I wrote yesterday how last week’s day trip to Wellington gave me the opportunity to check out The Beehive, #3 on VirtualTourist.com’s list of World’s Ugliest Buildings.

 But the real reason for I was in Wellington was to check out the Kuru Pounamu: The Treasured Stone exhibition over at The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, located on Wellington’s shoreline. This exhibition is a collection of more than 200 traditional and contemporary pounamu taonga (greenstone treasures) from not only from Te Papa‘s own collection but also from private collections from around the country.

Pounama taonga are an integral part of Maori culture and history. All you have to do is read the whakapapa (geneology) that is offered for some of the objects on display to discover that these greenstone treasures are directly linked to individuals and incidents in New Zealand history.

No one knows  exactly when Maori discovered pounamu, otherwise known as New Zealand nephrite or greenstone. But excavation at archaeological sites around New Zealand have established that it was widely extracted and used in the 1500s.

Tribes throughout New Zealand transformed it into taongo (treasures) ranging from weapons to jewellery. As a weapon, it was used as both a peacemaker and as an instrument of war.

It also has a profoundly spiritual force and is consider to reflect individual and collective mana.  

This Te Papa exhibition features a wide collection of these pounamu taonga, ranging from an impressive wall display of hei tiki (pendants in human form) to ear pendants, carving tools, and weapons.

Anyone interested in New Zealand’s Maori culture and history will enjoy this exhibition.

(Kuru Pounama: The Treasured Stone of New Zealand exhibition runs until February 2011. Free entry)

A recent day trip to Wellington, New Zealand’s capital city, resulted in a visit to The Beehive. It wasn’t a planned stop, but on the way to the airport, I had heard the radio newcaster report that this oddly named parliamentary building, where the politicians decide on the country’s policies,  had just made  the annual ‘World Ugliest Building’s’ list compiled by VirtualTourist.com.

Ranking it the world’s third ugliest building, VirtualTourist.com wrote…

“A slide projector that fell on a wedding cake that fell on a waterwheel is one description of this building known as “The Beehive.” Built primarily during the ‘70s, its proximity to the neighboring Edwardian neo-classical Parliament House only accentuates its unattractiveness.”

That sounded a little extreme, so I decided to check it out for myself.

Opposite the railway station and on the airport bus route, The Beehive is easy to find.  And it was a hive of activity, with tour groups wandering around the gardens and sitting on the steps of the Parlimentary Buildings. Locals and tourists alike were sitting on the grass, shaded by huge trees, and enjoying coffee or a bite of lunch.

All in all, it was a pretty pleasing place to be.

Despite the VirtualTourist.com description, I didn’t find The Beehive all that ugly.

Of course, if you took away…

…all the grass and trees

 …the connecting buildings,

…and the blue sky and sunshine,

this is all you would see…

Then , I suppose, The Beehive might be considered somewhat cold and ugly.

But, I guess in the end, it really is a case of ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder.’

As always, this week in November, with its turkeys, cranberry sauce, and expressions of thanks has Americans thinking not just of food or Christmas shopping, but of the little town in Massachusetts we all learned about every year as schoolchildren: Plimouth (or Plymouth) Plantation, where the first Thanksgiving was held amid starvation, fear, cold, and the unexpected generosity of the original Pilgrims’ native Wampanoag neighbors.

I wrote about visiting the living museum village of Plymouth last year in Thanksgiving Myth and Legend at Plymouth Plantation. This year I’m reminded of the journey that brought the Pilgrims to the New World, and the ship they sailed: the Mayflower.

If you’re not American, you can have no idea of the level of national myth that surrounds that name: Mayflower. Almost every schoolchild has been taught that this one moment, the bumping of the Mayflower against the New World’s shore and the first step onto Plymouth Rock is, frankly, when America was born. In the past 20 years, perhaps, this awareness has changed to acknowledge that other people had claim to the land first, and that “America,” like any other country, is only an idea that has little to do with the soil over which its borders are spread. And the Pilgrims certainly weren’t paragons. Their own society could be oppressive and narrow-minded.

None of this changes the fact that the Pilgrims do still seem, in this day and age of comfort travel, incredibly brave, setting out on a journey in a wimpy little vessel in the name of religious freedom. Passengers numbered 102, with a crew of 25-30, set sail from Southampton, England, in September 1620, aiming for the Hudson River. Wiggling off course, they ended up in Cape Cod Bay in November, not a great place to spend the winter even now, at least not without central heating. The passengers remained aboard ship for the winter, where half of them and half the crew perished largely due to contagious diseases. In the spring, the 53 remaining passengers began to build their new homes in the new — to them — world.

The original Mayflower was broken up and sold for scrap within the next few years. But the Mayflower II was commissioned a few decades ago to mimic the feel and experience of the original ship the Pilgrims lived and died on. It sits anchored at Plymouth, near the little rock marking the 1620 landing site, where two carefully maintained footprints represent those supposed first steps in their new home.

It’s a lovely ship to scramble over, with both role players and modern-day guides mixing to give visitors a sense of the Pilgrims’ experience, and to answer historical and nautical questions. My English in-laws were delighted with the tour, although we all grumbled at bit at the admission price of $10 each for adults. To them, it was worth it.

Oddly, for me, it was not the knowledgeable guides but those same English in-laws who managed to make the Mayflower II visit into something that opened my eyes and changed my perspective. When she got off the ship, my mother-in-law’s first comment was, “It’s amazing how much room they had, for each family.” Room? Those cramped spaces? “It’s absolutely spacious,” she said, “when I think about the potato famine boats we visited in Ireland, and how everyone was just stacked up one against another with no room at all.”

Yet another reason getting a different perspective from someone in another country is so vital to our human experience: in all the years of learning American history and making idiotic paper turkeys and Indian Chief headdresses in elementary school, and learning about that first horrible winter and the hungry faces at the first Thanksgiving, nobody ever emphasized the idea that those original Pilgrims were, for their time, financially well off.

“It has been a while since you stayed with us, Ms. Wellner,”

That’s how the email began.

“It has been a while since we had the pleasure of welcoming you to The Taj Mahal Palace & Tower, Mumbai. Is it that your travels haven’t brought you to Mumbai? Or, have we fallen short somewhere, for which you haven’t been back?”

I received this message on May 19th, 2009 –  just under six months after the terrorist attacks that began on 11/26/2008.  At the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower , fifty-two people were murdered.  I stayed at that hotel about eight months earlier. My room was facing the harbor in the “heritage wing”, which is more than a century old.

You know those rooms,  or at least their exterior, since the terrorists made them their particular target. Those were the rooms that  you saw on television, in flames. They were were not a part of the hotel’s triumphant reopening less than a month later, which was celebrated by high tea that was attended by one thousand of Mumbai’s elite.

The email was sent by the hotel’s director of sales, and it was a mass email,  with the opportunity to safe unsubscribe at the bottom. It continued:

“Please let us know – we would be delighted to do anything we can to help you choose us again when next you are in Mumbai.”

I first arrived in Mumbai at about 11 p.m., on a direct flight from New York. Through a break in what I thought were clouds, but I figured out the next day was smog, I saw what looked like white holiday lights strung up in the street, and then people, hundreds and thousands of people, streaming, dancing. I speculated that there was some sort of a national holiday, a street fair. As the plane descended, I saw that it was just a street and people walking around, shopping, eating – a usual weeknight in this city. Greaves India had arranged my trip and for a car to collect me and bring me to the hotel. The driver inched his way through traffic of all kinds – cars, buses, people, animals — moving at every angle. In the yellowish tinge of night, there were flashes of bright color, horns honking constantly into the burnt air, with blasts of garlic, bug spray, exhaust.  I peeled off my denim jacket, it was nearly 90 degrees and humid. We drove past the Cama Hospital for Women and Children, outside people were sitting cross-legged on the pavement, others unrolling bedrolls nearby, getting ready to sleep. I resolved that I would not get sick on this trip.

After an hour or so, we arrived at the Taj.

I walked up the carpeted steps of the hotel, my bags were seen to. I was brought straight to my room where I was checked in.  I dined in the hotel that night, my heels clattering on the white marble floor. After dinner, as I walked passed darkened boutiques. I had difficulty finding my room again, there were two corridors on either side of the stair case that looked exactly a like to me, and I only realized I’d picked the wrong one when I clattered down to the end of the wrong hall, and back again. That night, I leaned out the window and looked at the scaffolded Gateway to India – under repair from damage sustained in a 2003 terror attack, I’d heard.  In front of the harbor wall, I saw taxi drivers stretched out on the hood of their cars. I saw elaborate horse-drawn carriages, decorated with flashing lights.

I woke up early the next morning and went straight to the window. The taxi men were gone, there were now vendors selling nuts,  bright yellow and pink balloons, as groups of young women in white head scarves and blue tunics walked by. The gray water was now filled with boats with wide decks, tightly packed with people, who would scramble off onto ramps and then onto the sidewalk. And there were pigeons, and black birds I couldn’t identify, and always the sound of cars honking, honking. I didn’t know where to look first.

It was a relief to pull back into my room, which was white and cool and calm.

It hasn’t seemed decent to say so recently, but I really didn’t like Mumbai very much. Well “didn’t like” isn’t exactly accurate, I found it disturbing, with the interstitial slums threading through Rolls Royce dealerships and jamming up against country clubs, and the children rapping on the window of cars and pointing to their mouths begging for food, and other children selling audio books by Amartya Sen, while shriveled people with limbs going in every direction hovered, against the hypnotic bright flashes of saris.  I grew up in New York and I love cities, the larger the better, and I feel more at home in an urban environment than I ever will in the country. My travels have brought me to the developing world, before, and since. But I couldn’t get my bearings in Mumbai.  And every time I thought I did, I quickly lost my grasp.

For example, one afternoon, I was strolling in the tony gardens around Malabar Hill, taking in the sun and the flowers, and the flashing views of the harbor, I felt the muscles in my shoulders relax. Our guide was a gentle man named Dobash, who reminded me of my father in law. He was a professor before he retired and took up as a guide to stay busy. He was always teaching lessons.

At some point he asked me to look up, where birds were tracing idyllic circles overhead. The Parsis, he explained, do not bury or cremate their dead, they “expose” them in an open structure. We were near the Parsi Tower of Silence.  He explained: Men’s bodies to be arranged in an outer ring, women in the center, children in the middle. Vultures eat the bodies, the bones are bleached by the sun and eventually dissolved by lime. He pointed up. Those birds, he said, were vultures.  The sun suddenly seemed too harsh, and the bright flowers ominous. We are carrion.

Another morning, I had a business meeting, and we met at Aquarius, the hotel’s casual restaurant in the courtyard. We sat looking out onto the clear blue pool and the white scalloped wall covered in bright pink blossoms, and the conversation floated easily enough. After a while, the subject turned to the upcoming US election, and,  then casually, the woman I was meeting with told me that she hates the Pakistanis with a passion. I must have looked startled, so she quickly added that she was from a military family. A little while later, she also told me that she had a first pregnancy that ended in a full term still birth, and then she discussed how, in her view, World War III would start soon.  Everything always descends into chaos, she said. I had another sip of ice tea and watched the fountain burbling into the pool.

“We thought of writing to you, to let you know a little about all that has been happening at the hotel. The iconic Sea Lounge is now open; and so are most of your favourite restaurants – the Zodiac Grill, Souk, Masala Kraft, Harbour Bar… you can enjoy the Golden Dragon menu at Shamiana, till the restaurant reopens, while Wasabi by Morimoto continues to delight its patrons with its gourmet Japanese food on the roof-top, overlooking the Gateway of India. You can also shop for your favourite luxury brands at the hotel’s sprawling shopping arcade, offering some of the world’s most exclusive brands.”

The chaos of those days of terror in Mumbai are now resolving into a narrative. The Virgina Quarterly Review just published an extraordinary four-part series on it,  HBO is airing an equally gripping documentary called Terror in Mumbai. Like everyone else, I watched the news as it unfolded live on TV last year, and naturally,  like everyone else, I was totally shocked. But it is was only when I watched the documentary, which included the security camera footage from the Taj on the night of 11/26/08 that I realized something else: I was not surprised.

The security cameras recorded the gunmen as they moved through the same halls as I had, as they reared back to the banisters and kicked open doors.  They also recorded the gunmen, slightly dazed, as they walked into the courtyard by the pool and past the very table where I sipped iced tea, and they opened fire.

I never felt in danger at any time at the Taj, in fact, quite the opposite — it felt like a place of refuge from a city that I felt consumed by. But what I saw in the HBO documentary –  the gunfire and the bodies and the fact that the traffic kept moving outside even as the massacre continued — none of it seemed implausible.

I realized the source of my discomfort in Mumbai had been this thin layer of dread, lying just beneath the surface. But it wasn’t the dread, really, that discomfited me, it was that the dread was neither ignored, denied, or directly acknowledged. Just as the email from the Taj never once acknowledged the attacks that happened on its ground, while it politely wondered why I had not been to stay recently.

“We look forward to hearing from you, to welcoming you to our hotel. Please feel free to write to me at xxx@tajhotels.com. With best regards…”

I plan to return to Mumbai as soon as possible.

A review of Something to Declare: Good Lesbian Travel Writing, edited by Gillian Kendall. University of Wisconsin Press, 2009.

I was at travel writing conference not long ago, and the cocktail conversation eventually (and inevitably) turned to the question of what made a good nonfiction narrative.  Opinions abounded, but one guy – who happened to be an editor at a major newspaper’s travel section – said that travel narratives fail when they’re overly focused on the writer. What he wanted, he said, was to walk away from a story knowing more about the destination than the person who wrote it.

I, along with the assembled, sagely nodded.  But I’ve been turning it over in my head ever since, and I’d like to amend my nod: while travel writers, as a class, can be an amazingly dull bunch, there are plenty of writers who are at least as interesting as a destination, sometimes more so. Travel writing exists somewhere in the magnetic tension between two poles: that of place and that of the person who is traveling. There’s no one point of perfect balance; it shifts on a case-by-case basis.

In the pantheon of great travel writing, there are pieces where the writer as a character is hard to detect, concealed partially or entirely in the cloak of objectivity. Travel writing itself began in this way, as an essential means of transmitting basic information about terra incognita – for instance, see Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus. Or Mark Twain. I’ve recently been re-reading Twain’s travel writing, and while it certainly holds up, he obviously expects his story to be an introduction to the destination he’s visiting, spending many perfect sentences describing the exact shade of the white that is the houses in Bermuda, for instance.

Twain was publishing in the 1860s and 70s, and in the following decades, more of the world became known, and traveled, and written about, and the task of a travel writer changed. By the early 20th century, readers needed less basic information — guidebooks had emerged to handle that task anyway –and more in the way of something deeper, more personal. (By then, as now, even if a reader hadn’t been to Bermuda, they’d become familiar enough with the concept of a subtropical island to disqualify description as depth.)

So, in 1905, when Edith Wharton published her travel book, Italian Backgrounds, she summarized the situation perfectly: “Italy is a foreground and a background. The foreground is the property of the guidebook…the background that of the dawdler, the dreamer, the serious student of Italy,” which is to say, herself. But not only herself, Wharton implies: the foreground and the background work together. The place illuminates the person, the personal story illuminates the place.*

The personal story takes precedence in many contemporary anthologies of travel writing, whether they’re focus on the work of writer, or a particular type of writer. Among these, there’s a new offering Something to Declare: Good Lesbian Travel Writing, edited by Perceptive Travel contributor Gillian Kendall.

The punning title implies that the stories in this book could be slap-your-palm-on-the-customs-counter strident — in contrast, a book of gay male travel writing from the same publisher is entitled Wonderlands – but the very fine stories gathered here are not argumentative. Something to Declare is an engaging collection of deeply felt, unapologetically personal pieces. These tales are searches for soul, for answers and for meaning in the most intimate of relationships that happen to take place in a setting that is elsewhere.

There are a number of stories here that achieve that magical balancing act between person and place, where the place illuminates the personal and vice versa. Among these, “Hot Springs, Montana”, by Lori Soderlind, which deftly paints a picture of a not-often visited part of the United States, while exploring the ideas we have about the sort of people that live there, and what she hoped to gain by hanging out with them. “Oaxaca”, by Suzanne Parker, tells the story of a fraught return trip with her current lover to the city she’d visited with a previous one; “Wind”,  by Tzivia Gover, which is a close observation of a closeted Japanese lesbian couple.

As well, there are  pieces in the anthology that tilt so far towards the personal that I’m not sure they can be properly characterized as travel writing. For instance, “What Happens After This Day”, by Hannah Tennant-Moore, is the engrossing story of an intense love affair, woven in with a finely drawn narrative of a time spent at a Buddhist monastery in India — but the point of the story isn’t really the monastery, it’s the love affair. In “You Can Take Me to the Shrine, But You Can’t Make Me Pray”, there’s vivid description of Mexico City and its Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, but the story is really about a woman struggling with the idea of compromise and making a lifetime commitment to a partner and perhaps to motherhood. In “Shopping”, by Laura Sanders, the setting is dressing rooms in Italy, but the subject is –well, clothes shopping — and a woman’s sexuality. These are all excellent personal essays – and yes, they involve travel — but the place itself is a mere backdrop for the personal drama, not an essential part of the story. These stories could easily be set in other places without doing any damage to the overall meaning.

In fairness, we’re prepared for the fact that definitions will be fuzzy. In her introduction, Kendall questions every word in the book’s subtitle except “good”, She writes that she had a clear idea of the definition of “lesbian”, before she started on the project, but as she sorted through submissions, certainty wavered. What makes a lesbian a lesbian? She received stories with no reference to sexuality or orientation, submissions from a transgendered woman who was born male, from a lesbian in a heterosexual relationship. “As editor, did I need to be…policing the definition of “women” as well as “lesbian”? She settled the issue by skirting it: “I decided that my responsibility was not to create exclusive definitions, but just find stories with heart.”

Who could blame her for that? The result is that many of the writers in this collection do not make their sexual orientation a particular issue in one way or another; it’s a simple fact about their lives that informs their outlook and their stories. As well, while the stories in the collection do not shy away from sex, but neither is sex inserted gratuitously. And that’s all for the better, I think.

Kendall also questions the genre of writing that she’s curating: “What [is] “travel writing” anyway? Must it be about an exotic destination, a foreign culture, or could these stories be about a return to home after a long time away?” Again, she punts: “[I] quit trying to determine how far one had to go to “travel”, and settled instead on choosing the stories that let me know the narrator’s heart.” This explains why there are many fine stories in Something to Declare where place is less integral than it ought to be in a book of travel writing.

There’s one other essential criteria for this anthology that’s left fuzzy, and it’s the one that troubles me the most: the distinction between fiction and nonfiction. In the introduction, we learn that there’s one work of pure fiction in the book — I assume it’s the piece labeled “story”. But there are two other pieces in the anthology where we’re privy to the central character’s thoughts, and the central character’s name is different than the writer’s, and so it’s unclear what the writer’s intent is towards the truth – could it be a deft piece of reportage? A partial fiction? Or is this the work of a transgendered writer, a memoir in the persona of her former gender? This speculation is a disorienting, and ultimately a distraction from an anthology that otherwise offers so much to admire.

*My source on the history of travel writing is the essential Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing.