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Want more of my daily meanderings?

2010-08-04T18:02:00.001+01:00

Although the trip is over, my mind is still wandering. I’ve started a new blog called 908 Asanas. Come with me as I embark on my next ridiculous adventure as a neophyte yogini. Yes, I'm going to do yoga. Lots of it.

10 Things I Learned Traveling Around the World

2010-07-25T20:06:00.004+01:00

I have successfully procrastinated writing this final blog post for days and weeks on end. Partly because once the blog is over, then I have to accept the unsettling fact that the trip is over. That is: “The Trip”. Although we have been back for a few months now, we have been in a state of suspended animation - a perpetual limbo. We live like hobos out of our backpacks and sleep like temporary vagrants on a blow-up air mattress.

In some ways, it’s like the trip was a dream I once had. It’s funny how fast the past bleeds into obscurity in the face of the present. So I’m left asking myself, “What does it all mean?” and “What did we learn at the end of it all?” A lot of the answers are cliché but somehow I feel them in a deeper, more ingrained way than I ever could if they were just needlepointed on a pillow.

1. The world is a BIG place

There are over 195 recognized sovereign nations on earth. In my lifetime, I’ve traveled to 23 countries over a total period of thirteen months of travel. That’s just shy of 12% of the countries out there. There is so much to explore, so much to see, it would take multiple lifetimes to see it all. Some places we visited, we had only scratched the surface, seen only the merest glimpse of its culture and what it has to offer. Instead of “seeing it all“ we were inspired by other travelers and exotic destinations, so now there are far more places we wish to travel to than when we left on the trip!

2. Everything is Same Same but Different

There is this great saying in SE Asia: same same but different. It’s a way to identify something as similar but not identical. A dragon fruit is same same but different than a prickly pear. Sam song is same same but different than Jack Daniels. Traveling has deepened this concept into my bones. It’s not just a quaint saying. All the countries and cultures around the world are same same but different. Sure, there are variations of food and fashion and geography, but the people are essentially the same. In fact, the similarities are more pronounced, the differences are usually on the surface. The world is the same the world over.

3. Money doesn’t buy happiness

Everyone is hoping to eek out a happy life filled with family and friends. It’s the oldest cliché in the book that money doesn’t buy happiness but you can see that truth reflected in the humble smiles of people living in near-poverty. They exude happiness. And not in that well-groomed I-have-a-lot-of-designer-shit happy way. Life is simple, if you stop fiddling with it and analyzing it to death.

4. The less shit, the better

Carrying everything you own on your back, like a crab dragging its conch shell of a home, makes you realize the value of “stuff”. All the stuff you thought you needed. All the stuff that doesn’t live up to its value proposition because of it’s size or weight or maintenance requirements. Everything is studied for its intrinsic value, it's utility. And guess what? There are very few real necessities, even in this modern life.

Out in Hayward, I have four storage cubes jam-packed full of stuff, and for the life of me, I can’t remember what half of it is. I feel like it will be quite the excavation project when we unearth our belongings. And I have the feeling, I won’t need quite so much stuff. I can get by on less. I want less. I need less.

5. Gratitude and Humility

I have come back with a deep gratitude for living in the United States. The richness of our life here. Not riches, but richness. The quality and variety we have in abundance. We are so indescribably lucky that we fail to see it anymore. We take our lives and our livelihoods for granted. One of the most important things I took away from this trip was a double shot dose of Gratitude & Humility.

6. There’s no place like home

No one said it better than Neil Young, “Make a living life like a rolling stone, on the road there’s no place like home.”

The other day, I gave a five minute soliloquy on “the couch”. My friend Tina was telling me how she spent the previous day on the couch. I stopped short, and my mouth dropped open. "The, the couch!" I stuttered. Ohhhh, how I remember you! My velvety plush chocolate colored couch. How I would snuggle on you all day. How I could be so luxuriously lazy that I would alternate between watching tv and snoozing. I would daydream and stroke the cat in it’s own droopy eyed bliss. I would eat dinner while I watched Top Chef. Oh, how I miss you so! My Beautiful, Wonderful, Comfortable Couch!

When you are away from home and deprived of all the homey indulgences, you are delighted by the littlest remembrances. I bet you don’t appreciate your couch that much. Go on, go give him a big, bear hug. You would sure miss him if he was gone.

[I don't know why I envision my couch as male, some sort of a big floppy eared dog, always glad to see you, and you just can't seem to resist]

7. Wherever you go there you are...

Someone more profound and wiser than I once said, “Wherever you go there you are.” How true. You can alter you surroundings, change your location, travel halfway around the world but you can’t escape yourself. You are always there, staring back.

It’s funny that my life could be turned upside down from where it was and yet I felt exactly the same in so many ways (same same but different). There was still not enough time and not enough money. My relationship was stuck in all the same spots. We had the same fights, and fought the same anxieties in ourselves. I guess the point is: you have to face up to yourself sometime and now’s as good a time as any.

8. Growth is a painful process

I embarked on this trip to learn and grow, perhaps become someone new. Something has shifted. But it’s unclear what exactly. It’s subtle. Or I could be so close to the picture I can’t see the nuances any longer. But I certainly didn’t become what I always dreamed overnight.

Change is hard to invoke. Even harder to make stick. I wasn’t the perfect person I yearned to be. I didn’t do yoga every morning or floss every night. I didn’t write anything substantial, but this silly little blog. I didn’t endeavor in art - a near impossibility on the road. The closest we could veer was to be living art: an ever shifting collage of time and place.

I crossed one impassable bridge I told myself for years: I can’t travel because [fill in the blank] and in doing so I unwittingly fell victim to: I can’t [fill in the blank] because I’m traveling too much. It’s not because I didn’t have time or money or any of the other litany of excuses I hid behind to mask laziness, fear, and weak-will. It‘s fucking hard to have the guts and grit to live the life you’ve always imagined. (Thoreau didn't bother to mention that tidbit.) You can have every possibility and opportunity you have always dreamed of right in front of you, and you can still hesitate!

Yes, growth is painful, but like all things that flower we must necessarily (and at times unwillingly) grow towards the light. Little by little. Small small. We'll eventually get there, or die trying.

9. Life is always happening

I wrote this back when we were leaving for the trip:

Like a single balloon escaping the bunch and floating away. No anchor to hold steady. No direction but up and away.

I had that giddy feeling that I found out a way to escape. Escape the normalcy of a prescribed life, the 9-to-6 job, the obligations of adulthood. This journey made me realize I wasn't one of the chosen few that miraculously found a way out. In reality, nothing ever anchored me to earth, but myself. I could always write myself a hall pass. In fact, we all have a thick stack of 'em in our desk drawer. Life is always out there - happening, whether you are apart of it or not. The best thing is: you can always join the party, there is no RSVP required.

[I think I mixed three metaphors in one paragraph, that’s a new personal best (or some would argue, worst) for me!]

10. Life is unutterably fragile and fleetingly short

One of the most motivating quotes I heard when I was getting up the guts to go on this trip was from the movie Rumble Fish:

"You know the older you get, you say, Jesus, how much I got? I got 35 summers left.
Think about it - 35 summers."

As frightening as this thought is, there are no guarantees in life. No one is going to promise you a long life of good health. You actually don’t know if you have thirty-five summers or just three left. So don’t hesitate, act. Whatever you were "planning" to do sometime in the future once "this" or "that" happens is just excuse-making. Like the wizened old runner in too short shorts says: Just do it. Don’t look back on your life with tearful regret. Don’t be bored with the life that flashes before your eyes when you kick the bucket. That would be really sad: "Eibert, I give it two and half stars, it was uninspiring and the ending just dragged on and on."

Promise me. 35 summers. No regrets.

Fix your shit man!

2010-05-15T18:55:00.039+01:00

[An attempt to ghostwrite a ranting blog post with Ron about the horrid state of affairs in hostels, guesthouses, and shitholes all over the world.]

Why is it that everything everywhere is totally screwed up? (Or maybe I should say un-screwed up) Nothing works and is falling apart wherever I go or stay, so I’m constantly repairing other people’s shit. Of course, I never thought to bring any tools along on this trip. Big mistake. I ask myself over and over why I didn’t pack that Leatherman 831102 Super Tool-300 Multitool. (A shameless plug to Amazon where we get 4% of your purchase.)

Or the better question is why can’t these owners spend a few minutes - or weeks, cuz it’s going to take that long due to their neglect - fixing their shit?!

First, you walk up four flights of stairs to your room, either because there is no elevator, or everything is so dilapidated it is certainly a death trap. Each stair is a different height like you’re in a fun house. Not all different, mind you. The first eight or so are equal height and then the last is a half stair so you trip and unexpectedly lose your balance. What kind of ku-ku brain is building these places? Don’t they know to measure twice, and cut once?

Then I’m handed a skeleton key. What is this - 18th century technology? Once we got locked inside our room in Africa and had to slide the key under the door to the manager to get out. God forbid there is a fire. If the lock is not an ancient relic, it is a cheapo Chinese-made padlock: real high security. But apparently, there is a deep historical tradition of padlocks in China. Inevitably the light bulb is blown out over the door so it 15 minutes of fumbling around to even get inside.

Inside the room there are at least twenty light switches, half don’t do anything, half go to lights in a purely random fashion all over the room, or perhaps to something in next room. The light switch that isn’t labeled rings the front desk, so then someone shows up with whom you can’t communicate with. WTF?

The lighting is invariably a single energy saving florescent light that casts an unnatural hue on everything and everybody, making an already depressing room feel like a cross between an insane asylum and a prison cell. Never let yourself get excited by the bedside lamp, it doesn’t work. Face the fact that when it gets dark, you won’t do any reading in bed unless you use your Black Diamond Icon Headlamp (Cha-ching!)

Electrical outlets are inconveniently placed halfway to the ceiling, way too high to actually plug anything in. That is, if you even dare to plug in your Pink iPod Nano (Double cha-ching!) or other prized possessions. The electrical outlet holes are the definition of sketchy, and so worn out you have to use duct tape to fasten anything you might want to plug-in. Then there are always exposed wires of some sort that dangle threateningly from the ceiling, sometimes sticking out of an old water heater looming above your head in the shower! An electrician’s nightmare.

There is no such thing as a right sized curtain. It is too short, either lengthwise or longwise. Or it is too sheer, so we are on display like a zoo exhibit. The windows themselves are paper thin and useless to block out any sound - not the cows mooing, not the locals speaking at shout level, and certainly not the Call to Prayer blaring at 3:45am.

The switch for the A/C or the hot shower or both are outside or potentially in someone else’s room. You won’t realize this until you are naked, however, and have to call down for assistance from the front desk to get a little hot water. Often the A/C units are hooked into some scary voltage adapter that would cheerfully electrocute you. I got a 240 Volt zap while taking a shower in India, I went to turn off the hot water and as soon as I touched the knob…POW!

The TV is probably from the 1980’s with an average diagonal size of 13”. A far cry from our Samsung 58" Plasma(Quadruple cha-ching!) Although, at least it’s in color, there will be only three channels you can tune in. One is a serious religious prayer of some flavor, one is a disorienting frenzy of high-pitched singing and choreographed dancing that would make perfect sense on acid, and one has a great American movie on - OMIGOD! …But then you slowly realize that its sub-titled in Arabic and all the good parts are censored out anyway. You reach for the remote, but the remote never works so don’t even try.

Paint is most likely slopped on out of a bucket onto the walls with ill regard for the boundaries of trim, ceilings, or floors. It appears as if the concept of using a roller has not been invented in other parts of the world. The implement of choice is a broom of some sort that makes the finishes more careless and amateur than a blind man painting. My cat can paint better!

There are dust mites and bed bugs and future vaccines growing in the corners, waiting to be discovered. That’s if you are lucky. If you are unlucky you have cockroaches the size of circus peanuts crawling on your feet in the bathroom.

Now, don’t even get me started on the bathrooms!

You can’t even get through the doorway without incident, rusty nails sticking out of the wooden threshold to give you Tetanus followed by a trip up or tumble down the step into the bathroom.

If the shower works at all, you have a one percent chance of hot water; that is, if you remembered to call down twenty minutes in advance. The bathroom, or what is more accurately called the shower room, is essentially a showerhead positioned in the middle of the room over the bare floor and drain. Usually this is where the toilet sits so if you’re really into multitasking it’s great! The nozzle, although aiming down, will spray out sideways or trickle out in a low flow or in tiny spikes that feel like low levels of electrical current. The showerhead hose is at least forty years old and most likely you will have to hold the slimy implement while showering because the hook for it is broken.

The sink leaks on the floor. The hot and cold levers never work, or are backwards. The knob can be so hard to turn that when you finally force it on, the water sprays out of the sink onto your shirt. Forget about the sink stoppers, they never provide one, and even though we brought two different sizes with us the sink will never stay stopped up. This makes the hand-washing of laundry really fun. One minute after you fill the sink, you return to find your clothes stuck to the inside: damp and poised for escape over the edge. A completely sub-par wash job for clothes so stinky they need submersion in high-octane tide for at least two hours.

All this means the bathroom floor is constantly wet all day and all night long, and therefore so is the floor of your room. There are no bathmats or extra towels provided. You are win-the-lottery-lucky to get a towel in the first place, and then you must sacrifice it to dam up the damn bathroom floor.

The toilet seats are flimsy and made of some form of laminated cardboard. They have a tendency to just rip off, sometimes during mid-use. The toilet bowls themselves are ineffectually designed to make your daily business as smelly and disgusting as possible. Either, the water level is ridiculously low or there is a shelf in the toilet to catch the kids instead of dropping them off at the pool. Why, I implore you, why?!

After you’ve perched uncomfortably on the broken toilet seat and are on the verge of blacking out from your own foul fumes, you reach around and find the flusher doesn’t work. Of course not. That would imply that one thing in this fucking room works! Better get a bucket of water, placed inconveniently four feet away.

I mean, I know this ain’t the Ritz and I’m paying like ten bucks a night for this room, but FIX YOUR SHIT MAN!

RTW Trip Cost

2010-05-02T21:07:00.004+01:00

We traveled to 62 cities in 18 countries over 277 days. We spent a month preparing for the trip and a month or two in transition (read: recovery) after the trip. You may argue, we are still in major limbo. But Ron, bless his heart, has been gainfully employed for two months, where I’m still floating around not yet ready to come down.

A frequent question is: how much did we spend in a year of travels?

Bear in mind we are more Flashpackers than Backpackers. That is, we are not 20-year-old college students on summer vacation and we didn’t work our way around the world. We worked professional jobs and saved our nickels and dimes for several years. We stayed in budget rooms but not at the bottom-of-the-barrel establishments. We traveled cheaply, and overland where possible, but we didn’t hitchhike or ride on the roof of buses or in pick-ups full of chickens. We ate frugally, but we didn’t always eat street food. And the hallmark of the Flashpacker - we brought all sorts of techno gadgets: cameras, ipods, and a laptop.

Health Insurance: $1240
We were insured with IMG Global Patriot Travel Insurance which cost $310 per person for six months of travel coverage. We had a 1M policy with a $500 deductible and all the usual travel insurance benefits like emergency medical evacuation. Even with our scooter accident in Thailand, we didn't hit our deductible, so we didn't file any claims. Overall, we were happy with our coverage and more than happy that we did not need to use our coverage.

Medications/Vaccines: $2424
Before our trip, we loaded up on all the CDC recommended medications and vaccines. I spent five times as much money as Ron in this category due to my shoddy insurance coverage with Blue Cross. I also needed a year supply of birth control which alone cost $345. The list of vaccines we got are outlined in the post All Shot Up

Supplies: $3478
Most of this was spent at REI and includes everything from: backpacks, shoulder bags, cameras, clothes, shoes, sandals, water filters, books, a little netbook laptop, and even the world map we tacked to the wall and put pins in and dreamt about our trip, at the time was but a dream. For a full list, see our post What We Packed.

Moving/Storage: $4753
The move with Corrib Moving was $700 with all the supplies and the tip. Door to Door storage cost $280/month for 4 cubes of storage with extra insurance. Even though we downsized a fair amount, I guess we had a lot of stuff! For more details, see the post Packin it Up.

Daily Budget Europe: $10822
The daily budget includes room, food, drink, local transportation, and sightseeing. Our daily budget in Europe was $100/day, but we ended up at an average of $119/day for the 13 weeks we were in Europe. It is really challenging to live on the cheap in Europe. The most costly was the room which easily took up more than half the daily budget. I would highly recommend CouchSurfing to save money and meet local people.

Daily Budget Elsewhere: $10007
Our daily budget everywhere else (Ghana, India, Nepal, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam) was $50/day, but we averaged $55/day over six months. We tried to keep it cheap but you have to splurge every once in awhile on a good meal, a nicer guesthouse, or a beachside massage.

Daily Budget US: $5000
Most of this expense occurred the month before we left. I had hefty rent and bills on a San Francisco loft totaling over 3k. The remaining was for daily living expenses when we returned to the US in March, luckily to the loving arms and paid-for abodes of our families.

Transportation: $9916
This covered all visas and major transportation between countries, mainly flights and trains. We bought tickets as we went instead of buying a RTW Ticket which we debated for some time. In the end, we had far more flexibility and even saved money because our trip was cut short. But if I had to do it all again, I may have opted for the RTW Ticket. Sometimes too much flexibility is a bad thing.

Special Events: $2226
This was our slush fund and a critical part of the budget. If you get too close to counting your pennies every day, you can forget you are on a once-in-a-lifetime trip and have to live a little. This funded epic luxuries like: a Buddhist Thangka painting, a party in Paris, a romantic hotel room in Venice, an under-the-table gift for Salomey, a two-week Annapurna Trek, and a cruise in Halong Bay.

And the unexpected pitfalls like: being scammed in Istanbul and our scooter crash in Thailand.

GRAND TOTAL: $49,866

I have two emotions when I consider this number. First, I'm amazed at how much money that is! Um, that's a down payment on a house! But then I realize that I would have spent that same amount of money living in SF over the same year. And think about how much we did, how much we saw, and how much we experienced. It is a year we will never forget. A year that has changed us, evolved us, and opened us up to ourselves, each other, and the world. That, I believe, is what MasterCard calls "priceless".

Back in the USA

2010-03-09T19:23:00.002Z

After much deliberation, we have decided to head home to the good ole US of A. Ron's family made a valiant effort to re-rent his apartment, but in the weeks that followed, the financial situation proved to be a little more precarious than initially thought. Ron, like millions of Americans, is underwater on his mortgage. And in a big way, from buying in 2004 near the peak of the market in California.

He is headed back to San Francisco to look at mortgage renegotiation or short sale options. In the meantime, he is going to squat in his condo, and even with meager accoutrements, will be living better than we have been in 9 months. So don't feel too bad for him!

We've decided to divide and conquer, so I'm going to Oklahoma to see my Dad and my much-missed kitties. Fear not readers, there are a good 10 more blog posts from the last month in Vietnam and from earlier in the trip when I got back-logged. I won't be closing down camp just yet! And who knows, we may pick back up either abroad or here in the States.

The Tokyo Airport

2010-03-08T18:09:00.005Z

We arrived at Tokyo Airport before 7am, armed with a detailed master plan as to how to expedite our way through customs, get on the Narita Express to Tokyo, visit the Imperial Palace grounds, eat the most amazing (and expensive) sushi in the world, and arrive back by 2:30pm to catch our flights. Only problem was, I got one lousy hour of sleep (due to screaming kids and over-crowding) and Ron had just started to get my cold. We stood bleary eyed at the end of the ramp into the airport, like zombies. What to do now? Well, the traveler in us told us to press on, no matter the obstacle or physical discomfort. “You only get this one chance, don’t waste it.” The pragmatist in us said, “Screw it I want to go back to sleep.” Solution: the day room. Only the Japanese would think to provide a room at the airport where you could pay by the hour to sleep. Ingenious. We awaited their opening at 8am and snagged a double room for 5 hours. Cost: $65. A little more than the Holiday Inn, but worth every yen.

We awoke and wandered through the designer shops and duty free offerings. What can I say, the airport was splendid. Everything was clean and sparkling: all the little trinket shops with lucky cats and anime dolls.

Perusing bean paste sweets, as lovely as a work of art, as expensive as a small car…

Next came a Japanese food extravaganza. Since it was morning, we headed to a café for coffee and pastries. We sat amongst chain smoking travelers for an hour, only then realizing the whole café was, in fact, the smoking section. We headed to the next course where we ate some Japanese fast food, or Ikayaki, pan-fried squid dumpling. It looked more like deep fried goodness than it tasted: the inside was gooey with a hint of fishy flavor. However, the cold Kirin beer, serving as a chaser, saved the day.

We were frequently lured by the fantastical plastic recreations of menu items in restaurant windows, but we couldn’t resist the sushi bar. I mean, how can you visit Japan and not eat some sushi? We opted for a line-up of our favorite nigiri: maguro (tuna), sake (salmon), and aji (mackerel). Sipping hot sake and savoring the moment. Clearly, it wouldn’t rival the famous Tokyo sushi joints, but it hit the spot and made us feel like we got a little taste of this little island.

Now I know that in my synopsis I tend to stereotype, but I just loved, I mean LOVED the Japanese people: their gentle way, sincere helpfulness, and sheer graciousness. Everyone we met was so polite (and so stylish), I was literally taken aback. The only thing rotten about the whole day, was knowing we would be leaving, and we didn’t even get to venture out of the airport. Ron and I firmly resolved that in our next world travels we must return and properly visit Japan. Sure, we’ll need a small fortune but I have a sneaking suspicion, more like a trustworthy inkling, that it will be well worth it. Something about the air, the overriding sentiment of quality over quantity, has won me over. I’m smitten.

When it was time to board our separate planes, a curious feeling came over me. I had dreamed of this day (can you blame me after spending every day together for over nine months?!), and equally feared it, how could we ever part? Can I function alone in the world? And more importantly, can I even function? This ending has been quite abrupt and unexpected. We are being flung back into our regular lives - to sink or to swim.

Will we hack it? We'll see, dear readers. We'll see...

So Long Hanoi

2010-03-07T17:13:00.004Z

We only spent two nights in Hanoi, one before and one after our excursion up to Halong Bay. We stayed at the Sunshine Hotel in the Old Quarter a buzzing, boisterous section of the city. We walked the narrow streets, getting to Dong Xuan Market that was just closing. On the way back we passed street vendors selling Thit Jo or dog meat. They say that sandy blond dogs taste the best. Ewww. We didn’t dare it try it, I may be able to munch on Charlotte but I just couldn’t bring myself to eat Lassie.

One night, we finally took a cyclo ride and cruised past the Opera House and Hoan Kiem Lake on our way to a Mexican dinner at Al Fresca.

Street food abounds on every street corner. Vietnam is a serious contender, if not heavyweight, of the world in street-cooked delicacies. Most vendors specialize and offer up only one dish on their menu. In doing so, they keep costs low, operations simple and the food perfecto. Some memorable dishes include: Pho Bo (Beef Noodle), Com Ga (Chicken Rice), Bahn Mi (the famous “everything but the kitchen sink” sandwich). The price is invariably right at about 20,000-30,000 dong ($1-2) and you get to eat in miniature plastic chairs that make you feel like Lily Tomlin.

We didn’t make it to Bia Hoi corner (at Ta Hien and Luong Ngnoc Quyen) where fresh beer is served to revelers to cries of, “Mot, hai, bat…go!” or “One, two, three, cheers!” Apparently a lot of local Vietnamese drink beer when it’s the freshest, which is first thing in the morning when it sounds the least appealing. I suppose, there is always next time.

We did make It to Ly Van Phuc Street or what known as “Chicken Street. Tucked away on a side street is the most tantalizing smell of chicken ever to waft on air.

We were gestured to a plastic table and sat down. As the only westerners as far as we could see, we knew we were in for a treat. However, the menu was a bit challenging. Instead of totally chancing it, we went up to the grill master and pointed out our selection. No chicken feet, please.

The chicken came out on two giant bamboo skewers and there were only three words to describe it. To die for. It was easily the best chicken since tandoori in India. The potatoes were perfectly browned, tastily seasoned, and equally gone in 60 seconds. But Elanore, oh Elanore, came in the form of white baguette bread drenched in honey and grilled with butter. We ordered seconds of everything, and washed it down with some Tiger beer.

The entire evening was fab until we hopped in a taxi (not one of the reputable green & white ones). I thought, how bad could it be? Maybe all these people getting ripped off are whiners or inexperienced travelers. Well, about 10 seconds into the ride the meter had already flipped three times. The ride that was around 36,000 dong ($2) on the way there hovered near 100,000 dong (over $5) on the way back. You know me by now, and I wasn’t going to stand for that.

When we stopped I told Ron to get out of the car, it’s always easier to deal with someone one on one. I calmly explained to the driver that his meter was faulty but out of the kindness of my heart I would pay 50,000 dong. Upon this point, he started yelling that he “didn’t know” why it was so much but we had to pay up. His arm reached back and barred my way out of the cab. I laughed at him and pushed my way past his twig for an arm, throwing the bill in my wake. I mean seriously what was he going to do about it, I outweigh him by at least fifty pounds. The moral of the story: take only the Mai Linh or the Vina Sun cabs while in Vietnam. The reports of unsavory taxi companies are confirmed true

As a final aside, the Vietnamese currency is called “dong”. Although snicker worthy in its own right, it actually makes me think of Long Duk Dong from Sixteen Candles, everyone’s favorite foreign exchange student. Which brings me to one of life’s great mysteries, where in the world is Molly Ringwald?!! No doubt, living in Evanston, Illinois with Jake Ryan and two screaming brats.

Well, that’s all we have to report from Vietnam. We’ll leave you with a view of the rice fields that adorned many of our bus rides through the countryside.

The sheer beauty of Halong Bay

2010-03-06T16:59:00.004Z

Since we were almost certainly cutting our trip short so Ron could deal with his condo, we wanted to go out with a bang. To aid and abed this idea, my Dad had given us money to get scuba certification for Christmas, which seemed a waste at this point. So we re-appropriated the funds and settled on a luxury cruise around Halong Bay as our swan song of the trip. Thanks Dad!! To start our jet setting, we took a flight to Hanoi instead of the horrid overnight bus, which made us feel like movie stars right off the bat. The next morning, we took a shuttle bus 3 hours to the private dock at Bai Chay where we were greeted with warm hand towels and a fruity beverage.

You can take any number of tours on Halong Bay, from a few hours to a few days, from $25 to over $500 a person. We took the 3-day cruise on Handspan Indochina Sails which is one of the luxury lines, for $281/person. The boat, I mean Chinese junk, had only 16 rooms but less than half were full. It exuded romance and for us was a highly indulgent affair, so much so that I had those chills that whispered, “So, this is how the other class lives.”

Our wooden room was cozy at about eight square feet but the dominating king-sized pillow top bed had a down comforter (down! comforter!) and was stuffed a mile high with pillows. “Yay!” I screamed in glee internally to myself as I threw off all the unnecessary and pompous bed toppings, “to have the luxury of being annoyed at throw pillows!”

The bathroom was all marble granite and sparkling glass, and reminded me of our suite in Goa. Too good to be true, almost to good to use. Certainly interesting to use on the high seas, swaying and sloshing around on slippery floors. But the piece de resistance was the giant picture windows that looked out onto the magnificent bay floating slowly past. It was so beautiful we would just sit and stare in reverence. We couldn’t bear to close the curtains, unless absolutely necessary, lest we missed a split second of the majesty.

Nothing could be more perfect, and then of course, I started to come down with a cold. What ill timing for the finale of our trip! But I wasn’t going to let it slow me down. I knocked back a shot of Jack Daniel’s and leapt off the hull of the ship 12 feet into the frigid water. That should either wake me up or kill me, I thought. I put all my money, what meager scraps are left, on the former.

We had lunch in the large teak dining room on the second floor of the ship. Our table, for the remainder of the voyage, was in the corner along a long stretch of windows. Lunches were generally a five course set-menu of various seafood and meat dishes, some more successful than others, all far more fancy than our habitual fare. Needless to say, we were delighted with everything, even something as banal as a radish rose.

The first activity on the itinerary was a stop at Ti Top island situated 7-8 kilometers southeast of Bai Chay. There we could sun and swim on the crescent moon shaped beach and hike the 427 stone steps to a pagoda-style rotunda. The hike up left me light-headed and clammy but the 360 degree view of the surrounding bay sprinkled with thousands of limestone islets jutting out of the water was spectacular. Legends say that the islands were created by a great dragon, hence the name of Halong Bay translating into, “where the dragon descends in the sea”.

Our first afternoon we went sea kayaking in a doubles kayak. It was a pleasant sunny day to be out on the emerald green water. We paddled through the Luon Bo cave, the water eroding a natural granite archway into a secluded inlet. I love being inches above the water with the peace of nature all around you. Especially when you pull up your oars and glide along in perfect bliss.

With not a moment to waste, we were back on board for a quick shower and change of clothes so we could be ready for dinner. I can get used to this buffet of food at regularly scheduled intervals. Did some say buffet? Oh yea. Every night for dinner was a buffet! Nothing excites me more than to have a sumptuous feast ready for the picking. I can get a half dozen spring rolls with extra dipping sauce, fall-off-the-bone pork spare ribs, steamed vegetable medley (I actually squeaked when I saw fresh broccoli), and jumbo shrimp cocktail. And then have a repeat of all my favorites. Oh joy! (I can always buy bigger clothes when I return home, right?)

I got the best nights sleep aboard the boat from the gentle lull of the waves. Fascinating especially to me, I was up early and on deck at Tae Kwon Do before breakfast. The svelte instructor tried to teach us the slow deliberate movements but it was hard to follow. At times we would be turned around and she would be behind us. And then we would be perched on one foot in a crane position, which would be hard enough if the rocking ship underfoot was actual land. Half of us would stumble over in giggles. What do you expect at 7am in the morning?

We visited the Sung Sot or “Surprise Cave” that was discovered in 1901 by French explorers. Impressively grand at 10,000 square meters with thousands of well-lit stalagmites and stalagmites.

Some in interesting shapes and configurations. This, the tour guide told us, was a big cannon. Mmm hmm, sure. Maybe in your country, buddy.

We visited Cua Van, a working fishing village, that was the definition of remote. Not a Walmart in sight. Instead, the mini-mart would paddle to you where mother and enterprising children would sell you Oreos and Pringles (marked up 300%) from their family boat.

Surprisingly, they did have electricity (from generators I presume) to operate radios, tv’s and lights in their floating houses. There are 176 floating households and even a floating school, buoyed by empty drums. Everyone gets around by boat, children learn to swim before they learn to walk, and generation after generation of fisherman cultivate the waters. I’m sure it’s not an easy life, but you couldn’t paint a better view from your office window.

We went kayaking again and realized that some couples should just not kayak with each other. This was our third attempt, and as always, it ended with a fight. We couldn’t paddle in time together so we would knock oars. We also couldn't decide who was steering so we would run too close to the shoreline or into other boats. It was almost comical how we would veer back and forth, overcompensating every turn until we were pointed in the completely wrong direction. We bickered the entire time. I think we both pledged to stay on dry ground from now on, at the very least, to spare our relationship.

The remainder of the evening, we sipped our smuggled whiskey up on deck, watching the sun set in orange wisps behind the granite islets. Ah, this is the life.

Before we knew it, we were sailing back. Like the rest of our trip, it went by way too fast. The time on Indochina Sails was an unexpected highlight of the entire trip. So, if you are looking for an unconventional vacation idea, why not take a trip to Hanoi, a romantic cruise on Halong Bay, and (what I hear is) a fascinating cultural jaunt to the tribal villages in Sapa.

Hoi An, Vietnam

2010-03-04T20:10:00.013Z

Our next stop up the coast was Hoi An. We took our last official overnight bus ride of our trip. Hallelujah. It was a Sinh Tourist bus, the kingpin of travel in Vietnam, and it was the first multi level bus I’ve ever seen. With fully reclining seats stacked on top of each other in two levels. It looked quite promising but unfortunately it was most uncomfortable. First, I had my big satchel and the food bag and there was nowhere to put them. One I hung off the side, the other I stuffed between my feet so I was virtually immobile. Secondly, there was a sharp piece of exposed metal right under my Achilles heal, so I had to choose between wrapping my feet in the single provided blanket or turning blue under the full blast of the AC directly over my bunk. Either option left me sleepless. Overnight travel is pure torture, and I won’t be shedding any tears over our last sleeping bus.

We arrived in Hoi An in the early morning and proceeded to get turned around in the wrong part of town with no hotel in sight. There is nothing quite like being sleep deprived and lost to make you feel hopeless and irritated. A nice man pointed us in the right direction and we soon found Thanh Binh Hotel 3. Off the main street was an attractive hotel, the dark wooden interior had a Chinese flair which made the Roman statues of the inner courtyard pool seem more oddly placed. Our spacious room on the second floor had two beds, fast wifi, and a balcony for $25 a night.

Hoi An, an important trading port between China and Japan in the 15th-19th century, has retained a rich cultural heritage. In even earlier times, it was a hub of the booming spice trade, that brought much wealth from afar. The Old Town is now a World Heritage site, and it is a fascinating marriage of Asian and European architecture. There are Chinese style shop houses next to a Japanese covered bridge, juxtaposed harmoniously like a 5-spice blend with colonial style buildings. It feels like you are walking around on a movie set. These two enterprising grandmas were stars.

At night, the streets of Hoi An are lit up by brightly colored lanterns, and filled by pedestrians taking in a pleasant stroll by the riverfront shops.

We wanted to try some of the local dishes, and headed to a restaurant called Faifoo (interestingly, the previous name of Hoi An itself). Our ebullient waitress Yum Yum advised us on a few tasting menus and soon our table was filled with: Cao Lau, White Rose, Binh Xeo, Wonton, Springrolls, Cuttlefish, and Vegetable Soup. We topped off the feast with a Vietnamese bottle of Vang Dalat Red Wine. It was quite a gorging and we walked away (or waddled as it were) with a bill of only 300,000 dong (or $16). We were so in love with their Binh Xeo, a fried savory pancake wrapped in lettuce leaves, we had to return for our last lunch in town to have it again.

The next night we went to The Cargo Club, a highly lauded restaurant on the riverbank. Replete with white tablecloths and sparkling silverware under the soft glow of lamps, I felt severely underdressed in my Cambodian t-shirt. We started with the baked brie. Need I say more? Ron had bacon wrapped pork chop and I had an extra creamy gorgonzola fettuccine. Despite the severe lactose overload, it was a lovely evening dining on the terrace.

Hoi An’s other claim to fame is their prolific tailor shops and made to order wares. They had some totally cute coats with asymmetrical collars, but I couldn’t justify spending money on a jacket in the balmy weather. However, I made no qualms about talking myself into some new sneakers. Yum Yum told us that Shoes 9 on Tran Hung Dao was a reputable place that made shoes to order with real leather. I tried on a pair of hightops with a Velcro strap in a myriad of color. It was supposed to be a sample of all the types of leather on offer, but they were so funky that I wanted them off the rack. The girls seemed a bit confused that I’d want such an ugly pair of shoes but were quite happy to make a twenty dollar sale.

We meandered around town window-shopping and sight-seeing in the stifling hot afternoon. Our hair was wild and unkempt so we ventured to a hole-in-the-wall salon called Nana on the other side of the Japanese Bridge . Nana had spent a year in Hanoi becoming a beautician but was back in her hometown. My cut, the first of the trip, was a decidedly Asian inspired bob with a straight bang. Ron got his hedge-like hair mowed down mostly on the sides and back, but leaving some height a la Kramer. His hair grows like a Chia pet so this has been his 3rd or 4th cut.

We both sported the ultra fashionable Chinese bamboo hats, although mine was ten times too small. I wanted to get one Sushi sized, as a Halloween costume, but I hesitated at one shop and never found the size on offer again. What a shame, she would have been an adorably cute Chinese cat.

Nha Trang, Vietnam

2010-02-27T23:14:00.006Z

We took a daytime bus, an 11 hour ride, to Nha Trang on the central eastern coast of Vietnam. Other than an unannounced bus change in Mui Ne, the ride was comfortable and painless. Known as the best beach town in the country, we were looking to escape the bustle of HCMC. The beach wasn’t as impressive, nor as clean as those in Thailand, with rubber bands, plastic grocery sacks, and other slimy kitchen-drawer contents sticking to you like urban seaweed. At least the waves were more exciting, and the sun was still a-shining, and the sand was fluffy underfoot.

We stayed at the Ha Van Hotel right in the heart of the action. The hotel was lovely, with a veritable plethora of breakfast choices at their rooftop restaurant: banana crepes, cheese omelette, eggs with bacon, and fruit n yogurt. At night, the space morphs into a bar that serves up vile cocktails. We went for our “welcome” drink and was assured we could order anything on the drink menu by two separate staff members. One gin fizz ruined by sour lime juice and one sorry excuse for a long island later, we were presented with the bill. Even after calling downstairs and explaining the situation we were SOL. Oh well. We eventually did get our welcome drink and learned our lesson that anyone can feign misunderstanding due to language issues, but it will rarely work out in your favor. Our bright, clean balcony room was plush and lifted our spirits from Ron’s apartment crises.

If we were in need of a drinking establishment, there was always the bar across the street beckoning “Why Not?” that served our favorite buckets of booze. Their rendition included red bull, pineapple juice, and whiskey. Mmm sweet concoctions inducing short term memory loss...indeed, why not?

One of the famous local attractions of the city is the Thap Ba Hot Springs where we could take a communal mud bath, soak in a heart-shaped mineral tub, and lounge around the pools all day for a measly $12 a piece. I had visions of wallowing in a deep mud bath, but it was more like muddy water or a Yoohoo© consistency than the thick mud of my imagination. Since Tet was over, it wasn’t all that busy, and we were lucky to get our own tub. I had never been in a mud bath so it was an unnatural experience to be smeared with mud all over my body, in my hair, between my toes. My skin glowed, from the rich nutrients, for days afterwards. Ron didn‘t dare bring his camera, so you will have to just pretend this is us.

After several hours of soaks and dips in the various tubs and pools, we went for our first massage in Vietnam. Performed by two pint-sized girls, it was not the best massage I’ve had by any means, but there was an element of novelty when she leapt up onto my back, steadying herself by a mounted bar overhead, and walked up my spine. Thankfully, I could walk myself right on out of there 45 minutes later, so no harm, no foul.

We rode the longest sea crossing cable car in the world over 3 kilometers to Vin Pearl island, where we cavorted at another amusement park in Vietnam. Ron and I share a love for acting like kids and have frequented 8 amusement parks around the world since we began dating. (I’m sure our future children will love this about us.) The water slides were steep and scary as usual, made even more so because all the floor was made of steel grating. This is murder on the soft undersides of your feet, not that I noticed. I had to face my most petrifying fear of walking on see-through ground, first up several stories of transparent stairs where I clung onto the banister for dear life, to the platform at least 100 feet up which I raced across fighting back the vertigo. Good thing there were no lines. The fear of the ride down was no match for the walk up, and soon I was looking for alternate ways to while away the afternoon.

The wave pool was tumultuous and fun, as was the lazy river that seemed miles long with one stretch through a spooky cave. It was a poor-mans Pirates of the Caribbean, only you weren’t in a boat but a deflatable inner tube, floating by the odd element of danger and other sharp objects in the water. The waterpark edged against a beautiful sandy beach where we built sand castles on the shore and read our books. Also, included in the ticket price was all the rides at the adventure park, so we rode their compact rollercoaster 5-6 times, watched monkeys ride bicycles in a circus show, walked under sharks and stingrays at the aquarium, smashed into each others bumper cars, and played every game in the coin-free arcade. The trip back on the cable car felt like another ride, as we swayed on the cable high over the ocean, the lights twinkling and reflecting off the depths we hope we wouldn’t topple into.

Nha Trang has some of the best diving spots in Vietnam, so we didn’t want to miss out on a snorkel trip. The scuba shops didn’t really want snorkelers along unless they couldn’t fill the more expensive scuba slots. The other option was the much publicized party boat, offered by Mamma Linh, sure to be jam-packed with twenty somethings dancing to annoying music along with a floating bar, which we ended up learning was one dude in a buoy serving watered down wine. By chance one day, we spotted a sign that said something to the effect of “This is a real snorkeling trip if you want to snorkel, this is not a party boat” so naturally we signed up on the spot. It was $13/each at Vu’s Tour Adventure and we were not disappointed. It was a fabulous day of snorkeling at two different popular coral reefs around Mun and Mot islands. The full day excursion included a sumptuous buffet-style lunch with banana-leaf bowls full of shrimp, grilled fish, spring rolls, noodles, rice. A real spread of local cuisine. We gorged to our hearts content and leapt back into the water, a little less buoyant, but excited to explore the underwater world that awaited us.

We went to dinner with a Canadian couple, Robyn and Eric, that we met on the snorkel trip. They took us to a street side restaurant (which by day doubled as a car wash) that served Bo Ne which is beef grilled with onions and a spicy red sauce next to an egg that cooks itself on the hot caste iron skillet its served atop. You then mix it all up, spoon it into a baguette, and voila! steak and egg surprise. I nicknamed it “The Lisa Bonet“, since a catchy name would both help me remember how to pronounce it and slightly comfort me with a reference to The Cosby Show, that all-American institution of our youth.

Hole in our Big Red Balloon

2010-02-20T16:10:00.005Z

Also known as, a swift kick in the gut. Ron got deflating news today that pricked a tiny hole in our big red balloon. His tenant of his condo in San Francisco is not renewing her lease and is moving out in 12 days. Arghhhh!

We have been thrown unwillingly head-first back into the “real world”. Trying to make international phone calls on Skype, enlist help from two time zones away, find leases and photos and hard drives, post advertisements on Craig list, you-name-it. It’s seriously crimping our style, but now more than ever, the lure of home is calling. It’s one thing to travel away from reality when everything is in order, it’s quite another to try and conduct business or make major life decisions on the road. Stay tuned on the unfolding saga...

Chuc Mung Nam Moi!

2010-02-17T02:51:00.007Z

That is “Happy New Year!” in Vietnamese. Once again, we’ve unwittingly stumbled upon a major national observance. It is the Chinese New Year on February 14th this year that marks the beginning of what is called Tet. Where families reunite all over the country and then go on vacation. It has stopped us dead in our tracks in Ho Chi Minh City for the near future. For several days all businesses shut down and for the next week travel and hotels are triple the cost. Just our luck. So we have decided to stay put in the capital city, still known to the locals as Saigon.

Since we had only one day to sight-see before Tet began, we did a walking tour that included the Reunification Palace, where a tank crashed the gates in 1975 portending the fall of Saigon to the North Vietnamese Army. The entire palace is preserved as it was in that era of history and walking the hallways is like going back in time. The cool sixties style offices and meeting rooms are overshadowed by the basement, turned war room, where retro phones sit atop metal desks and ancient electronics are stacked. Ron was in a photo candy store.

On the way back from browsing at the famous Ben Thanh Market we saw a beggar in the street. So often, we ignore all the panhandlers, quicken our pace, pretending to be engrossed in conversation like we can’t be bothered. But this man was filthy, limbless, his face severely burnt almost melted away. In our effort to not look we both did, and then stopped 15 feet afterwards. Ron said, “If there is ever a person that could use a little help…”. I asked him if he wanted to go back, but he said he couldn’t. It was that disturbing. When you are faced with someone dealing with total physical wreckage you are humbled in your gratefulness for your fortune, yet frozen by dread and utter repulsion. Like you can’t get far enough away fast enough.

If this trip has taught me anything it is to not hesitate. Don’t delay on your life. Do the things you always wanted to, and do the things that you think you should do, if not for anything but your own sense of peace for never living in a world full of “what ifs“. I decided to go back. I gave him 100,000 dong, what is equivalent to about 5 bucks, and I looked him straight in the eye and smiled. He smiled back and we connected for a split second in what I can only describe as a pure exchange between two human beings. I wished him a happy new year, and was gone, but it’s one of those moments that I won’t soon forget.

We were lucky to meet up with our pals Jay & Corina again before they headed off to Japan. We celebrated the new year (again) and struggled through the massive crowds to see the fireworks display over the river.

My favorite are the sparkling gold ones that twinkle into a million pieces of glitter The blasts were so close overhead that ash floated from above, singeing off your eyelashes. We walked back to our hotel, the un-notable Red Sun, in a sea of people, moving like a leisurely lava flow through the wide boulevards.

To escape the heat and pass the days in the virtual ghost town of Saigon, we went to Dam Sen Waterpark for some fun in the sun. The waterslides were wildly steep and fast, and nothing short of dangerous. It was the first time I actually felt afraid at a waterpark. There were slides I just wouldn’t do. One, we nicknamed “The Vomitron” involved a precipitous descent in a tube, ending in a conical sphere where you would spin around inside from centrifugal force before being ejected out the bottom into a pool below. It was almost obscene. Being squeezed out the underside into the water, like a giraffe giving birth. But funny, was watching all the Vietnamese (there were only a handful of foreigners at the park) get up disoriented and dizzy, stumbling drunkenly towards the ladder out of the pool. And thankfully off the The Vomitron. Jay was the bravest, taking on slides that made the rest of us shrink away. More my speed, was lazing in the lazy river, although crowded and boisterous with all the locals on holiday, it was an experience to be at a theme park overseas. Overall, it was a thoroughly splendid day.

Although we sampled a lot of interesting Vietnamese food wrapped in lettuce leaves and topped with questionable sauces, we really craved a really good hamburger. I googled the area, and lo and behold, there was a joint called Black Cat that claimed the “best burger in the world”. An hour later, and we were salivating over the menu. Expectedly, Ron wanted to try and eat the The Big Cheese burger, a whopping 500 grams of beef served on a bun the size of a dinner plate. Instead of the usual, free meal if you finish it, the only reward for ingesting this artery clogger was a picture on the wall. At $13.95, the upside did not outweigh the heartburn. I ordered the Zurich burger and it actually was the best burger in the world. I’m not kidding! I mmm’ed after each delectable bite of beef patty, cheddar cheese, carmelized onions, and barbeque sauce enveloped harmoniously by an onion roll. Needless to say, we went back a couple days later for a repeat. Unfortunately the rapture was not replicated.

Crossing the street here is an exercise in blind faith and narrow escape by motorbike collision. There are over 3 million scooters in Saigon, one for every man, woman and child over 15. Imagine a city with hundreds of scooters whizzing by in both directions (and random vectors) between you and the other side of the street. Our natural inclination was to head to the nearest traffic light and crosswalk. Although rare in their occurrence, they do exist, but to laughable effect. Green does not mean go. There is no such thing as right of way. And you, a mere pedestrian, will get run over if you haven’t your wits about you at all times. In these parts, the size of your ride determines who rules the road. First come buses and trucks, then cars, scooters, cyclos, bicycles and lastly poor Ron and Alison, haplessly stranded on the wrong side of the road.

The first time we crossed, we latched on to two locals, shadowing their every movement. I crushed Ron’s hand as we inched forward into the chaotic flow of traffic. Every step or so, we’d stop for a rushing blur of bikes to pass, before our next tentative footfall. The dizzying lights and proximity of metal, made you feel like you were inadvertently trapped in one of those circus attraction cages of death. What seemed like an hour in only a matter of minutes, we were out of the pandemonium and in to a pleasant looking park bedecked by acres of glorious flowers for the new year. A bushel of which Ron bought me for Valentine’s Day. The hotel gave us a plastic bucket to put them in, not exactly a silver vase from the W, but it was the sweetest surprise.

This is the year of the Tiger, which influences major changes and social upheaval. I can’t imagine this next year bringing any more change then we have been experiencing but we’ll see. There’s always tomorrow and another near miss with the deadly SCOOTER.

How to eat a tarantula

2010-02-10T11:37:00.002Z

The short answer to this is...quickly and with your eyes closed. We promised we would and we didn’t want to disappoint our viewing audience. It took place at Romdeng in Phnom Penh on a humid Tuesday night. My hand was shaking as I held the fuzzy, hairy, and (not just for the rhyming effect) scary little critter for the first time. I shivered to the core with the willies. But I persisted, dunking its spindly legs into a lime ginger dipping sauce and then into my uncooperative mouth. Ewww.

It was crunchy, yet chewy, with a oddly distinctive beef flavor not repulsive but not appetizing either, since the picture in my minds eye of a tarantula in my mouth was creeeeeeeepy beyond creepiness. It’s leg caught between my teeth. I closed my mouth and chewed. Telling myself: don’t puke, don’t puke.

Ron was much braver. Biting into the tarantulas head like it was a deep fried onion ring instead of a red-eyed, thick-bodied, hairy-legged spider. The waiter told us they get them alive and kicking from nearby villages, and do the dirty work in the back kitchen. A wooden toothpick through their beating heart makes a vampires killing, before defanging them and throwing them in a hot oily pan.

I’m glad I did it, but that’s probably the cliff’s edge of my adventurous eating. We tried to order a beef dish stir fried with fire ants but they were out of lemongrass. Outta lemongrass! How can you be out of lemongrass?! That’s like being out of olive oil or onions. Inconceivable. Instead we ordered noodle salad with coriander rolls and tamarind pork spare ribs with pumpkin curry. I have to say that it was the best meal we’ve had in Cambodia. Even with two vodka tonics, for liquid courage, the meal was only twenty bucks. Gotta love the crazy food in SE Asia!

Temples of Angkor

2010-02-09T12:00:00.002Z

With a 7 day temple pass in hand we gallivanted around a half dozen or so other temples around Angkor. What follows are the highlights.

Angkor Thom is a massive temple complex covering nine square kilometers, built in the late 12th century as capital city of Jayavarman VII’s empire. The gates have long banisters with decorated ends sculpted into a naga, a multi-headed serpent depicted in an epic struggle called “churning the sea of milk”, which really creates a lovely visual in my imagination. The story is full of vengeful gods, long fought battles for immortality, and the eventual victory of good over evil. Quite a soap opera.

Bayon is one of the most widely recognized and photographed temples in the world, displaying an impressive array of 216 identical stone faces carved in rock. There are competing theories on the meaning of the faces. Some say that the king, Jayavarman VII, had them carved in his likeness or that they represent Avalokitesvara, the bodhisattva of compassion. Since the humble, Jay the 7th thought himself a god-king, both of these theories could in fact coexist quite nicely. We came in the very early morning and had the temple almost to ourselves to explore.

Most tourists (upwards of several hundred) hit Phnom Bakeng, a hilltop temple for the sunset over Angkor Wat below. We opted to go at high noon, and although fully exposed to the angry sun, we were again alone with the ruins. We have successfully avoided the herds by visiting the temples extremely early or late or at off-times.

The real draw of Ta Keo is working up the nerve to climb it’s frightingly steep staircase for a view from the top. Or, more accurately, it’s climbing up and not worrying about the vertigo on the return trip down. With no handrail in sight, it is not a place for acrophobics. After a tentative start and second thoughts, Ron conquered his fears and scaled the stairs bravely like a little mountain goat.

Ta Prohm is the temple most known for a towering, gnarly rooted tree, made famous by Angelina Jolie and her ridiculously bad British accent in Tomb Raider. Everywhere nature crept in around the edges. Roots outstretched like alien tentacles rising towards the sky.

Beng Mealea is a real adventurers temple, some 77 km outside of Siem Reap, accessible by private hired car. Where Ta Prohm has tamed the encroaching wilds, Beng Melea has succumbed fully. Massive trees have upended walls, roots strangled windows and doorways in a suffocating embrace, like the entire temple is simultaneously being lifted into the air and devoured by the jaws of the jungle. Through the ravages of time, the roofs of galleries have collapsed into piles of hefty sugar cube-like stones, that you can clamber over and explore like a real tomb raider. The twists and turns through the rubble is not a clear path, so the provided guide (for a small donated tip) helps you around the temple. At one point we saw a sign warning about mines and although we were reassured that the area had been swept, we found ourselves walking in our guides every footprint from there on out.

Banteay Srei is known as the jewel of Khmer Art and is a small, elaborately decorated temple built out of red sandstone. Beautiful in the early sunrise, irresistibly charming, and one of our favorites.

Angkor What??

2010-02-05T18:21:00.004Z

There was a slight chill in the air, as the tuk-tuk rode through the darkness towards the infamous temple of Angkor Wat. At 5am the roads were silent and nearly desolate except for a neat line of bobbing headlights. We had not seen this terrain before by day so we were filled with anticipation. Our imaginations filling in magnificent landscapes where our eyes could see nothing at all. When we arrived at the bridge across the grand moat stretching 190m wide, the temple itself was still shrouded in a black blanket.

Eerier still was the fact we forgot our flashlights and had to stumble into the depths of the hulking stone structure, hanging on to any faint light cast by fellow visitors ahead. I thought, isn’t this the way to see this for the first time? Like Henri Mahout, the French explorers who stumbled upon it in the 19th century. Uninitiated for the mysteries that laid ahead. Just naked curiosity and a sense of adventure.

We walked into the inner courtyard towards the center and sat on the steps of the northeast library (not so named for holding books). Overlooking a lotus pond, we waited patiently for the sunset to illuminate our view, as we nibbled on bacon and egg sandwiches. We could make out the spires of the main temple, as it grew lighter and lighter, like watching a picture underwater, come nearer to the surface and finally become clear.

The first thing we saw was…. a big, giant green tarp surrounding the base of the temple. Yes, folks, Angkor Wat was under construction. We have what Ron calls the “curse of the crane”. We can‘t count how many of the most famous places we‘ve visited that are under maintenance (sometimes permanently). Couldn’t they have at least used a gray tarp? I’m not asking for some faux stonework, just something to camouflage the ugly plastic green look. See, I feel vaguely qualified after all this travel to be a consultant for world heritage sites, efficient ticketing and queuing systems, and hotel and restaurant management. Maybe it’s time to switch careers. Anyone need some unsolicited advice? I have truckloads full of it.

I won’t go into a lot of the history of Angkor Wat, but it was built in the 12th century as the king’s temple (dedicated to Vishnu) and the capital city under the ruler Suryavarman I. At its peak it housed nearly a million people within the outer walls (enclosing 203 acres) and surrounding areas. It is considered by many to be the 8th wonder of the world and I can see why, between the magnificent scale and abounding Khmer art and architecture. Most noteworthy, was the outer wall of the central structure housing large scale Bas relief depicting Hindu stories about Ramayana and Mahabharata.

In a lot of Khmer art, and surely at Angkor Wat, you see many beautiful dancing figures called apsaras or devatas, which are female guardian spirits.

A sad, yet all too frequent, sight to behold: a headless Buddha.

Ron and I went back another afternoon about a week later, and it was far hotter and more crowded than our early morning excursion. Funny enough, I saw a local family at Angkor Wat with a Macy’s bag and I had to snap a picture. How did it get halfway around the world?

We wanted to go up the steep stairs to the highest point in the central tower, but unfortunately I picked the wrong day to wear a tank top so no entrance for me. Oops. Next time….

Home is where the <3 is…

2010-02-02T13:40:00.006Z

We have been on the road exactly 8 months today. Can you believe it?! I find myself often in a contradictory state where it seems like we just left, and in parallel it feels like I’ve been living like this forever. My life in San Francisco was a movie I watched once that gets hazier and hazier. The characters get flatter. The plot loses its hold.

Even though we are now fully living day to day out of our backpacks (which brings its own rewards and pitfalls), nevertheless we still miss the small and seemingly unending comforts of home.

Things like:
Our furry kitties sleeping on the bed with us
Brushing our teeth using tap water
Showers with a curtain over a stall or even a tub (dare, the thought)
Good plumbing
Fluffy toilet paper
Fluffy scrambled eggs
A morning bagel with cream cheese
Strong, fresh brewed coffee
A good hamburger without pieces of gristle in it
Grocery shopping at Whole Foods
Cooking our own dinners
The microwave
A little wardrobe variety
Washer n dryers

Pleasant smelling clothes
Steady electrical current
TV’s larger than 13” with good reception
Giant computer monitors (our laptop screen is painfully small!)
Having a variety of creative outlets
Safe, iced drinks
Britta water filters
Tempurpedic pillows

Down comforters

Sidewalks
Traffic Lights

The little details that outline our lives don’t necessarily bring us joy but they certainly remind us of what we truly have to be grateful for. I thought back to a day after work last year, when Ron picked me up in his Subaru. I clicked across the sidewalk in my green patent high heeled shoes to his car. We debated for 10 minutes on where we should eat dinner and settled for Lulu’s nearby. Being a busy night, we spent half an hour at the bar next door waiting for a table, sipping two rounds of $8 Maker’s Manhattans.

Did I appreciate at the time, that snippet of my life? Of working a great job in cute shoes, going to an amazing restaurant with my equally amazing boyfriend, and not once looking at the prices? Sad to say, but not really. I had to be 7875 miles away to realize just what type of life I had. How I appreciate it now more than I did then. How even after that realization, I’m certain more than ever that this was the right decision to up and travel the world. And how I can’t even really appreciate the breadth or depth of what I’m doing right now until I reflect back on it later. I’ve changed in ways you wouldn’t think. I’ve changed in ways I can’t describe. I’ve changed in ways that have not yet manifested.

I’m like a goldfish in a tank that can’t define the purpose of the water until I’ve been flung across the living room onto the carpet. Ever feel that way? You only “get it” in hindsight?

Well, one thing is for sure, after all these months away, all the different countries and cultures and sights: I miss home.

Siem Reap, Cambodia

2010-02-01T17:03:00.002Z

As one would expect, we spent many a morning touring the temples around Angkor Wat which is the main attraction of Siem Reap and indeed Cambodia. I promise to write soon about their grandeur in detail, when I can give them their proper blog space and corresponding photo opportunities.

The city of Siem Reap is vibrant and bustling yet maintains a small-town, if not quaint, feeling. The main tourist street and cornerstone of nightlife is Pub Street, and it is home to many popular restaurants placed strategically between bars offering 2 for 1 cocktails and cheap beer. After which there are no doubt hundreds of tuk-tuk drivers all vying for your business to drive you home after your swervy night out. They have certainly worked out how to cater to the millions of tourists flowing through here in a constantly increasing stream.

After trying several restaurants, our vote for Khmer food was at Temple, a restaurant off the alleyway bedecked in orange and advertised with the simplest tagline: “Traditional Khmer Cuisine“. It was also pleasantly unpretentious and reasonably priced so we became something of regulars.

Khmer food is pretty tasty, less spicy than Thai (some say “subtle“ or worse, bland) and extremely well priced. Even in smaller restaurants you can get dishes for $2-3, and less at the street vendors. Naturally, I was bonkers for the fresh spring rolls, always my favorite appetizer. And for a light, crunchy lunch or dinner, the banana flower salad was a novel taste. One of the most traditional dishes is Amok that comes with fish (usually) or chicken or beef. We found a few types, one with more sauce (my Mom’s requirement) and another drier version, both served up in a cute banana leaf bowl. The beer of the land is not surprisingly called “Ankgor” and runs for fifty cents per draught, which is splendid after a hot day at the temples.

Lined along Pub Street with all the other massage parlors is a unique offering called “The Fish Massage”. This entails dunking your bare feet into a huge tank of starving fish who then proceed to nibble away voraciously on your dead skin like it was their last meal on earth. And you have to pay for this wacky spa treatment, some $3 for 20 minutes. Ok, so I did it because my Mom dared me, and she did it because I dared her right back. And this is how we found ourselves, giggling uncontrollably with our feet in a giant tank of fish. I have to admit it was ticklish (and a little creepy) at first, but loads of fun and afterwards my feet were smoother than a baby’s bottom. Better than a $50 spa pedicure any day. And au naturelle!

It made me think for a split second of bringing this back to the States, until I thought about the waiver forms and the sanitary issues, the impending lawsuits and the Peta fanatics crying mistreatment of our little finned friends. The thought vanished into vapor where all the “wouldn’t that be cool” ideas go when you are touring the third world, a veritable Disneyland of dangerous ideas. Back in the US where we are cordoned off from danger by velvet ropes, under the watchful eye of rent-a-cops and video surveillance cameras, forever burdened by the fine print, cautionary language, and the moronically obvious safety warnings that tells us that, yes, coffee is indeed a hot liquid substance and no, its not a good idea to blow dry your hair in the bathtub. In our effort to protect everyone from everything, we have lost the ability of everyday life to kill off the stupid. Poor ole Darwin is rolling in his grave. And on top of it all, we’ve become hopelessly un-fun. Boring, really. Okay, okay, rant /off. I really enjoyed the Dr. Fish Massage, it made me squeal with delight.

The next day, on (my Mom’s) Ron’s birthday, we had a special night out at The Apsara Theater. First they served us a 3 course meal from our table on the balcony, and we celebrated with a sparkling bottle of champagne, toasting the birthday boy.

Soon the show began, and we had great seats overlooking the stage where we saw five separate styles of Khmer classical dance. The glittering Aspara dancers had slowly subtle and graceful movements, most notably with their hand gestures called kbach. Some were quite painful to behold, as they bent their fingers backwards far past normal. Like ballet, they train from an early age to gain super-human flexibility.

The last day my parents spent in Siam Reap was a Mothers-Daughters day. We had not had that much alone time so we enjoyed touring the city, chauffeured in our own private chariot.

First we went to Artisans D’Angkor a business that trains and employs villagers to work as weavers, sculptors, and metalworkers to reproduce classic Khmer artifacts. We didn’t buy much but enjoyed the tour of the workshops full of artists absorbed in their craft.

We went shopping for souvenirs at the Old Market and amazingly I couldn’t find anything to buy! Even with a free delivery home, I think I’ve successfully snuffed out my ingrained consumerist bent. A beneficial side effect of our world journey.

We had lunch at Café de le Paix and I had a make your own salad with chicken breast, black olive, blue cheese, and honey mustard dressing (on the side). What a treat! Next, we couldn’t pass up Gin Daisy’s served to us in bed, in the spacious modern interior of Hotel de le Paix. We laughed and gabbed like girlfriends would drinking mischievously in the afternoon.

The day wouldn’t have been complete without some massages. Just off Pub street, we stopped in one of the ubiquitous massage spots for a $6 foot massage. Ahhh, bliss!

Before we knew it, the day was over as was the visit. It went way too fast! It was amazing sharing our travel journey with my parents. We packed a lot in to two weeks: from beachcombing, cooking lessons, and snorkeling trips on a secluded island in Thailand, to corrupt overland border crossings taking us to the national museum and royal palace of Phnom Penh and then to the ancient wonders of Angkor Wat and her surrounding temples. Not to mention the food: the fresh spring rolls, fish amok, and fifty cent Angkor draughts. Followed by dozens of massages (fish or otherwise), dazzling aspara dancers, and crazy tuk-tuk rides. Lots of great memories. Sending our love to our new travel partners-in-crime: Mom and Ron!

The Paper Tiger

2010-01-29T15:44:00.000Z

In Siem Reap, we stayed at Le Tigre de Papier Residence, the hotel of a popular restaurant in town. It was a little out of the main Pub street area, down a dirt road. Not too far from the action but far enough so that it was a nice, quiet respite. I’m finding it hard to review this hotel after the kerfuffle that happened at the end of our stay. Basically we got unceremoniously kicked out. But, let me start with the good stuff.

It had a garden setting and little swimming pool, in front of a well-maintained guest house. The staff was super-friendly, even if some couldn’t speak English very well, they tried to accommodate our needs. Including early morning breakfast sandwiches when we toured the temples, trustworthy tuk-tuk drivers, and free hot water and ice (for our cheapo drinks we would make in the room). The room was very clean and comfortable with all the amenities: air con, tv, mini-fridge, and free wifi. All this for $25/night (usual is $30) which I negotiated before we checked in based on our booking of two rooms for 5 nights.

When my parents eventually checked out, Ron and I decided to stay an additional week. We had a half used 7-day temple pass and really liked the pace and vibe of Siem Reap. Everything was going swimmingly, until one afternoon while I was out for a walk there was a knock at our door. Ron was told that we had to check out, our room was booked. Say what?! I came back to find all of our bags packed because apparently they were confused about how long we wanted to stay (even though I double checked with two separate people at the front desk) and then went into a song and dance about how they did know but accidentally double booked a group of 20 people that they couldn’t disappoint by splitting up. Meaning they felt absolutely no remorse in disappointing us. Then they went into a third story that the room was overbooked because one of the girls didn’t write it down, and was subsequently fired because they found her pocketing the money instead of recording it.

All of this was inconceivable. If they were even a little bit organized, someone should have said something, I don’t know, the night before? Or at breakfast? Or at some point in the 11 nights we stayed at the hotel that there was a conflict!!! But not at 2pm in the afternoon, with three British girls yelling at Ron to vacate the room so they can check in. Can you fathom, that they didn’t even tell the new guests what had happened, and left Ron to take the blame for the situation?

The only reconciliation they offered us at the time for our trouble was to find us another hotel at Encore Angkor down the street (albeit more expensive, since we couldn’t bargain on our long stay any longer) but it had spoiled the dream world we were in up until that point. The owner was out of town when this happened but got our review and promptly apologized and offered us a free week if we return to Siem Reap, which was quite kind. Other than the shenanigans going on with the staff, it really was a lovely stay and their free breakfast is possibly the best in SE Asia, offering up strong coffee, perfectly cooked eggs, and fresh-baked croissants. So all in all, I still recommend a stay Le Tigre. Besides it has a cool name.

Capital city of Phnom Penh

2010-01-27T08:24:00.003Z

We had one day in Phnom Penh (pronounced Pa-nom Pen) which was plenty of time. All of us were far more interested in Khmer art and culture instead of it’s violent past of the Khmer Rouge. Many tourists visit S21 and the Killing Fields where a million and half Cambodians (mostly educated, professionals) were starved, tortured, murdered, or forced to work in labor camps. The infamously brutal leader Pol Pot inflicted mass genocide in the name of agrarian communism and actually restarted time by proclaiming it Year Zero.

Ron and I recently watched The Killing Fields, an Academy-award winning British film from 1984, that was enough history and sadness for us. It’s hard to believe what the Cambodian people endured just a short time ago. You do notice that you start to see a lot of younger people (under 30) as nearly 20% of the population during Khmer Rouge (1975-1979) were ruthlessly wiped out. The capital city has certainly bounced back and feels modern and organized. Especially on Sisowath Quay, the street running parallel to the Tonle Sap river.

We walked the short distance to the Royal Palace a little before 10am, in the already baking sun. Unfortunately, we had missed the spectacle of large-scale aerobics and tae chi taking place on the grounds at dawn.

The main attraction was the Silver Pagoda or Temple of the Emerald Buddha. Of course, you couldn’t take pictures inside the pagoda, but the centerpieces included an emerald Buddha made of glistening baccarat crystal and a life-size gold Buddha decorated with several thousand diamonds. Not exactly illustrating the non-materialistic nature of Buddhism. However, I do think diamonds are forever when encrusted over your third-eye.

Many tourists ride in what‘s called a “cyclo’, which is a bicycle rickshaw with a single seat in the front that looks awfully similar to a wheelchair. Apparently this was introduced back in 1937, and continues today, as does a lot of French influence from the time Cambodia was part of French Indochina (1887-1954).

In the hottest part of the day, we went to a popular café called Friends that helps local kids by providing careers in culinary arts and restaurant management. The lunch was full of fresh and healthy California cuisine, grilled chicken pitas and black bean burgers, that brought me back home. Their sister restaurant offered up adventurous and creepy jungle food, like crispy fried tarantula, which Ron and I vowed to try before we leave the country.

Next, we visited the National Museum which houses the best collection of Khmer art in the world. Again, a no photo zone, but Ron snapped this pic before he realized it.

While visiting a monastery, I saw a monk under a shady tree on his laptop and was struck by the sheer contrast of the old and new world. I wondered if the monk ever cursed at his computer, frustrated to his wits end with his windows operating system, smashing down on the ctrl+alt+delete keys in vain. Or had he reached pure, altruistic compassion for Bill Gates, an inner peace us mere mortal computer users will never know.

Overland to Cambodia

2010-01-25T07:11:00.000Z

Our time had come to make our way east to Cambodia. A journey from the Thai island of Koh Mak to the Cambodian capitol of Phnom Penh. My parents were initially going to fly from Trat (on the Thai mainland) but decided to travel with us on the cheap. Even after reading about our frequent mis-adventures and torturous rides of overland travel, they dared to veer off the beaten track and hit the open (albeit bumpy) road that laid ahead.

It was to be a day chock full of five types of transport: boats, trucks, vans, taxis, and buses and through a notoriously bad border crossing. If all goes perfectly we estimated arrival in 10.5 hours. Famous last words.

The first leg was a speed boat ride from Koh Mak to Laem Ngop. When we first arrived at the pier we noticed many people waiting to board the small boat and stayed close to the front of the line to ensure we got a seat. We boarded and got 4 bench seats in one of maybe 8 rows of available seating in the main part of the boat. Although the boat seemed full, we ended up stopping at three more islands and packing in people and luggage into every square inch of free space on the boat, poor passengers standing in the aisles and squatting on the deck, but thankful to be aboard. Apparently, they don’t mess around with making the most of each trip to the mainland. The sun was shining and sparkling over the glassy water as we sped as fast as that little ship could, so laden down from the weight of the cargo.

Speed Boat: Koh Mak to Laem Ngop

Time: 1:15

Cost: 450 baht ($14)/each

At the pier we retrieved our luggage and found there was little space left in the Sawngthaew (share taxi) to Trat (except if we hung off the back, something I could not picture my mother doing, as brave as she is, in a million years). We found another one but it was empty and wouldn’t leave until it was filled up from the next boat. So we splurged and paid fare for the entire truck to the Trat bus station and arrived with time to spare for the 10am departure. The bus station was immaculate and well organized with many helpful workers and locals offering assistance to our next destination. Not a one was feigning friendliness so they could demand tip or scam us in some way. Could it be that we’ve finally found the elusive trifecta of travel destinations in Thailand: cheap, clean, and friendly.

Sawngthaew (private): Laem Ngop to Trat

Time: 0:20

Cost: 300 baht ($9) total

We purchased tickets for an air conditioned mini-van from Trat to Hat Lek, the town just before the Cambodian Border. The ride was pleasant and we met an interesting couple that were international school teachers and had a lot of helpful information about Cambodia and Vietnam that I scribbled in my journal. The ride was generally smooth until we pulled over with a tire issue and ended up changing vans for the remainder of the trip. Amazingly this only delayed us around 15 minutes.

Mini-van: Trat to Hat Lek

Time: 1:30

Cost: 120 baht ($4)/each

Next we came to the main event: the border crossing. I had read everything conceivable to prepare for the well-known visa and taxi scams we would encounter. I would not be able to adequately prepare for the fact that our onward transportation would be tied to us getting visas quickly and no one would care about paying five extra dollars for their visa stamp but me. We thought we had missed the last bus to Phnom Penh and we would pay the premium for a private car but there was a 12pm bus that would wait for us so we had to hurry since it was already 12pm! The visa officials first demanded 1000 baht ($30) from each of us, then pretended to be generous by reducing the fee to $25 although the real price according to Thai immigration is only $20. To me it was principle, to everyone else it was an unnecessary delay, so we payed and moved on although it killed me inside. For anyone else facing this border crossing, I’m positive it won’t require anything more than your perseverance and your time. Don’t be intimidated or bullied, eventually they will stamp you for $20, like the guys just behind us that were furious we had caved in. Oh well, you can’t win ‘em all.

Cambodian Border Crossing and Visa

Time: 2:00

Cost: $25 (ahhh!)

The guy that sold us the inflated bus tickets turned out not to be the taxi driver after-all, we learned in amazement as he squeezed in to the drivers-side seat with the driver to accompany us. We sped away and caught up with the bus that pulled over for us on the side of the road. It was now after 1pm and the bus (and all the passengers) had waited over an hour for us. We were not looking forward to having to board, and to be known as the cause of the delay.

Taxi: Cham Yeam to KOH KONG

Time: 0:15

Cost: 350 baht ($10) total

We boarded the bus 95% full of locals, and surprisingly to welcoming smiles. I was worried about Cambodians after the kerfuffle at the border, but I realized how unwarranted it was. If all of Southeast Asia is like this, we may never come home! Now, we were ecstatic to make the bus but there were a couple challenges to endure. Ron and I sat in front of a fellow with a broken leg so that although the girls in front of us reclined their seats into our foreheads, we were unable to recline ourselves. Not great, but not the end of the world. My parents on the other hand had the only seats on the bus without overhead air vents and it was stiflingly hot and stuffy for the first several hours of the ride. Not that our air vents were blowing out ice cold air or anything, but they did get a worse deal. We all suffered equally from hours of loud blaring Thai karaoke and from our grumbling stomachs. We did not have time to take lunch at the border and had to last the entire bus ride on snacks. Luckily the food bag was bulging with teriyaki crackers, fig cookies, jelly bellies, and nuts.

Bus: Koh Kong to Phnom Penh

Time: 6:30

Cost: $15/each

We arrived in Phnom Penh a little after 7pm and nearly 12 hours of travel (only about an hour longer than a perfectly executed trip,…wow!). After a quick check-in to Riverstar, a budget hotel overlooking the Tonle Sap river, we headed down for a long overdue dinner and congratulatory cocktails. Nothing tastes finer after a hot, humid day of travel than an icy cold G&T. Amen.

My parents made it through valiantly, I was so proud. With grace, they dealt with crooked immigration officials, stuffy buses, and mild starvation for a real independent travel adventure. And they saved a bundle of money, the overland trip was less than $38 vs. over $250 for a flight. You can’t beat that! But to this day I’m sure they missed that air con and complimentary in-flight meal…

My Mom visits us in Koh Mak

2010-01-23T14:17:00.001Z

We are back in Koh Mak for a visit from my parents. To be a little more accurate, it is my Mom and step-Dad Ron, her husband of 11 years. To make it easy reading, I will refer to them as my parents, although my actual father is alive and well and living in Oklahoma selflessly watching my two cats. Another Ron will make things confusing, so I will refer accordingly to “My Moms Ron” vs. “My Ron” to hopefully clarify. Got it? Good. The two Rons looking smashing in leaf and vine crowns...

My parents have come out for a two week trip and we are planning to spend 8 nights in the Thai islands followed by a side trip to Siem Reap, Cambodia to tour the famous temples of Angkor Wat. We searched for nicer digs from our usual accommodations for their visit, and found an atmospheric resort called Cococape on the northwest side of the island. Set amidst a lotus pond and coconut trees on the seaside were architecturally interesting beachy thatched roofs over modern rooms with the all essential 24-hour air con.

My parents dark wood room was built on stilts right over the ocean so they could hear the lapping waves and, at night, rainy slosh underneath making it feel like sleeping on a boat. This is not to be confused with Happy Boat, a room shaped like a boat, also available at the hotel. Hammocks abounded for lazy days reading and there was a pier on which to while away the warm afternoons.

It was a nice place to stay but pricey. Our rooms in the middle of their bracket, ranged from $60-$100. The pluses were the seclusion, peacefulness, well-maintained grounds and friendly staff (even with occasional struggles to communicate our dinner orders). Also, a welcome treat for Ron and I was the daily room cleaning with fresh towels shaped into amorous elephants.

On the downside our bed was a bit itchy and ant-infested, and the room surprisingly lacked a mini-fridge. I guess our expectations become exponential when the bill tops $20 these days. You can't really complain when you get a super-deal.

Later, we stumbled on the holy grail for mid-range budget traveling on Koh Mak in the Holiday Beach Resort on the southside of the island. The 1500 baht ($45) bungalows were situated only steps from a sandy beach, the restaurant served up tasty food (and plentiful french fries), and the masseuses offered the best massage around. More on (my Mom’s) Ron’s quest to find the best massage on Koh Mak later on. My parents are already considering another vacation to Koh Mak next year! I can’t blame them, both (my) Ron and I have really fallen in love with Thailand and the genuine sweet nature of the local people. Plus, from the west coast of America to SE Asia is only about $800 which rivals costs to Central America and Europe for an annual vacation. If you haven’t been, I would highly recommend it!

(My Mom’s) Ron is what she calls a “massage glutton”. He has had a massage everyday since he arrived, and one day he had two! Thailand may, in fact, be the promised land for massage lovers. No, not just that kind, get your mind outta the gutter! A one hour massage costs between $9-12 depending on where you go and whether it is a Thai massage, oil massage, or a reflexology foot massage. With those prices, how can you not indulge in a daily massage? You can have almost ten massages for the price of one spa massage back home.

I tried a Thai massage once, and let me tell you, once was enough. You are first knotted and wrapped up into some type of endless knot or yoga pretzel and then relentlessly tortured by an 80 lb Thai girl with an unwavering smile (but I’m certain evil, sadistic heart). At one point her foot was in my armpit as she pulled so hard on my outstretched arm that I had visions of what it would have been like being stretched on “the rack”. Then came the dreaded elbow. She would drive her pointy bird-like elbow in deep, muscle pulverizing motions into the most sensitive parts of my fleshy body. When she got to my upper thigh I was breathing out in short, jagged exhales like I was giving birth (and attempting not to lose consciousness). So, in short, don’t do the Thai massage unless your masseuse speaks English and can “be gentle”, or you like to be tenderized before cooking on the beach.

One of the highlighted activities on Koh Mak is an elephant trek through the jungle. (My Mom’s) Ron was skeptical at first, imagining it to be a tro-tro atop an elephant (surely with a dozen people packed like sardines), but soon was converted like the rest of us. Isn't it fantastic that we have a common language forming from our blog experiences?!

From a tall wooden structure that was like an elephant docking station, we climbed onto a little bench in pairs atop the gi-normous mammal. Held down by little more than a few rope tethers wrapped around his voluminous belly. The mahout (guide) sat bareback behind the elephants head and deftly guided it by soft nudges of their feet to the back of their flying, flapping ears. Left nudge to the left ear means go left, simple as that. There are also corresponding verbal commands to control their actions like backing up and getting a move on. If those fail, they use a prod or blunt metal hook, to ensure immediate obedience, but we rarely saw this as necessary. Elephants are pretty dang smart.

We were led out into the jungle in the relative coolness of the morning, rocking back and forth to the giants gait. They would stop every now and then to twist their trunks around a plant before violently uprooting it and shoveling it into their mouths. These elephants are the poster children for vegetarianism, eating several hundred kilos of vegetation daily. Their favorites include sugar cane, tamarind, and bananas.

The mahouts fashioned together crowns of leaves for us to wear and look hopelessly dorky. This little tourist souvenir we will later forget we have on and wear around the island to the amusement of the other locals. Passing through the jungle we came out to a beach with coconut trees jutting in wild angles fit for a postcard, and the mahouts urged the beasts in the cool water for a drink before we headed back.

The trek was forty five minutes in length for only 500 baht ($15) making this the most cost-efficient elephant ride in the world. After the ride, we bought some bananas for a well-deserved treat for our carriers. Our twenty year old elephant reached out its trunk, twisting it around my hand, reaching for the baby banana with a nub at the center of its trunk that looked like a finger. So delicately it would take one after another. So calm it would remain as I wriggled and giggled. Staring into the elephants eyes covered by course black lashes, I realized what a gentle, magnificent creature was staring back at me.

One day, my Mom and I went to a Thai cooking school on the opposite end of the island. It was set-up beautifully in an open-air kitchen and workspace overlooking a gorgeous aqua ocean. Leng, the charismatic chef-owner, led us through a whole menu of our favorite Thai dishes. First we learned to make the staple Pad Thai and I was amazed at how easy it was, cooking up in under five minutes. The secret here is to use extra firm tofu and dried shrimp for just some crunchiness. Next, we embarked on three types of soup: clear and creamy varieties of Tom Yum and my all-time favorite Tom Kha Gai. An ingenious trick we learned is to knot a whole stalk of lemongrass instead of cutting it. This eliminates the chance of getting chewy, inedible pieces of lemongrass littering your soup.

Then, we made curry paste from scratch, pulverizing a dozen exotic ingredients into a giant stone mortar bigger than our heads. The knocking of the pestles pounded on for over five minutes until it was just right.

Our pastes included between 2-6 chili peppers each but Leng noted that some Thai locals use up to 20! We used our paste to make three different curries: green curry (the mildest with anise), panang curry (a nutty red curry), and yellow curry (which is actually a red curry with tumeric). Last, but certainly not least, was mango and sticky rice. The best part of class was sitting down with a Chang beer and eating all of our dishes. It was pretty inspiring to cook after being on the road so long, I can’t wait to get home and heat up the wok!

My parents rented a speedboat one day to take us out on a snorkel trip. It had rained overnight and the weather had been a little overcast causing the seas to swell. About twenty minutes into the ride, I was going green in the face. I don’t usually get seasick but the ocean was rocking and rolling in a continuous motion that made me want to puke. When we finally got to an island I immediately had to lay down for half an hour and take a Dramamine. Soon I rebounded and joined the action out in the water, snorkeling out to another small island and swimming with the fishies. Ron and I were in hot pursuit of an octopus and in almost as speedy a retreat from a large, speckled jellyfish.

Snorkeling has been one of Ron’s new favorite activities, especially as it is low impact to his back as he is still recovering from the scooter accident. He feels almost as good as new, but is finishing out the course of medication and muscle relaxants and otherwise taking it easy, which really is the island’s mantra anyway.

What else did we do? Food. There was a lot of Pad Thai to be had. And whole grilled fish and giant prawns at the beach barbeque. And delectable pineapple fried rice served in a half pineapple at Fantasia, a restaurant near our hotel that had a real chef. After all the eating, we did get some activity. Swinging in swings. Kayaking over mine fields of enormous black sea urchins, their spindles stretching to needle points in every direction. Meandering down the beaches and watching as my mom crawled her way up a palm tree grown out over the ocean. She’s going to kill me for posting this, but I thought it was the cutest thing I ever saw, her inching along and giggling. We called it “the Inch worm”. At the end, she did a little titanic maneuver, balancing belly down on the palm tree. You can almost hear Celine Dion on the ocean breeze...

On our last night we discussed our itinerary and unanimously decided to stay one more day on our quant little Thai island. We had mentally prepared to leave so the last minute extension made it that much sweeter. It was like finding a day tucked into the crease of a calendar, much like you would feel finding a twenty dollar bill stuffed between the cushions of your couch. Pure glee. So it was with the four of us, each doing our own thing. My Ron went snorkeling, my Mom read on the pier, her Ron got a massage, and I lounged at the pool. One more found day in paradise.

The Island of Koh Chang

2010-01-15T16:05:00.005Z

We took the slow boat (not dissimilar to the slow bus), a 3 hour ride on a wooden boat to the nearby island of Koh Chang (pronounced more like “chong” than “chang“). Landing at Bang Bao dock, a fishing village that smelled nauseatingly fishy from the first step to the last. Winding down a maze of docks past little shops selling all the crap the tourists can’t get enough of: seashell wind chimes, overpriced spf 30 suncreen, and horrendously ugly t-shirts of elephants. The latter, at least relevant, as Koh Chang means Elephant Island.

We climbed into a Sawngtheaw (no, I don't pretend to be able to pronounce this word) which is essentially a pickup truck with wooden benches along the bed to carry as many passengers as can squeeze in. It’s fun for a short, cheap ride and really the only transportation on the islands other than walking and the deadly scooters. They are not without action. Ron once had to stand on the back bumper and cling to an outside rail, white knuckling it up the hills, probably not the best for his ailing back. And I got in once and sat back into a blunt Allen wrench type doohickey that punctured a hole into my backside. I was literally bleeding profusely and had to sacrifice a handkerchief to stem the bleeding during the half hour ride. What we do for adventure.

We went to Siam Huts that proclaims itself as the cheapest huts on the island, but didn’t go for the rock bottom 290 baht ($8) huts instead opting for the”luxury” of what 560 baht ($17) would buy. It had AC which is quite unusual for a backpacker beach hut but was little better than camping out. The entire interior was sandy and you could see through the big gaps in-between the wooden floorboards to the beach below. The concrete bathroom, although attached was essentially outside and totally funked up so you didn’t dare enter without sandals. Why you ask would we stay? Well, there was one spectacular ocean view from our picture window and from the bamboo chairs with our feet up on the front porch. Exactly as you imagine a Thai beach hut to be.

After checking in and settling in, we got lunch and then swam at Lonely Beach, a lovely stretch of sand only a couple hundred feet away. Lonely Beach is a misnomer in every sense of the word. There is nothing lonely about it.

Our first night we decided to live it up. We had cocktails at the restaurant bar, which was a wooden deck strewn with triangular pillows (called Mon Khwan) and pads to lounge on. We struck up a conversation with a couple Brits, Nigel and Petra, and the night took on a whole new spin. We ate dinner down the beach and came back for several Samsong, a local spirit, served not in a glass but in a bucket. Yes, at some point we were drinking buckets of Thai whisky. We stumbled back to our hut and passed out around 2am with the party going full throttle (not that we would have noticed).

The next day I had a good level 8 hangover. Somewhere between the level 5 after New Years Eve and the 9.5 after our party in Paris. I was illin from the first moment I opened my eyes. It took all my strength to drink some water and venture out for some breakfast. Normally I relish breakfast but these runny eggs and stubby hotdog sausages were most putrid and nauseating. A nap and lunch and another nap later, I was feeling pretty good but we vowed to lay off the booze awhile and were in bed by 10:30pm like responsible adults.

At 10:31pm the techno kicked in at 115 decibels shaking our shack on its stilts. Oh shit, we thought. Last night we were at the party and tonight we get to see what its like to try and actually sleep here. We didn’t sleep more than 5 minutes for 5 hours. Not only was the noise from the bar unbearable but we were on the main walkway between two bars so we had frequent drunken revelers hanging out on our porch yelling retarded things into the night like “Australia!” over and over at 4am. For the record, the young travelers we have met from Australia are giving the whole country a bad rap. In my simpleton brain that longs to stereotype and generalize they are all loud, obnoxious idiots that I wish to bound and gag into submission.

We lasted exactly 3 nights before we were driven away. The view couldn’t make up for the lack of sleep so we took a share taxi to a quiet area known as Pearl Beach (really pearl is a nice way of saying rocky). We found a great little 7 room guesthouse called Saffron by the Sea. The rooms are usually 1200 baht but we got in for 900 baht (our absolute limit) for 5 more nights. It was really lovely amongst a well cared for garden on the ocean. The food was absolutely amazing. Not the speediest service but the portions were generous and oh-so-tasty. Our morning fave was muesli with fruit and yogurt.

Geckos, in these parts, are numerous. They are crawling all over every ceiling, light fixture, and hotel room you stay in. Like spiders, these are welcome little critters, who are likely eating all the nasty "skeeters" who antagonize you relentlessly. In an epiphany, we realized that the birdlike sound we kept hearing were actually geckos. It had sounded like a sort of large, nesting bird that made 6 to 7 consecutive eh-ow sounds. These little lizards can really project their sound! I got pretty good at mimicking it, and one came running towards me like I was making the call of the wild.

One night we had a traditional date night, a dinner and a movie, at Magic Garden. Not just any dinner and a movie but possibly the best cheeseburger on the trip with a bucket of whiskey to wash it down (okay, okay, we had some booze again, but only one and we shared it). We watched Into the Wild, an inspiring movie about traveling in the US, that ends tragically in the Alaskan wilderness. Alright, the end was a bit macabre, but the traveling portion was inspiring. There is so much to see and do right in our own backyards.

There is a lot of infrigement of the 7 eleven brand here with poser 7 day mini-marts full of half stocked shelves of nothing you want. But then we ran into a real bonafide 7 eleven and spent 45 minutes perusing the goods to shockingly loud Thai heavy metal that was surprisingly appropriate in the wee hours and certainly enticed us to buy more iced coffee and, of course, more chocolate covered pocky.

Another night, we walked down to southernmost point of White Sands Beach (the busiest and nicest beach on Koh Chang) which was beautifully sparse of tourists. The soft sand stretched into the water in such a subtle decline that you could walk straight out for 10 minutes and still be only waist high. Floating weightless enveloped in a perfect slate tinged baby blue from here to the heavens, the water only distinguishable from the sky by the faintest horizon line. A fat neon orange sunset stretched across the reflective canvas of the ocean for what seemed like hours before finally being swallowed up.

Evil Kneivel Kutulas

2010-01-11T13:13:00.006Z

It was the day before New Years Eve and we decided to rent scooters to explore the island. We had avoided motorbikes successfully up until this point due to inexperience and the fear of being mangled, but the island seemed so quaint and slow and flat. Really the ideal place to learn your chops on the road. So we thought. Jay and Corina, were in a similar boat, a bit apprehensive, but we strapped into our helmets and threw caution to the wind. A mere 15 seconds later, our throttle got stuck and we were literally flying through said wind into a 12 foot ditch, narrowly missing the sharpest corner of a house but breaking its roof, water pipe and electrical line on the way down. Not to mention running over a baby banana tree who surely never saw us coming.

Amazingly, we didn’t flip end over end and we landed upright and were able to get up and walk away. It reconfirmed our belief in guardian angels. We had some minor bruises and scratches. One I like to call “house burn” where my arm just dragged down the side of the house. Even with the amount of adrenaline pumping through our veins, Ron’s back hurt almost immediately and he had to lie down the rest of the night. We paid the damage to the bike, which was about $60 for mostly cosmetic issues, including the seat, left side of the body, and mud flap. Ron carried on valiantly through New Years, fueled (and anesthetized) by whiskey no doubt but crashed hard afterwards.

He couldn’t sleep through the night due to the pain, found it extremely uncomfortable to sit in a chair, and winced at even the thought of a yawn or a cough. We went to the clinic on Koh Mak and were given some light medication, but it didn’t seem to help much. Over a few days he seemed to improve and we had also reached out to my brother who suggested he may have fractured a rib. Although, there is nothing much you can do medically to help that along, at least we would have a diagnosis, and perhaps better painkillers.

We came to Koh Chang, a nearby island that has a small hospital for an X-ray. Low and behold, he fractured his left paraspinal process of his L1 vertebrae. Which means, he has to rest rest rest for another couple weeks for it to heal. Good thing we are on a Thai island, with nothing much to do but bum around the beach. I’m playing nurse and taking good care of him. And don’t worry about us getting on bikes again, the whole ordeal has basically scared the living shit out of us for ever riding a scooter again. Life is unutterably fragile, something I didn’t even have time to think about as I was flying though the air on an out of control bike. Best to keep your head in the clouds, but your feet firmly planted on the ground.

Happy New Year from Thailand!

2010-01-01T15:05:00.008Z

Ron and I are ringing in 2010 on Koh Mak, a little-piece-of-heaven island in the gulf of Thailand, like a small quaint pebble (5km x 16km) dropped in the ocean full of rubber and coconut trees. It’s a tough life of swimming in the pool overlooking the ocean and relaxing in our beachside hut. We have to race between the fan, the shade, and the water because not only is Thailand as hot as you would imagine, it’s really humid so we are dripping sweat almost immediately (and constantly).

We are staying at Buri Hut Natural Resort on the far eastern side of the island. Opened in 2006 there are 35 units ranging from 300-1500B ($9-$46) for an A/C hut with sea view. Although remote from the main happenings of town (which consist of a few hotels, shops, and restaurants, shoes off please...), they have three wooden trucks to drive you around, a pier, and an infinity swimming pool. Best of all, Tan the owner is a real sweetheart, and will take great care of you!

We have been enjoying the last four days partying with our friends, Jay and Corina, who are also on a year-long world tour. We had a scrumptious dinner of enormous barbequed prawns smack dab on the beach with the silhouette of dancers penduluming orbs of fire around them.

Later the locals released lit lanterns, glowing for miles as they rose into the dark sky.

Nearing midnight, we sipped the remaining Johnnie Walker Black we purchased duty-free enroute from India (a little luxury from back home) and leapt into the pool, hearing nearby revelers countdown sip, gao, bpairt, jet, hok, hah, see, sahm, somg, neung...

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

We miss you and wish you all the best this coming year….

Final Words on India

2009-12-30T16:45:00.045Z

How can I part without a love note to chai tea? The chai, rich with cardamom, is delicious and sweet and buttery good. We purchased some tea in a little clay pot from a Chai-wallah on the street. Unsure of what to do once it was drunk, we were instructed to throw it on the ground into pieces. So we did. A bit guiltily.

And I will miss all the head waddling: how the Indians say yes by shaking their head side to side like a charming little bobble head.

I may have said it before: it’s dirty in India, but I still want to make a fashion statement. What’s a girl to do? How about a hot pink face mask, the chic accessory of choice to filter out unappetizing smells and urban pollution alike.

I never knew that the Swastika symbol was a holy and auspicious Hindu symbol. It is everywhere: on temples, statues, altars, etched onto doorways, and ever present in festivals and ceremonies. One of 108 symbols for the Hindu deity Vishnu representing the sun's rays.

Being stigmatized so heavily in the West, as the symbol of the Nazi party, it induced from me more scorn than curiosity. I was fascinated to dig deeper into the use of the swastika throughout history as a symbol of good luck. If you are interested there is a good Wikipedia article about it. (I'm hoping right now I'm not the only one who didn't know!)

We watched a fair amount of TV in India to escape the heat and stem late-night boredom in our guestroom. Other than the Samsung commercial that is burned on our brains, we learned that most woman are mightily concerned with "hair fall" and most men want a Mont Blanc pen so they have "the power to write their own destiny". Damn advertising, I can’t believe this is one of the memories I leave India with!

Mont Blanc Ad Of Anil And Sonam Kapoor

India is a dizzying, fascinating country that feels like a blur from the inside of a tuk-tuk as easily as it could be the inside of a cuisinart. Flashes of bright rainbow colored saris, henna'd hair, red bindis on the forehead, hands in mudra, sacred cows, and miles of marigold garlands. I feel like I didn’t get deep enough, or entrenched enough in the culture. But at the same time, it was as much as I could bear for my first trip to the sub-continent.

Of India, people say you either love it or hate it, there is nothing in between. I don't think it has to be quite that stark, but it is certain the country will evoke strong emotion and wring out every neuron in your brain. In a single afternoon walk you can run through the gamut of awe, disgust, confusion, rapture and back again.

I'm intrigued enough to return, under different circumstances and different auspices (and lots more money!) for the list of experiences left undone. I didn't have the nerve to visit (or run away to) an ashram. My turned ankle kept me from 908 asanas on the Ganga. I didn't take a houseboat ride on Dal Lake up north in Kashmir or visit the beauty of Kerala state and eat masala dosa in the south. And most distressing, I didn't see any tigers!

What I wouldn't give to see these furry critters taking a romantic dip, awwwww....

Gorgefest in Goa

2009-12-25T23:07:00.003Z

We wanted to go from Varanasi to Madhya Pradesh region, or more specifically to the Bandhavgarh National Park where we could spot some big tigers. Unfortunately, fate wasn’t with us. Being high season and not planning in advance left us few transportation options. We could potentially take a bus to the park but pressing on to Goa sounded like three days in Purgatory, requiring several transfers between buses and trains. Apparently all the trains were booked for the entire end of December from Mumbai (Bombay) to Goa. What to do? We decided to stay in Varanasi a few extra days and take an airplane. Gasp! We cheated.

The flight wasn’t all rainbows and unicorns, consisting of three separate fights spread out over 26 hours. First up was an afternoon flight to Delhi that ran two hours late. Then we flew to Mumbai and had a long stopover before flying on to Goa, arriving the following morning exhausted. Ron also caught a slight cold, making the journey more arduous on him.

We flopped into our sandy bed at Saritas Guest House, too tired to complain that the room hadn’t even been cleaned. We stayed at Bogalo Beach which was nice, but not spectacular. I thought Goa was the French Riviera of India? Maybe because we stayed in the cheaper section of South Goa instead of the ritzier North Goa shoreline.

We enjoyed eating simple grilled food on the deck overlooking the ocean, walking in the white sand, and watching the sunset. Basically relaxing and laying low, like cows on a beach, while Ron recovered from his cold.

On a search for breakfast one morning, we stumbled upon a deserted beachside café. There were some cooks in the kitchen, not intent on actually cooking anything for us hungry customers, but on our way out we scanned the book exchange. Like a chorus of angels heralded from above, there was a golden glow around a large, imposing, brick of a book, hard-backed version of the brand spanking new Lost Symbol. Whether or not it is wise to admit so openly, Ron and I are both huge fans of Dan Brown and have been eagerly awaiting his next installment. I know, we’re lame, but there it is: I said it. I devoured it in twelve hours flat while lazing poolside at the next hotel we stayed at.

My brother was beyond sweet to put us up at a swanky hotel for the week of Christmas and in doing so, won the “Best Christmas Gift Ever” award. As we walked onto the manicured grounds at Heritage Village Club on Arrosim Beach, greeted by fresh flowers, fountains, and a fizzy welcome drink, I heard the Jefferson’s theme song in my mind, “You’re movin on up, movin on up...”

It exceeded all expectation - an unimaginable treat after the slumming we’d been doing. Our room was immaculate and shiny and was cleaned twice a day. I nearly hugged the housekeeper one afternoon, overwhelmed by gratitude for clean sheets and lavender sachets, down comforters and decorative teddy bears, granite countertops and designer faucets. Even our names were personalized on a sign outside. Sort of.

How did we do without these luxuries? Oh shit, how will we be able to travel again after this?!

We spent most of our days sunning and swimming in the large pool. We played countless games of HORSE on the poolside basketball hoop and threw a beach ball around like two kids on summer vacation. Around 11am, the swim-up bar would open and we’d start sucking down screwdrivers by the gallon.

Didn't I tell you it was all-inclusive? Open bar and all-you-can-eat buffet all day and all night. Holy cow, I um, became a cow and must have gained five pounds in seven days. Can you blame me? For once we didn’t have to skimp or count our rupees. Ron could drink ten coffees a day and even have dessert after dinner. It was HEAVEN ON EARTH.

We had our first ever balmy beachside Christmas Day. It was strange at first being so far from home, although the hotel was decorated festively and played Silent Night on repeat in the dining room. There was a big barbeque feast at night with row upon row of savory Indian dishes, seafood delicacies, and a whole roasted pig.

After gorging, we snickered at their cheesy dinner show and sipped champagne until the wee hours. We wish you all a very Merry Christmas from Goa!

Everything about our week was simply splendid until we checked out and they presented us with the bill, upon which I nearly fainted. Apparently there was some debacle at AMEX and the bill was not charged to my brother’s card. We had an hour before leaving for the airport and after a frenzy of phone calls, harsh words, and tears, we settled the bill and made it just in time.

All good things must come to an end, but there are many more adventures that await us. Next stop: Thailand!

Jaded in the City

2009-12-16T23:41:00.001Z

One of the downsides of this trip is having to deal with touts, drug dealers, and other unsavory sorts on a daily basis. We have been forced to learn the ins and outs and always remain vigilant. Some will catch you off guard. Saunter up to you in a business suit and nonchalantly whisper, “ You want marijuana? …hashish? …mdma? ….cocaine? …brown sugar? …you-name-it, what do you like?“ They are well diversified in product with a virtual drugstore beneath their tailor-made coat. The perfect response to this question is: “I don’t do drugs” which will thankfully end the conversation. A drug dealer knows not what to do when faced with someone who does not partake : no ailment to relieve, nor thrill to be had.

Even if we did want drugs, there are way too many reports of tourists being entrapped by police in cahoots with the dealers and, more importantly, I promised my Dad at least a hundred times that I wouldn't end up in a Thai prison. Needless to say, we were very good boys and girls.

To the rickshaws and taxi drivers pressuring us for a ride, we respond: “I need some exercise“. To the silk salesman and “come see my shop” guys we save them face and promise to stop by later.

Unfortunately there is no good response to the absolute most frequent bombardment which occurs maybe fifty to sixty times a day: “Hey! What’s your name? Where are you from?” You can’t play dumb, obviously we are Western, and look like Americans or Canadians or Brits. You can’t lie, how would that help. And you can’t be silent. because that will beg the question again and again and again. If anyone has a good way to defuse this fake conversation starter please let me know.

Sometimes it can be so maddening. With every new unsolicited interaction it builds and bubbles and simmers until I want to scream at the top of my lungs:

NO WE DON’T WANT ANY DRUGS OR SEXY SEXY ALL NIGHT OR TO STAY IN YOUR SHITTY GUESTHOUSE AND UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES DO WE WANT TO GET IN YOUR FUCKING TUK-TUK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Then maybe, just maybe, we can keep walking and save everyone the time and hassle. Alright, so I’ve become a tad jaded and I assume that anyone who talks to us wants something. This has reached such epic proportions that sometimes I blurt, “No thank you!” before they even get a word out of their mouth. As we walked to dinner one night, I verbally karate chopped a guy who was merely pointing out some monkeys above us playing on the electrical lines. Okay, so not everyone wants our rupee, it just appears that way.

The Holy Ganga of Varanasi

2009-12-15T19:32:00.005Z

Varanasi, the holiest of holy cities, has as many visually-charged epithets as one would expect. It is the city of death and pilgrims; the city of learning and burning. All life (and inevitably death) revolves around the Ganges River, also known, simply, as Ganga. There is more folklore flora and religious fauna to fill up five blogs, so please excuse me if I heavily abbreviate.

One morning we got up before dawn to take a boat trip up and down the river. We met Aso, a bearded boatman with a checkerboard boat, who expounded trivia and colorful tidbits as he rowed. He recalled the great monsoon of 1978 that flooded the Ganges to its highest recorded levels, where water surged past the highest ghat steps and flowed freely into the streets of the Old City.

We meandered down the river in the early morning hours; the sky softened into a wispy dawn. Birds scattered and swarmed in play.

There were sacred cows with wild eyes...

...and endearing goats wearing shirts to stay warm...

...and sadhus, ascetics whitewashed in ash, otherworldly yet not at all out of place on the steep ghat steps.

We passed dozens of ghats, each with a different purpose, named for worship of a different god, and frequented by a different sect. We passed Jain Ghat, a Buddhist temple; Janki Ghat for Rama’s wife; Nishadraj Ghat, the Boatmens ghat; Niranjani Gghat, a sadhu ashram; Kedar Ghat, a small Shiva temple; Digpatya Ghat, dedicated to Hare Krishna; Asi Ghat, the first of the holy ghats; and Dasasanwedi, the main ghat, to name only a few.

A trip here would be for incomplete without visiting the infamous burning pyres at the rivers edge. There are two: Harish Chandra, the small burning ghat and Manikarnika, the large burning ghat. Saffron wrapped bodies are strewn with marigolds and placed respectfully on the pyre to burn for two to three hours. Some people can’t be burned on the pyres and are given up to the river directly, these include: lepers, children, pregnant women, brahmins, and those poisoned by king cobras. Apparently it not uncommon to see floating corpses in the river, although thankfully we were spared this disturbing sight.

At the large ghat, the burning goes on 24 hours a day producing up to 200 cremations. An average pyre costs 3000 rupees ($60) but can vary in price depending on the quantity and qualify of wood used and the priests services rendered. The eldest son takes a place of prominence in the funeral ritual, releasing the final bits of bone and ash into the river where they sometimes scavenge the remains and pick out pieces of jewelry and gold fillings.

It is an honor to be burned on the pyres by the Ganges river and many travel vast distances to await their final liberation, what Hindu’s call the attainment of moksha. Death is not a quiet, somber event but a necessary, if not celebrated, evolution. One leaves the particular to join the universal; and rejoin the river of history like a drop of rain.

The local people bathe, brush their teeth, and wash their clothes in the holy waters. As we pass men and women beating their laundry vigorously on the ghat steps, Aso astutely called it the “Ganga Washing Machine”.

It might be a shocking enough use of the foul brown river water - with all the dead bodies, ashes, and human waste flowing in it - but even more disturbing is when the locals scoop up in their hands and drink it!! Although they purport these to be holy waters with true medicinal value, it is filthy beyond imagination. Do they know that the amount of ecoli bacteria and fecal coliform are 3,000 times worse than the safe level determined by the World Health Organization? Yuck.

We hired Aso another night for a boat trip to see the Ganga puja or Brahmin ceremony. Every evening at 6pm at the Prayag ghat, five Brahmin offer aarti or prayer, through circling lamps and incense, singing, drumming and chanting.

We were accompanied by Aso’s three daughters who were eager to sell us their handmade wares and fledgling services. The oldest was so persistent, I relented and had my first henna, a loopy twisting design on the back of my hand, painted on by the faintest candlelight. Admittedly, a rocking, dark boat may not have been the wisest choice for semi-permanent body art; it was sloppy and amateurish, but the girl was proud and so was I.

Hundreds of diyas floated on the river like twinkling stars in the inky sky. A prayer in each one, and in each heart.

Newsflash: Sad Dog Incites Twisted Ankle

2009-12-14T23:53:00.000Z

One morning, we were coming back through the gate into the hotel grounds and I noticed the saddest dog chained up and whimpering in the corner. Sometimes its appalling how poorly the animals are treated here, and ironic, in a land of vegetarians. Apparently, this lifestyle has more to do with dietary restriction and little to do with being humane towards animals.

Anyways, I was talking and looking back over my left shoulder at sad pooch and twisted my ankle on a patch of slanted grass by the walkway. More like I mangled my ankle. I think I came down on the left side of my foot so hard that I heard bones crunch. I fell down on the grass in a half summersault roll, grabbing my ankle in pain, seriously thinking I broke it. Ron hovered over me, freaking out, the look of panic in his eyes mirroring my own. I immediately flashed to the scary Indian hospital on the corner, crutches, a cast, and our trip ending in the blink of an eye.

Ron got the manager over, he took one look at me and said I was fine. Through teary eyes, I told him I heard a crunch, and he replied that if I broke a bone we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Point taken. He sprayed my ankle and foot with a numbing solution and in a few minutes I was able to get up and limp away.

I felt like I dodged a bullet, although I had to stay off my foot for a couple days, soaking it in a hot bucket of salty water and applying moove, a local pain ointment. It was sore in that tender place under the arch of my foot for almost three weeks afterwards. But we pressed on…and I regret to report, I didn’t liberate the sad, mangy dog in the corner; he’s still chained to that very spot.

The India-Nepali Border Crossing

2009-12-11T09:05:00.000Z

We were embarking on an epic and exhausting adventure by traveling overland from Kathmandu to Varanasi. The high level plan was to take a bus to Bhairawa, walk across the India-Nepali border to Saunali, take another bus to Gorakpur, and a train the last leg to Varanasi. Total travel time from door to door was estimated at twenty hours. The mere idea of this can make you queasy, but we pressed on. We are not hardcore vagabonds that relish in the least comfortable conditions, yet we similarly find ourselves with far more time on our hands than money in our pockets. We would gladly book the two hour flight on Jetstar like all the other sane people out there, but the adventure awaits...

We decided to enlist Touch Paradise to book the major legs of the trip, hoping to both give our friends some business and ourselves a break from logistical planning. I’m sad to say this didn’t make it any easier, cheaper, or more streamlined. Below is what we learned on the road, and there is but one way you learn on the road: the hard way.

The first important thing to know when you are traveling is where you are going. Duh. While this should be obvious there are at least a hundred cases where the local inhabitants call their city by several names or variations thereof. Either they are slow to adopt the new name out of habit or principle; or they have disdain for the anglicized version; who knows, whatever the case, it will be listed differently on your map, guidebook, tour brochure, train station board, and you will get a history lesson free of charge from the guy on the corner you beg for some semblance of clarity. This leads to a lot of unnecessary confusion and traveler heartache (like heartburn only it last much longer, sometimes your entire life) Let‘s take Varanasi: No one calls it Varanasi but you. It was once upon a time the ancient city of Kasi, then Varanasi, then anglicized to Benares or Banares which is still widely used, then back to Varanasi. This is but one example, there are millions of Istanbul’s which were Constantinople’s.

My advice for budget travelers is to book the train leg ahead but arrange the bus and jeep portions as you go. Expect to pay a maximum of 600 NPR ($8) from Kathmandu to Saunali which doesn’t include 150 NPR for rickshaw to the border. That’s right, the bus will stop a mile or so from the border, leaving you standing and scratching your head with all of your luggage.

The border is complete and utter chaos. There are cars, trucks, rickshaws, motorbikes, bicycles, cows, pigs, and people all jammed into every square inch of road, facing off against each other in irresolvable gridlock. There is just nowhere to go: not back, not forward, not sideways. There are no sidewalks, and as a pedestrian, god help you, you have to traverse this insanity through dumb luck and some well-timed shoves. Let’s just say if you looked up the word ‘clusterfuck’ in the dictionary you would see a picture of the India-Nepali border crossing.

On a good night, if you are walking across the border with a valid passport and the appropriate visas, then you can get through the border checkpoint in 1 hour. We planned on two hours just to be safe. I was grouchy, flustered, and sweating by the time we reached the Indian checkpoint and realized that I had left my passport on the Nepali side. Fuck. Yes, that is two expletives in two paragraphs, and I’m seriously making an effort to restrain myself. All in all, it was a ten expletive day. Ron ran back through the gauntlet of obstacles in what he described was like OJ Simpson in the 70’s Hertz commercial, where instead of leaping over rows of departure lounge seats it was carts of chickens. "Go Critter Go!"

To get to Gorakpur train station the cheapest is the bus but can take 3-4 hours depending on stops. The jeep can take as little as 2 hours, so if you are short on time don’t risk missing your train connection by taking the bus. A jeep costs the locals only 100 INR ($2) but they will ask you to pay anywhere from 150-200 INR ($3-4), which you can try to negotiate unless of course it is nearing 6:30pm and the last jeep is leaving and you should be happy with any seat you get. This is what happened to us. We took the last two seats in the last jeep, which meant we sat in the trunk on fold down seats with several other people. We were cramped and hunched over, our interlaced knees smashed into each other.

A helper boy of about 14 clung to the back bumper of the jeep as we tore through the night on the bumpy roads. I was worried for his safety, and as he wore a thin shirt, for his stamina against the chill. He must have been reading my thoughts and opened the trunk - with the jeep careening at top speed - and climbed in on top of us, the unsuspecting passengers. This made the uncomfortable ride, several magnitudes worse. He did offer us a cookie. But when we asked for a reduced fare - only slightly jokingly - he just laughed and laughed.

We arrived at the train station: an enormous, unimpressive concrete structure amidst a crowd of heaving, smelly people. We had not eaten a substantial meal all day and our prospects were low. Either we could brave the food shacks outside the train station or take our chances on what lay within. Neither sounded appealing. We weaved our way inside and found a snack bar that offered several types of savory pastries and pies. We bought six for under two dollars and found a bench to devour them. Then we waited - generously sprinkled from head to toe with flaky crumbs - for our train.

The train prices vary depending on class. Third class travel is the cheapest at 150 INR ($3) for a pre-booked ticket, and isn’t bad if you have a hardy constitution and are prepared with warm clothes, insect repellent, water, and earplugs. Sadly, we had none of these items at the ready. There were no provided blankets and the windows were stuck open letting in sub zero freezing temperatures and big fat mosquitoes by the dozen. Apparently not an incongruous happening. It was so cold Ron dug his wool socks out of his backpack to wear on his hands. I wasn’t so lucky. I tossed and turned and questioned my travel motives: what am I doing this for?

We arrived at 5am in the morning without a room reservation. Of course, our rickshaw driver didn’t want to take us to a riverside guest house of our choosing but finally he relented. He couldn’t get us very close so I had to follow him through the twisting and turning alleys while Ron stayed behind with our luggage. The guest house was completely dark when the rickshaw driver banged on the metal door, stirring a clerk inside. A few excited words were exchanged in Hindi and guess what? They were booked. Big surprise, he had suggestions for where to stay, but two flop houses later, we managed to get a decent hotel suggestion out of him and checked in to the Singh Guesthouse.

Twenty four hours after we left Kathmandu we slithered into our hard platform bed and shivered under the shabby covers. Why is it so cold? Whatever happened to the whole fabled notion of the Indian summer?

Yes, I’m a bit cranky,...but can you blame me?

Beginnings and Endings in Kathmandu

2009-12-09T20:07:00.005Z

First, the magical beginnings...

We returned to Kathmandu on Ring Road and saw the most unexpected sight - an enormous golden Buddha glittering in the sun. It was at the entrance of Swayambunath that we had previously visited, but since we had walked the winding the streets to the temple instead of taking the tour bus we somehow bypassed it.

This time around, we stayed at the famous Kathmandu Guest House. There are many levels of accomodation to choose, but as we were in the cheapest, our room was only a modest upgrade. The real draw, however, was the surrounding décor and hotel grounds - so atmospheric they made an ordinary breakfast interesting. As is eating while sitting cross-legged.

Krishna, our Annapurna porter, invited us over to his humble abode for dinner. He lived in a two room apartment with his wife, son, and mother-in-law that graciously welcomed us. We brought a bottle of our favorite rum: over which we drank, shared pictures, and stories of our life and in the process became good friends. I call Krishna my Bai (which means little brother in Nepali) and he calls me Didi (or big sister). We ate dinner, a sumptuous feast prepared by his wife at nearly midnight, which made me realize that eating late must be traditional for this part of the world. Note to self: eat a snack before attending any hosted dinners in Nepal or India lest you will be ravenous (and certainly a bit tipsy) by the main course!

We made our first (and potentially only) major purchase of the trip - a Thangka painting. We must have visited twenty shops in two days in a search, no a mission, for one piece that spoke equally to both of us. In the process we became quasi experts with the ability to spot sloppy work, pieces cranked out in production line fashion, and the true hallmark of a master: the intricate details of Buddha’s facial expressions made with hair follicle sized brushes.

We stumbled into Gauri Thangka Center, a popular gallery in Thamel, where they showcased exceptional buddhist art. Some were not even for sale and others fetched enormous sums like a recent purchase by Elton John. Fearing we were out of our price range, we were shown a few reasonably priced pieces in our range (like maybe three), but one was “the one“. It was a Buddha mandala painted in blues and bright pinks by Llama and master artist Bos Badu. We immediately resonated with it but to be sure, we ran back and viewed our second and third choices again before making the big decision to buy it. With the sun nestled behind the hills and our stomachs rumbling from lack of nourishment, we still took a jaunt to the tailor to pick out a silk brocade frame in deep purple. It was an exhausting day, but every detail had to be worked out.

Now, the sad(dest) endings...

We visited Pashputinath Temple: one of the holiest temples in the world, dedicated to Lord Shiva, and worshipped by both Hindus and Buddhists. The river that runs through the temple complex is where the Hindu funeral rituals take place. The corpses are covered in marigold and carried out on a metal stretcher to the river steps, where family gathers to pay their respect. The body is lit upon the pyre, burnt to ash, and eventually returned to the river. The cycle of life.

It was the first time I’ve seen a dead body up close and it was spooky. His bloated face had a curious resemblance to Tattoo from Dynasty. His body was immeasurably stiff and unyielding, like a piece could be broken off without disturbing the rest. He was on the paupers side of the river, where it cost but pennies for a funeral. The smoke that filled the air seemed noxious and full of death. Wait, it was full of death. The thought made me more ill than I was already feeling. Facing mortality and our nonnegotiable end is never a pleasant affair.

I wasn’t feeling altogether myself so we took a taxi back to the hotel. The driver was cordial enough at first but then tried to drop us off at least a mile from Thamel. We had taken many cabs so I was definitely rubbed the wrong way and offered him half the fare for half the ride. He was pissed with a capital P and started swearing at us in Nepali. Screeching through the narrow streets like a bat out of hell barely avoiding pedestrians and rickshaws unwittingly in his path of terror. I got out of the taxi while we fought in the simplest English he could muster. “You are not nice!” To which I replied, “No, you are not nice! Very bad man!” and stormed off. Only later did I realize that my camera must have come out of my pocket in the backseat of the taxi. I could imagine him smirking in my minds eye, with my camera and almost as worse, the last word.

In our leisurely pace of travel to and from Pokhara for our trek, we completely forgot to renew our 30 day visa! We were already 10 days late and had to burn two afternoons and $60 in late fees at the visa office across town. Fortunately, Nepal is lenient towards tourists and we were not deported from the country on the spot.

All tolled we will have spent six weeks in this beautiful and diverse country. From the highest peaks in the world down to the bustling Kathmandu valley, from the garishly decorated rickshaws to the simplest hillside monastery, from the serene Buddha eyes atop the stupas to the smiling eyes of the Nepali locals, it was indeed one of our favorite countries.

Pheri bhetau laa - we’ll see you again, Nepal!

The Peace of Pokhara

2009-12-05T06:47:00.007Z

“No other mountain view in the world is equal to Machhapuchre, with Annapurna hanging there in the sky above the green Pokhara plain.”
-Tilman, Legendary British Mountaineer

After the trek, we arrived back in Pokhara ready for some serious rest and relaxation. We searched and searched for a guesthouse that was both reasonably priced and had an in-room internet connection. This was much tougher to find than you would expect. None of the budget guesthouses offered wifi and the places that did were too expensive and charged by the hour. We almost caved and checked into Hotel Barahi, one of the most costly options in Pokhara, from sheer desperation but we would have to eat and drink air for two weeks. Unlikely. Dejected, we crossed the street and ran into an enterprising guy who jury-rigged an internet connection from the hotel office through a second story window into our room. For $25 a night, we were stoked. And we also got a bed with a real comforter and a bathroom with a bath tub! Unfortunately the food at the hotel sucked, so we were forced to leave our safe haven a couple times a day in search of sustenance. Aw, well you can’t have it all.

We had a couple favorites that we visited several times. A local dive nearby the hotel, called Aashis Fast Food, was run by the sweetest husband and wife team. They served up decent fare for super cheap and even let me take away a tray of dishes when Ron got sick one day (we think from the horrid room service at our hotel).

There is a lot of variety in the restaurants in Lakeside and we enjoyed: Japanese, Korean, Indian and Mexican dishes. Our clear favorite was Everest Steakhouse that served up huge steaks smothered with your choice of toppings like grilled onions and champignon mushrooms. We would order the half steak for 325 NRS ($5) which was about 12 ounces of steak alongside steamed vegetables and french fries. I think we went 3 or 4 times, including a reunion dinner with Yoav and Michal, and it was consistently yummy. The only criticism I could make was that they had the dullest steak knives on earth. Lucky the steak wasn’t too tough but it did measurably slow the mastication of the meat to have to cut through it with a butter knife.

And then there was the coffee. Ron, a self proclaimed coffee addict, has never quite adjusted to Nescafe and often laments that the budget restricts his free intake of caffeine. So imagine his glee when he found not one but several restaurants offering organic coffee, filter coffee, and the much sought after French press coffee. Oh my.

Although, many days we nested, there was always a cacophony of sounds outside our bedroom window to keep us company. It would start with a startlingly loud Moo! In the dead of the night. So loud, I would jump upright in bed, positively sure the sound emanated from somewhere as close as the bathroom. Later, with the birth of dawn came the loud crowing of birds rising and falling in waves upon the winds above the hotel. Then the vegetable guy would push his cart by at 7am sharp like he has probably done for 20 years calling something nasally monotone that sounded like “Ma na maaaaaaahr”. Next as the locals rise to get ready for the day there is the frequent ralphing sounds as they suck their snot through their nose and spit it out. No one uses tissues or handkerchiefs around these parts, that’s just nasty. It is much more socially acceptable to be a diminutive and smooth skinned Nepali woman walking down the street hawking up a loogie. Skink-hock-ptui!

The streets or street alongside the lake has just the perfect amount of action. There isn’t too much traffic. The sidewalks are wide and welcoming for us pedestrians, and there’s always something interesting to behold. One day, Ron saw the most unorthodox (read: inhumane) way to transport live chickens via motorbike.

One afternoon, we watched a bad action movie being filmed that, like on tv, we couldn’t quite pull ourselves away from. Part “what will happen next” and part “I can’t believe someone is wasting film for this”, we watched amongst a crowd of onlookers until we were shooed away for being in the shot.

And then there was the thankpa artist, that was quite happily and thoroughly excavating his nose cavity whilst he painted an elaborate mandala. I don’t know if this is my idea of zen. Similar to India, nose picking is not a private activity, and frequently happens in the midst of conversation. There is nothing much you can do at this point but hope you are not offered a handshake or some food after they dig out the golden nugget.

Ron got his first straight razor shave. The foam was slathered on his face in synchronization with the techno-nepali music in the background. It was supposed to be two or three dollars, but then the guy offered to trim his hair in a hideous marine cut and massaged his neck and then demanded more money. He was giving me the evil eye the whole time as I took pictures, probably because he knew I wore bigger pants than he. When I got wind of this little extortion I payed the guy the agreed upon price and told him not to swindle tourists into extra services without first discussing the price. He probably burned a couple holes into the back of my skull as I walked away, but I'm used to it by now.

The country is relatively stable and we felt safe traveling around, even though there were a number of Maoist protests going on that virtually shut down the country, including our bus back to Kathmandu. But we weren’t exactly sad about staying in Pokhara another night, we had been charmed.

Pokhara is pronounced poke-ha-rah with the emphasis on the last syllable but Ron calls it poke-a-harah like Pocahontas, and now I find myself saying it too. The locals don’t much appreciate it but smile anyways as we mangle most of their language. I guess it’s the effort that counts. At least we have Namaste down pat. A universal hello and goodbye in Nepal, every time I say it, it brings me back to the end of a hundred yoga classes, my hands in a prayer over my heart chakra, my heart saying “I honor the light within you.”

Annapurna Sanctuary Trek Costs

2009-11-22T09:47:00.006Z

The entire two week trek cost $1156 for the two of us. This covered our daily expenses, tea houses, food, equipment rental, equipment purchases, porter daily fee (including a tip), permit fees and extras such as rum, chocolate, and even a massage halfway through the trek. Also including all the trek necessities: tiger balm, bandaids, mole skin, knee wraps, and a ton of ibuprofen.

Agencies charge on average $1k per person for the same trek but that only covers the guide and porter, transportation, hotel, food, and permit fees. So really it would have cost us about $2500 through an agency, because of all the equipment and other stuff we brought. Independent trekking is a much better deal and doesn’t require very much legwork at all.

For anyone considering an independent trek, I would highly recommend Krishna as your Porter/Guide. He has started a trekking company called Touch Paradise that can also provide a range of other services in and around Nepal.

Krishna Dhakal - Touch Paradise

Thamel, Kathmandu, Nepal
website: www.enepaltrek.com
email: paradise@enepaltrek.com
phone: +977 1 4255406

Why is Krishna so fantastic? First and foremost, he speaks excellent English for a native Nepali which is a must given all the communication that takes place all day long. You don’t want to have to sign language with your porter basics like when you are leaving, which route to take, when to stop and why you are stopping, where to stay, etc. He has experience trekking all over the region for several years, so there are no surprises. And he’s friendly, a real doll in fact, so you actually enjoy spending all the hours you inevitably will spend together.

Often times I don’t know if I could have made it without Krishna. Not just for carrying weight that I certainly couldn’t have carried myself. But for leading us each and everyday, in good times and bad, inspiring us to keep going. And always with a warm smile on his face. Thanks Krishna, you are the best!!

However, once we tried to carry him around, we realized he was a bit heavier than he looks…

Last Day of the Trek

2009-11-22T09:27:00.000Z

The original plan from this point involved a two day trek back up and down a valley to Phedi. On the other hand, Yoav and Michal were going to follow a route that was one day on relatively flat grade back to Nayapul. We wanted to hang tough until the end but it wasn’t a difficult decision to follow our new friends. First we descended down stone staircases from Jhinu to the eloquently named “New Bridge”. It was one of at least a dozen scary river crossings. I’m not necessarily afraid of heights (like Ron) but I have a severe phobia of walking on anything vaguely transparent. Glass floors and loosely grated bridges give me vertigo and heart palpitations. I would have to remind myself repeatedly (and sometimes out loud) not to look down to the roaring river below.

This last day of our trek was easily one of my favorite. We followed dirt trails winding and rolling over the stepped farmlands, rice fields, and charming villages of slate roofed houses on lush green slopes.

The women dry and beat their millet harvest under the warm sun.

The men expertly weave baskets that will later be filled with all the necessities from the city for their remote lives in the foothills of the Himalayas.

The children watch you pass by with a pure and open inquisitiveness in their eyes. You are their real-life Dora the explorer.

Its hard not to romanticize the pastoral ideal of this existence, but it’s a tough and unrelenting life. The work is never done, there is always more to do. This struggle is etched into the wrinkled lines of the porters faces straining under their burdens. But they smile still. Bright and easy. Like the sun shining on them all day long.

I walked softly on my blistered feet, taking in the last hours of this once-in-a-lifetime experience. Ron captures it all on film, racking up over a thousand photos. I’m not exaggerating! We stopped for lunch in Sayil Bazar and I tried something called Chips Chilly which I probably should have guessed was french fries with a spicy red sauce. Hmmm. The 500ml of Fanta that accompanied it was like drinking nectar of the gods. Although probably not the healthiest of choices, eating in general on the trek has reminded me how much food is fuel. In modern day life you can forget that quite easily and just eat out of habit, out of boredom, and of course out of gastronomic pleasure. But food here has a purpose. It keeps you going, it gets you up in the morning, and then up the mountain that afternoon.

If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t have changed much. The only thing that would have made the trek far more enjoyable would have been to train on some inclines for a month or so prior. We are definitely case in point that you don’t have to be in top form to do this trek and still have fun (and still come back alive).

We had suffered many hardships: unrelenting stairs, dizzying high altitudes, freezing cold weather, unpleasant neighbors, sour stomachs in squatty potties, busted knees, twisted ankles, and blisters to boot. But its funny when I think back, I don’t remember any of those things. Perhaps we have our rusty old memory to thank for editing out the lowlights so we can remember what made the trip so special. Hiking in the clean mountain air. Krishna, our fearless leader. Poon Hill all to ourselves. Hot lemon tea and rum in a warm dining room. The Chomrong Fresh-House. Climbing the last steps up to ABC. Cocooning snugly in a sleeping bag. Laughing until your belly hurts with new friends. Unimaginably picturesque vistas and views, winding up from the golden farmlands to the snowy peaks and back again.

What a trek!

Jhinu Danda Hot Springs

2009-11-19T22:04:00.000Z

We met Yoav and Michal, a father and daughter duo from Yokne'am, Israel that we had seen on the trails a few times and had stopped for the night at the same guesthouse. We had one of those instantaneous connections, and enjoyed dinner together several times.

Yoav told us a story about his sister inviting him over for dinner and then confessing that she had cooked their fish in the dishwasher. Not only were the dishes clean but the fish came out perfectly steamed. This was funny in itself, but then I thought that we should rename dishwasher to “fishwasher” and we all laughed until we nearly cried.

As positively crazy as it sounds, steaming a fish in the dishwasher is a legitimate way to poach salmon. Try this recipe for some shock and awe and your next dinner party.

We had an equally you-had-to-have-been-there-moment when we misheard another porter saying the springs were so hot you could boil a chicken egg. We just heard “you could boil a chicken” and we imagined being in the springs with a flock of chickens, basically cooking up our dinner while we bathed. We could call the dish “hot spring chicken”. Since they drain and clean the tubs every night we laughed about how they would have to clean out the feathers lest they clog the drain. Later, when Krishna caught a chicken, we busted up again, like it wasn’t far fetched at all.

We heard the hot springs were “just down the hill” so we asked if we could wear our flip flops. Luckily, we ignored this advice and wore our hiking boots because it was a good thirty minutes down a wooded trail.

When we got to the bottom and turned the corner, who was in the hot spring? Ok, you know by now. I thought we shook them at the last guesthouse but there they were in all their glory, and in bathing suits. There were only three tubs carved out of rock, one was full, and one was occupied by a pudgy wrinkly naked guy who went pee in front of us before jumping in. We would have to swim with the enemy.

The tubs overlooked the aquamarine Modi Khola river, rushing madly and enticing you for a whitewater rafting trip (another popular adventure in Nepal). The water felt fantastic! It wasn’t especially hot but it eased our sore muscles. We soaked until our fingers and toes were prunes.

Later I was bored, having finished my book on Annapurna and was extorted by the teahouse owner into paying over four dollars for a cover-less and yellowing copy of Christine. I was that desperate, but as always entertained by Stephen King.

Also immeasurably entertaining, the owners son, Susan, was quite a little ham and requested prompt payment for his pranks in Pringles. The tennis-ball can was made a perfect size to hide his little arm straining for more chips. Unlike our adult sized limbs that don’t seem to fit anymore as we invariably find ourselves tipping the can upside down. We coaxed Susan into filtering a liter of water for us in return for a Snickers, and he shot off like a lightning bolt to devour it and came back smiling with telltale chocolate on his cheek. When you're a kid your life literally revolves around Pringles and Snickers, not so unlike two exhausted trekkers I know.

Coming down the mountain

2009-11-18T23:11:00.009Z

The next morning was crystal clear and the sunrise was spectacular, bathing the peaks in golden light. Everyone standing, mouths agape, in hushed reverence.

We walked a short distance past the volleyball court (who knew it was a thriving winter sport?) to a prayer flag strewn chorten to give our thanks before our departure.

The view on the way down was breathtaking, Fishtail looking high and mighty, a king lording over his village flock.

We were flying down the mountain, twice as fast as it took to climb up. As we continued descending and descending, I almost couldn’t believe how many stairs, hills, and steep trails we had climbed. Ron’s knees couldn’t believe it either, and he wasn’t a happy camper.

Washing clothes has been an adventure on this trek, especially as we have only two sets of clothes and they are inevitably stanky after a day of hiking. We would wash items in the sink but they would never dry overnight in the cold air, so almost everyday there were items pinned to the outside of my pack so I would have a fresh shirt or underwear the next day.

Our wool socks never seemed to dry thoroughly and my Mom (a veteran Himalayan trekker) advised many times to avoid wet feet at all costs. Well, I tried my best but I found myself in a pair of slightly damp socks in my oversized boots on the longest day of downhill. Needless to say, I got six blisters in identical positions on both feet, with several more days of trekking ahead. Not good.

We stopped in Bamboo for the night and were lucky to get one of the last rooms at the last guesthouses in town. I went for a hot shower in the disgusting toilet/shower combo and came out with the willies and not exactly feeling clean. Where’s the Purell?

Then the inexplicable happened. Can you guess? The same &*%#! girls showed up and checked in to the room next to us!! At this point I realized that god was punishing us for something we had done. There was no other reasonable explanation for the ridiculousness of forcing us next to these hyenas for a third night. I repented: God, I’m sorry for whatever I have done. Please, no more. I can’t take it.

We resorted to some rum and tea to ease the pain. Played cards with Krishna, even though he always wins! And watched the owners feed their fiesty goats. One of them, I would assume the billy goat of the bunch, would even waltz with you for some extra cabbage.

The next morning I bandaged my battered feet with medical tape, bandaids, and moleskin until they were unrecognizable lumps. My right knee was busted now like Ron’s (probably from over favoritism) and we both sported a super-cool knee brace.

Another casualty was Ron’s right index toe that was repeatedly jammed into the toe of his boot. It turned black, threatening to fall off. And yes, I have to avoid those jagged toenails underneath the covers on a nightly basis.

The neverending stone staircase from Sinuwa down to the river was painful on our tender parts. Ron dubbed it the Stairway to Hell, as we both tried to interject some humor into our constant complaining. But there was no consoling me on the way back up to Chomrong, even with the paradise vista of lush grass and waterfalls. It was as bad, if not worse, than I imagined it would be. Almost as nasty as the 3120 stairs up to Ulleri.

Donkey trains would pass us every now and then bringing supplies to the remote villages of the region. The bells around there neck jangling softly in the distance before you actually saw them bounding down the steps. We would quickly step aside, for this is their road and they knew it.

Exhausted and all busted up we collapsed in Jhinu, famous for their hot springs, at what else but the Hot Springs Cottage. They were still under construction of the second floor, but I could care less, eyeing the shower and then the wooden picnic table to rest my weary bones. Maybe indefinitely. Once I sat down, there was little that was going to move me again. Newtons law of inertia at full effect.

We made it to Annapurna Base Camp!

2009-11-16T22:41:00.004Z

The morning at MBC was bleak and cold. We hoped it would be a clear day and we would get a glimpse of the peaks we had been hiking 8 days to see up close. The hike, excuse me, trek started out innocently enough. There were no major inclines just a gentle upward gradient that should have been easier than it looked. I was, once again, struggling to get oxygen into my lungs and just moved in slow motion for most of the way which was only a couple miles.

It was still one of my favorite days of the trek. So quiet and peaceful, only the cries of crows in the lulls of the wind, in the alpine basin surrounded by the massive peaks of Annapurna I, Annapurna South, and Machapuchare. We spied a Himalayan tahr on the hillside, which is some type of a wild goat with bushy, wiry mane of hair.

We were in the heart of the mountain range, called Annapurna Sanctuary, with Annapurna I staring back at us.

“The sight far exceeded anything we had imagined, a terrific wall of ice rising above the mist to an unbelievable height, we were quite overwhelmed by its magnificence and grandeur”.

Yup. I couldn’t have said it any better than Maurice Herzog who along with Louis Lachenal were the first to summit Annapurna, the 10th highest mountain in the world. In doing so, they were the first pair to summit a peak higher than 8000 meters in the Himalayas, the planets highest mountain range. Higher than the Alps and the Andes. Put together. Ok, that last piece isn’t true but it sounds good.

We saw ABC perched on a hillside in the distance. The white guesthouses and blue roofs signaled the end of our journey, the sum of our struggles. One hundred thousand stone stairs of pure torture for one brief moment of sheer pleasure at the accomplishment. Somehow the math works out. It is worth it. Something in the challenge shows us what we are made of, which you just can’t get sitting on your couch watching other people do it in National Geographic specials.

Ron and Krishna reached the top and stopped to wait for me. Again. I just love to feel like the tortoise. I plodded along and Krisha came back down to take my pack. The high altitude made it feel more like 50 pounds and it was a relief off my tired shoulders. The last of the stairs up were almost effortless with the exhilaration burning in my heart over finally reaching the finish line. Sometimes I doubted I would make it, but I kept putting one boot in front of another a million times over. I didn’t exactly saunter to the top of this mountain, but I DID IT!!

We toasted and congratulated each other with the whiskey that Krishna had carried for over thirty miles, god bless him. One drink at 4130 meters and I was certifiably tipsy. But I relished the warmth in my belly because it was icy cold, even the sun couldn’t temper the arctic chill. Doesn’t that subliminally make you want to chew some gum? The only gum I have is banana flavored and lasts exactly four chews before you have to spit it out.

We checked in to our room at Snowland Guest House, and guess who was next door?! We pleaded with the owner to move us one room down, away from the noise of the girls, but later that night we could still hear them blabbering two room away! The next day I decided to take pictures of them at breakfast, y’know for the blog. This one is particularly attractive, not only is it blurry but the girl has a full mouth of food. Maybe the only time she shuts up. I know, I’m mean and spiteful. Don't mess with me and my sleep.

We ate pizza in a packed dining room of trekkers all joyously exhausted. My stomach was a little acidic and I was frightened and reluctant to bare my bum in the freezing squatty potty at night by nothing but headlamp. It’s amazing what you can do when there are no alternatives. You just have to get on with it. In our room, we could see our breath, but could only guess how cold it was, I would venture to say it was….freakin’ cold! I pulled out all the stops to warm my ice-cubed feet: two pairs of socks wrapped in my down jacket stuffed in the bottom of my sleeping bag. In addition to my furry hat, I wrapped my scarf around my face so that not a square millimeter of flesh was exposed. Whereas, I looked like a lump of clothes strewn on the bed, Ron looked cute all mummified. Even with blue lips.

Into the mist of Machapuchare Base Camp

2009-11-15T23:07:00.009Z

We awoke bright and early at 5am so we would arrive early enough at Machapuchare Base Camp (nicknamed MBC) and find a room. We had asked the woman the previous night to book us a room but through a miscommunication we didn’t realize it was a success until we were already up and dressed, having breakfast in the early dawn. Our new discovery is a Tibetan fried bread (sometimes listed as corn bread or gurung bread) with a fried egg “both sides” on top. So delicious is an egg folded in fried bread, like a giant breakfast taco, to get your motor running.

The next town, Himalaya came in only an hour and half, and I had premature thoughts of how easy the day would be. We continued up rolling hills, past so many waterfalls that soon the trail itself was wet and trickling underfoot.

The next two hours would be harder on rougher, steeper trails to scamper up until we reached Deurali. And then the final couple hours to MBC were pretty brutal. The change of altitude as we pushed towards the goal at 3700m/12,135 ft left me out of breath. I would slowly inch forward, getting further and further behind Krishna and Ron, leaning on my poles like crutches. My legs wobbled around in their hip sockets like I was relearning to walk again after being paralyzed. This would be my least favorite day of the trek.

As we neared MBC, the temperature seemed to drop twenty degrees and a misty fog rolled in like I was suddenly dropped into a very bad dream. Visibility ahead was only a couple feet. I panted and wheezed. Krishna said we were close. We crossed a river and were met with a fork in the road. He led us up a stone staircase that had a lodge that appeared to float on a cloud, an oasis amidst the mountains. I took all my strength that I had left in me to drag myself up those last hundred stairs. “Every step was a struggle of mind over matter”. It’s not like I’m battling the elements and hardships of the first Annapurna summit. Still, I silently cursed to myself, trying to urge myself on.

When I reached the top, Ron asked me not to be mad. Uh-oh I thought. Apparently Krishna directed us up the stairs but our lodge was down the hill on the other side. The entire staircase was an unnecessary detour! I was too exhausted to be mad, but later I would mime to Krishna that if he ever did it again I would strangle him with my bare hands.

We were greeted by the jovial smiling owner of the Gurung Guest House and fell into bed for awhile. Wrapped up under our sleeping bags for a nice afternoon nap, we would soon “meet” our neighbors, a couple Australian girls in their twenties, who checked in next door. Loud and extremely annoying, they kept chattering on without the least care to the paper thin walls. I learned more inane facts about them than I ever cared to know, including a blow by blow of a cold bucket shower, as I lay mentally and physically exhausted.

We got up to dutifully filter our water before dinner, and then snuggled into the dining room for some Tuna Mac & Cheese. The long wooden table seated at least twenty people and had a heavy blanket over it all the way to the floor to trap the warmth of a smelly gas heater placed recklessly close to our legs. At one point smoke billowed out from the table, us choking on foul gas, too cold to protest the danger and lung pollution we kept eating like it was perfectly normal.

There was no electricity in our room, so we tried to read by headlamp, shivering in our sleeping bags underneath extra blankets.

But the Aussie girls kept laughing and snorting, pausing only when someone from an adjacent room yelled “Shut up!” and then continuing on as if nothing had happened. Sigh. You can’t even get away from dumb people on the other side of the world and halfway up a remote mountainside in Nepal.

Little bit down, little bit up

2009-11-14T05:08:00.004Z

We reached Sinuwa, after the grueling descent to the river and back up again, we were nearly parallel to Chomrong across a deep ravine, which made me wonder why they just put in a zipline between the two villages? Both Ron and I would be dreading the return trip for days to come. We are quite the pair. I hate up, he hates down and this segment has a little piece of hell for both of us. Luckily we were fresh from the rest day and our legs felt good and strong.

Beyond Chomrong we started to follow the deep forested gorge of the Modi Khola river. The forests were lush with pine, fern and bamboo thickets. As we walked past little villages, I saw a chicken projected out of thatched hut, arching through the air, feathers a-flying. Kicked by a girl talking on her cellphone. These are the contrasts of modernity and village life that strike you.

Now that we are in the special Annapurna conservation zone, wood fires and bottled water are no longer permitted and lodges are limited both in size and number to keep the area as pristine as possible.

We stopped in Bamboo for lunch and had the best Dal Bhat of the trip. Dal Baht is the ubiquitous meal in Nepal, sold for pennies to the porters but for a couple dollars to us. Consisting of lentils, rice, padadam, and some sort of assorted potato and vegetables, it is hearty and you always are offered free seconds. Its definitely the most economical meal. The only thing to watch out for is what we termed, “Dal Butt” or the ensuing gassiness after consuming too much Dal Bhat.

An hour further through rolling hills through the forest, we stopped in Dovan (2340m) around 1pm, we were extremely lucky to get a room at one of the three teahouses. So lucky, in fact, that an hour later they were putting people up in the dining room and two hours later they had to turn people away. It was sad to see some trekkers coming through exhausted after hiking all day, told they had to go another hour up or down the mountain and hope to get a room. We made it a point to get early starts from then on, so we always got a bed.

We savored our favorite dinnertime drink of warm lemon tea and khakuri rum. The tea was so good and lemony, it was like hot lemonade. Later, we found it wasn’t really hot tea or real lemon after-all but a sweet lemon concentrate. In any case, it was warming and delicious. We tore into a pack of Snickers bars to find them turned unnaturally white from sitting on a dusty shelf for what must have been ages. Rule #4 for travel - read the expiration dates. I can assure you after a 6 hour hike, even 3 years past guaranteed freshness, a Snickers is still pure heaven. Just close your eyes.

Chomrong - Gateway to the Sanctuary

2009-11-13T22:12:00.004Z

We awoke late at nearly 7am (again) and hurried down for a breakfast of muesli with warm milk to assuage the cold morning. Then we took a path that winded down to a river, followed by a frisky rotweiller puppy. Across the other side there were a series of impossibly steep dirt trails, the kind you lean into and slide a half step down for every step you climb up. On to a village called Gurjung, past forests of marijuana and the aptly named Greenhill Lodge. There was a farmer tending his crops, grinning widely in the sun, and I thought about what a fantastic place this would be to retire for many of my compadres back home. A simple rustic life with killer Himalayan views amongst fields of green as far as the eye could see. This is a paradise found for someone, for sure.

We passed an eco-friendly sign with superbly bad grammar, like a Buddhist version of “All your base are belong to us”, that read:

Next we came to a teahouse that had the saddest, most pitiful sight imaginable. A little baby monkey tied up with a rope to a nearby pole. It just about broke our hearts. An Australian couple whom we met the night before was already well into a lecture to the owner about releasing it back into the wild. The story, supposedly went, that they happened upon the youngster alone, his mother killed. Somehow I couldn’t believe this was a better fate to having to fend for itself.

My ankle was a bit sore. Not horribly bad, but it would probably deteriorate if I walked on it too much. Better safe than sorry, we decided to hike three hours to Chomrong and stay an extra day to rest, which in more ways than one was a godsend for my aching body.

We stayed at Excellent View Top Lodge, which was totally packed the first night. We had a double room with a little balcony that did in fact have an excellent view, with the soft white cotton candy clouds stuck to the mountain peaks. But we had a window facing to the inside of the guesthouse (another retarded design feature), and it was pretty loud being near the shared bathroom, that was constantly in occupation. I had a startling thought that I had not done my business in 4 days now. I think when I’m in unfamiliar circumstances, my body just shuts down. I had a similar thing happen when I was on a week-long river rafting trip. In both cases, I wouldn’t make it all the way back to civilization without some debilitating septic shock setting in, so I would have to figure it out. The next day we were lucky to get one of the only rooms with a private bath (and western style toilet) for 500 NRS ($7) the most we paid for a room on the trip, and that did the trick. I guess I just needed some privacy. Unfortunately, it also had a solar shower but the overcast day didn‘t bring any hot water, so we were outta luck on that front.

Chomrong (2170m) is known as the Gateway to the Sanctuary as it is a one way trip from here to Annapurna Base Camp (ABC), although many loops and circuits can be made up on your itinerary up until this point. It is a large Gurung village, and the first in the region to have hydroelectric power, harnessed by the power of the rushing rivers.

Even with the massive amounts of ibuprofen I was consuming, my thighs were burning with every step down, I would lean on the banister and wince when descending the stairs into the dining hall. We had delicious chicken enchiladas one night that appeared to be an exception as everything else wasn’t anything to write home about. Overall, there are a plethora of guesthouses in Chomrong, so I would keep looking next time. Although it did, amazingly, have an internet café (for like 15 cents/minute or $9/hour!) that neither Ron or I wanted to step near. Being out in nature and away from technology was what this trip was all about.

Krishna showed us to a local place for food and drink called a fresh-house. Not surprising given the village in which we stayed, it was named Chomrong Fresh-House. We sat on bamboo mats on the dirt floor of the hut. The woman poured us local wine in little mugs, a warm rakshi brewed from millet. It had the distinctive taste of all the raki we’ve ever dared to sample all over the world, something resembling gasoline, likely prepared in an unhygienic way you prefer not to be shown. Over the open fire, she cooked slop for her cattle that wandered aimlessly outside the hut.

Her husband, an artist with good printing to prove it, painted a new yellow sign for their stair-side restaurant.

We sampled buffalo jerky that hung to dry in a wooden rack over the hearth of the fire. It was heated in some oil and was the jerkiest jerky I’ve ever chewed, like I gnawed on one small piece for like 10 minutes hoping I wouldn‘t swallow it, choke, and die on buffalo jerky on the floor of a hut somewhere in the himalayas. It was dried naturally without any additives, so it had a rather strong flavor. No brown sugar, molasses, teriyaki, or hot peppers in sight. It made me nostalgic for 1 ounce bags of sweet n hot jerky from Circle K. Such a little thing. The local children, just out from school, stopped by to pose for our cameras, giggling at each other in the viewfinder afterwards, and running from the husband playfully threatening to dab some yellow paint on their cheek.

Tipsy and ready for lunch, we trekked the 10 minutes back up to our lodge. Now that’s my kinda trekking! I treated myself to a half hour massage on my feet and legs. I didn’t really expect a lot given I was out in the boonies but I got a fantastic pressure point massage in my room. At times my tender muscles screamed but I let the nepali masseuse work his magic and I was jello afterwards. He charged a very reasonable 800 NRS ($11) but I gave him an even 1000 NRS and drifted peacefully off to sleep. Room service…

To the quaint village of Chule

2009-11-11T21:16:00.002Z

The next morning we awoke ready to hit the trail. Instead of walking up the stairway towards Ghorepani, Krishna showed us a sneak route, up a faint trail immediately across from our teahouse up through the forest. What a welcome difference it was being on an actual trail. This is what I imagined it would be the whole way, or maybe what I hoped. The forest full of pine, birch, and bamboo trees. Then massive rows of huge and ancient rhododendrons, dormant in the winter, but I could imagine what a sight it would be, a palette of colors in the spring. Continuing up the trail a little out of breath I thought of Krishna’s explanation of the day, he calls this “a little up”!!

We reached a summit that overlooked Poon Hill and I have to admit it may have been a better vista reached after a much easier climb. Perhaps we should have just seen the sunrise here on the way up to Tadapani. We snapped photos and I made a sad attempt at a panoramic shot which I won’t share with you but rather a good photo (except for my retarded 'wind' hair) of the fearless trio.

We descended down past Deurali and countless waterfalls to idyllic Banthanti situated right on the river in the gulley of two massive mountains. We spotted playful monkeys in the trees, their white hair contrasting their inquisitive black faces staring back at us. We continue the descent and Ron’s right knee started to bother him. He donned a knee brace and I snaped furiously his Napoleon Dynamite trekker visage of t-shirt, plaid shorts, ski hat, knee brace, and hiking pools. This is my boyfriend, folks.

Ascending now towards Tadapani, where most trekkers rest a night. I can see why. The views of the peaks, Annapurna and notably Machapulchre are astounding. For the English, the mouthful Machapulchre is called Fish Tail due to its distinctive peak resembling a fishes tail. This is a most sacred mountain to the Nepalis, and in fact it is one of the only Himalayan mountains to never have been summitted, not for difficulty but on purpose. In 1957 a British duo, Noyce and Cox made an attempt and stopped 50m short of the summit in deference to the local people and since then no other attempt has been permitted. It remains a virgin, inviolable precipice.

We pressed on, the trail headed down at a steep pitch over gnarled roots, loose rocks and dirt. The momentum of gravity often pulled me faster than I wanted to go, and once I came down on my left ankle and it twisted ever so slightly. It scared me that I could really hurt myself, and break an ankle out in the middle of nowhere. There is no medical care to speak of and it would take days to get me out of the mountains. A scary thought. I consciously used the poles to slow me down and brace the descent as best I could.

An hour later, a grass clearing came into view, both picturesque and quaint. It had all the elements to stir the soul into staying awhile: an inviting guesthouse, wandering donkeys, prayer flags stretched over the stepped farmlands in the distance. We just had to stay the night.

Upon checking into our room, I came face to face with my third hardship (first was the stairs, second was the altitude). It was my womanly visitor. I would say monthly visitor but before the trip I started on Seasonale birth control. It was to be the biggest boon to a world traveler like me, that I would only get my period once every season. It just so happened that my unlucky number was drawn on the trek and started in an undesirable squatty potty with no sink. Ugh.

The dining hall was cozy and warm, amongst Israeli, Australian, Swiss, Spanish, and even a Nepali couple (a little citified, and out of their element in the mountains). We ate lasagna, interpreted by a Nepali woman who may never have actually eaten real lasagne or even visited an Italian restaurant. The higher and more remote we go, the more amazing it becomes how well we are cared for by such isolated people scraping a living together. But we still have a chuckle at the frequent misspellings on the menu in the “dinning room“, like eggs “cock to order“.

Missing the Sunrise over Poon Hill

2009-11-10T21:52:00.006Z

After the tough second day, we decided to take it easy and only hike Poon Hill and back instead of trekking several more hours to Tadapani, what most itineraries suggest. We were up at 4:30am. It was freezing cold, and we weren’t even out of our sleeping bags. It took every bit of intention to unzip from our cocoons and step foot on the frigid tile. At least we didn’t have to dress, as we were already wearing all of our clothes to bed. We went down to the dining room for some tea, as most of the other trekkers were heading out for the hike. We were planning to leave at 5am as I had read that the views were great for a couple hours, during and after the sunrise, so we didn’t think there was a huge rush.

Once outside, it was pitch black, except for the bouncing light shining from our headlamps. We had on our down jackets, in addition to 3 other layers of clothes but after only a few minutes of heading uphill to Ghorepani, we were stripping down. At some point we got lost as Ron didn’t see in the darkness the stupa after which we were supposed to turn left, according to Krishna’s direction. (Since there was nothing to carry, we told Krishna to take the day off. Mistake #1) Finally on the right path we continued up stone staircases. We weren’t even to the trailhead yet and I was in trouble. I couldn’t breathe in the higher altitude. Each inhalation was shallow and unfulfilling, then exhaled as wispy smoke, visible in the cold air.

All of a sudden it started getting lighter and lighter out. As if god was turning up the dimmer switch much too fast. We raced on at a snails pace, each step up was laborious and painful. I was going way too fast, my heart needling the danger zone, but way too slow to make it in time. We paused a few times to turn around and just take in the sunrise, its serenity and splendor and silence. Warm rays of sunlight, like radiant bands of orange crush, illuminated the ring of peaks like a glinting crown.
Then back to an asthmatic breathing pattern and relentless stairs up ever higher. The sunrise nearly over, hundreds of trekkers were already coming down past us, with looks of pity, as we missed what they just saw. The most demoralizing point came as we neared the top where a German trekker, with calves like tree trunks, snickered “You’re late!” in a most arrogant tone like we weren’t worthy to even be on the same mountain. If I can stereotype here for a just a second… German trekkers are my least favorite, followed by hipster trekkers, then anyone with a mustache. Unless of course the moustache is white, then it will inevitably be paired with a twinkle in the eye and an easy smile for their fellow trekker. If the ‘stache is brown or god-help-us blonde (ewww, can we just outlaw this?) then they are bound to be hopeless grumps.

Ron went up ahead as I struggled horribly the last 100 meters or so, my lungs on fire. The view was spectacular but I couldn’t appreciate it for at least 10 minutes while I cooled down and Ron scampered around taking photos. Once my heart slowed to normal and the sweat evaporated from my brow, it got quite chilly, the wind whipping wistfully about. A cup of sweet coffee made possible by the entrepreneuring local woman was a delicious treat at 3210 meters.

By the time we got around to taking photos of each other and our couple shots made from Ron’s long outstretched left arm, there wasn’t a soul around.

We had the summit to ourselves and the majesty of a natural wonderland. No teenage girls saying, “Me next! Me! Me! Me!“ dancing in our peripheral vision for the perfect shot. Just us. And silence. Maybe we were extraordinarily lucky after all to miss the sunrise over Poon Hill.

Going back to the lodge, we had some breakfast and commenced our regular chores of filtering water, organizing our stuff, doing laundry, etc. We took showers, or tried to, as we had the most unexpected problem. It was not that the water was too cold (our usual hardship) but rather it was too hot. So hot it would scald your skin off. I actually had to ask them to tone it down. But it was so luxurious to take a nice hot shower and snuggle in to our sleeping bags for some afternoon reading and a pre-dinner nap. Mmmm.

The dining room was built around a bukhari, a wood burning fire encased in an iron cylinder of sorts with a chimney duct. When it got cooking, the room heated up fast and furiously. We hung our laundry to dry from clotheslines and within two hours they were baked like hot potatoes. Trekkers from all over the world, sharing a common journey, gathered in the warmth of the room, for substantial high-carb dinners. The porters and guides sat around drinking tea and playing a loud Nepali game that is a cross between pool and air hockey. The clickety clak of the flicking pucks and for the skillful, the cries of victory going on into the night. It was surely one of those games that would be fun to be playing, but was not so relaxing for a background dinnertime soundtrack.

Up, up, and up 3421 stone stairs

2009-11-09T04:15:00.000Z

We were to pack and meet Krishna at 7am to leave but Ron’s casio calculator watch alarm was muffled in his sleeping bag as we soundly snored away. We rushed through packing and breakfast and set off on a famously exhausting stretch of stairs between Tirkhedunga and Ulleri. These are no ordinary stairs, mind you, they are 12” inches high, cut roughly from stone, and someone counted 3421 of them between the two towns, though I think there were many more than that. Several times I counted out a hundred, and it seemed to go on and on and on. My strategy was to go slowly, at a pace I could maintain the whole way. I fell into a meditative rhythm - right foot, left pole, breath in. Left foot, right pole, breath out. The peak of Annapurna South inspiring me forward. It was an unrelenting ascent, and towards the end, I joked that I should just crawl the rest of the way...

When we reached and passed the town of Ulleri, I left some beads in offering on a tree, to mark the accomplishment of the summit. What I thought was supposed to be the hardest day of the trek. In hindsight, this was laughably naïve. The day wasn’t even over. And the uphill for the day was far from over. We stopped for a rest break and I snapped some photos of porters with extraordinarily heavy loads that can reach in excess of 100lbs. This when I can hardly haul my own body over the same mountain. One asked for half my granola bar, how could I say no? The hardy peoples of the region have a tough life living up in the hills. From early ages, girls and boys have to do there part to carry firewood, fodder, and supplies from the cities. The preferred method is in a doko, or hand-woven wicker basket worn on their back with the weight bearing off straps around their forehead.

We continued up through Banthanti amidst forests and waterfalls, and then stopped for lunch in Nayathanti at the Hungry Eye restaurant. It was only an hour further on to our teahouse, but I longed to stop for the day.

As we neared Ghorepani, several groups of trekkers started to clump together on the single trail. I really hate hiking in long lines so we started what I can only call Trail Games. Where you strategically stop for an extra rest or push on even when you need water so you can pass a group.

You also mentally size up the other trekkers. When the young and frenetic pass you by, that’s ok. But when grandpa with a bad heart and a limp threatens to overtake you, you must go all out to maintain your frontal position, whatever the cost just because you should be able to go faster. Some don’t follow any rules of trail etiquette. My least favorite was the group that would make a big production of passing you, and then take a long rest so you pass them. Then they start on the trail again and pass you once more. This can go on for hours.

When Ghorepani came in to view, everyone broke out into a foot race. This was a race for survival, a race to get the best room at the best teahouse. We stopped at the very first one in sight, the See You Lodge, unaware there were better places with better views further up in the main section of town. But, this was one of three of the teahouses we stayed in the entire trip that had an attached private bath. We payed top dollar for the luxury at 300 NRS ($4) and it was worth it, despite its crumminess, as we didn’t have to venture out in the dark and cold to pee. The shower head sprayed right on to the floor (and by proximity, the toilet) which meant the floor was perennially wet. This isn't anything new, we have been dealing with this design feature for about 6 months now. Fortunately, we brought slip-on rubber sandals, that we could wear in the shower and later around the teahouse with our Southface socks.
We collapsed in our little tin can room and napped after the nearly 6 hour hike. Waking to eat a giant fried chicken leg with watery mashed potatoes. And then enjoying a Snickers by the warmth of the fire. There is something deeply satisfying about eating a candy bar and feeling zero guilt. Every chocolatey bite, a well deserved reward. Guys can’t understand this. Ron would eat two a day if it fit in the budget and Krishna’s backpack.

Annapurna here we come!

2009-11-08T20:51:00.000Z

Today is the day we start our trek! After much deliberation, we decided to do a moderate two week trek called the Annapurna Sanctuary Trek, that takes you up to Annapurna Base Camp and back. We had initially thought we would do the classic three week Annapurna Circuit, but there is a hellish pass over 5000m (Thorong-La) that neither of us felt fit enough to tackle.

We awoke early to finish packing, had a big breakfast and was on the road at 9am. We took a taxi to Nayapul, 41km away, for 1600 NRS ($22). After an hour of winding roads through the mountains, the cab pulled over to the side of the road. Is this it? There doesn’t seem to be anything around. We started to get out, but then we realized that Krishna just had to take a piss. He thought this was highly amusing that we thought the trek started here, and it wouldn’t be the last time we would be entirely lost without him.

Around 10:30am we were in Nayapul, which seemed a long stretch of dusty wooden stalls on either side of the road. We grabbed our packs and followed Krisha down some stairs, through the bustling bazaar. Just like that, we were off on what was to be an epic journey. I was filled as much with anticipation and excitement as I was with anxiety. Will I be able to handle all the ascents? Would my knees hold out on the downhill? What are the teahouses like? And the bathrooms? What if I get sick or break a leg? Will I even make it to base camp? And if I get there, will I make it back?

We had our ACAP permit checked in Nayapul and TIMS checked in Barethanti a short 20 minutes further we started to criss-cross a beautiful aquamarine river by several suspension bridges.

We got our first glimpses of walking bushes or “tree people” what we dubbed the porters of large leave bushels (probably fodder for goats).

As we got to Matathanti the trail crossed the river (or we lost the trail) with no real crossing in sight. We literally leapt several feet from rock to rock, and came to a row of rocks that looked treacherous where I hesitated for too long. So long in fact, Ron had plenty of time to dig out his camera and capture my predicament on film.

Sometimes you have to force your body to just plunge ahead, because if you overthink it, you stand there for 10 minutes in an impossible situation of “there is no way forward or back, so you have to do it” even if you don’t want to. I finally started across the slippery rocks and one teetered ever so slightly so that my backpack pulled me off balance, and for the briefest of seconds I put my entire right boot (up to the ankle) in the river. Thankfully they were waterproof, and I made it across, but I was a bit ruffled right off the bat.

Our first day was blessedly short (around 3 hours) and relatively easy through stepped farmland. A little up, a little down. This is a famous Nepali description of trekking in the Himalayas, and what all the guides (including Krishna) use to describe virtually every hike. Today was maybe the only day that this was even fractionally accurate.

We stopped in Tirkhedunga at Shankar Guest House, our first teahouse, or what they call the guesthouses that line the trails around Annapurna. It was, in a word, basic. Two twin beds (about a foot too short for Ron) and a bare light bulb (useful only when there is electricity). The walls were paper thin, constructed from eighth-inch plywood board, and didn’t even extend to the floor. It was like our room was a bathroom stall, if you stuck your head in the 6” gap at the bottom of the wall you could see into the next room and the room after that!

The bathroom (which means only the shower-room in Nepal) is often solar powered, and usually has hot water if its been a clear day. The toilet is a toss-up between the squatty Indian variety and a regular western style toilet. The sink is never near the bathroom or the toilet, and is found closer to the kitchen. Inconvenient, yes, but let’s pray this allows the chef (or local gurung woman) washes up more often.

All in all, it did not match my imagination of ancient and historic teahouses that I thought would be more reminiscent of elaborately wood carved Tibetan monasteries. Like places Eddie Murphy visited in The Golden Child, where he rapped and scratched on a prayer wheel. I’m spoilt by this movie, and get a little smirk on my face when I spin one now (see previous post), not as reverent as I probably should be. Needless to say my expectations were outta whack. But I would soon appreciate the small comforts of the teahouses, the nice local people running them, the huge dinner portions near the warmth of a wood burning fire after a long days trek. All for 150-500 NRS ($2-$6) a night, you can’t beat it. We snuggled in to our humble abode and were sound asleep and snoring by 7 at night, which would not be an unusual hour for us to retire during the rest of the trek. Early to bed, early to rise.

Pokhara Lakeside

2009-11-07T15:30:00.002Z

Our jumping off point for the trek was Pokhara, a lovely and lush lakeside town, where the Himalayas reflect off the water, and everything and everyone is chill and relaxed. The bus ride was a bumpy 7 hour affair but we had front row seats for some breathtaking views of Kathmandu valley. The bus barreling far too fast for its badly worn shocks down a winding road next to a sheer drop off over gorges and the river below. Little villages and farms charmingly dotted the countryside blurring past our window.

We thought we were being savvy by packing our lunches ahead, but we ended up stopping for breakfast, lunch, and a pee break in-between. Our lunch of day-old Weizen pizza was eaten at lightning pace on the side of a bustling road where every honk nearly made me leap off the bridge we dangled our legs from into the sewage run-off below.

Before we took off, an old woman who could hardly stand without toppling over, limped to the bus window begging for money for food, so we gave her what would have been our lunch money. Grateful, she held her hands in prayer, Namaste.

We had booked ahead and stayed at Bedrock Hotel for the unbelievable price of 600 NRS ($8). I wondered, what is wrong with this place, that the price is so low? Well, for one thing, it didn’t include heat, which would have doubled the price but wasn’t really necessary with the extra blankets they provided. We also needed to toughen up if we were going to be heading into the mountains anyway. But the real shocker came when we first arrived. They said that they were overbooked for the first night and we would have to stay at a place next door, which we did not want to do.
Apparently a “big group” was arriving and renting all the rooms. After all my hemming and hawing over this, you know how annoying I can get, they relented into giving us our room and putting someone from the group in the other hotel. All was serene and peaceful, and we were snug in our bed by 10pm. About two hours later, it seemed we were engulfed in a flock of excited migratory birds. I couldn’t figure out what all the high pitched commotion was about until I peeked through the window shade and saw at least 100 teenage girls descend upon the hotel like a clearance sale at Forever 21. The group was not a bunch of trekkers (of course, what I assumed) but an entire high school class from Kathmandu on break. They packed 6 girls to a room, their flip flops flipped and flopped then flung in piles of pink and purple rubber in the hallway. Their loud incessant chatter overlapped each other in louder and louder waves of hysteria and then there was cackling about seemingly nothing at all that went on all night. Never having been a teenage girl, Ron couldn’t comprehend the situation and about died. I could understand it (even in Nepali you can make out the, like, you know when you like, y‘know, you know?) but it didn’t make it any more bearable. Worse, they didn’t check out the next day and we had to endure 2 nights of it.

The next day we went on a hike to the World Peace Pagoda perched on the mountaintop across Lake Fewa. We hired a local guy to paddle us across, who was very proud of Pokhara trying to relay facts and point out mountaintops in broken English. It made me think of Small from Ghana. There was a great secluded hotel right near the dock that would be a perfect place to relax after the trek, but alas they had no internet access - an unfortunate deal breaker.

The hike began as a series of stone stairs, that soon became clear that it was all stairs for a solid hour to the top of the ridge. It totally kicked our butt, we nervously glanced at each other, realizing that we were both in serious trouble to be going on a two week trek. Up is infinitely harder than all of our long walks put together. We scurried to the top at 1100m, the gleaming white stupa a jewel against the bluest of skies. In four alcoves around the perimeter, rested Golden Buddha statues.

In our glee, we didn’t notice the sign asking us to remove our shoes, and we were halfway up the stairs before a girl scoffed at us for sullying the sacred floor. Oopsie.

The vista was spectacular from this high up over Pokhara. From the lake below all the way to the snow-capped peaks in the distance, beckoning us. Or mocking us, we’ll see. Ron also snapped a great panoramic shot that is the new photo at the top of our site.

Then we declined two hours down the other side of the mountain and back around Damside (the local district) to Lakeside (the tourist district). Ron’s knees ached a little after this, and he got a little taste of what was to come. We wisely stopped at a roadside pharmacy and bought 6 sheets of ibuprofen. Locals here buy one or two pills at a time when they need it, so the pharmacist couldn’t understand what we would possibly do with 48 tablets.

Undeterred from our little walk, we rented gear for 15 days at Annapurna Trading Company for 230 NRS ($3) a day from a mustachioed man (like a young Sadam Hussein) who gave us a long commentary on Nepali politics free of charge. I still don’t really understand it, so I won’t try to paraphrase. To keep warm and snuggly in the high altitudes, we rented “Northface” down jackets and Negative 5 sleeping bags. In addition, we rented a big backpack for Krishna to carry everything in. We were quite lucky to rent brand-new, never before used (and abused) equipment, so we didn’t have to contend with any weird smells or worse - unidentifiable stains.

We also purchased a pair of trekking poles, which after hiring Krishna, was the second best decision we made on the trek. Although you look like a bit of a dork, they help immensely to keep balance on rugged terrain and reduce strain on your knees on steep downhills. I negotiated hard and got 4 “Leki” poles for 1700 NRS ($23). Although certainly not of similar quality being Chinese knock-offs, it was a startling price difference to our real Leki poles back home for $300.

Actually, the husband of the shop agreed to 1600 which put the wife in a sullen mood of disbelief at the nonexistent profit margin. I felt so bad for trying to get an extra dollar off from this poor woman, that I followed her out of the store and gave her 100 rupee bill. She hugged me, and we had a bonding moment commiserating about the men in our lives. Men and women, struggling to live and love each other, are alike all over the world. It made me realize in the often discomfort of the differences of culture when we travel, how many more basic similarities we share.

We unpacked nearly everything from our backpacks down to some essential personal items: toilet paper, sunscreen, sunglasses, camera, fleece hoodie, extra socks, t-shirt, flip flops. This would be the light day bag we would carry on the trek.

Then we loaded Krishna’s bag with everything else. First we stuffed in our sleeping bags, jackets, gloves, and hats. Then came our reading books (I brought a relevant book for inspiration- Annapurna by Maurice Herzog). Next was our ridiculously heavy first aid kit and shared toiletries case. Followed by about five pounds of Snickers and Bounty bars (these are like Mounds, mmm). And last but not least, a bottle of cheap whisky (at least we poured it into a plastic water bottle to lighten it up!). Yes, we had everything necessary to hike the Himalayas.

Everything left-over we left locked up at the Bedrock Hotel for our return. I was slightly horrified as to how much there was that we didn’t deem important enough to take with us. It was the size of a suitcase and weighed around 40lbs. What have we been carrying around?

Trek Preparation in Thamel

2009-11-05T17:20:00.002Z

The Thamel area of Kathmandu is a trekkers heaven. It has shop after shop of stores filled with trekking gear. Most of it looks like brand name gear but it really is made in Nepal or China with a stolen (or slightly altered) logo. My favorite was socks I bought that said Southface on them, they made me crack up every time I put them on.

Along with 4 new pairs of “coolmax” socks, our largest purchase was hiking boots. We must have tried on 20 pairs of shoes at a dozen different stores. It was surprisingly hard to find our sizes and the ones that fit were often super-ugly (I know that’s not supposed to be a consideration) or of questionable quality for the price. Our patience paid off, and I found a light green pair of boots for 3500 NRS ($48) that were most comfortable if a tad big. I figured bigger was better than smaller, as my feet were bound to swell from hours of walking. Ron later found a pair of black boots he liked, being quoted 6500 NRS ($89) at one shop but negotiating down to 3900 NRS ($53) at another.

We thought it was going to be cold but weren’t sure just how cold. Some we talked to thought that gloves and hats were unnecessary at this time of year. Maybe in Kathmandu, but we were sure glad we went ahead and bought yeti hats knitted from colorful yarn and fingerless gloves with a super functional fold-over mitten parts for a mere 500 NRS ($7) for the lot.

At first fumbling, we quickly learned the negotiation dance with local street vendors. If you ask the price and there is a one count pause than the real price is about a third less. If there is glance focused somewhere in the distance (where I think they picture you as a rich westerner in a big house) followed by a pause longer than two counts then the real price is probably half what is quoted. If there is sustained eye contact and no pauses then it’s a fair price. This is a very rare occurrence, but it does happen.

Part of the scam of tour based trekking is that they procure your permits for you, which is supposedly an expensive and difficult process. To trek in Annapurna you need two: Annapurna Conservation Area Permit (ACAP) and Tourist Information Management System (TIMS). These require little more than showing up at the Nepal Tourism Office right next to the main local bus station in Kathmandu, filling out a couple forms, giving 6-8 passport sized photos (we printed around 30 each on our Epson printer before we left on this trip), and 4000 NRS ($55) for the both of us. It took about two hours of our time (walking time included) and we were officially independent trekkers.

We didn’t want a guide, because the trails are well marked and easy to follow but we both cringed at carrying all of our gear ourselves, so we opted for a porter. Since we were leaving from Pokhara, naturally we thought to hire one there but after talking to a few folks, albeit from tour agencies, we considered hiring one from Kathmandu if, that is, we found the right person. Walking out onto the street one night, we were approached by a guy from Touch Paradise and we went back to their office to discuss. There are at least a million tour agencies here, so it could have been anyone from anywhere that night. We immediately liked the owner and after some discussion asked if we could speak to the proposed porter ahead of time (which was a prerequisite for our decision).

We met Krishna, a small (is there another?) Nepali in his thirties that looked about as big as the bag we wanted him to carry. It was a “yes” at first sight as we asked him questions about his experience and style. We just wanted someone that was easy going and spoke passable English and he was all that with a good sense of humor to boot.

We had an appointment to meet another porter (that according to Ron, sounded like he had marbles in his mouth) so we played hard to get but immediately went back and booked him. For 14 nights porter service (not including transportation to/from Pokhara) we paid 894 NRS /day ($12) or 12516 NRS ($169). This would later prove to be the best decision we made in the trek, as he carried all of our heavy stuff and was a cool guy and quasi guide as well. Worth every single rupee, indeed.

The Squares and Temples of Kathmandu

2009-11-05T16:19:00.006Z

Walking out of the tourist district of Thamel, we finally start to see the real Kathmandu. The little shops and buildings give way to unexpected ancient temples and squares. Women carrying bursting baskets of brick with nothing but a thin forehead strap. Butchers chopping meat on what must be unsanitary tables. Motorcycles zipping past buses with mutli-toned horns that sound like the bionic man. Rickshaw drivers napping on the job.

We walked the 2 kilometers to Swayambhunath Stupa, a major Buddhist pilgrimage site. Sorry, but I’m going to use the metric system from now on because, duh, it makes sense. It’s what the world uses outside of America and, like, the entire fields of Mathematics and Applied Science. But I won’t be adopting the universal clock, it still takes too much brain power to compute what 16:45 means.

Often called the Monkey temple, because there are just a ton of sacred monkeys running amok. Below is a short video of migrating monkey families in front of a contemplative gold Buddha.

We walked up the 365 steep stairs a little out of breath and at the top, guess what? The temple was under construction! What great luck we’ve had with all the sites being repaired when we show up, or maybe Ron just can’t escape restoration work no matter how hard he tries.

Around the stupa were a bazillion prayer wheels that we circumnavigated clockwise with a gaggle of school children straining on their tippy toes to reach the spinning the wheels. Om Mani Padme Hum. Ah! The jewel is indeed in the lotus.

Rainbow colored prayer flags hung from the spires of every stupa, their inscribed mantras fluttering in the wind up to the heavens. They are never removed so some are tattered and faded from the weather strung next to new brightly colored ones in dense masses that recall circus tents and used car lots for the pious and faithful.

We lit candles as offerings and received elaborate red, yellow, and gold marks on our forehead from an old woman for a small donation. The red clump started to slide off our sweaty faces (and regrettably into my bangs) so we removed it and reverently touched it to the third eye of Buddhist statues we passed.

We ventured to the famous Durbar Square, even after an unhelpful local told us it was closed because it was Saturday (which is like our Sunday, the most likely day off for businesses and religious observances).

It was most certainly open, bustling as I imagine it always is with locals and tourists alike. We watched as a man dutifully and painstakingly scrubbed a Buddha statue with a brush.

In continuing with our training program for the trek, we opted to walk to the Boudha Stupa and back. It definitely had distance, at nearly 16km roundtrip, but it was flatter than flat. It is very difficult for us to find appropriate inclines on the road, so I’m confident we’ll be under trained and ill prepared for what lies ahead.

You are allowed to walk inside and around the stupa, under the serene and watchful Buddha eyes. Even prostrate yourself on wooden slabs provided for your praying pleasure. The air felt light and pure, even surrounded by the congestion of urban Kathmandu only steps away. A respite in the middle of chaos.

I finally got a National Geographic shot (it took only 50 cities and 10000 tries!) of an old Buddhist monk relaxing near the entrance.

See more of our photos of Kathmandu on Flickr.

Kathmandu Post Office - A study in the ancient art of form stamping

2009-11-04T12:57:00.001Z

Ever since our First Need water filter broke back in Rome, we have had to buy bottled water. This really sucks. Not only is it expensive, but we pollute the planet unnecessarily with more empty water bottles. Also, it’s a constant daily struggle of procurement and transportation to ensure we always have enough. I had left a spare filter at my Dads which was not exactly convenient when we needed it. It’s like having your spare car tire not in your trunk but somewhere in Romania. So now we would need the spare and a spare spare so I went to REI.com (which was so bizarre online shopping again, trying not to faint at the costs) and bought one, in addition to super strength insect repellent and replacement indestructible sporks (our first pair, I accidently threw away in a bag of half eaten fried rice in Africa, and whenever we caught without a utensil Ron gives me the stink eye).

Since we didn’t know anyone in Nepal, my Dad sent us the care package to the Poste Restante, General Post Office in Kathmandu Nepal. I had read online that you can send letters to people traveling by sending it to Post Restante but not a lot of positive remarks about care packages. I was worried when we arrived to the post office, a dimly lit concrete wasteland of a building one afternoon. We were shuttled to three different tellers before entering a closet sized room to root through a box of letters, all too slim to contain what was sent. Uh oh, I thought.

My forehead perspired, as I tried to communicate “package” in sign language to the clerk. He went through a stack of orange slips and found one addressed to me, verifying my passport with a quick glance, and sending another fellow off to get a key for the giant iron safe next to us. Hooray, how easy was that! At this point I went in to a congratulatory speech on the reliability and efficiency of Kathmandu’s Post Office, how in the backpackers circuit it is second only to Bangkok. Never mind my single audience member didn’t really understand English all too well. The key was produced and in the cabinet was…only a stack of papers. Hmmm. Not so fast, flapjack.

We were directed to another low squat dingy building out back and that’s when the fun really began. First I handed my paper to a lady behind a counter in what looked like a shipping/receiving dock. She had me write my name and address on the back and wanted a photocopy of my passport, upon which when I told her I didn’t have one she ordered Ron to go out and get one. Good ole chivalry….or something. Then I was directed to a man sitting at a nearby table to fill out a form that was in Sanskrit. He pointed to one line and had me write my name, and pointed to another to sign. I had a fleeting thought of being in a foreign prison and being told to sign something you can’t read. Never a wise idea.

He wanted 20 rupees and told me to take my form to another room. This room had three desks where the men looked like they were not working hard but rather hardly working. One with a funny hat, beckoned me over, stamped my form and wrote some numbers down, sending me back to the lady. The ladies assistant produced my box from somewhere “in the back”, opened it, and started rummaging through it. What is this? He questioned, as he held up the water filter. I explained and he snorted in response. He wrote down what I gathered was the contents of the box on another paper and sent me back to the room where the guy listed the items in an oversized ledger book and asked for 65 rupees in “tax”. He stamped my other form and sent me back to the lady for the second time, who then sent me back to the guy at the table (again for the second time), and then back to the lady (for the third time), where Ron was back with my passport copy.

She stamped and collated all these papers and forms, and then she asked for another 40 rupees, before finally passing me my box. I wasn’t sure if this was actual payment for service or each stations “tip” for looking busy by stamping forms. This was no kidding, I must have been there two hours shuttling forms around, but at least I got to see the fascinating, unbelievable and wholly unnecessary bureaucracy of a post office in action. Thanks again Dad for sending it, can you believe it made it to us?!

On the way back to our room, we saw The Cutest Little Girl in the World. She wore a tattered sweater and dusty roses in her hair, with a smile that could melt your heart. We are accosted by street beggars at least a dozen times a day, but we could not resist her charm, I think we gave her 5 bucks, what amounted to a fortune in comparison to the single rupee coins filling her bowl. Ron took about a hundred photos of her. Finally I had to pull him away from her gaze, before he adopted her and smuggled her back to the US. He was totally smitten.

Namaste Kathmandu!

2009-11-02T11:57:00.005Z

I tried in vain to sweet talk the stone faced Indian woman at Delhi airport into giving us seats on the right side of the plane, but she was having none of it. We were told the right side seats gave you some magnificent birds-eye view of the Himalayas. Who knows if we got the information backward or just got lucky, but we sat on the left and saw the stark white Himalayan caps stretching out in a vast blue expanse of earth and sky. Much to the dismay of the right-seaters, we got the shot.

We arrived at Kathmandu airport and met our shuttle to the Acme Guesthouse. At some point someone asked to carry my bag, and naturally I assumed this was one of the guys from the hotel. Only after getting in the van did I realize the baggage carriers wanted a tip to carry my bag all of 50 feet. I told them I had no change, our smallest bill pulled moments ago from the ATM was 500 nrs ($7). They first said that bill was only 3 US dollars, pleading with me to be generous, and then backpedaled that they’d gladly make change for us. More like run off and never come back, do they think I’m stupid? I told them to shove off and stop trying to scam tourists fresh off the bus (or airplane, as it were).

I feel travel-hardened and although I’ve been way too nice and naïve in the past, this exchange made me feel that I’m just not taking any sh*t anymore. The hotel manager complimented my grit, that it was unwise to encourage the airport scammers, but then I wondered where the heck was he when they took our bags in the first place? Standing there letting it happen. Illustrating perfectly the first rule of travel, that the only person looking out for you, is you.

Kathmandu has some elements of dirtiness and craziness but is much more manageable (at least by two or three factors from India) and is delivered with a friendly smile. We immediately liked the feel of the city and were happy to be spending a week. The ACME Guest House was not all we hoped it would be, but we got a weekly rate of $16/night. The bathroom and general cleanliness, as usual, had much to be desired. I miss Reyna, my El Salvadorean cleaning lady that came in every other week. Ron used to complain about her sometimes lackadaisical cleaning jobs, but we would both kill to have her once-over some of these rats nests we sleep in now. My, how things change. It did have a nice grass lawn with tables and chairs but the food wasn’t great so we usually ventured out.

The restaurants were plentiful, serving tasty international cuisine. Most surprising was how well Nepalis represent Mexican food. In the span of one week we had burritos, enchiladas, nachos, and a sizzling platter of fajitas. (Ron got his birthday wish!) Other standouts were The Yak Restaurant serving hot Tibetan beer and momo’s (which are like Trader Joe’s potstickers only way better!) freshly made that day with a side of spicy red dipping sauce. Another Nepali staple food is Thungpa which is like a noodle soup, usually vegetarian but sometimes with chicken, I found it nothing like Grandma’s and required at least a tablespoon of salt to make it ingestible.

I had my alone-time lunch (those scheduled occasions when Ron and I split up to stay sane) at an Organic Café that advertised a “salad bar” but my dream meal was not to be as it was no longer being offered. Instead I had a huge salad full of nuts and jicama topped with balsamic dressing and I was temporarily in heaven and luckily not sick later on.

We ate breakfast many mornings at Weizen that offered a delicious set breakfast at a good value (150 nrs or $2). The set breakfasts are ubiquitous and pretty similar all over Nepal. If you can believe out of the twenty some-odd breakfasts to date, we never took a single pic, here is an example from google images.

You start with eggs that taste best “fried both sides“. Never order scrambled, they are sad, lifeless mush and worse are sometimes diced boiled egg parts masquerading as scrambled eggs. Next are the home-style potatoes lightly browned with onions and peppers, so tasty you almost forget you like hash browns more (almost). Then comes the toast that can be anything from freshly baked wheat toast (like Weizen) to a seeded hoagie roll (Maya, in Pokhara) to bland butchered wonder bread (most Nepali owned dives). It‘s a crapshoot really. With the bread surprise comes a little dish of butter that you must sniff to ensure it is not of the yak variety or gone bad of its own accord (it’s really quite hard to distinguish these two but one is a pinch more armpit-like). In the dish, which is often segregated by a little condiment wall, is the jam that is usually always an artificial cherry flavor that is very reminiscent of a red Sunkist fruit gem. Y’know the one that looks and, probably more creepy when you think about it, feels like a human tongue because of the exterior coating of rough sugar crystals.

Last (and least according to Ron) is what is called “milk coffee” or a weak, watery mixture of Nescafe with far too much milk making it more akin to coffee flavored milk than the reverse. The table is adorned with a cup filled with diagonally folded wax napkins alternating in color between yellow and pink. This counts as “décor”. And there is almost always salt and pepper but they are inevitably in the wrong containers according to tradition, which is frustrating for a self professed salt addict like me to get the proper salt volume through one partially blocked pepper hole. But I try.

Later, at night we would return to Weizen and playfully jostle for pizza and croissants with all the other backpackers at 8pm when the baked goods were sold at half price. It was really an ingenious ploy to sell through their stock, because at exactly 8:15pm everything would be gone but the crumbly remains of apple fritters and banana muffins. We learned this the hard way one night and came early enough the next time to watch the clock countdown the seconds to the strike of 8 o’clock. A hushed silence filled the room. We mouthed the game plan to each other, lower than a whisper, so no one else eyed our goods. My hand gripped the metal tongs, shaking in anticipation as the secondhand was swept up into the blur of grabbing arms and confectionary, like a famished Avalokiteśvara going for 1000 cinnamon rolls at one time.

Back to Delhi

2009-10-30T14:56:00.002Z

On the last leg of what they call the Golden Triangle (traveling from Delhi-Jaipur-Agra back to Delhi), the train ride was a total fiasco. We had a hard time reading the ticket and asked for help determining the track number. A nice fellow with heavily accented English and a leathery face, told us the train would be leaving in 15 minutes on track 4. Moments later, we arrived at the track and saw a train for New Delhi about to depart. Asking a boy in uniform if this was indeed our train and car, which said HL1 instead of H1. He directed us inside and to a compartment that, again, didn’t quite match up to our ticket. The train took off and I thought the worse thing that could happen was we would have to move to our correct car. Instead, we were on the wrong train altogether!

The conductor was very unhappy with us. Basically saying we had to get off the next stop or pay a fortune to cover a penalty charge and then buy a new ticket for this train. But it’s the same class car going to the same destination, surely we shouldn’t have to buy a new ticket?! The next “stop”, if you can even call it that seeing as it didn’t have a platform or corresponding town built up around it, came and went. The conductor came back and lectured us about an additional fine now because we couldn‘t follow instructions. I felt about 8 years old. How were we to know that our express train would even stop at that stop, it looked like a ghost town. Finally, he begrudgingly relented into letting us stay until Mathura (birthplace of Lord Krishna), a large train hub.

We were booted off the train to wait for our train that was supposedly 20 minutes behind us. I watched the shoddy electronic overhead board, it’s lite n brite bulbs flickering on and off, struggling to illuminate the train schedule, and was informed it would be late by 45 minutes. An hour and half later, I went back and our train no longer was displayed on the board! What happened?! The train apparently came and went and we didn’t get on it. We watched the incoming trains like a hawk, and even had two extra pairs of eyes as two British girls also mistakenly boarded the wrong train (see, we’re not the only losers!). We may have been a little distracted by the sheer madness of the crowds boarding the 3rd class cars. How enteriaining it was to see if someone else could, in fact, muscle their way onto vastly overcrowded cars.

We went from office to office in the train station trying to plead our case and explain our predicament. Some told us to go buy a new ticket. Others just stared mouth slightly agape with no reply at all (my favorite). We found one kind soul that explained the train probably came on the track behind us. Apparently track 2 means track 2 or track 3. A hard lesson learned in the nuances of the Indian train system. After some serious wheeling and dealing with the many official looking officials, he helped us get the all-important stamp on our ticket that allowed us to board any train heading to Delhi. So in the end, we just needed a stupid stamp.

We boarded the next train and shared a car with a nice older couple originally from India not living in the UK, that were quite the pair. We munched on samosas, sipped chai tea, and watched their well rehearsed joint story-telling in awe, as they finished each others sentences and snorted in playful contempt at each others idiosyncrasies that they must have been enduring for half a century. The train was running late (of course) and kept getting further and further behind. Another 9 hour train ride that should have been only 5. I’m beginning to realize that doubling our expected travel time is the rule, and arriving on time is the rare (and unexperienced) exception. The black swan of extended world travel.

Finally to Delhi, we holed up at Welcome Palace Hotel where we rented a shabby but wonderful suite with wireless internet connection and separate living room decorated in garish gold and aqua polyester fabric. We ordered room service, worked on the blog, and uploaded photos for two days. Trying desperately to get (and feel) a little organized before heading off to Nepal.

The hotel was in the Karol Bagh area of Delhi which is much easier to handle than the main bazaar. Although, we ventured out once to find the McDonalds (yes, I know, its cheating) and promptly got lost and turned around. We must have had the map upside down because when we finally asked for directions we were so far away we caved in and took a rickshaw. Through the soot and chaos, I saw the welcoming beacon of the golden arches, like a giant neon yellow dove in flight, heralding good chow ahead. Being in a Hindu nation, they didn’t serve any beef or pork products. That is no Big Macs or McRibs or slightly unHappy Meals.

I have to say that fries without the secret ingredient of beef extract was not as satisfying alongside my McChicken. I really think it adds to the intoxicating smell and ensuing full-body craving for a supersize portion. Like the “natural flavoring” is really a little bit of Detroit crack. It was good nonetheless, especially to have something different. We always thought we would never get tired of Indian food because we love it so much, but 3 meals a day for 3 weeks and I could eat a bucket full of chicken nuggets, no problem. Pass the honey mustard, please. I’ll make a bib from my napkin.

Me and my "other" Ron....shhhhhhhhhhhh.

The Taj Mahal

2009-10-25T09:33:00.008Z

We finally left Jaipur after 8 nights on another early morning train bound for Agra, the city of the magnificent Taj Mahal. And was it magnificent! The first night we opted to see it at sunset from across the Yamuna River. Instead of paying to view it from the park at Mehtab Bagh, we followed a dirt path down by the riverbed to take in the view. Because of the far distance from the Taj Mahal, the actual sunset stole the show.

The river was quite a bit lower than expected, but we saw some religious ceremonies taking place but weren’t allowed to get very close to the action. It did involve more fireworks and a mélange of colorful dresses reflecting off the river.

The rickshaw ride back to our hotel in the dusk and traffic was nail biting, as usual. Check out this cool guy we almost sideswiped.

We stayed at Maya Hotel, which wins our unofficial travel award for best room upkeep, best value and best food in India. With a friendly owner to boot! For 900 rupees ($19) a night, it may have tottered past the shoestring budget category but it was so clean and well cared for. Ron was in heaven with the nice lacquered paint jobs and finish details. I loved the big marble bed and overall room design felt so peacefully calm. I wished we stay longer.

The next morning we rose early again. See, this travel business is not all sleeping, lounging around, and goofing off. We are on a mission to see the world, so we must get up early, with the cackling birds and the mooing cows (and don't forget, the scampering cockroaches when you flick on the light). You must be up well before the crowds and the tour buses arrive. Of course, then we can run back to the hotel and take long naps and sip spiced chai tea for the rest of the afternoon. Mmmmm, that sounds good right now! Be back in a minute.... Okay. We got to the Taj (we are on a first name basis now) by 6am but the line was already a football field in length. So much for being early birds!

There were separate entrance lines for men and women. For once, this segregation gave me a good deal, I got a much shorter line. But then I saw a sign telling us we had to put our electronics in a locker and ended up rushing off to lock up our illegal items - ipods, camera chargers, and even my solar calculator. God forbid, I calculate the square root of 43 in the shadow of the Taj - an unholy, forbidden act.

To get in the festive spirit, I wore the salwar kameez again from Diwali. It was so comfy, like wearing pajamas, I really could wear it everyday but it is a little tight and bursting at the seams in places. With some quick stitching, I may get two more wearings out of it.

The Taj Mahal was started in 1631 and took 2000 craftsmen 22 years to complete. It was built as the tomb for Mumtaj Mahal, the wife of Emperor Shahjahan, who died during the birth of their 14th child. They were very busy. The emperor was so heartbroken by her death, he built her the most beautiful resting place in the world (and arguably still is) as a tribute to his great love. How's that for romantic?! Ron may think Valentine's day is a pressure cooker now, but my standards have just tripled.

There are a number of fascinating architectural features - it is identical in every detail from each of the four sides. And optical illusions - the quaranic inscriptions on the façade of the entrances increase ever so slightly in height, so to the viewer at ground level it appears totally uniform.

It really is a dazzling vision in gleaming white marble, and one of the few wonders that isn’t the slightest disappointing once you finally see it. We gladly parted with the 750 rupee ($16) entrance fee. One thing though, I was surprised at how much smaller the inside feels in comparison to the grand visage of the exterior. Perhaps another crafty illusion from the architects. As is this picture (flipped upside down) off one of the reflection pools, that Ron is quite pleased with, and tells me so over and over convincing me of its “blog worthiness”. I have to admit it is a pretty darn visually interesting shot, but these are the little things we debate excitedly about over our nightly curry....

Passing Around a Bad Cold

2009-10-23T12:50:00.006+01:00

After the high of Diwali, I awoke the next day feeling horrible with a bad sore throat. It was to be the worst cold I’ve had in years, knocking me out flat for nearly five days, leaving me with a lingering runny nose and cough for two more weeks.

We would watch a dozen movies on HBO (along with a thousand recurring commercials). Somehow they get away with playing commercials on movie channels here and unapologetically even play the same one multiple times in a row. I can now recite the entire Samsung Corby commercial by heart, “I’m with her…she’s with him…he’s with her…they’re all with me…” sung with a lame reverb. When the commercial came on, you could see Ron flying through the air in a double twisting tuck roll onto the bed, tumbling off with the remote in his right hand, thumb pressed firmly to the mute button before the second beat sounded. Apparently bad music can make musicians defy gravity in crazy feats of acrobatics when they are provoked.

We ordered tons of room service. And Mangu, the front desk guy we befriended, was so concerned he called us and then stopped by every day to see if I was okay. It was a sweet thought (starting to verge on stalkerish) but I felt like death warmed over so I would hide in the bathroom or feign sleep. This probably added to the mystery and extent of my illness. After the third day, Ron started to feel ill too. Though not as severe, we layed low for several more days and avoided the streets as best we could.

Once we were both a little better and certifiably stir crazy, we went to an indoor store, called Big Bazaar. Like an Indian Target, we spent hours wandering and browsing as you find yourself doing in places like that. Telling yourself you really need xyz even though it never crossed your mind once until just that second. We stocked up on some necessary supplies: underwear, sunscreen, deodorant and wholly unnecessary ones: pringles, lipstick (and when am I going to where this?), a 6 pack of handkerchiefs (y’know one for each of the six of us).

All the food in India is categorized and advertised as Veg or Non Veg. It’s a moral decision you are forced to make on a daily basis. Are you sure you can have a clear conscience eating meat with delicious, wholesome vegetarian food readily available on every street corner? Do you really want to be known as an evil Non Veg person? You betcha.

With an uninterrupted week of various veg curries from the hotel restaurant we took the walk of shame with our heads held high. We got a recommendation for a restaurant (or open flame on the roadside) called Talk of the Town which served the best tandoori we’ve ever had in our lives. Oh my god! So good and so spicy the red sauce burnt your fingers. Your lips smacking wildly, aflame in a fury of tender chicken goodness. Happily amongst the patrons spilling out on the street, screaming "Viva Non Veg!"

Rewinding the time one hour, we were walking on the side of a busy street on our way to the heavenly tandoori. I see a guy on a motorcycle approaching. He veers across three lanes of traffic and slows down right in front of me. Is he pulling over? I wonder, as he comes closer. I think he may run into me or fall over on me. Is he having a mechanical issue? And then it happens. He reaches out and grabs my left breast, smirks, and then speeds off. I was victim to my very first drive-by boobie grab. It happened so fast, and I was taken so off guard, I didn’t have time to react. But next time, I’ll be ready to deck the guy and steal his bike. I could break one of these skinny Indian guys in half. Go ahead, make my day,….punk.

Apparently grabbing is not all that uncommon here. Now I know why it was a such an important victory in the news recently - women jubilantly rejoicing to finally have a "female only" express train in Mumbai. If this could happen to me openly on a public street, I can't imagine what goes unchecked aboard the crowded trains.

Happy Diwali!

2009-10-17T20:51:00.003+01:00

Today is Diwali, the biggest Hindu festival of the year. Diwali is like our Christmas, New Years, and the 4th of July all rolled into one. In Hinduism, Diwali marks the return of Lord Raama to his kingdom after 14 years and defeat of the Demon King. Often called the festival of lights, the streets and homes are lit up with burning candles and lamps. It is the time to clean the house to welcome and worship Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth and prosperity. There is a generous spirit, affectionate visits between friends and family, and the exchanging of small gifts.

Amit picked us up and we went to Amber Fort, an impressive fortress with walls climbing the hills like the great wall of china (or so I think since I‘ve never been to china…yet). We hoped to ride an elephant but the handlers, smartly, took the day off to celebrate. Instead we walked around and took in the views. I saw a taxi driver yell at a monkey and throw water on him. Disgusted, I followed the monkey to see what all the fuss was about and found out they are cheeky little devils that will snatch anything they can get their paws on. There was a tree-full of them (better than a barrelful) leaping onto the walls, finding a victim to scare and steal their chiapati before making an acrobatic escape. Amit and I got a little too comfortable sitting on the wall, blocking their escape route that one nearly leapt off our backs.

On the way back we saw the Jal Mahal Palace. It was so beautiful reflecting off the water. I always wanted to live by a lake, but to live on a lake is a level of seclusion Ron and I would both love right about now, being two home-bodies forced out into the world for 5 months and counting. Ah, the nightly row back to our water palace. That sounds mighty good.

Now was time to get ready for the evening festivities. The moment I dreaded. After the dress disaster, I decided to buy some pink sequined shoes to wear with a dress I bought in Africa. Ron looked smashing in his white punjabi suit. Everyone complimented him, trying not to comment on what I was wearing, like they were disappointed I didn‘t even make an effort. I was dying inside.

I could see the same look in the eyes of Amit’s family when we arrived. They had surely all heard the story by now. Within minutes of arriving, I was led into the front room where auntie, mother, and sister dressed me in a burgundy salwar kameez. All my embarrassment dissolved in their knowing gazes as they transformed me silently into an Indian queen. You don’t need language to communicate what was happening, what they were so generously doing for me. Taking jewelry off themselves to place on me. Carefully applying makeup. The final touch was a dot on my third eye. It was a Cinderella moment, and infinitely superior than the best fitting tailor-made sari. Those horrible tailors did me an immense favor, I thought and smiled, surrounded by three angels. They smiled back, approvingly, at their job well done and showed me off to the rest of the house with pride.

Sister set up the altar to Ganesha and Lakshmi. and made a design in colored sand called rangoli. The ritual was fascinating with offerings of rice, perfume, and saffron paste. Then hand rolled cotten wicks were placed in terracotta bowls filled with ghee and lit up all around. We were included in the puja like any other member of the family. Circling the incense in front of the altar. Ringing a bell along with the chanting. Receiving vermillion on our foreheads and colored string on our wrists (left for women, right for men). It was a deeply touching ceremony to be so intimately allowed to see and experience.

Fireworks were lit every night for the days and weeks leading up to the crescendo of Diwali that echoed for hours with bursts of light in red, orange, and pink. At first, it was like living out a little kids fantasy - lighting giant rockets you can buy for twenty five cents that are twenty five times better than anything in Mexico. You can literally make your own KABOOM! in your backyard, and on this night a billion Indians do just that. The spent casings filling up the streets like overstuffed sofa stuffing. After a few hours of ear shattering explosions inches away from cherry bombs thrown by neighboring kids, I was ready to retreat to the sanctuary of the house. It was a wild and dangerous night to be out - near misses, close calls, cars driving too fast down streets over lit fuses exploding like hand grenades. I’m just not used to unregulated activities that can cause permanent damage, my ears still ringing the next day.

We ate dinner on the kitchen floor at half past midnight. A delicious thali made by Mom with lentils, spicy aloo, curd, soup, and piping hot chiapati. I was so hungry I only noticed after a few minutes that I was the only female eating with all the men. I guess as a guest this was the protocol but the rest of the women ate later. This left ample opportunity for Mom to lord over us and lavish as much food as possible onto our plates and into our bellies. I enjoyed sitting lotus style on the floor but Ron was cramped up and looked pained sitting on his knees.

The whole experience spending Diwali in the warmth of an Indian home was exceedingly special and tops the list as one of our best memories of the trip.

The Pink City

2009-10-16T12:48:00.008+01:00

The three nights in Delhi went by in a blur and we were already off to the train station, headed to Jaipur. Up at 4:45am, as usual on travel days, we had mostly packed the night before, everything snug in its usual place, a well practiced ritual by now. We checked out and were on the dark, quiet streets. This is the time to see India, in the early morning its wonderfully quiet. We got to the New Delhi Railway Station thirty minutes before the train, or thirty minutes too early. It seems everyone arrives only moments before departure. Our “chair class” car, which is second class was air conditioned and they weren’t kidding. It was meat-locker-cold, us shivering in our boots trying to remember how deep in our bag we packed our fleeces.

It must have been the nicest travel day we’ve had in months. The train was clean, the chairs were roomy and comfortable and they served us a large breakfast with multiple cups of tea. How fabulous! This train certainly rivaled European trains, but it was an exception not the rule. There were plenty of the trains you’ve heard about with hundreds of people piled in a car.

We passed slum after slum producing more awful smells - hundreds squatting by the railroad tracks, with no modicum of secrecy. It was morning business as usual. It looked like a war-zone but there had been no war except man against man in an overpopulated and poverty stricken nation. I used to hear a lot about the contrasts of the rich and poor in India, but I have yet to see anyone I would consider well off.

Amit and his dad, Raju, bless their hearts, picked us up from the train station. It was the first time in months we felt like someone was waiting to see us - like family. Raju owns a small private car company. A driver for over twenty five years, he embodies the principle that you have to be a professional to drive here. Amateurs would cause a ten rickshaw pile-up in the blink of an eye. The ebb and flow of traffic reminded me of fish in the sea. One car moves and every other car adjusts minutely. Two lanes of traffic balloon into four and then recede back as oncoming traffic picks up and everyone interprets the nuances and meaning of the incessant honking. It’s pretty amazing to watch, even though you are grabbing onto your seat in a death grip and praying to your god(s). It was a wonder we never really saw any traffic accidents, but I guess you never see yellowfin tuna collide into one another either, that would be silly.

We visited Amit’s family home for some drinks and sweet snacks. They live in a small two story house on a quiet residential street. Living areas doubled as bedrooms, as all the family was visiting for Diwali. The sons and daughters, aunts, uncles, and cousins. We were offered to stay as well, but would probably have been given the parents bedroom, knowing how highly they treat guests. We didn’t want to impose too much, and stayed at the nearby Hotel Galaxy where we got a room for 900 rupee($18) a night.

With the luxury of a private car and driver compliments of Amit, we explored Jaipur, what they call the Pink City. The old town is surrounded by magnificent high walls - white squiggly designs on a salamander pink background. Later that day we also visited the City Palace, where the royal family or Maharaja of Jaipur once lived. It was free for Amit and his friend Sandeep because they are Indian nationals, and superb negotiators, but Ron and I paid 600 rupees each for a one hour whirlwind tour. We especially enjoyed the vast collection of ancient weaponry but weren‘t allowed to take photos. One looked like a knife, gun, cigarette lighter, and nail clipper, all rolled in to one handy dandy metal MacGyver tool. There were also some fantastic and intricately detailed architecture and doorways in Rajput style.

And, of course, the obligatory guys running around in turbans...

We wanted to get traditional dress to wear for Diwali so we stopped at a store recommended by Raju called Satguru’s. I was expecting to try on a number of pre-made salwar kameez but instead found myself in a tailor shop with bolts of fabric being pulled out right and left. Do you like this, madam? Or maybe this? Or maybe this? I found myself amidst a frenzy of technocolored silk and chiffon. I asked about a red sequined sari and cringed at the 15000 rupee price tag (and also a bit at the idea of a midriff baring crop top). It was all a little overwhelming and after some time, and some complimentary drinks, I was definitely in one of those awkward social situa tions. I didn’t want to spend $200 but I didn’t want to upset Amit, and I certainly didn’t want to offend his Dad who specially set up our shopping experience. What’s a girl to do?

Finally I settled on something I thought would suit my style and budget more appropriately - a punjabi suit with pink paisley brocade top and pea green pants. I had a hard time picturing if it would look good on me, and wished I could try on a few styles instead of pointing to Indian models in a magazine. Not the best representation when you are several inches taller and several times curvier. An ancient tailor measured me, too bashful to get the most accurate of measurements, but I still held out hope. Especially after forking over $130 which was $120 more than I wanted to spend.

They delivered it to the hotel, as promised, later that night. When I tried it on, it was a complete disaster from top to bottom, front to back. The fabric of the top was stiff and boxy, three times too large, like I was wearing a giant pink garbage sack. The pants were too loose and too short, adding to the overall frumpiness and unattractiveness of the vision before me in the mirror. I was so horrified, and in tears, that I would not even allow a photograph. Not even for prosperity. Not even for you, dear readers. I never want to see that outfit again as long as I live.

Now what will I wear for Diwali? How do I tell Amit? And what will Dad think when I show up in non-traditional dress on their biggest festival of the year?