeing new faces and finding new party friends.  Aimlessly soldiers drifted in and out of tents on the base.  The fire was smoldering now as it was running out of fuel.  The smell of smoke and burnt lamb was ubiquitous.

Finally, one of the soldiers returned with our paperwork and passports.  “Horosho” (good), he said to me as he smiled.  Schumacher drove us on through the valley towards the border town of Ishkashim.  The sun was blasting out its last hour of unfiltered rays.  The desert mountains illuminated red and the river grew a deep turquoise color.  Off in the distance on the Afghan side of the river were towering peaks with glaciers on them.  The Panj River became placid as it slowed down and widened.  Fine white sand beaches were perched softly along its banks.  Giovanni was trying to get through on his satellite phone.  His driver supposedly had made the journey from Kabul to pick him up at the border; Giovanni was unsure if he had made it or not.  Finally, we reached Ishkashim and there was a narrow one-lane bridge crossing into Afghanistan with no signs of life on the other side.  Giovanni seemed to be a bit unnerved.  The border turned out to be closed and wouldn’t be open for another two days.  This bit of news appeared to be a relief for him.

Giovanni and I walked around the town of Ishkashim in search of a guesthouse for him.  We eventually found a place where there was a small room with just floor space for rent.  Giovanni looked happy about his accommodations and untied his scarf and put his baggage down on the creaky wooden floor.  He opened up his luggage and grabbed a huge bag of nuts.  He looked at me with a smile and said, “If worse comes to worse, I can live off of these for days in Afghanistan.”  I became somewhat melancholy and grateful for the times I had enjoyed with Giovanni.  A certain bond comes from outrageous experiences like the ones we had endured together.  I gave Giovanni a big hug goodbye and thanked him for everything.  Schumacher and his co-pilot were ready to leave and had the jeep waiting out front; I jumped in and sped away back towards Khorog.

The returning drive to Khorog was beautiful.  The light dimmed softer and the reds of the mountains along with the greens of the trees and the turquoise of the river popped.  Darkness encroached on our side of the river, but the south-facing mountains of Afghanistan were still illuminated with day.   Schumacher and his friend were conversing over their loud Tajik music and I was just taking in the scenery with happiness.  They were much more relaxed without Giovanni because they looked at him as the boss with the money.
My diet of the last week had finally caught up with me.  Fermented mare’s milk (the most repulsive taste on the planet) combined with grilled lamb, nuts, vodka, and some mystery food, finally spared in my stomach.  My insides growled and my intestines felt insecure.  Then came the pungent gas.  The most-foul gas I had ever smelled took over the airspace of the car in seconds.  Schumacher and his friend looked back at me with disgust and curiosity, their mouths wide open and their noses pinched.  I could see them wondering with puzzled looks if I was capable of creating such a nightmare.  They both snapped out of their shock and rushed for the windows, cranking them down in a furry; their heads were projected out of the car windows as far as possible.  They started doing this spitting gesture with their lips and made a loud “puh” sound over and over again and looked back at me with disgust “puh, puh, puh” Schumacher said.  “Where Giovanni?” he continued.  I didn’t exactly know what his comment meant.  When our airspace became tolerable and their heads were freezing off, they would roll up the windows and sigh a little relief until I viciously unleashed on them again.  This process lasted the whole way back to Khrog.

Night began to fall on both sides of the river.  On the Afghan side, daylight was the barometer of life and there were no signs of movement.  They were on a clock that was dictated by daylight.  But on the Tajik side of the river, it was also dark but life was still abundant in the little towns we passed through.  Kids were playing soccer, older men and women were sitting on their porches, and an old lady was still out near the road selling cigarettes, Mars bars and beer.  The telephone poles were a reminder that electricity had been part of life at one time.  The Tajiks continued on with the day refusing to be dictated by the sun and by the fact that their lights didn’t work anymore.

Physically these days weren’t straining, but mentally my mind was on overdrive.   My thoughts were constantly fired on with new events that were far from anything routine.  Eventually, I woke up in Khorog and looked out my window to another unfiltered sun-drenched day and went back to sleep.  I was planning to travel but instead decided to relax my mind before it got stretched, twisted, and explored again with a new adventure.

Tajikistan Part 6

Last post I dropped Giovanni off at the Afghan border.  This is my last post in Tajikistan and the last epic journey over the Pamir Highway coined as the “Rooftop of the World”.

So much work had gotten me to the heart of Badikshan.  One last epic experience in Tajikistan lay in front of me—traveling the Pamir highway over the “rooftop of the world”. Getting the authorization back in Dushanbe to this remote mountainous region had paid off.  My passport had its endorsement from Gafon, who wrote down the names of the towns I would be going through on this journey in neat Russian cursive…Jelandy, Murgab, Karakul.  Word had it that the Pamir Highway was festooned with checkpoints and corruption.  Gafon’s little bit of black ink would supposedly get me through.  The journey was 728 kilometers, topping out at Ak-Baital Pass (4655 Meters) and was going to take at least two days granted good weather, no breakdowns, and no checkpoint issues.

I woke up the next day at 4:30 a.m. and left the lady’s house where I’d stayed.  I was hoping to find a taxi to take me to the base of the pass, but there wasn’t a soul awake in Khorog except the birds.  A local told me the day before that the checkpoint at the base of the pass was two kilometers from town.  So, I started walking in the dark.  I walked under the stunning mountain sky with the stars glowing above me.  To my left was a tall, white statue of Lenin with towering peaks behind it.  Above me a majestic hue of blue was emerging through the black sky.  After an hour or so of walking, I realized that the checkpoint was not two kilometers away.

The sound of a loud engine tickled my ears and I looked back with excitement.  It was the first bit of sound I had heard apart from the chirping of the birds.  I put my arm out and made eye contact with the driver.  He stopped, smiled, offered me a ride, and drove me out to the checkpoint another 10 kilometers away.

A few locals told me that the best way of getting over the Pamirs was hitchhiking.  Since there was no public transport, I thought it would be a good idea to stand outside the checkpoint where the trucks stopped at the base of the pass and try to get a ride with one of them.  I stood in front of the checkpoint with the cold crisp air making my nose twitch and my eyes tear and run.  I was waiting anxiously for that first truck.  The light blue darkened and the south facing mountains came alive and glowed a light red-orange.   From the checkpoint, the road went immediately up and ascended towards higher peaks in the thick of the Pamirs.
My eyes only caught the movement of birds.  Nothing else was moving in my periphery. Not one vehicle passed by all morning, and after hours of waiting, I started to wonder how I was going to get over the pass.  Nothing had come easy in Tajikistan and I realized that getting over the Pamir Highway and exiting the country would be no different.  The sun had risen from behind the mountains, casting early afternoon shadows from the mountains above.  After five hours of waiting, I realized that I had to change my strategy.

An official working at the checkpoint informed me that there were jeeps occasionally making the journey, and that I needed to hook up with one at the Khorog market.  He sympathetically drove me to the market and directed me to the right place.  After a bit of asking around, I found a Russian-made jeep—like the one I traveled in with Giovanni—that was soon to leave.  They needed to find one last person to fill up the jeep.  I agreed on a $30 fee with the driver who said he could drive me to the town of Murgab—halfway to Kyrgyzstan—and from there I would have to figure out a way to continue.   There were four others passengers, plus the driver, and myself.  They motioned for me to have the front seat as the four other passengers crammed into the back of the jeep.

The jeep was well decorated and homely.  A brightly colored Afghan carpet fixed to the roof and to the sides of the vehicle.  On the driver’s side, a decorative wild horse print was imprinted on the seat cover.  I looked back observing the others shifting and adjusting so that they could fit four sets of hips between the two back doors of the vehicle.  On the right was a young college student named Katya, who was traveling back from Dushanbe to her hometown of Murgab.  She was an attractive girl with a soft pink headscarf tied around her head, deep brown eyes, and a fresh, inquisitive look.  To my luck, she knew some English and told me it was one of her dreams to know the language well.  To her left was an older Tajik woman who was wearing a purple scarf.   Her turquoise eyes were the intense and powerful emulating the color of the Panj River that I admired days earlier.  She looked me with clarity and depth.  There was a military captain in full camouflage gear from head to toe.  He had a thick moustache and a large build.  His eyes looked tired but he had a nice, genuine smile when he spoke.  Squashed up to the passenger rear door was a Kazak man with a black hat and dark sunglasses.   He came across shady at first with his looks but he was friendly and was very persistent on me taking the front seat.

This Schumacher had the same frame as the Schumacher Giovanni and I did the nineteen-hour road trip with.  But his nose was more rounded, he wore a baseball cap, and his eyes weren’t bugged out of his head hanging on by a few stressed out optic nerves.  He started up the jeep and sped out of the market and Khorog.  We passed the point where I was standing all morning and made it through the checkpoint with ease.  Schumacher waved, and the guards waved back with large smiles.  We drove through the large Gunt Valley that gradually gained elevation.  The lush poplars moved slowly to a gentle breeze.
A “wrrr, wrrr, wrrr” could be heard penetrating though the front right fender.  Schumacher quickly pulled over to the side of the road.  Everyone got out of the jeep; all of the men got on their backs and climbed under it in an attempt to diagnose the problem.  Schumacher told me the hub was bad and said, chas (time).  More men from a house across the street came over to help.  Everyone stood behind the vehicle and pushed into a driveway.  The crew of eight guys got to the jeep right away like a NASCAR pit crew.  The hood was opened, the chassis jacked, and the wheels flew off.

I was looked at as a guest and not a mechanic; an older lady at the doorway invited into the house with the other ladies.  We sat down on ornate carpets around a spread of bread and yogurt.  The light shone brightly through the large widow framed by purple curtains. We sat cross-legged and began to eat. The lady of the house poured me a cup of warm tea that contained milk, salt, and butter.  She smiled and gestured for me to drink.  The butter in the tea tasted out of place for me but I knew I had to finish it.  Every sip I took brought me farther way from being rude.  I could vaguely hear the guys working on the jeep; the thick walls of the house muffled the sounds of the machinery and voices.

The jeep was fixed in about an hour and we set off again.  The late afternoon sun deepened the green and red colors of the landscape.  The Pamir Mountains continued to shoot up on both sides of us.  We gained elevation out of the valley and the terrain became dryer and the vegetation scarcer.  The jeep groaned, as it desired more oxygen.  Schumacher shifted down, gearing up for the steep incline.  At the summit of the pass the road didn’t crest and descend, it just flattened out.  A harsh, cold environment emerged under a deep blue and purple sky.  A single house was on the left side of the road.  It looked desolate, grim, and unnatural.  Unnatural because it was the only house I had seen in hours.  And unnatural because this wasn’t an easy place for humanity, it was a place for harsh climatic conditions and beautiful skies.  Patches of snow covered the ground.   A ripping wind came through the door cracks of the jeep and found its way underneath my clothes.

The oddities of the place started to grow on me as we reached the top of another pass and gradually descended down.  Schumacher and I cracked opened beers that he packed.  They sounded off with a loud pressurized pop; the CO2 hit the back of my dry throat with a refreshing zing.  Schumacher turned up the Tajik music, and we both looked at each other and smiled.  The stars were gleaming out of the alpenglow with intensity.  I looked to my left

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and saw the profile of Schumacher’s face with a small fire in front of it.  He was enjoyably smoking his cheap filtered cigarette, drinking his beer, and singing to his music with passion.  I saw some eagles gliding and diving towards a sun that wasn’t setting on the horizon, but somehow below the earth.  Darkness fell, and we topped out over our final pass and descended into Murgab.

A large guard dressed in a thick coat at the checkpoint requested that I come into the outpost alone.  Everyone was sleeping in the back of the jeep, Schumacher was half asleep at the wheel.  I stepped out of the jeep into the thin winter air and entered the cramped shack.  The steel door suddenly closed behind me.  As it slammed with force the metal doorframe echoed like a prison door at Alcatraz.  It must have been 2 a.m.  The soldiers were brightened by candles and still awake.  The air was silent and I was powerless.  But the solders soon became open and friendly.  They were interested in my story.  They asked me questions from what the ocean looked and smelled like to what I thought of George Bush.  All of the information from my passport was written down in a thick book of passport numbers and names.  I was free to go after an hour.

We reached the town of Murgab, which was completely smothered in blackness.  After dropping everyone off at their houses, Schumacher realized I had no place to go.  There were no hotels in town so he invited me to stay with him.  His wife woke up and made me a comfortable bed with animal furs and blankets. The furs quickly retained my heat as I fell fast into a deep sleep.

Outside Schumacher’s front door that morning was a bleak existence; it was obvious that poverty was king in Murgab.  The thin air was still and chilly, but the sun was intense and bleached the landscape.  The backside of my neck was freezing cold in the shade, yet my face was already toasty warm from the sun.  Telephone poles and power lines crisscrossed everywhere as a reminder of what the place once was.  There was infrastructure without the means as power had been shut off for years.  Dirtied white buildings, broken glass, shit patties, derelict cars, and dirt made up the landscape.  Fragile chickens with plucked feathers ran around chasing each other with their bony legs next to stray dogs.   Schumacher’s wife and a few of her friends stood next to a wall warming up in the sun, talking away, and smiling.

The ladies seemed to be without the need of structured time.  Time was an irrelevant and an unnecessary measure in Murgab.  Indeed, Murgab was the antithesis of Switzerland in this in this and every other regard.  This was the type of place where seconds seemed like hours and hours like seconds.  The clock didn’t belong here, only the necessities of life demanded structured movement.  Natural functions of eating when hungry or heating when cold were the measures to move by.  When I looked out at the ladies, they were living for the sake of feeling the earth under them.  If there was a clock around it would have looked like Salvador Dali’s The Persistence of Memory.

I spent the morning squatting beside the ladies listening them talk in Tajik.  I couldn’t understand a word they were saying but they would look my way, smile, and then chuckle.  Murgab felt raw and innocent at the same time.  Simple smiles were rewarding and free, but the living conditions were borderline at best.

The Pamir people are good-looking people, but most get an aged look early in life from the harsh climatic conditions.  Teenagers have advanced wrinkles from the intense sun, and children’s skin is dry and irritated.  While focusing on survival, without the crutch of material comfort, children grow up quickly in Murgab.  But it was the genuine gestures and real smiles restricted by nothing—like being late for an appointment—which brought the value of the place up.

Katya from the jeep trip walked over from across the street towards me.  She greeted the ladies who all knew her and looked at me with a smile.
“How are you?” she said.
“I’m doing well,” I replied.
“Let’s go”.
“Where are we going?”
“You can stay at my family’s house for the night, come with me”.
Her composure was that of a confident thirty-year-old woman.  My living arrangements were set up in Murgab even though I was planning to leave to neighboring Kyrgyzstan that day.

We went to Katya’s family’s house across town up on a hill and walked past a clean and preserved white stature of Lenin with children playing beneath him.  There was a bronze star near the stature of Lenin.  This star is ubiquitous all across the former Soviet Union: it is a memorial for those lost in WWII where they lost upwards of 25 million people.  This one was the first one that didn’t have a flame coming out of it, since it looked to be out of fuel.  The roads were rough and potholed.  We walked by an alleyway where a net hanged across it.  Teens played volleyball unrestricted by electronics.  Laughter echoed between the buildings. Women suspended laundry outside to dry.  A couple of stray chickens chased each other around an alleyway.  Dog shit was off to the side of where everyone walked.

Katya’s family’s modest one-story house was a dirty white on the outside like all of the other homes.   Inside was a different story, it was very clean with ornate carpets both on the floor and affixed to the walls.  Sunlight coming in from the windows illuminated the many colors inside.  I was introduced to her father, mother, and her many sisters and brothers.  They took me to another room with a low table and told me to sit on the floor.  Katya came in and sat across from me while her sisters served us tea, bread, and yogurt.

Katya had to go help out that afternoon at the elementary school.   She showed me where one of the aid organizations was, supposedly they had information about transportation leaving to Kyrgyzstan.  We walked down the sunny but barren street with a cold wind that whipped up quickly.  My dark blue jacket absorbed the strong sun and was warm by touch, keeping me from freezing.  I went to the aid organization where a lady showed me to the market, which was where all the transportation gathered before departing town and where to register with the local faction of the KGB (they still called it that there).  Registering in every town and checkpoint is required in this part of Tajikistan.  After registration I had time to kill and I felt like getting some exercise.

A small treeless mountain shot right out of Murgab and I decided to climb it.  At the bottom was a drab looking government building surrounded by barbwire and a guard with a machine gun hanging over his shoulder.  I walked far around the perimeter of the building where the guard noticed me.  He didn’t take any action or say anything.  I looked at this reaction as an approval to climb.  There was no trail, so I walked straight up the dirt and eroded rock.  I reached the top in about an hour and received a bird’s eye view of the sun-washed bleakness of Murgab.  The sharp winds were ripping through me; my thick pirated Adidas hat I purchased a few days back was my savior from the cold.

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Approaching Murgab from all different angles didn’t change the prospective of it.  It looked just as bleak from close up as it did from far away.  But the cool part about this place was the astounding coordinates in the world it held.  In front of me was Murgab, Tajikistan.  As I did a clockwise circle: China, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan rotated by.  These exotic countries were all relatively close from where I was.

After descending from the peak, two of Katya’s sisters were waiting for me at the bottom of the mountain.  They escorted me back to the house. The family seemed very close, and this was partially because the quarters were cramped.  Noises of laughter and conversation took over the room; occasionally the sound of wind ripping through a leaky window could be heard.  The cooking began.  Smoke and the smell of chicken filled the air and made my eyes water as the house warmed up.   I sat with the father at the table; everyone else was eating down on the kitchen floor.

I remembered being told by the Tajiks at the embassy in Uzbekistan that people were very hospitable in Tajikistan.  And I remembered being a bit surprised by this as I thought Tajikistan as a volatile place in a volatile part of the world.  But here I found myself being taken in by complete strangers who cared about the comfort of my stay.

I wanted to know how the father felt about Murgab, Tajikistan, and the former Soviet Empire.  I started asking questions through Katya’s translation to her father.

“Is it better here now or in Soviet times?”  I asked.  She skipped the translation and responded with a curt and pronounced

“Soviet times” like it was common knowledge.

Katya’s father was eager to speak, passion washed over his facial expression and his eyes became wide and excited.  Katya tried to keep up with her father’s quick talking.   She said he didn’t like Putin, Yeltson, or Gorbachev, and told me that Lenin, Stalin, and Khrushchev were great leaders.  From a Western perspective this seemed a bit off, but after a few days in Murgab it made sense.  At least Murgab had a minimal share of the Soviet pie in those times.  According to her father, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Moscow had stopped subsidizing the borderlands like Tajikistan and it became economically dysfunctional with its limited resources.  Under the Soviet Union, Moscow set up infrastructure and a taste of modernity in places like Murgab.  Everyone had access to a good education and health care.

“Now what do we have?” Katya said to me, translating her father’s words.

“At least during Soviet times the apples weren’t rotten and the lights worked consistently.”

It was obvious that a radio could enhance someone’s life exponentially more in Murgab, but since there was no power, nostalgia for the past seemed to take over.  At least with Stalin the radio could be turned on.

I had no idea what people did for work in Murgab apart from a few government or teaching jobs.  I was sure that the pay was less than the average kids allowance at home in the U.S.  But doing any job in Murgab would beat the monotony of nothingness that dominates the place.  The father worked at the electrical plant, but I couldn’t figure out what he might be doing there.

You definitely feel closer to the sun, moon, and stars in a town removed from the world at 11,000 feet.  Maybe this element of Murgab could be addictive if brought up there, but I just couldn’t imagine the winter with lots of snow and cold, no power, and isolation.  But at least I had a choice, which was not the case for most Murgab residents.

I stayed with Katya’s family that night.  Even though the dynamic of the family unit seemed well-functioning, there were moments when a thick silence would sweep over the voices and mute them out.  The room would become quiet and the sounds of the howling wind would remind everyone of the long hard winter ahead.  There was a “what’s next?” look amongst the family that the parents, especially the father, had on their faces.

We played some card games huddled around a kerosene lantern.  The originality and simplicity apart from the technology of phones and working light switches had an attractive side.  It made for an evening without many distractions.   We played on into the night until the lantern started hissing and dimming.  The mother brought out some candles and lit them.  The lantern extinguished and the flickering candlelight took over dancing with warm light over everyone’s faces.

The daughters rolled out mats on the floor with blankets.  They set my sleeping area up on the highest position in the house as act of respect.  Cold from the outside was penetrating through the walls.  We all made our way to our sleeping areas.  The family huddled tightly on the floor in unison while I slept off on my own submerged under the weight of many blankets.

I woke up the next morning with a burning desire to leave.  The sun was out again, fast at work cooking away the remainder of the night’s cold.   Children were out playing, adults were passing time smiling and laughing, and the mood was tranquil.  But, like any outsider, I believe that the desire to leave a place like Murgab is innate.

I said goodbye to the family and thanked them for everything, Katya walked me down to the market.  Everyone in the village was smiling and chatting in freedom and limitation.  Free, because they had the time to keep conversations going for hours, but imprisoned, because they could never leave those conversations.  I said goodbye to Katya and told her I could make the rest of my way on my own.  I approached the market and quickly noticed the vacant lot, not one vehicle was in the vicinity.  A dose of panic shot up my arms to the thought of entrapment in Murgab.  Public transportation or trucks were not leaving Murgab on this day.  But I wasn’t willing to give up on my desperate desire to escape.  After a few hours of asking around, I realized that the only way out was to pay high dollars for it.  I was willing to do whatever it took.  Hours later, I finally negotiated with some locals to pay $125 for an escort to Osh, Kyrgyzstan.

I jumped in a jeep with two younger guys and we puttered around town taking care of little duties like changing the license plates to Kyrgyz ones, getting special registration for the trip, hanging out at their friends house, and sitting down for lunch.  It felt like I was stuck at a crowded airport with every plane grounded on the tarmac without the prospect of leaving for days.

We finally departed and I looked back down the straight road towards Murgab in awe that a place like this existed.  We sped out of the blip of civilization, it was just the raw forces of nature around us.  I was concerned about being able to get the guys to stop for pictures of the rugged landscape, but this seemed to work out without a hitch since they had to fill up the leaky radiator every twenty minutes.  The first checkpoint we stopped at was grim and depressing.  It was a little shack with a steal gate across the road.  The guard seemed to be either drunk or high on something as he walked around in a zigzag pattern.  Again, we were on one of the main arteries out of Afghanistan and the heroin business was good after the fall of the Taliban.  But it was all about who knew who in this part of the world, and luckily, my driver seemed to be friends with everyone.  To the right of us emerged a large electric fence extending about fifteen feet out of the ground—this was the border with China that we were driving alongside.

Eventually, we ascended to the highest point of the journey, the AK-Baital Pass at a little over 14,000 feet.  From here I got a view of Lenin Peak towering at 24,000 feet.  This was not the Soviet Union I envisioned in my youth.  Images of drab apartment blocks in Moscow broadcasted over television didn’t resemble this part of the empire.
We descended off of the pass for some time without seeing another vehicle until we eventually stopped with a serious radiator problem.  This was the first town we had encountered since we left Murgab seven hours earlier.  The town was Karakul.  It was bleaker than Murgab with a smaller population at a higher elevation.  Instead of white structures, most people lived in yurts.  The temperature was about fifteen degrees cooler.   The whole town came out for the action of our breakdown and I quickly noticed a welding torch was out.  About five or six guys were working on the jeep at once.  Two guys were up in the engine bay with their entire bodies submerged in it, while one of the drivers was underneath the jeep getting pissed on by radiator fluid.  Russian jeeps seemed pretty straight forward, which was a good thing since part stores were as common as tourists.  The Tajiks were a crafty bunch that through attrition could make any part needed.

An older man dressed in a suit with a tall curly wig on his head that looked more like a black poodle than human hair took me aside.  The older man insisted that I let the others work on the jeep while we did some sight seeing.  He brought me out to the surreal looking lake on the outskirts of town.  The weather was partially cloudy and ominous.  The sky was illuminated with deep purples and cold blues.  Ice was forming on the side of the lake as small waves lapped over the rocks.  I could see the end of the lake off towards the mountains, but it looked more like a treacherous ocean with its rough waters.  Communism Peak was in the background with massive glaciers and rugged formations.  We walked slowly around the shoreline taking the sights without talking to each other.  The wind picked up and it got way below freezing.  He invited me back to his yurt for some tea.

The yurt had carpets on the walls with a small wood stove in the middle.  There were no trees around, so instead of wood they burned cow patties for warmth.   My fingers were frozen. The hot tea passed to me they swelled my fingers with heat from the mug.  I spent time in the yurt exchanging smiles and listening to an infant wail away as her young sister rocked her back and forth in a homemade crib.  Darkness started to fall just as the yurt door opened.

“Pete, we go!”  the driver said, entering the yurt with a smile.

I started to warm up to the driver and his partner.  After our initial transaction of $125 for the trip I kept my mouth silent and my guard up.  I didn’t want them to think I was easy to extract money from.  But as our day continued on, I realized that the journey was farther than I thought and the expense of the breakdown was digging into their profits.  Also they had to go through the pain of dealing with the checkpoints.  With darkness came more checkpoints.  The driver would socialize with the guards, walk into the shacks and sip tea with them.  We were on Tajik time and I had fully adjusted to not getting much done.

A bright moon rose over the high peaks as we left Tajikistan and entered Kyrgyzstan.  The geography didn’t change, but a feeling of accomplishment washed over me.  I had pulled off with great success the most difficult country I had ever traveled through.  So many things went right when they could have easily gone the other way.  Since my entrance three weeks earlier, adventure was my everyday mantra.  I didn’t see one other tourist or westerner other than Giovanni.  I tapped myself in the unknown and pulled it off with tons of great experiences.  I was ready for Kyrgyzstan but relished in my truest definition of success—making it happen 100% on my own in a far outpost of the world.

We descended for hours out of the dark cold to a lit up and warmer Kyrgyzstan.   A road emerged from the right from China.  The road surface improved dramatically and trucks transporting all sorts of goods from China were ubiquitous.  I felt like I had been transported back into the developed world.
We stopped at a truck stop that was filled with Chinese truckers.  The guys and I sat down and ordered large meals and a couple of beers. My drivers were Kyrgyz and looked Asian. Ironically, they identified much more with European culture than Chinese.  Tajikistan’s history of Soviet domination brought it into a European sphere.   Influence came from Moscow through the catalyst of television, cinema, art, and literature.  They said they didn’t like the Chinese and spent a bit of time mocking their behavior with different faces and noises.  Suddenly, time became more apparent as the Chinese drivers walked at a quicker cadence.

We eventually reached Osh, Kyrgyzstan’s second city at about midnight.  I observed the first gas station I had seen in weeks.  The pavement around the gas station was new and the pumps were clean and lit up.  Kyrgyzstan felt like the Promised Land, and it was the simple features of modern civilization—like lights and a gas station—that made it feel that way.

Next Post:  Flying into Damascus, Syria at night.

Syria Part 1

George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston can be an interesting place or quite dull depending on your perception or circumstance.  The flight board touches every city in Middle America with any sort of a populace, and also services a number of international destinations.   Southern drawls and Midwestern accents fill up the terminals, overpowering a smattering of foreign languages.  Luckily, I didn’t have a nonstop to Amarillo, but a direct flight to London-Gatwick.

My transfer was brief in Houston.  I waited before our gate with excitement.  For some reason TSA required that everyone get in line to have their ticked checked.  It guessed it was an overbooked flight.  As I reached the front of the line I came across a tense conversation.

“I thought we had a problem,” the TSA officer said in a serious tone.  Her motions were square; the air around her was tense.
“That lady had a Syrian passport.”

“But she’s okay because she has residency in England.”

I showed my passport to the same TSA officer.  She looked at me with disappointment.
“Your passport is fraying,” she said to me.   “And a passport that isn’t 100% intact isn’t acceptable.”
She held my passport up to the light and attempted to look through it.  She couldn’t find anything wrong with my picture so she started plucking at the corners.  Her lips were pursed, her forehead pinched and tense.   Her fingers stabbed at my frays as she was deciding if she could fray me away from departure.  I kept quiet.  She handed the passport back to me with the look of a mother whose son just got suspended from second grade, then grudgingly let me through.

I had planned this trip for about a year and a half; I would spend my Christmas break seeing a country that is definitely misrepresented in the West.  Tarnished with negative press, I journeyed to Syria looking for a greater truth; I was craving to understand the Middle East devoid of any outside influence or distraction.

Everyone I knew cautioned me of the dangers before I left.  One family member told me that I might be beheaded.  Even my philosophy professor, who was about to travel to Liberia, advised me to stay clear of Syria.  Syria was sinominous with terrorism and danger in the 2006 American lexicon.   And even though I respected the concern from everyone, they were all giving me faulty advice.  I did my research and found tourist kidnappings or homicides were non-existent.  After a few days in London, and a couple of days in Moscow, I boarded Aeroflot flight SU 517 to Damascus.  Houston seemed a world away.

The flight from Moscow to Damascus was not as adventurous as I’d expected.  Families were traveling for the holidays.  It was a lively flight: babies shook rattles, children ran up and down the center isle, and parents read stories with the cabin lights on to their kin.  There wasn’t the edge of flying like in Tajikistan when I flew with a busted seat belt, a gold-toothed seatmate, a four foot dagger lying across my lap, and aggressive vodka consumption before 10A.M.  I sat next to a half Syrian/Russian businessman and an Iraqi man from Kirkuk who was in Russia for oil mechanics training.

My conversation with my seatmates about Russian politics and life in Iraq stopped when, outside the window, I saw a sea of lights.  This sea was different than any other big city I’ve flown into at night.  The difference was the green lights contrasting with the white ones; there were hundreds at the top of every mosque.  A long line of white lights stretched from the city to the airport, far from the green lights of the mosques: A highway, bisecting the naked black desert.   I took a deep breath and smiled.  I was about to touch down in the Arab world.

Russian pilots fly in a way that reflects their personalities.  They seem to be low on B.S., just like the culture itself.  In Russia, smiles are given when they are real.  Life is not sugarcoated.  In flying, Russian pilots mirror their culture.   They take a direct course without wasting any time, or trying to hide the fact of what they are really there to do, which is to get the plane out of the sky and to a runway in the shortest amount of time.  I felt and heard the landing gear smack down with a loud thud.  The pilot took a 90-degree turn to the left and roughly dropped thousands of feet in an instant.  Everything shifted around in the plane and my stomach went weightless. The landing was a gray area of sky and earth; the pilot fused them together seamlessly.  It was 2 A.M. and I was on Syrian soil.

Immigrations were a breeze, and I stood outside of Damascus International under the canopy of a large date palm and a larger-than-life illuminated picture of Bashar Al Assad, the Syrian president.  He wore a quintessential seventies mustache.  His firm gaze out of the billboard made him look animate.  I could walk to the left, or the right, or anywhere 180 degrees in front of Bashar and he would be looking at me.

A soft warm wind came over my face; the desert air-dried out any moisture left in me from Russia and smelled like sand.  The weather was welcoming; the cadence of human movement was much slower than it had been in Moscow.  I was completely out of my environment, like a senior citizen on crutches in a mosh-pit.  My bags were waiting beside me ready for the next step.   I was in that sweet spot.  This was one of those feelings I wish I could have bottled up and saved for a rainy day at college.  But to get this special feeling, I needed time, money, and an adventurous itinerary.

I went out to the street and waved in a small Chinese-made cab; when it stopped I sat down in the front seat.  An Iraqi couple took the seat behind me.  The driver spoke to them quickly.  I heard Damascus, Tony Blair, George W. Bush, and Sadamm Husain in the span of a few sentences.  Arab music was pumping out of the stereo.
The Iraqi man behind me was in his fifties and wore a white checkerboard cloth around his head.  His skin was dark and leathered; he wore a weathered dress suit and was missing teeth. Strain stretched his face.  His wife looked tired and broken.

“Where are you from?” the Iraqi asked me.

“The United States.”

Instantly the man became vocal.

“George Bush and Tony Blair are the worlds biggest terrorists!” he said vehemently in near perfect English.  “Iraq is the 51^st state!”

I didn’t respond.  Right away I felt the twisted pleasure of being put in a pinch.  We drove down the empty illuminated highway.  The music was good.  Colossal pictures of Basher Al Assad and his father passed on the side of the road at minute intervals as we sped closer to the city.  They were as ubiquitous as the green lights ascending the hillside in the distance.

“Do you like George Bush?”  The man behind me asked in a calmer and curious manner.

“No,” I replied.

I explained that I didn’t enjoy having W as a president or his foreign policy.  The man relaxed, opened up, and gave me a big smile.

“The American people are good people,” he said with enthusiasm.  “We just hate the government and the policies of it that are making our lives hell”.

My mind was sparking for something to say, but I came up empty.

The infrastructure of the highways was much better than I expected.  The roads were wide and the pavement was smooth.  Damascus neared; we veered off for the city center.   The buildings were mostly fours stories high with ac units popping out of many of the windows.  There were a few mid-sized skyscrapers speckled around in between.  It was about three in the morning and the only forms of life were policemen with machine guns strapped over their shoulders.  We approached a large illuminated roundabout.  A huge Bashar al Assad billboard reminded me of where I was for the thirty-fifth time.  The driver dropped me out front of a worn and pollution-stained three-story building and pointed up; his eyes focused and he gave me an assuring smile.
“Good guesthouse there.”

Just hours earlier I had been with my Russian friends, braving a cold wind in Moscow.  Hours later, I was in the heart of the Arab world.  Already I could feel the openness of the place as the warm breeze swept by.  I said good-bye to my first relationships on Arab soil and left shaking the two men’s hands.  We exchanged smiles, and wished each other good luck.  The woman kept silent in the back seat.

I walked up three steep flights to the Nijmat al-shark guesthouse.  I had to hang my bags over my back because the passage was narrow.   When I got to the first floor I heard some chatter, so I stopped and looked to my right.   I received an inquisitive look from four men and two boys.  A large spread of vegetables, hummus, and chicken, was placed on a table in front of them in a small clothing store.  The store was small but cluttered with clothes.  The ceiling was low and the light was bright.  They invited me in and prepared a plate for me and asked where I was from.
“I’m from the United States.”

“Welcome to Syria!”  they responded.

We exchanged smiles, good food, and a bit of conversation.  Two large pictures of Bashar Al Assad and Nasarella (the leader of Hezbollah) hanged above me.  Underneath, soccer posters with Arabic writing filled up the rest of the wall.

I was looking to get my bearings.  This is always an interesting time when traveling; it’s that first day where everything seems very foreign and fresh.  After a few days, initial foreign elements fade away and the newness becomes almost normal.  It is the beginning of this process that is always the most stimulating.

I thanked the guys for the meal and went up to my guesthouse.  I had to wake up the owner by knocking on the door loudly.  He opened the door and was in a daze.  He was rubbing the sleep out of them to see who I was.  “Salam Aleikum,” he said to me in a sleepy voice.

My introduction to the day was the 5 A.M. Morning Prayer vibrating through my fragile, thin-glassed window.  The sun was early and strong; birds outside occasionally flapped their wings on the glass.  I only put my head down for an hour.  This was not a time for rest, and my body and mind easily forfeited any need for sleep.  I was in Damascus.  The day was starting and my bottled-up excitement wouldn’t let me miss out on anything.

I turned on the television to a surprising news report: A beautiful girl with a tight top and a short skirt strutted around through the static.  She was walking around in front of the weather map as if she was on the strip in Milan.   Her overdone hair was devoid of a headscarf, her lipstick was bright red, and it was obvious by the waving of her hips that she was hovering over six inches of stiletto-authority.  Her last job could have been at a network in Moscow.

I exited the hotel into a vibrant city with life spilling out from the streets.  Pollution and dust kicked up into the air as cars and motorcycles sped around the large roundabout in front of me. The combination of delicious smelling smoked chicken and burnt fossil fuels accosted my olfactory senses.  Fashion was paramount.  Men wore wrinkleless slacks with tucked in shirts. Small children wore black leather dress shoes. The second call to prayer of the day echoed off the tall buildings.  Everything felt like it was coming from an unsuspected direction, like a Nor’easter.  The sun was strong and the palms were swaying gently in a warm, calm breeze.  Above the city was a large hillside with intricate streets wound between interconnecting houses, shops, and mosques.  A large portrait of Bashar al Assad stood in the roundabout in front of me.  People moved in all directions.  The place was pumping like a large Hawaiian wave.

Syria Part 2

My first impression of the people was that of diversity.  The Syrian people are a product of their history; while the average Syrian has darker skin, hair, and brown eyes, it is not abnormal to see red heads, blue eyes, or fair or black skin.  I saw women only exposing their eyes while under complete black cover, walking beside girls with knee-high leather boots and short skirts.  Even combinations of the two walking down the street together as friends.

Jesus Christ came on stage not long ago in Damascene chronology.  Damascus is considered the oldest inhabited city in the world; it has harnessed civilization for the past 10,000 years. Therefore, it is impossible to ignore the depth of the city—history and experience is palpable; as you only have to look at the thousand-year old walls for proof.
Syria is under an “authoritative grip,” but as I walked it didn’t feel to be such a repressive place from a surface level.  The truth is Damascus is problably one of the safest big cities in the world.  Crime virtually does not exist here.  The streets are mostly devoid of drunks, junkies, freaks, and organized crime.

I walked my way through the busy streets to the old walled-in city of Damascus.   Inside was a labyrinth of alleys and passageways.  Muslims, Christians, and Jews are all represented here, their shrines erected high above the archaic shops and living quarters.

I decided to visit the Umayyad Mosque, the gem of Damascus and the supposed resting place of John the Baptist’s head.  In the Umayyad Mosque, it is required—like every other mosque—that you take off your shoes.  I was removing my shoes when I accidentally bumped into the man next to me.  He looked at me and said excuse me in English.  His name was Mohammad and I was soon to find out that every other person in Syria is named Mohammad.

Mohammad was a big guy with a hearty beer gut, an Iraqi who had lived in Australia for the past ten years and was back to the Middle East, alone, on a soul-searching vacation.  A Plumber by trade, Mohammad was 22 years old and had a hybrid Aussi/Arabic accent.  He showed me around the Mosque and explained the history of it to me.  Mohammad was content to explain the history of Islam and its days of grandeur but I could feel he had a bit of a hang up.

Mohammad was starkly anti-American in politics.  He believed in many conspiracies, from George Bush’s planning of 9/11, to the denial of the Holocaust.

“All the education in the U.S. comes from the Arab world,” he told me.

His arrogance was a bit thick and his information was off, but it was interesting to hear his perspective.

“Most college professors in America are from the Middle East,” he continued.

“I have no interest in going to the states mate.”

For all his negativity towards the U.S., he treated me with respect.  His rhetoric eventually dissolved as we ate dinner, laughed, drank beers and shopped.  Mohammad insisted on buying everything for me.

Mohammad brought me to an ancient hammam (bathhouse) where we got massages on large marble stones and relaxed in the steam room.  In the entryway, old men chatted and sipped tea in a methodical fashion.  Pictures of Bashar Al Assad, Hafez Al Assad and Nasrella were looking down at us.  The social cohesion was strong and I felt very welcome in the hamamm.  The men passed around tea and constantly said,

“Salam Aleikum” (peace be with you).

We said goodbye to the older men, Mohammad and I proceeded to the door.  Mohammad stopped and picked up a magazine lying out on the table.

“Do you know what this says in Arabic?”

I looked at the magazine with a large US flag on the front cover with the Star of David pasted into each of the fifty stars.

“It says, America’s war with Lebanon,” he continued with a shake of his head.

Mohammad was referring to the 34-day war between Israel and Hezbollah the previous summer.
Mohammad wasn’t a true practicing Muslim; he didn’t pray five times a day.  He lived in the consumerist Western culture of Australia, but his roots were also in the Arab world.  It seemed he was unable to let go of the past, but also unable to understand his present.  Mohammad was stuck in-between two worlds with a foot lightly placed in Australia and one in the Middle East, unable to put much weight down in either one.

It’s obvious that Syria’s politics do not align with the United States, yet I found the people to be overwhelmingly hospitable towards me.  It was humbling to learn how well they knew the difference between politics and peoples.   It seemed that everyone in the country knew the English phrase,

“Welcome to Syria, you are welcome here”.

I puttered around Damascus for a few days.  The weather was sunny and warm, and I was in no rush to leave.  Intricate neighborhoods wound steeply up the hillside and rammed against Mt. Qassioun to the west.  When the slope got too steep to build, the desert took over with sand, rock, and scrubby bushes.  Another steep 800 feet in elevation led to the top of the mountain.  I spent days exploring these neighborhoods and would sometimes sit in a small park, or stand on street corners for hours, observing Syrian life.  I caught the attention of only a few people.  Everyone was nice and helpful but not shocked by my foreignness.  This wasn’t like Vietnam where people were awed by my foreignness in their hometown.   I stopped frequently at bakeries selling tasty miniature cakes and rich, creamy chocolates.  I would order hot tea and enjoy the simplicity of my moment.  I didn’t have to be anywhere.

The pace was relaxed in the hillside neighborhoods; most people socialized as they walked with others.  Huge political posters were placed high up on buildings.  Many of the cars had full- size murals of Bashar painted on their back windows.  He looked like a badass in his dark sunglasses.

Every day I walked into a different restaurant for lunch.  I sought out places that were busy and popular with the locals.  The food was consistently fresh and delicious.  I loved the hummus; it was whipped to perfection, like a mousse.  Service in the restaurants was superb, and the waiters had a lot of spunk in their delivery.  They walked around efficiently and quickly like ants.

One afternoon I decided to take a taxi up to the top of Mt. Quassioun, a road approached it from the backside and ended at a few lookout points at the summit.  The view was spectacular.   Buildings stretched off into the horizon until the haze took over far in the distance.   The taxi driver told me that this was a popular place for youths to come and loose their virginity, away from parents and imams.

I noticed an interesting phenomenon during my walks around the city: World powers were using soft power to harness the Syrian youth.  And even though Syria was a significant Cold War player, its position still seemed important between the United States and Russia.  Not far from my guesthouse was a Russian cultural center.  It was a striking building, well-kept and clean.  It had cheap Internet access, a café, lounge, and library, but was devoid of Russians.  Young Syrians sat drinking coffee in comfort under colossal pictures of Russian icons, like the Kremlin.  A couple of days later I walked by an American cultural center.  It was closed, but posted on the door, I saw a sign advertising American movie nights and English-speaking events.

The old city was a gem.  Surrounded by an ancient wall it had a Muslim, Christian, Jewish, and Armenian quarter.  Inside was an intricate maze of narrow streets and alleyways.  Christmas decorations were everywhere, especially near the Christian quarter.  I saw a Santa taking pictures with children under lights of reindeer stretching across the street.  Big illuminated noel lights spanned the front window of a shop.  The smell of smoked kebabs and grilled vegetables filled the air.

I went out one night craving an ice-cold beer.  I found a small bar/nightclub in a well-lit alley.  The alleys were off the main street but they were without the elements that I was used to in alleyways.  There were no bums, smell of urine, or trash.  Instead, they were well lit with people dressed up walking around clean cobblestones.

Inside the bar/club was a well-dressed sophisticated looking bunch sipping on martinis.  The décor was stylish and expensive looking with couches integrated into the wall.   I went to the bar and asked for a local beer that cost about two dollars.  To my left was a guy sitting by himself:  Mike a student and part time DJ, who was happy to talk.  In his early twenties, he was a slender and good-looking guy.  We immediately got into a conversation about politics. He told me that an American style of government would not work in the Middle East. His words were persistent with conviction and focus.  He wasn’t trying to intimidate me but it was obvious that his life had been weathered by Lebanonese politics.  He told me that he attended school in Syria where the environment was peaceful and stable.

“Lebanon is a place for everybody’s politics,” he said.  “And we Lebanese are sick of it.

Arab peoples need a tough leader.  Why do you think this country is so safe?  If Basher al

Assad left office, Syria would fall into religious turmoil like Iraq.  Christians have a good life

here and they are free to do what they want.  This would not be the case if Bashar Al Assad

was not in power.”

Mike said that when the Iraq war started, most conversations in cabs would end up in frustration.

“Fuck the USA,” the cabbies would say to him.

Mike gave me a nod, went for another beer, and then made it onto the steamy dance floor, pumping to techno.  Couples danced and jived to the beats.  The sun would be up soon and if I were in San Francisco or New York, last call would have happened hours ago.   But I was in Damascus, so I ordered another beer in celebration.

After a few days in the city I decided to go north to the second city of Aleppo.  I knew people at the Russian cultural center who spoke English, and I needed to get information on bus tickets.  There I met a Palestinian girl named Majdulian.  She had big brown round eyes and a beautiful smile, and was very helpful in finding me the best way to get to Aleppo and made a few calls to different bus companies.  After my ticket was reserved, we got into a short conversation about her homeland.

“Pit, I cannot go to where I’m from.  We Palestinians cannot go to my village anymore.”

“Why?” I asked.

“It’s Israel’s now,” she said with melancholy.  “I cannot go home.”

She looked up at me from her desk with her big brown eyes and said.

“But you can go Pit,

She stared at me.

“You can go Pit, you have an American passport.  The American passport is no problem in

Israel.”

I couldn’t come up with anything to say.

That afternoon I took a cab out to the bus station on the east side of the Damascus.  The station itself was a bit run down and was surrounded by a dirt parking lot; people moved in all directions.  I got through security and went up to an office where I picked up my ticket.  There was an hour to spare before departure.  I stood alone with my bag on the platform watching busses move in and out of the station.  The sun was shinning brightly and warmed my face and made me squint my eyes.  To my left was a beautiful, well-dressed girl.  She looked over towards me.  We made steady eye contact.  She could tell I foreign and I could tell that she was beautiful.   I approached her and said, “Salam Aleikum,” (the standard Arabic greeting that means “peace be with you”).

She looked at me and smiled.

“Nice to meet you,” she replied.

“What is your name?”

“Najuwa,” she said with a smile.

“Where are you from?” I asked.

“I’m from Homes a city north of here.”

“Oh,” I said.  “Why were you in Damascus?”

“I had a conference here, I’m a doctor at home,” she said.

She was stunningly beautiful.  I felt like she was interested in me by the way she gazed at me with her dark and mystical Middle Eastern eyes.  Or perhaps she did this to everyone.   I noticed attentive men around us that took interest in our conversation.  I felt a bit hesitant to move closer to her, feeling as though fifty of her older brothers were there.

“How are you?’ said a girl with very white skin and red hair in almost perfect English.

She seemed to move in from out of my periphery, but it was obvious she was listening to our conversation.

“I’m doing well,” I said.

She positioned her body to block Najuwa out.

“My name is Anisa.”

“So where are you from in the United States?” she said quickly, attempting at keep my eyes from Najuwa.

I was thinking about what way I needed to direct my attention.  I didn’t speak for a while but eventually said,

“I live in Nevada at the moment.”

“Where are you going?” she replied quickly.

Najuwa looked as disappointed with the situation, as was I.

“I’m heading up to Aleppo tonight and then I will go back to Damascus in a

couple of weeks.”

I loved the fact that Anisa’s English was almost perfect.  I could speak at a regular cadence and I could also understand her perfectly, but I hated the fact she was pulling me away from Najuwa.

“Oh, I’m going north too,” she said with a smile.

The bus driver honked the horn.  It was time to go.  I looked over to my left and saw Najuwa distance herself.  She didn’t like my diversion of attention and probably felt uncomfortable with the level of English with which Anisa and I were speaking.

The bus to Aleppo began to load so I moved my baggage and my body closer to it.  Najuwa became more distant through the sea of people.  She looked at me over the crowd and smiled.  Everything paused around me except for her gaze.  I got on the bus and pressed myself up to the window.  Najuwa waved gently at me from the platform, her stunning eyes beaming right through me.  I wanted to see her again, and I felt an impulse to run off of the bus to spend more time with her.  I felt at least I should get her number.  But I didn’t.  She gazed through my window and attempted to either destroy me or love me with her eyes. The bus started up, and engaged into reverse and then grinded into first gear.  Dust kicked up around us, and  “Joy To The World” came blaring out of the bus speakers.  Everything was squeaking and rattling as we drove over potholes.  My intense eye contact with Najuwa finally severed.  We reached the paved main road and sped off.  The glare of the late afternoon sun beamed through the windows of the bus and put soft light on everyone. The next song had a chorus that repeated “Palestine,” in a deep male voice.

Syria Part 3

The last episode finished with me leaving Damascus in route to the northern city of Aleppo.

The outskirts of Damascus were mixed with old decrepit buildings butted up next to nice new ones.  Auto dealerships appeared with shiny cars and illuminated showrooms.  I saw a Land Rover dealership next to a broken down house in front of which goats wandered.  “We Wish You A Merry Christmas” blared out of the speakers of the bus. Eventually the infrastructure of the city died off, buildings became scarce, and the desert took over the horizon.

Hours later into the night, we stopped at a large and lit up bus stop.  I got off and bought a kebab.  I sat down by myself at a large red table and looked through the pictures of an Arabic magazine.

“Can I eat with you?” a girl said in a soft voice.

For I second my mind played a trick on me and was giving me what I wanted. Was it Najuwa? I thought to myself.  I looked over my shoulder, but saw Anisa with another girl.

“Are you having a nice journey?” Anisa asked with a smile.

“Yes,” I answered.

Anisa and her friend moved around the other side of the table and sat down with their red plastic trays.

“This is my friend Daria”

“Nice to meet you Daria,” I said.

Daria smiled, “nice to meet you,” she said in a very thick accent.

She continued to smile.

I tried talking to Daria for a bit but again Anisa blocked her out quickly by taking up more space on the bench and dominating the conversation.  Anisa was nice; I just wasn’t a fan of her domineering personality.  There was a pattern here, but I didn’t mind at this point. It was refreshing to speak with someone who spoke English well.  Anisa told me about how important Christmas was to her and her friends.  She talked briefly about the Iraq war and the amount of refugees that had come into the country.  And she finished up clarifying that Syria is an amazing place to visit.

Eventually I reached Aleppo and I checked into a guesthouse near the center of the city.  The hour was late, but Aleppo was lively.  My first observation was the amount of Christmas lights in windows and the ones that hung high over the intersections.  I walked the streets in search of food and noticed a nice-looking restaurant with a larger-than-life Santa out front.  I opened the door to the sound of Frank Sinatra’s “Angel Eyes.”  The name of the restaurant was Monroe (named after Marilyn Monroe) and the décor was of famous U.S. singers.  The clientele was hip and packed with young well-dressed professionals.  I sat down by myself at a table.  It felt like I was at a restaurant in New York City.

On my way back from Monroe’s I stopped at an Internet café.  The two guys who worked there were listening to Linkin Park loudly.  I checked my emails and then got up to pay.  The owner refused to take my money and said I wasn’t there for that long; therefore he wasn’t going to charge anything.  I knew that if I used the Internet at a café in most parts of the world I would have been paying for it.  As a tourist it is always a given that you end up paying more for things.  In this situation, where it was easier to get money out of me than a local, the owner chose not to.

Back at the guesthouse a few guys sat around in couches in the small lobby.  At my entrance a larger man with tired eyes and a pinched forehead spoke without hesitation.

“Are you American?” he said in excellent English.

“Yes,” I said.

“Sit down,” he replied quickly and pointed to the chair in front of him.

The situation felt slightly awkward as he sat up in his seat.  He looked over me slowly.

“Iraq is now the 51^st state,” he said.

The air was slightly tense.  I looked into the man’s eyes and kept quiet.

“We like Americans, but this situation is hell.”  He paused for a bit.  “I’m a doctor at home

but I can’t practice because I will be killed.”

He explained he was Sunni and that he had to get out of Iraq because of death threats.  His eyes looked empty and lost.  He was waiting for a quelling of the violence before he could go back home, but he didn’t know how long that would take.  In the background Al-Jeezera blared over the television showing the latest deaths from Iraq.  The coverage was gruesome, and the gore wasn’t censored like at home.  I saw a man who looked like grounded meat with a collapsed skull on the street.

“Six Americans died in Iraq today,” he said.

Again I was hunting for words.  Not coming up with much I said,

“That seems to be normal these days.”

He shook his head with a sad face.  I wanted to ask him questions about the situation in Iraq.  I wanted to hear his story.  I wanted to know his opinion.  But I could feel it.  He was fresh out of the violence, and my intuition told me to keep my mouth shut.  The man passed me some pistachio nuts and I took a couple.  His suffering was palpable.  I felt like it was time to leave.

“Goodnight,” I said.

The men said goodnight back to me with sad smiles.  I headed up the stairs to my room and passed out.

The next day started with a lot of fire running though my veins.  It was a sunny and crisp Christmas morning.  I had spent other Christmases abroad but this one felt even more special and exotic.  I didn’t know beforehand that Syria—a Muslim country—had such a strong foothold in Christianity.  And I didn’t think that Syria would offer a Christmas experience that somewhat resembled one I was familiar with as a child.  But it did.

I poked around through the ancient narrow streets of the city.  Christmas is a national holiday in Syria, and all of the storefronts were closed that morning.  I passed around a tight corner in an alleyway curious to see what was ahead in the center of the old city.  I vaguely heard Christmas carols.  I followed the sound through the dark alleyway.  The sun hadn’t reached the street level yet, but above me the sky was a deep blue.  Birds flew around overhead.  The singing grew louder and as I rounded another corner I came upon a large church.  The sun illuminated the front shiny surfaces of the building.  A stack of wrapped up Christmas presents were neatly piled to the left in front of the church.  I opened up the door to a wall of volume.  The choir, along with the organ and congregation, energized the room with noise just like at home.   I entered the church and sat down in one of the back pews. Everyone was well dressed and standing.  The priest looked similar to Pope John Paul the II.  Bibles were in hand; the whole congregation was participating except me.  I sat in the back and listened to “Joy To The World in Arabic.”

After the Christmas ceremony I kept exploring the ancient streets of the city.  Aleppo had come alive with people and traffic.  I entered a souk that stretched for a half mile.  It had everything from light switches to large bags of spices.  Merchants yelled out what they were selling under artificial light.  When I finally made my way to the other side I emerged out of the portal to a bright blue sky.  In front of me was the awesome Aleppo citadel.

The citadel had a massive area for a moat, but was devoid of water.  It was grand and dwarfed every other building in its vicinity.  A long slanted entrance climbed steeply up over the mote and to the open gate.  From this vantage point the city seemed far below.  I looked around and saw the rooftops of Aleppo.  Once inside and up on top I could see a 360-degree view of the city.  The sky clouded up, but the sun was piercing through and shooting down rays of light on different neighborhoods.  The energy magnified with loud noise.  Hundreds, if not thousands of mosques, chanted the midday prayer over loudspeakers.  The imams of each mosque called out, “Allah Akhbar” followed by a prayer.

I walked around the citadel checking out different ruins.  Families and couples strolled around in leisure.  Off in the distance, kids played around on the stones of the citadel.  The area took up about the size of a football field.  I approached the children and two young women noticed my presence.   As I got closer I could hear them speaking to the children in English.  Both women had headscarves on and were dressed in stylish coats.  I said hi to one of them.

“Hello,” she replied, with a large smile.  Welcome to Syria.”

“How are you and where are you from?” she continued.

“I’m good, I’m from the United States.”

The woman’s name was Nasreen.  She was a nineteen-year-old college student who had started an English language school with her younger sister.  They had twenty students in total.  Nasreen made it clear that her parents had money but that she wanted to pay for her college on her own.  She was able to do it through her small business.

“We love Americans,” she said.  “They never come here to visit though.  We see French and German but never American.”

Nasreen looked at me confidently.

“Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, all over the Arab world, its one people.”

I looked out to Aleppo and saw the city in every direction.  We were in the middle of it on a high vantage point but I still couldn’t see the end of an urban landscape.

“Thank you for coming to us!”

She told the little blond haired boy beside her to repeat after her.

“Thank you for coming to us, thank you for visiting our country,” the boy said.

I was invited by Nasreen to join in with the students back at the school.  We boarded a small school bus at the entrance of the citadel and drove off through the city.  I met one of her teachers, Akhmed.  He was a soft-spoken man in his young thirties.  He wore a tight denim jacket that was holding back his gut.   I sat in the back with a few kids around me bumping around and laughing, just as I had done when I was a child.  Arabic pop blared over the speakers.

We eventually reached the suburbs of Aleppo.  15-story high concrete apartment buildings speckled the landscape.   The clouds became thicker and the weather colder.  It was early evening and the sun was making its way over the horizon behind the clouds.   The bus stopped in front of a dark grey apartment block.  The kids all ran out yelling and screaming.  I followed them.  Inside the front door was a colorful environment contrasting from the grayness outside.  On the walls hung huge posters with English phrases and colorings.  I sat down on a chair that fit about half of me with my knees up near my chest.  The students all came around.

“How are you, what is your name?” they said one at a time.

“I am Mohammad, I am seven-years-old,” a little boy said in a high pitched voice and then ran off giggling towards the door.

My attention turned towards the door as it opened.  A good-looking guy with a shaved-head entered.  His smile beamed from ear to ear.

“Hello Peter, it is nice to meet you.”

His name was Rodey; Nasreen had called him to let him know I was there.

“Hello, nice to meet you,” I said.

Rodey was Nasreen’s boyfriend.  They had met only a month earlier but were planning on getting married.  Premarital sex was taboo, and with Rodey’s bugged out eyes and quick movements I was guessing this was his catalyst for the rush into marriage.  He flirted with Nasreen and made her laugh.

After some light conversation and laughs Rodey became more stern.

“Why is the American government so against Muslim nations?” he said, while looking at me seriously for the first time.

“My father was killed by Israelis when I was a child,” he continued.

“Rodey,” I said.  “I am not for the war right now.”

He perked up and smiled,

“You are a good man Peter, let’s drink some tea!”

This was the end of our political conversation.

That evening Akhmad showed me around Aleppo.  Akhmad insisted on buying me everything.

“Peter, do you need CD?”

“No, I’m good right now, but thanks Akhmad.”

“But Peter come in this shop for CD.”

“I’m really good on CD’s at the moment Akhmad, but thank you.”

“Peter I must get you this CD, please come with me.”

“Okay Akhmad,” I said realizing that Akhmad might actually be more stubborn than me.

He proceeded to buy me three CD’s.

Akhmad took me out to diner that night to a colorful restaurant with Christmas lights hanging from the ceiling.   It was my prerogative to pay for diner; I had to pay back Akhmad someway.

“Akhmad I am paying for diner.”

“No Peter, it is in Arabic culture to pay for the guest.”

“But Akhmad, you have bought me many things and have showed me the city, it is the least I

can do.”

“No, Peter.”

Akhmad walked up to our waiter who was at another table and asked for the bill.  He waited at the front counter until the waiter met him.  He paid the bill and came back towards me.

“Peter, I paid,” he said with a smile.  “Let’s go.”

The city was lively but I was dead.  I felt the need to go back to my place for sleep.

In the morning I met up with Nasreen, Rodey, Akhmad and the children back at the school.  I worked on English with some of the kids but they were more into playing.  Nasreen’s school wasn’t of the strictest order and the amount of spoken English was limited.

Rodey took me out that afternoon to help me get a train ticket.  I was planning to go next to Latekia, a city on the Mediterranean coast the following day.  The train station had a tall ceiling with beautiful chandeliers hanging from it.  The walls were covered with ornate murals.  There were murals of the president’s father, Hafez Al Assad, in different settings.  The murals mirrored the ones I had seen in the X-Soviet Union.  Most tried to carry the theme of, “the common good of society,” with patriotic messages.  This meant that there were farmers helping farmers in the fields, and engineers smiling alongside of other engineers.  There was a mural of a Syrian astronaut with a Syrian flag on his helmet alongside four Soviet cosmonauts.  A military mural with the Syrian flag waved high over soldiers and tanks.  There was also a timetable on the wall.  The irony is that the numerals we use in English are technically called Arabic numerals, but the numbers in the Arab world look completely different.  The only similar looking numbers are 0,1, and 9, but 0 means 5 and V means 7.  Rodey’s assistance was crucial for me getting the right ticket.

I started taking pictures.  This action called out attention in a train station where there were not many tourists.  But Rodey was with me, and I was feeling quite at ease in Aleppo.  I took a photo of the astronauts.  I took another shot of a mural with a new highway with massive power lines overhead.

A man walked by quickly and looked at me briefly. I heard him say, “Fuckin Americans.” Rodey heard it quite clearly.  His eyes flaired up with anger, and his forehead got red.  He chased down the guy showing off his athleticism and grabbed him on the shoulder.   The man suddenly looked panicked.  He was weak in the knees.  Rodey had the Vulcan death grip his shoulder.  Whatever Rodney said, it instilled fear in the man.

Rodey turned and came toward me; the man ran away while looking back with apprehension.

“Peter, I am very sorry for him.  People not like that in Syria.”

“Peter, he said fuck American government and not people.  Please understand this Peter.”

That evening Rodey invited me out with Akhmad and a few of their friends.  We went to a nice apartment in an affluent suburb of Aleppo.  Everything was clean and in order.  Books stood aligned perfectly on the bookshelf, and the magazines on the coffee table were symmetrically placed.  Sprite was delivered by one of the guy’s younger sisters.  The television was on in the background.   I asked Rodey what channel we were watching.

“Hamas T.V.,” he said.

I chimed in on Hamas T.V.  Two soldiers were firing rockets while yelling “Allah Akbar,” at Israeli targets.  No one in the room paid attention to it.  Rodey changed the channel to one of the dozen of Arabic music channels that all had beautiful girls in sexy clothes.  He kept clicking through.  Syrian cable mostly consisted of music video channels with an occasional news network like Hamas T.V. or Al Jezera.  I realized the party wasn’t going to fire off as I sipped my third cup of Sprite.  We went out to another elaborate diner where I wasn’t allowed to pay.  Afterward, we drank more sprite and smoked Hookah.

My train was leaving at 5:00 the next morning and it was already late.  We journeyed back to Akhmed’s apartment on the outskirts of the city near Nasreen’s English school.  Akhmed had moved my bag over to his place that day.  Akhmed’s apartment—twelve-stories up—was bare bones.  The paint was peeling off of the walls and it was ice cold.  The bathroom required footwear.  The whole place smelled of raw kerosene.   There wasn’t much furniture in the apartment.  In the main room there was a television up on a stand, and a kerosene heater in the middle of the floor.  A few blankets and pillows lay up against the wall.  I walked into the kitchen and observed a delicately balanced stack of dishes towering out of Akhmed’s sink.

“Peter, you will sleep here,” Akhmed said as he organized the pillows and blankets for me on the floor.  Rodey popped in a movie and Akhmed made an attempt at warming up the place.  He had trouble getting the heater going; he lit match after match with no success.  The ancient kerosene drip feed contraption acted up, but Akhmad laughed it off.  He looked embarrassed with a pinched smile.

“Sorry Peter, I don’t know why it won’t work.”

I felt bad for Akhmad and guilty at the same time.  He had spent money on me for shopping, dinner, and taxis without accepting a cent from me.  His heater didn’t function probably because he didn’t have the money to fix it.

I logged in a quick four-hours of sleep and woke up in the morning to the loud noise of the Morning Prayer and a mosque alarm clock that Akhmad had set up beside my head while I was asleep.  The mosque alarm clock also had an electric Morning Prayer alarm programmed into it.  “Allah Akbar!” blared from both the alarm clock and the local mosque simultaneously.  It felt like I was in-between the cymbals of a marching band.  I jumped up quickly.  Rodey and Akhmad were already up and calling a cab.  Out the window the streets looked dark and quiet.

To be continued…next episode I go to the Syrian coast on the Mediterranean Sea!

Syria Part 4

Last episode of Motley Planet I reached the town of Aleppo and made new friends at an English language school.

The cab came and sped us off through the empty streets.  When we reached the train station,  Rodey carried my bag, and Akhmad walked beside me with his arm over my shoulder.

“Peter thank you for everything, we hope to see you soon,” Akhmad said.

“Good luck to you and your family, you are a good man,” Rodey said smiling.

I boarded the train and waved back to the guys, and instantly felt nostalgic for my time in Aleppo with the friends that I had made.  I knew I would not see them for a long time, if ever again.  The train started moving, and the doors closed; I was on my own again.

I put my head in my Syria book for most of the journey.  The landscape was dry with strips of land dedicated to agriculture.  As we got closer to the Mediterranean, we crested a small mountain range.   For a brief time we went through a dense pine forest and then descended out of the trees.  The value of timber had to be high in Syria since this was the first forest I had seen.  The countryside became greener, evidence of the humidity from the coast.  Olive groves appeared.

My goal was to get a hotel close to the Mediterranean.  I wanted to spend a few days near the water.  When I got off the train taxi drivers from all angles came at the platform.  Usually I go for public transportation, but when getting my bearings in a new place, sometimes I opt for a cab.  One cab driver sought me out,

“Cab ride to Latakia?”

Mohammad was his name but he quickly took to Schumacher.  Schumacher wore a shiny black faux-leather jacket that covered his husky body.  His black hair was placed perfectly making 90-degree angles at the upper corners.   If I could catch him in the right light his shadow cast a square on top of a brawny neck.

Schumacher drove me north of Latakia to the beach communities.  Thinking I was wealthy, he brought me to a five-star hotel that cost over $150 a night.  I told him I needed cheaper accommodations so he drove me north and then out to a peninsula.  It was a resort area that was mostly shut down for the winter.  Schumacher had friends, and I ended up staying in the basement of one of their rentals.  The Latakia area is a huge destination for Saudi families escaping the extreme heat of the Arabian Peninsula in the summer.  And also for those looking to cut loose.  Latakia is known for its liberal attitude; therefore bikinis are a normal sight during the warm months, and alcohol is readily available.

I checked into my room.  It was dark and dead.  It looked like it hadn’t seen humanity since the previous summer.  The few windows up high on the wall barely touched above ground level.  I was in a basement.  The faded red curtains filtered out the little light that was trying to get in.  I put my bag down on one of the fifteen beds that were in the apartment.  A plume of dust slowly rose into the air and was caught in a faint beam of light that came through the window.

The Mediterranean raged outside my door.  The winds ripped through me as I walked toward the stones and sand near the waters edge.  The water was a turquoise green that turned into a deep blue out at sea.  Up the coast to the north I saw a cone shaped mountain in Turkey.  The sun made an attempt at warming things. but the wind outperformed it at keeping everything cold.

I walked around the few streets of the town that night.  Everything was ghostly quiet.  Most of the lights inside the buildings were shut off.  Only a few streetlights illuminated part of the road.  Palm trees marked both sides of the street.  I walked into the only well-lit establishment that was a convenience store/restaurant in the basement of an apartment building.  There were a few white plastic tables and chairs crowded next to each other.   I met two Iraqis there.  The older of the two spoke English well and left Iraq twenty-days earlier.  He had been working with an American construction company.  He told me it was too dangerous to stay there, and that he had threats for his life.  They both looked lost and displaced.  They were in Syria “waiting it out” until things became better at home.  I was in a weird position: I was traveling to Syria because of a vacation, and they were there because of life threatening circumstances.  They were there only because of an American war.  I didn’t feel any hostility from them, but I felt a bit of guilt.

Back at my apartment I couldn’t get this thought out of my mind.  My dimly lit room with fourteen empty beds felt eerie.  I heard the Mediterranean at work with sounds of the wind and waves crashing against the rocks.  This little town was full of displaced Iraqis and I was the one American in town.  Obviously the guy and his friends who let me in the room knew this since they had my passport.  Questions entered my mind.  Would any of the Iraqis cross the line between people and politics and take their anger out on me?   I uneasily fell asleep to this thought in my cold and drafty room.

The next morning Schumacher knocked on my door.

“Pete, are you ready for a tour?” he said excitedly.

“Where too?”

“We have amazing Latakia and of course Crusaders castles to see.”

Schumacher took me into Latakia.  The city was bustling with action.  All the girls were devoid of headscarves.  Most of them dressed fashionably with skirts and designer boots.  The men were dressed nicely in slacks and leather shoes.  He showed me a few Roman ruins and we stopped for a pastry at an outdoor café.  We drove south of Latakia on a modern four-lanned highway.  Schumacher began to talk about politics.  He gave me the standard U.S. government is bad but the people are good routine.  He also said the same about the Israelis.

“No, I don’t hate Israeli people,” he said with passion.  “I hate government, army…if

someone takes your land what do you do?  Many Jewish people are good, I don’t hate the

Jewish.”

Our conversation moved onto 9/11.  Like most Syrians he though this was a conspiracy.

“Why haven’t Americans found Bin-Laden?  You send people to the moon but can’t find Bin-

Laden?  That’s crazy.”

We ascended up a mountianous road to the Saladin Castle.  The vegetation became thicker and small pine trees appeared.  Schumacher looked high up at a ridgeline and pointed.

“I think I see a cave up there…maybe Bin-Laden is in it?”  He tore into a deep laugh and I joined in.  As long as I laughed, he kept saying the same line.  Around the next corner, a cliff area appeared in the distance.

“Oh look over there…I think I see Bin-Laden, he’s putting out his fire so we don’t see

him.”  This led to us both laughing again.  I laughed at this joke two more times.

From atop the castle I could see out the Mediterranean.  I turned around 180 degrees to a backdrop of mountains with snow on top of the higher peaks and ridgelines.

I spent one more day out at the Mediterranean.  I decided to hire Schumacher to set me off on the next leg of my journey.  Schumacher and I took the long road trip with the afternoon destination of the Crusaders castle Krak Des Chevaliers.  We sped down the coastline on the smooth highway.  The infrasturctrure was much better than had I thought it would be.  Our conversation flowed well touching on everything from politics to life in Syria and America.

“You know the Saudis all come to Latakia to cut loose and have a good time.”

A two story high statue of Hafez Al Assad passed by with his hand waving towards the sky as we sped down the highway.

“Why is it that that America likes Saudi Arabia?”  Schumacher didn’t give me time to answer.

“They are the most repressive freaks in the Middle East.  You know that woman can’t drive

there and you can’t even drink.  And if most the supposed hijackers for 9/11 were Saudis,

why would the Americans stay friends?  If America’s goal is to promote democracy in the

Middle East, they send the wrong message to all Arabs by befriending Saudi Arabia.”

Schumacher pulled over to a mini mart off of the side of the highway.

“One second, I’ll be back,” he said.

A few moments later Schumacher came out with a beer and a smile.  He popped the beer outside of the car and passed it to me through the window.

“Is it okay for me to drink while you are driving?” I asked.

“Of course it is, what do you think?  It’s not Saudi Arabia,” he said and then worked into a loud robust laugh and sped off back onto the highway.

Schumacher look a left off of the main road and ascended up towards the castle Krak Des Chevaliers.  We went through a small village built into the hillside that had a dusting of snow on top of it.   Schumacher told me that throughout history whoever controlled the castle controlled a great part of the Levant and the trade coming out of the Mediterranean.  We slowed up in the village as goats and people outnumbered cars in the road.  A man walked by pushing a bloody hacked-up sheep in a wheelbarrow.

The Castle itself was well preserved and impressive.  We spent the afternoon there.  I didn’t know where I would be staying that evening but I knew I wanted to get closer to my next destination, Palmyra.   Palmyra, a lost city of Roman ruins deep in the Syrian Desert toward the Iraqi border.  I needed to get a ride inland to the city of Homs where I could then find a way to get out to Palmyra.  Schumacher agreed to take me to Homes for an extra $30.

I reached a guesthouse in the city but I felt charged to keep moving on.  I wanted to keep pushing through the night.  Palmyra was 100 miles away.  The owner of the guesthouse called in his brother who was willing to make the journey.

My driver was big and Gnome looking.  He had red hair and a mustache with a condom like hat perched high up on his head.  He was very pale in completion.  His eyes were wide and a deep blue.  His nose was like an awning and he looked like he came from a fantasy book.  His hands were huge but his shake was gentle.   We got in the small car and our shoulders touched each other like I was sitting next to a large man on a regional jet.

We drove out past the city lights of Homes to the naked darkness of the desert.  The road was busy with tractor-trailer trucks going each direction.  The diver said, “Iraq,” and pointed at the trucks.  My guess was these trucks were moving goods in and out of Iraq since there was no area of substantial population before the border.  There was a sense of excitement as we got closer to Iraq and farther away from Homes.  The constant stream of trucks clarified the fact that something big was happening not far away.

I woke up in Palmyra to a completely different landscape.  The air was dry and was already working away at cracking my lips.  The sun was strong and unfiltered.  I met an Italian couple that showed me around some of the ruins of the ancient city.  Palmyra was originally a wealthy trading post that eventually became part of the Roman Empire.  The geographic area of the city spans dozens of square miles and is loaded with Roman columns both standing and fallen.   There was a castle up high on a hillside looking over the city.  The Italians and I climbed it to get an expansive view of the ancient city as the sunset.

That evening I walked around the small city and stumbled upon a restaurant.  I met a young man named Mohammad who told me that his cousin was trying to fight the American military in Iraq but couldn’t get through the border.   Our conversation took place over a dish of pita bread and hummus at a small restaurant not far from the ruins.  A majestic golden hue radiated off of the ancient Roman stones of Palmyra while the sun set.  The weather was perfectly warm.   Mohammad had a stocky build and was dressed in Western fashion.  He wore a diesel t-shirt and designer jeans.  He was well spoken and quick-witted.  Mohammad appeared to be a product of Western culture, but he was also strongly rooted to his native land and reiterated to me the colorful history of Syria.  I felt no animosity.

That night I entered a small, well-lit barbershop crowded with eight men.  I opened up the door to a room of smiles.  There was a barber chair on the right with one barber behind it and a few seats against the back wall.   An older man of around sixty-five years old got up from his seat and urged me to sit there.  He was wearing perfectly clean, white traditional Islamic clothes.  He methodically passed prayer beads between his fingers.  I insisted that I could stand but he was persistent about me taking his seat.  The four other men chimed in and directed me to his seat.   I smiled and sat down.
The men smiled at me.  Our conversation was non-existent, but I wanted to be with them and I felt they wanted the same with me.  I was invited up to the barber’s chair.  It was like any barber’s chair that I knew from my childhood.  My haircut began and the onlookers watched closely.

It felt the same as being on a busy street in a major city.  While the curb and sidewalk might be a safe zone, you only need to step a foot onto the street to connect with danger.  This was what I felt like close to the Iraqi boarder.  My place out in the desert sands of Eastern Syria was calm, but it was impossible not to think of the danger a step away in Iraq.

Suddenly the environment became tense.  To the right, I noticed live footage had just come on the news.  Saddam was walking out on a platform with a few men around him in black masks.  He was handcuffed and holding a Koran.   A large rope was tied and noosed perfectly for his death.  Two large executioners escorted Saddam forward.  They put the rope around his neck.   No one in the barbershop looked happy about this.   I could see the faces of the men becoming more serious as the tone and cadence of the conversation pedaled into action.  They were Sunni.  They knew I was American.

“No good,” the man who was cutting my hair said, as he pointed at the television.

The lights flickered a bit, as if on cue, and I sipped my warm tea for comfort.  Everyone stood up and opened their mouths in awe.   Saddam was dropped and hung.

A commercial started playing.  Smiles, generosity and hospitality came back; the barber poured me a cup of tea.

After a few days in Palmyra I decided to go back to Damascus.  If I could get the right transportation link, I would make it to Amman, Jordan, by nightfall.  It was New Years Eve. Amman was where I wanted to kick off 2007.  The drive to Damascus through the desert felt like driving through the American Southwest.  The only noticeable difference were the signs on the side of the road pointing to Iraq, and randomly placed Bedouin yurts off to the side of the road.   I felt the urge for the bus to take a left at one of the intersections and go to Iraq.  I.  I wanted to see where all the Iraqis I had met had come from.  I wanted to be in the action.

Next episode I leave Syria for Jordan and Israel….

Syria Part 5/Jordan/Israel

Back in Damascus, the scenery felt familiar and normal.  I had a basic understanding of the city and felt comfortable navigating it.  I took a cab from the northern bus station to the southern one, where buses left for Amman and the rest of the Arabian Peninsula.

It was at the bus station where I met a man sitting on a bench with a few of his friends.  He was staring me down, so I said “Salam Aleikum” (hello)  to him as I walked by.  He smiled and said “Hi,” in English.  Mohammad Charlie looked like Robert De Niro, only he was missing a leg and had crutches.  His gray suit matched the cloudy weather, and his perfectly polished black shoe looked fresh out of a box.

(Check out video clip below.)

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I looked to my left briefly as a bus pulling in caught my attention.

“What the fuck are you looking at?”  He jabbed me in the stomach in a playful Italian/New Yorker type way.

Mohammad Charlie smiled and grabbed me on the shoulder that was a long reach up for him.

“Come with me, let’s go get some lunch…c’mon I’ll take you out, you little fuck.”  He ripped into laughter.

Mohammad Charlie was a familiar character to me.  He reminded me of my cousin Donny from New Jersey who used to grab me on my cheeks, hit me in the back, and laugh loudly from his belly.  But Mohammad Charlie’s surroundings weren’t familiar to me, and the fact that he was a piece of northern New Jersey in Damascus had me spinning.

It started to rain hard, but that didn’t stop Mohammad Charlie from putting his crutches into high gear to cross the street.  We sped down the sidewalk towards an intersection.  Mohammad Charlie was a few paces ahead of me.

“What are you crippled?” he said as he looked back at me.  “You walk like an old lady!”

Mohammad Charlie veered left to cross the street.  He went into a busy intersection without hesitating.  Two cars slammed on their brakes a few feet from his crutches. Mohammad Charlie glared through one of the cars’ windshields.

“Get the fuck out of my way,” he yelled out at the cars like a mafia Don.

We ascended the stairs up to the restaurant.  Mohammad Charlie ordered a spread of   chicken, vegetables and hummus.

“You know Peter, Syrians keep their heads down.   There is no action here.”

He seemed excited to speak his near-perfect English to me.  “You know man, I just want to

visit New York…I just want to go there once in my life.”

I ate until I was stuffed, but not even half my plate was finished.  Mohammad Charlie kept piling on more food like a relative on Thanksgiving Day.  My bus was leaving soon, and I let Mohammad Charlie know.

“Hey man, I want to show you something first,” Mohammad Charlie said.  “Stand at the

bottom of the stairs.”

I stepped down the staircase.

“Okay, stop there you bastard!  Are you ready?”

“Ready for what Mohammad Charlie?”

“You’ll see.”

I looked up at Mohammad Charlie standing on top of the staircase with a determined and focused gaze.  The staircase was steep and narrow.  He had both crutches wedged tightly in his armpits; his hands gripped the spongy handles one finger at a time.

“Are you ready?” he said.  “3…2…1…”

Mohammad Charlie flexed his one knee and jumped off the top stair.  He landed a few stairs down, using his one leg as a shock absorber.  His butt almost hit the stair behind him but he pressed up quickly with his one strong leg.  He looked at me with pride.

“Oohhh, nice, Mohammad Charlie!” I said.

“Again?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Get up or downstairs?”

“Down.”

Mohammad Charlie leaped again but made it one step farther this time.  He looked at me with a serious, I just jumped the stairs with one leg look, and continued on past me.

“Did you get that?” he said.

Mohammad Charlie walked me back to the bus station.

“You take care,” he said with a smile.  “I wish we could spend more time together.  But I

understand you are off, you little fucker.  Anyways, what the fuck is in Amman?  There isn’t

shit going on down there.  Amman for New Years,” he said under his breath.  “Who the

fuck would do that?”

I laughed internally, Mohammad Charlie’s shit talk was rubbing onto me in a positive way.

We gave each a firm hug.  He grabbed my cheek.

“You take care guy, good luck with everything, don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, which is

everything.  And come back to Syria, you hear me you fuck head!”

I got on the bus and waved goodbye to Mohammad Charlie.  He hobbled back to the place where I first met him.  His friends gathered around him.  Mohammad Charlie was the leader of his little group.  None of them looked like they were going anywhere.  The bus station was their hangout.

There were a few open seats near the back of the bus.  My ticket read 24b.  As I approached my seat, one young passenger stood out; he looked like the Arab version of Rickey Martin.  I sat down beside him and said, “Salam Aleikum.”

“Hi, nice to meet you,” he said in perfect English.  “My name is Karam, what’s yours?”

“Peter.  Nice to meet you.”

“Where are you going?”

“Amman.”

“Oh great, me too.”

Karam had an immaculate appearance.  He was wearing a fashionable sweater, designer jeans, and stylish black shoes.  He had just graduated college and was working on getting his accounting certification.  Karam’s mellow demeanor and kind mannerisms contrasted starkly from Mohammad Charlie.  Both personalities were equally enjoyable.  Karam was on his way to Amman to meet up with his sister for a family reunion.  The rest of his family had left Damascus two days earlier.

Karam’s sister lived in the disputed Golan Heights region that has been controlled by Israel since the Six-Day War in 1967.  This hotly contested land borders the Sea of Galilee and holds a large amount of fresh water in a dry part of the world.  Water is highly sought after in the Middle East because of its scarcity, and this is the big sticking point between Syria and Israel.  Years earlier, Karam’s sister had married a Syrian man from Golan and moved there.  The husband had lived in Golan since before 1967.  Therefore, even though he was Syrian, he was allowed to stay in Golan.  But it is impossible for Syrians to have an option to live in Golan and visit Syria.  And it is impossible for any Syrian to move to Golan.  They have to marry in with someone who has lived there since 1967.  By picking Golan, Karam’s sister was not allowed back into Syria; therefore she could not go to her home and see her family.  Karam told me that the Israeli government wouldn’t allow her to come back to Syria.  The only exception for a Syrian in Golan to return to Syria is if they are going to University.

Every year the family had to meet up in the one neutral place that would accommodate them all, Amman, Jordan.  I didn’t understand why the Israelis wouldn’t want Syrians to go back home.  The other way around made so much more sense.  The Syrian government wanted as many Syrians as possible living in Golan.  This would add to their claim that it was theirs and Israel was occupying them.  I wondered if it was Syria who wouldn’t allow her back in, fearing that she might stay along with others choosing the same path.  If Golan was devoid of Syrians and exclusively occupied by Israelis, Syria would be more distant from the hope of getting it back.  Whatever was going between the Israeli and Syrian governments, Karam’s situation highlighted family hardship at the expense of politics.

“Peter, I am trying to study accounting in the United States, I will have my interview at the US Embassy in two weeks.”

Karam told me that he had gone twice before for the interview but was rejected.

“They charged me $100 for each interview, my family had to save for months, and then they

rejected me without a reason.  But this time I think I will get the visa.”

Karam’s story sped up the trip.   The Jordanian border arrived quickly.  Going through Syrian and Jordanian customs was painless.  Massive billboards of smiling King Abdullah II, and his diseased father King Hussein, lay just inside the Jordanian border.  Their portraits looked more like they were trying to sell puppy food than run a country and contrasted from the ones in Syria of Bashar Al Assad who looked like he was a professional thug out on a mission to kick ass.

It wasn’t long before we reached Amman.  The city was modern and westernized compared to Damascus.  The highway system had large overpasses and byways.  Pizza Huts, KFC’s and Holiday Inns dotted the landscape.

Karam invited me to meet his family.  They rented out an apartment for the occasion.  We walked for ten minutes from the bus station and reached a quiet suburb.  Inside the apartment, Karam’s sister along with her children, mother, father, brother, twin brother, and a few other relatives were getting ready for a feast.  The women were busy at work setting up the table and cooking, while the men chatted while watching the children chase each other.  The room was bright and warm with high ceilings.  The air was thick, filled with the aroma of a feast in the making.  The aroma of cumin mixed with the smell of baked chicken.   Karam’s sister ran up to him and hugged him with all of her might.  They both had tears in their eyes.

After a large meal and waves of hospitality, I felt it was a family moment and time for me to move on for the night.  Politics were keeping this large family apart for all but a few days out of the year, and I didn’t want to interfere too much.  Their situation was bittersweet.

Karam helped me find a guesthouse a few blocks away.  The room was frigid cold and didn’t seem to have any source of heat.  I changed into some nicer clothes and set out on a mission to find a New Years Eve beer.

After walking down the street for thirty minutes I came upon an illuminated awning that led the way down a flight of stairs into what looked to be a bar.  Seedy looking men waited under the awning.  I got in the queue; the line moved quickly.  When I got down to the bottom of the stairs there was a man in a suit and tie who greeted me and then walked me over towards the bar.   The bar was dark and dingy with a low ceiling and dim neon lights.  A thick cloud of cigarette smoke hung in the air and restricted me from seeing the other side of the room  Girls in short skirts and overdone make-up passed me with long promiscuous looks.  There were all types, Middle Eastern, Asian, Caucasian and Black.  I sat down at the bar and ordered a beer: cost fifteen dollars.  I pulled the Heineken up to my lips and slowly put together my surroundings…I was in a raunchy prostitute den.  The place looked dirty without light, and felt filthy with the characters around me.  The guy next to me was about 150 pounds overweight with the buttons of his shirt stressed to the max.  He made out with a young attractive Asian girl.  An older Middle Eastern girl slowed down as she walked by me, her fat roll brushed over my leg and left a staunch smell of cheap perfume.  I slammed my Heineken quickly and pulled the eject cord.

Outside of the club I met a few guys in their early twenties.  One spoke English quite well.  He was acting like a gangster rapper, which clashed with everything I had seen so far in the Middle East.  He told me about the three months that he lived in L.A.

“Careful in Amman man, we have a few gangstas’ here,” he said, slumping his shoulder and limping around with attitude.   It was a pitiful show.  A few minutes later some drunk teens exited from a car yelling like brash fools.  Damascus seemed more special by the minute.  I went back to my apartment, put on every piece of clothing I owned and froze into unconsciousness.

The next morning I met up with Karam and his family to thank them for their hospitality.  They offered me to stay with them when I got back to Damascus.  I didn’t want another night of frigid sleep so I transported myself to the center of Amman.  The hills became steeper and the buildings carved their way into them.  The architecture was old and charming without the presence of international chains.

I had planned on staying in Amman for a few days and then visiting the lost city of Petra to the south, with the goal of returning to Damascus in about a week.   I checked into a nice guesthouse and set out to tour the city.

I walked down a narrow street towards a busier road with the intention of walking all day.  I always enjoy getting to know an urban environment by walking without a map or itinerary.  By doing so, I feel it is the best way to get to know all of a city’s intricacies: the random Roman ruin, a conversation with a stranger….

Amman didn’t have the same effect on me as Damascus did.  Maybe I didn’t give it a fair chance.  But as I was walking around the sun-soaked streets it dawned on me just how close I was to Israel.  Then the feeling came like a wave; I had to go to Jerusalem.  I went back to my guesthouse and asked how far away Jerusalem was.  The lady told me that it was only forty-five miles.

Forty-five miles in certain parts of the world can be a great distance; this was the case of Amman to Jerusalem.  I took a cab to the King Hussein Bridge, which connects Jordan with the West Bank.  On the Jordanian side of the bridge I went through customs and waited a couple of hours before the next bus crossed the bridge.  Once over the bridge, I could see the Star of David flapping away in the wind high above the customs building.  The desert landscape became green, the closer we got to Israeli immigrations.  The lazy S-turns forced the bus to slow while weaving around walls of barbed wire.   The grass manicured, and the palm trees perfectly trimmed.  Israel felt special.

Young women patrolled around the customs building with guns slung over their shoulders.  The border guards contrasted from their Syrian counterparts: they weren’t smoking; they were young, female, and difficult.

I was hoping for a quick transfer so I would have time in Jerusalem for the day.  Instead, immigrations took me aside.  Syria and Israel do not have diplomatic relations and the customs agents didn’t like the fact that I was in Syria.  I had to worry about getting an Israeli stamp on my passport.  If I did,  I might not be let back into Syria.  The Syrian government bars anyone from entering Syria who has been in Israel.  I asked in my most diplomatic way, for the custom agents to stamp a piece of paper instead of my passport.   This didn’t make them happy, and I was told to sit in a separate room.  I was asked why I was in Syria and what was my business there.  I was asked what I had done in Syria in chronological order from landing at the airport until departure to Jordan.  Three different women asked me the same framework of questions in slightly different ways.  After a long wait, a woman stamped my piece of paper.  The whole process took three hours.

I thought my situation was bad until I talked to another American at customs trying to get into Israel.  Angie was a woman in her younger twenties who worked for an NGO in the West Bank.  She was born in the US and was a US citizen, but since she had an Arab last name, she had being waiting for ten hours that day on top of the three days before.  And Angie’s reality was easy, compared to the average Jordanian, who can purely forget the notion of going to Israel at all.

Outside of customs, I looked around for a way to Jerusalem.  I met a few other travelers looking for the same thing: two Italians named Bruno and Patricia and a Finn named Sami.  Eventually a bus came; we boarded.  The sun started to go down and the colors of the desert softened and reflected a light red.  We drove through isolated roads in the West Bank.  The pavement was new. As we got closer to Jerusalem, traffic increased.  The city was humming with action; I felt like I was somewhere important.  The old city was completely walled with Arab, Jewish, Christian and Armenian quarters.  We drove slowly past one of the gates in the old wall.  The bus driver pointed to it and said “Damascus Gate.”

We walked through Damascus Gate, down the streets that Jesus Christ walked 2000 years ago.  It felt like we were entering a castle.  Except the actors were different.  Like Elvis Impersonators in Memphis, there were Jesus impersonators in Jerusalem.  These character actors were on a mission to get closer to their savior by dressing the part and following his final walk through the city.  Men without the physique of Jesus struggled to carry cumbersome wooden crosses over their shoulders while navigating between the busy narrow pedestrian streets.  Religion had always seemed a bit bizarre to me, but in Jerusalem it just got freaky with Jesus impersonators taking themselves seriously.  The one cool thing about this behavior was the hand imprint in a stone.  This is where Jesus supposedly put his hand over two thousand years ago.  Since that time people have been putting their hand there and has resulted in a full-impeded handprint in the rock.

Patricia and Bruno said they had a few rooms reserved and invited me to join them.  Jerusalem has old city that is walled in.  Outside the wall is a new Israeli and Palestinian part of the city making up West and East Jerusalem.  The streets were crowded with people selling everything from cucumbers to plastic toys.  We were in an Arab part of the old city, but occasionally a Jew quickly walked by.

We got to the “Austrian Hospice,” a tidy establishment with shared rooms.  I wasn’t sure when the change was made from hospice to hostel but it still had a sterile hospital feel.  I checked into a perfectly organized room and set my belongings down.  We were to meet up with Sami who was visiting a Canadian friend who had been studying in the city for the past two years.  Patricia, Bruno and I got a cab outside the Damascus gate and sped towards West Jerusalem.  The city grew more modern and resembled a nice section of a Western European city.  We met Sami and his Canadian friend Chad at a sushi restaurant.  It felt familiar.  I asked Chad if he leaned more towards the Israelis or Palestinians in regards to the political situation.

“After almost two years in this city I haven’t found any clarity and it’s more confusing to me now that I know more.”

We went out for drinks at a busy Irish pub afterward.  The place was massive and had high ceilings with big-screen televisions on the walls.  Freestyle BMX played on a movie screen.   I ordered a tall beer with my new friends and quickly ran the day through my head.  Crossing between different worlds is always fascinating, and my morning felt weeks away.  It felt artificial drinking a beer above such hotly contested land at an Irish bar with the smells of heavily urethane wood in the air.

The following morning I woke up at the Austrian hospice and went downstairs for breakfast.  The breakfast area was highly organized with labels on everything obvious, from cereal containers to salt and sugar shakers.  The China was arranged perfectly, the handles of the coffee mugs pointing at five-o-clock.  Light filtered through thin white curtains.  The mood was stiff, and the few people eating did not look up from their plates when I walked in.  No words were spoken; the only noise was the sounds of clanking spoons on bowls and coffee cups on saucers.  This didn’t feel like the Middle East at all.

I had limited time in Jerusalem so I sought out a guide to show me the major sights like Temple Mount and the Western Wall (Wailing Wall).  He charged a lot of money and then gave me a guilt trip when I didn’t tip him.  After my tour, I went back to the Western Wall to get more of a look around.  Jews were lined up against the wall swaying back and forth from their hips up.  The wall rose high above the ground and had paper notes stuck in all of the reachable cracks.  I walked around observing.  Some American Jews danced in a circle to celebrate a Bar Mitzvah.  One of the men observed my curiosity and invited me to join in with a smile.   It became obvious that I wasn’t a Jew by my lack up understanding of what the hell was going on with my out of synch dance moves.  The man’s smile went away and I was ostracized.

Israel to Syria and the end of my time in the Middle East

That evening I decided to go to East Jerusalem, outside of the old city, where a majority of Palestinians live.  My first observation was that the infrastructure was from a completely different era than that of West Jerusalem.  The curbs crumbled and the buildings looked worn.  I noticed a plate of good-looking hummus on an illuminated sign outside of a restaurant.  I walked inside.  The restaurant was large; I sat alone off in the corner.  A few Palestinian families along with some other lone diners ate in the restaurant.  Next to me was a Palestinian man in his early twenties.  A waiter walked by quickly and left me a menu on the table.  I perused over the menu in the brightly lit restaurant looking for the hummus dish I saw on the sign.   I heard the excited chatter of young kids and looked up from my menu.  I picked my head up in just enough time to see one of the little shits grab my menu out of my hands.

Five Palestinian kids crowded around my table.  They were downright nasty, evil little children.  The one kid with my menu—who was around ten-years-old—slapped it down violently on my table while yelling at me.  His friends collectively joined in and yelled at me with irate faces.  They came close enough that I though they were going to try and get physical with me. Their movements were quick and aggressive. They had zero fear.  I hadn’t seen this caged up behavior in Syria or Jordan.

The five children had rage in their eyes and anger in their movements. Anger that I didn’t know was possible at such a young age.   I thought about what I would do if these kids got physical with me.  I knew I couldn’t let them attack me, but they were also too young to strike back against.  Also, what would I have to deal with if I did retaliate?  Fathers, brothers, police?  The tension rose; the kid with my menu edged right up to my face.  What was I was going to do if he came at me?  I hadn’t made a decision in my head yet, my reaction would reflect my adrenaline.  They crowded in closer and got louder.  I needed some sort of intervention.  The tension was at a breaking point and time was almost out before a confrontation.  A loud voice screamed out from across the restaurant.  A man ran over to my defense yelling at the kids.  Whatever he said, it struck fear in them.   The little punks dispersed and ran off through the front door.  I caught my breath and thanked the man.  I opened my menu back up, and continued on looking for my humus dish.

I walked back through the ancient streets of old Jerusalem.  I felt like walking around for a while but the vibe wasn’t the most accommodating.  The streets were mostly filled with Palestinian teens who behaved like they could snap at any time.  And after my experience in the restaurant, I decided to go back to the hospice.

The following morning I left the hospice early and walked through the almost deserted streets of Jerusalem.  It was interesting that the city was broken up into four religious quarters but Israelis patrolled the streets and had control over the city.  When I got out to the bus station, I was subjected to a serious search.  It reminded me of the “Frankford frisk,” in Germany where the security agents left nothing untouched.  Large men with metal detector wands searched anything that moved and then came in with heavy hands.

The Israelis and Palestinians both live in captivity.  No one is really free.  The Palestinians are occupied, and the Jews have to go through so many security apparatuses on a daily basis that I believe their consciousness is occupied.  The day before I left Jerusalem I unloaded my pockets five times before walking through different metal detectors.  I even got searched walking into Sbarro’s Pizza.

Security dogs sniffed out the bus as I boarded it.  I was heading south past the Dead Sea to the town of Eilat before crossing back into Jordan.  We sped out of the bus station through the outer suburbs of Jerusalem.  The morning was brisk and sunny.  One of the neighborhoods we passed through had only Hasidic Jews walking the streets.  They wore long black coats with black hats and had beards with long curls off of their sideburns.

We left the urban landscape and were quickly in the desert.  One voice on the bus stood out louder than any other.  A woman spoke in a strong New York accent with a whiny undertone that pierced through the bus like a needle through a cotton sweater.  She was half standing and talking on her mobile phone.

“Yeah, yeah, in New York is cold right now I know…Hey how’s Martha dooin?  Did she get

back from her honeymoon yet?   I still think that guy Kent is a sleeeeeaze bag.  What do you

mean you’re not going on vacation?  Yeah, yeah, I know, the pizza doesn’t taste like back

home.”

This annoying conversation went on for miles.  For relief I looked to the left out of my window and saw the expansive Dead Sea.  The geography looked similar to the Mojave Desert except a massive body of water was in the middle of it.   I was below sea level—like in Death Valley—at the lowest point of the earth, 1385 feet below the oceans natural rim.  An odd feeling comes with being below sea level, and I’m not sure if it’s because I knew the fact that I was below sea level, or because nature has a way of messing with your vertigo.

Occasionally a resort popped up on the shore to my left.  To my right, backed up against the mountains, we passed occasional Israeli settlements.  The settlements were surrounded by tall security fencing with one gate in the front to let cars and people out.  Lights and horns fixated on top of the fences.  They were oases of humanity etched into the inhospitable landscape of parched land.  The settlements looked more like elaborate prisons than places to call home.

We reached Eilat.  The lady from New York was still talking loudly on the phone.  My mind had managed to lower her audio track for the duration of the trip, perhaps like someone who lives under the flight path of a major airport.  I took a taxi for the short trip to the Jordanian border.

The Jordanian border was easy.  Both the guards out front of the border facility were smiling and relaxed.  One of the men stamped my passport and said, “Welcome to Jordan!”  I put my first foot inside Jordan and felt weight lift off from my shoulders.  As I looked back on Israel from the sidelines, it came to me how tense of a place it really was.  Everything was on lockdown, and everyone was prepared for another Palestinian uprising.  It felt like Israel was on a ticker and its time was limited.  Everyone knew that the pot will boil over again and they are ready to force the lid back on if it gets shifted off.   But I also felt like there was a collective insecurity that one day they won’t have the ability to do this.

My mission in Jordan was to see the lost city of Petra and then make it back to Damascus in two days.  I found a ride with some French tourists who had hired a car to take them to Petra.   The road out of the Dead Sea basin went up most of the way.  During the two-hour drive we reached a little bit of snow melting over a pass.

Petra is one of the world’s great lost cities.  It encompasses a large space of desert comprised of buildings carved into sheer red rock faces.  It is the number one tourist draw in Jordan and has been shot in many movies, including Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.   I got there late in the afternoon and walked down the long narrow wadi that eventually opened up to a building about five stories high, carved into smooth rock.  I ran out into the desert following hiking trails to different buildings.  The sun was setting far over the Dead Sea, lighting up the rocks a deep red.

    

 

 

  

A couple days later I was on my way back to Syria.  I had met an Icelandic guy in Petra.  We both suffered through a savage hangover during our last night in Petra and were on the bus to Amman.  When we got to Amman we found out that no busses were leaving for Damascus so we decided to hire a cab.

The best Schumacher to date was at the wheel; he got us to Damascus in about two and a half hours.   He was touching the needle of his Audi up to about 112 mph and averaging around 105.  The other cars on the highway stood still as we raced by.

It felt good to be back in Damascus.  I took Karam up on his offer and gave him a call.  We set up a meeting point and time and meet up that night.  Karam took me out to his neighborhood, called Jermala, a busy suburb about twenty-five minutes from central Damascus.  He brought me to his house where I reunited with his family members who I’d met days before.  We walked around Jermala and went to a fast food chicken restaurant.  Karam told me that Jermala was full of Iraqi refugees.  He said that since the invasion rents had gone up exponentially.  No one had a definite number but there were over a million Iraqis in Syria. Jermala had and weird feel to it.  I felt like I stood out and I received many extended gazes.

Back at Karam’s house I got into a great conversation with his brother about religion and philosophy.  Karam’s older brother was a photographer and he told me that business was booming.  “Yes, Pete the Iraqis like to have their pictures taken and there are many of them here right now.”  He also told me that food prices had skyrocketed.   Karam and his brothers were well educated.  His twin brother had just gotten his degree in English Literature.  We huddled around a heater in a large room with pillows on the floor.  After talking for hours with Karam and his brothers they rolled out mats for us to sleep on.  I was comfortable on the firm mat, the heavy blankets kept me happily warm.

During my last few days in Syria I bought gifts for home and walked around the old city.   I had changed since I had landed weeks earlier.  My world had expanded dramatically.  I found a certain amount of innocence in Syria.  And while the outside world is available through Internet and television, there is still a refreshingly wholesome side to the place.  Karam asked me one day, “Do you have hot water in your houses in America?”  Karam was a clever guy.  He knew every member in Bush’s cabinet, and he could speak for hours about history, but he had no clue that most houses in the states had hot water for the last seventy years.

I felt no animosity in Syria whatsoever, despite the fact that most Syrians felt more effects from the Iraqi war than most Americans did (outside those who knew someone in the military.) People followed politics very closely, probably because the decisions made in Washington had a huge effect on their lives down to the very basics such as rent prices.  It was funny that everyone told me before I left that Syria would be such an anti-American place.  The greatest lesson I learned from Syria was that people don’t equal politics.  This can be proven in Great Britain where there is generalized negative view of Americans, while in the “axis of evil,” there is a generally positive one.

I ate a large feast with Karam’s family during my last night in Damascus.  My flight left that evening for Moscow.  Karam and his brothers insisted that they take me out to the airport.  His parents walked me to the car and hugged me goodbye.  We got in the car and sped off to the main road.  I looked in the rear view mirror; Karam’s parents waved at us until we were completely out of sight.

We got back on the main highway to the airport.  I rode down the same highway I came down weeks prior.  At that time I knew nothing about how the Middle East experience would be.  Weeks later I went to the airport with friendships and experiences that felt like they were years in the making.  Bashar Al Assad billboards passed at short intervals.  I was going to miss him not because I was a fan of his politics, but because the larger than life iconography of him everywhere.  Bashar played every role, from military tough guy, to sweet family man.  I felt like I knew Bashar at his best and at his worse.  I had seen thousands of images of his moustache; it never got old.  His identities always changed, but his moustache stayed the same.

Karam and his brothers brought me into the airport.  We sat down for tea and talked about our great times together.  I was going to miss these guys.  They humbled me with their generosity and realness.  .

My flight was called over the intercom and I got up to leave.  Karam smiled at me and put his arm around my shoulder.

“Peter, thank you for our times together, thank you for coming to Syria.”

I hugged Karam and his brothers.

“Thank you guys for bringing me into your home and lives,” I said.  “You showed me true hospitality and taught me so much about your country.  Best of luck with everything.”

I walked through security feeling mixed emotions.  I was ready to leave, but I didn’t want to let go of the Middle East.  I wanted to explore more of it and get a better understanding of this widely diverse part of the world.  I looked back.  Karam and his brothers were lined up in front of the glass separating us.  Their arms waved high up in the air; their smiles stretched ear to ear.  I looked back again as I walked through the metal detector. They were still there.  I walked on towards my terminal.  People and clutter stood in-between us.  Even as they became small, I saw their hands waving over everything obstructing my view.  They kept waving until I was out of sight.  I was going to miss this place.

Next post I write about the exciting country of Georgia!

Entering the unknown: corruption and The Republic of Georgia

This is a very exciting post!  Exciting because in three weeks I will be carrying out my eight-year long dream.  Cameraman Bryon Evans and I will be flying into The Republic of Georgia to shoot the pilot for a new travel television show.  It is basically a video medium of the blog. 

I traveled to Georgia eight years ago.  This series is from that trip.  Enjoy!

Spring 2003

I sat in a comfortable chair and bit into a Subway sandwich with extra turkey.  I pulled back an orange Fanta and let the carbonation dissolve the airy bread in my mouth.  I had time and I was enjoying it.  Intercom messages in German followed by English filled the terminal.  The ceiling was high and people from all over the world walked in front of me.  I looked up at the flight board at Vienna International Airport.

My time in the Western world was about to expire. The flight board listed dozens of cities that I recognized.  But one stood out.  The letters spelling out, “Tbilisi,” illuminated brightly in-between Istanbul and Kuala Lumpur.  I watched flights leave and arrive for some time; my sandwich had already digested.  When “boarding,” lit up next to Tbilisi, I got up and walked out of the clean terminal to a bus that drove us onto the tarmac.  Georgian Airlines flight 682 sat alone in a sea of pavement.  I walked up the stairs and boarded the aircraft.  What I was about to do would change me forever.

I was eager to leave Western Europe and go back to a world of adventure, a world full of randomness and spontaneity.  Since I had left Albania in the fall, I had missed the feelings I got in places like it.  My winter in Switzerland had been fun, but comfortable.  After six months in the Alps, I had come to feel as though the rigidity of Swiss life was going to snap me.

To my surprise Andre, the Russian guy I’d met on the boat between Stockholm and Helsinki, emailed me the day before my departure.  Andre: the guy responsible for the worst hangover of my life.

Pete,

How are you, girls all over me because I am at home

in Russia and time is fun and go fast untill have

money in my pocket and those girls knows exactly what to do with your’s money no mater if it’s dollars or rubles so I’am

stay on my legs my friend.

I never have been ther where you going know but thinking

big difference with georgia in a possitiv way. So you will

have good time down there.

Andree

Andree was on the only person I’d heard speak positively about Georgia.  My Swiss- German roommates in Verbier laughed at my interest in traveling to Georgia, as I made phone calls from Switzerland to buy plane tickets.

The flight was smooth and relaxing. The Black Sea reflected bright sunlight, which made my eyes squint almost shut, as I looked left out of the airplane window.  The Crimean peninsula in Ukraine shot out into the sea.  It was home of the Yalta agreement between Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill, and was summer vacationland for much of the former Soviet Union.  I had no idea that in a few months time, I would be lying on a beach below reflecting on the adventures in which I was about to land in.

White puffy clouds wrapped around the tops of the gigantic snow-capped Caucasus Mountains.  They shot up from the water to the sky without reservation.  As the Black Sea came to an end we started our decent. The clouds thickened.

Tbilisi looked much different than Vienna from the air.  At about 10,000 feet up, I noticed a river winding through the old city.  Groups of decrepit Stalinist-era apartment buildings stood on the outskirts.  Emotions of excitement, anxiety, and fear of the unknown coursed through my veins.  I had no idea what my life would be like in an hour.

I looked around the plane and everything seemed normal.  The hostess refilled my Sprite, a couple across the isle drank beer, and my peanut wrapper sat empty next to a generic glossy paged in-flight magazine.  But my situation was about to become completely abnormal.  The experience of exiting the bus in St. Petersburg had given me a little training for Georgia.  I felt like I had stretched a fair amount before I was about to run. But this was definitely the next degree of adventure, and the next level of testing myself.

I had nothing in Georgia.  No contacts, or an inkling of what it would be like.  I smiled inside with a feeling of luck to be on the flight, I was fortunate to be in this situation, and I knew the challenge would make me a better person.  As we made our final decent through lower layers of clouds, my mind fired with energy and excitement.  The security blanket of the airplane was about to be ripped off of me.

The plane landed smoothly to a runway that was rugged and dilapidated, and surrounded by old inoperable M1-8 Soviet choppers half decomposed into the earth.  I smiled from within and breathed deeply as we taxied around the runway.  The normality, cleanliness, and sterile atmosphere of Austria and Switzerland were something I was ready to let go of.  I wanted to see a country in its natural state, devoid of tourism, and the infrastructure that comes with it.  I wanted to see a place that was raw and unpolished.

The plane stopped in the runway—and as if on queue, black BMW’s and Mercedes quickly surrounded the aircraft.  The corrupt departed the plane: the mafia, businessmen and politicians moved swiftly into their German luxury automobiles.  I walked my way slowly off of the stairs and onto the cracked tarmac. The sky hung mute with clouds; the air humid.  Luxury sedans raced away.  Red light illuminated off the wet pavement from the retreating cars’ taillights.  Nothing was moving through Tbilisi International Airport.  I stood frozen for a second, like someone had pressed my pause button. The air–like me–was dead still.  I craned my neck slowly and looked around at the foreignness.

I picked up my baggage from the plane and walked towards the airport, which looked more like a glorified triple-wide trailer.  I entered through a worn door and was stopped by a rounded customs official.  By rounded, I mean that he was a collection of circles: a big circle for his torso, a smaller one for his head, and so on.  The official looked at my passport and then glanced at me with conviction.  He came closer and accosted me with horrendous cigarette breath.

“Twenty dollars,” he said.

“Twenty dollars for what?”

The man lowered his voice, pinched his eyebrows, and came a little closer to me.

“Twenty dollars to get in country…it is not much money.”

“But the visa fee is thirty-five dollars, what is twenty dollars for?”

“Twenty dollars,” he said sternly.

I complied and gave him twenty dollars.

“Thank you very much sir,” he said with a mischievous smile.  “Enjoy your time in

Georgia.”

This was my first exposure to blatant, out in the open corruption.  Next time, I thought, I wouldn’t be so easy.

I entered a country that was—as I was soon to find out—held together by a fraying thread.  I exited the airport and entered the buzz of taxi drivers.  About thirty of them surrounded me.  I tried to look like I knew what I was doing, like I had done this before, but my foreignness had sheen to it.  As out of place as I was, it was a relief to be a part of non-linear behavior.  I walked forward and pointed at one cabbie.  Before I could catch my breath, I was in the back of a decrepit Lada inhaling CO2 like a tree.

My first observation of the outskirts of Tbilisi was the infrastructure.  It was in horrific shape.  The roads were cracked and worn just like the suspension on the Lada.  Large bangs came through the floorboards, CO2 entered through my nose at different levels—depending on how hard the driver was pushing on the gas—and mixed with his second-hand cigarette smoke.  My lungs were getting hammered.   But a world of amazement lay just beyond my window.  Nine story concrete apartment blocks lined the roadway, clothes and blankets were hanging from small balconies.  Children kicked soccer balls in the alleyways; kiosks sold beer, chocolate, and soda.

Georgia made Russia look like the promised land.  When the Soviet Union ceased to exist in 1991, the Russians pulled out, and took everything including the toilet paper.  And what they didn’t take, they destroyed.  This reality, combined with the fact that Georgia hadn’t had the means to invest much in their infrastructure, made a scene for a grim looking suburbia.  The concrete even managed to look tired.

As we got closer to Tbilisi, the streets became busier.  Cars drove like heavy metal songs gone bad.  They swerved past pedestrians in an unpredictable way.  Once we got to the old city, the magic started to unravel.  Looking over the Mtkvari River, I saw an array of architectural influences: Georgian churches stood out with their sturdy bases, silo looking mid sections, and metal domed tops.  Within the same frame, I saw a Russian Orthodox Church, a sinagogue, Armenian Orthodox churches, a mosque, and various other statues.  The most impressive one was Kartlis Deda (Mother Georgia); a gigantic metal statue perched high above the city on the hillside with a sward in one hand, and a wine bowl in the other.  She reflected the muted sunlight with her aluminum armor and stood stoically over looking Tbilisi.

The taxi driver asked for my hotel, so I told him McDonalds.  I knew there had to be a McDonalds in Tbilisi, and since I didn’t know of a hotel to stay at, it was the only answer I could come up with.  I thought there would definitely be someone who spoke English at McDonalds who could put me in the right direction.  Plus, I had to go to the most reliable bathroom on the planet.  He nodded, and continued to drive in an incongruous fashion swerving around everything with the gas pedal floored.  It didn’t take long to figure out I was on an extended tour of the city.  In a way I liked it.  Like the plane, the seat in the cab was my safe zone and my one bit of normality in a strange land.  Soon I would have to leave it and step into the wild.

After circumnavigation the city a couple of times the driver eventually dropped me off at McDonalds.  I enjoyed the tour; it gave me good bearings of Tbilisi.  The tour came at a price though, and our negotiated price of $10 soon turned out to be $50.  My driver would be one of many who’d try to rip me off.  But I was more prepared from my airport experience and settled on $20.   Georgia was a place I would have to fight for to keep my money alive.

I stood outside a beautiful structure.  My clothes smelled like an exhaust pipe.  The corner of the building was tall with shinny glass, and had a bronze colored metal dome on top.  Next to the dome was a large sign that said “McDonalds.” I felt a weird familiarity in an unfamiliar land.  It was like someone was going to shoot a movie and decided to erect a grandiose McDonalds.  Then at the end of the day they were going to take it down and let the concrete apartment buildings, cracked sidewalks, and worn out neoclassical architecture take over.  I walked inside to a neon glow and to the familiar smell of big macs and fries.  The scent of greasy food clashed with my exhaust smell and made me want to puke.  I walked up to the counter.

To my luck, some of the employees knew English.

“Hi, do you know of a hotel or guest house to stay in?” I said to the young man behind

the counter.  He was a skinny guy with darker skin; the bright yellow McDonald’s uniform he wore looked radioactive and banana flavored.

“Oh hi! Yes I know of a place not far from here, an older lady runs it and she is very

nice.  Her name is Mama Nasi.”

“Excellent!” I said.  “Can you tell me how to get there?”

“No problem, let me call to see if she is there first.”

The young man called and shook his head with a smile.

“Okay, all good.  Come with me outside, I will show you the way to go.”

He left his post and the long line behind me.  We walked outside and he pointed down a busy street.

“It should only be a five-minute walk.”

“Thank you so much,” I said.

“No problem, enjoy yourself in Georgia, and if you need anymore help come back and

find me here.”

I walked happily with my backpack towards Mama Nasi’s guesthouse, which was a large house in a lively part of the city.  Mama Nasi emerged from the front door with a wide smile that reflected back the sunlight from her gold teeth. She looked like a proud old lady as she leaned against the wooden railing next to her door.  She wore a stylish black dress and it appeared like she had just taken the curlers out of her hair. Her eyes squinted, and her arms folded as she looked at me.

Between her broken English and my broken Russian, we understood each other to the extent that I needed a room and she needed five dollars for it.  She escorted me into a large green house, through multiple dimly lit rooms with tall ceilings.  Mama Nasi brought me to a grand room with three beds in it.  She pointed to the bed that was mine.  I thanked her and she left the room.  I put my backpack down on the ground and collapsed onto the bed.  I was in a wealthy state of mind; and like other times during my journey, I had the feeling that I would rather be nowhere else, than where I was at that very moment.

I couldn’t rest for long, there was too much going on outside of the window, and so I decided to walk around Tbilisi.  I toured around the city in an enchanted daze.  Couples and friends walked the main drag at a relaxed pace.  Beautiful signs written in Georgian were completely unrecognizable.  Unfamiliar smells of Georgian food steamed out of restaurants.  The sidewalks crumbled under my feet.  I began to yawn to the point of exhaustion.  I couldn’t stay awake any longer and walked back to mama Nasi’s.  I expired quickly.  My day had been like a dream; my sleep was a continuation of it.

I won’t be returning from Georgia and Ukraine until the 20th of July.  Next Motley Planet post wont happen for a while since we will be capturing footage from high up in the Caucasus Mountains, the Black Sea coast, wine country, or the capital Tbilisi.  If anyone knows anyone at the travel channel let me know. 

How I narrowly escaped a mugging in The Republic of Georgia

I returned from Georgia in late July 2011.  The shoot was a success!  We had great weather for 11 of the 12 days.  Georgia has transformed dramatically from when I was there eight years ago.  The economy has picked up, and along with it the infrastructure, security, and overall optimism of the people.  It shocked me how much corruption has been flushed out of the system, or at least what is visible at the street level.  

The police all have new cars, motorcycles, uniforms, and credibility.  I was told they now get paid well and can be trusted.  In 2003 the police made money on their own by collecting bribes, now they actually enforce the law and aren’t feared. 

Despite the war with Russia three years ago things feel very stable in the country.  And Georgia didn’t have the edge that it had back in 2003.  I can honestly recommend for anyone to travel to Georgia, and highly suggest that you do so if you ever have the opportunity. 

The Caucasus Mountains are surreal; we jeeped far into a remote location on the border with Chechnya, Russia. Wildflowers were everywhere uniformly two feet high.  The landscape was a lush green with jagged snow-capped peaks in the background.  Ancient watchtowers from 350 A.D. stand strategically overlooking valleys.  The mountain people live wholesomely off of the land, but despite their remoteness and simple lifestyle, everyone has cellphones with perfect coverage. 

The hospitality made the trip.  I did a lot of drinking…it’s part of the culture.  Up in the Caucasus I was given a massive horn (a large hollowed out sheep horn) that was filled with wine.  I slugged it in a few large gulps like the Georgians.  Sipping wine in Georgia is alien. 

The Black Sea city of Batumi was under construction with large hotels and resorts being build.  I haven’t seen that much construction in one place since I visited China.  People told me construction jobs were plentiful (when was the last time you heard that?). 

Below is the continuation of my story from 2003; again Georgia is a much different place now.  At the end of the blog are some pictures from my trip this summer.  I am now starting the editing process and plan to have something cut in the next couple of months.  Enjoy!

Georgia 2003

Last Post: Staying with a local in Tbilisi

Radio/TV tower

The communications tower that stood high on the bluff over the city was a leftover from Soviet times.  It was a rusty-red color with a large circular lookout perch near the top, and probably built a couple hundred feet taller than it needed to be to be for the effect of looking ominous.  Similar towers loomed high over other X-Soviet cities and presented an ominous big brother effect.

Grigory told me that area around the transmission tower in Tbilisi used to be quite an event. He said there was a funicular (a tram-car on a steep track) that brought people up the hillside where there were restaurants, bars, and a beautiful park overlooking the city.

I wanted to explore the area, so I proposed the idea one morning over the usual egg and vegetable breakfast.

“Grigory, let’s go check out the old radio tower today.”

“Peter, funicular broken; no way to top.”

“I saw stairs that go up alongside of the funicular tracks, we can just walk up them.”

“You want to walk up stairs?  You crazy?  I no athlete.”

“Common Grigory, it will be fun.  Plus, when is the last time you’ve done something like that?”

“Never.”

My question planted a seed in Grigory’s head.  From the few days I spent with him I realized that his world was small.  It revolved mostly around the church, video games with his friends, and diner at home.  I though he might be up for a different experience.

“Ok, we can go.”

“We go in fifteen minutes, after breakfast,” he said.

At this time in our friendship I knew that fifteen minutes meant two hours.  By early afternoon we took the subway to the north of downtown and surfaced near the base of the hillside.  We ascended up small streets and passed a well-kept building that was the Italian Embassy.  A few hundred feet up in elevation we came across a Russian Orthodox Church.   The small onion domes stood out from the surrounding architecture.  About fifteen minutes later we reached the base of the funicular.

“Funicular no worked for years.  No money to run it,” Grigory said disappointingly.

We started climbing up the stairs on the right of the funicular tracks that looked to be in good shape.  There were hundreds of them, and Grigory breathed heavily up each one.   He lit up a cigarette.

“Peter, this difficult.  I no fitness.”

He puffed on the cigarette for assistance, inhaling it like it was oxygen.

“Why you no breathing hard Peter?”

“Grigory, we have only gone up a few stairs.  Plus I don’t smoke; it doesn’t help your breathing.”

“Oh…” he said like this was new news.  He picked up his cigarette, examined it with his head tilted, put it close to his face, and looked at it from all angles.

We ascended up a few more stairs.  A humid haze lurked out on the horizon; the sun shone through it and reflected light off of the metal roofs of the city below.  The brown chocolate-colored Mtkvari River cut through the center of the city and contrasted from the bright greenery of deciduous trees.

I waited for Grigory who was a couple hundred stairs below me.  He was struggling again, and puffing on another cigarette.  Eventually he made it up to me.  I let him catch his breath as he put his hands on his knees and hunched over.  Once Grigory put himself back together I turned around to continue upwards. We were about half way up.

Out of the corner of my eye a blur flew past my periphery.  A whooshing sound loudly entered my left ear; I felt a swift breeze on my skin.

“Shit!” Grigory said.  I looked back and saw a large rock smack the concrete about a hundred stairs below us. Grigory grabbed my arm firmly and yanked me off the stairs and into the bushes.  My gut was flying.  High above us some young men at the top of the funicular quickly disappeared.  We waited in the bushes.  I felt my heart beating in my ears.  I sat in a squatted position carefully peering out from the undergrowth to the top of the funicular.  Grigory lit another cigarette and waited patiently.  I reflected briefly on how the rock that just missed me—by less than an inch—most likely would have shattered my skull.  Grigory’s cigarette eventually burnt out; he peered out from behind the bushes, and walked out slowly.

“Peter, it is okay, now.”

We got back on the stairs.  I looked up and scanned scrupulously for another airborne rock.

immobile funicular

As we got close to the top of the stairs my calves burned and Grigory breathed like a dying horse.  He lit another smoke for relief and inhaled the whole thing in no time while coughing profusely.  My lungs hurt just from being around him; my senses honed in on my respiratory system even though it was fine.  An old red funicular car stood parked in a concrete tube.  Narrow stairs climbed around the station and up to a grand balcony built on top of the funicular structure.  We rounded the corner of the building and three young men approached us.  They looked to be the same guys that threw the rock, and appeared to be in their late teens or early twenties.  Two of them were around my height, but with much smaller builds.  I wasn’t too worried about them.  But the third guy looked more dangerous.  He was shorter and stockier, and appeared to be more pissed off than the others.  His eyebrows connected thickly like sheep’s wool and cast a shadow over his savage acme that cracked his face.

The young men stared Grigory down and sneered at him.  They then gazed at me and sized me up; looking at me from my feet to my head.  I noticed they were confused about where I was from.  Their faces changed from hostile to puzzled.  The short stocky guy asked Grigory for a smoke in a demanding way; Grigory complied.   Tension mounted as they kept dashing their eyes between Grigory and me.  We stood placidly; face to face with them.  Grigory and I were bigger, but we were outnumbered.  There was a brief moment where they were deciding what action to take, and Grigory and I were waiting for their decision.  But they hesitated, and we walked past them; to our luck they didn’t follow.

Old Patio for music and dinning

Looking back at old Tbilisi

We reached the vacant building with grand arches and columns surrounded by a large patio.  The patio was running rampant with weeds; the bottom level of the building had been shelled out.  The expansive views of the city were magnificent.  Grigory told me that in Soviet times the area was beautiful and full of flowers and thriving cafes.  When the funicular rail car ran many people enjoyed the park: eating at cafes, and watching live music.

“This was the place to be on weekends,” Grigory said nostalgically.

Looks friendly but ominious...thugs and cops working together past the gazebo.

Behind the building were botanical gardens.  There were a few flowers with lots of overgrowth; empty benches and gazebos speckled the park.  Beautiful infrastructure was evidence of how pleasant the park once was.  But by 2003, it had certain ghostly eeriness to it; I decided to walk in further.

“My family and me came here before.  It was very beautiful with flowers.  Now just shit,” Grigory said as he looked off into the woods.

I started to walk into the park off to where he was looking.

“Peter stop!”

“Why, what’s wrong?”

“If you go farther, you cross line.”

“What line?”

“Safety line.  In park they rob you.  Robbers take money and split with police.  They work as one here.”

“Oh,” I said slowly.

“You must know where and where not go outside of city,” Grigory said instructively.  “Many bad people here.”

I stepped back towards the building.  There was one policeman walking around in the park that looked over at us.  He walked around slowly with his hands behind his back, and kept a tight frame on our movement.

“This part of park ok,” Grigory said as he waved his hand immediately in front of us.

A few older ladies walked by with handmade brooms.  They slowly swept pine needles and leaves out of the pathways.

We walked over cracked patios back towards the building.  Four large men appeared from around the structure.  They were dressed in suits and wore dark sunglasses.  Upon a closer look I saw a short Japanese businessman in the middle of the men.  Perhaps he was looking at investing in the place.

Grigory’s emotions started to unravel.  His face became serious and his eyes twinkled.

“Peter, Soviet days better.  In old days—safety, pavement good, people good, music good, we had money and time, and everything worked.”

Grigory snapped out of his melancholy as he peered over the edge.  His eyes widened as he looked back at me tensely.  This was the first time I saw him move quickly.

“Peter, guys wait to beat us!”

I felt a jolt of adrenaline pump through me.  I looked over the edge.  The three young men stood anxious for us at the top or the stairs.  They craned their necks in different directions and waited for our arrival.  The dodgier guy clenched his fists and gritted his teeth.  His flexed his jaw muscle stood out from a story up.

The flashback of events hit me.  The rock.  The stair-down/bizarre moment at the top of the stairs….

“Peter, they will beat us; or pull knife.  Come Peter! Hurry!”

I shot one picture at the beginning of this road. I have never run faster.

We ran the opposite direction on a road that led into the woods.  Large pine trees canopied the road and gave it shade.  The road was empty, and looked to be an access route for the communications tower.

Grigory breathed heavily and didn’t have time to stop for a smoke.  I ran fast.  We made some distance from the building, but when I looked back I could see the three men in pursuit.  They must have heard us when we looked down on them.  They made it to the road and were sprinting after us.  We had thirty seconds on them.

“Peter, keep running, don’t stop!” Grigory said as he fell behind me.

The road started to gradually wind; old curbs and rusting streetlights began to line the way.  Whitened light filtered through the canopy of tree branches.  I imagined the days before rust, weeds, and crumbling cement.  I empathized for Grigory; I was here as an observer, but he had to live in place where things were getting exponentially worse by the year.

I looked back again and they were gaining.  A weird combination of fear and excitement showered over me.  Grigory also looked back, but only fear was written on his face.  His breath was loud.  It sounded like he was trying to get all of the air in and out of his lungs through a narrow plugged straw.   He coughed up phlegm and spit it out with force.

We rounded another gradual bend in the road; an apartment building to the right emerged from the forest.  Civilization felt comforting.  The timing was right: my legs were starting to burn and Grigory looked like he had just gone through a full cycle in an industrial dryer.  I looked back again and estimated that we had twenty seconds.  The stocky guy fell back, and was in the same unhealthy condition as Grigory.

Our plight improved when I saw a bus exit from one of the apartment buildings.   We waved it down eagerly.  The bus driver saw us and came to a screeching halt.  It sounded like brake pads didn’t exist on the bus; metal screeched on metal.  The bus driver opened up the folding door and gazed forward with a cold and stoned look.   We ran up the stairs.   I looked down the aisle through the back window of the bus and saw the three figures quickly closing in.  The bus driver didn’t see them, first gear engaged, and momentum started working in our favor.  The three aggressors knew their mission was done; a plume of diesel smoke clouded them out as we crawled away.

Below are some pictures from this summer.  Again, much has changed in Georgia over the last eight years.  Both trips were amazing but completely different.  The twisted excitement that comes with instability was less this trip, but the ability to get around because of new pavement was much more efficient.  In both trips the people were awesome.

Tbilisi, Georgia at night (Click On Picture)

Parliment

Locals at a restaurant that showed us around

Kartlis Deda (Mother Georgia) Wine in one hand for guests, sword in the other hand for enemies

Lookout point

How did this get here? Stumbled upon this structure after a hike on the outskirts of Tbilisi.

Guys I met during the first day who took us into their home and showed us around.

Jvari Monastery (from the 6th century)

Near the radio/TV tower above Tbilisi. This is where I almost got mugged 8 years ago...now it's a nice place for families and entertainment. Perhaps the Japanese business man I saw here with his four body guards made an investment?

High up in the Caucasus

"Schumacher" our driver second from left and his friends

Above the village of Dartlo watching watchtowers

Backside of the village Upper Omalo

• 
• Upper Omalo
• 

Cycling in Georgia

Last post Grigori and I closely dodged a beating from the locals at a park above Tbilisi.  Here is a continuation of my 2003 travels in Georgia.

Grigori and I divulged into the delights of Tbilisi and into a good Georgian meal complements of the church.  I took a big bit of the katchapuri, sipped at some soup, and cleared my plate with satisfaction.  We met up with Alex who took me to meet some of his friends.  We walked to small market with a hair studio in the back.  His friend Alla owned it.  She smiled at me and introduced herself in English.  Her husband Misha was also there with a magnified glass stuck in his eye; he was working on a watch.  He lifted his head up and smiled at me while keeping the small glass squeezed in his eye socket.  I sat down in the barber’s chair.  Misha cracked me a beer and we all clinked our bottles together.  Alla buzzed my hair.

After my haircut I showed Alex, Misha, and Alla the difference between crossing the road in Switzerland and Georgia.  They couldn’t stop laughing as I mimed the process of waiting for a pedestrian light to turn green in Switzerland, and the chaotic movement of crossing the street in Georgia.

“Ha ha ha,” said Misha calming down.  “Peter, why you come Georgia not St. Petersburg or European cities?”

“Europe is full of beautiful cities but it is also full of tourists.  I wanted to catch a place in its original state.  Plus I think it is much more exciting here.”

“Oh…” he said.

“This place is real, and that’s what I love a about it.”

“Oh thank you Peter, we glad you here.”

Misha and I found a common interest in cycling.  He showed me his bike and shoes, and told me he would be riding the following day.

“Peter your ride with us?” he said with a smile.

“I’d love to, but I don’t have a bike here.”

“No problem Peter, I arrange bike for tomorrow.”

Eating back-to-back 3000-calorie meals and inhaling Grigory’s secondhand cigarette smoke was starting to wear on me.  My unhealthy Georgian lifestyle made me crave exercise.  Plus, it was cycling as a child that gave me the discipline and confidence to go to Georgia in the first place.

Grigory and I went back to his home.   The sun set slowly over the horizon and I felt satisfied with my place in Georgia.  I had made friends, and had developed life-marking experiences.  But I couldn’t help notice how extreme Tbilisi was.  It was a place of stark contrasts: rubble next to new restaurants, dangerous people inches from extremely generous ones, and despair pushed up against happiness.

Me, Grigori, Misha, and Paulu before our bike ride

The following morning I met Misha back at the salon.   An older man named Paulu was also there.  Paulu was a good-looking seventy-eight year old with an amazing mane.  His flowing gray hair swept thickly over his head.  He had a wide smile and a storied face.  Paulu had been married four times and was single again. During Soviet times he was a bike racer, and  coach.  He wore a blue jersey with black cycling shorts that fitted tightly over his fit body.

“Let’s do this!” he said as he slapped me on the back.

Misha’s cigarette dangled out of his mouth like it was going to fall out.   His elongated nose shot out over his two-day scruff.   His wide mischievous grin beckoned my smile.

“Peter are you ready for 80K ride?”  He handed me an old red Panasonic bicycle.

“Yes Misha,” I said with excitement as I put my leg over the top tube.

Paulu got on his bike and led the way.  He rode hard from the gun, and I was quite impressed by his speed.  Paulu enjoyed the role as leader and made sure we

stayed close to him.  He wanted to coach me and teach me how not to rock my bike when I pedaled out of the saddle.

“No, do like this,” he said while demonstrating to me.

Paulu & Misha

My health felt great for the first time in Georgia.   My body was consistently doing something active other than digesting massive meals and alcohol.  Heavy traffic made getting out of the city hectic.  Paulu protected me like I was his young protégé.  He rode to my left and buffered me from hairball drivers.

If the Tbilisi airport was my introduction to Georgian corruption, the bike ride was the conformation of it.  We rode swiftly along the right side of a long line of cars.  The police had set up a random checkpoint on the side of the road.  As we approached the checkpoint, Paulo slowed down and waved to the officers.  They waved back nodding their heads.  I looked to my left and noticed that each car was paying money to the police.  This scene had all of the signs of a tollbooth: a line of cars, and a person in uniform taking money.  But instead of a fixed structure with accountability, two policemen set up a

Soviet era bus stop

random barricade for the day to pull in some personal revenue.

“Peter,” Misha said.  “Police take money from cars but not take from BMW or Mercedes.  People with BMW or Mercedes have power, police scared of them.”

The whole process looked standard, and the cars waited in line patiently.  The difference between paying corrupt policemen, or tollbooths that funded a corrupt government, didn’t seem that much different.

We rode out past the end of the apartment buildings and old factories.  Lush Georgian countryside opened up, cars thinned out, and the sun beat down warmly on our necks.  We rode past houses with heavily fortified gates.  The sounds of chickens clucking and dogs barking filled the air; a warm wind blew gently across my face.  The cadence of spinning my legs felt sensational.

Jvari Monastery

Paulu and Misha warned me about a particular neighborhood dog.  They said he was viscous, and that we had to ride as fast as possible to get past it without getting bit.

“Bit?” I said with apprehension.

“Pete, dog mean, big teeth, bite, go fast”, Misha said with conviction.  My eyes fastidiously scanned the side of the road looking for dogs.  As we got closer to the house of the dreaded dog, Paulu warned me.

“Peter, do like me.  And when I go, ride very, very fast!”

I heard a loud bark.  A large German shepherd appeared on the shoulder of the road; his gaze fixated on us.

“Peter go!” Paulu said with gusto.  “Go, go, go!”

I got out of the saddle and sprinted as hard as I could.  Misha followed closely behind me.  A car drove by in the opposite lane.  When it passed we dashed quickly to the left side of the road, and came up on the dog with a lot of speed. The dog started charging at us.  Its mouth foamed and its teeth snapped with the intention of biting them into our calves. Paulu stayed behind us and sprinted straight for the dog while yelling at the top of his lungs.  I put my head down, and dug deep again.  My bike swayed back and forth, and the only noise I could hear—other than the dog—was my gears shifting, and my tires on the road.  I shifted up searching for more speed; my legs burned with lactic acid.  The dog was almost at my calf when its attention diverted to Paulu who was about 200 feet back.  Paulu charged straight for the dog.   The dog jump up at him but Paulu dodged the attack.  Paulu slowed down and began to duel the dog.  He grabbed his long frame pump, and when the dog jumped up at him again, he smacked it brutally hard on the upper part of the nose between its eyes.  I heard a hollow crack.  The German Sheppard let out a screeching whine and stopped barking.   It whimpered its way back towards the side of the road in defeat.  I stop pedaling and smiled at Micha.  He was breathing heavily while hunched over his bike.

“That close Peter, Paulu beat dog every time.”

We continued on through the blooming Georgian countryside.  It was midday and the sun filled the air with steadying warmth.  “Psssss,” Misha pulled over

Flat tires and smokes

immediately to the side of the road to see what was wrong with his wheel.  His tire had a leak.  He lit up a cigarette, smiled, and started fixing it with a spare.

“Bang!”  Paulu’s tire also blew.

The worn out tire had been sown with a needle and thread many times before.

“Shit,” Paulu said.  “Seven dollars new tire.”

This was a fair amount of money in Georgia.  They both put their arms up in the air and started laughing.  They laughed off everything and appreciated what little they had materialistically.  Their bikes were worn out with tired gears.  Misha’s shoes were much too small for his feet and he had to make his own cycling gloves.  Both their wheel sets were banged up and wobbled along as they rode.  What would be considered junk at home was respected in Georgia.  Paulu was very proud of his vintage X-Soviet race bike.  It wasn’t worth much but it was worth everything to him.  He was very particular with the machines and told me not to lye the bikes down on the grass because something could get scratched.

Another toast

After the tires were patched we rode on for about another hour and stopped at a house.  It was Misha’s friends place and he was expecting our arrival.  A full spread of food laid out on a table in the courtyard.  Women cooked and set up the scene.  There were six guys around the table drinking.  I was starving and ready to sink my teeth into delicious Georgian food.   But before I could get past hello, I looked at my hands and found myself double fisting wine and vodka.  Cheers were given to our friendship, and I went bottoms up at the top of the day.  Of course every drink had to be toasted to our friendship, deceased family member, the future, family, and ironically, good health.  There was no tactical way to dodge a toast to friendship, or your mother’s health, so I pounded the vodka with gusto.

My stomach felt tricked; the wine and vodka began to fill up.  But I needed food to counter my buzz and give me energy for the ride home.  An older lady cooked fresh pouri (Georgian bread) in a vertical and

Baking pori (bread)

rounded stone oven.   Her heavily wrinkled face surrounded her modest smile.  Around the table on the patio Misha’s friends laughed and drank.  Women came out to the table with dishes in their hands like on a conveyer belt.  We all happily stuffed ourselves.

“Cheers to your family!” one of the guys shouted; another fiery shot of homeade vodka burned down my throat.

Cooling the feet

A small brownish stream ran through the back of the property.  After lunch Misha decided his crammed feet needed some relief, so he sat down on the footbridge and dangled his constrained toes into the water with his shoes on.  A few of the guys came over, and we all broke out into a loud laughter.  The environment was rooted and marked by friendships, delicious food, homemade wine and vodka, and genuine comradery. Georgia was the opposite from my times in Scandinavia where the weather and the people sometimes felt cold.  I was in my perfect spot, surrounded by excellent people, and doing what I’d always loved to do…ride bikes.

My butt was in terrible pain the second I sat down on the bike seat.  I hadn’t ridden a bike in many months and my normal shorts had chaffed me during the ride out from Tbilisi.   Vodka consumption mildly numbed the pain; the damage had been done.  Every pedal stroke shot pain to my rump.   I was drunk and stuffed.  My drunkenness eventually sobered up to a buzz as we endured the forty miles back to Tbilisi along the Georgian Military Highway. Road signs spanned over the road in Georgian, Russian, and English, with the names like Baku and Yerevan.

Georgian/Russian/English

When we approached the outskirts of Tbilisi two dogs saw us from ahead and locked down their radars on six edible calves, achilles tendons, and ankles. The threat was twice as ominous as our previous dog experience.  Palau launched another preemptive attack.  The old man had fire in his eyes, and shook his head violently back and forth while he screamed.  He got out of his saddle and sprinted head on for the dogs.  The charge was mutual, but as the dogs and Paulu got closer to each other, the K-9’s decided it wasn’t worth the fight with Paulu and backed off.

Staying with a Georgian local in Tbilisi, Georgia

After the church service, Grigory and I went back to the main bustling street of Rustaveli, and walked around casually looking at different shops and talking about Georgia.  The sun started to set on the horizon.

“Peter, where you staying tonight?”

Grigory

“I am staying with Mama Nasi; an older lady that has a guesthouse.”

“Oh…” he said.  “If you like you can stay with my family.  We live in different neighborhood, but is good place.”

Grigory was a nice guy and had taken a good part of his day to show me around. I knew it would be a great experience to get to closer to local culture.  And like other times during this epic journey I was invited to be part of the game instead of being a tourist.

“Sure,” I said.”

We can go out now; my mother cooks diner.

“Okay, but we have to go back to Mama Nasi’s and get my stuff,” I said.

Mama Nasi

When we got back to Mama Nasi’s she was sitting on the porch smiling.   “Gamor jobt Peter,” (hello) she said as I walked up the stairs.

I sat down on the bench next to Mama Nasi and attempted to tell her that I would be leaving for the night.  She couldn’t completely understand me so she looked at Grigory for an explanation.  Grigory spoke to her in Georgian and her smile lost its life.   Mama Nasi thought Grigory was trying to compete for her five-dollars a night.  She looked like a disgruntled grandmother who was about to discipline her grandchild, that being me.

I started packing and couldn’t help but notice that Mama Nasi rummaged though my backpack.  Small chocolate crumbs lay on the floor, and a large part of my toilet paper roll was gone.  My chocolate was almost finished.  I left Mama Nasi’s thanking her; she gave me a half-hearted smile in return.  I still paid her for the night even though I wasn’t staying.  I knew I’d be back eventually and needed to stay on good terms.

Tbilisi Subway

Grigory and I reached the nearest subway station.   I approached the station and went through the door.  I literally walked through the door because it was closed and I didn’t open it.  This was only possible because of the missing glass; the entrance was a big metal door frame with a handle.

The Tbilisi subway felt Soviet, and descended like Moscow’s for an eternity into the earth’s lithosphere.  It had all of the same features like gold trimmed lights, old ladies waiting at the bottom of the escalator in little huts half asleep, and blue subway cars.  But Tbilisi’s subway was worn down—filthy and dark.  It was the most depressing subway—one of the most depressing places—I’d seen.  Flickering lights exposed faces hardened by difficult lives.  Old ladies sold everything imaginable, from batteries to soccer balls, and walked back and forth in the subway cars like zombies with almost every bit of life squeezed out of them.  Little scrubby kids came through with ripped up shirts and shoes, and sang with depressed screeches for pennies.

Not a word was spoken amongst the passengers.  The lights flickered in-between stations; sometimes to the point of darkness for a few seconds that seemed more like minutes. The eerie squealing of the breaks pierced my ears and sounded like a sound effect from Children of the Corn.  The crookedness of the tracks rocked me aggressively in my hard seat.  If I had decided to fall asleep, and relax my neck, my head would have smashed through the window.  But like the Moscow’s subway Tbilisi’s subway doubled as a bomb shelter.  It moved at high-speed, and had doors with the capability of dicing a human in half upon closure without much warning.

When the U.S.S.R. dissolved, “freedom” came, but with a vacuum of insecurity.  Rule of law washed away along with livable pensions.  The elderly got hit the worst.  I could see through downcast faces on the subway, nostalgia was there for Soviet times.

On the way to Grigory’s house

Grigory and I got off at the last subway stop.  His neighborhood was unbelievably poor.  Every building looked like a 1.7 magnitude earthquake could have leveled it.  Some of them even looked like Jenga puzzles with solid concrete bricks missing at lower levels, and random incongruous material placed on the top.  The pavement was gone and the streets between the sidewalks were dirt with massive potholes.  As we got closer to Grigory’s place the neighborhood got poorer.  Piles of trash decomposed into the streets, and homeless dogs poked around for food scraps. Old factories speckled the landscape and were out of operation decaying like large compost piles.  Many of the factories were shelled out.  The Russians gave a tough blow upon departure, but were unable to take the best part of Georgia: its rich culture and kind people.  Nothing in the neighborhood had been added since the big bruises were inflicted.  In a few days time everything would appear normal, but I was too fresh out of Austria not to notice.

We finally got near Grigory’s place.  An assortment of different colored fences constructed together looked like a fortress wall.  In front of the long fence-line were two sets of railroad tracks overgrown with tall weeds.  The tracks stemmed from the factory nearby that was out of operation.  Grigory led me through a white door into a nice courtyard; white pigeons ran around.  The homestead was clean and felt cozy.  Grigory’s parents had strong scented coffee waiting for us in the kitchen.  We sat down in one of the small structures adjacent to the courtyard where dinner was served.  I gave the family some chocolate—which I bought on the way—and Grigori and I sat and talked.

mentally and physically finished

After diner Grigory brought me to the best room on the property.  It had a nice wide bed with a flower printed quilt cover.  Above the bed hung stuffed animals in plastic bags.  My senses had been buzzing on overdrive all day and I was thoroughly exhausted.  I put my head down on the clean-ironed sheets and shut my eyes in a small Armenian home in the outskirts of Tbilisi.

Grigory and I woke up to a prepared Armenian breakfast of fried potatoes and vegetables.  After breakfast we retraced our steps from the previous night and reached his church.  I was antsy to do some exploring, but Griogory had to charge his phone, which meant we had to wait two hours.  He took me to Abanotubani—home of famous mineral baths located near the center of the city.  We heated up in the steam baths, and an older man gave me a massage.  He started with an aggressive smack to my back—perhaps to show his manhood—and then proceeded to rub it intensely for 30 minutes.

The pace-of-life moved much slower in Georgia than I was accustomed to. Achieving just a few objectives a day was a struggle.  But with slowness came additional time to make detailed observations.  Countering my lifestyle back home—the days weren’t chased, but observed.  It took time to get into the groove of not working timely from task to task.  Even though I had previews of this lifestyle in Eastern Europe, Georgia was running on a different clock altogether.

After a few days Georgia began to feel normal.  Our routine revolved around food and the church.  Grigory wouldn’t let me pay for a thing.  He made sure he paid for every meal out and every transportation ticket.  When I kept pushing him telling him I wanted to pay; he shut me off.

“Peter, don’t worry, it is church’s money.”

I felt guilty knowing that church offerings from impoverished older people were paying for my daily dosage of wine and decadent cuisine.  Usually, we would eat lavishly and then go to church for the daily prayer.  Indirectly I started to pay for everything.  Without Grigori seeing what I was doing I made sure I stuffed the offerings box to repay the church for my calories and alcohol consumption, and to help put some paint on the peeling walls.

Grigory (right) and his friends singing

New Georgian Orthodox church being built

Just a short walk from Grigory’s church was a grand church under construction.  Mercedes flew by next to cars held together with duck tape.  There was money in Georgia, but only for a select few.  On one occasion I decided to throw away my old worn-out shoes onto a huge junk pile on the side of the street. I walked away, but out of the corner of my eye I saw an old man with straggly grey hair pick the shoes out of the rubbish.  He gave them a sturdy look, pinched his eyebrows, and gazed at them with analytical eyes, and turned them in different directions.  He observed a fair amount of life left in the soles; he smiled like he scored a big find, and walked off with them.

Grigory’s friends

Grigory’s obsession was video games.  Everyday we met Alex, George, and a few other of his friends in a business crammed with televisions and play stations.  They zoned out on a soccer game for hours.  Yells and hollers echoed off the walls of the small room, while neighborhood kids rooted them on.  Grigory was quite good at the game, and received respect.  While everything in Georgia was shared or given to me, this was the one exception.  I touched the controller for all but a minute before Grigory couldn’t take it any longer.  His fingers twitched like an alcoholic who just had his handle of whiskey ripped away. He would say something like,

“Pete, give me control; you need practice.”

Or

“This finals round; perhaps you play later.”

Nicest McDonalds I’ve seen to date…the best worldwide public restroom.

Play station was a drag for me, but it was interesting to see so much passion spilled over a few outdated games.  Grigory and his friends were well educated: versed in music, languages, and could talk for days about the French Revolution.  But the mindless act of video games somehow satisfied them the most.

Next: A rock almost smashing my head followed by a mugging attempt and an intense chase.