Fifty Weeks

Needless tips for lengthy trips

2009-02-20T14:58:00.001-05:00

I haven’t really blogged here since coming home from my trip a long while ago but in the last couple years I’ve heard from a lot of people planning their own trips and I thought I’d write an entry of tips and suggestions to answer some of the most common questions I get…

First, remember your passport. And remember that it’s the only thing you really need for a big trip. Everything else is truly a detail.

Scan your passport and e-mail it to yourself. Make a few copies and stash them in your bag.

If you’re bringing valuables (like a laptop), insure them through Safeware and lock them in a wire-mesh bag from PacSafe.

Remember a padlock, a tiny flashlight, and a Swiss army knife.

Get a Lonely Planet guidebook but don’t become a prisoner to it. The region guides (Southeast Asia on a Shoestring, etc) are sufficient unless you’ll spend more than a few weeks in a single country, then its worth springing for a country-specific guide.

Under-pack. If you really end up needing something you can buy it on the road.

I usually travel with 3-4 pairs of socks, t-shirts and underwear. Then one long sleeve shirt, one pair of jeans, one pair of shorts. One bathing suit and a pair of pajama bottoms come in handy too. And a very lightweight raincoat.

You’ll quickly find an efficient way to organize your bag; try to stick to it. Whenever I misplace something its because I’ve put it back in a different place than usual.

You don’t need to pre-book hostels unless it’s a super-busy season for the destination. The only time I’ve pre-booked was for Oktoberfest in Munich.

You don’t need a phone.

Check the foreign transaction and ATM-withdrawal fees charged by your bank, they’re probably outrageous. Capital One offers a “direct banking” account with no foreign ATM fees, which can save you hundreds of dollars over time. I’ve heard Charles Schwab has something similar but don’t know the details.

I like having a family member listed on my bank account in case something needs to be taken care of while I’m away.

Doing your taxes before you leave might be helpful.

High-deductible foreign health insurance is pretty cheap and can be a big help if something medically expensive happens.

Now go.

A Map for Saturday TV premiere

2008-03-08T08:42:00.013-05:00

A week ago, as I wandered around the desert, some friends got together to watch the U.S. premiere of ‘A Map or Saturday’ and sent along some pics…

Mom and dad watched at my cousin Sheri’s house with some extended family

Friends in New York (who you may recognize from my welcome home party) got together at my friend Katie’s apartment.

And in Vancouver (a few days before) Canadian Kate got a group together as well.

The sign behind Kate was better than the T.V. listing on a lot of U.S. cable systems which called the show “A Map for Sunday” Ouch.

Thanks for stopping by...

2008-03-01T12:05:00.005-05:00

If you've stumbled here because of A Map for Saturday, welcome to the Fifty Weeks blog which I kept throughout my year-long trip. Below, I've linked to some of my favorite posts from the blog, if you're feeling a bit more ambitious you can scan the Archives. For what's new, check out my current blog tracking my drive through Africa. A full run down of what I've been up to is at BrookSilvaBraga.com.

Here are some highlights from my year away:
Valentines Day
The Scene on Ko Phi Phi
You Can't Find City Hall
The Fires of Varanasi
On the Nepal Side
The Bus to Pokhara
Trekking in Nepal
Moving on Up
When Friday Rested
Sleep in Fact
Leaving
The Fifth Bite of Dessert
My First Mugging
Pure Brazil
Drink Cart Land
a Place on Earth

The Interviewpoint

2007-10-01T14:26:00.000-04:00

I've recently launched my latest project direct to the web, The Interviewpoint has in-depth video conversations with a wide range of guests. Check it out if you have a chance.

a Place On Earth

2007-01-01T00:01:00.000-05:00

In heaven the beer is Belgian. The bread and cheese are French and the beaches are Brazilian. The waves are from Australia and the landscape from New Zealand. All the prices are Cambodian.

In heaven the soup is Vietnamese but the goulash is Hungarian. The city squares are Czech and the meadows are Irish. The bars are Irish too, but you don’t need to go to heaven to find an Irish bar.

In heaven the wine is Italian and the mountains are Nepalese. Dinner is Indian and lunch is Thai. Breakfast is Spanish and served just before going to bed. Whatever the meal, the steak is from Argentina.

The nights are short in heaven because the days are Swedish and it’s always July. The trains are German and always on time. The drug laws are Dutch.

In heaven the sun is Greek and the rivers Lao. The golf courses are Scottish. The composers are Austrian and the school children are Korean; I didn’t spend long enough in either country to nominate anyone else.

In the Bag

2006-12-01T00:25:00.000-05:00

In response to Anthony's question I'll give some Xs and Os info...

I used a large Gregory backpack (http://www.gregorypacks.com/prod.php?ID=7) and a cheap, junky day pack. Inside I had:

Clothes:
-1 pair jeans
-1 pair shorts
-1 bathing suit
-4 t-shirts
-1 sweater
-1 short-sleeve polo
-1 light rain jacket

A shaving bag (toothbrush, contacts, ravor, soap etc)

Electronic equipment
-Panasonic DVX-100a video camera (and batteries and charger)
-1 wired lav mic
-1 shotgun mic
-2 mic cables
-1 small Velbon tripod
-15 or so tapes (i bought more and mailed as i went)
-15" Powerbook (and charger)
-2 small Lacie hard drives
-Avid software on the laptop

A large duffle bag that folded small to put my bag in when I flew.

A Pacsafe wiremesh bag (and padlock) to put the camera and computer in where I stayed

I got insurance for the pricey stuff through Safeware.

Internet access was good everywhere except India (I didn't belive it either until I got there). I scanned my key stuff (Passport, plane ticket) before I left and kept a copy on my computer, another in my e-mail, and another with my parents.

Remember your passport and bank card; the rest will sort itself out.

Back

2006-11-04T11:38:00.000-05:00

It took 11 months to get to Costa Rica. But I slept most of the way.

It was snowing in Youngstown, OH at five yesterday morning. Then the sun came up in the Pittsburgh airport, I bought eggs in Atlanta´s international terminal, and withdrew Colones from the ATM near the San Jose baggage claim. I was in Costa Rica and for the first time since I left Argentina 11 months ago it really felt like I was traveling.

The twinges of excitement and fear on a cab ride from the airport to the bus station. The confusion over what ticket to buy and where to board the bus. The purchase of a lunch you can´t name even after you eat it. This is what travel feels like and you feel it much more when you haven´t done it in a long while and it used to be all you did.

When I went to a Berlin hostel this summer it felt like visiting the empty halls of your old high school. It all looked familiar but somehow I knew I didn´t quite fit in anymore. But now the halls are full and I took the bus from San Jose to Puerto Viejo, arriving 17 hours after I drove my rental car through the Ohio snow.

Rockin J´s might be one of the best backpacker pads in all the world. Or maybe I just forgot how great they can be. There were no dorm beds available when I arrived so I settled for hammock #44 just off the beach. There was a bon fire and a ping pong table, one dollar drinks and Mexican food. There were lots of high backpackers.

When I was in Berlin this summer I met up with Jens, my first real travel friend back in Sydney almost two years ago. He´s been home for a while now too. ¨I feel myself changing back,¨ he said. ¨I can´t explain how but I know it´s happening.¨

I knew what he meant. You can´t fight the changes when you come back any more than you can fight them when you go. Because they feel right and natural and you fit in better when you change. So it´s felt easy and fine to plot my next career move these last months. Easy to count the dollars I might make by selling the movie and imagine the things that might be available to me once it airs.

But how foolish all that seems from here now. In Puerto Viejo the hammocks are $5 a night and the bikes are $5 a day.

I flew to New York after a year of traveling and home swallowed me back up within a year. Then I came traveling again and it only took a day to be reclaimed.

Hidden World

2005-12-25T22:28:00.000-05:00

December 25 – Portsmouth, RI
The first thing to do when constructing your 20-something cliché is to equate your friends to a family. You can take cues from RENT or Reality Bites if it’s not immediately clear how to do this.

There is a burnt turkey or a flimsy Christmas tree and you’re all broke and happy.

So its Christmas day in Portsmouth, RI, USA and several elements of the narrative are falling short. There is no broken family or gaggle of bohemian friends. Just cousins and uncles and lots of food.

But when one cliché fails you can always look to another, and every returning backpacker will utter a variation of this sentence when discussing their return home: “The first week is great. You see all your friends and family, its good to be home. But then after a week…”

So yesterday was a week and Christmas is day eight, and now visions of Winona Ryder or Mark Cohen dance in my head. In my little cousin’s smile I’m strangely reminded of a Dutch girl in Rome, who hasn’t written back in a few days. In the bottles of red wine I’m nostalgic for French friends. But as Benny insists at the end of Act One, “Bohemia is dead.”

I’m unsure if it makes things sadder or less sad, but I’m aware there is no backpacking Bohemia for me to return to. Not mine anyway. The Dutch girl isn’t in Rome anymore…the Canadian isn’t in Spain…the German isn’t in Australia. No plane can take me back to the places I remember, because the people were the places.

I imagine the world now as a lonely place. I think of empty hostels and unfriendly bus stations. I think I picture it like people who haven’t traveled alone do: I imagine it being lonely because the people I know are gone.

I landed in Sydney on January 10, 2005. It was a sunny Tuesday but really it was Saturday. And every day for the next 26 countries and $20,000 was Saturday too. It was Saturday, December 17, 2005 when I returned. But the calendar was done playing games then and the next day church bells rang, and the day after that was a working Monday. So that world I discovered is hidden from me now. But in that false bohemian picture I see myself peaking in like a ghost, watching someone else still learning the straps on their backpack, watching them get comfortable in a hostel lobby, watching them step out of the week I’ve returned to and settle into their Saturday and smile at their first sight of this hidden world.

Twenty-Six Countries in 26 Pictures

2005-12-17T17:28:00.000-05:00

AUSTRALIA

NEW ZEALAND

THAILAND

INDIA

NEPAL

CAMBODIA

VIETNAM

LAOS

HUNGARY

AUSTRIA

CZECH REPUBLIC

GREECE

SWEDEN

DENMARK

BELGIUM

HOLLAND

ENGLAND

IRELAND

SCOTLAND (don't tell them its not a country)

FRANCE

SPAIN

GERMANY

ITALY

VATACAN CITY

BRAZIL

ARGENTINA

In Argentina, It Sounds Like Home and Looks Like England

2005-12-17T08:06:00.000-05:00

November 16 – flight from Buenos Aires to Atlanta
It starts in an airport very far away. The flight leaves from Argentina but goes to Atlanta and the American voices flow towards me like a stiffening breeze in the Passport Control line.

They sound strange, almost like foreign accents. In the unfamiliarity of the American voices it feels I’ve been gone much much longer than a year. They sound familiar the way a relative’s face might look familiar if you were suffering from amnesia.

Its slow in hitting me still. When I left the hostel I felt nothing. When I spent my final hours with the Danish girls at their apartment I still felt little. I knew—I know—that I’m not comprehending what’s happening. I don’t get it yet. I’m on a plane in seat 20A and that’s what I do. It’s the 29th flight of my year. Number 30 from Atlanta to New York will be next. But they’re just names, they’re just more places to go because what I do is go to places.

There was a pleasant symmetry in my last day. Just before I went to the airport Lonnie and Tania set up a stool in their kitchen and started cutting my hair. Neither had ever done such a thing and it was indeed an adventure.

Before I left New York I got my hair cut at Bumble and Bumble and happily paid $130 for the honor. I paid the money because I wanted to and I could. And today I got my hair hacked up by a couple smiling Danes because I wanted to and I could. My point isn’t that its better to get free hair cuts from cute girls than to waste your money. I wasn’t wasting my money because it was something I wanted to do. But the pleasure of today’s cut—patchy and uneven but pretty decent for a first effort—was strangely similar to the fancy salon: I knew I was doing something vaguely irresponsible (in one case blowing money, in the other risking embarrassment) but that was kind of the point.

Tania decided she’d give me something of a David Beckham cut. Beckham may be the world’s most famous athlete but no one in America has heard of him. So they won’t get the reference implicit in the Nuevo-Mohawk, or recognize it as the quintessential young-Brit style.

On this flight to Atlanta when I accidentally kicked my seatmate’s bag, he told me “It’s okay.” I’m used to hearing “No worries.”

I’m used to hearing foreign accents and languages, of eating different food and crossing strange streets.

But the American voices are coming like a flood and the hair is already growing out. They're the voices of my friends and it is after all a Mohawk, so these might be things to celebrate. Skol? Brosht? Salud?

No. Cheers.

All the Way

2005-12-16T06:11:00.000-05:00

There is no metaphor because it is the metaphor. If you decide to dance, you can't dance half way. It's better not to dance at all than to dance a little. I've spent my life dancing a little--I mean this literally not metaphorically--until tonight.

If you told me in January that I would spend the last night of my trip either A) Smoking crack, B) Hooking up with a guy, or C) Dancing well past dawn in the middle of a Buenos Aires night club, I'm not sure which I would have gone with.

People think I took this trip so I wouldn't be tormented in old age by not having done it. I never really had that thought. But in the many danceless moments I've spent at the edge of the dance floor, I have imagined myself as a very old man wishing I could be young. I always think how that old version of myself would do anything to have a chance to dance late into the night. So for that old man I've tried many times to dance, but at best made it half way.

But there I was 45 minutes ago, alone near the middle of the crowd bouncing around as if I know how to dance. I was alone there the way I would be if it were a movie and the camera slowly pulled away to show me joyfully dancing by myself. There was no one else on the last night. There was everyone but there was no one. The Danish girls and Brazilian guys and Canadian girls and half of Milhouse Hostel were there. But really there will be no one to miss when I get on the plane tonight and after not long there was no one I knew left at the club.

In the story of me dancing on the last night of my trip we can thank a Californian named Lauren. It was 4am and I'd been there for two hours not dancing even a little. But she asked me to dance while she waited for her friend and I knew that meant we would make out on the dance floor so I said 'yes.' We have to thank Lauren too for checking out of Milhouse this morning and not being able to go back to the hostel with me. So she went home to her friend's apartment. "You should stay," she said. "Its your last night."

So I did. And soon the sweat was dripping and my legs were sore. Girls were asking me for cigarettes. I can't give dance lessons but I can tell you what I did. First I realized I couldn't dance halfway, then I decided I wasn't dancing to try to meet girls, then I paid attention to the bass line and that was about it.

Its 8am now and breakfast is being served. I'm too tired to even read this over and see if it makes sense. Tonight I fly home and I wonder how much I'll sleep, the night after I'll meet some of you in New York and I wonder how much I'll sleep then too.

There were other thoughts in the cab ride home. There were other metaphors and decisions and revelations. But I'm too tired now. Its after 8am and I haven't been to bed. I'll try to remember the logo for the movie that occured to me in the cab, I'll try to get some sleep. I'll try to remember how to dance. I guess that's the metaphor actually...that when you learn not to dance halfway you have to hope you don't forget how.

I Know This Much...

2005-12-12T17:23:00.000-05:00

There’s that old graduation day joke: “What did you learn at college?” “My social security number.”

Well what do you learn in a year around the world? Your passport number.

In addition to those nine digits I’ve come up with this list of newfound knowledge:

I’ve learned…
…when you toast with someone you must make eye contact or suffer seven years bad sex.

…the “s” in Laos is silent.

…in Australia (and the UK) the word “Quay” is pronounced “key” and city bus drivers are happy to laugh at you for messing it up.

I've learned to identify the accent of most westerners and though I don’t understand their languages, I can almost always hear the difference between Swedish, Dutch, and Danish.

…to convert Celsius to Fahrenheit, kilos to pounds to stones, kilometers to miles, liters to gallons.

…to enjoy bus/train/plane travel so much that I always wish the trip would last a little longer. I really do. It’s just so relaxing in that seat.

…Holland and The Netherlands are the same place. People who come from there are Dutch.

…the rules of cricket (more or less) and the difference between Rugby Union and Rugby League.

…why some sports are popular in the U.S. but others are popular elsewhere: American sports fan prefers quick bursts of action that can then be replayed (football, baseball)…Foreigners prefer sustained action regardless of frequent scoring (soccer, rugby).

…about ten words of ten different languages, though I’ve forgotten more than I’d like to admit. For now my Spanish and Portuguese are actually pretty decent.

…to be happy doing pretty much anything alone.

…to sense the right “path” just by looking at the environment. I can usually tell where the train station must be or where the taxi stand is; there’s a universal logic to those things that you’re able to recognize after a while.

…to start a conversation really easily.

Maybe most importantly, I’ve learned that everything always works out. It’s the reason people are so often happy with their choices (traveling and otherwise); because whatever path you choose, it always turns out to be a good one.

Football as the Clock Ticks Down

2005-12-12T17:21:00.000-05:00

November 11 – Buenos Aires
Here’s the scene at 9:40pm on the fifth to last night of my trip: I’m in the TV lounge of the Milhouse Hostel in Buenos Aires. Of the nearly 100 hostels I’ve stayed in this is the most raucous party-hostel and below the balcony the disco ball is spinning, the music is blaring, the hostel bar is doing good business. In an hour I’m set to grab a drink with the Norwegian girl I just met in my room, whose name I don’t yet know but whose cobalt blue eyes I’ve memorized. If I want time to shower I best write quickly…

It made sense not to come home last night because it was after 4am when the Danish girls and I got in the cab. (These are the Danish girls—Tania and Lonnie—I met in Rio when the effort to not write about girls in South America still seemed to matter). They have an apartment here in Buenos Aires now and in the morning (read: early afternoon) we would all go to the football match. So it made sense to crash at their place. Their couch is short so I put a chair at the edge of it so my legs wouldn’t dangle off. Since backpacker fantasies go only so far I needed to use my backpacking sleeping skills and make the couch work.

So now lets get to the football.

Americans call it soccer and sometimes I do too. Tania is the biggest football fan I think I’ve ever met and she explained some particulars of the Boca-Independiente match as we strolled around the stadium looking for tickets. The game was in the Argentine National league and if Boca won and some other team lost their game, Boca would be league champs.

Lonnie agreed to join Tania at the game if I came along. It wasn’t safe for foreign girls to go to the game, they were told, especially in the 14 peso general admission seats. And walking around the streets outside the stadium that was believable. “Beautiful,” guys would say as they passed us with the gravelly snarl of a bad guy in a movie. The crowd was more than 95% male and Lonnie was one of two blondes I saw in the crowd of 50,000.

“This place is great for my self confidence,” Lonnie said. “In Denmark I can hardly get looks, here its like ‘ahhhh.’” She stuck her tongue out like a dog in imitation of the flattering Argentine men.

We bargained the scalper down to $14 (40 pesos) from $35 (100 pesos) and headed in.

It took us three tries to find the right gate (three times the frisking!) and at one point we were somehow in line with the opposing fans who are channeled through twelve-foot high metal gates from the outskirts of the neighborhood to a special entrance where they sit in their special section away from the home fans.

Unfortunately for us, our seats (or at least the space we found to stand behind the south goal) was directly below the opposing Independiente fans. Before we start scaring you with soccer-riot talk lets mention the positives.

International football fans put American rooters to shame. It’s almost embarrassing to think of Fenway Park or Madison Square Garden and people saying things like “playoff atmosphere.” The level of passion and enthusiasm I saw today far exceeded any assembly I’ve witnessed for sports, music, politics, anything.

There was more singing and dancing than at any concert I’ve been to. The ability of 20,000 people to sing and bounce in unison for a half hour is something to behold. Even now as I sit here at 10pm the program on the TV is a long montage of crazed fans greeting the team as they arrived at the stadium.

The dark side of this passion is a sometimes violent antagonism between the fans. It’s clear in the barbed wire fence around the field, the water guns perched above the stadium, and the hundreds of cops in riot gear. As soon as we found a place to stand (the only sitting was during half time) we had to start scattering. The opposing fans above were throwing giant water balloons on us. A one-gallon water balloon after a 150-foot drop is a weapon and so is a broom stick (previously used to wave a flag) and a rock (previous use unknown). Spit isn’t a weapon exactly but it flowed freely from above and on a warm afternoon I worried a bit that all the spitters would suffer some dehydration.

At halftime we all scrambled to find a place to sit and then we scrambled some more when a big firecracker fell from above and exploded in the crowd. “Puto! Puto!” the crowd below yelled at the crowd above. Homo, homo. Almost every other word screamed this afternoon (at the other fans, at the referee, at the opposing team) was “puto.”

The folks in our section spent halftime looking up at the other fans, waiting for something to run from. Everyone around me suddenly sprinted away so I look up but didn’t see anything falling. “Nada,” I said coolly. Then I saw there was already a smoking cylinder on the now-empty steps. Then a young girl came walking up through the empty space. The cylinder smoked red and then…then nothing. It was just a smoke bomb in Independiente’s color.

There was a guy with a bloody towel wrapped around his head who walked past us in the second half. There was water and spit splattered liberally on all of us. There was the consideration of a fractured skull. But there was no real damage done so now we can claim it was all part of the fun.

Lets talk about what was happening down on the field for a minute because this was my first professional soccer game. Sorry, football.

Football is one of those sports—people like to say—that you have to see in person to appreciate. They say this about hockey and racecar driving too. You can’t appreciate the speed on television.

In my opinion television conveys the speed of these sports but not in the right way. Football coverage is forced to use two types of shots: extreme wide shots and close ups. In wide shots the players look like blips on a computer screen; in close up you can’t tell what’s happening in the game. (I think football and hockey would both benefit from a lower angled wide shot similar to what the NBA has adopted in recent years.)

What you see much better in person is the tidal flow of the action. Americans complain of a lack of scoring but scoring isn’t really the point. The point is an evolving series of little battles for field position. In that way it’s a faster version of American football, which is also a battle for field position. Goals—or touchdowns—are the eventual product of winning a series of small battles.

Or you can compare the ebb and flow to basketball. While the scoring in basketball is constant, games are won or lost in a series of small increments: by making a defensive stop and then scoring, by missing a free throw.

So when the uninitiated see 40 minutes without “scoring,” fans see force being exerted in one direction or another. In that way it’s like boxing, where a novice is blind to tactical advantages as they mount. But eventually the pressure reaches a breaking point and a knockdown—or a goal—results.

Watching one game in person doesn’t make me an authority on the sport but it makes clearer how entertaining the game can be regardless of balls going in the net.

What you can see too is the way play changes from casual to intense (and dirty) as the ball moves closer to the goal.

When the ball finally finds a home in the net—in the opponents net—the response can best be compared to an orgasm or friendly riot. If you’re a Yankee fan think of Brett Boone’s homer, if you’re a Sox fan think of David Ortiz’s two homers (isn’t it nice to have more to think about than Yankee fans?). That’s the level of ecstasy I witnessed this afternoon in the middle minutes of an intra-national soccer match. I’m telling you they put us to shame.

There’s so much screaming and hair pulling over every poor pass and questionable call that I couldn’t help but think about next year’s World Cup. If the sport can mean this much on this level, it’s hard to fathom the hysteria of a World Cup.

After the game there were more broomsticks and water (we’re sticking with the belief it was water). There was cheering and singing well past the final whistle and finally an announcement that the right team had lost their game and Boca was league champs. There was much to remember about the afternoon of football but now the night has come—there are just five left—and I need a name for Norway.

Argentina (with dad) in Photos

2005-12-10T17:30:00.000-05:00

Iguacu Falls may be the world´s most impressive spill...

Dinner at the end of the line...

The big cube of Perito Moreno...

Training in Patagonia

2005-12-10T10:29:00.000-05:00

December 6 – flight from El Calafate to Bariloche
You can see it in the chapped lips and scaly skin; in the fading tan and the thickening layers of cloths. Training for a New England winter is under weigh, and its happening in the southern hemisphere spring.

Mark Twain insisted “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.” I doubt he spent a summer in Patagonia, because down here in El Calafate, Argentina where my dad and I hiked a glacier yesterday, the snowflakes are still large and occasionally plentiful.

El Calafate is only as far south as London is north, but on the hip of the Andes that doesn’t matter much. Less than a week after flirting with the Equator the climate takes some getting used to. What’s most unusual is that despite the cool temps—the weather is similar to New England at the moment—the days are long, with light lingering until 11pm each night.

Folks come to El Calafate mainly for the giant glaciers. “This will be a once in a lifetime thing,” dad said when we booked the Big Ice glacier hike. “Or I guess twice in a lifetime for you.”

I hiked a glacier in New Zealand seven months and twenty-five countries ago, but the Franz Joseph ice over there doesn’t compare to the big cube of Perito Moreno here in Patagonia. Much larger and entertaining (though less dynamic to walk on), Moreno terminates in the Lago Argentino and all day long chunks of ice crash into the water, echoing through the National Park and firing little waves across the chilly lake. (Beyond the presence of glaciers Argentina and New Zealand have some other similarities, but generally speaking the main attractions of Argentina (Iguaçu falls, the glaciers) are more spectacular, while New Zealand’s overall landscape is much more beautiful).

Preparing to be released back into captivity requires more than climate acclimation. So the visits from NYC Jason and now dad have provided a social reminder of what awaits in the States. It is a symphony of the familiar—common accents and interests, common experiences and beliefs. It’s the security—or banality—of knowing who you will spend your time with and what they will be like.

With ten days and just two cities left, there are considerations of what is already over. Have I trudged aimlessly through my last over-booked town? Have I taken my last twelve-hour bus ride? Am I done hooking up with strangers in dorm beds or turning strangers into new friends?

I’m nostalgic for dorm rooms; for communal kitchens and shared bathrooms. I’m settling into the knowledge that the people I’ve met, the things I’ve done, the places I’ve been are the sum of my trip. And in retrospect it all becomes much bigger or much smaller than it was at the time. The chance encounters that could have been with someone else were instead with Jens or Ella or Tania and in memory they are major people in my life.

Which brings up another question for the end of the trip: How was it? (Not was it good or bad, it was fantastic, of course…But how was it compared to how it might have otherwise been). If I took the trip 100 times each one would be different—though in certain fundamental ways not that different—and some would be better than others. On my trip I suffered no serious problems (medical, logistical, criminal) or remarkable good fortune (meeting a wife, stumbling into some new career). I think my trip fell into the giant middle class of long-term travel—few trips go badly or much better than all the rest.

Ten days. How many people never take a trip longer than that? How many times the rest of my life will I? Ten days isn’t such a short time to travel, but its short to me. Because it doesn’t feel like I’m going home in ten days; if you’ve ever gone home from a vacation this feels nothing like that. It feels like moving cities, like breaking up with someone you love, like quitting a job. It feels maybe like it did when I left to start the trip. But that big space of uncertainty that was filled with the excitement of things to come is empty now. There’s no giddiness that comes from moving back home in the dead of winter and being broke. There’s only the comparison the future suffers to the past. And I suspect Mr. Twain never spent a winter in New England after traveling around the world. I best train hard.

An Entry For Me

2005-12-10T10:28:00.001-05:00

December 9 – Nahuel Huapi National Park
This is an entry for me about how I feel about the trip. Maybe those who have followed along with the year will find it interesting too, maybe not.

To define the trip, to define what it means to me, I try to think about how my thoughts have changed: my thoughts about myself, my future, the trip, the time after my trip.

The easiest thing to put my finger on now is the “thoughts about the time after my trip” category, because it is in the process of transitioning from the future to the present. What has changed recently is it seems less grand now. I envisioned my return—in the vague way you envision something that’s unlikely to happen—as a victory parade, a launching into a new exciting phase in my life, or perhaps a colossal disaster. Those dramatic outcomes seem increasingly unlikely as Arrival Day approaches. In the end—travelers like to point out—no one back home really cares about your trip, and a week after returning you’re no longer the cool guy traveling around the world. You’re just a guy with a full passport and an empty checking account who is eventually compelled to get a job like everyone else.

How have my feelings about the beginning of the trip changed? I know how I felt then: excited, nervous, challenged, high. When I look at the photos from that first day I look young. Maybe physically young, maybe otherwise. Maybe because you’re most often excited/nervous/challenged/high when you’re young. Naïveté and optimism are characteristics of the youthful so maybe that’s why.

There was a sense of endless possibility then. I started three movies and two books. It seemed publishing an article in a magazine or newspaper was as simple as carving a little time away from the film and book endeavors. I think a part of that was a carryover from my old pace of life. I’ve learned to slow down quite a bit; I still need to work to feel good, but not as much as I used to.

I think traveling is like a drug. You never get as high as you do at first but you do still get high and you remember what it was like at the beginning and it hurts to stop. So I look back fondly and enviously at those early times when the simple pleasures of backpacking were as fresh as your first line of coke. (It must be more uncomfortable to make these metaphors if you’ve done drugs but since I never have I don’t mind invoking cocaine. But don’t do it kids, okay?)

But eventually you have to slap yourself hard across the face and resolve to break the habit. I know that. I’ve reminded myself of that all year but now I’m shivering in the corner saying something like, “I can quit anytime I want. I just don’t want to now.” Am I ready to come home? Yes. Am I ready to stay home? I don’t think so.

What’s mollified the backpacking emotions—loneliness and uselessness chief among them—is the work on the movie. And since this is an entry for me I’ll remind myself of something that is true but will certainly change with time: The movie is good but not great or bad. Eventually I’ll become convinced by others of its greatness or awfulness but its success shouldn’t validate me any more than its failure discredits me. You are free to remind me of this when the time comes. And I am free (this being an entry for me) to end by quoting Ani:

“They can call me crazy if I fail, all the chance that I need
Is one in a million and they can call me brilliant, if I succeed.
Gravity means nothing to me, moving at the speed of sound
I’m just gonna get my feet wet, until I drown.”

Trolling Inflation

2005-12-10T10:27:00.000-05:00

Nahuel Huapi National Park – November 9
Four years ago Argentina went to hell and overnight no one had any money, the peso was relatively worthless, and the world’s best steak was about $6.

Its this last fact—lets just ignore the others—that has helped make Argentina a major tourist destination in the last few years.

“Before, the peso was held to be worth the same as the dollar, which was ridiculous for a country like Argentina” a vacationing Buenos Aires fly fisherman explained to me earlier this evening on the banks of Lago Mascardi. “We went to America and Europe because it was cheap. No one came here because it was so expensive. Now its just the opposite. We can’t afford to travel but everyone comes here because for you its cheap.”

Sometimes the steak is $5, sometimes its $8. Its always fantastic.

So it was with this background that my father and I cooked our own dinner in our El Bolson cabana last night, but managed to spend $100 (290 pesos) on it.

The first step in spending $100 on dinner is to decide to catch it yourself. Patagonia has some of the best fishing in the world, so we hired Jorge to take us out onto Lago Puelo that morning. Four hours of guided trolling cost $68 (200 pesos) and fishing licenses were another $21 (60 pesos). We’d have to catch a lot of fish to make this economical.

And at first it seemed we might because within ten minutes dad had hooked two good-sized trout and it all seemed much too easy. They were about two pounds each which in most parts of the world is a good catch but here isn’t anything to brag about.

After the mandatory look-at-me-holding-my-fish pictures we threw them overboard because you can only keep two fish per trip and we had three-plus hours left on the water. The first trout—blood dribbling from its mouth—floated motionless on the surface of the water when we threw it back. “No problema,” Jorge insisted. He guided the boat over to the fish and tapped it on the head with a spare rod. It woke up and sped away.

All the fish seemed to speed away and for the next hour there were no bites. When the sun went behind the clouds it was downright cold on the windy lake. Jorge poured hot water from a thermos into a mug packed with mate, the local tea. The giant wad of tea floats freely in the cup and is drank through a metal straw with tiny holes in the bottom that keep the tea leaves out when you take a sip.

“The next one is to eat,” Jorge said in Spanish when our dry spell neared two hours. We didn’t want to go home without dinner.

Finally, dad hooked another fish which he thought was a biggie but slipped off the line. Jorge dutifully inspected the hook and reported it was bent by the giant salmon. Then dad reeled in a two-pound trout which Jorge whacked hard on the head with a mallet. We had some dinner.

Pops proceeded to catch a couple more small trout but after more than two hours I was still fishless. A lack of luck and lack of skill were both clearly present. Trolling involves pulling tackle a couple hundred feet behind the slowly moving boat and waiting for a strike. But the water was always tugging at the line and I couldn’t tell when a fish was biting.

“La promixa pesca es para mi,” I promised. The next fish is for me.

“Esperamos,” Jorge said. We hope.

And finally I did reel one in, a good-sized salmon that turned out to be the biggest fish of the day. But we had another hour of trolling and the fish were starting to bite and we didn’t want to max out our catch too soon.

As our time ticked down we snagged another trout—okay, dad snagged another trout—and dinner was caught.

The accompanying vegetables were $.85 ($2.50 pesos) and the expensive bottle of wine was $10 ($28 pesos).

Dad hacked up the boney fish and cooked them in the oven. The TV had international cable so we watched BBC World as we picked through the trout, sipped the good wine, and enjoyed our most expensive—and most pleasurable—dinner in Argentina.

Back in the USSA

2005-12-05T19:22:00.000-05:00

The bad news is my trip is ending. The good news is we can share a beer back in New York.

Saturday, December 17 at 9pm welcome me back to the city at Shades of Green (125 E 15th St) conveniently located near the Union Square subway station. I will have just gotten off the plane and will be counting on a few friendly faces to lesson the blow of real life. All are welcome so pass the word.

Drink Cart Land

2005-11-28T12:45:00.000-05:00

November 28
It must be a funny thing to grow up in Jericoacoara, Brazil. Six hours removed from the nearest large city, and more than an hour by 4x4 from the nearest ATM, Jeri is tucked along the north coast of Brazil. It’s as far south of the equator as Philadelphia is south of New York.

There aren’t exactly seasons this close to the middle of the earth and even the length of the days stay nearly constant, starting and ending just before six. But in Jeri the year is divided into windy and not-windy, and when the easterly gusts blow across the village’s giant crescent shore, the windsurfers come by the all-terrain busload.

A half-hour down the beach little groups of rickety houses sit empty from June to January, when the wind is strong but the fishing weak. Those villages come to life just for the fish, and Jeri wasn’t much different 20 years ago.

But in that way beautiful places become popular because they aren’t populated, Jeri has become a bold type Lonely Planet recommendation. It’s topped lists of the best places in the world to windsurf. It’s only because its so hard to get here that it hasn’t been ruined.

To be 18 and living in Jeri today, is to have grown up right along with the town, to live in a place where the population is still less than 3000, but it can seem like there are just as many foreigners.

Alex is 18 and has been working five nights a week for two years at the bottom of Rua Principal. He—like a dozen other men—rolls his small cart down to the stretch of sand between two beachfront bars sometime after sundown. (It is a peculiarity of the country that independent entrepreneurs are allowed to sell their goods on the grounds of other people’s establishments.) Pedro’s cart has fifteen bottles of liquor, a cooler with ice, a bucket with sugar, a basket with fruit, a drink shaker and a wooden mallet used for breaking ice and crushing fruit.

The national drink of Brazil is the caipirinha, and I met Alex on my first night in Jeri when I asked him if I could make caipirinhas for our group. Business is always slow for the drink-carts and he happily stepped aside as I replicated the steps I’d seen:

I cut the small limes into several pieces and removed the seeds, I put them in the drink shaker and added two scoops of sugar, I pestled the fruit and sugar with the wooden mallet until they formed a sweet paste. Then I added ice and a large measure of cachaca, the Brazilian sugarcane liquor. I put the top on the drink shaker and—following Alex’s demonstration—vigorously shook the concoction. Since there is no liquid in a caipirinha to dilute the 80 proof cachaca it’s important to do enough shaking to melt some of that ice. Despite providing the labor, I paid the full two Reais ($.90) for each of the drinks. All reviews of my effort were positive.

Alex’s brother Pedro is the liveliest worker in Jeri’s land of the drink carts. Maybe that’s because he’s been at it for just two months. Each night he grabs the wooden box that will sit on his hips for the next many hours, puts it’s strap around the back of his neck, and sets out to sell a couple cases of cigarettes. “Mi frangelo!” he says with a giant smile, “My brother!”

I mentioned to Pedro one night that he was always smiling and laughing. “When I started working my mom said to me, ‘Always smile, it will make the people buy more from you.’” At least that’s what I understood as Pedro spoke his Portuguese slowly and I listened hard.

There are two cigarette sellers in Jeri, the other a 60-something man who smiles and laughs and talks much less than Pedro. You can’t help but look at the two of them and wonder if they’re on different ends of the same life. Cigarettes in Brazil sell for less than US$2 so there isn’t a lot of room for profit.

Pedro goes to school from 1-5pm each day (allowing him to stay up nearly til dawn selling cigarettes each night) and has picked up a few phrases of English (“You smoke, yeah?” “My brother, he is a so gay.” “You from America, your name is a George Bush?”). But it’s unclear what career paths he could aspire to, how he might get out of Jeri, or if he would want to.

There’s a strange rhythm to places like Jeri, a type of erosion far swifter than that suffered by the giant dune of the western edge of town. It’s the erosion of faces each morning, the constant, incremental change of the handful of visitors, set against the static backdrop of the Brazilians who live here. You recognize a group of faces each night, but the group is slightly different than the night before. If you live here I imagine the group looks exactly the same every night of your life.

But the foreigners who all look the same never learn, they always act like its their first night here—because for them it is. And there’s a freshness to their naïveté that maybe lets you share their excitement over the squishing of the limes and the shaking of the shaker. Each night they don’t know that the local girls went home with other foreigners last night, or they don’t care. They don’t know that they’re prostitutes (or at least that the locals who resent them for hooking up with the tourists call them prostitutes) or they don’t care.

“That is a girl who has sex for money,” Pedro whispered in my ear one night. To Pedro of course it doesn’t matter if its true. Certainly, she’s a girl who doesn’t have sex with a cigarette salesman.

“You know those girls are only interested in these old foreign guys for a Green Card,” people like pointing out, especially female travelers who aren’t getting so much attention. No one seems to mention how many western women are interested in western men for what they can provide.

There isn’t much sadness in Jeri, and only an over analytical outsider could find so much to fuss about. There’s no poverty or self-pity and there’s some money to be made from people who come to town with a bunch of money. Small towns in the world’s poorest countries always seem to do pretty well. They take care of each other, maybe. Or maybe its just easier to provide for a small community than a large one. But there isn’t violence or hunger that I could find in ten nights in Jericoacoara anymore than there was in Jomsom, Nepal.

The great lesson for me about these places has been one about happiness. Everyone likes to say they live their life to be happy, which is a nice enough thought. But I’ve come to believe that absent overt, immediate suffering or chemical imbalance everyone gets a fairly equal share of happiness. I found it in the smiles of tsunami widows in Thailand, the songs of subsistence farmers in Nepal, and now the gait of an over-worked tobacco seller in Jeri. We’re all dealt different lots, but if we all end up with just as many happy days as sad ones, then that’s something to be happy about too.

Brazil Moments

2005-11-28T12:43:00.000-05:00

November 27 – Fortuleza, Brazil
It might be early in the morning or late at night, you never know. But you can be sure at some point each day you will have a Brazil Moment. They’re unannounced but instantly recognizable.

After nine nights in sleepy Jericoacoara—where Brazil Moments are held in check by the mote of a six-hour journey—you almost forget what awaits you.

An hour before sunset one day I was walking along the beach wall in the Barro section of Salvador when a police van sped by. It screeched to a halt just in front of us and ten machine-gun toting cops rushed out. They stormed the adjacent bus and pulled out fifteen young men, who then laid down in a row on the sidewalk.

Just past 2am last night we were sitting at a café here in Fortaleza. A young, topless man sprinted up the street in our direction, then ducked into a parking garage across the street. Five seconds later a second man came running and behind him another twenty-five. “It’s a riot,” I observed while sipping from my glass of Bohemia beer. As the mob sped past us they threw punches at each other, then quickly disappeared down the street. Many of the café-dwellers rose from their seats to get a better look. Many didn’t bother. After five minutes most of the sprinters came strolling back, smiling and high-fiving for a job well done, whatever job that was.

Around 1am one morning I was mugged.

There was that time at sunset in Rio when the drug crazed beggar seemed to consider doing the same.

Brazil Moments are the clearest examples of the vibrant, often violent energy that pervades the country. It is a kind of cousin to India in that way—you know something strange and maybe dangerous is always hanging in the air.

Tonight Jason and I will go for a walk from Iracema to Beira Mar. There’s not likely to be a Brazil Moment on the walk because we already made the journey this morning. Along the beach road there were several cops huddled in a circle, joined by other onlookers. Jason and I walked around the group and the young guy sprawled motionless and bruised on the pavement a few feet away. “Do you think he’s dead?” Jason asked. We couldn’t be sure of that, but we knew we’d had our Moment.

More Photos

2005-11-24T17:34:00.000-05:00

Got an e-mail today asking for more photos. Too bad my camera is broken again. Anyway, I've stolen a couple from people i've shared boats or buggies with and here they are. Thanksgiving at the beach is a funny thing. Not so bad though since you don't really miss the stuff back home since it doesn't feel like its really happening.

A Nine Island boat trip with two Dutch girls in Maceio, Brazil.

Towards the end of our five-hour trip to and from the nearest ATM, the Brit on my right and the two Swedes on my left stopped for a photo op outside Jericoacoara, Brazil.

A Year and Change

2005-11-20T09:25:00.000-05:00

November 14 – Fortuleza, Brazil
Its worth asking the question now. Not just have I changed, but how. After ten months in varied environments some change is inevitable, but judging what is different is the hard part.

So this week I piled into a Land Rover with three American guys and got a sense of what might be different now than at the beginning of the year. We made the 500 mile drive from Natal to Fortaleza along the gorgeous shore, stopping in a small town each night.

Jon, 25, was our driver. He’s from Florida but lives in Brazil now. A few of us met him out on the beer-splattered streets one night in Natal. He was getting friendly with some local girls. “But I can’t do anything with them,” he told us. “I’m married.”

Jon moved down here with his wife, bought a Land Rover and now drives people up and down the coast. He said he’d take three of us to Fortaleza for 700 reais ($300), about half the going rate.

Along for the ride were Rob and Joker, a pair of early-middle-aged Californians. Rob fixes air conditioners and is here for a couple weeks. Joker grows flowers, was born in Holland, and has a month to spend in Brazil. They’re both members of a drinking club which boasts “Beer Olympics” that compel members to get drunk and topless.

From the outset, it was clear Rob and Joker were cut from different cloth than me, but we all wanted to ride along the beach and sharing the trip was the only way to make it affordable so we piled in together.

Rob and Joker have two discernable pursuits in life (or at least during their time in Brazil): women and beer. From dawn til dawn they chase these twin vices with singular focus. Readers of this blog might think I’m interested in women and beer, but after four days with this crew I felt sober and gay by comparison.

Sample sentences uttered during four days in Land Rover:

“So, where we going to get laid tonight?”

“Hey, pass me another beer.”

“Ask this guy where the best place to party is.”

“We should stop and get more beer.”

Any characteristic pushed to the extreme reveals its inherent absurdity and so I was faced with the ugliness of these pursuits. They were a kind of mirror for me; to someone else do I look like them? I don’t spend every waking moment hunting women, I don’t say “it’s 5:30 somewhere” as I crack open a beer each morning. But on some smaller scale am I much different?

“Its really good to be riding with some Americans,” Jon said. “I’ve been driving all foreigners lately.”

I felt so differently. At this point I don’t generally like traveling with Americans. Largely this is a universal feeling; travelers don’t want to hang out with people from home—Danes don’t want to travel with Danes, Canadians don’t want to travel with Canadians. It’s not a rule, just a vague preference that’s probably stronger for Americans because—generally—we’re bad travelers. We’re loud and over-opinionated and America-centric. (Brits and Israelis have equally bad reputations and maybe these are all unfair stereotypes but many agree that America, England, and Israel turn out the highest percentage of annoying travel companions).

A word more on Americans. Throughout the year I’ve heard variations of this sentiment: “You’re the nicest American we’ve met.” I take it as a backhanded compliment because it isn’t just a comment on me but on negative perceptions of Americans. Some American travelers seek to avoid the stereotype by claiming to be Canadian which I think is cowardly and stupid. I really believe being American is an advantage because people have such low expectations that by simply being an okay guy you seem like a superstar.

And there’s this: the “nicest American they’ve met” isn’t the Brook who left New York in January, he’s the Brook who is living out of a bag for the year. I am different. I’m quieter. I’m unbelievably patient. I speak slowly. My temperament is malleable to the temperament of those around me. So this is how I’ve changed.

And when I’m with Americans the slang comes out, and the references to American pop culture; I speak faster and more loudly. I revert to that spectacular American characteristic of inserting evidence of how much I know into every possible sentence. So maybe its not the Americans I don’t like, but how I become when I’m around them. Its the sad knowledge it gives me that Traveling Brook will die on the plane from Buenos Aires to New York.

If I wanted to feel better about Americans the Land Rover was the wrong place to turn. Jon was the first person I’ve met to confront me with the power of ADD. He’s unable to hold a thought from the beginning of a sentence to the end.

“Remember I was telling you about the kite surfers, well they go up the coast to, because, look at this picture, isn’t that amazing? I had to drive through this river I should probably get a snorkel, when I was in Orlando I got clocked going 148….”

Eventually a story would emerge—often a story that was already told 15 minutes prior—and the stories often focused on girls. And so certain realities couldn’t be hidden for long. How many girls have you kissed since you’ve been married?

“At this party here I kissed 14 in one night, it was this party where all the…”

But in the four years you’ve been married, how many do you think?

“Oh, no, I have no idea. But I’ve slept with at least 20. I don’t know, at least 20 that I remember.”

So on Friday night in Canoa Quebrada we all went to work and soon my three companions had found female companionship—its not that hard around here. “If a girl is from a small village and she’s maybe 16 years old and has never been anywhere then I would never get with her,” Jon explained. “Because then its like I’m stealing her innocence, like she isn’t innocent anymore and I think that’s wrong. But with these girls its different because I don’t do anything. They come up to me. And they’re really aggressive, its just really hard because they’re so aggressive. But I haven’t been with a girl for a really long time. I mean like two months…You know, other than my wife.”

For a while the group was well fed and everyone was happy. Rob talked of retiring in Brazil as he massaged a new friend in the back of the Land Rover. Massage is a nice way to say grope which is what Rob did for the entire day we spent with three Brazilian girls driving around the dunes. Jon had his new girlfriend with him, and Joker had his. It would be unfair to say I was content being the seventh wheel but I just didn’t have the stomach for that level of fawning aggression.

But then Rob lost his girl and all of a sudden he was “happy” about it because, after all, he was trying to behave himself because he has a serious girlfriend back in California.

“I hate that,” Jon said. “I hate when someone gets blown off by a girl and then says he’s glad because he didn’t want to do anything anyway.”

But Jon is a prince of his own hypocrisies and claimed to hope his girl would blow him off too so he didn’t have her calling him.

And now I’ll figure out how all this relates…These faithless Americans and my trip; how I’ve changed and how I’ll revert when this is over….

I suppose we were all somehow changed by being where we were. The Americans in Brazil were acting differently than they would back home; I was acting differently than I would with other people.

We change for those around us. We become who we surround ourselves with, like a bag of water with a goldfish in it. You put the bag into a fish tank and after a couple hours the temperature of the water is the same, and you can open the bag and the fish swims free.

So I flew in my little bag to Sydney and the water was like this: everyone’s in their 20’s (or acting like it). People dress badly and party late. Multinationals, American politics, and having a job are uncool. Having money is less cool than not having money. Everyone is looking for a friend.

Did I change? Or was it just the water around me? And is that why Americanism bothers me now, because its just a temperature of water I’m no longer accustomed to? If that is the case, if we don’t change so much as respond, then certainly I’ll respond accordingly when I get back. But I think I’ll remember what the other thing was like, too, and I’ll remember why I liked it and what I didn’t like about the Americans when they came to remind me of some of what is waiting back home.

Message Home

2005-11-20T08:53:00.000-05:00

This is a message to the folks in Portsmouth, RI...For the last three days all e-mails to the three of you have been returned by AOL, so i have no way to write you (except this). I am receiving your e-mails though so feel free to write.
Dad: The flights you mentioned are all finalized, right?
Do any of you have non-AOL e-mail accounts, maybe I can write you there.
-b

The Non-Episodic Post

2005-11-07T17:35:00.000-05:00

November 6
So I thought I’d say ‘hi.’ The blog has become quite episodic and almost stylized to the point of being more travel essays than travel updates.

So what’s up with me? I’m working my way up the Brazilian coast. From Rio I flew to Salvador, and after a week there took an 11-hour bus to Maceio. Tomorrow I’ll head further north to the beach town of Praiya de Pipa.

In the last week my IPOD and digital camera have both stopped working and its not such a big deal. Do I feel that way because I’m close to the end or because I’ve embraced the non-materialistic backpacker culture? Who’s to say. (But I am now one of those many people with a broken IPOD who get annoyed when they read fawning articles about the IPOD. Has anyone considered the possibility that all these broken IPODs could be a serious problem for the Apple/I-tunes/I-everything empire?)

Jason, my NYC friend who met me in Cambodia is meeting me in Fortuleza for Thanksgiving. I guess he’ll have to bring the turkey. My dad is meeting me in Argentina for the first ten days of December, then I’ll have a week in Buenos Aires to figure out what it all means before I fly home and lose my tan.

I’m starting to get the “What are you doing when you get home?” e-mail. I’m the kind of person who starts mourning the end of summer around Fourth of July so the end of the trip was bound to cause some distress and I guess it has. I first felt it back in Toulouse when I was staying with Anaelle, maybe because that was more of a homey existence, or maybe just because I could start to see the end approaching. It was four months away then, now its less than six weeks.

I honestly gave no real thought to 2006 when I left at the start of 2005. The trip was so audacious, so huge, so life-altering that the idea of a world after “the trip” didn’t seem relevant or possible. But now its approaching and of course I think (and dream) about it quite a bit.

Job one is to finish and sell the documentary; everything else is secondary. If I’m successful I’ll attempt to parlay that into another attractive project, maybe carving out a niche in travel programming but more likely moving on to a new subject. That’s a best-case scenario.

If I can’t sell the documentary to a TV network (or even if I can) I’ll sell it as a DVD; I think a market exists. I’ll also submit it to film festivals but I think it might be too light and commercial for most festivals, we’ll see. Publishing a travel book is impossible and I won’t attempt it unless the documentary succeeds and I can use that brand to sell the book.

I hope to have a solid rough cut by Valentines Day and a finished product by the end of March. So at least for three months I plan to live with my parents to save money and keep me focused. I’ll also be selling the stock footage I’ve shot in 20+ countries on-line.

When all this fails and I’m broke I guess I’ll get a job and hopefully that will be enjoyable.

Tonight Stefan and I are going to party here in Maceio. Stefan is a crazy Swede who never gets girls back home but has scored thirteen in two months in Brazil. It’s good to be blonde when you’re going out here. It’s good to look Brazilian when you’re avoiding muggers (not that its helped me that much anyway) but its good to look foreign when you go out.

On the porch here at the hostel there are two hammocks and a radio playing bad music. The beach is two blocks away. Its been sunny, hot, and breezy each day in the north. It’s a lovely, relaxing existence. I’m getting much work done and enjoying the familiar clockwork backpacker progression of new friends, fun activities and quick goodbyes. Yesterday, I took a boat trip with two Dutch girls and we cruised around the little costal islands near Maceio. I did what I try to do every day or two: I pinched myself to remember what a good gig I have.

That was day 300. There will be 342.

Pure Brazil

2005-11-04T08:48:00.000-05:00

November 1 – Salvador, Brazil
We thought we’d surf. There are many things John does better than me and one of them is surfing. So he paddled out on the little rented board into the rough Salvador, Brazil chop and tried in vain to catch a wave. The waves were there and they were strong (as Brazilian waves seemingly always are) but they were breaking poorly and it was no use.

I was swimming with him and when we got back to shore we found we’d been blown 500 feet down the beach by the strong cross current. We walked back to our stuff, passing the plastic tables with the drinking Brazilians on the hot cream sand. Then I grabbed the board and headed for the waves.

“Iye,” a woman called after me. I looked back and saw she was calling after her child and kept walking. “Iye,” she called again but I kept walking this time.

“Brook,” John shouted from the shore and I looked back and then walked towards him. Another thing John does better than me is speak Portuguese and now he was talking to the woman and translating.

“She says you’re crazy to go out there,” John said. No one was in the water past their knees and red markers warned of the tide. But I trudged on with the rented board and proceeded to not come close to catching a wave.

When I returned to shore John was still talking to the woman, Jahnee. “She asked me to go to dinner with her tomorrow,” John said when we were alone. “I don’t know what to do. It’s a little strange. She’s divorced. She has three children.”

“That’s fantastic,” I said laughing.

“How old do you think she is?”

“I don’t know. It starts with a three.”

“Yeah, it does.”

We returned the surfboard and then John went over to her blanket to get her number and firm up plans. I waited by the water and then he came back. “So, do you want to come too and go with her hot sister?”

We walked back to their blanket and John introduced me to Jahnee and Danubia. The sisters didn’t speak five words of English and I don’t speak five words of Portuguese and we were going on a double date the next night.

Loyal readers will say, “Hey, Brook, I thought you weren’t writing about girls in South America.” And I will say, “Well, that was the plan. But this was just too good.”

The next day John was getting cold feet. “I don’t know, something seems sketchy about all this. What do you think?”

I thought he was right. You do hear stories of friendly locals who spike your drink or abduct you or rob you or worse. But they were mothers—we had seen their kids—and they seemed genuinely friendly and genuinely divorced and what was the worst that could happen? Okay, the worst was pretty bad, but what was the worst that was likely to happen?

“I’m not bringing any credit cards, I can tell you that much,” I said.

So we got on the bus for our seven o’clock rendezvous. As we paid our bus fare I made a mental note of the 53 reais I had on me; just less than $25. “I have about the same,” John told me.

And as the bus rumbled away from our pousada, the wheels started turning in our heads. “If we go out for a Bahian dinner that’s going to be 50 reais for two people,” John said. “We’re not going to have any money left.”

We had been so worried about having little cash for the robbers that we brought too little for our night out. And of course, we were too smart to bring ATM cards with us either.

“I didn’t think this through,” John admitted. “Or I thought it through too much.”

I feared Danubia would do some thinking through too. Jahnee had met a nice, tall, blonde, American boy—John—who speaks good Portuguese; and then paired her younger sister with some idiot—me—who can hardly say “hello.” (By the way, its “oi.” I at least know that much.)

As feared, when we met Jahnee in the Pelourinho, Danubia was absent. She was finishing work, I eventually learned.

If you think its fun being the third wheel, try doing it while the other two wheels are speaking an incomprehensible foreign language.

“Are you getting any of this?” John would ask from time to time, hoping my miserable Spanish would be of some help.

We looked out over the city and warded off some beggars and walked through the area where I got mugged a few days prior. John and I tensed up a bit when we got there, and spent a good part of the night looking quite literally over our shoulders.

Then Jahnee brought us to a little bar. I was ready for a drink. There was a giant wooden barrel with 20 taps jutting out and the bartender poured a small plastic cup of one of the brews. Then he added a few clear drops from another spigot.

Jahnee handed us the drink. It smelled of spices and tasted like a strong mulled cider. The three of us shared the tiny cup and were still finishing it as we walked back out across the Pelourinho. The cup was still a quarter full and I wondered how we had drank so little and imagined Jahnee putting the cup to her lips but not swallowing any; I wondered what those clear drops the bartender had added at the end were.

“No more,” Jahnee said and poured the rest onto the ground. I wasn’t sure if that made me trust her more or less.

We took a bus to some other part of town and walked forever. “She used to work in the factory over here,” John translated.

“These train tracks are only used once a year for a parade,” he said later.

A sleeping homeless man stirred and walked towards us. We walked away. The streets were dim but not dark, sparse but not deserted. It was residential but still sketchy.

“This is like a lovers’ lane,” John told me when we walked out to a little peninsula just past a nighttime soccer game.

“You bored?” John asked, because we could speak English freely without being understood.

“No, this is hilarious. When will we ever have a night like this again?”

“You know I really like it, actually,” John said. “I know these are silly places to visit, but for the first time I feel like I’m seeing a real side of Brazil, where people live.”

We walked and walked and then finally, up a hill, having gotten off work and made it through traffic, was Danubia.

She looked good. She could be Ana Beatriz Barros´ ugly sister, which is quite a compliment. “Oi,” I said, using a quarter of my Portuguese vocabulary as way of introduction.

“No fala nada?,” Danubia asked John and Jahnee. No, they said, he doesn’t speak at all.

It was like swimming without legs, typing without hands, going out to dinner without any cash; I was hitting on someone without the use of language.

We tried speaking, of course. We tried the way you would try to fly a plane if the pilot was unconscious. You would try because there weren’t any other options and it was going to be a disaster anyway.

“Numero?” Danubia finally asked when I hadn’t understood three other versions of the question.

“Ah, mi numero? My age?!”

“Johhhnnn,” Danubia would call when we couldn’t figure it out ourselves.

“No John,” I would say, with patience. “Vente-seis.”

“Vinte e seis,” John corrected, translating my Spanish into Portuguese.

I was 26 and she was 25.

We sat at a table by the water and the three of them would talk for a while and then John would give me a re-cap. We ordered drinks and Danubia said she was surprised I drink.

“She said, you don’t look like a guy who would drink alcohol. I’m not sure what that means.” John reported.

I thought I knew. I was the wholly ineffectual, therefore imasculine guy who could barely say ‘hello.’ In that way, I was far to young to drink, even if I was vinte e seis.

But then we learned “cachacaero,” which means drunk, so I accused Danubia of being a “cachacaero” simply because it was one of the only words I knew.

“Noooo,” she insisted. “You are a drunk,” she countered in Portuguese.

I flicked her in mock-anger and she seemed to take offense to me touching her.

“You have a strange way of flirting,” John said, apparently unaware that I was employing the only means at my disposal.

Then we walked for a while and were at the bus stop. It was 11:30pm and felt much later. The girls said we had to be careful about which bus we took back to Barra because some of them aren’t safe at this hour. It wasn’t clear if we were waiting for them to get their bus or they were waiting for us to get ours. Eventually we got on the same one and then got off somewhere dark and scary. We were in Danubia’s neighborhood and she was trying to say something to me.

“It’s the eyes,” Jahnee said, betraying a bit more English than she’d let on. “She says your eyes are beautiful.”

“I think they’re asking if we want to stay at their place,” John said. “But really I have no idea what’s going on.”

There was a taxi nearby that would charge us 16 reais ($6) to take us home. The girls said that was too much, we should just go back in the morning.

So we walked down the long, dark hill, past gated front doors and shadowy allies. Then Danubia took a couple small rocks in her hand and looked up at a building. “Keep going, Brook,” Jahnee said, slipping some more English in.

Danubia tossed the rocks up at the gated window, and as we continued down the hill, she told the woman who appeared in the window to let her son spend the rest of the night there.

At Danubia’s gate the first key came out, unlocking the first heavy-duty padlock. We walked along a half completed (or half destroyed) brick wall to her front door where the second key opened the biggest padlock I’ve ever seen. Not even the Dutch Girls’ bikes are this well protected (or in need of such protection). Up a short flight of steps we reached a tiled patio with a view of a neighboring favela.

“There’s something strangely beautiful about the favelas,” John said. “The way they slope up the hill, the different colors of the houses, the geometric shape of them.” He was right and we were plenty close to get a good look.

Danubia warned us about the state of her apartment the way everyone who ever takes anyone home warns them about their apartment. In Manila and Delhi and Salvador, the homes of the third world middle-class have a striking similarity. They’re structurally modest and made of somewhat inferior materials. They feature the adult furnishings you’d expect (carpets, family photos, dining tables) but with the flimsiness and discord of a dollhouse. The door to Danubia’s bedroom was made of one narrow board, the width of a CD case.

“You must think we’re crazy, bringing people home who we don’t know,” the girls said.

“You must think we’re crazy, going home with people we don’t know,” I countered.

“Four crazy people.” Jahnee decided.

Danubia cleaned the dirty dishes in her sink but wouldn’t let me help. She offered us some food but we were full and tired. The sisters seemed to want to delay the bed thing. Finally Danubia grabbed my hand and led me to her room. Soon John followed. And then, as the sisters squeezed into a five-year old’s bed in the next room, John and I dozed off together. In the end, from the bar to the bedroom, the sisters’ intentions were pure.

The Back in NYC Party

2005-11-03T10:40:00.000-05:00

So last night I had the dream again. In the dream its December 17, I´ve just landed in New York and I realize I´ve forgotten to tell anyone that I´m coming back.

While I let you play Freud and decide what that means, I´m going to make sure the dream doesn´t come true and let you all know now that I´ll be back on 12/17 (or 17/12 if you´re from anywhere but the U.S.) and I´m having an "I´m Back" party that night.

So mark your calendars for the night of Saturday, December 17. Exact Manhattan location TBD.

My First Mugging

2005-10-29T22:40:00.000-04:00

October 30 – Salvador, Brazil
It was a pleasant mugging. After 293 days traveling, and 10 in Brazil, it was due to happen anyway, so it’s nice that it was pleasant.

John and I were walking up the hill from our hostel into the Pelourinho for a Friday night drink when a young boy started walking along side me. I glanced down at the 8 year old and then someone grabbed my wrists and shouted some Portuguese at me. “Okay, okay,” I said to the dark skinned teen of about my height who bound my wrists as two or three youngens riffled through my pockets. He was lean but muscular and wore a red tank top with white stripes.

John told me later that he was shouting “Emergency, emergency” in Portuguese while this was happening but no one heard him, not even me. It was all less eventful and worrisome than it sounds and it was only later in the evening as it all sunk in that a small catalogue of images took root and replayed themselves in my mind as they would in a movie:

The little boy on my right as we walked up the hill, then the same boy pulling my pocket out of my shorts, spilling 11 Reais, some change, and my keys onto the ground; the guy in the red shirt appearing from nowhere, the kids briskly walking away after finding my passport and 50 Reais stashed in a lower cargo pocket; the little kid straggling for a couple seconds to rip the watch off my wrist but failing. Then me walking after them, shouting “passaporte, passaporte,” and then the one kid pulling the money out of the pages of the passport and flinging it against a cobblestone wall.

I retrieved the passport and John said, “So, should we go back to the hostel now?” And then we walked back down the hill and I felt a little embarrassed to be looked at by the locals the way I’d feel embarrassed if I had tripped and fallen. Then I remembered my keys falling to the ground and went back to find them. The keys unlock the wire-mesh bag that the computer and camera live in. I have backup keys hidden somewhere but my main set is attached to a keychain I bought in Paris and would prefer to lose later.

Always looking for the silver lining, I thought we could make a scene for the documentary out of all this so John and I went back to the hostel and I got the camera out. I figured we’d go back to where the robbery took place and I’d explain what just happened. The woman at the hostel didn’t think this was a good idea.

“I know a guy who has 12 people down there tonight, just waiting to rob people,” she said. “If you go, they’ll stab you for your camera. You’re crazy. It’s better in the morning.”

So we went in the morning and quickly whipped out the camera and shot a little explanation. Then we got out of Dodge all together, and found a quiet street three miles south in Barra, a suburb of Salvador. I couldn’t help but think of the jeweler in Copenhagen who rummaged through a box of spare parts in mid-July and found the piece I needed to repair the strap on my watch. It was hard to know if the improvised repair would hold up and each time I accidentally pulled on the watch I worried it would break. But the crafty little eight-year old who earned his cut of the $25 heist couldn’t wrangle the watch free. So now I know the watchband is secure, and that’s another silver lining. So I thank the jeweler for his professional work, and the band of banditos for returning my passport, and the laws of probability for suggesting the remaining seven weeks will be uneventful.

A Rio Letter

2005-10-28T22:46:00.000-04:00

October 26
No one told Lonnie and Tania that the plan for South America was to stop writing about girls. So they got on the bus at the airport and followed me to Ipanema and set out to intrude on the story of Rio. I’ll do my best not to let them.

First Acai. Theres is a little dangly thing below the “c” in acai so you pronounce it like an “s.” I’ve never seen this native fruit but I taste it almost every day in the form of a thick fruit shake. It’s the color of a brightly lit red wine and manages to taste like a mix of blackberries and chocolate without really tasting much like either.

There was little physical need for refreshing drinks this first week in Brazil because it was so often cloudy. In the sunny stretches we went to the beach and otherwise Tania and I would play 500-rummy using her crazy Danish rules or Lonnie and I would trade massages in our poorly ventilated dorm room and all the while I would remind myself that the plan for South America was to stop writing about girls.

So on Saturday we decided to Samba in the favela. Samba schools spend their year building up to one event: Carnaval. That’s when the kids from the favela become the object of all the tourists’ attention as they dance down the street in their Technicolor outfits. On the third Saturday night in October the schools choose their Carnaval song. That was this Saturday.

Nicholas is Brazilian and sleeps in the bunk above me. He’s been in Rio for three months while the bank he works for back in Brasilia is on strike. Picturing long-haired, groovy, perpetually undressed Nicholas working in a bank is like imagining Bill Gates in a Speedo on the beach. (And in conjuring that image, I wonder whether Gates would keep his oval glasses on or spring for contacts or even lasik. But I digress.)

The nice thing about having a crazy Brazilian in your room is he speaks Portuguese. So the Danish girls, Nicholas and I decided to walk up towards the favela around 1am Saturday night to watch some Samba.

The next morning we told the guy at reception what we’d done.

“Who did you go with?”

“Well it was the four of us.”

“You didn’t go with someone from the favela?!”

“No, just Nicholas, he speaks Portuguese.”

“Well that was really stupid,” he said, walking away. “That was really, really stupid.”

Nicholas wasn’t sure just how to get to the favela and Lonnie had told me earlier that Tania was worried about the whole thing. I was too, quite honestly. As we walked up the long, steep hill that leads to the slum we passed only two other walkers—young, dark skinned men—and a handful of speeding cabs. The streets were bare.

“This is a good workout,” Tania said, but it was unclear if it was the incline or the destination that had raised our pulses.

We reached a fork in the road and Nicholas asked the man at the little outdoor bar there, ‘Which way to the samba?’ As they spoke a couple women looked over at the girls and shook their heads.

“I think those ladies are telling us not to go up there,” Tania said to Nicholas.

“No, I was asking if they were charging an entrance fee,” Nicholas said. “They were saying, ‘No,’ there’s not charge.”

“Oh. Good.”

At the top of the final hill the street exploded with life and music. People were out on their front steps, rushing across the street, talking excitedly and generally having a good lively Saturday night.

We walked up a flight of stairs to the open-air dance hall and the music came blaring at us. At first there was no stage, just a clot of men banging drums in the center of the room and well-toned women dancing near them. There were young men in drum-major uniforms dancing with them too. They were informally surrounded by a crowd of spectators.

It was too loud to talk but we worked our way through the crowd and then we could see the stage where a couple men shouted out the lyrics through the powerful, crappy sound system.

“This is their only entertainment,” Nicholas said. “They don’t have money to go out anywhere, so this is it for them in their community.”

What strikes me in the favelas is how well dressed everyone is. This could be a reflection of my diminished expectations for a wardrobe (most of my clothes have gaping holes in them) or my experience with the poor in Asia who seemed more obviously desperate. Whatever the case, I happened to wear my best outfit (jeans and a polo) and was not over-dressed. Only my fancy digital watch was out of place.

If you were to travel around the world and could pick only one country to physically blend in with the population, Brazil might be the best choice. Heredity made that choice for me—my ancestry is largely Brazilian-Portuguese—and though I can’t speak ten words of the language I’ve had a strange sense of fitting in here. But the camouflage faded away in the favela where skin tones turn several shades darker.

Lonnie wore a hat to cover her long, light-blonde hair. But she couldn’t cover her fair skin or Tania’s crystal eyes and we were obvious outsiders. There was one other foreign woman in the crowd, a middle-aged blonde from California.

We don’t know which song was chosen for Carnaval because after two of the five nominations had been performed it was nearing 3am and we were tired. We walked back down the hill towards affluence and made it to the hostel unharmed.

Let me tell you a few more things about Rio. When we got to the hostel the night guard was sleeping. He sits on the porch outside our building from 10pm til morning because Rio is a dangerous city. It’s also a city with strict noise regulations and so his other job is to keep the backpackers quiet after 10pm. Even talking in a whisper outside our building is forbidden.

It’s a strange contrast to Lapa, where the noise is considerable until the sun comes back up. That’s where we spent our Friday night. Me and the Danish girls—still angling to earn further mention with each warm smile and short skirt—took a taxi to Lapa just after midnight. The cab dropped us in the middle of a throbbing outdoor blockparty. A couple thousand revelers were drinking or smoking or talking in the streets and the neighboring park and outside the loud clubs. Alcohol consumption is the mother of entrepreneurialism and along the street people had set up tiny, flimsy outdoor bars. They peddled cans of beer and even caipirinhas, the powerful Brazilian sugar-cane cocktail. One caipirinha is less than a dollar, two caipirinhas are all you’ll need.

“I’m really glad you’re here with us,” Lonnie said. It wasn’t a sentiment of affection as much as protection and I felt a strange chivalrous impulse to shield the Danes from abduction or assault.

There was no such danger until five that morning. We were waiting for the bus at that point, which indicates we had enough caipirinhas to think it was a good idea to take the bus. But we weren’t too drunk to notice the guy with the tall ‘fro reaching into Tania’s pocket. We made a little noise and stepped a few feet away and then got on the bus towards Ipanema.

It all turned out okay in week one. Even when the drug-crazed guy approached us on the empty, drizzling beach it turned out okay. “I…need…money,” he said a few times.

We apologized that we didn’t speak Portuguese and asked him if he spoke Spanish. “Not Espanol, English!” he insisted, wild-eyed. “I…NEED…MONEY.”

We convinced ourselves we weren’t being mugged, exactly. He seemed convinced too because he let us get up and walk away and find another wet spot to enjoy the sun going down. It seemed Rio got the memo. If there could be no mention of girls in South America, there would have to be something else. It’s not the bikinis that move the pulse in Rio, but a more dangerous kind of tease. And it’s a great parlor trick to make someone happy by doing nothing to them at all.

Danger City

2005-10-21T11:27:00.000-04:00

October 21 – Rio de Janeiro
They could save electricity and just turn them off. The streetlights in Rio don’t serve much purpose at night because everyone just drives through them anyway. Its not safe to stop.

It’s not safe to go downtown after 7pm on weekdays. You shouldn’t take your wallet out on the bus, you should have small change ready when you get on. Don’t walk around with a camera in plain view. Never carry any more money than you need for a specific outing but always have enough cash on hand to appease a mugger.

“Accept the fact that you might be mugged, pickpocketed or have your bag snatched while you’re in the country,” the Lonely Planet guidebook advises.

Then this tip: “Don’t wander into the favelas.”

Favela means slum and in a city where counting the poor is like numbering the grains of sand on Ipanema beach, there are plenty of fevelas.

City of God, the excellent movie set in a Rio slum brought attention to the situation a couple years back, and now favela tours are on the Rio checklist right next to Copacabana and the Christo Redentor statue.

Some have earned the unfortunate name “safari” and are apparently conducted in long, rugged jeeps that roll through the favelas at the direction of a guide wearing a safari hat.

I was sipping a papaya juice at the neighborhood Suco stand with my two new Danish friends when a man drinking a thick black shake started talking to us. He was mid-40’s with a graying beard and an American accent.

“I came here for a week,” John told us. “And now I’ve been here 20 years.”

John works at an NGO in a nearby favela—they’re everywhere in Rio and always one wrong turn and a five-minute walk away. “I’m bringing my friend up to the favela this afternoon if you’d like to come along,” he said.

We said sure.

Brazil has a huge poverty problem and the slums are the clearest sign of it. The tiny, squatted houses are built with flimsy-looking red bricks. The communities cling to the side of the mountain, running down its slope until a piece of infrastructure halts them like a dam: the back of a giant apartment building, a highway.

We met John at his house at 3pm. There were a dozen other backpackers there too and it was clear then that this was more organized than just tagging along with John’s friend. But it seemed safe and interesting and we followed John towards the cluster of little red brick boxes.

We reached a very long staircase and though it took five minutes, you could tell with each step you were crossing over to the other side of the tracks.

“You can’t take pictures of the slums,” John said. “You just look up at a cluster of houses and you don’t know but that could be a drug look-out and they won’t let you take a picture. The other day a guy took a picture—and he had been told not to take pictures—and a few minutes later someone came down and said ‘You have to give me your camera or your memory card.’ So he gave him the memory card. He wasn’t being robbed, its just that they can’t allow that.”

John’s free, non-tour tour had a catch of course, but it was an acceptable catch. He wasn’t really showing us the favela but the school at the edge of the slum where he volunteers. He’d show us the kids that were being helped, tell us how desperate their situation is, and then hint that it would be nice if we helped out.

The program plucks children out of the local slum who are considered especially high risk—mainly those with one parent—and guides them from the nursery all the way to university. Ideally.

The kids were friendly and fairly engaging considering they were in school. They wore uniforms with the logo of the school on it and gave little indication of being dealt one of the worst hands the 21st century has to deal.

One fourteen year old girl with the eyes and countenance of someone ten years shy of quietly concurring the world, gave dance lessons to one of the Danish girls. Then the Brazilian girls invited us to a samba party this weekend.

“Its much more fun than this,” the girl with the good English said. “Meet us at the steps at 12 on Saturday.”

“Twelve at night?”

“Yes. Midnight.”

Midnight at the steps at the base of the favela seemed like something so obviously dumb that they wouldn’t bother listing it in the Lonely Planet next to “don’t bring your wallet to the beach.” But after 30 crime-free hours in Danger City we were starting to feel a little better about it all and the Danish girl took the Brazilian girl’s number and said we’d like to samba.

Italy in Pictures

2005-10-21T10:56:00.000-04:00

Akshay and I in Florence.

Yep, it does appear to be leaning.

If it had stopped raining for more than an hour our pictures of Venice would have been better. Wonderful city though.

Cinque Terra is a group of five small villages on the northwest coast. They're pretty:

While casually posing here I set off an alarm and had to explain in Italian to the emergency operator that it was a mistake.

Akshay on the bridge in Florence.

When Akshay left, Canadian Kate stepped in and we headed south to the island of Ischia

First time anyone bothered to draw me and I think its pretty cool.

Roma in Pictures too

2005-10-21T09:56:00.000-04:00

Rome has so much to see it gets its own picture page. It must be so flattered...

You've probably seen this one before.

And this one.

Hey look, the Pantheon

Yeah, I think that's famous too.

This has something to do with the Da Vinci Code but we couldn't afford a proper tour so I don't know anything else about the Vatican.

The Vatican Museum is impressive:

Can you condem someone and then sell their memorabilia a few centuries later? Yes, apparently you can.

The Fifth Bite of Dessert

2005-10-21T09:33:00.000-04:00

October 17 & 18
Kate’s here on my left on the train from Sorrento to Naples. In Napoli we’ll find passage to Roma and tomorrow I’ll fly to Brazil. What meaningless names these places can become!

They mean more to Kate—it all means more to Kate—because she’s been backpacking for a month instead of nine. Back in Madrid when we met I insisted she’d get worn down by it all too and she thought I was wrong and even if she believes me now—the way you might believe me just because you think I know better than you—she won’t really understand it until February when all her clothes are getting tattered and her pulse is unmoved by each new country. Maybe then she’ll find someone to mend her shorts the way I found someone—her—to mend mine.

The hair and the eyes and the accent are different but Kate is Sabrina. Sabrina was the German girl in Australia whose green eyes owned the first month of my trip. I was the American in Australia in the first month of her trip who helped her forget her boyfriend.

It was new and scary then, it was lonely and dazzling. It was like the first bite of a great dessert, and now its like the fifth bite. Sabrina and I thought it all meant more than it did because we were too green to know better. We were tricked by how we felt because every time we’d felt that way before it meant something important. And that’s how Kate must feel now. She’s feels that and she feels angry; she must be angry that I don’t feel it quite the same way.

In February when her clothes are tattered and she meets another guy and falls for him it will still feel really nice. She’ll still wonder if it means something and imagine being with him for more than a week. But she’ll know not to trust her feelings too much because she’ll know this isn’t like all the times she fell before…

Or maybe she already knows it because when it happened—when I got on the train in Rome—she took it pretty good. The eyes brimmed but didn’t spill, and she seemed reluctant to let go of me the way she might be reluctant to have the last bite of gelati. She was in Italy and there would always be more gelati.

The other thing you learn in Italy though is that some gelati is better than others. You can’t tell how good your first cup in Sorrento is because you’ve never tasted any others. But then you get some across from the Coliseum and it makes you appreciate the first cup more. And then you get a cone near the Pantheon and you have a new favorite. Its always possible that the next one will be better or that you’ll always love the first one best because it was new and exciting and you had never tasted anything like it before.

June 9 to October 18

2005-10-21T09:30:00.000-04:00

October 18
This is Europe. It’s a miserable connection from Bangkok to Athens. It’s a breeze through Eastern Europe with mom. It’s two weeks in Greece with the family where it seems I never left or even got out of junior high.

My summer in Europe is a flight to Stockholm for the best weather Sweden has seen in years. It’s a giant basement hostel with 40 beds, three Dutch girls, a Canadian and an Aussie. It’s a drive down to Copenhagen with the Dutch girls.

In Copenhagen its stolen money and a Danish girl with an apartment with a double bed. There’s beer in Belgium and a 73-year old backpacker whose trip puts mine to shame.

Then there’s a home in Rotterdam with the Dutch girls and a New York reunion in London. There’s vibrant green and chocolatey Guinness in Ireland. For about three hours there’s a French girl too.

Then the French girl is in France, but first there are Swedes and Brits falling in love with Paris. The time with the French girl may last a weekend or a year, its impossible to say.

This is Europe and there is Spain. Spain almost feels like Australia and I think as long as I travel there will never be a better compliment.

Oktoberfest sneaks up like the last chapter of a good book. You don’t want Europe to end but since you can’t make it last longer you can only enjoy what you have left.

Italy means rain. It also means good food, cheap wine, famous art and beautiful sights. In Rome, Akshay and the rain leave. Canadian Kate comes and we eat mozzarella.

Europe is nights sitting on the pier with beers from 7-11 because the cafes by the water charge $8. Europe is playing basketball on the court in the gym connected to the hostel. Its all the things you imagine it to be but somehow it all feels different than you thought. Europe is driving through the south of France and riding trains through the north of Spain.

This is Europe so it always ends up on a train. It’s accelerating out of Roma Central as the sun sits on the rooftops and a Canadian gets teary and I go to Brazil.

On Surfing

2005-10-11T16:31:00.000-04:00

The official word on Italy must wait, but I offer instead this previously un-published dispatch from Australia.

Noosa, Australia February 15
If you spend any real amount of time in Australia without surfing a wave and drinking a beer it’s debatable if you’ve actually visited Australia at all. Having sampled many Toohey’s, Melbourne Bitters, and Carlton Draughts (as well as the occasional Victoria Bitter, XXXX, and Boag’s) it was time to learn to surf.

When you’re on Australia’s eastern coast and you want to surf you don’t have to wait long. The urge took hold in Noosa, a trendy foodie Mecca just north of Brisbane. There are 34,000 residents and three surf schools.

Sabrina and I paid $35 for a two-hour class and just after 9am the “Noosa Surf School ” herded twenty-five of us to the west side of the main beach and equipped us with red, long-sleeved tops and big buoyant foam boards. We had been instructed to bring swimmers (that’s a bathing suit), a towel, and a bottle of water but as we headed down to the shore from the parking lot we were told to just bring the swimmers; all other possessions and any sense of personal competence would be locked in the vans.

Freddy drew a circle in the sand and instructed the “first day, group lesson surfers” to huddle around it, positioning the tips of our boards on the edge of the circle.

In a paragraph or so I could outline the four or five tips that allow you, with practice, to surf a wave. But if you saw the way Freddy strolled out of the water board-under-arm after two hours work with his wet blonde hair waving in the wind you would imagine for a moment the life of a surf instructor and you would like that idea too much to endanger the livelihood of all the Freddys out there by revealing their simple secrets.

Let me not suggest, however, that surfing is easy. Step one for us was riding the waves boogie-board style on our bellies. When the waves grabbed us we were told to push ourselves up with our arms so our chests arched up from the boards. We were taking baby steps.

I grew up a block from the ocean and have been body surfing and boogie-boarding forever. I’m sure in some ways this helped but in one big way it hurt. With a boogie board, or when body surfing, you can choose your wave up until the point it reaches you. On a surfboard you need to commit to the wave well ahead of time, giving yourself a chance to balance on the board, make sure its pointed towards shore, and gain some momentum by paddling six or so times. It’s like trying to catch a fly ball but not being able to move once the ball is on the way down. I watched many perfect waves crash by because they didn’t look so good from a distance.

Any learning curve has a few mileposts that give you a sense of accomplishment but with surfing they’re so visceral, such a rush, that they feel like more than they are. The first, simple rush is when you’re still on your stomach and a wave grabs you and sends you to shore. You get a sense right away that this is a different ride than a boogie-board gives; if that feels like riding a moped, this is a Harley.

The next step is the much-fetishized “standing.” All the surf schools guarantee you’ll stand during your first lesson and you will. Once you’ve mastered lifting your chest off the board while it drives towards the shore it’s pretty natural to slide your feet up onto the board and stand. You don’t remember what it felt like to take your first steps but it probably felt something like this.

I was coasting to the shore on my belly a little while before Freddy showed us how to stand up but tried getting up anyway. Next thing I knew I was surfing. I feel comfortable using the word “surf” because the surf photographer left early and so there’s no visual evidence of the height of this “wave.” You will notice that in most first-day surf photos the wave looks like something formed by throwing a big rock into a still pond.

The next big thrill comes from catching an “unbroken” wave. Yes, lets dispense with the illusions, we were generally riding waves that had already broken 50 feet earlier. My bodysurfing instincts brought me out to the unbroken waves but those same instincts put in the wrong position for surfing them and they regularly broke right on top of me.

The learning curve then progresses to riding those unbroken waves in the fashion seen in surf videos, but I saved those thrills for some future session.

Since I can go no further with tales of glory lets discuss fashion. Do you know why we were wearing those long sleeved red shirts? We found out when we got back to shore. The parts of our arms that weren’t quite covered were scraped to bits as if we’d fallen off a bike. The shirt keeps the board from cutting you up. It doesn’t stop the board from instigating an adversarial relationship between you and the ocean though. The water grabs ahold of the board much tighter than you can and pulls you wherever it chooses. By Sabrina’s estimate she swallowed 10 liters of water due to this problem.

By now your arms are sore from the paddling, your sinuses are infiltrated with salt and your uncovered skin has developed a red splotchy texture that matches your shirt. You’ve been in the water for 90 minutes when they call you out. You want to catch one more wave but its okay when you don’t.

There’s something about the skintight surf shirt drying in the baking sun as you lug your board up to the shore. “All surf instructors are like our surf instructor,” Sabrina says at lunch in her halting English, and you ask, unnecessarily, what she means. “Long blonde hair, tan skin, blue eyes, smiling.”

There’s a silence as you eat your meat pie and she picks at her fish and chips. “‘Handsome’ means the same as ‘pretty,’” she confirms. “But just for a man, right?”

And later, waiting at the bus stop for a Greyhound to split you up and end your three weeks of living as a couple, Sabrina asks if you remember the surf instructor’s name.

Yes, no matter how simple it all is, you can’t imagine ruining it for Freddy.

Oktoberfest

2005-10-07T14:00:00.000-04:00

They call it Oktoberfest but it fills the second half of September. It’s probably a trick to get people to show up late but its doesn’t work. They come just after breakfast and start downing liters of local beer. The “tents” house as many drinkers as a large theater or small arena.

If Oktoberfest was held in England or America or just about anywhere, it would be a total mess. But hammered Germans keep relative order and the ‘Fest is more than unchecked drunkenness (though it certainly is unchecked drunkenness). It’s also a carnival of rides and games and food. But mainly its about the beer. I’m too hungover to write anymore so the pictures will have to do…

Me and Akshay, who came all the way from New York to get drunk.

Germans are friendly

Which do you see first?: A) the amazing blond, B) The fella in shorts, or C) the guy sleeping on the ground.

Then it rained...

We still have our mugs.

ESPANA

2005-09-30T05:52:00.000-04:00

September 28 – Madrid Airport
Well friends, I guess we have some catching up to do. There were two weeks in Spain, marked by higher highs and lower lows than I’ve felt in some time. But now I sit in the Madrid airport on my way to Munich for Oktoberfest and have a happy heart pinned to my left leg.

My real heart was less than happy in Barcelona, where Anaelle and I parted after dashing across the France-Spain border for the weekend. She went back north and I stayed south and it wasn’t any fun. Those kind of goodbyes—when you’ve spent several good weeks with someone and then you’re suddenly, terribly alone—don’t get any easier no matter how many you have.

Barcelona was too sad a place to stay so I took an expensive train to Madrid and re-joined the hostel life. It was nice to get drinks with a couple British girls and an American guy, even if they weren’t exactly my kind of people. By the fourth bar of the night everything around Grand Via was shut and we were lured into a shady bar under a neon sign. The girls weren’t opposed to getting a beer at a strip club but when we went in we found no stripping. The only thing dodgier than a strip club is a strip club without stripping; it means they’re selling something else. What they sold us were $12 beers which made us feel quite foolish.

LOS AMIGOS
On my second day in Madrid I switched hostels and ended up at Los Amigos, which may be my favorite hostel in the world, perhaps tied with Original Backpackers in Sydney. Original had the advantage of being the first hostel I had ever stayed at and producing good friends and a pseudo-girlfriend.

Los Amigos provided the same, with a big cast of friendly travelers who congregated in the cushy living room or spacious dinning room and shared bottles of sangria. There’s something about capital cities—Sydney, Paris, London, Madrid—that create a good backpacking mix of experienced long-termers and kinetic short-trippers; people energized with the excitement of just starting or nearly finishing their travels.

Kate is blonde and Canadian and she was sitting in the dining room. “How long are you traveling for?” someone asked her.

“Um, eight and a half months,” she said.

She said it the way I must say it when I say “a year.” It was laced with the embarrassment and false modesty of knowing you’re trip is the big kid on the block and you’re a little ashamed and a little proud and a little cocky. Kate was all those things. She’s spending all three trimesters in Europe and I think that’s a mistake.

“You’re spending eight and a half months in Europe?” I asked, peaking up from my computer. “You should go somewhere else. That’s too long in Europe. In my opinion.”

“That’s the wrong thing so say,” she said. And she meant it and from then on she didn’t like me and she was blonde and Canadian and from Vancouver. She turned to the girl she was traveling with and whispered her thoughts about me. “I’m always open to different kinds of people and never get upset but I really hate that guy over there, he’s a real asshole.”

HAPPY HEART/BROKEN HEART
There were two sisters from Canada and they came out with us one night. They had little fabric hearts pinned onto their clothes and they told me how they made 200 of the things to give out in Europe. They offered me a “Happy Heart/Broken Heart,” and I enthusiastically accepted. One side is all red with white trim and the other is made of two shattered pieces of the same red fabric. I wore mine happily because Madrid was a happy place.

Then some sangria and I decided greater happiness would be found in San Sebastian where Anaelle said she would meet me for the weekend. I wanted to go to Valencia, on the east coast, but San Sebastian was close to France and close to some other places so I went there and found Anaelle and much great happiness. On Sunday there was another hard goodbye that wasn’t quite as hard as the last one. I flipped my heart to the broken side, but I knew life would go on.

Still, I wasn’t strong enough to go to Bilbao or Pamplona, where I knew I would know no one. Instead I took the train back to Madrid where I thought some of the old crew might still be partying. They were and they came into the hostel around 1am that night as I sat in the hall typing. Kate the blonde from Canada, and Rachelle the brunette from Australia were among the inebriated. The day before I had e-mailed Kate and asked if she would still be around and suggested we should get a drink.

“Who the fuck does he think he is?” Kate wondered when she got the e-mail.

WHY MADRID
I was in Madrid instead of Portugal because the Brazilians had my passport. They were using it to quickly make a visa so I can go to Brazil next month. I had begged in broken Spanish for them to finish it in time for me to catch my flight to Germany. But in the mean time I couldn’t cross borders and see Portugal and instead just stayed in Madrid.

There was an ever-evolving group of happy Amigos at the hostel. Kalin, a Montanan culinary student was in my room. He and I went for kebabs with Kate and Rachelle on Monday afternoon. After the lunch we got up and left and Kalin realized his bag had been stolen as we ate. His camera and passport were gone.

Thinking quickly, Kate went to a neighboring deli, procured a can of San Miguel beer, and helped Kalin back onto the road of sanity and insobriety.

“Why don’t we all just get drunk this afternoon,” one of the girls suggested. It was the perfect cure.

Displaying the best possible characteristics of the backpacker crowd, six of us escorted Kalin to the U.S. Embassy to apply for a new passport. We made sure he didn’t get too upset or stay too sober. We bought 4.5 liters of sangria (for $5) and went to a park.

On the walk back to the hostel to regroup for the evening we passed Plaza de Neptuno, the giant fountain in the middle of the city where a dozen lanes of traffic converge. “Let’s go swimming in the fountain,” Rachelle suggested.

“Yeah,” I agreed.

But then we decided to do it later that night.

FOUNTAIN SWIMMING
Later that night we had bought 4.5 more liters of sangria and a bottle of wine. We had drank most of them by the end of dinner. Then we were all in Kate’s room and she was sitting up on her top bunk and then I was sitting up there too. I was drunk and tired so I lied on her leg.

“Come on, we’re going swimming,” Rachelle insisted. Moving 15 drunk backpackers towards the fountain proved impossible but eventually there were six of us walking east through Puerto del Sol and towards Plaza de Neptuno.

After 20 minutes we were there and the fountain was turned off and it didn’t matter. Kate and Rochelle stripped down to their bras and me to my boxers. We stepped into the fountain, turned around and saw three cop cars. If they patrolled the kebab shop as vigilantly as the fountain, Kalin would still have his passport and we would have had a nice swim. But instead we had to get out of the water and empty our bottle of wine.

Everyone went dancing at a club until 5am except Kate and I who went back to the hostel. In the morning she didn’t think I was “a giant asshole” anymore.

The next day someone else got their wallet stolen but we were too hungover to drink with them. We went for a walk and bought some groceries and made lunch. By that point, “we” meant Kate and me. We went to this little place where they serve churros with mugs of melted chocolate. We were in Spain so we took a siesta.

THEN IT WAS TODAY
Then it was today and I was going to Munich. “I’m new to this,” Kate said and she meant that she hadn’t shared a single bed with a single person since she started traveling six weeks ago. “I probably shouldn’t say it, but I think I’m going to miss you.”

And I guess she might. When you’ve spent a couple weeks with someone and then you’re totally alone, that’s a feeling Kate and me and everyone else will always hate whenever we feel it. But it was only a couple days of bedsharing for Kate and I and I’m going to Germany to meet a friend from home so it wasn’t so hard to walk out of Los Amigos towards the Opera metro station. Spain had given many good memories and it hadn’t even taken a passport or wallet in return. Kate, the blonde from Vancouver who is spending too long in Europe didn’t hate me anymore. I left for Munich with a happy heart and an expectant liver.

ESPANA Illustrated

2005-09-30T05:50:00.000-04:00

The Los Amigos crew

Happy Heart/Broken Heart

Canadian Kate

Fountain Swimming

Hablo Espanol

2005-09-30T05:47:00.000-04:00

The best Spanish instructors Portsmouth Middle School, Portsmouth High School, and New York University could provide did little to teach me Spanish. After three and a half years in the Rhode Island public schools I placed in the lowest possible Spanish class at NYU.

After two semesters at NYU there was another placement test. I failed it and had to take an additional semester to advance in their program. Then I struggled through another three terms, spending nearly $20,000 on the language, though never learning with certainty how to say the words “Twenty-thousand dollars.”

I had a sense though as Spain approached, that a funny thing had happened to my Spanish. None of the first 18 countries I visited this year were Spanish speaking, but by picking up a few words of Thai, Nepalese, Dutch, and French, I’d learned something about languages: You don’t need to know much to get by.

In Barcelona, Spanish felt like a native tongue. Instead of only knowing “hello” and “thank you” I could say real words and even conjugate the odd verb. Anaelle—who had been my French guide in France—sat back and let me be her Spanish guide in Spain. And by God, I could do it. With pretty much everyone I traveled with in Spain, I served as the Spanish speaker.

In school, as the middling grades piled up, I became aware of how little I knew. I was paralyzed into silence by a fear that I’d screw up the preterite or destroy the grammar of a simple sentence.

I’m not sure what the teachers could have done differently; I didn’t know Spanish and the other students did and they had to give me a crappy grade. But it would have been nice to know back then that I knew enough. If you can put the right verb next to the right noun they’ll figure it out.

Immersion is the only way to really learn a language, people like to say. For me, the word immersion always conjured up images of drowning. But maybe it’s more like scuba diving—you aren’t going to drown but you’ll learn to swim. So I’ve swam around Spain a little bit, and it’s been nice.

Fitting a Year into an Hour

2005-09-30T05:46:00.000-04:00

September 23
For reasons I don’t fully understand, I haven’t written on the blog about the documentary, which is the thing that consumes more of my time than anything else. I’ve started to write about it a couple times but then stopped. I think if the documentary is on my mind then I want to work on it, not write about it.

But now I’m on a long train from Madrid to San Sebastian and with a little less than three months left in the trip it seems I should say something about the movie. I’m sure some of this will be boring for TV people or be incomprehensible for non-TV people but such is life.

I’ve shot 67 hours of footage so far. That’s the question people always ask. The other question they always ask is “So, what is the focus.” I like it better when they ask how many hours I’ve shot.

The focus is, umm, well it’s about backpacking culture and the phenomenon of long-term around the world travel. And it’s about the people I meet and the places I go. And cultural encounters. That’s the best I can say and maybe that’s not good enough.

I don’t consider shooting video to be work. Shooting b-roll (which is support video, like a shot of a building, or of someone getting on a train etc) is just like taking pictures and I enjoy trying to get the most out of the camera that I can. I’ve become a much better shooter in the last eight months.

Maybe my favorite thing in the world is interviewing people. I know that because I get a happy and contented feeling after doing an interview that I don’t get from anything else. I think I’ve become a much better interviewer in the last eight months too.

The problem with interviews—and b-roll to a lesser extent—is all the work you have to do once the tape is full. For every hour I shoot there are three hours of clerical work to do. I have to transcribe every word of the interviews and catalogue each shot of video. It’s called “logging” and it’s what you do when you first get a job in TV. I think I’m a very good logger and it helps me a lot as a producer. The first draft of the script is done as I log—I make connections between soundbites and shots that work together and come up with most of my visual ideas during this stage.

Depending on what is on the tape a log runs up to 10 pages as a word document. It’s imperative to do detailed logging because there’s so much footage from such a wide range of times and places that I need to be very organized. I have 90 topical categories for soundbites and I assign a number to each bite, so an entry looks like this:

18:32:55 [52] Traffic it’s own entity. It’s like there’s trucks, buses, cars, a bazillion motor bikes, bicycles, an old lady, and someone in a rickshaw all going down the street together.

or

4:20:44 [26] I don’t know, it’s not difficult to meet people but the hardest part of traveling is saying goodbye to people I think. Because you can make really good friends with people and then after three days you may never never see them again and that’s weird

The first numbers (18:32:55) indicate where the clip is. [52] is the category for ‘Asian traffic’ and [26] is the category for ‘Saying goodbye’ so when I want to find soundbites about saying goodbye I can search through the 93 pages of interview transcripts for [26] and pull up all the things people have said about the topic.

Once the video is organized I load it all onto one of my two external hard drives so I can work with it. That takes one to two hours per tape. This is all before any script has been written or video edited. Sexy, huh?

I have a mental outline for the movie which is constantly evolving as the trip progresses. I’m almost always thinking about the film and almost every day a little idea will pop up and refine things a little. This afternoon as I waited for the Madrid Metro is occurred to me that each continent should have it’s own theme. This seems to be a partial solution to a problem I have: there aren’t story lines that carry through the whole trip because I’m the only person along for the whole ride. I’m afraid it will just be a mush of travel stuff without a linear story to follow. I think giving each quarter of the film (there are four continents) an overarching theme will help with that. We’ll see.

I’m aiming to make a one-hour show (and maybe a 90 minute version for DVDs or film festivals). So far I’ve edited 40 minutes, about 15 of which will end up in the final version. The sections I’ve completed are the “Before I leave” section (a fairly tight 7 minutes) and almost all of “Asia” (a loose 30 minutes). I’ve also cut a version of “Australia” which sucks and I’m scrapping.

I think I’ve been hesitant to write about the project because my feelings about it are so bi-polar. Sometimes I think it’s going to be great and sometimes I think it’s going to suck. I’m a little closer to thinking it’s going to suck right now but not too far on that side. It all depends on the reaction of the last person who looked at it or the success of editing or writing the last part I worked on.

I’ve invested a tremendous amount of time and energy into it all and it will be really demoralizing if it fails. Before I get to find out if it’s any good I have to finish it, which will take a ton more work. It’s hard to spend too much time on it when I think it’s all a big waste so maybe that’s why I’m writing this instead of organizing some footage. But as I sit here the desire to break down some interviews into numbered categories is taking hold, so I think I’ll go do that now.

A girl I was sharing a room with a couple weeks ago asked me about the movie. “Oh, do you really need to write down what happens on all those tapes?” Yeah, you sort of do. And then you have assemble them into something coherent and interesting. And if your story sucks then all the pretty b-roll and transcribed interviews don’t count for much.

A New Trip at the Old Course

2005-09-01T13:16:00.000-04:00

August 22 – bus from St. Andrews to Glascow
If you had to place a ball marker at the site of the renaissance of my year, it would be awfully close to the 17th green of the Old Course in St. Andrews, Scotland.

Travel is a sport of expectations and when your taste for “attractions” has been withered by seven months of temples, churches, galleries and vistas, you stop even bothering to formulate expectations.

So it was sunset in St. Andrews and Jennifer was walking me around town. We passed the Art History building at the University of St. Andrews, where she studied with Prince William until he graduated a few months ago. Behind the building the land fell off to the sea and the beach in the distance was framed by evening mist. You knew it looked familiar even before Jennifer said it was where they shot the beach scene in Chariots of Fire.

Beyond the beach were the little perfect hills of the Old Course, abutting the shore. We walked on down the hill and found a row of buildings lined up perfectly to the south. The north edge of town was bound by the North Sea, and to the east the Royal and Ancient Golf Club helped form a square. Slipped into this box—instead of a statue, or park, or town square—was the 18th green.

You’ve seen the Old Course on TV, maybe just last month when it hosted the British Open. The view from the parking lot of the Royal and Ancient shows you the giant 18th green, with the fairway behind it and the rest of the course stretching out in the distance. The first tee is to the right with the ocean crashing behind it. When you keep walking through town along the course, the 18th fairway is just a makeable putt to your right. There are people crossing the fairway on the path from town to the ocean.

After three-hundred fifty yards you reach the 18th tee and then the 17th green. Our walking path cuts so close to the green, and the pin is cut so close to the path, that the hole is about 15 feet away.

The sun is sitting low now and the long straw grass is casting longer shadows around the Atkins-skinny fairways. For the first time in months you’re excited to be seeing something. Big Ben is just a clock, and St. Andrews is just a golf course, but when you stumble onto something by accident you have an honest response to it. It isn’t colored by the expectations of guidebook blurbs or the recommendations of other travelers. It’s yours. So you write about it yourself which ruins it for everyone who reads what you wrote, and makes them wonder why you spoke so highly of the place.

For you, St. Andrews won’t rank with the Parthenon and the Taj Mahal. But it did for me.

Edinburgh, Scotland in pictures

2005-09-01T13:10:00.000-04:00

Edinburgh in August is one of the great places in the world to be. A glut of festivals clog the city with every lovely shade of life...

Mona Lisa Smirk

2005-09-01T13:08:00.000-04:00

Paris, France
“The first thing we have to do is find out where the Mona Lisa is.”

That’s the North American voice behind me in line at the Louvre. The world’s most famous museum can seem a lot like an airport where everyone is going to the same gate.

Visiting the Louvre and only looking at the Mona Lisa is like going to Europe and only touring Paris, but then again it’s exactly those kind of people who mob the Seine all summer long. Some will also visit the Venus de Milos and the Winged Victory—the same way they’ll also visit London and Rome—but for the most part they’ll swallow an ice cube and make a claim on most of the ‘berg.

When I first visited Paris 30 months ago, the Mona Lisa was tucked away in Room 13 of the Italian Renaissance section. It was a relatively non-descript location, not dissimilar to where Starry Night used to hide in the old MoMA in New York. But she was far from hidden, with signs throughout the Louve pointing towards her location and a wooden retaining bar arching around her to keep the people at bay.

Priceless works of art are fickle mistresses though, and Room 13 was jilted this spring in favor of a posher, larger pad down the hall in Room 5. Even for small, aged, 30x21 women size apparently matters, and even when you’re already on the banks of the Seine, the upwardly mobile are always looking to mobilize to a better location.

The north wall of Room 13 is on the rebound and has replaced its stunning, waifish ex-girlfriend with two large mistresses, one by an anonymous artist and the other by one who might as well be. La Mort de Seneque—which depicts a philosopher’s suicide—is by Luca Giordano who you and I don’t know and neither do any of the people who pass through here accidentally on the way to Room 5.

You can still see the scuffmarks on the floor, and the black screw holes that used to support the wooden retraining bar. The large windows are visible again; when Lisa lived here they were covered up.

Her new home is a sad place on a rainy Tuesday in August. Since the weather is no good every non-French speaker in Paris decides to visit the Louvre. And as they all descend on Room 5—that airport gate everyone is leaving from—there is a low hum like a jet engine at the moment the wheels start turning. The sound comes from behind a wall rising up in the middle of the room and when you walk around the wall there are two hundred tourists pushing up against a railing as if it’s 1990 and they’re the first people let into a Michael Jackson concert.

My first response, which was surprising to me, was to want to cry. There had been a lot of people in Room 13 on that sunny February afternoon when I was first here, but this was somehow much more vulgar, probably because there were so many more people, it was so impossible to look at the painting and the guards were constantly shouting, “Si vous plait, one photo and then move away. Si vous plait!”

That was probably the saddest part: No one was looking at the painting they came all this way to see, they were just taking a shitty picture of it. The compulsion of museumgoers to take their picture infront of an object much more beautiful than they is a mystery of the Louvre left unaddressed by Dan Brown.

I ask the guard near Lisa if it’s always like this.

“Yes,” he says. “This is the most famous piece of art in the world.”

But the Mona Lisa has as much to with art as Christmas does with Christianity. Both transcend their original intent in all the worst possible ways, commercialized and mass marketed past the vanishing point. Those still foolishly interested in the original message find it mostly washed away by the deluge of Tickle Me Elmos and Mona Lisa coffee mugs.

Like Stonehenge (where once you could walk between the rocks but now they’re fenced off) and the Taj Mahal (where today you can walk inside but someday you won’t) the Mona Lisa will be covered in more layers of glass and velvet ropes and wooden guard rails until finally they install a conveyor belt out front and charge you 10 euros for each trip by the tiny painting.

But until she’s crushed physically and not just metaphorically, Mona Lisa will keep smirking out towards us. And as we snap away at her and her mirror-like black dress, she’ll reflect back on us in the countless shitty pictures the embarrassing image of all of us focusing so many millions of pixels on something we didn’t even bother to see.

Hemingway's Paris

2005-09-01T13:06:00.000-04:00

Paris, France
Forty years before Dan Brown directed masses of Robert Langdon wannabes to the Louvre and St. Sulpice, another American author wrote controversially and compellingly about unknown Paris society. Instead of vilifying the Catholic church, Ernest Hemingway outed F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein. A Moveable Feast, Hemingway’s account of being young and broke in Paris, was published three years after his 1961 suicide.

But the years the book covers are 1921-26 so I wondered if Hem’s Paris was just water under the Pont de la Concorde.

It was during those lean years—when Hemingway was in his early-to-mid twenties—that he wrote his first novel, The Sun Also Rises. He didn’t write it at La Rotonde or La Domes where many of the day’s fashionable writers sipped crème cafes because, Hemingway wrote, people were there “to be seen publicly.” Instead he worked at La Closerie des Lilas, the quieter café down the street where “no one was on exhibition”

La Closerie des Lilas thanks Ernest dearly because today it can charge $6.60 for a café crème, while the chairs at La Rotonde and La Domes—still facing the street for maximum see-and-be-seen effect—are mainly empty. The $53 prix fix dinner at La Domes is actually cheaper than it’s counterpart at La Closerie.

La Closerie’s brochure quotes liberally from A Moveable Feast but ignores Hemingway’s primary endorsement.

“Have things really changed since the twenties?” the brochure asks, suggesting the café has always been a place “to spot celebrities and enjoy a fleeting flutter of recognition.”

If the café is home to some displaced nostalgia it may be because there are so few places to place it. The closest you’ll come to Papa’s ghost in this neighborhood is to meet eyes with one of the two photos of him behind the bar at La Closerie. He lived a block over, above a sawmill at 113 rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, but when I walked by to see what had happened to his old address I found it had literally vanished. The street skips from 111 to 115.

He doesn’t give an address for the hotel on Rue Mouffetard where he rented a room to work during that time and I couldn’t find it as I walked up and down “that wonderful narrow crowded market street.” It’s surprising since almost every building in Paris has a plaque naming a famous writer who lived there at some point. Such a plaque hangs from 74 rue Cardinal Lemoine where Hemmingway first lived in Paris. On the bottom floor a boutique calls itself Paris et un fete—Paris is a feast—apparently hoping that beer-bellied American pseudo-intellectuals will settle on a floral-print dress when they fail to find a museum below Papa’s old pad.

Today the area is home to upscale cafes, budget crepe stands, and tourist-aimed retailers, but when Hemingway arrived in Paris in 1921 and moved into the two-room flat with “no hot water and no inside toilet,” he was embarrassed to give his home address to Sylvia Beach for membership in her lending library. The address “could not have been a poorer one.”

Beach owned Shakespeare and Company, an English bookstore that underfed Hemingway would devise ways of visiting without passing the sweet-smelling bakeries on the way from his apartment to the store on 12 rue de l’Odeon. Beach became famous herself for publishing James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922 out of her small bookshop. Today the shops on rue de l’Odeon generally sell things that are old, expensive, or caffeinated. It’s also still a good place to buy books—nine of the 22 buildings on the small street have shops selling books—but not number 12; Shakespeare and Company is now Ann Gerard Creations, a minimalist jewelry shop.

Hemingway knew when he wrote A Moveable Feast in 1960 that Beach’s shop had been closed by the Germans when they occupied Paris. He knew it because he helped liberate the shop at the end of the war when he was attached to an American infantry division while reporting on the war. But he omitted all that and focused in Feast on the time in the 1920’s when a group of ex-pat writers—tabbed “The Lost Generation” by Gertrude Stein—descended on Paris and changed the course of English literature. By the 1960’s much of that story had already been told but the posthumous publication of Feast revealed intimate details of the era—from disclosing Fitzgerald’s insecurity with his endowment, to casting doubt on who had come up with the group’s name.

In Hemingway’s account Stein picked up the name when she was having her Model T repaired. The mechanic didn’t meet her standards and when she complained to his boss, the supervisor said to the mechanic, “‘You are all a generation perdue.’” Stein agreed.

“‘That’s what you are…You are all a lost generation, exactly as the garage keeper said.’”

Today, Stein’s old studio on 27 rue de Flores occupies a neighborhood slightly more sterile but generally indistinguishable from Hemingway’s; there’s a consulting firm and an internet café in the neighboring buildings. But what has endured is the name she borrowed from the mechanic and used to label the brilliant, bohemian group of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Joyce and others who grew up between the two World Wars. It’s that eight-decade old mystique that still brings so many young writers to Paris, and whether they find magic on the banks of the Seine, for the most part they don’t find anything of interest in the addresses that once meant so much.

Assuming a distaste for $6.60 café crèmes, the best place to find some derivative of what’s been lost in the last 80 years is to find the new Shakespeare and Company. Beach never re-opened the shop she was forced to close in the darkest days of World War II but she later turned over much of her library—including her original copy of Ulysses—to George Whitman, who owned a bookstore across the Seine from Notre Dame cathedral. After Beach’s death in 1962, Whitman re-named the store Shakespeare and Company and today it houses some remnant of what a lot of people come to Paris looking for.

Between the stacks of books are thin, dusty mattresses that visiting writers and backpackers can call home on two conditions: they must work two hours per day in the store, and write an autobiography about their life and ambitions.

“They’re young people who want to write and they come to Paris because they dream of Paris at night,” Jonathan McNamara, an Irish bookworm who’s worked at the store for a year told me over coffee. “They come here and they have no money, they have no job, they just have a passport…They show up and George gives them a place to stay and feeds them pancakes on Sunday mornings…He’s basically opening up his house and his bookshop for people to stay there.”

“Everybody who travels is indeed in search of something. Now whether its that something that they imagine was there 80 years ago or imagine is there today is impossible to say….Paris has become an archetype, it’s this idea of everything that your own home will never be.”

Rain, Whiskey, Cars, Condoms

2005-08-22T08:31:00.000-04:00

August 17 - Portrush, Northern Ireland
First let me take my drenched shoes off. Its still raining here in Portrush, Northern Ireland on the Emerald Isle’s north coast. I’m settled into a pleasant malaise and the weather suits my mood. If last week was marked by gaining no joy from things that should be pleasurable, then this week is about enjoying things that should cause bother.

The rain oscillated between mist and shower this afternoon. I was in Bushmills, where they give you a glass of whiskey after you’ve toured their distillery. It was something to take a look at after walking around the Giant’s Causeway just down the road. The whiskey glass emptied at 1:30pm and the next bus back down the road to Portrush would come by at 5:20pm. I decided I’d take a look at the rest of Bushmills, maybe stop into a café, send some e-mails from an internet shop, and look around the town. After 20 minutes it became clear there wasn’t much of a town, nevermind an internet shop. The bus was still more than three hours away.

It seemed like a good idea to hitchhike back to Portrush so I fired up my Ipod to the Whitechoclatespaceegg album and stood outside the Bushmills elementary school where A2 heads off to Portrush. The funny thing about hitchhiking in the rain is watching the cars go by. Most people look the other way, as if they don’t notice you’re there. This is probably what we all do when we see homeless people on the street. When someone acknowledges you, it is always from a full car. The father of the group gestures through the windshield that all the seats are taken, shrugging his shoulders guiltlessly. The poor souls with empty cars just have to look away. After a while this provides a perverse amusement because the folks behind the windshield wipers are clearly more uncomfortable about the whole thing then me under my trusty Patagonia rain jacket.

It’s always hard to know when to give up when you’re hitchhiking in the rain. I got some indication it might be a doomed effort by a trio of drivers who made a pointing gesture as they passed, seemingly indicating I should wait somewhere else but maybe using some Irish hitchhiking sign-language for “Sorry, you poor chump.”

After a half hour I decided I’d head into town as soon a certain song came on. I had already noticed how many compact cars here are red, I’d already smiled at the thought that the passing Porsche might stop for me, and decided that some of the girls who work in town must be driving home soon. I had decided the passing black Audi would be a nice choice for a chariot home.

Then the black Audi stopped and the steel fitter who drove it brought me five miles down the road to Portrush and wished me well.

In the evening I was hungry so I went to Marino’s which passes as a supermarket. Cooking for one mouth is a challenge, but Marino’s has a solution. In the sparse cooler are a few stacks of Microwave dinners. Chicken Madras for 2.89 pounds seemed like a fair choice. I paced around the store feeling somehow uncomfortable. Finally I grabbed the plastic tray of fake Indian food and headed for the check-out register. I felt like I should buy something else just cause. It was like buying condoms, you want to pad your basket with gum or contact solution or dental floss just so they know there’s more to you than that one thing. Because you know they can picture you using that one item in your basket. You know they can see you alone at the table, jabbing at your steaming soggy rice. You want to tell them you don’t do this often, just tonight and last night. Tomorrow you’ll be back in Belfast with people you know and it won’t be raining and you won’t be on the side of the road looking for someone to pick you up. But then you realize it’s okay, she’s probably more uncomfortable about the whole thing than you.

Mudwrestling for a Room

2005-08-22T08:29:00.000-04:00

August 20 – boat from Belfast
Even if you know fate doesn’t exist, you can’t count all the things that went a certain way to end up where you are. Let’s not start with some HBO executive’s decision to send someone to the Philippines to do a story, or even my friend Eileen’s firm recommendation that a free week in Southeast Asia would best be spent in Thailand. For the sake of this story we’ll even skip past the Bangkok Airways ticket agent who sat me next to Ross who invited me to find a beach hut with him and his British mates.

Lets start on the night 17 months ago that I followed the British mates into a Lamai, Thailand bar and found a ring in the center that looked a lot like the boxing ring I’d travel all the way to Asia to video. This ring though was slicked with jelly. “We tried mud for a while but it just ruined everything,” the Texan owner explained. Let’s start when I decided I should mudwrestle.

They sent me up to a changing room and gave me some shorts and then I got ready to battle two lithe Thai women. As the Texan began introducing “The Hoss, here all the way from New York City,” I nervously shivered in the entryway and glanced over at two guys sipping beer.

“Good luck,” one of them said.

“Thanks.”

It was the next day walking alone on the beach that I scurried up the hot sand and stopped into a beachside bar to get lunch. I choose that bar because four girls were playing guitar at one of the orange tables but when I went to order my curry I found the guys who had wished me luck the night before still recovering from the unmentionable end of their evening.

Bill and Paul commended me on my wrestling technique, and then I went up to the girls and asked to borrow their guitar. We all got to talking and then we went out every night that week. Bill and Paul were on an Around the World trip, which was a pretty amazing thought. They invited me on to Ko Phangan with them and we spent a few nights on Hat Rin beach, drinking Beer Chang and pulling German girls.

“Wait a minute,” I thought when the boat took me back towards New York and they got to stay for the next night’s full moon party, “I have to go back to work and you get to do this for another eight months?”

So that’s how I ended up here (wherever I am somewhere in the Irish Sea on my way from Belfast to Scotland) backpacking around the world for a year. But that wasn’t even my point. My point was that the main thing you do—or that I’m doing at this point—is chasing people more than places.

I’m traveling from Bill and Paul to Jennifer and then onto Idell before stopping into Annaelle. The trick you see, to save money, avert loneliness, and have the best time is to meet people in their hometown.

The mudwrestling didn’t just send me on this trip, it took me to a housewarming party last night in Bangor, a Belfast suburb. In the last year and a half (and mainly in the last month) I’ve developed a more streamlined means of arranging these kinds of arrangements.

Step 1) Go out with some people from your hostel.

Step 2) Locate a girl among the group who lives in a country you’ll be visiting in the future.

Step 3) You can probably figure out by yourself.

Step 4) Crash at her place when you pass through her town.

There are certainly variations on the theme. Jennifer, an erstwhile New Yorker who lives in St. Andrews, Scotland actually offered me a place before I bought her any beer. She has a friend who I met in Brisbane, Australia six months ago and turned her onto my blog. Jennifer read that I was in Ireland and invited me—sight unseen—to crash at her place and now I’m on the ferry over to Scotland to take her up on it.

Idell, my old roommate from West 73rd Street, lives in Montpellier, France these days and apparently has a spare couch or floor.

Annaelle lives in Toulouse, France and was kind enough to stick rather strictly to the above outlined Steps.

In the first week of September I’ll have been in Europe for three months and more nights than not I’ll have slept for free. I didn’t set out to spend time in Rotterdam, Bangor, St. Andrews and Toulouse. I can’t say I’d recommend them all. But after a while it turns out the point isn’t so much ‘where’ as ‘who.’

People are complaining I don’t write enough these days and I want to tell them to go ahead and write about their own weekend. I stopped traveling a few weeks ago and now I’m just living. The tourists can look at the Louvre, I’m going to go to the housewarming party. It’s better than a housewarming party at home because everyone here speaks with Irish accents. In the day you can walk around and look at stuff, and on the nights there aren’t any houses to warm you can go mudwrestling until you find someone with a spare bed in Spain.

London Photos

2005-08-11T17:38:00.001-04:00

A group of WNYU-FM chums met me in London for a few days.

Trafalgar Square is a nice place to snap a photo. When I first came to London two years ago, my friend Abtin and I were so constantly hung over that I don't think we even made it here.

In case we missed it, John points out Tower Bridge.

Well that's just art.

Okay, check it off the list.

While we were at Stonehenge, aliens abducted us and took us to this art exhibit.

Leaving

2005-08-11T17:38:00.000-04:00

July 31 - Rotterdam, Holland
“Go like you’re going to Ella’s house,” Amber whispered as the second floor floorboards creaked. “Then keep going straight.”

It was 5am and we had just gotten home and it was time for me to bicycle in the rain to Central Station where the 5:25am shuttle would take me to the airport.

I unlocked her bike and started peddling. I had my big 35-pound pack on back and my smaller 15-pound pack in front. The small bag kept falling onto my peddling legs so I stopped in the drizzle and tightened the straps. Then I peddled over the bridge and past the Roti restaurant, past Ella’s street and towards Central Station. The rain fell more heavily.

Three hours before, when I said goodbye to Ella, we were still a group of four and it was okay to see her walk up the stairs, look back and wave, and disappear.

On our way to late night snacks I peddled next to Hilde, who told me how her mother would hold her by the back as she rode her bike. This was an excuse for Hilde to hold me by the back, which she was doing as I rode into a new, dark blue car, crashed to the ground and laughed.

We had some 4am Dutch treats and rode towards home. Then Hilde stopped. Home for me was left, home for her was right. It was okay to say goodbye and pretend we knew we’d see each other in New York in a year.

Amber and I headed towards home and the rain came hard. We got back to her place and I swapped out my smoky, soaked sweater for my polo. We kissed on the cheek and pretended we’d see each other soon. I walked briskly down the stairs and got the feeling in my stomach and my shoulders that you get, always, in that instant you become totally alone again.

It was probably a duller feeling than when Sabrina or Christian or Elise left, but it was recognizably similar. The feeling in your gut when you’ve left your best friend and will never see them again and don’t know any other soul in sight: that’s the feeling you can’t describe even to yourself except when you’re feeling it.

Fast Friends - Part I

2005-08-11T17:37:00.000-04:00

August 5 - London, England
When I get back to New York and we talk about my trip, you can ask me about Jens or Jason or the Dutch Girls and I’ll smile with memory and tell you something about them. But if you ask about Scott, Brian, or Monica I think I’ll just ask who you’re talking about.

Scott, Brian, and Monica (the boys are from Seattle, Monica is from Melbourne, Australia) are who I spent yesterday with. We were sharing a 12-bed room across from Hyde Park in London and we said hi and exchanged names and took the tube to Westminster because Brian had never seen Big Ben—the boys had one night in London, the result of a long layover between flights.

We sat on the wall at the edge of the Thames, next to the bridge that leads to Parliament and Scott explained what I already knew. “The people I meet when I’m traveling, we don’t keep in touch and stay close friends. These aren’t people I’m going to invite to my wedding. But for a day or a couple days it’s really nice to have someone to spend time with. You both kind of need it, so you go get dinner together or get some beers,” he said. “You’re five-hour friends.”

The five-hour friend has been a staple of my European travel experience. Much more than Asia, and even more than Australia, I’ve been meeting people almost every day who I spend a single evening with and never see again. They wake up early to catch a train or I wake up early to catch a bus and that’s that. For a while you can remember what they looked like and what country they were from, but soon you forget which one was Scott and which one was Brian. In a couple weeks you aren’t sure if you met in Sweden or Denmark, but then you remember which hostel porch it was where you first said hello and then you know it was Copenhagen where you saw the cover band with the male singer who did the fantastic cover of Bonnie Raitt’s “I Can’t Make You Love Me.”

It’s a strange thing to get so good at goodbye. In the beginning, the phenomenon was how quickly you became close to people, what fast friends we all were. But maybe we were wrong; maybe what happened fast was we acted like friends. Your voice falls into a comfortable tone, you laugh easily and break bread and buy rounds of beer. These are the things you do with friends, not people you met 90-minutes ago. But maybe the truth is we don’t have any friends. And since none of us have anyone, we’re all willing to fill the void for each other. At least for a few hours.

When the Bus Stops in Dublin

2005-08-11T17:36:00.000-04:00

August 6 - Dublin, Ireland
You don’t get to say ‘I told you so.’ You have to decide now if I was dumb and doomed from the beginning or just taking a risk that could turn out either way.

Here’s the evidence you have to go on: I was in London and looking for the cheapest way to get somewhere else. The best I found was a $35US bus ticket to Dublin leaving three days later. The bus would take 11 hours and get in at 9pm so I figured it might be wise to book a bed before arrival. Yesterday, when I tried to do that on-line, I found every hostel in Dublin either full or unavailable for on-line booking. Still, I had a non-refundable bus ticket taking me out of town so I got on the bus and hoped for the best.

This is when you have to decide if that was dumb or not.

On a break from the full-day bus trip I managed a pay-phone call to a hotel clearinghouse in Ireland. Do you have any hostel beds available? I asked. “We don’t handle hostels and our cheapest room for tonight is $370.”

So I’m cruising along on the bus watching the day get darker and wondering if there are some good parks in Dublin to sleep in. It’s a Friday night and Dublin is a drinking city so my best (or at least boldest) plan is to lock up my bags at the bus station, head to a pub, and try to find someone willing to share their bed. Do you have any better ideas?

Perhaps the growing apprehension was visible on my face because when our bus pulled off the ferry and into Ireland, the immigration guy called me into his office. The Turkish guy with the Australian passport had been cleared, as had the Croatians who Mr. Immigration suspected were really Russian. He took me into his office and asked how much money I had on me.

“I don’t know, a couple hundred pounds.”

“A couple hundred pounds, how long are you staying here?”

“About ten days.”

“Let me see it, how much money do you have in your wallet.”

I don’t even have a wallet but I pulled cash out of my pocket and counted 160 pounds.

“I have a banking card with all my money on it. There’s over 10,000US on it.”

“10,000US? Do you have a statement saying that? How much could you get out right now?”

“I don’t know, 1000US. I have more money in my bag on the bus.”

“How much do you have in the bus?

“About 200US and 70 euros.”

“And where are you staying?”

“I don’t know, that’s what I have to go figure out.”

“You don’t have a place? You’re going to go find one now?”

That was the plan. As another immigration guy walked me back down to the bus I asked him why there was all the fuss over the money.

“We get a lot of people who show up with rucksacks, no place to stay and no money and then they end up back here.”

Hmm, why would anyone do that?

The bus pulled into the Dublin bus station and I found a pay phone. It took euros and I had pounds and everything was closed. I dug around my bag and amid the kroner coins, Stonehenge ticket stubs, and Belgian coasters I found some euro coins. I called Dublin’s biggest hostel.

“Hi, do you have any beds for tonight?”

“No, we’re fully booked tonight.”

“I’m having a lot of trouble finding a place to stay, do you know anywhere in town that has any beds?”

“No. All the places we talk to and send people to are full too.”

“Is there a tourist office or some clearinghouse that would have a list?”

“I think they’re closed now.”

“Okay. Do you have any ideas?”

“Well, you could try Kinlay House, they might have some beds available that they don’t book on-line.”

As I hung up the phone I started looking around the station for a locker to store my bag in. It was too cold to sleep outside without a sleeping bag so the kamikaze pub plan was sounding better. I dropped my last 50-cent coin into the phone.

“Kinlay House, hello.”

“Hi, do you have any beds open for tonight?”

“We have one bed in a four-bed room. It’s 21 euros. Do you want it?”

Fast Friends - Part II

2005-08-11T17:35:00.000-04:00

August 8 - Dublin, Ireland
A couple days later I was alone in Dublin. The night before I met Noah in the TV room and went to Temple Bar and emptied some Guinnesses with him and the Irish girls we met who sadly still live with their parents. When I woke up he’d already gotten on his rented bike and started peddling west. That evening I went back to the Temple Bar area to shoot some video of Irish drinkers (or at least tourists drinking in Ireland).

“Do you have a minute,” a couple young Irish guys asked. They wanted to know if they should visit Las Vegas or New York when they go to the States. A minute later a couple girls walked by and the Irish guys roped them in. They were from Brooklyn and had just got in for a week’s vacation. We all had a Guinness and then I followed Colleen and Christy to meet their Irish friend who just got back from a round-the-world trip.

I interviewed Robert on the cobblestone street outside the row of bars. He’d done 10.5 months and knew how it felt to be in month eight. Month eight—for most of us it seems—is when it all gets a little tiresome.

“Constantly packing and unpacking your bag, riding on buses, finding hostels, saying goodbye to people, it just stops being fun.”

That’s how I’ve felt the last week or so as the cycle of the five-hour friend has become a bit old. It’s not that it’s an unpleasant thing that you can only tolerate for so long, it is in fact a very pleasant thing that can lose its charm after a while. You get numb to the things you’re seeing and tired of making a new friend every damn day. It’s not loneliness because someone always turns up, but it’s tiredness with having to do it over and over again.

Colleen somehow bought all this as some great burden. “Traveling around the world must be so hard,” she consoled. “It’s probably been forever since you were able to just curl up next to someone in a comfortable bed.”

Oh yes, month eight can be torturous, so it’s good to find someone you can see in the morning—at least for five minutes—before you get on your bus and she gets on hers.

Wine in the Bumper Cars

2005-08-11T17:34:00.000-04:00

August 11 - Dingle, Ireland
Dingle is a small fishing town down on Ireland’s southwest coast. I find myself at the Ballingtaggart Hostel, just east of town. It’s 20 minutes away by foot, five on a bike, or two in a shuttle that you think is one euro but tries to charge you six, which you refuse.

Dingle is a pretty place to jog, especially if you find a well-worn path along the cliffs with breaks in the fences wide enough for you to fit through but not the livestock. It’s even nice if you find a poorly tended path with thorns and pot holes, though you spend so much time watching out for your ankles that you barely see the green hills and the brown cliffs and the grey-blue water.

The prettiest sunsets I recall from my first seven months are March 24 in Ko Phi Phi, Thailand; April 19 in Agra, India; and this past Tuesday here in Dingle. I remember pink surrounding the Thai palms, orange outlining the Indian riverbank, and a wave of orange and blue above the Irish-green hills and silhouetted trees. It’s only the dates I needed my notes to recall.

Yesterday it was sunny and I was inside the hostel working on the documentary all day. In the afternoon I walked by reception and saw Hugh, who had left on his bike from Dublin the morning after we went out in Temple Bar together. He’d rode 100 miles that first day and then decided biking around Ireland was more work than he was up for. If you aren’t on a bike, Ireland is a small place and you’re bound to run into people on different stops along the way.

If water naturally finds a level, then the backpacker naturally finds the best girl in his hostel. Anita is Swiss and she spends her nights coughing a loud bronchial cough in the bed next to mine.

There’s a good trick you can use if you want to get people together without asking them if they want to go out with you.

“Hey Anita, me and this Australian guy are going to go into town later if you’re interested.”

“Hey Hugh, me and this Swiss girl are heading down to the pub later if you’re interested.”

Then you have a group of three and when you stick out your thumb a middle-aged couple will pick you up and take you into town. For reasons I can’t exactly figure out I really liked Antia a lot. She was pretty but not especially so, and she didn’t speak all that much English. I think I was just due to like someone.

We stopped into the Dingle Pub and paid $5 for our pints. Yesterday I spent 25 euros on alcohol and 17 on everything else. Drinking is a pricy habit when you’re on a budget, but one way to help the situation is to skip dinner, which eliminates the cost of food and gets you drunk much cheaper. This was my approach last night and after a couple pubs I was feeling pretty Irish.

Around midnight we shared a pitcher of Sangria and picked where we’d wake up in the morning if we could wake up anywhere we’d been. We guessed eacthother’s siblings. We picked where we’d wake up in the morning if we could wake up anywhere we hadn’t been. Anita’s English had gotten better after her second beer.

The bar was closing so we bought a bottle of wine for the road. Hugh promised to bring the glasses back in the morning even though he knew we were leaving on a 7am bus. We walked along the pier and over to the small, darkened amusement park in the middle of town. There wasn’t a gate so we went in and walked over to the bumper cars and each sat in our own car. We were almost drunk enough to try and power up the generator but not quite. Hugh had pocketed some candles at the bar and Anita lit them and put one on the hood of each of our cars.

Anita wouldn’t sing so I said I would instead. “Something by U2,” Hugh suggested.

“Yeah, we’re in Ireland, it should be something by U2,” I agreed.

I stared out at the boats in the distance and sang all the words I could remember to “One.” Hugh was genuinely impressed, which was sweet.

Then Hugh and Anita decided the bumper car track could be a dance floor and as I attempted “Rock Around the Clock,” they swung around haphazardly.

Half the wine was gone. “Excuse me, the park is closed,” a middle-aged Irishman called over.

“Okay,” we said, and walked out with our wine. Anita thought we should walk home along the water instead of by the road. The scenic route takes three times as long even in the daylight but we trudged through the long, wet grass, trying to stay on the path. I wanted to get home and walked faster than the others. Finally I turned around and saw Hugh and Anita standing still 200 feet behind me. The lights of the town twinkled between their silhouettes. And then their heads moved closer together until all the lights between their faces were eclipsed and I walked home along the road and slept through my alarm.

The Dutch Girls Revisited

2005-07-30T08:50:00.000-04:00

July 30 - Rotterdam, Holland
This is the story of spending 10 days in Holland without setting foot in Amsterdam. I don’t know how many travelers have managed this feat, but now I have and this is why:

The Dutch girls had driven home to Rotterdam and resumed their lives while I toured Copenhagen and Brussels. The countries around here are small and it was only a couple hours on the train from Brussels to Rotterdam where Amber picked me up at the station. “It’s weird to see you here in my home,” Amber said.

Amber’s family wanted to meet “the American,” so we walked over to her sister’s apartment and answered the burning question her parents and siblings had waited to ask.

“So, Brook, can you ride a bike?”

Americans drive cars, they thought; Dutch ride bikes. “Yes,” I promised, “I can ride a bike.”

They must not have been totally convinced because when Amber and I rode off to her house her family stood on the side of the road watching me peddle away.

Amber’s house is not squatted. “Our old house was squatted,” she explained. “But the owners of this house asked us to move in. It was empty and they thought if no one lived here junkies would come and it would be a drug house so they asked us to stay here.”

There is no rent for the five-bedroom, four story apartment; they only pay utilities. There are big windows, creaky floorboards, and lots of space. There is an over-abundance of fleas. If there was rent to pay, fleas and cockroaches would be cause for complaint but there is no rent. Not even for the American who holes up for 10 days in an empty bedroom.

The Dutch girls did a convenient thing in anticipation of my arrival: they all broke up with their boyfriends. This isn’t exactly true because Hilde broke up with her’s a while ago and Ella still has one but he lives outside the city. The net effect though was they had free time to go to cafes and parks and bars. “I think you think we always hang out with each other,” Ella said as we all hung out with each other. “But this isn’t normally the case, we have other friends.”

Sometimes Amber would be waitressing and I’d have dinner with Hilde, or Ella would be waitressing and I’d get drinks with Amber, or Hilde would be waitressing I’d sit at my computer in the house that isn’t squatted and work on the documentary.

At night you get on your bikes and ride into town. “The tram stops running at 1am so if you want to stay out you have to ride your bike,” Amber explained. Even during the day no one takes the tram, everyone rides their bike. (Getting a driving license in Holland is such a time and money intensive process that many people can’t drive anyway).

You get to the club and chain your bikes to the fence. Inside everyone knows everyone and you aren’t traveling anymore, you’re just out at a bar on a Friday night and that’s a nice change. Some nights there are home cooked meals, or wine on the patio, or movies projected onto a big white wall in the house that isn’t squatted. There are jobs and ex-boyfriends to deal with and it’s more like real life.

At the end of the night there are two of you to share one bike. She pedals and you sit side-saddle on the metal bar behind the seat. You cruise through town on the faded-red bike path. This isn’t the night you race home across the bridge, or fall asleep together on the couch watching Forrest Gump. This isn’t the night you drink Grolsh at the outdoor tables, or the other night you drink Grolsh at the outdoor tables. This isn’t the night you project video of singing karaoke in Copenhagen onto the wall or the night you cooked dinner and said goodbye. This is the night you rode home side-saddle on her bike, chained it up outside the rent-less apartment, and creaked up the stairs to your room.

A 35 Euro Lock

2005-07-30T08:48:00.000-04:00

July 28 - Rotterdam, Holland
You lock your bike outside the Coffeeshop and go in. They don’t sell much coffee here and they can’t sell any beer because you’re in Holland and “Coffeeshop” is just a euphemism for the place you buy marijuana.

“We don’t really stay inside the Coffeeshop,” Amber explained the other day. “That’s for the tourists. We just buy something and bring it home.”

When you walk in there is a guy standing behind a glass partition. There are priced samples taped to the glass. Dutch is spoken, 10 euros are exchanged for a zip lock bag and you go outside to unlock your bike and ride home.

It occurred to me that there’s a fundamental difference between marijuana in countries where it’s legal and ones where it’s illegal. American anti-drug groups argue that the danger of marijuana is that it leads to more dangerous drugs, and that’s probably true. It’s a short step from your dealer providing a bag of something green to a bag of something white. But in the Netherlands the mechanics of buying hard drugs are entirely different than buying pot. You go to the store to buy your weed; you go someplace poorly lit to buy your coke or ecstasy.

Marijuana is less of a gateway to the hard stuff when you don’t have to develop a habit of illegal drug purchasing to get it.

But just as you start to think that legalizing marijuana might help solve the drug problem you’re back at the apartment re-locking the bikes. They aren’t very nice bikes but the locks are essential.

“My bike cost 10 euros,” Amber explains. “And the lock was 35 euros.”

“Do you really need such a big lock? Who’s going to steal your bike?”

“Well the junkies, of course.”

Somehow plenty of people found their way out of the Coffeeshop and into some poorly lit place. It’s hard to say which system is better, but easy to see that lots of people do lots of drugs regardless.

Beer/waffles/chocolate/frites

2005-07-30T07:51:00.000-04:00

July 21 - Brussels, Belgium
I’ve been traveling for 193 days so far. Yesterday I went to my third museum. The first was in Jomsom, Nepal. I went because Yuba, my guide, would have been offended if I declined. A couple weeks ago in Stockholm, Sweden a group of us failed to find bikes and instead ended up at a museum celebrating this giant 17th century ship that sank on its first voyage. Yesterday, here in Brussels, Belgium I visited the beer museum. I plan to establish a policy of visiting all museums whose admission price includes free beer.

As I sip my Leffe Brune it occurs to me that Belgian people should be the world’s fattest, but they aren’t. Belgium is known for four things, each an opponent of thin waists and wide arteries: Beer, Waffles, Chocolate, and Frites.

I’ve constructed my diet around these four food groups, as a quick scan of my expenses for the last three days makes clear: Beer $3.50, Beer $2.50, Waffle w/ fruit and crème $4.00, Beer $7, Godiva chocolate $2.70, Generic chocolate $2.80, Frites $2.50, Beer $10, Beer and chocolate $6.80, Waffle w/ crème $1.80.

Tomorrow I go to Holland and who knows when I’ll be back in Belgium. So even though its 4pm on a Thursday I’ve finished my Leffe and have cracked open a Chimay. It’s okay to have a vice for a couple days, its just good the Belgians have a little more self control. And its good I’m going to Holland, at least there won’t be any vices waiting in Amsterdam.

The Dutch Girls

2005-07-17T17:29:00.000-04:00

July 16
The Dutch girls—Hilda, Ella, and Amber—are in a punk band, but they had time to drive around Scandinavia for a couple weeks in Hilda’s sister’s car. They offered me a seat for the drive from Stockholm to Copenhagen. It’s hard to find time for all their band-related responsibilities—making posters, designing t-shirts, etc—even though they’ve cut the work load down considerably by declining to learn instruments, write songs, or develop any proficiency as singers. “We’re a social experiment,” Ella explained.

Canadian Andrew and I had no trouble believing they were three-fourths of Aus Der Flasche, their fictitious band. They look like female rockers; Ella’s nose is pierced, Amber’s lip is lanced, and Hilda (who is no stranger to peroxide) has a silver stud in the center of her chin. They have contrasting and complementing “looks” that seem destined for the cover of a fledgling magazine.

“If we could just come up with one song,” Ella mused over Asian food the other night. “Then we could have a CD to give out to people.”

Their plan is to heavily promote a concert and see how many people they can get to show up. When it comes time to play, the power will go out or one of the members will be in rehab or something. They’ve been working on the idea for two years now but it remains only an idea.

I can’t remember how I met the Dutch girls but I think I was with Canadian Andrew and Australian Nicole one day last week when the Dutch girls said they wanted to rent bikes too and we all walked around the city all day failing to find cheap bikes. That night we ate Asian food and went to a bar with a funny retro-metal band.

I hadn’t hung out with the Dutch girls without Andrew or Nicole and I wondered how it would be on the six-hour drive (that turned out to be nine) in Hilda’s sister’s tiny car. I knew they were all good friends and they spoke Dutch and I was coming in and messing up their dynamic. But there’s a certain kind of bonding that happens when you sleep next to someone and after the first round of naps on the drive through Sweden we were all quite friendly.

Meeting people and getting close becomes so routine that you don’t even see it happening after a while. It doesn’t feel so strange and fantastic to become fast friends with some exotic foreigner because it’s not strange anymore, it’s just something you do.

The Dutch girls are all about six feet tall and have boyfriends back home. I realized as we sipped Tuborgs at the edge of the Copenhagen pier that I’m much better at platonic relationships than I was before I left. I can only think of one from my first 25 years but I’ve had plenty out here.

The Dutch girls look like a fashionable punk band but they don’t act like it. They don’t like places with strict door policies even though they could get in. Their trendy/non-judgmental ratio is as high as you’ll find. The only exception seemed to be in their disregard for the hostel’s shoes-off policy. “We never take our shoes off,” Amber told me.

“This is a society,” I insisted mock-earnestly. “There are rules.”

“We’re in a band,” Amber re-joined.

They invited me to drive on to Rotterdam with them but I wanted to stay a bit longer in Copenhagen and once they get back home they’ll have jobs and boyfriends to worry about. So I was asleep when they gathered their stuff and left for the long drive down to Holland. When I woke I found a note and a beer on top of my pile of clothes and electronics. It said they’d really like to see me in Rotterdam and that I was good company. It called me Paul, because I had chosen that Beatle when our foursome handed out names. In the upper right corner it said “Kopenhagen, 14-07-‘05” and I knew as soon as I saw it that the idea of the date was sad. It was a morning in July during the year I took my trip and whenever I read the note from now on it won’t be that day anymore. In my mind I could see Ella writing the note as I slept in the bunk below her but it’s hard to say who wrote it for sure because it was signed “Aus Der Flasche.”

I taught Amber and Hilda "Dash" the game Bill and I made up in Central Park a couple years ago. It was thrilling to launch an international edition...

Sleep In Fact

2005-07-17T17:28:00.001-04:00

July 16
The alarm is going off and who knows what that means. The Sleep In Fact hostel here in Copenhagen, Denmark should have an alarm and a good number other things, but as of now I can confirm only the alarm. They should have someone at reception from 12pm to 3pm and 3am and 6am, but they don’t. They should have a decent means of securing the hostel and a system for recording who is staying here, but they don’t have either of those either.

What the Sleep In Fact hostel here in Copenhagen, Denmark has—in addition to the alarm that is still going off—is a climbable tree next to the porch in back. The burglar(s) climb up the tree, jump through the broken barbed wire and over the white railing with the pink potted flowers and walk into the two giant, unlocked dorm rooms to get their bread and beer money. They must have drunk well last night on my 960 kroners ($160) and on Brian’s 250 kroners. Brian says the bandits were unable to use his credit card and it’s unclear what use they’ll have for his Hosteling International membership card. Maybe they can get a discount next time they check into a place and then make off with a wallet while its owner is in the shower.

When I told the guy at reception that I had cash taken out of my jeans just one night after Brian had his wallet lifted, he was unmoved by the pair of thefts. “Oh, yes, there have been many robberies here recently. You have to be careful, there are a lot of bastards out there.”

The thieves know the hostel is unstaffed from 3-6am, making it quite vulnerable. They know when its 3am because they have the $200 watch Brian’s girlfriend gave him for his last birthday. The Swedish girls and I made it home just before 3am the other night. At 4am Jenny shook me awake. “You should get up.”

The girls had been talking in bed when they noticed someone walking in the room. Each of the rooms have 32 beds so it’s hard to keep track of everyone, especially when it’s dark. But a big new hostel opened up in Copenhagen this summer and has drained away most of Sleep In Fact’s business. There were only five people staying in the Swedish girls’ room and the guy walking by in a white t-shirt wasn’t one of them. The girls were a bit startled and after a couple minutes they followed the guy out of their room and looked out from the porch where they saw him hiding in the bushes bellow. That was when they woke me up.

I didn’t see anything in the bushes but we thought it might be a good idea to lock the doors, which were wide open to let some air in. We couldn’t figure out how to lock one of them so we wedged it closed with a chair. In the morning everyone’s stuff seemed to be where they left it and the folks at the Sleep In Fact Hostel, here in Copenhagen, Denmark decided they would lock the doors at night.

Like Going Home

2005-07-17T17:25:00.000-04:00

July 16
A friend of mine went out in Copenhagen the other night. It was getting late and everyone was drunk and the girl he’d been talking to—but didn’t dance with—was going home with the guy she danced with instead. Her friend finished her beer and turned to my friend. “So, will it be good for your diary if you say ‘I went home with a Danish girl?’”

They took a taxi north to her apartment because they couldn’t both fit on the bike she’d rode to the club on. It was already getting light when they walked up the spiral stairs to her studio apartment. It looked like New York with the bed by the door and the computer by the bed and the dining table next to the computer. She poured two glasses of water from a pitcher in the kitchen and brought them to the bed. It was a real bed with sheets and pillows and enough room for two people. It all seemed a lot like New York.

In the morning they took the bus back down to her bike and his hostel. It was Saturday morning and she was wearing an old t-shirt that was too big and a light jacket that someones grandmother might buy. Seeing someone in their Saturday morning clothes is almost like getting to know them. It just seems more real. He asked her what she was doing this weekend, not because he wanted to see her again but because he was living vicariously. It had been a long time since he felt the thrill of Saturday morning, the best time of the week. There were two full days in front of her that she could spend however she chose. She had worked all day Friday, taken a nap when she got home, and picked up a guy at the club; now she would walk around Vesterbro on this cool, cloudy Saturday afternoon, pick up her bike and ride home. It all somehow seemed a lot like New York, my friend said.

The Annex in Stockholm

2005-07-11T12:17:00.000-04:00

July 11
Sweden’s prices are as far north as its latitude so cash strapped backpackers are drawn to the summer annex of the generously named Bed and Breakfast Hostel. That’s where I brought my 135 kronas ($17) a few nights ago. “Is the annex open?” I asked when they tried to put me in a 195 krona ($25) dorm. “Umm, yes, it is.”

The Swedish man walked me across the street from the hostel and half a block up the hill. He punched “9833#” into the keypad and opened the heavy wooden door with a droopy T carved out of it. We took 17 steps down to the empty linoleum-tiled basement and found 19 bunk beds crammed along its walls. There are two de-bunked beds as well, allowing 40 cash-strapped backpackers to call the annex home on any given night.

“It’s like a hospital,” we all decided later, though I’ve never seen a hospital room with 40 beds. “It even has a sick guy.” Indeed, the gentleman in bed #40 has such a severe cough that after spending a night in the adjacent bed #34, I decided it would be better to keep my distance and relocated to bed #8.

It’s always light outside but it’s always dark in the basement annex of the Bed and Breakfast Hostel. When the blaring fluorescent lights go off for the night, it’s impossible to tell the hour until the next afternoon when they finally come back on. When you wake up it might be 3am or it might be 11am. The little droopy T carved out of the door is the only contact with the outside world and it’s too far away to cast any light into the annex.

The annex must be about the best place you could hope to stay. It’s a real challenge to share a room with 39 people and not make a few friends.

Last night we were at a nearby bar, which featured long-haired retro rock and karaoke. The three Dutch girls were out. So was the Canadian guy and the two Italian guys. (The Italian guys couldn’t understand Swedish women, who weren’t interested in them but were willing to make-out with eachother). The Aussie girl stayed in to get some sleep, but her Turkish bunkmate grabbed a couple pints. In the morning the Swiss girls and the American guys packed up and left. The whole room emptied out except for the one older woman napping in bed #1 after it was vacated by the Swiss girls.

A long white extension cord runs from outside the annex all the way into the middle of the room. It’s plugged into my laptop as I type on the one white plastic picnic table the 40 of us share. It’s right by bed #34 where two Puerto Rican girls came in and put their stuff down. They looked around at the rows of empty beds and the green forest mural that wraps around the walls. They started to think through the logistical implications of all the showers being down the block in the main building. They gathered up their stuff and moved out of the annex and into a room across the street and it was their loss.

A Couple Photos from Stockholm

2005-07-11T12:15:00.000-04:00

It's hot and this passes as the beach...

...the blonde on the left is a Canadian guy, the one of the right is a Dutch girl.

...Aussie's love carrots, apparently.

Greece Then and Now

2005-07-11T12:14:00.000-04:00

In front of the Sphinx of Naxos...

1980

2005

With mom (and dad and Quinn)...

1980

2005

Greece '05

2005-07-06T12:34:00.001-04:00

June 30
We all know what to do in Rome. But when you’re in that other ancient European civilization, it can be less clear. As it turns out, When in Greece, take off your clothes.

If you’ve been to South Beach or Ko Samui the concept of the topless beach isn’t so foreign. The Greek Isles are much the same, without those pesky bottoms.

As sister Quinn and I knocked a paddleball back and forth the other day, a stray shot fell a few feet to her right and when she bent down to pick up the ball she was confronted by the well-tanned hip region of a passing middle-aged man. She picked up the ball, unfazed but fully clothed and observed, “My goodness we are outnumbered.”

I have no memories of naked Greeks from my first trip to Greece. But I have no memories of that trip at all.

I was 18 months old when my mom brought me here for 100 days of backpacking around the islands and this is something of a reunion trip. Some of my first words were supposedly Greek and the stories of me getting lost in a Santorini arcade or lighting up at the sight of a Zeus statue have been so well worn in the intervening 25 years that it almost seems like I have memories, but of course I don’t. I have an image of dusty, almost colorless streets, and canvas colored plazas with ancient statues strewn about. They’re the images of photographic slides that sat stacked in our basement for a couple decades but made enough spins through a projector every few years to fix a memory of an image in my mind.

Even before I planned this yearlong trip our family had marked “Greece - Summer ’05” on our vacation calendar. Mom wanted to take me back, wanted to go back herself, and wanted my dad and sister to share the experience as well. What she promised she understood, but what she didn’t really understand at all, was that the experience wasn’t available to share. Greece ’80 can’t be visited by going to Greece ’05 any more than Hawaii can be experienced by going to Jones Beach.

And so we found a parking spot in Santorini’s Old Town and wound our way through the Gucci laden alleys. In place of the plaza where I had played, was a café selling dishes of ice cream for $14. On the slope where donkeys had carried us up from the port, there was an Aspen-style tram. Santorini—the Santorini where I got lost in the arcade—was lost for good.

Mom cried, wallowed, and cursed for a few minutes and then decided we should get a drink at a café overlooking the volcanic Caldera which, with the exception of a few extra cruise ships, looked a lot like it had for the past couple thousand years. We each had a coffee, paid our $26 and went back to our place.

Secretly, mom held out hope that seeing Greece for myself would trigger memories that the slides couldn’t. But the Greece we visited then isn’t here to be re-seen; only remembered by those with memories. And surely when I find myself in Sapa or Christchurch or Katmandu some decades from now, I’ll wonder where all the donkeys went. I won’t be counting pennies then, in fact I’ll buy my $8 cappuccino without a second thought. But the time when there was less money and more donkeys will be missed, for reasons real or romantic.

Let Me Tell You About the Greeks

2005-07-06T12:34:00.000-04:00

Greeks are the most image conscious people I’ve encountered outside Southern California. Find me a Greek female above the age of ten who doesn’t have her hair highlighted and I’ll give you a hundred drachmas.

Greeks can be a bit aggressive in line; they won’t push you like in India but they’ll walk right past you as if you hadn’t been standing there for 15 minutes.

Greece is one of the most Christian countries in the world; 98% of its population is Greek orthodox.

Chivalry is alive and well in Greece. In restaurants women are served first, unless some mannerless American grabs the plate before his mother or sister can be served.

Greeks eat late (lunch at five, dinner at 11) and then drink later. They don’t drink in the afternoon as much as other Europeans though. It’s rude for a waiter to bring your check before you request it; it’s annoying to sit there for half an hour trying to get the waiter’s attention so you can pay and leave.

I’m confident these observations are in parts inaccurate and in other parts prejudiced, but they’re my impressions of two-plus weeks here. There are a set of things you learn about a place when you visit. You read them in a book or you notice them as you walk the streets. If you stay in a place long, enough you learn that nearly all these observations are either false or mean something different than you thought.

Towards the end of our trip I met Yorgos, a 26 year old Greek. Your country is so Christian, I said, 98% are Greek Orthodox. “No, that’s not true. It’s a trick by the church,” he said. “When you sign up for an ID card they automatically count you as Orthodox. If I showed you my ID card it would say Greek Orthodox but I hate that church. So they get to say 98% but it’s not true.”

And in Yorgos’ small village chivalry seems trumped by its close cousin, chauvinism. In the cafés there women aren’t served first, they aren’t served at all.

He didn’t explain the dyed hair, or the line cutting or the late dinners (though he did decline to eat with us at 9pm), but it was a reminder of how much you can misinterpret or only partially understand when you’re busy becoming an expert and gawking at all the blonde highlights.

Family Photo Album

2005-07-06T03:56:00.000-04:00

So if you come to our house and someone tries to show you the Greece pictures you can say you've already seen them...

Mom, dad, sister, and the Greek flag.

This somehow strikes me as funny.

Mom at sunset in Naxos

Dad and I set the European Silva-Braga Paddleball Rally mark at 395. The international family record is over 500. And no, I don't usually look like I'm hitting a forehand smash when playing a friendly game by the water.

Santorini is a pretty place to take a family photo.

Santorini at day and dusk from our cave house.

Dad captures the Caldera in all its volcanic beauty.

I display poor technique with a light reflector.

Quinn directs her steed up the hill.

The donkeys that used to carry people up the hill behind my mom have been replaced by the tram you can see over her shoulder.

This is what a "Gucci laden ally" looks like.

Look how natural we look infront of this Sphinx of Naxos replica.

Our last stop was Milos, where the Venus de Milos was dug up by a farmer in 1820. Quinn poses armless to replicate the scene upon discovery.

"This has to be one of the world's best swimming holes," dad decided.

I make the 30 foot (what the hell, you're weren't there, let's call it 40) leap off one of the cliffs. Quinn jumped too but her dad has poor eyesight and deleted the picture. She forgives him.

Why does it always look like I have the camera pointed the wrong way?

98% of Greeks may not be Greek Orthodox, but it seems sometimes that 98% of buildings in Greece are churches.

A Word on Prague

2005-06-20T19:39:00.000-04:00

It’s past midnight and I have to be up at 8am to catch the plane to Greece, so Prague—a city already well lit with praise—will have to settle for this:

On my travels so far, three places have received the most enthusiastic and universal raves: Buenos Aires, Laos, and Prague. The Czech capital doesn’t disappoint, and when you’re on the Charles Bridge overlooking the Vlatava River at sunset, surrounded by the city’s hundred twisting spires, you have to remember all the things you love about Paris to stop yourself from proclaiming Prague the prettiest girl you’ve seen and calling an end to the contest right there.

Many of those hundred spires are sticking up from one of the city’s many churches. Mom and I were at St. Nicholas Church today, taking in the Baroque beauty after paying our 50 crown entrance fee (“Praying free 8:30-9:00am”). As the gold plated figures shined down on us I remembered something a group of Christian girls I met in Thailand last year had said. They wondered why the Buddhist temples needed to be so big, what was being proven and glorified by erecting the world’s largest reclining Buddha. I can confidently report that there’s nothing more excessive at Bangkok’s Wat Po than at Prague’s St. Nicholas.

Another religious opinion we’ve all heard is that Islam is a violent religion. I haven’t read the Koran but some people seem to think the book advocates violence while others say there are only a few such passages in a large text. Nothing in the book can be much more violent than the depictions at the alter of St. Nicholas. One statue depicts a man stomping on another’s neck while a more resourceful saint has found a pitchfork to lance an evildoer with. If you didn’t know much about Christ and walked into St. Nicholas, you might wonder what kind of religion he’d set up. “This doesn’t seem to match his teachings,” mom said.

Prague’s a peaceful place though, all-in-all. It’s a bold type name on any European map and that brings pride to the Czech people. It also brings the Czech people to Prague; “Prague-centrism,” as a country girl explained it to me. But it brings people from further away than Cresky Krumlov. They crowd onto the Charles Bridge for the long, slow sunset and take pretty pictures of the saints doing nasty things.

- - - - - - - -

Have a Nice Life

2005-06-20T19:37:00.000-04:00

June 8
Mom wanted to do the backpacking thing, she even worried I’d be disappointed if we got stuck in nice hotels instead of ratty hostels. She thought it would be great to share the backpacker experience with me. She seemed quite convinced of it until we got to a hostel. “I’m too old to share a bathroom,” she decided and we went and checked into the obscenely priced hotel.

When we took the bus from Prague to Cresky Krumlov it turned out they were having their annual Rose Festival, which involves half the town dressing in Medieval garb and the entire town drinking liters of Eggenberg beer. The only place we could find where we wouldn’t have to share a bathroom was way up the hill at the edge of town.

Yesterday night we were way down in the middle of town and it was getting dark. It was 10pm but it was still finishing getting dark, the way it does in June when you’re this far north. We had followed the music to Hostel 99, which is tucked around a cobblestone corner next to one of the bridges that lead over to the King Arthur-looking central town. The hostel is a bar too and we got our half liters of Eggenberg and listened to the Czech band playing their American-sounding songs and tapped our feet on the cobblestones. It was a lovely place, with the music and a bunch of backpackers and a bunch of older people allowing the mother of a somewhat old backpacker to feel at home.

After a while one of the tables opened up and we sat down across from a couple of Czech girls who had taken the bus from Cresky Budejovice (home of the real Budweiser) for the festival. They spoke enough English to convey their preference for metal and hard-core music (that was the brunette sitting on the left) and their observation that I must not like cigarette smoke (the blonde on the right). Mom went to get some beers and came back with Marta, a Spanish girl we’d seen on the bus who was eating dinner alone inside by the bar. Marta is living in Prague, and though she loves the city she’s finding to her surprise that it’s not a great place to learn English.

Mom tried to buy everyone dinner or at least a beer but they declined. It was Marta who ultimately bought us a beer once we didn’t need one. She was happy to have someone to talk to now that her friends have moved back to Spain and she’s traveling alone for the first time. It was her first night in a hostel dorm.

The Czech girls finally got up to leave. We had talked about America and the Czech Republic and music and speaking English and speaking Czech. We had a few beers and we were friends now. “Have a nice life,” mom said, a bit melodramatically, I thought. “Yes, have a nice night,” one of the Czech girls said. I told mom that if I wished everyone a nice life who I knew I would never see again I would be doing it quite often.

When we finished Marta’s unnecessary gift it was time to go home. She took my e-mail and promised to send recommendations for my trip to Spain. We went out towards the bridge and readied for the walk up the hill to our room with it’s own bathroom.

When you stop into a hostel and ask to look at a room, you’ll follow the dingy hallway down to a small box with a couple narrow beds and decide it’s worthwhile to shell out for the obscenely priced hotel. But some night when a Czech band is playing in the courtyard and the long tables are full with backpackers trading stories about their hometowns, you’ll understand what the rooms with their own bathrooms lack. “I’m sad now,” mom said. “I wish we had stayed at the Hostel 99.”

- - - - - -

American Graffiti

2005-06-13T14:08:00.000-04:00

Greetings from Budapest, the goulash, graffiti, and paprika capital of the world. If you’re like me, your main impression of the Hungarian capital came from the Michael Jackson concert that was videoed here and played on VH1 about a thousand times in the late 90’s. At the end of the show he got in a space suit, strapped on a jet pack, and flew off the stage and into the night. “Michael Jackson has left the stadium,” a voice intoned. It was only after watching the show a half dozen times that I was able to pick out the moment when Jackson swapped places with a stunt double who performed the trick. But that doesn’t have much to do with Budapest, does it?

My trip from Asia to Europe went like this: Bangkok to Seoul to Paris to Athens. It took about 24 hours. I was killing time at the Paris airport when someone kissed the side of my face from behind. “Hi Brook.” I didn’t have time to fully formulate the short list of possible culprits before I turned around and saw my mom. She was supposed to meet me in Athens but managed to surprise me in France.

Now we’re in Budapest, which as I mentioned has perfected goulash, graffiti, and paprika. Goulash is really good. You can get it as an entree of chopped meat in a lovely sauce or as a soup with vegetables. In either case it’s spiced with paprika.

That leaves the topic of graffiti, which is ubiquitous here. I’m not sure if this is a common Eastern European thing or not (and going to upper crust Vienna and Prague next may not reveal the region’s norm) but it is everywhere.

Budgetarily, Eastern Europe is a good halfway house between Asia and Western Europe. A good meal is $5-$10. That’s a lot more than $2 curry but a lot less than what I’m expecting in Paris or Rome.

Culturally, I am very much in the West and it’s different. It’s the West: the bathrooms have toilet paper but the restaurants don’t have flies. The streets have cars instead of motorbikes, the tourist maps highlights churches instead of wats. There are tourist maps. The tourists are harder to spot because everyone is white so people assume you can understand their language but you can’t.

And, worst of all, I’m afraid I’m “that guy.” That guy is the guy who complains about what I’m about to complain about. Mom and I were shopping at a market today when a voice cut through the peaceful murmur of commerce. It was a loud female voice that sounded American. Her origin was confirmed by a few “hey man”s. Why are these stereotypes always true? Why is the loud, obnoxious person always an American?

What makes me “that guy” isn’t just my disdain for the loud American. My real thought about her and her friends—and as soon as I thought it I hated myself for thinking it—was this: “Who do these punks think they are getting all excited about being in Europe? This is backpacking Disneyland. Try a week in Delhi if you think you’re such a world traveler.”

Some European friends have told me I’ll regret coming here; that Asia, Australia, and South America are better traveling choices. I don’t believe them and I’m certain I’ll have a great time in Europe. But for a moment I couldn’t even let some girl who DJs at a radio station (we all learned a lot about her as we shared the market with her) enjoy herself. That’s a fairly unforgivable traveling sin. The only stereotype worse than the loud American is the I’ve-been-everywhere snob. And in case I’m unknowingly a loud American, I can’t possibly risk being both.

Budapest

2005-06-13T13:15:00.000-04:00

Buda and Pest are actually their own cities but have come to be known by their combined name. Here are some pictures...

No One Told You Life Was Going To Be This Way

2005-06-09T01:29:00.000-04:00

Hark! Backpacker! Come to Vang Vieng. It’s a lovely Laotian hamlet just north of Vientiane and it won’t take more than a couple days of your time, assuming you muster the good sense to leave. Get off the bus and choose a guesthouse, any ole’ guesthouse, they’re all the same. Get a nice one down on the river if you like. Look at the limestone cliffs on the other side of the water, watch the sun go down behind them from your porch.

Get dinner at a restaurant, any ole’ restaurant, they’re all the same. You’ll see. Same menu, same prices, same little cushioned platforms with little knee-high tables. The seats all face TV’s playing episodes of Friends. All the places—four or five of them can be seen from one spot in the middle of the dusty main road—are not only all playing Friends, but playing the same season of Friends at the same time. This is not hyperbole in any form, so please friend, really, choose any ole’ restaurant. You’ll choose the one that’s always crowded of course because you think maybe you’ll start a conversation with one of the other solos taking up their own booth. You might even nod a knowing nod at the girl you left in the middle of season eight last night, who is now eating breakfast to the early episodes of season nine. You’ll make a joke to the girls to the right about them maybe watching too many episodes if they know there the rapid fire “da-dam-da-dam” hits in the “I’ll Be There For You” open. You’ll smile appreciatively at the different quick-cutting shots they use in the open from season to season. You’ll think about peaking your head into one of the dim, sparse bars that have dared to play Kill Bill instead. (This is literally the only other programming I’ve seen in any of the bars of Vang Vieng). But you’ll see it’s a bad copy of the movie and keep walking.

In the day go to a travel place, any ole’ travel place, and rent a tube. You’ll know the tubes are all the same because no matter who you give your $4 to, the same pick-up picks you up and drives you three miles up the river. They drop you all off and give you good-sized yellow inner tubes and you jump in the river. You drift down slowly; no, leisurely, with your French-Canadian friends and the Aussie girls who shared your pick-up and the Danish couple that didn’t speak but were physically in the pick-up too. After not long guys on the banks of the river start throwing ropes and bamboo sticks at you, shouting “jump and beer, jump and Lao beer.” You grab a rope and they pull you to the side of the river. They’ve built little bamboo platforms on the edge of the river. They’ll watch your tube for you as you buy a Lao beer and jump off their platform into the river. The jump is free if you buy a beer. If you don’t buy a beer the jump costs 5000 kip, half the price of a beer. So you buy the beer and make the jump—10 to 20 feet depending on the place. The water is deep enough, they insist, and on your first jump—when you fold your legs to stop from going in too deep—you can’t even touch bottom. The second time you do more of a pencil jump, going much further down and hitting your left foot hard on the rocky bottom and maybe breaking a bone.

You drift along for awhile and get another beer and talk to the Aussie girls and start to feel tired that way you do when you drink in the afternoon. You get back and take a shower and head into town for a coffee and a snack. A coffee and snack should be the length of one Friends episode (all the commercials are cut out and they play on an incessant, continual, addictive loop). You think you’ll make something out of your evening after the snack but then it starts pouring and there’s no way you’re walking anywhere in that so you do some e-mail and it’s still raining so you have to go back and watch a few more episodes and get some dinner and watch a few more episodes. You have to be sad that you’re leaving Asia and its quirky, pointless, carbon-copied backpacker sloth-villes. So please, visit Vang Vieng or Ko Samui or Siem Reap or Nha Trang. Any ole’ backpacker town, they’re all the same. But you’ll remember Vang Vieng; that’s the one with the tubes on the river under the limestone cliffs.

Route 13

2005-06-05T08:53:00.000-04:00

Carving though the Lao mountains down Rt 13 must be one of the prettiest bus trips anywhere. The distant green hills don’t roll so much as dance, the limestone jutting up sharp above the deep valleys as if someone had decided to combine Ireland, Thailand, and New Zealand into one place. To enhance the postcard effect, accommodating locals have built their thatch roofed homes above the valley and along the road. So after Rt 13 climbs up through a great stretch of undulating green, you look back at the coiled road behind you, wrapped hard around the belly of the mountain and take a blurry picture from the bumpy bus.

It’s all almost enough to make you forget how mortally dangerous Rt 13 can be. The problems go far beyond the annoyance of a laptop sliding across your lap each time the bus makes one of its hairpin turns, but I best mention that one first before it gets lost in the list. The hairpin turns cause all manner of difficulties. The constant, looming possibility of careening off the side of the road is sure to bother some. I wasn’t worried about that because I was asleep. I had reclined my seat a few inches and dozed off when suddenly someone punched me square in the temple. The right-cross had been fired by the bus itself, which by taking a hard turn had whipped my slumbering head against the window. For reasons sufficient to the bus’ designer, there is a hard plastic bar along the window at temple-level. There are no mirrors on the bus so I don’t know yet if I have a black eye.

There are sliding windows just below the black-eye bar on the side of the bus. The Lao man in front of me likes to stick his head outside the window—it just fits—and vomit onto Rt 13. It is a curvy, bumpy, windy ride and if it doesn’t get your head or your stomach maybe someone will blow up your bus. That’s happened a few times too so some people don’t like to make the nine hour ride between Luang Prabang and Vientiane. But Rt 13 has much to offer; the mountains, the thatch-roofed houses…well I guess that’s basically it. But as I’ve said there are plenty of distractions. I’d mention some more but the damn laptop won’t stop sliding and my friend in the fourth row has his head outside again.

When Friday Rested

2005-06-05T08:50:00.000-04:00

The best water pressure in Asia is found after a 30-minute walk up Kuang Si falls. When you find that certain spot, almost hidden along the badly marked trail, the water comes rushing down so hard you have to brace your neck against it’s force. Then you jump into the pool below and talk to a British girl about Asia while your friend talks to her friend. You’re on the edge of a pool, right where the water slides down another 30 feet; it’s trying to push you over the edge too. You can see all the way down to where you started walking up, which must be a couple hundred feet below.

When you spend your Thursday at Kuang Si falls, it will be hard for your Friday to measure up so it might be best for Friday not to compete. That’s what our Friday did—mine and Kym’s, that is. My Aussie roommate Kym and I are both men with women’s names which can be convenient for girls you hang out with who mention you on their blog and have boyfriends back home.

Kym and my Friday consisted of waking up at 11, getting breakfast and confiding in each other that neither of us minded if we didn’t do much. In the afternoon Kym bought a boat ticket and I did computer work.

Around 5pm, our Friday having successfully conserved its energy, we set out on adventure. Kym had rented a bike and I got one too. The bikes only cost $1 for 24 hours so it didn’t matter that we weren’t really going anywhere. We cruised through town along the Mekong River and Kym spotted a shop along the way selling Lao whiskey. The whiskey was called Tiger, and since Kym had been swiped at by a playful, somewhat-caged tiger the previous day at the falls, he felt compelled to buy the bottle. It also helped that it was $.80.

I suggested we get some coke for the whiskey but Kym was afraid it would get warm. “Warm?” I asked. “Aren’t we drinking it now?” And so we were.

There weren’t any plastic cups to be had so Kym called on some Asian ingenuity. Soda is often sold in re-used glass bottles and if you want to take it away they pour it into a plastic bag, put a straw in it and tie off the top of the bag. All through Asia there are people drinking out of plastic bags, which is quite odd at first. We got a couple bags of Pepsi and found a spot along the Mekong. We added too much Tiger whiskey and a bottle each of M-150 (a Red Bull knockoff).

An Australian girl came by and said hello. She was drinking a papaya shake out of a plastic bag. It was quite good, and even better with a ton of whiskey in it.

As the sun went down on the Mekong and Kym and I got drunk, we considered feeling sympathy for Johanna and Maya, the American sisters who would have to deal with us at dinner in our Tiger-induced state. It was a brief consideration.

We had two hours before we had to meet them and we scheduled our evening with great care. After downing half the bottle of whiskey we biked through town in pursuit of a massage. In addition to buying a boat ticket, Kym had spent his day surveying the massage options of Luang Prabang. (These are the types of concerns that face backpackers when they aren’t visiting waterfalls). We settled on a place and had our massages. I was awake for several stretches of mine, getting my $3 worth.

At 8pm we met the girls at the shop in the night market with all the round lanterns. We were still a bit groggy from our whiskey/massage evening and Maya clearly had reservations about getting on the back seat of Kym’s bike. But when Johanna got on mine, her sister followed suit and then we were dodging shoppers in the narrow space between stalls. The bikes could have been a bit steadier and the path a bit more designed for bike traffic but we made it through the market and down an ally back to the massage place. It was also a soup place. The bowls of traditional soup—noodles, beef, greens, mint, lime, chilies—were $.50 each.

After soup we climbed back on the bikes, picked up some fresh spring rolls at a stand along the way, and cruised through town. Luang Prabang is a great town to bike through and it’s my hope to find more towns so pleasant and accessible by bike. After a while we found Hive, a classy, touristy bar where the 20oz beers are $1.20 instead of $.80. We shared many Beer Laos (or is it Beers Lao, like Attorneys General?).

Everything in Laung Prabang shuts down early—smart of us to start early then, wasn’t it?—so around 11:30pm they kicked us out. The girls hopped on our backseats and we drove them home. There's something really cool about peddling a girl back to her guesthouse at the end of the night.

After we dropped them off, Kym and I heading back along the Mekong towards our place and I shouted across to him that I was hungry. We passed a place that still had a couple lights on and saw that the workers were sitting down to eat. We asked if they had any more of the soup they were eating but they didn’t. They could make us some barbeque soup though, for 35,000 kip ($3.50). “Thirty-five thousand, oh no, so much!” Kym shouted with a smile and a quasi-Lao accent. “I’m a poor backpacker, I have no money. Thirty-five is too much.”

I knew he was enjoying this so I went to the bathroom and when I returned we had procured soup and two drinks for 30,000 ($3.00). The table had a ceramic pit in the middle of it and they came by and filled it with hot coals. Then they put a big metal plate over it. It wasn’t really a plate though—it had a trough around the edges which they filled with water and a raised area in the middle that functioned as a grill. Meat went on the grill part and vegetables and noodles went into the broth. “It’s the Asian Benihana,” Johanna observed, when I brought her and Maya there the next day. The soup cooked there in front of us and Kym explained that Aussie should be pronounced as if the “s”s are “z”s and that the first syllable in “Australia” should sound like “us.” Our soup attendant ladled the broth into our bowls.

Kym and I had our soup and got on our bikes. It was pouring and we took off our shirts and tucked them into our shorts and peddled hard through the thick rain. The streets were empty and silent except for the rain. The receptionist at our guesthouse heard us parking our bikes and opened the door even before we knocked. He had long before gone to sleep on the floor between the reception desk and the entry door but he knew the guys from room two were still out.

We came in soaked and topless, trying not to get things too wet on the way. We changed into dry clothes and Kym packed up because the slow-boat was leaving in six hours. In the morning, with his pack already slung onto his back, he shook me awake and said goodbye and wished me safe travels and left to go north.

Vietnam in Pictures

2005-05-30T08:50:00.000-04:00

After meeting in Saigon, Elise and I took a tour of the Mekong Delta.

This is the famous, somewhat disappointing floating market near Cantho. "There's not enough commerce," Elise complained. "No one is buying anything from these poor people, it makes me sad."

There are no traffic lights in Vietnam and you're constantly faced with crossing intersections like this. Somehow if you just walk blindly across the street (and closing your eyes is pretty tempting) you make it across safely.

Elise wanted a nice night out so I worked for a few hours as a fruit vendor.

The rice terraces of Sapa were a highlight of the trip. I saw a 10 year old Lonely Planet in a bookstore today and turned to the Sapa section. It was a paragraph long and warned that there wasn't even reliable transportation into Sapa. Things have changed greatly in the last decade and it is now a serious tourist destination.

Kids everywhere love watching footage of themselves. Often I turn the screen around so they can see themselves in the monitor as I record. From New Zealand to Nepal every kid in the world seems to see this as an invitation to go berzerk.

Halong Bay is a massive collection of limestone cliffs. It's really quite impressive. Elise and I took a day long cruise around the Bay as the last stop on our trip.

Leaving on Jet Plane

2005-05-30T00:30:00.000-04:00

I think when I wake up tomorrow the trip will start again. I’ll fly to Vientiane, Laos and say goodbye to Vietnam and three weeks of air-conditioned rooms shared with New York travel companions. It’s been nice having Jason and Elise riding shotgun for most of May but there isn’t much point in worrying about whether I prefer traveling with friends from home or not because I don’t have much choice anyway. They just sort of showed up. And then they left. Elise’s departure tonight was hard but, as she often reminds me, I don’t need to reveal the details of my personal life on the internet, so I’ll leave it at that.

While Jason and Elise were here I didn’t do much writing or work on the documentary. I didn’t meet many new people. I never felt lonely and rarely felt stressed. It was like a vacation from the vacation and now I’m ready to get back to business. I can feel my head turning back on; a constant dialogue is replaced by an internal monologue. In a way it feels more natural or at least familiar.

On the way back from leaving Elise at the airport I met up with a Japanese backpacker just getting into Hanoi. I helped her find an area in the city with a lot of guesthouses (with the help of her Lonely Planet). It was late and everything was closed up and I had to bang on the closed metal gate to get let into my place. The groggy receptionist lied to the Japanese girl, saying there were no vacancies. I headed up to room 304 and she went down the street looking for another place to stay. It was the quintessential backpacker relationship; we met, traded stories, helped each other pass some time and find our way, then parted.

It occurred to me that there might be some lesson in my trip to the airport, in the idea that I had once again left someone I cared about but was satisfied to pass the time with someone I knew I’d never have to care about and could painlessly leave. But there’s no need to delve into the details of my personal life, Elise would remind me. And anyway, I’m heading back to the airport in six hours so maybe it will be clear then.

How I Spent $8200

2005-05-30T00:28:00.000-04:00

I’m keeping detailed records of where the money is going and I thought some of you might be interested to see how the expenses have broken down so far.

On average I’ve spent $58/day but the expenses have varied quite a bit from country to country. These are the averages for each county (excluding international flights and medical bills which I don’t count towards specific countries but have cost about $10/day over the course of the trip and are figured into the $58/day number):

Australia (44 days) $70/day
New Zealand (21 days) $67
Thailand (29 days) $31
India (10 days) $18
Nepal (14 days) $39
Cambodia (10 days) $29
Vietnam (13 days) $31

Those totals are the product of the specifics of my trip, not simply a reflection of the costs of those countries. For instance, India and Nepal are equally cheap but in India I had very low lodging costs because I stayed with families and split rooms with Christian while in Nepal I took an expensive trek and two domestic flights.

I’ve broken down my expenses into a few categories. Travel, food, and accommodation are the main culprits. On a day-to-day basis they’re equal burdens but the cumulative travel total is significantly higher than the others because of a few major flight expenses.
Travel $3087($22/day)
Food & drink $1594 ($11)
Accommodation $1487 ($11)
Other $686 ($5)
Medical $522 ($4)
Business $459 ($4)
Internet/phone $380 ($3)

With Europe on the way things are bound to get pricier but if I can maintain my current spending for the rest of the trip I’ll need another $12,250 (which thanks to my late generously compensated job I thankfully have). Europe on $60/day is ambitious, but I’m becoming a more efficient traveler and if there’s a better place to sleep on the street than Paris in July I’m not sure where.

The Picture of Gandhi in the Trash or Hiding Somewhere in My Bag

2005-05-23T02:00:00.000-04:00

May 8, Delhi International Airpot
You may have seen me a few minutes ago digging through the trash in the international departure area here at the Delhi airport. I suppose I should explain.

I had been in the check-in line for my flight to Bangkok on the way to Cambodia when I checked all my pockets thrice and realized all my money was missing. There wasn’t much money to miss, just one 500 rupee note actually, but given what I’d gone through to end up with one 500 rupee note I decided it was worth a slightly soggy rummage through the bin where I had tossed an empty envelope that may have been less empty than I had hoped.

I shared an autorickshaw to the airport with a nice nineteen year old English girl who was on the way to the airport to take the second flight of her life. Her first flight, the first time she’d ever left home, had been to come to India three months ago. There’s a distinction between incredible bravery and blind stupidity but there’s no sense teasing it out here. Anyway on her way to the airport she was carrying 160 rupees, which is the equivalent of $3 and constituted her entire net worth. “Actually if I had to I could transfer eight pounds from my savings account to my checking account and withdraw it if I had to,” she said. “I tried withdrawing 100 rupees today but it said I had insufficient funds.”

After paying her half of the 200-rupee fare she would be left with 60 Indian rupees for her flight to Kuwait, the five-hour layover there and then the trip to Heathrow where her sister will be waiting, hopefully. She told me she had budgeted her expenses so that her money would just barely last to the end of her trip. She is apparently a precise young woman.

So when we paid the autorickshaw driver he of course didn’t have change. I owed 100 rupees but only had 70 rupees in small currency and the 500 rupee note. He couldn’t make change for the 500 so eventually the English girl contributed an extra 30 rupees to go with my 70. These 30 rupees made up half of her money.

When she got held up entering the terminal (because her flight is still hours away) we were split up before I could pay her the 30 rupees I owed her. Part of me thought I should just give her my 500 rupees but I was rather fixated on the money myself because I’m trying to take one crisp bill from each country I visit and when you’re paying for those last few things on the way out of a place it can be hard to budget correctly.

Five-hundred rupees (about $22) is a big note to put in a scrap book so I was thinking I’d buy a souvenir and a drink at the airport and pocket a 100 or 50. I was thinking about this when I rummaged through my pockets for the 500 rupee bill which wasn’t there. Having lost and found countless things in the last four months I have a clear theory on finding them: You need to stop looking and then they’ll appear. So I’ve stopped digging through my bag and re-checking my pockets. I even resisted the urge to go back to the trashcan and have another dig. I’m just sitting here outside Gate 9 waiting for them to announce boarding so all the Indians can give me one more Indian show and scrum around the entrance to the gate as if the terminal were on fire.

In Bangkok I won’t have any baht and when I get to Phnom Phen I’m unsure if there will be any ATMs or even if they’ll let me into the country without an onward ticket. These things are concerns. But that damn 500 rupee note with the etching of Ghandi and the little pieces of silver foil woven into it is what I’d really like to find. Not that I’m looking.

Moving On Up

2005-05-23T01:59:00.000-04:00

May 8
Jason, my very gainfully employed friend from New York met me in Cambodia for ten days of Southeast Asian fun. He’s the first person I’ve met during the four months of my trip who I knew before the trip. I’d warned Jason—and everyone else—that I’d need to maintain my Spartan budget when he visited and that he should be ready for the backpacking lifestyle upon arrival. So I was a bit concerned when he e-mailed saying he’d booked a room at the top hotel in Cambodia. “When else will I be able to stay in the best hotel in a country?” he asked, ignoring both the clear fact he could likely afford the top hotel in any country and that it might not be absolutely necessary to stay in the top hotel in a country.

I arrived in Phnom Penh some hours before him and took a moto to the Raffles Hotel Royale. “Very expensive,” my moto driver noted after I disclosed our destination. (My residence the day before had been a $3 flophouse in Delhi with a room just big enough to fit a twin bed and my bag. The communal , outdoor shower was little more than a pipe hung above a slab of concrete with ample space in the crack of the ill-hinged door to see what was happening outside).

The moto dropped me at the base of a tall iron gate and I slung my packs on and marched through the large, circular driveway towards the towering hotel. I was out of place with my backpack, but it felt better to look a little poorer than everyone else than to be a lot richer than everyone. I shuffled up the red-carpeted steps and two smiling attendants opened the front doors for me. I was told to sit in the lounge and sip a complementary drink while my room was sorted out.

There was some confusion with the reservation—and by confusion I guess I mean they had no record of it but were willing to ask me to write down my name and reservation number on a piece of paper about five times over the course of 90 minutes, perhaps in the hope that either my name or reservation number had changed since the last time they’d asked.

An interesting thing happened. I quickly slipped into old-corporate-Brook. I was annoyed and unforgiving for their poor service. This was a high-end hotel, I was paying (okay Jason was paying) top dollar for the room and I wanted it all sorted our by the time I finished my fruity drink. I’ve endured every manner of traveling inconvenience in the last few months and it’s made me immune to them all. No number of canceled trains or delayed buses can tweak my pulse. But when the five star hotel provided three star service I was ready to demand to speak to the manager. And then I did ask to speak to him. After telling him how it was and how it was going to be I checked into room 139, tipped the bellhop for carrying my bag (the sight of a bellhop carrying my bag was well worth the full dollar) and sat down on the first real mattress I’d seen in a month. The room had a TV. With cable. It had an enclosed shower (as opposed to the traditional showerhead jutting out of a wall in the middle of the bathroom). It had a bathtub. It was the four-month anniversary of my departure and this was the first time I’d had any of these amenities in my room. It was fantastic.

After my shower I laid on the bed and watched BBC and CNBC. Then I took a bath. Then I went in the pool. Then I took another shower. I felt kind of bad enjoying it, like I was betraying myself somehow. But before my fingers even started to prune the feeling had been loofahed away.

The Right Price

2005-05-23T01:58:00.000-04:00

May 10
The problem with staying at the best hotel in Cambodia is all the moto drivers outside the gates know you’re staying at the best hotel in Cambodia. So when Jason and I walked out and asked for a lift to the Killing Fields they initially demanded $15. This price was too ridiculously excessive to merit negotiation. This called for a walk away.

Jason and I started walking west and the gaggle of drivers followed as I knew they would. They shouted out competing, decreasing prices as we walked but were still in the $8-10 range. I knew we could get a better price in the backpacker area across the main road and I knew the drivers knew that too. So we paused at the edge of the on-rushing traffic not only because crossing 12 “lanes” of motorbikes calls for a moment of quiet reflection but also to allow the drivers who had followed us down the street from the fancy hotel to give us the right price.

“Okay, five dollars,” an autorickshaw driver offered.

Jason, to whom the difference between $15 and $5 matters little, was impressed (or at least pretended to be impressed). “You definitely know how to work the system,” he said. It was the greatest gift of Jason’s visit to have a fresh set of eyes on an experience that’s no longer fresh.

So when we made friends with the girls at the café, or loaded wood into the van, or ran into the same girls from New York at dinner that we had met at Angkor Wat earlier that day it all felt fresher. It wasn’t just that I could see Jason discovering the fundamental though indefinable elements of backpacking, it was that I was somehow able to re-discover them myself.

Once we escaped the gravitational pull of the Hotel Royale it was indeed a backpacking week. Jason, who as a Wall Street trader makes a career of finding the right price spent his time in Cambodia making a game of finding the right price. I couldn’t completely believe him when he conveyed shock or disgust at a $4 entrée or a $2 taxi but his performance was still convincing and welcomed.

As it turned out the economizing was necessary because Cambodia is a country without a single ATM machine. I know there are blocks in Manhattan that don’t have ATMs (I’ve never seen one but they must exist). This is an entire country—and not some Vatican -sized thing—that doesn’t have one cash machine. I’ve been carrying an emergency stash to $200US and it came quite in handy, especially since US dollars are the unofficial currency of Cambodia. Jason had brought along $300 and this small bankroll got us through our trip. On our last night we gathered our remaining funds--$11—and wondered how we would afford 1) my bus ticket to Vietnam, 2) dinner and beers to celebrate Jason’s birthday, and 3) everything else. The answer came in the form of a Western Union, which was kind enough to hand over some Benjamins in exchange for an imprint of Jason’s Visa. We were flush and Jason was headed home and there was no more pretending about $2 taxis.

Nam Means Water and That's Good Enough for Me

2005-05-23T01:56:00.000-04:00

May 18
My passport tells me there are six countries from which I cannot purchase or import goods. The list was established in 1993 and names Iraq, Libya, Cuba, North Korea, Yugoslavia, and Vietnam. In the last 12 years Libya has become something of a friend, North Korea something of a problem, and Iraq something of a colony or beacon or albatross depending on where you’re standing. Vietnam has become a tourist destination.

There’s the natural beauty of the Mekong delta and Halong Bay. There’s the sobering Abu Gharib foreshadowing of the War Remnants Museum. And just outside Ho Chi Minh city, at the end of a 40 minutes ride most tourists don’t even think to make is a piece of contemporary Vietnamese culture far less melancholy and much more refreshing than images of American servicemen smiling over Vietnamese body parts. It’s called the Saigon Water Park and it’s where Elise chose to spend her first afternoon on the Asian continent.

For adventure and economy the best mode of transportation is on the back of a motorbike. It was Elise’s first go on the death traps and she arrived at our destination white knuckled. I would like to describe the otherworldly nature of Saigon highways but I’m afraid I’m the boy who cried “traffic” after Thailand and India. Sparing you the details then, I’ll say India and Vietnam tie for craziest roads ahead of Thailand and Cambodia.

We thought the water park might be closed because there was no one there, but it turned out to be open for another two hours. We paid our $4 and bounced towards the slides, wavepool and lazy river. There were about 20 other patrons in the park and an equal number of employees who seemed notably unconcerned with safety procedure.

I’ve seen all the damn temples and markets I can possibly appreciate so watching a movie or going to a waterpark is a great thrill for me. I didn’t think Elise would be so inclined though and I wondered if she’d be willing to admit to folks back home that she’d chosen the twisty slide over the War Remnants Museum. “Yeah, why not?” she said before diving headlong on a watery luge.

Angkor Wat (Cambodia) in Pictures

2005-05-23T01:19:00.000-04:00

Nepal in Pictures

2005-05-23T01:14:00.000-04:00

Safe in Saigon

2005-05-17T09:19:00.000-04:00

An hour breakdown at the edge of Cambodia couldn't stop me and my bus from making it from Phnom Penh to Saigon today. (Celebrating Jason's birthday until 2am couldn't stop me from making the 6:30am bus either). First impressions of Vietnam are quite positive. Proper blog entries on Cambodia are forthcoming but computer time is harder to come by when you have company as I did in Cambodia with Jason and will in Vietnam once I pick up Elise from the airport in a couple hours.

I Hear the Waves Crashing

2005-05-12T11:47:00.000-04:00

The hip hop drowns the ocean a bit, but still you can hear the waves. Jason and I are down on the south shores of Cambodia after a marathon travel day from the temples of Angkor Wat. He was taken aback by the unusual transportation we were forced onto for the 12 hour trip here. When the connecting bus from Phenom Penh was full we had to take a mini-bus (read: beat-up van) that stopped periodically on the 200 mile trip to pick up whoever wanted a ride. Then it stopped in a village to load some logs into the back and we helped pack them in as the villagers laughed and pointed a bit. It's nice to have a fresh set of eyes to remind me how absurd/interesting it all is. I'm a bit numb to the novelty of loading mini-vans with lumber. We have a bungalow on the beach and it seems quite nice and we're having a lovely time and I don’t think Jason wants to fly back to his desk but he will in a few days.

Meeting Up with Angelina Jolie

2005-05-07T11:48:00.000-04:00

Not sure if Ms. Jolie will be trolling the Cambodian shores this week, but you can always hope. Heading on overnight flight from Delhi to Bangkok to Phnom Penh. When you've taken overnight buses and sleeper trains for the last few months a red eye flight sounds inviting, a coach seat luxurious. Will meet NYC Jason and hopefully not have awful clash between my cheapness and his un-cheapness. The killing fields, Angkor Wat and the beach should make a nice little week. If anyone has a message for Angie please e-mail me.

Talk to me

2005-05-05T11:13:00.000-04:00

I'll be on Instant Messenger tomorrow (Friday) around 10am Eastern.

Trekking in Nepal

2005-05-04T00:53:00.000-04:00

There’s really no descent when you fly from Pokhara to Jomsom, Nepal. You take off from 2500 feet, sail between peaks and through wind gusts up to 8500 feet and then find the runway beneath you.

Yuba and I made the flight early Thursday morning. They don’t fly into Jomson after noon because the wind is too strong. We set out on foot from the little airstrip and through the little town. I had changed from short sleeves to long because the temperature had fallen as we had climbed.

After registering with the military people carrying old guns and wearing blue fatigues we walked along the riverbed for a couple hours. When the monsoons come all the rivers flood and getting around is a hillier and more time consuming proposition.

It was always easy to choose when to have lunch because there were only settlements every hour or so. The average village would have a couple hundred residents living in brick, whitewashed houses. We found a village at the base of the mountain and Yuba directed us to a guest house/restaurant.

Yuba is 26 though he insists he is 27 because he was born in 1978. The fact that he was born in September of that year and it is currently May is irrelevant to him. If it is 2005 and you were born in 1978 then you’re 27. It’s worth pointing out that Yuba is a smart guy. He’s getting some sort of IT bachelors degree and it’s only because the school is on break that we was able to guide me for the week.

I’m paying—overpaying I’m pretty sure—$22/day for the guide, food, and accommodation. I can’t imagine Yuba is seeing more than $10/day but this seems like pretty good work. The average worker in Nepal makes about $350 a year, he told me.

Yuba is a Brahman which is one the top castes in Nepal. The caste system is quite entrenched here and though Yuba is more attracted to Mongolin girls (who look vaguely Japanese) than Brahmans he thinks it would be more trouble than it’s worth to marry one. He dated a Mongolin girl for a couple years before she decided it just wouldn’t work.

(Nepal courtship and public health aside: Unlike other developing countries Nepal doesn’t have an AIDS problem because there is virtually no pre-marital sex.)

I think of castes as class distinctions but really they’re ethnic groups, which makes it a harder system to break; you look at someone and know their place. It was interesting to see Yuba get on so well with all the people we encountered. He has friends from various castes, he told me, but he’s not able to bring people from the low castes home where his parents live. In a country where the average worker makes about 1% of the average American income they still have that level of economic/racial discrimination. I don’t know what the lesson is in that, but there is one I’m sure.

Anyway, after lunch the real work began. We would climb up to Muktinath (12,500 feet) for the best Himalayan views of our trek. As we trudged up hill we were joined by two women who had been on our flight. The only way to get around here is to walk so there were lots of people “commuting” between villages. The one in the flowing blue outfit was 18 and the one in red was 16, if you could believe anything they said, which was debatable. They were a cheeky pair, Yuba told me later. They talked dirty to him but he couldn’t translate exactly what they’d said because of his limited English and tendency to giggle when explaining the conversation. They asked me why I hadn’t come with my girlfriend.

When we reached their village the girls invited us in for some tea. I’ve drunk more tea in a week in Nepal than during the rest of my life. I probably have four cups a day on average. Yuba and I kept climbing after the tea and I was huffing and puffing a bit. It wasn’t any worse than a good hard run. I was carrying about 25 pounds of gear, which I think was the heaviest pack I saw shouldered by anyone who wasn’t being paid or fed an oat bag for their labor.

Around 11,000 feet we ran into some women washing dishes in a stream. They spoke to Yuba and next thing I knew we were heading into one of their huts. They were holding their annual “Mother’s Committee” event and they invited us in. There were 25 middle-aged and older women sitting along the walls of the small room. They offered us some oat brandy which they had clearly been sampling themselves for the better part of the day. Yuba brought out his flute and played a couple tunes and the women got up and danced and clapped and sang. I was invited to dance with them and in a rare moment of choosing self-respect over a good piece of video, I declined.

Some time when you’re out with my friend Katie, who used to live in Denver and now lives in New York, ask her about the varying effects of alcohol at different elevations. She’ll tell you about the great quantities a Coloradoan can drink at sea level and how easy it is to get drunk when you’re a mile high, etc etc. After she explains all this, you can tell her the story of how I drank two glasses of Nepalese moonshine at 11,000 feet and then endeavored to climb another 1500 vertical feet.

Yuba doesn’t generally drink and he was pretty well hammered when we left the hut. He’s a giggly drunk and was good company. What I felt as we marched upwards was a rhythmic throbbing in my temples, seemingly in time with my pulse. It was no use resting because the pain was worst when we started up again so I tried to fight through it and get to the damn guesthouse.

We made it there and I was quite sore and weary. I’ll go ahead and admit at this point that the Jomsom trail is known as one of the easier Himalayan treks. “It’s good for old people, not young people like you,” a friendly Pokharian told me when I returned.

It was too cold and my head hurt too much to do much sleeping and in the morning I staggered out of bed to watch the sun rise over the mountains. My head hurt a lot. Yuba dragged me up to some super-holy Buddhist/Hindu temple where a sign described the symptoms of altitude sickness. At least then I knew the cause of my intense headache and nausea.

We walked back down to Jomsom and my headache went away. Going from 2500 to 12,500 feet in one afternoon had been a poor idea. Doing it with a belly full of oat brandy hadn’t helped much.

On the second night, back in Jomsom, I tried to call home to wish my mom a happy birthday. The call was 190 rupees ($2.70) a minute. By comparison, one of the guesthouses we stayed at offered dorm beds for $.50 a night. If we’re really looking for perspective, I could point out that a two-hour call would cost an average worker a year’s pay. All these figures turned out to be irrelevant though because the woman with the phone couldn’t get through on any of her 50 or 60 attempts. I was able to get through the next morning and the four minutes were worth all $11, I’m sure.

Yuba and I spent the next four days walking back down to where we had started. It had taken 30 minutes to fly from Pokhara to Jomson and it took six days walking and five hours in a miserable bus to get back.

In New Zealand everyone loves to tell you how there are ten times as many sheep as people. I haven’t seen any statistics like that here, but we definitely saw a lot more donkeys than humans during our week. They carry food and supplies from place to place since that’s the only way to transport stuff. If you want to know how far our culture has permeated the world, consider this: On a hillside in Nepal where the only way to get anything anywhere is on the back of a donkey, they guy directing the donkeys is wearing a Cleveland Indians baseball hat. There is no escape from America.

There are no actual Americans here though. Since 2001 the number of American tourists has plummeted (actually since late ’01 the overall number of visitors to Nepal has been cut roughly in half). The main groups here now are English, Australian, German, French, Japanese, and Korean. Also—like Swedes in Thailand—there is a totally disproportionate number of Israelis here.

On the trail and in the guesthouses these last six days Yuba and I saw few of any of them. There were the donkeys and the girls in the brightly colored outfits, there were the women washing dishes in the river and the guards with their heavy wooden rifles, there was the man walking down from Muktinath barefoot. Yuba gave him his sandals. “I saw a list of the poorest countries of the world,” Yuba told me. “Nepal wasn’t at the bottom, but it was close to the bottom, just a few countries were below us. But that isn’t right. Nepal isn’t poor. The government is poor but the people aren’t. Everyone here has a home and has food to eat. We’re okay.”

On the Nepal Side

2005-04-27T11:17:00.000-04:00

April 23
The big screened windows that line two walls of our Bhairawa, Nepal room have turned the darkest blue-grey of dusk. We’re lit by a tall-flamed candle that the nice Nepalese man with the poor English brought up with our second Katmandu beer. There’s no power of course. There are five hours left in April 23—actually a little less since we moved watches ahead 15 minutes when crossing into Nepal—but already it’s one of the more remarkable days of the trip.

Christian and I boarded a train in Varanasi just past midnight this morning. It would take us to Gorakhpur, three hours from the Nepal border where we’d take a bus to the end of India, then take another bus into the heart of Nepal. It would be: six-hour train, three-hour bus, ten-hour bus. If all went as planned, as we knew it wouldn’t.

In the train we unpacked our packs, wiped down our sleeper births and padlocked our valuables to the provided chains. I changed into my pajama bottoms and we took pictures of each other making the steerage quality bunks into our home for the night.

The train pulled out and the conductor checked our tickets and let us know we were on the wrong train. We threw everything into our bags, frantically found our keys and unlocked our valuables and ran for the door to jump out of the accelerating train. This was an entertaining spectacle to our fellow passengers. The train door was locked. “It’s locked!” I shouted behind me. I went to try the door in the next car and Christian went to the door on the far side of our car. The door I tried was jammed too so I ran back towards Christian. When I reached the end of the car the door was open and Christian was gone. “Jump?” I asked into the darkness. “Jump,” I heard back.

So me and the 45 pounds of gear just barely contained in my two bags leapt from the wrong train and onto the cement platform. It was instantly recognized as one of the great moments of the trip. The lone casualty of the 45-second packing insanity seems to be my digital camera case. It is the smallest of small prices to pay.

We got on the right train and woke up around 7am and then had to catch a bus to the border. This was a hassle because everyone is trying to rip you off with an overpriced ticket. We got the correct 50 rupee ($1.20) ticket but only after burning almost an hour. We got to the border around noon and walked over to the Nepal side. The immigration people were pleasant and efficient despite warnings to the contrary.

On the Nepal side a little after 12:30pm we looked for a bus to make the 9-hour trip to Katmandu or Pokhara. We got caught up with some travel agency jive and missed the last day-bus we had any chance of catching (though we might have lost any real hope of catching it when we wasted that hour looking for the previous bus). The only buses left were leaving in the evening and because of the curfews in Nepal they would have to pull over and stop from 9pm until 3am. We would be stuck on the bus for 14 hours! Christian has a ridiculous four days to see Nepal and really wanted to get there tonight. We tried hiring a car to drive us but when we finally decided to bite the 2200-rupee bullet it was too late to get the car in time to beat the curfew. We tried hitching a ride with some sort of religious man dressed in orange who said he could get through the check-points without stopping for the curfew but he ended up getting on one of the buses.

So we’re here at the hotel across from the bus stand waiting for the 5am bus to take us to Pokhara and in the meantime we’re having Katmandu beer, two bottles of which cost as much as our room (US$3). Everything seems like it will be quite cheap. Everyone seems like they will be quite friendly. And when the near Civil War and the lack of power force us into our candlelit rooms as night falls, it’s nice to have a friendly Nepali with bad English to bring you mediocre local beer.

The Bus to Pokhara

2005-04-27T11:16:00.000-04:00

April 25
The bus to Pokhara took ten hours. It was a pleasant enough minibus with 32 seats and about 50 people sitting. Christian said someone had a hen with them but I never saw or heard the bird. Some old women were sitting on the floor which made me feel bad but I’m sure they didn’t pay 290 rupees for the trip like we did so I didn’t feel too bad.

The blaring Nepalese music blowing through the speaker above my head was not Christian or my favorite part of the trip. There were probably about 15 or 20 government checkpoints spread across the 150 miles. The guards wear blue fatigues and carry carbines. When we reached the outskirts of Pokhara all the men of fighting age had to get off the bus and walk across a checkpoint on foot for 100 yards. Christian and I were able to stay on the bus. In contrast to India where white skin just makes you a tout target, being a foreigner in Nepal seems like it has a lot of perks. There’s an 11pm curfew in Pokhara but last night our waiter at the Maya Café told us “It’s only for us, for the Nepalese. You can stay out as late as you like, enjoy yourself.”

Krishna, the 25 year old bookstore owner I spoke with today said, “Life is like chocolate box,” when I told him I was traveling for a year. He hadn’t heard of the movie the reference was from but he took the meaning well. “It’s like chocolates for you,” he said. “For us it’s like we live in a cage.” I asked, leadingly, what the difference was between America and Nepal. “It the difference between the sky and the earth,” he said.

Nepal is in the midst of two years of significant civil strife as Maoist forces are held in check by an increasingly restrictive monarchy. A couple months ago the King fired a bunch of democratically elected officials. Krishna didn’t like that at all but said he thought most of the democratic politicians were crooks anyway. He didn’t fully blame (or credit) the King for the action either, saying he thought someone else was using “a remote control” to influence Nepal. He thought India was most likely to blame but the U.S. and England “are too curious about Nepal too.”

Krishna works in Pokhara where the tourists are. His family is still back in the countryside and he visits them every three or four months. It’s just too expensive to life in Pokhara, he told me. I’m typing this in a guesthouse with big windows, a good bed, and a private bathroom. They brought me a desk to work on and outside my room is a sunny porch. With little negotiation I got the room for $2.15 a night. But Krishna can’t afford to bring his family to live here and that sure makes you feel like you have a lot of chocolate smeared all over your face.

The Daily Hurricane

2005-04-27T11:14:00.000-04:00

April 26
If you and your watch get confused in Nepal—which is easy since the clocks here are set 15 minutes apart from the time zones used by the rest of the world—you can determine the time by noting when the daily hurricane roles in.

At 4:15pm the clear, bright sky clouds over to a slate grey. If you miss this moment to synchronize your watch you can wait until 4:30pm. At that time the gale force winds come to bend the trees and send the shopkeepers scurrying to collect the placards outside their shops. At 4:35pm any uncollected placards can be found crashing to the ground, and all the signs here show the wear of countless afternoon dustups.

The rain will come at a quarter to five. It might come in big, steady drops or road-swallowing sheets but either way it won’t last long, provided the wind keeps blowing the clouds through. This isn’t the monsoon season, it’s just the daily hurricane-like storm season.

At five the town looks deserted with all the storefronts covered by their metal roll-down security screens. It gets quite dark because when the clouds blot out the sun, the power company kills the lights for fear the power lines will be damaged by the storm.

By 6:30pm the sky is cleared and the sun is all but gone and just as the night sinks in the power comes back. If you’ve ever been in a hurricane where the leaves blew off the trees but the branches stayed put you know what it’s like each afternoon in Pokhara, Nepal. No one tapes their windows or buys eggs and bottled water. They don’t go down into their basement to wait it out. But they bring in the placards off the street or watch them sail down the sidewalk with the wind.

About Me

2005-04-27T10:14:00.000-04:00

April 27
Yesterday I read About a Boy, the Nick Hornby book where Hugh Grant floats around life without any responsibility or care. It occurred to me my life in not dissimilar. For one, I was able to read a whole book in one day while lounging about. I’ve gone years of my life without finishing a book.

I am doing something, I know. Traveling around the world is by no means a waste of time but as I mentioned a couple entries ago it does make you feel like a spoiled brat to fill your days with coffee shops and sleeper trains when the people around you are trying to scrape out sustenance and shelter.

Grant’s character says something in the middle pages about not knowing how working people have time for a job and a life when he fills his days just with the life part. That’s the situation I’m in too and the life part now seems like my job. I take long bus rides. I take walks. I talk to people in cafes or shops. I rent a boat with a friend and paddle around the lake for an hour. It’s a good gig, no doubt.

The thing about this kind of job is at the end of the year instead of saving up some money you’ve spent everything you have. If I went home now I would have four months of memories and eighteen thousand dollars. If I continue with the trip I’ll have twelve months of memories and just enough for first and last month’s rent. I don’t plan on going home but it strikes me that I could get out while I’m ahead.

I do sort of have a job and that’s making the documentary. It’s really nice to have something to pour energy into when I need to. If the documentary is good and I sell it (or even if it’s bad and I sell it) then the year can be seen as a wonderful coup where I took a 50-week vacation and still managed to advance myself financially and professionally. If the movie fails then I will be broke and all the equipment I carried and time I spent on the documentary will be a colossal waste.

Two feelings hang in the air for me: 1) I’m doing the most amazing thing I’ll ever do and at the same time I’m going nothing and 2) this could be my greatest success or my worst failure. It would be a pretty okay failure, all things considered, but that’s how I feel sometimes.

Now I’ll walk down the street to the café with the $.85 breakfast, drop off my laundry, check out the CD store, maybe rent a bike, and then pack up for my six-day Jomsom trail trek around the Himalayas. Cry not for me.

I N D I A

2005-04-25T11:13:00.000-04:00

Like the beginning of my trip back in Australia, my time in India has been too overwhelming to sum up in a couple simple stories. What I’ve done, like I did for those early days is give a sketch of each day. Additionally, there are three more lengthy entries that follow. The first, An Indian Warning, is about arriving in Delhi. The second is The Delhi Tour; and the third, Three Days We Ran Together is a detailed account of April 18 to 20 when Christian and I cruised through Jaipur, Agra, Allahabad, and Varanasi without staying anywhere overnight.

Also new, The Greatest Holiday, my final entry from Thailand. It’s a lot to read and you may want to break it up over a couple days.

April 13
After splashing some songkran water in Bangkok, take a taxi with Erika to airport and fly to Delhi where I stay with Akshay’s relatives. (See entry: An Indian Warning).

April 14
Delhi tour. (See entry: The Delhi Tour).

April 15
Go into Delhi for afternoon and shoot video in Old Delhi. Every time I bring the camera out I’m approached by curious people within ten seconds and surrounded within a minute or so. This repeats itself everywhere in India but never happened anywhere else I’ve been.

I brave a food stand in Old Delhi and order “a plate.” I think people at places like this are generally flattered that foreigners want to try their food, which is a rarity. The plate has three dishes (something with lentils, something with potatoes, and dahl) and chapati (a flat bread). When you finish eating here they just re-fill your plate until you tell them to stop. After several refills they charge me 20 rupees ($.45).

I buy a very expensive plane ticket ($450) from Delhi to Cambodia for May 8 when I’ll meet NYC Jason.

April 16
“You’ve seen everything in Delhi” Manu tells me, perhaps inviting me to move on. I take the bus south to Jaipur where I’m told it will be hotter. Hotter? Jaipur has more of a small town vibe (only 3 million people) and it feels more like “India.” The women are dressed in traditional technicolor outfits. Camels, yaks, horses, and the occasional elephant trot down the roads.

I stay with more of Akshay’s relatives and have more nice food and home atmosphere. The two-year-old son of the Saxena family is terribly cute. He calls me “bayhia” which means brother and when I play my Ipod for him he dances and says, “gana, gana.” Song, song.

April 17
I take a bus tour in Jaipur. I’m the only non-Indian again but they do the tour in English which is a bit strange but helpful. During lunch I meet Christian, a 20-year-old German who is in India for a month. He’s on a break from a 10-month teaching assignment in Sri Lanka.

We decide to meet for lunch the next day and possibly travel on together.

April 18
Meet-up with Christian and take night bus from Jaipur to Agra (aka Taj Majal).

April 19
Visit Taj, then take night train from Agra to Allahabad.

April 20
In Allahabad we impose on a family and visit an elementary school before a trying visit to the sacred sangam. Take evening bus to shady Varanasi.
(see entry: Three Days We Ran Together for April 18-20)

An Indian Warning

2005-04-25T11:11:00.000-04:00

April 14
In the cab to the airport to go to India, Erika told me what I should expect. She’d spent three months there before coming to Thailand. “Delhi is dirty, it’s hot, there’s traffic everywhere, the air is just grey and thick with smoke.”

“Sounds like Bangkok,” I said.

“Oh no,” Erika explained. “Compared to Delhi, Bangkok seems like Paris.”

Lodging would be a problem. “Everything’s just…dirty,” she said. “Bedbugs, mosquitoes, pretty much all the places are just dirty.”

Eating would be a problem. “Oh yeah, you have to be very careful. You can’t eat anything off the street.”

Crime would be a problem. “I don’t use my Ipod in public,” Erika said.

Travel would be a problem. “Trains just stop. I was on a train going south and then it just stopped. We all got off and then the next day another train came and took us the rest of the way,” Erika said. “When trains are 10 or 12 hours late no one is surprised or upset. ‘That’s just India.’”

Heat would be a problem. “Right now it’s about 40 degrees,” she said. When they say it’s 40 on 1010WINS, that means it’s a cool April morning. Forty degrees centigrade will fry an egg on the Delhi streets, but you shouldn’t eat eggs off the street here anyway.

“So why would anyone want to go to India?” I asked just before we boarded the plane and just after she had described the gut wrenching poverty and migraine inducing touts.

“It’s just so…alive.”

…

Even before the plane lands you get a sense you’re going somewhere magical or horrid or (since the plane hasn’t landed yet maybe it’s best to avoid value judgments and just say,) different. As we approached Delhi I looked out the window and onto the various neighborhoods that make up the city of 13 million. I’ve looked out a lot of plane windows onto a lot of cities but never at the moment I gazed down onto the streets have I seen an entire corner of a city lose power and become a black triangle of darkness. I’d come to learn it was a fairly regular occurrence.

Flight attendants around the world are known to announce the current time when a plane touches down after crossing time zones. But nowhere else do they do it quite like this. Watches set to Bangkok time must be changed from 10:20pm to 8:50pm…India’s clocks are set a half hour apart from everyone else’s.

…

Outside Delhi International Airport the taxi drivers were waiting. They offered their service spiritedly but not intimidatingly. It was less of a madhouse than I expected, though certainly a mad house. (In a strange way I came to compare Delhi to Byron Bay, Australia, that beach paradise that couldn’t live up to the endless stream of great things I heard about it. When you expect something overwhelming, you’re never overwhelmed; nothing could be as hot or insane as the Delhi of description.)

I did what you’re supposed to do and bought a pre-paid taxi. I was going to Noida, a Delhi suburb. My friend from home, Akshay, still has family in India and they were graciously putting me up.

The taxi driver invited me up into the front seat for the hour-long ride. Traffic in India is unlike anything I’ve ever seen. It’s congested but there aren’t awful traffic jams because of their unique system of driving. There are no lanes. The road could be the width of a four-lane lane highway but there are none of those broken white lines you’ve probably seen, umm, everywhere else in the world. So the big belching trucks, the chugging auto-rickshaws, the sputtering cars, and the cruising bikes (both motorized and peddled) all weave through each other in their own improvised dance. To pass, you honk your horn until the cars in front of you split enough for you to fit through. Honking is actually encouraged here, all big trucks have a large, artistic, English message scrawled on the back: “PLEASE HONK.” If your horn isn’t working I suppose you can just tap on the neighboring car, after all we are in arm’s reach of another vehicle for virtually the entire hour-long trip.

Have I mentioned there’s various cattle just walking along the side of the road?

I remember back to the entry I wrote a couple weeks ago talking tough about Thailand and being “inoculated by the motorbike taxis” etc etc. Certainly things here are more extreme, but I’ll stick to what I said: An inoculation gives you a little bit of a disease to protect you from becoming ill from a large portion of it and that’s exactly what Thailand (and the other countries I’ve visited) have done. If India was my first stop I would surely still survive but I doubt I would take it all very well.

The combination of three month’s travel experience and a string of Indian warnings seem to have dulled the impact of this amazing, challenging place. I also wonder if I’m bottling the apprehension/fear/concern/awe I might otherwise feel as a defense mechanism against freaking out.

…

So after a while we reach Sector 37 of Noida and it’s the right house and the Singhs are impossibly friendly. Shilpi, Akshay’s second cousin, makes me a grilled cheese sandwich and asks about my trip. Her little boys (two and five I’d guess) have been waiting up to see me. My room has a comfy bed and a fan. The lack of A/C isn’t a problem because it’s quite pleasant. In the morning I’ll go with Manu, Shilpi’s husband, into Delhi.

The Delhi Tour

2005-04-25T11:08:00.000-04:00

April 14
In Delhi, just below Manu’s office, a guy is sitting at a desk selling tickets. The sign behind him is in Hindi but Manu says I can get on a city tour here for 100 Rupees (US$2.25). First there is the small matter of buying a ticket. The highway isn’t the only place where India eschews the idea of forming a line, rather the style of driving is a single symptom of a culture of mini-mosh pits. Though there are only three or four people waiting to buy bus tour tickets we jockey for the teller’s attention and finally he takes our 100 Rupees and I get my bus ticket.

“He’s going to try and get you a seat in front with the big window,” Manu says after we buy the ticket. “I didn’t even ask, he just offered. That’s Indian hospitality.” I’m learning that people everywhere take great pride in proving what great hosts they are; in every country there’s a small number of people hoping to swindle you but everyone else is almost always helpful.

“The tour is in Hindi,” Manu mentions, “Is that okay?” Sure.

I am the only non-Indian, the only non-Hindi speaker, the only white guy on the bus. (And though it’s a country of 1 billion and the temperature is over 100 degrees I am the only person in India wearing shorts. This is not really an exaggeration.) The bus does not have air-conditioning or an English translation. It will be an adventure.

Our first stop is the Red Fort, one of the major Delhi tourist destinations. The bus pulls over on the side of a six-lane road (okay there aren’t lanes but it’s six lanes wide) and drops us off. “We have an hour here,” my seatmate Janeel translates. The tour guide has offered to translate for me when possible. On the walk from the bus to the Red Fort he grabs me hard by the arm and looks up at me wild-eyed like he’s about to tell me where the bomb is planted or who shot the judge. “Red Fort was built in 1639!” he shouts at me. “It was finished in 1648! It took nine years to complete!”

We approach the Fort and he explains the admission policy to the group. “It’s five Rupees to enter,” he says. “And 100 Rupees for foreigners.” Or in our case, foreigner.

Red Fort was built as the new home of the Mughal empire when they moved their capital from Agra (home of the Taj Majal). It housed Indian troops until just 18 months ago.

Throughout the nine-hour tour we were told (at elevated volumes) countless facts, tidbits, and anecdotes concerning Indian history. I can tell you none of them because I didn’t understand a word. Once in a while Janeel would tap me and tell me what we were all looking out the window at. At Gandhi’s tomb Janeel somehow got lost and didn’t make it back on the bus. After that, without translation, I spent the time between stops working on my crossword book.

There was plenty of time to work on the crosswords because there was a lot of driving. Delhi suffers from miserable urban sprawl, though I suspect the seeds of the problem were planted long before folks in L.A. or Houston coined the term. From north to south the city is about 15 miles, it’s a little less east to west. Manhattan is 12 miles north to south but the comparison fails. If you’re visiting New York you can go to Macy’s on 34th St, walk up Broadway through Times Square and reach Central Park all within 1.5 miles. You’ve seen a good chunk of New York. In Delhi there’s no central place to go and see the city, it’s all spread out. As Gertrude Stein said of Oakland, “There’s no there, there.”

Anyway, enough of the temples and forts it’s time to ride the subway! Around noon with the temperature around 100 the guide ingeniously killed an hour by having us ride on the air-conditioned subway. Delhi has a gleaming, modern, empty subway system that’s about five years old. Our group of 45 bought our seven rupee tokens and headed for the train, but not before a lengthy explanation of how to use the tokens.

The tour group was made up of Indians from other parts of the country and for many of them riding the subway was the most exciting part of the day. It is a certain kind of cultural encounter to be doing something as mundane as riding an escalator and watch as a busload of people ride an escalator for the first time. Mounting and dismounting the moving stairs was a point of great anxiety.

After riding the train for three stops we got off, exited the station, bought new seven rupee tokens and got back on the train to return to where we started and get back on the bus. At least we had cooled off.

By now I had made friends with Rahul, who was in Delhi to interview for M.B.A. programs. Later that day he’d take the 35-hour train ride back home but he hoped to go to school here. “Delhi is the city of opportunity,” he said.

Next we stopped at Qutb Minar (“India’s Eiffel Tower”), where there were a bunch of food stalls. This was our chance to get lunch. Rahul and I walked over to the food but Rahul only wanted a mango lassi. “I’m not going to eat lunch,” he said. He didn’t trust the food here and if he couldn’t eat it I probably shouldn’t either.

Ultimately I ventured for a samosa which they served with way too much rice. “Should I eat with my hands?” I asked Rahul, since everyone else was eating with their hands.

“It’s up to you,” he said diplomatically and unhelpfully.

“What would you do?”

“God gave us only our hands,” he said.

So I broke off pieces of samosa and grabbed some rice and shoved it in. I didn’t get sick. I did get overcharged though.

We saw more forts and temples and Rahul told me where I should take my shoes off and what the meaning of the different temples were and then we had a Pepsi in a glass bottle as the sun went down and they dropped us back where we started.

I found a bookshop with a Lonely Planet for India and happily paid 850 rupees for it. Some English guidance will be nice.

Three Days We Ran Together

2005-04-25T11:07:00.000-04:00

April 18
I meet Christian for lunch, my first real restaurant meal in India. Somehow I spend 200 rupees ($4.75) which is lot. I want to go south or east, Christian wants to go north or east, so we decide to head east together.

At the Jaipur train station there are a thousand people waiting for tickets. Thankfully we can get in the line for Tourists/Senior Citizens/Handicapped/Freedom Fighters. (No, we don’t know who Freedom Fighters are). There are about four people in front of us in line and it takes a little less than an hour to get to the window. The train is full but we get on the wait list.

In the meantime we walk around the markets. The touts are well concentrated here. Out of nowhere a bike pulls up with a 17-year old guy on it. “Why don’t tourists talk to Indians?” he asks.

“Well I think they don’t talk to Indians because sometimes it seems like everyone who talks to you wants something from you.” He gets off the bike as I start to answer.

“You think we’re all beggars,” he says. “We go to school all day and then in the afternoon our only way to practice English is to talk to the Europeans but they won’t talk to us. Why won’t you talk to us?”

“Well I’m talking to you right now so you can’t say I won’t talk to you.”

“I have a friend in Europe and I want to write him a letter but I don’t know how to write in English, will you write it in English for me?”

“Do you have the letter?”

“It’s up in that building. We’ll go up there and you can write it.”

I start to question the whole thing. “Sorry, I can’t. If you had it here I would but I can’t go up there.”

“Every time the Europeans say ‘Oh, I’m too busy, I have to go, I can’t help you.’ It would only take a minute.” He gets back on the bike with his friends. “You should go back to your country and leave India.”

Then as Christian and I walk down the street his friends on the bike follow us for a long time and ask us to go up to the same building that had the letter to translate. It has a great view, they tell us, you can see the whole city. And maybe it has a jewelry store we can look at too.

I come to learn the central problem of visiting India is how de-humanizing it becomes. In a vicious cycle the tourists treat the Indians badly and locals treat the tourists badly. They aren’t people, they’re just voices trying to sell you things or wallets with a lot more money in them than your life savings. There’s no getting around this conflict and it makes meaningful interaction rare and difficult.

After a couple hours in the markets we go back to the train station and learn we didn’t get tickets for the train. We walk a mile-plus to the bus station and buy tickets to Agra, home of the Taj Mahal.

I say goodbye to the Saxena family and meet Christian for our 11pm bus. The “luxury” buses here lack toilets which is a problem for Christian who is having some trouble with his stomach. “Trouble with his stomach,” is such a nice way to put it. Other than one day of feeling a bit achy, I haven’t had any trouble eating street food or drinking things with ice or brushing my teeth with the water or any of the other things that super concerned travelers avoid.

April 19
The bus gets into Agra around 5am and we head to the Taj Mahal. We get there just in time for sunrise. The entrance fee is 20 rupees. Or, if you’re a foreigner it’s 750. Yikes. They know you’ll pay and you do and it’s worth it. We take about a hundred pictures of each other and then finally go look at the thing. It is impressive, remarkably symmetrical and surprisingly small in the central room under the dome where the King and Queen’s tombs are. My favorite place is under the dome, about 10 feet behind the tombs. You can look back out the door and through the various gates that lead to the main building; everything lines up perfectly all the way to the horizon half a mile away.

Three hours is enough of that and since there isn’t much in Agra after the Taj we start looking for a train ticket. We find a “part-time travel agent” who says he can find out if there are seats available if we go to his office. When we refuse to go there he says he can make a call from “his jewelry store.” So we go there and he makes some calls and says we can’t get on the 8:30pm train but there are seats on the 11:30pm. He doesn’t know how much the ticket will be but he’ll charge us a flat 75-rupee commission regardless. We have a lot of trouble knowing whether to trust him. He says the train is booked (which is likely) but through a special agent he can get us tickets (somewhat less likely). We give him 200 rupees each and are told to come back at 1pm to get our tickets and pay the balance. It seems shady but at the end of the day it’s only $5 and the other choice is an excruciating hunt around town to the train and bus stations.

We return at 2pm and the shop is closed; supposedly the guy is at Mosque. We return at 3pm, this time with the video camera. I figure if we don’t get the tickets we’ll at least get a cool segment for the documentary. Christian and I are playing everyone’s favorite Indian travel game: “Scam or Not a Scam.” This time the guy isn’t there but another guy is in the shop and after leaving to make a phone call he says the “part time travel agent” is picking up the tickets and we should come back at 4pm. It’s impossible to say if bringing the camera to the shop helped produce the tickets but at 4pm the tickets were there. With commission we pay 281 rupees each which was a bit high but pretty reasonable given the short notice.

The guy is very offended that we would think he was scamming us.

We sleep in transit for a second straight night, this time in the sleeper class of the train. Imagine what you think the sleeper class of an Indian train might look like and that’s what it looks like. If you’re imagining chickens in the isles you’ve gone too far. Have you ever taken a tour of a submarine and they show you the stacks of tiny beds the sailors sleep on? That’s kind of what it’s like.

The best part of the “part time travel agent’s” arrangements for us was that we got to change trains at 4am. It wasn’t clear if we actually had seats on the second train and everyone we showed our tickets to got these confused looks on their faces, then laughed a bit. “I’m suspicious of your ticket,” a seatmate told us. “It is good for this train but for the second train you should re-confirm. You may have to buy a second ticket.”

An Indian train station at 4am is a certain thing. The floors are covered with people sleeping. It’s predawn. You don’t know where your train is or if you have the right ticket to get on it. You’re still in your pajama pants as you walk through the station getting shouted at by touts.

The guy at the info desk offers to sell you “supplemental tickets” for the connection train for 20 rupees each. That seems like a scam too.

So we get on the second train and take the same seats we had for the first train even though we know this is wishful thinking. Eventually the conductor checks our tickets and says they aren’t confirmed. We play dumb and he lets us share a seat (instead of the sleeper births we were supposed to have).

April 20
At 8am we pull into Allahabad. More than any other day of the trip, this day encapsulated the good and bad that makes India what it is.

Christian has a friend who has a friend who lives here and he called up the night before to say we’d be coming in around 6am. “Okay, I’ll pick you up at the train station,” the stranger said. We called a little after 5am to tell him we’d really be there at 8am. He didn’t seem to mind.

“The lawyer,” as we came to call him because we forgot his name, drove us to his home and served us breakfast. We’d leave our bags at his house for the day while we explored Allahabad then pick them up in the evening before getting on another bus.

His wife insisted on serving us breakfast. She was about 25 and he was about 35. They have a one-year-old daughter. You forget most Indian couples are products of arranged marriages because they seem like happy, normal families. This pair reminded me they were arranged. It seemed more like a business relationship than a personal one.

There’s a growing trend of “love marriages” here now. It’s still a somewhat exotic concept but Muhammad, my 20-year-old auto-rickshaw driver in Jaipur told me he had a girlfriend of two years who he planned to marry. Erika, the girl I flew here with, said her and her boyfriend are constantly approached on the street with the question “Love marriage?”

Christian and I left the lawyers house for one of the more bizarre encounters of my trip. Christian’s reason for coming to Allahabad was to visit a “Trees for Life” school here. Trees for Life is a volunteer educational organization that he worked for a couple years ago. He wanted to see their program here. Turns out the school wasn’t really a part of Trees for Life but we were committed to going by this point.

We walked into the courtyard of the school and a guard called us over and offered us chairs. Then he took us into the principal’s office and Christian said he had worked for Trees for Life and would like a tour. So they brought us around the mostly girls elementary school and we got stared at a lot. Everyone was wearing white shirts under powder blue dresses. When the principal walked into a class all the students would stand up at attention, giggle, look or point at us, then be told to sit down. I tried extremely hard not to laugh and did my best to ask interested questions. It was interesting.

We took an auto-rickshaw into City Lines, the main town here. It’s funny to use words like town to describe a place with a million people but the numbers are all so large here that a place with a million residents doesn’t feel so big.

It was damn hot. You know in the summer when you park your car in the sun with all the windows rolled up and then a couple hours later you get back in? That’s how it felt today. It felt exactly like that except you didn’t burn your butt on the seat. Christian and I were eating mangoes at a stand in City Lines when a building caught on fire. It was right across the street and the flames were pouring out of the porch area of the second floor apartment. Big fireballs would flare up now and then. Eventually it went out.

We asked a bookshop owner for a good, cheap place to eat and he came up with a recommendation. Instead of giving directions he sent a guide with us. There is so much cheap service labor here that people are constantly being used for things that don’t really require people. So the bookshop owner sent an employee to walk us five minutes down the street to a little hole in the wall restaurant.

There were lots of looks and laughs as we sat down. At places like this there generally isn’t a menu and you just order “a plate.” This ran counter to Christian’s celebrity-style ordering habits which call for substitutions or off-menu ordering even when the waiter speaks little English. The meals were good and cost 20 rupees.

It was around this time that India got annoying. It’s not the heat, or the hassling touts, or the risk of fraud that makes India so difficult. It’s the totally unrelenting nature of all these things. It’s hot every damn minute. There is always, always, always someone shouting “Where do you go? Auto-rickshaw! Take a look. Sir? Sir? Auto-rickshaw. Where you going? Come here sir. Take a look!” You want to relax and you can’t.

We couldn’t find an auto-rickshaw so we settled for bike rickshaws. They’re man-powered bicycles with little carriages in back. Christian and I each took our own to reduce weight and spread the wealth. The price was 10 rupees. The half-hour ride was an adventure. It is serious manual work to peddle that thing in the heat across town and my driver wasn’t a young man.

We reached sangam, the sacred confluence of the Ganges and Yumana rivers where in a single day (each January or February) 10 million pilgrims flood the meeting point. The rickshaw drivers refused our 10 rupee notes and the one English speaker in the encircling group explained they were demanding 60 rupees each. There was much shouting about where we had started the trip and what the agreed price was and eventually we agreed to 15 rupees each. We needed to pay with a 50 rupee note but my driver didn’t produce the agreed upon change so our only recourse was not to pay the other driver, forcing him to get his money from my guy. So they got 25 each instead of ten.

“They cheated you,” the English speaker said as he followed us, uninvited, towards the rivers. At sangam there were about two hundred boats waiting to carry tourists out to where the rivers meet. There were two tourists. One problem with traveling in low season is there are fewer fellow tourists but the same number of locals hoping to earn a living off the tourists. You don’t count how many times people offer you a boat trip during the 15 minute walk but if you did it would be around a hundred and feel like much more.

At the river people were bathing and out in the distance where all the boats were crowded I could kind of see the murky Ganges meeting the clearer Yumana. I met Vikteen, a middle-aged man, at the river. “What country?” he asked, in the traditional greeting of a foreigner.

“USA,” I said.

He lived in Allahabad and was a doctor. Many of his classmates moved to the US to practice medicine but he liked it better here. I asked him how often he came to sangam. “Once or twice a year,” he said. “How often do you go to Central Park?”

“I live one block from Central Park so I go there all the time.”

“Well then how often do you go to the Statue of Liberty. Not see it on TV or the movies but go there and see it.”

“Very rarely. I’ve only been to the actual Statue once.”

“Well it is the same. When you live very close to a place you don’t go often, it becomes normal to you.”

Vikteen explained that 50 years ago the pilgrims would march up to 500 kilometers on foot for the big festival here. They’d make a single-file line that stretched all the way from the river down to the south of the country. Now everyone drives and the banks on the far side serve as a parking lot.

Christian and I walked back to where the rickshaws were and the English speaker was still following us. We asked him to leave us alone but he wouldn’t. Eventually we negotiated the ride from 100 to 40 rupees and headed back to the lawyer’s house. When he dropped us off the driver asked for more money (they always do) but we wouldn’t give him the 50-rupee note until he produced the 10 rupees in change. Lesson learned.

We get on another evening bus for Varanasi, one of the most holy places in Hinduism. It leaves at 7pm and arrives around 10:30pm. It’s a local-style bus filled with commuters, some of them standing. The seats are less than shoulder-width wide. Sometimes you step back from the situation and realize you’re in one of the more remote, adventurous travel situations the world offers but it feels less exotic than you’d think. “Yeah,” Christian agreed as we sat at the Ganges earlier that day. “You think it should feel different and it will be like a different world but you realize how much the same it is, how small the world is.”

It feels exotic enough in Varanasi, where the Lonely Planet informs “two or three travelers go missing in the city every three or four months.” Apparently they’re abducted from the airport/train station/bus station. So we take our 11pm auto-rickshaw through the empty streets to Assi Ghat. We can’t tell the rickshaw driver where we’re staying because then he’ll get a commission from the guesthouse and the cost will be passed on to us. So we get off in the middle of the neighborhood and try to find out where the Sahi River View Guest House is while the auto-rickshaw driver keeps following us. Eventually we find it up a long, dark, scary ally and ring the buzzer. A sleeping guard/receptionist unlocks the doors and lets us in. It’s the first night in a bed since Jaipur.

The Fires In Varanasi

2005-04-25T11:06:00.000-04:00

April 21
When the smoke rises in the distance from the banks of the Ganges you know what’s on the fire. The pyres run all day and all night where the river meets the ghats that line it’s western bank. They burn Hindu bodies still damp with the river’s water, and how long it takes for the contents of the cloths sacks to turn to ash depends on how big the fire is. How big the fire is depends on how much wood you can afford.

Christian and I walked along the Ganges at sunset tonight, heading north from our guesthouse at Assi Gaht. The gahts are basically steps that rise up from the river until they reach the two or three story buildings that line the area just up from the river. The guidebook lists about 30 gahts but when you start walking you realize there must be a hundred. You walk from one set of steps to the next as far as the eye can see.

When you reach one of the burning ghats (most have much more pedestrian uses like bathing or sells crap to tourists) it is arresting. There are five fires burning in a small area and workers are tending the flames as they engulf their bodies just a few steps from the river. On the raised area above, a hundred people are watching the scene. A male relative of the deceased is supposed to stay for the couple hours it takes for cremation to finish. The cost ranges from $50 to $125 (an “electrical” cremation is $12). There are two piles of ash five feet high. There are two bamboo stretchers with covered bodies waiting their turn. There is a dog finishing the job the fires started. It is tearing at cloth (or is that hair?) covered flesh. You can see the bloody red color of it.

“The dog eats meat, human meat,” a man watching with us says. “It is the circle of life.”

You don’t want to use judgmental words like ‘gross,’ so you settle for an understated “That’s intense.”

You keep walking as the sun keeps going down and after a million people ask you to buy postcards, boat trips, and massages you find a place for dinner. Then the power goes out and whole city turns black.

After dinner on the roof overlooking the darkened river you’ll walk up the tiny sidestreets dodging cows and bicycles and lit only by candles and passing motorcycles. You’ll take a rickshaw back to your guesthouse and refuse the customary demand to alter the agreed upon price. The city will still be dark except the candles and the few places with generators and the fires on the river that glow brightest when the rest of the city is black. They’ll burn all night and be waiting when you visit them again at dawn.

The Greatest Holiday

2005-04-25T11:04:00.000-04:00

April 15, 2005
Don’t be jealous of the children of Thailand. Remind yourself they live in widespread poverty, remember how much you like Thanksgiving and Fourth of July. Don’t hate them because they have the greatest holiday in the history of the world and you don’t.

Songkran comes to Thailand at about this time each April to usher in the New Year. If you think fireworks, alcohol, Dick Clark, and freezing your ass off is a good formula, try this: a giant, all-inclusive, nationwide water fight. And it lasts three days.

Actually it can be more like a week. The official celebration was April 13-15 but on the evening of the 10th I was strolling through Chiang Mai with my video camera when I came upon ten kids (ages three to nine, I’d say). They were on the sidewalk between the mote and the main road and they had bucks on strings. They would dip their bucket into the mote, pull it back up full and dump it all out onto each other. Or, better yet, they’d wait for someone on a motorcycle to come by and hurl the water at them. Genius.

I walked a little further down the mote and found a bunch of older kids (ages nineteen to forty, I’d say) doing much the same thing with bigger buckets. They were foreigners mainly and all soaked to the bone. “That a waterproof camera?” one of them asked by way of warning.

After getting a few shots I put the camera down and was instantly soaked by some combination of bucket, hose, watergun. I grabbed a bucket and started dousing passing bikers. Some people would hold up their hands in a gesture of “No, please,” others would point to some precious cargo that shouldn’t be soiled, others just gave a mean glare. Most were doused anyway and few seemed to mind.

The next day our little game of splashing the passing motorists seemed pretty damn quaint. Chiang Mai had been transformed into some sort of 12-year-old’s waterpark fantasy. The streets were lined with people baring waterguns, buckets, hoses, buckets, waterguns, waterguns, waterguns. Everyone was wearing their bathing suits (though, notably, everyone was wearing a drenched t-shirt instead of going topless or with bikini top). At the mote, where the ten kids had doused each other the evening before, there were hundreds of dripping combatants. They poured full buckets down each other’s backs, then sprayed the on-rushing traffic. It was a mix of old and young, foreign and local, wet and wetter. Everyone was laughing and those of us who were doing this for the first time just kept shaking our heads and wondering how we’d stumbled upon something so delightfully, childishly fun.

What makes it impossible to remain dry in Chiang Mai (and many other parts of Thailand) during Songkran is how wet everyone else is. When you’ve been squirting and being squirted for hours there is a certain diminished return to getting your neighbor drenched for the 20th time. But when someone comes by with even a stitch of dry clothing that is a mark worth spending some water on.

The theater of the dry is a funny thing. Everyone has a reason they can’t get wet and they communicate this narrative with a series of pained, pleading expressions that change with the darkening of their clothes to a state of resignation. Only the police, the Buddha, and the very old remain at all dry.

You can’t complain because the water is washing away your sins in preparation for the New Year. Plus, everyone else is doing it.

In the evening you go home and wring out your clothes and leave them to dry. You take a shower and put on the only dry clothes you have left. You go to dinner and a few steps outside your guest house you’re soaked again and the perpetrators are laughing and carrying on as your face goes from pained to resigned. You eat dinner dripping and pay for it with waterlogged baht. Tomorrow you’ll scheme ways to hail a taxi without getting wet, or ask someone to get you a pancake from the stand across the street because you don’t want to risk it. You’ll feel like a prisoner in a warring city. Because you are. But it’s a lovely war in a lovely city and as you leave town on the first official day of the festival you can’t help but be a little jealous of the greatest Peter Pan holiday there ever was. You know that all the cranberry sauce and stuffed stockings you can imagine will never make you smile like squirting a watergun in Chiang Mai in the middle of April.

Midnight Train to Nepal

2005-04-22T09:28:00.000-04:00

Heading on a night train to the India/Nepal border in a few hours. You're wondering if Nepal is safe. We all are. We think it is or we wouldn't be going.

Train gets in at 6am then we catch a three hour bus and then we're at the border. We'll need to apply for a visa and get a bus into Nepal (another 10 hours of bus fun). If there aren't any bandhs (nationwide strikes that stop all commerce under fear of violence) we should get there easily enough.

The dangers seem to be ones of inconvienence, not safety. There have only been two tourists caught in civil unrest ever and it was widely reported so unless you see something on the news you'll know I'm okay.

Have written much about India. Have been unable to get it posted with current internet situation. Nepal promises to have much more basic facilities so it could be a while.

Cruising through the subcontinent

2005-04-18T01:31:00.000-04:00

In Jaipur and heading over to Taj Majal tonight or tomorrow. Jaipur looks like a National Geographic pictorial with Crayola colored outfits on all the women and cart-pulling camels trotting down the streets. Took tour of Jaipur yesterday. Was only non-Indian again but they did it in English anyway which made me feel a bit awkward but at least allowed me to know what was happening. Met Christian, a German, and we're probably going to travel on together for a few.

I'm moving much more quickly than I thought, thanks mainly to these tours which allow you to cover everything in a day. Also, there's no "social scene," people are too busy surviving to go out drinking. Christian is first traveler I've met...there just aren't many here during the awful hot summer and I've been staying in homes (with Akshay's relatives) instead of guest houses. The temperature gets over 100 every day and finding shade is a constant game. Okay, off to meet Christian and figure out next few days.

Incredible India

2005-04-15T01:07:00.000-04:00

In Delhi. Trying to avoid mental 'Heart of Darkness' conception of trip but Australia/New Zealand/Thailand/India routing has made that hard. Staying with Akshay's relatives in Noida, a Delhi suburb.

Took tour of city yesterday. The worst thing a backpacker can do is "take a tour." The best thing they can do is anything where they get to say "and I was the only foreigner." So this was a tour where I was the only non-Indian. It was given all in Hindi, it was $2.50 for nine hours of intense Delhi sights. Made friends with bus mates. Served as something of a curiosity.

Not sure when I'll get to post real entries, internet place here doesn't take CDs. Heading south tomorrow for Jaipur, then look at that Taj Majal and maybe go to Nepal and fight with the Maoists for a bit.

Ankle continues to improve. As girl said on flight to Delhi, "It's not good just to take antibiotics, but if you have to take them anyway, it's probably a good idea to be on them while you're in India."

A Good News Day

2005-04-12T06:27:00.000-04:00

Woke up with much less pain in ankle, pills must be working. Flew down to Bangkok to try and get Indian visa before everything closes for the holidays. Here was the scene when I reached the Indian embassy.

Me: Hi. I'm hoping I can pick up my visa. I know it takes five days and its only been four but they said it could be ready today.

Guy at window #2: No, impossible. Come back Friday.

Me: But I have a ticket to fly to Delhi tomorrow. I really need to leave, I flew all the way here today to get the visa.

Guy at window #2: You can sell your ticket and buy a new one for next week.

Me: I really need to leave tomorrow, I'm willing to wait here all afternoon but I need it today.

Guy at window #2: Okay, wait there then.

Two hours later I had my visa. Off to Delhi tomorrow.

Have Infection, Will Travel

2005-04-11T10:41:00.000-04:00

When my thumb got badly infected in New Zealand, Jason and I found a silver lining: At least it was my thumb rather than a toe. Even though it hurt everytime my thumb touched something it was easy enough to keep it away from touching stuff. A toe would be impossible to protect without staying in bed.

So, yeah, my foot is infected now.

Just went a clinic here in Chiang Mai and learned that the throbbing swollen lump that once looked like my right ankle is likely infected with a similar infection as my thumb was back in March. I woke up three days ago with ten or so bites on the inside of both ankles; don't ask me why the bugs only bit right there.

The patches of bites have grown more swollen and painful over the last couple days and last night it was bad enough that I couldn't sleep. Apparently the staph infection got in through the bites.

So I'm back on antibiotics, and am limping around like I just had a hip replaced. I have faith in the drugs and though I am going to India in a couple days at least I'll be staying with Akshay's relatives who can help me get to the right medical facility if necessary.

Never a dull moment.

Thailand in Pictures

2005-04-11T01:00:00.000-04:00

Bamboo Island

Going to Poda from Au Nang on my birthday

Monique found a cake, and it was actually pretty good

The fish swarmed around Alison at Bamboo Island, it was much more intense than this but most of them left before we could get the camera.

Shooting on the beach in Phi Phi

Chiang Mai at sunset

A market in Chiang Mai

Cooking class

Novice monks prepare for the start of the New Year water festival