Chao Phraya Diaries: Layers of a City

In the Valmiki Ramayana, the great Hindu epic composed around 2500 years ago, there is an interesting apocryphal story. After the abduction of Sita, wife of Ayodhya’s (in India) king Ram, his ally Sugriva, king of the Vanaras (monkey race), dispatched his forces to search for her. His search parties went in all four directions with detailed descriptions of the lands they were to explore. The party headed east was told of islands and lands beyond the sea where the sun rises, apparently called Suvarnabhumi, the “Land of Gold.” 

While ancient texts refer to Suvarnabhumi as a place where traders acquired wealth, particularly gold, there is archaeological evidence that the riverbeds and streambeds of modern-day Thailand were indeed a source of alluvial gold, eroded from distant rock formations.

About a thousand years after the composition of Ramayana, around 500 AD, the Pallavas of Southern India (present day Tamil Nadu) started venturing eastwards via the sea for trade, and forged a deep connection with these lands of Southeast Asia. Their flourishing commerce of textiles, beads, semi-precious stones, and spices also exported Indian culture, religion (Hinduism and Buddhism), architectural styles (rock-cut temples), and scripts. The Cholas, who succeeded the Pallavas and dominated Southern India (~800-1300 AD), multiplied this maritime trade with Suvarnabhumi. It transformed Southeast Asia into a heartland of Hindu and Buddhist ideas – a legacy still visible today across Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, the Malay Peninsula, and Indonesia. The temples at Prambanan (Indonesia), Angkor Wat (Cambodia), and the vast Buddhist complex of Borobudur are remnants of this ‘golden’ period.

I have just landed at Suvarnabhumi International Airport in modern Bangkok, a bustling metropolis of 10 million people. Even on an early summer morning, the city feels hot, humid, and intense. There is movement everywhere, the roads are already choked, and a certain tropical smell pervades the air. Amidst this moment of rushed life, I think of the stillness of the city’s sacred spaces I have visited in the past, and the beauty of these opposing forces coexisting on the same landmass.

To truly understand Bangkok, it’s perhaps wise to begin with the topography. Thailand’s defining feature is the Chao Phraya River basin, covering almost one-third of the country’s land with verdant, fertile plain shaped by millennia of alluvial deposits. The Chao Phraya, or “River of Kings,” flows nearly 400 kilometers southward from the central plains to the Gulf of Thailand. Both ancient Ayutthaya and modern Bangkok lie downstream, strategically located just before the river reaches the sea.

Ayutthaya, located about 80 kilometers north of Bangkok, was a cosmopolitan capital around 1500 AD, serving as the center of an eponymous kingdom. Ayutthaya is an interesting natural ‘island’ at the confluence of three rivers (the Chao Phraya, Pasak, and Lop Buri), which provided a natural defense – a ‘moat’, before the term was claimed by capital markets. With Buddhism at its cultural core, Ayutthaya flourished through trade, drawing merchants from across Asia and Europe. It was here that the practice of digging canals (khlongs) began, to shorten trade routes by cutting across meanders in the river, making transport more efficient for merchants. Communities grew along these waterways, using them for transport, irrigation for rice fields, and daily life.

The ‘island’ of Ayutthaya (Image courtesy: Google Maps)

Ayutthaya fell to the Burmese in 1767, after which the deposed King Taksin established a new capital at Thonburi, a riverside village further downstream on the western bank of the Chao Phraya. This move laid the foundation for what would eventually become Bangkok. Thonburi was also the site of modern-day Wat Arun, which then stood as an older Buddhist temple (its present structure would be completed in the mid-1850s.) Taksin’s successor later moved the capital across the river to the eastern bank, establishing it at Rattanakosin, a site chosen for its natural partial enclosure by the river, much like Ayutthaya. The traditional practice of digging canals (khlongs) was used extensively, transforming Rattanakosin into an artificial island crisscrossed with both natural and man-made waterways, turning Bangkok into the “Venice of the East.” This was the Bangkok of late 1700s and mid-1800s, where people lived in stilt houses, commuted by boat, and shopped at floating markets. Remnants of that aquatic past still survive today – more for tourists than for trade – in places like Taling Chan Floating Market.

The banks of the Chao Phraya define modern Bangkok’s historic core: the Grand Palace, Wat Pho (Sleeping Buddha), and Wat Arun. This is the Bangkok of golden spires, monks in saffron robes, and ceremonial rhythm. Further east lies its modern commercial heart – Sathorn, Silom, and Sukhumvit – with glass towers, BTS Skytrain lines, and upscale cafes. Despite this crude description, Bangkok does not really have a ‘historic district’ or ‘old town’ tucked away for camera-toting tourists. Instead, it’s a sprawl of overlapping worlds: royal palaces and riverside temples, tangled street markets, sleek malls, roadside altars, canal-side communities, rooftop bars, and neighborhood life that hums in between like a colorful timelapse.

The banks of  Chao Phraya  and Bangkok's historic core: Wat Arun on the western bank, and Wat Pho and the Grand Palace on the 'island' of Rattanakosin on the eastern bank (Image courtesy: Google Maps)

As the city modernized, many canals were paved over for roads, rails, and buildings, shifting Bangkok from a water-centric layout to one dominated by land transport, along with its infamous traffic. Chao Phraya, however, remained a vital transport artery. A City Line ferry from Prannok to Sathorn offered me a charming passage through the heart of the city, and almost through time. Expert boatmen, who may have lived for generations by the river’s rhythm, dock and undock the boat effortlessly at five stops along my route, each feeling nothing longer than a metro stop. The water offers a good vantage point to see the spires of ancient temples rising along the water, followed by the gradual unfolding of modern skyscrapers as the boat moves further south. Being on a local boat suddenly takes away the rush of the city’s roads, and Bangkok’s past and present seem frozen in this skyline above water.

I visit Wat Arun on the western bank again, this time on a Saturday morning. The short ferry crossing from Tha Tien on the eastern bank of the river still feels like the best way to get there: the boat ride offers a phenomenal view of its distinctive 70-meter-high central prang (spire), slowly growing on one’s spirit. The whole temple complex is a curious amalgamation of Hindu and Buddhist symbolism. Primarily, it is a Buddhist temple, named after Arun, the Hindu sun god. The structure of the prang is a derivation of Buddhist pagodas but is topped by a trident, believed to belong to another Hindu god, Shiva, with the prang itself symbolizing Mount Meru of the Hindus. There are terraces that can be reached by a steep flight of stairs, dividing the structure into three symbolic levels in Buddhist iconography: the base indicating all realms of existence, the middle representing one of the seven heavens, and the top denoting the remaining six heavens. The decorations on the prang, made of colorful porcelain shards and sea snail shells, depict beautiful figurines of Yakshas (giants) and monkeys supporting it on all sides, along with prominent statues of the Hindu god Indra riding his elephant, Airavata. The temple once hosted the Emerald Buddha, the most sacred Thai icon, which was subsequently moved across the river to the Grand Palace. A hall next to the prang now houses the Niramitr Buddha. This intertwining of Hinduism and Buddhism makes me ponder upon the fluidity of religion: in the short run, it appears largely orthodox; in the long run, it survives through adaptation.

Wat Arun might also be the most photographed temple in Bangkok. Tourists flock to the “rent Thai costume” services, and nearly every photographer seems to take the mandatory shot of flowing fabric from a traditional garment worn by their subject, set against the backdrop of Wat Arun’s architecture. Local youth gather in equal numbers for wedding photoshoots, or to record TikTok reels in traditional clothing, churning the wheels of social media and the modern economy. Looking up from the base on the middle terrace, the traditional colors of Thai garments blend so seamlessly with the colorful porcelain of the spire walls and their figurines that my friend remarks, “this is a game of find-the-human.”

A close up of Yakshas on the decorated central prang of Wat Arun (Image courtesy: Shesmax, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

My destination during this visit on Rattanakosin Island, on the eastern bank, is Wat Pho, an old Buddhist temple complex a few meters south of the Grand Palace. While the temple predates the founding of Bangkok, it was rebuilt and expanded in the late 1700s and renamed as a homage to the most sacred site in Buddhism: Bodh Gaya (the common contraction of Bodhi Tree in Southeast Asia is Bo Tree which, in turn, inspires Pho). The complex houses a large collection of Buddha images, the most popular being the 46-meter-long reclining Buddha. This figure is said to represent the Buddha’s entry into Nirvana and the end of all reincarnations. The posture is called siha-saiyas, or “sleeping lion.” The soles of the Buddha’s feet are a distinctive feature, decorated with auspicious symbols made from mother-of-pearl. Narrow hallways encircle the reclining statue, with beautiful murals adorning the walls and ceiling. The building carries a mixed energy of devotion, awe, and modern tourism. Dropping coins in the 108 bronze bowls that line the corridor, representing the Buddha’s auspicious qualities, feels more like an act of vanity than of piety. Adjacent to the building housing the reclining Buddha is a small garden with a bodhi tree, apparently propagated from the Jaya Sri Maha Bodhi in Sri Lanka, itself said to descend from the original Bodhi Tree in India under which the Buddha attained enlightenment. Whether or not wisdom spreads, religious symbolism certainly does. Something I initially thought out of place, a Thai massage center within the complex, turned out, upon further reading, to be the Wat Pho Thai Traditional Medical and Massage School, one of the earliest massage institutions in Thailand. Its teachings are also inscribed on UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list.

Feet with auspicious symbols of Buddha at Wat Pho (Image courtesy: Mastertongapollo, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

Outside the sacred spaces of stillness and away from the city’s slick, modern façade, emerges the vibrant hustle of Bangkok’s streets – its narrow sois and hidden troks – where resides its authentic, pulsating heart. The sheer mass of humanity appears to be constantly in motion amidst an intimate, human-scale chaos, spilling horizontally across lanes that barely fit two, and vertically towards the skytrains and skywalks above. The sizzling woks, steaming bowls, and smoky grills are perennially on fire, with a constant slurping and chomping against the backdrop of intense smell hanging in the air – of meat, fish, vinegar, sauces, and often, incense. It’s remarkable that such a large number of humans in such small spaces rarely descends into a raucous cacophony. Instead, mutual respect subtly prevails, whether on foot or on motorbikes. Further out, on the city’s main arterial roads, luxury cars and tourist buses often queue up neatly in stagnant lanes, while motorbikes, my preferred mode of transport in the perennially stuck traffic, zip past large vehicles as gracefully as water through a sieve.

Like most ancient cities, Bangkok has witnessed the rise and fall of rulers and followers, of souls who lived, breathed, and navigated the Chao Phraya and its canals, now long gone in the cycle of life. It’s also a city that is tirelessly reinventing, while holding on to its profound spiritual and cultural roots. Bangkok is a city that defines “stillness in motion.”

In the Shade of Eternity: Sierra Nevada

“There was a Buffalo Soldier
In the heart of America
Stolen from Africa, brought to America
Fighting on arrival, fighting for survival”

A year before his death at age 36, Jamaican reggae icon Bob Marley recorded these lines about African American soldiers who fought in the “Indian Wars” of the 18th and 19th centuries. Depending on which narrative one reads, these wars may either be criticized as the westward expansion of the United States to seize Native lands and relocate tribes to reservations through the “Trail of Tears,” or praised as the pursuit of the “Manifest Destiny” of Americans to spread Christianity and democracy from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans. The Buffalo Soldiers (arguably a pejorative) of the U.S. Army—African American regiments who “protected settlers” after the Civil War—were also, interestingly, deployed as the first park rangers in Sequoia and Yosemite National Parks before the creation of the National Park Service in 1916.

The Sierra Nevada (Spanish for “snowy mountains”) in eastern California is essentially a massive granite block roughly 640 km long and 100 km wide, that has been cut, shaped, carved and polished by glaciers and rivers since the Ice Ages. It hosts both Yosemite and Sequoia & Kings Canyon National Parks. Its numerous rivers are primarily fed by snowmelt, cascading into splendid waterfalls across its valleys, peaks, canyons, gorges, meadows, and lakes, making the Sierra a crucial “water tower” for California and neighboring regions. ‘Indian tribes’ (a phrase that always makes me cognitively dissonant as an Indian national) such as the Yokuts, Miwok, and Paiute have lived in this region for at least 1,500 years, until many were pushed off their lands during the California Gold Rush of the 1850s.

The Sierra Nevada range in California (Image courtesy: Dicklyon, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

Several ‘attractions’ and trailheads in today’s Sequoia National Park bear the name of one Hale Tharp, a Gold Rush miner who ventured into this area in the hope of making a fortune and settled into cattle ranching. His log cabin and barn are featured as the must-see “Cattle Cabin” in the park’s leaflets, while his dwelling made from a hollowed tree log, judiciously named “Tharp's Log,” is noted as a prominent contribution and a ‘historic site.’ Tharp also appears on information boards at various points in the park, including one at Moro Rock, a granite dome with a 2 km elevation, informing readers about the ‘explorer Tharp,’ who was the first person to ascend this prominent structure in 1861, ‘guided’ by two Indians.

History is written by the victors and is replete with narratives of their grace, legitimacy, and divine favor over so-called rebels and infidels. These labels shift, get rinsed, and are repeated every few hundred years. North Africans enslaved swathes of Christian Europeans across the Mediterranean; the Ottomans did the same with white Europeans from the Balkans; and the Crimeans went in the Russian hinterlands to capture white slaves. Europeans themselves did the same with Africans, turning it into the most profitable business of all. Religion, meanwhile, played a recurring role as the banner of legitimacy in these human pursuits of profit over the few hundred years of written history that we know.

And history is what reverberates as the theme across the enchanted landscape of Sierra Nevada.

“The Sentinel” is a majestic, 2,200-year-old giant sequoia in Sequoia National Park’s Giant Forest—the most famous and largest grove of these trees in the world. Sequoias are massive, routinely reaching 80–90 meters in height (comparable to a 25-story building), and grow slowly over centuries in ‘rings’ around the existing trunk. These rings archive history like etched grooves on a vinyl record. Each ring in the cross-section of a sequoia trunk, roughly representing a year of growth, can reveal wet and dry years, pest infestations, and occurrences of fire. John Muir, the naturalist credited with the birth of the U.S. National Park system, once described sequoias as “the greatest of living things.” Standing beneath a sequoia that has been alive for two to three millennia silently dwarfs you and your place in the world—physically and existentially.

The Sentinel (Image courtesy: m01229 from USA, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

The Sentinel began its life around 225 BCE, a time when much of Europe was tribal. Alexander’s vast, hard-won territory from Darius’s Persia had largely disintegrated. The Romans were expanding and consolidating power as a significant force on the Italian peninsula. Mauryan King Ashoka’s vast empire in the Indian peninsula had begun to fragment. The first unification of China under the Qin Dynasty was underway. And amidst all this, religion—the most profitable of human enterprises—had an entirely different fervor. The polytheistic Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians were worshipping a pantheon of gods and goddesses. Zoroastrianism was dominant in Persia, while Judaism was just past its early stages. Buddhism, having expanded significantly under Ashoka, was a major force in the East. Classical Hinduism was evolving from its Vedic roots, and the Bhagavad Gita was yet to be composed. The Mayan civilization was just beginning. Christianity and Islam did not yet exist. From its silent perch in a North American forest, unknown to the major powers of that Old World, The Sentinel was witnessing it all—quietly recording history while outliving empires. Standing before such an old tree, with its cinnamon-red bark storing all this history inside, makes you feel insignificant, yet strangely connected to the milieu of life beyond wars and conquests for temporary human dominance over nature. The sequoias’ silence hits you differently; despite their shallow roots and fire-dependent reproduction, they endure—in humbling contrast to human impermanence.

And further back in the arc of history, there are the rivers—the sculptors of Yosemite and Sequoia. Roaring through the canyons, they patiently chiseled the Sierra Nevada’s granite heart over millions of years. The entire range was born of molten magma that cooled and formed the soaring cliffs of Yosemite’s El Capitan and the gorges of the Kaweah. And the handiwork of these rivers resulted in the picturesque waterfalls and canyons we see today. Yosemite hosts the eponymous Yosemite Falls (the tallest in North America), Bridalveil Fall, and Vernal Fall, among many others—each framed by jagged granite cliffs, their mist swaying in the breeze and drenching onlookers. Sequoia features Grizzly Falls and Roaring River Falls, among others, cooling the air, their mist mingling with the scent of wildflowers. Despite the roar—much more pronounced in the spring when flows peak—these falls hold a quiet power, an intimacy with the rocks through which they plummet, thunder, and dissolve time. Occasionally, a double rainbow arches across the spray—a fleeting, timeless crown. In the deep, hardened soul of the granite, it is the rivers that have nurtured diverse ecosystems across the ages. A sign just outside Roaring River Falls reminds us of human fragility in this seemingly eternal world: Do not go near the rocks. People drown in this river every year.

Grizzly Falls in Kings Canyon (Image courtesy: Alexander Migl, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

Among granite peaks and ancient waters, the wildlife of the Sierra Nevada tells another tale of survival and loss through history. For more than two million years, grizzly bears were the lords of Yosemite and Sequoia, but were driven to extinction in California in less than a century by the traps and rifles of ‘settlers’ in the 19th century. Today, black bears still forage—often struggling futilely with modern bear-proof food storage boxes scattered throughout campgrounds and guest accommodations in the park. There are also mule deer, bighorn sheep, marmots, and even mountain lions and cougars—thankfully difficult to spot for entertainment’s sake in the park’s vast wilderness. Apparently, eleven woodpecker species inhabit this region, and watching one patiently at work on a tall oak tree was a delight.

To a modern-day visitor, Yosemite and Sequoia offer more than a thousand kilometers of marked hiking trails, a highway system with scenic vistas, campgrounds, and comfortable lodging options with reliable internet service—fruits of late-stage capitalism. It’s heartening to see how modern narratives in their visitor centers and information panels do at least partial justice to history, and how conservation programs strive to preserve the beauty and timelessness of this land that vastly predates—and will likely outlast—human stories.

Quoting Bob Marley again:

“If you know your history
Then you would know where you coming from”

On my way back from the Sierra Nevada, with sequoias’ shadows in my rearview, I thought a little about where I came from. And offered a silent prayer—grateful for the providence and amazing fortunes of my life.

Masai Mara

The sun rises over the Mara.

The vast landscape gets bathed in yellow and appears to stir softly, like a gargantuan beast languidly waking up. The first thing one might notice at the break of dawn is perhaps the vastness of the land. The term “Mara” itself describes this landscape, or more accurately, how the Masai view it: Mara means “spotted” in Maa, the language of the Masai who dominated East Africa before European settlers arrived. Ecologically, the Mara is a tropical savanna consisting of large open grasslands with scattered trees and shrubs. To the uninitiated, it might be puzzling to comprehend that these ‘open’ lands offer the exceptionally rich biodiversity of mammals, birds, reptiles, and insects that the Mara is acclaimed for. But in Africa, appearances can be deceiving.

The sluggish mornings, at first, appear unaltered from one day to the next. The equator sun rises and sets almost at the same time each day, witnessing one of the only two seasons: dry and wet. The temperature follows the same pattern each day throughout the year. However, this apparent monotony disguises the countless warps and wefts of feeding, hunting, chasing, mating, nesting, communicating, and the enchanting twists of woes and fortunes that keep the Mara’s numerous inhabitants in perfect balance as authorized by nature. The previous night was not an uninterrupted slumber, and must have witnessed the pursuits and hunts of predators, the scavenging and patrolling of hyenas, the strolling and grazing of hippos, and the remarkable lives of birds and rodents. The ensuing day will not be mundane either, and will play out the drama of multiple cohabiting species asserting themselves within their relative pecking order in the food chain.

Masai Mara Landscape (Image courtesy: Byrdyak, CC-BY-SA-4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

Masai Mara National Reserve in southwestern Kenya stretches over 1,510 square kilometers and forms a wedge-shaped landmass that is the northernmost section of the larger Mara-Serengeti ecosystem. The Serengeti side, ten times larger than the Masai Mara, is in Tanzania. Humans carved these borders, unbeknownst to over a million animals, including wildebeests, zebras, gazelles, and elands, that move along an ancient route from the southern Serengeti to the Masai Mara and back, searching for grazing and water: the Great Migration. It seems almost absurd that one species, humans, should find itself ‘wondering’ about the existence of such variety of life on the planet, as if humans themselves could have survived and thrived any other way.

Small 12-14 seater turboprop planes fly from the heart of Nairobi to more than a dozen airstrips in the Mara, instantly transporting one from an urban sprawl to Wild Africa. As a first-time visitor to this world, I flew into Keekorok, perhaps the most prominent airstrip serving the southern part of the Reserve, popular for wildlife viewing. The Cessna Grand Caravan’s raucous turbine engines glide the aircraft just about a kilometer above ground through its hourlong journey, offering a curious variety of scenery and interspersed clouds from its windows.

Taking off from Wilson Airport, an aerial view of urban Nairobi appears first. It reveals a neatly gentrified layout of green patches of large colonial mansions, commercial high-rises, and dense shanties, often separated by arterial roads: clean insurmountable straight lines dividing the haves and have-nots. A little further, there is a silhouette of Ngong Hills, popularized by the movie “Out of Africa,” followed by the Great Rift Valley and some lakes. The landscape turns green, with a patchwork of farms, fields, and forests. 

Mara River (Image courtesy: ryan harvey, CC-BY-SA-2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

Next, the iconic savanna comes into sight, and one can distinctly see the Mara River and its tributaries that sustain the diverse habitats and wildlife and are central to the annual wildebeest migration. As the aircraft begins its descent, a tower of giraffes is visible below, casually browsing trees and shrubs. Finally, the plane’s rugged landing gear touches down on a rudimentary gravel airstrip and decelerates quickly to a halt. Touchdown on gravel feels quaint for a city-dweller like me who is used to asphalt. There are no built structures around this airstrip that might require taxiing, parking, or gates. One simply picks up their bag from the rear of the aircraft, walks out on the gravel, and finds themselves in The Shadow of the Sun.

About 100 feet from the airstrip, wistful Masais sit on the ground with assorted knickknacks and kitschy souvenirs spread hopefully in front of them. They bear the disproportionate burden of ‘saving the environment’ by cordoning off these lands exclusively for ‘conservation’. A burden perhaps imposed by those who invented capitalism, primitively demonstrated here through the act of selling knickknacks and souvenirs, often to the inventors themselves.

Keekorok Airstrip

To the left, there is a makeshift toilet, and on the right, a small ticket counter that seems permanently closed. A solitary wooden signboard with stenciled letters is the only marker of the place and its coordinates. Several Toyota Land Cruisers with their quintessential open tops wait in line to collect their respective patrons who descend from the aircraft, armed with backpacks containing sunscreens, insect repellants, wet wipes, water purification tablets, first-aid kits, sunglasses, binoculars, and everything else described on travel websites. Many have separate bags with protruding camera lenses. Amidst this inconsequential theater of human behavior, I spot my guide and companion for the journey into the Mara.

Kaiyoni is a young Masai man who prefers wearing his colorful Shúkà – the traditional red, blue, and black clothing paired with intricate beadwork jewelry – during mornings but switches to jeans and t-shirts otherwise. He is sharply built, with piercing eyes and perhaps an acute sense of hearing and smell. Over the course of my time with him, he would emerge as someone possessing almost a sixth sense, making him constantly aware of the whereabouts of wildlife in this vast reserve. He would also demonstrate his driving prowess, navigating a Land Cruiser through hills, marshes, swamps, high grass, and river streams. Accompanying him is Jacob Obongo, the manager of Enchoro Wildlife Camp, who has hired Kaiyoni for this booking. Kaiyoni speaks little English, and Jacob doubles up as an interpreter for our upcoming safari.

It’s amusing that the word ‘safari’ is Swahili, meaning journey. It originally referred to long-distance travel on trade routes between African and Arabic cultures, with the Arabic word ‘safar’ also describing a journey. European explorers introduced ‘safari’ into English to describe their big-game hunting expeditions into the African interior. In contrast, the rather unimaginative word ‘game’ is very much English. It derives from a root word meaning fun and amusement, and was used during the colonial era in Africa to describe hunted animals as “game animals” or simply “game.” This term is now entrenched in wildlife management and conservation, often appearing in official contexts such as “game reserves.” Modern safaris are associated with wildlife viewing and photographic expeditions rather than hunting. Most safari-goers now travel with the goal of seeing Africa’s ‘big five’: the lion, leopard, elephant, rhinoceros, and Cape buffalo.

Driving with Kaiyoni, my first thought is the sheer abundance of the Mara. Herds of gazelles, impalas, elands, and wildebeests are easily spotted. Dazzles of zebras and towers of giraffes can be frequently seen up close. A pod of hippopotamuses grunts and bellows in the water, keeping themselves away from crocodiles. Sounders of warthogs run with their erect tails, providing comical relief in this seemingly precarious setting for the human eye: appearances can be deceiving, and a predator is always on the prowl.

Gazelles in the Mara (Image courtesy: Paul Mannix, CC-BY-SA-2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

Occasionally, I see flightless, 2-meter-high ostriches staring into the oblivion with their pink skins and black plumage, and stunning kingfishers perched on shrubs. At some point, I also see Cape buffaloes. Their massive bodies are covered in a thick layer of mud with an egret perched on their backs, picking off insects in a perfect symbiotic relationship.

In the afternoon, a coalition of cheetahs walks along the dirt road, probably looking for a place to rest and digest, undisturbed by the long lenses pointed at them. Kaiyoni’s sixth sense activates at some point, and he starts driving off the dirt road, into the grass, across the marshes, and around the trees for a few kilometers, until we arrive at a magnificent sight: two different prides of lions resting under the trees. It seems perfectly natural—an ironic use of the word—that a dozen lions with all their ferocity would be resting in this vast savanna. It feels almost obscene for humans to be there at all.

The next morning, we witness a lioness, patiently waiting, blending seamlessly into the golden savanna grass. Her amber eyes are fixed on a small herd of gazelles. At a chosen instant, she explodes into action, and the savanna erupts into a quotidian drama, majestic to human eyes. The gazelles scatter, their lithe bodies bouncing across the plains, safely into survival. The lioness and her cubs will have to wait for another hunt to feed themselves. Kaiyoni smiles, having seen this sequence unfold numerous times, perhaps understanding the sacredness of the ritual of feeding better than the rest of us. He then drives us to another hill far removed from the road, where we see a herd of elephants in the glorious morning sun. By now, we have been humbled into complete submission.

The African safari experience could be described as one of setting context to human existence. Driving for hours in the endless wilderness effectively chips away at the boundaries of human life and its self-centrism, revealing a world of flourishing beauty that neither needs nor wants humans. The intricate machinery of nature hums in perfect harmony here, from tall grasses and acacia trees nourishing wildebeests and zebras, to lions and leopards stalking these preys, and vultures and bacteria completing the cycle of life. This ever-shifting tapestry of life operates independently of human inventions, concepts, identities, and beliefs. Nature does not have democracy, as a friend remarked. The abstractness of humans and their inconsequence to this vast, rich ecosystem provides a context that is both bewildering and humbling. As I ponder my dreams, aspirations, skills, and enterprise, there is a feeling of liberation in noting the perverse fungibility of life and the fickleness of our feeble breaths. The Mara is an effective medicine to dissolve ego, allowing one to lose oneself and find it anew.

Vienna: Take Two

About 30 planes descend into Vienna every hour. Each of these metal birds cruises through the air, seemingly by magic, carrying human lives along with their hopes, dreams, anxieties, and plans. When the skies are clear, one of the most noticeable features of the Austrian landscape visible from these planes are perhaps windmills. Their white blades turn slowly and languidly, appearing to yawn and stretch, almost slowing the passage of time.

The passage of time has always been more a product of fragile human imagination than an immutable truth. Attempts to quantify this infinity have confounded us for ages, and we find solace in sayings like: Years fly quickly, but hours stretch long. Or more simply: life is short.

The city of Vienna has seen its years, and life in those years. Generations have lived through tragedies, wars, prosperity, and resurrections, all woven into the ebb and flow of the city’s history. From Roman military camps in the first century, to the Babenbergs a thousand years later, to the Habsburgs and the Austro-Hungarian Empire until the World Wars. History only occasionally throws surprises; pick any parcel on the planet from any era, and you will find humans surviving under kingdoms, religion, tribalism, business, and propaganda, and yet creating thoughts and objects of incredible beauty and value. Vienna generated its share of art, music, architecture, and intellectual life with composers like Beethoven and Schubert, luminaries like Sigmund Freud, and painters like Gustav Klimt. And it produced architecture like the 12th-century Gothic St. Stephen’s Cathedral, 17th-century Baroque palaces such as Liechtenstein and Belvedere, and the Neo-Renaissance Opera House (Wiener Staatsoper). The weathered cobblestones of Vienna still murmur the tread of generations.

Vienna State Opera (Image courtesy: Official Website)

Time also offers perspective, which perhaps is nothing more than an assorted mélange of experiences, learnings, some wisdom, and a healthy dose of nostalgia. However, one must pay attention to discern this perspective.

My last visit to Vienna was ten years ago, in May 2014, as my social media ‘timeline’ keenly reminds me. A decade is usually considered a milestone, rather arbitrarily, because at some point in time, the decimal number system won over other formats, and we thought fives and tens were nice ways to measure life. Ten years, that flew by. Or ten years, that fundamentally altered who I am: it’s perhaps both a Ship-of-Theseus question and an egoistic proclamation. But I digress.

Ten years ago, Vienna was merely a checkbox on my backpacking itinerary. Traveling through Europe's iconic cities on a shoestring budget is a common, yet challenging dream for most youth from my part of the world. I arrived in the city in my late twenties, stayed for two days in a hostel, and set myself up to the task of circling everything the city could offer on a paper map through free walking tours, wandering by myself; capturing, and often posting every sight on social media for a combination of instant connection and perpetual archiving, or something in between which is now difficult to remember. I saw Vienna from the tourist’s eyes: the Wiener Staatsoper, Karlskirche, Kohlmarkt, Naschmarkt, Albertina – neatly tagging each picture with its corresponding location. I clicked pictures of streets, supermarkets, people, spices, food stands, road signs, and skies. The visit was an exercise in optimization: seeing everything in minimal time and at minimal cost. The trip included an expensive hospital visit for an ankle sprain, a moderately priced ‘Strauss and Mozart’ concert at Kursalon for an ‘experience,’ and a somewhat costly visit to ‘Café Sacher’ to sample their famous torte and coffee. I felt happy and fortunate to be in Vienna, but the city was always distant and elusive – to be looked at from outside the glass, like Mont Blanc and Cartier products neatly displayed at airports. Knowing something like that exists was enough, the thought of actually using or owning a piece of it was absurd. Vienna existed, like a wonderland where I had a two-day economy access pass, and I had to see the most of a city where ‘other people’ lived, on the other side of the glass; it wasn’t a place where I could imagine myself. Even the extravagant desire to eat a Sacher torte was overlaid with self-doubts of the possibility of being denied entry based on appearance, uncertainty about being offered an actual table, anxiety about the prices on the menu, potential self-humiliation of having to leave if nothing seemed affordable, and a lack of confidence about trying all this anyway regardless of the outcome. I had managed to dare back then, picking a low-rush time to visit the café, asking for the cheapest combination of torte and coffee, fumbling my way through documenting the process using my camera while no one was watching, eating and drinking with trepidation, and leaving without a tip. I do not remember whether I liked or disliked the combination – it was a time when if someone offered me a Mont Blanc pen to try, I wouldn’t observe the quality of its writing.

My Sacher-torte and coffee, May 2014.

Ten years flew by. And I found myself in Vienna again.

The Viennese experience is perhaps a nice sliver of European summer. There is an elegant charm to its urban life that is organically slower, lived at an unhurried and intentional stroll, perhaps flowing with the pace and tranquility of windmills. For most of the local populace, life is lived more in the streets, cafés, parks, and performances than in offices, stores, cars, and bank accounts – the defining characteristics of America. In the morning, there is no queue of supersized vehicles outside schools with haggard parents dropping their wards for the purpose of education. Instead, there are 8-year-olds standing on their scooters, pushing their way to school with apparent autonomy, distinguishing themselves from the overtly protected enterprises of child-rearing elsewhere. Cyclists zoom past at almost dangerous speeds, and trams chug slowly through the streets depositing and collecting people across the town. By the evening, a relaxed fervor starts to build up. Streets have more activity, with perhaps everyone getting out of stone and glass buildings around the same time, ending the rationed hours allocated to capitalism. The flavor of businesses shifts to the more relaxed pursuits of horse-carts ferrying tourists, well-dressed waiting staff serving coffee and schnitzels and radlers, hawkers in uniform selling tickets to concerts and exhibitions outside the opera house, and violinists and saxophonists in parks hoping to be graced by a few coins from sympathetic ears. As I stroll through Stadtpark just before dark, a group of elderly men and women are doing tango on a makeshift dance floor with a Latin American background tune. In Leopoldstadt at dark, there is an African movie playing on a giant open screen. There seems to be a certain poetry to humans extracting more of life from the metronome of existence and the jaws of mortality. A cynical view could be that this life is afforded by the arc of history that deposited wealth from elsewhere in the world into Europe through plunder. A counter view could be that history has always been a story of the plunderers and the oppressed, of the winners and the vanquished, and those roles have kept changing around different parcels of the earth more or less equitably, in accordance with the fundamental laws of nature.

Graben near the Pestsäule, Vienna (Image courtesy: Viator)

I try to measure myself across the short span of ten years – it’s a good perspective, however biased by the interspersed experiences of life, the winnings and losings, the happiness and pain, and healthy doses of nostalgia. Ten years hence, I have more agency, and the city responds by being more accepting and accessible. I do not experience the city as an ‘other,’ through an insurmountable glass barrier, and I am able to feel its breath and blood and sparkles and wounds. Imagining myself here does not seem to be an audacious indulgence. I have grown enough to have the privilege of being able to exercise choice, discern my likes and dislikes, and feast upon sights and things that soothe my mind and senses instead of documenting them. Ten years later, the torte at Café Sacher feels a tad too sweet, and its coffee a tad bit disappointing by Viennese standards. The café itself feels small, like the houses and rooms where you grew up as a child that feel smaller when you revisit them after years. The sense of wonder and enchantment is muted, and I question the notion of an objective reality and the nature of memory. Perhaps time has shaped my identity and tastes differently, and perhaps there is some personal growth and an evolution of perspectives in the past ten years. Or perhaps, I just liked my flaky croissant and wiener melange elsewhere in the city too much!

My Sacher-torte and coffee, June 2024.

Jerusalem

Jis wajah se fasaad hote hain, uska koi ataa-pataa hi nahin
(The reasons for strife, they are nowhere to be found)

— Krishn Bihari ‘Noor’, 1926-2003 (Uttar Pradesh, India)
[A delightful rendition available here.]

The Berlin wall, built in 1960s, was a concrete barrier that separated West Berlin of the Federal Republic of Germany from East Berlin of the German Democratic Republic. It was about 155 Km long, and 13 feet tall. The Separation Barrier, under construction since 2002, is partly an electronic fence, and partly a concrete wall in urban areas that separates Israel and West Bank in Palestine. It is about 750 Km long (approximately 10 percent of it being concrete), and 30 feet tall in some places.

I was greeted by a series of murals, mostly pro-Palestine messages and symbolism, on the West Bank side of the Separation Barrier near Bethlehem. These are beautiful pieces of art, including many inspired by Banksy’s works (there is also a hotel claiming that the artist stayed with them), amidst one of the most contested regions of the world. I couldn’t see the other side of the barrier, but a reasonable assumption is that murals there would depict the alternate side of this ethnoreligious conflict. The vocabulary changes based on where you stand and what you read (in my case, based on the VPN gateway): liberation for one is occupation for the other, someone’s resistance is another’s terrorism, aggression for me could be security response for you, and what one calls as settlements could be annexation for another. Amidst this exchange of words and gunpowder that arbitrate the nuances of power and hierarchies, hangs precariously the lives and livelihoods of the ‘common’ millions who are frightfully present throughout the unforgiving wheels of history.

The spectacle of barriers continues in the Old City of Jerusalem: they are there, inside and outside, shifting over centuries, determining who is welcome – or not – in different neighborhoods. Modern day Jerusalem consists of an urban sprawl that developed largely after the creation of Israel in 1948, and a medieval Old City enclosed by 16th-century walls and gates built by the Ottomans. The Old City is constructed in white, using picturesque “Jerusalem Limestone” (meleke) whose sun-kissed photographs are splashed across travel magazines, goading visitors to soak-in the culture and beauty of the holy land. The city could be a treat to the eyes, with its medieval bazaar bursting with smell of spices, and its narrow alleyways lined with restaurants and souvenir shops buzzing with tourists and pilgrims and guides. But with all its beauty, it is probably difficult to find another parcel on earth that is such a startling juxtaposition of tribal instincts of humans reflected in organized religion, of political opportunism that feeds it, and of military/militancy that enforces it.

(Image courtesy: israeltourism, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

A walk through the Old City in Jerusalem is a distinctly unsettling experience; it feels like an exhausting drag through a viscous, thick concoction of faith and religion, traditions and orthodoxy, rules and checkpoints, and an unnerving feeling of being watched. There are points where one may be asked about one’s religion or nationality, and accordingly granted or denied access. The present day nomenclature of the territorial fragmentation of the Old City introduced in the mid-nineteenth century by the British – the Armenian Quarter, the Christian Quarter, the Jewish Quarter, and the Muslim Quarter – perpetuates the city’s history tainted by perennial disappointment.

Jerusalem’s tag as the “land of creation” derives from its veneration as a holy city by the three Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity whose believers constitute more than half of humans on the planet. The Temple Mount, a large compound on a hill in Jerusalem, contains the religious sites for all three. In Jewish scripture, this spot is where Abraham nearly sacrificed his son Isaac, and this was also the location of the first temple (Temple of Solomon around 950 BCE) and the second Temple (around 500 BCE). Both temples were destroyed in conquests, but a large section of one of the retaining walls from the second Temple remains, and is known as the Western Wall, the holiest site for the Jews. After Islamic conquest, a shrine called the Dome of the Rock was built in the 7th-century on the site of the destroyed second Temple, and is believed to be the site of the prophet Muhammad’s ascent to heaven. After Mecca and Medina, this is the third holiest site of Islam. The Al-Aqsa mosque, located adjacent to the Dome of the Rock on the same compound, is also holy to Muslims. Christians also believe that this is the same site mentioned by the prophets in the Old Testament of the Bible, and was visited by Jesus according to the New Testament.

“Poets and storytellers are in error in matters of the greatest human importance,” wrote Plato, lamenting the pervasive legends of gods and heroes. On Good Friday, pilgrims walk the Via Dolorosa (“the way of grief”), through the 14 “stations of the cross” representing the path that Christians believe Jesus walked on the way to his crucifixion. As a tourist, one is bombarded with ‘facts’ and ‘counter-facts’ as promulgated by different Christian sects at various stations. The route ends at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, believed to be the site where Jesus was crucified and buried, and where his resurrection occurred. The church itself has continued to witness scuffles between Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Franciscans, Armenians, Coptic, Ethiopian and Syriac sects. In Bethlehem, a little south of Jerusalem, lies the Church of the Nativity, believed to be the birthplace of Jesus. It’s also where Greek Orthodox and Armenian priests have often attacked each other. Amidst brawls over stories and contests for the ownership of God, lessons on how to live with tolerance and righteousness were lost, replaced with an all-pervasive ennui of existence, and God being reduced to a refuge. In a book I read recently, truth was laid bare: “For two thousand years, Jerusalem has brought out the least attractive qualities in every race that has lived there.”

Outside the Old City walls, political drama of the last century has been playing out. It started with the British troops entering Jerusalem in 1917 under Edmund Allenby, who directed the Palestine campaign in World War I. My crossing into Israel from Jordan was through the Allenby bridge – the current land border between the two countries that came later – where immigration for a solo male traveler, arguably suspicious, was a predictable four-hour process. This was also the point at which the Arab hospitality, optimism, and smiles, largely disappeared and a palpable unease settled-in for the rest of my journey, until I reached Tel Aviv. Since the end of the British Mandate and subsequent wars and peace talks, Southern Levant has been a land perforated with political greed, false hopes, lost identities, and claims over resources. The last failed attempt at peace, Oslo Accords, turns 30 on Sep 13, 2023, marking yet another generation lost.  

Unless one is able to find repose in the Kotel, or the Dome of the Rock, or the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, Jerusalem will batter the soul and bludgeon the most stout of optimists. And while hope in general might be in short supply in Jerusalem, as one listens to the sound of the shofar, the muezzin, and the church bells, one is at least ‘hopeful’ of the judgment day that everyone here agrees upon. It’s dangerous, and ignorant, to be taking sides when witnessing the world’s most intractable, divisive, and perhaps the oldest conflict. Meanwhile, a taxi driver who drove me between Israel and West Bank said: “no mother will ever send her child to war either for the temple, or for the mosque, or for the church.” I did not ask his religion, or nationality.

Jordan

Then the Lord said to him, “This is the land I promised on oath to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob when I said, ‘I will give it to your descendants.’ I have let you see it with your eyes, but you will not cross over into it.”

This was apparently a pronouncement made to Moses, a prophet revered by three monotheistic religions, at the top of Mount Nebo, about 30 km south of modern Amman. Since three-thousand years, this pronouncement of the ‘Promised Land’ has united a horde of believers, continually reshaped the geopolitics of this region (and the world by extension), and left a long trail of beauty, art, faith, hope, belief, and often, violence in its wake.

Geography is a great tool to understand history, and tracing the Jordan river was helpful for me to gain a basic comprehension of the Southern Levant. On the map, the Jordan valley bisects the region from north to south, with the 250 km long Jordan river flowing roughly from the Lake of Tiberias (Sea of Galilee) into the Dead Sea. There is desert all around it: Syrian desert to the east, Arabian desert to the southeast, and Sinai desert to the southwest. The valley is amongst the oldest inhabited parts of Eurasia, and possibly a route through which early humans migrated out of Africa into Europe and Asia two million years ago. Northern portion of the valley has a higher population density, and more than 90 percent of Jordan’s population is concentrated here.

On a clear September day, I could see a good panorama of the southern portion of the valley (including the Dead Sea), and the national borders that currently encompass it from the summit of Mount Nebo, close to the city of Madaba about 30 km south of Amman. And on another day, I could see a good panorama of the northern portion of the valley (including Lake Tiberias), and the national borders encompassing it from the city of Umm Qais, situated on a high plateau about 25 km northwest of Irbid.

(Image courtesy: Google Earth)

A crude way to divide the better-recorded history of the valley is into the Nabataeans from the 3rd century BC (who built the beautiful capital of Petra), their alliance and cultural merger into ancient Romans who ruled until about the 4th century (a period which also saw the crushing of three Jewish revolts, altering the fate of Jews forever and ending their dominance from Southern Levant for the next 1800 years), followed by the Byzantine rule for about two centuries, until the rise of Islam and the Muslim conquest of the Levant in the 7th century and establishment of the Caliphate. It gave way to the Crusaders who established the Kingdom of Jerusalem and other Crusader states in the 11th century. Then came the Mamluks during the mid-13th to early 16th centuries, who were in turn defeated by the Ottomans in the early 16th century. The Ottoman rule lasted until World War I, when the British took over the region to the west of the river under the Mandate for Palestine, and established Transjordan as a protectorate on the east of the river. This forms the backdrop of the present-day conflict. Amidst all this churning, there were a plethora of cultures and people, tribes and nomads, customs and traditions, crafts and fabric, and arts and cuisines, that greet modern-day travelers with a maelstrom of a ‘Middle Eastern’ experience which is almost impossible to fully comprehend, and yet a delightful concoction to stimulate the senses.

Remnants of this complex tapestry of history and religion can be seen, in parts, through a narrow, serpentine road winding down the ridges, gorges, ravines, plateaus, and edges of the desert in modern day Jordan: the King’s Highway, believed to be one of the world’s oldest continuously used roads. This route has served as a vital artery connecting ancient kingdoms and empires for millennia, and warriors, merchants, and pilgrims have used it as a thoroughfare. In ancient times, it was an important trade route connecting Arabia, the Fertile Crescent, the Red Sea and Egypt. It was also an important pilgrimage route, for Christians during the Byzantine period visiting the Holy Land and for Muslims in early Islamic period traveling to Mecca. Ottomans also constructed the magnificent Hejaz railway in the late 1800s roughly along this route from Damascus to Medina, and I could see a refurbished Ottoman locomotive on display at the Wadi Rum Train Station near Shakaria.

The modern Highway 35, which I used, is a tarmac atop its ancient ancestor, running south from Syria and passing through Roman ruins, Byzantine churches and mosaics, Crusader castles, the ancient city of Petra, natural wonders of Wadi Rum, before reaching Aqaba with its Mamluk castle. It traverses the most fertile part of Jordan – through the country’s springs, water sources, olive orchards, and other agricultural land – and therefore is its backbone. In my itinerary, this highway took me north from Amman to the cities of Jerash and Umm Qais, and south from Amman to the cities of Madaba (with detours to Mount Nebo and Umm ar-Rasas), Shobak, Wadi Musa (where Petra is located), and Wadi Rum. A road westward from Wadi Rum connects to the Dead Sea Highway near Aqaba, from where I drove up north almost parallel to the King’s Highway, to Wadi Mujib and Sweimeh, before crossing over to Israel.

Traveling through the country, the first thing one notices is the kindness, generosity, and conviviality of the people in this land. Jordan shares the cultural traditions common to the Arab world, and their hospitality to strangers is exceptional. Long handshakes and conversations, cups of tea being offered everywhere, and faith in everything being ‘God willing’ lends an almost mystical elegance to the inhabitants, and a comfortable serenity to the visitors. A vocabulary of exactly one Arabic word – šukran – was sufficient to be felt accepted and welcomed everywhere. Jordan’s cuisine is rich, sumptuous, and a means to express hospitality and generosity, which also implies that one is always stuffed, and happily so. The dishes primarily feature beans, olives, yogurt, garlic, za'atar, rice, meat, khubz (flatbread), salads, and an umpteen variety of spices and dips; lavish breakfasts give way to even grandiose meals, interspersed with countless servings of tea and coffee through the day. For inexplicable reasons, I was stuck for days with everything that started with the letter ‘M’ – mansaf, maqluba, musakhan, and mezze – until the Bedouins fed me Zarb in the Wadi Rum desert, apparently a delicacy cooked in a large underground pit for several hours. Smoking is prevalent, and by some estimates, Jordan has the highest smoking rate in the world. It feels strange to find officials and civilians smoking inside most buildings and office rooms, something usually associated with days of monochrome cinema. Alcohol, on the other hand, is scarce.

Jerash (Image courtesy: John Romano D'Orazio, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

Jordan has a lot to offer to tourists. Ruins from the Roman times are scattered throughout the country, most notably in Jerash, Jordan’s best preserved Roman ruins often dubbed the ‘Pompeii of the Middle East,’ and in Umm Qais, both cities located in the northwestern corner of the country. These cities were part of The Decapolis, believed to be a league of ten cities that were allowed significant political autonomy within Roman protection. Jerash (originally Gerasa) is imposing, with its paved and colonnaded streets, largely-intact temples, theatres, public squares and plazas, baths, fountains, and city walls – a marvel of human achievement from more than two thousand years ago. The vastness of the site made it a challenging walk for me; even the milder early-autumn sun seems to sizzle amidst the rocks and the sand, and lack of shade anywhere in the city can be tough on visitors. Umm Qais (originally Gadara) is similar, though less vast and more picturesque due to the use of black basalt stones conferring a dramatic hue to its structures. Another highlight of Umm Qais is its tremendous vantage point at a crossroads between three countries; I could see the Golan Heights, northern Palestine, and Lake Tiberias, but not southern Lebanon (Mount Hebron) which is also visible on clearer days. There are some Roman ruins in Amman itself, and a garrison for Roman military in Umm ar-Rasas. Many of these sites also have Byzantine-era churches with well-preserved mosaics and carvings, and are well-shaded for visitors, with large signboards describing the international agencies that paid for preserving the heritage. International aid often bends to divine influences of select variety.

The crown jewel of Jordan is Petra, a city spread over more than 250 square kilometers. It perhaps represents the pinnacle of human quest, and dedication of a people to shape rocks, over a hundred years or more, resulting in a city entirely carved out of red sandstone in the middle of a desert. Petra was built in 4th-century BCE by the Nabataeans, a civilization of ancient Arabic peoples. There are more than 500 buildings in Petra today, mostly tombs and mausoleums, in addition to the famed Treasury and the Monastery. Large, majestic rooms were created by scooping out rocks, often with colorful walls of red, orange, and grey hues. The city also has a unique system of conduits and cisterns to harvest, store and distribute rainwater, and a dam that must have bent a creek to the will of its inhabitants. Petra shows the essence of industry in our species, and sitting inside any of its numerous caves, there is a mysteriously tender feeling of not being alone, but being in the company of those who are buried here, everywhere, and continue to live on.

Another allure for tourists is the Dead Sea, a quirk of nature with waters containing 34% salt, almost 10 times that in oceans, increasing its buoyancy sufficiently to make a human body float. It was originally a much larger lake that extended to the Lake of Tiberias, but its outlet to the sea evaporated around 18,000 years ago, leaving a salty residue in a desert basin at the lowest point on earth, 1300 feet below sea level. Until the 1950s, the flow of fresh water from Jordan river and a few other tributaries balanced the surface evaporation, holding water levels steady. However, water inflow has since reduced due to large-scale irrigation and generally low rainfall. In addition, an Israeli dam collects significant water from the Sea of Galilee, further reducing the flow. And finally, there is Arab Potash Company that has been pumping Dead Sea’s water on the Jordanian side since the last 40 years into solar evaporation ponds to manufacture potash, a key ingredient in fertilizers. On the Israel side, the Dead Sea Works operates even larger evaporation ponds for a similar purpose. Over the past 50 years, the level of the Dead Sea has dropped by 45 meters, and water levels are falling at an average rate of 1.2 meters per year. Visiting the Dead Sea is more dystopian than delightful – abandoned resorts, receding shoreline, and rampant use of freshwater and energy to keep this place on life-support is distressing.

 Wadi Rum from a balloon (Image courtesy: Jedesto, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

And yet there is hope, and an eternity to the universe that remains untouched by the human hand. The moonrise in Wadi Rum, the ‘Valley of the Moon,’ is as exquisite as it perhaps was millions of years ago, when this sandstone desert was still under the sea. Its spectacular landscapes, stretching forever, and dotted with mountains, monoliths, canyons, and sand dunes, mirror the alien landscapes of the infinite stars and planets visible in the unpolluted night sky above. As I stand in the cold sand gazing through telescopes, the moon’s surface comes into view – a familiar landscape of craters and rocks, and Saturn appears – its rings smaller and monochrome than those in pictures. And there is the Milky Way, and the Andromeda, and a supernova explosion somewhere thousands of light years away. As I stand, I know that I am looking at all these events in the past, stuff that has already happened, in a perplexing ‘timeless’ reality that is incomprehensible to the unidirectional human mind that cannot comprehend time. And it’s the surest sign that in the grand scheme of things, we are inconsequential.

Perspective

About 200 km northwest of Las Vegas lies the Death Valley, the hottest place on earth. About 75 km northeast of the city lies the Valley of Fire, a vast expanse of bright red Aztec sandstones from the Jurassic period. And at about 375 km further ahead in that direction begins the Grand Staircase, a sequence of sedimentary rocks stretching south, starting from Bryce Canyon at the top, Zion Canyon in between, and Grand Canyon at the bottom. To travel through these lands is to witness a snapshot of nature’s long dance that continuously shapes and reshapes the flying rock we call home. In these lands, swathes of earth get bent, lifted, tilted, carved, and eroded over millions of years to form mountains, cliffs, basins, canyons, valleys, ridges, plateaus, mesas, deserts, badlands, and every other phrase in geology that humans have coined in their attempts to comprehend the mystery and grand spectacle of physical existence. Wind operates as the conductor of this grand orchestra, moving earth and sand into shapes and patterns that inspire awe, and compacting them into rocks that stay to tell the story. Water flows and meanders through rivers that drain out plateaus; streams that cut through mountains like sandpaper; waterfalls that churn silt, sand, and cobbles sending them downstream; abrasive narrows that carve rocks into canyons; lakes that feed life as we know it; and snow that wedges apart rocks as it forms in its crevices, and caps everything at the top to complete nature’s perfection. Fire appears, once in a while, spewing out the innards of the planet, bedazzling the landscape with new colors, shapes, and patterns that will keep redefining these lands that represent ‘forever’ more meaningfully than anything humans ever accomplished. And all these elements – earth, wind, water, fire – at the inconsequential moment of human observation, come together to reveal more than 200 million years of the planet’s history meticulously stored layer by layer in the rocks – a timespan that dwarfs the existence of humans by a distance and some more. This region in the southwestern United States is one of the finest productions of nature’s drama. Its extremes of climate and geography make it the ultimate showcase of our insignificance in space and time, and our absurd attempts at ‘reality distortion’. Being here proffers something priceless to us: perspective (a word that, ironically, betrays our sense of self-importance).

Death Valley, straddling the California-Nevada border, is the largest US National Park outside Alaska and is a land of striking contrast and extremes. Despite its forbidding and gloomy name, there are parts of the valley with lush green oases teeming with mammals and birds and reptiles, fields of wildflowers, peaks frosted with snow, occasional rainstorms, and a tremendous diversity of life. There are mountains as high as 3300 meters, deep and winding canyons, and rolling sand dunes. And there are barren salt flats, devoid of soil and vegetation, and covered largely with table salt (along with calcite, gypsum, and borax). A drive from the aptly named Furnace Creek Visitor Center to the Badwater Basin (and nearby Devils Golf Course, and Salt Creek) transports one to the second-lowest point in the western hemisphere at 86 m below sea level. Air trapped in this basin surrounded by the mountains recirculates the heat without being able to escape and sucking out most humidity. A colloquial story of the basin’s naming is about a surveyor’s mule refusing to drink the ‘bad water’ – high in salinity – from the spring-fed pool near the present-day boardwalk. The basin must have had ancient names, presumably vanished amidst the prejudice of recorded history and its narrators.

(Image courtesy: NPS)

At a slightly higher altitude in the Death Valley, short walks from the Zabriskie Point towards the Golden Canyon seem easy at first, but quickly remind one about the fragility of human bodies to withstand the forces of nature. Unforgiving terrain in this part of the valley, mostly made of yellow and brown stripped hills shaped by water, offers no shade and makes walking difficult. Humans have, nonetheless, lived here for thousands of years and sophisticated native American cultures have hunted and gathered in these lands. The first European descendants arriving in this area were lost travelers originally headed towards the California Gold Rush, who might also have lent the valley its present name – rather harsh for a land that accommodates such diversity of life. Motorable roads within the valley form a surprisingly dense network to access its different parts, and a pleasant drive to the Dantes View is a great way to soak-in the panorama of the swirling white salt flats and surrounding mountains from 1700 meters above the ground. Arguably, the most scenic drive in the valley is the Artist’s Drive where the generosity of creation is resplendent in the colorful rocks. Presence of different compounds (iron oxides and chlorite from volcanic deposits) adorns the hills with diverse hues – shades of red, orange, yellow, blue, pink, green, and grey – perhaps prompting the name of the road. For visitors with more time at hand, there are several locations to explore where Star Wars was filmed, and the mysterious Racetrack playa (a dry lakebed) to see, which is known for its strange moving rocks that seem to have been dragged across the ground.

Death Valley is a masterclass in adaptation: of bushes and mesquite plants that survive with long roots, beautiful Joshua trees that grow in the desert, bighorn sheep that can eat almost any plant, toughened snails and pickleweed plants that survive even the hostile salt flats, and generations of humans who thrived through vertical migration patterns moving from valley bottoms in winter to higher altitudes in summers. There is a stark and lonely vastness in this valley – a place that juxtaposes scenic views, multiple climates, insignificance of life, and yet, life’s sheer tenacity.

(Image courtesy: Lana Law)

A worthy detour while driving northeast from Las Vegas towards Zion is the Valley of Fire – a place where time appears to stand still, with the past and present fused under the beating heart of the sun. Located in the Mojave Desert, its name derives from 150 million years old brilliant rock formations that illuminate the sky with a fiery red color. These Aztec sandstones with their rough floors and jagged walls are what’s left after the compaction and extensive erosion of sand dunes – a constant process of natural transformation over an incomprehensible timescale. The Valley of Fire Road traversing through the park – yet another example of America’s focus on automobiles to reach the inaccessible – takes one through some of the most famous rock formations such as the elephant rock, arch rock, and the fire wave. Humans inhabited this region too, and there is rock art (petroglyphs) by the ancient peoples that can be seen at the Atlatl Rock. Witnessing this juxtaposition of humankind’s eternal quest to mark ‘we were here’, and the nature’s slow but assured dominance over it, is humbling.

Driving northeast for another 2.5 hours from the Valley of Fire gets one to Zion, the middle layer of the Grand Staircase and arguably, its finest composition for human exploration. Zion is charming, spectacular, imposing, and domineering, all at once. It offers something for everyone – leisurely strolls, moderate to strenuous climbs, cliffs and rivers and waterfalls, vivid imagery, plants and wildlife, and fascinating stories of the land and its people. The story of Zion’s topography, and of most of the Grand Staircase, is extraordinary. A long time ago, when dinosaurs were evolving, Zion was a flat basin near sea level. Over time, streams in surrounding mountains deposited so much sand, gravel, and mud eroded from those mountains, that the entire basin sunk. More layers of sediments continued to be deposited and solidified into rocks. At some point, the earth very slowly pushed the entire surface up, hoisting huge blocks of the crust creating the Colorado Plateau and mountains as high as 3000 meters, and giving speed to rivers that flowed rapidly down a steep gradient, cutting through rock layers, and forming deep and narrow canyons. The layers of rock across the Grand Staircase today are a magnificent tableau documenting the fascinating story of these geological processes that are still underway amidst the stunning but transient landscape of the region. Grasping the passage of geological time with the perception of a human mind is futile, and reinforces, yet again, how miniscule our lives are amidst the extravaganza of the universe.

(Image courtesy: Grotto by Tom Morris)

The term Zion was used by Mormons who settled in this region only during the mid-nineteenth century, even though the land has been inhabited since more than 8000 years. The last of native tribes, the Paiute Indians, receive a share of recognition today through odd jobs in managing the national park, even though most of their culture appears to be largely lost. This recent history of substitution of cultures, mostly described as ‘exploration by European American fur trappers’, ‘pioneers settling into the area’, and ‘increased economic activity’ is perhaps the familiar archetype of the complex human conflicts and power struggles that have existed around the world for centuries and narrated by those who survived to tell the story, and yet inconsequential and frivolous when viewed from the prism of nature’s endurance.

A lot of breathtaking scenery of the Zion National Park today is accessible through motorable roads that lead to several trailheads for hikes and climbs and canyoneering, campgrounds that allow spending time in the wilderness, accommodation both inside the park and the town of Springdale just outside, and facilities for river trips and use of stock animals for exploring trails. One of the oldest sections of these roads – the Zion Mount Carmel Highway connecting Springdale with the east side of the park – consists of a 1.8 km tunnel with six large windows cut through massive sandstone cliffs to provide light and ventilation through the canyon wall. Constructed more than ninety years ago, a drive through this engineering marvel is a showcase of human ambition that blasted through rocks and made way, however temporarily, in the grand scheme of things. A few kms north of the tunnel lies one of Zion’s star attractions – “Angels Landing” – a 9-km roundtrip hike that gets one to the top where, as put by a Methodist Minister a century ago, only an angel could land. The last 1 km of the hike requires a permit, though the non-permit parts allow equally majestic views. Shorter jaunts from the Zion Canyon Scenic Drive, such as to the Weeping Rock, or the riverside walk, divulge more of nature’s artistry and interplay of imposing cliffs and glistening rivers. Zion, the middle child in the Grand Staircase, and closer to the earth’s surface than other two, is a happy place; somewhere where the fickle human heart doesn’t feel lost and forlorn amidst the vastness of nature, but is more at ease in the latter’s abundance.

(Image courtesy: NPS)

At the top of the Grand Staircase lies the Bryce Canyon National Park, famous for its surreal hoodoos, the red spindly rock formations collectively creating the park’s ‘Amphitheater’. The story behind the creation of hoodoos as narrated by the native Indians is more refreshing than the tedious geological explanation. Once upon a time, before the Paiute people, lived the to-when-an-ung-wa, the Legend People, who took too much from the land and used to drink all the streams and rivers in spring. They were punished by the coyote God of the Paiute, the Sinawava, and turned into stones. When the sun shines on these red, snow-capped formations casting long shadows, the Legend People appear to look back at us, creatures of dust ourselves, with a calm serenity, telling us a story. At the bottom of the Staircase, is the Grand Canyon, the more acclaimed of the three layers. Standing at the rim during the day, the canyon below is a vast tapestry of colors, patterns, rocks, and water smelting into each other on earth, stretching infinitely in time. At night, the spectacle is reversed, twinkling as stars overhead, a vast tapestry of colors, patterns, rocks, and unknown elements smelting into each other in the sky, stretching infinitely in time.

There is no perspective, other than the cold hard truth of the eternal existence of space and time, and of life that flickers in it like fireflies.