Hi there. Since I’m these days I’m writing more about travel, look for me over at my new website sarahsteegar.com. The companion blog – where I post fresh chat about travel and airline life - can be reached directly at shadesofperegrine.
I still check in at Killerboob – it will always feel like home – but at sarahsteegar.com I’m going in new directions, and I hope to see you guys there!
Filed under breast cancer
Hi guys. I just wanted to drop a line and say that even if I’m not here a lot these days, you may notice me popping up in new places. At least I hope so!
As part of a “more proper” refocusing of my writing into freelance travel publishing, I have finally taken the plunge with a showcase website, at sarahsteegar.com.
It’s still a toddler, so to speak, but I’m working on it. Please check it out, if you like, and feel free to provide feedback. Not just on the site – but on the world of travel in general. And I welcome it, because I have a new gig that involves answering those very questions…in my new travel columns! That’s right, as of March 1st you can find me at the brand new Ah-Ha Traveler website and downloadable magazine. It’s fresh, it’s fierce and, best of all, it’s free! FREE!
On the website you can find me as Travel Ninja, a shorter column where I will share traveling tips gathered from my experiences as a flight attendant, expat and an all-around avid traveler. My magazine column, From the Air to There, will provide a more in-depth discussion of airline, destination and traveling issues.
The idea behind these columns is that I live several angles on travel. Being a Flight Attendant offers a particularly unique angle as, going to the same places over and over and over, we are often something in between a tourist and a local. We love our classic touristy stuff, but we also get enough regular experience to stay on top of what is new and relevant in some cities, and to find local haunts where we just like to make friends and hang out like locals. If that doesn’t provide enough street cred for the job, there’s always that whole “bi-continental commuting thing” I’ve got going on, which should fill in any gaps.
Meanwhile, The Ah-Ha Traveler website is shaping up nicely with some smart content to check out now, but mark the calendar for March 1st to make sure you download your first free issue.
All the while, keep your eyes peeled. My strategy is to climb like ivy – it may seem slow at first, but hopefully, all at once, my writing will be framing every window in town. Through which we can look at the world together. (What…too much? 
) …See you there.
I have just a minute here, but I have to take a moment to send support and love to one of the most amazing women I met on my breast cancer journey. Susan Niebur is an Astrophysicist (!), mother extraordinaire and all around admirable example of a woman (not to mention admirable human being). She was diagnosed with IBC in 2007, and when I finally dove into the world of blogging my own experience, she was the first – and most amazing – woman I connected with, at her fascinating blog ToddlerPlanet. She e-introduced me to many of my other breast cancer sisters and friends and was the source of so much support for me. She is yet another e-friend that I had optimistically let slide from my regular visitations until a mutual friend has brought her back to my “forefront” a few weeks ago. Her news was frightening and disheartening to me. But you’d never know it from reading her mind.
Please pray, think about, send vibes into the universe – whatever it is you do – for Susan and her family as they face her tough times with as much grace as ever. Here’s to amazing women.
Filed under breast cancer
There is one more story from Madagascar that I haven’t had a chance to tell. To set the ambiance for this event, you should know that the issue of walking at night was an ongoing debate amongst us three. I had read consistently that in Tana it was a no-no. However, our hotel was mere minutes from the places we tended to eat, around Boulevard de L’Independence, and Adam and Wendy are more the “Oh…it’ll be fine” type. I admit it was tempting. You feel silly and wussy and a little xenophobic to hesitate walking such a short distance, even when the locals tell you not to. Usually we settled the debate by asking a disinterested party: our waitress, the handyman at our hotel, etc. Always they said “Take a cab”. One time, after a skeptical look from us, our advisor said “Remember: when you’re white, not at night.”
The west coast fishing village of Mangily was one place I’d been told we could venture after dark. We discovered that it is one thing to feel tempted to walk a short way along the familiarity of busy city streets, knowing the locals will absolve you by insisting you should not. It’s another to have been told you’re perfectly safe to walk alone down a quiet dirt path into the black, black night of Nowhere.
We had just finished our second dinner in a row at the fantastic Chez Freddie and embarked on the 15 minute walk back to our beach bungalow. Our only light was the moon above, and some bleed from the few structures with electricity along the beginning of the route. The sandy road ran behind the line of beachfront accommodations to our left; to our right was total darkness, and some trails that disappeared into it. It already felt like a demarcation between Mangily-for-tourists and the villages that burrowed inland, like our only way home was the alley behind a restaurant. Then came the crying.
It was a woman, somewhere at the end of those night-eaten paths. She was wailing, somewhere in the distance. We travelers locked eyes, but at first we kept walking. It was faint, and clearly none of our business. What were we going to do, jot off blindly into midnight fields of goodness-know-what? The normal person in me felt cowardly; the Anthropologist in me chided “arrogance” at the idea that we’d be the only ones to save her. My mind filled with images of ways it could go wrong: fighting our way through clutching, waist-high vegetation to find someone with a limb cut off in an accident (and we would help how?) or perhaps a girl being attacked by men wielding scythes; stumbling into a village ceremony of some sort, the unwelcoming whites of eyes all trained on us; fumbling into the darkness, never to find a thing – including our way back. No images arose of us actually being helpful.
But we could not ignore someone so clearly in distress. We stopped in our tracks when it became clear it wasn’t a fleeting lament, twitchy and struggling with our conscience vs. our logic. But Wendy is an innate Protector of Women; she had that look in her eye and I knew she was considering plunging into the darkness after the voice. She would do it, too.
“It doesn’t sound like she’s hurt, or being attacked,” I noted. “I mean, it’s going on and on and on. That’s not fear or injury. She sounds…sad.” The other two nodded. “That’s grief,” we determined. Snatches of calm male voices floated to us from around the bodiless keen, as if trying to comfort her. In some sense, we felt better. “But what if it’s not grief?” Wendy had to ask.
Just then a woman rushed out of a stick house on the ocean side, hastily wrapped in a lamba (Malagasy sarong). She tore across the road, crossing just feet from us, and dashed confidently inland into the darkness.
“Look, she’s got support,” Adam pointed out. “Wendy, we simply can’t help,” I concluded. And with that, we continued to our temporary home, heavy-hearted and uncomfortable.
The next day a local boy sat talking to me on the beach. Surprisingly, he had nothing to sell; he seemed to just want to chat with the vazaha. Maybe he was practicing his French. I asked him about life in the area and, eventually, if he knew everyone in the surrounding villages. When he said yes, I mentioned the night’s events. “I didn’t hear anything from the villages last night, but it is the anniversary of a tragedy from three years ago…a woman left her house and shut the door, with her 7-year-old boy and 4-year-old girl sleeping inside, and a candle burning.” He did not have to describe how fiercely a house made of dried sticks would blaze. “The smoke was very black and thick, and the boy could not find the door.” My new friend mimicked the boy’s search with outstretched hands. “And they never got out?” I asked, without thinking. But sadder yet, he nodded. “Yes. They did, but it was too late. It was…very awful.”
Suddenly the sounds this woman was making made all too much sense and the images stung my eyes. It is difficult to describe the feeling it gave me. The story had little do with the loud things that divided me from this woman: the poverty, the local importance of skin color, our basic standard of living. Even where tourists are from, children die in house fires, parents make terrible mistakes. But at the same time, those elements felt relevant. Maybe it’s because when children are literally all a person has, losing them so cruelly reminds me just how little Luck cares about balance.
Whatever the reason, I also felt intrusive to have overheard her pain. Like I’d peeked behind a veil of privacy that separates all tourists from the life of locals. A veil which obscures the fact that, behind everything we see, there are people living, breathing, celebrating, suffering. It is both something we should not forget and none of our business. That night’s mystery symbolized the veil that had been there all along, as we passed through town after town in our car: people were working hard, but they looked okay. They all appeared fed; children laughed in the streets. But the truth lay at the end of dark roads that are too terrifying for us to go down and we are ill-equipped to even try.
Wendy and I had this exact same thought. Our first overwhelming impression, in our separate taxis from the airport to Antananarivo. There is no better way to describe the encompassing thrum as people piece together their daily survival before your very eyes.
It’s such a contrast from home, where the jobs we perform have nothing to do with our actual daily needs. For us, the facts of life happen behind the scenes. Somewhere else. But in places like Madagascar survival plays out each day in a constant-motion drama. It’s arresting to see how hard *most of the entire world* works, for such incongruously humble lives.
Don’t get me wrong; I was never one of those who thought that if someone is struggling to make ends meet, it’s because they aren’t working hard enough. (Nor that I have any real clue about the life of the people I’m seeing.) 
Even so…the scene is striking. People walking, walking, everywhere. Barefoot. Bare feet! Rolling tires down the road. Infant tied into the small of a woman’s back – or the back of another child – head flopped to the side in oblivious baby slumber. Carrying you-name-it on her head: planks of wood, birds, oranges, carrots, laundry, barbed wire, firewood, sacks of rice, bricks piled 10 layers high. Wandering zebu, chomping dry grass. Stalled cars. Fixing bikes. Whole families pushing carts. Together. Uphill, burdened high with rice or wood. Maybe a youngin’ perched on top. Embroidering linen. Selling honey, self-collected; different flavors from different trees. Riverbeds crowded with washers: of clothes, of zebu, of cars. Of themselves. Planting rice, ankle deep in shiny water. Scattering seeds, skirts a fabric bowl. Plowing muddy terraces. Burning land. Tending to a mud-brick kiln, black smoke seeping out the cracks. Smearing homes with red clay stucco. Children walking home from school, blue-uniformed herds. Women braiding hair. At wooden stalls. Stall after stall after stall. Selling nuts and nails and everything in-between. Making. It. Happen.
Then there is a different kind of work. We became very aware of pretty young Malagasy paired up with vazaha men. Particularly middle-aged ones. In fact, our favorite hangout was Hotel Glacier – a notorious prozzie bar with an open friendly ambiance and fantastic food. We expected a sad scummy joint (as we’d read in advance what was also “on the menu”); what we found challenged our preconceptions and made us debate our multiple types of naiveté. Were we really looking at prostitutes, or just pretty girls from a poor country who dream of finding a foreign saviour? It was impossible to tell. On top you saw just an ice cream and pastry shop on one side, a cafe on the other. A gem of a place where locals and vazaha mingle, for reasons that all look sweet on the surface. Gorgeous smiling locals, dressed like any in a London lounge. Chatting friendly in the washroom. Helping me dig-up some TP. Back in the bar, receiving drinks from mostly middle-aged white men. Was that it? Laughing. Smiling at us like we’re all on the same page. We did not actually see any women leave with any men. But we looked, simply because we do not understand. So much we do not understand.
Filed under travel
I am still dreaming of Madagascar.
Every night my lids are plump with images that have scattered by the morning like fragments of a jigsaw. Red earth, scorching and fumes, humble shacks. River banks clothed in fresh laundry spread to dry. Easy smiles framed by dimples, full of surprisingly perfect teeth. Children who come running as they see your car pass, cheerfully waving: “Bonjour, Vazaha!” And Lionel Richie (more on that later).
One thing the Malagasy do not lack are dimples, near perfect teeth and a welcome, sweet gentleness. Vazaha is pronounced ‘vaza’, and when the children greet you with gusto it comes out sounding like the old Bud Light commercial: Whazzuuuuuup?!
Vazaha means “stranger”, almost always meaning a white person. We laughed heartily at the idea of swapping places with them on the streets of America. Running out to their car, waving happily “Hello, black/Indonesian person!” But in a place like Madagascar, it felt like something richer. A rare moment of uncomplicated exchange, where there is nothing incorrect about naked curiosity. There was something settling about being observed as much as we were there to observe. Like the exchange we represented was of more than just tourist dollars. That impression remains precious.
We processed the vast differences in our worlds, and poked fun at ourselves, with a long-running challenge: what things do the Malagasy not need? That’s a hard one, not because they couldn’t use a lot, but because they already find clever ways to manage with…everything. Soda cans: made into model airplanes and cars. Empty water bottles: transport packaging and honey containers. Talk about reduce, reuse, recycle. These people have got it down.
Many items from infomercials got mentioned in our challange. The winner, by far, was a chain of gyms. To our surprise we did find one customer among those stuck in a life of back-breaking work: a man in bright red underwear performing his morning stretches on a giant boulder sticking up from a valley of rice terraces, for all to admire. That was lovely and strange. A winking show of vanity in a place where there is little time for such things. Good for him.
And then there’s Lionel Richie. Madagascar seems to have a thing for him. If you’ve ever wondered if there’s a place where old 80′s albums go to die, this is it. This is their afterlife. We were hoping to ride in our car to the sounds of local music. But (our driver claimed) there were rarely music stations along our roads. So Dancin’ on the Ceiling it was. And I heard it several places other than that, like the “cabaret” at Hotel/Bar Glacier. A little Beyoncé, too. But mostly Lionel. Ballerina Girl will be in my head for a long time, as I could not help but think of my home town friends-turned comedians Rhett & Link (who have a thing for that album). But I didn’t tell anyone about that. It seemed something else they didn’t need from me. But they probably would have smiled and politely found a use for it anyway.
(More Mada commentary to follow later this week…)
Filed under breast cancer
That’s precisely where I am, if you look at my calendar. Let me explain.
Did you ever make a lot of promises, not realizing how all the obligations would come together at once? That’s what happened to me this year. Except – although it won’t win me any band of wailing sympathizers for saying so – the promises I tend to make have to do with traveling. So for the last, oh, quarter of 2011, that’s where I’ve been. Keeping promises on the road. (My dear husband is very understanding!)
It started like this: every year I have two standing travel plans. I take one trip with my dad in the summer; this happens to be one of my most favorite things ever in life. If I’m even luckier, like this year, sisters (and/or husbands, kids) will decide to come too. The other standing plan, of course, is my husband’s vacation.
On the down side, these trips cannot be merged. In his current job, my husband’s vacation is split into two parts, tethered to the months of August and September. Dad is only open May-July. (So much for the fact that it’s 100x easier for me to travel in the shoulder/low season.) That makes three trips, de facto. On the other hand, this works out, because my husband doesn’t like to fly so much. He doesn’t like to fly over the ocean at all, although he will if strongly enticed. (Or appropriately drugged up. That works too.) So he’s very content for my father and I explore the Far and Away; hubby is thrilled to deal with the less-intrepid me.
But a year ago I also promised to look after my nieces in America for a few days (albeit another one of my favorite promises to fulfill), which happened to fall in August, then get postponed at the last moment until September. Hmmm. The calendar was getting crowded, but I could manage (…she said with determination).
Then came one of my best friends. To be fair, he’s been begging me to travel with him for years, but I’m always too booked up (see above). So this year I promised, with the stipulation that I only go for 4-5 days. I just couldn’t take more. “I couldn’t”. Unless it was like, Madagascar, or something, where I’ve wanted to go for 10 years. Oh what? You’re keen on Madagascar? October is the perfect month to go? Er, ok then. Maybe a bit longer. Wait, what? My other best friend wants to go too, and is already buying her tickets from America? *sigh* Fine. Two weeks it is. (Life is so hard…)
So that’s where I am. I just finished a week with hubby, where we did nothing but sit by a pool all week (and write some, yeay me); I have just two days before I leave to try and explore an island twice the size of the UK, where about 90% of the roads are unpaved, all in a span of two weeks.
Thank goodness I’d promised to relax by the pool for a week, even if it falls on the toes of the Far Place.
Filed under breast cancer
