Getting away

Of all the bits in my travels, I like blogging from my Blackberry the best.

I kid you - I just have a lot of time to kill before the 2-hour Ramayana show begins here at Borobodur.

But on the car up to Ratu Boko, we passed verdant paddy, and eventually drove up the twisty, narrow, steep road up the hill, past habitations built on the hillside, past old men and women whiliing away life with no concern for the "economic crisis", past water that fell down the hillsides just as non-chalantly, past overhanging trees that served to shelter you just that little more from the sun, ths skies, past vales of green that waited hungrily for your car to topple in.

Sorry, it was dark and cloudy, and must have permeated my psyche.

But these trips up the hills and jungles, especially when overcast or when it is late in the day with deep shadows amidst golden pools of hillside, are what I remember best from all my travels. The tortuous and tortorous ride up to Darjeeling from Siliguri; the walks in the woods - Corbett be damned - in Sikkim and Bhutan; the ride up to Rumtek, only to miss the monastery, and my pal the Karmapa; an old trip up to some tea plantation in Java.

There is something about the creeping jungle doing so up and down hillsides that make them ever more scary and embracing at the same time. Maybe the elevation reinforces the distance from the mad world outside and beneath?

Maybe it is altitude sickness.