I bring you news, now, of the holiday season – Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years – of vacations and revels, mostly.  I do live in Pakistan, so you, dear reader, must know by now you can’t escape a sordid tale of violence somewhere to follow.

Thanksgiving season was kind to Jules and I in Quetta, with pumpkins, sweet potatoes, and even a turkey available for our celebration.  Jules made some kickin’ stuffing for our Thanksday meal of traditional sides, and we (well, I, since Jules is vegetarian) enjoyed the turkey in a second celebration at a gathering of expats that weekend. 

(pic left: the busy intersection of Almo Chowk not far from the house)

We did, sitting at our Thanksgiving evening table, hear our first Quetta blast – a hand grenade attack not two kilometers from our house.  A reminder that all is not well in this troubled country.

Early December brought the hope of the Messiah even to Quetta, as we enjoyed a Christmas pageant put on by our friends who work with male nursing students at the Christian hospital.  It was a novelty in this Muslim country and ushered in much Christmas cheer.

Mid December brought hope for Pakistan, too, as Musharraf ended emergency rule and the political situation seemed to smooth out, with elections set for early January.

While Jules stayed busy at the office I stayed busy decorating our cavernous house with a touch of the Christmas spirit.  While crèches are impossible to find in Quetta, I did have success on my quest to find holiday illumination.  At an electrical store, I said something vague about a string of lights.  I was preparing to draw my desired item on paper, a usual tactic when the item is obscure and the language barrier high, when someone said, “Oh, you mean Christmas lights,” and that was that.

The lights went up along our open-staircase banisters and on the “Christmas tree,” a potted juniper that our guard, Juma, dragged inside to escape the cold.  The tree supported paper snowflakes and a paper angel as well.  I believe this was my first ever Christmas tree.

In the bazaar, in addition to the lights, I found a wind-up Santa who beats his plastic arms against a plastic drum and bobs from side to side when you turn the key.  We call him “Uzbek Santa” (pic right), his features making him look for all the world like he comes from our Central Asian neighbor.  Juma also found me some pine cones which, soaked and dried to be rid of critters, found their way into bowls and encircled candles around the house.

We even threw a Christmas party, quite a success, with one garnished and candle-lit buffet, two Dr. Seuss movies for the kids, three trays of Christmas cookies, more than twelve foreigners in attendance, and plenty of cheer to go around.

For the Christmas and New Years holidays Jules and I traveled to Laos, land of elephants, rivers, bamboo and banana-forested hills, and the finest French restaurants in Asia.  Combined with company-paid R&R (rest and relaxation) and office holidays (the Muslim holiday of Eid-ul-Adha combines nicely with Christmas), we had about 2 weeks to seriously decompress from Pakistan.

It is always a relief to board the Thai Airways flight in Islamabad and leave the constrictions of Pakistan for the freedom of Bangkok.  We stayed two nights in that hedonistic city, most of the time over-stimulated, sampling its high, low, and pop culture offerings.  We ate fancy fare in avant-garde vegetarian restaurants (though an election-time alcohol ban kept us from drinking vino rojo with our Italian dinner), sipped flavorful coconut soup from alleyway vendors (a roach fell on Jules while we ate), and window shopped and movie-watched (“I am Legend” and “The Golden Compass”) in glitzy and ultra-modern malls that outclass anything I’ve seen in the US.

There was even a department store that, reminiscent of Macy’s in New York, featured stylish holiday-time displays in its windows and gigantic Christmas-star lights  on its façade.  The stars reached so far toward the heavens you had to be on the elevated Skytrain to appreciate them.

We entered Laos by air from Bangkok then settled into a riverfront hotel.  Luang Prabang, in the north of the country, is an easy-going, scenic city with striking Buddhist temples, stellar French restaurants (Laos was colonized by les Francais), and the mighty Mekong River (pic left) whispering seductively along its edge.

We relaxed in its relative opulence most of our days in Laos, whiling away afternoons in coffee shops that could have been lifted from the streets of San Francisco, kayaking the quiet rapids on the Mekong’s sister Nam Ou river, drinking BeerLao in riverside cafes, window shopping for jewelry and handicrafts along the tourist drag, and admiring the charmingly faded colonial French villas mixed with steep-roofed Buddhist temples (pic below), dragon-snake heads silhouetted along their eaves.

Luang Prabang, like Bangkok, was all decked out for Christmas, these Buddhist countries welcoming the foreign tourists (and their dollars) aching for the sight of colored lights and Santa decorations, the scent of gingerbread, and the taste of a holiday turkey.  We lounged most of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, sipping wine late into the night on our riverside balcony.

My clearest memory of Christmas celebrants is the sight of, on our hotel-bound walk after Christmas dinner, an extended Lao family carousing into the night.  They circled at street-edge around a homemade barbecue pit, roasting kebabs and sipping Lao-Lao (a potent rice liquor, usually fifty percent alcohol), a raucous party on otherwise deserted streets.  Even most of the falang (foreigners) had gone to bed.

After Christmas we took a break from the opulence of Luang Prabang for a bit of roughing it in the hills around the town of Luang Nam Tha.  A worn public bus took us even further north, an all-day ride through mountainous terrain.  We bonded with the other foreigners on the bus when it dropped us at the end of the line in a terminal we thought, according to our travel guides, was just on the edge of town.  Finding the locals unusually unhelpful, we all set off together, slowly to realize that town was ten kilometers away.  With darkness falling, we all piled into a pickup tuk-tuk and rode into town.

Luang Nam Tha, for tourists, is a main-street strip of restaurants and guest houses where wrinkled hill women in traditional dress constantly badger you to buy handicrafts and where you can buy a pineapple shake or two chocolate “pancakes” (crepes) for eight thousand Lao kip, a sum that sounds like a fortune until you realize it is a bit less than one US dollar.

Most foreign visitors use Luang Nam Tha as a base for exploring towns further afield or for hiking in the forest.  We signed up for a two day guided trek in the Nam Ha preserve, a protected area just outside town. (pic left: the village we stayed in on our trek)

The night before our trek just happened to be one of the rare nights on our vacation when we had a TV in our hotel room.  We were horrified when we turned it on and saw that, back in Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto had been assassinated in a suicide bombing only hours earlier at a rally just outside Islamabad.  It was such a shock to know her charismatic voice and presence silenced by this most brutal of methods practiced by brutal men, a method of retribution that alternately feels run-of-the-mill and indescribably gruesome.

Benazir Bhutto, twice prime minister of Pakistan in gentler years, had returned to her country in October.  A deal with the government freed her from pending corruption charges and ended years of self-exile in London and Dubai.  Despite an attempt on her life the day she returned, she campaigned hard for her party and spoke out against the emergency rule imposed by Musharraf during November and December.

She was no ideal prime minister when in power, her previous two terms finding early ends.  Nor was she, as I see it, as worthy of our adulation as her Western-media-darling status would make it seem.  Yes, she spoke for democracy, but from a platform made possible by her family’s landed, almost feudal, power.  Corruption charges plagued her and her husband, known as “Mr. Ten Percent.”  There is no doubt, however, that her death is a huge loss for Pakistan as well as a horrific personal tragedy.

(pic above: Pakistan could use some of the valued Buddhist tranquility.) 

We watched CNN’s coverage of the assassination till well past our bed time, then promptly left town the next morning for our two day trek into isolated forest.  Sufficiently cut off from news (one of the luxuries of vacations), we worried nonetheless about what was happening back “home.”  And what was happening back in Pakistan was riots in the streets that led to a three-day, country-wide shutdown, a period of mourning for Pakistan’s most charismatic politician.  It was a good time to be out of the country.

Our group trek in the Nam Ha forest, while pricey, turned out nicely.  The guides were good and our fellow trekkers  more interesting and less annoying than we feared, as we hiked through some excellent teak, bamboo and banana-tree forest.  (pic right: crossing a river on a bamboo raft)

The downside was, in the community where we stayed the night, a bit too much of the "come have an authentic (not!) village experience" that makes Jules’ skin bristle.  She, after all, visits remote villages for a living and doesn’t need to be part of any “primitive peoples show” put on for the tourists.

We did have some excellent and very authentic Lao food, including a lunch of roasted duck (killed the night before) and bamboo/banana plant stew cooked over a fire and served on all natural settings - a banana leaf 'table' laid on the ground and some bamboo dishes and chopsticks that were made before our eyes. (pic below)

Jules and I talked a lot on this trip about how we travel very differently than we would if we were tourist-ing from the US.  Now, when we leave Pakistan, it is all about finding places with some Western amenities where we can relax and feel “normal.”  Usually, we would kick ourselves for being in some exotic place like Laos and visiting the most Western coffee shop in the country every day (at least when we were in Luang Prabang).

But, when you make your home in Pakistan you experience the “exotic” every day, so when we travel we do so to escape difference, not seek it out.  We feel much less need for the sort of “cultural tourism” our forest trek offered since we live in a place where we are immersed in another culture.

After the trek we returned to Luang Prabang on December 30, another all-day ride on a public bus, with visions of a relaxing New Years time dancing in our heads.  Much to our self-annoyance (for not planning ahead), we found the town chock full of Thai and Chinese tour groups, with all of the hotels and guesthouses fully booked.  Feeling rather like the biblical Joseph, I heard many "no room in the inn's" while I pounded the pavement searching for a bed, with Jules guarding our bags in the nice coffee shop.

Growing rather desperate as nine p.m. approached and the coffee shop holding Jules and our bags closed, we set out together to try to find ANYWHERE.  After another hour of inn-keepers laughing at us when we asked if they had a room, we finally found a guest house owner who, sympathetic to our plight, offered to put us up in her father's house, sleeping on a mat on the floor.  Two other backpackers, apparently, were already staying in the house’s guest room.  So we sat at her riverside restaurant, scarfed some food (hadn't eaten all day), and then hopped on the back of her motorbike for the ride to her parents’ house. (pic right)

It was quite the adventure, with a fifth desperate traveler joining us on the floor before the night was old.  We woke up next morning to the father’s pig-butchering business in full swing in a small, greasy room we had to walk through to get into the bathroom.  Luckily, the next day the daughter had a room for us at her guest house, so we gave her our business for the remainder of our stay.

The next night we celebrated New Year's Eve in style with a set menu dinner at the fancy L’Elephant restaurant.  From sleeping next to the pigs to five course, gourmet French meals impeccably served, nothing like the extremes of traveling!

The year 2008 began officially for us, then, at a garden-style bar packed with foreigners.  There, we had the privilege of watching one group, drunk on BeerLao, sing Auld Lang Syne at least five times at midnight (followed by a ragged version of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”).  Through the trees we could see paper lanterns lift into the sky.  It is difficult for me, usually, to find a satisfying way to celebrate New Year's Eve; this year we got it right.  (pic left: New Years stars outside a monastery)

Of course, it was hard to be anything but grateful as we remembered last year’s celebration, with Jules laid up in hospital and even my attempt to get us to the roof for some fireworks-watching spoiled by the nurses.

After a fun but tiring four hours of kayaking on the Nam Ou river New Years Day, Luang Prabang had one more blessing for us before we left.  When I told the manager of our favorite coffee shop that we lived in Pakistan, she, to Jules’ everlasting delight, gave us our purchases of coffee beans and next-day-bus-ride’s pastries for free.

On January 2 we rode a bus south to the Laotian capital, Vientianne, enjoying views of spectacularly craggy, jungle-covered hills along the way.  Then it was a flight to Bangkok for us, a cushion for the next day’s hard landing in Islamabad, itself a cushion before our final return to Quetta.

Not too much had happened in Quetta, it turned out, when we returned “home” there on the sixth of January.  The city, and its province of Balochistan, is more concerned with local politics than national, and Benazir was from neighboring Sindh province (i.e. not from Balochistan), so she had few supporters in Quetta.

The situation in Pakistan remains mixed.  Some parts of the country are still in mourning for Bhutto, while in other parts Taliban and tribal-motivated violence continues unabated.  A recent suicide bombing in Lahore, traditionally a peaceful city, and a Taliban attack on the Westerner-serving Serena Hotel in Kabul have both sparked concern.

The most present and pressing result of Benazir’s death has been the disruption to the election schedule, polling day moved back from early January to February 18.  But the Shia celebration of Muharram comes between now and then, a time often marred by violence, and it is easy to imagine elections being postponed again.

I find it impossible to predict the future for politics in Pakistan, though I am learning enough about this nation to know it has the resilience to get through even this crisis.  The country is simply too diverse and its people too irrepressible to fall apart completely.  "Most Dangerous Place on Earth," the magazine and newspaper headlines say of this place.  Don't believe it.

Presently we are in Islamabad for a long weekend, where Jules is participating in head of office meetings at her organization’s country headquarters.  We are glad to escape the Quetta cold (low 40’s during the day and low twenties at night – who ever said the desert was always warm!) for the relative warmth of Pakistan’s capital.

The winter weather has inspired me to cocoon myself in service of the muse.  My writing about Kenilworth and my family, a years-long project now, is daring me to point it toward a manuscript conclusion.  Winter brings, I find, its solitary, writer-ly compensations.

Last week Jules came home from work one day and, as we talked, said, "Have you been in Kenilworth just now?"

I was mystified but had to admit that, at least mentally, I had been, since I was all day editing an interview with a man who grew up there.  Then I realized that I was talking differently, “talking black,” as we say, as if I was indeed in Kenilworth, and that's why Jules asked.  We laughed.

This winter brings its companionable compensations, too, and for that I am glad.