Sun rays on the Annapurna Cirque

First the heat, then the cacophonies of horns, livestock and Hindi film music and finally night with its relative and merciful quiet; my first impressions of Nepal were unmistakably and unavoidably physical.  It was like waking up in the middle of a crowd and not knowing why people were shouting and shoving and if you should go with the flow or get the hell out of there.  By the time I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes, I found myself on a week-long walk into the hills to visit Chandra’s village.

Bouhda Stupa

Am I getting ahead of myself?  Makes sense I suppose.  Ever since I got the offer from the Rassias Foundation to go to Nepal, I felt like I was playing catch up.  The Himalaya, like Patagonia, seemed like a place that I had to wait for; wait until I was older, or richer, or a better mountaineer.  But the opportunity fell into my lap, and I could not turn down a paid trip to Nepal.  So I went a few weeks early to do some exploring before I taug

The chariot of Rato Machhendra Nath

ht a Teacher’s Workshop for the Tibetan teachers of the Rangeyeshe Institute.  What follows is some sort of selective record of those experiences.  I finally bought a camera, as I still remember hiking through the most beautiful landscape I had ever seen in the Torres del Paine and not being able to record it after Jonny’s batteries died.  So I’ve shared photographs that will surely be more eloquent than any words of mine.

My trip and my work would not have been possible without the help of Greg, a Jesuit preist and Dartmouth alumnus, who helped organize the teacher’s workshop and introduced me to Chandra, his assistant.  Chandra was my companion in my travels through Nepal.  He took me into the homes of his family and into his own village as we hiked through countryside that has never seen a road.  All of his relatives and friends and acquaintances were wonderfully gracious hosts, sharing whatever they had: including raksi, a rather potent homemade hooch that I eventually learned to decline lest I spend all day sweating out moonshine.  Chandra told me that I was the fourth foreign guest to ever pass through most of the villages we saw.  Indeed, people seemed genuinely excited to meet me and hear the few sentences in Nepali that I managed to learn.  Later when I joined the tourist beat, I realized how remarkable was my experience in the hills.

Rest on the way to Chandra's village

The first night in the hills

Rea and me, she is the daughter of Raphael who runs the Learning Center of Kathmandu

My brief stay in Nepal felt like life with the filter removed, closer to the marrow.  Colors were brighter, noises were louder, poverty was poorer and people were incredibly generous.

Chandra's father

I saw a goat being born, and people who were not long for this world.  The generations, from the cradle approaching the grave, were present in almost every home.  I was also sicker, and I struggled physically more than I have in a long time.  By the end of my time hiking into the Annapurna Sanctuary, I had lost almost 20 lbs.  I spent days and nights alternating between appreciation of the tearfully beautiful scenery and a losing endeavor to keep nourishment inside my body.

A little work in the fields

Traditional Nepali rifle and funny-looking American

Of course, I couldn’t go to Nepal without getting as close as possible to the mountains that have filled my imagination since my uncle, Frank, first gave me Maurice Herzog’s account of the first ascent of Annapurna.  So Chandra and I hiked into the Annapurna Sanctuary where our companions included the inimitable peaks, a stray dog, a few fellow travelers, a group of young Nepali communists and the memories of fallen mountaineers.

There was much, in the village schools and children and in the faces of the teachers I met, that I was unable to photograph.  And of course, there is even more for which I have yet to find the words.  A Nepali named Dawa Tenzing once said, “Many people come, looking, looking…some people come, see.” I am not so foolish as to claim that I came to some great understanding about Nepal or the developing world or mountains that pillar the sky, but I hope that I saw something.

My final words written in Nepal:

Today is my last day in Nepal.  Facts are nice to hold onto when interpretation and reaction are slipping and sliding through my fingers.  It will be memorable certainly, but already my memories are becoming postcards.  I’ve already lost the desperation I felt a few weeks ago.  I guess it’s good that discomfort and loneliness fade, but I worry about the loss of intensity and immediacy.

Have I changed?  I’m always changing, I suppose, but I no longer am sure about sudden transformations; seems more like gradual accretion; or inertia and drift, pushing and pulling into tomorrow.

You can get used to almost anything, and you do.  It becomes part of you as soon as you are no longer part of it.  I will carry a little bit of Nepal with me.  And as I tell the stories and show the photos, it will become solid and passed and past; another memento.  Unless I return.

“He who binds to himself a joy
Doth the winged life destroy.
He who kisses the joy as it flies,
Lives in eternity’s sunrise.”

Returning to America after an unreal year of traveling every other weekend with Carson was a strange transition. On one hand, spending a year in Turkey was exactly what I had hoped it would be–a chance to see the world from a new perspective, an overdose of travel, and an opportunity to pause and reload for the correct graduate program and my future.

I realize in retrospect that out of everything in Turkey, it is the companionship of a fellow traveler, trust, and the constant support of one Carson Thomas that I miss the most. For those who have had the pleasure of spending a significant amount of time with Carson, they know that his perspective, open mind, and unique ability to enjoy and look forward to the unexpected are qualities that are hard to come by. When the quirky, the crazy, the random, and the unforeseeable have come my way over the past year I often chuckle to myself and then by reflex look for Carson to share a nodding of heads. While our paths have diverged for the moment, I have no doubt that we will once again travel together, until then I hope that we can simultaneously update this blog with our separate experiences.

The first year of grad school was the hardest academic term (by far) that I have had. One of the good things that taking a year to travel did for me is that it gave me the opportunity to reflect on what I wanted to do more of and less of at Cornell compared to my years at Carleton, Bilkent, and South Eugene. One thing that came to mind is that while the political world has always caught my eye, I have never been that involved with my schools and instead chose athletics  as a main focus. While I don’t regret these decisions, many long talks with Carson led me to realize that I was beyond excited to jump into the political world of Cornell and Ithaca. Looking back on 2009-10, much of what I enjoyed involved my commitment to the graduate student assembly, various community outreach opportunities and the student government of my own program — The Cornell Institute for Public Affairs. One funny facet of being so involved in a new location with new faces around is that others perception of who you are, what you are experienced in, and what you want to do is purely based on the first few months of social and professional engagement.

One aspect I often struggled with was the fact that I have always had a very close group of friends that was in one way or another strongly tied to my past…perhaps I was spoiled for a long time…regardless, I struggled for a while with the fact that that link was gone for the most part and would have to be rebuilt. Ithaca may be gorgeous but the setup of the community and campus for a few different reasons is not very conducive to fluid social connections. The above factors, combined with an overly focused academic couple of terms, and it was really not until the end of the spring that I felt truly comfortable with my friends and surroundings.

One year of an amazing program that is CIPA as well as a few fantastic connections made along the way and I am very grateful to find myself in what has thus far been an amazing internship at NASA’s Office of International and Interagency Relations in Washington, DC. In the two weeks that I have been on the job I have been extremely appreciative of the involvement and trust that my supervisor and others in the office have granted me. As part of my final project (similar to a thesis) for CIPA I am working on the Obama administration’s new initiative to use NASA as a means to reach out to nontraditional partners through space policy. It’s proving to be a challenging project but one that has endless avenues to explore and has taken me from Latin American ambassadors to Russian and Swedish atmospheric balloon agreements.  Perhaps my favorite moment thus far was taking a tour of the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland where we got to visit the Operations Center  for the Hubble Space Telescope and send real-time messages to Hubble 345 miles above the earth. The time it took for our signal to bounce off of two centers in California, up to Hubble, and back down to us took less than 1 second.

I will be in DC through the beginning of August at which point I’ll have a short time to visit friends and family before heading back for the final year of my two-year program. Let this be a challenge to Carson who often talks of posting on his new adventures but rarely does…

Asking to get off of a bus and pointing out that there is a cow on the side of the road sound remarkably similar in Turkish.  Our confusion between inecek var (ina-jek-var) “get me off” and inek var “check out that cow” led Leon Schneider and I to more than a few late rendezvous, unnecessary taxi diversions and disappointed Turkish children.  Still, we persevered and managed to make the most of our year spent teaching English at a university in Ankara, Turkey.

Despite being the center of government bureaucracy, Ankara does not rank high on the list of must-see Turkish tourist destinations.  We livened things up by helping to organize Ankara’s ultimate frisbee team (The Bilkent Goats) and subsequently compiling good performances against the teams we faced in Turkey and on our travels throughout the Eastern Mediterranean.  Of course, it wasn’t all disc and gallivanting.  We did do some teaching, frightening our lily-livered superiors with in-class discussions of Turkish and American politics, including topics like terrorism, religion, the Kurdish situation and Armenia.

We lived 100 kilometers from where Alexander the Great cut the Gordian Knot and where the events of the 20^th Century continue to etch indelible rifts between neighbors.  The Turkish people today are vitally invested in the many competing historical narratives that have ebbed and flowed through and around the Anatolian Peninsula.  On our emotional last day of classes, my students asked me to share my Turkish experiences when I returned home.  They do not want to be thought of as the backward country of Orientalist myth: all covered women, fez-wearing men and medieval practices.  In truth, I came to know and love a modern nation proudly struggling with a conflicted past and an uncertain future, the home and inheritors of both Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and the Ottoman Caliphate.

My words can do little justice to the warmth of the people we met and the richness of our escapades. From the soldiers who stopped us at gunpoint and then befriended us in North Cyprus; to the Kurdish brothers who adopted us over breakfast at a remote road stop; to the magnificence of Istanbul’s monuments and the hospitality of its frisbee team; to the frenzied dancing and raki drinking in Ankara, suffice it to say that Leon and I enjoyed our year as much as prudently possible, and probably a fair bit more.

Sadly, we have both left Turkey and parted ways.  Leon is on his way to graduate school at Cornell hitting up the Grand Canyon, Moab and Monument Valley along the way, and I am left to fend for myself in the mountains of Nevada and California in between jobs in Spain and Mexico.  I’m looking to the Dominican Republic next.  While we have become happily reacquainted with American beer and a choice of Mexican, Chinese, or Thai at most street corners over the past few weeks, our one year in Turkey was unforgettable and the places and friends we made along the way will be truly missed.

In May, my mother Connie came to visit and we took the opportunity to get in some mother-son travel together. We started out with one many must-see sites in Turkey: Cappadocia.

After a full couple days of tours and hiking, I headed back for Ankara to teach (sadly) and left mom to venture forth solo. It was interesting to see the difference between how I have been treated by foreigners as a young American male versus how Turks approached and communicated with mom. Once I left Cappadocia, it seems that our American/foreign origin was far less intimidating as my mom reports everything from eye contact (unusual especially from the more conservative women here) to being invited into a local’s home for a meal.

Once we were reunited in Ankara, it was off to see all that Ankara has to offer (not a ton). First and foremost on my mom’s mind was the famous Anatolian Museum.

Upon realizing that hopes for a spectacular vacation rested outside of Ankara, our next stop was Istanbul and the ever majestic Aya Sofya.

Just across the street (strategically located) is the almost as famous Blue Mosque. As you can see Connie came equipped with the necessary head scarf. Behind her are the men washing up before prayer.

I managed to catch the call to prayer on tape just outside the Blue Mosque.

We concluded our time together in Istanbul with a little relaxing in our luxurious hotel room overlooking the sea with a Bosphorus ferry ride.

We were fortunate enough to get caught  in the middle of a sail boat race underneath the famous Fatih bridge…

At any point throughout our stay there were over 100 boats/tankers visible outside our hotel window emphasizing Istanbul’s true geographic importance.

Late Spring and early summer has been beautiful in Ankara, which means that nearby Cappadocia, Izmir, and other coastal towns have become hard to resist each and every weekend. An Easter bash (above) was celebrated in fine form by us Americans…and perhaps only surpassed by Turkey’s International Sports holiday in which everyone gets off work and school to do simultaneous acts of kick-boxing and step-aerobics.

The first annual Turkish Frisbee tournament was held last month. Futbol remains the national sport despite our best efforts. Our team (The Bilkent Goats) swept our way to a national tittle, beating second place Istanbul Turk Kasi 15-8 in the finals.

Along with the joys of sunshine, BBQing, and Besiktas winning the Turkish futbol league, has come the stress of post-Turkish life and returning to the real world. As it stands right now, I’ll be returning home to Oregon on July 16th for a couple of weeks before a quick stay in Arizona  with my grandparents and then a road trip across the country to Ithaca where I’ll start school at the end of August. Along the way I hope to stop and spend some time in my old stomping ground of Madison, WI as well as Denver and Chicago.

For our last vacation in Turkey, Carson and I decided to head East to a part of the country that seemed to live more in legend for our Western students than anything else.

With words like Kurds, Honor Killings, and the PKK being thrown around we left knowing that it would be in far contrast to our first Bayram way back in September that was filled with sandy beaches and warm salty seas.

We flew into Trabzon to get things kicked off. While it was nice to be back on the Black Sea again and gaze towards Russia and the Ukraine, it was the Sumela Monastery that we were truly interested in. Getting an early start paid off and we enjoyed the vertical car ride, and even steeper hike up to what looked somewhat similar to “Dracula’s Crib”.

The Monastery stands at the foot of a steep cliff facing the Altındere valley about 1200 meters high. It was founded in the year 386 (during the reign of the Emperor Theodosius I, AD 375 – 395) by two Athenian priests – Barnabas and Sophronius. Legend states that they found an icon of the Virgin Mary in a cave on the mountain and decided to remain in order to establish the monastery. During its long history, the monastery has fallen into ruin several times and been restored by successive Emperors.

After spending a night cheering on Trabzon Spor (futbol) in a local pub with some serious fans, we were content to have seen and done all there was to see and do in Trabzon, and it was off to Erzurum.

From Erzurum on, the Turkish towns, peoples, and beliefs began to change.  The further east we ventured Turkish Nationalism was replaced with Socialist ideals and remnants of the Soviet Union’s influence. Perhaps most dramatically, Turks were replaced by Kurds. The one thing that perhaps did remain constant was the locals love of Obama, hatred of Bush, and Lonely Planet’s utter confusion when it came to maps and hotel locations of the towns.

Prepared to find a deeply conservative and remote lifestyle in Erzurum, Carson and I were more than a little tickled to be met with lingerie clothing stands on the streets and the always-insightful words of 50 Cent — the American rap artist. Perhaps the least interesting of any town we visited, after a half a day of site seeing and castle dwelling (along with a gorgeous sunset while perched upon the castle walls), it was off to Kars and a rendezvous with another good friend from our program, Emma Harper and her brother.

Kars itself was not necessarily our dream when it came to ideal destinations. We spent the first evening hiking to the local castle and checking out the unfinished (ironic?) friendship statue representing Armenia and Turkey.

An early wake up call and a new found love for Turkish Menemen (basically under cooked scrambled egg with glorious honey at its side) brought us to one of the highlights of our trip–Ani.

Our Kurdish hotel owner (turned taxi driver) drove us out towards the boarder of Armenia with the Kurdish radio blaring but drowned out by his own socialist ideals and human-first, Turkey-second world perspective spiel.

Ani is a stunning, uninhabited medieval city alongside the Tzaghkotzadzor valley which also happens to divide Turkey and Armenia.

Once the capital of a medieval Armenian kingdom, the “City of 1001 Churches” was strategically located for defensive purposes as well as for proximity to several of the great overland trading routes.

For the time period, Ani was considered one of the most technically and artistically advanced structures in the world.

Ani’s population of 100,000-200,000 people rivaled that of Constantinople and Cairo at its peak.

With immense and snow capped mountains looming to the West and Turkish check-points and watch towers overlooking Armenia to the East, to call Ani surreal is an understatement.

Happy to escape the rain and long dolmus (Turkish translation: “Stuffed” (think grape leaves)) bus rides we arrived at the small town of Dogubayazit, my personal favorite of the trip. With Mt. Ararat and perhaps Noah’s long lost arc looming nearby we wasted no time in hiking up to the main attraction: Ishak Pasha Palace.

An Ottoman-period palace constructed in 1685, Ishak Pasha is a rugged and remote counterpart to the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul.

Serving as a rare example of historical Turkish palaces, the Palace is justly depicted on one side of the Turkish 100 new lira banknote.

Even more excited to be outside of a city than outside of a dolmus, we spent the remainder of the afternoon climbing in the nearby hills, the Koran blasting from valleys below.

Every so often, we had short glimpses of camouflaged Turkish military.

With a little free time to spare and the lure of a local waterfall in between Dogubayazit and Van, we found ourselves wandering in no-man’s land. In a strange turn of events, we were taken in by a group of Kurdish men who offered us breakfast and hospitality in exchange for our foreign stories and explanations of what brought us so far East.

We closed out a great vacation with a day and a half tour of Van. As the southernmost point of our road trip, Kurdish dancing and music was widespread.

Our first day in Van was spent atop a castle overlooking Van Lake, and the night ended beautifully as we met up with one of Carson’s Bilkent students, Rohat, whose uncle happens to own a very nice hotel and offered to wine and dine us on his bill alongside his extended family. With raki flowing and dish after dish picked clean, Rohat’s father took us through his younger years of traveling through nearby Azerbaijan, Iraq, Armenia, Iran, and Russia…impressively mastering at least 5 languages along the way.

Barely recovered from the previous nights food coma, we headed out for our last day of site seeing on Lake Van. Consisting of saline and soda, the lake is one of the world’s largest to have no outlet.

Interestingly enough, the original outlet was blocked when a nearby volcano erupted. As we headed out by boat to see Akdamar island and the Church of the Holy Cross, we were entertained with stories of the Great Van monster who stuffs its large and grotesque belly with foreign travelers and tourists. The cathedral was more than worth the Lake Monster risk as it contains the only surviving medieval Armenian church in which most of the wall paintings are still intact.

With a true Turkish shave to close out our last day which apparently includes them using a lighter to burn off the high cheek bone hairs, we returned to our last two months in Turkey clean shaven and nose hairs picked efficiently out.

Carson and I just want to take a second to reassure everyone that we are very safe after today’s  attack. We were both teaching at the other end of campus when the attempt took place. Needless to say, classes have been canceled and everyone is a little unsettled. Rest assured, we are spending the rest of the day under tight security in our very safe American apartment.

http://uk.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUKTRE53S33P20090429

Love,

Carson & Leon

Tomorrow Leon and I embark on our journey to the Northeastern corner of Turkey, a region bordered by Georgia, Armenia and Iran.  Less developed and with a bit of a reputation among Turks from the West, the East promises an indelible holiday.  The following is adapted from a correspondence between me and a good friend of mine:

Spain frightened you.
Spain.
Where I felt at home.
The blood-raw light,
The oiled anchovy faces, the African
Black edges to everything, frightened you.
Your schooling had somehow neglected Spain.
The wrought-iron grille, death and the Arab drum.
You did not know the language, your soul was empty
Of the signs, and the welding light
Made your blood shrivel.

from “You Hated Spain” by Ted Hughes

Words, black on white, are elusive when most evocative, fading out of focus as they conjure colors and emotions that drip onto the stark page.  Selim Dospatli, a student, my student, is blind.  I wonder what colors words bring to his clouded eyes.

Downtown engages in its frenetics, suburb pleases in its comforts, but I always seem to end up on the outskirts, those liminal landscapes of industrial sprawl and forgotten indigence, the margins whose overgrown lots are the vanguards of a wild reclamation.  To be sure, neon and prefab extend their mediocre sway, but somehow the glare is less garish swallowed in darkness and the monotony relieved by its feral inhabitants.  And when you catch that first whiff of pine or the first glimmer of a formerly-blotted star, you know you stand between civilization and the “lone and level sands.”  Keep walking.

Thank you for giving me a bit of blood-raw real, open in case of invigilation.  BUSEL’s Grey Kafka Castle versus saturated flesh and light sharp enough to slice sets and props out of reality.  I am excited to travel in the East of Turkey.  I no longer seek the pristine wilderness because it hurts too much to see its gradual humiliation.  I am intrigued by struggle, the poigancy of victory in defeat and defeat in victory.  Nothing of Andrea del Sarto’s silver-grey, placid perfect.  Spain and Turkey know much about the price of race hatred, wars won but decades and centuries lost, though Spain has soften the edges.  Turkey still fights the old fights, and I will skirt the battlefields.

I am going back to the mountains next year.  I am comforted by places where I know that I could leave and walk in a particular direction and not see another person for days.  Helps with claustrophobia, especially the claustrophobia that makes you forget how much bigger the mountains are than people.  Maybe I should embrace the childhood fantasy, explorer climber author, but there is no syllabus or program for that life.

All good things...

After nearly three months of effort and exhaustion, not the least for all those who had to read my eyas prose as it trip-hop-stumbled through vatic recrudescence and earnest acedia, I have finished that great monument to prodigiuos pedantic perversity, James Joyce’s Ulysses.  Now, with tongue firmly in jocoserious cheek, I resheathe my dagger definitions, awaken in aching accouchement and set out to find a shout in the street.

Any and all suggestions for a new project are welcome.

Peeling charqui off my arm, I imagine leaves of grass on bare skin instead of bare words. The smell of green haunts my memory, a childhood chimera of false recollection.  Life is not lived behind doors and under lights. Whispers and echoes indoors resound louder and louder; the hot breath of rude students and hapless teachers.  I cannot hear the wind.  It is a simple matter to lose perspective when your line of sight ends in the false horizons of walls and hallways, cut off prematurely in a pique of perspective.
Still, beauty surprises me, tapping my shoulder in the evening light.  Factories and sprawl are means to long moments, the seconds that because I do not stop for them, kindly stop for me.  We walk slowly and pause, knowing no haste, putting aside my labor and my leisure.  I pass the schools where I strove with success and shame, the green past fields bounded by woods and water.  I am frightened that the sun will set before I can find what I need or want or have, and I will have to wait another lonely day surrounded by people until dusk returns with its clarity and solitude claims my comfort.  Many words and many voices distract us from the desperate courage necessary to lay quiet each day and accept each ragged or smooth breath.
On Cypriot shore, I watched the sun go all the way down.  At the end of the day, even with the horizon, it moved with the beat of my heart.  It is a strange feeling to live a lifetime in a day, to awake like a babe born with an old soul, whose eyes know more than they have seen; to grow young as the day climbs, not getting, not spending, embracing a youth too physical for words.  The sun slung low today, and I marked its heavy path.  Before noon, I lived, died and awoke again.  Before noon, I leapt fell, and forgot why.  Before noon, I went to the point and threw myself in.
I wanted to find if the sea was cruel or kind or indifferent.  I swam into the sun, surrounded by light and a greater motion than I had known.  Why save something for the swim back, not to seek, not to find and not to yield past the limits of easy endurance?  Too old too young, I never quite lose myself though I never quit trying.  Blanch-bleached and blown out by sun and sand, these memories will be needed in some dark place.  Blue and white reared and content.  There’s big life out there, commensurate with ability and potential.  Dreams and oceans: for each wave that breaks violently and gently, there are infinite inexorables waiting to fill your mind.