Japanic Attack 24.04.10

Whoever is planted in the Tao
will not be rooted up.
Whoever embraces the Tao
will not slip away.
Her name will be held in honour
from generation to generation.

Let the Tao be present in your life
and you will become genuine.
Let it be present in your family
and your family will flourish.
Let it be present in your country
and your country will be an example
to all countries in the world.
Let it be present in the universe
and the universe will sing.

How do I know this is true?
By looking inside myself.

Tao te Ching - Chapter 54

I’m completing this in the future and much has happened that colours my writing. I have contemplated what and how to write about Japan. I have come to a couple of conclusions. I am very likely to sound racist or culturist or something when I write about my observations and thoughts. I hope to be able to pre-empt your arriving at the conclusion that I dislike the Japanese. I don’t. I admire them greatly and am in awe of them and the way they conduct themselves individually and as a nation. One of the things that will influence my writing is my hunger. They say you shouldn’t go shopping on an empty stomach. I will posit that you also shouldn’t write commentary on an empty stomach. And I am always hungry in Japan except when I am feeling nauseated after eating a meal that didn’t agree with me – and that is not as infrequent as I would like. So while my writing has often been critical I have usually felt that it had enough bonhomie infused that it wouldn’t be mistaken for vitriol. I am not sure, because of the weird chemistry that my body is experiencing that I will not write something that parses as mean or dismissive. Please give me the benefit of the doubt. Japan is a mostly wonderful place with fantastic people.

Today, the 22nd, is our first full day in Tokyo. After we got to our hotel last night we dropped our bags in our room – well, closet would be more apt but I won’t get started on that just yet. By the time we got out of the hotel to seek sustenance it was about 9 pm. Amazingly as we walked along the main streets most restaurants seemed to be closed or closing. Oh oh. We were really hungry from a day of sitting in a plane, then on a train without anything but some noxious jelly-like sandwiches with catfood in them. I think Soph had the Salmon Supreme while I had the Seafood Delight. The indescribable desserts or perhaps ink blotters with bean paste that came with the airplane meal were passed over – sorry, I know it’s a sin to leave good food on the plate but I will use the word ‘good’ as my escape clause. So we are ravenous and in search of a delectable meal in one of the greatest cities in the world – and it’s closing up before our eyes. Suddenly a leisurely reconnoitre for comestibles shifts to a panicked jog looking for a place that a) doesn’t serve moist Whiskas on Wonderbread and b) still has its metal security door up. We found a little eatery off the main mall to a nearby temple. It promised grilled food which, while not exactly what we had in mind, seemed a pretty good second best.

Anyone who has visited Japan will know what I am referring to here but the first thing that happened when we ducked under the little flaggy thing that they hang in their doorways was a great expostulation of ohios and goyzimusses and other words. I thought they either mistook us for familiars because of the enthusiasm of their voices or that we had just happened in on a robbery and we were being told to flee before we became part of it. Nope, that is just what they do. It’s actually a charming custom that makes all patrons feel wanted and welcome. Except when you are just stepping in to look at a menu or ask if they serve anything that doesn’t have pork, it kind of makes you feel committed even though you were feeling pretty uncommitted. One time we stepped into an ‘Italian cafe’, Soph wanted coffee and I felt like tea. The maître’d looked offended to think that an Italian cafe would serve tea. Oops. That was our first brush with the sort of fascistic control they exert on their integrity as a particular type of restaurant. In other words, noodle shops are noodle shops, sushi are sushi/sashimi. Meat and nothing but meat if you get my drift. A vast array of restaurants might only yield one or two that are favourable to your (my) needs or tastes. Anyway, back to the tale...

The mood was quite congenial. We had a fractured conversation with one of the cooks who had spent a year in Vancouver. It was our first meal in Japan and we were working hard to recognize customs and protocols for ordering and eating. We selected a few dishes that appeared delicious and they were prepared right before us with a precision and artistry that was quite beautiful to watch. The portions were a bit small for our shrunken stomachs but we smiled politely and nibbled on our repast. I was thinking perhaps I should buy a magnifying glass so that while I eat I can imagine that I am eating a portion made for a human. Do you remember those toys you sent away for from comic books? One had a great sense of anticipation waiting for a battleship game with gigantic battleships as depicted in the cartoon illustration. Likewise (often) with Japanese portions. It took us a few days to realize that the stacks of food depicted on the 2” x 3” photos in the menus posted outside are actually 1:1 scale. Luckily my tongue rooted out a little shred of scallop stuck between my molars when I was exiting the restaurant and I increased my intake by 1/3. We had dropped $50 and were perhaps hungrier than when we entered because trying to pick up atom-sized pieces of food with chopsticks consumes an incredibly large number of calories. As a rule of thumb the only time that this portion deception doesn’t happen is when you order a bowl of something and it is a gigantic, greasy, way-too-salty, carb overdose of starch in a broth with a raw egg in the middle. Then you slug it down hoping to at least get back, calorically, to the low waterline mark on your stomach. Alas that wasn’t salt you fool. You have just gargled back a couple of canisters of Accent – and the MSG hallucinations start to kick in before you turn the first corner. Somebody get those visegrips off my temples!

So this is the first day. I am feeling kind of queasy from my first food experience but I am game. Once bitten and all that...out we venture after a night of a bizarre dream about a woman forcing a wolf into her womb. The streets are clean and orderly. Little flower pots and rocks with immense character are in the doorways of each residence and establishment we pass. People are out, bent over clipping tidy hedges and wee bits of foliage with nail scissors. The sidewalks are just a bit dangerous because they are shared with cyclists who, though they ride slowly, are as quiet as a ninja and only announce their presence with a bell when you can already feel them with your neck hairs. I never thought I would see anyone bow while riding a bike but I can now cross that off my to-do list.

We choose an Udon/Soba resto nearby. It’s cheap and the dishes look appetizing. It has a few patrons who are quietly reading or texting someone or SMOKING. We are confident that there will be some vegetable material in the bowl though it doesn’t seem to be visible in the photo. We step in – Ohio Goyzimus!es from three directions (ah, I’m starting to get used to this) and we sit down. One of the staff catches our attention and directs us to a large rectangular box by the door with about 150 buttons on it. We realize that we have to select our food from a machine and they will bring it to us. But we don’t read Kanji or Kana and there is no English so the fellow helps us choose – we point at our selections on the menu outside and he tells us the number that corresponds to the buttons inside. We drop in a few thousand yen and hey presto! It issues a little green ticket. We present him with a couple of these and he receives them very formally with arigatos and a bow and Bob will soon be our uncle.

Yikes! Salty and weirdly sweet noodles in MSG sauce with a raw egg in it. I am getting a bad feeling about this. Oh yeah, about the vegetables. Apparently they exist, just not for food. I think they are used for photographic purposes. They do eat some grown material but they generally have to subject it to strange torture like brine or salty pastes before they can eat it. (I have some photo evidence to be uploaded to facebook). Usually they also have to wrap it in plastic. As a remarkable contrast to the abundantly fresh and cornucopic markets we saw in Southeast Asia the Japanese markets smell like saran wrap and dried fish. Tiny portions of things are put out singly on shelves – a carrot for 100 Yen ($120), one hot-house tomato, same price. Five stalks of large asparagus $7. Is this a joke? Where is the soylent green? I am going to starve in this country. I am surrounded by hectares of restaurants and there is almost nothing I can either afford to eat or be able to digest. And only 27 days before I return to Canada. Can you hear the girding of my loin? I form a survival strategy that if I chew very thoroughly and eat small amounts my stomach will shrink and I won’t feel hungry. Useless theory – I discard it the next day when my growling stomach frightens an old woman on the subway train and she moves to a safer perch. She needn’t have worried; she looked much too stringy to eat though I considered it briefly. I am not getting enough calories to survive. New strategies include theft, eating shrubbery, eating paper and begging. Soon I start looking for whey powder in stores. I might as well be looking for deer in a shrine.

I will write a blog on shopping. It won’t be flattering but it has to be done.

Tale of Three Cities 23.04.10

It was the worst of times. It was the worst of times.

We needed to idle a few hours away before we left Phnom Penh. We walked to nearby Wat Phnom where we were surprised to see a large troupe of baboons. I think they are baboons. In any case there were lots of them and they liked to play/fight with each other. The first one I saw was an old Grandpa with breasts as big as mine who was nursing a nasty bite on his tail. It looked like it needed about 50 stitches but he was not likely to get attention. Apes sure can look sad – they have ‘depressed’ locked down in the expression department. There were a dozen or so juveniles tussling and rolling around on the grass. I got the impression that they liked the attention they were getting from me pointing my camera at them because they got more aggressive and intense as I stood and clicked. It started to turn into a monkey melee so I stopped and moved on. We visited the Wat temple, got our last taste of the strange brew of Hindu-tainted Buddhism (Buddha sitting on a dragon) and then meandered back to the hotel to meet our Tuk-tuk driver.

As we sat in the tuk-tuk on our way out of Phnom Penh I felt a weight lifting off my shoulders. I had arranged to get to the airport, uncharacteristically, about 3 hours early. The poverty and prostitution, the decay and deadbeat farang and the universal decrepitude of the old city all contributed to me unease about the place. – instead of wanting to stay and contribute something I wanted to flee.

We passed huge new government buildings along the road to the airport; gleaming marble and glass castles that probably represent the squandering of international loans and empire-building bureaucrats. It would have been nice to see Ministry of Health and Welfare but these were Departments of Security, Armed Forces, Military etc. We were jockeying with other tuk-tuks, bicycles, scooters that buzzed and dithered like sparrows around the large, glossy, black SUV crows. The underclass is huge here and the canyon that separates them from the uber-wealthy is enormous. The airport is clean, modern and of a nice scale.

Truth to tell we barely scraped Bangkok this time through. I scrambled through the immense Suvarnabhumi Airport trying to get a JR Rail pass for cheap train travel in Japan – you can’t get them in Japan, only outside – Contrary to Lonely Planet info the airport office wasn’t offering them and their downtown affiliate was closed because of the civil unrest. SOL. So we caught the shuttle to a nice airport hotel. We saw soldiers in fatigues with automatic rifles idling around barricades along the highway on and off ramps but the trouble seemed to be at a great remove. Downtown Bangkok was just a yellow glow in the distance. The decision not to stay downtown was just practical – the traffic is horrendous and it would have added hours to our commute. Another shuttle returned us to Suvarnabhumi Airport in the soft, blue morning light. Easy-peasy on to the plane and off from tropical climes to spring in Japan. We had missed cherry blossom time but were still looking forward to a more Canadian climate.

Japan didn’t disappoint. We arrived late afternoon and caught a train into Tokyo from Narita. It is a pretty long trip on the Limited Express(?) which was sort of like a GO Train, stopping along the way at some but not all stations - $20 cheaper than the high-speed. The trees were beautiful in the dimming dusk. It was raining gently and the viridians, Prussian blues and Nile greens laid against a Wedgewood blue sky blending to ultramarine were like a drink of cool, fresh water to our eyes that had been looking at dry, desiccated landscapes for nearly a month. Navigation was not too difficult. The wayfinding systems of Japan are usually very well designed. They have a notoriously amazing public transportation system. One of the first things we noticed when we rose out of the subway station on our street was the near absence of traffic. Either everyone takes public transit or this place is like something out of a John Wyndham novel – Day of the Triffids or The Midwich Cuckoos. The streets are eerily quiet. The silent, sturdy Toyota taxis are common enough but compared to the swarming, honking, weaving onslaught of motorbikes, scooters, tuk-tuks, taxis, cars, bicycles, Buses etc. of Southeast Asia we felt like we had fallen into a miniature train set. Perfect little trees were everywhere. Lines are straight, everything is tidy. We were disoriented with respect to north and south so we asked a mature woman on a bike at a street corner if she could help us orient. She spoke very good English and this first encounter lulled us, temporarily, into the illusion that communication was going to be a breeze. We had no idea what we had just gotten ourselves into but we were about to find out

Phnom Penh 19.04.10

In harmony with the Tao,
the sky is clear and spacious,
the earth is solid and full,
all creatures flourish together,
content with the way they are,
endlessly reapeating themselves,
endlessly renewed.

When man interferes with the Tao,
the sky becomes filthy,
the earth becomes depleted,
the equilibrium crumbles,
creatures become extinct.

The Master views the parts with compassion,
because He understands the whole.
His constant practice is humility.
He doesn't glitter like a jewel
but lets himself be shaped by the Tao,
as rugged as common stone.

Tao te Ching, Chapter 39

You know what you’re going into when you reach for the balcony doorknob and it’s almost too hot to touch. It’s 8 am. Open the door and suck in your first breath of the oven. Below motorscooters loaded with 3,4,5 riders buzz along under the young trees on the esplanade. The river shines like a ribbon of sun, doubling the blinding glare from the east. Last night’s troubling scenes of hookers and toddlers roaming the street in the orange sodium vapour light are cicatrice memory.

I fall back into the fluorescent glare of the tiny room, get dressed and descend to seek some food that doesn’t nauseate. Thailand, Lao and Vietnam were fantastic for food. The establishments weren’t always pin-clean but the food was lightly cooked and robust in complex flavour, texture and colour. In Cambodia I have begun to grow weary of the sameness of the heavy curries and the oily cooking. For the first time in months I am contemplating Western food.

As we walk out of the hotel a mid-30s Aussie fellow is leading a not-quite-young but gamefully smiling Cambodian woman up to his room. He winks archly at me. He’s hugging a few cans of Foster’s to his chest. I will see the pair the next morning at nearly the same time. They will be leaving the hotel. She will definitely not be smiling – appearing more a captive than a lover. He looks grim and tired, impatient. Although it is morning the flesh trade is 24/7 in Phnom Penh. The johns are fiercer looking here. Lupine ex-biker types with denim vests and long stringy grey hair. They sport formerly impressive arms with sagging tattoo work. They are often seen wearing bandages and grinning with hockey-star teeth. The game must be more volatile here. A half-crazy Brit was shouting at the young woman who tends the front desk. He said he’d been beaten and robbed. He looked the part but he might have blown his bundle in a binge. He stinks of beer-sweat and he’s abusively instructing her to get him a visa for Vietnam while accusing her of ripping him off. He says he’s down to his last $200 or so. Sounds desperate.

We find an English-style buffet down the road a bit. We load up listlessly with calories – tepid eggs and decent pineapple, chaser of strong coffee and we head out for the mandatory trip to S-21 or Tuol Sleng – the Pol Pot interrogation (torture) facility – and then to the Killing Fields. Suffice to say that the trip was often fragrant. Open sewage canals run parallel to and cross the road. Houses on stilts perch like drunken Herons over the scummy brown soup. For the 10,000th time I silently pray, ‘there but for the grace of God go I’.

Tuol Sleng is a grim place with palpable ghosts. The spare, nearly empty rooms of the former school building seem to echo with screams. Each classroom has a single iron frame bed placed in the centre – an article: manacles, chains, ammunition canisters rest on the bare bed surface as testimony to the room’s purpose. Some walls have a palimpsest of graffiti – a few have planks of wood painted green bearing faint traces of chalk that whisper school lessons from a better time. Ironic that these items look down upon the torture beds – Pol Pot was trying to pound Cambodia back to the stone age by eradicating knowledge and education. The visual experience of this is numbing but what stabs the soul is a gallery of photos of the doomed inmates of Tuol Sleng. They were mostly very young adults – almost children. They stare at the camera defiantly, angrily or displaying fear, uncertainty. Some are focused inwards, perhaps contemplating a strategy for survival or worrying about their siblings or relatives they have been parted from. Of the thousands that were processed here only a handful survived. Those few had skills such as bookkeeper or photograper that made them too useful to exterminate. The faces of these people brought the reality home where the ‘set-piece’ torture rooms could not. I will post a little photo essay in Facebook.

Then out to the Killing Fields as they call it. It is a former orchard where over 2,000 bodies have been exhumed though they haven’t dug through the better part of the property. A shrine displaying thousands of skulls and bones sorted according to estimated age are piled in a dusty glass case that ascends through the centre. Perhaps more disturbing are the glass cubes of half-rotted garments, many of them children’s clothing – if they killed the parents they murdered their infants. There are reports of soldiers swinging babies against trees. It is too horrible. Over a dozen shallow craters pock the earth making it appear like an enlargement of a golf ball. Many of the pits are near a large tree where loudspeakers were hung to play music that would drown out the screams and groans of the victims as they were being buried alive or brutally murdered. It is midday and the loud electric burr of cicadas is the tension track to the otherwise silent grounds. The crime that these men, woman and children committed was being upper or middle-class or being a professional, teacher or even for wearing glasses and therefore, potentially, being learned.

There are photos here too; taken during the four years of Pol Pot’s genocidal regime. They are displayed chronologically. Each successive year shows the victims in worse and worse physical shape. They were starving even though Pot had relocated most people from the cities to rural areas for farming. Many thousands would die after his ouster due to widespread famine. We are informed that several of the key perpetrators of this genocide are still being tried – their trials having now stretched into years. Only one of them has admitted guilt and been contrite.

On the trip back we are silent – space needed for processing. The eternal question – why does this keep happening?

Shell Crater 18.04.10

The Master has no mind of her own.
She works with the mind of the people.

She is good to people who are good.
She is also good to people who are not good.
This is true goodness

She trusts people who are trustworthy
She also trusts people who aren’t trustworthy
This is true trust.

The Master’s mind is like space.
People don’t understand her.
They look to her and wait.
She treats them like her own children.

Tao te Ching – Chapter 49

I’ll return to Siem Reap in a later blog. We spent five days there and I stood in awe of the creativity of man and the destructive power of time and nature. And at the destructive power of man and the creative power of time and nature.

We are in a bus heading south to Phnom Penh, once dubbed the Pearl of the Orient. Perhaps anus would be more appropriate now. No offence meant. The bus is jam-packed, which means the seats are all occupied and there are half a dozen young girls sitting on buckets in the aisle. The bus ride will last about six hours. The girls flagged the bus down on the highway and seemed to bargain with the driver for a few minutes – time for them to get back to school in Phnom Penh after Songkran. I am the only whiteface on the bus and I notice people are sneaking looks at me. I cannot guess what they are thinking. The young girl sitting on the bucket next to my seat tries to sleep. She has grabbed the armrest and wrapped her fingers around it. She has long, dark blue glossy fingernails and she sighs and presses her sleepy face into her knuckles. After an hour or so I remember that I have a long thick kromar (a traditional Cambodian scarf) in my bag so I fold it into a facsimile of a pillow and offer it to her. She accepts it without saying a thing but a smile briefly appears and there is a word in her eyes.

The highway is flat. The country is brown. How many times have I written the word dusty in these blogs. The sun is somewhere straight above in a sky that is cloudless but so uniformly bright that it feels more like fluorescent than directional light. The air conditioning is struggling. Every couple of hours the bus driver pulls into a rest stop and spends about 20 minutes flushing or filling something at the rear of the vehicle. Perhaps they use water for coolant. At one of the stops we clamber out of the bus to a smouldering-hot eating area under a metal roof. There are a few concession stands. One vendor is selling the much-anticipated cockroach-in-a-bun, without the bun – a few locals are sampling the delicacy. At another stop Sophie points to a lady with a bowl on her head offering another amuse-guele: fried tarantula. Mmmm-mmmmm! My stomach fails me and I decide that eating bugs isn’t going to be one of my tales.

All along the highway there are houses. For hours on end we pass a single defile of homes ranging from huts to block and brick houses that line the road. I suppose the farm properties extend back from the road like some seigneurial (?) system. I don’t know. The houses are tiny; squarish with thatch walls and often thin, rusty corrugated steel roofs. They are on sturdy stilts, probably 8 feet above the ground. Some are well kept with swept dirt yards and the obligatory chicken, rooster, chick trifecta. Dogs are everywhere and there seem to be a lot of white cattle. Not Brahmas, more like a western-looking animal but probably very drought tolerant. There are tall haystacks in many yards. I mean tall; maybe twenty feet. and varying greatly in shape despite their common constituency. There are tall cones or broad-shouldered boulders of the stuff with one or two or three lobes they appear like hairy cartoon monsters crouching just off the margin of the road - massive beasts squatting on low wooden palettes – why the palettes? Moisture prevention? To discourage snakes or rodents from nesting? Probably some reason I can’t even guess. It wasn’t until I saw a couple of those bucolic paintings by Millet in Tokyo (yes, I am well ahead of this journey in time and space but that is a different matter) that I suddenly realized why they seemed so familiar yet so strange. In those 19th century paintings Millet showed scenes of peasants with thick arms, blonde hair, white blouses and florid faces enjoying the simple bucolic life in the company of the same damn haystacks. We don’t see anyone languishing or raising a stein around these stacks and you can forget the autumnal fields and verdant hills. Too, there are properties whose yard is all at sixes and sevens a pick-up-sticks jangle of jerry-built coops ad pens and fences and God-knows-what. Bits and fragments of plastic lie everywhere like a bomb went off in a toilet paper factory.

I couldn’t take a successful picture of it from the bus but we passed miles of a table-flat land whose only feature was an infinitude of palm trees. They stood a good distance from each other. Against the brilliant hazy distance they appeared like black needles, each with a massive eagle’s nest of foliage at the crest. I thought they were like tall, frozen. anorexic mushroom clouds.. They spread across the horizon as far as the eye could see on a chessboard of fallow, dun rice fields. The visual effect was profound, like something other-worldly - maybe Biblical.

And then, incongruously, in a sudden flush of dense foliage there appeared a series of houses with clusters of gigantic white statuary out front. They must be artisanal businesses specializing in stone sculpture. There were lions and Buddhas in various stages of completion, some emerging like Michelangelo’s caryatids (but meditating, not struggling) from massive blocks of roughly quarried stone. The sight of these stark white forms after a numbing array of tawny, stilted houses came as a brief shock.

Has anyone ever written a thesis correlating the ratio of tread to riser as a indicator of a civilization’s consideration for the common man? I thought the stairs in ancient Angkor were a strange choice for royalty. They were perhaps 5 inches wide and anywhere from 10 to 20 inches high making for a challenging climb and a death-defying descent especially where they were broken or missing altogether (the Angkor buildings are to wheelchair accessibility is as Stephen Harper is to the Arts community). The stairs to these Cambodian farmhomes are likewise very steep. There aren’t any faces to the risers per se, just treads that vary from a series of narrow planks or bamboo to a solid piece of wood. The stairs are often painted bright colours, blue, yellow and green. Some have handrails. How do the elderly and the crippled climb up and down? There are no icebergs for the feeble to be set out upon. What is the tropical equivalent of death by ice floe? Probably just death.

Many hours and impromptu stops later Phnom Penh rises like a mirage in the waxy fug. At first it is white and modern looking but as we become more engaged in the urban core I see the same stuff as in the poorest of the cities we have visited. Ruined sidewalks and tangles of electrical wires, walls with mould and mildew and a nicotine haze of half-burnt fuel. People walking, working and sitting wherever you look. The constant cacophony of horns and poorly tuned engines. It is poor. We are told that in Siem Reap most workers are paid approximately $25 per week. That’s a good meal for two with beer in one of the tonier restos that are common in the downtown tourist track – and a fraction of the price of one night’s stay in one of the Tourist Hotels that line the road from the airport. Tuk-tuk drivers rent their machines here by the day. It will cost them $5 to sit on a corner and harass the passers-by. They may or may not get one ride a day. In this season tourists are outnumbered by tuk-tuk drivers by a sizeable margin.

In the old city it is crumbling decay with rank, fetid smells and soot-blackened windows – a patina of grime around things that people touch – doorknobs, handles and tables. When we first arrive there is a scrum of tuk-tuk drivers at the bus station. They were literally climbing over each other to get the attention of the handful of passengers who seemed inclined to hire a ride. We chose a fellow with an honest face. His name was Mony and he was ecstatic to have won the short contract for $3. Like the approximately 2000 drivers that we would encounter in the next three days he asked us if we wanted to visit the Killing Fields and Tuol Sleng – the one-way ticket internment facility from Pol Pot’s reign of terror. There seem to be four things that one can see in Phnom Penh: The aforementioned, the Russian Market and the Royal Palace. The drivers offer up this menu like a little ditty. Running the gauntlet of drivers is like passing through a forest of birds all chattering the same song.

Our hotel was depressing - one of the recommends from Lonely Planet – ostensibly charming because of its proximity to the river. A word of advice to fellow travellers: if you absolutely have to visit Phnom Penh do yourself a favour: avoid the hooker bars and shabby hotels of the Riverside – at least near Wat Phnom. I don’t know where good accommodation can be found but it ain’t here.

Phnom Penh pretty much stopped my writing until now. I felt like I fell into a shell crater and some part of my wit and words got left there. Each time I ascended to our humble room I climbed up the musty-carpeted concrete stairs with unusually high risers and short treads I thought of the short, brutish life of the common folk back in the ‘Golden Age’ of the Khmer Empire, the horrible fucking-over the Cambodians took under Pol Pot and the onerous and dysfunctional life that most citizens experience today. The way up is steep and tiring; the descent might be lethal.