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I went to Oktoberfest and did not have a beer. Nope, not one biermadchen's tear of frothy brew, a sacrilege for which I will surely rot in some Faustian teetotler's hell.

 

Photos .story: audio and video by Russell Johnson
Click for MP3 Audio 

I think of Faust because listening to the car radio earlier I heard a Bavarian radio station announce that it would hold a Goethe marathon, 8 hours straight of readings from the German poet. ZZZZ.

Back to my beerless Oktoberfest. It is not that I didn't want to join the thousands of stumbling, bleary-eyed imbibers who swayed and yodeled the night away in one of the beer tents. The fact is, I simply could not get in. There were so many people here that the doors were shut. It would take hours to nudge my way within striking distance of a stein of frothy brewsky.

by Russell Johnson

AUDIO-MP3

Interior Decoration - Longhouse
Skrang River, Sarawak, Malaysia

Somerset Maugham called it "a terribly jungly place". the island of Borneo.

This is my kind of background music. Insects prattling like powertools. We are walking through the Southeast Asia jungle. My kind of place. I love the sss sss.steam heat. As long as I don't have to do too much. I would have been one of the first ones kicked out of "Survivor."

This is Borneo, home of some of the world's oldest rainforests. It is an island that houses a freakshow of flora and fauna unmatched on earth: 1500 species of flowers (170 types of orchids), 262 brands of birds, monkeys, flying lizards and, should the jungle floor look at times as if it were moving, 458 appellations of ants.

Butterflies flutter by. Scientists have counted 281 breeds of them here. You see signs in villages advertising the local "Butterfly Taxidermist."

When I was a kid, I had a walk-in closet papered with National Geographic maps. Borneo was near the floor just below the hem of my rain slicker. Borneo always intrigued me because it was this huge island -- a big green blob on the map -- with a few rivers and very few names of towns.

What was there? Who knows?

Later I read tales of pirates and headhunters, of the Brooke Brothers, the fabled White Rajahs of Borneo. One of the brothers was missing an eye and had a collection of exquisite glass eyes that a servant carried around in a case

There are still pirates in the waters near here. No headhunters, though.

We are told that the snaggle of skulls hanging from the rafters of this longhouse are antiques. We are being treated to some very graceful dancing. Tatooed men with hornbill feathers and headdresses, women with dresses and crowns adorned with silver coins.

We had been led up the Skrang River river in a tippy canoe powered by an outboard motor. Our driver was a woman, of the Iban tribe..with a cigarette handing from her lip. Our guide was Malaysian Chinese. His name was Donald Duk.spelled DUK.

Borneo is divided among three countries. There are Malaysian and Indonesian sectors] And Brunei is here, too, with its Sultan.

It was really quite spooky to sit in this longhouse .a long structure on stilts that houses a whole tribe,.along with their dogs and gamecocks. Chickens and pigs run around below.

Even spookier was sleeping here, through a jungle storm. With those antique heads.hanging from the rafters. The only tourist death I have heard about from around these parts was a German who got swallowed by a python. It pays to watch your step. Didn't sleep at all that night.

There is a fascinating underworld side to Borneo. The next way we began our hike through the Niah Caves.a cathedral of limestone in the jungle. I feel like jungle man. The sight of the mouth of these enormous caves strikes a chord. I look up, eight stories perhaps, at swiftlets slaloming through limestone icicles. From deep inside I hear water dripping and the flutter and screech of birds and bats blending and echoing through holes and passages like chords from a prehistoric pipeorgan.

As I walked through the cave I looked up through the cavern's chimneys at blue sky and the lush vegetation of a jungle plateau. (half expecting a B movie brontosaurus to poke its head through the hole.)

It is easy to see how cavemen developed their vocabulary; they had to schlepp around on bat and bird guano. The experience is sort of like a Laurel and Hardy pie-fight. You can't avoid getting dirty so you might as well dive head-on into the action.

There is quite a business in harvesting this..stuff. You see men hiking through the jungle carrying huge bags on their backs. Makes good fertilizer. But its not where the big money is. In the cave's ceiling, flashlights swirl like fireflies as the birdsnest collectors poke to dislodge their delicacy. Swiftlet nests, scraped from the ceilings of the caves, are a hot commodity for the Chinese who boil them to make bird's nest soup (which is actually bird spit soup.as the nests don't dissolve). The Niah nest trade began about 700AD during the Tang Dynasty. The going price when I was there was about $260 U.S. a kilo.

"Hurry, we'll miss our flight," insists our guide. Indeed we will have to march four kilometers through the jungle, shuttle across a river in a tippy canoe, and drive several hours to the airport in Miri, an oil town on the Sarawak-Brunei border. Alas, I will miss Niah's daily media event. Around sunset there is, they say, quite a stirring. Bats screech and birds scold and flutter as the cave cycles from daylife to nightlife. Swiftlets swarm by the thousands into the cave (perhaps to find their nests missing) and bats flap out into the night.

Visitors to the caves at this hour are warned to wear disposable headgear.

We do a forced walk through the jungle. Looking up into the trees snapping pictures, I lose my step on a bridge and jam my knee between two planks. It takes two people to pry me out. Hurting badly, I hobble on.

Arriving at Miri airport ten minutes before the day's last flight to Kuching, the capital of the Malaysian state of Sarawak's, we find that there are no seats left in economy. Cool.an upgrade to first class. I limp on board the Malaysian Airlines jet, sweating, knee throbbing, feet swelling inside of terminally soiled sneakers. I am seated next to a Malay man in a perfectly tailored dark business suit. There is Dom Perignon on the menu but I sheepishly settle for a local beer which I gulp while trying to avoid eye contact with anyone or making broad gestures so as not fan my ill wind around.

The man speaks politely with an educated English accent. "Are you here on holiday?" he asks.

  by Russell Johnson
I managed to spend a week in Japan without experiencing a single tea ceremony: only a single taiko drummer and one platter of sushi. Instead, I got a daily glimpse at the anatomically-correct rear end of horse designed by Leonardo DaVinci, a European-style symphony orchestra and the dancing Toyota cherubs.

Lord Ludovico of Milan commissioned DaVinci to build the biggest statue in the world, of General Francisco Storza. He never finished it but a Japanese scholar and a computer did. The computer figured out that it could never have been cast in bronze, because such a weight would not be supported by the steed's well-turned ankles. So, it was completed in plaster and now faces the courtyard of the Nagoya Convention Center. The view from the front of the center is of the horse's back-end.

I was in Nagoya for a tourism conference, which should have been a showcase of the culture of the host nation.the unique qualities that make it different from every other place on earth, the reasons a traveler might want to go there.

Instead I found a large industrial city with only two tourist attractions, a temple and a castle that was rebuilt after being bombed out during World War II, unless you count the Noritake china factory and a few really cool old radio towers on top of buildings.

This is not Kyoto, folks.

The last time I was in Japan I spent a glorious week in Kyoto.  That was 1987.

It was there that I experienced my first (and only) meal of Kobe Beef which, next to pufferfish, is Japan's best-known delicacy.

 I joined three friends at one of Kyoto's most revered restaurants for a single piece of perfect, beer-fed, hand massaged meat. We agreed beforehand to dine silently, to savor each bite with Zen-like contemplation.  Part of it was aesthetic, the other part was that we did not want to waste a single Yen of what is still, 12 years later, the most expensive restaurant entre' I have ever consumed.  The tab was US$135 each for just the morsel of meat plus a bottle of beer.  

But it was good.

The time I spent alone, wandering contemplatively among Kyoto's temples and dining in inexpensive noodle shops, was easily one of my life's peak experiences.

But Japan is trying to develop the Nagoya region as a tourist center. I have trouble with places that think travelers really care about their industrial accomplishments and who exhalt the culture they have assimilated from the West. I don't know if it is an official lack of self-esteem or some mistaken notion that travelers find some comfort in flying for a dozen hours to experience a place practically indistinguishable from home. Yearly I get a calendar from the chamber of commerce of another north Asian city that features its TV tower, its smokestack district and other landmarks that remind me of Detroit.

I am not saying that the quality of the attractions is poor. The Nagoya Philharmonic was excellent. Its European-style arrangements have some nice touches of Japanese folk music. The little kids dressed as airplanes, busses and Toyotas were cute. The DaVinci statue is exquisitely crafted. But a big, macho Italian charging on a horse seems a bit out of place as the centerpiece of the Nagoya Convention Center.

While some may find this quirky and charming now, it will soon cease to be so as the globalization of culture threatens the world's rich tapestry of differences. The tourism industry is threatened, too. Its very product is the promise of exotic places and the differences that make those exotic.

I wouldn't discourage anyone from going to Japan, to experience the excitement of Tokyo or the beauty of Kyoto or Nara. I have sailed the Inland Sea, and there are beautiful villages that line it. The Japan National Tourist Office www.jnto.com has some good tips on how to save money in Japan. (Avoid major hotels where I spent $18 for a slice of pizza).

But skip Nagoya.