Monkeyrockworld

Back in South East Asia, with style.  I spent the weekend in Georgetown, World Heritage Site on the island of Penang. The good feeling is always there, the great food as well, the vibrant couchsurfing community too, always ready to welcome everyone and throw all of the daily cultural events at you. Last friday night it was time for the Chinese Lion Dance, something I’ve been attending many times already, but something that always leaves me quite impressed. Penang has a community of young Chinese guys carrying on this amazing tradition and, from my point of view, the dances you can see here are much better than the ones I saw in China.
Georgetown is always brilliant, chilled, warped in time. it’s like it didn’t really exist. The street stalls color the streets at night, the few bars blast some soft music form their doors and the many guesthouses, many of  which are built inside spectacular traditional pre war houses, bustle with travelers’ stories, buzz with laptops’ noises and random chats. I like this place because the traveler scene is totally weird: the young backpackers come in from Kuala Lumpur or Thailand, stroll around the place, find it terribly boring on the first night they stay, and leave the next day. The older ones instead fester inside of the dingiest guesthouses like human tumors, and they are some of the oldest travelers I ever met, some of them in their fifties. Georgetown has alway been a frontier town for the backpacking trail and one of the easiest places to get Thailand’s tourist visas with no hassle, hence here we have a real freakshow.

This time I met again my friend James, Italian man living in South East Asia for the past twenty years, doing his online business from one of the guesthouses. We spent some time together, walking around, losing ourselves in the tropical heat, sitting around the  Krishna temples waiting for some free steamy rice and curry to be put in our hands with an endless series of “Hare Hare Krishna Hare” and a smile topped by a bloody red dot painted on some dark skinned forehead.  Life here is an incredible mixture of colors and cultures, ideas and religion, and although I keep on posting pictures and things related to the Chinese community, you wouldn’t believe how many different things you can see overhere.

I met Giorgio, as well, and he really struck me: he’s a man in his fifties, but he looks like Jesus Christ a moment before being put on the cross, a stunning 30 something look with some eyes so greyish and blue they look like the ones of a wolf. A good wolf, tough. He speaks a perfect English with no intonation or accent, but he’s Italian, or at least, he used to be Italian, a loooooong time ago. He has spent many years wandering trough India, but not alike many people that used that mystical country as a drug heaven for themselves, Giorgio is as pure as spirit and therefore he doesn’t talk or interact with the reality the way normal human beings do. His essence is pure spirituality, and his words are low and muttered sometimes, but they get to the point a few minutes after he says them. He’s so amazing he lives in a guesthouse, but instead having a real room, he pitched a tent in the main hall, sleeping on he floor. Last morning he set off early to go get a thai tourist visa and he will be off to some thai wat soon, to get shelter, meditate and eat for free with he monks.

This is what I call an enlightening meeting, not because I want to end up like him, but because it makes me understand that compared to Giorgio, I am bullshit, and all of the travelers I met and all of the people writing about travel and thinking they are better because they left their hometown or found ways to work traveling, all of them, and me myself, we should go home. Because it’s in the depth of time and hidden between the lines that someone like Giorgio can still stalk the Earth and overcome its deadly boundaries, he walks and talks, and his speech becomes the air we breathe, his action might be funny if looked through our small world perspective, but he’s a real hero. He’s really like Jesus walking across the waters, because all of the background stops spinning when he opens his mouth, and his soft spoken voice tells some incredibly stupid or awesome things. And I feel small, and mesmerized, and less powerful because there is always someone crazier than me in Georgetown, in its underbelly of foreign lives, hidden behind crumbling walls. Good luck to you Giorgio, and welcome back to Penang to you, dear Monkey… this place never ceases to amaze me.

That’s why we met Giorgio in his amazing town, named after himself and his amazing story that doesn’t need to be told, because it lives in the air around us, in the tropical sun and the exotic food smell. This is one of the many reasons I love Georgetown.

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