​Sherrill and I visited more than 60 countries and most of the United States during our 52 year marriage.  This is number 71 of a series about our lives and travels, true stories of two people discovering the world, each other, and themselves through five decades of traveling together.  If you scroll down, you'll come to earlier posts in this series.  To start at the beginning of our marriage and travels look at the Archives list in the sidebar and start with May, 2017.  Older posts are a previous series. 

​              A perfect blue sky welcomed us to Sophia, capital of an independent, no longer Communist, Bulgaria.  Since the rest of our little group of friends wouldn't arrive for another day, Sherrill and I set out to explore alone.  We walked toward the city center, past a Russian orthodox church built for Russian diplomats and a 19th century palace.  Much of city was bombed during World War II, but we discovered surviving historic buildings scattered around town.  Over all, the city still felt impoverished.  A block from a huge Orthodox church, a flea market stretched for blocks, shabby people of advancing years trying to sell whatever treasures they'd managed to find or acquire.  We bought a flask adorned with the hammer and sickle for our grandson.

​              We watched red-uniformed guards prance in front of the presidential palace, passed a department store that once was a  Stalinist government building, explored a couple of subway stations in which Roman ruins had been uncovered (in one of which three middle-aged women in shabby coats and kerchiefs were playing accordions, a dish for donations by their well-worn shoes), and wandered through a busy 19th century central market, two levels supported by a forest of steel pillars, a glass roof above.  Sherrill found a Bulgarian edition of Alice in Wonderland at a little bookstore. Our stroll ended at an Easter Egg festival in a small park, the first of many holiday events during the next weeks.  This formerly atheist country, it seemed, had embraced religion and especially took the Easter rituals to its collective heart. 
              The next day was Palm Sunday in the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, which we and our friends acknowledged by dropping in at services in the multi-domed Alexander Nevsky cathedral that Sherrill and I had passed the afternoon before.  The streets around it now were lined with people selling flowers that the faithful could take as offerings. In the dark cavern of the giant church, we found crowds of people, mostly women, lighting enough candles to illuminate all of Sophia.  

​              Colorful rituals and elaborate costumes, we discovered, were an important part of religious expression in Bulgaria, many of these traditions extending far back in time to before Christianity.  We saw examples of this when we visited a museum in a former palace: after a room of gorgeously decorated Easter eggs, we were startled by an exhibition showing mummers known as Kukeri, men who put on animal-like costumes and skirts of cow bells each spring—except for some who dressed as brides—and paraded and danced through villages and towns to scare away evil spirits and guarantee a good harvest.  The elaborate costumes and masks were on mannequins, but we saw videos showing actual mummers in rowdy and obscene action.  A month later, the day before Sherrill and I left Bulgaria, I stumbled onto the actual event in Sophia, an astonishing spectacle, more like a giant frat party than religious ritual, but one that I was glad not to miss. 

​              I'm sure we didn't miss a single religious holiday while we were in Bulgaria, including St. Lazarus Day, which we observed in a mountain village with costumed young people singing and dancing about Lazarus rising from the dead and the yearly rebirth of the land.  Driving through Bulgaria almost to the Greek border, through forested mountains and past hillside farms, blossoming trees, and wild flowers gave us a new appreciation for the natural rebirth that happens every spring.  We stayed in converted old houses in tiny villages, along the way dropping in at churches and monasteries to admire scenes of the damned in Hell.  

​              When I think of Bulgaria, now, I see a parade of fantastic frescoes, some in small country churches, others in remote monasteries, and some in large urban churches and cathedrals.  These paintings graphically dramatized the joys of Paradise, the horrors of Hell, and the struggles of mortal life leading to one or the other.  A short drive to a mountain church introduced us to these passionate warnings with surprisingly three-dimensional 12th century paintings that had abandoned—pre-Giotto—the flat Byzantine style.  








Orthodox Church priest at Rila Monastery,
​surrounded by frescoes.

​              Young people were fleeing to the cities from Bulgaria's villages, leaving them to the old and dying.  A highlight of our trip was a day in Pirin, one of those villages, where we were welcomed by eight old women who were fighting to save it.  The women, all widows, known as the Mysterious Singers, had performed around Europe singing deep in their throats in a traditional style seldom-heard now, wearing antique dresses covered with felt, lace, and embroidery that had belonged to their mothers and grandmothers.  They welcomed us with the traditional bread and salt and sang while we ate lunch on the wide porch of a restored house. 

​              Forty-five widows, we were told, still lived in this shrinking village and at least 30 houses had been abandoned, but the women hoped to get young people to return and restore houses and save the village.  When I walked around the village, I saw many once handsome old houses in various states of collapse. 
              "Look at the men."  Sherrill nodded at a row of old men sitting on benches in the village square near the river that cut through town. 
              She was right: the old men looked tired and bored and content to sit around complaining and gossiping while the old women tried to change what was happening to their village.  As we traveled through the country, we saw this in other villages, too.  Maybe the women would succeed, but it wouldn't be easy.   

                                                ​*              *              *
              "There's no work for us," Ali told us. "because we're old."
              L., our new Bulgarian friend and guide, was translating.  Ali and his wife were only in their fifties, but considered themselves old—and, to be honest, their hard lives had aged them prematurely.
              We had driven much of the day on narrow mountain roads to this Muslim village in southern Bulgaria.  The women all wore the traditional Muslim Pomak dress of pantaloon-like pants with long jacket, apron, and kerchief.  Sherrill smiled at a local woman as they met on the narrow hillside street.  The woman hesitated, looking confused by our appearance. They never saw foreigners in that village.  L. stepped up, explaining who we were.  Shy, but friendly, the woman invited us to her home nearby. 
              Carefully inching on muddy steps past a lean-to animal shelter, root cellar, and storage area, we entered a one-room house hanging on the cliff side.  She asked us to sit on the two narrow beds against the walls and brought a bucket of goat's milk, which she poured into small glasses, and homemade feta cheese. Ali, her husband, joined us.
              "Life is more difficult, now," L. translated for Ali.
             At least, he said, under Communism they had jobs.  He drove a tractor then and his wife worked in the tobacco industry.  The switch to free market lost them their jobs and they couldn't find new ones.  With their goats, growing vegetables, and producing some tobacco, they managed to earn only about 3000 lev a year, about $2000, and prices were higher, now.  She also sewed and wove, making most of their clothes, as well as gifts, carriers for babies, and felt slippers to sell.  
​              "Young people do better, Ali continued.  "They have hope.  Not old people like us."

           In Sophia and Plovdiv, the second largest city in Bulgaria, younger generations did seem to be embracing new opportunities. We saw new businesses ranging from internet cafes to boutique hotels to shops selling electronics.
        "The Militia belongs to the people and the people belong to the Militia."
           L. translated it for me from an old sign on a wall. An ominous message, attributed to Todor Zhivkov, the Party leader in Bulgaria,1954 to 1989.
              Getting around the hilly city of Plovdiv with its streets of oversized cobblestones was difficult (even painful, as Sherrill discovered), but the old city was fascinating, especially the Ottoman mansions with their overhanging second and third floors, beautiful woodwork, and painted decorations.  Once upon a time, before Communism, fine craftsmanship was appreciated. We also found, hiking along Plovdiv's hills, the remains of a Roman forum and amphitheatre. There seemed to be no place in Europe where they hadn't left their mark.

​              Sunday, a couple of days later, was Orthodox Easter.  L. and our friend Hala had arranged for us to spend the day in a small village in the hills between Plovdiv and the Black Sea.  Roma (gypsies) who lived in the area were, we learned, now fully integrated into the village.  (Very different from when Sherrill and I visited Communist Romania in 1988, where they were total outcasts.)  We were welcomed with the traditional bread and salt and shown around the village.  A little later, we saw the lamb that had been cooking for eight hours in a brick and clay oven at the house of one of the Roma men.

​              With great ceremony, he cracked open the hardened clay that covered the opening of the brick oven, releasing delicious waves of rich aromas, and brought out two huge pans, each with half of a golden-brown lamb.  He carried them to a horse cart decorated with streamers and flowers, then at least half of the villagers, with our little group, paraded behind the cart as the decorated horse pulled it to the hall where the rest of the Easter feast was waiting.
              And a feast it was: all homemade dishes prepared by the villagers, plus local wine and rakia—a homemade brandy popular all over Bulgaria, different in each region, but always lethal.  About half way through the feast, which went on for hours, the songs started.  Then the speeches between the songs: they made speeches, we made speeches, we toasted each other.  They took photos of us, we took photos of them.  We took photos of each other together.  Everyone was enthusiastic and happy.

​              "Nobody will be able to walk," Sherrill whispered to me.
              "We have the pony cart!"
              It all was touching because they were completely sincere and happy that we were there, sharing the day with them.  Nothing like this had ever happened in their village before.  It was hard for any of us to get away.  




                                                           Vocalizing village woman at
                                                            Easter Sunday feast

​              During the next days, we visited a Neolithic settlement from at least 5500 BC, then a Thracian town that became a Greek colony and later a Byzantine stronghold, and several other historic towns along the Black Sea, but it all seemed tame after our fantastic Easter celebration—or maybe we still were suffering from hangovers.  Sherrill, however, did enjoy a day at the summer palace and gardens of that royal eccentric, once the darling the press, Queen Marie of Romania.  Terraces of flowers in luxuriant spring bloom cascaded down the hills toward the sea.
              "See what you can do when you have a money and a staff?" Sherrill told me.
              "You have me," I pouted.
              "I know, sweetie."  She patted me on the cheek.  


Sherrill and 9th century frescoes in
Sveti Stefan church in eastern Bulgaria.
A UNESCO World Heritage Site

​              Sherrill and I had visited the Bulgarian city of Rousse on the Danube, directly across from Romania, back in 1988, when these countries were still Communist and we took a cut-rate cruise on a Bulgarian ship from Rousse to Vienna.  The town was grim and depressing then, but this time it was lively and its 19th century art nouveau buildings were being restored to their former beauty.  A large house in Rousse had been transformed into a museum dedicated to the strength and power of Bulgarian women: women as mothers, caregivers, teachers, and artists; women as movers and shakers, scientists and social leaders; women as the foundation of society.  The women of the village of Pirin would have approved.  Sherrill certainly did.  

​              The Bulgarians were fine hosts, almost too good.  This was proven again when we visited Koprivshtitsa, a village of brightly painted houses, stone bridges, wooden gates, and cobbled (of course) streets.  The village priest and his young wife gave us dinner in their home.  (Apparently, Orthodox priests must be married.)  He was about 50, square-shaped, with a wide florid face.  He began by admitting that he is known for drinking—then proved it. He brought out a huge bottle of homemade rakia—the strongest we'd had yet.  Then homemade red wine.  His wife served a very good dinner, but he preferred singing and drinking to eating and urged us to do the same.  We actually poured some of the rakia in our glasses into flower pots. 

​              Sherrill and I extended our visit in Bulgaria for a couple of days, moving to a smaller hotel in Sophia.  On our last day, while on a walk I came to a large plaza swarming with scores of men.  Some men wore skirts of big bells to frighten away evil spirits, several young men were dressed as brides, and others in animal outfits with horns and antlers, masks and elaborate headdresses were joining them.  

​             These were mummers dressed in the costumes we'd seen in the museum at the beginning of the trip.  Eventually, they formed into a lively parade, moving across the plaza, dancing and throwing candy, shouting and singing.  I was sure that I saw some bottles being passed around, too.  The hotel receptionist later told me that it must have been for St. George's Day, usually only celebrated in villages, not in Sophia.  Originally a pagan celebration to guarantee a prosperous spring, it had evolved into a quasi-Christian celebration.  Whatever its intent, past or present, it seemed primarily to be an excuse for a jolly good time.  

         The people of Bulgaria hadn't completely left behind the gloom of Communist days, but they were working very hard at it, one way or another.
 
To be continued....   
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If you find these posts interesting, why not explore the rest of my website, too?  Just click on the buttons at the top of the page and discover where they take you -- including, a bio, information about my four novels, along with excerpts from them, and several complete short stories.

Sherrill and I visited more than 60 countries and most of the United States during our 52 year marriage.  This is number 70 of a series about our lives and travels, true stories of two people discovering the world, each other, and themselves through five decades of traveling together.  If you scroll down, you'll come to earlier posts in this series.  To start at the beginning of our marriage and travels look at the Archives list in the sidebar and start with May, 2017.  Older posts are a previous series. 
​

​              We were old enough to know better, but Sherrill and I were doing it again: traveling like kids with no reservations, constantly changing our plans, missing boats, buses, and trains—and having a good time.  Maybe we would have said that it wasn't the destination that mattered, but the journey.  As we traveled together to different parts of the world, exploring, wondering, discovering, it seemed as if we could do it forever.  Why not?  It was 2008 and we'd already been doing it for forty-four years. 
              A 25-minute train trip from Mussolini's bloated Milan station deposited us in medieval Pavia, where we discovered narrow cobblestone streets, a covered bridge, and a 14th century castle turned into the city museum.  As far as we could tell, no one else was in the museum except us and a young red-haired security guard in baggy orange pants who scurried along with us unlocking doors and then locking them again.  She tried to make conversation with us, despite her shaky English and my worse Italian—and the interruptions of her walky-talky—compensating with smiles for what she lacked in vocabulary.  I had the feeling that she'd keep on opening and closing doors as long as we needed her to do it.  

​              "Berkeley?" exclaimed another young woman at the university's science museum, thrilled that we'd come all the way from California.  "Do you have a mug from the Berkeley university?  For our collection?"
              Sadly, we had to disappoint her, since we didn't travel with a U.C. Berkeley mug.
              We always felt comfortable, at ease, in Italian towns, but we especially enjoyed our evenings in Cremona, the next town we visited, when everyone—families, couples, and individuals—came out to walk.  It was like the paseo that we had seen in Spain, quietly joyous and civilized.  They stopped for a glass of wine and a snack, then later had dinner in a trattoria or restaurant.  Why, we wondered, didn't everybody live like this?  

​              We'd arrived in Cremona on Saturday morning when the piazza by the Duomo and campanile—reputedly the tallest in Europe—was full of stalls and tables.  Eventually, we found a room, left our luggage, and continued exploring in this town famous as birthplace of Stradivarius.  While Sherrill checked out the weekend market, I climbed the bell tower and gazed out at the centuries of history below me, then we wandered around town together.  In a galleria under a glass dome, a young couple was giving ballroom dancing lessons to a dozen other couples of all ages, the women in the spike heels that Italians seemed to love. 

​              "Babies.  Toddlers," Sherrill pointed out.  "All over the place.  And their daddies."
              How could I miss them?  And she was right about the daddies.  Often, it was the fathers who were caring for the little kids.  Italian men did seem to be good parents.   
              "Look."  Sherrill nodded toward a young father and his two-year-old daughter barking at each other over and over after a dog had passed them.  A little later, she pointed out another dad and his tiny son saying "ciao" repeatedly to a friend trying to leave them.
              "Ciao!"  "Ciao!"  "Ciao!"  
               We could still hear them as we wandered down a narrow street lined with violin-making shops, passing three young musicians playing violins together, an open violin case on the cobblestones in front of them. 

​              It was hard to say why, but Mantova (Mantua) a couple of days later felt quite different than Cremona—maybe because it was larger and surrounded by three artificial lakes, maybe because it was crowded with palaces and other splendid buildings, and maybe because it seemed more sophisticated and less family focused.  After visiting the ducal palace (and seeing the Mantegna murals portraying the powerful Gonzaga family as if they were conspiring Mafiosi) and the duomo, we wandered around town, peering into shopping arcades, the display windows full of expensive clothes and underwear, and passing Italian couples discussing both the fashions and the underwear.  Our favorite display showed life-sized statues of well-fed pink pigs among the elegantly garbed mannequins. 
              Spontaneously, one morning, we hopped on a train south to Modena for the day because Sherrill wanted to see the Romanesque church there, but when we arrived couldn't find the way from the station to the center of town.  When I asked a young local fellow for directions, he took a city map from his backpack, opened it to show us the route, insisted that we keep it, and walked part way with us to make sure we were heading the right direction. Despite our impetuousness, it turned out to be a good day.  

​              Back in Mantova, we wandered into a collection of life-sized 18th century wax figures at the university's science museum, including a female with her guts and other internal body parts on display as if they'd just been scooped out by a sadistic doctor and a scrawny male with no skin.  Walking back to the hotel, we encountered two groups of young people, in each a guy dressed like a medieval fool, the others chanting "Il Dottore!" at him and then laughing.  The two young men had just received their doctorates and were being paraded through town as fools.  We liked that their friends weren't going to let the new "doctors" take themselves too seriously.

​              We tossed aside our plans again the next day, taking a boat to Sirmione on Lake Garda because we remembered that some friends had enjoyed it.  Well, it wasn't really that simple.  When we left Mantova by train, we intended to hop off at Peschiera and jump on a boat for Sirmione, but our hopping and jumping didn't quite work out.  After a 20-minute walk to the lake with a friendly British couple, we reached the Peschiera dock just in time to watch the boat churning into Lake Garda.  The next boat was in three hours, so we explored Peschiera's old town, had lunch in an osteria we found on a side street (a delicious mushroom soufflé), and wandered around the waterfront area. 
              "If we hadn't missed that boat," I told Sherrill at lunch, "we wouldn't have had this wonderful meal."
              "Okay, Pollyanna, if you say so." 

​              Eventually, we did get to Sirmione, a small, ancient town on the end of a skinny peninsula, filled with picturesque old houses, a 13th century castle with moat and drawbridge, and a Roman ruin overlooking the lake, but crowded with German and British tourists, including at least two dozen middle-aged German bikers in helmets and black leather jackets with their oversized motorcycles and lots of good cheer.  We found a tiny hotel in which the rooms were named after flowers instead of having numbers.  Ours was circliamino—cyclamen.  The place was run by a very old woman with bow legs, a cap of white hair, and a face like Lionel Barrymore.  She was helpful, talkative, and humorous and we had a good time whenever we talked with her.  

​              "You like it here," our hostess insisted on the second day we were there, "so you should stop wandering from town to town and stay with me."
              "Why not?" Sherrill asked me, mischievously. 
              "You see?" said the old lady.  "The signora agrees."
              While we were there, we also got to know a young woman from Venezuela who had lived several years in Hawaii, married an Italian, and now was happy in Italy—although it did take her a while, she admitted, to get used to the Italian way of life.
              "Not like Venezuela or the United States."

​              We didn't spend the rest of our lives in Sirmioni, the way our hostess wanted.  Sherrill and I preferred to keep moving.  We always were aware of how much more there was to see and experience—in Italy and around the world.  Something wonderful, we were sure, was waiting around the corner—and around the corner after that and the next corner....
              On the bus from Sirmioni to Breschia, however, we decided to stay there for a bit, instead of immediately going on Bergamo, as we'd planned, so we got a room in a hotel by the station, left our bags, and set out.  Breschia, we discovered, had not one, but two cathedrals—a new Baroque one and an 11th century old one (Sherrill's favorite), in the Lombard Romanesque style with a domed interior plus several lower levels that descended to an even older crypt.  We allowed ourselves only two days in Breschia, but made the most of them, hiking to the remains of a large Roman forum, up a steep hill to a medieval castle, and among narrow winding streets (more cobblestones) and odd-shaped piazzas.  We were glad not to have missed any of it.  

​          On the other hand, Bergamo, our original destination, soon became one of our favorite Italian cities.  We were lucky enough to get a room in a converted convent perched on a cliff in the upper medieval city—which was separated from the newer city below by massive fortifications.  To go between the two cities we rode a funicular up and down the cliff.   
           A couple of happy incidents:  When Sherrill and I slipped into a small church in the upper town to see a Titian polyptych behind the altar, the place turned out to be empty and dark.  Nevertheless, we stumbled through the church toward the altar, trying to peer through the gloom at the painting.  An elderly caretaker limped up out of the shadows and—instead of telling us to go away—explained in Italian that we could go behind the altar and climb the steps that the priest used.  We hesitated, but he urged us  to go on up. 
              "Si!  Okay!" he said, using what I guessed was the only English word he knew.
              Obeying him, we reached a spot where the light from the side windows illuminated the Titian so that we could see it perfectly.  As we left, I tried to give him a tip, but he refused with a sweet smile, saying that he was glad to do it for us.  

​              Later that day, we met a young woman from Australia who was in Bergamo to study at a Montessori school training center. 
              "I have my teacher certificate," she explained, "but I want this one, too, because I believe in the Montessori approach."  She was excited when Sherrill told her that our grandson had gone to a Montessori school and loved it.  "Most people I talk with," she told us, "have never heard of Montessori." 
              She was there for six months, taking classes in both English and Italian, studying hard, hiking from a room in the lower town to the training center in the upper town except when she splurged on the funicular. 
              "I feel encouraged, now," she said, as we separated, "after talking with you."
              Sherrill and I celebrated our forty-fourth wedding anniversary by taking the train to Lecco on Lake Como, where we walked along the lake front, had lunch at a restaurant crowded with crusty local people who apparently ate there often, toasted each other with sparkling wine, and then rode the train back to Bergamo—all very spontaneous.  Afterwards, we wished that we'd asked someone to take our photograph, but at least we had the memory. 

​              Bergamo's botanic garden, a quiet paradise overlooking the rooftops of the upper city, could be reached only by climbing 141 steps.  Primarily a research and educational garden, it exchanged seeds and plants with similar gardens around Italy and Europe.  We wandered through it, reading the labels when we could.  The sounds of the bees and of the wind playing in the trees and the smells of the flowers and freshly dug soil, even of the fertilizer, were comforting in their earthy way.  The garden wasn't the largest or the most exotic we'd ever seen, but up there above the city and countryside it felt magical.   

​              Other cities were more beautiful, but Torino (Turin, in English), one of the financial engines that drove Italy, surprised us.  Like Bologna, the buildings along many of its streets, both old and new, were fronted with arcades, often with shops, restaurants, and bars peeking out from behind them.  The streets were straight, as in Paris, with skinny orange trams running on them like Milan, and lively young people everywhere, like Berkeley.  The city was crowded with museums, including the third largest Egyptian museum in the world (after Cairo and London), several fine art museums, and a twin-towered Roman gate that in its long history had been turned into a castle, then into a palace, and finally ended up as a museum.  However, our favorite museum in Torino was the Mole Antonelliana.
              Started in 1863, this strange building with an elongated dome topped by a Greek temple topped with a pointed spire grew until it reached the height of 167 meters, the highest brick building in the world and the tallest building anywhere until the Eiffel Tower.  Now, it housed the greatest museum in the world dedicated to the history of the motion picture—six of its floors around a central atrium, full of endless movie clips, still pictures, and more.  We took the glass elevator to the top, gazed out over all of Turin—at the red tile roofs, domes, towers, palaces, office buildings—then went back down to the spiraling ramp and the history of the moving image, starting with shadow dramas.   

​        We could recline on lounges while gazing up at movie clips projected onto a sloping ceiling above us, but plastic-topped tables in the restaurant also showed movie clips and rooms around the edges played films on different themes and from different historic periods, including the development of special effects.  Gazing up through the huge atrium, we were encircled by a parade of movie posters from around the world, from Luchino Visconti's Il Gattopardo (The Leopard) to Cabiria, Italy's first movie epic (1914), to Gone with the Wind to Hitchcock's Vertigo to Cameron's Titanic. 
         "We can't do all this in one day," Sherrill told me, lowering herself into a chair.
          She was right, so we returned the next day.

              In the evening, while she recovered in our hotel room, I went out for a bite to eat and discovered that for the modest price of a glass of wine in one of the bars or little cafes around town I could fill up on happy hour snacks.  I even took something back for Sherrill to eat.  On the way back, on the bridge crossing the Po river, I watched a costumed juggler go out into the crosswalk in front of cars, juggle while they waited for the light, then collect money from the drivers as they drove away.  He was good, too. 
 
To be continued....   

​              If you find these posts interesting, why not explore the rest of my website, too? Just click on the buttons at the top of the page and discover where they take you—including a bio, information about my four novels, along with excerpts from them, and several complete short stories.    
              Please pass the posts on to anybody else you think might enjoy them.  
              

​Sherrill and I visited more than 60 countries and most of the United States during our 52 year marriage.  This is number 69 of a series about our lives and travels, true stories of two people discovering the world, each other, and themselves through five decades of traveling together.  If you scroll down, you'll come to earlier posts in this series.  To start at the beginning of our marriage and travels look at the Archives list in the sidebar and start with May, 2017.  Older posts are a previous series. 
​

​Why, people wanted to know, since Sherrill and I had survived one trip to India, were we going back?  Maybe that was why.  We had the opportunity, so in January 2008 off we went, this time to the southern part of that vast country, again with our friend Hala.  
"But it's dirty," people told us, "you'll get sick, you'll die."  This, of course, from people who'd never been there.
"Think of the stories we'll have for them," I told Sherrill, after one of these conversations. 
"Yes.  Especially if we die." 
​
The previous post, A MARRIAGE IN MOTION 68, told about the first part of our visit to south India, beginning in the east coast city of Chennai and continuing eventually to the west coast city of Kochi, which is where we pick up the story here.  

​              We were lucky to be in Kochi (Cochin) for the great elephant festival—special elephants given to temples by rich donors.  Cleaning an elephant so it will be ready to wear its finery, we saw on the first day, was not easy, even when the elephant cooperated, and sometimes they got a little frisky.  Crowds of Indian families came to admire both the elephants and the paraphernalia they'd be wearing.  The next day, we rode a boat to the part of the city where the festival was being held.  The streets and temple grounds were filled with thousands of people, but we didn't see any non-Indians except those in our group.  At one intersection, three elephants waited in all their gold and feathers and beads, a pair of Brahmin priests on each. 

​              Slowly, a dozen decorated elephants moved into position on the temple grounds like a chorus line about to start dancing, their giant India-shaped ears flapping as crowds surged around them, pushing Sherrill and me so closely to them that we began to feel nervous.  Nearby, firecrackers were exploding.  Nobody else seemed nervous, however, although we'd heard of excited or frightened elephants stampeding.  Sherrill and I had become separated from the rest of our group, ending up directly in front of the twelve spectacularly attired elephants just as the priests began raising tall, gold parasols above them.  We could feel a proud, godlike aura radiating from the magnificent animals.  Eventually, our group came together again and we made our way to the street, which had been decorated with countless rows of silver streamers in honor of the festival.  

​              Indians, we'd learned, loved rituals, costumes, and high drama.  All of this was combined in a production we saw while we were in Kochi of the Kathakali, a 400 year-old dance/drama performed by elaborately costumed men.  Hala and our guide had arranged for us to see first how the performers were made up and costumed for the performance, a very long and elaborate process.  The stylized performance—of an ancient tale of a female demon who disguised herself as a beautiful maiden, a noble prince, and an innocent princess—was very dramatic, although slow-moving.  At the beginning of the show, the theater was full, but not everyone in the audience stuck it out to the end.  Fascinating as it was, I think we left after about an hour. 
              "We got the idea," Sherrill agreed, as we walked out with the others. 
              Maybe super titles would have helped.

​              We had no idea what was going to happen to us the next day because all the roads in the neighboring state of Karnataka had been shut down by striking truckers so that we wouldn't be able to reach Mysore, our next destination.  No buses, taxis, private cars, or even trains were allowed to move.  There were threats of violence if anyone tried.  After breakfast, we unexpectedly had the morning free, so Sherrill told me to go exploring instead of driving her crazy with my fussing. 

​              I followed zigzagging streets deeper into the old import-export area of Kochi, waves of exotic aromas pursuing me as I walked past 17th century spice warehouses.  Many of the bustling people were dressed in traditional Moslem clothing, some women completely covered except for their faces.  I had to make my way among hand carts, loaded wagons, and three-wheeled trucks piled with rice, tea, and spices.  A few goats wandered the area, but I only saw one cow, and it was asleep.  A couple of young tea wallahs were navigating the crowds with surprising dexterity while carrying their wire containers holding glasses of chai.  

​              I was back at our hotel in time for lunch, but news about the strike and our transportation options kept changing.  Finally, Hala and our guide, nick-named by the group the "Knight of the Burning Cell Phone," were able to get us seats on a plane to Bangalore in Karnataka.  We flew on "Spice Air," our plane named "Mustard."  When we arrived in Bangalore, however, we learned that the city still was closed off by the striking truckers, the roads to Mysore blocked.  Bangalore, a major computer/IT center, had a population of five and a half million then and it seemed as if most of them were at the airport.  Many of the stranded travelers were Moslem families returning from pilgrimages.  Since it was impossible to get out of the airport, Hala and our guide ordered box lunches for us.  

​              Finally, some hours later, we got to a hotel, had some food and rest, and the next morning discovered that the strike had ended and our guide miraculously had got us onto a bus to Mysore (since all the trains were overbooked).  By the time we reached Mysore, we were almost back on schedule.  How he had energy to do it, I never knew, but he immediately gave us a tour—during which we saw a group of young men with shaved heads in dark red robes—Tibetan refugees. 
              India is so huge that it encompasses many landscapes and climates.  As we drove north from Mysore toward the fifteenth century capital of Hampi, the terrain grew drier, studded with cactuses, agave, palms, and massive boulders deposited by ancient glaciers.  At lunch time, we pulled into a rustic truck stop, where we ate box lunches we had with us—although some of us bought additional snacks from the truck stop cook.  The cross-country trucks in India were smaller than in the United States, but brightly decorated, each truck proclaiming its owner's personality.  Several pulled into the stop while we there.  When we were back on the road, we saw lines of them stretching into the distance because of the just-ended strike, their gaudy colors making them look like a parade of carnival wagons.
              Along the way, we saw a farmer digging up his field with a wooden plow—only the blade was steel.  Dazzling white egrets hopped around after him, eating insects and worms that he turned out of the rich brown soil.  

​              Monster boulders and ancient temples seemed to drift around each other in a surreal dreamscape on Hampi's dry hillsides.  Although some of the temples were older than many others we'd seen in India, the simplicity of their design gave them an incongruously modern look—rather like Frank Lloyd Wright's wide-eaved "prairie houses," but made of stone.  Others were covered with massive, grotesque sculptures, showing different perceptions of the divine.  Monkeys greeted us and rhythmic chanting drifted down the slope as we climbed a rocky hill to a small shrine.  A sadu lived there, we discovered, spending his life praying and chanting, depending on others for what he needed to stay alive.  He had turned his back on worldly existence to focus on the eternal, whatever it was.  

             For two days, we explored this extraordinary place of colossal temples and palaces and huge step tanks to store water cut deeply into the granite hills. From time to time, bas-reliefs and statues seemed to reach out, almost as if they were trying to grab us: oversized images of Hanuman, the monkey god; Ganesh, the elephant god; and Narasimha, half-monkey and half-man.  In one temple complex, a gypsy woman suddenly jumped out.  Short, gaudy in multi-layered skirts, scarves, and spangles, she complained angrily and shook her fist at us.  

         Sherrill and one of our friends in the group waited in the shade of a tree while the rest of us explored a hilltop temple.  While we were gone, they were unexpectedly entertained by an eccentrically costumed man doing magic tricks.  At the end of the performance, our friend gave the magician ten rupees.
             "He was pretty good," Sherrill told me, "but we couldn't understand a word he said."

​              Part of our exploration of this vast city was in woven bamboo basket boats along a meandering river, four of us per boat.  Since the boats were round, they weren't easy to steer, but the ride downriver brought out the child in us, whether we saw everything that we passed, or not.  

             After Hampi, we visited more palaces, temples, and towns, renewing our acquaintance with Hindu gods and goddesses.  Kali, the goddess of destruction, seemed very popular in the south.  Small, dark, and fierce, she was considered good to have your side.  One day, we passed close to a large camp of gypsy caravans, but when we stopped some of the men made it clear that they wanted us to move on. 
             A traffic jam of bull carts was a new experience, but we ran into one at Badami's great Harvest Festival.  The cattle auction also was new to us, but the rest of the fair seemed like a U.S. county fair, with hundreds of colorful booths and stalls selling food, souvenirs, and produce, plus bells and decorations for cattle.  When we reached our hotel later, almost the first thing we saw was a sign: "Beware Monkey Menace."  We did see quite a few monkeys, but weren't bothered by them, not even when we visited some cave temples the next day. 

​              Continuing up and over the step-like mountains known as the Western Ghats, we reached the coastal state of Goa.  The architecture we passed now showed Portuguese influence.  Although the area was conquered repeatedly by various rulers over the centuries, the Portuguese came to stay in 1510, using it as the launching point for their spice trading empire.  The colonial town of Old Goa still showed some old world charm, with its monasteries, convents, churches, and seventeenth century houses and shops.  We looked in at the great Basilica of Bom Jesus, with the tomb of St. Francis Xavier, whose body supposedly remained in pristine condition long after death—except for pieces that were stolen by other churches.  

​              A short flight took us to Mumbai (Bombay), India's largest—and most chaotic—city.  Of course, we visited the usual places, the  "Gateway to India," symbol of the city,  the astonishingly ornate Victorian train station and neighboring market, and the open air laundries at which scores of men labored all day for pennies.  The best times, we sometimes felt, as in most great cities, were when we just wandered, looking and discovering on our own.  Once again we were lucky.  Just months after we were here, terrorists took over the Taj Mahal Hotel and other buildings in Mumbai, killing many people. 

​           The ancient rock-cut temples in the caves on the island of Elephanta made a spectacular conclusion to our month in the south of India—even though early Portuguese colonists had used the enormous statues for target practice.  Fortunately for the nearly two-thousand year old statues, they seem to have been poor shots.  Many of the statues showed the divine faces of the god Shiva, destroyer, creator, and preserver of the universe.  Maybe his powers helped save the statues.  

​           Sherrill and I walked from the brightness outside, past giant rock-cut columns, into the darkness of the central cave, eventually discovering a sculpture nearly 20 feet high and wide, the divine image of Shiva, eyes closed, silent and serene, damaged but still magnificent.  From each side emerged the profile of another of Shiva's aspects, first the Destroyer, leading to time and death, and then the Creator, beautiful with a suggestion of the feminine, the here and now, forever.  As if hypnotized by the statue, we gazed at it for what must have been a long time, then slowly walked back into daylight and the path down to the waiting boat.   

           ​People sometimes asked Sherrill and me if we weren't afraid when we traveled to places such as India and Iran, Turkey and China, those decades ago.  We always said, No, we weren't afraid of either the places or the people—although cliff-side roads did make me nervous.  We were glad to be there, happy that we were having these experiences.  People everywhere, we'd discovered, were welcoming, kind, and generous.  We could have added, also, that we weren't afraid because we were exploring the world together. 
​

​To be continued....  
 
              If you find these posts interesting, why not explore the rest of my website, too? Just click on the buttons at the top of the page and discover where they take you—including a bio, information about my four novels, along with excerpts from them, and several complete short stories.    
              Please pass the posts on to anybody else you think might enjoy them.  
 

Sherrill and I visited more than 60 countries and most of the United States during our 52 year marriage.  This is number 68 of a series about our lives and travels, true stories of two people discovering the world, each other, and themselves through five decades of traveling together.  If you scroll down, you'll come to earlier posts in this series.  To start at the beginning of our marriage and travels look at the Archives list in the sidebar and start with May, 2017.  Older posts are a previous series. 
​
             One of the pleasures of exploring India is the feeling of existing simultaneously in several different worlds.  There Sherrill and I were, after another marathon journey (including six hours in a transit hotel in the Singapore airport), still on California time, in the coastal city of Chennai (formerly Madras) on the Bay of Bengal near the tip of the Indian subcontinent, surrounded by Victorian-era buildings from the days of the Raj, about to explore some of the most ancient and dramatic sites in India.  Once again, since I couldn't sleep, I went for an early morning walk the day after we arrived.  

​              Even at 6:30 a.m. the air burned my eyes—one reason probably the ancient buses ferrying people to work.  Mount Road, one of Chennai's grand old streets, still was lined with buildings from the Raj.  My favorite was the brick and stone "Higginbothams Printers and Publishers, Booksellers and Stationers" from 1844, although "Khan's Cricket Academy" was a strong contender.  Since the sidewalks were crumbling and sometimes disappeared and the traffic was getting heavier, I had to watch both my feet and the pavement, dodging three-wheeled tuk-tuks and smoking buses, as well as growing numbers of beggars and vendors, including men furiously squeezing sugarcane juice into dirty glasses.  The only non-Indians I saw were three freckled young missionaries in gingham dresses and kerchiefs.
              Religion, power, and business had been stirred together into a lumpy curry during India's long history.  Our exploration started with Fort St. George, built by the East India Company in 1653, and the accompanying British Anglican church, then moved on to the first Catholic cathedral in India: dueling European churches in a Hindu land?  Then we plunged into the colorful chaos of a seventeenth century Hindu temple, where we watched a Brahmin priest with his sacred string across his bare chest reciting prayers, followed by a non-Brahmin repeating them in the local language of Tamil—a recent development.  

​              Sliding further back in time, on another day we hiked among giant seventh century rock carvings and temples, including the world's largest bas relief, a dramatic picture of how the god Shiva sent the Ganges river down to earth.  However, judging from the way people drove, I was starting to believe that the combustion engine had become India's supreme god.  On our way to the French colonial town of Pondicherry, we passed a gasoline tanker lying on its side by the road, leaking gas.  Each trip became a terrifying pilgrimage that we prayed to survive, but we looked forward to those adventures.  We never knew what we might discover along the way.  A group of women dressed in red that we saw hiking along the side of the road belonged to a cobra-worshipping cult.  They built miniature temples around the termite mounds (the mounds could grow to three or four feet high) that cobras had moved into to escape the heat, and left milk and fruit for the cobras.  

​              A visit to the sprawling Chidambaram temple south of Chennai introduced us to the dramatic Puja ceremony of washing the sacred crystal lingam.  Crowds of worshippers weeping with emotion pushed through the huge building to get as close as possible when the priests poured milk, ash, and water over the lingam while they chanted prayers.  The lingam represented the generative power of the god Shiva.  (In north India, Vishnu was the more popular god, but there in the south people preferred Shiva, destroyer, creator, preserver of the universe.)  At the climactic moment, the priests waved fire in front of and behind the lingam, illuminating a sacred ruby within the crystal and causing many of the faithful to sway and moan and slap their faces in ecstasy. 
              Sherrill took my hand and together we maneuvered our way out.  The smoke and incense were making her sick.  Neither of us was comfortable among people working themselves up into such a frenzy, probably because we didn't understand where it might lead. 

              Our friend Hala and our guide had arranged for us to participate in the annual Pongal Festival in a remote village in the hills outside Tanjore—another unique religious experience.  Young men and women played drums and danced up and down the village's meandering dirt streets.  Sometimes, the festivities had to move aside for buffalo carts or local buses. Village women had used colored powders to create lavish floral designs on the ground in front of their houses.
           The word "pongal," we learned, means "boiling over."  We watched some pongal rice being cooked its special pot.  When it boiled over, people looked to see which direction it spilled over—it would foretell their future.  
              After several hours in the village, we left on one of the crowded local buses, riding it to Tanjore.  The bus stopped for gas opposite a big tent next to an old Catholic church.  A Christian revival meeting seemed to be going on—although the area was Hindu.  (In fact, I'd actually heard a Moslem call to prayer at 5 a.m.  In India, now, religions seemed to weave around each other, not competing as much as co-existing—although we knew, of course, about the religious violence after Partition.)  

​              An ancient outdoor shrine at which local people worshipped animals, trees, and the sun  revealed still another way in which people in India related to life and death and the world around them.  A long dirt path lined with clay horses and elephants led to a sacred tamarind tree.  The figures were simple, some unpainted clay, some broken, others intact and brightly painted, often with grotesquely grinning mouths, as if they were laughing at us as we walked past.  Near the tamarind tree was an open area where, we were told, goats and cocks sometimes were sacrificed.  In India, people could accept a religion such as Hinduism, Buddhism, or Christianity and incorporate it into ancient beliefs that had been passed down for millennia.  They saw nothing contradictory, for example, if they hung bags containing the placentas of cows from the branch of a banyan tree as an offering for those ancient gods.

​              "This is more like it," Sherrill said when we stopped at a village in which master bronze workers had been producing exquisite bronze figures for a thousand years, using the traditional lost wax method.  They worked squatting on the dirt floor, making molds, casting the bronze, and refining and polishing the statuettes.  In the little adjoining shop we found a beautiful statuette of Saraswati, the patron goddess of education, which we bought for our daughter, along with a gracefully stylized figure of a deer for ourselves—art and religion united.

​              We braved (barefoot, of course) the enormous crowds at the evening Hindu ceremony in the seventeenth century Meenakshi Temple in Madurai.  The immense size of the temple brought to mind Cologne cathedral or Notre Dame, but the granite columns inside had been carved into monstrous grotesque creatures.  Pilgrims from around India prostrated themselves in front of shrines and scattered colored powders on statues, but it was the shrine dedicated to Shiva where the crowd swelled until there was hardly room to move.  Suddenly, excitedly, people moved back just enough to allow bearers to carry Shiva on his silver palanquin across the temple to the shrine of Parvati, his wife.  Then, as priests blew horns, waved feathery fans, and chanted, they surged forward again in a frenzy as Shiva joined his consort.  All we could do was try to avoid being crushed.

       No other town we'd seen in India was like the former French city of Pondicherry: straight streets lined with trees and elegant colonial buildings, and a long boulevard stretching beside the Bay of Bengal.  However, when we stopped at a statue of Gandhi overlooking the bay, several gypsy women and their children and trained monkeys suddenly appeared.  One of the gypsies sent her monkey to climb on a woman with us.  The monkey nearly had its tiny hand in one of the woman's pockets when she screamed.  The gypsy reined in the monkey and pretended to scold it. 
      While we were in Pondicherry, we saw the first of several posters urging parents to value female children, part of a campaign to stop the killing of girl babies. 
              "Too little, too late," Sherrill commented.
              "Better than nothing," I said.
              "Better than nothing?  Yes."

​              In the town of Madurai, we went to the opening night screening of a Tamil movie, managing to get seats despite the crowds of fans.  We had never seen a movie in which the musical numbers were full of beatings, murders, and other violence.  The young males in the audience loved it all, of course. 
​          We also saw a bigger than life-size statue of one of India's biggest movie stars who retired to become a successful politician and then started free lunches in the schools throughout the state of Tamil Nadu—which prompted the farmers and other poor parents to send their children to school for the free food, which eventually increased the literacy level in the state to 80 percent.   

​              The movie screening was an exciting conclusion to our time in Tamil Nadu.  The next day, we continued south into the more rural state of Kerala, where we stayed for a while on the edge of a tiger and game preserve.  On the way, we saw farmers washing their cattle and then decorating them with colored powders and wreathes and horn decorations as part of the Pongal celebrations—and to show their gratitude to the sacred cattle.  

​              We didn't see a tiger in the preserve, but we did spend several hours with a naturalist, spotting Indian bison, large deer, a native otter, wild boars (big and hairy and ugly), and many birds, some posing like feather-adorned mannequins on dead trees in a lake.  Kerala also was famous for growing spices.  Sherrill and several others drove off on a "spice safari," riding jeeps into the higher hills to explore different spice plantations, including one that grew "the best pepper in the world." 
               "You would've hated the narrow cliff road, sweetie," Sherrill told me when she got back that evening, "but you missed some wonderful smells!" 

​              The road we took over the mountains to the Arabian Sea the next day wasn't much better, winding precariously among hillside tea plantations.  Flashes of color darted like wild birds through the green tea plants as children with backpacks ran to school through the tea hills and women in saris cut the leaves and stuffed them into bags.  When we hit the coast, we landed in a world of lagoons, inland canals, and lakes, the "backwater" area where the second largest lake in India fed into a web of manmade canals.  

​              Crossing the lake by boat, we reached the complex of cottages where we stayed for a while, a quiet paradise surrounded by water, the perfect starting point for further explorations. As we boated along the canals during the next days, we sometimes passed through half-hidden villages. Often, rice fields stretched into the distance from one or both sides of a canal—bordered by levees, since the fields were lower than the canal.  In one village, we saw a woman making rope out of coconut husk fibers, then we moved through hundreds of ducks being herded by a man in a boat, an absurd yet beautiful sight as they quacked their complaints.  One of the villages we passed was where Arundhati Roy, author of the 1997 Booker Prize novel The God of Small Things was raised.

​              When we left this backwater paradise, we continued on to the 600 year-old city of Kochi (Cochin)—a colorful mélange of Portuguese, Dutch, French, British, Chinese, and Jewish history, starting with when it was founded by Vasco da Gama.  As I write this in 2018, weeks of fierce rains have buried large parts of the historic city under mud (Kochi is built on several islands, as well as the mainland), but the city is digging out.  Some of its islands are artificial, so this kind of disaster may recur as climate change continues. 
To be continued....   
 
              If you find these posts interesting, why not explore the rest of my website, too? Just click on the buttons at the top of the page and discover where they take you—including a bio, information about my four novels, along with excerpts from them, and several complete short stories. 
              Please pass the posts on to anybody else you think might enjoy them.  

​Sherrill and I visited more than 60 countries and most of the United States during our 52 year marriage.  This is number 67 of a series about our lives and travels, true stories of two people discovering the world, each other, and themselves through five decades of traveling together.  If you scroll down, you'll come to earlier posts in this series.  To start at the beginning of our marriage and travels look at the Archives list in the sidebar and start with May, 2017.  Older posts are a previous series. 

​              Almost as soon as Sherrill and I reached Hanoi, we had the feeling that this trip would be different from any other we'd taken.  Already, we'd spent more than 30 hours traveling to Bangkok, including a rough spell flying through the edge of a typhoon.  We reached our hotel there at 1:00 AM.  Our continuing flight with Vietnam Air later that morning got us to Hanoi in only one and a half hours, but the ride into the city was just as long—passing countless motorbikes, including one weighted down with six fat pigs in cages.   
              Sherrill and I were surprised to see so many buildings that obviously dated back to the French and Chinese colonial periods.  The ornate old architecture, with its frills and gestures to a long-vanished past, gave Hanoi a distinct charm, even when it was decaying.  The government in the unified Vietnam was Communist, but the economy was capitalist, our guide told us.  People often worked at several jobs, even working at the sides of streets, selling food, cutting hair, giving massages, whatever they could do. 

​              We learned more about life for ordinary citizens one evening, when we joined a local family for dinner in their apartment: a middle-aged woman, her two adult daughters, and the oldest girl's husband, who was Dutch.  When we arrived, they served us rice wine and we settled into their main room, a combination living and dining room.  They all were educated and, except for the mother, spoke English.  The main problem in their lives, it seemed, was economic. It wasn't easy to find a job that paid enough to live comfortably. 
              "But it's a beautiful country," the young husband told us.  "And the people are the most gentle and kind-hearted you would find anywhere."

​              When we set out the next morning, we had no doubt that most of the 4 1/2 million citizens of Hanoi had leaped onto their motorbikes moments before.  Later in the day, we passed more than a hundred parents sitting on motorbikes, waiting for their kids to emerge from a grammar school.  A ride on cyclo-bikes took us careening through traffic to see some of Hanoi's old town and French quarter.  Interesting and colorful as the ride was beneath its veil of pollution, it was a relief to put our feet on the ground again when we stopped.  

​              As we drove to Ha Long Bay a day later the world gradually seemed cleaner, especially after we crossed the Red River.  Farmers were irrigating their fields the ancient way, using baskets on poles, even plowing with wood plows pulled by water buffalo.  A water buffalo trussed on the back of a motorbike sped past us—not very comfortable for either the animal or the man.  Rugged green mountains rose up dramatically as we neared Halong Bay.

​              When we reached the dock area we discovered a bubbling bouillabaisse of wooden junks and smaller vessels, many of them fishing boats of different sizes and types.  The traditional style junks, it seemed, now were strictly for tourists.  Sherrill and I shared a small cabin and tiny bathroom in one.  Meals were up on the deck.  Years later, we read about some of those Halong Bay junks sinking, drowning both crew and passengers.  Once again, we were lucky, but there was always the possibility that one day our luck would run out.  That didn't stop us from traveling, though. 

​              At lunch, we met several interesting people, including a woman in her seventies who during the war spent five years entertaining troops in Vietnam.  This was her first trip back.  As we ate, the junk moved out, sailing between tall, jagged islands draped with cloaks of greenery except where the streaked limestone cliffs plunged naked into the sea.  Nearly 3,000 jagged little islands had been counted in the bay, some little more than green-covered pillars, others much larger, eroded into strange shapes, sometimes with natural arches, caves, and grottoes.  

​              Back in Hanoi the next day, we visited the one remaining building of the Hoa Lo Prison, famous once for its nickname, "the Hanoi Hilton"  because many U.S. prisoners of war were held there during the Vietnam war.  Built by the French in the nineteenth century, the prison was crammed in the days of French Indochina with as many as 2,000 Vietnamese political prisoners.  Most of the displays, however, focused on the time when the North Vietnamese kept U.S. soldiers there.
              On our way south to Hoi An, we stopped at a fish farm, where large cages were immersed in the water between plank catwalks and houseboats.  Climbing down onto a wood walkway, we watched sea creatures hauled up in nets: monster shrimp, huge striped sea snails, crabs, a shark-looking fish, and some sea beasts that we didn't recognize. With the help of a translator, Sherrill talked with a woman in her nineties sitting on her haunches on the planks chewing betel nut. 
              "How long have you been chewing betel?" Sherrill asked.
              "Since she was seven," the translator replied for the old woman.
         "No wonder her teeth are black."  I stepped closer, asking in pantomime if I could take her photograph.  She nodded, then spat red betel nut juice on the planks.  

​              Travel in Vietnam was a constant ricocheting between distant and recent history—from the 16th and 17th centuries when Hoi An was a port used by both Chinese and Japanese traders to when Vietnam was a French colony to the war of the 1970s.  At My Son, nearby, the Cham peoples built temples and towers in the seventh century similar to those that Sherrill and I saw when we visited Cambodia.  However, in the nineteen-seventies, the U.S. dropped bombs on some of My Son's magnificent temples because they were near the Ho Chi Min trail.
              The subject of the war was never far away during this trip.  We stopped at China Beach, the once famous R & R location for thousands of American soldiers.  It was quite an emotional experience for the woman who had entertained troops there.  She walked barefoot into the surf, a tiny figure on the long beach, lost in private thoughts.  Afterwards, she talked with Sherrill and me about her memories. 
              "The soldiers loved it when our troop was here.  They took us out into the water in little boats and things.  One of our girls drowned, though.  I can remember it so clearly."
              Turning away, she stopped talking for a while.  
              We passed Da Nang, which she also remembered. The entire city was a vast military base during the war, she told us.  Now, it seemed to be turning into a city of high rises. 

​              Unexploded mines and bombs still killed people, as late as 2007.  At least six percent of the population was disabled.  This was a serious problem in many parts of the world, we'd learned in our travels.  We'd encountered it in Cambodia and Laos and in Croatia.  Even if many years had passed since the conflict, the land mines often remained buried, ready to maim the unaware.  Dioxin, a chemical related to the notorious Agent Orange still affected the soil and water in Vietnam, even the fish.  When we were there, early in the new century, most of the population had been born after the war, but we saw school groups visiting museums about the war.  After all, it still was part of their lives.  

​              Returning to Hoi An, Sherrill and I explored the Old City, walking along the river, through crowded, fragrant, indoor and outdoor markets, then wandering among different neighborhoods until we reached the white sand beach on the South China Sea.  We passed dozens of tiny shops: in one a man was repairing old TVs, in another someone was fixing motorbikes, and I saw a youth working an aged sewing machine.  That evening, we had dinner alone on a roof terrace overlooking Hoi An, electric lights blinking below and fireflies darting through the air near us. 

​              On the way to the city of Nha Trang, we stopped at a fishing village where families lived on their boats, venturing between floods into the bay to catch whatever they could.  Shanty houses on stilts were connected to land by precarious catwalks.  As many as seven or eight typhoons hit that area every year, we learned.  A hike across town brought us to a giant statue of Buddha.  Along the way, we passed several dark little shops in which we could see through open doors kids playing primitive computer games.  The Buddha, handsome and stoic on his great lotus blossom, looked as if he had been carved out of a monster bar of white soap.  After paying our respects to the Buddha, we indulged in a cab back to our hotel—we had underestimated the impact of the heat and humidity.  

​              We were glad to get to the cooler air of the mountain city of Dalat, once a vacation retreat for French colonial officials, among gently sloping hills, rice paddies, and vegetable patches.  A visit to the Dalat university gave us an opportunity to meet and talk with students—much like young people everywhere, they were smart, ambitious, and eager to leap into the modern world.  

​              Driving through the highland area, we followed the narrow roads among rice terraces and paddy fields, occasionally passing bamboo thickets and fast-flowing streams.  We were surprised to discover that the area still was a center for ethnic hill tribes, each with its own language and traditions.  The women were very handsome in their hand-woven, elaborately embroidered clothing, sometimes with headbands and tassels.  Physically, they reminded us the most of the Hmong people we saw in Laos, although sometimes also of the regally handsome native Peruvians we'd met three years before. 



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              Several thousand people lived in small clusters on the slopes below the mountain of Lang Bin, many of them of the Lat tribe.  Although the area generally was poor, they filled their lives with color.  In one of the long houses, we saw some beautiful fabrics being woven on fairly primitive looms.  The hands of the young weavers moved like hummingbird wings as they pulled the threads into place, their naked feet working below at the same time.  At another place, we watched with fascination the complicated process of constructing  beautiful lanterns from wood and silk.  In the evening, we sipped rice wine while listening to folk songs and watching traditional dances around open fires—a very different experience than anything in the cities.  

​              Arriving in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) after our time in the highlands was like jumping into a wind-whipped sea.  Its eight million people and many thousands of motorbikes and bicycles, all in constant motion, stirred up whirlpools of chaos that left us staring with amazement. There was a lot to see in the city, but getting to it was the challenge.  (Now, eleven years later, the city expects to reach a population of more than 20 million by 2020.)  Past and future were colliding, sometimes violently, in front of our eyes.  

​              Maneuvering between the clouds of exhaust on the streets and the clouds of incense and food smells in the markets, when we could we dove into the somewhat cleaner, definitely cooler, air in the nineteenth century Notre Dame Cathedral, Opera House, and other Beaux Art buildings dating from when the French were trying to recreate Paris in Indochina.  Gigantic wall maps in the 1891 Post Office gave us a glimpse of a long-ago Vietnam.  Crossing a street was terrifying because of the rivers of mopeds in constant motion, but also because the drivers were unpredictable, often suddenly making U-turns into oncoming traffic or swerving wildly as if aiming right at us.  Somehow, Sherrill and I reached the 1880 Hotel Continental, where we lunched amid the Belle Epoch splendor of a long-gone colonial world.  We enjoyed it, but at the same time felt out-of-place and somewhat foolish.  At one point, Sherrill gave me one of her looks, wry may the word to describe it, making it clear that we were in on the joke together, one of the many jokes that we shared during our travels.  

​              Walking through the War Remnants Museum in Saigon was as upsetting as it was fascinating, starting with the military helicopter, fighter plane, tank, and bombers in the walled yard.  Some of what we saw inside the museum was even more upsetting: the "tiger cages" in which the South Vietnamese kept political prisoners, photographs of effects of napalm and Agent Orange and of the My Lai massacre, and even a French guillotine used to execute prisoners in the days of French Indochina.  Sherrill and I agreed that it was undoubtedly good to bring all of this out in the open and probably also good that it was so upsetting, but we questioned the notion that if people saw it all it would stop them from repeating history.  

​              Our last full day in Vietnam we descended so far into the past that we became part of a prehistoric world of huge palm fronds thrusting up from muddy water mottled with chartreuse algae.  A sampan took Sherrill and me into the maze of rivers, swamps, islands, villages and rice paddies and floating markets known as the Mekong Delta—where the Mekong River empties through countless channels into the sea.  Along the way, we sampled several different tropical fruits, some of which we'd never tasted or seen before.  From time to time, we heard and glimpsed brightly hued tropical birds as they darted among the palms and trees.  These watery villages were different than the ones we'd seen before: some floated on the water, others were surrounded by rice paddies or bordered by swampland and coconut palms.  It would fun, I told Sherrill, to come back and spend more time in the Delta area, but we both knew that it wasn't likely to happen. 

​              Returning to Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City, we became aware of a couple of campaigns being publicized on billboards and posters around the city.  One was telling people that they must start wearing helmets on motorbikes on December 15, just a week away.  Sherrill and I wondered how successful the campaign would be.  We had noticed on several trips in this part of the world that people to seemed to have an aversion to both seat belts in cars and helmets when riding bicycles and motorbikes.  Maybe they didn't like being told what to do and maybe it was just a kind of fatalism: whatever will happen will happen.  The other campaign was to encourage the use of condoms.  Posters showing condoms with happy, smiley faces were plastered on walls around the city.  Did that effort have a chance of success in the Vietnamese culture?  We had no idea.  Sherrill did have a chance, though, to dart into a book store and buy a copy of a Vietnamese edition of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.  
               The next day, we rose before dawn to begin our long journey--once again staying overnight in Bangkok en route--back to San Francisco and Berkeley.

To be continued....

​              If you find these posts interesting, why not explore the rest of my website, too? Just click on the buttons at the top of the page and discover where they take you—including a bio, information about my four novels, along with excerpts from them, and several complete short stories. 
              Please pass the posts on to anybody else you think might enjoy them.  

​Sherrill and I visited more than 60 countries and most of the United States during our 52 year marriage.  This is number 66 of a series about our lives and travels, true stories of two people discovering the world, each other, and themselves through five decades of traveling together.  If you scroll down, you'll come to earlier posts in this series.  To start at the beginning of our marriage and travels look at the Archives list in the sidebar and start with May, 2017.  Older posts are a previous series. 

              The summer of 2007 broke records for heat and wild fires along the Adriatic Sea from Slovenia in the north to southern Greece. That also was the year that Sherrill and I set out with our friend Tom to explore the five countries along that coast. The temperature didn't start out unusually hot, but it steadily, relentlessly, rose.  When our little Slovenian plane from Frankfurt to Ljubljana dropped through the clouds enough to give us a view of Lake Bled circled by forested mountains, it didn't occur to us that an historic heat wave was starting down there.  

             From Ljubljana, we drove back to the lake through gold farmland, green forests, and villages of red tile roofs.  Jet lag had me walking around the lake early the next morning, where a female mallard and four ducklings waddled down the bank, and into the water to join the male waiting like a monarch atop a post jutting up from the rippling water. A striped hot air balloon with a few people in its basket drifted over the lake.
             Our young guide, from neighboring Croatia, took our little group to dinner in a small town hidden in one of the forests, the front walls of many of its seventeenth and eighteenth century buildings decorated with frescoes.  A drive into the mountains one day brought us close to the Italian and Austrian borders, where we visited the largest cave complex in Europe.  A tram took us through a long tunnel and several large chambers until we reached a cathedral-sized space where we continued on foot.  During World War II, the Russians forced prisoners to build new walkways and bridges to expand access to additional chambers.

​              We visited one castle on top of a mountain and another spilling out of a giant cave,  but Sherrill, Tom, and I were more interested in the palace at Lake Bled that once was an official residence of Marshal Tito, the iron-willed Yugoslav ruler after World War II, and now a  hotel.  We walked over late one afternoon, sipped drinks on a terrace facing the lake, and talked to some of the hotel employees about the building, its history, and Tito.  We even found Tito's bunker on the side of a cliff above the palace. 
              After the serenity of Lake Bled, we expected the capital city of Ljubljana to be jarring, but we enjoyed walking along the city's narrow streets, past parks and handsome old buildings.  Several streets were pedestrian only and many were lined with open-air cafes and markets.  With a population of only 200,000, it hardly felt like a major city.  

​              Zagreb, Croatia's capital, was much larger and livelier.  The evening after we arrived, we poked around the lower town and part of the older upper town.  Some streets were closed off for sidewalk cafes and stages.  The public spaces were like a big living room for everyone, the  crowds happily enjoying the singers and bands—as well as, we noticed, quantities of beer, wine, and grappa.  At the same time, I also was impressed by the number of bookstores—more than a dozen within a ten minute walk of our hotel.  Sherrill found a Croatian edition of Alice in Wonderland in one of them to add to her collection.
              The next day, we saw people lighting candles and praying at shrines inside the shadowy gate to the upper town, remembering victims of the Croatian war for independence.  From 1991 to 1995, the Serbs often attacked the city, but never occupied more than its outskirts.  One woman we met said that as a child during one siege period she spent six months in a basement.  

​              As we entered the national museum of art an elderly guard told me to check my water bottle in the cloak room.  When I went over there, I found a bare-chested young man behind the counter pulling up his trousers.  I held out the water bottle, but he waved me away.  The art, as was usually true in small countries, was mostly Croatian, with little from the rest of Europe.  After the museum, Sherrill and I walked over to the botanical gardens, a welcome change from the hot concrete streets.  While we were there, a wedding party, the bride in a strapless white dress, started taking photographs.
              "It always happens," Sherrill whispered, "every trip—weddings."
              "It must be symbolic."
              She smiled.  "If you want symbolic, look over there."
              Down the path, we saw two young men in dark suits with clip-on ties and little badges on their breast pockets—a pair of Mormon missionaries.  We seemed to run into them almost as often as wedding parties.  

​              Our destination the next day was a national park to see dozens of small lakes connected by waterfalls and cascades, but on the way we drove through a large area that still showed major damage from the war with Serbia and Bosnia, many buildings empty shells surrounded by wreckage.  One historic village and the old bridge in its center, our guide told us  had been quickly restored to show Croatian pride and identity after independence.
              "Croatia is shaped like a crescent, Bosnia-Herzegovina pushing at its center.  The border here once was the line of defense against the Ottoman Turks."
              "More symbolism," I whispered to Sherrill.
              We continued south, passing through more ruined towns and villages, toward the ancient city of Split, where the Athena, our 50-passenger ship waited.  Our guide gave us a short history of the area—leading up to the birth and then the death of Yugoslavia, a bloody tale of ethnic conflict from the seventh century into the twenty-first.  Landmines still lurked around there, she told us.
              "For your own safety, I can't stop the bus, not even for photos."
              "Just like in Cambodia," I whispered to Sherrill.

​              At last, we saw the great aqueduct built to bring water to Emperor Diocletian's palace at Split and then our ship. 
              The legend was that Diocletian's palace was so huge that eventually an entire city fit within it.  Soon, we saw that this was not just a legend.  With a footprint of more than 260,000 square feet, it easily had held the shifting populations of ancient, medieval, and renaissance towns.  Even now, at least 3,000 people of the modern city lived inside the palace, many behind walls constructed 1,200 years ago.  In the center, we found what once was the palace's great hall, now an open-air square.  Nearby, we heard singing: five men in black, we discovered, their voices rising powerfully in a gigantic domed room.  One of the sixteen granite sphinxes that Diocletian brought from Egypt pointed the way to the main "street" just beyond.  Only three of the sphinxes survived; the others were smashed by early Christians. 
              Hopscotching from one era to another during the next days, we drove across a small bridge to the medieval island town of Trogir and hiked along its narrow streets to a little square, complete with a miniature Romanesque church, where we found in a small chapel a bearded figure hanging upside down from a hole in the ceiling.
              "What is that supposed to be?" I wondered aloud.
              "It's God," Sherrill said, pointing.  "Look." 
              The clue was that he was holding the world in his hand. 

​              As we ate that evening, the Athena sailed to the Croatian island of Hvar and dropped anchor, our ship like a toy among the private yachts crowding the harbor in front of us.  Several of us took a tender over to the dock to explore for a while, peering in at some of the busy bars, cafes, and dives around the harbor.  Later, while we were waiting for a crewman to let us onto the tender, a young man stumbled up to me.
              "What is that?" he asked, pointing to the streamlined plastic shell of the orange tender bobbing in the water.  "A submarine, or what?"
              Hvar, long ago a haven for pirates and now known more as a summer resort than for its thirteenth century walls, was pretty, but the next, larger, island that we reached two days later appealed to us more: Korcula, birth place of both Marco Polo and our guide. 
              "That's where I went to kindergarten." She pointed to a limestone building shimmering in the sunlight above a great stone wall.  "My father was a sea captain—so was the father of a boy in my class.  We'd stand at that big window and look out to sea for our fathers."
              As we began hiking past the city walls and towers, the day already was getting hot.
              "That's the way it is, now," she told us, "extreme.  Very hot or very cold."
              I noticed a sign that someone had painted on the seawall and asked her to translate.
              "Look at us," she read, "we're still here."
              The street pattern was designed to prevent winter winds from howling through the city.  However, that also meant that we didn't get any breezes to help with the heat.  We went into the Romanesque cathedral primarily to cool off, but were rewarded with a recently restored Tintoretto painting of St. Mark flanked by St. Bartholomew and St. Jerome, its rich colors of burgundy, gold, black, and white freed from centuries of dirt and varnish. 

​              Visitors often say that the highlight of the Dalmatian coast is the city of Dubrovnik, its massive walls clinging to the cliffs above the sea.  It still stood there, a monument to survival, despite the terrible sieges of the recent war.  Starting with Dubrovnik, we had to follow new security procedures, carrying badges with our photographs and passport numbers.  Early that evening, which happened to be the longest day of the year, we went ashore to begin our exploration of the pedestrian-only walled city.  With the slowly fading sky like a curved ceiling above the great walls and historic buildings, the city almost became an artificial Las Vegas panorama. 
              Why?  What compelled them to do it?  That was our question when, early the next day, we drove along the road winding above this unique city and looked down from where the Serbs had shelled it.  And why, although Dubrovnik had been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site, did no one from the West try to stop the attack?  With mixed feelings, we walked across the historic bridge and through the old gate into the city.  The streets were narrow enough to shade us from the heat of the day—except when I went up to walk on the old walls while Sherrill wandered among the crowds on the streets and shops below.  From above, the rich colors—scorching blue sky, dark sea, orange and red tile roofs, and gray stone walls—might have been painted by an old master.  

​              About 80 percent of the tile roofs had been replaced since the war.  Forty thousand roof tiles were donated by the city of Toulouse.  From time to time, I came across buildings destroyed by the Serbs, still in ruins.  By mid-afternoon, the main streets were crowded with day trippers from the big cruise liners parked in the bay—they weren't allowed to dock, even at the new port.  Their passengers were given four hours to experience the city. 
              One evening, our guide took several of us to visit and have dinner with some local people at their farm close to the Montenegro border.  "During the war," she told us, "the Montenegrins invaded and occupied this area.  They burned many of the farms, including the one we're visiting."  Until the Serbs under Milosevic stirred up ancient hatreds, the people on both sides of the border had got along together. 
              Luko and Mira, a middle-aged couple married thirty years, welcomed us at a stone farmhouse with an orange tile roof, blue wisteria draped over the entrance.  Opposite, behind a fence, a lazy-eyed donkey and some sheep grazed.
              I asked, with our guide's help as translator, if they were surprised when the Montenegrins invaded.  Of course, they said, they had never imagined that such a thing could happen.  They showed us snapshots taken by neighbors of their burned and gutted farmhouse.  Luko had stayed to fight, but Mina and the children went to Dubrovnik where they lived in a hotel for eight years—even though the city was under siege. 

​              At dawn the next morning, we sailed out past Dubrovnik's gray city walls and rocky cliffs, heading south toward Montenegro. A few hours later, we reached the medieval city of Kotor, wedged between dizzying, craggy peaks and the meandering bay, long ago carved by glaciers.  Tom and I walked with Sherrill through Kotor's sun-baked old town, then joined a small group hiking up the 300 year-old fortified wall that climbed the mountain behind the city.  
              We'd waited until 5 PM to start, but the heat still was fierce.  We gulped from our water bottles and mopped our faces with handkerchiefs, sleeves, whatever we had, stopping now and then to gaze over the tile-roofed town to the bay and along the gray rocky face of the mountains, continually changing shape as the light moved.  Finally, more than an hour later, drenched with sweat, we congratulated each other on reaching the top.  Then, after a brief rest, the seven of us began to trudge down over the slippery broken stones and loose gravel.  The first to reach the harbor stripped to his underwear and jumped into the water. 

​              Most of us were on deck the next day when the Athena pulled up anchor to begin its long voyage to southern Albania.  After lunch, the two tour guides explained more about the violent history of the Balkan peninsula, then opened up a question and answer session with the Hotel Manager, Second Officer, and themselves.  Many of the questions dealt with recent history and the war of the nineties.
              "What were you four Croatians doing when the war started in 1991?"
              Our guide explained that she'd left her home on Korcula for the first time and was starting university in Zagreb, so on top of adjusting to university life she also was coping with daily air raids and curfew.  The Hotel Manager was at his home in central Croatia, where they were bombed daily.  The Second Officer was from Dubrovnik and was there during the war.
              "I can't talk about it," he added, "because I can't be objective."
              The other tour leader was working outside the country at the time, he said, so he was safe, but worried about family and friends back in Croatia.  

​              The Athena sailed all evening and night, reaching Saranda, Albania early in the morning.  Coming into port, we were surprised to see so many unfinished buildings not only near the harbor, but throughout the city and climbing the hills.  The heat was expected to continue during the day, so we left for our shore excursion immediately after breakfast.  Our Albanian guide introduced herself and promised to give us an honest account of her country during the forty minute rides to and from the archeological site.
              The unfinished buildings we saw everywhere, she explained, were an investment in the future.  Privatization allowed people to claim parcels of land, but they had to be working on it to retain ownership.  The country was still poor, despite a decade of progress.
              "After forty years under Enver Hoxha's dictatorship," she admitted, "we're still  on the way from the Middle Ages to the present—not an easy or quick trip."
              Thanks to Hoxha, she said, Albania became completely isolated.  We drove past some of the 750,000 bunkers built around the country and coastline to "protect" Albania and its people from outsiders.  Many of the bunkers had been broken and damaged and "decorated" since the dictator's death.  Now, they hunkered along the rocky shore like giant multi-colored tortoises.  Vast sums of money had been spent on those miles of fortifications.  Why?  According to Hoxha, to keep out the rest of the world, which was insanely jealous of what the Albanian people had.  Since no Albanian could leave the country or have contact with anyone beyond the fortified borders, nobody could contradict him.

              At last, after several close calls on the narrow road, we reached the UNESCO site of Butrint, Albania, with its Greek and Roman ruins.  We stopped at a little cafe/bar rest stop at the entrance.  Because they seldom had foreign visitors, there was no souvenir shop, so they'd brought bags of postcards, booklets, and crafts to set up on tables.  They would accept any currency, they said, dollars, Euros, whatever—but preferably not their own. 
              There wasn't much that we could see in Albania then and few roads to get us anywhere, so we sailed early the next day, stopping at the Greek island of Corfu on our way to Delphi and then Athens, the end of the trip.  The heat had continued to escalate, climbing as high as 111 degrees.  All over Greece people had to be hospitalized and the Acropolis in Athens was closed.  By the time we reached Piraeus, the port for Athens, the sky was darkened with clouds of smoke as forest fires spread across the country.
              The temperatures began to drop a little the next day so the three of us could explore Athens a bit.  Sherrill and I hadn't been there since 1984.  The Acropolis reopened, so Tom and I climbed up to the Parthenon while Sherrill tried to stay cool below.  Two days later, after watching an orange sun struggle into the grimy sky, we left for the airport.  
To be continued....   
​

​              If you find these posts interesting, why not explore the rest of my website, too? Just click on the buttons at the top of the page and discover where they take you—including a bio, information about my four novels, along with excerpts from them, and several complete short stories. 
              Please pass the posts on to anybody else you think might enjoy them.  

​Sherrill and I visited more than 60 countries and most of the United States during our 52 year marriage.  This is number 65 of a series about our lives and travels, true stories of two people discovering the world, each other, and themselves through five decades of traveling together.  If you scroll down, you'll come to earlier posts in this series.  To start at the beginning of our marriage and travels look at the Archives list in the sidebar and start with May, 2017.  Older posts are a previous series. 

​              "Hi from Delhi.  We're seeing a lot, despite our 35 hour trip here and jet lag.  Aside from walking into the bathroom door in the middle of the night, no mishaps, so far.  India is astonishing.  Thousands of gods, more than a billion people, the best vegetarian food in the world.  Fabulous forts and palaces, temples and sacred cows everywhere.  We have a great country guide, an Indian gentleman who sounds like Ronald Colman."
              ...From an email to our daughter, October 2006.
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              When Sherrill and I returned from India, people wanted to know our impressions.  It was hard to sort them out, but the strongest was the kaleidoscope of color.  Navigating the crowded streets of Old Delhi, we were swept up in the preparations for the annual Festival of Lights, people buying candles, fireworks, and gifts to honor Lakshmi, goddess of beauty, wealth, and good fortune.  The streets were lined with sellers of marigolds and buildings draped with lights.  We were dazzled everywhere by the colorful saris women wore, even sweeping out their houses, tending children, or working in the fields.  The sculptures on temples often were painted rainbow colors.  On special occasions people threw powdered colors on each other.

​              A pedal rickshaw ride through Old Delhi took us careening along narrow streets overflowing with merchandise and people under a terrifying chaos of electric wires.  The population of two million all seemed to be out at the same time, even when we visited the largest mosque in India and a magnificent tomb that was model for the Taj Mahal. 
              A couple of days later, our little group was back in bicycle rickshaws, this time weaving through the hectic streets of Varansi on the way to the Ganges River, making our way through motor scooters, small trucks, taxis, bikes, and other rickshaws streaming in all directions, each intersection such a whirlpool that we never knew where we'd come out.  Finally, leaving the rickshaws, we followed our guide on foot through a maze of alleys and tiny streets. 

           We reached the river at the top of the most sacred of the many ghats along the Ganges, then descended several dozen wide steps, passing at least ten bodies being cremated on tall pyres until we got to the water, where we climbed into a large rowboat and went out into the river to watch priests performing ancient rituals, hundreds of people participating and watching.  More bodies, we could see, were brought to be cremated, mourners gathered around, the chief mourner in white, with a shaved head.
              The next morning, we were up at 4:15 to go out on the river to watch the sun rise as people went through their daily ablutions, after which we hiked with our friend Hala and our guide through winding streets and hidden neighborhoods. The local people mostly ignored us.  Back then, few tourists went there, but Sherrill and I always felt that Varanasi was a high point in our years of traveling.  

​              We arrived in the city of Agra on the holiday that everyone had been preparing for, Dawali, celebrating when Lord Vishnu defeated his enemy and rescued his consort, the goddess Parvati.  It seemed like a cross between Christmas and the Fourth of July: families getting together, exchanging gifts, fixing up their homes inside and out, decorating with marigolds and lights, in some areas spreading fresh cow dung on the ground outside them, and setting off firecrackers and fireworks.  

              We'd been looking forward to seeing the famous Red Fort, a fortified red sandstone and marble palace built by several Mugal emperors over a couple of hundred years.  Dominating its hill, it overlooked the Taj Mahal, which we visited later in the afternoon, when the light gradually transformed the colors of the marble and the precious stones set in it.  The great monument to love was larger and more beautiful than we'd expected.  No photograph could capture it any more than photographs can capture the true spectacle of the Grand Canyon. 
            Our guide invited Hala and our group of ten to his home in Agra for Dawali so that we could experience the beauty and warmth of the holiday.  Outside, it was exquisitely decorated with burning oil lamps, marigolds, and other flowers.  Inside, his wife had created a shrine with flowers, images of the deities, and small oil lamps.  Their son, who was in graduate school in Delhi, had come home for the occasion.  The family welcomed us as if we were old friends, serving us traditional homemade treats.  This intimate celebration was another highlight of the trip and of our travels. 

​              The walled city of Jaipur, rose-colored capital of Rajasthan, lived up to its legendary beauty.  One of the most beautiful—as well as practical—buildings was the Hawa Maha, or Wind Palace, its red and pink sandstone facade designed like a honeycomb to allow cooling air to circulate.  Jaipur also was where we bounced and swayed atop an elephant up a mountain road to the Amber Fort.  Once the palace of a powerful raja, with its massive gates, pillared pavilions, grand stairways, and magnificent views, the fort gave us a good idea of the splendor once enjoyed by Mogul nobility, although Sherrill didn't care much for its austere gardens.  Monkeys skittered on rooftops as we walked through jeweled, mirrored arcades

​              A trip through desert country—passing camel carts, overloaded trucks, crowded buses, and wind-whipped acacia trees—took us to Birkaner, another ancient city. 
           When Sherrill woke up the next morning, I handed her a small package.
            "Happy Birthday!"
             When she unwrapped it, she discovered a chain with a 100 year-old rupee coin with King George V's portrait on it that I'd bought in an antique store the day before.  After breakfast, Hala draped three huge necklaces of roses and marigolds around her neck, wishing her a happy birthday.  Then we all toured Birkaner in three-wheel auto-scooter taxis, including a visit to a camel breeding farm where we ate camel milk ice cream—very rich, not great, but not too bad.  That evening at dinner, Hala had arranged for a beautiful birthday cake to be brought out for Sherrill.  

​              The next day, driving deeper into the Rajasthan desert, we passed many villages, camel carts, over-loaded (although richly decorated) trucks, including two trucks by the side of the road that had collided head-on as they approached a railroad crossing.  The gates were down at the crossing, although no train was coming, so traffic had piled up on both sides.  Then a railroad employee appeared from somewhere, waved a green flag, and the gates went up, but that caused a huge traffic jam on the tracks as everyone tried to cross first, trapping us on the tracks along with everyone else.
              "Why doesn't someone do something?" Sherrill wanted to know.
              As if he'd heard her, a man got out of a car and began directing the traffic, himself, breaking up the logjam.  

​              During the next days, we explored one fortress or palace after another, all of them gigantic and ornate, especially the 15th century Meherangarh Fort atop a mesa overlooking the blue-tinted city of Jodhpur: beautifully carved sandstone walls, rooms of gold and silver mirrors.  We even had lunch in a small palace in the center of a lake, monkeys, squirrels, and gigantic bats called flying foxes around us.  Then we continued through farmlands seldom visited by foreigners, people staring curiously and sometimes waving.  As always, the women were working dressed in colorful saris, even when picking crops or carrying bundles of sticks or water jugs on their heads, their clothes bright against the brown earth. 

​              "It's a sea of camels," Sherrill said, as we drove very slowly past several dozen camels loaded with household goods, babies, and toddlers led by women and old folks.  Ahead, we discovered the men with their goat herds, leading the way to new pastures.  It took us at least an hour to maneuver past the caravan and herds. 

​              On our way to a camp where we'd spend several nights in tents, our guide spotted men in white turbans, shirts, and dohtys all splotched with pink.  We learned, when we stopped to talk with them, that they'd been to a wedding where colored powder had been thrown—a traditional ritual.  While we were talking, a crowd gathered around us. 
              "Namaste," we greeted each other, putting our hands together—which means, "I greet the light within you." 
              Some of the villagers wanted their pictures taken with us.  A brightly dressed woman with an ornate nose ring connected with a chain to her ear was waiting with her grandson for a bus.  Several buses picked up villagers and dropped off others.  Our guide brought us tea from the man who ran a little shop, but when he tried to pay the man refused his money.  

​              Our tents stood in a row atop a 100 year old dam, next to a lake and farmland.  The camp owners, three young brothers, welcomed us.  The whole area once was their family's private hunting preserve, but it was broken up after India became independent.  We ate in a large open-sided tent from which we could see long-tailed green parakeets, spotted owlets, and other birds.  The next morning, we drove in two jeeps to visit local farms, a village, and a school.
              At the village, we were invited to join a pre-wedding celebration.  The groom's family had come to meet the bride's family, but the groom wasn't allowed to see the young bride—she looked about fifteen—until the wedding day. The grandfather blessed us, putting the spot representing the third eye on each of our foreheads. 

​              After two idyllic days and nights at the tent camp, we took a back road south, deep into territory that seldom saw tourists.  Women in orange and yellow saris were sorting red chili peppers and threshing millet in the middle of the road.  We passed a family of pigs devouring piles of garbage and spied countless small shrines along the pavement and bats hanging from electric wires.  Finally, we reached the largest Jain temple in the world, an incredible mountain of marble carved with delicate lacy patterns, as astonishing inside as outside.  We never knew what was around a corner—it could be horrible or wonderful.

​              We were nearing the end of our trip, but our friend Hala had arranged a conclusion to remember: invitations to a party given by the Maharaja of Udaipur on his private island.  Dressed in whatever finery we'd brought, we went down to the royal dock on the lake, showed our invitations, and walked down a red carpet while a band played.  After nonalcoholic cocktails, we got on a boat to go to a palace on the island.
              From the boats, we walked through gardens and courtyards, past shrubs covered with small lights and ponds with shimmering flowers.  Then we joined the other guests for the evening's event honoring Lord Brahma, creator of the universe.  Speeches, music, and dances followed, then fireworks, cocktails (alcoholic, this time) and buffet dinner.  During drinks, the Maharaja wandered around shaking hands.  With his portly physique, white beard, and moustache, he looked like an Indian Santa Claus.  He was the 76th head of the Mewar dynasty, although, of course, he no longer ruled anything, except his businesses. 

​             Although we didn't get much sleep. the next morning we left early to get our flight to Aurangabad for our visit to Ajanta: a huge horseshoe around a canyon of manmade caves, temples and monasteries, going back hundreds of years BC. We had a different, younger guide there who had his own perspective on India. 
        "Yes, the economy is growing," he told us, "but corruption has become a way of life."
              We spent most of the day exploring the caves (lots of carved stairs).  All of the art, from giant statues to small exquisite paintings, was about Buddha.  For over a thousand years, the caves were safe because they were abandoned and forgotten.  Now, they may need to be closed again to preserve them.
              Sherrill stopped to talk with an elderly caretaker while I climbed higher.  When he asked her age and she told him, he was astonished.
              "And she still has her own teeth!" he shouted to his friends. 

              The next day, we continued to the great cave temples at Ellora, all carved out of a single mountainside.  The biggest Hindu temple there is the largest cut-out monolithic structure in the world.  Then, the day after that, we flew to Mumbai (Bombay) and bounced to Singapore, Korea, and San Francisco: exhausting just to remember, these years later.                                           
To be continued....   
​

​If you find these posts interesting, why not explore the rest of my website, too? Just click on the buttons at the top of the page and discover where they take you—including a bio, information about my four novels, along with excerpts from them, and several complete short stories.  You also might enjoy reading the new e-book of my early novel, The Night Action, set in San Francisco's North Beach in the 1960s.  The book is available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, and other online retailers.  Click on the title or Here for the link. 
              Please pass the posts on to anybody else you think might enjoy them.  

​Sherrill and I visited more than 60 countries and most of the United States during our 52 year marriage.  This is number 64 of a series about our lives and travels, true stories of two people discovering the world, each other, and themselves through five decades of traveling together.  If you scroll down, you'll come to earlier posts in this series.  To start at the beginning of our marriage and travels look at the Archives list in the sidebar and start with May, 2017.  Older posts are a previous series. 

​              No doubt about it, it's work planning and organizing a trip on your own, but it also can be part of the fun.  Sherrill and I discovered that we could take a train straight from Fiumicino Airport to Rome's central Termini—no need for a bus.  Although we'd been to Rome twice before, we wanted to visit some new places, including the just-restored Ara Pacis (altar of peace) and Mausoleum of Augustus by the Tiber.
              The train to Naples when we left Rome after a couple of days was much faster than the local trains we endured in 1978 because of the Italian passion for strikes that start and stop without warning.  This time, we were able to really explore the city, starting with the archaeology museum, including the adults-only room of frescoes from Pompeii.  A self-guided walking tour of old Naples, up and down hills and through a kaleidoscope of neighborhoods took us from the castle on the bay to the Galleria shopping arcade that rivals Milan's venerable one, then on to a tour of the San Carlo Opera House, where we learned about its long history.  Along the way, we stopped for lunch in a little trattoria that we discovered and would have returned to if we'd remembered how to find it.  

​              A 40-minute train ride a few days later to Caserta to see Europe's largest palace and its gardens proved once again that schedules and time tables didn't necessarily mean much in Italy.  All the guidebooks said the palace was open but we found it tightly locked and a crowd in front proclaiming its anger in a dozen languages and accents.  Since nobody was getting in, we returned to Naples, where we took a train across town and then a funicular up the side of a mountain to a Renaissance castle and Baroque monastery—and a spectacular view of the city, bay, and Vesuvius.
              "Nobody can say we're not flexible," I told Sherrill.
              "Yes, dear," she replied. "Nobody can say that."  

​            Later,  we rode the funicular back down the mountain and took a bus up a different hill to the Naples museum of art where we happily wallowed in a special exhibition of Titian paintings before riding still another bus back down.  An old man at the bus stop by the museum pantomimed a warning about pickpockets as we got on the bus.  It turned out that he was right.  When we got off, I discovered that my front left pants pocket had been emptied—of used bus and train tickets.  Everything else, as always, was under my clothes.  
              Another day, another series of train rides: first to the remains of the buried city of Heculaneum, which turned out to be closed (of course) because of a "staff meeting"—that is, somebody explained, a temporary strike.  So we took another train to Pompeii, which we discovered was closed for its morning strike.  Eventually, we got into Pompeii and discovered that a great deal more of the ancient city had been uncovered and restored since 1978.  We tried to see it all, despite the terrible heat and lack of shade.  Although we drank water constantly and rested from time to time, Sherrill turned quite pink.  

              Herculaneum, open at last, was better preserved we discovered than its larger neighbor, primarily because Vesuvius had covered it with mud, not ash.  In its prime, it must have been a very elegant little town.  Even now, its mosaics and frescoes were in remarkable condition.  However, despite all the water, we felt miserably dehydrated.  Maybe we shouldn't have drunk that whole bottle of wine at lunch back in Pompeii. 
                 *             *             *   
              "At least, I'm not driving!" Sherrill told me the next day, as she stared out the bus window at the blue sea and sky meeting on the horizon.  

​              We'd taken a train from Naples to Sorrento (which we discovered was full of British tourists lazily savoring both sunshine and wine) and now were on a bus speeding along the spectacular curves of the Amalfi Drive.  After briefly stopping at Positano, a startlingly vertical town that plummeted down a series of cliffs to the bay, eventually we reached the excessively picturesque town of Amalfi.  We found a small hotel just off the Piazza del Duomo, which turned out to be a perfect spot from which to watch a political rally in the piazza while we relaxed with cheese and wine.  From time to time, Sherrill fed some local dogs bits of garlic bread.  

​              Early the next morning, I strolled around Amalfi, which felt like small towns everywhere, no tourists, just local folks gossiping, cleaning the narrow cobblestone streets, setting up their shops, shouting affectionately at each other.  I walked out to a point high above the bay where an old hotel faced the sea—one where Wagner had stayed.  I could picture him there, furiously working, inspired by storms churning up the dark water. 

​              Sherrill and I hated to abandon Amalfi's many charms, but the next day we took a ferry across the bay to Salerno, which, we agreed, had little charm.  Most of its old town had been destroyed during World War II, but we located a small hotel near the train station then rode a local train to the village of Paestum, where we hiked up to a group of the best preserved Greek temples in the world, even better than those we'd seen in Sicily and far better than any in Greece. The weather was warm, but not as brutal as at Pompeii. The huge Doric temples of golden stone stood magnificently amid the ruins of the ancient city, as if we could walk right into them and pay tribute to Hera or Neptune.  

​              On the train back to Salerno, we talked with an Australian woman who was traveling around Europe by herself for six months. 
              "We all do this," she said, "because bleeding Australia is so far from everything else."
              Her partner, she told us, was married to another woman, the three of them living together—still, there she was wandering alone for six months, making her plans as she went.
              Salerno, that evening, was bouncing.  We strolled out a pedestrian street filled with people of all ages doing the traditional passeggiata, but some also were campaigning, because the Saturday and Sunday coming up were election days.  Several piazzas were taken over by the political parties.  Finally, we reached what was left of the old town after the wartime bombing, where we ate a typical meal of the area: melanzana (eggplant) and frutta de mare (seafood).  Simple fare, but well prepared.
                                                            *          *          *

​              A train across the foot of the Italian peninsula brought us to the town of Taranto on the arch of the boot, named after the tarantula.  (The dance of the Tarantella was born there, it was said that if you were bitten by a tarantula you had to dance nonstop or you died.)  In fact, Sherrill had a big bite on her arm, red and quite swollen, but we decided that it probably was not from a tarantula.  Eventually, it faded away.  

​              From the train, we gazed out at fields and hills covered with yellow Scotch broom.  The houses there had flat roofs, more like Greece than the rest of Italy.  Soon, we were passing orchards of gnarled old olive trees.  For a while, as the train continued south, we chatted with a red-haired woman from Bulgaria.  We were lucky that we spoke today's universal language, but we didn't know that in just two years we'd be exploring her country.  In Taranto, we changed trains for Brindisi, then changed for Lecce facing the Adriatic on the heel of the boot.
              The cab driver who picked us up at Lecce's station told us that the hotel we wanted didn't exist anymore and took us instead to a B and B also near the historic Baroque section of the city.  The couple running it seemed awfully buddy-buddy with the driver, I thought, and it was hard for me to get a straight answer from them about the price for the room.  I should have walked out then, but after our long train journey Sherrill and I just wanted to rest. The room was okay, but the next morning for breakfast we were given a note to take to a cafe around the corner, where we each got a hard roll and cup of coffee. 
              "That's all?" I asked the counter man.
              "Si.  E tutto."  

​              Nevertheless, we were glad to be in Lecce, a beautiful city almost at the bottom of the Italian boot.  We had a splendid time strolling along its streets, admiring its magnificent architecture, from the Baroque Piazza del Duomo and its astonishing cathedral to the equally amazing Basilica di Santa Croce.  The whole city was full of elaborately carved facades exploding into clouds of joyous angels, triumphant saints, dragons and birds, heralds and lions—except for a second century AD Roman amphitheatre in the middle of the whole drunken place.  When we worked up an appetite, easy to do hiking over the cobblestones after our prison-fare breakfast, we found a restaurant where we sampled the hearty rustico-style cooking and robust red wines of the region. 
              From Lecce we took a train north from the pointed heel of the boot along the Adriatic coast to the busy port city of Bari.  (The morning we left Lecce, the hotel proprietor and I argued about the amount due and two days later Sherrill realized that one of her blouses was missing—for whatever reason.  However, we didn't let any of that spoil our memories of Lecce.)  Bari's new city wasn't very interesting, but we enjoyed exploring the old part of town.

​              If we ever had any doubts, we had proof that Santa Claus was dead when we saw St. Nicholas's tomb in the Basilica of San Nicola in Bari.  One evening, after exploring the old waterfront and sprawling Romanesque castle, we indulged in some splendid red wine, delicious mussels, pasta, and artichoke flan.  A British couple sat at the table next to us with a beautiful baby girl and a young boy who looked like Christopher Robin.  We met them again at our next stop, the ancient cave town of Matera.
              An hour and a half by train through olive groves brought us back in time to one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, the hillside town of Matera.  We hiked In the broiling sun along its steep twisting streets, exploring the homes dug into the hills and cliffs.  The ancient town had been carved along a rocky ravine, facades and other rooms added much later.  Even churches were cut into the cliff.  Only in the 1950s did the Italian government force most of the population to move out.  Recently, a number of movies had been filmed there, including Pasolini's The Gospel According to St. Matthew and Mel Gibson's The Passion of Christ.  Maybe it didn't look exactly like Bethlehem, but it definitely looked ancient.  

​              A couple of days later, we returned to Bari to head north again, then began the seven hour trip on the Eurostar from the hot south to Bologna.  When we turned inland, the weather grew cloudy and we arrived with a cloudburst, but the next day was beautiful.  The rule when traveling is: be prepared for anything.  Sherrill always was, with a folding umbrella and rain hat in her purse. 

             Neither of us expected that Bologna would become one of our favorite Italian cities, but it did.  Part of its charm was the old arched porticoes lining its streets.  Even new buildings were built with arcades, so the weather hardly mattered.  The center of the old town still was surprisingly medieval with its square towers (one leaning dramatically), and the massive unfinished Basilica of San Petronio that looked as if a giant had come along and started to skin it.  We enjoyed wandering among the university buildings scattered around the old city—it's said to be the oldest university in Europe—and were especially fascinated by the ancient anatomical theatre and accompanying exhibits, including skeletons and models showing the networks of muscles and veins beneath the skin. 

​              One of Bologna's pleasures was that it wasn't touristy.  It lacked the famous attractions of Venice, Florence, and the Cinque Terre.  We saw no other Americans, just a few Germans and British.  It also had its own wonderful version of Italian cuisine.  Our favorite example was the dinner we had one night at Cesari's restaurant on a side street near the Duomo.  Cesari, himself, guided our choices: asparagus flan and tomato aspic, a bottle of Sangiovese di Romagna Riserva, ravioli stuffed with pumpkin and goat cheese, then veal with asparagus sauce and sweet and sour rabbit with olives and onions and polenta.  No room for dolci, alas. 
              Mostly, we enjoyed wandering around Bologna's old city.  When we stopped to look at the 18th century theatre, we chanced onto a dress rehearsal of a dance show and were taken to watch from our own box.  Some of the dancers were in 18th century costumes, others almost naked.  A Don Juan figure in blue pantaloons danced barefooted—until he descended into Hell.
           In one small church, we found a gorgeous Cimabue Madonna and child in remarkable condition.  We wanted a postcard of it, but the place seemed deserted.  Finally, we located a caretaker who took us through a series of back rooms where he presented us to an old man who took us to another room (that he had to unlock).  The walls were covered with tall wooden cabinets that he opened and closed until he found the drawer with the postcards.  He'd worked so hard that we bought several—then he didn't know how much to charge us.

​              As much as we liked Bologna, we dragged ourselves away for the hour train ride to Parma, the "city of art."  Parma's cathedral was an impressive Romanesque monster, but the real treasure was the 13th century baptistery next to it: an 8-sided silo with fine carvings on the outside, then inside a fantasy of colors and shapes rising in a great inverted cone.  We discovered other splendid churches and streets on which buildings of ocher, rust, and orange alternated, many of them displaying humorous and grotesque knockers and carvings on their doors and under their windows: weird figures with open mouths, lolling tongues, and bugging eyes.  

              The city's infatuation with the grotesque reached its peak in the Puppet Castle, a museum dedicated to three centuries of hand puppets, marionettes, carved puppet heads, props, and scenery.  Ah, what we could have done with those, Sherrill and I agreed, back when we were putting on puppet shows at the San Jose library children's room.  At the Farnese Palace, we had a chance to explore probably the most beautiful theater we'd ever seen.  As magnificent as it was, inspired by Palladio's theater designs, built in 1618 for Cosimo de Medici's visit to Parma, this great half circle of columned and arched tiers facing a handsome stage sat there almost unused during its long life, although it was damaged in a 1944 bombing raid and then restored.  
              From Parma, we trained to Milan, where eventually we got a plane to San Francisco.  People often asked us what our favorite country was.  Increasingly, we answered, "Italy, of course!" 
​
To be continued....  
​

​              If you find these posts interesting, why not explore the rest of my website, too? Just click on the buttons at the top of the page and discover where they take you—including a bio, information about my four novels, along with excerpts from them, and several complete short stories.  You also might enjoy reading the new e-book of my early novel The Night Action, a tale of San Francisco's North Beach in the 1960s -- available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and other online retailers.  Click on the title or Here for the link. 

              Please pass the posts on to anybody else you think might enjoy them.  

​Sherrill and I visited more than 60 countries and most of the United States during our 52 year marriage.  This is number 63 of a series about our lives and travels, true stories of two people discovering the world, each other, and themselves through five decades of traveling together.  If you scroll down, you'll come to earlier posts in this series.  To start at the beginning of our marriage and travels look at the Archives list in the sidebar and start with May, 2017.  Older posts are a previous series. 

​            "Where's the train?"
            "Does anybody even know?"
            Sherrill and I were in the little station at Aguas Calientes, Peru, the one nearest the Machu Picchu temples high in the Andes.  We'd already checked out of our hotel up at the site, had bused down terrifying hairpin turns to the station, and were waiting to board a train that, it seemed, wasn't coming and if it did come wasn't going anywhere, anyway.  We kept hearing fragments of gossip.
            "Somebody said an avalanche buried the tracks."
            "And the train?"
            A shrug: "Maybe still in Cuzco."
            "Maybe buried, too, for all we know." 

​              The station, tracks, and street were filling with people hoping to get down the mountain. 
              "Trapped at Machu Picchu—that'll be a story to tell folks."
              "If we ever get out of here."  
              Jose, our energetic young local guide, confirmed after scurrying around talking with people that melting snow on a nearby peak had washed down tons of mud and rock, covering a section of the only track down the mountain to Cuzco.  No train was on the track at the time, although a year and a half before, six people had been killed by mudslides in the same area. 
              Jose collected the dozen members of our group and took us to a school yard where we joined others from different groups also waiting to leave.  During the next hours, he monitored the situation and made sure that we were one of the first groups to get onto the bus convoy that zigzagged down the mountain, around the buried rail tracks, to a station where a local train from Cuzco could fetch us.  The situation reminded Sherrill and me of a time in China when a bus nearly went over the side of a crumbling mountain road and we had to walk the rest of the way to the Yangtze.  

​                                                         *            *            *
              The two of us had arrived a few days earlier in Lima, Peru's capital, hoping for an eye-opening look at the country and some of its best known places.  That evening, however, we didn't see much of the city, but were hustled off by Victor, our elderly tour director, to our hotel, a sprawling historic building in its own grounds.  The hotel was comfortable and the service good, but we would've preferred one centrally located in the old part of the city.  Sherrill and I liked to explore on our own whenever we had a chance. 
              The next morning, we met the rest of our group and were off and running, first to what was called a "local Indian crafts market."  It was huge, with a vast array of booths selling handmade wares ranging from toy llamas to silver and gold jewelry to knitted socks and clothes to chess sets of Incas vs. Spaniards.  Not our kind of place, Sherrill and I agreed, but then she discovered the one item that she had to have: a hand-sewn wall-hanging about 2 feet by 1 1/2 feet with miniature stuffed cloth figures of a village market in front of mountain peaks, tile-roofed houses, and farmyards, each individual sheep, llama, and human being, each tiny vegetable and piece of fruit, sewn and stuffed and then stitched onto the background to create a surprisingly lifelike scene—a remarkable piece of craftsmanship. 
              "Can you imagine anybody actually sitting down and making this?" she asked me.
              "You could.  If you wanted to."
              She shook her head, but didn't argue. 

​              Before lunch at a ranch on the outskirts of Lima, we visited a couple of gardens and watched some impressive horsemanship with Peruvian Paso horses, a unique protected breed considered part of the country's cultural heritage.  Then we continued on to Lima's Gold Museum that displayed artifacts from several centuries of Peruvian history, especially pre-Inca gold ornaments: filigree figures of men, birds, monkeys, and lizards, bracelets and funerary masks, and gold balls and pendants, some inlaid with precious stones.  Back in California, a few weeks later, we read that an expert had called some of those gold pieces fakes, but we recalled a similar controversy about some of the Mycenae gold in Greece.  
              Then Victor took us to do a little sight-seeing on the way back to our hotel, but every time I opened a window on the bus to take a photograph, he rushed over to close it and when I started to wander away from the group when we stopped to visit Lima's cathedral he told me to stay with the others.
              "Dangerous!" he told me.  "Somebody snatch your camera!  Hurt you!"
              As far as Sherrill and I could figure out, he seemed to think that his job was to stand between us and contact with local people, which was not our idea of seeing the world. 

​              A day later, we flew past tall pointed peaks graffitied by weather and time to the mountain city of Cuzco.  We'd see more of Lima when we returned and, I hoped, have a chance to decide for ourselves if it was as dangerous a place as Victor wanted us to think. 
              Our Cuzco hotel, in an old monastery, was perfectly located, in the heart of the colonial city.  From there, it was a short walk to the great Plaza de Armas and other places of interest.  In fact, we were almost next door to the local archeological museum, but when I asked others in our group if they'd join Sherrill and me exploring it, since it was not part of the tour, everyone begged off.  They were too tired. 
            "Maybe it's the altitude," Sherrill suggested.  
            We'd already started taking our pills to prevent altitude sickness, so the 10,000 foot height of the city didn't seem to be affecting us much.  Since dinner that night wasn't included, I wandered around a bit and found a traditional restaurant several blocks away where Sherrill and I had a fine meal of ceviche, stuffed peppers, and rice and roast chicken.  The next day, we discovered that everyone else had either used room service or gone to the hotel dining room. Why come, we wondered, if you weren't curious about the place around you?
              The city was worth exploring, despite the altitude and steep cobblestone streets.  Many of the buildings lining those narrow streets rose on top of the giant mortarless stones of the Incas, over which another floor of smaller stones had been added by the Spanish, and finally modern bricks.  Most of the Spanish-built colonial buildings were fronted with ornate balconies above long covered arcades—well designed to cope with outside weather, whatever it might be. 
              "Dueling cathedrals," Sherrill quipped when we walked into the vast Plaza de las Armas in the center of old Cuzco.  

​              On one side of the square, the huge plateresque-style cathedral grandly asserted its age and splendor, but the even larger, more ornate, Iglesia de la Compania de Jesus built by the rival Jesuits across the plaza challenged it with its own magnificent bulk.  We decided, though, that the original cathedral won because of the large painting inside of Jesus and the apostles feasting at the Last Supper on roasted guinea pig—apparently the national dish since colonial times.  

​              Day after day, as we explored the area, we were astonished by the architectural feats of the Incas.  The great fortresses of Sacsayhuaman and Puca Pucara were almost beyond belief.  How could humans without modern technology get stones that size into place and keep them there without mortar?  These had to be among the greatest structural accomplishments in history.  When we weren't climbing among these gigantic stones, we visited farms at which alpacas, vicunas, and llamas were raised for their wool and stopped at villages where the wool was woven into fabric. 
              "It kicked me!" Sherrill exclaimed, pointing to one of the vicunas.  "I didn't do a thing and it kicked me."  
           She wasn't hurt, just annoyed.  Why had it kicked her when there were other, better targets around?   

​              Our bus stopped at the side of the road in a small mountain town while Victor, Jose, and the driver attended to some business, a good opportunity, I decided, to get out and explore a little.  Just a block away, I discovered an authentic Indian market.  Local people from the area had come into town with their produce and wares and set them out directly on the street, where they were buying and selling.  Most of them were wearing their traditional outfits, including the large felt hats for the women.  Excited, I ran back to the bus to tell Sherrill and the others about my discovery.  Not one went back with Sherrill and me.  They preferred to sit on the bus until the guides and driver returned.  Had they been so intimidated by Victor's warnings that they were afraid to mingle with local people?  How could they pay so much money to go there and not want to experience everything possible? 

​              The next morning, we boarded the Vistadome train for the four hour trip through the mountains from Cuzco to Aguas Calientes, from which we took a bus up the steep, switch-back road to Machu Picchu.  Our luggage went into the Sanctuary Hotel next to the archeological site's entrance and, at last, we confronted the grandeur of Machu Picchu.  Despite the photographs we'd seen, nothing had prepared us for the spectacle when we walked through stone entrance gate. 
              We felt as if we were in an extraordinary, magical place, maybe more than at anywhere else we'd been.  Nearly every inch of the steep mountainsides seemed to be covered with flight after flight of stone terraces, stone houses, and massive stone temples, some of which looked as if they might have been used for astronomical observations.  Oddly enough, we encountered few other visitors.  

​              After lunch at the lodge, we continued exploring the mountain site with Jose.  He explained that, although no records from the Incas had been found, archaeologists had identified baths, tombs, a prison, a palace, and places for sacred, possibly bloody, ceremonies.  Since we were staying next to the site, we were able to explore more on our own that afternoon and evening and even the next morning.  The heavy stones used in the construction were of varying sizes, yet they fit together perfectly without mortar.  And all around us stretched the vast, surreal, panorama of green and gray peaks that rose to astonishing heights, fragments of cloud drifting around their rugged sides, sometimes obscuring the view, other times parting to reveal a sudden glimpse of another world. 

               "Sherrill!" I cried from the bathroom that evening before dinner.
              A tarantula of hideous size and color had made a home in the shower.
           "Baby," she said, when she saw the hairy reddish monster standing on tiptoe by the drain. She fetched a rod from the closet, lifted the spider with the end, hurled it out the window, then turned back to me.  "Remember, they don't bother you...."
              "...If I don't bother them!  I know.  But I wanted to take a shower."  

​              After another day exploring Machu Picchu, we made our way back down to Aguas Calientes. That was when we discovered that the Vistadome train that we'd expected to ride back to Cuzco couldn't reach us because of the landslide.  Thanks to the efforts of Jose, our resourceful guide, we managed to get onto a crowded bus that took us to another train station further down the mountain where we squeezed onto a local train—no Vistadome, but it got us to Cuzco, although we had to stand part of the way.  That evening, back at the Hotel Monasterio, we cleaned up, relaxed, ate dinner, and at last had time and energy to ponder the experiences of the past two days.  

​              The next morning, we drove to the monumental ruins at Pisac, a huge complex that guarded the Sacred Valley of the Incas stretching just beyond.  We carefully made our way along the different levels, down steep stone paths and terraces, past buildings of many sizes, including one labeled the Temple of the Sun because of its position on the hillside, through some of the most impressive stonework we'd seen yet, all perfectly cut from local granite.  Pizarro and the Spanish had destroyed much of the Inca city of Pisac in the 1530s, hoping to eliminate the local culture and religion.  The Spanish used many of the stones for their own colonial city—just as the Romans used Greek stones and the Moslems used Roman buildings as quarries.  

​           On the way back to Cuzco, we stopped at modern Pisac's crafts market and a local ceramic gallery where, of course, we had opportunities to spend money.  That evening, at a Cuzco restaurant, we watched masked performers go through routines and dances that supposedly were based on traditional rituals and dances.  It all was colorful and lively, and the musicians were skillful, but we wondered how authentic the show actually was.  Sometimes, it seemed pretty campy to us.
         After flying back to Lima the next day, we had a couple of days to see more of the city, although once again Victor kept trying to protect us.  Maybe he was afraid that he'd lose his job if something bad happened to one of us.  Since the new Lima archaeological museum wasn't included in the tour, Sherrill and I got the hotel to order us a taxi to take us, drop us off, and return a couple of hours later.  The driver actually did return exactly when he promised.  The museum was crowded with splendid artifacts, but most of them were unlabeled, not even in Spanish.  Once again, we saw few other foreign visitors.  

            All in all, Sherrill and I enjoyed Peru and its people and found the country and its long history fascinating, but the travel experience wasn't one of our best.  The tour company was considered upscale, but that seemed to mean protecting its clients from everything local and  native, including the people.  The great advantage of traveling on our own—even if it was more work—was that we could decide how long to linger in a place and whether or not a risk was worth taking, plus we usually had more opportunities to meet and get to know local people.           In the future, Sherrill and I decided, we'd either travel with friends or on our own.  In the long run, it would be less stressful.  Fortunately, we had good friends who agreed with us about how to explore the world. 

​              We hoped to return to Peru for a more complete experience of the country, but we never did.  As it turned out, however, some of the best, most exciting, travel experiences of our lives were ahead of us.   
To be continued....   
 

​              If you find these posts interesting, why not explore the rest of my website, too? Just click on the buttons at the top of the page and discover where they take you—including a bio, information about my four novels, along with excerpts from them, and several complete short stories. 
              Please pass the posts on to anybody else you think might enjoy them.  
 

​Sherrill and I visited more than 60 countries and most of the United States during our 52 year marriage.  This is number 62 of a series about our lives and travels, true stories of two people discovering the world, each other, and themselves through five decades of traveling together.  If you scroll down, you'll come to earlier posts in this series.  To start at the beginning of our marriage and travels look at the Archives list in the sidebar and start with May, 2017.  Older posts are a previous series. 

​              "How can it be here?" the four of us wondered as we stared through the dusty windows of our rental car at the marble-sheathed base of Pisa's leaning tower.
              Instantly, two shiny Carabinieri cars spilled uniformed officers on both sides of us.  Cathy, who happened to be at the steering wheel, rolled down her window.  The officers told us in emphatic Italian, with gestures, what we were guilty of, but we already had a good idea.  Larry and I knew a little Italian, so we tried to communicate that it all was a mistake. 
              "Abbiamo fatto uno stupido errore," we admitted.  

​              Cathy and Larry and Sherrill and I were staying in an updated 1750 farmhouse in the Tuscan village of Migliarino between Lucca and Pisa.  The trip had been organized to celebrate Larry's 70th birthday.  One evening, when we'd joined them for dinner at home, Cathy had surprised him with a cake decorated with a green, white, and red frosting map of Italy and a miniature Italian flag and handed him a binder with details of the trip.  Now, it was happening. 
           As stupido as we might be, sometimes, we'd known better than to drive into the center of Florence, so we'd parked in Pisa and ridden a local train the rest of the way for our second of three days exploring the city.  Now, we were in Pisa again, on the way—we hoped—back to the farm.  The town, however, was a jumble of one-way streets.  Somehow, we'd got trapped on one so narrow that it was impossible to turn around, but with no cross street onto which we could escape.  The only person we passed was a man who gave us a perplexed look as he folded a sidewalk cafe umbrella.  Then, we saw a pair of open gates ahead.  

​              Cathy nodded toward them.  "I'll turn around in there."  
              It seemed like the only option, but as soon as we passed through the gates we confronted Pisa's famous campanile and its guards. 
              The officer at Cathy's window copied information from her license while tossing out a series of questions in rapid Italian.  Eventually, though, he seemed to relent and told her how we could get out of Pisa, despite the one-way streets, and onto the road for Migliarino.  It probably was obvious to him that we weren't clever enough to be terrorists.  As soon as we were back in our little two-bedroom, two-bath apartment, we opened a bottle of wine and celebrated our escape.  

​              We'd already had several good days in Tuscany.  We'd discovered a local deli just up the road from our farm, become friends with Maria, its vivacious proprietor, and found a little market for basic shopping.  We'd explored the historic center of Pisa, begun our pilgrimage through Florence's many treasures, and visited Puccini's atmospheric tower and villa at Torre del Lago on the edge of Lake Massaciuccoli.  We could visualize more easily than in most homes of the famous, the handsome, dapper, cigarette-smoking genius who lived, worked, and entertained there—even composing on his piano while behind him his pals played cards.  

​              We'd strolled atop Lucca's thick Renaissance walls and through both its Piazza San Michele, where a Roman Forum once stood, and the Piazza dell' Anfiteatro, which followed the shape of an ancient amphitheatre, then wandered along its narrow winding streets until we found a tiny outdoor restaurant for dinner.  Lucca wasn't as spectacular as some Italian cities, but felt comfortable, like a friendly neighbor who'd welcome us whenever we dropped in.  

​          When Sherrill and I visited Italy with our daughter back in 1978 we encountered far fewer tourists.  We'd had no trouble just walking up and climbing Pisa's leaning tower, but in 2005 we had to go online before we left home to buy advance reservations for both the tower and the museums next door—just as we had to buy advance reservations for the Uffizi gallery in Florence.  As the days vanished under our weary feet, the four of us, determined to make the best use of our time in each town, walked almost without stopping, it seemed, from church to museum to palace to cathedral. 

      Florence almost overwhelmed us with its riches.  We crowded in one experience after another, from the magnificent trio of the Duomo, baptistery, and campanile to the fortress-like Bargello palace to the restrained, humanist beauty of Brunellesco's Pazzi Chapel to the art-filled rooms of the Pitti Palace sprawling on the hill across the Arno.  It was impossible to study every single object in either the Uffizi or Pitti Palace, so we split up and focused according to personal taste and interest.  At the same time, could anything capture the power of the human spirit as dramatically as Michelangelo's David, standing tall, ready to battle evil, in the Academia?  Well, maybe the gelato that we indulged in from time to time.  

​              Knowing where we'd put our heads every night made it easier to wander and explore each day, maybe taking a picnic lunch, maybe trusting to fate that we'd find a perfect cafe.  Why not just head into the hills beyond Lucca, for instance, to seek out the elegant summer villas built by the city's elite when it was at its economic peak?  Why not stroll among their gardens and prowl through the grand houses that now were open to the public?  Even though they were built by bankers and merchants, they reflected the ideals of the renaissance, and their vast gardens adorned with grottos and fountains, lakes and arbors, transformed the landscape surrounding the villas into a civilized paradise.  We even picnicked (discretely) on an old stone wall by one of them.  

​              It was inevitable, however, that as we wandered we'd get lost, miss a turn, read the map wrong, aim the wrong direction, but the local people were unfailingly friendly and helpful—whether we could understand them, or not. 
              The young man gassing up his motorcycle certainly was friendly and willing to help.  He listened patiently to me and seemed to understand my Italian and answered my question with great detail, even as he got ready to get back on the road.  The problem was that half of his words were lost in the plastic dome of his helmet.  Then, before I could ask for clarification, he grinned, jumped on his motorcycle, and shot off with a roar. 
                Somehow, though, we always made it back to Migliarino. 

​              We couldn't miss Siena, extravagant, unpredictable city of the notorious Palio horse race, seventeen neighborhoods in death-defying competition.  Although we weren't there for the race, we explored most of the city and the great sloping brick Piazza del Campo where it took place every year and managed a reunion lunch with some old Berkeley friends who also happened to be in town.  Even Siena's cathedral was out of the ordinary—the plague had interrupted its construction, so what had been intended as a side arm of a much larger building became the center aisle and front.  The alternating zebra-like black and white stripes of both the church and its campanile added to their magnificent weirdness.  Sherrill bought a copy of one of the distinctive Palio banners and decided that we needed to return sixteen more times so she could collect all seventeen—one at a time, of course.  I made no promises.  

​              Every morning, a chorus of excited birds babbled at us through the windows of our apartment on the farm.  A drive north one morning to La Spezia and then a train got us to the rugged Cinque Terre with its dramatic cliffs plunging straight to the sea, then—although the day was a bit drizzly—we alternated hiking along the cliff-side foot paths with riding the local train as we explored the five little towns with their brightly colored buildings piled like children's blocks on the cliffs.  Sometimes, from certain angles, they looked as if they were starting to tumble down to the rock-littered beaches.  A few years later, the towns and the trail connecting them were seriously damaged by an earthquake.  Even before that, local government had set limits to the number of visitors allowed to invade at one time—to preserve the local culture, they said, because cruise ships were starting to turn the place into a Disneyland, just as they already had with Venice. 

The marble mountains of Carrara, 60 miles north of our farm, had been quarried since Roman times, but still seemed to be yielding countless blocks of their famous stone.  We could picture Michelangelo stomping through marble dust, eying and rejecting hunks of marble and then finally approving one for the job he had in mind.  Oddly enough, he didn't look like Charleton Heston, at least to me, but more like his painting of a muscular God the Father giving life to Adam.  We could see that modern machinery now was cutting and moving the huge hunks of marble, so it seemed that only someone with such power could have done what Michelangelo did almost to the day he died.  

​              Life before and during the renaissance was hard and violent, so you had to be strong and well prepared to survive.  As we explored Tuscany and environs, we saw proof of this in palaces that were more fortress than home and defensive towers into which besieged occupants could retreat.  The walled hill town of San Gimignano was the supreme example.  Like many towns of the time, the population regularly broke into quarreling, battling factions, which led to the famous towers that thrust up like stone arms and fists across the town's hills—as well as a once-secret network of underground passages.  Sherrill and I knew from trips to other countries just how deadly quarrels between neighbors could be.  

            "Why," I asked the others, one evening on the way home, "do we always end up aiming for Bologna?"
           It was true, as we drove between towns, carefully following our maps in that pre-GPS era, sooner or later we saw that we were targeting an exit that would take us to Bologna.  Whoever was driving then had to do some fancy maneuvering to keep us from being swallowed by that huge city.  We decided that it was a plot of whoever had put up the road signs, but we defeated their evil intent and enjoyed dinner accompanied by a show of fireflies back at our farm.  
          It would've been a challenge to say which of the hill towns we visited—Monterchi, Pistoia, Volterra, Barga, Cortona, or another—was the most beautiful, but the most memorable for us may have been Arezzo, where Piero della Francesco spent most of his life—and where we toasted Larry at his birthday dinner at an outdoor restaurant on the Piazza Grande.  Of course, we prowled around the city, seeking out Piero's paintings.  At one point during the day, while Larry—the art historian among us—was explaining some of the technical aspects of renaissance painting, other visitors began gathering around, also listening. 

             "Is this a class?" somebody asked.  "Can anybody listen?"
             "No, it's not a class," Cathy answered.  "He just knows a lot."  
            With a smile, Larry told them that they could listen if they wanted.  They gratefully accepted his offer and even asked questions.  After a while, we continued along the Piero trail, seeking more of the master's paintings. 
              It hardly mattered which town we were in, we always were surrounded by beauty, both natural and manmade—as well as superb food and wine. 
              "And gelato," the others would be quick to add. 
              "Why don't we stay here?" we asked each other more than once, meaning Italy.  "Can it get better than this? 
              Right then, I'm sure that all four of us would have agreed that life couldn't possibly be any better. 
To be continued.... 
​

​ 
              If you find these posts interesting, why not explore the rest of my website, too? Just click on the buttons at the top of the page and discover where they take you—including a bio, information about my four novels, along with excerpts from them, and several complete short stories. 
              Please pass the posts on to anybody else you think might enjoy them.