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Year: 2024

Nepali gifts – subsistence-resilience, cows and cricket, and an Annapurna Ranges happy ending

Aug 17, 2024 | agriculture, belonging economies, books we are reading, children's learning, civil violence, colonialism, community sufficiency, food sovereignty, home economies, Indigenous knowledges, Industrial culture, interspecies relating, Mother Country, raising boys, regenerative farming, social warming, storytelling, subsistence economy, toxins & pollutants, walked-for food | 47 comments

 

We left the sleepy, mahjong town of Lujing, outside Chengdu city in China early in the morning.


We had a plane to catch.

We could not find another way of getting to India overland from China due to border disputes, politics and bureaucracy, so we spent a little time among the clouds,

got forcibly fumigated by the air hostesses before landing, and arrived in Kathmandu three hours later. After going through immigration and customs, changing currencies and setting up a Nepali sim card, we hired a Tootle.

A friendly Nepali man took us to the lodge where we were to stay on our first night.

We walked some of the intense streets of Kathmandu,

and some of the gentle ones,

witnessed people gathered at the butchers,

and at the stupas and pagodas.

We came across personal struggles,

transportive skills,

and bigger challenges affecting people day to day,

Kathmandu is the first city we’ve visited on this journey, since we left Darwin, where drugs and alcohol are causing misery in peoples’ lives. Woody was grabbed by a man in the street. The man was inebriated, by substance and grief. He tried to cuddle Woody, forcibly, which set we parents off. We are all learning how our vulnerabilities as travellers conjure up fear, and reactivity, especially when just arriving in a new country. In reading J Krishnamurti again,

he reminds us how fear is often a precursor to violence, to a lack of freedom.

We parents were upset by the inebriated man. He required our compassion, our witnessing of his grief, our openness. Woody required protection and surety. Krishnamurti makes much sense to us, especially his thoughts about religion, however inside books, sense can be very clear-eyed, while on the streets such papery clarity can soon dissipate.

On another occasion on the edges of the tourist district of Thamel in Kathmandu,

Meg was pushed aggressively by a street vendor because we’d stopped in front of his stall to talk with another man who wanted to know about our travel plans. The push had the desired effect as we quickly left that unhappy place, after Meg offered back her views about his behaviour. We must have been an unwitting block for his livelihood.

The man who wanted to know of our plans, like many older street businessmen in this tourist district, wanted to yarn with us so as he could better weave our needs as travellers to his financial needs. Initially we were irritated and put off by this in Kathmandu, but later after speaking with Nepalis and understanding how business works here, we realised this perceived pushiness comes from an indigenous trait of connection through gossip and story sharing mixed with colonisation’s imported scarcity anxiety and lust for material riches. Nepal is currently in conversion from an indigenous culture into an imperialist one, guided by the west, China and India. This is the process from human-ecology interactive violence (eating, farming, hunting, gathering) to what Deborah Bird Rose calls, ‘man-made mass death’.

It’s easy for us to refuse what’s on offer in Kathmandu, in most cases. We are on a shoestring budget. But we also enjoy speaking with people and sharing story, even if we know there is financial intention behind the interest. It is part of the local/foreigner dance, here.

On our first night in this city, we went looking for and bought a khukuri from Ramesh, a former Gurkha soldier.

Gurkhas are a Nepali fighting unit who have a reputation for fearless military prowess. The word itself derives from Go-Raksha – protector of cows. This again reveals the conversion – cowherds become militia, famously employed by the British empire to their dirty work. No, we didn’t buy the big knife or khukuri, Patrick was given that by Ramesh to bring drama to our shared photo. Rather, we bought the little one that now travels on Patrick’s belt. It cost AU$30.

Happily, we’re back in the business of sliced mangoes for breakfast. Yes, this local green variety is ripe!

Wearing a knife again brings things up for us. We’re not going to pretend it is only for mangoes. While we are big fans of Krishnamurti’s ‘freedom from fear’ invitation, and for wisdom like this,

we also think there is a right time and place for what we call appropriate, conscious, or ecological violence, such as hunting, subsistence farming and slaughtering, and self defence. We say this without fear in Nepal. It is wild and unruly here, but quite safe in most places.

The work that Krishnamurti perennially invites us to partake in is understanding our inner violence – impatience, irritation, superiority, lack of curiosity, absence of compassion, preciousness, and so forth – and he offers meditation (post-thought peace), breath work (being in a state of wholeness with the world), and a daily mental practice of recognising early when we enter states of fear or anger, which when not faced, can lead to wounding. More common is psychological wounding than knife or physical wounding. This goes a little way to understanding the high suicide rates of men in Australia. While there is much necessary media about physical violence to women, few want to see more subtle and more common forms of psychological violence in our communities, especially perpetrated against men. The societal acceptance of Clementine Ford’s extremist misandry, especially in the so-called liberal media, is testament to this.

Before we left the city we scoured the streets of Kathmandu for somewhere to buy a cricket bat for Woody, and after much searching we eventually succeeded, here.

We found Kathmandu boys are mostly into football (soccer), though cricket is more of a thing here than in any other country we’ve visited since leaving Australia. We didn’t see Nepali girls playing either sports until Pokhara. Woody has been longing for a game, and we didn’t have an opportunity until we reached Bhaktapur, about an hour east of the city by car, through thick traffic.

We arrived and were instructed to pay AU$60 to enter historic Durbar Square, where we were to stay. It was too much dosh for we neopeasants, so we declined, cancelled our booking at a cheap hotel inside the square, and booked into this little sweat box with stellar views, just outside it.

A kind Nepali fella back at the gates told as that after 7.30pm the guards go home and people can freely walk into Durbar Square.

It was beautiful inside,

and fragile. In 2015 an earthquake ruptured many of the buildings.

We enjoyed this place for its dedication to the sacred, pissing street dogs, absence of motor vehicles and night time quietude and cool, though we also felt a sadness here – an old Nepal walled off from the rest of the country, which has been superseded by global imperialism and national political corruption.

We are seeing in the culture how technological ascent and the global machine conglomerate disturbs everything immensely, everyday. In Krishnamurti (1973) we read this:

“…we see that education, science, organised religion, propaganda, politics, have failed. They have not brought about peace, though technologically man has advanced incredibly.”

Five decades later we are observing that technological advances have led to the psychological derangement of people, making life faster, more furious, more interrupted, more anxious, polluted and permanently unsettled. It is perpetually draining to behold the continuous propaganda and promises of US-style empire capitalism, while living the actual realities of it.

The following day, to oxygenate our rather sedated bodies in play, Woody and Patrick started a game of cricket on the brick pavement that framed a water feature and temple outside our hotel.

They soon noticed a young boy watching and they invited him to play. He was shy and declined, at first. But after a while he started helping to retrieve the ball from the water. Woody got carried away with the bat on one occasion, which found him stripping down to his undies and swimming out to retrieve the ball. Sushil, the young Bhaktapur boy, who joined our game while school kids and teachers looked on from above in their classrooms, soon lost his shyness, and we all took turns to bowl and bat, often fielding the ball out of the pond. Sushil is a natural sportsman and he loves both batting and bowling.

Once the shade disappeared from the pitch, we all got mightily hot and so we invited Sushil to join us for a drink. Patrick and Woody found out, with limited language, his family business is peddling fruit, or should we say, pedalling fruit?

We offered him a banana lassi but he wanted a Coke,

that slow release poison in a bottle, killing the microbiomes of Nepali everywhere courtesy of the psychological warfare conducted by US empire admen and women.

We observed again in Bhaktapur that Mother Country has a way of slowly eating up that which is not required,

and like all hubristic civilisations over the last 5000 years, the US empire will be eaten up too.

The following day, when we came back into the traffic jams of Kathmandu city, we glimpsed a goatherd and his animals travelling by foot.

What are we doing in this city? We want to behold subsistence-resilience, not traffic! We stayed one more night in this little cosy, mozzie-filled room,

laughed at the phenomena of us only tripping in the streets in China’s cities, which are flat, expensive and new, yet never in the countries that keep our street senses switched on,

once again marvelled at the mind-fuck that is the electrical experience in southeast and subcontinent Asia,

and headed out to find a Nepali restaurant mostly catering to locals.

We all loved the food at the Himalayan Yak, especially Woody,

and the family who ran this modest restaurant were a big part of the love we consumed in their fare. We also liked and noted the lack of advertising outside the restaurant, just a lovely gold and red drape that suggested some form of business.

The next morning we left Kathmandu, we walked to the bus stop in the rain.

We had just received a message from our friend, Trace, who asked us to look out for cyclists carrying all manner of things in Nepal. Trace is an inspiring children’s book writer and illustrator, and she told us she is considering doing a children’s book on the subject, after years of noting and documenting the beauty of such low-tech transportation and the everyday miracles of what can be sometimes carried on a bike.

We only published one bike of this husband and wife gleaning duo, in our previous Laos-China post. So, for Trace, and anyone else who is into appropriate technology, here are the wonderful cycling twosome we spoke with in Chengdu. The husband is carrying cardboard recycling; the wife is carrying plastic.

Our bus left Kathmandu at 7am, and there was talk on the bus about the potential of landslides because of the heavy rain overnight. We travelled with great alertness,

witnessing at one point a local bus on the other side of the road marooned in road-edge mud, seriously close to tipping over.

We followed the powerful Trishuli River for some time, and when the driver pulled over for punters to buy food and use the public toilets, we soaked up the energy of the river.

On and off over this several hour bus passage, the rain belted down,

and we saw locals or government employees out in it, trying to elevate the force of the water causing the land to slide.

There were innumerable examples of the concrete walls, attempting to arrest the pressure, failing.

At Dumre we got off the bus and hopped in a taxi for a ten minute drive up to the high country of Bandipur. Oh, how our senses relaxed as we moved towards this misty,

sane,

magical,

place.

We booked into this room for AU$20 per night,

looked out onto the town from the hotel,

went for a walk,

beheld sweetness and beauty everywhere,

and felt our nervous systems calm. In the main street of the town, no motors were permitted, and we witnessed first hand what a pre-industrial village would have felt like, and the greater peace that would have resulted. We asked if this man would be happy for us to photograph him and his craft.

Instead of delivery trucks, people carried things along the street with traditional baskets.

What we witnessed here is an easy work ethic, a green gym epistemology – a time for yarning and gossip, and a time to carry and labour.

No one seemed overly consumed by their work here, although the man sewing (above) did seem to be the exception. Every time we passed his doors he was working, and we felt a sadness in him that perhaps his continual labouring helps ease. We saw in Bandipur a beautiful village, only accessible from the rest of the country by motor transport since 1998, and that despite being part-supported by tourism, is still in tact socially, spiritually and ecologically.

Quite by chance we arrived in the low tourist season. Now is the coolest and quietest time of year. We booked one night, as we do with any new place, but immediately knew we were going to stay awhile. We just didn’t want to leave, and the goats were a big part of this.

Back home in Djaara Country, our flerd ran out of food while we’ve been away, and as a result kept getting out, causing generous neighbours and friends a lot of stress. Back in Thailand we made the painful decision to give our animals away. Being in Bandipur we witnessed peasant-sized small goats browsing on common land, as ours did, and the huge breeding-programme goats at the National Goat Research Centre, where we were welcomed in and shown the bucks, young and old,

and the does.

We tried hitchhiking back up the hill, the three kilometre hike from the research centre,

but there was little traffic. As as we walked we talked about saving our pennies when we get home to invest in some bigger animals.

Goats here in Nepal are a big part of daily life, and so too is play. Each day in the afternoon we went to Thulihill, the village park, to play cricket with anyone who wanted to join in. We fashioned stumps out of fallen sticks.

Playing both cricket and football here has helped dismantle the local/tourist, us/them barrier. When we come across others in Nepal we like to acknowledge them in the customary, local way, Nameste, which so elegantly translates as ‘the light in me sees the light in you.’ The more we stayed, played games and met people in Bandipur, the deeper our relations grew with the people of the village. Having worked in hospitality in our own tourist town of Daylesford for a number of years, we have a sensitivity to being ‘the locals’ too, and how tourists are often in extraction rather than connection mode.

We love the casual drying of corn between rain showers in the streets,

the Sishnu (nettle) and Bandipur (fermented vegetable) soups, served with local Tumba (millet) wine, which is clear in colour and tastes more like a spirit,

and we love Nepali money, which celebrates six indigenous Nepalese animals. The largest note, 1000 npr, is worth just over AU$10.

In the evenings we played cricket until the light faded,


and the local boys said to us, you need to get home because the tiger might be out. We were thrilled more than fearful, however, we took their advice and didn’t dawdle in the dark, more forested parts of the village.

On our third day, after writing a bunch of postcards,

we jumped on the cable car from the top of Bandipur,

and descended through the clouds to Dumre to send them. The Dumre post office, which we found online, didn’t actually exist in physical reality, despite the internet stating it did – the map is not the territory, just as data modelling is not our complex immune biomes. So, instead of sending slow mail to love ones we stopped in at the Dumre markets, brought some bananas and mangoes,

the latter of which we couldn’t get in Bandipur, and headed back up the hill, praising the craft of Baya Weavers (or, Tope Chara, in Nepali),

yellow-breasted sparrows Indigenous to Nepal and other parts of Asia.

Bandipur is just over a 1000m above sea level. On our fourth day the clouds revealed to us the Himalayas. While difficult to see in this photo, this first sighting of the majesty of these mountains enchanted us. Hint: Not all the white above the tree line is cloud.

There is an undeniable power in this country, and beautiful people. Dilap, who pointed out the mountains to us when we descended the staircase at his family hotel on that morning, is one of them.

We moved hotels to his, after the black mould became too overwhelming in our room in the first.

On the journey down from Bandipur to Dumre to catch the bus, we asked Dilap how his family survived Covid without tourism: “We didn’t have much money then, but Nepali all know how to grow food. We are an agricultural country. We help our friends when they struggle, and the food we grow at home is fresh and is healthier than from the store.”

In Bandipur we witnessed widespread home-grown food production and herbal medicine plants we use at home,

We helped heal Woody’s knee injury with our own peoples’ medicine kit – soaking this typical boyhood scuff of the knee injury in eucalyptus oil and warm water to clean it,

and later applying narrow-leaf plantain salve. He limped around for a day or two,

but soon forgot about it when it was cricket time. Woody’s immune system, of course, did most of the healing particularly with good food in his belly. We ate healthy Nepali food in this lovely town, much of it grown close by, (rice, lentil dahl, buffalo curd, veg curry and a weed saag),

and we sat and yarned in the clouds.

Bandipur bore many gifts, including the community of village cricket and a dreamy peaceful respite from the intensity of travel. We left with tremendous gratitude.

We caught another bus on to Pokhara, which was slow going (can you see the goat on the van’s roof?),

mostly because of the monsoonal rains causing landslides that narrowed the road,

but also other challenges.

It took five hours to travel 80 kms. It is currently wet in this region, and the next season’s rice crops have been planted.

We saw from the bus endless examples of subsistence agriculture. We love the fenceless nature of farming here, where cows and goats graze right up to rice paddies, and where the ‘fences’ are the human herders who stay with the animals to prevent them from eating the crops.

This being with the herd, being with the land, instead of constructing fences suits a less manic, less alienated culture. For the cow- or goatherd to observe their animal’s intelligent senses in what they graze and when and where, gives the farmer knowledges about deep and diverse nutrition. These knowledges slowly accrue in the being with, and often cannot be measured. In Nepal, we’ve witnessed how animals are often stabled for part of the day with rice straw or freshly cut weed fodder, after bouts of free-ranging.

This allows people to do other things throughout the day.

When we arrived in Pokhara, and went down to the lake, we found cows free-ranging among the tourists and locals.

The Pokhara farmer whose cows they were was on always on hand.

The very first image (thanks to Jordan and Happen Films) we published in the very first blog post of this journey, was of us moving our animals across town.

We miss our flerd and find comfort in the ways people are with their animals here, and also the way they are with each other. Like in the two-cows-by-the-lake image above, we witness daily the unashamed public affection Nepali friends have for each other here.

On the way to Pokhara we passed gravel mines on the fertile flood plains. This gravel is being used to make concrete to build roads,

and modern Nepali buildings.

We stayed in one of these buildings in Pokhara.

It was an oven inside because of the concrete acting as a heat bank.

Due to the monsoonal rains there are great numbers of mozzies so we needed the fan in the room all night to both repel the mozzies and try to distribute the radiating heat from the room so we could sleep. Here is the rooftop room we spent the first two nights in in Pokhara. When thermal mass is not a good thing, and not just because of the ruined fertile flood plains…

We spent the afternoon walking the streets of Pokhara to seek out various things. We looked for a shoe repairer to fix the holes in the soles of Patrick’s shoes. A skilled man in his street workshop stopped them from leaking,

and also brushed the mud off and polished them, all for the equivalent of AU$10. Locals told us he over charged us, but it’s all relative.

We also sought out more postcards, and a secondhand bookshop. There are several in Pokhara, with books in many languages. Patrick found Bikas-Binas (Development-Destruction): The change in life and environment of the Himalaya, a radical text from the mid 1980s featuring both Nepali and foreigner contributions, discussing through a development-critical lens what was happening to this beautiful region at that time. When Patrick opened this book it fell to this page,

In one of the book’s essays, Deadly Development, the author, Claude Alvares, reads the development of this region as a con-game:

“…for it seems now that the idea of economic development has been used by the ruling classes to induce people to accept not only enormous sacrifices, but the destruction or mutilation of older cultural patterns and physical and moral environments, and debilitating forms of dependence.”

There is a romantic, pre-development painting of a Pokhara village scene hung in the office of the hot hotel we were staying in. It depicts traditional stone, slate, clay brick and thatch buildings, which are only one or two storeys high and presumably cooler and ventilated. Villagers are engaged in ecologically-embedded labours,

That was a scene of Pokhara, according to the artist. This is a scene of Pokhara now, according to Artist as Family.

The irony of being dependent on some of the patterns of colonialism is not lost on us, though we baulk at most things on offer here.

Radical texts like Bikas-Binas don’t appear to exist anymore, or they are labelled conspiracy texts, and disappeared from view in the search engines. When you do a Google search for something today, it is always filtered according to the empire’s narrative. This is why

On our first evening in Pokhara we stopped to ask a man where we might eat where the locals go. John, a jovial Irishman, led us to such a place and joined us for dinner.

John, who is currently living in Pokhara, is a great source of local knowledge. We told him of our plans to bus from Pokhara to Sonauli on the Indian-Nepali border and go through immigration there. He told us that with our Indian e-visas – the most over-complicated and annoying piece of bureaucracy we’ve ever had to endure, and which Meg spent several hours filling in back in Kathmandu – we won’t be able to cross at Sonauli, and worse, John told us, “you’ll need to return to Kathmandu and fly to Delhi; there is no other way.”

We were gutted.

What we are witnessing on this journey is the more a country ‘develops’ the more ridiculous the rules become, and the less freedoms people hold. Development isn’t only about eliminating old cultural patterns and customs and transforming ecologies into construction sites,

it is also about controlling people, and herding them into sad little, hard spaces as workers or consumers, and both.

And this control stems from a desperate economic system based on a the fabrication of scarcity. Capitalists and Marxists alike perpetuate this system, which is always city-centric and debasing to people and life forces.

We are on this journey, having not gone overseas for twenty years for social, economic and ecological reasons, to give Blackwood a glimpse of other cultures and lifeways before health-fascism – biometrics linked to Digital IDs passports – become the norm, and people like us won’t be able to travel at all.

As those of you who have been following this journey from the beginning know, Woody’s love of cricket and our meeting ‘cultural others’ through a shared love of the game, combined with our more adult focus on subsistence-resilience are the main intentions for this travel. We know we need to be ever mindful of the restrictives, negatives and our expectations, acknowledge them and let them go through to the keeper.

The feralty of street dog life in Pokhara helps with this. The way they dance through the streets with their souls in tact gives us courage and guidance.

We walked for a while with these two,

up to the park, where cows graze on soccer fields and players kick around them and cricketers play until dark.

That magnificent steer (in the photo above) certainly had his eyes on the ball. How genius for a large park that enables festivals,

track running, football, volleyball, badminton, cricket and many other social gatherings, for the cows and buffalos to be the ecological lawn mowers of it,

eating down the grass while returning manure to feed the park, and being part of the social life of this beautiful commons.

Having cow pats scattered around the park certainly adds another level of coordination and awareness as a player, when chasing down the ball.

On our fourth and final afternoon of cricket in Pokhara, a two meter long, grey-brownish snake revealed itself, just near where this fella fielded a ball.

A few stones were thrown to encourage it away from the game. It was very respectful. We are impressed with so much in Nepal, especially the interspecies connections and reverence for life.

Last cricket season in Hepburn, we watched a Muckleford player bash to death a two metre long tiger snake with a cricket bat. It just wanted to cross the field to get to the creek. We players could have waited five minutes for the snake to pass. Almost everyone on the field cheered when it was dead and hurled across the boundary fence. There is deep trauma in a culture that thinks this is OK.

We moved from the top floor of the hot box hotel after two nights to another multi-levelled hotel closer to the park. The trees in the garden of the Trekkers Lodge significantly help keep the building cooler, despite it too using much concrete.

It also helped we were on the first floor. Outside our window to the south was another hot-box-for-empire building going up, but much more interestingly, corn and millet were planted together where in Australia people plant lawn seed. This backyard also housed stooked rice straw for the buffalo stabled nearby, with taro and bitter gourd on the edges of the patch for human consumption.

The sweet family who ran the lodge had other family members growing this food, and collecting fodder in the park across the road for the buffalo.

The owner of the hotel told us the buffalo lives in this shed, near were we are sleeping,

and sometimes free-ranges in the park. All of this is done in small suburban, often shared areas, and it is giving us so many ideas about the scale of a farm, especially if daily human ‘green gym’ practices of foraging fodder are incorporated. Buffalo, at least on menus in Nepal, is called buff. Instead of beef, buff sits beside chicken, pork and goat dishes. While we spent three nights at this lodge we kept checking from where we could, waiting for the buff to come out of her shed to get a goodly photo. But she liked her little cow cave, and all we got is a glimpse of her lovely rump.

Coming to Nepal is like doing a RetroSuburban masterclass. Not just in the growing of food, but in the way people transport things,

wrap things,

and feed themselves in a way that doesn’t require many resources and is accessible to most. We loved eating masala omelettes and drinking mint tea for lunch. The cost was around AU$2, not just because we are in Nepal, but because such a meal can be hobbled together without a middleman, without a supermarket.

Cafe owners share, borrow or buy ingredients from one another, so no food is wasted. Often, when we’ve ordered something we’ll see the cook go across the road to another cafe get an ingredient or two. This is another example of working together – another indigenous trait that hasn’t been destroyed here.

On our first day in Pokhara we spotted these lovely boats on Lake Fewa.

On our fourth day in Nepal’s second largest city, we hired one.

and rowed across to the other side of the lake to trek up to the stupa. On the way we beheld more rural food production and preparations, such as future crop patches mulched and left to go fallow,

and in other patches, manure brought from the stables and animal sheds to return to the soil, akin to any organic food production that doesn’t require the mining of phosphate rock.

More intelligent indigenous-peasant lifeways we witnessed on our walk, and which we have seen all over Nepal, are the ecological air conditioning systems that invite rest, yarning and cooling. They are often about 3 degrees C cooler underneath them.

Here, the technics required to build this air conditioning/recuperation/social system incorporates local materials. Large mossy benches made from brick or stone are built around (often pre-existing) giant ficus trees, and they operate as temples of relief and shrines to the long history of people and ecologies being in union here. We walked on, up the many steps,

past the ‘tree elbow’ love tree,

leaving lying dogs to sleep,

passing fading proverbs adorned with wild flower,

until we reached the stupa.

We looked out across the lake to Pokhara, at a city of 600,000,

and rested and meditated on the shady side of Shanti Stupa,

which was built by Japanese buddhists belonging to the Nipponzan-Myōhōji order, and local Nepali devotees and artisans.

Our response to Pokhara at first was a repulsion for the tourism and imperialism that’s so clearly fucking over the culture here. But having meet with the locals on boats, such as Santos who grew up on the streets,

and over breakfast with Surentra who worked in Australia for five years as a chef,

and each evening playing cricket with a bunch of generous young men,

who generously included us in their afternoon games, we felt ourselves shift from sadness into relationship.

We witnessed sophisticated subsistence-resilience here, showing the way forward for the rich countries that are speedily coming down the affluence bell curve,

and we beheld the growth and learnings within ourselves.

so, after two weeks, we leave this spirited country full of possibility and with much post-hope positivity.

On our last morning in Pokhara, we woke to unseasonably clear skies, and thus to the majestic Annapurna Ranges of the Himalayas.

This rare glimpse (at this time of year) of the power and magic of this Mother Country somehow changed us. Perhaps it changed us in how we relate as humans, now knowing this grand scale of range is possible. Or is it that Annapurna is a mythological site, and we were briefly drawn into her mythos as we silently stared. We held no expectations to behold her because this is ‘off’ season and the Himalayas are usually covered by clouds, but behold her we did.

Mandrill (a poem from Chengdu Zoo, China)

Aug 8, 2024 | civil violence, interspecies relating, poem, sacred country | 40 comments

Listen to Mandrill (1min) and/or read it below. Photo by Meg.

 

I took my eldest
Zephyr
to Melbourne
Zoo
when he was
five
he was the
wildest
of them
all

Now in
Chengdu with
Blackwood, 11
his first zoo
our only tourist
caper in
China –
beholding panda
pacing concrete
floor

I’m against
the glass
against
these incarcerations
and there you
come
with your
interest
in my
beard

You ask me
seek me
my heart moves
towards your
sweetness
my eyes fill
and you ask me
not to pity you
and you jump at my face
at the glass

This brief
connection
sacred country
our heart
breath
eye
combined
my eldest in prison too –
more punishment
of the wild

The fast train leg from Laos to western China

Jul 31, 2024 | agriculture, bicycles, books we are reading, food culture, government, politics, public transport, state-corporate nexus, street food | 57 comments

 

We left Nong Khai in Thailand in a Grab car from The White Inn,

approached a sign reminding us where we’ve been, and directing us to where we are going,

departed the country through a relaxed Thai immigration, bought three tickets bound for Laos,

travelled in a van

across the Thai-Laos friendship bridge above the Mekong River,

were directed through Laos immigration,

exchanged some money, got on another bus to Vientiane, the capital, where we booked another Grab

to the Vientiane railway station, 20kms out of town. Phew; big morning so far!

At the station some locals kindly helped us navigate the rail system and the language,

and we stood in queue to buy tickets for the Laos-China Railway.

We tried to find something edible near the station while we waited a few hours to board, but we didn’t have much luck.

When we were allowed through into the station, we proceeded into a neofascist security zone, which we hadn’t experienced since leaving Australia.

After going through the scanners, we had our knives taken from us. We were really shocked and protested and asked, “How are we going to cut up fruit while we travel?” After much indignation at having our knives confiscated we were told we could pay to have an officer take them to our destination at Luang Prabang station. We agreed. It cost us AU$20, although we didn’t think we’d see them again.

Laos the nation and Laos the Laos-China Railway are two distinct countries. The former is chilled out and beautiful and wild, the latter authoritarian, stern and uptight. We have travelled through several countries with our knives, Patrick generally keeps both his knives on his belt while passing through immigration. In fact he did this here too and remarkably they didn’t pick them up in the body search, just Meg’s and Woody’s knives in the luggage scan. Was this a taste of what is to come in China? Woody was especially upset. For we adults it was like going back to school and having to endure nanny-state rules, a context that Woody hasn’t ever experienced.


His Leatherman was a gift from Steve, a kind Warrnambool man, who we met on our last big bicycle tour in 2021, and his Opinel knife and pouch were a gift from his Aunty Hen. After several hours of traveling through the beautiful Laos valleys,

where we saw many examples of subsistence farming.

it was time to get off at Luang Prabang. The armed police officer who had our knives alighted with us.

His briefcase contained some of our most useful tools on this journey, and in life generally. We were overjoyed to have them back,

but we had a problem. We knew we were going to come up against this situation again, especially in China. That night we booked a sweet little room with surprisingly cute folded swan towels, in the old capital. It was the cheapest room in the little city. Someone’s been to international hotel school in the 1980s, eh?

After arriving quite late in the day, we dropped our bags and set out to explore the town,

and to find some grub. We found a lively and packed night market, forgot to take photos, ate a delicious dinner of stir-fried veggies and rice, and came back to our swan-toweled room with mangoes for breakfast. In the morning we used our knives for the last time to cut them up.

Cutting up mangoes has been a morning ritual for weeks now, as mangoes are so cheap in Asia, and local, and in-season. We were now coming face to face with state-paternalism. We knew this was the influence of China, who paid for and jointly run the railway line we were now dependent on for our trajectory north. We headed out again after breakfast to see a little more of Laotian culture and living,

and to find the local post office to send our knives home.

We had to make such a carry-on yesterday to be able to pay get them back, and we knew things were only going to get worse the further north we headed. People around us yesterday had to hand over their work hammers, deodorant sprays, scissors and small useful knives such as ours. Hopefully we will see these prized tools again back in Australia.

After we sent off our package, we went looking for a bookshop to stock up on reading material. We walked for a while through beautiful streets,

stopped into a cafe run by this German woman and her dog,

discovered an incredible wasp’s nest above us on the footpath,

beheld more miraculous examples of bamboo scaffolding,

spent a moment reflecting on the magic of remnant ritual offerings,

before collecting our bags from our room, checking out and hopping into a van with just two seats left, heading for the station. We three squeezed in,

travelled for twenty or so minutes with a cohort of fellow travelers, and once again went through the intense process of getting clearance to enter the station. Passports, facial-scanning, security gates, body scanning, luggage scanning. Patrick had decided to keep his knife in his luggage to see whether it would go undetected. It didn’t, and the authorities refused to offer us the same knife escort service, so he gave it away to some Celtic travellers (sitting beside Woody in the pic above) rather than leaving it at the station. Now completely knifeless, we lined up to board the Laos-China Railway for our next leg.

Once again, the train attendants were officious.

The land from the train was beautiful and uncontrolled. There was longing in us for such uncivil life, and we contemplated the easiness of Thailand, sans the pollution, and the autonomy we have back home, as we don’t live in a city. As we travelled, Meg and Woody listened to an audiobook about Don Bradman, while Patrick read The Forest People: The story of Laos’s unknown tribe.

This account of Mlabri (or Mrabri) people is again another example of just how uninformed Yuval Noah Harari is when he describes human history as being a singular path of narrow self-interest. His ridiculous propaganda, we later found, is also available in Chinese.

Like countless examples of indigenous lifeways, sharing food and other resources among the Mlabri is the rule, not the exception. Every wild forested area we passed held the possibility that Mlabri are still living outside the luggage-scanning, finger-printing, facial-recognising insanity of the global machine conglomerate.

When Meg lived in Laos 25 years ago, teaching English, there were no sealed roads. While the roads now are still rudimentary, Meg was surprised to see so many sealed ones from the train. We also saw many beautiful patterns of cultivation, demonstrating other earth-harmonious lifeways are possible besides nomadic forest dwelling.

We wished we could have spent more time in Laos, but this journey to India is taking much longer than we expected, and we still have a long way to go. In the afternoon we arrived in Boten station in the north of the country, where we came across this musician playing a Lusheng wind instrument.

Later we found out that Dong people, a minority group from southeastern China, traditionally play this instrument. We waited at Boten station for a few hours for another train to take us into China.

As you might imagine, things were fairly serious going through immigration into China, which occurred after just 12 minutes of being on the train. Everyone got off. We had our temperature and faces scanned, our fingers and thumbs printed, and our passports checked and scanned, and notes were written down. It was quite a procedure. We held both apprehension and excitement for entering China.

Once back on the train we had our tickets checked and passports read again.

As we travelled, we passed millions of hectares of cultivation, everything highly organised.

We couldn’t quite believe we were in China when we alighted the train at Xishuangbanna.

We didn’t think our travels were going to take us this far north, into this epic country.

But we had significant challenges ahead. We had no money we could access, and we’d booked a hotel that required a 15-minute car ride. We didn’t have a local sim card, or a way to install an e-sim, therefore we had no use of the internet. We knew most things in China require an ID banking app, and our remnant Laos Kip had no agency this far inside the country. Outside the station we were approached by a fella who could speak a little English. We showed him the name of our hotel as he shunted us towards a driver. We conveyed to him we had no money, and he said, “Driver, ATM.” We understood. They had a brief conversation and we were led away by a sweet man who drove us to several ATMs until one relented and gave up some yuan. We all cheered and got back into the car.

Then we continued on to find our hotel, which wasn’t a hotel at all, but some sort of shonky sublet business. The driver couldn’t find it because there was no hotel, there was just a picture of a hotel on the internet. Eventually he found some locals who directed him to a back door operation where we got a key card for this little apartment room.

We were grateful. We handed over our passports for about the seventh time that day. Nothing is underground here, not even shonky sublet businesses. Everything is recorded and scanned and documented. Several moments later we were also grateful for the family-run restaurant across the street who accepted us for a meal after 9pm. We sat down and we were brought tea and dry roasted soybeans.

They asked us to take selfies with them. We were quite the novelty in this city. We were going to find out that in southwestern China our ethnicity was quite exceptional. People kept staring at us. Long stares that were met with our smiles. Our meals arrived,

which we had ordered by pointing and hoping for the best as there was zero English in the restaurant and we had no internet for our translation app to work. We were so grateful for this first delicious Chinese meal and also grateful this business took cash, as across the country they are phasing it out. We noted (pardon the pun) that all the notes of money included a picture of Mao on one side.

It didn’t seem very communist to have just the one character on every note, especially a character that had caused so much suffering in the twentieth century. We wandered around the city after dinner. It was Friday night and everywhere we turned young women were being styled and groomed in some sort of costume that looked part wedding dress, part traditional costume.

There were dozens of businesses working on hundreds of young women. The street life was vibrant and had a carnival feel about it. We went looking for a sim card and were told we had to go the the business park in the morning at 9am and apply for one. So we woke early, took some bananas for breakfast as we could peel them without our beloved knives, made a cup of tea and sat outside on the balcony taking in the new day,

until quite suddenly we were forced inside with a toxic smell permeating our olfactories. We packed up and left the building gagging, alongside others who also ran outside. It smelt like turps mixed with something stronger. We handed in our key and were helped by a kind local woman to hail a driver.

We were taken to the wrong place by the driver. You just can’t go into any phone place and get a sim card here; we discovered you have to go to the right phone place, and apply for one. We hailed another car, and he took us across the city to the right phone place, even though the previous places were all the same company, the government-run China Mobile. We were noticing most of the traffic consisted of new electric vehicles and we saw only a remnant of an older kind of mobility, although it too was electric. We also noticed how well organised everything is, including the streets and the roadside gardens.

It took about an hour to apply for and receive a sim card, by which point we’d missed the train we’d hoped to catch. Before we headed to the station for a later train we walked around looking for food. We came across many police cars, cameras and prohibition signs, such as this one, prohibiting long distance riding.

Our bicycle touring sensibilities were shocked. Over the past decade, we have spent nearly two years on the road riding long distances.

Since arriving in China we are finding the authoritarianism a frightening sign of what is to come in Australia, if people don’t pay attention to the incremental rise of surveillance, digital ID metrics, biometrics, censorship, and everything else Australian federal and state governments are doing to screw up our freedoms (such as steer us into another bogus pandemic, this time bird flu). While China has learnt predator capitalism from the west to grow its economy and incentivise ‘progress’, the west (particularly the Anglophone Five-Eyes countries) appears to be learning from China how to control populations and eradicate dissent. This is how the global machine conglomerate works. Any self-respecting anarchist does not want to live in a police state that has a prohibition against long-distance bicycle or motor bike riding. Patrick has also been reading Howard Zinn’s, The People Speak,

which details the horrendous struggles working men, women, indigenous, black and minority Americans have had over the centuries, since the Spanish first arrived. Be it industrial fascists, industrial communists, or a more contemporary, insidious merger of the two into an industrial state-corporate nexus, we people will need to fight against the next wave of totalitarianism. Being in China is making us realise just what is at stake, and reading Zinn reminds us that freedom doesn’t just happen, it has to be worked for and reworked for. One of the books Meg picked up in Laos is Elie Wiesel’s Night, another timely reminder of what happens when a country gives in to authoritarianism.

And it’s not just the Five Eyes countries. The way in which the German and Israeli governments are currently conducting themselves today, they would do well to turn back to books like these.

For lunch we found a restaurant and once again navigated the menu without a clue for the language.

We thought we’d conveyed, “Chinese vegetables and rice for three” quite well, and we received a beautiful leek and pork dish and some rice. OK, fair enough. We were grateful. Then another dish arrived. Egg and tomato – delicious, but too much. And then another, Chinese vegetables, and then another, which we couldn’t recognise. We protested, but the staff had no idea what we were saying.

It was all bloody delicious although enough for six people. After we had eaten all we could, we cleared out our ‘tea chest’ container and piled in the leftovers, which we had on the train, later in the day.

We travelled north, having no idea how we were going to get to India from China, but just pushing forward in the general direction, avoiding Myanmar. We’ve heard of the rapid industrialisation of China over the past three decades, and now we were experiencing it. The scale of development here is mind blowing. So far we have seen high intensity cities and agricultural zones, with only little glimpses of wilder spaces when the fast trains have come up from the extensive tunnels, briefly for air.

We got off the train in Kunming,

went through a series of security checks and scans to leave the station,

and popped out into a city of 8 million people.

As we travel north it is gradually getting cooler. Meg managed to set up a Chinese pay app and so we could order DiDi cars by copying in the addresses of where we are and where we need to go. While we waited for one to collect us, we bought some fruit from a lovely lady at a street stall outside the station. In this photo, Meg is saying no to a plastic bag, something we find ourselves saying many times a day.

We became aware of an intense police presence outside the station. The lady with the fruit stall and other stall holders were moved on by police screaming orders at them through a megaphone. Guards in mobile towers patrolled the station with machine guns,

and everywhere we turned there were CCTV cameras watching and recording. We travelled through the extremely lit CBD of Kunming,

across the city to the cheapest accommodation we could find online. It was hot inside.

We remembered the images of Chinese people during Covid, screaming from the balconies of their apartments to be let out, and we sensed what these inhumane lockdowns must have been like for people here. We were grateful we could come and go as we pleased, although having arrived and walked up 14 flights of stairs we weren’t going anywhere, we were well past ready for bed. We’d eaten the lunch leftovers in the late afternoon, and we still had some steamed sweet potato we’d bought earlier in the day. So we ate those, put on a load of washing,

took a shower, and went to bed in a sauna of an apartment with wet towels covering us. It was coolish outside, but these apartment buildings are heat banks. The motorway the apartment towers were built beside finally quietened late in the night, and we awoke to rain, coolness in the streets, and a Chinese tea set.

Just near to the apartment we found a friendly little restaurant. We ordered just two bowls this time,

and shared them between us as we are learning the portions here are often very generous. This delicious noodle soup breakfast cost just AU$4, and we were invited to keep refilling our bowls at no extra expense. It was at this meal we quite suddenly fell in love with China. Despite the unpleasant surveillance state and the attempt of Maoists in the twentieth century to eradicate the past, China still holds its deep cultural roots dear. Its soul is still intact, as are the souls of many of the people we are meeting.

Every meal we’ve eaten in this country has been outstanding. This lovely fella approached us after breakfast and asked whether we needed anything.

Steve has been learning English for several years and we shared some lovely moments together outside the restaurant. Our endorphins were tripping after our warm, albeit brief exchange. We DiDi’d back across the city to Kunming Station, noticing the old and new of China intersecting in many places.

Mobile phone towers proliferated the motorways,

and millions of rusting solar hot water systems sat upon apartment rooftops alongside their associated stainless steel header tanks.

We bought some more fruit at the station and went through several thresholds again to check in,

having to line up and scan our passports (the locals had their Digital Identity cards scanned) twice in the space of seven minutes. We witnessed one man being sent back because of a problem with his ID card. He was distraught.

The volume and scale of everything in China is incredible. The train we booked to Xichang was 16 carriages long. We were in carriage 15, which took about a half kilometre fast walk down the platform to board on time. Many had to work hard to get to carriage 16 before the train left.

Once again we settled in with our various books, audiobooks and writing projects, and travelled under ground for much of the trip. Each time the train resurfaced we were met with intense cultivation,

even on the drier, rocky hilltops perennial tree crops were growing.

These fast trains travel at around 165km/hr. We arrived at Xichang Station in the afternoon,

and DiDi’d into town.

We were dropped off in this leafy street,

where we had booked this comfortable room, the cheapest we could find in the city at AU$60 a night.

We dropped our bags and went exploring, finding we were in a neighbourhood full of sleepy fruit merchants.

Woody was thrilled. Many people work hard in China, and they take sleep whenever they can get it.

The family run hotel we were staying in was again a friendly place, and in the evening the team helped us to navigate our way to get to the opening of the Torch Festival, which was occurring in the city.

The Torch Festival is an annual traditional festival of the Yi minority. Fire is the symbol of the Yi people’s pursuit of light, and is believed to have the ability to drive away insects and pests, and protect the growth of crops.

Whatever went on there, we’d missed it by the time we arrived, but nonetheless soaked up the afterglow.

There was such a buzz about the place,

and many people asked us to take pictures with them. We obliged and had a lot of fun taking pictures with strangers. We woke the next day to this rather prosaic but nonetheless interesting view from our room window.

By mid morning we farewelled our happy hosts,

walked back to the street stall holders to stock up on fruit that didn’t require a knife,

admired the chickens and the wonderful characters selling produce on the street,

and spoke English with the brothers (the one-child policy ended in 2016),

while we waited for our fast ride,

with a Didi driver wanting to be a F1 driver, back to Xichang Station.

Agricultural crops are grown right up to and throughout the cities, and even right up to the train tracks at Xichang Station. We are continually amazed by the intensity of production.

There is something very special about this country – the people, the food, the buzz on the streets. And one of the things that enamours us most is the clean air. While we’re not green tech enthusiasts and we know e-cars are just another industrial revolution that will continue to mine, deplete and poison the world, the lack of motor exhaust pollution makes being in this heavily populated country an absolute pleasure.

After another four hours on a fast train we arrived at the city of Chengdu in Sichuan province, the gateway to Tibet.

Our first hotel in this city, again the cheapest we could find at AU$60 a night, was the filthiest we’ve stayed in for our entire trip. It was situated beside a large teaching hospital,

and in the morning we woke to a street-wide blackout that went on until after we’d left for some damn-delicious dumplings for breakfast.

Meg did some more research and found us another hotel room. It is the fanciest we’ve stayed in on our trip so far, but for the same price as the previous night. We’ve been spoilt outside Australia, being able to get goodly rooms for between $15-$40 a night throughout southeast Asia. We know back in Australia the same rooms would all be over $120, which is why we travelled the Australian leg with a tent and sleeping bags.

While few people speak English in China, every second person wears a t-shirt with English words written on them, or printed on walls are philosophical phrases or advice in English, sometimes making sense, but often lost in translation.

We’ve also noticed the absence of street dogs in these modern cities, which is very different by comparison with the rest of Asia, though people’s pet dogs do hang out on the street, occasionally.

We did, however, in the last days of our time in China when we stayed in a more remote village, come across street dogs, this one suffering terribly from mange.

We love the bike culture in the cities. People don’t as much own them but hire them, and it is interesting that even though the state is obviously very controlling here in certain ways, it is not stupidly paternalistic like Australia when it comes to things like helmet wearing. Personal accountability and personal choice, when it comes to safety, is obviously left for grown adults to decide. We’re impressed by this.

In Chengdu, Woody hired a bike and for the two kilometres or so he rode it, cost a mere AU 20 cents. We’re also impressed by this.

While we have found the excessive camera surveillance here disconcerting,

we have also found people largely ignore the militaristic over-shadowing of their lives. People break rules here, for example they smoke in non-smoking areas. While we personally don’t like having to smoke passively, we do like the spirit of the rule breaking.

Meg hasn’t been able to work at all in China as they ban Zuckerberg and Google products. They also ban Substack. We can understand the Chinese government banning the US spy corporations Facebook and Google, as these bastard companies are censorship dogs that collude with the US government, eroding democratic diversity and political dissident reach, and censored thousands of vaccine injured people trying to tell their stories. So, we’re glad these companies are being punished by China. But Substack? Really? This important independent publishing platform is where all the independent academics, artists, thinkers and journalists who still have their integrity in tact gather their writings, and it enables readers to transition away from the court journalism of legacy media and the predators at Facebook and Google.

A former student of the School of Applied Neopeasantry, Sunshine Yang, who we recorded a podcast with earlier in the year, told us back then, “People do whatever they like in China, they just don’t criticise the government.” We’re publishing this post before we have left the country. We hope the feedback here is taken in the right spirit.

Examples of beautiful acts of anarchy amongst all the 2030 smart city correctness being grown here in China, are the many marvellous gleaners that, like the street stall folk, bring a poetic to otherwise homogenised and boring modern streets.

The regular traffic too has a beauty in its anarchy and wildness of flow. Cyclists and scooters dart every which way and even against the traffic, bringing a feralty to the streets. Jay-walking too! We’re glad we’re not driving in Chinese cities, being a pedestrian is a wild ride enough. While there are obvious strictures on peoples’ lives here, in all the cities we have visited we haven’t seen anyone homeless, drug or alcohol affected, and people are able to raise money in novel, autonomous ways in public. This family (below) is attempting to raise money for an expensive treatment for their sick child. We don’t know enough about the healthcare system here to adequately comment, but obviously not everything is covered by a universal healthcare system, which you’d think by being in a communist country would exist. Cuba is an excellent example of medicine-for-the-people, but perhaps China has followed the toxic US model of medicine-for-Pharma-profits. We don’t know. The reason we know a little of these people’s sad story is we downloaded an app that converts photographs of Chinese text into English.

Sunshine, from afar (she is travelling in West Africa currently), and a group of lovely Tibetan women we met on the street,

all gave us goodly information about how we might travel to Tibet and enter India from there. We have read that foreigners need to apply for a special visa, which takes about 20 days and we need to go with a registered tour company. The problem we are having is we only have a two week visa for China, and we also don’t want to return to Chengdu after Tibet. The stipulation is we must be accompanied the whole time by the tour guide company. But we need to travel on from Tibet to India. While we are enjoying Chengdu city, and admiring the traces of ecological culture within this now very high-tech country,

and laughing at the hubris of the greenwash,

and playing music together,

and eating consistently wonderful meals on the streets,

and coming face to face with some confronting things –

this little one, with a AU$2000 price tag, was scratching on the glass, desperately trying to get out, if only they were able to play together –

we are at the same time cobbling together plans for the next leg of our journey.

Sunshine found for us the name of a Tibet tour guide called Harry. She has been going out of her way to help us. She told us Harry could get a visa in five working days. We contacted him, excitedly, and shared our travel wishes and our time frame, and he got back to us confirming he indeed could get us visas to travel on the world’s highest altitude and highly affordable railway for 35 hours to Lhasa in Tibet, and from there he would escort us to the Nepalese border. Yay! We were so excited when we heard the news. The train ticket was only around $100 each for all that way. The Ghan railway in Australia, by comparison, is thousands of dollars. Half an hour later, however, Harry contacted us saying that the most significant festival in the year is taking place now in Lhasa, called the Shoton (or yoghurt banquet) Festival, and there is no way the officials will be able to supply a visa in such a short time. Oh no! We are so disappointed. How are we going to get to India from here?

We have come so close to getting through to India overland or by boat, sans a short flight from Darwin to Timor-Leste. All the other borders where India meets Chinese territory are not open, and they are contested, heavily militarised zones. The two countries have longstanding disputes with each other, although relations may be warming as they are both in the original BRICS currency challenge to the dominance of the US dollar and western financial institutions.

We are looking into flying from Chengdu to Kathmandu, but the flooding and land slides covering roads to the south of Kathmandu towards the Indian border is making that option look dubious, too. So we are spending a few more days in China, in a village outside Chengdu, called Lujing, which is a little wilder,

where the locals brew booze from their rice,

and dry their own corn,

and enjoy their street life,

while we gather our thoughts, do more research, and see how else we might get to India. We are so close, yet still so far away.

Thank you for following our journeys, Dear Reader. When we leave China in the next few days we will be two months into our four month journey. We have travelled such a long way from our beloved home and community in Djaara Mother Country, thank you for coming along with us. Signing off for now, hoping you are well, eating nourishing food and breathing clean air, whatever part of the world you call home.

All the little and big offerings of Thailand

Jul 25, 2024 | appropriate technology, bicycles, biodiversity, ceremony & ritual, climate change, dogs, economics, food culture, Industry science, medicinal plants, pollution, street food, subsistence economy, travel | 31 comments

 

We’ve been pollution-sick again, which has been inhibiting our enjoyment of this rich and colourful country.

Patrick and Woody have had it worse than Meg, but each of us have have struggled in our own way. Blackwood is also experiencing homesickness: “I miss our food, I miss my ball on a string, and I miss my friends at Forest & Free.”

When booking transport over the past 12 days in Thailand, we have found it best to stick with people on the ground and avoid the national railway or bus websites. While digital, cross-language communications might improve over time, it currently doesn’t match pointing, grunting, nodding, shaking, laughing or any combination of body gesturing to get on the right train, ending with a khawp khun kha/p!

What we’ve also found difficult about being in this beautiful country, apart from our own participation in what we dislike most about global tourism, is the homogenisation process that is creeping in everywhere there is development. An example of this is the Safety First signage that proliferates through the country.

We think the ‘Safety third’ ethos of the early Burning Man festivals is wiser. Without a little daily danger or risk, our bodies switch off, they lose an alertness, which we think pre-disposes people to becoming accident-prone and even compliant. We’d prefer to live in a world where sharp metal lugs stick out below bus seats,

and rusty metal blades come out of the footpaths,

and a billion or so unleashed dogs inherit the streets by day and night, than live under the cult of safetyism. We’ve loved beholding the autonomous culturing of dogs in Thailand. No one fears them here. When we think of life back home, walking with Zero around Lake Daylesford, there is always one, if not five people who recoil with horror that our little scruffy is off a lead. Oh, Zero! you would love it here!

How western imperialism appears to work as a global-machine-conglomerate is to covet all the major issues of ‘the global village’ into a set of preordained arguments. These arguments are never framed by independent, bioregional, democratic, or indigenous thought – although there’s a fair bit of theatre in places like the UN and in universities that purport heterodox or alternative voices are heard – instead, they are created to serve large global markets, which always have a homogenising effect. That’s why this Thai motorway looks like it could be in South Melbourne, sans the signage.

Because the human world is now so advanced in preordained, market thinking, solving problems is difficult. Climate change has been a theory in the orbit of scientists since the 1930s and yet the machinations that reportedly drive climate change have only steadily worsened over 85 years. To make things worse there’s now a very large industry that’s grown out of ‘Climate’, a kind of Jevon’s Effect industry, making those who are financially welded to it hard to trust. Big money has a way with decision making that the empire is perennially blind to. This is why it is so hard to trust the expert class.

By contrast Monks here live with little and ask for their food, which encourages acts of generosity in the culture. They are trusted and loved.

When we crossed the border into Thailand in this weird little space shuttle of a van,

we came to realise that our fellow passengers were Malay dopenauts who’d come to the only country marijuana is legalised in southeast Asia. When they alighted, we too got out of the van and stepped into light rain falling in the little city of Hat Yai.

We changed currencies,

and found a family-run establishment to buy lunch.

Across the road from where we were to stay that night was a friendly little family-run garage.

By day they service motors. By night they serve beer and pork, and punters cook a ‘set’ or two on little drop-in table BBQs.

As we’ve travelled we’ve tuned our eyes to seek out local tree crop fruits that come with their own thick-skinned packaging,

and have sought out local snacks such as grilled banana,

which are sold wrapped in banana leaves.

And, as everywhere, we like to buy direct from growers’ markets.

In Thailand we delighted not just in the dogs that are left to dance on their own accord, but the plants too;

and in the technologies that quieten the streets and produce no exhaust;

and in the vegetables cultivated locally and sold proudly by growers;

and in the overhead lanterns that mark such a street a night market;

and in all the little,

and big places of ritual, offering and worship;

and in all the kind gestures we’ve witnessed, such as this lady bus conductor eyeing an elderly man who had no hope of reaching the bus stop in time, request to the driver to stop, then urge him to back up, before helping the oldtimer up the steps and into a seat.

The driver was not in the least bit annoyed by this delay in his proceedings.

It took us a few goes to leave Hat Yai. We’d booked our tickets online, and so we thought this was our train,

but it was two days early according to the computations of our tickets. We managed to get on one later that night,

which took us to Surat Thani. We arrived just after midnight in a bit of a blur,

and were thankful for another kind lady, who waited up and let us into our tiny room.

While in Surat Thani we did some day tripping,

We took a local bus, then a truck,

to a market, where we ate Shrimp Pad Thai,

which came in this beautiful little leaf bowl,

and bought bananas with sticky rice.

Later in the day we went in search of a nearby agricultural cooperative, only to find the gates shut and no one around.

We reacquainted ourselves with an interesting weed on the walk there. Mimosa pudica, which we were first shown back in Timor Leste by Sebas, who called it, Shy Maria, is a herb that responds dramatically to being touched, going from upright to prostrate at the slightest feel.

Mimosa pudica is not the broad cut-leaf creeping plant that dominates around Meg’s feet in the photo above, but the small little fern-like leaf plant she is gently caressing. You might have to zoom in to see. We found this paper on the benefits of this sensitive medicinal plant, which states, “[i]t majorly possesses antibacterial, antivenom, antifertility, anticonvulsant, antidepressant, aphrodisiac, and various other pharmacological activities. The herb has been used traditionally for ages, in the treatment of urogenital disorders, piles, dysentery, sinus, and also applied on wounds.”

Plants offer us the possibility of rewiring our nervous systems,

and appropriate technologies offer the possibility of maintaining or recovering our health,

and humourous exchanges offer up the possibility of living with lightness.

Prachuap Khiri Khan is a town by the sea. We stopped there for a night, walked from the station via the food market,

dropped our bags, where we took this photo,

and walked down to the ocean.

Subsistence and local market fishing at the scale of these little boats will never dismantle biodiversity in the world’s oceans.

Only ‘feeding the world’ via the global-machine-conglomerate will do that, as Patrick’s teenage love, Karina, unpacked in her film Blue.

The next day we were back on the rails. An old rattler, hot, noisy and fumesy. We all started off well,

looking out to the rice fields and lyrical wirings,

but as the day continued, and it got hotter, and the dirty squalls coming into the carriage refused to bring comfort, we all started to fade.

By the time we reached the outskirts of Bangkok,

a city of 17 million people, we were fairly wasted.

Although, Meg still had a little spirit, and so we awarded her this watermelon for being the most resilient member of the band.

We’d booked online a little cheap room near the station,

but didn’t know it was right in the middle of a western tourist zone. You know: beer, pizza, cocktails, dope, all night revelling, maybe a dash of Pad Thai and Houellebecqian sleaze. The only picture we took here doesn’t really capture it, rather we were once again collecting photos of vines growing over powerlines.

Woody and Patrick pretty much slept for two days and nights. It was a low key anniversary of Patrick and Meg’s, and Zero’s 14th birthday. Happy birthday little fella! We miss you Zero. Thanks for loving him in your home Black Cockatoo!

The pollution in Bangkok was next level, and after we’d slept through it for a few days, we hightailed it out on another hot, old rattler.

This six hour ride was gruelling, especially for Patrick. It is the combination of heat and pollution that is so harsh for this fella who has spent most of his life in cool mountain fields and forests. Patrick hadn’t had asthma since he was in Hong Kong, 27 years earlier. In Bangkok and on this train he struggled to breathe,

and if he didn’t go to bed when we arrived at our hotel in Nakhon Ratchasima and do 4 rounds of Wim Hof breathing, he would have required a hospital ventilator. The breathing method opened up his air passages, which brought a few hours of peace and rest, before he started burning up. He then spent the next two nights and days in and out of fever. He fasted, drank water, dried his sheets over the oven-like balcony rail outside our room, and collapsed back into bed.

When we all surfaced from this time, which included having to change hotels for another night of convalescing, we walked straight out into a street festival the locals had put on to raise money for the monks.

In leaving Nakhon Ratchasima, we thought we’d mix up the transportation a little,

and jumped on a bus,

to Khon Kaen.

We loved the stick food on offer here, though trying to buy food naked has been a challenge in Thailand. Shopkeepers seem to need to close the deal by wrapping your purchase in plastic. It takes a watchfulness to arrest this urge.

The following day we headed to the Khon Kaen train station,

where we were met by this little remnant life force.

We waited to catch the last train we were going to board in Thailand,

and that afternoon travelled to Nong Khai on the border with Laos. Feeling better than we have for days, we had dinner with the locals who have a penchant for green chairs,

and red shrines.

To get into Laos the visa process is a little complicated. So we have had some days here to wait, and to look across the river to the path we have chosen to get to India. Myanmar is too dangerous to cross at this time, and there is no longer a ferry or boat option across the Bay of Bengal. Hence why we’re here, in the north of Thailand.

We’ve been on the road seven weeks now and we’ve just hit another sweet spot here in Nong Khai.

Wherever you are in the world, Dear Reader, we hope you too are experiencing a sweet spot in your life. Sending much love to you from us here, and thanks so much for following along on our journey.

The low life and rich cuisine of Malaysia, in a yellow t-shirt

Jul 13, 2024 | adventure, agriculture, alcohol, ceremony & ritual, children's learning, colonialism, Covid-19, culture, food culture, health, Industrial culture, lifemaking, politics, protest, raising boys, social warming, storytelling, street food, travel | 36 comments

 

At Batam, we left Indonesia.

We realised, too late, we could have caught a ferry directly to Malaysia. Instead we had booked ourselves to travel to three countries in one day.

We love travelling by sea. Give us a jetty, port or ferry terminal any day, before an airport.

Leaving Indonesia was as relaxed as arriving into the country, way back in West Timor. By 8am we were on our way to Singapore,

and by about 8.30am we finally finished off our crumbly stores of homemade roo and rabbit jerky.

By mid morning we were arriving in the old British colonial port of Singapore,

where we experienced a rather more uptight immigration system. Still, those who were supposed to be assessing our x-rayed luggage and bodies were instead scrolling on their screens or watching a movie on their phone, just like in Indonesia. We were to find the same laissez-faire attitude in Malaysia, later in the day.

We had hoped to connect with some permies in Singapore but the timing wasn’t to be, so we hightailed it from the south to the north of this micro-country, which we found to be fastidiously neat.

From the north of Singapore (about 30 minutes by car) we boarded a five minute train that took us to the Malaysian border.

We crossed the Strait of Johor,

into Malaysia, and were thrilled to find these homemade baked goods at the station.

In the third country for the day we boarded another train to go north, with our lunch of tea eggs and beef cake.

With the bureaucracy of borders behind us and our bellies full and nourished, we settled in for a gentle journey for the afternoon,

beholding what nation states do to their respective Mother Countries in order to participate in the global-pool-of-money-tragedy-of-the-commons routine.

In Malaysia, rubber and tin industries are in decline, but palm oil is in expansion. While habitat loss and species extinction are stories well associated with palm oil farming, in more recent years metastasis cancers have been linked to palmitic acid in those who consume it. This is potentially serious because palm oil is now found in close to 50% of the packaged products found in supermarkets. Think Nutella, for example, which is more than 50% palm oil and refined sugar.

When we arrived in Gemas that night, we were asked by an Indian-Malay tradesman staying in the same hotel why would we come to such a town.

“We like non-touristy places,” was Patrick’s reply. “We want to see how people live in towns that are not famous.”

Even though we were treated like tourists and overcharged when we stopped at a local food hall for dinner,

the meals we bought were delicious and highly affordable for we radical frugalists who live in a rich country, and whose nation’s wealth is also dependent on destroying the landbase. We are not shy in ‘fessing up to the fact that our travelling is predicated on the privilege of a currency made strong by mining, thus earth-wrecking. Thus too, the local fruit here was highly affordable, a little of which we bought for breakfast and lunch the next day.

We’re getting used to living on golden mangoes, and sleeping in cheap hotel beds.

We woke to rain and fog,

walked through the streets,

startled the local pigeons,

and arrived back at the station.

Seeking out small towns and avoiding big cities is our aim in Malaysia, in the bid to avoid taking in too much pollution. However, we are finding that Malaysia has much cleaner environments and air than Indonesia. We have loved the absence of drugs and alcohol in the two countries. It makes us reflect just how much pain comes with addiction to these things.

From sweet Gemas we boarded a train,

and relaxed into a rainy morning of travel and air conditioning. While Patrick has recovered from his malaise in Batam, Meg was feeling a tad under the weather.

By midday our train had arrived at the Terminal Bersepadu Selatan on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur, where we stood in line to book a bus to go yet further north.

No one gave Woody the memo about his politically indecent attire. At the time we were clueless that if you wear yellow clothes in Malaysia you could risk a fine of AUS$1600. In 2016, protestors wearing yellow clothing walked the streets of Kuala Lumpur calling for the resignation of then-Prime Minister Najib. Several years on, yellow clothes are still considered a symbol of protest and a threat to national security. We were completely oblivious to this next chapter of people control.

Across the world governments are incrementally stepping up efforts to censor, coerce and forbid people from exerting their basic human rights. A slow, year-by-year approach using mass propaganda tactics has seen human rights steadily dissolve across the world.

In 1951, Hannah Arendt, in her The Origins of Totalitarianism, wrote: “Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.” Does this sound like the past four years to you? Does this sound like watching, for example, ABC TV’s emergency porn propaganda during the Covid years?

Thankfully no one locked Woody away or fined him for wearing a yellow t-shirt. Coming from a family of protesters, the irony of being political disruptors even without knowing it wasn’t lost on us.

The bus we booked turned out to be filled with electric massage seats. Only none of them worked. This large coach headed off about an hour after the advertised time,

and on the way out of KL, we met glimpses of the city displaying modernist vertical gardens,

and archaic colourful temples.

The measure of a city’s soul does not concern the most elegant architecture, the most dazzling spectacles, or the most novel cafés and restaurants, but rather how the poorest members are living.

Our ‘first class massage coach’ embodied only the pretence of wealth. It was in fact the cheapest bus ticket money could buy, and it stopped several times over the course of the afternoon, to drop off passengers at unglamorous petrol stations,

taking us past thousands more hectares of palm oil monocultures,

and grand old hills and mountains,

many of which are being reduced to lime,

and cement products.

On the road we read about the 5 million year-old limestone hill being destroyed by a Malaysian cement company, and reflected on all the small projects back home where we’ve used cement, as well as all the many times we have found alternatives.

While the massage chairs were broken in the bus, and were generally fairly uncomfortable, at least one provided the right nest for rest for Magpie.

And while the rail systems in both Indonesia and Malaysia are reliable and enjoyable to travel on, we’ve found that if you are travelling by bus, always expect the unexpected. The driver dropped us off in Pekan Simpang, and not where our ticket stated.

We protested (must have been Woody’s reactionary yellow t-shirt that got us going), saying we booked a ticket to Taiping, the next town. The driver shrugged and rudely said, “You get a car.” Which is how we arrived here, at the Knight Alley Hotel in Taiping.

Woody and Patrick tucked Meg into bed and went exploring.

Taiping is known as the rainy town, but it was warm and dry, and the buildings fascinating.

There’s significant juxtaposition between wealth and poverty, arrogance and humility, imposition and makeshift spirit here.

Wherever the locals gather for meals is a sure bet there’s goodly food on offer. “I’ll take your picture, dad,” said Woody.

Woody and Patrick dined in one of the food halls in the main centre. It was bloody hot.

Chilli pan mee for Patrick, a glutton for punishment, and a fermented chicken bun for the boy.

We love the food here, and the endless trip hazards in the streets that keep us alert and watchful,

After our meals we tripped into a fruit store to buy some dinner for Meg. The fruit bat got to work, hand selecting golden mangoes for his mum.

On the way back to the hotel we found this beautiful little offering.

We were later told that the offering was most likely made to the spirit of a tree that once stood on this street corner. The beauty of this gesture reminded us of our own European animist tradition – to touch or knock on wood, to wake up the gods or spirits living there, to bring forth luck or safe passage. Traces of this tradition remain in us today, carried by grandmothers and uncles, and poets like Blake and Wordsworth, who once penned, “One impulse from a vernal wood/ May teach you more of man,/ Of moral evil and of good,/ Than all the sages can.”

Approximately 63% of the population of Malaysia practices Islam, 18% Buddhism, 8% Christianity, 6% Hinduism and 5% are other groups, which include animists, Confucianists, Taoists and Sikhs. To our minds, any spiritual practice that makes offerings to the spirits in trees that have been cut down, has our attention. Can we imagine if this was a major religious expression throughout the world? Oh, how our economic, political and cultural forms would radically change.

We left this lovely little non-tourist town, without experiencing the Taiping rain,

and were pleased we could travel the next leg by train.

It was a short trip, which included the practice of patience,

before we arrived in Butterworth, an industrial service town that powers Penang Island from the mainland.

We booked another $30 room high up in the clouds. We estimate we are spending around AUS $50 a day on this trip.

and while Meg did some office work to both fill back up the coffers and because she loves her meaningful work managing the Holmgren Design comms,

Patrick and Woody pursued their bourgeois lifestyle, and took a swim.

Woody is getting right into the spirit of this trip. When we first arrived in Dili he experienced significant culture shock. Now, several weeks on he is thriving.

In the late afternoon, we took a ferry across to Penang Island,

Woody practiced his photography,

Patrick too,

while Meg hung out with the bikies.

It was a short ride, and as none of us had eaten lunch, we stopped into this cosy shed for a snack.

The proprietor didn’t seemed that fazed by our late arrival.

While in Malaysia we’ve been dwelling on the phenomenon of the human blindspot. What have we been ignoring or are unable to see while we travel? The evidence now of scientific fraudulence and iatrogenocide in the Covid era is all around for anyone willing to investigate it. DNA contamination in the original mRNA shots is becoming a growing concern for scientists brave enough to study it, for example. We see it, hear and speak it. But it feels like the majority still prefer to actively unsee the lies, or defend them. Rather than sit in the sadness and horror of such masking (for what this means to human health and indeed civil rights), we’ve found it more important to ask, what are we averting our eyes from? What are we refusing to speak? What are we blocking our ears to?

It is the little things, the fledglings, the minutiae that inform this journey.

After we had a little moment with this chick, she hopped down from her perch and proceeded onto the road. We turned to see a man race over to her rescue, gather her up and return her to a safe place. After we’d photographed and admired the little bird, we’d turned away from her despite the obvious absence of a parent bird. The kindness of the rescuing man caused us to reflect on why we hadn’t done the same. In hindsight, it probably got down to touch. We were afraid of touching the chick, even us, confirmed terrain theorists. This event made us more aware of the greater caution we have to microbiology while travelling. While we are mostly eating street food and using tap water to clean our teeth, in the bid to train our microbiomes to co-evolve with our adventuring, we are at the same time applying the precautionary principle.

While in George Town on Penang Island, we met Tamanna and Adam, who are locals. Patrick and Meg teach on David Holmgren and Beck Lowe’s permaculture courses, both in-residence and online. Tamanna and Adam have booked in to the online PDC and Meg, in recent weeks, established a goodly email rapport with Tammana about the course. One thing led to another, which in turn led to us sharing an evening together. Adam led us to a lively street of food.

Where we were thrilled for his local knowledge.

He ordered many little tasting plates,

and the flavours were divine.

“Dinner is on us,” said Adam. We agreed with the condition we repay the generosity back in Australia. During this meal, Patrick was escorted to another realm,

into a nirvana of flavours and pleasure sticks.

We had such a special night with these two, reminding us how more enriching it is to be with locals of a place, who equally love simple and rich food culture.

The next day we headed north again,

catching a commuter train to the border,

where we had a few hours to reflect on our brief sojourn through the heart of Malaysia,

and where we beheld the switch from palm oil to rice agricultures,

and caught up with some sleep. Could someone please tape that mouth shut!

Then, before the day had begun to buzz, we were off the train,

and into a local initiative that takes people across the border in vans.

We lined up,

and were transported to the Thai border centre, where we went through immigration and customs without bother or money.

From there, we boarded a space ship to transport us to the next leg of our adventure…