Well Come

As I stumbled, blinking, into the Senegalese night from the cool of the airport, I saw masses of people behind metal fences.  Some waved around signs, none of which had my name on it.  I'd never met the people whom my colleague told me I'd be staying with, but I was told the person who would be picking me up had a picture of me and would be carrying a sign.  I hadn't found a SIM card for my phone, either, so I was flying blind, with only a name and a useless phone number.  I passed through one checkpoint, then another, then another, until a tall man in white called to me from behind a barrier.

"Mister!" he said.  "Mister!  What's your name?"

Unthinking, shifting my backpack, I replied, "Harry."

"Mister Harry, I was sent for you," he smiled.  He gestured for me to follow.  "Come on."

I came a little closer, hesitantly.  "Who sent you?" I asked.  "Amina sent you?"

"Yes, Madame Amina," he confirmed, still smiling.  "Come on, let's take a taxi."

I shuffled behind, hesitant, but somewhat encouraged by his confidence.  As a taxi ran in front of me, I heard "Psst!"  I saw the taxi slow and the driver wag his finger at me.  I glanced at my guide, who was talking to someone else at this point.  The taxi driver shot his eyes toward the man I was following and again wagged his finger.  My stomach started to prickle.  Finally, fucking finally, I chose between rudeness and safety.  I walked back the way I'd came, crossing the barriers into the walkway leaving the airport.

"Hey, Mister Harry!" the man called from behind me.  Without turning, I shouted back something about making a call and booked it back to the entrance to the airport.  All the way up to the rifle-carrying guards, anyway.

I stood there for a long second, not really processing what had just happened.  Unable to think of literally any other option, I tried walking again: past the taxi touts, ignoring anyone calling "Monsieur!" or "Hey, mister!" or "Mon ami!"  This was the Conakry airport in January all over again, with a dozen places labeled "Meeting Point," each presumably the last before dumping travelers onto the mean streets of the capital.  Except this time there seemed to be other risks than just being asked for money.

"Mister Harry!" a muscular young guy in a beard called to me.  I met his eyes, and he pointed to the end of the walkway.  Others called to me, but I walked towards where he'd pointed, though with every step I second-guessed myself: did this guy just hear me talking to the man in white?  Was he my ride, or was this just the start of an exceptionally well-executed con?

"Hi, Mister Harry, my name is Mohamed.  Welcome to Dakar," he said with a smile as he took my hand.  I shook it even more tepidly than usual.

"Did, ah...who sent you?" I asked without a great deal of resolve.

"Excuse me?" he said, blinking.  I repeated myself, using different words, and his eyes turned to comprehension.  "Amina, yes, Mrs. Amina."

I sighed in relief.  "I'm sorry, there was just a guy—"

"Come on, let's get a taxi," Mohamed said, turning.

I walked behind him into the surprisingly well-lit parking lot.  All of Dakar was surprisingly well-lit compared to Conakry, where indeed the students sit outside stadiums and airports to study after dark.  Casually, smoothly (yeah, right), I began to press Mohamed for details.

"So, I know Geneviève is coming on Wednesday," I said coolly, dropping the name of my colleague.

"Yes, yes," he said, seemingly without recognition.

I tried again: "And, uh...how is Mariam?" I asked.  From what I understood, Geneviève's little daughter was staying with Amina.

"Yes, ha ha," he said, still not meeting my eye.

Suddenly chilly, I stopped in my tracks.  As calmly as I could, I asked to see Amina's phone number so I could compare it with what I'd written down.

"Wait, wait," he said as he fiddled with his phone, no longer smiling.  Then he showed me a picture:

(That's me in the back.)

I don't think he bears me any ill will for regarding him with such suspicion—though I wouldn't blame him if he did.  Since that first meeting, though, I've struggled to fill the long, long taxi rides with conversation, and it's obvious that Mohamed has been trying, too.

"What kind of sports do you like?" he asks, or "What kind of car do you like?"  A noble effort, and probably smart questions for most other guys, but sure-fire conversation-enders with this particular knucklehead.  Even "Do you use social media?" is a pretty short talk, perhaps unsurprisingly.  We converse in English, since he said that's what he prefers to use with me, though sometimes it's clear French would be better (if more difficult for me).

On Tuesday he took me to a roadside tea cart, one of hundreds in downtown Dakar.  I bought us tiny plastic cups of very powerful, very minty, very sweet tea, and he introduced me to some of the regulars at this particular establishment (which was only just a couple of thermoses and a wooden bench on the sidewalk).  With one of them, a youngish Fulani man whose name I don't catch, I hit it off immediately: he and I discussed linguistics and geopolitics, mostly in French, while Mohamed sat next to me, smoking quietly.

Taking Jenn's advice, I've been trying to deal with the awkwardness by pretending that it doesn't exist, pretending that our long silences are companionable and mutually agreeable.  It works, some of the time at least.

I've realized over the last several days that I put a lot of pressure on myself to be charming and polite, meaning I haven't really liked myself very much here in Dakar; we don't really share enough interests or enough of a language for me to be very funny, and the pressure I put on myself to entertain makes for some severely unentertaining banter, plus the fact that I have no idea what's expected in this culture means I might be acting like a total jerk much of the time.

I didn't ask for a guide—though a day walking around town quickly shows me how much easier and safer things are with one—and I often get caught up in myself.  I'm frustrated that I'm not getting to vacation the way I'd imagined I would, frustrated that I'm not able to be pleasant and charming and funny, frustrated that I care, and frustrated that I don't care enough, as though Mohamed is unworthy of my trying to put forward my best self.

The food, meanwhile, is excellent, as is the weather and the freaky North Korean-built monuments (see above).

Right Location, Right Time

Tanti Amina and her four children live in Keur Massar, a community on the outskirts of Dakar.  To look at it, Keur Massar could be extraordinarily old, a ruin of some forgotten war, with crumbs of concrete being swallowed and regurgitated by slithering mounds of ochre sand.  On the contrary, Tanti Amina's neighborhood is very new, under development for only about three or four years.  In fact, Tanti Amina's house—sparkling-clean, ornamented with various succulents in pots of seashells behind the front gate—is under construction, too, with workmen piling concrete bricks on top of the roof and hammering at all hours.



She tells me one morning that she plans to turn the extension into a location, another apartment for vacationers to rent for a week at a time.  I tell her about AirBnB, and she seems interested.



Inside, meanwhile, it is cozy, tastefully decorated (not that I'd know, of course), with comfortable, new-looking couches—the kind without obvious butt grooves, that tend to have tablets left on them (best to check before you sit down).  As Mohamed, my self-professed guide (he pronounces it "gweed"), shows me in, Tanti Amina and her children greet me warmly, excusing their lack of English.  I thank them profusely, promising to try my best with French for the next week.  Considering the type of houseguest I am, it gets much easier once Tanti Amina reminds me of the phrase n'importe quoi, "it doesn't matter."



After a few fits and starts, mostly due to faux pas or fear of committing one on my part, we sit to eat dinner.  It's late, after 9:30, and I apologize for seemingly having kept the family waiting.  I assume my poor French is what causes their confused looks, though it becomes clear over the next few days that dinner in Senegal rarely happens before nine, nor lunch before two.  We eat our couscous and chicken in a rich red sauce from a common dish while sitting on the floor, and though Tanti Amina's questions lead me to believe this isn't an everyday affair, the family's evident comfort with eating in this style make me marvel at its authentic exoticism or exotic authenticity.

Before going to sleep, I fret for awhile about eating before the young woman who cooked our food ate her own dinner—am I profiting from some misogynistic tradition where the younger daughter eats after the rest of the family?  My mind is put at rest the next day when Mohamed tells me that that girl is the family's hired help (giving rise to anxiety about having committed another faux pas by being unable to tell apart family and employees).




It's a long, dusty walk to anything from Tanti Amina's house.  No taxis come anywhere closer than ten minutes away, to the Shell station near the highway.  As Mohamed walks me that way in the morning, I note several horses and donkeys lashed to strange two-wheeled carts, as well as dozens of big golden eagles wheeling over the unfinished, brightly-colored houses.  Later, in a crowded city bus painted brightly like the Jeepneys of Manila, we ride past bald vultures clashing on what looks like an abandoned playground.  It's relatively quiet between Mohamed and me on the bus, and before that on the walk, as well as on the taxi rides downtown, across town, and back home.

Mohamed and I hadn't gotten off on a very good foot, unfortunately.  But that's a story for another day.

You Ate WHAT? Championship Edition

By now, I think it’s safe that we don’t have anything to prove when it comes to being adventurous eaters.  Every time we get the opportunity to put some kind of unfamiliar critter in our belly, we jump at the chance: we chow down on chicken hearts, blood sausage, sheep testicles, live octopus, whale brains, and silkworm larvae.  And (except for the larvae), they’re all pretty damn good.  In our experience, people typically don’t bother eating stuff that doesn’t taste at least pretty okay, and we’ve armed ourselves with that knowledge in our quest to eat our way across the world.

With varying results.

Now, China has a bit of a reputation as far as food goes.  Actually, from what we’ve heard, it has two entirely different reputations: in the popular imagination, China does not consume what we consider “Chinese food” in the West, but rather heaping bowlfuls of sheep eyeballs and cat brains, fried mantises and pickled anus.  And of course, depending on whom you’re talking to and how potentially racist they are, dog.  According to the people we’ve met who have actually been to China, however, Chinese people are bigger fans of less intimidating cuisine like fried noodles and dumplings.  This was a dispute that we had to settle for ourselves.

On the recommendation of Wikitravel, we made our way to Beijing’s Donghuamen Night Market, a site we were told featured traditional Chinese street food, and also snakes and scorpions.  Truly a challenge that we couldn’t pass up.

We took in the sights and the smells, which were spicy enough to cut through the ever-present layer of smog.  There seemed to be a thousand dishes for sale, most of them on sticks, all of them distressingly familiar.  Grilled squid tentacles, meat dumplings, noodles with cabbage, roast chicken.  Vendors shouted in Chinese and in English, and we tuned them out as we had done with touts all day.  One voice, however, cut through:

“Hello!  Hello!  Snake!”

We did a double-take.  The vendor brandished a skewer of diamond-painted skin and smiled.  We ordered two, with chili.

Honestly, snake is the least intimidating weird food we’ve tried.  The taste and shape were so similar to a garden-variety squid tentacle (that’s what we keep in our garden, anyway) that we half-thought we’d been ripped off.  Still, if you can’t trust a complete stranger selling snake on a stick, who can you trust?  Snake is chewy, savory, and all in all more food-like than half the stuff they sell at KFC.  The scariest thing about this experience was the price tag: 60 yuan for two, amounting to about $10, a hefty sum that would buy four much more filling meals elsewhere.

Worried that we wouldn’t be able to fill our bellies for less than a hundred bucks, we wolfed down some safer offerings, which tended to be much cheaper than the exotic stuff: grilled corn, fried dumplings, and a big bowl of stewed tripe.  Our hunger thus sated, it was time to get serious.

The friendly-looking young vendor called to us as we walked past.  He gestured to his many-legged wares.  “Hello!” he said.  “Hello!”

“How much?” I asked, suspicious.  He told me that each stick of fried locusts was 30 yuan, and I waved him off, assuming we could get a better deal at a different stall.  “But!” he yelled, then abandoned his English, made antennae with his fingers, and began making cricket noises.  We thanked him and moved on.

Sadly, there seemed to be some kind of agreement or syndicate at work at Donghuamen Night Market, as all the prices were the same down the line of food stalls.  We returned to Bug Man, deciding that if 10 bucks was too much to eat bugs, then dammit, we were just going to have to spend too much.  We gave the man a fistful of cash and ordered one stick of crickets and one of miniature scorpions.

This is when it first hit me that we were doing something crazy.  Somehow it had never entered into my head that there’s a reason most people don’t eat scorpions on a daily basis.  They're pretty poisonous, right?  Or venomous?  Is there a difference?  The Fear started to kick in.  Were we about to spend the next week laid up with food poisoning?

Well, if we were, we resolved with a sigh, then at least we’d be the coolest kids in Intensive Care.  We took the plunge.

Cricket is, I’m sorry to say, not a taste sensation.  My worries disappeared with the first bite, which reminded me more than anything of the tiny shrimp that are such a popular snack in Japanese izakayas.  The main taste was of frying medium, unfortunately.  Though the feeling of having legs stick out your mouth as you chew is delightfully bizarre.

Round two: Jenn and Harry vs. scorpions!

Note: we made a delightfully witty video of Jenn eating scorpions and declaring them delicious.  Unfortunately, we can't post it due to technical something-something.  Anyway, little bitty fried scorpions became our new favorite food.

Scorpions were clearly where it was at.  Not wanting to pass up an opportunity to explore this new world of deliciousness, we headed back to Bug Man to try a more intimidating specimen.  This one was a whopping 60 yuan for a single nighmare-creature-on-a-stick, but we were in too deep to back out now.  Also it's possible that the venom was affecting our brains.  We scoffed at the startled-looking foreigners who were tentatively nibbling on chicken wings; we were obviously so, so much cooler than punks like them.  Who would bother to travel thousands of miles just to eat something they could get at home?  We chuckled, then dug into our bug.

And the reviews are in!

Yeah, we clearly flew too close to the sun on this one.  There was some sort of meat inside them claws, but they were protected by a thick layer of inedible chitin.  It tasted like a mouthful of fingernails, something I've finally learned not to eat.  It...wasn't food, really.  Gnawing on a mouthful of shards of black armor did nothing but cut up the insides of our mouths.  Discreetly, we tossed the thorax and tail in the trash, flushed with anger over wasting $10 on something that wasn't even food.  The little scorpions on sticks were a harmless delicacy, something that anyone could giggle over and praise themselves for being adventurous.  This big one?  This was sold only for ego purposes.

As we conducted our walk of shame back to the subway, our reputation had apparently already made it down the line of vendors.  "Hey," one vendor whispered to the next, probably, "here come a couple of foreigners who think they have something to prove.  Bring out the weird stuff!"  "Let's see if they'll eat raw starfish or something!"  "I bet I can get them to eat a hammer!"

"Hello!  Spiders!" called one man, holding up enormous tarantulas on sticks.  "Dog!  Dog!" shouted another, brandishing some unidentifiable cut of meat.  We had been branded as rubes.

"What did we do wrong?" we asked ourselves on the subway ride back to the hotel.  We had wanted nothing more than to eat what few dared to put in their mouths...and therein is the lesson.  There's two kinds of weird food in the world: stuff that people in other cultures really do eat, and that's scary purely for cultural reasons (balut, beonddegi, most state fair offerings); and then there's stuff that was never meant to be eaten, but enterprising cooks know that they can pass off as delicacies to gullible tourists or anyone who wants to show off their fearlessness.  The big scorpion belongs in the latter category along with those hot sauces that make you cry and throw up.  We had proven ourselves adventurous, even fearless.  What comes next for us is to pursue the wisdom that most people learn at a much younger age: don't put stuff in your mouth that isn't food.

People Persons

The next morning, we were relieved to be finished with our hardest task at Pasar, though that relief was tempered slightly by our disappointment at the disappearing audience.

“A lot of our friends spent 10, 12 hours driving here yesterday from Wakayama or further,” Natsu explained.  “They all fell asleep early.”

“But you can perform again on Friday if you want to,” said Aki in a rare show of energy.  We agreed, excited, and, figuring we’d practiced enough by that point, threw ourselves into enjoying the festival.  Over the next week, we overcame our shyness enough to become quite close to some of the Pasar family and friends:

There was Mayumi, proprietress of "Mayumi's Miracle Cafe," with an unbelievable laugh and a cigarettey voice.  The rumors said she had worked in the fashion industry for 30 years before quitting to run a vegan cafe.  When we parted ways, we wondered if we would meet again, and she told us, "Maybe we will.  Every minute, every second...is a miracle!" and roared with laughter.

Shuuichi.  Tatted up, giant holes in his ears that he would sometimes use to transport cigarettes, carrying around a hollowed-out gourd full of alcohol, he would frequently just bend over or list to one side for a few minutes.  I thought he might be narcoleptic, but then I saw him driving a car.  He did talk to me at length about his life -- I caught very little of it, but it seems he was a hikkikomori, a shut-in, for twelve years.  Now he spends his time trying to experience as much as he can of life.  Rumor has it he did some of his tattoos himself while locked away in his house.

This dude came by himself and danced like nobody has danced before, usually while wearing outrageous masks or swinging around kites that he made out of cut-up magazines.  Oh, and he's just as blurry in real life.

Yoko and little Haru-kun, sporting the official festival garb.

Our worries about filling our idle time fizzled quickly: from our first cup of coffee at 8 a.m., we were put to work kneading pizza dough, lighting the fire for the brick oven, baking and selling pizzas, helping Maya in the communal kitchen, carrying heavy objects to the stage and back.  When we had a moment to breathe, we were asked to give the other WWOOFers a break and work the bar.

“Hey, you can’t come back here,” the Austrian told us when we first fetched someone a beer.

“What?” I asked, certain that I had just misheard over the band.  But no, he explained, the bar area was only for staff, and Jenn and I weren’t allowed back there.  In an uncharacteristic disregard for confrontation, I explained to him in small words that we were part of the staff, that we were here to help at Pasar, and Natsu herself told us to take over the bar.  He spent the next few hours offering elaborate apologies and bowing in what sure looked like a patronizing manner.

In truth, I liked being a bartender.  It was one of the few tasks that needed doing that didn’t require a higher level of Japanese or knowledge of the inner workings of Pasar Moon.  I got to be right at the heart of the party -- hell, after a couple of Pasar mojitos, I fancied myself the most indispensable part of the party -- and I had an excuse to interact with all of the merrymakers.  Plus, at the bar, we had the best seat in the house:

“That’s now how you make a mojito,” the Austrian told me, his lip curled in a sneer, his eyes rolling like pinballs.  I pretended not to hear him, but at last I thanked him for the help and got him to teach me how to properly pour one.

Then it was, “You have to tip the glass when you pour the beer.”  And, still later, “You opened the valve on the keg too much, let me fix it for you.”  When he disappeared after pouring three cups of pure foam, I adjusted it back.

Of course, if we were part of the Pasar staff, we may not have acted like it the whole time.  After Aki told us that, despite his earlier offer, Dragon Room presenters wouldn’t be receiving envelopes full of dead presidents to perform, we were informed that we would still be getting free admission to the festival and free food.  Unfortunately, meals at Pasar, especially during festival time, are a very sporadic thing.  Often we would be so busy at the pizza oven that we wouldn't think to eat anything until two or three in the afternoon.  With no staff meal obviously forthcoming, we would buy some food from one of the many food stalls, only to be told half an hour later that the staff's free lunch was ready.

Still, there are fates worse than a piping-hot Pasar Burger.

At least the music was great.  The live performances spanned from trippy looped acoustic guitars to reggae to punk to things we’d never heard before.  One of Pasar’s regulars, supposedly the 40th generation priest at the local Shinto shrine, took the stage to play something extremely trippy that he called “space rock.”  The DJs killed it, too, playing a great deal of Afrobeat and funk and generally keeping the crowd in a dancing mood: one proud dad bounced his little daughter on his shoulders to the sounds of “Rapper’s Delight,” big old grins on both their faces.  We bopped our heads and danced in place by the pizza oven or at the bar while the Austrian sulked or bored the other WWOOFer to tears.

Taka watched a kid use a piece of bamboo as a guitar to play along with the band.  He drilled a couple of holes in it and attached a shoulder strap.  The kid proceeded to completely shred on his new instrument.

On Friday night, before performing at the acoustic showcase that would close out the evening, we were treated to a burst of traditional Japanese culture.  First, a duo dressed in kimonos took the outdoor stage and led the crowd in bon-odori, the standard Japanese festival dance.  There’s really no analogue for it in America; it’s a seasonal activity that everyone in the country is very familiar with, so maybe the best comparison would be like singing Christmas carols.  But, y'know, dancing.  The crowd went nuts, every man, woman, child and dog gleefully performing the dance moves that are so remedial they’re almost offensive.

Then, the central courtyard of Pasar was transformed into a stage for the kagura, a traditional Japanese performance art.  It was described to me as a “snake dance” or “warrior dance,” but what it turned out to be was an elaborately staged pantomime.  The first act had a masked figure engage in a fishing exhibition that had him flinging hard candy to the crowd and snookering volunteers to come and help him catch papier-mache fish.  He brought our young American friend up, and she performed her duties admirably (though she did break his fishing pole), apparently oblivious to the fact that the young, blonde American invited to participate in an ancient ritual under the full moon is pretty much doomed.

The second act brought the promised snakes, which were actually dragons for some reason.  The protagonist, whose words were muffled through his mask and who gasped for air in between lines, was evidently some sort of mustachioed dragon-slayer, much like Super Mario.  The three dragons were rendered with terrifying detail, and I gasped with the rest of the audience when they had the protagonist tangled in their deadly coils.  The story ended on a happy note, though, with the dragons’ heads chopped off and tossed into the crowd.

Luckily, we didn’t have to follow the dramatized execution: before we took the stage again in the Dragon Room, there was a long performance by a very diverse group of musicians, including hula dancers and a bongo player who was the spitting image of Snoop Dogg (but, y’know, Japanese).  The house was still fairly full when Jenny Dreadful (that’s us) started to perform, and with only fifteen or so minutes to play, we did some of our old favorites: “You Made the Night Too Long,” “Bei Mir Bist du Schoen,” “Feelin’ Good,” and “I Need a Little Sugar in My Bowl.”  The audience loved it, and we felt immediately vindicated.  We came to Japan to do exactly this, and how ‘bout that, we killed it!  The final performance by a tall, mohawked didgeridoo player brought a satisfying end to the evening.  Jenny Dreadful received about 1000 yen in tips, 500 of which we gave to the didgeridooist.

Saturday came, the penultimate day of the festival.  Everything had settled into a nice, comfortable groove: coffee, kitchen duties, making pizza, breakfast at 2 p.m.  In the evening, when Jenn went to lie down on the tent for awhile, I went to the bar to offer the WWOOFers a break.

“Hey, Harry!” the Austrian greeted me.  “Tequila?”  He produced the bottle and poured a couple of shots, plus one for Mayumi.

“Hey, thanks,” I said cautiously.  “You buying?”

“Nah, I don’t have any money,” he replied.

Mayumi and I exchanged a look.  “I can keep a secret,” she said, then burst into laughter.

The Austrian produced the salt and announced in a bizarre fake accent even more affected than his own, “Hai, Pablo Escobar especial...co-caine!”  He looked at us expectantly.  Mayumi and I laughed, though I think hers may have been genuine.  We downed our shots, regretting that the limes had sold out the night before, and all high-fived.

“I’m so glad you’re here,” said the other WWOOFer in a low voice.  Before I could get a chance to ask her any questions, I heard a booming “Tequila!” followed by a raucous cheer.  Behind me, the Austrian was pouring another round of gratis tequila shots.

“Yeah, he’s been doing that for awhile now,” she told me, rubbing her eyes.  I eyed the Austrian, who cheersed with a half dozen roaring drunk musicians (including last night's didgeridooist) and offered them "Pablo Escobar especial...co-caine" to a barrage of laughter.

"Don't worry," I told her with the false bravado of speaking to a 17-year-old, "I've got this."

Dutifully, I took the bar next to the Austrian and slapped him on the back.  "Hey," I began.  "Hey," this time in a friendly manner, as one would address his best buddy who also happens to be haplessly drunk.  "I've got it, man, you can take a break."

"No, no, it's good, I...I work."  His English was worse than I remembered, and if he was this out of it, I doubted my ability to peacefully convince him to leave.  We worked side by side, though hardly together, through the final band of the evening.  I poured a few more rounds of tequila for some of the musicians -- apparently he had given them a taste for the stuff.  Eventually he wandered off once he realized he wouldn't be getting any more free drinks, and I kept to my work cheerfully.

Around eleven o'clock, when the last band had wrapped up, the didgeridooist assembled his friends to do another shot of tequila.  I poured four, then five, then eventually seven as more friends wandered up.  I hadn't congratulated the tall man for his excellent performance on the didgeridoo the night before, but I held my tongue when I saw how much he was listing from side to side.  He met my eyes and gave me some sour look I couldn't read, so I went back to my work.  When I passed out the shots and the salt, the musicians raised their cups, cheersed, and downed their tequila with gusto.  Except for the didgeridooist, who pointed at my chest, slurred something beyond my Japanese ability, then reached his long arm across the bar and poured his tequila all down the front of my shirt.  Pinned by the bar as I was, I had no room to do anything but take it, the cold liquor wetting my clothes.

I lacked the vocabulary to take any action.  "Why did you do that," for instance, or "what the hell did you do that for?"  What I did manage was a polite, "Oh, no, you spilled your drink!"  The didgeridooist reeled back a bit, not averting his dark eyes from mine.  His friends started to disappear, though one or two of them said something quiet to him.

"You say somethin'?" he barked at me, or at least that's how I understood it.  I denied saying anything, collected the empty shot glasses, and turned my back to him, trying to keep tears from welling up.  He wandered off at some point, and I held it together long enough to close the bar promptly at midnight and collapse in the tent.  I heard later that Taka reopened the bar not long after and the party, including the Austrian and the didgeridooist, kept the fun going until five in the morning.

I wish I understood what was going through the didgeridooist's head (or, y'know, coming out of his mouth).  I've never had the experience of esteem and admiration for someone turning to a feeling of betrayal.  At least, not so quickly.  Or wetly.  Maybe I somehow gave offense without realizing it.  Maybe he was just a mean drunk.  Probably that one.  He evaded my eyes for the rest of the festival, either because he felt shame about what he did or, not remembering, he disliked me enough to avoid me.

Whatever the reason, I tried not to think anything bad about Pasar, even as I saw Pasar's friends and staff hang out with this guy into the wee hours.  This may have been an ugly incident, but peace and love were still the words at Pasar, and 99% of the people at the festival immediately became my favorite people in the world.

Sagada 2: 600 Feet Under

Jenn and I had been spelunking before.  One of the precious few things to do in Missouri (if you don’t like baseball and meth is too rich for your blood) is to explore one of the Show-Me State’s many caves, caverns, or assorted holes.  I’ve been to Onondaga Cave a number of times and had a generally very pleasant experience appreciating the stark beauty of limestone rock formations and naturally-occurring gift shops.  “Onondaga,” of course, is an Iroquois word for “well-lit, with professionally maintained footpaths.”  In short, we considered ourselves old hands at caving and fully prepared for the two hour tour of Sagada’s Sumaguing Cave (you think we’d have learned by now not to trust any time estimate that we’re given, especially ones that end in “two hours”).

We entrusted ourselves to a guide named Patrick.  Patrick, as will soon be revealed, is an intensely trustworthy guy.  He’s been taking hapless tourists into the caves for nearly fifteen years, and presumably, all of them made it back out alive (though given the preponderance of coffins hidden within, a cave-related death would probably approach The Perfect Crime).  We were well-equipped for a spelunking expedition: the man in the tour guide guild office advised us to wear flip-flops and cautioned us that, while long pants were acceptable, shorts would make us look better in pictures.  I carried the nice camera, trusting that the combination of a zipper and good intentions would add up to something close to “watertight.”

Thus readied for a pleasant jaunt into the hellish bowels of the earth, we sallied forth down the hill towards the cave.  We had a brief break when Patrick went to exchange his kerosene lantern for one that he thought would have a chance of working better -- as far as I’m concerned, this decision qualifies Patrick for instant canonization.  While we waited, we took pictures of some far less camera-shy hanging coffins.

The first stop was the Lumiang Burial Cave, which involved only a brief stop to gawk at an collection of non-hanging coffins.  Up to this point, caving seemed to be little different than hiking, in that I seem to be ill-suited for both and also I forgot to bring water.

Take note of the gear worn by Action Hero Harry.

Pictured: Jenn's last known photo.

Patrick talked us through the caving agenda: as we preferred the two-hour tour (hahaha) to the longer six-hour Cave Connection, we would be encountering three distinct stages.  The first, he told us, we would be scooting down steps on our butts.  The second we would be getting wet up to our knees, and the last would be our choice of the Hard Way or the Easy Way.  Clearly he didn’t know who he was dealing with, this Patrick, and has no idea for our predilection for never, ever doing anything nice and easy.  As we walked to Sumaguing Cave, we passed some rice terraces that were as spectacular as they were downhill.

Down hundreds of steps, really rocks placed in a vaguely step-like pattern, we walked in the officially-recommended flip-flops, one of which Jenn promptly broke.  We passed under several hundred bats congregating on the ceiling of the cave -- I don’t know the proper term for a group of bats, but I’m going to go with an “eew” -- and Patrick helpfully advised us to stop using our hands to steady ourselves on nearby stones lest we coat our hands in guano.

In front of one of the famous limestone formations.  No, I won't tell you what it's called.  All SFW guesses welcome in the comments section!

There’s no easy way to convey the kind of fear that begins to settle into your chest when you’ve descended into an unlit cave in shorts and flip-flops, hundreds of feet below where the bats deign to live, the ceiling gets lower and lower, and your guide tells you to leave your shoes behind from this point.  It is a good way to reacquaint yourself with all of your childhood fears, this Sumaguing Cave: fear of the dark, fear of falling, fear of drowning, and fear of guano.  When it came time to squeeze ourselves through a narrow mouth, a river rushing down our backs, camera bag held desperately overhead, Patrick shouted back to us, “Oh, I forgot!  We started the third stage a ways back.”

In his description of the cave experience, Patrick had neglected to mention the Pitfall Level, in which we were instructed to hang on to a rope that was suspended from the cave wall and to walk ourselves over a deep, possibly bottomless pit filled with stanky cave water (and possibly man-eating salamanders).  “Ha ha!” I suggested.  “Seriously?”  Patrick demonstrated by scrambling to the other side with the casual ease of a Batman.  Jenn and I exchanged a look.  Shit, we thought, shit.  We're in way over our heads here.

There was some dispute over whether the properly gentlemanly thing for me to do would be to allow Jenn to go first, or for me to go first and test the water, as it were.  Jenn decided to attempt it first, summoning all of her courage, and as I fiddled with my flashlight, I suddenly heard a mighty splash!  I looked up into the dimly-lit corridor and Jenn was utterly gone, disappeared into the pit below.

My mind flew to all of the things that would never happen now.  There would be no cycle tour in Japan, no traveling through Cambodia and Thailand.  No children.  She hit her head on the rocks, I thought, she hurt her spine.  Best case scenario, we're going to spend the next ten years getting her walking again.  I was too terrified to say anything, even to call out to her.  All I could do was kneel on the rocks and pray for her to rise again.

Patrick shot his hand into the water and pulled Jenn up by the shirt, clutching her glasses in her hand.  “Can you swim?” he asked coolly.  She nodded, and before I knew it she was back up on the ledge, sopping wet but miraculously unharmed.  Somehow she hadn't hit her head on the stone wall, she had turned herself right-side-up and taken a breath before falling in.  I breathed again.

At last we reached the bottom of the cave.  Patrick invited us to enjoy the pleasures of the cave’s “Swimming Pool,” an offer that we wryly turned down.  We had done it, we had accomplished what we were sure was impossible, it had nearly killed us, but we had successfully made it to the end of the cave!  The smell of kerosene filled the room, and Patrick let us have a break while he smoked a cigarette.  “Are you OK?” I asked Jenn for the thousandth time.  She still was in high spirits, though the prospect of scrambling back over the sheer, slick cliffs quickly filled us with a gnawing sense of dread.  The feeling of success was immediately gone.  There was no way we could make it back up all those sheer rock cliffs, not with how shot our nerves were already.  We didn't have anywhere near the strength of arm to get ourselves back up to the top.  Panic set in.

Really, what carried us out of that cave (besides Patrick) was the knowledge that the alternative was dying alone in the dark.  Each time Patrick had to leave us to grab his bag or to scout out the way ahead, visions danced in my head of whether we would asphyxiate, freeze to death, or be eaten by bats first.  Gone was the confidence that led us down the California coast; all I wanted was to be back at home in bed with a grilled cheese sandwich.

I’m making jokes about this experience here, but that’s by virtue of being dozens of miles away from Sumaguing Cave.  To get some feeling of just how terrified we were at the bottom of the cave, just take a look at this photo.  There were no handholds except invisible crannies in the slick rock walls (which, remember, we were climbing up in bare feet and shorts).  There were many, many occasions when Jenn’s or my hand slipped and we were just a Patrick’s Awesomeness away from death or disfigurement.  If our hand missed its mark, if our toes couldn’t hang onto the rock, there would be no easy transportation out of the cave to a local hospital: we were hundreds of feet down impassable rock, half an hour’s walk from the local (hospitalless) town, six hours from the closest big city.  An error, be it due to nerves, lack of fitness, or simple bad judgement, would be fatal.  Like, no-backsies-fatal.  And we were scared that we wouldn't make it back out of this cave alive.

I mean, look at that.  That's 9 feet of rock and the only way out of Sumaguing Cave.  In rough patches, Patrick advised us to take turns boosting each other's butts up the cliffs or stepping onto his knee.  Not to brag, but we've eaten breakfasts bigger than Patrick -- I was 100% convinced that putting my weight onto his delicate limbs would result in a hospitalization.  More than once our fingers clawed at the top of the rock, struggling to haul our bodies up the ledge or else fall back to our deaths.  We were blindly, pants-wettingly afraid.

Bruised, sore, sopping wet, we trudged back up the rocks, past other tour groups going the other way.  Until that moment, I never knew how happy I could be to see a broken flip-flop and piles of guano.

Once again, we rose through our plight and arrived back at the surface world, thus rising from Mighty up to Mighty Mighty.  I recalled all of the Dungeons & Dragons games I ran that took place in caves and chuckled at the thought of an armored, 300-pound dwarf dodging traps and doing battle with goblins in anything like what we had just gotten through -- 10 minutes in Sumaguing Cave would be enough to off any adventuring party.  Having accomplished the impossible, or at least very difficult, we proceeded to celebrate by not leaving our hotel room for 36 hours.