embers

"That is our human fate," said his mother. She was sitting at her mirror, staring at her fading beauty. "One day we lose the person we love. Anyone who is unable to sustain that loss fails as a human being and does not deserve our sympathy."

- page 41, "Embers" by Sandor Marai


This is the kind of book I like to read.

"same-same, but different"

After all I've seen and done on my trip, I'm not ungrateful for what I have. So, I can't say I hate my life...but...I don't know. Lets just say I have a powerful urge to drink right now.

wow. I went to work tonight. The feelings of anger, impatience, frustration and depression returned like thunder. It took months of intense traveling and spiritual self-examination to develop the zen peace of mind i brought home; it took the restaurant 10 minutes to destroy it. wow.

New York Traffic

They say traffic in new york is really bad. lots of honking and reckless driving in willful ignorance of the rules of law.

They say there are many immigrants in new york, from the middle east, India, Asia, etc ...

They say many cab drivers are immigrants who can't even speak english.

Therefore, is the traffic in new york bad because 3rd world driving norms have been imported via immigrant cab drivers?

And the winner is....

bar of soap!

Postscript: postscript

It feels like I never left. I am sitting here typing and watching Tegan & Sara videos; I'm pretty sure this was exactly what I was doing the day before I left... Four months ago.

I noticed my blog has a whiny tone to it. Like a diary, it has become a medium for me to vent my negative energy.

it's 5:13am in the morning now. I think I'll go get coffee, have my last cigarette and watch the sunrise.

Postscript: Taipei

While searching for a plane ticket on kayak, I found the best itinerary in the world. It was 700 dollars for a one way ticket home with a 16 hour layover in Taipei. I decided to take advantage of that long layover and squeeze in one more country/city into my trip.

During my researching phase, I learned that Taipei Intl. Airport has a program for long-layover passnegers. There are two half-day day-trips into the city and country you can sign up for at the airport and the amazing thing is that it's totally free. Every airport should do something like this. But in the end I decided to strike out on my own because I didn't like the itinerary of the tour I would have had to take.

Armed with google map printouts, advice from wikitravel, and my resurgent mandarin chinese I arrived in Taipei at 10pm and checked into my hostel at midnight. This was one of the coolest looking, nicest hostel/guesthouses I've seen. I think this could be a Protip: In big, international cities, stay in guesthouses/hostels because they are great value and really pleasant places to stay (whether or not your on a budget). There was nobody at the reception since I was checking in at 12am and checking out at 6am. The front door was password protected but there was a hotel phone out front and I called the posted number for the english speaking extension; nobody answered. I remembered I was bilingual so I called the chinese number and the guy told me the passcodes. Since no one would be working during my six hours stay there, I was supposed to use the honor system and put my money in the little red box next to the kitchen fridge.

I wandered around the deserted, empty downtown streets for an hour before going to bed at 1am. Is there anything in the world better than strolling down a deserted empty city street late at night?

For some reason, I thought Taiwan would be as hot as Vietnam. It was not. It was not as hot.

woke up around 6am (didn't sleep well because of early departing backpackers) and started to do my self-guided tour. I eschewed all the typical tourist sites. You know how I feel about tourist traps. I decided to check out the University. I thought The Taiwan Univeristy campus would be a pleasant walk with cool looking buildings. It was okay but it was not like UW or UCLA. Protip: large university campuses are cool places to see and maybe even do things as a tourist. But it was still an interesting walk. The buildings are utilitarian and it was so early in the morning that there were no students around. In fact, there were more white haired senior citizens doing Tai Chi around the campus than there were students. The main library was closed! 7am on a Monday morning and the main library was closed.

Then I headed to YongKang Street, famed for it's eateries. Again, it was still too early in the morning and most of the restaurants were still closed. So I went Taipei 101 (here). It was a rather cloudy, windy and cold day; my day in Taipei. I didn't get to see anything from the 400 meter up observatory. That's not true; I saw a lot of clouds.

Then I went back to YongKang St. and ate at a place famous for their Steamed Juicy Pork Buns. They were good. Their other dim sum items weren't that great. There was the daily crowd of tourists at the front of the restaurant lining up to get in when I left.

Then I ate some more food at other shops along YongKang St. Then I had to leave for the airport. I almost didn't make it back in time because of transportation. I arrived at the gate with 30 minutes to spare.

Then I flew for 7 hours and caught up on movies. I swear, 90% of the movies I've seen in the past 3 years have been in-flight entertainment system movies.

Then I arrived home; felt my usual disgust at the Honolulu Airport's facilities, services and staff.

It reminded me of an article I read about how difficult it is for tourists to come to America. They want to spend money in our country and do some cultural exchange but the government seems to throw all these barriers and hurdles in their way. The article stated that travelers are more afraid of the TSA and border agents than of terrorists or accidents; they are afraid of saying or doing the wrong thing while going through immigration. I realized I felt the same way. What does it say about our country when people are more afraid of the government than terrorists?

Taipei was a cool city. I liked it. I realized if I was going to live in a big city, it would definitely be in a nice, international, modern Asian big city. I don't know what is about nice, international, modern Asian big cities, but they do things right.

27 and 358/365th

I have climbed mountains, I have crossed deserts. I watched countless bodies burn on funeral pyres and I performed CPR on a dead man. It all has to mean something, right?

skewers

I’m going to miss meals like this in restaurants in ex-pat/rich tourist areas of big cities in poor countries. This was 10 dollars, tax and tip included, mediteranean sausages, with coffee, delicious. AND, they had this song playing.

Taiwan!

Heres a picture of angkor wat in cambodia.

I have grown quite attached to some of these material objects that have traveled around the world with me. I've traveled eight and a half lengths of string around the world and these things have been with me the whole time (since central america): my shorts, my board shorts, my belt, my backpack of course, my messenger bag, my travel alarm clock and my trusty faithful Prada toiletry bag.

Sad :(

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oN86d0CdgHQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rSBgfXoIPo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsTNxVtS4c8

Three Pics

This is why you don't eat street food. A woman cleaning and gutting raw chicken in the city river.


That tank of greenish liquid in the over sized syringe looking thing is motor bike gas. These little stands are found all along the road because the bikes can only hold a few liters of fuel at a time.


More pseudo-inspirational quotes. From the surf shop, whose owner survived the war with tales to tell. So after listening to her stories it's not really pseudo-inspirational, it's just inspirational (inb4 James).

Things to do when I get home:

go to walmart, bask in its beautiful flourescent capitalist glow

eat a hamburger

drink a cup of coffee

make a kite

go to pali lookout

fly a kite (at number 5???)

get drunk on red wine and watch Lost in Translation

go to Honolulu Zoo

get Right.

[antonym of disaster]!

success? Whatever the word is, I got to surf. I met a cool italian surfer dude who showed me a secret surf shop with proper boards and the best burgers in town (the awesome local woman who owns the shop was awesome). I went out to the beach break in front of the shop and caught one good head high wave. The conditions weren't that great, the winds were still mucking things up and I was out of shape and hungover but it was fun, I was surfing in Vietnam.

Disaster!

Disaster! The wave here has potential but the on-shore winds are blowing hard again. I hope, but kind of doubt, the wind will be calm in the morning. Not only that but the surfboards/bodyboards availabe here for rent are a joke. Two of the three boards don't even have fins or leashes and they're full of cracks and dings. The other surfboard is better, but not by much. One of the bodyboards is completely devoid of laminate and leash. The other bodyboard has holes and grooves in it for skegs and the "leash" is scrap string and velcro. And no fins of course.

I arrived safely after a sleepless 12 hour overnight sleeper bus ride to Da Nang. I found Hoa's Place, the cult-status surfer/backpacker guest house at Non Nuoc beach. The vibe is here is nice, very much a boardshorts and no shirts on the beachfront type of thing.

Macro Vacations

I call these backpacking trips, "macro vacations". It's not just a break from your job, it's a vacation from your way of life.

I'm headed to 6 feet, 10 second swell in Da Nang. Wish me luck.

Vietnam

uncommon valor

Cu Chi Tunnels

went to the popular Cu Chi Tunnels exhibit right outside of Saigon. It's an exhibit of the tunnels the Viet Cong lived in and fought from during the war. It was pretty interesting. I got to crawl through the tunnels and see all the different booby traps the VC used to deter GI's. I shot an AK-47. It was fun.

And it shows why an imperialist invading force can never defeat and win against a dedicated homegrown guerilla insurgency that has the support of the local population.

I had to pay 15 dollars to fire 10 rounds with the AK-47. I thought it was a bit expensive. The bullets looked pretty old and possibly war remnants. Then I started laughing at the thought that the Vietnamese were selling Americans their own war bullets back to them.

I realized that only rich westerners with too much time on their hands would pay money to crawl through a dirt tunnel.

Home

I've decided I'm going home when whichever one of these things occur first:

1. I finish my bar of soap

2. my razor becomes too dull to use

3. my camera memory card gets full

Halo Guest House, De Tham, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

I really hate this hostel I'm in right now. I've stayed at worse places that were more expensive, but something about this place and the way they do things here has gotten under my skin.

The last thing they do at night is turn on the AC and the first thing they do in the morning is turn it off. And they keep the AC just cool enough to say it's not warm. An employee comes into the dorm every 30 minutes, not to service the dorm, not to empty the trash can full of used toilet paper, but to turn off lights they deem unnecessary and to close the door even though people are inside. The english signs they have posted around are grammatically incorrect and almost incoherent, but the people that staff this travel-agency/hotel company speak fairly good english. They ask that we don't wear shoes in the dorm, but the floor is filthy. It is a 12 bed dormitory in a large room, but they have one fan for the twelve bodies that occupy the space in this 35 degree celsius weather. They gave me two different keys for the lockers and both of them opened lockers that already had other people's things in it. Af you're unlucky enough to sleep next to the window, the evening is full of traffic noise and bad cover music from the bars outside. One of the employees took a nap in one of the beds during the hot vietnam afternoon, I'm sure he was dirty and sweaty and I'm sure he didn't change the sheets for the next customer who was going to pay for the bed.

The only redeeming factor is that they charged me a half-night for my last day here because I am catching an overnight sleeper bus to Nha Trang.

I'm still going to downvote the fuck out of this place on tripadvisor.com

update: they're not on tripadvisor.

America, FUCK YAH!

The Vietnam War, as presented by the Saigon War Remnants Musuem:

Just as interesting as the photo exhibit, was the reaction of the white tourists. You could see the shock and horror on many of their faces, you could almost see their illusions about America fall apart in front of you.

Just as depressing as the photo exhibit, is the fact all those white people were so shocked by these images. It was new to them! I don't want to sound like I'm so cool and smart and seen so much but a lot of those images weren't even that graphic, and many of them were iconic images from the war (like the napalm girl and the 4 photo spread of the rookie helicopter gunner turned veteran). And it was really sad hearing these people talk about America and it's militant hypocrisy as if it was a new development. That much ignorance is just unforgivable.

This girl seemed affected.



This girl looked like she was going to cry.

Affects of agent orange and the other chemical weapons used by the US.

Waterboarding.

Some things never change.

Video

But to be fair to the white tourists, many girls from a group of Japanese highschool students were very traumatized by the photos as well.

Phosphourous munition victim.

This guy was wearing a military flak-vest looking vest (with no shirt underneath). Bro couldn't handle the "Historic Truths". I hope he felt like a douchebag walking around the musuem wearing that very martial looking vest.

This picture was from a gallery of paintings by children. According to the kid who drew this picture, their ideal world is one that consists of peace and harmony among all people, but only after all non-asians have been exterminated from the planet.

Visiting the musuem was a very interesting and worthwhile experience. 

And as awful as America's role in the war was, I must repeat that after traveling around the world a bit, I cant help but be grateful for the inhumane foreign policy that preserves our current way of life:

24 hour electricity, hot water, smooth roads, traffic lights, EPA, FDA, NBA, NFL, NASA, IRS (yes), science, Hollywood and polished entertainment media, relatively corruption free government and police force, supermarkets, crosswalks, no spitting, public trash collection, free education, politeness and consideration for others, empathy, generosity, freedom of religion, welfare, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, emergency medical care, cheap oil, freeways, awesome music, fixed prices, equal rights, women's rights, sense of self-responsibility, queuing, street cleaning, class action lawsuits, clean water, tipping, birth control, etc.... God bless america... 

nah. 

First Love, Fast Love, Last Love

I had another one of those "holy shit, I'm in __________" traveling moments. This one was at the floating market in the Mekong Delta, I had just bought a cup of vietnamese coffee (see above) from an old woman on a rowboat and I was eating a pineapple I had bought from another boat when I realized, "holy shit, I'm in vietnam".

Lovely little moment.

Then, I bought a beer from another boat because I wanted to.

I've read a lot of cautionary tales of scams and crimes committed on tourists in my guide book. But they never really seem realistic to me until I hear about real experiences from other travelers. On the Mekong Delta tour, I met two german girls and they told me one of them was carrying her camera in her hand. Someone cut the cord and stole the camera and she didn't even notice until she had walked a couple hundred meters down the street. I was talking to this other girl in this criminal hostel I'm staying in now and she said another guy in the dorm had lost USD$2,700 in the old "poker game" scam. A local invited him to the family home and cook him dinner. The "rich uncle" comes over and wants to play poker, they play the victim for a little while, then more people come and play and then the victim is suddenly in the red for a couple thousand dollars to a big and menacing group of locals. To be fair, the backpacker was a 19 year old "kid". A little too naive and trusting. Too eager for a story to bring back home.

Did you know 9/11 happened 11 years ago?

random pics

Bar's Bar. The place bars go to for a few drinks after a hard day's work of being a bar. I couldn't resist and had a drink there. It was acutally a posh place: Dim lighting, overstuffed chairs, dark wood decor, 5% service charge and 10% tax added, professional staff, good whiskey, etc...

This is ice cream. The thing that looks like real cabbage leaves is white chocolate.

Typical street vendor selling random stuff. In this case, sunglasses and zippos. There are also many locals who walk carrying a stack of books for sale. These books are all photocopies. They have the original cover art and everything, but the image and the text on the pages all have the distinctive photocopied blurriness to them. They have pretty decent titles like Catch-22, The Ten Thousand Day War, and other good titles I can't remember.

Random pic of typical street in kathmandu city.

backpackers in the backpackers ghetto drinking beer from the street side bars with the famous tiny plastic chairs that make you feel like you're peeing in an elementary school urinal.

back in chiang mai, some of the other wwoofers playing soccer with local kids.

The father of the smal hotel I stayed at in Ho Chi Minh (aka Saigon). I guess the family sleeps on the tile floor like that because it's cooler. The wife sleeps in a little alcove between the ground floor and first floor.

His snoring was terrifying. It sounded as if the man was suffering from night terrors, sleep apnea, nightmares, severe sinus congestion and drowning by orangutan all at the same time. I could hear his snoring from my THIRD floor room. With the door closed.

HoChiMinh Zoo

I went to the city zoo and saw some animals:

There's an asiatic cat somewhere in there

giraffes, which I realized look a lot like camels, they both have that same goofy looking face.

A penguin.

A silly orangutan. note the large hands they use to strangle people .

Tiger, a young one. I played peek a boo with.

White tiger.

I honestly did not expect to see some of the animals I saw. Tigers? White Tigers?! I thought that was pretty cool, if only it wasn't so depressing. The zoo itself was in my opinion quite nice and well kept. I have to go the honolulu zoo when I get home. There's a lot of thigns I have to do when I go home.

Cinderella story

The Cinderella story is such nonsense. Why would a well-experienced, highly educated, rich, powerful, cultured, intelligent prince want to marry a dumb peasant washer woman? They have nothing in common. The only thing the Prince wanted was to lay a pretty peasant girl, and what a prince wants, a prince gets. Hence the country wide search for the girl who fits the glass slipper. And don't tell me it was for love. A prince doesn't marry for love, nor does he acquiesce to love. What if Cinderella had been ugly? Would Prince Charming have even bothered picking up her glass slipper from the floor?

Rich powerful man, beautiful woman in need of rescuing.

Disney fantasies. Disney movies work by manipulating our emotions. Their movies (or all entertainment in general) are designed to bring us up, then bring us down, only so they can raise us up again and end the story/experience on that positive note. Look at Bambi, happy deer and his mom (happy), mom gets killed (sad), proceed to happy ending (happy again).

They call Thailand the land of smiles but i think Vietnam should be given that nickname. The people here are friendly and they smile a lot. But it is mostly in the context of selling you something. And I've found that the vietnamese are good salesmen. They will often touch you in a friendly way to gain your trust, like a hand on shoulder or arm type of touch. The prettier girls kept touching me on the stomach which I found charming, inappropriately intimate, obvious, and effective (not that I bought any 5 dollar shirt just cuz they touched my tummy). I don't feel like getting into the complex details, but they are generally convincing when it comes to prices.

I am staying at a tiny family run hotel in the backpacker's area of ho chi minh city. It's kind of weird because the family lives in the downstairs area, the lobby is their living room/living area. I got to see the son get whipped with a stick by both mom and dad as I sat here on the computer typing this. The other night the father was either asleep or drunk on the marble floor next to me and snoring like an orangutan was strangling him with a wet mop. I don't know if he sleeps like that normally or if he was having some kind of crazy drunk-sleep. I have video of him, and pics I'll post here when the family isn't looking over my shoulder. This place is a pretty good deal. US$12 for a private room with AC and cable TV, hot shower. the house itself is down a tiny little alleyway full of narrow walk ups. It only has 4 stories, and therefore, four rooms.

Vietnam

Holy shit, I'm in Vietnam.

First thing I did in Vietnam was get two hundred US dollars worth of dongs.

Then, I went to Vung Tau to catch a 5-6 foot (face) swell. But as Colonel Kilgore said, "charlie don't surf!"...and the reason charlie don't surf is because of the ridiculously strong on-shore winds that blow all day, every day. My hopes for surfing in vietnam have been dashed. I knew the winds were bad here, but I thought that I might be able to catch the morning glass, but apparently "morning glass" doesn't translate very well into vietnamese.

In Vietnam, there is an ethnic minority that worships Liam Neeson as their god. Despite harsh religious persecution from majority groups and after many years of movie screenings to raise funds, they built this 28 meter high statue of their actor-god on a mountain in Vung Tau.

Pho, this particular bowl was really sour. I couldn't tell if it was rotten or if that was supposed to be the flavor. I didn't get sick so I guess it was just the flavor. But then again, after India and all the literal and figurative shit I've eaten off the streets, I feel like my stomach is pretty rugged and manly now.

Ho Chi Min City. Is pretty cool. I really like this city. it's got a good vibe. it's modern, but gritty at the same time. I like vietnam in general. I really do.

Me watching the mush at Vung Tau. This place was a beach resort town, but totally second rate. the water was murky, the sand was full of garbage and not nice. The only food you could get was either pho, bun or fried rice.

stupid CSS.