Coming to This

My penultimate column was published almost two weeks ago. I'm only posting this so late because I spent the last two weeks in a windowless room devoid of any time cues or outside contact. I was not in jail. I was participating in a sleep study because I'm poor because I spent all my money on the trip that this blog has documented.

As always, the link can be found on the right hand side, or by clicking here (or above). Enjoy it or suffer it while it lasts, either way, there's only one more coming.

The Obligatory Travel Conversation

It's not long traveling until you realize you've had the same conversation with everyone you've met. Where are you from? Oh, I've been there, [say hello in their language]. Where did you come from? How was it? What's your name? Cool. Where are you going? I've heard that place is a-MA-zing. How long are you traveling for? Oh, I'm traveling for longer (thought silently).

This "conversation" is mandatory, and some people just love it. It bores the hell out of me. It's truly miserable after the hundreth time. You get the same set of answers. I know it's necessary though - you have to start somewhere. You can't just walk up to someone in a foreign land, shake their hands, make creepy eye contact and ask them if they believe in god. Unless you're a Mormon or Jehovah's Witness.

Like I said, some people wallow happily in it like pigs in shit. I try to get it over with as quickly and abruptly as possible, so I can move on to more interesting things. I rely heavily on trolley/surgeon dilemmas just to hear what people say. Not familiar with trolley dilemmas? The bro over at Philosophy Bro can give you the lowdown.

A certain someone I traveled with for four months seemed to put up with the obligatory conversations pretty well. Sorry brosef, but I remember we met someone once, might've been the Swiss girl in the van to Luang Prabang, and as you two were having the Conversation, I just thought, Kill Me Now. By now a seasoned traveler, I know at this point you're regaling all sorts of people with far more dialogs.

Anyway, Adam and I relied heavily on Would You Rathers to entertain each other, and soon employed classics like "Would you rather spend the rest of your life with latex gloves on, or have your fingers perpetually covered in Doritos powder?" to keep other travelers on their toes. There's always Would You Rathers concerning superpowers, but flying always wins, so it's not so interesting.

The Conversation is possible to overcome. Once the basics are laid down, a blunt question is generally acceptable, and you can move on to discussing involuntary organ-harvesting from executed Chinese convicts.

For the record, I support organ-harvesting, but I don't support the death penalty. If you're gonna ice some people though, might as well make use of them. That was a good conversation to have on a rooftop bar below the peaks of Yangshuo, even when a pony-tailed over-the-hill Canadian hippie butted in and started talking about slippery moral slopes and living and dying for ideals, and his younger sidekick really missed the point and started mentioning souls.

One of the best responses I got from one Conversation was from an Australian girl in Hue. At some point early on I asked her where she was from but she seemed not to hear and instead went on talking about the book she read that brought her to this town. About twenty minutes later when there was a break in the conversation, she said, "I'm from Sydney." I asked you that like twenty minutes ago, replied I. "Yeah, I don't really like to get into that stuff so soon."

At least I know I'm not the only one sick of it. Hey, thanks for stopping by.

Friends in Many Places

Certainly one of the benefits of traveling is meeting people from all over the world. One of the benefits of that benefit is that you can meet up with these people further on in your travels and have a friend in a strange city or have a place to stay and be lazy when you don't know what else to do.

Way back in Laos, Adam and I met a couple of German travelers on our way to Savannakhet from the 4000 Islands. It was Lalita's birthday and she was celebrating by spending a day in steaming buses and vans on Lao roads, and occasionally puking. Martin was flying home the next day.

We found a cheap hotel in town, and spent the next few days together, fruitlessly waiting for Thai visas, exploring a river and cave that Lalita fortunately convinced us to go to, and moving onward to Vientiane and beyond, meeting up again in Luang Prabang.

Fast forward to Berlin. Thanks to the beauty and horror of Facebook, I met up with Lalita at a show, and she offered me a place to stay in her flatmate's room while it was empty. Mom was leaving the next day, and I didn't know where to go or what to do, so it was a perfect situation.

I may have overstayed my welcome, but Lalita is too kind and knows what it's like being a traveler. I didn't do much besides sleeping in, lounging in the apartment, lounging in parks, going to yoga classes as part of a cheap promotion and frequenting CouchSurfing meet-ups. It was a carefree and unproductive week. In fact, it was remarkable for it's high level of unproduction.

I did make a decent meal one night to justify my presence there, and we watched a couple movies together. When she wasn't working or out with her boyfriend, we had some good talks about traveling and life and hipsters and yoga and cats.

I also met another friend from one of my Australian trips in Berlin. We ate cheeseburgers on the Fourth of July and I felt truly American. In Baku, Jamie and I stayed with a friend of his he met through CouchSurfing in London, and I also went out for dinner with a Dutch friend that I kept running into throughout Russia, Mongolia and China. And in Amsterdam I had a couple drinks with a friend from Korea.

Spend enough time traveling, and you have a network of travel friends who can actually become real friends if you actually follow up with staying in touch and making visits. I'm theoretically off to see some more friends, but with how lazy I've been the last week and a half in Berlin, I'll be surprised if I wind up actually getting anywhere.

Travels Soundtrack: Southeast Asia

There's certainly no dearth of songs about Vietnam, my first stop in southeast Asia. I can only think of like two right now, but I'm sure there's a ton. Anyway, 'Born in the USA' by the Boss gets my selection as the headlining song on my Vietnamese soundtrack. I like this video a little bit extra because it's in France.





Onwards to Cambodia, with an easy selection for 'Holiday in Cambodia' by the Dead Kennedys. I don't actually have this on my MP3 player, but I imagined listening to it while I was there. Another politically/socially critical song, but there's not much else to say in music about SE Asia. At least until you get to Thailand...





The above video was apparently made by some 10th grader. Thanks, kid.

Now to Laos. I don't know any songs that reference or are about Laos, but some of the Vietnam war protest songs might be appropriate since we dropped more bombs on Laos during the Vietnam war than we did on Vietnam. Anyway, this song is at least somewhat relevant to Laos, considering the government there is a bunch of commies, or close enough for all you people who know what these sorts of political terms mean.





I listened to this song a lot. I happily discovered in on my MP3 player in southern Laos as Adam was incapacitated when I chose a band at random to listen to; I have a lot of bands I've never heard of on my MP3 player, for just this reason.

Thailand is my final entry for southeast Asia. I was tempted to go with this little ditty by Steven Seagal. Seriously. Seagal has released two albums. I don't know if his video is actually supposed to be Thailand or another SE Asian country, but I think Thailand is the best bet. Either way, I feel pity for the poor girl that has to touch him in the video.

No, the clear choice for Thailand is Murray Head's 80s classic 'One Night in Bangkok'.




After I failed to hitchhike by sea from Thailand to India (so much for any sitars in this series of posts) I went back through Laos and China. Feel free to listen to 'Reds in My Bed' and 'China Girl' again.

Next up: central and western Asia.

A Proper Welcome

Border crossings, airports, train stations, etc. all offer a great opportunity to make a good first impression with travelers. I had the good fortune to enter Belgium via the Antwerp train station.

Take a look at that photo (not mine). After gathering my bags, brushing past people in their seats traveling onward, and turning out the door, this sight really impressed the hell out of me. It was Gothic, it was beautiful, it was spacious, it had a lot of high windows.

It did what most cathedrals aim to but often fail to do - it made me stop, catch my breath, crane my neck backwards and stare reverentially upwards saying "ho-ly shit".

And I wasn't the only one. Travelers, people generally keen to get the hell out of a train station, were dropping their bags and snapping pictures all over the place. It's a grand welcome, and great way to set the tone for a visit to a beautiful city.

When I entered China through Laos, the Chinese border control station was almost equally sublime, mainly because of the contrast it represented from Laos. The Chinese surely know how to flaunt their wealth over their poorer, less developed neighbors.

Take a look:



Sure, it's just a normal building right? Don't forget how relative the word "normal" is. Laos doesn't have a single skyscraper in the country. They don't have trains. The lovely capital city might as well be a village.

It took a day an a half on semi-paved roads to get from Vientiane to this border post. In Laos, the "highway" is a two-lane road that winds up and around mountains. Villages along the road were literally along the road: their depth was one house deep and the houses were built on the shoulder. You could see people bathing at the public spigots.

Then you get to China where the roads - fully paved, multi-lane roads - go through mountains instead of around them, where the border post is full of glass, natural light, and swooping roofs. It's a statement.

I Was Right!

I hate to admit it, but I was right. Dead right.

The bus from Vientiane to Kunming was miserable. It was about 40 hours over two nights. They call it a "sleeper" bus. I doubt if anyone got a wink of sleep at night.

Bunks are thin and short. Maybe tiny Asians can fit in them, but I can't. At night, it got cold, and condensation built up on the window, which I had to lie against, and a draft came in, despite the windows being as closed as possible.

Besides being cramped, my blanket, though thick and heavy enough, was both too short and too thin for the bunk that was cramming me anyway. The D-shaped railing on the side was necessary to keep me from rolling out of my second tier bunk on the switchbacks all through the Lao hills, but it also was supremely uncomfortable to keep rolling into.

Plus the roads were bumpy, windy, and often just short stretches of dirt.

The good news is that napping was not only possible but almost mandatory during the day. I was so exhausted from tossing and turning in vain to find a comfy position that I did have a couple decent naps.

We stopped to piss in the woods now and then, and food was taken care of at roadside restaurants that served Chinese slop under a cement roof. I've eaten worse though. After crossing into China, we stopped in the sunny and clean border town of Mohan and I ate breakfast with two teachers from Ireland, and a Malaysian guy on business or on holiday. He never cleared up his ambiguity. One Irish guy went into the restroom and came back declaring it "top 5 worst bathrooms, easy." And this is after two years in China and a 6 week holiday through SE Asia.

The claim stood until dinner time at a low dim feeding hall, when he called the former top 5 worst bathroom "Disneyland" compared to the cement shit-trough that passed as a toilet.

It was a quality operation, this transport. We took the small windy roads in China to avoid paying toll fees on the smooth highways, and we sat at a gas station outside of Kunming for 3 hours to avoid getting in at an ungodly early morning hour. When we finally got moving, we got in at 5:30AM.

Happy Birthday!

Behold this year's first birthday present, received in the wee hours of the morning, before it was even my birthday in America.

Bed bugs, for the third time this trip. In my room, I finally reconcile myself to the fact it's not mosquitoes and I can't go back to sleep. That's not a nice thing to have to accept at one AM in the morning, or again at two or three AM after I try to go back to sleep.

It's what I get for staying in a single room for $7.50, where the ventilation slats in the bathroom open onto my neighbors bathroom, and my view is of the corrugated steel wall of the next building two feet away, and a water pipe runs down past your window; I never know if it's raining outside or I'm just hearing the shit and dirty water wash down from the floor above.

I pack my bags and go to the lobby, waking up the manager sleeping on the floor under a mosquito net.

"I need a new room. Mine has bed bugs and I can't sleep." I show him my bites; well, not all of them. I have them on my feet, going up my legs a bit, some on my arm, and a short line on my right ass cheek. He's not very responsive, standing in boxers, staring at the counter, and scratching himself.

"No rooms." I'm not sure I believe him, but he doesn't seem to be about to change his mind. I can't go to another guesthouse because everyone else will be asleep too. Plus there is a curfew. You never hear about the government in Laos, but they're a real bunch of Nazis, and I don't want to fuck with them.

"Okay, can I have some clean sheets then?"

"Don't have any." I think he's talking about rooms again, and I repeat my question. He understood the first time. He's really not going to give me clean sheets, which of course they have somewhere.

I give up and go back and shake out my sheets as best I can and lay down on top and luckily don't get bitten again. Or maybe I don't get bitten enough to wake up. Either way, this time is better than the other times I was a victim of these little bastards. The first time, I was bitten by bed bugs was in Vietnam, on a boat with nowhere else to go. The next was in Vang Vieng, Laos where I went down to the lobby and woke up the night manager. I got a new room that time. Both times I was with Adam, and both times he wasn't bitten at all.

Happy birthday, and think of the bites on my ass for a happy Valentine's Day.

More Photos!

I have updated my Laos photo album, with a link to be found as always on the right-hand sidebar.

These will be the final photos I upload from Laos, as I leave tomorrow on the train for Bangkok and Phuket, and hopefully a boat to India.

Vang Vieng

The thought of this town is actually one of the reasons I decided to completely derail my original plan to go west through China. After fall in Russia and Mongolia when the temperatures started to get truly frigid, the promise of floating down a lazy river in the sunshine with a bucket of whiskey and coke was too much to pass up.

The more time I spent in Vietnam, Cambodia, and southern Laos though, the less appealing it got. It's not hard to see how well-trodden this part of the world has become among backpackers. Going to a town that promised an even greater concentration of drunk twenty year old tourists in hippie parachute pants started sounding not so good.

We went anyway. After all, I had to see for myself what the place is like. It turned out to be a small ugly grid of streets lined with Internet cafes, restaurants, and souvenir shops selling the ubiquitous "In the tubing Vang Vieng" shirts you see backpackers wearing all over SE Asia. More and more dull cement guesthouses are under construction and I got the overall impression of an abandoned Soviet resort town overtaken by Laotians unimpressed with foreigners' shenanigans, but willing to take their money.

It is a town that is anything but quaint. For years it's had a borderline legendary reputation for hedonism, and the bars that long ago grew popular for showing a never-ending loop of Friends episodes still play the same show. I don't know why, the show is terrible and outdated. I saw a few places showing Family Guy which is only marginally better, but I guess when you're catering to catatonic Australians that barely have peach fuzz on their chins, you can play whatever crap you want.

The town is, by the way, 80% Australian. It's uncanny.

But the tubing is what put the place on the map, despite plenty of other activities in the surrounding karst peaks, along with the availability of all sorts of technically illegal drugs.

After renting a tube, we were dropped off about 3km upriver, and then walked another few hundred meters to put ourselves in the greatest concentration of bars. It was noon and the sun was shining. The whole place had the look of a third-world river circus. Bars were built on shanty decks over the water, and huge wooden poles had been erected over the water for zip-lines and trapezes. There were water slides and diving platforms, and the river bent around piles of stones that had been dredged up out of landing zones. I can't imagine anything resembling safety regulations existed.

Tubing in Vang Vieng is really a euphemism for bar-hopping by a river. The only time people are in tubes is getting from one place to the next. I had the idea of floating down the river back to town, but we made it only about 200 meters in the course of five hours, and had to get a taxi back to return our tubes by the deadline. Most of our time was spent on the trapezes and slides, and my body was sore the next day from hanging and swinging and hitting the water.

The river was fun, but the scene is so over the top, I don't know how people can survive there more than a few days. We spent a total of four nights there, two going north to Luang Prabang, and two coming back south to Vientiane. I'm glad I went, but I wasn't sad to leave.

Luang Prabang

Usually when I imagine myself traveling when I'm not traveling, I like to imagine sitting in some small exotic city, comfortably wasting time in a shady cafe while life goes by in the cool breeze, thinking profound thoughts and being content.

I can't say I've had any profound thoughts. I have resolved to actually go through with my plan to try and hitchhike to India on a boat from Thailand, mainly because the prospect of absolute failure has suddenly and strangely begun to appeal to me.

I've also been reading another Haruki Murakami book. There's plenty of profound thoughts in there which save me from coming up with my own.

But the city of Luang Prabang has every other aspect of my disembodied travel fantasies. It's tiny, in the middle of nowhere, it occupies a thin river peninsula and is full of colonial French architecture. Cafes, boutiques, white-washed cement with dark wood and awnings. It should be in an issue of Martha Stewart's magazine.

It's remarkably quiet, especially after the boozy circus that was Vang Vieng. For two days Adam and I have done nothing but wander around and drink beer on riverside decks, make friends and lounge on mattresses on shaded platforms on hills across bamboo bridges, and relax on our massive balcony.

I left my passport at the Indian embassy in Vientiane, and that's another thing I always imagined while traveling: taking it slow while you get visas for places even more exotic than the one you're in. I also kinda imagined myself reading newspapers and having coffee, but I hate coffee and haven't read a newspaper for ages.

That's okay. I'll settle for wading in turquoise waterfall pools and strolling down quiet streets past orange-robed monks coming in and out of the the temples which are hidden among the trees and villas.

More Photos!

Dear friends, I have uploaded many more photos from my travels.

To the right, as always, you will find a new link for the country of Laos, where I currently reside.

I've also added more photos to the Cambodia album.

Killing Time on Don Det

The first thing we encountered in Laos was some small time extortion. Before we even reached the border, in fact. The bus attendant claimed he'd take care of all our visas and stamps for $46 bucks, including only a $1 service charge. He broke the prices down and was of course lying. Everything cost $40 bucks without his "services". And that includes $4 for two stamps that we wouldn't have had to pay if we were smart and asked for receipts, because they were clearly extraneous and illegal charges.

But that's where the problems ended. All border crossings are suspect, as far as I'm concerned.

On Don Det, and island in a freshwater archipelago by the Cambodian border, we lounged about for four days, doing nothing more productive than ride bikes one day, and another day I went tubing - jumping out of a boat upstream for the sole purpose of floating back - with some other backpackers.

It's easy to do, kill time, on such an island. Our $5 bungalow was on the northern tip of the island and gave us killer views of the sun melting into reds and pinks in the sky and over the Mekong as it sunk below Cambodia. There were bars and restaurants on stilts over the river with mattresses and hammocks and diving boards lining a dirt path, the "main street" of Don Det.

All you can do is swim, sit, read, eat, drink. There are a lot of backpackers that zip over from the mainland for a few days, and a lot of places for happy shakes. Those can lay you out for a day or two if you're not careful though. Trust me, it happened to someone I know.

I tried to figure out why all the cats had docked and crooked tails. It seemed to be a feature of the island. I never found out. Maybe it was a genetic thing, a small island of inbreeding cats. Maybe dogs routinely fucked them up when they were kittens. Maybe people bent them for the hell of it, but they all had crooked tails.

They seemed happy though, those cats, and every other animal too, even the mangy dogs with swinging balls. And why not? Apart from a chicken in a domed bamboo basket with poor prospects for its immediate future, all the animals roamed free under the warm shade. There was always a breeze. The cats and dogs and water buffaloes were maybe the only creatures with an easier and lazier life than the stoned backpackers in bathing suits and yoga clothes.