GeckoTV Episode Guide

September 28, 2009 | Location: Indonesia | 5 Comments 

GeckoTV is an exciting reality TV-less show on display at most homestays in Ubud, Bali, Indonesia. This season chronicles the tragic story of “Gecko Zero”, a gecko outcast trying to find meaning in a harsh world – but mostly looking for a bit of light in which to eat bugs. In the grand tradition of shows such as 24, all action happens in real time, to the beat of one episode per night.

Season 1, Episode 1: “Geckos in Position”
The episode introduces Gecko One, Gecko Two and Gecko Three, the three lizards on watch outside the Backpack Foodie’s homestay. Each is assigned one lamp, and spends evenings chasing bugs. The episode, albeit slow, introduces familiar concepts of future GeckoTV episodes: most importantly, the strategic importance of standing near lights is explained. The show’s catchphrase is established: “Gecko One in position! Gecko Two in position! Gecko Three in position!”

Season 1, Episode 2: “Enter Zero”
The drama ratchets up in episode 2, as Gecko Zero enters the scene. He has a crooked tail, and so although his history of territorial fighting is not explained, it is nonetheless obvious. Gecko Zero is immediately recognized as a sympathetic figure in the way he refuses to fight Gecko One despite being larger.

Season 1, Episode 3: “Exile in Light”
Episode 3 furthers the plight of Gecko Zero, as he continues to get chased by Gecko One out of the right corner of the patio roof. In a dramatic turn of events, Gecko Zero is chased all the way to the center, where he descends along the central chandelier. Things look up for Gecko Zero… Until he meets the mysterious Gecko Lamp, who previously appeared invisible in the flourish of the chandelier. Is there no place for Gecko Zero in this world?

Season 1, Episode 4: “Bug Wars”
Gecko Zero returns to the right side of the roof, yearning for peace with Gecko One. Things degenerate as Gecko One gets fed up with Gecko Zero snatching up bugs. The conflict is intense, and Gecko Zero’s tail is further twisted and maimed by One’s attacks. Will Gecko Zero find peace?

Season 1, Episode 5: “Gecko Infinity”
This episode is infamous for “jumping the shark”, as numerous new geckos are introduced, including Gecko One-Point-One, Gecko Two-Point-One, and Interior Gecko. Although many more conflicts are portrayed, they soon overwhelm the viewers, who prefered Gecko Zero’s simple plight.

What I learned by watching GeckoTV:

• Real life is a lot more interesting than TV.

• There isn’t much to do at night in Ubud, besides sitting on the porch drinking Bintang beer. Good thing there’s geckos!

Lost for Authenticity

September 19, 2009 | Location: Indonesia | 1 Comment 

I disliked Ubud the second I stepped out of the taxi into the pouring rain. But three nights, one cockroach, one earthquake and an unspecified number of roof rodents later, the Balinese resort town is starting to grow on me.

Today, I decided to give the place a second chance. I’m going native. I sit in local restaurants, drink as the locals do, and eat typical Ubud food.

Surrounded by Australians and Japanese in vaguely Southeast Asian clothes, I take another sip of my iced café latté, whose ice, the menu informs me, is made from “reverse osmosis H20″. I ponder the relative merits of yoga and Balinese massotherapy as relaxation methods.

Yep, I’m turning into an Ubud local already.

Denpasar to Ubud

Our stay in the region started well enough.

We arrived four hours late in the provincial capital of Denpasar: due to a power outage in the Manila air traffic control center, our Japan Airlines captain initially turned around for Tokyo, but decided to land in Okinawa instead before circling the Philippines airspace. Once we checked into our guesthouse, we passed out from exhaustion, and only hours of relentless jackhammers next door woke us up.

Helene and I found a lot to like in Denpasar, despite the unending thunder of construction and motorcycle engines. Sure, the sidewalks of Denpasar were shoddy at best, their tiles often broken or missing, revealing deep storm drains underneath. Yet as we walked the streets of the city, we were charmed by the smiles of children, the numerous offerings to Hindu gods, and the smell of flowers. In Bali, even the cigarettes smell nice: the men all seem to smoke a brand of clove you could mistake for incense.

Denpasar is not picturesque, but in retrospect it offers what I look for in my travels: a glimpse into normalcy, and the chance to interact with residents as equals, outside the trappings of tourism. The local expatriates we met all seemed mellowed by their time in Bali. On our last morning, grabbing a bowl of rice and vegetables from a hijab-clad lady running a street stall, we were greeted by a German man wearing Hindu religious attire. “I eat here every morning; it’s great,” he told us, before joking in Indonesian with the shop owner.

It seemed our stay in Indonesia could only get better. We commandeered a taxi and headed north to the mountains and to Ubud.

The Tourist Hordes

Touted as the cultural alternative to the party-soaked, overdevelopped beaches of Kuta, Ubud is used as an example of a local culture thriving under the influence of tourism. Away from the multinational resorts that blight many countries of the Majority World, Ubud encourages its visitors to embrace local culture and appreciate the numerous rituals of Balinese daily life.

Sadly, however, the Ubud residents embraced tourism not willingly, but as a survival mechanism.

Travelers have been lured to Ubud as early as the 1980s, and initially showed little respect for the daily lives of residents. Tourists would enter the homes of locals during religious ceremonies, thinking they were witnessing a staged attraction. They were ejected from temples as they disrupted important rituals, and “No Tourists Allowed” signs soon marred the intricate house facades and temples.

Showing remarkable lucidity, or perhaps fatalism, Ubud decided to embrace the inevitable: residents founded their own tourism office, with the intent of educating visitors about their way of life, and inspiring their respect. This survival technique proved admirable, and perhaps saved Ubud from being completely ravaged by the tourist hordes.

Today’s visitors to Ubud are drawn by the promise of spirituality and artistic inspiration. It’s easy to imagine author Elizabeth Gilbert, walking down Monkey Forest Road, politely turning down touts and shopkeepers, on her own road to spiritual enlightenment and recovery from divorce. Long before Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love became a bestseller, Ubud had already established itself as a prime New Age vacation resort.

Inspired by the Balinese displays of spirituality, people of all ages brought external concepts such as yoga and organic-certified farming to the town. Whatever the Balinese think of seeing these concepts blended with their own religious customs, they’re not saying.

The Curse of Authenticity

Sitting on the terrace of the fancy Kafe on Hanoman street, I have come to accept my status as one of the tourist swarm. I try to avoid eye contact with a newspaper vendor on the sidewalk, and ignore the taxi drivers vying for my custom on a slow Saturday afternoon. As a tourist walking down the streets, you face a barrage of “hellos”, as shopkeepers try to entice your patronage every ten meters. Gone are the shy smiles: here children ignore foreigners, jaded by their presence.

I may sound like I’m condemning the tourists who came here before me; but the truth is, I am as guilty as they are. As a world traveler, my drug is authenticity; yet every time I visit a place deemed ‘authentic’, I put demands on it. I will eat in a local restaurant but raise my nose at the KFC stand, even though students probably eat a lot more of the latter than the former. My choice is based on Western values, and on a mental construct of local life.

When we describe a culture as authentic, we are ensnaring it under a glass dome. We demand of other cultures that they present a quaintness unchanged by the passage of time and the lure of modernity. When we eat in a Japanese restaurant, we are worldly; when the Chinese eat Italian pasta, they are being ‘corrupted’ by Western influences.

And in the event that I find a secret jewel, untouched by my own culture, where the children gape at the color of my skin, and I feel transported back to the Middle Ages, what then? If I write about it, am I not acting as a scout for the tourist hordes, opening a trail that will soon turn into the highway for a tourist bus?

Am I doomed to corrupt that which I love the most?

From Authenticity to Truth

I was chased out of my room this morning by an earthquake originating off the coast of Bali. Helene and I took refuge on Kafe’s terrace, looking for a wifi connection that we might use to reassure family back home, as well as check on the news. In retrospect, the disquieting rumble of the earthquake shook a worry loose in my mind. I chuckle, thinking it might well be my most authentic Indonesian experience to date.

That Ubud managed to become a tourist resort without Marriotts and Hiltons locking up its vistas into compounds might very well be reason for hope. As for myself, I hope that my desire to treat as equals the people I meet in my travels will suffice to prevent me from enshrining them in the mothballs called authenticity and tradition.

Ubud is teaching me to seek truth above authenticity. Whatever Ubud used to be, it is what it is now, and it’s not my place to judge it, only to experience it in a spirit of mutual respect.

I chase away my worries; it’s time for an organic salad.

The Empire of Fish

September 12, 2009 | Location: Japan | 7 Comments 

The fishmonger exclaims as he splashes my shoes with brine. Mistaking it for an apology, I wave to let him know it’s alright. His face tells the real story: the splash is accidental, but it’s my fault for being here.

Helene and I don’t belong here. The hordes of motorized carts ferrying fish in styrofoam boxes tipped us off as soon as we dived away from one. We don’t see any tourists this far in; Helene speculates they lack the mental fortitude and the twitch reflexes needed to survive this traffic. But we survived three years of Shanghai streets; you could say we’re used to living on the edge.

Ahead of us, I spy the tuna auction block. We don’t belong here, yet here we are: at the heart of the empire of fish, the Tsukiji Fish Market.

From elven bread to fish

I dreamed of visiting Tokyo’s largest fish market for years. As a matter of fact, Japan’s relationship to fish is the source of my desire to travel.

I first read J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings as a kid, and immediately fell in love with Middle-Earth’s elves. I dreamed for years of visiting Rivendell, to learn their exotic culture and language. I lamented the fact that it would never be.

Years later, I happened upon a very different book, Junichi Saga’s Confessions of a Yakuza: A Life in Japan’s Underworld. I had picked it up from the library to read about tales of Japanese crime syndicates, but it was Saga’s candid description of daily life in pre-WWII Japan that struck a chord with me.

The Japanese fascination with fish, in particular, provoked my imagination. As a Canadian boy who only ate fish as deep-fried sticks, a nation of fish-eaters was stranger than anything Tolkien himself could possibly conjure.

I had found the elves I dreamed of here on Earth, and they ate seafood.

Among the Fishmongers

Twenty years later, and I know my way around fish. I haven’t eaten a fish stick in a decade.

Still, Tsukiji comes as a shock.

We’re still inside the Tsukijishijō subway station when our nose gives us all the directions we need. Japanese couples rush past us with portable coolers.

The Japanese, unsurprisingly, eat the most seafood of all the nations of the world. The Tsukiji Fish Market is where most of that seafood is sold wholesale: every day, an astonishing 700,000 metric tons of fish transit through the world’s largest fish market. Stand in the middle of the wholesale area, and look to your left and right: all you’ll see is fish, stretching as far as the eye can see.

As we dodge our way across tiny alleys, hundreds of species of fish start to make my head spin. Tsukiji handles more than four hundred types of seafood, most of which are alien to me. No fantasy novel ever prepared me for this.

Those I do recognize are no less impressive, all of them fresh and shiny as snow after spring rain. It’s 10 AM, so the fishmongers are busy preparing the fresh catch for wholesale customers. A man in a rubber apron prepares live eels in the Japanese manner, by driving a spike through their eye and filleting them in a blur of speed. As I admire his handiwork, I wonder if the eels understand what happened to them before, or after, they are turned into perfect fillets.

All the fish I have ever eaten parade in front of me, from red snapper to oysters, from blood-red shrimp to delicate salmon roe. I spy a man handling fugu, the poisonous pufferfish whose flesh is sought by thrillseekers across Japan.

And then there’s the tuna.

The Tigers of the Sea

Pacific bluefin tuna are the kings of seafood. These large predator fish – some have been known to reach 450 lb – are warm-blooded, feed on smaller fish such as squid, herring and mackerel, and migrate 11,000 miles across the Pacific and back. That tuna looks to us like any other seafood is highly misleading: given its place on the food chain, eating tuna is akin to dining on the flesh of a Bengal tiger.

Despite a dire need to regulate the fishing of bluefin tuna, the species is overfished to the brink of extinction. Still, bluefin tuna is brought in daily to Tsukiji, where it is inspected, evaluated, and auctioned off one by one. The spectacle of tuna auctions has drawn many tourists from around the world, to the point the Japanese government banned visitors from the auction block last Christmas.

Helene and I skipped the auction, but we are privy to the next step in the production chain. The giant fish, their flesh the stunning red of a Burgundy wine, are now cut up into massive chunks, before being sent off to restaurants around Tokyo.

The likeness of bluefin tuna to Bengal tigers comes back to me as I witness the cutting tools required to bring them down to size: the market workers wield knives over a meter long, their blade as sharp as swords. Some of them have been crafted by the very swordmakers who once armed the samurai. One would think even these historical warriors would be amazed at the sight of these blades.

Walking close to huge sections of bluefin is certainly impressive. They are known to command a fortune at the auction: in January of 2009, a single tuna caught off the coast of Japan fetched in excess of $100,000 USD. Knowing that our current fishing practices are pushing the bluefin tuna to extinction, it’s easy to feel both awestruck and alarmed by the display.

The Belly of the Beast

Dazzled by the empire of fish, Helene and I retreat from the wholesale market. Soon, the buzz of motorized cargo dies down.

Circling the wholesale market, the exterior market caters to retail customers looking for fish and other products. The exterior market by itself constitutes an amazing sight: stall after stall offer everything from dried fish to kitchen knives, and a host of restaurants bring the fish from the market to its conclusion on a diner’s plate.

Clothes damped from the wet air, shoes stinking of fish, Helene and I retreat inside one of the dozens of sushi restaurants peppered throughout the exterior market. Here, we indulge in a sinful act: we order o-toro, the fattest part of the bluefin tuna’s belly.

I’ve read too much about the fate of tuna and other sea predators to partake of this lunch without a large dose of ecological guilt. As I write this, I worry that I may be glamorizing the act of eating o-toro. I am ethically more comfortable with eating whale, as most Japanese whale is caught from sustainable stocks, than I am with savoring bluefin.

But how was the o-toro, you ask? Amazing. So fat it melts on your tongue.

To placate my conscience, I order one piece of uni, sea urchin roe. Sea urchin, sitting at the bottom of the food chain, is as removed from tuna as a carrot is from a wolf, and generally comes from sustainable stocks with minimal ecological impact.

It’s delicious, lower on mercury, and easier on the conscience. It’s a small but significant consolation in a world of disappearing seafood.

There and Back Again

We make our way back to the subway, bellies filled with sushi, eyes wide. I think back to the dog-eared copy of The Fellowship of the Ring that I read in the public library as a child.

The Tsukiji Fish Market is the reason I travel. My world might not have orcs or dragons in it, but it has fish of all colors and shapes, from the innocuous sea urchin to the migthy tuna – at least for now.

The fishmongers are wrong: this world is where I belong. And I want no other.

Where to Go

Tsukiji Fish Market, or Tsukiji shijō (築地市場) is located in central Tokyo. The nearest subway station is Tsukijishijō, on the Toei Ōedo Line. From the station, follow the signs… or your nose! If you want to catch the tuna auctions in the morning, you’ll have to arrive at 5 AM sharp, which will most likely involve a taxi ride to get there. If you do catch the tuna auctions, keep to the designated tourist areas.

Keep in mind that the wholesale market is a place of business, not a tourist area. Be respectful of workers, and do your best to stay out of their way.

If you absolutely must try o-toro, keep in mind how much of a precious resource you’re partaking in. Then try uni and see if that does it for you.

Further Reading

	Taras Grescoe’s Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Disappearing Seafood is an important book that discusses the imminent extinction of bluefin tuna, and countless other species, through overfishing and human folly. It is required reading if you are at least a bit concerned with the social, ethical and environmental consequences of the food you eat.
	The book that began my obsession with Japan, Confessions of a Yakuza: A Life in the Japanese Underworld paints a fascinating portrait of pre-WWII life in Japan, whether you’re interested in the crime aspect of it or not.

Postcard from the Edge

September 8, 2009 | Location: The World | 1 Comment 

I make sense of it through the imagery of dreams.

I’m sitting at the edge, my legs dangling from the cliff, my heels drumming the rock, echoes spiralling down. The wind whispers through my hair.

I plant my hands behind me, and push myself. Friction grabs me back, but I persist. I drop. The wind now howls its way into my head. My legs dangle, free of gravity’s grasp.

I’m off the edge.

As I write these words, the little plane icon on my seat’s monitor is inching its way towards the International Date Line in the Sea of Bering. Twelve hours earlier, Helene and I boarded a plane from Montreal to Chicago, then from there to Tokyo, Japan. I busy myself with the minutiae of international flight – customs, timetables, body stretches – to distract my mind from the immensity of what is happening to us.

On this day, September 7th 2009, Helene and I have completed the last push that took us off the edge of our previous life. Today, we have become world nomads, on the first step of a one-year journey. This is the result of ten months made in equal parts daydreams and plans, of fears and hopes. We deconstructed our daily routine until we left ourselves out of a home and out of jobs. The total sum of our worldly possessions amounts to thirty cardboard boxes in a storage locker, and two backpacks small enough to make it as carry-on.

In more ways than one, it feels as if we have jumped off a safe, comfortable mountaintop, and the air is now rushing around us.

But I have dreamed enough of this to know better than fear.

For if you dream of flight enough, one day you wake up with wings.