Nine Gates of Asia

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© 2013 by Faruk Budak. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 01/29/2013

ISBN: 978-1-4817-8258-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4817-8257-9 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4817-8259-3 (e)

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Preface

Chapter 1   Starting My Journey

Chapter 2   India

Chapter 3   Nepal

Chapter 4   Burma

Chapter 5   Laos

Chapter 6   Cambodia

Chapter 7   Thailand

Chapter 8   Malaysia and Singapore

Chapter 9   Indonesia

Final Words

About the Author

To All The Travelers Living On This Planet…

Special Thanks To

LEA and LIEN, my guarding angels.

Filiz TASEL, My dearest friend, The author of Boiling The Bones,

The Founder of Nasha Foundation International,

Mama Nasha of so many Africans.

We have so much things to do before leaving this planet . . .

Nilgun OGUN, a NGO worker

Thank you so much . . .

Preface

My tour of twenty-two countries across Asia and Africa ended in Istanbul without incident fourteen months and twenty-two days after it began, also in Istanbul. A famous film director once said, I finished shooting the film in my head; now it is time to shoot it for others. For me, I have already been to these places and seen them; now it is time to share that with others. I spent long nights writing this book about the Asia leg of the trip.

I had been dreaming of this project since December 1999. It was something I just had to do during the transition phase after my military career, a duty to be fulfilled…

I wanted to share my experiences with other Turks during the journey but to do it in a way that did not demand anything in return. While researching my options, I came across the idea of creating the www.FarukBudak.com website and sharing the whole journey through Letters from the Road. I had to wait until I went to Amma’s Ashram in southern India to learn the English terminology of what I had in mind. Apparently, I had already embraced the selfless service concept and made my plans accordingly.

One of my goals throughout this journey was to visit the places on UNESCO’s World Heritage Sites list. Considering that there are over twenty places accepted as World Heritage Sites in India and adding in all the other places I wanted to see, I knew I had to travel at a very fast pace to squeeze it all into a seven-week period. Actually, when you look at the whole of my almost fifteen-month-long journey, I moved every 2.4 days. In other words, every 2.4 days I traveled to a new place—I moved very fast.

I have known for a long time that, just like dreams, some numbers are tremendously important in human life. One night, in the ninth month, I was woken up just before dawn. It was only then, a long time after I had visited the Borobodur Temple in Indonesia’s Java Island and the Bayon Temple in Cambodia’s Angkor, that I realized the significance of some of their architectural aspects that coincide with the number nine. I would like to stress that these interpretations are solely mine. It is also an interesting coincidence that even though I had planned to visit eleven countries in Asia, I could get permission to enter only nine—just like when you add up fourteen months and twenty-two days numerologically, you get the number nine as well.

I would like to conclude by saying that this journey, aside from its physical aspects, was a spiritual journey and this book was not written only by me. Yes, I was on my own—I alone lived all of this—but I was never alone while on the road. God and the heavenly angels were my companions. Since I believe a lot of their messages are given to us through dreams, I included in this book those who provided me with guidance, either before or during my journey. Those who have interpreted these dreams are also important, unusual beings.

Throughout the book, you will come across some important names. The most important among them is Shaen, my inner sense, the name of the soul that I have been with. Whenever I spoke with him, whenever I asked a question, I always received the right response. He was my best friend throughout this long and lonely journey.

Sedi is actually a human being, a lady with supernatural senses and the most important one in channeling my guardian angels. She was the spiritual leader of the journey. She sometimes sent emails and other times we spoke on the phone.

Lien and Lea are the names of angels who have accompanied me on this journey. Sevgi means love in Turkish, and it is the nickname of a lady, one of my best friends, someone who helped me, supported me, and motivated me. Blue is the name of another lady who commented on my dreams but would like to remain anonymous.

This book lays out what I saw, felt, and experienced during my long journey on Asia’s roads. But there is another journey hidden behind all this. It is all about how you choose to see things, what you are looking for. As 13th-century Muslim mystic Jalal ad-Din Rumi said, You are what you seek.

With love,

Faruk Budak

*     *     *

As I began my journey, there was only a single person to see me off at the small terminal in Atasehir, Istanbul, Turkey—a very old friend, Ebru Tandogdu.

The most important thing I knew at that time was that the me before the journey was not the same me who would return to my homeland at the end. This was not just a long trip to see different places but a spiritual journey with an important mission. I might have just been embarking on one of the stages of an internal journey to the depths of my soul to try and discover the real me. I could barely guess the things I was going to see.

How will the things I see be reflected in my inner being? What are the things I will discover in my inner self? These were the questions at the center of the adrenaline-filled sense of wonder and curiosity that gripped my soul. Despite the negative warnings of all my friends, I was ready to face any kind of problem I might encounter. I was not afraid or concerned and firmly believed that any problems would be tiny steps that needed to be overcome during my spiritual growth.

March 17: Istanbul to Ankara

I begin on the comfortable bus of a well-known firm traveling the 445 kilometers between Istanbul and Ankara. Sitting in a comfortable seat, I sip my coffee in contentment. I can’t help wondering where and when I will find such comfort again on my fourteen-month-long journey. I feel as much at ease as if I were on a routine Istanbul—Ankara trip. I don’t feel any anxiety or alarm; I am surprised at how calm I am. I figure I will wait and see what happens after the three-day stop in Ankara.

As I gaze at the scenery from the bus window, a dream I had recently flashes in my mind like lightning. I relive the dream I remember so vividly and in so much detail.

The Start of Everything

The first days after the 1986 New Year holiday started giving hints of a chain of negative events and disasters that would spread out over the whole year. The first huge shock was the death of my uncle together with his whole family in a traffic accident on the way from Bursa to Izmir. The death in this accident of my uncle’s smart young daughter of university age whom I loved very much shook me to the core, and accepting her loss was not easy for me.

During a routine checkup at the end of February, I was told there was the possibility of a very serious illness and was forced to follow a very trying diet. A lot of the food I love was put on the forbidden list. I was also badly affected by the mental exhaustion that came from working on the lengthy computer program at the heart of my PhD thesis and my attempts to try and monitor ten thousand variables.

Then, on top of everything else, I heard on the Friday before Father’s Day that my wife of nine (!) years wanted to end our marriage. By the end of summer, it was clear that the split was inevitable—the ending of the family unity that had been accomplished by years of sacrifice and hard work. I was truly at a loss. In the meantime, my younger sister underwent a serious operation and recovered with difficulty. The aftershocks created in my inner world by this chain of devastating incidents had left me totally frazzled.

I needed to rid myself of the effects of these problems and the resulting inner turmoil, and make a fresh start. I found real therapy and a fresh new start in the quiet and peaceful environment of Candarli on the Aegean coast. I returned rested and relaxed to my peaceful and happy self, and felt ready to turn a fresh new leaf in my life.

I met a lady writer, winner of the Orhan Kemal Story Award, during a nature walk near Ankara on the 29 of the ninth (!) month. Over the span of a month and a half, we had lengthy conversations on eight or nine nights that stretched until sunrise, and this opened up a totally different world full of mysteries to me before she disappeared from my life. I could feel radical changes taking place in the way I detected, thought, and comprehended. I changed and was renewed. That dear writer went out of my life in the same way that she came in…

The long Ankara winter when I was alone with myself and officially divorced turned into a nice phase where I restarted my PhD thesis all over again after an enforced six-month break and proceeded with great speed. When the date for the presentation of the thesis was set in June, I immediately started making plans for an overseas trip to reward myself. I decided that this had to be at least a three—to four-week trip, and the country I would go to would have to be interesting, but cheap and English-speaking.

All these restrictions pointed to the East where the sun rises. The choices before me included India, Nepal, Thailand, and Malaysia, but India started to come to the forefront. I was going to go to India…

My three-week-long trip to India in the summer of 1997 went without a hitch. I returned home after incredible experiences, with memories each more interesting than the last, and in an extremely happy mood. While I was still in India, I determined the route of the trip I would take the next summer: a five-week-long trip starting in Singapore in Southeast Asia, continuing on to Malaysia, and ending in Thailand.

*     *     *

A year later, I took that next trip. As I reached the last city on my itinerary, I took a small step on my larger journey. I experienced something I had never experienced before. The place was the bridge over the River Kwai in Kanchanaburi, Thailand: one of the key points on the railroad stretching deep into Burma that the Japanese planned during the Second World War.

My inner voice told me urgently to go to the bridge. As if I was being pulled by a giant magnet, I walked along the road from the center of town. I could not hold back the increasing urgency of my steps. Passing the museum on the left of the road and suddenly coming before the bridge, I felt a shiver run up and down my spine. The bridge stretched over the river like a black necklace.

As I walked across the bridge, thousands of kilometers away from my homeland, in the last hours of the day, a tremor from the depths of my soul made me think at length of the thousands of prisoners of war who lost their lives during the construction of this bridge. I felt unbelievably at peace as a result of the holy vibrations emanating from this place, the incredible silence and unparalleled beauty of the sunset.

Standing on the bridge, all of a sudden I started crying with a tremor rising from deep within me. Without any reason, I was crying, sobbing even, though not a single tear dropped from my eyes. It felt as if I was living the last moments before an incredible explosion, that my soul was going to break into atoms and leave me. I could barely control myself. It took a long time for me to get back to my normal self.

What was this spiritual earthquake? What was the meaning of this horrific tempest I experienced in the depths of my soul on this black steel bridge? Why, in whose name, and what did I lose that I keep crying like this in a place way over on the other side of Asia? I wondered if my inner self, the real me deep inside, remembered something. It was the first time I had experienced such a spiritual earthquake. I decided that to find the right answer, I needed to wait for the right time…

*     *     *

My goal in the summer of 1999 was Vietnam. This time, another friend from the army I had known for many years, Mahir Koseler, wanted to come with me. Despite the fact that our desire to go to Vietnam was met with justified suspicion at the highest levels of the military establishment, our five week long trip to this country that opened its borders to foreigners in 1994 passed wonderfully.

On the first day back in the office upon my return from Vietnam, I learned that I was going to be sent for a special six month long course in the U.S. In the first months of 2000, while in the U.S., a project gradually started forming in my mind to tour Africa from its southernmost tip to its northernmost point. To do this, I needed a period of at least six months. As I could not get leave for such a long time, I needed to leave the service. As I laid out my career plans, I planned to complete my PhD from an academic perspective and to reach the rank of colonel as the final point in my military career, then immediately give up my profession. Thus, the time to leave was gradually drawing near.

In the spring of 2001, my travel project had clearly taken shape. I would be leaving Turkey and going through the Middle East, crossing over to Africa and going as far south as Cape Town. I was going to need eight or nine months for this trip. I knew I was going to realize this trip anyway, but I also wanted to share it with the Turkish public along the way and set an encouraging example for the youth of Turkey. In trying to find an answer to this quandary, the idea of forming an email group started developing. I started to email my plans to various e-groups.

The number of members in the group started with two or three hundred and was soon almost a thousand. This was quite a joyous thing for me. I was getting a lot of emails filled with support, praise, and wishes for success, along with those who voiced their jealousy. There were also messages from people who wanted to join on the whole trip or a part of the trip. But this journey was something that must be experienced alone.

January 29: Last Month in the Countdown

Almost two months have passed, and my continuing silence means I have recently started to get emails from group members asking if I have decided to give up on this