Back. Or rather, Next.

The plane’s landing, I feel giddy. When I saw the golden gate my stomach jumped, when I saw Stanford I felt tingly. But I’m not clear on what the actual emotions behind these responses are! Is it excitement? Do I feel like I’m at home? Am I happy to be back? Relieved? Anxious?

Pause. Check. Be mindful. I’m happy (pretty sure). Excited, very. Anxious? Not at all. Is this home? If the past few months have done anything they have exposed me to half a dozen different conceptions and manifestations of home. This place is as good as any and will do for now; but I reckon I’m restless at heart. A little stint back here then I’ll be off. To the Kenyan savannah, to the Indian urban, to the Sydney coast. Or somewhere yet untrotted.

Always go west?I cheated, friends, and I apologize. The shortest way back to San Francisco from Nairobi is via Dubai; and the shortest way from Dubai is over the pole. So I didn’t always go west– today on my final leg I went east, then directly north, and directly south. I will be heading those ways again very soon, I feel it. The adventure begins. Every day.

What a beautiful life.

Waiting for my backpack. The immigration officer who checks my passport asks where I came from. I proudly say “Kenya”, to which he asks with more than a hint of derision, “Why’d you pick Kenya?” Whether or not this was a manifestation of the classic American attitude that USA is best and greatest and the only and the one, that is certainly what it felt like. There are so many things great about this country. It is an amazing, remarkable place. But that blind patriotism I just don’t miss.

In every place you take the good with the bad; there are the things you love, and the things you put up with because there are other things there that you love. There exists no best, there is no one, there is no only. There are a hundred cool places, and wildly uncalculable opportunity cost and value judgments that must be made when choosing the next place to call home. At some point I will probably settle, most of us do. But it won’t be forever. It’ll just be next. And it wont be perfect but it will be great.

Cali, I’m ecstatic to call you my Next.

(And dear reader, you legend, thanks for following! I hope these musings and images were curious and transporting, or at least a decent diversion. Thank you for joining me! I hope to see you on the road, soon. )

Kenya

I was in Africa two years ago. Morocco. It was different from anything I’d experienced. But this feels like a different continent.

In early childhood we develop “working models” of the world– we learn concepts ranging from the basic (one Graham cracker broken in half is not more, even though it’s two) to the nuanced (actions as right or wrong, and responsibility and consequence). This working model arms us with the tools to go out into life and make sense of everything. Kenya has blown mine apart.

So while I try to reconcile this new information with my old value systems, let me buy some time by putting up pictures of animals. Everyone likes animals. Clicking a shutter is easier than reevaluating life priorities, styles, goals and ideas.

I want to thank Elahe and her parents Hassan and Naheed for their generosity, warmth, and for catalyzing the umpteenth paradigm shift on my Always Go West saga.

What they show on Nat geo (leopard vs gazelle).

What they don’t show on Nat geo (same moment, zoomed out).

Dubai

Dubai

I consider natural, organic, temporal forms beautiful. The ocean, sunsets, colours. My understanding of beauty requires an element of randomness, of unpredictability, of improbability. My aesthetic sees things that are too predictable as being mass producible and kitsch. Rarity is beauty, and transience creates rarity. Hence, I love the natural. Some manmade efforts i find beautiful but many I don’t. Buildings like the Taj, and the Sydney Opera House I find beautiful because they seem impossible to have created or envisioned; are quite organic, and experiencing them is influenced greatly by temporality. Interior decorating on the other hand appeals to my sense of order and design but not beauty. No matter how well designed a built space is, it was still designed intentionally and that intentionality is reproducible and predictable and thus less cool than a natural space. I rarely walk into a room and gasp at it’s beauty, but often look at the sky or an ocean wave and gasp. So, as nice as resorts and fancy buildings are, I don’t really find them compelling for their beauty. They seem too processed, too deliberate, too manufactured.

Dubai was different. Dubai is entirely constructed. Entirely intentioned. Entirely planned and meticulously executed, from its miraculous engineering feats to its ornately decorated malls and restaurants. It is the farthest thing from natural; the whole place seems to exist as one giant act of defiance against nature. Ski slopes and lake-sized fountains rising out of the desert, islands and sky scrapers rising out of the sea. In Dubai the natural world has been squashed, molded, and conquered. Why then did I find it so beautiful?

I think it was the sheer force of the statement: When there’s a will, there’s a way. Humanity, for all of its foolishness, can do incredible things, it can do the undoable. With enough vision (and money) it can manufacture miracles. Don’t get me wrong, Dubai is far from perfect — it expounds blindly capitalist and consumerist values, feels distressingly superficial, is non-democratic, has limited free speech, and treats its poor migrant workers worse than the dirt they shovel. None of that sits right with me. And then there’s the clincher — it could hardly be less sustainable. Its tagline, if it had one, would be “MAN RULES, NATURE DROOLS, WE WIN, SUCKAZ”. (I actually think that retrofitting dubai for sustainability would detract from its all-powerful nature-taming mission statement). Hubris coats the city thick and sticky like honey: the sandy winds are already retaking roads and the salty seas reclaiming islands dredged from their beds, yet still they build. How could a place like this rekindle hope in me for a sustainable future? It’s a bit abstract– before coming to Dubai the sustainability battle seemed fairly hopeless to me, Sisyphean even. But Dubai showed that nothing is hopeless — money and vision can achieve anything. (Now we just need to get business on the side of sustainability.)

Dubai isn’t necessarily a great thing to have on the planet. From an emissions perspective, it’s a disaster. All drinking water comes from squeezing salt out of the ocean, all electricity comes from oil, all food comes from elsewhere (it’s a desert. It’s too harsh even for cacti). By any measure, the landscape should be a write-off as uninhabitable. The fact that people inhabit it puts a massive toll on the environment. But all this is an easy argument to make, and it’s been made many times before. Less intuitive is that from a philosophical perspective it is an incredible thing to have for humanity. It is a physical realization of the notion that anything is possible.

Dubai is also compelling for a second reason. It is an incredible tool for Muslim-Christian cultural exchange as its rampant capitalism and excessive luxury draw people into a Muslim state who otherwise wouldn’t ever consider going (and while they’re there, they can’t help but learn something about Islam and realize their working stereotypes don’t work so well). The Sheik’s community center for cultural exchange is a beautiful desert-style adobe building where discussions and classes are held, with the mission to “open doors and open minds”. And it is impossible to peruse Louis Vuitton alongside a woman in a burka with glowing eyes and not have a mental stereotype shattered and us-them barrier torn down.

Dubai is an interesting experiment and a powerful statement. I never expected a city founded on florid excess to rekindle hope that we can create a sustainable future. I never expected a fundamentalist non-democratic Muslim state to reassure me that global cultural differences can be settled and that we are one tolerant species. And I never expected to ski in the desert.

UAE

1. Everyone else looks tinsy when you’re twice as big. Vista from Burj Kalifa.
2. An impossibly huge torus in the middle of the sand between Dubai and Abu Dhabi, Ferrari world celebrates an automobile that epitomizes the incredible feats humanity can achieve when it has a strong, passionate dream and no consideration of environmental impact. Apt metaphor for the whole country perhaps.
3. After a couple days here I got tired of superlatives, but here it is: the biggest, most ornate mosque in the world. All the women tourists had to put on the national dress to enter– black garb and head scarf. I reckon everyone liked playing dress up as much as seeing this contemporary Taj.
4. Three-storey 50 metre-long pane of glass aquarium. In a mall. I dare say it is the biggest in the world.
5. Dunes at dusk.
6. Champion of a host: huge shout out to the boss in the middle Andres for putting us up for a week and showing us the most incredible UAE experience. Gracias habibi!
7. Bein a camel.
8. Dunes on fire.
9. From my looking platform I could look outside at the 50 degree centigrade air shimmering on the road, then turn 180 and look in here to an indoor ski resort. I almost want to say it’s a miracle, but miracles are generally a good thing and I just can’t tell that this is a good thing. It is profoundly inspiring and completely absurd. Oh, and all the snow is made with ocean water that has had the salt crushed out of it, drop by drop. I’m blown away.
10. A mosque can’t keep itself spotless can it.
11. Paradise for capitalists (and architects)… Also happens to be very strictly muslim. Dubai seems to be the least so among the Emirates, but it is very much a pulse of the city behind the shimmering glass and fancy luxury.
12. Beautiful white sand beaches, entirely man-made. Beautiful blue water, heavily salted from post-desal dumping. Beautiful sunlight scorching at 122 F. The beach bit really feels like a desert. (Resisting the urge here to pun on “deserted”).

Kerala backwaters

Hostel vs Hotel

Oh, five-star is a different life. The hectic apprehension associated with budget accommodation melts away into a warm sense of comfort and security; the high-pitched whisper behind my head saying, “will your passport and gear be in the room when you return?” shuts up; the bathrooms are not only scum free and endowed with toilet paper, but they are gorgeous and architecturally inspiring (endowed with the tiny toothpastes, brown sugar soap, and natural sponge loofahs!); the bed sheet thread count replaces the bed bug head count; and the racket and honks of India is noise-cancelled in favor of live jug-and-strings classical music.

A good life, no doubt. Thanks Mum and Dad, and Sandra and John, for this respite. (And my sister Sush for the delightful company!)

But the comfort comes at some cost, and not merely monetarily. There is a lot to love about the hostel life! You meet everybody: other travelers from around the world, staff who you can spend an afternoon bumming around with being silly, locals who work in the streets you have to walk through every time you go anywhere. In Agra we met an awesome Dutch duo, a Zara designer and a Spanish chef; the hostel staff borrowed a moped and drove us through monsoon rain to their family doctor so we wouldn’t get charged commission as tourists; and a kid who worked a water and snack joint around the corner shared his whiskey and coke with me on a Friday evening as we bartered over cookies. In Delhi we were declared part of the manager’s family and met an amazing Japanese woman traveling alone. The hostel experience is fundamentally about opening your social circle and it feels fantastic. It’s also raw– you get your own water. You eat street food. You walk through the streets the locals walk through and you live on something closer to their budget. Travel is about seeing another way of life and backpacking immerses you in it. There is no better way to get a feel for the place, its pulse, its vibe, its soul.

In resorts I don’t have a burning urge to explore in the same way. It is so lovely being comfortable that I just enjoy sitting. I tend to think about things less (life, people, time, travel, ideas). I’m less motivated to do anything. I veg. I feel like I slow from 200 to 2 miles per hour. It’s glorious! Resplendent. Oh-so-needed after a long period on the go. And I love every minute of the luxury. But it does provide another data point on the best way to travel and experience the world.

The working life grants very limited vacation during which many activities must be squeezed into one brief respite. We have one or two weeks to travel, relax, shop, splurge, and do all of the things that make us happy. It’s interesting that many people buy luxury goods (available anywhere in the world) only when traveling, and we have special institutions like Duty Free established to help strengthen the association between travel and shopping. Besides the fact that both activities are things we do in free time, the two share very little in common, yet are now inextricably linked as similar experiences. Another activity often linked with travel is pampering. Massages don’t actually have anything to do with seeing a new place, but are an integral aspect of a swanky foreign holiday– again, very little in common between the act of traveling and of getting a massage, except that both are activities done in free time. The scarcity of vacation has created strange bedfellows of the travel experience, and for me it is important to extract exactly what aspects of travel I most seek, and which aspects are these other arbitrarily related pursuits.

I reckon I see more of a place, meet more people, am more active, more engaged with my surroundings, and more energetic when I live like a backpacker and stay in crummy, shabby hostels. But doing so is exhausting, and as I insert myself into the working life I will need my holidays to serve the multiple functions — not just to travel but also to recharge. I think an 80/20 break up of time, hostel/resort, is ideal for me. Backpack at the beginning of the trip, and end with a few days of high-life treatment (if funds permit).

Both are so fun. Being comfy and spoilt is wonderful. But a big part of me just loves not having to shower and still smelling better than the mattress.

Done with Photography?

Post-photo

I’m over Photography. Burnt out. Tired. It feels a bit like a chore. This feeling will pass. But right now, I’m post photo.

I don’t like how my whole brain becomes a world-scanning machine for well-composed shots. I don’t like how it makes me focus almost exclusively on the visual experience of a place and ignore the sounds and smells and textures. I don’t like the fact that I feel frustrated when I see something too beautiful and all-encompassing to capture on camera. I don’t like how I see everything as flattened and bounded by hypothetical rectangular frames.

I love photography for the focus and clarity it provides– all the above ways in which it makes me think are actually incredibly useful tools for experiencing a place. If used sparingly. I’ve been going a bit overboard.

This morning I took my camera out of my bag for the drive to the airport. It would be my last spin through India, and I wanted to be ready to capture any nice moments if they came. A local in a lungi walked past the car, lit by the pre-dawn blue and the grazing-angle headlamps of an oncoming truck. It was beautiful, simple, peaceful, a rice paddy behind him with just a touch of mist. I didn’t pick up the camera in time and he was gone, the moment over. And I felt frustrated. How absurd and miserable it is to feel frustrated at seeing something beautiful. Its fleeting nature just made it more precious. I didn’t have the chance to immortalize it, sure, but there is beauty in that too. If I had photographed it I wouldn’t have actually been there and experienced it, with the cool humid air blowing my face, head bobbling with every pothole, spicy moist smell, and simple quiet stillness.

End note: I wrote this a few days ago and have since taken more 534 photos and purchased a tripod. I can’t shake this addiction (recently watched Trainspotting, and the mantra “just one more hit!” seems relevant). I’m getting better at controlling it though.

I have an ongoing goal, which I tend to forget about occasionally but am pursuing with renewed invigoration. To photograph mindfully.

Kochi

This. Place. Is. So. Chill.

The people all smile. The tuktuks don’t hustle you. Actually, barely anyone hustles you. The colors are lovely. And the streets are filled with the sound of… Silence. India you’ve done it again.

Mumbai

Delhi set my expectations about what “India” was. It was my first impression. The slums, dirt, noise, smells, and heat were all normalized, tared, reset to baseline. It was necessary because I could have never moved beyond these initial shocks and experienced the beauty and wonder of India if I kept being aware them. In Jaipur this resetting allowed me to notice the wild colors of saris over the baseline grime, the extra smells of jasmine perfume, and away from the honking streets the subtle sound of tablas. In Agra it let me shake hands with adorable filthy kids, traipse through cobblestone streets smeared with every kind of animal feces in search of delicious sweets, and fall in love with the Taj. Being able to calibrate to a new environment is such a crucial capability when traveling. If you can’t do it you will be perpetually distracted by that context’s quotidian and unable to attend to anything else. If you can, there is a world of weird and wonderful just waiting to be seen.

In Mumbai, my Delhi-informed expectations of India meant that… I didn’t think I was still in India. It was so different. There were slums, but I was accustomed to those. What I wasn’t used to was seeing skyscrapers sprouting up like dandelions across the horizon! This city had a skyline! I was used to busy roads, but not to big sidewalks! What? Urban planning?! I was used to heat and rain, but Mumbai was a couple degrees cooler! Still tropically balmy by literally any standard but I felt almost cold! And the treatment — I was used to hot hostels and public transport but for our couple days in Mumbai my mate Anuj from Stanford positively spoiled us, putting us up in his guesthouse and giving us a driver to take us anywhere we wanted. Wow. I thought I had gotten a sense of India from my time in the north, but all I had really gotten to know was one facet. India is a vast, varied cornucopia of experiences, languages, cultures and religions all miraculously united (somehow) into one country/pseudo-continent.

We saw someone run through smashing waves to get to Haji Ali mosque, built off the coast of and connected by a little concrete footbridge that is submerged at high tide. We met a photojournalist at the Juhu beach oil spill and Maria got into the newspaper. We watched people literally beat the shit and grime out of clothes at the Dobi Ghat washing machine village. We went to the Jehangir Art Gallery to get a bit of cultcha. We went to a bar. The ratio of tuk tuk to shorts sightings reversed (not a beeping three-wheeler in sight, but a whole lot of leg)!

Very different side of India. Onto Kerala in the far south next. Now I’m sure that’ll be equally dissimilar, but I can’t imagine how.

Agra

I undressed her slowly. At first she was shrouded in an ancient, dirty city. When I finally found her hiding amongst the decaying concrete constructions and tin shanties she was wearing an earthy red sandstone shawl. I could smell her, sense her, but she was hidden from sight. I caught glimpses through her shawl, stolen glances, and shivered. This wasn’t a striptease, it wasn’t lewd or sexual. It was dignified and sensual, like drawing a nude or watching an hourglass silhouette walk away.

Stumbling along the shit-smeared streets of Agra I reached a nondescript hotel at the end of an alley and climbed to the roof. And there she was. Exposed. “It”, I suppose, might be more apt for she was, essentially, inanimate — a building. But I couldn’t stop staring. Or thinking about it as a her. Her form really wasn’t seductive or erotic, it was more like the curve of a back than cleavage. She was a wild crazed mad celebration of love and longing and, as I would see from the inside, lament.

I cannot put my finger on exactly what it was that made the building a her, or made it captivating. The Taj Mahal was built as the mausoleum for Shah Jahan’s favorite wife when she died giving birth, and perfectly distills the tragic inextricable relationship between love and loss. The outside of the Taj is a glorious display of affection and beauty — the photos take themselves for you (for example– the entire structure sits on a raised marble dais so that the only thing visible behind it is a blue sky backdrop). But the inside, if you got there at dawn before the tourists and tour guides rampaged through, was an entirely different experience.

It was elegant in there still; but dark, gloomy. Distraught. The wind hummed eerily through the lattices and arches. Outside, the translucent marble felt warm to the touch and soft, fleshy. Inside it felt colder. Somehow it was deeply, achingly sad. The chamber felt otherworldly, underworldly. If the outside of the Taj was a celebration a woman, the inside was an anguished aria of her absence.

Back outside I forced myself to put my camera down and just look. I found myself making more eye contact with the Taj than whoever I was speaking to. I’d find excuses to peep back as I was walking away.

We changed hotels to stay in the one with the rooftop view of her.

And in the pre-dawn glow on our last day before we tuk-tuk’d to the train, I raced up to the roof one last time to say bye, lingering a little longer than I should have.

What a strange, wonderful building.