American girl travels the globe

Yankee moves to the American South

2010-05-21T14:35:00.013-06:00

Here's where the journey comes to an end. After 2 years covering the Middle East, Asia and Australia, I'm now back in America and settling into a brand-new city. Perhaps my next story, on a blog to come, will tell the tale of a Yankee who moves to the American South. My new life consists of people who tip their cowboy hats and call me "ma'am" when we pass on the sidewalk. Welcome to the great state of Georgia, where everything is peachy-keen, and nothing beats a tall glass of iced sugary-sweet tea.

I encourage you to read through the older posts on this blog, especially those written in Egypt and India, which tell some of the most colorful tales.

Walkin' on pavement

2010-05-14T22:52:00.009-06:00

If The Onion newspaper -- a satirical paper that prints fake, funny news -- had an Australia edition, it would probably headline:

Last intersection in country filled in with circle.

Australians seem to have an aversion to intersecting lines. Everywhere -- even quiet suburban streets in tucked-away neighborhoods -- have "roundabouts" where there should be intersections. I suppose they may see this as posh European design, or perhaps as a good opportunity to never test their brakes. Occasionally, I can see the merit in the occasional tasteful roundabout. But the Australians have really gotten carried away with this. They've even begun creating "figure 8's" -- a roundabout that opens directly into another roundabout.

There's a figure 8 down the street from my sister Aruna's house in Sydney, which I walk past everyday on my way to somewhere in the neighborhood: the library, the park, the childcare center, the train station. In fact, I do a lot of walking these days, which leads me to this conclusion:

When this trip ends and I re-enter the "real world," the hardest thing to readjust to will be walking on pavement.

I started walking on pavement when I reached Sydney. Aruna Di’s house is in a neighborhood designed for pedestrians, with wide sidewalks large enough for two people heading in opposite directions, each pushing strollers, to pass by comfortably. This is a massive improvement over the suburbs and exurbs designed around the idea that no one will ever walk; where the narrow sidewalks end abruptly if they exist at all. Having usable sidewalks is a major blessing.

Still, after months on dirt and sand, my legs aren’t used to stepping on hard pavement surfaces, and my knees are hurting from the impact. Normally I wouldn’t mention this – as my knees are sensitive and prone to aches – but Sara’s knees are hurting as well, and hers are normally as healthy as can be. “This isn’t normal for my knees,” she says. “It’s definitely the pavement.”

Still, I can’t complain. One of the biggest blessings about staying inside a house instead of a car is that you don’t remain in one position for several hours a day, or have to apply pressure to your joints as you maneuver in and out of tight spaces.
As a result, your body becames far less stiff. With the migration toward ceilings that allows you to stand up, and a little help from a Wii Fit, you even notice your posture improving again.

Living in a house rather than a car -- complete with luxuries such as showers and tea kettles -- is amping us up for re-entering the workforce.

We sold the car for less than we wanted, largely because I have a job waiting for me in the U.S. and I wanted to rush back to re-start my life, and didn't feel like waiting around many more weeks while my life is put on hold.

In the end the car ... after you include resale loss, repairs, servicing, towing insurance, title transfer, sales tax and tools bought ... came to an out-of-pocket net expense of $2500 for 6.5 months of use. In other words, it costs the two of us about $50 per week per person.

Add this to the food/fuel/cost-of-living of $22 to $25 per day per person ($154 to $175 per week), and you end up with a weekly expense total ranging between $200 to $225 per person - in other words, around $1000 per person per month.

And all these calculations are done in Australian dollars -- so minus 10 percent and you have the cost in US Dollars ($900 per month per person).

That's not bad for half a year of 4-Wheel-Driving around the great Outback desert of Australia. :-)

That figure represents such frugality as buying everything secondhand, eating the cheapest groceries (goodbye, blueberries -- hello, pasta), not having health insurance, sharing rides with other backpackers for extra gas money, and spending 3 weeks at the end of the trip selling off everything from our sleeping bags to our prepaid mobile phone.

On the other hand, that figure also represents such extravagances as chartering a boat out to an undeveloped island in the Whitsundays where we were the only people on a white-sand beach and we could snorkel with giant sea turtles over vibrant coral reef. Which, let's not forget, is the reason we're in Australia in the first place.

Two years ago, I had never snorkeled in my life; now I've seen some of the most beautiful scuba and snorkel areas in the world, from the Gulf of Aqaba to the Indonesian tropics to the Great Barrier Reef. Two years ago, I had never 4-Wheel-Drove through deep sand dunes, or studied the tides to decide whether or not it was safe to camp in a certain spot on the beach.

So when people hear about my adventure and say, "whoa, you must be rich!" I just smile and wonder -- would they ever believe me if I told them the true cost?

Now entering No-Mans-Land

2010-04-11T18:56:00.002-06:00

We’re heading into the Red Center of Australia; the most remote place on earth excluding Antarctica. There is a lake that we will be driving past – Lake Eyre – that is bigger than the Netherlands. Can I repeat that? One single lake is bigger than Holland. And that lake is only the smallest dot on the map of Central Australia. There are simply no words to describe how desolate this landscape is.

I’ve programmed this blog entry to post a few weeks after I’ve written it, because I don’t anticipate being close to internet for several weeks. By the time you read this, we will already be deep into the desert. We’ve stacked our car with canned foods, dried noodles, jars of pasta sauce, raw beans. We’ve loaded 40 liters of water into the back of the car, and strapped 60 extra liters of fuel to the roof.

We’ve stocked up on 6 bottles of sunblock, 2 spare tires, a 4-wheel-drive tire patch kit, and an extra tire inner tube. We’ve double-checked every fluid level in the car, including the battery fluid (until last week, I didn’t even know there IS fluid in a car battery that occasionally needs refilling). In short: we’re prepared – or at least I hope we’re prepared – to enter a land where there is nothing available to us. No phone service, no food, not even a tree for shade. This is truly the Outback desert; more remote than the Sahara. This is as “out there” as it gets.

This will be our last big hurrah in Australia. After our desert adventure is finished, we’ll head back to Sydney into a life of tranquil domesticity: playing with my nieces, baking cookies, and selling off everything we’ve collected over the past year -- our solar panel, our camp stove, and most importantly, our 4-wheel-drive Nissan.

I write this from Port Augusta on April 2. From here, we’ll head north to Coober Pedy – a “big city” of 4,000 people -- to spend Easter weekend with some locals we met in Koolunga who own an opal mine in Coober. (It’s not as impressive as it sounds. There are so many opal mine shafts in Coober Pedy that owning one is as simple as sticking pegs in the ground and declaring it yours. The land is so abundant that it’s free – first come, first served.)

After Easter weekend, we’ll head further north, toward Uluru, the most sacred place in Australia to the Aborigional people. I’ll write about Uluru in more detail later. From there, we may or may not head to Alice Springs before beginning the real adventure: the Oodnadatta Track, a week-long journey on unpaved road that takes us past salt flats, hot springs and lone trees in unmanned lunar landscapes. This track will lead us to Lake Eyre – the lake that is larger than Holland – before eventually leading us back to civilization, back to our starting point, Port Augusta, where we plan on celebrating our return to society with a dinner at the hippest restaurant in town, “Barnacle Bill’s.” With a name like that, you know it must be swank.

Where is the Outback?

2010-03-31T22:06:00.000-06:00

Where, exactly, is the Australian Outback?

No one knows. There is no border between the Outback and civilization, no line on the map. You won’t drive under a large wooden gate that says, “Welcome to the Outback! Food services ahead.” If you tell Australians that you’re heading into the Outback, they’ll give you a quizzical look and ask what you mean.

The Outback is best described as a vast, empty, barren, desolate desert. But then, Australia is best described with those same words. While international attention focuses on the country’s populated east coast – both Sydney and Melbourne have hosted the Olympics – and Australian folklore focuses on the beach-and-barbeque lifestyle of its city slickers, the bulk of the country is uninhabited.

By “uninhabited,” I don’t just mean it consists of small towns. I mean it’s truly a no-mans-land. There are spaces larger than the state of Colorado that don’t have a single road running through it. To paraphrase travel writer Bill Bryson: it is impossible to exaggerate the scale of the Australian Outback.

In South Australia, where we are now, there is a single cattle station -- I repeat, just one of many many cattle stations -- that by itself is larger than the nation of Belgium.

The other day my friend and I thought about taking our 4-wheel-drive across the Simpson Desert, a 68,145 square mile (176,500 square kilometer) swath of nothingness. The trip, we realized, would require about 8 to 10 days. We’d need to carry all our water with us.

Allowing five liters per person per day in the desert heat, we’d need 100 liters (26.4 gallons) minimum just to survive, assuming we don’t have any unexpected delays or leaks. We’d also need the same amount of extra fuel strapped to our roof. And that’s just the beginning. We’d need all the tools and knowledge to handle a car breakdown in the middle of a moonscape, a blazing desert in which – not to sound melodramatic – our bodies may never be found.

The Australians refer to this knowledge as “bush mechanics” – the ability to get your car running when you’re at least 400 kilometers from the nearest human being. Here it is an essential skill.

Ultimately we voted against the Simpson Desert, thanks to the cyclones that slammed into Australia’s northeastern coast in mid-March, causing flooding in the desert that results in vehicles getting bogged down to their axles in wet sand. This is just another reminder that if the "ordinary" conditions in the desert don't kill you, and freak cyclone, wild animal or any number of other bizzare natural activities might.

To I need to illustrate any further? The Australian Outback is harsh, unforgiving terrain. It’s no wonder that Aussie culture – like the Americans – celebrates radical self-reliance.

But even without venturing into the Simpson Desert, the Outback is all around. It is alluring and terrifying. Its appeal is unavoidable. Young Australians see treacherous Outback crossings as a coming-of-age ritual. Mature Australians undertake it as a challenge, and a way to connect with their land.

We constantly marvel at Australia’s “grey nomads,” the sunburned retirees we see adjusting the valves on their dust-encrusted Landcruisers. Contrary to the popular image of most retirees, these 60-somethings know exactly how to weld a cracked hose in the middle of nowhere; they heat their shower water off their car batteries; they can change two tyres before lunch.

They are lured into the Outback time and time again – at great expense and inconvenience -- because its power is raw. The Outback may be a killer, but it makes any traveler feel alive.

A Day in the Life

2010-03-20T00:54:00.006-06:00

A day in the life ….

It’s impossible to sleep after sunrise, no matter how groggy you feel. Once the sun peeks over the horizon, its rays glare through your car window, beaming into your eyes. In a car, there are no curtains or blinds to grant you a reprieve. You squeeze your eyes shut and pull a sleeping bag over your head, but your car – made from a combination of steel and glass – becomes mercilessly hot.

Imagine the feeling of climbing into your car on a summer afternoon, beads of sweat forming on your thighs where they touch the seat. You turn the ignition just for the pleasure of basking in the air conditioned breeze, and you silently curse yourself for not parking in the shade.

Now, imagine living in that car night and day. Imagine snoozing through the frosty nights in a feather-filled sleeping bag, and waking to see your cold breath condensed in moist droplets on the windows. Imagine that in the pre-dawn light, your condensed breath is illuminated by a climbing sun rising over the great Australian desert, promising yet another scorching day. By 7 a.m., the sun has climbed another five inches on the horizon, and it is already hot enough to boil you out of your glass-and-steel home.

Being not-quite 5 feet 2 inches, I have an easier time climbing out of our wooden platform bed than Sara does. I flip onto my stomach, pull my knees into my chest, and crouch down into a fetal position, careful to keep my head low to avoid slamming it into the ceiling, an all-too-familiar feeling. From this position, I slowly shift my body weight backwards, towards my butt, while pulling my knees further forward until I’ve somersaulted onto my back, with my feet pointing towards the windshield. From this angle, I can slide forward into the front seat through the center console area. I land with a thud in the passenger seat, and then start groping around for a change of clothes and a toothbrush. I clean my teeth while sitting in the passenger’s seat, and spit toothpaste out from the window.

Usually we’re parked somewhere out in the desert, far from paved roads, cellular coverage, or electrical grids, which means I don’t need to worry about another car driving by while I’m changing from warm nighttime clothes into cool daytime garb. But we’ve driven through enough cities – and slept on the sides of enough downtown streets -- that I’ve become an expert at changing entire outfits from the comfort of the front seat within ten seconds flat, if the situation demands it.

Sara, being much taller, has to execute a far more difficult maneuver than I do. Too gangly, too long-limbed, to crawl through the center console area, Sara has to reach through the wooden planks of the bed-shelf, cramming her hand through the narrow gaps, and feel around for the door handle with the tips of her fingers. When she finds it, she gives it several tugs – without the benefit of using her wrist for leverage -- until one of these fingertip-tugs is strong enough to release the door. She scoots her torso sideways, bending at the waist while still lying down, until her head and shoulders poke out of the door. Then she reaches up, grabs the roof rack, and executes a pull-up, the kind that makes a high school gym teacher proud. Her full body weight hangs from the roof rack, supported only by her biceps and triceps, while she disgorges her legs from the platform bed and pulls her knees outside the door.

“It’s a great arm workout; my abs are getting tighter, too,” she says. “I’d just prefer I didn’t have to pump iron before I’ve had a chance to pee.”

Once we’ve executed the difficult climbing-out-of-bed manouvers, the next hurdle is breakfast. Before we can start this, we have to consider at least half a dozen factors, not least of which are location and weather. Are we in a city, parked in some residential neighborhood and trying to appear discreet? Are we in a national park, and – if so – are we allowed to be there, or do we need to flee before a ranger finds us? Or are we more than 50 kilometers away from the nearest sleepy hamlet of shacks, more than 200 kilometers from the nearest petrol station, in a remote zone where we won’t have to worry about seeing another human soul for at least several hours, if not days?

Equally as important is to consider how the weather conditions affect the chances of our breakfast becoming a failure or success. If it’s raining, then obviously, we have to go hungry. Fortunately it doesn’t rain much in the barren Australian desert, so long as you avoid the wet season in the north. Mostly, we’re thinking about sun and wind. If it’s too windy, then no matter how many wind barriers you build around your stove – and you can erect pot lids, pans, books, you can even throw yourself on top of the stove – nothing will prevent high winds from extinguishing your fire and leaving you with a pot of cold water that will never convert to tea.

Sun is less of a problem, at least for me, because my naturally brown skin resists burning, but poor pale Sara – whose ancestry is British and Irish – could easily turn beet-red and blister before the eggs are fried and the toast has been toasted. The Australian sun is unforgiving. The skin cancer rates in Australia are higher than anywhere – and I repeat, anywhere – in the world. The indigenous, the Aboriginals, have very dark skin, closely resembling the darkest-skinned sub-Saharan Africans.

Australia is not a land intended for the fair British complexion. And most people here have the luxury of cooking breakfast indoors, brushing their teeth indoors, reading books and sorting their photos and painting their toenails indoors. Not Sara and I. We are exposed to the sun at every waking moment of every day, and no matter how much we try to avoid it – driving around in search of shade, wearing wide-brimmed hats and long sleeves – the sun always wins.

We’ve thrown out conventional sunblock and replaced it with zinc oxide. We slather so much zinc that our faces are streaked with creamy white. Sand and dirt clings to its greasy surface. We have no sink to wash our faces. But in the middle of the day, the sun is so strong we have to re-apply zinc oxide again, making our bodies greasier, and attracting even more sand and dirt to cling to us. We fall asleep grubby, wake up, and repeat the process, smearing another layer of zinc over the previous day’s layers, ignoring the pimples that have popped up in protest.

But no matter. My face still browns, and Sara’s face still burns. It is the natural consequence when everything you do, from changing your socks to cleaning your contact lenses, happens under the full and angry sun.

After grabbing a pair of sunglasses – and there are always at least 4 or 5 sunglasses laying on the dashboard – Sara will climb partway up the car, unhook the straps around the tarpaulin, and fish the camping stove out from the roof rack. She’ll hand me the stove, followed by the bottle of liquid propane, and a chair with wooden armrests which we use as a countertop for the stove. She’ll dig the hose from the back of the car and connect the gas bottle to the stove, while I rummage through the cardboard boxes lining our bed for bread, eggs, tea and ginger, and pry a milk crate out from underneath our bed.

All our kitchen gear is stored in this milk crate – pots, pans, forks, spoons, spatula, a can opener, a cheese grater, a mesh filter, plates, bowls, metal cups, plastic cups, even a pair of tongs we never use because most of Australia has enacted strict fire bans. To make all this cookware fit into a single milk crate (we use a second milk crate for storing salts, sauces and spices), we have to stack them in a very specific, very precise manner. The Teflon pot goes in first, the stainless steel pot fits inside of that, and so on.

This precise stacking is easy when everything is clean, but dishwashing can only happen when we have access to running water. If we’re in the remote outback, we don’t want to use our precious drinking water for something as superfluous as washing. Not to sound melodramatic, but we may need that water for survival, particularly if anything happens to the car and we end up stuck, alone, in the middle of a barren desert, where whole days might pass by without another person driving along whom we can ask for help. We are often a 10-hour drive from the nearest mobile phone signal, a 2-hour drive from the nearest paved road, and light-years away from more drinking water.

And so we stack dirty dishes on top of other dirty dishes, until everything shares a similar level of grime, of tomato sauce and coffee grounds and shreds of carrot. Our morning tea is always served with a visible layer of canola oil, leftover in the pot from cooking dinner the night before.

If we’ve just been to a grocery store, we might have some perishables with us, special treats like yogurt or cheese or lettuce that we have to eat immediately before it goes bad. Many days, our eating decisions are governed not by what we desire, but by what is due to spoil next. Sara and I both specialize in different daily chores, and my business is to have an up-to-the-minute mental inventory of every food item in our car, and where it stands in the Spoilage Queue. “What’s for dinner tonight?,” Sara might ask, and I’ll think for a minute. “Mandatory cabbage, carrot and green bean; they’ll be rotten by tomorrow,” I’ll say. “We have enough rice to make that into a stir-fry, though we’re out of garlic and the ginger has gone bad. Or we could mix it into a pasta; we need to finish that open bottle of sauce before it goes off, too.”

Sara, meanwhile, is an expert at examining the bread for mold. We don’t mind a little mold. We tell ourselves it strengthens the immune system. But it’s her job to decide how much mold is too much, which she does through a carefully-crafted system of visual and olfactory examination. She’ll hold a piece of bread up to the light, squint, shake her head from side to side to look at it from different angles, and put each piece of bread through two separate smell tests: pre-toasting and post-toasting.

Sara is also in charge of risk mitigation. She noticed that the knife blades were poking out from the open sides of the milk crates, easily ready to stab us through the palm if we grabbed the milk crate without first studying it carefully. It was especially dangerous to grab the milk crate at night, when we cook dinner by the glow of a flashlight strapped to our foreheads.

She solved the problem with three tools: her pocket knife, cardboard from boxed wine, and electrical tape, which she combined to make a sheath that would cover the knife blade. Now all our kitchen knives have the same safety dressing as King Arthur’s sword or a Khukuri blade – ours is just made of cardboard.

The lack of available running water means that we also go for days – sometimes weeks – without a shower. In colder climates, like Tasmania, this isn’t a big deal. It is amazing how quickly 16 days without a shower begins to feel normal. But in hot zones, which is to say everywhere in Australia that isn’t Tasmania, the layers of dirt, grime and sweat accumulate much more quickly. After 3 or 4 days, we can smell ourselves.

After 7 or 8 days, we can’t. Our hair begins to itch, and then flake, and when we scratch it, we can see layers of dirt falling out. After 10 days, I sometimes wake up in the middle of the night with an itchy scalp, and lay in my sleeping bag for hours scratching.

It’s at this point that the need to cleanse overtakes any desire to do anything else. I demand that we drive 75 kilometers to the next dot on the map that’s “big” enough to merit a name, which usually turns out to be a collection of 12 dilapidated wooden shacks. There’s no bodega or food mart, no petrol station – that’s another 100 kilometers down the road –but it does, thank God, thank God, it does have a little water tap coming up from the ground, and when you turn the knob, transparent brown water, stinking of rust and sulfur, sprays out. It’s not safe to drink, but at least it will stop your scalp from itching.

Sometimes we hit the jackpot, and find a park with a public restroom. These always have handicapped stalls, in which we can lock the door and have total privacy. We can really bathe in the sinks of these handicapped stalls. This is where I scrub my feet – really SCRUB them in a way I’ve never scrubbed anything before. I scrub the skin around the heels, near my ankle bone, and watch dark brown flakes wash off it. I scrub in between my toes, and watch it change color. I scrub the balls of my feet, watching brown suds form. Then I rinse, and then repeat, but the suds are still brown. So I do it again, and during the third scrubbing session, the water washing off my feet is still brown.

In the beginning, this all felt like a great adventure, but after months and months of living like this, we began to feel grubby and homeless. It’s hard living, and it wears on you.

But then we went to Sydney, and stayed in the comfort of my sister’s house, where everyday we could make tea in a kettle behind walls which block out the sun, and every night we could flip a light switch before cooking dinner, and stand up straight while getting in and out of bed.

After a month or so of this, we became restless again. It was time to hit the road.

I should explain why exactly we live like this. What is so spectacular in remote, rugged 4-Wheel-Drive country that we spent thousands of dollars to fly to Australia and buy an off-road vehicle? Why do we spend thousands of hours living in cramped conditions, forming aches and pains and burns, and forgoing all creature comforts – forgoing even basic personal hygiene? What do we experience that is worth giving up pavement, electricity, phone service, fruit, dairy, vegetables, internet, and the youthful health of our skin?

To understand this, you must first understand that being away from paved roads and buildings, from the electrical grid and mobile coverage, is ITSELF part of the appeal.
Many people have asked me if I’m working during this trip. I reply that in order to work, I need regular internet and phone service. And throughout the majority of this trip – from the Sahara Desert to Burma – I have been in extremely remote locations.

Many people believe the whole world is wired, that we live in a globalized digital age that can connect people in all parts of the world. This is simply untrue. There are enormous swaths of earth – vast, vast tracts of land – that are off-grid and unplugged.

We lived, unplugged, in the lush hillsides of Laos, rich with waterfalls and rivers, with hammocks and chickens, but devoid of any nighttime light that isn’t candle-powered. We lived, unplugged, on Kanawa Island in Flores, where the only thing to eat is rice and fish, and the stars shine brightly in the absence of nighttime electricity or noisy generators.

And even in a rich developed nation like Australia, where a teenager punching a cash register at a petrol station in the Northern Territory earns a whopping $18 an hour, there are literally thousands of kilometers of vast, empty land where bizarre animals we’ve never heard of – the echidna, the wombat, the wallaby – freely roam the open wilderness, and the Milky Way arm of our galaxy shines brightly in a dark night sky.

This is why we are spending almost a year in the Outback. To truly live in the Outback takes time and patience. We drive across empty beaches. We drive over jagged rocks on steep hillsides. We drive across sand dunes that remind us of the empty Sahara. We cross deep rivers and pray we don’t flood the engine. We burst tires, and crack fuel lines. We brake for – and occasionally hit – wildlife we wouldn’t have recognized a year ago.

We abandon the car and walk, sometimes for days, carrying everything we need on our backs, drinking directly from clear streams, burying our poop into the dirt, crouching on logs to make our lunch. We’ve breathed the earth’s freshest air and drank the freshest water. We haven’t just seen wildlife in the wild – we’ve lived alongside it. And yes, experiencing the world in its purest form means that we have to sacrifice our high standards of nutrition, comfort, and cleanliness, which come hand-in-hand with the industrial and digital age.

The dawn light turns the car into an oven, and I pull my knees up to my chest, somersault onto my back, unfold my legs and scoot through the gap between the front seats, thudding atop a pile of clothes piled next to the steering wheel. But the view is truly spectacular.

Ghost Tour on the Tasman Peninsula

2010-02-25T01:10:00.000-07:00

In the days of Charles Dickens, the jails in Great Britian were overstuffed with convicts locked away for crimes ranging from idleness to assault, from petty theft to murder. So many men had gone through the British penal system that there was no more space in the jails to house all the prisoners.

The British sailed these convicts halfway across the world to an obscure island in the middle of nowhere known as Australia. These convicts became Australia’s first settlers.
But Australia, which stretches the width of Pennsylvania to California, was too large a space to keep prisoners under control, so the British searched for an even more obscure location, a place harder to escape from.

Their quest landed them in Tasmania, a small island that today is a 9-hour boat ride south of Melbourne.

The British corralled the prisoners to a thin peninsula, known as the Tasman Peninsula, at the bottom of Tasmania. The peninsula is connected to the mainland only by the thinnest neck of land, across which the British chained a line of snarling dogs. Here is where hundreds of convicts were forced to do backbreaking hard labor of constructing houses, churches, even building their own prison cells. The result is Port Arthur, a town built by convicts, for convicts.

We headed into Port Arthur and discovered a walled-up fortress surrounding the entire old town. “This is incredible,” I thought, imagining prisoners staring longingly at the wall, dreaming of getting out, not knowing that even if they escaped these walls, they’d discover two large bodies of water and guard dogs chained across the peninsular neck of land. “Wow, how intense,” I thought. “How do you wall off an entire town?” It reminded me of the Old City of Jerusalem, the only other town I’ve seen that’s 100 percent walled away.

Yet this wall, we discovered, was the one thing not built by convicts. It was built in the last couple of decades to force tourists to pay entry fees.

Surrounding the wall were half a dozen large tour buses, a gift shop, a tall desk selling entrance tickets and tour packages, and a restaurant called Felons with the tagline: “Not eating here? Now THAT’S criminal.” What was once a penal colony had morphed into a veritable tourist zoo.

While this normally would cause us to immediately turn around and retreat into some wilderness area, we decided to stay and follow the advice of some locals we had met camping, who strongly recommended Port Arthur’s ghost tour. The ghost tour was a reasonably cheap option in which, among other things, you’d visit the scenes of centuries-old murders.

Murders were ubiquitous in those days. Convicts, desperate to escape their life of hard labor, wanted to escape into death, but they believed that committing suicide would sentence them to eternity in hell. But after carefully studying Christian doctrine, they found a “murder-suicide” loophole. They’d murder a fellow prisoner and be hung for their crimes, but just before the hanging, they’d get the opportunity to visit a priest and ask for forgiveness for their murderous sin, thereby absolving themselves so they could enter heaven.

We spent a night on the ghost tour, camped by the ocean at the edge of the peninsula for two nights, and hiked along the shoreline overlooking the towering cliffs. After about 4 days on Tasman Peninsula, we decided to leave and head to Hobart, the capital of Tasmania.

We’re driving down the road, past a Tasmanian Devil sanctuary, when I see a sign announcing ‘Chocolate Factory – Free Tastings. Open.’

“Pull over!,” I demand at once, visions of Willy Wonka running through my head.
We entered a room filled with the tools used to build this peninsula. Several tree-cutting saws, with handles designed to be pulled by two men, lay strewn on the floor. A crank-handle telephone hung on a wall post. Rusty steel blades that looked to me like finger-slicers were propped against a back wall. Two large windows in the wall showed woman in white lab coats mixing and moulding batches of chocolate in the next room.

I wandered toward the front, where a tray of chocolates were laid out, representing every flavor imaginable … Cherry brandy chocolate, licorice chocolate, orange ginger chocolate, strawberry chocolate, rum and raisin chocolate, as well as classic flavors like hazelnut, mint and white.

A rotund woman with reddish hair, standing behind the chocolate tray, asks if we’ve been on the Port Arthur tour.

“Just the ghost tour,” I tell her, “which was heaps of fun. I normally don’t take tours; waste of money if you ask me. I like going at my own pace. But their tour of haunted places and strange sightings was quite fun.”

“Ah, but you must take a tour to know the stories of what you’re looking at.” She had a lecturing tone in her voice which caused me to keep quiet. “Otherwise you’d think they were just buildings and not know anything about them.”

Her voice softened a little, and a faraway gleam developed in her eyes. She was silent for a moment.

“When we were kids we play on those buildings all the time,” she finally said. “That was before they built big walls around it and started charging admission. That was before anyone ever came down to this peninsula to see our convict heritage. No one in those days talked about it, you know. We were all descendants of convicts, all us kids, playing in the old jails that used to house them, but we never once thought about it.”

She shrugged. “Never knew most of that stuff, really. Then some history buffs started coming down here to check it out, and the next thing you know, people are coming in by the thousands to see the old solitary confinement cells.”

She shrugged again and held out a piece of chocolate with a set of tongs. “Good for business, though.”

Tasmania is a little island at the end of the world

2010-02-18T16:28:00.000-07:00

Tasmania is a little island at the end of the world.

A 9-hour boat ride separates Tasmania from the rest of Australia, and perhaps this isolation – as well as Tasmania’s unique climate and history – gives Tasmania the feel of being in a different country.

While mainland Australia consists of desert expanses, monsoon torrents mixed with severe drought, and is intersected by the Tropic of Capricorn, Tasmania is made of rolling green hills, grey granite cliffs, and is intersected by the 42nd parallel – the same line of longitude that comes close to the Canadian border.

The air in Tasmania is the cleanest in the world – scientifically stated. It is the benchmark against which all other air is measured.

An air monitoring station sits on a cape on the west coast, measuring the quality of the air that travels the longest uninterrupted expanse of ocean in the world. The winds blow in from South America, carried east across the ocean for thousands of uninterrupted miles, hitting Tasmania with full force and earning it a nickname as the land of the “Roaring Forties,” a reference to the longitude.

This climate is ideal for growing berries, olives, walnuts, wine, and raising sheep, goats and cows for producing gourmet cheeses and local yogurts.

And so, in addition to the endless camping and hiking that makes Tasmania famous among outdoor enthusiasts, many visitors come here for the wine tastings.

We started our visit to Tasmania with a tour of the Tamar Valley wine region. Most cellar doors were what you’d expect – open, breezy rooms with hardwood floors, oak-barrel furniture and floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the vineyards or the river.

But one winery was different.

The door is locked when we approach, and we assume the winery must be closed. But a chubby man with a torn black t-shirt appears in the window. He looks to be about 30 and his curly hair is unwashed and oily. He unlocks the door and it swings inwards.

Loud rock music playing as we walk in. A long-haired guy is breaking down piles of cardboard boxes. To our left is a blackboard covered with curvy chalk writing, resembling the menu in a college-town sandwich shop.

The man clears about a dozen empty beer and wine bottles off the desk.

He doesn’t even try to describe the wines. Most wine-tasting hosts say, in slightly pompous and well-heeled tones, “Now let’s start with a Brut Cuvee,” but he began rambling about the time he spent making wine in Oregon and how it showed him that the American political system is screwed.

“I mean, really,” he says as he absently swings some Riesling into a glass, “why do the majority let people get away with not having health care?”

Then he abruptly switches topics.

“You know, you gotta watch for the animals when you’re growing grapes here,” he says as he pours something white and sticky from another bottle without checking the label. “Two years ago, I lost $30,000 worth of crops to wallabies. To wallabies! Can you believe it! They just find their way into the fields and chew up enough crops to pay for a house. You gotta watch out for them. Watch for kangaroos, too. They’ll really mess your crop.”

He pours himself a small drink.

“Some people catch them and drive them over to a competitors field and let ‘em go there,” he tells us. “Business is nasty. But there’s good people, people who trap the wallbies and the kangaroos and drive ‘em out into the country, 60 kilometers away, and let them into the wild.”

He’s switched to red wines now, though he still won’t mention anything about it.

“But I still don’t like live trapping,” he says. “I prefer to shoot the roos.”

He was a window into the young, hip, Generation Y side of winemaking, the kind of winemaking that’s armed with a rifle, listens to an iPod and has no pretentions about what the critics are saying about Bordeaux this year. He loves the chemistry of winemaking, the calculus of soil, wind and water, and the machinery through which it’s processed.

We camped that night under the Batman Bridge, which crosses the Tamar River, which divides the two sides of the wine valley. “Look at us,” Sara told me, “sleeping under a bridge. We’re going to wine tastings all day and sleeping under a bridge at night. In America we’d be considered homeless. Here we’re just called travelers.”

Kamikaze Kangaroos

2010-02-12T03:15:00.004-07:00

When driving through the Australian outback, you’re surrounded by nothing. Barren, empty space fills a great majority of this country. You could go 800 kilometers without seeing a town, a grocery, a gas station, a place to get your tire puncture repaired, or a nozzle of drinking water. You could go for days upon days without seeing another human being.

But there’s one thing you will see constantly: Kangaroos.

They’re everywhere, both living and dead. The living ones bounce up and down across the fields, resembling giant hopping rats in search of their next meal. Once upon a time, seeing a kangaroo was a novelty; now it’s as common an event as seeing a squirrel.

It’s the dead kangaroos that bother me, the ones whose bodies litter the roadside like …. Well, like litter. Lots of it.

Seeing so much roadkill is a reminder that we have a high chance of knocking off a kangaroo as we drive. The roadkill – which has usually been festering in the desert heat for days – is an even more stark reminder than the dozens of warning signs posted along the highway that say: “Danger, Kangaroos!” or else just show an image of a kangaroo and assume you know that this means you should try to avoid killing one.

You should also try to avoid being killed by one, because perhaps one of the most violent ways to die on the Australian roads is by being kicked to death by a kangaroo. Here’s how it happens: Your car smashes into a kangaroo, whose badly-injured body flies through your front windshield and into your front seat. The terrified kangaroo starts thrashing about, kicking as hard as it can with its massive leg muscles, those muscles that make it so famous for jumping. Within a few minutes, you’ve been kicked to death by a kangaroo.

It’s a fate so scary that everyone in Australia drives around with “roo guards” on the front of their cars. The “roo guard,” which is similar to what Americans call a “bull bar,” is a set of steel tubes that stretch the length of the car’s front hood (or as Australians call it, the “front bonnet”), protecting the engine and radiator from kangaroo-related damages.

Our “roo guard” didn’t help when we hit a kangaroo. Well, really, the kangaroo hit us. We were driving down the main highway at night in Western Australia. Well, perhaps the words “main highway” are misleading – we were on the only highway, the only road. There is only one road that runs the length of Western Australia, north to south, and we were on it. In fact, we seemed to be the only people on it; we hadn’t seen another car for at least an hour. Such is the remoteness of Western Australia.

Despite the empty highway, we were driving quite slowly – about 60 kilometers per hour – in an effort to reduce our risk of roadkill. I was sitting in the front passengers seat, scanning the sides of the road for kamikaze kangaroos. We had devised a system of alert signals. Every few minutes, I’d call out “left incoming!” or “right steady!” to signify, for example, a kangaroo on the left side of the road hopping into the highway, or a kangaroo on the right side that was sitting still.

The kangaroo that hit us belonged to the “right steady” category, though I didn’t have to say anything because it wasn’t sitting by the roadside. It was squarely in the center of the right lane.

It sat there, in the middle of the street, completely still, just watching us as we pulled up. The driver immediately slowed us down further, to about 50 kilometers an hour, perhaps less, and we began to cruise by the kangaroo, which was still just sitting still. We had almost passed it when it decided to take a giant leap into the side of our car.

WHAP! We could hear its body crunch against the back passenger door at 50 km/hour, and I instinctively cringed harder than I’ve ever thought possible. My eyes squeezed tightly shit, my lips curled back, my breath sharply drew in, and I gave new definition to the word “cringed.”

But later we saw that there was no blood on the car, and when we circled around and drove by the same spot again the next morning, we didn’t find a body. It must have lived, though I imagine it didn’t have a very pleasant evening.

“I hope it had health insurance,” I said.

The closest call we’ve been in happened a few weeks later, when I was in my usual position in the front passanger seat, scanning the roads with intense concentration, looking for suicidal animals.

It was nighttime, and once again we were alone on an empty highway.

It was pitch-black dark outside, with no street lights or other traffic to illuminate the roads. Suddenly I saw something so immediate, so terrifying, that language failed me. I opened my mouth to talk, to give the driver an urgent warning, but all that came out was “WHHA WHA WHA WHA!!”

There, in the center of the highway, was an enormous jet-black cow. I am not joking.
It was massive, looking like it weighed at least 500 pounds, and about as tall as our car. You would NOT want to hit this thing.

And here it stood, in the middle of the road, jet-black in the dead of night.

The driver slammed on the brakes, and we narrowly avoided it. Everyone in the car was silent for a moment as we contemplated what being another few inches over and being a few seconds too late would have meant.

Finally someone spoke.

“How on earth did you see that thing?” the driver asked me. “It was so dark; it was hard to see even up-close.”

I nodded.

“It’s eyes,” I replied. “I could see its eyes.” Yellow in the reflection of the headlights.

New Year's Eve picnic in the park

2010-01-10T19:38:00.004-07:00

In Australia the world happens in opposites. Summer is winter, winter is summer, water spins counterclockwise and mammals lay eggs.**

And while the U.S. is undergoing a record cold snap, we’re sweltering through an unimaginable heat wave. The native Aussies tell me these temperatures are normal for this time of year, smack-dab in the middle of summer. But we’re sweating, praying for clouds, and avoiding any activity between 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., when it’s just too darn hot to even walk down the street.

But the upside to all this was feeling the heat during the holidays. I was ecstatic for my first summertime Christmas.

After all, the cartoons I watched as a child sometimes jokingly featured a “Christmas in July,” featuring Santa Claus sipping an iced lemonade from a lawn chair as a soccer game unfolded in the background. This is what I imagine Sydney’s Christmas in December would be.

We arrived in Australia in the blustery month of August, when we wore wool socks to bed and jackets in the middle of the afternoon. As the clock inched towards December and the days became longer and hotter, I noticed excitement building for summertime Christmas: from the pomegranate-martini Christmas cocktail recipes printed in ladies home magazines, to the ads for pre-Christmas barbeque grill sales, to the shopping mall Santa Claus wandering around in shorts.

So, what was it like? Did it meet my expectations of Santa sipping iced lemonade from a lawn chair? No. It was even stranger. Because, you see, if you let the entire country’s population off work in the middle of the summer when the weather is good and the beach is the best place to be, what are people going to do? Party, of course!

Christmas in Sydney is a massive beach party. The bars and sidewalks are overflowing with Christmas revelers wearing Santa hats and beads. People are throwing back the Christmas beers and chilled spritzers, firing up kangaroo meat on the grill, and tossing beach balls.

Here's one kid who's really looking forward to Santa in the summertime!

But that wasn’t the strangest part. See, I can accept spending Christmas Day sipping vodka-Sprites on the beach. What I wasn’t prepared for, however, was a warm New Years night.

As a lifelong Northern Hemispherian, hot weather and the New Years Countdown just don’t mix. In my mind, sandals and New Years go together like peanut-butter and anchovies: the combination just doesn’t make any sense.**

Yet here we were, less than a week after Christmas at the Beach, making plans to spend all of New Years Eve at the Botanical Gardens, where 20,000 like-minded people queue from 5 a.m. to get a prime spot from which to watch the midnight fireworks.

We reunited with some longstanding British friends and queued at 9 a.m. for what felt less like a typical blustery New Year’s Eve than like an re-enactment of a summer rock festival. I wore a skirt and SPF 30; my British friends carried lawn chairs and beach towels. Others tossed Frisbees and snacked on potato chips.

By 12 noon, we made our way through the gate and spread our picnic blankets on a grassy hill overlooking Sydney’s trademark Opera House and Harbor Bridge, and for the next 12 hours, we had a New Year's Eve picnic in the park.

The summer solstice, more commonly known as the longest day of the year, had just passed on December 21, so the sky stayed bright until late in the day. By the time the little kids New Years Eve fireworks lit the sky at 9 p.m., the sky had barely grown dim.

A few of my friends brought a sweater or light jacket along, but didn’t need it. One friend from Colorado even lost her jacket at the end of the night; she hadn’t paid any attention to it all day.

Again, Summertime Christmas I can hang with. For some reason, there’s nothing abnormal to me about Santa Claus in shorts. Okay, maybe the holiday menu is strange: instead of hot gravy and stuffing, everyone spends Christmas Day sipping sparkling white wines and eating peaches. But watching a Christmas tree wither in high heat doesn’t faze me, because I’ve been preparing for a Summer Santa for months.

But I’d never considered New Years in the summer! Now THAT was something I that took some getting used it. But now that I’ve felt it … now that I’ve spent 16 hours laying in the grass waiting for the countdown, now that I’ve watched the fireworks from the comfort of a t-shirt …. I can’t imagine how I’ll ever go back to a blustery New Years again. Give me Dick Clark’s Down Under, please, with pomegranate martini to go.

Next stop: a bright summertime Valentine’s Day?

The two cutest kids on earth, otherwise known as "my nieces," live in Sydney and eagerly await
Santa in Shorts.

Footnote: ** Yes, crazy Australia has every type of animal on the planet, including an egg-laying mammal. Can you guess which one? It’s the platypus. Native to Australia and spotted by us in several national parks along the eastern seaboard, the platypus is a mammal that lays eggs. (Technically, the platypus only has one hole instead of multiple – i.e. it uses the same hole for both mating and excretion – which classifies it technically as a monotreme rather than a full mammal.)

A zeal for New Zealand

2009-12-14T02:16:00.002-07:00

Greetings from Christchurch, New Zealand, the "Gateway to Antarctica," and the only city I know of that boasts three "CH"'s in its name.

New Zealand is the opposite of Australia: while Aus is tropical and dry, NZ is cold and rainy.

"Tropical and dry" may sound like a contradiction, so I'll describe Australia like this: beaches are to Australia what temples are to India. There are countless numbers of them. Australia is, effectively, a giant beach, with sand and desert in the interior and rainforest dotting the coastline. We've been to countless rainforests and beaches across Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, and Cambodia, and one of the strangest things about being in Australia is seeing this same tropical climate in a white, first-world country.

Australia's reputation as a tropical leader, its endless sunshine, its infinite beaches, combined with the thinning of the ozone over its skies, results in -- according to Lonely Planet -- a stunning 1 in 2 Australians developing skin cancer. As you drive down the streets in any Australian city, you'll see the same pattern of businesses: a McDonalds, a grocery store, a skin cancer clinic, another McDonalds, another grocery store, another skin cancer clinic, then a pub, then another skin clinic.

The Sydney, Australia preschool that my three-year-old niece attends asks parents to slather sunblock on their kids before they leave the house in the morning; then the teachers slather even more sunblock on the kids before they're allowed to go outside and play. The children all stand in a line as the teachers kneel in front of each kid, applying sunblock to their little legs and arms. Once outside, they're strictly held to the "no hat, no play" policy. And they can't wear just any hat: it has to have cloth coming down that shields the ears and neck from direct sun exposure.

New Zealand, on the other hand, has only 300 deaths from skin cancer a year, and its skies are commonly covered with rain clouds. One particularly beautiful section of the south island, Milford Sound, gets an average of 20 feet (6 meters) of rainfall each year. And though Christchurch students are home for the southern hemisphere's summer break, everyone is still wearing fleece jackets.

In short, I've traded palm trees for pine trees.

But the beauty of those pine trees cannot be described -- imagine deep green, forested hills rising up from clear blue lakes. Imagine vivid bursts of flowers -- brilliant reds, oranges, pinks, yellows, plums, creams -- catching your eye with each turn of the head. New Zealand's reputation for natural beauty is well-deserved.

It's reputation is so strong, in fact, that the number of international tourists who visit annually is 62 percent of its population. This country of 4 million sees 2.5 million visitors a year.

But the same reasons that draw visitors to NZ -- it's remote wilderness, its rugged beauty, its national heroes like Sir Edmund Hillary, its culturally progressive attitudes towards environmentalism -- are the same qualities that give some of the locals island fever.

After all, imagine being stuck on a remote island of 4 million for your entire life.

That's how my cousins' two sons, age 16 and 20, feel. Both have grown up in Christchurch, a "big city" of 400,000, and when I ask if they like it, they reply with a shrug. "It's pretty small," the 20-year-old tells me. "A couple of nightclubs. That's all."

His room is decorated with posters of 50 Cent and Eminem, artists who rarely if ever give concerts in his country. In one corner, he has a Lakers jersey hanging up, and he tells me a highlight of his trip to the U.S. two years ago was getting to sit in a massive professional sports arena and watch a live, internationally-televised game between two major-name teams.

I notice as we drive through downtown Christchurch that the performing arts center has only one musical playing (and its an old show, Anything Goes, not a new release like Wicked or Spamalot or Avenue Q). The city's well-reputed library is smaller than the one at my university, and charges $5 if you want to check out a new release bestseller.

I understand now what I wouldn't have understood 4 years ago, when I was in the threshold of my outdoor-enthusiam: beautiful landscapes can only entertain you for so long. Colorado is great not just because it has the Rocky Mountains, but because it has the combination of Rockies AND concerts, restaurants, galleries, nightlife, libraries, performance venues, and street art. And despite all this vibrant city life, I'm still itching because it feels too small, because it lacks a strong publishing industry and financial district and ethnic enclaves and waterfront.

But no place has it all. That's why we travel.

Family Reunion Down Under

2009-12-11T07:16:00.005-07:00

Yikes! It's been more than a month since I've put up a blog posting ... a far cry from the beginning of my trip, when I was intent on posting 1-2 times each week. But in the Frequent Posting Era, I was excited about the adventure. Now travel is just a regular way of life. Familiarity makes people grow blase about anything, even experiencing the unfamiliar.

I've concluded the section of the trip in which I was traveling with two Germans from Darwin, Australia to Sydney, Australia, a distance of 4,000 kilometers -- equivalent to driving from Los Angeles to Pittsburgh.

That's a LONG distance to spend on the road with anyone, much less with strangers who spoke varying degrees of English. In total, our road trip with these two Germans lasted nearly two months. We 4-Wheel-Drove through sand dunes, went to remote beaches, snorkeled over crystal-clear waters, gazed over vast cliffs, blah blah blah. We also spent at least three hours each morning cooking hash browns and drinking endless cups of tea.

In that time, they asked us a lot of questions about the English language, and those questions gave me some sharp insight into how tough it is to master -- not just communicate, but really, truly MASTER -- another language.

Theresa, a 25-year-old gereontology graduate, asked basic questions, like the definition of "inevitable," "bruise" and "callous". She was confused about the double meanings for "shallow" -- it makes sense in a pool, she said, but what do you mean that a person is not 'deep'? And what's the difference between 'done' and 'finished'?

Ollie, a 20-year-old who just finished a year of compulsory national service, lived in the U.S. from age 0 to 5, and asked relatively more complex questions, including my personal favorite: "What's the difference between 'carbohydrate' and 'hydrocarbon'"?

After I said goodbye to the Germans in Sydney, the Family Reunion Down Under officially began. I headed to the home of my sister Aruna and her husband and two kids. My parents flew in a couple days later, and within 48 hours, we had a troupe of cousins coming over for dinner. This time, as the only non-Nepali speaker in the group, I'm the one who's struggling with the mastery of language. Though I understand Nepalese very well, there are still times when I interrupt a conversation to ask the definition of an odd word here or there -- such as today, when I cut in to ask them to translate a word that turned out to mean "refreshing." Meanwhile, my sister's 3-year-old daughter, Shraya, needs the opposite -- the other day we were speaking to her in English and she (ironically) got stuck on the word "stick," needing it translated into Nepali. (How do you say "ironically" in Nepali, anyway?)

I didn't expect to give a second thought to language skills now that I'm in an English-speaking nation for the first time in more than a year, but Australia is English-speaking at work only. In their home life, Australians hold a wide berth of native tongues. The nation is incredibly diverse, thanks to the millions of Chinese, Indians, Nepalese, Malays, Sinhalese, Javanese, Balinese, Papua New Guineans, etc., who recognize this nation as the nearest First-World country and, accordingly, do everything in their power to move here. I looked at a photo of Shraya in her preschool class, and, I swear, there was only one white girl in the picture. The other thirty-ish kids all seemed to be East Asian or South Asian. (Ah yes, and the German girl asked what "-ish" means.)

The Outback is a different story -- the diversity there is mainly Aborigional. In the big cities you see evidence of Aborigional culture primarily in art and music, but in the Outback, particularly in Northern Territory and Western Australia, we saw Aborigional people everywhere -- in grocery stores, at petrol stations, at parks and beaches. Their culture has changed -- while some are still wearing white body paint and hunting bush goannas , others are listing to hip-hop and eating McDonalds. Yet they seem to be a strong and insular community; I don't see many examples of blended or interracial families.

Of course, my family hasn't blended either -- though we're scattered around the world, marriage has kept our bloodlines 100 percent Nepali, at least for the moment. And after a week of Family Reunion Down Under, Sydney-Style, visiting cousins and their spouses and kids from both Mom and Dad's side, it's time to take this show overseas once again. Tomorrow my parents and I fly to New Zealand to continue Family Reunion Down Under, the Christchurch Chapter.

Klaus the Camel Man

2009-11-06T02:03:00.007-07:00

Camels were first imported to Australia by the British and the Afghans, who – before the railroad was built -- used these creatures as to carry supplies across the vast Australian Outback desert.

Klaus is another foreign import to this land. He arrived in 1968 from Germany. Now he, too, is using camels to cross the Outback.

We first heard about Klaus from a motorcyclist crossing Australia’s Outback plains. Despite the 15 liters of water, cooking gas and petrol clamped to this guy’s motorcycle, despite the leather and ropes and tent and mattress and pots and pans and pillow weighing down his machine, the biker didn’t imagine he was the most interesting show on the road. He knew that even his harrowing trip was outdone by Klaus.

Because Klaus, age 61, has been traveling Australia by camel for seven years.

He has two camels, in fact; Snowy, age 11, and Willie, age 12. He bought both of the camels 7 years ago when he started crossing Australia, and these original camels remain with him today.

“I have a pension now so I don’t have to waste time working,” he said, while patting Snowy’s nose. “I got no time for it, anyway, too busy.”

The camels dragged the body of a campervan behind them for the first few years, which was roomy, but not terribly efficient. Three years ago, Klaus traded in his campervan for the shell of a Suzuki Microvan, which, as the name implies, is smaller than a minivan – its about the size of a tiny truck that a college grounds staff drives across campus.

All of his automobiles are 100 percent camel-powered. The animals are attached to it through an aluminum mast taken from a catamaran, which is pressure-fit around the shaft coming off the steering. This steers the front wheels. When we examined it, the aluminum was fatiguing and cracking at the joint.

“A Suzuki without an engine is a pretty good car,” Klaus told us. “With its narrow size, I can walk in the shoulder quite comfortably. Any wider and I wouldn’t be able to.”

Four solar panels are bolted on top of the Suzuki – a mishmash of different brands, sizes, and wattages. The two panels over the cab of the Suzuki were the smallest, at 30 watts each, while the largest stood at 50. (To put this in perspective, our car’s solar panel is 80 watts, and doesn’t do much more than power a few camera batteries and this laptop I’m writing on).

We met Klaus the day after the motorcyclist told us about him. “He’s about 15 kilometers down the road,” the biker told us, “so you should be able to catch him tomorrow.”

Sure enough, we found him only a few kilometers away from where the biker had met him the previous day.

“Word travels faster than I do,” Klaus quipped. He walks 3 hours in the morning and another 3 hours in the afternoon, slowing down as the camels graze for Spinifex plants (which taste best in the morning when they’re covered in dew). Most days he averages 20 kilometers, but lately he’s been going 15 kilometers a day, “which I’m fine with, because its bloody hot.” He estimates he’s traveled 30,000 kilometers over the past 7 years. (To put this in perspective: we estimate we’ll drive about 30,000 kilometers in the 1 year we stay in Australia.)

Klaus has walked every inch of those 30,000 kilometers, rather than riding in the back of the Suzuki.
“(Whether you walk or ride) makes no difference to the camels,” he says. “But you’d fall asleep at that speed. You feel better when you’re walking. I feel sorry for people who have to sit on their butt all day, no matter how important they are.”

He never bothered with a desk job, working on machines as a pipefitter since he immigrated to Australia in 1968 from Germany. His job carried him across Africa, Asia and Australia, but he notes that you can’t really see a country when you’re there for work. Now that he’s retired, he’s seeing the country slow.

His lack of family ties make this possible. He was married for 14 years but divorced a decade and a half ago, which coincided with the last time he owned a vehicle with an engine. The couple never had kids.

He sleeps out under the stars every night, using only a mosquito tent. “I like looking at the stars, and besides, its too messy inside,” he says.

I peeked inside the Suzuki – it contains Dan Brown’s newest book, a small electric mini-fridge, and a dog named Shorty, who he received two weeks ago from a traveler who learned that Klaus’ initial dog was killed by a snake.

Klaus himself was bitten by a poisonous spider a few weeks ago, and taken to the northern city of Katherine for treatment. He kept his camels tied to a tree during his hospital stay, because – as he notes -- who’s going to steal a camel?

He’s never been in an accident. When giant trucks pass by, the drivers CB radio each other, so that every truckdriver knows to look out for him. “It’s the campervans that are worrisome,” he says. “The drivers seem like they don’t realize that what they’re towing is wider than their car.”

Klaus was eager to learn about our trip – what strange animals had we encountered? what interesting characters have we met? – and I realized he must get quite tired of discussing himself over and over, answering the same questions again and again.

The one question we never asked him is why he chose to travel. I suppose we thought the answer was obvious. The question was so simple it doesn’t need to be asked.

Renovations in house, car, year

2009-10-25T23:18:00.003-06:00

The Nepalese celebrate occasions according to a lunar calendar, and so, each year, the date of my so-called ‘birthday’ changes. On any given day in September or October (has it ever happened in November?), in accordance with the position of the moon and stars, my parents surprise me with birthday greetings, at which point I’ll realize that today happens the lunar anniversary of the morning I came kicking and screaming into the world.

2009, however, is fabled to be a hallmark year: for the first time (at least, I think it’s the first time), my lunar birthday and my American calendar birthday – you know, my ‘normal’ birthday -- fell on the same date. I wondered if that meant that this was the year that is supposed to usher in strange luck; perhaps the stars are signaling that this year is bound for fortune, fame and glory.

If that’s what the stars meant, they have a funny way of showing it. For precisely the evening before my birthday, just as dawn was beginning to set, we found that the clutch no longer worked.

It happened mid-drive; we were at an intersection, trying to turn right, when suddenly we discovered we couldn’t shift into First Gear. As the line of cars behind us blared their horns, we tried, and tried, and tried, and tried, and eventually coaxed the clutch into First. But then we stayed in First, gradually working our way up to Second, carefully avoiding all traffic lights and disobeying stop signs, until eventually, we rolled into a Woolworth’s parking lot, where our car summarily died.

It was a Sunday night, and in the great Australian tradition, every shop had closed at 5 pm. But we noted, with glee, that we happened to break down in a shopping plaza that hosts not only a grocery store, but also an auto parts store, a hardware store, a mechanic’s shop, and a pet store (for cuddly entertainment while we wait; though we later discovered that, in the great Australian tradition, this pet store had zero cats and dogs, but plenty of bearded lizards).

So we did what any traveler would do: we began eating dinner in the parking lot next to our broken-down Nissan.

We'd just found our forks when a security car pulled up.

“Get the F&%$&(&%#* out of here!” he bellowed; the first words out of his mouth. No ‘hello,’ no ‘are you okay?’, not even a ‘I’m going to have to ask you to leave.’ No, he started out cursing, and picked up speed from there.

“You F&*^$* backpackers, you’re all the same! Well, you F*^$#*(*& better F%&^$@* get the F%$#^&()^% away from here before I call the F*^$& cops!”

All of us were too shocked to speak. We sat silently for a minute. Then Sara, the most diplomatic of the group, ventured, “Sir, we’re broken down.”

“I don’t give a F&^$*(! That’s not my problem! Now get the F&^$#* out of here, you filthy backpackers, before you leave your rubbish everywhere and crap in our gardens!”

“We have our own trash bag in the car,” I piped up. “And there are public toilets right there.” I pointed.

“Did I tell you to F&^%% talk? No! Get the FO()&*(&^% away!”

“Um, we can’t go anywhere. Our car is broken.”

“I don’t F(&(*^*&% care! Get out of my face!”

So we abandoned the car, jumped the concrete fence separating the parking lot from the street, and ate our dinner, in sulky silence, sitting on the street curb. It seemed like more of a public nuisance than eating in a parking lot. At least in the parking lot, we weren’t a traffic hazard.

Then we sent two delegates back to the parking lot (better that all four of us aren’t there, lest Mr. Dirty-Mouth decides to pop a blood vessel in his forehead in our honor) to retrieve the tents from the roof rack. We walked for five or ten minutes deep into the bowels of a construction site, and when we were satisfied that we were far enough from the road that we couldn’t be spotted by passing traffic, we fell asleep.

When we awoke at 5:30 a.m. we could hear construction cranes at work; because of the daytime heat, workmen begin their shifts quite early. Soundlessly, we packed our tents and zoomed out of the construction site in record time. Returning to our car, I hung out in the passenger’s seat reading back issues of Vogue until the auto-parts store opened at 8 a.m.

From that point forward, the car-savvy travelers in our crew effectively lived on their backs underneath the car, tinkering with cables and hoses and whatnot, while I passed my time at Big W, the local Walmart.

By 9 a.m., my friends surprised me with a discount birthday cake from Woolworth’s. Mmmm, breakfast.
By 10 a.m., I had read most of the celebrity gossip magazines in the check-out lanes, and by noon, I had bonded with the bearded lizards in the pet shop.
By 2 p.m. I had so thoroughly raided the free samples at the makeup counters that my face was caked with at least a dozen foundations, powders, and concealers, half a dozen shades of eyeshadow, and a blend of no less than four each of lipsticks, lipliners, eyeliners, bronzers, primers, and blush shades. I raided the “tester” nail polish display and painted each fingernail a different color. And I was finally starting to get bored.

Finally I decided to do something productive with my time and complain to the shopping center management about their foul-mouthed security guard. “A simple ‘could you please leave the premises’ would have been fine,” I told them. “There was no reason to swear like a drunken sailor.” The kindly management apologized profusely, and were polite enough not to comment on the fact that I was wearing enough makeup to make Bozo the Clown cringe.

Coming out of that meeting, I encountered the German girl with whom we’re traveling, Theresa, who told us that she had shared our hard-luck story with two locals who were running some errands. Then she introduced us to the locals.

“Eh, I feel sorry for ya guys,” said the man, who had a sun-wrinkled face and spoke with such a heavy south Irish accent that it took all my concentration to understand him. “Wouldja like to come to our place for dinner?” His wife, a thin, toothy woman with curly hair and a consistent smile, nodded.

The four of us travelers looked at each other and had the same thought: wow, real home-cooked food. Maybe even something that requires an oven.

When we reached the house, we were greeted by piles of dust, loose gravel, planks of wood, cement slabs, and enough saws and drills to supply a small-town hardware store.

“We’re renovating the place,” the man explained. “I own a company that builds and moves homes; we’re hoping to finish this project by Thursday so we can get it on the market and then we can all go home.”

He ushered us down an expansive, freshly-painted hall which were lined with large, bare rooms.

“If ya got sleeping bags, ya kin sleep on the floors,” he said. “We just put in carpet.”

By now we were all grinning. Our luck had changed! For the first time since August – since August, for Christ’s sake -- we could sleep indoors. We could stretch and stand up and move about freely during the night. We didn’t have to hunch under the low roof of a car, or cram into a tent, and we didn’t have to pack up our mobile sleeping units at the first sound of cranes at daybreak.

“Sounds great!,” Ollie, the 20-year-old German, said. “We’d love to.”

It was then that the Irish-Australian stranger turned Good into Great.

He smiled and handed Ollie a $50 bill. “Do me a favor,” he said. “Go down to the bottle shop and turn that $50 into a pack of Pure Blonde beers. We’ll start the lasagna while you’re away.”

Lasagna! Made in an oven!

I don’t have to describe the rest of the night, and I didn’t have to spend too much time studying the moon and the stars on that particular evening. All the strange luck of the day played out on earth, and I knew it was going to be a good year.

Port Hedland is Ore-some

2009-09-25T01:34:00.003-06:00

For almost a month, we haven't driven though any towns at all. We covered 3,000 kilometers without hardly ever seeing a traffic light.

So we were pretty excited when we rolled up to Port Hedland, population 6,000.

“Guys, Port Hedland is so big it even has a suburb," Sara announced.
“No!” said Marilyn, the French girl.
“Oui!" Sara replied. "It's suburb is called South Hedland. I bet this place will have a McDonalds. Anywhere big enough to have a suburb should have a McDonalds.”

We were excited about this not because we love Big Macs, but because McDonalds has free wireless internet. Which, in the land of uber-expensive cybercafes, is the only way we can ever go online.

We pulled into Port Hedland, a mining town in which every building is covered in a thin layer of red dust, and a fair number of the cars have yellow reflective tape attached to their sides so they can be seen through the dust.

The first place we went was the visitors center, where we noted the internet was $6 an hour. “Is there a McDonalds?”

“Goodness, no, not in this town,” the lady at the desk said with a chuckle. “But there is one in South Hedland.”

“So what is there to do in this town?”

“Well, you could watch the trains go by. We have a nice viewing platform where you can take pictures.” She pulls out a piece of paper. “Now, here’s the train schedule.”

Hmmmm. “Anything else?”

“Well, you could go on a tour of the mines. We’re the largest ore mine in western Australia.”

"Wow, that's fascinating. Maybe next time. Thanks anyway.”

Despite the lack of entertainment, the visitors center was piled high with Port Hedland souveniers – it sold postcards of the mining operation, of the port, of the salt flats. It stocked illustrated books about how to avoid roadkill and how to cook in the bush. And it had dozens of t-shirts that read, “Port Hedland is Ore-some!”

We drove to South Hedland and spent the next several hours at McDonalds using wireless. After visiting the grocery store for produce, and after buying a bag of ice for a whopping $6.50, we figured we’d run to LiquorLand for a box of wine before heading out of town.

We pulled into the store at 6:20 p.m. The shelves of ‘cask wine’ were covered up, and a big sign in front read, “Cask wine sold only between 2 pm and 6 pm.”

“Why is that?” we asked the freckle-faced guy behind the counter.
He shrugged. “Thought it was pretty weird when I moved here too.”
“So this rule applies only to your store?”
“No, it’s the law in this town.”
“But you’re the only liquor store in town.”
“Then yeah, I guess we’re the only ones that need it.”
“Do a lot of people buy cask wine between 2 and 6 in the afternoon?”
“Oh yeah, tons. Cheapest wine there is.”
“And do a lot of people come looking for it after 6?”
“Nah, the locals all know when to get it. Only the out-of-towners don’t know, and we don’t get a lot of them.”
“So what good does it do?”
He shrugged again. “Like I said, I thought it was pretty weird when I moved here too.”

We decided to branch into a new topic of conversation.

“You like living here?”
He shrugged again. “It’s better than prison.”
“Do you get to get out much? On your days off?”
“Nah, there’s no where to go, really.”
We put two $5 bottles of Chardonnay on the counter. “We’ll take these.” Sara handed him a debit card.
“You want a flyby?” the freckled guy asked.
“I don’t know what that is.”
“That’s okay.” He rang us up. “How do you like South Hedland?”
I smiled. “It’s oresome.”

We camped that night in a little 24-hour stopping area some 50 km to the east, where a big sign said that the toilet facilities had been removed due to continuous vandalism. A small river ran nearby, which invited a torrent of mosquitos, and a herd of cows sat riverside. Their cow dung was scattered across the ground, and in the morning we could hear the occasional moo, over the sound of the millions of birds.

“Those birds! So loud!," Marilyn said through an angry French accent. "I want to take rock and” – Marilyn indicated a throwing motion – “put it on the bird.”

She was drinking tea out of a sandy cup. Scattered around us were dishes that hadn’t been washed in 4 days, since we left Exmouth. We are saving our water for drinking, so we wait for the remnants of dinner to dry, then wipe them off the plate or pot with a dishrag before using again.

Tracey, the British girl who is quite new to camping, keeps marveling at all the idiosyncracies of our lives.

“Dressed for bed!” she said on one of the first few nights, as she was going through her routine of pulling on jeans, two pairs of socks, a jumper and gloves before hitting the sack. “I’m getting dressed for bed!”

Now that its hotter, and we’re starting to stink more, she’s marveling over our unkemptness.

“I feel downright nasty,” she said in the morning. “I’m sweating everyday, covered in dirt and sunblock and red dust, and I haven’t had a shower in so long.”

“We shower soon before,” Marilyn countered. “In Exmouth.”
“That was 4 days ago,” said Tracey.
“Yeah, so not that long ago,” I said. There was a brief moment of silence, then we all started laughing.

Later that morning, as we were disassembling the bed and morphing it into shelving units again, Tracey noted our bedspread, looked at me, and said, “you use sanitary napkins as a pillow?”

Until she said it, I had thought that was a normal and unremarkable choice. After all, a package of pads are quite soft and compact; they make the perfect pillow, really. They're far better than a rolled-up jacket, which comes unraveled as you toss and turn. And they take up far less space than a real pillow; a valuable trait, since space is a precious commodity in the car.

But the way she asked that question – the hint of incredulousness in her voice – clued me in that perhaps, laying your head on a package of sanitary pads was a creative thing to do.
“Uh, yes, its quite soft,” I said.
“Why, that’s a great idea!” she said.

Western Australia with our new 4WD Nissan Patrol

2009-09-10T03:20:00.003-06:00

We're in Australia right now, and we've bought a red 4WD Nissan Patrol -- the big brother of the Nissan Pathfinder -- loaded it up with 2 spare tires, tons of extra water, dried foods, a spare 60 liter canister of extra petrol, camping gear, and a French girl and a British girl -- and are driving around western Australia.

A few anecdotes:

Buying the 4x4:
Because we’re buying the car from backpackers, we go the old-fashioned route and start looking at flyers in hostels. In addition to showcasing their vehicles – year, mileage, recent repairs -- the "car for sale" advertisements also noted they have a “roo bar.” Apparently, its de rigeur to keep a kangaroo bar attached to the front of your car to prevent damage when those lovely little creatures dash in front of your car on the highway.

Preparations for travel:
Consisted of lots of details that you don’t think of before you set off on such a trip. We’d need a can opener, wine bottle opener, and a cutting board. We’d need plastic plates, bowls, silverware, tin coffee mugs, pots, pans. We’d need a gas stove, gas canister, Tupperware of many sizes, and a table. We need a cooler. We need cardboard boxes – or preferably, empty milk crates – to store this all in. We need dish sponges, dish soap, a metal-wire scrubber.

Then, of course, you can’t venture hundreds of miles from civilization without spare petrol canisters, spare water canisters, at least 2 spare tires (including a spare wheel rim), a car jack, jumper cables, and a basic tool set – at least a wrench. Back at home, we have half a dozen old wrenches lying around in garages and tool sheds, but here they’re $10 at the hardware store.
Ditto with building the bed – we needed metal screws, yet another thing that everyone at home has, but here in a new country, we need to get it from the store. We also need a hacksaw.

First day:
I put food – gallons of canola oil, at least 15 kilos of dry beans, 2 kilo of oats, 4 of flour, 5 of rice, and a boxload of fruits and veggies – into cardboard boxes across the hardwood floor of my friend's living room in Perth. Some of the boxes are so heavy I can’t lift them, and spread out over the floor they take up what seems to be the entire center of the room. I wonder how we’ll ever fit this into the car.

I wander outside. Sara has strapped the 2nd spare tire to the roof rack, and it seems to take up half the space. She’s standing on the roof attaching camp chairs, a shower jug, and a soft-shell second cooler to the remaining roof space. “Shove the food in under the bed,” she says, referring to a narrow cube of space in the back. I go back inside and try to lift the heavy boxes. No can do. I drag a box across the wood floor. An edge of a plastic bag holding 3 kilos of bulk chickpeas snags on something, and the beans spill out over the floor.

Hmmm, I think, looking at a sea of thin, easy-to-tear plastic bags filled with beans and lentils. This could be a problem. I suppose I could line a cardboard box with a trash bag, and any bags that rip would spill into the trash bag. Then I could throw them all into a soup. But we don't have a plastic trash bag.

I wander back outside. Sara is still standing on the roof tucking things under the cargo net. She’s got a plastic net hook in her mouth. “Hey, I think we should get some ratchets,” she says, “so if we have to break hard for a kangaroo, all our stuff won’t go flying over the highway.”

Another $30, I think to myself. These trip costs are adding up fast.

The first week:
Our LPG (natural gas) tank is leaking. We know because we drive 140 kilometers with a full tank, and then stop to refuel; we fill 45 liters. There’s no way 140 km burns 45 liters. No way. So we pull into Geraldton at 3:30 pm and call a mechanic who specializes in LPG installations and repairs. By 4:40 he’s figured out what we need, a 1.5 hour service that can be done in the morning.

“Know any place around here to sleep?” Sara asked. “A camping ground, someplace free. We can’t afford the $25 a night camp sites around here.”

“Ah, well, you could drive 10 km out of the city and look for something,” the guy said. “Lots of brush in those parts. Or if you want, you could sleep here after we lock up.”

“Really?”

“Sure, you wouldn’t be the first ones to do it. We lock the gates at 5, so once you’re in, you’re in. But you can spend the night here, sleep in the office if you want, use our kitchenette. You’ll get to meet the dogs, too. They’re our guard dogs, attack anyone who tries to get thru the gate. but don’t worry, they’re real friendly.” large Doberman and Labrador. “Don’t let em put you off. They bark like mad. Bark at every little sound. They bark at their own bark.””

Sara came back to us with the plan. “What do you think, guys?”

“This place would be warmer than a tent,” the British girl said.
“And it has a kitchenette, with a real stove,” said the French girl.
“And a proper toilet,” said the British girl.
“And running water. We can wash our dishes. Get the sand out. They’ve needed to be scrubbed for two days,” I said.
The vote was unanimous.

Malaysia and Singapore

2009-08-22T23:48:00.008-06:00

No place on earth is as cosmopolitan as Kuala Lumpur. The Malaysian capital is home to a blend of Chinese, South Indians, Malays, Thais, Koreans, blacks and whites. Sit at a cafe and people-watch, and you'll see Chinese girls wearing short skirts and tank tops, redheads pushing strollers, Indians in saris. Even the Muslim women can't agree on the 'proper' way to dress: you're equally likely to spot women draped head-to-toe in black burqas, with only their eyes showing; others wearing brightly-colored headscarves, cinched at the chin, with regular clothes, and yet others wearing a transparent scarf loosely over their head so that their roots and their ears are exposed.

There seem to be no ethnic tensions in Kuala Lumpur: this rich blend of diversity gets along famously. The city could be a living advertisement for racial harmony. After spending a week there, I've figured out why. The people of this city have united over one common, shared love: Shopping.

Yes, shopping. Kuala Lumpur is the world's biggest shopping mall. It's not so much a "city" as it is a vast network of malls. The train stations connect from one mall to the next, letting passengers on and off directly inside the mall. And each mall has a pedestrian crossing that connects, underground, from one mall to the next, so you can walk across whole neighborhoods without ever stepping outside for air.

Of course, the constant air-conditioning that malls provide are, for us, the prime reason to go, as KL is devestatingly hot during the day, and a stroll through a crowded shopping-plex provides the ultimate relief from the sticky, muggy heat. So all week, we strolled past Cartier, Fendi, and Lancome counters, we browsed books at Kinokumiya, ate masala dosas at the Food Court, and watched $2.50 screenings of newly released Hollywood films.

We stayed for so long because we had to wait for our laptop's hard drive to get replaced. Did I mention our power cord was stolen about 3 months ago? Well, it was -- the laptop was fine, but the cord was lifted. As a result, we spent 2 months hauling our MacBook, now a giant paperweight, around primitive parts of Indonesia that aren't modern enough to carry contact lens solution or tampons, nevermind the possibility of carrying replacement power cords. (Ask me how I know.)

When we finally flew to KL, the city that's a shopping mall, we made a beeline to the Mac Store. But alas, as soon as we plugged our laptop in, tingling with excitement at this reunion, the hard drive immediately crashed. I blame the thieves. I don't know why or how, but I blame the thieves. It seems like too much of a coincidence.

Nonetheless, we lost all our data. All my journal/diary entries from this trip -- notes I was keeping for the book I plan to write -- have disappeared. Most of the photos we've taken on this trip are gone. We now have a souvenir hard drive wrapped in tin foil. And we stare at it, glumly, knowing one year's worth of journal entries and photos are sitting somewhere in that hard drive, refusing to get out.

So when we said good-bye to the Billabong stores, Arabian Oud perfume shops and sushi conveyor belt cafes that characterize Kuala Lumpur, and headed south to Tioman Island, I made sure to keep notes by hand. And since I'm too lazy to dredge them up in order to write this entry, you're going to read strictly what I can remember off the top of my head.

Tioman Island: home to the cheapest beer in Malaysia, thanks to its status as a duty-free island, which means its cans of Carlsburg aren't subject to the "infidel tax" that the Islamic-influenced government assesses on alcohol. (They're both morally opposed to, and profit handsomely from, alcohol consumption).

But beyond the cheap beer -- which still isn't cheap -- wildlife is the best reason to go to this little island in the South China Sea. There are no cars on Tioman Island, no paved roads; only a dirt path that bikes occasionally travel. Hardly any people live on the island, other than hotel and restaurant operators; if it has an indigenous population (which it may or may not), it's quite sparse.

As a result, if you look high into the tree branches on Tioman Island you can see pythons napping in the sun. At night bats fly overhead, hunting the mosquitos that live in the island's dense forest. Thank God for bats. They're nature's DEET.

Tioman Island is overrun with monkeys, big grey long-tailed monkeys with fluffy white beards that leap tree-to-tree. Its skies are filled with tropical birds. Its grounds are covered with monitor lizards, big scaly creatures with sharp claws that look like little Komodo dragons. These monitor lizards, from head to tip of tail, extend longer than the length of my leg.

The wooden walls of our beachfront bungalow on Tioman Island was home to spiders the size of my hand. I used to sit on my porch at night and watch geckos on the ceiling nibble at bugs and insects.

The island is completely overrun with cats, all of which resemble each other in color, size and design, representing a starting lack of genetic diversity and a high degree of inbreeding. Most of the time they meow pathetically at your doorstep, but I'd occasionally spot a cat with a gecko in its mouth. And it's no coincidence that Tioman Island was one of the first places in the past few months where we didn't have any mouse or rat problems.

And because the island is so small, and car-free (in fact, it's pavement-free), its also de riguor for all bungalows and restaurants to be on the beach or in the forest (the only thing seperating ocean from forest is about 35 feet of sand.) Though every meal was eaten on a wobbly table while sitting in a cheap plastic chair, it was always directly on the beach.

We spent 6 nights on Tioman Island and were sad to leave so soon, but we had to hurry if we wanted to have enough time to visit 3 more locations:

(1) the world's oldest rainforest, where we spent 1 night sleeping in a shelter deep inside the jungle

(2) Malacca, the world's most recently-crowned 'World Heritage City' by the United Nations. Malacca was made famous for the pirates in the Straits of Malacca, and

(3) the richest country in Asia, Singapore. I didn't think I'd like Singapore -- it seems to business-like and boring, like "California run by Mormons," as the guidebook says -- but it's actually a really sweet place to visit.

First of all, it has paved roads, and stoplights, and neatly-trimmed hedges. It's buildings have to live up to a building code. It's avenues have medians and pedestrian crossings. In a word, it's developed. This alone makes me love it.

Singapore appeared, to us, after a year of rats, tin roofs and trash heaps, after a year of dirt roads, potholes, and diesel exhaust, after a year of buildings that are so crooked that your round items actually roll from one side of the room to the other.

After all that, it's wonderful to see a country that has neatly-trimmed hedges. Someone in the country owns a hedge-trimmer! Wow!

Singapore is home to a great riverfront (eat your heart out, Cincinnati!), the world's sweetest city botanical gardens (worthy of an entire day of your life, easily), and home to the universe's most incredible zoo. I saw orangutans for the first time in my life, thanks to the Singapore Zoo. (Fun fact: in Indonesian, "orang" means human, and "utan" means forest. "Orang-utan" is literally the man of the forest. And with their opposable thumbs and the expression in their eyes, they really, really do resemble humans. Picture your hairy Uncle Steve. That's what an orangutan looks like.) The Singapore Zoo even manages to keep polar bears, despite it's location 1 degree from the equator. I went there twice in the 2 days we spent in Singapore, and I regret that we didn't stay in Singapore longer, just for the sake of spending more time at the zoo. If I lived there, I'd go to that zoo monthly. And I'd go to the botanical gardens near-daily. Seriously, this place is worth seeing. And its air is clean, and its people are well-behaved.

In Singapore, you can ask someone on the street for directions, and they'll give you directions. Just like that! Without asking for a tip, without trying to sell you a taxi ride, and without saying 'oh, I'm going that way, follow me,' and then leading you to their perfume shop where they morph into a high-pressure salesman. I'm shocked by the honesty. Shocked. And I love Singapore for it.

But I've written enough for now. Stay tuned.

And P.S. -- no, the photos on this posting we not taken by me. You'll have to wait until I load the Malaysia photos onto our brand-new hard drive. This takes a lower priority to everything else that must be done to get this new hard drive up to speed. Because guess what? We lost all our Southeast Asia photos in the Great Hard Drive Crash of 2009, and now, frankly, I don't care anymore about loading photos.

Renting a house in Bali

2009-07-28T07:20:00.005-06:00

We've been on the road for 10 months now, and many people have been asking us: "aren't you homesick?"

Not exactly. We're not homesick for Colorado, per se, but we do miss HAVING a home. We miss being able to unpack our belongings. We miss being able to store food in the refridgerator and cook our own meals. (The service is quite slow at most restaurants, so every breakfast, lunch and dinner turns into a one-hour affair. There's no such thing as snacking; no such thing as grabbing a 'quick bite'.)

The solution? When we arrived in Bali, we decided to settle down in one place for three weeks -- that's the longest we've spent in any area -- and rent a house.

For the first time in a year, we've unpacked. I mean, really, unpacked. We've put our clothes on shelves. We put our sunblock inside a drawer. Our books are in a cupboard. We've even used hangers. It's amazing to use a hanger. Remember that everytime you see one. When you can open the door to a closet or cupboard, and see your shirts just hanging there -- not bunched up inside a stuff sack at the bottom of a backpack, but actually hanging up, as shirts are meant to do -- it feels like order is restored in the world again.

The house a two-story beauty; two bedrooms, wood floors, tiled roof, floor-to-ceiling windows, and an enormous front porch that looks over a koi pond. The kitchen is a detached from the house, due to a culture that sees cooking as servant's work -- the kitchen is made of concrete and has no windows, so when we're cooking we occasionally lapse into coughing and sneezing fits and have to run outside for air. The rats are everywhere, so we have to store everything in the refrigerator -- Oreos, Ritz crackers, cooking oil, ketchup, all must live in the rat-proof fridge. In spite of this, the rats ate our soap and toothpaste on the first night; items we forgot to protect.

The rats accessed it because the bathroom, though attached to the house, is "outdoor" -- it's made from stones and has no roof. There's just a big hole in the wall, and when you step through it, you enter a beautiful garden with plants and flowers and a stone fence, with moss creeping up the stone and plants growing through the cracks. And on one end of this stone fence is a little showerhead, and that's where we bathe. It's quite beautiful to shower outside; like being under a waterfall.

We chose to live in Penestanan, on the outskirts of Ubud, Bali for two reasons. First, its a lush region where life can't help but grow. Life is everywhere. Vines creep up tree trunks and wind around fences. Little plants grow on the vertical rise of each stair. Trees bloom with pink and red flowers, whose petals get blown to the ground by the wind, so that the streets are littered with flower petals. The Balinese people leave offerings of rice to the gods every morning, and chickens and birds spend the afternoon pecking at the offerings. Caterpillars climb up walls, ants build highways along the sidewalks, and we can see every variety of butterfly and bird known to man -- purple/red/white/orange/violet butterflies and blue-white-black winged birds with long curious beaks.

There are water fountains and water fixtures everywhere (apparently water fountains are quite cheap: just dig a hole, fill it with water, stick a jug in the center and attach a pump.) Fish, usually koi, live in all of these, and all day long they dig up insects from the bottom for food, so all through breakfast we listen to fins splashing as the koi dive-bombs to the bottom of a pond, and the afternoon soundtrack is the crowing of chickens and twitter of birds, and evening brings a symphony of insects (along with a smatter of mosquitos.)

Nighttime is also when the geckos come out to hunt, big blue-striped geckos bigger than the distance between my middle fingernail and my watch. We watch them, sometimes, as they hide behind a clock or a roof tile, waiting for a praying mantis or a smaller gecko to wander near, and then *snap*, they catch their dinner. Life just keeps happening in Ubud, playing out its many dramas.

The town of Ubud itself, about a 20-minute walk from our home in Penestanan, is dedicated to art. There are galleries and museums strewn all over the city, and spas and restaurants offering 1 hour Balinese massage for $5 dollars, or one-and-a-half hours for $7. Every night there are cultural performances, which I usually shun (cultural song-and-dance feels contrived, when most of the locals are listening to Bollywood soundtracks on their mp3 players). But Ubud is like the New York City of Balinese music and dance; the cultural performances are the authentic production of talented lifelong dancers, who get on stage in silks and gold and heavy makeup and tell the Hindu saga of the Ramayana with their hips.

But the art and culture isn't the second reason we chose to live near Ubud; our second reason was for the food. For the first time in nearly a year, we can eat more than rice. I repeat -- we finally are free from the obligation of eating rice and noodles. These supermarkets sell bread; real sliced bread. They even sell brown bread and focaccia bread, which now tastes to me like manna from heaven. And I nearly fell down and wept with joy when I saw that they sell cheese. Cheese! I can't remember the last time I ate cheese, except on the occasional overpriced pizza. But here it was in all its varieties: feta, brie, goat's cheese, cheddar, mozzarella, edam, gruyere. I bought it all and ate until I was sick and loved every moment.

Five weeks in Flores, Indonesia: an anthropologist's dream

2009-07-13T00:13:00.000-06:00

Most people go to Flores for a week, hit the tourist hot spots, and jet away. We stayed for 5 weeks.

Why, you might ask? In a word: transport.

The roads on Flores are undivided unmarked lanes, suitable for one and a half lanes of traffic, and filled with two lanes of cars and motorbikes flying around blind curves and weaving around each other. Buses are filled with live chickens, chain-smoking passengers, and sacks of potatoes. The bus conductor hands you a plastic vomit bag when you board, and all through the ride, you watch and smell fellow passengers get carsick. When you're trying to get off the bus, a team of 10 hawkers surround you, blocking your exit, yelling "taxi? taxi?" The daytime heat this close to the equator is oppressive, and you sweat buckets as you haul a backpack around.

In other words, there's ample incentive not to move around too much. If you find a nice spot, you stay there.

We found our first nice spot in a verdant hilly town called Moni, in eastern Flores. Because of Flores' arduous terrain, ethnic tribes speaking distinct languages and practicing various faiths blossomed in valleys that are as close as 20 kilometers apart, but seperated by the volcanos in between. Moni is a tiny village of Catholics -- population: 300 -- who speak a local language, Lio.

The village has only one road with very occasional traffic; the odd motorcycle cruises by every few minutes. It has a tiny number of cafes, where chickens wander freely around your feet as you wait for your order.

Once at dinner, we ordered chicken. "How many people want chicken?" the waiter asked. Three of the four of us raised our hands. He nodded. "Okay, I go kill it," he said, and began walking out back, where the livestock roams freely in the fields. "Wait, no, no!" We couldn't stomach the thought of issuing a death sentence -- fresh as the meat would have been.

The same is true for vegetables. It takes at least an hour, sometimes 90 minutes, for the servers to bring you a simple fried rice with vegetables, and I suspect this is because they're picking the vegetables after you place your order. All the houses and cafes onto terraced hills where the villagers grow rice, corn and various staples.

We stayed in a spacious guesthouse, elevated on stilts to protect it from the nearby creek. It was built entirely from rough-hewn wood, with big gaps in the floorboards that allowed the sun to shine through (and that you could lose earrings or loose change through.)

All the furniture was handwoven bamboo, which means its both authentic and uncomfortable. (Suggestion Box: A few cushions could really improve a bamboo couch.)

Every morning we awoke to the sound of hogs squealing in the field next to our house; in fact, we awoke BECAUSE of the volume of hogs squealing.

Space is ample in this village, so our guesthouse had a wraparound front porch and an actual living room -- yes, a real-life living room, a room with just a coffeetable and chairs, and a sink (sinks are a luxury here), and a door connecting to the bedroom.

This guesthouse bore the closest resemblence to a "house" we've seen in the last 10 months, and having that living room plus porch was a major reason we stayed in Moni for so long.

Most tourists dash into Moni, spend one day seeing the tri-colored volcanic lakes nearby, and promptly leave. We defied convention by staying for a week. For the first two or three days, this confused all the villagers. "Why aren't you leaving today?" they'd ask, or they'd try to sell us on a taxi ride to the tri-colored volcanic lakes.

But after we'd stayed for 3 days, they understood that we were comfortable, and we weren't leaving. And that's when Moni became really, really nice. That's when locals stopped trying to sell us things, and just started to talk to us like fellow humans.

So we spent our days reading books, splashing around in the nearby waterfalls, and taking long walks through the lush green rice paddies. The showers at our guesthouse were too cold, so we bathed in the same place all the villagers bathe -- in the natural hot springs. For a week, we got to unpack our belongings, spread them out, and LIVE somewhere.

Then we flew across Flores, and took a boat to some very remote islands off the western coast. These islands had the capacity to hold 24 people -- in their 12 bungalows -- but only 2 bungalows were occupied. In other words, we had the island all to ourselves. White sand. Clear blue water, great for snorkeling -- in an average morning, we could see moray eels, stingrays, parrot fish, angel fish and all kinds of multihued coral. The front porch of the bamboo bungalow made a perfect spot for reading.

Our days fell into a blissful routine: watch the sunrise, eat breakfast, read, go snorkeling, eat lunch, read, go snorkeling, take a walk, watch the sunset, eat dinner, read, fall asleep by 9 p.m. We stayed for 10 days.

I took a break from paradise long enough to complete the next level of my scuba-diving certification. I completed four dives in Komodo National Park, some in water with very strong currents, and recieved my new license to dive down to 60 feet, independent of a divemaster's supervision.

We also saw the Komodo dragons -- enormous lizards. "Lizards" is too weak a word. The Dragons are larger (from head to tail) than I am tall. The adult lizards outweigh me, outrun me, and are natural predators against humans. They're also cannibals; the mothers eat their own babies. Many scholars believe that the mythological Chinese dragon is based on the Komodo Dragon.

Komodo dragons are also nearly extinct. They only live in one place on earth: inside Komodo National Park, a series of islands off the west coast of Flores. (Between the dragons, the skeletal remains of the prehistoric "hobbit," and the vast array of tribes and languages, Flores is an anthropologists' dream.)

Update on the motorcycle victim and the da-da-da-da guy

2009-06-27T01:41:00.002-06:00

On the motorcycle accident victim:

"You'd need an entire team of microvascular surgeons to repair that leg," our medical-student friend declared. It was true: the muscles, tendons and ligaments had been ripped apart. Bone was visible.

"These doctors just stitched up a flap of skin over the wound. They didn't repair the torn muscles," our friend said. "He's going to have serious problems with that leg for the rest of his life. He might not be able to use it again."

On the driver:

Hermanns, the driver of the car that hit the motorcycle, was still at the police station a full two days after the accident. Through the grapevine (Flores is a close-knit island), we learn that his fate is dependent on the whim and discretion of the officers, and on the severity of the victim's injury.

On the da-da-da-da-da guy:

Allegedly, this 21-year-old guy was perfectly healthy until 7 months ago, when he fell down during a drunken brawl and hit his head. He isn't mentally retarded, as we presumed. He has a severe head injury. And with no way to properly treat it, he now spends his days chained to a bedpost, flailing his arms and repeating the sound "da-da-da-da-da."

Shattered silence ... and window

2009-06-21T05:59:00.008-06:00

Video of the "da-da-da-da-da" guy.

_______________________________________________

We heard his voice the first night we slept in Labuanbajo, and we couldn't believe what we heard. We thought it was a one-time affair.

But we heard his voice again the second night, and the third night after that. And we heard it during the day, sunrise to sunset. His tone never changed. Nor did his words.

"Da-da-da-da-da-da-da."

He repeated that phrase, day in and day out. We asked around; we discovered that he is a mentally handicapped 21-year-old man whose affliction causes him to be handcuffed to a bedpost. And from that bedpost, day and night, night and day, he repeats the sound, "da-da-da-da-da-da-da."

By the time our Group of 8 finally left Labuanbajo, we agreed on two things. One, we felt sorry for him and his family. It must be awful to be, or to care for, a mentally handicapped person in a country where resources are practically nonexistant. Second, on a more selfish level, we agreed hearing his incessant "da-da-da-da-da" was driving us bonkers. We were glad to have a peaceful night's sleep in the next town.

When Sara and I returned to Labuanbajo -- a small port town on the western coast of the Indonesian island of Flores, an island which rose to fame as the archeological site where the the three-foot-tall "hobbit" was discovered -- we checked into the same hotel and didn't hear his voice. One night passed, then another, without disturbance. Silent night.

Then the sound of "da-da-da-da-da" shattered the day. Sara was in the room when the sound started, but she felt confused. The sound wasn't coming from its usual direction. She went to the window to look out, to see where the sound was coming from. She spotted the guy. It was the first time she'd ever laid eyes on him. He was standing shirtless by the water, flailing his arms, chanting "da-da-da-da-da." Strange, she thought. How did he get untied from his bed? She looked away for a minute, and then, fortunately, looked up just in the nick of time.

He was standing 10 feet away from her, outside her bedroom window, swinging a stick through the air. She watched as a split-second later, he reached his arm back and hurtled the stick toward the window. She covered her face with her arm as the wood shattered her bedroom window. Glass shards flew everywhere.

She caught her breath. Except for a few minor scratches on her back, she was uncut. But glass shards were covering her room, her belongings. It would be a long, cautious afternoon of cleanup and moving.

By the time she looked out the jagged hole where the window had once been, the man was gone. But his voice carried through the distance.

"Da-da-da-da-da-da-da."

Trauma on the Trans-Flores Highway

2009-06-09T21:12:00.002-06:00

If only we had left the hotel five minutes earlier. If only lunch had taken 1 minute longer. If only we hadn't pulled over at the drivers' aunts' house to get a pair of pliers. If only we had to pause for a bathroom break.

If the timing had been 1 minute off, we wouldn't have rounded the blind corner at the exact moment the motorcycle came barreling downhill in the other direction, hugging the curve a little too far inside.

But our timing was perfect. All I remember is the crunch of plastic, the sound of headlights shattering. The thud of his body hitting the side of our SUV. The wide-eyed frenatic face of our driver as his neck whipped around to watch the motorcyclist flip over. My moment's hesitation before I opened the door and ran outside, to where the motorcyclist lay moaning on the ground. The blood spilling from his head and leg. The bone protruding near his right knee.

The medical student among us whipped off his t-shirt and used it as a tourniquet. I ran to grab our first aid kit, not knowing how far away the nearest hospital might be. Locals rushed from their homes to stare. Three Indonesian men grabbed the motorcyclist, picked him up by his arms and legs, and carried him to the backseat of our SUV. My friends scrambled to get out as the local men loaded the victim inside. Our driver sped off with the motorcyclist moaning in the backseat. Our medical student friend, still holding his t-shirt against the victim's leg as a tourniquet, rode along, elevating the motorcyclists' leg and not letting him see the wound.

We got directions to the nearest clinic. By stroke of luck, it was less than 2 kilometers away. We walked there, single-file. Taxi drivers and touts shouted at us during our walk, wanting to make a quick buck off the Westerners, as they always do -- "you want taxi?", "hello, hello, where you go?" "I sell you pearls?" -- but their words sounded especially hollow. How could they even think of goading us into spending money at a time like this?

The clinic was bare, empty, white. It had 4 rooms with not much more than a bed inside each room. When we arrived they were operating on the victim's leg. The injury wasn't as bad as expected. Nothing had shattered. His bones were intact. The gash in his knee was severe. He looked like a cadaver; tendons and muscle visible. A man in a green military uniform and flip-flops was sewing up a flap of skin over the gash. It fit together like a bad jigsaw puzzle, leaving a border of visible muscle around it. The room had no lightbulbs. The man in flip-flops was operating by the light of the afternoon sun streaming through west-facing windows.

A Muslim woman in a white headscarf and flip-flops was swabbing at his superficial cuts with cotton balls. She placed a blue trash can under the operating table, where his blood was flow into. Sometimes the blood barely dripped into the trashcan; other times it gushed like a broken dam.

The motorcyclist kept moaning and groaning, his voice low like a dying animal. He never screamed, never yelped in pain, never raised his voice. He seemed to be in shock. Occasionally he'd lean over to vomit off the side of the operating table. I later learned that was a symptom of head trauma. All I could notice at the time was that he was regurgitating mostly rice.

A crowd of children with dirty clothing and bare feet stood in the open double-doorway of the operating room, watching the gory sight with passing curousity. They were all boys, around 8 years old, distracted from their football game. None of the adults paid attention to them.

A man with glasses and good English came to speak to me. He said he'd seen Michael Moore's movie "Sicko" and asked how much this operation would cost in the U.S. "I don't know - $10,000?" I said. He asked for $16 for the ambulence that would come transfer the patient to a larger hospital.

The driver told us he'd have to stay in town for at least 2 nights, sorting things through with the police. Apparently under Indonesian law, when a car and motorcycle collide, it is always presumed to be the car's fault, even if (as in our case) the motorcyle had crossed over into the wrong lane. Ultimately the final arbiters are the police, and our driver was now faced with the task of convincing them of his innocence. He told us to catch a bus to the next town and be on our way.

The G8 Summit

2009-06-04T23:47:00.003-06:00

Sara and I have now met up with 6 -- that's right, 6 -- of our friends from Boulder. Now we're traveling around Indonesia as a group of 8. It's like a party on wheels; a group of friends, all from Boulder, all who have known each other for years and years.

We reunited on Gili Air, a small island off the coast of Lombok, Indonesia. Gili Air is a storybook-perfect location: it has no roads, no pavement, no streets of any kind. It's small enough that you could (and often do) walk in a circle around the perimeter of the island in 1 hour. The water is crystal-clear. If you're standing in the water you can see your toes below. The water is filled with coral life, with makes it a great snorkeling location (perfect for spotting sea turtles, barracudas, angel fish, parrot fish, or just swimming through the seaweed).

As a group of 8, (I've started calling us The G8 Summit), we rented out an entire small hotel (actually, there was one French guy staying there alone, and he quickly became our new friend and an Honorary Coloradoan.) Each of us were staying in wooden bungalows with large front porches that opened out directly onto the sandy beach. We'd gather each morning in a gazebo for complimentary breakfast, where we'd sneak bites of our eggs to the hungry stray kittens who always knew when we were eating, but who cuddled with us and played with us even when we were food-free. Then we'd spend the rest of the day swimming, snorkeling, reading, and going on walks. The restaurant next door served the world's best vegetables-with-peanut-sauce for $1.50, and mixed fruit smoothies for $1.

We befriended several local Indonesian guys living on the island, who told us stories about the year or two that they lived in Saudi Arabia as restaurant servers (many of them have worked in the Gulf temporarily, because the pay is better, but most returned because they missed their families). They were sad when our Group of 8 left, but even paradise gets boring after a few days. It was time to move on to bluer waters.

After 2 solid days of interminable bus-ferry-bus-ferry transit, we've now arrived on the island of Flores, which in my opinion is far superior to Bali. Bali is the place you go if you're either 1) an avid surfer, 2) interested in seeing temples, temples and more temples, or 3) a 16-year-old Australian on Spring Break. Bali is so over-developed that it's turned into a maze of concrete and big-box retailers, and its narrow roads are congested, even at midnight. Flores is the island to visit if you're interested in getting back to nature; it's the island of coral reef life, lush forests and mountainous terrain.

Mantis Attack

2009-05-27T00:30:00.004-06:00

This video was shot by my friend Sara from outside our bungalow in Koh Tao -- literally, "turtle island" -- Thailand.

******
Greetings from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, which is the world's biggest shopping mall. This place has more Louis Vuitton, Cartier, and Valentino designer shops than (probably) NYC and Paris combined. It's the ideal location if you want to buy a $250,000 watch.

Why such extravagence? In a word, oil money. We paid homage to this yesterday by journeying to the viewing platform of the Petronas towers, which used to be the tallest towers in the world until, recently, a tower in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, took away that honor. (Petronas -- like "petrol" -- is a multinational oil and gas company).

Leaving Thailand was bittersweet. We spent a total of 2 months in Thailand on this trip, and I could easily turn around and spend yet another month there. It's a paradise of beaches and islands and jungles. It's not "cultural travel," so to speak (its so full of tourists that in some places you could easily go 24 hours without seeing a Thai person), but when you're on a 2--year trip in some of the world's most difficult places to visit, you sometimes just want a utopian slice of heaven that gets away from it all. Thailand is that place. Now we're back to "reality," in K.L., but only for a moment. We fly to Bali tonight.

Now I'm a mermaid

2009-05-22T22:26:00.008-06:00

It took six days, private coaching and a remedial course-for-dummies, but I finally got my darn scuba-diving license.

But man, it took forever.

The ordeal began when I innocently signed up for a 4-day class that certifies students to dive unsupervised down to 60 feet. About a zillion people I know have this license, and they'll all universally agreed that it was an easy class.

I should mention that in Thailand, there are certain islands where there's only one thing to do; there's one theme that draws visitors. People go to Rai Leh and Ton Sai to rock-climb. EVERYONE there is a climber, and if you're not, don't bother going. Similarly, people go to Koh Tao to get a scuba-diving license. It's not the best place to dive if you're already certified -- there are areas on Thailand's Andaman Coast with more coral life -- but thanks to warm waters and zero ocean currents, it's the best place to take classes.

I should also mention that Koh Tao looks like a postcard. Crystal-clear turquoise waters that run royal blue over the reefs. Blossoming scented trees. Coconut trees that entire porches are built around. Straw rooftops. Young, beautiful people. Our hotel has a deep blue swimming pool with infinity edges, where introductory scuba lessons are held, and hardwood floors, and banisters made from teakwood logs.

Should be paradise, right?

It was until Day 3 of the class, when our instructor, Julian, took us 6 students into the ocean on our first dive. The instructions sounded simple enough: deflate your buoyancy control device, achieve neutral buoyancy, equalize your ears and sinuses, descend a meter, equalize again, don't forget to breathe through your regulator, check your air levels, and adjust the inflation levels in your vest as needed.

Okay, the instructions sounded complicated. But manageable.

So I went under, a few feet at first, and then a few more, until finally I was about 20 feet underwater. I was breathing through my mouth, since my nose was enclosed in a mask. It felt fine at first.

But then water flooded my mouth. I blew it out. More water flooded it. I coughed it out. I reminded myself that my mouthpiece was designed for coughing in; I could even vomit into it if I needed to. But then an enormous amount of ocean saltwater flooded into my mouth, more than I could cough out. I couldn't breathe with a mouth was full of saltwater. I needed to clear my mouth to be able to breathe again. I tried swallowing it. I coughed some more. I swallowed again. No avail. There was too much water inside my mouth.

I signaled to the instructor that I had a problem (you obviously can't talk underwater, so you're trained to use specific hand signals to communicate). The instructor, who had 5 other students distanced between 5 feet to 60 feet underwater, wasn't looking anywhere near me. I decided to ascend. It felt like the only way to clear my mouth.

I came up sputtering, breaking the surface of the water with a cough that cleared my mouth. A minute later my instructor followed me. He was angry; the veins in his temple showed it. "Back on the boat," he barked.

I swam back to the boat ready to cry. I had just flunked out of scuba school. I had ascended when everyone else stayed underwater. This meant I couldn't get my license.

It's okay, I tried to tell myself. Lots of people drop out of high school. Lots more drop out of college. You made it through both of those. You'll just be a scuba-school dropout. Or, rather, a flunkee.

A couple minutes later, Nicole, a sweet and tiny German girl in my class, came up behind me on the boat. She had tears in her bright blue eyes.

"I'm out of the class," she cried. "I got too much water in my mask, and I couldn't clear it out very well. I had to surface. He yelled at me."

I was glad to have a fellow flunkee to commisserate with. We moped for the rest of the afternoon, waiting on the boat while our classmates finished their underwater tests. We both went home feeling like crap.

But my two friends back at the hotel, both of whom have Advanced Diver licenses which certify them to dive 130 feet underwater, had a different reaction. "How can he throw you out if you feel uncomfortable on your very first dive?" they said. "It's your very first dive! An instructor is supposed to instruct!"

At their urging, Nicole and I appealed to the head of the school, who assigned us a new teacher; a South African named Nick who spent the next two days working with just the two of us.

I honestly didn't think getting a new teacher would help; I thought the problem was me. I figured I was just a bad athlete. I'm the slowest high-Himalayan trekker in our group, I'm too scared to lead-climb most routes, and we all know how ill-fated my Spanish bicycle trip was. And Julian, the dive instructor who flunked Nicole and I, confirmed this fear: "Some people aren't meant to scuba," he said, "just like some people aren't meant to drive a car."

Oh crap, I thought; I'm also bad at driving a car. I hate driving at night, in the rain and in snow. Geez, can't I do ANYTHING? Am I just bad at EVERYTHING?

But if there's one thing I've got going for me, it's persistance. With Nick, my new instructor, I practiced scuba drills again and again and again in the hotel swimming pool. I dove 10 feet underwater, exhaled every ounce of air from my lungs, filled my mouth with pool water, and practiced clearing my mouth so I could breathe through it again. I took my mask off underwater, dropped the mouthpiece, and located it blindly. I went through everything -- everything that was so-called 'easy' to do by the zillions of people who came before me -- until I had it down, better than any other student I observed.

And then I went back for another test in the salty open ocean. And now, after six days, private coaching with Nick, and endless practice, I finally have that license.

Well, not THAT license, exactly. I aimed for a lesser license, one that certifies me to dive 40 feet underwater instead of 60 feet underwater. But hey, the devil's in the details. I'm licensed. As my friend says -- "now you're a mermaid!"

And Julian was wrong. Some people ARE meant to scuba -- with a little extra effort.

Cambodian Killers

2009-05-05T21:26:00.006-06:00

Note: I'm back in Thailand, but I want to say something about the 10 days or so that we spent in Cambodia in March. Also, I added new photos of the Water Festival to the previous post.

Imagine seeing a human skull.
Not an ancient skull. Not some fossil in your anthropology class. No, a very recent human skull, belonging to a woman who was murdered thirty years ago with a blunt force blow to the head.

Now, imagine seeing two of these skulls. Both belong to murder victims.

Now imagine four.

Imagine eight.

Imagine, if you will, an entire platform, six feet by six feet, blanketed in skulls. End-to-end.

Had enough? We’re not done yet. Now picture 17 of these platforms, stacked vertically from the floor to the ceiling, like some grotesque bookcase. Now imagine that every single platform is covered in skulls.

The platforms that are at eye-level have only one layer of skulls, for the benefit of the viewer. The shelves below and overhead have mounds of skulls, two feet thick. Skulls piled haphazardly on top of skulls on top of more skulls.

Signs hover over each section of the platform, labeling the skulls “female, age 20-40” or “male, age 40-60” or “female, age 10-20.”

Welcome to Cambodia. Home to one of the worst genocides in recent memory – the indiscriminate slaughter of 3 million people from 1975 to 1979. Half as many people died in Cambodia thirty years ago as the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust sixty years ago.

Yet we never seem to hear about Cambodia. We never read books on it, or study it in school, or watch movies about it, or hear pop-culture references to “Khmer Rouge” the way we hear pop-culture references to “Nazis.”

Some people say we hear more about the Holocaust because it happened in the “civilized” world, in Europe. But the genocide in Cambodia was 1) carried out by Paris-educated elites, and 2) extremely “civilized.” Every victim was photographed, numbered, and documented in exquisite detail.

So here's a primer on what happened 30 years ago:

The Khmer Rouge – French for “Red Khmer” – was founded by Paris-educated Cambodians who sympathized with Marxism and Leninism. They fantasized about creating a utopian Cambodia in which everyone is a farmer.

In their ideal society, there would be no labor divisions or social stratification. Everyone would plant and harvest the land. Each person would be allotted about .85 kg of rice a day, and the rice surplus would be taxed by the government and exported to other countries. The money generated from these exports would pay for imports of farm equipment and machinery. There would be no education; there would be no need for it.

Even if that theory could have worked, it would have had some massive downsides. A society where everyone is "equal" and "works with the earth" is a society devoid of poets, artists, lipstick, popsicles, magazines, music, restaurants, chocolate, books, videos, and finding your favorite pair of really warm winter socks.

In practice, the Khmer Rouge's "agrarian utopia" economic theory couldn’t pan out. The people couldn’t harvest enough rice to feed everyone. The rice tax had to be paid first, and the meager leftovers didn’t provide enough food for the workers. Thousands starved to death.

The tax, they said, was necessary for buying farm equipment. Without that equipment, even less rice might have been produced, and even more people might have starved to death. It was a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t situation.

A social stratification grew between the lifelong farmers and the city-slickers. The city-slickers, less talented with the land, quickly became viewed as second-class citizens and as worthless, inexperienced farmers whose presence was more a burden than a blessing. This only added to their malaise, which began when they were forcibly ousted from their city homes and displaced to a farm.

The government assigned only nominally-trained people to work in medical clinics. Thousands with illnesses and injuries died at the hands of these untrained medical workers.

This disasterous economic situation would have been bad enough by itself.

But to make matters worse, the Khmer Rouge decided that it wanted to crack down on anyone who might be bold enough to oppose their communist ideology. The people who were most likely to do that, they decided, were the educated ones – the privleged class, who had the most to lose.

So they began summarily rounding up every learned person in the country – teachers, doctors, anyone who spoke a foreign language, anyone who wore eyeglasses.

First, they tortured them. They tied them to beds and beat them with steel rods. They hung them upside-down until they lost consciousness, then dunked their heads in cold water to revive them, then hung them upside-down again, repeating this cycle until the prisoners went crazy. They forced them to live in solitary cells and blocked their ability to commit suicide as a means of escape.

The torturers extracted a forced “confession” in which, under severe duress, the victims accussed neighbors of allegedly bad-mouthing the government’s policies.

Once they “confessed,” however accurate or inaccurate their information, the torture stopped. And the killing began.

To save the cost of bullets, the KR forced the victims to line up on their knees in front of a mass grave. They struck the victims in the back of the head with a heavy blow, murdering them by blunt force. They pushed the body into a mass grave – these sites became known as Killing Fields.

From 1975 to 1979, the KR killed a whopping 3 million people, out of a total population of 7 million.

Many Cambodians, scared of getting killed, decided that if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. They enlisted to work for the government, as torturers and executioners, in the hopes that this would spare their own lives.

That tactic failed. The paranoid and suspicious KR leaders began executing their own executioners. They increasing suspected their own staff of harboring secret anti-communist ideals. Their goal was to wipe out every living teenager and adult, whose minds have already been tainted by capitalist ideals. Then they could re-start a new society of babies, who would grow up learning nothing but communism and agrarianism.

They nearly succeeded.

Today, walking around in modern Cambodia, its evident that just about the entire population is under 30. As we walk down the streets, ride buses, and eat in restaurants, we rarely notice anyone older than we are.

One of the beggars I saw was the most pathetic-looking human being I have ever laid eyes on.

In India, you see some extremely pathetic beggars; people so crippled by disease that they have to crawl on all four (or three) limbs, clutching their begging bowls in their mouth. But even India didn’t prepare me for this.

Cambodia has almost no beggars. Most would-be beggars have been killed. But the few who live are extremely disfigured. The heartwrenching beggar that I saw had half his face melted off and one eyeball gouged out. I don’t remember how many limbs he had; I was too repulsed to count.

But what’s magical about Cambodia is that everyone is smiling. I mean, truly smiling – beaming from the heart. Grinning so wide they have crinkles of laughter around their eyes.

Why they smile, I have no idea. How they’ve found reason or hope in this crazy world, I can’t explain. But you look at the smile of a Cambodian, knowing that literally every family has lost at least one person to the genocide, and you can’t help but think that every stupid little problem in your own life is a hollow figment of your dark imagination. If these people, who have every reason to frown, can find reason to smile, there’s no excuse why we all can’t be grinning.

Water, water everywhere!

2009-04-30T15:09:00.008-06:00

Mandalay, Myanmar (Burma) is an uneventful city 361 days a year.

But without planning on doing so, we happened to reach Mandalay for its wildest, most invigorating and ludicrous annual blowout: a four-day Water Festival marking the Myanmar New Year.

In the heart of the city are about 5 massive Water Festival stages, each surrounded by massive sound systems and each rigged with hundreds – literally hundreds – of neon hoses. The day we arrived in Mandalay, the officials turned the nozzles on. From that moment, pandemonium erupted.

Hundreds of locals leapt up on stage, grabbed a hose, and began spraying the street below. For every hose that was dousing the street, there were at least 10 more people below, dancing in the showers. There were young people and old people; men and women, drunk and sober. The one trait they shared in common is that they were all really, really wet. The temperatures in Mandalay were forecasted to reach 108 degrees that week, but no one cared. Businesses were closed. Schools were on holiday. The city morphed into a water park. And everyone was dancing in the streets.

Within minutes, the streets began to flood. The water ran off towards the curb and stayed there, clogging the city drains. It stood an inch deep, then two inches, then finally knee-deep, at which point small children decided that it was the closest thing to a swimming pool they’d ever seen, and began hurling themselves like cannonballs into the street water.

People carry empty water bottles, refilling it with all the water pouring from overhead or from the puddles down below, dump it onto the head of the nearest person, and repeat.

Teenagers take the opportunity to punk themselves out. They wear black hoodies with mesh lining. They spike their naturally black hair, then add purple or blue dye to the tips of their Mohawks. They draw dark circles around their eyes. The women wear electrifying red lipstick. The boys drink so much whiskey their bloodshot eyes soon match the girl’s lips.

The teens load themselves into the backs of their friends Jeeps and pickup trucks, packed in more tightly than sardines. Slowly they cruise through the mosh pit, getting soaked to the bone.

The water in the bed of the pickup truck grows ankle-deep. The interior of the open-top Jeeps get drenched. The driver doesn’t seem to mind. He alternately either sits behind the wheel or darts out of the car, grabs another friend on the sidewalk, shakes his hand, chats, chugs a whiskey, remembers that he left his car running in the middle of the road with 25 people in the back, and darts back to the driver’s seat again.

We go out into the street and – as obvious foreigners in a land almost devoid of visitors – become instant celebrities. We feel and act like politicians, always shaking people’s hands, getting photos taken with their babies at their request.

Our initiation begins as we walk towards the city center. We make it about 5 feet outside the hotel door before a young child runs up to us, splashes a bucket of ice-cold water onto us, and runs off. We step off the hotel stairs and onto the sidewalk. Another kid gets us in the face with a supersoaker. We turn left and begin walking. A grown man runs up to me, grabs the collar of my t-shirt, and pours a cup of water down my neck.

And so it continues, every step of the way, for five or six very wet blocks, until we reach the real scene of the spraying.

We know we’re getting close when we begin to see men lying face-up in the gutter, unconscious from too much alcohol. Then the blare of the music hits our ears. It sounds just like the past three decades of American rock music – The Cranberries, The Who – but all the words are redone in Burmese, and everyone’s singing along in a language we can’t understand.

When we get to the periphery of the crowd, locals begin to grab our shoulders and shake us.

“Are you happy?” someone yells into our faces as they shake my friend’s shoulders. “Are you happy?”

“Um, yes!,” she exclaims.

Someone else grabs my arm from behind.

“Happy!” he yells. He’s apparently either forgotten the words “Are you,” or the phrase “new years.”

There’s more of them, surrounding us, shaking our hands, grabbing our elbows. They try to speak but their words are slurred, their accents are thick, their vocab is limited.

“What your office?” someone says.

“Student,” I reply. I know better than to admit to being a journalist when I’m in a country where 1 out of every 10 people is a government spy.

“Wha our office?” he repeats.

“A student,” I say again.

“Wat our of fes?” he says. I piece it together.

“Wat our of fes …. wat-er fes … water fes! Water festival! Yes!”

The crowd around us grows thicks. Their heads wobble. My right hand is constantly being tossed from one handshake to the next. Someone is still gripping our shoulders. “Happy New Years! I love you!” the crowd screams.

And so it goes. We have dozens of conversations like this; maybe hundreds. We watch a man get on his motorcycle, but he’s too drunk to remember how to turn it on. No problem. His friend sits on the bike behind him, reaches around and grabs the handlebars. A third person gets in back and kicks the clutch. A fourth jumps onto the front of the bike. And off they ride, bouncing off the curb, onto the street which is now evenly running 6 inches deep in water.

We inch closer to the stage and water sprays directly in our eyes, our ears. We can’t see where we’re going. We can’t hear anything but the sound of George Michael’s “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” blaring from the speakers. I can feel someone grab my arm. “Are you happy?”

Blinking, we can faintly make out the sight of thick lines of motorcycles inching past us at hairpin-close range. If we move a split-second too quickly, or if the motorcycles misjudge us by a half-inch, we’ll end up with a nasty exhaust-pipe burn on our leg.

(In fact, several days after leaving Mandalay, while trekking through the mountains near Inle Lake, we come across a 22-year-old farmer with a third-degree exhaust-pipe burn on his leg. He hasn’t received any treatment and asks if we’re carrying a basic first aid kit. We wash his wound, clean the pus with some Q-tips, cut the scabs off with a Leatherman knife, apply some Neosporin and gauze, and tell him to go see the medicine man for some oral antibiotics. Then he shows us the gash on his hand. It’s obvious he needs stitches immediately, or he might be at risk of permanent nerve damage or even loss of limb. Already it’s gotten infected and his hand has swollen badly. We’re not equipped to handle an injury that severe, so we tell him to find a doctor; then we ask how it happened. “Water Festival,” he says, but his details are hazy.)

Deciding that being on stage, where there’s no traffic jam, is safer than being on the flooded streets, we snake around to the back fence and, with a smile, charm our way to the top row. Someone hands us neon hoses, and we let loose upon the crowd. I spot a cop trying in vain to direct traffic, and I turn the nozzle on him, spraying the officer full-force in the face. He staggers back, wipes his eyes, then tries again. This time, the woman to my right pegs him with a fire hose.

I start reflecting on festivals in America, where no one could point a fire hose directly on a crowd because of the very real possibility that the water pressure could burst someone’s ear drum. The pressure from a fire hose – for those of you who have never borne the brunt of its wrath – is unimaginably strong when fired point-blank.

Then again, if this were America, everyone would have to wear wrist bracelets indicating whether they were 21 or not. Security would be set up around the parameters. Food vendors would have to follow strict kitchen guidelines and pass a health inspection. A first-aid tent would be nearby. The guys lying unconscious in the gutter would be medically tended to, then arrested. Old ladies couldn’t sell dirt-encrusted unsealed bottles of Grand Whiskey for $1. No one could carry glass bottles into this crowd.

If this were America, this event would require parking. It would have orange cones and trash cans, police barricades and street sweepers.

In the U.S., the streets would have been designed by a road engineer, meaning they wouldn’t flood so unevenly, and the sidewalks wouldn’t have huge chunks missing where people could fall through to their waist. The motorcycle exhaust-pipes would be designed in such a way as to prevent it from burning flesh on contact.

In America, all food and alcohol vendors would need a license. They’d have to rent a booth. Here in Myanmar, anyone’s grandma can carry a pot of noodles to the festival and sell them for ten cents a bowl.

In America, companies would advertise at festivals of this size and scale. There would be corporate booths, raffles, prize giveaways. A sleek new car model would be on display. The local radio DJs would broadcast from the festival. All the beer would be sold in identical cups that bore the logos of the companies that sponsored the event.

At this festival, there was only one place with corporate logos; the stage itself. No where else were there any ads. Nor were there booths, or tents, or “Over 21” bracelets.

But then, Myanmar isn't exactly the Land of the Free.

According to the Web site of the U.S. Department of State:

"Burma (Myanmar) is an underdeveloped agrarian country ruled by an authoritarian military regime. The country's government suppresses all expression of opposition to its rule."

"The Burmese Government has a standing law ... that bans all gatherings of more than five people."

"The military regime carefully controls and monitors all internet use in Burma and restricts internet access through software-based censorship .... access to most “free” international e-mail services such as Hotmail and Yahoo is prohibited .... All e-mails are read by military intelligence."

Myanmar: Access Denied

2009-04-12T01:47:00.001-06:00

Note: This will probably be the only time during my 3-week trip to Myanmar (Burma) that I will be able to post to my blog. The heavy-handed government has blocked access to most internet sites, including blogs (even this blog) and most email accounts.

The first 4 times I tried to access this blog, I was met with this message: "Access denied. Your system policy has denied access to the requested url. For assistance, contact your network support team."

Fortunately, entrepreneurial twentysomethings are much more computer-savvy than middle-aged bureaucrats. Some brilliant guys at a cybercafe, using a proxy server, were able to circumvent this firewall.

Without further ado, my take on Myanmar.

******************

We decide to visit Myanmar (Burma) for two reasons: it’s closed to the world, and the world is closed to it.

Myanmar (Burma) has been ruled by a repressive military junta since the 1960’s, which locks the nation in complete isolation. It outlaws foreign companies from establishing a local branch. It outlaws taking Myanmar currency outside of the country’s borders, thus effectively shutting off all export-import commerce. It won’t allow books or magazines from other nations to come into Myanmar. It blocks web sites and even some e-mail servers. It stopped granting permission (visas) for foreigners to enter the country.

Of course, there are exceptions to all of this. The government DOES allow some foreign mineral-extraction companies to set up shop; high-ranking leaders take a large cut from this, as big as 5 percent, and live like kings. The government also tightly controls exports and imports, though the common people have established a thriving black market, on which they buy cheap Chinese imports with U.S. dollars.

Laypeople are so enthusiastic about getting U.S. dollars that they pay a pretty penny for it. The “official” exchange rate is 1 US dollar to 6.5 kyats. The government-owned banks will exchange 1 US dollar for 450 kyats. And the black market will trade 1 US dollar to 1,050 kyats.

The people of Myanmar led a popular uprising in 1988, followed by democratic elections in 1990. The military junta refused to acknowledge the results of the elections. They locked the leader of the democratically-elected party in house arrest. She remains in house arrest to this day. (She has been awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for her non-violent resistance to the military junta, though she couldn’t go to Norway to receive her Nobel, thanks to the house arrest.)

In response, the U.S. and other developed nations have imposed sanctions on Myanmar, further isolating it still. There’s hardly a nation on earth that’s been as cut off from the world as this one. (Yes, yes, except Bhutan. I know.)

But a few years ago, the Myanmar (Burmese) government, desperate to get dollars flowing, finally started granting tourist visas to those who filled out extensive application forms in advance.

That’s how we found ourselves at the Myanmar embassy in Laos, submitting forms, photos and a scheduled day-by-day itinerary of our trip to a visa application official. (We also signed a pledge that we would not get involved in Burmese politics or social issues in any way, shape or form.)

Thanks to her rubber-stamp of approval, we are now in Myanmar.

After flying into the airport, we started searching for someone with whom to share a taxi to the city center. We found a 50-year-old Dutch man carrying a duffel bag with 4 pairs of roller blades. That’s right, 4 pairs. Plus 4 helmets, 8 elbow pads, 8 knee pads, 8 shin guards. He said he brought the equipment for his kids. But then he said that he was alone. His kids live in Holland. And he flew straight from Holland to Burma (via Bangkok) and that he is flying straight back. So his story makes no sense. But hey, it’s none of our business.

We step outside and this 50-year-old Dutch man bursts into song. He begins singing a Burmese song that roughly translates into “shake your booty, yeah, shake it.” All the Burmese men start singing along, laughing, clapping. This guy can really light up a taxi terminal, even at 8 a.m. after a red-eye in coach.

"What brings you to Burma?" I ask him.

He grins mischieviously.

"I'm here to meet a 21-year-old French girl." He winks.

*******************************

Its 102 degrees in the capital, Yangon (Rangoon), with 100 percent humidity. This wouldn’t be so bad were it not for the fact that electricity only stays on for about 4 hours a day. Throughout most of the afternoon, the power fails. This means no fan. No fan! Nothing can cool you down. From 10 am to 5 pm, you feel like you’re living in a furnace.

All we can do is lie on the wooden floor of our guesthouse (the floor is cooler than the mattress) and wave a hand-held paper fan in front of our face.

We stare at our electric fan – a standard little tabletop fan – and pray that it kicks back into gear. (It doesn’t). We also drink water, despite the fact that the water, like everything else in the refrigerator, has turned warm.

Then we realized there’s one place in the city that has air-conditioning. The movie theater! The daily afternoon power cuts don’t affect them. They must own a generator, or maybe an on-site power station.

We clamor to see the 12:30 showing. We don’t care what the movie is. We just want the air-conditioning.

I’m literal when I say “THE movie.” There’s only one screen in the movie theatre. You don’t get a choice of what you want to see. You see whatever’s playing.

Tickets range from 50 cents to $2.20, depending on how good of seats you want. All seats are assigned.

We opt for a mid-range seat -- $1.20 – the cheapest of the balcony seats. Balcony is literally an “upper-class” experience, because it has stadium-style seating. The ground-level seats are on a flat surface.

Before the movie starts, a notice flashes on screen saying that everyone must rise in honor of the nation’s flag.

An image of Myanmar’s flag waving in the wind begins to play. The clip looks like it was shot in the 1950’s. It’s discolored, grainy and sped-up. The sound system crackles to life and begins to play an off-key tune which I can only assume is the national anthem.

The audience gets to its feet, but midway through the anthem, sits down.

The day we went to the movie hall, it was playing The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. But the power was “if-fy,” to say the least. The movie halts in its tracks three times as all the power in the movie hall fails. Fortunately the movie is never paused for long; after a minute or two, the screen kicks back to life. More importantly, the inside air stays cool.

I’ve never been a movie buff in the U.S. In fact, most movies bore me. I’d rather be reading. I don’t mean to sound pretentious. I don’t read Proust. I mean, I’d rather read an issue of TIME. Or Glamour. Or Mary Higgins Clark. I’ll read anything. I’ll read the back of a cereal box. (I won’t read Dickens. I hate Dickens.) Anyway, my point is, I don’t normally care that much for movies.

But here in Myanmar, I can understand the glory of a movie. I understand how, by watching a movie, you step into a magical other world. You receive a respite from the Burmese gruel, from the dogs, from the cracked haphazard concrete slabs, from the guys hanging off the sides of buses acting as human rear-view mirrors and yelling instructions to the driver. You escape it all for 2 hours. And you step into a clean, orderly, beautiful world.

Our world, or at least our immediate surroundings, will be changing again soon.

Today we’re taking a (not air-con) bus to Mandalay, where the temperature is predicted to be 108 degrees, and the air is said to be caked with dust.

Lets just hope they have power. All I want is a standard little tabletop fan.

****************************

So here’s what I’ve noticed about Burma:

•The country has a 1950’s classic feel. The cars are old British ambassador-models. The people are dressed smartly.

•The air smells of beetlenut, and the streets are stained red with beetlenut spittle.

•Sidewalks consist of haphazardly strewn cement blocks jutting every which way.

•The sidewalk has huge gaps between the cement blocks, at random intervals. An inattentive person could tumble five feet down into a gaping hole.

•People crowd the sidewalks selling fried bread, wristwatch bands, umbrellas.

•Dogs are sleeping everywhere. On steps leading up to a store. In sewer gutters. Everywhere.

•Someone is blaring Celine Dion at top volume.

•For an inexplicable reason, a man on the street corner is carrying a baby in a box.

•If I wear a Burmese outfit, I can pass as a local. This gets me into ancient monuments for free.

•If it rains too hard, sewage water spills out onto the street.

•Every man, woman and child wears an ankle-length wraparound skirt.

•The women slather thick chalky yellow cream on their cheeks. It’s supposed to be an extra-strong sunblock.

•We’re staying in the Muslim quarters. There are several mosques nearby and we hear the call to prayer five times daily once again. I realize that in spite of its hardships, I miss traveling in the Islamic world. I miss the delicate curves of Arabic script above doorways. It makes modern Egypt beautiful.

•The mosque across the street has a sign inside that says “Live like Ali, die like Husein.” I have no idea what this means.

•The architecture of the Buddhist temples in Myanmar are a perfect combination of Thai-style and Chinese-style, fringed with a fiery Burmese flair.

•I realize I’ve gotten really good at identifying artistic and architectural styles of individual Asian countries. I can easily spot the differences between Chinese, Thai, Cambodian (Khmer), Indian Mogul, and now Burmese.

Vietnam: A History Lesson Up-Close

2009-04-06T21:39:00.009-06:00

Sometimes I feel like life is one giant field trip. Everywhere you go, there’s a fascinating subject to learn or experience firsthand.

I never took art classes in school. The counselors said art classes “wouldn’t look good on a college application;” take a more rigorous set of electives.

Big mistake, but I was lucky enough to discover why firsthand.

It was in Europe that I learned an appreciation for the great artists: Van Gogh in Holland, Botticelli in Italy. And in the halls of the Prado Museum in Madrid, where I’d spend afternoon upon afternoon, I learned HOW to critically look at a painting. This is perhaps the most important art lesson of all.

This “field trip” mentality has stayed with me wherever I’ve gone. Japan was a lesson in haiku, Zen gardens, efficient interior design. Portugal loves to brag about its seafaring history. Laos was a place to connect with the countryside.

Vietnam is a lesson in history. It’s also a lesson in propaganda. The two are inextricably linked.

I began my study of the Vietnam War in by visiting Hoa Lo Prison in Hanoi. Sarcastically nicknamed the “Hanoi Hilton” by the American POWs, this was the prison where former Pres. candidate John McCain endured 5 painful years of his life, back when he was an anonymous, middle-class twentysomething.

The prison – now a museum – begins its tour with exhibits that show how much the North Vietnamese suffered when they were imprisoned at the hands of French colonialists. Display after display showcased the torture devices that were used – iron rods, metal spikes, a guillotine with a rusty blade. Wax figures posed as prisoners inside the cells.

Then the museum turned to its next display: after the French pulled out of Vietnam, and the country gained its independence, the North Vietnamese began using this site to lock up American POWs. But did they display the same torture devices?

Oh no. They showed photos of American soldiers playing basketball, strumming a guitar, reading letters from home. They showed photos of Americans decorating a Christmas tree, feasting on duck, hunched over a chess board. They made no mention of torture or suffering; they only showed smiling pictures of soldiers above placards noting that the Americans made a “temporary stay” at the prison. In their fantasy land, the North Vietnamese prison guards were loving, compassionate angels over the American POWs.

Which is a bunch of lies. McCain, for one, is permanently disabled as a result of the torture he underwent at Hoa Lo Prison. He can no longer lift his arm above shoulder-level. He hasn’t been able to in 40 years. While he was imprisoned there, he grew so desperate to escape that he tried to commit suicide twice. Clearly, his life wasn’t all Christmas trees and turkey.

The language that the museum used was also notable. The placards kept calling the North Vietnamese “patriots” fighting for the “unification” of their country.

History is written by the victors.

In South Vietnam’s museums, the language changed dramatically. They described themselves as “common people” fighting the North Vietnamese “occupiers” and “aggressors.” The Americans, they said, were their allies.

We met a man who was a South Vietnamese soldier and was shot in the leg during the Tet Offensive in 1973. He retired from combat life after his injury and moved to Saigon, where he aided the American troops in offices. After Saigon fell to the grip of North forces in 1975, he returned to his family farm. But times at the farm were tough, and he moved back to Saigon to gain under-the-radar employment. The North Vietnamese rulers required everyone to “register” and “apply” to move to Saigon, in an effort to keep former South Vietnamese rebels out, so he snuck into the city, an illegal alien in his former capital, and pedaled bicycle-powered carriages for a decade.

He still calls Saigon by its original name, refusing to yield to Hanoi’s dictum that the city’s new name is now “Ho Chi Minh,” in honor of the famous North Vietnamese communist leader.

The museums and battlefields in the South, which still show the craters that B-52 bombers dug into the earth, are told in a way that placates the victors, that agrees Vietnam is stonger and better now that it's been unified, North and South joined together, into a large socialist republic. But there still seems to be an undercurrent of rebellion there, maybe reflecting a tinge of that same undercurrent of rebellion that you see in parts of the American South, where people agree that the Union is better united but muse, under their breath, about their lost war for independence.

150 years after the Civil War, the Confederate flag still flies freely in the American South. With that in mind, its astounding how rapidly, and on the surface wholeheartedly, the Vietnamese South has unified with the North. Equally astounding is how swiftly the nation has rebuilt, and turned into a thriving economic power.

*************************

My Two Cents:

After going to Vietnam, I have less fondness for John F. Kennedy and much greater appreciation for Richard Nixon. While I think Henry Kissinger fouled Cambodia, I can sympathize – though I ultimately disagree – with the Nobel Prize committee’s decision to award him a peace medal.

Nixon’s ‘Vietnamization’ withdrawl strategy – take ground forces out, keep scant air forces and non-combat advisors in -- could be a useful model for today’s Iraq quagmire. But there’s a large, biting difference between Vietnam and Iraq.

Vietnam was a straightforward war: if the South lost, it was clear that the Viet Cong would become the new leaders. Who would become the new leader of Iraq, however, is uncertain. And that question, among others, is keeping us in. It’s possible Iraq might fall into the hands of a Saudi-backed, Iranian-friendly puppet government that runs the country and funds its madrasas. Or that a Taliban-friendly power might rise in the political vacuum the way it did in Afghanistan in the early 1990’s. Or – most frightening of all, and most likely – that an American withdrawl could leave behind a completely destable power vacuum without any rule of law and warring factions will compete for power.

If Obama’s team (Biden, Clinton) can smoothly withdraw while creating stability, they’ll be one of the greatest wartime presidential teams and deserving of a Nobel Prize themselves. If their withdrawl plans further the instability, however, their legacy as war leaders will be more bleak than Lyndon Johnson’s.

Ride to nowhere

2009-04-04T01:49:00.003-06:00

The bus that’s taking us to Vietnam looks like a 60’s-era VW van: blue, white and rectangular, with vinyl seats. A rock wedged behind the front tire poses as a parking brake. A large sign in its cracked windshield announces the buses’ destination: “VINH,” a city on Vietnam’s eastern coast.

At a bus station in Luang Prabang, the ancient Buddhist city in northern Laos, we meet our new ridemates. First onboard were two Londoners, only 2 weeks into their very first multi-month overseas trip, and not yet cynical. Hannah wore a stylish scarf set off against a grey beer t-shirt; her boy-faced boyfriend, Tom, acted as innocent as he looked.

Broad-shouldered, barrel-chested Dave came on the bus next; though British, he was loud and excitable enough to be mistaken for an Aussie. He took a strong liking to Sally, the elegant, beautiful brunette riding back to her home in Hanoi, where she worked as an English teacher. Sally was polite, good-humored, friendly – in short, a real Minnesotan. There’s just no such thing as an unpleasant Minnesotan.

The cast of characters assembled – Hannah, Tom, Dave, Sally, and of course, Sara and I. Three Brits, three Americans, on a bus packed with Laotian men, all men, all heading for Vinh, Vietnam. We Westerners compared notes on how much we paid for our tickets – “I got quoted 220,000 kip by three different agencies, so that’s what I paid” – “Really? I only got charged 190,000” – and we contrasted how long we had been told the bus ride would take.

“We heard 13 to 17 hours,” Hannah said.

“They told me 22 hours,” Dave replied.

We place bets. Sally says we’ll reach Vinh by 11 a.m. the following day. I guess we’ll get in by 2 p.m.

Two Laotian men edge onto the bus, heaving a washer between them. This is a real, industrial washer – a Toshiba brand top-loader. As in, “washer and dryer,” but without the dryer.

Why they were carrying this contraption onto a bus was beyond me; certainly, I thought, there must be better ways to ship a washer.

The men knocked through the aisles, banging against seats and tripping over loose straps as they inched their way to the back of the bus, washer hoisted at chest level. Then they found the pile of backpacks we had dumped onto a seat and dumped the washer unceremoniously on top. It balanced precariously atop the amorphous blob of backpacks. I prayed the driver wouldn’t brake suddenly and send the washer flying.

Sally got out to have a cigarette and the washer-loading men begin to tease her. “Hey, what you do?” they mock. “What that?” Laos is a country where pretty women don’t smoke in public. They must wonder how she’ll ever find a husband.

The bus driver turns the ignition, forcing Sally to abandon her cigarette and rush back inside the bus. We pulled out of the station, rounded the corner, pulled off to the side of the street, and parked. We were 200 feet from the bus station, and we were stuck.

The Westerners had no idea what was happening, as usual. We did the only thing we could do: crack jokes. Sara looked out the window at a tailor shop across the street and quipped that we could really take advantage of this delay. “Anyone need to take your pants in?”

After an hour (“I think your 22-hour prediction was closer to the mark, Dave,”) we finally figured out WHY we had stopped: we were waiting for someone to load a motorcycle onto the bus.

After an hour of sitting by the roadside, someone pulled up on a 150 cc motobike and a gaggle of men loaded it onto the bus, balancing it in the aisle. The stench of gasoline filled the air. We’ll be riding with this fuel-soaked fellow passanger until someone discovers delivery trucks and towing.

90 minutes after our departure from the bus station, we finally leave the street we had started from. An uneventful hour passed, then another. We jumbled in our seats, vibrating from the shock of every rock and pothole on the road.

I tried to get some shut-eye, but the armrests wouldn’t rise, making for a fitful night’s rest. I looked at a nearby Laotian to see how the locals handled it. He was drinking whiskey through a straw from a plastic bag. Soon he had conked out.

We Westerners, the sober ones, were all awake at 2:30 a.m. when the bus pulled to a stop at a small town near the Laotian border. We had reached a small village, too tiny to have stores, shops or streetlights. All the other passangers were heading inside a private house. I followed them in, entering a bare, furniture-less room that held a gas stove in one corner and a TV tuned to soccer on the opposite wall. A lady was stirring ramen noodles over the gas stove, and scooping it into bowls for each bus passenger who approached.

The Westerners hung back, unsure whether this was included or whether it costs money. We had all spent our last Laotian kip before leaving. Since kip is a non-convertible currency, we didn’t want to carry it to Vietnam; it’s useless once we cross the border. As a result, all of us had empty wallets. We wanted to ask if the noodles would cost anything, but no one knew enough of the language. It’s a situation we get into a lot while traveling. Finally, we accepted the noodles. We were in a private house, after all. (Sure enough, no one asked for payment).

Sally stepped outside the house and lit another cigarette. A Laotian guy approached her and flashed a trading card – like a baseball card – featuring a naked white woman. She laughed nervously, like a polite Minnesotan.

We piled back onto the bus. The driver asked if anyone else wants a turn at the wheel.

Someone begins to drive, but the bus can’t handle the curves and slopes of the mountainous roads that separate Laos from Vietnam, and we chug along at 10 miles per hour. At 6:30 a.m., we make it to the border and everyone troops into the station to get their Laos Exit Stamp. We notice that most of the Laotian men, our fellow bus passangers, are now wearing helmets. Little green helmets.

“Do they know something we don’t?” Hannah asked.

Sara approached one of them and gestured at the helmet. The man motioned back that it keeps him warm.

We get stamped out of Laos, walk 200 yards across the no-mans-land borderplex, get stamped into Vietnam, and embark on our lumbering journey again. Around noon, we pulled into a little town for lunch.

“I think this town’s called Nokia Samsung,” Dave said, looking at all the ads. It was astounding how a place too small for a traffic light could carry so many cell-phone ads.

A bowl of noodles later, we’re back on the bus, and predicting that we’ll reach Vinh within 3 or 4 hours. We were half right. We were 3 to 4 hours from our destination. But the bus driver had no intention of stopping at the correct destination.

Instead, he pulled over about 20 minutes north of Vinh and ordered all the Westerners to get out. “You’re close enough,” he said, and then he got out of the bus himself, joined by a woman who I assume was his mother, a shrill lady with a pushy attitude who corralled us off the bus. Someone else took hold of the wheel and the bus continued north up the highway without us.

The shrill lady pointed us six Westerners, now stranded and penniless, towards a barn across the street. We all followed her in and then waited, unattended, in the barn for 20 minutes. Finally a man emerged, wielding a butcher knife in one hand and a green mango in the other. “Hanoi?” he asked. Sara, Sally and I – three of the six Westerners who intended to continue toward Hanoi – nodded yes. The other three, who intended to stay in Vinh, shook their heads no.

He pointed the knife toward the barn door and shook it. “Go,” he said, leading the way. Sara, Sally and I walked outside and saw that he was gesturing us to sit in his private car. “Hanoi.”

“How much?” I asked. The shrill lady, presumably the matriarch, grabbed my backpack off the floor and began putting it in the backseat.

“No,” I said, and wrested my backpack out of her grip. “How much?”

“150,000,” the guy replied.

“Too much,” I said, and Sally, Sara and I walked across the street and flagged down a passing minibus.

“How much are you paying to Hanoi?” Sally asked in clear Vietnamese to the passanger in the front seat. The man with the butcher knife and mango appeared behind her and said something in angry, rapid-fire Vietnamese to the passanger. The passanger paused and replied to Sally, “150,000.”

“He told you to say that,” Sally rolled her eyes. I distracted Butchie while she walked off and asked the same question, in Vietnamese, to a passanger sitting in the back of the minibus who hadn’t heard the exchange. Thank God we have her around, I thought.

“It’s 90,000,” she called to us. “Get in. I have Vietnamese dong. I’ll spot you until we get to an ATM in Hanoi.”

We loaded in. The man with the knife sat in the driver’s seat and began cruising north. I wondered who had been in the drivers’ seat before. Had he gotten out? Or was he a passanger now? And who would have driven this minibus if we had gone in the private car with Butchie? I just don’t understand the world of southeast Asian public transportation, other than that its filled with cronyism and cartels.

Our bus ambled down the highway, passing motorcycles with live pigs tied to the back, snorting and wheezing as they hung, upside-down, by the tailpipe. We passed a pickup truck with a two-story cat and dog cage filling the truck bed. We knew those cats and dogs were on their way to being someone’s dinner. It’s as common a dish as chicken here.

The three of us chatted all the way to Hanoi, and paused several times to think about our other half – Hannah, Dave and Tom, the three that got dumped only 20 minutes shy of Vinh. We knew they had no money on them, and the highway was too remote to have ATMs. The closest ATM, ironically, was at the bus station in Vinh. We hoped they’d be okay.

That’s the thing about bus transportation in these countries. Even when the ticket you buy is for “Vinh,” and the bus is clearly labeled “Vinh” on its destination sign, there’s still no guarentee it’ll get to where its going. If the bus driver is related to someone along the way, he can force you out of the bus, force you to buy a service from his brother, to complete the journey.

All you can do is note the absurdity of it. Make friends with a few Brits and a Minnesotan. And crack jokes. Anyone need their pants hemmed?

Motorbiking the Laos countryside

2009-03-11T08:58:00.006-06:00

The second group of Germans who added adventure to our time in Laos appeared in the form of a 45-year-old curly blonde Lufthansa flight attendant named Maurice, an ex-army man with boundless energy who had managed to phenegal an annual 5-month paid vacation from the airlines, and a 24-year-old medical student named Lydia, a squatter in an East German warehouse-turned-commune who traveled exclusively for the sake of witnessing authentic displays of traditional life in small towns.

Little did we know, when we met them, that this unlikely duo would inspire Bike Trip Number Two.

Bike Trip: The Sequel wasn’t as ill-fated as the first one I did in Spain. Nor did it use a traditional bicycle. No, this bike trip came in the incarnation of a motorcycle, which we rented for $8 a day, threw some clothes and a camera under the seat, and drove across the mostly-empty roads of rural Laos. My friend Sara, who’s confidently powered a motorcycle for 15 years, did the driving; I rode passenger.

These two Germans were staying at the same guesthouse where we lived in Champasak, a World Heritage site of ancient Khmer ruins, though we didn’t meet them until the four of us shared a cramped pickup truck ride out of town. They themselves had just met each other the previous day, when they began chatting in English at the guesthouse and slowly discovered they spoke the same native language.

They were planning on renting motorcycles and driving around the Bolevan Plateau, a rural, fertile crest of rolling hills dotted by small villages where freely-roaming livestock outnumbers the people.

Sara and I had been entertaining the same idea. We heard the waterfalls in the Plateau were magnificent, and we were enticed by the idea of visiting villages that couldn’t be accessed by public transportation.

Of course, we’ve seen plenty of travelers with badly skinned knees, sprained elbows, deep cuts on their face and exhaust pipe burns scarred across their shins. Each one has the same story: they’d never driven a motorbike before and rented one for the first time while in Thailand or Laos, only to skid out on gravel and win a souvenir lifetime scar.

We’ve long made fun of these people. “If you don’t drive a motorcycle at home,” Sara has always said, “don’t drive one on vacation.”

But with three experienced drivers and me as the passenger, the four of us joined forces, rented motorbikes and set off into the sunset. We completed a 3-day motorcycle trip without seeing a single traffic light. We were in far too rural countryside for that.

Biking through the Plateau was like being the superstar of Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. In every village, at all times of day, naked Laotian children (the children under age 10 seem to be allergic to clothing) would race to the side of the road to wave at our passing motorcade. A smile would light up the kids’ face and they’d yell “Sabai Dee,” hello, as our tires sprayed desert dust onto their naked bodies. If we were steering across a curve, or honking at a herd of cows in the middle of the road, or for some other reason had to pass them without waving back, an extremely evident crestfallen look would appear upon their face, as the most interesting thing they’d seen all week breezed past them.

The trip went smoothly for the first two days. The villages all looked the same: sparsely populated ranch-style homes propped up on stilts to avoid the annual flooding. The grounds were covered with boars, chickens, cows, water buffalo, dogs, cats, and goats, and at night in the guesthouses we’d spot dragonflies, large geckos and toads. There were new waterfalls every 10 kilometers, and red dusty road accented by green palm fronds and the scent of wild jasmine.

By the start of day three, our clothes and hair were caked with red dust from the roads, and our stomachs were churning from the incessant bowls of rice-noodle soup, but we felt quite content.

That’s when everything fell apart.

Lydia knocked on my door early that morning. “I have to go to the hospital,” she said. She’d been vomiting all night, and her fever had risen to 38.5 Celsius (normal is 37).

We had been sleeping at a women’s union, the headquarters of a United Nations-funded NGO in which female volunteers travel to rural villages to teach Laotian mothers about public health practices. The ringleaders of the operation happened to be traveling by car that morning to Pakse, the nearest town with a hospital, 150 kilometers away. They volunteered to take Lydia by car; I would be left to power her motorcycle back.

Small problem: I have no idea how to drive a motorcycle. I had been riding in the passenger’s seat for a very good reason.

Next problem: I had to learn, immediately, how to drive one of these beasts, and I had to get us back to Pakse, a 150 km away, by no later than 4 p.m., so we can return the bikes and catch a bus north to the capital, where some friends from Boulder, Colo. were waiting to meet us.

“It’s simple,” Sara said, as she attempted to teach me the reins. “So you accelerate with the handlebar …. and your left leg changes gears … you can brake with your right leg, that’s the back brake … there’s also a hand brake that controls the front wheel ….. be careful not to skid out by applying the back brake too hard …. that’s the one you control with your foot …. and you can start in gear, but be sure not to rev it too much if you do …”

Simple? I needed Cliff’s Notes to remember all these rules. I needed a veritable “cheat sheet” to label all the buttons, bars and pedals. I’m sure that once you’ve learned how to drive, it becomes instinctual; like driving a car. But dammit, how was I supposed to make split-second traffic decisions when I couldn’t remember where the damn brakes are?

I turned the key, set the clutch in neutral and revved the handlebar; popped the bike into first gear and started rolling. Oh crap, how do I stop? And why is it so hard to steer at low speeds?

“You’ll do fine,” Maurice said. “Its easier the faster you go.”

“Great,” I replied as I began driving the 1st of 150 long kilometers. A wild boar scurried across the road, stopping directly in my path, about 20 feet from me. “Um, where is the horn??”

Laotian roads are a little like a video game: you never know what’s going to pop out at you. One minute, you’re in fourth gear, cruising along, feeling fine. The next second – why did the chicken cross the road? A whole pack of chickens crossing the road! You swerve, and try once again to remember where the horn is located. And which of these two brakes controls the front wheel?

Then you think with envy about all your friends who had the benefit of practicing motorbike driving in short spurts before they made their first long-distance haul. Ten minutes of driving feels fine; several hours at a stretch, and the stress starts eating at you.

Then, in the spirit of every long-distance bike trip I’ve done, the inevitable happened: it began to rain. A freezing cold, hard downpour.

Those of you who read this blog last spring remember that on my first bike trip – the one where Kim and I were trying to cruise across Spain on bicycles – we were met with rainy weather. It never rains in Spain, and it REALLY never rains in southern Spain, but when I jumped on a bike, the skies opened and a cascade of water poured out.

Well, the same is true for Laos. It’s a desert climate; cactuses grow and the roads are covered in dust. And it’s a hot, palm-tree lined climate, where people use umbrellas exclusively to shield themselves from the sun. What are the chances of a cold shower?

But of course, it did, and this time, we couldn’t delay our trip: we had to catch a bus from Pakse that night. So we rode through the rain, weaving around puddles, wearing nothing but a tanktop, the only clothing we had. Goosebumps were forming on top of my goosebumps, and I started loosing feeling in my fingers. Twice, we pulled over to warm up our hands by the heat of the engine. We’d park the bike, crouch down, and tap-tap-tap on the hot coating around the oil tank, trying to regain dexterity. At least the chattering teeth and the numb toes distracted me from my trepidation about the motorbike.

Perhaps I’m not meant to be making bike trips in foreign countries. But that’s not going to stop me from trying it again.

Local drug lord

2009-03-03T08:45:00.005-07:00

We met Toby in the back of a pickup truck during a 4-hour ride to Laos’ southernmost islands.

“Sabai Di!,” Toby said as soon as he saw us: the Laotian hello. “Where you come from? Where you going?” His black shirt was worn and filled with holes. He twisted his short dreadlocks with one hand. His eyes darted around the truck as he spoke.

We didn’t know it at the time, but Toby would be the first in a string of Germans who’d make our trip to Lao far more fascinating. (The story about the next set of Germans will have to wait until the next blog posting).

He hardly stopped chatting during the scorching hot ride through the red dusty desert. He talked to anyone who would listen. He spoke to all the Laotians in the truck, even the ones who couldn’t speak English (or German), and he hardly noticed they spoke different languages.

When I started snacking, Toby asked for a piece of my donut, which he offered to a young Laotian kid sitting nearby. The little boy looked at him shyly, then quickly looked away, burying his face in his mother’s skirt. Toby handed the donut back to me.

Toby had been in Don Det, the island where we were both headed, for six weeks. He earned a good living in Munich working for a retirement home, but he wanted to leave it. He had fallen in love with the simplicity of Don Det and wanted to live there forever.

“It peaceful man!,” he said with a twinge of an accent. “You can make relax, play with children, talk with locals.”

Don Det, a small oval-shaped island clustered in a group of 4,000 Islands just a few kilometers north of Laos’ border with Cambodia, hasn’t yet experienced the trappings of modern life. Electricity, banks, and cars are a thing of the future. Don Det is one of the few places where locals haven’t yet learned to create a “tourist area” that’s segregated from where the villagers live. On this tiny island, all people live side-by-side.

Foreigners live along the Mekong River in straw-roofed guesthouses built from wooden planks, and spend their days swaying in a hammock on the front deck or floating on an inner tube down the Mekong. Locals live less than 10 feet inland, in single-story wooden houses lifted by stilts to avoid flood damage during the rainy season. The families sleep inside the homes at night and hang out underneath the homes during the day. Laos is the country that seems to have perfected the use of hammocks, which are strung underneath every village home. The front yards all bear cactus, geese, pigs, dogs, cats, and red desert dust. Each house has a small vegetable garden elevated into the air on stilts so that the chickens can’t peck at the crops. There has never been a car on this island.

The one and only “road,” a dirt path too narrow for cars, sees only light bicycle and foot traffic. There are no refridgerators. Boatmen arrive in the morning with deliveries of ice for the coolers. The closest ATM is 4 hours north; Toby was going on a day-long ATM run when we met him. Bugs swarm the night skies, flying into your eyes as you trod down the pitch-black path. You can’t even read by the light of your headlamp without inhaling nostrils full of bugs. So you go to sleep after dusk, listening to the barking geckos and a symphony of insect chirps, whirrs and squeaks, and you wake up at dawn when the roosters crow.

It’s easy to see how someone would love Don Det; much tougher to see how someone could spend six weeks there. We wondered, for the first few days, how Toby was entertaining himself on this small island. We didn’t have to wonder long.

On our third or fourth day there, Toby found me laying in a hammock at night, gazing at a clear, bright view of the Big Dipper. “Get up! Get up!,” he shook the hammock. “My friend is having a birthday. We are making a party!”

“Making a party, eh?,” I said. He was furiously shaking the hammock. He was not going to take no for an answer. I found a candle and began locking the door to my bungalow by flickering light. Toby paced impatiently.

“Come hurry!,” he said. “Wha – you don’t need to lock the door, no one here will take your things! Bho Pang Yan – no worries, this is Lao, no worries. Let’s go!”

We started walking down the familiar dirt path, the only road on the island. He called out to every man, woman and child as we passed. “Eh!,” he’d yell, and then he’d say something in Laotian. The men would laugh. He’d yell out another two or three sentences in Laotian, to more bales of laughter. Then he’d spot someone else, another local, and yell out again. He seemed to know everyone, and everyone knew him. He kept a brisk pace along the path, with me scampering at his heels to keep up.

After this happened several times, his sounds began to take shape in my ears. What first sounded like unintelligible garble began to form as words and sentences. And I started to realize that he was having the exact same conversation with everyone; he was repeating the same Laotian sentences over and over.

“What does supermao mean?,” I asked him, noting the word he said most emphatically.

“It means crazy drunk,” he replied, then kept his burst of speed along the winding pitch-black path.

We reached the “party,” the one and only café on the island that had generator-powered lights. About 8 people were there, drinking wine and smoking. Toby disappeared immediately. I struck up a conversation with an Indian girl, a blue-eyed Gujurati with a great sense of style. From my peripheral vision, I kept scanning for Toby. Something was up; I knew it, I could tell. Why had he been in such a hurry? Why did he disappear so fast? He wasn’t … normal.

I finally spotted him just along the path, deep in conversation with a tattooed Westerner. The guy took something from him, then walked away quickly.

I waited until the next break in conversation, then saddled up to Toby.

“So how are you staying here?” I asked. I didn’t need any pointed questions. He was all too happy to share information.

“You know the red pills?” he said.

I raised an eyebrow. “What pills?”

“You know, the red pills, the new ones,” he said. “People only knowing about them now. Maybe you don’t have in the States yet. Its so cheap in Cambodia! Only 8,000 kip! The pills have been in Cambodia much longer. But no one knows it here, man. So close to the border, 5 kilometers, 10 kilometers to the border. And you can sell it here for 60,000 kip. But don’t let them catch you at the border, man! One pill, one year! It’s bullshit!”

“One pill, one year?” I repeated. It was a stiff penalty, but I knew Lao, like Thailand, has tough drug laws.

“One pill, one year,” he replied. “But such good money, man. I stay in Don Det.”

I did the math. 8,000 kip is $1 US dollar. 60,000 kip is $7.50 US dollars. Toby was sticking his neck on the line for a profit of about 6 bucks. Minus transit fees.

But it made sense, all of a sudden – how Toby knew everyone, and everyone knew him. How he was so fluent at saying the same things in Laotian again and again, conversations that involved getting messed up. And how he kept himself occupied in these sleepy little islands.

I left the islands after 8 days. As far as I know, Toby’s still there. He says he’ll be there for another 5 years, that next time I come back he’ll own a house there.

“But not when they bringing electricity, man,” he says. “When electric come to Don Det, I get out.”

Ode to Bangkok

2009-02-14T11:45:00.000-07:00

No other city on earth is as crazy, captivating and no-holds-barred as Bangkok. This mega-metropolis of 10 – 15 million residents hoists skyscrapers to rival Manhattan and sprawl to put Texas to shame. No matter how much you struggle to leave Bangkok, to explore Thailand’s world-famous white-sand beaches and topaz-water islands, the pulse of this urban megacore keeps you locked inside. Bangkok is truly the place where anything is possible, from mango vendors serving you 4 a.m. fruit to hawkers in front of bars holding enormous signs boldly proclaiming “we sell fake I.D.’s!!” (not that anyone needs one, except to take to their home country.) At both noon and midnight, you’ll find people clamoring in the restaurants, surfing the Web, watching outdoor movies or shopping from sidewalk vendors don’t differenciate noon from midnight. Bangkok is the land where street vendors sell everything: the Harry Potter book collection, roasted squid, and corn-on-the-cob. Foreigners come crawling to the city to satisfy their most eclectic desires. Want an affordable sex-change operation? Want a fake press I.D.? Want a Thai wife? No problem – this is Bangkok! Bangkok has it all! You can have your teeth whitened by top-notch dentists before noon, get a new tattoo in time for dinner, guzzle a bucket (literally) of hard liquor by 9 p.m., get your hair cornrowed at 3 in the morning, and then stay up until sunrise at an Israeli-owned internet café, where you eat hummus while downloading Weird Al videos on YouTube with your new Welsh friend, who chain-smokes and has two black eyes.

I love the city for its fashionable $2 streetside clothing racks, its $5-an-hour massages, and its 75-cent plates of pad thai. I recently spent a few days at Ko Samet, a beach with soft white sand, crystal-clear blue waters and perfect cloudless skies, and you know what I said upon returning to the traffic and congestion of the city? “I missed Bangkok!”

The only hint is its “officially” nighttime is when transvestites start roaming the streets. Short men wearing stuffed bras and hip-hugging dresses pose very convincingly like sexy young Thai women. They congregate at the bars and flirt with clueless Western men, who buy them cocktails all night.

I didn’t know this until I had been in Bangkok long enough that I must have unwittingly watched hundreds of them in action. “Look at the size of ‘her’ hands,” someone told me, “and look closely at the neck. That’s a man.” After that, my friends and I started playing a guessing game of “man or woman?” with every high-heeled, mini-skirted Thai we saw. I found myself wrong (or at least, outvoted) about 80 percent of the time.

Perhaps “man or woman?” is a game that’s better lost than won. The winners, who can always guess correctly, show symptoms of having been in Bangkok too long. Stay in Bangkok too long and you may morph into a white-haired aging hippie in the corner of a 24-hour vegetarian restaurant eating kale at 5 a.m. while muttering to himself about how expensive south China has gotten these days. (Yes, this guy is real. We met him at dawn after a red-eye bus ride from Ton Sai back to Bangkok. Which, by the way, was also when we met the Welsh guy with the two black eyes, who kept recommending the Massaman curry. Which, by the way, is delicious.)

After two months in repressive India, where everything shuts down by 8 p.m. and wearing shorts, tank tops or above-the-knee skirts is a no-no, Bangkok is a breath of fresh air. Here, reality turns upside-down, and its good to be on your toes – in this case, toes encased in spiky high-heels which you can buy from a street vendor at 3 a.m. Just remember: the girl shopping for high-heels next to you wasn’t necessarily born a girl. Need a cheap sex-change operation, anyone? I know just the place ….

Limestone cliffs of Ton Sai, Thailand

2009-02-04T09:40:00.003-07:00

We had to wade when we exited the boat. There was no other way to reach land. Water sloshed above my knees, lapping against the edge of my skirt. My sandals began to sink into the mud, which I couldn't see beneath the murky waters. Still, we waded. Treasure lay ahead. We had to reach the limestone cliffs.

We were arriving in Ton Sai, a beach in Thailand with a pebbly, narrow strip of honey-hued shoreline. No one comes to Ton Sai for the mediocre beach. Hundreds come each year for the climbing. Surrounded by psychedelic stalagtites, and featuring more than 700 bolted routes, Ton Sai is a climber's mecca.

We had intended to climb at Raileh, the beach-next-door, which features equally good climbing routes and a much smoother shoreline. Unfortunately, everyone else had the same idea, rendering Raileh crowded and expensive. Worse yet, Raileh is filled with roaming vendors who interrupt you while you're sunbathing to ask, for the 10th time that day, if you want to browse their ugly selection of sarongs.

Ton Sai, on the other hand, has that laid-back, never-in-a-hurry ambiance that could only belong to a budget beach carved out for twentysomethings who stay for months. Everyone in Ton Sai is sculpted like a Greek god. It is the isle of beautiful people.

On our first day there, I scouted out the area and found a great climbing spot. It was in the shade all day, and there were no other people around! No lines!

I tried to lead a couple of 5.10's. But something felt amiss.

"Maybe you're not comfortable leading climbs," said a girl named Pete. (She spells it "Phet," and she's Thai, a native of an island about 1 hour north).

"Maybe," I replied. "Lead climbing is good for me, like eating brussel sprouts and paying taxes."

But something felt amiss. The rock was rough. The edges were jagged. Was I scared? Or was something wrong?

I figured out the problem the next day, when reading through a climbing guide.

"Shadow Wall: Dangerous and loose rock. Long draw-outs between protection. Questionable anchors, especially on multi-pitch routes. Not recommended!" the book said.

Well, whoops.

We switched over to another climbing wall, slightly more crowded, but with a sweeping view of the waters. The guidebook described several of its routes as "a classic! Don't go home without it!"

We spent a great day climbing. And then another. Then another. We found more good climbing walls. Made new friends from Britain and South Africa. Got recommendations. Explored even more rock walls. Took rest days to read Harry Potter on the beach. Discovered our favorite lounging, chill-out bar.

We meant to stay in Ton Sai for 2-3 days. We ended up staying for 10.

Such is life here.

***************************************

My friend wrote this story about Ton Sai, and it made me laugh so hard that I'm reposting it here:

“This isn’t going to work.” Paula said very matter-of-factly. “There’s a monkey blocking my way.” She said it as if she was talking about a traffic jam or a long line at the grocery store. (I guess we are just getting used to everything at this point.)

Paula was attempting to deliver some leftover shrimp and fried egg to a pregnant cat that she had befriended at our bungalow in Tonsai, Thailand. Unfortunately for her, the monkeys had other ambitions on the snacks.

“There was a big monkey right on the path, so I tried to go around our bungalow, but it darted around the side and intercepted me,” she said. “Why are you laughing?”

I am fascinated at how monkeys, from quite a distance away, can tell when someone is carrying food. They have such one-track minds.

“Ok. Let’s go,” I told her, smugly getting up from my beach-strung hammock. “We’ll get past the monkeys.”

We neared our bungalows and caught wind of an unexpected sight. The lone monkey had multiplied into a full troupe of monkeys – papa monkey, mama monkey, twin baby monkeys, cousin Earl the monkey. And believe me, they were causing havoc. A small female perched on our railing eating a banana peel that we had discarded, apparently unafraid of fulfilling every monkey stereotype. Another small monkey fished the remaining crumbs from a neighbors’ Pringles can as the neighbor looked on helplessly.

I have never taken a primate behavior class, but I have hung around enough bars in a college town to know how to make a dominant male behavior display, so I knew what to do.

I bared my teeth at the largest monkey I could find. Paula, meanwhile, coaxed the pregnant cat to a nearby bungalow. As the monkeys attempted to follow her, I held them at bay by making sustained eye contact, hissing and showing my incisors as needed. As ludicrous as this sounds, it worked. Paula was able to feed the cat in relative peace while I battled the monkeys.

What has my life come to?

South India in the wet season

2009-01-29T06:58:00.005-07:00

Tropical South India is a totally different country than North India. Southern land is rich red clay. Its trees sprout coconut and banana and its rice paddies are flooded from heavy rains.

My parents, who are devout Hindus, went on a month-long pilgrimage to the holiest temples in South India last month. My friend and I tagged along.

Here’s a highlight from four weeks of “Parent Pilgrimage” -- a whirlwind tour of Hinduism’s most revered temples.

India has four temples that are the holiest sites in Hinduism. These are called the four “dhams,” and they are located in the north, east, south, and west. Earlier I blogged about our visit to the eastern “dham” in Puri, in the Indian state of Orissa. This story is about our trip to the southern “dham” in Rameshwar, in the state of Tamil Nadu.

My great-great-grandmother visited the dham in Rameshwar. So did my great-grandmother and my grandmother. Now I’m here with my mother. Five generations in a row.

Rameshwar is an island, connected to mainland India by a train that rides across the Gulf of Mannar. It’s only 20 miles from the nation of Sri Lanka, although the connecting ferry between the two countries stopped running more than a decade ago, deterred by civil war in Sri Lanka.

Hindu mythology says that the Lord Ram’s army once built a bridge connecting Rameshwar to Sri Lanka. The army was trying to rescue Lord Ram’s kidnapped wife, the goddess Sita, who had been kidnapped by a demon living on Lanka. According to religion, the rocks that Ram’s army used to build the bridge to Lanka miraculously floated, buoyantly, atop the ocean -- making bridge-building far easier.

Of all the Hindu myths, Ram’s story – written in the Hindu holy book Ramayan – is the one I carry with me from very early childhood. When I was a little kid, I slung an empty Pringles can across my back and pretended it was my archery pack, and I was a soldier in Ram’s army, fighting the demon of Lanka. When I was a little kid and I couldn’t sleep at night, I would repeat the name “Ram” to myself again and again, like I was counting sheep.

Then I started attending Catholic school. By fourth grade I decided I loved Jesus, and I set out to follow God’s Ten Commandments. I even prayed Hail Mary’s on the rosary – the full rosary, which takes about an hour -- every night for a month. I was the only student in my class who wasn’t baptized.

This worked until I was 9 years old and my mom took me to Pashupatinath, the holiest temple in Nepal. At the center of Pashupatinath is a giant statue of a golden bull – Lord Shiva’s holy bull, Nandi.

Seeing this golden bull reminded me of the “golden calf,” which, in the Biblical chapter of Exodus, the Prophet Moses warns the Israelites to never worship. Moses felt so vehemently anti-golden calf that he announced that God’s First Commandment is “thou shalt not worship any other gods besides me.” But the Fourth Commandment is to “honor thy father and thy mother,” and my father and mother were worshipping the golden bull. I was in a Catch-22: I could either obey the First Commandment or the Fourth Commandment, but I couldn’t obey both at the same time.

At this point, age 9, I got confused and gave up. I’ve never been particularly religious since.

Fourteen years later, I’m traveling with my parents on a pilgrimage around India.

As we rode the train to the island of Rameshwar, we saw what looked like rocks floating on the water. But they weren’t floating this time. They were flooded. The area surrounding Rameshwar had been submerged by heavy rains, and the streets turned into canals. Fences and poles stuck out from flooded plains.

Little did I know I was about to be submerged in water, too.

The temple at Rameshwar contains 22 wells covering a 2-kilometer area. At each well, a temple official casts a rope down into the abyss, pulls up a bucket of water, and dumps the entire bucket on the head of the person in line. Pilgrims come from across south Asia to get doused by well water. And so I figured – being part of a pilgrimage – I should too. I mean, when in Rome …. it wasn’t exactly a Roman bath, but it was definately a public bath.

About a dozen men, including 2 male children, all wearing black longis (long skirts) to show their religious devotion, joined my parents and I. Together we were led around the temple to 22 wells. Each well had a different name and signified a different god or geographic location. One signified the Ganges River; another signified the city where Buddha found his enlightenment.

We always let the Men in Black finish first. Then I’d get doused. Afterwards, my parents would get splashed on their hands and feet. And then we’d move on to the next.

And you know what? It felt a little like a baptism.

Five generations in a row.

Wedding Crashers

2009-01-23T04:39:00.002-07:00

A television commercial for the U.S. Army once asked: "If your life were a movie, which would it be?"

Apparently, mine is Wedding Crashers.

At least, that's the new activity on the docket – crashing weddings. Specifically, lavish Indian weddings where the buffets stretch as far as the horizon, the bands (and there are several) play 1980's pop hits and the ladies vie to see who can wear the heaviest gold.

We stumbled upon this new activity in Goa, a former Portuguese colony that's now India's most popular beach resort (read: shoreline not covered with trash). Huge waves of foreigners normally spend Christmas and New Years sunbathing on Goa's shores, but the "high terror alert" – Goa has the highest terror alert in the nation in the wake of the recent Mumbai attacks – has kept tourism at bay. We went to Goa in spite of the red alert, hoping the beaches would be empty and the amenities cheap and plentiful.

As it turned out, we were right. For $2 a night per head, we slept in an ant-infested 13 x 9 ft. shack built from woven bamboo mats. Its roof was a single blue tarp with a few palm fronds thrown on top for decoration; its green metal front door opened directly onto the beach.

During the day we walk 100 ft. from our front door to a sandy lounge chair, where we recline under an umbrella by the ocean, drinking Coke, staring at the grey naval warships dotting the horizon. We'd see the occasional foreigner -- like that crazy Dutch woman who feeds chappati to all the stray dogs, whose skin is saggy from far too much sun -- but we'd also see rifle-toting Indian soldiers patrolling the shoreline or bunkered down behind sandbags. Searching for Pakistani terrorists?

We were the only customers at a local restaurant one afternoon when we struck up a conversation with the owner, Amaro Rodriguez. He's born-and-bred Indian who, like many Goan locals, bears a Portuguese name as a result of centuries of colonialization. Amaro mentioned that a friend-of-a-friend's wedding reception would happen close to our hotel that night. "If you want to come, meet me in front at 9 p.m.," he said.

We had our own longstanding evening plans – a dinner date with old friends whom we hadn't seen in a long time. Our party of five dined late into the night, and when we walked past the wedding reception on our way home, around 11 p.m., we knew there was no hope of finding Amaro.

Still, we wanted to go to that reception. The music was bumping. A line of parked cars stretched across the otherwise vacant road. Men in suits and women in evening gowns chatted on cell phones near a cobra-strewn rice paddy. Stray goats peered curiously inside.

We decided we should try to crash the event. We had – sort of, kind of, technically – been a little invited. And if anyone questioned us, we'd just say we were meeting Amaro.

We skirted the party to see if there was a good back enterence we could use to sneak through. Or maybe the kitchen enterance? We toyed with a few stealthier ideas, then decided the best disguise is confidence. With our shoulders back, chin up, head held high, we marched proudly through the front door. No questions asked.

Inside was a wonderland. Fountains sprayed against the foliage. Ice sculptures gleamed next to the ice cream buffet. A red carpet stretched across a miniature footbridge, opening into a sea of white linen-draped tables. Kids in tiny suits scampered on the swingset. A rowdy group grooved to live music. A swarm of Indians rushed to us like servants, asking if they could pour us tea / give us chocolate / help us find a seat.

From the haze, a very drunk Amaro stumbled toward us. "You made it!" he yelled like a victory cheer for his favorite team. "Come!" He grabbed me by the hand and led us to the bar. "You like wine?" My friend and I each took one glass and headed to a table. Before we could finish sitting down, Amaro was stumbling toward us with two more glasses of shiraz. "For you!," he said, then bolted from the table. He emerged a minute later carrying a full bottle of rather expensive red wine. "And this!"

"How exactly do you know these people?" I asked Amaro.

"Um, the groom played football – no, his brother played football with – I mean …," Amaro stumbled over his words.

Then he leans over to us. "There's a wedding here almost every night," he says, winking.

Ah. So we weren't the first to have this nefarious idea.

It's a shame we had to leave Goa after only a week. We could make wedding crashing a full-time preoccupation.

Inauguration Day

2009-01-20T11:12:00.003-07:00

It's 1:30 a.m. as I write this from a dingy internet cafe in Bangkok. I'm here watching live online video streaming of President Obama's Inauguration. The computers have no sound, and my friend and I are the only Americans in this brown-walled building, but still the energy is palpable. We burst into applause at the silent computer monitor when Obama took his oath.

I interviewed Vice President Joe Biden once. Well, "interviewed" is a strong word -- I was one of three reporters in a room with Biden, and each of us could ask him one question. It was April 2007, when Biden was a Senator preparing his own Presidential bid, and he had just made a speech in Boulder, Colo., about foreign policy. During his speech, he said that there were certain issues he cared strongly about, and other issues he didn't care about quite as much.

My question to Joe Biden: what are the issues you don't quite care about?

He faltered and gave a run-around political answer: Well, what I really meant was that there are some issues, like Iraq, that I deeply care about .... he began. After a minute or two of talking in circles, he saw from the expression on my face that I wanted a straight response. So he gave me one.

Federal highway allocation, he said. He didn't care very much about divvying up money for highway projects. (I published this response in the newspaper that I wrote for at the time.)

Ironically, now that the economy is in tatters, the first thing that Pres. Obama and VP Biden will do in office is pass an enormous economic stimulus package -- which will include a HUGE federal highway allocation.

Funny how the world works, ain't it, Biden?

Queen of the Arabian Sea

2009-01-05T00:27:00.010-07:00

We’ve discovered India’s most charming state: Kerala. Shaped like a miniature version of the South American nation of Chile, the state of Kerala runs lengthwise down the coast of southwestern India. Its lowland coastal areas are brimming with narrow waterways framed by palm trees and tropical bushes. Floating down these backwaters on a canoe or houseboat is remarkable.

Kerala is the richest state in India, with the country’s lowest infant mortality and highest life expectancy rates. It (officially) has a 100 percent adult literacy rate. Its electricity is on at least 23 hours per day. It has sidewalks in some areas, and is beginning construction of at least one overpass.

Kerala was ruled by the Portugese, then the Dutch, followed by the British, before coming under India’s command in the 1950’s. As a result, Kerala’s buildings are the first we’ve seen in India that have any semblence of architectural style. Most homes in India are rectuangular concrete boxes. The homes in Kerala have architecture – curves and frills and tiles and archways resembling a hodgepodge of different genres and cultures. Some of the homes even have a fresh coat of exterior paint. I haven’t seen fresh exterior house paint in 4 months.

Kerala is officially the cleanest state in India. The streets here are littered – they perpetually resemble the morning after a street carnival – but they lack the knee-high mounds of trash that characterize other Indian cities. Yes, people still burn trash in open sewers. But the size of these trash fires are smaller than India’s norm, and the occasions are less frequent. People boast with pride that Kerala is as clean as Mexico City.

Kerala is a communist state, and although its citizens are educated, they lack local job opportunities. As a result, the sons of Kerala find jobs in the Middle East, and send oil money home to their wives and daughters. The women of Kerala spend their newfound wealth on silk sarees and gold jewelry found in upscale department stores. (We spent an afternoon browsing in one extravagant department store where sales associates carry silver platters of complimentary cups of coffee.) Across Kerala, thousands of jewelry advertisements and home-furnishings billboards list their company branch locations “across the Gulf.”

We arrived in Kochi on New Years Eve after an 11-hour bus ride involving 4 transfers, and we fell asleep before midnight. We’ve been traveling around so much in the past several months that we’ve decided to stay put in Kochi for a full week.

Plus, this is the first place in India where we’ve found good donuts and milkshakes.

Kochi is a small fishing town on the Keralan coast, with a cosmopolitan core – movie theatres, department stores – that grew from its legacy as a trading post. We’re living on Press Club Road, where the journalists congregate, and our street has more English-language bookstores than I can count on both hands. Our room is the cheapest in the city, a major plus. Our favorite neighborhood breakfast nook is on our street corner. We commute around town on boats – Kochi’s alternative to buses.

Each day we catch the ferry across the lake to Fort Kochi, a once-obscure fishing village that became the first European settlement in India. The water over its main square is covered with Chinese fishing nets. It takes four men to lower and raise the nets, with are supported by teak wood and bamboo poles.

The buildings, restaurants and general ambiance is Portugese-Dutch-British inspired, with flourishes of Indian and Arab influence. It has a Jewish quarter with a Kashmiri workforce. You’re as likely to meet a Christian or a Muslim as you are to meet a Hindu. The Italian traveler Nicolas Conti, who visited Kochi in the 1400’s, said: “If China is where you make your money, then Kochi surely is the place to spend it.” Though the town still feels like an obscure fishing village, its known as the “Queen of the Arabian Sea.”

We spend our days floating on the backwaters, strolling through the architecturally-interesting neighborhoods, and chasing the perfect donut.

The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come

2008-12-27T05:17:00.003-07:00

Every Christmas in Colorado, I go to the Denver Performing Arts Complex and watch a stage production of the popular story by Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol. The main character in this story, Ebenezer Scrooge, is a miserly old man who gets a visit from three ghosts: The Ghosts of Christmas Past, Christmas Present and Christmas Yet to Come. This third ghost, who can peer into the future, shows Scrooge the dire consequences of his greed – that he will die alone and unloved. Terrified, Scrooge changes his ways and becomes loving and kind.

Traveling to India is like getting a visit from this third ghost, The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come.

India -- at least, PARTS of India -- represent a nightmare vision of what the world could become if it doesn’t strengthen its environmental standards, curb its population growth, cut bureaucracy, cut corruption, increase transparency and accountability, and strengthen law enforcement.

The beaches in Tamil Nadu, the southern Indian state where we now are, are naturally beautiful. This state’s shoreline is blessed with and sapphire waters and smooth sand. But no one goes to the beaches, which are covered in filth and flies. Undeveloped beachfront property is piled with bottles, cardboard, and broken furniture. Green fields bloom with the colors of plastic bags instead of flowers. Discarded mattresses lay by the side of the shore. Human feces is piled on the rocks. Most Indians just stand on the sidewalk and look appreciatively at the water. No one dares to go in.

This is all the more tragic because of the climate. Even in December, the weather is swelteringly hot. Sweat beads on your forehead as you sit at a restaurant, batting a swarm of flies away from your food.

Due to the heat, everyone tries to cool down their rooms. Most can’t afford air conditioning, so they power ceiling fans. Unfortunately, this is India, and it’s bursting at the seams with people. Not a single inch of the country has breathing space. The streets are packed with foot traffic at 6 in the morning. From pre-dawn until past midnight, everyplace you look -- the rocks, the rooftops, the restaurants – are covered with literally hundreds of people.

When this large of a population tries to turn on their ceiling fans, the demand for energy becomes unsustainable. All electricity shuts off. At the peak of the heat, when you’re raked with sweat and flies are swarming all around you, you can’t even sit by a ceiling fan or refrigerate your water.

And this is what its like in December – the winter season. Just imagine southern India in the summer. I can’t imagine what diseases sprout when you combine this degree of streetside trash with monsoon waters and mosquitos.

Sai Baba's ashram

2008-12-17T07:15:00.001-07:00

More than a century ago, a 16-year-old mystic began performing miracles in Shirdi, a town in east-central India. He split his time equally between the Muslim mosque and the Hindu temple, spreading a message of unity and tolerance. His message and his miracles won him thousands of followers, who worshipped him as a living god. He called himself Sai Baba, and he died in 1918.

Eight years later, in 1926, Sai Baba: the Sequel was born.

A 14-year-old boy from Puttaparthi, a small town in the West Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, began performing miracles. Among his most attention-grabbing feats is the ability to produce ashes from thin air. His followers hang photos of him in homes as far away as Brighton, Colo., and ashes emerge from the portrait. Countless examples of these miracles have won him millions upon millions devotees, who worship him as the reincarnation of Sai Baba.

Although Sai Baba has a strong interfaith following – including Muslims -- he has joined the pantheon of Hindu deities. His face is depicted on cell phone ads, painted on the sides of cargo trucks, hanging from grocery store walls. Anywhere you might view a painting of Ganesh or Shiva or Krishna painted, you’re likely to see Sai Baba, as well.

His face is unforgettable – he wears a bright orange robe, and his Afro puffs out like Jimi Hendrix.

His ashram in Puttaparthi is where we have spent the last four days. Around 50,000 Sai Baba followers visit this ashram each day, rendering it the size of a small town. Another 40,000 daily visit the original Sai Baba’s ashram in Shirdi.

All day long, the Puttaparthi ashram buzzes with the activity of a college campus. Devotees sleep in the campus dorms and eat at the campus dining hall. Some attend lectures; others hang out on the quad. It even has its own planetarium. I’m not joking.

Large signs everyone instruct people to observe “Silence!” while walking through the ashram’s many-acre campus. The dining hall tables all hold placards instructing people to observe the same silence. God can only speak to a silent heart, the signs read.

It’s fitting, then, that the day we arrived at the ashram, my friend became sick and lost her voice. She tried whispering for a day; the next morning she fell silent. Now she signals that she has recovered, but is vowing to keep her silence until we leave.

Those who do speak say mostly one phrase – “Sai Ram,” a blessing of the Hindu god Ram. People say “Sai Ram” to mean everything. “Sai Ram” means hello. It means pardon me, I’m trying to get past you. It means please put your plate in the correct bin. It means you can exit from the south gate, not the west gate.

The ashram campus is also gender-segregated. Men and women eat at single-sex dining halls. They stand in separate lines. They pray in separate areas. There is an on-site shopping complex, which women can browse in the morning and men visit in the evening.

Men and women also sit in separate sections of the main auditorium, where Sai Baba appears each afternoon.

Being at an ashram waiting for the guru to come on stage is like being at the biggest summer rock concert of the season. The line starts forming two hours before the show. Signs posted by the entrance specify the items you can’t carry into the concert hall –cassettes, books, umbrellas, razors, food, flowers, plates, pens. You shuffle through the single-sex line until security pats you down, searching for illicit contraband, and runs a bomb-detector over your outfit.

The auditorium is a large, empty open-air hall with a ceiling covered in small chandeliers. It resembles the Fillmore Auditorium in Denver, except its pillars are pink, and shaped like lotus flowers, and its borders feature a band of blue- and gold-plated elephants running across the ceiling.

The crowd sits quietly in the auditorium and waits. They know the star of the show is always fashionably late. Servers parade through carrying trays of drinks (water). Identifiable by the bright bandanas tied around their neck, they resemble Boy Scouts wearing saris.

Then an audible surge of anticipation sweeps through the crowd. No one can see or hear anything, but everyone knows the star is about to come on stage. The crowd – all sitting cross-legged on the marble floor – scoots forward. People begin whispering loudly and craning their necks.

The band strikes up an “Om.” The crowd chants the mantra in a low rumble. The chandeliers overhead all light up in sync.

And then – he appears. The legend himself. He is 83 now, and rests on a cushion on a plush red throne, his regal wheelchair. He is flanked by a support crew of five or six men wearing white – his holy rendition of call girls by his side.

The crowd is breathless. Everyone raises their hands in prayer. People try to sit on their knees to get a closer look. Security scouts dart around, madly gesturing everyone to resume their Indian-style sitting posture.

Sai Baba is past the point where he has to say anything. His uttering a single word would reverberate like a rock legend striking a single chord.

But now he is in his twilight years, in a wheelchair, and the guru’s appearance is brief. Two or three lucky people in the front row get a chance to bow at his wheelchair before he disappears backstage. He is wheeled out again onto the stage, where his devotees can see his face, but he cannot speak. No one seems to mind, though. They are awed to be in his presence. “Sai Baba: Live!” For them, it is like looking at the face of Jesus -- another miracle-maker with a message of love.

Then Sai Baba is wheeled offstage, and the crowd spends an hour singing devotional hymns with the cover band. No problem, though. They’ll be back tomorrow, to catch another glimpse of Sai Baba, the guru with the orange jumpsuit and the Jimi Hendrix hair.

Going Postal in India

2008-12-13T22:55:00.011-07:00

“We were in the most high-tech city in India, and we couldn’t find a wireless connection.”

Everything in India is a headache. Our two days in Bangalore have been consistent hassle. No, hassle is too light of a word. It’s been a hair-graying, wrinkle-forming, blood-pressure-raising debacle.

It began when we de-boarded the train in Bangalore City. My parents wanted to hire a porter to carry their heavy suitcases down and then up two flights of stairs. “How much do you charge?” my dad asks a porter in Hindi. He grabs the bag and starts walking away with it. Dad and I both physically intervene. “No, how much?” Dad asks again in Hindi. He continues walking away with it. “No! Stop! How much?” we ask. “60 rupees,” he finally says in perfect Hindi. Highway robbery. Or, in this case, platform robbery. We needle our baggage away from his grubby hands and I carry it myself. I’m not dealing with porters anymore.

Outside, we’re surrounded by a thick crowd of touts competing to overcharge us for a ride from the train station to M.G. Road, Bangalore’s urban core. They start quoting us between 200 to 350 rupees for a ride; they pull out laminated “price sheets” to substantiate their claims. My friend finds a taxi driver who says he’ll take us for 50 rupees. We start loading our baggage into his car. Then he changes his tune. “150 rupees,” he says suddenly. “No, you said 50,” I reply. “50 won’t pay for the fuel,” he says. “But you told us 50 a couple minutes ago,” I say. “No. 150,” he says.

I stand my ground. “What price did you tell her?,” I ask, gesturing to one of my friends. He ignores my question and starts talking about fuel cost, distance – anything but the answer to my question. “What price did you tell her? Tell me what price you told her.” I keep repeating my question. He looks away from me; starts talking to my dad. I physically stand in front of my dad so that he’s forced to look at me. “What price did you tell her?”

“I can’t speak English,” he says to me in English. “You’re a dirty liar,” I replied. A crowd of at least 20 taxi drivers, all men in ugly brown uniforms, had gathered around to watch the scene. “Let’s go,” I said to my family. The taxi driver followed us, talking nonstop in English, trying to convince us to ride with him. “I thought you couldn’t speak English, liar!” I yelled behind me as I walked away. The crowd laughed.

We purchased two rickshaw rides from a government-sponsored pre-paid counter, for 50 rupees each, but the rickshaw drivers tried to rip us off for a 10 rupee per bag “luggage fee” (there is no such thing).

We reached M.G. Road, found a restaurant playing AC/DC at top volume, and parked half of our crew there with the luggage while the other half started searching for cheap hotels. A long hour passed. Then another. All the hotels were far beyond our price range.

Finally we met some Nepalese men, who advised us on the cheapest hotel in the area. It was too dirty for my parents taste, but fine by my low standards.

“I’ll check in and stay here with my friends,” I told the hotel receptionist.

The receptionist looked at my passport, signed me in, and took a deposit. I returned to the restaurant; I gathered my luggage and my friends.

An hour later, I was in the hotel lobby once again – but this time, the atmosphere had changed.

“You can’t stay here,” the receptionist told us on arrival. “You’re American. Only Indians and Nepalese can stay here.”

“But you saw my U.S. passport,” I protested, “and you let me sign in.”

“No, you cannot stay,” he replied, ignoring my logical point.

“But I showed you my passport. You said I could stay. You let me sign in,” I protested. “I walked all the way to my storage area, got my baggage, and walked all the way back here.”

“Only Indians,” he said. “Nepalese is okay. Not foreigners.”

“Then you should have said that when I showed you my passport.” I was angry at this point. “I could have checked other hotels. Now it’s evening, and I’m not walking around this seedy neighborhood at night. Not with all my luggage on my back and no place to stay.”

“You can’t stay here,” he said.

“I’m not leaving,” I replied.

I was feeling bull-headed. I would not trudge along these shady streets at night searching for a room I couldn’t afford. It became a matter of principle.

I staged a sit-in. My friends and I anchored ourselves to the dingy couch in the dimly-lit hotel lobby. We talked. We read the newspaper. We ate donuts. We refused to leave the hotel lobby’s couch. We would sit there all night, if necessary.

After about 2 hours passed, the hotel staff relented. “Okay, you can stay,” the receptionist said. “Give me your passports and another deposit.”

Our hotel room’s windows couldn’t close, so mosquitoes swarmed our beds all night. The people outnumbered the beds, forcing some of us to sleep on the floor. Still, we considered our stay in that room a victory. We had out-stubborned the hotel reception desk. It’s like being more Catholic than the Pope.

The next day, I went to the Air India office to get a paper ticket for a flight we’d purchased from travel agent www.Orbitz.com.

In November my friend and I had purchased an “electronic” ticket, but one week later, Orbitz.com left me a voicemail saying our carrier, Air India, required paper tickets. Orbitz said they had mailed our paper ticket to my address in Atlanta.

No good, I told Orbitz. I’m in India. I need that ticket to leave India.

Go to the Air India office, Orbitz told me, and fill out a lost ticket form. Sounds simple, right?

It took 5 phone calls to various Air India extensions before I could decipher that they have an office in Bangalore. It took two calls to the Bangalore office before I could get any semblance of its address.

Bear in mind that I don’t have a cell phone or a landline – each time I make a phone call, I need to search for a cybercafe with Skype (an internet-based phone system, which only some cybercafes have). My calls to India cost 34 cents a minute.

At any rate, I visited the Air India office on my first morning in Bangalore, optimistically hoping they could re-issue us tickets. Instead, five Indian women crowded around a copy of our e-ticket printout, not knowing what to do, each suggesting something different. One thing they agreed: they could not re-issue us tickets. I would need to call Orbitz, and ask Orbitz to call the Bangalore office to confirm that I indeed had paid Orbitz for the ticket. Only after hearing from Orbitz directly, they said, could they re-issue a ticket.

I left the Air India office and searched for a cybercafe in order to phone Orbitz. I finally found one, but a sign in front said it was closed for the entire month of December. So I took a taxi to a busy street near my hotel, where I scouted out five or six cybercafes. None of them had Skype.

Finally, I started ducking into alleys with my friend’s laptop, trying to find an unlocked wireless signal. Fortuantely, I was in Bangalore, the only place in India where this would be possible. I found a weak wireless signal, and signed on.

The signal was so weak that every call to Orbitz – and I made at least 4 or 5 calls -- was dropped midway through. Each time this happened, I’d call back and start from scratch, waiting on hold and explaining the situation to a new agent.

I wondered if I was placing an international call to the U.S. while talking to Orbitz agents at a call center in Bangalore. It could be that the people with whom I’m on a long-distance call are actually next door.

After more than an hour of repeated calls, I’d made minimal headway. Two of the Orbitz agents had gone as far as to place me on hold while they called the Air India Bangalore office. My calls were dropped while on hold.

(A ludicrous policy prevents Orbitz agents from giving me their phone extension or their name – a rule that ensures that anytime a call is dropped, we start over from square one.)

Two friends and I took a rickshaw through rush-hour traffic back to the Air India office, hoping that one of the Orbitz agents had called it. No such luck. And now Air India was changing its story. Orbitz would have to call the Air India branch in Chicago to confirm our pre-paid ticket, and Chicago would have to call Bangalore.

“But our bus tickets out of Bangalore are for tomorrow,” I said.

Then Orbitz should call Chicago, Bangalore said, and Chicago must call Chennai, and you need to collect your paper tickets in Chennai.

Jesus. All because Air India isn’t modern enough to issue electronic tickets, and our paper ones are sitting in an Atlanta P.O. Box.

We took another overpriced rickshaw to M.G. Street and started searching for a wireless spot from which we could phone Orbitz, again, with this new instruction.

Of course, we couldn’t find a wireless connection strong enough to make a phone call. We tried paying for wireless at coffeeshops. At bookstores. Behind the beauty parlor. In front of Ruby Tuesday’s. In a stairwell near a guy selling photocopied books. We tried everywhere. We asked cybercafes if we could pay to plug into their lines. They all said no.

We were in the most high-tech city in India, and we couldn’t find a wireless connection.

And that’s what’s so funny about India. Bangalore is undoubtedly a modern city. It has designer shops and coffeehouses. Its women wear jeans instead of saris. Its men drink espresso instead of tea. The intersections have traffic lights. We didn’t see a single cow or monkey on the streets (though dead rats may always be a fixture of Indian sidewalks).

We had a beer at a bar on Thursday night, and we felt like we could have easily been in Denver, Chicago or any major U.S. city. Nirvana and Limp Bizkit music videos played on a flat-screen, the stairs were carved from frosted glass, the red plush booths were illuminated with matching mood lighting. Boys and girls in their twenties mingled at mixed-gender tables, drinking alcohol and eating appetizers. Two twentysomething women in tight tanktops lit cigarettes.

But the mess of motorcycles on the streets, the constant honking of horns, the way the smog burns your eyes, the mosquitoes chewing you alive – you’re always keenly aware that you’re in an Indian city. And as our experience shows, no hotel or taxi service or airline in an Indian city has its act together (at least, none that we've encountered in our many months here). At best, they’re disorganized and incompetent. At worst, they outright lie.

Much is made of India’s rise to power, especially as a technology giant. Certainly, there’s an inkling of truth to this. Being in India is like going to the business school of the streets – you learn to deal with insolent, irrational and stubborn people; to act assertively to get what you want; you learn to be suspicious of everyone; to furiously guard your self-interest in order to not be scammed for every last penny. In those regards, Indians have an advantage. They’re better-practiced.

But their strengths double as their weaknesses. And when it comes to good old-fashioned “who would you rather hire” – well, I don’t think India, in the long run, really has as strong of a chance as some people in the West believe.

Parent Pilgrimage kick-off

2008-12-10T07:04:00.001-07:00

Each corner of India – north, east, south, and west – is home to one of Hinduism four holiest sites.

Puri, a beach town in the East Indian state of Orissa, is the holiest city in India’s east. It’s the home of Lord Jagannath, the “Lord of the Universe.” Hindu pilgrims have visited Puri for centuries to catch a glimpse of Lord Jagannath himself, who is carved from wood and lives in a temple with his brother and sister.

Many pilgrims even commit suicide in the presence of Jagannath, wanting to die while being watched by the Lord. When the British invaded India and saw the spectacle, they coined the English word “juggernaut,” which means a “compelling, destructive force.”

My parents, who are traveling with me for the next four weeks, choose Puri so that they, too, could look into the eyes of Lord Jagannath. (They are on a month-long pilgrimage to east and south India’s holy sites). They visited Jagannath’s temple twice in the past few days – once without me, because I was on my period and, as such, was not allowed to enter the temple, and then once again with me.

Lord Jagannath’s temple is a perfect microcosm of India – chaotic, claustrophobic, filled with crooks. And, like India, the best and only way to derive meaning from it is to filter out the madness and focus on the divine.

Lord Jagannath and his brother and sister, all of whom are large carvings with intense eyes, live in a dark room. The walls are painted black. There are no windows. A single door opens into another dark, windowless cavern. The only light comes from candles.

Enormous puddles of water are spilled across the floor, probably left over from the God’s morning bath. In the afternoons, rice from the God’s lunch turns the floor into a sticky mess. The priests feed the Gods seven times a day.

Lord Jagganth’s room is clogged with pilgrims, who come to pray, and priests, who come to extort money from the pilgrims.

My mom and I entered the room. The crowd and the darkness and the puddles immediately gripped us. My first thought was of the news reports of Hindus getting trampled to death at temples. It’s easy, very easy, to see how that could happen in a heartbeat.

“Look at Vaghuan,” said my mom, using the Nepali word for “God.” I made eye contact with Lord Jagannath. I held his gaze as my mom and I pushed our way through the thick maze, circling the statues clockwise.

A priest stopped us and forcibly directed me to bow my head, then deposit money. I obeyed, foolishly, because he was a priest.

“Don’t do as they say!” my mom told me afterward. They’re scammers, like the rest of India.

We circled the Gods, bowed to Lord Jagannath, left five rupees at his feet. We bowed to Lord Jagannath’s sister, and left five rupees at her feet.

“That’s all you’re leaving?,” a different priest sneered at my mom. “You’re disgusting. I can’t believe you.”

I couldn’t believe him. This so-called holy man talks trash to pilgrims who waited their whole lives for a chance to pray at this spot? It reminded me of the irate priests in Jerusalem who screamed at Christians to hurry up as they knelt in prayer at the site of Jesus’ crucifixion. There’s nothing like a sacred site to bring out the sins of greed and anger in the men who purport to be holy.

“Don’t think about them,” my mom told me later. “Just focus on Lord Jagannath.”

Yes, the temple is just like greater India. Tune out the scammers, the pollution, the traffic, the monkeys, the beggars, the trash, the thieves around every corner. Keep eye contact with the Lord.

In Puri, your faith in humanity is rigorously tested. I mentioned Puri is a beach town, but let me tell you about this despicable beach.

On one side of Puri are the hotels, where pilgrims rest. The beach by these hotels is relatively clean, by Indian standards. Yes, there are hypodermic needles in the sand (we saw two), and yes, there are wrappers and plastic bottles and dog feces everywhere, but, hey, that’s India. No big deal.

Travel a little further, past the hotels, and you’ll reach a primeval fishing village that hasn’t changed in 500 years. The huts are built from clay and straw; the streets are too narrow for vehicles to pass. This is the Land Time Forgot, and it exists in a parallel universe where motors, plastic bottles, wrappers, haven’t been invented yet. Ducks and chickens roam in people’s front yards, where the fish – the day’s catch – sit drying in the sun. There’s one tiny store, but carries only homemade goods. It sells nothing with packaging. You get the feeling that the people who live here have never seen packaging; never heard of Coca-Cola. It is a self-contained fishing village.

And it’s infested as hell.

The kids all have open sores on their faces and arms. The stench is disease is rampant. Behind the straw huts, where all the villagers take out their fishing boats, the beach is covered with human feces. Absolutely covered. I’m not talking about one or two people taking a crap in the sand. I mean, this beach is the toilet, and at any given second, you can see at least five men with their pants down. We gingerly walk along the shoreline, but the feces is everywhere. There’s no way to avoid it. The waves touch our feet, and we scramble out of its path. The water is a carrier for infectious disease.

It’s hard to imagine how people can trash their environment so abrasively. In the cities, its easy to blame faceless “government” or “industry” for the diesel exhaust. But in this fishing village, its individuals who are crapping all over the beach, turning a natural resource into, literally, a dump. It wouldn’t be hard for them to build a latrine – just dig a hole in the ground! – but laziness prompts them to excrete into the water table instead.

Along this beach, strewn among the human feces, are the bloated bodies of dead sea turtles. Sea turtles are an endangered species; it’s thought that they will be extinct within our lifetime. They’re dying in droves at this exact beach, where – judging by the dozen recently-killed corpses – we estimate that at least two sea turtles a day are trapped by the fishing nets and carried on shore. These turtles are larger than my torso, and its clear they’ve reached sexual maturity; they might have some to Puri to mate, and instead were killed and turned into crow food.

Flies fester this beach, feeding on dead corpses and human feces.

This is truly the land that time forgot.

But time, it seems, passes slowly in Puri. My grandparents came to Puri to pray, back when the fishing village looked exactly like it does now. When my grandkids visit Puri – or will my grandkids be only ¼ Nepali? Will their genes be too white to be allowed entry to the Hindus-only temple? – the fishing village might still look the same.

Ah, yes, my grandparents. I’ll close this with a happy story.

At Lord Jagannath’s temple, there is a Nepali priest who lives by the temple’s west gate.

My parents met this Nepali priest, who handwrote our names into a book of Nepali visitors. He then flipped through his book and read aloud the names of several of my uncles, aunts and cousins who had prayed in the same spot. “Raghab Dhoj Pant, wife Indira, son Ranjan,” he read. “Hari Dhoj Pant and wife Basudha.”

“What about my parents?,” asked my dad, whose name is Prahlad Dhoj Pant.

The priest flipped through a single volume of a large book. “In 1956,” he read aloud, “Bhadra Kumari Pant, wife of Dambar Dhoj Pant, visited this temple.”

Wow. We were amazed. How can so many Nepali visitors be so meticulously documented – and their entries found – in a single paper book? Such organization.

Perhaps India does have a praying chance, after all.

A well-dressed cow

2008-12-06T07:52:00.002-07:00

If you need to beg for money in India, make sure you have a nicely-dressed cow.

We spotted a “sadhu,” a holy beggar dressed in orange rags, walking from shop to shop along the narrow streets of Varanasi. Most beggars are ignored – there are just too many of them – but his ally, his cow, won him a plate brimming with donations.

This cow wore a bright sequined cape, garlands around his neck and a crown of flowers on his head. He was the cow equivalent of an Indian bride.

*****

In both Nepal and India, drug dealers are everywhere. We were offered hashish three times on the way to breakfast. Three times on the way to breakfast!

A simple “no” won’t deter the dealers. Indians are persistent. So we’ve started messing with them.

Like last night. As we were buying apples at a fruit stand, a dealer approached us and asked, “Hey, you want some hash?”

“I already have a hat,” my friend said.

“No, hash, hash,” the dealer replied.

“Yes, I’m wearing a hat now, can’t you see?,” said my friend, who was bare-headed.

“I’m talking about dope,” the dealer replied.

“Are you calling me a dope?” she said.

The dealer laughed. “You are happy like flower, not sad like rain,” he replied.

****
Talk about a shitty job.

There’s a large yellow curtain, tied to wooden poles, opposite the clay oven at the restaurant we frequent.

Behind this yellow curtain are six water buffalo. These buffalo voluntarily confine themselves to the space behind the yellow curtain; backstage.

Needless to say, the buffalo create a lot of crap. And someone’s job is to pick up this crap with their bare hands, pat it into “dung pies,” and stick these shit pies to the sides of the restaurant’s walls. The walls are tiled, end to end, in shit pie after shit pie. Handprints are engraved into each one. Once the pies dry, someone peels them off the wall and burns them for heat.

Let’s just hope that whoever has this job isn’t also the cook.

****
We’re in our Varanasi hotel room and someone is throwing stones and trash at our window. We can hear a loud “clang!” twice a minute.

We can’t see, through the streetlight-devoid alleys, who the perpetrator is.

“Screw you!,” my friend yells out the window, after trash smacks the window pane for the two dozenth time. “Quit it!”

She looks at me, confused.

“Am I yelling at a monkey?,” she asks. “I don’t know.”

Trekking in the Himalayas

2008-12-01T08:48:00.008-07:00

In the month since I last wrote in my blog and now, I’ve:
-- Trekked in the Himalayas for 10 days,
-- Visited the Taj Mahal,
-- Picked the first orphans who’ll be supported by my families’ foundation, and
-- Watched a surgery for injuries sustained from a water buffalo attack

Here’s the story, in five scenes.

Scene 1: The Taj Mahal

In early November (on the 5th, to be exact), we catch a train to Agra, home of the Taj Mahal. We arrive the evening before Laurel’s birthday and visit an upscale Indian restaurant for dinner, where the waitstaff bring out blankets to shield our legs from mosquitoes.

We visit the Taj Mahal at dawn, as the sunrise casts light and shadows on its marble walls. The 17th century monument is symmetrical on every side, and its splendor exceeds it hype. It was built, humorously, by a Moghul king who died during an opium-induced sex fest at age 74.

From Agra, we ride a bumpy bus to the India-Nepal border, where we discover that the border-crossing station doesn’t have electricity. The guards stamp our passports by the dim glow of a single flickering candlelight.

Little did we know it would mark the start of an electricity-free month.

Scene 2: The Journey

Our first Indian scam took place at the border, where we paid for “tourist bus” tickets but were herded like cattle onto the public bus, which traveled at an average speed of – no joke – 7 miles per hour. For 11 hours.

The bus stopped constantly. Is someone selling corn on the side of the road? Let’s stop the bus. Have we reached a town with a tea stand? We’ll stop. Waiting for a prospective passenger who said he’d be standing by the side of a highway? Halt the bus for 20 minutes!

People filtered on and off, riding on the rooftop if there wasn’t space in the aisles.

After 11 hours of squirming on rickety bus seats, we finally reached Pokhara, Nepal, only 75 miles from where we started.

Mt. Macchapucchre, towering at 23,000 feet, stretches across the sky to greet us.

I point out to my friend that the mountain’s topmost 3,000-ish feet are bare; its slope is too steep to hold snow. No climber has ever summitted Macchapuchree.

“I’ve never seen a mountain that couldn’t be summitted,” my friend said. She would later laugh at herself for saying those words – less than two weeks later, while standing at Macchapuchre’s Base Camp, an icy river bed at the lowest point of a valley, a measly 12,137 feet in altitude.

She’d stare at the sky and study the rocky summits towering yet another 11,000 feet higher than where we stood.

“That one can’t be summitted, either,” she’d observe. “There’s no route. It’s too cold for trad climbing, and there’s no continuous ice face. And that one --,” she’d point, “can’t be summitted either. Nor that one. Nor that one. Impossible.”

Scene 3: Trekking

Our first two days of trekking are all uphill, up, up, up, up, 10 hours a day, up slopes so steep we get vertigo when we move too quickly. On the morning of Day 3 we awake while the moon is full and robust; its glow illuminates the snow-capped peaks of Mt. Annapurna and Mt. Dhaulagiri.

We hike with headlamps and mittens for an hour, until we reach the top of a hill, named for the indigenous Poon tribe that lives on that hill, altitude 10,474 feet.

The sky’s colors – as many Coloradoans know – become more intense as you rise in altitude. We watch the first glimpse of dawn burst into a symphony of vivid reds.

We endure an 11-hour day of traversing the mountains. We ascend 1,092 feet to Poon Hill to watch the sunrise, then descend that same distance to our starting point. We then descend another 1,049 feet before ascending 1,804 feet until we can rest for the night.

Our hike raises us above cloud line, then down into the mist, then above cloud line again.

The landscape changes with the altitude. At its low points, the trees are covered with moss and tiny purple flowers spring from rocks and fallen logs. The air is so thick with water that life can’t help but thrive from every crevasse. Waterfalls of all sizes spring from every direction, countless waterfalls. The sound of the nearby river indicates how much further we’ll have to descend before we cross the bridge and can start ascending again.

Once we do cross that bridge we walk higher, higher, for hours, until we’re above cloud line. The landscape turns into dry, bushy yellow grasses on clay soil. It’s brought to life by the hisses and whirrs of insects and birds, or on occasion, by the jingle of cowbells worn around the neck of every horse, donkey and dog that cross our path.

We check into a teahouse for the evening and warm ourselves by the fire in the kitchen, in the clay pot they call a “stove.” The next morning we descend a little lower in altitude, to a lush area covered with bamboo, oak trees, aloe vera and rhodedendrons. Even at 10,000 feet, the landscape is dotted with rice paddies, poinsettas, marigolds – and marijuana, enormous trees of marijuana, taller than the ears of corn they’re planted next to.

We sleep in teahouses at night, little stone shacks perched on whatever ground could be terraced flat. Most rooms don’t have electricity; some say they’ve been without lights for weeks. Walls are paper-thin; some built from nothing but a single sheet of tin.

It’s too cold to sit outside our sleeping bags after sunset, so we eat a candlelit dinner of rice and lentils (dal baht) and crawl into our sleeping bags by 6 pm. Thick fog rolls in at night, obscuring the sight of everything except the water buffalo nearby. Morning skies are clear, and at our altitude, the colors of the sunrise are more majestic than ever. The sun paints vivid pinks and reds on the 24,000-ft peaks.

On Day 4 we continue with the ups and downs – descend 2,722 feet, then ascend 1,213 feet. This is tiresome.

By Day 5 we reach the tiny, remote high-altitude villages, just before Base Camp. Just to eat dinner, I pile on 3 long-sleeve shirts, a fleece, a down jacket, an outer shell, 2 pairs of pants, wool socks and mittens. Still my toes feel like a singular block of ice, and I curl and uncurl them while I eat to improve circulation.

Until today, the scenery has reminded me of other places I’ve hiked. The lush mossy forests, with life sprouting from every nook and corner of rock and tree, resembled hikes in Japan during the rainy season. The terraced rice fields reminded me of hilly northern Thailand. The dry landscape above cloud line was reminiscent of trails in Arizona.

But by the time we reach 12,137 feet, on Day 6, the scenery becomes downright fictional. It looks like Lord of the Rings meets Impressionist Art. Heck, it looks downright cartoonish. There’s no other way to describe it.

We reach the Base Camp of Macchapucchre on Day 6, and spend a night acclimating before our sunrise hike to Annapurna Base Camp, 13,548 feet. The mountains are unlike anything we’ve ever imagined. They tower over us like imposing gods. Some portions held snow and glaciers. Other shot into the sky as sheer, straight-angle rock face. Their vertical rise measured 10,000 feet above where we stood. We’ve seen these same mountains from a distance, but up close, these are Mountains.

It took us four days to walk back to town. We finished the trek on Day 10. We’ve all been changed from the vision of the Mountains.

Scene 4: The orphanage

My parents have launched a Foundation to sponsor orphans in Kathmandu, Nepal. The day after I arrive in Kathmandu, I go with them to Bal Mandir, one of the city’s largest and most reputable orphanages, to agree to an ongoing relationship between our Foundation and this particular orphanage.

In Nepal, its hard to decide whether or not your charitable contribution is going to “leak” into the pockets of the corrupt, but we’ve met with Bal Mandir officials several times, and we feel like at least the majority of our money will go towards the children.

Most of the infants at the orphanage get adopted by foreigners, so we decide to start sponsoring kindergarden-aged kids, who are unlikely to be adopted. We decide that the Foundation can afford to sponsor 8 kids per year, at $375 per child, which covers the entire cost of housing, meals, and private school.

I spend 4 days in Kathmandu and visit Bal Mandir twice, selecting the kids on my second visit. We read through their case files. We give priority to the kids who’ve lost both of their parents to either death or disappearance. We decline the kids who are registered as orphans because their mother got remarried – which, in Nepal, is included in the definition of “orphan.” (Stepfathers usually reject the child, because she is the spawn of a different man).

The kids – mostly boys – were adorable. Like most kindergardeners, they have virtually zero attention span. “Which of you is Suman Gurung?,” we ask when we walk into a playroom filled with children causing havoc. A little boy, wide-eyed, walks up to us. “And which one of you is --?” By the time we’ve called up the second boy, little Suman has wandered away, playing with blocks in the sparsely-furnished room.

Because we’re sponsoring specific kids, we have total decision-making authority over the kids’ lives. My parents and I decide to send these 8 kids to Kathmandu’s best private schools, even if it ends up costing more. I left Kathmandu, and headed back to India, while my parents remained in the city to negotiate tuition.

Scene 5: The hospital

I visit Kathmandu’s Helping Hands Community Hospital to write a story about it for a magazine in Colorado. While I’m there, I go into the surgical room and watch, up-close, as a woman has surgery for injuries she sustained from a water buffalo attack.

I’ll post the link to the story and video when it’s published.

From Egypt to India

2008-11-10T09:52:00.000-07:00

We ended our 1.5 months in Egypt with an expedition through the White Desert, a strange and mystical portion of the Sahara where the crystal sand gleams like snow.

Anvil- and mushroom-shaped white rocks, as high as 40 feet, jut from the ashen ground. This desert looks like the moon.

The White Sahara Desert is hundreds of miles from civilization, and despite the specks of sand hovering over the horizon, the night sky still burst with stars. We could spot a different shooting star nearly every 15 minutes, sometimes more frequently.

After returning from the White Sahara Desert we had a spare day to spend in Cairo before needing to return to Mohammad’s house in Alexandria, Egypt to retrieve our backpacks. We spent the extra day in Giza, back at the Pyramids.

What’s strange about the Pyramids is that all photos taken of them are only taken from in front, so that the viewer sees the sand around it.

Take a photo from behind the Pyramids, and you’ll see a different story.

The Pyramids and the Sphinx gaze out over an urban cluster just a few meters away. Giza is a “suburb” of Cairo, which holds the dubious distinction of World’s Most Polluted City. Like most developing-world cities, Giza is teeming with honking cars, crowded streets, dogs and vendors on every corner, concrete buildings haphazardly shoved into every modicum of space.

The eyes of the Sphinx, unchanged for 5,000 years, have watched Giza grow from a desert to an urban headache.

We, however, were ready to leave Egypt after not 5,000 years but 5 weeks. We happily boarded an airplane bound for New Delhi, via Abu Dhabi.

We spent a few more days in New Delhi than we had planned, waiting for our luggage, which had chosen to stay in Abu Dhabi. We had been warned that India is a hard country to travel in, but we found it relatively relaxed.

In Cairo, you always have to be on guard, because a boy could run up to you on the street and grab your breasts. This happened to me four times.

Three out of four times, I was surrounded by a large crowd of men (as is ALWAYS the case when walking down the streets of Cairo) and couldn’t identify exactly who it was that did it. I know that it was always a little boy, under the age of 10.

The first time it happened, I thought it might have been an accident. There was a swarm of young boys around me, all reaching out with their hands, and I thought it might have been an accidental brush.

The second time, I felt uncomfortable. It was too firm a grab to be an accident.

The third time, I turned and chased down the entire crowd of young boys that had been following me. They ran away in terror. I don’t think they’d ever see an angry female screaming that she was going to beat them down.

The fourth time, a boy around age 10 who had been sitting by the side of a building stood up, ran to me, grabbed my right breast, and ran away. I was with two friends, one of which is a 6-foot, 2-inch tall man, and he chased the little kid down the block.

Meanwhile, some bystander witness apologized on behalf of Egyptians. The apology was directed not to me, but to my 6’2” friend. In Egypt, it’s customary for men to address only men. If they wanted to ask about me – what’s my name, am I also from America – they’d ask it to the male in the group, as though I wasn’t there.

India, or at least New Delhi, was much different. The only place I was ever grabbed was on my arm, by beggar girls.

The scams in India were more elaborate – people pose as (fake) authority guards and tried to convince us that the train ticket office was closed and they could escort us to an “after-hours” (fake) office – but the Indian touts are lazier. In Egypt, the touts stalk you as you walk from hotel to hotel; they refuse to leave you alone. In India, a loud firm “go away!” (“bhago!”) will get them to go away.

New Delhi was also far less crowded and polluted than Cairo. We all became sick upon entering Cairo; we immediately developed sore throats from breathing the air. Nothing like that happened in Delhi.

Perhaps best of all, India’s packaged products have “fixed pricing.” Anything manufactured in India – a bottle of water, shampoo, toothpaste – has the price printed onto the packaging, so we were assured that the shopkeepers couldn’t charge us triple the actual price.

Of course, they’d still try. I’d buy a box of apple juice and the shopkeeper would say, “85 rupees.” And I’d point to the label and reply, “But it says 70.” And – here’s the great part – the shopkeeper would reply “okay” and charge me 70. In Egypt, that would NEVER happen. A two-hour fight would ensue. (Refer to my earlier story, in which we read the correct prices for falafel printed on the menu, and the restaurant refused to acquiese.)

Once we got our luggage, we departed New Delhi for Rishikesh, the yoga-ashram capital of India. It was a tourist grotto, filled with meditating backpackers, but it was nice to be so close to the source of the Ganges River, where the upstream water is so clean you can touch it. We befriended some Israelis, went to a few yoga classes, took photos in the sand.

2008-11-06T05:23:00.002-07:00

At a restaurant in Luxor, Egypt, we asked the waiter how much a falafel sandwich costs.

"3 pounds" he said.

"And what about a plate of ful (Egyptian beans)?," we asked.

"10 pounds," he said.

We ordered the falafel and asked to see a menu. The menu was written in Arabic, which my friend learned how to read in college. The first two items on the menu? Falafel sandwich, 75 cents, and a plate of ful, 75 cents.

We called the waiter over. "This says "ful", 75 cents," my friend told him, pointing to the word "ful" and sounding out the letters. "And this below it says fa-la-fel," he pointed.

"Oh yeah, well what does this say?," asked the waiter, pointing to a different item.

My friend sounded out the word.

"But what does it mean?" the waiter asked.

"I don't know," my friend said.

"See, you can't read Arabic then!" the waiter said.

"I don't need to know what every food on this menu is. This says ful, 75 cents, and falafel, 75 cents! That's all I need to know!" my friend replied.

The waiter wouldn't budge, so we called over the manager.

"Those aren't the prices on the menu," the manager said, pointing to the prices on the menu. "Those, um, those are the barcodes. The scanner PLU codes."

"Why would you print the barcodes on the menu -- and why are they the same number for both dishes?" we asked.

"We have a different menu that we'll release tomorrow that shows that its 3 pounds for falafel," the manager replied.

"But this is today, and this is the menu you are handing out right now," we retorted.

"What's the big deal?" the manager replied. "Why do you care so much about money?"

This mockery lasted for more than 2 hours. In Egypt, even when you CATCH people scamming to you, they continue to blatently lie in your face, then guilt-trip you about it.

In the end, we wrangled the fair price from the manager, but it cost of 2 hours of our time.

Story of Sayid

2008-11-04T08:57:00.002-07:00

So, the story of Sayid:

We were in Aswan, Egypt; home to about a million sailboats. These simple wooden sailboats -- called "feluccas" -- carry people down the Nile River, toward Luxor.

We had two desires:

One, to visit Abu Simbel, a stunning Ancient Egyptian monument to Ramses II, carved in rock. Two, to take a felucca ride down the Nile to Luxor.

Abu Simbel is located far south, about 30 miles from Egypt's border with Sudan, in an area that's marred with dangers (or so they say). In order to visit Abu Simbel, we had to depart Aswan at 3 a.m. flanked by an armed police convoy.

To arrange this, we had to enlist the services of someone who could reserve us a seat in a microbus traveling with the convoy.

Enter: Sayid. He, like all the other trip organizers in Aswan, stood by the banks of the Nile waiting for tourist business. He promised us a trip to Abu Simbel, followed by a 2-night, 3-day felucca ride, for a price that was far lower than any of his competitors. (We had asked around, and knew that the prices could sometimes vary by a factor of 10).

We thought we had everything in the bag, but when we went shopping with Sayid for food for the falucca tour, the situation began to unravel. With him accompanying us, the prices of food seemed to triple.

We were a bit confused -- after all, food was included in the cost of the falucca ride, so everything we were paying at the store would be deducted from the final price we paid to Sayid. If this was a scam, we reasoned, it worked AGAINST Sayid's favor.

Later that same evening, Sayid told us that the trip to Abu Simbel was cancelled. He claimed the microbus that we were supposed to take had been in an accident. An unlikely story, but it was already 10 pm and we were scheduled to leave at 3 am. It was too late to book a different tour.

We shrugged and went to bed, figuring everything would get delayed by a day.

At 3 am, there was a knock on our door. The microbus driver had shown up. Sayid had lied about the bus crash. Our trip to Abu Simbel hadn't been cancelled after all. But why had he lied? We hadn't paid him in advance. Cancelling the trip meant cancelling his business. We wondered if Sayid was a very stupid scammer.

Deciding we could no longer trust him, we met him the following day and told him we wanted to book our felucca ride with someone else. Standing at the Nile's edge, on Sayid's motorboat, we asked Sayid for our food back. He claimed it was stored on a different boat, and that we'd have to go to a different dock to retrieve it.

He drove us in his motorboat to another dock, where we sat for an hour, waiting. Then he unlocked a compartment underneath where we'd been sitting. The food had been there all along.

He demanded 40 Egyptian pounds from us, for the motorboat ride. We screamed at him for wasting our time and demanded he return us to our original dock.

With much hassle, we booked another tour for the following day. Our felucca ride was better than we had imagined: scenic sunset views on the sapphire blue Nile; the hilarious company of British and Australian travelers who soon became our new friends. We fell asleep under a starry sky, docked on the Nile River banks.

We were shocked, however, when the first morning after camping out on the boat, we opened our eyes and saw Sayid looming over us like a character from a B-grade horror movie. He was stalking us.

We had to restrain our felucca driver from punching him out. Apparently, Sayid has quite a nasty reputation among felucca drivers. Even his own family, we hear, despises him.

The 'Story of Sayid' became a bit of a running joke on the Felucca, and while we half expected him to show up again, lurking in the papyrus, it was all smooth sailing thereafter.

Scams, rip-offs and cheats

2008-11-01T07:23:00.004-06:00

Being a Westerner in the developing world means that many people see you as MoneyBags McGee. They look at you and don't see a person -- they see dollars. And they'll stop at nothing to scam those dollars from you.

I may sound dramatic, but potential scams happen, literally, dozens of times a day. If you're not on guard at all moments, you can kiss your wallet good-bye. We've been scammed for small amounts several times, but we're doing relatively well. Most travelers we've met have lost much larger amounts.

Some of the more common scams include:

-- A tout will follow you around as you're searching for hotels in a new city. (Your backpack is an obvious sign that you need a hotel). You know full well that if you walk into a hotel with him in tow, the hotel will pay him a "commission" and tack it onto your bill. Yet you can't lose him. You tell him to go away. Get lost. Scram. Goodbye. You get stern with him. You yell. He continues to stalk you.

You and your friends devise a "divide and conquer" plan: one of you will stand on the street and engage the stalker/tout in conversation, while the other one ducks into a hotel and looks for a room. This plan fails, because the person who sneaks away immediately attracts the attention of another greedy stalker looking for commission.

-- A really suave tout stands inside the hotel lobby, posing as the staff. He has a copy of the hotel keys and shows you the room. He negotiates the price of the room with you. He helps you check in. Yes, he's a tout, earning a commission, but you might never know it.

-- "The official" -- a man in uniform stands in front of a train station and explains that a given ticket office is closed, or sells tickets to locals only, or doesn't sell tickets as far in advance as the ones you need. He then redirects you to the "foreigner office" or the "advance sales office" or the "after-hours office," which in fact is a scam-office that sells fake tickets.

-- "The counterfeit" -- a person hands you US dollars and asks you to exchange it with them for Egyptian pounds. Then they either hand you counterfeit money or they claim that YOU shortchanged THEM, and demand more money.

True story: some Australians we met got counterfeit money at the DESK of an established Exchange Bureau.

-- You pay for something at a store or a restaurant, and the shopkeeper/server doesn't give you change. You ask for change. They give you PART of it. At this point, most Westerners fail to count their change and they walk away. If you're street-smart, you count your change, then stand your ground. The shopkeeper gives you another portion of it. You continue to stand there with your hand extended. They give you a little more. Then they tell you that they don't have any smaller bills or coins, so they're unable to give you adequate change. At this point, you either demand it and make a fuss, or you ask that they trade you another item in exchange for being shortchanged. Either way, this costs you 10 minutes of your life.

-- The "premise changing" scam. You ask an Egyptian taxi driver how much a ride will cost. "Ten pounds," he'll say. You and your friend get into the cab and complete the ride. Upon exiting, you hand him 10 Egyptian pounds. He looks at you and says, "no, 10 British pounds."

When you refuse, he raises the stakes. "10 British pounds EACH."

-- The "bribery" scam. When you refuse to give the cab driver "10 each," he refuses to unlock the trunk, where your baggage is kept, until you pay him 10 each -- plus another 10 for a "baggage fee," plus a "tip."

-- If people say "everything is included" -- that means NOTHING is.

-- Inventing the amount of time it will take to get from one city to the next by bus, then encouraging you to take a "private car" that gets you there "faster."

I wanted to tell the story of Sayid, the ostensible "driver" of a felucca sailboat that cruised down the Nile River from Aswan to Luxor, who pulled one of the most frustrating and ingenious scams we've countered. But right now it seems our internet time is running short. Stay tuned for the story of Sayid next.

Photos

2008-10-31T10:30:00.002-06:00

I've assembled a slideshow of the best photos from the last 6 weeks, taken in Egypt and Israel. Enjoy!

Quirks of the two countries

2008-10-29T09:37:00.007-06:00

Quirks about Egypt:

- Mannequins wearing hijab (veils)
- Donkey-carts and horse-drawn buggies driven down six-lane highways of congested urban traffic
- Drivers at night keep their headlights off, and flash them only if they're about to hit you
- Drivers will never brake for a pedestrian or for another car, preferring insted to honk or flash their headlights
- City water pipes lay ON the road, where they can easily get smashed, insted of underneath the road
- Some cafes and street vendors swear that falafel (a delicious fava bean patty) is sold only during the morning hours. Others only offer it past 10 p.m. Some say it's off-limits during Ramadan; others say it can only be sold between 3-5 p.m. every other day.
- Garlic-scented hair conditioner
- Streets filled with sheep
- A donkey cart with "Toyota" painted onto the plywood
- Crazy 7-way intersections with bumpy concrete, manhole covers halfway out, pipes exposed, and the thick clog of diesel burning your lungs
- Buses blast loud low-quality "Allah!" music throughout a 15-hour ride. The bus stops occasionally so passangers can pray at rest stops.
- No one checks when you set off the metal detector. And EVERYONE sets off the metal detector. You could probably walk through a metal detector with a gun slung over your shoulder and no one would say a word.

Quirks about Israel

- Half-assed security everywhere: entering a bus station or a restaurant or a sandwich shop requires letting a 19-year-old security guard take a cursory glance at your backpack.
- Peanut-butter flavored Cheetos.
- Push/Pull on doors is totally reversed.
- Our friends' lease, for his apartment in Tel Aviv, stipulated that he COULD NOT use electricity on Friday nights or Saturdays, which are considered to be a holy time of the week (Shabbat). If he's caught trying to use electricity on Friday night or Saturday, he could be evicted.
- Tel Aviv's maze-like six-story bus station, which sells clearance thongs.
- Jerusalem's highly organized three-story bus station, which sells yarmulkes.

Jerusalem: A Two-Act Play

2008-10-15T17:11:00.003-06:00

Meanwhile, back in America -- looks like the Dow is falling but Britney Spears' popularity is rising. Has the world turned upside-down?

We're in Egypt now, but before I tell stories of our trip here, I'll recap Jerusalem: A Two-Act Play.

SCENE ONE: JERUSALEM'S WAILING WALL.

Bring an engineer to Jerusalem, and he'll be the first to point out that the holiest site in Judiasm is a structural retaining wall.

The "Wailing Wall" is an appropriate name -- hundreds of Jews wail, sob and bow at this otherwise ordinary-looking 2,000-year-old wall at the base of the Temple Mount. A couple milennia ago, Romans destroyed the Jew's holiest temple, and this retaining wall is all that remains.

Three of us -- two girls, one guy -- washed our hands and began walking toward the wall to pay our respects.

On the way, an old woman began yelling at us in Hebrew. We ignored her, figuring she was a beggar, a vendor or just plain crazy. We kept walking. She kept yelling. Walking. Yelling. Walking. Yelling. Finally we figured out what she was trying to tell us -- the Wailing Wall is gender-segregated and the guy was supposed to be on the other side. Oops!

He headed off to the other corner of the wall, where the Hasidic Jews at the enterance handed him what appeared to be a paper take-out cup, like the kind a elementary school cafeteria would serve fries in.

"Put this on your head," they told him. It was, apparently, a McYarmulke. (Pronounced ya-ma-kah .... it's a little cap Jewish men wear over their future bald spot).

It was generous for them to give him one -- they could have required all non-Jewish visitors to buy a Yarmulke at the Yarmulke Stand in the bus station. That's right, the Jerusalem bus station sells every design and size of Yarmulke a man could possibly want.

SCENE TWO: THE SITE OF JESUS' CRUCIFIXION

When Jesus was nailed to the Cross, the scene must have been unglamorous: an angry mob, some wood, and a hammer.

Now, the site where He died is festooned with silver and gold. It looks like a hip-hop video. The site of the crucifixion is some shiny bling-bling.

The angry mob, however, hasn't disappeared. They've just converted into priests.

At the site of the crucifixion, a long line of devout Christians, who are undoubtedly making one of the most important pilgrimages of their lives, wait for their chance to kneel and pray at the location of the Cross. Many of them are elderly and have probably scrimped and saved and waited and prayed for their once-in-a-lifetime chance to see the place of Holy Passion.

But their moment in God's presence is probably ruined by the priests.

These guys have spent too long watching Christian pilgraims, and have lost their patience for crowd-control. They stand next to the worshippers, yelling "hurry up! HURRY UP!," and fly into a tizzy once a worshipper has been at the Cross for longer than a few seconds. Most of the time, the priests begin screaming before a Christian has even had enough time to bow.

One particularly angry priest physically shoved an old lady out of the way. Security rushed him, demanding to know what he was doing. "I asked her to leave!!" he bellowed. Security apologized to the old lady and allowed her to get to the front of the line. "NO!!" the priest yelled, and rushed in for interference. Another priest caught wind of this and ran over, trying to calm the first priest down. Suddenly people are screaming in different languages. Commotion ensues.

Even all the bling-bling in the world can't make the site of the Crucifixion sacrosanct.

Yom Kippur

2008-10-11T11:32:00.004-06:00

Zohar invited us to stay at his kibbutz -- a communal village, population 650 -- in northern Israel.
We leapt at the prospect of seeing a communal village, although Laurel was a little hesitant. Should she spend Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year, at the kibbutz? Or should she try to spend it with Israeli relatives she's never met before; family with whom she shares a common great-grandfather?

Thanks to strange serendipity, she didn't have to choose. As it turns out, Laurel's relative lives on the same kibbutz. In fact, he's Zohan's next-door neighbor!

This relative, Yani, is extremely friendly. He wholeheartedly greeted Laurel when she knocked on his door, and he hosted us for three consecutive dinners. Today he and his wife drove us to Mt. Carmel, took us to a Sufi market, and bought us an amazing hummus, dolma, and lamb kebab lunch.

Devout Jews fast on Yom Kippur, but the kibbutz is populated with kids in their early 20's who care more about fun than fasting. We spent The Day of Judgment hanging out at a campfire with about 25 Israeli youth. We cooked pizzas over the fire, munched on cookies, and enjoyed an unconventional, fasting-free Yom Kippur.

In general, we're better-fed in Israel than we ever were in Egypt. During Ramadan in Egypt, there simply was no food available. We'd get hungry, and climb onto the roof of the hostel, and shake a palm tree until dates fell out. We'd munch on the dates and call it lunch.

We were poor and hungry, and we all lost weight. Here in Israel, we're promptly putting those pounds back on, one scoop of tahina at a time.

The landscape here looks dry -- rust-colored soil, stone settings -- but amazingly, this kibbutz is brimming with fruit. Our days consist of picking pomegranates out of trees, watching quails, walking past the sheep pastures, picking wild herbs to make tea.

We're returning to Tel Aviv tonight.

Don't mess with the Zohar

2008-10-06T08:49:00.003-06:00

Zohar is an Israeli man who had a month's vacation from his job in the military last year.

He spent that month traveling through California, Colorado and Texas, and found our house through Couchsurfing.com. We let him sleep in our basement for a few weeks.

Now, good karma comes into play. We're staying at his apartment in Tel Aviv.

It's amazing how a border -- an arbitrary, imaginary line -- changes everything.

As soon as we crossed into Israel, we faced a new language, new code of socially acceptable behavior, and new standards of health and hygene.

The hummus here -- as opposed to in Egypt -- is sold in a safety-sealed plastic package, without flies. The prices here have quadrupled. It's acceptable to wear short skirts here. Instead of people fasting for Ramadan, public transit shuts down for the Sabbath.

We seem to have arrived in both Egypt and Israel exactly in time for their annual religious holidays. We spent Ramadan in Egypt; now we're spending Yom Kippur and Sukkot at Zohar's kibbutz in northern Israel.

I never took the time to describe the "iftar," the breaking of the fast, that happens every sunset in the Arab world. The bustling, crazy, traffic-choked streets clear out. The loud panic subsides to a whisper. For a brief hour, the streets are completely quiet. All you hear is the Call to Prayer singing "Allah Akbar" and all you see are groups of men sitting together on rugs, eating their first meal of the day.

Here in Israel, we're about to witness Yom Kippur, the day of judgment. Everything shuts down on that day -- no public transit, no jobs. Everyone fasts.

Maybe the more countries change, the more things stay the same.

Border crossing

2008-10-05T10:26:00.002-06:00

Crossing the border on foot from Egypt into Israel is something everyone should experience once -- and only once.

Yesterday we tried to catch a bus from Dahab (our coral reef resort hangout) to the border. But since the bus only runs once a day (which you have to GO to the bus station to discover), our plans were waylaid for an extra 24 hours.

We caught the bus to the border this morning, but had to bribe the bus driver to take us to the actual border, instead of dropping us off at the central bus station. He demanded an extra 5 Egyptian Pounds from each passanger, under the table.

I got off the bus desperate to change my tampon. I was leaking blood everywhere; my pants were stained deep red from the bus ride.

Unfortuantely, the nearest bathroom was across the border, and a long line of Korean tourists were standing in the way.

With a determined look on my face, I jumped ahead of all of them in line, knocking mothers and little kids out of my path. I did this not just once but twice, through two security checkpoints. I darted into the dirtiest bathroom I've ever seen -- far worse than anything in Nepal -- and took care of business.

We exited Egypt and walked to the Israeli enterance, where my passport was flagged because it shows that I was born in Nepal. Security called for backup, and soon three people stated questioning me:

When did you move to America?
Why?
Why didn't your parents just keep their jobs in Nepal, insted of moving?
What do each of your parents do for work?
What are your parents names?
What did you study in college?
What part-time jobs did you have during college?
How are you paying for this trip?

I found the questioning utterly pointless, given that they have no way of verifying my answers.

And so on. In total, security detained me for more than an hour, suspicious of my ties to Nepal. I don't think they believed me when I claimed that I no longer have a Nepalese passport.

Finally across the border, we caught a bus to Eilat, where we're waiting to take the 1 a.m. bus to Tel Aviv. In total, we'll be in transit for about 24 hours.

Welcome to World Tour, Country #2.

Thou shalt dodge a Dromedary

2008-10-04T15:57:00.005-06:00

It's 3:30 in the morning, and I dimly spot a large object lumbering towards me on the gravely path.

"Jimal! Left!," someone calls out, and I duck to my right to avoid being run over by a camel. These creatures seem as heavy as horses, and getting stepped on by one would be an ugly injury.

I wonder why camels are allowed on such narrow winding paths in pitch-black dark. Surely my headlight can't spot them coming from above.

But our paths cross, the camel and I, and he continues a steady saunter downward while I push on toward the summit.

I've been walking since 2 a.m., and I need to reach the top by 5 a.m., in time to see daybreak over the mountains.

I have no trouble doing so, and I find a narrow stone ledge at the summit of Mt. Sinai.

It's here where (according to Christians, Jews and Muslims alike) Moses recieved the 10 Commandments from God. I had read about this mountain millions of times in Catholic school, but never did I imagine it to be so desolate.

Life is impossible in these mountains for plants, trees -- for anyone other than camels and box-lunch tourists on air-conditioned buses.

I try to imagine 40 days of solitude on this mountaintop, as Moses spent when he talked to God. Once the sun rises on these mountains, they become scorching hot and unbearably dry. Anyone would start hearing voices, it seems.

As the sun rises, the only voices I hear are hymns in German, in Korean, in languages I can't identify. They're sung by the pilgrims sharing the crowded summit with me.

As I start my descent back down, I hear the gurgles and groans of camels. 40 years from now, the camels will still be on Mt. Sinai.

2008-10-02T14:54:00.004-06:00

Even in a tropical paradise, sometimes its the strange people you meet -- not the sunny place you're in -- that sticks in your mind the most.

This is true of Dahab, Egypt.

This beach town on the Sinai peninsula, near the Gulf of Aqaba, boasts some of the bluest, bluest waters in the world, and an elaborate seascape of coral reef.

It's my first time snorkeling and my first glimpse of coral reef. I'm identifying an entire new world underwater of puffer fish and parrot fish.

The town feels more like a Thai island than Islamic Egypt. We can freely swim in bikinis while staring across the gulf at Saudi Arabia. It's amazing to realize that a tiny stretch of sea separates a beach where women can deep-sea dive from a country where women can't drive.

Of course, snorkeling, coral reefs, reflections on freedom -- blah blah blah. None of this is as colorful as Mickey.

Mickey is a middle-aged Danish woman who's been living in Egypt for the past 7 years.

When I call her "colorful," I mean it literally. She's bright red, head-to-toe. Her color might come from sunburn; it might come from her excessive alcohol consumption. We suspect it comes from both.

She looks old for her age, with saggy, wrinkled skin and an incessant cough from a lifetime of cigarettes and hash. Her cough sounds like water hissing as it hits a pot of hot oil.

She's our neighbor at Camp Sabry, a Bedouin camp overrun by cats.

None of the Camp Sabry residents can sit in our musty, unclean rooms in the evenings, so we all converge under the woven canopy in the center of the campsite.

This space has become our "living room." The cats outnumber the people at least 3-to-1. They seem to multiply hourly.

Sitting in Camp Sabry's "living room" last night, Mickey -- in her usual drunk state -- tried to tell us a story. She made it through "Once upon a time," before devolving into a coughing fit. She sounded like the muck of ancient earth was lodged in her lungs.

All the other guests began laughing at this old woman's failed state. She looked around angrily, then tried again. "Once upon a time -- " she began, before her words dissolved into fitful coughing.

She managed to tell the story -- a fictional tale about a fish with a golden head -- though she told it in a rambling, convoluted way, like Sarah Palin trying to answer a foreign policy question.

Then she walked off, defeated.

Half an hour passed. It seemed like the night was calming down. Even the cats had disappeared.

Then I noticed everyone staring at me. What? Wait, no, they're not staring at me. They're staring at some spectacle behind me.

It's Mickey, completely topless, drunk beyond her skull. Her body is as red and saggy and wrinkled as her face. Her breasts, somehow, are perky and creamy milk-white.

She walks past all the practicing Muslim boys, who are vacationing in Dahab to celebrate the end of Ramadan fasting. They glance, look away, glance again, then look away with vigor.

She stumbles toward the bathroom, then back toward her room. But she walks through the wrong door.

We watch as she enters someone elses' open bedroom door. We wait for her to realize her mistake and leave. She does not.

After some hesitation, the guests crowd the doorway. Mickey is passed out asleep on someone's bed. Four feet away from her is an innocent man, sleeping, oblivious to his intruder.

The Muslim men aren't sure what to do. One grabs a towel and places it around her, covering her skin. They try to pick her up.

She wakes up, falls over. Shoots a look at the innocent man asleep in the next bed.

"WHAT'S he fucking doing in my fucking room?" It begins as an angry bellow, then falls to a mumble. By the end of the question, she's asleep.

The sleeping man wakes up from of the commotion. Screams.

Just another night in tropical snorkeling paradise .....

Crossing the Sahara

2008-09-25T17:53:00.003-06:00

We crossed the Sahara on a bouncy bus, gazing for hours at the endless sea of sand in every direction. The Sahara is barren, empty, desolate.

We drive for an hour. Flat sand. There is no life here, no mercy. Leave someone in the sands without water, and they'd die quickly.

We drive another hour. And another. And another. The scenery never changes.

Then, suddenly, trees. We rub our eyes. Is it a mirage? No -- it's truly an oasis.

The Siwa oasis, which worshipped the Ancient Egyptian god Amun until (relatively) not too long ago, is a solitary small town close to the Libyan border. Donkey-carts outnumber cars. The stones give way to dwellings carved into the stone, which gradually give way to modern dwellings made out of stone and mud-brick.

Women are rarely seen, not even at markets. They are cloaked from head-to-toe, with a mesh veil hiding even their eyes. By contrast, women in burquas in cosmopolitan Cairo look exposed.

So on our second night at the Siwa oasis, when we had the opportunity to visit a woman's house, Laurel and I lept at the chance. No man other than her son could accompany us; women can only be in the company of other women.

Their privacy is so fiercely guarded that her son wouldn't even reveal her name.

But we did get to see her face: smiling and shy. The left side of her mouth had large yellowed teeth, the right side had no teeth. At home she wore a simple beige tunic and a blue headscarf over her curly black hair. Although she was slender, she had an unbelievably large booty.

She brought us tea and cookies; applied henna to Laurel's hands. A television, her only contact with the outside world, played in the background the entire time. It had satellite stations, most of which were in Italian, and for awhile it broadcast images of women in thong bikinis sunbathing on the Italian Riviera. I wondered how television rocked the Berber (nomadic north Africans who settled in Siwa) way of life; I wondered if shows like these were the equivalent of porn.

She couldn't speak any English. She didn't want her picture taken. She didn't ask for any money for the hours she spent applying henna to Laurel's hands; Laurel had to forcifully press 10 Egyptian pounds ($2 U.S. Dollars) into her palms.

Her son drove us back to town on his donkey-cart. We realized he's probably the sole breadwinner of the family, as his father, whom we met, is blind. Even without eyesight, though, the father can expertly manuever the TV remote.

Salaam alaykum

2008-09-22T17:36:00.002-06:00

“Is salaam ‘alaykum!,” we’re greeted at the train station in Alexandria. The man who says it, Mohammad Abdallah, was born and raised in the Sudan but lives in Egypt and holds a U.S. passport.

In the early 1990’s, when he was a young immigrant studying in America, he lived with my friends’ family in Broomfield, Colo., and when he discovered we are in Egypt, he invited us to stay with him, his wife and their three daughters, ages 9 months through 9 years.

We’ve been spending the past few days at his apartment in Alexandria, a coastal city bordering the Mediterranean Sea.

Outside the famed Library of Alexandria, we met an Egyptian-born guy from Los Angeles named Mustafa and his crew of Egyptian “homies” – twentysomethings with sideways baseball caps who listen to hip-hop all day and stay bored because its cool. We’ve spent the past two afternoons hanging out with them by the sea. They smoke cigarettes, rap Ludacris and Bizzy Bone lyrics, and complain about how none of the Egyptian girls will get naked for them.

All day long, we’re hot and hungry. We sleep late into the afternoon – it’s too hot to move much while the sun is out – and stay awake late into the night, when the temperature cools. We’re usually still awake by the 4 a.m. morning Call to Prayer.

At night, the city erupts with characteristic craziness. Horses pull wagons piled with eggplants down narrow, trash-strewn streets. Children ride tricycles past sheep and goats tied outside butcher shops. Men weld chicken cages as the animals cluck inside. Pedestrians dance around microbuses driving within an inch of bodies.

After breaking fast with Mohammad at sunset, we ventured out to buy a watermelon from a midnight melon cart. Someone had carved “Allah Akbar” – “God is Great” – into the melon skin.

My friend, who studied Arabic in college, read aloud from the watermelon rind. I practiced reading the Arabic numbers on license plates passing by. We began to sweat in the smoggy night humidity.

We're going to Siwa tomorrow, a small oasis town at Egypt's western border, next to Libya. More than a dozen tourists were kidnapped at the Egypt-Libya border a few days ago, but that was in the south. We're heading to the north, which (fingers crossed!) will be safe.

“Is salaam ‘alaykum!” – peace be with you.

Walk like an Egyptian

2008-09-20T15:25:00.002-06:00

Day 2. 500 to go.

We spent Day Two at the Pyramids in Giza, which are both majestic and subtle. In a barren desert, with no buildings to compare relative size, the enormity of the pyramids is hard to grasp. Standing next to the pyramids, you lose all concept of space, distance and size.

Laurel and I rode camels across the sands, reaching a dune plateau overlooking all 9 pyramids: the 6 pyramids of Giza and 3 to the east. We pause to gaze over the stark landscape, then turn our camels in the direction of the Sphinx. I think of the empty desert the Sphinx used to look upon; how that space has now become a dense cluster of cement high-rises thick with smog and soot.

We dismount our camels by the Sphinx. Our legs are sore from riding. “You’ll be walking like an Egyptian,” says our camel guide Samir.

Back in Giza, Laurel befriends an Egyptian perfume-seller, Ismael, who is about to go to 1 out of his 4 homes to have dinner with 1 out of his 4 wives.

Laurel tells him we’ve love to experience breaking a daily Ramadan fast with a Muslim family; he invites us into his living room, where we recite the first verse of the Koran while breaking fast with sweet plum-colored juice. One of his wives cooks us the best falafel we’ve ever tasted.

We pile back of the street, bellies full, smoke a hookah on the sidewalk, drink a cup of tea, and catch a bus back to Cairo.

Arabian Nights

2008-09-20T15:23:00.000-06:00

502-day journey, Day 1.

It’s my first visit to the Arab Muslim world, and I landed in the middle of the Holy Month of Ramadan, stepping out of the airport just in time to hear the Call to Prayer boom across the city from the mosque speakers.

From our hotel in downtown Cairo, we catch a birds-eye view of hundreds men outside the neighborhood mosque, kneeling in prayer along the sidewalks in neat little rows that stretch into the busy street. Above them, three stories above ground, five men unfurl a rug on a rooftop and break fast at sunset.

The streets are devoid of women during the day, but at night they come out in droves, crowding into markets and shops that pound with energy at midnight but fall asleep during the hot, hungry days.

The women are high-fashion, wearing cute designer tops over long-sleeved shirts and tailored, couture ankle-length skirts. They carefully coordinate their headscarves to compliment their shirt to compliment their handbag. A surprising number of stores showcase risqué lingerie. Burqa-clad women, covered head-to-toe with only a tiny slit exposing their eyes, will rifle through racks of fur-and-fishnet lingerie in the downtown shops. (Women in burqas, by the way, have incredibly expressive eyes. Making eye contact with them on the street can give you chills. They tell you a story in a single glance.)

In spite of its seeming conservatism, Cairo has a Burning Man Festival quality to it: the city is a sandcastle, built precariously on harsh desert land, and it comes alive at night, with bright flashy lights and loud music raging from sunset to sunrise. Party boats that resemble Burning Man art cars cruise up-and-down the Nile, and young ladies in sequin-lined headscarves hang out on the riverbanks, chatting (and occasionally holding hands) with their male counterparts. Egypt is “dry” in every sense of the word, and it is fascinating to watch a thriving alcohol-free nightlife in the city that never sleeps.

The interim

2008-09-20T15:20:00.001-06:00

From Germany I fly home to Boulder and entertain my parents for their one-week visit to the Colorado Rockies.

The day they leave I travel with some friends to northern Idaho, where we watch a quintessential small-town Americana Fourth of July street parade and pick up a few hitchhikers in Canada as we drive to mountainous hot springs.

After a week I return to Colorado, spend six weeks starting and finishing a few freelance projects, move out of my house, then fly to San Francisco to hang out in the Bay Area for a week while preparing for the Burning Man Festival.

We ride a veggie-oil schoolbus into the desert, and experience the festival (which is a novel of its own). When its done I ride with a British woman to Reno, where we stay in a hotel that has its own movie theater, shopping district, six-lane entryway and restaurant row.

The next day I catch a flight to Atlanta, where I attend a four-day journalism conference and visit with my parents.

I then fly back to Colorado, pack my bags, and five days later find myself on a flight to Egypt. Thus begins a 16-month round-the-world journey.