Visitors in the land of the magic bus

Is it the Puritan Ethic that plants itself between our child-like inclinations for bright fancy and the manifestation of vehicles such as the trucks and buses of Pakistan?  Seeing my first episode of Michael Palin's BBC series, HIMALAYA, last night I was seized by a strong hankering, not experienced until now, to know a culture in which we could travel about surrounded by walls of image and color and be considered normal.  Ken Kesey did stand out in a crowd.

The Merry Pranksters, on the road in America.

Pakistani bus/truck art.  Photo copyright Umair Mohsin.  More photos here.

I've watched many of Palin's travel series, admiring his ease in discomfiting situations, his lack of resistance to the range and diversity of this planet and its life forms.  Though, as he admits in an introductory promo, their stays are brief, he and his crew introduce us to distant communities, intentionally revealing them as our fellows, not as curiosities.  He expresses concern that the mere presence of outsiders may change a way of life and not for the better.

In this episode, we're invited to see a polo match and festival for 10,000 villagers, held on a plain more than 12,000 feet up.  Not having traveled outside my home state all that much, I find something within me expands as I am introduced to my world on a wider scale.   Like a visit to the Planetarium,  an armchair journey alters the scale of what I think I know.  Rather than feeling diminished by my own minor participation in a whole too big to comprehend, I experience a sense of connectedness to the remote, even the infinite.

One of the two languages I speak is color.  When I find it appreciated, applied in ways not seen on the streets of Los Angeles,  I take notice.  While I seem to be descended from people of a more limited palette, my years of sunshine, oranges, hydrangeas, hibiscus and geraniums in red clay pots have caused a mutation. What about marigold as the base color for my Honda?  It seems a good place to begin.