Thursday, October 21, 2010

What to Bring on Your Big Trip

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

Thursday, September 30, 2010

Final Report

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

Friday, July 16, 2010

Masa Mara Safari




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

Friday, July 2, 2010

First Impressions of Nairobi

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

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

Monday, June 21, 2010

Cairo

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

Monday, May 17, 2010

Welcome to the Middle East

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

Wednesday, March 24, 2010

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

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

Thursday, March 18, 2010

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


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

Saturday, February 20, 2010

A Night in Bhutan

"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

Thursday, February 18, 2010

Adventures in India, Veg and Non-Veg

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

Monday, February 8, 2010

Inventory Time

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


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

Monday, January 25, 2010

The Nine Best Ideas in South East Asia

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

Thursday, January 14, 2010

First Quarterly Report





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