Not only had I planned a trip to England, leaving on January 13, 2019 but also a trip to Africa leaving sometime in October. But, as John Lennon once observed, life has a way of throwing everything into disarray when we make plans. He didn't say it exactly like that but the intent was the same.

So what do I mean by a different kind of voyage, as my title suggests?

I'll be taking a ride on a British Columbia ferry overseas. That is to say, getting down to the terminal early in the morning on two occasions: one to go out to a part of Greater Vancouver I've never visited - New Westminster; the other to downtown Victoria, to the Royal Jubilee Hospital's Pain Clinic.

Well, how very exciting, I don't hear you calling. And I couldn't agree more.

Yet, and yet, I think of all the people in the world who I've had the honour to meet as I've travelled around interviewing for Burnished Gold: Stories from Around the World of Resilience, Courage and Healing after Major Trauma. All those people who don't have the opportunity to write and publish. Because they don't know how. Or because they would face unspeakable punishment for doing so. Or for many other reasons. All those people who are in pain. Because they don't have access to basic medicines like Tylenol or its equivalent. Or because there are no medical services where they live. 

And my gratitude overflows. Not for what I don't have or can't do right now.

​For what I do have.

Sunset gives way to horizontal purple clouds streaked with orange shadows. Across the valley, viewed from high up on Papa Jero's homestay and farm, Bukit Kembar - meaning Twin Hills - in Wanagiri / Munduk Village, comes the sound of birdsong, crickets and crowing roosters. My travelling companion and I have arrived here from Lovina on Bali's north coast.

We started the day watching the sun rise from an outrigger, from which half-an-hour later we'd see pod after pod of dolphins. Up until we were joined by innumerable other outriggers - I counted 40 - the dolphins were not apparently bothered. But I was. Every time a call came: "That way! Over there!" motors on the traditional jukung fishing boats spluttered into life and roared over the waves for tourists to take photos or even try and touch the beautiful marine beasts. Three types live in these waters: bottlenose, spotted and spinner. Sorry, have no idea which was which.
​
What a relief to avoid most tourists and visit the ancient still-working Brahma Arama Vihara Buddhist monastery in the village of Banjar. It meant a lot to me, in particular, to spend quiet meditative time in the presence of the Buddha in all his phases - from the anorexic aesthete to the laughing round old man with his several belly layers. Not that I'm the committed practicing follower I was once, but there's a continuity and familiarity about entering a Buddhist temple when travelling overseas that I find comforting.  

More comfort was to come. First a stop at a coffee plantation where we sampled the wares accompanied by a plate loaded with some kind of fritter. Fattenly delicious! We did out duty and looked at all the goodies for sale: spices, perfumed soaps and bath condiments, teas and coffees, teacups, saucers and spoons with matching sugar bowl, jug and teapot made from coconut shells. And it was off to the sacred hot springs at Air Panas. A lovely refreshing break standing under warm water spouting and gushing from the mouths of sculpted serpents. 

​Lunch next, in the middle of which it rained. Just as my travelling companion was hiking in to see Munduk waterfall it poured. I ordered an ice cream and wrote, under cover of the restaurant. When the rain dwindled to a shower, we were off again along winding narrow roads busy with scooter traffic,  monkeys  and the usual small roadside warungs serving everything from the lunch special to Dutch coconut cookies, to Pura Ulun Danu Bratan. This floating temple from the seventeenth century is Hindu-Buddhist and honours the lake goddess, Dewi Danu, the deity who assures the rice fields are always well-fed with water.

And so we came to Papa Jero's Go Green homestay . . . but I'll leave that treat to another postcard from Bali. 

I My travelling companion and I started our Bali adventure in Kuta. Not quite my cuppa. It's noisy, loud, brash but never unfriendly, filled with crowds of party-goers, clubbers, pubbers, winers and diners, surfers and anyone else you'd like to throw in there. Think hustlers, sex trade workers, and everyone trying to sell you something - from handmade lace to outrageously large-sized black carved penises. 

We'd already booked a hotel where we could crash for our first day undisturbed. After the sojourn in China it was hardly necessary. Had we been exhausted perhaps we could have excused the difference between the photos of our rooms on Airbnb and the reality. The nicest thing to say about Hawaii Bali Hotel is the pool's great. I enjoyed the air con and the telly - saw a couple of excellent movies but, believe it or not, I actually skipped all news channels. So I knew less than the Balinese  about what "your handsome president Justin" was up to than did they. Mind you, I put them right on Canada not being a state of America. Oh yes, and on the prez misnomer.

We stayed two nights before moving to what I found more sympatico digs although deeper into the heart of Kuta. The age difference between me and my travelling companion never occurred to me before. Now I felt like a bag of old bones, albeit decorated with beaded braids and toe- and finger-nails painted scarlet with patterns of flowers, dots and squiggles. I enjoyed watching the surfers ride huge waves, the likes of which I'd seen before only on TV. The famous sunset was pretty good, too, although I've seen just as good if not better at home in the southern Gulf islands of British Columbia, Canada. (Which, so you know for future reference - and there'll be a test! - is an independent country with a prime minister lying north of the U.S. Not that Mr. Trudeau has much time to lie down anywhere but you know what I mean. This is a blog after all, not a bestseller.)

It was the Memorial to the 200 victims of a bombing attack in 2002 that really jolted me. Mostly foreign tourists from all over the world - including 2 Canadians, Richard Gleason and Mervin Popadynec - killed by political extremists in an area of Kuta called Legian. It's where all those young people hung out in the trendy bars and nightclubs just having a good time on vacation. In 2005 two more bombs exploded, killing 20 more unsuspecting overseas visitors. Sons, daughters, nephews, nieces, brothers and sisters. A small note placed at the foot of the monument said it all: Happy Birthday Joey. 

​We may not know who Joey was, but he's far from forgotten.

Not an auspicious start, Mount Rinjani belching and spewing on the island of Lombok, one of thousands of islands that make up Indonesia's archipelago. The wind blowing ash across Denpasar International Airport and, for a while, closing it. On tenterhooks wondering if the flight I'd booked was on or off, but China Eastern Airlines assured me that "everything fine, all flights to Shanghai okay." Yes, but what about onward to Bali? "All okay," the sweet sing-song voice soothed. 

​All not okay.

I just had a hunch I'd get stuck in China - again. Last time was 2013 on my way to India. Thirty hours' wait for a pilot and crew who failed to show, and a woman hurling abuse at a spokesperson attempting explanation before the "crisis," according to the abusive passenger, could be resolved.

This time things were more organized. Yes, we sat around for hours. Yes, the announcements were on-again, off-again to make our way to this or that departure gate. Lucky me got pushed in a wheelchair, necessitated by knee surgery 4 weeks earlier. My obstinacy to travel to Bali even if the sky fell in, was now causing me a lot of pain.

Ultimately Chinese Eastern put us up in a hotel where we made friends with fellow passengers while we ate and drank, and afterward slept in comfortable beds. Can't say hotel staff were entirely welcoming. One hippy-looking guy left his book on a table, thoroughly annoying a server who threw it at him.  Literally.

Next morning, back at the airport, no one could find a wheelchair in the general confusion of people stranded for this or that reason, until I further held things up by sitting on a conveyor belt. A chair was found on the double. I don't condone my behaviour, but in extremis it got results.

Pastoral scenes give way at last to urban dust. The train slows then, comes into Bhopal Junction station. This is where I get off, where on December 4, 1984, a 33-year-old PhD candidate, Satinath Sarangi, arrived late in the afternoon. 

    Disenchanted with his studies at the University of BHopal, he'd been working some 50 kilometres away in a rural area. That morning, a brief news item on All-India Radio alerted listeners to a gas leak somewhere in the city, killing under a hundred people. It didn't sound dangerous, but Sathyu (as Sarangi is known) thought otherwise. He left immediately to volunteer his help for a week.

    With a few rupees in his pocket he alighted from the almost empty train -- an oddity in India where trains usually overflow -- he walked into the station forecourt uprepared for the scene confronting him. He could not make sense of what he saw, he told me when we met in early February. People huddled close together in groups, their eyes swollen, tears streaming down their cheeks. Groaning. "People walked around as if drunk, falling over." 

     Dumfounded, he stared at the sweep before him. Wherever he looked people writhed in pain, or sat stock still groaning and weeping, or walked around not knowing what to do.  "There was this complete and utter helplessness. You could see that. I don't know how many people were there but it seemed more than a thousand."

    Someone had turned a nearby bus shelter into a First Aid post where a crowd had gathered. Still unable to make sense of what he saw, Sathyu found volunteers giving antibiotic eye drops for burning eyes, milk and juice to soothe raw throats, antacids to relieve searing digestive tract pain. People said something had affected them during the night, something like a gas that smelled like burnt chillies but they didn't know what. A lot of them had never heard of Union Carbide. Or that its local plant employed many of the men whose families lived in the slums surrounding the plant. Or that the plant manufactured a pesticide farmers across India spread on their fields to kill the beetles, bugs and insects that ate their seedlings. But they did know that whatever it was, it had turned the leaves black on the trees and that birds, cows, goats, oxen, chickens, dogs, rats, cats  -- and people -- lay dead in the streets and homes of the city.

    Sathyu helped carry the sick to cars and trucks and autorickshaws for transport to hospital. And then, all of a sudden, the odourless colourless gas hit him. For the first time in his life, he fainted.


    

The 6.00 am Shatabbdi Express for Bhopal Junction leaves bang on time. The countryside flies by, predawn images through the window as on a black and white television screen. Birds wake with the rising orange ball of sun, flapping their wings as they land by a pond to drink. 

    Above the scummy water, on a sandy mound, a man sleeps curled up in his blanket inside a makeshift shelter. Four wood posts and a roof of straw. There is almost a romantic air about his home, although in reality there is nothing about it that is remotely so. Marigolds and other flowers bloom on his little plot. He has no facilities. Once, a man in his position could wash at a railway station tap. Not any more. 

    The Minister of Railways has ushered in new rules in an effort to improve hygeine
on India Rail property. Effective immediately: Fines of 500 rupees (about $10) for anyone caught washing, urinating, spitting, cooking at a railway station. What - all at once?

    Another body of water, outside the next station, is clogged with paper, Styrofoam cups, food containers and plastic bags.  A bird sits on a hog's back pecking insects from its hair. A herd of water buffalo, those sacred beasts of India (who would happily eat those papers, cups, food containers and plastic bags, to their detriment) gather outside the front door of a solidly-built structure, through which I spot a family start its day.

     An old woman, perhaps the grandmother, brushes the hair of a young girl dressed in school uniform... but the train has whizzed by already and I am not privy to any more. A disembodied female voice comes over the PA system. She says we are stopping at Mathura Station where tourists should get out to visit important temples. 

    I am glad I've already been to Mathura and Agra, the next station and seen the sights: Krishna's birthplace, the Taj Mahal, the Red Fort. I bought a camel there, a toy. The salesman told me how well-made it was. "No plastic," he said. Later, I found a small hole in the fur and underneath, pink, manmade, plastic.

    Welcome to India!

Indira Ghandi International Airport is bang up to date, large and imposing. No longer the smelly dump filled with street people as it was eight years ago. No problems getting through Immigration. "Report to Chief of Police within a fortnight," the officer says. I'm on a Journalist Visa and certain restrictions apply. Outside, the taxi driver awaits me, holding up a sign with my name scrawled across it. Then we're off along a new highway, past new buildings, the gates of Government House, the statue of Ghandi marching to the salt flats, a squabble of monkeys cavorting under some trees, and at a set of traffic lights the inevitable beggar-woman bangs on the window. She wants money to buy milk to fill the baby bottle she waves in her hand. I say, "Use these," pointing to my breasts. "That's what they're for - milk." The driver nearly falls over laughing. He laughs until we reach the old Pantanjali district where the streets are narrow, filled with men on bicycles, young men on motorbikes and mothers, laden with shopping bags, hang on to small children. 

I chose this area partly because I stayed here in 2008, partly because it's close to the old railway station from where I'll catch the 6:00 AM train tomorrow to Bhopal. But I wasn't prepared for how run-down and filthy Main Bazar Road has become in the intervening years. And Hotel Vivek, which was never what you'd call pucca sahib exactly, has become downright seedy.

 Same staff welcome me. Same old man guards the front door. Same fat co-owner leers at me with his bulbous eyes, insisting he himself bring Mem bottle of water upstairs to room. Small comfort knowing he's after a tip and not my body. Same rooftop cafe: gone to greasy dustballs and dead flowers but at least the food's still reasonable.

A quick once-over with Baby Wipes in lieu of a bucket shower in the none-too-pristine bathroom, despite its new sink and toilet, and into bed. Then it starts: horns honk; tongues wag - in every conceivable language you can imagine; dogs bark; traffic snarls; trucks rumble. A parade, probably a funeral, accompanies me into fitful sleep. Mixes with jet-lag, images of delly belly, shadows, wakefullness, a dreamscape. Seventy-two trombones play off-key, big drums enthusiastically beaten, march through the bedroom from the narrow street a hundred feet below. Recede. Return. Recede again. Until fitful sleep claims the exhausted traveler at last.

It's a clear and sunny morning and, from my seat on the starboard side of the plane, I have a perfect view of mountains, rivers and valleys north of the Himalayas. Some river beds appear dry or as ribbons of mud until a huge dam appears leading into the deep wide waterway of a hydro-electric project. Roads twist and turn atop mountain ridges, linking villages. Further on, villages lie at greater distances to one another; discrete communities where the earth is reddish brown, sandy and scorched over miles like a war zone.

Three lakes appear on this living map from my airplane window and another hydro-electric project in the north east. Long rectangular fields in a swath of green surround the lakes: agricultural production on a large organized scale. We pass over myriad toy barns given over, I suspect, to some sort of light industry. Then leave all that behind as we come to another mountain range dotted with trees, and uninhabited river valleys. Smoke rises from within the trees, a burning bush, its flames shooting high into the air, changing direction with the wind. More wider valleys appear; pockets of civilization stretching into the far distance. Even the tops of mountains are inhabited here. Villages, huddled in the lee of hillsides, grow into towns, widen into cities. Disappear again into another isolated region connected by a single road zigzagging across slopes thick with forest.

Eyes growing heavy, I lean against the window. Take in a modern bridge that crosses a river coiling like a well-fed snake across verdant fields; a fat brown python shedding its skin to merge with a blue waterway so straight it must be a canal. A cityscape looms with infrastructure of resevoirs, highways, flyovers, districts and townships. This is China, vast and changing.

I nod off, waking only with the announcement that we will be arriving shortly in New Delhi, India.

After my magnificent seventieth birthday celebration I flew off to India as planned. Then, as John Lennon once observed, life got in the way. The games began.

Predictably, the 13-hour layover in Guangzhou (formerly Canton) seemed never-ending. If there's anything about that entomological design of an airport you'd like to know, please ask. One hour prior to departure, hopes dashed that we might soon leave the giant caterpillar. A woman let out a gut-wrenching scream. Her sister caught the hysteria, followed by a tiny girl - daughter to one of the women - who ran to the safety of her father's arms. Snatching her up, he slunk into an unlit corner.

The screaching, at fever-pitch within a few seconds, sounded as if the women had self-immolated right there in Departure Lounge A2. Two airline officials quietly explained in Chinese, further provoking the women's ire. "Speak our language," one of them yelled, waving her hands in the air to make a point. Silver bangles jumped up and down her arms. "Stop hiding behind language we don't understand. It's discrimination." The other woman shouted her agreement. 

Passengers stood up. Pressed forward to the desk. Craned their necks. A rustle like dry grass caught in the breeze, carrying the ash of a carelessly tossed cigarette butt, kindling one blade, then another, sputtered into flame. Spread fast as panic will among the crowd. Whispers rose into a crescendo of  what d'you mean? Cancelled? Cancelled till when? Tomorrow morning, 9:30?
  
I walked to the elevator, rode to the second floor, told the woman at the information desk I needed a wheelchair, "Right now." Indicated where I would sit until things got sorted out downstairs: extensions on visas, permission to stay at all; food, accommodation, transportation, food. I didn't budge from the safety of my chariot until we climbed aboard a bus that took us to our air-conditioned hotel with tea-making facilities, hot showers, and small bags of whatever passed for dinner hung on the outside door handle.  
 

March 2 (in India) already and only 8 days before it's time to pack and take the taxi to Chennai Airport for home. It's been a funny sort of a trip with two bouts of pneumonia that have left me breathless - and not with wonder. I have been writing my "postcards" - just haven't found a good way to delete and paste them here. Looks like I'll have to copy them as if by hand. That I shall do, starting today I hope.

One thing I've spent much time doing is visiting Indian Immigration. In Canada it was insisted upon that I acquire the J visa i.e. Journalist Visa. "Too many of you people come in on Tourist Visa and then practice journalism. We can't be having that I am telling you." After pulling strings with the Vice-Consul (Visas) I got mine in a couple of days. However, there was a stipulation that I register here within two weeks of arrival. What a rigmarole.

First I could not find the correct place to register, having been told by the Immigration Officer at Delhi that I could do it with any Chief of Police anywhere in India. Wrong, Mr. Immigration Official. When I did find the right place, India Immigration here in Pondicherry, I was told I did not have permission to be in this place. Pondicherry is not in Tamil Nadu State, it's a Union Territory separate unto itself. After speaking on the phone and twiddling every elastic band, staple and paper-clip in his stationary tray, the Head Honcho (you could tell, he was the only chap with a glass-topped desk) said he would give me his permission. Then I had to fill in certain forms. When I returned those next day another official, a woman this time, said they were "not ac - cept - able" as if she were the headmistress and I a naughty pupil. On Day Three I got the forms right but had to return the following Monday. Over the next couple of days she must have investigated that everywhere I said on the form I'd stayed was true. I know that because she called here at the guesthouse where I'm Writer-in-Residence. The following Monday I appeared at the appointed time only to be told to give them my passport and return in the afternoon. And eureka! I finally got my piece of paper, which I must hand to the immigration people when I leave the country.

My parting shot to the receptionist as I left the Pondi branch of India Immigration was,
"I hope not to see you again." Thank goodness he had a sense of humour: he cracked up laughing.