Calendar of Regrets

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12.11.76. P.S. Tourism makes foreign countries into museums you walk through.

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12.11.76. P.P.S. I guess what I'm trying to say, Taru, is that travel shows you what you already know in ways you don't recognize. How little you understand when you begin your journey. How much less when you end it. Which is exactly why you go.

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12.11.76. From the terrace of Sutaungpyai, flooded fields gleaming through hazy atmosphere all the way to the horizon. Shared the ferry over with five Brits — sweet, daffy hippy types with filthy cracked bare feet, paisley bandanas, colorful baggy Nepalese pants, baggy once-white shirts. They started improvising their way south and east two months ago, traveling from Katmandu to Janakpur, across into India, Bhutan, and now through Burma. They've enjoyed everything, they say, but it's Bhutan they adored most of all. Stepping into it was stepping into the thirteenth century. No phones, no paved roads, not one traffic light in the whole place. Bhutan moved from a system of barter to currency within the last ten years. Thimphu, the capital, has a population of slightly less than 30,000. But the hippies' favorite spot was the Tiger's Nest monastery perched on the side of a craggy cliff among colorful prayer flags at 10,500 feet. Approaching, all you hear is steady wind, chanting monks. Awesome, the hippies say. The coolest, man. You've got to see it. Difficult not to enjoy their goofy enthusiasm.

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12.12.76. Afternoon and early evening at U Bein, a two-hundred-year-old teak footbridge crossing shallow Taungthaman Lake for more than a kilometer. The Burmese are madly proud of it. I have no idea why. Everyone you ask is keen to talk about how the mayor after whom it was named took the wood from a decaying palace. How it was built back when the U.S. was busy drafting its Constitution. Running low on film. Got to shoot sparingly. What's great about taking these photos, Taru, is knowing they allow us to make my experience yours. You can carry it with you. You can keep it in your pocket like a memory you've both had and haven't had.

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12.12.76. Teachers. You can tell, a fat French diplomat in a floppy hat and red face out for a stroll told me, because they're wearing the emblematic green sarong-like wraps called longyi. Somehow, watching them draw near, I'm reminded the primary mode of every trip is the non-finito.

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12.12.76. Jesus, where the hell did Thanksgiving go? Lining up this shot in the viewfinder, I just remembered. Did you and Robert celebrate with all the trimmings? Granted it's my vanity, but I can't get my mind around an image of your dinner table without me filling one of its chairs. Was he as infuriatingly sardonic as ever? I don't know how you put up with all that self-righteous derisiveness. Sorry. More proof, I'm sure, of your angelic status and my boneheaded selfishness. In Bhutan, the hippies told me, there are only a few dozen personal names. They're used for both men and women, in any combination. The name, the self, just isn't that important. How can you not want to visit a place like that?

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12.12.76. Today, an anthology for you. Asked if he traveled much, Thoreau responded: Yes — around Concord. Freud said that travel's pleasure is rooted in a refutation of the father. I love to travel, Einstein once wrote, but hate to arrive. The world is a book, Augustine once wrote, and those who do not travel read only one page. G. K. Chesterton: The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see. George Bernard Shaw: I dislike feeling at home when I am abroad. Albert Camus: What gives value to travel is fear. Edward Dahlberg: When one realizes life is worthless he either commits suicide or travels. I met a lot of people in Europe, James Baldwin confessed upon his return; I even encountered myself. I asked the man who sold me a can of warm Coke at a wooden cart at the end of the bridge why I haven't seen any hospitals in Burma. If old, sick, he explained, don't travel to see doctor. Travel to cemetery to look for better place.

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12.14.76. On the river again, heading north. Looks like I'm leaving the last Westerners behind, thank god. Haven't seen another white face since yesterday. Will mail these next packages from Katha.

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12.15.76. Woke in a dingy room in a Rangoon guesthouse nearly a month and a half ago, thinking: I've made it. This is the end of the world. There's nothing more beyond. Woke today on the deck of a ferry in a place more remote than I've ever imagined a place could be, aching from trying to sleep on the floorboards, surrounded by passengers coughing up morning phlegm, and I looked over the side, and I saw this, and I realized I'm just starting out, Taru. This is just the beginning. This is the first sentence.

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12.16.76. They showed up out of nowhere at dawn, these boats, our own floating supermarket and fast-food joints. I bought a couple bananas, a bowl of lentil soup daal for breakfast. Can't shake the idea of Bhutan. The hippies said there aren't any horizontal surfaces there. Everywhere you look, you're surrounded by layer upon layer of mountains tumbling toward the snowcapped Himalayas cragged in the distance. People wear traditional robes dating back to the seventeenth century. I forget what they're called. The men hold daily archery matches in village pastures. Families paint large red, angry, windswept phalluses with wings on the sides of their houses for good luck in matters of fertility. Everyone possesses an almost childlike naiveté about the outside world. Everyone is always ready to greet you with an uncomplicated smile.

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12.17.76. The river mucky, overripe. Faint whiff of sewage hangs in the air. The sun is outrageously, exasperatingly brutal. Even though we're moving, you can't sense any breeze. The afternoons have been unbearable. When twilight starts coming on, you expect a reprieve, but there's absolutely nothing. Everything remains dead, dead, dead. Except, of course, the mosquitoes. For a while, you try to slap them off, then you just give up and go back to whatever you were doing. I've got fucking bites everywhere — even across my scalp, down my pants. To pass time last evening, I tried striking up a conversation with this skinny old guy with gray stubble across his head and face. He was sitting beside me, staring over the railing, smoking a home-rolled cheroot. I waved my hand along the shoreline, grinned so he could see my pleasure, exclaimed beautiful, beautiful! He didn't blink. Didn't even turn to see who was talking. I thought maybe he hadn't heard me, so I repeated myself. He huffed, rose, and shuffled away without even glancing in my direction.