Poverty? Overpopulation? Pollution? People with diamonds on their foreheads? Curry?
Slander and calumny. There's so much more to the place than that.
First of all, it ain't just a country. It's a subcontinent.
It's the home of some of the world's rarest animals, including the golden langur and the last remnants of the Asiatic lion.
India is the manufacturer of the world's cheapest car, the Tata Nano, which goes for around $2,000 American dollars. Because of the nutty-bonkers-hundred-percent-off-your-rocker price tag, it's colloquially known as "The People's Car." I remember reading about it in National Geographic a while back, and liking the idea immensely. I remember thinking Huh! Imagine, a small, efficient, cheap car that nearly every family in India can afford! A four-door in every pot!
Speaking of building amazing stuff, another thing I read about in National Geographic was the Golden Quadrilateral, a massive superhighway running all around the subcontinent. It was a massive project, years in the undertaking, but finally finished not long ago. The story of its development read like a small country's revolution.
I've also read that India was home to Asia's first Nobel laureate. And I heard that back in the day some Mughal bigwig built a rather fancy house for his wife. The memory of his wife, to be exact. Crazy, huh?
Oh yeah, and apparently there's people in India who don't truck with victuals, either. Hoopy!
I've heard intoxicating things about India. The railroads that span the entire nation. The deep jungles, where elephants, tigers and (a few) lions still roam. The mystic palaces. Monkeys running up and down the street and bugging you for snacks. Sacred bulls wandering everywhere. Beautiful women with deep, dark eyes, and some of the most colorful clothes seen anywhere on Earth. Epics to rival The Odyssey and Beowulf. Pearls the size of your fist. Veterinary schools that set the world standard. Temperatures that can soar up to 120 degrees in the shade in summer.
As you might have guessed, I'm not so keen on that last part. But the rest of it's incredible. Truth be told, I want to go to India.
To follow in the footsteps of Paul Theroux as that loquacious curmudgeon rode the train down the length of the nation. To see the shores with brand-new eyes, as the first representatives of the East India Trading Company must have, all those hundreds of years ago. Take a dip in the sacred Ganges River. Explore the jungles of Sri Lanka. Beat the heat in Calcutta with a glass of gin. Visit the new deli in New Delhi. Swim with the planet's ugliest dolphins.
Even the mere name speaks bewitchment.
India.
Home of a certain bald-headed troublemaker we all know. Home to over a billion people, some of the finest minds and hardest workers on Earth. Producer of high-grade doctors, soccer players, artisans, chefs, and holy men. A center of religious thought, architectural achievement, military might, cultural development, and historical wonderfulness for thousands of years.Not to mention the setting of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, my second-favorite movie of all time. And, of course, the inspiration for the title of a rather good Led Zeppelin song.
Can't get much more random than this, can you?
(This is Lake Charvak, an artificial lake in the Tashkent Province.)
Uzbekistan is located in Central Asia, surrounded by the rest of the 'Stans, just a hair to the right of the Caspian Sea. Like a lot of countries in the region, it was once part of the Soviet Union.
But I don't hold that against it. Uzbekistan has always been one of my favorites. Couldn't say why, though.
Maybe it's just the name. I mean, come on—Ooze-beck-i-stan? A country with a "u" and a "z" in its name? Right next to each other, no less? How many times has that happened?
Then I actually started to learn about the place. As I was telling Mary Witzl of ResidentAlien, I once had an Uzbek exchange student in one of my high school math classes. Mary and I both know how frustrating it can be for people from the 'Stans to talk with Westerners, because we know practically zilch about these countries. We view them as small, out-of-the-way, backwater countries whose people speak strange, nearly dead languages.
That's not strictly true. Kazakhstan is huge. Wikipedia says it's about 2,700,000 square kilometers. That's greater than all of Western Europe combined. Kazakhstan would barely fit inside the continental United States. And as Mary writes in one of her excellent posts, Turkish is actually spoken in the 'Stans, thanks to the old Ottoman Empire. It's the lingua franca of the Central Asia, as it were. That's a far cry from dead.
We're not even clear on the geography of the place. Even I couldn't tell you which 'Stans are where in relation to Uzbekistan. That Uzbek exchange student I mentioned earlier (a very short, round, cute girl) finally got tired of it. One day, before the bell rang, we all pulled out a map of Central Asia and had a look. Our abashment was complete when she began correcting things. On a National Geographic map, too!
"No, no, no," she said. "Bukhara is not the capital. Here, Tashkent capital."
These were cities I hadn't even heard of. Now, when I hear their names, an excited tremble passes through my body. What bewitchment in those strange places, the allure of the East, the mystery of an unexplored land. Tashkent, Bukhara, Samarkand...shining metropolises waiting to be discovered.
Uzbekistan is beautiful, wild, and rich in culture. The cities are full of ancient mosques and temples, and the scenery is rugged and diverse.
Take the Registan, in Samarkand, for instance:According to the information I found, the Registan was the ancient heart of the city of Samarkand. Registan, some say, means "sandy place" in Persian. The legends say its floor was strewn with sand to soak up the blood of the Timurid Dynasty's captured foes. This is where Tamerlane stuck the heads of his enemies on spikes.
This is the Shakh-i-Zindeh mosque, also in Samarkand:
Uzbekistan is also home to the eleventh-largest desert in the world, the Kyzyl Kum (which, declaims Wikipedia, means "red sand" in Uzbek, Kazakh, and Turkish). It's full of saiga antelope, camels, agama lizards, and Bukhara deer, plus sand dunes and a plethora of fossil-bearing rock formations.
Uzbekistan has changed hands a lot in its history; first Alexander the Great marched through it, then Genghis Khan overran it, then Tamerlane, then the Russians. The Silk Road traverses a good part of the country, and thus the cities of Bukhara and Samarkand prospered in antiquity. The ancient Uzbek princes held quite a bit of influence.
Their wealth and opulence found an outlet in architecture. This is the Samanid Mauseoleum in Bukhara...
...and then there was this little honey, the Kalyan Minaret...
...also known as the Tower of Death. Supposedly built in the 1100s, it was used to call Muslims to prayer five times a day. In times of war, it was used as a lookout point. And also...
Fitzroy Maclean, who I am insanely jealous of, was a Scottish-born English diplomat posted to Moscow before World War II. During his tenure as an ambassador, he traveled extensively around the U.S.S.R., even to places he wasn't technically supposed to go. He sneaked aboard a train to Uzbekistan one day and spent some time exploring the country, much of which was recounted in his memoir Eastern Approaches. (That book is now at the top of my Amazon wish list. You'd better believe it.)
Maclean found that the Kaylan Minaret had a darker purpose: execution. Enemies of the state were thrown to their deaths from the top of the tower, even as late as the 20th century.
Maclean went on to have many more hair-raising adventures during the Western Desert Campaign in North Africa, and behind enemy lines with Yugoslav partisans. Some theorize that Sir Ian Fleming, the famous author, used Maclean as one of the inspirations for the well-known literary character James Bond.
Sir Ian Fleming was also, as I mentioned, born the same year as my great-grandmother, Ruth. Coincidence?
Anyway, whether or not I ever get to travel to Central Asia by train and have hair-raising adventures, Uzbekistan sounds like a culturally rich, visually stunning and metaphysically satisfying place to go. Who's with me?
Flying's going well, if you're still interested. Today Harold and I practiced SF/SFO, or what everybody else calls Short Field and Soft Field Operations. This is just what it sounds like: landing and taking off on a short runway or a patch of soft ground.
See, as shocking as it sounds, you will not always be landing on a nice, long, paved runway. Sometimes you may be landing on a short dirt strip. Or a grass field. Or a sandy beach. (Bush pilots have to deal with these conditions all the time, so I'd better get good at it.) There's a certain special trick to pulling off these sorts of unusual landings and takeoffs. Normally, on a paved runway, all you have to do is let down some flaps, and—
I've been told I should really itemize things if I want to explain flying more clearly. So here goes a very basic explanation of what you need to do to land on a PAVED runway:
reduce throttle
lower flaps incrementally
use pitch to control speed, and throttle to control altitude
flare about ten feet from the ground
touch down smoothly, apply brakes
To clarify, flaps are those big flat things that stick out from the trailing edges of the wings, which are lowered right before the airplane lands. They're different from the ailerons, the control surfaces which dictate the airplane's rate of roll. The flaps act like air brakes. They slow you down as you come in to land. They also increase the surface area of the wing, enabling a plane to stay aloft even at very slow speeds—just the ticket for a slow descent onto a runway. Generally, you lower them in increments: a little bit when you're on the downwind leg of the landing pattern; a little bit more when you turn your base leg; a little bit more when you turn to make your final approach.
"Flaring" is what you do just a second before landing. It's something that airplanes borrowed from birds. You see it on National Geographic TV commercials all the time: some big lolloping bird comes in for a landing, and right before it hits the water or ground or tree branch or whatever, it sort of turns its body up on end and tilts its wings back to slow itself down. Flaring in an airplane is the same kettle of fish. Just a few feet above the runway, you pull back on the controls to tilt the nose of the plane up. This slows you down even more, just enough to land. That's why you want to make sure not to do it too high, like I do, because you'll bounce down onto the tarmac very hard.
Now, with short field operations, you do the same thing, except you have to be a lot more precise. If your field is only a few hundred feet long, you don't have much room for error, so you have to pretty much touch down RIGHT at the VERY END of the runway to ensure that you have plenty of room to roll to a stop. To practice this, Harold told me to pick a point on our nice big paved runway at Apple Valley Airport. Once I did, he told me to land there, or within 200 feet of it. (Two hundred feet may sound like a lot, but in terms of airplanes coming to a halt, it really isn't; our runway is about 6,000 feet long, and ours is a small airport.) Once I'd done that, he said, I was to immediately put the flaps up and apply the brakes, to stop as soon as practically possible.
And guess what, sports fans? I got it on my first try. Nailed it. Touched down right where I'd wanted to, snapped the flaps back up, jammed on the brakes (not too hard), and came right to a dead stop. Bingo.
...which meant that we now got to practice a short field takeoff. This would be just like a regular takeoff, except instead of mundanely powering up and rolling down the runway, I would keep the brakes on while I poured on full throttle, suddenly release them, and go.
And that's exactly how it happened. I stood on those brakes for all I was worth as the little plane roared and bellowed and shook, straining forward like an attack dog on a chain. Then, at Harold's command, I let go the brakes. I was promptly knocked back into my seat as we jumped down the runway and leaped into the air.
Yeah, I reckon we'd have made it A-OK if the field had been short.
Soft field landings are a good deal trickier. To land, you have to keep a little power on until the last second, then touch down only on the back wheels. See, the landing gear on a Cessna 172 is set up like a tricycle. You have the two rear (or "main") wheels, and the nose wheel. During a soft field landing, you want to touch down ONLY on those two main wheels. This is because, when you touch down in a Cessna 172, you're still going rather fast by human standards: about 50 miles per hour or so. If you do a three-point landing and the nose wheel gets bogged down in the sand or wet grass or gravel or whatever, you run the risk of flipping the plane over. So the solution is to do a wheelie.
Yes, I'm serious. You touch down only on the back wheels, holding the control yoke back (but not too far back; you don't want to bang the tail on the ground). You hold the plane in that configuration for as long as you can. In a few seconds, the plane will slow down enough on its own (and lose enough lift from under those upturned wings) that the nose wheel will gently...
...come...
...down...
...by itself.
Bang, you're on the ground, right-side up.
Soft field takeoffs are even trickier. Remember how I said that flaps are normally used for landings? Well, you actually use flaps for soft field takeoffs, too. Just a little, though. What you do is lower the flaps about ten degrees, start your takeoff roll, then raise the nose as soon as you can. (Same reason as before: you don't want to get that dang nose wheel stuck or bogged down when you're going that fast.) So you're doing a wheelie down the runway. At 60 miles per hour, the plane will start to lift off, but you don't want to climb yet. You want to keep the plane low, just over the runway. When the plane reaches 80 miles per hour (the best speed for climbing), THEN you can start climbing. If you start climbing before the plane reaches 80, you'll leave ground effect and the plane could settle back down onto the ground.
("Ground effect" is what happens when you fly an airplane really close to Mother Earth, like right after takeoff. The plane isn't actually flying, per se, even though it's off the ground: the air getting pushed down by the wings is bouncing off the ground and hitting the plane again, pushing it up. Only when the plane reaches a certain speed is the necessary pressure differential created between the top and the bottom of the wings; that is what actually keeps the plane in the air without ground effect.)
If you're on a paved runway, lifting off at 60 and climbing out is no problem. If you lose ground effect (which usually doesn't happen) then you'll just bounce back down onto the nice hard runway. However, on a soft field...well, we've already discussed this. This is why you use flaps (for the extra lift) and hug the ground until your airspeed is 80 (so you know you can stay up).
In case my lengthy explanation hasn't made it clear, soft field takeoffs are flippin' hard. You have to really hold that yoke back to keep the nose wheel off the ground. (Good thing I've been doing all those lateral pull-downs on the weight machine, eh?) Then, after you take off, instead of keeping the nose pointed at the sky (like you do with every other type of takeoff), you actually sort of level out, pitching the plane back down again, riding ground effect until you reach 80, then climb. It's very, very counterintuitive. Needless to say, Harold had to help me with it the first couple of times until I could get a feel for it. My job was made harder (ironically) by how smooth the air was today. There was no wind at all. We didn't have a headwind to land into and slow us down (and make it easier to do wheelies). But I did my best.
I was grinning inside as we pulled up to the gate, shut down, and climbed out. I had just gotten a little taste of what I could expect out of a bush piloting career. Moreover, those kind of landings are just plain cool. They demand all of your attention and a great deal of manual dexterity (not to mention some biceps). And come on, I mean, wheelies? In an airplane?! Hot diggity!
I am now 20 pages into the first edit of my recently completed novel. I made the description of the opening setting more detailed, such as giving the name of the bar where my two protagonists like to hang out after work. (Shelly's Back Room, Washington, D.C. It's a nifty little cigar parlor.)
My new California driver's license came in the mail. Or rather, my old California driver's license came in the mail. I have the same number, the same shaky signature, even the same terrible photograph, taken when I was 16 years old, right after I got a buzz-cut. It expires in one year, too. Instead of making me a completely new license, California merely dredged up my old one from the archives instead. Gosh darn those mother-fudging son-of-a-witch dastards. Anyway, this finally closes the book on my frustrating quest to get my car registered in Southern California.
I'm going to discontinue that column I have going on here, random travel destinations. It's silly. I think, if I am going to do it, I'll wait until I've actually been to these places before I decide to showcase them on my blog. Stay tuned for a grand reinstatement in 50 years.
As I write this, I am sucking on a blueberry-flavored lollipop...which has a dead scorpion in the center of it. I've just managed to get his little stinger uncovered.
I'm going to watch The Matrix Reloaded tonight.
I went into town at 11:00 today for my FAA flight physical. The Federal Aviation Administration demands that anybody who is, or is training to be, a pilot must hold a medical certificate issued by an approved physician. To get this medical certificate, a pilot must submit to a medical examination on a regular basis. I went in to get my Class 3 (lowest) medical certificate today with a Dr. Krider, the doctor that my soon-to-be flight school Apple Valley Aviation endorses. The nurse weighed me (I'm 20 pounds lighter than I was the last time I got a medical examination), tested my eyes, took my pulse and blood pressure, and had me pee in a cup. Then Dr. Krider came in, listened to my breathing, prodded my chest and torso, had me (ahem) turn my head and cough, and then pronounced me fit to fly. I was issued my medical certificate and went on my merry way.
But get this: my colorblindness has mysteriously disappeared. The last Class 3 certificate I was issued had to have restrictions put on it (no night flying and no navigating by colored light signals) because I had failed the color test. They had me stare at those dang bits of paper with bunches of colored dots on them and asked me to tell them what numbers I saw. And of course I said, "I don't see any numbers," because I couldn't, dammit. This time, though, I buckled down, squinted, cocked my head to the side, reached out with extrasensory force, and passed the test. This time, I saw not only the 12 but also the 15, the 4, the 7...not all of the little buggers, but enough to pass the test. Now my certificate has no restrictions on it, which means I'm free to complete any and all training for a private pilot's license, including night flying. Yippee! Let's get to it! Bring on the Cessna 172 and let's saddle up! Aviation-related blog posts are finally on their way!
The National Geographic Channel can do no wrong as far as I'm concerned. They've got two shows currently running that are the proverbial bee's knees: Mega Beasts and Prehistoric Predators. Both are overflowing with gorgeous computer-generated images of ferocious monsters and fabulous creatures that seem to leap right off the screen at you, plus little-known facts that even I, a lifelong paleobiology lover, never suspected. Did you know Hyaenodon had incredibly long nasal tubes so it could still breathe even when it had a mouthful of meat?
Alaska, irrespective of what's written in my description on the right, might have to be put on hold. After a couple of months of off-and-on searching, I have managed to discover only one real media-related job in Anchorage, and a solid lead on another. The real job is blogging for Examiner.com, which is apparently some kind of nationwide news provider that seems primarily web-based, although it claims to have some scions in print. I checked out the website itself and it seems to resemble MSN quite closely. Regardless of what it claims to be, it's not a day job. Blogging for it wouldn't pay the bills, certainly not fund my flying career. The solid lead is NNB, New Northwest Broadcasters, which are a West Coast-based network of radio stations that fancy themselves as being hip, casual and community-focused. Their website (http://careers.nnbradio.com) states that they work hard and play hard: they believe in being competitive, but they do it in a fun way, apparently. Mom somehow got wind of these guys and sent me the link while I was still in Korea. It sounds quite interesting, particularly given that they have a branch in Anchorage. I dithered for my last few weeks in Korea, not sure whether I should call them up six weeks in advance, or wait until I get back from my adventure. I'm trying to get up the nerve to drop them a line right now, in fact. Why call instead of e-mail? Adam's advice, and I think it's good. Shows you're truly interested and want to speak to somebody real.
So, in light of the fact that Anchorage is an expensive place to live, and I might be seriously jeopardizing my savings by going out on a limb and moving up there without prospects (as it's looking like right now), I'm hedging my bets. Yesterday I applied for two reporter positions with newspapers that are based nowhere near Alaska. One of them was the Telluride Daily Planet, in Telluride, Colorado. The town's famous; Old West bad boys like Wild Bill Hickok used to hang out there. The place was a mining boom town, full of bars and brothels back in the day. Now, apparently, it's a thriving resort in close proximity to some ridiculous ski slopes, with a reputation of being filled with crack-snorting liberals. Oh well. It won't be the first time I've applied to go into enemy territory. I almost went to school at UC Santa Cruz, did I ever tell you that?
The second, and somewhat more exciting, reporter's position I applied for was based in...give up? The Virgin Islands. No, I'm not kidding. A Caribbean-based newspaper was sending out an all-call for reporters with a B.S. in journalism or English and with a penchant for "investigative reporting." They gave me fair warning that it wouldn't be all sun, sand and surfing. I'll be expected to work a full 30-hour weekly schedule, generating and investigating seven or so stories per week. The pay isn't the best ($25,000-$30,000) but that's roughly the same pay scale as I was offered for teaching in Korea. As long as I'm not getting paid less, I'll take it: it's a job in my field, and it's in the freakin' Caribbean Sea, for Pete's sake. National Geographic will have to notice me now after I've done a couple of jobs like this. There might even be flying opportunities down there, who knows? It's another opportunity to travel and work. I'll take it.
I haven't ruled Alaska out completely, rest assured. I said I hadn't gotten a line on any jobs in journalism up there, but there are a few more besides. There were no less than 14 openings listed on CareerBuilder.com for a "Ramp Service Agent" with Alaska Airlines or Alaska Air. What's a "ramp service agent," you ask? Well, simply put, they're the people who put the luggage on the plane and take it off again when it reaches its destination. Yep, that'll be me, one of those poor buggers bundled up in fifty layers, driving a tractor pulling people's bags between the terminal and the plane in all kinds of despicable weather. Sounds harsh, but it's better than crab fishing. It pays $15.86 per hour to boot, which is marginal for Alaska (given the cost of housing) but might still be enough for me to live humbly on and still fly. There might be writing opportunities in it, and I will be in close proximity to aircraft and an airport, which is better still.
So, anyway, I'm still tossing that stuff around. I reckon today I'll apply for one of those ramp positions with Alaska Airlines, and finally call the general manager of NNB, Anchorage division. (It's about dang time, too.) Moreover I have phone calls to make to three car dealerships in the area: one to Lucerne Valley to inquire about a Range Rover we all saw parked there a couple of days ago as we drove back from Big Bear whence we'd taken Mom to lunch on her birthday; and two to a couple of other car dealerships on 7th Avenue in Victorville about whatever SUVs or trucks they might have in stock. So excuse me, it's almost noon now and I need to get busy. Ta-ta...
Truth be told, I want to go to India.
