Love Among the Ruins: Once Upon A Spring In Greece

by Don George on

I was sifting through the multiple layers of my travel journals, letters, and photos this past weekend when, like an archaeologist happening upon delicate shards of Hellenic pottery, I discovered these handwritten notes on fraying sheets of lined, curling notebook paper. I don’t remember exactly when I wrote these words, but they vividly brought back the long-ago springtime they describe, the end of a year when I was living on a teaching fellowship in Athens, fresh out of college, trying to chart the course of my life’s path. And especially they conjured the woman whose memory remains a precious shard of Attic magic among the runes and ruins of my life.

It happens at some point every spring: I will be driving innocently along some rural route, and suddenly a certain slant of sunlight will recall the way the light filtered through the pine trees along the road that wound up the coast from Athens to the little taverna no one seemed to know about — no one except Gisela, the beautiful and mysterious woman with whom I had fallen ineluctably in love that spring of 1976.

We would install ourselves in peeling white wooden chairs around a stolid wooden table on the beach, under the pines, and the kindly taverna owner would bring us huge chunks of hard, delicious bread, a salad of feta cheese, tomatoes, cucumbers and black olives, and glasses of retsina.

We would eat and sip, but mostly we would watch the shimmering sea and listen to the sighing pines, censing the air with their tangy perfume.

I re-create this scene, and suddenly that whole mind-opening, life-transforming Grecian year revives in a sun-flooded succession of images:

I recall the breath-stopping, time-skipping beauty of just-blossomed scarlet poppies against white marble ruins at Olympia.

I recall the Peloponnese mountain family who insisted on sharing their meager Easter feast with my parents and me.

I recall the ethereal geometry and bony patina of the Acropolis at dawn, before the tourists arrived; and the soul-stirring rite of reading Plato, Socrates and Aristotle as Apollo’s first rays illumined the site.

I recall unfathomable connections on the island of Crete — the magical frescoes and sere splendors of Knossos, and the painter from Chania who showed me the island’s harbors and meadows, churches and town squares through his eyes.

I recall the craggy monasteries and worldly monks of sacred Mount Athos, and the sensual abandon of the long, embracing beach at Lindos, on Rhodes, where I communed for a week with a ragtag band of European pilgrims who were all seeking some sort of Aegean answer.Aegean answers: Hungrily, hesitantly, I would unfold for Gisela my despairs and my dreams, but mostly I would talk about Greece: about the clarity of the rock and the light and how it was teaching me to attend to the present; about the earthy kindness I had encountered everywhere; about the sheer age of the sites and the accumulation of wisdom and sadness and celebration that seemed to hang, poignant, in the Attic air.

Summer came and I left — for Africa and then graduate school, a long, winding road. I never wrote to her, never heard from her.

Now, half of my life later, I wonder: Do we craft our memories, or do our memories craft us?

Now, half of my life later, I know: I went to Greece seeking the roots of Western civilization, and returned with a rootlessness I have never lost.

And every spring the owner shuffles toward us, bearing a laden tray. The sea shimmers. The pines cense and sigh.

The Attic sunlight gleams again in Gisela’s laughing eyes.

[flickr image via steve.wilde]

Delos Diary

by Don George on

As reported earlier this week on Gadling, the Greek government recently announced that it has earmarked $2 million for the restoration of an ancient theater on the sacred island of Delos. That welcome announcement — some rare good news emanating from that beleaguered country I love — had special import for me, because one of the magical experiences of my early traveling life took place on Delos. Reading about the theater and the history of the island re-immersed me in that singular memory — and inspired me to hunt through my journals and scrapbooks for an account I wrote shortly after my visit more than three decades ago. I offer it here not as a guidebook to the current conditions of the place — I’ve never returned — but rather as a snapshot of its spirit, and a celebration of the serendipitous bonds that travel can sometimes bestow.

***

There are no tavernas, no discotheques, no pleasure boats at anchor; nor are there churches, windmills or goatherds. Delos, three miles long and less than one mile wide, is a parched, rocky island of ruins, only 14 miles from Mykonos, Aegean playground of the international vagabonderie. Once the center of the Panhellenic world, Delos has been uninhabited since the first century A.D., fulfilling a proclamation of the Delphic oracle that “no man or woman shall give birth, fall sick or meet death on the sacred island.”

I chanced on Delos during my first visit to Greece. After three harrowing days of seeing Athens by foot, bus and taxi, my traveling companion and I were ready for open seas and uncrowded beaches. We selected Mykonos on the recommendation of a friend, who suggested that when we tired of the beautiful people, we should take a side trip to Delos.

On arriving in Mykonos, we learned that for under $3 we could catch a fishing trawler to Delos (where the harbor is too shallow for cruise ships) any morning at 8 a.m. and return to Mykonos at 1 p.m. the same afternoon. On the morning of our fourth day, we braved choppy seas and ominous clouds to board a rusty, peeling boat that reeked of fish. With a dozen other tourists, we packed ourselves into the ship’s tiny cabin, already crowded with anchors, ropes and wooden crates bearing unknown cargo.At some point during the 45-minute voyage, the toss and turn of the waves became too much for a few of the passengers, and I moved outside into the stinging, salty spray. As we made our way past Renea, the callus-like volcanic island that forms part of the natural breakwater with Delos, the clouds cleared and the fishermen who had docked their caiques at the Delos jetty greeted us in bright sunlight.

At the end of the dock a white-whiskered man in a navy blue beret and a faded black suit hailed each one of us as we walked by: “Tour of Delos! Informative guide to the ruins.” A few yards beyond him a young boy ran up to us, all elbows and knees, and confided in hard breaths, “I give you better tour. Cheaper too.”

I had read the Delphic oracle’s proclamation the night before and wondered what these people were doing on the island. I asked the boy, and he pointed to a cluster of houses on a knoll about a thousand yards away. “I live here. Family.”

At first glance, Delos seemed the quintessential ruin: broken bits of statues, stubby pillars, cracking archways and isolated walls. Nothing moved but the sunlight, glinting off the fragments like fish scales scattered over a two-acre basin.

Other movements had once animated the alleys and temples before us. Legend has it that Delos was originally a roving island when Leto, mistress of Zeus, landed there racked with birth pains. Poseidon anchored the island in its present position while Leto brought forth Artemis and Apollo, the Greek sun god and protector of light and art. Apollo eventually became the most revered of the Greek gods, and religious devotion, coupled with the island’s central, protected situation, established Delos as the thriving center of the Mediterranean world, religious and commercial leader of an empire that stretched from Italy to the coast of Asia Minor.

Wandering the ruins of this once-boisterous center, we found temples both plain and elegant, Greek and foreign; massive marketplaces studded with pedestals where statues once stood, now paved with poppies; a theater quarter with vivid mosaics depicting actors and symbolic animals and fish; a dry lake ringed with palm trees; a stadium and a gymnasium; storehouses and quays along the waterfront; and an ancient suburb where merchants and ship captains once lived: the haunting skeleton of a Hellenistic metropolis.

***

At 12:45 the captain of the trawler appeared at the end of the dock and whistled once, twice, three times, then waved his arms. He repeated this signal at 12:50 and 12:55. My friend left, but something about those deserted ruins held me, and I decided to spend the night on the island. I watched from the top of Mount Cynthus, the lone hill, as the boat moved away toward the mountains of Mykonos on the northeast horizon. Looking around, I felt at the center of the Cyclades: to the north, Tinos, to the northwest, Andros, then Syros, Siphnos, Pros and Naxos, and beyond them Melos and Ios — all spokes in the sacred chariot of the sun god.

Below me the ruins were absolutely desolate, shimmering silently in the midday sun. A lizard slithered over my boot. The boat crawled father away. The wind sighed. Droplets of sweat seemed to steam form my forehead.

I walked down the hill to the shade of the tourist pavilion, the one concession to tourism (besides a three-room museum) on the island. I walked inside and asked the owner, a large, jolly man with a Zorba mustache, what he was offering for lunch. He looked surprised to see me. “You miss the caique?”

“No, I wanted to spend the night here.”

“Ah.” He looked beyond me into the glaring, baked ruins. “We have rice, meat, vegetables.”

“Do you have any fish?”

“Fish? Yes.” He directed me to a case in the back room, opened it and took out five different fish, each caked with ice. “Which do you want?” I pointed to one. “Drink?”

“A beer, please.”

He nodded, pointed out the door to a terrace with tables and chairs scattered at random like dancers at a Mykonos discotheque, and said, “Sit, please,” motioning me into a chair.

The heat hung in the air, folding like a curtain over the pillars and pedestals, smothering the palms and reeds. Occasionally a dusty-brown lizard would scuttle from one shadow into another. The owner moved from kitchen to terrace like a man who has never waited, never worried about time, wiping off the table, bringing a glass of cold beer, then fish, fried potatoes and a tomato salad.

Eventually, two old men dressed in the same uniform as the man who had greeted us that morning walked up carrying two pails filled with water. One went inside and began to talk animatedly with the owner. The other sat down on the edge of the terrace, dipped his callused hands and pulled out a white and black octopus. He rolled the octopus in a milky white liquid from the other pail, twisting and slapping its tentacles against the cement until he was satisfied it was clean. Then he laid it aside, and dipped in again, pulling out another slippery creature. He cleaned five octopuses in all, leaving them oozing in the sun, their tentacles writhing and their suction cups puckering.

At 4 p.m. a cock crowed. What is he doing here? I wondered. And, more important, why is he crowing at 4 p.m.? The sound broke the silence with an eerie premonition. I looked at the bottles, chairs, tables, heard the reassuring murmur of voices inside. Beyond the terrace, in the light and heart, seemed another world.

***

An hour later I walked into the ruins, following the wide central avenue (the “Sacred Way”) toward the waterfront, the theater district and the hillside temples. On my way I passed columns carved with line after line of intricate symbols with no breaks between the words; sacrificial altars; huge cisterns for storing rainwater and oil; and vast foundations outlining meeting halls and marketplaces by the wharves. I explored the remains of private houses, passing from room to room, trying to imagine where their inhabitants had cooked, eaten and slept, awakened from my reverie only by an occasional spider web or lizard trail. As I walked on and the setting sun cast the halls and walls in an orange-pink light, the ruins seemed to take on a strange life all their own.

What had been eerie desolation became an intense timelessness, a sense of communion with other peoples and other eras. My boots crossed rocks other sandals had crossed; my hands touched marble other hands had touched. When I reached the mosaics, they seemed a living thing, green-eyed tigers and blue dolphins, flowers of every shape and color, the same to me as they were to the countless merchants and artisans who had admired them centuries before. I continued up the hill to the temples of the Syrian and Egyptian — as well as Greek — gods, and reflected how many different cultures had met in that silent hollow below.

While I was sitting in the temple to the Egyptian gods, a figure appeared walking up the hill toward me. It was not the owner of the pavilion, nor any of the fishermen I had seen previously. This was a man in shorts and a Western shirt with a satchel and a walking stick. We exchanged waves and wary glances until he came up and sat next to me. “You are English?”

“American.”

“Ah, good.” He stuck out his hand.

He was a physicist from Hungary on leave from a national research project for two weeks. “I have been saving my passes for this trip,” he said. “Isn’t this wonderful? Yesterday I examined all the ruins from there” — he waved a finger toward the stadium at the distant end of the basin– “to here. Today I have walked the circuit of the island.” He paused to catch his breath, his cheeks as grainy as the rocks on which we sat. “There really isn’t that much else to see.”

The mountains were turning purple over the poppy-red water. The ruins were fading into shade. I wanted to explore further before darkness set in, so we agreed to meet for dinner.

***

When I entered the tourist pavilion, the owner greeted me like a long-lost friend and brought out three glasses and a bottle of ouzo. “We drink.” The Hungarian appeared through another doorway that, I learned later, led to the pavilion’s four “guest rooms,” distinguished by the presence of a mattress and wash basin. We finished one bottle and began another, talking in Greek, Italian, French, German and English about everything and soon thereafter about nothing. When one language failed, we tried another, until we were all speaking in the universal tongue of Loquacious Libation.

In another hour or two the owner fixed us a feast of fish, lamb, fried potatoes, rice, tomatoes and cucumbers, with baklava and rice pudding for dessert. While we ate, the physicist and I talked. I learned that the cluster of houses I had seen earlier had been built by the French School of Classical Studies when it was digging on Delos in the 1950s and `60s. When the last archaeologists left, the curator of the museum moved in with his family. It was his son I had met that morning. The old man who had hailed our arrival was a fisherman from a local island who turned to guiding when the fishing was slow.

After finishing our second bottle — compliments of the owner — of sweet, resiny retsina, we drank a good night toast of thick Greek coffee. Then the physicist retired to his room, preceded by the owner’s wife, who had drawn a pitcher of cold water for his use in the morning. I was traveling on a backpack budget, however, and when the owner offered me the use of his roof for 30 drachmas (under $1), half the cost of the guest rooms, I gladly accepted.

I walked up two flights of cement stairs to a cement roof enclosed like a medieval fortress with a four-foot-high wall. The stars glinted like a nighttime mirror of the marble ruins. I unrolled my sleeping bag in a protected corner, thankful that the lizards could not reach me at that height, and rummaged in my backpack for soap, toothpaste and a toothbrush.

“Could you use this?” The physicist held out his flashlight. “I’ve come to ask you to hurry in preparing your toilet. The owner wants to turn off the electricity.”

After I had washed and brushed and stumbled back up the stairs to my sleeping bag, I heard a scuffling of footsteps; voices thundered back and forth through the blackness, and the lights went out.

The footsteps returned, a door squeaked and banged shut, chairs scraped. Then everything was silent. No machine sounds, no human sounds, no animal sounds. Absolute silence. I lay in my sleeping bag, and the ruins encroached on my dreams — the swish of the lizards scrambling over the rocks, the moist coolness of the marble at sunset, the languid perfume of the poppies dabbed among the fluted white fragments.

***

Streaming sunlight awakened me. I turned to look at my watch and disturbed a black kitten that had bundled itself at my feet. In so doing, I also disturbed the ouzo and retsina that had bundled itself in my head, and I crawled as close as I could to the shadow of the wall — 6:45. I pulled my towel over my head and tried to imagine the windy dark, but to no avail. The kitten mewed its way under my towel, where it set to lapping at my cheek as if it had discovered a bowl of milk.

I stumbled down the stairs and soaked my head in tepid tap water until at last I felt stable enough to survey the surroundings. Behind the pavilion a clothesline ran to the rusting generator. Chickens strutted inside a coop at the curator’s house. Rhenea stirred in the rising mist.

Again I wandered through the ruins, different ruins now, bright with day and the reality of returns: The tourists would return to Delos, and I would return to Mykonos. I ate a solemn breakfast on the terrace with the physicist, then walked past the sacred lake and the marketplace to the Terrace of the Lions. Standing among the five lions of Delos, erected in the seventh century B.C. to defend the island from invaders, I looked over the crumbling walls and stunted pillars to the temples on the hill. Like priests they presided over the procession of tourists who would surge onto the island, bearing their oblation in cameras and guidebooks. As the trawler approached, a bent figure in a navy blue beret hurried to the dock, and a boy in shorts raced out of the curator’s house past the physicist, past me, and into the ruins.

[flickr image via Alex Healing]

Pearls of wisdom and wanderlust from Pico Iyer

by Don George on

Last month the wonderfully thoughtful and eloquent author Pico Iyer published his 11th book, The Man Within My Head, an intriguing hybrid of autobiography and literary criticism that insightfully illuminates the life and work of Graham Greene – and of Pico Iyer. On his book tour, I’ve had the honor and pleasure of interviewing Pico on stage twice, the first time on Jan. 26 in an event sponsored by Geographic Expeditions in San Francisco and the second in Washington DC on Feb. 10 as part of the National Geographic Traveler Conversations series that I host. Happily, as it turned out, these conversations traveled in quite different directions — but really, every conversation with Pico is an edifying journey, wherever it goes. Here I want to single out four pearls of wisdom I took away from our San Francisco odyssey.

1. Spring and summer, East and West

I began by asking Pico about the differences between the author of his first book, Video Night in Kathmandu, published in 1988, and the man who wrote The Man Within My Head. This prompted him to reflect on how the older you grow, the less you know: “The sentences in my first book are delivered with a really bratty confidence. You know, ‘I know everything in the world because I’m 28 years old.’ And my new book is haunted by a sense of not knowing a thing, and that being the beauty of life but also the confoundingness of it.”

A little later he took these thoughts to new soaring levels:

“Partly I think it’s the difference between spring and autumn…. Graham Greene at the very end of his life said that there’s wisdom in age and it’s all about wishing you weren’t so wise. Yet autumn can see spring a lot better than spring can see autumn.

“I’ve always been fascinated by autumn. It’s my favorite season in the country that we both share as our secret home, Japan, because it can take in the whole cycle, because it knows everything is impermanent, and because it knows that the impermanence itself is rather permanent. All the leaves are falling, the cold is approaching, it’s getting darker, and the days are shortening, and that is all necessary to get back to spring. Whereas spring has a much more linear sense; it believes everything is moving in a forward direction. When I was a kid, I thought/expected I would know much more at 50 than I do at 20. Now I can see the progress moves cyclically rather than in a linear way, and follows the seasons rather than a manmade assembly line.”It’s a bit of the difference between the New World and the Old World. And as we talk about this, I’m thinking that the dance between spring and autumn is probably the dance between East and West. When I’m in Japan, I’m very conscious of California being a land of eternal summer, which is why our Japanese wives and so many of our Japanese friends long to be here. But it’s also the reason that people like you and I love to go to Japan, for that much larger picture, the roundedness. There are seasons in California, but there is the hope that you’re always pushing forward, whereas in Japan there’s a certain sanity for knowing that you’re ultimately going to come back to your grandparents’ place. For all the external changes in the world, for all the ways in which you’re shifting fashions with each passing month in Japan, ultimately you come back to the ancient verities. The new is only as important and valuable as the old that underwrites it.”

2. The travel writer: From information-saturation reporter to sage of silence and space

Pico has been a traveler from a very young age. As a student, he commuted regularly between a boarding school in England and his parents’ home in California. I asked him how travel has changed for him over the course of his lifetime, and he began his answer by returning to his first book and describing what he felt his role was as a traveler-writer when he wrote it.

“When I wrote that first book, I felt that what the world desperately needed was more information about our global neighbors. When I went to places like Burma and Tibet and even China in 1985, I thought most of my friends, neighbors, and such readers as I might have in California can never expect to see those places and barely know what they look and smell like, and feel like. So my job was to be an information-gathering machine, kind of an emissary, but certainly a representative to go and take in as many sights, sounds, facts, and sensations as possible, and just saturate the page with that almost like verbal television.”

That image led him to describe the very different role of the writer today:

“Now I feel like we all have much too much information and what the writer can offer is freedom from information, a way of stepping out of the rush and commotion and acceleration of the day, a way to try to put it in a much larger perspective and make sense of it. In my new book I deliberately made the sentences as long as possible, almost literally to extend the attention span of the reader and take her to those places that no multimedia mechanism or invention can do better. Writing can’t hope to compete with the internet or TV or any of our latest inventions, so it has to stake its claim in those places of silence and nuance, the spaces between the words and intimacy that those other mechanisms can’t claim or colonize so powerfully.”

3. The challenges and rewards of travel today: Surrendering the illusion of control

That image of the contemporary’s writer’s role and goal took Pico to the evolution of travel itself and the challenges facing contemporary travelers.

“In that sense I think travel has changed. If anyone in this audience were to go to Peru tomorrow she would be able to access it online. She would be able to get all the information she could possibly want. The challenge would be forgetting that, and going with a clear mind so that she’s seeing Peru as if for the first time.”

Which led us – via a detour through Don DeLillo’s new book and Pico’s own epiphanies in Jerusalem – to a subject about which we both feel passionately: the importance of vulnerability and surrender in travel.

“Travel is an act of humility,” Pico said, “and it’s a leap of faith-literally-because you’re trusting in the world. One reason I travel is that when I’m at home, I’m completely straight-jacketed in my assumptions. Again, I’m like this kid in my first book. I think I know it all. I think I’m on top of the world, that I can plan my life for the next ten years in ten minutes. The minute you’re in a bus in India, forget it. Nothing is in your control. You’re reminded of all the much higher forces, whether you ascribe religious names to them or just call them nature or fate or time or providence; there they are, and you are a speck on the horizon that they’re going to bat about randomly. It’s a very tough kind of shock therapy, but it’s good.”

4. How to see the world as it is and how to bring kindness to it

And then Pico took this thought to an even more poignant place:

“One of the things I have most appreciated in travel and do still is that it confronts you with moral and emotional tangles that it’s easy to sleepwalk past, to sidestep in one’s everyday life. You arrive on the streets of Havana and a stranger comes up to you, a Cuban, and shows you everything for a week, and couldn’t be kinder and more understanding and sympathetic, never asks for anything, opens all the doors of his country to you, and really gives you Cuba. Then, just as you’re about to board the plane, he says, ‘Please will you get me a green card?’

“What do you do with that? I don’t think there’s a right answer, but it’s a really important question to think about. When you’re in the same situation at home, somehow it’s easier to slide away from it, but there, when you return to your home, all you’re thinking about is this Cuban person waiting at the airport for a letter from his new friend that’s either going to open a new door or is going to, not close the door, but allow him some way to keep the hope alive in a situation with very little hope. It’s one of the things I love about Graham Greene; more than any other traveler, that’s what he was interested in, how to see the world as it is and how to bring kindness to it. Travel asks you that question at every second.”

How to see the world as it is and how to bring kindness to it. Yes, I think, the world thrusts innumerable challenges and incongruities at us constantly. Should we help our new Cuban friend try to get a green card – should we even suggest that there’s a glimmer of a possibility that we might be able to help him? Is that kinder or crueler? Should we give $5 to the woman in the weaving collective whom we just met, knowing that could transform her day, or her week, or her month? Should we give $5 to 5 of the women in the collective? Can you help me get a loom? A bicycle? A visa? A job?As we travel we weave a web of interlacing connections. What is the kindest thing to do?

Pico’s words moved me on stage and move me still, reverberating as a pebble dropped in a pool, restlessly rippling – probing me out of the comfortable corners, irresolveable, illuminating the nuances in my ever-expanding ignorance, all I don’t know, can’t know, the jostling confoundingness of the day-to-day journey, life-enriching – within my head.

Three unexpected treats on Oahu’s North Shore

by Don George on

Last October, when my wife and I visited Oahu for a week, we spent the first few days happily exploring the attractions and activities we’d plotted before the trip: the artfully educating exhibits at the Bishop Museum; the snorkeling splendors of Hanauma Bay; the tranquil and transporting Byodo-In Temple; Chef Ed Kenney’s acclaimed organic cuisine at Town restaurant; and the then-just-opened Japengo restaurant in the Hyatt Regency Waikiki, which promised – and as it turned out, delivered – a palate-expanding fusion feast (three faves: the Tootsie maki with crab, avocado, shiitake and lobster; the scallop butter yaki; and the coconut crème brulee). I’ve already written about two other highlights from those first few days: a night of multi-course culinary magic at Alan Wong’s restaurant in Honolulu and a visit to life-changing MA’O Organic Farms in Wai’anae.

But a quarter-century of serendipity has taught us that some of the most memorable on-the-road experiences come from listening to residents after you’ve landed in a place, and on this trip again three of our finest discoveries – all on Oahu’s less-visited North Shore – came from locals’ impromptu advice. If you’re going to Oahu, here are three North Shore sites we’d recommend you add to your own must-do map.

1. Waimea Valley: This 1,875-acre valley preserve on the outskirts of Hale`iwa, near Waimea Bay, doesn’t billboard its wonderfulness. In fact, that’s one of the many things we loved about it: how humble and low-key it is, despite– or perhaps because of? – its riches.

Waimea Valley comprises one of Oahu’s last examples of the traditional land use system called ahupua’a. In this system, the islands were divided into wedge-shaped slices of land, ruled by a local chief and often overseen by a priest, that ran from the mountains to the sea and incorporated all the kinds of topography and resources residents needed to thrive. You can learn much more about the ahupua’a system here.

If you have time, Waimea Valley offers a many-layered immersion in traditional Hawaiian nature and culture, with daily activities that teach Hawaiian games, stories, hula-dancing, lei-making and other creations, special events such as the Kanikapila celebration of music, and guided hikes that range from 2 to 7 miles and take visitors through streams, into forests and up ridges for spectacular views.

Waimea is so inexhaustible that you could easily spend a few days here or make multiple visits – and amazingly, 80 percent of the valley is still virtually unexplored — but even if you have only part of an afternoon, as was our case, it’s still a thoroughly edifying and enchanting place. All we did was walk along the path that has been thoughtfully paved through the cultivated part of the preserve. The three-quarter-mile trail wanders through a luxuriant profusion of plant life: thick ferns slick and shiny as green rubber, flaming red ginger plants, sun-burst yellow hyacinth, cloud-white lilies and flamboyant festoons of purple bougainvillea. The world we wandered through was so lush and bright that it was as if the preserve had removed the filters from our eyes.

The best thing about Waimea Valley for us was this: Even though we weren’t machete-ing our way through dense underbrush, those paths seemed to lead us ever deeper into a wonderland of tropical flowers and plants, so profligate and prototypical that they became a splendid synecdoche for wildness, and ended in the Edenic sight of a deep green pool backdropped by plunging Waimea Falls. While we never had to worry if we would make it back in time for our sunset horseback ride, by the end of our afternoon visit, we felt cleansed, renewed, in a way that only wilderness can confer.

2. Giovanni’s Original White Shrimp Truck: When we told locals we were going to spend a couple of nights at Turtle Bay Resort in Kahuku, they told us we had to save one meal for Giovanni’s Original White Shrimp Truck, located a few miles away just off Kamehameha Highway.

So as soon as we checked in and got settled, we meandered down the road, past a few other trucks advertising Kahuku shrimp and other fresh-caught seafoods, until we spotted the sign “Giovanni’s Original White Shrimp Truck” and the gloriously graffiti-covered vehicle itself. We splashed into a muddy parking space and made our way to a roofed and paved pavilion area with perhaps twenty picnic tables and benches. Half a dozen people were waiting in line at the truck, where the menu was posted on the side.

We chose the classic “Shrimp Scampi” combo plate: a dozen grilled shrimp marinated in olive oil, fresh chopped garlic, and lemon butter, served with two generous scoops of rice, and the whole drizzled with lemon garlic butter and flakes of carmelized garlic.

To complement that, we bought grilled corn on the cob – “picked this morning,” said the kindly farmer behind the grill — from a stand at the opposite end of the pavilion, and fragrant slices of pineapple from a third truck bordering the pavilion area. And then we dove into the greasy, buttery, corn-kernelly, garlic-shrimpily, pineapply pool. Oh man! This is how you spell DELICIOUS! For about 20 minutes, we both journeyed to a place of silent savoring bliss. For $20 apiece, we’d found Kahuku heaven.

3. Twenty One Degrees North: At the other end of the budget spectrum, we saved one final splurge for our last-night-on-Oahu meal – and it was absolutely worth it. Ten minutes by car from Giovanni’s, we ate at Turtle Bay’s flagship Twenty One Degrees North restaurant. Presided over by exuberant executive chef Hector Morales, this was the white-tablecloth-and-china yin to Giovanni’s picnic-table-and-paper-plate yang. The welcome was warm and gracious, the setting subdued and elegant without feeling uncomfortably formal. One could be equally at home here in an aloha shirt or a sportcoat, we thought. And the setting was spectacular, with floor-to-ceiling windows that looked onto the beach, the swaying palm trees and the ever-swashing sea.

Even more spectacular was the food. Because we were celebrating one of the finest trips we’d had in years, we went all out and ordered a multi-course extravaganza. Our favorite dishes included the Diver Scallops, a single splendid scallop served with melted leeks in an Asian pear and poached fruit reduction; the Crab-Crusted Hawaiian Sea Bass nestled in a cannellini bean cassoulet, with spinach and roasted tomatoes; the Opakapaka, served with a savory pipikaula risotto and an audaciously delicious pea and mint puree; the Kahuku Shrimp, Avocado and Hearts of Palm, the shrimp grilled perfectly and accompanied with buttery local avocado and hearts of palm; and the Ahi Tartare, a palate-piquing marriage of smoothly scrumptious ahi with a piquant chili mango salsa.

Our delight in these dishes was deepened by the knowledge that we had field-tested and -tasted many of their ingredients earlier in the day on a visit to Al and Joan Santoro’s wonderful Poamoho Organic Producefarm. This convivial couple, who had retired from their careers as a naval intelligence officer and computer systems engineer to become organic farmers, embodied Oahu’s inspiring new sustainability ethic, and their joyful collaboration with Chef Morales exemplified the farm-to-table spirit that we had encountered throughout the island – and that infused the Twenty-One Degrees North menu, from the shrimp and fish caught in the sea just outside the restaurant’s windows, to the fruits and vegetables harvested from family farms just down the road. Our sense of culinary apotheosis culminated in the chef’s signature chocolate soufflé – which simply and sweetly lifted us away. Overall, we felt the cuisine at Twenty One Degrees North was every bit as enlightening, delighting and delectable as the creations at Alan Wong’s – and that is the highest compliment we could pay.

As we drove to the airport the next morning, we silently thanked the locals whose tips had bestowed these unexpected gifts of Oahu’s North Shore – and began to plot how soon we could return to discover even more.

Photos by Kuniko George

Four top treats from my 2011 travels

by Don George on

Since I’ve been a travel writer for three decades, people often ask me if I don’t get tired of all the traveling and writing. After all, when you do anything for 30 years, it must get boring, right?

Wrong! I guess that’s one of the gifts of this line of work. Every trip, every place, offers something new, even if I’ve been there a dozen times before. This year I took four big trips — to British Columbia, London, France, and Oahu — and each one reaffirmed this truth with multiple unexpected treasures. Here are the top treats from each.

1) OAHU: MA’O Organic Farms

My wife and I didn’t know what to expect as we drove on a sunswept October morning to this outpost on the little-visited Leeward Coast of Oahu. When we turned off the Farrington Highway at the Wai’anae exit as instructed, we found ourselves in a nondescript residential area of one-story stucco homes. We wound though the streets deeper and deeper into the interior until we reached the end of the road – and found the smiling face of Kamuela Enos, the Education Resource Specialist at this singular place.

MA’O’s mission, Enos told us, is social entrepreneurship through farming, cultivating organic food and young leaders for a sustainable Hawaii. MA’O stands for mala ‘ai ‘opio, which translates as “the youth food garden.” Basically, MA’O takes youngsters from the Wai’anae community – a traditionally neglected settlement of mostly native Hawaiians, beset by severe social, economic and nutritional challenges – and puts them to work on the 16-acre farm, where they learn all the aspects of running a farm, from working the fields to managing the distribution of the produce to maintaining smooth relationships with clients and consumers. MA’O also runs a variety of in-school programs at the Wai’anae intermediate school and high school and at nearby Leeward Community College.I could write paragraphs describing all the great things they do and grow here, but you can get a wealth of information about the marvels of MA’O from their excellent website. What you can’t get from the website, and what I want to tell you about here, is the brightness that shone in the eyes of the young staffers we spoke with, the electric optimism that radiated from them. A number of the staffers we spoke with told us their lives had been turned around completely – “transformed,” “saved” — by MA’O. One had been living in a car with his mom; another had been thrown out of school multiple times. At MA’O seeds of hope had been planted, and tender shoots of promise and self-worth were sprouting; they were cultivating the sense that with energy and work and determination, they could shape their own future. In a tangible sense, they were nurturing – planting, watering, weeding — their own lives. The vegetables we tasted at MA’O were wonderfully flavorful – but the hope we felt sprouting all around us was the most delicious crop of all. Our visit to MA’O pounds still in our hearts and minds; it’s an extraordinarily moving and inspiring place, and we felt blessed to experience its grace.

If you want to visit, MA’O welcomes visitors through its G.I.V.E. (Get Involved, Volunteer Environmentally) Days program on the last Saturday of each month. If you would like to attend a G.I.V.E. Day, call the office at 808-696-5569 or email info@maoorganicfarms.org; include in the text of your email your complete contact information and the number of people you will be bringing. In addition, you should fill out the Education Resource Request Form and mail it to WCRC, PO Box 441, Wai’anae, HI 96792, email it to info@maoorganicfarms.org, or fax it to 808-696-5569.

2) FRANCE: Troyes

I love France. I studied French literature (and art and history) in college, lived in Paris the summer after my junior year and again the summer after graduation, had the epiphany that changed my life there and have been back half a dozen times since. And I’ve been editing travel stories about France for three decades. So how is it that I had never even heard of Troyes until I visited this enchanting town 90 miles southeast of Paris this September?

This is still a mystery – though another long-time Francophile on my trip said the same thing – but the important point is that I unlocked the treasures of Troyes on this journey to the heart of Champagne. What was so terrific about Troyes? Where to begin? The heel-clicking cobblestoned alleyways and half-timbered, Gothic-gabled homes and shops. The flower-festooned squares and the Renaissance mansions with their chessboard brick-and-white-chalk facades. The extraordinary museums such as the Museum of Modern Art, with works by Picasso, Matisse, Rodin, Rouault, Degas and dozens more – in all more than 2000 works from 1850-1950. The soul-soaring churches, among them the grandly Gothic Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul and the church of Saint-Martin-ès-Vignes, with its stunning 17th-century stained-glass windows.

For me, the pleasures of Troyes were embodied in a short walk in the old quarter, among the 16th-century half-timbered buildings that were constructed after a devastating fire in 1524. The pace of the town was relaxed, the citizenry smiling as they walked, the children licking ice creams as their mothers licked the shop windows (leche-vitrine, as the French say, so much more Gallically sensual than “window-shopping”). Seduced by a Renoir, I stepped into a closet-sized art gallery. The wildly white-haired and tweed-coated owner, who looked a bit like a professorial puppet, seized upon me and delivered a very learned 15-minute lecture that somehow interwove the aesthetics of Renoir, the history of Troyes and the best place to find andouillette sausage, a local specialty.

The day we had to leave, I awakened to 21st-century birds trilling in the 12th-century courtyard of the charming Maison de Rhodes (a gloriously restored former residence that once belonged to the Knights Templar), wandered into the town square and discovered a merveuilleux merry-go-round plunk in the middle, and just beyond that a quintessential sidewalk café. There and then, my heart was won; I didn’t want to leave and can’t wait to go back.

3) LONDON: Church of St Martin-in-the-Fields

On an August trip to London I previewed the 2012 Summer Olympic Games preparations and the transformation of the city’s once beleaguered East End, made a pilgrimage to bedazzling Buckingham Palace and explored the leafy literary lanes around the storied Langham Hotel. Wandering at will one late afternoon in the West End, I chanced upon the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields. I’d never seen the church before, but as a long-time listener to classical music radio stations, the name resonated like that of an old friend; for years and years I’d been enthralled by recordings of Sir Neville Marriner leading the Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields orchestra.

Impulsively I stopped to see if there was by any chance a concert that night. There was! A 7:30 candlelight concert featuring works by Mozart, Bach and Vivaldi. The performance was thrillingly familiar and yet not. The trappings and rituals – the searching for a seat among expectant concert-goers, the hush of the crowd as the conductor raises his baton – were familiar, and yet I was in London, in a setting I’d only stumbled on a few hours before. The whim and wonder of it were magic, as were the notes filling the stony, candlelit chamber. When the orchestra launched into “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik,” a familiar frisson swept up my spine all the way to the top of the barrel-vaulted ceiling.

The magic continued that evening with a delicious roast chicken dinner at a serendipitously stumbled-upon bistro called Cote, and then a long and languorous moonlit walk past convivial crowds of theater-goers and bar belles and beaux spilling into the streets, past the historic mews and views of Fitzrovia and Bloomsbury where I’d wandered the day before, past the BBC bar I’d tumbled into on my first jet-lagged night, until I reached the lamplit Langham. I felt enwrapped – enraptured — by London that night.

4) BRITISH COLUMBIA: Sea Cider

I thought I knew cider. I’d grown up drinking it every fall in Connecticut, stopping at country stands to buy the murky elixir that smelled of apples and crisp afternoon slanting sunlight and falling leaves. I thought I knew cider – so when Victoria resident Cathy Ray offered to take me to a farm and ciderhouse in nearby Saanichton for a tasting, I thought I knew what to expect.

As with the best travel experiences, I was in for a big surprise. Well, many surprises. In contrast to those Connecticut roadside stands, Sea Cider looked like a winery: a gracious two-story house fronted by an expansive green orchard with long rows of widely spaced, low trees and beyond them the sparkling waters of the Haro Strait. The second surprise was that Sea Cider had fully eight different varieties of cider to choose from. When I couldn’t decide which one to taste, owner Kristen Jordan offered a flight with small sips of all eight. This brought the next surprise: Each cider was gloriously, goldenly clear – not the brownish muck I’d known as cider. And then I took a sip and discovered the best surprise of all: These were fermented!

From that moment on, the afternoon swirled and soared in a giddy ballet of sunlight, bracing fresh air, Canadian camaraderie and glorious cider. I tasted all eight, of course, and like wine, each one had its own distinct bouquet, feel and taste. What a revelation!

You can read about Sea Cider’s different ciders here. And if you live in one of these lucky places, you can buy your own Sea Cider elixir and savor it in the comfort of your home. But to tell you the truth, I suspect it tastes even better if you’re laughing and learning in the Victoria sun, looking onto shining Haro Strait. If you go to Sea Cider, say hi to Kristen for me and be sure to taste the Kings & Spies – just as I am even as I write these words, savoring one last delicious treat from my travels in 2011.

[flickr image via jasmic]