I took a walk today on the beach, hoping for a quick dip in the ocean here in Sri Lanka before I went back to work on my laptop. It was my first day in Hikkaduwa, and I found out quickly that the rough seas were far better for surfing that swimming, and the beach, washed away in the horrific tsunami of 2004 that killed at least 40,000 people here, is only partially rejuvenated, with rows of touristy beach bars, guest houses, and t-shirt shops instead of tombstones. No worries, I thought, I only have two days here before heading north to Kandy, the cultural center of the country.

I walked for about half an hour and then stopped at a rock outcropping that cut off my progress in high tide, and headed back. On my way back, I noticed a nice spot under a few palm trees that wasn’t littered with tourists or the remnants of their vice. I sat down on the sand.

These days, I mostly go on intuition. I follow the vibe, and if I feel I should stop then I stop. When I feel I should go, I go, and it’s usually as simple as that, and always serves me well.

After a few minutes I noticed my only company on that part of the beach, three local guys who were sitting on a bench. They smiled and said hello and we got to talking. They called me over to sit with them and offered me a joint they just finished rolling I declined (not really smoking or drinking these days – on a natural high!) but offered them some of my water in return. They were locals to Hikkaduwa and made money as jack-of-all-trades to the tourists, getting commissions placing them in hotels or bars, teaching surf lessons, and probably selling marijuana.

They told me how not enough tourists were friendly and it was nice I smiled and came over. Too many tourists only hang out with their own, looking down at the locals like they’re invisible. Especially the Russians, they said, who never smile or are friendly. They asked me about where I was from (everyone here loves U.S.A and is interested because there aren’t many tourists from there) and my plans in Sri Lanka. As they smoked, we chatted about their village. I told them I was planning on just walking around.

The youngest of the guys, wearing knockoff designer sunglasses and red highlights in his hair, offered to take me on a real walk if I wanted. He’d show me the interior village in the jungle, heading inland from the beach where tourists never bothered to trek. I took him up on his offer and stopped by my hotel and grabbed my camera and we set out.

In flip-flops and a swimsuit with a backpack, I followed my new guide as we crossed the train tracks into the interior. He wasn’t much of a talker (which was fine with me) and to be honest I never even caught his name when he told me, but he would narrate the various flora and fauna as we passed. His grandfather was a natural healer for the village in a much simpler time, when everyone ate and lived off the land and the sea. 

“It’s his birthday today, you know?” he said.

“Who?”

“Bob Marley. The natural mystic.” I told him I hadn’t known that but I loved his music.

We walked on a one-lane paved road, tiny lanes through surprisingly beautiful colonial summer homes for rich Sri Lankans that looked like something out of the Swiss Alps, dirt paths that led to more humble one-room shacks with laundry hanging on the fence in front, and then traversed through the jungle thickets, my new friend holding back vines and bushes so they wouldn’t snap back on me. Soon, there were no roads, and we followed footpaths or then trails into the growth that were indecipherable to me. 

“Now we are on the jungle road,” he said. “This is a good road, no?” 

He pointed out jack fruit that could feed a whole family, hibiscus you make a tea from the flowers, clover-like low ground cover that is healing for bare feet in the early morning, young pineapples growing, the rice paddies that were abandoned and overgrown after the tsunami, and a root that looks and smells like ginger but is poisonous. He showed me a tiny fern that folded up as a natural defense whenever you touched it. He explained that that fern was ground up and used as a natural version of Viagra, but I assured him that I didn't need it because the bamboo was still strong.

“See that little black and yellow bird over there in the tree? That’ good luck.”

With his encyclopedic knowledge of the natural world around us, he broke off leaves and rubbed them together and held them out for me to smell: cinnamon, curry trees, spicy red peppers, lavender. 

Many a yard dog barked when we passed, and even more came up to us, flea bitten and happy, wanting to play by biting at our flip-flops or just holding out their heads to be petted. I smiled and waved at the people we passed, sweeping out the threshold to their bungalows or collecting firewood, their naked babies running in the yard. Children played tag in little smiling gangs out front of the markets, which were really just booths in the front room of houses, selling Cokes, phone cars, local bread, and lottery tickets.

He knew them all, and acknowledged them with a silent nod. “In this village, everyone knows everyone,” he said. “That is good. But sometimes bad,” he laughed.

He told me how when he was younger, no one wanted to be out after 6pm. There were no streetlights or electric lights in the homes then, and some of the sidewalk-like roads we were using didn’t even exist. “And ghosts. Every child was scared of spirits after dark back then.” 

Now, he worked at the beach bars most nights and did this same walk in the pitch black at midnight or later. “Sometimes when I have too many drinks and come home late,” he said, “these stray dogs from the beach follow me home the whole way, and then turn around and go back once they see I am safe.”

It wasn’t hot but the air almost dripping with tropical humidity, so he stopped at a well and dropped a bucket into it and drew cold, clear water for us to drink and splash on our faces. We took a shortcut on the “jungle road” that led us up a steep hill, past a school where children studied math outdoors covered only by a pavilion roof, to the crest where a Buddhist temple sat. 

“Take off your sunglasses,” he advised me as is the custom, and we removed our shoes, too and entered. He showed me the 27 statues of Buddha, each one in a different pose with a different meaning. No one else was there in the whole monk’s compound but the incense was still burning and offerings out from that morning. We stopped there in silence and felt the breeze.

From the vantage of the hill he pointed out a faraway lake. “That is where we’re going,” he said, and I did not argue. We walked down the backside of the hill, where there were scattered empty liquor bottles, so small they were almost guilty, and a few discarded forks and plastic cups. There were rubber trees on the way down the hill, where the monks stripped sections of bark and tapped in and got a flow of perfect molten rubber.

We got down to the lake and we wound through mud flats and ferns taller than two of us. Something moved in the bushes and he held out his hand to stop me. An iguana scampered past, about three feet from head to tail. “That’s a young one,” he said, “But they are dangerous when they are older.”

“Do they bite?” I asked.

“No, they whip with their tail, which is like a razor. There is poison in the tail that no medicine or even hospital can save.”

We made a wide berth around the iguana and came to a series of streams that paralleled the lake. We walked into a clearing where an old man was sawing a felled palm trunk. The old man smiled and called us over. It was his land and the only way to pass, and he invited us to do so and also invited us to sit by his clapboard shack to talk. His young wife was there, barefoot in a purple dress, and his two young boys fetched water and held the end of the palm trunk as he sawed. The old man loved it when he found out I was American, and told me he was a carpenter, making tables and chairs so his wife could open a little restaurant right there at the edge of the lake.

We bid him a good day and walked on his property through swamp flats toward a good swimming hole. An old lady carrying water buckets passed us, her face set in a permanent squint from decades of staring into the sun reflecting off the water. She was the wife of a fisherman and my friend showed me where they had prawn nets set up in the water to grow their catch. 

About 100 meters out in the lake waters, past where you could see black stones under the water to where it was deeper, there was a stilted bamboo structure poking out of the surface, about as big as a closet. 

“Someone sleeps in there to guard the shrimp from thieves,” he said. “Every night.”

We had to jump over a few streams and take off our flip flops and wade across a creek but we got to the swimming hole on the lake, and went in and splashed around, enjoying the cool relief. He pointed to an island far out in the lake. 

"That island is where they send bad youth who get in trouble or get arrested," he said. "The island is like a prison for the boys and girls, but sometimes they escape. They leave at night and swim all the way across the lake in the dark. When they reach the village here and the fishermen find them..."

I waited for something gruesome to come from his mouth.

"The villagers give them a blanket and food and water and let them sleep in their hut. In the morning, they give them some money and point them to the bus and tell them to go back home and don't come back," he went on. "Some of the kids just stole because they were hungry or from bad places with no parents."

“You call it 'Hitler', right?” he said as he pointed to a swastika painted over a door, the ancient Hindu symbol for luck and good fortune that was bastardized and used as the Nazi crest. Next door was a little house with its windows open that served as the village music school, curtains blowing like music notes.

He led me cautiously around huge black scorpions in the street, which he explained had ventured out from the jungle only because it rained the night before. We were both hot and tired and thirsty. “You want coconut water?” he asked, and led me to a gardened yard by a simple cement house. No one was there but he felt over the door and found the key and let himself in. He came out with a machete and suddenly I realized how far out in the middle of nowhere I was, with no ID on me, no phone, and no one that even remotely knew where I was or who I was with.

“It’s my brother’s house,” he said. He picked up a strand of course rope off the ground and looped it around his feet and started climbing a coconut palm tree, securing his feet around the tree first then pushing off to inch up. He was to the top – 50 feet up – in less than a minute and twisted coconuts off the branches until they fell to the ground. He scurried down and cut open the coconuts and we drank the cool water and ate the white meat.

On the way home he walked fast, to chase the sunlight, winding between so many jungle paths and main roads and village cobble stoned lanes that I would have been hopelessly lost without him. In the middle of the jungle we came upon two young men dressed in business attire, complete with black shiny shoes and shirt with ties. They were selling insurance door to door, he said, which is a job for the young because they have to walk all day in the jungle and sometimes the dogs come after them.

We heard scampering in the tree tops as we walked and my friend pointed out monkeys. There were everywhere, but quickly climbed out of site when we approached.

“They are scared of you,” he said.

“Why are they scared of us?”

“No – you,” he said. “They see your white skin. The British used to shoot them, so now they remember even generations later and run when they see a white man.”

An old man was trying to loosen a bunch of bananas from a tree with a long pole while his family looked on. “We have 16 types of bananas,” my guide told me. He led me out back of their house without even asking their permission and started pointing to the ominous trees thick on the sunset horizon.

“What am I looking at?” I asked.

“Watch,” and he clapped his hands and immediately scores of huge birds hanging upside down from the branches, as big as falcons, started whirling their wings and flew about.

“They are dog bats, because their face looks like a dog,” he said. “Good eating too. My uncle shot one once and we ate it and it was the best meat I've ever had. They're so tasty because they only eat fruit.” 

We must have been walking for 4 hours and everything hurt, but I wasn’t about to complain, and I don’t think he would have listened. But suddenly I could hear the faint promise of the ocean, and we came across the train tracks, deserted of man or machine. 

“I take a photo of you,” he offered, so I sat on the tracks in my best lotus pose.

When we got back to the main beach road it was as if civilization and the modern world roared back into our senses – tourists laughing too loud on their way to the bar, a chicken bus roaring by, tuk tuk drivers offering rides.  

There was no grand goodbye or false sentimentality between us. I thanked him and patted him on the back, then handed him 2,000 Rupees – about $18 – for his trouble, even though he hadn’t asked.

“Come find me tomorrow,” he said.

“Cool. Where and what time are you thinking? Or do you have an email? I have a local cell phone, too.”

“Just find me on the beach,” he said. “I’ll be around.”

There are many great architectural marvels in this world: the Sistine Chapel, the Burj Dubai, the Pyramids of Egypt, and the Great Wall of China, but none that stand as a living monument to two peoples’ love more than the Taj Mahal. The iconic marble temple complex in Agra, India doesn’t just have a love story intertwined in its creation myth, the Taj Mahal is a love story.

 The story starts in the year 1592 with the birth of Prince Khurram, the son of Jehangir, the fourth Mughal emperor of India and the grandson of Akbar the Great. Price Khurram was born to a life of royalty and unsurpassed privlidege, his name changed to Shah Jahan in accordance to custom because he was the rightful heir to the throne after his father. 

When he was 14 years old, Shah Jahan was walking with his entourage in the Meena Bizarre and witnessed a girl selling silk and glass beads. She was the most beautiful thing his eyes had ever seen and it was love at first sight. The girl was named Arjumand Banu, a Muslim Persian princess that was a year older than him. Upon meeting her, Shah Jahan immediately ran back to his father, the emperor, and declared his undying love and that he wanted to marry her. The love was mutual and the wedding was set and the young couple wed in 1612. 

After her death, Shah Jahan was so heartbroken that he ordered the whole Emperor’s court to mourn with him for two full years. He honored his pledge to her never to marry again (a big deal for an emperor at that time!) and then set out to plan and build the greatest testament to love the world has ever seen, a mausoleum over her grave so shining and ornate and grand that the world would remember her beauty, forever.

It took 22,000 workers and artisans 22 years to build the Taj Mahal, which means “Crown Palace”. (There are claims that after completion, Shah Jahan had the hands cut off of all his craftsmen so they could never build something that beautiful again, though these claims aren’t proven.) The head architect Shah Jahan chose for the job, Ustad Ahmad Lahauri, was not actually from India, but a Persian from Iran, so the late queen’s origins would be honored. They used 1,000 elephants to transport the heavy building materials like slabs of marble and stone. When it was done, the total price tag was 32 million Indian rupees, or the equivalent of $1 billion at the time, which would be much more in today’s dollars. 

They used the finest white marble brought all the way in from the bordering country of Rajasthan. Depending on the time of day and how the sunlight kissed it, the marble of the Taj Mahal changes colors; sometimes rosy pink, milk white, or golden yellow, all representing the many feelings he had for his wife. 28 kinds of the most dazzling precious and semiprecious jewels were used, tens of thousands of stones in all. The brought in turquoise from Tibet, jade from China, crystal, lapis lazuli, amethyst and turquoise from all over the world. These jewels were crafted together into the most intricate flowers and then replicated thousands of times in patterns all over the walls and ceiling of the Taj Mahal. Writings from the Quran were inscribed in golden calligraphy on the arched entrances and walls.

Built on the southern bank of the Yamuna River in Agra, the Taj Mahal consisted of a spiraling domed mausoleum. Centered inside was an octagonal marble and jewel-encrusted chamber, which was supposed to be the resting place of Mumtaz Mahal. But her body was actually housed in a sarcophagus far below that very spot, in accordance with Muslim doctrines.

In total, the Taj Mahal is 240 feet high and surrounded by four smaller domes and four minarets, or Islamic prayer towers. In front, there is a long series of gardens and crystal clear rectangular pools. The entire Taj Mahal complex is guarded by a red sandstone gateway entrance building and a red sandstone mosque, and jawab (“mirror”) or replica building directly across from the mosque.

Once completed, the Taj Mahal was just the first part of Shah Jahan’s tribute to the inextinguishable love for his bride. He planned to build a second grand mausoleum – this one in all black – directly across the river from the Taj Mahal, joined with a connecting bridge like two lovers holding hands, and there he would be buried when he died. 

But Shah Jahan’s son, Aurangzeb, seeing the opportunity to dispose his ailing and heart-stricken father (and perhaps worried that he might spend the whole family fortune on more construction) usurped his father, the Emperor, and took power in 1658. He placed Shah Jahan under house arrest in a tower of the nearby Red Fort of the rest of his days, his only solace that he could see the Taj Mahal out of his one little window. Shah Jahan sat in prison for 8 years until he died in 1666, still in love with the princess he came across in the market so many decades before. His body was placed in a tomb right next to hers in the center of the Taj Mahal, the only thing that is a-symmetrical in the whole structure.

Over the centuries, the Taj Mahal changed hands with each new Emperor, ruler and invader. The British changed the gardens from the roses and daffodils that were originally planted to the Wimbledon-like cool green lawns you see today. During World War II and later during conflicts with the new nation at war, Pakistan, false scaffolding and structures were built around the Taj Mahal to confuse and deter enemy bomber pilots. 

These days, the Taj Mahal has been named one of the original Seven Wonders of the World.  Each year, ore than 3 million tourists from all around the world come to the Taj Mahal to witness its grandeur and learn about the Emperor who constructed it as a tribute to his one true love. Even 400 years later, it is the greatest love story ever built.

"Not a piece of architecture, as other buildings are, but the proud passion of an emperor's love wrought in living stones."
-English poet, Sir Edwin Arnold

-Norm  :-)


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I recently tried out a strict vegetarian diet for a month as I was traveling through India, the country with the highest rate of non-meat diets in the world. Here are some personal observations, not facts, and I welcome all feedback and comments that will help educate me further on the subject. (I have no doubt I'll be humbled many times over by what I don't know.) So here are 15 things I learned during my month with a vegetarian diet:

1. Your body releases strange and horrible things as you detox from decades of eating meat and purge with only fruits, vegetables, nuts, dairy, and grains.

2. While it may seem like a gastronomical torture to avoid meat (it did for me in the past) gaining success as a vegetarian is all about surrounding yourself with good food choices so you don’t even feel you’re missing out. I cheated by going “veggie” while in India for a month, where they have so many curries, stews, and vegetarian rice dishes that I wouldn’t have even noticed meat in there. (And cows are sacred and not eaten.)

3. Substitute the words “animal flesh” for “meat” every time you think about dinner and you’ll see it differently.

4. While it’s undeniable that there are huge benefits to eating vegetarian, that diet doesn’t necessarily equal healthy. For instance, breads, pizza, ice cream, junk food, and soda are all technically vegetarian. So I think you should clarify if you just want to eat healthier or actually be vegetarian for another reason.

5. One of the knocks against a vegetarian diet is that it doesn’t provide enough protein, which animal meat has in abundance. I’m a 210-lbs. (at the time) athletic carnivore, and believe me, that’s not a problem at all. Nuts, avocados, yogurt, eggs, peanut butter, and many other natural foods offer more than enough protein.

The other good news is that these days, there are plenty of healthy and natural vegan protein supplements or powders, like these here.

6. The biggest difference I felt was my energy level. It was more consistent and I didn’t have wide swings of feeling drained and tired and then bursts of energy. I felt consistently alert and active and more calm and relaxed when I was fatigued, not just tired or sleepy. It was like I didn’t burn out and had plenty of energy in reserve always.

7. My skin was clear, my eyes whiter, a nagging toothache from an old tooth filling went away, My anxiety was down, my moods better, I slept better, and I felt lighter, not just in weight but in spirit. However, I don’t know what part of this was because I was near the beach and swimming in the ocean part of the time (but only about a third of my time in India) and what was due to my new diet.

8. Since food was so good and so cheap in India, I ate at least three huge meals every day, with plenty of fruit shakes and iced coffees and snacks in between, and still lost a lot of weight. While I’ve lost weight before as I travel, I did notice it was different this time because it felt more like bod fat I was losing.

9. I didn’t have any cravings to eat meat, but if I did they were mental – not physical. I’d walk by a restaurant that was offering hamburgers or see an ad for fried chicken and think, “I should want that.” But in reality, I just wanted to taste and eat good food – not necessarily that.

10. The first couple days you may feel a little hungry, but after that you feel way more full with less as your stomach and digestive system heals and becomes more efficient. Missing a meal because of travel or whatever wasn’t a big deal at all, where I would have had the shakes and felt panicked before when I ate so much meat.

11. Thank God for eggs.

12. After only a few days, my taste buds changed and I was more in tune with subtle flavors, textures, and tastes. While a veggie sandwich or a dish of veggies over rice would seem extremely bland to me before, I now really enjoyed and appreciated it.

13. I haven’t done much research on the subject, but it’s apparent there are two reasons for going vegetarian: health, and/or cruelty to animals because they are living beings.

I have a good new Australian friend (hi Rana!) who passionately advocates for vegetarianism because it’s cruel for us to kill and eat animals (among other reasons). I respect and appreciate her stance, and that the unspeakable conditions and treatment of animals in slaughterhouses, poultry farms, and generally feeding the modern machine of Western meat consumption are so cruel it’s disgusting.

However, I don’t necessarily believe that means we shouldn’t eat meat. I just think we should try to change conditions so animals are raised, treated, and slaughtered in a more humane and natural way. How can killing something not be cruel?

I realized that if I was placed in the wild with no defenses, I would become some other animal’s food, probably a bear or a mountain line. Or a shark in the ocean. Is that cruel? I don’t see it as so. I look to the Native Americans and their practices of revering and honoring what animals they killed, and made it a point to not waste anything from the kill. When it comes to being in tune with the cycles and circles of nature, I’ll trust the Native Americans.

And purely to play the devil’s advocate, if someone is at a pro-vegetarian protest and a mosquito lands on his or her arm and they swat it, is that cruelty? Do we know definitively that trees and plants and all organisms don’t feel something? If they were out in the wild and it was the option of starve or kill and eat animal flesh, what would they do? Again – I understand and agree with the argument, but I don’t think it’s a completely shut door.

In my newly evolved opinion, becoming a proponent of vegetarianism only because you think killing other animals for food is cruel is slightly misguided. I think everyone should rally for better, more humane conditions and treatment of animals and less waste, but they are not 100% mutually exclusive.

14. Meat looks barbaric and dirty and just gross if you haven’t eaten it in a while. It’s as much portion and digestion as anything. I look at a 6 or 8 oz. piece of steak now and can’t believe that looked tiny to me in the past. That solid piece of flesh has to sit in my stomach until it’s broken down and digested naturally. So when I gorged myself on a 20 oz. steak or a huge cheeseburger or whatever, I realize how long that food was just stuck in my gut, half digested.

15. My month of being a vegetarian is up and I’ve moved on from India to beautiful, wild Sri Lanka. I wanted to try transition easily back to trying a little bit of meat, so I ordered rice, salad, and barbecue chicken last night. The chicken seemed sort of…odd to me. There was so little meat and so much bones, carcass, and membrane to pick around. I did eat a few pieces and it didn’t taste too bad, just like the sauce and the rice that was with it. I fed the rest to the dog who was begging by putting his head on my leg.

Going forward, will I be a devout vegetarian? No, I doubt it. (And I don’t think I’d ever give up some fish or seafood!) But I certainly do think this month of eating only plants has given me a new appreciation and even consciousness of what’s on my plate. I definitely have enjoyed the health benefits, and will adapt my new diet so that I maximize those, while sill enjoying a good quality cut of meat every once and a while.

When I do decide to eat higher on the food chain, it will be a choice – not a default – and will come with the reverence that I am accountable for extinguishing some living thing’s spirit because of what I’ consuming. I will endeavor to stop indulging, wasting, and eating mindlessly. My feet will tread lighter and my grasp on all living things will be a little more gentle. I’ll try to educate myself about how to eat healthier and more humanely, reducing my negative impact on this earth and honoring what I use.

-Norm   :-)