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![[My best holiday experience]](iyer970325.jpg)
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C O N T E N T S Welcome to Wanderlust On the Amazon: Snapshots of a Green Planet Two Sides of the Rhine - Pico Iyer booklist The Dangers of Fade into Blue D E P A R T M E N T S Passages
Postmark: Paris Table Talk
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United with an old school friend and an unlikely Virgil (in the form of a 23-year-old Canadian drifter), I was taken (in my jet-lagged, half-dreaming state) into the heart of Thai doubleness. Girls in bikinis sashayed up to me and nibbled at my ear. Tuk-tuks took me bumping down streets alive with shadows. Strange voices rang me up in my dismal hotel room with soft offers of sweet company. I heard heavy feet padding after light ones, giggles and held breath, all night in the corridor. By the next day, I was taking the overnight train to Chiang Mai, eating exquisite and unnamed delicacies in my cabin and watching the darkness fall over the rice paddies, and rise again, with the cool mountain air of the north. And by the following evening, I was thick in what seemed like a Vietnam jungle, with an animist headman smoking opium in his hut and getting up, by the light of a guttering candle, to perform the strange, slow steps of an unearthly dance. To a relative innocent in his mid-20s, three days away from a job in a cubicle in Rockefeller Center, writing secondhand accounts of events around the world, it was a revelation as instantaneous as lightning. Or the difference between reading of love in a novel and feeling one's heart pound wildly as the object of one's devotion narrows her eyes. And so my first real trip to Asia unfolded in what seemed a series of dream-panels -- adventures and faces and events so far removed from my day-to-day experience that I could not convert them into any tongue I knew, and revisited them again and again, sleepless, in my memories and notes and photographs, once home. Almost every day of the three-week trip was so vivid that, upon returning, I gave a friend a nine-hour account of every moment. The motorbike ride through Sukhothai; the first long evening in an expat's teak house in the lazy sois off Sunkumvhit; the flight into the otherworldly charm of Rangoon and the Strand Hotel, and the pulse of warm activity around the Sule Pagoda at nightfall. Long hot days in the silence of Pagan, 5,000 temples on every side; slow trips at dawn along Inle lake, seeing a bird-faced barge being led through the early quiet; a frenzied morning back in Bangkok, tapping out an article while monsoon rains pounded on the windows all around me.
And as an unintended bonus to all these Asian epiphanies, on my flight back to New York, through Japan, I had a layover in Tokyo, spent a morning walking around Narita Temple in the hushed October sunshine and knew that I had come upon a home as unavoidable as my past. And one as familiar as the person I had been looking for all my life. Twelve years later, then, I still sit in Asia, in a quiet room in Nara, and recall the first sights that ripened around me into a lifetime partnership, and a holiday that never ends.
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