Underthecurrent

Bring something to stop you from sh*tting.  Subsection (b): know when to use it.

Someday, most likely through some accidental water consumption, after visiting enough places there will be uncontrollable bowel situations like nothing previously experienced.  Assuming the cause is a bacterial infection, this will likely go on for several days with incredible regularity.  With luck, this will happen in a place with a pleasant and private commode and not many activities planned.  If you have been a bad person in a past life perhaps this will happen on a long haul bus or during an economy class flight.

Some gap year child who has been to three places and spent most of the time killing any bacteria in water they are drinking with moonshine and vodka will tell you that local pharmacies will always be able to sort this out.

A random selection of international pharmacies confirms (a) no, in many places it’s common for basic stock to run out and (b) you may be given a mix of wild and wacky pills including random antibiotics that you definitely should not take in your current sad state.  The pills you should have are not a cure, your body has to do that and minimal interference is best, but they are the magic bullet in situations where social standards suggest spontaneous defecation would be inappropriate.

About nine months ago, give or take, alone for two days in Colombo.

In many ways, it was my kind of city – a bit of a jumble, relatively safe and full of little places waiting to be found out.  It’s the sort of place that the tidy thumb of globalization hasn’t pressed too hard on yet.  Although I was so obviously foreign in the neighborhoods I walked through, no one really bothered me (other than always hopeful taxi drivers, hoping that I would give up my love of walking through cities).

The best things were away – up an uninspired escalator in a confusing mall, down a nondescript alley, waiting in a strip mall.  Circling the same road three or four times trying to pick the shop front for something I’d heard about.  Behind walls and gates were colonial buildings, houses of worship and sometimes gardens.

The streets and hotels on the news are familiar.

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It’s common to read things about how travel teaches you about the goodness in people.  Fair enough.  It’s true that if you go into the world you will, generally, be surprised at the kindness.  It is comforting to see that for all the differences most of us want and value some of the same things.  But history, recent and distant, is generally brutal.  People may be, maybe, inherently good but humanity is really probably not.  Go far enough, listen enough, and it is hard to avoid this conclusion.

The stories on the news become more vividly imaginable because they happen in places that are no longer unfamiliar.

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After a long overnight trip, the guest house in Cinnamon Gardens has cold white linens and an ample concrete shower block.  After a rest, it’s time to make this day.  The old streets around here have colonial buildings and tall, leafy shade trees.  This gives way to commercial roads with wild traffic and variable sidewalks.

Eventually, there is incredibly spicy chicken with daal and rice and air conditioning.  There are complex Hindu and Buddhist temples to try and absorb, perfect single cups of tea to drink and new ayurvedic products in the pharmacies to consider.  In the evening, the largest rat imaginable will peer out from the bathroom and a very apologetic guesthouse manager will bring two other men for a probable rat assassination.  There are crashing sounds, it is better not to ask.

The days in Colombo, probably less than a week in total, are happy ones.  This is a place in the world with so much to find for those who will look; may it remain open to the world and the world open to it.

This time last year I was laid up on the West Coast in Central America with what was probably low-grade dengue fever.  It was too far and too complicated to get a blood test, and basic dengue has no magic treatment anyways, just comfort and hydration until the weakness starts to fade.  A few months later, LG would contract a far more serious round and end up sweating, shaking and hallucinating for two days in Northern Spain.

We made our way down the coast wave hunting after the season finally ended on the other side, scouting beaches on maps, powered by instant noodle provisions and that haunting Nicky Jam melody from ‘X’ that would call to us all over the world for months after.

Along the way, the tourists ran out.  In most of the world it seems most people are still skipping from specific place to specific place.  If you stick to the main roads, the same people will show up again and again in different towns, almost like everyone is secretly on the same trip.  In the must-see places, it seems like everyone speaks a bit of English and everything is easy.  Transportation is fairly reliable and there is always pizza.

Leave that road and days will pass without seeing anyone who is obviously foreign.  This happened, not by any design, in many places.  Sometimes, after long periods off the path we would accidentally wander back on it (usually at some UNESCO site, or proximate to a UNESCO site, leading to a joke that a great name for a child would be UNESCO because they would be incredibly popular regardless of attributes).  Seeing a lot of other foreign people was a bit of a shock.  Where did they come from? Where were they going? Was there some secret handbook handed out going through customs that we never collected that would have pointed us to the Right Places?

I’m not a travel purist.  There are great places that everyone goes because they are great.  There are also places that become sort of legendary travel vortexes, not necessarily great unto themselves but where a kind of travel culture converges and finds hosts willing to tolerate a bit of Babylon.  Then there are the ordinary places and the hidden gems that haven’t mastered, or been mastered by, capitalism.  All of these are satisfying in their own ways.

The place where my joints were temporarily swelling has become famous this year.  I refuse to write about it in detail even now, for months after it was a secret whispered only to those we really liked.  Where was the best place you went so far?  Let me tell you, and you must go now, we’d say.  No one goes there.  Best spot in the whole country.

A couple of days with the aircon, a generous shower and English cable TV, all of which we had been without for the five weeks before, helped.

The reward? A perfect day in the ocean, the kind where you burn no matter the heavy zinc sunscreen because you just can’t refuse this limited time gift from the universe.

Then it was time to keep moving.

*

Writing too much while it was happening felt wrong (and was also extremely difficult, as long trips tend to involve a lot of complicate logistics that are best not done too far in advance and, also, it’s best to actually enjoy the trip while it happens), there was too much to digest, not enough frame of reference.  The story was making itself.  Now, though, the worry is losing the detail to time, and a decision has to be made how to preserve the stories and impressions.

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As of next week, this has been going (off and) on for ten years.  Awhile back, I tried to scan my memory for whatever the address at Diaryland would have been, maybe the first incarnation.  That was probably twenty years, and a million thoughts, ago now.  Probably better lost to an archive somewhere.