A Location, A Menu, An Adventure, An Image

You can tell summer is here, because there’s moths whapping across the iridescent bulbs in the bookstore, and posters stuck with Blue-Tac are curling from the walls and by 10am its already too hot to be still in bed on a lazy Saturday morning like today’s. But here at Hyde Park, where I have come to type the afternoon away, the sun is bright but the wind is still strong and the air is filled with dragonflies and with falling leaves and with whole swarms of dancing blossom, buds of which are dropping onto my laptop and getting stuck between the keys. I am seated on my rainbow rug, alone, with a makeshift picnic consisting of White Rabbit milk and rice paper lollies (from China), SOTO cuttlefish flavoured snacks (from Malaysia) and a Berri 2.4L Family Pack container of Apple Juice (from Australia). The crows caw in crescendos, ducks preen, Italian men gather in brimmed hats, glittering ribbon hangs from the twigs of trees, remnants of a long faded park-based celebration. A lone, dumpy woman sits still, slumped slightly forward, on a bench nearby, staring off blankly across the park, white, knobbly legs poking out from a pale blue skirt like broken pegs. Groups of rosellas, swirling oaks, a wedding limousine, a girl’s laughter. The White Rabbits are not anywhere as good as I remember them to be.

Last weekend I cooked a dinner party for some people and although I had some valuable assistance from a few key individuals it was, I think, the first time I could honestly say that I had done that, of my own accord, in my lifetime. It was all Middle Eastern food, as will be the successive dinner parties or picnics which are planned to occur on a fortnightly schedule from this day forward, and to which you might be invited if you are both within proximity and particularly strategic in your dealings with me (Let us assume, for the purposes of this blog, that the food will be at least, somewhat, good). The previous menu, which all but eight of you missed out on, read as follows:

Mezze
Warm Lebanese pita bread
Olive Oil
Za’atar
Fresh Hummus (made from hand-peeled chickpeas, kids)
Muhammara (Red pepper and walnut paste)
Baba Ghanoush
Eggah (Parsley omelette)

Mains
Moghrabieh (Lebanese giant couscous) with chicken and lemon zest
Stuffed red peppers & stuffed tomatoes

To Drink
Chilled Egyptian Karkadai (hibiscus infusion drink)

In summary, I have decided that cooking can be rather fun and isn’t all that stressful after all.

In other recent news:
I have, in the course of three weeks, twice had to foil attempts to steal from the bookstore. The first time we were tipped off by a nearby store owner who suspected that the woman had just stolen some cards and maybe a tshirt from him and that she was now in our store, which she was. I watched as she tucked a number of books into her bag and then made sure than she realised that I was watching until she sheepishly, and not altogether stealthfully, removed the stack from her bag (3 x Jodie Picoult novels and 1 x WA lesbian magazine) and tried to balance them on a nearby display shelf as if nothing had ever happened. She then bought two other books and mumbled something non-sensical which I presume was aimed to throw me off making any comment about her poor attempt at crime. The other time was last weekend, when I was again tipped off, this time by the kebab store guys from next door, that a girl had just stuffed a calendar in her bag and walked a little way down the street. My reponse this time was somewhat more direct as I approached from behind and took the calendar from her bag before threatening, rather hollowly, to contact the cops. Her excuse went something like “Oh some girl just GAVE it to me to put in my bag. I dunno WHO she was! She just said ‘Here, put this in your bag and walk away’. Yeah, I don’t know what that was about”. And really there’s not all that much you can say to an alibi as strong as that.

I leave you now with a Clip-Out-And-Keep souvenir photo of me which I will take right now, with my computer, of me sitting in the park in my traditional Colombian hat. Good day.

Time capsule letter

Below is a letter I wrote to myself while I was on the Seminar Camp in Israel in August last year. The idea was for our letters to be sent to us one year or so later, which they were, and I received mine this week. Thankyou Eva, for remembering to send it out.

------------------

3 August 2005, Bet Govrin, Israel, 5.00pm

Dear Chris,
Last night there were jackals. Of course there has often, or always, been jackals before last night, every night, for a number of millennia anyway. But last night there began to be jackals for me. Jackals entered my mind, my sphere, with a distant hoot, heard above the growling cello coming through my headphones. Suddenly there I was, contemplating jackals. Contemplating my proximity to jackals. There were jackals last night.

About a week ago it had been the same thing with warplanes. Their roar filled the sky, an echoing boom over the kibbutz. Before that it had been Helene, one of the most gorgeous people who ever did live. Before that there was Eva, whose presence filled everywhere with light.

This camp has also bought new things from within. I know, now, some of my most significant and most dangerous flaws. Before, I might have guessed at them or seen them in miniature, but I may not have held them in my palms like plump, round plums. There they sit now, wet and dark, firm and promising, one in each palm, ready for me to decide what to do with them now. I cannot leave them behind: in many ways they are attached to my skin, they are attached deeper. I must carry them, learn to carry them, to hold them well. I must cherish and admire them, like terrible monsters in a nearby cage. I must learn and understand the howl of a jackal.

I wonder what the next six months will bring, what the next year will bring, what new things will grow from within me or approach from outside? What will a month of focused attention in Cairo do or bring? A month or two of desert solitude? A few weeks in Palestine? Will my heart and head jumble further, get dry, soak and expand, explode completely? Already (it’s been less than a month) I feel better, stronger, more focused, less bored – will this trend continue or will I sink back into post camp ennui? Hopeless sadness? Self doubt?

This night is advancing, we approach the close of camp. We will be spread, soon, smeared again in the CISV Diaspora. The group, unbreakable; broken. And the warplanes will roar and the jackals will howl.

And those I love and those I can no longer live without, they will be in every song, they will be in every wish. They will be the birds and the drums and the gorgeous masts of old ships. Our love can, and our love always will, from this point forward, float on.

I hope you are well & happy & safe.

Chris.

News Feed

After over a month with no contact I return, loyal subscribers, to your bedsides and Electric Viewing Consoles™, humble with apology and laden with tawdry gossip. Since returning home from the cloud-crested mountainsides of Colombia I have been gradually resettling, a process which took significantly longer than I think anyone could have anticipated, but which seems to have advanced to a stage with which I can feel comfortable and ready to call life "on track," once again.

I have recently added a StatCounter to this blog which lets me to see quite a lot of information about every single one of you who comes to read about me and I am happy to report recent visitors from places such as Lithuania, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Japan and Guatemala. I can see that due to the second last sentence of my last post I have attracted hits from charming North American pedophiles Googling "adorable pre-teens," and that, mysteriously, I have developed a fanbase in Canberra, a city in which I know no one but produces more hits than any other city in the world including Perth. I do now realise, however, just how much people actually look at this thing, which is more than I ever expected, and so in order to satisfy the clearly insatiable appetite of my legions of world-wide fans I present, just quickly, a digest version of news from the last few weeks of my life:

1. I am now the owner of a new laptop which means that, in theory, blog entries should be much more frequent as I am able to compose updates from basically anywhere - the beach, buses, strip clubs, hospital beds and so on. I would like to take this opportunity to publicly thank the small Chinese child who was employed to assemble my machine out of its composite parts, in poor conditions, for very little pay. You are whole, you are much-loved.
2. A lot of my days are spent fiddling around on this new computer in the snug and lovely environs of a small alleyway cafe in the city called Tiger Tiger which was apparently not named after the Mandarin phrase "Horse horse tiger tiger" (ma ma hu hu) which means "so so" or "comme ci comme ça"; nor was it named after the line in the William Blake poem "Tiger" (Tiger, tiger, burning bright / In the forests of the night); although it was, however, named from an artpiece in the WA State Art Gallery which was in turn named for the Blake poem, according to reasoned speculation. The cafe has lovely wooden tables and communal couches and a candy jar and staff who grin & joke and wireless internet & "special" hot chocolates with all sorts of surprises mixed in including, but not limited to, shredded coconut, cinnamon and sesame seeds. Anyway, I am here at this place a lot of the time, drinking such hot chocolates while the speakers play Dylan or Tim Buckley or Ryan Adams or Bon Jovi and the grey clouds spatter rain on the city streets.
3. Next week I am moving into a new house, away from the oversized parental home by the coast and into Northbridge, in a street scattered with the houses of friends and which runs into Hyde Park, which remains one of the most beautiful urban parks I have ever seen. I am moving in with two girls - Jess (who was formally known by me and select others as "Lil Cutie" until I swore I would stop calling her that if I moved in) and Laura (about whom I know not enough to give even a brief anecdote). The house is a terrace which is exactly opposite in layout to the next door house, and the girls have a cat who used to live next door until the owner killed its siblings and said it would have to die too unless someone could take it. Which Jess and Laura did, and for a while the cat was so confused when it came into the house because all the rooms were in reverse.
4. I am no longer "seeing anyone" and can guarantee that I won't be for some time.
5. Today I went for a ride by the river. Let me paint the picture. It's overcast, ok; theres a chilled wind and maybe a bit of drizzle, and my knuckles are bitten with cold. My bike sweeps around the river's edge, the water glinting a metallic brown blue, flat, calm. The trees are tipping down the cliffs on the edge of King's Park, dark and drooped and speckled with clusters of yellow acacia. The sky is rich with clouds, and its making the earth glow. There's black cormorants, proud and still, with wings cocked; there's pelicans; there's shelducks followed by furry ducklings the size of children's teacups. Theres a row of Australian flags pointing northwest and flicking in the winds, which makes the flagpoles squeak like hospital-bed wheels. I am riding through puddles. Two guys in beanies are playfighting on the grassy banks. A girl in tight ponytail stares at the water. There are streaks on sunlight emerging from behind cloud on the banks over Freeway South. The low cluster of city skyscrapers. Engine Oil. Cold sweat under my backpack. The smell, everywhere the smell, of wet leaves.
6. Last week I was in hospital for a double-ended visual inspection of my digestive system. If you get my meaning. I got to starve myself for 4o hours or so, then drink litres of a solution that tasted like sea-water. Then I got to see a televisual broadcast of the inside of my empty gut, which was mostly healthy except for a little mini polyp in there somewhere which got lanced by a little mini laser before it could grow into something sinister and nasty.
7. There are two courses I am applying for next year. One is a Masters in International Relations, specialising in Peace and Conflict Studies, at ANU in Canberra for one year and at the International Peace Research Institute in Oslo for six months. The other is a Masters in International Development at RMIT in Melbourne. There are certainly positives and negatives in both courses, so my policy right now is just to wait and hope that the universities help me by deciding for me...
8. I will soon be participating in a local project in conjunction with International 24 Hour Comics Day which will lead to my being locked in the WA Film and Television Institute for a full day, in which time I must personally complete a 24 page comic, which at first didn't seem too hard until I considered the idea of a page an hour, which assuming there's about 10 frames a page is a frame every six minutes without counting time for eating or thinking or planning or going to the toilet or whatever. Which: Ha!

That's the news, folks.
Now that that's out of the way, expect future posts to stick to descriptions of sunsets and trees with occasional ill-informed diatribes about social justice and complaints about the absolute static stillness of Perth and the aggression exhibited by its bored, mindless citizens when fueled on alcohol and even occasionally, actually, not.

It is about time to get out of this town, more or less for good.

Important Notice

Dear Passenger C. J. Stokes:

Due to "communication problems" currently being suffered by Bogota El Dorado International Airport your aeroplane to Buenos Aries, Argentina, which you'll no doubt recall was due for departure at the exciting hour of 6.55am has unfortunately been delayed. We also regret to inform you that the original delay of three hours has now been extended to five hours. We at Aerolineas Argentinas reserve the right (of course!) to extend this delay further, and request that in the ensuing waiting period you sit tight, smile, and ignore the headaches, oncoming diarrhoea, gut-squeltching and need to vomit that you have been experiencing for the past 14 hours, as caused (one assumes) by a combination of sunburn, inhaled peach-flavoured shisha smoke and the consumption of a bad patacon. Please feel free to make full use of our small box-like room with a paper sign reading Sala 10 sticky-taped to the window, in which there are not enough seats nor access to entertainment and which is currently filled to overflowing with frustrated Latin Americans. Please do not find a place to lie down on three empty seats in another section of the airport, because if you do we will be forced to wait until you have just fallen asleep then send a member of the airport police squad to wake you up, mutter something to you in Spanish, then proceed to write down on a sheet of paper your name, passport number, address, educational level, current occupation, birthdate and marital status. He will not give a full explanation of this process but will instead just smile and push on to the next possible-vagrant/terrorist who likes to lie down on seats. You may proceed, instead, to the fast food resturaunt named Presto, where we will be happy to serve you a complementary breakfast of dry eggs, dry arepas, coffee and a small thimble of orange juice which tastes similar to a mezcla of bodily fluids. Take the time to watch, on our wall-mounted televisions, back episodes of Colombia's hit television show "The X Factor... for kids!" where you can see adorable pre-teens croonin', krumpin' and caterwallin' while tiny niñas lay down the freshest booty-shakin' reggaeton dance styles.

We thankyou for your patience and look forward to having you on board Aerolineas Argentinas sometime in the next day or so.

Best,
The Smiley Crew at A.A.

Nights alone, nights in company

Cartegena de Indias. Wooden balconies, coloured stone walls with green flowering creepers, horses pulling carts with massive wheels. A carved cross above a window in the Palace of the Inquisition, the window from which heretics were denounced. The crashing surf just beyond the thick city walls. The smell of arepas with cheese, of fried chicken, of sweat and salt. Slow moving tourists, looking up, looking everywhere. The hollers of frizzy haired teens in school uniform. Limestone churches with huge wooden doors and tall ceilings and pews dotted with quiet people, sitting, crossing themselves. Carts of avocados and limes and eggplant. Heat.

In Plaza de Bolívar troops of dancers perform for thickets of tourists, twitching and shaking and jumping and wiggling to the rapid thump of large drums, their hips quaking and feet stomping, tall, beautiful, African Colombians, barefoot and dressed in bright primary colours, black muscles, big grins. They collect money in straw hats, and the spectators disperse around the square, past perfect fountains and the old men selling collared shirts and flavoured ice and cups of watermelon juice from square tubs on wooden wagons. It is late in the day, it is almost magic hour, but the humidity is still strong, and the outdoor cafes are filling up with groups of tourists from across Colombia, the Americas, the world.

Then it is night. In the Plaza de las Coches skinny whores wait in the yellow lights beneath the arches of the old city wall. "Hola, mi amor!" they whisper, holding slender white cigarettes between brown fingers and winding their waists subtlely to the reggaeton spilling from a tinny radio. There is not much work tonight - President Uribe is in town this monday and there has been a city wide ban on alcohol declared for the whole weekend, - so without nightclubs to comb through the girls are left to roam in the quiet squares. I stop and talk a while to a girl named Erica; a gentle mulatta with big eyes and a white skirt that flicks up in the breeze. She tells me about her life - she has been working this way for two months, she has a one year old daughter called Rosario whose father is gone, and they live with her parents in a distant bario. She is studying cosmetics by day and working by night. She is nineteen years old.

We sit astride wooden benches and watch the soldiers with their heavy black guns pacing the streets. We drink freshly squeezed lemonade through thin straws as blue clouds pass across the sad, bent moon. She says she wants to be alone with me in a hotel, that its a quiet night and so it will cost me just 30,000 pesos, which is just under $US13. I decline, but give her 40,000 pesos instead to walk with me a while through the old city. Her real name is not Erica, it is Marja. We walk, and we dodge the approaches of smug dealers offering 'crystal', and watch as the well dressed trickle in and out of a private wedding party as warm light and the rhythm of vallenato blasts over the wall and through the trees and into the shuttered streets. We converse in a combination of Spanish and charades and the night presses on and turns into morning and so we bid farewell beneath the illuminated face of the plaza clock. I give her another 5,000 for the moto-taxi home, to her parents, her daughter, her real life.

I make other friends too, while in Cartegena. While loitering under the huge street lantern in Plaza Santa Domingo I meet Camillo, my first bonafide Colombian hipster, who works in television and is due to act as third producer on the up-and-coming British film production of Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera, which I have just finished reading, and which is due to start filming soon around both Mompox and Cartegena. While on a boat cruise out to some nearby islands I meet Jenniffer, a hard-rock loving teenager with huge biker sunglasses, and her working-class Bogota family who have saved hard for a four day trip to the coast, by a bus trip of 24 hours each way, to see the ocean for the first time. She approaches me on board the boat and gives me a gift, a small white and brown shell she has found while beachcombing, after she sees me grinning sheepishly at her after thinking that she sees me taking sneak pictures of her, along with many other awkward looking tourists, from across the deck of the boat. It is a warm gesture, and a brave one, and the next day when I bump into her family under the statue of Bolívar's horse they invite me to walk with them, and eat with them, and visit the grey sand beach with them, where they spend hours lolling in the shallows in unfashionable clothing while Jenniffer sings, in makeshift English, all her favourite songs to me ('Stairway to Heaven', 'Enter Sandman', and so on) on the jagged rocks where crabs scuttle and waves smash.

On the bus to Santa Marta I meet a woman from Cali, her face thick with make-up, who interupts my reading to quiz me in heavily accented Castilian. She is in private security, she works around Cali with the obscenely rich and/or famous as a private bodyguard, in a company called SNIPER. At the moment she is in the employment of the owner of a large hacienda, with cows and coffee and sugar cane but, she assures me, without cocaine. She is one of ten (10) men and women employed to protect this one guy and his family from the threat of murder, kidnapping and theft. She says she loves her job, which only occasionally actually involves violence. She touches my leg a lot and giggles and asks if I have a girlfriend. Soon after I say that I do she cuts the conversation short and drifts into sleep and I go back to Garcia Marquez's autobiography. Past Barranquilla we skirt the coast line on a thin road cutting across the Ciénaga Grande, an expansive area of swamp land which laps upto the Caribbean Sea, and then there, in front of us, across the plains of cartoon cacti and brown marsh sits the purple mountains of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, rising sudden and triumphant out of the coast, steep and snowcapped.

Here I am, now, at the foot of this moutain range, my feet in the ocean and my skin burned, drinking juices made from fruits with names that sound like distant planets: Lulo, Cipote, Maracuyá, Guanabana. It is a small town, this Taganga, packed with backpackers from all over, but overwhelmingly from Israel, scores of them, hippified and with grins of mischief, their presence being so overwhelming that it leads juice stand proprietors and hotel owners to have a great number of their signs in Hebrew and Spanish, with English third if there at all. Small boats wedge in the dirty sand, five metre cacti pierce the sky along the hillsides, rainbow coloured fish live on in the smashed up former reef. It is from here that I depart: tomorrow to Bogotá, and then half a day later back home to Australia. I'm out of time. Oh Colombia, there's so much more, but I'm out of time.