Road trip through Africa

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By David Abel
Globe Staff
3/22/09

HOBAS, Namibia -- Across the moonlike horizon, the only hint of life was a trail of dust kicked up by wild ostriches. The only sound was the hiss of an arid wind scouring the vast plains. And as our scrawny rental car rumbled over the craggy desert road, casting long shadows as the morning sun sent the temperature over 100 degrees, we felt an ominous thud.

Given the rock-strewn road, given the hundreds of miles that separated us from help, given where we had been and what we had already survived, it seemed better to ignore the jolt – and my girlfriend's glower.

"Not good," she said, urging me to slow down.

By that point, thousands of miles into our trip through southern Africa, we had become accustomed to bumps on the road, and other surprises that come with driving a compact car in a land better suited for military vehicles.

Our journey began in Johannesburg, where we rented a carrot-colored version of the Honda Fit. The agents at the local Avis didn't seem concerned that we were about to test its limits, or that we would be driving with just one spare, a donut. Getting permission to cross borders required little more than a 15 minute wait, a $100 fee, and a few forms for our destination in Windhoek, Namibia.

More difficult was learning to drive on the opposite side of the road. For days, every time I tried to activate the blinkers, I hit the windshield wipers. When I tried to flash the brights, I washed the windshield. And with every turn, I had to overcome an inner GPS that kept guiding me to the right – and a possible head-on collision.

Learning to look left was even more challenging with jetlag. But the real test came a few hours after we exited the well-maintained highway from Johannesburg and headed east into the winding mountains toward what our guidebook called "one of South Africa's most impressive natural features." Unfortunately, as we approached the Blyde River Canyon, it began to pour and a thick mist shrouded the snaking road. Visibility dropped to the brake lights of the car in front of us.

After a few hours circling through the clouds and seeing nothing but fog, we managed to find the way to our bed and breakfast and then to Kruger National Park, the nation's storied wildlife sanctuary that borders Mozambique and rivals the size of Israel.

Our self-guided safari began on a finely paved road that offered nearly instant glimpses of grazing zebra and watchful impala. They all seemed so sweet, almost docile, unperturbed by our presence. Then we came upon a herd of elephants.

We drove beside one chomping on a tree’s leaves. We sat about 15 feet away and admired how the massive beast seemed so limber, so light on its feet, as it stretched its wrinkled trunk into the branches, curled its tip around a clump of green, and gently dropped the breakfast into its mouth. It felt like being at a zoo, but we were the ones in the cage. Yet there was a difference: Our cage didn’t afford the same protection as steel bars.

As I snapped pictures from the passenger seat, agog at the seeming gentleness of this blubbery behemoth, the elephant started to approach us. At first, it sauntered in our direction, its floppy ears almost waving hello. Then it picked up speed. At less than 10 feet away, the elephant appeared to be in a full-on charge, and I dropped my camera in my lap.

“Drive, go – hit it!" I yelled, as Jess put the car in gear and floored the gas.

It was a good lesson – to keep a healthy distance from the wildlife – as we would pass countless other large animals – rhinos, lions, hippos, buffalo, everything from aggressive baboons with a reputation for opening car doors to monkeys that liked to steal the rubber from windshield wipers to giraffe that didn't find our curiosity endearing when we wanted to take a peek at their newborn.

After a few days, we left the low-lying savanna of broad grasslands and scattered, boulder-filled hills for a landscape that looked more like the Berkshires than how we imagined Africa. The provincial road we took south toward the great plateau of Lesotho climbed hundreds of miles along rolling, velvety green hills, through groves of pine trees, past rainbow-haloed farms. But the deeper we drove into the heart of South Africa, the more it became clear where we were.

At nearly every turn of the road, we witnessed the country’s enduring ironies: children begging beside some of the world’s most fertile land; sprawling shantytowns of zinc-roofed huts in the shadow of gleaming high rises; the tall, barbed-wired walls that enclose white subdivisions, underscoring how the official end of Apartheid has yet to yield an end to segregation.

Yet as we passed from the rocky, table-topped peaks of the Drakensberg to the seaside cliffs along the lagoon of Knysna, from the high desert scrubland where elephants feed with warthogs in Addo National Park to the lavender fields of wine country in Franschhoek, it became easier to understand why so many tribes and vying Europeans were willing to fight for this land.

And nowhere did the stark beauty stand out more than around Cape Town, a peninsula at the tiptoe of the continent, where steep mountains rise from the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, the rich flaunt their wealth in gaudy cars and the less prosperous offer to watch them for a few rand, and a mélange of Africans, Europeans, Indians, Malaysians, and many others mix more than anywhere else in the country.

We skipped the more touristy sights, such as the cable car ride up to the cloud-covered Table Mountain and the overbooked sail to Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela spent 27 years imprisoned in a tiny cell. Instead, we walked the center of the city, from the opulent Mount Nelson Hotel to the 350-year-old Slave Lodge, where thousands of slaves were confined in horrific conditions before being sold. We explored the Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens, home to 9,000 indigenous plants and flowers; swam in the cold, turquoise waters off Boulders Beach, where thousands of penguins putter and nuzzle in the white sand; and hiked the cliffs along the Cape of Good Hope, the most southwestern point of Africa.

We could have spent weeks in Cape Town, but we were on a tight schedule. It was time to leave the ocean for the desert. For the equivalent of about $25, we filled our tank and drove about 300 miles north to Namibia, a former German colony known as much for its towering sand dunes as its diamond mines.

When we arrived at the sun-baked border in the late afternoon, the heat remained intense. Outside, the scattered quiver trees, a squat and spiny symbol of the desolate land, provided little shade. Thankfully, crossing involved little more than handing over our passports, getting our car’s papers stamped, and shaking a few hands. The English-speaking border guards echoed our guidebooks, assuring us we would be fine with our two-wheel-drive car. Their only advice: Don’t drive at night and never pass a gas station without filling up – even if we had three-quarters of a tank.

Minutes after leaving, however, it felt like we were on the moon, with a lot more gravity. The road to our campsite resembled a rollercoaster, and it was among the better roads we would experience over the next week. But as we set up our tent and slipped into the warm river below, we watched a purple dusk give way to a cool breeze and a canopy of stars, and we knew it had been worth the trek.

The next day, after canoeing on the border-dividing Orange River, we ventured further north, along an increasingly lonely road. For hours at a time, we saw no sign of human life. Our cell phone flashed “No Service” and the GPS that served us well in South Africa searched fruitlessly for civilization. When we finally made it to our next destination, a 100-mile span of gouged rock called the Fish River Canyon, we breathed deeply as we watched another crimson sunset dissolve into another glittering night. Maybe we were worrying too much, I thought.

The next morning, as the temperature quickly surged, I drove with more confidence. The car could handle it, I thought. The roads looked worse than they were, I said to myself as I watched a pair of ostriches sprinting in the distance. It was about that point when I failed to notice a sharp rock jutting from the center of the road. The car shuddered. Jess looked at me with a combination of fear and pleading for me to slow down.

As we rolled on, I began to smell something unusual for the middle of the desert, something acrid. Neither of us wanted to acknowledge it. A few minutes later, when we came across a pack of antelope-like animals, we stopped to snap pictures. Jess got out to investigate the smell.

“Oh my God,” she said, adding stronger language as she gaped in awe at the damage.

When I got out, I saw mostly melted rubber, shards hanging off the rim. The front left tire was completely destroyed.

So we dug out the donut, jacked up the car, and pulled off the remains of the old tire. Then we set the donut and lowered the car. From there, we knew it would be a long drive. One more bad rock, and we would be walking.

The closest town was about 150 miles away. So we went easy on the water, marked the mile whenever we passed a human being, and drove slowly down the rocky road, averaging about 20 mph.

The stress was enough to make us think about turning in the car. But there was so much left to see.

After we replaced the tire, an ordeal that set us back a few hours and less than $100, we drove further north into an increasingly otherworldly landscape, where we would meet orphaned cheetahs, explore a forest of quiver trees, hike through deep canyons, and climb oceans of sand that sprouted thousand-foot dunes.

The roads didn’t get any better. In fact, they seemed to get worse, almost beyond imagination. So we drove slowly, often ridiculously slowly, and we both watched the road more closely.

Turtles crawling along the road seemed to pace us, but we were enjoying the ride.

After several weeks, we finally made it to the paved roads of Windhoek, where we hand-washed the Honda, scrubbing out the dirt from every crevice.

We decided we would let someone else do the driving, and a few hours later, we left Namibia on a 22-hour bus ride to Zambia, undaunted by the long road ahead.

David Abel can be reached at dabel@globe.com.

The Thunder of Zambia

By David Abel
Globe Staff
6/22/2009


LIVINGSTONE, Zambia -- Before our raft capsized in a muddy river teeming with crocodiles, before we found ourselves eye to eye with the jittery parents of a newborn giraffe, before a horde of monkeys raided our tea platter and swiped our sugar cubes, we boarded a rickety bus in sweltering Windhoek, Namibia, for a long journey into the night.


As the desert sun bled over the horizon in a rainbow of crimson, we left the Namibian capital for a 22-hour ride to Livingstone. But the trip nearly ended before it began. Shortly after the driver pulled onto the one-lane highway, two police cars with flashing lights forced us to stop on the bush-shrouded shoulder. The officers chatted with the driver, and then, inexplicably, we were off again, into an increasingly dark night, the bus’s headlights the only sign of humanity in the visible distance.


“They were my friends,’’ the driver told me later at a rest stop. “We know the police. They don’t worry us; what worries us is running into animals. They’re attracted to the headlights.’’


He said he had been luckier than other drivers and had slammed into only a few antelope-like animals in the years he had been making the night trip to Zambia. Yet the prospect of colliding with large, antler-bearing creatures provided too much roadkill for thought as we sped through the darkness. Then the air conditioning cut off, and my girlfriend and I squirmed as we tried to sleep, the sweat pooling in our open eyes as we questioned our wisdom.


It was the last leg of a monthlong trip earlier this year that began in Johannesburg, and we were ready to have someone else do the driving after navigating thousands of miles in a compact rental car on treacherous roads in South Africa and Namibia.


When we finally crossed the border a day later and arrived in Livingstone, the driver deposited us on a dusty road in the damp heat of this small, growing city, which has become an increasingly popular base for exploring Victoria Falls since the political and economic implosion of neighboring Zimbabwe.


Like a knight in a shiny SUV, Richard Chanter, a British expatriate and local DJ, was waiting to pick us up and take us to the nearby lodge he has owned for the past decade. He helped us get our bearings, and after much-needed showers, we set off to explore the city in the remaining light.


We walked down several small streets marked by gaping potholes and crowded with everyone from students in their bright school uniforms to the elderly hauling groceries on their heads. We found our way to the main street, where old, diesel-spewing trucks, bright blue taxis, and loud motorcycles raced around each other in an ungainly minuet. Along the side of the road, beneath decaying cement buildings, we browsed wood carvings, beaded bowls, wire sculptures, and other trinkets at the local tourist market.


The next morning, Chanter drove us through the city, to the edge of what the Scottish missionary doctor and explorer David Livingstone discovered in 1855 and called Victoria Falls, in honor of the British queen. Zambians call it Mosi-oa-Tunya, or the Smoke that Thunders, a name we would soon come to appreciate.


He dropped us off by a scrum of trinket merchants and a one-room museum, where we were directed to a gate, paid the equivalent of a $20 fee, and carefully made our way down a narrow path through a lush bower. Before we could see anything, we felt its presence. A fine drizzle began to soak us, and then we could hear the low thunder. As we made our way down an increasingly slick path, we caught a glimpse between the foliage. And there it was: the mighty wall of water and the cloud of mist rising hundreds of feet into the sky.


“Unbelievable,’’ Jess said. “Unbelievable.’’


The 360-foot-tall falls, more than twice as high as Niagara, stretches out over a mile and is among the world’s widest. Here the wide placid Zambezi River bordering Zambia and Zimbabwe is transformed. The closer we came, the more the drizzle turned into a squall. But with rainbows arcing in every direction, wild flowers leaning off moss-covered rocks, and water cascading down in a soothing symphony, we were mesmerized for hours, oblivious to the cold shower as we dawdled along the edge and looked through the fog to Zimbabwe.


We dried off later at the Royal Livingstone, a five-star hotel less than a mile from Victoria Falls, where guests pay more than $900 a night. It was a peculiar place in a land where many people live in thatch-roofed villages, and it felt uncomfortably anachronistic with black waiters in white gloves and long-tailed tuxedos serving mainly white tourists. But we couldn’t pass up the hotel’s famous afternoon tea, and its beckoning buffet of cakes, cookies, and other gooey treats.


Any concern we had about the legacy of colonialism faded as we discovered more pressing issues. While we nibbled on crumpets and slurped pudding on the riverside patio’s leather couches, we noticed a few vervet monkeys staring at us. They seemed cute and entertaining as they frolicked on the manicured greens. What we learned was that they were even more interested in us, particularly what we had on our plates.


We soon found ourselves at the center of a daily duel between the turquoise-testicled monkeys and the patio’s lone security guard, a young man armed with just a slingshot. The monkeys worked together to foil the guard, climbing on the hotel’s roof, lurking behind the couches, feinting in different directions. Whenever the guard turned his head, they took turns darting toward our table, climbing up and grabbing whatever they could, making it a less than leisurely lunch.


“They’re very smart,’’ the guard said after one monkey crept into the dining room, opened a drawer, and rifled through it for goodies before being chased away.


The next day, after more fun with the monkeys, we unwittingly decided to test the boundaries of other wildlife in the area. We had learned that a giraffe in the bush that surrounded the hotel had recently given birth and thought we might try to catch a glimpse of the calf. A driver at the Royal Livingstone offered to take us on foot to find the giraffe, which wasn’t difficult, given their size.


But it was a brief tour. As we cut through the dense foliage following our guide, we spotted a giraffe’s pointy ears. The giraffe spotted us, too, and looked at us intently as we approached. Moments later, its mate came into view, looking at us with a less curious gaze, and then it began moving toward us.


“Run,’’ our guide shouted abruptly.


So we ran, following him out of the bush in a sprint, at once afraid to look back and sad we didn’t get to see the baby.


Having had our fill of adventure on land, we decided to explore the river. The day before we left Livingstone, we set out on a rafting trip down the Zambezi, Africa’s fourth largest river and home to crocodiles, hippos, and something even more menacing: a series of Class 5 rapids, which the local rafting companies dubbed “Commercial Suicide,’’ “Gnashing Jaws of Death,’’ and “The Terminator,’’ among others.


We learned the power of the warm river within minutes, and over the course of several hours, we probably spent more time overboard than on the raft. At one point, one wave of whitewater overturned our boat, flipping it from the front to the back, dumping all nine of us, including our guide. I was launched about 10 feet and spent a few seconds underwater scrambling for air. It was good fun.


The guide assured us not to worry about the crocs or hippos, as the water was moving too fast for them to feed on us. But our interest in swimming flagged when we saw a few of the toothy reptiles sunbathing on rocks jutting out of the river.


By that point, the trip was nearly done, and we were on our way back to Livingstone - sore, exhilarated, and ready for a vacation from our vacation.


The next morning, after five days in Zambia, Chanter dropped us off at the small, local airport. We sucked in the humid air and admired the billowy clouds as we walked across the tarmac to our Johannesburg-bound plane.


As our plane took off and climbed into the hazy sky - we were happy to no longer be traveling on sketchy roads - we could see a broad expanse of central Africa for miles, varying hues of seemingly untouched green in every direction, except one.


Before our plane banked into the clouds, the pilot drew our attention to what looked like smoke rising from the ground. In the distance, we could see the deep gash in the green. It was our last glimpse of Victoria Falls.


David Abel can be reached at dabel@globe.com. 

Into the Moonlight on Essex Bay

By David Abel

Globe Staff
10/25/2009

ESSEX BAY – In the golden light of dusk, we slipped into the warm water and followed the receding tide from the beach.

Overhead, the sky was a darkening canopy of blues, with wispy clouds floating on a pink horizon. A gentle breeze rippled over tall grass in the distance, brushing us with the softness of velvet. There was no late-summer humidity, no hint of the onset of fall, not a bug or concern in the air.

As our kayaks cut through the silent waters of the bay, it was a reminder of why September is New England’s most serene month.

We had come here for a moonlight tour of Essex Bay, a nook of the ocean that seeps into the marshlands between Cape Ann and Crane Beach. But day dissolved into night we discovered more than the beauty that floods in and out of this wildlife refuge an hour north of Boston.

The tour began on the rocky shores just north of the Walker Creek Marshes, and several guides led our group of a dozen kayakers through the shallow water. We paddled toward the setting sun and watched the gold light burn into an orange haze.

As we curved around Cross Island, a barrier for much of the surrounding estuaries, we came across flocks of egrets, herons, and other birds prancing through the shallows, many of which use the bay as a way station on their long journeys to teach their young how to fly.
    
We passed other small islands and old shacks moored in the bay, the legacy of a time when local authorities were less strict about development on the water. The more we paddled, the more the greens of the surrounding grass and the changing colors of the sky seemed to merge like an Impressionistic painting. The orange blurred with pinks and reds, until the sky glowed a soft purple.

As we cut through the bay and the sun sank behind us, we watched a full moon rise in front of us, casting a soft light that sparkled over the calm water. We passed a sand bank where several boats were beached in the low tide. From there, we followed our guides and glided onto the southeastern edge of Crane Beach, parked our kayaks on a steep grade of sand, and gathered around a fire pit to sip hot chocolate and devour well-deserved desserts.

Under the darkening sky, we met Richard “Ozzie” Osborn, who has been running the trips around the Essex River Basin for 15 years. With sparks illuminating his face, Osborn told us how much of the area was part of the old summer estate of Chicago industrialist Richard T. Crane, a 2,800-acre property, much of which the family has given to a nonprofit land trust over the years.

“What’s crucial about the property as it is is that we’re in the main flyways for migrating shorebirds,” he said. “Some of these birds fly tundra to tundra, from the northern most part of North America to Patagonia.”

He pointed across the beach and into the last embers of light as he explained how the trust has preserved much of the land and left it undeveloped. “It’s in its natural state, almost unscathed, which is really unique,” he said.

While regaling us with stories and facts about the area, the sky faded to black, except for the bright moon rising higher in the sky.

We followed the moonlight back to the kayaks and shoved into the dark, flat water, where we crossed fast-moving currents flooding in from Ipswich Bay. We paddled into what felt like a star-filled void, where it was difficult to distinguish the sky from the water. We were silhouettes and kept from ramming each other with neon sticks glowing from the ends of our kayaks.

The more we paddled, the more it felt like we were weightless, floating in space. The strong current of the incoming tide made the rhythmic motion of paddling feel effortless, almost intoxicating.

It was an entrancing peace, a kind that unites the brain and the body.

We cruised along the marshes, past the undeveloped islands, through the quiet of night, until we were back where we started, invigorated by the warm breeze, the warm water, and the warm feelings.

Osborn said he couldn’t recall a better night for kayaking in 15 years running the same trip.

“We got a special not to be on the water,” he said.

David Abel can be reached at dabel@globe.com.

Holiness and Haggling in Turkey

By David Abel
Globe Staff
7/13/2003

ISTANBUL -- Naked, alone, and sweating after another sleepless night, I gaze at the shafts of light shooting through holes in the 500-year-old dome, waiting fretfully for the stocky man whose calloused hands will soon grind the tension from all my aching limbs. Lying on a large block of soapy marble, which feels like a sacrificial altar as steam rises all around, I fall into a groggy state where dreams blur with reality and the past slowly consumes the present.

As if experiencing them all over again, my mind flashes images of lava-sculpted canyons, turquoise lagoons, and relics of civilizations dating well before Christ. I smell the toasted pita breads, roasting shwarma, and the sacks of spices flaunted in the markets. I hear the high-pitched call to prayer ringing from the minarets, I taste the rush of honey oozing from a chunk of baklava, and I feel the warmth of the Mediterranean banish Boston to a distant memory.

These are the last hours of a whirlwind, 10-day tour of Turkey. Back in Istanbul after a long night on a crowded bus from the southern coast, a trip that briefly stranded me on the Asian side of the city, I'm in a bathhouse built before Columbus discovered America.

It's early on a Sunday morning, and with tourism still suffering from the war in Iraq, I have this vast place to myself, and the movie playing in my mind.

It starts with a mix of holiness and haggling, mediated by small glasses of apple tea and belly dancing. The trip from Istanbul's massive millennium-old mosques to the Grand Bazaar may be short, but it takes a while to go from the grandeur of the Aya Sofya, a sprawling Roman Empire-era church converted into a mosque, to the maze of merchants peddling everything from pricey carpets to cheap pottery.

The contradictions are everywhere - and they are what make this continent-straddling city, and country, so alluring. The melange of Europe and Asia, or secular West and sacred Middle East, is visible in the McDonald's next to a mosque. Young women shrouded in headscarves shopping in music stores playing Eminem. Nearly pornographic movie posters beneath the ubiquitous minarets.

In this land of extremes, contradictions arise even in the most rudimentary communication. Of the few Turkish words I learn, the indispensable ones are cok guzel, "very beautiful or very nice," and sao ol, which literally means "stay alive" but translates into something between "no thanks" and "leave me alone."

As the film rolls in my brain, I'm on a ferry plying the Bosporus, both awed by its shimmering beauty and aghast at 3,000 years of blood spilled for control of this strategic waterway, which separates Europe and Asia by connecting the Mediterranean with the Black Sea. On the European side, I see the mosques and palaces of the Ottoman Empire towering over a jumble of ugly modern buildings. On the shores of Asian Istanbul, where fewer tourists venture, there is a similar cacophony, though with less grandeur and more fishing boats.

The image fades, it's now dark out, and I'm on a large bus, something like a gussied-up Greyhound with Turkish carpets on the floor and a stewardess serving a round-the-clock assortment of tea, fruitcakes, and a special lemon-scented cologne. The road is smooth as we barrel through the night into the nation's heartland. But sleeping proves difficult, especially with the hourly stops.

Speed is not a priority. With bus stations here like convenience stores in America - everywhere, always open, and always bustling - there is a good excuse for not rushing. Around 3 a.m., somewhere in the salt flats between Istanbul and Cappadocia, I open my crusty eyes to find a party. The early-morning revelers - scores of families, lovers, and solo travelers - are yapping over tea or raki, the smooth Turkish liquor. There are old men cooking kebabs and young children trying to sell me a visit to the bathroom, which they maintain for a fee.

From there, I am transported into a broad valley filled with apricot trees, vineyards, and almost every imaginable flower, all blooming in their spring splendor. On the horizon is a massive snow-capped volcano. Some 10 millions ago, it erupted and left a warren of lava-shaped canyons and goopy rock formations, which one guidebook compares to the "Grand Canyon on acid." Burrowed inside many of the rocks, a soft, easily sculpted stone made of lava, ash, and mud, are countless caves where locals have lived for thousands of years.

One of them houses the five-star hotel where I'm staying. Perched on a hill above Cappadocia, the views are only matched by the lavish meals and the attentive staff, with waiters so responsive that a fork set down between bites risks immediate replacement. For such luxury, courtesy of the War on Terror, which has left nearly the entire hotel vacant, I am set back $45 a night.

Following a small stream through one part of the valley, a friend and I arrive in a small, touristy town, where we stop to browse in a carpet shop. Before long, a salesman named Savas is giving us a tour, pouring us apple tea and explaining the differences between cheap wool kilims and silk masterpieces. When he gets the drift we are not the buying kind of customers, he has his driver take us a few miles away to the top of a red canyon, where he leads us on a three-hour hike across mahogany-colored rocks and fields full of irises and poppies. Then, back at his home in the carpet shop, he cooks us dinner, a crispy Turkish pizza prepared in a wood-burning oven.

When I am about to leave this lush fantasyland - there were moments I considered spending the rest of my life here - Savas suddenly appears at the bus station with a gift, his prayer beads. We hug and I'm on the road again, another all-night bus trip to an unknown city.

The next morning, I awake to the smell of the sea. The dry air has given way to humidity and with beaches, yachts, and skin-baring sunbathers all around, the place has a much freer feel.

A bumpy ride on a dolmus, or microbus, takes me to the turquoise waters and white-sand peninsula surrounding the legendary Blue Lagoon in Oludeniz. There's a crowd of tourists, but when I glide through the pristine water, which is clear as glass, they seem as far away as the previous night's stressful ride. Then I am on a plateau above the lagoon, beyond several rocky hills covered with pine trees, walking among the ghostly remains of an abandoned town, where thousands of Greeks lived before Turks forced them out when they declared independence from Greek rule in 1923. A few hills beyond is Fethiye, one of the main ports on the Turkish Riviera, and I'm ambling along the crowded harbor, feeling like I'm running a gantlet as scores of aggressive restaurateurs beseech me and every passing tourist to dine with them. Further inland, there is the massive gorge in Saklikent, where a guide escorts me and a group of mostly burly British men through a muddy river that leads to a hidden waterfall.

As I'm feeling the frigid spray of the cascading water, something like a vice closes around my ankle and tugs me a few feet. I wake from my dreams at the bathhouse and stare up at the beefy, shirtless masseuse. If I'm not fully awake, he gets my attention by pouring a bucket of warm water over my head. Then he takes out something like a Brillo pad and begins rubbing off layers of my skin, as if he were trying to remove something sticky from the bottom of a pot. He douses me with more water and begins kneading every muscle in my body, cracking my back, and providing a perverse mix of pain and pleasure. When he is done, after scrubbing me with a bubble bath's worth of suds and washing it away with a combination of hot and cold water, he leaves me alone again.

Still on my back on the warm marble, everything seems more vivid. I watch the beams of light slowly crawl across the cracked floor. I hear the drip-drop of the dozen surrounding fountains, which I like to think once bathed sultans. And then a strange sensation overcomes me, an inexplicable urge for an agnostic unaccustomed to religious feelings. Perhaps it's primal, but suddenly I feel the desire to hum something holy, a prayer. And then it comes out, from a tune in my mind for anyone listening to hear, some hallowed hymn, which I repeat over and over until I fall asleep again.

David Abel can be reached at dabel@globe.com.

Copyright, The Boston Globe

Racing Across China

From Beijing to Hong Kong

Click here for more pictures from China.

By David Abel
Globe Staff
1/29/2006

Earplugs shoved in, eyes tightened against the fluorescent bulbs above, hacking, snoring, and bleating cellphones all around, we shoot through the frozen night, clanging past desolate fields and impossibly crowded cities.

I curl up on what the Chinese call a hard sleeper, one of six coffin-sized boards stacked in our overnight train's doorless compartment, waiting for sleep to blur the 10-hour ride with my dreams.

Unable to move without knocking my head into the bunk above or plunging five feet below, I try to rest after racing through Beijing's massive, neon-lighted streets and crossing a sea of humanity. (Late on a Monday night, the sprawling train station everything in China feels gargantuan seems like New York's Penn Station at rush hour, only more crowded.)

Three days into a three-week trip that would take us more than a thousand miles from the bare, stone-topped mountains surrounding Beijing to the chaos of the pollution-choked streets of Shanghai to the serene, sampan-lined beaches around Hong Kong my girlfriend and I have already learned a few lessons:

Pointing to pinyin (the Roman letters spelling out Chinese characters) leaves most people as clueless as we are trying to read Chinese. City maps are about as useful for conveying distance as textbook pictures of the solar system (just crossing a street in Beijing, many of which are more than 14 lanes wide, not including the bike lanes on each side of the street, can feel like an epic journey). Northern China in the winter is about as temperate as the tundra. Oh, and everyone from grandmas to businessmen spits.

We might have discovered such things before leaving, but because my girlfriend had just landed a new job, we arranged the trip only five days before we left. We had long wanted to travel to China. And with luck finding reasonable fares $700 round trip from Boston to Beijing we applied for rushed visas and took off with no plan, other than to see as much as possible.

I had always imagined China like Napoleon's sleeping dragon, a giant still burdened by a long history of authoritarianism and communism. Instead, we find a nation awakened as a superpower. (A few days after our arrival, a government report announces China's economy this year will exceed those of Britain and France, making it the world's fourth-largest, behind the United States, Japan, and Germany.)

We also find that it's a place rife with irony and extreme contrasts. There are 2,000-year-old pagodas in the shadows of some of the world's largest skyscrapers. Tyrannical one-party rulers dissidents are routinely jailed struggle to control the chaos of 1.3 billion people. A new class of millionaires live large while some 100 million people remain mired in poverty, many unable to afford medical care.

My first discovery is a Wi-Fi signal at the airport. The hourlong drive into traffic-clogged Beijing also offers glimpses of the country's latest great leap forward: countless new Audis and BMWs cruising state-of-the-art highways; a canopy of pollution stretching over the city like a neon halo; a horizon cluttered with so many high-rises, many of them recently built, it makes Boston seem like a village.

Over three days in Beijing, we visit ornate Buddhist temples adjacent to ancient slums. We take 40-cent subway rides that put the T to shame. We get lost in dense crowds at tidy markets full of fake jade and Mao-waving watches. We sip green tea at restaurants whose windows advertise the carcasses of ducks, some next to a McDonald's or KFC.

We watch monks perform martial arts and acrobats contort their bodies in seemingly impossible positions. We brave the freezing winds under Mao Zedong's gaze on Tiananmen Square, a vast, mainly empty cement plaza, except for tourists, hawkers, and green-jacketed police. We tour the warren of old halls in the Forbidden City, making obligatory stops at the "four-star" toilet and Starbucks. We climb the pristine hills of Mutianyu to a restored portion of the Great Wall, a sight that lives up to all the superlatives. After enjoying the wintry solitude of one piece of the 4,100-mile delusion of various emperors' grandeur, we hop on an alpine slide down to the parking lot.

Groggy as dawn breaks and our train rolls into Nanjing, the capital at various times in China's history, we lug our backpacks into the cold of the sleek, new station. (For all their progress, it seems the Chinese have yet to master heating systems.)

A few minutes later, in a taxi to the museum commemorating the Japanese invasion in 1937 (one of Nanking's periods as capital), we hear what sounds like air-raid sirens. I make a bad joke that the Japanese are back; in a few minutes, with hundreds of people lined up for a ceremony next to the museum, we learn it is the 68th anniversary of the attack. The occupation and systematic massacres left an estimated 300,000 Chinese dead.

We spend the morning gaping at gruesome photos and mull it all over a tapas-like lunch of dainty, perplexing dishes. We later try out our five or so words of mispronounced Chinese on smiling, puzzled merchants and sneak into a regal villa honoring Sun Yat-sen, China's revered first president.

After yet another miscommunication, this one stranding us at the train station for a few hours, we take a two-hour trip east to a city called Suzhou, less than half the size of Beijing, with about 6 million people. We haggle to stay in what may be the planet's most elegant Sheraton a stately complex of humpback bridges, picturesque canals, and serene courtyards and spend the day roaming the city's renowned gardens, gawking at ancient pagodas, and passing on plentiful opportunities to buy silk.

A few hours later, we hop on another train, this one little more than an hour east to Shanghai. When we arrive around midnight, China's largest city is ablaze with neon-lighted towers, and it all feels about as foreign as Times Square.

Over three days, through a gnawing cold, we walk for miles, exploring the colonial buildings along the Bund and ascending to the top of the rocket-shaped Orient Pearl TV tower. We stroll through an old ghetto where the Japanese confined thousands of Jews during World War II and dine atop Pudong, a section of Shanghai where the only constant seems to be moving cranes and the flash of blowtorches used in building skyscrapers in every direction. We haggle in tourist-filled markets for knockoff bags and other baubles, and when my girlfriend leaves me to power shop on Nanjing Road, I spend an hour fending off a legion of prostitutes, who patrol the city's wide shopping corridor in high heels and long winter jackets.

We take breathers from the overwhelming pollution with forays into the city's sophisticated museums, where a certain freedom of expression thrives. At a small modern art museum, we watch a video of pigs feasting on a drunken man's table; at the urban planning museum, we stand in a wraparound video simulator that transports us to the future city; at a large history museum, we find ourselves dumbfounded at the spare-no-expense exhibits.

Rundown and in need of clean air, we take a two-hour train ride south to Hangzhou, a lakeside city dating to at least 221 BC.

With hills ringing the large, placid West Lake, it's easy to understand why the Chinese call the city paradise, even in the dead of winter. We take a small ferry across the murky expanse and stop to explore several island gardens whose beauty is impervious to the cold. We eat "beggar's chicken," a local delicacy in which the bird is wrapped in lotus leaves and clay. (It's one of the few poultry dishes to survive the nationwide campaign to isolate the avian flu.)

Before heading out yet again, this time for the airport, we do something we haven't done much since arriving in China. We relax. We dry our rheumy eyes in the hotel's sauna, then devour dragon fruit, a prickly, pink-fleshed monster of a flower that tastes like a mix of kiwi and watermelon.

Later, we fly to Guangzhou, formerly called Canton, an enormous city of some 10 million people in southern China. For years the country's most prosperous city, replete with flyover highways, acres of malls, and smog-veiled skyscrapers, it looks a bit like Los Angeles. Even the warm air is similarly velvety.

With only a short time left, we haul our increasingly heavy bags along narrow sidewalks to the closest bus stop. When we spy a large, modern bus in the parking lot, we jump on.

It's time for Hong Kong.

Under a bright sun, we leave the congested city on a dizzying, three-hour ride south, one that would require clearing two frenzied customs stations with hourlong lines, switching buses three times, having our passports stamped twice, and stopping for heat-sensing cameras to check whether we have any sign of fever, perhaps the avian flu or SARS.

When we finally arrive in Kowloon, the edge of the mainland just north of Hong Kong island, I quickly realize "one country, two systems," the former British colony's special status since China took over in 1997, means more than different currencies or a frontier dividing capitalism and communism.

There's the greater political freedom antigovernment protests in the parks and newspapers that print actual news. There's the beauty of the city's skyscrapers packed like a forest along the island's craggy hills. There's the human scale of the streets, many of which are lined by old banyan trees, lighted like day at night, and narrow enough that they don't require a marathoner's endurance to cross. There's also the ubiquitous English and slew of double-decker buses driving on the British side of the road, all providing a feeling of being at something more than a crossroads, a kind of prosperous merger of East and West.

After gorging on dim sum, basking in the skyline's laser light show's glow from the top of Victoria Peak, and negotiating a harbor cruise on an old sampan, we take a high-speed ferry though the South China Sea's bright blue waters to Macau.

On our short visit, we find that the 400-year-old former Portuguese colony, which also became Chinese territory in 1999, has more to offer than casinos.

There are the restored churches and other anachronisms, such as signs everywhere still in Portuguese. A large museum compares everything from the history of Eastern and Western philosophy to the derivation of the word tea "cha" in Chinese and why it is pronounced either "cha" or "tea" in languages around the world. (The difference results from where in China traders first bought tea.) But Macau's most important cultural contribution, in my humble opinion, is its small, freshly baked almond cookies, which shopkeepers offer by the handful to lure visitors into their stores.

Our spur-of-the-moment trip to China ends on a diversion.

In our rush to leave Boston, we had applied only for single-entry visas, not realizing that to return to the mainland, to fly home from Beijing, would require another visa. (The Chinese, to retaliate for the stiff price of US visas, would have charged us more than $100 each.)

But we discover a way around the issue, without another Chinese visa.

We fly to Vietnam.

Contact David Abel at dabel@globe.com.


IF YOU GO:
United and other airlines offer flights from Boston to Beijing, often with a stop in Chicago or San Francisco. Fares generally run more than $1,000, but deals on the Web can get close to $700. And if a Massport-Hainan Airlines plan gains Federal Aviation Administration approval, travelers will be able to fly directly from Boston to China aboard China's low-cost carrier by the end of the year.

Where to stay

Marco Polo Hotels
www.marcopolohotels.com.
The Marco Polo Hongkong Hotel offered a large room with a king-size bed and postcard views of the skyline for $125 a night.

Grand Hyatt
Jin Mao Tower, 88 Century Blvd., Pudong, Shanghai
www.hyatt.com
The "highest hotel in the world" on the 53d to 87th floors is in the heart of Shanghai's financial district. The lobby has views of the Bund and Huangpu River. Rooms start at $250 a night.

Westin Shanghai
88 Henan Zhonglu
www.westin.com/shanghai
A modern hotel near the Bund and Nanjing Road, with a spa that offers after-hours de-stressing until midnight. Club deluxe rooms start at $350, including breakfast.

Sheraton Suzhou
259 Xin Shi Lu
www.sheraton-suzhou.com
A deluxe, five-star hotel surrounded by magnificent gardens. Rates start at $150 a night, including breakfast.

Where to eat
Beijing There are entire restaurants devoted to producing the city's most famous local dish, Beijing duck. Emphasis is on lamb, pork, and large, doughy dumplings. Staples are heavy noodles and breads rather than rice. Street food is plentiful, cheap, and of varying quality. Fast-food outlets such as KFC are ubiquitous.

Shanghai You'll find restaurants representing every regional Chinese fare, as well as cuisine from around the world. Here food is known for xiao long bao (steamed dumplings), hairy crab, and river fish. Its street food is the city's culinary claim to fame.

Hong Kong is dizzying in its choices. Don't miss the dim sum palaces, which serve from midmorning to midafternoon. There are more than a thousand kinds of dim sum, and many restaurants prepare 100 varieties daily, serving them from carts, often steamed in bamboo baskets.

Fares of the Heart in Peru

Testing a New Relationship on the Highs, Lows, Lumps, and Luxuries from Lima and Beyond

Click here for more pictures of Peru.

By David Abel
Globe Staff
11/07/2004

LIMA -- Call me sadistic.

We had met little more than a month before, but we had chemistry, the kind with sparks that could easily ignite. Things moved quickly, and we both saw the glimmer of potential. Enough that commitment-heavy words started slipping off each other's tongues.

With infatuation often confused for love, I wanted to know whether our feelings had depth, whether they could survive the isolation of a desert, the climb up a mountain, the dislocation of an unknown culture.

I wasn't being hyperbolic; I wanted a reality check.

So I proposed a test of sorts, a trip, preferably to somewhere in the developing world where we might find ourselves stuck on long, unnerving bus rides or risk food poisoning or altitude sickness.

Less than 10 weeks after we met, and both fluent in Spanish, we agreed to spend 10 days together in Peru. It would be a journey covering thousands of miles, with transportation including irritable, poorly trained horses, which took us from the highest navigable lake in the world to the deepest canyons, from icy rivers to hot springs, from the capital's seaside skyscrapers to the cobblestoned streets of centuries-old colonial cities.

It would also, of course, be more time than we had ever spent together.

She's a lawyer accustomed to long-term planning and glitzy hotels. I'm a reporter used to spontaneity and sleeping at hostels. The trip would require compromises, such as our ac commodations, which would range from the presidential suite of a five-star hotel to mangy inns where showers didn't guarantee hot water.

Both in our early 30s and set in our ways, we might have driven each other nuts and ended up flying home separately. Neither of us knew what to expect.

FLYING IN FROM different cities, we met in Lima, where I found her curled on a couch in the regal lobby of the Country Club hotel -- our first compromise -- her hazel eyes struggling to stay open after 2 a.m.

The next morning, we set out on a tour of the capital, a sprawling metropolis of 7 million people. Through the mist, we saw a city bounded by a coastline of cliffs, colorful shanties crisscrossing denuded hills, and a canopy of dark clouds overhead, all of which made the August cool winter air feel heavy, damp, and stagnant. We devoured crusty empanadas at street-side panaderias, strolled across broad potholed boulevards and large plazas, where a small army of street vendors hawked everything from sugar cane juice to fresh papaya, and learned about decades of Marxist-inspired violence at an exhaustive seaside museum. At the end of our one day there, we sat for a meal that included Pisco sours, a grape brandy mixed with egg whites, and a platter of Anticuchos, cow hearts sprinkled with salt.

Then, after a few hours of coping with interminable lines and other chaos at the airport, we left the cacophony of Lima for Cusco, the oldest continuously inhabited city in South America.

At more than 10,000 feet, I immediately detected something strange about the capital of the Incas, the millennium-old indigenous empire eventually crushed by Spain. As we passed the ochre-roofed churches built on Incan ruins and browsed alpaca sweaters and the juicy peppino and granadilla fruits at the crowded markets, the bag on my back seemed to weigh more, my feet felt like cinder blocks, my head like a tightening vice. The altitude sickness eventually subsided, the result of tender care from my hardier companion, the magic of coca leaves (to which I developed a mild addiction), and the benefits of the most luxurious room at our five-star hotel.

A 300-year-old former seminary, the Hotel Monasterio has a breakfast buffet that is about the best I've ever seen. In our first room, an elegant duplex, the staff sent us a platter of local fruit and a bouquet of roses and lined the bathroom with candles. They also drew us a bubble bath, which, with all the salts, oils, and multicolored rose petals scattered about, seemed like soaking in a latte, with whipped cream and sprinkles on top.

The next night, a concierge asked whether we were on our honeymoon, an illusion possibly cast by the beaming grins fixed on our faces since we had checked in. Then, to our amazement, the staff upgraded us to the presidential suite, which typically costs $700 a night. We found the entrance at the end of a corridor filled with Renaissance-style paintings, the only suite with its own doorbell. Inside, beyond a living room with more fruit, flowers, and a bottle of champagne, we found cherubic figurines above a bed that could have fit a family of four, a marble bath with towel warmers, a private room with toilet and phone, and a patio overlooking a courtyard with a gurgling fountain.

It was hard to leave, but with the US ambassador checking in after us, we reluctantly shipped out, assuming it would be downhill from there.

FOR $50, WE HIRED a driver to take us through the Sacred Valley, a region of towering peaks, ancient salt mines, and a range of awe-inspiring Incan ruins, many carved into the land. We spent the next day on horseback, fording rivers and inspecting mud huts in a dry, rocky valley. Then we took the early-morning train to Aguas Calientes, the base for all trips to Machu Picchu. The two-hour ride took us past arid plains that resembled a desert, snow-capped glaciers that seemed to promise tundra, and the dense, verdant foliage of a jungle.

When we reached Aguas Calientes, we had a choice: Take the bus up the spiraling road to the legendary "Lost City of the Incas," or climb on foot.

Of course, we made our decision on level ground, well before eyeing the first of more than a thousand stone steps. As we trudged up the popsicle-shaped mountain, our water dwindling, our white skins turning bright red, and my sweetheart glowering and groaning about how I should leave her behind, that she would be better off jumping or lying down and waiting for wolves to relieve her misery, I kept thinking, "A crisis binds, doesn't it?"

When we finally reached the summit, the well-manicured plateau and all the impossibly assembled boulders appeared like heaven after ascending through hell. In short, we found a grandeur only hinted at in photos. About all the mysterious moss-covered arches, baths, and fort-like homes, I jotted this in my journal: "Beyond the $20 tollbooth lies the reality of some despot's dream / A heaven on Earth / Where the firmament is carved in stone / Where orchid gardens are groomed by llamas / Where pillowy clouds and daunting heights both camouflage and exalt / One peoples' attempt to create its own eternity."

The next leg of our trip landed us near Peru's southern border with Bolivia. From the airport, we took a colectivo, or small bus, which slowly crowded with an impossible number of passengers, who squashed us between the lumpy seats and our bulky backpacks. Then a storm began, unleashing hail and lightning, and the dark, narrow road made imminent death seem possible. The two of us shared good, morbid laughs as we bumped along to Puno, the gateway to Lake Titicaca, the world's highest navigable lake and the reason we had come.

Early the next morning, after a breakfast of cantaloupe smoothies and fried eggs at a less-than-luxurious inn the gold-toothed colectivo driver had recommended, we boarded a tourist-packed powerboat and watched the shore's toxic lime waters turn sapphire as we approached the center of the lake. We learned how the surrounding sand-covered hills produce some 6,000 varieties of potatoes.

We saw how the indigenous Uros walk on water, literally, by piling reeds in the shallows and building floating islands, complete with tepee-like homes. They live much the same as centuries before, with a few innovations like solar panels to power their stereos.

After a frigid day on the vast lake, which spanned 3,300 square miles at an altitude higher than 12,000 feet, we longed for warmth.

A HALF-HOUR FLIGHT later, we landed in Arequipa, the nation's second largest city, where many buildings are made of a white volcanic rock called sillar and an enormous snow-capped volcano dominates the horizon. We rushed from the airport to the bus station, to wait only long enough for a lonely teenage vendor to slip us a note suggesting we adopt her.

When we eventually left for the Colca Canyon -- at 11,333 feet nearly twice as deep as the Grand Canyon -- we didn't realize it would make all the other trips seem, in comparison, like swan boats gliding across the pond in Boston's Public Garden. As the city gave way to the desert and the pavement turned to dirt, the old Greyhound-style bus chugged along the winding cliffside road, sometimes gaining air as we passed more than a few crosses, each indicating a quicker path to the bottom. The nausea set in only after the driver blasted the local version of country music, a screechy fusion of Mariachi ballads and Asian arias that every few minutes featured a woman's piercing screams.

The four-hour jaunt ended when we arrived at a rustic row of huts perched above a shallow river, where we found a better cure for dizziness than coca leaves. The round pools of steamy water made us feel as if we were floating, the star-studded sky seemed like a glistening sea to stretch into. The hot springs brought us so much peace that the next morning, we skipped a condor excursion and spent much of the day soaking in the liquid bliss.

WHEN WE RETURNED to Arequipa the next night, our last in Peru, we found a smoky bar, drank the local beer, and listened as a squeaky band laid waste to the Beatles.

After they cleared out, the salsa started. It was then that I looked closely at the petite woman with the big smile in my arms. We had shared a range of highs and lows over 10 days. Everything from tears and death wishes to long laughs and deep solace.

Alone on the dance floor, we peered at each other through the smoke, and our gaze deepened. It felt as if we were on a stage, under a warm spotlight. We hugged and kissed, and as I twirled her around, her smile widening with each turn, I realized my questions now had answers, that what we were experiencing went much deeper than infatuation.

Watching her dimples expand, her mussed hair bounce off her shoulders, I couldn't escape the thought: I was in love.

David Abel can be reached at dabel@globe.com.

Copyright, The Boston Globe

Cave Dwelling in Cappadocia

By David Abel
Globe Staff
9/03/2003

CAPPADOCIA, Turkey - When I arrived around dawn at the bus station, after a long, sleepless trip from Istanbul, I had little strength to fuss over a hotel. I just wanted a bed, a place to rest my head, where I could lie horizontal for a few uninterrupted hours.

The night before, I had read about a few pensions in my guidebook. They seemed just right - not too expensive and funky - and they were caves.

That's right: I wanted to stay in a cave. It's the thing to do in Cappadocia, a lush valley in central Turkey shaped by a volcanic eruption 10 million years ago. So I circled a few recommended caves. And in the morning, I would set off to what seemed to be the most appealing one.

Shortly after arriving, I hoisted my heavy backpack onto an old van and left the station with a few tourists to find a place called the "Tuna Caves Pension."
We never made it there.

On the way, we stopped at another hotel, which the driver and other tourists described as cozier than the cave I had dog-eared.

It didn't take more than a quick glance to realize it wasn't quite the funky habitation I had in mind: It was dank, musty, and definitely uninviting. As groggy as I felt, I started thinking I would rather sleep on another bus than in some bat-infested, moldy cave.

After inspecting the craggy interior of one room, I met a couple who had spent the previous night at a newly built hotel a few miles away, on a hill overlooking the valley. They raved about it. The views, they said, were to die for; the food was unparalleled. It was a five-star hotel, they said, and the best part was the price. Courtesy of the War on Terror, and of the recent routing of Saddam Hussein's military in Iraq, the place was empty. And the price had plummeted to just $45 a night.

That last part really got my attention.

So I climbed back into the van and told the driver I had changed my mind. I wanted to go to this place on the hill, in Uchisar, called the Museum Hotel.

To say the least, I don't typically stay in five-star hotels. I'm the kind of guy who prefers to go camping or stay in a hostel than pay to sleep in some overpriced inn. But I have to say, without a doubt, this was the best decision I had made throughout my 10 days in Turkey. I knew that the moment I arrived.

If anything, the couple had underplayed the beauty. In the distance, from the top of the hill, I could see the entire valley, the mahogany-colored canyons, the bizarrely goopy rock formations, the massive volcano at the edge of the horizon. The air was even different: A cool breeze banished the heat stifling much of the valley.

It was as if I had suddenly walked into another universe. After an all-night bus trip squirming in an uncomfortable seat, it was as though I had become royalty, for just $45.

I mentioned my hunger and the concierge had my dirty, sweat-stained backpack taken to my room. A bellhop escorted me to the patio, which overlooked all the grandeur of Cappadocia. Then they prepared to feed me.

In minutes, a legion of traditionally dressed waiters and waitresses set a table, poured me apple tea, and served a meal of chicken and rice. For someone used to scrubbing his own dishes, it took some time to get used to the staff hovering over me as I ate, replacing my fork between bites. It didn't take too much time, however, and I feel comfortable saying it was one of the best lunches I've ever had.

Still, it was nothing compared with breakfast and dinner. Breakfast included a buffet of fresh juices, recently harvested olives, a variety of feta cheeses, fruits, pastries, and just about anything I could have desired. Dinner included fresh salads; crusty, feta-filled hors d'oeuvres; large, meticulously prepared entrees; and desserts so good they defy adjectives.

Yet the part that made it worth it was the room.

A cave built into the side of a hill,my room didn't have any right angles. But it wasn't anything like the cave I had seen earlier. It had satellite TV, a king-sized bed with silk-smooth sheets, and a marble bath with Jacuzzi. There were also elegant paintings and other pricey pieces of art on the walls (thus giving the hotel its name), irregularly shaped windows that looked out on the valley, and an untold number of small perks - everything from a comfy robe and soft slippers to Turkish carpets lining the floor to a bottle of wine.

In short, and this only slightly runs the risk of exaggeration, it seemed the way one might imagine heaven. And I say that without having entered the pool, which was under construction when I visited in June.

Drifting off to sleep that night, I curled up in the smooth sheets and my head lay gently on the feathery pillow. I was as far away from the previous night's bus as I could be, and the big bed alone was enough for me to consider staying there for the rest of my trip. And then I started harboring visions of moving in, perhaps taking a job as a bellhop or a window cleaner. And if they let me, I might stay there for the rest of my life.

Unfortunately, that never panned out.

Back home in Boston, back at the job and in my one-bedroom apartment scrubbing dishes and doing my own laundry, I often think about that bed, and the view, and all the meals. It was good to be the king, at least for a while.

David Abel can be reached at dabel@globe.com.

Copyright, The Boston Globe

Bedlam and Beatitude in Bangkok

By David Abel
Globe Staff
11/30/2003

BANGKOK -- Even past midnight, well after the summer monsoons, the stagnant air slides under my clothes, spreading a damp, sticky coating that fills my pores.
It's a greeting of sorts from this sprawling tropical metropolis, one of the hottest cities on the planet.

I have spent more than 24 hours in planes and airports, so the soupy air almost feels pleasant, particularly when it moves. To do that, I hop a tuk-tuk, one of countless motorized rickshaws that provide an airy perch to breathe in all the chaos of the capital's crowded streets the fumes from the lack of catalytic converters, the steam of fried noodles sizzling in sidewalk stalls, the foul aroma of durian fruit, which smell like elephant dung.

As my driver cuts through the traffic, I notice a halo of haze hanging over all of Bangkok, from the muddy, catfish-filled Chao Praya River to the narrow streets packed with wan-looking girls selling sex in Patpong to the massive markets in Chatuchak, where vendors hawk everything from Siamese cats to buckets of live eels to bags of fried grasshoppers.

One of the first things a visitor notices is the incongruous relationship between the grandeur of preserved antiquity and the tackiness of encroaching modernity.

Next to the majestic millennia-old wats, those often bejeweled temples housing immense golden sculptures of Buddha, are the neon lights of countless 7-Elevens and Dunkin' Donuts. Saffron-robed monks amble about in sandals, some chatting on cellphones. And on many corners, the state has erected life-size color photos of the king and queen, revered relics of another era who use their monarchy to promote a peaceful, if coup-plagued, democracy of 60 million people.

My 10-day tour of Thailand begins on an overcrowded ferry that slowly groans down Bangkok's antique central artery, the chocolate-colored Chao Praya River.

Before embarking, I stand on a pier with bamboo supports, watching children empty bags of bread crust into the river. Hundreds of catfish suddenly swarm to the surface, feeding in a frenzy that makes them look like piranhas.
From the river, when I can see above the crowd of commuters boxing me in, I glimpse Bangkok's future and its past.

There's the towering, cabled bridge as sleek as Boston's newest span and the gleaming skyscrapers as opulent and modern as any in the States. Just off the river's banks are the nation's largest, most cherished temples, with one side giving rise to Wat Pho, home of the massive reclining Buddha and neighbor to the glittering, if overwhelming, Grand Palace, and the other to Wat Arun, the ceramic-covered temple of dawn. Floating along the center of the busy waterway, where rusting warships putter past motor-powered gondolas and children ignore the sludge to swim with the catfish, are giant, trash-filled barges, adding their pungency to the humid breeze.

Later, I take the city's new sky train, a smooth-running railway rising some hundred feet over the clogged streets, to the Chatuchak market, a world of hundreds of little worlds that would take days, maybe weeks, to explore.

One section of the market features a kind of zoo, but here the animals monkeys, rabbits, snakes, everything from frogs to ferrets and puppies ranging from beagles to bulldogs are for sale. In another part, a warren of small restaurants and fast-food takeouts serve up some of the country's spiciest dishes: unripe mangoes dipped in chili powder, chili-filled pad thai, hot and sour soup diced with small green chilies that seem to explode in your mouth. And stall after stall provides the opportunity to buy pirated DVDs and CDs, orchids and other exotic flowers, large Buddha statues, toy guns, and porn.

If Bangkok is indeed the world's hottest city, as some surveys claim, the market feels like standing on a planet closer to the sun. To air off, I take another tuk-tuk, and eventually find my way to the infamous Patpong district. The sun by now has disappeared, but as I wait to meet a few tourists and their Thai friends, the air-conditioning beckons from the ubiquitous 7-Elevens seemingly more than in any city I have ever visited.

Unlike the red-light districts of Europe, where the state keeps things relatively tidy and there are fewer accounts of forced prostitution, the narrow streets of Patpong are a free-for-all. Tuk-tuk drivers promise to escort the throng of Western visitors to "pretty ladies," random men surreptitiously flash signs reading "SEX, SEX," and young women in black halter tops solicit with offers for "massages" and tickets to watch them do obscene things with ping-pong balls.

The bedlam of Bangkok, a city of 6 million people that seems to go on and on, has a way of grating quickly, even on a tourist only gawking. So the next morning, for less than a dollar, I take a bus an hour and half to Ayutthaya, the former capital.

Before renting a pair of old, battered bicycles, a new friend and I sit under the scorching sun for a quick lunch of fried eggs and noodles. Well-fed, we tour the spired shrines and regal palaces dating to the 14th century. We dodge elephants on the road and stay hydrated with little bottles of a potent, sugar-filled energy drink.

That evening, after a show of fireworks over the Chao Praya in Bangkok a tribute to President Bush and more than a dozen heads of state in town for a summit among Pacific Rim countries I grab my backpack from the guesthouse where I'm staying and catch a cab back to the airport.

I'm headed north to Chiang Mai, Thailand's second city. It is near the border with Burma and Laos, and in the shadow of the region's giants, India and China, which for centuries have influenced Indochina.

Over the next five days, I indulge in the other side of Thailand the peaceful, sybaritic side. To shed my lingering jet lag, I take advantage of the two-hour massages available throughout the city, for as low as 200 baht, or $5. I join treks through the jungle, ride elephants, take bamboo rafts and rubber rafts down white-water rivers. I climb 8,415 feet to the top of Doi Inthanon, the country's highest mountain, swim beneath waterfalls straight out of paradise, and tour local villages where Burmese and Chinese refugees have brought cultures that have changed little over centuries.

Between a regimen of rice noodles, tongue-lashing curries, and banana shakes meals that rarely cost more than 100 baht I attend a "Meet the Monk Night" at a local Buddhist monastery, observe a Thai boxing class , and spend the night at a family's home to learn Thai cooking.

I meet people from around the world in Chiang Mai and sleep only a few hours a night. There's so much to do in such a short time, and I try to lap it up.

This city in the north, on the edge of so much beauty, where doors open on every block to something strange and inviting, where locals invariably greet you with a smile, and where all the senses are easily roused, strikes me as a place I could stop and live for a while. And many Westerners seem to have never left.

But there's another plane to catch. The family that owns and lives at my guesthouse, which feels like home after only a few days, serves me a quick breakfast of banana pancakes, and then I'm off, back to the hothouse of Bangkok.

With only a day left, and a flight to Boston that leaves before dawn the next morning, I store my bag at the airport and set out into the capital again, hoping to grasp onto this city before it begins feeling like a dream.

I walk through the Sunday markets again, eating as much as my stomach will bear, tour the glittering temples of the Grand Palace, where I find the gleaming Emerald Buddha, Thailand's most sacred Buddhist statue since an abbot discovered it in 1434. I walk the city, from the backpacker haven of Khaosan Road, to Ratchadamnoen Klang Ave., Bangkok’s Champs Elysee, to the teeming sidewalks of Chinatown, until my feet burn from blisters.

Around midnight, exhausted, I stop for a massage in a well-lit building off an alley in Chinatown, where a doughy 70-year-old woman lifts me up with the balls of her feet. Two hours later, with the kinks and soreness gone, I take a cab back to Khao San Road, where a party between "farang," as foreigners are called, and locals lasts through dawn.

I take a seat at a bar for my final meal in Thailand, and watch a parade of drunken foreigners, vendors, and prostitutes mix it up in what from a distance, with heavy eyes, looks like a carnival. Large German tourists compete for who can eat the most crunchy insects and dried worms. Vendors hawk everything from noodles to tattoos to gewgaws. And the night's unlucky, or hardest working, prostitutes stroll around, propositioning any man who meets their gaze.

When a short woman in a long shirt glides past, holding a bouquet of multicolored balloons, it feels like my cue. I finish off my Singha beer, pay my bill, and hail a cab to the airport. As I leave the steam bath of Bangkok, with the sun inching its way over the horizon, I take one more scan of the hazy horizon and offer a "sawitdeecop," or goodbye, to the night.

David Abel can be reached at dabel@globe.com.

Copyright, The Boston Globe

Learning to Cook (Eat) in Chiang Mai

By David Abel
Globe Staff
12/17/2003

CHIANG MAI, Thailand – To say I’m not a cook would ignore well-honed skills of calibrating a microwave to prepare pre-made dinners and even, on occasion, my dabbling in the art of using a stove to re-heat leftovers.

Not to boast, but I must also acknowledge, after some trial and error, that I’ve managed to master the culinary skill of bringing water to a boil, often for the purposes of preparing pasta, as well as the ability to properly pour milk into my cereal bowl.

So I wouldn’t want anyone to infer I was completely unprepared for my foray into, as the attractive brochure promised, “learning to prepare the fine cuisine of Thailand.”

The first problem was figuring out how to operate the large, sharp knife, without removing one of my fingers. But we’ll come to that.

I decided to take a cooking class here in northern Thailand, the country’s second largest city and what my guidebook called its “cultural heart,” because it seemed a way of eating well for the night – so long as I could partake in the instructor’s creations, and avoid eating my own.

I’m much better at eating than cooking.

The brochure also promised free transportation, which came at the appointed hour one afternoon this fall in the form of my 30-year-old teacher, Yui, who met me on a dusty corner of the city in her lime-green Mazda, a car that looked much older than she did.

“Are you ready to cook?” she asked in excellent English.

I smiled and said, “I’m ready to eat.”

We drove through a maze of narrow streets, between the motorized rickshaws and ubiquitous red trucks that serve as local taxis, to her small home on the city’s outskirts. Her husband, children, and other relatives were waiting on the outside patio, the table and frying pans all set up, and I learned, to my delight, I’d be her only student that evening.

I washed up and she presented me a cookbook, with the hope – and this would require a significant reserve of faith – that I’d be able to return home and figure out how to recreate the dishes she would teach me how to make, or at least avoid wrecking.

First up was the staple of any dining experience in Thailand: Pad-Thai. The fried noodles, served often with chicken, pork, or shrimp, are available almost anywhere in this nation of 60 million people, from sidewalk stalls to jungle villages.

I was in luck. I’ve actually made Pad-Thai before, at least the packaged version from Trader Joe’s, which essentially requires little more than my already enumerated skills – boiling water and adding the contents of a sealed package.

This, unfortunately, would require me to tap into a deeper reservoir of talent than I had thus far proven in any kitchen.

In quick order, and making it look as simple as tying her shoes, Yui showed me the eight or so steps, and her secret signature. “Now, it’s your turn,” she said.

But before the good stuff went cold, I had to taste it – to assure myself I would get some return on the 400 baht, or $10, I paid for the class. As good as it looked, it tasted better: One bite of the slivery, oil-covered noodles was enough to know I hadn’t made a mistake.

Following her eyes, I reached for a chunk of tofu on my cutting board and began dicing them in small cubes. I did the same with Chinese chives, which made it readily apparent to Yui that I had no idea what I was doing.

As I chopped away, satisfying myself I was making progress, she watched as I drew perilously close to my fingers on the other side of the large knife. “Stop!” she commanded, and then gently explained, without making me feel like a complete dolt, the proper way of using a knife – that is, holding it close to the blade and keeping at least one finger on the side, for control.

That cleared up, and the shallots and turnips successfully peeled and minced, it was time to fire up the wok and pour in four tablespoons of canola oil. (Sunflower oil works as well, Yui said.) Then, in quick succession, I dropped in the ingredients: The tofu first, and then after it browned, I added the shallots. Twenty seconds or so later, I put in slivers of chicken breast. When they turned white and firm, I added two-and-a-half cups of water and dropped in the dried rice noodles.

I stirred it all around for about 30 seconds and it was time for the secret elements – a tablespoon of fish sauce and soy sauce, a squirt of lime, one and half tablespoons of brown sugar – and the key to the flavor – two tablespoons of tamarind puree.

Then I dropped in two heaps of chives and bean sprouts, mixing them in for about 20 seconds. Next, I cracked open an egg – a skill I’m still working on nearly a decade after college – and, as Yui instructed, let the yolk ooze unevenly, by tilting the wok. The final touch: Two tablespoons or more of roasted, ground peanuts.

Unfortunately, it didn’t look anywhere as tempting as Yui’s. The noodles and eggs seemed overcooked, and I nearly suffered third-degree burns by hovering too closely over the sizzling oil. But when she dropped a small purple flower on top, I smiled. It was mine, after all. And though it may have lacked – OK, definitely lacked – the same flare as Yui’s, it was edible, and for that, I was proud.

With our first meal complete, we hopped on Yui’s scooter and I held on for life as she weaved through a patchwork of potholes and a barrage of old, carbon-spewing cars to get to her neighborhood market.

There, over cement floors that reeked of the refuse sliding through mud-filled gutters, brightly lit stalls featured every fruit and meat and fish imaginable, some still alive. For an hour, while we sipped coconut smoothies from plastic bags, Yui introduced me to everything from foul-smelling durian fruits to cantaloupe-sized watermelons to oblong eggplants, as well as the frogs and grasshoppers for sale.

Holding up a bag of dried worms, she joked: “Would you like some?”

Afterwards, with the sun now beyond the horizon and a stash of produce in hand, we made the perilous ride home, sans streetlights, or helmets for that matter. The sticky air grew mild and Yui’s assistant had set aside the ingredients for the next two dishes – Gang-Keow Wan-Gai (green curry with chicken) and Tom-Ka Gai (chicken in hot and sour soup, with coconut milk.)

I showed little improvement with the next two meals. But I learned quite a bit, even if I can’t recall much of it anymore, or didn’t quite believe it. Yui, for instance, insisted coconut cream was healthy and lemon grass would be easy to find in just about any supermarket in the States.

Still, after about six hours at her house, not all was lost. For one thing, to say the least, I left without an empty stomach.

Actually, by the end, after consuming some six meals (I ate most of the dishes she prepared) I felt like a mirthful Buddha – proud most of all of my bulging belly.

David Abel can be reached at dabel@globe.com.

Copyright, The Boston Globe

Seven Hours in Japan

A Jewel Found Near the Airport


David Abel
Globe Staff
12/21/2003

NARITA, Japan -- The last-minute ticket to Bangkok had one noticeable flaw: a massive gap, indeed a possible purgatory, between connecting flights.

My recent journey from Boston to Bangkok would start at 6 a.m. at Logan, involve a change of planes in Newark, then a 13-hour flight to Narita, the closest airport to Tokyo. It would be another six-hour flight to Thailand after a seven-hour layover.

At first, it seemed like an opportunity to visit Tokyo. To my dismay, I learned it takes some two hours to get there from Narita, and because I had to check in early for the next flight, it wouldn't make sense to try.

So when I arrived, I imagined spending hours here pacing around the airport, practicing my "konnichiwa"s and "domo arigato"s until boredom had consumed me.

It didn't occur to me there would be much to do in a city dominated by an airport, but in my traipsing about, I met a woman who suggested I visit the Temple of Narita. For some reason, I imagined it would look something like a cross between a Howard Johnson's and a Chinese restaurant.

What I never expected was that it would be among the most impressive sights worthy of any superlative I had ever visited. The time would vanish faster than I wished, and my jet lag was easily ignored.

The short trip from the airport began with my cashing in a few dollars for yen, and purchasing a riceball, a baseball-sized, dollar-valued clump of rice packaged in dried kelp. Then I found my way to the airport train.

Fifteen minutes and two stops later, the clean Keisei train arrived in a dingy station in downtown Narita. It was cold and rain ing, and through my misty glasses I could see only gray slabs of concrete, neon advertisements, and a flurry of compact cars passing by on the wrong side of the road, splashing mud-colored puddles onto my leather shoes.

Perhaps this was a mistake, I thought, and considered taking the next train back to the airport. But I decided to stay for the temple. Even if it amounted to little more than a heap of kitsch, it would kill some time.

So I crossed to the next block, making sure to look to the right and avoid an anonymous death in an industrial, soot-covered foreign town. I spotted a sign with what seemed to be a picture of a temple. It pointed to a narrow road. A gaggle of girls in school uniforms, who took a minute from chatting on their camera cellphones to giggle at my appalling Japanese, confirmed the direction.

As I walked down the road, I heard a woman's voice, a soft, enchanting melody and it seemed to be following me. There was a pining quality to it, like a genie trapped in a magic lamp, beseeching passersby to help her out. Then I noticed speakers attached to the streetlights. Soon after, I discovered the source: a group of elderly women dressed in colorful kimonos, their faces covered in white powder, dancing robotically around an open-air stage, singing in unison, in the middle of the afternoon.

This was the first of what began to feel like a carnival of surprises during a mile-long walk, my first and indelible taste of Asia. The grime surrounding the station disappeared on this orderly, well-swept street lined with fountains, cafes, and all sorts of markets and shops.

The rain subsided to a fine mist, and I found myself sampling jelly-filled pancakes, pickled cucumbers, and everything from rice crackers to spicy sauces. In buckets set up along the road, merchants sold leeches, small sharks, eels, squid, octopus, and snakes. Behind glass windows and through small doors, I found rock-filled gardens with perfectly manicured trees, some bearing exotic fruits.

Every few feet offered a different indulgence for the senses the aroma drifting from orchid shops, the sight of a man clubbing and impaling snakes, the tongue-tickling taste of gooey sweets.

But none of it prepared me for what stood at the end of the road.

When I arrived, it seemed to hover above me in a cloud. Then I walked along a narrow path to the entrance, a giant stairway that rose at such a steep grade it looked like a vertical climb.

After trudging past other exhausted visitors, stopping a few times to catch my breath and cleanse my hands in a ceremonial well, I found myself at the top, on a broad plaza, gazing at the massive, 1,000-year-old Naritasan Shinshoji Temple.

What first stood out was the giant, three-story pagoda, a 300-year-old single piece of wood carved with gilded dragons and brightly painted rafters. Behind it stood the Shinto temple, its simple elegance adorned with a massive circular lantern hanging by the entrance, regal red carpets, and some 296 special mats in a candlelit sanctuary. All around the complex were more than 40 acres of rock gardens, streams, small waterfalls, and everything from topiaries to apricot trees.
After taking it all in, including the steady deluge again of rain, I found the stairway down, making sure to avoid what would be a painful tumble to the bottom.

It was near sunset when I found my way back to the road, and many of the merchants lighted rows of candles beside their shops. I browsed through a store full of kimonos, ate a strange, gummy rice concoction on a stick, which was good and salty, and watched restaurant workers prepare bento boxes and chefs assemble sushi.

When I reached the end of the road, it was dark and the rain had stopped. I looked at my watch and couldn't believe the time. I would have to rush to make it back for my flight to Bangkok.

David Abel can be reached at dabel@globe.com.

Copyright, The Boston Globe

A Gulp of Dublin

Guinness Tour a Tough Swallow, Till the End

By David Abel
Globe Staff
5/28/2003

DUBLIN - It's tall, dark, and most handsome, with a creamy head. One smooth swill is enough to make you believe it's a gift from God, as nearly anyone in this nation of beer drinkers will tell you.

But a Guinness is not, at least purely, a divine invention - a point made over and over again at what has become this city's leading tourist attraction.

Since it opened two years ago, the Guinness Storehouse has served more than 1 million pints of "black gold," the thirst-slaking prize rewarding those who reach the top of this six-story homage to Ireland's most cherished creation. Yet the prize comes at a price: an unrelenting stream of propaganda about Arthur Guinness, who founded the beer company in 1759.

The mere mortal, whom curators have anointed with a status approaching a saint, is portrayed as something like the father of modern Ireland. His picture and folksy adages are nearly everywhere. There's the homeless shelter he built, the claim that all Irish girls were hoping to marry one of his employees (a "Guinness man"), and the relatively good wages he paid his workers. There's even a multimedia exhibit about him that asks: "What's the missing ingredient?" Why, good old Arthur, of course.

When you can get past the mawkish tributes, you'll find yourself in a room shaped like a giant pint glass. From there, the museum starts in a humid room featuring a large indoor waterfall, meant to represent the real magic ingredient in Guinness beer - the water from Irish springs. Here you'll also find assorted fun facts about barley, hops, and yeast, the beer's principal ingredients. For example: It's the roasting and malting of the barley that gives Guinness its deep dark hue.

The most interesting part of the tour, perhaps, is the explanation of the brewing process. But if you're hoping to see the beer actually being made, as some guidebooks suggest, forget about it. The building may have once been the company's brewery, but it's now most definitely a museum, and everything here is a replica or a well-preserved relic.

If it all feels too virtual, or the walk-through of copper tanks reminds you of something out of Disney World, remember: There's that prize at the end.

The well-illustrated brew-making exhibit explains how all the hops and yeast and barley come together. It even displays special sniffing devices, which provide a sense of what the barley or hops smell like during different stages of fermentation.

The beer's promoters, not surprisingly, call the brewing process "Five Steps to Heaven." The first step is steeping grains of barley in water until they spout shoots, the sugars that make malt. The barley is then dried and submerged in tanks of hot water, which eventually produce a sugary liquor called wort. Later, the wort is drained in large copper kettles, where it's boiled with a smidgen of hops. Then the yeast is added, and the result is something unappealing and greenish. The final step is the draining of the yeast, or the maturation process.
Then comes the sampling. Unfortunately, according to the Guinness website (www.guinness.com), "There are currently no vacancies for this job."

After the brewing process explanation comes more propaganda, including a nostalgic exhibit featuring decades worth of Guinness advertising. There's also an interesting account of how the beer company created the Guinness Book of World Records and how the company persuaded pregnant women that it was in their interest to drink its stout. (The curators leave some facts out, such as Ireland's rampant alcoholism. A 1999 survey by the European Union, for example, showed more than 51 percent of Irish citizens said they drink regularly, more than any EU country and double the average for Europeans.)

There are lots of other tidbits to learn about, such as how cooperages built the old beer-storing barrels and how Guinness is consumed in more than 150 countries.

But by this point, if you have a pulse, there's something beckoning from the top of the pint-shaped building. It is, of course, that promised beverage that has taunted your taste buds since you plunked down the nearly $15 to enter.

An hour into the tour, it's hard to resist skipping the rest of the extended tease. If you're left underwhelmed thus far, the bar at the top of the museum should make up for it.

The ride up to the sixth floor may be cramped with tourists, but when the elevator doors open, it's like "Ode to Joy" is indeed ringing from the heavens. All around the circular "Gravity Bar," is a panorama of Dublin, a sprawling view of green hills, turrets, and the labyrinth of narrow streets and countless pubs. At the center, the heart of the place, there's the mother lode - taps flowing with free beer into pint after pint.

All around is a hopping scene of tipsy tourists, all marveling in their own way at the city below and the bitter brew in their hands.

Then it's your turn.

You clear a path to the bar. You wait impatiently for a bartender. Then you hand over your ticket and watch the bartender make the black magic. You watch as he tilts a glass and pours the stout until it fills about three-quarters of the pint. You want it now, but the beer needs time to settle. After a minute that feels like an hour, the bartender tops it off with a creamy head, making it look like a sundae.

Then it's just you and your Guinness. Nothing else matters. Above the chaos of Dublin, the blather about Arthur now a faint memory, this is your own private moment of bliss.

David Abel can be reached at dabel@globe.com.

Copyright, The Boston Globe

Camping in Iceland

Click here to see more pictures from Iceland

By David Abel
Globe Staff
7/15/2006

REYKJAVIK -- At the edge of the island's largest glacier, in a desert covered with lava rocks, I learned what it means to be an amateur camper.

Around the time of dawn, had the sun actually set during our week-long trek through Iceland, it suddenly became clear that my $119 department store tent hadn't been designed for arctic gusts.

I might have detected signs of a problem earlier, had my girlfriend and I not gone to such lengths to block out the midnight rays and howling winds. Equipped with essential gear like earplugs and eyeshades, we hadn’t bothered to use some of our other equipment, such as the metal stakes to secure our tent. Not a wise idea, we found, in a country with next to no trees.

We visited Iceland this summer after hearing how its glacial rivers offer some of the world's best whitewater rafting, and its capital, aside from $10 draft beers and basic entrees costing north of $50, boasts of hot springs and glamorous parties. With the promise of some interesting things to see, we chose a scenic route, one that would take us nearly a thousand miles over six days.

It took just four-and-a-half hours to fly to Keflavik, a decades-old NATO base on the southwestern edge of the island, where for more than $500 we rented a little Toyota Yaris for the week. As we left the airport, we quickly perked up from the overnight flight. Greeting us was a large, arcing rainbow, the first of about a dozen we would see along the way.

Our first stop, in an effort to shed jetlag, was the nearby Blue Lagoon, an otherworldly spa about 15 minutes from the airport. We arrived before it opened, but it was worth the wait. We spent several hours sloshing about the briny, 100-degree water, slathering a cleansing goop into our drowsy pores.

Pampered, crinkled, and smelling of sulfur, we left the tourists behind for a lonely road, a narrow two lanes that looped through blackened lava fields. It was a peaceful drive, like on a car commercial. Then we reached a sign with a yellow and black exclamation point that read “Malbik Endar.”

It was the only hint of civilization in the visible distance, and it signaled the end of the paved road.

Our manual-shift Yaris squealed as we climbed a steep grade on what felt more like a mountain trail than a dirt road, its massive bumps and yawning crevices keeping us wide awake. We took this shortcut for hours, at one point flagging down a passing car – the only we had seen on this seemingly quick way to the national highway – to make sure we weren’t headed to nowhere.

We puttered along the curving road, through parched valleys, over craggy, Utah-like peaks, until the bleak horizon gave way to grass and the sea glistening in the distance. A few more bends in the road, and we came upon a few grazing Icelandic horses, a shaggy, affectionate breed that nuzzle to ward off the cold.

When finally we found the national highway – a country-like road that rings the island with one lane in each direction – we picked up speed and headed 200 miles east to Skaftafell, a lava field at the base of Vatnajokull(cq), the Kentucky-sized island’s largest glacier.

We stopped at sparsely populated towns with prefab housing and expensive gas stations, which were often the only places to eat. All the lamb burgers and mayo-topped fries, however, didn’t lessen the awe of the ever-changing landscape – a flower-covered prairie that quickly morphs from moonscape to tundra to a California-like coastline, each with its share of roaming sheep.

At about midnight, the deserted highway gave birth to another rainbow, this one arcing toward a mountain range and disappearing into an unmoving halo of clouds. Nearly as bright as noon, we saw what looked like muddy, giant ice cubes spilling from the green foothills.

It was our first glimpse of the mist-covered Vatnajokull, and we decided to put up our tent in a small campground about a mile from the glacier. As it began to drizzle, we discovered we couldn’t inflate our air mattress. We brought the wrong charger. We also found our tent looked a lot more like a sail than others nearby, which were low-slung, aerodynamic, and importantly, secured with large ropes and stakes.

It didn’t take long to learn why. We tried to deprive our senses with earplugs and eyeshades, but we couldn’t help from feeling the wind push the side of the Target special over our heads. Then one of the poles – the main one – cracked. Half the tent collapsed.

It was time to wake up.

So we fought the wind, stuffed the tent in the car, and soon after marched off to inspect the glacier, which a few decades before would have been where we camped. Stakes in the ground marked its steady retreat, which has hastened in recent decades. A series of waterfalls feeding into a small river provided ample evidence of the melt.

Later, we took a cruise in a bay studded with large icebergs, which had snapped off the glacier and slowly flowed out to sea. Some of the multi-ton, sharp-edged bergs scattered along the southern coast’s black-sanded beaches, where sheepishly we climbed atop them. One false move, I learned all too well, meant the stab of a razor-sharp edge.

Bandaged and back on the road, we followed large, black mountains across rocky fjords and beside dozens of waterfalls, one more picturesque than the next. We stopped for an hour to wait for the owners of a gas station to return and took another shortcut, making the last one actually seem like a shortcut.

With thick clouds touching the ground, we inched along an impossibly curving road in driving rain. The puddled mud, however, made it easier to appreciate the bright green hills, translucent streams, and yet more waterfalls.

We ended up about as far away as possible, in a flat desert in the shadow of a massive volcano, where we found a campground with grass-roofed cabins. The wind felt strong enough to topple the Yaris, so we opted for a cabin, one with thick shades to block out the light.

The next day we took another dirt road to Dettifos, Europe’s largest waterfall, a gushing oasis in the middle of the desert. From there, we explored one of the country’s few places with trees and admired towering rock formations that resembled large buildings. Slogging onward, we passed ocean-front, centuries-old towns, snow-capped mountains, ground vents spewing steam, and Myvatn, a large in-land lake where it's impossible to escape swarms of black flies.

Haggard after midnight, we gave the tent another try. We washed up at a hotel, repaired the pole and ripped rain shield with duct tape, and drove to a hilltop with about a dozen cabins.

We received permission to camp there by the rafting company we had paid for the next day’s trip and parked beside one cabin that seemed to block the wind. We set up the tent behind it, this time using large rocks and metal stakes to keep it from blowing away.

What woke us a few hours later wasn’t the strong wind, it was two drunken women, irate to find our red tent behind their cabin. At 4 a.m., they yelled, beeped the horn of their SUV, revved its engine, shook the tent with their hands, and despite my pleading for mercy, they went into their cabin, opened the windows, and blasted – strangely for the middle of Iceland – Kansas’s “Dust in the Wind.”

It didn’t bother us that much; we came prepared. We had earplugs.

The next morning, having survived without blowing away (or being blown away by the friendly locals), we packed up, found the rafting center, and soon found ourselves sliding on dry suits, which provided neck to toe protection.

At the end of an hour-long bus ride through a hail storm, our Nepalese guide (he said he got the job by answering an Internet ad) told us to put on our helmets and helped us carry our large rubber raft into a smooth portion of the East Glacial River, which still felt freezing despite wool socks, the dry suit, and rubber boots.

Within minutes, the grassy banks gave way to canyons and the icy impact of the rapids soaked our faces and numbed our gloved fingers. The bumps turned to ledges, and as our guide urged us to row harder, we flew over sizable drops, some tipping other rafts in our group. We shot through the bluish-gray river, staring at the stark black cliffs, rocky masses that at points rose more than 100 feet on each side. We glided along for about six hours, the beauty of the moss-covered, treeless gorge inuring us to the onset of frostbite.

When it was all over, we stripped, sipped a few cups of hot chocolate, and did our best to thaw. We sped out of the small town of Varmahlid and picked up the highway again, now nearly two-thirds around the highway. We drove again through midnight, along the ocean, beside tall mountains and broad meadows, until crossing into another desert.

It began to rain, and with exhaustion setting in, we stopped at a timeworn hotel we found beside the road. They wanted more than $200 for the night; my girlfriend – who strongly opposed staying in the tent another night – managed to negotiate them to half that.

The next day, after detaching the tape we used to seal the blinds, we took more dirt-road longcuts to explore caves, a large national park, geysers, and yet more beautiful waterfalls.

After all the miles, all the sheep, all the rustic majesty, we rolled into Reykjavik. The capital had a campground by the sea, but my girlfriend wouldn’t consider it, even after our hotel told us they had cancelled our reservation. We spent the night in a newly appointed Radisson, for more than $250.

With less than 24 hours in the small city, we walked around and felt the gloom of returning from nature to a city marked by hues of gray – slabs of concrete, perpetually overcast skies, the North Atlantic bobbing against rusty ships moored in its harbor.

After all the waterfalls, glaciers, and volcanoes, this outpost of cement, with its bagel shops, traffic, and neon signs, felt too close to home. Suddenly surrounded by nearly 200,000 people (about two-thirds of the nation’s population), I felt boxed in.

As we rushed to the airport the next day, with broad expanses of lava rocks lining the road, we passed signs for more otherworldly landmarks, which spewed a misty steam in the distance.

It was hard to pass them by.

David Abel can be reached at dabel@globe.com.

Marauding through Moscow

Click here for more photos of Russia

By David Abel
Globe Staff
12/30/2007

MOSCOW – Shortly after dawn one morning on my first trip to Russia, a land where guidebooks advise foreigners to avoid just about anyone in uniform, I elbowed my way out a cramped subway car onto a marble platform full of indecipherable Cyrillic signs.

Lost, sleepy, and trying to find my way beneath fluorescent-lighted chandeliers and timeworn frescoes of muscle-bound workers, I pushed through the throng of rush-hour commuters and noticed that all the hammers and sickles, red stars, and other relics of communism weren’t the only holdovers from the Soviet era.

Staring somewhat ominously at me was a large man wearing a bright blue beret, combat boots, and a blue-striped tank top. He looked like the kind of guy experienced in the art of killing. I tried to avoid his gaze as he hoisted a nearly finished beer and shouted in my direction, "Slava, VDV! Slava, VDV!" which sounded like a menacing version of gibberish.

But after nearly a week in Russia, it no longer seemed odd – and few paid the man much attention – to find someone drinking in public, haranguing passersby with drunken songs and incomprehensible epithets. I had become accustomed to curious sights throughout the fading grandeur of Moscow’s metro system, which some 9 million people use everyday. Once, I watched a man, in full view of just about everyone in a subway car, plant his hand down a woman’s shirt while another man, after perhaps too much vodka, lost his lunch as the train lurched to a halt.

What I didn't know early that morning was that I would spend the day trying to steer clear of many of the drunken man's comrades, thousands of beret-wearing veterans who wrought a measure of chaos to nearly every corner of the capital, from metro stations and markets to parks and all around Red Square.

I would learn later that this disjointed legion of large men – many of whom were trained to kill Americans – were celebrating a peculiar holiday here called Paratroopers Day, which seemed like a mix of St. Patrick’s Day and Veterans Day, with more alcohol and belligerence. The holiday marks the birth 77 years ago of the Soviet Union’s airborne assault troops, called the Vozdushno-Desyantniye Voiska, or VDV, the proud, highly trained force that helped lay waste to much of Chechnya after years preparing to fight US troops in Europe.

Having managed to pass the drunken paratrooper without incident, I found a way out of the station on one of the metro’s many escalators, which travel about twice the speed of their American counterparts and rose from what seemed like a mile below ground. I emerged into a cold drizzle next to the massive, neo-gothic foreign ministry, which could pass for the Legion of Doom, and trudged through the sodden streets, passing everything from a McDonald’s to vendors hawking trinkets bearing the likeness of Lenin and Marx.

As morning blurred into afternoon, I wandered around the city, from the ornate metro stations to a gritty market where Asian-featured men from the old Soviet republics in the Caucuses sold imitation Nike sneakers, oversized watermelons, and all kinds of gewgaws. I rubbed elbows with grimace-faced babushkas and young women who flaunted their beauty with long hair, short skirts, and stiletto heels, a choice that seemed perilous on cobble-stoned streets. I dined on pelmini (Russian dumplings), borscht, stuffed cabbage, and black bread, though sushi, pizza, and lots of gourmet imports were widely available.

I visited the old Lubyanka prison, where Stalin jailed thousands of dissidents, potential counterrevolutionaries, and innocent victims in the 1930s. The imperious building, amazingly, is now headquarters of the Federal Security Service, the successor of the KGB. When a guard gestured for me to stop snapping pictures of the weathered, gray stones and many surveillance cameras, I crossed the street and found a tiny park home to the relatively invisible Memorial to the Victims of Totalitarianism, a patch of garden with little more than a commemorative rock from a labor camp where the Soviets worked an untold number of people to death.

A block away, I stumbled upon Moscow’s premier science museum, which highlights the country’s contributions to everything from chemistry to rocketry. There were some of the world’s first spacesuits, an exhibit about how Dmitri Mendeleev developed the periodic table, early radio receivers, and importantly for science, a model of the Soviet Union’s first atomic bomb.

Afterward, as I passed the scaffold-covered Bolshoi Theater and neared the red-brick gates of the Kremlin, I began to realize something was different about this day than my previous days in Russia. Nearly everywhere I turned, I saw the men in the blue berets and striped shirts, or telnyashka, a signature part of the uniform of Russia’s special forces.

Few of them seemed approachable, but I was curious. I decided to try out the few words of Russian I had picked up over the past week.

I went up to one paratrooper walking with a woman and asked, in about as awful an accent as possible, if he spoke English: “Izvinitye, vui gavaritye po angliyski?"
The woman responded: “A li-ttle.”

“Can you explain,” I asked, “why so many people are wearing berets today?”

I added with a smile: “Spasiba,” or thank you.

They didn’t return the smile. She looked blankly at me and said something about it being a holiday. Then she made a puzzling gesture, what I now think referred to men descending from the sky in parachutes.

No better informed, I walked to Red Square, where hundreds of on-duty servicemen in green fatigues kept a close watch on their retired brethren, who ambled about waving their blue and green flags and yelling, “Slava, VDV!” or “Glory to the Airborne Troops!”

I prodded a friend, an expatriate living in Russia, to ask a police officer what was happening. She was reluctant, because of the rule about not approaching those wearing uniforms. He looked coldly at her, more through her, refusing to say anything.

With the area crowded with similarly unfriendly men and the sun finally peaking through the dark clouds, I thought it would be a good time to visit Gorky Park, which my guidebook described as “one of Moscow’s most festive places to escape the hubbub of the city.”

There was definitely a party.

On the metro ride to the park, scores of disheveled, red-eyed men in berets held each other up, sang, and hugged fellow comrades, even those who appeared to be strangers.

Outside the station near the park, a group of paratroopers stood around a buddy laying half on the sidewalk, half on the street. He was motionless. A man wearing a beret held his head, but his chest didn’t seem to be moving. It looked as if he was dead, until they pulled him up and his eyes rolled open.

I crossed a bridge over the Moscow River and watched as other paratroopers ran into traffic waving flags, butted chests with passing comrades, and hurled bottles of vodka and beer cans anywhere they wanted.

I thought once I crossed the bridge I’d be in the clear, but their numbers were only increasing – the conscious and unconscious. It was as if I had walked onto a base after a victorious battle.
It turned out, compounding the evidence of my obliviousness, that the park was the epicenter of the paratroopers’ drunken festivities, the place where they all congregate to observe their day of mayhem.

When I passed through the columned entrance of the park, which has old carousels, roller coasters, and remnants of the Soviet Union’s failed effort to copy the Space Shuttle, the paratroopers were everywhere.

They were urinating on benches, strumming guitars with medals on their chests, and filming each other dancing and wrestling. Some disrobed to their tattoos and splashed through the park’s fountains. Others ended up half naked, passed out on the muddy grass.

The year before, when local media reported authorities had arrested five paratroopers and sent some 20 others to area hospitals, The Moscow Times described the day as “relatively uneventful.”

On this day, to make sure I didn’t end up like the men splayed out on the grass, I decided it might be a good idea to explore a different part of town.

David Abel can be reached at dabel@globe.com.

Slogging up to Castro's Secret Hideaway

By David Abel
Defense Week
2/18/1999

COMANDANCIA DE LA PLATA, Cuba - There's something alluring about secret hideouts, whether it's Batman's Cave or just Fidel Castro's former revolutionary headquarters burrowed high in the mist-shrouded Sierra Maestra mountains.

So after a few months lurking not far from the Maximum Leader's erstwhile nest of rebellion, I figured I'd check it out. My main mistake, however, was mounting the steep slopes in a pair of pricey running shoes.

I learned that a few minutes into the 4-mile trek up a winding, mossy-rocked trail.

First came the pelting rain. Then globs of oozing mud. Finally, a steady stream flooded the route leading up the mountain.

The gaggle of Austrian tourists began to scatter about the trail like strewn bowling pins - teetering or supine in the muddy gutter.

"It was easier for the revolutionaries. They had combat boots," said Obi, our 24-year-old guide, who managed to keep his bright white imitation Nike's spotless. "They also used mules."

The journey to Castro's secret headquarters during most of his 1956-1959 guerilla war against then dictator Fulgencio Batista, who often sent U.S.-supplied B-26 bombers to strafe the rebel stronghold, began before dawn in Santiago de Cuba, the island's second city on its southeast coast.

Wilfredo, our gray-haired former guerilla warrior taxi driver, whisked us from the hilly city's narrow streets to the Sierra Maestra's lush greens in a sleek, state-owned 1997 Citroen. The recent French import, though embarrassingly new in a country where many cars predate the revolution, proved worthy of its $100 bill as the rolling hills climbed into steep mountains.

"Batista's army couldn't defeat the revolutionaries because Fidel held the high ground," explained Wilfredo, cruising past an old Soviet Lada chugging up the precipitous grade. "The bombers couldn't find them because the Sierra Maestra is dense with foliage."

About three hours later, after passing scores of small mountain villages once won over by Castro's band of bearded rebels, a flimsy rope blocking the road halted the Citroen. Across the street a skinny man clutching a government receipt book was waiting for us in a small shed.

He said we had to pay $5 to continue. I asked him why the Marxist government was interested in profiting from one of its sacred symbols.

"If you go to the Eiffel Tower in Paris, you have to pay $10," he piped back. "This is a bargain."

We handed him the dollars and Wilfredo steered us up near vertical inclines. A few minutes after passing another dingy Lada, whose passengers had already set out on foot to climb the several miles of slatted pavement, our squealing taxi reached a cement plateau called Alto del Naranjo.

Wood planks nailed to a post marked the crossroads: Pico Turquino, Cuba's highest peak, 13 kilometers. A community called La Platica was 1.5. Santo Domingo, the largest of the nearby villages, was more than 5 kilometers downhill. The last sign pointed into the forest: 3 kilometers to Comandancia de La Plata.

The smooth dirt path enclosed by a variety of pine and palm trees quickly grew narrow and rocky. Large boulders left steep drops and mushy puddles at the bottom. Shrieking macaws, tree-rapping woodpeckers and a cacophony of less-friendly hissing and hoofing sounds made you wish you were carrying a machine gun.

The rain-drenched trail ended at a small shack. An elderly farm hand there told us we reached the halfway point to the Comandancia. Underneath the rest stop's beveled roof was a potpourri of plugs for the revolution: fraying posters of Castro and his guerrilla warrior pal Ernesto "Che" Guevara, Canadian flags and a sign-in book glowing with rebel sympathy mainly from European tourists.

Before setting back on the muddy trail, Obi informed us that we had to leave our cameras in the shack. Nearly forty years after winning the war, the government still maintained a semblance of secrecy about the commander in chief's main battlefront hideaway.

Maybe that was because the image-conscious leader preferred not to publicize the relative comfort he lived in during his more than two years cooped up in the Sierra Maestra.

We arrived at the Comandancia's first post after about another mile of slogging through tortuous trails. The thatched-roof hut served as a way station for visitors seeking to meet Castro, and also as a dental office.

A bearded dentist and guerilla officer named Luis Borges provided free dental services to peasants living nearby in La Plata. It was a way of impressing on the people the benefits of a social revolution, Obi said. Castro, plagued by bad teeth, was among the frequent visitors and Guevara, a trained doctor, sometimes tended patients.

Further up the hill, past a helicopter clearing where Obi said a CIA agent posing as a journalist guided planes to bomb the rebel headquarters, and above a crease in the mountains revealing the sea, lay the rebel leader's dormant camp.

A small house built after the revolution served as a museum. On display were several American Singer sewing machines used to stitch rebel uniforms, an assortment of rifles, battle maps and field medical kits, and a series of pious explanations about the rebels' heroic feats.

Past the grave of a fallen comrade, Obi pointed out the various look-alike wooden shacks camouflaged by a thick canopy of trees. One was called the Journalist's House. It served as everything from an ammunition dump to a place for Castro to meet the droves of international reporters who came to hype the rebel's cause.

The main attraction stood at the bottom of a log stairway: Castro's cabin. The two-room shed stood on stilts above a peaceful creek. Inside were comforts the rank and file soldiers didn't have: a double bed where Castro slept with his personal secretary Celia Sanchez and a gas-powered Swedish refrigerator. Near an escape hatch in the basement was the Comandancia's only outhouse, reserved for the commander in chief.

"Fidel would rarely sleep here; it was more a place to do work," said Obi, as several Austrians mentioned their surprise to see such comforts. "He would go and sleep on the front lines with the soldiers."

More than a hideout from Batista's troops, the Comandancia served as the revolution's staging ground. Castro aired verbal attacks against his enemies with a propped radio transmitter, soldiers learned how to shoot and guerillas would set out from the headquarters on their various missions.

The last building on the trail was the "civil affairs office for the liberated territories." It served as everything from a hospital, a shelter for a women's combat regiment to the site where Castro signed Revolutionary Law I, granting squatters, renters and tenants ownership of the land they worked.

The trip back to level land was a similar game of slip and slide.

Our small group had gravity to help increase the damage of our inevitable plunges. The rain picked up and the trail-level clouds fogged my glasses. A squishy sound of my $100 running shoes slapping the muddied trail clopped with every step.

Approaching the plateau from where we started, I squinted through my misty lenses in search for Obi. Scattered around me was a ragged group of previously primp tourists. The thought that we looked like we had just fought a guerilla war crossed my mind.

Then I found Obi. The young guide, who sometimes makes three trips a day to the Comandancia, had barely a speck of dirt smearing his American-imitation sneakers.

"I know the right rocks," Obi said. "It's my land."

My Macondo in the DR

Click here for more photos of Jarabacoa.

By David Abel
Globe Staff
1/5/2007

JARABACOA, Dominican Republic – About 25 years ago, after some unfathomable whim led my dad to build a farm in the central highlands of the Dominican Republic, I found myself riding in the back of a rental car, bouncing toward nausea on a narrow dirt road that promised imminent death.

As we climbed into the clouds, looping beside thousand-foot drops and over car-sized ditches, I felt as if I entered some montage of despair in National Geographic. We were as far as I could imagine from our suburban home in New York.

My dad had decided to take the family to see the fruit of his labor in Jarabacoa, an isolated mountain town where pine trees scent the tropical breeze, clear blue rivers carve through velvety green hills, and a rich soil and temperate climate spur the growth of everything from flowers to eggplants to bell peppers – all of which my dad would eventually grow.

Dominicans have long called the town a paradise of eternal spring; to me, my sister, and mom, it seemed more like the gates of hell. As we chugged up the primitive road, passing cliff-side crucifixes and old, smoke-belching trucks that nearly sideswiped us from the opposite direction, I saw a poverty unlike anything I had ever witnessed – zinc-roofed shanties, pregnant women balancing bales of fruit on their head, naked children hawking handmade brooms.

Over the years, sometimes with decades between visits, I've made the same trip, the most recent this past December. In that time, I’ve watched as this sleepy town shed its anonymity, progressed with the shifting direction of the country’s economy, and emerged into a metropolis of about 75,000 people, one that now attracts thousands of tourists a year.

The two-lane road up to Jarabacoa remains a danger zone. There are few if any streetlights, people and animals frequently cross the winding road’s blindspots, and a mix of motorcycles, jalopies, and large trucks race up and down the mountains, often using the oncoming lane of traffic to pass each other.

But the road is now entirely paved, lined by guardrails, and no longer hews to the edge of the cliffs. Zinc-roofed shacks still dot the side of the road, but they’re now mainly built of concrete, not the flimsy wood of decades ago. Children continue hawking brooms, fruit, and the mix of milk and orange juice called morir soñando (to die dreaming), but they’re outnumbered by neon-signed restaurants, freshly painted hardware stores, and the ubiquitous convenience stores called colmados, which sell everything from Presidente beer to the addictive crackers made in the area.

Jarabacoa, a word from the native Taiínos that means “place where the water flees,” lies between the confluence of three rivers that flooded the area when Hurricane David swept the island in 1979, destroying nearly everything in its path, including much of the farm my dad had built only a few months before.

My dad, an accountant who owns a small business selling flowers in Manhattan, had decided to grow his own pompons, daisies, and other bouquet-stock varieties as a check on the volatile prices set by local wholesalers. He began looking for land in Colombia when an employee from Santo Domingo suggested he consider the Dominican Republic. Eventually, he arranged a visit and a government official gave him a tour of possible sites, selling him on the country of 9 million people that borders Haiti on the island of Hispaniola.

With no knowledge of agriculture, at best high school-level Spanish, and hard of hearing, my dad bought about two acres of land beside a mountain and a stream, built four greenhouses, and invested in, among other things, refrigeration equipment, water tanks, and a generator, a vital piece of equipment in a country with constant blackouts.

Over the decades, the farm grew into a larger operation, with additional greenhouses, about 25 acres of land, and scores of employees. In the early 1990s, my dad decided it was time to sell. But things didn’t go as planned. The buyer, who chose to grow bell peppers instead of flowers, ended up defaulting on his payments, and my father had to repossess the farm – as well as learn how to grow peppers.

Since then, the farm has survived a few more hurricanes, devaluations of the peso, even an attempted coup involving a former administrator who held the farm hostage while pressuring my dad to sell it to him for a fraction of its value. (I was drafted to leave my job at a Mexico City newspaper and spend several months here fighting legal battles with the former administrator – who sought to shut the farm down – and learning how to run a pepper farm.)

When I returned in December, I found Jarabacoa had grown as much as the farm, to the point that the town now almost completely surrounds the greenhouses.

As I drove across a rebuilt bridge into the heart of Jarabacoa, passing a new sign welcoming visitors, the air smelled familiar, of smoke from the thick grass burned in the surrounding hills. The slow, melodic pulse of bachata, the country’s aching ballads of love and lost love, seeped from the open-air windows of newly built homes, out of a parked pickup stacked with pineapples, from the radio of old men drinking rum and playing dominoes. All around, palm, lemon, and star-fruit trees swayed in the cool morning breeze.

The road passes an old police station and merges with Avenida de Independencia, one of the town’s potholed main streets, which used to be surrounded by little more than squat homes, spare government offices, and a few stores. Telephone polls remain canvasses for political parties and the rum company Brugal still sponsors most street signs. But now the Avenida is crowded with swarms of scooters, SUVs, and flatbed trucks, some with giant speakers advertising the rapid-fire Spanish and bouncy merengue of local radio stations, no matter what time of day.

Jarabacoa’s central square, once dusty and forlorn save the boys selling shoeshines, now looks manicured, with flowers, plants, and a shiny gazebo. Just off the square, where an enormous, century-old saman (rain) tree shades much of the area, a modern downtown has grown, with Internet cafes, a shopping arcade, supermarkets, a bank, hotel, gym, and restaurants such as the Evolution Bar, Comida Chinaexpress, and Pepperoni Pizza. There's even a small casino.

Many of the changes reflect the nation’s economic growth, which last year amounted to 10 percent. They also reveal the influence of New York, where thousands of locals have lived or have relatives. Then there’s the effect of all the tourists who come to visit the nearby Pico Duarte, the largest mountain in the Caribbean, raft down the pristine, ledge-filled Yaque del Norte, and trek to the town's large waterfalls, Salto Baiguate and Salto Jimenoa.

The road to the farm from the center of town, a previously desolate stretch of dirt where police in powder-blue shirts and white safari hats used to shake us down for bribes, now passes everything from densely built hovels to elegant estates. Uniformed children flood out of newly built schools as European backpackers hike past a mausoleum-filled cemetery to the less-than-inviting Hotel California. From the patios of their small homes, the young and old flash broad smiles to strangers as they gently move back and forth on rocking chairs, a national pastime here as much as baseball.

About a mile from town, a few blocks from the farm, a growing neighborhood – complete with a new pharmacy, elementary school, and convenience store – stretches into Palo Blanco, the lush valley where only open land existed when I first visited. Now, with the town advancing all around, the farm had to erect a fence to keep poachers from raiding the greenhouses.

As I drove past stray dogs picking at heaps of trash, some of it being burned beside the road, I looked up and saw the large green hills shimmering in the distance and watched as a film of dust, kicked up by passing mopeds, created something of a halo over the valley.

When I passed the neighborhood, there it was, pressed even closer that I had remembered it to the town’s urban border.

Rising over the warren of cement, the plastic roofs of the farm’s netted greenhouses magnified the bright sun, releasing a soft perfume from the thousands of carefully tended pepper plants that slowly grow from sprig to more than 6 feet tall. I waved as employees shuttled between jobs looping twine around the plants to keep them upright and filling crates with the end product – large, ripened orange, red, and yellow peppers.

Before greeting the employees, some of whom I have known since I was a child, I stopped to scan the glimmering horizon, suck in the fresh air, and realize how my dad wasn’t as crazy as we all thought he was.


David Abel can be reached at dabel@globe.com.