December 23, 2007

I can’t help but notice the last paragraph of my last entry, regarding Myanmar: There’s no reason not to visit this warm and friendly land. The events of the week of September 21 would on the surface seem to refute this, at least for the short term. I doubt the traveler would notice much of a difference, nor frankly would most of the citizens. After all, the sorrow of an oppressed people isn’t always worn on the sleeve, and most of the Myanmar people don’t live in the city. Only a short time has passed since since my return from what was one of the most peaceful, tranquil, beautiful adventures of my life, and I have missed it like hell every day. I spent a month among the Burmese, eating the same food, using the same busses and boats and pickup trucks called linekas, seeing the same views and feeling the same breezes cool my cheeks in the evening time. Watching endless lines of saffron monks make their morning alms rounds, and strolling the shady streets that make up the massive heart of the chief army barracks at Fort Mandalay, giving a wave at the bored young soldiers guarding the empty crossroads, and getting warm and shy smiles in response. Living and traveling as low as was possible given such a short trip, I thought I came as close as I could to being Burmese, if only for a little while.

Knowing those same smiling soldiers now have the blood of monks on their hands is profoundly disturbing. How could they? I have asked myself this a thousand times, and I cannot find an answer. So I think we all should find out. I know I am in the minority, but I advocate everyone consider visiting Myanmar now. Stay as long as you can, and meet as many people as you are able. You bring your change wherever you go, so hop to it! I won’t say the Myanmar people need you, but they sure could use the support. I’m going to try and put my money where my mouth is, and return in 2008.

Onto another trip—June, July and August in Eastern Europe. The Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Montenegro, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, the latter four on the back of an awesome dual-purpose Kawasaki 500cc KLE. All in all, I put 4000 miles on the thing, some of the most amazing miles of my life, taking a little tent and sleeping by the shores of the Mediterranean wherever the mood struck me. Since I’m in the process of spending a lot more time in Eastern Europe over the next few years, I ended up buying the bike and storing it at a friend’s house, where it is eagerly awaiting my return I am sure.

The Travel Mate Contest winner and I are still working out the best time to fly! (Who’d have thought that getting time off of work would be so problematic . . .  wait, don’t answer that!) And maybe I can wrap it up into the above-mentioned return to Myanmar!

But by far the largest preoccupation this past year has been finishing my next book. I’m happy to report just this instant I put down the 127,410th word! Set in the deepest jungles of Cambodia, it’s called Two Dolphin, and I think it’s going to be really good. I don’t often say something like that about my own work, but in this case, I must make an exception. I recently won the Fort Collins Arts Alive Fellowship for 2007 with this manuscript, so I have reason to be hopeful. Here’s the synopsis for the interested:

Two Dolphin is a novel of 130,000 words set in the country of Cambodia. The story revolves around two young women who have come to Cambodia for very different reasons—one a student on a fling, a weekend away from Bankgok, the other the less-than-enthusiastic wife of an idealistic young man trying to find a better life. But almost immediately, the student falls in love, the wife becomes a widow, and both of them become trapped in their self-made snares. They meet accidentally at Two Dolphin, a bustling international ecovillage beside the Mekong River, and their lives begin to intersect in a profound way. In the sweltering, mine-infested malarial jungles, the two women remake themselves, living together as sisters and trying to start afresh. But in a place like Cambodia, where anything is possible, everything is uncertain, and the former student finds the courage to nurture a love for the widow that grows far beyond anything she could have expected. When the ecovillage is threatened, the residents will do whatever it takes to save it; when their union is threatened, the student will do the same.

Although first and foremost a story of love (the love of one young woman for her deceased husband, and the love of the other for the widow), through the juxtaposition of native villages and Two Dolphin, the lives of Khmers and Delphinians, this work of fiction offers a strong postcolonial critique, as well as a hard examination of the exploitation of the East by the West. Ecovillages like Two Dolphin exist—I’ve seen several for myself—and are part of a growing trend towards sustainability, reparations, and environmental protection. The only problem, and the problem faced by Two Dolphin, is that these goals rarely come without the colonists’ inevitable burdens of patronization, racism and greed.

What do you think?? I’ve been working on this for two years, and it’s almost ready to go out to some agents, so wish me luck! If all goes well, it’ll be out in late 2008 or early 2009.

That’s all from me. The next few months will be hectic, but I’ll try to update this at least once a month. To all of you who have followed this pitiful little attempt to blog, or have bought my book, or will buy the next one when it comes out, I can only give you my heartfelt thank you and gratitude! If you ever catch me on some spooky trail or lost in a windy old medina, say hi and I’ll buy you a cup of tea!

DR

December 23, 2007

May 21, 2007

Well, the weather is getting hot and I’m getting antsy, so it’s time for me to hit the road again. This time, despite my deep and lifelong obsession with Asia, I’m going back to my roots—Eastern Europe. I’ll be gone for just over two months, and during that time I might end up anywhere from Hungary (pretty certain) to Croatia (really want to) to Bosnia (sounds interesting, but a little far from where I want to be, so sadly probably not this time).

Unusually for me, it will be more of a working vacation than an adventure. As some of you might know, I’ve been hard at work on another book for some months now, closer to a year as a matter of record. Well, I’m finally done with the first draft, and I want a change of scenery so I can edit it. So during the first month of this trip, I’ll hand-edit 10 pages a day of the printout; 30 days and it’ll be a second draft. Then I’ll transcribe the changes into notepads by hand, again at the rate of about ten pages a day, for the second month. Then by the time I get home, I’ll have a complete book ready to type up as final draft. The story is set entirely in Cambodia on the banks of the Mekong River, and it’s called Two Dolphin. I think you’ll like it!

In any case, I’m very excited to get back the lands of my ancestors. I don’t get back to Europe very often, mostly due to the cost of it, but Eastern Europe can still be had fairly cheaply. Universities let out their empty dorm rooms over the summer, and private rooms can be extremely inexpensive. A two-room apartment in Hungary can cost as little as $150 for a month, so that might be a good option as a base. Who knows?

I just got up some pics of my recent Myanmar trip (at long last). All I can say is that whatever your good impressions of that country based on my photographs, it is a hundred times as amazing as that! The people, the landscape, the climate, everything. Just trust me, and go!

Of course, if I say that then I also have to add: don’t use any government hotels, services, programs, busses, boats, etc! Like I always say, go low, go slow, and make your money count by giving it directly to small businesses and individuals, not tours and international companies. If you do this, there is no good reason not to go visit this gorgeous and friendly land.

Anyway, I hope to be updating this blog from the road, or at the very least, soon after I get back (with photos of course), so until then, keep reading and keep traveling!

D

May 28, 2007

Myanmar, God I miss you already!

Okay, now that's out of the way, hi! I'm so glad to be home. Really. I mean that. After all, who would trade the crisp, cool convenience of their local super-maxi-mini-mart for a gathering of a hundred old women selling fruit by candlelight, their uber-massive online bookseller for claustrophobic alleys filled with the sounds of bookmaking in the air and the bustle of bindery after bindery after bindery after bindery, or their smooth tarmacs for roads so rough they appear to have been strafed with bombs, leading not to civilization but to rotting riverports and villages awash in children? Where a 21-hour bus ride is the only way to get across less than 300 miles of distance, where there is electricity only between the hours of six and eleven at night, and often not even then, where every human you meet stops and stares at you because most of them haven't seen anyone like you in these parts before?

Okay, I admit it. Me. I'll tell you why next time round, which will be very soon, I promise, complete with the very best of the over 2500 photographs I took over five weeks on the road. But first, I have a very important announcement to make!

Emily wrote about Laos, the only one of the bunch who did. We'll be heading out together sometime later this year, maybe in the summer, but more likely this upcoming winter, due to the monsoons in that part of the world. Watch this space for details and updates.

For all of my wonderful friends and supporters, both of books and me in particular, who didn't win, I cannot thank you enough. Your entries were amazing, inspiring, and wonderful; I wish I could take you all! But even though we won't be traveling together this time around, if you keep going and I keep going, I'm sure we'll meet on the road. It is a small world, after all.
And as for you, Emily, get ready for one hell of an adventure!

DR
February 2007

First, an apology as always for my sloth. Secondly, thanks to all who bought a copy of my book. Don’t forget to fill out the form in the back, seriously! One person will win this trip; it might as well be you!

For all my Colorado friends, there’s a great new book out called Pulse of the River. An anthology dedicated to saving the Poudre River, it contains, I am very proud to say, a brand new short story of mine entitled “The Postcard.” It is one of only two fiction pieces in a book otherwise filled with great essays and poetry, so I feel quite special! All the profits go to saving the river from being dammed, so check out the site at www.pulseoftheriver.org if you have a spare few minutes.

So, I had the distinct pleasure of seeing one of my most consistently fascinating friends a few weeks ago. Her name is Rita Golden Gelman, and if we want to make an SAT-esque analogy of my comparison to her, it would go something like this: As a traveler, Rita is to David as a human is to a chimp. As a traveler, this woman is evolved! She has no home, no possessions, and lives her life, as far as I can tell, entirely by the seat of her pants! The uber-nomad, the Legend. And what an amazing life it has been. Take a tour of her great website www.ritagoldengelman.com and tell her I say hi.

In any case, she found herself in my hometown and gave me a ring out of the blue. We went out to dinner that night for a bit of trading stories, laughing and decimating my local sushi bar. Actually, decimate is the wrong word, as it technically means “to remove every tenth one,” and we did a whole lot more than that, I think! & But the whole night was an absolute pleasure! Rita’s a great storyteller, as those of you who’ve read her amazing and funny book, Tales of a Female Nomad, can attest, and she kept me in stitches. To which a Kiswahili speaker would reply quanini una checkkha? (Sorry, Rita; I had to work in a usage somehow!)

But never fear for your fearless wandering scribe—I’m fighting back with a trip to Myanmar! I’m leaving in a few days, in fact I’m probably there right now … spoooooky … and won’t be back till the middle of January, which isn’t long enough but it’s better than nothing! I’ll be exploring Rangoon, the road to Mandalay, the relic-strewn plain of Pagan, the languor of the Irrawaddi, the deserted seaside beauty of unnamed villages, the hidden temples of Mrauk-U, and anything else that comes across my radar.

I’m very excited about this trip in particular because I’m going deeper into the world this time, lower than I’ve ever gone, in terms of the manner in which I move. I’m out to prove a point, if only to myself. It regards the amount of extraneousness and waste in my life, a typical Western life. I want to pare everything down until I can move and exist like a Saddhu, unencumbered and free (tho not as wise, sadly). This is something I’ll be working on over the next few trips, in the following year. After that, I might just move away entirely. To paraphrase Paul Bowles, a true traveler moves through the world, from place to place, over a period of many years. I might have to give that a try.

So I’ll write again when I get home from Myanmar. And there’ll be plenty of great photographs, too, so be sure to check that out too! Remember, go low, go slow, and drop me a line if you feel like sharing an adventure of your own.

DR
A little diner in northern Colorado,
December 1, 2006

August 2006

Who knew four little words could be so terrifying! I guess there are a few worse ones, like where is your permit or I forgot the antimalarials or they’re out of soy. Nevertheless, here goes:

GOAT TREES IS OUT!

Truth be told, it has been out now for a few months, but you know how we writing types operate—slowly and procrastinatively (and with the prerogative to invent words of our choosing, as needed).

So, better late than never! And besides, like all writers, I have excuses, too. Who could have anticipated the tremendous amount of attention a new book wants? Wants, hell—a new book demands, insists, cajoles, threatens, and in general, acts like a spoiled little child. But with the passage of a few months, things are easing, and I can actually enjoy the good parts, like the reviews (which have so far been absolutely amazing; to read some of the latest, click here). The book has been selling well, selling out in many stores, in fact, and I’ve been invited to read in some great places, like the Tattered Cover in Historic LoDo, and at the infamous Bookslut’s monthly reading series in Chicago. What more can I ask for?

I guess there are always a few things, but for the most part life has been good. Very turbulent, though—flying through an eyewall turbulent—but all involved have come through on the other side, and the skies are turning blue once more.

In other, better news, I got my hands on a restored 1977 VW bus that I immediately named Cyril after a certain character in a certain book which for decency’s sake I won’t name here. He’s a Velveeta-yellow poptop Westy, which makes him suspiciously like the bus that appears in James Mitchener’s Drifters, one of my perennial favorite books to read when I’m just about ready to buy a ticket somewhere, but don’t quite know where yet. Cyril and I have some great plans in the works; foremost is a drive from Denver to Panama early in the next year. Although I’ve driven cars and occasionally motorbikes on five continents (never in Europe, though, of all places!), Central America has thus far escaped my road rage, so it’s high time to have a crack at every pothole in Mexico, Belize, Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama, over the Canal and through the woods until I get to that little, hairy piece of jungle just before the Columbian border into which, sources tell me, I would have to have a screw loose to venture. Ah well, you have to turn around somewhere. It’s as good a place as any.

In my travels, I always seem to end up on the other side of the world. But I think it will be very worthwhile to explore my own neighborhood for a change.

As always, to those of you who’ve gotten your hands on Goat Trees, my heartfelt gratitude for your support. Keep those Travel Mate entries rolling in, and I just might see you next year!

DR

Update: The Tattered Cover LoDo reading came and went on August 3. I want to thank that amazing chain for hosting me in such high style. I read, I talked, I signed dozens of books, but the slideshow of my photography they had me put together, to play behind me as I was, ahem, “working,” was what did it for me—amazing reactions all around, absolutely, and a perfect idea. I’m going to have to do that every time. Thanks for making me fall in love with tour reading, guys!

Well, I’ve been back from India for a few days and I already miss it! Not to say that I’m not happy to see the people and haunts I left behind to go on such an amazing journey from Delhi all the way to Chennai, but there is certainly a twinge of something lost when I wake in the morning. It might just be that I’m waking to 10 degrees and snow, instead of 90 and sun, though it’s probably more than that.

The trip itself was tremendously interesting, exciting and revivifying all at once. Indispensable, in other words, the kind of trip I live to make. The itinerary evolved from day to day based on a number of things, but largely and most disruptively a rapidly-spreading outbreak of bird flu in Gujarat and Maharashtra states, where I had hoped to see the wild lions of Sasan Gir, and farther south, the ruins of Hampi. But it wasn’t to be, so instead the trail wound from old Delhi to Agra to Ahmedabad, then the unexpected and unavoidable hop by air to Kochi, down on the far south of the Malabar Coast. From there it was all trains again, picking down the coastline until there was nothing left before me but blue water—Cape Comrin. From there, up to Madurai, then north by northeast to Pondicherry, where I rented a small motorcycle and explored just about every lane in every fishing village in a twenty-mile radius, while testing my reflexes against the mayhem and chaos of Indian roads, which are packed with pedestrians, flocks of chickens, packs of dogs, herds of goats, cows, bicyclists, pedicabs, oxcarts, camels, motorcycles, three-wheelers, taxis, cars, busses, and elephants! After that, it was on to Chennai, where I stayed for only a pair of days before flying home. There are fresh pictures in the “Adventures” section if you’re interested. Stories, I’m sure, will follow.

As you probably know, my book, Goat Trees: Tales from the Other Side of the World, is coming out very soon now, April 29th to be exact, and with it, the Travel Mate Contest gets into full swing. So all along the way, through the choked alleys of old Delhi, down the backwaters of the Kerala State, to taking a handful of sand from the Cape, I couldn’t help but think that in about a year’s time, I’ll be doing something like this with the winner of the contest. And that led me to think I should use this opportunity to relate to prospective winners (that’s you, if you’re reading this and go ahead and grab a copy of the book when it comes out next month) what they might expect if we’re lucky enough to travel together.

First, I suppose it’s only fair to be painfully explicit as to what you shouldn’t expect. Don’t expect 5-star luxury. Don’t expect 4-star luxury. Don’t expect any stars at all, except for the ones over our heads. There may or may not be hot water; you might sweat a little because fans have a habit of dying when the power goes out, which tends to happen in the places where I like to be. You might have to read your novel by candlelight, or walk with me to the train station at midnight in Damascus.

So what should you expect? Expect an adventure.

Apart from are a couple of things that are impossible to skimp on, chiefly airfare and entry fees to some of the iconic monuments around the world—the entry for the Taj Mahal cost between three and ten times my nightly accommodation requirements—almost everything else can be pared back to a point where you are as close to the local life and culture as you, a foreign guest, can reasonably get in a short period of time. Which is where you want to be. How?

There are three elements to consider: Eating, Sleeping, and Getting Around.

Food is a great way to gain insight into a culture and to meet people. But where you eat is one of the most important decisions you can make on any trip. Though you mightn’t expect it, expensive restaurants can bite you very hard overseas. Don’t follow the tourists; follow the locals, the ones who live nearby and who can choose to patronize a place over long periods of time, or conversely run a place out of business in two weeks if they don’t behave. Locals can’t afford the expensive western-style buffet serving the same slop for dinner that it offered for lunch, along with a hundred-fold increase in the bacteria that was already brewing at noon. Locals hit the diners and teahouses, street stalls and bazaars, where freshly-cooked is king, where they can see the chef. You might get some quizzical looks at first, but you’ll be smiling when you dig in. Some of the best meals of my life were in India for quite literally pennies in local hangouts, eating until my belly was so full I couldn’t sit straight for an hour. How does an all-you-can-eat thali for 30 cents sound, complete with five delectable dippables, a sweet, yogurt, rice, and two kinds of bread so fresh it burns your fingers? What else will 30 cents buy you (in India, at least)? You can pick out your own fish and watch the boy grill it to whatever you know as perfection. You can get two huge papayas that will ruin fruit for you the rest of your life because you’ll never again taste anything as sweet. Bottom line—I love to eat, so rest assured that for us eating cheaply will never mean eating poorly!

Expensive hotels are out. The reasons are too many to list, some obvious, some not. The former: they are insulated from the country you came to see, they blow your budget. But they are also almost always situated far from any local scene such as bazaars and markets and old-towns and medinas. Instead of your dollars remaining in the local economy to help the people who are opening their country to you, the money often gets channeled to international corporations. Also, I was never much comfortable spending more on one night of sleep than the average person in country earns in several months. It doesn’t feel right, and I won’t do it.

So what’s left? My favorite hotel in the world (really, in the entire blue-green thing, at least what I’ve seen of it so far) cost fifteen dollars per night. It was a faded turquoise stucco structure overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, left over from Portuguese days on the African coast; this windswept oasis is something from my dreams. In India, I averaged about ten bucks a night on accommodation, which is about right, though I could have done it easily for five, even in Delhi. In Indonesia you can get away with a couple of dollars for a beach hut, as well as in most village settings around the world. There are whole networks of families accessible through various internet organizations who will take you on for a few days at no cost beyond pitching in for food, simply to hear your stories and share your adventure, if only for a little while. You just have to know where to look, and whom to ask.

So we’ve got eating and sleeping covered. How will we move around? Three words—on the ground! I’ll do anything the locals are doing. Motorcycle taxis and tuk-tuks, ferries and long-tails. What they lack in speed, they make up for in the quality of the experience. Though slower than jets, overnight trains are much more comfortable, and provide for a much truer view. After all, in a place like Ethiopia, the only people who can afford to fly are the generals, magnates, and tourists! Who wants to be in such company?

One splurge that has always been worth it to me is to rent your own transport, at least occasionally. I took a rental car for a while in the Anti-Atlas Mountains and got to outposts that had never seen a white person before. Come to think of it, this option isn’t always an expensive one—the motorbike in Pondicherry, a highlight of the whole subcontinent, rented for about three dollars a day; I saw much of Angkor Wat from the back of a bicycle whose daily tariff was a buck.

Still want to come with? I hope that you do.

Upon picking the winner, I will go out of my way to make the planning of our trip a truly collaborative process, open to discussion from the planning stages to when we’re deep in country. I never compromise on safety, and will not hesitate to remove us from any area or situation that sets off my fairly well developed alarms. But for the most part, I feel (much) safer in Phnom Penh or Delhi than I ever do in New York City or Miami, and I’ll make sure you feel that way, too.

More than anything, I want the winner of this contest to have an amazing, fulfilling and absolutely uniquely amazing time.

I think you and I will do just that.

DR
March 2006

If having my own site has taught me anything, it’s this: I’m no blogger!

Maybe it just isn’t in my thrown bones to be a diarist. This might sound odd coming from a writer, but it’s true. Although I maintain that all fiction is in fact nonfiction, to me, my life isn’t all too exciting, at least not enough to write home about.

So, with that in mind, and bearing in mind that my mind will be in India in a few weeks time, I’ve been thinking of Cambodia. Odd, but maybe not so much; of all of the countries in which I’ve spent time, it’s easily my favorite thus far. The people, the food, the scenery, the hammocks—Cambodia is a place where I could see myself retiring; give me five more years! And although I’m optimistic about the subcontinent, I’ll be looking for Cambodia in the backwaters of Kerala State and Tamil Nadu.

My mind is wandering already, so I’m going to rein it in by painting a picture of Cambodia by way of two things: a short story and a recipe I learned from a girl in Phnom Penh last year. Both are tastes of Cambodia, and one of them is a hell of a desert to boot.

Before I slip into my apron, channel the ghost of Julia Child, and show you how to make Khmer coconut and pumpkin custard, let me tell you how I learned this amazing bit of cuisine.

She was a girl from Phnom Pehn, the head chef at a small guesthouse run by reformed street kids. She was a little older than the rest, maybe 22, but in a country run by children, her youth didn’t mark her in my eyes. And, as I said, she was the oldest of the lot.

In the early hours of the morning, we met on one of Phnom Penh’s quiet dirt streets. Her long black hair was pulled into a loose bun at the nape of her neck, and she was already laughing when she saw me. The Khmer humor and sense of spirit is amazing and infectious, and I was laughing right along in seconds, at what, I hadn’t a clue.

Hopping a tuk tuk—one of those little 100 cc Honda Citi bikes hooked to trailers and piloted in our case by a grinning man in a crushed fedora—we sped toward the Psar Themei, the central market. The sun had hardly risen, so what few tourists Phnom Penh got were still snoozing beneath the weight of their hangovers, and most of these wouldn’t have much interest in fresh fish and veggies at the crack of dawn anyway.

Psar Themei in the morning is a vastly different place than I had seen the previous days when I had come to pick jackfruit or dragonfruit or just to feel the joy of wandering through another endless Asian market. Only women were out this morning, Khmer to the last one, squatting between endless rows of fruits, strange gourds, and dead chickens, clothes and batteries and everything else that was needed to sustain such short, tropical lives.

We plunged through endless corridors of stalls until we arrived at the seafood guild. Our eyes roved over displays of squirming carp and madly slapping crabs, a world of captives drowning slowly in the air. As we passed each vendor, the fishmongers prodded the creatures to make them wriggle in their shallow metal bowls to prove their freshness. Others needed no such encouragement—behind a stack of crates, a catfish was making a break across the slimy path, heading for the comparative safety of the sewer grates. I paused long enough to watch it vanish through the cracks, but then we were off again. Three, ten, a dozen stalls further, and then the girl stopped at a vendor apparently identical to the rest. She bent at the waist, tilted her head. Each time her eyes fell on a fish, the dark, squatting woman thumped it on the head to make it dance.

With a nod, the girl selected two unknowable eel-like creatures. The fishmonger swiftly severed their heads, pinned the wriggling carcasses between her bare feet, and skinned them in a matter of seconds. Then she wrapped them in newspaper and handed them over. The girl gave the package to me, I handed her a few riels, and we were off again.

Fresh herbs were next, veggies and fruits. Shrimps, tiny bags of spices, a handful of thick, broad leaves from a feral tree in a courtyard—our visit was targeted and purposeful, so it went by fast, too fast in my opinion. Finally, in the end, we had everything except for one thing—a pumpkin. The girl examined dozens of the small green things from as many different vendors, and finally settled on one 8 inches across and about five high, symmetrical, with just a shading of orange creeping into its smooth sides. She stuck it in my hand, and grinned as I paid.

We emerged from the market into a throng of motodops and animals and walkers and kids. We stopped, craning our necks and shielding our eyes from the sun, now an inflamed red on the jagged concrete horizon. Sensing our abandonment, the drivers surged against us like a tide, but then a fedora began to flail overhead in the distance, and all of us were laughing by the time we reached our man.

I’ll spare you the details of Samlau M’choo Yuen (Khmer Sour Fish Soup), Fish Amok (coconut cream and fish on a bed of steamed spinach) and the other amazing things she taught me. I might post them later here, or if you want them, write me at info@davidrozgonyi.com and I’ll email them to you. This is what she did with the pumpkin:

It couldn’t be simpler. She cut the top out like a tiny jack-o-lantern, and scooped out the innards. Then, squatting barefoot on the dirt and concrete floor of the little kitchen, she whisked together 180 grams of plain white cane sugar, a coffee-mug of coconut milk, 4 egg yolks, and a ½ teaspoon of salt. She filled the pumpkin with it, and, with the top off, steamed the whole thing for about an hour. Then she taught me the other recipes while the pumpkin chilled for a few hours, although she mentioned that overnight was best.

At the end of our meal (we ate everything we made, and shared the leftovers with the junior girls, cooks and maids alike), she presented the pumpkin, its top back on like a little elfin hat. It cut as soft and sweet as any birthday cake, the custard yellow velvet, the flesh of the pumpkin sweet and delicious. We ate with small silver spoons, scooping out alternate mouthfuls of creamy coconut custard and pumpkin. It was, without a doubt, the best dessert I’ve ever had.

So, if you’d like to have a taste of Cambodia, get a pumpkin, make the custard, and then, while it firms up in the fridge, read my new story under the “Writing” section entitled “Ta Prohm Procession.” I hope you like them both!

Now all I have to do is remember to find someone to teach me something interesting to cook in Madurai. . . .

Hello and welcome to my very own blog. I mean, notebook. Finally, a place where I can lean back, stretch my legs, and refuse to edit what I write down. A place to post all of the letters to editors that, in the throes of indignation I bang out and then never send. A place to document the weird things that seem to happen to me, like the time I crushed my television after. . . . Or when I came home from Cambodia to discover. . . . You know what, I’ll save those stories for later. Maybe I should introduce myself a little better. The first rule of character development is to make the character identifiable. So here goes.

What can I say that isn’t in my quasi-official biography? I’m twenty-eight. I write fiction, mostly because I love doing it, but I cannot discount the fact that at this point I’m hardly qualified to do anything else. My first book is coming out next year. I travel (now there’s something I can talk about. And I will, at length, ad nauseum, believe it). But what can I tell you that you don’t already know? Well, how about that all of this makes me very nervous, and very scared. Eight hours of bone-shaking, wing-creaking turbulence flying up South America’s spine in an empty 747 puts me to sleep; the thought of the next year keeps me up nights. I can’t tell yet whether it’s fear or excitement. It’s probably both.

And there are many exciting things to come over the next year. I’m going to India. Goat Trees: Tales from the Other Side of the World will come out in April. My publisher’s contest winner will be announced—the Goat Trees Travel Mate contest—and I’ll start planning the trip with him or her or you, that is if you buy the book and write the winning essay telling me where in the world you want to go, and why. Now that’s an amazing thought; I wonder where the winner will want to go. Where would you want to go? Fourteen days in Kenya? Colombia? Indonesia? Mongolia! I can hardly wait. I’ll go around the country meeting people and signing a few books. In between all this, I’ll write a few short stories, and maybe finish a novel I’ve been thinking on for a while about Libya, the country of my birth.

I hope you’ll share these adventures, both big and small. I’ll try and make it worth your while. The photography will be updated from time to time, as will the essays, short pieces, and of course, this diary, which I’ll try to update no less than once a month, but as we writers are notorious flakes, the only promise I can make is that I’ll tell you a good story once in a while. Please check out my friends, too. They’re people I know or have encountered who are doing good work, important work, in a variety of fields—literary art, activism, environmental protection, aid and relief. Our support is required for all of them to continue. Please take a look at what they’re doing, and lend them a hand if you can.

That’s all for now. I’d better get on with some of the productive things writers do, like mowing the lawn or rearranging my bookshelves. Thanks for stopping by my site. And don’t get me wrong—I appreciate it—but the next time I see you, it had better be on the road!

DR, September 1, 2005