Adam's Ambles

Under the Banyan Tree in Burma

I got onto World Hum.  Quite proud of this, really, as World Hum features some of the best travel writing talent out there.  I'm very pleased to have made the cut.

I was on my way home to visit my grandmother when she had a stroke.

Home. That’s a relative term when home refers to Burma. Because I’m half-Burmese, Burma—which I prefer to “Myanmar,” a name conjured up by the nation’s dictators—has always felt a little like home.

My relatives, even Burmese I’ve never met, treat me like a long lost son. I see elements of myself—my passivity, my faith, my taste for rich, oily hot food, and whatever capability I have for empathy—realized in this country and its culture. It’s a self-centered worldview, but travel can be narcissistic, especially in countries like Burma, which seems to naturally lend travelers a sense of self-discovery.

Yet sometimes, Burma feels more foreign than the rest of the world. Because I don’t speak Burmese. Because I put my feet up on a chair and inadvertently become the clumsy Westerner I really am. Because, geographically, home for me is really Maryland and the Chesapeake Bay. And maybe, most pertinently, because I have no real experience of the poverty and fear the average Burmese lives with daily.

From Lonely Planet's Travel Blog

I rock the US Campaign Trail:

An American's guide to America, for young Australians

What do Americans and Australians have in common? Reciprocal working-holiday visa rights, for a start. A phenomenon I write about here.

As an American, I want to thank former Australian Prime Minister John Howard for one of his last strokes of statecraft. The man was a trailblazer for backpacks the size of large children and furtive sexual encounters in filthy hostels. Howard had the American government grant its first ever working-holiday visas - to young Australians. I'm pretty happy about this turn of events. Maybe you'll all learn how to pronounce 'aluminum'.

Australians have been laden with a great responsibility: to learn about my often misunderstood country, and teach Americans about working holidays - the snooze button on the alarm clock of life. Remember, Australians pretty much invented the tradition, giving untold thousands of British school-leavers the chance to support the Australian fruit-picking industry and get badly sunburned in the process. For the record it can be a crap way to have a vacation. I remember standing in a kitchen in Brisbane with a mop, drenched in sweat, asking my pommy co-worker, 'So where are all the goddamned koalas?'

Melbourne's culture of cool

Taking it down under with an article on Melbourne:

Melbourne is Australia's second city. Yes, yes, you are, Melbourne, as much as you might deny that brash and beautiful Sydney dominates the world's image of Australia. You could say Melbourne is the Boston to Sydney's New York, or, more accurately, San Francisco to Sydney's Los Angeles; either way, one of the few flaws Melbournians will admit is the chip dug into their shoulders by the Sydney Opera House.

Let's take that analogy further, because Melbourne really is like Northern California with cricket and Australian accents. Imagine if a parallel universe ran between Sonoma and the Australian state of Victoria, and through said portal runs schizophrenic weather (Melbourne days can shift from sunny to thunderstorms in the space of a few hours), long expanses of sunbaked wine country, storm-tossed Pacific coastline and a young, beautiful population infused with the spirit of possibility, experimentation and hit-or-miss innovation.

Above all, both share a love of "lifestyle" in all its incarnations: eating, drinking, shopping and art. One great Aussie-Cali commonality: an obsession with organic ingredients, the fair-trade-y-ness of their coffee and the quality of said cups of joe — plus the soy milk.

Time to visit Burma again

Here's a December article on why people should start traveling in Burma again. It also, I believe, is one of the few travel stories in the mainstream media that addresses the actual history/culture of Burma.

It's time to go to Myanmar, also known as Burma. This might sound funny given the October crackdown on pro-democracy supporters, but based on talks with family and journalists in Southeast Asia, I believe most Burmese are eager to see tourists in their country again. Tourists bring money to the struggling economy and, more important, remind the Burmese their government isn't the sole determinant of reality in the world.

The Burmese have always wanted to share their country, because they don't like playing second fiddle to the rest of Southeast Asia. I know, because I'm half Burmese. I know the country where my roots run deep is forgotten by many travelers, but locally it is considered a cultural fountainhead, and was once the baddest boy on the block.

Haunted Maryland

So, I've been pretty shit about updating this blog, but partly that's because I've been selling a fair amount of my articles. And I realize I should start posting those articles here.  So without further ado: Travels through Haunted Maryland (wooooooooooooooooo):

A 22-year-old waiter at an elegant tidewater B&B at the tip of Maryland's Western Shore washes up on a sharp October night.

"I'm going home," he says to the late-shift dishwasher. "You'll be OK?"

There were no guests at the B&B that night, and she would be cleaning the house alone.

"Si," she says. "But no alone. Me. Y dos ninas."

The waiter pauses, remembering the stories. "Phantasmas?"

"Si."

"Scary phantasmas?"

"Oh no, no!" the dishwasher says, laughing. "Las ninas esta muy bonita."

I know that story because, four years ago, I was the waiter. Our dishwasher swore that two little girls haunted the upper floor of the building, and I've never doubted her. Because the house, like Maryland itself, is weighted with a creeping, skin-pricking age, the kind of years that well up in an old room and creep across your neck.

There are plenty of good reasons to visit Maryland in the fall. The changing leaves are fantastic, and the crisp air is invigorating. And in time for Halloween, Maryland's long dead - and those who believe in them - creep out of their holes.

Entering Australia, Ch. 3

We live in a former rope factory (on Rope Walk) just off of Sydney Road, although I am not in Sydney city. I am in Melbourne, Australia’s second city, by circumstance and not by choice as any Melbournian will tell you.

This is (or thinks of itself as) Australia’s cultural capital, seat of the arts and design and converted warehouse lofts. If Baltimore is a city defined by its port and lake trout takeaways, Melbourne’s distinctiveness lays in coffee shops and art galleries, its ideal citizens emerging from an austere, exposed-wall studio with a glass of red in the one hand, reaching for an espresso in the other. “What’s the difference between an Australian and a bowl of yogurt?” runs the old joke. “Leave the yogurt in the sun for a week and it’ll develop some culture.” Leave a Melbournian in the sun for a week and they’ll develop a samba-house fusion lounge.

To Melbourne’s credit this sense of cool isn’t encased in an armor of exclusivity; the city feels very West Coast, and particularly Northern California/Pacific Northwest in this regard. But maybe me, the born and bred East Coaster, can’t stand that much accessibility. When everyone’s cool, no one’s cool. Then again, I’ve never had much time for velvet ropes. At first glance Melbourne feels unlike Manhattan because there’s no line between who is in and who is out, but to expand on my above allusion, when everyone’s in, it kinda feels like everyone is out. Melbournian’s natural tendency to make a frenzied rush for the next trend — a city that moves from tapas to converted warehouses to chocolate bars (as in bars that serve chocolate) — makes non-participants in the race for cool feel a bit put out.

But there’s bits I love about this city. I can think of few towns of this size — about 3 million — so packed with immigrants. Sydney Road is one long stretch of Turkish restaurants, Italian (or as they’re called here, ‘Continental’) grocery stores, including one of the largest in the southern hemisphere (which, by the way, always feels like a cop out indicator. ‘Largest in the southern hemisphere,’ a phrase that gets thrown around a lot in Australia, sort of implicitly acknowledges ‘largest in the world’ tends to be above the equator). I’ve never seen Malayalam script outside of Kerala, but there it is, advertising dhosas and thalis at a clean little restaurant just across the corner of a cozily cool bar that serves $10 “’Roo and a glass of wine’” specials on Mondays.

Vietnamese, Japanese, Chinese, Thai, Greeks and Lebanese (the latter two living here in apparently some of the biggest concentrations outside of their home countries) round out the milieu. Thank goodness for the Arab Melbournians, who at least know how to brew a cup of coffee. The heavy Italian presence here means the capital of Victoria has been reared on espresso, and the nasty, thick bitter stuff is ubiquitous. It’s impossible to find a normal cup of Joe here; my girlfriend looked at me as if I were suggesting we casually eat babies when I asked for normal filter coffee in some chic Italian bakery.

Still, I’ll take the Italians and their espresso over the all-in-black hordes of Melbournian literati any day. And in fairness, this far up the Sydney Road I don’t have to worry much about running into the hip and hipster-ish — although ‘Villain,’ a skater-chic, graffiti-ed up boutique does sit next to Ereem ‘Muslim women’s fashion’ (which is just down the street from the Radical Socialists’ ‘Solidarity Salon’…).

Entering Australia, Ch. 2

First days here and my girl took me to Bell’s Beach and Lorne on the south Victorian coast.

“I always know I’m in Australia just by looking out the window,” she said. “It’s the most distinctive landscape I know.”

Australia’s continental isolation does make its scenery unique. On the way to the Great Ocean Road, a sort of Australian Highway 1 that runs from Victoria West to the state of South Australia and Adelaide, the land smoothes out into flat stretches of dark, mossy green and then re-establishes as lumpy mountains rolling all the way to the coast, their exposed red cliffs facing a teal-and-stormy blue southern ocean. The dagger-sharp rocks that litter the bays, the fleeced-out chilly beach towns and hard-core wet-suited surfers and the dark green forests put me in mind again of Northern California. Except here there are no redwoods, no pine trees or sequoias. The tall copses of weirdly skinny, paper-barked gum and gingko trees are unique to this land, as are the giant leaves of spiky cactus and dinosaur-era ferns clumping up in valleys with shallow estuaries fed by the sea.

We stop to watch surfers race through some of the biggest waves I’ve ever seen at Bells Beach, famous (to me, anyway) as the setting of the final scene of Point Break. I’ve been out to the Wild Coast of the Transkei in South Africa, supposedly one of the great surfing beaches of the world, but those green breakers under their green African hills don’t compare to the perfectly curved tubes and rips that form with almost monotonous predictability off of Bell’s.

I don’t know much about surfing, the entirety of my experience being a two-to-three foot wave I belly-boarded in Narrangesset, Rhode Island, but even I can tell the waves here are as perfectly sculpted as David. We stop in the cute and quiet (in winter, anyways) seaside town of Lorne and have decent fish and calamari and chips (although they charge us extra for ketchup and tartar sauce). The girl finishes with a muddy cappuccino. On the grass that runs up to the beach I stare in frigid amazement (it is windy and cold and wet in August; where am I?) at red-headed cockatoos and zebra-mottled magpies, birds utterly foreign to my eyes that must be as common and pest-y as sparrows and crows back home. I look east at the mountains that front the Great Ocean Road. A few years ago North Korean diplomats were picking up, dropping off and otherwise hiding 50 kg shipments of heroin in these wet hills.

The day after the girl takes me to visit her family in the Goulbourn Valley. Her father (to my father’s delight, like I had found as perfect a specimen of the Australian Outback as possible) is a retired farmer and sheep rancher. From their cozy, single-story brick home he takes me in a ‘ute’ (pickup truck) through a sheep-hearing station (a real sheep-shearing station!), past fields of ‘crop’ (which seems to be a catch-all for what we Americans would differentiate as wheat, barley, oats and hay) and metal fences, much of it neglected because, as he tells me, the area is flooded with ‘lifestyle’ farmers from the city buying out farmland they tend on the occasional weekend away.

We see some kangaroos hopping through the gum forests, although he assures me that there are days when whole herds of ‘roos thunder (do kangaroos thunder? What’s the appropriate adjective for describing the syncopated hop of hundreds of marsupials?) through the valley. We pick around the ruins of what was, during World War II, Australia’s largest prisoner-of-war camp, a facility that housed 8,000 Germans, Italians and Japanese, guarded by 5,000 sentries, all interred in (essentially) my girlfriend’s backyard.

I think of my home in Maryland and its proximity to Point Lookout, once one of the biggest POW camps of the Civil War, where Confederate prisoners were packed into a malarial swamp and guarded by free black soldiers, all a warning to the pro-secessionists who inhabited my corner of the state. The death toll among the Southerners, as you might guess, was enormous, and their ghosts are still supposed to roam the marshes of the Point Lookout peninsula.

In contrast, the prisoners in the Goulbourn Valley were apparently well-looked after (although some Japanese, honor-bound by Bushido, did attempt a mass break-out); many Germans and Italians decided this rich, open farmland was a better option than there bombed out homelands and stayed in Australia when the war ended. Near an old, concrete bunker, once a nest for a machine-gunner, now the same for swallows, is an iron cross-studded monument from German soldiers to their “gerfallen komraden.”

Back at the girl’s place I read the war-time diary of her grandfather, a veteran of Tobruk, which is tantalizing for all the details he leaves out, be it from fear of German capture or typical Australian dryness or both I’m not sure (he describes a retreat across the North African desert as “a hell of a time,” surely one of the great understatements of all time). A book by a popular Australian journalist-cum-historian slams Douglas Macarthur and the American military in general for inactivity in the Southwest Pacific theater, a characterization I imagine a lot of veterans of Bloody Ridge, the Coral Sea, the Ilu sandpit, Savo Island, Tulagi and Henderson Field might resent, but I bite my tongue — convincing the world Americans are heroes hasn’t done a lot lately for our self-image.

We have a ‘snag’ (a sausage, apparently) at the girl’s brother’s house, where I play with the kids and humiliate myself while trying to kick around an Australian League football. But hey — it’s all about making an impression on the family, and I am trying to be the good foreigner here. I am pretty un-athletic at the best of times, but put me up against Aussie Football, one of the roughest, least sensible sports in the world (it appears to basically be a game of non-stop punting, ‘fisting’ [i.e. punching, you sickos] and bouncing of a normal football), and the spectacle must have been mortifying to girl’s family. They were gracious with my incompetence though, inviting me to a real game in Melbourne despite the terrifying manner in which I debased their favored sport. My final stroke of humilation: when the girl’s seven-year old nephew arced a perfect, NFL-style spiral after I attempted a lame duck wobble version of the same pass. Sigh.

Burma, baited breath

Videos of the protests--100,000 in the streets of Rangoon--here.

Ominous military threats to crack down on the "Golden Revolution"--here.

Entering Australia

How long can you chase the ocean before it catches up with itself? How long can the night run away from the morning?

When you leave Virginia at 8 in the evening and arrive in Australia at 6 in the morning, over 24 hours and—two, three days?—later, after 17 hours alone over the trackless Pacific Ocean, a never-ending ripple of black under a black night sky, the answer to the above questions is: a long time. And yet, now, after all that, after three in-flight meals and five in-flight movies, here I am. Flying over the Australian continent, over a blustery, Southern Hemisphere winter, my usual broiling August reversed on itself into a dry, 50-degree cold, except it’s not even 50 degrees, its 10 according to a temperature system I don’t know.

Here I am, asking the same questions Tony Horwitz asked in the beginning of “One for the Road,” when he moved to this odd little country around the world where the woman he happened to love lived: Where am I? You look down and it’s all a crumpled plain of dry and scarp and shrub, brown-green mountains smoothed out by age and the rough-hewn canyons of tectonic isolation.

I came here once before, in 2004, on a working holiday visa, a joke of a holiday if ever I heard one, as if working as one-step-above an illegal immigrant for minimum wage is somehow a vacation. It seemed a strange country then and still a strange one now, not for its differences but its utter similarity to the States. Sitting next to a couple from Baltimore on the plane over, I remarked, staring over the endless Pacific, that coming to Australia feels like coming all the way around the world to the place you just came from. Of course, its not, in certain, certainly pertinent ways: a different landscape. Funny accents, funny spelling. Strange weather. A dry, Pacific land carved by a dry, Pacific wind, with no forests or fields I’d recognize in North America.

But in so many ways, more than England, more than anywhere except Canada, Australia feels like America. The books in the airport lounge are all by Americans — the same ‘Marley and Me’ and Oprah book club recommendations, maybe a few more Bryce Courtenays and Lonely Planets over Fodor’s and Frommer’s, to this country’s credit. The same fashions, and the same brashness of youth. The same disengagement from world issues, although here I suspect our motivations differ; Americans are turned off to the world because we feel above it. Australians ignore the world because it is so far away. The immensity of the Pacific isolates this land, its people, even its flora and fauna, like a million, modern English Channels. During World War II, wounded American Marines fighting the Japanese were flown back to Hawaii for hospital care. If their comrades in France flew the same distance for treatment, they’d be evacuated from Caen to Kansas City.

The love of sport (of course, the Australians I saw in LAX were part of a cycling team), the love of MTV, the lack of history, all make Australian culture feel like a rip-off of my own, as if I were shopping in Hong Kong for nationalities and couldn’t afford genuine ‘American’ and settled for a cheap knock-off: Yankshmee! Just as loud and shallow and young and vibrant as the real thing!

Except (and it’s a big except) Australia isn’t an independent country. It is still part of the Commonwealth of nations, and what’s more, the head of state is still technically the Governor General of her Majesty Elizabeth II, the Queen of England. A technicality you may say, except that same Governor General used the authority derived from the inbred House of Windor, thousands of miles away, to remove a sitting Australian Prime Minister from office in the 1970s. Australians can claim all they want that the Whitlam affair was simply a bending of the rules, an expedient expulsion no different from any ‘No confidence’ motion, but I still think Americans would balk in disgust at the idea of the appointed representative of the Queen removing their head of government from office. And worst of all: When Australians had the chance to vote, in referendum, on becoming an independent Republic in — what year was that honey? ‘I don’t know!?’

See, they don’t even CARE about the time they COULD have become a real country, which isn’t surprising because they didn’t. You read me right — when Australians had the option of voting themselves into a real Republic (note: didn’t even have to fight a revolution) they opted: to stay. To stay in the Commonwealth. Because it would have cost too much to change all the stationary and the stamps. Because becoming an independent member of the society of nations was too much trouble and bother.

I’ve had Australians rib me for my American spelling. To which I say: You win a revolution and become an honest-to-God, independent country, and then you can spell any way you want.