Traveler's Almanac

What to Bring on Your Big Trip

2010-10-21T11:17:00.000-07:00

You will never regret bringing less on your big trip. Most of the useful stuff that you carry will probably be the things you buy en-route. The less large and awkward your luggage is, the easier you can carry it and the more spontaneous you will be.

All the same, there are a few things that were oh so useful to us, that I thought I would mention them here. I'm not going to give you a complete packing list because, that would be boring. Instead my goal is to tell you about few things that turned out to be very helpful.

ATM card- When we checked in with our bank about using our checking account abroad, we found that we would incur a hefty fee by using our ATM card abroad AND a percentage each time we used our card. After shopping around, we found a checking account through Charles Schwab that didn't charge us a surcharge for using foreign ATMs and actually reimbursed us for the foreign banks charges which made withdrawing money any where in the world totally free. This saved us a ton. Now that we didn't have to worry about ATM fees, we were free to use ATMs as often as we wanted. This helped us avoid having to much cash on hand which meant we could worry less about theft and changing unused currency when we left that country. This one card worked for us in all 17 countries that accepted foreign ATM cards. So take some time and check around for the best deal for you.

Online Photo Account- Posting pictures was a fabulous way to share the trip with friends and family as we went along. It helped us feel connected to home and let us reflect that we were doing some very cool things. At times, coming up with a thoughtful blog entry was daunting; how could we manage to sound intelligent about some of the mind blowing and bizarre places we were in? But posting a narrative below a picture was always easy. Our viewers felt like they were "right there with us" and one friend even uploaded our pictures to create a rotating desktop image for his computer at work. Posting photos also allowed my mother in law to comment that we "looked very well fed" at some points in Asia, and why would you want to miss out on that? We posted on Flickr and Facebook but I am sure there there are plenty of good options out there.

Cheap Cell Phone- We left home without a phone thinking we wanted a break from being "plugged in." After some months though we realized that we did want a phone to call local people and fellow travelers and reserve hotels. For a minimal cost, we were able to buy a simple phone and a sim card. Leave your US sim card at home and avoid major roaming charges.

Reusable Shopping Bag- Okay so most things you can buy along the way. However we never regretted bringing our Envirosax reusable shopping bags. I liked not needing a plastic bag in places where people had to burn plastic trash for lack of a formal sanitation system. The bags also came in handy to take laundry to be washed, packing muddy shoes after a big hike, to bring towels to the beach, to pack snacks and magazines and other comfort items for epic train rides. Since the bags fold into the size of a kiwi, I had no problem finding room for them.

Travel Insurance- We got insurance through International Medical Group. It seemed like a good plan- it could be extended to provide coverage once we got home. However since nothing ever went wrong its hard to evaluate the quality of our insurance. Shop around and look at testimonials in travel blogs and Lonely Planet's Thorn Tree, which is a very good travel forum to post a travel question or read through other people's answers. Just make sure that which ever insurance you choose covers medical evacuation.

Travel Games- Having a few good travel games can help you keep your zen during the most trying of times. They can help you through uncomfortable waiting times and can provide a good way to make friends and enjoy your downtime. They can be a life saver in trains, airports, stuffy ferries and border crossings.

Travel games do not have to be expensive or heavy. And you certainly don't have to bring them from home. We picked up two packages of cardboard dominoes in Indonesia for 20 cents a piece. They fit into boxes the size of film canisters. For a dollar or two we purchased Connect Four in Thailand. Its slightly bigger than a pack of cards (another readily available choice). I also have a Othello set that folds practically flat. For most of the year we were carrying at least three games. Mark bought a small backgammon set in Syria when got tired of Othello and dominoes.

Games can be a great way to interact with local people. Your fellow train passengers are just as bored as you are. Often they are curious about you and just looking for an excuse to approach you. A game can be the perfect excuse. People love to watch games and play games. Even if you don't speak the same language, most people can observe and figure out simple games like Othello or Connect Four.

Dominoes came in handy on a slow Sunday in a bus station in Indonesia. A group of local men showed us how to throw down our cardboard dominoes so that they made a really cool slapping noise on the table . They laughed hysterically as we tried to copy their moves. After a game or two, we all were very sad when the bus arrived three hours later. Another time, we stayed with a local family on an island in the middle of the Mekong river. There isn't much to do on an island in the middle of the Mekong river- that's the whole point. So we found ourselves playing Othello on a log in front of the house. The neighbor came out and watched our game. He quickly understood the rules and played the next game against Mark. Having games can often provide an inroad to interact with otherwise shy locals.

Travel Underwear- The seasoned traveler who suggested these to me at a cocktail party got a big eyebrow raise, let me tell you. But sure enough, now I am the crazy lady who can't stop talking about her underwear. Any clothing that can dry in four hours in a locked hostel locker and does not begin to show wear after one year is clothing I can endorse. Three pairs of travel underwear is all you need for your year-long trip. You can wash two pairs easily in a hotel sink while wearing the third and let them dry overnight wherever you find yourself sleeping. And they are super light and compact which means that my lingerie drawer was about the size of an orange. Just make sure you choose a color and cut you like, because they aren't wearing out anytime soon. http://www.exofficio.com.

Some Essential Technical Clothing- They do have extra socks and t-shirt where you are going. Whats more, you'll probably prefer the stuff you buy there- after all you bought it in India/Middle East/Africa/Etc. The exception is technical gear- the durable, light weight that will hold up and fold up for the duration of the trip. Here are a few of those rule breakers that I would recommend:

Warm Layers- light weight thin layers like running shirt or long underwear tops pack easily and layer for ultimate versatility. One or two is probably enough depending on where you are going. You can get heavier sweaters and jackets locally if you need to.

Sturdy Hiking Sandals, walking shoes, hiking boots- These are hard to come by most places. Light sandals and dressier shoes are easy to pick up on the road although some people may have trouble finding their shoe size in some places. I would recommend a good pair of close toed shoes with good tread as well as a good pair of walking sandals like Tevas.

Pants- good fitting, light weight, easy washing pants are your best friend. Zippered pockets can prevent things being stolen from your best friend. I spent at least every other day in my grey Columbia pants- other than some spilled paint in northern Laos they are no worse for wear. Zip off pants are a choice of many travelers, but since shorts aren't really worn by adults in most of the world, how often will you really need to "zip off"? Personally I prefer pants that can be buttoned up at the bottom to make capri pants.

With clothing the important thing to remember is modesty. While shorts, tank tops and sundresses may be perfectly suited to your notion of hot weather wear, most warm weather cultures would disagree. Most world cultures dress more modestly, covering shoulders, legs and chest. Show local people your respect by dressing modestly.

Camping Lamp- A small bright headlamp can save the day or night, rather. We had trouble finding good ones on the road so you may want to bring one along.

High SPF Sunscreen- Technically, if you aren't freakish about sunscreen you should be able able to replenish your supply as you go. Many tourist areas will stock some sunscreen, usually a low SPF at a high price. However, I am freakish about sunscreen! I suggest you bring a good supply to ensure that you have the kind you like- you will be using every day after all. The stuff you bring from home will be cheaper and fresher.

Not Much Else- When packing for the unknown, its easy to justify bringing things "just in case." If its not something you will be using regularly, then leave it behind. Not sure if you have packed to much? Take the time tested walk around the block with your suitcase or backpack before you go. Its a good way to get a sense of how heavy your bag really is and make all your neighbors jealous about your big trip. If your neighbors feel sorry for you, you may want to re-evaluate your packing.

Mark and Juliah

Final Report

2010-09-30T10:53:00.000-07:00

A Summary of Our Trip Around the World

Trip dates: October 1st 2009 to September 27th 2010
Countries visited:18
Longest Country Stay: India- six weeks, Indonesia, Syria, Tanzania, Cambodia- one month each
Shortest Country Stay: South Korea and Holland-four days each, Israel and Rwanda- 8 days each.
Places stayed: 125 (110 hotels and 15 homes)
Daily Average Cost For two travelers: $75

How much of this did you plan before you left?
Juliah: We had airfare that went around the world, stopping in five places and then brought us home. The dates of our ticket were flexible so we didn't have to know the dates of our trip which helped us be more spontaneous. We bought several other plane tickets en-route.

Mark: Both of us were excited about taking this trip, but Julie invested much of her Netflix share in travel documentaries. Booking our multi-stop round-the-world ticket with United Airlines was an unrivaled frustration: Julie and I would plan a route on the hallway map, then I would call United booking agents and run their gauntlet of robot switchboard operators. Agents would tell us that available carriers wouldn't take us to certain airports, detours would run over our allotted mileage, a rough draft of an itinerary would be formed, and then the Ratings Department would call us back two days later to inform us that the flight didn't meet preconditions for special pricing. United's website wasn't set-up to book this kind of flight, and all stages had to be booked over the phone. In all, I estimate I spent 9 to 12 hours on hold and speaking to United Agents.

In the last few days leading up to the trip, we went on shopping sprees for essential supplies we didn't think we could find abroad: contact lens solution, sunscreen, bandages, a miniature speaker system to amplify the iPods. We'd haul our loot to the living room and spread it our in piles, then practice packing it into our bags. We lost or discarded much of it in our first month of travel, when we realized neither of us wanted to be hauling 40 lbs on our backs.

Visas weren't a concern, as I was sure we'd be able to secure them at the border crossings, but we'd planned our time in Indonesia to run just over the maximum allowance for Western tourists, and that was a problem. This required two trips into San Francisco to get an advance visa with the Indonesian consulate.

How did you know how to do this?
Juliah: In preparation and sheer excitement I read travel blogs and watched way too many travel documentaries. For three years, I visited the public library on my lunch break and checked out travel books and covertly stashed them in my cubicle drawer for the subway ride home. Many books have been written on how to plan long trips- many quite useful. I spoke to anyone from anywhere or who had been anywhere (Most people love to talk about their big trip or home country). We put up a map of the world in our apartment and put pushpins in it for the places we wanted to go. For years we bored our friends with the rain cycles in India and the best ways to get to Senegal.

But really, you don't need to know how everything is going to play out. If you give yourself enough time, you can really figure most things out. Once you start your trip you can ask lots of questions and make plenty of observations. When we left we knew how to get to from the airport to our hotel in Seoul, Korea. Everything else was easy to figure out en-route.

Mark: I had taken a similar trip about 8 years prior, just after two years of teaching in Japan. The 24 year-old me was way more disorganized than the 33 year-old version, so I knew we'd be able to compensate for any lack in planning once we were on the road. There were places I'd been before where I felt a connection to the land--Laos and Cambodia, especially--and places I'd seen briefly and wanted to explore more in depth, like the Middle East. And there were places I knew nothing about, but was very excited to explore, like East Africa. Once Julie and I had committed to the idea of the trip, defining a loose itinerary wasn't too hard.

How did you afford this?
Juliah: The whole year long trip, airfare and all, cost us about $33, 000 for the both of us. Not including our original airfare package that's about $75 a day for the both of us. We could have spent less by doing fewer things. But in the end we decided that the time was also the factor- we may not be back to some of these places for quite a while. So it seemed like a shame not to stay in a nice hotel, dive or go on safari while we were in these amazing places. We could have also saved some money by focusing on fewer places and therefore taking fewer flights. But the temptation was just too great. When was I going to be invited to Bhutan again? When is the next time I will be this close to Sri Lanka?

We scrimped and saved. We stayed in and ate lentils and watched movies at home rather than going out in New York City. When we left we gave up our apartment and sold all of our stuff. If you aren't paying rent or storage fees, you have lots more savings to play with.

Mark: We also worked really hard in the three years leading up to the trip! Julie tutored after school, and I worked overtime and second jobs. I put away about 15 to 20% of my take-home pay into a liquid cd account, where it accumulated more interest and I knew I'd be unable to access it.

Best thing about traveling for a year:
Juliah: In the end, I absolutely loved having all that time. Taking time off made for the most fantastic year ever. However, at first it was absolutely daunting. I remember arriving to a small island in Indonesia and feeling like I needed to do something big and monumental with the time- I had a year, gosh darn it, and I ought to do something useful with it. I should be moving towards a goal or at least a cohesive final project. The island was 4 kilometers around. You could hear the ocean from the very middle of it. The only vehicles on the island were donkey carts. There wasn't much to do there.

When I couldn't figure out how to make a big project of this travel plan from my small island in Indonesia, I decided not to worry about how all the pieces fit together into a cohesive experience- instead I would let each day be what it wanted to be. Then I really started enjoying myself. One day found us dodging blood splatter of a buffalo sacrifice at a funeral in Indonesia, while another day was spent bouncing through the tea plantations on an over crowded Sri Lankan bus, clutching a stranger's avocado tree on my lap. One evening we canoed on the Kerala backwaters in southern India, our hosts singing and pounding their oars in growing darkness. Another evening we smoked apple flavored tobacco, drank frozen lemonade and played backgammon until 2 am in a second story cafe in the capital of Jordan.

A year really gives you time to follow your curiosity and not stick too tightly to a schedule. Having enough time lets you wander until you find the freshest black pepper in a market in Cambodia. You can stop and join the locals for tea in the Middle East instead of rushing on to the next set of ruins. One time we spent an hour on the beach in Zanzibar helping a fisherman dig for worms. Another time we asked a guest house owner in Sri Lanka if we could help her make dinner and learn how she cooked. Having enough time means not just seeing the major temples in Bhutan but also hanging out at the archery field in the afternoon to watch locals shoot arrows at a skate board sized target from a foot ball field away with amazing accuracy.

Being able to see many places lets you make interesting comparisons. . In Asia, India, the Middle East and Africa the word for tea remains "chai." Meanwhile, only Rwandans practice the two handed wave. Men in India wear Lungis (a plaid cloth that wraps like a skirt) which is rather similar to the Indonesian sarong that Balinese men wear.

What were some things we saw over and over? Lets just say many people on this planet enjoy World Wresting, wearing skirts, people make mainly organic trash and really nobody bothers owning a dryer. Oh, and lots of people eat eggs. How is that for sweeping generalizations?

Worst thing about traveling for a year
Juliah: Fatigue. Traveling this long can be tiring. Imagine if the direction of traffic changed every three weeks, if you were never quite sure when to cross the street. Imagine if you had to learn how to greet people over and over and if you weren't sure if you were being polite or not. It's exhausting to always be an outsider and never completely understand the rules.

After a while seeing the "must sees" feels like a chore rather than an enjoyable activity. Ruins, museums, palaces, temples- once you have seen a handful its not easy to get excited about the next dozen or so. "We don't have to do anything we don't want to" became our mantra. Although we enjoyed Petra, we were exhausted after one day. So we forfeit our two day ticket to return to Amman and play backgammon in our favorite cafe.

A good cure for travel fatigue was downtime. Laundry, e-mail, games, reading all became activities central to our lives. We learned to wash our clothing by hand and hang it all over our hotel room to dry. When you have no home, washing your three shirts in a hotel sink with bar soap becomes a very comforting activity. Some days we lingered over breakfast with fellow travelers. Some evenings were spent drinking beer on hostel roofs. I read more leisure books this year than ever. Sure, I didn't have to be in India to read books and play dominos, but reading books and playing dominos let me be in India and actually enjoy it.

Posting pictures and journaling was a good way to recharge and reflect on my experiences. When I wrote about what we had done I realized that we were indeed doing some amazing things. Having people see and respond to our pictures and posts validated that even more.

I did get really really tired in months 11 and 12. The answer was to move more slower and enjoy something different. Slow and different meant learning to paddle a dugout canoe around a lake in Uganda. We watched a multitude of birds along the shores of the many islands and marshes. We also combated fatigue by doing more home stays and enjoying spending time with local people. I was too tired to see the local museum in Kisumu Kenya, but I was eager to help Mama Okech pluck and clean a chicken for that night's dinner and then watch cartoons with her grandkids in a nearby village. When we were too lazy to contemplate going to another genocide memorial in Rwanda, we were still excited to go hiking with Eva, a German woman working in Rwanda.

Mark: Travel fatigue was a pretty constant stressor. After three months of moving, I'd look at a calendar and think, "Jesus! We have 9 more months of travel." When we'd been gone 5 months, I'd wonder how we'd pull off the next 7 months together. We missed familiar friends, routines, and comforts, and the unrelenting togetherness of the trip got to the both of us. No doubt, this journey brought us closer to each other, but many mornings we'd wake up and read the same expression on each others' faces: "What, you again???"

What went wrong on the trip:

Juliah: Nothing that we ever worried about. We accidentally left our warm clothing on an overnight bus to Bangkok. We spent a sleepless night in the Calcutta airport on our way to Bhutan. At two am we realized that our hotel room had bed bugs. When we tried to cross into Egypt we were turned back to Israel to get a visa. I dropped my camera in a lake and didn't get to use it to take pictures of chimpanzees the next day. Our cheap cell phone went missing from an unlocked tent at the source of the Nile in Uganda (This was the only theft we experienced). These things sure were annoying when they happened- but they certainly were not major. We were able to remedy most situations.

Mark: I left my iPod on a train in Month 5: a good argument for never taking sleeping pills on an Indian train, no matter how difficult a time you have nodding off. We dealt with minor frustrations and lost items, but this happened rarely, since we had so little to lose. The best remedy to setbacks was patience, and over the course of the trip we became more patient than I'd thought possible.

Injuries and Sicknesses
Juliah: A monkey in Bali pulled out my earring, causing my ear to bleed. The earring was recovered. Yes, i wore it after it was in a monkey's mouth.
I got so sick in India that I couldn't lift my head to adjust my pillow.
I spent my first three days in Beirut in a benadryl coma due to the massive mosquito bites that covered my face and neck and made it look like I had been beat up.
My eyes swelled shut from bed bugs bite in Jordan.
In Rwanda I fell in to a waist deep drainage gutter and cut up my feet.

Mark: I supported Julie when a monkey pulled out her earring in Bali, when she was sick in India, when her face swelled up like a bag of hot chocolate marshmallows in Beirut, when she had bedbugs in Jordan, and when she fell into a drainage ditch in Rwanda.

Actually, Julie was a tough-as-nails champ when it came to injuries, and most of the time I had no idea she was hurting. I was kind of a baby when it came to very minor but persistent ailments. I had pretty severe allergies that followed me for most of the year. I suffered a centipede bite (painful and scary, but not dangerous) and had a high fever in Varanasi, India. The rest of the year I was in remarkably good health, compared to all the years I spent in the teeming petri dish that is elementary school education.

Are you still speaking to each other?
Juliah: Yes
Mark: Depends who's asking. Is Juliah asking?

Would you do it again?
Juliah- yes! yes please. I would visit fewer places the next time though and go much more slowly. I might even invite Mark to join me.

Mark: A year is a long, long time, and I don't think I have it in me to reenact another 365 days homeless, wandering travel. That said, there are plenty of other adventures I have in mind... an apartment in Phnom Penh, a 6 month language course in Damascus, bicycling across America, and the Appalachian Trail. I don't think we'll ever be done traveling.

Mark and Juliah

Masa Mara Safari

2010-07-16T06:07:00.001-07:00

Some people blog to be helpful to other travelers. They dutifully provide bus schedules, restaurant recommendations, referrals for guides and hotels for the rest of us. Alas, we have not been that kind of travel bloggers. We have been more concerned with trying to show the folks back home that we haven't gone soft in the head. But now, for the purposes of helping other travelers, I would like to share some of our experiences with the Masa Mara Safari in hopes that other travelers will could benefit from our experience.

We did a two night safari to the Masa Mara reserve in the middle of July. We went with Big Time Safari. And they were good. I'll tell you more about them, but first a few things to think about while planning your safari:

The Vehicle is probably fine.
Most Safari outfits use a pop-top matatu. It is a van with fewer, more comfortable seats and a roof that pops up to allow you to stand and look all around you while enjoying the shade and safety of the vehicle (think lions). For the purposes of a dry season (July) safari, this vehicle was fine. Maybe even ideal.

Number of Participants is important.
Ask how many people are going and how many they will take in a single vehicle. 2-4 would be ideal. Vans with more than 5 looked rather miserable. Not everyone fits in the pop top and the seating opportunities become more limited.

Quality of Co-Participants will impact your experience.
You will spend 3 days with these people. Make sure you do better than us in this department. We found ourselves confined with the most rude, vulgar and immature Spanish guys to ever grace this continent. I wish I could say it didn't affect our experience, but it did.

You will bother the animals.
About this we felt bad. And maybe you will too. Zebras sprinted from the road when we approached. Ostriches stopped their courtship dance when the van motored up to them. Even the sleeping lions woke up when we leered over them with many cameras. It didn't seem like a big deal until I understood just how many safari vehicles were in the park. Our car was one of 20 surrounding two leopards in a patch of bushes. The driving safari, in our experience, did disturb animals. This is something you should weigh out before you sign on.

Your Trip will be short, yet it will be long enough.
A "three day" safari really comes down to about 12 to 18 hours in the park. But consider that you will spend all your safari time driving around looking at animals. By the third morning, we had seen all we needed to see. In fact, a one day game drive would have sufficed. Keep in mind, that while you may spend 18 hours in the park, you will probably spend three full days in the car.

There are lots of safari companies.
We originally signed on to Safe Ride Safari. John picked us up in Narok at our hotel. When I asked how we would be returning to Nairobi (the other couple was continuing on) he asked if I had malaria and then told me not to worry about it and get back in the car. He was so rude, that within 10 minutes of being picked up, we agreed to take our backpacks out of the car and catch a bus back to Nairobi. We then realized that the guide/driver would greatly impact our experience. After that we insisted on talking to guides before signing on to a safari. All agencies were happy to call their drivers on their cell phones and let us talk to them. This gave us a gauge on niceness.

So in the end we visited Masa Mara with Big Time Safaris. George was our guide and driver. He was courteous and informative and gave the trip some good structure. He went out of his way to make sure we saw animals and got to observe different parts of the park. At times we were behind schedule which was a bit frustrating, but in the end it was fine. The camp was okay- a few more thoughtful details would have gone along way. The food was okay. We also spend sometime with another guide and driver named Abdi who would have been very good as well.

jl

Mark and Juliah

First Impressions of Nairobi

2010-07-02T08:18:00.000-07:00

Arrived in Nairobi early-early on June 30th, landing around 1:20am and clearing customs by 2:30. Julie and I are scared: Nairobi is rumored to be the most dangerous city in Africa. We'd talked about crashing at the airport til dawn, but now we're dead on our feet and will pay almost anything for a clean bed. We don't have a hotel reservation or taxi waiting, but by the luggage carousel we force a conversation with Dirk, a German high school student doing volunteer work outside the capital, and he agrees to share his cab to his hotel, where we hope they have an extra room for us. We're somewhat amazed that this ride has worked out, without any prior planning, and is cheaper and less scary than arranging our own transportation at 3am. We knock on the glass door of the Embassy Hotel, and a fuzzy shape moves in the darkness: the manager, rising from his sleep on the couch. He turns on a light, unlocks the door for us. He's unfazed by our arrival, and hands us a registration form. We copy our passport numbers, dates of issue and expiry, visa numbers and port of arrival. A young prostitute in a banana and khaki-colored dress comes inside and interrupts to ask if there is a room available. Does it have a bathroom? Is there tissue inside? She hands the manager 2000 Kenyan shillings, about $25, and takes a room key. Her john is waiting outside, and comes in when she gives him the A-OK sign.

At 3am, inside the cab, the city is deserted and sort of menacing-looking to first time visitors, but by noon, when we've woken, we notice that the streets are clean, people are extraordinarily well-dressed, relaxed, and polite. The downtown district abounds with coffeeshops and Indian restaurants. There is construction happening behind our hotel, and the workers wear helmets and climb metal scaffolding. These are the things we're noticing after our 8 weeks in the Middle East.

I've got feeling of whiplash from flying from Egypt to Kenya. In Luxor, the temperature was 120 degrees Fahrenheit, forcing these skinflint travelers to splurge for rooms with A/C. In Nairobi, it's shot down to about 70, cool and overcast through most of the day. Security guards give you directions without expecting to be tipped. People ask you where you're from as a simple conversation starter, not as a means of suckering you into their shop--but we still have our guards up.

Mark and Juliah

Third Quarterly Report

2010-07-02T08:12:00.000-07:00

To think that it's now month 9. The first part of our trip seems like a vacation we took years ago. People have started asking us which country we've enjoyed the most. I'm tired of the question already! My answer is that having the time to move slowly and really observe things has been my favorite part of this trip. I have most enjoyed the places I knew the least about. This quarter has been all about surprising places. From a rowdy Buddhist New Year's on the south coast of Sri Lanka to the syrupy sting of the Dead Sea in Jordan, our mantra quickly became "Who knew?" And when it comes to surprises, the Middle East has been very rewarding. Hospitable, safe and welcoming, there is much to see here in terms of people, history and natural beauty. What a shame we met so few Americans seeing it for themselves.

Countries covered this quarter: Sri Lanka, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel and Palestine, and Egypt
Days in the Middle East: 74 (April 16th- June 29th)
Miles traveled in the Middle East: 3,900 (Most of those logged on a train to southern Egypt)
Route: http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=3851295
Cousins Visited in the Middle East: 4 (Thank you for offering up your cousins, Loussi and Maya).
Accommodations used to date: 109
Pictures taken by Juliah: 4,920 (Mark had shipped home a memory card and was unable to provide an accurate count)
Maximum number of falafel meals consumed consecutively: 4. Cheap, ever present and delicious, a large portion of our body mass is now made of falafel.
Next on the Agenda: East Africa

A Few Highlights from the Middle East:
Diving the Blue Hole in the Sinai Peninsula. We suited up in 5 millimeters wet suits, put on our tanks and started walking down the dirt road. We passed a cliff with at least 20 memorial markers for the divers who had died at this site. Summer, our dive master, made a point of humming a happy song as we continued our walk. Then we got into the water and began our 30 meters decent down a stone shaft. It felt like a free fall. I had to pace myself to make sure didn't fall on top of Mark who was right below me. The fall ended when we emerged through a tunnel in an immense reef wall. To our right, reef pulsating with crazy corals and little orange fish. To the left the deep blue Red Sea, mysterious and seemingly bottomless.

Getting pulled off a bus by Israeli Defense Forces headed back from the West Bank. Apparently foreign tourists were not permitted to pass through this security check point. We suspected that the Sargent on duty was just miffed that we had visited Palestine. With the Turkish flotilla incident just weeks behind us, perhaps the Israelis were feeling even more on edge than usual. The Israeli soldier barely looked up from his cell phone when we tried to protest this "new policy." So we were forced to walk along the highway in growing darkness until we found a cab to take us to a different security checkpoint that would let us back to Israel.

Touring the tunnels below the Islamic Temple of The Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. Burrowing through the dark and muddy tunnels you eventually find the foundation and original door to the second temple, the most sacred site for Jews and an undeniably eerie place for the rest of us.

Climbing a hill in Amman to see the sunset. As we reach the top, two Palestinian women pull us into their home and demand we stay for coffee. We meet their children and heard all about how much they love American people. They hope we enjoy Jordan. We completely miss the sunset.

Petra at sunrise. I'm torn between the stately symmetry of the carved facades, statues and niches and the beauty of the stone itself. The cliff faces are marbled with white, red and orange hues that would make them stunning even had they not been carved by an artful ancient people. The stones reminds me of salmon and then I long to poach salmon and eat it with a nice salad. I found myself walking away from one building only to turn back for a second look.

Staying the night in a 10th century monastery tucked between rocky mountains above the desert in Syria. We ate homemade cheese with the monks and slept above the chapel which let the smell of frankincense wafted up from below.

Smoking shisha (tobacco water pipe) on the banks of the Euphrates river at sunset in eastern Syria. Eventually the guy at the next table started chatting with us, paid our bill and took us cruising around town as the desert air cooled and the locals finally emerged for the evening.

Sleeping on the roof in Damascus. It's cheaper to sleep on the roof rather than getting a room and besides they still give you breakfast. There are 25 cots set up on the roof, most just 6 inches from the next. Blankets quickly become a commodity between our 25 roof mates, most of us sleeping just inches from each other. The 4am morning call to prayer finds us wearing rain coats and wool hats and snuggling to keep warm.

Wading in the Mediterranean on the south coast of Lebanon and collecting a few choice pieces of sea glass for my desk at my next job. The southern coast of Lebanon has been inhabited for thousands of years. Its difficult to choose between the colorful bits that turn up among the pebbles in front of the light house turned hotel we have been sleeping in.

And How Would You Say Things Are Going?
It's amazing what seems normal after a while. After nine months on the road, I can't imagine doing anything else. It has been a very good use of a year. By moving slowly and not pushing ourselves to do the "must sees" we haven't burned out yet.Though, there are a few indicators that our stamina may be waning.

For one, everything we own is falling apart. My watch, which got a new band in Northern Thailand and a new battery in downtown Mumbai just got fixed for $1.25 on the streets of Nairobi. To my shock and dismay, the watch repair guy actually used his teeth.

What's next on the agenda?
Africa! East Africa. In 2006 Mark and I visited Ghana, Togo and Benin in West Africa. We looked forward to returning to Africa ever since.
The guide books that we bought in Cairo for Uganda, Tanzania and Kenya all have animals on the covers. Usually the cover of a guidebook excites me, but I couldn't be less excited about these book covers. Chimps? Elephants? really? What excites me instead about East Africa is meeting people, enjoying some lush beautiful country and seeing how people live. It will also be nice to eat with our hands, drink beer and have really good papaya again. But still, I will take 120 giraffe pictures when the opportunity arises.

When are you coming home?
This is a frequently asked question, to be sure. We will probably be home in later September or early October.

-jl

Mark and Juliah

Cairo

2010-06-21T06:20:00.000-07:00

There's a good reason we haven't been posting as often over the last few weeks: our brains have been literally fried by the heat here. In southern Jordan and Egypt, you can feel cerebral matter melting out of your ears. Sorry to say, I haven't been keeping up with my journal. All my photos look bleached and whited out in the sunshine. Thinking back over these last months, I have moments of amnesia associated with blunt head trauma; it's just that hot here.

Last night I had a good conversation with a German student living in Cairo, and she helped me to put into context some of the feelings I'd been having about Egypt since arriving from Israel. The Holy Land itself was a difficult place, buzzing with tension, mistrust, religious zealotry, jittery and arrogant military, and occasional bigotry. It became a regular and uncomfortable routine to bump into a local who would tell you how much they despised Arabs, or would speak somewhat gleefully about how the Palestinian people could never come back to this land. One shopkeeper at a passport photo shop harangued us out the door, ranting about how my president ("Barack HUSSEIN!!!") was a Muslim, how all Muslims rejoiced in the September 11th attacks, and how by visiting Egypt and the Muslim world, we were supporting terrorists. Other times, we'd wind up in heated and circular arguments with other travelers about the legitimacy of the Israeli state, the rights of Palestinians, and the future of the region. Each day would shed light on an angle we hadn't considered before, but the picture as a whole emerged as one people scrambling to climb over the backs of another, while their neighbors did the same. Yeah, the sights were fascinating, but I couldn't wait to leave. The longer I spent here, the more I wanted to completely disassociate from it.

But Egypt wasn't much better. We crossed the border from Eilat to the Sinai, and in Dahab and Upper Egypt the temperature shot up to 50 Celsius, about 120 Fahrenheit. We were followed in this heat by hotel touts, restaurant touts, shopkeepers, greasy cops who'd corner you for baksheesh, and overtly sexual and harassing men in their 20's. Walking the streets, muscle-bound guys would zero in on my wife and sneer "Beauuuutiful. You're one lucky guy," in this breathy voice that made me want to punch the men give the whole city the finger. Last night, after giving us directions to an intersection, a man invited us to his perfume shop. He said he could sell us a fragrance that would make sex feel like an earthquake, that would make us feel something like we'd never felt before. People just do not say such things in the Middle East, but they seem to happen here.

I know I'm painting a broad and hyper-negative picture of Egypt, but this is how I'd been feeling after a week of travel here. We'd meet good people in Egypt, too, but it was impossible to let our guard down after dealing with the pestering and harassment. I wondered how they navigated this extraordinarily stressful society.

"People live such difficult lives here, that the immediate benefit takes priority," our friend told us. Financially, they were really struggling, and they did what they could to keep their heads above water without much consideration for strangers. That's why the touts would follow you for blocks or clutch your arm and guide you to a shop or restaurant. Among the people at the bottom, it means every transaction is followed by the question "Are you happy?" and the hope of charming a tourist into tipping 40 of 60 cents. Police pull you aside and give extensive directions around a neighborhood, then ask you for a dollar. It's hard-scrabble living and everything feels on edge.

But there's an allure to the challenges that come with living here; a little bit of language opens doors for you, and people who invest the time in living here have experiences they could have nowhere else. For some, the sheer weirdness keeps people going: our new friend Astrid told us how in a one week period, she had one cab driver fall asleep on her, another read a newspaper while driving in traffic, and a third propose marriage. And quietly hiding among the loudest and rudest of the crowd are the polite. It takes some work to find them, but they are here: practice a few sentences of Arabic with a shopkeeper, and you can be drawn into an excited, seven-hour conversation that only ends when you insist you have to go. Seeking out a small restaurant on our last night, we were invited to ditch our plans and have dinner with a local family. I think it's this allure that keeps drawing some people back here, like Astrid, who's now made her 5th extended trip in 18 months. And though the rest of the Arab world rags on Egypt as well, everyone is consumed by their music, art, and cinema--one of the world's largest entertainment industries outside of Hollywood and Mumbai.

No doubt, this is one of the world's more difficult places to travel. You can make a two week trip of it and see nothing but the ruins of a civilization that ended with the Roman Empire, but exploring the living culture takes more time and effort than we have at the moment.

--mark

Mark and Juliah

Welcome to the Middle East

2010-05-17T03:18:00.000-07:00

Welcome. Welcome. Welcome.

The man in army fatigues had looked through every last page of my passport and examined each stamp in detail before adding a Lebanon stamp to my frayed passport. We had just arrived at the Beirut Airport from Sri Lanka. I was immediately struck by all the white people and how most of them seem to be smoking as they line up for Customs. The immigration official looked me in the eye, paused to hand me back my passport and said "Welcome to Lebanon" in such a thoughtful way it sent chills up my spine. Leaving immigration, I asked Mark if he too had received a meaningful Welcome to Lebanon and he said that he had.

Maya's cousin Omar met us in the airport and ushered into his car. He pointed out key buildings as we headed towards the hotel he had helped us to book. A long the way we stopped for an amazing schwarma sandwich that slit the throat of any ideas I had had about vegetarianism back in India.

"Are you afraid?" asked the hotel manager with a ghoulish smile as I handed him my passport when we arrived. Remember, I thought to myself, 'they can kill you but they can never take your soul.' It was a line I had heard on the TV show "Jailed Abroad", a show about foreigners who end up in captivity somewhere with dirty floors, hostile inmates and no flush toilets, usually for drug smuggling. This line came from an episode in which two journalist were captured by some terrorist group somewhere. One was an ex-marine who gave this shred of advice to the other journalist when it looked like they would both be killed. Whenever we have cable in a hotel room we try to watch the show. The show makes us feel pretty smug and superior-- we have dirty floors and no flush toilets because we are cheap.

"What should I be afraid of?" I asked the hotel manager, trying to sound very very casual.
"You have an American passport. I could sell this, you know."
"Then can I trade it for this free city map?" I took one of his city maps from the desk.
The hotel manager smiled and nodded and soon all three of us were sitting and drinking coffee until 11:30 pm. We spent the next afternoon smoking a nargila (water tobacco pipe) with him in a parking space ac cross from the hotel.

The kindness and hospitality we have encountered so far in Lebanon and Syria has been shocking.

"I think the rule in the Middle East is just to say yes" Mark said thoughtfully as we were strolling through Aleppo's old souk. Aleppo is Syria's second city and vies for the title of longest inhabited place on earth. The souk is a labyrinth of tunnels lined with neatly kept shops. While old and attractive, most of these shops are still geared to locals rather than tourists, which is make the whole thing feel even more authentic. Mark is talking about the frequent invitations we as foreigner receive here. A one minute conversation with a man in a small desert oasis town leads to an invitation to breakfast in his work place. Yes to a group of old men sitting by the side of the road in Lebanon yields us a ride back to our rental car after hours of hiking in the wrong direction. Yes to a man sitting at the next table in a cafe along the Euphrates finds us in the back of a luxury sedan with his brother. We cruised the riverside and tour town with music blaring before being thoughtfully deposited at our hotel.

Sometimes, hospitality isn't really a question at all. Palmyra is an ancient set of ruins of an oasis town in the middle of the desert. You can probably see to the Iraqi border from here although all there is to see beyond this town is a large expanse of desert. From the citadel we wandered down the hill of small rocks and dried grass to a small valley of roman tombs in the shape of three story towers. A man sitting with a group of people in the shade of a van yelled and beckoned us over. We were quickly ushered to sit down with them and drink some tea as they guessed at out nationality and introduced the family. Sometimes accepting hospitality here doesn't feel like a choice but these two tired travelers are happy to sit down and drink some tea.

Mark and Juliah

If You See Just One Movie This Year, Make It This Horrendous Piece of Bollywood Crap, "My Name is Khan"

2010-03-24T23:01:00.000-07:00

Julie and I saw our first Bollywood flick 6 weeks ago, but are still fascinated by how this 3.5 hour behemoth was written, funded, produced, and screened.

Shah Rukh Khan stars as Rizwan Khan, a middle-class Indian Muslim with Asperger's Syndrome who moves in with his San Francisco-based brother after the death of his mother. He falls in love with a local hairdresser and they marry, but the terrorist attacks of September 11th inspire suspicion and hate crimes against his family. When his 14 year-old step son is murdered by a racist, after-school soccer team, Rizwan's wife has a breakdown and orders him to leave the house on a mission: Find the President of the United States and tell him: "My name is Khan, and I am not a terrorist!"

But Khan's efforts to reach the president run into trouble at a George W. Bush support rally in San Francisco, when security hear him yelling "Terrorist!" (as in, "I am not a terrorist!"). They arrest him and bring him to a Guantanamo-like facility, where he is tortured and interrogated. A federal judge releases him when it's discovered that rather than being a terrorist, Khan had actually reported the plot of a radical imam to the FBI.

Free from prison, Khan journeys to Georgia, where he saves the town of Willamina from a Hurricane Katrina-type storm, inspiring other American Muslims to assert their identities and perform acts of community service. Unfortunately, while reconciling with his wife while constructing a makeshift hospital, Khan is stabbed by the very imam he had reported to the FBI!

Meanwhile, Barack Obama is elected President on a pro-Georgia Reconstruction platform, and at his first speech as president-elect, invites Rizwan--just out of the hospital--to share the podium with him, and Khan finally has his chance to tell the American government: "My name is Khan, and I am not a terrorist."

You can watch the trailer here.

Mark and Juliah

2nd Quarterly Report: January 1-April 1st.

2010-03-18T23:20:00.000-07:00

This honeymoon has its own anniversary. And now we are celebrating six months.

Countries Visited This Quarter: Cambodia, Thailand, Bhutan, India and Sri Lanka (we arrived in Sri Lanka March 25, so we won't mention it much in this report.)

Sunglasses Replaced (six month count):
Juliah:6
Mark:1

Hotels used this quarter: 29
Hotels used to date: 67

Longest Stay: Varanasi, India: nine days.

Highest fever recorded: 103 degrees. The honor goes to Mark. Nicely done, Mark.

Types of Animals Pet/Handled (to date): 14
(cow, dog, cat, rabbit, toad, fish, hawk, buffalo, pig, chicken, goat, elephant, pigeon, gecko)

Hours Spent on Trains in India: 102 ("Groooooaaaan" --Mark)

Miles Traveled in India: 3,160. (please note that total mileage was calculated "as the crow flies." actual mileage may be greater.)
see the google map for route details.

Favorite Sleep:
Juliah: Ganpati Guest House, Varanasi. We had a simple room on the top floor overlooking the Ganges. It was the best people watching on earth. At sunrise, boats of pilgrims took to the water. At night, crazy tourists swam. We spend a week on the top balcony, practicing Hindi with the hotel staff and eating pomegranates.

Mark: Gantey Palace Hotel, A former prime minister slept in our bed. Hotel staff provided hot water bottles under the sheets, and the room was enormous, if freezing. We had a killer view of the Paro Valley just outside our window.

Rudest Awakening:
Juliah: I had fallen asleep in a Jeep Taxi on the way down the mountains from Darjeeling. It was a share taxi, the kind that works like a public bus, picking up people along the road and cramming them in wherever they fit. I was wedged between two Indian men when I fell asleep. I woke up to something wet on my hand and realized that it was saliva. I had drooled all over myself and was ultimately woken up by my own spit. Of course, my fellow passengers were too polite to let on that they had noticed.

Mark: After a 9 hour overnight train to Kolkata, we were woken by the sound of yelling and clapping. In my groggy state, I thought it was a conductor coming through to kick us out. When I looked again, I saw it was a hijra, an Indian transvestite, also known as the "third gender." Hijras come through trains and harass male passengers for money. I later saw a man refuse to pay one, and she flirted with him, brushed his cheek, and tried to touch him while other passengers laughed and the man fumed.

Favorite Act of Kindness:
Juliah: Leaving the Capital of Bhutan for the Indian border, our bus made a routine lunch stop at a small restaurant on the side of the windy road. We marched in to the restaurant with the other passengers and found a seat next to the fire. The Bhutanese woman sitting across from us helped us order Tibetan dumplings (momos) and two cups of tea. When it came time to pay for our food, the woman told us that she had bought us lunch because otherwise they would have overcharged us. She refused to let us pay her back. When we reached the border town, her son climbed on top of the bus to retrieve our bags and the two of them took us to our hotel in a taxi to make sure we found our way. The taxi dropped us at a hotel and we waved good bye to the woman and her son as they crossed the border to the Indian side of town where they lived.

Mark: These are almost too numerous to count, but met some very kind Kashmiris in Varanasi who chatted with us for 10 minutes, gave us free breakfast from their food stand, refused our money, and insisted we come visit them in their home someday. People say many terrible things about India: that the country is filthy, the people are obsessed with money, that locals are rude; but the opposite is also often true. Everybody bathes, even if they do it in the streets from public pumps. For every 10 people who harangue you for baksheesh, one will buy you a meal, a train ticket, or a cup of chai. Leaving Chennai for the airport, we met a man headed for work who asked me in all seriousness, "What is your nice name, sir?"

Favorite Meal:
Juliah: On our first Saturday in Bhutan we climbed Tiger's nest. It was a a very steep climb in high altitude that lead to stunning mountain views laced with prayer flags and clean mountain streams. At the top is a cold little monastery build against the cliff. Most folks save it for their last day when they are good and used to Bhutan's altitude, but not us. We climbed Tiger's Nest on our second day in the mountains.
After the hike, we went to Yeshi's house for dinner. We sat next to the fire and ate all sorts of amazing Bhutanese food with the Dorji clan and their friends. It was so nice to be among friendly people and eating good food in a warm home after our harrowing hike.

Mark: Nothing beats Thai cooking, but India put up a fierce competition. We had some very fresh, 5-cent cauliflower samosa in Varanasi that were out of this world. I had them once and could never find them again. A hole-in-the-wall restaurant in Mysore served us a set menu on a banana leaf. The menu was different everyday, and as soon as you'd finish with one item, a man would come by and replenish your curry, dal, or vegetables from a bucket, as often as you'd like. You could stay for hours, and each meal was under a dollar.

Coldest Place:
Juliah: Bumthang, Bhutan in February. We put all our cloths on to have dinner next to the stove. After dinner we thought it would be nice to wander around town. After passing two store fronts, we decided instead to head back to the hotel where Mark and I feel asleep in one twin bed, huddled together for extra warmth.

Mark: Agreed. There were wide spaces between the wooden slats in the wall, and at night Juliah would say she could hear the glaciers moving outside. Under 4 layers of clothing and 5 blankets, I could still feel my extremities going numb.

Warmest Place:
Allepey, Kerala, India in mid-March. I started sweating around 9:30 am. I was standing in the shade next to a canal waiting for a ferry and I couldn't stop the sweat from dripping on to my book. When we reached the homestay, our hosts told us they only did tours at 7:30 am and 5:30pm as it was too hot for them to go out at any other time of day.

Favorite New Thing:
Juliah: Prayer wheels. There is nothing like turning prayer wheels as you walk clockwise around a 7th century Buddhist monastery as the sunrises over the snow dusted Himalayas. In Bhutan we went to Buddhist temple after Buddhist temple. While they were all very beautiful, with large gold buddhas, murals and offerings, temple fatigue quickly set in. Prayer wheels became a nice way to experience a religious site without glazing over.

Mark: Eating with your hands rocks! The trick is to make a little shovel with the fingers of your right hand and then spoon it into your face. It's a little messy but a lot of fun, and you'll notice that Indians wash their hands more often than any other people we've met.

Mark and Juliah

A Night in Bhutan

2010-02-20T03:49:00.000-08:00

"Look, cranes!" I shout as the car coasts down from the mountains into the Phoebijika valley. We have passed our first yaks on the snow patched summit after hours of hairpin turns through the mountains of Eastern Bhutan. Mark and Ugyen, our driver, squint through the windshield at the large flat expanse. The Black Neck Cranes come to the Phoebijika Valley to winter. In the spring they return to the Tibetan Plataea. "No wait, those are prayer flags!" They laugh, but the flapping white things seem to rise a bit. "Nope, those are cranes." We all squint across the expanse of marshland to see the large white birds take flight.

Ugyen tells us that there are no local hotels in the valley and most of the tourist hotels will cost more than we are used to. In the high tourist season, sometimes tourists have to stay with local families. Mark and I exchange glances, some discussion ensues, a phone call is made, then we are on our way to stay the night with a potato farming family. Tourist hotel be damned!

Ugyen negotiates the car across the dried marshland until the road disappears in the middle valley outside a small monastery. The wind whips across the plain making the bunches of white prayer flags on poles snap back and forth. The sun has begun to set over the far hills and the shadow across the valley is growing.

Ugyen approaches the monks to ask if we can leave the car there. It turns out the monk's car is broken. We help the monks push the car across the tundra as Ugyen gets in the drivers seat to make it start. "This is the reason I bought all that special clothing before we left" I think back smugly on the hours of agonizing decisions in REI and Paragon sporting good stores back in the US. It was so exciting to think of what we might encounter and what gear would prepare me for it. Then I look down and saw that all the clothing I had on today I had bought in a market in Cambodia. The minivan putters 50 yards and Ugyen emerges triumphantly. The head lama thanks him and drives off towards the sun now rapidly setting behind the mountains.

We grab our bags from the trunk and start walking up the hill. "I think its that house" Ugyen gestures to a mud house half way up the hill still golden in sunlight." We march up the hill through the scrub bamboo and over a small muddy stream with muddy rocks. The wind howls and whips up sheer cold as muddy temple dogs pad past me, nearly knocking me over as I battle between warming my hands in my pockets and keeping them out for balance.

Soon a young woman in an olive kira and a grey north face fleece appears on the hill side. She cocks her head and smiles and offers to take a bag. Then she leads us the rest of the way to her 70 year old mud farm house near the potato fields. She and Ugyen stomp their feet and yell at the three temple dogs who have come up the hill and encourage them to go home. "Leopards" she explains. If the dogs don't go home, they will be eaten by leopards. With that, she ushers us into the house. I notice that this is one of the few homes I have been to that has no dogs.

The mother and father appear at the door of the house and usher us in. We take off our shoes and come in to a small dark wooden room. In once corner is a propane stove and some pots and pans on a shelf above. In the other corner sits a neatly folded stack of blankets. In the center of the room is a pot belly stove with some small seating mats encircling it. Behind this room are two more. We put our bags in the corner and sit down.

We spend the evening drinking milky sweet tea around the stove, a cat curled under our knees (proof, I think, that the family had offered us the warmest seat in the house). With Ugyen as an interpreter they ask us where we are from and how long we have been in Bhutan. Then they chat amongst themselves and with Ugyen, who, as it turns out, is only shy in English.

Dinner is local red rice, home grown potatoes cooked with chili homemade cheese and dried beef cooked with more potatoes. The father urges us to eat more and more, refilling our cups from a seemingly endless pot of dahl until we feel drowsy. Then the daughters get up and make our bed in the alter room. "Are you happy here?" asks the 80 year old grandma sitting on the floor across the stove from us. Yes, yes, we say emphatically. Happy and warm. The family laughs. I am afraid you think we are dirty" says the older daughter in English. No, no. We insist.

One of the daughters escorts me to the outhouse with a flashlight before bed. We brush our teeth together on the porch and I ask her about her schooling. She is studying to be a teacher in Paro. Then we are ushered into the Alter room, one wall completely full with calendar pictures of gods and Buddhas and a burning butter lamp beneath them. Large pieces of bacon hang from a rack on the ceiling. Our bed is a series of mats and blankets carefully arranged on the floor. We put on all our clothing on and arrange blankets strategically before going to bed and shiver beneath the bacon.

jl

Mark and Juliah

Adventures in India, Veg and Non-Veg

2010-02-18T22:48:00.000-08:00

We found an interesting article in the Kolkata Telegraph about urban professionals who've been robbed with snakes. Kolkata is such a teeming, colorful mess of people, food, and the bizarre. After 6 days here, the idea of taxi passengers have snakes thrown at them in the name of Bholebaba no longer seems strange. Bands of totally naked children run to you in the street, tug at your arm, beg for money, and follow you for blocks. Outside Kalighat Temple, someone tried to hand me a pigeon. You need a sort of evasive grace to make it down the street here: beggars and street children emerge from the corners and come directly to you; adults walk up to you with broad, paan-stained smiles, arms out, as if to shake hands. "Hello, sir!" But shaking hands can be the biggest mistake of your day, as these men have iron grips, and won't let go until they're done with their spiel: a desperate fumbling for a personal connection ("Your country USA...Obama!"), a plea to visit their shop ("No charge for looking!").

We started one day checking e-mail at a nearby internet cafe, but had to leave when an electrical fire started in the corner of the room, flushing out the patrons with acrid smoke. Our other plans that day included a subway trip to Kalighat, to visit the temple of Kolkata's patron goddess: the multi-armed, black-skinned destroyer Kali. I was super-excited by this trip, my 10 year-old undergraduate degree in Religion coming back to me in foggy bits. Kolkata--formerly Calcutta--is the ancient resting place of one of the goddess's severed toes, and one of the holiest places in India for offering a goat.

I thought I would be disturbed, but the sacrifice was quick and the animal was neatly beheaded: one moment it was standing quietly in the corner, eating red flowers from another goat's garland necklace; the next moment, it was walked to a guillotine and decapitated by a strong man with a mustache and scimitar. The family who have brought the goat dipped their middle fingers into the pooling blood and dabbed it against their foreheads, like a kind of tikka.

But Julie and I were hungering for a weirder scene, so we went to Varanasi--also called Benares, also called Kashi--the holiest site along the Ganges River, the city of Shiva, destroyer of the universe, where sadhus come to paint themselves in a holy ochre and roam the steps leading to the water. Our guesthouse was several blocks from the burning ghat, where families bring their newly dead to be cremated. We passed by the cremation sites with hoards of other tourists, foreigners and Indians, and our clothes became saturated with the smell of ash. "No photos! No photos!" a well-dressed Indian man barked at every foreign face, sometimes to no avail as pasty white tourists clicked their shutters at the crowds and the embers. A semi-charred leg rolled out of the fire, and the priest tending it would roll it back in.

In spite of round-the-clock burning funeral pyres, narrow streets congested with temperamental cows, and constant pitches for silk, musical instruments, hashish, imported Chinese toys, prayer baskets, and caged birds, Varanasi is an excellent place for hanging out, walking the length of the city by the holy river, watching funeral processions from the inside of a lassi shop, and taking things in: talking to other travelers, to Indians, to shopkeepers, tea sellers, rickshaw drivers, boat rowers, child touts, and guesthouse staff. After weeks here, you can start to understand the bewildering diversity in this country of a billion; how people can describe themselves as Gujurati, Punjabi, Keralan, Kashmiri; Hindu, Muslim, Jain, Buddist, Jewish; Businessman, Holy Man, Poor Man, Artist, Host, and Friend. In 6 weeks here, we covered over 3,000 miles--most of it by train, usually moving no more than 40 miles per hour. But we feel also that we've barely scratched the surface...but that any more time here might drive us both crazy.

ma

Mark and Juliah

Inventory Time

2010-02-08T01:01:00.000-08:00

It's what's inside that counts, right?
Now that we have been traveling for over four months, we'd like to take a minute to tell you about what is inside our bags. What we still have, what we picked up and what we have lost along they way.

Best Thing I Bought:
Juliah: Dominoes! We bought them at a small country store in Sulawesi, Indonesia for 20 cents a set. They're made of cardboard and each set is the size of a roll of film. The dominoes totally save the day. There is often a lot of down time on a trip like this. Having some cheap games makes you a more patient traveler.

Other games we have are Othello, which I bought in Japan, and Connect Four, which we picked up in Thailand. These are good because the rules are easy to communicate and easy to follow. This means you can usually pick up a new player or a spectator at least anywhere you go.

Mark: A new tattoo! Thais are very into spiritual tattoos (though their designs actually come from Cambodia), and there are hundreds of images for a variety of purposes. The one I picked out is a 9 Spire Sak Yant Gao Yord that protects and brings good luck. I don't know why I spent all that money on travel insurance.

Since we arrived in Bhutan, I've also been very grateful for the thin, warm layer I picked up in Phnom Penh's Russian Market. I've worn it almost 10 consecutive days without washing, have slept in it, and spilled yak butter tea on the sleeves. It smells like travel, but it keeps me from freezing.

JL: Mark's only other long shirt of Mark's has affectionately been dubbed "Stinky Blue."

Most Recent Purchase:
Juliah: A clothes line and clothes pins. $1.50. Laundry has become a very satisfying activity for me. I'm getting much better at washing clothes in hotel sinks.

Mark: Prayer flags. These cost something like $10 in the tourist markets, but we picked ours up for $3 at a temple in Thimpu. And they've already been blessed by monks.

Thing We Lost That We Really Miss:
Juliah: Our camp light! We used it for everything: reading late at night, reassuring ourselves after malarone-induced nightmares, bathing with a bucket when the power was out, escorting our British friends back to their hotel late at night past barking dogs. I left it at a home stay on an island in the middle of the Mekong River in Cambodia. Hours later on the bus to Eastern Cambodia, I had a dream that our homestay host asked me "Juliah, why did you leave your camp light here?". The odd thing is that the woman spoke 7 words of English in real life, but in my dream we could really converse. That night we went through our bags and confirmed that yes, we had indeed left our camp light there.

Mark: My lightweight, warm, black shirt from REI camping store, forgotten on an overnight bus from Laos to Bangkok. There's such a crush of tuk-tuks and touts whenever a bus disembarks, that Julie and I had a strategy to get off quickly, grab our bags, and run two blocks away from the bus. Unfortunately, I was groggy and disoriented, and left behind the warmest thing I owned.

Favorite Thing I Brought:
Juliah: Contact lenses and hiking boots. Everything else I think I can find here.

Mark: Journal: perfect for scrapbooking beer labels from across Asia.

Last Thing I Left Behind:
Juliah: A snorkel. I left it in Bangkok. It served its purpose and probably won't get much use in India and the middle east. Thanks for the snorkel,dad.

Mark: Purple, short-sleeved button-down shirt. I have almost none of the original clothing I brought from the States.

Things I Don't Need Anymore
Juliah: Toilet paper. I'm almost over it altogether. Pretty cool, right?

Mark: Asthma Medicine. Amazing how 4 months in Asia can clear up a chronic respiratory problem.

Thing I Would Like to Ditch Next:
Juliah: Mosquito Net. Its pretty light weight and useful but we haven't used it at all! So far we've been lucky with the bugs. It was dry in south east asia or else too cold for mosquitoes.

Mark: Malaria pills. It's horrible medicine that needs to be taken daily, induces stomach cramps and sunburn.

Thing I Covet the Most:
Juliah: more clothes. I just wish I had more choices, but I guess that's a sacrifice you make when you travel light.

Mark: Right now, I covet gloves.

Juliah: Mom and Dad, there is a box of stinky old clothing headed to the house right now, but don't worry, the thai post office said it would take two or three months to arrive.

Mark and Juliah

The Altitude Hits You and You Fall Down

2010-02-08T00:15:00.001-08:00

While you catch your breath, here are some interesting facts about Bhutan:

Bhutan has one of the strictest tourist policies in the world. Having witnessed the rise of tourism in neighboring India and Nepal, Bhutan has regulated the tourist industry to keep out low budget backpackers. The average tourist must pay $200 to $250 a day to be in the country.

Bhutan got its first popularly elected Prime Minister in 2008. Most Bhutanese will tell you they wish the king was still in power.

Bhutan uses "Gross National Happiness" rather than mere economic measurements to measure its progress towards society's greater good.

The penis is considered a protective image. Pictures of penises adorn walls of buildings while wooden penises hang from the eves to protect the home. (See our flickr page for extensive documentation http://www.flickr.com/photos/markandjuliah/)

Located in the Eastern Himalayas, it is said that there are so many mountains in Bhutan that many have not been named, let alone climbed.

There are only two flights in to the entire country per day.

Bhutan got television for the first time in 1999.

To enter temples, schools and other government buildings, Bhutanese nationals are required to wear national dress.

There are no traffic lights in the country.

20% of the country is under constant snowfall.

By Constitutional Law, 60% of the country must remain covered by forest. Currently 68 to 72% of the country's land is covered in forest.

They have free health care for everyone--even altitude-sick tourists.

Mark and Juliah

The Nine Best Ideas in South East Asia

2010-01-25T19:43:00.000-08:00

Last night we went out for a little escapist pleasure and saw Sherlock Holmes in Bangkok's Siam Square. After 128 days of continuous travel, it was nice to sit in a cool theater, get sucked into American entertainment, and forget that we were supposed to be engaging in rewarding cross-cultural experiences. The movie was excellent, and started after only two trailers and a 90 second homage to King Bhumipol. Check it out if you get the chance. Everyone in the theater stands while this is playing.

We've got about 36 hours left in Thailand before we fly to Bhutan, via Kolkata. Julie's getting some highlights while I do laundry and hunt down some paperback books. Over our last few pitchers of Beer Chang, we've had time to consider some of the best ideas to come out of South East Asia. Here they are, in no particular order:

1. Street Food. Okay, this might actually be the best thing in South East Asia. Street food is sold from wheeled carts and grilled or fried immediately as you order it, so it's often more sanitary than the restaurant meals that may have been sitting for hours in the corner of a dodgy kitchen. There are hundreds of options, it costs a fraction of what you'd spend anyplace else, gives you a chance to banter and practice your language skills with the vendor, and you know your money is supporting people at the bottom of the economy struggling to get a leg up. Yay, street food!

2. Tuk-tuks. Named after the sound of their motors: "tuk-tuk-tuk-tuk...." You can cross Phnom Penh from North to South for about $0.75. In Thailand, they look like a green, three-wheeled egg. In Laos and Cambodia, they're usually just a motorcycle with a carriage hitch.

3. Fresh, Green Pepper. Not chili pepper, but "pepper" pepper. It's cooked fresh with your meal: soft, ripe, and about the size of tobiko caviar. Fresh pepper pops in your mouth, and the flavor is strong like bitter dark chocolate.

4. Mortar and Pestle. Grinding spices releases and blends flavors more effectively than a food processor. The twenty minutes it takes to mash raw ingredients into curry paste is well worth it. If you don't have one at home, go get a large, wooden mortar for your kitchen.

5. The Wai. Put both hands together in a prayer position at your forehead and give a little bow. For over a billion people in Southeast Asia and India it means "Hello," "Goodbye," "Thank you," and "Welcome." More humble and less ambiguous than a handshake.

6. Monks. Most Thai, Lao, and Khmer men are expected to spend a period of their lives in a monastery. Some serve only 6 months, while others train for 10 to 20 years. Monks perform acts of charity, prayers for their communities, and give daily blessings in return for alms. They live off of nothing that is not given to them.

7. Constitutional Monarchies. Thai people really love their king, and are fiercely patriotic. Check out this video. Most of it is in Thai, but it's still fascinating.

8. Haggling. Even in some department stores, there's no set price. The disadvantage is that there's usually tiered pricing: one for locals and one for foreigners.

9. Geckos. They're small and green, and they chirp and eat mosquitoes. What's not to like?

Mark and Juliah

First Quarterly Report

2010-01-14T03:44:00.001-08:00

First Quarterly Report
By Juliah

January, 2009 Kampot Cambodia

After over three months on the road, I feel compelled to give you a quarterly summary. Thanks City of New York, I obviously haven't forgotten the work we did together. Here, we have chosen some very important qualitative and quantitative indicators to provide you with a snapshot of our travels so far. Let us know if you have any suggestions for other data we can/should track and we will probably do it.

Countries visited:
South Korea, Indonesia, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia.

Average daily expenditures (for the both of us)-$56

Sunglasses Replaced:

Juliah-
Seoul, South Korea $8 (they came with a case!)

Manado, Indonesia $2 (the red ones)

Bangkok, Thailand $1.50 (blue)

Mark- none

Three points Juliah. Juliah wins.

Accommodations used to date: 43

Note: We have slowed down considerably from when we first started this trip. In our first month or two, a change in accommodation was more likely to indicate movement between towns or attractions. Now we find ourselves changing accommodations within one town more often- like to move to cheaper or more comfortable places.

Cheapest Accomodations: Muang Ngoi, Laos, $3.75 for a riverside bungalow. It had a nice balcony, electricity from 6pm to 10 and a shared bathroom round the back.

Most Expensive Accommodations: Seoul, South Korea, $35 for a room in a large budget hotel where you had to request the sheets but you get instant coffee in the morning.

Modes of Transportation thus far

airplane, taxi, shuttle bus, day ferry, donkey cart, outrigger canoe (motorized), motorcycle, trekking, cargo truck, share taxi, city bus, overnight train, sangthaw (its a pick-up with benches in the back), overnight ferry, double decker overnight bus, bicycle, tuktuk(benches pulled by a motorcycle), riverboat.

Flat Tires Attained: 3

Sulawesi Indonesia:2

Kampot, Cambodia: 1

Best Animal Related Injuries

Juliah: In the Monkey Forest in Ubud, Bali, a monkey climbed on to my shoulder and ripped out my earring. It took the earring up into a tree and sucked on it for a few minutes before spitting it out. My ear hurt for a few days. I kept wearing the earring for several weeks.

Mark: On Koh Wai, Thailand, a nasty centipede crawled up my swim suit and bit me three times on the left and right legs. Everyone there was very nice about it, but the the spots ached for weeks!

Memorable Meal

Juliah:

1. Day 2 of our trip, in Seoul we decided to have a sashimi lunch at the fish market. The Seoul fish market is huge and full of, well, fish. Its bigger than Cosco. We confused the exchange rate and ended up ordering a $60 sashimi meal instead of a $6 sashimi meal. We realized this too late and decided we just had to roll with it. The number plates and dishes that followed were mind boggling. We didn't know what it all was and which parts we should have been eating. It was day 1 of sitting on the floor and my legs had fallen asleep before the sashimi even arrived. We washed as much of it down with Soju as we could. See our flickr page for the pictures.

2. We took a motorcycle tour in Eastern Cambodia and stopped in to a Pagoda around lunch time. The monks and the abbot were just finishing lunch and after some talk between our drivers and the pagoda staff, it was decided that we would eat lunch here. We sat on the floor in front of the large gold budda on matts and ate the lunches we brought with us. Then a woman offered us tea, the remaining food the monks had eaten and rice from an alms bowl (the kind that monks across SE Asia use to collect food from the community each morning.) Sadly, the alms bowl rice didn't taste any different from regular rice. At the end of the meal the abbot requested we take a picture together.

Mark:
1. JULIAH ATE DOG! We were starting a two-day hike through Sulawesi, Indonesia and our guide was buying a little package of dog meat for himself. He asked if we wanted to try some, and Juliah took a heaping handful, ground up with chili and lemongrass.

I did not eat dog.

2. On our overnight village stay on that same trip, our guide Budi arranged for us to eat Papion. It wasn't the most delicious meal, but the preparation was amazing. We helped pick out the chicken for slaughter, and then we got to hold it and play with it for a bit. After it was killed and cleaned, the parts were mixed with rice, diced banana stalk, and instant noodle seasoning, then poured into a long segment of bamboo and cooked directly in the fire, while the head of the household kept beating a pesky cat with a stick. The taste was overall pretty plain, but the preparation was amazing.

Notable Sleep

Juliah: Trekking in Tana Toraja we got to stay the night with a family who lived in one of those crazy carved houses. (Note: this was actually the same day I ate dog and chicken in bamboo that Mark mentions above). We had dinner with them and watched the soap operas from Malaysia until the generator went off at 9pm. The older daughter had given us her bedroom for the night. It was one of the three rooms and was at the front of the home. The bed was a two inch mattress on the floor and two blankets. As we were settling in, she ran upstairs to us and said in English "simple" and gestured at the room, as if she were embarrassed about how simple her home was. I think she learned the word from our guide downstairs and ran upstairs before she could forget it. In our limited Indonesian, we told her that the house was beautiful and thanked her for letting us sleep there.

Mark: Our first night's stay in Bangkok was pretty horrendous. It was the cheapest place we could find, but the walls were just plywood and the mattress was just a thin layer of sawdust.

Food We Love

Juliah- Coconut pudding dumplings in Thailand, Roasted sticky rice served in banana leaves in Indonesia, mango salads, cold sugar cane juice with orange served with crushed ice in a plastic bag, green onion dumplings.

Mark: Lao sticky rice, Thai green curry, our first meal of Indonesian nasi goreng, and Cambodian iced coffee with sweetened condensed milk.

Best Splurges:

Juliah: Jeans! I bought them for $10 at the Russian Market in Phnom Phen. Since so many clothing factories are in Cambodia now, you can buy clothing really cheap. Jeans are totally impractical for this climate and travel but they make me feel like a human being again.

Mark: Scuba diving certification in Indonesia! It was a serious expense, around $350, but it include something like 20 hours of instruction and 4 ocean dives, and it's allowed me to continue diving with Juliah.

Memorable Party

Juliah: This is easy, because we haven't had many parties. Most of the time, its just the two of us, drinking a local beer and playing dominos in the evening. Two evenings come to mind.

Pay day at the Scuba Shop on Gili Meno in Indonesia

Mark was getting his scuba certification and we practically lived at the dive center. When we walked by the only bar on the island, the local scuba guys beckoned us to have a drink with them. Later, the poi came out and there was fire dancing. Mark amazed all the 18 year olds punk rock surfer guys who worked in the dive shop with his fire dancing. Their jaws dropped to see a older white guy twirling fire. Afterwards, we looked at those green glowing things in the water (phosherates?) and I fell into the ocean.

Tubing in Vang Vieng, Laos

So you rent an inner tube for $5 and take a tuk tuk up the river and find bars full of hundreds of half naked 22 year-olds drinking and zip-lining in to the water. After a beer or two at the first place, you and ten of your new best friends smear more sunscreen on each other and get on your inner tube and slowly float down to the next bar. The bar staff throw you a rope to reel you into their bar. Then they help you to stack your inner tub on the already gigantic pile of inner tubes. This goes on for about 10 bars. The whole scene felt so hazardous- so much drinking and poorly constructed rope swings over shallow water. All the same, it is a time and a place unlike any I have ever seen.

Mark: There was also Christmas at Niall's house in Phnom Penh. Just before we left California, we joined a social networking site called CouchSurfing, that allows people all over the world to connect while traveling through homestays and coffee dates. Niall is a British guy living in Phnom Penh and a few housemates, and the four of them were generous enough to throw an open-invitation Christmas party for 25 strangers in their penthouse apartment. We met some incredible people and had a great time.

Some awesome things that made it all worthwhile

Diving a airplane wreck in Indonesia
Washing an elephant in a waterfall
Exploring a floating village at sunset in a boat with local young people
Sharing a meal with 1,000 people at a funeral in Indonesia
Kayaking through a green mountainous valley with no one else around
Getting an amazing thai massage in a temple in Bangkok

Most Frustrating

Juliah:
1.Asian style toilets. I don't understand why I am still peeing on my left foot every.single.time. I wish I could watch other women use the toilet to see what they are doing. But I have not been able to facilitate this so far. . .
2. Tiered pricing systems. I pay $8 that locals pay $1 for.

Mark: The Indian Embassy in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. When we applied for our visa in person, we were told we needed to submit photocopies of our passports and paperwork--something not mentioned online. This required a mile's walk through the city during the hottest part of the day to find a working photocopier, and a race back to the embassy to submit our application before the noon deadline.

Interesting People We've Met
I think this was Michael, an older American who'd moved to Cambodia in 1992 to start the country's first English-language newspaper, the Phnom Penh Post. His only previous experience with journalism was as a newspaper delivery boy. He'd been in Cambodia when the UN Transitional Governing Authority pulled out and just as Cambodians were sorting through the rubble and rebuilding their country, and he'd documented the very violent coup of 1997 when separate political parties had their own tanks and soldiers fighting in the streets. He said he'd only been able to publish about every other week, "the most infrequent weekly in South East Asia," but the coverage had been brazen: interviews with child soldiers, photographs of soldiers going through the pockets of air crash victims. When we met him, he'd recently returned from several weeks in Afghanistan.

Most Annoying Fellow Backpacker

Juliah: French woman on bus in Laos from border of Thailand and her stupid German boyfriend. They rolled their eyes and snorted everytime the bus stopped. The bus kept stopping because the driver was looking for gas before trying to cross an isolated strip of mountains. The european couple would have noticed had they looked up from their lap top. When they did look up, the german dude came around to the front of the bus, sat in the drivers seat and honked the horn at the driver. It was a bad moment for white people everywhere. Oh, AND he threw trash out of the bus window. Who does that?

Mark: In Vang Vieng, Laos, we met this bizarre Swedish guy who lured us to his friend's bar and just became stranger and more annoying as the night went on. He asked us about our lives back home and what we did for work, then said, "Oh, I'm a carpenter, healer, rescue diver; I do many, many things." He later said he hoped something really awful would happen to the US, that it would fail and that it would be good for the world.

Things we have learned about ourselves that we feel like sharing

Juliah:

1. I have a good sense of direction. I can take you to places that neither of us have ever been before, but I some how know how to get us there.

2. I am more afraid of heights than I would like to admit. But I just admited it! There, glad thats out in the open.

3. I am fine with very little. A bucket of water for a shower, a plate of rice for a meal, one pair of pants. No problem. Bring it.

Mark:
1. Travel is more rewarding when you can speak the local language, and I really enjoy learning foreign languages. Just a few words can get you much closer to local people, and that's been the most rewarding part of this trip.

2. I have a serious fear of biting and stinging insects. Since the centipede incident one month ago, I keep swatting at imaginary red ants in my shorts.

Surprises so Far:

Juliah:

1. Mark is STILL talking to me!

2. I'm not exhausted or grumpy or jaded at this point in the trip.

Mark:
1. In the eight years since I was last here, there have been some serious changes in South East Asia. Many of them are positive: people have higher standards of living, the roads have improved, and more schools have been opened. But mass tourism development has left a mark on some previously very beautiful and quiet places, and I'm not always happy to see large, loud crowds of culturally insensitive foreigners interfering with monks in Laos or laughing in some of the more somber places in Cambodia.
2. We are under budget! We never have to go home!

Hopes/Fears for the Future

Juliah: I have an irrational fear of running out of SPF 85 sunscreen. Thanks mom and Kate for the last shipment.

Mark: I'm looking forward to dumping some of the weight in my backpack! We haven't bought many souvenirs, but the small things have been adding up. I also hope we can continue to avoid dysentery in 2010.

Mark and Juliah

True Tales of Survival from Cambodia

2010-01-03T19:22:00.000-08:00

If you've ever imagined ghosts rising from their grave to haunt a dark cemetery, you'd have a pretty accurate picture of Phnom Penh's Killing Fields. Through the nearly 4 year nightmare of the Khmer Rouge, two million people were starved to death, worked to death, forced to farm fields studded with hidden landmines, beaten to death with hammers, rifle butts, and against the trunks of trees. 20,000 of them were dumped at this site, one of 300 around the country. Reconstruction efforts designated this place a site of remembrance and mourning, gathered the remains of as many victims as could be recovered, and placed them in a memorial stupa in the center of the field, a former Chinese cemetery. Many of the bodies were buried too deep and scattered too far for recovery, and now, 31 years after the fall of Pol Pot and the KR army, when the rainy seasons churn the ground to mud, chips of bone and scraps of cloth sift from the earth and float to the surface, occasionally fragments of skulls still blindfolded in traditional red krama scarves.

The older generations (meaning anyone over 35, since the average age in Cambodia is 18), remembers the KR and the following years of war vividly. They recall their own humiliations and suffering, but none who we've met will discuss their feelings about the leadership: not only Pol Pot and Ieng Sary, but the village chiefs who facilitated violence and starvation, the teenaged children who conducted the interrogations and murders. "Cambodian people remember, but they do not say,"one man told me, himself a former Khmer Rouge soldier until his parents were murdered. "We don't want to be angry, but we know which countries did this." Start with Richard Nixon, which orchestrated a coup and installed a corrupt, viciously anti-communist puppet who would allow the US military to carpet bomb Cambodia's eastern border, where Vietnamese troops were building bases. Consider Great Britain and France, who taught Cambodians how to lay land mines, still maiming farmers and children today. Blame also China, who traded guns for food with the Khmer Rouge at a time when Cambodians were starving to death, anticipating that the KR would use them against their ancient enemies, the Vietnamese. Cambodia is still awash in Kalashnikov machine guns. There's no one devil behind the atrocities, just the manipulations of superpowers fighting a proxy war over ideology.

I do want to share with you how amazing this country is: the people are humorous, giving, and show kindness without limit; the land is flat, covered in rice paddies and majestic, tall pagodas against a background of small hills, karsts, and mountains. Phnom Penh is a clean and sophisticated city with cafes, noodle stalls, silk shops, and a rich tradition of foreign communities and western ex-patriots who bring their own colors to the culture. But the crowds of street children and amputees keep prompting the same questions about the terrible history of the country. Instead of writing about our adventures, I'm going to try and share stories of some of the people we've met here, who've been generous with their time and every other resource they've had at their disposal.

Sokha Keo

Sokha Keo was the very first person we met in Cambodia, just about an hour after crossing the border from Thailand. We'd had a rough time crossing immigration: Julie had haggled down the price of our visa from $40 to $25, which I didn't think was even possible. The border guard wore no name tag and no shirt, and refused to give his name or any kind of receipt. It was a quick introduction to the corruption of public officials in Cambodia.

It was too late to reach Sihanoukville in the south, so we walked into town to seek out lunch. We had no Cambodian money, spoke none of the language, and had no hotel.

"Can I join you?" a man asked us from another table. "I am a student of English," he said, and proceeded to tell us about his teacher, an American who had left several years prior. Sokha recommended dishes for us to try, shared some food from his own plate, and said he would be happy to pay for our meal, though we rejected the last offer.

"Are you from Koh Kong," I asked him.

"No. I am born in Phnom Penh, but I am an orphan. My parents were killed, Khmer Rouge, so I come here to the orphanage in Koh Kong. Now I work at the social affairs and rehabilitation department."

"Oh," we said, not really sure how to respond, feeling uncomfortable, realizing that back home it's culturally taboo to ask questions about death.

"Do you want to come to my house?" he asked. We turned him down, feeling too green in Cambodia to know or trust people, but he gave us his number and asked us to drop in on him the next time we were in his town.

Receptionist at the Ankor Meas Hotel

We reached Phnom Penh the next day in the late afternoon. Reaching the capital city involved a 6 hour bus ride over smooth, new roads built by Chinese construction firms. We'd already checked in, and had spent the day exploring Phnom Penh: the Royal Palace, where the floors were covered in silver tiles, the National Museum, housing Hindu relics from Ankor Wat, and S-21, an old high school the Khmer Rouge converted to a detention and torture center where prisoners were kept immediately before transfer for execution at the Killing Fields. Now we were back at the hotel, chatting with the woman at the front desk.

"Are you from Phnom Penh?" I asked, wondering if she might recommend other cities in Cambodia.

"No, I'm from Kampong Thom," she said. "I moved here after the war."

"What do you remember from the war," I asked. "Do you remember the Khmer Rouge?"

"Always, poom-poom," she said, imitating the sound of machine gun fire. "Sometimes we eating, 'poom-poom', we have to drop everything and hide. We working, washing clothes, 'poom-poom,' we have to leave and run."

The woman was roughly our age, and I came to understand later that she wasn't referring to the Khmer Rouge, but to the years following their defeat--once the Vietnamese had invaded, chased Pol Pot into the jungle, and attempted to turn Cambodia into a colony. For nearly a decade, guerrilla battalions of KR soldiers held control of land in the south and east, making incursions into the cities to murder civilians.

Mr. Sreung

After visiting the ruins of Ankor Wat in Siem Reap, Julie had an idea to get as far away from the tourist circuit as we possibly could. In Kratie, roughly four hours south and east of Siem Reap, we could spot endangered Irrawady River Dolphins swimming in the Mekong, then take a boat to a small river island and stay with a family.

The home we found belonged to a slightly older couple, Mr. and Mrs. Sreung had grown children who lived nearby and visited often, though none of them spoke any English. Mrs. Sreung had a point book through which we were able to communicate that we could stay for $6 a night and request meals, though I vigorously underlined the picture showing that I had trouble with entrails, and ignored the illustration of dried stingray.

Mr. Sreung returned home from work every day at around 7pm, and initially showed very little interest in us. When Julie and I attempted to teach him dominoes, he tried to teach us a Khmer card game. None of us could really follow the rules, which seemed a cross of blackjack and poker, and Mr. Sreung opened up a bit, revealing he was diabetic, and that he knew some French.

"I was working for the French," I think he said (though he might've also said he lived in France, or was going to France).

"Oh, so it was good for you to be away when the Khmer Rouge came."

"No, no," he said. "All the time, working. Always working." He got up and went to his kitchen, returned with a small amount of rice that fit in the center of his palm. "This was for one person, for one day. All we had to eat." He got up and went to the kitchen again, returning this time with a small bowl filled with rice, enough for a single pot. "And this," he said, "was a ration for 40 people."

Mr. Thriy

Mr. Thriy was our guide to Bokor Hill Station, a resort for wealthy French colonialists abandoned in the 1950's, then used by Pol Pot as an army base and prison.

"Don't worry about the guide," he said, pointing to a shy official in flip flops, carrying a Kalashnikov rifle. "There is no crime in the jungle; he only carries the gun if we run into the wildlife. Like in Bokor, there is still the black bear."

"Also," he said, "I know many books explain about the landmine, but don't mind about the landmine here, because I was army, and I know when we put the landmine, we only use them against the army, then when we leave, we pick them up again."

"What army were you in?" we asked him later.

"Khmer Rouge army," he said. He had joined when he was 21, when the KR was a collection of loosely assembled bands of rural villagers reacting to American bombing in the east and President Lon Nol's suppression of communist sympathizers in the cities. A year after Pol Pot came to power in 1975, he learned the Khmer Rouge had killed both his parents. He deserted the army and lived alone in the jungle, eating wild potatoes, fish, and any game he could catch. "If I heard a person talking, I would run away," he said. "I still knew how to talk, but my mouth couldn't make a sound."

After two years of living in the forest, Mr. Thriy was captured by Vietnamese soldiers, who had invaded to fight KR attacks against border villages. "They tied me to a tree. I thought they were going to kill me, but I talked to them, and they could understand me, slowly, so then I became a soldier for the Vietnamese army." Fighting against the Khmer Rouge in a later battle, he had stepped on a landmine. "But a small one, a plastic one, so no problem. I'm moving so fast, I can't stop, but I knew what to do: jump on my side and tuck my leg." The explosion shattered his shin, which wasn't repaired until years later. Now, at age 53, he takes tour groups on mountain treks to Bokor Hill Station, close to where he fought the Khmer Rouge.

These are only a few of the stories we've heard from people over the last month, traveling Cambodia west to east and back to the Thai border. We love this country--enough to overstay our month-long visa and deal with the hassle of corrupt border officials--and if any of you were considering a trip to Thailand, I'd recommend Cambodia first.

If you're interested in learning more about the Khmer Rouge, I strongly recommend Loung Ung's First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers. It's a complicated history, and the author explains it much better than I can.

Thanks for keeping up with us over the last few months. We're working on a statistics and retrospective entry that should be up soon. We leave the Southeast Asian peninsula on January 28th for Bhutan.

Mark and Juliah

Bite You Back!

2009-12-25T19:55:00.000-08:00

On a Monday in December I was bitten by a centipede.

Coming from the States, you tend to picture these creatures as benign, sub-rock dwelling critters like salamanders, not the ferocious, thick-bodied nightmares that Thais use to spice their whiskey and whose bites can kill cats. Over breakfast of rice soup with squid, the bastard dropped on my leg from underneath the table, scooted up my bathing suit, and waited patiently for me to notice.

When the Thais saw me yelping, they rushed over, saw the insect dashing from my leg into the brush, and freaked out. I'd seen centipedes only once before, in Australia, where a bush guide had warned they were poisonous--could kill infants, in fact. Watching three guys rush screaming into shrubs after the beast did little to calm me. Though they failed to find the centipede, they did uncover a poisonous black snake, which they beat to death with bamboo sticks.

If you've never been been bitten by a centipede, I'll tell you what it's like: first a sharp sting sets in, the area turns red and swells, burning like a match head. Your loved one asks you to describe the pain on a scale of 1 to 10, and then you become an island celebrity: other tourists drop by to wonder why everyone else is staring at you; someone remembers someone else who got bitten by a spider some years ago, or the time they saw a snake in their bungalow, or a deer they saw on the hill. You struggle to pronounce the Thai word of the animal that got you: mak ue?
No, that's banana. Tak auw.
Tak ow?
No. Tak auwww.

And on and on. Days later, people you'd never seen before are still asking about the leg. The attention starts to wear like the residual pain of the bite, two red puncture wounds that fade day by day, your war story sounding less impressive every time you tell it.

-Mark

Mark and Juliah

Mark and Juliah in Big Tiger

2009-12-23T23:59:00.000-08:00

With one spare day in Bangkok, we woke early to visit foreign inmates at Bangkwang Men's Prison, at the far edge of the city, last stop on the Bangkok commuter ferry. We'd heard conditions at the jail were awful, and the guys there, most of them incarcerated on drug charges, appreciated any kind of visitors and the gifts they might bring. It wasn't out of sense of charity that we went, but a drive to get away from the tour buses and banana pancakes, to do something a little off the beaten path in the city that had become the beaten path, plus a burning curiosity for a glimpse of life in a foreign prison.
The jail was surprisingly easy to find, guards shockingly friendly and obliging, and everything appeared much nicer than I'd expected. The man we'd intended to see, Jody Aggett, had been freed several months prior, and Julie and I were at a bit of a loss. "He go home,"the guard said, but gave us the name of another inmate he recommended we meet. Though we were the only foreigner present, besides a pair of Indian and Sri Lankan missionaries, the prison staff seemed used to dealing with visiting tourists.
Michael Connel had been caught at 19 trying to smuggle ecstacy into Bangkok Airport. He'd been acting independently,thinking he could turn a neat profit off the only drug not available in the Golden Triangle. His Thai lawyer told him not to worry: "'Given your age, and the fact that it was your first offense, I think I can get you off with 30 years,'" Michael related to me. The judge gave him life, with the contingency of a death sentence, should it be recommended by a higher court. I don't support foreigners trafficking drugs abroad, as it cuts into local business, but I can certainly see the screwed up logic of a 19 year-old trying to make some money on his vacation.
"But I'll be out of here in another 6 years," he said. Britain's working on a treaty for prisoner transfers with Thailand. America has a similar one, that allows US nationals to be charged and tried in Bangkok, but to serve their sentences at jails back home. "Once I'm there, I'll probably serve another 6 years, and be paroled." Michael had already served 7 years. He'd had his hair shaved short and looked in good health, wearing his own clothes--an adidas jumpsuit and baseball cap--rather than the standard orange jumpsuit, a privelige for good behavior. His manner was kind, courteous, relaxed, and altogether charming. When I lifted the gift sack of fruits, cookies, chocolates, and toiletries to the viewing window for him to see, he thanked us graciously.
"I'm sorry," I said, "we weren't sure what exactly you needed in there. I hope these things will be useful."
"Have you got any freedom in the bag?" he laughed. "Did you happen to bring any of that with you?"
I had no idea how to respond that.
"To tell you the truth, I'd rather serve out my sentence here than back home. Here, the guards are easy going and will leave you alone, so long as you don't cause trouble. I've got a job with the medical dispensary, and that keeps me busy. If you look around here, you'll see most of the guards sleep half the day. I imagine the British jails will be a lot rougher, full of gangs, with fights breaking out."
I told him I was confused; up til then, I'd been informed of Thai prisons only from reading The Damage Done by Warren Fellows, a memoir of eating rats to survive, of keeping one's head down to avoid sadistic guards.
"What you have to keep in mind is that that book was written 20 years ago,"Michael said. "It's nowhere near as bad as it was then."

Michael is a genuinely nice person. He made a serious mistake at age 19 and certainly deserved to be banned from Thailand, but it's very difficult to see the justice in any teenager being detained for 30 years to life, with the constant promise of a firing squad hanging over his head, then deprived of the chance to attend university or get any sort of professional training. If and when he's released, he'll be a much older, much sorrier person with far fewer resources for supporting himself, and he'll be alone.
Julie and I are asking you to do something kind this holiday: send Michael a postcard, a letter, or even a small care package to let him know people are thinking of him. You can reach him at:

Michael Connel
Bangkwang Central Prison
Building 12
1 Nonthaburi Road
Nonthaburi, Bangkok 11000
Thailand

If you'd like to contact other foreigners at Bangkwang, there's a roster of inmates here. All of them appreciate your support.

Mark and Juliah

Final Days in Laos

2009-12-09T15:15:00.000-08:00

Just enough time to post a quick update on our travels. We were heartbroken to leave Vientiane yesterday. This was my third trip to PDR Laos in 8 years, though at first I felt like a bit of a freak admitting that much to other people. Slowly-slowly, though, we met others who'd been returning to SE Asia's only landlocked nation every other year, or every year, plus people who'd made Luang Prabang and Vientiane their home, and who looked as comfortable as the locals skipping about the cities on motorbikes. I was more than a little envious of them.
It's remarkable how, as a city and a capital, Vientiane has really come into its own. More than once, I got curmudgeony on Juliah, reminding her, "I remember when this city didn't have a single paved road! I remember when there were chickens in the streets everywhere! Now look at this place: cars! pet dogs! cops with shoes!" You can't quantify the level of growth that's occurred here in the last 10 years, since back when the country had a single airport that supported a single daily flight from Bangkok. I'm nostalgic for my first memories of the country, but also thrilled for the Lao people, who are desperately in need of development.
On our second to last day, we took the advice of a boorish Australian who'd hated every place he'd been except a single temple just outside central Vientiane. Wat Si Muang is one of many temples rebuilt after Thailand sacked the country in the mid-1800's. Though Thais and Laos share the same religion, Buddhism didn't stop the Thais from burning wats and wrecking images of the Buddha, just as it didn't prevent the Burmese from wrecking the temples of Ayuthaya prior to that. Inside War Si Muang is the city pillar, laid during the official founding of Vientiane. Underneath this several ton stone, it is believed, is the crushed body of a pregnant woman: a self-sacrifice or human sacrifice that pre-dates current Buddhist practices.
Wat Si Muang is Vientiane's most active temple, not only because it is the city's temple, but because the grounds and images inside are believed to have special powers of protection and blessing. A 20 pound molten Buddha statue, destroyed when the Thai wrecked the city, rests on a pillow in a room just outside the main prayer chamber, where the devout come to pray and the tourists come to take flash photography. The practice is to raise the statue above your head while silently meditating on a personal wish, and to return to the temple later with offerings of wax flowers, bananas, and incense. Inside the main chamber, the room was stacked with elaborate offerings. Outside, a small procession of students, families, and crippled people waited their turn to pray, against the backdrop of monks blessing families, performing baasi ceremonies to bind together spirits to protect the health and souls of the devout.
We're back in Bangkok to meet Julie's sister and enjoy watermelon shakes before heading to Koh Chang, off the southern coast. Pictures will be posted shortly to this page, but in the meantime please check out some of our other photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/markandjuliah/
Best,

Mark and Juliah

Thanksgiving in Laos

2009-11-30T23:21:00.000-08:00

Thanksgiving in Laos found us in a cave. I was not sure what the holidays would feel like here, whether they would make us nostalgic or if we would even notice that we were missing them. We were in Muang Ngoi, a small town one hour up the Nam Ou river from Nong Khiaw by boat. Its a small town with a single dusty walking path below lush jagged mountains that stop you in your tracks. Every night groups of people sat by a fire in the middle of the single path. There are no roads. The only way to arrive in Muang Ngoi is by boat or by walking from the next village over. The town has been here since the 15th century, but none of the old temples survived the US bombing.

On Thanksgiving Mark and I walked down a footpath to a soccer field to a series of caves along a shady stream. Locals lived in these caves for years to escape US bombing during the war and farmed at night as bombs only dropped during the day.

We followed the path by the stream out of the woods until it crossed the stream. Women with no shoes carried large bags of rice by a strap across their forehead. We shuffled to get out of their way as they gracefully climbed over a cattle fence and through the stream. The path lead us to a wide plateau of rice fields which were being harvested by men in straw hats.

With some helpful directions from the rice farmers we arrived in the village of Bana and drank ginger tea in a small cafe with a couple from Switzerland. The owner pulled out a bottle of lao lao which is a local whiskey. It was a small water bottle with only a few inches of lao lao left, but he offered each of us a very small shot making the few ounces of hard alcohol last for three rounds for the five of us. Clearly, the sharing was more important than the actual drinking.

We played petang with the owner next to some old bomb parts. After lunch we were invited to drink more lao lao with the rice farmers as we were walking back to Muang Ngoi across the rice field. They already had a young Argentinian man with them in the shade of their baan ( a shelter used for eating and resting next to the rice field) but they happily made room for us. Soon a single glass of lao lao is circulating. I pull out a bag of peanuts and the Argentinian pulls out some bananas to share. Both are well received and soon sticky rice is passed to us. We talk about work, soccer, rice and how cool it is to be a rice farmer.

Soon a Spanish couple made their way towards our shelter. The rice farmer with the best English (who is now red in the face from drinking) stopped the woman and apologized for not inviting them to drink with us- the lao lao has run out. The Spanish woman thanks him and explains that she doesn't like lao lao and is happy that it has run out. They all laughed. After the Spanish couple left we sit for a moment and reflect on this Thanksgiving. Soon it is time for the soccer game back in Muang Ngoi and the rice farmers head back to town.

Pictures:
The vally near Muang Ngoi
The cave
Playing Petang (note the bomb part in the background)
For more pics see our flickr page: markandjuliah

Mark and Juliah

Adventures on Special K Island

2009-11-11T00:03:00.000-08:00

If you look at a map of Indonesia, you will notice a large island in the shape of the letter K in the northeast of the country. This is Sulawesi. We started at the bottom of the left leg and worked our way to the north, transversing that large bay created between the right arm and right leg of the K. My only regret is that we didn't give ourselves more time on this beautiful and friendly island. We met many smart travelers that devoted their entire 3 and 4 week trips to Sulawesi.

When you visit Sulawesi you may go to a fascinating region of Toraja. Here Torajans live in strange boat-shaped houses that face north to remind them that their ancestors came from the north on boats. By day, Torajans farm coffee and rice, and by evening the rhythmic pounding of rice could be mistaken for drums echoing across vast valleys of rice paddies. If you are one of the lucky visitors to Toraja you may get to observe a funeral. Funerals are elaborate parties attended by -literally- truckloads of family and friends and neighbors who descend on villages. Torajans believe that a proper funeral is needed for the deceased to navigate through the various challenges of the afterlife. Torajans believe that their deceased ancestors will have to face many challenges as they travel through the afterlife. A proper funeral is needed support them on their journy.

A crucial element of the funeral is the buffalo sacrifice. Families may save up for two years before they can afford the water buffalos needed for a sacrifice ( the decease

d bodies are kept in the home in the meantime). Once you see one of these large and gentle creatures fall to their knees, blood spurting from the neck, you may feel a sense of relief. That was it; the buffalo sacrifice is over. But no, a good Torajan funeral needs 24 sacrifices. Those other buffalo standing around, obliviously batting their eyelashes- they are next. Lucky you, you get to see 23 more sacrifices.

When you are at a Torajan funeral, you should wear black and bring a case of clove cigarettes as a gift. Another pointer is not to stand too close to the sacrifices. While some sacrifices go well (the animal falls peacfully to the ground), sometimes the buffalo flails and thrashes for sometime before collapsing. You don't want buffalo blood on your one pair of pants.

Slaughtering Buffalo in Tana Toraja

2009-11-03T19:59:00.000-08:00

Maud was getting on my nerves. The French girl had been on the bus with us to Rantampao, 10 hours from Makassar in the south. She was friendly enough, but I could sense there was something off about her. She followed us to a budget hotel and had been the one to tell us about the chance to observe a funeral ceremony that same morning, but when we met with Johnny, the guide, to arrange a tour the following day, she'd whispered conspiratorially, "You leave the negotiating to me."
"That Austrian couple you took today was on a honeymoon, and they had a lot of money to spend, but we're backpackers, and we're traveling for a long time, so you have to give us a good price, okay!" Her tone took us off guard; I think we'd expected her to be aggressive, but not belligerent. Haggling comes with the territory of budget travel, but getting in people's faces, shouting, and wrecking relationships for the sake of $5 usually makes us squeamish.
Johnny thought for awhile, wrote out his expenses on paper. He was a local, but as a Christian convert, had followed the tradition of taking a western name. He listed his costs, stated what he needed to make, and came down to about $50, from the $90 he'd charged the Austrians earlier that day.
"No, I said you have to give us a good price!" Maud yelled. "That's not a good price!"
The two of them bickered back and forth, he more politely than she, but he refused to budge from 450,000 Rupiah. Maud turned him down, then went back later that night to track him down and book his services. The next morning, when he met us for breakfast, she was still whining and badgering him about a discount.
Our tour turned out to be pretty fun. Torajans are fixated with death and the afterlife, and we visited sites where bodies had been interred in caves, a living tree where the corpses of infants where inserted into crevices and twists to grow into a part of the trunk, and saw life-sized tau-tau carvings, wooden effigies of the dead, which somewhat resemble muppets. In the last cave, dessicated skulls where gathered in piles on the floor and jammed into crannies. Above them were tau-taus looking out.
After visiting three sites, Johnny took us to a funeral celebration 30 minutes away by car. Maud slept in the front seat as we passed scenery of rice terraces and traditional villages.
Funeral celebrations in Tana Toraja are gorgeous and complicated events that last for days. The following is a mix of what we observed, plus some explanation provided later by our trek guide. In the center of a traditional village, the teardrop shaped coffin is placed on a palanquin resembling a Torajan house and marched from one end of town to the other, to the accompaniment of a parade of uncut cloth, beating gongs, and what can only be described as war-whoops. Torajan homes uniformly have 3 rooms, are shaped like ships, and face north, to remind the inhabitants that their ancestors were sailors who arrived from boat from the south. While the coffin is carried, the whole of the village follows, carrying an uncut length of white cloth, empty spirit chairs over their heads, leading water buffalo by the nose, and, shaking the palanquin.
They return to the village center, move the coffin to a special platform, serve lunch to all guests and say a special prayer before sacrificing two buffalo.
Tea and cookies are served as the men in the village get down to the grizzly business of flaying and butchering the animals. Dogs circle, flies hover, and choice cuts of buffalo are auctioned off to raise money for the local church. When this is finished, several buffalo are led down to the rice paddies to fight. We thought this would be inhumane and awful to watch, but the buffalo turn out to be fairly stupid, aggressive, and cowardly animals that will lock horns a few minutes if they just see another male in their direct line of vision, then turn tails and run away if they think they're outmatched.
Torajan cosmology holds that death is the start of a journey to the afterworld, but that journey cannot begin until a proper funeral has taken place. Often, families will spend 6 to 24 months saving for a ceremony after a member has died. During that time, the dead person is kept in the home, served regular meals, given cigarettes and betel nuts, and addressed by others as a living person.
The funeral marks the start of the deceased's journey to the next world. It's a long, difficult, and perilous trip over mountains and through deep caves. When the deceased arrives at their destination, they meet a judging god who examines their life and assigns them status in the afterworld. Someone deemed worthy and virtuous can be made a demi-god, and can go on to influence the destinies of their descendants.
A good funeral helps the trip and transition. It can give the spirit a head start on the journey, and make the dead look good in the eyes of the god. Women gather together and pound rice in large mortars during the funeral, to give the appearance to deities listening that the deceased was an important person with servants. Water buffalo, usually 26 to 100 of them, are sacrificed over the course of the day. They carry the dead and their belongings into the next world, and the quality and breed of the buffalo make a tremendous difference: two-toned buffalo are extra valuable, because the black color allows the animal to walk on land, and the white allows it to fly; a buffalo with a patch of white on its forehead will cast light in the darkness of a cave; for reasons unexplained to Julie and me, it's better if the buffalo has a long tail.
In the public markets, these buffalo sell for up to a few thousand dollars each.
I wasn't quite prepared for the slaughter of these animals, but Johnny was very excited for us to come and witness. We watched from a peanut gallery as a short stick attached to a ring in the animal's nose was raised high, forcing the buffalo's head up. Someone would dash in with a machete and, using a forearm swing, cut the animal's throat, wide and deep. The bull would fall down, make snuffling noises, kick its feet a few times, and the eyes would glaze over just as flies began gathering near the bright pools of blood. The other 25 buffalo, meanwhile, stand around the body of their companion, dumb and unfazed, chewing grass, probably thinking, "Well, it won't happen to me."
Johnny returned us to our hotel that evening, the Wisma Maria I, and we spent the night trying to avoid Maud while listening to our neighbor's cancerous hoiking and spitting. Everyone smokes here. No one considers it dangerous, and everyone in Sulawesi will tell you the same thing: It's a sign of friendship to give and share cigarettes, usually a sweet and aromatic blend of tobacco and cloves. On the hill trek the next day, Julie and I spotted a four year-old hanging out under the village rice barn, taking French inhales from a discarded, burning butt.
The trek was incredible, by the way. Photos on Flickr will do a better job illustrating the scenery than I can here: steep, emerald green, rice farming terraces; friendly families offering tea when we stopped to rest; village chiefs stuffing coffins into caves hewn from massive boulders and outcroppings, and spending the night in one of the traditional, boat-shaped homes. Everywhere, the mountains were dotted with fleets of these houses, all pointing north.

Mark and Juliah

2009-10-18T02:51:00.000-07:00

Indonesia- so far
So diverse and overwhelming are these 17,000 plus islands that you have to really choose where you go. So diverse and overwhelming are my experiences here that I must choose what I comment on.

Everyday everything needs prayer
Everything here needs offerings- cars, trees, doorways, sculptures, computers, desks and ticket counters all have little palm trays full of rice, flower petals, incense, cake and sometimes ritz crackers. Some days, the gods get bananas, other days mints. Our cab driver tells us that he puts 70 in his home every day. The air smells indescribably smokey and sweet. Homes are so elborate and oriented around religion that in Ubud, we don't know what is a home and what is a temple. The courtyard complexes that are homes, have elaborate shrines and sculptures. Twice a day our landlady puts on her good sarong and scarf and blesses her home, sprinkling water, and praying all over the courtyard before leaving the small offering baskets and banana leaves with bits of rice for the sculptures. Then she makes us breakfast- a thermos of tea, a plate of fruit and a grilled egg sandwich, which she delivers to our balcony when we wake up.

Diving requires suspension of Rational Belief
After a year or two of not diving, the Gili islands seem like a good a place as any to plunge back in. As the dive boat approaches the site, i feel the most amazing sense of panic overtaking me. I tell the Indonesian dive leader, Ronny, that I am nervous. I am told this is a good way to stop being nervous. He says no problem. He will keep an eye on me. Okay now I feel a bit better. We dive roll off the side and meet at the front of the boat. After all the regular technical checks we are ready to begin our decent.

When I get underwater I see that the ocean floor is sixty feet below me. Below me is certain death. I feel my throat seize up. This is how it ends. Dark, wet, airless, blue death. This is it. I begin to hyperventilate. I signal to Ronny that i need to return to the surface. He follows me back to to the surface.

"Whats wrong?" He asks me when we are back in the sun and the rolling waves as if I was not about to die. "I can't do this. Its too deep and I am going to die." I tell him. "No, no, its okay. you just have to breath like you normally do. In and out, you know, in and out." Oh yes, that. I try breathing. Okay it works. "Do you want to try again?" He asks me. Yes, i say because yes is the polite answer and he is so nice and slightly charming. The real answer is no. No, I would rather pull my still-living self back onto the boat and reflect on how nice it is to be alive. But I said yes, and now holding Ronny's little Indonesian hand we are descending again. I am not normally a hand holder but diving requires a certain suspense of all rational belief. I hum and look for fish until finally we are at the bottom.

When we get to the bottom, I am fine. Fish, corral, spongy little things- All my old underwater buddies are here and the surface is way above our heads. I give Ronny the "okay" sign and we swim to catch up to the group.

"We make people fly" - Lion Air slogan
Its our first domestic flight within Indonesia and we are already noticing new things.
1. Throughout the entire check-in and boarding process, no one has wanted to see my ID. This is more eerie than not taking off your shoes in security.
2. They burn incense in the airport here. all over the place. I can imagine how well that would go over at Dallas/Fort Worth
3. On the plane, in the seat pocket in front of me, I find a laminated three fold "Invocation Card" which leads us through safety prayers for Muslims, Protestants, Catholics, Hindus and Buddhists. Most compelling, Mark and I agree, is the Muslim prayer which thanks Allah who "has bestowed upon us the will and ability to use this aircraft." For the day we spent trying to get to the airport today, we are grateful to have arrived. I am also grateful for Lion Air. Apart from making people fly, they encourage people to pray for our safety however we choose.
4. The airline has given us the emergency exit. The extra leg room makes 6' 3" Mark very happy as we have yet to live a day in this country where he doesn't hit his head on something. Thank god(s)

Juliah

Photos-
Temple in Ubud, Bali
Rice offering left on the doorway to our hotel
Man on ferry headed to Gili Meno, an island off of the Island of Lombok

for more pics, see our flickr page: http://www.flickr.com/photos/markandjuliah/

Mark and Juliah

Hello! Where Are You Going?

2009-10-18T01:54:00.001-07:00

On the streets of Makassar, we're followed by share taxi and bicycle rickshaw touts. None of them follow very far, but there always seems to be another where the last one left. All of them want to know the same thing: "Hello! Where are you going?" Occasionally, one will ask "Where do you stay?" Everyone seems a little desperate for business around here; between the global economic bellyflop and lingering fears of angry Muslim men, it feels like most of the world's share of tourism has sidestepped the archipelago for safer, nearer destinations. They don't know what they're missing!

Indonesia is an enormous and beautiful place. You couldn't see half of it if you had a billion-year visa and five lifetimes to live here. 17,000 islands cover a range of volcanic mountains, arid beaches, and rainforest. Moving from island to island, you find communities of Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and Christians, none of them neglected by the regional airline's multi-denominational prayer card, which thanks Allah for giving men the "knowledge to build these airplanes and the will to fly them."

We landed here October 7th, following 24+ plus hours of travel from Seoul, which included an 18 hour layover in Bangkok. In Thailand, we had just enough time to shuttle in to Bangkok's Khao San Road tourist ghetto for a plate of green curry and a massage, then back to the airport to slum on the floor and wait for our 6am flight to Bali. We arrived in Ubud filthy with the grime of Korean mosquito stuck to our palms, tropical heat under our shirts.

Making your way here is easy, if you don't mind taking the long roads. It gets cheaper if you can hop in bemos, share taxis that charge about 5 cents a mile. This was how we made our way across the prefectural island of Lombok to the smaller islands in the north: Gili Trawangan, Gili Air, and Gili Meno. You arrive dusty, sweaty and cramped. The reward is a destination without roads, cars, or electricity, and a week's worth of banana pancake breakfasts.

Without getting into too much detail, I'm posting our intended itinerary for the next two weeks:

Currently in Tana Toraja, Sulawesi. Imagine a giant floating letter "K" in the middle of the ocean, its top vertical bit twisted and extended a bit to the right.
Heading north tomorrow Tentene or the port city of Poso, then on to Ampana to catch a boat to the Togean Islands
From the Togeans, it's another 15 hour boat ride to the northern port of Garontolo, then continuing northeast to Manado, where we catch a flight back to Bali and chill for a week in Candidasa.

There are over 50 islands within the Togean archipelago, part of the larger archipelago that comprises Indonesia. Send us a worthy recommendation for one of these islands--even better, a comfortable guesthouse--and receive a grateful postcard from the both of us.

Mark and Juliah

Korea, where have you been all my life?

2009-10-08T03:54:00.000-07:00

Seoul-

If you like clear English signs and frequent public restrooms, its hard to go wrong in this city. Friendly and strange and 6,000 miles away.

People here love to take pictures. Families and couples snap pictures on all sorts of digital devices all day long. Korean children may be the most documented children on the planet. We went on a ferry ride down the river. What seemed to be a scenic boat tour, turned into a photo shoot for a hundred Korean families and another 80 young couples. Since Koreans love to take pictures, they don't seem to mind at all when you take pictures either. Taking pictures transcends the language barrier. The Koreans are doing the same thing we are and thats nice in a way.

I have eaten so many interesting things, but unfortunately I have no idea what most of them are. One day we ate at the fish market. We sat down on the floor and agreed with the waitress that the sashimi special was for us. After we ordered, we realized that we both miscalculated the price of the meal by a factor of ten. we had no choice but to smile and see what came next.

Even more impressive than Korean food is how restaurants are set up. There is no asking for water, napkins, an extra spoon after you have dropped yours on the ground. In Korea, its all there on the table. No more flagging someone down to refill your water glass, you just fill it from the jug on the table. What else is on the table? A button that calls your waiter! Just in case you need something important like . . .food or more So ju. So ju (which is a deceptively smooth vodka like liquor) is drank everywhere. It cheaper than beer which makes it a natural choice for people here what seems like all the time.

We had three days in Seoul on our way to Indonesia. The time went to quickly. Just as we were learning the metro and making drinking friends over lunch, it was time to go. You have never seen two people who were sadder to go to Bali!

Mark and Juliah

My Mother Called to Say Indonesia Had Been Destroyed

2009-09-27T11:09:00.000-07:00

Anything that can go wrong, might.

This philosphy guides the final days of preparation before selling your things, leaving your home, leaving your family, and living in small hostels on the other side of the world. That mole might be tumorous. The money you'd plan to live on isn't enough to get you through. The country you're visiting has been wrecked by a tsunami, your guesthouse washed away. The reasons to fear and postpone your plans grow, then multiply exponentially in the last 36 hours before you leave home, friends, and comfort.

The night before we left for SFO, I tore apart my backpack and triple counted the clothes, travel medicines, and adaptors we'd packed for the trip. I called the banks and checked that the money was still accessible. I bit my nails and wrote up checklists, crossed things off, then made them longer.

Now that we're here, Julie and I have to weed through our rucksacks and throw things out with a critical eye for weight and volume. First on the hit list: my denim jeans, the sixth bottle of sunscreen, the fourth pair of underwear, the second bottle of contact lens fluid. Beat with jet lag, I sat at the edge of the hostel bed, our things splayed on the floor, and severed the back cover of Juliah's journal with a leatherman. Twenty four hours into our journey, and we're still working through preparation anxiety.

But slowly, we're getting into the vibe of being here, seeing Seoul, getting lost in the crowds. Speaking Korean feels like chewing on taffy when you try asking directions to Gwandaemon. When people get you, they nod once and say "Nehhhhhhh...." By the hour, you start to feel like you really can navigate these streets, get the hotel room, or find the park by the river. Maybe tomorrow, we'll even get around to trying a cup of the boiled silkwork larvae.

Mark and Juliah

California. California.

2009-09-17T13:51:00.000-07:00

So we left Queens. It was sad and touching and really wonderful to get to spend some time with people before we left. Our plan was to stay here in California with my (Juliah) parents for six weeks, have a proper wedding and then leave on THE TRIP.

Even through our relaxing interlude, you can feel a deeper strain happening in the state of California. In August the state of California had a garage sale in Sacramento to raise funds by selling off cars, equipment and furniture. The very same day, the city of San Francisco held a benefit concert for itself, like one might for rare and debilitating genetic conditions or animals on the brink of extinction. Go San Francisco! Go California! It is nice to see government doing what they need to pay the bills. But what about coordination between the state and local government? What if I wanted to go to the garage sale AND the all day concert- did they have to plan the two events for the same date? Surely there is an intergovernmental committee that works these things out.

We shipped our belongings by truck from Queens. It was genius. Trucking companies with room to spare in their trucks can rent the extra space out to folks like us who want to move some stuff but really don’t need a 28 foot truck of their own. This also allows regular folks like us the opportunity to spend some time with truckers and trucks.

The good folks from Craig’s list took care of most of our larger items (Again it was nice meeting you all. Please let me know if the clock on the coffee maker continues to allude you- I can walk you through it again.) so we didn’t have much to bring. We packed our truck on a hot day in August in Queens then got on a plane. Ten days later our belongings were here in Kentfield after the truck made a shipment to San Quentin and another shipment to Trader Joes. With the help of the friendly California driver, we unpacked the truck quickly directly the street to block the street for the shortest amount of time.

The boxes, bags and random items we dropped on to the street in front of my parents house all said we were adults who had real adult lives in a far away (and now abstract) place called Queens. On the street were things like mixing bowls and a blender, personal files and rugs and work cloths, damn it. These adult possessions make no sense here on the street in front of my parents house. Here we are adult children in transition.

No matter. If I have learned anything this summer, it is how to let go of things you are not sure you are ready to let go of. You stop thinking about it and take a deep breath and put one foot in front of the other. Sing a song under your breath if you think it will help. Make sure that the song is upbeat in nature and something you can walk away to well.

Now we have 17 days until THE TRIP. Mark asked me if I was mentally ready for THE TRIP. I laughed in his face. Our trip now puts us back in the US August 18th, 2010- ten and a half months from now. It certainly hasn't hit me that I am actually planning to spend almost a year in two pairs of pants and three pairs of underwear. How could I possibly wrap my mind around that? I mean really.

photos:
1.Flag in downtown San Francisco
2.Finally a yacht that I can identify with right now
3. Mark and I at Six Flags

Mark and Juliah

Our Days Are Numbered

2009-07-05T18:50:00.000-07:00

It’s finally summer in New York City. It’s hot and sunny and I am almost ready to suggest we pull the air conditioner out from under the bed. Now that Mark and I have quit our jobs, we have a month to enjoy New York before leaving for California in August. After our wedding, we will prepare for our trip. The trip.

About this trip: This trip has been quietly planning itself in the back of our minds since we returned from West Africa in fall of 2006. It was an amazing 7 weeks full of markets that smelled of smoked fish, voodoo priests who offered us grain alcohol from feather-covered bottles, scary moped rides through dense French-speaking cities, wild elephants swimming in muddy watering holes, large cement mosques with scratchy loudspeakers, bright, custom-tailored clothing that we loved but never wore when we returned home. We arrived back in our apartment in Queens at midnight. We sat silently on our couch in our apartment that the subletters had finished cleaning just hours before until Mark broke the silence. “We have to do that again,” he said. I nodded.

Since then, the map in our hallway has been covered with many different pushpins identifying potential destinations. Our building super Fernando will wonder if we were playing darts on that wall when he comes to repaint the apartment. After months of evening conversations that start with the lines like: ‘You know, I was talking to this guy from Senegal” or “I had some other thoughts about South Korea today” we have a rough outline of our trip.

Our trip starts in October with a few days in Seoul, South Korea, before heading to Bali, where we start our exploration of Indonesia. In November, we head back north to Thailand, Laos and Cambodia, where we plan to spend two months before heading to India in January. From India we will head west through the Middle East. Possible stop offs include Turkey, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon. From Egypt we fly to Kenya and then return through Europe in spring or summer 2010.

While I hope to learn and experience a lot of large and wonderful things in the next year, there are some little things that I am also excited about:

Really large insects (and maybe poking at them with sticks—but gently)
Hotel room with outdoor bathrooms (sitting on a toilet and looking up at the clouds is the best)
Having to think about what day of the week it is
Riding a camel
Riding an elephant
Riding a river dolphin. But I’ll settle for seeing a river dolphin.
Eating meals on banana leaves
Observing fishing communities
Deciding that morning to sleep somewhere else that night
Learning some new tricks in the kitchen
Strange new fruits
Playing the “what bit me now?” game
Getting really good at washing clothes in a sink