Back To Work

2 days ago I left Bangkok. I stayed there for a week this time around. A week that felt more like an eternity, and depending on your spiritual beliefs, a week that might certainly have eternal implications. For the sake of sharing with you the full breadth of my travels – the good, bad, and ugly – I will say of this recent stay in Bangkok that it shared the same basic elements that a worried parent might imagine of their child's 21st birthday spent in Las Vegas. Pause for a moment, play the role of said worried parent, and see what manifests...While, for the sake of decency, I will eschew any further details, I urge the moralists among you to consider your own private desires, your fantasies, and then consider a world in which fulfilling them is not only possible but very easily done. I can see my parents wincing right now. Though as possibly ashamed or disappointed as they are, I bear no regrets nor feel I owe any apologies. For the record, and some small circles among you have the full story, nothing that happened was overly imprudent nor anything I would call deviant. What happened over the course of that week could make for a rather humorous montage in a movie that would easily pass for an R rating. Maybe, mom, I'll even tell you about it one day.

Bangkok, highlighted by a few crazy nights, was also a place of some sobering goodbyes. On the 21st, Fergus and his buddy Joyce took an early morning flight to Kuala Lumpur where they will stay for a short time before moving on to Australia and New Zealand. Fergus made for a good friend on this trip. In the 2 months we traveled together we shared some amazing experiences, from the trek in Laos, to New Year's in Krabi, to the surreal week we just finished in Bangkok. As I type this, I am watching the Arsenal v. Man U game, and actually enjoying it! Becoming a soccer fan has perhaps been my most dramatic lifestyle transformation since I phased out underwear about 2 years ago. And I owe it all to Fergus. His seemingly endless supply of energy and his always timely and hilarious quips (which became known as Fergusisms), has made the just completed leg of this journey a breeze. And arriving just as he did, as Ryan was making his way home, made Fergus' presence all the more welcome. Agent Smith, too, has also left my company. A few days ago we met up with 2 girls from back home, Carly Norr and Julia Sakis, and for the next 2 months Ace will be escorting them through the larger part of Southeast Asia. They are currently side-stepping landmines in Cambodia.

One of the most unfortunate aspects of long-term travel, as this recent series of farewells has made clear, is its impermanence. What is true one day, is not true the next. Things that in our normal lives are taken for granted – friends, family, home, a quiet place to have a cup of good coffee and read the paper – when traveling are searched for and measured on a day to day basis and often completely lacking. I can only do my best to compensate for these things by accepting short-term facsimiles. This is partly what makes drinking so appealing. Alcohol, as you know, is probably the easiest way to bridge the gap between strangeness and familiarity. The person who at the beginning of a long night at the bar is at first a stranger, after enough drinks can be the best friend you've ever had. But these kinds of relationships, as we all know, comes with their own set of complications. Namely, the next day you're left with that hollowed out feeling and the same emptiness that lured you to the bar in the first place is perhaps even deeper and more crushing than before. As it was, first with Ryan, then with Ace and Fergus, I was able to hold on to some permanence, some stability, even among the whirlwinds of travel. I needn't seek out, or try to re-create, those pieces of home and we could each lean on each other to validate our experiences by sharing them with one another. And it was genuine. But now the dynamic has changed.

Knowing I would be striking out on my own at the end of January, I contemplated a few options. Burma, Malaysia, Indonesia, and China were all heavily considered. In the end I chose to return to Laos. It was here in Laos that I first fell in love with Southeast Asia back in November. The geography of the country, landlocked between Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, and Burma, and taking shape along the banks of the Mekong River, is absolutely gorgeous. Seemingly endless expanses of lush and untouched jungle, the pulsating current of the Mekong, and giant limestone monoliths, all make this place a treasure of natural beauty. And the people here are beyond friendly. It is impossible to walk down the street here without being greeted by a big smile and a loud "sabai-dee". And still just entering into the tourism industry, opening its borders to tourists for the first time in 1997, the oft dehumanizing aspects of traveling are not nearly as apparent here as elsewhere in the region (we'll see how much this changes over the years; I'd like to believe there's something unique in the Laos character that will be able to resist the temptations of excessive commercialization, but the Laos people, too, are human after-all).

But above all, what drew me back to Laos was work. I've shaved the beard, cut my hair, and I am now officially employed (actually unofficially – more on that later). As I've mentioned at least a few times, it was in Laos, in a small village called Veng Vieng, that I first learned how to, and fell in love with, rock climbing. And I'm back for more. Laos Rock Climbing Shop, owned and operated by Jun Sangthong, and staffed by his girlfriend, Na, and 2 younger brothers, Noi and Bun, is where I will be working for the next month (or more), teaching beginner's climbing lessons and helping out with the day-to-day operation of the shop. Predictably, the pay is, well, non-existent, but I do get some compensation. For one, I get to climb as much as I want over the course of the next month. A few days a week, depending on the weather, we don't see any customers, and on those days I have the freedom to take whatever equipment I want and go off on my own or with one of the brothers and climb to my heart's content. Second, I get 3 square meals a day. In the morning we have coffee and soup, for lunch we usually have Laos sausages that we bring out to the crag with us, and for dinner Na will make a proper Laos style feast that we all sit around and eat together at Jun's house on the outskirts of the village. Another exciting thing is that in the 2nd week in February one of Jun's good friend's from Germany (he used to be married to a German woman) is coming to Veng Vieng with a rock drill. In the next 2 months about 30 new routes are planned to go up in the surrounding area and there's a good chance that I'll be able to bolt at least one of them myself. As climbing enthusiasts know, putting up your own route is a kind of immortalizing undertaking, both getting to name the route and getting authorial credit in future guidebooks. Before that happens though, I'll have to get significantly better at climbing. Lastly, and perhaps the most appealing aspect of working here at the climbing shop is that it provides a space for me to make a home (if a short-term one). The Sangthong family has already made me feel like one of their own. Jun has given me keys to his house and to the guide shop and has told me in no uncertain terms to treat his things as if they were my own. Veng Vieng, for its part, is an ideal place to spend an extended amount of time. There is a good coffee-shop/bakery that gets the Bangkok post every morning and several restaurants with big screen TV's that show DVD's and live sporting events. About a mile south of Veng Vieng is a cement factory where there are daily pickup basketball games played by the factory's onsite workers. The guesthouse I'm staying at is also a familiar place from my last visit here. In November I was thrown a surprise party on my 24th birthday by the family that runs the establishment. Unbeknownst to me, the woman at the reception desk, Connie, noticed on my passport that my birthday was going to take place during my stay here and she arranged for a party on my behalf. I was treated to a BBQ fish dinner, a birthday cake, and a bottle of homemade opium liquor from Connie's father. When I returned a few days ago, she didn't immediately recognize me as I had shaven my beard and cut my hair. After a moment of studying my face inquisitively she ran from behind the counter and greeted me with a big hug and immediately escorted me up to the same room I had stayed in before.

Earlier in this post I did my best to impart how emotionally exhausting traveling can sometimes be, especially when you are on your own. The strain of dislocation, of transience, and what ultimately amounts to loneliness, gets compounded over time and can weigh heavily on what should otherwise be a thrilling thing. To come back to a place like Veng Vieng, where I can have at least some of the stability of home (a favorite restaurant for instance, or being on a first name basis with the owner of the local bookshop) while also experiencing all that comes with traveling in an exotic locale, is understandably alluring. Plus I get to climb. A lot.

Thailand Backroads

Our road trip up Thailand's stretch of the Malay Peninsula has officially come to a close. We are now back in Bangkok and just biding our time until we each travel our separate ways this following Sunday. To recap: the journey lasted 11 days in total, during which we stayed in 4 different cities/towns/municipalities, whatever, spent a net total of 22 hours on Thailand's surprisingly efficient, clean, and comfortable public buses, watched countless DVD's and televised movies dubbed in Thai (The Mighty Ducks easily being the most enjoyable among them), managed to refrain from getting drunk on at least 6 of those nights, ate some of the spiciest food imaginable, played hours of basketball, watched more soccer than I ever thought I would in my life, and generally had a very good time.

Though the trip was enjoyable for a million reasons, it was not the trip we had planned it to be. Initially our primary goal was to simply save money. This very straightforward initiative led us to seek out the names on the map that we had never heard of, cities that didn't show up in the guide books or grace the covers of the pamphlets in guide shops, places we could fairly assume that tourists didn't usually travel, and where as a result things would be cheaper, there would be fewer temptations, our time would be more leisurely, and we could expect to be treated more like foreign dignitaries than like ambulatory wallets. Our predictions were partially right.

What we found along the Malay Peninsula was not the expanse of loosely connected agrarian villages that we had expected, but instead a region of vast emptiness occasionally punctuated by mid-sized cities and the squat concrete buildings which house a given districts Social Services Office say, or the Ranong Province Biosphere Reserve Administration Center. Our first stop was the city of Pang Nga, which is just a boat ride north of Phuket. Here we discovered that even away from the metropolises of Bangkok or Phuket, Thai life does not consist of the quaint repose that we were hoping to find. To be fair Pang Nga actually turned out to be something of an anomaly (at least for 1 of the 2 nights we were there). While this city of merely one main street has its share of go-go bars and unsavory temptations, all in all its most notable attractions are of a more bucolic nature. The surrounding countryside proves a pleasant day's hike with a network of massive limestone caves that hold centuries old Bhuddist shrines and some very strange and wonderful sights aside. Largely Pang Nga's more village-like feel is a consequence of the 2004 tsunami, which, as you'll remember, essentially wiped out this entire area of Thailand. Evidence of the tsunami still scars the province. Even miles off the coast it is not uncommon to see flipped boats or uprooted palm trees strewn over deserted plots of land like garbage. My guess is that before the tsunami struck, and probably just a few years from now, Pang Nga was and will be more city than village.

Our next stop after Pang Nga was the city of Surat Thani. Bordering Bandon Bay, Surat Thani is the major jumping off point for travelers heading to the Gulf islands of Ko Samui, Ko Phangan, and Ko Tao. Surat Thani indeed sees its share of Western tourists but they are all generally in transit to those other places and the city itself gets no real mention as a tourist destination. In our 4 nights there we found Surat to be, if on a lesser scale, almost identical in nature to Bangkok and other major Thai cities. Large and seedy looking hotels, ubiquitous massage parlors, bars, dancing clubs, and cheap-eats at every turn characterize Surat's downtown area. It was here that we fell like rocks off a ledge from our purported game plan of saving money and more reserved modes of entertainment. Surat Thani is cheap, no doubt about that, but it's become painfully obvious that when something is cheap you don't always spend less money, you just buy more of it. In other words, el vino did flow. Perhaps the highlight of our stay in Surat was the night we happened upon Boogie Bar. In contrast to the establishment's unassuming and dime-a-dozen front, once inside the patron is immediately transported into an absolutely surreal setting that is 2 parts Texas ranch-hand watering hole and 1 part Thai. We're talking bull skulls mounted on the walls, confederate flags dangling from the rafters, waiters in ten-gallon hats and leather vests, old wagon wheels, all types of cowboy themed bric-a-brac sitting on the bar shelves, and of course, a live band with its bandana-ed and banjo pickin front man belting old Merle Haggard and Hank Williams tunes in an absurd Thai-cowboy twang. But for the 3 of us, the place was filled exclusively with Thais. Perhaps strangest of all was that they were all singing along with every song. Who knew that Thai people love country music? Just odd.

After Surat we decided to rededicate ourselves to our initial goals and with the help of wikipedia we identified the inconspicuous provincial center of Chumpohn as a city seemingly aligned with our newly restrained desires. A 5 hour bus ride from Surat through the peninsula's aforementioned rural void deposited us into the austere city center of Chumpohn's capital district. From our 6th story, $9.00/night, 3 person suite in the city's finest hotel, we overlooked a very unimpressive pseudo-cityscape that recalled the moribund concrete framework of Prague's post-soviet outskirts. Perfect. This would finally be the place to get some rest and save some money. Later that evening, walking solo through the city, I happened upon a basketball gym where 9 jersey clad Thais were in the midst of pre-game warm-ups. As it happened the Chumpohn Health Services Department was gearing up for their mid-season matchup against the District 5 Steel Workers squad. A man short, the Health Services Department called me over from my seat near the entrance and in their barely comprehendible English and my even worse Thai it was agreed with the District 5 Steel Workers captain that I could fill in as the 5th man for the HSD. I might as well have been Lebron James to these guys. Even at my abbreviated stature I was the 2nd tallest man on the floor and was able to dominate the defensive frontcourt while also playing a Bill Waltonesque high-post against the Steel Workers ineffective 2-3 zone. After storming to an early lead, and receiving a stunned applause from the opposing team for executing a behind the back dribble en route to a layup, I deferred most of the scoring to my two running mates, Thoon, and Sammy Krung – Thoon a lithe power forward willing to run the break, and Sammy the bank-shooting assassin, a-la his nominal counterpart, the Celtic great, Sam Jones. In a rout the HSD handed District 5 Steel its 1st loss of the season (or so it seemed they were trying to tell me). After the game I retreated back to our hotel in a very placid state of mind, more than happy to let the rest of the night slip by in front of the TV or hiding behind a book. But no. What do I find when I return to the hotel? Fergus chugging from a bottle of Mekong whiskey, Ace putting on his dancing shoes, and 2 Thai girls in their weekend skivvies ready and willing to take the newly arrived farangs for a night on the town.

THAILAND, YOU RELENTLESS SEDUCTRESS!

Apparently Agent Smith and Fergus had met these girls at a nearby restaurant, and the next thing any of us knew, the 5 of us, and another of these girls' friends, are sitting in a bar drinking cocktails and watching a song and dance performance by very scantily dressed girls that was really more like a pathetic karaoke performance than anything you'd expect to find on a professional stage. And I was personally loving every minute of it. Turns out that Chumpohn, despite its drab facade, is hardly lacking in the kinds of attractions that make Thailand so famous. And the 3 of us are absolute suckers for all of it. And the beauty of a place like Chumpohn is that we were the ONLY white people we saw the entire time. So in the same sort of way I was able to dominate the basketball game, being in those dance clubs in Chumpohn was like a group of A-list Hollywood actors showing up at the Round Up. Good times. We spent the next 4 days in Chumpohn drinking, being hungover, eating, and drinking some more. Again, not exactly how we planned things, but I'm not saying we didn't have a good time.

For our last stop on the tour, 2 Thai girls agreed to drive the 3 of us from Chumpohn to the coastal city of Hua Hin. None of us had ever heard of Hua Hin, not from the guidebooks or from other travelers, so we expected to find a sleepy little fishing village or at most a quiet getaway spot for Thai nationals. The girls driving tried their best to clue us in, but their English was virtually non-existent, and we were all hungover anyway so we didn't really care. What we discovered in Hua Hin was a bustling resort city, complete with a Hilton hotel, about 30 Starbucks, a McDonald's, a Burger King, a Giant mall with a state of the art Cineplex, a hundred other grotesquely lavish hotel resorts, and a massive stretch of waterfront condos which made me immediately think of Miami Beach. Apparently Hua Hin, though not a backpacker favorite, is hugely popular for European retirees and a place of conspicuous consumption for Thailand's own upper crust. Fancy restaurants and Vegas style clubs abound and our 2 escorts were eager to show us a good time. And so it was – back into the fray. Fortunately for us, each of the girls we were with owns and operates at least 2 beauty salons and they both have plenty of expendable income. They paid for the majority of a very nice seafood dinner that we had and then took us to a huge club in Hua Hin's downtown where I bet we all had a really good time, but I couldn't say for sure because I don't remember any of it. Somehow I woke up in a bar miles from where we had been the night before just in time to see the opening kickoff of the Eagles v. Saints game. All's well that ends well, I suppose. Our 2nd day in Hua Hin was predictably uneventful, and we ended up scrapping Petchaburi from our itinerary and coming back to Bangkok after our 2nd night in Hua Hin.

Now only 1 problem remains. No one knows where Fergus is. I'll keep you posted on his whereabouts.

New Beginnings

It's been a hectic few weeks since my last posting on this space. Lots of major happenings here in Thailand, holiday festivities and end of the year blow-out bacchanalias. And literally "blow-outs", as I'm sure you've all heard, Bangkok being the most recent staging area for Thailand's increasingly proactive coterie of militant separatists. Fucking assholes. There's some speculation that the bombings were directed at the inept and, as some see it, illegitimate undertakings of Thailand's post-coup government, but public opinion is pretty staunch on the supposition that this has nothing to do with the coup at all. Most people blame the Bangkok bombings on the same Muslim extremists that blew up 20 banks in southern Thailand back in August. Civil unrest in the southern provinces is at an all time high right now, as this predominantly Muslim region (largely ethnic Malays) push for independence or to be ceded to the Malaysian government. The Thai government for its part has been predictably obdurate on the issue. Southern Thailand is responsible for billions of dollars in tourism-based revenue every year, money that fuels the growth of one of the most robust economies in all of Southeast Asia. Which is precisely the problem. The last thing that these traditional Muslim communities want is to be infiltrated and whored out by throngs of "Westerners" whose interests (buying stuff, fancy hotels, girls, loud music, booze, etc.) are completely at odds with their own cultural values. I am extremely sympathetic to their cause. (See my first post.) These people should have every right to cultural preservation and should not be forced to convert to the religion of capitalism. Sincerely. But what the fuck? People and their goddamn bombs. It just doesn't make any sense to me. 2 days after X-mas I had to take a bus down to the Malaysia-Thai border in order to renew my visa. The bus driver ended up getting lost in Satun, a small province that borders Malaysia, and we spent at least 2 hours driving in circles along random city streets only a few miles from our destination. And why didn't our Thai driver just stop the minivan and ask someone for directions, saving us all a lot of time and grief? Because he was afraid. And we all were. One peek out the van's window revealed a street corner bristling with army-fatigued, booted, beret capped, and Argus-eyed soldiers, all of them cradling very large automatic weapons and standing their posts with grave purpose. Burqa clad women streaked across the vista in ghostly blurs. Young men congregated around benches and under the tarp canopies of street-side food stalls, returning the soldiers watchfulness with their own penetrating glares. No laughing or playful banter, just the slow, silent compression of resent. And there we were in the middle of it, driving around like a pack of idiots, our fear strung up like laundry across the wires of distrust going one way and disaffection going the other. But for the surrounding jungle landscape, I swear we could've been driving through the streets of Mosul. I urge any would be travelers to stay away from the southern tip of Thailand. Not sweet.
(The corresponding image was taken from Google images. I wouldn't dare take out my camera in that place.)

In additional sad, though decidedly less serious news, my traveling companion of 6 months, Ryan Donnelly, turned in his wandering boots on Dec. 19th and headed back stateside. As I told Ryan a few days ago, traveling without him has made me feel a bit deflated, like I'm walking around with just one shoe on. Traveling with a single person for 6 months is a loaded experience. I imagine it's something like matrimony, without certain obvious benefits of course. Adapting to another's quirks and exposing your own usually hidden self can be a strenuous undertaking and it's virtually impossible to avoid moments of irritation, exhaustion, and confrontation. But over time you learn to deal with each other's faults, ignore the annoyances, and strike a mutually agreeable balance between personal space and companionship. I can say without equivocation that Ryan was a model travel companion, always willing to compromise, tolerant of my impulsiveness, indulgent of my tiresome wont for petty debate, and generally compatible on every level. He is missed.

And such is the circle of life: a man dies, a child is born, and blah, blah, blah. It so happened that as Ryan was on his way out, I was able to forge a similar dynamic with 2 equally agreeable fellow travelers – Adam Smith, a friend from the way-back machine who'll henceforth be exclusively referred to as not Adam, but maybe Ace, or Ace-man, or Ace Bomb, or A-Sizzle and no Steak, or Atom Bomb, or Atomic Hot Sauce, or any variant thereof, and Fergus James Miller, a proper London bloke chalk full of the disarming charisma for which his part of the world is so well known. Since our triumvirate left Bangkok on Dec. 21 (A tragic thing, really, the news of our departure hurling the women into hopeless depression. I am still haunted by the image of their desperate waves from the curbside, goading us back to their open embrace as we pulled away in the taxi, a flood of their tears washing over their bare ankles and emptying with the rest of the filth into the gutters of Patpong.), we've been hanging out in and around the southern Thai enclave of Krabi. Adam and I spent the majority of our time on the tiny beach of Ton-Sai. As it happens, Ton-Sai is a mecca for rock-climbers. Thousand foot limestone crags jut from the surrounding turquoise waters like massive fangs. Unlike the granite peaks of Yosemite, which are famous for their sustained cracks and eminently flat faces, Krabi's limestone scarps are characterized by deep pockets, massive jugs (nope, not those kind), and severe overhangs. Whereas on the former type of rock the climbing is cerebral, methodical, and highly technical, climbing in Krabi is basically just an exercise in brute strength. Agility and balance become more and more crucial as the level of climbing becomes more difficult, but a day of climbing in Krabi is essentially a day of continual pull-ups (which facially must sound horribly meat-headish and dull, but trust me, is as enjoyable as any recreational activity around). Of our 8 days on the beach, Adam and I climbed 5 of them. We had the implausibly good fortune of running into one of my friends from Laos who himself just began working as a climbing guide on Ton-Sai and who was gracious enough to not only guide us for free but let us rent equipment at ridiculously low prices. As some of you may know, since a 3-day beginner's course that I took in Laos, I've cultivated something of a passion for rock-climbing, and you can expect climbing to be a recurring theme in this space. In fact, rock-climbing may turn out to be a unifying theme for the remainder of my travels. Consider yourselves warned.

After enduring some serious physical and psychological punishment (rock-climbing can sometimes be like a crucible, especially the higher up you go and the farther you have to fall), by the time New Year's Eve rolled around, Ace, Fergus, and I, along with our climbing buddy from Laos, Mr. Noi, decided a night of indiscreet partying was the reasonable thing to do. Around 7pm on the 31st, the 4 of us took a long-tail boat from Ton-Sai to the more upscale shores of Ao Nang. By 9:30 we were all retarded drunks. Soon afterward I time traveled to 2007. One minute I was drinking whiskey in Ao Nang, the next minute I was rubbing sleep from my eyes on Ton-Sai beach, surrounded by palm trees, the sun dawning just inches above some nearby cliffs, all things quiet and serene. Remember in Contact when Jodie Foster goes in the time machine and wakes up on that island? New Year's morning was something like that. "They should've sent a poet." I really don't remember a damn thing about N.Y's eve but here are some pictures to prove that I was indeed there. Your guess is as good as mine.

After a day of recovery on Ton-Sai, the 3 of us convened for a meeting of the minds in which we laid out an itinerary for the next 2 weeks. Having each blown a Thai fortune on reckless spending during the holidays, we made budgeting the order of the day. Our goal is to get to Bangkok on the 16th of Jan. having spent around $200 apiece. What this means is that we'll be avoiding all major tourist destinations or anywhere else we're likely to encounter inflated prices – hitting up the hinterlands, the backwater boondocks, easy-living farm life, that sort of thing. We'll be traveling strictly by local bus, eating at local haunts, staying at budget hotels, and most importantly, keeping the boozing to a minimum. I predict a lot of nights sitting around drinking beers and playing poker without any feminine distractions (sort of like college). The plan lacks glamour but certainly has its appealing aspects. For one, this will be an opportunity to see the "real" Thailand (I hate that phrase as much as you do), cities where tourists rarely travel, where day to day life is driven by internal mechanisms, and where we'll be perceived not as a commodity but just as an oddity. Our encounter with the locals are also likely to be in stark contrast to our dealings with Thai people elsewhere. Not that the Thais in the heavily touristed areas are dicks or something, but the nature of our relationships going forward are bound to take on a softer edge, less pragmatic and more personal perhaps, or at least held aloft by the strangeness of the occurrence. And even though between the 3 of us we can only speak a lick of Thai, we should be able to meet plenty of people and have a pretty good time. Then again, foreigners in search of the "real" California would likely end up in places like San Bernadino or Fresno, so this whole thing might to turn out to be a total disaster. I'll be reporting from the road. Until next time, mahalo.