Probe the Globe

Kenya: A Safari in More Than One Way

2008-05-16T04:57:00.006-04:00

How did you spend your New Year's Day? Maybe you went snowboarding? Maybe you drank beer and watched football all day? Well, I had quite a different experience in Nairobi. Instead of boisterous toasts and songs, the Kenyans called in the new year with riots and tear gas in what the Kenyan newspaper I picked up called "Kenya's Darkest Week."

I'm not sure if any of you had actually realized at the time (other than my poor mother and father who probably sent a combined 15 emails during the 4 day period when everywhere in Nairobi was closed or without power) that your dear friend Sean was traveling through a warzone, but you can now say that you know someone who has seen a Civil War unfold.

I was by no means in the middle of the action, of course. What I saw firsthand was a group of protestors wielding tree branches marching to exercise their right to assemble in Uhuru Park, only to be forced to flee back to the suburbs by a heavily armed military truck firing out several rounds of tear gas. The really striking thing was what I didn't see: people; on the day that the ODM called for a Million Man March on Uhuru Park, every single business (except for one restaurant, thankfully) closed, work days were called off, and all the citizens of Nairobi who weren't protesting retreated indoors, leaving the normally bustling, cosmopolitan cityscape looking like the post-apocolyptic movie set of 28 Days Later. Police dressed in riot gear like Ninja Turtles (refer to the pictures) made rounds in packs through the empty streets while thousands of military personel surrounded Uhuru Park, so as not to allow the ODM supporters to assemble.

I could write a lot more about what I saw and felt in Nairobi that week, like political discussions with locals in which even supporters of Kibeki agreed that the incumbent President rigged the election or my cameo on Kenyan TV standing near the Chief of Police as he addressed the discovery of a car full of homemade bombs parked outside the restaurant where I was eating lunch, but I'll save those other gems for another occasion.

For now, HERE ARE THE PICTURES

India: Pictures

2008-05-02T08:16:00.004-04:00

Up until this point in my trip, my photography has focused mainly on landscapes and scenes. To really capture the essence of India (which is undoubtedly the eccentric population), I shifted my concentration largely to portraits. Crusted skin and tough eyes scream out at the daily struggle to survive in modern India; it seemed to me like the deep grooves of wrinkled faces could tell the stories of their hard lives like a Braille book. Here are some photos from my collections across India:

Album 1 - Udaipur

Album 2 - Agra (Taj Mahal)

Album 3 - Varanasi

Album 4 - Pushkar

Update: I Have Not Fallen Off the Face of the Earth

2008-04-25T04:17:00.004-04:00

My apologies for the absence of recent posts. It may have seemed to some like I'd suddenly fallen off the face of the Earth. Well, I may have come close to doing so while swimming in 'Devil's Pool' (above) on the top of Victoria Falls' 100m cascades (and even closer when I leaned my upper body over the canyon below while a native Zambian held on to my ankles), but rest assured I am fine.

I hope that some of you are still checking on this site periodically - indeed if you're reading this then you have been. I still fully intend on updating with pictures and a few stories that will bring us to an end of my year-long adventure.

Zimbabwe: Mo' Money, Mo' Problems

2008-02-08T15:12:00.000-05:00

Zimbabwe has more millionaires per capita than any other country in the world. I have done absolutely zero research in making that claim, but I can’t imagine that it could possibly be untrue. Why? Because the Zimbabwean Dollar is currently valued at a black market rate of $6 million ‘Zim’ (as the currency is called locally) to US$1.

In case you haven’t heard, Zimbabwe has been in a state of unprecedented hyperinflation in recent years. ‘Absurd’ is really the only word that comes to mind to describe it. The current “official” government rate of inflation (by far the highest of any country in the world) is 24,470%, but even this falls way short of what a number of independent sources are pegging around 150,000%. In an age where the US Dollar’s place in the world economy is becoming about as unstable as security in Baghdad, it’s nice to go somewhere that a buck will fetch a stack of 12, $500,000 notes (the highest in circulation). The above picture is of the pile of money that you would have received upon exchanging US$30 when I was there in December 2007.

There have been a number of statistics and fun (sad?) facts thrown around lately about how much produce, newspapers, and chicken has gone up in the past year, but I’d like to take an approach that no one to my knowledge has done yet: say you were a wealthy millionaire (by US standards) and had the equivalent of US$10,000,000 locked away in Zimbabwean Dollars in a Harare bank in 2003 and hadn’t touched it since; well, I hope you had an interest rate of 100,000% or more, because otherwise today, in 2008, that multi-million dollar fortune would be worth exactly US$1. That’s right, at one point in early 2003, Z$600 was worth US$1. In 2005, it had passed Z$10,000. In January of ’06, it had reached Z$100,000 and in July of that same year it was already over Z$250,000.

Struggling to cope with rates that were spiraling out of control during these years, the Zimbabwean government responded with a measure to curb hyperinflation that was so baffling in its pointlessness and futility that it showcases the ineptitude that President for Life Robert Mugabe has had in alleviating the plights of his people: in August 2006, a new, revalued Zimbabwean Dollar was introduced that reduced the value of its currency from Z$250,000 to Z$250. Seem simple? It was. All they did was print new money on which the last 3 zeros were dropped. Clearly, this has worked wonders on the economy (all degrees of sarcasm intended), since the rate has since shot up to Z$6,000,000.

It’s only going to get worse. Since my visit this past December, the value of the Zim Dollar has already devalued by 200%, from Z$2 million to Z$6 million.

Here’s a CNN article on the hyperinflation if you’re interested.

This is really only scratching the surface of the problems that Zimbabwe is facing today. Shortages plague the country. Finding decent food in a grocery store is like trying to find a Nintendo Wii during Christmas. You go to a supermarket and find that for every 10 aisles, only a handful of shelves are stocked at all, and when they are it’s usually with giant brown blocks of soap or beaten up packages of muesli that cost as much as a live chicken. Thousands of people go over the border to Botswana to do their shopping. I spoke with one restaurant owner who was telling me about how difficult it is to buy meat since they have to compete with every protein-hungry family in the country, especially around holidays. Of the 20 or so entrees listed on his menu, only 3 were available at the time I visited. Shortages of petrol have meant that buses run irregularly, if at all; instead, everyone has to fight for tickets on the decades-old trains that take 14 hours to go 200 miles.

But I hate to end on a depressing note. Honestly, I loved Zim, I just felt sorry for the people there. Matopo National Park has some amazing rock formations and offers one of the best chances in the world to see rhinos. And since everyone seems scared to travel to Zimbabwe, including the densely packed ‘Overland Truck’ tours which are the bane of every backpacker’s existence in Africa, you have the whole place to yourself. It’s nice to have a break from the obligatory jockeying for position with other safari vehicles in places like the Serengeti. Plus, it’s got one of the most beautiful views in the world: an overlook of the sprawling cascades of Victoria Falls.

Pictures: Nepal

2008-02-08T11:33:00.000-05:00

There's something humbling about the Nepalese Himalayas. Sheer size, for one; 10 of the 14 tallest mountains (over 8,000m) in the world are Himalayan. It's things like standing at 4120m (about 2.5 miles) above sea level and still being dwarfed by 360 degrees of snow-capped peaks at Annapurna Base Camp that really put ones size (both physically and metaphorically) into perspective.

Nepal is a kingdom of contrasts where lush landscapes mingle with the barren rocky tundra of the Tibetan Plateau, Buddhist temples brush up again Hindu shrines, and only in recent years are the boundaries of the cast system between social groups being pressed and transcended. Other than the occasional nuisance of a band of tribute-demanding Maoists, the Nepalese are a fantastic people who love to share their energy and vigor.

Click here for the pictures

Pictures: Egypt

2008-02-03T15:41:00.000-05:00

Egypt is every archeology buff’s wet dream; behind every ancient pyramid, excavated pharaoh tomb, and labyrinthine temple lays a piece of a rich 5,000 year old history. Now I don’t pretend to have a profound interest in rummaging through historical rubble, dig sites, or antiques – I’d much rather pass the hours sipping chai and playing backgammon with a thick-bearded, white-robed man named Mohammad at a sheesha bar – but that doesn’t matter in Egypt. Even the most jaded of travelers have to admit a rejuvenated child-like sense of wonder when they find themselves staring head-on at the real life models of the very pictures that filled their elementary school textbooks growing up: the mysterious Sphinx, hieroglyphic-laden walls that tell the tales of a forgotten civilization, and the beaming golden treasures of the legendary Tutankhamen. Egypt: the home of Cleopatra, the Nile River, and the only in-tact Wonder of the Ancient World (the Great Pyramids of Giza). And this is to mention nothing of the bustling markets of Cairo’s Khan El Khalili, the Great Sand Sea of the Sahara, tiny date-farming towns on the desert oases, or world-class scuba diving at the Red Sea’s underwater Ros Mohammad Marine Park.

Check out the pictures

Phase IV and V: GREAT SUCCESS!!

2007-11-24T06:56:00.000-05:00

(This is just an email I sent out to everyone on my big list, but I know that I'm neglecting some of you, so just in case here it is)

Greetings all!

Shalom, Salam, and Namaste from the Middle East and the Indian Subcontinent!

As has been the trend of all my travels to date, email updates have become progressively slack as my trip has gained steam, and boy, there’s enough steam in here to fill a sauna; I’ve now been on the road for exactly 285 days.

When we last left off, my budget was on life support from the financial beating that Europe had pummeled me with. Well, I’m glad to report that my wallet has made a speedy recovery thanks to the care of Uncle Jordanian Dinar, Aunt Egyptian Pound, and the Nepali & Indian Rupee twins (despite a thwarted coup attempt from their dubious cousin, the Israeli Shekel). Though the sights have been expensive (the enterence fee to the Taj Mahal cost more than a week’s accomidation), the rooms, food, and sheesha have been decidedly cheap.

The most recent additions to my travel portfolio have been Phase IV (to be named in clever fashion at a later date), which saw me trugging across the hot sands of the Middle East, and Phase V (to be named in equally clever fashion), which brought me up to the Nepali Himalayas and down to the cows and chaos of India. My merit badges are as follows:

Jesus on Water Badge: for floating effortlessly at sunset on the hypersaline Dead Sea

Million Star Hotel Badge: for camping out under the planetarium-like desert skies of Wadi Rum (Jordan) and the Egyptian Sahara

Supermodel Diet Badge: for fasting for a week during Ramadan

Stubborn Pursuit Badge: for (fruitlessly) chasing a camel across the desert

Jacques Cousteau Badge: for diving the H.M.S. Thistlegorm wreck (Read Sea)

Hebrew Culinary Badge: for ingesting copious amounts of humus, schwarma, and falafel.

Indiana Jones Badge: for visiting Petra, the Hollywood home of the Holy Grail

Civil Disobedience Badge: for attending a protest in Palestine

2.5 Mile High Club Badge: for 2 weeks hiking around and into the Annapurna Sanctuary (Even at 4.2km at base camp, Annapurna I still towers over at over 8km)

Planet of the Camels Badge: for rubbing elbows with thousands of spitting, humped animals at the Pushkar Camel Fair

Line of Fire Badge: for dodging countless rogue M-80s during Diwali, India’s “Festival of [Explosive] Lights”

I’ve Been to Hell and Back (Twice) Badge: for surviving Delhi not once, but two times

Humbling Structures Badge: for visiting both the Taj Mahal and the Great Pyramids of Giza

Digestive Prowess Badge: for not succumbing to India’s infamous explosive diarrhea

It’s crazy to think that a (very) lucky few of you will get to see my handsome face in less than 2 months, when I pass through NYC on my way to South America (the not-yet-confirmed final leg of my trip). Anyone who will be in the metropolitan area between Jan. 21-29, make your appointments now.

But there’s still one more great adventure lined up before then; next stop: AFRICA.

India: Are You F***ing Kidding Me?

2007-11-24T06:45:00.000-05:00

Sorry for the vulgarity, but visit the Indian Subcontinent and tell me if you don’t find more applications for this 5 word phrase than anywhere else in the world. Between all the delicious curries and breathtaking sights, you’ll see so many scenes that leave you aghast and asking yourself, “Are you f***ing kidding me?”

I could go on for pages and pages about this one, but I’ll just limit myself to the first pair of places that pop into my head: the streets of Delhi and the Burning Ghats of Varanasi.

Take Delhi. Most places in the world are fairly difficult to describe in a paragraph. Delhi isn’t. Here is its essence in just on word: MADNESS. Close your eyes and picture the worst rush hour possible and extend it to 24 hours. Now crank up the MADNESS knob past ten. If you imagined reckless rickshaws, homicidal taxis bent on taking you as far as possible from your destination, carts selling everything from produce to orphans, face-painted shamans chanting at the sky, street kids chasing after you for money, and packs of unyielding dogs and goats, then you’re starting to get the picture. Now, take away the painted traffic lanes, crosswalks, and 2/3rds of our traffic laws, and mix in a dash of con artists trying to get you to “export rubies” and a few men and women screaming belligerently at no one in particular, just trying to play their part in this orgy of entropy.
The only things that seem to impose order in Delhi are cows. If there is just one certainty in India, it’s that no one will ever harm these sacred Hindu animals (on pain of death). Carts, cars, taxis, pedestrians, and modes of transportation that you’ve never seen or dreamed of skirt around them at full speed, careening into (and of course injuring) each other, as the culprits meander happily through the middle of head-on traffic, knowing that they are king of their domain.

Enter Varanasi, one of the holiest cities of Hinduism. People come here for 2 reasons: to bathe in the sacred waters of the Ganges River and to die. At Manikanika Ghat (the “Burning Ghat”), fires are alight 24 hours a day. It’s no marshmallow roast they’re having; look closely and you’ll see a pair of legs sticking out from the end of the flames. This is where people are creamated to have their ashes cast out into the Ganges. Cows, goats, and dogs rummage between fires, scavenging for edibles, while ships carrying firewood piled 2 stories high wait their turn at the docks. Just off-shore, a group of men wade waist deep in the ashy water, sifting for gold earings and jewelry that may have been set adrift with the charred bodies. Some people, like lepers and children, are not permitted to get creamated, so instead they have large stones tied to them and are simply sunk to the bottom of the river. On any given day, a number of degenerated bodies float back to the surface.
According to the Lonely Planet travel guide, surveys of the Ganges River have shown that there are nearly 1.5 million fecal cholera bacteria per 100mL… safe bathing water should be less than 500. And less than 20 meters away from the burning and sinking of bodies, pilgrims are fully immersing themselves in the same dirty waters, going so far as to use their fingers to brush their teeth with it.

Are you f***ing kidding me?

Trekking the Himalayas

2007-11-10T08:36:00.000-05:00

Nepal wasn't on my itinerary this trip. To be honest, I'm not even sure that I could have placed it correctly on a blank world map before I left the States last February. I generally try to stay out of countries where the current king has usurped power by unloading 2 full rounds of ammunition into the entire royal family (especially ones in which it has happened so less than 2 years ago). But a fellow traveler in Cairo had informed me that October and November are the best months to visit Nepal, when the monsoon clouds pull back to reveal clear blue skies as the backdrop for gargantuan snow-capped peaks. I didn't need much convincing; I was headed to go trekking in the Himalayas.

On the first day of my trek, I was scheduled to fly on a small charter plane (18 seats all counted). Knowing my luck in cavalier modes of transportation (see my earlier tale of the Cambodian Boat ride), I was a bit skeptical about stepping onto a plane that might as well have been a radio-controlled toy, but my bad travel karma was repaid to me in dividends; the flight was gorgeous, whizzing through valleys of some of the world's biggest mountains. Even better, it took just 18 minutes to reach our destination.

From here began my 12 day trek from village to village in the Annapurna Circuit. Each day involved roughly 6-8 hours of hiking as the trail took me through an incredible variety of terrain from the bleak rocky tundra of Tibetan Mustang to hills of lush terraced rice fields and monkey filled bamboo forests. En route, I got to meet and learn about the customs of the minority Thakali people, witness the sacred musical chanting of refugee Tibetan monks, and have my taste buds assailed by some awesome apple crumble and apple brandy in Marpha (Nepal's apple capital, as it were). Finally, I stood drop-jawed as I found myself in the middle of Annapurna Sanctuary, where half a dozen Himalayan mountains towered over me from all sides (and being "towered over" while standing at 4130m is a pretty damn humbling experience). The tallest of these peaks, Annapurna I, sits pretty at over 8000m.

But grand vistas and good booze aside, the real eye-opening experience for me was trekking in a new pair (i.e. not worn in) of one-size-too-small hiking boots. While Annapurna Base Camp has left quite a lasting impression on me, the dozen or so blisters that I amassed during my journey have rendered me walking in a splendid gimp-like fashion that have left quite an impression of their own.

Last Pictures for a while: Jerusalem and Jordan

2007-10-15T20:56:00.000-04:00

I hope you enjoy these albums, because they may be the last you see from me for a while. Recently, my wonderful computer company's (That's you, Dell. Please note the sarcasm) AC Adapter decided it would be a really neat party trick to start shooting out sparks everytime I try to plug it in, which has resulted in an unintentional fireworks display in my hostel for the past few nights. Tomorrow I'm flying to the capital of crazy, Delhi, India, a city in which I can't fathom getting a watch fixed let alone something with wires. Savor these last photos.

Jerusalem is a Tale of Two Cities in the most literal of senses; it's the capital of both Israel and Palestine and serves as a spiritual heartland for both Judaism and Islam respectively (not to mention Christianity). It's a place caught somewhere between the 1st and 21st centuries, but even it seems unsure of exactly where. Walk through modern Western Jerusalem amongst the Hasidic Jews in the morning and then take a stroll down the hectic markets of the Old Town - making sure to dodge the bread carts - in the evening... you'll see what I mean. But whether Muslim, Jewish, Christian, or otherwise, everybody can agree that Jerusalem is truly a special, special place.

Click HERE for Jerusalem

My first thought upon entering Jordan was something like 'Wow, this place is absolutely devoid of color.' The dwellings and shops of the small towns that I passed en route from the northern Israeli border were uniformly plain, unpainted, and run down. What I would come to find in the coming weeks was that it's not the hues of old towns and modern city centers that paints Jordan's picture, but the colorful people and the dramatic landscapes; there's clearly a reason that Petra was chosen as the site of the Holy Grail in the final chapter of Indiana Jones.

Click HERE for Jordan

Pictures: Israel and Palestine

2007-10-09T07:05:00.000-04:00

This first album follows my trail from Tel Aviv to the northern Israeli towns of Akko and Tsfat. These 3 cities - though situated closely together in the small, New Hampshire - sized country - look and feel thousands of miles apart. Tel Aviv is secular, metropolitan Israel; Akko is the Palestine of a hundred years ago; Tsfat is the city of Jewish spiritual rediscovery.

CLICK HERE for Israel pics

The second album is from the country that occupies most of our international news coverage (excluding Iraq), Palestine. It's a place that merits a visit from anyone wanting to see exactly what "The Other Side of the Fence" really means. Despite being oppressed to a staggering degree, its citizens are some of the most kind-hearted people in the world whose spirit, pride and identity are unwavering.

CLICK HERE for Palestine pics

Palestine: The Other Side of the Wall

2007-09-22T18:20:00.000-04:00

Remember back in June when I was recounting my latest transportation-related misadventure of being Shanghai-ed by Muslim extremists and I said that it was “the closest feeling I'll probably ever experience to driving through the West Bank of Israel”? Well, I should now add a footnote to that which reads, ‘…until I actually went to the West Bank, that is.’

If you had asked me a month ago whether I planned to venture into the heart of what might well be the most tempestuously disputed territory in the world, I would have just shot you a brief but thorough ‘you-must-be-off-your-rocker’ look. And yet there I was yesterday amongst dozens of protesters in the West Bank town of Walagah, witnessing first hand the spirit, passion, and solidarity of the Palestinian people.

The most important thing to understand about the West Bank is that it is suppressed and controlled in an almost Orwellian ‘Big Brother’ sense by the Israeli government. A massive concrete barrier designed to keep in the Palestinians, dubbed locally as the ‘Apartheid Wall,’ surrounds the entire perimeter of the West Bank. Metallic towers created with the sole purpose of spying on the activity of its citizens are scattered intermittently through settlements and the countryside. At every exit of the Apartheid Wall, armed Israeli soldiers enforce checkpoints that prohibit residents of the West Bank to leave without permission… even to visit their own capital in Jerusalem. It wouldn’t be much of a stretch to call the Palestinian Territories a ‘prison-state.’ (Of course, it's not that Israel is a Big Bad Monster... like America, it just hasn't found the best solution to combat terrorism yet.)

Every week, there are a handful of organized demonstrations in the West Bank to express disapproval of the encroachments of the Israeli state on the rights of the Palestinian people. The protest that I attended [to the CIA: note that I did not say ‘participated in’] was in opposition to the further enclosure of the Walagah section of the Apartheid Wall.

The pre-protest rally was one of the most beautiful things that I’ve witnessed in a long time. Under the cover of a handful of trees, the organizer of the protest came forward and delivered a calm, collected speech to his fellow townspeople about the state of affairs in Walaguh. Old men and young boys alike listened intently while subconsciously fiddling with their Palestinian flags and banners. A cool breeze blew through the crowd, giving an eerie feeling like the calm before a storm. After everyone became clear of their objective, the townspeople prostrated towards Mecca and engaged in a Muslim prayer. It was incredibly sincere.

I have to admit that I was a bit scared when I entered the town; I’d recently heard stories of people being hit by the rubber bullets of riot police, and the sole piece of advice offered to me before my arrival was to carry half an onion in my pocket in case the crowd was tear-gassed. But in the end, the protest proceeded without a clash with the army. There were no burning effigies, guns, nor gas. After a great deal of effort on the hottest of days, the crowd managed to displace a pile of Israeli-placed boulders intended as a roadblock to their town. No one had any doubt that the army would come back with bulldozers the next day to put things the way they had been. That’s the way it has always happened. It was a small victory, but a very large demonstration of Palestinian solidarity.

Dead Sea: The Best Float Since Root Beer

2007-09-14T09:54:00.000-04:00

Try to sink in the Dead Sea. I dare you. Nay, I double dare you. It's like trying to drown yourself while wearing 3 life-preservers; literally impossible.

To answer the question: "Just how salty is the Dead Sea?", I did a little taste test for you all. Your answer: VERY. One drop probably contains as much salt as a whole bucket of movie popcorn. (I was about to say it is the world's saltiest body of water, but I just found out that that accolade belongs to a lake in Djibouti)

Since swimming on one's back is positively effortless here, I tried to get as far out to sea towards Israel (from the Jordinian side) as I could. I'd say that I was 1/8th of the way there when the beach patrolman whistled me back, clearly angered that his title of 'easiest lifeguarding job in the world' would be put in jeopardy by my border crossing antics.

The Dead Sea is also the lowest altitude in world, allowing me to answer another question: "How low can you go?" Answer: 420m below sea level.

No Name, No Bed

2007-08-31T16:14:00.000-04:00

Traveling around the world for a better part of my adult life, I’ve become accustomed to lots of different methods of self-identification. In the States, of course, every document you will ever fill out asks for First, Middle, and Last Name. On my first flights to Europe, I had to adapt to the British English “surname” (which I still can’t hear without feeling slightly puzzled) on international immigration cards. In East Asian countries, you always put your “honorable name” (last name) first, making me Casey Sean (or “Keishi Shoun” as they say it). Japanese people customarily introduce themselves in conjunction with their place of business, so I would have been “Keishi Shoun of the Uchita Board of Education” and, in Chinese, you should remember to specifically ask for one’s family name upon meeting a new acquaintance.

I’d thought that I had heard it all and was pretty much un-catch-off-guardable, which is why I was so caught off guard when a portly rabbi in vestments showed up panting at my dormitory door at Tsfat (Israel)’s Ascent Institute waving my check-in slip in his hand and telling me that I had neglected to fill in my “Hebrew Name.” Of course I had nothing other than a blank look to offer in response was quickly shuffled off the premises after making my one phone call to secure other lodging in the area.

Now, the moment that I stepped in the door and bypassed a threesome of Hasidic Jews with their long curls, bushy beards, stiff hat, and standard issue black suits, I knew that I well out of my league. Everyone (in the whole town, really) was dressed just like they must have been in the good ole B.C. years when Moses came down from the Mt. Sinai and proclaimed “Thou shalt dress like nerdy 1920s mobsters,” but here’s the funny thing: 75% of them spoke with a New Yorker accent. It turns out that Tsfat is the place to go for rediscovering long lost Jewish roots. They could have chosen a worse place; its position atop the 3rd tallest mountain in Israel gives a sublime view of the surrounding valleys and the Sea of Galilee, and many followers actually believe that the Messiah will pass through the town on his way to Jerusalem. [As a note: Judging by bemused reactions of the 10,000 people who asked for my Hebrew name over a 3 day period, I think that I must be one of the annual dozen or so non-Jewish travelers that visit the region. After telling one teenage boy that I wasn’t Jewish, he thought that I must have misunderstood the question (granted my Yiddish isn’t perfect) and pointed to my pants signaling that he wanted to know whether or not I was circumcised (this I did very clearly understand).]

But that’s not the point. I had no Hebrew name and was back out on the streets. Of course, I wasn’t turned away because of my name, but rather because it was a big tip-off that I’m not Jewish. I freely acknowledge the benefits of rekindling spirituality and of religious community, but I can’t shake the feeling that I was unjustly treated. I’ve slept in Christian dormitories before, and never did they demand a baptism certificate or WWJD bracelet. I’ve stayed several times at Buddhist temples – most recently for 15 days – without a karma check. Now, I’m not going to lie and say that I really had my sights set on staying for several nights at this place… I just think it’s ironic that my first encounter with religious discrimination was at the hands of a group that has a 3,000 year old history of being persecuted against.

But that’s not the point either. I think what this is all a round about way of saying is that I need to adopt a Hebrew name for when I visit Jerusalem later this month and give the Jewish dormitory another go. Any suggestions?

Rediscovering Italy

2007-08-28T06:55:00.000-04:00

I really wasn’t excited in the least to be going to Italy. For starters, it’s one of only two countries on my trip that I’ve already been to (the other being Thailand). I’d seen Rome, Venice, and Florence, and thought that I’d just be retracing old footsteps with newer, more expensive ones (the last time I was in Europe – in 2002 – one Euro was worth only $0.90. Now, the same Euro is valued at over $1.35. That’s really painful to think about. It’s an increase of more than 50%, which meant that I’d be shelling out just about an extra 50 cents on every dollar, 50 bucks for every hundred, and 500 for every thousand compared with what I spent the last time around). In particular, my desire to return to Rome roughly neck and neck with my desire to step roll back and forth over a bed of porcupines. My lasting memory of the capital city was having to cancel my credit cards and devise a scheme to borrow money from a series of friends after being pick-pocketed on the subway en route to the Vatican museums. That and how impressively the dirtiness of the air manifested itself in the form of raindrops that stained spots on my black fleece brown.

There’s also a big part of me (the snobbish been there, done that part) that instinctively wants to dismiss big European tourist hot-spots in favor of the less trodden, more exotic countries. That’s why it’s with great reluctance that I have to admit that Italy is really one of the coolest and unique countries in the world.

At the very least, Italy has some of the most magical places anywhere. Venice is hands down the most unique city on Earth. There’s just nothing like it. After visiting old town after old town after old town between Sweden, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Austria, it was like a breath of fresh air to find myself lost in the literal labyrinths of Venice’s waterborne neighborhoods that take 15 minutes to traverse 3 blocks without a map, where 3 in every 4 streets dead end onto tiny canals that you have to carefully poke your head around to get a view of bridge coordinates without falling into the water. It’s a totally pedestrian city with the obvious absence of roads and cars; the only transportation being via the expensive ‘water bus,’ the extortionately expensive ‘water taxi,’ and the mortgage-inducingly expensive Gondola rides. Renovating old buildings in such a place is blindingly costly, as well, which means that most homes and shops retain a rustic, centuries old appearance. Walking along the empty back canals at night with a slice of fresh margarita pizza or a heaping cone of gelato is really a sublime experience.

Though Venice is certainly the most unique city in Italy, Cinque Terre steals the crown for the most awe-inspiring locale. Though still not nearly as famous as Rome, Venice, Milan, Florence, etc., it should really be at the very top of every one’s list for can’t miss places in Italy. Cinque Terre is the collective name of 5 small Italian villages nestled between mountain and sea on the Mediterranean coast just south of Genoa. Each of these townships has its own unique charm – ours, Riomaggiore, spilled down from a valley between vineyards and a mountaintop church to the sea, opening up along the coast like the perfect set for a Broadway musical. Sitting on the rocks just off the port and looking back at the tiered balconies from hundreds of faded, green-shuttered buildings, you could really imagine the residents all springing forth from their houses in unison at the sound of the town bell and bursting into song. The villages are interlinked to one another by what might be the most impressive network of hiking trails in the world; the Cinque Terre area map looks like a NYC transportation schematic, but with trails where subways should be. Narrow paths between villages winding through vineyards and grottos provide some awe-inspiring views of the Italian coastline.

And this is to say nothing of the cheap (but good) red wine, pizza and fresh pasta at every meal, and heaping servings of gelato that you have to race against nature to gobble up before it melts.

I’ll even begrudgingly admit that I enjoyed Rome this time around. But then again, I consider any trip to the Italian capital that doesn’t end in a missing wallet an enormous personal victory.

Click HERE for the pics.

Couch Surfing: The Future of Backpacking

2007-08-28T06:23:00.000-04:00

Wipe that confused look off your face. I know that some of you are probably picturing some crazy new ‘extreme sport’ that strange ole Sean managed to get involved in (and the strange picture of my Latvian friends and myself probably doesn't help matters). Rest assured, this has nothing to do with souped-up household furniture careening down canyons or anything of the sort.

“Couch Surfing” is an emerging colloquialism amongst backpackers referring to crashing at the homes of locals, as opposed to staying in hostels or camping. It’s to sleeping what hitchhiking is to traveling. The term comes from the website name and address of one of the two flagship internet sites that provides travelers with a search-based forum to network with other like-minded souls willing to lend a helping hand. Participation ranges from meeting for a cup of coffee to giving a tour around town to hosting travelers overnight. The easiest way to think about it is like Facebook for travelers; each person has their own profile with pictures, personal information, travel experience, etc. and after staying at someone’s house or meeting other ‘Couch Surfers’ on the road, you can exchange information and become online ‘friends’ and give each other ‘references.’

The most obvious benefit of Couch Surfing is that it’s absolutely free. As anyone who has ever been on a trip can tell you, the most expensive parts of travel are 1) travel itself (plane, train, and bus tickets) and 2) hotels/hostels. Couch Surfing eliminates the latter and frees up funds for other, more exciting activities.

But the real wonder of Couch Surfing lies in establishing connections. Staying in hostels, you meet a lot of fascinating people from all over the world… the downside is that none of the people you form these transient relationships with are actually from the country that you’re in. With Couch Surfing, you stay with real people in real houses with real jobs, real stories, and real insight into local culture and life. Not to mention the doors that staying with someone in touch with local scenes opens.

If I stayed in hostels through the entire Baltic region, I never would have heard about what it was like growing up under Soviet occupation, would never have stayed in an apartment above an old KGB cell, and wouldn’t have had one of the best weeks of my trip (To briefly summarize, my seven nights Couch Surfing in Latvia included a 2 night hardcore music festival in the woods, a retreat to my host’s grandparents house in the Latvian countryside where we baked in an old fashion water and hot coals sauna and ate home cooked meals straight from the farm before lying out on blankets under the clouds above the pasture, gazing in amazement as my host and his break dancing group lit up the clubs of Riga, and being treated like family by all his friends and relatives).

I could go on with all the stories of my Couch Surfing escapades in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Austria, and Israel, but for now I think you get the picture.

Couch Surfing is really a fascinating opportunity for backpackers to interact with local communities in a way they never could have before the 21^st century. In my eyes, this is one of the most visionary uses of the World Wide Web to date.

Check it out: www.couchsurfing.com

Exodus to the Baltic States

2007-08-28T06:20:00.001-04:00

Wanting ever desperately to prevent selling a kidney – which is what a further stay in Scandinavia would have required – I decided it was time to push on into Eastern Europe to a handful of countries that most Americans could never imagine as travel destinations, let alone place on a map: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Slovakia, before reaching the more popular tourist spots of Austria and Italy.

I fled Sweden in style aboard the Tallink ferry – the name being a hybrid of the words ‘Tallinn’ (Estonia’s capital) and ‘link’ – which was the biggest vessel of any kind that I have ever had the pleasure of boarding. I would have never in a million years thought that Tallinn would be enough of a draw to merit the daily departure of a 10 story cruise ship with hundreds of cabins, casinos, bars, disco, and a cabaret show. For Americans, Estonia and the other Baltic States remain relatively obscure and well off the radar of travel enthusiasts, but for Swedes – and for many other Europeans, including hordes of obnoxious British stag (bachelor) parties – the secret is out: Tallinn, Riga (Latvia), and Vilnius (Lithuania) are stunning, rife with life, and are quickly becoming the next big tourists destinations of the old Soviet Bloc.

The reasons that everyone is coming to the Baltics these days are twofold: the miraculously well-preserved Old Towns (the cultured response) and the pulsing nightlife (the real appeal for most). Each of the capitals features labyrinths of narrow cobbled streets winding through centuries old buildings dating far back into the medieval period filled with Gothic churches and spacious, café-laden squares. Personality wise, I found the three to be totally different from each other, Tallinn feeling quite a bit more contrived than the two, like a Medieval Disney Land of sorts. Riga’s Old Town felt like the most genuine and lived-in of the three, its neoclassical buildings and adorning nymph statues spilling out from the center and filling the entire city.

I spent about 3 weeks between the three Baltic countries, covering each of the capital cities, as well as attending the 5 day long Ollesummer (Beer Summer) festival in Tallinn, camping out in a Latvian national park for Fonofest (a 2 day ‘hardcore’ music festival) and dropping by a Chapel Hill-esque college town called Tartu (Estonia) and Lithuania’s stunning 40km long sand dune spit.

The Baltic States were not at all how I had imagined. Ignorantly, I had pictured a series of backwater towns with technology from the 70s, music from the 80s, and prices comparable to Thailand. I was shocked to find that almost all public squares were equipped with free Wi-Fi and that all Estonian citizens were using computer-chipped ID cards that had made the country one of the world’s first test grounds for online voting in a general election. They really couldn’t be very more modern. Stuff wasn’t cheap either. The cost of goods wasn’t exactly expensive, but it certainly wasn’t Budapest or Krakow either. But then again, compared with Swedish prices anywhere else in the world could seem like Eastern Europe.

Click HERE for pictures from the Baltics

Sweden: From Prince to Pauper, Coffee Surprise, and Pictures

2007-07-24T09:41:00.000-04:00

Backpacking across China and Southeast Asia certainly has its rewards: the beautiful landscape, the exotic cultures, the tasty curries and spicy Sichuan cuisine, the pristine beaches on secluded islands… the list goes on and on. Upon arriving in Scandinavia, however, the advantage of Asian travel I appreciate the most is that it’s dirt cheap.

Going from Thailand or Malaysia to Sweden is like taking a giant leap from Target cargo pants to Diesel jeans. Your average hostel in Bangkok is going to run you about $8 a night for a double room (don’t even get me started on the more remote areas… Matt and I were paying $2.50 for a riverside Bungalow in Laos, and I had a single room on the River Kwai for $1.50). Compare that with the $30 I was paying in Sweden for a place in an 11-bed dorm and you’ll start to get an idea of the financial shock I underwent.

Perhaps the saddest consequence of my fall from fiscal grace was the blow to my culinary experience. I’ve found that after traveling for an extended period of time, it’s not the sites, but the food that begin to excite you. I’d take a spicy Thai red curry or a plate of dumplings and wanton soup over a visit to another wat any day of the week. It appeared now, much to my chagrin, that my magical food tour would have to be put on hiatus in Scandinavia. Whereas in Asia I had been eating out for every meal, in my 2 weeks in Sweden I never once even sat at a restaurant.

I found myself forced to navigate the aisles of many a Swedish grocery store. Going to a grocery store in a new country is always a bit of a shock. Once you cross a border, everything from the sections to the labels to the languages to the foods themselves magically change in an instant. Having just gotten used to the stores in Southeast Asia, I was again cast into an unknown culinary world in Europe. I don’t know why it is, but to me the foods in the grocery stores of European countries are so much weirder and more intimidating than those of Asian countries. Maybe it’s the massive sections of belly-sized cheese wedges that smell like gym socks or maybe it’s the rows and rows of sausages the size and shape of which I can’t imagine came from any one particular animal. There aren’t as many familiar name brands either. The biggest kicker, though, is the lack of English anywhere on the packaging. As you may have guessed, I haven’t totally mastered Swedish yet, so I just had to guess at what everything was.

On my first trip to a grocer, I was looking for milk and found a paper carton with a picture of a cow on it. The brand name was ‘Milkjo’ or something absurdly close to ‘milk’ like that. It even said 3%, which I correctly took to be the fat content. I didn’t worry about what ‘Fil’ – which was written in bigger letters than the brand name – meant. It just had to be milk. I returned to the hostel and brewed myself (poured hot water into freeze dried crystals) a cup of coffee, which I was aching to have after my long day of travel. I tipped the carton of ‘milkjo’ and out came a much thicker liquid than I remember milk being. I stared for a long moment at the goop in the mug. ‘Well, it’s 3% and I usually drink 1% at home so maybe it’s just supposed to be thicker,’ I thought. I gave the carton a whiff and jumped back halfway across the kitchen. It smelled like spoiled yogurt. It turns out that I had bought ‘Sour Milk’ (that’s what ‘Fil’ means), a Swedish favorite. Surprises are the last thing I like with my coffee.

CLICK HERE for some pictures of my 2 weeks in Sweden, which I promise were better than how I just made them sound.

Midsummer: Drunk Swedes and Maypoles

2007-07-13T09:51:00.000-04:00

‘You’ve come for Midsummer? You will get to see a lot of really drunk Swedes,’ was the first thing that Erik – the Vandrarhem (youth hostel) owner, no slouch at imbibing himself – said to me upon my arrival in Leksand.

Leksand is a modest, 80s mid-American suburbs-looking town lying at the southeastern corner of Sweden’s Lake Siljan. There’s not much in Leksand, one grocery store, a handful of Italian and Chinese restaurants, the state-run alcohol shop, a movie theatre that operates only seasonally. On any other week – and indeed in the days prior to the event – it’s a serene place surrounded by villages of red wooden cottages with baby blue shutters and barn doors – the colors are mandated by local law – but now it was preparing for a raucous implosion of guests from all over the country. For Midsummer weekend, the Swedes all but evacuate the major cities and flock to the countryside; Leksand alone balloons to well over twice its normal population (an estimated 20,000 people come to watch the maypole rising on Midsummer’s Eve). Suffice it to say, I was in the right place to celebrate with the drunken Swedes.

A fertility festival of pagan origins, Midsummer’s Eve is the most important – or at least most zealously celebrated – weekend on Scandinavia’s yearly calendars. It takes place annually on the Friday following the 21^st of June, the longest day of the year (It never actually gets dark in most of Sweden during the summer. In Leksand, the sun sets somewhere around midnight. One night, I rode a bike home from a party in a neighboring village at 2am and had no need for a lamp, as there was still plenty of light out).

Midsummer celebrations center on the rising of a maypole. Symbolically the maypole is meant to be a phallus and, accordingly, its erecting is a fertility ritual. The Swedes go the extra mile in decorating the dried pine tree trunk with a pair of wreaths positioned like testicles, just in case you had difficulty deducing the symbolism. Each town in Sweden has its own maypole and its own erecting (stop giggling) ceremony. It’s a lot more difficult than it sounds. Leksand’s maypole is the biggest in the country at just over 28m in length, or about a third of a football field. Check out the picture above to get an idea of the scale (this one is from another village and is considered a small maypole).

A big part of the fun in watching the maypole rising is the interlude between stages. While the supporting sticks are undergoing strategic repositioning, a band of violinists dressed like a roaming tribe of Quakers play a speedy Swedish ditty that sounds like the Scandinavian combination of folk and bluegrass. The song is always the same (or at least it sounds exactly the same to me), so the team hoisting the maypole knows when the end of the number is near, and they prepare for the next big cry of “HAAAIIILLL” and accompanying heave.

After the maypole is finally up and standing, a circle of people several bodies thick forms around it and a series of dances commence. At the big rising in Leksand, thousands of people held hands and danced (ran) frantically around the circle, kicking up a cloud of dust that obscured the view of all but the very top of the maypole.

Then come the big parties and the drunken Swedes, but that’s a whole nother story.

Pictures: Malaysia and Singapore

2007-07-08T17:45:00.000-04:00

After a brief encounter with Islamic extremists in Southern Thailand, I ambled my way through the Malaysian peninsula down into Singapore. En route I found myself in the middle of the rustic markets of Muslim Kota Bharu, Diving in the pristine marine parks near the road-less island of Pulau Perenthian (the only place I've ever been without land transport), jaunting through the world's oldest rainforest in Taman Negara, and eating non-stopped ethnic cuisines at Kuala Lampur's Little India and China Town. Malaysia was pretty amazing, but with just under 2 weeks to spend there, I barely scratched the surface.

I knew I was going to like Malaysia. Singapore was the real shocker. Far from the boring, sterile, strict metropolis that I - along with most people - imagined, it's a vibrant city packed full with charm and character. City planners here all deserve sashes of medals for the effective way in which they fused colonial and modern architectural elements, laid out streets and shopping districts without a trace of anonymity, and created the magnificent water promenade that runs along the Quays of the Singapore River.

Check out the pictures when you get a chance.

Click HERE

Kota Bharu: A Muslim Movie Set

2007-06-26T17:30:00.000-04:00

In my travels across the Malaysian peninsula, there was a small city near the northeastern border with Thailand that really captured my interest. Kota Bharu, the capital of Kuantan province, is generally passed over by travelers or used as a stop-over en route from southern Thailand to the island paradises of Pulau Perenthian, which is a shame; it has probably the friendliest populous in Southeast Asia and the best selection of cheap ethnic eats.

Kota Bharu is the only city in the Malaysian peninsula that is predominately Muslim. Walking through its streets, you can really feel like you’re on a movie set. During any of the 5 daily prayer times, speakers from the mosques blast out guttural chants that serve as a surreal background soundtrack for exploration. Women rushing back and forth from the markets are all dressed in these beautiful batik fabrics, vibrant and colorful, with matching shawls that hide most of their heads but really bring out the more subtle features of their faces. The smells of spicy fish curries waft from every street corner along with freshly cooked noodles and herbal teas.

Anyways, it’s a great little town that was a refreshing departure from Thailand and I wanted to share some shots of the town markets.

Click HERE for the photos.

Taman Negara to Taman Merlion: Jungle to Metropolis

2007-06-24T18:05:00.000-04:00

Taman is the Malay word for ‘park.’ Negara is ‘national.’ Taman Negara, the National Park of Malaysia, is the world’s oldest rainforest. So how old is ‘old’? An impressive 130 million years old. Think about that. That’s 65,000 times more distant from our lives than Christ. Taman Negara owes much of its longevity to its relatively close position to the equator. It survived several Ice Ages and geothermal disasters. It’s the stuff of legend. I spent a couple days hiking its more easily accessible routes (like the one leading to the pictured Canopy Walk), taking a wooden speedboat down its river’s rapids, and getting red mud tattoos from locals.

So that’s Taman Negara. Keeping in mind that taman means ‘park,’ what do you think that Taman Merlion means? Surely merlion doesn’t refer to the unholy union of the Queen of the Sea and the King of the Jungle. Right? Right!? Wrong. The Merlion – indeed half Mermaid, half Lion – is the ‘mascot’ of Singapore. Who knew that cities had – or needed – mascots? I was wondering what Knoxville’s would be, but then I realized that for all intents and purposes we do have a mascot (the Volunteer and/or Smokey, of course). Maybe since Singapore isn’t big enough for any kind of sports league, they thought they’d just make one hybrid, Voltron-esque mascot for the whole country.

On my first night in Singapore, I was taking a bit of a stroll down the city’s stunning waterfront promenade – which earns my nomination for ‘coolest place to spend an evening’ in Southeast Asia – when I happed upon a sign pointing to “Taman Merlion.” I had read about the mascot before in my guidebook, but never gave it a second thought until now. I veered off the road down to the bay and came upon the funniest looking thing I have seen in weeks: a life-sized statue (I say ‘life-sized’ because I can only imagine that a merlion would be several meters tall in real life) of the beast illuminated by floodlights, sitting proudly on its curled, feminine mermaid fin and spewing a stream of water from its mouth. The merlion elicited an explosive fit of laughter from deep within me – the kind that only solo travelers and asylum inmates seem to make. I swear that when it saw me, the lion-shaped torso looked almost embarrassed at its forced association.

Bandannas and Times Square

2007-06-16T10:28:00.000-04:00

My head has been naked for the past 3 months. When I was gathering my laundry from the maze of clotheslines on the roof of Dali No. 5 Inn, I noticed that my bandanna was curiously absent. This do-rag was my favorite piece of headwear in the world (I’ve conveniently circled it in the picture above just in case you have trouble distinguishing it from Soup’s Vietcong assault ware). I scoured the entire place, peeking under the unmentionables – sorry to mention them – of dozens of globetrotters, but alas, it was no where to be found. At the time, I couldn’t imagine that it was stolen. That just seemed impossible. I know it was camouflage and badass, but who would take a cheap piece of fabric? Now that I have been halfway across the continent, I am beginning to understand the motives of our fabric thief: you literally cannot find a bandanna to save your life in Southeast Asia.

Anything else you want – anything – is for the taking: screen-printed t-shirts of beer companies, cartography sets, fake diplomas and driver’s licenses, decorative umbrellas, flying squirrels, you name it. I’ve searched high and low from China to Laos to Cambodia and Thailand. Nothing.

When I arrived to Kuala Lampur, Malaysia, I found myself at a guesthouse on a massive pedestrian shopping street, just around the corner from ‘Times Square,’ the biggest shopping mall in all of Southeast Asia. If I couldn’t find a replacement here, I’d never find one.

The first thing to dawn on me upon entering a place like Times Square is that Americans – who once reigned supreme over all that is material – have been disposed from their throne as the world’s most avid consumers. That crown now belongs to the Asians. When you think about the psychology behind rabid consumerism, it all kind of makes sense; in the past 20 years, Asian countries have been experiencing massive economic booms. In the wake of success, we’re seeing an emerging middle class in China, Thailand, Malaysia, and – most notably – in Singapore and Hong Kong. People who could barely afford to eat growing up are now finding themselves with pocketfuls of extra cash. So they flaunt it. Now that they can spend, they probably feel that they have to.

But there are more pressing issues than fiscal anthropology; my head was still nude. You’d think that amongst 10 floors of shopping, a square foot of fabric would be an incredibly easy thing to come across. I found a lot of things in Times Square. I found the Hajj Game and the Amazing Mosque Race. I found a store called Cue that sold only billiards paraphernalia. I found a travel agency that only dealt with flights to countries ending in –stan. I found two branches of Sock World. I found an entire half floor of furniture that looked like a space-aged ghost town. I found that there was a 20 story hotel attached to each end of the shopping mall. I found that the staff of each shop knew as much as the information desk, which was nothing. I found myself being led to the 6^th floor, then down to the 2^nd, then back up to the 8^th, and then all the way to the 1^st.

Each time I asked a clerk where I could find a bandanna, they would look at me like I asked who the Comptroller of Swaziland was. Finally, after inquiring from no less than 30 people about where in the fair city of Kuala Lampur I might procure a do-rag, a magical thing happened: I found one. There was a small selection amongst a host of wigs (I guess the two are always used in conjunction in SE Asia) at a store called Mono. The irony of getting sick the day after visiting a store named after an infectious disease has not been lost on this traveler.

Thailand Pictures

2007-06-16T10:02:00.000-04:00

Here are a bunch of pics from my 2 months in Thailand. I've started to post my pictures to Facebook instead of Kodak Gallery... let me know if you think it's better or worse, easier or more difficult, or whatever.

The first few (Songkran, Chiang Mai, Sukothai):

HERE

The second several (Rocket Festival, Central Thai, Bangkok, the Islands, Full Moon Party):

HERE

What "Train Track Failure" Really Means

2007-06-10T11:08:00.000-04:00

Wow, I don't even know where to begin to explain this one. Let's just say that I've had my first run-in with Islamic extremists on this trip. I say 'this trip' because there was once before, in Amsterdam, when I met a duo of Moroccans who told me repeatedly about their desire to spray an ocean full of bullets over Israel and since then I've tried to avoid all Jihad-related discussions. But this was different - way different.

I'll start from the end. I found this article online after being informed about the happenings of the last few days in the ever volatile Thai south by fellow travelers whilst soaking up the rays on the Perhentian Islands:

CLICK HERE

Zoom back to June the 4th. I was en route to Malaysia from Thailand, enjoying the luxury of my 2nd class sleeper when I was so rudely awakened by a jolt as our train stopped. A hurried attendant came into the back car, where I was grumpily stirring, and asked us to promptly awake and gather our things; the train was experiencing a "track failure" and was going to have to back up two stations to Hat Yai. We were to disembark immediately upon arrival there. Upon stepping onto the platform, I was greeted by a TV cameraman who was up in my face like peanut butter on jelly. 'I guess he's never seen a tourist,' I thought. I made my way across town to the bus station after receiving a pittance of a refund from the ever generous Thai Railway system, where I nearly witnessed the largest riot in history over the privilege to board a mini-van. You see, everyone who had been headed to the Malaysian border via train was now trying to procure tickets on the only mini-bus headed anywhere near Sungai Kolok. After nearly getting stampeded to death, the ticket attendant, threw up his arms and left for a half hour. He returned with a big, clunky bus that must have seen its last use right around when - judging by its cobweb-covered colored lights - disco died. At least we had a bus. In Cambodia, they would certainly have made all 100+ people board a single Dodge Caravan and probably stick a few more on the roof for good measure.

About an hour into our trip - including the twice around the bus station we did just for good measure - traffic began to slow to almost a complete halt. We crept along the road until finally we could see the cause of the hold-up; a crowd of hundreds of Muslims clad in robes and shawls had blocked off all but one lane of traffic in front of a mosque. They were standing arms folded - like a troop of Arabic bouncers - and cast glances of death at each person who passed. The Thai people on the bus started to shrink in their seats. A woman a few rows ahead of me stood up to look and see what was happening and her boyfriend pulled her back to the seat. All was tense as we passed the scene, then the Sungai Kolok native sitting beside me explained what the trouble was the best he could... by making a serious of explosion noises. Indeed he was correct. 5 days ago - auspiciously the Buddha's birthday - machine gunfire ripped through the mosque and a roadside bomb killed 10-15 police officers and civilians. Now, the Muslim community was staging a giant protest. It was the closest feeling I'll probably ever experience to driving through the West Bank of Israel.

I think it's pretty cool that I've probably had my face on Thai TV along with a segment with phrases like 'Muslim Insurgents' and 'derailed train.' So we've had the 'stranded by a jackknifed 18 wheeler' event in China (not to mention the dirt road being dug right in from of our van), the 'hey, let's stuff 26 people in a pickup truck with all their luggage' bright idea in Cambodia, a few other mishaps made trivial only be the aforementioned disasters, and now the 'Shanghai-ed by Muslim extremists' adventure. I should think that I have a decent store of travel karma built up come Europe. Don't you?

The Full Moon Party: Need I Say More

2007-06-05T10:23:00.000-04:00

I have to admit that my desire to attend Thailand’s infamous Full Moon Party was fuelled largely – if not solely – by the street cred it carries amongst backpackers. Though relatively unknown/unheralded by my fellow Americans back Stateside, anyone that owns a travel-sized rucksack has heard the tales of debauchery that wash up from Ko Phangan’s shores at the ends of each 28 day lunar cycle. The rampant drugs, the sex, the blaring electronic music of more sub-genres than you’ve ever heard of, it’s the stuff of legend.

I can’t remember exactly when my ears had their my first encounter with these stories of the Holy Grail of parties. I can say with certainty that it was sometime during my first sojourn of length in Europe, long before I had even dreamed of coming to Southeast Asia. I was only just beginning to discover the piazzas of Italy and the cafés of France, and the idea of this magical Never-Never Land called ‘Thailand,’ with its beachside bungalows and hammock-citizen ration of 1:1, was about as tangible as a trip to the rings of Saturn. And then, there was this slightly ghoulish sounding ‘full moon party.’ Dancing the night away under the stars on a remote beach, miles away from the nearest care in world had (and still has) such an exotic appeal that it was instantly romanticized in my childlike fantasy to a degree that would forever remain untouchable in reality.

I won’t bother explaining the event itself in any detail. You know what a party is like. Take the biggest frat party you’ve ever been to, remove the frat boys and sorrostitues, replace them with backpackers and actual prostitutes, substitute a beach for the house and electronica for the Dave Mathews CD, eliminate the noise ordinances, trade the beers for buckets of Thai whiskey, throw in some thieves, add a lot of black light body paint, and multiply by a factor of 20.

It was alright. Nothing Earth-moving.

The Full Moon Party’s place amongst the great celebrations on my world-circumvention festival tour is hazy at best. On one hand, it’s a massive, world renowned, gathering of merriment in the middle of a tropical paradise. On the other, it lacks all the history, tradition, and cultural significance that all the other celebrations on my itinerary have. Call the Full Moon Party a Thai ‘festival,’ and Songkran and the Rocket Festival would simultaneously slap you across the face. It’s simply a blockbuster party, no more no less.

Photos: Laos and Cambodia

2007-05-26T04:06:00.001-04:00

There about 20 pictures or so that I compiled from Laos and Cambodia. Click here.

Rocket Festival: A Diamond in the Rough

2007-05-22T04:40:00.001-04:00

With a population standing around 23,000, Yasothon is by no means a bustling metropolis. On 362 days of the year, it’s a mere thoroughfare town en route from Ubon Ratchathani to Khon Kaen on Thailand’s route 23 highway. The fact that most people haven’t even heard of those two cities should say something about the size of Yasothon itself. It’s a mere blip on the map. Except, that is, during its annual Rocket Festival. On those remaining 3 days of the year, you’d be hard pressed to convince locals and visitors alike that there’s anything outside of this country town.

Boom Bang Fai is a festival held annually in a number of agrarian towns in the central region of the Southeast Asian peninsula (Southern Laos and Eastern Thailand). Local folklore attributes its origin to a time when Praya Than (the god of rain) was angry with mankind and refused to allow rainfall for 7 years straight. The resulting famine and death sparked a war between man and Praya Than, in which rockets were fired into the sky. To make a long story short, Praya Than agreed to allow the rains to continue and told mankind to send rockets to the sky when more was needed.

A pyromaniac’s wet dream, Boom Bang Fai features dozens of teams who parade their homemade rockets (anywhere from 1-8m in length) through town and then send them skyward on the festival’s final day. The rocket launching takes place all day Sunday over Yasothon’s river. The sounds of the rockets up close are deafening and the smoke that pours to the ground makes it look like a certified NASA launch.

The rockets are only half the fun, though. The shamed technicians whose rockets fail to fire are thrown into a mud pit, which quickly escalates into full scale mud wrestling amongst throngs of participants, both willing and unwilling. During the days leading up to the launch, 42 concert-sized stages (I counted) lined the main street, blasting music during all waking hours and playing host to dancing, drinking, and merrymaking. Saturday featured a day-long parade of traditional costumes, dance, eccentricity, and, of course, rockets.

The best part about Boom Bang Fai was its relative obscurity amongst foreigners. Though it wouldn’t seem so to most people back home, Thailand is one of the most touristed countries in the world; one of those ‘no rock unturned’ places. At Songkran in Chiang Mai, for example, there seemed to be at least 1 foreigner for every 5 Thai people. By contrast, out of the thousands of people at Yasothon’s rocket festival, I counted less than 15 foreigners in the whole town. The result was a genuine sense of welcoming from the Yasothon locals, who were clearly beaming with pride that a foreigner would take interest in their most important of events. I was taken in to a number of parties and barbeques and treated like a guest of honor. It was nice to find that for all the popular tourist destinations it has, there are still rocks like this one to be turned over in Thailand.

Long Live the King

2007-05-22T01:19:00.000-04:00

In 99% of countries around the world, Monday is the worst day of the week. It's the first day of the work/school week and it's the furthest you could possibly be from a relaxing weekend. It gives rise to the Office Space expression "Somebody's got a case of the Mondays." Thailand, however, falls within the other 1% of the world, where every Monday is [We Love the] King Day.

Gold is the official color of the King (corresponding with the color attributed to the day of the week of his birth, Monday) and on Monday, you'd be hard pressed not to know it. Everyone who is not in business attire dons nearly identical gold polo shirts bearing the crest of the royal family. Add to that the golden wristbands engraved with the phrase "Long Live the King," and you have yourself the genuine monarch roadie wear. It has a very 'Casual Friday at the office' feel to it.

In Thailand, it's pretty much national law that you have to love the king. I'm not kidding. That's actually not far from the truth, as Thailand has some of the strictest laws prohibiting blasphemy against the monarchy. Shrines and pictures of the King in various regal and humanitarian scenes (meeting with a peasant, showing his love of photography, taking a walk through the countryside) dot the streets and literally almost outnumber traffic lights. About a month ago an elderly ex-pat decided to go out and spray paint a giant "x" over a couple of these portraits and was subsequently sentenced to something like 75 years in prison. The King ended up pardoning the man 'in his infinite wisdom and kindness,' and he was released, albeit stripped of his visa.

The penultimate experience of the Thai reverence for their King came for me at the beginning of a movie at a Chiang Mai theatre. After the previews and before the feature, a message came on the screen that said, "Show your respect for His Majesty the King." Suddenly, everyone in the theatre arose and what ensued was a video montage tribute. Rice fields, countryside, and other beautiful Thai landscapes filled the background while raindrops containing pictures of His Majesty floated down the screen. The background music was the Royal Anthem... that's right, not the national anthem, the King has his own song. As the rain cleared, a rainbow came across the screen and illuminated one of his portraits. This happens before every movie in every theatre in Thailand.

Operation Transcendence: Wat Pratat and the Golden Teacher

2007-05-10T02:43:00.000-04:00

Located about 60km outside of Chiang Mai, Wat Pratat Sri Chom Thong is a temple held in very high esteem amongst the Thai people. Part of that has to do with the precious religious relic it holds – a bone fragment of the Buddha. As one could guess, this is incredibly rare given the 2550 years that have passed since his death. There is actually a special structure just outside the main hall that’s only purpose is to wash the artifact during Songkran. When they rinse it, the runoff flows down a wooden chute and hundreds – if not thousands – of people scramble to touch or bottle-up the water.

The other reason Wat Pratat Sri Chom Thong is so well-regarded is the head abbot of the temple, Ajahn Tong (literally golden teacher). Having entered monk-hood at age 11 and now age 84, Achan Tong has been practicing Buddhism and meditation for almost three lengths of my lifetime. To say he is merely ‘held in high esteem’ would be a gross understatement. For the Thai people, he is something akin to a living Buddha. It is said that he doesn’t experience normal states of feeling and transcends all pain and suffering. The reverence was explained to me like this: the Buddha is quite a distant figure, having lived more than 2550 years ago, and boarders on intangible for most people. Ajahn Tong is basically a living saint, very real, and touches the lives of all the people in the community. When he receives a promotion in the hierarchy of Buddhist positions in Thailand, the whole town holds massive parades with elephants and all. Within the temple complex there is an altar with a statue of the Buddha at the back and a smaller, but equally holy-looking, Ajahn Tong kneeling in front. That’s how much this man is loved.

Anyways, because of both these reasons, absurd amounts of donations flood in from the community, have made possible the creation of the International Meditation Center, and fund the housing, food, and course for community members and inquisitive foreigners – i.e. me – alike.

Operation Transcendence: Rules of Engagement

2007-05-08T08:46:00.000-04:00

On the first day of my Vipassana meditation course, I had a private opening ceremony with a white-gowned nun and an orange-robed monk. It was conducted entirely in pali which, along with Sanskrit, is to Buddhism what Latin is to Catholicism. Little did I know that I would be expected to read my vows on the fly in this antiquated language. I made three offerings of flowers, incense, and candles to the monk, Buddha and the teachings, and committed myself to the ‘eight precepts’ that would govern my conduct at the temple:

1) To refrain from killing any living being (easy enough, but includes mosquitoes and room-invading armies of ants)
2) To refrain from taking what isn’t given (alrighty)
3) To refrain from inappropriate speech (lying, slander, or discussing our own meditation with others)
4) To refrain from sexual misconduct (no problem)
5) To refrain from taking harmful intoxicating substances (beer and…caffeine?)
6) To refrain from eating after 12pm and before 6am (um… what’s that you say? That’s right, only breakfast and lunch. No dinner allowed.)
7) To only wear white clothes and refrain from wearing jewelry, accessories, etc. (see prison uniforms) and to refrain from distractions from meditation (books, music, internet… anything non meditation-related, not allowed)
8) To refrain from luxurious seats and beds (foreshadowing my sleeping arrangements)

And finally, though it wasn’t an actual precept, we had to abide by one final kicker of a rule:

9) To refrain from sleeping outside of the hours of 10pm to 4am (are you serious?)

So there you have it. For two weeks, my day was something like this:

Wake up to the beating of the temple gongs and accompanying barking of the 2 dozen resident dogs at 4am. Meditate until 6am. Eat Breakfast. Meditate until 9am. Morning meeting with instructor. Meditate until 11am. Eat Lunch. Meditate until 10pm. Go to sleep.

A few things need to be noted about this schedule. The first is that this was literally it. Apart from walks and breaks between meditations, there was nothing else to be done as per rule #6. Secondly, look at the schedule between lunch and bed. By the time it’s 12pm, you’re hit with the terrifying realization that you still have 10 hours to kill before your day ends. The third is that there’s no dinner. No eating for 18 hours straight daily. Call it a warm-up for my participation in Ramadan this year.

No coffee, no beer, no dinner (let alone eating after noon), no books or entertainment, and waking up at 4am every day for 15 days. I broke so many personal records there that my backpack should be covered with ribbons and medals for the rest of my trip.

Something Approaching Enlightenment

2007-05-07T01:07:00.000-04:00

I’m back people! I couldn’t decide whether to go dramatic or grandiose with my picture so I decided to go with both.

I just spent 15 days up close and personal with Thai Buddhism and Vipassana meditation and man, what an experience. I started trying to put everything I wanted to write about in one post, but it was turning into quite the novel, so I'm just going to make a few small posts over the next several days. For now, enjoy the pictures of this enlightened Legend.

Brief Hiatus

2007-04-19T00:43:00.000-04:00

Hello, you have reached www.probetheglobe.blogspot.com. I cannot come to the phone right now. I will be out of contact for the next 3 weeks as I attend a meditation retreat in northern Thailand. Please leave a message and I will get back to you as soon as I've attained enlightenment.

-Sean

Songkran: Super Soakers and World War III

2007-04-19T00:11:00.000-04:00

*unfortunately the picture wouldn't post, so you'll just have to wait!

If I had just one phrase to dedicate to describing the sheer madness of Thai New Year, it would be this: Balls-to-the-Wall Water War. What needs to be emphasized about Songkran in Chiang Mai is sheer magnitude. It’s the fact that during this three day period, the entire city stops and engages in combat. It’s the fact that every man, woman, and child is armed with some kind of water displacing device. It’s the fact that you can’t take five paces outside of your guesthouse without getting drenched. There’s no exaggeration there. Whatever spiritual beginnings the festival might have once had, it has digressed into all-out mayhem.

At least in name, Songkran is an important religious festival for the Thai people. It reigns in the Thai New Year and marks a time to wash away the trials and tribulations of the past and prepare for what’s to come. Therein lays the origin of the water fights that have now enveloped the nation. They were once friendly gestures of cleansing (and certainly on a much more prudent scale). Neighbors would carry buckets of water with flower pedals and monks would carry their alms bowls, gently splashing the tiniest bits of water on passersby.

Today, the rituals of Songkran have been all but obscured in a non-stop, three day orgy of water. Chiang Mai’s layout really lends itself well to the modern incarcerations of the ancient festival. What would be the biggest hindrance in most places for city-wide water warfare? A reservoir of H20 large enough to quench the demands of an entire water gun-totting urban population. Chiang Mai’s 5m deep moat surrounds the crumbling gates of the Old City and provides just the aquatic storehouse that the festival merits.

Songkran is unique in that over its three day period, there is really no exact moment where everyone can burst out and say “Happy New Year!” America’s New Year is all about the big countdown. During Chinese New Year, fireworks go on for days in either direction, but firecrackers crescendo at midnight on New Year’s Eve. Thailand’s New Year is different. It's about drawing out the passion of that one moment evenly over the course of three days as if to say, ‘Why exhaust yourselves for 10 seconds when you can have a weekend-long orgasm.’

Cambodian Maritime Trouble: What We Hadn't Signed Up For

2007-04-17T01:25:00.000-04:00

All the guidebooks about Cambodia rave about the boat trip from Siem Reap to Battambang, so Matt and I decided to give it a whirl. What we hadn't realized was that sometimes in dry season, the water levels are too low to complete the journey. Today was one of those days. We stopped at a village in the middle of nowhere and unloaded all of our bags. We weren’t anywhere remotely near Battambang. What then proceeded was the most uncomfortable travel experience I’ve ever had.

Throw out everything I’ve complained about relating to the quality of roads and comfort of transportation up until this point. We’ve hit a new low… and man was it low.

Our chariot that awaited us in the village was a lone Toyota truck. How many people do you think you could fit in the back of a pickup? Keep in mind that this had to include luggage as well. The correct answer, and I kid you not, was 23 people (26 including the three in the cabin). Once we fit everyone in the truck, on the truck, and around the truck, you were wedged in so much that movement of limbs was quite impossible. I had a Cambodian woman on my right that must have thought I was sprawling out, as she kept motioning for me to scoot over. If I had moved, it would have meant forcing someone overboard and flying into the jungle.

This is all to speak nothing of the condition of the roads. Being in the middle of B.F. Cambodia, there was little more infrastructure than haphazardly cleared paths leading us through the jungle. Let me clarify that it was the roads that were cleared. The route was laden with obstacles. Every few feet, we would get assaulted by thick branches and patches of brush. On passing over big bumps, it was only the tightly wedged formation of our bodies that kept us from flying off the back of the truck. It was also the peak of the day’s heat, in the midst of Cambodian summer.

To add a cherry on top, there was a box of dried fish wedged against my knees that gave off the worst stench you could ever imagine on a bumpy car trip. And it lasted hours.

Now that I've adequately complained about the truck rodeo, I should give credit to the boat trip. Although it prematurely came to an end, passing through floating villages where canoes outnumbered huts was pretty cool. Prospective passengers had to board the boat by paddling over from the docks of their water-borne dwellings and intercepting our course. Kids in tattered shirts waved jubilantly from homemade piers, clearly the only outside contact they would have the entire day. The boat wasn't the immaculate yacht pictured on our tickets, but it still made for a scenic journey through one of the world's most fertile freshwater fishing areas.

Aki Ra: Key Club, Shmey Club

2007-04-11T00:48:00.000-04:00

Think you've done something charitable in your life? Well, check this out:

Just outside of the Angkor temple area, there lives a man named Aki Ra. He knows not his birthday, nor his exact age. He was orphaned by the purges of the Khmer Rouge and subsequently assimilated into their army.

By the time he was about 5 years old, Aki Ra was training to shoot automatic weapons and had planted his first land mines. Since then, he was conscripted twice more – once when the Vietnamese army took eastern Cambodia and once when the Cambodian Army had retaken jurisdiction – and tells tales of planting countless mines and killing many men, as it was the only way of life he knew after being brainwashed by the Khmer Rouge. Times were so bad that when no water was available, he had to urinate in a plastic bag to soften rice enough to eat it.

After the conflict ended, Aki Ra began to pay back his debt to society... in dividends. Using nothing more than a stick with a screw attached to the end, he dismantled land mines around the country. Think about that.

Today, in addition to founding and maintaining the Land Mine Museum to promote international awareness of civilian victims of land mines, Aki Ra employs fellow Cambodians (through donations to the museum) to detect and safely disarm land mines in their home villages.

If you think that wasn’t enough, Aki Ra has also founded an orphanage for victims of land mine blasts. There are about 20 kids at his facility with missing arms and legs that now have a home and are educated in brand new school facilities (also commissioned by the donations Ra has raised).

He even returned to the site of the first land mine that he planted and personally removed it and continues to disarm land mines to this day.

And to think, I feel pretty good about myself when I give a few bucks to charities here and there. Aki Ra has to be one of the most admirable people in the world.

Angkor Wat: Raiders of the Lost Ark

2007-04-08T23:14:00.000-04:00

Before coming to Southeast Asia, I'd never heard the word Angkor independent from Wat. In Western schools, we all study about the Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians. In rare cases, we even learn a bit about the Persians, Mongolians, and Ottomans, but almost certainly never about the Khmers. The Angkorian empire (Khmer Kingdom) reigned for over 6 centuries and, at its peak, spanned the length of the Southeast Asian peninsula from Burma to Vietnam before it fell at the hands of the Thais. What is left for us to marvel at is the otherworldly architecture of temples and ruins of a long forgotten civilization.
What are now being called ‘The Temples of Angkor’ stretch for well over 100km in the area just north of Siem Reap. The name may be a bit of a misnomer since ancient buildings from the Angkor time period can be seen in other parts of

Cambodia

as well, but this is certainly the best preserved cloister of wats in such a close proximity.
The centerpiece of ‘The Temples of Angkor’ is, of course, Angkor Wat. No matter how you quantify its dimensions, Angkor Wat is the largest religious structure in the world. Its moat measures 1.5 km x 1.3 km, giving the complex a square area of almost 2 km. This makes the inner enclosure simply vast and awe-inspiring. Keeping in mind the scale of Angkor Wat, think about this: the sandstone that was needed for its completion was actually quarried 50km upstream and floated, block by block, down the Siem Reap river. These aren't legos, they're massive, heavy rocks that had to be moved and assembled entirely with 12th century technology. This is just one of many temples in the vicinity.
Exploring Angkor is an amazing experience that gives visitors a chance to get a glimpse into a culture that remains a mystery even to archaeologists. After climbing around apocalyptic Bang Mealea and watching nature take its revenge on the jungle temple of Ta Prohm, its easy to see why movie bigwigs chose the area for the filming of Tomb Raider.

Vang Vieng: Spring Break in a 3rd World Country

2007-03-31T12:07:00.000-04:00

Between Luang Prabang and Vientiane lies the new backpacker Mecca of Vang Vieng. Why it developed into what it is today is no mystery. The scenery is beautiful. The calm Nam Song river runs alongside some stunning Karst peaks as they pass this once tiny village.

If Laos isn't technically a 3rd World country, feel free to substitute the word "developing" in the title of this entry.

I know that for anyone who hasn't been to Southeast Asia, this probably seems like a ridiculous stretch, but I challenge you to tube down the Nam Song with hundreds of other travelers, floating with a Beer Lao in hand while pop music blares from the speakers of volleyball court-equipped riverside bars and bodies catapult to the water from zip-lines above you. If not "Spring Break," I think you'd at least have to give me something akin to "Senior Trip."

With the amount of drugs and dreadlocks, you'd think a direct flight just opened from Amsterdam to Vang Vieng.

Trying to find a Laotian who isn't involved in tourist commerce in one way or another would be like trying to find Waldo in a sea of candy canes.

I can't say I didn't enjoy my time watching episodes of The Simpsons and Family Guy from the pillow-laden bamboo mats of cafes or the easy access to tubing and kayaking in the Great Outdoors. It's just that a more authentic version of Vang Vieng would have been nice... whatever that means.

Luang Prabang: Amazing Young Monks

2007-03-31T11:20:00.000-04:00

Of Luang Prabang’s residents, it is generally said that everyone is either a) a tourist, b) a monk, or c) someone profiting off the tourists. Though I don’t think my 5 days in Laos’ most visited city qualifies me to assess the veracity of the claim, I can say that there all three classifications are there in spades.

The thing that impressed the most on me from my time in Luang Prabang was the ability and overt desire of young monks to speak English. On our second day in the city, Matt and I stumbled upon a swimming hole at the end of the peninsular Old City, where the Nam Khan river filters into the mighty Mekong. There were about 30 children, half of which were MITs (monks in training). Clad in their sleeveless robes of various shades of orange, they were wading, splashing each other, and doing back flips off of boulders in the middle of the water. While Matt stripped down to his skimpies and went to swim and spook the lads with his now Lawrence of Arabia-esque beard, I squatted next to a group of four of the bald heads and had an even-paced English conversation with the high schoolers. Amazed at their aptitudes for my native language, I asked how long they had been studying. I had assumed that English education must begin at an incredibly young age, like their parents played BBC cassette tapes over headphones to them while still in the womb. It turns out that they had only been studying for a couple years.

Why was their grasp of English, or at the very least their willingness to speak it, so much better than my students in Japan is a mystery to me. Japanese students now study English from elementary school onwards (mandatory as of this year) and are even sent to cram schools and English conversation companies to hone their abilities, yet often times are confused in class by questions as simple as “What’s your name?” Maybe monks should teach them, too.

China to Laos: A Vehicular Travel Experience

2007-03-29T03:35:00.000-04:00

It’s hard to say where to start describing a three day international trip from southern China to northern Laos. When trying to convey the gravity of the trip appropriately to a fellow traveler in Luang Prabang, I found myself instinctually referring to it as “quite the vehicular travel experience.” I think the phrase ‘vehicular travel experience’ captures the essence of what we went through across the borders of these two communist countries.

I could go on about the 50+ hours in transit, how the number of vehicles we used reached double digits, or that the bumpy terrain under the guise of roads were in such a state that construction workers were digging out paths right in front of us. I'll excersise a bit of prudence and just talk about the disastrous wreck we witnessed on our way to the small Southern China town of Mengla.

On the curvy, narrow mountain roads of deep southern China, I’d be reluctant to drive a big car, let alone a truck or anything than needs space for wide turns. Well, someone thought it made sense to force through an 18-wheeler carrying something enormous bearing resemblance to a turbine engine. As anyone could have predicted, the truck’s back half fell off the road mid-turn, its metal rear bumper cutting through the pavement and rendering the vehicle immovable. It’s front end was stranded on the far side of the road, effectively blocking all passage. It was the kind of scene that you can only stare at drop-jawed in utter helplessness. Traffic stopped dead on both sides. A group of roughly 40 witnesses stood on a hillside overlooking the vanquished beast of a truck. The Chinese men were chain smoking. The Dai minority women dressed in flowing, colorful fabrics and traditional head-dresses sat helplessly on tree trunks. We were stopped for a good hour before someone had the idea of creating ramps beside the paved road on both sides of the front end of the truck. The ‘ramps’ were actually just stones angled to give a slope from ground to road and provide enough traction to maneuver around the wreck. Cars could go one at a time off the road on one side and back on at the other side with the help of this device and the direction of the dozen self-anointed traffic cops.

The whole ridiculous process reminded of me of a textbook schematic on facilitated diffusion. I won't bother extrapolating, as my street cred is bound to take a hit at even the mention of cell transport mechanisms on my webpage. Instead, I'll just post this ambiguous graphic on the web and leave it up to you to find some correlation to the wreck.

China pics: 3 of 3

2007-03-24T08:37:00.000-04:00

Ok, last one. Click it.

China pics: 2 of 3

2007-03-21T11:59:00.000-04:00

Click here to see them!

China pictures: 1 of 3

2007-03-19T10:54:00.000-04:00

Here's a batch of some random photos from China. Enjoy.

Tackling Tiger Leaping Gorge

2007-03-19T10:07:00.000-04:00

You can't go to Southwest China without hearing about Tiger Leaping Gorge. The 2-3 day trek through its canyons and mountainside has become sort of a rite of passage amongst backpackers to the region. Deservedly so. The centerpiece of the Gorge is the mighty Yangzi River. Its emerald green waters course through the twists and turns of the canyon formed by two chains of snow-capped mountains, Haba Xueshan to its west and the jagged, steep Yuelong Xueshan to its East. The mountainside trail carving through the towering peaks of Haba Xueshan - complete with steep ascents and even steeper drop-offs - make for some of the most truly humbling vistas that I’ve ever encountered.

I think the most remarkable part of the Tiger Leaping Gorge trek has to be the variety of milieu. We went through bamboo thickets and wove in and out of passages through the middle of cliff faces. Red guide arrows led us past villages resting in seas of stacked rice terraces hugging the mountains. We saw countless roosters, chickens, oxen, horses, wild boar, and bulls. The next day would see us crossing waterfalls hundreds of meters high and overtaking flocks of goats and their Shepards on the same trail. We found large boulders to rest on, each offering their own views of the peaks and the canyon below. The beauty of Tiger Leaping Gorge is so thick and vast that you can’t help but think that you’re only staring at an elaborate oil painting on the largest canvas imaginable. It’s that intangible. It was simply surreal.

And Matt got spanked (not figuratively) by a middle-aged Naxi woman who became increasingly insulted at his refusal to pay her 8 yuan fee for having 'cleared' the most dramatic viewpoint of the gorge. It was absolutely hilarious. That was maybe our greatest moment of cultural exchange on the trip thus far.

Publie Facilifies: The Wonders of Chinese English

2007-03-03T09:57:00.000-05:00

English translations are always amusing in Asian countries. Menus and signs are the instant classics in China. On a rainy day in Guilin, one sign in particular lent me endless amounts of entertainment. Below is the posted English translation of the rules for visiting Elephant Park, a famous tourist attraction where a cliff jutting into the Li River bears resemblance to the trunk of an elephant drinking water. It starts off with a series of spelling and grammatical errors and then belligerently crescendos into the jumble of letters and made up words that make up rule #8. See how many errors you can pick out from just this one sign.

Enirance Regulation

1. Tourists must buy tickets for entrance and have if checked before entering into the park the tickets should be kept in good shake for checking after entering the park.the ticket will be invalid in case that the coupon be torn off by oneself.
2. The tourists with check bill should change it for souvenir Ticket at the Booking office.
3. Guide(incl local guidecnd guide in full charge in full line)must present valid certificate before entering the park free of charge.
4. The children under 140cm in height can enjoy free charge for addmnission of the park.
5. The children without company of their guardian are not permitted admission into the park. Any swimming in dangerous water territory is prohibited
6. The park isno-smoking place.please observe thisregulation.thank you for cooperation.
7. Gun and bullet.explosive and flammable articles are strictly prohibited taking.
8. Barbecue is forbidden in the park.lay stress on sanitation and maralify.Taking care of publie facilifies and installaticns in the park.keeping off flowers and turf.taking care of tour ist safety.

Bonus points if anyone can give me a definition of ‘maralify’.

On Top of Moon Hill

2007-02-28T12:44:00.000-05:00

Matt and I rented bikes (of the non-motorized persuasion to avoid disaster) to head out into the countryside. Getting out of town might have well have been a big game of Frogger. Traffic laws, especially right of way and the existence of laned traffic, seem to fall by the wayside over here. At one point, there was a truck protruding from the side of the road so Matt tried to go around, only to be greeted by an elderly woman on a moped carrying a 2 meter long bundle of sticks coming right at him on the wrong side of the road.

Once out of the city, it was smooth sailing, breezing past rice terraces and weaving through the Karst. We parked our bikes, paid a 1 yuan ‘bike watching’ fee to guarantee our bikes weren’t stolen, and ascended a steep set of stairs to the top of Yueliang Shan (Moon Hill). The steps reportedly number over 1100, but I think that’s just communist folklore. At the summit of Yueliang Shan lies a massive natural stone arch, giving the illusion of a hole in the peak from afar, hence the name. We climbed up to the top of the arch, revealing a full 360 panorama of the dozens of gumdrop hills in sight, most enveloped in a slight haze in the overcast afternoon light.

Yangshuo: Backpacker Paradiso

2007-02-28T11:29:00.000-05:00

Our past three nights were spent in the cozy backpacker haven of Yangshuo. Nestled in a valley between the peaks of the Karst and the Li River, it’s a nice place to enjoy the Great Outdoors and chill out amongst the throngs of ‘Westernized’ cafes and restaurants.

My mom linked me to a webpage chronicling a couple’s trip around the world, where they proclaimed Yangshuo as ‘the Ibiza of China.’ Though I think that it’s an unfounded analogy on numerous levels, there is an undeniable over saturation of bars pumping out tunes well into the night along ‘West Street’ (not sure if the irony of the name is lost on the Chinese). But the bar scene plays a distant second fiddle to the natural surroundings. Anyone who has their reservations need only look past the neon to see the shadows of the Karst looming over the city like a gothic cathedral, reminding all who is master over this dominion.

Ocean's Eleven Chinese Acrobats

2007-02-23T11:46:00.000-05:00

Anyone who has ever seen Ocean’s Eleven knows about the Chinese Acrobats. Ever since deciding to go buy tickets to a show, I have had visions of the scene where George Clooney and Brad Pitt go to a performance to scout out a talent for their big heist. The acrobat runs up a pole with hands and feet and then does a spring move off the pole, a couple flips and then lands perfectly on his feet. Of course, he makes it into the eleven.

The real Chinese Acrobats are just as impressive. To describe the show in detail would be impossible. Take a look at the pictures and be assured that the Ocean’s Eleven routine made its appearance as the finale.

Hike through Middle Earth

2007-02-23T11:42:00.000-05:00

Mao Zedong once said that “He who has not climbed the Great Wall is not a true man.” I am now a real man. Today, Matt and I traversed the Great Wall of China. You can’t just go to ‘The Great Wall of China,’ though. You have to pick your part of the once 6000km wall carefully. Most tourists go visit the most restored portion of the wall in Badiling. Most photos in guidebooks are taken at this section of the wall and, accordingly, every vendor of tacky goods worth their weight in Mao Zedong alarm clocks has set up shop all around its perimeter. The second most touristed section in Mutianyu, though reportedly not as bad, is also moving in a similar direction. Wishing for a more spiritual experience and not really feeling the need to buy copies of the Teachings of Mao Zedong, we opted for a less traveled route: a 10km hike from Jinshanling to Simitai.

After a 110km bus ride out of central Beijing, we found ourselves at the gates to the Great Wall… or rather the ticket window (the China Tourism Board has levied a fee to roam freely on the premises of each section of the Great Wall that can be visited). Several minutes later we had reached our first rampart. We were standing on the Great Wall of China.

Climbing on the crumbled remains of stone steps that restoration efforts had clearly passed by, we ascended from Jinshanling farther up into the mountains.

From the vantage point of raised ramparts, I gazed in awe at the wall snaking off into the horizon in both directions, dividing the deep valleys below. Standing on the Great Wall, you don’t feel like you’re anywhere on Earth. It just doesn’t seem tangible. Yet there you are, standing on a 2000 year old part of history with nothing around to interrupt your journey but steep drop-offs and moving vistas. Matt commented that Peter Jackson could have well been inspired by the wall in molding his creation of some of the sets from Middle Earth. I’d have to agree.

On the decent into Simitai it was clear at which point the restoration efforts had begun, as our rocky and tempestuous route gave way to paved stone walkways that could even support a car if need be.

From the front entrance of the Simitai portion of the wall, there are two ways to get to the parking lot where the bus was waiting for us. One was via swinging across a zipline extending a hundred meters over an emerald green lake like India Jones. The other was a 15 minute walk by foot. You can guess which path we took.

Mao Knows Best

2007-02-23T11:39:00.000-05:00

Every city has its characteristic items that are sold to tourists at its every nook and cranny. I’m used to the normal postcard hawkers and faux watch vendors, but what I wasn’t prepared for was the Teachings of Mao Zedong book salesmen. Curious, I picked up one of the tombs very carefully, thinking that this could well be the Chinese equivalent to the Bible, and thumbed through the pages. As the cover had promised, there in English and Mandarin were the words of the Chairman, himself, for all to remember and ooh and aah at, like a modern Confucius.

Communist Construction

2007-02-21T11:33:00.000-05:00

The thing that has possibly left the greatest impression on me from China thus far has been communist architecture. There is no doubt in my mind that there is a brilliant psychology behind every structure in the city.

Take Tiananmen Square.

On the West side of the square, the Great Hall of the People in its dominating size and lifeless presence looms over passers by and instills a sense of humility in their place amongst the affairs of 'The Party.'

To the South of the square lies the equally massive Mausoleum of Mao Zedong, where the bodily remains of ex-chairman Mao Zedong are on display. All can remember the sacrafices of the leaders of the revolution.

Combine these with the excessive width of Chan'an Road, the sheer vastness of Tiananmen Square itself, and the narcissistically large portrait of Mao watching over the every move of his people, and one gets the sense that communism and the party is still very much a part of the composition of everyday China despite the recent influx of capitalist influences.

Linguistics

2007-02-21T11:29:00.000-05:00

After an epic 40+ hours in transit, I found myself on a limousine bus to Beijing's city center. Peering out the window as we drove past the neon signs and advertisements of the city outskirts, I wondered just how deep the resemblances of the last giant Red State would run with my home for two years, Japan.

For me, the characters were the first noticeable similarity. The Japanese language utilizes thousands of kanji (Chinese characters), which were imported from mainland Asia hundreds and hundreds of years ago. Though the characters utilized contemporarily both in Japan and China have diverged from their original forms and nuances, many have retained the same basic meanings. The practical end result of this thousand year long linguistic evolution from my standpoint has been a sense of comfort amongst the passing signs and maps and restaurant menus. Of course I don't understand most of it, but it's just familiar enough to feel at ease.

The spoken languages, however, couldn't be more different. A Japanese couple occupied the seats behind me on the airport bus and every other seat was filled by Chinese people. The Japanese couple talked very calmly in their nice, polite, rhythmic patterns in a soothing fashion that could put a baby to sleep. A Chinese girl to my left, chatting on her cell phone, was belting out tone-filled, razor-sharp syllables that could cause an eardrum to implode in an instant. If Japanese were the classical music of languages, then Chinese would certainly be the punk rock.

It has begun

2007-02-21T11:26:00.000-05:00

China, I have arrived. Actually, I've been here in the People's Republic now for almost a week, but amidst all the excitement of Chinese New Year and keeping myself busy exploring Beijing, I've yet to write anything about my trip.

The day after I arrived, I was met by my fully-bearded partner in crime, Matt “Soup” Huffman, who has been told by the Chinese that he bares more resemblance to an Arab than an American (and, apparently with my new buzzed hair and 5 o'clock shadow, I look German). We've since partaken in all the madness of Chinese New Year in addition to taking in the temples, the parks, the Forbidden City, and, of course, the Great Wall of China. We'll be in Beijing for another few days before pushing off to our next destination (Guilin; in southern China). I'm going to take a day before we head down there to catch up on writing and pictures, so keep an eye out for some new posts before then.

No surprise, it was scripted

2007-02-13T21:15:00.000-05:00

My travel buddy, Matt "Soup" Huffman, and I like to talk about The Script -- which I write in italics not because it is a book title, but because it is so important that it deserves nothing less... in fact, I'm gonna go back and bold it, too. Done. -- when referencing our misadventures. The Script is the collective body of everything that has and will happen in our lives. Because it accounts for past experience, our individual natures, and the world's sometimes strange sense of humor, The Script predicts the future. Not that it ever needs to.

It was my fault. I should have referenced the opening chapter of my travels in The Script before I booked my flights. I mean, of course I fly out on the only snowy day in the Midwest. Of course every flight is delayed or canceled. Of course my connecting flight to Beijing is the ONLY on time flight in the history of O'Hare International Airport on the snowiest day of the year, causing me to miss the connection. And of course I end up spending the maiden voyage of my journey waiting 24 hours for the next flight to China.

Life has quite a sense of humor. I really should have known. It was scripted, after all...

I'm ready for China... is China ready for me?

2007-02-09T12:27:00.000-05:00

*After I realized this reference was being lost on a number of people, I thought I'd extrapolate just a bit... This is the Gate of Heavenly Peace in Tianan'men Square in China, where the famous huge picture of Mao (now yours truly) looms over all passers by.

The Return of ProbeTheGlobe

2007-02-09T12:20:00.000-05:00

As I begin to embark on a journey of epic proportions (to speak as self-inflatingly as possible), it is time once again for ProbeTheGlobe to crank its gears and keep all of you informed on my whereabouts and misadventures.

I’m setting off on a 13 month odyssey across four continents and probably a couple dozen countries. Here is the basic itinerary I have mapped out:

Feb. 13 – fly to Beijing, China

Feb. 13 – June 20– Make my way through China and Southeast Asia by land

June 20 – fly from Singapore to Stockholm, Sweeden

July 15(ish) – fly to Valencia, Spain

Aug. 5^th (ish) – fly to Siena, Italy

Aug. 20^th – fly from Rome to Tel Aviv, Israel

Aug. 20– October 16^th – spend time in Israel, Jordan, and Egypt

Oct. 16^th – fly from Cairo to Delhi, India

Nov. 25^th – fly from Delhi to Cape Town, South Africa

Nov. 25^th – Jan. 25^th – Make my way through SE Africa

Jan. 25^th – fly from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia to Rio, Brazil

Mar. 15^th – fly from Buenos Aires, Argentina to home

I’ll be following festivals around the world. I’m shooting for the pace of one big festival per month. I’ll be starting with Chinese New Year and ending with Rio Carnival. I’ll be at a full moon party in Thailand and the world’s biggest food fight in Spain and many other places in between. I know, you all feel very sorry for me in this endeavor.

The whole way, I’ll be chronicling stories and photos and posting both to this webpage. Hopefully, I’ll do a better job in terms of frequency in my posts than in the pasts, but that depends largely on where and when I have an internet connection.

The basic premise for my trip around the world is this: to use festivals around the world as a launching point of exploring the common ways that we celebrate our basic humanity. On a daily basis, we hear about the horrors of the world – war, famine, terrorism, crime, poverty, etc. – that paint a bleak picture of human nature and the perseverance of decency. We see pictures of people grieving over lost loved ones and videos of the vocalization of hate. Every news channel, regardless of partisanship and bias, tells the stories that speak only to our sadistic desires to fear. In the midst of an era of the broadcast of misery, it’s easy to forget that people also celebrate. Whether it’s religion, manhood, coming of age, a successful harvest, or just an excuse to come together for debauchery or a giant food fight, every culture hosts events that celebrate the basic qualities that make us human.

That's the premise on paper. There is also, of course, always the pursuit of (mis)adventures.

*I'd like to add that I did not shoot this picture of the world.

Awa Odori - Lord of the Dance

2006-09-05T20:23:00.000-04:00

The week before I left the Land of the Rising Sun, I took a little trip with Mike and Ben to Tokushima. For those of you not robbing the Japanese school systems blind as an Assistant Language Teacher, Tokushima is a costal city on the island of Shikoku, or ‘The Four Countries’. The bait: Tokushima plays host to a huge dancing festival. Every year, during the Obon holiday weekend (celebration of the dead, but in a more serious way than Halloween), tourists, locals, and dance enthusiasts converge on Tokushima for a 5 day celebration of the local traditional dance routine. The ‘Awa Dance’, as the dance and festival are both called, is probably the most famous of Japan’s centuries old ceremonial dances. In fact, anyone who has been to Tokushima has undoubtedly seen videos, pictures, or the statues of dancers that seem to line the streets every 20 feet. It’s definitely the city’s claim to fame, unless you’re a big fan of ‘ramen’ (Tokushima’s style is often sought after by noodle aficionados).

Though the festival itself spans 5 days and crazy nights, we actually only went for one of them. That decision was partly financial and partly realizing that the 3 of us going out on consecutive nights in such a milieu could be disastrous on our collective health and possibly on the status of our visas.

The Awa Dance festival turned out to be one of, if not the best, festival that I’ve been to in Japan. The traditional outfits were more colorful than a Gay Pride parade and varied from the yukatas, happis, and jimbes that I’d seen before to things that were entirely new to me. The dances weren’t just contained to the small-football-field-sized bleachered areas made to accommodate the spectators, but spilled out through the entire city to the point that every street corner played host to swarms of energetic festival-goers doing their own renditions of the dance in circular, tribal-style interpretations. All the booze and dancing and shenanigans aside, the best part of the festival for me was the reasonable temperature brought by scheduling the festival at night. Unlike the other big festivals I’d been to where I was almost drowning in seas of my own sweat creeping up in my yukata, I was pleasantly breezed out.

Check out the pictures.

Here are the black and white ones I shot… look at these first, it looks leagues different without the big bright colors.

And these are the ones in color.

Enjoy… and go visit next year!

Photos: Nighttime and Markets

2006-07-19T01:13:00.000-04:00

With my stay in Japan reaching its countdown stage of under a month, I realized I should post the photos I want to share while they’re still slightly relevant. This week, I’m finally delving into the couple thousand or so pictures that I’ve taken in the past several months this year.

This first set of pictures is of the markets in Asakusa (Tokyo) and Toji (Kyoto) as well as some night shots of Dotonbori (Osaka) and Akihabara (Tokyo).

Click Here for the pictures.

The temple in Asakusa is the most visited in Japan, which I imagine would make it the most visited in the world. Even on weekdays outside of peak season, it and its markets are slammed with patrons both Japanese and foreign. I don’t know the exact figure of how many people go there daily, but lets just say… oh…. 6 trillion people a day.

Kyoto’s Toji temple turns from national treasure to giant Flea Market the 21st of every month. The juxtapositions of mounds of Japanese garakuta (junk) with centuries old temples and a multi-storied pagoda makes for an interesting contrast.

Dotonbori is the large promenade of Minami (southern Osaka) filled with eateries, bars, beautiful people, neon, and belligerence. It runs alongside a river in which hundreds of drunk people dive when the Hanshin Tigers win the Central League baseball championship.

Akihabara is the nerd capital of the world.

DJ Justice Returns!!

2006-07-13T00:04:00.000-04:00

This past Saturday, the Japanese listeners of WKNC 88.1 FM came out in force and were treated to the comeback of their beloved Legend and American Hero. It was the return of DJ Justice in his first public appearance since retiring from the airwaves and The Brad Dixon Radio Program: The Nuisance Party.

In the Japanese music scene, there’s a wonderful underground movement of Rock DJing. Its for those of us who can get into the screaming riffs of Mars Volta and the nerdy sass of Weezer a lot easier than the “what, what, whats” of hip-hop or the “un-tisk-un-tisk-un-tisks” of trance.

The idea of Rock DJing seemed absurd to me when I went to my first event. Flashing lights and cheesy laser effects generally reserved for raves and the like illuminated a kitchen-sized dance floor packed with cheering, lively Japanese people. Some danced while others jumped up and down screaming out the hyms of their favorite records, but everyone was facing the DJ like he was putting on a rock performance of his own. In reality, he needs do little more than flip through his CD collection and fade through tracks, but there’s plenty of energy and fervor to spice things up. The blend of everything from the Crystal Method to Alkaline Trio had me hooked from my first show.

Fast forward a year and a half and I find myself in the DJ line-up for RIZM: Vol. 5, an event combining rock DJs and bands into a stage club event. The idea is non-stopped music. As one band stops, a DJ immediately starts while the bands set-up their equipment and tune, and it continues band/dj/band/dj/etc., ending with the DJs playing until sunrise. I would have never imagined a place in Japan where I could start off a DJ set with At the Drive In (at 3am no less) and have people dance and scream the lyrics back to me with such enthusiasm.

Tsukiji Market: Something's Fishy in Tokyo

2006-06-27T21:56:00.000-04:00

Hahaha...ooohhh... clever word choice.

Tsukiji Ichiba in Tokyo is the largest Fish Market in the world. That shouldn't be a surprise considering its in the nation brought us sushi. Every morning before dawn, thousands of fish and sea critters from all corners of the globe (yes, it has corners) are brought to dock in Tokyo to be auctioned, filleted, sold, and shipped out to sushi restaurants all over Japan.

With that in mind, I'd say the most amazing thing about the market is how little it reeks of fish smells. I know, I'm easily impressed. That and Japan has fostered a love of sterility in me.

As most of you know, I'm quite the morning person, so I wasn't bothered in the least bit by getting up at 5am to be bounced like a pinball amongst the racing carts, trucks, and auctioneers before most Tokyo businessmen even go to work (Note for my special readers: I like mornings about as much as I liked Vanilla Sky)

The early hours of the market were worth dealing with to see sites like enormous tunas being inspected and rated before auctions, as if for the Tuna Draft, butchers knocking fresh fish on the head with the blunt side of sword-proportioned knives to get them to hold still, and eating maybe the freshest (and most expensive) sushi I'll ever get to try.

Check out my pics from the market.

Hanshin Tigers Fans: Taking the "White" out of "White Trash"

2006-04-20T10:22:00.000-04:00

Who knew that White Trash didn't have to be white? Apparently it can be yellow, too... though Yellow Trash sounds a lot grimier. The number of people at Koshien stadium who looked like they were still living in their mother's trailer/basement was mind-blowing.

If you don't believe me, take a look at this picture. Take note that the Hanshin Tiger "H" shaved in the back of the center dude's head tapers off into a Rat Tail. Also, though you can't see in the picture, both of the guys (and possibly the girl) have mustaches, which alone makes anyone eligible for White Trash status... except maybe for Burt Reynolds or anyone who owns Magnum PI status.

The good news: like all other Japanese people, the Yellow-White Trash looking people were incredibly friendly and inviting.

Koshien is an incredible place to watch a baseball game. It was built originally to hold the finals of the annual high school baseball tournament held every year, so the capacity isn't near the size of, say, Fenway Park. The crowds at Japanese baseball games are raucous, as well. It's like everyone is a cheerleader, but a little drunk and with crazy costumes and plastic noise-making bats. There's a song and cheer for every player. Instead of the Seventh-Inning Stretch, everyone blows up a sperm-shaped balloon (the likeness is really uncanny) and launches them in the air at once, filling the stadium. It must be to encourage procreation, since the declining birth rate is considered a national problem in Japan.

Philippines: A Pillar of Missionary Success

2006-04-13T05:11:00.000-04:00

I would like to give every Filipino a personal congratulatory handshake: their country is the most successfully brainwashed in the world.

Not in a dangerous sense, just in a twistedly amusing one.

I thought I must have met a real nut when a local described the starting point of history in the Philippines as “the Spanish discovered us in the 16th century.” What are you, a planet? A new species of plant? What do you mean you were ‘discovered?’ But it turns out that for many Filipinos, this was the start of their existence. Probably because before that, there was no Christianity in the Philippines.

I don’t think it would be a stretch to call the Philippines the most Christian country in the world, especially keeping in mind that it was more or less forced into Catholicism by Magellan and his successors. Officially it’s 92% Christian (81% Catholic), 5 of the remaining % being radical Muslims living in the southern islands near Indonesia, which are really more like bastions of crazy than part of a country.

Walking through a shopping mall in Tagbilaran, the capital of Bohol Island, I was perusing the somehow legal stores of copied games and movies, when over the PA for the entire mall comes a generic pop beat that I took to be a bland shopping tune. Then a voice dubbed over the beat starts, “Hail Mary, full of grace…” I look around me and everyone, the customers, the clerks, and even the security guards stopped in mid-transaction to bow their head as everyone in the mall repeated the prayer, crossed their hearts, and proceeded walking like nothing had ever happened. I could have run out with all the merchandise in the store and no one would have been the wiser. Not to mention the people around me were praying whilst surrounded by thousands of copies of copyrighted material. Never seen anything like it.

Though most of their Empire has long since crumbled, the Spanish Conquistadors and missionaries can rest in their graves knowing that their efforts were not unfruitful.

Philippines: Pints with Pints

2006-04-06T23:07:00.000-04:00

What did you do for Saint Patrick’s Day this year? Oh, me? I spent mine with Leprechauns.

Well, maybe that depends on how you define ‘Leprechaun.’ If you definite it as Merriam-Webster does, as “a mischievous elf of Irish folklore usually believed to reveal the hiding place of treasure if caught,” then my account is slightly inaccurate. If you replace ‘elf’ with ‘Hobbit’, ‘Irish’ with ‘(J.R.R.) Tolkienian’, and ‘reveal the hiding place of treasure if caught’ with ‘hold the key to saving Middle Earth’, the definition now becomes “a mischievous Hobbit of Tolkienian folklore usually believed to hold the key to saving Middle Earth,” and my account can be justified.

The Hobbit House: Pints Served by Pint-Sized Filipinos since 1985. Literally, all the staff are midgets (or ‘little people’, or whatever is P.C. these days). You’re waved down in streets outside by midget doormen, you’re taken to your table by midget hosts, your order is taken by midget waiters, and midget barmen pour your pints, all in a bar based on a Shire Alehouse. Bands play on a stage in front of a giant Hobbit mural. Dirty plates and glasses seemingly disappear as a tiny pairs of hands sweep above the table-tops.

What more perfect day to go to such a pub than Saint Patty’s Day? The Shire turned into an Irish pub for the weekend. Our green pints of Guinness were delivered by midgets in all green and leprechaun hats.

Just to make things clear, I’m the only one sitting down in the above picture.

Philippines: Raiders of the Lost Butanding

2006-04-03T20:06:00.000-04:00

I didn’t have an underwater camera with me, but this is a professional artist rendering of what my adventures with the Butanding may have looked like…

Butanding is a regional word in the Bicol region’s dialect for whale shark. In the waters of Donsol, a small fishing town in the region, whale sharks have been consistently spotted seasonally for the past couple dozen years. As a recent program by Filipino local governments to counteract the illegal hunting of whale sharks for their price-fetching meat, a tourist office for “Whale Shark Interaction” was opened in Donsol about 10 years ago. Basically, you can pay a registration fee and hire an ‘interaction expert’ and crew to go out in the nearby waters and ‘interact’ with the butanding. Since whale sharks only inhabit warm waters near the equator and since their migratory patterns only allow a few months in which they can be easily spotted in a given place, I decided the opportunity was too good to pass up.

After careful research (haphazard Google searching), I came to find that despite their status of “biggest fish in the sea,” they don’t throw their weight around with all their man-eating potential. They’re just plankton feeders. But even being equipped with this knowledge only allows a certain amount of ease once you’re face to face with a creature 6 to10 times your size.

By law (or arbitrary Filipino rule), you have to pay to hire a boat, crew, and a professional “whale shark interaction expert” to guide you and find the butanding. In my mind, I was picturing the professor from Gilligan’s Island with dozens of gadgets to track the water depth, give a heat spectrum of the surroundings, and equip a sonar to listen for the whales’ mating calls, but coming from a lone office in a fishing village off the face of any Philippines map, calling this expectation unreasonable would be like calling the Hundred Years War ‘a little long.’ Our resident expert, Jonathan (every Filipino has an American name) explained the plan, ‘We go to the water, and we look for big shadows.’ That was it. Jonathan took his best Titanic ‘top of the world’ position at the helm of the boat (glorified canoe) and combed the waters. It took only minutes until I heard my first “butanding!” cry from the crew. The captain maneuvered the vessel with the bamboo steering rod the best he could until we were a few dozen meters directly in front of the butanding’s path, and we jumped from the moving boat. The visibility of the water wasn’t too great the day I went out on the boat, so it was difficult to see from underwater where the whale shark would appear. I brought my head up and was about to ask Jonathan where it had gone, but he was already yelling “MMM!!! MMM!!!” through his snorkel and pointing right in front of us underwater, so I put my head back under to see a flat, gigantic face darting straight for me. I may have pissed myself a little, but in the ocean, that’s okay. We moved alongside, and swam beside the whale shark for as long as it would let us before it submerged too far and changed course to lose us. I was about to comment on how huge the fish was, but Jonathan told me ‘that one was a baby, that’s why it moved so fast.’ It was “only” 5 meters big. The next ones we’d find after that were 8, 9, and 10 meters long. They were so big that the polka-dots on their bodies were the size of whiffle balls. They’re known to grow up to 18 meters long.