Pre-Tour Rundown: From Iowa to Connecticut

Canasta's loading up the cars for a bunch of tour dates in the next week. I'll try to do some good road-blogging, but it looks like most of our time will be spent driving, sleeping, or rocking. Here's the rundown. (For more details on any of these, see Canasta's show schedule.)

Friday, October 17th - Papa's Corner in Ames, IA
My only familiarity with Ames comes from the part in Omnivore's Dilemma about the industrial corn complex. I'm expecting giant corn silos and an agricultural school. Oh, and I know that the street lingo for agricultural school is "ag school". At least it was back in New England. We didn't have real street lingo in New England, so we take what we can get.
Saturday, October 18th - The Industry in Iowa City, IA
My initial impression of it, based on the name alone, is that this is actually a miniature replica of the state of Iowa. Perhaps there is a neighborhood called "Little Des Moines" where you can get authentic... Des Moinesian food?
Sunday, October 19th - Schubas in Chicago w/ Pale Young Gentlemen, Bearsuit
Canasta's back at Schubas! With fun pop bands! We get to sleep at home! Team Chicago: if you're ready for more Schubas action, we're playing at 9pm. You know you can't get enough.
Wednesday, October 22nd - The Space in Hamden, CT (near New Haven)
The last time I went to Connecticut it was to the New Haven IKEA because Boston hadn't built their own yet. I am hoping that this trip involves fewer self-assembled bookshelves and more rock music. If that means I don't get my Swedish meatballs, oh well.
Thursday, October 23rd - CMJ Marathon in New York!
Arlene's Grocery - Show at 7pm, Canasta at 11pm - $10 for tons of Chicago bands
Canasta is sharing the stage with Brighton, MA again, along with a ton of other great Chicago acts that are descending on the lower east side for the gigantic CMJ Marathon. Even my non-hipster, non-staying-up-late, non-scenester friends have good things to say about Arlene's. I plan to eat cupcakes and pizza during a week mostly spent sitting in a carseat. The next time you see me, I will be fat. Fat fat fat.
Friday, October 24th - MilkBoy Coffee in Ardmore, PA (Philadelphia)
I went to Philadelphia on an 8th grade field trip, and I vaguely remember some animatronic Benjamin Franklin explaining the basics of democracy in a stiff and didactic presentation. Either that or it was a very bad production of the musical 1776. I've blocked the memory.

And then to top things off...
Saturday, October 25th - Solo Show at Uncommon Ground, Chicago
Welcome me home by coming out to the original Uncommon Ground (at Clark and Grace). I'll be playing a late solo show - 11pm - but if you're a fan of that nice Basia Bulat/Ingrid Michaelson vocal style, Jetty Rae will be coming down from Michigan to play for you all at 10.

Minneapolis Tour Diary (Part 2)

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We start the day together at Galactic Pizza in Minneapolis, which has been mentioned in every prior conversation related to this Minneapolis show, all past Twin Cities shows, past touring of any kind, our website, and (natch) our upcoming Pizza Fest gig. (It's that good.) We order six pizzas, each at least medium-sized, two of which have white sauces on them, which I think should count as at least 33% more filling than normal in the competitive eating standards set by our fearless leader. Some of us feel slightly ill from this amount of pizza, but had we known at this point that the return trip would take 10 hours, I think we would have eaten more.

Our first delay happens near the Wisconsin border, a slight gaper's block as we pass an RV, pulled over, that has reportedly run a car with stolen tires into the shoulder. Stolen Tire Car bolts the scene upon realizing their tires have been identified, presumably in some sort of interstate database of Stolen Tires and The Vehicles They Propel. All of this is related to me by a friendly road crew worker on the shoulder of the highway, staring at a gas gauge slightly above empty.

Slightly. The gas gauge was totally wrong.

While we are waiting for the other half of the band to rescue us with a gas canister, a deer approaches the highway near the car. Perhaps the deer was looking for its friends, many of whom are dead in the breakdown lane behind us. Sad. I'm preparing to be traumatized watching this stupid deer lope across the highway into an SUV. El is envisioning, perhaps, that the deer even ricochets into our windshield as an added bonus trauma. Matt, in the driver's seat, honks the horn repeatedly. Nothing. The deer maybe thinks that since our car is stopped, the rest of the highway is going to follow suit. Stupid, stupid deer. The honking finally convinces it to turn back to the forest, which kind of makes us running out of gas worth it, El reasons, because we have saved a deer's life today.

A few hours later, a lake floods one of the eastbound lanes of I-90. Awesome. We finish an entire crossword puzzle in the time it takes to pass the flooded area. At this point it's not even thunderstorming, which starts soon enough, about the same time we receive a call from the other car. During a gas stop they've been told that a tornado touched down about 20 miles in the direction we're driving in. Awesome. We stop at a McDonald's to try to figure out if driving further south is stupid. If we were deer, this is when we would start listening for insistent honking. We hear a lot about Cedar Rapids, not a lot about Wisconsin. We book it back to Chicago.

And if you thought all of that was exciting, we're playing with the Battle Royale again next Tuesday at the Empty Bottle.

Minneapolis Tour Diary (Part 1)

[Housekeeping: Click here for the lowdown on this month's mix contest. Pretend Readers, you are beating the Geography Nerds by a Clinton-ly slim margin.]

I arrive in Minneapolis with half of Canasta on Tuesday night, with the other half driving directly from Chicago to soundcheck the next day. In the morning, miraculously, there are pancakes made for us at the house we're crashing in. I can't imagine future tour accommodations will be this hospitable. In the house with us are two very young children who speak more German than I did after a year of night classes. If that doesn't encourage you to start learning another language right away, I don't know what will.

The rest of my car has social and professional visits to pay, so I have a full day to do some solo exploring. I've heard the city has great neighborhood hangouts (a trait it shares with Chicago), so I set an aggressive agenda of hanging out in various places for the day. My first stop is a queer-friendly coffeeshop near the river. In Chicago most queer-oriented businesses predominantly attract either men or women, rarely both, but this shop reminded me that in smaller cities don't get to be so picky or self-segregating.

My second stop is "Eat Street", a strip with a self-explanatory commercial plan. What I don't expect is a plethora of Vietnamese grocers and competing Banh Mi sandwich shops. I have a "mock duck" sandwich and move up the street to coffeeshop #2, a joint a few blocks away from the art school with a correspondingly artistic interior. Extending the theme, I kill a few hours at the modern art museum before soundcheck. While I'm there, I notice a lot of teenagers dressed in (their version of) club clothes and overhear various pre-concert plans being made. This does not strike me as an Iron & Wine crowd (playing next door to us tonight), and eventually I piece together that Kanye West is playing across the street. I'm reminded of the scene in Hedwig and the Angry Inch when Hedwig opens the door of the little seafood shack she's performing in and is cartoonishly blasted by light and sound coming from the competing Tommy show, also across the street.

There's enough love to go around for all three shows, though, and we have no trouble getting our share of club kids to fill up our corner of Minneapolis' music triangle. Getting back to Chicago the next day is a different story.

[to be continued...]

On the road...

[Reminders: Vote for me in the I-Go contest and get your Amazon reviews up for the Monthly Mix contest.]

I'm up in Minneapolis with Canasta today for our 7th Street Entry show. I'll do a full "tour diary" -- for this one-day tour -- once we're back in Chicago, but so far the story points have been:

(a) Culver's, the only frozen custard chain I'm aware of, is at virtually every exit from Wisconsin to the Twin Cities. I haven't spent enough time in the midwest yet for the novelty of abundant frozen custard to wear off. It makes me giddy.

(b) Somehow mosquitos got, like, inside my sleeping bag last night. I was indoors.

(c) There's a queer coffeeshop in Minneapolis! And it's open right now! And there are other queer people awake and hanging out before noon! What's not to like?

Photos are up on Flickr

I've finally had time to (somewhat) organize our travel photos, and they're up on Flickr now (under Adam's username, "adamrsorkin"). Just click on this link and it will take you to the collection page for all of our Southeast Asia photo sets. I started to provide captions for them, but for some reason Flickr got all of our photos out of order. While that's a charmingly postmodern twist on the traditional vacation slideshow, I don't have the patience to narrate it! So it'll be a little bit of a self-exploratory slideshow.

The photos are divided by location, though, so you can match them up with the corresponding blog post to get more of the story behind them. Email me if you have questions about specific pictures.

Here's the link again:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/48149524@N00/collections/72157602142623809/

Chicago, USA

The first thing that strikes both of us is how quiet it is. Barely any cars on the roads despite it being the middle of the day. Intersections are barely full. The engines themselves are ninja-silent. Haven't seen a single motorcycle yet since we landed. The obeyance of traffic signals should be noteworthy, but no one is trying all that hard to run red lights. When crossing the street, I blatantly cross in front of cars that had no intention of stopping before I stepped out. I've learned that as long as a driver is looking at you, and you give them enough room, they're going to stop. No one here drives fast enough in daylight hours to not stop.

We drive east on Lawrence Ave., which would qualify as a cross-city artery in Bangkok given its width and speed. We easily find parking on the street (!!!) outside Hamburger Mary's on Clark Street. It's a little out of the way from our 'hood, but we need giant, enormous, size of your head hamburgers. We have started a hiatus from rice, rice noodles and other noodles, in addition to pineapple, coconut milk, and shitty light beer. When our lunch arrives we realize there are easily three meals on each plate, and possibly three days' worth of protein. We don't eat again until about 9:30am the next day (Bongo Room), which this time thankfully only serves us two meals on each plate, which we don't finish. It's ironic that Adam and I were worried about gaining weight from a steady diet of white rice and noodles when our typical dinner was one-third of American portions.

The jet lag isn't horrible. I force myself to stay awake until 6pm and then sleep for 13 hours. We try to spend the weekend much as we would in Asia, not planning anything, just going from one activity to another, not doing any chores or errands or even unpacking our backpacks more than what's needed for the day. I have a newfound appreciation for my neighborhood, for trees and sidewalks. The long walk east towards the North/Clybourn stop, which I used to think was a little dingy what with the road construction and highway underpass, is a passable walking route now.

There's good music everywhere that an employee iPod is plugged into a store or restaurant sound system. I think my neighborhood packed up all of the shitty American music it didn't want and sent it to the shopping malls of Thailand and Malaysia. It's a charitable and self-serving relationship at the same time. If you are wondering what happened to Phil Collins' "Another Day in Paradise," it's accepted a permanent residency in Southeast Asia. It is playing in a bar right now, as you're reading this. 70s lite rock fans: if you are missing some of your old LPs, they have been taken to Singapore.

I used to scoff at the over-gentrified Latin American food in the neighborhood (I'm talking about places like Salud, by the way, not the more traditional joints like Irazu), but now I'm a sucker for anything with cilantro, chiles, or tortillas. We found one Latin American restaurant in all of Southeast Asia, and what they called "Super Burritos" were a little like what I called "quesadillas" when I made them in 8th grade, in New Hampshire, where nobody from Latin America wants to live.

In a similar vein, I'm more appreciative of the U.S.'s location in general. When people asked us where we were from, I always made a point to say "USA" or "United States", never "America," because the Americas are so much larger than just us -- also because the numerous Canadians we encountered in our travels live in North America, too, so why don't they get to say "America"? Sadly, most people only knew what country we were talking about when we said "America." (Adam got a haircut from someone who hadn't heard of "USA" or "America" or "US" or "United States" or "New York.") And I hate to think that the rest of the world is oblivious to the hugeness of North America, but Canadian travellers are constantly explaining where they're from, and it's obvious from the cuisine in Southeast Asia that little contact has been made with the Latin American world. We didn't meet any tour guides, any tourists, or any backpackers who spoke Spanish unless they were Spaniards, except for one British girl who had just spent 4 months on South America. When I told people I knew some Spanish, it was probably as useful, in their minds, as learning the periodic table of elements.

I've heard people call the U.S. "the melting pot that never melted," but I can't believe that anymore, at least not my U.S. In Chicago, it's required to have some basic multicultural fluency, everyone eats everybody else's food, and the billboards turn into Spanish about a half mile west from here. I wouldn't care about learning Spanish if not for the fact that we have entire continent and a half south of us that speaks it, and English isn't quite the lingua franca that it is in other continents. We're lucky, we North Americans, that we can basically travel throughout two continents with two languages. (Thanks, era of brutal colonialism!)

But there's no travelling in the foreseeable future for Adam and me. He's already started work, and I've started working on a new batch of songs for an EP. There's no school vacation coming up for Adam, no wedding to plan, no trip to plan. It's the first time in a very long time that both of us are off the map, so to speak.

I'll let you all know when the pictures are up on Flickr -- we have some trimming to do, 17 pictures of the same tiger, etc. -- but in the meantime, I'll give you all what you've been waiting for, and the reason why Adam and I love Southeast Asia so much.

Monkeys!

Days 37-38: Return to Bangkok

Cultural acclimation is a funny thing.  I am constantly adjusting to some new cultural standard or norm, so it's difficult to notice the ones I've already acclimated to.  Adam and I are looking forward to spending our last two days back in Bangkok because we don't have to learn a whole new city or country.  Once we get there, it's scary how easy it is to slip back into the lifestream in Bangkok, as if our internal rhythms were calibrated to it for the past five and a half weeks, and we're synchronizing with the master clock again. 

At the same time, the things that we found so surprising or challenging six weeks ago are barely noticeable now.  Heading for the somewhat confusing taxi stand outside (one must que for and obtain a price quote from the government regulated desk before approaching a driver), I get the feeling I get every time I land in Chicago, and I see tourists trying to use a CTA fare machine.  The (illegal) hotel and taxi touters inside the airport don't even give us the time of day anymore.  They can recognize how long white people have been in-country for based on the deepness of their tans and sunburns.  For the amount of sun in our skin, we're obviously not about to pay $40 for a cab ride to the city.  On the way into the city, we talk absent-mindedly about what kinds of suits we're going to buy, instead of quietly taking in the odd Bangkok skyline as we did the last time we took this ride.  I remember thinking how fast our driver went the first time.  Now, I believe our cab would have to be a Formula 1 racing car to be noticeably faster than any other vehicle on the road.

And I don't even realize the rest of the little things I've already acclimated to, things that are common throughout SEA, like the noise of the city, the smog, the honking of tuk-tuks, motorcycles that drive inches away from your ankles because the sidewalk is nonexistent, huge pedestrian overpasses that stretch across Siam Square like a monkey's jungle canopy highway, crossing halfway through streets to psych the cars into stopping, meals where you're never sure what everything is on your plate, hand-held showers with electric hot water heaters, being grateful there's at least one high-speed public transit line even if it doesn't take you anywhere you need to go, watching the other farang out of the corner of your eye and trying to figure out how long they've been here for, what country they're from, are they getting a better deal on their room or are they stuck in the backpacker ghetto, drinking $1 Chang or Singha or trying to find some hard alcohol that doesn't taste like peach schnapps or lychee syrup blended with vodka, bargaining with sellers of knock-off Tevas, knock-off Raybans, pirated DVDs and Lonely Planet books for the other countries on the trail that everyone seems to take either north through the mountains to Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam or south to the islands to pretend that nobody knows where you are.

We buy four suits and ten shirts, all custom-tailored.  For once, we buy ourselves some souvenirs.  We put as much as we can on a credit card whose statement will be historically high in October, but that seems so far in the future that it may as well be our next college reunion.  I eat my last pad thai, Adam has his last fruit shake.  We wake up at 10:30 on our last morning to check out of our room, pick up our suits, and buy an extra suitcase and duffel bag to pack in since we're only used to carrying 12 kilos of luggage with us. 

About 12 hours later we're at Suvarnabhumi Airport again, ready to kill time inside airports and airplanes for the next 26 hours or so.  Midnight marks the beginning of the Longest Friday Ever since we will cross the international date line while we're flying, so, technically, we get two Fridays.  (Accordingly, I'm missing a Monday from back in late July.  I'll gladly trade a Monday for an extra Friday.)  We do what many people do on Fridays in the U.S.: we eat Asian food and watch movies.  I sleep for a total of four hours, Adam for six, but they're broken up in two hour chunks, so I think of them as naps in the greater scheme of things.  We eat four Korean meals which are indistinguishable from each other, either due to being made for airplanes, due to my sleep deprivation, or the fact that there's only so many ways to combine seaweed, rice, and vegetables without being redundant.  (Sorry, Korea, I know you can do better than that.)  We try to go to Dunkin Donuts for breakfast in the Seoul airport, but my croissant sandwich has pickles and ham in it, which turns it into a lunch sandwich.  Even after landing at O'Hare it's hard to tell we've stopped moving: we're still filling out immigration forms, talking to unfriendly immigration officials, standing in a line with people from all parts of the world, waiting for baggage.  All old habit by now.

The U.S. customs official looks at our declaration cards listing four countries.
"How long were you gone for?"
"About six weeks!"  We're so excited that we're so cool.
" What were you doing for six weeks?"  Homeland Security is not excited.
"Um... we were travelling."  Because we're so cool.
"That's it?  Just travelling around?"
"...Yep."  So not cool, I guess.
"What do you have with you that you didn't have when you left?"
"Oh, some suits--" "Four suits--" "A couple of shirts--" "Custom tailoring, basically, it's listed there--" "And some souvenirs--" "Wood, 'n stuff--" "It's all there."
He pretends to inspect the form again.
"Do you have any tobacco with you?"
"No."
"OK, get outta here."

Thanks for the welcome wagon, Homeland Security.

Next and final installment: Repatriation.

Days 34-36: Angkor Wat

[Just a note: Adam and I arrived home safely yesterday, but the next few posts will be about our last week in SEA.  We arrived home to computer troubles, so you'll have to wait a bit for pictures, unfortunately!]

Day 34: We are enjoying all that the Kuala Lumpur Low Cost Carrier Terminal (LCCT) has to offer this morning, and since our flight has been delayed, we treat ourselves to two whole breakfasts.  Something about spending that much money simply on breakfast is comforting because it makes me feel like I'm truly on vacation instead of simply travelling, even if our tickets on the People's Republic of Flight, Air Asia ("Now everyone can fly") has relegated us to the LCCT.  Travel days used to put me in a shit mood, but the unexpectedness of travel in Asia has warmed me to them.  Where a short plane ride in Europe or the U.S. leaves you in relatively familiar waters, two hours in a plane in Asia usually means a new alphabet, new food, new religious iconography, and new people. 

For some reason the alphabet and religious iconography especially make a huge difference in the atmosphere, and Cambodia will be no exception.  We're only spending two and a half days here before returning to Bangkok, and all of that time will be spent staring at the 8th-12th century temples collectively known as Angkor Wat.  The history of the temples are a bit like an Indiana Jones plot: thriving capital of the impressive Khmer empire, abandoned by a new king who wanted a new capital in Phnom Penh, swallowed by jungle, "rediscovered" by French explorers/colonialists who sparked modern archaeological interest in the temples, then taken over in the 20th century when genocidal fascism was all the rage, except this time instead of Nazis it was the Khmer Rouge, and instead of world domination, they were content with killing a third of their own population.  Pol Pot was "inspired" by the great legacy of the Khmer empire; in a way, it's ironic that Cambodia's greatest national treasure also drove its greatest criminal to almost destroy the country.  Walking around the temples, it's almost more believable if the Khmer Rouge were fighting in the name of the Lost Ark instead of insane dictatorship, believing the ruins there to contain something akin to the divine right of kings. 

As far as non-mythical treasures go, Angkor Wat is probably as good as it gets, and as such, the temples are the key to Cambodia's economic self-sufficiency through tourism.  Cambodia is undoubtedly the poorest country we've ever visited.  Even in the heavily-touristed Siem Reap, most of the roads around town are unpaved, functional ATMs are a rarity, and everyone deals in USD because the local currency is so unstable in comparison.  Our hotel room with private bath, air-con, satellite TV, and an honest-to-god room decorations costs a whopping $18.  Beer is never more than a dollar.  Rice and curry is three, four if you want fancy things like a cloth napkin or a full silverware set.  As we've been told by other travellers, sellers of all sorts of arts, crafts, and postcards are everywhere, some of them quite insistent that you buy something "maybe not for your girlfriend, but OK, your sister?  Your mother?  Maybe later?  I will remember you, you come back and you buy something, OK?"   And while in other countries such insistence may be annoying or unfriendly, at this point in our trip, it's completely understandable.  The average Thai salary is $2,000 a year (USD), and they had things like police officers and street signs, and a countryside free of landmines.  I can't even imagine what the average Cambodian salary is, or what our total trip budget would look like to them.

The temples themselves are amazing, but simply describing them just won't do them justice.  We try our best to keep up with the other photographer-tourists at the temples, and it seems like everyone else came here to do just that.  We politely step out of sight for people lining up perfect shots between window frames, doorways, crumbling faces framed by the perfect tree, or close-ups of various Hindu gods and Buddhas.  Many have gone all the way and brought tripods and macro lenses.  Even with the large number of tourists, though, we easily take over 100 pictures, and most of them don't have a living soul in them.  The immensity of the temples allows for any number of photos that make the temples appear spooky and deserted, despite knowing there are seven Koreans hidden from the shot behind the pillar in the lower left-hand corner.

All of this is only a fraction of the physical structures that stood here at the height of the Khmer empire.  The stone is the only thing that remains, but stone was only used for temples: even the palaces were constructed from wood, as were all of the houses, and all of that wood has long since disintegrated.  I wonder in 1000 years what will be left of our cities, what landmarks future tourists will still be able to take pictures of.  It's hard to imagine that a bunch of tall concrete boxes will be of any interest to anyone, especially since we'll hopefully have flying cars by then.

Next time: Back to Bangkok one last time before the Forty-Eight Hour Friday.

Days 30-33: Kuala Lumpur

I never liked the second half of Back to the Future II when I was a kid.  The first half was really fun because it was in the future, with lots of neat gadgets and whatnot.  Then Marty travels back home in the second half, except his hometown is an alternate-universe version of the one he just visited in the future; it's a ghetto in comparison.

 

42 years ago, Singapore and Kuala Lumpur (a fledgling, 8 year-old capital at the time) parted ways over either differences in opinion about how to govern (according to Wikipedia) or racial tension between the Chinese and the Malays (according to our Lonely Planet).  However it went down, KL and Singapore basically got their post-colonial engines started around the same time, started with approximately the same racial potpourri, and their economies were both based on trade routes through the East Indies.

 

Being in KL is like being in the second half of Back to the Future II.  Having just visited the future of the Southeast Asian city, we got back in the Delorean to go home and find a strange alternate-universe Singapore striving hard to prove its economic self-sufficiency, its progress, its determination, and its touristic appeal.  What I find in KL is a mass of quickly-built skyscrapers while the ground level has shared in little of the prosperity.  (The U.S. could be faulted for this as well, but I hardly think we should set the example for class egalitarianism.)  The teenagers that would be snacking on ramen in Singapore are found more often in a Burger King or KFC (they're everywhere!), and even less successful Western franchises have found a home here.  Missing those potato skins at TGIF?  Look no further.  Want three or four TGIF copycats on the same street?  Hell, make it eight.

The greatest cultural gap between us and them is this strange paradox between KL inviting the world to its 50th celebration of independence (called "Merdeka") and then not telling the world when the hell to show up.  KL's tourist office was massive, sleek, and modern, but they did little besides point us to Chinatown and Little India, and point out the record-setting skyscrapers -- Menara KL and Petronas Twin Towers -- that would be very easy to miss if one were blindfolded and trapped in the trunk of a car.  No mention was made of the giant Times Square-style countdown to Merdeka happening in a few hours, and getting information about the Merdeka Day parade itself was like investigative journalism.  As I'm sitting in the office trying a fifth time to ask when the parade would start, I notice the hanging signs that everywhere throughout Malaysia - "Visit Malaysia 2007 - One Golden Celebration."  I wonder who has spread this invitation throughout the country, because it is painfully obvious sitting in the tourist office that it wasn't the tourism board.

 

Once I'm soured by this experience, it is difficult to reconcile my feelings.  KL is the first city that I've felt at odds with, the city where I'm most aware of my status as tourist/outsider.  I am frustrated that we have given up travelling to other cities specifically to be here for Merdeka.  On the other hand, I am feeling guilty, wondering if I am slowly becoming the stereotypical Ugly American traveller.  Am I imposing an overly American perspective on my experience, am I expecting things that aren't part of Malaysian culture?  It's clear that people operate on a more relaxed schedule here, but I'm finding it difficult to believe that Merdeka celebrations are some sort of national secret.  The only way to resolve this is for Adam and I to create a running joke about Malaysian travel, which roughly revolves around all Malaysians being telepathic and sharing things like train times and bus routes only within the psychic network.

Our underwhelming time in KL comes to its narrative peak in a suburb about an hour away with the International Fireworks Competition.  The fireworks lost.  Were pyrotechnics like wine, we would have been impressed, for it seemed as if a store of vintage, late 80s fireworks had been saved especially for this competition.  For seven minutes, the best pyrotechnic technology from 1986 was emptied into the sky in a semi-rythmic display, with music from 1995.  After seven minutes the fireworks were over, and Adam and I had lost about $60 and five hours of our lives (between transit and waiting for the start).  To add insult to injury, on the bus ride back to the city, we saw the conclusion of a giant, 21st century fireworks display in the city itself.  I can only assume telepathic cheering ensued, but the only thing I felt was a telepathic kick in the balls.

Adam and I got off the bus, got drunk, and ate a stingray.  A marching band outside our hotel kept us awake until 2am.

Next time: The big red bus (Air Asia) takes us out of our misery - no, not a plane crash! - it's Cambodia, home of the 50 cent beer.

Days 26-29: Singapore

It was love at first sight.  At the immigration terminal on the causeway between Malaysia and Singapore, there were little glass doors that swung open and closed automatically, and they said: "Beware of Swing Flapper," which brought to mind an image of a Roaring Twenties dancer with moonshine tucked into her cleavage.  The signs could not have been more innocent, as the next warned us not to bring any pornography into the country.  As Adam put it on the phone to his sister, the government is totalitarian, "but they're doing a really good job."

Singapore has a reputation for being a shopping capital, a completely Westernized city, a police state, and an oasis in the middle of an underdeveloped part of the world.  It is easy to see how all of these persona can co-exist in one national identity as we drive into the city.  Signs on the bus cheerfully but rigidly instruct passengers on proper bus etiquette, and all of the highway message boards simply read: "Have a Nice Day."  We arrive late on a Friday night and the young teenage crowd in our neighborhood is still up, ostensibly shopping in the back-to-back malls, but mostly loitering and eating from a wide selection of western chains ( Long John Silver?!?) and little ramen shops and fruit shake vendors. 

 

On first glance it's completely the oasis of clean, orderly, Westernized Asia we'd been promised, but thankfully the following days proved that Singapore had a character of its own that's more "Western-friendly" than Western-ized.  "Westernized" would make Singapore the object, the acted-upon, with Westernization being thrust upon the city instead of a selective choice.  If that is the case, I'd like someone to Singaporize some things about the U.S. (political totalitarianism not included).

 

Let's talk public transit.  (I know I have some urban planning geeks reading this; take notes.)  The city has several interconnecting subway lines but has three or four stations that serve as major interchanges instead of one.  The Holy Grail of all metro transit, a circle line, is due to open next year.  Trains run frequently and on-time, and payment is graduated per distance travelled.  Fine -- these are all standard things any transit system strives for.  But how about text messaging the ID of your bus stop to a toll-free number to receive an accurate ETA on the next bus?  Or signs at subway stations informing you which cars will be less crowded during rush hour?

 

I don't know if being a "walking city" is really a "western" characteristic, but we are giddy on arrival with the prospect of being able to walk places without having to hire an obnoxious tuk-tuk or overpriced taxi.  In between subway stops, we take walking tours of Chinatown, Little India, the colonial district, the waterfront -- you can cross any street you like, and if it's dangerous, they've built an air-conditioned underpass to keep you in one piece.  The other Asian cities we've visited have a more, shall we say, cavalier approach to crossing the street.  You basically spot a cluster of cars driving cautiously enough to slow down if you step in front of them, then you watch them as you cross in case someone gets cheeky.  (I'm not above using local people as human shields, either.) 

 

And sidewalks!  Until we arrived in Singapore, the largest sidewalk I'd seen was only wide enough to fit a small stroller, but only if you folded the child inside in half.

 

The quality of the museums makes a huge difference, too.  Singapore is a country that realizes the enormous influence it has on visitors via the narrative told through its cultural institutions.  The Asian Civilizations Museum (more a survey of Eastern culture than a museum dedicated to Singapore) had a brief history of Singapore exhibit that quite smartly incorporated its British colonial roots into a story of ever-increasing importance in the trading world.  Little mention was given to stories of defeat, like the Japanese occupation during WWII.  Lonely Planet's history lesson also points out that Singapore's first British founder, Sir Raffles, is a less controversial starting point for its history than overlapping claims of discovery from the three major ethnic groups - the Malays, the Chinese, and the Indians.  But rose-colored glasses are nothing if not transparent.

 

Singapore has also taken food courts (a.k.a. food centers) to a whole new level.  In four full days in the city, Adam and I go to two, maybe three restaurants.  We have a long list of food centers to try, and almost every one seems to have independently operated food stalls hawking various favorites and specialties.  The culinary crossovers between the three major ethnic groups lead to some surprising combinations.  Curry sauce is available at Chinese food stalls.  Indian roti or pratha stalls fill their bread with ham and cheese.  We eat Peranakan and Indonesian food, both of which we are almost sure we will never be able to get back in Chicago.  (Especially Peranakan - the restaurant imported large, meaty nuts from Indonesia that were packed in volcanic ash.)

 

Other foods we get fat on: thick, handmade noodles in an eggy seafood broth, fried shrimp and mango rolls, yam cake, shrimp and cantaloupe with mayonnaise (better than it sounds), biryani that was savory and spicy (as opposed to the sweet stuff we get in the U.S.), sugar cane juice, waffles folded in half and stuffed with sweet corn and peanuts, chendol (an Indian drink made of coconut milk, brown sugar, and little noodles made of green bean flour), every type of Chinese food you can name, and custard buns filled with Japanese pears.

 

After two days of eating like this, we took our fat asses over to the zoo to sweat, walk, and sweat.  Adam and I really like animals, and hanging out at zoos is basically the only activity during which I can endure small children, because Adam and I will push them out of our way to get a closer look at a stupid zebra or otter.  This is the zoo for people who love animals but hate to see them trapped in cages, because with the exception of some fragile and/or dangerous animals, there aren't any cages.  There's an entire system of interconnected trees above the walkways in the zoo just so the orangutans can move around on their own.  But I'll post pictures on Flickr when we get back, lest I degenerate into long descriptions of cute, fuzzy animals.  Plus, maybe you hate cute, fuzzy animals, I don't know.

 

Next time: The train station where you board the train from Singapore to Malaysia actually sits on Malaysian land -- do you know how you can tell?  You have to cross a super-highway crowded with freight trucks to get to it.  Silly Malaysia!

Days 22-25: Pulau Sipadan

Day 22: Our legs almost collapse on us while we walk down the stairs of our hostel, still dark at 5:30am.  We're waiting for our transfer to the airport as part of a 4-day tourist package to the island of Mabul, near one of the region's most renowned diving spots, Pulau Sipadan (Sipadan Island).  You may be thinking that you didn't have us pegged for the package tour type, but there's some history behind Sipadan.

Sipadan is a geologic anomoly, an island off the very eastern tip of Borneo at the frontier between coastal island and ocean.  The island sits atop what is essentially a 600m deep cone of coral and volcanic rock; divers can swim a few meters off the beach and see the drop off immediately below them.  The depth of the waters and its favored position among ocean currents brings lots of food into the area, and along with it brings every imaginable sea creature going all the way up the oceanic food chain to sharks and turtles.  (And the sharks and turtles, in turn, bring divers, obviously.)

Its position has also brought more vicious creatures to its shores than sharks, unfortunately.  Being smack dab in the middle of disputed waters between Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines historically made for pirate-rich waters, and at least one local Malay told me people feared the island for years because of piracy.  Many of you are doubtless excited by the thought of dozens of romantic wooden ships sailing the south Pacific, waiting to be boarded by Johnny Depp .  Modern day pirates steal entire cargo ships of high-end items such as electronics and cars.  The pirates with a particular stake in Filipino and Indonesian politics have a more crusade-like tone to their mission statements, read: Muslim insurgents.  22 people were kidnapped from a resort on Pulau Sipadan by pirate terrorists in 2000, then taken into Philippine waters for ransom.  The story gets uglier from there -- plank walking would have been more benevolent -- but my brief Wikipedia search hasn't turned up conclusive information, possibly thanks to the Malaysian Tourist Board's hard cleanup work.

Sipadan's current situation is more secure.  Now that Malaysia has undisputed control of the region, they've built a shiny new naval base about an hour's speedboat ride away from the island.  Sipadan has also been declared a protected marine park, and is now inhabited only by two sad little volleyball courts and a dozen scrawny but convincing camouflaged guards.  As for the resort itself, they now operate from a half hour away on Mabul, which brings us to Day 22, with Adam and I sitting on the pier on the mainland, waiting for a boat transfer to Mabul.

"I dive, you know, but I don't use the tanks," says the boat captain to Adam, me, and a thoroughly uninterested Englishman who, it turns out, is a divemaster in the Philipppines.
"I am skin diver, you know?  Skin diver," he continues.  "I am OK, I can hold my breath for maybe a minute, but I have a friend who can hold his breath for three or four minutes, no tank!"
"Wow.  That's amazing."
"But there is one skin diver who the whole world knows, I am sure you know him."
"Um, no, no we don't really know any skin divers."
"Really?  He can hold his breath for 4, maybe 6 hours.  You know his name?"
At this point, I'm staring at the horizon looking for giant squid.  The Brit has his headphones in.
"Kevin Costner!"
"Oh!  Waterworld, of course."
I get a big handshake, and almost as a reward for my water movie trivia, he shows me a lethal box jellyfish sitting underneath the pier.

Once on the island, pirates are the least of our concerns.  Although the ostensible reason for our resort operator's Sipadan location being closed is for marine conservancy (specifically, the island's huge turtle population), one of our divemasters alludes to the island's sordid pirate history.  " Not safe.  They moved us to Mabul because of safety concerns,"  she says.

She is one of a number of Malay locals who lead our boat trips to the island, stuck in paradise catering to dive geeks and resort junkies.  She and her cohorts casually change tanks full of oxygen with burning cigarettes hanging out of their mouths, walk the perimeter of speeding boats as if they were on a city sidewalk, and during breaks, toss dive knives back and forth with other dive boats to cut open pineapples for our snacks.  In a word, surly.

"But don't worry, no more pirates here now," she says.  No, I think to myself, they've all turned into our divemasters.

In spite of divemaster surliness, the days pass all too quickly.  The resort itself is the double-edged sword any island resort is: you're in paradise, but you can't leave.  We make friends with a French couple and the aforementioned British ex-pat divemaster from the Philippines, and spend a few days diving and sitting in various resort bars drinking bad, expensive beer.  But like any dive resort, the diving itself would justify staying under a tin roof eating banana pancakes.  (Or, as some do, living on a converted oil rig off the coast of Mabul -- have you ever seen an oil rig turned into a "resort"???)  On our first dive just off of Mabul we see three green turtles and a host of other marine life that divers in Thailand pee their wetsuits over.

Sipadan itself is as dramatic as described above.  I still get some butterflies in my stomach just before I jump into the water, and these are amplified by the sight of a wall dropping straight down into the ocean with no end in sight.  We see turtles on every dive at Sipadan: turtles swimming, turtles resting, munching on coral, sleeping under coral, everything.  Cute, lovable, slow-moving turtles, everywhere.  People say Sipadan is for more experienced divers, but fuck them -- everyone loves a big, dopey turtle swimming next to you.

The sharks, I guess, require a little more savvy.  We see small reef sharks on most of our dives, too, usually about 4-7 feet in length.  They're a docile variety, but I'm used to docile sharks that are immobile and look more like catfish than classic sharks.  Reef sharks swim and look like a plausible shark, like the kind you would put into a swimming pool to scare people.  And again, there's enough small marine life (won't bore the non-divers with marine geek-talk; email me for details) to open a small aquarium.  Maybe in a smaller city like Milwaukee or Hartford, because you wouldn't get penguins or beluga whales, but everything else would be there.

Even the island and the pirate divemasters grow on us by the end of our stay, and we're a little sad to leave.

Next time: We get to Singapore, and we're so not sad to leave Malaysia.  Singapore is fucking awesome.  (Shit, I can't swear, I'm in Singapore right now.)

Days 19-21: Mt. Kinabalu

My, it's been a few days, hasn't it?  Adam and I were in Malaysian Borneo for a week, where internet access was a little slower, as one might expect from an island with a reputation for jungles and headhunters.  I wasn't quite sure where Borneo was or what country it belonged to before we came over here, so some brief geography tips before we begin: Borneo is a large island in the middle of SEA, south of the South China Sea, north of Indonesia, west of the Phillippines, and east of the Melaka/Singapore straits that dictated Indian trade routes for centuries in these parts.  The island itself belongs to three countries: Indonesia in the south, two semi-autonomous Malaysian states in the north, and one tiny, ultra-Muslim-fundamentalist country between those two Malaysian states that won't even be named here because they execute gay people and don't allow alcohol.  (Let's call it Awesomeland, capital: Fun City.)  Travel in Borneo is limited mostly to one or two paved roads and a lot of windy dirt roads over a series of steep mountains, so our brief itinerary was limited to two highlights: Mount Kinabalu (the highest mountain in SEA, and today's installment), and Pulau Sipadan (next installment).

Our trip to Mount Kinabalu began in earnest last night after we left Phuket, as we had no real intermediate destination.  We flew into the budget airline terminal in Kuala Lumpur.  In Malaysia, some airports are divided into a real terminal and a budget terminal, although these terminals can be anywhere up to half an hour's drive away from each other and share an airport code but no runway.  In the U.S. we would find somebody to name each of the terminals after and call them different airports, but with the airfares we paid we have no ground for complaint.  We stayed in a transit hotel that was essentially a construction site for a real hotel: the floors were the bare concrete you find in most people's basements, and when you went to the bathroom down the hall you passed a dark, empty hallway that was closed off by a plastic tarp.  At night, when the wind blew through the building, we heard things fall onto the ceiling boards above us.  We told each other this was a good experience because "it can't get any worse than this."  This is blunt but honest foreshadowing.

The next day finds us waking up underneath an intact ceiling, praise be, and riding back to the budget terminal at KL.  The terminal has two restaurants: a McDonald's and a restaurant that is not McDonald's.  We ate at the latter the night before, and we have a rule that we never eat at the same restaurant twice on vacation, so hash browns and burnt coffee it is.  It takes the edge of some homesickness since we've been living in transit for 12 hours.  AirAsia's big red airplane takes us all the way across Malaysia to the eastern edge of Borneo, Kota Kinabalu.  We check into a backpackers hostel and discover, for the first time, Malaysian Backpacker Beds - a standard that consists of a flat futon mattress and a towel-blanket.  It takes me five minutes to decide to use this thing as my blanket since I have my own pack towel, and if I curl up on my side I can fit my whole body under the towel-blanket.  We spend the rest of our day avoiding our room by buying hiking supplies for our trek up Mt. Kinabalu.

Day 19: We are picked up by our tour company for the mountain, which turns out to be a guy and his car.  It allows us to enjoy a comfy two hour ride up to the base of the mountain, and thankfully we are left to our own devices for much of the day to warm up on some circular nature trails around park headquarters.  Ever since our arrival in Malaysia I've been culturally disoriented, and Kinabalu reinforces this.  By disoriented, I mean that Malaysia is a much more ethnically diverse country than Thailand, having large Malay, Chinese, and Indian ethnic groups, plus a history of British colonial rule up until 50 years ago. 

It was easy to forget exactly which country we were in, and once we were at Kinabalu, the Babel effect drove it home.  Hearing 10-15 languages being spoken around me was starting to make me wonder where this mountain really was.  We are the only Americans on the mountain, as far as I can tell, so at any given moment it is just as easy to imagine us hiking in China, in Korea, or in Spain, depending on which language is being spoken the loudest around us.  (On Kinabalu, it tended to be the Koreans.)  The Babel analogy is an obvious one given our altitude -- not to mention the feeling that, upon looking up at the 4,095 meter high mountain we are about to climb, all of us trying to scramble to the top of those rocks is a really stupid, stupid idea.

Day 20: We stuff ourselves full of eggs and fried rice not knowing when we would get to eat next.  We have 6 km of trail to cover today before we reach our resthouse on the mountain tonight.  Some of our fellow hikers have muscular, strong calves, Oakley sunglasses, and devil-may-care grins, and this makes me feel nervous.  But I also feel confident seeing that some of our fellow hikers are fat and slow, and probably lazy too -- but I don't like to judge people too much.  No, not me.

We have a spritely guide from the park service who walks behind us and asks us questions about life in the U.S., including whether we have to take A-levels (which, from an outsider's perspective, is a more meritocratic approach to college admissions than income) and what types of monkeys we have.  Since I love monkeys, this breaks my heart to think there are people who just take it for granted that you can have different types of monkeys in your backyard, let alone just having a monkey.  We don't talk much to other hikers since we are moving at our own pace, and it's a quick clip at that.  We reach the resthouse in a little over 4 hours and sit in something like a ski lodge for another 4 hours, stretching our legs, drinking tea, and reading books, watching clouds move through the lodge.  At the grandmotherly time of 5pm we eat a large dinner of rice, mystery gamey meat, and bok choi, and prepare for bed.  It rains buckets until we wake up.

Day 21 begins at 2:30 in the morning.  Our guide meets us outside of our little tin hut on the mountainside.  It's about 45 degrees here and we are dressed to go skiing.  After five minutes of climbing, flashlights in hand, we strip down to a more reasonable early spring day.  After ten minutes of climbing, I am covered in a layer of sweat that is supposed to be "wicked" away by my "wicking" layers of expensive outdoor clothing.  At our altitude, we are above any cloud or tree cover; looking up there is a blanket of stars ten, maybe twenty times the size of a Malaysian towel-blanket, interrupted only by alien black shapes where the mountain peaks.  About a half hour into the hike we are holding onto thick ropes that are sopping wet from tonight's rain.  As we gain more altitude, we can look down and see a trail of blueish dots moving slowly up the mountain; looking up we see a similar trail snaking back and forth up the rock face, a parade of flashlights leading up to the star line on the peak. 

I think they take people up at this ungodly time of night because this sight is more inspiring than seeing the gradient we are climbing.  By 4am, I've lost any sense of how high we are, how steep we're climbing, or how slowly we're marching.  A vaguely Australian voice to my left makes a joke about zombies; concurrence from nearby English-speakers.  Some muttering in Korean from up the trail; I wonder if they have zombie movies in Korea.

At 5:30 the first signs of light appear from the clouds on the horizon, and we pass the last switchback up to the peak.  Only about 15 hikers have made it there before us, so we secure prime real estate among some rocks overlooking a twenty-story drop into a maw of slick rocks.  We are dressed again for skiing with the addition of being wrapped in our bed blankets.  It's about 34 degrees without the windchill.  As the sun starts to appear over the clouds, we get a sight usually reserved for airplane rides.  It looks as though we're sitting on the peak of a rock island in a sea of clouds.  The mountain has a concave slope that drops right off the edge into the clouds: were this still covered in glacier, one could start a neverending slide from about 50 meters below us.  Adam almost spoils the moment by asking where the hell there aren't any Care Bears up here, but the wind picks up and we're both too cold to speak.  When we start to lose feeling in our fingers around 6:15, we head down, not reaching the starting gate again until 1pm. 

I don't remember much of the climb down, but I do remember thinking that I was thankful that Adam and I had decided to do such things while we were still young, or that perhaps one starts to get a glimpse of what being old is like by doing things like this, when your knees ache for days just by going on stairs, but you are amazed and thrilled by the things your body is still capable of doing.

Next time: Turtles!  Sharks!  Pirates!  Adventure on the high seas...

Days 16-18: Phuket

Some of the earliest stories I heard about Thailand involved a "gay resort town" that also happened to be called "Fuck it" - ah ha ha!  Other languages are funny.

 

Adam and I had to see what all the fuss was about since, for the most part, we're travelling as friends in this part of the world.  (And sometimes cousins or roommates, if people get suspicious.)  It's been difficult going back into the closet (we've left our wedding rings at home), but both of us felt that sticking out as white tourists was quite enough, thank you, and attracting any more attention to ourselves was not worth whatever eye-opening, rainbow flag ambassador experience the two of us could have (especially in the more conservative countries we're visiting, Malaysia and Singapore).  Thailand, however, has a reputation for being super gay-friendly, famous for its ladyboys (some of them are drag queens but some of them have definitely had some work done), and for being a destination for, um, cheaply getting your work done.  So we took a few days in Phuket to see how gay it could really be.  I think a short story will sum it up for you.

 

Picture this: among maybe 15 gay bars in the gay "complex" in Phuket (ahem, more than Boston, might I add???), Adam and I stroll into a bar called "My Way" on several people's recommendations for a "cabaret and boy show."  I'm expecting a slightly larger woman singing musical theater and Sinatra tunes with perhaps some go-go boys dancing on table tops. 

 

Instead, we enter the bar and are immediately seated, like in a restaurant, in lounge seating near a stage.  As our waitress gives us drink menus, I think to myself that she needs to work on her voice ("This is the voice I want to speak with...") but Adam assumes she's a bio-female without a second thought.  She's wearing cute, hipstery sneakers and a white 50s-style waitress uniform.  Her look has already outdone a few of the drag performers I've seen in second-tier drag shows, and she is merely the wait staff.

 

Then the show starts, and it's not just one drag queen lip-syncing one of her favorite diva songs.  It's choreographed, with back-up dancers.  Wearing some sort of I don't know what kind of half-shirt that completely covers the right side of their torso from shoulder to waist but leaves the other half of their torso bare.  Each number involves a complete costume change in a matter of minutes, and then a whole new coreography.  Oh, and sometimes with swirly lights.

 

Yep, gay.  It has in 30 minutes out-gayed most of the gay things I have done in a whole career of gay.

 

But then there's a darker side of the ladyboy show.  (I'm still confused as to whether this next part is a traditional part of ladyboy shows or just something special "My Way" cooked up.)  A fat man, probably in his fifties, comes out of the wings dressed in a lime green chiffon skirt and a purple chiffon blouse.  The sandals are simple.  His eyes are made up to look like a sad-face clown, and he has the lipstick to boot.  And he's lip-syncing to a woman singing "Hava Nagila," running frantically around the stage and then occassionally sticking out his tongue and wriggling it around when he gets behind the lyrics too much.

 

Adam and I find this fucking hilarious (of course) and are laughing our asses off in the front row.  Adam and I are also probably the only two people in the room who have any sort of ethnic context for the song -- though who knows, maybe "Hava Nagila" is a popular drag number in Thailand?  I think we are attracting too much attention, because later he brings the spotlight over to us and goads us into tipping him because "You were smiling at me, huh?"  When a 200 lb. ladyman sticks a spotlight and a mic in your face in front of the whole bar, you don't have much choice but to fork over some baht.  Besides, I thought explaining to him that I actually just had a quasi-Jewish wedding to the boy next to me was going to take more complex English than your average Thai understands.

 

Next time: We fly to Malaysia and see... Roman characters!  Hooray!  We can at least pronounce things even if we don't understand them!

 

[Melissa - We skipped out on the Haad Rin backpacker action on Koh Pha-Ngan and went to Haad Yao, on the other side of the island.  Never made it to Haad Rin, but I think I can picture it. :)  Rachel - You saw a man in heels.]

Days 12-15: Koh Phi Phi

Day 12, 5am: my tiny watch alarm somehow manages to wake me from the dead sleep I had after Adam's certification party.  We stuff our backpacks in an hour and head to an early ferry for the mainland, eating a chicken-chili sandwich for breakfast and staring out at what is still a surrealistically beautiful ocean-scape.  We've purchased a joint ticket with enough travel vouchers to get us by boat, bus, bus, then boat again to Koh Phi Phi, off the coast of Phuket (pronounced "poo-get", by the way).  Every tourist on the ferry is branded with a small sticker on their lapel with their destination: " P.P.", "Krabi," "Airport".  It is a handy way for the Thais to quickly herd farang from vessel to vessel without answering any questions about how far the next town is, why the bathroom on the bus is broken, or where the hell we are.  A sheep dog would have been a cute alternative if not for the flea hazard.

We arrive in Phi Phi twelve hours later.  Our divemasters had sent us on this trail as Phi Phi is fifteen minutes from some of the best dive sites on the western coast.  All I knew beside that was that Phi Phi was an extremely popular destination, more astoudingly so because it was still recovering from the 2004 tsunami.  The juxtaposition of its popularity and its recent tragedy loom over the whole island, like the wave is still ready to roll right through.

The tourist sections of the island are almost totally rebuilt by now, of course.  Brand new private-chalet style resorts line the beaches and cliffsides.  Some older structures still remain; it's difficult to tell what is original and what is rebuilt, but many restaurants and stores have pictures of their reconstruction efforts proudly displayed behind the counter.  Housing for the island's Thai residents is predictably still a work in progress.  One beach still had a 200 yard stretch of debris and flattened straw huts that nobody deemed urgent enough to rebuild.  The middle of the island, equidistant from all beaches, was mostly an alleyway of hollow concrete structures being filled in.  The pace of construction was understandable; local construction workers seem to only have hand carts or, at the most, moto-carts to wheel bricks and dry cement from the pier up through the narrow roads of the island.

All that considered, the reconstructed tourist center of the island hid most traces of any hiccup in the ebb and flow of visitors.  Our immediate thought on stepping onto the island is Cape Cod: knick-knacks and restaurants as far as the eye can see.  Even in low season the island feels like Cancun during spring break.  The average age is 20, and most tourists are British or Irish and on one- and two-week missions to become sunburnt or alcoholic before the embassy choppers them away.

In all seriousness, even the TRL crowd doesn't spoil our time on the island.  Koh Phi Phi Don, the main island, is shaped like two sandy, half-moon bays rubbing backs and circled by limestone cliffs.  The neighboring island, Koh Phi Phi Leh, is where The Beach was filmed, so pretty much imagine the most beautiful and uninhabited island you can still take a film crew to and then anchor a couple of dive boats around it; you'll get the picture.

We do five dives over the course of our three days on the island.  Again, I could fill the rest of this post with dive-geekery (drift diving, wall diving, lionfish, a leopard shark) but of greater interest to you, my non-diving readers, is the last dive, a night dive to the underwater tsunami memorial.

The tsunami memorial is a series of four stone pillars with plaques from different countries describing, in their home-tongue, the losses of the 2004 tsunami.  In the center of the pillars is a Japanese-style pagoda on a platform, next to a hand cart, with a mailbox in front of it.  The mailbox was filled with letters to tsunami victims; then, the platform was floated out to a spot right off of the coast and sunk to its current position at the bottom of the ocean.

We ride out to the site in a traditional longtail boat at sunset, and when dark hits, we jump in the water and turn on our dive lights.  A group of four of us grab onto a rope that leads straight down for 18 meters.  The only thing I can see for several minutes is the light of three divers below me.  Then, very faintly, I see a Danish flag, and the first pillar.  I turn my light to the side and see the submerged cart, and in another direction, the corner of the roof of the pagoda.  One thing at a time, everything else dark and bleak, washed of almost all colors.  No sounds except for breathing.  It's like a graveyard, but more immediate, more like the moment the tsunami struck the island is frozen here, and we are able to move freely through the wave.  It is possible here to imagine what it is like to be sitting in your house one moment and then see nothing but water, and then blackness.

Next time: We say goodbye to Straightey McAsia and head to the gayest beach in SEA.  You think you've seen a drag queen?  Do you really think you've seen a drag queen?  You've seen a man in heels, honey, that's what you've seen.

Days 9-11: Koh Phangan

After our cooking course in Chiang Mai, Adam and I head straight to the airport to begin the long trip down to the Gulf of Thailand, starting with the obligatory transfer through Bangkok.  Our destination is Koh Phangan, a mid-sized island along the backpacker trail famous for a two-day beach party every full moon, which has franchised into parties timed with the half moon and new moon, plus after-parties.  Consequently, Adam and I have timed our visit to not coincide with any imaginable lunar event to avoid the throngs of thongs.

 

Day 9: We wake up in a five-storey backpacker hive near Khao San Road in Bangkok after a precious four and a half hours of sleep.  By the time we arrived last night, about two dozen tired farang are passed out in the lobby on Thailand's national pillow (a soft triangular prism that can be used for the head or lower back), watching "The World's Fastest Indian" on a big-screen TV.  American movies on big-screen TVs are the bread and butter of backpacker haunts around here, and each will have their satellite TV schedule for the day posted on a whiteboard outside, sometimes with a poster for the movie printed from the internet and attached. 

 

I have to say these movies are usually quite good compared with the selection on Thai transportation, which we were subjected to throughout the day from the time we boarded a 6am bus to when our ferry dropped us off on Koh Phangan at 4pm.  Allow me to summarize the day's entertainment:

• Four explosion scenes per film (varieties: road-on-road, air-on-road, air-on-boat, bridge-on-boat-on-car, national-landmark-on-acts-of-god-or-terrorism, etc.) 
• Liberal use of slow-motion
• Actors that snuck onto the B-list because they slept with a producer
• Jean Claude Van Damme
• One and a half episodes of "Weeds", on our video iPod, before our battery ran out.

The day's entertainment quickly fades as soon as we see the beach we're staying on: a quiet cove on the northwestern side of the island, with only about 8 or 9 resorts/bungalows, two convenience stories (neither of which were a 7-11, for a change), and a swanky bar on the hill overlooking the bay, run by a Thai woman who had returned home after living in Salt Lake City of all places.  (I can see why she came back.)  The beach has all of a dozen other people on it, since it's the low season, and we have our own bungalow within a 60 second walk of the water.  We have a hammock.  Nobody wears any footwear here.  Bungalows sell noodles, curry, and beer on a tab basis, so nobody even carries a wallet around.  I realize now how effortlessly people can drop off the face of the earth.

 

Day 10: Diving!  Adam is doing the first two dives of his open water certification, and I'm going on two "fun dives" (that's what all recreational diving is called here).  Our dive shop is staffed entirely by people who have dropped off the face of the earth.  We dive mostly with ex-Brits, plus an ex-South African, with varying lengths of stay in Thailand.  Two have been in country working in the diving industry for 6 years.  This amount of time is unprecedented for most Thai divemasters, who are here for only a year or two to cut their teeth as divemasters or instructors.  But the folks at this dive shop have found something really special here, have stuck around, and take us out to show us what that is.  So far, they've been the best dives I've ever been on, and there's a fantastic coral "chimney" that one can swim through.  Adam would be getting spoiled on the amount of fish he's seeing if he wasn't throwing up over the side of the boat -- the poor guy is on a dive boat for the first time and the waves are a half meter high.  In fact, most of the boat is in some stage of avoiding or enduring sea-sickness.

 

Day 11: I could geek out about the marine life we saw, but I'll save that for any other dive geeks who want to email me for details.  Plus, I have no pictures from underwater, so me telling you about the awesome pipe cleaner shrimp I saw won't make for terribly engaging reading.  But above-water, Adam has avoided sea-sickness today and has finished his certification dives.  Though the diving here is fantastic, the conditions at sea are confining the islands dive boats to one site, so the crew refers us to an island on the other coast of Thailand - Koh Phi Phi - to see some different creatures, so we plan to take off the next day. 

 

After he finishes his paperwork, the dive crew gives us a proper send-off by giving Adam him his "final exam," which they claimed was an internationally recognized test, but honestly I think only the British would have the imagination or the stomach for it.  Adam's instructor presents us with a wooden bucket -- maybe the size of a wine chilling bucket -- with some straws, some ice cubes floating around, and a dark, unidentified liquid.  To pass the test, Adam has to "descend" to the "bottom" with his dive buddy (me), using his snorkel (just the straw - only divemasters use their actual snorkel for this test), and it has to be a straight descent - no stopping.  I got an ice-headache around 15 seconds; I'm not sure how Adam was doing.  At about 23 seconds I got to some layer of alcohol that had perhaps not made it to the top and think I might die on this beach, which is fine with me but I thought it would have maybe been from a shark attack.  We finally make it to the bottom around 37 seconds.  We chase it with several of the oversized Chang beers that they brew here (which have coined the term "Changover").  Adam's poor instructor is halfway through Chang #2 when some late customers arrive at the shop, but the British have an uncanny ability to be helpful and decorus even when drunk.  We book an early taxi to the pier and collapse in bed with the alarm set for 5.

 

Ugh.

 

 

 

Days 7-8: Chiang Mai continues

[My last post appeared a few days late... sorry for the backlog of reading material!]

 

Day 7: Elephants.  We wake up and have a lazy breakfast of Thai french toast with mango and pineapple, then take a circuitous route through the Karen village to another hilltribe village about an hour's trek away.  This village is slightly more obvious about their tourism enterprise, as they clearly have a monopoly on river transportation.  The two traditional forms of transport for these people are bamboo rafts and elephants.  The newest form of transport is the recreational white water raft, but it hasn't caught on here.  Our first task is to load our pack