Columbia, South America

It is never a good thing to be told by a traveling friend that he is in a particular country and "you'd love it here". It gets me every time. So I hopped a plane to Columbia which has everything from beaches and rainforest to high mountains. I opted for two weeks down the middle of the country. No beaches.

Bogota from the Candelaria section.

Villa de leyva, a Colonial village.

So green! Between Popayan and San Augustin.

On my flight I sat next to a young man name of Camilo who is a journalist. He had been in the South Carolina city of Columbia with a group that had somehow won a trip to see Justin Beiber who my new friend does not speak too highly of. He did like the outlet stores and stocked up on Armani brand clothing while in the U.S. Camilo is from Cali and is well aware that he is lucky to have been raised in circumstances that allowed him a college education. His is really not an unusual family because even he has a sister who he says is a drama queen. Camilo is exceptional in that he can talk to anybody, and he does. Three plus hours passed quickly in his company. Clearly he had to have a magnet.

A sneak shot of Camilo waiting for luggage at the Bogota airport.

One strong piece of advise Camilo had for me other than to be smart on the streets of Bogota was not to go to the market in Sylvia by myself. Not to worry because I tagged on with a hostelmate, a fellow by the  name of Niko who is as easy with people as Camilo. Every Tuesday the indigenous Guambiano people come into the small mountain town of Sylvia to buy and sell their wares. Many of them still dress in their traditional blue capes, bowler hats and skirts, even the men. They are camera shy, I am told, but Niko made friends first and had no problem getting them to smile for the camera as well as for his teasing conversation. He made fast friends with Maria del Carmen and her mother who sell fruit at the market. We both sat on the steps by their table for quite a while and she sent us on further adventures to an agricultural school and the small village of Casique. Maria has one of my magents in Sylvia.

Maria del Carmen has the magnet.

Guambiano people in traditional dress.

While in Columbia I gave a magnet to a girl from Belgium who was staying at my hostel, Casa de Nelly, in San Augustin. Niko also has one he ways he will drop off somewhere in Equador.

Nepal

A friend sent a magnet with her friend who passed it to yet another friend who took it to Nepal. This is the response, once again passed from friend to friend to friend:

"We have been having another great adventure in both Bhutan and Nepal.  I gave one magnet to a Nepalese naturalist in the Chitwan national park.  He was very kind and helpful.  I took his picture and explained the project to him.  Yesterday We got into the river after our daybreak elephant ride and washed and got on the elephant in the water.  The elephant soaked us."

Cambodia and Vietnam

This post is a continuation of Tom and Brenda's trip to southeast Asia. See the previous post.

Cambodia is a country that has been devastated by wars. Brenda described it as being like a sick person still recovering but not yet up to full strength. So many of those who would now be considered the older generation were killed leaving few to go back to raising food, teaching, doctoring, and so the younger generation have to figure it out on their own. I've heard similar comments from others who visited that country.

 

An American who was working there as an economic developer and other investors bought an old pepper plantation with the idea that it could be a model for growth to rehabilitate the plantations. He also built a resort and this is where the magnet was left. What's interesting is that the brother of this developer left a magnet there a couple years earlier. Such a small world.

I think she got the magnet. One of them did.

On their first day in Vietnam, Brenda and Tom took a tour of the Mekong River. There they saw a floating market, all in the water. Vendors advertised their wares by hanging samples on poles and the people wore conical hats. They say vendors in Vietnam are very aggressive.

Traffic is very heavy in Saigon and when drivers get frustrated the aren't above going onto the sidewalks. It can be dangerous being a pedestrian. Another site visited was the Presidential Palace where there is on display a helicopter captured when they were landing on the roof, loading up and taking away as many people as possible at the end of the war as Saigon was lost, or gained, depending on viewpoint. In Vietnam they people don't talk about politics. At all. None.

The Imperial Palace

A magnet was left with the manager of the hotel where they stayed in Hue.

　

　

Thailand & Bhutan

This is another story about the travels of Brenda and Tom. They are described in a prior post about Austria, Germany, Slovakia and Italy. On this adventure, they toured southeast Asia. I will break this up into two posts to keep it short so stay tuned for Cambodia and Vietnam.

The first stop was in Bankok, Thailand. Brenda is a member of a worldwide network of musicians who have their names and locations in a catalog so they can find each other and play duets together. The violinist Brenda is playing with was the recipient of a magnet.



This is a bridge made of boats leading to a market.

Bhutan is a country that does not want to be 'westernized' and thus retains its own culture. People in Bhutan still wear their traditional dress. Men wear a short robe called a goh and women wear an ankle-lenght robe called a kiri. This is a Buddist country where there are a lot of little pagoda-like temples for people to stop and pray, sometimes in the middle of rice paddies. Prayer flags can be found in surprising places.

 



A visa is required for entry and a tourist must be accompanied by a guide each day. In the photo below, the guide in traditional men's dress is eating his lunch in the company of a hopeful couple of dogs.

The fellow on the left was their guide who was given a magnet.

 

Burundi and Rwanda

Judy, one of my neighbors, went to Burundi as part of the Friends Peace Team to work with the African Great Lakes Initiative (www.aglifpg.org), a group working with survivors of the genocides that took place in both Burundi and Rwanda in the 1990s.

In Mutaho, Burundi, land was donated to build a guesthouse for those who participate in the REMA gatherings. Rema is a word that means 'be comforted' which is appropriate for women who lost their husbands and family members in the genocide.  Judy spent most of her stay working with this project. She said she wanted to leave a magnet with someone with a refrigerator but nobody had one. The office had one but it was aluminum and the magnet wouldn't stick so she left it on a shelf in the kitchen.




Beginning the building process.

The REMA women.

Burundi drummers, always good entertainment!

Judy also attended HROC training in Kigali, Rwanda. Participants came from several African nations as well as the USA. HROC stands for Healing and Rebuilding Our Communities. They are striving to build a sustainable peace through trauma healing workshops and gatherings such as these.



Overlooking Kigali.

At the Peace Garden there were lots of these.

The magnet in Rwanda rides on the dash of the car owned by the the African co-ordinator for the HROC project, a man Judy has great respect for.

Malaysia and Pakistan

Once again I am waiting for a flight in Qatar. This time I only had three magnets left. The first I gave to a family waiting to fly back to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. At first the older of the women was reluctant to take it because we had absolutely no means of verbal communication. Once she realized it was simply a gift, she smiled a thank you and I walked away feeling a little uneasy.

In the Qatar airport, only the US flight section is barricaded, completely sectioned off with yet another checkpoint and scan. This is the only place in the whole airport I see people having to take off their shoes. I walked away with all my gear except the bag with my diary/drawing pad. A woman chased me down to give it to me...whew! I gave her a magnet and have no idea where she is from.

In the line to board, I struck up a conversation with a younger woman in traditional dress that includes long dresses and headscarves. I noticed her earlier because I liked her choice of colors. She was from Pakistan on her way to an event in California. I gave her a magnet and we had a short conversation about the dangers of taking things from strangers at airports. After joking about how it didn't blow up or shoot bullets, she tucked it in her gear. We also sat near each other on the plane and she noticed me working on a drawing. I handed her my book and another lady, older, dressed as if from India, came up, snatched it from her hands, leaned down to me and rapid-fired a long comment that only had one recognizable word it in: talent. I thanked her and she sat down without seeming to notice that one of my drawings was of her.

Flores, Indonesia

From Labuhan Bajo, a city on the west end of Flores, one of Indonesia's many, many islands, I booked onto a tour of Rinca and Komodo Islands with some snorkeling thrown in. On our boat was a French couple, a Brit, Spaniard, and two Americans and three Indonesian crew members. We hiked short loops on the islands and saw:

Komodo dragons,

water buffalo,

 

 huge clusters of bees hanging from tree limbs,

 

 

 

monkeys, beautiful views, and islands, islands and more islands.

 

 

The captain of our little boat got the magnet. That's him on the left. The only metal I could find was on his little steering wheel so I stuck it there.

 

 

Yogyakarta​, Indonesia

I went to Java to see the Borobudur temple complex and was directed to meet a friend of a friend, a young man by the name of Yogi who I now call my friend. Yogi graduated from Indonesia's most prestigious university the day I arrived. There I had the honor of meeting him for the first time as well as his mother and younger brother. 

Yogi hopes to see the world so I gave him travel gifts: a North Carolina Tar Heels T-shirt, a mug from the MeMeTheWorld project (http://www.memetheworld.com/), and a magnet. The first day I was there Yogi and 'the boys', other friends of his at the university, took me to Prambanan, a Hindi Temple complex. The story is that a ruler had the desire to marry a woman who was not so enthusiastic about him. In hopes of winning her affection he allowed her to ask one thing of him, anything. She asked the impossible, one thousand temples to be built in one night. In the morning there were 999 temples. He had failed at his task; failed to win her love. Spurned, the enraged ruler turned her to stone and so she became the thousandth temple. This temple is still being rebuilt from piles of block that lay around, looking almost organized. Its got to be a daunting task.

 

I was teased about taking flower photos but that's what women do

The following day we all piled in and drove to Borobudor, a Buddist temple complex. This one is huge, certainly the largest in all of Indonesia. It is tiered and each level is lined with releif carvings telling depicting life in days long, long past. None of us are Buddist so we could only guess at what it was all about. We did notice that they were more about work and other earthly things on the lower levels. As we climbed, they became more and more about clouds, some with reclining figures. Could this be heaven? Nirvana? Yogi had the presence of mind to bring the MeMeTheWorld mug and his magnet. We had fun placing them in the arms of statues and in the teeth of lions.
 

Bali, Indonesia

Every day in Ubud, Bali, people set out these little offerings called cadang, if I got it right. They are made of stripped palm leaves and filled with some sort of dried stringy plant, flower petals, a sweet smelling yellow flower in season, and a food offering of a piece of fruit or a cracker. I caught this woman putting one on a motorbike and waving lit incense over it. She let me take her photo, though I'd rather she hadn't stopped to pose for me. She was very nice about it so I gave her a magnet.

This is the grandson of the painter who worked across a walkway from my patio at Demank homestay. I wish I could remember his name and hope that if he reads this he will leave it as a comment. This young man is ten years old and served as interpreter for his grandfather who is an amazing painter. He speaks four or five languages already: Balinese, Indonesian, Malaysian, another Indonesian dialect or two, and English. He is up on current events and we spoke of political unrest, Metallica and the Miss World contest which is to be held here with sarongs required. Wait...did I hear that right? Anyway, it was quite a conversation. Here he poses with his magnet.

Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Phillipines, Abu Dahbi

On my way to Bali, I flew Qatar Airways and after an eight hour layover in Doha, I still don't regret it. The plane offered comfortable seats with lots of leg room and the food was great. My seatmate was a man who lives in Nigeria and travels once a year to visit family in the USA. His name is Larry and he took a frog magnet home.

The airport in Doha is a really slick affair with a strong resemblance to a shopping mall. I couldn't believe all the perfume displays. A man I dared to approach in the gift shop was wearing the white robes and headgear that I associate with the movie "Lawrence Of Arabia". I approached him, told him of my project and he agreed to take one to his home in Saudi Arabia. The terminal was full of brown skinned people, many in ethnic dress. I found it to be interesting and fascinating.

I presented a magnet without explanation to the girl in charge of the women's restrooms which were never without long lines. She was in the foot washing part of the mosque unpacking boxes and I confess I sneaked a peek into the prayer room while presenting my little gift. Mark one up for Qatar.

I struck up a conversation with a lady from the Philippines. She told me about living on the island Bacolod which is a major sugar cane producer. She also told me of the island with underground caves and waterways, another with seven waterfalls, and another with lava beds and hot springs, all of them big tourist attractions. Her name is Gilda and we did the usual maternal photo sharing of children and grandchildren while waiting for our flights.

I approached a woman in a red headscarf who said, yes, she lived in Abu Dhabi and she took a magnet. I've been trying to get one there for years.