Madagascar
5 Apr
The urge for new places and new things began quite early on; my first personal computer came bundled with the PC game, Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego? At 10 years of age, I finally found out why I shunned boardgames and card games: they couldn’t talk back to me, I couldn’t make them do interesting things, and I couldn’t see pictures of exotic places, or learn smatterings of foreign tongues. This little disc I slipped into my 4x CD-ROM drive, could. Even if it went along at Pentium I 120Mhz.
I was addicted to that game for it combined two of my favourite elements: mystery, and travel. It was quite a ridiculous game: you played the detective that was to hunt down the master villain Carmen, but she kept giving you the slip, but not without leaving a ridiculously simple clue. At least, it seemed simple to me at the time — of course everybody knew that La Paz was a city in Bolivia, that kabuki=Japan, that Nigeria and Lebanon had large Christian and Muslim populations, right? So why does the in-game travel agent keep offering me silly options which didn’t make sense?
After 7 days of non-stop playing (I hadn’t, at 10 years of age, found a suitable activity online to be preoccupied with, other than wondering if I could extract .mpg files from VCDs or copy .wav files into a floppy disk), a strange country appeared in the game, and found its way into my vocabulary. _Madagascar_. I loved how it sounded, how it took so much effort to say it, yet slipped off my tongue with aplomb. _Ma-da_ _gas-car_. There was an accompanying photograph of a native, and monkeys, and coconuts — and clear, blue, waters. It became my favourite catchphrase. My schoolmates would say, “So I went to Japan during the March holidays”. And I’d say: So? I’m going to _Madagascar_. One day.
I haven’t been there yet, but I’ve had this insatiable obsession with places I can barely pronounce, since. From the long and lilting phrases in Thai which put my Teochew-trained tongue to shame (try “getting to _Thong Nai Pan Noi_ by _songtaew_ and going to _Haad Thansadet_ for an afternoon siesta, _pad prik pao_ and _cha dam yen_); to the magical desert city of “Jaisalmer”:http://www.umaidbhawan.com/jaisalmer.htm (from which we will proceed to Jodhpur then Udaipur then to take a bus to Ahmedabad to see Gandhi’s _ashram_), and catch a train to Madgaon in Goa; to skipping the boat ride to Sihanoukville, and going by taxi (air-conditioned) from Koh Kong on which you couldn’t see any markings of road and returning by bus, turning down Battambang, Kompong Thom, though we badly wanted to go to cross the border to Laos but that would mean having to cross the border at Stung Treng…
My parents’ unorthodox beliefs about _travel_ helped, too. When all my classmates were taking packaged tours to Japan and Hong Kong, my mother planned train journeys, put us up in the outskirts of Seoul where absolutely no English was spoken or written, found her way to navigate back alleys and canal boat journeys, took us hiking up strange Korean hills because she heard from the locals “there’s a shoe factory up there, and they sell wholesale” (she found it, and had a ball of a time). My father and I didn’t have a choice but to follow. If she’d had her way (and time to do so), we’d have sailed home from Korea via Qingdao.
I grumbled for a while: we never did tourist class hotels (she hated them and found them too expensive for ‘dingy and soulless’), we stayed in _yogwans_, the equivalent of the bed and breakfast, ate absolutely amazing food on the streets. Eventually, I _got it_. You see, being checked out of your hotel at 1am, with no “next action” planned, and driving out of Seoul on a highway, not knowing where you’re going, and finding all hotels booked, and ending up in a strange, gaudy, hotel with glow-in-the-dark ceilings and condoms and sex toys on sale in vending machines on every corridor — with your parents (I was 15), can be, shall we say, potentially lifechanging. Especially when you wake up the next morning realizing where you were at, wander out of your hotel room to look for your parents (who’d ditched you and gone on a morning walk), and strange Korean men ask you in the Korean you understand but can’t reply to: “So lady who are you here with?”
I learned all I needed to know on the road, and I’m not done. I’ve collected a fair amount of stories, but I’m hoarding them for now. I want to tell you all about military men with rifles in our trains and buses. I want to tell you all about Indian Army soldiers who fought at border skirmishes, and have so many stories to tell I feel I need to learn Hindi so I can talk to them. I want to tell you all about our motorcycle-taxi driver who was so sweet, you couldn’t tell he was ex-Khmer Rouge. I want to tell you all about the 80 year old men who work as porters or waiters at The Planter’s Club, and who won’t respond to anything except “boy”, even though they’re 80. The little children holding dead babies outside the National Museum, asking for money, which breaks your heart but you know you can’t give money to. The beautiful street children who run up to your after your plane lands at Dum Dum airport. Shocking myself, when I found myself in a fellowship with a Nepali pastor in the transit town of Siliguri. Seeking out safety and familiarity among Teochew shopkeepers while waiting for “a friend”:http://www.sweetcucumber.com/ to find us in the insanity of the Phnom Penh bus depot. So when you say, _she likes the Third World too much_.. I first want to laugh at the ignorance behind the brandishing of this phrase (what is Third World if the Cold War is already over, and the Second is gone?), and next pause to think, _that is my world_. My world of border crossings, travel by train and boat, Indian Army and Khmer Rouge, roadside restaurants and _chai_ in terracotta cups.
Stories and conversations beginning with Madagascar, winding up all over the world. In two weeks I return to love Kolkata, eat scones in Darjeeling, trek to Sikkim, buy Benares silk or look at burning corpses along the ghats in Varanasi, see Pink City (Jaipur) and Blue City (Jodhpur), steam in the summer on the Thar Desert, ponder upon the Taj Mahal, stake out the set of my favourite movie (_Octopussy_, in Udaipur), go to Ahmedabad just to see Gandhi’s ashram, live it up in Goa and Mumbai. In short, I’ve made a habit of packing my life into a 65L backpack, collecting stories, telling stories, listening and watching. One-sixth of a year spent on the road suddenly doesn’t seem long enough.
And I either need a bigger backpack, or _discover laundry_. Though what I also learned on the road was, take as little as you can, buy everything you need on the road and throw them away. If only life itself could be as simple as that.
