Find Andrew

2008-11-22T13:27:00.000-08:00

I just reached into my pocket to pull out a piece of paper that reads "Farmers Mkt: Magazine and Girod." Confused, I looked to find the name of the bar printed along one side of it. A blank receipt, apparently, on which my final bartender of the night had written directions to the question I must have asked: where can I find some good groceries around here? It seemed like everywhere I've been in the past week, people are offering me directions, opinions, and downright orders to go do all the best places in the city. So much so, that I guess one of them went to the extent of writing it down for me because he figured I'd forget it. New Yorkers make a life out of rating their favorite pizza or bagel shop and assuming a lifetime loyalty to never go anywhere else, but here it seems like people are genuinely proud of what their city has to offer, and want to make sure I see it.

hold on..

I'm at a coffee shop right now, which has a chalk sign next to it that reads if you can name who said today's quote, you'd get a free cup of coffee. Today's quote: "All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we think we become." I walked in and said "Carl Jung." Wrong answer, it was Buddha. $1.85 for my coffee. I've been sitting here with my laptop and in walks an older man who says "Carl Jung." Before giving me time to feel proud of myself for thinking along the right lines, another older man speaks my new theme riddle to the barista on his way out the door:

as I was walking down the street
I met a man
who tipped his hat and drew his cane
in this riddle was his name

Bunch of Wackos in this town.

Anyway, I meant to relay the story of a perfect monologue I heard the other day while in clinic. As it turns out, just about everybody round here has a story to tell, sometimes several. Older black people in particular, it turns out, have had it rough in the past few years. Between the crime and the hurricanes, and the culture of violence they happened to raise their children in, they've really got the short end out here. One old lady was telling me that her son locks her in her room in the house and throws things at her if she ever enters the "house." Literally, a prisoner in her own home. The police and hospitals keep taking him away for short periods, but "never long enough."
But the story I wanted to write down came from a different lady, who prided herself on raising a good family that didn't "do" drugs and violence. I'm not going to try to relate the story word for word, but here's an idea:

Her son was in his early 40's, living well and working hard in a factory. He drank alot, but only because he enjoyed life so much. He had many, many friends and was well loved by them and his wife and daughter. She started to notice a few years ago that he had started to lose weight. He didn't believe her when she said so (probably thought she was being overly motherly), but eventually he started to look sick. At some point, he finally went to the doctor and they found his liver was already swollen from all the cancer. They never even found out where it came from originally, but by the time they found it he was on death's door. He died last December. His funeral was absolutely packed, because this man was so well loved in his community. This woman had outlived all 12 of her brothers and sisters, or as she said it "I buried the last of my sisters two years ago, but when I had to bury my son last December, I lost it. But I'm feeling better now." Worst part is, the son's wife remarried immediately. "too soon" according to the old lady, who figures this means a long history of cheating before the cancer.
It's a sad story, like a lot of sad stories are, but this one was given as a completed monologue, the kind of which I'd only seen actors try for. It was complete with pauses, introspective mood swings, and the kind of eyes that didn't cry but became just a tiny bit shinier at the most poignant moments. But the thing that made this visit special was that the monologue was instantly therapeutic. She looked different after she said it, like a weight had been lifted off her shoulders. The whole visit could have come straight out of a play, as it started in the classic form of a "regular checkup." I started by running the gambit of what you ask when old hypertensive diabetics come in, and when I she told me that her son had died almost a year ago, I told her a few things I'd been reading about Love and Survival, and how it was in her best medical interest to make sure she kept some of the connections she still had. I put my stethoscope on her heart ("How's the old ticker, doctor?"), and then she began the monologue. I figured the heart exam could wait, so I just my stethoscope away and shut the hell up for the next 5 minutes. All I had to do after that point was sit back and enjoy the play. It was like being in the presence of Shakespeare. When it was over, I finished the physical exam, told her that her thoughts about her son being cheated on before his death weren't going to help anything, and suggested she keep a strong relationship to her late son's 17-year old daughter. Then I left, and the "real" doctor came in and adjusted her medications.
Psychiatry?

2008-11-19T15:55:00.000-08:00

People seemed to have a hard time understanding why I don't just fly to New Orleans. Just about everybody felt sorry for me, some even thought I was "hardcore" for driving. What they don't understand is that I'd just spent 3 months on my feet, entirely responsible for the way i look, act, and pretend to want to learn. 28 hours sitting in a car watching the landscape go by is a little bit of paradise in relation. More importantly, how am I supposed to have any sense of appreciation for the massive distances that formed the personality of this country if i'm just going to take a nap and end up in a new city? Furthermore it puts the great journey of the American Beat generation in perspective. They came from the East, drove across the vast expanse of country, stopped in New Orleans for a few years to develop their eccentricities, and eventually picked up and moved as far West as they could and settled in San Francisco. Making the same journey in a much different order, I might have a chance at understanding their time but only if I could appreciate the distances they traveled to do it.

So now that I'm here, I'm definately getting the impression that this is a place to develop one's eccentricities. The people I've met so far seem to agree when i suggest it, and some feel relieved at the idea that they might not have to stay here. Very few people come here and stay. Even less are from here. For me to suggest that this might only be a stopover on their way out West still rings a few bells around here. But as for the post-Katrina move, one black lady I met who is actually from here says everybody she knows who left has moved back. However the news might say otherwise, that's been her experience. Also, she said she was able to buy a 3 story 4 bedroom house in the Lower 9th Ward for $40,000 from an old couple that is sick of getting flooded out. According to her, the area is a great place to live (though I'm sure the color of her skin helps determine that).

Somehow I ended up in a Central American family practice clinic about 12 miles from the French Quarter. Although I still managed to live in the perfect neighborhood (the Marigny Triangle), the clinic is privy to being in the direct flight path under a mile from the airport landing strip, and serves an established yet growing Central American community near there. Closer to New Orleans, the hurricane seemed to bring the advent of Taco Trucks in its aftermath. As the jobs opened up for the "reconstruction," it didn't take long for the Mexicans to find out. And unlike in Los Angeles, the few people I've talked to so far seem to not mind it at all. Not only did they finally bring good Mexican food with them, but if it wasn't for them, nothing would ever get rebuilt around here.

2008-09-24T18:45:00.001-07:00

A word on Socratic Method:
Socrates and Plato, according to Wikipedia, taught that the soul is an immortal and all-knowing force that incarnates time and time again through the life and death cycle of the human form. Though the soul itself knows everything, it's for some reason wiped clear of this knowledge every time it's reincarnated, where we spend most of our lives trying to re-learn everything we'd forgotten before we die again. Therefore, Plato would say that there's no such thing as new knowledge, there's only the remembering of forgotten knowledge.
This is why Socrates refrained from lecturing directly. Instead, he would pick on a particular student and lead them down a series of questions until the student himself came up with the information of the lecture. By never lecturing directly, Socrates could say that he was only helping the student "remember" what he had always known.

I was first introduced to Socratic teaching during my three weeks in Trauma. Three times per week, the entire Trauma unit (up to 30 people, all various levels of students except a few attending) would chose a few patients to discuss and cram into the room beside each patient, where an attending would "teach." A student would present the case:

"Here we have Mr. John Doe, came in three days ago with a gun shot wound to the left flank, along the axillary line at the 9th intercostal space."

This usually means that today's lecture will be about the management of a patient with a gunshot wound to the left flank. That's what I got used to hearing for the first two years. Here, an attending would then ask the student to stop while he looks at somebody's name tag and says "Andrew, what are the structures we're worried about hitting when a bullet passes through the 9th intercostal space?"

OK, easy. Spleen, Stomach, Diaphragm, Lungs, Liver, Heart, and just about everything else depending on the angle.

"Very good, and how would you assess for injuries to these structures?"

Not so easy. Well, I guess I'd see if he's vomiting blood, we'd know it hit the stomach.

He wants me to say we'd rule out a major arterial bleed, then order a CT scan of the chest and abdomen. Instead of going straight there, the attending would then look at a resident and ask "What is the possibility that a gastric penetration would present with frank vomiting of bright red blood?"

That's a tough question, which is why it was given to a resident. However, we quickly learn that the answer to most of these is either 20-30% or 70-80% (unless it's less than 3% or greater than 97%), which the resident would chose and the attending would probably say "Almost. It's actually.." and then he might cite a recent meta-analysis of world data that came out with whatever figure he had in mind.

Then he'd turn back to me and ask "Let's say he's not vomiting blood on presentation. What would be your first concern?"

"Bleeding, I guess"

"And how do you assess for bleeding?"

"Hypotension?"

"You're right, if the patient had a very low blood pressure you may be inclined to think he was bleeding significantly. However, you will remember that 40% of your blood must be lost before you show signs of hypotension. How would we be able to tell if there was massive internal bleeding sooner than that?"

"CT scan?"

"Very good, that would tell us for sure whether he's bleeding, but you might not want to subject a patient to an hour-long CT scan if he's bleeding internally. Any other ideas?"

I'd have no idea, so he'd finally open it up to anybody to answer, and reward the answer with a direct line of questioning that would lead us to collectively lecture ourselves on bullet trauma to the flank, simultaneously easy enough for some med students to answer questions, with a few difficult statistics questions for the residents thrown in to disseminate the most modern protocols currently being developed in medicine.

In the meantime, he would talk us into coming up with the solution to a problem ourselves, instead of having it taught to us. If you can get over the embarassment of not knowing the answer to a question, it inspires confidence that you can, deep down, figure these things out even if you forgot the specific protocols. After all, coming up with your own protocols and decisions is the basis for every major profession out there, not only for doctors and lawyers for whom Socratic method is taught.

Anyway, it's a welcome change from 2 years of classroom education.

2008-09-21T16:04:00.001-07:00

I've gone from fighting along the front lines of LA gang warfare to fighting on the front lines of the national obesity epidemic. In this upscale community hospital, highly trained professionals devote their days to stapling 2-3 stomachs a day, taking out the gall bladders that notoriously erupt in anybody who satisfies the 5 F's (Female, Fair, Fat, Fourty, Flatulent), and repairing the hernias of people whose insides are literally bursting out of the abdomen at the seems. The days of going elbow-deep into a dying man to pump his heart have been replaced by going elbow-deep into people who are so fat that elbow-deep barely penetrates their abdominal wall.

I'm on call tonight, and this being a level 2 Trauma center, we'll probably deal with some kind of minor trauma in the area. Fortunately, people tend to shoot themselves less in Pasadena than they do LA. More fortunately, the resident's lounge has a big plasma screen TV and a Nintendo Wii.

2008-09-09T22:35:00.000-07:00

I had my last call night (a Saturday, no less) on the LA County Trauma service, where I got to wheel a dying 16 year old gang member on a gurney past a gauntlet of 20 members of his family and friends as they let out a virtual wall of wails and cries. I also provided a hand to squeeze for a screaming 20 year old kid who got hit over the head with a beer bottle and was getting the footlong, 2-inch deep laceration painfully debrided while he told me we totally reminded him of some reality TV show, Code Blue, and that he loved us... probably because we had just given him a milligram of Ativan... all the while having the two kids who drove into a tree while high on mushrooms giggling uncontrollably at us from their respective beds across the room.

...and now I'm at an upscale community hospital in Pasadena, where each patient gets their own hotel suite-style room with a view, and the surgeons listen to internet radio playing "Summer of 69" while cranking through the gastric bypasses and hernia repairs of the rich. Not bad for a scene change. I'll try to keep updated about this new assignment, if there's anything worth updating.

2008-09-04T20:33:00.001-07:00

I just had a long talk with the wife and 21-year old kid of a man who I saw come into the ER half an hour after he crashed his motorcycle on the freeway, who's been in a coma for the past 5 days. I saw the case come in and recorded the vitals as they dropped in the ER to the point where I had to walk out for a second because I was convinced the man was dying. Somehow they managed to bring him back, even though he had spinal fluid coming out of the ears and nose, a flail chest (where enough ribs are broken in two places to create a movable part of the rib cage), and a double femur fracture and compound tib/fib. We've been fixing the rest of him, but he's been virtually brain dead since then and all the doctors have been doing their best to save the man while also doing their best to avoid the wife who's been at his bedside most of the time. The man's stabilizing, and we're pretty sure he's not coming back.
Yesterday I saw the wife at the bedside and I had some free time, so I went in to say hi. She's been really nice this whole time, albeit in some kind of traumatic psychosis, and had apparently been living in the hospital for the past 4 days. All I did was tell her again, slowly, what's been going on and then I just sat their and nodded for the next half hour as she talked and talked about miracles and how she's felt death before but doesn't feel death now, and how she's fully aware of the worst case (and most likely) scenario but would really rather the doctors stop being so negative and let her believe in her miracles. I didn't think she'd have that kind of perspective on things. So I told her the good news, that we really don't know much about what's going on in the brain (I didn't tell her that the CT scan showed a probable brainstem infarct, giving him virtually no chance of recovering, after all the Radiology read was "probable").
The Chaplain came by a little while later and I got a chance to speak to him before he went into the patient's room to pray at the bedside for him, and it turns out he also felt strongly about letting the wife believe in her miracle. Still, he as he walked into the patient's room to pray for him, he told me he was more worried for the wife.
In other sad news, we were the trauma team to try to save the victim of a pedestrian who got hit by a van that was being chased by cops (see local news story, at http://cbs2.com/carchase/Chase.Crash.Pedestrian.2.809710.html).

Sure beats taking a single-use toothbrush out of the rectum of a 15-year old jouvenile hall horrifically suicidal kid who wanted to take the scalpel out of the resident's pocket to slit his wrists because Freddy, the voice in his head, told him to do so because sticking the toothbrush into his ass isn't killing him fast enough.

can't say it isn't interesting work...

2008-08-29T20:40:00.001-07:00

In a level 1 Trauma center such as ours, you're always guaranteed a trauma surgical team can be mobilized to the ER within a few minutes, no matter what time it is. To make this possible, there are three Trauma teams that rotate 24-hour shifts of responsibility for all traumatic patients who arrive at the hospital. We do this using a set of pagers that represent the Trauma Team Activation (TTA), and every day at 8AM the Trauma teams meet to pass the pagers onto the next shift. Yesterday was my second day of carrying the Med Student TTA pager for 24 hours. This 24-hour shift, plus a few hours on either side for taking care of our own patients, is what's meant by being "on call."
So although I came in at 6 to write notes on the patients I was following, the day officially started as I came walking through the turnstile of our dining area with a huge tray of the most impressive and soon-to-be satisfying breakfast tray I had assembled from the breakfast bar, and the TTA pager goes off. I watched in horror as my team took their untouched breakfasts and dumped them in the trash and ran towards the ER. Savages. I stuffed what I could in my mouth and headed off past them.
It was a prison inmate who got beat up a week before and collapsed this morning, turned out he was bleeding into his abdomen. Quick trip to the operating room, and after I spent a few minutes scrubbing in, I walked into the OR to take a look at what's going on. As soon as I get there, the attending looks at me and says "Here you go." so I open out my hands to receive this giant bloody slippery purple thing as he hands it to me. You gotta be kidding. So that's what a spleen looks like.
The rest of the day blended into a haze of work and running, with a few hours for class at some point in between. The residents are sleeping when i get back from class, in prep for the storm to come... which doesn't come for long enough for us to head to they mythical gym on the 13th floor. Yeah that's right. The 13th floor, the mythical and mysterious place that only the elevator with the full-time button-pusher leads to, where you need to stand in front of a one-way mirror before another one-way mirror slides open to let you in. But apparently the Jail ward is not only for sick inmates. The wardens need their break room, and what else would they have in there other than a dirty couch in front of a TV/VCR combo, with an entire weight room behind it. No kidding. We had about 10 minutes of building through the skinny scrubs, before one of the residents got a page for a motorcycle crash. All's well and we head up to the call room to watch TV in college dorm style, turning up the computer speakers high among the 2 bunk beds of the tiny room to watch whatever ABC.com has to show us. I try to get some sleep on one of the top bunks, but when the TTA page comes, I jump down and we're all in the elevator in 30 seconds. Some guy got shot right outside our parking lot. It was 10PM. We walk in that area at 10PM. This wasn't another gang shooting in some ghetto somewhere, it's a drive by in our neighborhood. It shakes us all up a bit as we prep to cut into his belly to patch up whatever the bullet hit on its way between the in and out holes. I stay behind in the ICU to put in a Chest Tube on the motorcycle crash, something which 3rd year med students really aren't supposed to do.
This being my first procedure, I'm understandably nervous to learn that this guy has a broken shoulder and can't lift his arm above his head. As you can imagine, sticking an inch-thick tube into somebody's armpit is a lot easier with the arm up. To make things worse, this guy was huge. There'd be a good few inches of fat to get through on my way in between the ribs. We dope him up pretty good, an extra dose of morphene and some versed, but he's still with it enough to make it very clear how much it hurts him. I numb him up a bit and then make my first surgical incision on a live person. And then widen it. And then widen that further. Two inches of permanent scar later, I stick in the clamps to spread the layers of fat by continuously opening up blunt-ended scissors after sticking them inside this guy. I went in 2 inches deep and stuck my finger in and couldn't feel the ribs. I burrowed in another inch and still couldn't feel them. I went in another inch to 4 inches into this guy's side, with him yelping in doped-up agony, and still couldn't feel the ribs. The resident beside me was amazing, in that he let me carry on with this without stepping in to say I was doing everything wrong and killing this person. In fact, he stuck his own finger into this 2 inch hole I'd made, felt around, and said he thought he felt the ribs. I still couldn't feel them. The patient's getting louder.
The TTA pager goes off for both of us underneath our sterile gowns. We look at each other. The other resident and the attending are upstairs operating on the man who got shot outside our parking lot, leaving the two of us as first responders. I ask the resident if he wants to take over and finish it so we get go deal with whatever horribly traumatic dying person is about to get carted into the ER, and to his charity, he asks "are you sure? I don't want to take this from you." What a guy. Yeah I'm sure go show me how the surgeons do it. He reaches his finger all the way in, the guy jumps off the table, but still no ribs. More scissors and more spreading, and still no ribs. How much fat can one man have? He eventually sticks the 8-inch blunt scissors in so all I can see are the rings of them through the resident's knuckles, and then when he thinks he found the ribs, goes over one and pushes as hard as he can. I hold down the patient's knees and I hope that the restraints I put on his arms hold. "YOU GUYS!!!!" the patient screams "It's NOT GOING IN!!!!" "YOU GUYS!!! STOP!!" Finally, there's the loud POP and gush of air that signals the release of air that we're trying to set free with this operation, followed by globs of dark red blood pouring out the hole. I hand the resident the tube to put in, and he sticks it in. And further. And pulls it out. He lost the hole he'd made.
This was a disaster on all fronts. He tries to stick the tube back in, but then takes it back out as he tries to find the hole he'd made. I watch him put the tube onto his sterile towel, only that the patient's kicking and screaming had ruined the flat blue towel that was our sterile field. The bloody sterile tube touched the patient's dirty gown. i had a brief moment of being unsure whether I should say anything or not, maybe I could just pretend it didn't happen and let the resident put that contaminated tube into the guy's chest, let him go off to deal with his TTA, and hope everything's ok? The resident picks up the tube and tries to put it back into the patient just as I snap out of my haze and say "WAIT!" I showed him the bloody line on the gown where the tube had touched it. The poor guy had a minor breakdown of sheer frustration. I wish I hadn't said anything. A nurse is around by this time to take the order to find us another chest tube, only he doesn't know where it is. This being one of my first times of usefulness, I do. I run him over to the area closet where the chest tubes are, point at the one I want, and run back with him. Being clothed in a gown and gloves of sterility, I felt like even more of an ass asking him to do things that were obviously within my own reach. Still, rules being rules he ran back with me and opened up the sterile chest tube into my hands so I could hand it to the resident, who eventually put it into the patient.
When he was done, I asked the resident to run off to the ER while I dress the wound and clean up, not telling him I've never dressed a wound before. I put gauze on the wound, and then wake up to the fact that this guy has two HUGE spots of road rash to the left and right of the wound, and a rediculous amount of chest and back hair above and below it. Gauze needs tape. Tape needs skin, and there's no sterile razor around to shave him. If I don't do this right, this guy could get a life-threatening chest and wound infection. Nobody else is around. Crap. The dressing I end up with is hilarous both in shape and physics, but I manage to patch this guy up without taping over road rash, and I even got whatever tape I had to put over the hair to stick. It's fine.
Turns out the TTA was some Iraq vet who got into a drunken fight with his girlfriend while on the freeway and opened the door and jumped out. All being said and done, he was stable and we left him under close nursing care. By now it was 2AM. The Chest tube's in, the Operation's over, it's time to get some sleep. TTA goes off, back to the ER. False alarm, the ER can handle it on their own. In bed by 3:15 with strict orders to be downstairs at 4:45. TTA at 4:40.
This one's a fighter. Guy's family calls the cops in to take a look at their strange-acting 19 year old, who dives through a second story window, only to get back up and keep running with blood gushing out his arm. Cops tazer him 8 times and stick him into an ambulance. It takes literally 10 of us to hold him down while somebody sticks a needle into his arm to knock him out as he gives the most blood-curdling series of "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! NOOOOOOOO! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!'s" and doesn't let up no matter how many poison darts we stick in him. Finally the call is made to knock him into a coma and have a tube breathe for him. Horrific. He's got a 3 inch hole in his right arm that goes down to the bone, not to mention a slew of body lacerations that apparently happen when you jump through a window.
Now it's 6:30 and time to have seen all our patients already and start rounding with the attending. I hadn't seen a single patient. TTA at 6:45, this one's getting helicoptered in from a rush-hour motorcycle crash somewhere far away, the "real deal" from what the ER docs can tell me. The open bone sticking through his calf is the least of his worries, and the only reason we still think he's alive is because he's got a weak pulse. The base of his skull is cracked (which was a good teaching point because hs's got the characteristic "racoon eyes" that go along with that), and he's got what looks like spinal fluid leaking out his ears. A portion of his rib cage is broken so that it actually goes down into his chest instead of expanding with the chest when he breathes. I'll find out tomorrow if he'll ever regain brain function.
I get out of there shortly after 11, within a half hour of my 30-hour legal work limit, and as much as I think I can complain, the residents are all going to stay there a few hours longer. And they're actually responsible for these people. It's insane. And to think that most of the docs in the hospital had to work an extra 30-40% harder is just plain stupid. So it goes.

2008-08-27T19:42:00.001-07:00

I walked out of my first 30-hour workday with the kind of spring in my step you can only get from having stuck your hands into a dying man's chest to pump his heart for him, pulling back half a man's abdomen to watch your teammates remove yards upon yards of dead bowel, and sowing up the deep cuts of two kids that are going to wear the quality of my work as a scar on their chest forever. OK maybe there are other things to give you that spring in your step, but those 30 hours really topped the list of all-nighters I've had, whether all night dancing in a warehouse, or even in the flat desert at Burning Man. Definitely beats spending the night in the library...

I go back on call tomorrow at 5:30AM to come home around noon the next day. During these same hours, 20 of my closest friends will be partying their collective asses off in a mid-size town of 40,000 party-goers and engineers in the Black Rock Desert and for the first time since I started going to the festival 7 years ago, Burning Man is not the only place I want to be during this week of the year. I'll do my best to write what happens...

2008-08-21T19:51:00.001-07:00

It's three days into my Trauma Surgery clerkship and I'm already onto the sleeping schedule of an 80 year old. I never had the chance to elaborate in my thoughts of Pediatrics, mostly probably because they were too depressing to write about. A combination of close friends of mine and random new acquaintances had to bear the brunt of those rants, unfortunately for them, leaving little more than a post on big macs here on this blog. Even though I've only been here three days, the gaping hole between the two clerkships is readily apparent. For one, people get better on the Surgery ward. Or the die. Either way, if they die we're probably going to give them a few more hours. Tertiary care pediatrics deals with kids who are really, really messed up to begin with, and all we can ever hope to do is solve their acute problem so they can go home and remain a burden to their family for another few years.
The breakdown is becoming apparent in terms of quality-life-years. Internal medicine is a specialty where great measures are taken for the sake of gaining 5-10 quality life-years for 70 year olds, or 5-10 numb years for 80 year olds. Pediatrics has the goal of possibly adding 50 or so years to a patient's life, but in a tertiary care facility such as the one I was at, the underlying disorder is bad enough to render these years a disaster, leading the primary caregiver down the awful path of convincing herself that keeping this child a live is a good idea in the first place. Trauma surgery, now, deals in terms of Quality Life Years, where all three of these terms are preserved to the utmost degree. A man gets hit by a sewage truck and pinned to the wall. 52 pints of blood and a few extravagant surgeries later, he has a chance for another 40 quality years. Man gets shot in the neck and once in the face. All it takes is an air tube and critical care, and this man can live another 60 good years. Now HERE's a field of medicine we've got down pat. For the first time since I've seen, the state of modern technology is helping save lives. Quality lives. That's something I can get into.
...but I'm three days in. Tomorrow is my call day. 5:30AM Friday 'till noon Saturday of serving on the team to provide the majority of Level 1 Trauma surgery in Los Angeles County on a Friday night. Also my first overnight call night at a hospital (definitely not my last). I'll have to wait 'till after this before I know what I think.

2008-07-28T00:45:00.002-07:00

Big Mac Attack

There's a McDonalds in the basement of the hospital. Yeah, we know.

So the story goes, there was a kid once who had an incredibly rare (yet often seen at this hospital) metabolic disorder called methylmalonic acidemia. Kids with this disorder can't break down Lysine, Leucine and Valene, three amino acids that are found in lots of foods and we might even find delicious. They spend their whole lives fed by a carefully made formula through a direct gastric tube, because any time they're exposed to these amino acids, toxic byproducts build up in their system and they get sick. One day, a kid with methylmalonic acidemia happened to be hospitalized for some other reason, couldn't bear the temptation, and snuck down to the basement and bought a big mac. He was found in a coma on the floor. Take that, Morgan Spurlock.

2008-07-28T00:35:00.002-07:00

Chapter 2:

It's been a long while since I wrote anything on this site, and as always, one of the best reasons I had to delay writing anything was that I didn't want to have to sum up all that's happened in between. However, the experiences I'm being exposed to right now aren't worth waiting for a time when I can sit down and write about everything in between. More importantly, if the time in between never drove me to take time out of my day to write about it, it probably isn't worth your time to read either. So here I am, three weeks into what I expect to be the single most important, exhausting, and encompassing year I'm supposed to have, and I'm bringing the blog back. 3rd year of medical school in the US is supposed to be one of the most privileged experiences the world has to offer. This year, I'm going to watch people die. I'm going to watch people get born. I'm going to help guide people through all stages in between, using some of the most sophisticated technological and psychological tactics the Western World has come up with to date. I'm also going to get the chance to hurt someone. Or to keep dying people alive for weeks or even months longer than they would ever have wanted to be kept alive, and I have to deny a patient the right to die peacefully because his mental state had already deteriorated at that point beyond "legal decision-making capacity." Or, who knows, I might make someone's life a far better place.

Whatever happens, I'll do my best to write something about it. Because it's interesting, and fun to read. But more importantly, I need the pressure valve. A stranger was kind enough to point out to me at a party this weekend, after I walked in and didn't even sit down before starting on a rant with the first person i saw that would take me through the next half hour. Without saying hello, I started complaining to anybody in ear shot about how crazy my past 3 weeks had been, how i've been working 80 hour weeks and communicating with terrified parents in broken spanish that their kid may or may not have a brain tumor, and if he does then it's good news because that means we can fix it and he might not have to be on lifetime seizure meds, or that their 11-year old kid with a metabolic disorder is "healthy" again and can be sent home to spend the next 11 years the same way as the first--as a gastric-tube fed wide-eyed child with uncurable propensity for turning his own muscle into a poison that has turned his brain to mush and left him with the intellect of a 6-month old.

This stranger, in his generosity, reflected to me the impression that I had become an overworked "Type A" of some sort of "higher intellect" that seeks to justify his own hard work by imposing his experiences on others. Insults aside, I couldn't agree with any of these claims, especially to call me a "Type A." Except he was right, because he hadn't known me in my 26 years before I had become this so-called "Type A personality," and in that moment I was being exactly that way and doing exactly that.

So here's my solution. Instead of walking into every future social situation as a maybe-interesting-story waiting to happen, I'm going to prep myself by getting them out of my system here. On this website. Something happens, it goes here first. From now on. That way, hopefully, I can start to appreciate social interactions for something more than a way to hear myself talk.

So that's my introduction. Chapter 2.

2007-07-26T01:28:00.000-07:00

It’s funny how after a week of being down here in Ko Pangan, arguably the most fun island in Thailand, therefore the world, the only thing that really made me happy was booking my bus ticket back to Bangkok. I’ve never wanted to be in Bangkok before, but now I can’t wait to get there.

The past week here has been relaxing at best, lonesome at worst. In other words, it’s been exactly what I’ve wanted it to be. I needed a place I can sit and be bored to pieces at, somewhere I can spend a full day stoned out of my mind, staring at the waves and doing absolutely nothing. I needed to have that just for the purpose of snapping out of it later and wondering what a waste I’ve been. I needed that so that I can look back a few weeks from now and be glad to be back in med school. I needed it and I got it.

I found this bungalow on a deserted corner of the island, where I’m the only guest I’ve seen who stays more than the day it takes to come here and get the hell out. I stayed because I found my own personal, private beach where I can, as I said before, sit and watch the water come and go for hours and hours until I snap out of it and think of something more productive. Unfortunately, in those circumstances “more productive” thoughts tend to be thoughts of loneliness, boredom, and even depression about why the hell I’ve exiled myself from humanity.

The nights haven’t been much better. It’s about a 30 minute drive to the “happening” side of the island, where I’ve spent almost every night since I’ve been here. Unfortunately, I’ve never seen more “hard to meet” people anywhere else in Thailand that at that beach. It doesn’t help that this time I’m here, it’s summer break so all the beaches are flooded with everyone’s favorite stereotypical douchebags. The bright side of this is that I’ve seen some of the most beautiful women I’ve ever encountered. The dark side is that I’ve only met a few of them. Also, it’s a lot harder to distance yourself from every other stereotypical drunken douchebag when there are just SO MANY of them everywhere you go. I’ve never, ever thought traveling in a group would be more fun than traveling alone. At Had Rin beach in Ko Pangan, I finally see the appeal.
The nice thing about my trip to this island is the massive amount of work I’ve been doing, which considering that was my primary purpose, makes the rest of my worries inconsequential. I’ve written a complete report about the survey, which will be used to help write a paper for eventual publication. I’ve also written a pioneer draft of this Ayurveda paper that might seed another paper later down the road. Oh, and I managed to study half a week’s worth of Cardiology (the week I’ll be missing for Burning Man). Not bad for a week’s work.

2007-07-17T20:07:00.001-07:00

I made it successfully out of Mae Sot and into Chiang Mai, still my favorite city in Southeast Asia. I made it four days, met a few good people, and started my 2-day trip down to the islands. I was on a bus for 12 hours last night, and here I am in Bangkok waiting between 6AM until 6PM for my night bus that'll take me 12 more hours before I get to the port where I take another boat 3 hours out to Ko Panghan. It better be worth it...

But the plan is to find a cozy little bungalow somewhere on the beach and lie in a hammock for a week while I write this research paper on what I did in Mae Sot. If all goes well, I might write two. Either way, I'll have a good enough chance that I'll get at least one paper out this summer.

I wish there was more to say, but I've been basically drinking and sleeping since I left Mae Sot, so there's nothing aside from party stories worth posting. Sorry.

2007-07-11T09:12:00.000-07:00

I've spent all my time so far posting ramblings about my situation, so I guess I should probably back up and state what it is actually that I'm here to be doing.

I somehow managed to convince my University that it would be an "investment towards my medical education," as well as maybe even for the world as a whole, to fund a summer trip to Thailand on the Burmese/Thai border to study traditional medicine use among the recently (illegal) immigrants who've been raped, pillaged, and chased out of their homes through minefields to come seek refuge in a country that so adamantly doesn't want them that they forbid them to be anywhere outside of home, with the lights off, and not even use cellphones, after 9PM. So there's a public health clinic here that was setup by a Burmese doctor 20 years ago (who has since been named the "Mother Teresa of Burma"), that treats people for a dollar. About half of the patients are immigrants or displaced people, and the rest are simply migrants who cross the border daily for work (or sometimes just for treatment at the clinic). Come to think of it, it'd be kind of like a public health clinic in San Diego. Except with more malaria and amputees. And (I think) more fouled up penis oil injections that end up in thigh skin grafts (see that post).

So there's a war going on that nobody I know has ever heard about, that's been going for over 40 years. The Karen (car-REN), an ethnic "minority" group that was considered by the British to encompass several sub-groups to categorize about 50% of the Burmese population, has been fighting one of the most brutal military totalitarian regimes since the end of the second world war. Burma, with it's 500,000 troops and endless workforce of villagers forced at gunpoint to be their workhorses, have almost completely routed the Karen insurgency and terrorized millions of villagers out of their homes. The Karen still have a complete government, that exists in exile in Thailand, and they control everything from their army to their healthcare system.

Of the whole team of Westerners who've come from far and away to help the exiled government re-organize their infrastructure, teach their medics, build schools for refugees, and buy drugs to put on the backs of medics who make 3-6 month treks into Burma to provide medical care to the remote villages, my job has very little to do with any of that. Instead, I'm focusing on making the helping the displaced people and not-yet-emmigrated people more self sufficient in a way that doesn't involve a constant stream of international goodwill and aid money. What we're about is bringing back self-sustainable healthcare to these villages who've had it for thousands of years in the form of herbal medicine. Until the Burmese military government cuts down all their trees, the Karen people have one of the largest pharmacies in the world growing right out their front door. Unfortunately, with a 40 year conflict such as this one, the teacher-pupil relationship that carried this information through the ages has become severely endangered. Now there's a push by the exiled Karen government to centralize all this information, re-test it, and distribute it among the villagers through a program of herbalist training centers and spreading handbooks of traditional medicine to the villages directly.

I'm here to conduct a survey at the local "almost-free" clinic to see what kind of information I can extract from the patients about what should be done to the healtcare system once they get here. In the meantime, I found out about an herb that cures Hepatitis B, and another herb that apparently treats HIV. These are all stories that I'll cover later. For now, I'll say that the Hepatitis B herb is currently being studied, and that the HIV treatment has been somewhat lost because the member of the clinic who was able to find the herbalist who administered the treatment was shipped off to another country for resettlement (another victim of the brain drain), and so the herbalists that were able to treat this woman (who did gain weight and apperaed significanty healthier in the same way HAART therapy would appear) cannot be found. India's been launching an investigation about herbs that could potentially treat HIV as well, but we'll see either how much it works or how much the profiteers don't want us to know about it in the coming years...

I know that didn't answer much about what I'm doing here but it gives you a tip. For now, I'm drunk and I'm tired and I can't be bothered to write anymore and there are two people who want to use my computer. I'll do my best to finish this idea later.

2007-07-05T02:19:00.001-07:00

I forgot I never really explained myself when I said that the refugee camp was one of the most beautiful places I've ever been. In lieu of that, I'm sure I sounded like a psychopath again. At least a sociopath. Nevermind, this is why:
It's that the people there were some of the worst off people in the entire world, and here they were building a community out of nothing. More than that, it's as though entire communities had retransplanted themselves onto this beautiful landscape, renamed itself after names of the old villages, and went back to daily living. From what I understand, a new family arrives from their most recent massively traumatic experience, after hiking for a week in the jungle to get to safety, and they're helped in all ways by the experienced folk who'd been there for a few years now. Suddenly, they go from running in the jungle with a baby on their backs, dodging landmines to avoid the Burmese military who's chasing after them, to having a little shack with some fellow villagers they may have known in the past. They get food, water and shelter. Now all they do is wait.
In the meantime, the place has become infested with children under 10 years old. The camp's been there for almost 20 years, and waiting has turned into a way of life. But the kids don't know any better. They love it. There are giant soccer games, and children laughing and playing up and down the muddy banks of the hill.
I heard that yesterday the Americans came with 8 large trucks and took 320 people out of the camp for resettlement in the US. Now THAT's impressive, something I'd assumed was acompletely given up in the midst of all this recent anti-immigration furor. They promise to take 10,000 refugees per year, and other countries like Canada, England, and i think Australia are taking smaller amounts. On one hand, this is great considering there are only 150,000 refugees sitting in camps along the border. On the other hand, the Burmese are taking this as a "go ahead" to kick more natives down the mountain to the refugee camps on the Thai side. For every refugee that gets resettled, they say, two more come in.
Another side of the story is that we, as Americans, tend to take the best and the brightest from the world. Of course, it only makes sense for us to do, but this means that the medical clinics in these camps are consistently drained of their staff. The clinic in the camp I went to said they had 33 medics at the end of May. Now they have 28. By the end of the month, they'll have 23, and they'll be down to a dozen by the end of the rainy season. That's a dozen under-trained staff to handle about 60 beds (I wasn't counting very carefully), a pharmacy, and a complete outpatient department during the height of the rainy (disease) season in a refugee camp of 50,000! Understandably, they're rapidly training more staff with intensive, incomplete courses of 7 months instead of 18. The US has a policy of resettling refugees based on their relative "risk." Whatever that means officially, educated refugees are much more valued.
It turns out there's also a population of Indians and Bangladeshis who come to the camps in hopes of getting resettled as Burmese. Now there are members of the American resettling staff whose job it is to try to determine who's really Burmese and who's not.
There are also Muslims in the camps. As our guide told us, even though they make up only a few percent of the total population, when resources get scarce they're the ones who cross neighborhood boundaries to steal from the other side of town. This is the local opinion of Muslims who have absolutely nothing to do with the Muslims that make the headlines anywhere else in the world. I should probably also say that 60% of the camp is Christian.
That's enough for now.

2007-07-05T01:11:00.000-07:00

The third full day of the survey, I get led into the "trauma surgery" room to interview one of the staff right next to a "sterile" bed with a man lying on it who was getting his penis re-wrapped. It was open when I first got there, a bright red bloody mess of what was supposed to be the shaft, between a normal head and scrotum. It was kind of a leap of professionalism for me to have been able to sit through an entire interview, and even pay attention, while a 30 year old man was lying in excruciating agony (without uttering a peep) as a pretty 25 year old girl medic wrapped his massively enflamed manhood in a new set of gauze. He left about 5 minutes later, and I had a brief pause of full interest into what I was hearing through my translator, and then ANOTHER man waddles through the curtains and lies down on the bed, exposes his Johnson, and gets the re-wrap. Throughout the course of my 30 minute interview, three people in total had to have their penises rewrapped.
Fortunately, I'd heard about this before as an epidemic phenomenon that nobody's really talked about. Ethnic minority villagers would go get subdermal oil injections into their dicks, so that the oil would spread along the entire shaft to increase girth. Nobody has any idea how many people actually get them, but the hospitals see a new case of a very sloppy (and infected) job every two or three days. The best case scenario is a complete skinning of the shaft, replacing it with a graft from the thigh. There have been several cases of amputation.
They only really see it in the camps, which means that either it's something that has been brought down from the hilltribes that has never been seen in the cities (along with a lot of other strange rituals and habits), or it's an entirely new phenomenon. The latter option suggests a great opportunity for sociological research, as it's very likely that this is the natural response to the demasculization that's occurring in these refugee camps. When it's the man's role to supply and provide structure and stability to his family, he's so utterly demasculinated when his family is forced out of his house at gunpoint and flees to a refugee camp where work is scarce and food is provided free of charge. He should at least be able to please his wife...
Who knows? It's not my work, in any case. There's a long term survey that's being conducted at the clinic to find these things out, so the exiled Karen government could impliment some sort of education about it at least.

2007-07-01T05:41:00.000-07:00

Refugee Camp

I finally made my way into visiting my first refugee camp. It’s closed to tourists, and so I halfway figured I’d never even get to see it. But one of our contacts here happened to be going there to speak at the opening ceremony for a new “college,” and we were able to come along.
This might have been the most beautiful place I’ve ever been. Having said that, I should then mention that it’s home to some of the most brutally destroyed human beings that currently exist in the world, in that just about every member of the camp has had just about the worst thing imaginable happen to them. I didn’t get a chance to meet anybody personally, but I’m staying at this guesthouse with a couple who’s filming a documentary about the situation. They went to the same camp a few weeks ago on the specific mission to interview the new comers. The people they met were still shell-shocked, telling stories of their closest family members being raped and/or murdered while they were forced to watch, and then being forced to walk minefields by the Burmese military in order to clear them. It wasn’t that each person had their own story, it’s that each person had 10.
So I went expecting something out of a Save the Children ad about African refugee camps, or something I’ve seen on TV about the camps in Gaza. Instead, we drove into a mountain region with a gigantic sheer rock face on once side that rivals Yosemite in majesty, and the driver told us we were here. I didn’t see any buildings at first, and then as we drove further we saw little shacks that looked like Tiki huts nestled between the massive trees of the deep forest. As we drove further, more and more huts appeared, and closer together, and it became apparent that each hut was almost identical. A wooden platform, on stilts, with a floor, and an angled roof made from thatched leaves off some of the local trees. We drove on, and the huts got closer and closer together until we could see nothing but thatch leaf roofs, mud, bamboo struts, and kids behind a wire fence.
The driver took us in. It had been raining all week, so the packed dirt road had turned into the kind of terrain that I’d have thought only a 4wd would dare enter (I brought this point up later with our guide and he said they can drive any crappy car through it if you’re good, which realize how wimpy us Americans tend to be about these things). It was muddy, it was dirty, and the bamboo floors of the huts were wide open for us to see how they served as living room and bedroom for the whole family. But we got down to the basin to find a giant soccer field with a thousand people sitting around watching a match.
Just next to the soccer field was the local health clinic, which I got to tour and I’ll discuss in a later post.
But you could already tell the attitude was so much more complex than I’d ever imagined. As we walked up the hill to this school, people stared at us while children laughed at us and followed us around, while babies were screaming behind closed curtains of other huts. Meanwhile, we were slipping and sliding to try our best to get up this mountain, as the dirt road had turned completely into a mud road. I’d worn my more respectable clothes, it and it was a bit embarrassing to have to grab hold of huts to keep from falling over into the god-knows-what-its-made-of mud.
Then the weirdest thing happened. We got higher up and I swear I could hear the sound of a marching band. Then I climbed even higher and it got louder. Eventually, the mud cleared and I had a chance to wash my shoes, after which I climbed a bit higher and was greeted by a girl wearing a white schoolgirl outfit. She shook my hand and said “Welcome.” Marching band music was playing louder behind her. My guides have gone ahead, and I was completely baffled. The mud path became a dirt path and eventually became a paved walkway that led to more concrete and eventually real buildings. Then another school girl shook my hand. Then a very important looking person in a suit shook my hand and pointed me upwards towards a bigger building. By then I was very sure there was a marching band in this building. I got to the entrance and started taking off my shoes by the large pile of shoes outside the doorway. I took one shoe off, and then was stopped by a very embarrassed, polite, super smiley person who also looked important, who told me it was not necessary for me to take off my shoes. So I put them back on, even more confused, and walked into a room of barefoot people with muddy disgusting shoes on (were they being THAT polite to a foreigner?). The noise of the awful marching band was deafening. They were also sitting down, not marching, in a closed room. The tuba missed every third note. Then I was approached to sit in one of the chairs on stage, where I’d noticed my host was sitting next to some important looking Karen people and a white guy. The white guy organized the funding for this school. We sat next to him because I think they thought we were other funders. Whoops.
Anyway, I had to sit through a very long and tedious opening ceremony in the front row on stage, which meant I wasn’t even allowed to close my eyes to rest them. However, it gave me a great vantage point to take several videos of some of the musical performances the students had put together, and some of them were awesome. I’m going to compress them and put them with a pack of photos to send out, but I don’t feel comfortable putting them up on a public space like a this. Anybody who wants them, please email me so I can send them out to you.
I gotta go get some dinner, but there should be a lot more to say tomorrow after this meeting. We’re also training our translators for this survey in the afternoon. If I have any energy left, I’ll write it all up.

2007-06-27T02:03:00.000-07:00

My Laptop got infested with ants. There's one running over the screen right now. It guess it comes with the territory, but somehow they're only there for a few seconds after I open it up, but as soon as they get exposed to the light of the outside world, the all scurry in between the keys immediately, except for the dumber ones who stay out long enough for me to crush. The funny part is that they run away from the cursor whenever they do come out...

Anyway, I wrote the following post when I was drunk the other night. I saved it as a word document until I had the chance to edit it while sober. However, I don't have no idea if anybody's reading this right now, so I'll just post it in case I get to use it later. I've since changed my opinion about the particular NGO people, since they sent me an email after our meeting thanking me for the meeting. I never knew how simple niceties could be so nice.

Wow.... I can't find the file on my computer. Must have been THAT drunk. Anyway, I'll consider this a post until I find the file anyway...

More to come: I've been shadowing at the clinic for the past few days, and just tonight I met some Burmese guy who had been detentioned for the 10 years and invited me over to his office tomorrow because I was interested in hearing his story. So much to say, so little spare time drunk...

2007-06-24T00:50:00.000-07:00

I finally started to meet some of the NGO people around here. I’ve developed quite a strange perspective about them, mostly because they don’t fit any other stereotypical traveler I’d encountered so far. First of all the NGO worker, unlike the budget backpacker, has the money to spend on decent hotels and meals. Case and point, we were having dinner with The Professor at his hotel a few hours after arrival and during a discussion about malaria, a Canadian aid worker rolled her eyes and said “oh, I wouldn’t worry about Malaria, just be sure to keep your air conditioner on. The mosquitoes become lethargic under 21 degrees.” Yeah, I know. She was 28 and pretty until she opened her mouth, then she invited herself to our table and wouldn’t stop talking about her condo in Bangkok (with her eyes closed). I've just been so used to Israeli travelers fighting tooth and nail to stay in the absolute worst hotel for virtually no money, it's a little strange to see a rich white girl unable automatically assuming that we had a hotel with air conditioning.
But tonight I got to really appreciate how much more educated the Westerners are here than anywhere else I’ve traveled in Asia. In my guest house alone, for example, there are three medical students, two law students (one at NYU), a doctor, and it seems like everybody else I meet is either a graduate or PhD student writing their thesis in Public Health. At the bar, I met up with two of the medical students who work at the clinic (both from Liverpool), and got a further appreciation for the relative strength of the USC medical curriculum. They were good people, don’t get me wrong, but they somehow got by without ever learning Anatomy, Physiology, or anything else important until they got to have a case presented with it. Somehow they started their clinical rotations with less than one year of didactic training. Nevertheless, within a few minutes of arriving at the bar, I was engaged in some of the worst, most interesting, embarassingly scientific discussion about "doctor stuff." It's a conversation I got so used to having that I didn't even realize I'd been going through withdrawal until the opportunity came to come back to it. We were on fire. One girl had a paperback British medical textbook that essentially was a "what you need to know for the test" about everything there was to know about medicine, in extremely concise terms. I was so impressed by it that I couldn't help but excuse myself from the conversation to review material from the past year. It makes me a little frustrated I didn't bring anything like that here, and even more frustrated that I wish I had.
There was a newly graduated English doctor there who I spoke to for a while. Very cool guy, but are also absolutely overwhelmed at how little he can help in the face of these medics who have less training than nurses, but have learned so much more about tropical disease than any doctor from the Developed world would ever encounter. In any case, the fire sparked again and I found myself deeply engaged in dorky conversation, but learning and teaching with a fury that I'd completely lost during the last two weeks of intense studying for the cumulative exam. But I wasn't the only one who was glad to rekindle that fury. The doc, or recent grad to be more precise, offered to be my private tutor for any subject I wanted, as it would really help him fully understand the concepts. I told him I'll skipping a week of Cardiology (a 5-week course) to go to Burning Man, and it would really help to learn some of it before I start. He seemed happy about that, but I passed it off as late night drunken conversation. Instead, I offered what I really wanted to do: shadow him around the clinic and have him explain cases to me. This way I could pimp him for information, he could teach me what he knows, and most importantly, I'd get to weasel my way into the a clinic that otherwise wouldn't have room for me. We set a date for him to show me around on Tuesday. We’ll see how things go.
I realize I never introduced what I'm doing here or how I got here. I started writing that entry in Word, but was somehow so spun around by the jetlag and the whirlwind of introductions, meetings, and discussion that writing a blog was the last thing on my mind. I'll finish that up and publish it shortly, but for now I'll sum it up as saying I met this professor at Oxford (with an added professorship at Columbia) and this girl from Texas, and the three of us went around meeting all these heads of governmental and non-governmental organizations for a week before settling into what it was I'm going to be doing here. The end product is a survey I'll be conducting at the local refugee clinic, studying traditional medicine use among migrant workers and refugees, so that I could present this information to the clinic to help them decide whether they could use an herbalist among their staff. There's a much larger story behind all this, but I'll get to that all later.
Oh, and I ran into Shogo on my second night in Chiang Mai. Anybody who knows who Shogo is would think that's funny. It's funnier that, despite being surprised to see me, he still spent all of his time hitting on girls (unsuccessfully). Actually, better than that I ran into Shogo and then later ran into the same girl that called the police on me because she saw me leave the club with another girl one year and a half before, the last time I was in Chiang Mai. Her new boyfriend was there, and after everything was said and done she was happy to see me and things were good, except that she'd gone off the deep end with alcohol when I saw her, and I later heard she'd lost control of the bar that she used to own. That was her livelihood. Now she has her boyfriend to depend on. He's and American, extremely cool, and slightly bummed. Glad I got out of that one... Another great night in Chiang Mai.

2007-06-23T06:22:00.000-07:00

Secretive, so secretive. I’m not even doing anything important, and here I go worrying about everything I say to anyone because I’ve been told so many times by my coordinators that Burmese spies are everywhere. Not that it benefits or threatens me at all, but supposedly Rangoon has spies all over this town wanting to know who’s working for the NGOs. A Burmese translator from five years ago supposedly had the Burmese Secret Police come to his family’s house within Burma and demand his son’s return upon immediate threat to the family. He went to Burma, was taken prisoner, and was threatened in no peaceful way to never again work with their enemy, the Karen, or else… He blames it on a chatty waiter here in Mae Sot.
This place does kinda read like a spy novel. Except that so far people seem so happy, who’d ever think anything wrong? I think the answer lies in my ignorance about the situation, and that since I’m only just starting to be able to tell the difference between Burmese and Thai, I haven’t yet noticed that the Thais are all cheery and happy, whereas the Burmese are serious and determined. When I walk the streets at night, it’s the Thai singing songs and drinking beer. It’s the Burmese that are slower and deliberate. Also it’s the Burmese that spend all their time either starving or helping.
It turns out there’s also a significant Muslim population, which was the first time I’ve ever seen Muslims in Southeast Asia (and no, I haven’t been to Malaysia or Indonesia). Thankfully, from what I understand anyway, there’s no solidarity with the Muslim separatist movement in the south (the terrorists causing all the headlines in Thailand). In any case, they’ve been here for generations and represent a much longer history than I first gave this town credit for.
But coming over the hills the first time on Wednesday gave this city, in fact this entire province, a new light. It’s a serious mountain range between the rest of Thailand and this long valley of borderland called Tak province. Beyond the valley rests another mountain range and Karen State in Burma, the site of the longest currently-running conflict in the world. So much of it is covered in landmines that it’s almost impossible to move anywhere without severely detailed maps. I guess that’s the point.
Mae Sot rests right before this mountain range, and is protected from the rest of Thailand by the other range. All the refugees that make it settle down into this limbo of a valley, only to be picked on by Thai police who refuse their entry into the rest of Thailand and occasionally raid the camps for “illegals,” which are most of them. So, Mae Sot is the fastest growing city in all of Thailand. And merchants are really taking advantage of it. Some of the COOLEST antique stores I’ve ever seen exist here, old colonial treasures left over by the British, though in order to buy anything it takes quite a leap of consentual negligence to forgo thinking about who had to flee the border in what kind of hurry and with what desperation with their family heirlooms to sell once they arrive in Thailand. Again, this place reads like a spy novel.

2007-06-06T17:00:00.000-07:00

I woke up in the middle of the night upset that I had to leave the game-show Pathology quiz because of an urgent need to urinate. About halfway to the bathroom, I realized that not only I'd been dreaming about some sort of Jeopardy styled Path-test, but I was still processing the images in my head as I stood over the toilet. i went back to sleep with the pictures still in my head.
It's been happening all week. All year, in fact, especially during these times just before a test when I need to cram as much information as humanly possible into my head in a short period of time. It's pretty interesting to get to see the the process of learning so vividly, and so real-time. One theory of dreams is that it's a time for all your short-term knowledge from the day to resurface to the forefront of your consciousness so that they could be filed away into more permanent areas of your brain. Kinda like taking the papers from the back, sides, and additional surfaces of your desk and bringing them to the main working area to read and sort them before putting them away in your filing cabinet for their more permanent storage. Your dreams are the re-experiencing of your days experiences as you're sorting them to pack them away to clean your desk for a new day. Kind of a neat thing to see firsthand in the middle of the night...

2007-05-29T16:27:00.001-07:00

There was a point today during the Cadaver Closing Ceremony, while one student from each small group came up on stage to light a candle in memory of the person who let us know them in a way nobody else ever could, that I was struck down by the sheer obsurdity of where I was. This has been happening to me about once or twice a month now, for the past two or maybe even three years. But now for some reason I guess I should write about it.

There's an exciting time around finals season, when all the information from the preceeding section comes together to finally make some sort of sense. For the neuro final last month, for example, there was a good week during which I could imagine each neuronal pathway involved with every action or perception I had until I was blue in the face and dizzy with mental imagery. When you're stopped at a traffic light, which layers of cornea, lens, and retina must the green light pass before influencing a form of Retinoic Acid to undergo a confirmational change that allows it to bind a molecule that changes the internal voltage of that cone cell to send a signal downstream to another neuron that sends another signal to another neuron that extends an arm behind your eyeball, through your optic nerve, to bounce a signal to another neuron on your Lateral Geniculate Nucleus in your Thalmus that then relays another signal to the back of your brain, where the signal is mapped, deciphered, and sent elsewhere to begin the process of recognition that eventually gets interpreted to mean "GO YOU IDIOT!" before getting relayed to the motor cortex where the act of pushing a gas pedal is imagined, then initiated, then checked and double checked by the cerebellum as you get the car moving while your entire sympathetic nervous system is shocked into action by the sudden honking of angry cars behind you.
Whew.
So just when I thought I could stop thinking so much, the process starts all over again double-time in preparation for the cumulative exam. It's kinda neat, I have to admit, but sometimes I just need to shut the hell up about it. I already told Dan he had a tumor when he broke his femur, and lord knows what else I might accidentally bring into people's minds over the next few weeks.

But the cadaver ceremony really marked the end of one of the craziest years I've ever had (so far). The cadavers themselves were particularly symbolic, as our is now in so many pieces that I was looking at a piece of it yesterday for almost a minute before I realized it was a human tongue cut in half down the middle (which I only figured out when I traced it down to a quarter jaw with a few silver molar fillings). Now that they're all in bits, it's up to us to fit them back together in our heads. Kinda like breaking the glass at the end of a Jewish wedding. Except we cremate the glass and give them back to their families with an implicit "thank you for letting us borrow your loved one."

But I'll never again have that moment of first incision into a dead woman's back, or the chance to utterly destroy a human being's face with a hammer, chizel, and hacksaw and get away with it. At least if I do, something will be missing. The flinch is gone. It doesn't bother me anymore. The fact that I come home to eat dinner still smelling like dead people just isn't nearly as bothersome as the hunger you come to build after looking at so much meat. So it goes. I've become a psychopath. All for only $42,000 and a bitch of an application.

2007-01-31T22:29:00.000-08:00

Something's definitely wrong here. It's been about 6 months since my last honest post, and probably about 8 since my last good one. I've had multiple requests from several different people to just post again so I could finish this damn thing and end the so-developed "book" that I seem to have written. Looking back, it's been over 50 posts (half of which were written while the constant amoebic and parasitic load on my intestines was spilling out into my creative mind and giving me some of the worst verbal diarrhea I'd ever experienced). In any case, it's been a lot of writing without a conclusion. Sorry.
I'd like to say that the real reason I never finished was because "closing the book" on this one would be emotionally equivalent to giving up on the prospect of ever leading a life as exciting and unexpected as I had. I can't believe I actually lured myself into believing that load of poetic bullshit. I mean really, Andrew, you have the chance to become an international doctor, cure cancer, or even more likely, finally prove to the scientific world the existence of supernatural forces. Your life isn't over just yet.
So why didn't I finish the book? Because it took me this long to finally come up with a legitimate post's worth of information. The past 6 months have been one long adventure. Except that I mean that in the worst way possible. ONE long adventure. About equivalent to 2 or 3 days traveling between villages on a thousand year old dirt path. It's a problem that seems to be common among travel writers, Jack Kerauac being no exception. Most of the stories in "On The Road" take place over a total of only a few months of traveling, while living in steady locations for years at a time might only merit a sentence or two. That's what happened here, and if I didn't know better I might let it happen again.
6 months ago I started med school. I learned a lot. A LOT. I'm not going to explain to you how much I learned because it would probably take 6 months (and $42k/year) to explain it. Also, 6 months ago I got a girlfriend. I also learned a lot. Except this time most of what I learned was what it would be like to be married with 1.2 cats in the yard, 2.3 kids, and an old Indian motorcycle rusting away behind the house... Jesus, I had no idea until just now how stupidly poetic that last part is (I'll "symbolically foreshadow" and say the bike's now up and running). Basically, I'd been living in my own 1-bedroom place, spending most of my time either with her or with my books, and using the spare nights of the week paying for overpriced dinners and overpriced drinks at overpriced "chic" and "in" (meaning culturally devoid) clubs. Before I knew it, I found myself caring about the clothes I wear, the way I act, and being sure to be seen spending the money I do. A "good night" became going to bed early after a nice dinner. Dishes were clean, floors were mopped, toilet seats were down. I was staring this future in the face, with random bouts of anxiety and loathing bubble to the surface during drunken arguments and Santa blackouts, when she out of nowhere dumped me about three weeks ago.
But at some point during the customary week of being down, I woke up. It was a bit like snapping out of a daydream and realizing you've been floating down a river for an hour and a half and now the scenery's completely different and you totally missed the change. Now, suddenly, I just woke up in the middle of med school, with a whole lot of facts in my head and a few memories of the past 6 months, but with no coherent chronology of it all. Basically, I just had one of those self-reflective "HOLY FUCKING SHIT WHERE THE HELL AM I AND HOW DID I GET HERE THIS IS AWESOME" response that I used to enjoy at least twice a week in Asia. This would be the time that I'd go find an internet cafe and write down everything I'd been experiencing for the past few days, but since my life got boring, it's taken me about 6 months to get to this point.
I also just tried re-reading my old blog for a few minutes, and I came across a post I made while I was trying to put the thoughts together in my head that it was time for me to stop traveling. I think the title had something to do with Hunter S. Thompson, but basically at the end I go through some of the lasting points behind Robert Persig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: namely, that the "dynamic quality" was the most wonderful force in the universe and that everything static is relatively dead. My goal for traveling, in these terms, was to experience dynamism as directly as I could. At the time of that post, I was coming to terms with the fact that all this new-ness and unpredictability around me was getting static itself, and that the only truly dynamic thing for me to do would be to settle down and sit still for a change. So here I have it, 6 months later in chronological terms, only about two pages later in "book" terms. It's been just about as strange and novel of a trip as I'd ever had between posts, but only insofar as to say that it's been the most dull.
I guess to fully process the lessons I learned during my time traveling, I'd have to actually reread all the posts and spend a significant time thinking about and writing all my reflections on it. But I think that's called an Epilogue. There'll be a place for that when there's a time (and desire) for it.
So that's the end of the book. The end. Kaput.

But it's not the end of my story. I won't be that tacky to say it's just the beginning, but I might say it's the end of the beginning. Or I won't say anything at all. Aw, nevermind. I'm still doing stuff, that's what I want to say.
A week ago I decided to move in with my med school buddy into the heart of Silverlake (one of the hippest areas of LA which, I know, doesn't say much but it's a start), and we're set to turn the yard into a tiki bar and the living room into the local afterparty spot for the coffee shop crowds and bar scenes. In the meantime, I'm trying to decide whether to spend my summer leading a group of 4 local researchers (3 high school students and a botanist) through the Massai villages of Northern Tanzania to unearth the local ancient traditional medicines for fighting off malaria, or to work as a liason between American doctors and Burmese village healers along the Thai-Myanmar border to study the interaction between Eastern and Western medicine. Also, I'm working to get my med-student ass to Nicaragua during Spring Break to ride around in a doctor mobile and give as much free healthcare as we can to some of the poorest people in the world. What I'm trying to say is that this blog is not going to be over any time soon, even if the posts might get scarce between events. So stay tuned, check back every few weeks, and I might just be able to change your attention for about 10 minutes at a time.
Until then, let me leave you with these words:
NOBODY WON THE DISEASE POOL, I DON'T HAVE AIDS, AND BRIAN GOLDMAN IS AN ASSHOLE.

-andrew

2006-12-14T20:17:00.000-08:00

This took up half a page in the Sunday San Francisco Chronicle.

and now time for finals...

2006-07-06T11:06:00.000-07:00

I guess this means I've moved from the South to in Da Souf now:

From a parking lot in Graceland,
andrew

2006-07-04T17:33:00.000-07:00

Well so ends 2 solid weeks spent in the drunken whirlwind, and I’m back on the road again. I guess I started the process in attempt to spend “quality” time with all my friends in two social weekends surrounding a weekday trip to Bill’s Cabin after “the” wedding. The wedding went fantastically, but it was some point at the cabin when we were drinking heavily on a floating dock instead of quietly contemplating the beauty of nature, as normally tends to happen when people like us take acid, that I realized how much I’d not quite come back to normality since my Asia trip. And what a beautiful thing it was. I had initially thought that Thailand was a crazy place, and that my trip to Thailand was like stepping through the looking glass into a world where anything you want comes true. Looking back, that’s one of the most naive things I could have ever said about the place. Thais automatically consider you the stereotype of the Western Traveler, to which I eventually bent to. No matter who you come in as, it's very difficult not to leave as the party-hearty individualism-craved On The Road type see-everything do-everything traveler.
New York, on the other hand, consists of just about every other type of subculture personality. Whether it's the Pakistani DirtyWaterHotDog seller or the Bridge and Tunnel "Do what you gotta do" people, there are way too many people you could potentially speak to in English to be able to generalize them all. But they still try. And since the only thing a New Yorker can use to generalize you is usually your first impression (of which race and accent have a lot to do with), they so often use your first impression to react to you in whichever way they deem appropriate. For example, when I first moved to New York 6 years ago, I was overwhelmingly upset at how bitchy and downright rude everybody was. In retrospect, I had approached every new person I met on the street with an air of discontempt at how rude they were supposed to be. Naturally, they were rude straight back at me. On this recent trip out there, I had just finished travelling a world where everybody who spoke English was a kind and talkative, interesting, person. I couldn't help but get overly talkative with every deli worker, coffee guy, cab driver, street bum, and anybody else who spoke some sort of English. This time, however, everybody was rediculously nice to me. I know they couldn't have possibly changed that much, and considering I just spent 2 years out of the city, I figured it was me that changed. I guess I just realized that New Yorkers tend to reflect you straight back to yourself. The same thing probably happens in most other places around the world, but in those places there tends to be some kind of blanket kindness applied to just about everybody (who's white). New Yorkers are the only people I've found to have the balls to react to you exactly as they see you, and I've finally figured out the best way to be seen.

The New York trip culminated in a 24 hour booze session which, as Melissa later described me when I came home at 5 in the afternoon, I ended up so drunk it looked like I was on ecstasy. Fortunatey I wrote a delerious email to Jael which, when quoted in full, would propably provide the best description of what happened that night/day. Also, I'm too lazy to write it out again...

Fucking hell do I have a story to tell about last night. It's a good thing you emailed me while I'm still drunk from a full days and nights worth of drinking and it's only 4 in the afternoon, so you get to hear about it. The whole crew went to Mcsorleys last night and then a few stragglers went to some karaoke bar later with mikey the bartender. Then they all left and I was hanging out with mikey and his sometimes-gay east village irish/scottish bartender crowd (which is probably one of very few of those around) getting free drinks until about 8AM, by which point some guy made out with me and I apparently turned him down in a way that no straight man has ever done and he stormed out of the bar and fell asleep. So I finally got on the N train to get to astoria by 8, and as the train approached I spotted some way-too-fashionable girl with the wraparound Channel sunglasses on the train ahead of me so I casually stolled into that car and before I knew it ('cause I was drunk enough to be charming, I guess), she invited me to Bumblefuck queens (way out past Flushing) to watch her get her nails done. Then it turned out that the nails people were all Vietnamese and I sang the Vietnamese national anthem with them and told them my charming little bits of Vietnamese that I knew and put the girl to sleep, and then suddenly she loved her boyfriend. By 11AM we bought a fifth of bacardi and a bunch of cola and we were all sorts of flirting again, even though she turns out to be a methadone addict. Hot. She totally won me over when she said she was going to give me a guest pass to her gym and instead agreed to try to walk to manhattan. One hour and two bars later, she told me she'd find us a ride to the subway, and the next thing I know we're in a big ass pickup truck with three guys (two with their shirts off, one of who was actually named Rod...honestly) and she told them that I was her cousin and started massively flirting with the driver, basically biting his neck while he was driving and making him promise her that he'd take her to the most expensive restaruants in Greater New York on their first date, all while staring me in the eye giving me "look what I can do" winks, and all of which I had to approve because I was her cousin...then she started making really super sexual gestures at me and eventaully said she had to whisper something in my ear, which turned out to be her toungue, to which I shouted "I really don't think Grandma would approve of that!" and everybody else was buying the whole cousin thing until then and she totally cracked up. I beat her at her own game, it was awesome. But before then she had REALLY led on the driver and took his phone number (making a point not to give her own one out) for the date that was all just a ploy to both get us to the subway station and to fuck with me. I was totally enamoured, and totally looked past the stupid and annoying things she'd been saying all night (fuck, man, I'm kinda embarrased for still going after her after she said "Wow, you've been to India? That's in Africa, right?" Ugh). Anyway It's 5PM and it was a fucking awesome day and I think I'm goinng to stay a little longer in New York now.

I spent the next day in a stupor and left the day after that to see Rita (which didn't work out because her entire half of pennsylvania was completely flooded) and then to DC. DC was pretty, athough I drank the fountain water during the floods and ended up with a very nostalgic case of Delhi Belly (pissing out the ass). Ah, India. I spent the past few days with Chris in Chapel Hill, NC and now I'm in Asheville for the 4th. I went to some beer garden bar to watch the Italy/Germany game (sorry, Deuchland, I thought you already learned you can't win them all...) and picked up some girl named MaryBeth, whom i'm meeting in an hour. We're going to watch some bluegrass outlaw rock band that sounds like fun before I make my way further back West. Oh, the traveling life. I'll be so sad to see it go. But after that day with the subway girl I was glad to know it's not over yet. Anyway, I'm off....

2006-06-11T18:52:00.000-07:00

Well I'd typed up this elaborate nice long post about how great it was to be out travelling again, and how great it was that I'd found the perfect travel companion for an America trip, but somehow Word lost the document (or I was tired and saved it under something else). I'm stealing the wireless internet out of the back of a Holiday Inn somewhere in the middle of Kansas, so instead of retyping the long, beautifully constructed poetic prose, I'll make it short. I found this English guy on Craigslist who just happened to come from India and is making his way overland eventually to Columbia. He's doing a few weeks in America on a whim, but having his perspective has really kept me from getting compacent with the country I'm so familiar with. The rediculous scales of the landscape in Arizona and Utah, for example, would have gotten tired if there wasn't somebody from a flat country in the passenger seat. He also helped me form some really interesting opinions about American life and culture, but I'll save those for when I get some real time to do this.

Last night we drove to Colorado Springs, the "Evangelical Utopia" formed by the Bush-crazy megachurchgoers, and this morning we tried to go to the New Life Church service to see exactly what they have to say. I kinda though to if as a similar experience to trying to go see some Hindu ceremony in Manali where a Shaman gets possessed and then kills two goats. Go figure, we went out last night to the "biker bar" (about 50 BEAUTIFUL solid chrome Harleys parked out front) and got a little too drunk to make it to Church in time. Jules, the guy I'm travelling with, is 6'5'' and particularly attractive. With his English accent and our definately out-of-place style, he couldn't get over how easy it could have been for us to pick up girls that night (had we actually done something to "play the game"). One girl, for example, essentially invited him into a foursome. She wasn't at all attractive so he turned her down, but I think it gave him a little bit of faith in American culture. And in a Christian utopia, of all places. There's definateley something the Evangelists don't know about. Anyway, I left him there this morning so he can try it all over again tonight. Good luck, Jules.

After four days of having him in the car, I'm driving across America alone for the first time and, go figure, it's through the most boring state there is. I'm going a bit stir crazy, but at least I know it'll lighten up a bit once I get to Lawrence. It's getting dark so I better get driving again. I'll actually try to describe some stuff later when I'm bored to pieces. Internet access is a lot harder to find in this country than any country I've been to in Asia. If I didn't have this laptop, I'd be completely screwed. Right, so, on the road again....

2006-06-09T01:04:00.000-07:00

I'm still alive, I'm still around, and I'm still moving. New continent, but this one's turning out to be just as strange as the last one. My gastrointestinal tract has been uncharacteristically sound over the past week, so I'll compensate by letting loose a lengthy stream of verbal diarrhea in the form of the next post as soon as I get out of Utah. I'm taking this British guy to Colorado, and then I'll be bored enough to sit down and write properly. For now I'm enjoying myself a bit too much to bury my nose in my notebook, sorry. Will post soon.

-andrew

2006-05-30T11:16:00.000-07:00

I kinda forgot I'd made "friends" out here in Delhi. Last night I drove straight into the Bullet Wallas shop/hangout after 12 hours of driving, and it was like running into an old group of friends I hadn't seen in a while. I guess I'm going to have to start getting used to that feeling...
I sold my bike, then went to the bank and liquidated my account to pay for this bike I'm getting shipped to LA. Somehow, magically, I'm down to a hundred bucks total assets. OK, three hundred with unused travellers' checks...and I guess reiss and jael owe me some money...but that's not the point. The point is that this trip is over, physically and financially, and it's pretty neat that they coincide. Not bad, I guess, for a year's worth of savings: 7.5 months travel and a motorcycle. A whole lot of fun was had, and I'll have something to remember it by as I'm cursing the LA traffic. Great. The end.

Section Break

Now the problem is that I've liquidated my bank account and still have 3 months worth of traveling to do. Luckily, the wizards over at Citibank have devised some way to warp the fabric of time-space and let me borrow from my future earnings as a doctor 10 years from now, but it's all a bit mystical and fine-printed. In any case, it would be a lot more fun to try to do cheaply. So far, I've found 3 options:

accordioning across the country, which might get me beat up.
craigslisting across the country, which also might get me beat up.
couchsurfing across the country, which might get me beat up AND raped.

I think a mixture of all three would be safest, but there's no denying that the internet has massively changed the American Road Trip so I might as well use it to my advantage. Some Aussie told me about Couchsurfing.com as a way to match travellers with couches, and it sounds like a great way to "do" America. I could also post on the Craigslist Rideshare board in every city I plan on driving through, and see how many people I could push into the car. Could be an interesting way to meet people, anyway.
Jeff's not coming, which would make the accordioning either extremely free or massively depressing. I'll take it along, and see how it pans out. He brought up a good point, that most American's don't give a rat's ass about two wierdos from San Francisco playing for money. True as that might be, Canadians might just dig it. Anyway, if I end up going up north, it might be a good idea to set up shop on a few streetcorners.

I'm leaving for the airport in 30 minutes. 20 hours of flight time ahead. whoopee. I'm up for any suggestions with how to get across the country, so let me know if you know of a cross-country zip line or something. I'm out. So long, Asia.

2006-05-29T13:54:00.000-07:00

I figured out that having sex out here is a lot like eating meat; you have the desire in you but then you look at the rotting pieces of flesh lying in the heat covered in flies and you forget you ever wanted it. That might be why India has one of the lowest HIV rates in the world. Bad hygene, they don't teach that trick on MTV. See Jael, eating garbage can save your life.

I've been doing absolutely nothing for the past 3 weeks (except thinking of things like that). OK, I've been driving a lot. And getting the bike fixed. I saw that Beatles Ashram. But aside from that I've been smoking hash with whoever's at the guesthouses I've stayed at 'till 1AM, then waking up and doing it all over again. They're nice guesthouses, usually have a nice table overlooking the himalayas, and have a "please do drugs here" policy. It's a good policy, really beefs up the grilled cheese sandwhich market. Makes a whole lot more sense to come here than to Amsterdam for the same thing, anyway.
But that's not why I came out here. I came out here to see shit, do shit, and find shit, not smoke shit. Still, no matter how hard I try there's not one tiny little bit of me that has ANY inclination whatsoever to step out the door and walk down the street to look at a temple. I'm used to the heat, I'm used to the smell of horseshit, dogshit, cowshit, goatshit, peopleshit, I'm used to smelling like that myself, I'm used to the squat toilets, the dirty food, the dirty water, the barking dogs, the barking shop owners, the beggars, the con artists, the persistent needy children, I'm finally over having every shopowner say "hello Friend" or anything it'll take to get me into his store as if he was a porn site trying to lure me inside by sending me "friendly" junk emails. It's not so bad, all that. In fact I can pretty surely say I'm accustomed enough to it all that it doesn't bother me anymore.
So then what went wrong? I've been trying to figure this one out. It's not that India's daunting, or that there's not much or too much to see out here. It's that I have absolutely no desire to tread through all that muck just to see it when I could be perfectly content talking metaphysics with similarly lazy travellers from all around the world. The metaphor is spot on: India is like the leftovers of a diamond smuggler after he gets off the airplane; you have to swim through all that shit to get to the diamonds. I've been swimming through rubies, saphires, AND pearls for the past 7 months so I can't see any reason to go outside and swim in shit when I could be getting grilled cheese sandwiches and fruit lassis served to me as I'm rolling the next spliff.
That means I've gotta go home. When I've lost the ambition to swim through a subcontinent of shit to find even a few places of interest, I've lost the will to travel. I'm wasting time here. Hopefully when I get home to find out how boring things really are, it'll defibrulate me into wanting to get the hell out into the world again. That's the plan, anyway. Flight leaves in 24 hours...

2006-05-23T08:25:00.000-07:00

May 31st.

There it is.

I have no idea how Melissa figured out exactly when I'd be leaving (particularly since I wasn't even sure at the time), but I just booked a plane ticket back to San Francisco for exactly one week from now, thereby clicking the proverbial "section break" button on my metaphysical word processor. I'm now officially on my way home, and so ends my time in Asia.

It's not at all over here yet, though. I've taken my motorbike back down the marijuana infested Manali-Kullu valley to Mandi, the crossroads town where I'd written my post after having spent 3 days fixing the bike. Now I'm taking the other road to New Tibet, where places have names like Mcloud Ganj and Dharmasala. I dropped my muffler on the way down here, and if I thought my bike was loud before, I had NO IDEA how loud these things can get. People don't just look at me anymore, their faces are irresistablely attracted to the monstrosity I'm driving by the 18 massive horses screaming out my right foot. It happened as I was picking up a hitchhiker (I started playing Himalayan Crazy Taxi with the Saddhus walking along the highways). He might have accidentally stepped on it, but 500 miles of bumpy roads had finally pulled the not some bolt and I heard a loud "KALUNK" as the hitchhiker yelled some Hindi version of "What was that?" in my ear. I pulled over, figured out what had happened, and just as I went to get the muffler so I could find some duct tape and put it back on, one of those giant diesel trucks honked a "sorry, dude" and proceeded to roll directly over it without slowing down the slightest. So now my exhaust pipe ends just below my right foot and the whole valley can hear me coming. Man, is it fun. So much fun that there's gotta be a law against it back home. At least I'll have the freedom for one more week to go deaf in the right ear.

But all this thinking about dynamsim and rates of change has got me thinking that maybe it's not the places I should be going that needs changing, but the whole format of my travelling. I think I've figured out a way to bring that "whatever it is" back to my trip. Change continents, first of all. But more importantly change what I'm doing. After buying that plane ticket, financing a further road trip across America would involve some borrowing somehwere. I could sleep in my car, but it'll cost about $800 for the gas alone. So here's the proposal:

America by Accordion. The objective is to drive a circle around America, making New York in time for "The" wedding and coming back by the end of July, by playing street accordion for gas money in cities along the way. Personal money could only be used for food and lodging, so I wouldn't be allowed to refill my tank without having earned it. This would only really work with Jeff's help, whose phone number is (650) 678-9346 and who really loves when people call him to tell him to go on road trips... because he's deciding... It doesn't quite beat "Around Ireland with a Fridge," a story about a guy who lost a bet and had to hitchhike around Ireland with a small refrigerator. But it could be fun...

2006-05-21T03:47:00.000-07:00

Last night I went to a "bar" out here in Manali, the first true bar I've been to in India. It looked just like any upper-mid range bar in San Francisco, with a big half-circle bar and mirrored glass shelves supporting top shelf liquors. Not surprisingly, the patrons were mostly members of the Yuppie Indian class, exactly the same people I've seen in the same bars in New York. They seem to do everything seriously, which works well in the business world. But there's nothing they take more seriously than their vanity. I thought it was a racist generalization to see rich, perfectly clean cut Indians dancing in the clubs of New York as if every move was a perfect pose, with tight silk shirts and trendy Diesel jeans, moving just carefully enough to hint at how much they've pre-empted every move to make them look the best. It turns out this an invalid generalization of all Indians, but surprisingly accurate for this class of Indians, and since so many of the Indians in America are from this business-centered group of people out there to "make it," it seems to discribe a lot of the Indians in America. But it wasn't American vanity that did it to them, from what I learned last night, they were like that before they left.

There was a Tibetan looking man sitting next to me, with long hair and a distinctly Native American look to him, who was wearing a white shirt with bright red letters spelling "WHERE ALL DA WHITE WOMEN AT?" On one hand, this was the kind of shirt that, in New York, I'd wouldn't be surprised to see on a young uptight Indian businessman "going loose and crazy on Saturday night," but this time it was worn by a stiff looking Tibetan who then "dance-walked" around the dancefloor for the rest of the night with his ultra stiff head-bobbing, foot tapping, and arms twitching. It might have been the joint recently passed to me, but I couldn't help but thinking of where this man came from. What kind of family, from ancient Tibetan traditions, had moved as refugees to India in the past fifty years to raise their son into this head-bobbing product of the new globalized pop culture? It wasn't just him, though. Aside from the slick-back hair silk shirt playboys, a lot of the poorer looking people danced with an anything goes craze I've so far only seen at weddings here. There was a pop song I've heard a lot here (that's apparently been a pop song for as long as I've been traveling) that goes "rakada RAJA RAJA RAJA RAJA RAAAAAAA JAA." When this song came on, all the headbobbers from the corners flooded the dance floor. When it came on a second time, 45 minutes later, everybody went even crazier, into a near epileptic fit with the ferocity of a mosh pit. You might call it the traditional old village happy-as-fuck dance, but here they were moving every part of their body the same way when Ja-Rule came on. Within a year, I bet, they'd be dancing in exactly the same way in front of some elephants and a dressed up groom on a fancy rickshaw.

With all this talk about Dynamic Quality, I completely discarded the fact that I was sitting in the middle of one of the most Dynamic places in the world. Here are millenia-old cultures coming out in the past few decades into the new gobal culture. Fair enough, America might have seen some changes in the past 30 years, but these people were coming from a culture that, presumably, has maintained relatively static over the past several thousand years. And here were its children, going crazy to music from around the world, taking on values that are diametrically opposed to those they were brought up with. Interestingly enough, the Israelis have made a pretty significant impact on the youth out here, as the music in the bar eventually turned to Psytrance... and there's no better gouging rod out here for finding Israelis than to hear psytrance being played way too loud behind some bushes.

Maybe it's all this dynamism that's responsible for the change in traveler culture I noticed in this country. There seems to be two types of travelers I've met so far. There's a 18-24 year old European/American group with an "uncertain" look in their eyes. It seems to be a pretty common thing for high school and college graduates to come out here to "do" India for the summer, only to spend their trip trying to stay alive instead of actually enjoying themselves. It's as if, in their first trip into the third world, they dive straight into the deep water and try to stay afloat for three months. Some come to "find themselves," some come to test themselves, but one way or another they end up having to frantically tread water until their rescue at the end of the summer. The Israelis seem to have built metaphorical party boats on the surface, and can spend their entire vacation eating Israeli food, doing good drugs, and dancing to Psytrance. Then there are the legitimate "cool" people, who've become official travelers (in the Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles discribes a Traveller, as opposed to a Tourist, as someone who no longer associates "home" with his original culture. I'd say that's about right). These people include the Shiva Riders, the Bullet Wallas, expats who're making business here, foreign tour guides, journalists, people legitimately studying yoga or mysticysm, and generally those people who tend to look comfortable out here. They, in the Lake of India metaphor, are the snorkelers or even scuba divers who feel just as comfortable under the water as above it.

If we take this poignant metaphor to its unneccessary end, my problem is not that there's not enough dynamism out here to keep me interested, it's that there's too much. Instead of diving down into its depths, I've had a chance to learn to float comfortably in the sun, or with the motorcycle, "jetski" over its surface. It's so nice up here that I've lost the drive to dive down and explore the dangerous cold waters beneath the thermocline, and the unknown depths are just scary enough for me to see no reason really going down there.

This means it's time for me to go home. When I've lost that drive to dive in head-first into the unknown, I'm no longer a Traveller but a tourist on vacation. I'll spend another week or so in Dharmsala, where the Dalai Llama is absent at the time, then I'll head home. So ends the Asia part of the trip, now the trick will be to start all over again in America. I've still got 3 months left...

2006-05-19T05:00:00.000-07:00

I saw Hunter S. Thompson's Indian doppelganger at a rave last night. Actually, if you could breed Hunter Thompson with John's uncle in Kennewick, you'd have whatever it was that I saw last night. It took an hour of finding the trailhead, and then another full hour of hiking up the steep climb in the dark with an LED light before I finally got to the party at midnight. The party just got groovin' at about 3, and it was freezing out (one of the "should have been obvious" pitfalls of having a party in the Himalayas). All of a sudden, this shaved-head fat guy wearing shorts, a hawaiian shirt and carrying a walking stick marches into the middle front of the dance floor as if he just got to the party. He stands there, feet apart, hands on his hips, surveying the crowd like he was a five-star general looking over his troops... except he looked like the mad genetic scientist from Southpark. He yelled "HEY," just to let everybody know he was there, and then marched directly into the middle of the dancefloor. Nobody knew what to do, so we just pretended not to notice him. Then the music moved into one of those Trance buildups that somehow never fail to get people "WOOOOO!!!"ing, and the strange man stood there resulutely, and raised his walking stick, slowly, into the air as if he were summoning some kind magical incarnation. As the rest of the crowd got all excited about the perfectly predictable buildup, this man stood in the middle of the dance floor pointing his cane at the stars. Then the climax came and he started shaking his knees as if possessed, yet all the time maintaining the perfectly straight face as he looked up at the stars. That was the way he danced, with his cane up in the air like that. Later, he'd walk around as if inspecting the place. Perfect Hunter Thompson if I'd ever seen one. And he was Indian.

In the last post, I described the scene when I'd found out how much this mechanic had gone out of his way to help me. What got to me about it wasn't just this mechanic, it was the sudden realization that I'd fallen into the trap of generalizing Indians. All I've heard, from travelers and even Indians, was how malicious Indians can be. They'll take your bag if you're not watching, and they have no morals when business is involved. So, I started to see all Indians this way, and wondered why I wasn't making as many local friends as in other countries. But the Indians changed as soon as I crossed into the borders of Utternachal and then Himalchal Pradesh, and I didn't. Until the mechanic.

Also last night, I had heard of this party through some Israeli sources. It was supposed to be a past-dawn psytrance party out in the woods so, naturally, I assumed it was an Israeli party. It was all Indian. It was fully put on and attended by Indians. The Israelis showed up after 3, and I ran into several groups of them on the trail down when I left at 4, so maybe they had yet to overrun the place. But it was an Indian party.

OK, now I'm gonna talk a little metaphysics, since I've been kinda in withdrawl since Rishikesh (all the hippies out here have been replaced by Israeli ravers). I've been reading Lila, Robert Persig's continuation of Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance and a further discourse on the Metaphysics of Quality (which seems to be his thesis in life). The idea is that reality is composed of Qualities, not of substance, and that there are two different forms of Quality: dynamic and static. Static quality is everything we know, from the static qualities of a chair to static ideas of the cultures we live in. Dynamic quality is the force of change against these static forms, the driving force behind Evolution (challenging static biological forms) and the source of chaos in the 20th century (challenging static social forms). If this doesn't make any sense, there are two full books written about the subject that there's no way I'd be able to fully summarize here. Go read them.

The reason I've gone traveling, using this form of thought, is to get as close as I can to this Dynamic force, to change my situation every few days, change my ideas, encounter new ways of thinking, etc. That's what was so special about that mechanic, he broke through my generalizations and brought me back to Dynamic quality. This is Life. This is Adventure. This is Constant Change.

But it would be easeir to chase my own shadow. Dynamic quality exists at the "leading edge" of consciousness (sorry, Barber lab), that point just before future becomes present. Impossible to catch. Instead, my reality has become this constant race for change and, in so doing, has become static. I'm constantly changing, my ideas are constantly changing, and so consistantly that it's become static. Driving through the countryside, never seeing the same mountain twice, has gotten boring. It's this static quality that I've been trying to get away from, and if I can't do that by travelling any more, maybe it's time to go home.

I was right in the middle of these thoughts when Hunter Thompson walked into the middle of the dancefloor and I found myself, once again, happy to be travelling. It was just so far out of my realm of comprehension to see an image I'd thought only existed within the strange subculture of America, encorporated by an Indian at an Indian rave I'd also thought was solely Western.

So I've figured it out: given my current Rate of Change has gotten stale, I can either go home and return the static world, or find a way to make things massively wierder. My mission for the past few days has been to figure out which road to take, and whether or not to go home just yet. That's why the mechanic and Hunter Thompson were so much fun, they brought me another taste of Dyanamic Quality. On the other hand, these mountains are beautiful, but they look like Nepal and Switzerland. Having to walk my motorcycle through a herd of cows is annoying, not exciting. Going to a rave in the wilderness: "It's been done before." Yesterday I walked past a motorcycle gang called the "Shiva Riders," a group of old punk rockers from England whose ringleader had built an honest Throne with the Shiva trident on his motorcycle seat. I walked by, thought "huh." and kept walking. Unless I find something REALLY out there soon, maybe it is time to go home...

2006-05-16T09:46:00.000-07:00

I just figured out that most of my problems with Indians are a direct result of my taking everybody's advice that all Indians are out to cheat you. Keeping a constant vigil on the society around you is exhausting, and more so when everybody's trying to be your friend. I think it might be a regional thing, but I've been surrounded by genuine talkers ever since I got out of Dehli. It's almost frustrating, actually, trying to not feel bad for being a complete dick to somebody who's trying to be your friend in order to sell something, and then finding out he's actually just trying to be your friend.

This, and a handful of other revelations, came to me about 10 minutes after leaving a mechanic's shop, slightly drunk and significantly more stoned, wind blowing through my hair and in a state of pure enjoyment. This dream state was abruptly and abnoxiously broken about 2 minutes later when I had to turn around because the engine started misfiring.

For the past three days. Yes, THREE days, I've been stuck in or around Shimla with a motorbike that just doesn't know how to keep a rhythm. Granted, it was the most frustrating experience I'd had traveling so far, but throughout it all I couldn't believe how far the mechanics went out of their way to make me happy. If they spent half of the time making me feel better as they spent on the bike, maybe I'd be in Manali by now. Here's what I mean:

I passed through this town called Shimla riding the bike as if it were a sick horse, thankful for every engine fire and becoming increasingly aware of its hiccups. The bike absolutely refused to make it up the driveway out of the hotel in the morning, so a crowd of 4 Hindus helped me push it up. I was hoping it would at least get to Manali, since it got this far already. 6km out of town, I stopped at a crossroads and somebody ran up to me and asked if I wanted air in my tires. He looked nice, though, not like a sleezy mechanic salesman. Then he pointed at my engine and said the head gasket is leaking. Then, and here was the selling point, he offered to fix the head gasket for $5, including labor. $5! I spent $500 on fixing the head gasket of the thunderbird a few years ago, and that was after shopping around (initial estimate was 2 grand!). So, OK maybe that would fix the problem.

He didn't speak much English, so he dragged his friend over who immediately thrust himself on me as a "temporary english speaking friend" until my bike would be finished. First it should take an hour, then they had the wrong gasket so they had to drive another hour to get the right one. All the while I was watching the time tick by, trying to figure out how I was going to make the 7 hour trip to Manali before dark. Eventually, I got pissed off and ran off to have a tea and read my book, but the English speaker wouldn't leave me be. He had tea with me, all the time asking questions about me, about the bike, about America, all questions I'd heard so many times that they just all pissed me off. Finally, the head gasket arrived and they started putting the engine back together. This job was relegated to "the boy," not the original mechanic, so I kept an eye on what he was doing. Then I heard a loud snap, and looked over to see he'd overtightened a large bolt and snapped the end into its thread in the cylinder block. That was a big deal. I'm not even a mechanic and I know that was a big deal. It was one of two bolts holding he cylinder head piece onto the cylinder block, without which there'd be a whole lot more oil leaking than with no head gasket at all. As if that wasn't bad enough, I had to stare at this boy wide-eyed as he looked around, gave me a quick glance, and then proceeded to put the engine back together AS IF NOTHING EVER HAPPENED.

I casually walked over to him, gritting my teeth, and watched him drop as bolt and then hit his head on the handlebars just before I spoke. That was funny. He knew he fucked up, and he was nervous. I found the snapped bolt, put it in the hole where it should be, and said "problem." He looked at me wide-eyed, looked at his boss, and said "no problem" and kept putting the engine back together. I said "PROBLEM!" and motioned for him to take the engine back apart, to which he replied "no, no problem" and kept working as if I weren't even there. I took the bolt over to his boss, who only had to see the pissed off look on my face and the snapped bolt to figure out what was going on.

The boss wasted no time in getting "the boy" to take the engine apart again, and then spent a half hour pounding a screwdriver into the hole to dig the piece out. I don't know what they intended, but every hammer blow on the engine made me quiver. That didn't work, so they brought out the welder and tried to weld the broken bit of the screw to a nut so they'd have something to grab it by. But, since they only had an arc welder, they ended up just welding a big lump of metal onto the supposed-to-be-completely-flat cylinder block. All the while, my teeth were getting ground to dust.

Finally, they left it alone. The english speaker had left, and I they stopped talking to me. I knew this would happen, all the stories of having these roadside mechanics totally fuck up your bike and force you to pay thousands of rupees to get them fixed again finally happened to me. I asked the boy one last time to fix it, and all he could say was "no problem." That did it. I blew up.

Now, anybody who knows me knows that I don't blow up very often. But I spent not an ounce of effort concealing it this time. TAKE OUT THAT PIECE! NOW! WHO THE HELL ARE YOU TO TRY TO FIX THIS BIKE? I SHOULD BE IN MANALI BY NOW! WHY, FOR FUCK'S SAKE DID YOU EVER STOP ME AT THAT INTERSECTION?????

I realize in retrospect that this had a profound effect on the mechanic. It turned out, contrary to everything I'd been told about Indians, that this guy really just wanted to make me happy. He was one of these people I've seen a lot of in Thailand and Nepal, with that innocent look of happiness behind their eyes that's most common in buddhist cultures. At this point, however, he looked more like a guilt-ridden child who'd just upset his parents. The english speaker came back and told me the mechanic would take the piece over to someone who could fix it, and that it would take more time. I was pissed off. I had lost a full day at this rat-bastard mechanic. I told him to fix it and ran off before the english-speaker before could ask to come along. I'd been fucked by mechanics enough for one day. I just wanted to be alone.

Almost 2 hours later, I was feeling much better when the mechanic drove his scooter by the restaurant I was eating at, motioning for me to come back when I'd finished. Apparently he had been looking all over town for me. Instead of coming back to a functional working bike, I came back to my bike all in pieces with the cylinder block still unrepaired lying on the floor. I got ready to blow up again, but the english speaker was right there to explain the situation. Apparently, this mechanic had driven up and down the road for 20km trying to find somebody to fix it, but as it was Sunday there was no shop open that could bore it out. So, because they knew how important it was for me to keep moving that day, they offered to replace the entire cylinder and piston from a newer Enfield bike they had for sale in the shop. I'd be driving out of there in another hour. For no extra charge.

I was almost ready to cry. It wasn't just the conflict of emotions, or the fact that I knew I needed a new piston anyway and he'd saved me a lot of extra money. He had this puppy-dog look on his face of that young kid who'd broken his parent's expensive something and would do anything to make things the way they were again. This, in the country that was supposed to be full of cheaters, was too much to deal with. Then they offered me a smoke, and brought me up to a balcony, rolled a joint, and passed it around between the three of us until we were all in a much better mood. The English speaker gave the mechanic's defense, saying that I was a foreigner and therefore diserved some kind of respect, and would do anything in his power to make sure I left happy. Then we talked for a while longer while "the boy" put the bike back together. They probably knew to bring me up there so I wouldn't be breathing down the boy's neck, but I guess they were right that it made everybody happier that way. It took longer than expected, as expected, so we rolled another. Then another. Then I brought out a half pint of brandy I'd been carrying around since Nepal. Then it was finally finished. I was on my way. I gave him an extra dollar tip, and left.

So it was at this point of riding through the lower Himalayan countryside in the afternoon of a beautiful sunny day that I came to the other revalation that this whole trip closely resembled a video game. Final Fantasy, or something like that. I passed towns like Sharog and Mantaur, swerving to avoid trucks and goats, meeting companions along the way and having to negotiate tenuous deals with strange new civilizations. Or maybe it was like Zelda, where I had to get somewhere but there was always something blocking the path, in this case the bike keeps breaking down, and I'd have to meet some new characters to help me through. And the whole time I was getting experience points in bike mechanics, and once I'd reach a certain level of experience, I wouldn't need the mechanics at all and could fix the bike myself. Low level problems, like timing and carbeurator adjustments, I could do, but things like changing head gaskets I'd need like a level 8 mechanic or something.

Then my engine started coughing and misfiring. Maybe it's nothing.

But yeah I'd gained experience points in all sorts of stuff. I was a Level 1 Reiki healer. I had training in Vipassana. I had rudimentary knowledge of Thai and Vietnamese. I also had found a few buddies that I might meet up with a gain to help face a new challenge. Best of all, I was going ot a Bullet Wallas hotel in Manali where there'd be all sorts of motorcycle groups leaving in all directions for day and week trips. OK, I've never really played Final Fantasy but I'm sure it's a lot like this.

Then the engine sputtered again. FUCK. I KNEW this would happen! I drove all the way back, about 30 minutes, except it was uphill on the way back and the engine was coughing so much it would hardly chug up the hills. I barely made it back to the shop, all pissed off again. The main mechanic took me back upstairs, and smoked another two joints with me while four people in the shop gathered around my bike to try to figure out what's going wrong. They were working on the timing, and I didn't care anymore what was going on so long as it worked. Almost 2 hours later, they did something to fix it. I drove it really hard for 10 mintues to test it, came back to the shop full of smiles, and offered them money. This was the test. THEY REFUSED MORE MONEY!!! This was a big deal for me. I left full of smiles and feeling guilty for ever having doubted their intentions.

An hour later down the road, the engine started sputtering again. I found a hotel for the night and gave up. In the morning, I found another local mechanic and asked him to look at it. Just as I pulled up to the mechanic, the bike stalled and wouldn't start again. This was about 10 O'clock. If I left by noon, I could make it to Manali. He also had his english-speaking friend who had exactly the same questions I wasn't in the mood to answer. Long story short, at 1 O'clock he showed me that the timing plate had been cracked and the only replacement was at the Authorized Enfield repair shop back in Shimla, and that the only way I'd be able to fix it would be to stick the bike in the back of a Jeep and drive all the way back. This took me a while to get over, and eventually I summoned the jeep and we somehow hauled the thing inside.

I was in no mood for any kind of talking. But, this English speaker had exactly the same questions to ask me and wouldn't leave me alone about it. He asked me about sex in America. For some reason everybody who talks to me for more than 5 minutes wants to know how much I paid for my motorcycle and how many women I "make sex with." After telling me how Indian women like "polite sex" and American women "like two hole sex," I loosened up a bit. Then they stopped the jeep and bought us all beers, lowered the windows, and drove along drinking and blasting Punjabi pop music as loud as the stereo would take it...all the time my bike not rolling out the back because of a rope and a brick behind the tire. They made me feel better. That was twice in two days that I've been pulled out of a very bad mood. When we arrived, the mechanic didn't ask for any money, despite having spent all day working on my bike. Granted, he did get a free ride into Shimla and probably some kickbacks from the driver (to whom I paid 15 bucks, a shitload out here), but I gave him two bucks for the help and the beer.

So they took me to an "authorized" mechanic, who cost a whole lot more ($30) but actually fixed the bike. Turned out the valves were all sorts of fucked up becuase the engine had overheated so much (because of the busted head gasket). Oh, the domino effect. They, too, saw how upset I was at having to spend another day there, so they personally drove me to town and found me a cheap hotel.

I'd driven straight through Shimla without even seeing the city center because I was on a mission to get to Manali. Now I was stuck there, so I thought I might as well look around. And HOLY SHIT was I an asshole to ever skip it. In the midst of my struggles to find something that resembled home, this place was like a little Britain tucked away at the base of the Himalayas. It was like walking into Gibraltar, with quaint English houses and a large Protestant church towering overhead. Wierd. They had a Domino's Pizza. They had a real, deliciously overpriced coffee chain place. They had a CITIBANK. It was exactly what the doctor ordered. I was overwhelmed, not just at the city itself, but of my own initial refusal to ever give it a chance. It was a carnival, full of obnoxious Indian tourists, but nonetheless it was a place of interest. I'd lost sight of the fact that I was traveling to see India, not to get to Manali. It took three days of getting stuck in Shimla to actually ever see it.

So I got my bike by Noon the next day, giving me just enough time to make it to Manali before dark. Five hours up the road, a storm hits. I'm 100k from Manali, in a nice town called Mandi, but I get it now. I get what makes the motorcycle trip fun. It's not about the actual destination as much as the chance places you end up. Back in Rishikesh, I was riding with an Israeli couple who had rented a scooter for the day. There was a wedding in the street, with animals and a band and confetti and lots of dancing. They motioned us to stop and dance. We stopped and danced. They sprayed us with silly string, and then kissed us all goodbye as we left a few minutes later. It's these kinds of things that make the motorcycle trip what it is. And as much as it sucks to be stuck with mechanics, it's more fun to be riding in a jeep drinking beer and singing Punjabi dance tunes with actual Indians than getting stoned on a balcony talking cheap metaphysics with a bunch of dreadlocked bums. Definately a challenge in every sense of the term, but it wouldn't be "traveling" if it weren't. That would be a vacation.

2006-05-13T08:21:00.000-07:00

Rishikesh was enough fun. A nice place to smoke a lot of pot by the side of the Ganges and watch Western hippies walk by with their gurus and this "all-knowing" look on their faces. I've never felt any kind of scorn for hippies 'till I got to this country, and now it's almost pervasive. It might be wierd that in two months I've gone from spending 10 days locked in a meditation ward to hating hippies, but I think when it comes down to it, I loved the idea of coming to India to "find yourself" until I started meeting people who came here to find themselves.

It's not that I disagree with some of the things that come out of their heads (except for their ideas on science; they always hate to find out I have a degree in Biochemistry), it's that the words of the Griz, the old sage of the Beer Store on Clement was right: "Most of it's just to get into your pants." To have to listen to some of the WORST metaphysical conversations on a daily basis didn't do much to help my spiritual self-esteem. But to have to consistently see wide-eyed, dreadlocked, hairy legged girls wearing saris follow these western guys with beards, sarongs and "the guru walk..." That's what did it. It's not about mind-expansion. It's about getting dumb girls into bed.

OK, I'm basing this on a handful of people I've met. But there's definately a pattern of wide-eyed girls following solemn, "all knowing" guys around. And most of them, when you try to talk to them, look straight through you and can never really answer the questions you ask.

Maybe I'm not giving them enough credit. During my 10 days, I would have looked you straight in the eye and been to self-absorbed in what was going on inside my own head to answer any kind of question. But watching other people go through the same process made it seem so futile. OK, go to India. Find yourself. But then come back a better person! So many of the people I've been meeting here have no plans to go back. In fact, they have no plans to do much of anything, until the money runs out. Then they'll find something to do.

What kind of benefit is that? Spending your whole life "finding yourself." I guarantee that nobody here is going to attain enlightenment. Fine, I'm being short sighted. Nobody here will find enlightenment this life. Or the next. Buddha had to wait 300,000 generations after somebody told him he'd one day reach enlightenment? Brahmin yogis, maybe. Western hippie tourists? Not just yet. So why lock yourself in an ashram in Rishikesh?

The Beatles did it. I went to the Maharishi's ashram here where the Beatles (and a few hundred other people) lived in tiny smurf houses for a few years at a time. These bungalows are awesome, and really 60's psychedelic looking, made from a 10 foot diameter cylinder with a spiral staircase around the perimeter, leading to an 8 foot tall dome on top with a 4-foot door. I guess only pictures would do them justice. Anyway, the place looked like the most fun in the world. But they came back (except George really) and made the world a whole lot trippier with some really psychedelic albums. There's a benefit. I just wish people would bring something better back to our world than more organic vegan restaurants.

Back on the motorbike. Back to India.

I went to Renuka, which was neat. Not only was it named after Anitha's sister, it's also (quite fittingly) a wildlife preserve. They keep a small lake absolutely brimming with fish so that all sorts of birds stick around. They also put some of the sickliest looking lions in a cage together to hope they'd breed and make more. AND BREED THEY DID. About 20 minutes after walking away from them, I heard the repetative grunting of one lion followed by a few long, drawn out roars from another. It was a lot like having noisy roommates, except I was a HALF MILE away. It was probably the funniest thing I've ever heard, I only wished there was a way to record it.

On the way out I got seriously lost and spent about 8 hours driving what should have taken 2. All the signs were in Hindi, so I think I went to the other end of the state. Whatever roads I took, none of them were on my map. It's an Indian made map. I can't complain to anybody here because they'll just look at me funny and say, "what? It's an Indian made map."

So the bike's not broken and, Ganesh willing, I'll be in Manali by tomorrow night. It's a good 250km through hills (that's a lot out here), but my bike's almost burning as much oil as petrol. There's some gasket in the cylinder head that the mechanic in Dehli GLUED back together, so now I have to wear jeans to prevent the boiling oil from frying my calves. I should have went for a newer engine...

2006-05-09T09:22:00.000-07:00

Thanks, Cromie for the dragon suggestions but I don't think my bike is quite up to the challenge of being named after a dragon (kinda like naming my housecat Tiger). Unless there's a dragon with Emphesyma.

I am tempted to call it Nuts 'N' Gum, but because it represents what the thing's made out of (I had to get the engine glued back together when it stopped an hour outside of Dehli because the valve nuts had shaken off) and not for whatever "else" that could mean. But you're right, John, about the fecal references. When you suggested the "Turn Rattler," I began to wonder at the source of my diarhea (the rear shocks need replacing). So I've settled on it:

The Liquifier.

Now THAT's Badass (pun intended).

OK So here's what I've been really spending my time on in Dehli. I was going to not talk about it 'till it's finished but it's what I've been doing and I guess that's the purpose of this blog. Why else would anybody WANT to spend a week in Dehli?

I'm sending a bike home. I just bought the frame before I left, a 1964 Royal Enfield rusty jumble of steel that RUNS hilariously. The steering pulls to the left, the front brake doesn't work at all, there's no battery, it basically looks like it's been buried since '64. But parts here are cheap, and labor's even cheaper. So, I bought it for about $500 and for the same price, I'm replacing everything and sandblasting the rest. Totally rebuild the engine, gearbox, clutchbox, and drivetrain, sandblast and chrome up the original front wheel, get the old tan seats with the springs under them. But more importantly, I'm lowering the back wheel and getting longer front forks with the wraparound handlebar. It'll be a chopper. A British Colonial Chopper. It'll be "something else" anyway, but it's been so much fun deciding the details over the past few days that I haven't got to much traveling. I'm driving up to the Himalayas right now, and the bike should be finished by the time I get back (an American's putting it together, otherwise it definately would not) and I'll get to see it and make some final changes before it gets shipped to LA.

So if anything will need a name, it'll be that one. But I could use some help with this one thing I've been battling over. It's a 350cc engine right now, and gets just over 80 miles per gallon. But it doesn't go much past 60mph, and anything over 50 is bad to sustain. I could have it converted to a 500cc (22 horsepower instead of 18), and it'll eat 60mpg but get up to 70mph if I need it to. I've been driving in India and Southeast Asia for 6 months, and out here there's rarely a chance to do 60, but will I need the 500cc for a city bike? It'll cost $200 more for the conversion, plus the extra gas costs. In either case, it'll be a slow cruising bike, so maybe I should just keep the gas milage? Any advice?

But oh, man it's a fun project.

Moving on, last night I stayed at the worst hotel yet. There was a HIVE OF WASPS in the bathroom. I made the mistake of killing a mosquito by smacking the wall it was on, and in few seconds the room looked like a scene from "The Birds," except I was the screaming girl with the arms flailing. So they moved me to another room, which had almost as many mosquitos as the first, and when the power cut out at 1AM (for good because of massive electrical storm), there was no fan to save me. Back too Malaria pills for me.

I checked into another hotel here in Rishikesh (oh yeah, I drove 6 hours in the teeth-grinding Indian traffic to get here, and broke down an hour outside of dehli right across the street from a mechanic. $3 and one hour later I was back on the road, getting run off the tarmac by the big diesel trucks going against me in my lane), and it's nice here. For the first time in India, it's just real nice to be around. The hotel restaurant overlooks the Ganges, and I just sat there getting gradually stoned as all the people who stayed there came in for a meal and eventually stayed and talked.

Everybody here talks about India. People in Thailand talked about Thailand, but not nearly as much as they talk about India here. But I haven't heard it all yet, so it's still interesting.

So advice about the 350cc to 500cc conversion would be appreciated (John, I'm looking in your direction)

2006-05-06T04:37:00.000-07:00

...I meant Biker Shubes rides on Sunday. Apparently the rear axle needs fixing. I found a dreadlocked Israeli dude to ride with me to Haridwar and Rishikesh tomorrow, so I got someone to help me push the bike after I've been stuck trying to crank the engine for half an hour in the scorching heat. WAhoo...

2006-05-04T12:02:00.000-07:00

I didn't really realize it until talking with Cromie a few minutes ago, but I guess I just joined an Indian motorcycle gang. Yup, that about sums it up. I'm a Bullet Walla and in two days I'll be riding up into Dalai Llama territory on my awesomely awesome 1980 Royal Enfield Bullet motorcycle.

I should probably back up a bit...

I got to Delhi off the worst train ride ever endurable to my rich Western upbringing. This diserves a whole post devoted solely to these 15 disgustingly gruelling hours, since the memory has (thankfully) faded in the past three days, but let's just say I wouldn't wish an overnight Indian 3rd class ticket on anyone. I got to the train station at 1PM for a 7PM departure, assuming I could book a sleeper train the same day. They were all booked, and after a whole lot of runaround I bought a General Class ticket and asked the conductor to upgrade me to a sleeper if anybody cancelled. In retrospect, I fucked up in refusing to bribe him (I thought at the time he was just overcharging me) and, as a result, he left me with the heathens and lepers in General Class. OK, it wasn't so bad, and I got to see firsthand what the lower castes have to deal with out here, but I'm really happy to be traveling alone so I wouldn't have had to feel guilty for bringing someone else to it. And it was kind of nice to bond with complete strangers (literally, for the worst 4 hours of it I counted 12 people in a 3 foot by 12 foot corridor and was sitting on my backpack with two others with my legs pressed neatly into the legs of everybody else with tiny pockets of unfilled space). Anyway, I did it. It's over. I got off the train and ordered the most expensive hotel I'll ever take here (20 bucks) with AC and a full night's sleep.

So as I mentioned in the last post, I came to Dehli looking for this Bullet Wallas shop. In case you were wondering, a "walla" is the term used here to describe a person who "does" the preceeding noun. For example, there are Bike Wallas who fix your bicycle on the side of the road, Shoe Walas who fix or shine your shoes, Water Wallas, and so on. So thes people like the Royal Enfield Bullet. A lot.

Sure enough I found some small shop with a comically oversized sign and, after stepping into an empty room I hear "Hey Bro, come up here" in the most refreshingly Southern accent I've ever heard. Turns out the club's run by this American biker from the South who took it upon himself to stop Westerners from being so brutally ripped off by the Indian bike shops. We sat there for a few hours, talking of America, of motorbikes, and of riding around India while other friends and members would walk in and out of the office with certain things to bring up. There's no "business time" here, just time spent chatting in offices. So, inevitably, nothing ever gets done. A good example of this is that I'm still in Dehli fixing up my bike.

He's not much of a shop, but he happened to have two bikes on hand. One, for about $580, has been passed around between members for several years and he knew it to be reliable. The other one, for about $425, he had just bought a few days before and didn't know much about it except it had a new clutch and alternator system and the engine sounded fine.

So I took the risk. Thought it'd be fun. I spent all of the next day working in his shop to fix it up. Now, I have no idea what's up or down with motorcycles, but one of the things he kept saying was how much of a precision instrument thes bikes weren't. You can set the spark plug gap with your thumbnail. You can clean the carbeurator with a toothbrush. You can just about pull and twist any bolt into position, and if it doesn't work, you can drill out a new hole for it until it all comes together somehow. They're not high performance, rediculously high-tech machines alligned to within thousanths of an inch like the Harleys back home. They're nostalgic hunks of metal that were meant for British Army brats to work on in their spare time. So he took me to a parts store to get what I wanted and needed, and let me use his shop (looking over my shoulder occasionally to make sure I wasn't breaking the thing).

I started easy anyway, replacing the dorky English handlebars with lean-back cruiser ones. This was a whole lot harder than it seems, actually, and involves changing all four cables (there's an extra "decompression" lever which isn't worth going into) and a whole lot of elbow grease in getting everything off. There was even some welding involved, but I just drove down to the Welding Walla and gave him a quarter to do it. Then the oil, filter, air filter, lamps, electrical switches, and other random shit like that got replaced. So now I feel almost like I know something about motorbikes. But I've gotten over the "no way can I work on a bike" barrier which, ultimately, is a whole lot important than learning to change a clutch cable.

There's also a fleet of young Indians willing to work for next to nothing on whatever you tell them to do. Not very smart, but they're great at muscling stuff on. So I had a squad of 4 of them spend almost an hour trying to get this luggage rack and front crash bars on. Watching the group of them working so hard in the sun to bend this giant metal luggage rack to fit the back of this bike made me so happy to have them around, especially when they cost just under $1.50.

So then I gave it a good, heavy test drive and learned that the 3rd and 4th gears don't work, and switching between any two gears was next to impossible. I don't know if this had changed since I first rode it, but anyway today I took it to a "real" mechanic (one recommended by the Bullet Walla dude) who spent four full hours taking apart the gear box, the clutch box, and the entire rotary mechanism to find a bent rod all the way on the inside. The whole thing was like a lesson in motorcycle maintenance, with his "trusty boy" running around like a medical assistant handing him tools to perform the deep surgery. Actually, come to think of it, it was just like watching surgeons perform deep abdominal surgeries my senior year of High School. OK, it was a little more boring, but a lot greasier. So at he end, he charged 10 bucks labor and about 12 in parts. Now I understand why you'd have a motorcycle out here. That same thing would have cost at LEAST $200 back home.

So I take it back to him tomorrow morning for a full inspection, and then I'm off to the Himalayas (again). Oh man, am I excited though. Especially knowing I'll never have to deal with he trains out here. Granted, I didn't give them a fair chance but I did see the sleeper carriages and they were pretty shitty as well. But all the Bullet Wallas are up in that part of the country for the summer, and they're usually pretty easy to spot (dreadlocks, tatoos, awesome bikes) so it'll be fun to get to know them. The ones here in Dehli have been all way too cool for me.

That brings me to this rediculous thing I decided to grow on the front of my face. I came back from the mountians with a full beard, and turned it into the most Redneck goatee-with sideburns HickStash I could fashion. It looks awesome. It would look better if I had a mullet, but my hair's still growing back from having buzzed it 2 months ago so instead I got this round poofball thing going. Basically I look rediculous. Unfortunately, since none of you guys who would get the joke are out here, I'm just sitting here laughing by myself. But it's still funny enough every time I look in the mirror, and it somehow works well enough with sunglasses and a big black motorcycle, so I'll do my best to get a few pictures before turning back to normal. Or maybe I should just go all the way and sleeve up in tattoos and get real fat. This Dehli Belly would have to let up before I could conceivably gain any weight...

Right, so Biker Shubes rides at dawn on Friday. As the central breeding grounds for all New York Cab Drivers, I think I'd go nuts if I get stuck in it for the two hours it takes to get out of the Dehli suburbs. I'll spend a day in Hardiwar, then a few in Rishikesh, and eventually further up. Once I get into the mountains, it should be nothing but road and me (and maybe a few other riders by then). Bill Gates and Bill Clinton (for some reason) each spent tons of money fixing up the Indian Himalaya roads in the past few years. Supposedly, it makes the drive like a dream. Thanks, Bills.

I'll email again after the first 8-hour drive up to Hardiwar. Or from some intermediate town while waiting for a mechanic...

Speaking of which, I've been told by Mr. Bullet Walla that it's IMPERATIVE to bless every new bike out here, so tomorrow I'm heading to the giant Hanuman temple (monkey god) to bless it. I guess I should also give it a name. I'm up for suggestions.

2006-04-30T23:23:00.000-07:00

This country is nuts. Even since I've sobered up, my senses haven't been so constantly assaulted since Burning Man (urine instead of essential oils and monkeys flying between the roofs instead of art cars, but you get the point). Actually, on the subject of Burning Men, I went to the burning Ghats last night to watch a face melt for the first time since my last acid trip. Then I climbed on a small boat and headed down the Ganges, where we slowly approached this giant Hindu prayer ceremony. Guys in robes were doing strange hypnotic fire dances facing the Ganges from small platforms about 15 feet from the surface of the water, while a whole crowd of people banged pots and bells and howled the oddly familiar Indian yogic chants. I don't know much about the Hindu reasons for it, but just the thought that they've been doing that every day for the past several thousand years blew my mind. They also say the fire they use for the cremations has been burning for 3000 years. It'd be interesting to visit with a fire extinguisher just to see how they react...

I'm getting a huge kick out of the insanity here, so I figured I'd take advantage of this good feeling before it turns tragic. So tonight I'm taking the train to Dehli tonight. Despite all the aweful things I've heard about that city (no there is no Pastrami on Rye, and if there was I wouldn't dare anybody to eat it), it's a trip I can't put off much longer. I need a camera for this country (just to prove to myself later on that I'm actually seeing some of these things), and I think that'll be the best place to either fix my broken one or get a new one. And it's on the way to Rishikesh and Dharmasala, the Indian Himalayas where the weather's supposed to be perfect.

OK, I'll be honest. I'm going to Delhi to do some more motorcycle shopping. There's a hotel there devoted to motorcycling around India on a Royal Enfield Bullet (www.bulletwallas.com), and if I figure I'll get a good picture on the feasability of riding around India after picking their brains for a few days.

Will let you know how things go.

2006-04-30T01:16:00.000-07:00

Well holy fucking shit I guess I'm in India now.

So the bus stopped at the bus station in Varanasi at 3 in the morning, leaving me and this western-girl-dating-a-nepali-guy to find someplace to stay the night. Even at 3 in the morning, we were accosted by a pack of rickshaw drivers. The Nepali guy spoke some Hindi, and the three of us piled into a rickshaw after negotiating him to take us to a 80-rupee room (2 bucks) where I got a few hours of sleep until I woke up stewing in a pool of my own sweat on the sheetless bed, staring at the ceiling fan that had the guts to move just exactly slow enough to have absolutely no effect on the air in the room. It was 8 O'clock. I took my ATM card and passport and wandered off in search of a cash machine, and on the way I found an internet cafe and wrote my last post.

By an evil twist of fate, there was a street Lassi vendor right next to the ATM and, after watching a resepectable Indian man walk up and buy a delicious looking banana flavored glass of Acidophilus, all I wanted in this growing heat was a nice tall glass of whatever he was having (I was also having one of those your-body-trying-to-tell-you-something cravings about drinking yogurt to stop the interesting tricks my bowels have been playing on me for the past week). So I ask the man, "what kind lassi you have?" to which he replied "we have bhang lassi." Hmm. I've heard of India's famous bhang lassis from all the way in Thailand, and I envisioned the continuity of my day hitting a fork in the road. I could boringly walk around a bit and then go home to stare at the fan for the hottest part of the day, or I can dive in head-first into India's holyest city, bumbling around town in a drug induced stupor without any map, sense of direction, knowledge of Hindi, guide book, friends, or any idea of how to get home aside from a crumpled up business card in my pocket. The saint on my right shoulder had some good points about possibly losing my passport or being robbed, but the devil on my left had the final word. The lassi man asked me if I'd like it strong or medium, and thank everything that I had the modesty to say "medium" (even though I felt it was a copout at the time). He took a large spoonfull of some thick green paste, added some milk curd, added some white stuff from various white bottles, some ice, shook it like a martini, and served me the most delicious pot drink I'd ever had. I gave him 10 rupees (25 cents) and was off.

Before I even try to describe the insanity that was about to unfold, I should let you know that I'm also wondering why the hell I'd ever do something so dangerous and stupid. Everything I'd heard about India was how rough and tumble it was. The hotel staff, as well, did everything in their power to scare me from walking around by myself (I'd later figured out this was nothing but a ploy to hire a guide, but I was still terrified before I left). But later on that night I had a conversation with this Irish girl (a doctor, actually), whom I'd coincidentally met in the hot springs at the end of the Nepal trek. She had crossed the 18000-foot pass one day after I had, the morning after I arrived into Jomosom during a storm. The storm, apparently, went straight over the pass and caught everybody in an almost life-threatening blizzard, and I have so far heard three people's accounts of having made it. Two of them included vomiting up blood, getting lost and disoriented in the white-on-white landscape, losing the trail, and still for some reason persisting in making it over the top. This Irish doctor, despite a constant headache and frequent vomiting, never realized she had severe altitude sickness and kept going well after it was safe to. She was also travelling alone. But she related it to the book, Into Thin Air, where John Krakauer gives his story of the deadly 1996 Everest expedition where 5 people died. Reading the book, it's hard not to scold him for making so many stupid mistakes and neglecting the obvious signs of danger. But there's something we both noticed about how some decisions just can't be explained afterwards. For whatever reason, she felt totally safe to continue walking, long after someone had yelled at her to go down. Similarly, I felt perfectly up to the challenge to immerse myself in India for the first time while being incredibly, rediculously stoned. I guess some things are only mistakes if they go wrong. No matter how pissed off and frustrated I was when I finally got home, I wouldn't have changed that day for the world.

I started walking. It really didn't matter where, and I had no map or points of interest to see anyway. The first thing I noticed was how refreshingly isolated I was. In Nepal, I'd be consantly accosted by kids and teenagers trying to befriend me, or by vague merchants trying to sell me things. Here, I was the Scum of the Earth. There was no reason to pay any attention to me, unless you were trying to sell me something I didn't want. So it was easy to shrug everybody off, and be rude if I had to be, because I wasn't afraid that any of the people approaching me actually deserved any respect.

And so I walked like this, ignoring everybody around me, until I found my way into the old city. This part of town is as old as Jerusalem, with the meter-wide stone roads and the large stone appartment buildings with rediculously tiny rooms and doorways. Soon enough, the alleys got narrower and narrower, then the smells got more and more acrid, then the people got more and more deformed. The lassi started to kick in just as I was at the center of it all. Then I started to notice the Sadhus sitting cross-legged along in dark little alcoves along the street, the flames of massive amounts of burning incense, Yogis chanting from unknown rooms behind the walls, Hindi shouts of Things for sale, a lone Tabla played by some unknown performer, bulls and goats fighting to get through the narrow passes as much as the humans. It was craziness. Absolute insanity. I haven't seen anything like it since Marrakech, but I don't think it would be fair to compare anything else to it. There was just something about it that I can't put my finger on, something completely contradictory to all the shit on the ground, the dirty decrepid people, and the husslers that seemed perfectly natural, perfectly clean and sanitary. As much as everything was disgusting and poor and sad, it was one of the most beautiful things I'd ever seen. I had no idea what to make of it. So instead of trying to deal with these contradictions or make any kind of sense out of it, I just got the hell out of there.

I emerged from the "old city" to a main road. Finally, something I could make sense of. The sight of real shops and motorcycles, rickshaws and bicycles running up and down the street felt somewhat comforting. At least it made some sort of sense. I still had no idea what to do with myself, so I entertained the idea of going Motorcycle shopping. No matter what the situation, there is nothing more fun in the world than Motorcycle shopping.

So I walked and walked and walked and walked, paying attention to every motorbike I passed, my mouth watering every time I walked by one of these Royal Enfields that seem to be the National Awesome Bike of India. Eventually it became apparent that I wasn't going to find a motorcycle shop, or someone who could fix my digital camera, or anywhere air conditioned, and by then it was not only gruellingly hot but I had finally come to terms with exactly how stoned I was getting. Before I knew it, I was in no condition to do much of anything and I decided to go home.

That's where the "fun" began. I pulled out the business card of my guest house and stopped the first rickshaw driver I saw. It couldn't be more than 10 rupees to get there, but then this guy looked around confused, asked some people something in Hindi, then said "eight-t". I said 8? Great! Let's go. He said no, "EIGHTTTT" so I showed him 8 fingers. He shook his head and flashed all 10 fingers to me 8 times and I got the picture. There was no way in hell I was going to give this guy 80, and by then a crowd of other rickshaw drivers had appeared. I was spun around so many times, each one telling me the other ones are lying cheaters and trying to forcably push me into their own rickshaws, none of them apparently having any idea of where to go anyway, that I just left the group of them in a dizzy frenzy. I walked away as fast as I could, having newly discovered the virtues of walking, when a kid on a bicycle stops and tells me he'll take me there for 10 rupees. I vaguely remembered him from the rickshaw frenzy, and thought it'd be a laugh to ride on the back of a bicycle through the rediculous traffic, so I hopped on. It was terrifying and exhilarating, but after two stops to see some friends of his, it became clear that he had no idea which way to go either. He put me on another rickshaw and negotiated the price to 10 rupees (which, in retrospect was the proper thing for him to do), and I gave the kid only 5 rupees which I was impressed I managed to still be able to do in my state. I was stoned. I was really, really stoned. Total confusion, entirely at the mercy of these mercenary transportation con-artists to get me home. None of them spoke my language, and every street out here looks exactly the same. Unless I was staring directly at the front entrance of my hotel, I wouldn't be able to find it. To make everything much worse, the hotel was through some meter-wide streets so no rickshaw would actually be able to take me directly there.

I remember being on the back of the rickshaw (by the way, if nobody's seen one they're basically large tricycles with a canopied chair on the back) and three people were all talking at me simultaneously. One was the kid with the bicycle, who finally went away when I gave him his 5 rupees, then there was the rickshaw driver, then this other "respectable" looking Indian who came out of nowhere and spoke perfect English. He mentioned my hotel, said he was heading in that direction, and asked to share the rickshaw. I was so transfixed at the hilarity and insanity of the situation that I could hardly mutter the words to tell him no, so he climbed aboard. Some way down the line, I asked him what he did and why he was dressed so well. He had a "shop." It was a great "shop." He had two in Manali, where he was from, but here was here to check on his "shop" here. There was something obviously wrong with the way he said "shop" that gave away that he was a drug dealer. Eventually, once he got clear about it, he told me it was nothing like a "government shop" and that, instead, he offered the best pot in India. 800 rupees for 10 grams, or 300 rupees for the cheap stuff. 7-20 bucks for 10 grams. neat. Too bad I wasn't in the market, otherwise that'd be a really cool shop to visit. That was EXACTLY the wrong thing I could have told him. Then he went off on how, since it was a government shop, he was able to offer Chinese Opium, Cocaine, and probably anything else I could think of. I did kinda want to see what a shop like that would look like, and if I needed to I could buy a few grams of pot to be able to leave comfortably if necessary, so he stopped the rickshaw prematurely and asked me to pay 5 rupees. I only had a 100 on me, so eventually the dealer paid the 5 rupees himself. I was pretty happy about that, grifting the grifter.

His "shop" was right next to my hotel, so he said. So I followed him around and around these old city parts, constantly vigilant and making sure that we were always surrounded by people. All around me I kept seeing signs in English so I knew we weren't too far off from some sort of safety. All of a sudden, the foot traffic went from shoulder-to-shoulder to dead empty and I stopped. I wasn't going any further than that. The guy told me it was just around the next corner, but I could see in his eyes that he had no intention of causing any harm. He was a shrewd businessman and probably evil enough, but somehow I didn't feel threatened by him. He was salivating over making another customer, not of eating my soul. So I followed him another 10 meters down the road to an open door.

The inside looked dark. Too dark. There was no electricity, but some fire burning somewhere inside for light. It struck me like a ton of bricks that I had absolutely no intention of going in there. Just at that moment, some other short Indian guy with a shaved head and a comically tight muscle shirt came out and started shouting, not asking, for me to come inside to "take a look." He had the look in his eye of a hungry tiger watching an innocent little animal walk unknowingly into his cave... By now I was hyper-aware and paranoid and had I lost any interest at all of going inside. Muscle shirt man started pacing back and forth outside the door, as if guarding something, muttering something about how great his stuff is and trying to make the last-minute sale, but I was getting ready to leave by force if need be. I must have looked absolutely terrified, to be honest. In any case, the original drug dealer got the picture that I wasn't going inside and tried a different approach. He walked me back to the main street, pointed me to my hotel, and told me if there was ever anything I needed, he'd be somewhere there.

So I started walking up the street again. When another guy offered to walk me there, I decided to take the next right. I knew I was supposed to take a right turn somewhere, and this seemed right. It wasn't even so much about whether it was the right turn or not, it was more to achieve that confidence of knowing that I was well on my way to get home, I'd be home in any minute. 10 minutes later, somebody shouted "hey, Canada!" It was the guy whose presence made me turn prematurely. I had apparently told him I was from Canada. It turns out I tell everybody I'm from Canada when I'm nervous. He had a bright smile on his face and looked a little like a drunkard, but I really had no choice but to trust him. He led me back to the main street and pointed me exactly in the right direction, gave me exact orders, and sent me off. I gave him 5 rupees before he even asked, which put me in his eternal good graces.

He told me to walk 400meters, then turn right. I had no idea how far 400 meters was and, worse than that, I was kinda stuck for telling any sort of time. And it was hot. I was tired. There was some indoor place that looked like a narrow smoothie bar, so I stepped in and bought some water. The smoothie guy was just finishing up making two delicious-looking yellow drinks with fruit garnishes and everything, so I asked for one of those. He said something questioningly in Hindi, but I had no idea what he said so I just said "One More" and he shrugged and went to it. Only when he started making it did I realize there was no fruit in the bar except for a few old bananas and a bunch of jars of various powders. Maybe they were in some fridge somewhere. Nope. He put a spoonful of one of the powders from a jar into a glass. Then another from another jar. Then from another. Then another. Soon enough he was grabbing jars behind him, under the counter, from all over the store to put powders into this glass. I looked like a teenage chemist mad at work, and I was starting to get worried. When he served it to me, he gave me some sort of "look," and I had half a mind to think he was poisoning me. It was delicious. Perfect for the temperature outside. In retrospect I think it was some kind of fiber smoothie, but I remember examining everybody's faces to see whether they were giving me funny looks because I was drinking poison or because I was so funny looking. I turned out fine, and the trip to the smoothie bar would've been perfectly benevolent if I hadn't walked out facing the wrong direction.

So again I walked forever, 'till I finally decided I had gone too far. Then I turned around and walked back. By this point I started noticing people really looking at me funny, because they'd seen me walk that same stretch of road 4 (or maybe 6) times. Finally, I heard "Hey, Canada!" The same guy greeted me with the same bright smile, this time a big concerned. "How did you get lost?" I had no idea what to tell him. He took me by the arm, told me straight, slow, and descriptive exactly what I was going to pass on the way to the turnoff, and reminded me to keep asking people where to go.

There it was. I'd found him. A Nice Man in India. Finally, after hearing over and over again that everybody who talks to me is only after my money, I found a nice man who was genuinely concerned for the wellbeing of a strange traveller. I think, in retrospect, I had decided to go out exploring to throw myself at the mercy of the image of a Brutal India. I would either have been treated awefully, in which case I would save my time and leave the country, or the stereotype would break and I'd be finally able to relax out here. It turns out that all the hassle is only about trying to make a buck. That's it. Rickshaws and touts don't leave you alone because they want to offer you their services, not "just to hassle" you. Once I gave that guy his 5 rupees, he respected me and actually cared about providing the service he was paid for. That's the trick, I guess.

All the same, I was damn happy to get back home. It was 3 by the time I got there, and I found myself hungry and not wanting to eat because I'd have had to brave the world outside to get to a restaurant. So this morning I moved hotels and started over. Now that I've had my baptism of fire, it's time to explore Varanasi. I'm in the heart of the Old City, a few hundred feet from the Ganges, right next to where they burn people at night.

I'm in. I'm set. I'm ready. Bring it on.

2006-04-28T22:28:00.000-07:00

My second-last night in Kathmandu, Simon and I went to "the" casino in town. After 2 hours of playing blackjack and drinking free cheap (extremely expensive for Nepali standards) scotch until I was drunk, I stumbled out of the casino with 3000 more rupees than I started with. It's about 40 or 45 bucks, just enough to cover my Indian visa, and well over a month's hard-earned salary for many of the people around me. Simon lost his 1000 rupees, so I spent the rest of the night getting both of us proper drunk. It was a nice way to leave Nepal.

The massive protests ended when the King backed down and allowed for Congress to reconvene, but the Maoists kept attacking villages and blocking the roads out of Kathmandu because they were pissed off at being underrepresented. They, after all, had been fighting the King for the past decade and if the country has an actual fair election, nobody would vote for the Maoists. So we all got worried that this might descend into a Khmer Rouge or Bolshevic-style takeover. Let the people overthrow the government, then have the goons with guns step in.

As far as I was immediately affected, I still couldn't get out of the country by bus. I had arrived into the country on Saturday night. By monday afternoon I was ready to buy a ticket to Delhi. Monday night the revolution ended and I was told the busses would be running. Wednesday I tried to book a ticket but learned the Maoists weren't giving up power yet, so I was about to buy a ticket to Delhi again. Wednesday night, the Maoists declared a 3-month ceasefire and opened the roads. Friday morning I boarded the bus.

This has really fucked with my head. I've changed my entire itinerary from starting in Varanasi to starting in Delhi, to back to starting in Varanasi, to back to starting in Delhi, and this morning I finally, FINALLY woke up in Varanasi. Now that I'm finally here, I have no idea whatsoever what I'm going to do. But I'm here. I'm out of Nepal. That's all that matters.

As far as the Maoists are concerned, I'm keeping my eyes on the press but it no longer affects me directly. The ceasefire is nice and all, but nobody's kidding themselves that this is the end of it. The bolsheviks, for example, waited 'till October to take control of the February people's revolution. So we'll see.

I don't have too much to say on India just yet, except that everybody's a few shades darker on this side of the border. But then again I just arrived at 4 in the morning (it's now 11), after 20 hours of being hit on the head and knees on the aisle seat of a loud bumpy bus by people, bags, and goats boarding and leaving at various horn-honking stops. People shout more on this side of the border. That's about all I've noticed. Varanasi's neat, but I gotta get to bed to really think anything decent of it. Will post again soon.

2006-04-25T10:11:00.000-07:00

Yep, this place is back to normal. It's really, really wierd how fast everything sprang back to normal, but the city came alive OUT OF NOWHERE at some point this morning. The King made the announcement last night at 11:30, and apparently the people had been so accustomed to getting outside and protesting that everybody ran out in their underwear and PJs shouting and parading in jubilant victory in the same kind of numbers that, the day before, sent 500 people to the hospital.

9 hours later, when I got outside for breakfast this morning, the whole town's out and about. All the shops were open, full, and buzzing. I biked around exactly the same streets that were dead barren and desperately silent the day before to find myself dodging pedestrians, motorcycles, taxis, rickshaws, tiger balm sellers, drug dealers, and potholes in a fury of Chinatown nostalgia. It was a totally polar shift, all of a sudden. I remembered how long it took for New York to resume its usual pace of business after September 11th (several weeks), and then realized that these strikes and revolutions are a semi-common thing out here. They have strikes out here so often that everybody has a backup strike plan, in case one hits. Sure, they're usually not this long or important, but they're well used to starting and stopping businesses as news hits. That, and I guess everybody needed to suddenly do 3 weeks worth of shopping and selling.

It was weird, though, how yesterday the afternoon was cloudy, full of glum faces of bored, temporarily unemployed, broke and starving Nepali traders in front of closed-door businesses. And today was sunny, with every shop wide open with merchandise spilling out onto tables on the street and smiling, happy business owners happily bargaining with naiive westerners once again. It was a glorious day for shopping. I left the tourist part of town and found all the people selling nicknacks along the street had been starving for attention this whole time since their turf was under lockdown, and they were running after me and Simon to buy their stuff at well below "Nepali price" (which means only a little above what I should be paying, but less than half of what I'd be otherwise paying). So I stocked up on shit, am heading to the post office tomorrow, and am ready to finally get out of here! Go figure, of course, now that the town's back to normal I'm getting the hang of it all and want to stay, but my feet have gone itchy for India and the wind is blowing that direction. Varanasi this weekend!

2006-04-24T20:46:00.000-07:00

ROCK AND ROLL!

The revolution's over! The King has backed down and reinstated parliament. Nepal's a democracy again... for now. There's still the worry that the Maoists, the military force behind this rebellion, will be a little pissed to remain largely unrepresented in the parliament, but at least for now the country's back on its feet. I woke up this morning to the news that the strike's over, the busses start running tomorrow, and the planned curfew has been cancelled. I don't know much more than that other than the BBC blurb. I'm heading around town to explore! I feel like I've been cooped up in this tourist center way too long. Will post again soon when I get a better picture of what's going on.

-andrew

2006-04-24T04:58:00.000-07:00

I figured it out. For the past several days there has been a daytime curfew imposed on the city. So, after our 14 hour bikeride was over at 9PM, the city was open again. I guess we did good, then, by coming in late. Unfortunately, since the curfew's still going daily, this also means I'm stuck to the tourist part of town until the curfew lifts (between 6 and 9 PM), probably for as long as I'm still here.

I met an older guy last night who was stuck in Phnom Penh during the Khmer Rouge takeover, which made me feel like this is all a relatively slight inconvenience. He said he and the 13 other tourists in all of Cambodia had to wait 3 weeks for a military escort to the Thailand border. All day and night he had nothing to do but hang around the hotel all the press and diplomats were staying at, the one in the Killing Fields film.

I made it to the Indian embassy this morning before the curfew officially began. It was swamped with tourists (by that I mean Israelis) trying to get out of here, and after 3 hours of waiting I handed my passport to the counter and was told to come back Thursday. The embassy, entirely unexpectedly, decided to help us all out and process the visa forms in 3 days instead of 5 (5 meaning 7, since we'd have to wait the weekend). So, I get my visa out Thursday. I'm booking a flight to Dehli on Friday, so I get to actually do stuff this weekend. Granted, it's Dehli and people have told me it's one of the worst cities in the world, but at least I'll be moving again. I'll have spent just over 6 weeks in this country, a full 2 weeks longer than planned. Good thing I'm not on any schedule.

The way back from the embassy was creepy, to say the least. The curfew officially started at 9, and I didn't leave the embassy 'till after noon. I rode my bike to the embassy in the morning, dodging the foot traffic of the streets buzzing with tea shops and market stalls. In the afternoon, the roads were absolutely dead clear, except for the groups of military and the occasional massively armored army vehicle. Military dudes, for some reason, come in green or blue camo out here and only hang out by the dozen. There is, almost literally, one group of army guys on each corner surrounding the area I'm staying at. On the bikeride back, I was stopped every few street corners and asked to maintain my direction directly back to the tourist area, provided I'd finished whatever business it was that led me out of there in the first place. They are extremely apologetic, I have to give them credit for that, one guy told me it was "regrettable" that the curfew is imposed and "asked" that I return to my hotel and relax for the day. I guess that's what I'll be doing 'till friday anyway. Relaxing. At least I'm stuck outside the massive protests that have been leaving hundreds of people in the hospital every day. HP 5 is long gone, time to find another apple for this bookworm.

2006-04-23T00:14:00.000-07:00

I've never seen "28 days later" but apparently our ride through downtown Pokhara reminded my friend of that movie. Early the morning after spending a full day finding used bicycles, I'd set off with two people I had met in the mountains to bike to Kathmandu. The intention is to get to India, which unfortunately is in the other direction, but the Indian Embassy happened to be in Kathmandu and I can't get a visa at the border. It was 200km, sure, but at least we'd get a chance to turn this pain-in-the-ass strike into some kind of adventure. It took only 5 minutes of riding to start seeing the Nepal we'd been protecting ourselves from. Up in the mountains and in the tourist part of Pokhara, we had all been completely oblivious to the massive revolts in town. Pokhara, apparently, was the first city where protesters/rioters had been shot to death by military. By the time we came through it, the roads were littered with overturned barricades, broken glass and car parts, and partially burnt street bonfires. All the shops were closed.

Then for a long time nothing happened. By that I mean it was beautiful easy riding through mountain scenery and rice terraces. The first 20km or so was all slightly downhill, so it seemed for a while that it'd be no trouble at all to make the 200km in two days. By the time we hit the hills, though, we were all starting to reconsider. The bikes were holding up, but my brakes were shot and my friend had to kick his gears into place. But, due to the strike, the busiest road in Nepal we were on was almost completely devoid of cars to hit (aside from the occasional ambulance) so I never had to use the brakes anyway. The uphills gradually got worse, and one of our rank was having more and more trouble with the strain. Just before the end of the first day, he was lagging behind us and an ambulances offered him a ride to Kathmandu. He gave his bike over to some random passer-by and jumped in, all excited to get a free lift to Kathmandu (he wouldn't have minded ditching us completely, a fact I'm still a bit bitter about. He is, by the way, Israeli), only to find the ambulance dump him at the half-way point town. An hour later, the rest of us came to that town and waited for him for half an hour before finding him there. Apparently, he had completely misunderstood the ambulance driver or vice versa, and he was stuck there, pissed off, having lost the money for the bike as well as a means of getting to Kathmandu. He managed to find a midnight black-market bus to take us the rest of the way for 500 rupees (8 bucks), hoping to avoid the maoists at 1 in the morning, but the other guy and I decided to keep pushing along. So then there were two.

I don't think I've ever been so tired in my life as that next day (yesterday), and this is no exaggeration. It was 110km to Kathmandu, and we had both had grossly underestimated how far that was. It would've been managable if some rat bastard hadn't decided to put a 40km hill climb just before the entrance to the Kathmandu valley! It was rediculous! It'd be something on its own, but after 70km of ups and down was impossible.

I started to get cranky. This might be an indication that I'd lived too long in New York, but I started getting more and more aggrivated at the swarms of little kids all trying to make conversation with me. One thing I noticed about Nepal that I've said before is that these people are friendly to a fault. The whole reason I had to make it to Kathmandu in two days was because this guy I'd met at the Vipassana camp who took me around for three days was leaving the country the following day (today), and I'd felt obligated for the first time in my trip to make it there on time, out of sheer guilt of his friendliness to me. But EVERY TIME we'd stop at some tea shop, all the kids would run around us and not stop bothering us with questions about everything about us (as far as asking for the names of every member of my family) when all we'd want to do is relax and have some tea. Worst of all was all the kids shouting "What's your name?!" or "WHERE YOU FROM?" as I'd be fighting for my life pedaling up the hills past their homes. I literally couldn't spare the breath for an answer, but all they were doing is being curious and friendly. Eventually even their looks pissed me off. I had a green doorag on and Simon had a yellow hippie headband, we must have looked like something out of the movies for them, and I remember this one teenager giving me this awestruck "wow, I want to be you" face, knowing absolutely nothing about either of us and under any other situation I'd have been complimented but this day I just wanted to be invisible. Other people looked at us with obvious disdain, but another thing about Nepalis is they have no respect whatsoever of subtlety. However people judged us, they lucked directly at us and gave us their expression. We were on display, and all I wanted in the world was to do my thing and be ignored.

Everything was against our making it in 2 days. We managed to leave by 7, but by 3PM we had gone only 70km because of all the hills. There were a couple of burnt busses along the way, still sitting in the middle of the road. I checked, after seeing so many Hollywood films, to see that the gas tanks hadn't blown up (maybe they kept the gas for themselves?) but that didn't make the damage any less complete. These busses were Fucked. Anyway, stopping to get inside and hang around didn't help our time. At 4PM, we hit a storm, still 30km from town, and had to duck inside for a half hour 'till the rain passed. From then on it was a steady uphill the likes of virtually destroyed me. Simon, the friend, was feeling the same way, but after spending all my energy on the first 70km of hills, I was in no place to tackle 3 hours of steady uphill. At one point my body simply shut down. My legs just couldn't peddle any more and I couldn't catch my breath. I stopped the bike and stood there, delerious and gaping for air, and it was the only time in my life where I'd actually felt on the verge of passing out. I felt the overwhelming desire to fall asleep, and if I'd close my eyes even for a second I'd lose my orientation and almost fall. I fought the urge to pass out long enough to park the bike for a few minutes and relax, then I just pushed the bike up the rest of the hill during a gorgeous red sunset under the storm clouds. It took almost an hour until I found Simon having tea at this massive police checkpoint on the entrance to the Kathmandu valley. The military guys told us a curfew had been imposed in the city and we weren't allowed to enter. So there we were, 10km from Kathmandu after struggling through all that and we weren't allowed in. Worse than that, there was no place to stay near the checkpoint and it was completely dark, and we were freezing. My clothes were soaked between the rain and the sweat, and now that we'd stopped I was in desperate need of a hot shower. We were advised that the nearest hotel was half an hour bikeride down into the valley, just before the Curfew zone. We had no choice but to keep riding in the freezing darkness.

That ride down is sure to be one of the most memorable experiences of my trip. Simon held a small flashlight in his mouth as we rode down, but otherwise we had nothing but the occasional lights of buildings and fires to guide us. Very soon we found ourselves riding through the remnants of a complete warzone. Bonfires in the street, concrete blockades everywhere, military vehicles and troops scattered around, all the shops closed but people mulling about. We had to be extremely careful to ride slow enough to avoid the rocks and bricks in the dark. One time I didn't spot a brick in time and, since my breaks wouldn't stop me, barely slowed down enough to not fly head first when my front tire hit it. Even with all our precautions, it was impossible not to consistantly run over broken glass and it was a miracle the tires didn't burst.

We got in through the suburbs into town and learned that, in fact, there was no curfew and the cops at the top of the hill had no idea what they were talking about. Most likely, nobody tells them anything, but it was great news to hear we'd be able to have a gigantic feast on our arrival. On the way to the hotel we hit a big, loud group of protesters shouting something in Nepali. I couln't see much through the people but it looked like there was a big bonfire in the middle of the intersection and several people were carrying torches and chanting very loudly. It didn't take much thought to make that U-turn and find a way around.

We got to the hotel, had a delicious gigantic pizza each, and passed out immediately after. I woke up this morning almost unable to walk, and Simon's feeling the same way. Maybe tomorrow we'll have a look around town to see what's actually going on, but for now I'm laying very low until the saddle ass dies down a bit.

I'm on a mission to get to the Indian embassy tomorrow to submit a visa application so I can get out of here. Looks like Tibet's out of the question, since there's no Jeeps to drive me there and biking up those hills is out of the question. If the strike hasn't ended by the time my visa is cleared (5 days), it's a 2 or 3 day bikeride to the Indian border. Or, if I can find someone to buy my bike here, I'll splurge for a plane ticket.

In the next day or two I'll learn a whole lot more about the situation here, so my next post should be almost entirely about that. Hopefully, I'll find a good rooftop from which to watch hordes of protesters get beatup. The day I left Pokhara, apparently, 1300 protesters were hospitalized in Kathmandu alone. 1300! I still can't get over that number. I think under a dozen were shot, but it's definately reason enough to keep my distance. In any case there's a real curfew on tonight so no boozing it up for me after 9. On the bike ride over, we saw group after group of army dudes carrying massive guns walking the road out of Kathmandu, accompanied by the occasional Tank-looking thing (Bradley maybe? Definately something I've seen on the Iraq footage). I don't know where they were going or why they were leaving Kathmandu, but there must have been 200-400 of them in all. There's no shortage of them left here, though. I'll let you know more about what I see on my trip to the Embassy.

2006-04-20T05:08:00.000-07:00

I'm only 550 pages into Harry Potter (200 left) but yesterday I called my all-too-friendly Vipassana friend in Kathmandu and he's leaving the country in three days. After spending a rediculous sum of money (my travel budget for the entire trip) to various officials, unnofficials and corrupt whoevers, he's cleared a visa to live in Israel to make money for his family. It's eerie how everybody's final dream is to leave. Worse still how America tops the list of places to go to. My one-man campaign of convincing all of Nepal to move to Canada instead of becoming disgruntled Taxi drivers in New York isn't working fast enough...

Right, so he's leaving the country on Sunday and I want to see him before he leaves, so I bought a bike a few hours ago and am setting off tomorrow at 7 in the morning. 200km should be pretty easy to do in 2 days, but if I leave early enough I have a chance of pulling it in a day. It should be a nice ride, no cars or busses on the street. Wish me luck anyway.

I took the bike around Pokhara and the whole city's in this lofty Sunday afternoon mood. I'm guessing it's been that way for the past 18 days or however long this strike's been going on. It's like the entire city has taken to playing FingerPool and Cricket as the prime method of demonstration against the king. Whatever works.

2006-04-18T06:12:00.000-07:00

I just finished the 84km walk to Pokhara and FUCK, it hurt! I really shouldn't be complaining, considering I'd just walked 175km in the past two weeks in order to "see the great outdoors," but there's something not quite so sporty about walking on pavement the whole way. Actually, here I really shouldn't complain considering it was along the only paved road in Nepal. And, because the entire country was forced to walk (sometimes several hours) for groceries, it proved to be the slowest, most talkative traffic I've ever been a part of. OK, fine. It was fun. To be able to pick a destination on a map and "just walk" to it, negating the "being stranded" bit, was fun. It was a real bitch, but it was fun. Really made me realize how awesome cars are, but also how totally different life must have been without them. It's just like driving for several hours in sparse traffic (maybe 10 cars in sight), except you spend your time talking to the cars next to you. Then they exit and you keep moving, letting your mind wander or talking to your friends until a new person walks within talking range or you stop somewhere. This Nepali/Tibetan guy I walked with had a pocket radio in his hand that played Nepali music, which was vaguely like driving through America's countryside and listening to its local hick music.

It was a long day though. Two long days, actually. 84km was neatly spaced by a tourist town exactly halfway, making it two 42-km, 10 hour walks--coincidentally, exactly Marathon distance. I was a whole lot more impressed with that distance before I figured that one out, thinking I'd accomplished some super-human feat because the soles of my feet felt like they were going to explode at the end of the first day. Still, I walked the marathon, twice on two consecutive days, with a 35 pound bag on my back, and felt damn accomplished. Then a few hours after I arrived in Pokhara, I met these Kiwis who had left the Hot Springs a full day later to arrive here around the same time, doing in two days what took me three. They pulled 60km that day, and I shut up about my aching feet.

There were some alternatives to walking the whole way down. We found some crazy teenager who'd be willing to take his car out for $150 (split between 4 passangers), but if he got stopped we don't get our money back and would have to walk anyway. And his car could get burnt by the Maoists. There was a really, really, frustrated pissed off Isreali "army" guy back in Beni who "absolutely needed" to get to Pokhara by the following evening in order to make his flight home. I sat by him during the longest negotiation I've ever sat through (2 hours) until the offer came to $130 to rent this shop owner's motorbike between 5 and 7 in the morning, at which point his son in Pokhara would meet him 5 km outside Pokhara and hide the bike. The Israeli, enforcing every stereotype of himself by playing the "They can't do shit to me, I'm a tourist" motto, figured if he didn't stop for any maoist checkpoints he'd be fine. The shop owner (who's bike stood to get burnt by the deal) gave it a 90% chance of success. So, brokering his own insurance policy, he agreed to rent out the bike for 10% of its cost to the desperate Israeli. The whole deal fell through in the end because the Israeli only had $30 cash on him and the shop owner didn't trust him to hand over the rest when he arrived in Pokhara because, after all, he was Israeli. Unfortunately, the shopkeep was probably right in his judgement. All antisemitisms aside, it's extremely rare to see these Israeli army dudes show even the least bit of respect or loyalty to the locals out here. At least, they're the only nationality I've seen consistantly disrespect the locals here, especially when there's money involved...I'll rant on on that later.

The deal was brokered by this man from LoManthang, a small town (capital of the region) a day's walk from Tibet. By the way, the "Nevada-esque" desert crappy region I was describing earlier happens to have the most coincidentally apt Nepali name, "Mustang." I had passed through Lower Mustang, the relatively developed and culturally depleted side through which the Anapurna Trek runs directly through. LoManthang, where this guy's from, is the capital of Upper Mustang. Most of Mustang's inhabitants are Tibetan and speak Tibetan, because Mustang was historically a region of Tibet before Nepal took control of it. Since the Nepali government has nowhere near as much interest Upper Mustang as the Chinese government has in the rest of Tibet, the Tibetan culture of the region is largely untouched, making it one of the most culturally interesting places to visit. Why didn't I go myself? Well, the entry permit for Upper Mustang, set by the Divine Right of the King, costs $700 US Dollars for 10 days, plus $70 for each additional day. True, this keeps the region "untouched," but not a dime of this goes to the inhabitants of Upper Mustang. This is one of those things this country's so mad about.

Anyway, this guy I was walking with is 57 years old and might have Tuberculosis. His Tibetan doctor has been trying to help, but ultimately they need an X-ray to be certain of the diagnosis. So, what do you do when you live in Tibet and need an X-ray? I met him on day 7 of his 10-day walk to the hospital in Pokhara. This man has to walk 10 days for a referral! Each way! He'll try to fly back up to Jomosom, which only costs him $20 because he speaks Nepali, but that only cuts 5 days out. And this guy's 57. To think of how pissed off I used to get when I had to walk to the opposite wing of the hospital to see another doctor! But anyway I was really lucky to get to walk with somebody who speaks Nepali (and perfect English), so I got Nepali prices on things and got to have the Nepali radio news translated for me every 3 hours as it came in.

Right, so politics:
The night separating the two-day walk, we got to see a procession of school kids singing, laughing, and shouting slogans in Nepali while carrying a large paper effigy of the King down the end of the road to set him on fire. These were kids! They had ABSOLUTELY no idea what they were doing or saying, other than that some adults told them this was what they should be doing. I don't like the King one bit, but it really pissed me off to see a group of school kids laughing and playing around a burning effigy of their king. Gave me a really scared feeling in my stomach, that this was what they were teaching the kids of this country. It had that aweful eerie Lord of the Flies "laughing cannibals with torches during a school project" feel to it. Worst of all, I take part in the burning of a giant Man every year as well, with laughing and shouting and everything these kids were doing minus the voodoo aspect of assigning a particular living person to be represented by the effigy. Maybe it was this dicotomy that put me off so much, but in any case that image has been stuck in my mind. The night before we left, in Beni, two different groups of people lit two and three tall, tree-shaped fires each up in the mountains overlooking the town. Their shouting could be heard all over town. I recognized those fires in retrospect to be proper size and shape of a man on a stick, which means that there must be hundreds of burning Kings around the country every night. The country really hates that man.

In the part of Pokhara I'm staying at, there were a couple of small rallies in the past day but nothing major. This part of town is absolutely littered with army guys with big guns, just in case something major was to break out. Also, because they're keeping the Maoists out of this part of town, the strike can't be enforced and most of the shops are open. I guess they're supposed to make us feel safe with their big guns, but the looks on their faces makes me side with the opposition. They're fucked. The Maoists were one thing to contend with. You could shoot Maoists, and they only represent a small minority of the people anyway. But now, since the 7 parties joined their cause, they have 90% of the population represented in one giant standown to depose the King. If this thing comes to a head, the Army has no chance. Worse than that, if the Maoists decide to be half as brutal to the army as the army was to them, each of these 20-year olds with guns I see "guarding my right to shop" is in serious trouble. It kinda reminds me of the looks on the flight attendants' faces when flying United just after September 11, except that these guys are in fear of their lives not just their jobs.

The protests here really put the protests in America into perspective. Unlike any protests I've been to in America, there were none of those pricks or douchebags with signs that have no relation to the issue at hand. I came to remembering the anti-Iraq war protests where I'd suddenly find myself amid a group of protesters shouting against the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Fine, good point and all, but I wondered what would happen if, amidst a group of excited Nepalis shouting "FREE NEPAL," I'd suddenly burst out shouting "FREE TIBET!" and trying to convince everybody of the brutal injustices committed by China. I think it's about equivalent. There's a time and a place for everything, granted, but protests are really so much more effective when they're united.

But ultimately it's all people tooting their own horns. Nobody listens to protesters except protesters, and they're already out protesting. It's fun and it gives people some kind of high, and that's why they do it. That's why the kids burned a paper King at the stake for a school project, and that's why every few hours there's a bonfire in the middle of the street here. It's just people getting excited. This point was comically enforced a few hours ago when I saw about 10 Nepalis with homemade torches marching down the street towards me shouting slogans. At first I got a bit excited that they'd be out to riot, but they just passed by as I stepped to the sidewalk. A few minutes later, they come running back down the street, some putting out their torches, some still shouting slogans, most unsure what to do. All scattered, excited, and confused. I think they saw a few army guys and got scared, but eventually they regrouped about 50 feet from where I was standing and started shouting again, then started walking down the street away from whatever they were running from. Then came the wives. Three women came out into the middle of the street where they had just regrouped and started shouting, sorry "nagging" at the boys to bring them back. The arch in this one woman's back and her demeanor really gave the impression that she was some housewife or mother nagging her kids around like they just did something naughty and need to be punished. Ashamed, most of the guys turned back with their heads down and shut up. A few others kept the party going by buiding a bonfire with everybody's torches on the ground and promting the shouting of more slogans. With the fire on the ground, others on the sidelines joined in and they shouted some more for about 5 minutes, then dispersed. It was pretty funny.

On my way back, along the way the guys had initially walked and then ran from, I noticed all the shops had closed down when the torch men came by. I think they were worried they were Maoists were out to torch the shops of any scabs breaking strike, but it was really like night and day. I walk down and every building has a shop. I walk up and it's all closed or half-open garage doors. The internet cafes, banks, and hotels were all still open. I guess they're immune to Maoists.

So needless to say it's nice here in Pokhara. Plenty of excitement to keep me occupied. I'm almost 300 pages into HP, leaving about 450 left. If I finish the book and the strike is still going, I've decided I'll buy a bike and bicycle my way to Kathmandu. It's only 200km from here, and I briefly considered walking it, but from the tourists I've talked to, I won't have to go it alone. The book is ticking...

I'll update soon.

2006-04-15T04:17:00.000-07:00

Well, this is interesting. It seems as thought the fabric of this country has somewhat disintegrated during my bout in the mountains. I'm currently in a town called Beni, at the end of the trek, from where I'm supposed to be able to catch a bus to Pokhara, Nepal's "Other City." Unfortunately, all busses and taxis on the highways have been burned in accordance with a Maoist-issued strike. Those "crazy guys" decided to march into Kathmandu with their big guns and their new found 7-party friends (representing the rest of nepal) and have been demanding the King to step down. The King, who finally said something yesterday after 6 days of violent protests, is offering to present the country with a new, brand new, rigged election. Needless to say, the maoists are keeping their strike going strong. So I'm stuck. No busses, no taxis, all the shops are closed, basically all I got out here are the hotels that are still open (tourists are still catered to) and a few black-market shops that have to be extremely careful the maoists don't find them open ("or else").

I came down from the mountain just a few hours ago, hoping that this week-long strike would have been over once the king spoke last night. Last night, by the way, was new years out here, making it the third new years I've seen in the past 5 months. Neato. Anyway, the strike has been declared indefinate, so tomorrow morning I'm WALKING to Pokhara. It's 84km (50 miles) and should take three days, but there's really nothing else to do. From there I might be able to catch an airplane out of this country before the whole place blows up. Basically, nobody has any idea what's going on except that nobody's allowed to work, which makes for a very scared but extremely drunk "of age" community, and a whole lot of kids running around playing in the street. I'll give you a whole lot of comments on the situation once I get to Pokhara, but the demand for internet here is extremely high so I should take my leave. In case any of you are worrying, though, I'm staying out of the police riots and keeping my head down. My goal at the moment is just to find a way out of this country to move on.

If not, fortunately I recently bought the 5th Harry Potter book, which should keep me busy for about a week of downtime. Wish me luck.

2006-04-10T02:12:00.000-07:00

So in playing little buddha boy in the last post, I can follow it up by playing little boyscout in this one. In retrospect there were a lot of things missing from the past post, and a lot of things overstated. And I'm sure, for anybody who hasn't had the experience themselves, that any connection between observing bodily sensations to my realization of impermanence would be based purely on "sure, OK Andrew" principle. There are plenty of books written on the subject, I'll wait 'till I can append an MD to my name before I write my own. For now suffice it to say that in addition to learning how to hold concentration longer (which will definately help me for the next 4 years), I got to experience some neat feelings. I've been trying my best to meditate as much as I can out here on the mountains, but I feel like a complete idiot meditating if I'm sharing a room with someone, and I'm usually too tired to stay awake anyway. Lately, I've had a room to myself and, in the case of the night before the pass, it was the only thing to do when I couldn't sleep and there's no electricity to read by. The best places are the temples scattered throughout the trek. They're just really nice places to sit and be quiet, and usually have some sort of floor cushions to make meditating a bit easier. One time this guy I was traveling with came into a temple while I was meditating and tried to meditate next to me because I, by sitting there like a doofus, had already broken the taboo. One step closer to being a guru. Ha. Right, so anyway the past month had been fantastically productive. First got into mental shape, then into physical shape. It was so healthy, I felt fantastic.

But OH, MAN the beauty of breaking fast. Yesterday I had a Yak burger and Apple Moonshine after a month of being a sober vegitarian. Ah, the release. I guess I should back up, since I've been spending the past 2 weeks trekking through some of the most beautiful, and also some of the ugliest, parts of the world. I'll condense everything because internet is rediculously expensive out here because it was carried up to this place on the back of a mule. Or maybe a Sherpa. I'll tell you, after passing a dozen mule caravans every day, they have about the same look in their eyes as the Nepalis with refrigerator-sized loads every day. Which is not to say that sherpas are dumb, it's that mules can be really smart. I was walking along one of those cliche Indiana Jones long, extremely high, really really rackety and unstable suspension foot bridges the other day when, out of nowhere, a mule walks onto it coming towards me. Then another mule follows. Then another. No herder in sight, they just kept coming like they knew the entire 50k trail as well as they knew the ass of the mule in front of them. They knew to pass on the left, as the Nepalis do, and they also knew that I had no chance of actually passing them without being pushed off the bridge myself. Assholes. So I had to go back the way I came and wait for 20 minutes while the slow-ass caravan, and its herder all the way in the back, came through. I think they'd do well driving in New York.

So the first few days kinda sucked. The canyon we were following was covered in smog that completely precluded the beautiful white peaks looming high above us, and it was hot and the villages were all new hotel dens. The second day I learned what an absolutely wreched idea it was to prepare for a 2-week trek by sitting completely still for 10 days. My muscles had not only atrophied, but I had no stamina other than the determination to follow the group I was tagging along with. For lunch the second day we went to this restaruant at the top of this mountain, and on the SECOND-LAST STEP up, my calf went into a full charlie-horse and I almost fell all the way down from the pain. For the rest of the day, every other muscle in my leg threatend to cramp up every time I stopped I felt and I had to be super-super careful to keep moving them. My bag is also way too heavy because I thought it would be "challenging" to not drop anything off in Kathmandu. So while other, smarter, people had tiny day bags and never changed clothes, I was packing 8 months worth of traveling. I couldn't keep up with the group and collapsed at some hotel along the trail. At least I had the whole place to myself.

I woke up the next day and felt better, and the next day after that I felt well enough to do a double-day, hiking from 9AM to 6:30 and covering 24km and 2000 vertical meters. By then I was into it. That night was the last night I'd spend in a modern village ('till today). At least at this town I met some cool guys my age I'd spend the next few days with, until I caught up with my original group and realized they were really annoying anyway and left them.

I really need to send some pictures, because on the 5th day we entered the Kingdom of Rohan, for anybody who saw or read the Two Towers. The resemblance was striking, and gorgeous, and also a little desolate and ghost-towny. Each village at this point was made of rocks and wood, perched on top of a hill or along the side of the canyon, in the high desert (2500-3500 meters up). It did feel a little awkward walking through "someone else's" village every time, but the feeling from the people was that there really weren't enough of us. Of all the hotel spaces, maybe 10% of them were ever occupied. This way I almost never had to pay for a room, on the condition that I ate dinner and breakfast there. It's definately a buyer's market out here.

Not only do the buildings look like something out of Lord of the Rings, but we got to this first Rohan village as they were holding some sort of archery competition. They all sucked. Most of them were drunk, but each person had his own arrows and the bows were hand made but extremely effective. So some great pictures of Rohan are to come when I get back to Kathmandu. I got a cheap film camera but I'll have the pictures burnt to CD to send off anyway. I spent 3 nights in the district capital of Manang, where I spent two days doing some absoultely stupid and rediculously fun day trips up the sides of the mountians. The first day I went out in Birkenstocks and wool socks (yeah I know, but I had blisters and it was cold!) to try to find some cave somewhere. I don't think I found it, but I ended up climbing up to 4000 meters, at times with knee-deep snow, until I hit some completely abandoned monastery-looking village with a giant eerie looking gold Buddha that must have come on the back of some poor Sherpa. There were some more prayer flags further up, and from the distance it looked like they were accessable. By the time I got close enough to not want to turn back, I realized I was scrambling up a black-diamond slope with either snow-ice or sliding rock to grip on to with my faded-soled sandals. I guess the really stupid part was that if I'd fall/slide down and broke my leg, I'd be a 3-hour trek to any kind of help. But in the end I got to the prayer flags, found them absolutely littering this remote rock outcrop overlooking these giant mountains and canyon. I guess it'd be a good place to sit and meditate for 7 years, especially since it'd be so hard to get back down. I sat there for maybe 30 minutes before I got bored and went down anyway. The boyscout in me made me make my own trail down, since it was impossible to get lost (any way down hill was the right way), which involved a lot of fun, dirty slipping and sliding in the mud, snow, and ice. My sandals are now completely torn up, but are still somehow together despite that day and a dog chewing through 75% of one of the straps in Vietnam. The next day was a bit more conservative, but involved another few hours of scrambling up the side of a mountain trying to get to this temple in a cave somewhere near the top. At one point I lost the trail and found this other cave that was covered with these little plaster prayer-things (again, the pictures will help), it looked just like some archeological site you'd see on the Discovery channel. This was actually the perfect place to sit and think about things, since it was so obviously "the space" for many others. I eventually found this "temple," which was more of this 90-year old Llama's house. I walked in, felt really awkward at having entered somebody's house, and he told me to sid town and then annointed me with some holy sugar water and tied a string around my neck. It was a whole lot more awkward than exctiting, but I guess a cool thing to have done nonetheless.

The next three days were spent acclimatizing to the Throng-La Pass, the highest pass in the world (meaning the highest you could get without climbing a mountian). 5416 Meters tall, about 17,800 feet. I don't know how that compares to the mountains in America, but it's damn high. Really, really high. 2/3rds of the way to the cruising altitude of a 747. Altitude sickness was a big deal, so on the approach I was warned to only climb 2000 feet or less per day. My breathing was doing wierd things, according to the people I'd be sharing rooms for those 3 days with. I'd breath heavily about 4 or 5 breaths and then stop breathing for 20 or 30 seconds altogether. It scared the shit out of 2 different groups of people, but apperently is a perfectly normal way of handling the acclimatization. By the time I got to the high camp where I'd spend the final night before the climb, I had a pounding headache and even started to get a metal taste in my mouth--two signs of mountian sickness. But I was there already, I fell alseep and woke up just fine.

So Yesterday I woke up at 1:30 in the morning because I just couldn't sleep anymore. I'd heard sleep is hard up that high (I was at 4800m) and it was freezing anyway, under two thick blankets, thermals, hat, scarf, and sweater. Breakfast at 4:30, out the door as it got light enough to see at 5:30. Absolutely beautiful day. There's something really cool about sunrise when you haven't been up all night drinking, and spending surrounded by white is even cooler. I got to the top around 8AM and, at 17,800 feet I did the most American thing I knew how to do. I scrambled up the hill another few hundred feet until I was certain I'd reached 18,000 feet. Yeehaw! My brother might have set the family depth record at 160 feet, but I'm pretty sure I now have the altitude record. Take that, Dima!

I got down to the next village by 1, checked into the Bob Marley hotel (?), and checked right out after being creeped out by the first Nepali Ladyboy I'd ever seen, but not before having a delicous Yak Burger. I'm still trying to figure out why I left, but I don't think it's entirely the ladyboy's fault. I was almost out of money, and I had enough to make it to the next village where there's an ATM, but I think once I had the Yak burger I got hooked. I wanted nice food, nice beer, and a nice bed with a hot shower. I was ready to splurge, but I didn't have the money on hand. So I packed out and left at 3 for a 4-hour hike to the ATM. It was stupid. Real stupid. But I had my Ipod on and set to my workout gym music and just felt fantastic so I kept moving, totally high on the massive amounts of oxygen in the air, completely forgetting that I'd be stuck after dark. The land after the pass, by the way, turned from Rohan to Nevada. It sucks on this side. It's desert. Not even cool, death valley desert, just dry Nevada desert badlands. No trees, just a little grass. Not even cacti. So I walked faster. Then the sun went down. Then the rain started. Then the lightning started. Eventually I saw the village off in the distance and walked even faster, but somehow the rain made everything look closer than it actually was. No matter how long I walked, it seemed like I never got any closer. Eventaully it got really dark, really rainy, and I was surroudned by swamp somehow. I was almost, really almost there, and in these last 5 minutes I had to walk calf-deep in mossy, swampy, suction sludge to finally get there. Then the village turned out to be gigantic, but there was a whole giant strip of hotels about 10 minutes away. By now it was really dark and rainy. I started walking past the "old village" on the long road to the "new village" where all the hotels were. There was a giant barbed-wire barricade blocking my path, but I was so tired, cold, wet, and certian I was on the right path that I just walked around it. Two minutes later I was surrounded by Nepali military men shining flashlights at me, asking where I was going. I said, "HOTELS" they said "NO HOTELS, go back!" I told them I was absolutely sure the hotels were this way, and they had no idea what I was saying and motioned me to get the hell out of there. I was so pissed off, but who's to argue with guys in camo gear with guns? I went back there today and apparently it's the army barracks of the "Royal Nepali High Altitude Mountain Warfare School" and they close the road outside at night, isolating the two parts of the village. So I went back to the old village to find one of the old, rustic hotels. To risk making too many Lord of the Rings references, I felt like the hobbits coming to that first little dirty Man village and pleading for a place to stay. I was covered in mud, soaking wet, and aching all over. I did feel accomplished, on the other hand, at having covered at least 25 miles that day, but I don't think this came across in the negotiations for a room. Instead of that rustic old romantic hotel with a chimeny and a fire place, I found some place called the Jimi Hendrix hotel (apparently he stayed there once) that just looked like a piece of crap all over. I was in no mood for negotiating, so I'm paying for the room now, 75 cents big whup. Fortunately, they have fantastic home-made boozes. From Wheat Wine to Aprocot brandy to millet seed Sake, I got DRUNK. Oh, how wonderful! And I met some Japanese trekker and got him drunk while telling him about how the Japanese have invaded the East Village and Inuyasha was taking over the pot-smoking college scene.

So I'm still here today. This town sucks as far as trekking is concerned; it's supplied with power and phones, and you can get here by motorbike and there are even some trucks driving through, which means I'll most likely be following the road for the next few days. But I got here just as the storm started, and now it's really, really raining. At least I'm somwhere that's well supplied and cheap until the storm dies down, but I'm not moving 'till it does. I hear there are nice hot springs two days downt he road, and I'm considering extending the trek back into the mountains. I am 2/3rds around the Anapurna mountians, which are arranged like a giant horseshoe. I can spend another 4 days getting into the middle of the horseshoe, the view's supposed to be rediculous. Otherwise, I can be back in Kathmandu in 3 days if I want. I have 'till the hotsprings to decide.

Anyway, the rain stopped momentarily so I'm off to have myself a Yak Steak. I passed by YakDonalds on my hurry to get to this village, but I hear the food's better here anyway. I'll post again from Kathmandu.

-andrew

2006-04-01T07:32:00.000-08:00

Dear All,
There comes a time in everyone's lives when we must re-evaluate the path we have chosen. It is said that one's so-called "chosen" path is the result of incomplete knowledge and, unless one has the chance to step outside his life to fully evaluate the circumstances before committing, he will ultimately end up missing the true meaning of his life and feel unfulfilled. So was said to me during my meditation retreat, and as a result of my Guru's guidance, I have decided to re-plot my path fully. Next week I will follow him to his mountain ashram where I will permanently part with all of my belongings (clothes, electronic devices, even the money left in my bank account) in order to gain full acceptance into his noble Society of Samadhi. By casting away all my savings, I can more fully immerse myself in His teachings and, given proper guidance and discipline, eventually come closer and possibly return to The Source. Discipline will be intense, food will be scarce, and complete silence will be maintained. Only time and dedication will tell, but during this time I must have no outside contact or attachments to anyone I've known. To make my transformation complete, I must maintain my separation from the world I've known for many years, possibly decades, following this point.

For this reason I must bid a final farewell to all of you, as I will probably not be seeing any of you ever again. Those of you that I will see again will find me a new and changed person, but even that won't be for many, many years. I've already send my letter of declention to USC, forfeiting the position in the entering class of 2006 that I've fought so hard for, but I know it's for a noble cause. I've changed my life, and I feel fantastic. I thank you all for your continued support during my life up to this point. I offer you the following description of my past two weeks as a narrative of how I achieved my current position, and after this post you won't be hearing from me any longer. Again, thanks for your continued support and take care of my former world while I'm gone. Namaste.

OK, happy april fool's day. I couldn't help it. I know that's what some of you were half-expecting to hear at some point, so there you had it. I'm still going to med school, I still have my money, I haven't succumbed to any brainwashing (yet), and this long pause is due to my 17 day trek.

But I did have this half-crazy experience at this meditation camp if you want to hear about it. The coolest part of this experience is that all of you can easily experience the same thing. There are meditation centers all round the US that offer exactly the same course, for free. www.dhamma.org will tell you a little about it, but if you want to hear a more detailed account, keep reading. It's the longest post I'll ever have, but most of its length is on purpose to try to convey the sense of intense boredom for those 10 days. Like the analogy to India I love take so much to heart, my meditation experience was like a giant lump of shit with a few diamonds mixed in that are worth diving for. Also, since I'll be out of contact 'till mid-April, I thought I'd give you something long to chew on. It gets really cool around Day 7, if you want to read ahead, but for it all to make sense it'd be best to stick through the boring bits. That's what I had to do, so I'm passing it on. Just warning you now.

So maybe it was a bit of an overreaction to shave my ead and enter Buddhism school because of a hangover, but I was really pissed off and it wasn't just the $12. I guess I just finally realized had been wasting my time for too long and it's time to do what I really came out here to do. And besides, if it had been my intention to ever pay for sex, it was $12! That's like two girls in Vietnam, or four in Cambodia.

The experience unfolded much like an acid trip: decision to commit, then boredom, then more boredom so you get pissed off that you wasted your time on it, then anxiety, confusion, and finally experience followed by introspection. So here it is, my extended psychedelic experience, detailed chronologically:

My experience of Vipassana camp:

Day 0:
I found myself on a crowded bus full of backpacks and Nepalis, with about twice as many seats as there should be so that I had about 5 inches of leg room for the bumpy 1-hour journey that would take us the 15km straight up a hill overlooking the Kathmandu valley. I had no idea what to expect, other than people I've met traveling have told me to do it. I understood the precepts, as Lev pointed out, that there would be no talking, no eating after midday, men an women would be separated, no comforts, and no sexual activity (yes, that includes shaking too many times after peeing). Other than that, I figured I'd be sitting on a temple floor for 10 days, that was about all I knew.

The bus ride gave me a pain in my knees that I would come to regard as a relative tickle to the pain I'd get later. I get out and they show me to my room, which luckily I get to myself because they only had 38 people to fit 100 spots. Usually they keep everybody in dorms to help enforce the no jerkoff rule, but they said I'd meditate better with my own room. I originally laughed at the idea but I guess they were right in the end.

The place consists of a few acres of land, mostly covered with buildings with tiny garden paths in between, up the hill overlooking Kathmandu. I say overlooking, but the city was usually blanketed a cloud of thick pollution so that the only time I could actually see any of it was after a rain, even though it was less than 10km away. For 700k people, they sure know how to pollute.

The first thing that struck me was how local the population was. Who am I kidding? I couldn't tell if they were Nepali, Indian, Paki, or Tibetan, and they had about the same racial distribution of NYU. Some dark, some not so dark, some Koreans for some reason, and overall the racial distribution of the crowd reminded me of my premed classes. Still, I expected a course full of hippies for some reason, but these guys looked like any old group pulled off the street. Businessmen, students, loafers, everybody. There were two westerners there, one fat British guy whose double chin gave him that same "either depressed or hopelessly apathetic to the world around him" look that Keith from The Office had. The other guy was this german guy with a completely shaved head except for a Hare Krishna pony tail growing out of a circle in the back, which he said he did "just for fun," not for any religious sense. Luckily I met him before we had to stop talking for 10 days, otherwise I would have had quite an interesting impression of him. The story ends with me going trekking with him. There I spoiled it.

Eventualy one of the happy smiling servants (eventually referred to as the bowing happy slavedrivers) informed me I was "requested" to have tea in the dining hall. I followed the German pseudo-Krishna, who had done the course at that location 9 years ago, to the dining hall and had some of the best tea of my life. This hot milk tea, which was traditional Nepali tea that everybody else had come to despise years ago, saved my sanity later on.

Unfortunately during this tea and subsequent meal, I made friends with this German guy and another Nepali I had met waiting for the bus earlier. I call it unfortunate because it's really a lot harder to not talk to someone if you know them, and once the silence began, I'd feel awkward whenever I was near.

We were led into a large hall where the head guru gave us the run-down of the rules. He was an old man, covered in blankets and a Nepali hat (looks like a Russian pointed hat) who sounded as though he were reading from queue cards. No empathy, just a harsh cold voice. I'll say more about him later, but for a while I was worried that he'd be the one conducting the sessions.

At the end of the run-down he gave us the ultimatum that we could leave now. If we chose to stay past 8PM, we'd be locked in for the full ten days. There would be no escape after that point. I considered it for a while, then realized there'd be no transportation back to town anyway, but it was a nice gesture.

At 8PM, The Gong was rung and "Noble Silence" began. I followed the crowd, half of whom had attended the course before and knew what they were doing, to the main meditation hall, where I was given a square pillow that would be my space for the whole time. I sat down, waited with eyes closed for a little while, and started getting worried that that was all I'd be doing from that point on.

Then, seemingly out of nowhere, came the WIERDEST chanting I'd ever heard. The tone was poorly maintained, there were only about three different notes, and at the end of every phrase he would drop his voice to a crawling throat growl that you'd only hear because the micrphone was so close to his throat. I couldn't help but crack up at the sound of it, but then he stopped chanting and told us we were going to learn the art of Annapana. After a group chanting (a formal request to Someone to learn this form of meditation), he gave instructions in Hindi and then English to focus intently on our respiration by observing nothing but the air coming through the nose. We were by no means to change our natural breath, just to be aware of its natural course and all of its sensations within the nose. So I tried. At 9PM we were told to go to sleep.

Day 1:
The Gong sounded loudly and persistently for 10 minutes at 4AM. It was a pleasant sound, more like the ringing of a clear bell than a gong, but any persistant banging like that at 4AM would be enough to wake even me. At 430 came another bell calling us to the hall. It was cold. Ass cold. I put on my thermal top and bottom, jeans, long sleeve shirt sweater, jacket and hat and even wrapped my towel around myself and was still freezing when I got to the hall. They said nothing for almost 2 hours as we sat there shivering, not allowed to do anything. So, I tried doing what the teacher told me, closed my eyes, and tried focusing all my attention on my respiration. Just the part coming through my nose. Without changing my breathing at all, and above all, without thinking about anything else. This is hard to do. I mean really hard to do. Try it. Really, try it. Right now...

Really. Breathing. Nose. Now....

How long did you last before you started thinking about food, or music, or what else was in this blog, or if your boss is looking over your shoulder, or what you did last night? Or how long before you started breathing heavily or shallowly? I quickly learned that, probably because of all the booze but more likely all the TV and Hamburgers I'd been exposed to in the past 20 years, I couldn't hold my attention more than a second or two before wandering off. My attention span was pathetic, and we were supposed to do this for 2 hours? Rediculous. So I did my best, rediverting my attention over an over again in an endless attempt to learn to concentrate for more than 5 seconds at a time. It was impossible.

Worse than that, I'd work for about 5 minutes, then realize my leg had fallen asleep, then stretch and come back to realize my back was full of knots, or wasnt straight, and by the time I finished stretching my legs and cracking my back, I had been thinking about everybody back home or something I was going to do when I got back or something I had done before. Anything but meditating.

Somehow, 2 hours had gone by and the gong rang again. I followed the crowd out to the dining hall for breakfast. Rice porridge with a small cup of bean soup, all served in metal dishes. The tea, again, was fantastic. We got a break for an hour and a half where I went back immediately and took a nap, then at 8 we were called back for meditation.

The whole group moved in complete silence with their heads down the whole time. We were not even allowed to make any kind of eye contact. All forms of communication were prohibited. Actually, when I first got there I was really excited about this prospect. I'd realized that, in 4 months of traveling, that I had the obligation to engage every Westerner I'd see in some sort of conversation, and if I didn't do it they probably would. When I came back to Thailand, I found I was the quiet, "over it" type of traveler and couldn't stand making those same conversations I'd had thousands of times by then. What's your name? Where are you from? How long have you been traveling? Where have you been? Wow, that's great. Where are you going to go next? I've heard and asked those questions so many times it made me sick. Now, finally, I was going to get my 10 days of peace and quiet.
So I sat again in the meditation hall. This time, however, that wierd chanting appeared again and we were given the same instructions, in a soothing, relaxing, new-agey meditative form but without tacky music in the background, to observe respiration through the nose. Which part of the nose is the breath coming through? Left nostril? Right nostril? Both? Was it hard or shallow, hollow or soft? After about 30 minutes of this instruction, we were to meditate 'till 11 with one 5 minute break in between.

For this whole time I felt pretty cool, actually. Not so much that I was getting any kind of results or confidence in meditation, but more that I kept seeing myself meditating and thinking how cool it was to be involved in a 10-day meditation course. After this, I thought, I'd use this method to increase my concentration every morning before going to classes and I'd be such a great student. And I'd be able to concentrate for long periods, and math would be fun, and I'd never be bored waiting in line again because I'd always have something to do. Then I'd realize I'd been daydreaming for the past half hour and I'd been thinking about such a superior concentration precisely as a result of my aweful concentration, so I'd return to thinking of my respiration for another 5 seconds until my mind would wander again. Probably 95% of that day, apart from the time under instruction, was spent daydreaming. The other 5% was just trying to concentrate, a small fraction of that was actual concentration.

The lunch bell rang at 11 and we were served this giant mountain of rice with four differenet scoops of cooked veggies, two tortillas and a small cup of bean soup. This would be the last meal of the day for the old students, but I would get fruit and more milk tea at 5. These meals were to vary slightly for the rest of my time, but not by much. Nevertheless, the cafeteria would come to be one of the defining parts of the experience, I'll go into this later.

For now let's just say I spent the day in this state of content daydreaming, in one sense happy to be there and in another sense frustrated at my lack of attention. Worse than that, the pain of sitting there was steadily getting worse. The knots in my back had multiplied and I if my foot wasn't alseep, my knees were in bitter agony. Somehow I made it through the 1:00-5:00 meditaiton session fueled by memories of college. I got my fruit, had my hour break, then got called back to meditation at 6. It was a long day. It was a really long day. I mean, just sitting there thinking about stuff or trying to focus on one thing for a long period of time was so grueling. At 7:00, we were called to sit in on an hour long videotaped discourse by our teacher, S.N. Goenka, who should probably be introduced at this point:

S.N.Goenka: He is Mr. Vipassana, the guy to start this current Vipassana movement, busy teaching every single class that is ever being given anywhere. In order to be in so many places at once he recorded the entire 10-day course to audio and video tapes that would be played either while we were meditating (audio) or during an hour long discourse every evening (video). Yeah, it's really lame, but at least this way I knew I was getting exactly the same experience as everybody else around the world. I wasn't relying on having a "good" guru.

The discourse was the intellectual arm of the course, explaining everything we were doing at the precise times we were experiencing them. After conducting those courses for the 30 years before he videotaped them, he'd learned exactly what to say to us when. So we learned the history of Vipassana. Apparently, it was exactly and only what Buddha taught and nothing more. Just his teaching before it got corrupted, which was a way of understanding all of reality through knowledge of oneself and ultimately attaining enlightenment this way. Buddha, as I came to understand, was interested in the nature of the universe as much as any noted scientist of the past 400 years, except that he lived without any instruments with which to study the outside world. Instead, he went on the premise that we could never understand the outside world by direct observation anyway beause we would have to narrow its attributes to those detectable by our senses. Any instrument as well, from a microscope to a bubble chamber, would be necessarily limiting our experience of the world to those attributes detectable by that instruement. Instead he hypothesized that our bodies our infinately observable, and by observing the inner world we'd be able to find truths that pertain to the outside world as well. This was either said on that first or second night, but I didn't understand it 'till much later anyway. I'll go more into detail as I come to learn certain parts of that myself, but you'll have to keep reading for that.

But basically, Buddha taught how to see these truths for yourself. No gods, no wierd rules, no statues, no ceremonies. It's basically a do-it-yourself handbook of Peace and Enlightenment, whose focus is experiencing truths for oneself instead of understanding things purely intellectually. This was exactly the way Buddha taught it, if you believe Burmese tradition. Here's the breif history if you care: India was covered in Vipassana practitioners for about 300 years after Buddha died, but eventually it ran the course of all religions and got perverted and corrupted. According to Goenka, a few small groups of Burmese monks kept Vipassana pure for the past 2500 years and now this guy was trying to reignite Buddha's spark. A noble cause. Anyway, my palate was wet and I got excited to try it again. One thing he did say, however, was that he kept noticing students had the hardest times on the 2nd and 6th days. He related the whole course to an operation that works on the deepest parts of the mind, and these are the days of rejection or doubt, after the first incision, where the patient wants to back out and run away. He warned us then. After the discourse we were bought back to the main hall where an audio tape told us to focus our attention on a smaller area of the nose of our choosing, either the lip of the nostril or a part in the middle or somewhere above my upper lip. We practiced for 30 minutes and then went to sleep.

Day 2: Quite possibly the longest day of my life. It was no longer "cool" to be stuck in this meditation hall for the two coldest and drowsiest hours of the morning, but I stuck to it (mostly out of fear that the happy smiling slavedrivers would do something). I was determined not to fall into this trap he had warned us again, and I actually managed to bounce out of bed and head down. For those two hours, I tried my absolute best to not get discouraged, and maybe I spent a full 10% concentrating this time.

After breakfast I went back to sleep. When the gong woke me up, I was pissed and didn't want to go at all. It was a total turn around from that morning. My back hurt, I was exhausted. I had no desire to go, yet I pulled myself out of bed and dragged myself to the hall in a way that reminded me exactly of the last year of college having to wake up early for my Physical Chem course.

Actually much of this day was spent thinking about its relation to that P-chem course. I kept finding that concentrating on absolutely nothing but this one tiny little part on the front of my nostril was as hard, if not harder, as concentrating on the most boring and unintelligable of mathamatical proofs for extended periods of time. Not only that, but I felt that same sense of frustration boil up from inside me and form a complete and total block that stopped me from progressing any further. I was to later learn this in subconscious terms, that an inner part of me rebelled against any inner probing that might lead to its eventual demise, and it put up a curtain of severe aggitation to stop me. This made perfect sense once I realized it, but only because this aggitation had formed such a curiously complete block that it was impossible to pass. It's the same frustration we all feel when we know we have to do something and it's not just that we don't want to do it, but it becomes unreasonably impossible to progress any further without going outside for a walk or something. This frustration manifested itself physically as well, tying up my back in painful irritating muscle spasms and constantly diverting my attention to the coming pains in my legs from sitting cross-legged for any more than a few minutes at a time.

This was where John's advice of trying to sing entire albums or recite full movies came into play. I got through most of 40 Oz. to freedom and the entire B-side of Abbey road without stopping. It seemed my attention span had at least increased in that way. But the boredom. The intense, unwavering boredom wouldn't leave me alone. The only way to deal with the boredom was to focus on my breath, which would eventually make me so frustrated I'd prefer boredom.

But the reality was that I was stuck there. The rules were strict, and I lived in perpetual fear of being reprimanded by one of the Happy Smiling Slavedrivers who, between all their bows and smiles would ask you so kindly to return to what you're supposed to be doing that you just feel aweful for every being so ungrateful. So for 3 hours I waited for that 11:00 lunch bell, doing my best to concentrate and supress the frustration, which seemed to only make it worse.

Lunch was bliss. I learned to make fajitos out of the tortillas, using various combinations of the veggies, and dipping it into the bean soup. Oh, the thrill of it.
But eventually lunch was over. I went back to sleep.
I barely rolled out of bed at the call of the 1:00 bell, because I knew this would lead to 4 straight hours of "meditation."

Possibly because of the refreshed perspective, but more likely due to my sense of mental self-preservation, I began to realize the nature of the exercise. Concentration was the goal of the exercise, but it was also the method of survival. Once one surrenders fully to the concentration of any one thing, time narrows discreetly down to the present. One of the topics mentioned in the discourse the night before was that the reason we can't concentrate is because the mind has been conditioned to divert all attention away from the present. Any attempt to focus on the present results in memories of the past or plans of the future. The mind has become a sort of wild animal, and the purpose of these first few days had been to beat it into submission. As I'd focus in on the present, however, boredom and frustration become impossible. Boredom is the comparison between the present situation and one of the past or future that may be more exciting. If past and future are eliminated, the only moment that exists is the present. With no comparisons to a more preferable situation, boredom becomes impossible and ideally you could concentrate forever. Similarly, frustration is the aversion to the present situation by comparison to a more preferable one. If the idea of a more preferable situation were eliminated, frustration would too disappear. The same thing happens with concentration on anything. It's perfectly reasonable to get lost in the most boring task and never realize any frustration or boredom until you become aware of the outside world, or things you could be doing.

At the end of the day we had small meditation sessions with the head guru, where he would ask some questions and then say something, then we'd meditate together. The Head Guru was this old guy who sits in the front of the class with his legs crossed, completely obscured by the layers of clothing and blankets and big Nepali (looks kinda Russian) hat covering every bit of him but his face, which was always tilted downward as he slept most of the time, except for occational bouts of consciousness in which he would bumble awake just long enough to shout sal-ZAK!, which apparently means WAKE UP in Nepali, and then he falls back asleep or watches over us intently for a few minutes and then falls back asleep. When I got to actually come close to him during the small sit-in meditation, I found his face to be completely benevolent, childlike, and compassionate to everything any of us had to say. It had that kind of permanent smile that only existed in the eyes, and was such a stark contrast to what he looked like from far away that eventually I came to finding questions just for the purpose of being around him to ask them. Props to this guy for filling the role perfectly.

During this session, he told me that we weren't actually yet practicing Vipassana, that this was just a concentration exercise to prepare us for the real teaching. With that knowledge I went to bed excited for the next day.

Day 3 and 4 kinda blended together. The instructions had changed from being aware of respiration to becoming aware of all the sensations present in the entire nose region, and eventually just to the sensations present between the upper lip and the nostril. You'd think that'd be a boring task but after a few hours I noticed there was a whole lot going on there. There'd be itches, tingles, pressure ripples, tiny skin permutations related to the movement of your nostrils in response to the respiration.

This was actually where things started getting cool. I gradually came to sharpen my mind to notice smaller and smaller things. I learned a lot about the experience of an itch if you sit and observe it carefully instead of ever scratching it. It moves! I had no idea. Imagine my excitement for learning that most of my itches would move about a half inch before dying away, given the boredom surrounding it. At one point I was convinced I felt the itch of a single neuron, which I could tell because it was rediculously faint and "twinkled" rapidly between being on or off with no gray area in between.

So you sit there for an hour and observe the jungle of sensation that somehow cropps up around the mustache area, then go outside and all the trees are sparkly. Really, it's that easy and unexpected. It might initially have something to do with being couped up in the dark for so long, but the experience lasts for several hours. I noticed this first on the third day after thinking about the ultra-subtle sensations around my nose for a few hours, and when I got outside I could swear I was on mescaline. This made sense to me intellectally, if the mind is trained to observe subtler and subtler characteristics of the body, it might pick up on things otherwise thrown out by the "reducing valve" Huxley described as his "Doors of Perception." The radiance and intensity of colors was reminiscent of my previous mescaline experiences, so I got excited and kept working at it until the sensations got more elaborate and easier to perceive. The amount of hard work required for this course cannot be stressed more. I struggled to concentrate more than any other class I've ever taken (mostly because I had no other alternative for entertainment), and this time the reward is immediate.

I also started to notice several other changes in my perception and thought patterns. My concentration was improving, for one, and by the end of the third day I had no trouble concentrating on my breath for several minutes at a time. Because the array of sensations around the nose area are infinately more interesting, I could focus intently on that one small area for up to 30 minutes without any stray thoughts. The inside of my head, as well, felt clear somehow. Actually it felt embarassingly like having the cobwebs cleaned out, or some massive Spring Cleaning when all the excess furniture was taken out. Sitting here typing this and remembering that feeling in relation to my present state, I recognize those days as having been devoid of all that background chatter going on in my mind that I never noticed until it was gone: what am I doing now, what am I doing after this, did I lock my door, should I be meeting anyone right now, am I forgetting something, I really need to buy that, I should email this guy, etc. All these thoughts combine to form some kind of static background noise in the back of my head, and these were all the thoughts that kept creeping up after I silenced my important, current thoughts. By the third day of meditation, most of these were silenced as well, so when I did have important current thoughts to consider, they had my undevided attention. Again, I thought of how useful this skill will be for med school.

On the afternoon of Day 4, we were finally given instruction in Vipassana. This came in the form of a 2-hour lecture during which we weren't supposed to change our posture at all. Mind you, by this point I'd worked up to only 20 minutes without changing postures. We sat in the main hall until the chanting came again, then we were instructed to move the area of awareness from the mustache/nose area to the top of the head. Once we started feeling any kind of sensation there, we were to move our attention down, gradually through every part of the body, passing each part only after a sensation was felt. So this is Vipassana.

Day 4, 5, and 6 were spent gradually developing this skill. With each sweep from head to toe, the sensations got subtler and subtler until a thin layer of them covered the entire body. The trick is, the more calm the mind, the subtler sensations you can experience. A panicky mind, for example, will hardly even experience pain. A furious mind, as well, would experience massive pains but usually not itches. A calm mind might experience knots in your back. In order to experience these extremely subtle sensations, one must be in a complete state of tranquility, bordering on hypnosis. This screws up any scheme of immediately analyzing any experience, since the realm of conscious analysis is far too exciting to feel these sensations. As soon as any such analyzing thought comes to mind, the sensations disappear. It's kinda like looking at a really dim patch of stars that disappear whenever you look directly at them. I soon learned, too, that my mind had been explicitly trained to analyze all information given me, so I spent one hell of a time trying to break this habit of immediate analysis (I'll be the first to admit that this is a very dangerous move, considering it could potentially open me up to some serious brainwashing. As far as I remember, or was allowed to remember, no instructions to kill the Prime Minister of Malaysia were given). They soon told me the point wasn't even about the sensations themselves, Buddha just found them to be a useful tool to lure my mind into the meditative state. Only a meditative (hypnotised, thoughtless) state could experience these sensations, so I could walk this path backwards to achieve such a state by concentrating on the senations. Clever.

By the 6th day, as was warned during the first discourse, I was ready to leave. By then, I got real good at exploring my body from the inside out. I finally found out for myself the basis of Eastern Medicine, of inward study instead of outward study, and slowly I became personally aware of things I'd only read about. By the 6th day I could pinpoint 5 of my chakras and feel this intense pressure between my eyebrows (an experience a lot of people feel but is really not as exciting as a Third Eye experience would be, actually it got to be pretty annoying). I'd be able to mentally probe all of my muscles, and when I'd get bored I'd try to feel around some of my innerds. I was able to feel sensations down my esophagus down to my stomach pretty easily, but kept getting lost in my inner intestine. I was surprised to learn how big my lungs actually were, but for some reason I had trouble feeling any sensation within my heart. The coolest thing I did, and I know John would be proud of this one, was be able to accurately describe the size and shape of a turd based on the sensations around it. It was quite the deja-vu when it came out anyway. Stuff like that kept me occupied for a long time. I got really excited to actually be able to personally experience the Anatomy class I would be taking next year.
I felt that I had learned a very valuable technique and it'll be nice to go home and practice it. But I kept looking up at the mentally enhanced trees and getting itchy feet to go trekking, and my frustration doubled as I kept thinking about being trapped in this "camp." I wanted out, but for a totally different reason. The new meditation instructions were all new variations of the same concept--feeling sensations all over the body, and I figured I'd learned all I could learn.

The 7th day it changed

I was totally frustrated all morning and even after breakfast at having to waste more of my time sitting there while these beautiful mountains were all around, just waiting to be trekked.

At some point meditating just before lunch, I became aware of something more than bodily sensation. I became aware of my frustration as a sensation itself. For the past few discourses, the teacher told us about the relation between craving and aversion, how everything returned to the sense of craving, and once craving was illiminated then the real work could begin. What I was experiencing was craving itself, manifested as a physical sensation in the middle of my body about three inches above my solar plexus. It was an honest physical sensation that corresponded to a my mental craving to flee, and having observed it before reacting to it, I had three options:

1. I could do what I had always done and fuel it by thinking of how I wanted to get out of there. This would inevitably lead to the frustration growing, and getting pissed off at being stuck there until I'd be overpowered by emotion. Previously I would only notice the massive sensation of frustration. Now, for the first time, I could "feel" the seed of craving before it overpowered me.
2. I could try to supress this craving consciously, something I've been conditioned to do when I'm not supposed to feel something, and something which in the long run will inevitabely come out multiplied later down the road. I suppressed this desire to flee for the first 6 days, for example, and on the 6th day I was completely overwhelmed by it.
3. I could walk the fence and neither supress or fuel the sensation, and simply observe. This is the most difficult path, and is what is taught in Vipassana. Actually, I was to learn, this is the most applicable goal of early Vipassana training. To avoid the temptation to fuel or supress an emotion, to simply observe it as it wells up within, it'll eventually dissapate on its own.

Say I'm in a meditative state and I experience this craving to do something or to not do something. As soon as I'd give compliment it with thought, I would not only fuel it but I'd also break my meditative state. As I said earlier, the realm of thought is too exciting to experience subtle sensations. So if I let my mind concentrate on the source of this craving, it multiplies and I break out of this meditative state. Basically I pop back into awareness all pissed off. The basic instinct is to react to this sensation, but the only way to remain hypnotised is to not react at all. The applicable goal of this whole camp was to break this habit. If you can become aware of a negative emotion and identify it before it gets out of hand, you might be able to stop it before it grows strong enough to illicit an action. Say you're really, really pissed off all of a sudden. If you can focus in on the feeling of anger, you might be able to stop pouring gas on the fire before your hand goes through a wall. That's a worthy cause. Fortunately not too applicable to myself, but anybody who is easily overcome by emotion could benefit greatly from this course.

So anyway, I became aware of craving as a physical sensation and had the opportunity to consciously ignore it and let it pass. Every sensation passes, I've learend. From the tiny subtle sensations that last mere fractions of a second to the massive pains that last hours, it'll all pass. And just like that, the craving to get out of there will pass. They had been teaching this for a long time, to tell us to let cravings pass and be aware of them instead of reacting, but I'd realized then that never actually wanted Craving to leave. Craving is fun. Craving is the source of life and excitement and, one of my major realizations that blocked any further progress on the 6th day was that, let's face it, Buddhists are boring. They have no drive. I bet Richard Gere is a great guy but would probably bore your head off if you met him at a party, and I didn't want to turn into that. But eventually I surrendered to the fact that this attachment to Craving was what made me so miserable there. If I lost my cravings, my desires, I'd become a robot. By this point my mind was wide open, strained at so much concentration, and I was having less and less thoughts. All the thoughts I had left pertained to my cravings for food or sleep or to get the hell out of there, but other than that my mind was blank. I felt like a lobotomy patient, and I wasn't ready to let go of the last of my thoughts to complete (of as I later found out, Start) the surgery. I think Tom Waits put it best, "I'd rather have a BottleinFrontofme than a Frontal lobotomy." If I could only let go, on the other hand, I might actually learn something. So this time when I finally became aware of Craving as its own sensation, I surrendered to the technique and let it pass.

From that point on I felt exactly like a mental patient. Sitting in the cafeteria with white walls and metal dishes, with my shaved head and beenie feeling like a recently bandaged brain surgery, my head was no longer thinking of how strange it was that I was so excited to make fajotos out of Nepali food. I was actually, genuinely excited to make fajitos out of Nepali food. I consciously kept all other thoughts at bay just to see what I could get out of this mental state, but I do remember being genuinely, radiantly happy (soberly, and for no good reason at that) for the first time in a long while. The world maintained the mescaline visual feel, but with the added empathy of an ecstasy experience. I apologize for all these drug references, but I find it hard to describe these feelings in any other way, drugs just tend to open these doors automatically and temporarily. Here were the same sensations, only cheaper.

I spent the whole 2 hours of our lunch break in a daze. Few thoughts, but the thoughts I did have were all revealing in some way. I kept aware of my inner sensations and remained careful not to react to any cravings.

I came back to the meditation hall to have the most intense meditation experience of my time there to that point, that would consistently get beat the following day by a crazier one. This time, as I tried again to focus my concentration on my inner sensations, I'd notice knots appearing in my back to block the subtle free-flowing sensations I had come to enjoy. With the mind trained on the most subtle of sensations, even the smallest knot in my back caused enough pain to break my concentration and try to massage or stretch it out.

When the mind is totally blank long enough, it will fulfill its own necessity of constantly chewing on memories by pulling up the really old memories. Things popped up from my childhood that I won't bother mentioning here because, in addition to being private, would be really boring to everyone else. Even I thought they were boring, and they were supposed to be my so-called "repressed" memories. I had no idea why I'd randomly think of such mundane things, and occasionally one of these memories would illicit some kind of emotional response out of nowhere. For example, I focused in tightly around one of the knots on my back and suddenly I was overwhelmed by the sensation of being absolutely terrified and angry at the same time. This emotion came out of nowhere, but with it came the crystal-clear memory of being trapped in a doctor's office by my mother. The doctor wanted to administer a 100-point scratch test on my back (a test where the skin is pricked with an allergen to see if there's an allergic reaction), and I cried so hard out of fear of the pain that they finally agreed not to do it. I must have been 5 or 6. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out why that one crept up...

But the thing that contrasted most with everything I'd believed previously was that the memories or emotions somehow correlated with the knots on my back. As my awareness moved to one of these knots, a memory would appear. I remember this one knot had appeared randomly, so I focused in on it to consciously ignore it and I had the image of a digital mushroom. I then focused on the thought of the mushroom until I was playing Mario in the living room of our old house and my little sister, still a toddler, came over and pulled my hair and I got so absolutely fed up with her that I went into a rage about how I could never get any sleep because she'd always come into my room and pull my hair because I was lying down. I was SO angry. I must have been 8 or 9. I let the anger come and go without adding to it, then the memory faded and the knot cleared up.

This really bothered me. Really, I mean I know I believe in a lot of mind-body mumbo jumbo stuff but whenever I'd hear that a knot or a pain is a "repressed memory," I'd stop taking that person seriously. This happened twice on my trip so far. But here I am, having experienced it personally, and I'm a little stuck. I guess I've experienced more to convince myself that it is true than to convince myself otherwise, so I might as well leave it at that.

In any case, it did make perfect sense to me that if I could concentrate all my awareness on a knot to consciously ignore it (if that makes any sense), it would dissapate. My understanding is that a knot is muscle that has overtightened to create pain, then the muscle around it overtightens in reacton, creating its own pain and causing a positive feedback reaction that ends in a stable ball of tension that remains after the original pain has left. If one can mentally go in there and stop the muscles from reacting to each other, the knot will eventually release. I guess this still leaves room that the origins of the knots could be repressed somethings, but in any case I used this understanding to clear knot after knot after knot as they would randomly pop into my back (and I do acknowledge most of them were due to my posture).

From that point on, every meditation session was more like a day at the spa. I'd come out a little lighter, with the same feeling as having relaxed all your muscle spasms after a deep-tissue massage. That, finally, was work being done on my inner self, and I could feel it happening when I'd come outside after a session and feel lighter.

That was basically it until the 9th day, which was the last day of real proper meditation. On the 10th, we'd break our code of silence and re-learn how to interact with people. But after breakfast on the 9th day, the teacher told us how to achieve Bangha state--that mystical crazy wierd cool state of existence that's the envy of every beginning Vipassana practitioner. It's the state of total realization of impermanence, where you become aware of every atom of your being and dissolve into a state of sensation. And, of course, as soon as he explained it I was overwhelmed by craving to experience it and lost all my focus for the next several hours.

He said the first step of this was to feel subtle sensation on absolutely every part of the body, that all the intense sensations should be gone. Eventually, even the long-term pains of my knees, legs, or back would disappate after being ignored long enough. Then, I could start feeling sensations inside (which I had already been doing so this part was easy) until the same subtle sensations coated the inside as well and all I was left with was this awareness of a spinal cord. Eventually, even the awareness of this solid spinal cord would turn to subtle sensations and I would achieve the Bangha state, whatever that was.

This is how it happened to me: as soon as I got to the point of subtle sensations all over me and blanketing most of my insides, two knots appeared in my back. It was the afternoon of the last real day and I was in no mood to deal with those knots, I figured I'd just go ahead feeling subtle sensations all over my body except for those two knots. After about 15 minutes of concentration, I was aware of every point in my body simultaneously and even my spinal cord had "dissolved" into a sea of floating sensations. Everything I had previously considered "solid" and "permanent" were now freely coming in and out of existence, but I was still aware of a human form. It's impossible to describe how I could do this, or why, but somehow I consciously dispersed this body of sensation into a cloud I felt was about 10 feet away from me. I felt just like a Nova, and was no longer aware of any part of myself except for those two knots on my back. It felt like, if someone was to look at me, I'd look like nothing but two eyeballs and two black smudges floating in midair. Actually they weren't even eyeballs, they were this distinct and still unpleasant pressure sensation between my eyebrows. I still don't know if this is the Bangha state, but it felt pretty cool. But that was it: pretty cool. Is that what I spent 10 days of my life doing? This? I spent about 5 minutes like this, trying to appreciate this odd sense of cloud-being and use it to find some semblance of God, or Power, or the Source, or Buddha, or Vishnu, or Jesus, or ANYTHING that would turn this into a life-changing experience.

For a while I thought I had screwed up the experience because I didn't bother to get rid of those two knots, and the perception of them kept me grounded in reality. But I'm pretty sure that was it. I had experieced everything there was to know about the world--nothing. That was it. All my sensations are imparmenent and could not be relied upon for anything because I could fling them 10 feet away from my body if I so desired. Amazing.

The life-changing realization came a full day after this experience, when I put the course in perspective. It was all an exercise in impermence. The awareness each sensation, from pain to craving to this subtle stuff, is really to solidify the concept that every sensation is impermanent. The pleasant warm flow of sensation I'd been experiencing around my body, if looked closely, is not nearly homogenous. It's like looking at a static TV from far away to see gray, and then coming close to see a dance of thousands of particles of black and white clicking on and off. Everything about this sensation was impermanent, even my perception of it would always eventually pass. Between subtle sensations that lasted only the tinyest fractions of a second, and these massive pains that would last several minutes or longer, the whole concept of impermanence gradually took form.

Everything is impermanent. My perception of indigestion will pass, my numb leg will pass, my joint pains will pass. Even my arm itself will pass, my entire body will pass, this building will pass, the ground will change. Everything is impermanent. Rivers will change course, lakes dry up, and even a mountain is just a slow wave. Everything we know is changing, and will always be changing, and so the most rediculous thing we could ever do is get attached to anything being the same. It will change, as everything does. If you're attached to the way things "should be," you have no reason to get stressed when this picture threatens to change, because it always will. If you're attached to your belongings, why get upset when they get stolen or lost since they will stop being yours by one course or another? So many relationships end out of an attachment to the way the other person was when you first met them. Everything changes. Even I, this body, this mind, everything about me will eventually cease to be. There's nothing to hold on to, and no way to hold on to it anyway. It was the most depressing truth I've ever had to experience head-on.

But on the other hand, since I've become discretely aware of this nihilism, I'm free to enjoy things more fully. This moment right now is the only time things will ever be this way, so whenever something really fun is happening there's no reason not to get the most out of it. Everything good will change, so there's nothing wrong with getting the best out of it so long as you don't get depressed when the shit falls. When it does--you lost your job, your girlfriend dumped you, White Castle is closed--things will inevitably get better.

The trick is to control your craving for the good times. If you leave out any attachment to the good times, you can't possibly feel bad for the bad times. Similarly, if you don't get attached to the bad times, you won't contaminate the good times with past misery. Maybe I like this philosophy personally because it's one giant long extravagant way of saying what every man's been trying to tell his girlfriend for centuries, "Please babe, don't get attached." I mean, really, if there's no attachment then each others company can be fully enjoyed every time they're together, and there's no misery when the two are apart. But that's a different argument altogether...

Suffice it to say, I got to personally experience something which, although from the outside perspective might be looked at as simply a product of my imagination, I believe as experiential truth. The idea of physical knots manifesting from my deeper conscious, for example, is entirely unproven so nobody would believe it except those who had experienced it. To touch a totally different argument altogether, Buddha supposedly was able to feel his body down to the subatomic particle and determined that they pass in and out of existence so fast that they cease to be and reappear "trillions and trillions of times between every blink of the eye." He came short by I think another 150 orders of magnatude, but the idea was that he "felt" the reality of quantum physics 2500 years before it was "proven." It makes me reconsider the whole concept of truth, that if something that remains scientifically unproven could ever be considered truth. For me, brought me to the conclusion that the whole point of the scientific method is to be able to spread a conviction of truth that one person has to others. One person arrives at a conviction and would like to convince another, he outlines a thought process and shows evidence to support each step to guide the other person experientially to arrive at the same intellectual conclusion. This is what was done for me during this course, I was led by the hand down the same path that Buddha followed and found out, for myself, what he was talking about. I didn't feel muons or anything, but I did follow the path long enough to convince myself of several things that are now obvious to me. That, as far as I'm concerned, is good enough truth for me.

Tomorrow morning I'm heading on my trek. It's around the Annapurna region, about 300km of walking I think. The past few days I made good friends with one of the guys from the meditation camp, this Nepali guy who has been so incredibly and rediculously kind and generous (even though he's dirt poor and absolutely refuses to let me pay for anything). He's been so kind to me that it's kinda making me uncomfortable actually, so it'll be nice to get out. On the other hand, I'm going out on the longest camping trip of my life, alone, in the middle of a country during civil war, with nothing but a compass, a map, some money, and some clothes. I was told sleeping bags are useless since the hostels are so cheap, so I don't even have one. I've already met some friends to travel with and it's the high season and a very busy trail so I expect to see enough people along the way to never have to walk alone. Still, I'm really really REALLY looking forward to the opportunity to finally get out a bit and practice some of this meditation stuff I've been writing so much about. It'll be a good crunchy time, at long last.

I've also accidentally become a vegitarian, and I'll proably continue during the trek (they hardly have enough animals for milk and fur, let alone meat up there). No alcohol, either, for 2 weeks and probably 2 more (unavailable anyway also). It's a full detox. 4 weeks of total recouperation. The Eye of the Storm. OH THE HEPATIC FREEDOM! Kumbaya, my LORD....Koooom Bye YAh.

2006-03-14T21:24:00.000-08:00

OK, I can appreciate Nepal in all respects but the FUCKING INTERNET! This will be the THIRD time I'm writing this email, the first time being lost in a brief power outtage and the second being stranded on the computer I was writing it on when the connection to the internet failed. The browser was even too old to have the autosave function on it. AARGH. Let me at least mention how beautifully written, elegantly composed, and marvelously executed the past two blogs were. When was the last time a blog made you stand up and cheer, then cry? Well that was what you missed. Thanks, Nepal. Now you just get this shit:

Ugh, I've started this thing twice already so you'd think I should remember how it goes. Oh yeah, in one version I continued the analogy I had of coming back to Thailand in order to switch gears between my two main trips, Southeast and South Asia. And, because I'm new at driving a stickshift, I rode the clutch for about three weeks and then popped it out about two days ago fast enough to give me whiplash. It happened when I woke up on the floor of this girl's place I had seen the day before, but had no recollection of where I was or how I got there. Looking back on the day before, my birthday, I realized it had been an absolutely great, drunk, crazy, fun time. Fit to be the last. For a while anyway.

That was 3 days ago. Since then I've shaved my head, enrolled in a monastery, and am getting ready for a 3-week trek through the himallayan wilderness. Well, maybe it's more like a buzzcut, a 10-day vipassana course, and a long walk along a path, but it sounds cool anyway. The buzzcut's awesome, I look rediculous! If I can find somebody to take a picture and email me, I'll post it up. I look just like one of those Goombahs from Mario Brothers. But it will really make the meditating and trekking a whole lot easier.

Anyway, Nepal: as it tends to happen, I came here at exactly the right time to witness the Holi festival, a day when the entire country of nepal celebrates the coming of springtime by hurling bags of colored water at each other. This really happy looking nepali guy who owned the bakery I had my breakfast at invited me to come back at 11 and celebrate Holi with him. So I went back, thinking we were going to throw water around, but instead we headed to this really tiny, totally local restaurant (about 10 by 15 feet long, including kitchen) and ordered food and beer. The beer, however, came in the form of a bucket filled with fermented millet. It looked like wet, rotten birdseed and smelled like sake. Apparently they wet it, add yeast, and let it sit in the corner of the room for a month, then scoop it into a bucket and serve it. The waitress then added hot water to it until it was full and gave us a metal filter straw to sip out of. Tasted like sake, too. When we're finished, she adds more hot water. Basically, you keep adding hot water about 5 to 7 times until you've washed the seeds of all their alcohol, and by then you're really drunk.

So then it was time to head outside for the festivities. I got painted up to look like Braveheart, because if I didn't someone else would do it for me. I had a much better description of this in the other posts that were lost, and I don't really have the time to go into it right now. Just imagine zig-zagging down the 10foot wide streets, trying to dodge the bags filled with parasite river water being thrown at you by kids on the roofs of 4 story buildings lining the street, and simultanously trying to dodge the motorcycists and rickshaw drivers who are doing the same while doing their best to miss the massive potholes that litter the road. Tourists make great targets. I developed several strategies of not getting hit, but most tourists, particularly the girls, were absolutely covered head to tow in color and water. I remember this one part of the street where the concrete was completely obscured by green, yellow, and red color. Women were hard to find on the street, because apparently Nepali men have no idea how to flirt so instead of actually approaching a girl they wait until this festival to pelt them with bags of water. Instead, the girls are high up on the roofs throwing their own bags down at the lonely boys.

Anyway, I gotta run. This meditation course starts soon and I gotta register. It's a 10-day Vipassana course, you can learn all about it from www.dhamma.org or ask any hippie. Alex made it 8 hours, so my immediate goal is to make twice that. I'll do my best to stay the whole 10 days, but I get the feeling that those first few days of sitting still, without talking, without eating after noon, without reading or writing, and waking up at 4 will be the most difficult thing I'll ever do out here. Wish me luck.

I'll be out of any kind of contact for the next 10 days, but between this post and the last one it should be enough to fill my quota.

2006-03-13T19:48:00.000-08:00

Happy Birthday to me.

I've had some pretty crazy birthdays but there's always been some kind of expectation to fulfill, people to "catch up with," or hidden agenda somewhere. I guess what made this one so much fun was that I didn't expect it in the slightest. I mean, 24 isn't that special of a number (except, of course, that it's the last time for 22 years that I'll have consecutive even numbers, which is great), but everybody around me was looking for some reason--any reason--to go nuts. I must have just hit the bill.

My birthday surprise officially started when my night bus to Bangkok arrived at 5AM. It was still dark and I was tired and pissed off that any hotel I find was going to charge me full price for the 2 hours of nighttime left. I literally spend 3 minutes walking (covered in backpacks) before some Thai gay guy and his pretty lady friend pull me into the bar they're at and start offering me drinks. Alarm bells started going off in my head, particularly when i got a good look at this girl. She was skinny. Real skinny. I mean way too skinny for me, even, but there was no sign that this form was the product of any illness or disease or anything. I figured she was probably just a whore and, in any case, the gay guy was with kept buying me drinks hoping I'd go for him.

The sun rose and I got drunk. This girl didn't come onto me one bit, which gave me enough confidence that she wasn't going to ask for money. So I hit on her a bit until she invited me to stay at her place, on account that I didn't have a room yet. What a sweetheart. It was a nice welcome to Bangkok, anwyay, but I woke up at noon and, after checking to make sure she didn't take anything, left to find myself a real room.

That was a nice start to the day.

So I went out to buy a plane ticket outta there. It turns out I fucked up and forgot to get my Indian visa and I would have had to wait a full week to get it. Nepal, on the other hand, offers visas on arrival. So at the drop of a hat I changed my plans around entirely and bought a ticket to leave two days later for Kathamandu. I guess that's why I travel alone.

I met up with my friend Mark, whom I had known on the 10-day motorcycle trip and for a few days before and after in Chiang Mai, and whom I'd seen for another week down in Ko Pangan. When we went out, it turns out he had a table full of friends here, and when they asked what it was I wanted to do for my birthday, I said the only thing I could, considering it was almost my last night in Thailand. "I want to see the worst smut imaginable."

I mean, I wasn't out to get laid (that need had already been fulfilled), and I wasn't out to see any disgusting child-porn or slavery or pissing or shitting or anything like that. But I did want to see what it was that everybody came to Bangkok for, because it definately wasn't the temples. Anyway, it was enough to get half the table up and with us. There were three Marks and two Thai girls (one of whom was the legitimate girlfriend of "my" Mark, the other was being paid by another Mark to be his girlfriend for the past 10 days). After the cab ride to the Pat Pong district (otherwise known as the PingPong district), the guys decided to have a quick drink at a local cafe first, since beers will be so expensive inside the clubs. I was already a little drunk, but before we could gulp down our drinks and go, the waitress stuck a cake under my chin and the whole place sang happy birthday. It was one of those really sweet, really tacky moments that made me realize I'd actually made some good friends out here. Back in Ko Pi Pi, ludo (the french guy from the motorcycle trip) gave me a birthday present of videotaping a series of video birthday messages, including singing the tackiest, most hilarious version of Happy Birthday I've heard so far, and burning me a CD of everything on his camera since my camera had been broken. Some of you will meet him, as he plans a Las Vegas trip at some point int he next year.

Anyway, I blew out the candles and went to see a pingpong show. It was a little disspointing, but since we got there a little late they had ended their major show. I did get to see a girl spit two (non-hardboiled) eggs into a cup, and then some other girl smoked two cigarettes out of hers. As this was going on, some really pretty hooker comes over to one of the Marks and then jumped on me when he told her he had no money, it was my birthday, and I was full of money. So she jumped on my lap, and gave me quite the lap dance as she chewed my ear off. At first I tried to pull her hands away from where they were going, then I realized she had nothing better to do and kept my own hands on my money and enjoyed the ride. Eventually I told her I wasn't going to pay for anything and she left with a slightly dissaponited grin.

But it any case it got my heart pumping. They turned on some aweful dance club music and I started dancing with both Marks' girlfriends. Soon enough, I was up on the pole myself with the hooker girlfriend dancing with me. I was basically sober, and I had absolutely no sexual desire behind it, but there was this massive grin on my face that I only then realized had been missing for the past month. It was back. So I kept dancing with this hooker girlfriend, who was actually a really cool, funky, witty chick that is really good at what she does--being that cool, funky, witty girlfriend you wish you had, and can have at a price. Oh yeah, and her boyfriend of the time was a 40year old fat bald Englishman who was a real cool guy, but albeit not quite attractive. Anyway at some point I managed to make him jealous, which he later told me screwed with his head since you're not supposed to ever get jealous of a hooker, and so i stopped. Actually, by the end of the night I picked up the bartender, of all people, but she was too nice of a girl, living with her family, and I couldn't be ok with leading her on. She did call me later, that was nice.

We left the club and followed some skeezy salesman guy to the "afterhours" club, which was basically a tacky (crowded) club with a line of whores sitting on red velvet cushions with their backs to wall mirror, waiting patiently to be picked up by her new "soulmate." So we left and ended up right back to where i had initially got off the bus less than 24 hours before. Buckets were $5 (one pint of whiskey and two redbulls) so we just got hammered. By then we were dead sober from the price of the drinks, and one hour later we were dead drunk from the price of these drinks. It was 4 or 5 AM and I don't remember much after that. I remember I unfortunately ran into the girl from that morning, who then took me back to her place when I was in no condition even make it home.

I woke up the next morning with absolutely no idea where I was. It's been a long while since this had happened to me, and to be honest it was a lot of fun trying to piece things together. "Where am I? Why does my head hurt? Hey, this place looks familiar, kinda like that girl's place yesterday. Holy shit, it is that girl's place from yesterday. And that's her lying next to me. But she has her clothes on. Did I get laid? I gotta get outta here" Slowly it came to me that she led me back there, then I vaguely remember lying down for a second and then I woke up. It was almost 1PM. She must have been pissed off. I wake her up and she's got nothing nice to say to me, so I say goodbye and leave. As I walk home i realized she'd taken $12 from me. Bitch. At least that habit I'd formed of never taking anything valuable out finally paid off. I went back to her appartment and banged on the door, demanding my money back. She lets me in and falls back asleep, denying everything (poorly) and saying I could look around if I want; basically, that I wasn't going tofind it. I went home and fell asleep.

The next day I flew to Nepal and here I am. I'll be back online later to give the whole report.

2006-03-09T21:56:00.000-08:00

I was having a beer with my new "best friends" on a dinner beach table watching that Corona commercial cliche beautiful sunset over the white sand beach, when a small family came out of their bungalow onto the sand. One of our group who had been "traveling" in the same bungalow for 3 months said "Families are going to ruin this island."

I was pissed off at first, thinking he had no right to claim this island in the name of young single travelers looking for sex and sun. But on the ride back, we got to stop by the construction site of a group of villa bungalows, the future time-shares that will, at the expense of obstructing and stealing the prescious scenery, will most likely be occupied at most one month per year. I've come to agree with my friend at least that families will transform the island in the end to become that serene, expensive, winter getaway that we all see in the brochures. I gritted my teeth in frustration, knowing full well that the next time I visit this island it will probably be with a family of my own.

But tourists will always want to avoid tourists, and finding paradise out here is a cat-and-mouse game of colonizing a new island before the fat vacationing sandles-and-socks fanny pack Europeans move in. Ko Samui is beautiful but overrun, go to Ko Pangan. Ko Pangan's too touristy, go to Ko Lanta. Too many people in Ko Lanta, head to Ko Lippe. As it stands now, everybody's going to Ko Lippe to run away from tourists. It's an island at the southern end of the archapelago, takes two days to get there, is full of unpopulated alcoves and beaches, and is cheap as all fuck. Basically, it's got two years before it's overrun itself, and it gives me the impression that we'd be more successful trying to run from our own shadows.

A few days ago I landed (and am leaving in one hour) on Ko Phi Phi, also transliterated as Ko Pee Pee, which is more phonetically accurate. I came here to meet Ludo, the French guy I'd been travelig with in Laos and Cambodia, before I head off to India and dissappear forever. It's the site of the movie The Beach (coincidentally about trying to find that hidden paradise before anybody else gets there), and, unfortunately happens to have been one of the Tsunami's biggest casualties. The island i'm on consists of a north and south mountain, and when you have two large rocks like that in the ocean, sand collects in between. So basically there's a 150m strip of sand and soil connecting the two mountains, on which the whole tourist city is built, and is where I'm sitting right now. The wave swept over the whole thing and sent the city into the water. I went on a night scuba dive to the site of a bungalow that had been transplanted 2km from shore last year. It was surprisngly intact, but between the weightlessness, the torch-lit darkness of it and the fresh trajedy, it was turned out to be far creepier and Indiana Jonesy than my sunrise exploration of Ankor Wat. On the other hand, the city has been completely rebuilt in the past year to the point that, if it wasn't for the pictures and frequent shrines, I'd have had no idea about the devastation.

By some strange twist of fate, since the tsunami this island has been almost exclusively recolonized by the Swedish. Even the Swedes don't quite understand it, but everybody's tall, blond, beautiful, and prissy. And at the beach it seems like they don't even sell women's tops around here. I really can't complain, but I keep getting this wierd Deja Vu about Santa Monica beaches. Even the French guy I'm with tells me the girls here are stuckup. That says alot.

2006-03-03T19:53:00.000-08:00

Well, it was my foot. I was driving back home yesterday morning after bringing a Thai girl back to her place (by the way, every time an ugly middle-aged "I'm not here for the pagodas" man drives by me while I have a Thai girl riding on my motorcycle with me, every one of them inevitably lets out this huge grin of relief that there are some young people out there as well who come here to pay for sex. That grin, which has followed me every time I ride or walk with a local for any reason, betrays the same sense of personal comfort that makes the man feel better about his local "hobby" and, in almost every case, makes me feel like a slut and her feel like a prostitute. I have no problems with the sex tourism industry, but for god sakes I wish they'd stop making the rest of us feel like assholes). Anyway, as it turns out I was completely wrong in my last post about the speed necessary to traverse these roads. A slow speed makes it necessary to try to tiptoe around the potholes and rivlets, whereas a relatively fast steady run in 2nd gear lets the dirtbike tire treads and shocks take effect to cling to and absorb the impact of the bumps and troughs. Basically, by some cruel twist of fate, the drive becomes safer as you go faster and approach with more confidence; in other words, when you're drunk. So I had no problem driving home even with someone on the back seat, but a few hours later when I was sober, tired, and nervous, I hesitated to speed up when I was about to lose my balance and I fell off the bike as it came to a stop. I've had worse falls before, but since I was only wearing sandals, my right foot got pretty scratched up. That's nothing to cry about, but a few hours later I was kickstarting the bike with the same sandals on and the kickstarter sprung back up unexpectedly and jammed my heel into some metal bit just behind it. That one hurt, not so much that it left a deep scratch but that compounded with the other scratches to incapacitate my right foot for anything other than walking. I guess it serves me right to not respect the bike as I should, but fucking hell it puts a damper on any swimming, running, or soccer. No more exercise for me. Oh, the agony!

But the coolest thing that happened to me on this island so far came at a point last night when I was about to renounce my title as one of the luckiest people I know. I was at a jungle rave, which was cool but nothing to call home about, a few hours after my foot turned into a gauze bandage, and an hour before sunrise I realized my bag had been stolen. I left it behind the blacklight psychedelic mushrooms (thinking nobody would ever come up to the blacklight psychedelic mushrooms for a closer look....stupid), and a few hours later it wasn't there and all the useless crap I was keeping in it was neatly taken out of my posession. My swim trunks were in there, I was kinda pissed off about that. Anyway, once the sun started rising I stoped around the perimeter of the party with my fists clenched and a big frustrated frown, all pissed off about the way the day had been going, when (shortly after finding someone's used condom in the bushes) I came across a small wad of money. I looked around, saw nobody was watching, and pocketed it to later find out it was 3500 baht (at 38 baht to the dollar, this makes it almost $100). Holy fuck, there's a week's budget. The jew in me relaxed all my previous tension and the hippie in me replaced it with guilt. But, after hearing so many stories that night of stolen bags and packs of cigarettes, I felt better knowing that I probably deserved it more than the people who would take it 2 minutes after I put it back. If that wasn't enough to lighten my mood, I came back to where I was sitting and found, under the light of the newly risen sun, that someone had earlier dropped their "emptied" bag of ecstasy (no pills, but about a half pill's worth of residual powder) directly in front of where I had been sitting the whole time. Let's just say my sour mood was alleviated.

On a completely different note, I'm finalizing my plans to get the hell out of this den of debauchery they call an island and head to what somebody told me is the biggest lump of shit on the planet, India. Hopefully I'll get there before my birthday, so I can invite a Billion people to my party. Meg is also scheduled to meet me there at the end of the month, so at least I won't be swimming through shit all alone.

To sum up this post:
Bets are closed for first motorcycle injury.
All bets on for first gastrointestinal disease acquired.

Odds (pay/bet):
1:2 Diarrhea
3:1 Disyntary
5:1 Gihardia
7:1 Uncontrollable explosive vomiting
10:1 Green poop
15:1 Red poop
30:1 Tapeworm

Other offers considered.

2006-02-27T19:01:00.000-08:00

I've successfully checked off the last on my shopping list, now I'm just having fun. The diving course was a whole lot of fun, but since it sounds like everybody an their mother has done the same thing, I won't bore you with brutal details of the pretty things I saw since half of you already saw the same thing. I did get to swim with a school of Barracudas, that was pretty neat...

Anyway, yesterday I came further down the Gulf of Thailand to Ko Pangan, the island that is best known for its Full Moon Party, where way too many people crowd along one beach to drink and fuck to some of the worst Techno in the world. My friend Mark met me off the pier, one of the Dutch guys who had acompannied me on my 10-day motorcycle trip about 2 months ago. My last chore, by the way, was to retrieve $75 I lent him when we parted. Check. I took his advice and rented a "real" motorbike, which is basically the same 125cc bike I had earlier, except this time with an actual clutch and dirtbike tires. At first I thought it was just for fun, but then I followed him on the 20 minute ride to the bungalow he had reserved for me.

The roads here are fucked. Fucked. I mean, the best case scenario is a 2-lane pothole road with washed out dirt patches interspersed. The northern Thai roads look like 280 by comparison. I live about 15km away from the parties, and the last 2km is not just dirt road, but washed out dirt road with rivlets and gaping holes,rocks, and mud patches scattered about. This virtually guarantees that I'll be staying up every night past sunrise, since it's way too hazardous to try traversing as drink as I will be during the night. About half of the people out here have some sort of Thailand Tatoo, or at least recent bandage, so it's no longer a question of IF I fall down as WHEN, and how bad. This way I won't be surprised when I do, just pissed off the morning after. None of the injuries out here are serious, since they all happen on a rediculous dirt road that anybody with half a brain would recognize is a tactical impossibility of crossing going any faster than 5mph, so whatever scrape I have will be on ankle, shin, knee, elbow, or (worst comes to worst) forehead since I'll only be going fast enough to make a nice mark. Place your bets, guys.

I missed the Full Moon party, so instead I made sure to get here just in time for the BlackMoon party, a much smaller event on a smaller beach which goes from 10 last night to 10 tonight. Right now (10:30AM) I'm having breakfast in the 2-hour break while the party switches beaches to keep going for another 12 hours.

The party wasn't that big, but of all things it looked exactly like one of the 2:00 or 10:00 clubs at Burning Man, except transported to a beach in Thailand and the people weren't dressed nearly as cool. The party went on long into the sunlit hours of sleep deprivation like in the desert (this time the Red Bull had real speed in it, making it easier), but my Burning Man conditioning made me feel anxious to move on to the party next door as soon as I got bored, and I was a bit dissappointed to realize there was no other party next door. I guess it was cool, but I've been spoiled by going to the Best Party in the World for the past 5 years, and it's really unfair that I have to frame this place by those memories. At least, for the first time since I left San Francisco, most of the people here last night have either heard of or have been to Black Rock City themselves.

Anyway, my coffee is finisihed and I have another 12 hours of party to go. Last night I took the advice of my friend and went to sleep at 8 to wake up at 3, in time to get to the party by 4 and have enough sleep to keep going all day. So we'll see, maybe I haven't given this the chance it diserves. Time to shake my head out of this daze, pack up and head out. Fuck, it's a hard life out here.

2006-02-24T06:00:00.000-08:00

So that was that for Vietnam. To be honest, I'm kinda glad to be rid of the place even though it was really tempting to stay while I was there. I guess getting attached anywhere would do that to you.

I've come to about the halfway point of my trip (it's been since November 16!), and about a week ago I decided to get the hell out of Southeast Asia. I think I've just about had enough, and it's time to swich gears before India. But before switching gears, I have to put in the clutch and take some time to readjust. And, since I'm new at riding stickshifts, I'm gonna ride with my foot on the clutch for as long as I can. Two weeks, actually.

Basically, I've accumulated a laundry list of things to do before I leave this part of the continent. It's kinda like an international scavenger list, and so far has been making traveling a lot more interesting. For one, I left my iPod with this girl I was sharing a room with (no, not "sharing a room with") in Dalat, just before staying on the Vietnamese farm. Then she hurried up the coast of Vietnam while I was passing out fliers in Nha Trang. I managed to take the (fucking) 36 hour bus ride (!) straight to Hanoi before she left the country and take my iPOD with her, so after almost a month I'm now reunited with my one true companion out here, Mac.

So I flew back to Bangkok after relearning the hard way that I'll always be late for any flight anywhere in the world (I came to the airport 40 minutes before the flight, where they threatened to not let me on and then let me on but then realized I had to talk to the immmigration police for 20 minutes because I was late on my Visa and then checked my bags for me while I was talking to the police so I had a few minutes to spare before they closed the plane doors. I think they let me through security with my swiss army knife just to get rid of me). I digress. In Bangkok I had to pick up a Packsafe from a hostel (this chickenwire that wraps around my backpack) that I left with my friend in Pai 2.5 months ago. I also had to fix my digital camera, which is now broken in 2 different ways (the LCD's broken and I've got sand in the zoom lens mechanism), and it took visiting two Cannon Service Centers before someone could tell me it would cost $150 but might be free if the warranty covers it and I ship it home to the States. I'm shipping it home just in case and waiting to buy a cheap knockoff digicam in India, which kinda pisses me off since now I'm in some of the most beautiful scenery I'll ever see and I don't have my camera. Hooray for being "in the moment."

Now I'm on Ko PADI (formerly Ko Tao before all these dive operators moved in), taking the 4-day Open Water Scuba certification lesson 'cause this is where I've been told is the best (and cheapest) place to take it. One more thing to check off my list. After this I head to Ko Pangan where I can check off two more things on my list, go to the "New Moon Party" (which is supposed to be cooler and smaller than the massive Full Moon party) and, more importantly, meet this guy who owes me $75 that I lent him around the same time I lost my packsafe.

Basically I'm doing my housekeeping before setting out again. I'll head to Bangkok, buy new clothes and supplies, and take the next flight to Calcutta... provided I don't get stuck anywhere in paradise. For some reason I'd much rather prefer standing on a train packed chest to elbow to face to knee to back with sweaty Indians in the boiling heat for 10 hours across the most polluted parts of the world. I'm trying to figure out why as well.

2006-02-16T03:43:00.000-08:00

A Phuong to call my own:

Phuong with "almost"

This post won't make any sense unless you read the last half of the previous post, but in any case I went out for dinner with "almost but not quite" girl, thinking I would take the moral highground and tell her off in favor of Phuong. Then, of course, I got drunk and for some reason invited her out to the same late night club Phuong was going, mostly out of some perverse desire to allow myself that whim selection at the end of the night that is difficult to explain to anybody not male. As predicted, the results were disasterous.

At first, the two got along drunkenly as old friends would, jumping over each other and allowing me to take this unflattering but improbable photograph of the two together. Then I decided to make that fatal mistake, the one that every playboy has warned me against and has never failed to ruin a good situation: I told each of them the truth about each other. I really don't know what came over me, maybe it was that they were getting along so well I figured they knew, or maybe it was that each of them was looking at me like I was theirs tonight and I wanted to illicit a little competition. Actually it was probably that them sitting on each other like that made me reach for that one-in-a-million cocky meneuver of trying for both, but in any case they ceased to be friends at that point.

Both were really drunk at this point at least, and Phuong confided in me that if I wanted to leave with the other girl it would be OK, so long as I never gave her my heart. That would be have been great aside from that the other girl had already run away crying. I mean LOUDLY crying and collapsing into the arms of some random stranger, the kind that made the whole club know what kind of asshole I was (and it was conveniently timed to coincide with the end of the music and the "go-away" call). When I saw this, however, I remembered she had pulled the exact same meneuver that night on the beach when I refused to hang on her arm the whole night. That night I chased her out on the beach to consoler her and ended up making out further down the beach. When she did this again at the club, I lost all sympathy for her and told her, and Phuong, they were both drunk and I was going home alone.

This girl could barely walk, so I called a cab for the two of us thinking it would be the only decent thing for me to drive her home, but she would only give the driver directions to my hotel. I looked at her waving her drunk ass head in circles and told her, again, that I didn't want her in my room and asked her for directions to her place, to which she responded by vomiting graciously all over the floor of the cab. For some reason I expected the mythical torrent of Arabic curses and plagues to pummel down on us within seconds of the purge, but instead the driver simply smiled at me and increased the fare. Anyway, as if the puke didn't make me happy to not take her home, I looked outside the window to see Phuong driving drunkenly on her motorbike directly in front of us, preparing the lobby of my hotel for the cockblock.

She still refused to give me her address, so I drove her back to the club, kicked her out of the cab, and walked home with her running away crying behind me. Only this time her cries only made me angrier knowing they were only for show and there were no tears anyway. I walked back pissed off at everybody and Phuong kept calling me saying she couldn't stand to see me go home with someone else. Walking home alone at 3AM also made me a prime target to the swarms of motorcycle drivers and ladyboys offering sex and "may i steal your wallet," and after living here for a month it took 'till this mood before I realized that if I look them square in the eye and bark loudly at them to "FUCK OFF" then they leave me alone. If I don't, I have to pretend to not hear them for a good two minutes until they get the picture. My friend lost $20 this way because two ladyboys got off their motorbikes and reached into our pockets while telling us they wanted to fuck us. I got the idea when mine accidentally tugged outwards on my cellphone, but my by the time I told my friend he had lost his money. "FUCK OFF" is far more effective than "no thanks." I digress. Telling everybody to FUCK OFF actually put me back in a good mood and I forgot about being angry at the crying girl long enough to realize this was no place to leave her by herself. I ran back to find her sitting on the curb still crying. I felt really aweful for a moment, then I looked more closely to see she was just passed in crying position and had no tears or even red eyes when she woke up. I called over one of the motorcycle taxis I hadn't told to fuck off yet, gave him money to take her home, and walked home with a clear conscience where Phuong was waiting patiently. She called me today apologizing for whatever she did and told me she doesn't remember a thing, which means she probably thinks everything's her fault. Lucky me.

I've said this before and I still don't believe myself, but I've had enough of getting entrenched in local situations. Phuong has been calling and sending text messages saying how much she appreciated our time together and wants to see me again. At least she confessed that she absolutely hated my guts when we first met and it wasn't until the night on ecstasy that she started thinking I wasn't such a bad guy. In any case, Buffalo Springfield was right, Vietnam is a quagmire. So I just took a 36-hour bus out of there to Hanoi and I'm flying back to Bangkok in another 48. Time to move on.

2006-02-15T04:06:00.000-08:00

The party I was promoting sounded like it would turn out to be one of those spectacular full moon raves rivaling Ko Pangan, but by the time it had started, I was pretty happy not to have invested anything in it personally. After a full week of handing out flyers, putting up posters, and trying valiantly to sell the $25 tickets, we went to the beach ourselves and waited patiently for the latecomers to arrive. Of the 500 people I had expected to come, we ended up hoping for 200 and only sold about 70 tickets in advance. Waiting on the beach for these latecomers to arrive felt much like watching the election results. Long after you know the trend had been set, there's always the possibility in the back of your mind for a landslide at the end of the evening. At the end of it all, even some of the people who bought tickets didn't show up.

By the time the sun set, it became clear that the only thing left to do was make the best out of a bad situation and party our brains out. I went back to town with two other Americans who had been roped into promoting the party, with two mission objectives: get some more people to come and, more importantly, buy drugs. We came back with 7 pills of surprisingly potent (and extremely overpriced) ecstasy to find everybody at the party either trashed or sleeping. In other words, it was clear who was up for the all night party, which made it a lot easier to get things going. The DJ was trashed, he didn't have a mixer, and everything was running off the Windows Media Player of an old sandy PC. In his drunken (and partially defeated) state, he had set the playlist to "dance music" and passed out, leaving people trying to nod their heads the rotten House music that had been corrosively eating away at the hard drive. I wasted no time running up to the "DJ booth" and finding any old funky dance music I can find and ran back to the dance floor to help wrangle up anybody who was on the verge of dancing.

Lucky for me, one of the people still awake was this girl I had vaguely gotten to know that morning. She's pretty, vietnamese, and surprisingly cool but our conversation only went so far as me asking, somewhat sarcastically but mostly just-in-case-ly, "do you want to be my girlfriend now?" and her matching my tone and saying "yeah, ok." Then I left for town and didn't come back until she was drunk. I took the whole thing with a grain of salt, but as I ran back to the dance floor that night, she came out of the dark and virtually tackled me to the ground. She was, to no small effect, drunk. For me, the drugs were just starting to take hold and I was in no mood to defer my carnal instincts. After about half an hour of stumbling around with momentary bursts of uncensored PDAs, I took her for a walk along the beach. Now, one of the shortcomings of this party was that they had security guards set at either end of the "party area," of the beach, which only gave about a half kilometer of party space. Lucky for us, the security guard had temporarily abandoned his post, leaving us to our own demise by allowing a quick run to the other end of the beach.

10 minutes later, I was in the middle of what I absentmindedly thought would be the absolute perfect situation. The full moon was out, it was a beautiful night, I was lying down making out on a desolate beach with this gorgeous local in the middle of some foreign country, on a really strong pill of ecstasy, she was all for it, I had brought my condoms. It had all the ingredients to a perfect night... aside from that one fatal shortcoming that I had always thought were only rumors. I took her pants off, followed suit, got ready, and...wait...FUCK! I thought whiskeydick was bad, it didn't come close to the adverse effects of ecstasy on one's reproductive "enthusiasm." She was disappointed, I was trying my best, but to be honest it might have been worse had things worked. About one minute after we got to this point, THREE security guards were virtually on top of us shining flashlights down at my bare ass and shouting something in Vietnamese that I could only pretend to not understand. Neither of us saw them coming, but I was impressed how casually she stood up (naked from the waist down) and put her pants on calmly as if nothing happened. We zipped up and walked back, and I guess she realized she was a bit drunker than she thought. My drugs were just getting going, and she was on the verge of passing out. I tried keeping her awake but in the end I walked her to her friend's tent and she went to sleep.

I was happy to learn that, out of the 50 or so dissapointed partygoers that night, 8 of us were up to make it to the sunrise. So we kept the music playing, took the rest of our drugs, and started with the spliffs. I still had a little bit of the my pill left, and at the plea of my vietnamese coworker I gave it to one of his friends, this flyer girl who works at the bar I had been DJing for the past few days. As far as I could tell, her name was "Fu," or at least that's what she was responding to. Before I knew it, she was rolling hard and was in no mood to deal with my coworker who kept trying to get her into his tent. I, on the other hand, had completely given up on sex that night and the two of us ended up sitting in front of the speaker staring at the moon and talking about Vietnamese folklore. Until that point, I hardly knew her other than as that punky tomboy girl with the baseball cap and permanent chin bandaid who kept hitting me over the back of the head with her pack of flyers. Actually, I had basically given up on her and regarded her just as a fun person to hand out flyers with, but by the time sunrise came I had started to really dig her. Once it got light out, she grabbed a spraycan and painted a startlingly accurate charicature of me on the dancefloor, then asked how to spell my name (the closest she had come was ENDU). I showed her and then asked how to spell her name, partly so I wouldn't feel embarassed anymore in case I had her name wrong. My heart skipped a beat when I saw what she was writing. The first PH was almost obvious, but she kept writing letters out until they spelled "P-H-U-O-N-G." Anybody familiar with the half of Matt's blog (upsidegone.blogspot.com) that talks about his Phuong would understand why I had the distinct urge to give up chasing her right then. In fact, for the rest of the morning, I did. Once I knew her full name and the precident behind it, I realized everything she had been leading me up to had the seal of running me around in circles until my head spun around in a false love and ended up writing half of MY blog about her. So the next night when we went out for drinks, I put all my effort in an all-or-nothing play for her and, fortunately or unfortunately, we've been steadily seeing each other ever since.

I've basically made a home for myself here, which is making me want to leave. I have an awesome girlfriend, I have a job if I want it, and people want me to stay. This American who had been working with me to promote this party just signed a 6-month contract with a club out here to promote/spin fire and if I didn't have other things to do out here, I can easily imagine doing the same. Westerners who know how to party and know what other Westerners want in a party are a highly valued commodity here, and these people can really use the help. They recognize it, and I've been really impressed with how heavily my advice has been taken. The beach party was a disaster, but they want me to at least be here next month to help fix what went wrong and, somehow, I feel if I have the control they might give me and the money they're willing to spend, we can turn it into a BurningMan-style full moon party-all-night, good music, cheap drinks, drugs available real party. But, as I said at the beginning, I was really happy this time to have nothing personally invested in this disaster. I think it's best if I keep it that way and, in any case, it's not worth sacrificing India. So I'm trying to uproot as fast as possible so I don't, as they say, gather any moss.

But, then again, I just got a phone call from Impotence girl asking me to meet her for dinner. Much as I like the girl I'm with, there's some part of my manhood at stake now. It's not even about the sex anymore, just the pride. But alas, morality might win out on pride tonight. If not morality, nackerdness. Let me just say anyway that it's been a month with virtually no feminine contact and here I am, back in the game and feeling fantastic. Rock on.

2006-02-04T23:53:00.000-08:00

I got a whole lot of catching up to do, so sorry for the length of this post. For those of you who only have the time to read this first paragraph before your boss looks over your shoulder, it starts with being adopted into a Vietnamese catholic village community and ends with me finding work as a promoter for the http://www.vietnamwildbeachparty.com. That's the gist, you can stop reading now. Oh yeah, and if you're inclined to find out for yourself, you can now call me by pushing 001 84 905957437 into your phone.

As for the juicy part, I think it might be easier and more interesting if I give up trying to merge the past week spent in the village into a cohesive prose and just list random things as they pop into my head. I'll warn you now, if you're not into cultural exchanges, this first part might be a bit boring but I promise it gets interesting towards the end.

The tour guide I was with (about my age, real nice guy, spoke fluent english) invited me to spend Tet (Chinese new year) with his family in the 'burbs. He also happened to need another driver to take his spare motorbike out there, so it worked out easy. Anyway, we drive 50km out to the middle of nowhere just northwest of Dalat (if you feel like looking it up) to the Thanh Bihn village, where I took part in a very awkward family reunion between the tour guide (Hinh) and his folks. Luckily, there had been another American (from LA) that had been staying in with the family for the past two weeks already (but I think he was the first guest ever), which made living there a bit easier. Apparently, the entire country goes home for a week or two in celebration of Tet, and for most of them this is the only time they ever see their family. As you can imagine, the families here are ENORMOUS. There were two huge dinner tables full of people, and some more eating on the floor during the high point. And that's just for relatives once removed.

The town is 100% Catholic. This has far reaching implications with everything they do, act, or feel. Basically, and completely unexpectedly, the place looked overwhelmingly like the deep south, except that everybody was so goddamn happy all the time. That was probably the wierdest thing about the place, actually, even though I spoke absolutely no vietnamese at first, everybody would communicate in smiles and laughter. Not like the polite smiles we have in the states, I mean like genuine smiles that come out of being extremely happy all the time. These kids particularly, they sleep with all their siblings, sometimes as many as 5 per bed, spend every waking moment running around and playing with each other, and don't ever get a wink of discipline from their parents (to the point where I'd get woken up every morning at sunrise to the 7-year old running around the house singing the worst vietnamese music at the top of his lungs). Many times the houses have plenty of extra room for more beds, but they just see no reason to sleep alone. It's the kind of happy that was really, really nice at first but after about 5 days started to get under my skin. Once I figured out that they weren't just pretending for the guests, it almost started to bother me that families back home were never so together. These people were poor by international standards (they grow their own food, plus coffee for some income), but the family acted as a single unit, as if each member was just an extension of the whole. I mean they were really, really happy together in a way I'd never imagined possible.

There's also a lot of physical contact between men, and absolutely no contact between men and women, which took a little getting used to. Absolutely no sex before marriage, and never any kissing in public afterwards. Basically, it's a country of 5th graders.

Oh, I went to Mass at sunrise on the first day of the new year and no, I didn't take communion. Kinda wierd, really, some guy came up to the altar and started singing into a microphone as if the psalms were some kind of Buddhist chant, then everybody sung along. Women and men, by the way, were separated on opposite halves of the pews.

I got to see a pig die, and made me consider becoming vegitarian if it weren't for the fact that they then could feed the whole family for the next three days with it. The first day, actually, they made this really delicious jello stuff out of the fresh blood. Goes really well with lime.

I saw my first cockfight, too. They really beat the shit out of each other before one walks away, for almost half an hour. At one point Hihn's brother had to pick them up to move them back into the middle of the fight space and got blood all over his hands. I didn't even think that this was exactly the spot in the world where bird flu happens until he starting scubbing his hands with grapefruit and lemon to disinfect afterwards.

Oh, it turns out that the first visitors into your house after Tet determine the luck for the rest of the year. And somehow we were considered extremely lucky. I think the criteria was foreigners with big smiles are lucky, but in any case we got whored out to 6 or 8 houses on the first morning of Tet, after waking up an hour before sunrise to attend mass. At each house we drank buckets of green tea in front of an identical smiling shy girl who, translated through Hinh or his brother, wanted to marry one of us. For this one girl, who was really cute actually but also 16, the third sentence was "Do you want I be your girlfriend?" after using the previous two to establish that I didn't already have a wife or girlfriend myself. Good for her, the next sentence invited us to coffee with her friend, who wanted to marry the other American. It would be great to come here without any morals one day...

Anyway, we parted on a long and drunken night full of sad and really touching speeches (loosely translated), and before I left they offered me the new name Tran Thanh Anh, which kinda has a ring to it. I had adopted the name Anh, after realizing that nobody could pronounce my full name, and in Vietnamese culture they put the first name last. All the kids were really sad to see Uncle Anh leave, and the entire family from the bottom up gave me a whole hearted open invitation to come back for Tet (and/or the marriages of anyone in the family) anytime I could make it.

Hinh and his brother Quinn drove us back to Dalat, and just before arriving there Hinh stopped and asked if it would be OK if they drive us all the way to Nha Trang (7 hours away). Quinn, being a country boy, had never seen the ocean, and they both felt it was too soon to part. So I changed my plans from kitesurfing in MuiNe to getting drunk with Hinh, Quinn, and Tyler (the other American) in Nha Trang. We left late, so it took two days of motorbiking through absolutley gorgeous scenery to get there, something which Hinh as a tour guide usually charges $40 per day to do.

We got there yesterday morning, and after two full hours of hearing the Yelps and Yahoos of a Vietnamese countryboy playing in Ocean waves for the first time, we started drinking. I don't think I've ever been quite this drunk before on this trip, but it was nice to know that my "guides" were far worse off. After splitting a liter of rice whiskey on the beach, the conversation inevitably drifted over to sex which, we soon realized, was a very mum subject in the fully Catholic village of Thanh Binh. So Tyler and I proceeded to give a full female anatomy lecture, using sand diagrams to compare techniques, enough to get both of them riled up for a complete night. After another round of Long Island Ice Teas, we were ready to say "yes" for the first time to the motorbikes passing by offering to take us to brothels. We went to this one that looked exactly like a massage parlor, except there was no question about the motives of the employees or the clientelle. An hour, by the way, costs about $6. The brothers tried and tried to persuade us to come with them, since they felt bad doing it on their own, and we must have spent close to half an hour outside the place trying to communicate our intentions. It was probably the best reason I've ever had to pay for sex, but whenever I looked into the mechanical setup of the place, it was such a turnoff that even in my drunken state I had no desire to get led into one of those mangy rooms. For the price, though, we couldn't help but treating them to one hour each of fantastic City-Girl sex and running away to find the local nightclub. When we saw them again at the hotel, they didn't give us any details but both were so rediculously exhausted that it must have been something good.

We woke up a few hours later (7AM) to wish them goodbye and good luck for the long trip home, then after a few hours sleep Tyler and I got some afternoon breakfast to try to remember what the hell had happened to us the night before. It must have been something good, because after sitting down for about 30 minutes, some guy I vaguely recognized as the promoter for the bar we got our long island ice teas came up and asked if I wanted to work with him. Maybe it was the wierd hair (which has since become blondish pink), or the loud happy drunken state I was in, or the awesome bright blue T-shirt I was wearing that said "I EAT YOUR SKIN" in bright red that is so much more disrepectful because I bought it in Cambodia, but in any case he thought I'd make a good sell for this massive full moon beach rave next weekend.

So I followed him to talk to his "boss," who was this young (mid-late 20's) Vietnamese business-looking guy with a Moto Black Razr cellphone and a black silk shirt that made him look like some agent of the local mob. Both of them, by the way, speak this hilarious Australian-Vietnamese accent. Anyway, he explained how absolutely awesome this party was and how much money they're putting into it, then blitzed me with all sorts of freebies and incentives to make sure I didn't run away. They'll basically pay for all my transportation expenses, some drinks, and (nice) hotels for as long as I want to work for them. He showed me around town and pointed out the various bars and travel agencies that he "owned," then bragged about how he knows everybody everywhere, can get free drinks at all these bars, and before I left I got the distinct impression that this is just the kid of some rediculously rich family who wants to make his starting capital into an entertainment empire. Anyway, the way I see it, I've just been flung from the deep South to the New York VIP crowd.

Whether it turns out for the best or not, I'm in Hoi An at the moment getting ready to start talking to everybody I can find about this party, and when I get back to Nha Trang they'll need me to tend bar and keep doing the same thing. Except this time I'm getting paid to drink and party. I guess I'll have more to say about this in a few days once I figure out if the whole thing's a huge scam or not, but this morning arrived at the "free" hotel I was supposed to stay at in Hoi An and the receptionist gave me a brief scare when he told me the "arrangements" my "boss" had told me about didn't exist and tried to charge me $20 per night for the room. With a quick phone call to "the boss," everything was cleared up and I was escorted across the marble floor, past the massive swimming pool, through the Hyatt archetecture, to the room. Nice.

2006-01-25T06:42:00.000-08:00

So I got invited to spend Tet (Vietnamese and Chinese New Year) with this guy's family out in the cuts. Basically, the plan is to spend the next 5 days on a Vietnamese family farm about 60km from where I am now, and follow them to the beach town of Muine afterward, where I'll get to learn to KiteSurf (for real this time). I think I've done pretty well for myself, anyway. In any case, I'll be completely out of communication for the next week so if you have something to say, say it now.

Thanks, Mat, for the advice about Saigon but unfortunately I already got the hell out of that city so it's a bit late. I guess I was just sick of being treated like a big bag of money, but with all that hustle I can imagine why a New Yorker would like it. Still, from my 4 days in Saigon I'd say Chiang Mai is way, way cooler if you're looking for a new place to teach English. Then again, I only stayed there for 2 weeks...and I guess the whole hippie thing worked there too.

I'm up in this really tacky resort town a few hours north of Saigon called Dalat, which was cool for a the first two days because I look like a cheapskate asshole in relation to all these Vietnamese tourists paying through the nose for the kitchiest things imaginable to give to their families for Tet. But the scenery would be beautiful, if it weren't for all the fucking Agent Orange we dropped on the surrounding area. I got to drive out for about 20km into the countryside, and virtually all the forests are made from identical 30-year old pine trees with tiny patches of jungle in between. To be fair, the US Air Force left some reasonable patches of old growth jungle intact, but the locals cut them down anyway for wood. It's all just depressing no matter how you slice it. Hopefully the farm I'm staying at was far enough from the fire zone to still be beautiful. Happy New Year again!

2006-01-23T02:57:00.000-08:00

2006-01-20T01:09:00.000-08:00

Enough with this loafing! It's time to try an experiment. I'm out for 8 months and I've been making the exact same first impression on everyone I've met. So the other day I went to a barber shop and died parts of my hair bright, bright red/orange and cut it all short enough to stick up. Thankfully one of clients at the barber shop spoke english enough to translate this request, since nobody could figure out why the hell anybody would want that. In any case, I then went ot the American War market and bought some authentic Taiwanese reproductions of US military clothes (vest, camo shorts, shirt and aviator sunglasses) and proceeded to turn my image around 180 degrees from hippie to war-crazy party GI. I guess the experiment was to see how differently people would treat me.

This goal was accomplished in a major, major way. It might be because the funkiest style these people have seen is a pair of nice sunglasses and a cool shirt, or occasionally you might see somebody with bleach yellow longhair. Or it might be some kind of post-war nostalgia of the G.I. flings (or dads) here on shore leave who must have looked equally nuts. But if people looked at me as another passing tourist before, now they have no idea what to make of me.

I guess the biggest success of this experiment is the reflection of this image back onto myself. In the bars at night, people treat me like a party animal whether I am or not; it's a whole lot easier to be energetic anyway. One night I was tired as all hell, but all it took was a few minutes to round up some people at the local bar and head to Apocalypse now (dressed the way one's supposed to be) and ended up standing on the chairs shouting the lyrics to I Will Survive like it was a war rally song. The music at this club was truly aweful, but for some reason only the guys I was with and I could tell. "If you're going to San Francisco," by the way, is now a horrid techno song that has been following me through every major dance club in Southeast Asia. It's also fun to be a total dick to the really abnoxious tourists for once and, since I'm a bit more intimidating now, I don't get any shit back, yet. In any case, shooting those shotgun rounds at the VietCong tunnels had a whole new meaning.

The pinnacle of success came last night, when I finally gave up any sense of decency about the war and learned the Communist Vietnamese National Anthem from some Vietnamese guy who spoke absolutely no English. At 5AM, after goose-stepping around the pool table singing in aweful Vietnamese for the 30 or so people still in the bar, Charlie took me on his motorbike for a twilight tour around Saigon. It was nice since I had somehow failed to see most of the major sights of the city (aside from the American War museum, where I just felt like an insensitive prick), and they looked so much nicer at dawn while the hordes were sleeping. At some point during our dramatic and brutal reinactment of a VC-US engagement outside some former battleground, I managed to break my digital camera while jumping away from a grenade. Thankfully the rest of me was safe and I managed to shoot the gun right out of Charlie's hand, then shot him twice in the stomach. It was way more fun than Cowboys and Indians, I'll tell you that.

I guess having absolutely no respect for the former conflict is the best way I know how to say sorry. Wearing what I did gave me an instant and undeserved cameraderie with my tour guide of the Cu Chi tunnels (some of the tunnels Charlie dug between Saigon and Cambodia), who had served as a communications officer for the Americans. Today I'm wearing a bright red shirt with a big yellow star in front--the North Vietnamese flag--and still look like an American GI. The kinds of smiles I've been getting from the locals tells me at least some of them get the joke. To the rest, I'm just an excusable tourist.

But the LCD on my camera is still broken. I have pictures up 'till then, and some poorly framed ones after. I might as well burn and send them in the next few days, since I doubt I'll be taking any more photos until I get my camera fixed in Hanoi or Bangkok. I just sent a bunch of pictures the other day, if you didn't get them, email me.

...dogs are chewy.

2006-01-18T20:19:00.000-08:00

A few years back, I heard that the best part about Cambodia is leaving Cambodia. While I don't exactly disagree, he failed to mention the method of departure, but more on this later...

After seeing the kids running out of bungalows, dolphins on solitary rivers, and the sun setting over a dirt red sky, I spent the rest of my time in Cambodia doing the tourist business. Angkor Wat, though it cost $20 to get in, was definatley the coolest 1100 year old gigantic ancient Cambodian temple devoted to the four stages of human evolution and the Hundu god Vishnu that I've ever seen. It's really, really, really big. I left my guest house at 5AM, got there with the stars still out, left my friends behind and explored whole parts of its moonlit Tomb Raider tunnels. All I could tell were that there were four big concentric square cloisters defined by a series of tunnels arranged with shrines at each of the four corners. I couldn't see anything else. Each next square is a good 200 foot climb with almost vertical stairs. After seeing a gorgous sunrise over the thick cambodian jungle, I came back through the tunnels to find the places where I felt like Indiana Jones in the dark were actually covered in bas-releif carvings of everything from hindu monkey gods to buddhas to depictions of wars. Then the tourists came in hordes and made the place look like disneyland...

After a full day, we headed to the city that nobody can pronounce, Phnom Penh. 30 years ago when the Khmer Rouge took over, they evacuated this city of 3 million people, killed all the educated people, and brought everybody else to work in the rice fields. I got to see the killing fields, essentially their concentration camp, which was a field of mass graves with bones and clothes sticking out of the ground. They arranged thousands of skulls, all with bullet holes or bludgeon marks, by age and sex, in a giant glass shrine devoted to them. To truly relive the experience, my driver took me to an illegal shooting range, which was disturbingly close to the mass graves. So out here, it costs $200 to fire a rocket, plus $500 if you want to buy a cow to blow up. I'll have to hold out until I can get the package deal for much cheaper, but instead I got to fire an AK-47, the same gun they used to kill the women and children at the killing fields next door, for $15. And no, I didn't realize this coincidence until much later.

But this brings me to the idea of Freedom that's been on my mind ever since Laos. We're supposed to be living in the land of the free, and we're spending billions of dollars and thousands of lives defending Freedom worldwide. When put up next to Cambodia, however, the US looks definatively more like a police state than a land of "Freedom." Out here it's total anarchy. You can do anything and everything (so far as it doesn't directly harm another), and the only cops out are there to line their own pockets, not to enforce any concept of "public safety." For example, there are almost no traffic lights or signs in Phnom Penh (3-5 million people), and you have Broadway-style intersections anyway. And still, people don't get hurt (except with landmines). You can also blow up a cow with a rocket, throw a grenade in the water for fish, do any kind of drugs anywhere you want, drive as fast and crazy as you can handle (on a motorbike while holding a beer in one hand and a joint in the other), and basically fuck anything you want for less than $10 (and no, i didn't, but I did to the motorbike thing). Back home, it's not only that you can't drink in the street, have to obey every single traffic rule, go to prison for harming only yourself with drugs, can't drink before you're 21, can't enter a public park after dark, can't loiter, can't smoke in public, get your phones tapped,
and get taxed on EVERYTHING, but there is always an abundance of hard-nosed police officers out to enforce it all, each of whom would love to add to their CV by putting you away for as long as possible. It only recently stuck me how rediculous it was that it's illegal to sleep on the street, or in the parks, or on the beach in America. The land of Freedom. I'd rather be completely repressed by a regime that does absolutely nothing.

Sorry, I had to get that off my chest. On with the boring stuff:

Basically, everything in cambodia once I got onto the tourist trail was shit. The people were shit, the sights were shit, the prices were shit (i was genuinely pissed off to have to pay $3 for a room). And everywhere, I mean everywhere, were guys on motorcycles trying desperately to be your driver for the day. There's absolutely no work for these people, and they'd be extatic to take you for a full day tour for $10. Gas, by the way, is still $4 per gallon. That makes the 125cc motorbikes in Thailand look like gas guzzling SUVs, since most of them out there were anywhere from 90cc down to 50cc, and 20 years old to boot.

So instead of taking the cheap bus directly to Saigon, I booked a four day tour around the mekong river delta in South Vietnam for about $40. The brochure really looked great, and I was pretty excited. Of course they never came to pick me up from my guesthouse in the morning, so an hour later I walked with my backpack all the way to the travel agent, who put me on a motorbike, who put me on a minivan, who took me to catch up with the tour bus. We crossed the border with everything alright, spent a day boating through a floating village, and borded another bus to take us to the next stop. These villages, by the way, make most of those huge fish you see in restaurant aquariums back home. They live in houseboats, under which they keep a giant cage to grow up to 100,000 fish in the natural river waters. Twice a year, they sell them off to make 10-15 thousand US dollars, a fuckton of money out here.

Anyway, we get off the bus at the next stop to find... absolutely nothing. No tour company, no guide, no representative, just a bus stop with absolutely no English speakers. There we were, 9 of us, stranded. After almost 2 hours of playing tweed-ball hackey sack with the locals, we all decided to fuck the tour and buy a ticket straight to Saigon, so here we are. The Vientamese, by the way, have no problem pointing their finger directly at you and laughing at how different you are. I personally have no problem with this, since I find the situation equally hilarous and laugh right back at them (sometimes even with them), but it almost drove this one guy to tears. That was funny. I can see why Matt likes this place.

That's it for now. I'm off to see the American war crimes museum that has been recently renamed the "War Remnants Museum." Sorry for the Agent Orange, guys, it was to defend your Freedom.

2006-01-14T03:39:00.000-08:00

My bus across Cambodia stopped for half an hour for a pit stop, and through the people selling deep fried spiders and ducks I found a stand selling big bags of beef jerky. Without knowing any Cambodian, I bought a half kilo for $4.50, which I did my best to negotiate down but instead of budging in the slightest, they just kept looking at me as if I was only joking about buying it in the first place. They wouldn't sell me any less than a half kilo, but after staring at it for so long I really just had to have it. I take this huge bag of beef carrion to the beat up restaurant table where my friend is sitting, take out a huge piece, and tear into it full force. It might just have been the best beef jerky I've ever had; sun dried and probably no more than a day or two old.

In less than a minute, the whole restaurant was staring at me. Then they tried their best to muffle their laughs. Finally one guy said to me, "no eat!" and then burst out laughing. I spat out what I had in my mouth and gave the big piece to the guy, who took it into the kitchen and DEEP FRIED the fucker for a good 3 or 4 minutes. He served it on a plate for me and said "now, eat."

I tried saying how we eat this stuff raw where I come from, but they just looked at me like I was crazy. I guess out here they have to beef-jerky-ize everything before the flies get to it, without refrigeration and temperatures at 90 degrees during the winter. I guess even then it stands the risk of getting really, really gross so they deep fry it before serving it just in case. Deep fried beef jerky is, by the way, an awesome idea and everybody should do it... you know, for health.

One night in Laos, I was trying to decide whether to snack on squid jerky or deep fried chicken feet when I realized how much my diet has changed out here. Once I managed to eat a whole duck on the bus without any utensils, after watching a Cambodian do it. I guess it must be working, since this delicious beef jerky hasn't made me sick yet. I stopped eating it raw just in case, but now every morning I come out with a huge slab of meat for the kitchen to fry as breakfast.

By the way, replacing the Team America song with the words "Cambodia, FUCK YEAH" makes for a much better song.

2006-01-11T06:56:00.000-08:00

Cambodia,

I keep thinking that the only reason I'm here is because of that damn Dead Kennedys song, which has been in my head ever since I crossed the border. This place is kinda like Laos, but with a slightly more desperate tinge to it in the tourist centers. Once off the main drag of any city, the young people turn rediculously friendly, almost to a fault.

The kids here are particularly nuts. We rented motorbikes and headed 15k to go see some freshwater dolphins, which are particular only to the Mekong. The dolphins were pretty cool, but nothing compared to the drive up. Every few seconds for all of 40 minutes, children were literally running out of their tiny houses, both arms flailing in the air, shouting "HELLO!!!!" or "GOOODBYYEEEE!!," neither of which they knew the meaning of. I mean, literally for 40 minutes straight we were accosted by kids, sometimes in packs of 5 to 10, running out to see the foreigners riding on their motorbikes. Luckily my friend ("opium girl") was riding on the back of the bike so she was the designated waver-backer, leaving me to concentrate on holding onto the handlebars and shouting things in English that I knew they didn't understand. We saw the dolphins from a boat, then got back on the bikes and headed another 20k further upriver. The kids from this point on were even worse. If they don't get many foreigners on the road to the dolphins, they hardly knew what to make of us further up.

So we see a big temple and stop to take some pictures. Within 2 minutes, all the kids from the local school come out (maybe 30 total) and we play some haphazard volleyball and try playing this game with a bamboo thatch ball that's basically like kicking around an oversize hackey sack. The pictures will be sent soon.

But there's definately the feeling that some real shit went down 25 years ago. Everybody over 40 has the look of genocide to them, and from just hearing three days worth of stories so far, it sounds like each of them was either in front of, or behind a gun. The Khmer Rouge imposed three years of absolute terror on the country (beginning with ordering all the cities totally evacuated), but they somehow managed to stick around the borders of the country until about 10 years ago. The kids I saw under 15 have this look of absolute joy to them, as if their parents imparted all their optimism to this future generation, while the parents themselves look old and broken.

Now I'm in Siam Reap, the town right next to Ankor Wat. I get to wake up at 5AM to go see the sunrise from the top of supposedly one of the most spectacular temple ruins in the world. The temples here, though I haven't seen them yet, are supposed to be the only reason most people go to Cambodia. That's why they charge 20 fucking US dollars to get in per day (to no benefit of the temples, either). Dicks.

Oh yeah, I got to spend three days in another (completely different) absolute paradise in Laos before I left. I had no idea that a country I had known only as "somewhere in asia" five months earlier could be so peaceful and beautiful. I guess I'm just American. Anyway, it's this place near the Cambodian border where the Mekong river fans out that's called the Four Thousand Islands and no, I didn't count them. Basically, you can only get there by boat, everything is candle power after 11PM, and there's absolutely nothing to do but swim, bike, read, smoke pot, canoe, and walk around all day with your jaw dropped wide open at how cool everything looks. The island we were staying at was big enough a tiny village of locals, but for every Laotian you saw, there must have been 5 chickens, 3 pigs, and maybe another ten water buffalos walking through the rice fields. Oh yeah, and I saw one monkey on the island, chained to a tree, with his tiny little pecker fully erect, looking at me with a really sick little monkey smile. Reiss, I really wish I had a picture of it for you.

Oh yeah, and I haven't seen a single squirrel here... maybe that's the curse of the landmines.

-andrew

2006-01-05T01:37:00.000-08:00

I just learned that the five years of Vietnamese and American secret bombings not only made Laos the most heavily bombed country in the world (per capita), but has created one of the largest expanses of protected forest in the world because the shrapnel absorbed by the trees has made them absolutely useless pieces of wood that would break any bandsaw that dared cut through them, and the mines laid throughout the jungle would make the logging too dangerous anyway. Maybe Kissenger was just an ecoterrorist.

2006-01-03T22:39:00.000-08:00

Vang Vieng, Laos

So as it turns out, I stumbled into another lost backpacker hideaway in the middle of some random country, only this one hasn't been shut down or overgrown yet. There might be two paved roads in the city, leaving the rest of the place looking like a dusty wild-west movie set among towering cliffs on all sides. The river fans out a bit along the side of the town, and forms an island that's about half a mile long and 500 feet wide. This island, which is only accessible by a creaky narrow bamboo bridge, has been totally taken over by foreigners. There are a half dozen large bars, each surrounded by bamboo thatch huts (with no walls) filled with pillows and mats. Each bar area has a large campfire or two that burns through sunrise, one of which is set in the middle of a bamboo patch with another dozen hammocks strung up on the bamboo. Another bar has a line of huts along the riverside with a string of floating lamps out in the water. Not only can you order opium tea and mushroom shakes, but on our last day when we were eating lunch at this place, the Lao owner gave us a joint for absolutely no reason other than because nobody saw him do it. It sounds like it's a particularly Lao mentality to be happy by making someone else happy. Lao people in Thailand behaved the same way.

While looking for a place to stay on our first day in, we walked by a group of Lao teenagers drinking outside and singing along with Thai music. They, drunk, motioned us over to come drink with them. My group (three other people) were tired and needed to get rid of their packs, so I told the Lao group I'd come back later. Later, I couldn't convince anybody else to come so I just went back to see them on my own, armed with a half case of beer. It's really wierd what these cultures take of modern technology: they don't have many computers or TVs, but for some reason I've almost never seen a stereo system without the attached karaoke component. I mean, these kids brought out a huge speaker and an old, dusty sound system, but they also brought a TV to watch the video feed of their music, which was all in VCD Karaoke format. So we get really drunk in the heat of the afternoon while screaming to the Karaoke English transliteration of Thai songs. One of the guys was Vietnamese, whose dad had fought in with the VietKong, and when I met him he was wearing a US Army camo jacket and had bleached blond hair. That way I spent only 3 minutes of the obligatory 7 minutes apologizing for what my country has done to his. I hang out with these guys for the next few days, until it becomes too obvious that one of them only wanted to get into my pants. Still, in the meantime they took me to the big Lao club in Vang Vieng and requested a song on my behalf. A few minutes later, the DJ announced the next song for "Mr. Andloo" and put on the Britney Spears, which I had no choice but to pretend to really dig, since the guys were so excited about finding an American song for me.

As I'm writing this in the internet cafe, there's a russian lady screaming into a phone inside her "sound proof" phonebooth that sounds to amplify her abnoxiousness.

Anyway, New Year's was spent walking from campfire to campfire among the blacklight neon red and green painted bamboo dens on the island. Fun stuff, though nobody had a watch so there was no countdown. I started one anyway, and everybody went along with it so I guess I was close enough.

Oh yeah, on the two day riverboat trip to Luang Prabang (first stop in Laos), the boat would stop every half hour or so to load or unload some rice for the villagers, and a few poor looking village kids would run to the shore to wave at us. One of these kids, who was about 7 years old and looked extremely bored, not waving and just picking his nose because he probably had no idea why everybody just ran to shore, probably from some village that has never seen 24 hour electricity, had on a bright blue shirt with the words "PUNK'S NOT DEAD." Now that's punk.

We're now in the capital, Ventiane (named that way because the French didn't want to pronounce Wien Chan, seriously), to get our Cambodia visas, use the mail, get some books and relax in a European atmosphere. The whole place stinks of French. Cafes, wine stores, overpriced meals, there's even an Arc Du Triumph lookalike here. But it's a nice place to do some chores before heading off to nowhere. Tonight we take the 12-hour bus ride to the south of Laos, to someplace called the Four Thousand Islands, where there's no electricity after 8. Then through Cambodia into Vietnam. I'm going to love or hate candles by the end of it.

2005-12-30T06:12:00.000-08:00

So I'm having dinner while watching an aweful vampire movie here in Vang Viene, Laos, when after about 30 minutes I realize that, written behind the TV at the restaurant are the words "Happy Ben Johnson Restaurant." Why call it that? Then I see the word "Happy" written just under the TV itself, and then again on the wall to my right. This prompted me to finally look around the place I had been eating my casual dinner at for the past half hour and find the walls absolutley COVERED with spray paint pictures of giant mushrooms, framed in the words "Happy" and "Fun." In giant letters, on the wall lining most of the tables of the restaurant, the words "Try our Delicious SPECIAL Mushroom shake" were staring down at me. Then I look down to see I had been eating the mushroom pizza. After a closer look at the menu, I found I was lucky to order just the "Mushroom pizza" and not the "SPECIAL mushroom pizza," which was twice as expensive. Laos, of all places. At least now I know where to go for New Year's. Happy 31st from here.

Oh yeah, and I finally figured out how to enable anonymous comments. go nuts.

2005-12-29T00:24:00.000-08:00

Round one of pictures has been sent out. If you didn't get it, email me and I'll send it to you by Gmail. I'm in Luang Prabang, Laos, about two days along the Mekong river east of the northern tip of Thailand. Really beautiful, and even cheaper than Thailand. Out here I'm a millionaire with $100,but best of all the biggest denomination of currency is equal to about 2 bucks, so I have this humongous roll of money in my pocket right now, and it takes a stack of cash every time I want to buy anything. Kickass.

2005-12-23T03:33:00.000-08:00

For about $350US, I can blow up a buffalo with an RPG-7. A full, real life buffalo. I got the offer last night and I've been thinking about it way too much. Just imagine the look on his eye just as he sees a screaming rocket coming towards him. Then imagine the brains, guts and glory spewed across the field. Jesus. I think the only thing holding me back is that if I miss, I still pay the $350. The money's for the rocket round, nobody gives a fuck about the buffalo.

So that's why I decided to leave thailand. It's too much here. The devil can sit right next to you and you can take him by the hand and show him something new. Anyway, I need a break. I've been in Chiang Mai long enough to start running into people I know everywhere. It's no longer anonymous. I can't even talk to a girl anymore without getting the evil eye from some girl I used to know or her nosy friend. I've had enough, at least for now. If I don't leave now, it won't be long before I end up covered in buffalo guts.

So we're heading up to the northern tip of Thailand, then taking the two day boat down the Mekong river into Laos. For the next few weeks I'll be following the river down through Cambodia, through dirt and shit and disease and poverty and beautiful, untouched landscapes. Hopefully that'll get my head on straight and get me the hell out of Gammorrah before I end up with a hole in my pocket and possibly somewhere else. I just learned yesterday that the room I've been staying in for the past week was the scene of the brutal murder of a 24 year old western girl about two years ago. In my bed.

So I get two more nights of trouble before I head out. I've been looking long and hard for a Santa Suit but, for some reason, they're a bit hard to find out here. In the spirit of Santarchy, I had found friends who would do a Rude Santa pub crawl with me but alas, drunk santas without suits are just drunks. So it shall be.

2005-12-17T23:43:00.000-08:00

A Burmese guy I met last night turned me on to this story of a Nepalese boy who's been meditating under a tree for 7 months without food or water, and plans to continue for another 6 years, as Buddha did, until he achieves enlightenment. This time, however, reporters will be watching. It's exciting, if not absolutely terrifiying, if the world will get its Buddha incarnate at this particular point in history.

2005-12-16T23:48:00.000-08:00

Melssa's right, I might as well drop my pants now and go find a ladyboy bar to get reamed up the ass by a girl named "Long." I am getting old. My last few nights in Pai, I started seeing this girl who wouldn't tell me her age ever since I told her I was 23, insisting that she's 23 since I'm 23. She's old enough to be that smart, anyway, which places her at around 32. She does a really good job looking young and punky with the center-lip ring and the sexy hippie fashion that can only come from an interior designer, but she comes from the part of England that makes her accent identical to the uber-feminist ultra-posh artist chick from Big Lebowsky. Above all, the way she rolls a joint shows at least a decade of practice. Needless to say, I can't get away from these older women. Maybe that's why I like this 21 year old Laotian bar owner I met here last week, who has in the past two days won my heart over by being too hammered to stand up straight (and still somehow manage to drive her scooter home).

Anyway, the visa run took an unexpected 4 hours each way of driving max speed (80-100km/hr) and since I couldn't manage to wake up before noon, I ended up driving the whole way back in the dark. Go figure it was up in the mountains, so even though it doesn't compare to what the New York nights are like now, I had to wear a full ski mask, helmet, sweater, jacket, boots, and hold on to the bike as tight as possible to keep from freezing to death. The best thing that happened to me was being stopped for drugs at a police checkpoint (I guess I did look pretty sketchy), and I they let me warm up by their fire for a few minutes before going onward. Anyway, now I have a cold. But I have a month long visa!

I got to see Myanmar for about 20 minutes, too. I rushed as fast as I could to get to the border before it closed. As it happens, I made the 4 and a half hour trip to make it to the Thailand exit gate at 4:58 on the day my visa expired. But then, in order to get a new visa, I had to officially enter Myanmar, which was 100 feet away. Somehow, for some reason, Myanmar exists on a time zone that is 30 minutes behind Thailand. So it was 4:28 in Myanmar. That gave me a half hour to get the stamp, walk around the product of a brutal totalitarian regime for 20 minutes, and get back before 5:00. Anyway, Myanmar sucks. It's kinda like the border in South Tahoe between Nevada and California, taken down about 20 notches. On one side you had large urban developments and on the other you had, basically, an Arab market. Cheap, cheap, cheap stuff and people who are desperately desperate enough to lower the price from that if you walk away. Anyway, fun stuff.

Big lebowsky girl just came by. Off to party,

2005-12-12T04:19:00.000-08:00

There was some point about an hour or two after we got back when the three of us, sitting around a bottle of whiskey commemorating a successful trip, all looked at each other and realized how rediculously lucky we were to have come back in one piece. I don't know why it felt so safe to be on the road like that, but in retrospect we were riding like madmen on cycles that slipped and skidded every time we had to stop, without helmets, without gloves, without insurance. Whew.

I guess the reality of our recklessness really sunk in when we saw our friend who had been taking life very easily since his accident on the second day of the trip. We found him living in a bungalow 8 km from town with a bandage wrapped around his shaved head like a turban. Before the accident, he was a ready-to-go party hearty Sir Fucksalot whose goal was to fulfill some bet he made to sleep with 100 women during his 7 months. But instead of spending the next week using his scars and badass haircut to his sexual advantage, he locked himself up in his bungalow for the next 5 days to meditate. By the time we saw him, he had a new glare behind his eyes that shone through the layers of sweat and shit that come from a week of not washing your head. He had a new lease on life, and was making the best of it. Strikingly different than the rest of ours' intention to live hard and fast.

Anyway I'm back in Chiang Mai cause I need to make a "Visa Run." Thailand offers a free 30-day tourist visa, so anybody who wants to stay in the country longer than that has to leave every 30 days and re-enter. There are busses that take you from here directly to the Myanmar border just to get the passport stamped and then turn back. From Pai it takes about 7 hours each way. From Chiang Mai I think I can do it in 3, so I rented another motorbike and am going to spend the day on the road tomorrow. This time with a helmet, on the highway, going slow. I've had enough of physical danger for one week.

2005-12-10T02:45:00.000-08:00

I must have spent close to a week in Pai, the lost hippie getaway of the world. It's just one of those places to end up if you have nothing to do for a long time and don't intend on learning anything about the local culture. In any case, it's one hell of a party. Still, it was really nice to find a group of people who wanted to take a motorcycle trip around the province. Their plan was written on a table napkin by some thai who sorta knew something about something in the area, but basically we all left our backpacks and sent off for ten days around the country with nothing but a small bag and a napkin map. I guess I expected a slow cruise, since we had these crappy bikes and no helmet or sunglasses to block the swarms of mosquitoes that come out at sunset. Instead, we pushed these bikes as fast as they could make it, pushing 100km/hr on the straightaways. For most of the trip, the road was steep and rediculously curvy, enough to end up in first gear just to make it to the top of the hills. At night this turned into one hell of a deathtrap, since much of the road had been washed out in the recent floods. The whole helmet thing became frightfully apparent when one of our group (the fastest) took a turn right in front of me at night and didn't see the signs (written in Thai anyway) that said the lane ends immediately after the turn. I saw him fall, then made a full skid to stop myself in the gravel, barely not falling over. I parked the bike and ran over to find him lying face down in a huge cloud of dust, unconscious. In a few more seconds, he began to cough and answer to his name. A few minutes later, a truck stopped for us and took him to the hospital where they gave him 5 stiches in the back of his head. By the way, two hours of good, sterile medical attention out here cost him $15US including 12 more daily visits to have his wounds cleaned. Needless to say, he had to head back. Three of us left. So we slowed down a bit, enjoyed the scenery, and made it the rest of 600 Km around and to Chiang Mai safely. Two nights ago we stay in this tiny town in Bumblefuck nowhere and try to find the party. For some reason, there's one bar with anybody in it in this whole town of 1000 or so people. Of course, it's a ladyboy karaoke bar. Why not? We walk in and everybody is so crazed to see three foreigners that I felt like a big juicy steak in front of hungry lions. The lions, of course, were singing awful thai songs. Awefully. It took two songs before they hand me the mic and make me sing some god aweful song I've never heard before by a group called Westlife. I sung at the top of my lungs in the butt-rock drunk karaoke tone I know from home, but it was enough to get surrounded by ladyboys. At one point I go take a piss and one follows me into the bathroom, mid stream, and closes the door behind me.
"Five minute"
"no"
"Two minute"
"Get out of the way"
"Just give me two minute"
I had to physically push her out of the way to get to the door. She was, by the way, a full foot taller than me. I guess I missed my chance to get my asshole tickled, but I almost got her to strip in the bar in front of everybody to prove she had a ManGina. That would have been worth the effort.

Now we get the weekend back in Chiang Mai, in essence, to get laid by legitimate chicks. So last night we went back to Bubbles 'till 2 and Spicy 'till 6, the two bars that exist for the sole purpose of providing a breeding ground between Western guys and Thai girls. The girl I met this time happened to actually be a winner, not just a pretty face for sale. I didn't expect much, since she was wearing next to nothing (fashionably) and dancing like a spring break girl gone wild. But at 21, she owns and runs her own bar in the center of town and speaks perfect english. I guess what won me over was when she refused to let me buy her a second drink. I hope I can play this one without her getting too attached, but it's real nice to have someone to see in Chiang Mai since I'll probably be coming back here a lot. Then again, one of the guys I'm travelling with has been getting a daily phone call from his girl in Chiang Mai, complaining about why he's not back to see her yet. I don't mind learning my lesson the hard way.

Oh yeah, so I go take a piss at this Spicy place. I barely have time to unzip when I feel a cold towel around my neck. After the ladyboy incident, this is a nice subtle touch. I guess it's OK. Then I feel hands massaging my back. Pretty nice massage, actually. I keep peeing. Then, two hands around my neck and before I know it, the entire top half of my spine cracks. Then the other way. Fucking chiropracters in the pissers out here. I finish, zip up, and stick around for another few minutes to get three guys grabbing my arms, ears, and back to do the quick and dirty upper body massage. I give them 50 cents and walk out feeling more refreshed and alive than I've ever come out of a bathroom before. Fantastic.

One more night in Chiang Mai before I have to return the bike to Pai. Then I head to the islands in the south for the new year's and "new" moon party. NYE should be huge, I think 100k people descend on Ko Pangan for the weekend. I guess life could be more difficult.

2005-11-26T23:41:00.000-08:00

Oh, man this place is rediculous. Every single human need is taken care of. I'm going to go nuts if something bad doesn't happen soon. My typical day in Chiang Mai consists of waking up at 10, getting a full "American" breakfast with "hilltribe" coffee for $2 while reading the Bangkok Post, hanging out in a shady jungle-filled courtyard with the expats until it gets hot enough to walk next door and get a full hour massage for $3, reading until it gets dark enough to start drinking, and then drink the bars closed. Even sex is available if you can't find it for free. It's awful. Life is SO easy here I can't stand it.

So I took one of those three day touristy treks that "follow the path of hilltribe villiages to experience the ancient culture of Thailand," or some crap like that. I guess I've been walking through stall after stall after stall of people trying to get me to buy the Elephant Safari trek or the "See the Longneck Tribal people" trek everywhere I turn. You can't even take a shit here without looking up to see a poster selling treks. Needless to say, I wasn't expecting much when I was able to bargain the price down to just over $30 for the three days, and the guy said something like "onry eight peopor, six girls! Ha ha ha, vely goo!" Which turned out to be 25 people, mostly couples.

But at night when most of the group went to sleep, I found myself sitting around a camp fire on the balcony of a bamboo hut at the top of a mountain overlooking deep jungle hills as far as I could see. The people who lived with the villiage and tour company came out then, not because it was part of the brochure, but because there's abolutely shit to do in the jungle at night. Before I knew it, one Thai guy wearing a tie-dye orange shirt and a Jimi Henrix headband and another guy wearing a Vietnam-era US military outfit were playing Niel Young on two guitars and a drum they brought out. Then the whiskey started flowing, and before we knew it we were passing guitars around to anybody who could play. They make a "whiskey" from sticky rice that's basically like a 35% strong Sake, and goes down a little too easy. Needless to say, sappy bleeding heart Vietnam-era american songs gave way to anything that's good to sing at the top of your lungs to. Basically we sat around a campfire, drinking booze and getting stoned, and sung awefully at the top of our lungs the same songs that we'd be singing in San Francisco or New York, only these people didn't speak English, and we were in the middle of the fucking Jungle.

I got back last night, a Saturday, and went Big. I guess I keep hearing the stories about the Thai girls, I decided to test the waters. The only rules are don't ever pay for sex, always use a condom, and don't end up married. We made it to Bubbles, the local "big club" at just after midnight. I guess I knew what I was getting myself into the moment I saw 80% of the people were white guys talking to thai girls. Sure enough, it took me all of 30 minutes before I found myself talking to a girl I thought was real pretty, but not pretty enough to be a whore. Far as I could tell, she wasn't a man either. Everything was going great, she had a name I could actually remember (as far as I could decipher, her name was "Two"), and she gave me the keys to her moped while I drove to my place, piss drunk, without a helmet, pretty girl knawing at my neck, in a country that drives on the left side of the road. I don't know why I spend so much time thinking about sex safety and then go do something like that. Anyway, we park the bike, walk inside, and end up completely cockblocked by the hotel staff, who have a policy of not letting Thai girls in after 9. I guess more times than not, there's money involved, and they didn't want to be associated with "that." Racists. Anyway, after the cold shower I figured I'd accomplished my goal anyway, to see if I could pick up a pretty girl at a sleezy club and not pay a dime for sex. The sex part is the most dangerous part of the task, save for the drive over there, and I was so piss drunk I wouldn't have remembered much anyway. Besides, now I can go back to Ayuthaya for that. Good enough for me. Check.

Off to Pai,

-andrew

Breaking in

2005-11-21T02:30:00.000-08:00

It's a strange feeling to sit on the intersection of two lifestyles. For me, anyway, it took four days before I was finally able to accept the fact that I have nowhere to be for the next 9 months. Bangkok wasn't more than a stopover I guess. I did the usual thing: got lost in the markets, had a LEGITIMATE thai massage, and watched girls pull feather boas out of their twats (I lasted all of 5 minutes before making a b-line for a real bar), but I guess what did it was finally leaving town.
Ayuthaya is a semi-major city about 80 km north of Bangkok, that 1300 years ago served as the seat of the Thai empire. As a show of wealth and power, the Thais built a large rectangular moat around the intersection of (2 or 3?) rivers and decorated it with gigantic carved phallises surrounded by walls lined with buddhas. There were two or three fortresses I saw, with all the inner walls lined with buddhas sitting shoulder to shoulder. Thousands of them. Big ones in the middle as well, originally covered in gold. So the Burmese were so excited to finally sack the city that, to get the Thai to surrender, they systematically cut off the heads of every single buddha in the city and melted down the big ones. Talk about vengeful, this must have been the religious equivalent to salting the fields of all of Thailand. Anyone who's played Black and White knows that when you sack the temple of an opposing God, your religion points drop to next to nothing and your followers lose faith and join the opposing side. The ancient Burmese rulers must have known this trick. I'd sure like to play against them.
So I was contemplating this while taking a victory bikeride after getting to know this really pretty Danish girl, when I found myself alone in the dark among these ancient lit-up ruins all around me. The road was dark, I had no flashlight, and before I knew it I was biking for my life down the broken sidewalk as 5 rabid dogs chased after me. Apparently I had crossed into their turf. Dogs out here are a lot like the people who wander the sidewalks in Alphabet City. Most of them are poor looking for freebies, some are grossly diseased, and some are looking to start a fight. To be honest I had it coming, I biked right by this dog as he stood there barking at me, but I didn't expect all his friends go from dead asleep to dog racers so quickly. After dodging a few trees, cracks, and rocks in the dark (thank you New York City Crazy Biking School), I finally made it to a major road which, fortunately, was the end of their territory. Score so far:

Andrew: 1
Rabies: 0

Whoever chose Rabies in the "Disease that Andrew gets First" pool loses out today. Anyway, I'm finally in the swing of things. I'm up in Chiang Mai after taking the 10hour sleepless night bus. It's time to pass out. I'll find out what else I'm doing when I get there.

-andrew