Viva Mexico!!! ... but not aerobus.

A few short days after the wedding, the die-hards found themselves in Mexico. Brett and I got a bit frantic in the airport as Viva Aerobus’ delayed and delayed and delayed our flight some more. Viva… pffft. In four hours time, we had ditched the South Terminal “Airport”, sought solace at the Hilton Airport bar, hightailed it back to the “airport” and walked up a plane. Eventually we landed in Mexico with not a swine flu germ in sight.

The South Terminal

Wee!!! We're finally taking off!

Our 1^st hotel, Luna Maya, was absolutely lovely. Anyone on a bit of a budget, I would strongly recommend their cabanas.

Our cabana

The private beach

Testing out the hammock

But anyone not on a budget, Nueva Vida de Ramiro is stunning. ABSOLUTELY STUNNING. Thank you, Dad and Sue. Thank you Thank you, Thank you, Thank you, Thank you. Brett and I have never stayed in such luxurious, heavenly accommodations. My father and Sue, who due to health and mobility issues decided to bow out of Mexico, were generous enough to pass off 2 nights in their booked hotel room on to us. We are so grateful. One morning, I set my alarm to 6 am so that I could see the sunrise over the ocean. My alarm went off, I opened my eyes and from my bed, looked straight out our glass double doors and right onto the beach and rising sun over the turquoise sea. All from my bed. Satisfied, I went right back to sleep. H E A V E N.

Our Cabana.

The room

My favorite hammock since Peace Corps.

The Welcome Board.

The ruins were beautiful. They don't necessarily stand up against those other famous ruins like Copan or Tikal, but you just can't beat that real estate. Not to mention clouds of butterflies.

Two sisters.

Turtles!

Those sisters again.

Brett tries to blend in with the locals at a nearby beach-side restaurant.

Cenotes might be my new favorite natural wonder. Brett and I explored some free cenotes which were lovely. It was great to see the locals taking advantage of them.

This one a local hitchhiker was kind enough to show us our first day.

The top layer of water was warm, the bottom cool. It took some getting used to.

Local brothers excited about spotting fish.

We also, on the recommendation of Brett’s mom, checked out Hidden Worlds. The highlights were definitely the splashdown zip line and the snorkeling. The limestone structures the above and below the water were both so stunning, it was difficult for me to decide which to look at.

We lucked into a fantastic find in town: Pollo Pirata. That's right, Chicken Pirate. Brett was so brave as to try the habanero sauce. I was so proud. This is him devouring it:

Later we moseyed down to the reception area. It was gorgeous and very Conde Naste.

Oh so high-so.

Kit strikes a pose and strikes it well.

There was a wonderful buffet and what Mexican celebration is complete without a pinata?

Dylan's swing.

Kit means business.

All in all, a great, great trip.

Day Two, Houay Xai.

We woke up fairly late. It was, maybe, ten o'clock. We got ready and went back to the restaurant with the ants. The ants were still there. The breakfast wasn't very good. We walked back down the street to see if the Gibbon Experience had opened their office yet. They had not and the note was still there saying that they would return at two. Marcus and I decided to take a walk and see if there was anything more happening during the day than there had been in the evening.
Marcus, having been to Houay Xai earlier in the year, remembered there being a market. We started down the road. We walked past the same ten people on the same ten motorbikes. We stopped at a couple of shops so that Marcus could try to find a long sleeved shirt for the jungle. We also bought a couple of other things out of no real necessity, save conveniences, like shaving cream, toothpaste, some razors, and, later in the day, a flashlight. Marcus didn't have any luck finding a long sleeved shirt.
We walked up to the market. There, we found a store selling mats. Mats are great for keeping your climbing gear clean. We had forgotten to bring a mat, so we bought a new mat from a very nice lady who then was also kind enough to sell us some water. It was hot, close to noon, and there was very little shade. We checked out the market. It was full of all kinds of things.


The thing that I remember being the most plentiful, however, were the flies. They were everywhere and all over everything. They swarmed the meat as young mothers haggled over prices with the vendors who absentmindedly swished the flying pests away with plastic bags. I decided, in that market, that I was no longer eating meat in Houay Xai. This resolution was short-lived, but, at the time, I was convinced.
We quickly lost interest in the market and continued walking up a steep hill. When we got to the top of the hill we turned left. We walked some more and came upon an old concrete machine gun bunker. As we were admiring the craftsmanship of Vietnam era military engineering some young girls sitting on a patio down the hill noticed us. They started shouting all the English words they knew, "Superman", "banana", "stop", "bunny", "monkey-carrot-dollar-same". I laughed and said 'hello' and then we kept walking.
We walked past the Laotian military barracks and down another hill back into the main part of the city. We saw a baby chicken in a ditch who couldn't find its way out. It was chirping wildly trying to get its mother hen to come and save it, but the momma didn't seem too concerned. I still don't like chickens. That is why I eat them. We stopped in at the cafe that I had been to the night before for lunch. This was done mostly because it was right across the street from the 'Gibbon' office, which was just down the road from where we were staying. It was getting on to two in the afternoon and there was still no sign of activity in or around the office.
Marcus started to wonder if maybe they had gone bankrupt and just not bothered to tell anybody. Marcus is a bit paranoid. We ate our food and, as we were finishing, we saw some young men walk up to the 'G' office. We got scared. It was a combination of the way they were dressed, the bad hair, bad sunglasses, bad posturing, and the way that they walked that caused Marcus and me to simultaneously begin to pray that they would not be on the same 'experience' as us. There was no way in hell that we wanted to be stuck in the jungle with these boys for company. I took it as a sign that I am aging (that, and the gray hairs). A few minutes later a land rover and a jeep pulled up in front of the office and people started getting out and going into the office. We payed our bill and wandered over to check in for the trip we would be taking in the morning. We chatted a bit with the people just returning from the trip and the excitement for what we were about to do began to escalate. The people were thrilled with the experience. They told us we would love it but they couldn't explain why, we would just have to do it ourselves. We signed our waivers and release forms and were told to be back at the office at 8:30 in the morning. The boys with the bad hair were no where to be seen. We were, honestly, relieved.
As we were in the process of filling out the forms we met an American woman named Constance. Constance was, by all definitions, a soccer mom. She was traveling through Laos with her son for his 21st birthday. I am not entirely sure, but I believe she said that his name was Q. I also can not quite recall the exact line of questioning that she engaged in with us but it was strange enough that both Marcus and I almost instantaneously started coming up with reasons that we needed to leave. Since we were in Houay Xai, this was not exactly an easy thing to do. We settled on the idea that we needed to go for a run and that is exactly what we did.
We went back to the guesthouse, paid for the room for another night and made a reservation for a room for the night we returned from the jungle, and then went for a run. Our run covered almost exactly the same course that we had walked earlier in the day. I am pretty sure that the Laotians are not big on running. I am also sure that they don't see many people, especially foreigners, who go for runs while staying in Houay Xai. As the two of us passed by there was lots of pointing, confusion, and laughter as the by-standers saw us, proceeded to look for what we were running from, and, then, realized that we were not running from anything. During the run it again became apparent that Laos was trying to asphyxiate itself. The air, while not filled with same kind of pollution that we had been acclimating to in Bangkok, burned in your lungs. And it was really hot.
After the run, we took turns getting cleaned up and washing our clothes in a bucket in the shower and hanging them out to dry. While Marcus was getting ready, I went to the roof to try and catch a bit of sun and get some color in to my pasty white skin. The boys that had previously been no where to be seen came up to the roof as well. Fantastic!, they were staying in our guesthouse. I said hello to them and got absolutely no response. I felt justified in my early stereo-typed condemnation. They proceeded to roll up joints, open beers, get fucked-up, and hold conversations consisting mostly of monosyllabic insults. Based on the difficulty that I had understanding there monosyllables, I decided that they were most likely young South Africans (nothing against South Africans, I wouldn't have liked these kids no matter where they were from). Marcus came and got me after he was finished and I took my turn washing the filth off. When he came back down from the roof I got the impression that he was, yet again, praying that we would not be spending the next few days in the company of those gentlemen.
We went back to the same restaurant by the river for dinner. The ants were still there. Marcus continued to terrorize them. At one point he had one of the vicious little bastards hanging by its mandibles from the tip of a pen. He then dipped the monster in the cherry dipping sauce for the spring rolls and then returned him to his compatriots. The ant's buddies started alternating between tearing the poor guy limb from limb and realizing that he was one of their own. It is definitely interesting to watch ant behavior when they are forced into an ethical dilemma. Constance was also at the restaurant. She introduced us to her son, again I am pretty sure his name was Q, and, to our relief, informed us that she was not on the same trek that we were. She spent the rest of her meal with her son glancing at Marcus with a very strange expression. We ignored it the best we could and pretended to have interesting conversations about things that we had already talked about and, eventually, she and her son left.
After we finished dinner we went back to the little cafe we had lunch at, ordered a few beers and had a very interesting conversation with an older Irish lady named Mary. She had been traveling for most of her life and entertained us with her stories of those travels. After a couple beers and a couple hours of chatting, we headed off to sleep.

Post the Third

We settled in to our seats on the bus and started to take in the scenery between Chiang Rai and the Laos border. Lush green rice fields, amazing karsts, wooden huts, and an ever present acrid smoke that seemed to choke the horizon. It seems that, in preparation for the rainy season, most of Northern Thailand and Laos light everything on fire right around the beginning of March. I have never spent a lot of time studying agriculture but I seem to remember that field burning was one of the less desirable ways to prepare land for the next seasons crops. They don't seem to have gotten the memo in this part of the world. As the bus traveled on, we not only saw the acrid smoke on the horizon but also the remnants of the recently charred fields and then, as we got closer and closer to the Laos border, we were actually driving past hillsides and fields that were in the process of being burned. I imagine that a controlled burn is a lot less labor intensive than some of the other ways you could clear land for cultivation but, I must say, it does kind of rob ones appreciation of the natural beauty of a place when it hurts to breathe.

For about the first thirty minutes of the ride, Marcus and I had a great time. We were on the road and heading to Laos for a fifteen day adventure that promised to be a great time. We took in the sites of the country, so refreshing after several months of the pollution, concrete, and craziness of the city, chatted about the plans that we had and how we were going to implement them, and laughed about the situations we had already found ourselves in within the first six hours of the trip. The windows on the bus were down, the air was thick with the smells of the countryside (we hadn't been overwhelmed by the smoke yet), the scenery was beautiful, and, by god, we were going somewhere.
That somewhere, according to the English signage on the bus, was Chiang Khong. As we got further and further away from Chiang Rai, a subtle shift in Marcus' demeanor started to become apparent. "Hey, Brett" he eventually said to me, "what if we got on the wrong bus?" The bus slowed down, some people got off. Marcus, newly worried with the seeds of doubt, changed seats. I went to sleep. I woke up a little while later to see Marcus on his cell phone trying to get a hold of someone in Bangkok to confirm that we were, indeed, supposed to be going to Chiang Khong. He was unsuccessful. I could read the stress on his face. I went back to sleep and had a lovely dream about unicorns. The dream caused me a bit of an epiphany when I realized that we never stop fantasizing. As adults, we just limit our fantasies to the world of the possible and then pin all of our hopes and dreams on things that are just as imaginary as unicorns, but they are things we can justify as being 'possibilities' and we are just as upset when these fantasies fail us as we were when we found out there were no unicorns.
We finally arrived in Chiang Khong and were immediately relieved to find a host of tuk-tuk's waiting to take people to the border crossing. It was about 5pm and we were not sure how much longer the border would be open. We threw our bags into the back of the tuk-tuk and energetically encouraged the driver to get us there quickly. Unfortunately, there was nothing quick about the tuk-tuk we chose. I am not sure if it was the weight of our bags or the 1% grade of the hill we were driving up, but the man's motorbike definitely struggled. I started debating whether or not we should have walked. Eventually, we got to the top of the road leading to immigration and that is as far as our driver was willing to take us. We paid the man, grabbed our bags and walked down to the little office on the banks of the Mekong River. We were still not sure if immigration on the Laos side would be open and we still had not acquired our visas for Laos but the man at Thai immigration happily stamped us out of Thailand. We walked down to the bank of the river and hired a boat to take us across to Laos.




The boat ride took all of five minutes and then, after collecting our bags, we walked up the boat ramp to find the Laos immigration and visa services office....open!
We handed over our passports and filled out our applications. We changed money. I, for the first time in my life, had over two million units of a currency on my person. We got our passports back with the Laos visas, paid our fees (it's cheaper if you are an American than it is if you are a Canadian, go figure). We then gave our passports to the immigration officer and we were officially in Laos. This really consisted of, yet again, grabbing our packs, and then walking up the road in to the little town of Huay Xai (Hoo-ay-sigh).
As I said before, there was nothing happening. Marcus and I checked into the Friendship Guest House, dropped off our bags and then went to find the Gibbon Experience office.



The office was just down the street from our guest house, as it would turn out that everything else was as well, and there was a note on the door that said 'will be back at 2pm'. It was already six in the evening so we assumed they meant 'the next day'.
We ate at a pretty nice restaurant just down the street from our guest-house (ha!)which had the added benefit of having these huge red attack ants all over the riverside railing. These ants were HUGE! They were so huge that when they snapped their mandibles shut...YOU COULD HEAR IT! The ants also had these crazy black eyes and you could tell that they could actually see because they would stop and look at things (like you, or your finger, or the tip of a chopstick, or each other) While we were waiting for our dinner to arrive we observed these creatures capturing all sorts of bugs and we also observed that the gecko's, which were easily ten times bigger than the ants, were terrified of them. Marcus started alternating between catching bugs to feed the ants and then flicking the ants off of the railing into the dark oblivion of the riverside grasses.

Our food arrived. Marcus ordered sticky rice and spring rolls. I had a very nice fried rice with chicken that, while delicious, really hurt to eat because of the burn in my mouth from the pizza earlier in the day.
After dinner, Marcus decided he still wasn't feeling too great from the previous nights escapades and that he was going to go to bed. It was 8:30 at this point. I decided to stay up and check out Houay Xai. I wandered down the main street and saw the same ten people on the same ten motorbikes driving back and forth down the road. I saw people eating dinner at little impromptu cafes and food stands. I heard a lot of Thai pop music blasting at speaker-blowing levels out of tiny little radios. I found a little cafe that was playing Jack Johnson (at least is wasn't the Eagles), ordered a beer, and began writing in my journal. And that was about it. Thus ended the first day of our trip to Laos. I was in bed by 11:30 in order to prepare myself for the day ahead, little did I know that Houay Xai was so sleepy that I wouldn't have needed to sleep at all and would have still had plenty of resources to deal with what there was on offer.

This Guy. Post the Second.

We walked into the pizza shop, took off our huge backpacks, and managed to get ourselves seated at a table. We went over the menu, decided on what we were having, placed our orders and, then, I started scanning the dining room to see what the people of Chiang Rai that ate pizza were like. As I was looking around, I noticed the man pictured to the left. Well, not actually that man. I stole the photo of the interwebs and then doctored it a bit in paint to make it slightly resemble the man that I saw, but I think it is close enough to accurate to paint the correct picture.
He was sitting at a table behind Marcus. He had a copy of the Lonely Planet 'India' guidebook unopened on the table in front of him, underneath a plate of half-eaten onion rings. When I say half-eaten what I mean is that each of the individul onion rings was only half-eaten. In other words, he had eaten half of each onion ring on the plate. It gets even odder. Oh, and there were three cups of coffee, not that that is odder but they were also on the table. The man himself was wearing a baseball cap and very, very dark sunglasses. I am not sure if I need to, but I will remind you that we are sitting in a fairly dimly lit pizzeria. I begin to look away and look at some of the less strange clients in the restaurant as he starts tearing the warning label off of a pack of cigarettes. By the time I had scanned the rest of the dining room and got back to looking at the man in the hat and glasses, he had removed the warning label from the cigarette pack and was holding it in between his lips so that the picture of rotted teeth and a cancer-eaten lip was covering his own mouth. While he was doing this he was also scanning the dining room and locking eyes over the top of his glasses with anybody he caught looking at him.
I quickly looked away, but at this point thought it would be a good time to involve Marcus in the freak show that was occurring just a few meters away. "Don't look now", I said to Marcus, "but in a bit look over your left shoulder at your six o'clock." Marcus eventually glanced over and then almost choked on his own laughter. The man continued to sit there in this fashion for about the next 10 minutes. Marcus and I, all the while, quietly discussing the ins and outs about why westerners get such bad raps in foreign countries. Suddenly, the man stood up and, without collecting any of his possessions or asking for his check, walked out the door. Watching from my seat, I saw him stand outside the front window, pull out a cigarette, light it up, and then walk across the street to a temporary traffic police shelter and sit down. At about that time our pizza arrived. We ate, I burned the roof of my mouth severely, we payed our bill and, by the time we left, the man still hadn't come back. Everything he left was still on the table but he was no where to be seen. Perhaps the mother-ship called at an inopportune time.
After we left the pizzeria, Marcus realized that he had forgotten to pack a towel. This was very bad. According to one of my favorite authors in the world:

A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-boggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitchhiker) discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, washcloth, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet-weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitchhiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitchhiker might accidentally have "lost". What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with.
Chapter 3 of Douglas Adams work,
'The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy'.

Not that Marcus or I are interstellar hitch-hikers but the same, in a much tamer way, can be said about the uses of a towel even if it is toned down the things that one may come across backpacking through SE Asia. Marcus decided that procuring a towel was the single most important thing that he needed to do. I waited outside of a shop he went in to search for the towel. I smoked a cigarette in clear view of the bus that we were supposed to be taking to the border. I glanced at my watch, it was 2:30pm. I looked up just as the bus started backing out of the bus station. Marcus still hadn't returned. I quietly chuckled to myself. The bus pulled out and slowly headed down the street, turned the corner, and disappeared. Marcus returned about two minutes later carrying a towel. I smiled as he walked up and told him that our bus had just left. He asked me what time it was. I told him it was 2:33. He waved his towel furiously, "This is Thailand," he yells, "NOTHING EVER LEAVES ON TIME, LET ALONE FUCKING EARLY!"
It turns out that a towel is also useful for flagging down buses in Thailand. I know this because, at that very moment a bus pulled up beside us and, although it didn't actually stop, a woman on the bus started signaling for us to get on. Marcus said, "Laos?". The woman continued signaling for us to get on. The bus still hadn't stopped moving. It was a split second decision. We jumped on. I, confused by how quickly everything was happening, tried to sit down on one of the open bench seats without removing my pack. In my haste I completely mis-judged how much space the seat had to offer and the combined size of me and my backpack. I found myself mercilessly wedged between the back of the seat and the seat in front of me, the weight of the pack having pulled me into the compromising position before I could re-shift my weight to get out of it. I squirmed, and squirmed, and squirmed and, eventually, managed to get the backpack off and into the back of the bus where Marcus was standing and laughing at me. Not only was Marcus laughing at me but so was every other person on the small bus. Every person, that is, except the young Thai monk sitting directly behind me. He was definitively unamused.

The First Post

Houay Xai, March 2nd 2009
An incredibly sleepy town. I was born in an incredibly sleepy town and grew up in some even sleepier towns (anyone ever heard of Bridge, OR) but this town puts them all to shame in the category of sleepiness. I have been here for a little less than a day at this point and some of the really noticeable things I have noticed are that anything that happens here happens in exactly the same way on any other day (I am convinced of this even though I have been here less than a day), and I am pretty sure the town has hired about 10 young couples to drive up and down the main street to give the illusion that there is something going on somewhere; and that people are trying to get there. After very close inspection, however, you realize that the people on the motorbikes must be driving the same 5km stretch over and over again, all day long. What I have just said is not actually true, but it feels that way.
The trip actually began yesterday in Bangkok. Marcus and I made our way to the airport at 7 in the morning. Marcus, in a far worse state than me, wasn't sure he was going to be able make it and was dreading the flight up north to Chiang Rai. The reason why Marcus was in a far worse state than me? The night before we had gone out for some end of term drinks with our co-workers and Marcus, in his infinite wisdom, decided to get on the whiskey. Not such a bad decision, some of you might think, but what you don't know is that Marcus hasn't really had anything to drink in about two full months (according to my calculations, anyway). We all had a good evening, but the drink hit Marcus a little harder than he was expecting.
We got to the airport, checked in to our flights and then proceeded to kill the next three hours. We wandered around. Marcus, starting to enter the stage of his hangover where everything was becoming funny because nothing made any sense, picked out a strange little cafe for us to have a breakfast sandwich and for me to get my coffee. It may sound like I am berating Marcus for drinking but, I assure you, I am not. I am merely berating him for drinking whiskey all night when he hasn't drank in two months.
We went through the security check (I think they are making the machines more sensitive because my piercings keep setting the damn detectors off), immigration, and then made it to the departure gate. Marcus immediately laid down on an empty row of benches and went to sleep. I found a place to buy some water and snacks and then proceeded to watch the Discovery Channel in Thai. It is very strange to see a bunch of American inmates speaking in Thai. I have always wondered what people do in prison and now I know--they learn strange languages so that they can be on TV shows in foreign countries.
Eventually we boarded the plane. The flight to Chiang Rai took just about an hour and we were in a taxi and on our way to the Chiang Rai bus station before noon. We got to the bus station and asked when the bus for the Laos border was leaving. We were shown to the bus we needed to take. I asked, in Thai, when the bus left. We were told that the departure time was 2:45. I checked my watch. We had an hour and fifteen minutes. Somewhere in this process I realized that I had forgotten to pack any socks. Marcus laughed at me for being an idiot, still blurry eyed, but obviously in better spirits. I looked up and down the street and saw, to my luck, an Addidas shop. Now, I have never been a big fan of Addidas but I was pretty sure they could fulfill my need for a couple pairs of socks. I wasn't wrong.
That wasted about ten full minutes. With an hour and five minutes left, we decided to get some lunch. We opted for pizza and thank god for that because if we hadn't, we wouldn't have met this guy:

This will take a little bit of explanation, I am sure.
And it will come in the next installment. I promise.

The Long and Winding and Dusty and Bumpy Road

On the jarring scooter ride to Mae sot from the Wattana resort, I am first hit with the smell of horses, making me nostalgic, then of mangos, which makes me hungry, then of dust, which makes my nose scrunch, and then of Tom Yum Gung, which makes me hungry again. Around that time, I turn onto the main highway and its nothing but exhaust until I hit the market. There’s something to be said about riding on a scooter as opposed to a car. You notice more, like the bumps and potholes on the road, for example. The sounds, the smells, the wind, the amount of bugs in the air, are all acutely in your ears, nose, hair and face. Our resort lies about 20 minutes out of town, making walking and a mountain bike impractical. I rented a motorbike. Unlike the motorbike I rented in Mae Hong Son, this one has seen better days - and none of them were with me. It’s not an automatic but a manual, the brakes are shot, the starter practically comatose, and I spent the 1st 4 days learning how to get the lazy creature to start.

3 tips should you ever find yourself renting a scooter in Mae Sot:

Don’t drive a dusk down unpopulated roads, lest you spoil your appetite on the copious quantities of insects along your way and freckle your face with unbecoming bug carcasses.

While while Bangkok races, Mae Sot shuffles it’s feet. In BKK it’s virtually impossible to move fast enough for the poor schmuck with the misfortune to get stuck behind your pokey moped. In Mae sot, I don’t know know if the dramaticly slower flow of traffic is due to the slower pace of life, or just because these poor 100 cc dinorsaurs just can’t go any faster carrying every household member on board.

After 3 or 4 trips into town and no movement from fuel gauge needle, chances are more likely that it’s broken and not that you’re clunker is getting exceptional gas mileage.

My favorite establishment in Mae Sot: The Borderline Cafe, Shop and Gallery

Happy... Happy....

Happy New Year! I hope 2009 blesses you with good health and peace and ice cream and a puppy.

We had a rather eventful ending to 2008, but then again, when is travel with this dynamic duo not eventful? On Christmas Eve, Brett and I hopped on a bus to Krabi. We bought some yummy Thai snacks at a stop along the way and I dozed off and Brett dozed off and we woke up in Krabi a lot of hours later. We hopped off the bus and Brett went digging in my purse for his wallet and couldn’t find it. I stuck my hand into my purse and noticed my big bulky red monstrosity of a wallet was also missing. We found a table. I dumped the contents of my purse onto it. Everything was there…except our wallets. Perhaps the most frustrating thing about this is I KNOW BETTER!!!! My wallet was only ever taken from me by threat in Honduras, I slept atop my purse in China. I KNOW BETTER! To my defense, it was an acrobatic feat that our little thief achieved getting past my feet on the window side to steal them. Then again, considering how heavy Brett and I sleep, maybe not. Little bugger. We were stuck in Krabi with absolutely NADA. No CC. No cash in pocket. NADA. The kind people at the Tourist Info were kind enough to give 50 Baht to a songteaw driver to take us into town to the police station. There, many hours later, and with some help from some of you, we got 2 pieces of paper saying our wallets were stolen. I was able to cancel my cards and have them sent to Krabi. Unfortunately, they were then sent to Texas instead. The situation has since been fixed.



Here's a picture of Brett, hoarding his chicken and mr. donuts, pre-fleecing.




Here's me worrying:




Here's Brett worrying:

Here's Brett after he gave up worrying:

Here's why it was easy to give up worrying:

Thanks to the gracious generosity of our friends, Marcus and Pascale, we were still able to enjoy our vacation. We got a wonderful little bungalow and we climbed and ate and ate and climbed and climbed and ate and laid in the sun and ran (one of us for longer distances than the other) and got bitten by mosquitos (one more than the other) and met people and climbed and ate and ate with people and drank and it was all very lovely. I left my camera in my bag most of this trip and took mental photographs instead.

New Years Eve, on our last full day, it was just Brett and I who headed to the crag. We went to Eagle wall and I started the day doing what I’m always scared to do: lead climb. Nothing too challenging.. I got to the anchors. I did something wrong but caught myself and was able to stem my feet so that my hands were free. I fixed it. I came down. My foot hurt. I though I could just walk it off and it was really just stiff, no intense moment of pain just a sudden lack of full movement. I climbed two other climbs - badly. We headed back and I started limping… and it just kept getting worse. By the end of the dinner, every step was painful and bringing me close to tears. I decided I would forgo the festivities since the thought of walking in the sand was making me sad. I said the words: “I’m not going anywhere without a cane or a crutch”. Brett disappeared and reappeared with a crutch. This man is works miracles. He makes crutches appear from thin air. I hobbled to the beach. We drank, we celebrated, we danced (me on 1 foot and a crutch), the tide ate one of my fugly fake crocs and I celebrated even more, we watched paper lanterns create staircases in the sky, and then I went to bed.

The next day we got to Krabi without incident, showed them the lovely slips of paper issued by the efficient and effective Krabi Police Dept. and boarded a plane back to good ‘ol BKK. That evening, Brett met my Dad and Sue. It was lovely. We had a nice dinner which was serendipitously not to far from our place.

The next day, we took Dad and Sue to Lumpini Park, one of our favorite places in BKK. Lumpini Park: BKK as Central Park: NYC. We sat, we chatted, we reminisced, we observed a water monitor creep around the lake and then we ate at a neat restaurant: Cabbages and Condoms. Brett loved hearing my Dad’s mishaps (it runs in the family) and stories, some of which I had never heard before.

On Sunday, they came over for a lunch and we chatted and reminisced some more. We went to one of my favorite restaurants, Three on Convent, for dinner then said goodbye as Dad and Sue would be taking of for Chiang Mai and I to Kuala Lumpur the next day.

I continue with my month and a half long cough. I’ve gotten a number of different suggestions as to how to get rid of it but not much has worked yet. An expensive Doc took chest x-rays and told me it wasn’t TB (yay!) and that it was acute bronchitis. Acute my *ss. This is chronic.

So here I am, in Kuala Lumpur. I’ve found a lovely yoga studio that I like much more than the gym that I was going to last KL ride. After several yoga sessions of the easy and restorative variety, and a week of work and a still swollen ankle, I have taken the weekend to do nothing other than elevate, ice, and heat my ankle. So here I lay, ankle in the air, scouring the net for entertainment and wedding locations, depressing myself with BBC news, and waiting for next weekend when I am hopefully mobile and Brett arrives.

Ode to our (hopefully) future home.

As I've mentioned before, our cozy little nook of Bangkok has been much better than anticipated. I like our apartment, and all the people who work in it. I like the food and have found where to buy mango sticky rice. I like my Thai lessons, despite the fact that I haven't become miraculously fluent after 3 lessons as previously hoped. I expected to hate every second of being in Bangkok. I don't. In point of fact, I like it.
But I love Krabi. Our recent vacation to Krabi and Tonsai reminded me of all the reasons I left the hustle and bustle of Japan and came to Thailand. Brett and I spent a day of our vacation checking out Krabi on motorcycle. What follows are my unfair comparisons.

Bangkok Traffic: Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more exhausting, hot, and grey. Bangkok has gazillions of motorcycles, motorcycles taxis, regular taxis, songtaews, buses, private commuter vans, cars, tuk-tuks, and the occasional suicidal pedestrian trying to cross four lanes of traffic instead of using the pedestrian bridge (we admit to joining their ranks on occasion). They are all vying for the same 1 m² of free space in which to wedge their vehicle of choice in order to cut off the driver who dared to allow said space to exist and thereby advancing half a meter closer to their destination while gagging on the carcinogenic accumulation of exhaust fumes. Krabi's traffic, however, is actually like a good, lazy summer's day.

Where Bangkok is like a flash flood carrying with it sewage and jewels, Krabi is a peaceful brook. Bangkok is a cacophony of horns, vender calls, rushing cars, trains passing overhead, stereos blasting and public aerobics being conducted on the street corner with instructions assailing you over giant speakers along with badly remixed Spanish dance songs. Krabi is the whisper of a breeze, the lapping of waves against boats and docks. To be fair, there was still the occasional but wholly ESCAPABLE audio assault as you pass the main market. Bangkok is a collage of astronomically expensive, mouth watering luxurious high rise condos and office buildings, high fashion shopping malls, dilapidated buildings, beggars, business men, prostitutes, students, tourists galore, billboards, discos, karaoke bars, mom and pop shops selling random household necessities, 5 star restaurants and and endless streets of outdoor food stalls. Bangkok has everything (except an affordable climbing gym). Krabi does not. Its a simple child's drawing of a couple of buildings and some trees. It's lovely. It's a drawing I can't wait to live in.

Click here for photos.

We want Thailand but does Thailand want us?!

It started in Japan. After three months of calling and emailing and writing and sorting and more calling and mailing and more calling and nail biting and check writing and more calling and more emailing to collect all the necessary documents we were denied the long-coveted 90 day Non-Immigrant B Visa. Resigned to the 30 day tourist visa, we packed our bags and headed to the airport. A misunderstanding of the excess baggage charges on Singapore Airlines resulted in the heartbreaking discard of countless items (Chacos , all my dresses , CDS, running shoes, and countless sentimental objects) that had to be tossed tenuously to the wayside to arrive at a financially manageable (debatable) excess baggage charge. Then, we had to undergo the process again when surprised with a flight from BKK to Chiang Mai when we were expecting a long 10 hour bus ride. Then, we learned about the nightmare of the temperamental at best visa process. . Then, Brett's wallet got stolen along with the only access to both our money. Mon Dieu! Luckily, he had the foresight to give me the bulk of the money we took out from the ATM which will hopefully last us through Chiang Mai. We are sorting our banking options out and crossing our fingers and our toes.

But we've also ridden elephants and floated down peaceful rivers surrounded by lush landscapes on bamboo rafts. We've explored man-made caves in the Thai Buddhist temple, Wat U-Mong, just up the street from our hotel and been blissfully twisted and contorted during a Thai massage. I was given a ride on the scooter of my favorite cafe owner and he showed me and a friend around the Chiang Mai Sunday market. Next week, we hope to explore some Chiang Mai crags. The people are wonderful and friendly. We're very excited about our new home... if it will have us.

Beachside Musings

Location: Roots Guesthouse, Mae Ramphung Beach, Rayong, Thailand

Having recovered from playing on the beach all morning, I awoke from my nap to sit on my balcony, stare at my surroundings, and soak in what was happening.

Though I intended to stay in Japan for only six months (a year at most), I ended up staying for two and a half years. I must admit that when I decided to move to Japan, I was excited about the move and change in scenery but fairly ambivalent about the country itself. It was a convenient runner up to the more attractive but less financially viable South America. It was a challenge from the start. Modern Japan, for its flashy, neon ways was a culture I had little in common with originally. That said, I left the country having learned much more than expected about its culture, language, and people and left feeling even more curious still. By far the best presents Japan bestowed on me were the incredible people who shared my trials and tribulations, not to mention fun, cherry blossoms, and not just a few nights of drunken karaoke. I left Japan feeling all the richer for the friends I'd gained along the way. Like my friends and family back home, they will always be dear, if not as near as I would like them to be.

We arrived in Thailand on Songkran, the Thai New Year. It's celebrated by dousing people with water as a sort of "blessing". Locals and foreigners alike walked, drove, and scooted around with water guns and buckets of water making the hot, humid air even wetter. We escaped Bangkok to an intentionally low-key beach filled with mostly Thais. We walked up the main strip with our backpacks looking for a guest house and were greeted with hearty and enthusiastic "hello"s just before buckets of water were cheerfully poured on us. We were soaked from head to toe. Hahahaha, it was priceless.

One of the most difficult things in Japan for me was that despite being surrounded by people, you could feel so alone. When not with friends, I walked around invisible. Umeda station was a crowd of hundreds or thousands of people invisible to each other and refusing to meet my eye. As we walked around the beach, people would immediately make eye contact with us and smile. Others would shout "Hello!" while standing in the beds of passing trucks. It's an invigorating and soul-hugging feeling to be seen again.

The rich smells of Thai food are wafting up to my balcony. Brett is swimming on the beach. I have no doubt that Thailand will give us its fair share of headaches. It already has before we even landed. I'm just happy to be here.