Bathing an Elephant

by Jane Spencer 

“Guess what?  I rode an elephant in Nepal!”

My five-year-old grandson was not impressed.  “You rode one of those dirty, smelly things?” He’s very sensitive to unfamiliar odours and textures. 

“Well, we gave her a bath,” I elaborated, over the phone.

Weeks later, I was still thrilled with my visit to Chitwan National Park in Nepal.  The park, located in the terai or subtropical lowlands of the country, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site with a diversity of ecosystems (forests, ox-bow lakes and flood plains), animals (rhinos, sloth bears, deer, crocodiles), and birds (hornbill, kingfishers and peacocks). Elephant numbers there have grown to fifty.  They live in a protected environment in exchange for safari labour, with a guarantee they won’t be transported to zoos or hunted for ivory. 

It was my first safari and my first contact with elephants. Our group of four was guided to a platform with stairs which we took turns mounting, before lowering ourselves into a box frame roped around the elephant’s girth.  The elephant trainer, or mahout, wielded his sharp metal hook and shouted an order, then we were off into the grasslands to search for one-horned rhinos, and maybe, if we were lucky, a Bengal tiger.

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An Alien Universe

by Elyn Aviva

Unwittingly, my husband, Gary, and I walked into an alternative virtual reality. We were surrounded by aliens who looked human. Aliens who spoke a language that sounded like English, but their vocabulary was subtly different. Words like “ROI,” “SEO,” and “hashtags” peppered their speech. 

And they communicated with odd body language. Although they seemed to be talking to each other, they rarely made eye contact. Instead, they stared intently at small, vibrating, hand-held devices with brightly lit screens. And they kept tapping these strange pieces of equipment, sometimes with one finger, sometimes with several, or sometimes with their opposable thumbs. Occasionally, their eyes flicked up from the screen to glance around. But only for a moment.

Into what strange world had we wandered? An international travel bloggers conference in Girona, Catalonia, Spain. It sounded appealing in the invitational email: inexpensive, educational, entertaining—and it included a visit to a castle. AND it was taking place in my adopted home town of Girona, so why not?

In this alternative universe, everything was baffling, including the meaning of words I thought I knew. “Relevant” meant “meeting your fans where they’re at” and “content” meant maximizing your Google indexability (the number of searchable key words in your website or blog). “Service” writing” meant providing information and the rush to publish meant some bloggers are posting not weekly but daily or even hourly. A popular book author was called a “long-form print guy.” “Engagement” referred to how actively engaged your Facebook (or blogsite) fan base is, not to a diamond ring.

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Meeting the Sultan at Topkapi

by John Mole

Editor’s note: The following is by the oldest blogger we have ever published. Actually, he is more than 400 years old. Contributor, John Mole, was so taken by the diary of Thomas Dallam, who, at age 25 was charged with delivering the gift of a self-playing organ and clock from Queen Elizabeth to Sultan Mehmet III of Turkey, that he translated the work into modern English. This post, originally titled ‘The Sultan’s Organ” was written in 1599. It includes what is probably the first ever recoreded glimpse inside the Sultan’s harem by a foreigner. 

I set up the organ in the grandest pavilion of Topkapi palace. Inside was a little apartment. I have never seen the like for carving, gilding, paintwork and varnish. The Sultan had nineteen brothers put to death in there. It was built for the sole purpose of strangling them.

The main hall has two rows of marble pillars. The pedestals are made of brass and double gilt. The walls on three sides only go up to the eaves and the rest is open. But if there is a storm or a gale they can quickly lower cotton hangings that will keep out any kind of weather and just as quickly open them again. The fourth wall is made of porphyry so polished you can see yourself in it. On the floor are rich silk carpets. There are no chairs or tables or benches, only one royal divan. On one side is a pond full of different-coloured fish. 

***

The Sultan came over the water in his golden barge. I was ushered out of the room and the door locked behind me. I heard the Sultan arrive and the loud noise of his retinue. He sat down on his great throne and commanded silence. The Organ began to salute him.  First the clock struck the hour. Then a chime of sixteen bells played a four part melody. Two figures raised silver trumpets to their lips and blew a fanfare. Then the music started with a five part song played twice. At the top of the organ a holly bush full of blackbirds and thrushes sang and flapped their wings. Various other movements amazed the Sultan. He sat down in front of the keyboard and asked the Chief White Eunuch, the Kapi Aga, if he knew anyone who could play it. He said the man who brought it was outside the door. 

“Fetch him here,” said the Sultan.

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Today’s Learning Objective: Kill a Goat

by Laura Fuller

Ron’s blue eyes were bloodshot and watering when he returned to the group.  His cheeks were sunburned, his hair sun-bleached. He shoved his hands in the pockets of his white hooded sweatshirt, an act of 13-year-old toughness.  He and Mary had volunteered to eat the goat’s kidneys, not because they’d wanted to, but because peers’ opinions outweigh adolescent reason. Mary now smiled proudly in a pack of incredulous girls. Ron fought to put the texture of warm, raw goat kidney behind him and move on with his life, but I could see that he was struggling to gain control of his gag reflex.  Kyle offered to walk with him back to the tents, stoically, so as not to make Ron feel weak.  

I watched them walk away, their shadows long in the evening grass, and turned back to the other 20-some seventh-graders, all of them perplexed as to how to receive this cross-cultural gift. They were outlined against a horizon of royal blue Tanzanian sky, high above tufts of trees and shrubs on the rocky terrain below. The high rocks on which we stood began to glow reddish in the setting sun. This, I predicted, was both the height and the conclusion of my short, ridiculous teaching career in Dubai.  

The kids had all chosen to observe the ritual slaughter of this goat, not wanting to be cowardly among the courageous or rude to the Maasai guides.  After sixteen hours of Serengeti driving from the nearest city, we were lucky to have the Maasai patrolling our campsite’s perimeter every fifteen minutes at night to ensure our safety.  They silently taught our students to carve spears and showed us the soft cave in the bush where they held their councils. 

The seventh-graders, from Dubai – who actually came from all over the planet – were upper-class, elite, and as such, polite and appreciative. They were first inquisitive: goat slaughter? And then horrified: goat slaughter. 

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A Woman Like a Fort on Sullivan's Island

by Cinelle Ariola Barnes

My husband always tells me that I am strong.  Apparently, it is partly why he married me.  He thinks that there is an unwavering soundness to my soul, and he reminds me of that each day – on both calm and stormy ones.  Sometimes I challenge him, dare him, to put his finger on that which makes me so.  And every time, he says, “I can't quite pin-point it, but it is there. It's just something and it is there.”

I never understood. For the six years we've known each other, I've staunchly refused to see the opposite of my frailty.

On a warm July day this past summer, my back tanned in the Carolina sun and my legs lay comfortably on salt-and-pepper sand. My toes just touched  the hem of the sea; it was warm, like bath water.  In my hand was an Anne Lammott book. I had no real intentions of reading it. I sat, feeling blessed by the chance to read.  My husband built a sandcastle for our daughter, but she didn't care because she was only eight months old.  Instead, she raked the sand with her dainty fingers and ate it.  Every twenty minutes or so, my husband checked back in with me, for a drink fresh from our monogrammed cooler, or a reapplication of sunscreen. 

This was normal protocol for family day in Sullivan's Island.  This is what we do there – on Saturdays, Sundays, Church days, lazy Tuesdays and on days when friends or family visit.  It is our lather-rinse-repeat. Our very own ritual, the one that never gets old.  It is our stay-cation itinerary, the one that allows us to vacate our life while still playing in our own backyard.  We go there often, no matter the weather.  This casual, unhurried beach captivates us.  It is no tropical paradise but, to borrow my husband's words, there is something there. Strength, I think, is what he calls it. 

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Genuine or Hoax? Visiting a Crop Circle Formation at Avebury, England

by Elyn Aviva

The news rippled through our group like a breeze through a wheat field: a crop circle had just been spotted! According to a crop circle blog, it had appeared only two days earlier, on the side of Windmill Hill, close to Avebury, in southern England. We were told it was still fresh and relatively untrammeled. Even better news was that we were nearby, since our group was visiting sacred sites in the area—including Stonehenge, Glastonbury, and Avebury, site of the largest stone circle in the UK. 

Crop formations usually occur in fields of ripe cereal grains. They appear all over the world but are most prevalent during July and August in the Wiltshire district of southern England. The complex patterns range in size from just a few feet across to over 900 feet, although the average is about 200-300 feet in diameter, and they vary in elements from a few to over 400. The designs may be circular (hence “crop circle”) or based on other geometrical forms (hence “crop formation”). 

They are controversial. Some researchers believe they are encoded messages from either Gaia/Earth or ET/the Cosmos; others believe they are hoaxes perpetrated by tricksters. They may be a relatively recent occurrence, first documented in 1976 in the UK, or they may be much, much older. I’d been reading about them for years, but I’d never seen one—and never walked inside of one. I was excited at the prospect.

Before setting out, our guide, Jude Currivan, showed us a tantalizing diagram of the crop formation. It looked like a huge, blunt-ended sword, pale gold cut into the middle of a field of dark ripe grain. Jude promptly christened it “Excalibur” and called it “the sword of truth.”

The sword blade was composed of 16 overlapping circles. Each overlap formed a geometrical figure called a vesica piscis or mandorla, which is often found in sacred art. Extending through the center of the circular handle and out the top were 10 circles in increasing and decreasing sizes. The handle incorporated both a disk (representing the sun?) and a crescent (representing the moon?).

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