Taro's Travels

Kallisti

"9", said Tom - an assessment of one of the girls on our trip. No holier-than-thou-ness, please: male or female you probably rate people too.

"9.5", replied I, "until she spoke". I have a low irritation threshhold, and it's triggered frequently. I'm an equal opportunity misanthrope, however - I irritate myself.

Once upon a time, there was an astronomer named Schiaparelli who discovered the Martian canals. These were confirmed by renowned astronomer Percival Lowell who built the most advanced observatory of that time and spent years observing the features of Mars, including the great canals built by Martian natives to channel water from the polar regions to the desertified temperate zones. He published multiple books on the topic including his anthropological deductions regarding Martian life. Such work directly and indirectly inspired generations of writers including Edgar Rice Burroughs, HG Wells, and Ray Bradbury.

Once upon a time, at around the same time as Lowell was mapping Mars, and roughly quarter of a century after the discovery of X-Rays, physicist Rene-Prosper Blondlot discovered N-Rays, a new form of radiation.

Once upon a time photographs of the Martian surface sent back by spacecraft Viking I revealed the presence of a gigantic monument - a weathered face.

Once upon a time - not for very long - I took up the use of Tarot cards, as is perhaps not unexpected for someone of my name. And the cards told me what I needed to hear, because they always do.

Don't you just love recognising patterns in noise? Sometimes a cloud is dragonish, or like a bear or very like a tower or a sheep. I used to close my eyes just to watch the fractal sparks.

On the covered bridge near Hue, our group met a wizened old lady ("crone" isn't quite the right word - she smoked like a chimney but she was petite and sweet). She'd been married to a GI but he died. Now, for D10000, she'd read your palms and tell your fortune - and in the case of Jock and Marge the fortune of their kids too. Ages of marriages, ages of divorces, number and genders of offspring, when money would arrive and other eventually-confirmable or dismissable specifics. Apparently I'm to get more money next year, probably because I'll stop living on US$15 or less a day, and I'll die at 77, which on the one hand - so to speak - is bad since it's less than average for an Australian male, but on the other hand is good since I did one of those life expectancy calculators a few years back and it told me I was going to die at 49.

There were a few difficulties in deciphering her accent, and of course we tend to excise from memory "uninteresting" details that we can dismiss as noise. I was a "very good man" she said, to the amusement of my companions, and suggested I was a doctor or a teacher - I obviously have delicate white-collar-worker fingers, though it's not a bad stab to suggest that a traveller is a teacher since so many were, are, or will be. Even I - having once sworn never to - might teach sometime.

I'll be marrying in two years, with two kids, 1 boy 1 girl. There are two possibilities - someone of my age, or someone much younger - 20. That was either out of left field, or a rather interesting attempt to cover as many bases as possible. Or, as the group agreed later, it could be someone in their mid-twenties, or perhaps even mid-thirties. 20 was an interestingly specific number, though, for someone who had otherwise - with myself and others - studiously avoided giving exact ages for such things.

Addenda

I've missed out on lots of details of people along the way for one reason or another -sometimes because they don't fit the story, and sometimes because I'd dearly like to forget them.

Jess, for instance, was heading up to China and planning on doing some insane overlanding to get to India - she was thinking of working her way through Central Asia into Kashmir, since she couldn't apparently get to Mongolia without an invite. Like I said - insane overlanding. Couldn't make her fit into the correct entry without killing flow, for some reason.

Putu, who I met on Lovina Beach at night, was a cook at a hotel operated by an Australian. She spoke a little English and I spoke a little Bahasa - so we stumbled through chatter - it was too dark to use my phrasebook. But I'd already decided on what to write in Lovina.

Putu - a male one - ran a cooking class in Lovina. I was going to tie it in with later cooking courses. Have yet to take another one.

There have been a bunch of taxi drivers who I wish nothing but ill upon.

And there have, of course, been other omissions, but that's enough names for now.

"The intense desire to talk with someone, sharp as any pain; this was what people meant when they talked about love. Just the super-heightened desire to share thoughts. That alone." Blue Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson

Once upon a time, along the way, I fell a little in love (for want of a more nuanced word). It's true: within this chest there beats a fist-sized lump of muscle pumping oxygenated blood through my vascular system! She was, incidently, 20. "Interestingly random", you're thinking perhaps? Or perhaps "Ick" -- but I had her pegged originally as mid-20s, and whoever said neurochemistry was rational, anyway? No doubt if she'd been 19 or 21 the "20" could be rationalised as being as unspecific as others - there's always pattern, whether real or chimeral.

No, this wasn't in Patpong, though I was in Bangkok for a week.

I'd thought of the idea of seeing somebody's face when you closed your eyes was poetic licence. Interesting fractals, sure, but surely not something so recognisable and distinct. I'm not fishing for sympathy - this was, after all, an interesting and overwhelmingly positive experience. It's not that I'm (still) out of love with - well, again, that's enough names: if you don't know, or know enough to know, you don't need to -- it's that I can't countenance ever being in love with her again. Sufficient temporal distance; sufficient spatial distance; sufficient emotional distance. Nice, even if I did have to go travelling and fall a little in love to get there.

Anyway - no neat happy starting - much less any neat happy ending, and if I'm not married to someone of about my own age in two years, either, don't feel particularly disappointed. Nor do I expect that if I die before 77 I'll be able to get a refund, since the oracle will probably be gone, and, if not, as a head-in-a-jar my mobility will be limited.

Astronomers have just voted to remove Pluto from the list of planets.

The Randi $1,000,000 for any testable demonstration of paranormal ability remains unclaimed.

More-recent photographs sent back by the Mars Global Surveyor reveal that the "face on Mars" is just a weathered hill - an illusion formed by pattern recognition and shadow.

There's no life on Mars, and Venus is one hell of a place to avoid.