Good Morning Lowcountry

Glasgow

Many people by now have had six-degrees, or one-degree, or even immediate experience with international terrorism. A friend of mine was in Tel Aviv airport in 1972 when the terminal was sprayed by automatic gunfire from terrorists, killing dozens of people and injuring more; she saw the attack. Many of us know someone who knew someone who died in New York, or D.C., or Pennsylvania, on 9/11.A niece was working on Pennsylvania Avenue on 9/11 and drove past the Pentagon to take a co-worker home. Another niece flew out of London the day after the Lockerbie bombing of PanAm Flight 103 in 1988.

Tuesday, I walked across the brick crosswalk across the road, under the rain canopy in the middle of the street and into the glass entrance doors of Glasgow Airport in Scotland to fly home to Charleston. Saturday, I watched on TV in amazement the flame-engulfed Jeep that terrorist attackers rammed into those doors, closing the airport and stranding hundreds of passengers in planes on the tarmac for the next 6 hours or so.

(AP Photo/ Alistair Robertson)

Because of closed-circuit TV security cameras in public places (4.2 million of them), Britain has a longer pattern of vigilance and citizen alertness than the United States. Citizen alert couldn't have stopped that Jeep from Glasgow Airport's doors. It's one of the few airports situated directly on a busy street. The Holiday Inn where I spent the previous night is right across the street. We has a short walk from the hotel to the airport with our luggage. It was like going from, say, Gaillard Auditorium, to the nearest edge of Marion Square. But Brits are much more conscious of danger and much more likely to report suspicious activity or even a car parked illegally.

Scotland ... the brave

I have not been there in a bunch of years.

But in June, my sister and I are traveling to England and Scotland (our auld sod, seat of Clan McLeod at Dunvegan Castle on the Isle of Skye in the Outer Hebrides). I've been there. The castle was built around 1100 and has been home to the chieftain of the clan continuously since. It's typically medieval ... stone walls, very thick; a moat (not kidding); a drawbridge over the moat; a basement dungeon that has a flood gate to the loch it sits on (they chained the prisoner to the walls and then let the tide in --  not kidding. Their other favorite thing was to run the enemy into a cave then build a fire at the entrance and smoke 'em to death -- these were clan wars); various things that have been in the family since the Crusades; portraits of various McLeod men (chiefs) on the walls that bear a spooky resemblance to our father and our brother. The Isle of Skye, when I was there, contained a lot of sheep.

I will also get a huge kick out of seeing Edinburgh again, a great city topped by the castle on a cliff.  I worked there for a summer at a place called the New Club on Princes Street, a gentleman's dinner club of the old order. I think it was called the New Club because they changed locations in about 1846 or something. I can't remember. The dining room was dominated by wall-sized oil portraits of Albert and Victoria. Once a month or so they had a "Bar and Barrister Dinner" with lawyers and judges who wore kilts.

(KRT PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF THE BALMORAL HOTEL AND ROCCO FORTE HOTELS: The venerable clock tower atop the Balmoral Hotel in  Edinburgh, Scotland.)

We Hoovered the huge Persian run in the dining room every day. We polished the silver every day by turns, forks Monday, knives Tuesday. There were 8 or 9 pieces of sterling flatware at every place. Sometimes 10 -- fish fork, prawn fork, desert fork, desert spoon, fish knive, meat knife, butter knife, cheese knife, etc. This was a place where a man peeled and ate an apple (Golden Delicious was a favorite) with a knife and fork.

This was an exclusive place where members were members only because their great-great grandfathers had been members, and titled nobility came to eat. The Duke of Edinburgh had been in the day before I started. I think I met a few Lords and stuff, but we really were discouraged from speaking to the members or speaking at all. I was trained by Isa McLeod, who had worked there as a server for 53 years.

I learned a lot about haggis, Scotch eggs, gooseberries and cream, Stilton, and the class system. I learned how to serve a Welsh Rarebit from a sterling silver box. I learned that old British warriors like Commander Haig-Ferguson eat stewed prunes for breakfast. I lived there and was paid, in addition to room and board, 10 pounds a week. I learned proper service but not very well. I was fired by Miss Twiddle (not kidding) for asking 2 couples (on lady's night) to blow out their candle when they were finished. (I wanted to leave and get to the pub before it closed.) Miss Twiddle (that was her name) said and I quote, "You'll have to go, Harriet. This is the finest club in all Scotland and possible the finest club in all Britain. People do not come here to blow out their own candles."

It was previously unheard-of for an American to work there, anyway.

My sister and I leave June 12 for London.

Borneo!

While I have only dreamed of such places and read about them, friends Bill Altice and Deborah Boschen (from Virginia, USA) are traveling now in Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand (where they were married a few years ago by a Buddhist monk) and Borneo.

Bill, who used to be an ad copywriter, is an excellent writer. Here's his very informative and entertaingin post from the Other Side of the World:

"Every one of our overly ambitious itineraries includes
a whole day lost to travel somewhere along the line.
One small glitch and our intricate schedule explodes
in our face...

"On Thursday, we drove three hours back from Halong
Bay, picked up our bags at the hotel and raced another
half-hour to the airport outside Hanoi to find that
AirAsia had rescheduled

(A Penan woman and her child wash themselves in their Patik village's only clean water supply, in Sarawak, Borneom, July 20, 2001. The Penan are among the world's most isolated communities. About 9,000 live in tiny settlements in the mountains of northeast Sarawak, Malaysia's largest chunk of Borneo island. Vincent Thian/AP)

our flight two hours later than we'd expected.

"Bang!

"We had hoped to land early enough in the evening in
Kuala Lumpur to have a look around and to make a trip
the following morning to the Petronas Tower, the
world's tallest building, to cap off our "Top of SE
Asia" tour, but instead, we arrived around 3 am after
an hour-long ride into the city, by bus and taxi and
finished the long day drinking Tiger beers from the
mini-bar while watching a documentary about Vietnamese
herbal medicine.

"By the time we dragged ourselves out of bed the
following morning, showered and ate breakfast, we
barely had time for the long ride back out to the
airport to catch the next plane.

"Our cabdriver kindly pointed out the Petronas Tower as
we cruised the freeway at 80 miles an hour while he
played the "Best of John Lennon" for us.

"SIDEBAR: The ugly, culture-killing, dual-pointed
spearhead of Globalization is comprised of 1) the
over-produced and inescapable Power Ballad (think Bon
Jovi and it's ilk) and 2) the pervasive, though
sometimes amusing (especially fashion-wise), influence
of Hip-Hop (Google "Bathing Ape," for instance.)

"We left KL headed for Borneo and somewhere over the
South China Sea, I looked out my window and saw below
us a sky full of vertical cloud towers, tufted at the
top, all of which seemed to have been pulled up
through a precisely-spaced gridwork, like needlepoint,

(Pygmy elephants cross a road in Taliwas forest in Malaysia's Sabah state on Borneo Island. Vincent Thian/AP)

receding in perfect placement all the way to the horizon.

  
"Our hotel's drivers picked us up at the airport and
drove us down the coast from Kota Kinabalu, the
capital of Sabah (Malaysian Borneo) about ten miles to
our beachside destination. The sky was clear and blue,
the temperature was in the 80's and a strong breeze
off the ocean made the palm trees swish and whisper.

"Our "chalet," as they called it turned out to be
exactly what we'd hoped for: a raised, one-room,
wooden house with a porch on the front, ceiling fans
indoors and out and an air-conditioner with a croaking
lizard in it.

"We dropped our gear, held hands and walked down to the
beach to watch the big red sun drop into the sea --
and discovered, to our horror, that the sand was
covered with trash.

"The Aussie hotel manager, Shelley, told us that the
local infrastructure has been overwhelmed by the
presence of illegal immigrants from the Philippines,
Indonesia and Bangladesh, but we suspect that public
education and a fledgling tourist industry have a lot
of catching up to do, as well.

"In this area, the water at the beach is so shallow
though, that you can walk out a half a mile or more
almost anywhere and in order to really swim, you have
to catch a boat out to an island several miles
offshore.

"Which is exactly what we did the following day and
ended up alone on our own beach, next to a wide lagoon
that was open on the seaward side and ringed with
jungle.

"We were alone on a beach on a beautiful day in BORNEO.

Vietnam

The Vietnam War is a painful subject for me. My brother John served there for 13 months and was there during the Tet Offensive. I remember his being there as a time of family crisis, the war being piped into the den every night by television, the shock, the fear, my parents' grief and worry.

My brother came home whole from Vietnam and never looked back. But he also did not eat Vietnamese food or have any desire to return to Vietnam ... ever ... as a tourist.

After decades of associating Vietnam only with the tragedy of the war, I've had several friends who've traveled to Vietnam and one who lived and worked in Hanoi for years. This month three friends are in Vietnam. One woman and her boyfriend are there for a few months to make a documentary film. A Vietnam veteran is returning as a tourist. And a couple from Virginia are there as tourists now. Here's what the Virginians wrote about

"Uncle Ho's Place." ...

"The "tropical" weather here in Hanoi dropped into the
upper 50's yesterday, but we bundled up and caught a
cab to Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum right after breakfast
and spent almost all of the rest of day walking around
the city.

"The Ho Chi Minh Experience made the trip here richly
extra-dimensional. The manicured garden park setting,
the stylized Communist architecture, the astoundingly
surreal museum and (yikes!) Uncle Ho himself, all laid
out and lit up inside a glass box like a haunted house
display will stay with us forever.

"After checking our cameras, we queued through the
mausoleum with a great throng of natives, but were
pulled out of line to have our bags checked for a
second time, after the initial x-rays, simply because
we're Westerners and because the whole world is afraid
of being blown up now, it seems.

"Once inside, we filed closely down a ramp in the dark
room and walked around three sides of the spooky
sepulchre, hurried along by military guides and
shooshed for speaking to each other. Guards in full
ceremonial uniform, complete with rifles and fixed
bayonets, stood at rigid and unblinking attention in
the shadows on each corner, staring straight ahead.

"We then passed through the grounds and around a small
lake where he lived and worked in the Fifties and were
able to gaze upon his two "used cars" -- one a Puegot,
the other unrecognizable -- and his appropriately
sparse living quarters and study areas.

"Then we bought souvenirs: a book in English that's a
stilted translation outlining Ho's prodigious
achievements on this very site, handsome and stylish
pictures of the man at different ages, a very cool
military hat (wait 'til you see me) and, yes,
T-shirts.

"At the end of the walk was the monolithic museum,
which, once inside, immediately floored us both in
every aspect of its unusually ambitious design and
layout. We were both awed completely and were deeply
engaged with the top-floor-to-bottom historical
timeline when the museum suddenly closed for lunch.
Bang, goodbye, come back in two hours.

"We spent the afternoon strolling home, first along the
broad boulevards of the embassy area and and past the
statue of Lenin, captured as always in fiery oration,
before turning down into the real living, teeming city
and finding our way back to the Old Quarter one block
at a time.

 Tourists gather around a display of American bombs at the Army museum in Hanoi in 2000.  Vietnam's attitude toward the war has evolved from a propaganda vehicle for the communist party to a lure for tourism. Richard Vogel/AP

"The population of Hanoi lives, eats, buys and sells on
the sidewalks, all day long. Most the time you have to
walk in the street, being as wary as you can of
traffic, because parked motorbikes and
commerce-in-progress of some kind or other prohibits
anything else.

"And the deeper neighborhoods are usually segregated by
a specific kind of trade. As I recall, in sequence, we
passed through the lighting area, the motorbike
seatcover area, the herb and spice area, the bamboo
intersection (bongs to ladders), and the toy area
before we found our way back to the streets around the
lake that cater specifically to tourists.

"After three days, we've decided that once you plunge
into the beehive here and get used to it all, Hanoi
starts to actually feel cozy in its craziness and the
people are friendly and always willing to attempt
to communicate with you (especially with a calculator).

"Unlike the smooth and beautiful features of the
Japanese and the Thais, the Vietnamese look more
Chinese to us and seem to have sharper, more
pronounced features -- and almost anyone off the
street would make an interesting subject to
photograph.

"Later in the evening, we had expensive Lychee
cocktails by the pool at the fancy, hundred-year old
French Colonial Metropole Hotel (thank you, Mary),
then ate dinner and packed for Halong Bay."

Circumnavigation sans argent

You've read about local bikers J. Hite, Andrew Norton and Rodger Willis's  trip around the world in the print version of GMLc. They're also blogging it at dualsportdiary.com. Their goals: "1. To ride our motorcycles round the world starting April 29th, 2006. 2. To use only couchsurfing and camping along the way." J. says on the blog: "What better way to come up with great stories than going around the world with no money?"
 

Here's an update from J.'s father, Arnold Hite:

"We heard from J. Saturday evening.  They had crossed into Russia.  They were calling from Kursk.   Kursk is in southwestern Russia about 100 miles from the border with Ukraine.  They report that they were unable to find a pay phone, or find anyone to allow them to use a private phone, anywhere in Ukraine.  I suspect the same will be true in Russia.  They were calling from the used satellite phone J. bought off ebay.  He bought 500 prepaid minutes.  He was unwilling to talk very long but this is what we heard.They had just ridden all night long to arrive in Kursk.  It was morning there and they were having trouble finding a hotel.  They need at least one night in a hotel to validate their visas.  They are very tired.  It was obvious from J.'s voice that they were very tired.  J. eported that their gear is holding up well.  I had asked about the gear because Andrew Norton's father reported a big credit card charge at a motorcycle shop in Ukraine.  We are speculating that it was for new tires.  They are still together.  Hopefully soon they will find a Internet source and take a break."