My travel tactics: How to be more gawked at than gawking

As those of you who read this blog regularly know, I'm rather obsessed with the idea of showing respect to the places I go and integrating as much as possible with people who rarely or never have contact with foreigners. I recently summed up the dilemma with this facebook post:

Unless I’m in a crummy part of town and eating, I’m taken to be a gawking outsider and get perpetual stink-eye. But once I order food, say a few Burmese words, and sit down in a minuscule plastic chair, suddenly everyone is laughing and all is wonderful. But there are only so many meals i can manage in a day! It’s literally gotten to the point where i try to walk briskly enough as to be anonymous and unobtrusive until I find a seedy neighborhood, then I quickly try to pick a stall/stand, as the ones I don’t pick think i’m only leering. Once I’ve finished, I effectively have to run home before I offend anyone else and until I can work up an appetite again.

Today provided an excellent example: I ended up in an exceedingly dingy bar in slum Yangon (video to follow, when I can get it to upload) and had a blast with the locals who were bringing me food and cheroots and mountain hooch, while I was handing out shots of Burmese whiskey. The one guy who spoke a little English told me they had never had a white person in there before. 

That’s my approach to travel, and I’ve realized I don’t like it any other way. So for anyone interested in doing likewise, i thought I'd compile my accumulated wisdom on how to invert the normal dynamic so you become the spectacle for their amusement, instead of them being the zoo you're ambling through with your Nikon.  (Forgive the soap box.) And while i used to be envious of Anthony Bourdain and his excellent shows, I realize now that having a cameraman/crew would also ruin the effect that I'm after, so I'm happier doing it my way.

Tips:

• Cross train tracks. Then try to cross a bridge. Never go toward the city center or business district
• Choose places where you can sit close to the cook and she can see your reactions. Make pleasure faces/gestures while eating 
• Take pictures of the food but not of people  — or places unless no one is watching (the still above is an exception, as the guys in the bar asked me to take pictures with them)
• Know your few words (delicious, favorite, thank you, etc) in the local tongue but always bring a dictionary as well
• Avoid cleanliness, ceilings, doors, and anything with electricity
• Seek out neighborhoods without pavement; once the children start following you and people come out of their doors to stare, you’re there
• Chose a place with seating; take-away destroys the purpose
• Say their version of hello to everyone who stares at / acknowledges you as you’re walking
• Don’t use your left hand to touch food, in case there are convives who don’t have plumbing
• Try to avoid raw meat or fermented foods; they can get quite odd and/or make you ill. (i’ve had some raw tripe that tested my mettle.) Careful with the free water but don’t buy or bring bottled water or ostentatious drinks; drink tea instead
• Eat every speck of food; more on this in a later post
• Avoid deep-fried food, as it fills you up and limits how many things you can try
• Make lots of eye contact and say thank you for everything
• Share a table with people whenever possible
• Pay for first meal with a bill big enough to cover it but not so big as to make change a problem. Then you’ll know the base price-point for future meals and can use smaller bills
• Eat as many chilis as you can handle so they can see you’re not a wimp and might even laugh at how much you like spicy food
• Don’t wear sunglasses; as you walk, everyone needs to be able to see your eyes, and you need to look humble and joyful
• Try to get dinner in before sundown so you can see other people well (and your pictures will come out better)
• Buy a Lonely Planet guide just so you have a must-avoid list

World's Best Food? I say BURMESE!

I'm posting a few pics just so you can witness this paradise of the palate. I'll come back with a post dedicated to tea salad, the dish that made me love Burma -- both last time and now --- but feast on these in the meantime...

Fish with two curries, cabbage and a chili/fish paste compote. I go to this stand every morning for breakfast. $1

Chapati and chana. I watched him slap the dough to the inside of the tandoori oven. 20 cents. 

Curried fish filets and all the trimmings: cabbage, vegetable tray with spicy fish-sauce dip, sour greens soup, and tea. $1

Fish with chilis: can I get a pound of this a day?

A sublime roasted eggplant salad with dal

Almost a beef jerky but soft

Spicy chicken. But note the sides: raw eggplants mint, some incredibly sour leaves, cucumber, boiled beans maybe, and something like very firm and tart  green mango. 

Squid and tiny shrimp. Eighty cents -- with two bowls of soup!

A nod to Leopold Bloom: kidneys for breakfast!

Chicken livers and gizzards

Ode to Manila

Filipino food 101

One month, an odyssey of flavors. Here are some of the highlights...

A variety of dried fish and squids. These are delicious dipped in vinegar sauces and/or grilled.

Bikol: a treat of grilled coconut rice (i think). Super yummy.

Sinigang: the ubiquitous sour tamarind soup, a Filipino classic.

Street food in Manila, including chicken adobo (top), pancit canton (the noodles) and veggies cooked in coconut milk

Fish-head sinigang in Iloilo, a town in the Vasayas. Delicious. 

The classic crispy pata: pork knuckle. 

A Manila streetfood staple: batter-fried duck egg.

One of my standard breakfasts: pancit with assorted vegetables and a balut on the side. 

Eatery food in Iloilo: munggo (mung bean soup) and pickled anchovies.

Lechon kawali! One of the many variations of fried pork meat/skin.

Popular fast food: Filipino spaghetti, fried chicken, lumpia (summer rolls), and pichi pichi -- a steamed cassava dessert, this time covered in cheese. 

Pork adobo: a classic. 

One of the best things I ate: kinilaw (Filipino ceviche) in Iloilo.

My favorite Filipino food? Sisig -- pig face salad -- here bought on the street in Manila. 

Tapa: fried marinated beef. 

Turmeric chicken (manok) and sisig

Lunch on the island of Negros Orientales: grilled fish, prawn sinigang, and tomato/ginger/chili salad. Yum!

Visit to a Filipino village -- a pictorial...

My dumbest moment ever? The balut story...

"Oh, do not ask, 'What is it.' / Let us go and make our visit."

Well, I'm now in Manila and happy as a tahong.

I've already eaten a zillion delicious variations of pork, vinegar, fish, and deep-frying as well as more pork, more vinegar, more fish, and more deep-fried stuff. I'll do a giant Filipino food post soon, I promise.

But before that, I want to step back a bit in time and recount a now rather prolonged odyssey I've had with the most (in)famous Filipino food of all: the balut.

A balut is a fertilized duck's egg, eaten when the embryo has gotten quite near ready to be hatched. It seems to strike fear in most palefaces (though is also eaten in much of the rest of SE Asia), is praised for its texture -- as you are supposed to be able to detect the crunch of the beak -- and is reputed, like many things dubious, to be an aphrodisiac.

When I failed to eat balut last time I was in this part of the world, many of you readers gave me deserved grief. So when I saw a little handwritten sign in the Filipino supermarket near my house in LA that said "balut," I knew I was in.

Once home, I used the standard method of tapping the top of the shell off so you can drink the liquid.  I had read that they were only lightly cooked, and when I started sipping the liquid, I thought to myself, Wow, this is really lightly cooked -- as in really.

So I drank it all -- nor was it pleasant in the least -- and then I unwrapped the rest of the thing and found this inside:

would you eat this? 

Friends,  you know me to be an idiot. I looked at that imminent avian and thought to myself, Well, I guess lightly cooked is pretty damn lightly cooked, and then i popped the whole thing in my mouth at once and ate it. 

Nor was it pleasant in the least.

Now, I tend to like pretty much everything, so I realized maybe something was wrong. So I fired up the Google machine -- for, while intelligent people research and then act, I clearly do the reverse -- and I saw many images of yellow hardboiled-ish-egg-looking orbs -- but with heads in them. None looked like the photo above

And then i realized: I had eaten a balut, but it had been raw. 

(When I told my Filipino colleague Andrea Roxas this, she died laughing, called her grandmother in the Philippines, who also died laughing and apparently still asks about the dumb white guy who eats raw balut.  I'm a family favorite!)

As to moments of travel-related dipshittedness on my part, I think this even beat out smoking Burmese cigars backward (thus inhaling the entire filter) or trying to chew the mega-roach's wings as my biggest rookie mistake. Some live, others learn. 

I knew I had to try again. So I went back, bought another, boiled it this time, and then shot this video:

Upshot: that was one seriously overcooked balut. When I recounted both my mishaps to another Filipino friend, John Pingol, he postulated that the grocery would never have sold me a raw one -- as I had suspected from the get-go -- and thus had gotten the one in a million raw one the first time, but then the second time, had just cooked an already cooked one. Good times. 

Well, now I'm in Manila, so you can be damn sure I was going to do it a third time and try to get it right 

(apologies that my forehead looks like Gary Oldman's in Bram Stoker's Dracula...)

Success! Though it still mostly tasted like a regular hardboiled chicken egg, and the bird in this one was so small, it didn't have much of an effect. I felt I needed to go back and find a bigger, Erik- or Billy-sized fetus to get the full effect. 

Fortune smiled on me, and my next one had this titan inside, taking up pretty much the entire egg -- and so developed it even had real feathers and feet! 

That, my friends, is a balut to test your resolve.

But braved it I did, if only to recount back to you lovelies. So if you want to know just how giant the thing is when seen next to my head, have a gander. Or to have explained the umami effect (or, were I to coin a neologism, the counter-umami effect, as it was) of highly developed feathers, beak and feet eaten in a lightly boiled state, spend another 90 seconds with me. I'm sure it will be more fun for you than it was for me. 

Though balut will never be my favorite breakfast, and though much of the point really was lost on me, I'm glad I tried (and tried, and tried). For not only should everyone's norms should be shaken to their  taproots, but also because unpleasant things push the amplitude of your life's vibration just as the joyous ones do, and I think that by plumbing deeper below the axis you make yourself that much more capable of rising up above it. Melville's Catskill eagle, anyone? 

(And, now that the balut is crossed off, anyone have anything else they want me to eat while I'm here? Or any culinary misadventures you want to share? I love hearing from you.)

Australia on my fork

Wattle-seed "damper" with dukkah seeds and oil

Melville once quipped, "Nantucket is no Illinois," by which he meant that it's an island, not an immensely landlocked state but for Lake Michigan to the North. 

A similar logic would have us say that Australia is no France, but here I'm referring to the lack of threat that one would feel the need to emigrate to Oz to satisfy one's all-consuming gourmandize. No, I suspect you haven't heard much about Australian cuisine (I barely demur from putting the last word in quotes), and that clearly is a function of enough people following the old maxim that if you have nothing nice to say, you zip your trap. 

Now that isn't to say that you can't find good ethnic food in Australia; from what I'm told, that abounds and is quite passable. But as I was soon to be visiting the countries themselves from which said food would hail, I tried to focus exclusively on local specialties and oddities, like the quite nice wattle- (Oz-speak for acacia) seed "damper," a loaf traditionally made in the Outback, baked either directly on the coals or in a camp skillet and also, the gods of Wiki tell me, sometimes called "cocky's joy" -- a marvelous, if rather misleading appellation. 

Salmon, smoked crocodile, emu carpaccio, and kangaroo pate

To maximize my exposure to the indigenous, autochthonous, and native, I twice visited North Queensland's most celebrated restaurant, Ochre, in Cairns. They specialize in all the synonyms I just listed and bring together tasting trays for those of us with mental checklists and inkpens itching to ex.  

My overall takeaway from Ochre was that the food was terrible, but actually that's because the dishes my Swiss friends ordered -- veggie and a seafood samplers, respectively -- deviated both from the local injunction and from all attentiveness to the laws of flavor and texture (though the presentations weren't half bad) . However, the truly Aussie-only ingredients they did rather well, as with the platter above. 

I had never had croc, though i have had gator, and the croc left a much more pleasant memory.  The emu wasn't especially noteworthy one way or another, but I do think there's an extra transgressive pleasure in punishing creatures that are supposedly birds and yet remain flightless. (Poor things.) 'Roo I had eaten in virtually un-chewable and vile jerky form, whereas this pate was both palatable and admirably easy on the mandible.  

But the star of the night was the wallaby steak. (What is a wallaby, you ask? As far as my zoology takes me, it's a small type of kangerooish thing that of course only lives in Ausralia).

Now if i could get wallabies to traipse through my brother's yard in Westchester, there's no doubt we'd be hurling boomerangs at them willy-nilly in hopes of eating more of these tender, slightly gamy, and simply yummy steaks. (Everything else on the plate was an icky purple goo drowning some couscous, but bless their hearts for trying...)

Wallaby steak -- yum!

That was round one of Ochre. I went back a second time and started with a flight of local hooch: two gins, a wonderful rum called Iridium, and a liquor most unfortunately named "The Big Black Cock Whiskey." (We'll let that pass, per the aforementioned knowledge that my maturation was also slowed by lack of outside input; too much isolation and that shit just happens.)

Still feeling the need to get a kangaroo steak, I ordered that, but it proved true to the warnings: overcook it even an iota and it gets tough.  Mine was overcooked an iota and a half.

Kangaroo steak -- bring a buzzsaw

Finally there was a dish on the menu that had really attracted my attention: "Gulf Bugs on Lemongrass."

Ooh, local bugs! Alterity for the honky-normative! Take a video; scare the children! Those of you familiar with these pages will remember the giant roach, the wallet-sized tarantula, the grasshopper, etc, so I was dying to see what entomological wonder some Australian gulf could come up with with a few undisturbed million years of evolution.

What I got were these:

They call them Gulf bugs...

(Sorry about the blurriness)

Good god! They're huge? Are they the biggest cicadas in the world? Biblical locusts? Ants that could eat Adelaide?

As it turns out, none of the above: they were absolutely scrumptious "bay lobsters," as they are called by their other name.  Shellfish, not insects? I realize that I had the distinction of running a marketing team for Disney, but does it take insider experience to realize that with a predominately foreign clientele, Ochre wasn't really doing its star dish justice by calling it bugs instead of lobsters? 

But there I go again, taking umbrage. So apparently here in my final hours in Australia, I had still missed the point. Shouldn't I instead have been taking a page from this sweet country's book and just sat back, chilling with a beer and a smile?

Alas, relaxation is not my strong suit, much less easygoing acceptance. I fear I was too much a New Yorker for this country and it too much a relic of the Commonwealth for me.

Time to move to duskier settings; next stop: the teeming chaos that is Manila. 

Bats revisited

Not to belabor, but these things were utterly crazy -- and there were thousands of them each night swarming the tree outside my hotel in Cairns, Australia. Each one looks like this:

yes, I'm a giant frigging bat with a mink collar worthy of a Tzar -- and what of it? 

Since my scuba-diving trip in Cairns got cancelled, this was my best Aussie nature experience -- living that is -- that I had in North Queensland. And though the spectacled fruit bat -- a.k.a. flying fox -- is not exclusively indigenous to Oz, I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a hotel in a downtown city anywhere else in the world where you can see this every night:

'Nuff said

A friend just asked if, now that I'm peregrinating about and being utterly freewheeling, whether I'm back to my old self, and how distant Disney feels. My answer was that the job really feels like someone else's memory that I temporarily housed, like I had been sent down the wrong Bladerunner assembly line but am now fixed.  

i took this picture from outside Kata Tjuda, and I think it summarizes the Disney years pretty well:

Whereas now, things are much more like this.

The oyster waits, shelled. 

Curious dingoes and flying foxes (no, not SE Asian flight attendants...)

So…close encounters with dingoes or “I can now go to the grave saying I was sniffed by wild dogs.” 

The backstory is that I had signed up for an outback tour that included 3 days of driving around in a rickety van with 18 20-somethings — and, yes, I was feeling quite acutely the fact that my birth year starts with a 6 instead of an 8 or 9 — and two nights of “bush camping,” which apparently means no tent, just you and a bedroll under the prodigious Southern Hemisphere stars.

Now, the rest of the group circled their sleeping bags around a big central fire, but I was concerned that my snoring might keep everyone awake — until they stoned me or doused me in kerosene and set me ablaze — so I took my roll and moved a couple hundred meters away from the camp. Our guide told me I’d be fine out there by myself, and though we had spotted some dingoes creeping up sort of close to us, they scattered when we trained our flashlights on them.

In the mood for American tonight...?

Well, the stars weren’t really out yet, but the moon was so bright that I had a very tough time going to sleep. So for quite some time I was just lying there with my eyes closed, and then I heard faint footsteps. I opened my eyes, and about 4 feet away was a dingo, somewhat courageously checking me out. 

I obviously couldn’t get a picture, but he looked a lot like the one on the left in this stock photo)

An hour or so later I heard the footsteps again and the same thing happened. And then, once I guess I had dozed off lightly, I woke up hearing sniffing noises, opened my eyes without twitching any other muscles, and there were three dingos right up close, giving my face the nose test. They weren’t menacing at all, and once they realized I was awake, they all backed away. 

I don’t think I was in any danger — though I have to think my un-showered self probably smelled a bit like an aged bratwurst —  and to be honest, they were really cute and playful-looking. Perhaps my guide knew this, or perhaps he was just okay having the lone senex in the group dragged off into the night. 

In any case, I’ve now had exceptionally close and unexpected encounters at various times in my life with dingoes, moose, falcons, water buffalo and stingrays.  This was the least frightening of the episodes, but, as with each of the others, it felt kind of magical, like being behind the curtain of a play or seeing a poet’s original hand-written drafts. 

Maybe it’s sad that nature in its own element is such a rarity for me (my Alaskan friends are just shaking their heads), but I am a country and city boy, after all, and there really wasn’t anything where I grew up except corn and soybeans for 150 miles in any direction. i’m planning on doing some serious scuba diving in the next few weeks, so that’s likely to add a few species to the face-to-face list, but for now at least, the dingoes seemed really cool -- and a distilled dose of authentic Australia.

Next animal adventure: the spectacled flying fox, a.k.a. fruit bat, one of the world's largest "megabats," with a wingspan of 4.5 feet. They look like this (stock pic):

And here's one I caught with my own camera. 

Uluru

Friends, if you haven't seen it, this is the majestic Uluru.

Formerly known by the dumb honky name Ayer's Rock, it is Australia's most famous monolith, the world's second-largest stone (it rises over a third of a kilometer up and then is embedded seven kilometers deep!), and sits in the middle of the Outback levelness like an areola of an entire continent. 

Like the rest of Australian history (and American too), it's story is neither un-vexed nor un-tragic.  I knew this, but I still came to Uluru because I had read that it was the spiritual symbol of the Aboriginal people and that seeing it at sunrise or sunset would have a powerful moving effect even on us palefolk. 

The reality is that it's much more than that to a certain segment of Aboriginals, principally the Ananga.  It is their primary text; the variations and variegations on the rock surface give rise to their foundational stories, and from these stories comes their sense of identity, their laws, and their social structure. It's not that they sit and watch the colors shift on Uluru and feel God; no, they read Uluru, they use Uluru (the caves for shelter, the water it traps, the surface to record on), and Uluru is the chronicle of the past and present of their people.

Less than a century ago, white Australians turned it into a tourist trap, and since then, people like me have handed over money to keep it that way.  But in 1985, Australia did the right thing; they agreed to hand Uluru back to the Ananga -- after a 99-year lease and a few more profits.  

I would love to know how much Ananga culture will be left by 2084.  Dedicated members of the Ananga trying to hold on, they've built an amazing cultural center inside the Uluru grounds, and maybe they'll make it.  

I truly hope so, for without the Ananga, Uluru stops being the world's most magnificent sacred text and goes back to just being a pretty rock in the middle of a desert. 

yes, these are actual pictures from my Mesozoic iphone.  It's that damn photogenic. 

It lives....or at least I do

yes, good people, this is the new blog, and I am indeed typing these brief words from the underside of the globe, almost dead-center in the middle of that left-by-itself-its-entire-childhood oddity known as Australia.

(as a similarly conditioned oddity, of course I'm sympathetic)

within a few days, expect photos and limpidity on wild dingoes sniffing my face while I tried to sleep on a bedroll sans-tent in the outback; on Uluru, the great aboriginal icon (and much more); and on my probably overactive honkiphobia. 

for now, a pic of where I am: 

The at-times-aptly-named (but not always) Australian "Red Center"