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SmartyFella Michael Zack Bike Blog Post from South America

August 27, 2015 by Michael Zack Leave a Comment

A special thank you to SmartyFella Eric Hamaoui for the previous travel guest post from Europe.

While our indie production team attended the Silicon Valley Bike Summit for part 2 of our Emerging Transportation documentary, our South America bike correspondent gives us another travel narrative. Welcome back, SmartyFella Michael Zack! In honor of National Dog Day, here’s a puppy picture first.

South America Bicycle Blog Michael Zack

Photo Credit: Michael Zack’s Bike “Wolf” and dog “Tara”

My Wolf, carrying the “Moça Dourada” statue, makes it home safely; welcomed by Tara, our Pastor Alemão.  “Tara will never be hungry again!”
My friend Renee asked me to send some bike photos for her blog.  If only I had a camera there would be so much to send; I see cool bike things daily.

 

I was once an aspiring photographer, going so far as spending a year at junior college photography school.  But my temperament was very restless at the time; and by the time I had moved my photography equipment into the Washington Heights apartment of an actress who was about to premier her one-woman Broadway bound musical, a Jewish female version of Charles Bukowski’s Bar Fly, my cameras were seeing little use, (although I did capture Lady Bunny at Wigstock, when it was still in Tompkins Square Park), and I was downtown all day expediting building permits for Helen Frankenthaler’s remodel of her Carnegie Hill brownstone, I had lost my creative drive.

 

New York, it’s often described as the concrete jungle where you see stars in the street, but not in the sky.  I never did meet Helen Frankenthaler, the great Abstract Expressionist, but years later I did walk past her secret unmarked grave on a Bennington College hillside.  She is as abstract in death as in her art, I guess we could say.

 

However bright my hopes for a new NYC life were burning, with my roommate’s  decade-long gestation about to sparkle off-off-Broadway (the “Plan B” after a lifetime gig on Tina & Tony’s Wedding didn’t pan out, as I always recall when I see it STILL advertised in the NYTimes), I was making my home one day, walking past the carcasses of the cars lining the streets upper Manhattan in random degrees of dismemberment (greasy men where always leaning under the hoods “collecting” parts), I found the apartment door ajar, the place ransacked for anything worth taking, and my one-ticket out of Miss Bar Fly’s apartment stamped.  It was official, I was not going to be a photographer.

 

Being two middle-class kids making it in the city there was stuff to take, digital alarm clocks, a blender, her luggage, my cameras.  I was blamed for the robbery, because I had brought a trick home the previous week. But I still think it was the building superintendent, because SHE gave him the keys to do something in the apartment that week, too.  But I did put a suspicion over my head (he told me he was a Dr. from New Jersey, but who really knows), and I moved to the unfashionable side of Williamsburg, the Italian side.

 

I’m a fatalist, so that ended my interest in photography.

 

Actually, this was 1989 and at that time, all of Williamsburg was unfashionable.  No self-respecting Italians would live there, but I was endlessly fascinated seeing the neighborhood white women rounding up the all the kids in the afternoon, grabbing a baseball bat, and go around marauding through the neighborhood scaring someone (I never did see) out of “nostra” neighborhood. It was kind of like a Mickey Mouse Club for the Misguided. Our African-American friends were always attacked coming to visit us in that neighborhood.

 

I didn’t miss those cameras, but I really should have photographed those women, now that I think of it.

 

I have had no camera, since 1989. I do remember in the mid-nineties buying those plastic disposable 35mm cameras though.  I like those.

 

Coupled to that, I lost my cell phone and have been cell-free since last Carnival Tuesday when I jumped into a cab with a friend to go visit her friend, who runs a bar in front of her house, who took some time during our visit to do lines of coke on the counter.  Counter, not the Bar, I guess you have to wait until after closing to see that.

 

I’m nervous around coke, I associate it with impending bankruptcy.

 

I’m nervous enough without coke, so it’s nothing I want to try a 2nd time. The first time I tried it, a very cool Hep Cat Jazz Bass Player at one of the cooler Michigan State Co-Op Houses shared a line.  My heart beat so fast I thought I was going to die.  I was really concerned, for a minute or two.
I don’t know, the next day my cell phone was gone, I didn’t bother to look for it.  It was a sign of fate.

 

So I went cell-free.

 

I hope to buy a tablet some day.

So when Renee told me about her bicycle blog, I immediately wanted to share photos of all the cool bicycling people, the bicycle things I see in Goiânia, Brazil, a city where the 1st world meets the 5th, a tropical Dallas where millionaire farmers live in penthouses, where bicycles are great cheap transportation for people and cargo.

Michael & Thiago

Photo Credit: Odilon Vasconcelos Writer Michael Zack & Downhill Bicyclist Thiago

 

The way Critical Mass and SF Bike Coalition parties made bicycling an ethnic/gang thing in San Francisco, I can see the same increase here in camaraderie amongst bicyclists, and with our friend riding inside cars.  I can see that happening here.  Sunday Streets is here, too.

 

Goiânia used to be a motorcycle city, and it still is (as you see lots of people limping around with metal cages with pins drilled into their legs to show it), but more and more people have either cars or bicycles.  I think the percentage of Motorcycles to cars is going down, and motorcycles to bicycles is way down.    Bicycling has exploded in the last 10 years, with so many good bike shops opening.  A front-page newspaper article I saw the other day read (I think, my Portuguese is weak) that by cycling you can save 500 bucks a month, and that is the reason bicycling is becoming practically the only good option a lot of people have. If you have to take 3 or 4 buses to get to work and pay $3.30 each ride, with no free transfer except at terminals, and no monthly discount pass, riding a bike starts to make a lot of sense.  The buses are a private thing, who knows where the money goes.  Brazilians don’t know how anything works, they just know it works badly, so what’re you going to do?  So that’s the way it is; co-incidentally similar to the arrangement Catholics have with The Church, “Who’s to know, who’s to say?”

 

Folks will transport almost anything on a bicycle here; including a whole family if need be, or it’s Sunday.  Yesterday, I pedaled past a guy carrying tall wood cabinet strapped on the back, vertically. That’s very top heavy.  He looked very proud, “bummer, no camera”, I was thinking to myself, but gave him a Goiano thumbs up,   “bem feito cara”

 

Groceries are delivered by bicycle; grocery cargo bikes are very cool and I am  saving up for one.

 

I have been living without a car, doing my daily commuting across the city by bicycle (or by bus when it’s raining) and transporting almost everything on the back of my bike, in orange panniers. People ask me where I get my panniers, ALL THE TIME.

 

As Renee is a long time friend I first met in MBA class I know she will indulge and appreciate the following. A tip for all you entrepreneurs out there, a word for you Kid – “Panniers”.

 

I might not have a hot body, but I’ve got some great Panniers, orange and old (like The Donald), and they get a lot of positive attention, and people ask where I got them, and I tell them I think they made it here from Os Estados Unidos.   If I was going to start a bike line, I would start with a great bike bag/pannier. Maybe in denim.  The bike messenger bag will never go out of style. Denim too, for that matter.

 

This past month, I carried 8 foot lengths of steel rebar to build a stone wall, a 20 kilo bag of dog food, and a golden statue of a woman, on my bike
I love bicycling, riding through the balmy air; but in truth it’s an economic necessity, and it’s also often faster than driving would be, because I weave through traffic, go through red-lights, jump on the sidewalk when need be.

 

My favorite bike advantage: riding against one-way traffic.

 

I’m cool because I am a cell-phone free, iWatch free Bicyclist. When I’m out in the city, nobody can F’in call me -to paraphrase Faye Dunaway in Barfly.

 

 
 
Moca DouradaPhoto: Odilon Vasconcelos Golden Lady – The “Moça Dourada”

Bicycle Touring Through Morocco: A Literary Travel Memoir

November 29, 2014 by Michael Zack Leave a Comment

Morocco bicycling tour Michael Zack

Photo Credit: Michael Zack bicycling in High Atlas Mountains by Photographer Rob Bregoff

Pedaling Nowhere Writer Logan Watt’s article “Bikepacking Morocco” is just one of the signs that bike touring in Morocco is becoming more popular with cyclists. What if you retraced the steps of your favorite writers on a travel adventure too? SmartyFella Michael Zack did just that. Here’s his story.

There is something that we want to find, some experience calling us, when we set-out to travel.  From the first step confidence as to what that is diminishes, and it not far down the road that we’re reminded again that it’s the journey, not the destination, that leaves a lasting impression.

In the spring of 1995 I boxed my touring bicycle in San Francisco and re-assembled it in the Casablanca Airport, and rode out of the airport, past people working in the fields who smiled and waved. I learned two things quickly: to defend myself from less welcoming dogs with the help of my tire-pump and to carry some stones. Marrakesh was to be my home for five months and I ended up riding over the High Atlas Mountains with my invincible friend Rob Bregoff. We were just beginning a five year domestic affair. We made it to the mountain pass and to Zagora “the door to the Sahara”, but we, like so many other couples, couldn’t make it past Y2K.

I first went to Morocco in 1991 to find the American writer Paul Bowles. Leaving the Joe Orton Diaries incriminatingly underneath my childhood bed, I landed by boat in Tangier and checked into the waterfront youth hostel. Two days later I had given up any hope that I would summon the courage to ask around to find Paul Bowles, occupied in my head with what I would actually say to Paul Bowles should I meet him (I had nothing really to say), and questioning “what on earth he would have to say to me? The whole literary world comes knocking at his door”.  Instead, I humbly went forward to Marrakech to see for myself some of the North African life I experience in Paul Bowles novels The Sheltering Sky, Let it Come Down and The Spider’s House, and most evocatively found in his short stories.

I never did meet Paul Bowles, but this past spring I spent two months sleeping in my parent’s Michigan basement, reading everything on my Mother’s bookshelf and on “Michael’s table” where she keeps all the books I’ve given her because my Mother is determined that my legacy will include the return of every gift I’ve given her.

My Mother kept suggesting I read Paul Theroux’s The Pillars of Hercules, “it’s down there on the shelf.” She loves his writing, me not so much.  He’s quick: can sum-up a place in the comment of an old man working in a Tabac that sells porno. Wherever he is, he’s always checking-out the porno, taking the temperature of a repressive nation.  It’s a series of events that are only related in that they happen to him; but it’s travel writing, and carefully observed for what it is, and easily dismissed as obviously having been better to stay at home, so it’s wildly popular.

Tangier Morocco Passport Stamp

Photo Credit: Michael Zack’s Passport Stamp for Tangier

Upon reading the premise of the thick hardcover on the torn dust-jacket with the picture of the Amalfi Coast, I was hooked.  Paul travelled by land and sea around the coast of the Mediterranean, from one of the Pillars in Southern Spain to the other in Morocco, a journey that would take him through Europe, Asia and Africa.  Hooked, because in the autumn of 1995 Rob Bregoff and I had an unforgettable lunch of really giant prawns at a table positioned on a little carved out spot on the Pillar, just above the crashing surf of the Atlantic.

When Rob landed in Tangier for our bicycle journey to the Sahara, I waited for him in my room with a view of the harbor in the Continental Hotel, a Moorish palace where Bernardo Bertolucci filmed some of The Sheltering Sky.  I didn’t know what boat he would arrive on, so I arrived a couple days early, and Rob was a couple days late, leaving me a long time to watch the ferries come and go, and lay around the empty ornate hotel lobby rooms thinking about Bernardo Bertolucci, and strolling The Kasbah and all over the slightly menacing city. Rob arrived, and before we took the night train to Marrakech we rode over to newly late Malcolm Forbes’ frothy abode – with all the glamour of a Hollywood set – now Forbes’ Toy Soldier Museum, undoubtedly a tax-exempt charity run by his heirs.  Peddling West, from this not so subtle re-imagining of Christian domination over the Islamic world, we came to the Pillars of Hercules, and those jumbo shrimp.

Would Paul get there?  Would he order the shrimp?  So, I read through the 500 pages as Paul weaved his way around the political hot spots of the region. And he finally does get to Tangier. Not as I had imagined, by way of Algeria, but back across the Straights of Gibraltar, from where he began, arriving on a ferry boat, just like we all did.

The magical moment for me is when he goes and looks up Paul Bowles. Paul meets Paul; “I know your books” Bowles greets him and invites him in, and recounts again, for the record, that it was Gertrude Stein in 1931 who suggested he go to Tangier, for the boys, and the tax-free cigarettes, and it was he alone who could stand the place (for very long), so he stayed.

As the audience waned, they smoked some hand rolled cigarettes of The Rifs finest, floated away into their own worlds, and Theroux end up walking the alleys of The Kasbah until he stumbles upon writer Mohammed Choukri who Paul Bowels translated into English and “introduced to the world”, and got published his novel For Bread Alone.  Mohammed was a little drunk, a little surly, and basically summed-up Bowles as patrician, and cheap, “In twenty-one years he has not bought me even one cup of coffee”.

So there I have it, in 2014 I completed my journey I set out on in 1991, to visit Paul Bowles in his legendary Tangier apartment, where he died in 1999.

I didn’t do it, but someone else did,, and wrote about it.  And if my Mom hadn’t given me the book, sold me on it really, I would not have ended this journey so comfortably, in the comfort of my bed (with it’s perfect reading lamp), in the interior of Brazil. Thanks Mom!

 

Michael Zack Travel Guide Morocco

Photo Credit: SmartyFella Michael Zack Passport Photo 1995

Michael Zack is a writer currently in South America. Renee and Michael became friends on an asphalt basketball court in grad school. Renee believes Michael and his layups are invincible.

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