I hired Daniel to take me on an overnight trek in Kalau. He was an excellent guide, despite indulging in the longest, loudest, most prolonged belching sessions I have ever had the opportunity to share a mountain with.

Daniel’s grandparents arrived in Burma from Kerala in 1890. He has visited India only once, on a two-week holiday, but under Burmese law he is classed as ‘foreign’. Kalau is an old British hill station and has a large population of Indian and Nepali descent, imported as civil servants by the British, who didn’t want to train the Burmese. Over a hundred years later, their descendents are still resented for this former favored status, and are allowed limited freedom of movement and property rights. Perhaps because of this discrimination, the ‘foreigners’ in Kalau have struggled harder to learn English than the ‘natives’. Daniel learned English at Catholic school and from the BBC World Service, and we managed to have good chats as we walked.

He took me to a village school, where seventy or eighty kids sat in a single room, supervised by three teachers. They were divided by age into four groups, and each knot of kids chanted the day’s lessons by rote. Schoolbooks were ancient and scarce, and pencils were donated by the few tourists who passed through. In the middle of the room, the youngest teacher was cutting a child’s hair.
    ‘The parents won’t do it, even though we tell them,’ she explained. ‘Often, we cut fingernails too.’

Among the only teaching materials was a map that the head teacher had made. Burma, divided into regions, each region carefully stuck with a mosaic of representative products. Teak chippings. Tiny paste rubies. Rice grains. Scraps of cloth. Wheat, vegetables, coal. She had rigged a little electrode plate by the names of each province; if you touched it with an old ballpoint, the region would light up on the map. The children had played with it so much that now the battery was dead.

The map had won her a prize at a state competition: three dollars, which she had used to buy ingredients for a meal for the children. She needed to give them incentives to come to school, she explained, as their parents often wanted them to stay at home and help with farming. The oldest child in the room was about nine, the youngest a squalling one-year-old tied to her sister’s back.

As she carefully pointed out the products of each region, Daniel said:
    ‘It is simply amazing that this country is kept so poor.’

Little paper, few pencils, few books. The one gleaming item in the schoolroom was a laminated mission statement that I was to see in every classroom I visited. Though the teachers could barely speak the English they taught, this McKinsey-worthy effort was proudly written in English first, then in bubbly Burmese script.

’Our Mission is to Create a Learning Society to Equip Knowledge Workers for the Information Age.’

The future knowledge workers of Burma chanted the two-times tables. 80% of them will not get to middle school.

Later I tried to explain to Daniel that there were poor people in America too, though the poverty was on a different scale. I told him about a school I’d visited in Brooklyn, where the teacher complained that she’d used her own money to buy a uniform for one little girl, whose father had immediately sold it. He didn’t believe me. How was this possible?
    ‘Well, sometimes people don’t have homes to live in, so they live on the street. Housing and food are very expensive, and if you don’t have a job or a family to take care of you…’
   ’But why don’t they simply take some land and grow food?’
   ’You can’t do that. They don’t have the money to buy land. And they don’t necessarily know how to grow food.’
   ’So all the land is owned by somebody? There is none free to take?’
We pondered this for a while.
   ’It is very strange that people are poor in America,’ he said
   ’Well, it’s very strange that people are poor in Burma, too.’

Daniel brought me to stay at a monastery on top of a hill. The abbot received us with smiles and we had yet more Chinese tea. I had been fed every few kilometers on this trek, and hadn’t yet figured out how to refuse politely. At the monastery, I gorged on lephet, chewy, fermented tea leaves, while Daniel and his ‘boy’ cooked an elaborate meal. I forced down vegetable curry, dahl, fried tofu, and mountain rice, then sat very still as two pints of saliva rushed into my mouth. Daniel and the abbot chatted in Burmese. They had just turned to ask me questions about September 11th when I sprinted for the door, stumbling over a basket of day-old chicks and causing the mother hen to squawk. Outside, I puked heroically.

All night long, the peace of the monastery was broken by retching Dervala. At four a.m., the roosters, gongs, and chanting monks got their own back.

Four monks lived in the hilltop monastery. It was too remote to do a morning alms round, so the villagers brought dry goods up weekly and the monks kept chickens and grew vegetables. Early in the morning they cooked vegetable soup and rice for the day (monks don’t eat after midday). Then they swept, tended the chickens, and carried out various other chores.

The sweet-faced abbot complained that one of the monks, an elderly man, shirked his duties. I wondered if he found them a distraction from sitting meditation or studying Pali scriptures. The abbot snorted. He didn’t meditate either. He was just an old man looking for a more comfortable retirement than his children could provide. All he did was eat and sleep.

This played nicely into Daniel’s low opinion of the Burmese sangha. He was Catholic, and resented the subtle discrimination against non-Buddhist faiths imposed by the regime. He taught me how to pay respect to Buddha figures and monks when we entered a monastery; a complete prostration, three times.
   ’Do you bow like this to every monk?’
   ’No,’ he sniffed ‘Only to good monks who do not drink and smoke and keep women.’

I’ve just finished Air America, an account of the US’s undeclared war in/on Laos (and nothing to do with the Mel Gibson movie). It made me hopping mad. This is what they left behind:

Fifteen westerners had the run of a huge luxury cruiser that set off at dawn and chugged down the Ayerawaddy for eight hours. At first we thought we’d been segregated, then we realized the only locals on the boat were the crew. Burma has so few tourists that I saw the same people at each stop, and here I ticked off several faces in my private game of Falang Bingo. There was a festive atmosphere as we settled into this plush boat after days of chicken buses and dingy guesthouses.

We glided past stupa after golden stupa. The Burmese have no money for roads, schools, or hospitals, but they do not stint on gilding pagodas.

I had never heard of Bagan before visiting Burma, but it rivals Angkor Wat in splendor. (Unfortunately, my appreciation was somewhat blunted by the fact that for the first time on this trip I ended up in a hotel room with a TV. It was hot outside, and it took longer and longer each day to drag myself away from Indonesian MTV and the air-conditioner. Bad tourist!)

Hundreds of huge, perfect temples rise from a plain of misty greenery. Nature and architecture exchange places here, and ancient trees look like upstarts next to thousand-year-old stupas. From a temple roof at sunset, Bagan is a strange enchanted forest, and I half-expected the monuments to slide gently back into the earth as it grew dark.

The temples were built in a 200-year span, at a time when my forebears were illuminating Latin bibles and the English who later colonized both countries were living nasty, brutish, and short lives in the European Dark Ages. The Burmese kings built the monuments of a great civilization, and carefully noted on stone tablets each donation of slaves that fuelled the effort. One tyrant laid down that he should not be able to insert a needle into the spaces between the bricks of the temple he had ordered up: his perfectionism paid off for posterity if not for populism. Bagan reminds you that these were once a conquering people.

And now? Riding my bike down dusty paths to visit out-of-the-way ruins, I was pursued by ragged boys selling cotton paintings of scenes copied from temple art. Most hadn’t sold anything in weeks and they were desperate. They outnumbered the tourists hugely. Beneath the serene elegance of longyis and silky-haired beauty, the Burmese are struggling to buy rice that has gone up in price three-fold in a year. They need dollars to hedge against their frail currency that makes visitors comparatively richer each extra week they stay. Their own Lady, Aung San Suu Kyi, has asked tourists to stay away. But in Bagan they beg us to tell our friends to visit next year.

I finished Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance last week, just fifteen years after I’d first started it and five months since I lugged it from Brooklyn to Bangkok. I have finally earned my backpacker stripes.

It’s somewhat embarrassing to be caught with that battered purple cover at 30, but nevertheless I enjoyed it. I like people who think before they speak, who make things, who care about elegant solutions, though I have none of these characteristics myself. That’s why I’ve always sought the company of engineers, to the point of finagling a career in software despite being academically qualified only to parse medieval Spanish poetry.

When I tried to trade my Zen, the Tam Tam Caf&eacute stood in my way. ‘One for one, same or better quality’ said the notice explaining their book exchange policy. I wanted a Rick Moody, which was in better shape, so I offered a Stendhal as well. No, said the woman at the desk. She held up the Rick Moody.

    ‘We only trade one for one. And have to be same size. This book is more big than your book.’ She showed me that neither of my books was as tall or as thick as hers.
    ‘But I want give you two books in exchange! And mine are in good condition.’
She was adamant. ‘No. Have to be one book, same-same size of big.’

Dammit, Pirsig was right. Nobody understands Quality.

It’s a year ago this week since I started to write here.

Someone had sent me a link to Caterina’s site, and I learned there were people out there that I would want to have a cup of coffee with. This woman’s voice was like that of my favorite email friends, and here she was publishing for the hell of it. Then Paul Ford of Ftrain became my web-writing hero, and I forced him to become real-life friends with me on the strength of being a Brooklyn neighbor. I started to carry a notebook to jot my own scraps of books and subway conversations. Late in the office one night, I set up a Blogger account and sent a trial letter to myself.

Blogger took the friction out of writing: there was no pressure to produce paper-quality material in this disposable medium. No one expected a Harper’s essay, because no one expected anything. I liked having yet another outlet to chat in and I found these daily snippets suited my attention span. Matthew Arnold said the Irish excelled at lyric poetry because we lacked the concentration for the novel form.

My shy experiment was aimed mostly at the people who were already email friends, though I didn’t tell them it was here for a month or two. Then more people stopped by, and I got to know some who linked or wrote. Some I even met in three dimensions. I got back in touch with old friends who live far away, and I sparked a few to start their own sites. This site has been a home of sorts now that I have no fixed address, and the daily ramblings have mounted up into a personal history. I feel well-rewarded for a small effort.

So thank you for visiting. I’m glad you’re here.

I would live all my life in nonchalence and insouciance, were it not for making a living, which is rather a nouciance.
— Ogden Nash

It rained for days on end in Hanoi. This was not monsoon rain, whose passionate downpour turns to steam. Hanoi rain is Dublin rain, a constant, dispiriting drizzle. You could film The Commitments under these gray skies. Everyone hunches under rain capes and umbrellas. My hands and feet are cold from the effort of evaporating dampness, even though the temperature isn’t especially low.

At first I was pleased. I am still Irish enough to believe I have to ‘make use’ of a fine day. Finally, after six months, I have rainy days to waste. I have a hotel room with satellite TV, an incredible luxury. I lie on the bed eating Ritter Sport chocolate, drinking beer, wearing a fleece. I am taking a holiday from my holiday. I am very happy.

On Star Movies, I watch a dreadful John Turturro movie, then Spike Lee’s Mo’ Better Blues, then a cringing Liz Hurley vehicle with Denis Leary as an unhappy New York cop. Six straight hours of straight-to-video Brooklyn street scenes. The rain drips outside and I watch Fort Greene and Bed-Stuy, DUMBO and Bensonhurst. I wonder how to get the kind of apartment Denzel Washington’s jazz musician has. I squawk when the Brooklyn Academy of Music shows up, and when Denzel bikes in Prospect Park. I squint trying to recognize Frank’s Lounge, or Five Spot, in Fort Greene.

Still Hanoi drips like a runny nose. I had set myself the task of working on an application essay for teacher training college in Ireland. But given a practice run of a few days living in Ireland’s weather again, I find that all I want to do is huddle in sloth. Which, come to think of it, is pretty much what I did there first time around. Hmm.

I used to have a job describing how computer applications that didn’t exist yet would work. I wrote long documents in the subjunctive tense: “If the user presses this button, show the following message…” I drew crude pictures of the screens that didn’t exist. To amuse myself and the engineers, I chose a theme poem for each project:
    “In a minute there is time for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse”.

These days my job is simpler. I take buses. The pay is lousy but the shiftwork hours are slightly better. This week, so far:

Hué to Hanoi: 13 hours
Hanoi to Halong Bay: 4 hours (followed by 5 hours on a boat )
Back to Hanoi: 4 hours
Hanoi to Hoi An: 17 hours
Hoi An to Na Trang: 14 hours
Na Trang to Dalat: 7 hours

In Vietnam, it’s easy. Clean buses shuttle up and down Highway One, serving tourists and upmarket Vietnamese. They pick you up from your hotel and drop you in the center of town. Usually the seats recline a little. Once I even had a reading light.

In Thailand, the government buses have a swinging, Braniff Airlines feel. On the night bus from Bangkok to the Lao border, a cross-dressing conductor led me upstairs to my assigned seat. His lurid makeup and beehive were essential elements of the Sixties jet-set atmosphere, and I was excited when he brought a bottle of mineral water and a pink cardboard box containing an apple, a sandwich, and a pastry. He gave me a fuzzy blanket before turning out the lights, and woke me at 6 with a beaker of Nescafé. I slept through most of the speed-fuelled Thai stunt driving.

Burma is different. Roads are maintained by forced labor, often child labor. Not surprisingly, ten-year-old girls don’t keep road surfaces in a condition that’s suitable for a Landrover, let alone a rusted-out fifty-year-old bus with the steering wheel on the wrong side and completely bald tires. The on-board mechanics never showed frustration at the constant breakdowns, even though on one 26-hour journey we stopped five times for them to crawl under the bus on dark, flooded roads. At one point they splashed out and bought a “new” tire, which was almost as ancient and smooth as the one it replaced. Nothing can be wasted in Burma. It is considered a dreadful faux pas to ask the expected arrival time; the nats (spirits) get annoyed at your presumption and you might never get there. When you don’t have capital investment, you must rely on good vibrations.

In Laos, there was a baby gibbon on the first public bus I took. He swung around the bus chattering at the passengers and he ate pack after pack of chewing gum, unwrapping each stick carefully, chewing for a minute, then it spitting out. Meanwhile, his owner vomited cheerfully and copiously every half-hour or so. The Lao are mysteriously prone to travel-sickness, and each bus has little plastic carrier bags hanging from the luggage racks. Other passengers give encouraging shoulder pats, but the buses never make puke-stops.

The best part of chicken bus travel is what I’ve come to call Bus Dim Sum. At every stop (and there are always several) local vendors screech at the windows, hawking their goods. You never know what will be thrust into your lap. Plastic bags full of iced coffee, songbirds on a stick, dumplings. On the way to Paxse in Southern Laos, I sat opposite a woman who bought two large skewers of grilled grasshoppers. She crunched, and spat the legs on the floor of the bus. Then she smacked her lips over a duck fetus that had been cooked in its shell. She ate it whole, rubbery beak, feet, and all. Finally, she bought three wild honeycombs for the bee larvae, another delicacy. I was morbidly fascinated, but not put off my own grilled chicken, spatchcocked flat between two bamboo skewers tied with straw. With sticky rice, of course.

More to my taste were the eggs on a stick. I thought these were plain cooked eggs, but each shell had a quarter-inch hole at the narrow end, from which the flesh had been drained, beaten with scallions, garlic, and coriander, and poured carefully back in. A bamboo skewer sealed the hole and pierced the other end, and they were then barbecued over charcoal, four to a stick. When peeled, they were firm, egg-shaped savory custards, with a slightly smoky flavor. I pictured Delia Smith introducing them as an hors d’oeuvres recipe, forcing thousands of sweating, swearing English women to chip at slippery eggshells on a Friday after work.

Bus Dim Sum is a welcome distraction from the endless waits of the chicken bus circuit. In Laos and Burma, loading up never took less than an hour. No one (but me) ever complained as sack after sack of rice was loaded on the roof, and fighting cocks, piglets, ducks, and VCRs were battened down inside. My record was the three hour loading process before setting off from Paxse to Savannakhet, which would have reduced me to tears if I hadn’t kept busy eating my own body weight in snacks.

Other delays are as predictable as loading. For some reason, every single bus stops for gas only after all the passengers, rice, and chicken are loaded. This was especially odd in Burma, where all the local passengers had to get off outside the gas station for fear that shortages might cause them to storm the pumps. (I was usually left alone on the bus.)

Over the months I’ve learned tricks for long journeys. I keep a comfort kit packed: shawl, blow-up pillow (smelly now), Virgin Atlantic eye mask, sleeping pills (which I haven’t used yet), aspirin, travel sickness tablets, toothbrush, soap, toilet paper, two books, water, sweets. A plastic bag to put my daypack in, in case there are chickens next to me. I check before I sit down that I’m not on the wheel-well, and that the seat isn’t broken. I figure out on which side the sun will shine and sit opposite. Once this brainwork is done, I grow slack-jawed and passive, like the livestock I travel with. When it grows dark at 6 o’clock, I doze obediently. During the day, I read until I feel sick, then I look out the window, thinking about my next Bus Dim Sum. I do stiff-legged yoga stretches at the rest stops while the locals stare.

I always fantasized about having a warm-body job. This isn’t a bad gig, as they go.