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Travel Food Feature
Not my cup of tea
Complaining about British food may be old hat, but, well, it's just so awful.
By Emily Wise Miller
[03/03/00]

Daily Planet
Indonesian "sorcerer" commanded women into bed
Police have the 36-year-old fraud in custody for his own protection.
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[03/03/00]

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Fowl play in an English village
Townspeople are stumped by a chicken-style whodunit.
By J.A. Getzlaff
[03/02/00]

Travel Advisor
The fine print
What to do when airlines bait and switch, plus advice on the Delaware-Virginia question and nonpackage tours of England and Ireland.
By Donald D. Groff
[03/02/00]

Burt Wolf
Sexual license, cross-dressing and other healthy behavior
Why we need the excesses of Carnival.
By Burt Wolf
[03/02/00]

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My room had a sloped ceiling and doors that swelled in their frames. The walls were a shrieking orange, mustard curtains offset the rain-streaked windows and a tangerine bird of paradise crooked its beak from a clay pot on the sill. The air was pungent with perfume, which I eventually traced to a single lilac wilting in a water glass next to my bed.

I flopped down beside it, weary from the bumpy ascent from the San José airport by jeep, lurching over boulders slick with mud. As the road, overgrown with jungle debris, had narrowed, my driver Enrique had cursed the plantation owner who'd refused to pave it.

"Course why should he fix a road for his coffee pickers who will never travel beyond the boundary of this plantation?" he'd shrugged.

When our journey had ended in front of an iron gate rimmed with barbed wire, Enrique had smiled at my surprise.

"This is the yoga retreat?" I asked.

"Sí," he'd said, pushing the button of a remote control that opened the gate of this medieval fortress with a tortuous groan.

Now nestled in bed, I picked up a book sitting on the wicker nightstand. It was signed by the retreat's owner. Scanning its jacket for a bio I discovered my host had once enjoyed beautiful women, "more money than God" and had just put the deposit on a new Citation II plane -- "so he could fly even higher, faster and further" -- when he was arrested for manufacturing and distributing organic ecstasy.

Learning I had sought spiritual refuge at the residence of an ex-con was oddly reassuring. I had seen my share of devout yogis who had launched off on vision quests to India only to return shell-shocked from the burning bodies in the Ganges and the stench of shit in the streets. Trying to overcome their post-traumatic stress, they'd insist that from the darkest mud grew the unspoiled purity of the lotus flower. Then they'd book their next trip with Club Med.

As spiritual seekers we had left the caves and monasteries. Hell, some of us were eking out our existence in the urban sprawl, meditating on roaches scuttling across the sink, exhaling the OM seed of all sound as the tenant in the basement screamed obscenities at her man for bringing home a whore.

I'd known that any lasting sense of peace would have to be culled from the eye of the storm. So I'd wanted to teach those immersed in chaos: the mentally ill, convicts, beaten wives of cops. I settled for Chicago's downtown day traders, who I figured were teetering close enough to the abyss. But I began to feel myself numbing to the city's frenetic pace; seeing myself as a facilitator of stress management rather than an inspired yogi; increasingly overshadowed by the stark skyscrapers that reduced the sky to a two-by-four patch of gray November.

I opened the book to a random page.

"I see through the apparent suffering now as a balanced equation of freedom and limitation in which Consciousness is amusing itself," it read.

I drifted to sleep watching a millipede scuttle across the blaze of orange paint.

In the morning I awoke early, padding onto the porch in bare feet, stunned by the panorama of miles of cloud forest descending into the valley 5,000 feet below. My own front yard was a teeming micro jungle of feathery ferns and red-splotched begonias sagging heavily under the morning dew. Several species of orchid exposed their furry tendrils and leafy lips accented with hot pink or spotty leopard from satin petals.

I pulled on my jeans and boots and ventured into the outer gardens where golden Buddha statues dotted the landscape, and grapefruit, oranges and mangos rotted into a kind of citrus ambrosia underneath my feet. Peeking into the other guest houses I noted a definite '70s drug decor: white leather couches, mirror crisscrossed with gold lame, Jacuzzis, rice paper screens.

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