Harpier cries, "'Tis time, 'tis time"

I felt compelled to to read the next installment in the Jade del Cameron 1920s Africa mystery series, mainly because I've invested so much time in it already (and also probably because I'm feeling nostalgic for my own African adventure.) The tropes are getting old, though, filled with mysterious and often supernatural-possessed natives. This one was no different: the murder-solving multicultural American heroine and her family embark on a trip to Zanzibar. They manage to destroy a cult, solve some murders, and free slaves, all despite local legends of witchcraft and sorcery.

Months ago, I accidentally abandoned my Newbery Medal-reading streak, but recently tried to re-start that by re-reading The Witch of Blackbird Pond. I liked it well enough as a fifth grader when I originally read it: after all, it features a strong teenage heroine who challenges 17th-century Puritan gender norms. Reading it almost 30 years later as an adult was interesting: I distinctly remember 10-year-old me being surprised and disgusted by the love triangle, dismissing it all as mushy crap. Re-reading it as an adult, it's a very obvious subplot. It's still a cute story, with a good message for young readers about doing good, treating all people with respect, and standing up for themselves and others... a somber lesson to take into 2017.

I'm not entirely sure how Blackbird rose to the top of my Newbery reading list, but I suspect it's because I've been listening the hell out of Hamilton. (I suspect that Hamilton's childhood in St. Kitts and Nevis reminded me of Blackbird Kit's childhood in Barbados.)

It took months and months of friends pleading with me to listen to the soundtrack before one finally had a Hamilton listening party that forced me to hear it in all its brilliance.

The play admittedly has its faults, and scores of critics have ranted about them more eloquently than I could -- about the whitewashing of slavery despite having a mostly black cast, the glorification of bootstrap ideology, failing the Bechdel test, etc. But as a history nerd, it's a freaking Tony-winning musical about the country's first Secretary of the Treasury! You can still appreciate that it's a fantastic story, without forgetting or demeaning its historical context. As a carefully crafted tale, its narrative structure is just sheer genius.

Along with Les Miserables and Newsies, it's now one of my favorite musicals. (Yes, I have a strong preference for productions with a fight-for-justice theme.)

Besides, wildly popular cultural phenomena are only relevant because they speak to something about the contemporary condition. Hamilton is actually a story about the here and now and the debate Americans have been having over national identity since electing a black president.

"History has its eyes on you.."

Tawantinsuyu

Since my adventure buddy was just diagnosed with breast cancer, I've been thinking a lot about our recent trip to Peru.

We read Turn Right at Machu Picchu  before we left. It's a hilarious memoir by a travel writer following in Hiram Bingham's footsteps, tracing the 1911 jungle trek that led to Bingham's (re)discovery of Machu Picchu.

Going from 0 to 11,000 feet was horrible; we felt the effects of the altitude within 2 hours of our arrival in Cuzco.  We had 4 days to acclimate before starting on the Inca Trail, and there were plenty of things to see in Cuzco: the Qorikancha, the Sacred Valley (Pisaq, Ollantaytambo, Chinchera), and Saqsaywaman.  At every site, the ruins were a stunning testament to Inca engineering: amazingly precise stonework and astronomy.

And Peru is BEAUTIFUL.

Ollantaytambo

On the road to Chinchera

On the road to Chinchera

The Inca Trail itself was not as difficult as we anticipated it would be. (I think Muir Snowfield is a tougher hike.)  But there were SO MANY STAIRS. It's completely mind-boggling that the Inca road system, which stretches across thousands of miles in 5 modern countries, could be made up of so many stones and stairways.

 

The terrain was breathtaking: desert to alpine to jungle in all varieties, over every other hill.

And the highest I've now hiked is now 13,828 feet, to Dead Woman's Pass on the Inca Trail.

There were several more Inca ruins on the 4-day trek to Machu Picchu. Honestly, when our group got to the end of our destination, where a thousand international tourists roamed around us with cameras, it was a bit much - especially after being on the trail for over 3 days with few other people.

Huayna Picchu towering above
Machu Picchu

But then we climbed Huayna Picchu. In the rain. And though we didn't feel particularly bad-ass after the Inca Trail itself, we absolutely did after finishing Huayna Picchu. BECAUSE IT'S ALL STAIRS. 1,180 VERTICAL FEET OF STAIRS.

After the super touristy Machu Picchu experience, we headed west to Arequipa. There was a general strike going on in the region, so our plans had to be a little flexible. We took a tour of Colca Canyon, where we saw condors; the same tour took us to see more awe-inspiring mountains. And the bus sneaked up to 16,108 feet -- the highest I've been, period (even if I've only hiked up 13,828).

A condor flies over
Colca Canyon

Sabancay, the smoking volcano

El Misti

There was so much of Peru we didn't have time to explore: Lake Titicaca, the Amazon, the Nazca Lines, the foodie scene in Lima, other gorgeous hikes in the Andes.  But it was so beautiful, and the mix of cultures so proud and fascinating, that we just might have to go back some day!

And yes, I did eat a guinea pig....

.... Meh.

The good is oft interred

If there are two films you should absolutely NOT watch back to back despite being bored on an airplane, they are The Book Thief and 12 Years a Slave.

They are both excellent films.  They are, however, depressing as hell.

The Book Thief, based on a book I will likely not read because the movie had me sobbing in front of strangers and fellow plane passengers, is about a little orphan girl in WWII Germany. Aside from the German accents done by British actors being pretty bad and some of the characters being rather one-dimensional, the story brutally plays with your emotions. It's narrated by Death, so that kind of sets the tone from the beginning; also, it takes place in the middle of a war, so you know at least some of the main characters won't survive. You just have no idea whether it's the Jewish guy hidden in the basement, the boy next door being shipped off to military camp, the retired father being shockingly conscripted, or anyone else you grow fond of.

So I have no idea why, after wiping the salt and tears from my cheeks and eyes and choking down my sobs, I thought I should follow up a story about WWII bombs with a story about the horrors of American slavery. But I did!

12 Years a Slave was one of the books I could have read in a sociology class in college but chose to re-read Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl instead. The movie has a stilted feel to it, and it takes a little while to get used to the speech patterns. As the true story of a free black man sold into slavery,
at least you know he's eventually rescued and returned to his family in the North. Like the protagonist, the viewer sees the institution of slavery through the eyes of someone unfamiliar with its daily horrors and who at the end of the story can close that chapter of history.  I couldn't help but compare the narrative device to Kindred, which also uses the lens of an outsider to illustrate the evils of slavery.

Unfortunately, after watching back to back films about the horrible things humans do to each other, I had no opportunity to watch anything with puppies and rainbows.  The plane landed, and I arrived home in Seattle to our sobering gray and rainy weather.

Y Ddraig Goch ddyry gychwyn

Mt Snowdon - My first
summit outside the US!

It's been three months since I got back from the Great Welsh Hiking Adventure.

It wasn't life-changing in the sense that mental fireworks went off at the top of each summit and I descended with Zen-like universal truths. But it was substantially personally introspective and incredibly fun... despite the fact that I got rained on, mud-slogged, and then horribly sunburned at various points.

Several things contributed to my obsession with making the trip possible:

• Reading too much about King Arthur as an impressionable tween
• Reading the entire Brother Cadfael series as a teenager
• Having my only experience in Wales (as a solo traveller during my study abroad Christmas holiday) involve staying at a sketchy Cardiff hostel and then getting crapped on by a bird and having to wash my hair in a public restroom at a mall packed by January sales shoppers
• Seeing Jasper Fforde post about hiking multiple Welsh peaks in one day
• Reading about the British Special Forces training in Wales
• Reading a popular but not-so-amazing book about a female hiker
• Knowing The Planning Committee & Co. would only be expats in the UK for a few more months 

Breacon Beacons - Stopped 

here to have lunch. Also
realized exactly whyso many
of the mystery series I used
to read had so many people
fall off mountaintops in
Wales: the slopes were

incredibly steep and strewn
with boulders, with nothing
to grab ahold of except
blades of grass.

Brecon Beacons - View of the 

first 3 peaks (Corn Du, Pen Y 

Fan, Cribyn) from the 4th (Fan 

Y Big).

The trip started with Mt. Snowdon - my first summit outside the US! With no tree cover, slippery rock trails, hail, 40mph winds at the trailhead and 55mph winds at the summit, and rain coming down nonstop in sheets, the weather conditions were the worst I've ever been hiking in (and if I had been in the PNW, I wouldn't have even gone). Though my phone and camera got horribly waterlogged during the hike, I have so many cheesy selfies of me looking like a drowned rat all over Snowdonia. And even after traipsing around the mountains for seven hours, when I found out the town where I was staying had the ruins of a keep built by Llywelyn the Great, I strolled the extra two miles to check it out.

After a few Bristol-based days with the coolest hosts in the world, I set off to walk around the Brecon Beacons: 4 peaks in one loop!

Wales Coastal Path

Then I hopped on a lot of public buses to get to the ocean to start hiking the Wales Coastal Path in Pembrokeshire and Ceredigion, ending up in Aberystwyth.

From there, I hopped another bus to Dolgellau via Machynlleth (where, due to an unexpectedly missed bus, I spent a pleasant few hours at the Owain Glyndwr Centre learning about the last Welshman to hold the title of Prince of Wales).

Wales Coastal Path
Trusty shoes and backpack!

My last summit was Cader Idris. It dumped rain on me for the first hour, then alternated clear skies and thunderstorms for the next five. I was the only person on the trail (which was one of two to the top), slogging through muddy, hilly sheep fields. But I couldn't stop grinning the whole time! It was so beautiful and green and rainy, I couldn't help thinking that maybe Gwynedd was a magical place after all and that if Arthur is sleeping somewhere in Britain awaiting her hour of need, it would definitely be somewhere in Wales. It was a great end to my trip.

walking up Cader Idris
Such a gorgeous green (rainy, muddy) hike!

I estimated that I walked or hiked 53 miles in the 10 days I was in the UK. I wish I could have had a longer trip, but I'm pretty satisfied that I still got to see quite a bit of Wales.

Though I still couldn't seem to grasp the basics of Welsh. It was cool hearing it everywhere (more so in Snowdonia), but I totally butchered the names of most of the towns where I stayed.

And then, because I indicated on my customs form that I'd crossed numerous cow pastures, I even had my hiking boots cleaned and disinfected by U.S. Homeland Security in Dublin.

This was my meal every

morning at every B&B.

Glad DHS did it instead of me!

From Bosworth to Boulogne

For a history project my senior year in high school, I wrote a very passionate defense of Richard III's innocence in the deaths of the Princes in the Tower. (Not that I was a huge fan of the entire Plantagenet line, but even back then I liked defending often-unpopular or obscure points of view just for the hell of it.) I had read Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time back in middle school, and I think it made an impression on my proto-emo soul.

So when a friend reminded me of Josephine Tey's books, I read the three preceding books in her Inspector Alan Grant series... and then I re-read The Daughter of Time again. It's been a while since I've read mysteries without a female protagonist, but Tey's Inspector Grant series is an enjoyable police procedural mystery set, peppered with descriptive piquancies - perfect for gray Northwest evenings!

In the first three books, Inspector Grant is in the field, running around Britain solving murder mysteries and gaining insights into human behavior from his theatre and society friends. But in the last, while recuperating in hospital from an injury sustained while chasing crooks, he "solves" the mystery of whether or not Richard III murdered the Princes in the Tower. (He comes to the conclusion that he did not, and that the hunchbacked, throne-usurping Uncle Richard story was propaganda put out by Henry VII and enshrined by pro-Tudor factions for decades onward. Even Shakespeare was not blameless, writing as he did under a Tudor monarch.)

Of course, reading the series reminded me that earlier in the year, DNA tests proved that a skeleton found under a car park in Leicester was indeed Richard III's.

Meanwhile, an ocean and several hundred years (and light years) away, I am also fascinated by the superhero film genre as an ever-evolving expression of national identity. So when Man of Steel came out earlier this year, I went to see it. (It's a pretty crappy movie. Amy Adams is wonderful as always, and I did like the extended back story of Jor-El and Krypton. But there were way too many gratuitous explosions and overly long scenes of the casual destruction of planets and buildings. The tornado scene was particularly unfortunate, given so much devastation this year in Oklahoma. How can a superhero save an audience that is too desensitized to violence?)

Looking at oh-so-pretty Henry Cavill was basically the only thing that kept me in my seat for over two hours.

Soooo, after election season settled down I finally got around to watching The Tudors.

I had long been personally boycotting the series due to the anti-Plantagenet conspiracy that particular dynasty wreaked on its predecessors (see above and what reading The Daughter of Time did to an impressionable 12-year-old).

Turns out, the series is brilliant. It takes a lot of liberties with the timeline (and some historical figures age quickly, while others don't age at all in what should be a 20-year span).  But aside from some digressions from the history books and chronology, I think it gets the general spirit right.

Trying to make a rather fit Jonathan Rhys-Meyers look like a rotund Henry VIII, though, was amusing, as was Henry telling Thomas More "You're not a saint!" (Ha ha... )

The most fascinating aspect of the series, though, was how it portrayed the tumultuous break with the Church in Rome and the rocky, somewhat sketchy beginnings of the Church of England. I really appreciated how the series included the doctrinal implications of the schism as well as the cultural and political ones. That gray, confusing area where England was neither fully Catholic nor very Protestant is generally glossed over, but is so fascinating... especially from an organizer's perspective! (What do we do with all these abbeys? What do we believe about the transubstantiation, again? How do we tell the illiterate masses what just happened? What is happening? What's the definition of heresy this week?)

The series is most known not for its insightful theological statements, of course, but for its raunchy soft-core porn-esque sex scenes.

From the brilliant and nerdy comic Hark! A Vagrant: 



Maybe I should just continue on this chronological journey, and move on to the Stuarts! Mi Hermana did tell me over Thanksgiving that she's addicted to Game of Thrones, and that after recognizing threads from family rants while watching the Red Wedding episode, discovered it was indeed based in part on the Glencoe Massacre...