The Beauty

Forty-five granite steps climb above the green to the temple’s face. Three segments of thirteen steeply inclined stairs make their way to the uppermost platform upon which Dabosa sits. Six more footfalls take the walker to the temple structure's great doors. Dark, thick bee sap falls from the awning and collects in a gooey splat, feeding hordes of well-nourished ants. Detailed paintings of Buddha's life adorn the interior walls, a story laid out beneath a ceiling saturated with lotus flowers. Finely carved wooden dragon heads spiral above the focal effigy of Buddha. Paper lanterns and flowers hang from the ceiling, white and pink and bright, hovering above the meditation cushions.

Looking down on the residence and dining hall from Dabosa

Dabosa is nestled amidst thick forest that clings to the steep Sobaek Mountains of central South Korea. Sandy bedrock cliffs jut out of the canopy like spots of skin revealed beneath the furry green coat. Small farms and a narrow road tuck in alongside the clear creek that carves the valley. All the eye sees is forest, rock, cloud and sky in all directions, the vista enveloped and protected by Sognisan National Park. The ear is treated to the almost electric whirring of cicadas from mid-morning on with the accompanying chorus of birds, bees, and breeze through the trees. It feels like a long way from anywhere, and indeed the bus ride here ferried me through endless landscape paintings of rivers and hills, sparse settlements and fields of crops three and a half hours from the capital city of Seoul in the north.

Eight times a day I ascend to the meditation hall, beginning pre-dawn under the starlight, continuing through sunrise and the heat of mid-day, with the final trip after nightfall as the cool mountain air permeates camp. The slow climb encourages a focused entry into the coming sit, a preparation for the internal work I am about to do. The even slower descent is a product of the radical pain flaring through my knee joints, a byproduct of sitting for long hours and releasing the hellfire from within (more on that later).

Yinchuan, China in May

At the base of the steps is a small lawn, partitioned into two for male and female usage. Upon this lawn the participants of this ten day meditation course saunter, stroll, pace, power walk, lope and do laps. There is no contact permitted between students. This includes speech, eye contact, gesturing and physical touch. We are prohibited from writing, reading, and engaging in essentially anything that would distract us from the work we have come here to do: sharpening and purifying the mind.

With all of these distractions removed, and still having free time between sits, naps, and eating, I delve into the rich life of my surroundings. Giant frogs, tree frogs, mini-toads, dragonflies, ugly-butts, cicadas, praying mantis, long-green-legs, ants, spiders, and bees. The small green metamorphoses into an insanely interesting and incredible insectorium filled with hours of entertainment and rumination.

A small cord bisects the lawn, keeping the (human) sexes segregated. The local dragonfly population has noted the perfect positioning of this line and its members sit perched upon it, using it as a hunting platform from which they can launch and devour their prey. I encounter one just as he touches down on the cord, the head of a sizable gnat in his mouth. The legs of his captive kick in constant struggle as he slowly munches away, jaw extending down and away from his oblate head and engulfing bit by bit the gnat’s entire body. Legs continue to flail as the transparent wings pop off as if they were connected by cheap, desiccated glue. The dragonfly works his mouth unhurriedly. The gruesomely fascinating display bolsters my recent decision to relinquish my own carnivorous habits.

Where do sunflower seeds come from?

I am particularly fond of the dragonflies. They are stunning creatures, clothed in a broad spectrum of spectacular colors, crimson flowing to burnt orange and radiating gold, amber speckled with jade, lightning bolt yellow across a body of black. And their relative ease with my proximity offers the opportunity for extreme close-ups and advanced scrutiny. Their head is quite large, and the neck by which it is attached to the rest of the torso surprisingly small. Their eyes are massive, dusty and opaque, the color of rust at the apex, and becoming increasingly metallic and mirrored toward the base. They have an endearing way of cocking their head to the side while they view you, somewhat like a dog does when it hears a perplexing sound, but considerably more buggy in character.

A much less aesthetic member of the lawn community is the ugly-butts, as I have so named them because they have ugly butts. They appear to be a blend between malnourished bumblebees and elongated horseflies, though fortunately with neither the biting nor stinging capacity of their unlikely relatives. They are hairy, with bristles covering the rear half of their body and sprouting from between their eyes. In flight their wings produce a sound like a giant mosquito, and their skinny little hairy butt rises up in the air akin to a scorpion’s tail preparing to strike. This style of flight strikes me as particularly ungainly and gross.

What I assume to be the males are infinitely occupied with finding a mate. They have a white film oozing from the tip of their rear, which is likely some kind of sperm/egg/or supercharged hormone they wish to swap with a member of the opposite sex. Perched upon a step, rail, or other elevated surface, they scout for ladies who may be huddling in the grass. Bullying is standard to maintain a good viewing platform, and fisticuffs erupt whenever one’s zone has been infiltrated by another.

At Seolleung Royal Tombs, Seoul

When finally a mate is selected, they link butts. This ritual grossly lacks style and grace, in stark contrast to the mating dance of the dragonfly. Stacked one on top of the other, the dragonflies both face the same direction and hover in unison, apparently enjoying their brief union. Grounded or aloft, the pair moves together as a unit. The ugly-butts apply no such form to their reproductive function. Facing away from their ugly partner, the only thing connecting the two are their hairy rear ends. When forced into flight, one dangles behind the other and struggles to flap its wings, producing a sickly dissonant hum as it flies in reverse. Most unpleasant to behold.

At the base of the stairway leading up to Dabosa sits a giant granite urn. Functioning as a cistern to catch rain-water for use by the residents of the grounds, the half-spherical stone goblet spills overflow into a smaller rectangular basin and then out again into a drain. At the very rear of the urn is a small hole, which I presume connects to a well that plunges into the bedrock below. Seeing no pump, I wonder if it is an artesian well. In that tiny hole lives a small frog, jade green and very cute.

My good friends Lena and Derek in Shanghai

She remains settled back in her niche through the heat of the day, but in the early and late hours when the air is ripe with insects to be plucked, she edges herself out to the brim of her abode and snipes unsuspecting bugs mid-flight. She is rather skittish and my multiple attempts to approach her have all been rebuffed. I’m guessing she’s already taken.

The next morning I come across a small praying mantis upon the white and black crystalline stone. Leaning close to deepen my inspection, I note how wobbly he looks when he walks, with such a wobble you could call it a hobble. He has none of the speed or precision of the little mantis from Kung Fu Panda, and I wonder why a world renowned martial art would want to emulate such an awkward looking creature. I briefly consider trying to roundhouse kick him to see how he may counter my attack, but seeing as that may distract the other meditators I decide to refrain. I watch him penguin-mantis walk a little further, as if on two peg legs that have been overly worn down and need replacing, and then leave him to his mysterious training regimen.

You are probably wondering what kind of “sharpening” and “purification” (heavy emphasis on the quotes) of mind I am doing when it seems that my only achievement is a reversion to a childlike simplicity of thought. But this in itself is part of the work I am doing: to be present in this moment. To be here now. To see the beauty and richness of that which surrounds us, and to dive in and relish it as a child would. To embrace the beginner’s mind, as Shunryu Suzuki describes it.

And when we begin to see the fullness of the now, the brimming juices flowing from every experience, we find that what we have is more than sufficient. That wonder exists in the mundane. That a walk to the store contains an epic poem beyond the Odyssey in scope, and that a slice of watermelon is so saturated with ecstasy that my roommate Dan can’t resist polishing one off in only two sittings (he’s a pretty happy guy). That we can find our own Eden in our backyard, in our everyday.

Friend and fellow meditator Sasha in Seoul

But these realizations take work. We have been trained out of seeing things with this vision. We wander aimlessly in the misty, tangled cloudforests of our past and the shifting new moon shadows of our future. We rush through our days to get to the next five p.m. clockout, weekend or vacation.

So we must work to retrain our minds, to remind ourselves how to be aware. There are a multitude of phenomena that reach our sense organs every moment, and produce unconscious responses in the body and mind. To begin to observe that flow of input and response is the key to gaining deeper insight into how we act and behave. To understand ourselves and our environment. As Deepak Chopra describes, our bodies are a “cosmic computer,” through which we can listen to the song of the universe. With such a magnificent melody forever engulfing us, how could we instead choose to don our i-Pod ear buds or let our smart-phone multi-media digital machines suck us in?

The work is not easy. To return to the aforementioned hellfire; I am beginning to gain some understanding of the commonly used Christian terms of purgatory and hellfire. They always appeared to me to be scare tactics to frighten the listener into living a moral life based on the effects in the afterlife. Sin and you will wander the barren plains of purgatory, somewhere between heaven and hell, cold and alone. Or worse, be scalded, boiled, burned, and tortured in the ever plunging circles of Lucifer’s inferno, according to your crime.

But to believe that we must wait until death to reap the fruit of our action (whether sour or sweet) is an illusion and disservice. Anger burns within this body, and the products of this fiery furnace, all soot, smoke and ash, absolutely manifest in my daily mental state and course of action. Buddha described anger as a hot coal in a fire that we have picked up, planning to throw at someone or something, the object of our rage. Yet the coal never truly leaves our hand, as the seething emotions are never truly delivered to their target, and we boil inside just as the hot coal burns flesh.

King Sejong the Great, who created hangeul, the Korean alphabet, seated in Seoul

When the anger is not observed and let go, it gets stored in our body, in our unconscious mind, as a habit pattern of response. The storage tanks of the unconscious are vast and deep indeed! So when I sit, and observe what I feel and experience in this moment, both in body and mind, the old anger bubbles up, boils up, and manifests as very real hellfire throughout my body. Oftentimes the flames of pain lick around my knees and ankles, shooting up and down my legs as if I am stewing half-submerged in a cast-iron cauldron.

I use anger here because it is my strongest negative emotion with which I battle. Others will likely experience other strong negative emotions that overpower them from time to time. And often our unchecked emotions push us away from those we care about, in the form of open conflict or through the more subtle workings of pride and envy. Ultimately we can even lose ourselves in these experiences, not understanding why we feel a certain way or being confused about an irrational act or statement. Why am I so agitated? How could I hurt someone I love like that? And is this not purgatory, wandering alone through life, without even the solace of the self, an understanding of our own inner workings?

The beauty and richness of life and the world we live in is here. We just have to start seeing. The light and strength and love are within all of us, we just have to start believing. And then when the path is revealed to us, we just have to start walking.

As S.N. Goenka says, “only you can work out your own liberation. No one else can do it for you.”

Shiver me Limbs!

The end of June, 2011.

I meet Phil in the early morning hours after buying some fruit and fried breads. We cruise through the already bustling streets en route to our bus, which will take us up to 三关口 (Sanguankou) our climbing destination for the morning. We arrive at our stop, and entertain a number of taxi drivers and pedestrians by our mere presence. They quickly endeavor to assess our equipment, its integrity, and how much it cost us. Hands begin passing over bike frames, checking the suitability of the padded seat, honking horns and ringing bells, gauging the value of each item as if they were preparing to auction it off in a few minutes time. Several men cycle through to lift and assess the weight of each (conveniently undertaken after we’ve already taken off our panniers). 不太重 (bu tai zhong), “not too heavy” is the verdict.

Phil and I prep the bikes to go under the bus, which he informs me may not happen at all if the driver is feeling particularly prickly that morning. Seats down, wheels off, bags off; all amidst the constant banter and questioning of our audience. They want to know where we’re going, what we’re doing, what everything cost, if we’re married. We try to keep track of our dismantled components in the crowd, all the while trying to put back a 包子 (baozi) or two, steamed buns with a variety of filling. This morning I went with the 韭菜 (jiu cai) a garlicy oniony vegetable that’s quite tasty.

My buddy Richard and my bikes on the road.

The bus screams up and the ticket lady ambles off  to appraise the situation. Phil and I quickly dive under the bus, rearranging all the luggage to suit our needs. Ticket lady laughs as I sprawl prone in the belly of the beast, shuffling this bag there and that sack there. Soon we establish a sizable alcove and stack our bikes underneath. We leave our peanut gallery on the sidewalk to harangue the next passing 外国人 (waiguoren), foreigner, that passes by, of which there are few in the city of 1.5 million.

On the road, we settle sleepily into our seats, passing idle chat and the remaining 包子 between our teeth and along our tongues. Phil regales me with harrowing adventure tales of gnarly whitewater and flipped kayaks in the Alps, round-the-world airport scrambles, and a Guatemalan bus station that defines the word chaos. I enjoy the tales as the 贺兰山 (helan shan), Helan mountains, climb into sight, capped in cloud.

The 西夏王陵 (xixia wangling), Xixia tombs, one of the area’s biggest tourist attractions pass into view on the scrub plain. Mausoleums constructed over a thousand years ago to safely encapsulate some dead ruler or another, the earthen beehives are a stark contrast to the surrounding flats (“a pair of muddy nipples,” according to Phil). I watch them float by against the overcast backdrop as the bus banks westward to the mountains.

Standing atop the Great Wall at sunrise.

Soon we pass through the old Great Wall, stamped earth that has lasted since the Ming Dynasty constructed it in these far western reaches of their empire seven hundred years past. And then we are off the bus, in a cold gusting wind blasting down from the mountains. Clad in shorts and t-shirts, us mountain hardy fools neglected to bring much of anything warm. To add to the fun, the clouds are descending upon us, and drops begin to fall from the sky. We smile stupidly and hop on our steeds.

The headwind is large, and we could walk faster than we are pedaling. With only a couple kilometers to go before turning off the pavement, we bend our heads into the breeze and will our legs to work. They fight back. They refuse. Muscular mutiny. And I just fed them! Ungrateful bastards.

At our wash winding out of a steep canyon, we turn onto the sharp cobbles and debris and pedal shakily past goats, sheep, and a farmer/shepherd before finally dismounting when pebbles turn to boulders. Lock the bikes to a tree, grab our bags, and we’re off!

Dodging a few rocks kicked down on us from the local fauna, we wind up canyon around sharp dry bends in the river bed and arrive at our cliff. Phil’s crag is quite nice, being so close to the road and rather accessible. He and his compatriots are likely the only hands and feet to have scaled this wall, and he affectionately tells me how he has named several of the climbs after a busty friend’s cleavage and crack.

Sunset east of the Yellow River.

The hike up has warmed us, but it is by no means comfortable. The warmth quickly evacuates our bones as we harness up and eyeball the wall. I offer to lead a climb, and am soon awkwardly scaling a crumbly, dusty crack with two questionable pieces of gear, sharp rock, and dirt in my eye. I love it. As I pull out of the dihedral on broken rock, with little behind me that would remotely catch a fall, I am shakily reminded how and why I love climbing so much. I slowly set up an anchor at the top and peer back down at Phil, still belaying me, and wrapped in a brilliant neon pod from head to toe. Ordinarily functioning as a waterproof cover for his bike packs, he has converted this blindingly bright shell into a kind of cocoon, and looks quite happy about it. Dancing around in the canyon bottom, trying to stay warm, with a huge shit-eating grin on his face, I can easily see how he and I would naturally become good friends.

A bit more grabbing and high-stepping later (technical terms for climbing), and it’s raining. Sideways. The wind is now punching across the mountain side, left hook, right jab, right up my shorts. We decide it might be a reasonable time to head home. So we scramble back down the slippery rock to assemble our gear and say goodbye to the crag for the day.

Camp along the Great Wall.

We wheel our bikes back to the road, mount up and begin our initially slow roll down the hill. Phil crams the last of his 包子 into his cockpit and we begin to pick up speed. The drenched asphalt could have bred concern of hydroplaning, but instead Phil and I glimpse an opportunity of reduced friction to go as fast as we possibly can to get the hell down to some warmer pastures. Whirring wheels and water sailing through the air accompanies our rapid acceleration to 60 kmh as we play leap frog with freight trucks coming down from the mountains.

The air warms rapidly and we are soon too hot. Back in the flats we resume casual conversation as we pedal toward a noodle joint for some sustenance for our ride back to 银川, Yinchuan, our home. All in a good morning’s fun.

P.S. As usual, I forgot to take photos this trip, so the photos posted are from a cycling trip a couple weeks prior.

From the Vault: Night Before Duge La

Night envelops camp, carrying the first bite of winter. The old woman begins to chant and her leathery voice reverberates off the large boulder that is our shelter. She rocks forward on her sit bones and back again, arms clasped about her knees. The shadows dance across the valleys of her face as it sails in and out of the fire’s light. Fat flakes of snow fill the air around us, falling thick to the ground. My anxiety about the next day’s journey is dispelled in the aura of this pilgrim’s song. The three younger travelers join in the mantra and the vibrations saturating the air are intoxicating. My lids flutter as I finger my prayer beads and gaze into the fire. In the darkness above lies the high pass Duge La, the portal that will take us into Tibet and around the sacred mountain Kawagebo.

The four pilgrims hail from the small village of Yongdri, on a tributary of the Mekong River in Yunnan Province, China. It is the gateway for the circumambulation of one of Tibet’s four holiest peaks, a village I had left that morning with blessings and warnings of the journey ahead. Beyond the buildings tendrils of water snaked down cliff faces and the subalpine forest burned bright crimson, flush with fall.

Higher still sits a giant boulder amidst a braided stream. Reams of prayer flags join features of the landscape, marking this stone as exceptional ground. Fluttering green. Flickering blue. Orange waving and yellow wafting. The stone is charred from the fires of many pious passersby and broad Tibetan script is scrawled across the overhanging face in charcoal. All now draped in darkness.

Under its generous cover huddle five pilgrims. Elder mother, son, wife, cousin, and me, our gear cluttered around us. Their belongings bundled on pliable wooden frames, lashed down with twine. Thick bedding wrapped in a tarp; a sack of pulverized roasted grain called tsampa; balls of yak butter; a bag of loose black tea; several bowls and one large kettle. With these provisions they plan to trek for eight days, from pre-dawn to dusk, crossing two 4500 meter passes to earn the blessing of the mountain, Kawagebo.

The humming dissipates and I materialize in this world once again. Over creamy spicy yak butter tea I am invited to join the family, to navigate Duge-La as a team the following day. I warmly accepted and we retire for the night.

Dawn. A foot of snow and unease in camp. My morning haze turns to disappointment when I see little movement from the others. It’s over and we haven’t even started. I fidget in my sleeping bag while the snow falls harder. Suddenly there is chatter in the air as a festive party of ten more Tibetans approach camp. Greetings and laughter are exchanged.  I am poked and prodded as my nylon and Gore-Tex is examined, ridiculed, and promptly dismissed. With a few shouts and shoves, we pack up and climb into the storm.

Two Weeks on Tonsai

Tonsai. Just uttering the word makes my fingers tingle. Imagine white sandy beaches crawling out of the jungle and kissing the azure waters of the Andaman Sea. NOW imagine giant towers of limestone thrusting out of the ocean and reaching toward the sky, everywhere, with vegetation covering and spilling off of the walls and spires. Sound like a climber’s paradise? It is.

Phra Nang Beach, from the Defile.

But for climbers’ eyes only? No! Normal people can soak up the beauty too. And they do. Nearby Koh Phi Phi (where the movie “The Beach” was shot) consistently earns “one of the most beautiful islands/beaches” of the world status. And the Phra Nang Peninsula, where Tonsai and its sister beaches are, displays the same natural wonder. In fact, southern Thailand in general is covered with beautiful coastline on both this side and on the Gulf of Thailand, where the famous islands of Koh Samui and Koh Phangan are located. This kind of beauty attracts notice. Phra Nang and Railay Beaches are covered with tanning hard (and soft) bodies, rich and famous, or just rich, from all over the world speaking languages of many origins floating on the ocean breeze. Tonsai Beach, just across from Railay, is more the climber and budget traveler hangout… erego, that’s where I was at.

So the climbing: It’s by far the steepest, strangest, funkiest, most overhung, and downright alien climbing I’ve ever done. All kinds of weird stuff to grab onto, scum up against, stick your head into, paste your foot upon, and generally stare at and wonder, “how the hell am I going to use that?” Then there’s the green stuff. Trees and their kin hug the steep slopes, edging a sylvan elbow into any habitable zone on the mountainside. Vines and roots and runners leap off the tops of towers, dangling down the walls and cliffs to find nooks and pockets and crannies to bed down in. One way to tell how steep a wall really is, is to gaze up at the plant matter hanging down at dead vertical from its top and then measure the angle at which the wall steadily creeps away inward. Yeah, it’s steep.

The impressive karst topography is the combined result of bedrock (limestone and dolomite) and the erosional power of the ocean and the tropical monsoon. Check out these sites to get a better understanding of the process: Wikipedia, Answers. A loose way to imagine it is to think of the water flowing through the porous rock and dissolving, transporting, and then depositing minerals in new, down gradient locations. This essentially causes the rock to flow like a liquid, and create stunning and bizarre formations like stalactites, pillars, stalagmites, tufas, and “flowstone” (read, everything else) for climbers to play on. It also creates massive underground cave systems. The world’s largest cave was discovered in Vietnam a couple years back in the same kind of landscape. On Phra Nang one tunnel traverses under the massive Thaiwand to transport climbers through the dark hollow, over rickety bamboo ladders and ledges, from Phra Nang beach and Escher World to Railay and the Thaiwand’s north face.

Up on Monitor Wall. The Thaiwand and Railay Beach behind me.

Getting back to the steepness. Your shoulders and arms are nearly always pitched back with your feet in and below you. This kind of climbing is intensely physical and pumpy (where your forearms fill up with blood, muscles and tendons and ligaments tighten, and you can no longer grip anything), and forces you to get creative to try and work reasonable rests into your progress. Given the featured nature of the rock, the rests get pretty funny-looking. One of the best is the crotch-tufa-squeeze, where you straddle each side of the flowstone and squeeze with your groin muscles to hold you in place and shake out your arms. Others involve sneaking into small caves, which are then typically pretty dicey to get out of; shoulder scums against tufas, which can be tenuous if you’re slippery with sweat; and the notorious “ride the pony,” where you get to wrap your legs all the way around a free-hanging stalagtite and lock your feet on the other side. You don’t believe it works ‘til you’ve done it. It’s an adolescent-minded climber’s dream.

Annaliese loving life, Tonsai Beach behind her.

The physical nature of the climbing also triggers another physiological response: profuse sweating. This is the tropics, on the ocean, and although this is the dry season, you remain perpetually wet. Being the monster sweater that I am, all I had to do was peer at the rock and think about climbing and I was drenched. Just slipping my feet into my flip flops in the morning caused beads on my brow. So when I actually got on the rock, I was a veritable waterfall. I constantly apologized to Annaliese for sliming up all the holds for her. I think every climb we did was one grade harder for her since everything was so thoroughly slick from my passage. But the rock wasn’t the only thing that got slimed. December through February is the high season here, and the crags were often swarming with people. Packed in densely at the base, one may or may not have been liable to be hit by my rain of sweat pouring off the wall from above. Thankfully, stalactites will drip consistently throughout the year here, so unexplained droplets never drew me any unwanted ire. What they didn’t know didn’t hurt them.

Inspired by our constant grungy tropical funk, we sought out and found a new word in Thai: kee klai. Body grime. It seemed fitting, as the sweat inevitably mingled with dirt, chalk, sand, vegetation, dead bugs, etc. to form a mosaic of grossness. Most evenings (well, more like some evenings), a nice cold shower would cleanse me of my filth, while I conversed with the resident toad that lived in our shower drain. He was a climber too, so he understood.

After two weeks of climbing it was hard to leave. Tonsai is a kind of vortex that you easily slip into and fall out of the time-space continuum. You climb awesome routes, eat amazing Thai food, drink cheap beer, meet cool folks from all over the world, sleep and repeat. Sometimes, you mix it up with swimming, lounging on the beach, reading, shooting pool, chess, the occasional Thai massage. But that’s basically it. Wear as little clothing as possible and soak up the incredible natural beauty of this peninsula paradise.

My main gnome, Hinnie Fumbeggins, with
Happy Island in the background.

Our second to last night, Annaliese and I figured we would investigate the night life a little. For most of the trip, we had focused exclusively on climbing our heads off and relaxing accordingly, have a beer or two, go to bed early. But Tonsai does have an evening scene with fire spinning, dancing, and all kinds of tropical cocktails. So we decided to give it a go. 

Well, our festive natures revealed themselves that evening, as we cocktailed, shot pool with Norwegians whose names we couldn’t pronounce (Svehdreh?!?), drank beer, talked smack, engaged the bartender (Mai) and his brother (Wee) in some solid whiskey slapping (intrigued, aren’t you?), watched Wee perform some incredible slack-line fire-dancing-and-spinning, partook in LOTS of hearty laughter, watched John the Brit cheat and repeatedly beat Muay Thai Kickboxing Wee at arm wrestling, then agree to get whooped a little in some street Muay Thai to help Wee recover some face, which inevitably turned into Wee knocking the crap out of a German judo master Franky, who just wanted to observe this foreign martial art and didn’t expect to get whalloped (I don’t think anyone expected that), and then John, Annaliese and I intervened as moderators to prevent an all out brawl as Franky expressed his discontent (severe), Wee acted confidently cool that he had done nothing wrong (and could take Franky, no problem), and Mai lifted up his shirt in bravado, threatening to knock Franky once more (Franky would have judo-chopped the drunken Mai). With our international social mediating powers combined, the three of us were able to diffuse the situation enough that beers were bought and hands were shaken and no large quantity of blood was spilled. Exciting multi-cultural exchange, no?

But such a minor skirmish couldn’t sully a truly wonderful experience. Since I have left Tonsai, I have dreamed of returning for more of that intoxicating lifestyle. The tropics and the beach just go so well with… well, really anything. But especially climbing. It has been delightful to meet many climbers since then that have yet to visit Tonsai, and to regale them with the sheer excellence of the place, and watch their goofy smiling anticipation grow dramatically.

A note from 18 January in my journal: “Today Annaliese and I parted ways. After a spectacular two weeks climbing, chilling, eating, sleeping, swimming, whiskey and rum slapping, and billiards-ing on Tonsai, Railay, and the greater Phra Nang, our adventure has ended and the next phase begins.”

Indeed it has.

Alaska

Huge.
Wild.
Raw.
Mother Nature bearing her breast.

This is Alaska.

There is a conduit, a portal, a tunnel to the center of the Earth that opens near the Arctic circle and funnels the heart of the planet to the surface. In Alaska, everything is bigger, more exposed, and has the capacity to deeply impress your soul.

Breaching whales, calving glaciers, soaring bald eagles, belching sea lions, constant rain and piercing sun. Ice and moon and stars. Mountains massive. The biggest darkness.

The place changes the people that go there, that experience this beauty, this raw awe. It has changed me. Twice I have gone and been profoundly affected. My recent journey was with my mother, sea kayaking and whale watching in the Icy Strait of the Inside Passage near Glacier Bay National Park. Days spent paddling on the water, with steller sea lions huffing and burping and splashing alongside us; harbor seals poking their slippery, silent heads above the surface to inquire of our nature with flaring nostrils; bald eagles coasting out of the old growth forest, chittering peal resonating off the still waters of the strait; jellyfish pulsating across our paddles.

A nighttime fire, full moon obscured by clouds. Humpback whales blaring, jumping, slapping, feeding, calling, crying through the darkness. Hours of prehistoric cacophony filling the strait. The voice of a 45 foot, 40 ton mammal is LOUD. The voices of many are louder. Their full moon symphony accompanied us to sleep.

Such a special place attracts and creates special people. Our guide and avid naturalist, Annette, led us through bays and channels, estuaries and rocky coastline while describing to us the vivid and detailed natural history of the place. She watched and understood. She not only knew the names but also the behaviors and interactions of all our surroundings, flora and fauna; the tides and currents and climates. She quietly absorbed while we absorbed, and enthusiastically shared when our gaping jaws and shiny eyes turned to her for information. She led us and befriended us.

Our hostess in Gustavus, Sally, advised us over delightful breakfasts of currant juice and nagoon berry jam, eggs from their backyard chickens and fresh coffee. She laughed with us in mornings and evenings and shared with us her life in Alaska, and a window into life in Gustavus.

Glacier Bay. Multitudinous glaciers, rivers of ice falling off mountains and spewing icebergs into the ocean. Fantastic fjords of aquamarine blue cut deep into valleys where waterfalls pour off cliff faces and tumble down steep slopes to churning water below. A lone mountain goat balances on a polished bedrock knob jutting hundreds of feet into the sky, a nearby eagle eyes him from his spruce-top perch. A blubber-fattened grizzly jaws and crunches and tears at the flesh of a washed-up whale, shimmering coat glistening in the sunlight. Buildings and parking garages of ice cleave from the Margerie Glacier splashing into the silt laden water and whipping waves out into the bay. Harbor porpoise travel through water and tufted puffins flutter by air.

This is Alaska.

10 more days in the north. Again I have been deeply moved, finding it difficult to leave and stirred up inside upon my return home. Alaska speaks to a deep part of me in a language I do not yet fully understand. It is a sacred place. And I can hear its call from afar...

"There's a land where the mountains are nameless,
And the rivers all run God knows where;
There are lives that are erring and aimless,
And deaths that just hang by a hair;
There are hardships that nobody reckons;
There are valleys unpeopled and still;
There's a land - oh it beckons, and beckons,
And I want to go back - and I will."

Robert Service, "Spell of the Yukon"