Common Sense and Whiskey

Friday Photo Quiz #140 - Where in the World?

2012-01-27T09:14:46-05:00

It's a UNESCO World Heritage site in a formerly war torn land.

Can you name the city? The country? The answer is below.

And a good weekend to all from Common Sense and Whiskey and EarthPhotos.com.

And the answer is ..................................................... it's Dubrovnik, Croatia.

When Croatia declared its independence from the former Yugoslavia, Yugoslavia’s federal army attacked in October 1991.

"The walls that have encircled Dubrovnik for more than 700 years, one of the most beautiful and strongest fort systems in Europe, could not protect the city against modern military weapons. Over the ensuing eight-month siege, the city was bombarded with more than 2,000 shells, causing damage to a number of significant heritage structures."

As you can see from our quiz photo, taken in 2003, everything has since been rebuilt.

•••••

See almost a thousand photos from cities around the world in the Cities Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

Election Year Politics

2012-01-26T12:32:24-05:00

"This President has taken a very dangerous course with regards to Cuba, saying we're going to relax relations, we're going to open up travel to Cuba. This is the wrong time for that…."

- Mitt Romney in the NBC Debate, 23 January, 2012

Since anything is liable to be said in an election year, and since this remark was tailored to the Florida Latino community, it remains to be seen how fervently Mr. Romney believes what he said, but a couple of questions:

- What's dangerous? Is Governor Romney concerned that Americans might adopt the Cuban revolution as a model for our politics? The Cuban economic model as ours? Maybe if we talk to the Castros they'll, what, invade? Or maybe if we just give our sixty year policy of economic sanctions and travel restrictions a little more time, it'll work?

- Why is this the wrong time to open up travel to Cuba? Would it have been better ten years ago? Will it be better ten years from now? (In fact, best I can tell, the current "people to people" program was instituted by President Clinton in March 1998, and later restricted by President Bush. The Cubans were even wary of the program at first.)

Governor Romney said it. I'm just asking.

You'd think denying American business access to the Cuban market would rile up the business wing of Mr. Romney's party. And then there's the matter of denying Americans their freedom to travel, for political reasons.

We're going to take advantage of the President's 'dangerous course' while it's available, with a trip to Cuba in March. Watch for reports here on CS&W.

Food Market, Hanoi - Wednesday HDR

2012-01-25T10:17:27-05:00

People seem to like Vietnam food HDRs. Two of the top five viewer-voted most popular photos on EarthPhotos.com are from the Hoi An, Vietnam morning market.

Check out all these goodies in the meat section of a huge market in Hanoi.

There are 353 more HDRs here , and 384 more photos in the Vietnam Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

Shot with a Nikon D-700, made HDR in Photomatix, finished with Nik plug-ins and CS5.

Winter in Finland - 6

2012-01-24T13:34:00-05:00

My wife Mirja and I traveled to Finland last month. Here's the last in a series.

And so we’ve come to Saariselkä, Finnish Lapland, and we see that it’s possible to live inside the Arctic Circle. It takes a little more work, bundling up and all, and you need a plan before you go outside. There’s no idle standing around out there.

But there are even a few advantages. Dragging your groceries behind you over the ice on a little plastic sled called a pulkka is easier than carrying them. There’s a word for the way you walk: köpöttää. It means to walk with tiny steps, like you do to keep your balance on the icy sidewalk.

Plus, other humans live here, too, and they seem to get along just fine. Infrastructure’s good, all the transport is in big, heavy, late model SUVs. There isn’t the choice of goods you might like, but we have that problem in our little town of 600 in Appalachia, too.

Once I would have thought “selling time shares in Lapland” was a punch line, but now we have a friend who does just that. And much to my surprise, a completely full 757 flew us back down to Helsinki (and a full Airbus flew us up) and they were doing three planes from Saariselkä to Helsinki the day we flew back.

In fact, the local folk of Finnish Lapland are entirely swallowed up by the tourist onslaught they’ve created. There are 13,500 hotel, lodge, igloo and rental apartment beds around Saariselkä. And the goal is 4.5 times the number of visitors by 2020.

Kuukkeli was the only grocery in walking distance. It’s part of a chain, and a bit of a dry goods and souvenir store, too. You could buy the usual Finnish dark breads and sausages and ready to eat heat-and-serve paistos, casseroles made of beets or mushrooms or potatoes and ham. And tins of moose, bear, elk and reindeer.

A word of advice: Just capitulate on the reindeer thing. Do not try to resist.

In Saariselkä you can buy reindeer burgers, cold smoked reindeer, reindeer steak, reindeer sausages, reindeer meat pie, smoked reindeer flatbread (Kuukkeli says in high season it sells 250 a day), reindeer pizza (chopped smoked reindeer, blue cheese and pineapple), reindeer quiche, reindeer soup, smoked reindeer roll, croissants with chopped cold smoked reindeer, reindeer paninis and warm reindeer sandwiches.

The single hardest thing is getting out of bed in the morning. Even though we’d go to bed at night at a normal time, more than a week after arriving in Finland (so there was no jet lag excuse), we’d still wake up in the dark to find that it was 1:00 p.m.

And that can be unfortunate if you mean to make something of the day, since the light is gone by the 3:00’s. The last bus from the ski fell to the village ran at 3:40. There was no more light. But maybe that’s why when I was out after 11:00 at night chasing the revontulet, the Northern Lights, so were others, romping up and down the hills in Saariselkä, all bundled and round like the Michelin man.

And at just 200 kilometers inside the Arctic Circle, it’s not as long an Arctic night as places farther north like Svalbard or Barrow. In fact, the sun only stays below the horizon for about a month at this latitude. By the second week of January they’ll have an hour of sunshine. At the end of May the sun will rise before 2:00 a.m. and the next time it sets, they say, will be at 2:00 a.m. on 20 July.

See photos in EarthPhotos.com's Finland and Lapland galleries.

And see previous posts in this series: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

I'm Gonna Wash Those Ions Right Outta My Hair

2012-01-24T11:04:42-05:00

At latitudes more northerly than ours, sky watchers are having a great time with the largest solar storm since 2005. Last night I watched an aurora over Yellowknife on the Canadian Space Agency's AuroraMAX. Let's just say it's not quite the same as being there, but it is a chance to see something really awesome, in the actual meaning of the word.

Winter in Finland - 5

2012-01-23T13:07:30-05:00

My wife Mirja and I traveled to Finland last month. We continue our series.

Hyvä asiakkaamme,
Ethän käytä huoneiston takkaa.
Se on tällä hetkellä epäkunnossa
Ja savuttaa sisään.

Dear customer,
Please don’t use the fireplace. It is for the moment out of order and the smoke comes into the apartment.

Ärade kund,
Vängligeninte sätta eld på spisen.
Der är ur function och skall röka in I huset.

Now wait a minute! We might need the fireplace. It’s LAPLAND and it’s -16C outside.

But the nice lady explained that they only manage these little apartments, they don’t own them, and fixing the fireplace involves a capital expenditure. That will require a meeting to authorize funds, and we’ll be gone by then.

Well, everything turned out just fine. The apartment was mightily insulated with a double door entryway and a great heater and sauna.

And I had fun with the translations. I took “Ärade kund” as a plea in Swedish to be kind and understanding, and in the Finnish, Ethän käytä huoneiston takkaa, I imagined they’d decided to confide to the natives that stupid Ethan had messed up the damned fireplace again.

•••••

Finns are a conserving lot, even when they don’t need to be. Like with space. The municipality of Inari, for example, just on the other side of the Ivalo airport, maybe 70 kilometers up the road, is Finland’s largest in surface area at 17,321 square kilometers. Which is about half the size of Belgium.

Finns live in a land bigger than Italy with a population density ranked 191st of 228 countries and territories and they make tiny, tiny, tiny stoves and fridges. I mean, I realize I'm from America, the land of the free and the home of the big, but c'mon, I'VE GOT A MEAL TO COOK, HERE.

The biggest carton of maito (milk) you can buy is a liter. And the loft in this little apartment, sure it’s for kids (please let it be for kids), but not only can you not walk in it, you can’t walk on your knees in it. A bloody death trap if there were ever a fire. Not that there would be, though, because our fireplace didn’t work.

•••••

You can understand why Finns have historically been part of Sweden or Russia, just as the Sami here in Lapland are part of Finland now. It’s because the world’s stock of Finns is perilously close to not being big enough to constitute a nation.

Here’s a country with no more people than metro Atlanta, and they’re the only people in the world who speak their language (although the language of their Finno-Ugric cousins in Estonia, whose country is even smaller, is similar). Imagine Atlanta as a national capital and Birmingham and Raleigh as capitals with distinct languages and cultures.

The whole ‘Finland’ proposition is fragile. Which makes me like it even better.

See photos in EarthPhotos.com's Finland and Lapland galleries.

And see previous posts in this series: 1, 2, 3, 4

Big Displays Up North

2012-01-22T09:44:48-05:00

The big blast from the sun on Thursday, known scientifically as a coronal mass ejection, may bring some excitement for skywatchers today and tomorrow. Having stalked the aurora last month in Lapland, I can testify that it's a thrilling, thrilling moment when you spot the beginning of a display.

Just on the off chance that you can't travel to the far north tonight, here are a couple of web resources: AuroraMAX, from the Canadian Space Agency, has a live, 180 degree view of the sky over Yellowknife, Northwest Territories. And I learned something in Lapland - use Spaceweather.com. Here's its aurora gallery for this month.

Break Bread with the E.U.

2012-01-22T03:50:00-05:00

Croatians vote today in a referendum on the government's plan to join the E.U. If they vote yes, does Croatia get bread with a little butter crown?

That is so thoughtful.

Winter in Finland - 4

2012-01-21T14:49:21-05:00

My wife Mirja and I traveled to Finland last month. We continue our series.

4

A rainy, snowy mix Monday morning. We set out at 6:00 a.m. for Helsinki for an 11:15 flight to Lapland. This weather would shut down Atlanta for a week. Here, we just got in the car and drove.

Through town and onto the highway. Slushy and slippery. We sped along in the dark and I swore we’d slide off the road sooner or later, at a hundred kilometers per hour, with one lane good, the other ice.

Finnish law requires winter tires for winter. Winter tires wear out the roads, though, so Finnish law requires that they be changed back in summer. And the winter tires did the trick, and we didn’t slide off the road.

•••••

At the floating market in Can Tho, Vietnam, sellers hoist a bamboo pole from their boats and attach one of each of their fruits, to advertise that today, they’re selling pomilons or star fruit or coconuts. In the same way, totems rise at exits along the highway in Finland, lighting the fog that swirls around them in the perma-dusk.

Brilliant neon signs climb the poles: Pizza! Market! Gas! ABC! 24H! Credit Cards!

(When I thought ABC was the Finnish Alcohol Beverage Control, I was hugely amused that their logo is a hand flashing a thumbs-up. Alas, ABC is an ordinary store, and the government toddy dispensary is called Alko.)

Teboil! Neste! Those are both gas stations, often credit card only, with no attendant in sight. Teboil is part of the Russian Lukoil group.

Then we were back in the dark, and the big trucks (including those extended tandem jobs) threw slush, and I was pretty sure we’d perish on the way to the airport. But gradually it got warmer, motoring south, and all we needed were a couple of degrees to melt the ice on the road.

See photos in EarthPhotos.com's Finland and Lapland galleries.

And see previous posts in this series: 1, 2, 3

Friday Photo Quiz #139 - Where in the World?

2012-01-20T12:18:00-05:00

Hmmm... Okay, so it's a big city... it's got boats like that, and somehow that doesn't look like an American boat. Or a European boat....

Can you name the city? The country? The answer is below.

And a good weekend to all from Common Sense and Whiskey and EarthPhotos.com.

And the answer is ..................................................... it's the Asian city state, Singapore. Here's an HDR of the view if you pull back some from the tight shot.

•••••

See 947 photos from cities around the world in the Cities Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

And take all the CS&W photo quizzes.

Winter in Finland - 3

2012-01-20T10:36:00-05:00

My wife Mirja and I have a cabin on her family's land in the Northern Savonia region of Eastern Finland. We visited for Christmas. We continue our series.

3

Tonight it’s grown colder. Not by much but you can tell. We’ve spent the afternoon in Finnish tradition, lighting candles at ancestors’ graves. We visited four cemeteries, in Leppävirta, Saahkarlahti, Luttila and near here, at Koönönpelta. We’ve seen the patriarchs, men who fought in the war of independence, fathers and grandfathers and great uncles.

Shops were locked tight, so the cemeteries were the most populated places in Finland. So many candles at so many graves that it made you think Finns born around here stay around here.

Such a majority of graves were lit that 1. There must be an entire industry supplying the candles (They look like they all come from the same factory. They’re sheltered by a particular casing to keep snow from putting them out), and 2. Peer pressure must turn people out so that Uncle Hari’s isn’t the only unlit grave.

It’s quite a sight, and it’s really touching. At every cemetery, there’s a bunch of candles all grouped around one place to honor people not fortunate enough to be interred close to home.

From 2:30, in a firm, snowy dusk, we toured highways and snow covered, scantly-traveled back roads until 5:30 or so, and then had the traditional Christmas dinner (on Christmas Eve) and exchanged gifts.

•••••

There was a service at 8:00 Christmas morning at the church in Lepaävirta and we drove over. Quiet, country roads. The whole earth, the farmhouses and the fields, everything was still and twilight-blue in the cool of the snow, and the land seemed to lay asleep and felt very much at peace.

Mirja said later that the preacher’s cadence was painfully slow, and I thought so too, but it pleasantly drifted by, soothing and nice. Of course, I wasn’t laden by the message. I understood scantly beyond Jesus and Christus.

The Lepaävirta church is more impressive than you’d expect in a largely non-practicing Christian place like Finland. It’s a tall building, maybe the tallest in town, and it was three quarters full. Because it was Christmas, I guess.

I asked if the church was called anything other than “Lepaävirta Lutheran Church,” but it’s not even that, it’s just Lepaävirta Church. In an 80 percent Lutheran land, it would only be called the Lepaävirta Something Church if it were another denomination.

•••••

The Finnish branch of our family owns a few tiny, rustic cabins along the lakefront, inherited from the past, all of them in various stages of restoration. We went down to the one they call Markku’s cabin, which is on an inlet, a little bay maybe just 100 meters across. It was much more frozen than where we stay, on more open water.

Markku's cabin and the lake beyond

There may have appeared to be more ice than there was because snow covered the surface, but it was hard to tell in the dark. Still, the water around the little dock (for row boats, not bigger vessels) was slushy, and you wouldn’t venture to walk on it.

We fired up the sauna there (there’s a sauna everywhere) and we watched the news on TV. Christmas atrocities this year featured Nigerian Muslims versus Christians. Besides that and an oil spill in the Bay of Bothnia, it didn’t seem like there was much news on the holiday, and there didn’t need to be.

•••••

It was just above zero Celsius, and becoming a tire-spinning mess. There was enough snow that it wouldn’t all melt, but the eves were dripping.

Do Finns appreciate the relative warmth or would they prefer a firmly white Christmas? They’d prefer a white Christmas.

This weather, what can you do? If it were ten degrees colder you could go skiing, do all kinds of things. Mind you, it’s usually too cold, that’s for sure, but this weather is good for nothing.

•••••

It’s Sunday night now. YLE predicts the strongest storm of the season tomorrow. If the planes fly we can get to Lapland, and that’s good for us. The weather will push through and leave Tuesday or Wednesday night clear for the aurora. At least that’s what we hope.

See photos in EarthPhotos.com's Finland and Lapland galleries.

And see previous posts in this series: 1, 2

Winter in Finland - 2

2012-01-19T10:23:00-05:00

My wife Mirja and I have a cabin on her family's land in the Northern Savonia region of Eastern Finland. We visited for Christmas. Here's a little about our trip, part 2.

2

Oh my, are we full. We hit our little town of Varkaus at 5:30 in the afternoon, not so fresh from the U.S. and firmly in darkness. Up at the farmhouse there were plates and plates of Christmas food, rossoli, ham and sinappi, Finnish mustard.

Pirrika (a kind of potato bread staple) and egg butter. Karelian stew (the pan gravy is just outstanding). Sieni salatti, which is a salty mushroom salad picked in the late fall, pickled in a brine with onion, finely chopped and mixed with a touch of cream. Pickles homegrown and homemade by Risto. Potato and bacon casserole.

Risto has taken a cooking class and much of the food is his, wielded with flourishes of the chef, like whole peppercorns. Tomorrow holds the promise of pancakes (whole milk, not 2%) and homegrown berries. And it’s not even Christmas.

•••••

The ride up from the airport at Helsinki can be done in 3-1/2 hours in summer in the sunshine, but it took over four this time. Mirja’s brother Markku did us the honors, whisking us away from the arrivals hall.

Down at the very south of Finland there was snow in the (dark) fields, but not much. The top of the grass poked through. Roads were dry and clear and it was effectively dark at 3:45, so it was hard to feel like it was mid-afternoon.

Markku was patient with Radio Suomi (Sumoi is Finnish for Finland), but a song with the lyrics, literally, “dee dee dum” in call and response, finally did it. On another channel YLE, the Finnish government broadcaster, has an English newscast now and then. When they say it, it sounds like “Wily English news.”

Road signs indicated things like “beware of moose, next 14 kilometers.” The particular type of halogen they use on roadsides combined with the low clouds to cast orange patches of light just off the highway, just far enough away so you couldn’t see why they were there. The orange color somehow felt warming.

We stopped halfway so Markku could have coffee and a pastry. I didn’t envy him. It was dark and he’d already driven all the way down earlier in the day. And I’m afraid I wasn’t the champion companion, either. Mirja did that duty. They sat up front and caught up in Finnish, and I lay down in the back (as much as you can in a Kia) and slept.

Finns have a well-developed roadhouse culture. Maybe it’s because the highways are monotonous tunnels of darkness. At intervals, oases of services perch by the exit, all together in one complex. There will be fast food and sit-down cafeteria-style grills, newsstands, groceries and ABC stores, toilets and gasoline.

This rest stop had a grocery called Ako, so we went to get odds and ends, things like the licorice flavored candy called salmiakki that Mirja loves. It was disorienting here under halogen in the dark in the snow in the middle of nowhere, seeing everybody so busy - people of all ages, the parking lot and the store and the restaurant all full, families with children sharing a meal, young men smoking and hurrying by, people coming and going. It seemed like the middle of the night, but it was the middle of the afternoon.

See photos in EarthPhotos.com's Finland and Lapland galleries.

And see previous posts in this series: 1

Helsinki - Wednesday HDR

2012-01-18T13:28:27-05:00

I don't know, I just thought Vatican was a pretty funny name for a café bar nightclub. This was three bracketed handheld shots with a Nikon D-700, combined in Photomatix & finished in CS5 with Nik tools.

There are 352 more HDRs here at EarthPhotos.com.

Winter in Finland - 1

2012-01-18T10:23:00-05:00

My wife Mirja and I have a cabin on her family's land in the Northern Savonia region of Eastern Finland. We visited for Christmas. Here are a few thoughts, in six parts.

1

There’s an expansive view across the lake from the cabin, and more lights on the far shore every time we visit. It’s just about the ideal temperature for winter, hovering a little below zero Celsius, with just an ankle-high cover of snow.

Mirja’s father Risto is a tree farmer. He has outfitted the old farmhouse up on the road with a particular Siberian variety of Christmas tree. There’s a Finnish pine from here on the farm in the cabin.

Mirja is deep into something she does every first night in Finland. She builds a big birchwood fire, parks by the fireplace and immerses herself in Finnish TV. It doesn’t really matter what’s on. Tonight being the 23rd of December, it’s mostly about Joulopukki (Santa Claus – literally the “Christmas goat”). Well-loved Finnish entertainers are sitting for interviews and performing for Christmas. And Mirja’s enjoying her native language.

There’s a half hour of news: Pictures of destruction in Syria. Extended coverage of tributes to Vaclav Havel, Czech audio with Finnish subtitles. Dispensation not to worry about calories over the holiday and quick lists of ingredients for traditional holiday dishes. And not a single report from a mall.

I sit outside to survey the lake. It’s much less frozen than last time. The ice is only firm very near the shore. On our last December visit we rode horses and a sleigh across the lake. This time you wouldn’t even walk along the edge.

Northern people will know this, but it’s novel to me. Here near the shore, where unfrozen water runs by the ice, there’s a constant chatter, like maybe mice rooting around inside a wall, except sharper. When a big wind blows from one side of the lake to the other the semi-frozen surface farther out sends up a big, more profound rustle.

See photos in EarthPhotos.com's Finland and Lapland galleries.

Common Sense and Whiskey, the Book - Madagascar, Chapter Ten

2012-01-17T10:14:00-05:00

Here is Chapter Ten of Common Sense and Whiskey, the book. We're publishing each chapter here on the blog (Track down previous chapters here). You can order the entire book at Amazon.com, at BN.com, or direct from EarthPhotos Publishing. Here's the Kindle version (just $6.99). Click these photos to make them bigger. More photos and additional commentary are available at A Common Sense and Whiskey Companion. And here's the Madagascar Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

10 MADAGASCAR

Weeks-long rains had very nearly drowned the capital of Madagascar. Water filled the fields around Antananarivo, locally known as Tana, and giant sea birds crowded Lake Anosy.

At the airport, Mr. Andriamanohy Rantoanison, Manou, showed us a laminated card with the prix fixée: 44000 FMG.

It was essential to speak some French here, and Manou the Malagasy (pronounce that “Malagash”) Francophone, Mirja and I did it well together, less from skill than from good will, patience and good humor.

Manou brought us to the Mad Hilton, where they served raisin juice for a welcome drink. You see the same picture of Tana in all of the few guidebooks. Now we saw it too. Your intrepid backpacking-guide author stayed at the Hilton.

Antananarivo, Madagascar.

Tana sprawled across several hilltops and the Hilton was set back from the town opposite Lake Anosy. In the middle of the lake stood a monument in commemoration of Le Premiere Guerre Mondiale, and along the shore floated leaves that couldn't have been more green. They fairly glowed. Glew?

The sun dropped behind clouds before sunset. New in town, we stayed in our room a few floors up, attacked the minibar and warily eyed the busy, dusking-up streets around the lake.

The Malagasy are not brewers. I spat out a Madagascar-brewed Golden-something. Spat it out. Golden left a wicked curl in your tongue and a sour aftertaste.

•••••

Zoma means Friday and it’s also the name for the positively teeming Friday market in Tana.

It's strange to prepare for theft, but that’s what they admonish. Fix your bag to minimize what they get if they slash it open. The Bradt Guide to Madagascar: "The Zoma is notorious for thieves. It is safest to bring only a small amount of money in a money belt or neck pouch. Enticingly bulging pockets will be slashed."

From a hill above Independence Avenue, a sea of white umbrellas washed out ahead in every direction, swallowing up the main square, flowing into busy little eddies beside stairways, up the hills as far as the eyes could see. Up one hill, down the next.

We paused. This was big, sprawling, daunting and dramatic. We clasped hands and dove in.

Flowers first, down on the right. Then a jumble of sundries, the multitudes and the advertised danger, rarefied by the dry hot sun.

Someone reached out and tugged at Mirja’s skirt. Beware the "voleurs," she warned.

Buy whatever you will. Locks and hinges. Grenadine drinks. Bright plastic jugs. Chicago Bulls caps. Greasy food rolls. Major motor parts. Michael Jackson T-shirts. A vast selection of wicker. Bon Bon Anglais Limonad. We bought a "Madagascar" ink-pad stamp that actually printed "Madagascap."

Must've been three or four hundred meters down one side. Too tight to turn, too close to walk two abreast, too tense to relax. Still, smiles from the stalls. Dignity, not desperation. Smiles, and lots of open looks of wonder.

All the way down and halfway back we didn’t spy anyone from our part of the world, probably for an hour.

Baby clothes. The tiniest shoes you've ever seen. Embroidery. Crocheting - napkins and table covers embroidered with lemurs and scenes from traditional life.

The Malagasy are a little smaller than me in general and I was forever bumping my head on the edges of their big white umbrellas, knocking my sunglasses off my head.

Mirja tried on mesh vests.

Down by the train station, the varnished wooden trunk section. Turning back, furniture. Circuit boards. Tiny piles of tacks. Stacks of feed bags.

There is a classic trap: there is a Malagasy 5000 Franc note. Then there is another that says 5000 also in numbers, but instead of reading merely "arivo ariary," it reads "dimy arivo ariary," which I believe means five times five thousand and in any event definitely means 25000 Malagasy Francs, even though in numbers it says 5000.

The feed bag guy wanted 1100 (27.5 cents) for a multicolored “Madagascar” bag. Realizing it just as the bill left my hand, I gave him not a proper 5000 but one of the 5000's that are really 25000. After a lot of consultation with a lot of people, I got the correct 23900 in change.

We walked up each side of the Zoma - past the train station, bureaux travel, the Library of Madagascar, and made it to the top of an adjoining hill unrobbed.

Here at the top of the hill stood the country’s symbols of power: the Central Bank, High Court, Ministry du Promotion de l'Industry. A band was set up to play on a flatbed but never did. There was hubbub, amplified music and lots and lots of people. Up here the kid beggars that you usually tolerate because objectively, their circumstance ain't like yours, swarmed so that they might have carried us away, so we turned aggressive and swatted 'em back.

Crowd at the Zoma, Tana.

By midday, unscathed and self-satisfied, we sat with our backs to the wall like in any good western, at the Hotel Colbert's terrace bar, already having seen a week’s worth in one morning. Hotel Colbert had a dubious five star rating, apparently not from any organization in particular.

It was a gorgeous day and the city was so picturesque, completely foreign. We ordered Heinekens in the haze. At Hotel Colbert smoking was still as big as it ever was. Yellow Benson and Hedges ashtrays as big as your head took up a quarter of each table, and flaccid, bibulous Frenchmen sat nursing their Three Horses Beers, and hacked and smoked too much.

Four ceiling fans, all whipping. Glass tabletops. No magasin (store) at this five star. The clerk unkindly suggested I go out to scrap with the local boys to find a newspaper. I wasn't successful, or grateful.

•••••

One night, at a restaurant across town, we sat working our way through the national dish, romazava, a meat and vegetable stew with ginger on the side containing "brèdes," which is pronounced "bread" and is in fact greens.

The lights dimmed for the floor show, an unself-conscious, barefoot, foot-stompin' celebration - white teeth behind brown faces. Boys pranced in costumes of yellow feed sacks and chubby girls all whirled and sang at the tops of their lungs.

Another night we watched a surging mob, malevolent like snakes writhing in a bag. Hoping it was the start of a coup maybe (Madagascar is good for a coup every five or six years), we rushed up to the second floor to see better. Probably 30 or 40 young toughs ran down the rue.

There in the dusk, in front of a big window in a Hilton conference room with no lights on, we quizzed a young security man.

His reply, "They are fighting," perfectly illuminated everything. In the end it turned out to be just some pedestrian rivalry among kids from the Lycée Ampefiloh down the street.

•••••

The most recent journal en Anglais in the Madagascar Hilton was the Wall Street Journal Europe from the fifteenth, ten days before. Just as we sat down to catch up on the news, Manou came driving up the ramp at 7:00 sharp, right on time.

Manou might have been a smidge younger than I first thought. He had English well worse than our combined rudimentary French, but we conveyed some really abstract ideas both ways in the course of the day - alongside the inevitable, "We eat corn. Do you?" "Yes yes! we eat corn too!!" type of linguistic breakthroughs.

Manou had two daughters, 15 and 13. He was trim and fit, with salt and pepper hair of the Merina, the interior people. The coastal people are descended from Africans and have coarser Negro hair. The Merina, including Manou, are fairer, almost olive-skinned, and said to be of Indonesian origin.

Manou’s eyes were expressive, crinkly. His only trip off the island was about as likely as a family of four from Des Moines vacationing in Macau: Once Manou had a patron who took him to be a croupier in Djibouti.

•••••

Our plan was to travel south down the spine of Madagascar just west of a line of hills called the Ankaratra range 160 kilometers, to the town of Antsirabe (Malagasy town names sound vaguely Sri Lankan, long, flouncy words full of both consonants and vowels, like the towns in Sri Lanka called Warakapola and Ambalangoda and Batticaloa). Antsirabe is home to hot springs and a hotel, and reasonably accessible via the improved road, Autoroute Nationale Numero Sept, the N 7. There's a lot you read about Madagascar that's not true, but they were right when they wrote that the N7 highway is flat and smooth.
Everything began spectacularly - cool in the highlands, with sun and cumulus and very blue skies. As we sped in and right back out of the first town, Tranombarotra, we established our communication ground rules: Speak slowly, and keep trying.

Manou wondered about the predictable driver’s concerns: What do we drive in the U.S.? How much is it? How much is gas?

He spent a little more time looking back at us than I might have preferred. Finally though, as he began a poorly understood synopsis of Malagasy politics, Manou turned back to regard the highway. First Republic, with the French, was "fantastic." Second Republic, starting in '73, "no good." Friends like Libye, Irak and Corée du Nord.

Manou had a special hate for the North Koreans, who would fly in and demand rides to the president's palace and not pay, an unhappy situation enforced by the presidential guard. The North Koreans built the palace for President Didier Ratsiraka on the other side of some hills south of Tana.

Manou stopped for us to take pictures of it (which would have been at our peril in the old days) framed in the foreground by mud-hut squalor. Massive and multi-level. Ratsiraka tried to be king, said Manou.

Didier Ratsiraka’s palace.

The Malagasy abhor conflict. Some 400,000 people organized and marched down here from Tana in August, 1991. Ratsiraka put machine gunners in the hills and lobbed grenades into the marchers, killing a hundred or so (the government said eleven). Even thus outraged, it took the consensus-building Malagasy another two years to oust the guy in elections, as, no fool he, Ratsiraka overnight became the world's best capitalist and most sincere promiser.

Ratsiraka had shot up his own people. But the Berlin wall had fallen and so had his income from the Soviets. He presented himself as a candidate in elections, lost but officially won, and finally lost for real. Now he lives in France.

One of the things you’ll read about Madagascar that's just not true is that all the hills are clear cut and stripped, denuded down to the red earth. The hills are mostly bare, but they're green, rather like Hawaii in lushness, and rather like Scotland for the tree-free, rolling moor feel. Most of the land is under cultivation, terraced for rice, but with some corn and a little blé (wheat).

Boulders were strewn across fields and rounded hills for the first 45 kilometers south of Tana. Not breathtaking. Oddly pretty. Everybody, man, woman and child, wore a straw hat. The houses were long and lanky and thin, a peculiar tall style, concrete or brick, sunbaked red either way, most often thatch roofed but sometimes tin.

In Vietnam, the colonial French taxed houses based on their width, resulting in tall, thin buildings. These were like that.

Another thing you’ll read is how powerful is the animist belief system of taboos, or fadys. Now here was a tiny village of twelve or 15 red houses - and the two tallest buildings were Christian churches - the Protestant, then the Catholic.

Roads like the N 7 hold motorized traffic, of course, but with not so many cars, these roads are also used for walking. Since pedestrians share the road with cars, you're forever having nerve-rattling near misses, as cars won't slow down and walkers don't jump to the shoulder until the very last second.
Add pollution, the need to constantly pass broken down trucks, tiny kids, occasional zebus (a type of cattle), and constant horns, and you've got life on the N 7. A thigh-high clump of weeds in your lane serves as a notice that there's someone broken down beyond a curve ahead, usually with two or four bare legs underneath the vehicle, extending still further into the road.

The road had been curvy down to Ambatolampy, about halfway to Antsirabe. Zebu carts far outnumbered cars and refreshingly, there were almost no motorbikes or mopeds. At Ambatolampy, Manou knew of an American with a Malagasy wife who ran a horse stable. Did we want to stop?

So just on the other side of town we turned up a dirt track at a sign, "Manja Ranch 1 km." and spoke English with the man of the house. He'd just awakened (it wasn't yet 9:00), didn't offer his name, and drank tea without offering us any. Just another anti-establishmentarian who couldn't or didn't want to do it the American way - from St. Louis, posted here as an engineer eight years ago.

Quit, married locally, stayed. Goatee, a little wild-eyed intensity, and a 70's-mod orange and blue striped shirt. He'd started the horse farm, with a half dozen or so horses and more servants, and he was trying to entice groups from Tana down into the hills.

First, he needed to get into the guidebooks, of which there were then exactly two: Hilary Bradt's Guide to Madagascar ("I don't know why we're not in there.” He felt it personally. “We've written her. People have written her for us. But you know, she's getting lazy. She only comes to Madagascar three weeks a year anymore.") and the Lonely Planet guide, in which he'd got a mention ("They stole a lot of stuff from Hilary.").

He groused that the government counted every arrival as a tourist arrival and thus while there were 52,000 "tourists" last year, really there were only about 30 or 35,000. The government kept ticket prices too high, there was no reason this country should be as poor as it was.
He blamed Ratsiritka but also his predecessors for taking too long to jump start tourism. This would be the year that decided whether they would stay or sell and go. He muttered quite a bit.

It was a couple hundred meters higher than even the king's and queen's hilltop palaces in Tana out here, and when clouds covered the sun it got positively chilly. We bumped and rolled on back down toward Ambatolampy.

Manou said rice cost 2000 Mfr per kilo, or 50 cents for 2.2 pounds, and that was an outrageously high price he thought, given all the rice in all the fields.

When he'd ask something in French, we'd decipher and try to answer and he'd always reply with an endearing, "Aaahhhhhhhh!,” the secrets of the universe being revealed, when really we told him things like the English word for vache is cow.

After Ambatolampy the N 7 straightened out and we really cruised. The town before Antsirabe, Ampitatafika, marked a transition. The landscape flattened and the crops changed from terraced rice paddies to fields of maize. From here on in, people squatted at the roadside over covered iron pots on wood fires - steaming ears of corn for sale.

We traced along a muddy brown river through little villages, all red brick, with the rail line to our left. We stopped on a bluff 27 kilometers out of Antsirabe and did a roll of film (we took rolls of film in the 1990s) of the kids in the fields far below. Manou asked about U.S. racial problems and confided Madagascar’s, between the highland Merina and coastal peoples - even though we're all brown, he smiled.

We drove right into and straight out of Antsirabe, straight on to Lac Andraikiba, a beautiful clean deep blue bowl free from crowds except for kids. We shook off the few kids begging for stylos and took a 30 minute stroll along the bank. Three or four girls washing clothes giggled. A canoe with two men paddled silently toward the center of the lake.

Rowing on Lac Andraikiba.

A man with a basket on his head tried to sell me something to either eat, chew or smoke. Whatever it was I told him "non, merci," and we walked back.

Screaming bright blue and red tiny flowers. Eucalyptus trees. The path thick with grasshoppers. They "thp-thp-thpped" by.

Manou dropped us for Heinekens at the Hotel des Thermes in Antsirabe, which is this mad colonial pink and white bemehoth hulk. It ain't pretty but it did have cold beer.

That's important because the Star brewery is right here in town and when it comes to Malagasy superlatives there is only one: the worst alcohol award. Golden Beer is just pucker-up-and-spit awful. Three Horses is likewise pucker-up awful and it was awarded the Monde Medal d'Or at Bruxelles in 1992, which unquestionably undermines that award forevermore.

But here were Heinekens - and brown Malagasy kids swimming in the pool, and a gaggle of Scandinavians, all mixed with a Japanese bus tour. Mirja had Malagasy wine, "vin gris," or gray wine - Gris de Manamisoa, from Ambalavao and it tasted about as good as its name.

But this was truly a beautiful, gorgeous day. Unusual evergreens and billowing white, clean clouds.

Then it was time for the pousse-pousse ride. As far as I can tell, Antsirabe is pretty clearly the pousse-pousse capital of the world. A pousse-pousse is a cyclo without the pedals - literally a push-push - because the driver is inside a little wood frame with a bar, attached to the seat over 16 inch wheels, and he has to push-push the bar to move. It’s a Malagasy rickshaw.

They were absolutely everywhere, hand painted, individually named carriages named after girlfriends, movies, towns, rock stars. So we sat with a tiny old man pulling us along, bare feet slapping the pavement, getting going faster down hills, laboring up the other sides. Up the road to the Antsirabe train station, then a turn and a promenade down the grand avenue to the Hotel des Thermes and back. 2000 plus a 500 tip was 60 cents and he was delighted.

It's hard to imagine the life of a guy who can't afford shoes but still has to haul a cart full of people around on pavement - then it starts to rain and he has to just keep on hauling.

The pousse-pousses of Antsirabe.

Women washed clothes in a canal down by the thermal bathhouse you can't use anymore, and laid them on the ground to dry.

Blue gray clouds scudded in, kicked up a breeze and dumped a little rain on Antsirabe as we stopped at the Hotel Diamand restaurant. The stable man back in Ambatolampy told us it was the only place in town to eat, believe him, so we asked Manou to drive us by for lunch before heading out.

On the plus side it had a color TV and a bar, "Nightclub Tahiti." The most expensive thing on the menu was Camembert cheese at $5 a kilo. Crab meat was not quite $2. Hygiene was the only factor on the other side of the ledger, and it was enough to keep us from eating.

Manou, though, could as good as taste the zebu as we left Antsirabe, I guess, because he laid on the gas and got us back to Tana in just over two and a half hours, compared to something like four hours on the way down. And at these prices, ol' Manou and Madame Manou would be wadin' in zebu for weeks.

I'm not sure what makes a zebu, really. How or if it's different from a steer. But one man's bullock is another man's zebu, I always say.

Grapes, corn and green apples, offered for sale on the roadside. Blé in the fields.

Manou was probably a pretty good businessman. Didn't much claim to like his Peugeot 504, but he still had it souped up with Pioneer woofers and tweeters cut into the back.

We were just rollin' along at the 39 kilometer marker outside Tana when BAM!!!!!!

Glass splintered, we swerved and Mirja and I jerked awake. I whirled to see a cock flying into the grass behind us.

We stopped. The left headlight was busted away.

Already a man was approaching the cock in the high grass. We had our second glass-breaking ride, after Burma, Manou had a repair bill and somebody had an unexpected dinner behind us.
Soon enough the scramble of stalls, like "Poissonerie," down at the paddies signaled the edge of Tana. Twenty-plus year old metallic Renaults. Tatas, polluting as usual. But to be fair, in Madagascar, so did all the other buses - Mitsubishis, Mercedes and Izusus, too.

•••••

They wouldn't buy back your local money when you left Madagascar. Since we had maybe $80 worth we were tipping fools that last day, ordering onion soup, bread with goat cheese, entrecôte with sauce, all we could eat at lunch, and being forced into Three Horses Beer, endured in the 65 centilitre size, because the Heinekens ran out.

We had evaded theft our entire stay, but we pressed our luck with one last trip to Avenue de l'Independence. Our luck ran out.

The idea was to spend a couple hundred thousand Francs. So we bought some art and a musical instrument we only mildly wanted, beat away the vending crowd and climbed into a taxi, where a kid reached in the window and pulled Mirja's gold bracelet right from her wrist. He bolted around the corner, into the crowd and away.

Damn.

•••••

Evidence There Will Be Spring

2012-01-17T08:40:56-05:00

Under the title, Goodbye darkness - sun rises at Utsjoki, the broadcaster YLE writes, "Polar night is drawing to a close in the Finnish far north. The sun rose above the horizon in Utsjoki for about an hour on Tuesday, from 11:57am to 12:47pm." Utsjoki is Finland's northernmost town, up on the Norwegian border about 60 kilometers from the Arctic Sea.

Here's what the midday twilight looked like when we visited Lapland last month:

The Week Ahead

2012-01-16T10:56:12-05:00

Some original travel writing this week, about two very different places: Tomorrow we'll publish chapter ten of Common Sense and Whiskey, The Book (Amazon) (Kindle) (BN). Chapter ten is from Madagascar, one of your more exotic places on the planet. Then Wednesday we'll start a few short takes on our Christmas trip up to Finland and the Arctic Circle. They'll come daily in short, serial form, over the following several days. Hope you enjoy them.

Meanwhile, follow along with my friend Laurence Mitchell, who's in Southeast Asia this week.

Love Letter to a Map

2012-01-16T10:34:01-05:00

Made by one guy in Oregon.

About Out of the Way Places

2012-01-14T14:24:09-05:00

Here are two engaging, very different city profiles:

Riga, from More Intelligent Life

- "Did you know ... the Duchy of Courland, now part of Latvia, once held Tobago as a colony?"

- "Wander through (the old town) on a winter night and you're lost in a fairy tale ... Wander through it on a Friday evening in summer, on the other hand, and you may find yourself lost in a British stag party. Ryanair has much to answer for."

and Nizhny Novgorod, from The Daily Beast

- "One of Russia's best-known democrats, the first governor of Nizhny, Boris Nemtsov, tried to shake up the city ... He reopened the Nizhny Novgorod Fair.... The city did not become a merchant center. It soured in melancholy and inactivity."

- "Today Nizhny is paused, as if quietly waiting for what will happen next. But I have noticed that the number of very good poets has increased lately."

Haven't made it to Nizhny Novgorod yet, but there are photos from Riga in the Latvia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

Now THAT'S Austerity

2012-01-14T14:17:45-05:00

In an article about the pain of yesterday's rating downgrade, the New York Times reports that, "In Paris, for example, a sparkling light show that illuminated the Eiffel Tower for 10 minutes every hour after dark has been cut to 5 minutes."