Category: TRAVEL

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Mount Sinai

Watching the sunrise from atop Mount Sinai was a once-in-a-lifetime experience for me and my trekking partners. And for several busloads of Japanese tourists.

I was part of a group of ten people trekking in the Sinai desert for a week to raise money for a children’s charity. The Sinai wilderness is barren, silent, mystical. In the entire trek we saw almost no-one else.

We were at altitude with no moisture in the air, 1,000 miles from the nearest city. This made the night sky a thing of absolute awe and wonder. As we lay there one night marvelling at the billions of stars, one of the trekking partners mused, “No wonder so many religions come from here. Anywhere else on the planet we might think “My, isn’t humanity clever”. Here you look up at such a sky and think “We are totally, totally insignificant…”

On the final night we camped on the back slope of Mount Sinai, the mountain where Moses received The Law. We awoke at 2:00 AM to trek round the front. There, thousands of ancient steps have been carved out of the mountain leading to a chapel on the summit. Our objective was to climb the steps up to the chapel in the dark to watch the sunrise over the Sinai wilderness.

We set off in pitch blackness. After a few hours we had rounded the base of the mountain. There was a dull glow in the distance. As we approached, we discovered that it was a parking lot. It was full of buses full of pilgrims preparing to climb Mount Sinai just as we were. Our solitude was shattered.

We happened to fall in at the base of the steps in the midst of a group of particularly energetic Japanese pilgrims. Fulfilling every Karate Kid stereotype, each pilgrim was wearing a headband with something written on it in Japanese. Up ahead in the dark their leader would yell “YURIKI!” (courage in Japanese). The pilgrims would then lustily respond “YURIKI!” in unison. We soon left them behind. Our group was much fitter and had grown accustomed to the thin air at altitude. But for some time we could hear their call and response fading ever further below us in the dark.

After a couple of hours our little group reached the summit. We hunkered down against the outer wall of the chapel, poured some coffee, and faced eastward waiting for dawn. In time the sky began to glow pink. Then the top of the sun’s orange disk broke the horizon, flooding the vast desert wilderness below us with light. It was absolutely magical.

About this time, the bedraggled leader of the Japanese tour group finally reached the top. Exhausted and panting for breath, she uttered a feeble “yyyyyuuuuurrrrrrikiiiii”. The few pilgrims who had managed the summit with her gasped out an equally feeble response. Perhaps next time they might consider taking altitude tablets. Hey, the tablets worked for Moses…

 

[If you know others who might enjoy a lighthearted story to begin their week, kindly forward them WordsfortheWeary. The more the merrier.]

[Apologies for the small photo, working on improving]

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Middle America

La Crosse, Wisconsin is magical. I’ve been here for a month and I am completely won over by the place, the people, and the large portions. Some of this month’s more unforgettable local moments include:

Guns: The local school held a fund raiser where the top raffle prizes were guns. My sister-in-law’s dad won himself a new .22. People in Wisconsin hunt, so nobody here thinks this is odd.

Trust: I accidentally mailed a letter with a name but no address. Realizing my mistake, I immediately went to the Post Office and explained the situation. The woman there asked for my street address and then said, “That address is on the south side, so your mail carrier is Pete”. She called Pete in his truck. He rifled through his stack of collected mail and said “Got it”. He then delivered the unaddressed letter to the Post Office at the end of his day. The kind lady called me. I picked up the letter. I was never asked to show ID or to sign a form.  I asked the kind lady about it and she just laughed, adding “Who would make up such a story?”

Service: I spent hours in the Social Security office on behalf of mom and dad. Their case is complicated, and the woman at the counter was new. She struggled with the transaction and I left with many things unresolved. But I did secure a meeting for the following Monday with her manager. The woman from the counter then called me the next day – let me repeat that someone from Social Security voluntarily called me – just to say she did not feel she had provided satisfactory service and she looked forward to Monday’s meeting with the manager to make sure everything got resolved. I nearly cried.

Jesus: We took my nephews to a maple sugar bush. The smell of wood fires and boiling sap were as delicious as the pancakes. We ate on a picnic table in a huge drive-shed filled with tractors, farm implements, fishing gear, mounted deer antlers, bags of fertilizer…and in the corner, a 9-foot statue of the Holy Family. Someone had placed a Green Bay Packers hat on Joseph.

Empathy: In my one and only ten-minute interaction with a local bank teller I discovered the following: she has three dogs, her favorite sandwich is peanut butter and pickle, she competes in 1950s dress-up pageants, she once wept in a cathedral in Ireland, her favorite line from a poem is tattooed on her foot. I learned all this after I disclosed that my mother has dementia. Her mother does too, and so she just opened up.

Character: I picked up a local homeless lady who was hitchhiking. She is in her 70s and living rough. She asked me to drive her to a hamlet 5 miles out of town. Turns out that she is an artist. She keeps her work in a storage locker in the hamlet. As we drove past a roadside bar she mentioned casually that years before she had opened up a guy’s belly there with a corkscrew after he hit a woman. “I was wild in my younger days”, she mused, “But don’t worry sonny. Now I just paint”.

[If you know others who might enjoy a lighthearted story to begin their week, kindly forward them WordsfortheWeary. The more the merrier.]

[Image Credit: The Raven at genesiseightseven.blogspot.com]

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The Russians

I was on a long haul flight. Four Russian sailors were seated in the row in front of me. What could possibly go wrong?

Before we had even taken off the flight attendant came round and offered me free drinks.

“Trust me” she said, firing a glance at the four men in their matching blue-striped sailor t-shirts, “When those guys get going you are going to want a little something to take the edge off. Besides, they usually drink all the booze. So you had better get some now”.

I ordered a whisky and asked her to tell me more.

“They’re Russian sailors”, she said. “They sail oil tankers across the Pacific and then fly back to pick up the next tanker. Every month they fly with us. It is always the same routine…”

As I discovered first hand, their routine happened in the following order:

  1. Drink an insane amount of hard liquor. I suspect they had already started before they even got on the airplane.

  1. Hang out near the lavatory and try to pick up women. This is difficult when (a) you are blocking access to the toilet for women who need to pee, (b) you have too much chest hair, (c) you behave like a Russian-accented Burt Reynolds, and (d) you absolutely reek of booze. Just an observation.

  1. Hug your buddies and sing Russian sailor songs very, very loudly. Continue to drink.

  1. Throw up into to your air sick bag while your buddies laugh at you. You laugh at them when it is their turn to throw up.

  1. Take off all clothes except underwear. No kidding: they all stripped down to their undies.

  1. Get on your knees, facing your airline seat, and pray to God in Russian while moaning and periodically throwing up.

I asked the flight attendant about the clothing removal.

“Yeah. I don’t know about that part”, she said. “We can’t tell if that is a Russian thing or a sailor thing”.

[If you know someone else who might enjoy a lighthearted story to begin their week, kindly forward them WordsfortheWeary. The more the merrier.]

[Image credit: Quikmeme]

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Pause in Posts

Dear Readers,

This site will be inactive for a few weeks, but we will return soon with lighthearted stories on faith, friends and the general oddities of the human experience.

We wish you all the best as you begin this new year and return to work, to school and to life in the next week weeks.

Thank you,

Words For The Weary Team

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The Village

A crowd of African women gathered around my wife as she breastfed our daughter. They giggled. Then one of them reached out and poked my wife in the boob.

We were deep in the African bush. Our Ugandan landlord had invited us to accompany him to his home village. We drove with him in our Jeep for an hour north of the city, then for another hour on a dirt track. We were not in Kansas anymore.

The entire village, perhaps 100 people, gathered to meet us. Our landlord was a big deal. He had “made it” in the city, and he supported most of the children in the village to attend school. He was greeted as a dignitary and we as his honored guests. Without doubt we were the first white people many of the villagers had ever seen.

The village itself consisted of a brick walled school with tin roof, a small church, and a few other mud and brick buildings. Hut were scattered amidst banana and palm trees. Chickens, dogs, and goats roamed freely. The hills around the village were terraced and planted. The air was filled with the sweet smell of wood fires with an occasional taint of livestock and sewage.

Our landlord went to conduct his business. My wife needed to feed our infant daughter, and so retired to the relative privacy of our Jeep. Or so she thought. Soon the women of the village followed her there. They clustered around within inches of my wife, smiling and shy, as she began to breastfeed. That’s when the boob-poking incident took place. The ice was broken. Despite the vast chasm between them, they united in gales of laughter. As she returned from the Jeep, the women took turns carrying our daughter and holding my wife’s hand.

Meanwhile, I was conscripted by the local boys to play soccer (football). The ball was made of banana leaves and twine. I was goalkeeper, following the time honored tradition of putting the fat kid in net. Also, there was no way I could keep up with these boys. They had been playing barefoot soccer since the day they could walk.  They moved with the speed of gazelles across the uneven ground. Soon one boy was bearing down on me. He let fly with a strong kick. I reached out to catch the ball.

It turns out that beneath a banana leaf exterior the core of the ball included some mud and cattle dung to give the ball weight. The ball splattered into my hands, spraying dung and mud on to my shirt. Everyone, myself included, erupted into laughter. Another moment of unity in this village from a different world.

Our landlord concluded his business. We said farewell. As we made for the Jeep our landlord explained that the village wanted to slaughter a goat for him (and by extension us) as a gift. This was a great honor and very a big deal. A slaughtered goat was worth half a year’s salary. We knew we could not refuse.

What we did not expect was to find a goat, still very much alive, already lashed to the roof rack of our Jeep. And not at all happy to be up there. …. What happened next will feature in next week’s post: The Goat.

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The Dinner Cruise

We were adrift on a hippo-infested lake at sundown, helplessly floating towards the Congo.

Our years in Africa were drawing to a close and we were on our final safari. My wife, daughter, mother-in-law and I had treated ourselves to a dinner cruise on the lake. The boat was a small  pontoon with an outboard motor. The table was set in the middle of the pontoon, with the “kitchen” off to the side. There was a canister of cooking gas and a little camp stove and a cooler full of beverages.

As we approached the dock, all of my radar went off. Years of dealing with logistical challenges in Africa had conditioned me to spot things that were likely not to work. The scene before me included many warning signs.

There were no life jackets, no paddles, and no lights on the boat. We stepped aboard and I said quietly to my wife “They need to start the motor before we cast off”. This did not happen. Instead we cast off. A very pleasant African waiter served us soup and uncorked a bottle of wine while we drifted ever further from shore. Only then did he try to start the motor.

Nothing. He tried and tried. Nothing. At this point it was pretty clear that we were moving far away from shore with no way to get back in. We could hear the nighttime animal life, including the swishing and grunting of hippos, in the water around us.

When it became clear that we were adrift with no real options, the pleasant African waiter did an amazing thing. He stripped down to his underwear. Ignoring our pleas not to, he then dove overboard into the water. He clenched the boat rope in his teeth and began to swim through the hippo-infested water back to shore.

The guests and staff at the lodge came out to cheer this fellow on. But nobody came down to the water to help him. We landed without incident and were escorted up to the lodge restaurant and seated at a table. It was all as if nothing had happened. We felt confused, bewildered, colonial.

Moments later a waiter arrived at our table. It was the very same fellow who had just swum us back to shore. He had thrown his clothes back on, still wet. His hair was dripping on his shoes. He smiled and, as if nothing at all had happened, simply asked “And what may I get you for drinks to begin your evening?”

[If you know someone else who might enjoy a lighthearted story to begin their week, kindly forward them the link to WordsfortheWeary. The more the merrier.]

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The Catastrophe

Years ago, my parents had an evening out with two of my dad’s colleagues. It ended in such disaster that the two couples have not really spoken since. I am not sure I blame them.

Both of my parents are warm and open. They love life and people and do not take themselves seriously. At the time, my father was a young professor. He still embodies many characteristics typical of that field: curiosity, impracticality, and woeful time management. My mother is his soul mate in these respects. By contrast, the other couple – both also young professors – takes life, themselves, and their role in academia very seriously. They are fastidiously punctual. They are precise. They are serious. The two couples planned to see an evening production of Shakespeare’s Richard III.

Earlier that day, my sister and I were in the back of the car as my parent’s ran errands. We were quite young. It was hot. One of us (I blame my sister) got sick in the car. My parents, late as usual, raced home. While dad settled details with the babysitter, mom did a hasty cleanup of the back of the car.

My parents then raced over to pick up the other couple, who were impatiently waiting by the curb. They got in the back seat. They went to buckle up. That’s when everyone discovered that the seatbelts, which had been retracted at the time of mom’s hasty car clean, were still covered in vomit. There were profuse apologies. The couple dashed into their home to change their soiled clothes. Mom did a second round of cleaning. There was still just enough time to make it to the play.

The car zoomed off to the theatre, a 30 minute drive away through the country. They had gone halfway there when dad discovered that he had left the tickets at home. So they turned around and roared back to town, got the tickets, and took off again. It was now certain they would be late for the concert. The other couple sat in the back of the car, expressionless.

To save time dad tried “taking the backroads”. This is code for getting lost and driving around blindly in the country. Apparently this is about the time when conversation in the car really “got frosty”. Even dad’s joke that at least they would get there in time to see Richard II went over like a lead balloon.

Finally they arrived. They had indeed missed the first of three acts. In addition, the theatre, assuming they were no-shows, had given away their seats for a sold-out performance.

After some negotiation, the theatre allowed them in to see the next two acts. Since there were no longer any seats, both couples were obliged to sit on steps in the aisle.

They drove home in silence following the performance. A thick fog covered the countryside and they again got lost. Then the fuel light went on in the car. Tensions rose to breaking point.

Thankfully, they managed to coast into town on the last fumes of fuel remaining in the car. The couple got out at their curb without saying a word. My parents limped away, then convulsed in laughter. They have not stopped laughing over that evening for 40 years.

This story is dedicated to mom and dad, with bottomless thanks for your gifts of love, laughter, and for not taking yourselves seriously.

[If you know someone else who might enjoy a lighthearted story to begin their week, kindly forward them the link to WordsfortheWeary. The more the merrier.]

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The Border

Crossing the border between Canada and the US used to be pretty easy. That’s to be expected between the best of neighbo(u)rs.

Take for instance the time I crossed from rural Maine into rural-er New Brunswick. To reach the border I foolishly took a minor road through the heart of Maine. Don’t ever do this. When eventually I hit the border, the crossing booth looked like a glorified port-a-potty. There were two female Canadian border patrol members squished into its cedar-lined interior. I expect they saw fewer than 20 cars a day.

I rolled down to the window and handed them my passport.

The guard looked into the window of my car. “Sir”, she said. “It looks like you have a car packed for a family. But I don’t see a family. Is there a family in there? You didn’t forget them, did you? That is generally considered bad for the marriage.”

I explained that my wife and children had flown to Halifax. It was only me doing the 1,000 mile drive because we needed a car once we got out there. I was solo, but would soon meet the family in Halifax.

“Sooooooooo”, she said with faux chastisement, “No family. That would explain the beef jerky and cigars at 10:30 in the morning”.

Indeed. That morning on the way out of Bangor, Maine, I happened upon a shop that sold beef jerky, whisky, and cigars: the holy trinity of road trips. Of course I hadn’t had (much) whisky since I was driving, but I was happily nurturing a cigar and chomping on beef jerky as I rolled up to the border.

I confessed. Mea culpa. Guilty as charged. Then I asked her not to judge me since Maine is – truly – an exceedingly boring state through which to drive. She agreed. Then she added: “Looks like we got another liberated husband here. Enjoy your time in Canada”.

That was it. Not a single question about where I was staying, for how long, what I was bringing in. Nothing. I was clearly not an existential threat to the legal or sovereign interests of Canada.  That’s to be expected between the best of neighbo(u)rs.

[If you know someone else who might enjoy a lighthearted story to begin their week, kindly forward them the link to WordsfortheWeary. The more the merrier.]

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Fat Ass

My donkey was not happy.  With every step, he let everyone know it.

Earlier, my brother, my wife and I had walked through a mountain village in Ethiopia with our guide. In the pre-dawn light we approached a group of tethered donkeys. They had been arranged to take us up to an Orthodox Monastery, perched high above on a mountain ledge.

The donkeys looked as us. Then they turned plaintively towards me as one, as if to say “Please God, not the big feller”. As we mounted up, my donkey let out a loud hissing sound like air escaping from a tire. He then added some frustrated stomping and braying for effect. The guides giggled. My wife and my brother giggled. The donkey and I did not giggle.

We plodded off in the dim light. Each step brought an exaggerated, labored wheezing sound from the donkey. Imagine a goose being struck by a truck. That was the sound he made with every step.  At this point, the guides and my family began laughing outright. I named the donkey “Grunter”.

We started the steep ascent to the monastery. Grunter now added to his symphony by loudly passing wind. He wanted us to think it was from exertion. I think he was just an attention seeking ass. Regardless, it was loud. It was foul. And it was frequent. This went on for 30 minutes. The guides began laughing so hard they could barely walk. My wife and my brother were forced to mouth-breathe from the stench.

We finally reached the summit. The monastery was stunning. The morning sun shone over an endless view of the wild Ethiopian mountains. We stood in quiet wonder. Timeless. Holy. Beside us, monks wrapped in simple blankets were deep in morning prayer.

The donkeys saw us approach them to begin our descent. Grunter tried to bolt. Inspired by the peace of the monastery, and simply resigned to the obvious drama that awaited us, I opted to walk down.

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The Chicken

This Week’s Post is Written by WordsfortheWeary’s Editor, not Author. 

A two week trip to East Africa is always memorable, but Uganda is particularly so. What began with a breakdown ended with chasing a chicken, and nothing but adventure in the middle.

It began with a week in Tanzania. When our car broke down in the dark on some lonely roadside within a couple of kilometres of the airport, our family laughed. We truly were back in Africa. A friendly driver was flagged down by our driver/guide/general-care-taker Chris, and we were taken along random back routes to find an isolated but stunning coffee plantation that hosted us the first night.

The rest of the trip in Tanzania was spent driving across the country to enjoy safari, as well as tour Olduvai Gorge – actually pronounced ‘Oldupai’, but was misspelt by a European explorer in their letters and was named incorrectly. The ‘cradle of humanity’ is host to dozens of early hominid skeletons of varying ages and species, with layers of rock dating 2 million years back. To get there from our hotel, we had a Maasai guide walking us across the bush for 2 hours. It was how he began the walk talking about possibly seeing leopards whilst on foot, or showing us the track of a hyena that had been there “a couple of hours earlier”. Looking at the large knife he had tied to his waist, I suddenly found myself concerned about this walk in the wild. Happily, the most adventurous thing we saw was the afterbirth of a wildebeest, and herds of them and Zebra wandering about the plains.

Uganda hosted the usual assault of brilliance for the week after Tanzania. Within an hour of landing we were reunited with old friends and chatting to the later evening – which later proved a mistake, as mosquito bites coated us the next day. We spent our time catching up with our community and the clinic my parents had built and being roasted by the sun. Occupying a strange place in time, not much had changed. A few new high rise buildings and some new roads, but the same people, places and beauty.

The best story from our week in Uganda would be that of the chicken. Some years ago, dad had come home with a goat in the back of his car. It was meant to be a very fresh gift of food, but with a vegetarian mother and sister, that wasn’t a preferable option. Gerald was adopted and lived with us until he ate my dad’s beloved roses, at which point he was sent to a farm for breeding purposes. It was perhaps, then, predictable that a Ugandan family friend would bring us a cockerel. Large, white and pooing on the veranda and gardens of the Makindye Country Club, this chicken presented a problem.

He came to us with tethered legs, but slipped his tether and was running around at full speed. Despite numerous offers from the kitchen staff, we did not want him slaughtered for us. Dad decided he wanted to try and catch it. For a surprisingly stupid animal, the score was 4 – 0 in its favour. Dad merely caught feathers. It was only when our former househelp-turned-chicken-farmer came to visit that the chicken was successfully caught and gifted to another Ugandan friend with a farm. And we came back to Europe, sunburnt and aching for Uganda.

[If you know someone else who might enjoy a lighthearted story to begin their week, kindly forward them the link to WordsfortheWeary. The more the merrier.]