World Heritage Site

Driving From Oregon To Oaxaca

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After finally getting the title and registration to the Toyota, I drove down to Klamath Falls Oregon from Salem to see my second family Bea and Sal Florez who are being well-taken care of by a couple in their home. Then took a long boring drive to Las Vegas to see my son Greg. Didn’t wait in Salem for the title to arrive in the mail so my friend Lyn said she would fedex it to Las Vegas while I was there.

When I informed him that the woman who was going to drive down to Oaxaca with me had reneged and that I was driving down alone he had a fit and called his best friend Mike in LA and asked him to please accompany me. We drove to the border at the new shiny Columbia Friendship Crossing 30 minutes north of Loredo Texas. At the crossing I discovered I had a copy of my title and registration but after all the wrangling in Salem I had left the original on the copier glass in the back of the pharmacy in Las Vegas. The friendly border guards mercifully let me through with just the copy! I immediately called Greg and had him go to the pharmacy to see if he could collect my title and registration…maybe somebody had turned them in. Lo and behold, there was the original…after 3 days…still on the glass! So with the help of my iPod and new car speakers we continued down on wide empty expensive toll roads only getting good and lost once after taking a detour through the city of Monterey.

We spent three nice days visiting my friend Patty Gutierrez and her husband Jose in their little casita in San Juan del Rio south of Queretaro…a nice break. We were all invited to dinner in the home of a broiled chicken vendor…their first real contact with American tourists and after being given two clay jars as a gift I was horrified when I dropped one which exploded on the tile floor of the courtyard.

We visited the sacred Rock of Bernal…a UNESCO World Heritage site…the largest North American monolith and the second largest in the world……soaking up the quiet soft vibes. This enormous rock is considered the encounter point between the indigenous communities of the region and the mestizo society that erected the village of Bernal below. Well-known as ‘tonalita’ the volcanic rock, at a height of 288 meters from the base to the peak, became exposed by erosion.
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After ending up on a toll road going the wrong way and finding our way back in Mexico City and driving through beautiful rolling mountains back to Oaxaca I was finally “home.”

To Siberia & Lake Baikal

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Video

We boarded a Moscow train at midnight. We are headed across Russia on the trans-siberian train system. However we will be breaking up the trip by getting off in Yekaterinburg and Irkutsk, with a side excursion to Lake Baikal, in Russia and Ulaan Bataar in Mongolia on the way to our final destination…Beijing China.

The next morning one of our cabin-mates, (there are four of us…two racks on each side of the cabin) Vladamir, starts his day with a bottle of beer. Enjoying the changing colors of the trees as we climb and dip through the Urals our cabin mates and we share all our packed lunches with each other and Vladamir, who knows no English shares his vodka with us. Diana, who is a translator in German/Russian for a Moscow law firm) does speak English, tells me there is no Russian like Frank Sinatra…and that she doesn’t like Antonio Banderas because he is “dark.” (We have discovered that anyone “dark” is called “black” and is discriminated against…as are homosexuals…hardly anyone out of the closet here.)

Unknown to each other, they are both traveling to their home town of Yekaterinburg, the third biggest city in Russia, to visit their parents. On the way our rich Moscow train passes through dirt-poor even though picturesque villages and Vladamir gets off at a town famous for it’s glass factory to buy a set of crystal glasses (about a dozen glasses for about $20) and bag of apples from the sellers who are tapping at our window. Regulars know what to buy at each stop-whether a bag of berries picked by bucket in the forest or a baked chicken from a babushka (grandmother). We even saw men hawking huge chandeliers. One man was trying to sell a stuffed bird with a wing span six feet wide!

An ex-pirate by the name of Yermak, who is recognized as the founder of Siberia, crossed the Ural mountains and challenged the fur traders for control of the land. In November 1581 he raised the Russian flag. By 1900 over a million people had made he long march to the squalid and overcrowded gulags of Siberia and the word, Siberia, came to mean a place for criminal and political exiles.

In 1891 Tsar Nicholas III began construction on the railway from Moscow to Vladivostock on the east coast of Russia near the Sea of Japan. The greater part was built without heavy machinery bu by men wit nothing more than wooden shovels. Nevertheless, they could lay up to 2.5 miles of rail in a good day, according to the Trans-Siberian Handbook. Most of the labor force had to be imported as local peasants were already employed on the land and the workers came from as far away as Italy and Turkey but the Chinese coolies were terrified of the Amur tigers with which the area full and the government subsequently turned to the prisoners in the gulags to relieve the shortage of labor.

The trans-Mongolian line (to Beijing) branches off from the main Trans-Siberian route (to Vladivostock) at Zaudinsky and follows the well worn route of the ancient tea caravans that traveled between Beijing and Moscow in the 18th and 19th centures. In those days traders made the 7865km journey in no less than 40 days. Since the railroad began operating in the mid-1950’s the journey now takes about 5.5 days.
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Naxi Old Town-Lijiang

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Lijiang has been designated a World Cultural Heritage Site by the United Nations. There are two kinds of Naxi dwellings built with wood, clay tiles, earth bricks and hard work…one is a courtyard enclosed by three dwellings and a wall and the other a courtyard enclosed by four buildings with a courtyard on each corner. If one story there will be three rooms….if two story there will be six rooms. The center room is used as a living room and the two side rooms are reserved as bedrooms for the elderly of the family. We watched the construction of one of these houses on a side street…after the pieces were laid out on the ground the villagers all came together for the house raising with ropes and manpower…the pieces being fitted together without the use of nails. We understand that after this the workers throw down candy and money and firecrackers are set off…then all work stops and the villagers share a meal together.

Just as the blood circulates through the human body, says the text on the back of the Lijiang map, so does the water, that originates just north of Lijiang from the springs at Black Dragon Pool, that runs through the Old Town. There are three main arteries of water that divide into succeding other arteries and veins that have been channeled by vertical concrete banks….the pebbled bottom visible through the crystal clear water. Restaurants, cafes and shops charmingly line these canals and the bridges over them.

On each trip to the center of town, the Square Market, we passed one of the many three-pit wells of the town. Granite walls separate the spring water into three separate picture perfect pits…the first used strictly for drinking water, the second for washing vegetables…the third for washing clothes. When the night falls, the local Naxi residents spontaneously gather for a circle dance around a bonfire…the Alili Dance that a woman pulled me into but was never able to master.

The town’s reconstruction after the earthquake coupled with the construction of a new airport has brought in an influx of Han Chinese entrepreneurs running tourist shops and restaurants for Han tourists that are pushing out the Naxi stalls. What used to be the preserve of hardy backpackers, Lonely Planet says, is now a major tourist destination for Han Chinese who only since the end of the Cultural Revolution have had an opportunity to travel the far reaches of their own country.

Robben Island

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June 16 to July 13, 2002
Standing bunched shoulder-to-shoulder in the small anteroom of the prison on Robben Island where Mandela and others were political prisoners, our half of the ferry load of visitors impatiently waited. Well, for Pete’s sake, I thought to myself…what a disorganized outfit…should have had someone to meet us here by now…and then finally….a tall large-bellied black African burst into the room from a side entrance, squeezed his way to the front of the group and quickly apologized for keeping us waiting. Come, he said, lets go see the prison rooms now.

On our way out to the exercise yard our guide stopped at the foot of a staircase. “I was imprisoned here for 9 years for the trumped up charge of sabotage, he said, and this is where all the orders came from,” he said as he looked to the top of the stairs at the door behind which pain and torture, psychological and physical, were incarnated. “All letters in and out of the prison were intercepted here…my father never received my letters…they led him to believe that I was dead…he only found out I was alive the day I arrived home from the prison all these years later,” he said. Here the decision was made to separate the political prisoners from the general population. The most feared political activists and the most watched, like Nelson Mandela, were kept in “B” section. The rest were put in other sections…

Out in the yard our ex-prisoner guide talked about the lack of medical care. “The doctor would put his stethoscope to my heart and all the time his ear pieces would still be hanging around his neck. Later, when I became very sick I was finally diagnosed with severe diabetes. I was assigned to work in the kitchen. That was how we communicated with Mandela and the others…messages were passed on with the food.” He showed us the spot where Mandela buried the original of his memoirs after they had been transcribed on tiny pieces of paper and smuggled out of the prison. Then we entered a door off the exercise yard, walked down a narrow hall and took turns looking in through an iron bar window into Mandela’s cell that was only a space of about 8 feet by 8 feet.

When it was discovered that he had been collaborating with the other prisoners, Mandela was moved to another prison in Cape Town and kept in isolation. It was from there that, as the recognized head of the African National Congress (ANC), he was able to get messages out asking for negotiations between the ANC and the South African government to end apartheid. When international pressure mounted and the internal violence continued, and it became apparent that apartheid was on it’s way out, Mandela was finally released in 1993-27 long years after his incarceration. Within a year he was elected President of South Africa.

Many of the former guards are still working on the island that has now become a national museum and there are about 15 former political prisoners who are volunteering daily to lead public tours. When someone asked how it felt to be around his former captors, our guide told us about his reconciliation with one of the most cruel guards who came to him and asked for forgiveness.  “It is very very difficult for all of us…all these many years later we are told that it is good to come here and confront the truth of what happened to us.” he told us that the reason he was late meeting the tour group was because another former guard and his wife were in the group just prior to ours. “When they departed, he said, I couldn’t stop myself from breaking down and crying…and as it all came back to me I just couldn’t stop for awhile…”

Robben Island was used at various times between the 17th and 20th centuries as a prison, a hospital for socially unacceptable groups and a military base. Its buildings, particularly those of the late 20th century such as the maximum security prison for political prisoners, witness the triumph of democracy and freedom over oppression and racism. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.