Why I travel.

Take me back.

Take me back to rotting garbage on dirty streets, where water is a luxury and stink a certainty. I want to feel unwashed and threadbare sheets on hard beds, and pay more than I think I should for it. I want suspicious food, where I savor every bite, knowing it might be the one that ruins the next day. I want to take nothing for granted, be vulnerable and love everyone who shows me kindness.

I want to be concerned about bed bugs, so I remember their absence. I want to be aware of the malarial menace of mosquitoes, so that I notice when my ankles are unblemished.

I want to be foreign to the irritation I felt on the BART train yesterday, “delayed” a couple irrelevant seconds by the guy who was too busy talking on his phone to put his ticket in correctly. I want to feel only incomprehension for the ambient discontent of the spoiled and comfortable, knowing that they are me. I want to stay shocked that people complain and grimace while they wait a few minutes for delicious, safe, nutritious food, prepared by people they won't even bother to thank, unmindful of the insane miracle that brings it to us, every single god-blessamned day.

That work, those wages...
a foreign experience

I want to look at those wrinkles everyone here has between their eyes, the scowl of the perpetually concerned, the mouths of unspecified tension, and feel a wash of gratitude that cleans my face and lifts my lips. I want to be aware of the masses that have so little, every country on Earth. I want to remember how scarce and precious food was for all of human history except the past tiny sliver, invisible on the timeline, and how horrifically we will return to that state...probably sooner than we realize, so that I can stand in awe in a grocery store again, unrushed, uncritical, reverent.

I want to move slowly.

I want to disconnect.

I want to be away from screens. I want to read a book.

I want to talk to strangers.

Here I have friends, but move among the distrusted, suspicious without reason, fearful until proven innocent. There is little danger here. Screw the newspapers, the evening news is a betrayal.

There I will know no one, but might move among possibility, alert and careful, but accessible and listening. The danger is much higher there. The intimacy with human brutality and human kindness, experiential and firsthand, the latter outnumbering the former, despite brutality's instant potency.

Here I can go in comfort. I can pass my day easily, accomplishing tasks in virtual reality, e-living in binary code that I can never touch, my life erased by a magnet.

There every hour will be uncertain, the world so foreign, so unknowable, that it might touch me at any minute. It will be under my fingernails and between my toes. Present on my skin and stained into my clothes. It's possible I will bleed. It's possible I will help, just a little. It's possible I will reach new magnitudes of suffering, or experience joy so visceral you'd have to pay a fortune to chase it.

Take me back. I want to travel.

Is it weird being back in America?

Is it weird being back in America?

I wasn't sure how to answer that question. “Not...really.” Adjusting to Stateside norms was pretty easy; I did grow up here, after all. I can handle silverware and I never picked up on the whole spitting thing anyway. But as the last month has passed I've noticed a couple ways in which I am still adjusting after all.

Trishaw drivers know better than anyone how to survive
in the traffic in Yangon, Myanmar

Number One: crossing the street. In 90% of the world, as far as I can tell, moving around on the street is based on the principle of not making any sudden moves or changes of direction. If you can estimate everyone else's trajectory, you can move around them.

To cross the street overseas: start walking into traffic, not fast, not slow, no sharp directional adjustments. If possible, walk straight at the back of a passing car. It will continue moving, so when you reach it you will slide right into the space it just vacated. Continue this until you've Froggered your way across the street.

It's similar to the way you don't try to avoid the cockroaches, just trust that they'll avoid you.

But in America, if you do this, all the cars on the street do something extremely unexpected in the global mind: they stop. Or at least, they slow down and wave you across. Now, instead of sliding unobtrusively through traffic, you are blocking it. Dangit, Americans, stop being so polite!

So I have had to go back to obeying formal traffic rules. It's weird.

One need not make plans in the San Blas Archipelago

Number Two: I rarely planned anything more than a day or two in advance for the past few years. I would reach a town and stay there until I was done, during which time I'd hear about some other place within a six/seven hour bus ride. Go. I am not an itinerary sort of guy. But here, this means I don't get out much, since everyone else has social calendars booked weeks in advance.

Me: “Hey, you wanna do something?”

Friend: “Sure! Let's get sushi! When works for you?”

Me: “How about tonight?”

Friend: “I'm booked until January.”

I gotta get the hang of that. Anyone want to go get sushi...in January?

Does this dude in Kuala Lumpur seem worried about his image?

And finally, there's Image. I've made a career out of trying to resist this, probably as a means of coping with my lack of fashion passion (as my closet of blank-ass clothes will attest), but my skills were were honed overseas. In Nicaragua they described my sandals as “Jesus shoes” and I kept wearing them. In Sri Lanka I sewed up the entire left side of my shorts with the wrong color thread and thought no more about it. In Myanmar I could not have cared less when it was a woman's style bicycle I rode.

You can't be too picky about your image if you get your hair
cut in a saloon. Can I get a sarsaparilla with this perm?

I brought that all home with me. The friend moving out of my new room offered to loan me her woman's style bike and I accepted, no worries, who cares if people think I look silly? It's a bike. That ended up not working out, so I have my manly man ride after all, but whatever, it's shruggalicious.

And I had to smile in the grocery store as I bought a big bag of toilet paper, thinking about how poop-phobic Americans are, and remembering confessions of people who were humiliated to buy the stuff. “I buy it at Cosco in gigantic packs so that I don't have to do it very often.” Whatever! I'm not embarrassed by anything!

Can you guess what these Pa-O kids in a mountain village
in Myanmar think of our image concerns and poop-phobia?

But on the walk home, toilet paper casually under my arm on the busy street, I saw a bag of clothes hangers on the sidewalk. I inherited four hangers with the closet, but I now had seven shirts, with premonitions of more to come. I needed hangers. And here was a bag full of them, free on the sidewalk. We're also an intensely germaphobic nation, but the odds these hangers were actually infected and infested, scabies, hepatitis, bed bugs? Very slight.

But I walked right on past. What would people think if I was rummaging through the garbage on the street?

Oh.

Damn. That's disappointing.

It's weird being back in America.

So nasty. So beautiful. Kasankeyj Part 1

It's 12:21 AM and I would love to go to sleep, but this hotel room is crawling with bed bugs. I pulled the sheet back on each bed to see if one was clean. Well, one is cleanER, by virtue of not having a massive mold/blood/feces stain creeping in from one corner.

Did you know long-term travel is not actually as glamorous as it may sound?

So I'll tell you about today, which was fantastic (up until about an hour ago), and see how many bugs I kill in the time it takes to write this.

When I left Mardin I didn't know where I was going. I had two possible destinations, Midyat and Hasankeyf, and conveniently enough, you have to go to Midyat first either way. It didn't look like much as we drove through, some nice monuments and undoubtedly nice people, but nothing crying out to be visited.

I've spent most of my time in Turkey in medium-to-large cities, so a smaller town sounded good anyway. Onward to Hasankeyf!

I was expecting a small, potentially sleepy town, but I stepped off the bus into a tourist carnival. Vendors were selling cowboy hats, bow & arrow sets, and plush dolls of the Gangnam Style dude. I admit, all three appealed to me.

My first try, bear with me

A dude with a hotel on the corner pounced (it all seems so obvious in hindsight) and showed me a room that was not too cigarettey (it is Turkey after all) and with a good price, but it was the view out the back that sold me. He recommended I start walking through the souvenir frenzy, and his friend has a restaurant just past the mosque.

Of course he does.

Hasankeyf has a 15^th century mausoleum, a mosque from 1409 that apparently included a harem, and the ruins of a bridge built by the Artuqid Dynasty somewhere in the 11^th or 12^th century, probably on a Roman base, which spans none other than the legendary Tigris River.

But it wasn't any of those that made me ask myself “Where the hell am I?” in wonder. That came first from the medieval citadel perched on the absolute edge of a 135 meter-high cliff, and then from the cave houses.

Cave houses! Who? When? What happened?

There was no information, just Turkish tourists and goats, all scrambling over the rocky scree in search of photos and roughage. (According to the map given to me by the president of Bed Bug City, the caves may date back to the Iron Age civilization of the Urartu. I will pause for a moment while you practice saying that.)

I was in love. Cave house ruins with a vista over the Tigris! They call it the Dicle Nehri here, but that's one of the two rivers that flowed out of Eden, which is less mythologically potent than the spell cast by such exotic names when studied in grade school. If only Mrs. Hallas and the rest of my fourth-grade class could see me now!

(And I can still do long division too! Mrs. Hallas must be so proud.)

The story's about to get better, in my opinion, but I hear tell that readership declines rather precipitously after about 400 words, and this is number 590. Since I actually want y'all to read the next part, I'll split it into two.

It's time to risk the bed bugs, but assuming they don't bleed me dry, I'll tell you tomorrow about reaching the Edge of the World, and the friends I made there. Good night.

First week in Nepal, Part 1

Well hello.  Alive and well in Kathmandu.  I like the idea of going two months without touching the internet, but here I am, and there you are.  How are you by the way?

Let's see.  It is pretty hot in here, so a quick update.

We arrived last Tuesday, after just over 24 hours of travel.  London Heathrow was its normal bustling place, and my sense of adventure was awakening, which in this case meant I ordered a burrito.  A London airport's take on a burrito was actually fairly decent...though I am not sure why it was soaking in marinara sauce.

Bahrein was kind of a culture shock, as the Middle East always is.  Strutting men with aggressive auras, their women's personality defiantly leaking out of the eye slits in their burrqas.  I have no idea how to spell that, and this computer is not so savvy as to either.

Our flight to Kathmandu was K and I, and a returning UN mission of some sort (our neighbor's English was not quite good enough to explain what), all guys, all cheery.  The decent through the Himalayan clouds was bumpy and exciting and epically beautiful.

It was raining when we landed, and the knowledge that I was feeling a monsoon on my skin left me high.

Customs was pretty painless, and the boss of our program picked us up at the airport, and drove us through town to the hotel we're staying in.

Driving through Kathmandu for the first time.  It tends to leave people looking fairly shellshocked.  Newcomers first getting out of their taxi look a little shaky, their face overly still as they try to pretend it is totally familiar to ride through a vehicular maelstrom like that.  Sometimes there are lanes painted on the ground, which seems kind of cute.  There is no sense of lanes going the same direction, and the border between your side and oncoming traffic is maleable, fluid as shaken up oil on water far from reaching equilibrium.

The Nepali people seem to be very kind, but the approach to driving and movement is pure sub-continent.  Standing in lines has more in common with practice for a defensive lineman in American football than an orderly wait for one's turn.

We spent a couple days in Kathmandu, walking around town, seeing the beautiful temples and palaces, all rimmed with garbage and flies.  The sacred and the profane breath through the same hot air here.  Temples and sacred spaces are scattered through every tiny winding street, people going about their lives alongside stray dogs eating garbage at the foot of crouching monuments with orange-smeared faces of gods.

Kathmandu is one of three distinct cities, which were formerly independent kingdoms.  The others are Patan and Bhaktapur.  We will be staying in Bhaktapur all summer and have not seen it yet, and Patan has been enveloped by Kathmandu's sprawl.  We walked there last week, an hour walk turning into three as we regularly got lost.  There are no street names here, but that's okay because it is all worth seeing.

We seem to be among the few tourists who walk between places, entering "local" neighborhoods, and the people tend to find us fairly interesting, especially the children.

We took refuge on the 17th century temple of Vishnu in Patan's Durbar Square while the monsoon poured incredible amounts of water down around us.  Women in colorful robes sang beside us, and a young couple ran through the rain to huddle on the other side, looking exactly like a Bollywood movie, close but not touching, heated smiles and rain slicked hair.  I waited for the coordinated dance, but it must have been canceled on account of the weather.

The program starts tomorrow, so we wanted to get out of the city and see more of the country.  We took a local bus, which was another cultural experience of accepting the driving style and waiting to see if we would die that day.

We went to Manakamana, where some amiable Austrians built the longest cable car in Asia in 1998.  It goes nearly vertical, covering 2.8 kilometers and ascending 1000 (feet I think...I can't remember the unit, but the view was beautiful coming up to and into the clouds).

There is a temple and small town at the top.  The moderate rain turned heavy and we ducked under the metal roof of the area where worshippers leave their shoes when they enter the temple.  A holy man in bright yellow robes was accepting gifts of bags of rice and applying the orange and red paint to the devotees foreheads.  I am chagrined at not knowing what it all was...the difference between bindhi's and...

His eyes were an incredible light blue, and the suspense until I can see what that one picture looked like may drive me crazy all summer.

The plan was to walk out, but the rain went from heavy to biblical, and the 18 kilometer walk down the mountainside quickly became impossible, so we ate the Nepali lunch, Dal Bhat, and took the cable car back down the mountain.

We caught a jitney (mini-bus) to Dumre, from where we would walk 7 kilometers to Bandipur, which we had heard great things about.  Not long into the trip we pulled over, the driver got out and wandered off.  We sat quietly for a bit then people got out and we noticed the line of stopped traffic snaking off around the bend in the distance.

Turns out a waterfall that forms in heavy rain had shut down the road, and we waited for it to clear.  We waited 7 hours, talking to other passengers and seeing the shanty structures the people there live in, before it got dark.  The larger buses were given clearance to go, but the smaller would be washed away.  Most waited in line, but ours returned to a small truckstop town just down the road.  The logistics of moving people and vehicles around in a place like this, where trucks had all elbowed up, double blocking each other in, was another chance to practice calm acceptance.  This was only difficult when we, and a dozen other large vehicles, were stuck on a bridge over a monsoon swollen river...I sat calmly listening for sounds of its collapse, but we were in luck.


The internet connection, and power supply to the city, are both unreliable so I think I'll break this into two.

First week in Nepal, Part 2

Given that the waterfall regularly closes down the road (there are basically only two highways in Nepal, one going NE of Kathmandu, one SE) so we realized that if we managed to cross, then the road was closed again, we could very likely miss the beginning of our program, so decided to return to Kathmandu.

Only a few mini-buses were going there, and the nightime and stuck-in-a-jam rates were exorbitant, plus we had been advised, in person and Lonely Planet, that driving at night here is particularly hazardous, so we decided to try and stay the night there, and return the next day.

Turns out we were not the only ones looking to get a room, and the entire village was booked up.  Legs getting shaky, we went to find some food before taking another shot at finding a ride, and a young guy approached us to say that he and his friends had a room they could share with us.  "We no sleep, we will have fun."

We were somewhat dubious about this, but at least it was off the street, but he soon disappeared and we were back to square one.

The universe and the people in it are amazing though, and we soon met a Nepali gentleman who lives in the UK after serving a career in the British military.  (Check out the history of the Gorkha legion sometime.)  He was returning to his village for the first time in 12 years, bringing his two university-age children along, who had only seen it when they were small.

He had his parents with him as well, and the five of them had a small room with four beds reserved, but he offered to let us share.  They had contracted their own minivan for the trip, and if the roads cleared were going to continue, so we sat until a little after midnight, talking to this family.

They said Grandma didn't speak any English, but I caught her laughing at things I said.  Grandpa curled up and fell asleep, looking perfectly comfortable, even though the "beds" were actually wood tables with a blanket laid on top.

After midnight they heard that the road was open, and departed, leaving K and I living like kings in the room.  We considered looking for others needing a room, but most of the people had departed the town, so we had the Grand Hall to ourselves.  Well, us and the bed bugs.  And mosquitoes and truly impressive variety of stains and phenomena on the blanket, walls, floor, table etc.  The squat toilet in the bathroom brimmed with a liquid stew.

We voted on which bed looked the least filthy, segregated it from the rest, each wadded up a shirt to use as a pillow, K put on her waterproof jacket to try and serve as a further protective layer, and we lay down to see if we would sleep.

We actually did pretty well, given that our original prospective hosts were in the room next door, drinking and gambling, and occasionally coming to peer in the windows of our room at us (the tattered cloths hung in front of the window were not wide enough to cover it, and I felt reassured by the bars cemented into place.)

Remind me to write a letter to the manufacturers of my pants, asking why they anchor the belt loops with metal rivets.  This design clearly did not take into account sleeping on a wood table with a thin bug infested blanket as cushioning.

All in all it was another one of those interesting travel experiences that are part of why I love it.

Discomfort and adjustments are good for a person, but the enduring worry is the bed bugs.

We are moving in with our first of two host families tomorrow, and we do not want to bring extra guests with us.  As far as we could tell we escaped okay, but last night I looked up to find a big juicy bed bug walking up the wall.  I think it was another one on the other wall, but it fell off as I approached...right onto our bags.  We were unable to find it.

The good news is that the little brown turd-looking thing was just lint, so at least there's no rats in there.