The Northermost of these Islands, as I have before observed, is called by the Natives Aeheinomouwe and the Southermost Tovy Poenammu. The former name, we were well assured, comprehends the whole of the Northern Island; but we were not so well satisfied with the latter whether it comprehended the whole of the Southern Islands or only a part of it. This last, according to the Natives of Queen Charlotte’s Sound, ought to consist of 2 Islands, one of which at least we were to have sail’d round in a few days; but this was not verify’d by our own Observations. I am inclinable to think that they know’d no more of this land than what came within the Limits of their sight. The Chart which I have drawn will best point out the figure and Extent of these Islands, the situation of the Bays and Harbours they contain, and the lesser Islands lay about them.

And now I have mentioned the Chart, I shall point out such places as are drawn with sufficient accuracy to be depended upon and such as are not, beginning at Cape Pallisser and proceed round Aeheinomouwe by the East Cape, etc. The Coast between these 2 Capes I believe to be laid down pretty accurate, both in its figure and the Course and distance from point to point; the opportunities I had and the methods I made use on to obtain these requisites were such as could hardly admit of an Error. From the East Cape to Cape Maria Van Diemen, altho’ it cannot be perfectly true, yet it is without any very Material error; some few places, however, must be excepted, and these are very Doubtfull, and are not only here, but in every other part of the Chart pointed out by a Pricked or broken line. From Cape Maria Van Diemen up as high as the Latitude of 36 degrees 15 minutes we seldom were nearer the Shore than from 5 to 8 Leagues, and therefore the line of the Sea Coast may in some places be erroneous. From the above Latitude to nearly the Length of Entry Island we run along and near the shore all the way, and no circumstance occurd that made me liable to commit any Material error. Excepting Cape Teerawhitte, we never came near the Shore between Entry Island and Cape Pallisser, and therefore this part of the coast may be found to differ something from the truth; in Short, I believe that this Island will never be found to differ Materially from the figure I have given it, and that the Coast Affords few or no Harbours but what are either taken notice of in this Journal, or in some Measure pointed out in the Chart; but I cannot say so much for Tovy Poenammu. The Season of the Year and Circumstance of the Voyage would not permit me to spend so much time about this Island as I had done at the other, and the blowing weather we frequently met with made it both dangerous and difficult to keep upon the Coast. However, I shall point out the places that may be Erroneous in this as I have done in the other. From Queen Charlotte’s sound to Cape Campbell, and as far to the South-West as the Latitude 43 degrees, will be found to be pretty Accurate; between this Latitude and the Latitude 44 degrees 20 minutes the coast is very Doubtfully laid down, a part of which we hardly, if at all, saw. From this last mentioned Latitude to Cape Saunders we were generally at too great a distance to be Particular, and the weather at the same time was unfavourable. The Coast, as it is laid down from Cape Saunders to Cape South, and even to Cape West, is no doubt in many places very erroneous, as we hardly were ever able to keep near the Shore, and were sometimes blown off altogether. From the West Cape down to Cape Farewell, and even to Queen Charlotte’s sound, will in most places be found to differ not much from the truth. [ed. note: It only took Cook six-and-a-half months to draft the above "chart."]

Mention is likewise made in the Chart of the appearance or aspect of the face of the Country. With respect to Tovy Poenammu, it is for the most part very Mountainous, and to all appearance a barren Country. The people in Queen Charlotte’s sound–those that came off to us from under the Snowy Mountain, and the five we saw to the South-West of Cape Saunders–were all the inhabitants, or Signs of inhabitants, we saw upon the whole Island; but most part of the Sea Coast of Aeheinomouwe, except the South-West side, is well inhabited; and although it is a hilly, Mountainous Country, yet the very Hills and Mountains are many of them cover’d with wood, and the Soil of the plains and Valleys appear’d to be very rich and fertile, and such as we had an opportunity to examine we found to be so, and not very much incumber’d with woods.

It was the Opinion of every body on board that all sorts of European grain, fruit, Plants, etc., would thrive here; in short, was this Country settled by an industrious people they would very soon be supplied not only with the necessaries, but many of the Luxuries, of Life. The Sea, Bays, and Rivers abound with a great Variety of Excellent Fish, the most of them unknown in England, besides Lobsters, which were allowed by every one to be the best they ever had eat. Oysters and many other sorts of shell fish all Excellent in their kind. Sea and Water Fowls of all sorts are, however, in no great plenty; those known in Europe are Ducks, Shags, Gannets, and Gulls, all of which were Eat by us, and found exceeding good; indeed, hardly anything came Amiss to us that could be Eat by Man. Land fowl are likewise in no great plenty, and all of them, except Quails, are, I believe, unknown in Europe; these are exactly like those we have in England. The Country is certainly destitute of all sorts of beasts, either wild or tame, except dogs and Rats; the former are tame, and lived with the people, who breed and bring them up for no other purpose than to Eat, and rats are so scarce that not only I, but many others in the Ship, never see one. Altho’ we have seen some few Seals, and once a Sea Lion upon this Coast, yet I believe they are not only very scarce,but seldom or ever come ashore; for if they did the Natives would certainly find out some Method of Killing them, the Skins of which they no doubt would preserve for Cloathing, as well as the Skins of Dogs and birds, the only Skins we ever saw among them. But they must sometimes get Whales, because many of the Patta Pattoas are made of the bones of some such fish, and an Ornament they wear at their breast (on which they set great Value), which are supposed to be made of the Tooth of a Whale; and yet we know of no method or instrument they have to kill these Animals.

In the woods are plenty of Excellent Timber, fit for all purposes except Ships’ Masts; and perhaps upon a Close Examination some might be found not improper for that purpose. There grows spontainously everywhere a kind of very broad-bladed grass, like flags of the Nature of Hemp, of which might be made the very best of Cordage and Canvas, etc. There are 2 sorts, one finer than the other; of these the Natives make Cloth, rope, Lines, netts, etc. Iron Ore is undoubtedly to be found here, particularly about Mercury Bays, where we found great quantities of Iron sand; however, we met with no Ore of any Sort, neither did we ever see any sort of Metal with the Natives. We met with some stones at Admiralty Bay that appear’d to be Mineral in some degree, but Dr. Solander was of Opinion that they contain’d no Sort of Metal. The white stone we saw near the South Cape and some other parts to the Southward, which I took to be a kind of Marble, such as I had seen on one of the Hills I was upon in Mercury Bay, Mr. Banks–I afterwards found–was of Opinion that they were Mineral to the highest degree; he is certainly a much better Judge of these things than I am, and therefore I might be mistaken in my opinion, which was only founded on what I had before seen not only in this Country, but in other parts where I have been; and at the same time I must observe we were not less than 6 or 8 Leagues from the Land, and nearer it was not possible for us at that time to come without running the Ship into Apparent Danger. However, I am no Judge how far Mineral can be distinguished as such; certain it is that in Southern parts of this Country there are whole Mountains of Nothing Else but stone, some of which, no doubt, may be found to contain Metal.

Should it ever become an object of settling this Country, the best place for the first fixing of a Colony would be either in the River Thames or the Bay of Islands; for at either of these places they would have the advantage of a good Harbour, and by means of the former an Easy Communication would be had, and settlements might be extended into the inland parts of the Country. For a very little trouble and Expence small Vessels might be built in the River proper for the Navigation thereof. It is too much for me to assert how little water a Vessel ought to draw to Navigate this River, even so far up as I was in the Boat; this depends intirely upon the Depth of Water that is upon the bar or flat that lay before the narrow part of the River, which I had not an opportunity of making myself acquainted with, but I am of Opinion that a Vessel that draws not above 10 or 12 feet may do it with Ease. So far as I have been able to Judge of the Genius of these people it does not appear to me to be at all difficult for Strangers to form a settlement in this Country; they seem to be too much divided among themselves to unite in opposing, by which means, and kind and Gentle usage, the Colonists would be able to form strong parties among them.

The [Maori] Natives of this Country are a Strong, rawboned, well made, Active People, rather above than under the common size, especially the Men; they are of a very dark brown colour, with black hair, thin black beards, and white teeth, and such as do not disfigure their faces by tattowing, etc., have in general very good features. The Men generally were their Hair long, Coomb’d up, and tied upon the Crown of their Heads; some of the women were it long and loose upon their Shoulders, old women especially; others again were it crop’d short. Their coombs are made some of bones, and others of Wood; they sometimes Wear them as an Ornament stuck upright in their Hair. They seem to enjoy a good state of Health, and many of them live to a good old Age. Many of the old and some of the Middle aged Men have their faces mark’d or tattow’d with black, and some few we have seen who have had their buttocks, thighs, and other parts of their bodies marked, but this is less common. The figures they mostly use are spirals, drawn and connected together with great nicety and judgement. They are so exact in the application of these Figures that no difference can be found between the one side of the face and the other, if the whole is marked, for some have only one side, and some a little on both sides; hardly any but the old Men have the whole tattow’d. From this I conclude that it takes up some time, perhaps Years, to finish the Operation, which all Who have begun may not have perseverance enough to go through, as the manner in which it must be done must certainly cause intollerable pain, and may be the reason why so few are Marked at all–at least I know no other. The Women inlay the Colour of Black under the skins of their lips, and both sexes paint their faces and bodies at times more or less with red Oker, mixed with fish Oil.

[Maori Fashion]

Their common Cloathing are very much like square Thrumb’d Matts, that are made of rope Yarns, to lay at the doors or passages into houses to clean ones shoes upon. These they tie round their necks, the Thrumb’d side out, and are generally large enough to cover the body as low as the knee; they are made with very little Preparation of the broad Grass plant before mentioned. Beside the Thrumb’d Matts, as I call them, they have other much finer cloathing, made of the same plant after it is bleached and prepared in such a Manner that it is as white and almost as soft as flax, but much stronger. Of this they make pieces of cloth about 5 feet long and 4 broad; these are wove some pieces close and others very open; the former are as stout as the strongest sail cloth, and not unlike it, and yet it is all work’d or made by hand with no other Instrument than a Needle or Bodkin. To one end of every piece is generally work’d a very neat border of different colours of 4 or 6 inches broad, and they very often Trim them with pieces of Dog Skin or birds’ feathers. These pieces of Cloth they wear as they do the other, tying one End round their Necks with a piece of string, to one end of which is fixed a Needle or Bodkin made of Bone, by means of which they can easily fasten, or put the string through any part of the Cloth; they sometimes wear pieces of this kind of Cloth round their Middles, as well as over their Shoulders. But this is not common, especially with the Men, who hardly ever wear anything round their Middles, observing no sort of Decency in that respect; neither is it at all uncommon for them to go quite Naked without any one thing about them besides a belt round their waists, to which is generally fastened a small string, which they tye round the prepuse; in this manner I have seen hundreds of them come off to and on board the Ship, but they generally had their proper Cloathing in the boat along with them to put on if it rain’d, etc. The Women, on the other hand, always wear something round their Middle; generally a short, thrumbd Matt, which reaches as low as their Knees. Sometimes, indeed, I have seen them with only a Bunch of grass or plants before, tyed on with a piece of fine platting made of sweet-scented grass; they likewise wear a piece of cloth over their Shoulders as the Men do; this is generally of the Thrum kind. I hardly ever saw a Woman wear a piece of fine cloth. One day at Talago I saw a strong proof that the Women never appear naked, at least before strangers. Some of us hapned to land upon a small Island where several of them were Naked in the Water, gathering of Lobsters and shell fish; as soon as they saw us some of them hid themselves among the Rocks, and the rest remain’d in the Sea until they had made themselves Aprons of the Sea Weed; and even then, when they came out to us, they shew’d Manifest signs of Shame, and those who had no method of hiding their nakedness would by no means appear before us.

The Women have all very soft Voices, and may by that alone be known from the Men. The Making of cloth and all other Domestick work is, I believe, wholy done by them, and the more Labourious work, such as building Boats, Houses, Tilling the ground, etc., by the Men. Both men and women wear ornaments at their Ears and about their Necks; these are made of stone, bone, Shells, etc., and are variously shaped; and some I have seen wear human Teeth and finger Nails, and I think we were told that they did belong to their deceased friends. The Men, when they are dressed, generally wear 2 or 3 long white feathers stuck upright in their Hair, and at Queen Charlotte’s sound many, both men and women, wore Round Caps made of black feathers.

[Maori Warring]

The old men are much respected by the younger, who seem to be govern’d and directed by them on most Occasions. We at first thought that they were united under one head or Chief, whose Name is Teeratu; we first heard of him in Poverty Bay, and he was own’d as Chief by every one we met with from Cape Kidnappers to the Northward and Westward as far as the Bay of Plenty, which is a great extent of territories for an Indian Prince. When we were upon the East Coast they always pointed inland to the Westward for the place of his residence, which I believe to be in the Bay of Plenty, and that those Hippas or fortified Towns are Barrier Towns either for or against him; but most likely the former, and if so, may be the utmost Extent of his Dominions to the Westwards, for at Mercury bay they did not own him as their Prince, nor no where else either to the Westward or Southward, or any other single person; for at whatever place we put in at, or whatever people we spoke with upon the Coast, they generally told us that those that were at a little distance from them were their Enemies; from which it appear’d to me that they were very much divided into Parties, which make war one with another, and all their Actions and behaviour towards us tended to prove that they are a brave, open, war-like people, and void of Treachery.

Whenever we were Visited by any number of them that had never heard or seen anything of us before they generally came off in the largest Canoe they had, some of which will carry 60, 80, or 100 people. They always brought their best Cloaths along with them, which they put on as soon as they came near the Ship. In each Canoe were generally an old Man, in some 2 or 3; these used always to direct the others, were better Cloathed, and generally carried a Halbard or Battle Axe in their hands, or some such like thing that distinguished them from the others. As soon as they came within about a Stone’s throw of the Ship they would there lay, and call out, “Haromoi harenta a patoo ago!” that is, “Come here, come ashore with us, and we will kill you with our patoo patoos!” and at the same time would shake them at us. At times they would dance the War dance, and other times they would trade with and talk to us, and Answer such Questions as were put to them with all the Calmness imaginable, and then again begin the War Dance, shaking their Paddles, Patoo patoos, etc., and make strange contortions at the same time. As soon as they had worked themselves up to a proper pitch they would begin to attack us with Stones and darts, and oblige us, wether we would or no, to fire upon them. Musquetry they never regarded unless they felt the Effect; but great Guns they did, because they threw stones farther than they could Comprehend. After they found that our Arms were so much superior to theirs, and that we took no advantage of that superiority, and a little time given them to reflect upon it, they ever after were our very good friends; and we never had an instance of their attempting to surprize or cut off any of our people when they were ashore; opportunity for so doing they must have had at one time or another.

It is hard to account for what we have every where been told, of their Eating their Enemies killed in Battle, which they most Certainly do; Circumstances enough we have seen to Convince us of the Truth of this. Tupia, who holds this Custom in great aversion, hath very often Argued with them against it, but they have always as streniously supported it, and never would own that it was wrong. It is reasonable to suppose that men with whom this custom is found, seldom, if ever, give Quarter to those they overcome in battle; and if so, they must fight desperately to the very last. A strong proof of this supposition we had from the People of Queen Charlotte’s sound, who told us, but a few days before we Arrived that they had kill’d and Eat a whole boat’s crew. Surely a single boat’s crew, or at least a part of them, when they found themselves beset and overpowered by numbers would have surrender’d themselves prisoners was such a thing practised among them. The heads of these unfortunate people they preserved as Trophies; 4 or 5 of them they brought off to shew to us, one of which Mr. Banks bought, or rather forced them to sell, for they parted with it with the utmost reluctancy, and afterwards would not so much as let us see one more for any thing we could offer them.

In the Article of Food these People have no great Variety; Fern roots, Dogs, Fish, and wild fowl is their Chief diet, for Cocos, Yams, and Sweet Potatoes is not Cultivated every where. They dress their Victuals in the same Manner as the people in the South Sea Islands; that is, dogs and Large fish they bake in a hole in the ground, and small fish, birds, and Shell fish, etc., they broil on the fire. Fern roots they likewise heat over the fire, then beat them out flat upon a stone with a wooden Mallet; after this they are fit for Eating, in the doing of which they suck out the Moist and Glutinous part, and Spit out the Fibrous parts. These ferns are much like, if not the same as, the mountain ferns in England.

They catch fish with Seans, Hooks and line, but more commonly with hooped netts very ingeniously made; in the middle of these they tie the bait, such as Sea Ears, fish Gutts, etc., then sink the Nett to the bottom with a stone; after it lays there a little time they haul it Gently up, and hardly ever without fish, and very often a large quantity. All their netts are made of the broad Grass plant before mentioned; generally with no other preparation than by Splitting the blade of the plant into threads. Their fish hooks are made of Crooked pieces of Wood, bones, and Shells.

WAR CANOE OF NEW ZEALAND

The people shew great ingenuity and good workmanship in the building and framing their boats or Canoes. They are long and Narrow, and shaped very much like a New England Whale boat. Their large Canoes are, I believe, built wholy for war, and will carry from 40 to 80 or 100 Men with their Arms, etc. I shall give the Dimensions of one which I measured that lay ashore at Tolago. Length 68 1/2 feet, breadth 5 feet, and Depths 3 1/2, the bottom sharp, inclining to a wedge, and was made of 3 pieces hollow’d out to about 2 Inches or an Inch and a half thick, and well fastned together with strong platting. Each side consisted of one Plank only, which was 63 feet long and 10 or 12 Inches broad, and about 1 1/4 Inch thick, and these were well fitted and lashed to the bottom part. There were a number of Thwarts laid a Cross and Lashed to each Gunwale as a strengthening to the boat. The head Ornament projected 5 or 6 feet without the body of the Boat, and was 4 feet high; the Stern Ornament was 14 feet high, about 2 feet broad, and about 1 1/2 inch thick; it was fixed upon the Stern of the Canoe like the Stern post of a Ship upon her Keel. The Ornaments of both head and Stern and the 2 side boards were of Carved Work, and, in my opinion, neither ill design’d nor executed. All their Canoes are built after this plan, and few are less than 20 feet long. Some of the small ones we have seen with Outriggers, but this is not Common. In their War Canoes they generally have a quantity of Birds’ feathers hung in Strings, and tied about the Head and stern as Additional Ornament. They are as various in the heads of their Canoes as we are in those of our Shipping; but what is most Common is an odd Design’d Figure of a man, with as ugly a face as can be conceived, a very large Tongue sticking out of his Mouth, and Large white Eyes made of the Shells of Sea Ears. Their paddles are small, light, and neatly made; they hardly ever make use of sails, at least that we saw, and those they have are but ill contrived, being generally a piece of netting spread between 2 poles, which serve for both Masts and Yards.

[Maori Digs]

The Houses of these People are better calculated for a Cold than a Hot Climate; they are built low, and in the form of an oblong square. The framing is of wood or small sticks, and the sides and Covering of thatch made of long Grass. The door is generally at one end, and no bigger than to admit of a man to Creep in and out; just within the door is the fire place, and over the door, or on one side, is a small hole to let out the Smoke. These houses are 20 or 30 feet long, others not above half as long; this depends upon the largeness of the Family they are to contain, for I believe few familys are without such a House as these, altho’ they do not always live in them, especially in the summer season, when many of them live dispers’d up and down in little Temporary Hutts, that are not sufficient to shelter them from the weather.

The Tools which they work with in building their Canoes, Houses, etc., are adzes or Axes, some made of a hard black stone, and others of green Talk. They have Chiszels made of the same, but these are more commonly made of Human Bones. In working small work and carving I believe they use mostly peices of Jasper, breaking small pieces from a large Lump they have for that purpose; as soon as the small peice is blunted they throw it away and take another. To till or turn up the ground they have wooden spades (if I may so call them), made like stout pickets, with a piece of wood tied a Cross near the lower end, to put the foot upon to force them into the Ground. These Green Talk Axes that are whole and good they set much Value upon, and never would part with them for anything we could offer. I offer’d one day for one, One of the best Axes I had in the Ship, besides a number of Other things, but nothing would induce the owner to part with it; from this I infer’d that good ones were scarce among them.

Diversions and Musical instruments they have but few; the latter Consists of 2 or 3 sorts of Trumpets and a small Pipe or Whistle, and the former in singing and Dancing. Their songs are Harmonious enough, but very doleful to a European ear. In most of their dances they appear like mad men, Jumping and Stamping with their feet, making strange Contorsions with every part of the body, and a hideous noise at the same time; and if they happen to be in their Canoes they flourish with great Agility their Paddles, Pattoo Pattoos, various ways, in the doing of which, if there are ever so many boats and People, they all keep time and Motion together to a surprizing degree. It was in this manner that they work themselves to a proper Pitch of Courage before they used to attack us; and it was only from their after behaviour that we could tell whether they were in jest or in Earnest when they gave these Heivas, as they call them, of their own accord, especially at our first coming into a place. Their signs of Friendship is the waving the hand or a piece of Cloth, etc.

We were never able to learn with any degree of certainty in what manner they bury their dead; we were generally told that they put them in the ground; if so it must be in some secret or by place, for we never saw the least signs of a burying place in the whole Country. (ed. note: Maoris kept the locations of their burial lands secret. First, they buried a dead body; then they exhumed the corpse, cleaned the bones, and hid them in a cave or break in the rocks. It was important to hide bones, as people made weapons out of them.) Their Custom of mourning for a friend or relation is by cutting and Scarifying their bodys, particularly their Arms and breasts, in such a manner that the Scars remain indelible, and, I believe, have some signification such as to shew how near related the deceased was to them.

[Maori and Tahiti Lingo]

With respect to religion, I believe these people trouble themselves very little about it; they, however, believe that there is one Supream God, whom they call Tawney, (ed. note: Maoris did not pray, so this was probably the “creator” of animal and vegetables) and likewise a number of other inferior deities; but whether or no they worship or Pray to either one or the other we know not with any degree of certainty. It is reasonable to suppose that they do, and I believe it; yet I never saw the least Action or thing among them that tended to prove it. They have the same Notions of the Creation of the World, Mankind, etc., as the people of the South Sea Islands have; indeed, many of their notions and Customs are the very same. But nothing is so great a proof of their all having had one Source as their Language, which differ but in a very few words the one from the other, as will appear from the following specimens, which I had from Mr. Banks, who understands their Language as well, or better than, any one on board. [Ed. note: See Banks's linguistic codification below.]

In the daytime, the ground is a flat plane of pale white, the sky often a flat plane of slightly less-pale white. Above a certain latitude (about 69° North) there is no vegetation and hardly any topography. The horizon where earth and sky meet is sometimes invisible. If the wind picks up and lifts the dry snow into the air, you cannot tell where one stops and the other begins. At night, you could stare at the layers of stars, Milky Way, and brilliant green Northern Lights forever if the cold of the 19-hour February night wasn’t trying to kill you.

I was there to work on a media production that shot on and between the natural gas fields of the Mackenzie Delta. The field crew at the sites told us to wear a hard hat at all times. They told us only go to the bars in groups. They told us not to go to anyone’s house, “especially if they’re native.” The acrimony between what they call “the oilpatch” and the locals has left blood in the snow of weekend mornings for decades. Even in a just world, if you take away the sunlight for a month, there will be fighting.

They told us to stay in our vehicles. If something happens, and you leave your vehicle, you will not be rescued in time. You do not leave the road; to leave the road is to die. You are given an orange safety vest, so they can find your body, in case you don’t listen.

The road is usually a frozen river. To break through the ice and fall into the river is yet another way to die. Sometimes the road is the frozen-over Arctic Ocean. When you break through that ice, you sink. They say it’s the air bubbles in your decomposing body that cause it to float, and in the sub-freezing water of the Arctic Ocean, human bodies don’t decompose. If you fall into the Arctic Ocean, your corpse may be well-preserved, but no one will risk a life, or expend the cost, to retrieve it.

Suppose you do fall in. By the time you reach the surface, the hole you fell into may have frozen over already. If you can punch through ice with lungs full of 35° water, maybe you deserve to live, but then you’re soaking wet in subzero temperatures, and you will spend your last few conscious minutes too delirious with hypothermia to be thankful that your next of kin will have something to bury.

Once, I asked a guy who’d worked up there for twenty-five years if he’d known of anyone who’d fallen through the ice and lived. He could think of only two. One of them, a rookie driver, got out of his truck just in time before it broke through. He stood on a snowbank watching his truck sink as he waited for someone to come along, and he wasn’t far from town, so someone did. There are checkpoints along the frozen river and when you pass them, you’re supposed to call a dispatch office, so they know to get help if you don’t reach the next checkpoint at the predicted time. The rookie driver went back South, back home, the next day, and his truck was pulled out. A year later, that truck hit the frozen river again, driven by another rookie. Local drivers call that truck “The Submarine.”

The story of the other fallen survivor is more grim. A driver’s semi truck broke through the ice of the Artic Ocean, and he couldn’t get out in time. His truck plummeted past the snowballs of salt that form just below the surface of frozen ocean water, and he was able to draw just enough breath from the air pocket in his truck’s cab before diving out into the viscous, freezing water. The ice was already forming over the hole he’d just broken through, and he would have died if a fuel tank hadn’t broken off from his truck. He rode the fuel tank all the way to the surface, where it broke through the thin ice, and he flung his hand up over the top.

The driver behind him in the convoy had stopped well short of the hole in the ice and had already given up his buddy for dead before he saw that gloved hand rise up with the fuel tank. Negotiating the thin ice around the hole, the other driver pulled the fallen man out. A helicopter — an unusual sight, but not unheard of — just happened to be passing over. The pilot saw the incident, and landed nearby, soon flying the fallen driver to the nearest hospital within two hours. The driver was treated for hypothermia and frostbite, and released that night.

The rescued driver immediately went to the bar, where he wasted no time telling his story. A number of his listeners didn’t believe him and even took umbrage with the tale, at which point, the rescued driver became aggrieved, and a fight broke out. Less than twelve hours after he was submerged beneath the ice of the Arctic Ocean — a situation that no one in recent history had ever survived — the rescued driver was nearly beaten to death in a dingy bar. He was taken back to the same hospital he had just left, and this time, he was there for two months.

You don’t need to break through the Arctic Ocean or get in a bar fight to die north of the Arctic Circle. Being outside will kill you just fine. In February, the temperature is often -40° F in the middle of the afternoon. Most people will never know cold like this. I grew up in Minnesota, and once or twice it would get that cold, usually at night, but Minnesota is humid. Minnesota has lights and trees and telephones that always work. The Arctic is the world’s second-largest desert. The snowflakes are large and dry like the little paper circles from a three-hole punch. You can’t even eat them to stay alive. They will dehydrate you. They will kill you faster than drinking no water at all.

Often, while on assignment in the arctic, I used to walk from the building where I worked to the post office. The three-block walk took me past what I was told was the northernmost traffic light in the world. Who is to say? In that climate, on foot, a Don’t Walk sign is a mild death threat. Even if you’re wearing moisture-wicking base-layers and down pants and Dakota boots graded to -80°, the moisture on your eyeballs will still freeze. Under a balaclava and behind a tight pair of wraparound polarized lenses, you will blink the ice from your eyes as you walk. When you step indoors, the meltwater from your irises will moisten your cheeks, and you will remember to wipe them dry before you go outside again.

You might wonder how people live there, but they have for thousands of years. There are two indigenous populations in the Mackenzie Delta, the Inuvialuit and the Gwich’in. The desk clerk at the Gwich’in-owned hotel told me that the two groups are old enemies from way back. In the bars, after a few drinks, each group unites in their prejudice against any kind of outsider, but even in the daytime, I heard racial slurs directed against me. You can brush it off at first, remind yourself that it’s not personal, but it wears on you after a while. The Inuvialuit and Gwich’in men and women that owned and worked at the trucking companies that serviced the drilling sites were uniformly friendly and generous, but in my two-plus months in their world, I heard far more overt public racism than I hear in Los Angeles over a span of years.

The arctic’s small towns reminded me of small towns in North Dakota. Some people were friendly, some were wary, and a few were just looking for an excuse to beat the shit out of me. The teenagers dressed in FUBU and Rocawear and were excellent at Guitar Hero. On Sunday mornings the church traffic congested the main street, passing the homeless population (!) that lived in the crawl spaces beneath the buildings and the blood in the snow from the previous night’s altercations. But only once did someone pick a fight with me in the Arctic. I defused it by saying that I didn’t work on the natural gas fields, which was technically true. But I see you with them, the wiry man in the stained tan Carhartt jacket said. I’m only recording what they’re doing, I said.

A gruff woman then said that my team was in the area to exploit the locals in some other way. I told her that we didn’t really care about her at all. Which was true. You’re not why we’re here, I said. We’re not trying to make you look bad; we’re not trying to make you look like anything. The man went away, but the woman stayed — and remained mad at me for a while. Later on she gave me her number. I never called her.

Daily life in the Arctic seemed like daily life in a lot of small towns. People went to work, went to the bars, went home. The cable TV and Internet connections were superb. I watched The Wire and the John Adams HBO miniseries when I was there. The food was hearty meat-and-potatoes kind of fare — poutine, hamburgers, Salisbury steak. The availability of fresh fruit and vegetables was scattershot and fluctuating. Prices were extremely high. A bottle of Yellowtail Shiraz was $34.00. A six-pack of Kokanee beer in cans was $13.00. The practice of mixing Clamato or another kind of vegetable juice in your beer was widespread, I suspect, because it made the beer last longer.

Most dry goods were also extremely expensive. A friendly mechanic who looked like Billy Gibbons from ZZ Top said that he once lost a Mac tool set out of a poorly closed cargo hold a few dozen miles from town. Of course, he forced the pilot to land. He believed that otherwise someone else would find out about the tools and steal them.

Things from the Arctic weren’t always that easy to come by either. To eat caribou or musk ox or elk or another arctic mammal, you pretty much had to know someone. I ate the first two. They handed out fermented whale blubber at the spring festival. I did not eat that: It smelled 126-times-worse than the socks of someone with athlete’s foot who’d just run a marathon ankle-deep in bleu cheese. Someone brought it back to the hotel, and it stunk up an entire floor for a day.

Surprise: There are no penguins in the Arctic. They’re in the Antarctic, and you might go on a special trip just to see them. The Arctic has polar bears. You will go out of your way to avoid them at all costs.

You must attend safety training to be present on a natural gas drill site. The section of the safety manual that covers polar bear attacks reads:

If a Bear Approaches:

DO NOT APPROACH THE BEAR

Seek shelter (camp, vehicle, under a vehicle)
Shout or make noise

Drop a pack or item of clothing if retreating. It’s always a good idea to move slowly away from a polar bear while leaving a trail of items. The polar bear is a curious animal and will to stop to inspect each item giving you time to free yourself of the danger. If you’re near shelter and confronted by a polar bear, remember, move slowly towards that shelter and leave the bear plenty of items to keep it distracted.

Gather together in a group; make yourself look bigger by holding a jacket over your head.

If a Bear Attacks:

Find safe shelter.

Defend yourself. If you encounter a female defending her cubs, get away from the bears and remove yourself as a threat to the cubs. Do not fight back.

Polar bear attacks occur most often at sites of human habitation, such as hunting camps, weather stations, and towns. Compared to other bears, polar bears are more willing to consider humans as prey. Consequently, the person attacked is usually killed unless the polar bear is killed first.

During my time in the arctic, the natural gas companies hired a small cadre of Inuvialuit men with snowmobiles and high-powered rifles to patrol the perimeters of the drilling areas and shoot any polar bears on sight. They’re a real threat: Due to the very real effects of global warming on their environment, polar bears have moved a good deal farther south than they have habitually ranged. In my last month on location, a town some 500 miles south of where I worked had two polar bear sightings. This was considered “unheard of.”

By the time I left the arctic, in April, the temperature was above freezing. The frozen river was closed to travel. The sun was out for 18 hours a day. You could see people’s faces when you ventured outside. I even saw someone in shorts.

I flew back with an associate producer named John and a petroleum services company employee named Marcel. John and I took Marcel out for dinner as one way of saying thank you for his participation in our project. For the first time in months, I had cell phone reception, drank fresh fruit juice, and saw attractive young women. I saw trees. I saw neon. The vehicle transporting me lacked an AC plug dangling beneath the radiator grill. Within a week of being home I had eaten either sushi or Mexican three times apiece. Within three weeks I was in a relationship.

I’d go back to the Arctic in the summertime. I hear it gets up into the 70’s, and that the wetlands of the delta are a breeding ground for giant mosquitoes. It is said that they’ve fatally sucked the blood from drunks and skinny-dippers; there are stories. In the winter, the Arctic is chaotic, manifold, and cruel in how it metes out death, but in the summer, when the heavy curtains are drawn to block the brightness of night, its extremes wield a more comfortable moral. You just won’t be able to sleep.

Tuesday, 10th. P.M., I rowed round the head of the bay, but could find no place to land on account of the Great Surf which beat everywhere upon the Shore. Seeing 2 Boats or Canoes coming in from Sea I rowed to one of them, in order to Seize upon the People; and came so near before they took notice of us that Tupia called to them to come alongside and we would not hurt them; but instead of doing this they endeavour’d to get away, upon which I order’d a Musquet to be fir’d over their Heads, thinking this would either make them surrender, or jump overboard; but here I was mistaken, for they immediately took to their Arms or whatever they had in the Boat, and began to attack us. This obliged us to fire upon them, and unfortunately either 2 or 3 were kill’d and one wounded, and 3 jumped overboard. These last we took up and brought on board, where they was Cloathed and Treated with all imaginable kindness; and to the Surprise of everybody became at once as cheerful and as merry as if they had been with their own Friends. They were all 3 Young, the eldest not above 20 years of Age, and the youngest about 10 or 12. I am aware that most Humane men who have not experienced things of this nature will Censure my Conduct in firing upon the People in their Boat, nor do I myself think that the reason I had for seizing upon her will at all justify me; and had I thought that they would have made the Least Resistance I would not have come near them; but as they did, I was not to stand still and suffer either myself or those that were with me to be knocked on the head.

In the morning, as I intended to put our 3 Prisoners ashore, and stay here the day to see what effect it might have upon the other Natives, I sent an Officer ashore with the Marines and a party of men to cut wood, and soon after followed myself, accompanied by Mr. Banks, Dr. Solander, and Tupia, taking the 3 Natives with us, whom we landed on the West side of the River before mentioned. They were very unwilling to leave us, pretending that they should fall into the hands of their Enemies, who would kill and Eat them. However, they at last of their own accord left us and hid themselves in some bushes. Soon after this we discover’d several bodys of the Natives marching towards us, upon which we retir’d across the River, and joind the wooders; and with us came the 3 Natives we had just parted with, for we could not prevail upon them to go to their own people. We had no sooner got over the River than the others assembled on the other side to the Number of 150 or 200, all Arm’d. Tupia now began to Parly with them, and the 3 we had with us shew’d everything we had given them, part of which they laid and left upon the Body of the Man that was Kill’d the day before. These things seem’d so far to Convince them of our friendly intentions that one man came over to us, while all the others sat down upon the Sand. We everyone made this man a present, and the 3 Natives that were with us likewise presented him with such things as they had got from us, with which, after a short Stay, he retir’d across the River. I now thought proper to take everybody on board, to prevent any more Quarrels, and with us came the 3 Natives, whom we could not prevail upon to stay behind; and this appear’d the more strange as the man that came over to us was Uncle to one of them. After we had return’d on board we saw them Carry off the Dead Man; but the one that was Kill’d the first evening we Landed remain’d in the very spot they had left him.

]]> http://thefastertimes.com/slowtravel/2010/02/06/murder-making-nice-in-north-new-zealand-1769/feed/ http://thefastertimes.com/slowtravel/2010/02/01/review-of-my-one-month-nyc-sublet/ http://thefastertimes.com/slowtravel/2010/02/01/review-of-my-one-month-nyc-sublet/#comments Mon, 01 Feb 2010 17:17:38 +0000 Adam Baer http://thefastertimes.com/slowtravel/?p=931 As this is a travel section and not a navel-gazing personal essay/rant depot, I’ll not go too deeply into why I have spent the last four weeks in my home city of New York. Suffice it to say, I had to travel here from LA for medical reasons. I’m OK now, thank Science, but as my tenure in the city that never sleeps comes to a close, I’d like to offer some thoughts on the temporary domicile I chose instead of: a) my childhood home (too hot, too much parental involvement, too uncomfortable for my wife and I, especially while recovering from a procedure), and b) my brother and his girlfriend’s apartment (which is very nice, but would have felt like imposing on two young people who already have very busy lives and don’t need to play nurse nancy). Alas, I’m not alone: More and more people are now choosing to look for extended stay options (especially for medical trips), even in cities where they know people, especially given that new types of hotels designed explicitly for extended stays have been popping up over the last couple of years. (See my forthcoming March article from Inc. magazine on these joints; I’ll link to it at some point.) Still, I decided a more personal, home-style approach would be best for us.

The first thing I thought I’d do was check out Craigslist (no dice, lots of sketchy real estate agents) and then look into sites like AirBnB.com as well as this one wildcard site recommended to me by a touring musician. (I’m not actively linking to any of these, by the way, because I can’t quite endorse one with such limited experience; visit them on your own and make an independent decision. I ended up finding the best option for us on the wildcard site, but that’s not to say that you won’t find the best spot for you on any of the others.)  Yet one thing that all of these sites failed to address in an attempt to remove the personal aspect from long-term stays is renter-rentee security: surprise, but it’s smart to include a standard sublease agreement. Especially if you’re headed somewhere for an important reason. Last thing you want, of course, is to arrive at the joint you’ve secured after paying a stranger a few grand via PayPal to find out you’re not even allowed to stay there, especially if the owner lives in another country. That such an arrangement is OK with some people — even people who own expensive real estate — only speaks to an objective lack of intelligence in a world rife with identity theft and shysters. (Why do dumb people always end up with great real estate? Perhaps a question better left for another piece.)

Anyway, that was our situation at the beginning. I had to lobby for a real sublease agreement — even though it protects a landlord as much or more than a renter — and then be labeled as someone who “is always bargaining.” It worked out — although just upon arrival, when it was too late to make other plans, it was explained to me that the building containing my temporary unit was a co-op that specifically banned subletting. Which meant that as the days and weeks went on, I was not able to come and go in a sort of stress-free way, despite some very nice doormen: I had to instruct all guests (and there were’t many of them) to pretend they were friends of the owner; and the general stress level that I could be kicked out at any moment was ever-present if not extremely high. Not really what you want when you’re paying a lot of money to stay somewhere for four weeks so a surgeon can use an extremely advanced technique to keep you healthy for the rest of your life. But I digress.

Rental method and landlord issues aside, I found that using one of these sites was fairly easy — that is, if you believe in blind trust. So, too, was communicating with the landlord — although, be ready to deal with virtual communication a lot (which means having to deal with people who may not be bright enough to communicate maturely via e-mail — or in certain cases, to be available, or speak English), and with a number of other unknowns.

In our case, we ended up in a roomy, bright one-bedroom apartment with high ceilings and lovely hardwood floors on the east side of New York City, near the 59th Street Bridge. It had clean white walls, a comfortable queen-size bed, professional cooking appliances, cozy living room furniture, flatscreen TV (sans good cable channels), and Internet (although I had to buy an Airport Express from the Apple store to get my Wi-Fi humming, but that was a small $100 concession). In all, it was a fine choice, save for the aforementioned social and communication issues.

What I’d like to write about more, however, is the sort of philosophical issues that come with uprooting yourself and staying in someone else’s apartment for more than just a couple of weeks. This wasn’t a crashpad. It was truly a temporary home. I had my family visit. I cooked in the kitchen. My wife often engaged with the building staff — and did laundry with other families’ hired help, while pretending to be a resident to many people who could have been co-op officers. After the procedure, I became a regular at a couple of the neighborhood restaurants. I visited a bar. I bought a humidifier in the Bed, Bath, & Beyond.

I was in the place long enough, in fact, that I began to have issues with the neighborhood. Why is the Food Emporium so damn expensive and gourmet-seeming when they never have a fresh piece of salmon that could rival my Los Angeles fish joint? It’s great living by the bridge for Long Island visitors, but the car noise is really something for which I did not sign up, given some of the headaches I had to weather. In other words, this wasn’t quite hotel living — or even extended-stay hotel living. Especially being in the space for more than a few weeks. This was literally temp-living. Temporal displacement. And even though it happened in the city that raised me, I still felt as if I was always dialoguing with an “other,” always playing pretend.

I had never lived in the uber-quiet and wealthy Sutton Place area, for instance. My New York, growing up, was Tribeca, the Upper West Side, West Village, Brooklyn. Sure, I’d run up and down 5th Ave. as a kid on his way to dates at the Met Museum. Sure, I’d enjoyed the requisite and overpriced dessert a few times at Serendipity 3. (Before John Cusack made that lovely film we all bought to sit on the shelves next to Kubrick and Orson Wells.) But this micro-hood, so close to the Upper East Side, was a foreign place to me. And I was living in someone else’s home, picking up someone else’s mail, looking at pictures of someone else’s dog, treading lightly (and very cleanly, to the point of anxiety) in someone else’s space, whether or not he or she lived there full-time anymore. I never knew until I tried it, but it’s an odd experience, getting up in the middle of the night and being able to make it to the bathroom and/or kitchen without having to think about it, or even open your eyes, given that it’s not your kitchen or bathroom. It almost makes you question who you are, inside, and how you got there. Was this a parallel world?

As I type out this little ditty, I sit at some sort of uneven but stylish nickel or zinc-plated wooden table with a Dali-esque view of what I have come to call Our Smokestack Garden, just outside the living room window. Maybe it would feel less surreal to be here all the time — if, say, there were just another building, or a view of the river, in this direction. But sometimes I wonder just what my residential reality is. My home is in Los Angeles, at the moment, but my family lives in this metro area, and I have seen more of them this month than I have most years, living out west. Of course, I could quote Billy Joel or the smug, pandering “Away We Go” film and say that I’m home wherever my wife and I sleep. Yes, poets of pop culture: you’re right. But living in a sublet for a month in another city is a new type of Slow Travel — one that messes with me on the ontological and philosophical level. Especially when it’s in another city for functional reasons — as opposed to, say, Spain for a holiday.

The more I stay here, for example, and the more occasional visitors I receive in this living room (my friends and family have been great about coming by to see how I’m doing, while still treading ever-so-lightly and never upsetting the quiet balance of the whisper-filled co-op), I feel like I’m hosting them somewhere that is partly mine. That the space itself, filled with sophomoric art and luxury appointments in a swanky portion of New York City, says something about me the way my real apartment in LA does. That I must remind myself that something important to my life — in this case, recovering from surgery — has happened here. I fear that I may have memories of this place that last longer and function differently than memories of, say, my favorite hotel on Sardinia, or even my father-in-law’s home in a rustic portion of central Italy, where I spent a few weekends last year on assignment. That I may associate this space with too many unpleasant memories.

In a way, the place is too personal. I almost feel as if I would have benefitted better from staying in something more impersonal but still full of home-grade amenities like an AKA Hotel. But for people on something of a budget, it’s just much more cost-effective to try the one or two-month sublet. It also gives you more true home-y amenities, which you need if you’re going to be handling something of a medical nature.

Please excuse the absence of pictures and video in this piece. Of course, they would help, and entertain. I just thought long and hard about taking readers on a walk-through and explaining my thoughts about various matters, including a kangaroo pelt resting comfortably on the bedroom’s leather sofa, an antler lamp, and the sign on the door opposite the dining room table that says “Pls Do Not Open,” as if it wouldn’t just be easier to lock the damn thing. But I don’t want to incite more irrational behavior from the landlord.  (For the record, I haven’t cared about what might exist behind this Pandora’s Door, but others, including my wife have, and it’s just a funny conversation topic, although I have never let anyone try to open it. I’m sure it’s just some sort of a private closet, or else an old door that led to the apartment next door — this pre-war building was likely cut up into smaller apartments at some point. Still, I guess the possibility remains that it’s a portal into another dimension.)

In the future, I’ll try to avoid another one-month sublet from the random stranger advertising on the Internet. It’s certainly a valid, timely form of Slow Travel, in the sense that it’s instantly available and puts you in direct contact with the local community as a true/mock resident. But it’s just too much of a mindfuck (technical term), and there are just too many unknowns, especially if you’re subletting for a very important reason. Which is why I had initially sent out a note to a bunch of friends asking if they had knowledge of someone in the city who might want to enter into such an arrangement with us. Chances are that the timing just wasn’t right. But to sublet — or, I would imagine apartment-switch — for more than a couple of weeks, especially for serious life reasons from a stranger that could have all sorts of personality issues (stupidity, for instance)?

I’m not sure that’s an option for me in the future, and I’m really looking forward to leaving on our agreed-upon departure date, and in leaving the place in the exact condition that I found it (cleaner, even), lest someone more irrational cashes a deposit check I probably shouldn’t have sent overseas to begin with. What’s next? I do have to remain in NYC for a few weeks. So, please make those guest beds, mom, says the 33-year-old married professional. It looks like there’s a reason we don’t toss around the word “home” as casually as it might appear, and pinging between real homes owned by my family members is likely a strong way to improve the taste in my mouth that this Slow Travel experience has left me with. Away We Go.

You probably wouldn’t know this from reading the New York Times, which last weekend ran a long travel feature, strangely enough, on visiting Cairo during Ramadan. The Islamic month of fasting ended more than three months ago; it won’t come again until the second week of August, the exact day depending on the moon. Stranger still, timeliness aside, was the story’s hook about booze. The writer, Jennifer Conlin, noted the difficulty of drinking in a Muslim country like Egypt, during the holy month of Ramadan no less, but worked in an aside about the joy of sipping overpriced gin at a Western luxury hotel, where we are told a non-Egyptian can still get a drink during the holiday, passport permitting.

To be fair, drinking during Ramadan is a bit difficult. Horreya stops serving Stella and Sakkara, Egypt’s illustrious lagers, and reverts to being a tea, coffee and board game spot. But downtown Cairo has a bevy of drinking dives - and not all of them are shuttered for Ramadan. The Greek Club, the Odeon Hotel and the Windsor Hotel (the former colonial British officers’ club) all serve alcohol throughout the month, as does Drinkie’s, Cairo’s busy beer and wine delivery service. The latter will only deliver to foreigners, further sign that the voice on the other line can tell if your Arabic is local or not. The rooftop Odeon Hotel, which offers little in the way of a skyline view, is known to charge for more beers than you’ve ordered, since its waiters, lacking Horreya’s pragmatism, insist on clearing empty bottles off the table. Café Riche, where the Free Officers planned Egypt’s 1952 revolution and where Cairo’s literati once held court, was serving beer this past Ramadan, but that’s hardly consistent since the place seems to close whenever its manager likes. In these ways and others, Ramadan is a drinker’s hassle and people are known to stock up for the month or have an overpriced arrangement with the guy at the local bodega-equivalent. But the city is hardly parched, even if the New York Times believes that “nearly every restaurant and café becomes temporarily dry,” and Downtown Cairo will prove the point.

Downtown has so many drinking spots throughout its faded belle époque streets and alleys that Stella, which is now owned by Heineken, published the “Baladi Bar Flyer,” a map of 51 drinking establishments throughout the area. There’s a website too. Once upon a time many of these were elegant watering holes, where you probably heard as much Greek or French as Arabic and the floors were clean. But today most of downtown Cairo’s bars are either too weathered and cheap, too sketchy, or too “baladi,” which means local, to attract the gaze of the New York Times. Today English is heard plenty, French and German too, considering the glut of foreign language students, ex-pats and tourists in Egypt’s capital. Times have changed, as a misplaced nostalgia for the city’s cosmopolitan, colonial past competes with free market economic policies that now promise to gentrify the smog-stained area by revitalizing its historic, quasi-Parisian architecture.

You’d probably hear that last bit in conversation in a downtown bar in Cairo. Like bars anywhere, they are neighborhood spots where patrons meet and air their concerns, whether they are intellectuals, students, journalists, shopkeepers, or just old-fashioned drunks (none are mutually exclusive). The Baladi Bar Flyer lists the price of a Stella, of course, plus other important indicators for a night out in Cairo: “Shisha available… Open for Ramadan… Belly Dancing… Women friendly.” Individual bar write-ups are faithful to the city’s drinking scene, in which most Egyptian patrons are men well over the half-century mark (though the sight of a women in a headscarf drinking a beer is not uncommon), everyone smokes, and beer (Stella usually) is the sole drink of choice, unless you fancy Egyptian brandy, which isn’t advisable. Of Horreya, which means Freedom, the guide writes: “Lively, popular and spacious, Horreya is ideal for those first few drinks. The chess section and the blurry reflection from the dirty mirrors also make it one of Cairo’s more photogenic locations. The toilet is invariably a mess.”

In any Western city, Cairo’s best half dozen dives would have been shut down or become too popular to warrant visiting, not to say it’s always easy to find a seat at Horreya or Stella Bar, two favorites. But the moment I imagine either one in New York, I immediately expect that Western sensibilities (or the profit-seeking motives of its owners) would repaint the place, redecorate, ban smoking, fix the toilet (God forbid), raise prices and otherwise ruin the place. In Cairo, where drinking is far more common than the average headline or travel feature might suggest, whether among Muslims or Coptic Christians, bars stay as they are, which is to say they decay. But that is their abundant charm. I’ll avoid leaping to any greater conclusions, like drawing a metaphor to Egypt’s aged ruler Hosni Mubarak, because that’s a conversation better suited to one of this city’s baladi bars.

“Peace be upon you! Sir, is this the road to al-Ghab, to Apamea?” Ali asked a bearded man on a motorcycle.

Even though Ali hailed from India, people often considered him Arab — khaleeji, from the Gulf.

The bearded man stopped, shook his head, and said to follow him. “Up this hill, my friends, is the shrine of Job.”

We drove up the green hill dotted with olive trees and parked our car near the shrine. It was a squat rectangle of old white stone with a low metal door, and its painted green dome sagged. There was a small military building next door, dwarfed by a radio tower.

We were trying to find our way to the Ghab, an irrigated valley split between these hilly villages around Serjilla and the coastal mountains. The Ghab had been home to a wild ecology in antiquity, including lions and elephants that were hunted by pharaohs. More recently in the 20^th century, it was a swamp until the U.N. International Monetary Fund restored irrigation canals from the Orontes River and made a lake. Founded by Seleucus, one of Alexander the Great’s generals, the city of Apamea sits at the south of the Ghab valley and was Greek until Rome took it in 1^st century B.C.

The motorcycle guide greeted us, introducing himself as the imam or religious leader of a village nearby. He spoke precise, formal Arabic and we walked to the edge of the hilltop, and looked down on the northern tip of the Ghab.

“It’s steep driving down there,” he said, and suggested that we visit his village instead.

But we were set on the valley, on seeing Apamea and reaching the city of Hama by nightfall. So we bid farewell, and careened down the mountain.

The area, with its meadows on the bank of the Orontes River, was known for its horses; a Greek historian wrote of over 30,000 in Apamea, and some 500 elephants. Apamea was one of the largest Roman cities in the Middle East with a population in the hundreds of thousands, a majority of which were slaves. But most of what was left for us to see was a long colonnaded avenue, a major thoroughfare similar to but much bigger than the Biblical Street Called Straight in Damascus.

We were also on the hunt for olive oil because northern Syria is olive country, with its Mediterranean climate of rocky hills and green mountains. In ancient history olive oil was the area’s principal trade; it was used not only for food but also the earliest street lamps.  We’d driven from one small village to another before dropping into the Ghab, each village connected by groves of olive and almond trees, blooming wild and white in the spring over wildflowers. We’d stop the car and one of us would run into a shop or stall to inquire about olive oil, but all we’d find offered were metal canteens or big plastic drums.

Along one canal we found a man who agreed to sell us two large plastic water bottles worth. We stayed for tea and a crowd of fifteen — mostly bright-eyed kids - gathered around as we talked with the local imam, Mohammed Ali. We asked him the name of the village.

“Qalat ad-Deen,” he smiled to us. Fortress of Faith.

“What do you get from visiting ancient ruins?” he asked in return. Sigmund, the Croatian studying Classical Arabic literature, replied with a quote about the waystations of medieval Syria by Usamah Ibn Munqidh, a 12^th century warrior-poet who chronicled the Crusades.

Mohammed Ali nodded, and insisted we stay for the night.

I thought of the abandoned Byzantine towns that we’d just seen: the “Dead Cities” — historic stone ghost towns that once thrived on the olive oil trade 1,500 years ago. Hundreds of them dot northern Syria, which was a Byzantine heartland around Antioch when Muslims invaded in 634 AD. Serjilla and al-Bara stand as two of the best-preserved settlements south and west of Aleppo, Syria’s second city and historic trading center on the Silk Road. At Serjilla the traditional male meeting-house or andron – the local tavern — is still intact, its columns looking out on rocky slopes and olive groves. We stood in the entranceway and imagined the wooden beams still intact for the second floor and the Byzantine men with beers chatting above us.

Historians cannot agree on why all these settlements were evacuated in the century or so following the Muslim conquest of Syria, although some theories focus on a decline or shift in the olive trade. The stone villages are bleached by the sun and history but intact and overgrown with green. It is the residential architecture of Byzantium, which is really Roman, so the scene could also easily have been rural Italy. A far cry from the campy “Axis of Evil” image applied to Syria after 9/11.

As UNESCO-protected World Heritage Sites, the historic centers of Aleppo and Damascus have seen a tourism boom in recent years. Traditional courtyard houses in Damascus in particular have been purchased and converted, sometimes quite cheaply, into boutique hotels and restaurants. It’s progress, to a certain degree, but these renovations threaten to turn old Damascus into a historic Disneyland. Still, everyone is getting in on Syria’s opening of its long-socialist economy - Gulf investors, Western European tour groups, even the Aga Khan.

Outside of the cities, however — beyond the cherry kebab, Lebanese wine and honey-soaked sweets associated with basking in a courtyard in Damascus or Aleppo — a different series of sights exist: huge castles from the Crusades, a tea and soda pit-stop in a hut called the Baghdad Café on the highway to Iraq, a kilo of grilled kebab from a butcher in any wayward town for about eight bucks, and history.

“All of Syria is ruins” is the constant refrain in nearly any conversation with a Syrian about what to see in the country. We had a car but if not would have used Syria’s cheap and extensive bus system. After getting a flat tire on the highway a few hours past the Baghdad Café, we stood on the side of the road cursing and wishing we hadn’t scorned a bus across the country, from Damascus to Deir az-Zor on the Euphrates, for around five dollars, one way.

But a service taxi — which people take to get from a village to a small town, from a city to a historical site — won’t go bombing down mountains and through the narrow, dusty roads of the Ghab that are crowded with farm trucks. You can end up taking most the day hopping from one servees to another, or waiting for one to fill up before it leaves, while in the car you can skip all that and speed from place to place.

There are few traffic laws in Syria, though the driving is saner and more orderly than Egypt. In the cities a moving violation might even be enforced. But on the highway driving is an easily understood system of left-lane speeding, headlight flashing, and horn honking. Coming from Boston, this could be a driver’s dream: to survive, or at least to make it places quickly and to fit in, you have to drive like it’s the Massachusetts Turnpike — just so everyone knows you’re there, and so an overloaded lorry that sounds like a lawnmower won’t slam into you.

The trip began in Damascus, as the city was emerging from a winter of rain, wind, and some hail. It rained on the desert drive out to Palmyra, another Silk Road center once ruled by Zenobia, a Syrian queen who rivaled Cleopatra in fame and beauty and led a revolt against Rome. Her city is huge colonnaded avenues and temples, like Apamea, only stretched out in the desert halfway to Iraq; the Baghdad Café is on the way. We stopped for an hour in Palmyra and had a lunch of roasted chicken at a restaurant down from a row of tourist shops near the ruins, served by a boy who had already adopted the gut and mannerisms of an old man. We sat at a plastic table near a spit cooker and ate the chicken with our hands and little pieces of bread.

Ali steered the car gingerly to the side of road on the highway past Palmyra, about halfway to Deir az-Zor, the main city on the Euphrates. A rear tire was flat. Sigmund had worried aloud in Damascus before the road trip - “but is it safe? What if our car breaks down in the middle of the desert?” Now, broken down in the middle of the desert, Ali and I looked sideways at him as he took pictures of the situation. All three of us struggled to loosen the wheel bolts until we noticed a motorcycle coming down the highway. I flagged it down and its three riders hopped off. One, an old man in a red keffiyeh, started walking immediately off into the desert. The other man, in an old officer’s uniform, helped with the jack and turned the crank right away. The young boy with them stood mostly silent and looked on at the three foreigners in the desert and their flat tire.

Having attached the spare with minimal words, the uniformed man hopped back on his bike with the boy and drove on to pick up the third rider. We continued down the highway, limited to 80 kilometers an hour on our miniature tire, and pulled into a rest house that we hoped might have a garage. It didn’t, and a group of Iraqi men inspected our spare, inspected our flat, and told us to sit down for tea.

They were from the city of Mosul in northern Iraq, the oldest among them said, and asked what we were doing out here in the desert. Syria hosts some million and a half Iraqi refugees. Most of them are in Damascus, establishing whole Iraqi neighborhoods in refugee camps, concrete slums mostly, outside the city center. They have the best fish restaurants in the city, since the carp is cooked the Baghdad way, called masquf. The fish is split open and cooked slowly on sticks away from a fire for an hour, then covered in a spicy or sweet sauce that might be pomegranate.

We talked to the Iraqis about our trip, that we’d come from Damascus via Palmyra and were headed for the Euphrates — the next day, we said, to sites down-river near the Iraqi border: the river fortress of Dura Europos, also built by Seleucis, and the Sumerian ruins of Mari, 11 kilometers from the border. Mari’s golden age started in 2900 BC, but Hammurabi, the king of Babylon, sacked it in 1759 BC. Mari’s king Zimri Lim, though beaten by Hammurabi, had built an extensive mud brick palace that other kings of the region pined to visit. French archeologists from the Louvre first began excavating it in the 1930s.

The Iraqi men bid us well, and we drove in the dark to the city of Deir az-Zor. We got the tire changed the next day, after our regular breakfast of ful — broad beans in a bowl with yogurt, olive oil, and chopped tomatoes, which kept us going all day.

On the road down the Euphrates we played Frank Sinatra.  ”New York! New York!” he sang as we drove nearer to the Iraqi border town of Abu Kamal, site of an American cross-border raid last fall supposedly targeting some terrorist. The Syrian government maintains, and most foreign reporters agree, that the eight dead were civilians — a father and his sons, a guard and his wife, and a fisherman.

Since that raid in the last days of the Bush administration, things have thawed a bit in Syrian-American relations. Barack Obama hasn’t visited yet, even if President Bashar al-Assad and his wife Asma have both offered invitations, including one last summer on British television. George Mitchell and John Kerry have visited for photo-ops with Assad in the presidential palace where he doesn’t live. The meetings are always in rooms with rich wood furniture inlaid with mother-of-pearl. There’s always a box of tissues on the table, a near requisite for political summits in the Arab world, I don’t know why.

The visiting delegations have made a lot of talk so far and less action. Internal politics, though, is barely opening in a country that has long repressed it. Photos of “our leader” are everywhere: either the father, Hafez, who ruled for thirty years until his death in 2000 or the son Bashar who succeeded him, or both, next to Basel, the “martyred” son who died in a car crash in 1994, or Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah. But these reminders of rule are surface and even kitschy, a cult of the leader along the lines of Kim Jong-il.

Sigmund worried aloud about going so close to the border in his typical combination of paranoia and humor as we cruised down the Euphrates. “If we run into fedayeen (militants) who have jumped across the border to kidnap some foreigners, I’ll just say I’m Chechen or Bosnian Muslim.” Ali and I were confused, and turned down Sinatra. “And if they pull down my pants to inspect me, I’ll just say religion was repressed in Yugoslavia and that my parents were afraid to have me circumcised because they were members of the Communist Party.”

Balkan politics and jokes — I didn’t always know the difference — were an unexpected part of going around Syria. But Syrians seem to like Croatians, or at least one who recites classical Arabic poetry, and not simply because of their ties to Croatia — for example, INA, one of the largest oil and gas exploration companies in the country is Croatian.

We did not run into any fedayeen and later in the day drove back up the Euphrates toward the Kurdish northeast.

Syria’s Kurds are politically ostracized, and the questioning at the hostel check-in was more tense than usual. In Hassakeh, the region’s largest town, the interrogation at the Ugarit Hotel went like this:

“Where are you coming from? Damascus? Deir az-Zor? Deir. When did you leave? Five? But it’s a three hours drive here. You drove south first? To ruins? Dura Europos? Mari? But there are ruins in Tadmur. Palmyra, you know? So what time did you leave Deir again? And you live in Damascus? How many days do you have the car for? When are you going back to Damascus? What time are you leaving tomorrow? Going where? Aleppo? And then where? Welcome. How are you?”

An old white Peugot 504 followed us out of the town the next day after we’d attended a Palm Sunday service at the local Syriac Orthodox church. The police did a bad job of hiding surveillance, stopping when we stopped — we pretended to ask for directions — but they pulled away when we took the turn west for Aleppo and not for Qamishle, a grubby border town in the Kurdish northeast near Turkey. Sure enough down the highway, at the only checkpoint we passed through in all of Syria, a man with a Kalashnikov was smiling knowingly, waiting to check our passports.

Later that day, we reached the massive, artificial Lake Assad named after former president Hafez al-Assad. His son Bashar immediately succeeded him. The lake was made in the 1970s by damming the fabled Euphrates, though the project never produced as much electricity as promised.

We passed through military checkpoints crossing the huge dam to get to a crumbling medieval castle that used to look over the Euphrates valley. Today it’s surrounded by the lake.

The lake’s namesake, Hafez al-Assad, was known as “the Lion,” but in his youth was apparently called “the Beast.” His son Bashar is “the Doctor,” putting on a friendly face of economic liberalization and development as he maneuvers Syria out of a diplomatic cold. The young, soft-spoken and London-trained ophthalmologist is a strange dictator. Posters, billboards, framed photographs and stencils of his mustachioed image are everywhere, from the cities to roadsides in the middle of nowhere. His portrait is hardly imposing, though, unlike his father or his older brother Basil, the heir apparent who died speeding his car through fog in Damascus. Bashar’s elegant, British-born wife Asma was a banker at J.P. Morgan before marrying Assad and stealing some regional First Lady limelight from Jordan’s Queen Rania.

The first couple is young and the president apparently likes eating out and going to gallery openings and the theater. Syria economically is “virgin territory to explore,” the state’s central-bank chief told the Wall Street Journal recently. The tourism market looks to the five World Heritage Sites in the country, from the Old Cities of Aleppo, Damascus and Bosra to Palmyra and two Crusader castles. Egypt, the over-visited tourist hub of the Middle East, has six World Heritage Sites.

A line of Crusader castles, strongholds of the Knights Hospitaller, spread along the mountains on Syria’s coastal strip. The often-brutal knights held out after losing Jerusalem to Salahuddin, who couldn’t siege the imposing basalt fortress of Marqab on an extinct volcano above the Mediterranean. It finally fell to the Sultan of Egypt in the end of the 13^th century. Today, when you look down from the towers at Marqab, the sea frames the smokestacks of a factory below and countless hothouses for growing tomatoes. Like most sites in the country, the crowds are usually Syrian and Arab families and tickets are cheap.

Syria’s most visited castle on the tour bus route, and one of its World Heritage Sites, is the mammoth Krak des Chevaliers near Lebanon’s northern border. Fortified for centuries by successive Christian and Muslim occupiers, the castle commanded the mountain gap into Syria from the sea. Lawrence of Arabia simply called it “the best preserved and most wholly admirable castle in the world.”

We set out for the Krak from Hama a day after driving through the Ghab valley. Hama is Syria’s fifth largest city and, before the 1980s, arguably Syria’s most architecturally idyllic, where huge medieval waterwheels or norias groaned on the Orontes River and narrow stone lanes hugged the banks. By the 1980s the city, long known for its religious conservatism, had become a base for the Muslim Brotherhood, which was engaged in a guerrilla war with the government. Hafez al-Assad responded by sending his brother, Rifaat, to shell Hama. Most fighters were holed up in the Old City, along with many more civilians, and the area was leveled. At the time no reporter could agree how many were killed: some said less than 10,000, others more than 30,000.

Today a narrow strip of the Old City has been restored, and the norias are moving. The city still produces the best hand-loomed fabrics in the country. We each bought a soft, handsome jelabiya robe from al-Madani, a family-run workshop founded in the 1850s, which makes towels, tablecloths, scarves and, I would argue, the world’s finest bathrobe in its Old City studio.

The stone alleyway that serves as the remaining spine of old Hama, lined with a few renovated cafés, galleries, and the palace of the former Ottoman governor, suggests the charm of the city’s past and the violent reprisal of a government that destroyed it.

It’s hard to consider the brutal story of Hama far out on the road, looking over a valley with an imam or changing a flat tire with Iraqis, running up the odometer from one ruin to another, where the rest of Syria — its mess of history especially — comes through, a past between conflict and cosmopolitanism.

On the drive from Apamea to Hama, perched over the Orontes River, we passed the castle of Shaizar, which in the 12^th century was ruled by the poet Usamah Ibn Munqidh’s uncle. While Usamah was in Damascus as a diplomat in 1157 AD, an earthquake hit Shaizar and nearly killed his entire family, including his uncle the emir. Sigmund hopped out of the car and raced to the huge door, excited to see the castle of the poet he spent hours each week studying and translating, but the castle was locked since it was dusk. A few shabab, teenage boys, stood by the door smoking cigarettes and wearing T-shirts advertising Gauloises, the French cigarettes.

Driving south back to Damascus from the busy, fertile north, green gives way to dry, rough hills and the mountain range that borders Lebanon. We saw Syria’s capital as the natural oasis that it is as we drove south through beige mountains on a dangerously empty tank of gas. The rental company in central Damascus docked us for an additional cleaning fee, since our Kia was caked in dust and dirt from Deir az-Zur to the coast. With minimal arguing, they covered the cost of the flat tire.

We were ticketed blocks away from the rental office in central Damascus for breaking a half meter past a red light. We’d sped down dirt roads and highways and narrowly missed hitting wild dogs as we drove through the Dead Cities and in the Ghab.  Back in Damascus, however, we couldn’t dodge the first traffic cop in our sights.

It was 4:00 in the morning, and Sho, a 30-year-old children’s TV writer, and I had been at the bar for many hours–those Tokyo hours when the trains stop running and there’s nothing to do but something that could incriminate you later. The other patrons looked like something out of a casting call for a send-up of a David Lynch film. There was a stern-faced guy in a samurai robe and haircut; a 50-something androgynous man with perfectly brushed shoulder-length hair that rested on his flowing, red silk blouse; a grumpy, 30-something salary man in a wrinkled brown suit whose wife was home asleep; a 60-ish dude with a Sam Donaldson-hairpiece; and a 50-something guy who looked like a Japanese Ned Flanders in a fishing hat, but probably could’ve pierced my windpipe with his pinky.

I speak no Japanese except for arigato (thank you) and campai (cheers). They spoke little to no English, but were fluent in the transcontinental language of crooner ballads like Dylan’s “Visions of Johanna” and the entire first side of Tom Waits’ “Closing Time.” For hours we’d sung along to every cut that the craggy-faced bartender played on the old turntable, and I couldn’t have been having a better time. Sho, however, was having too much fun, pogoing up and down, singing louder than the rest of us, slurring who-knows-what through a smile that could swallow the Tokyo Dome. That’s when Samurai and Salary each grabbed one of his elbows and headed for the door.

“He is a good guy, but very irritating,” repeated the professor, extinguishing a butt and flicking another one loose from the packet.

“They’re kicking him out for being a happy drunk?” I asked. “Where can he go? The trains aren’t running.”

“Do not worry,” he said, lighting up. “Sho is not leaving. They will talk to him. When they return, he will no longer be irritating.”

It took me a moment to do the math. Sho wasn’t being sent home–Samurai and Salary were taking him outside for a tune-up. I asked the professor to call off the event. Using cool-headed barfly diplomacy, he urged me to mind my own business. But humanitarianism got the better of me. I had to help Sho. To not intervene would be un-American. I got off my barstool and walked swiftly but calmly toward the door. Hairpiece and Flanders barely looked up from their drinks. The bartender puffed away on a Kool. Walking past them, I noticed that Joni Mitchell was playing on the stereo, which I found quite strange. I took a deep breath, prepared myself for the worst, and stepped outside into the steamy Tokyo night.

* * *

The trip started innocently enough, when a magazine editor called me at my Los Angeles home office with a challenge: You have seven days to board a plane bound for an international destination at least eight air-hours away. You must stay in your destination for four nights. You may not go to Europe. (No, not even Croatia.) You may not stay in a hostel. You have a budget of $1,200 to cover airfare, hotels, the works. Yes, that’s all you may spend–$1,200.

The editor explained that the current economic unpleasantness had forced carriers to take drastic measures. They were keeping prices high until the last minute, and then selling seats in bulk at fire-sale prices to travel websites and vacation-packaging outfits. Better to sell a bunch of cheap seats than no seats at all. Hotels were doing the same. He’d heard about $400 tickets to Mumbai and respectable digs for $50 bucks a night.

As a courtesy, I was allowed to use flexible travel dates–three days on either end of departure or return–an absolute must when looking for last-minute deals. I started my search at the three pillars of web-based discount travel: Travelocity, Expedia, and Priceline, and detoured to sites like Kayak, Sidestep, Orbitz, and Cheapoair, to name a few. Indeed, there were deals, but they were outnumbered by snags. L.A.-Houston-Caracas for $560 (Priceline) sounded good. But, oops–that’s not eight air hours. L.A.-Marrakech direct for $610? Yes, please. Oh, wait–that deal was only valid in the off-season, which ended 12 hours ago. I found a ticket from L.A. to Ho Chi Minh City for under $800 (Orbitz), which was steep, but my remaining $400 would surely get me a decent room and a back-alley tattoo in Saigon. The snag? You need a visa for Vietnam, and a rush job costs $200 or more. This went on for approximately two days. A false lead here, a vanished deal there. Priceline laughed me out of the game every time I made an offer, even though I used the recommended 30-percent-below-market-rate formula. A company called wholesaleflights.com berated me for calling their toll-free number. Pop-up ads dangled juicy-looking deals, but they turned out to be nothing burgers or fine-print sandwiches.

Finally, deep into an afternoon search on Day 2, buried beneath two-dozen open Safari browser windows, I came across search results from IgoUgo.com. (I’d discovered the site earlier in the day, entered search terms, and been promptly distracted by the spoils of cyberspace.) Igougo searches multiple sites, including one called vayama.com, whose results looked like this: L.A.-Vancouver-Tokyo R/T AIR CANADA, $333. Now we’re cookin’. Add taxes, fees, and a $30 travel-insurance offer, and the whole thing totaled $537.55. Not bad, considering it usually costs close to two grand to get to Tokyo on anything classier than a tuna boat.

I did some quick math: $1,200 minus $537.55 equals $662.45. Add a hotel and it was going to be tight. But I took my chances and booked it. As luck would have it, one of those pop-up ads proved useful. It read: Sakuro Hatagaya Hotel, Tokyo, $70 per night. The place was tiny, maybe 8 feet by 10 feet, but it photographed well enough, with its platform style bed and striped duvet cover and tiny-but-clean bathroom with tub. I reserved it free of charge for 24 hours, looked at my options (mostly $100 and up for an equally clean, glorified coffin), made sure I wasn’t missing any vacation rentals on craigslist or Vacation Rentals By Owner (VRBO), and confirmed.

I now had $382.45 remaining. I set aside $40 for each day of air travel (bringing me to $305.42), which left me with $75.60 for each of my four days on the ground–a challenge in any big city, let alone Tokyo, which holds the distinction of being the world’s largest (30 million-plus) and the second-most expensive, behind mafia-controlled Moscow. When I told people how much I had to spend in Tokyo, they all just laughed and wished me luck.

* * *

The cheapest way from Narita airport to central Tokyo takes two hours and cost $18. The city’s train/subway system charges by distance, and per transfer, making it easy to spend $10, $15, even $30 a day if you’re not careful. Throw in a few trips to one of Tokyo’s ubiquitous vending machines (piping-hot ramen, anyone?), and you might find yourself gutting monkfish to pay off a dinner bill.

I avoided hemorrhaging yen ($1 = 100 yen) by using the standard three-pronged method when traveling on the cheap in an expensive destination–eat at establishments that don’t employ waiters, never take a taxi, engage with the locals. This is how I came to meet Maki and Kiyoshi, a couple in their late 40s who occupied two of five counter seats at a narrow eatery a few blocks from my hotel in the quaint Hatagaya neighborhood. Maki spoke enough English to help me order a plate of deep-red tuna sashimi and light shrimp tempura; with two Sapporo drafts, dinner cost $23. (Though the cook, a kindly woman in her 60s, comped me four baked anchovies, each the size of a my index finger.) If Maki, a self-employed marketing consultant, and Kiyoshi, a hydro-engineer, represent typical Japanese hospitality, then travelers to the Land of the Rising Sun are in luck. For it was the lovely couple who helped me map a simple itinerary, which consisted of many miles on foot, punctuated by a couple of only-in-Tokyo activities each day.

If you’re headed for Tokyo with a small fistful of yen, chances are you’ll meet your own Maki and Kiyoshi, and personalize the trip as you go. But you might as well know this: With a comfortable pair of shoes, you can spend a day hoofing it to Shinjuku Station, the world’s busiest, and watch some of the million-plus commuters walk in near-silence through the busiest–and cleanest–subway station on the planet. Above ground, you can, and should, turn down the Shinjuku district’s many alleys, the kind that would instill fear in any other large city, but here are immaculate and inviting. These alleys are so skinny you can barely avoid bumping into a nameless, flame-spitting yakitori counter, where skewers of chicken and veggies are made to order. (If you’re lucky, like I was in an alley near the station’s west entrance, a friendly gentleman next to you will buy you a beer before leaving.) If you’re in Tokyo during baseball season, you can buy a $10 standing-room ticket to the see the Giants at the Tokyo Dome, where you and several thousand otherwise repressed salarymen can sing the team song and toss back a few B.Y.O.Sapporos. (Management even provides plastic cups for the BYO crowd.) Should you ride the roller coaster next door to the Dome? Damn right, you should. How better to see a skyline so vast it makes Manhattan look like downtown Albuquerque?

Another can-do Tokyo drift. Walk the East Garden of the Imperial Palace (the palace itself is off-limits to the public), then heel-toe an hour east to the Ginza neighborhood, where Gucci and Armani stores commingle with manicured bonsai gardens and the kinds of buildings you’ve only seen in Saturday afternoon samurai movies. From there you can walk an hour north to the park at Ueno station and slow-drip a few more bucks at the zoo or any of the museums that line the park’s walkways (I opted to save my yen), then drop down the hill to seek out Moses Kabab, located on the walk street just south of Ueno station, where the happiest Turk in all of Tokyo will make you the savoriest $6 chicken gyro sandwich you’ve ever eaten. Or skip the sandwich, pop into a noodle bar, pay $7 or $8 at the vending machine by the door, bring your ticket to the counter, and slurp down a Japanese staple like soba noodles in broth with a veggie-tempura patty on the side. (These establishments are as common to Tokyo as bodegas are to Manhattan.)  Amply refueled, walk 45 minutes east to the Asakusa neighborhood, Tokyo’s most charming tourist market and home to the 1,364-year-old Sensoji Temple, before hopping the $9 boat down the Sumida river to must-stroll 18^th-Century Hamarikyu Onshi gardens. Sore? Ask a local to recommend a traditional bathhouse, or Senjo. I went to Maki’s and Kiyoshi’s favorite, shiny-clean Sengoku-Yu, near my hotel in Hatagaya, where I paid the old lady at the door $7 and spent an hour soaking in three hot pools before crashing for the night.

Those are a few things you can do. But there are a few Tokyo musts for the traveler, no matter the budget. First, resist the urge to sleep off a sake hangover or a pair of sore legs and get yourself to the 5:00 a.m. train to the Tsukiji fish market, the source of Tokyo’s daily seafood. I trekked there in a downpour, which added to the cacophony of noises created by electric carts driven by men in rubber boots who transported tuna the size of wild boar. Head in the direction from which the carts race, and you’ll find the famed tuna auction. Some warehouses store tuna that were frozen on the boats. Others have the fresh stuff. Row upon row, buyers inspect the tuna with flashlights and then gather around an auctioneer to bid on the day’s catch before selling it to market stalls and restaurants throughout greater Tokyo.

Must-do number 2: Keep your Friday evening free, and take the time necessary to get a recommendation for an Izakaya, or traditional happy-hour pub. Better yet, go with a local. I was lucky enough to be invited by Maki and Kiyoshi to their favorite, Kushi Katsu, which gets only a handful of Westerners per year. An Isakaya, as Maki explained, “is where people go at the end of the work week to drink and smoke and say bad things about the boss.” From where I sat, along a community table just wide enough to hold fast-arriving plates of tempura and tuna and mackerel sashimi, everyone seemed several Sapporos past disgruntled. Over an endless parade of sake and beer and raw fish, Maki and Kiyoshi and I exchanged my-country-your-country observations the way people do when language is a barrier.

Soon enough, the young man across from us chimed in. I couldn’t understand a word he said, except for this: “Randy Newman.” And then, “Jackson Browne.” And then, “David Bowie.” And in case I didn’t hear him the first time, “I rike-a-Randy Newman. He do music for Monsters, Inc.”

The conversation turned from American singer-songwriters from the 1970s to the films of Wes Anderson to Sesame Street, and old programs like Barney Miller. Before long, our new friend bowed to Kiyoshi and insisted on taking us to his favorite bar. “It would be my honor,” he said. [Maki translated.] “To meet you and not take you to this wonderful bar would be a shame. It is my favorite place in all of Tokyo. The people are wonderful.” And so we left the izakaya (the bill was remarkably low $50) for a tiny bar called Stories, not far from the bustling Shibuya district. On the way to the subway, I asked our new host his name. “I am Sho,” he said. “Like TV. Show.”

* * *

I opened the door to the street to find nothing but steamy asphalt and the buzz of street lights. I looked left, right, left again. I listened for the sound of Sho being walloped by our otherwise friendly bar mates. Nothing. Maki and Kiyoshi were long gone by now; they’d had the good sense to catch the last train home. Side one of Joni Mitchell’s “For the Roses” was still playing when Sho came back inside and took the seat next to me. He had a big, fat shiner and a clean laceration over his left eye that could have used a butterfly bandage or two. Not much blood though. Samurai and Salary took their seats and the bartender freshened their drinks. He gave Sho a glass of ice water and bottle of antiseptic for his eye, and everyone sat there as if nothing had happened. Sho was still smiling, singing, drunk as man can be without falling down. I helped him clean his wound; it stung, which made both of us laugh hysterically. The professor tapped me on the shoulder, raised his glass for a toast, and said, “Your friend, he seems liberated.”

Time passed. Records played. More singing. I looked at the clock to learn it was 7:00 a.m. I gave the bartender 5,000 yen to cover my and Sho’s tabs. He gave me 1,000 yen back–the last of my $1,200 budget. By the time I walked in my front door, 36 hours after leaving the bar, I was $50 over budget, having forgotten to set aside money for a taxi and a tip for the driver.

A few days later I emailed Sho from home. I wanted to see how  the rest of his evening went, and to get the bloody details from the fight. “I do not remember what happened to my eye,” he wrote.

To jog his memory, I sent him a photo I’d taken of the man in the suit. I also made a few recommendations for quality American television shows.

“I do not know Weeds or the Wire. But I like the Sopranos,” he replied. “I do not like the man in the suit.”

[Ed. note: A different, shorter version of this piece appeared in the magazine Budget Travel.]

Then, at a friend’s wedding, he found himself telling the story to a group of people, all of them giddy as he unfurled the narrative. He did the whole thing, the bathroom, everything, omitting only the end. The crowd of people, which included several good friends, but also this couple from Philadelphia who he hardly knew, laughed and slapped their thighs and said, “Really? You’re kidding. Really?”

The flight was from Washington, D.C. to Houston. Sam was going to spend a weekend with his cousin, Jason, who was ten years older and known in the family as a bit of a degenerate. His mother had wrung her hands about the visit when Sam first announced that Jason had invited him and that he would like to go, venting out loud about the pros and cons. The main pro was that it might be good for Sam to spend some time in the company of an older man. The main con was that Jason was a musician and someone who gave every impression of having bad habits of the sort that are highly transferable to an impressionable fourteen year old.

Sam kept his mouth shut about it and let his mom work out the issues with her sister, Jason’s mom. Sam had never told his mother that over the years Jason had taken every opportunity to extol the virtues of sex, group sex when possible, drugs, alcohol, the Allman Brothers, and various jazz fusion artists. Jason had once advised Sam to spit as often as possible when walking with a girl, because although they would complain and find it gross, girls ultimately were more likely to have sex with you if at some strategic moment you grossed them out.

In the end his mother let him go. The ticket was bought and for a brief moment it seemed like his mother would want him to wear one of those plastic pouches around his neck containing his identification, like he was a pet, or a minor, which she pointed out he still was, technically.

After the plane had been aloft for twenty minutes the refreshments cart rattled down the aisle and the chirpy sing-song voice of the stewardess drifted over the ambient hum. The phrase, “juice-or-coffee?” was inter-cut with the sound of ice being poured into plastic cups. Sam deferred to the woman sitting next to him when the cart arrived at their row. Mid-twenties, a lot of tousled brown hair, wedding ring. Sam, was a precocious noticer of wedding rings, having noticed at an early age that his mother did not wear one. When he asked her why she said, “Because, sweetie, I’m not married.”

“Bloody Mary, please,” said the woman sitting next to him.

The stewardess was pulling together the Bloody Mary. He glanced sideways at the woman who had ordered it. She was attractive but kind of overweight–the sort of girl, he thought, that you look at and think “God, it would be fun to pork her,” and then, “But it would suck if anyone saw me with her!” Then, with a shudder, Sam thought, “Please tell me that sentiment is universal and I’m not going to hell.”

He did not believe in heaven, hell, or God. But every now and then he felt something, or someone, looking over his shoulder, wanting to give advice. He had once shared this thought with his shrink and, in the silence that followed, added, “Do you think it’s my father?” But the shrink hadn’t answered.

The stewardess was doing a semi-limbo–shoulders back, bending at the knees, rummaging the shelf of cans. She could have bent forward but instead she did this awkward limbo-like gesture and Sam wondered if maybe it was because if she bent forward it meant her ass would stick out and she didn’t want her ass sticking out right into someone’s face.

“No bloody Mary mix.  Would tomato juice be OK?” she said. “Or I could check in the back when I finish.”

Tomato juice was fine for the woman sitting beside him. Sam took the can, the cup of ice, and finally the little vodka bottle and handed them across to his neighbor.

“Thank you,” she said. She was wearing jeans and a heavy knit sweater within which lurked an intriguing fullness and heaviness whose contours he couldn’t quite make out. As he handed her each item, he noticed her hands. The nails were manicured and a deep red. The hands themselves were a bit strangled looking and tired.

“And you, sir?” said the stewardess.

“Same for me.”

“I’m going to need to see some ID,” said the stewardess.

“I don’t have it on me, Ma’am,” he said.

“Then I’m afraid I can’t serve you, sir,” she said, totally perky. “Is there anything else I can get you?”

“I can’t believe I’m being carded on an airplane,” he said.

“We have laws up here the same as on the ground,” she said. “Actually a lot more of them.”

“I just don’t think it’s reasonable… it’s not like the captain is going to come out and…” He dropped off into the silence of defeat. Then he said, “You’re a stewardess not a bartender.” This was just lashing out, he knew. He felt bad about it.

“Actually we like to be called flight attendants. Can I offer you soda or juice?”

He recovered his composure and said, “I’ll have the tomato juice, ma’m, and a lemon.”

“Sure thing!”

“I’ll have a second bottle of vodka,” said the woman sitting next to him.

“Okie doke, that will be four dollars for the second bottle,” said the flight attendant, her smile tight. She handed the beverage to him and then the bottle of vodka and stood there to make sure he passed it over. He held onto it while the woman beside him attacked the interior of her purse. At last she produced a twisted, strangled looking clump of bills, which he passed along. The flight attendant and her cart moved on to the next aisle.  The phrase, “Coffeeorjuice?” chirped out again and Sam sat there contemplating the red viscous liquid in the cup on his tray.

The woman mixed her drink. The second bottle sat there, unopened. The initial thrill of her request, which Sam was sure meant that she would give it to him, was starting to turn into a kind of mortification. Would she make him ask for it without offering? He peered at her hand. The diamond ring pivoted like a top as she stirred in circles, round and round.

When his mother made her remark about not being married there was a brief short circuit in his mind–the synapses fired one after the other like the blue lights lighting up one after another to illuminate a runway that lead to his dead father lying beneath a collapsed roof. In this picture his father’s hands and feet were sticking out of the rubble, like in a cartoon.

There was no actual photograph of this image. It was a figment of his imagination. But it was real, too, since this is apparently what had happened to his father when Sam was two years old. The image was a sad photographic heirloom which he kept buried in the backyard of his mind. But his mother’s remark lead his gaze to this buried treasure and exhumed it. Confronted with the image of his father under rubble his circuits shorted, sparks flew, and then it all vanished, except for an awareness, hovering like smoke that lingers after the bullet is long gone, of her absent wedding ring, and all wedding rings.

When the woman next to him finally said, in a small, conspiring voice, “Would you like this?” there was so much tension between them it was as though a whole conversation had transpired already.

He poured the vodka and they toasted.

“Cheers,” she said, smiling, her eyes squinting in a way that struck him as familiar.

She asked him questions about himself. “What grade are you in?” she said. “Who do you hang out with?” “I bet you have a lot of girlfriends.” He went back and forth between answering her honestly and trying to calibrate what would give him the biggest advantage. He wasn’t sure towards what end he wanted an advantage. She was an adult, and he reflexively spoke to adults with an eye towards some hidden agenda, that was the game, except she was an unusual kind of adult. She conspired with him on another bottle of vodka. He felt pleasantly light. She was animated. She seemed to want something from him, some acceptance into a club, his club. He couldn’t imagine what his club had to offer, other than that he was in it. Perhaps it offered her a chance to be a teenager. She acted like nothing would make her happier than to be able to be in the lunchroom when he walked in so they could sit together.

She sipped the plastic cup with her pinky in the air. Dainty little slurps with her eyebrows raised. Her mascara was caked on her lashes. A wave of lust and antipathy passed though him like a tremor. It gripped him in a manner similar to the reverie he’d had repeatedly about Ms. Deluca, the biology teacher with enormous breasts and a kind of fullness and sadness to her mouth about whom he fantasized while she lectured on vertebrates. Finally there was that one class where genus and species and so forth was discussed, at the end of which he’d raced out as soon as the bell sounded and sequestered himself in the restroom stall to madly relieve himself of his need.

When he opened his clenched eyes he was a little stunned, and couldn’t quite orient himself until he looked down and saw what he had released in the clear water of the toielt bowl. It drifted down like a frozen sculpture, or someone falling through the air in the slow motion.

When he told the story at the wedding he ended with a line of hers, “Oh you dear boy, I hope I haven’t corrupted you,” and everyone laughed and laughed.

He was in the midst of explaining the logic he used by which he could claim success in school.

“It’s like a contest,” said Sam.

“What does that mean?” she said.

“It’s like, Who can do worse? If you do worse, you win. You know? So. And I am very competitive.”

“The winner is the big loser?”

“That’s not how I would phrase it. I mean, loser is, you know.”

“Yeah, it’s not good.”

“Well the point is whomever fucked up the most was winning. So you weren’t a loser. You were a winner. And needless to say I am often winning.”

“If you say so.”

“That’s what I’m telling you. That’s what we called it. Winning. Which I supposed is fucked up.”

“You curse a lot.”

“It’s because I’m jaded and have seen too much of the world.”

“Whether or not you have seen too much of the world, I will not venture to say. But jaded you are not.”

“I’m not?”

“No.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I don’t know. You’re not jaded. You’re sweet.”

“Thank you. I know you’re much older than me but…”

“You make me feel like an old lady.”

“I just mean, you know, older.”

“Ok, I am definitely older than you, yes. You were going to say something.”

“I forgot.”

“Rats. It sounded like it was going to be a compliment.”

“Well I was going to say that you seem really sweet, too.”

“You were?”

“No, Actually. Not really. I mean you are sweet but sweet is not a word I usually use unless it’s like, you know, that song is sweet, or whatever. It’s like a girly word. But since you said it… Ok you know what I am thinking?”

“No. What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking that you remind me of this girl I go to school with.”

“Oh yeah? What’s her name.”

“Vickie.”

“You’re kidding! That’s my name, too!”

“Your name is Vickie?”

“Yes!”

“That is a shocker. That’s really, really weird. I may need another drink to settle my nerves.”

“And what’s the deal with the other Vickie?”

“Vickie is, I don’t know, I kind of like her and hate her.”

“Wow. I remind you of someone you hate?”

“No, no, I don’t hate Vickie it’s just that she pisses me off but I also like her.”

“And what pisses you off about her?”

“You sound like my shrink.”

“You see a shrink?”

“A bunch of people in my grade have shrinks. I’ve been seeing mine for a year.”

“Is there something… wrong with you?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. I mean, what does wrong mean?”

“You’re a very interesting kid.”

“It was my idea,” he said. “I told my mother I was underachieving and I thought I should see a therapist.”

“That’s very proactive of you,” she said. “I’m impressed. You were telling me about Vickie. I was reminding you of her. What do we have in common?”

“I don’t know, you look alike a little bit I guess.”

“And are you into her? You like her? Does she know that? And you said you hated her, too? What’s the deal with that?”

“She takes a lot of shit. I wish she wouldn’t take so much shit.”

“What does that mean?”

“Well, they call her Vickie the Quickie.”

“Who is they?”

“Everyone. My friends. People. She tends to smile and giggle like an idiot and not say anything. And it’s not true.”

“She’s not a quickie?”

“You use that word very easily.”

“Oh I didn’t mean it like that, to pile on. Oh… you like this girl don’t you.”

“Of course, that’s why I’m pissed at her for being such a doormat.”

“DO you ever stand up for her?”

“Stand up for her? What do you mean?”

“Defend her against the people who call her Vickie the Quickie.”

“What’s to defend? She sits there smiling like an idiot.”

“And this is the person I remind you of!”

“In a good way.”

“Oh, dear boy,” she said, and she reached out and petted his hair.

Then out of the blue she said “I’m going to the bathroom…want to come?”

Without thinking, he said “Yeah,” and he slid into the aisle behind her and walked staring at his shoes, which he followed into the bathroom. In the cramped space she whispered, “Sit down,” and he did, and looked up at her with fear. She sat down on his lap. Her weight crushed him. She started kissing him. Her tongue in his mouth in small lizard licks. The fluorescent lights and the smell made him feel as though some medical procedure was taking place. To say his dick was not growing was an understatement. It was trying to crawl into itself and vanish. She stopped kissing him. For a moment he sat there with his mouth ajar and his eyes closed. He shut his mouth but took another moment before he opened his eyes. He was afraid of what he would see. He wanted to leave.

She stroked his hair, stroked his face, purred into his ear, “You are such a beautiful boy. This is going to be so special.”

When he opened his eyes he saw that she was looking at him with this matter of fact expression while unbuttoning her blouse. There had been a fullness to her breasts that had he had keyed into right away, but it didn’t prepare him for the site of her pale flesh pressing against her bra, and then their forward thrust when she unhooked it. She pushed her breasts into his face. He was suffocating, drinking of them, he was the thirstiest man in the world now swimming in a pool of clear water, drowning and drinking, and very hard. She pulled down his jeans and then hers, and straddled him on the nasty little toilet.

“Maybe we should use a condom,” he mumbled, and decided that the effort counted, and it would protect him against AIDS, everything. She put her hand down there, squated. He was inside her. He thought for a moment it would snap off inside her. It felt huge and something separate from him. He gasped a fearful sound, a sound he might make if he heard the engine of the plane sputter. It was a gross animal sound. She replied with a whimper, tender, a little predatory, his mind raced contemplating if she would now change dramatically, if this was a trick, some nasty version of candid camera.

“Baby, baby, baby,” she said. She bounced on him, lightly at first, but quickly she became more forceful. The whole experience began to feel like a water rocket that you pumped pumped pumped and then pressed the button and it exploded. She crashed down on his lap, he was aware of the smell, the same awful bathroom smell, and along with it the lemony and slightly acrid smell of her body, her breasts, one of which she was guiding into his mouth. He thought fleetingly of Vickie, not her face or anything she said, not of her, but of the exasperation he felt, and a curious kind of feeling welled up within to accompany the animal rutting that now consumed him, something along the lines of vengeance. He tried to get a nipple in his mouth but it was too hectic there wasn’t time he was being molested he thought he might sustain an injury something enormous was rushing out of him… “Oh God,” she said as he exploded. She banged up and down extra hard.

He made a grunt and a whimper, a bit like a sound his old dog Charlie once made when its paw got run over. And suddenly a home movie began playing against the dark screen of his tightly shut eyes, the golden lab whimpering loudly as the car eased out of the garage and then quickly limping away, trotting, walking it off, walking it off in circles while his mother threw open the door and exclaimed, “Oh, Charlie!” almost irritated, like it was the dog’s fault. After a few minutes Charlie stopped whimpering. But he never really stopped limping.

To interrupt this movie more than to see where he was and what was happening to him, he opened his eyes.

Vickie was tearful again, gazing at him, her tits there between them.

“Oh baby you are such a beautiful, boy,” she was saying.

“You are, too,” he said. He didn’t know if he meant it. He was elated. His thighs hurt.

“Oh God, Oh my beautiful boy. Oh dear, oh boy. Oh boy! Oh boy Oh boy oh boy!” She laughed. She sniffled. “I hope I haven’t corrupted you, my dear beautiful boy,” she said, and she smiled at him apologetically. With that she stood, grabbed a tissue, and shoved it between her legs. He was afraid he would not be able to stand. His legs seemed useless, damaged. He hoisted himself onto his feet with his arms. His legs were fine. A few moments later they pushed out of the tiny space. The male flight attendant was standing there fiddling with a coffee pot. He looked over at them beaming. “You guys are in big trouble!” he whispered. His hair was heavily moused and had blond streaks. It occurred to Sam that he was gay. This seemed appropriate. Gays thought a lot about sex, this was necessary because they had to decide that they were gay. It was like he had now joined The Sex Club, where people did more than talk or think about it, they had it, did it, rolled around in it, ground against one another in airplane bathrooms and got winked at when they emerged.

“I have a weird favor to ask you,” he said when they were again seated.

“Anything you want,” she said.

“It’s just so I can remember this experience,” he said, which he thought was as delicate a way of putting it that was both true and that would also satisfy this sudden primal need, which was proof.

She listened to his request and tilted her head, as though to look at him from a new angle. What did she see? He held a frozen grin. The grin of a shoplifter at the moment a security guard asks, “Excuse me can you show me what is in your bag?”

“Of course honey,” she said after a moment.

She took his journal, and wrote feverishly, with her own pen, while the plane descended. Her hair blocked his view of the page.

“Don’t read it till we split ways,” she said, handing it back. “Promise?”

He promised. The plane was landing. The static hum of noise that had created a soft muffling between them, a kind of privacy, became louder, his ears were blocked, and they sat beside each other gathering themselves up to say good-bye.

He was going to be met by Jason, and was already giddy at the thought of sharing this recent development.

The first thing he did was go to the bathroom, pee, and stare briefly at his dick to make sure it didn’t look diseased. It looked like it always did, but different. Alone, disease free, and no longer a virgin, he stared at himself in the mirror for a few moments and then threw his arms up like a boxer whose just knocked out his opponent. He didn’t make a sound. It was a pantomime of joy.

He wanted to read his journal right there but he didn’t want to sit on a toilet like a fugitive. So he went out and found a bench near baggage claim to read what she wrote before he got in the car. Just as he reached into his bag, he saw her, waiting there with everyone for the baggage carousel to start moving, looking dumpy and unremarkable and, he now thought, though he hadn’t before, a bit used. He had been awakened to the potential for sex in any situation. He studied her for clues as to how he might discern those underlying tendencies in other women. But this errand, which he processed while he stared, was interrupted and overruled by another feeling, a really sad kind of feeling that came with seeing her standing there alone waiting for the baggage carousel to start, with no one there to pick her bag up. He imagined that the bag would be a little too heavy for her, and she would drag it off the carousel and then stand there for a minute recuperating.

Just then her head swiveled casually and her eyes locked on him looking at her. A smile appeared on her face. It was knowing and confidant somehow and he felt stupid for all the pity he had just been feeling and a little embarrassed to have been caught staring.

He stood up and waved. He was sure, for some reason, that she had written her number down in his journal. He had no intention of ever calling it. But he liked that he had it. It made turning from her with a wave and walking away much easier.

Years later, when he told this story to girlfriends, or at the wedding, and everyone got so amused, it insulted his memory of the whole thing, which is why he could never get to the end of the story. Everythung got so abstract as soon as they parted. The excitement of their connection didn’t translate into real life, and it didn’t translate at all into his grown up life, and yet he felt it still. Or maybe it had to do with the feeling of being conned somehow, that there was something off about it all in a way he couldn’t quite see at the time, that fleeting feeling he had in the bathroom, of coming into life being a con, the worry that the con and real life were intermingled, a feeling that was always provoked by that amusement that greeted his attempts at telling the story, and kept him from getting to the end.

Jason was there at the airport with a huge grin, arms outstretched, wild blond hair tamed a bit but still brittle, like a brillo pad. Sam always marveled that he was related to this brillo pad hair. They clapped backs and rushed to the car  - an El Camino, a car of pure criminality, Sam thought with admiration - and on the way Sam kept saying he had the most amazing news.

“No fucking way dude,” said Jason when Sam spat it out at last. “In the friggin bathroom? That is so awesome. You’re kidding me, right?”

“I’m not kidding! I knew you would say that. I have proof!”

“I believe you, kid. Crazy shit happens with babes all the time. They’re just dying for it. That’s what most people don’t understand. There was this one time…”

“I want to show you the proof,” said Sam. He wasn’t ready to yield the floor just yet.

“Dude don’t show me no disgusting tissue or something.”

“She wrote in my journal! I made her write it down in my journal! Right here!”

“You keep a journal? You gotta be careful about that.”

“I haven’t even read it yet. “Let me read out loud. ‘Beautiful boy, you have been a delicious dream,’” he began.

“Get the fuck out of here,” said Jason. “You wrote that yourself.”

“Dude, is this my handwriting?”

“I’m driving kid, I can’t be reading your journal.”

Sam looked back to the page.

There, right below his most recent entry (”I’m on a ski lift. It’s fucking cold. Snow last night, fucking powder, I’m going to kill. The Stockwells and the whole chalet scene is getting me down, but two blond girls and their mom checked in last night with about a thousand suitcases and a deviant…” after which he had dropped the pen) was her handwriting. It had round letters which in their roundness suggested that with only a little effort they could have been turned into an illustration of a bunny, or something else cuddly and nice. There was something about it that reminded him of the other Vickie. It also had a hopefulness to it that made him uncomfortable. He drowned these feeling with the sound of his own voice.

“Beautiful boy,” he began and again, reading loudly. “You have been a delicious dream, as though you were an angel sent to enter my thoughts and draw them out for me to see in the plain light of day–or this airplane –what a shambles my life has become and how much richer and funner it could be. My dad used to beat me and my husband kicked the shit out of me just before I left DC. I was in such a low place when I got on this plane. But it was a gift to talk to you and it was a gift what we had together in that little bathroom–the mile high club! I hope I didn’t corrupt you, you innocent beautiful boy! That was really and truly the most beautiful and tender and deep sexual experience I ever had. Thank you.”

Sam closed his journal. He stared out the window, and a creeping exhaustion began to overtake him. It wasn’t until later that he realized that she didn’t leave her number. And so the remaining lingering image, like when you look at a bright light and then close your eyes, was not the wild bouncing in the skanky bathroom and the big tits in his face and his huge explosion. It wasn’t the image of her leaning towards him after getting that second bloody Mary and starting to look at him as though every word that popped out of his mouth was the perfect word and it was guiding them down the path of an unseen maze towards a prize. What stayed with him was the image of her at the baggage carousel waiting for it to start, and then it lurching into motion and starting to snake around and around without anything yet on it, which was weird, because that was an event he hadn’t even been there to see.

This story has been excerpted from Flight Patterns: A Century of Stories About Flying, edited by Dorothy Spears

Our host presented both this news and the brownie itself with the prideful flourish of a culturally aware ambassador and rehearsed rhetoric of a stadium rock band playing the “surprise” encore of their early 80’s megahit.  She was in fact so earnestly pleased and excited that none of us had the temerity to explain: The Thanksgiving Brownie… that’s not a thing. In fact, as a foodstuff for a feast holiday that includes literally hundreds of possible iterations — family specific appetizers, seasonal side dishes, and a host of customary desserts — a brownie was one of the few rare things nowhere to be found.

But by this point in the meal, we could no longer feign surprise.  A group of American artists, training abroad in London, we wanted to be sensitive, encouraging and appreciative of the lengths to which she had gone.  We also did not want to feed into the image of the coarse and ravenous American.  Nonetheless, we itched under our skin, mumbling to one another, “But seriously… there is going to be pumpkin pie, right?”

There weren’t many rules to this holiday, but she had somehow managed to break them all… if not in spirit, then in scope.  However, is it not the very decadence and ritualized details of a feast-custom that makes it fulfilling?  We had prepared ourselves to go without our mom’s stuffing or uncle’s famous, albeit inedible, Depression-era jello/pineapple/cream cheese “dish” — the kind of concoction that would be thrown out of a Mormon engagement party.

We were even alright when the turkey was served — two reasonably moderate slices, as would be expected from this restaurant, or any white-tablecloth joint any other autumn night.  But as the brownie was announced, a silent cue to the end of our meal, we realized… this was to be the entire serving: a sliver of turkey, skosh of gravy, and a small ramekin of what amounted to cranberry chutney, really.  There might have been coleslaw.

This was the challenge of living abroad on Thanksgiving, an American creation myth of sorts, one of the country’s few holidays that evades both flag-waving jingoism and abrahamic perniciousness.  Of course, themes of gratitude and gluttony are universal, but for me in London, and for friends abroad in France, Egypt and Italy, we woke with the exhilaration of Christmas morning to a populace who saw it as nothing more than a Thursday.  These are their stories of bringing Thanksgiving to foreign lands, or of their international friends trying their best to bring the holiday to them.

* * *

jeudi

We’ll begin with Lizzie Lewis, whose family had moved to England for a few years in her childhood, and was now facing their first Thanksgiving abroad.

Instead of trying to have some sort of normalcy, my parents decided the best thing to do would be to go to Southern France… for Tapas…

My mother and brother Richard hated being in London, and my mother was lamenting the lack of Turkey and cranberries the entire time.  After this long, awkward wake of a meal, my dad decided to give my brother and I a whole lot of Francs to go out on the town.  So we went to this bar, with a “Ricard” flag, and decided it would be a really good idea to “Souvenir” the flag for my brother.  Just then — as if in cahoots with the electric company — the power went out.  And my brother lept out of his seat to grab it.  Mid-reach, the lights flicked on again and he jolted back into his seat, flag in hand.  We rolled it up, put it down his pant leg and exited the bar.

We continued on this debaucherous path till 4 am when we returned to our hotel room, promptly passed out, only to be awoken by our irate mother at 7 a.m.  Evidently my father too had decided to go out, and ended up getting so inebriated that he couldn’t get into the hotel room and fell asleep outside like a hobo.  My mother, worried all night, was going to the reception — to contact the police — when she saw him on the ground, passed out under the stoop of the Hotel Lobby.

* * *

In a small apartment on the other side of Paris, Ariana Jackson, rejoined her traveling academic parents for what they hoped would be an eclectic French Thanksgiving:

My family had lived in France for two years when I was younger and subsequently spent all our summers there, so Paris was already a second home to us. Out of the blue, two friends of mine (really more college acquaintances) decided they would also head to Paris for Thanksgiving, so we invited them, as well as a good friend of mine studying in France. Plus my parents had cultivated an odd mix of ex-pat friends and French people over the years.

Soon it became clear to Ariana’s mother that finding a whole turkey, in France — before Christmastime, would be near impossible.

Turns out, my mother’s underground network of American ex-pats, all trying desperately like us to celebrate our strange little holiday on the sly, located a bird.  We had heard it was small, but when it arrived, it was still covered from beak to toe in feathers… with the head on, just the neck snapped.  The philosophy seemed to be: “We break its neck.  You do the rest.”  But somehow, in this New York bachelor-sized apartment, with only an economy-sized stove and minimal counter space, my mother pulled it off.

The spirit of being grateful for the people in your life, the things you have, and generally being at peace with the world for a few hours of good food, good wine, and good conversation was somehow heightened immensely by getting to share it in and with another culture.  Ten people huddled around a table for four in an apartment built for one, stuffing our faces with dishes that probably seemed crude and unrefined to the Frenchies.  Luckily, we outnumbered them, and in fact spent most of the dinner marveling at the absurdity of the French people and their customs.  But the real Thanksgiving story is mainly about disparaging other cultures…  So I guess we stayed pretty true to that.

* * *

el khamees

For France, by way of the Middle East, Foster Itter — an American teaching English who has spent five Thanksgivings abroad — began by recounting her Thursday in Egypt.

After a fairly dramatic Halloween party, at my host family’s apartment… on the holiest day of Ramadan, my friends and I decided that Thanksgiving would best be celebrated at a restaurant.  Until a crazy Christian girl — 23, married, participates in bible re-enactments in full costume — organized a Thanksgiving celebration at the villa where I lived, which I thought would be nice to attend.  But somehow, she ended up preparing too many sweet potato pies. As in, so many that she could not fit them all into her oven.  So, her husband was going all around town, with more than five large sweet potato pies, requesting oven space.  Meanwhile, my roommate and I were on our balcony, drinking tea with whiskey.  We had started around 11 in the morning and finished around 3 — in time for a knock on the door from her husband.  We were drunk.  And suddenly we had Christian sweet potato pies in our oven… Lots.

Foster then recounted a more valiant attempt at tradition, buttressed by youth when she was seventeen, and living with an older couple in Viterbo, Italy.

Benito was named after, of course, Mussolini — and both Benito and Teresa still held his namesake in high regard.  I had arrived in late august without knowing a word of Italian. I had learned fairly quickly, but as a seventeen-year-old, I was concerned with being thin and smart. Teresa was also concerned with me being thin, and untraditionally never served pasta at dinner, as it would make us ‘grassa.’  Teresa was a bitch.

At school, I was carefully preparing a community Thanksgiving, fancying myself as some sort of Martha Stewart, I gathered golden fallen leaves from the trees by the small train station and strung them from yarn to make special garlands and hung them in the sala grande at school.  And everyone prepared a dish.  I made coleslaw.  Teresa stood in the corner of the kitchen, arms folded, scowling each time I added more mayonnaise.  She would make this funny grunt noise.  When I finally tipped the jar over the bowl, she could not contain herself: “This will make you molto grassa!” …  I spent the rest of the evening in my tiny bedroom crying and clambering over the radiator and out the window to smoke cigarettes.

The feast at school was a success. I remember wearing a special Thanksgiving wreath on my head: you know, wired orange tinsel or something.  One of my friends then implored me to come and help her cook a Thanksgiving meal for her host family — I can’t remember how she herself got roped into it, her host family may have missed the school celebration and felt denied a true American experience, and therefore asked Alexa to prepare a meal.   This was a disaster. Alexa had no idea how to cook.

In lieu of the traditional turkey, we had a large chicken.  The oven was not working, so I had to quarter the chicken in the kitchen sink… and I was seventeen… I had never quartered a chicken before.

I also had no clue how to make stuffing, and as I soon learned… you can’t stuff a quartered chicken.  I phoned my parents, who explained that to achieve a perfect stuffing, I desperately needed sage and parsley.  I asked Alexa for sage, and Alexa asked her twelve-year-old Italian sister, who in turn phoned a neighbor, and the neighbor brought fresh sage from his garden.  At dinner, in my broken three-month-old Italian, I had to explain the story of Thanksgiving several times. I primi Americani sono arrivati.

* * *

giovedì

A little farther South, George Jaramillo was studying with a number of other American students of Architecture, in Florence.

The really ‘off” part about the whole meal — to a bunch of architects — was that this intimate holiday, usually a family in their home around the table, was held in this extravagant former palace of Napoleon Bonaparte — a great hall in the center of Florence — with sixty people.  And because they had acquired this ridiculous palazzo, they were beholden to use their elaborate caterer.  I can remember all the Italians trying really hard to make our meal as ‘American’ as possible.  But the bread… well, it was still that unsalted Florentine bread that turns into a rock thirty minutes after it has been cut.

Dinner was served over three courses with a slew of turkeys and mashed potatoes and gravy. I am not sure how they got Turkey and cranberry sauce into Italy, but it was all there and more than you could ever finish.  And of course, at meal’s end… what looked like hundreds of Pumpkin Pies.

* * *

George’s story salted my wounds, as we sat there. Two chalky cakey chocolate triangles, jauntily perched askew, if not askance, a sprig of menthe, soon became not only gastronomically disappointing but a shibboleth of how misunderstood this holiday was.  After whispers had spread, a spoon clinked a glass, and our host announced:

“For those of you who might want additional turkey…”

You could feel the gaffe shoot under your nails like bamboo.  No, you don’t understand. We get to eat as much of this as possible… for hours… until we fall asleep at the table. Then we wake up, eat a course of desserts — pumpkin pie, sweet potato pie, pecan pie, apple pie, possibly cakes, but never brownies… or if brownies — only on the side of Pumpkin Pie.  After which we bide our time ’till we can make a second plate entirely — often in the form of a sandwich — from the leftovers of hours before.

Feeling the Sally Albright rise inside of me, and in the spirit of the holiday which commemorated and irresponsibly romanticized our country’s first great failure to bridge the divide between cultures — part of the very reason so many of us had gotten on that plane in the first place — we just said thank you.

Of course, the Palm Springs of the 1960s and earlier was the preferred fast getaway for slow-traveling Hollywood stars, just two hours east of Hollywood on a straight road. Al Capone hid away in the Desert Hot Springs spa now called Two Bunch Palms. Elvis honeymooned in a midcentury modern just below the San Jacinto mountains. And Sinatra was as fulltime a resident in Palm Springs as he was anywhere else, while some of the best modernist architects — Neutra, Frey, Lautner — left monuments to the low-slung, indoor-outdoor lifestyle that changed California living — and weekending — forever.

But something changed — perniciously, it seems — for Palm Springs in the 70’s and 80’s: the retirees multiplied, early bird specials popped up, and the classic 60’s hotels with magnificent pool scenes that had staged true Palm Springs Weekends fell into disrepair. People either realized (and got critical about the fact that) there seemed to be Nothing to Do in the area — precisely the reason to visit a spa, party, or cut off from a busy life if you don’t enjoy the rustic outdoors. Or they simply moved on to the next vacation trend: Acapulco, say, or Love Boat cruises. One thing is certain: air travel picked up, and having a haven a few hours by car from your house never seemed to matter less.

Today, in a lot of ways, it’s the early 1960’s again, and there’s more to this sentiment than our culture’s recent proclivities for wearing skinny ties and watching Mad Men. There’s a national mood of change afoot, as if you need to read about that in a travel essay, and in response, people are indulging in a particularly accessible facet of the Slow Travel movement, staying close to home more often, choosing to “vacation” in locations within short distances from their houses and ever-tenuous jobs — looking within (their borders) for divertissement and solace.

Throughout, Palm Springs still stands, and, for better or worse, has now resumed its previous role as party spot and rest escape, the place you head to literally Get Away. A few years ago, two major hotels — the Parker Palm Springs and the Viceroy, both artfully interior-designed within inches of their lives — reinvigorated what was already a newly burgeoning boutique hotel-spa-resort scene, where smaller redesigns — for example, that of the Orbit In — had already started to draw young adults out from Hollywood to bake in Bertoia chairs by a saline pool and drink saketinis at a boomerang bar.

Now, however, the influx of revisioned Palm Springs getaways meant to bring the 60’s escape-feel back has reached a critical mass. There’s the Movie Colony Hotel, the Horizon. Even the Holiday Inn looks cool again. So, in the wake of having written a comprehensive Palm Springs Refresher service package a couple of years ago (don’t chide me for the torturous assignment; I was writing about cancer at the same time), I decided this year to offer a brief study of two of the best new attempts at the Palm Springs Weekend 3.0. Places that my wife and I actually choose for personal breaks, one of which even staged the epic Palm Springs Weekend movie. Places that don’t just show up in magazines.

The aforementioned movie-set hotel is the most closely associated with the Springs-that-Swing air wafting throughout the desert once more these days. It’s called the Riviera, and driving past its grand fountains up the driveway to the retro-Hollywood-glam lobby, it’s not hard to imagine why a movie was made there, even before its extensive $70 million renovation, which set the stage for a recent Playboy bash and Trina Turk fashion show.  Of course, this stuff never personally impresses me — I’m much more inclined to research a hotel’s sordid history — but it did offer a stark contrast from what most people experience at generic luxury hotels, which have become so passé you cannot remember their names as they swindle you.

It’s not PR spin to remind oneself that the Riviera also catered to the Rat Pack, specifically, and as you walk through a deliciously ornate lobby past a blinged-out pool table and Mad Hatters’ chairs (laugh, if you want; the furniture doesn’t take itself too seriously, and it will tell you as much after a couple of drinks), you notice mosaics of celebrities on the walls as if this was some sort of temple for those who would call popular culture their religion. More significant, perhaps, the bones of the place, which is built with a chain of modernist duplex buildings dotted along the perimeter of a huge pool in the shape of an overwatered three-petal flower, render it ideal for group socializing.

That’s pretty much all that happened while we were there. I noticed two wedding parties on the grounds along with disparate small-group vacationers cliquing with each other but also cross-pollinating new pods. Waitresses in bikinis and other skimpy outfits sauntered about as I made notes of new social connections made (I even met a Filmmaker From Hollywood!) and sipped a minty cocktail on an outdoor bed. But the Server Flesh Show wasn’t so egregious as that of the Las Vegas Hard Rock, which is something of a low-rent porn reenactment. I know it’s hard to believe, but neither my wife nor I felt that these women were for sale (at least not yet); perhaps they just wanted to remind you that you were having a Palm Springs Weekend, that it was OK to disrobe: physically as well as mentally.

Too many Palm Springs hotels now flaunt interior room furniture that sacrifices function for form, but for all of its cool, the Riviera was unusually comfy for bedheads like me. I even chose to spend one sunny, warm afternoon watching a movie inside my cool, dark room. I’d never done that before in Palm Springs, and even if I’d never decorate our house with such over-the-top flashiness, I didn’t mind the excess, choosing instead to view it as a way to truly consider myself cut off from even a standard hotel weekend. This only works, of course, if you turn the Blackberry off, but I did that, at least for a few hours, and I’m pretty sure I spent more time in this room than in any other desert hotel over the last five years.

Later, at dinner, in the hotel’s Circa 59 — and let me say that for all the “authoritative” reviews of Palm Springs’s newish restaurants outside the hotels, none of them, not even the beloved Copley’s, is worth your money — the service staff actually seemed to give a damn about how you liked your unctuous pork belly appetizer and medium rare rib-eye. As a New York native, this isn’t especially unusual, of course, but coming from LA, where wait-people in even some of the best restaurants don’t know a thing about the food or care if you will enjoy it when it arrives (late), it was a refreshing touch. I’d attend this actual restaurant — poolside, of course — even if I was staying at another resort, and I enjoyed the eminently logical equation it helped me balance out about Palm Springs eateries you see on the main drag, with its tcochke shops and the wandering SoCal socially secure set.

That said, and this may sound arbitrary, but hear me out, the fact that I wasn’t given a cocktail menu full of over-designed drinks, gave the night a classic air. I could order my vodka with lime and receive respect for keeping my spiritual exploration simple. Is dinner cheap there? No. But cheap is not the same as inexpensive. And do you really want to pay the same money for rhinoceros pizzle in an equally high-end setting? Charge it all to your room, I say, and then pretend next month, when you’re viewing your statement, that you were wedding-crashing. If that doesn’t work, at least you’ve won some more frequent flier miles. I’m a big fan of not worrying about money during a Palm Springs Weekend. If you don’t completely subsume the life of a Desert Escape Character, if you don’t sell yourself that you’re not just playing make-believe, you lose out on the true benefits of the trip: disassociation.

At the Colony Palms Hotel, which we visited a number of months ago to celebrate a birthday, a reality disconnect of a different order rules one’s stay. It’s not about pretending to be a modernist; it’s about sequestering yourself in a compound that looks like real (rich) people took their time to build it a long time ago after a trip to Morocco. Certainly, there’s rarely something more relaxing than sitting among clean Neutra-esque lines as the sun crisps your skin with a view of craggy desert hills; but there’s an artifice at so many of the new hotels that try to offer this experience — and the Colony Palms chooses to play an entirely different, more genuine, game, perhaps aware of the ontological stress caused by too much mod-mimetic-experience-planning. And, mind you, you’re hearing that from someone sitting in an Eames chair as he types.

Maybe it’s just me, but a resort that was once owned by Jewish mobster Al Wertheimer back in the 30’s, when a speakeasy and brothel stood where people now receive spa treatments and the most tender short ribs east of my favorite Los Angeles Le Creuset, puts you in a worthwhile kind of nostalgic mood. It’s not quite fatalistic  — as in let’s go for broke, we’re stars! — but it’s more than just carefree.  You know that even though the stylish, dark wood furniture suggests North Africa you’re in the California desert, but it’s fun to retrace the steps of yesteryear when backlot royalty rolled out here in environment-killing guzzlers to waste nights away drinking Sidecars and Jack Roses in the cool night air.

Speaking of air, my wife felt a whoosh of some, when doors in our rooms closed without us. We’d been sitting in a private Jacuzzi on our patio, next to a room where Kathy Griffin had once reportedly stayed and thought she’d seen or experienced a ghost, and we saw the lights go on in an empty room and then our patio doors shut. It was windy, to be sure, but when I brought this issue up with the extremely friendly hotel manager, he said that there was a mystique about this place. Nothing scary, mind you. Just something a little special, a tad of otherworldly intrigue. As if the trim humans sitting by the extremely clean rectangular pool that separates the restaurant from the lobby may not be the only regular guests.

In fact, the weekend that we took up residence at the Colony Palms, there were a few unexpected people there with us. The Palm Springs Film Festival was happening that weekend, and there was something of a to-do related to the screenings at the restaurant. My wife called it right: It wasn’t close to disruptive as a wedding party might be — it was evidence that we were in the so-called right place.  Let’s just say that a few A-listers you would never run into at a café on the Entourage shoot-list were skipping around the private vacation space we had secured for the weekend. Men who actually look like men, and women who don’t dress like slutty high school sophomores. I won’t utter the words “Clooney” (!) and “Portman” (!!) but the classy populace dotting the patio could have easily jibed with people referred to by the best casting directors as having A Quality.

More important, however, I had the best massage of my life — and I have actually received massages pretty regularly for years, thanks to some excellent if pricey health insurance — at the Colony Palms spa. In fact, I’m sorry I didn’t include this place in the spa feature I linked to above. This wasn’t some clichéd new-agey experience with low lights, silly music, lots of oil, and a booklet of bad marketing-speak. I swear that the masseuse outshined every other top Palm Springs practitioner: she got as targeted as necessary on a carcass that has seen way too much battle, and I felt the effects of this magic for days. (Of course, everything was on the level. I shouldn’t even have to say that. But I know how some minds work, so there it is. In virtual print. )

What’s my thesis? I asked myself this very question with a tumbler of vodka in my hand as my wife and I parsed out how we should spend the rest of the month last winter. You see, we had a few big decisions to make that weekend, and some involved going after money in our professions despite how terrible it would make us feel.  My best explanation for how we proceeded relies not on what sounds like a decadent weekend (the Colony Palms is actually quite affordable); in fact, we both chose simplicity. A weekend at this elegant spot with the Beautiful People had helped us feel very good about ourselves — less scared by the world and its ridiculous demands that you break every rule you stand for just to keep on thriving. It wasn’t an extroverted party weekend but an inner celebration.

Three months later, when I drove out from L.A. again to hit up some other new Palm Springs joint for a travel magazine review, I didn’t even absorb a hint of the restorative vapors with which either of these escapes had infused us. In fact, I felt so much like I was just spending the day in Beverly Hills, I decided to watch Palm Springs Weekend, the movie, all over again. Lying on my “retro” hotel room floor, the ornate bed du jour to my right, as the riff-raff by this spot’s figure-eight-shaped pool screeched in each other’s direction so loudly through the windows I could hardly hear the terrible dialogue spewing from the TV’s design-y but inferior speakers.

Finding one haven in the desert should have been enough. But that I had found two (before this gig) — and that I could not return to them — made me so depressed, I conked right out and didn’t even think to drink.

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