Okay, one day in Varkala, and it’s a different story. Shades of Koh Chang, in fact. I arrived by train mid-morning, standing like a sardine in the second-class coach, then set out on foot in the hot glare through the streets of the town. One guest house I inquired about was full; I headed off down the road, trying to follow the signs and my map. A quick look at my pocket compass told me I was headed in exactly the wrong direction, so I flagged down an auto-rickshaw to take me to the “Government Guest House.” No vacancies there, either, so somewhat discouraged, I went by foot to the “Cliff Road” to seek out more guesthouses. The first likely place I came to, with Internet on the main floor and big clean rooms above, was available at a good price, so I parked my backpack there with a reservation for at least the one night, and continued on to the cliffside strip to explore further. 
So far I still wasn’t convinced. But then after lunch in the Café Italiano, I saw “Drumming Lessons” on the sign of a café offering otherwise the usual list (travel services, money exchange, massage, email, food and drinks, etc.). I approached a likely fellow with an Afro and dark complexion, and he said his friend the djembe teacher was out of town till the 30th. But he said they jam every Friday, and I was welcome to join. When I asked about dununs, another friend at the café next door came to the rescue with the business card of a local Senegalese drummer who teaches drum, dance, and “African Yoga.”
I followed directions to “Master (Ken) Doumbia’s” house on my way home through the shady green back lanes to my “Sopanam” lodging. The house was quiet and the large gates were shut. Oh well, I thought, I’ll try again in the morning, when classes were advertised for 11:00. Then, after stopping by my guesthouse to confirm my stay for a week, and going to dinner, I walked back down to the strip to check out the scheduled tabla-and-flute concert at the Blue Moon. It wasn’t happening, so I stepped into the cybercafe to check out Ken’s website (http://www.westafricanroots.com/)for more info. There under “workshops” it seemed to indicate he’d be teaching in Senegal in December-January. I sent off an email inquiry just in case, then went home to start some editing work. Simultaneously, from a nearby location, some LOUD electronic music started up. A hip bungalow operation?, I wondered; it’s going to be a long week here. But not ten minutes into it, I heard on the cranked-up PA something about “the Africans.” Hmm, sounds like a wedding. There’s still a chance.
Sure enough, the unmistakable sounds of djembes and dununs pounded through the night air. I ran to the window and threw open the sash, and saw the lights of a house some 100 meters away where the drumming was clearly coming from. A five-minute walk put me through the open gates to a wedding party in progress, with three African drummers going full tilt (two on djembes and a third playing upright duns). I even got into the dancing action for their last piece, then introduced myself to Ken by saying I’d just sent him an email. Yes, he was teaching every day, and I was welcome to come at 11:00 the next morning. Then the DJ took over and some good funky dancing in the sand-covered yard followed. No place like home: drum and dance.
An hour later, back in my room as the pounding electronic beats continued flooding through my window, came the dubbed and repeated line, as if airmailed personally: “Destination is Canada . . . Destination is Canada.”
December 30, 2006Today in an email Ilana wrote, “I hope you find what you are looking for.” Exactly the words Nora told me when I left for Maui eight months ago. What does this mean to me--and why does it seem strange or even misplaced?
First of all, I need to consider the possibility that their assumption is correct. Then maybe I am searching for something without even realizing it.
From my point of view, I would rather say, “I’m simply doing what I feel impelled to do: to live in a warm place where I can swim and walk and work and play, in good health and congenial surroundings.”
Lately I find happiness in disparate moments . . .
--playing drums with Ken and the other students today, getting locked into a nice solid Kuku groove at tempo. There is so much to be aware of and to appreciate and to refine even while holding down the accompaniment, especially if there is a good lead drummer to support and follow. It is a pleasure for me to play with someone who is a “master” (whatever that relative term may mean), because my playing gravitates to the quality of those I play with. When I am in that groove of present flow and rhythm space, there is nowhere else I need to go.
--being invited by Ken to join him for performance at the Funky Art Café tomorrow night. I am always grateful for performance opportunities, and when they arise, it is a grace of serendipity that allows me to know that I am where I am supposed to be.
--sharing a lovely smile with a beautiful brown-skinned Indian woman flashing large white teeth, just outside the Ayurvedic Wellness Centre where they offer free consultations . . . only, not today.
My passage to India has been so far uneventful in this new age of travel. Just a token clip of ancient Bing Crosby crooning White Christmas to begin the flight; it was over before I could start up my iPod in self-defense. In the back alley by Khao San Road drinking cappuccino with the rest of my Viennese Breakfast (two perfectly boiled eggs, buttered brown bread with minced green onion), it took me twenty minutes to register the big plastic jolly Santa over a six-foot bubble of falling snow, the whole display framed with flanks of real potted poinsettias. Otherwise, it’s just another Christmas: an unexpected wi-fi connection in the boarding lounge, allowing me to say e-hello to distant family and friends; then on to the wonderfully pungent and India-present lamb masala on the plane, with more excellent coffee, this time plain and strong-black; and while still airborne, finishing a couple of editing jobs on the trusty laptop. 
Crichton has a heavy axe to bear, and an uphill battle to climb against the Gore-bred masses, with this polemic-laden book; but he does his old good job (Jurassic Park, The Andromeda Strain) of exploring deep themes and exposing conventional social/scientific “wisdom.” The signal point that he (also John Steinbeck in the next book I start to read, Log from the Sea of Cortez) makes is that we are creatures of our present time, not of the past, though we may indeed be prisoners of our illusions of past conceptions of the world, and what is politically correct or even, whatever it may mean, “true.” Both Crichton and Steinbeck make that point especially when dealing with the interface between contemporary culture and romanticized notions of simpler people and places living in a state of supposed “paradise” or “nature.” Steinbeck draws on the relativistic notion that we change a reality simply by our presence in it. Chrichton is fond of upsetting popular assumptions such as “global warming is an unquestioned reality” or “the redwoods are the natural state of the environment in California” or “the way people lived in villages was better.” 
Steinbeck writes:
So it is with this “adventure” I’m on. It’s only adventure in the old sense to traverse these continents, and so by a very long stretch. Far from the exploits of Alexander the Great, for instance, or Vasco da Gama--or even of E. M. Forster, the eminent English novelist (Passage to India). I’m just another tourist, bound for another beach, another cybercafe.
--Is it the wreckage of civilization that overwhelms the first-time visitor, here as in Iquitos, Peru, or Conakry, West Africa, calling to mind the epithet, “Apocalypse Now”? With the streets full of rubble, crazy drivers and pedestrians alike playing chicken 24/7 amid the choking diesel, shrieks of engines, garbage and open sewers, and the unspoken grief of the wretched beggars, the fixed stares of the ordinary poor, in general the desperate and all-pervading social poverty? A pretty picture it is to see the ladies in their brilliantly colored and jeweled finery, tiptoeing matter-of-factly through the broken pavement and dust and gravel, while the canned music blares unbidden from every corner.
--Is it the red-eyed gods and buxom courtesans of the art museum, the India of the romantic imagination? This is the India of the days of its own empire, its caste-mad hierarchies and nobilities, its hallucinogenic religious eroticism . . . before, that is, the arrival of the Portuguese and British overlords posing in roseate landscapes and lush gardens, co-opting the Brahmins and looking the other way while Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva, Krishna, Ganesh, Hanuman, and Siddhartha Buddha gamely grappled in eternity with the demons of the ancient psyche.
--Is it simply this: the rich spicy curries and inexplicable masalas that thrill the senses, bring tears to the eyes, and cause me to swear despite all the assaults to decency and beauty and humanity and nature, that it is worth it, and that I’m glad I’m in India?
Routine now gives way to impending movement, to the smaller island of Koh Maak. In the meantime I alternate the basic elements of daily life: where to eat, when to swim, checking email, and 
A human being is a part of the whole, called by us "Universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest--a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.
In any case, I was not disappointed because, though I embarked at first as the only passenger, I was joined before we left the dock by a jovial party of ten Russians, mostly rather hefty specimens of the Slavic breed. It didn't take long before one man about forty years of age, with passable English, sat beside me on the gunwale and said, "You will drink some vodka with us?" My own Russian blood moved me to take the bait with hardly an instant's hesitation. I gave my name, Nowick, explaining that it was the name of my Russian grandmother. Sadly, she left Russia too young and never taught me any of that rich language, which swirled around me on the boat for the next five hours. I was fed white bread and mini-kielbaski, Pringles and pineapple. My tiny plastic cup was refilled and, when the vodka bottle was dry, refilled again with gin. The flow of Russian from the "Russkies," as they called themselves, increased with the flow of spirits. One man from Latvia worked back home as a "mechanic of spirits." My translator, with twelve years of part-time instruction in English yet an elementary grasp of it, worked in Moscow as an automobile insurance adjuster. His wife was a dentist. It was strange on the surface, yet somehow, genetically perhaps, or by Canadian temperament, I resonated more closely, and felt more at home, with this voluble crowd speaking with obvious and uninhibited humor and passion, than I had even while jamming on the beach with the Turkish hippies, and certainly more than in the British pub-with-hammocks back at the Elephant Garden. These, I sensed at a visceral level (maybe it was vodka warming my heart) were my people. "In there," my interlocutor said pointing to my half-empty cup, "is your health."
The Latvian woman sitting at the other side of me, who kept thrusting bread and kielbaski at me, was going on the whole evening about the absent "barracuda," as I could tell by that word's appearance once or twice in every sentence. Meanwhile we absently jigged for squid, holding rods baited with strips of white flesh, or simple line wrapped around plastic bottles and dangling weighted white lures. One woman won the night's lottery with a lucky catch of a six-inch squid. The gimpy-legged captain apparently did hook a barracuda at one point, but lost it before landing it. The stars were bright, the moon was missing, the sea air was soft and warm.
And today? The blaring canned Thai music from the temple celebration down the road pounds me outdoors and on my way, away. Down the road into the unsettled corner of the island? To a shady corner of the beach to write? Back up to 
The first track extended as a sandy dirt path through a palm grove behind the beach, leading to the previous limit of my explorations, a narrow cement road winding into the exclusive domain of the Grand Kahuna Resort. There life-sized statues of elephants mingle with opulent buildings and exotic landscaping. I am met also with the usual morose silence of the hired workers there, and a security guard who informs me that to pass further into the grounds I need to pay a fee; there is no continuous road access here through to the other side of the island as I had been told.
Back on the road where it was cut off by the creek, I faced the choice of returning the easy way I had come, following the level paths through the trees, or following the main road back. The latter choice would complete my circuit of and curiosity about the terrain, since I had not followed the road to its end on my initial trip last week. At that time the number of hills and the sweltering heat had got to me, and I'd turned back short of the washout. Today I still had some energy left, and that motivation which seems to drive me from time to time to return to paths not taken in order to somehow complete unfinished business, or to redeem myself for holding back out of fear, fatigue, or simple unreadiness to act fully in a certain direction. This syndrome I could apply for example to relationships that ended, I felt, perhaps prematurely; to my 
To dispose with the trivial first. I barely escaped from the freezing snow and icy rains of Victoria and Seattle, shedding my fleece and windbreaker and toque at Chris's house with my car, and walking 45 minutes to the Clipper downtown. Luckily I had discovered that my runners had serious holes and were expendable, so at least I could wear them for the trek until the SeaTac airport where they went into the trash bin, and save my sandals for the remainder of the trip out of the ice and snow. My socks and feet got wet and cold anyway, but the long walk in Victoria and again a brisk walk in Seattle for a second city bus connection, after I just missed the first, at least kept my blood moving. Missing that first bus but catching the second by flagging down the driver a block early mirrored the bad/good luck that would follow in the first two days of the journey.Yesterday on arriving I was shortchanged on the bus and then overcharged in the guesthouse restaurant. In both cases I could have or should have known better, but was cast in the spell of the jetlagged and newly-arrived - just as in 
On my arrival at the Bailan Family Bungalows, I set up quick housekeeping next door to a fat London couple with thick accents, and headed for the beach. There only a few others lounged or read on the coarse dark golden sand, or fished wading out from the rocks, and I tested the waters before sunset. The brownish water was salty and bath-warm, and the bottom was rocky with the tide out. The sunset colors gathered slowly in intensity, in the lukewarm air. This was not a glorious splash of paradise hues, but a muted, more subtle brand of chosen environment. The essentials seemed to be in place, yet lacked a certain definite impact. In fact, on leaving the beach, I noticed a definite line of demarcation revealing that the sand had been imported here, dumped as a gilt overlay upon an otherwise unappealing stretch of plain brown dirt.On Saturday night at the Tree House, the most popular destination for the backpacker types, a crowd of a hundred or more sat in the dim-lit sprawling bar and restaurant, a virtual campus of the university of ex-university. Couples chatted, alluring young things sprawled languidly on hammocks, DJ tracks grooved in the background. "Amazing," I observed to a nubile princess standing in line with a menu beside me. She said nothing. At the desk I inquired about room rates and retraced my steps down the gravel path through the forest, stopping for an hour at a lonely Internet outpost manned by a tanned longhair busy at a sewing machine.
Today the tide turned, in various ways. I awoke before seven and enjoyed a lovely swim in the now soft-sand-bottomed waters at high tide. Had a fruit lassi at the guesthouse restaurant and changed my reservation from four nights to two, given the cheap alternatives in the neighborhood or also likely farther afield. Then set out on foot over the forbidding hills to Bang Bao, the fishing village at the south of the island.
Just short of the turnoff to the village, I followed the obstacle-smashing impulse of my miniature Ganesh that 
Finally a friendly bungalow owner and two friendly walking companions; and the beach we came to was superb. Soft white sand curved around the forest for a mile or so without any visible human impact, past the restaurant and bar at the sparsely-populated main beach area. After a long pleasant swim and beach walk, I ate an excellent spicy and tender squid red curry stirfry for lunch, and headed back to explore Bang Bao where I wanted to check out Internet facilities, availability of espresso, and boats to the neighboring smaller islands of Koh Wai and Koh Maak. As I said, the essentials.
But the best was just to come around the first corner, where I saw same faded funky signs advertising "Djambe's . . . hand drumming . . . drum workshop." Of course I was intrigued to see all 
It was a setting and an opportunity almost too good to be true. Indeed, the little strip of land there between beach and road is only rented, and Djambe noted that the undeveloped land beside that last choice beach down the road is presently for sale. By this time next year, everything here that is most enjoyable could be swept away by the relentless tide of tourist dollars.
On the Bang Bao pier is a tapas restaurant called Little Havana. The choices I made, a dish of soft feta and gently fried vegetables, and tender potatoes with aioli, plus a pineapple-orange-lime drink, were all absolutely outstanding, and a welcome change from a steady Thai diet. I chatted with the owner who is from Belgium. He also works as a website developer and database manager, for clients back in Europe, from his new location where he has been for six months now. He has a Russian girlfriend, but knows enough from being here to explain to me the difference between the Thai "bar girls" and what Westerners would normally call "prostitutes." "Here what they want is, maybe you could even say, a friendly relationship," Dido told me. "A night of fun, and then maybe you take care of them a little, spend a little money on them."
I was curious because at Lonely Beach while walking down the road, I had been accosted by two or three such beauties from the balcony of a roadside bar. "Hello! Where you going? Come here." I kept walking of course, set in my Canadian reticence and prejudice about such things. And I was already hooked up with a couple of folks I'd just met at a restaurant, on our way to a live music concert nearby. That connection began with my query about a djembe on the premises. At the concert I ran into the London couple living in the bungalow beside mine. I left after a short time and, while I was getting ready for bed, the couple also arrived home in the midst of a fierce drunken argument full of swearing and so thick with alcohol and Cockney that it sounded like a foreign language laced with Anglo-Saxon expletives.Dido's eyes lit up when I told him I played 
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