The Bus Stops at Every Baobab Tree: Dispatches from a Volunteer in Tanzania (Post # 2)

          Six months ago, I’d decided it was now or never. And now that now is here, I suddenly wish I’d chosen never. Of course I don’t have to stay. It’s not like I’ve been conscripted into the French Foreign Legion. If I quit, I wouldn’t have to move to Canada and assume a new identity.  “Volunteer” means voluntary, right?

I’ve been in Tanzania for one day and I’m already losing it.  Maybe it’s the anti-malarial medication? I’ve been taking it for three weeks now. According to Tom, a volunteer headed to Mwanza, that’s plenty of time for the side effects to set in.

“She had this crazed look on her face,” said Tom, earlier tonight after dinner about someone who had taken the same brand I’m taking. “Half the time she couldn’t even remember her name. Then one day she tried to slit her wrists with a panga.  They had to strap her to a gurney and airlift her to Europe. I wouldn’t take that crap if you paid me a million dollars. It’s tooootally poison.” Tom had spent time working with refugees in Mozambique a few years ago. The poor woman he was referring to was one the development workers at his camp.

 Tom held court from a woven mat on the living room floor with his arm around his wife Katrina.  They looked like two al dente strands of spaghetti curled up together cross-legged on the floor. The two of them together couldn’t weigh more than one of my thighs. From the looks of it, they’d each suffered more than a few bouts of tropical disease.

 “But surely that has to be an isolated incident,” I said, thinking that I hadn’t heard the words “side” or “effect” and certainly not the word “poison” come out of my doctor’s mouth when she’d prescribed a year’s worth of anti-malarial medication to the tune of $400.

“Then there was Charlie in Zimbabwe,” Tom continued, ignoring my question. “It started with nightmares, and then he turned paranoid.  Started hearing voices. After a while all he could do was lay in his cot, balled up under his mosquito net, and blubber like a baby.”

Tom explained to everyone that he and Katrina thought of this as their life—“this” being development work. For them it was not just a career, but a lifestyle. They’d been in Zanzibar for the last month taking intensive Swahili lessons.  At the Dar es Salaam airport, they sauntered up to us, having just gotten off the ferry from Zanzibar.  In the coastal breeze their jeans lapped fluidly over their thin hips. Despite only a month in the country, they'd already assumed the air of bored ex-pats. They were so relaxed and laid back it was as if they had never had a worry or responsibility to speak of in their lives. At first, I attributed their utter mellowness to their tropical island stay, but as I got to know them over the next few weeks, I discovered this was how they always were.

“But what if you get malaria?” I asked Tom.

“I’ve already had it a couple times,” he said with a hint of pride in his voice.  “First time was the worst. Mozambique, 1998. Three weeks of night sweats and puking my guts out. I lost twenty-five pounds. But the severity of the symptoms lessens each time you get it.  It won’t be bad at all the next time around,” he said smiling. He was positively gleeful.

The next time?  If he lost another five pounds he’d no longer be visible to the naked eye.

“Well I’m taking it, I’m not worried,” said Kim. Kim, a twenty-five-year old with freckled Irish looks, is a chemical engineer from Toronto. I’d never met any actual chemists before Kim.  I’ve always put scientists on an Olympian pedestal since chemistry in my life has only meant an abysmal four-credit C-, bringing my G.P.A. down to the atomic weight of zero. Kim seems far from the stereotypical pocket-protector nerd that can pas de deux her way around the periodic table, but can’t manage a conversation with the mailman about the weather. If cool Madame Curie was taking anti-malarial medicine, that was good enough for me.

The Bus Stops at Every Baobab Tree: Dispatches from a Volunteer in Tanzania (Post # 1)

Hello everyone, I was a volunteer in Arusha, Tanzania from July 1999 to July 2000. I kept a journal while I was there, which I'm going to share in excerpts on my blog. Thanks for visiting!

Chapter One: My Lips Are Turning Blue

               My last weekend in the United States, I went hiking in the Colorado Rockies over the Fourth of July holiday.  I’d stayed in a tent for three nights, did not shower, slept on the ground, endured dozens of mosquito bites and hiked for hours each day at elevations ranging from 7,000 to 11,000 feet, all while carrying thirty-five pounds of gear on my back.  Some people might consider that “roughing it.”  I’d considered that roughing it.  That is, until I spent my first night in Arusha, Tanzania.

The electricity has been out for several hours. I’m wearing nearly all of the clothes I’ve brought for the next year, and I’m doing my best to cover my body with a British Airways blanket, which is about the size of a generous hand towel. I’m wearing a “coal miner” headlamp strapped to my head because the candlelight coming from the candles stuck in Coca Cola and vinegar bottles on the table next to my bed, give off less light than a firefly at one hundred paces.  I’m attempting to read, but can’t because my hands are shaking uncontrollably and I can no longer turn the pages of my book.

Coming from the frigid hinterlands of Wisconsin, I recognized these symptoms as the first stages of hypothermia.  Alright, I don’t really come from the “hinterlands” but my hometown of Milwaukee does get very cold in the winter.  Unless I had taken the wrong flight yesterday, I shouldn’t be anywhere near the frigid hinterlands of anywhere.  Arusha is within spitting distance of the equator, but here I am freezing my rear end off.  How is this possible?

Tripled up in a bedroom with Sally and Nancy for the next two weeks, I examine my temporary roommates.  They look warm, comfortable and snug in their sleeping bags. They are having no problems reading their books.

“JoAnn, didn’t you get my e-mail last week?” Nancy asks.  “Hey, your lips are turning blue.”

Nancy, our volunteer guru for the next month, was the coordinator hired by Visions in Action, the volunteer organization that has sent me here, along with twelve other volunteers. Her job is to guide us through orientation and job interviews until she returns to the U.S., the apron strings are cut and we start our real volunteer work.

“What e-mail?” I ask.

“I told everyone to bring their sleeping bags since it drops down to the fifties at night,” Nancy replies.

That is the fifties with no central heat, storm windows or R-40 insulation. Tanzania is south of the equator so it is the dead of winter.  Arusha town sits at just over 3,700 feet elevation. This might have had something to do with the low temperatures, but the equator is right over that hill.  What is six degrees south in a potential longitudinal range of three hundred sixty?  Equator is supposed to mean sweltering tropics; Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn sweating buckets on the African Queen, but nonetheless, despite all the humidity and perspiration-stained clothing, managing to fall madly in love.

When I’d met Nancy earlier that day just outside of customs at the Dar es Salaam airport, I loved her honeyed Georgia drawl, but noted immediately that she didn’t look a day over nineteen.  (She is actually twenty-three.)  She sports shoulder-length dreadlocks and has a nose ring.

Sally, a twenty-two year old volunteer from California with waist-length pale blond straight hair, has classic, California girl looks and with her athletic build she gives the impression of having just stepped off a surfboard after landing a nine-foot swell off Half Moon Bay.

Sally is one of four volunteers in our group headed to Moshi town, about fifty miles to the east of Arusha, after our month-long orientation.  I am one of five volunteers assigned to stay in Arusha. The house we are in will be my home for the next year. The other four volunteers in our group face a two-day bus ride to their final destination, Mwanza, a malaria-cursed port city on Lake Victoria in northwestern Tanzania.

Moshi is known as the “gateway to the roof of Africa” because supposedly it is at the foot of Mount Kilimanjaro. I say supposedly because you cannot actually see Kilimanjaro from Moshi except on rare and special occasions. Kilimanjaro is very high strung and moody and only shows herself during certain times of the year. When one happens to be lucky enough to catch a glimpse of her, usually it is only a partial view of the top, the base or the middle, rarely the whole. But even an incomplete look at Africa’s highest mountain is breathtaking. I saw Kili earlier today, on our ten-hour bus ride from Dar. All of a sudden there she was on the blue horizon; the flat, snow-covered top seemed to float on the gray clouds that completely obscured the base of the mountain. I took this as a good omen for the next year.

Year. A year is a very long time. I suddenly wonder if I will make it? In fact, I am beginning to wonder what I’m doing here in the first place. I don’t know a soul on the entire continent, I’m freezing to death and I’m sharing a room with two women nearly half my age. And, did I mention I am sharing a room? 

Mother Natures’ Lesser Half

I wrote this while I was still living in Milwaukee. I feel beyond fortune to live within driving distance of this gorgeous vista taken just last week from Glacier Point in Yosemite National Park.  Hope you enjoy this tongue-in-cheek essay about National Parks, which are near and dear to my heart.

In planning this year’s summer vacation it has come squarely to my attention that there are serious inequities in this country.  I’m not speaking of gender bias, racial discrimination or the widening economic and social gaps between the rich and poor.  Yes, these are deeply troubling, but a simple glance at a U.S. map will reveal injustices of far greater latitude and longitude.

It seems as though certain states have been inordinately blessed with the riches of nature, while others lag far behind like the ugly duckling stepsister, wobbling Quasimodo-like through life, trying to get by on personality alone.  From sea to shining sea, Mother Nature’s partiality and favoritism is sorely evident.

According to Wikipedia (the source for all knowledge) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_parks_of_the_United_States there are 59 national parks in the United States.  But shockingly, only twenty-seven states and two U.S. territories share in this fruit of plenty.  Simple arithmetic would seem to dictate that one park be assigned to each state, and, with nine left over, divide them equally among the territories (Puerto Rico has no National Parks!) Among the twenty-five have-not states, given the cold shoulder by Mother Nature, many must make do with inferior millenniums-after-the-fact attempts to rectify these gross disparities, through man-made consolation prizes in the form of national military parks, battlefields, historic sites and monuments.

For example, Connecticut, along with a half dozen other states, shares the Appalachian National Scenic Trail and also shares a National Heritage Corridor (whatever that is) with Massachusetts.  But, unfortunate Connecticut can claim only one place of pilgrimage of its own:  the Weir Farm, a National Historic Site designated in 1990 for one of America’s earliest impressionist painters who summered there in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  But is the farm of a dead artist really supposed to keep Connecticut happy in comparison to say, the Grand Canyon, or the mystical vision of the granite face of California’s Half Dome?

Then again, perhaps Johnny-come-lately Connecticut should count itself fortunate compared to Delaware, the only state in the union that has absolutely nothing!  Delaware is no doubt extraordinarily embarrassed, as it should be.  On the other hand, everyone knows that Mother Nature created Delaware as the perfect location for businesses to incorporate.  Too much beauty and splendor or history in that state, and the next thing you know the stock market is taking a nose-dive. But even among the halves, some must make do with tiny slices of the pie of National Park glory.  Should we begrudge Idaho their small sliver of Yellowstone, America’s first national park, when that state must share it with Montana and Wyoming?  This hardly seems fair given that Montana has splendorous Glacier National Park all to itself and Wyoming shares its magnificent Grand Teton National Park with no one.

But exactly what kind of behind the scenes pork barrel politicking went on when Mother Nature decided that California would get nine national parks, Alaska eight, and Utah five, while Illinois must be satisfied with an odd historic trail or two and the Lincoln Home National Historic Site, and only then because of an accident of birth? Likewise, can Kansas in America’s heartland truly be contented with its amber waves of grain and its Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve when it knows deep down inside that this could never come close to National Park material?

I ask you, is this fair? What was Mother Nature thinking?

New York no doubt feels fortunate to have its gorgeous Fire Island National Seashore, as does my home state Wisconsin with our Apostle Islands National Lakeshore on Lake Superior. And yet, I can’t help but feel a certain sense of inferiority since for reasons unknown, these shores weren’t quite good enough to achieve National Park status.

Don’t cry for us California and Alaska.  Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.  I’ve decided to forego this year’s summer road trip.  Instead I’m going to spend my vacation in the safety and comfort of my lovely Milwaukee backyard while I enjoy the bustling wildlife antics of the common gray squirrel and the breathtaking views of the newly built addition to my neighbor’s bungalow.

Mombasa or Bust: Part II

With two hours to kill, Katie and I walked in circles around the courtyard of the Tanga bus station, since there was nothing else to do. We later learned from a Tanzanian passenger that the bus station vendors had nicknamed each of us. Katie, a Canadian of Irish heritage with curly hair and freckles, was named “beer girl” presumably for a Guinness beer T-shirt she wore. My shoulder-length blonde hair was clipped into a ponytail and I was dressed modestly in an ankle-length skirt and a long-sleeved blouse, but was mysteriously branded "woman of the night."

We boarded the second bus at the appointed departure time. The bus remained motionless for an hour and forty minutes.  During that time, vendors pressed against the bus, shouting into the open windows in the hopes of making a few shillings. I had a choice almost as varied as the selection offered by my favorite grocer back home, without moving from my seat: peanuts, cashews, hardboiled eggs, vegetable or beef samosas, soap, toothpaste, toothbrushes, mangos, bananas, oranges, combs, mirrors, and hair curlers.

But the strangest item of all was a single tan-colored brassiere tacked to a board by its strap, hanging limp like a dead fish among the other sundry items for sale. Did this aspiring undergarment salesman really hope to make a sale of a bra through a bus window?

“Sir, is that a B or a C cup?”

The bus finally left and stopped a minute later at the petrol station. After fueling, we returned to the bus station. After thirty minutes we left again and drove to a private residence in town. This seemed to be a normal layover since all of the passengers immediately exited to stretch and have a smoke. There, we waited for another thirty minutes while one of the passengers packed his luggage. We drove from the passenger’s home and returned directly to the Tanga bus station. I was now feeling as though I’d entered the Tanga, Tanzania episode of The Twilight Zone. 

              We finally left the station for a third time and stopped at a nearby ice cream shop to pick up more passengers where an American and Dutch man boarded. As the American passed us, his first words were, "Are you enjoying this never-ending nightmare?"  They’d had a far worse journey having left Dar-es-Salaam early that morning, but along the way their bus had broken down.  They’d been stranded on the roadside for hours without food or water. I gave them my cashews, which they immediately devoured.

Finally, on our way once again, our second “express, non-stop” bus to Mombasa stopped repeatedly at tiny villages along the way. No one boarded, but at every village the driver yelled out to ask if so-and-so friend of his was there. At each village, a chorus of voices rang out in unison, “Hayupo” (Swahili for he's not here) and we continued on.

Other than kerosene lamps and flickering candlelight, there was nothing to see in the night so dark it was like traveling through a black hole. I dozed at times, but deep sleep eluded me. Anyone who has traveled in East Africa knows that the condition of the roads is frightful because they are pockmarked every few meters with potholes the size of small craters. And, because it's so dark, the driver often misses them.                 There's nothing like going 80 k.p.h. over a massive pothole. Many times during the ride, I was jolted from a light slumber as I hurled to the ceiling and then plummeted back down into my seat. Under the circumstances, I think I should have been entitled to a fifty percent refund on my bus fare since I was out of my seat, for at least half the trip, but I didn’t think it would be worth the time for a four-dollar reimbursement.

              Just before the border crossing into Kenya, a torrential rain broke.  The parched ground was suddenly flooded with an inch of water. The Kenyan customs officer, an underpaid, bored bureaucrat in a crisp white uniform, chose this opportune time to search our luggage. All of the passengers on the bus dragged or carried their luggage, fifty feet through the muddy deluge, to the customs building. After a superficial glance at the contents of our drenched luggage, the customs official was apparently satisfied that no contraband was present after all and we were allowed to return to the bus through the downpour. I'm fairly certain that if someone chose to smuggle drugs or perhaps a cache of arms across an international border, they wouldn’t leave them lying on top of their luggage!

              We finally arrived in Mombasa at the stroke of midnight with only moments to spare to catch the last ferry of the night into the city.  A promised twelve-hour trip had taken eighteen hours, about the time it would’ve taken to fly from Tanzania to New York. Fortunately, Katie and I were able to enlist the help of our fellow male passengers in misery, who gallantly accompanied us by taxi to a guesthouse, where we spent a safe and uneventful night before heading to the beach the next day.

Mombasa or Bust (Part I)

 “Whatever you do, don’t arrive in Mombasa after dark!”

We had every intention of heeding this warning, made repeatedly by Kenyan friends in the know.  But bus travel in East Africa is infamous for its unreliability, so it was almost assured that we’d arrive in Mombasa at the worst possible hour.

My housemate Katie and I were halfway through a one-year volunteer program in Arusha, Tanzania. We’d planned to meet some Kenyan friends on the beach in Mombasa for the New Year holiday, but our travel options from Arusha were limited. Air travel, given our budgets, was out of the question.  Because we’d waited until the last moment to make travel arrangements our first choice, taking the shuttle to Nairobi and then the overnight Nairobi – Mombasa train, was no longer available as the first and second-class compartments had been booked for weeks. We were left with only one grim alternative, the Simba Express Luxury Coach.

My first clue that the coach would be neither express nor luxury was of course the name.  In Tanzania, the “express” buses are usually the slowest. The “luxury” buses are typically rusting hulks, teeming with masses of humanity that pitch to and fro across Africa, like toddlers learning to walk.

As a veteran of six months of excruciating bus trips within Tanzania, I’d learned that all is fair in love and bus ticket sales.  Exaggeration, if not outright lying, is a standard business practice.  So when the ticket salesman at the central bus station in Arusha assured us that we'd have ample leg room in our reserved front seats, that the bus was direct to Mombasa, it was scheduled to arrive no later than six in the evening, and it was “non-stop,”I knew enough not to believe him. I faced our journey with the forbidding resignation of one confronted with months of painful dental procedures.

My seat was a single at the very front of the bus. Katie was directly behind me. Every square inch of the bus, including what would have been my “ample leg room,” was packed with people, luggage and provisions from the market: bunches of bananas, bags of oranges and plums, baskets piled with carrots and tomatoes and plastic totes containing half-suffocated chickens.

Children were made to stand in the aisles while their mothers and fathers perched on the luggage rack, to my right. A certain numbing rhythm developed as a child swayed, every few seconds, into my right shoulder. The ageless woman seated opposite me periodically gummed an orange. Her mouth puckered like a fish as she spat the seeds around the child, across my lap, and through the open window to my left. Most, but not quite all of the seeds escaped out of the window. Whenever a seed landed on me, the woman simply smiled, exposing her few remaining slanted yellowing teeth rooted in her brown gums.

I turned to the scenery. Mount Kilimanjaro was hidden that day, but as we traveled east from Moshi, I saw the southern Pare Mountains appear suddenly from the arid plains like a sleeping giant blanketed in green. This made me think of sleeping, which I’d desperately tried, but it proved impossible.

Along the way, we stopped at every village, mud hut, cattle dip, baobab tree, termite mound and watering hole. At every stop, streams of passengers boarded and a few got off. The reason for the number of stops is simple. Our “luxury coach” was the only local transportation available for the thousands of rural residents who used it to visit relatives and to go to the market.

It took eight hours to cover the two hundred sixty miles between Arusha and Tanga, a port city on Tanzania’s coast, where Katie and I learned that our direct-non-stop-to-Mombasa luxury bus, had terminated its journey. The bus driver informed us that a second "express, non-stop" bus was scheduled to depart in just two hours and arrive in Mombasa at 8 p.m. With over one hundred miles to go, arriving before dark was now impossible.

Extreme Penny-Pinching

I can still picture my mother spending long hours at the kitchen table scouring the Sunday newspaper, not for the latest news, but for bargains.  This was in the late-sixties—before double coupon bonus days, midnight madness and weekend blowout sales. It was the dull age of retailing when one might see a “half-yearly” or “Lincoln’s Birthday” sale, but for the most part you were lucky if Gimbels Department Store had foundations at 17 ½ percent off.

Mom would sneak a cigarette or two late at night, a habit she’d successfully kept hidden until I was in high school, and pour over the advertisements like a bookie adjusting her point spreads.  Her total absorption burned holes through the vinyl gingham red-checked tablecloth. 

No household item escaped my mother’s frugality. Plastic bags of all types became valued pieces of luggage.  They were washed, dried and re-used again and again until the synthetic fibers finally disintegrated and were given a proper burial in our trash bin.

On special nights out I’d often catch mom spelunking inside a nearly empty tube of lipstick with a bobby pin. “The tube is almost half full,” she’d say.

My two brothers, sandwiched between two older and two younger sisters, had to endure the worst of mom’s thriftiness; wearing hand-me-down leotards from their big sisters under their pants in the cold winter months.  Under duress, my brothers donned thick, stretchy tights of the type worn by Robin Hood and Superman, but in girlish pinks and yellows.  It might have worked if only it had been several years later when Joe Namath made pantyhose for men seem GQ. To this day, it’s a taboo subject at family gatherings.  If anyone wants to bring an immediate flush of embarrassment to my brothers and send them into an emotional tailspin, just mention the word “leotard.”

There were no trips to the barbershop for my brothers.  Haircuts for them were more like hair divestitures; their heads were shaved, military style.  Mom would sit them down on a chair in the backyard, throw a towel over their shoulders and shear their heads practically down to the bone.

I’d add to their misery by rubbing my hands over their freshly-shorn, sandpapered skulls saying, “Women go wild!”

            But my sisters and I also suffered my mother’s tonsorial mutilations.  Every few weeks mom would have us sit on chairs in the kitchen with the linoleum floor lined with newspapers.  She would pull out scotch tape to secure our perfectly straight hair across our foreheads to trim our bangs.  It never did the trick. Year after year of childhood photos show our bangs slanting upwards, on a twenty-degree angle, giving each of us a vaguely extraterrestrial, Mr. Spock-type look.

There was no reason to buy new rain boots when our old leaky boots could be made weatherproof through mom’s ingenious re-use of Wonder bread bags.  Of course she meant well, she wanted our feet to be warm and dry when we got to school.  But what she didn’t foresee was the horrible cloakroom scene when the boots came off and we were left wearing the bags.  With the ensuing taunting from classmates at the unmistakable primary red, yellow and blue Wonder balloons covering our shoes, it’s a wonder none of my siblings or I were humiliated into a lifetime of intensive psychotherapy.

We six bread-bag-footed children of Vulcan bangs and buzz cuts and unisex leotards skipped through our childhoods believing this was all perfectly normal.  And then one day I discovered that my mom was different.  It could’ve been the time I learned that our daily treat of baked cakes and cookies made from scratch, always waiting for us after school on the kitchen table, was special because other mothers made theirs from something called mixes.  Or perhaps it was when I found out that no other mothers in our neighborhood made soap out of lye and pig’s lard from the hog my father had slaughtered each year. (We lived in the city.)

I’d like to say I’ve completely escaped mom’s legacy of exuberant prudence, but as Cokie Roberts wrote, “We Are Our Mothers’ Daughters.”  How true.  I’m just like her. I can’t seem to throw out a plastic bag to save my life. 

Co-Ed Naked Spa Hopping

            My friend Diane and I were spending two weeks traveling around Japan, which included a jaunt to the southern island of Kyushu where Beppu is located.  Beppu is a geo-thermal wonderland of natural hot mineral springs.  Billows of steam rise everywhere, giving the town an atmosphere of a giant outdoor sauna or a film noir movie set.  We had already spent several days in Beppu experiencing the wonderful variety of available tourist attractions.  We had been buried in 140 degree sand up to our necks, had enjoyed several mineral baths that claimed therapeutic properties ranging from improving one’s complexion to healing arthritis, and had toured around the “hells” of Beppu, which are boiling ponds ranging in color from vermilion to sky blue.

It was our last day and we had just hours left before our train departed to Tokyo.  I felt we had “done” Beppu, but soon learned that Beppu was not “done” with us. 

While taking our final stroll around town, we came upon another spa that Diane wanted to try.  I had immediate reservations since this resort was not mentioned in my guidebook and all of the signs were in Japanese, leading me to believe this was “off the beaten track” for tourists.  Now don’t get me wrong.  I believe the best part of traveling happens spontaneously and I love the adventure of having “non-touristy, local” experiences.  But when it comes to exposing my body, I’m extra cautious.   

“Come on.  We’re fourteen time zones away from everyone we know,” Diane argued.  She had a point.  Completely ignoring my gut that was shouting, “Don’t do it!” always a mistake, we entered the building.  

We disrobed in the locker room and entered a communal indoor mud bath. Luxuriating in the slick mud with other women, we moved back and forth between the hotter and cooler areas of the bath until we had had enough. We rinsed off under a cold shower and just before stepping outside, one of the attendants grabbed onto my arm.  She urgently tried to tell me something that was obviously very important.  But my ignorance of the language and inability to decipher Japanese charades had rendered her communiqué impossible to interpret.

So it was that Diane and I, two fairly well-endowed women, stepped outside, naked as the day we were born, whereupon we made three crucial discoveries: we were the only Gaijin (foreigners) at the spa, the resort was co-ed, and the two of us were missing one small, but essential item.  Every Japanese person we encountered, and 99.9 percent of them were of the male persuasion, was holding a small hand towel the size of a wash cloth, over his genitals.

Diane and I were not just naked. We were beyond naked. We were Über-naked.

Had we missed the warning sign in the locker room: “Please remember, don’t shame Buddha, all of the Shinto deities and the memory of hundreds of generations of your ancestors by stepping outside without your little washcloth?”  Or perhaps there was no sign because the Japanese are born holding these tiny cloths as they exit the birth canal?

Desperate to cover ourselves, Diane and I crisscrossed our arms over our bodies.  With our hands hovering ineffectively over our nether regions, we darted to the nearest hot spring for cover.  The dark gray, mineral-laden water conveniently covered our nudity, and thankfully, we were alone. 

But not for long.

Apparently, word of the two, too-naked, big-breasted American women, had spread like wildfire throughout the spa.  Suddenly, dozens of extraordinarily friendly men, also unclothed, but of course with the obligatory washcloths, joined us in our pool.  I did my best to fend off the many overtures from these interlopers who floated dangerously into my personal space, trying to chat us up.  The Japanese love nothing more than to practice English, but the last thing I wanted to do was encourage naked fraternizing. 

After a few minutes, I noticed that I had begun sweating profusely from the intense heat. After fifteen minutes, I felt nauseous.

I knew that I had to get out of this bubbling caldron, but escaping would have required climbing up a three-foot ladder to exit the pool, thereby providing a front-row view of that to which only gynecologists and lovers should be privy. My mind, which was now melting along with the rest of me, struggled to reason that I was thousands of miles from home, and the chance that I would ever see any of these men again was infinitesimally small.  But I couldn’t bear the thought of baring my undercarriage, free of charge, to this rapt group of strangers.  Diane agreed, so the two of us waited it out with a steely determination that would have impressed any prisoner of war.

One by one, our fan club left, and finally, we were alone, once again.  We quickly made our getaway. Like two boiled lobsters plucked from a pot, steam rose off our crimson bodies, as we climbed out and once again scurried for cover to the nearest pool.

And so it went.

We spent the rest of the afternoon sprinting from one hot spring to another until we came to the last one of the day.  Divided into three sections, each about the length and width of a bathtub, Diane and I chose adjacent pools.  As we stretched out, we discovered that the water was only a few inches deep, so our entire torsos were completely exposed to the air. 

We sat up and struggled to reposition ourselves to find some cover.  A moment later, a man in a deep pool next to ours who had witnessed our thrashing, floated over to us, stuck his foot out of the water and pointed at it.  It took only a moment to realize that Diane and I were lying in the footbaths—a fitting end, I suppose, to an altogether much too naked and humiliating day.

 Please visit my website www.joannhornak.com where you can sign up to win a free copy of my second novel, A Delicate Bond.