The seeds of our destiny are nurtured by the roots of our past.
Until this blog post, I always thought of Salisbury Hill. Salisbury Plain includes Stonehenge.
My friends already knew I was a nut. Besides, what's so great about turning water into whine?
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I was negotiating a ride with one of the rickshaw pullers in a large city on the north coast of Sumatra. He gave me a good price in exchange for him sitting in the rickshaw with my luggage, while I pulled the rickshaw.
I was hitchhiking around Southeast Asia, and I had A LOT of luggage, including a business suit, my waterski and waterskiing gear. The rickshaw driver and I became fast friends. He invited me to stay the night at his place.
He lived in an assortment of lowslung buildings with his friends, pictured. The floors were dirt or rough concrete. There was a well, and a place to wash oneself. Many of them were university students. They were having difficulty finding advanced mathmatics textbooks. One of the guys gave me a long list of extraordinarily complex mathmatics books. I promised I would send them some of the texts when I returned to school in Connecticut. I never did. I never even tried. White men's promises.
My accomodation on Samosir. Samosir is an island in a volcanic crater which forms Lake Toba. Lake Toba is the second largest lake in the world by volume. The island has no motor vehicles. I rented that entire bungalow for about US$10 a day in 1993. One of the few places I have seen that is almost Shangri-La.
