Where the heck is Paraag now?

A Week on Kilimanjaro

2011-08-07T17:28:00.000-04:00

Nearly six months ago, I embarked on an adventure of epic proportions. Okay. It wasn’t so epic, but I needed to grab your attention, and therefore we’ll just pretend it was of epic proportions. Truth be told, I’m not sure I have a complete understanding of the distinction between epic and merely grandiose, but we’ll save that exploration for another day, perhaps as part of another adventure of epic proportions.

You may ask why it took me so long to log this account and add it to my sparsely populated blog. Well, you see, this trip has been a difficult one for me to recount – the reasons for which will become apparent enough through the course of my monologue. I was reading a recent issue of Esquire the other day where one of the staff writers recounts his climb up the mountain. He mentions one of his thought processes during the hike: “I want to be done climbing Mount Kilimanjaro and jump right to the part when I can tell people that I climbed Mount Kilimanjaro.” I guess I need to get on with doing that – telling you all my tale.

I had been bugging my brother-in-law Chris for several years about going on a hike with me to Tanzania to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro, and after much cajoling, he finally assented. After extremely little cajoling, Chris’s childhood friend Mike decided to join us. So last November, we bought our flights, arranged a hike and booked a safari. Our trip would start in mid-February, which gave us 3 months of prep time.

For the next two months, I did what I normally do prior to embarking on any highly demanding physically challenging endeavor: nothing much.

When I started telling my co-workers and friends that I would be gone on vacation for a few weeks, inevitably the first question was “Where are you going?” After I divulged, a typical follow-up question was, “How long have you been training?” My response was generally along the ilk of “Training? We don’t need no stinkin’ training!”

Before I continue, I thought that it might be fun to quickly summarize some of my choices before and during the trip.

Dumb Choices:

1. After 8 months of not even looking at a gym, I finally got off my butt and started a training regimen 30 days before my trip began.

2. My training regimen of choice was the Wii Fit, more specifically a 30-day challenge on EA Sports Wii Active.

3. I only completed 2/3 of the aforementioned 30-day challenge.

4. There are several routes up the mountain. I specifically avoided the Marangu route because that route is routinely booked up completely, and is even lovingly referred to as the “Coca-Cola” route. So I went with the Machame route. Little did I realize that the Machame route does not have a maximum and therefore has about twice the number of hikers as the Marangu route. I hate crowds of people… in fact, that’s kinda my reason for hiking to begin with – to stay away from crowded cities and buildings.

5. Never start a 7-day hike up a 19,000 ft mountain when you’re coming off a 102 fever and 4 hours of sleep. So, when the guide director tells you that “you need to be 100% before you start the hike,” it might be a good idea to listen to him.

6. If you’re already spending multiple thousands of dollars on a plane ticket and in tour fees, it may be worth it to spend several hundred more on proper clothing and equipment instead of merely packing any article of clothing you own that says “Columbia Sportswear” on it.

7. Just because it says “Columbia Sportswear” on it doesn’t mean that it’s an appropriate item of clothing for hiking. Apparently this company has a wide variety of clothes, many of which are cotton. The majority of mine were cotton. Cotton doesn’t do so swell a job wicking away moisture, which is a good clothing property to have when you’ll be sweating in freezing temperatures.

8. If the weekly anti-malarial pill (mefloquine) is known to have annoying adverse effects on people, it might be worth the extra hassle to take the not-so-challenging daily pill (doxycycline).

9. You should know whether or not your backpack is indeed waterproof before you set out on a journey that has a high probability of involving heavy precipitation.

10. If you know you’re a light sleeper, it would probably be a good idea to make sure that your earplugs survive the final cut when you’re making decisions on what to leave and what to take.

11. Along that theme, if you’re a light sleeper and you’re camping for 6 nights on a mountain at abnormally high elevations, it’s probably a better idea to bring your own sleeping gear (sleeping bag + pad) instead of relying on borrowing it from the touring company.

12. If you’re going to go through the hassle of climbing a big-ass mountain, suck it up and take the nice camera, even if you’ll have to carry it.

13. Nalgene bottles are not the best bottles to use when you need to carry three 1-liter water bottles. They’re kinda rigid and don’t pack so well in a small backpack.

14. Layers. And more layers. Enough said.

Smart Choices:

1. I took the advice of a friend and bought some trekking poles, which got a ridiculous amount of use during the hike. It’s one of those things that once you have them, you can’t believe you ever got along without them. I might even start using them to walk up the steps at home or the long walk from the parking lot at work to the front door.

2. Instead of taking a few rolls of toilet paper for use in the squatters, I took a package of Charmin Freshmates wipes. I would say more, but I think we’ve probably sufficiently approached TMI.

3. We booked a 7-day hike to give us ample time to get acclimatized to the altitude before doing the long strenuous hike to the summit. The aforementioned Marangu route gets to the top in 5-days.

4. Suck it up and just embrace the squatter. Fear of the squatter will only provide you with discomfort and the potential for squatting behind a large rock off to the side of a very crowded trail.

Yes, that’s it. I didn’t make a lot of smart choices. Either that, or it’s more fun to point out the dumb choices. Or maybe the dumb choices are more memorable.

My flight from Boston to Kilimanjaro had been largely uneventful, sans the 15 hour layover in a very poorly stocked airport in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Nothing happened in that 15 hours. It was about the most boring 15 hours of my life. I guess it would be better described as completely uneventful instead of largely uneventful. I arrived in Addis at 8am and my flight left for Kilimanjaro at 11pm. Amongst the very few learnings that day was the realization that the Addis airport is supremely busy early in the morning and supremely busy late at night, but there are almost zero flights during the day.

Our plane reached the Kilimanjaro airport at about 2am, and then I had another 90 minutes in a taxi to the hotel. When I arrived at the hotel, the night staff took me straight to my room and I had a nice long sleep. As you can imagine, it’s not easy to nap in a warm humid airport, so I had some catching up to do.

Chris and Mike arrived over the next 18 hours. That evening, I came down with a fever and didn’t get much sleep. We were slated to begin our hike the next day, so I spent the majority of the time in my room trying to rest. Chris and Mike took a walk to a local market and waterfall, but they too spent the majority of the day relaxing. During our pre-trip briefing that evening from the hotel’s tour director Desmond, we learned that our humble party of 3 would be accompanied by a gaggle of locals – one head guide, two assistant guides, one cook, one porter each for our personal goods, and four additional porters. That’s 11 people tending to 3 tourists. We definitely had to check our egos at the base of the mountain.

Because of my sickness, Desmond suggested that we might want to delay our trip and take a shorter 6-day hike on the Rongai route. He cautioned strongly against starting the hike without being 100%. He also explained that while offering some very stunning views, our chosen Machame route was easily the most heavily touristed, especially during the peak season that we were in the middle of. My initial inclination was to take his advice, but I didn’t want to cause my travel mates a delay, and so I figured I would tough it out. Desmond’s other major piece of advice was to take your time and go VERY slowly – the Tanzanians have a phrase in Swahili that we would learn too well “pol-e pol-e”, which means “slowly, slowly”. Hiking slowly helps your body acclimate to the altitude.

The watered down version of our trip itinerary:
Day 1: drive to Machame gate at 1800m altitude, hike for about 6 hours through a rainforest canopy to the Machame camp at 3000m.
Day 2: Hike for 8 hours from Machame camp to 3900m to the camp at Shira plateau.
Day 3: Hike for 8 hours from the Shira camp up to the Lava Tower at 4500m, and then back down to Barranco camp at 3900m.
Day 4: Hike for 4 hours from Barranco camp to Karanga camp at 4000m.
Day 5: Hike for 4 hours from Karanga camp to Barafu camp at 4600m.
Day 6: Begin at midnight to hike from Barafu camp for the summit climb to 6000m. Return to Barafu camp for a quick rest and lunch before continuing down to Mweka camp at 3000m.
Day 7: Hike for 4 hours through rainforest from Mweka camp to Mweka gate at 1800m.

The next morning we woke up and packed up our belongings into potato sacks that the hotel crew gave us. They had an entire gear room with items available to borrow for any poor souls who didn’t bring a full complement of gear. I borrowed some lightweight waterproof pants, gaiters, a sleeping pad and a sleeping bag. The pants and gaiters didn’t fit perfectly, but I suppose the price was right.

After a two hour drive with our 11 person crew in what can described as an Extended-Extended-Cab Family Truckster Rovermobile (with a Mercedes badge), we arrived at the very crowded Machame gate entrance to Kilimanjaro National Park. Our lead guide Martin handed us some brown sack lunches and waited in line to get our paperwork processed while the rest of the crew unloaded the Rovermobile and assembled the gear for the hike ahead (50lbs per porter).

Our paperwork was completed about two hours later and we set off on our hike at about 1pm up what I am positive was a naturally occurring constant incline gravel road. Fortunately, the gravel road ended about an hour later and we were hiking uphill in the middle of a rainforest. We had yet to get a clear view of the top of the mountain – there was cloud cover between us and the peak. In retrospect, this was probably a good thing since our spirits were pretty good, despite the almost complete lack of any flat stretches, let alone slight declines to rest our legs. Heeding Desmond’s advice, we took our time and didn’t rush the hike. It seemed that most other tourists received the exact same advice, so there really wasn’t a lot of traffic from other tourists. On the other hand, porters from all groups were constantly running right by us – as effortlessly as though they were running downhill towards a free Chic-Fil-A buffet. Desmond had prepared us and told us to not let our egos get hurt too much by this – for me, this was really no different than seeing the porters race by us when I did the Inca Trail in Peru 7 years ago.

The entire hike on this day was overcast, except for a moderate rain for the last 30 minutes. Julia had given me a $1 plastic rain poncho for just the occasion and it covered me and my backpack like a charm. I suppose that should have been added to the “smart choices” section.

The campgrounds were littered in all directions with tents everywhere. This trail was, in my opinion at least, severely over-crowded. After a quick meal in an unbelievably cramped dinner tent, we retired to our sleeping tents for the night – me in one tent, and Chris and Mike sharing the other.

“Crowd Noise” is how I would describe the next 5 hours. Apparently, many of the other hikers didn’t get the memo that we were trying to climb a massive frickin’ mountain and chose instead to gabber into the wee hours. And when they finally went to bed, the porters decided to gabber loudly for a few hours. Hyped up on anti-malarials and Diamox (altitude sickness prevention pills), I slept nary a wink all night. When Martin came to wake us up in the morning, I was not a well-rested camper, so I asked Martin if we could find a more remote area away from the festivities for the next evening.

After a simple breakfast in the awkwardly cramped dinner tent, we joined our fellow hikers in continued ascent. Soon after we began, we were harassed by throngs of porters attempting to pass us on a very narrow rocky path up a never ending hill. In my exhausted state, it didn’t take long before I grew frustrated, so I found a nice spot to step aside for 15-20 minutes to let the hordes through. This dance continued for hours – walk a little, let porters pass a little, walk a little, let porters pass a little.

Normally at this point in a hike (or in a blog post about a hike), I would begin waxing poetically about the stunning scenery and take my time just soaking in the atmosphere and the surroundings. I was just too exhausted from the lack of sleep to do too much of that. We weren’t really in a position to see the mountain top itself, and the terrain we were hiking along had spotty vegetation on it and looked kinda weird, so maybe it’s just as good that I didn’t stop and soak in too much. I think my guides thought I was walking too slowly anyway… even though every other sentence out of their mouth was “pol-e pol-e”. It seems that the majority of people who don’t make it all the way up the mountain tend to fail because they hike up too fast which doesn’t give the body adequate time to acclimatize to the thinning air.

After about 8-9 hours of steady hiking, we were the last to arrive to our campsite for the evening. This area was called the Shira Plateau – it was an apt name, as it was a vast area of flat land, perfect for pitching hundreds of tents. And owing to my request that morning to be planted far away from other campers, the crew pitched our tents away from the masses next to an emergency heliport pad. Our tents also had our own personal bathroom squatters! No waiting in line or having to worry about manually holding the door closed tightly lest ye be intruded upon. More importantly, the view from this plateau was positively stunning. If it weren’t so stinking cold and I weren’t so stinking exhausted, I would asked for a few cups of tea, grabbed a chair and just sat and stared. That is, in fact, my idea of a perfect vacation – sitting in peace staring at one of nature’s wonders where pictures will never do it justice. Somehow the nights on this mountain were far more peaceful and beautiful than the days.

Dinner was again in an all-too-crowded short tent, which was perfectly designed to get you to eat quickly and get out from sheer discomfort. Unfortunately, hiking at high altitudes requires you to do the exact opposite – eat as much as humanly possible. This is really difficult when you’re cramped in the corner of a tent leaning over the table at a 40 degree angle just to fit inside… and this is coming from a 5’5” guy. Chris and Mike are almost a full foot taller than me. We actually would have been better off just eating on the floor.

The silence was beautiful tonight. The hike and the altitude had set in for all of the tourists, so most everyone went straight to bed. Being a few hundred feet away from them helped more. And still I couldn’t get a wink of sleep. I tried absolutely everything imaginable… I read a book, I listened to my iPod, I counted sheep (yes, I actually did try this), I tried sleeping on my side, I tried sleeping on my front, on my back, leaning up against the tent, lying on top of the luggage – you name it, I tried it. Except sleeping pills… I didn’t bring any of those. Normally, being physically exhausted is all you need to hit the sack.

At some point in the night, I began to hallucinate from the exhaustion and sleep deprivation. I was reading “Three Cups of Tea” by Greg Mortenson, portions of which tell stories about hiking in high-altitudes to get to remote areas. I began to live the story, and I started visualizing the next chapters as if they were real and in the moment. I was having trouble distinguishing where I was on Kilimanjaro from the mountains of Pakistan in the book. Talk about creepy.

When Martin came to wake me, I was in a complete daze and felt separated from my body in a strange way. I was operating in some weird state of auto-pilot and was really just following whatever orders I was given. With no one ensuring that I was doing everything I needed to do, I didn’t really know what to wear, how much water to get, or anything else that I needed to do. I don’t think Chris and Mike fully realized quite yet what state of mind I was in. For the most part, I was just trying to muscle through it and kept quiet. I think the one decision that I did make that any semblance of intelligence to it was to stop taking the Diamox pills. I had decided that this must be the reason for my insomnia.

The first 4 hours of today’s hike was a slow steady climb uphill on a semi-rocky terrain. We were well above the tree-line at this point, so the vegetation was very sparse. So I just kept my head down and that “Put One Foot in Front of the Other” song from the old stop-motion movie Santa Claus is Coming to Town that we used to watch as kids kept repeating in my head. I suppose that singing would normally be considered a really good way to pass the time and keep moving, but the only problem is that I only know those 8 words of the song – I don’t remember any of the rest of it. So it was 4 hours of these same damn 8 words ringing in my head. And I REALLY hate Christmas music to boot. I just googled the song and apparently every other line in the song is this same verse, so I guess I wasn’t that far off after all.

After what seemed like an eternity (though it had only been 4 hours), I reached a stopping point where Chris and Mike had been patiently waiting for me for the past 30 minutes. They had eaten their packed lunches while they waited for me, and I sat down as soon as I saw them, intent on getting a little bit of rest while I could. I was also suffering from the mental and physical exhaustion that accompanies a complete lack of sleep. We were at approximately 15,000ft so far, and there was another 1000ft to go before reaching the Lava Tower, after which point the trail would descend back down to Barranco camp at 13,000ft.

My exhaustion was pretty obvious, and so Martin decided that I would go with an assistant guide on a shortcut straight to the Barranco camp instead of going up to the Lava Tower. After a quick visit to the squatter, we split up and I was assured that there would be water (I was almost out) and camp after a quick hike.

I don’t remember much about the next 4 hours. All I remember is realizing that I had not actually had any lunch, but that I was too exhausted to even try. I also remember asking Simo, the assistant guide, how much further camp was every 30 minutes and his response in his non-existent English was always the same. He would motion to me that we had a few hills to go up and down and then we would be there. He also gave the same response when asked where I would be able to get more water.

After what seemed to be an eternity, I was on the verge of collapsing. I couldn’t see straight. I could barely pick up one leg to put it in front of the other, in spite of what the darn song was telling me to do. About all I could do was shuffle my feet forward. The problem with this was that the hills were extremely rocky, requiring extension use of our trekking poles and preferably a decent sense of balance. My hiking technique at the time was definitely lacking in grace and I consider it to be a minor miracle that I didn’t tumble and fall and completely lose it.

What I did lose was my temper with the guides. I was completely out of water because Simo kept telling me that there would be a stream very soon to fill up my bottles. I was also a wee bit frustrated that the alleged 3 hills to go up and down actually numbered closer to 17. Before too long, I noticed that our path to the camp was intersecting with the trail with the rest of the hikers coming down from the Lava Tower and I ended up spotting Chris and Mike. After waving them down, I grabbed Chris’ extra water bottle and re-hydrated. Water had never tasted so good.

Our guides were really frustrating me. I was learning more about the mountain and the trail listening to the assistant guides from other tour groups than I was from my own head guide. Whenever I asked a question, I would get one of three responses: 1) an unrelated response, 2) “pol-e pol-e”, or 3) “Be Free”, which I suppose was Martin’s version of “Don’t Worry, Be Happy”. I don’t tend to be a needy tourist, but it seems to me that a bare minimum should be to get a quick description of the day’s hike each morning – how long the hike is, what the terrain and trail are like, and what our elevation will be like. It helps you become a bit more mentally prepared. But hey – maybe “Be Free” is really all the description we needed.

From this point, camp was only another 10 minutes away, which meant that it was easily 30 minutes for me at my current pace, and that was easily the longest 30 minutes of the hike. I think Chris had seen enough during these 30 minutes to decide that I needed to be sent down the mountain and back to the hotel, and so he began to discuss different scenarios with Martin on how to get this done.

When we finally arrived at camp, I went into my tent and rolled out my sleeping bag and was a few moments from passing out. Chris had different plans – he made sure that I got out of the tent and ate some food first. Chewing is already a chore at 14,000 feet, and it was even worse in my condition. But I was famished and he knew that I needed some nourishment before falling asleep.

In the middle of the night, I woke up for a bathroom break and the most amazing scenery met me outside the tent. The sky had opened up and the moon and stars illuminated the landscape – no flashlight was required. The snowy peak of Kilimanjaro was directly above us and glowed effervescently. My eyes turned to follow our trail and it disappeared straight into a massive wall of a mountain. Even now, six months later, this is my fondest memory of the mountain – how I wish I had a chair and a cup of hot cocoa so that I could sit there and stare for an hour. That would have made it all worthwhile in a heartbeat.

I probably got about 6 hours of sleep that evening. I woke up very refreshed, gobbled down breakfast, and was rearing and ready to go. I couldn’t have picked a better day to have a ton of energy. The wall of a mountain I had spotted last night turned out to be part of the trail. I could see a steady trail of tourists and porters both dotting a line all the way up the Great Wall of Barranco. Actually, I’ve been to the Great Wall and that moniker wouldn’t do this wall justice. I suppose calling it the Barranco Cliff of Insanity might work, but it seems to me that when you call something a cliff, you tend to be on the top and not at the bottom. So I’m going to go with The Great Waterless Fjord of Barranco. In truth I think it’s called the Barranco Wall, but that’s just kinda lame.

The path up the side of the waterless fjord was exhilarating with stunning views as we teetered on the edges of the trail, one mis-step plunging us to our collective dooms. The guides were very cautious with us, and with me in particular given my condition the past few days. I think I caught them completely by surprise by being so energized and scrambling up the mountain with ease. The wall would have gone very quickly had it not been for so many people. Inevitably, we’d get to a difficult patch where only one person could pass at a time and a tourist faint-of-heart would take an exorbitantly long time to climb up. The porters would frequently get very impatient and shove their way through or find less secure alternate routes to circumvent the tourist roadblock – I can’t say that I blame them. After all, it can’t be comfortable having 50 lbs of unbalanced tourist supplies strapped to your back and neck. These difficult patches were not necessarily easy – they were very similar to a medium-difficulty rock-climbing wall… except a little more slippery, a lot colder, a lot higher altitude, and lots of people staring at you.

Once reaching the top, we relaxed for a few minutes to soak up the view and then continued on our way, a casual stroll down a slight descent until the next uphill climb. It began to rain shortly thereafter – thank goodness we weren’t still on the (not-so) waterless fjord anymore. The wall definitely wouldn’t have been so much fun in the rain.

Our hike today was pretty short – about 4 hours in total to the Karanga camp. When we finally reached the camp, I was completely soaked by the rain. Mike and Chris were both relatively dry, so I started changing in my tent to try and figure out why. It turns out that I had left my armpit zippers wide open, which allowed all of the rain hitting my shoulders and upper arms to stream down the jacket and straight onto my shirt. I was also wearing a balaclava on my head and my hood apparently was not completely covering it. As a result, my balaclava was soaking up rain water and wicking it straight down to my back. In retrospect, I probably should have pulled that $1 poncho back out. Fortunately after reaching camp, the sun came out and we could dry our clothes and gear by hanging them on the tent lines.

The campsite for tonight was on a very noticeable incline on very rocky terrain. It was clear that we had gained in altitude as well – a seemingly short jaunt to the squatter left me breathless, even with no backpack to carry. The peak of Kilimanjaro was right smack dab in front of us – almost as though you could reach out and grab it. It wasn’t off in the distance or over the next hill anymore, it was right there. Tomorrow, we’d have another 4 hour hike to both ascend a bit more and also to get into the right spot of the mountain before we attempting the final ascent.

That night I didn’t sleep very much – maybe an hour or two at the most unfortunately. It seems my insomnia had returned, I suppose because I was no longer exhausted. The hike to Barafu camp was nothing special under the circumstances. I don’t remember it all that well – I just remember having some gradual ascents and gradual declines on very rocky terrain. We reached Barafu camp at about noon. The plan was to get an early rest and begin the ascent at about midnight for those final 1400m. This is standard for the mountain because it’s such a long day – about 7-8 hours to the top, another 4 hours to get back down, and then 4 more hours down to the next camp at Mweka.

When we arrived at the camp, we ended up sitting on a bench for 3 hours waiting for the tourists who had ascended the night before to get back down the peak, rest for an hour or two, eat lunch, and then make their way down. Sitting there with nothing to do and nowhere to go for hours on end was quite frustrating. To make matters worse, our porters had chosen spots right on the trail in the main campground for my tent – my tent actually shook a little bit all evening as people plodded by. I clearly would not be getting any sleep that evening again unfortunately.

Our gameplan for warmth was to load up and put on every possible article of clothing. It’s quite freezing on the peak in the wee midnight hours – if the temperature doesn’t get you, the wind-chill definitely will. I had on 4 layers under my jacket, 3 layers on my legs, 2 pairs of gloves, 2 balaclavas, a ski jacket, ski goggles, and my thick woolen cap from Mt. Bromo in Indonesia. Water tends to freeze if left in your backpack alone, so we filled our water bottles up with warm water and put them inside our jackets to keep them from turning to ice.

We set off for the peak at about 11:30pm under the light of moonlight. Plenty of people had their headlamps on, but I actually found it easier to see using the moonlight instead. Scattered up and down the path were trickles of light from the headlamps of long lines of guides and tourists, trudging along in unison in as a train of human hikers. The guides sang songs to pass the time and give something for the tourists to focus on.

The trail itself from the start was very steep and a bit icy from the previous day’s snowfall. There were small leveled out strips from time to time, but it was largely straight uphill. It didn’t take long for my shorter well-bundled legs to fall behind Mike and Chris, so within a few hours they had pulled far enough away from me that they decided that we should split up. I don’t blame them at all. It didn’t help that I was also getting very short of breath and stopping every five to ten minutes to rest. I tried to get a sip of water, but my hands would freeze every time I pulled my gloves off.

Honestly, I don’t remember much. I do remember hiking up a seemingly never-ending maze of switchbacks with the end nowhere in sight. Trains of tourists would pass me when I stopped to catch my breath. The wind was gusting and made it impossible to do little more than put your head down and keep trudging forward in baby steps.

I remember getting a granola bar out to try and get some strength and sat on a rock for about 10 minutes gazing at the mountainside glowing in the moonlight. I noticed that there were very few people below me on the mountain… a straggler here or there at the most. There was one fellow who was 30 yards down from me who was puking non-stop and the guide was arguing with him that he needed to turn around and get back to camp. These guides pride themselves on getting people to the top – I heard from a lady after the trip that her guide basically pushed her up the mountain for the last 3 hours of the hike. Unfortunately, mine was not so determined. In fact, he seemed quite happy when I had decided at that point that I didn’t have the energy to move forward. Exhaustion had just gotten the better of me, and unfortunately the benefits of the 6 hours of sleep from two nights before had long been used up. The only problem was that I still needed to make my way back to camp.

Sometimes, I find that it’s actually harder to go downhill than it is to go uphill – I know there are more than enough people that don’t agree with me on this point. When you are going uphill, your center of gravity is moving towards the landmass and if you stumble, you stumble into the mountain. When you are going downhill, it’s the opposite – if you stumble, you tumble. The only way to not do this is to walk down backwards (takes too long) or to lean back as you step down (hard on your knees). Because the mountainside was so steep and icy, I skidded down a lot and I even fell down a few times. I also helped a few others who were struggling with the same decision I had faced – I like to believe that they felt some comfort in knowing that they were not the only ones who had to turn back. I know I did.

Best I can figure, I made it about halfway up from Barafu to the peak. This would put me at a maximum height of about 5300m or about 17,400ft. I got back to my tent and didn’t sleep very much. But it didn’t seem like it was too long before I heard Chris and Mike’s voices again (probably about 6 hours later). They had reached the summit in superb time… so superb that they got there too early and would have had to wait for another 30 minutes to see the sun rise. Apparently, when you’re at the top of a 19,500ft mountain – 30 minutes is an absolute eternity. They reached the top, took the obligatory picture, and promptly turned right back around as I’m sure every single one of the other 25,000 successful hikers per year do at that peak. Glory is short. There is no reveling necessary, since reveling would imply that it’s an enjoyable experience. Of course, I wouldn’t know. And yes, that bothers me to no end.

After letting Chris and Mike rest for a few hours, we had some lunch and started a rapid descent down the mountain. Six hours later, we were at Mweka camp at the top of the tropical foresty portion of the mountain at the same elevation we had been at 5 nights before – 3000m. What had taken us 4 days to get up had taken us only one day to get down – certainly there are much faster paths, but the name of the game is acclimatization. The more time you have to get your body accustomed to a higher altitude on the mountain, the more likely you’ll be able to reach the top.

Sleep at 3000m was no problem at all. Sure, I was very tired, but it was nothing like the exhaustion I had felt a few days prior when I collapsed at Barranco camp. A thousand meters clearly makes all the difference in the world. After a few more hours of hiking the next morning, we reached the Mweka gate, had a bite to eat at a roadside stand, and then rode back to the hotel in the Extended-Extended-Cab Family Truckster Rovermobile where the first order of business would be a well deserved shower. The week on the mountain had flown by. We had hiked a total of 50 miles from gate to gate. And it was hard to stomach that I had missed my goal.

Early in this post, I mentioned an Esquire article I had been reading… the writer mentions that he trained for four months for the hike by working out six times a week and by sleeping in a special altitude tent each night to get his body accustomed to low altitude conditions. You really don’t need all this. You don’t need to be supremely fit to hike up this mountain – anyone can do it. No, seriously. There were grandmas and grandpas who were climbing up the mountain – sure they were in decent shape and were finding it difficult, but they were still making it up.

I think that’s what makes it so difficult for me to recount this trip – the way I see it, I just flat-out failed. I know that sounds harsh and many have told me “at least you tried”, but somehow that doesn’t comfort me much. Perhaps this trip has reminded me that I’m not indestructible, much like my ACL tear did to my psyche a decade earlier. I’m sure that better training or more appropriate gear would have helped me get farther up the mountain, but I really don’t think it’s the sum total of why it didn’t happen for me. At times, I think that perhaps I did not commit myself enough mentally to trudge through and make it up to the top. At other times, I think that there were just too many obstacles to overcome – sleeplessness, altitude sickness pills, anti-malarials, physical fitness, and appropriate gear. Actually, I think I would have been able to push through with everything except the sleeplessness. That was an absolute killer.

The Esquire columnist ends his article saying “For me, the most gratifying part of finishing Kilimanjaro is that I know, for sure, that I can do it, that I did do it, and that I never have to do it again.” My immediate thought when I read that was… “Damn!”

So who’s up for climbing up Kili with me next year?

I've Outsourced My Blog to India, v2.0

2008-04-08T15:11:00.008-04:00

Wednesday, March 5th to Friday, March 7th Last night, we rode a bus for 14 hours to get to my father’s hometown – a small town called Aheri. I suppose I should probably qualify the term “small”; by Indian standards, this town is tiny with a population of only 100,000. A similar town in the US would probably be about 5,000 people, which is basically where I grew up in Eastern Kentucky. Hmmm… maybe that’s why my dad moved us to Eastern Kentucky when I was 3. Nostalgia. Anyway, since the end destination of this bus was our little town of Aheri, you knew going in that this was not about to be the most comfortable bus in the world – Greyhound is exceptional in comparison. This bus was closer to an old yellow grade school bus. Except that it’s painted red and yellow. Or at least I think it was red and yellow; the layers of unwashed dirt and grime can make it hard to distinguish at times. Similar to other developing countries that I’ve traveled in, there is no real limit to the number of passengers that are permitted on the bus. While this one wasn’t overflowing by any means, there were at some points during the journey between 10-15 people standing in the aisle. Imagine riding a bus with standing-room-only for 14 hours. Fortunately, we had seats. Unfortunately, there was no space for our luggage, so our bus conductor was nice enough to convince the bus driver to keep some of our very large suitcases next to him in his compartment, which is separate from the passengers in the back – it’s kind of like the buses that you might see at an airport shuttling people back and forth between terminals, but of course this bus was nowhere near as smooth and comfortable. Needless to say, I didn’t really sleep that night. We stopped every 20-30 minutes at another stop to pick up or drop off passengers. Since we had luggage in the aisle as well (my mom packed lots of foodstuffs for us to bring home from Gulbarga via the rest of the trip), people were stepping over the luggage and bumping into me non-stop. It was really a lot of fun. And we complain about Greyhound… sheesh! Never satisfied. When we reached Aheri, my father asked the conductor to drop us off in front of my uncle’s house. Even though there are 100,000 people in the town, even the passing bus conductors know where the Maddiwars live. My grandfather was one of four brothers who settled in the area and it was only until the recent generation that the family began to scatter. As a result, our family has been a mainstay of the town for the better part of a century. Walking through the town, there are many buildings and edifices of some sort with the Maddiwar name on it somewhere – either because a Maddiwar lives there, owns the business housed there, or donated money to build the place. One of my uncles was telling me that just having the last name “Maddiwar” automatically extends you a line of credit virtually anywhere within the district. That’s just kinda cool. Anyway, by the time we reached the house at 9am, the ceremonies for my cousin’s wedding had already begun. My cousin Pallavi has been living in the US since she was 8 (for the past 20 years), met a guy where she lives in Stamford, CT, fell in love, and they decided to get married at his parents’ hometown in Chennai, India. While it’s a bit unconventional, I thought it was neat because I’d get to see a real Indian wedding for someone that I actually knew really well. My cousin Pallavi and her brother Pawan basically grew up with me – we’re more siblings than cousins. Coincidentally, Pawan just got engaged and is getting married this summer. For me, of course, that’s all the more reason people were wondering why I wasn’t married yet – I could no longer rely on the trusty old “but it’s different in America” defense with two MUCH-younger cousins getting married. Damn them. They ruined everything, and probably just to spite me. Back to our story, by the time we reached the house, we had missed the entire Haldi ceremony – to refresh your memory, the Haldi ceremony is where you get a yellow paste smeared all over you. The yellow paste doesn’t tend to like to come out of white clothing very nicely, so it’s always best to wear something decent that you don’t mind never being able to use again. One of my cousins, Suyog, was absolutely devastated that we were not able to partake in the Haldi, so he took it upon himself to ensure that we were still able to live the experience by promptly smearing a thick Haldi paste on our faces and in our hair (well, not my hair but definitely my scalp). I was picking Haldi out of my ears for the next few days. But I was extremely grateful to Suyog for thinking about our feelings and making sure that we felt included. It was very nice of him. For the next few days, we really just hung out. There were a number of ceremonies taking place, seemingly randomly to an outsider like me. For example, on the first afternoon, we all got into un-air-conditioned vehicles in the midday heat and followed a small band of wedding instrument players to a nearby temple that was all of 5-6 blocks away. Frankly, this would have been far more bearable for the majority of people if they had just walked since sitting in the middle of the car with no direct window access was actually hotter than outside in the sun. At this temple, our mothers and aunts and grandmothers led the group in some prayers and then a chicken was fed. This was new to me – apparently, there is some sort of tradition that you give a chicken some food and if it eats the food, it’s good luck for the wedding. Of course, if the chicken doesn’t eat the food, you just wait there until it does eventually eat it, but still – it’s for good luck. Yes, it sounds funny, but so does waiting for a fat man in a red suit to fly from rooftop to rooftop to give us state-of-the-art toys via the chimney, even if you don’t have a chimney. To each culture their own. One morning, we all got up and went to the river. By “we all”, I mean about 30-40 of us. By “went”, I mean that we sat in the back of an overgrown pick-up truck. By “sat”, I mean that some of us sat and other stood and others hung on for dear life at the tailgate. One of our uncles owns a rice mill, and gave us use of one of their trucks to shuttle us to and from the river. At the river, we frolicked. Some actually bathed (I think it was also for good luck), others swam, others just dipped in for the cool sensation of the water in the hot sun. Regardless, it was really nice to do this as a big family. I can’t recall the last time I’ve seen all of these cousins and uncles and aunts in one place (again, the family has scattered somewhat), and it was just really nice to see everyone at the same time and just hang out and chill. One of the traditions of our family in India when someone gets married is that you feed the town – or more specifically, anyone who wants to be fed. So one afternoon, we headed next door to a local school and they served lunch to anyone who wanted to come by. From a Western point of view, this may seem strange, but I think this is a great idea. A wedding in India is a big deal – there is no such thing as divorce or re-marriage (well, not where my family grew up at least) and it’s really a massive celebration of the real joining of two families – it’s more than mere rhetoric. Inviting the town to join in your celebration is a really nice touch. Unfortunately, in the US it’s just cost prohibitive to do this, unless you went with mac and cheese (grody) or PB&J (minus the J = yummy). Maybe Ramen noodles could work… As I mentioned earlier, my other cousin Pawan also recently got engaged. His fiancée Shreya joined for this trip. Shreya moved to the States when she was fairly young, but somehow manages to have a complete love affair with all things India. She watches far more Indian Bollywood movies than Hollywood movies and stays more current with Indian pop culture than American pop culture, even though she hasn’t been back to India since she moved here. As such, Shreya’s perception of India has been a bit romanticized (she’s no idiot – she knew this going in too), which is understandable since cinema doesn’t reflect real everyday experience. The first leg of their trip was to Ahmedabad, which is a fairly (relatively) modern city in the state of Gujarat. Ahmedabad was somewhat of a culture shock, since she had never seen the dirty streets, the dusty roads, the polluted air, the poverty that smacks you in the face, the lack of a proper sewage system, and all those other common traits of developing countries. Aheri is a good number of notches further on the developing scale than Ahmedabad, so I was borderline scared for Shreya on how she would react. Aheri adds a couple of unique touches that she didn’t see in Ahmedabad:

It is perfectly normal for a cow to walk through your complex.
There is no air conditioning. Anywhere.
There isn’t an abundance of television programming.
There is no Internet in the entire village.
There is no electricity from 6am to noon every day. On purpose.
There are no Western toilets. You cannot avoid the squatters.

The last one was really the clincher for Shreya. In fact, one of my favorite exchanges of the trip came from Shreya on this precise topic:

“I just don't like the idea of pooing in a hole,” Shreya explains in exasperation. “But you poo in a hole at home too,” Pawan attempts to help. “Yeah, but that’s a much nicer hole!” Shreya drives home the point.

Regardless, I was definitely very impressed. Shreya had to deal with all of this plus she had to be on her best behavior since scores of family wanted to meet her and were undoubtedly watching her – out of curiosity, out of concern for Pawan’s well-being, out of whatever – Shreya was to an extent on display and she knew it. And she really handled it all exceptionally. In the evenings, the family gathered in one of the rooms and talked or played games. A favorite of Indian families is “Antaakshari”, which is song-based game. Everyone splits up into two teams, one team picks a random song and sings a few phrases of the chorus and then the next team has to go. But the other team’s song selection has to start with the consonant that the previous team’s song ended on. Since India churns out of ton of Bollywood movies each year, and each movie has an entire album’s worth of songs, this game can go on and on for hours. For the most part, the point is not to win; it’s more for the fun and camaraderie. This game also illustrates how much more central the family unit is in Indian society than in American society – just as it’s perfectly normal for an average Indian family to sit down and sing together for hours on end, it’s equally normal for kids to do mini-performances for their family: either singing or dancing or sometimes both, regardless of ability. I can’t imagine some of my American friends ever doing this with their families when I was growing up, and that was before the onslaught of the personal computer and the video games that has further divided the family unit in our country. By the way, I think you should know that I really really REALLY hate mosquitoes. I’ve been bitten everywhere imaginable during this trip (well, almost) and nothing seems to be working for me. First it was my arms and feet. So then I made sure to sleep with the fan directly above me – this only helped a little, so I went to applying the all-too-popular Odomos anti-mosquito cream to my arms and legs. So then the mosquitoes started biting me on the face. So I put the cream on my face (yecch!), and they moved to my scalp. I applied it to my scalp, and then they bit my lower lip which promptly swelled to Bubba-like proportions. And then they decided to bite me everywhere regardless of where the Odomos was applied. One night, a mosquito bit me on my eyelid, and I couldn’t open my left eye for 3-4 hours in the morning after I woke up. I need to find a mosquito net. Maybe I should buy a portable one and carry it around with me. Or I should just travel in a popemobile or something like that. That would be cool. I want a popemobile. Though I’m not sure I really have space in the driveway for that. Currently, I’m single and I have three cars. Many would say that’s two too many. I like to say that I have options. My sister likes to say that I’ve gone through my mid-life crisis twice now. Who is right? I am. Why? Because I’m the one writing this. And as the historians like to say, the winners get to write the history books. I’m a real winner. Saturday, March 8th Today, about 80 of us had tickets for a train to Chennai. Since there isn’t a train station in Aheri, we had to drive to the nearby town of Ballarsha. By “nearby”, I mean 3 hours away. And by “drive”, I mean rent an entire public bus to take us there. We left at about 9am, and pretty quickly I was missing the air-conditioning present in many buses elsewhere in the world. The natural air conditioning coming from the open windows was less refreshing and more just blowing hot dusty air all around us. When we arrived at Ballarsha, we stopped for an hour or two at a schoolhouse run by one of our cousins for lunch. They brought in some cooks to make fresh “pavbhaji” for us. Pav bhaji is a spicy blend of mashed vegetables (mostly potatoes) served on bread that is made on a very wide iron skillet – ugh… that description just doesn’t do it justice. Click on the link I gave you and read up on it instead, okay? The train station was a madhouse. Well, not in total, but for us it was. Imagine trying to get everyone and everyone’s luggage into a crowded train in 3 minutes. And in India, the conductor will not slow down or wait for you if you aren’t done loading or unloading. It’s complete survival-of-the-fittest. So after we got all of our elders on the train and seated (since leaving any of them would be worse than leaving a bag), we had teams of people loading bags through two doors and one emergency exit window. Then we spent the next two hours moving bags around so that everyone’s bag was close to them. Even though very few people needed to actually get into their suitcases, generally-speaking people weren’t okay with assuming that their bag made it. The fact that it was family loading the bag onto the train was irrelevant. My preference was to use simple process of elimination: I verified that my bag was on the platform with everyone else’s bag before the train arrived; I verified that someone in our group was watching the remaining bags that were on the platform as they were being loaded; and I verified that my bag was no longer on the platform as the train was pulling away. Q.E.D: the bag must be on the train. I’m satisfied. But no one else is. Since thievery is relatively common in India, my logic process is dismissed as naivety by most. And perhaps most are correct. 16 hours later, we were in Chennai. Yes, you read that correctly. We rode a train for 16 hours. Pure joy. I had finished the book I brought on the trip to read: Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns. So at the Ballarsha train station, I grabbed whatever book I could find by a recognizable author – I ended up with Paulo Coehlo’s The Zahir. I spent much of the train ride reading my book. My sister spent much of the train ride playing Antaakshari with the rest of the family. Sunday, March 9th After we unloaded from the train this morning, we loaded onto a bus. This was no government-issued public bus either – this was a luxury bus with sleeper berths above the seats. The only problem was that there weren’t enough seats, so the young and limber had to climb up and sit in the sleeper berths or stand in the aisle. Apparently, the bus driver also forgot that this was a taller sleeper-bus and promptly ran into the underside of an overpass that we were attempting to squeeze under. If this were the US, we would be there for two hours as we waited for the police to come and block off the street to allow the bus to back up safely and file the necessary paperwork. In India, we simply had a couple of people hope off the bus and direct traffic while the bus backed up. Given the rule shared previously of "Size matters", the bus had the right of way.

We had a quick breakfast on the outdoor patio of a hotel. I'm not exactly sure where this hotel came from or what the significance of this hotel was, since we were not staying at this hotel. So it seemed a bit random. But the food was good and the setting was good, and we were all just really thankful that we were no longer in the train. Some of us were probably thankful that we weren't in the bus either.

When we finally got to the hotel we were staying at, we ran into a bit of a snag. One of my uncles had painstakingly worked on the room assignments assuming four per room. When we arrived at the hotel, it seems that the majority of rooms were set up with a single large bed, which just could not feasibly fit 4 people, and was a stretch for 3 people, not to mention the families with young children as well. Keep in mind that Indians are used to sleeping in close quarters - if these were Americans, all hell would have broken loose! In the end, my cousins and uncles worked it out such that we had 3 per room plus some suites for the families with kids. The rooms were small but comfortable and definitely served the purpose. I was a bit impressed actually - it's a arduous task to take care of 80 people and this potentially sizable blip was handled more than fine.

The wedding reception or engagement was that evening. I honestly have no idea if it was the engagement or the reception or what. What I do know is that we all went to another hotel (yes, another one) and there was a puja and there was food and everyone was there and dressed up. This hotel was really nice - probably the nicest one I've been in in India. My sister was amazed - she kept commenting "It's like we're in the US!" Given the description of where our family is from, I'm sure you can see why this was like walking into a different world for us, and I suppose for some of our family members as well.

Monday, March 10th Early this morning, my cousins got up and started the wedding ceremony at something like 5am. Why would you do this? I can imagine that this would make no sense to a lot of you. A key for any religious ceremony is not just that you do it, but it's also when you do it. There are good times and bad times to do any particular ceremony, and I believe this one for this particular day for this particular couple had to begin prior to 6am to fit inside the auspicious timing window. Indians can be a bit superstitious, granted, but there is a huge science behind Indian astrology - believe it or not, it's not a something that the priest used a little plastic wheel from a Cracker Jack box to figure out. But let me diverge for a moment - does anyone else think it's hugely funny that we have a treat that's called "Cracker Jack"? I mean, it's got nothing to do with crackers. Which means that the term "cracker" must be an adjective describing this character "Jack". And sure enough, right there on the front of the box is someone I can only assume whose name is Jack. And indeed, he is white.

Back to the wedding, my cousin Pallavi and her new husband Venk got married this morning in the Divya Room; at least I think it was the Divya Room - I forget. What I do know is that the hotel had a room a few doors down called the "Pallavi Room", but unfortunately my cousin or her then-fiancee's family was unable to secure that room in time.

After the wedding, the family split up a bit and everyone went their separate ways in the late afternoon. It was kinda sad, since this was really the last time in memory that we had seen this many of our family members in one place at one time. I make it out to India about once every 5 years, and our family is so large that I cannot possibly remember everyone's names let alone everyone's face. So over half of each trip is consumed with trying to remember names and faces. What further complicates this is that my father's generation had very large families - instead of 2-3 kids, there were 6-8 kids in each group. Since they get married relatively young and start popping out kids a short while afterwards, there's a weird juxtaposition of generations as well. On my dad's side, I have nephews who are my age or older and who have kids. In fact, if you go to the second-cousin level, I think I have nephews and nieces whose kids are getting married now. On my mom's side, I'm one of the oldest and my sister is the only one with kids. And so, it can get very complicated and confusing and just about the time I think I have it down, it's time to leave. And every time I swear that I'm going to write down a family tree so that I can keep it straight for the next time. And no, that hasn't happened yet.

Very late this evening, my sister and I joined my cousin Pawan, his fiancee Shreya and Shreya's mother and boarded a plane to come back to the States. We had lots and lots of bags, so it was nice that the airport queue was relatively empty when we got there. Of course, we did get there about 4 hours in advance, so that may have something to do with it.

Okay everyone. That completes my India trip. And I finished this just in the nick of time… I leave tomorrow on my next adventure – this time to Nicaragua. Where’s Nicaragua you say? What is there to do there? Well, I guess you’ll have to wait until I write that one up. As always, thanks for listening.

I've Outsourced My Blog to India

2008-04-01T15:45:00.004-04:00

My sister Leenata and I recently came back from spending two weeks in India. We had cousins on both sides of our family getting married on consecutive weekends. For Indian weddings, EVERYONE shows up – so this gave us the perfect opportunity to see almost all of our scattered family in a very short period of time. We couldn’t pass it up. For my sister, this was also the first time she had been away from her kids for more than a day or two since the oldest was born 6 years ago. Anyone who has met my nieces and nephew know how difficult it is to leave them for a few hours, let alone for two weeks. This was a real commitment, and I, for one, was impressed. Our family in India was even more impressed that my brother-in-law Chris would be taking care of the three kids single-handedly for the majority of the time. For my conservative family back in India, this is not the norm at all. When I told friends and co-workers that I was heading to India for a few weeks for weddings, the response frequently involved some level of questioning regarding marriage prospects. I suppose that’s a fair question – everyone seems to have a story about a friend or acquaintance from India who went on a seemingly normal vacation to India only to return engaged or married. I was definitely dreading this particular aspect of my trip since I was attending the weddings of younger cousins on both sides of my family, providing ample opportunity for anyone and everyone to ask the golden question – “when are you getting married?”. My sister and I even engaged in a friendly bet of sorts on the number of times I would be asked. Though we never ended up with a final number, we would have both well overshot the actual. I was asked the golden question only about 40 times, which is especially surprising since I was attending two weddings. But hey, I’m fine with that! I think the hardest part was trying to explain why I wasn’t married – and there’s just no easy answer for that. There’s really very little difference between trying to explain a love marriage to someone over there and trying to explain an arranged marriage to someone over here – in each case, it’s the context that matters and it’s extremely hard for many people to understand an environment that’s so completely different from the one they grew up in. I really don’t think that one way is better or worse than the other – both have their pros and cons, but it’s just different. I did finally settle on a response to the golden question, though. I started telling people that I was getting married in three years. The response was generally something along the lines of “oh… okay”. I think I perplexed them a bit and they were wondering if a) I was serious, b) if I understood their question (my command of the language is not the greatest), and/or c) if I responded using the correct words. Instead of asking clarifying questions, these poor unsuspecting relatives were left walking away while thinking “What just happened here?” In any case, there you have it – I have three years to find a wife. Most of the happy couples I know were introduced to their significant others through friends/family and did not meet at a bar or a club or anything like that. So the way I see it, my current predicament is entirely your fault. I hope you're proud of yourselves. But anyway, to the trip… Wednesday, February 27th - Friday, February 29th The next two days are about to become potentially the most boring days of my life. In the past when we’ve flown to India, we’ve almost exclusively flown on Air India. I’m not positive why this is, but all I do know is that the decision was never mine to make. So it could be that Air India offered the cheapest flights or it could be that their food was Indian enough to suit my mom’s taste. But what you could always count on is the complete lack of basic human decency that economy class passengers could expect from the flight attendants. For this reason, I always felt a slight amount of pride when my mom ordered us to swipe the Air India-branded stainless steel utensils from our dinner plates – after all, that’s what they get for being so rude. To be fair, what my mom was really after was the small spoons that they gave you for dessert – these were the perfect size spoons for her spice jars and she hadn’t been able to find that size in any store anywhere. But above all, I recall that as a kid that those flights were the most excruciatingly long and uncomfortable hours imaginable. Needless to say, I was less than enthused about the upcoming days. From the outset, there was a glimmer of hope with this flight. We had booked our tickets on Jet Airways, which had recently began serving the Newark airport and connects via Brussels. I had heard nothing but excellent things about Jet Airways, and I my fears had already been assuaged by my (cousin) brother-in-law’s father who works for the company. From the moment that my sister and I stepped onto the plane, we were in awe. Part of this awe came from our walk through first and business classes. Well actually, I suppose that this was more jealousy than anything else. But we were pretty pleasantly surprised when we arrived at our seats. This was a very new plane, and as with many newer planes, each seat has it’s own LCD TV – except this one was HUGE (must’ve been at least 10 inches) and had a selection of around 100 movies, a few episodes of different TV shows, and a small selection of games. The seat spacing was excellent too – in both dimensions. Leenata was even able to sit Indian-style for most of the flight without much discomfort. The food was very tasty, and the menu had a choice of foods and a choice of drink. My favorite part: there was a section that said “Wine List” – underneath this heading was “Australian White Wine” and “Australian Red Wine”. For some reason, that cracked me up – no mention of which winery, which year, which type of wine or anything. But at least they gave us each a bonafide wine glass to drink it with – yes, even in Economy class. After a few hours in Brussels for a layover, where we strangely had to pass back through security to get on a different plane that was only a few doors down, we made it to Mumbai without much incident. We landed at about midnight and had 3 hours to make our connection flight on Jet Airways to Hyderabad. In total, from the time we left my sister’s house in Northern Kentucky, we spent almost 50 hours in transit before reaching Hospet, our first real destination in India. Here’s the breakdown for those who don’t believe: 2 hr pre-flight, 2 hr flight to Newark, 5 hr layover, 6 hr flight to Brussels, 4 hr layover, 8 hr flight to Mumbai, 4 hr layover, 2 hr flight to Hyderabad, 1 hr post-flight, 4 hr drive to Gulbarga (where we paused for ~3 hrs), and then the 8 hr drive to Hospet, where the first wedding ceremony was being held. From a vehicle standpoint, we traveled by minivan, tram, plane, tram, plane, plane, bus, bus, plane, and SUV. Whew – I’m exhausted just writing that. Perhaps the strangest thing that caught my eye during these 2 days of travel was in the US at the Newark Airport. For whatever reason, some genius had decided that people in airports were wasting way too many natural resources and that we direly need infrared assistance for all of our bathroom endeavors. The toilet was automatic, the faucet was automatic, the soap dispenser was automatic, and the paper towel dispenser was automatic. I can never seem to position my hands “just right” underneath the faucet to trigger the sensor. So I spend time moving my hands from side to side, up and down, forward and back, hoping to trigger the right combination of positionings to get some water. After struggling a bit, I noticed a small sign above the faucet that read “Note: Black clothing may not operate faucet”. This puzzles me – what do they want you to do if you are wearing a black shirt? I had noticed that the airport bathroom task force hadn’t provided a normal faucet for those black-clothing-wearing folks. Perhaps they expect you to take your shirt off prior to washing your hands. I suppose this may work for 75+% of Americans, but what do you do if your skin is of a darker hue? Removing a shirt is hardly going to help. And how exactly does my shirt color have anything to do with turning on the faucet anyway – I thought the infrared was looking for my hands? Clearly, you can see that I was stymied and intrigued. So much so that I told my sister to go check the women’s bathroom. Indeed, the same sign was there. Saturday, March 1st This weekend in Hospet, my mother’s younger sister’s daughter was getting married. This morning was the beginning of the real festivities – the Haldi ceremony. I haven’t really seen too many Haldi ceremonies before, so this is still a bit new to me. But basically, the bride and her family are smothered in haldi. Haldi is a yellow powder that is frequently used in both cooking and religious ceremonies in India. In this particular application, enormous amounts of the powder are procured and water is added to make a nice paste, which is then generously applied vigorously to the face and arms and feet and hair (and by association, the clothes) of each individual. Though there are religious aspects to this function, the event is a lot of fun since everyone takes an active part in trying to one-up each other in making a mess. At some point, everyone decides that it’s time to wash the haldi off. I don’t think there’s a standard way to do this – it seems to differ a bit from family to family or region to region. For this cousin’s wedding, they sat the bride and her parents and an unmarried family member down side by side in a row and poured water over their heads to wash it off. But not just normal water – they had five large buckets of five different colours of water that they had to do this with. It’s kind of like the Gatorade baths that head football coaches enjoy after a win, except that it’s done with five different flavours, and lemon-lime Gatorade tastes better but is stickier than this water. And I doubt that it’s fortified with electrolytes, whatever the hell those are supposed to do. I think the Gatorade people made that up. Gatorade is thirst-aid, for that deep down body thirst! After the Haldi ceremony, we moved over to the wedding hall. This wedding hall was an old theatre or playhouse of some sort. There was audience seating, and there was a stage where the wedding ceremony would take place. The groom would be coming later this evening, so during the day, our side of the family was busied doing assorted prayers and pujas of some sort. To Indians, this makes perfect sense. To non-Indians, I am sure that this sounds quite curious. I say “assorted pujas of some sort” simply because I have no idea what’s going on, and in fact, most people probably don’t have much of an idea specifically of what’s going on. Indian weddings are highly ritual-based, and pujas and prayers are given by the priest in Sanskrit, a language that is no longer in common use. In Western-society, it’s akin to the prayers given in Latin when a new pope is installed (at least I think it’s in Latin). No one really speaks Latin anymore, not even Latinos. Which brings up a very good point – where the heck did the term “Latino” come from? I know of nary a Mexican who is fluent in Latin (and no, Pig Latin does not count). Sometime during the day, we all sat down in the adjoining cafeteria-type area, and were served lunch. Our plates were banana leaves, stitched together for good measure, and we were served from shiny stainless steel buckets. It’s just much more efficient this way – the banana leaves are completely bio-degradable (as is the food placed on it) and the buckets are easy to serve from. And there’s something cool about being served from a bucket. It’s very strange for me to write about India – every detail that I’m recounting is very second-nature for me since this is something like my 10th or 12th trip to India. So the things that may seem different for a first-timer are not so different to me and therefore I don’t even think twice about it. For example, the power kept going out in the wedding hall – each time this happened, one of the employees would make a mad dash to a side room and fire up the generator. Also, there was no air-conditioning here – but there were massive fans that lined the audience area. Whenever the generator had to be fired up, the fans were turned off because they drew too much juice. In the streets, there are cows and water buffaloes wandering around doing their own thing. Traffic is nuts, so those who own cars rarely drive their own cars – instead, they have personal drivers. The traffic rules are simple:

There are no traffic rules.
There are no traffic rules.
Size matters.

During our two days in Hospet, my dad and I even witnessed a few minor accidents. In the one of them, a pedestrian was hit by a car – the fellow wasn’t run over or anything, but was definitely raised off his feet a little bit. The guy who was hit walks around to the driver and they promptly have a yelling argument and then the pedestrian slaps the driver quite hard right across the face. But none of these things make me blink at all, since for me, this is the India that I am used to seeing.

That evening, the groom and his family are driving in from their town and get delayed by traffic by a few hours. When they arrive, the wedding party is on the stage for the engagement ceremony. Yes – they are getting engaged. The wedding is tomorrow, but the engagement is today. I don’t completely understand this, but that’s what it is.

For those of you who have not witnessed an Indian wedding, the ceremony can seem a bit chaotic and haphazard. There are a ton of people who stand up right next to the actual ceremony to watch or take pictures, completely blocking the view of those seated in the audience. Those seated in the audience expect this, so they weren’t really planning on watching the ceremony anyway – if they wanted to watch, they’d get up and do the same. Instead, those in the audience are chatting away with other audience members. To the Western eye, this can seem very rude. But for Indians, a wedding is more of a family wedding and less of an individual wedding – so socializing is part of what you are supposed to do. Weddings are a gathering for extended family to reloop with one another. As a result, everyone goes to a ton of weddings, so they have little need to witness the actual rites since they’ve seen the procedure many times before. But they go to catch up with family and meet those who are now new to their family, since they can now expect to undoubtedly see a few of these new extended family members at the next wedding. Sunday, March 2nd This morning is the actual wedding ceremony. The actual ceremony is performed under what is called a mandap, which is a small 8’ x 8’ stage of sorts with pillars on each corner supporting a roof to cover. This mandap was really cool – it was handmade from a freshly cut banana tree. The artisanship in building and decorating the mandap was absolutely amazing – and at the end, they just tore it down and threw it all away to biodegrade naturally. It was definitely a “green” wedding.

In the middle of the day, my father and I began to get a little bit bored, so we left to go to some nearby ancient ruins – an area called Hampi. What was clear in the hour we were in Hampi was that we could not see anything in one hour. Hampi is listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site and has ruins dating back to 1 BC. The area was chosen to be one of the capital cities of the Vijayanagara empire from the 1300s to the 1500s because it was well protected by hills on three sides and by a river on the fourth side. Unfortunately, it wasn’t protected enough, since the Muslims destroyed the city later on – I think they must have parachuted in to sneak past the natural defenses. Or maybe they used a Trojan Elephant.

Anyway, the ruins were immense and were really a 1-2 day event to do it justice. But the nicest thing about going to Hampi was that we drove around in our air-conditioned SUV instead of sweating it out in the heat like all the other poor travelers. They should invent an air-conditioned jump suit that you can walk around in – kinda like a spacesuit, except equipped with a microphone/speaker system to allow you to communicate with those poor chaps who are walking around sans A/C spacesuit. Since an A/C spacesuit would probably be a wee bit on the heavy side, the manufacturers might want to think about making it from space-age lightweight materials. Perhaps some titanium alloys of some sort. Maybe some memory foam. Or at least use some materials invented by NASA. Fortunately, it’s a spacesuit, which lends itself very quickly to use NASA-invented materials.

After returning to Hospet, we had lunch and got through the remainder of the wedding. And after a few more hours, we packed 10 of us into an SUV for the 8 hour drive back to Gulbarga. Monday, March 3rd to Tuesday, March 4th Last night, we arrived pretty late at my mom’s family’s house. The families of my mother’s three younger brothers live here in the same house that my mom grew up in. Yes, you read that right – all three families. This isn’t completely unheard of in India, though it is rarer and rarer. For us visitors though, it makes it much nice – we only have to visit one house instead of three!

We didn’t do a lot during our brief stay here. Really we were just here to spend time with family that we hadn’t seen in years and years and years. My mother’s family owns a small factory that makes nails and pots and pans and buckets and other metal goods, which they sell from a hardware shop in town. When we were younger, my parents would bring us to India every other summer, and we’d spend weeks on end here. At that time, the factory hadn’t been built, so there were workers in the backyard of the house who were making pots and pans by hand by pounding on flat sheet metal with hammers. We’d spend the day watching them, flying kites, playing cards, running down the street spinning a bicycle tire with a stick (which was surprisingly enjoyable), or playing shop in the shop. There were no televisions, no video games, no movies, and no internet.

On Tuesday afternoon, my sister, father, and I loaded our luggage back into the SUV and drove back to Hyderabad where we had initially picked up the SUV and our driver Rais. Along the way, we watched an old Bollywood movie called “Raja Hindustani” in the SUV. But before we discuss this particular movie, I think it might be prudent to explain the basic rules for making a good Bollywood movie to those of you who have not been exposed to this very unique artform.

By definition, Bollywood movies are musicals.
The male and female leads (also known as the hero and heroine) are not required to have singing or lip synching skills to star in a movie. It is perfectly acceptable and even somewhat expected that the singing voice and the speaking voice of the hero(ine) are inexplicably different.
By definition, Bollywood movies are cheesy.
If for whatever reason, the hero or heroine should so choose to sing a song or just a random verse using their own voice, the singing is horribly bad.
By definition, Bollywood movies require an unnecessary level of overacting.
There should be at minimum 1-2 songs during which the hero and heroine change clothes multiple times for no apparent reason. These clothing changes occur instantaneously, without pause for the musicians to take a bathroom break. Very rude.
The standard movie has a pure-hearted sometimes-wealthy heroine, who falls in love with an often-poor hero, who her father completely disapproves of. Generally towards the end of the movie, the father comes around and sees that our hero is a good person and that his daughter’s happiness is paramount. And there will be much rejoicing.
Bald people are not to be trusted.
The hero should always be clean-shaven.
Men with beards and goatees are not to be trusted.
Moustaches generally signal a potential penchant towards evilness, leaving the audience to wonder if this person is really evil or not.
Women with white hair are not to be trusted.
Women with a streak of white hair in the middle of their naturally black hair are most definitely not to be trusted. The white streak signifies pure evil.
People in masks are not to be trusted. No wait… that rule came from The Princess Bride. (bonus points for whoever can correctly identify the character and actor who said this line)
Women with an abnormally large or abnormally small bindi (the red dot) on their forehead are not to be trusted. After all, if they could be trusted, then they would have worn a normal bindi. It’s just that simple.
If there is a fellow with a turban in the movie, he is either an evil villain or he is there for comic relief and will break out in dance at every possible opportunity.
When men drink, the five o’clock shadows on their faces grow at a very fast pace such that by the end of the song, they look downright unkempt. Drinking = very very bad (with finger wag).
People who smoke are not to be trusted.
When there is a musical performance not involving the hero or heroine, somehow the lyrics of this performance are strangely extremely relevant to what’s happening between the hero and heroine at that very point in time. Frequently, the hero and heroine will insert themselves into the performance, whereby the original performers will adjust to their presence as though the intrusion were planned in advance. Others in the audience do not mind this interruption and surprisingly, do not even ask for their money back.
The hero is generally an amazingly good fighter regardless of his level of physical fitness and tends to be uncommonly strong regardless of the size and tone of his frame. Additionally, he is never encumbered by the clothes/shoes that he might be wearing at that time.
The hero must get in a fight to protect/rescue/defend the heroine or the heroine’s honour. The heroine does not like seeing the hero fight, and may even react angrily to the hero for engaging in hand-to-hand combat.
The heroine is always secretly impressed by the hero fighting for her.
All heroines like to sing and dance in the rain.
No kissing is allowed during a movie. Instead, all mild petting and sexual innuendo is reflected through song, often involving multiple instantaneous costume changes. This impact is taken a step further if rain is involved.

“Raja Hindustani” followed the majority of these rules to a “T”, despite my lack of knowing exactly what this “T” concept really stands for. However, there was one MAJOR aberration – a long open mouth kiss between the hero and heroine. SCANDALOUS! My sister and I were in absolute shock. This was followed up with the heroine’s father accepting the poor but virtuous hero as his future son-in-law without putting up much of a fuss. Perhaps my rules are not rules at all – they are merely guidelines.

To the casual observer, it may appear as though I am mocking the Bollywood movie. But this is not true – I mocketh not-eth. After all, Bollywood movies are more popular to more of the earth’s population than Hollywood movies are. And frankly, once you see a few of the movies, they start to grow on you. Though they are filled with an unnecessary amount of drama, in a sense similar to soap operas, they are also feel-good movies. While there are many Hollywood movies that are also feel-good, there are an awful many movies that are crime thrillers or slasher/horror movies or something else that makes you leave the theatre with the heebie-jeebies rather than a happy smile. And I guess I’ve never really completely understood why you would want to pay good money for that.

After watching the 3 hour movie in the car, we arrived at the bus station in Hyderabad. We had booked tickets on an overnight bus that would take us to my father's hometown. This was no luxury bus either, but we'll save that for next time.

So that concludes the first half of the trip on my mom’s side of the family. I’ll do my best to get the second half written up more timely... especially since I'm a week away from my next vacation!

Singapore Slings and Philippine Flings

2007-06-09T18:11:00.000-04:00

It’s the last week of my three week trip. Very sad… Sunday, May 27, 2007 This morning, I took the Singapore Airlines flight that I was initially supposed to take yesterday. It was pretty empty. But apparently, most Asian airlines have absurdly low weight limits for intra-Asian flights. As such, I was about 10 kg over, which cost me about $100. The only reason I had an extra 10 kg to begin with was because of all of the shopping that I did at the Silk Market. Oh well, I guess there goes all of those savings… I also didn’t have time or patience to argue with the attendant, and in retrospect, that was a bad choice in itself. I realized later on that I could have pulled stuff out of my bags and carried on a “personal” bag. Oh well – live and learn. In any case, Singapore Airlines lived up to its billing as the world’s most awesomist airline around. Sure they still fly you from point to point just as any other plane would, but they do it a little bit better (no, they don’t give you a happy ending – and yes, that was for you, Rupa). It’s just in the details – for example, there are at least 50% more flight attendants for your beck and call, the food actually tastes good, the orange juice was poured for you in a small glass instead of a flimsy prepackaged piece of plastic, the headsets came in Ziploc bags, the bathroom had aftershave and cologne in it, the flight attendants had an extremely large kitchen area, there were footrests at each seat – and this is all in economy class. After I got into the taxi in Singapore, I noticed a few things about this country that are shareworthy: 1) they must have been influenced by those smarmy Brits because they drive on the wrong side of the road, 2) it is indeed very clean here, 3) many of the streets are very tree-lined – not just little itty-bitty trees but really tall and lavish trees, and 4) there’s an awful lot of construction here too. Also, the sky was blue instead of smog-gray. I felt like Ahhhnold at the end of Total Recall when he on the surface of Mars outside of the space station sans spacesuit and he gasps and gasps for the fresh air as the atmosphere is just starting to be created. Or maybe like those people in the Claritin commercial as a layer of unclarity is peeled away from the screen and fresh air is abound. And there was much rejoicing. After checking into the hotel, I ventured out of the Sheraton Towers and onto the streets for a brief walking tour. I got about two blocks when I turned back to change into something lighter – it’s quite humid in Singapore. When I ventured back out, I was about to cross the street and I caught myself jaywalking – so I ran back to the curb and dutifully waited for the light to change. Fortunately, there weren’t any police around to take me to jail and cane me. Call me stupid (not that you needed a reason), but I didn’t know that Singapore was the shopping mecca that it is. There were a ton of shopping malls, and I was right near one of the major shopping districts on Orchard Street. Even though I hate shopping, I enjoyed walking by the storefronts. Not because I wanted to look inside, but because of the anticipation of the inevitable burst of air conditioning that would cool my feet. Twas nice. I also learned later on this I was there in the middle of the great Singapore shopping sale, and to top it off, sales tax was increasing by a few percentage points in a few months, so these ridiculously low prices would never be seen again. Our prices are insane! I decided to people-watch and had some dinner at an outside café. I ordered a pesto chicken pizza, which I later realized was my first real Western food in two weeks. But when it came to the table unfortunately, I realized that I had forgotten to tell them to hold the mushrooms. There was simply no separation strategy on this pie without completely obliterating the food. So, I closed my eyes and dug in. Yes – you heard it first here, I actually caved in and ate some mushrooms. Ewwwww – slimy fungus! But I will withhold further comments on acceptability of such fungus for daily consumption. Basically, I figured that after yesterday’s debacle with the sautéed 5” fishees, I couldn’t really refuse my food twice in a row. That’s just a wee little too picky. After my ice cream dessert, I headed back to the hotel in case my lactose intolerance tendencies should flare up again (it’s spotty, for whatever reason). Monday, May 28, 2007 I got up, ate breakfast, and headed to the subway to get to the P&G Singapore office. The hotel was at most 100 feet from the subway, and the Singapore office was only one stop away – very good location. Despite this, it was so humid that I was sweating when I got to the office and needed about 30 minutes just to cool down. I would have thought that 2 weeks in Beijing would have been enough to get acclimated to warmer weather. I would have thought wrong. The Singapore subway system is very clean and very neat, which is exactly what you’d expect from the sanitized existence in Singapore. The subway platforms themselves are enclosed from the tracks, similar to the way an airport tramway might be, and this keeps it quiet and air-conditioned as well. Jolly good. I stayed at work until 8pm – I had to finish up a Birkman personality test for an all-day team-building offsite that our plant’s leadership team has scheduled on the day I return from this trip. I’m not going to claim that I completed this personality test to the best of my ability – the questions were quite annoying – asking me to decide if a particular phrase mostly applies or mostly doesn’t apply to society in general, then the same 120 questions for me, and then asking me pick a first and second choice out of four professions about 50 times. I’ve done this test before, and I’m curious to see if the same results come out. I think your current state of mind can completely alter the answers that you give on personality tests. For example, my Broadway choreographer ex-roommate had filled out the personality survey on eharmony.com and was matched up with all of these biker dudes. Whereas all she was looking for is someone dreamy. Someone dreamy who she could then move in with and leave me hanging. No, I’m not bitter. P.S. I hate you Lisa. I ventured out a little bit tonight to grab some dinner – I went to Clarke’s Quay. I still don’t understand why people insist on using crazy spellings for very simple words – just call the damn thing Clarke’s Key. Every time I see or write this, my mind pronounces it as “kway”. Anyway, the Kway was chock full of bars and restaurants and would have undoubtedly been quite the lively scene had it not been a Monday night. I sat down and ate at Renn Thai, which my Singaporean co-worker Yogesh had recommended to me. The food was pretty good, but the service was terrible – a fact that Yogesh confirmed with me the next day. In retrospect, I’m not exactly sure why Yogesh recommended this to me after all. Tuesday, May 29, 2007 After a non-descript (for you) day at work, I spent a few hours this afternoon finalizing travel plans for the rest of the week. My co-worker Belle was leaving the office for the week this afternoon, the other team members who I could have met with were in training tomorrow, and Thursday was a national holiday – so it looked as though my services would not be needed beyond today. What does that mean? Another day of vacation! Yippee! I could tell you where I’m headed, but then that would spoil the fun of you reading all about it for yourself a few short paragraphs away. And that would just downright cruelness. In the evening, I joined Yogesh’s family for some authentic home-cooked Marathi food. For those of you who don’t know, my family is from Maharashtra State in India, as is Yogesh’s. Since Yogesh and my mom are both reading this, I’m going to decline any comparison between the two, other than to say that it was very yummy. In fact, I actually felt bursting-at-the-seams-FULL for the first time this entire trip. A completely random topic of conversation after dinner, Yogesh’s 9 year old son told me that Chinese people didn’t like the number 4 because the sound of the number approximates the sound of the word meaning death (or something like that). Then he told me that many buildings here (and in China) don’t have a 4th floor for this reason – immediately, my mind flashed back to that exact realization in the Sheraton elevator earlier in the day. But they do have a 13th floor. Wednesday, May 30, 2007 This morning, I headed to the airport to get on a Philippines Airlines plane to Manila. Yep – you guessed it, I’m going to the Philippines. For those of you keeping track, this is country #33 for me, so I’m well on my way to 100. Since I was flying business class, I didn’t need to worry about luggage weight constraints. Somehow I managed to book a business class ticket to Manila followed by another business class ticket from Manila to Beijing for roughly the same price as my initial business class ticket on Singapore Airlines straight to Beijing. Go figure. By the way, I thought it would be good for you to know that drug trafficking in the Philippines is punishable by death – it said so right on the customs and immigration form that I filled out on the plane. They mean business, folks. Personally, I think I’d rather be caned in Singapore for jaywalking than die in the Philippines for smoking some weed. Almost as soon as I stepped off the plane in the Philippines, I was frequently asked if I had a Filipina girlfriend – apparently, this is quite a common thing for foreigners to do when they come to the Philippines. In fact, the whole “marry a foreigner” seems to be a very common and very acceptable practice for Filipina women, if not a desired outcome. From what I could tell, Filipino men didn’t appear to have too much of an issue with this. In fact, they frequently espoused the benefits of Filipina women – beautiful, caring, sweet, loving, honest, loyal, and I suppose somewhat submissive. I suppose that for males with a strong sense of ego and with a desire to maintain the “traditional” roles in the household, this must seem like heaven. Indeed, if my dating acumen does not undergo a step-change in the near future, I might want to consider taking another trip to the Philippines. Beyond all of this, it appears that it is perfectly acceptable and perhaps even expected for married men to have “girlfriends”, though the reverse is clearly not okay. For such a seemingly sexist society, I found it quite odd that the country has freely elected two female Presidents in its history. Perhaps “sexist” is the wrong word. Regardless of what the right word was, this whole Filipina girlfriend thing was so pervasive that I almost felt bad that I didn’t have one and that I had no plans to find one. When I arrived in the Philippines, it was much different than I had expected. Other than the immigration line taking about 15 minutes, everything else was actually pretty quick. Belle (my Filipina co-worker in Singapore who told me to go to Boracay) had scared the living bejeesus out of me, telling me that traffic is really really bad and that the airport lines required a 3 hour advance arrival. I needed to go from the international terminal of the international/domestic airport to the domestic terminal of the domestic airport. It’s really quite strange – both airports seem to share the same land, however the entry points are on opposite ends of the same field. I couldn’t figure out if they use the same runways or not, but I’m sure that they need to coordinate efforts, else air traffic controllers lose their jobs. The next leg of my journey was a short 35 minute plane ride on Asian Spirit airlines to Caticlan, which is a small town that basically serves as the main access point to Boracay. Boracay is a separate island in the Philippines, so I guess you could call it a singular Philippine, right? Asian Spirit only permits 10kg of checked in luggage per passenger, and I was about 20-25 kgs over. Fortunately, their rate/kg is very low and I only needed to give them an extra $20 or so to cover the penalty. The Asian Spirit plane that I was on had enough seats for maybe 150 passengers, yet there were only 10 people on board. And somehow, they still have a flight every hour. You would think that with such a low fill rate, they’d decrease the frequency of flights. Instead, they’ve artificially increased their fill rates by removing random rows of seats in the airplane. Initially, I thought that these were emergency rows. After looking around, I realized that there were three such rows completely missing, and the vacated windows were clearly not emergency windows. To top it off, the other rows were still “Asian-sized” – so you either had a ton of legroom or no legroom. But the best thing about this flight was their drink options – water or a wannabe orange Capri-Sun. I hadn’t drunk from a foil pouch in ages, and this just brought back good memories of my lunchbox in grade school: a Capri-Sun, a piece of Sara Lee poundcake, and a peanut butter sandwich (I’ve never liked jelly – it belongs to the same slimy food group as mushrooms). Lunch was almost as good as the staple breakfast at our house: three Eggo waffles in the toaster oven or a microwaved pack of Tennessee Pride sausage biscuits (we weren’t a Jimmy Dean family). After I arrived in Caticlan, I had to take a trike (standard Suzuki motorcycle with an elaborate side cab bolted on to it) from the airport to the boat ferry, then a boat over to Boracay, a trike to the street corner near the hotel, and then a 10 minute walk to the hotel. So let’s recap today’s traveling mechanisms: taxi-plane-taxi-plane-trike-boat-trike-foot. Exciting and new. My hotel for my stay in Boracay was a 15-room place called Turtle Inn. It was built about a year ago by a fellow named Troy, who moved to Boracay from his hometown Miami with his Filipina wife Mhalen. The inn itself was laid out against a mountainside and each floor only had two rooms so that each had its own balcony looking out over the island. Unfortunately, we weren’t high enough up a mountain to see the beach or the ocean or anything, but it’s the thought that counts here. There was definitely an art deco Miami flavor to the whole place as well. I was a bit pooped from the traveling, so I hung out with Troy and a couple of the other guests for a while. One of the fellows was a dive instructor from England, who had recently found a job on Boracay and was looking for a more permanent place to stay. The other fellow was a guy from Houston who worked on offshore platforms who was in the Philippines meeting with a lady he met over the internet, who he’s hoping he’ll get along well enough with to get married. She brought three of her sisters on this trip to Boracay too, so I think she was probably looking for a bit of family approval as well. And then there’s Troy. There’s lots to be said about Troy; he definitely falls along the thresholds of what is acceptable for a married man to do in the Philippines. As much as I disagreed with some of Troy’s choices, I had to admire him a little – he’s a seventh grade educated fellow who has built a beautiful place, has a wonderful wife, he knows what he wants in life and in his business, and he makes no bones about it. We talked quite a bit during my stay and learned of this travelogue – knowing that I wasn’t quite his breed, he wondered aloud what I’d write about him, and ultimately agreed with my assessment. After a local dinner at the hotel, Troy took me to a local hangout that he goes to called Red Pirates. It was a bit shabby with a makeshift roof, but then Troy explained that it was completely wiped out during a typhoon in January and the owner is still working on putting it back together. The owner is a British girl who shared that when it rains, her bedroom is pretty much under water. After a few beers at the bar, Troy and I joined a couple of Filipina girls staying at the hotel to go to the local hotspot called Cucamunga’s. There were a ton of foreign guys there with Filipina girlfriends or foreign guys looking for Filipina girlfriends – it actually reminded me quite a bit of Thailand where the same is seen almost everywhere. Thursday, May 31, 2007 Initially I had planned on starting my scuba diving today – the diving is the reason I came here and it’s supposed to be excellent. However, after I learned that Troy was renting a boat for the day to do some big fish fishing, to motor around some islands, and then go to a waterfall, I figured that I’d postpone the diving till the next day. So off we went at 5am to do some fishing. I think this was the first time this particular boat crew had ever gone fishing, because no matter what they did, Troy was at odds with them non-stop. 4 hours later, we hadn’t caught anything (or “we ain’t found sh*t” as the token black guy combing the desert in Spaceballs would have said). However, in that time, the boat crew had managed to screw up two of Troy’s reels and tangle a few lines as well. Troy’s brother in law John claimed that we weren’t getting any bites because the moon was bright last night which enabled the big fish to do their eating at night. Now, I don’t know the first thing about fishing and frankly I don’t want to know, so I have no idea if this rationale is legit or a bunch of malarkey. For all I know, he could have told me that all the fish went to McDonald’s last night for a Mac Attack and it would have had the same “umm… okay, whatever you say” effect on me. So I basically spent the first six hours frequently moving around the front of the boat to stay in the shade of the tarp to minimize my baking in the sun. What? A tarp? On a boat? Yes indeedio. This was a traditional bangca – a boat made completely from wood. Think oversized canoe with a box hut from the middle to the end of the canoe and a lightly colored tarp as cover on the front end. Such an overgrown canoe would have a massive tendency to tip over in the ocean waves, so they’ve installed two bamboo beams parallel to the canoe about 12 feet out from either side in catamaran fashion to act as steadying forces. And it works. Somewhere around noon, we stopped in Caticlan to grab some lunch in a dimly lit restaurant showcasing food in buffet trays that didn’t appear to be the freshest in the world – possibly due to the dimly littedness of the venue. I tried to pick the least offensive looking item and pray that I wouldn’t be afflicted with the Philippine version of Delhi-Belly. Mystery meat (beef surprise?) on rice with a bonus bowl of beef broth complete with random floating bone piece, to give it that authentic feel. Troy and John had a beer. I had a big bottle of water. My mouth was parched and all we had on the boat were sodas, beer, and a few fruit juice cans. I can’t fathom why you wouldn’t have water available on a torturously hot morning. I think Troy thought I was a pansy. And I can hear you all in the background muttering “Hell, I could have told him that.” Thanks for being a friend. You’re all great. Troy’s intent for this trip was to do some scouting with John – he’s trying to help John develop a one-day tour package that would be offered to his hotel guests, and the intent of this trip was to scope out the area a little. So, from Caticlan, Troy wanted to take a minivan to some waterfalls on the island. After a bit of discussion with our boat captain guide (who was from Caticlan) and a bit of problem finding an available minivan that could take us, we ended up boarding a public bus for 35 minutes. I caught up on some sleep since I was operating on only 3 hours and the motion of the boat was not conducive to a solid rest, especially considering the sun-evasive maneuvers. After passing out for a half hour on the bus, I awoke to the sound of us rushing to get off the bus seemingly in the middle of nowhere, except for a few food stalls and road headed into the hills. I guess we needed to take this road. There was a trike headed in that direction which at first glance appeared to be full – but the other passengers waved us on and somehow we fit four more people onto the trike. And no, these trikes are not that big. We were riding Asian-style, with a complete disregard for fire code and all those other codes that have been invented in our bubble-wrapped “civilized” Western society. Of course, we also weren’t able to go any faster than maybe 10 mph with all the passenger weight – I seriously contemplated getting out and pushing. After a 15 minute ride through alternately paved and completely unpaved road through some stunning mountain scenery, we stopped at a place called Hurom-Hurom. Troy had been mumbling that the area had looked familiar – the boat captain guide-dude had led us to where he thought we wanted to go, which was a cold water spring resort in the mountains that a lot of Filipino families frequent to swim and bathe in natural spring water. There were no waterfalls in sight. Yet somehow, Troy found it interesting enough to have us sit there and watch for three hours over four beers. I more think that he couldn’t peel himself away from gawking at some of the more attractive women and girls that were in their swimming clothes – he kept muttering “Oh lordy, I’m going to hell”. Towards the end of the visit, John and I finally caved and jumped in – the water was very cool and refreshing. Troy stayed out from concerns of shrinkage. After a half a lap, John and I were sitting next on the opposite end of the pool, and some random woman sidles up next to me and starts invading my personal space, which causes me to shuffle over a little, and back and forth. She introduces herself as Kiki, and I try to limit conversation. I get a little freaked by personal space invasion, since I’m mildly claustrophobic (we’ll save that discussion for another day). And, truth be told, Kiki was no Salma Hayek. Actually – writing both of those names in the same paragraph is an utter disservice to all things Salma (I beseech thee Salma, please forgive me). Finally, Kiki made her way to the other side of the pool and took a beach ball and started tossing it at me (not to me, but at me). I try to be cordial and toss it back and continue a conversation with John. After 10 minutes, it gets old and I hop out of the pool. Troy’s words of comfort: “Well, it’s better to be found attractive by an ugly girl than by no girl at all”. This, of course, does wonders for my self-confidence. Thanks Troy. After a quick trike ride back to the main road, we try to get on the first bus or jeepney (see tidbit at the end) back to Caticlan. Then Troy gets seduced by a local to have a beer in his little shanty of a bar. It only takes a few minutes to realize that these two old men are completely wasted. Back on the side of the road after finishing a beer, one of the men tries to get my room number so that he can send me a Filipina prostitute. I tell him that I appreciate his concern for my sexual well-being, but that I’m diving tomorrow. And yes – that statement was completely devoid of logic on many levels. But he was drunk and I could basically say anything I wanted to. When we got back to the jetty and the boat, we found that it was low tide and we’d have to climb down to sea level and take a little canoe over to our bigger canoe. On the way down, I lost my footing and slid down 20 concrete steps on my ass, resulting in a bruised back side and pretty-well scraped up ankle. Boat captain dude felt horrible and kept trying to wipe the blood and wound with his dirty hand, while I kept shooing him away to leave it alone – the blood would keep it cleaner than his dirty hand. Amidst the hubbub, I lost my knockoff Oakleys – my superfly pair of sunglasses that I had tied my future coolness to. Superfly, wherefore art thou, superfly? Alas, I am destined to an existence of sub-coolness, mired in the silly dorkiness that you all love me for. After a chicken curry dinner at the hotel, I head out to the beach at night. The weather has cooled and the scenery is the epitome of perfect. The beach is mostly empty. The moon is out. There are a few clusters of clouds in the sky, but plenty of stars leaking through. And I’ve stolen a plastic lounge chair to lie back and soak it all in whilst listening to my odd mixture of oldies and has-beens on my ipod nano. This is just a perfect evening. I did try taking pictures, but I think I need a better camera – it was too dark and nothing would come out. So for all of you out there who enjoy these notes year after year, how about some payback and get me a new camera? J Troy was really worried that I didn’t have any fun all day – I spent a fair amount of time in quiet, but that’s just how I am. On the contrary, I thought today was great. I love completely random days. For as anal as I can get when I’m at work or at school, I love being the exact opposite in my personal life and on vacation – c’est la vie, que sera sera. If you plan all the details out, you’ll get so wrapped up in it that you miss the beautiful parts and you either won’t see or won’t be able to take advantage of opportunities that come up along the way. Of course, it also helps to travel during off-peak periods to permit this travel style. Friday, June 1, 2007 After some pancakes and juice at the hotel for breakfast, I headed to the beach to start my full day of scuba diving. One of the hotel employees had walked with me on the beach to compare prices on the first evening I was here, and I ended up just going with the dive shop that the hotel has a loose affiliation with called Dive Gurus – the price was about the same as any other shop and they were in low season and I’d be the only diver and they’d go wherever for however long I wanted, without charging me an additional “solo diver” fee. Last night, I had swung by and discussed with my divemaster Edwin what dives we would do the next day. After about 2 seconds, I realized the fatal mistake I had made in delaying diving by a day – all divers know that you’re not supposed to fly for 24 hours after your last dive. This would severely limit the number of dives that I could make. So we decided to try to get 3 real dives in on Friday morning and afternoon (pushing the 24 hour time limit slightly) and a shallow night dive in that evening. That’s not too shabby. I did, of course, take advantage of the opportunity to tell Troy that I had to cut my diving back sharply (which was the sole reason for my trip here) so that I could go with him to not catch any fish and to not go and see a waterfall. Everybody say “Thanks Troy”. Since I haven’t gone diving in 5 years, I took a quick refresher training just to make sure that I knew how to not die under water. As I expected, it all came back very quickly, so I ended being an apt pupil. Heck – Edwin and I both had a problem coming out with the same answer on the answer key on a few questions that use a table to figure out the residual nitrogen in your body – everyone uses computers nowadays so the tables are outdated. This dive shop actually gave me a computer to use for all of my dives, and you divers out there know that this is not typical at all. At 10:30am, Edwin and I joined another divemaster Jung Eon with her student Gaylord (who was taking classes for advanced certification). We took a bangca boat to a dive spot called Angol Point. Edwin and I were in the water for 52 minutes and got down to 17.1 meters. The water was quite clear (~20 m visibility?) and very warm at 30C. Even so, I opted to wear a wetsuit to protect me against scraping up against any coral. Any diver knows that an inadvertent scrape against some fire coral will remind you of your mistake for many moons. We saw lots of pretty fishees and stuff. Actually, for all three of daytime dives, we saw lots of pretty fishees. Describing fishees is not all that easy, but here goes the list of what we saw on this dive: a blue ribbon eel, black frog fish, porcupine fish, nudibranches (sea slugs), and a bunch of standard tropical fish. The porcupine fish reminded me of a pufferfish – I’m not sure if I’ve actually seen a pufferfish before or not, but my memory flashes back to an episode of the Simpsons where Homer adamantly demands a pufferfish meal, even though most of the fish is deadly to consume other than one small sliver in the middle; and the cook is freaking out pleading to not have to try and get that small sliver. I did quite well during this dive – I was impressed that I was able to control my buoyancy and not have to constantly inflate and deflate my BCD to keep from floating away or sinking (for those of you not in the know, this is a very common problem for beginners). As a result, I was able to hover in any physical orientation I needed to in order to get a view. In fact, later on in the day, I took advantage of my perfect buoyancy and started doing somersaults and cartwheels and backflips – I, of course, tried to do this when Edwin wasn’t looking, lest he realize that I’m a freak. We returned to the dive shop for a lunch break, and I went down the beach to Mario’s and had a pizza and a mango shake. The shake was huge and was unbelievably delicious. It was by far the best thing I’d had since I had arrived to the Philippines. Super yum. The pizza wasn’t too shabby either, and it was actually kinda comforting to have some Westernized food for a change. We did the second and third dives back-to-back with a 45 minute rest on the boat. Edwin asked me if we could do this instead of returning to shore, and my only concern was whether or not I’d have to use the restroom in between. Fortunately, I didn’t have to. By the way, when wearing a wetsuit, you are not able to freely contribute to the ocean as you might be able to when merely wearing a swimsuit (stop pretending you’re grossed out – you’ve done it before). Wetsuits are not easily water-penetrable. Dive 2 was at a dive spot called Balinghai, which is basically just a large coral shelf. The water was still crazy warm, and we dove for 45 minutes with a maximum depth of 21.6 meters. At the beginning of this dive, I started getting a little panicky – remember how I mentioned that I am mildly claustrophobic earlier? Well, try putting a constrictive wetsuit on with flippers and a BCD and oh yeah – you can only breath through this mouthpiece. That can trigger a little bit of a panic attack, which increases oxygen consumption pretty dramatically. I think I would probably do much better without the wetsuit. I took Edwin finding some interesting fishees to snap me out of my minor panic attack and relax me enough to enjoy – I’m sure he didn’t even realize that he helped me by doing that. Over the entire dive, we saw lots of neat stuff: 2 blue spotted stingrays, lionfish, yellow goatfish, bigeye fish (named so because they have very very large eyeballs), a moray eel, long nose emperor fish, blue fin trevally, and lots of standard tropical fishees. Lionfish are really really cool looking – so go and google it so that you can see. Go on, I’ll wait. By the way, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, I keep referring to standard tropical fishees. I don’t really know how to describe them better – think of little fishees in all sorts of colors, some yellow, some red, some orange, some rainbow, some blue, some Nemo fish (yes I know they’re called clownfish), and so on. On this dive, these standard tropical fishees hovered all over us and we got to play with them. If you were still enough, some of the fish would venture right up to your facemask for an up close and personal view. ‘Twas very cool. The third dive was at Friday’s Rock, so named because it’s straight out from Friday’s beach resort. At this dive, a speedboat from a larger dive shop called Calypso Divers with 8-9 divers and only one divemaster came by and went in a few minutes before we did. They weren’t the agilest of divers, so we tried to keep our distance from them. However, Friday’s Rock wasn’t the biggest rock in the world, so we kept running into them. As you can tell, I like not diving with a whole lot of people much better. It lets you focus on the fishees. On this dive, we saw 3 small bamboo sharks underneath a rocky outcrop, big red reef snapper, mantis shrimp underneath a rocky shoal, a school of large golden trevally, a school of large barcheek trevally, 2 lionfish, and lots of standard tropical fishees. The key thing that I remember from this dive was the very large schools of fish that kept swimming by – where were these fish yesterday when we were trying to go fishing? Overall, Edwin told me that I was diving extremely well and that I should have done the advanced diver course so that I can go deeper and see more things. I think he was comparing me to Gaylord, who was having some minor issues with buoyancy and equalization, and just thought that I would have had a much easier time getting my advanced certification. I suppose I should probably do that next time. Maybe one of these days, I’ll actually take a vacation where the focus of a good bunch of the trip is to go diving. For that, I’ll need to have someone with me who wants to go diving. So, all you’uns out there, let me know if you’re interested. We had a few hours before we had to go out for our evening dive, so I went back to the hotel and showered because I felt disgusting from all of the salt water. The shower was so refreshing that I was extremely tempted to cancel my night dive. In retrospect, I probably should have done just that. At about 6:30pm, the sun had set, and Edwin and I loaded put on our gear in the dive shop and walked into the ocean from the beach and swam out a few hundred feet. The deepest we got on this dive was about 3 meters and we stayed down for about 35 minutes. Because we were so shallow, I was having a terribly hard time establishing buoyancy, especially with the waves whipping me up every once in a while. Because I couldn’t get my buoyancy right, I kept inadvertently whipping up sand and mucking up the already-shoddy visibility. We still saw a few interesting creatures – Edwin found an octopus that was trying to avoid us and kept playing with it, then he started bothering a squid, which sprayed some red ink and swam away. There was also a wasp fish, a big hermit crab with conch shell, and a Spanish dancer. This was all neat and such, but because of my aforementioned diving issues, I signaled to Edwin to call it quits and we swam back ashore. I just wasn’t having any fun and being out there was more of a chore than a joy. After paying up, I headed up the beach to find some sushi. It had been 3 weeks since I had some good sushi, and I figured that being in the ocean, we’d probably get some good sushi here. Well, it wasn’t all that great unfortunately. But at least it was cheap. That’s really no consolation though. Saturday, June 2, 2007 I slept in this morning – I honestly don’t remember the last time I was able to do that actually. It felt good. The weather today was hot in the sun, but nice and cool in the shade. I don’t like weather like that because you’re either sweaty or chilly, and that’s just plain weird. I took a stroll up the beach – my only objective for this morning was to get some cash. My destination? A place called D Mall, which is a collection of stores like an actual mall. I don’t know if there’s an A Mall, B Mall, and C Mall. I hope there are though, otherwise it would be tricky to explain why there’s a D Mall. By the way, I must say that the mango shakes on this island are really something else. I spent more on my mango shake than on my pancakes, but it was still just a $5 breakfast. But the mago shake was huuuuuuuuuuuge. And it was oh so good. Come to think of it, you would also probably spend more on a mango shake in the States than you would on a couple of pancakes. So maybe this isn’t as strange as the initial glance. At around noon, I began the journey back to Manila. First was taking the trike back to the jetty, then a boat over to Caticlan, and then to the airport for the flight back to Manila. This plane was the precise opposite experience as the previous Asian Spirit flight. This was a turboprop plane that was fully booked and reeked of mildew from a damp interior. The A/C didn’t work too well, so it was extremely stuffy inside and when we were airborne, the A/C kicked in and quickly began to drip on me from all the condensation. The saving grace was the wannabe Capri-Sun. I even got two of them because my neighbor didn’t want his. Yay. My hotel was in Makati City, one of the safer sections of Manila that is a big commercial center for the city. I think P&G may have their Philippine headquarters there or something and they had some unbelievable rates with some top-notch hotels. So I went out of my travel norms and stayed at the New World Renaissance Hotel for what’s got to be less than 50% of normal price. Security at the hotel was nuts. Before they let the taxi in, there were armed guards who looked into the vehicle and had mirrors on poles to look underneath the vehicle. I asked the guards later on if they had ever found anything, but they just smiled and responded to an entirely different question – I don’t think their English was very good. And I figured that since they had guns, I wasn’t going to probe any further, so I said thank you and smiled back. Before I could even walk into the hotel lobby, I had to walk through a metal detector, my entire luggage had to go through the standard airport security luggage car wash (also known as an X-ray machine), and there was even a K-9 unit on hand to sniff out for drugs. After relaxing for an hour or so, I decided to venture out for some food. The area had a lot of very Westernized shopping malls. Prices were pretty solid, and if I wasn’t completely shopped out from China, it probably would have been a good idea to spend a few hours browsing. Come to think of it, I’m never really in the mood to shop. So I continued on to find some food. I passed by a nice looking place that had a nice picture of a steak on the little menu board thingamabob, and boy that looked enticing. So I went into the W Grill, which was modeled after a Texas roadhouse – it had a mechanical bull inside, and all the menus had country or ranch type themes. The beer came in a few sizes: Bottle, Big Ass, and Pitcher. I definitely didn’t want a pitcher, so I ordered the big ass. When I got the beer, the plastic cup was a mold of a guy from waist down with his pants pulled down in the back exposing his very rotund backside. I kid you not. I ordered a porterhouse steak, medium rare. I didn’t really get a porterhouse steak. I don’t know what it was, but it was very thin and very tough. That probably serves me right though – when traveling to the Philippines, it’s probably not the best idea to order a steak if they’re not well-known for good steaks. So I left a wee bit on the disappointed side. But the beer glass made it all worth it, without a doubt. I had a few chores to do before I called it a night. First was to find the Hard Rock Café, so that I could get a Manila shot glass for my friend Rajesh, who collects them. I think he’s got to have at least 50-60 by now. Heck I have four sitting on my shelf here that I still need to give to him. Next stop was for my friend Julia to Max Brenner’s, a chocolate-themed restaurant with a slogan of “Chocolate by the Bald Man”. I had a Venezuelan hot chocolate and a piece of cake for dessert. The hot chocolate was very tasty. The cake was not the greatest. I actually wanted the chocolate soufflé, but that would have required a 30 minute wait. And I’m not really a waiter, I’m an engineer. Sunday, June 3, 2007 Today was a long long travel day. I got up at 5:00 am to leave by 5:45 am to get to the airport by 6:15 am to get on my 7:30 am flight to Beijing. I asked the hotel to get me a taxi, so they booked an airport transfer. When I was checking out, I found out that the airport transfer runs 2100 pesos (~$45), whereas a metered taxi would run about 100 pesos (~$2). Granted, the metered taxis were absolute crap-mobiles that probably wouldn’t pass any Western car inspection, but that’s just a huge differential. So I asked for my metered taxi instead. The taxi driver kept refusing to turn his meter on and was trying to charge me 300 pesos for the trip. I told him that I’d pay 150 pesos max, or to take me back to the hotel. He muttered something in Tagalog and proceeded. After a relatively uneventful flight from Manila to Beijing, we landed and I had to retrieve all of my bags, go through Chinese customs, and then check back in at Continental. I was a full 3 hours early for check-in, yet there was still a line at the Continental booth that was about 45 minutes long. Apparently, Chinese labor is too expensive for the idiot Continental tightwads, so they installed 3 kiosks that they expect everyone to use to check in. Nutty. In the waiting area about 15 minutes before boarding, Liang and his girlfriend/fiancée/wife Chenlu arrive and we start swapping stories about our last week. Originally, we had booked our flights online and selected seats so as to be able to sit next to each other on the plane ride back. However, somehow Liang and Chenlu were moved. We asked the fellow next to them if I could swap with him, but he was for some reason being really paranoid about being separated from his carry-on. Not very friendly, methinks. We were stuck on the runway at Beijing for 2 hours before they let us take off, presumably due to weather and traffic. The pilot was unbelievably candid about this, and it was clear that he was irritated with the tower because they wouldn’t give him an estimate on when we’d be able to take off. And he kept mentioning every 5 minutes that flight time was 12 hours and 25 minutes, and that he’d try to make up time in the air for those with connecting flights out of Newark. Once we finally land in Newark, we’re stuck waiting for another 30 minutes while another plane moves from our gate. Again, the pilot was not very happy and shared his frustration with us. After going through customs and then an additional agricultural screening, we took a cab back to Liang’s place and he dropped me off at about 9pm. In total, that means that I was in transit for about 27 straight hours. Fun fun. Okay – that’s it for this trip. I hope you’ve enjoyed following along. My next trip? I don’t know. Since my school is virtually up, I have a lot more leeway in specific timing, but I think I have a week or two that I might be able to take this fall. Last year, I had mentioned that I was planning to go to Kilimanjaro this fall – since this time, my brother-in-law Chris told me that if I waited a year, he’d join me. So, I’m postponing that plan for a little bit (will that still work for you, Hemangi?) and I’ll have to pick somewhere else this fall. If anyone is up for some nice hiking and camping, I’d be more than up for that. Chile anyone? Heck – I’d even go back to Peru again if someone’s interested. Toodles! Tidbits: 1. Philippine Airlines accommodates for Asian-sized passengers by providing a step at each row of seats to help people reach their luggage. 2. Why is it that the country is the Philippines, but the people are Filipino? Can we please standardize the spelling of the “ffff” sound in this nation? 3. Around the Philippines, a common mode of transport is by what they call a jeepney – it’s basically a scrappy old Jeep Wrangler front end with two long bench seats running on either of the extended cab in the back. It probably seats about 12-16 people. Beyond this, most of the jeepneys are lavishly and cheesily lined with shiny metal, and painted with caricatures and random phrases or whatever. It’s the poor man’s version of a pimped out ride. About the only way to make it better would be to give it a Dukes of Hazzard horn. 4. A lot of places in Asia charge extra if you use American credit cards. The upcharge is sometimes more than the 5% that you’d normally expect. Because I was paying in Philippine pesos, the hotel bill came down by about 8%. Moral of the story – always pull out money from the ATM, which has no fees. 5. About 10% of the Filipino workforce works abroad and sends money home. In fact, money coming in comprises of a significant portion of national wealth. Working abroad is so pervasive that overseas workers even have their own line in customs at the airport.

Paraag 2: Even More Cultural Learnings from China for Make Benefit Glorious Village of Hoboken

2007-06-01T18:13:00.000-04:00

Folks – so sorry for the delay. But I’ve been living it up here in Asia. But I’ll not bore you any longer with superfluous prologue. To the journal! Sunday, May 20, 2007 We woke up this morning to the fresh smog of Xi’an permeating everything. Deborah fell a bit ill over the night and opted to catch a few more hours of sleep, so Liang and I headed out for a local breakfast and then walked around the Drum Tower and Bell Tower. We learned that the Bell Tower is sounded every morning, and signifies that the city gates would be opened. In the evening, the Drum Tower is drummed and the city gates are closed until the following morning. So we watched the 9am morning ceremony, whereby a group of 10-15 traditionally dressed Chinese bellsounder-types paraded around the circumference of the Bell Tower until coming to the bell to sound it. That’s really about it. Traffic continued around the Bell Tower as if nothing special were happening, so I suppose it’s just a show for us tourists. From there, Liang and I went to visit the Muslim temple. The streets leading to the entrance of the temple were these small alleyways festooned with shopping booths with owners calling out to us to buy this piece of crap or that piece of crap as we walked by. It felt like that one scene in Jesus Christ Superstar where Jesus gets upset that there are a bunch of shops at the temple – “…but you have made iiiiiiiiiit a den of thieves. Get ouuuuuuuut, get out.” Thank you, thank you very much. Next show in a half an hour. At 10am, we went back to the hotel to get Deborah and check out of the hotel. Liang’s uncle’s cousin’s brother’s ex-roommate’s grandmother’s postman’s teacher’s cousin-in-law was the hotel manager of the place we were staying at, and offered to have his personal driver take us around today and then drop us off at the airport in the evening. We also had no clue what to expect as far as cost for the hotel room, but it appears as though we got something close to a 70% discount from the normal room rate. Folks – we were experiencing the magic of guanxi before our very eyes (re-read last week’s if you don’t remember what guanxi is). See? It’s always handy to have your own private Chinese friend-turned-tour guide handy. Everyone say “Thanks, Liang.” No really, say it. Out loud. The first stop this morning was at the City Walls, where we spent a few hours in the scorching heat riding rented bikes atop the Walls around the periphery of the old city. It was mighty exhilarating to get some fresh smog in the lungs. Ahhhhhhhhhh… But, what I don’t understand is that if the Chinese people were going to go through the trouble of building such a massive wall to keep intruders out, why wouldn’t they go one step further and build some shade? I don’t understand these people. For all the pollution in Xi’an, the government has made some effort towards energy use reduction. For example, most of the buildings in the area had thermal water heaters on the rooftops – apparently, these things will heat the water to 90C during the day. Also, all taxis and buses run on compressed natural gas or something (we learned later in the week that it is a biofuel, made from wastes of some sort). In the taxi ride to the hotel on Friday, After the city walls, we went to a local restaurant to get the best steamed dumplings ever known to mankind. This is where having our own local personal driver came in extremely handy. He knew where all the good places were that the tourists didn’t know about. After lunch, Deborah wanted to see the Muslim temple so we went back to that area. However, we were a bit sidetracked by the shopping. I’m not sure if I mentioned it yet, but in China, almost all shopping is by negotiation. The vendor usually starts with a price that is about 5-10x too high. You counter with an obscenely low number, which they then tell you is way too low and accuse you of stealing from them. Then they ask for your “maximum price” and your “best price” numerous times, even after you’ve theoretically already given this price. Frustration abound for folks not seasoned in this. By the end of the week, what worked best for me was saying a price, maybe coming up a tad, stand there until they come down, begin walking away, which elicits a price lowering, and then repeat as necessary. If they don’t chase you as you leave, that might be a good indication that you are toooo low. Each vendor has an absolute minimum price, and they know exactly what it is. Typically, it matches up precisely with others’ minimum price. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if they are all colluding together to begin with, or even if they all work for the same parent company. So, after much negotiation, Deborah ended up with a red 3 piece Samsonite luggage set and I ended up with a Swiss Army computer bag for about $125 USD. At the time, we were very happy with this purchase. The bags appear to be VERY sturdy with good material, stitching, and zippers. Yes, zippers. A quick indicator of a cheaply made bag is how the zippers look and feel. These were good zippers. Later in the trip, I realized that we probably overpaid a good 30%, but this was our first set of negotiations and I at least felt like we got a decent deal upon leaving the store. Essentially, we had talked them down to about 30% of the original price. Sounds decent. Next was sunglass shopping for me. I figured I’d use my immediate access to a female perspective (Deborah) and a metro perspective (Liang) to find me some fly shades (yes – I said “fly”, this will be repeated so get used to it). Initially, they were both steering me towards these designer-like shades that were completely not me at all – way too fancy and preppy and cool-looking. After trying on about 20 pairs, I found some Oakley-knockoffs that fit my fat head pretty well. Deborah gave the thumbs up, so I bought two pairs in different colors. I figure that once you find something that works, stick with it, right? Deborah liked them so much on me that we kept saying “Super-fly!” whenever I wore them for the remainder of the week. Good times. Yes, I know I stole this phrase from legendary wrestler Jimmy “the Superfly” Snooka, who by the way never really seemed to be all that super-fly. I was really putting the “super” in “Super-fly”! You’d better recognize. Fo-shizzle. The last stop of the day before going back to the airport was to the Forest of Stone Tablets. When I heard about this place, I guess I kind of imagined a big tree-ey forest with some large stone tablets sticking out of the ground from time to time. I was wrong. These stone tablets were from the olden days, and were essentially the grave monuments for old dead Chinese people. Each monument had script manually engraved into it and so basically we got to spend an hour or so walking around looking at this stuff. But when you can’t read Chinese, every tablet looks the same after you’ve seen about five of them. So I figured that maybe I should ask my friendly neighborhood Chinese interpreter to do his job (you know, since I pay Liang good money for this) and start telling me what it all means. Unfortunately, it’s all written in old Chinese (which is kinda like Olde English, without the completely unnecessary ‘e’), so he couldn’t really do much for me. After a couple hour delay and a quick flight back to Beijing, we finally arrived at the hotel. Immediately I felt a difference in air quality (we went from ludicrous-smog down to ridiculous-smog). Also of note, the good people at our Unisplendour hotel finally caught on and activated the second elevator – we had a huge improvement in elevator wait times from this point forward. Monday, May 21, 2007 Last night, I think I had the perfect sleep. I took ½ a sleeping pill. So, to recap on my sleeping pill experimentation, it goes like this: ½ sleeping pill = good; 2 sleeping pills = very, very bad (with Seinfeldesque finger wag). This morning, we had a class on something or other. I don’t actually know what the title was, but it was by a Chinese guy who used to work in the US and now works in China, who similar to previous presenters refused to follow his own slides. He was sharing with us his experiences between the two work cultures, and he was fairly direct from his observations. While I’m always more than happy that someone shares with us the truth (regardless of whether or not we can handle the truth), this fellow could have afforded a little bit of discretion on how to share certain things. I am by no means Super-PC Boy (geek squad computer repairman by day, and enforcer of political correctness by night in bright red tights, furry unibrow, and Rollie Fingers mustache). But this fellow could clearly use some help on how to get his point across. He was basically telling us that business gets done by old Chinese men at the spa where they engage with prostitutes. When someone asked about women, the presenter said that women will join for dinner but basically don’t go to the spa with the men. Liang was not happy about this, since he made it sound as though ALL business is done this way in China. I’m sure it happens in the US as well, and I’m sure the frequency is probably higher in China, but certainly not all business is done this way. I was bored and tired of listening to this guy, so I played hangman with my neighbor. Good use of tuition funds indeed. In the afternoon, we went to another corporate visit at CNC, which is a Chinese telecom that is one of the primary sponsors for the Olympics. We were entertained by two young fellows with extremely broken English (I don’t remember their names, so I’ll call them Darryl and Darryl), who basically read from a script and acted out scenes to demonstrate how communications will be revolutionized at the Olympics for visitors and support personnel. Riveting stuff. On the bus, our trip admin quickly acknowledged that all of the corporate tours were nowhere close to what they were expecting either, and asked that we write our frustrations out on the feedback form. On the way back to the hotel, the bus stopped on the side of the road at the Olympic Stadium, called the Bird’s Nest because it resembles a bird’s nest (duh). It was a comical scene to see 60 random people wandering around the side of a road taking pictures. Some of the local construction workers were so surprised that they started snapping pictures of us with their cell phone cameras. A number of us hailed cabs from the side of the road and went down to the Silk Market, which is a multi-level mall filled to the brim with these shopping kiosks pawning fake goods. Think Chinatown on steroids. I ran into a group of my classmates who were going back and forth between two tailors attempting to get the rock bottom lowest prices, and using quantity as a leveraging tool. Eventually, we got one shop to come down to 80 yuan (about $10) for a button-down shirt and 300 yuan (about $40) for pants. With some help from Ken, I picked out fabrics, got measured, and paid a deposit on 4 shirts and 2 pants. When we were done, there were nine of us about to hail taxis, when a lady runs up to Ken and starts negotiating for a single flat rate to take us all back to the hotel in a van. We finally get a rate we like and hop in the van. Suddenly, out of nowhere, she pulls out a bag of Polo shirts and Beijing 2008 T-shirts to try and sell us. I ended up getting 2 Polos for 30 Yuan each ($4). Ken bought her entire stash of 12 T-shirts for 200 Yuan – not because he needed the T-shirts, but more because he wanted to see how low he could get her to sell them for. After we unloaded at the hotel, we headed over to a local bar for a happy hour with MBA an IMBA students from Tsinghua. The nice thing was that our tour admins were handing out free drink tickets. They didn’t have any wine, so I was sticking to my Jack and Ginger. After an hour or two, one of our classmates walks in with about 15 kids from Swannee State in eastern Tennessee – he bumped into them at McDonalds and convinced them to join us. I was happy – these were seemingly my people. So I tried talking to one of them and explained that I was from nearby Eastern Kentucky. She wasn’t amused. Then I realized that here’s this 18 year old who is traveling in China with 20 of her closest drunk friends and is being talked to by a random brown guy who must be twice her age. Sure, I would have appreciated some discussion of the coincidence, but I decided to let it slide. At some point in the evening, one of the guys gets us to pitch in for a bottle of Absinthe – this stuff is apparently illegal in the states. I’m not sure why, but I can say that I blame them. It tasted like Yaeger, only more Yaegerish. The music at the club was real old school stuff, so I was pretty happy. Somewhere along the line, the Absinthe kicked in and I started seeing the little fluorescent green fairies. And miraculously, thanks to Nate, I made it home in one piece somewhere around 2am. Thanks Nate. Tuesday, May 22, 2007 Somehow I managed to get up early today and thought about going for a run, but it was very rainy. It’s probably for the best that I couldn’t go, even though I had very recently sworn off alcohol. Two full bottles of water were consumed in rapid fashion. Today, we didn’t have classes. Instead we were taking a trip to the overhyped Ba-Da-Ling section of the Great Wall. With the rainy weather, we knew that we had clearly lost to the gods of chance. The first stop on the way was to the Ming Tombs. As we neared the tombs, we got stuck in a pretty heavy amount of traffic. Owing to the two bottles of aforementioned water, I really really had to go. So our bus admin Gabriela discreetly mentioned it to tour guide Tony, who then exclaimed “W.C.?” and told me to go on the side of the road. I opted not to and instead Tony dwarfed me as he escorted me under his umbrella to a side street. One of the folks there told Tony that I could use the side of his building. Very kind indeed. You know, when you really gotta go – the relief from actually getting to go has got to be one of the greatest sensations ever. Try it sometime. I think you’ll be forced to agree. After my escapade, we finally made it to the Ming Tombs, which is where a bunch of people from the Ming Dynasty were entombed. I’m completely guessing here, since I couldn’t hear anything during the underground tour. The vast spaces seemed to make it very difficult for a voice to carry at all. Basically, this section of the tour was quite useless. The great thing about it is that each of us had shelled out an additional 200 Yuan so that the whole group could go. About the only good thing that came out of going to the Ming Tombs is that the bathroom arrived sooner than it would have otherwise. Lunch was at a roadside place catering to tourists that, surprise surprise, had ample floor space dedicated to selling us stuff that we didn’t need. So I escaped directly to the tour bus after lunch and took a nap. In a few hours, we finally made it to the Great Wall. Since the weather had turned sour on us, a very large subsection of the group was looking for warmth. Warmth reared its ugly head in the form of “I Climbed the Great Wall” sweatshirts, which a number of classmates bought for between 115 and 25 Yuan, depending on bargaining skill. Undoubtedly, the Chinese folk among the group scored the cheapest prices. The wall itself was quite magnificent – as far as we could tell at least. The weather was so bad that we could barely see 50 feet in front of us, so we weren’t able to see the Wall as a huge never-ending structure as the guidebooks made it out to be. We were forced to use our imagination instead and recreate the postcard pictures in our head from the cloudy grayness surrounding us. The Wall itself is actually not the original wall – it’s a restoration of what used to be there, so there is definitely a bit of a lack of authenticity. However, they did keep some of the unnecessarily steep climbs and the abnormal step sizes for added effect. There’s got to be a ridiculous number of poor souls each year who tumble to their doom trying to get back down. In the end, the Great Wall was unable to live up to its stated amazingness. Instead, this was perhaps the Merely Acceptable Wall or the Bologna Sandwich Wall ($10 fake bucks to first person who correctly identifies that reference). I think I’ll need to make another trip back to China if only to go far away from the crowds and see the real Great Wall. In fact, Quoc did this exact thing on this very day – he skipped our tour and took a bus several hours away, then a 70 km taxi ride and a 2 km hike to get to a deserted section of the wall. Had I known that he was planning to do this, I would have certainly joined him. Wednesday, May 23, 2007 I don’t know what the class this morning was specifically on – it was kind of devoid of learning. I actually missed the first half of it owing to a bit of stomach queasiness. But I heard that a battle had ensued during the missed portion between a few of the students and the teacher. This afternoon’s class was much better – it was given by a fellow who is the China Representative for The Economist. To me, at least, this title gave him instant credibility, and he lived up to my lofty expectations. I don’t really remember what he talked about but what I do know is that is was extremely interesting. I would look up my notes for a refresher, but that would mean that I need to continue typing, and I want to finish up this update and send it out. After all, I’m on frickin’ vacation. At 5pm, we hopped on the bus to go to an acrobat show that was at 7:30pm. We ended up getting there a full hour or so early, but tour guide Tony had told us that “we will surely suffer” if we leave after 5pm because of the bad traffic. This use of unnecessarily dramatic verbage resulted in countless jokes and laughs from the rest of us. The acrobat show was downright awesome. Think Cirque du Soleil without all the crazy music and lighting effects. And with all Chinese people. We saw crazy Chinese leapers leap through rings. We saw two sets of two people in Chinese dragon gear balance opposite each other on a huge bouncy ball and roll it up and down a seesaw – no one was directly on top of the ball, both dragons were to the side, offsetting the weight of the other to manipulate the turning of the ball. We saw a crazy contortionist lady balance something like 18 little ornamental trees on her body (feet, knees, hands, elbows, face, neck, etc.) while twisting and turning around. We saw 15 Chinese ladies ride a single bike around the stage in extended-cheerleader-pyramid formation. We saw these crazy strong dudes go up and down a staircase while doing a one-hand handstand. It was bongos. Since I had partied hardy the first week, I figured that I’d give my tired old body a break the rest of this week and not go and be social all night long with my other classmates. So I headed home after the acrobat show. Back on the first day we arrived, Liang and I had gone shopping for some necessities at a local department store. Among those necessities? Beer. I couldn’t resist. They were selling a 40 oz. of Chinese beer for about 60 cents. And how could you turn down the prospect of drinking a 40 in China? Well, both of those bottles had remained in our fridge. Until tonight – I drank one. Thursday, May 24, 2007 I got up this morning to go for a run. That makes three bouts of real exercise in two weeks. It only goes downhill from here, unfortunately. The class this morning was on the financial systems in China, and was taught by the professor who served as the overall coordinator for this DBI course. A couple of interesting points that he shared are: 1) corporate debt is not widely used in China because it requires special approval and the money is restricted in use; as a result, corporate debt levels in China are ~8% while they are ~35% in the US; 2) the Chinese SEC (CSRC) was set up as a response to the “8.10 Incident”, which occurred on October 10, 1992, when a very desired stock was about to be offered up as an IPO – buyers waited in line for more than 3 days only to be told on the morning of the sale that the bank had already allocated all of shares (mostly to themselves); the result was rioting in the streets; 3) the Chinese stock market is split into A shares and B shares; A shares are in Chinese denomination and are only available to Chinese investors; B shares are denominated in USD and are only available to foreign investors; the result is that the two shares are completely identical but the share prices are completely independent because they trade in separate markets (no arbitrage is possible); 4) because Chinese people have a very high savings rate and they don’t have too many options in which to invest their money, the A-share stock market is very over-inflated and appears to be a bubble that is about to burst – most investors are very short-term looking to make a quick buck, as a result, annual share turnover is 500% (each share is sold on average 5 times per year), whereas the US average is about 100%. The class this afternoon was focused on overall economic mega-trends and China’s place in the global economy. It was taught by Professor David Li, who had some extremely interesting conclusions. He was probably one of our best professors during the course, and immediately engaged us – this explains why almost everyone in the class sat still while he went nearly an hour over his time limit. The professor explained that his family was “educated by peasants” during the Cultural Revolution when Mao Zedong sent everyone in the cities back to the farms, then he was in the first class at Tsinghua when the Reform Era began and the schools started back up, and then he went to the US to get his Ph.D. and worked in the States and internationally for a number of years before returning to Tsinghua as a professor. It was just really cool to hear first hand how someone’s life was dramatically shaped by the history of the country. You know, if any of us had gone through something similar, we would have told the story extremely differently with some clear resentment and bitterness – but this man talked about it openly with grace and with a smile, and described his experience with gratitude for having the opportunities that he had. Now I can see why he has the outlook that he does – he’s an optimist and he knows that others around him didn’t have the opportunities that he did. Even so, I couldn’t help but have an absolute tremendous amount of respect for him. Back to the class, a couple of noteworthy points: 1) China’s share of world GDP was 20-30% in the 1700s and 1800s and dipped to 5% during the Cultural Revolution and is now in the high teens and on an upward trend – so there’s nothing to fear about the economic growth in China, instead think about it as China returning to its rightful place in the world economy; 2) compared to the volatility of the economic boom of the US during the Industrial Revolution (late 1800s, early 1900s) and in Japan during the same period, China’s economic boom has been extremely steady – the professor attributes this to an actively managed monetary/fiscal policy in China today; 3) the Chinese government’s debt is expected to get to about 120% of their GDP in 10 years (US debt ~60% US GDP), this is not of major concern because the Chinese government still owns 60%+ of many strategic companies, which is valued at between 125-150% of Chinese GDP; 4) the regional disparity in income levels is about 2x in the US and between 4-6x in China because of incomplete market reform in China – only certain areas have been permitted to participate in capital investment and many people in China are required to live in the region they grew up (their huko). Okay – everyone except the business school graduates are probably bored out of their mind right now, so I’ll move on. We went back to the Silk Market this afternoon to pick up our tailored clothes. I had left one of my favorite shirts behind for them to copy the collar and cuffs from – unfortunately, they did a complete copy of this shirt instead. While this was still okay for me, I still don’t understand why they took measurements. The pants puzzled me even more – the waist was about 2 inches too wide and the length was about a ½ inch too long. Okay – the length I can understand, but the waist? I also took this opportunity to buy some other staples. Earlier in the day, I had dropped off some laundry at the hotel to get cleaned. When I took a look at the price list, I drastically reduced my laundry load. It seemed to me that I could probably buy new clothes at the Silk Market for a little more than what it would cost to wash them. My suspicions were confirmed: Price to wash 11 pair underwear + 11 pair socks = 132 Price for new 11 pair underwear + 11 pair socks = 150 I continued my shopping spree by buying 6 white shirts and a pink Polo. I had tried to buy a pink Polo from the van lady on Tuesday, but Andrew grabbed it before I could. Normally, I’m not the type to buy pink, but every female in the van thought that the color looked good with my skin tone. So dammit, stop calling me a pansy. This evening, I stayed in again because I needed to work on our final presentation for the class. More on this in tomorrow’s blurb. Oh yeah, remember the 40 oz. story from the night before? Well, I drank the other one. So fret not, fair maiden – no beer was wasted in the writing of this story. Friday, May 25, 2007 Today was all class presentations. Each group of 4 had to give a presentation on a company that should enter China, and discuss how it should do so – preferably using the material that we had learned earlier in the course. Our group chose Dunkin Donuts, mostly because we couldn’t understand how Starbucks could possibly be so successful charging their outlandish rates. Essentially, it seems that most US fast food companies have come into the country charging the same price as they do back at home. I understand that they can certainly charge a premium, but Starbucks’ price is already outlandish in the US, let alone after conversion into Chinese yuan. The presentation went very very well. I had a few people come up and tell me later on that ours was the best prepared. However, since the class is Pass/Fail, this basically confirmed my earlier suspicion that we should have cut the time spent on creating the presentation in half, and go bowling Thursday night with the rest of the folks instead. Believe it or not, I was actually the one in our group advocating for having fun instead of working on the presentation – I don’t think I learned anything by creating the presentation, it’s all stuff we’ve done before in other classes. And even so, we were so pressed for time that we had to skip about half of what we had prepared during the actual presentation so much of it was for naught. After lunch, I headed back to the Silk Market to pick up my re-tailored pants. While I was there, I went ahead and picked up a large Tumi suitcase for 300 yuan, a nailclipper set for 35 yuan, and some iPod headphones for 30 yuan. I probably could have gotten all of those for even cheaper, but I didn’t want to go through the hassle of the additional bargaining. It just wasn’t worth the price difference anymore. We had our Farewell Dinner this evening at the Beijing version of Tavern on the Green. The meal was extraordinary and each plate was decorated for added effect. We even had an appetizer of rose petals – it was pretty good. After the dinner, most people were headed to an expat bar or to a suite in a fancy hotel that one of the other students had booked for the evening. A few of us wanted to actually experience a piece of Beijing in our last evening there together. So, Chris, Chris, Quoc and I hopped in a taxi and headed a little Korea area about 15 minutes from our hotel. Our plan was to barhop and see where the evening took us. The first bar was a Korean place where we paid 10 yuan for a 40 oz of Yinjang. That’s dirt cheap. The second bar was not really a bar at all – it was a group of plastic tables and chairs on the sidewalk that was getting service from some street stalls. The area was packed, so Quoc befriended another group of tourists so that we could crash their table. We met these four people from Africa (one from each Central African Republic, Kenya, the Gabon, and Seychelles) – they were in Beijing attending a seminar on forestry at the Beijing Forestry University. Actual quote from Quoc or one of the Chris’ – “I have no idea if I’ll ever be in the Central African Republic, but if I ever do, I’m glad I know this dude”. Here, we got 8 fairly large mugs of beer for 32 yuan ($4). On the street, we ran into some random people that we had met at the Tsinghua happy hour on Monday night. Charles (an Tsinghua IMBA student from Montreal) sent us a few blocks away to Peppers, where we each had Tsingtao beer and a Patron tequila shot. The bartender there wasn’t paying any attention to us at all, even though we comprised 4 of the total 7 people sitting at the bar, and the bottle of Patron was literally right in front of us on the bar. So every time Quoc turned to his left to talk to me, Chris refilled his shot glass. I think he may have had 3-4 additional shots. Serves Peppers right – that place was expensive. We kept walking down that street from Peppers and onto a street that was all torn up, presumably to be repaved. The street stank like a squatter, so we ducked into a random bar when we saw a foozball table in it. We played a few pretty-evenly matched games of foozball, despite the lack of a second level defender on one of the rods (I don’t know what this is called, but one of the two defenders on the second to last row were missing, giving that team a severe handicap). And, of course, we had another 40 oz of Tsinghua. Chris wanted a massage before he got on the plane tomorrow, so we walked and then taxi’ed over to an area that Charles told us would have a good massage parlour. We couldn’t find anything, so we went into this big glitzy building that said “spa” on it. From first glance, it was clearly pricier than we had planned, but this was no deterrent to complete the night of total randomness. Somehow, we ended up getting stark naked with a bunch of old Chinese men for an unnecessary long time - first was a shower followed by a rest in a hot tub (still naked). Then Quoc spotted another small pool and jumped into it. Turns out, this pool had little fishees in it – once you were in it for a little while, these little fishees would start nibbling on you – a really strange sensation. And since we were still stark naked, all parts of us were being nibble. Someone mentioned that they think the fishees eat the dead skin. I have no idea, but I do know that the water was really gross with fish feces. After 10-15 minutes of feeding the fish, I took another shower. Then we had a guy come up to us barked orders and pointing to a price list. We presumed that this was for the massage, so we pointed to something that looked like a 1 hour massage. After an hour, our massages were done and we met in the lobby to get back home. Quoc didn’t look too good – later he would share with us that the combination of the multiple tequila shots and the relaxation of the massage resulted in him yakking on his poor massage therapist. When we went to pay, we quickly learned that we didn’t have enough cash. We tried charging it, but they didn’t take any American credit cards. So, Chris and Quoc were held hostage while the other Chris and I were escorted to an ATM to pull out more money. The first ATM didn’t work, which scared the living bejeesus out of us. I was worried that they would make us clean up the fish feces to pay off the debt. Instead, Chris and I were led to another ATM, which ended up working. Somewhere around 3am, we stumbled back home. Saturday, May 26, 2007 Getting up was difficult this morning. I’ve had a cough for the past week, and I often can’t fall asleep because I’m coughing too much – somehow, lying horizontally makes me need to cough more frequently. I’m sure there’s a physiological rationale for this, but Princeton Review didn’t cover it in the MCAT class I took a decade ago. After three hours of sleep, I went downstairs to get my free breakfast before they took the food away. Most everyone was leaving today to go home or some other location in Asia. In fact, I was supposed to head to Singapore this morning, but changed my flight to Sunday to see if I could get some additional Beijing sightseeing in – I had been hoping to figure out how to get back to the Great Wall, but that will have to wait until another trip. I sat down with Edouard for breakfast, and he convinced me to join him for a quick jaunt to the Emperor’s Summer Palace. I had been planning on doing this anyway, but had wanted more precious some sleep first. But Edouard was leaving this afternoon and had a sense of urgency. So I showered and changed in 5 minutes and off we went. The first thing that I can tell you about the Summer Palace is that it’s very hot there. Of course, this is probably more a function of the weather than the location, but even so. It’s hot there. Since past a certain point, heat and enjoyment have a negative relationship, I wasn’t enjoying myself very much. Edouard had befriended a English-speaking tour guide who promised to give him as much as he could possibly get in 30 minutes before he had to leave. I, on the other hand, wanted to get my money’s worth, but also wanted to get some shade. So I suppose I should tell you something else about the Summer Palace: it’s very very large. It’s not just a palace, but more like a massive palace grounds, almost the size of a city-state. Interestingly enough, there were a ton of local Chinese people just hanging out playing cards or eating lunch as if this were Central Park. I suppose if I lived in Beijing, I might do the same – the grounds are very beautiful with lots of trees and a man-made mountain that was built from dirt shoveled out for the man-made lake. In two hours of walking around with very little stoppage time, I probably only covered 1/3 of the place. In the blistering heat, it felt like I was walking around for 4 hours. I think I probably went through 4 bottles of water in that time. After a few hours, I caved in and escaped back to my hotel – complete with air conditioning and filtered air. You can tell that the air must be filtered as soon as you walk in. We had learned earlier this week that Beijing is China’s 28th worst polluted city, and it ain’t no Singapore. My guess is that Xi’an is much higher on the list. I still had not figured out my travel plans for my return from Singapore – I had no idea where I was going to go and how I was going to get there. After a few hours on the internet, it felt like every idea I could come up with awash with issues – flights not available, flight times mismatching, not enough layover time, you name it. My mind started drifting towards calling it quits – it was really hot, I was out of sleep, I kept coughing up my right lung from the smog, I didn’t know how or where to pick up airline tickets (not always e-tickets), I could barely communicate with anyone in this country, and on and on and on – I had 150 reasons to just try to find a way home after Singapore instead of venturing anywhere for a few days. I even played through a conversation with my mom in my head, who undoubtedly would commiserate with me and make me feel like less of a schlep for throwing in the towel. My thoughts went to one of my core beliefs: “things always have a way of working out”. Where was this belief now? Just as my faith was shattering, the solution dawned on me like a light from the heavens with the angelic voice background music. My faith was quickly re-established. I was making this whole thing way too complicated. I’ll just rebook my fully refundable fare from Singapore (P&G’s) and book what I need to book and pay the difference. Very simple. Of course now I need to figure out how to make a collect call from China… The only other thing I had to do today was to meet up with Quoc for one last Peking Duck dinner. He was also leaving tomorrow, but had opted to find a new hotel for a single night because he was tired of the same place. So, our plan was to meet at a particular subway stop at 7pm. Since I had never taken the subway alone and I wanted to walk around a bit (and the housekeeper was urging me to leave so that she could clean the room), I left really early and got to the pre-arranged subway stop at about 4:45 pm. On the map, I found the Drum and Bell Towers close by so I figured that I would take in another tourist site if I could. As luck would have it, I got there right as it was closing. So, I just walked around. The major streets in Beijing in this area are pretty far away from each other – in between are just back alleys. I probably spent about 45 minutes walking through back alleys, which was a far cry from the store-lined somewhat-sanitized existence on the sidewalks of the major streets. I’m glad I took this detour. In the last two days, suddenly my trip to China was very different from what it had been. I finally saw some of real life in Beijing, and I remembered why it is that I like traveling in developing countries to begin with – it has a profound ability to put things in perspective. All of a sudden, things that I thought were important weren’t quite that important: which movies and shows I haven’t seen, the discrepancy between my salary and the market salary for equivalent skills in NYC (we don’t get cost-of-living adjustments for being in NYC), trying to figure out how to get my Alfa repaired, wondering if my team is staying focused while I’m away, losing 0.50% interest on my savings account by not switching banks – suddenly, a lot goes into perspective. It’s not that these things should be ignored – it’s just that these things aren’t the crises that we have a tendency to make them into. Perspective is really a wonderful wonderful thing. I saw a little girl in one of the small alleyways skipping rope and a little boy tossing rocks – both of them lit up with a huge smile as I waved and said “Ni-hou” in my best feigned Chinese accent. Some of the adults that I passed by also wore big smiles and were very happy to see a complete stranger this deep in their neighborhood. Other adults passed without even a glance. You know, it’s an amazing thing to see someone who seemingly has nothing, living in the small of a back alley with foul odors about, sharing a latrine with 5000 of their closest neighbors – still somehow this person understands the power of a smile. That’s someone with perspective. At 7pm, I met up with Quoc and his so very cute friend Florence to go to a nearby restaurant. Apparently, I was distracted by Florence’s cuteness and neglected to mention my distaste for cooked fish. This neglection became quite apparent when a huge stir fry pot of little 5” fishees (that would be the complete fishee, not just merely meat of fishee) arrived at the table. Attempting to show some sort of bravery, I offered to share it if the little fishees didn’t taste too fishy, but was told that the fishees were indeed quite fishy. So I stuck with the Peking duck, some tofu, and the yummy the cucumber appetizer. Then I headed back to the hotel to pack up and finally get some sleep. My apologies if I got too sappy a few paragraphs back. Bite me. But no worries – there is one more week to go! So you can look forward to another note in the coming week. Rest assured that I’m actively working on increasing the number of stamps in my passport. Tidbits 1. The Chinese language is really hard for a foreigner to learn. A different intonation of a word will be a different word, so you can’t really attempt to try to communicate out of a guidebook. And the Chinese characters are unlike anything that you are familiar with (unless you’re Chinese, Japanese or Korean). It’s a total feeling of helplessness, especially when you didn’t even bring a guidebook to begin with. My pointer here is that when traveling in China, bring your friendly neighborhood translator (also known as Liang). 2. You know you’re addicted to the internet when you log in to your work e-mail, just because you can. Some would say that it’s that I’m addicted to work – I honestly don’t think this is it. After going 4 years without knowing how to hook up to work from afar (this was on purpose), I finally caved and placed the phone call to IT support to reset my password for my SecureID and have them walk me through VPN (external access). And now I can’t stop checking work e-mail whenever I’m online checking my personal e-mail. I think there’s a reason I don’t normally take my work laptop home or on vacation. 3. Inner Mongolia is a state/province in China that coincidentally borders Mongolia. Outer Mongolia is the actual Mongolia, or as Quoc puts it, the part of Mongolia that China hasn’t gotten off its ass yet to go over and conquer. 4. If you’re interested, Quoc maintains his own blog on the web. His is shorter, but it has pictures. You can read about his off-the beaten-path trip to the Great Wall, and get Friday night’s story again. Or you can be loyal and just read mine. J www.quoctran.us/blog 5. I’ve seen two female taxi drivers in China already. I can’t remember the last time, if ever, that I saw a female taxi driver. Someone told me that Mao had two positive things that he did for the country: 1) women are treated much more as equals than in other Asian countries, and 2) he standardized the Chinese script being used around the country so that different dialects could still communicate. India could have learned from this. 6. Buses and planes are “Asian-sized” here. Even my knees touch the seat in front of me, and you all know how short I am. I’m glad my brother-in-law Chris isn’t here.

Paraag: Cultural Learnings from China for Make Benefit Glorious Village of Hoboken

2007-05-23T18:15:00.000-04:00

Hello everybody! Once again, for your reading pleasure, I have been sentenced to a few weeks out of the country, and will therefore continue my habit of capturing my experiences in poem. In this case, my poetry is in free verse, which interestingly enough resembles a narrative. I am in China for two weeks for a 3 credit course that I am taking at NYU for my MBA degree with 50+ other students from the school. The course is aptly called Doing Business in China. I had actually wanted to take the Doing Business in Outer Mongolia or Doing Business in Liechtenstein, but those booked up too fast. Following the course in China, I’ll be going to Singapore for 4-5 days for work, and then back to China to do some sightseeing, somewhere (I haven’t figured out where yet, but since the country is sooo small, my options will be limited). Sunday, May 13, 2007 After some last minute shenanigans in attempting to get to the airport on time (fortunately all was well and there was much rejoicing), I met up with Liang and checked in at the Continental gate in Newark. Many of you may know Liang – he and I have been friends for 10 years and have canvassed the country together with P&G (Mehoopany, PA to Cape Girardeau, MO to Cincinnati, OH to Avenel, NJ). Liang is also taking classes at NYU for an MBA. Don’t get any funny ideas; he’s engaged. To a female. The Continental flight was really interesting – it was only a 13 hour flight and flew over the North Pole. I believe this is my first flight over the arctic region, though I’m not really sure that it matters. As many of you have experienced, service in coach class on US-based airlines has seriously degraded over the years in efforts to maintain low costs. As a result, there is no more free liquor on international flights (not cool at all) and meal #2 had a striking resemblance to meal #3 – both involved a bread product, cheese, egg, and a mystery meat that we shall call “sausage”. And both were equally nauseating. However, meal #2 came with a small container of Haagen-Dazs vanilla ice cream. Gotta give the props to those wily folks at Continental. Just when you think it couldn’t get any worse, they pull out the Haagen-Dazs trump card. Check-in through Chinese customs was relatively uneventful as well. I don’t think they really looked at any of our documents. There were three forms that we needed to fill out: an entry card, a customs card, and a health card. The health card was funny – I guess that the idea is to prevent people who have certain diseases from entering the country. But the classification of a disease was quite inconsistent and somewhat dubious – a virus or a cough, among others, and even had a box for the “snivels” (my guess is that they meant “sniffles”). On a positive note, I could already see that the Chinese government is putting a lot of effort into making the travel experience as user-friendly as possible in anticipation for next years Olympics – the customs desks had buttons for customer feedback installed that allow the traveler to press a button corresponding to their experience with their customs agent: just right or too much time. I was just happy that they let me through to begin with. My visa photo was less than friendly-looking and worth a double-take to anyone paying attention, and one of my technicians even texted me to let me know to “Have a safe trip. I told the FAA who you really are.” Our two week course is at Tsinghua University in Beijing, which is widely considered to be the top university in China. Our hotel is the Unisplendour Centre, just adjacent to campus. The hotel itself had just been completed 1 ½ days prior, and had that fresh “new car” smell (also known as Eau du Drywall or Paint Thinner au Jus). As we found during the coming days, “completed” is a term that is being used quite loosely. Eventually (probably the day we check out), the hotel will have a gym, sauna, and bowling alley. I’m sure it will be a lovely place. Until then, we’ll manage using a single elevator and an unfinished stairwell. Many of the others registered for the course (60 in total) had also flown in on the same flight and were ready to get some real food after a few hours. So we headed downtown to this neat pond area (Qian Hai, I think it's called) which has many small restaurants and bars littering the pondfronts. After some meandering, the group of us settled in and picked a rooftop bar with enough space for the 15-20 of us. We had some appetizers that loosely resembled chicken fingers, lots of cheap Tsingtao beer, and just spent some time getting to know one another. After a few hours of cheap beer and very little food in our bellies, we opted to skip dinner and head to a place called Bed for more cheap beer and small appetizers. I could see that cheap beer was probably going to be a recurring theme throughout this trip. Somewhere around 1am, I headed back to the hotel to attempt to get some sleep on my bed that was about as comfortable as plywood. I know I’m making this hotel out to sound like a nightmare, but it actually is quite nice – once it’s all done, that is. Monday, May 14, 2007 Breakfast this morning wasn’t really much to write home about, but it’s at the hotel and it’s free, so I don’t know that I’ll be going anywhere else really. At 9am this morning, we had our first class session, which basically consisted of a few administrative issues to discuss and a couple of video presentations. I think they knew that we would be tired and jetlagged and didn’t want to schedule anything for today that we really wanted to know. The video presentations were apparently narrated by the Chinese Don LaFontaine (the dude who does all the movie trailers in the US in an inordinately excessively dramatic fashion). It didn’t take long for the entire class to be cracking up at the guy. First, he told us about the history and importance of the Badaling (ba-da-boom) section of the Great Wall of China, which we are scheduled to visit in week 2. We also learned that the Great Wall is indeed, very solid. Video #2 was about the Forbidden Palace, and was also fortunately narrated by the Chinese Don. For the remainder of the trip, the whole class was essentially extolling the virtues of the Badaling section of the Great Wall and its solidness. It would not be wise, dear reader, to question the solidness of the Badaling section of the Great Wall – doing so would certainly make you suffer. After an interesting boxed lunch (you get the distinct feeling that I’m not going to like the food on this trip, but let’s see what happens though) and a brief stop back at the hotel, we loaded onto two buses for a company visit to the Capital Steel plant. This place was absolutely enormous – a sprawling 17 square kilometer campus just outside of Beijing. The imagery there was really neat – there’s a mountain range in the background and a bunch of small Chinese pagodas and decorated walkways and a lake in the middle of massive pipelines and multi-storied factories and kilns. Our tour guide couldn’t speak an ounce of English, so Liang was volunteered to translate to the entire group. Conditions weren’t very ideal to learn very much, and we basically had the equivalent of an elementary school visit to a big steel plant where we could ooh and ahh over the vats of hot liquid magma (ok, ok, it was hot liquid molten steel) being poured into other vats, and then somehow magically pressed into sheets of finished steel. It was really hot outside too, so we were just happy to get back onto the bus. Maybe that was just me. We had a welcome dinner at the hotel, where we were ironically not really verbally welcomed by anyone in particular other than the wait staff. Dinner was better than previous meals and beer was also cheap (free, in fact). One of the other students on the trip, Rina, led a group of us to a place where she had had a good foot massage on Sunday night. Since it was about $8 USD for an hour, eight of us decided to try it out. As we would later find out, they didn’t quite have the capacity for eight people to get an hour-long foot massage at once, so they gave us a couple of random masseuses who appeared to be newbie trainees (I got one of the newbies). My masseuse kept looking over to the girl right next to us to see what she was doing and then attempted to do the same. Needless to say, my expectations weren’t very high and I wrote off the experience in the first 2 minutes. Though my masseuse was not female, he was a good looking young fellow. But I don’t swing that way – I believe the immortal Tone-Loc said it best in verse: “it’s the eighties, and I’m down with the ladies”. On a positive note, I was entertained by some Chinese gameshow featuring 40 Chinese Backstreet-type Boys who danced around. Two teams of two of them were somehow selected to compete in a contest to sweep and clean a hair salon, and then one on each team had to wash the gloop of gel out of their teammate’s hair. Riveting television. It’s really unfortunate that I didn’t bring TiVo to share with you all. I promise that I’ll remember next time for you. After the massage, we met up with about 20-30 other folks at an expatriate hangout bar called Tree for the rest of the evening. Strangely enough, of the two beers on tap, one was Beamish (and Irish Stout similar to Guinness), so I had a glass of that. When I realized that I could get four Tsingtao drafts for the same price, I switched over pretty quickly. Tuesday, May 15, 2007 Even though we got home pretty late last night, I decided to peel myself out of bed this morning to go for a morning jog on about 4 hours of sleep. Amazingly enough, there were 4-5 others from my class who were doing the exact same thing. I guess I’m not the only idiot out here. But the lack of proper rest was very apparent from the actual jog – I did about 2 miles at a pretty slow pace. We had a class this morning on Human Resource Management in China and learned some interesting things. First off, it became quickly apparent that to make sense of anything here, you have to understand the history of the past 30 years to understand what changes the nation has gone through. So, for you, dear reader, let me summarize briefly the recent history of China. And I promise that it will be shorter than the brief history that I gave you last year of Ireland. Way back in the year of 1949, two significant events took place. The first is that my mom was born that year. The second is that this is the year that the Communists won control of the country in a revolution, forcing the Nationalist government to flee to Taiwan. Mao Zedong (a.k.a. Mao Tse Tung) was installed as the Chairman of the new government. In 1966, Chairman Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, in which he aligned with students (who became the Red Guard) against other members of the CCP which put the nation into anarchy until solidifying full control of the country and the CCP under Chairman Mao, while sending his political enemies in the CCP to work in the farms. The revolution was purification attempt against capitalist and anti-socialist tendencies that had been creeping up. After Mao’s passing in 1976, Deng Xiaoping took over and began to reform the CCP and the country’s economic policies, which eventually opened up the country to free enterprise, to foreign companies and to foreign investment. But during the period from 1949 to 1976, the entire country was a planned economy, where the government effectively owned and operated all enterprise – people were told where to work and each work unit (i.e. companies, factories, etc.) was given an annual output goal. This is a massive amount of change between then and now. Also, the Chinese government doesn’t tend to do anything rapidly – they believe in gradual change to better manage any adverse consequences that may arise. Arguably, this is also a trait of Chinese people as well, along with the patience to wait for change. Americans, on the other hand, are quite impatient. So, back to the Human Resource class, we learned several interesting facts: the labor participation rate for women in China is ~80% versus 65% in the U.S.; bribery and corruption is very difficult in China (as opposed to India) because no single person in the government has enough power to be able to make significant decisions – there’s just too much bureaucracy; state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in China have a flatter pay gradient between the bottom and the top than private enterprises, and as a result, there are some significant pay discrepancies from market salary rates both at the top and at the bottom. We learned more, but I’m even beginning to bore myself. After lunch, we received a tour of the campus – for being in a major city, Tsinghua is extremely spread out with lots of open space and room to enjoy. I’ve gone jogging in the morning a few times to take advantage of this (the hotel gym and bowling alley is still under construction). We kept asking our tour guide where the Tsinghua students go to relax and hang out, and effectively we were told that they don’t do this at all. Liang’s fiancée Chenlu confirmed this later on, saying that they were “a bunch of nerds”. J Next was a visit to the Tsinghua Science Park, which required business casual attire to watch a 30 minute video presentation and a 30 minute Q&A session to learn very little about anything. About all we could gather is that the science park is a for-profit arm of the university that aims to be similar to a Venture Capital firm and provide financial and mentoring assistance to fledgling companies in exchange for ownership in the firm. But the presenter wouldn’t share any details about how they chose firms to invest in, what discount factor they applied (risk), and what return they were expecting from their portfolio of investments. And they also shared that they were being used by some major companies, including Google, Schlumberger, and my very own Procter & Gamble. Liang and I were both a bit puzzled by the association with P&G and were determined to go visit P&G’s office here and find out. After a bit of searching, we finally stumbled upon the Beijing Technical Center and had a very difficult time finding someone to talk to (and understandably so). After some very minor digging, about the only thing that we could ascertain that P&G needed the science park for is real estate. For dinner, about 20 of us went to a well-known Peking Duck restaurant called BaDong (the BaDongaDong restaurant was around the corner). We sat family style around two large round tables and let some of our members of Chinese heritage (Ken and Yenyen, primarily) order the food. After an amazing meal with a variety of appetizers (including duck tongue), entrees, four Peking Ducks, and a lot of beer for those who were drinking, we feared the worst from the bill – after all, the menu didn’t even have prices on it, which is a clear sign of “frugal buyer beware” in the States. So we all took a guess at what the cost would be per person, and whoever got closest wouldn’t have to pay – most of the guesses were in the 300 yuan range (about 40 USD) and reached up to 900 yuan. The total per person ended up being 161 yuan – which amazed everyone at the table. To work off our full bellies, we began a 20-30 minute walk to a bar. Unfortunately, after 30 minutes or so, we came to realize that we were walking in the exact opposite direction. So we took taxis to the bar of choice tonight, called Face. Our cab and one other somehow got dropped off at Babyface, which was a full out dance club/discotheque. 30 minutes later, we figured out where Face was and walked there. It was a neat place, with lounge-type rooms, an outdoor area and a few rooms with a pool table. We grabbed a vacant room with a pool table and hung out until 2am, when the bar closed. I played a couple of games with Kathryn as my pool partner – but we are both billiardly-challenged. To give us even a fighting chance, I came up with a few ways to even the playing field: our opponents had to play left-handed. We were still embarrassed. Wednesday, May 16, 2007 I didn’t sleep very well, but still decided to get up at 6:30am and go for another morning jog, pretty much duplicating my route from before. I’m guessing that I’ve had about 10 hours of total actual asleep time since I arrived in China. Our class this morning was on cultural values. This is a very important discussion to have, however, it didn’t end up being much of a discussion. The material was very contradictory and we all left a bit confused: on the one hand, Chinese people are reserved, but they are also very friendly. Chinese people are very direct, but they go around in circles explaining context before getting to the point. All the while I was trying to place my experience with Chinese-born friends and colleagues into what I was hearing, and some things made sense and others didn’t. But that in itself may be the issue. You simply cannot make generalizations about a nation that has undergone the amount of social and economic change over the past 30 years. If anything, this is what I learned from the class. A few of the generalizations probably still make sense, in comparison to the prototypical American at least: respect for authority, respect for elders, and very patient. However, I think these generalizations are probably true for the entire continent. One thing that we did learn is that Chinese names are written and spoken with the surname first, and that you should always address someone by their title (Doctor, Professor, Chairman, General Manager, Director, Vice President, etc.). At P&G, everyone is on a first-name basis – we all call our CEO by his preferred initials A.G., and I have to think a minute when someone else mentions something about Mr. Lafley. From what we’ve learned, most foreign companies have held on to their own customs from their base country – this is also true of many European companies in the United States. Another key takeaway was that guanxi, or social networking, is vitally important to getting things done in China – business occurs through connections to those in a position to help. As such, Chinese take guanxi very seriously and will go out of their way to invite someone over for an expansive dinner or give gifts for this aim – an argument could be made that this is a milder form of bribery, but likewise an argument could be made that this is no different than any other society. From a business standpoint, the key point is that you need to make a connection with someone who has connections to be successful in China. Interestingly enough, one of the most common criticisms that Asians get in the US in the business world is that they do not network enough. But maybe that’s just at P&G. It was extremely hot today – the sun was being especially vicious in direct contact that I could feel my skin burning and melting off. What a wonderful day to tour Tiananmen Square, which was a huge open air area that could hold half a million people. More importantly, there was no shade. After the Square, we toured the Forbidden Palace, which still has a huge picture of Chairman Mao on the front. The Palace had a little more shade, but indoors would have been even better. The Palace itself was very beautiful – there was a lot of fresh paint and a couple of the buildings were inaccessible due to restoration (part of getting ready for the Olympics?). The palace grounds seemed to be a never-ending cascade of courtyards leading to buildings with pass-though gates to the next courtyard. Perhaps the most memorable portion of the tour came from our tourguide Tony, who looks like a 6’4” version of Yao Ming. On the bus ride to the Palace, Tony showed us a map of China and said that it looked like a rooster or a cock. Then he pointed to one end, saying this was the cockhead, and the other end was the cocktail. Immediately, every male on the bus went into full Beavis & Butthead chuckle mode. Yes, men – they’ll never grow up. After the palace, a huge group walked over to a market area where food stalls were set up so that you could walk up and buy appetizers from a variety of vendors to fill your tummy. I had an awesome bowl of tofu and a dumpling, but our sub-group didn’t appear to be too adventurous. We didn’t have any takers for the grasshoppers or scorpions. So we just ate at a nearby restaurant and let our Chinese delegation (Liang and Yenyen) order for us again. And to finish the evening off, nine of us went in search of a massage parlor, and we found a pretty good one at the Peace Hotel. Liang, Rina, and I had a one-hour full-body massage while the rest had foot massages. And no I did not get a happy ending (Mom – don’t ask what that means, just move on please). My masseuse kept commenting in Chinese that I was very strong and had a lot of dense muscle, or at least that’s what interpreter Liang tells me. The massage did work out the kinks in my quads, which had been very tight for the past few days from my morning jogs. However, my back and shoulders had also been bothering me but I don’t think the masseuse had enough time to fix that quite up. After the full body massage, the three of us decided to follow it up with a one-hour foot massage. I learned that when you tell the masseuse if it hurts where she is massaging, she can tell you which part of your body that is linked up to and that it’s an indication that you have issues with that particular organ. For me, both feet indicated stomach problems (strangely enough, I’m suffering from a bout of heartburn just as I write this). Kevin (who had the foot massage first) decided to join us and do a full-body massage while we did our feet. Then he decided to let this masseuse dude (who also is a chiropractor and acupuncturist) do this thing called cupping on his back. Basically, cupping involves taking a mini fish bowl like thingamadoodle (~4” diameter), lighting a match in the bowl to expand the air by heating it up, placing the cup on your skin while the air is hot, and the subsequent cooling of the air will create suction. Don’t worry – I have pictures. Each of which are worth 1000 words. Supposedly, cupping does something about your Chi when the bowls are placed over the pressure points. Two of the twelve cuppings on Kevin’s back caused extra discoloration – the masseuse dude said that meant he had some issues there. Since my shoulders were still sore, I figured that I might as well try this too. One of the cups fell off and broke, and another one showed extra discoloration – supposedly, this one was linked up to one of my kidneys. Or perhaps it’s just a blood blister. Who knows? At the end, I was left with 11 little crop circles on my back. Very attractive indeed. Thursday, May 17, 2007 For whatever reason, I wasn’t able to sleep a wink last night – nonstop tossing and turning from the crazy firm beds (inspired by plywood), Liang snoring, me consciously trying to fall asleep when Liang wasn’t snoring, and some residual jetlag for sure. However, I somehow still remained completely coherent all day today as if nothing happened (though some would say that I’m not quite coherent in normal situations). Today’s morning class was taught by a professor from the Tsinghua Law School on the Legal Environment for doing business in China. I think the professor knew his stuff, but he just droned on and on and didn’t really use his own slides very much and didn’t really make any major points. At one point, one of my classmates asked him point-blank what he would consider the top 3 watch-outs or must-dos regarding the legal system and he somehow managed to skirt that too. Typical lawyer, I suppose! At the same time, this was a confirmation of one of the generalizations that we learned on Tuesday about Chinese people – they give too much context and take a long time to get to the point. One other thing that was apparent was that history explains a lot here as well – the CCP and Chairman Mao had essentially done away with laws during the Cultural Revolution. It was Mao’s way or the highway, except that I don’t think the highway was really an option. So the country basically had to recreate an entire legal and judiciary system from scratch after Mao passed away, and as a result, some legal frameworks that we are used to in the US simply don’t exist in China. Lunch today was from McDonald’s – your pick of a Big Mac or chicken sandwich. I opted for the chicken sandwich, but it didn’t taste right at all so I tossed it. The last thing I wanted to eat was McDonald’s though; I barely touch the stuff in the US and I’m certainly not planning on starting in China. So I just went back to the hotel to attempt to get a nap in. It didn’t work. This afternoon, we had a company visit to Lenovo, a electronics manufacturer who recently purchased IBM’s computer manufacturing division. The thought is that you’ll begin to see the Lenovo brand in the US in the next few years. Haier, a long time Chinese manufacturer of appliances and electronics, has already begun selling a few things. Anyway, the Lenovo trip was neat. We got to look at some of their new products. And then we got a tour through their assembly area. Their facility was pretty hi-tech and they’ve instituted lots of operational and supply chain improvements (automated warehouse, Kanban, grape charts, 5S to name a few). Liang and I had all sorts of more detailed questions on logistics and supply chain since we have a manufacturing background. Unfortunately, our guide could not answer any of our questions. You know – for a group of 60 MBA students, you’d think that the company would have a senior manager talk to us and give us the chance to ask more strategic questions. It didn’t happen at Capital Steel, and it didn’t happen here. Great. After Lenovo, we headed downtown to the Lao She Teahouse to watch a traditional Chinese variety show. They kicked it off with some traditional Chinese music, which somehow managed to resemble bluegrass music with all the twangs and slides in the performance. There was also a very poor and unfortunate martial arts performance from some supposed yong monks – I called them the Shaolin-monk-wannabees. But there were two really cool performances too: the first was a hand shadow performance (two guys making animals using their hands between a light source and a screen) with some unbelievably real looking dogs and birds. The second neat performance was a guy who balanced a huge jar on his head – he’d toss it in the air with his head and catch it again on the top or the side or even the rim. But jeez – give me 20 years of non-stop intensive training and I’m sure I could do that stuff as well. Show me something impressive already… Of note, on the busride to the show, Tony shared with us how he met his current girlfriend. One of his aunts set him up and they met at the subway and walked around and talked for 15 minutes or so. Then he told her “I think you are very clever and very beautiful and I think you would make a suitable match for me.” He was visibly blushing after he told us this. Tony’s the man. I’m going to try this line sometime – clearly, I can use all the help I can get. Now that my brother has gotten engaged, there’s no escaping the questions from my parents anymore. Damn you, Rupa! A bunch of us headed out to an ex-pat bar called The House of Suzie Wang – kind of a strange name for a bar, but whatever sells I suppose. It was too packed, so after an hour or so, we decided to go clubbing and took taxis to Babyface (the same one from a few nights previous). The music was very techno, which didn’t appeal to everyone, so half the group (including me) walked over to Face. Boy this seems repetitive. Friday, May 18, 2007 Last night, remembering my issues the previous night with falling asleep, I got some OTC sleeping pills from Quoc, who had successfully used them to conk out on the plane for the entire flight over – seemed like exactly what I needed. I looked at the box and it said to take 2 pills. So I did. When I attempted to wake up at 7am this morning, I wasn’t exactly in one piece. My body and my mind were simply not on the same page. I spoke with Quoc later on, and he told me that he only took 1 pill for the entire flight here. Couple that with the fact that I’ve probably only taken an OTC sleeping pill once before in my life and couple all that with me only looking for 4 hours of sleep and then I realized that I made a wee minor miscalculation error. This morning’s class was supposed to be on Corporate Strategy. The professor who taught it chose to not follow his slides whatsoever and kept going on tangents, and we ended up learning more about financial markets than anything else. He was a really good professor and very knowledgeable and we enjoyed his perspective, but he didn’t stick to topic. Even so, I learned a few good nuggets of info that I shall share with you: the country has deregulated significantly and the private sector now accounts for more than 80% of China’s GDP; SOEs are still established in key core businesses like telecom, utilities, and airlines; many SOEs function as a government work unit and not only as a corporation – in addition to a production function, they also have an administrative/social function to perform (hospitals, schools, etc.); and some of the small struggling SOEs were taken public with cooked books to bail them out in the stock market only to have the true performance become apparent a few years later. The professor had an interesting analogy to explain this last point: it’s like an ugly girl – she has plastic surgery to make her look pretty and someone marries her, then they have an ugly baby and the husband realizes that he has married an ugly girl. Political correctness is not a strong point of this faculty. In the afternoon, we had a class on Private Equity taught by a guy who works in industry. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your preference for learning new things), I don’t think I have much to share with you on this class. It had very little impact on me. Liang, Deborah, and I left early to get a taxi to the airport to catch a flight to Xi’an (home of the terra cotta warriors). Since we left during rush hour, the cabbie took a bunch of backroads and we got to see an ungodly amount of new construction for Olympic Village and other hotels for next summer’s big event. When we arrived at Xi’an, we were dropped off at a really nice looking hotel and realized that Liang’s uncle had the serious hook-ups. We were only charged 300 yuan per night per room, whereas the going rate was closer to 800 yuan per night (~105 USD). After settling in, we went to the Muslim section of town – apparently, there’s a large Muslim population in the city that started when the Mongolian Khan’s invaded and a few of the soldiers stayed back and settled here. This group of Muslims is their descendents. Anyway, the Muslim section is basically a street full of street vendors and neat little eating booths. So we walked around and did some window shopping and ate some random little appetizers before sitting down for a full meal. The food was crazy cheap – I think we paid about 30 RMB ($5 USD) for all 3 of us to fill up our tummies. But the best part of dinner was this “fashionable” Chinese dude at the table next to us, complete with Right Said Fred “I’m too sexy” inspired see-through top. However I would suggest that he should probably should lose the gut before going with that particular look. We took turns trying to secretly take pictures of him or take a video clip of him. Saturday, May 19, 2007 We started a full day tour this morning to go see some local sights and the terra cotta warriors. Our tour guide Sally was local, very fluent, and very knowledgeable. I kept wanting to ask her if the bus driver’s name was Harry. The first stop on the trip was to the Wild Goose Pagoda (not to be confused with the Wild Turkey Pagoda). This structure is over 1300 years old and was built to house a bunch of books that one of the first Buddhist monks brought over from India. The pagoda also leans a bit to the west, so Xi’anians call it their “Leaning Tower”. The next stop was to some ancient archeological ruins from way-prehistoric times. These ruins were discovered when some pots containing skeletal remains were excavated during construction of a power plant for the city. After discovery, the location for the new power station was moved elsewhere, and a massive structure was constructed in place to serve as a museum right there. For lunch, we were taken to a place that specialized in tour bus groups. In other words, they specialized in giving you a bunch of not-so-great food and letting you meander around their mall for a bit to do some convenient shopping. I actually ended up getting a Gore-Tex North Face jacket, but I had to do a bit of bargaining. This was my first foray into this since I had arrived, and I talked her down from 960 RMB to 350 RMB (~$45 USD). I now know that this even was probably way too much, but at the moment, I was proud of myself. Next, we were taken to a “terra cotta factory” which was essentially another excuse to go shopping for a few hours. I was less than amused. Finally, we were taken to the actual site of the terra cotta warriors. There are about 7000 of these statuettes at this site that were constructed long ago by an emperor who believed that he needed protection from his army in the after life. So he ordered his entire army to be cloned in clay, but 20% bigger. As a result, every one of the statuettes is unique and different and a mold had to be made for each person. After the emperor died, a general who was looking to take over the kingdom ordered all of the statues destroyed, so they’ve been working on restoring the statues to original condition – so far about 1100 have been reconstructed. Also, they haven’t completely excavated the entire site because they found that the paint fades over a few years and they want to try and preserve it when they can find the right technology. There are three pits of warriors on the site, and insanely massive buildings have been constructed over them to house them in place. Pit #2 is almost completely unexcavated – they believe that most of the warriors in this pit are still in tact and again don’t want to ruin the paint by uncovering them too early. The weather was extremely hot today, and the smog was getting outright unbearable. By the end of the trip, I had come down with something and decided to stay in for dinner and get some rest. My stomach was queasy, my sinuses were stuffy, and I had a headache. Xi’an is surrounded by mountains on three sides, so this could explain the thickness of the smog. I don’t think we saw a blue sky the entire time we were there – just this grayness hanging around. Ick. Ordering room service for dinner was quite an experience though. For the first time this trip, I didn’t have Liang around to translate for me. So I called up room service and asked for the Beef with Oyster Sauce. However, somehow I had ordered the Minestrone Soup instead. After a few back and forths with the lady on the phone, she put someone else on the phone and we went back and forth again a few times. Finally, I realized that they were expecting me to order by number and thought that I was ordering B-4 (sounds like Beef) which was the Minestrone Soup, whereas I was looking for an L-5. That was some nice excitement. Then the dish came with mushrooms, rendering half of it inedible for me. Mushrooms are part of the slimy food group, which I don’t care to partake in. There’s also the sticky food group (which includes caramel and honey) which I also try to avoid. Okie doke. That’s all for now. I’ll send you the next write-up as soon as I have it completed. Until next time… Tidbits: 1. Chinese people seem to have some strange fascination with the English language. Most people walk around with T-shirts that have words emblazoned on them in English, even though they can’t read the language. The strange thing is that often these English phrases make absolutely no sense – we saw one that said “Where there’s smoke, there’s smoke” and another that said “We delieve in the fower of lovers. Lovers rock.” right underneath a small skull and crossbones. 2. There’s also some strange fascination with Snoopy. In the course of a single day, we came across three different items emblazoned with a Snoopy logo. The first was a cheap ball point pen that came with our welcome packet. Later, an old lady’s hat had the little Snoopy figure printed all over it. And lastly, a worker at the steel factory had some very crass artwork stenciled on the hood of his car; but he also had Snoopy car seat covers. 3. Random aside… one of the more underappreciated song lyrics is from Coolio’s song “1, 2, 3, 4” where he pines that “if you got beef, then eat a porkchop”. Excellent advice. I think I’ll have a T-shirt made with this line on it. (Sorry about that – I was listening to my I-pod when I was writing this update, and I have this song on there.) 4. I had forgotten my sunblock back home. So I went to a shopping centre to buy some, and all lotions (including suncream) were “whitening”. The standard Chinese consumer has fair skin, and therefore “whitening” lotion blends in with their skin. On my skin, the opposite is true. 5. We learned that infrastructure is growing in China at the rate of a full city of Houston per month. And since Houston is crazy spread out, so that’s a crazy amount of development.

Stay Away from me Lucky Charms, Dammit!

2006-10-07T18:16:00.000-04:00

And thus beginneth me second week in Ireland. Initially, I had thought about flying up to Scotland. But throughout this past week, I had decided that there were plenty of areas of Ireland that I had not yet seen. And so I decided to stay. And stay I did. Indeedio. Monday, September 11th I started a five-day trip through Northern Ireland and northwestern Ireland today. I didn't book it until the day before. It's with Vagabond Adventure tours, a small start-up tour company that is aiming to take tourists off the beaten path. Instead of a tour bus, they take tourists around in converted 4x4 Land Rovers, so that they can really and truly go "off the beaten path". It's quite awesome. I stumbled upon it quite by accident. Actually, the credit all goes to Preeti. She noticed their Land Rover while we were at the Cliffs of Homer... errr... Moher, and bugged me to check out the website, and everything sort of fit into place. I wanted to go to Northern Ireland, and they were going. In fact, they hadn't had this tour in many weeks, and this would be the last trip North for the season. It's funny... keep a good attitude and the world somehow conspires to make things work out. Or at least I like to believe that. So, we headed north from Dublin. We were five people in all: Dave, our driver and tour guide extraordinaire; Janine, a paralegal from Seattle; Lucy, a surgical assistant from Holland; and Genevieve, a finance-person-of-some-sort from Montreal (that's Frenchie Canadien). Lucy had actually been on a tour of Northern Ireland with a larger tour company called Paddywagon the week before, but she disliked it so much that she spent her every last shilling to come on this trip. Lucy and Gen had both done Vagabond tours in the weeks past of Southern Ireland. Dave's first task on this trip was to teach us how to speak like the locals: apparently "Northern Ireland" is pronounced "Nor'n Ir'n" up yonder this-a-ways. Each of us had to pronounce it correctly before Dave would continue further. After crossing the border into Northern Ireland from the Republic of Ireland, we noticed a few neat things to indicate the change: the color of the lines on the road changed, the signs changed from kilometers to miles, and suddenly there were kiosks around offering to change money, no doubt for a nice dandy fee (Nor'n Ir'nders use pounds and not euros - just like them snobby Brits). It was amazing to think that a short decade or less ago, this very border that was now barely marked had been heavily armored during "The Troubles" as the Irish calls it, between the IRA and the Loyalists and British government. But more on that later. No tour to Northern Ireland is complete without a thorough dousing of history, and the history really comes alive here because it's still so very real and in your face. And it will literally render you speechless. The first stop for the trip was to Slieve Gullion (not to be confused with Gollum, of Lord of the Rings lore), which is another ancient burial tomb that sat atop a tall hill. And we had to climb this hill. At one point, someone broke out into "Climb Every Mountain" from The Sound of Music. It was probably me. Now, the very top of this mountain was all rocks, a rocky shoal, if you will. I don't really know what a shoal is, but I like that word. Dave explained that on a clear day, you can see 25% of Ireland from the top of this shoal. This was not a clear day though, and we could barely see each other. The words "Marco" and "Polo" were uttered much. Oh, I just looked up what a shoal was, and it's the complete opposite of what I was trying to describe. I guess I'll have to try and use it correctly some other time. This afternoon, we arrived in Belfast, which is really a very beautiful city. We swung by the Crown Bar, which is a wonderfully decorated old-school saloon, and walked by the Europa Hotel, which holds the distinction of being the most bombed hotel in the world. After some lunch, several of us took a tour of the City Hall, which was celebrating its Centennial. The real eye-opener of this visit to Belfast was the Black Cab tour, which didn't make too much sense, since we were in a cab that was green. I asked our driver, Eamon, about this, and he clearly thought I was an idiot. He got no argument from me on that point, and by this point 4 hours into our weeklong trip together, my traveling companions had also become well aware that I was idiot. A Black Cab tour of Belfast takes you through both the Catholic and Protestant sides of Belfast and tries to explain what's going on in the city and what happened in history. Okay, I can't really go too much further without going into a history lesson. Those of you who don't want none of that thar larnin' schtuff, skip on. But I beseech thee to not skip ahead, because this is incredibly real and has parallels all around us. So, without much further ado about nothing, here goes: Am Awfully Brief and Somewhat Accurate History of Nor'n Ir'n and "The Troubles", by Paraag Maddiwar, copyright 2006 So, a long, long time ago in the late 1100s, the English had taken over Ireland and asked them to get lost, eh, - you know, in a friendly "vacate your property or die" sort of way. Conquests were waged at some point, and the English kings decided that they could grant land to Englishpeople and Scottishpeople, enforceable by the local English brute squad. The Irishpeoples were none too happy about all of this, and therefore many additional skirmishes took place over time. Somewhere in the mid-1500s, Henry VIII of England was excommunicated by the Pope basically for getting a divorce from Catherine of Aragon and remarrying Anne Boleyn. So, he installed himself as the head of the Protestant church and England became Protestant. But the Irishpeoples remained Catholic. In the early 1900s, the Irishpeoples finally were able to kick out the Brits from the majority of Ireland and proclaim independence as the Republic of Ireland. However, not all of Ireland republicized with them - specifically, 6 counties in Ulster (one of four regions of Ireland) were predominantly British Protestant and didn't go along with it, and instead decided to stick it out with the Brits. The problem was that there were still a good number of Catholic Irish peoples hanging out here. It was, indeed, a recipe for issues. In the 1960s, the Catholics were kinda tired of being discriminated against and launched a Civil Rights movement; interestingly enough, this was roughly around the same time of a similar movement by the African American community in the United States. Initially, these were peaceful marches by the Catholic community asking for equal representation in government and equal voting rights and equal access to land and housing and your standard basic rights issues. But tension was in the air, and before long, skirmishes started to take place between the Catholic and Protestant communities and some mayhem was ensuing. So the British Brute Squad came in to maintain order, and the Catholics were initially happy that someone was there to help maintain the peace. Through a series of events, including the highly unfortunate "Bloody Sunday" (also of U2's "Sunday, Bloody Sunday" fame), the British Brute Squad began to be seen as the oppressors as they quite unevenly maintained the peace. The IRA that we've all heard of started up around this point, and the "Troubles" began, largely a back and forth, tit-for-tat type of battling between the communities. There was virtually complete segregation between the two sides (education systems, housing boards, etc.) and very limited means for thoughtful discourse. When you're bourne into and surrounded by all of this, it's not as easy as it might seem to stand back objectively and cut it out. And neither side wanted to back down. When Margaret Thatcher came into office, she labelled the IRA as a terrorist organization and started treating the Irish-Catholic political prisoners as criminals. This most certainly wasn't helping the situation. Finally, in 1998, Tony Blair and leaders of each community ushered in the Good Friday Agreement whereby both the British and Irish governments publicly proclaimed that they had no claim over Northern Ireland. Though it may seem simple, this was a tremendous symbolic gesture. The region would become self-governing through a power-sharing agreement. Largely, the population was tired of the Troubles and wanted a return to sanity. The fear and mistrust still runs deep between the communities, though, since it's impossible for all of that history to disappear with an agreement. Since 1998, there has been a tremendous decrease in violence, and the vast majority of people simply want to move on. In fact, some locals (or at least tourist guides) say that every tourist to Northern Ireland is a vote of confidence in their peace process. That concludes my awfully brief and somewhat accurate history lesson. Well, perhaps it wasn't so brief. But you all know that I'm a wee bit on the long-winded side when it comes to writing. Hope I have not bored too much. So yeah, back to the Black Cab tour. The communities in Belfast still remain largely divided. In the rougher areas, there's a huge wall (like the Berlin Wall) that separates the two communities. So Eamon took us to each community to show us and teach us. First we went to a sort of slummish-area on the Protestant/Unionist/Loyalist side, and we saw lots of murals celebrating their martyrs and heroes. Several murals were very graphic in nature, showing armed gunmen and the like. Other murals outright denounced Catholics while celebrating their paramilitary organizations (the UDF, UFF, UYM, etc.). Then Eamon took us across the wall and we saw the Catholic murals and memorial gardens, which were much more toned-down. Dave told us later that the Catholic murals used to also be quite graphic, but have been toned down as they have realized that the international community doesn't react so good to pictures of masked gunmen. The Catholics had some other interesting murals: one of our own President sucking the oil from the Middle East with a smattering of skeletons on the ground; another of Frederick Douglass, who spent time in Ireland after escaping from slavery; and another one claiming similarites between the Palestinian community and the Irish Catholic community. Nevertheless, we tourist types were very happy to put the heavy stuff behind us as Dave drove along the eastern coastline of Northern Ireland to a town called Carnlough, where we called it a night. Actually, it was just late afternoon, so I took a stroll to the world-famous Cranny Falls, which are almost a tenth of the height of Niagara Falls! They were nice and simple and peaceful, but I didn't see an easy accessway to the water pool below the falls, so I could not go swimming. And there was much sadness. Genevieve showed up soon afterwards along with some young local friends she had made. One of them made it a point to talk lots about how she was cousins with one of the Dixie Chicks. Quite random. Tuesday, September 12 Okay, I know yesterday's summary was waaaaay too long, but the history lesson is largely over. And I really couldn't write anything without including the history. So get over it already and stop your whinging (French-Canadian and/or British for whining). We continued along the Great Eastern-Northern Ireland Coastal Highway (GENICH for short) for some time this morning. Across the way on the West side we could slowly and faintly make out the mountains of Scotland through the mist. They were spitting distance. That is, if you can spit 20-some miles. For a good few hours, I was just perched on the right side of the land rover staring and sticking my arm out the window with the camera in feeble attempts to take pictures of what were incredible views, only to have the pictures come out mildly incredible. But you know this already, pictures will simply never do justice. Along the way, we stopped and Genevieve and I hopped out for a short hike to meet the others at a really really old church, Layd Church. Much of the structure of the church had crumbled away. It was neat and sorta creepy to walk around and look at gravestones laid down some 5-600 years ago, right next to stones that had been placed down only a few years ago. I've never been much a fan of graveyards though. Kinda gives me the heebie-jeebies. There was an old interesting structure with a loop on the top of it. So Dave told Gen and I to clasp hands through it and he'd take a picture. Then he announced that we were now married. Well, that was pretty simple. And here, my mom's been trying to figure out how to get me married off for some 32 years. Hey mom - that's all I had to do. Outside of the church, there was an old burned out Honda hatchback sitting in the makeshift parking area. So we took a picture for Dave to use as marketing material for Vagabond's Northern Ireland tour. I was thinking that if my buddy Zach had been around, he'd probably be saying something like "It's a Honda; we can bring it back to life." So off along the Eastern coastline of Northern Ireland we went until it became the Northern coastline of Northern Ireland (maybe it was the Northeastern coastline). This coastline gradually got steeper and steeper as small beachlike enclaves gave way to cliffsides. Our next stop was Carrick-a-rede, which is an extremely small island right off of the Northern/Northeastern coast. Being that we are now on cliffsides, the only sane way to get to Carrick-a-rede is via the aptly named Carrick-a-rede walking bridge. Now, the guidebooks advertise this as an Indiana Jones style hanging rope bridge that is very adventurous and daring. Indeed if I were a smarter feller, I'd play along. Don't get me wrong, I thoroughly enjoyed hanging out on the island eating a boxed lunch and staring out into the ocean. But about the only exciting part of the bridge was the sine waves that occurred when multiple people on the bridge walked in unison. Sine waves that people like me liked to add to by strategically choosing when to take my next step at an unnecessary force. It's like those ants in the Tom and Jerry cartoon where Tom is relaxing on the hammock and the ants bounce him off. And that annoying little Jerry squeals in delight. One of these days, I want Tom to eat that blasted Jerry. We had lunch on the island and then walked around a bit. There's not all that much walking around to do on the island - it's kinda small. But, as opposed to the lawsuit-happy US, there weren't any real fences on the periphery of the island to save you from plunging to your doom. I got a little too close to the edge for Gen's comfort, so she told me that she was divorcing me. Oh well. Guess I gotta get back to that church... After a brief stop on a secluded hidden beach that the Paddywagon tour had just vacated, we continued along the Northern coastline to what's known as the Giants Causeway. Genevieve and I took the long route to the Causeway from the old and mostly gone Dunsevarick Castle. This is a 7-10km walking path along the cliffside which allows you to really soak in the scenery and offers much more spectacular views in relative solitude than the tourist trap known as the Causeway. And pray tell, what is the Causeway? It's basically a bunch of basalt rock formations where nature demonstrated a geometry lesson by forming perfect five, six, seven, eight, and ten-sided columns and structures along the cliffside and shoreline. It's very strange looking. There's a perfectly logical geological reason for this that I don't quite understand. And there's an old folks tale that Dave related to us that goes something like this (there's lots of mildly differing versions of this readily available from a Google search)... Back in the day, there lived a huge Irish man named "Finn MacCool, a man so large, you could see the whole of Ireland between his legs. He was, indeed, a horse of a man." (Brief aside - that last part is in quotes because Dave had a habit of saying the entire phrase at the mere mention of this fellow Finn, even if he said the phrase a mere few minutes prior. Good times.) So this very large man Finn MacCool, "a man so large, you could see the whole of Ireland between his legs. He was, indeed, a horse of a man", built this causeway to Scotland to fight his rival, the Scottish giant Benadonner. Finn spent an entire week building the causeway, so he was tired and fell asleep. But Benadonner was on his way across. So Oonagh, Finn's wife, did some quick thinking and dressed Finn up as a baby. When Benadonner arrived, he saw the huge baby and figured that Finn must be much much larger. So he ran back to Scotland, tearing up the Causeway in the process. This really happened. It is a veritable fact. I swear it to be true, especially since the US Intelligence Agencies have assured me that it is, indeed, a horse of a truth. Wednesday, September 13 This morning, we all woke up to the fresh smells of the bed and breakfast we were staying in that was situated on a pasture. Mmmm... mmmm... how I love the smell of fresh cowdung in the morning. Nothing like a little wake-me-up. Our first stop this morning was by another beach and did doughnuts in the sand. Wheeeeeeee! I asked Dave if I could drive the Vagabond Land Rover. He said no. Dave sucks. Next, we followed some back roads to a lookout point with some spectacular views. These were backroads that most tour buses would never bring you to. It was, indeed, yet another Vagabond Exclusive. Dave also made sure to check with Lucy to see if Paddywagon had brought her up here the week before, and, indeed, they had not. Unfortunately, up on the clifftop where the lookout point was, there were gale-force winds in effect and a smattering of rain was beginning to take shape. Basically, if you stopped and jumped up, you would land a few inches in front of where you started because the wind was so strong. It was so strong that when we were headed back to the vehicle, I even walked backwards to shield my face. So we walked very slowly and very deliberately as close as each of us were willing to get to the edge so that we could see the mist-covered view, which was still quite spectacular. The lands below were flat as could be, stretching for kilometers and kilometers and dumping into water. Was it the ocean? A river? I don't know. I couldn't tell with all the mist and gale-force winds. But the highlight of today was our visit to Stroke City, which is what some people call the town of Derry/Londonderry. The Protestant/Loyalist/Unionist crew calls it Londonderry, while the Catholics called it by it's olden-day name of Derry. Since everyone was trying to be politically correct, all of the signs say Derry/Londonderry. This got kind of cumbersome to say, so it became known as Stroke City. This was not named as such because people in this town were gluttons and had a high incidence of heart failure, but because "stroke" in Ireland means what we normal people in America would call a "slash". After having lunch in Derry (I had a very large mystery-meat Yankee Burger and a Guinness at some bar), we had a walking tour with a local feller who gave us the lowdown on the city. The city has a full city wall structure that still remains in tact around the old city, and the majority of our tour was along this wall. Derry plays a significant part of the recent "Troubles" history as well, as this was the site of "Bloody Sunday". Beyond that, Derry plays an important role in the history of the country as this was a site of many battles and a famous siege between the Irish locals and the British occupiers. I'll spare the history lesson for now, assuming that you can google it if you are interested. Within a few minutes of leaving Derry, we were back in the Republic of Ireland headed towards the County of Donegal. This is a county that often gets overlooked by tourists because it's not as close to Dublin as most of the other sites. That also means that it is more untouched. So, Dave drove us through the Blue Stack Mountains (no clue why they were named this since they weren't very blue and I didn't see any stacks of anything) and let us out to take a walk by some "famine houses", which were old stone houses that were vacated by potato farming families during the Great Famine. Next, we took a walk with a local dog (I forgot the dog's name, but let's pretend it's Rufus) to an ancient burial site called a "dolman". A dolman is an extremely large flat rock perched atop a few vertical rocks. This makes you wonder how such huge flat rocks got there to begin with. My guess is that they used prehistoric cranes powered by prehistoric hydraulic systems. So Rufus hopped up top of the flat rock, and was soon getting a wee bit too visibly excited. Ironically, local legend has it that making whoopee atop these dolmans (which, remember, are ancient burial grounds) is somehow fortuitous. Tonight's stop was in a small town called Ardara, which is close to the west coast of Ireland. Gen and I took a walk after dinner and stopped in a few different pubs and had a glass of port at each stop. Unfortunately, none of the pubs had any music. So we went back to our hotel pub and had another glass and listened to the country twangings of small feller who was seemingly delighting his small crowd of blue-haired tourists. And then he sang "Sweet Caroline" in the perfect cheesy country lounge singing voice. The blue-haired people loved it. Gen had never heard the song before, and didn't seem to believe me when I told her that everyone in the States sings along loudly in the pub when this song is played. So I sang along too. Thursday, September 14 This morning, we got a late start out of Ardara, and headed back into the mountains. A good portion of the morning drive was stunningly picturesque. We were driving in a valley with steep mountains on either side of us (which, of course, explains the existence of the valley), and there were also some small lakes in valley keeping us company. In the distance in front of us, we could see the ocean and a beach in front of that ocean, since that's where beaches ought to be. And then we passed a mini-waterfall where we stopped for some pictures and I commenced to be eaten alive by the small bugs that hover around waterfalls. Then we turned left. Into the mountains we went, off of the paved road and onto a narrow gravel road that was not-so-aptly named Granny's Pass. I didn't see any grannies up here, nor did I expect to. This was, indeed, yet another Vagabond Exclusive. And Dave also made sure to check with Lucy to see if Paddywagon had brought her up here the week before, and, indeed, they had not. I've run out of adjectives to describe the scenery, so you'll just have to look at the pictures whenever I get around to sending out a link. So just close your eyes and imagine something. It's kinda like Spongebob, except with more natural scenery and green and less annoying voice and yellow. See? That's some darn good imagery right there. We were on our way to the Slieve League mountains, which were some crazy tall and steep mountains that dumped straight into the ocean - in fact, at it's peak, it was about 2.5 times taller than the Cliffs of Homer... err... Moher. That's some pretty tall mountains right there. The difference, I suppose, is that these mountains weren't a pure vertical drop into the ocean, which probably explains why they weren't called the Slieve League Cliffs of Insanity. I suppose you could say that the Slieve League mountainside was, indeed, a horse of a mountainside. If we had half a day here, I would have loved to hike along the edge up to the top - there was a well worn trail to the peak and beyond. Instead, we were probably around halfway up where we were congregating near the carpark. The amazing thing is that there were very few tourists here, because County Donegal is seen as being too far away for most tourists. Silly tourists... the Cliffs are for kids. We took a quick stop to pick up lunch and eat it on the side of the road perched high up another mountain overlooking the ocean. Interestingly enough, we were overlooking an area where Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker had bought a nice house with ocean view. A few years ago, Sir Broderick apparently had a car accident that killed some locals. He was very sad and apologized profusely to the family, and I think he was even forgiven by the family. Wow. I'm boring myself. On our way to the town of Sligo, we stopped off to let Lucy and Janine have a horse-riding lesson for an hour. I did not join, because every time I ride a horse, I feel like I'll never be able to have kids when I finally get off of it and I'm curled up in pain. I'm sure that this must be the horse's fault and cannot have anything to do with the fact that I don't know how to ride a horse all proper-like. So Dave drove Gen and me into the mountains and we saw more scenery. Last stop tonight was Mullaghmore, a small coastal town West of Sligo on a small round peninsula offering spectacular views of the ocean. The waves were really picking up because there was a storm or something somewhere in the world. The waves were just massive - they were, indeed, a horse of a waves. So surfers were very very happy this weekend. But I was not - if the waves weren't so strong, I would've been able to have a surfing lesson tomorrow. So, I took an hourlong jaunt around the periphery of this peninsula. Every few steps, I'd stop and take another picture of these crazy high waves crashing into the side of the peninsula or some funky rock formation. It was stunning. When I got home and took a look at the pictures, they all seem to look the same. Pictures suck. Friday, September 15 This morning, we went to the site that everyone who comes to Ireland comes to see. Yes, we were at Drumcliffe, site of the grave of poet W.B. Yeats. It was small and non-descript, and in all other ways, not really live-altering at all. But, at least the feller had his wish of being buried next to his all time favorite mountain. And that's gotta count for something. Next, we went to Strandhill, a small beach area with a facility that gave seaweed baths. I wasn't all that up for the seaweed bath, so I hung out with Dave and Gen staring at the huge waves crash into the shoreline. Then one of the local shopkeepers informed Dave that there was a beached whale nearby in the next inlet and that we should go down the beach a bit, and turn left to walk over the sand dune. So, we walked down the beach, and then turned left. Except we turned left a bit too late and suddenly our short-cut became an extremely long hike through really itchy armpit-high grass weeds growing in a sand dune. And this was no normal sand dune, it was huuuuuuge - it was, indeed, a horse of a sand dune. As we got closer and closer to our destination, the winds brought an occasional whiff of the distinct stench of a large dead fish. Yum. Unfortunately, the beached whale wasn't as beached as in right in front of us beached. It was beached way out in the water a bit away. Then again, judging from the distance and the stench, perhaps it's a good thing that it wasn't beached right in front of us. From Strandhill, it was back to Sligo, where I bid adieu to the gang. They were all on their way back to Dublin to end the trip. I was on my way to Galway, a town a bit south of Sligo on the West coast. After a short 2 hour bus ride, I was there. In a few hours, my Dublinese friend Shashi joined me. We were headed to the Aran Islands the next morning for the weekend. And that was Friday. Saturday, September 16 We got up early this morning to pack up and walk the whole TWO BLOCKS to the bus stop where we caught a bus to the aptly-named Aran Island Ferries to, wouldn't you know it, take a ferry to the Aran Islands. Our bus was a wee bit jammed. We were standing up the entire time and we were in front of the yellow line. Can you imagine that? It was like we were in Indonesia or something. When we got to the ferry, I proceeded to sit downstairs in the middle of ferry, where the rocking and swaying motion is minimized. This helps prevent unnecessary yakkage of my 12th consecutive traditional Irish breakfast. And I napped. Shashi was bored, so she went outside up top and watched the rescue team glide down from an overhead helicopter on a training mission. Or something like that. I was asleep, so I had to take her word for it. There are three Aran Islands - Inishmore, Inishmaan, and Inisheer. That's Gaelic for Great Island, Middle Island, and East Island. Truly, the talent for aptly naming things is something that is in the Irishpeoples blood. We checked into our bed and breakfast, except that they didn't have any rooms available when I made a reservation, so they let me rent out an apartment that the owner had for a pretty cheap price. While it may not have quite been a deeeluxe apartment in the sky, it was still pretty sweet. Except we were only there for a night, and couldn't really enjoy having our own kitchen very much. Oh well. I didn't really want to cook on vacation anyway. So, what is there to do on the Aran Islands? Go for a bike ride. And since neither of us had gone bike riding in a very very long time, this was the perfect time to spend an entire day bike riding. After teaching Shashi the basics (never slam your front brake only, especially when you are moving semi-decently fast, else you get tossed quickly head-over-handlebars), we were on our way. But, what stuck out about this island? There were endless stone walls everywhere. And they were tall and quite close together. A lot of the roads we were riding along were narrow as well, so it felt as though we were in a giant maze. A maze that never ended. It was quite creepy. I was starting to not like it very much. But then we got to Dun Aengus. This island is relatively flat other than the occasional molehill, but apparently it all rises up to a point on one of the edges of the island - this at the old fort/castle/whatever known as Dun Aengus. And the edge of this side of the island is pretty much a cliff all the way down. So, many more cliff-like views were had. The wind was blowing up at us from the ocean as well, so it made for a neat sensation to lie down on the ground looking over the edge of the island down to the ocean below with the wind in your face. Like Superman. On the way back, it started to rain. Shashi has a tip for everyone out there. When biking in rain, try not to wear a pair of shorts that could turn a light shade of transparent when wet. She spent the ride back to the hotel/apartment with her jacket around her waist. Sunday, September 17We had thought about renting the bikes for a full day and taking them out this morning, but by the end of the ride yesterday evening, my butt was sore from the seat and Shashi couldn't move her quads. So we figured we'd be best served to turn the bikes in early. Today was a pretty bland day in all. Mostly travelling. And we took all sorts of modes of transportation. We took a ferry from the Aran Islands to the mainland. A bus back to Galway, and a train back to Dublin. And a taxi from the Dublin train station to downtown. Except when I got downtown, I learned that all of the mid-range priced hotels (there are no cheap ones from what I could find) were charging exorbitant prices and were sold out due to the impending Ryder Cup. So I found a room at Trinity College in a dorm room. Except it was more like a jail cell than a dorm room - cinder block walls, fluorescent lighting, narrow enough that you could reach both walls, a shared bathroom, and escape-proof windows. Monday, September 18 Bad weather finally caught up with me on this, my last day in Ireland. So I grabbed a book, went to a cafe and then a coffeehouse and read a book. Sounds exciting, doesn't it? Then I went to the Guinness Storehouse for the brewery tour. Except that it wasn't really a brewery tour. You paid something like $15 to go on a self-guided tour through a set of exhibits that explain how the beer is made. But no tour of the actual brewery. But at the end, you get a free Guinness, though you did just pay $15 bucks for the supposed free beer. I got to learn firsthand though how to pour the perfect Guinness. So now I can watch the barkeeps next time and point out the error of their ways. The free beer is generally consumed on the top floor of the exhibition building, which has a wonderful 360 degree view of the city. While we were up there, the skies cleared up enough for me to see across the land of Dublin. This evening, I booked some tickets to what I thought was a play. But it turned out to be a stand-up comedy show. Oh well... it was called "Jesus: the Guantanamo Years", with the premise being that Jesus returned to earth only to not get past U.S. Customs (being a man of Middle Eastern descent) and was detained in Guantanamo. I thought this was a pretty funny basis for a play. But not really a stand-up comedy act. I'm a bit of a stand-up comedy snob, and I didn't really think it was all that great of a show. Well, that concludes this trip. I hope you've enjoyed reading all of this as much as I've enjoyed writing it. Then again, it's really not all that much fun to write. That's why it took me do darn long this time. But it's a lot of fun to read later on, so it's worth it. Next year, I'm off to Kilimanjaro - likely for the first two weeks of September like this trip. If you're interested and serious about being interested, let me know. I'm going to try to book flights and such a bit earlier than later. Since the hike will only be a week's worth, I'm going to look into a safari for the other week, or something like that. Toodles! Tidbits: 1. I don't think the French Canadian accent sounds like a Canadian accent with the French "ze" added in random places. I never once caught Gen finishing a sentence with "ze eh?". Imagine my dismay. Also, never tell a Hollander (the Hollish?, Hollandaise?), even jokingly, that they are an American-wannabe. Them's bad idea jeans. 2. Apparently the European teens have brought back an old fad with a bit of a twist. Remember back in the 80s when it was cool to roll up one pant leg? Well now, these crazies tuck in one pant leg into their sock. Just one. Not both. I almost went up to one of the idiots to say, "Ummm... excuse me, but your pant leg is in your sock." It's like the fad here in the States where people like wearing their collars up. It takes every amount of restraint that I have to not go up to them and fold the collars back down. It makes them look like yuppie Draculas. 3. All of the signs in Ireland are written in both Gaelic and English. Though very few people speak Gaelic. About the only places that Gaelic is spoken is in the boondocks of the country. 4. For whatever reason, all bars are required to post standard government sheets on the window with the price list that they charge for their beer and liquor inside. 5. Irish drivers are really polite. On these roads, you're allowed to use the shoulders as passing lanes. Except in Ireland, the slow drivers will move over into the shoulder allowing you to pass them on right side (remember - they drive on the wrong side here).

The Luck of the Irish be with ye

2006-09-22T18:17:00.000-04:00

Hello all. It's another mass form letter from me. Which can only mean one thing: I'm on vacation again. Actually, I was on vacation but am now at home, so my apologies for the delay. Feel free to attempt to garnish the wages that I get from this travelogue. So, where did I decide to go this time? I figured that it was time for me to really buckle down and explore my roots. Yes, Ireland has a long history dating back many many generations of O'Maddiwarty's. Oh yes, I'm traveling for week 1 with my friend Preeti, who has been very anxious to leave behind her residency in the thriving metropolis we all know as Lansing, Michigan (that's the state capital, folks) to go to a far off land and relax a bit. My understanding is that it was a successful week for her as well. Monday, September 4th I arrived at the airport today and went to get my rental car - something I thought I had gotten a steal of a deal for: $184 for a week in a Passat. Not bad at all. But there was a minor catch - apparently, as of September 1st, Mastercard stopped covering rental car insurance for Israel, Jamaica, and Ireland. Why oh why Ireland is on this list is beyond me. And the friendly folks at Europcar wouldn't rent without insurance or without charging the value of the car on my credit card up front in case something should happen. So, we ended up paying for the insurance from Europcar, which was about 1.5 times the car rental cost. Makes a horseload of sense to me too. The week was not starting well. So off we were in our newly rented Nissan Primera (kinda like an Altima, Passat-ish enough) to the Wicklow Mountains just south of Dublin. Task one was learning how to drive. These people drive on the wrong side of the road: since we in the U.S. drive on the right side of the road (not the left), it stands to reason that in the UK/Ireland, they must drive on the wrong side. So, I was back to figuring out which side of the steering wheel had the blinkers and which side had the windshield wipers, but more importantly: how to operate the stick shift with my left hand. This indeed required an unnecessarily large amount of concentration to will my left hand into the correct position. My old roommates have witnessed my feeble attempts to throw a football with my left hand. It's less than pretty. The other thing that I think we take for granted is the fact that we "learn" where the right side of the car is in the US. When the sides are reversed, it's not so easy to transpose that "learning" to the other side of the car. But don't worry, oh reader, no accidents were had, thereby completely wasting the money we spent on the car insurance. Damn. You know, I kinda wanted to wreck the car to at least get some value from that lost money. I mean, might as well, right? We went to a town called Glendalough in the Wicklow Mountains, where some saint founded some monastery in the mountains and there were a bunch of ruins made of stone. Okay, okay. That's not a very good description. But it was rainy when we got to the ruins, and I was in no mood (carryover from the morning's insurance shenanigans) to give a flying monkey about it. The mountains were pretty, and we had a nice hour-long walk by some lakes. That's really about it. Back into the car, we drove and drove and drove through very narrow roads towards Waterford, where we were hoping to stay the night. But the jetlag finally caught up to me, so we stopped to grab a bite to eat in a dumpy town called New Ross. If this was New Ross, I didn't want to go anywhere near Old Ross. The tourist information centre folks told us straight up that about the only thing to see in New Ross was a schooner that was parked right outside of it. And I saw the schooner as we walked into the tourist information centre. Impressed I was not. Why they needed an entire staffed tourist information centre to begin with was a bit confusing. The only place to eat in this town was a new 2-week old Indian restaurant. And the food: imagine Green Giant frozen spinach for a moment. Now heat it up and throw some curry sauce in it. That's the saag paneer. Preeti didn't find much paneer in her dish. And the inside was a bit cold still. Ick. But the decor was muy impressive. At the centerpiece was a small orange candle-holder with Jagermeister imprinted on it. Preeti asked the owner-dude if she could have it (well, it was kinda cool-looking), but he told us that he got it from the owner of a nightclub that he moonlights at and didn't get enough for all of the tables to begin with. So he could ill-afford the one on our table to give Preeti. Better than this centerpiece were the "Martha's Vineyard" emblazoned water pitchers that our glasses were filled with. That's a bit more on the random side. Those resourceful Indians... Tuesday, September 5th We did end up getting into a B&B in Waterford for last night, but only after the very friendly and helpful folks at the Travelodge told us that we could save money by getting breakfast for free at a B&B instead of getting a room with them. The Irish people are strangely helpful. How the Travelodge manages to stay in business with such friendly business-giving-away-staff-people is quite baffling. Maybe they get kickbacks? So, why are we in Waterford? To go to the Waterford Crystal Factory. Go figure. It was very convenient that they located the factory in a town with the same name. Otherwise, I think all sorts of confusion would occur, and you could be assured that some hilarity would ensue. So here's the skinny: crystal is basically glass with some lead oxides and other top-secret special sauces blended in to make it authentic "Waterford". We got to watch as a fruitbowl platter thingy was bent into shape by a guy using a wet folded newspaper as his tool of choice. We also saw a bunch of glasses made through a blow-mold. Then we saw the etching and engraving processes required to turn the crystal base structure into art. It was actually pretty neat. And I learned a few things from the gift shop where our tour surprisingly ended. 1) Marquis is a brandname that Waterford contracts out to a firm in the Czech Republic - Marquis branded items (like my little crystal thing I got from P&G for 5 years of service that was worth 20 Euros) are generally of lower quality, probably because they contain fewer lead oxides and not quite so much special sauce. 2) All of the Wedgewood dinnerware that my old roommate Scott bequeathed to me is some pretty high class stuff. A small plate runs something like 12 Euros, and here I got most of an entire set of it for free. However, the newer stuff says that it's "Microwave and Dishwasher Proof". The stuff I have is about 40 years old, and clearly is not anything proof (including Marcus-proof). I was on my way to the counter to protest this point, but Preeti pulled me back thinking it would be a losing proposition. She's probably right. The funny thing is that they still sell the same style, so I could replace the broken pieces. The next event for the day was to go to the Blarney castle outside of Cork. The key event here is to lie down on the ground on your back and drop your head underneath to kiss the Blarney Stone, along with the 3 billion germs lingering around from the previous visitors who have undoubtedly frenched the thing and/or hocked loogies. To get to the Blarney Stone, we had to walk up very claustrophobic spiral staircases in an old castle (Blarney Castle, to be precise) for 6.34 flights, where the Blarney Stone all of a sudden appeared to be more like a Blarney Wall than anything else, with a section of floor conveniently missing in front of it to allow your head to dip down under it. The prize for kissing the stone is the gift of gab - allowing you to talk your way out of anything. I'm just baffled beyond words. Very strange indeed. Wednesday, September 6th We got up this morning, grabbed breakfast and a Subway sandwich for the road, and headed out for Mizen Head, the most southwesterly point of Ireland. On the way, we passed all sorts of neat scenery - mountains and rolling hills rife with those picturesque mortar-less stone walls running all criss-cross around the landscape. My thought had been that these stone walls were erected primarily for land division purposes or to keep animals in a particular enclosure. Later I learned that the land had so many stones in it that the olden-day people had to oull them out and do something with them to make the land usable. So they made walls. Within these walls were mostly cows and bulls, and plenty of sheep. Preeti noted that some sheep had a splotch (technical term) of blue paint on their backs and some had pink splotches. I decided that this was the way that the farmers could tell if it was a male sheep or a female sheep. Then she found sheep that had 2 splotches of blue on them. These, I decided, were the gay sheep. Not that there's anything wrong with that. And then she found some with a splotch of blue AND a splotch of pink. We surmised that these must be sheep that would have been welcome on the set of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. More interesting than the walls and animals that we saw were the town names. Names like Innishannon, Gaggan, Bandon, Ballineen, Skibbereen, and my personal favorite: Ballydehob, which quickly overtook Gobbledegook as my favorite word. When we arrived at Mizen Head, we saw the ocean south of us. And it was nice. Then we paid about $5 to cross a pedestrian bridge out to the old lighthouse and some random establishment out on the rocks and we were be-smitten by the views. The establishment was downright creepy though - this is where the lighthouse keeper used to live, so they tried in vain to turn it into an exhibit, complete with a couple of "experience" rooms sans light so that you could try to imagine what it must have been like for the lighthouse keeper to live in a creepy place surrounded by plasticized fake rock walls, a painted blue sea floor, with only the light of a ten-inch black light as your guide. Wow. After Mizen Head, we headed up to the Beara Peninsula. The southwestern portion of Ireland basically comprises of multiple peninsular fingers jutting out from the mainland into the Atlantic ocean. Some peninsular fingers are fat and some are skinny. Mizen Head is the first peninsular finger, and Beara Peninsula is the third, of five in total. The fourth one is the most famous one - the Iveragh, also called the Ring of Kerry (no relation to ex-US presidential hopeful John). The second most famous one is the fifth finger, the Dingle peninsula. About all there is to do on the peninsular fingers is drive around the periphery on the wrong side of the road and stop every five minutes and oooh and ahhh. Which is what we did. And lots of it. The nice thing about Beara is that it's just as scenic of a drive as the Ring of Kerry, but far less touristed. So our oohs and aahs took place in much more serene circumstances. If anyone has driven the PCH in California, these peninsular drives are similar except the roads are narrower and the landscape changes to include valleys, cliffs, and mountain views. Okay. Maybe they aren't so similar. But it was worth a shot. Thursday, September 7th This morning, we drove around the Ring of Kerry. It wasn't extremely different from the spectacular views around the Beara Peninsula, but we figured we might as well drive it since we were already here and there's nothing wrong with having more spectacular views, right? Also, the tourist buses normally drove it counter-clockwise and we would be going clockwise, so we wouldn't be stuck behind throngs of them. Though, I suppose, now we had to face them head-on on narrow roads. Despite our fears, the traffic wasn't actually very bad. I love traveling in low season. I highly recommend doing this whenever possible. After the Ring of Kerry and some nice cheap lunch, we headed to Tarbert to take the aptly named Tarbert-Kilkee Ferry across the bay to Kilkee. It was either that, or drive inland about 85 km and then back on the other side. We chose wisely. From Kilkee, we drove up to the Cliffs of Moher. When I first saw the name, I thought it said the Cliffs of Homer, but unfortunately I was wrong. It's more unfortunate for the storepeople there though; imagine the merchandise that they'd be able to sell with a picture of Homer yelling "D'oh" and tripping over the edge of the cliff. Maybe I'll get someone to make me one of these shirts. That's just pretty damn funny. Anyway, the Cliffs of Moher were pretty darn high - about 213m high of sheer verticality plummeting into the ocean, to be precise. Again, this being low season, there weren't too many tourists there, but more than enough. It was about 7pm by the time we got there, which was perfect for viewing the sunset. Preeti and I walked the length of the paved footpath, which ended abruptly though there were several more kilometers of cliffside to be walked along. Instead, an sign blocked our way asking us politely to not go any further. Preeti obliged. In true Paraagian fashion, I did not (as did many many other able-legged tourists) and ventured out. I was still a safe distance from the cliff edge (no unnecessary risks taken - I promise, Mom), and my destination was a lighthouse tower thingy in the distance at the very end point of the cliffs. After 30 minutes of fast-paced walking, the lighthouse tower thingy was not seemingly any closer to me, and I noticed that there were no longer any tourists ahead of me. So I turned around and joined Preeti to watch the sunset over the ocean. I got lots of pictures of this so that you can enjoy it as well. (Rachel - this might be a good one to print out for the wall as well.) Friday, September 8th By the way, did I mention that we had absolutely phenomenal weather so far? I don't think I did. By way of this short paragraph, I'll consider it mentioned. Today we headed towards the town of Limerick to go castle-hunting. First up was Bunratty Castle, which, of note, hosted the World Down Syndrome Swimming Championships in 2006. Must... not... crack... joke... too... politically... incorrect... By the way, I didn't see any swimming pools around. So who knows how and where this contest took place. Bunratty Castle is a folk theme park type of thing that tries to recreate the olden days, much like Colonial Williamsburg. They had authentic olden-day people complete with olden-day garb, living like the olden-days burning peat bricks in their fireplaces for heat and to cook on. And every once in a while, one of the olden-day doors to the olden-day buildings would open up into a non-olden-day souvenir shop. It was a spectacular blend of new and old. My hats off to the genii who came up with it. The centerpiece of the Bunratty Castle folk theme park type of thing was the restored Bunratty Castle itself. Apparently, someone named Earl used to live there - many of the rooms had his name on the door: "Earls Closet", "Earls Private Chapel", "Earls Kitchen", etc.. After Bunratty Castle, we went into Limerick and toured through King John's Castle. A life-size figure of King John greeted us at the doorway. He looked like that uber-creepy Burger King feller with the perma-smile in those really creepy Burger King commercials that give me the heebie-jeebies. In one of the rooms, they had some French life-size figures that looked like 80's hair band rock stars. This castle actually had some real history to it though, and they put a lot of effort into explaining the significance that the castle played during the war in Ireland between Protestant Dutch William the Orange and Catholic English James I for the throne of England. On our way back to Dublin, we stopped off in the town of Nenagh, to get some food and drive by the P&G plant so that I could get an obligatory photo of the outside. I'm such the company man. Back in Dublin, a friend of mine hooked us up with a sweet hotel right in Temple Bar, which is an area in Dublin where lots of the bars and restaurants are. Very sweet. Dublin seems to put a much higher priority on pedestrian-only streets than we do in the US. In fact, I can't really think of too many areas at all that are pedestrian only in the US. In Europe, it almost seems that most larger cities have pedestrian malls of some sort. Maybe that's why we're overweight Americans... Though it was a Friday night, Preeti and I had dinner, watched some street performers who didn't appear to be particularly good at what they do, and just strolled around the area soaking it in and getting a lay of the city. Saturday, September 9th Today was explore Dublin day. We began by heading over to Trinity College to go see the famed Book of Kells, which according to Wikipedia, is an ornately illustrated manuscript produced by Celtic monks around 800 AD. By the way, I'm still not certain if Celtic is pronounced with a hard or soft "c" sound - I've heard both from Irish-speaking Irishpeoples. But back to this manuscript, the exhibit showed the extreme amount of effort that went into making such a book - from making the pages to procuring the ink (some of which came from a stone only found in the Middle East) to the elaborate artwork. From there, we went to the Long Room of the library, which interestingly enough was quite a long room. That wasn't the cool part though - this room was chock full of really really old books. And they were organized in an interesting fashion - large books on bottom, small books on top. No Dewey Decimal system here. The next stop was the Christchurch Cathedral. Cathedrals are always neat places to be - very peaceful and quiet. This cathedral was no different. Well, there were a few things that were different on display. For example, they had the bones of a cat and mouse encased in a display - these creatures apparently got stuck in an organ piper and become mummified. Good times. And the cathedral came complete with a spooky grotto underneath where all sorts of characters were buried. Come to think of it, there were just way too many graveyards in Ireland. But I suppose that's what they get for living in a country with a civilization older than 400 years. (Native Americans didn't entomb their dead, from what I understand.) Next stop was Kilmanheim Jail. We learned that this was the first jail that was designed to reform criminals rather than simply contain them. This jail was designed to give each inmate his/her own room, and to only be allowed to speak to guards and not to other inmates. The idea was to force the criminal to think about and reconsider his/her crime. While this may have been a good idea, it didn't work out so well. The jail was frequently overcrowded. In fact, during the Great Famine of 1846-1851 (not to be confused with the Splendid Famine of 1078 or the Marvelous Famine of 1425), many poor Irish people were committing crimes on purpose to get into the jail so that they could at least get some food and shelter. It being Saturday night (and Preeti's last night in town), we decided to hit the town with my local friend Shashi, who took us to a nice place to eat and hooked us up with a great pub/club. Sunday, September 10th Somehow, Preeti managed to wake up this morning and make it to the airport. I, on the other hand, slept in. And then continued to sleep in. Finally, in the late afternoon, Shashi joined me and we drove up to the ancient burial mounds in Newgrange just north of Dublin. These burial mounds were created in something like 3000 BC. There are actually three sites up here: Newgrange, Knowth, and Dowth. Unfortunately, the Newgrange tours were all sold out, so we were left with going to Knowth. Knowth's burial mounds are not quite as impressive as Newgrange, but they are moundy enough, indeed. All in all, the combination of the dreary weather (it finally came) and the tiredness from the night before dampened any fascination that I might have had for this archeological site. But the views were fantastic from atop the mound, that's for sure. Okie doke. That's all for now. I'll try and get the next installment out to you in another week or so. -Paraag Tidbits: 1. The Irish Road-Maker People (RMP for short) really love their roundabouts. I kinda like those roundabouts too. Preeti and I early on decided to try and say roundabouts like Irish people would, but the best we could do was the faux-Canadien "roundaboots". And then we exploited every opportunity we had to say it. 2. Don't try the black pudding if you ever go to Ireland. It's not really pudding. I didn't fall for it either. But I was afeared, very afeared. 3. In Ireland, a mobile home is not a sign of a hillbilly dwelling. They tend to be vacation homes for the middle class. So it was really strange to see a beautiful coastline or picturesque city with a trailer park in a prime location. Given my Kentucky roots, my mind couldn't even process this complete reversal. 4. Johnny must have had an Irish brother named Eddie. There are Eddie Rockets restaurants populated all over Ireland. I never went in, but my guess is that they served black pudding too. 5. The Euro really sucks. Or rather, the exchange rate sucks. Funny story. Okay not so funny, but you've read this far and so you might as well stick it out. I kept calling them Pounds instead of Euros the entire trip. Okay, that reads very unfunny. But I already wrote this and hit the "send" button, so it's too late to delete it.

Livin La Vida Costa Rica, with a vengeance

2005-09-20T18:17:00.000-04:00

Ever notice how some movie sequels attempt to be unnecessarily creative when a simple 2 or 3 suffix (as in Jaws 2 or Jaws 3) would do? I think Die Hard has to be one of the worst offenders, with Die Hard 2: Die Harder, and then Die Hard with a Vengeance. Then there's always the "Son of ___", "Bride of ___", and "___ Returns". Let me know if you remember a better silly sequel name. Enough of that though, to the main course. The resumption of our travels... Saturday, September 10 Today we began a 2 day trip to go see the turtles in the Northeastern corner of Costa Rica - in a place called Tortuguero. Which literally means "turtle-catcher" after the natives who used to catch the turtles (I'm guessing here). This 2 day trip began with a 3 hour busride full of camera-toting tourists, many of them not of the 20 & 30 year old persuasion. Ooooh - the excitement of adventure was thick in the air. The northeastern area is a bit marshy and not so habitated, so the roads were not in spectacular condition. We did get to see a banana-packing plant along the way though. And about 30 kilometers of nothing but banana plantations. Fun. Our tour guide on this bus ride was the king of the entirely unnecessary dramatic pause. I've never seen (or heard) anyone, ANYONE, ever use as many dramatic pauses in normal speech where they are absolutely unnecessary. Neeraj and I had to duck down so that he didn't see us cracking up. He'd say things like, "And dinner tonight... ... ... ... is at 7pm... ... ... ... 7pm... ... ... ... 7pm." After a 2 hour boatride from the end of the bus road, we finally arrived at our fancy hotel. They had a live band singing. Except that I thought it was more speaking in a tune rather than singing, since there was a clear lack of musical essence to the voices. And the song? Matilda. "Matilda. Matilda. Took the money and run Venezuela". In the early evening, we took a short trip from our hotel into the town of Tortuguero. During this short jaunt, we quickly got annoyed with one of the other tourists - someone I like to call "Cluelessita". I'm jumping ahead, but this quick bit will explain the name completely. On the ride back to San Jose, this girl said (and I quote, or pretty darn close) "Sometimes when someone is speaking Spanish, I can pick up a few of the words and I get really excited. Then I lose them because I got too excited." Anyway, after Cluelessita asked an inordinate number of questions related to the life cycles and mating habits of turtles and responding to each of the answers with a glossed-over brain-dead "Wowwwww", Neeraj and I went off in search of an internet terminal so that he could contact his wonderful loving girlfriend. This evening was actually pretty cool. At 8pm, we went to the beach with the park rangers to watch the turtles lay eggs. No flashlights, no cameras, and no light-colored clothing. The intent was to be as invisible to the turtles as possible. Quick aside - Neeraj had no idea what the hubbub (bub) was about with all of these turtles - he thought we came here on a 2 day trip to see the standard turtle (about 6 inches), not realizing that we would be in the midst of behemoth green sea turtles (4 feet long). So everyone who knows or sees Neeraj anytime soon, be sure to point at him and laugh uncontrollably. At him. Not with him... ... ... ... At him... ... ... 7pm. So we spotted a turtle that had just come up on the beach and was beginning to make it's way to the top of the beach to potentially lay some eggs. The group sat down and held still so as to not frighten the turtle away. Instead of coming straight up the beach, this turtle decided to come in at a slight angle and came within 3 or 4 feet from us. We were in spitting distance. Not that we would spit on a turtle. But it wouldn't notice anyway because it has a shell. We also got to watch several turtles leave the beach to go back into the ocean, and also saw a turtle laying eggs. Quite an eventful evening. Sunday, September 11th We woke up at 5am this morning to go on a boat ride through the canals to go check out some birds. Not "birds" in the British slang, but birds as the squawky lightweight creatures that we know them as. And we saw many birds, and I no longer remember which ones. I'm not much of a birder. We also saw some Caymans (mini-crocodiles) and a few small turtles. After a quick breakfast and shower, we took a quick 2 hour boatride back to the busride, and then a 3 hour van-ride to San Jose. With Cluelessita. Neeraj and I had both come to the conclusion that we could ill afford to look at each other for the majority of the trip or else we'd burst out laughing at Cluelessita. And that would have been... ... ... rude. Monday, September 12th Today was the first day we had on our own. The previous week and change had been prescribed by the package tour we had paid for. The rest of this week was up to us. So after some hemming, and a little bit of hawwing, we settled on renting a car. Not a normal car, mind you, but a 4 wheel drive manual. A Daihatsu. What the heck is a Daihatsu? I think maybe it's Kia's low-cost division. And that's pretty darn scary. Acting on some advice from other Tortuguero tourists, we settled on our destination of Dominical on Pacific coast - largely a sleepy surfer town with nice beaches. The route to Dominical went through the mountains - a strech of road that the locals call "Devil's Pass" because it's very windy and high in the mountains. But that Devil was no match for my driving prowess, as I conquered it in no time. That is, only after I took the hint of other motorists and became comfortable with passing very large trucks going very slowly on a very windy road. At some point, you just say "the hell with it" and punch the gas. In the States, I wouldn't do this. But in Costa Rica, all of the drivers are very aware of their surroundings and understand what other drivers must do. So they are expecting this sort of driving, which is why it works. Similar to New York City driving, which wouldn't work in most other places in the country. We reached Dominical just after sundown and picked a place out of the guide book called Tortilla Flats. This was our first sub-4 star hotel experience in Costa Rica. And even then at $35/double, it was more than most of the tourists here were paying. But you get what you pay for. Neither of us slept well, and I got freaked out by a co-habitant roach that I met during a late-night bathroom break. I hate cockroaches. Pure loathing. Even as I type this, I am shuddering. Tuesday, September 13th After some breakfast and dropping off a load of laundry, we drove a few kilometers up to a private rainforest reserve called Hacienda Baru for a tree-climbing and zipline adventure. On this trip, our guides pointed out a few birds, a two-toed sloth, and a three-toed sloth. The only reason we knew how many toes they had is that we waved and then counted quickly as each waved back. The tree climbing adventure was neat - they suspended several ropes from a really really tall tree. And we used ropes and winches to climb up. Winch #1 was attached to your body harness. Winch #2 was attached to your legs. So, the process is that you stand up, putting all the pressure on Winch #2, and raise Winch #1 as high as possible. Then you sit in your harness with all the pressure on the recently elevated Winch #1, and lift your legs up along with Winch #2. Lather, rinse, repeat. This was quite a work-out for both of us, since we were mostly using our arms and not our legs. I could even hear my old climbing-fanatic roomies yelling at me "Use your legs!!!". Acting on a tip from someone we met at the hotel's bar last night, we decided to head north to the Rafiki Safari Lodge (yes - Rafiki like Rafiki the medicine monkey from the Lion King). All of yesterday's driving was on paved road. Today was all unpaved. After 20 km on very pot-holey road, we turned onto a gravel road for 17km. Actually, calling it gravel is like calling Cluelessita a Rhodes Scholar. Many times along the way, we questionned whether or not we were on the right road, or even on a road at all. When we arrived, we didn't know what to think. Then the manager, Loki, came bounding down the steps to our Daihatsu in the empty parking lot to welcome us and lead us up to the bar to chat and have our free welcome drink. Apparently, we were the only guests, and the last guests were the ones who had recommended the place to us. Rafiki is a relatively new place, opening in 2000 to preserve rainforest, promote socially and environmentally responsible tourism, and raise money to soon begin a tapir reintroduction program. What's a tapir? It's this huge behemoth of an animal that occurs naturally in these parts and through Central America and parts of South America. Rafiki recycles everything they can, composts or burns everything else (they go through great pains to ensure that it's done in an environmentally friendly way). All of the power is hydro-electrically generated from a nearby stream. The lodging at Rafiki is nothing short of extraordinary. They took African safari tents, added a big front porch, and outfitted the back of the tent with a large bathroom rivalling that of 4 star hotels. Our jaws dropped when we saw it and we were speechless. Needless to say, staying at Rafiki is not cheap, but since it was low season, we worked out a deal with Loki that was mutually agreeable. And no, this did not include washing dishes or performing certain favors. But by far the coolest part of Rafiki is the pool, or more specifically, the huge concrete waterslide leading to the pool. The pool itself is quite small, but is filled by water from the mountain stream, and overflows into a lake a few 100 feet away - the constant water replenishment means that no chlorine is needed, which is again, environmentally friendly. But back to the water slide - Neeraj and I must have slid down it at least 6 times each. And you go so fast that you get scared each and every time you slide down it. Just phenomenal. This evening, two girls joined us and Loki as the inhabitants of Rafiki: Jill and Renee, who are originally from Cincinnati. Jill has been in Costa Rica for the past few months doing odd jobs, including serving as a raft guide at Rafiki for a week or two. Renee is her visiting older sister, who currently lives in Phoenix working in a landscape architecture firm. Wednesday, September 14th Our big adventure trip this morning was a combination horseback ride (something I had sworn to my privates that I would not do again) and rafting trip down the Savegre River. The coolest part of the horseback ride was that we saw a family of toucans. I tried to take a picture, but the darn things wouldn't stay still or in plain unencumbered view. Stupid toucans with their Stoopid Froot Loops. The rest of the horseback ride was largely forgettable as far as I was concerned. Anytime we tried to gallop, I had to re-swear that I'd never do this again. The pain. Oh... ... ... the pain. The Savegre River itself is mostly a Class 3 river - nothing all that spectacular for normal rafts. But we weren't going on normal rafts; the rafts we were using were called "Mini-Me's". It's basically a much smaller raft for two rafters and one guide in the back, which means that the raft is much more maneuverable and much lighter. This is basically a recipe for getting tossed. And I got tossed a lot, beginning with the second rapid. Loki was our raft guide, and we pretty much told him to maximize the fun at virtually any cost. Which is pretty much a raft guide's dream. Renee, on the other hand, was scared to go at all, so their boat took easy routes with minimum spillage potential. We got tossed and then went back for more. All in all, Neeraj got tossed 5 times and I got tossed 10 times. Several of my unbalancings we due to rapid swings and shifts of the raft, completely attributable to the skill of Loki. The last 5 came on the same rapid - a relatively small rapid that was good for surfing (the raft pretty much holds in spot provided that the balancing is right) with an eddy to the side that allowed you to re-enter the rapid if you lost it. So we redid this rapid about 8 times. This was the mini-highlight of the trip, by far. Well, besides the waterslide, which we slid down another 8 times or so when we got back. We decided to stay at Rafiki again tonight because we were having such a great time, and having good company makes all the difference in the world. For anyone who is counting, this would make the first time that we are staying in the same place for consecutive nights. Thursday, September 15th This morning, we went on a 2 hour hike with Rafael on a close-up look through the rainforest and learn more about the plantlife and birdlife of the area. I'm not naturally very excited about plantlife and birdlife, but I was very excited just to take a hike (pardon the euphemism) and have a look around and appreciate nature and its beauty. And it was visually stunning. Since Neeraj and I have had so little actual exercise, we were absolutely pooped with just hiking for 2 hours. Very very sad. But we had the perfect remedy for this when we returned. Waterslide. Say it with me: water... ... ... slide. After cleaning up, we drove up to Quepos and the Manuel Antonio National Park, which is quite possibly some of the most touristed area of the country. A few short years ago, this area was considered to be quiet and hidden. Now, it's full of large resorts overlooking the Pacific. I wasn't particularly looking forward to going here based on everything I had heard, but I didn't want to not go either since the surrounding landscape is supposed to be beautiful. After finding a place with an ocean view, we pretty much just planted down to rest. We were both exhausted. Our room had a TV too, so we watched some Telemundo. I love Telemundo. Sometimes I turn the volume down when I watch Telemundo - but that's a different story. I watched some of the Miss Italy pageant - the talent portion of their pageant is quite diverse and interesting. One girl did what looked to be a stripper routine on the host, and another did some face-painting. But the Telemundo highlight was watching that show "Small Wonder" - remember that sitcom from the 80's? It's the one of the family with a 10 year old robot daughter who talks in a monotone voice, but somehow their idiot community doesn't realize that she's a robot. It's way funnier in Spanish. And no, I was not drinking. Friday, September 16th Our main activity today was a kayaking trip through a nearby mangrove swamp called Isla Damas. It was just me and Neeraj on this trip with the guide (like that's never happened before), and we had actual kayaks this time (not the inflatable kind). But there was no danger whatsoever. Except the swarm of monkeys that we met. And any temple-going Indian knows, monkeys are evil. They steal your things and hide their poop in your clothing when you're unawares (no, this has never happened to me). We did manage to see more birds and more trees. After cleaning up at the hotel, we swung by the park entrance and picked up Jill and Renee to give them a lift back to San Jose. It was a 3-4 hour drive, and it was getting late. The treacherous part of the trip was up a mountain, without guardrails. And seemingly without any lines or reflectors whatsoever. This was the real adventure. There were a number of times where I had no idea where the pavement was, what direction it was going, and where the edge of the cliff was. With the headlights coming in my direction, I generally just aimed to stay to the right of them and cross my fingers that I was correct. On more than one occasion, the roadsigns were not reflective in nature, and we barely veered in time for our turns. The redeeming factor in this trip was the radio. For whatever reason, Costa Rica has a plethora of radio stations that play 80's music that is extremely singable. So, every 3 minutes, we were all hooting excitedly and singing along to songs we hadn't heard in forever. We even heard two separate Bangles songs ("Eternal Flame" and "Walking Down Your Street") on two different radio stations. I mean - when's the last time that's happened? Saturday, September 17th. I returned the rental car and then got on my flight home. No drama. No interesting stories. Nada. Sorry to disappoint. I did finish another book today though - "Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim" by David Sedaris. I've read another book by Sedaris, and something tells me that all of his books are pretty similar. It's an interesting read. Nothing I'd say that you MUST go read now, but it's not a bad read in the least. That is, if you are like me and don't care much for the movie-worthy action adventures or murder mysteries or Harlequins. Okie doke. That's it for now. I don't know where the next trip may be, but I figure that it will be something a bit more adventurous. Currently, I'm leaning towards a long hiking trip (7-10 day) in Patagonia. Any takers? Let me know if you are interested and we can work out a time frame that works for all those interested. As far as the extended guys weekend out, let me know if you are interested in that too. I'm thinking of a 3-day rafting trip down the Colorado River in April for starters. So long, and thanks for all the fish. -Paraag Tidbits: 1. One of the first things Neeraj and I looked up in our Spanish-English dictionary was "moo" when we passed a cow on the bed of a truck. Just so that you know, it's "mugido". No really... it is... No joke... mugido. 2. To give you an idea of the level of comedy between my brother and me these past 2 weeks, here's a few sample whittled-down conversations: me (offering a bottle of sunscreen): "do you want to put more on?" Neeraj: "did you just call me a moron?" me: "you have the door key, right?" Neeraj: "no, you're dorky" Neeraj: "wakka wakka wakka" me: "here comes Jaws" (from a Pac-Man sticker 25 yrs ago when we were utes) Neeraj: "what the hell is that?" me: "must be one of them Mexican staring frogs of southern Sri Lanka" Okay, maybe you had to be there. I was going to try and have a count for you of the number of obscure movie/TV/advertisement references we made over the length of the trip, but I lost count on the second morning. 3. I'll try again. On Friday, we asked our kayak guide what river we were crossing. After he replied "Naranjo", my brother asked if this was like "naranja" which means orange. When the guide replied that it was not, my brother responded with how about "naranja con cojones?" 4. Watching NFL games on HDTV is amazing. This has nothing to do with the trip, but I'm watching football right now as I write this, and it's important to note.

Livin La Vida Costa Rica

2005-09-12T18:18:00.000-04:00

Hi. I'm in Costa Rica. And you know what that means... you probably should move on to the next message until you have time to read this! For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about, a brief introduction: every year for the past three or so, whenever I travel abroad for fun and pleasure, I send back a weekly note to my friends and family who want to keep tabs on me. This was blogging before people knew what blogs were. And I'm too stubborn to find a blog site. So hit delete if you want to or simply tell me to get you the hell off of this list. The quick overview - my brother Neeraj and I are in Costa Rica for a couple of weeks. For any of you who have had the pleasure of meeting my brother, you`ve understood within 5 seconds where I got my rather strange sense of humour from. Saturday, September 3rd I got up early this morning to catch my 8am flight out of LaGuardia. Worse even, my poor cousin had to drop me off. Wow. I'm even boring myself already. This was a pretty ho-hum day. I waited at the hotel for my brother to join me. In the meantime, I read an ENTIRE book - The Kite Runner by some Afghani fellow. It's really quite good. Consider that a reco. Sunday, September 4th Neeraj and I started the first real day of our 10 day package tour today. I got lazy and we booked a package tour. Very unlike-me, I know. Please forgive and forget. First stop: the Monteverde cloud forest. We boarded our private soccer-mom mobile transportation taxi for the 3 hour ride. Roughly 53.7% of this ride was un-paved and filled with pothole-hell. But we arrived to the Hotel El Establo in the early afternoon. This hotel was absolutely stunning. We had a "Junior Suite", complete with a walk-out back entrance that overlooked said-cloud forest. Our first event of the day? A Canopy tour. I had no idea what a canopy tour was, but what I did know is that we were doing the tour with "The Original Canopy Tour" company. It`s a good thing I did this package tour thingy, otherwise I may have been tempted by "The Imitation Canopy Tour" company`s offerings. And that would have been very bad. So, the canopy tour is basically as follows: the company selected very strong and sturdy trees to build platforms on way way up there (enter some height dimension here that would make you go "oy vey!"). Between these platforms, they string a super duper heavy duty industrial-grade cable. And on this cable, they attach you with a harness to a pulley and send you on your way. Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! It was fun - yes. But we were so focused on getting us tourist types from platform to platform that we didn`t really have time to focus on the surrounding nature. So, 1 hour of 7 ziplines and 2 rappels and we were done. On our tour was a fellow who manages the zipline operation up at Whistler. He says he was "merely" on vacation, but we think he was doing some serious recon work. You know - since Whistler in British Columbia and Monteverde, Costa Rica are direct competitors and all. I made it a point to let him know that "The Original Canopy Tour" is often imitated, but never duplicated. Neeraj and I were not content with driving through pothole-hell only to take in a few ziplines, so we signed up for a night walk to look for sleeping animals and grody bugs. We even got to hold our own weakly powered flashlights in desperate need of new batteries! Imagine the fun and excitement. So let`s see - we woke up an armadillo sleeping in the trees (that`s what we were told it was), made a tarantula retreat into a hole, and saw lots of ants, leaf-cutters, and other grody insects. Unfortunately, they didn`t let us keep our weakly powered flashlights in desperate need of new batteries as a souvenir. After a quick dinner at Morphos Cafe in the tourist trap town of Monteverde, we went in search of nightlife. We found it at Bar Amigos. Blaring music, disco lights, and completely empty. Perhaps 9pm was too early. But I`m an old fart now, so we headed to the hotel, where hanging out on the back porch watching the lightning and listening to the thunder over the cloud forest narrowly beat out watching Scary Movie 3 on the tube. Monday, September 5th After a quick breakfast of black beans and rice and scrambled eggs, we were picked up by another soccer-mom mobile to head to the Arenal Volcano. Except this time, our ride was not so private: we were joined by 4 backpackers and a local lady complete with snot-nosed (though cute) 2 year old. After surviving another few hours of pothole-hell on dirt bullock-cart roads, we came to Laguna de Arenal. The next portion of our trip was by boat. So there`s a bunch of us tourists standing there, waiting for instruction, and the fellow tells Neeraj and me to get on the boat. So we do. And the boat takes off. The backpackers are still standing on the dock. And so we`re the only two people on the boat with at least 60 seats. We thought we had booked a relatively cheap package tour. I guess not. So Neeraj and I did what anyone would do in this situation - we laughed and pointed and stuck our tongues out at the backpackers. And when we got to the other side of the lake? Yes - we had our own private tour bus take us to our hotel. Quick aside to demonstrate the level of stupid comedy that ensues when my brother and I are in the same room. The tour company`s name was Arenal Adventures (not to be confused with A Renal Adventure that occurs with passing a kidney stone), and their motto was "For Nature Lovers". Upon seeing this plastered on the boat, I promptly turned to Neeraj and said "Neeraj, don`t be a nature hater". Okay. Maybe we`re the only two people in existence that find this funny. Our hotel here is Arenal Paraiso, and our accomodation is a private bungalow with a view of the still-active Arenal Volcano. There is a beautiful pool with a wet bar, and 10-15 small jacuzzi pools scattered about for privacy. Very romantic indeed. Too bad we`re not gay. True - we are brothers, but remember that we grew up Kentucky. Our tour this evening was to the base of Arenal Volcano. Pre-1968, no one knew that this was a volcano, and the name was Montana Arenal. Unfortunately for the villagers on the west side of the "mountain", everyone learned the truth loud and clear as a village was wiped out. Since then, the volcano has been spewing forth a steady stream of lava bursts. With the binoculars, it was possible to see some red rocks tumble down the side. After the volcano tour and some nice picture-taking activities, we went to the Tabacon hot springs for a relaxing soak in hot springs and a grand buffet dinner. Again, Que Romantica! Tuesday, September 6th Ahhh... our first real exercise on the trip was planned for this morning. After another breakfast of black beans and rice and scrambled eggs, we headed out for a 4 hour mountain bike ride with two other tourists, who doubled as American Airlines flight attendants. Chris and Andre. Both female. And both over 40. But they were loads of fun and we learned plenty about the secret lifestyle of flight attendants. By the time we returned to our private hideaway bungalow, we were thoroughly exhausted - feet, ankles, quads, butt, you name it. All in pain. But instead of relaxing to give the pain a chance, we had to get cleaned up to be taken to our next destination: Selva Verde. Selva Verde is a private rainforest reserve on 500+ acres. They are level 2 on the eco-tourism commission scale thingy, whatever the heck that means. And this being low season, we were about the only ones there. Except for about 15 retired folks with Elderhostel. Neeraj and I tried to do as much exploration of this place as possible, since our departure was scheduled for early the next morning. So, we took a walk about the grounds. Or at least we tried to. The primary forest was restricted for private tours only and it was too late in the day to take a private tour. So we were left with the much smaller secondary forest, which to our chagrin was not very accessible either. The park attendant there basically restricted us to a straight gravel road that ran for a few hundred meters. That was much fun. So we went back to the room to rest the aforementioned sore parts. Then we met Iliana. Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. She works at Selva Verde and spoke perfect American English. Probably because she grew up in California, but that´s beside the point. She came by and talked with us as we had our dinner in the empty dining hall, and then we were graced by her presence again later as we had a few cordials at the bar. And that´s about it. Quick clarification for Neeraj`s girlfriend Rupa (earmuffs for the rest of you). Iliana is no Rupa. Believe me. I just had nothing more exciting to write about than a decently cute lady who we spoke to for about 5 minutes in total. We were THAT bored. Wednesday, September 7th We woke up this morning at 6am to go on a free birdwatching tour with one of the guides. As expected, we were the only people on the tour. So we had customized service. Among the more impressive sightings were a toucan, a couple of kingfishers, and other random birds that we don't remember the names of. Later in the morning, we went kayaking this morning on the Class 2 Sarapiqui river. Neeraj has never kayaked before, and I`ve been a few times. But before you get some amazingly glamourous imagery in your head of us doing rolls and hot dogging it in the rapids or anything like that, I should make a few minor clarifications about this kayak. Firstly, we were in a 2-person kayak. Secondly, the kayak was inflatable. They call it a ducky kayak. I think of it more as an inflatable canoe. But it was all good since neither of us had ever been in anything other than a raft over Class 2 rapids. Again, we were treated to customized personalized service, since we were the only two people on this trip with our guide. Our guide David gave us little to no instruction at all too, which I particularly liked. David reminded me of Lou Diamond Phillips. Or Benjamin Bratt. Or a cross between the two. Along the way, Lou/Benji took us on a quick meandering through the woods to find some poisonous frogs. He caught a few really cool ones - a red one with blue legs called the Blue Jeans frog and a camouflage green and black one called the Sgt. Slaughter frog (okay - I don't remember what the real name was). W got to hold them and cuddle them and call them our own. They're poisonous but it's safe as long as we didn't lick them or rub them against any open wounds. Which was a bummer since I wanted to have a distance frog-spitting contest with Neeraj. Oh well, next time... After a quick lunch, we were driven in our luxury vehicular transport (a 20 year old four door ratty pick-up truck) to our next hotel, which was another private reserve called Sueno Azul. This place could have been really cool, except that it was virtually deserted. It`s two in the afternoon and even the reception fellow was at a loss for what we could do for the remainder of the evening. Looking at the brochure for the place, we saw this huge man-made pool that is filled by a natural waterfall and figure that perhaps we should head over there to find people. Since there is no way to easily get there at this hour, we embark on a one hour hike on a gravel road. The place is deserted. So deserted that the fellow who maintains the area comes up to us and strikes up a conversation (though he speaks no English) because he`s bored out of his mind. We take a dip and then head over with this fellow to the butterfly garden that he also maintains, where we get to see all sorts of pupae, larvae, and all of those other icky and slimy and gooey stages that a butterfly goes through before becoming a butterfly. The neatest part of this excursion? We rode a tractor back to the lodge. Thursday, September 8th This morning we begin our 2-day/1-night rafting adventure down the Class 3/4 Pacuare River. On the trip with us were a couple from a Barcelona business school, a married couple who run a restaurant and store in Florida, and six ex-Enron older fellas who get together for an extended weekend every year for a guy`s weekend out of sorts. This is their 12th year doing this, and they`re just loads and loads of high hilarity and are full of stories of their drunken misadventures in the past. Through the course of conversation, it turned out that one of those guys has spent the last year and a half in Indianapolis (where my brother lives) and they both used to frequent the same place (BW3) and play the NTN trivia game all the time. They even recognized each other`s NTN names. Small world. After having breakfast and riding in a bus seemingly in the middle of nowhere for 3 hours, we finally arrived to the put in for the rafting trip. The six fellas in one raft, the other six in the second raft. The other raft also had an innertube that they dragged behind the raft for someone to attempt to ride out. "Attempt" is the key word here, as it didn´t take long for the first guy on the innertube to get tossed. I was very jealous - I WANNA RIDE THE INNERTUBE!!! Today`s rafting adventure only consisted of one hour of Class 3 rapids. Along the way, we passed by many of the campsites of the other rafting companies. And then we arrived to the Pacuare Lodge where we were staying. Boy this was luxury. A bungalow for every 2 people, complete with fully functional bathroom. The kitchen was amazing and appointed with extremely nice cooking appliances. The lawn was meticulously manicured. Unbelievable. To kill some time while most of the others went on a canopy tour set up here, a few of us went for a short jungle hike to a couple of waterfalls for a swim and a waterfall massage. It had rained extremely heavily last night (which made for a much better and faster first day of rafting by the way), so our waterfalls were more than mere trickles and were powerful enough that we had trouble even staying underneath the waterfall to get the waterfall massage. But that didn`t keep me or Neeraj from trying. Our guide Laura remarked that we were like little kids. Dinner this evening was exquisite and by far the best meal that I`ve had so far: beef tenderloin, cashew rice, and some steamed vegetables with a few glasses of red wine. Even our dessert plates were decorated, just as you`d find in a fancy restaurant. Even breakfast the next morning was sans the black beans and rice. And yet, we were in the middle of nowhere without even electricity. Led by the six older fellas, we all proceeded to the bar and drank the place out of beer, vodka, and tequila. Slowly, everyone retired and went to sleep... before 11pm. When the guys realized this the next morning, they quickly realized that this was the earliest any of them had ever gone to bed on any of their prior 12 excursions. Even so, one of them was so drunk that he fell in a ditch at some point and woke up in a dirty bed with an extremely badly bruised/broken toe. Friday, September 9th At first, I thought to myself that this was way too luxurious for my style. I thought differently this morning when I woke up completely and utterly refreshed. The pampering had had its intended effect. So I showered up and headed to the dining bungalow, and WHAAAA! There's a huge 4 or 5 foot long venomous Bushwacker snake right there on the ground in front of me. And now that I've jumped away, it hasn't moved an inch. And it appears that its head is propped up on a rock. And there are people inside the dining bungalow laughing at me. Nice prank. But I want to see my brother's reaction. After all, night before last, he freaked out over a crunchy junebug on the OUTSIDE of the window screen. This should be good. So I walk with him from our bungalow to the dining bungalow making sure that he passes right by the snake, and ummm... nothing. Doesn't even notice it. So I call out to him to stop and motion over and he's like - "Hey, there's a snake on the ground." Today is the fun day of rafting: all Class 3s and 4s. Yippee! The first half of the day was largely uneventful in our boat, as we were mostly turning around to watch the six guys sing songs and halfheartedly paddle out of synch. After lunch, Neeraj and I swapped with a couple of the older gentlemen who weren`t of the mind to get tossed from the boat. In the end we were very happy that they offered to do this. For one of the rapids, we all stood up on the raft in a circle huddle, and attempted to ride out the wave. It didn`t work, and three of us were tossed from the boat. For another rapid, we headed straight for a rock wall as our guide yelled "No brakes! No brakes!". I got tossed with Neeraj on this one, and found myself under the raft for what seemed like 90 seconds, but in reality was a little more than 5 seconds. I was actually pretty calm and collected while under water, and I remember thinking to myself that I just might want to find out where the edge of this raft is because breathing is important too. And seemingly, every which way I went, all I found was more raft. Until 90 seconds later of course (or 5 seconds if you want to believe the guide). The guide told me that he could see me pushing up on the raft floor and that I traversed the raft a couple of times before finding the edge. All good fun. After the rafting run, we said our goodbyes, exchanged e-mail addresses, and headed on our way. The fellas were heading down to a town on the Caribbean coast called Cahuita, and we were headed back to the lovely Sueno Azul, where we would again have absolutely nothing to do. So I picked up a book there called "Ragtime in Simla" by Barbara Cleverly. I don`t recommend it. It`s your standard murder mystery with plot twists and so forth, but it was set in early 1900`s India. Every major character was a Britisher, except of course for the fellow who came out of the woodworks to be the ultimate villian - the seemingly innocuous (and very Indian) workplace confidante of the female suspects. Just left a bad taste in my mouth. Okay, that`s week one in a nutshell. I`ll write more when I get home and let you know all about week two. Tidbits: 1. I`m thinking of starting my own guy`s extended weekend (3-5 days) out type of groups. I`m not looking for any level of drunken debauchery here that these guys partake in, but I think it`d be neat to have a standing weekend trip where a bunch of us go hiking/camping/rafting/biking/spelunking/whatever to somewhere where few or none of us have been. And you rotate planning ownership among the group from year to year. Let me know if you`re interested. 2. For whatever reason, virtually every tourist that we`ve come across from the US has been from the West Coast. My theory is that East Coasters go the the Caribbean for vacation, while West Coasters go to Mexico or Central America for vacation. Note that I`m still working on the refinements of this particular theory. 3. Black beans and rice and scrambled eggs are the standard breakfast here, as Zach and I found that a single pancake and porridge were the standard breakfast in Peru. In both cases, it was very good and filling the first few days, but gets very old very quickly. I want my Kashi. 4. The standard phrase that everyone says here is "Pura Vida", which is the national "hello" or "goodbye" of Costa Rica, and literally translates to "Pure Life". I suppose this is akin to "Hang Loose" in Hawaii and "No problem, Mon" in Jamaica. 5. Does anyone know how to say, "Get your brown ass a calling card so you can call your lovely, spectacular, magnificent, loving girlfriend" in Spanish? Rupa would like to know. 6. Any serious coffee buffs out there? I'm thinking about hauling back some nice beans, and just wanted to know if anyone was nuts about coffee enough to want some.

The Peruvian Misadventures of Zach and Paraag, Season Finale

2004-09-20T18:19:00.000-04:00

I left out a very important detail from my first e-mail. We were not alone during our rafting trip - we had the company of billions and billions and billions of mosquitoes. And just like most folks and chicken, the mosquitoes proved to prefer white meat over dark meat. I, for one, was not complaining. Poor Sack and Colon though - their faces and hands were littered with mosquito bites. Zach even had a mosquito bite on his palm. Unreal. So, my last story ended on Friday, the last day of our rafting. We were about to embark on the greatest hiking adventure known to man, a 7 day / 6 night hike through the Andean mountains, culminating with the Inka Trail to Macchu Picchu. Sounds exciting just writing about it. Funny scary story... on my flight from Atlanta to Lima, I had an exit row/bulkhead seat on the aisle, with a flight attendant seat across from me for takeoffs and landings. This friendly gentleman asked me about my upcoming trip and and the hike and asked if I had been training for it. I had to think about my training regimen and it boiled down to this: Diet: Eat healthy. But if you decide to stray from time to time, this is okay, since you can make it up by exercising more and burning the calories. Exercise: Just do it. But in the end, it's really the thought that counts. Having the full intention to go downstairs to the little condo gym as soon as you got home and run a few miles on the treadmill is half the battle. By that logic, thinking about it twice was the whole battle. It's simple algebra. Net: I was in the worst shape of my life and had gained a good 10-15 pounds or more since moving to the New York area. And after being asked about my training regimen, I really began to get a little concerned about my ability to make it. Friday, August 27th (continued) Friday night, our tour guide, Oscar, for our hike came by the hotel to give us a briefing on our trip. We soon learned that the Salkantay portion of the hike (days 1-3) normally goes via a route that reaches 5000 meters, and that there was snow above 4200m. So we would be going via an alternate route that reaches a max of 4300m instead. This alternate route was clearly not right near Salkantay mountain from the map that Oscar was showing us. Unfortunately, we were having a bit of trouble understanding Oscar, and he was having a difficult time understanding us. So, as he was explaining that the main route was under half a metre of snow, we were understanding that we would be hiking through a half metre of snow. And we were getting a bit scared and feeling a tad slight bit on the unprepared side. We also learned that we had been upgraded to a "private" tour meaning that it would be the two of us and an army of attendants: tour guide, cook, waiter, horsemen, porters, etc.. "Private tour" was fancy-speak for "no one else signed up for the tour". Immediately following the briefing, we ran over to the Q'ente office to set the record straight and find out what we were getting ourselves into. They assured us that we would not be hiking through half a metre of snow. But due to the mis-information and a smidgeon of language barrier, we were still a little on edge, and unsuccessfully set out to find some waterproof hiking boots and waterproof pants in the town. Dejected and quite a bit on the apprehensive side, we returned to the hotel and attempted to go to sleep. By the way, at the Q'ente office, I learned that the fabric-lined ceiling would not have met fire code in the US. Thanks Zach. Saturday, August 28th Neither of us slept at all last night. No sleep for me because I was worried sick about the upcoming hike. And no sleep for Zach because he was just sick - I think he may have spent more of the night in the bathroom than in the bed. After a mild breakfast and a morning on the crapper, Zach declared that he was ready to go on this hike. Zach is one of those people who will rarely call it quits and will do everything he can to gut it out instead (like running a marathon with an injured foot). So, only he knew at this time what he was feeling. And I knew that he had his mind made up already and that there would be no changing it, so off we went on our expedition. On the ride to the hiking trail, we met our cook, Rolando, and our waiter/assistant cook, Wilbur, who were riding in the van with us. The first hour or two were on paved roads, but they were still quite windy since we were traveling up and down mountains, and it culminated in a small little town where Rolando and Wilbur hopped out to buy our food for the trip. Zach was still not feeling so well, so he looked for a bathroom. Upon examining the condition of the bathroom, he left the bathroom area and looked for somewhere else to attempt to spew his guts. The next two hours of driving were mostly uphill, but more importantly, on a very unpaved and narrow road. We believe this road may see traffic only once or twice a week because it was in very poor condition, and pretty much weaved in and out of the local farmer's lands. It was also only wide enough for one vehicle, so in the rare occasions that there were two vehicles on the road going in opposite directions, my guess is that the smaller vehicle would have a lot of backing up to do. We finally reached our launchpoint around lunchtime, a location which pulled double duty as the local elementary school's front yard. And all the kids and locals were out and about to stare at the foreigners. I figured that I blended in with Andean folks a bit better (being short and of darker skin tone), so I opted to turn and stare at Zach too. What strange, tall, and ugly untinted folk stands before me? Must be the devil! This last portion of the drive really took it's toll on Zach and he was quite visibly not feeling well at all. After visiting the local outhouse (I got a picture of that), he lay down in the van and moaned and groaned for a while. I mustered enough Spanish from my high school memory banks to explain to Antonio, the elderly van driver, what was the problem and he was convinced that he knew exactly what to do - Zach spent the next ten minutes lying on the ground with Antonio holding his feet straight up in the air and breathing deeply (I got a picture of that too). Oscar and Antonio both declared a small victory when some semblance of color returned to Zach's face. And the locals got a good show out of it. After having some lunch, Oscar and I walked about 1/2 kilometer to the nearest phone to call and talk to the Q'ente office about options. I wanted for both Zach and I to return to Cusco, and just do the 4 day hike instead. However, since we were the only tourists, this would mean that the crew would be disbanded and would likely not get paid at all. So, Oscar was trying to convince me that Zach should return alone and rejoin us for the Inka Trail, and I would do the first part of the hike alone with the crew. As we were walking back to the elementary school discussing options, Zach pleasantly surprised us and met us halfway, declaring his wellness and that we would go on with our hike. Fortunately, this solved the dilemma at hand. We hiked for two or two and half hours straight uphill. And I really mean straight up hill. There was no real trail either - it appeared as though we were hiking through people's property. Rolando and Wilbur made us look like fools, since they were virtually running up the hill with backpacks, whereas we were huffing and puffing each step of the way. With very high altitude (we were going from 3400m to 3700m or so), it really doesn't take much to get winded. The sun was out as well, so we got hot quickly. Weather and temperature in the mountains is a funny thing - when the sun is out and unhindered by pesky clouds, you feel the heat from the sunrays. As soon as cloud interrupts, the cool breeze becomes a chilling wind. Throughout the trip, we were cycling through layers of clothing at a very rapid pace. After what seemed like an eternity of hiking, we reached our campgrounds. Rolando, Wilbur, and the pack-horses had long passed us, so all of the tents were set up and ready when we got there. Quick aside - when signing up for the trip, neither Zach nor I had any intention of playing it pansy and having an entourage of folk at our beckon to do everything for us. I knew that I wasn't quite in the shape that I'd need to be to be able to carry my own backpack at this altitude, but that's all I was expecting: a packhorse for my backpack and some food. We had a dining tent, a kitchen tent, food galore, a bathroom tent, and our sleeping tent. Clearly, this is a large quantity of tents, so we clearly needed a tentmaster, Lucio Leon. And to carry all of this stuff, we had four packhorses and the dude who owned and operated the horses, Mario. And since we would pretty much be out in the middle of nowhere far away from civilization, Q'ente hires an additional "emergency" horse to walk with us, complete with its own attendant Pedro (who doubles as Mario's extremely arthritic father-in-law). You got it, counting tour guide Oscar, that's 6 people to attend to us. The campsite this evening was stunning - we were on a flat area protruding out of the mountainside that jutted out enough to give a nice wide panoramic view of the landscape below and beyond. Really just wonderful. There was a near full moon as well, rendering our headlamps useless and giving the entire place a glow of sorts. Just stunning. Sunday, August 29th Overnight, Zach got up and helped fertilize the landscape a wee little bit, so this morning his stomach was feeling much much much better. From what I could gather, the hike yesterday wasn't the greatest feeling in the world for him, but he tried his best to complain as little as possible, and succeeded. After breakfast, we had a nice leisurely 2-3 hour stroll along the mountainside, heading away from the inhabited and farmed valley and towards the higher altitude mountains inside. The stroll was mostly flat, and went along without issue. Even so, it didn't take long for Rolando, Wilbur, and company to race past us and have the lunchsite ready by the time we arrived. It appeared as though this would be the standard pattern for the coming days: we get up and start on our way, the staff clean up, pack up, race by us, and set back up by the time we reach the next stop. This really was a serious blow to our manhood. Having emptied his stomach out, Zach was struggling at this point more from lack of energy and probably some minor dehydration, and less from his churning stomach. By lunchtime, exhaustion had set in and some rest was in order. The temperature today was definitely a bit chillier than yesterday, owing partly due to the higher elevations and partly due to the cloud cover sky. Amazingly enough, even in these steeper mountains, there were still locals out and about - but only tending to livestock, not farming these lands. After lunch and some rest, we started on our way again. Unfortunately for us, the second half of the day resembled the hike from the previous day - mostly uphill. In fact, it was so steep that we were mostly doing switchbacks to get up the mountain (a trail that meanders right and left up a mountain for less steepiosity, but at the expense of length). As we rose up the mountain, it was getting colder and colder, and there was even a light dusting of snow on the ground. As the elevation increased, the air got thinner, and Zach took a turn for the worse. We later realized that he wasn't getting enough oxygen, but at the time all we knew was that he was experiencing splitting headaches. So, at long last, the emergency horse came to the rescue and Pedro and Gringo (the horse's name) were put to good use. The last stretch was particularly trying - very very steep, and I was already exhausted and sore - I was literally stopping every 25 meters to catch my breath. The top couldn't have come soon enough, and at long last we reached a plateau and a campsite waiting for us at about 4100 meters (about 13,500 feet). Soon after arriving, it began to snow and the wind picked up mightily. Even with every stitch of clothing we could manage to get on, we were still freezing. And yet the feet of Pedro and Mario were managing to get by with only sandals. You would think that they must have been suffering from a serious case of frostbite. It's possible, but my guess is that they had no feeling in their feet at all, coupled with an extremely thick layer of skin that had been building up since birth. Tonight was hell night for Zach. His description of his headache in his own words: "I feel like someone is driving a nail through my skull with a sledgehammer". I've never experienced a nail through my skull with a sledgehammer, but I could gather that this was probably not a good feeling. He even managed to mention that this was more pain than when he had to pass a kidney stone. Ouch. Very quickly, we set up a mattress pad and sleeping bag in the dining tent for Zach so that he could lie down in between attempting to eat. As his head got worse and worse, we decided to try some oxygen. Two 3 minute doses of oxygen later, Zach felt better. Then we got him working on some very deep breathing to see if that would work, and it helped a little more. From our collective deductive reasoning, we reasoned that Zach was in such good athletic shape that his normal resting heartbeat and breathing pattern on normal (to us) elevation was so low that this was actually causing him to have more problems in this higher elevation, especially in light of being dehydrated and energy-less from the stomach virus. And to add insult to injury, when dinner was ready and Zach had to get up, he stumbled head first into the gas lamp and burned a rather sizable upside down triangle between his eyebrows (you should be able to make out the burn mark in the pictures later in the week). That night, we froze to death, except without the dying part. But it was pretty darn cold. I distinctly remember getting up because I had to go to the bathroom, but I really didn't want to go outside since I knew it was going to be very cold. So I actually sat there in my sleeping bag for a good half an hour trying to convince myself that I could hold it until morning or come up with some alternative option even though I knew that there were none. Monday, August 30th It was cold. And we really didn't want to get out of the tent at 7:00 in the morning. After procrastinating as long as we could (only about 15 minutes - the staff is very persistent), we packed up and headed over to the dining tent for our standard breakfast: a pancake, a bowl of porridge, tea, and fruit. Oscar informed us that by 11pm or so last night (we had long before gone to bed) the snow stopped and the clouds disappeared, giving a phenomenal view of the night sky and Salkantay mountain in the distance. In the pictures I sent, there's a group picture with Oscar on the emergency horse Gringo - and in the background is Salkantay mountain. Looking at it this morning made us mildly disappointed that we had to go through the alternate route and not be close up by the mountain for this 3 day portion of our hike. After breakfast, Oscar advised us of the perils that lay ahead - we would be climbing to 4300m to the mountain pass before descending rapidly into the valley below. As we left the campsite, Oscar decided that we would be best served to go down by about 150m first to climb up the other side of the valley to get to the pass. We couldn't really argue with his choice, but we were less than thrilled. During this morning's hike, Zach did pretty well up to the mountain pass. We took it slow and steady and therefore didn't have to stop too frequently at all. Once we got to the pass, the scenery was stunning in all directions - lots of snow-peaked mountains, and views of the valleys on both sides. But it was windy and cold, so it didn't take much cajoling to get us going. Fortunately, the climb portion of the day was over, and the rest was downhill - but there was a lot of downhill to go. And again, Zach's headache got the better of him, and Gringo was put to use once again (and this time I got pictures!). :-) At this point, Oscar and I decided that if Zach didn't feel better by the morning, we would call it quits on the hike and head to the nearest town (still 1.5 days away) and pharmacy. Another dose of oxygen after lunch, and 4 Advils later (for Zach), we continued on our journey. We walked a good 2 kilometers on flat land along Canal Inka - an aqueduct that was built in ground by the Incas to channel water. The channel was lined with rocks along the sides and bottom and, for the most part, had withstood the test of time. An hour or so later, we passed by our first real Incan ruins - this one was a trading outpost that was built to manage the local traders. These outposts were built wherever valleys met, and watch towers were built and manned in the mountain peaks to ensure that all trade was regulated. There were all sorts of very interesting engineering features that Oscar pointed out to us, from trapezoidal doorways to help resist earthquakes to the rock extensions from the walls to tie the grass thatch roof to. Initially, we were supposed to camp here for the evening, but we were about a 30 minute hike from Huayllabamba (the "Huay" was deemed excessive and dropped for the movie "La Bamba"), which is the hometown of Rolando and Wilbur (our campsite was Rolando's backyard). Huayllabamba also serves as the first campsite for many tour groups on the Inka Trail. By this time, Zach was feeling quite well as well - I think the 4 Advil did the trick. I know what you're thinking, and I'm thinking the same thing: why the heck would you take 4 Advils when the recommended dosage is 1 tablet? I don't know. I just work here. Overall, we had hiked something like 13 kilometers today, down 150m, up 350m, and then down 1,300m to Huayllabamba (at 3,000m). My legs were killing me. Downhill really takes a toll on your knees and quads - quite a work-out indeed. Try it sometime if you don't believe me. That night, there was a festival in Huayllabamba and a band had come to town to play music. We soon learned that festival songs all sound the exact same - Oscar told us that all of the songs start out the same, but the middle is different. We had to take his word for it, because we couldn't tell a bit. Imagine listening to a Wilson Philips song or an Air Supply song over and over and over. And then take out the vocals and replace it with loud brass instruments that are, at times, out of sync. It's just that annoying after a while. We also quickly learned that festivals are a good excuse for the locals to get wasted. They did. Tuesday, August 31th We woke up and took our own sweet time this morning. We were waiting for the porters to come and bring a fresh supply of food for the remainder of the journey. From here to Macchu Picchu, pack horses are not allowed on the trail as the government tries to maintain strict control over the number of people on the trail (500 per day) as well as manage the cleanliness of the trail. And so, we would be bidding adieu to our horses and Mario and Pedro. We had heard from others that prior to government intervention a few years back, the trail was filthy and overcrowded and the controls had really helped to preserve the trail. After breakfast, Oscar and the others got a soccer game going - they actually had a good size field up here in the mountains. What a stunning backdrop to boot! I didn't get too much exercise while playing, since I was stuck at goalie for virtually the entire match. But Zach was out and running with the rest of them as best he could. This was a very good thing. Finally, we had lunch and were introduced to our new porters: Pablo, Juan Carlos, Antonio, and another fellow named Pedro (who we promptly named Pedro 2). So, now we had a crew of 8 people to tend to me and Zach. We were royalty. The thing is, 7 or 8 is basically the minimum number of staff per group, just to carry the basics. From there, the rule of thumb is to add 1 porter for every additional 2 tourists. Since Zach was feeling so well, he opted to continue with the trip instead of heading out to civilization, the town of Ollantaytambo, which was about a day's hike away. Though he was feeling great, we weren't sure he was completely out of the woods, since we were at a drastically lower elevation than the night before. The agenda for this afternoon was an uphill hike for about 4-5 hours to go up approximately 850 meters. But we were both feeling really, really good, and made it up in 2.5 hours flat. In fact, we beat the porters up the hill, as well as Oscar. Of course, Oscar was weighed down by his backpack today, but we surprised them all by only stopping when Oscar needed a breather. In fact, I think we probably gained a little bit of respect from the fellas. As the rest of the tourists made their way up the hill and to the campsite, it was strikingly clear that we would no longer be able to enjoy the scenery in absolute solitude. But that's cool - after so many days on our own, I was ready to see and meet other people. Zach was getting on my nerves and he smelled funny. Wednesday, September 1st We got up early this morning to get on the trail before anyone else did. Oscar knew that we would have an advantage with being a small group, and was trying his best to take the opportunity to ensure that we weren't subjected to the clutter of tourists. We had another 400m uphill to get to the first pass of the trail at 4200m, and it can get really slow and cumbersome to have to continually try and walk around people who were going slowly. The scenery along this trail was already a ton more spectacular than the 3 day Salkantay portion, and we could clearly see why all of the tourists flocked to this trail. Even Oscar agreed that the scenery on this hike was the best around. There was the sun, some livestock, snow-capped craggy mountains, valleys, a village, and our trail back to the bottom all in view from the same point. I think Zach took something like 30 pictures of all of the different viewpoints, and a number of duplicates. At this point, I was just happy that he was feeling enthused enough to be taking way too many pictures to begin with. We reached the first pass before the majority of porters and in front of Oscar again. After relaxing a bit, we had our first sighting of "The Leprechaun", or at least that's what we called him. He wasn't dressed in green either, he was in all black. But he had this beret on and longer than necessary sideburns, and you could smell his cologne from a mile and half away. Okay, the cologne doesn't add to the leprechaun-ness, but I couldn't really leave that part out now, could I? Throughout the remainder of the trip, we passed The Leprechaun and he passed us - many, many times. And each time, we laughed to ourselves, as I am doing now. In true Zach style, he took 3 pictures of the guy. Descending down flagstone steps takes a serious toll on the knees, and takes a lot of time (for me at least). It didn't take long before my quads were screaming and my knees aching. The porters passed us pretty quickly as they ran, no... glided down the steps and into the cloudy murkiness below. The visibility on the other side of the pass wasn't the greatest, and there was a light mist in the air. After descending about 700 meters, we stopped for lunch at 3500m and relaxed for a bit. I admit - I was playing the part of a pansy a bit, since my knees were just killing me. But the next section was uphill, so it would be easier on the knees. Before long, we were on our way - there was a nice stopping point halfway up at a small set of ruins called Runkurakay. I don't recall what the significance of this place was. My mind was elsewhere. I think there must have been a heavy dairy product of some sort in our lunch, because I'm lactose intolerant and I really had to go and bad. And going out in the bushes just wasn't going to cut it. I continued up the hill, and was extremely frustrated to reach what I thought was the second pass on at least three different occasions. When the second pass finally arrived (at 3900m), it came and went quickly for me, as I was again off to the races. Oscar had informed me that the next set of bathrooms was at the next campsite (these campsites had nice constructed bathrooms instead of holes dug in the ground), and I was determined to get there as quickly as possible. After a descent of 300m, I passed the camera to Zach, who with Oscar headed to a beautifully preserved set of ruins called Sayaqmarka a mere 20 meters away. I virtually ran for the next 15 minutes to get to the campsite and achieve my relief. The porters were all surprised to see me so soon, as I waved hello and goodbye in a blur running by on my beeline to the crapper. Now you might be asking why I have opted to go into such exquisite detail of the resultant of my lack of tolerance for lactose. No real reason. I just have nothing better to talk about at the moment. Sue me. Thursday, September 2nd I slept horribly. I lost my dinner last night and spent most of the night awake, and to and fro the crapper. Fortunately for me, the crapper was very close by. When it was time to get up, I couldn't. I was exhausted, completely out of energy, a tad bit dizzy, a mild headache, and my stomach was still queasy. I just couldn't muster up the energy to move. But we still had to hike up to the third and final mountain pass today (at 3650m) and then down to our final campsite at WinayWayna (at 2650m). I don't particularly remember much of this day - I just remember it taking a really really long time, probably because I was stopping a lot. I do know that the trail passed through two tunnels carved by the Incas through stone because there was simply no other way to go around. My guess is that had I felt better, I probably would have appreciated this a bit more. And perhaps I would have discussed this appreciation a little more with you, my readers. I guess you'll just have to go for yourselves. At WinayWayna, I went to sleep in the tent, while Zach and Oscar went on another short trip to some nearby ruins. This makes the second set of ruins that I missed. However, I was able to experience most of it, thanks to the 200 or so pictures that Zach took. After a brief sleep, I felt much much better. Hot showers were available here, so we indulged of course. It took quite a while to scrape off the caked on layers of sunscreen and mosquito repellent. Yecch. I also learned that the electrical wiring for the hot water heating source would not have met NIOSH safety standards in the US. Thanks Zach. Friday, September 3rd We got up at 4:45 this morning so that we could be the first ones into Macchu Picchu. The park rangers open the gate at 5:30, and Oscar was determined to be first. We were. As soon as they opened the gate, we ran for a good half hour straight to be the first ones to the ruins. This would permit us to see the ruins without the plethora of tourists who would very soon descend on the site. From the Inka Trail, the entrance to the site was through Inti Punku, the sun gate. On the summer solstice every year (December 22nd - remember, it's the Southern hemisphere), the sun rises directly through this gate and hits the sun temple in Macchu Picchu. And the sun gate was an excellent place to get a postcard picture. For the next few hours, Oscar gave us a guided tour of the place. It was quite phenomenal. Apparently, the stone used here is extremely hard on the official hardness scale (something like an 8 out of 10). And the Incas carved these stones to perfect alignment to build the structure, since they had no real mortar. Macchu Picchu was built atop a mountain that is wrapped around on three sides by the Urubamba river. This offered the Incas excellent protection from enemy invaders. In fact, the city was only known to the royalty and clerics, and was vacated when the Spanish conquistadors arrived. The Spaniards never found Macchu Picchu. From far below, the city is virtually impossible to see as well. The site itself appears as though the area was literally shaved clean to build a city. It is just seemingly coming out of absolutely nowhere. By the way, there are very few artifacts at all located at the Macchu Picchu site. Hiram Bingham "discovered" the city in the early 1900s and took everything back with him to Yale University. Currently, the Peruvian government is trying to get Yale to return them, but no luck so far. Stupid Ivy League universities. Before long, we were exhausted from lack of sleep and the many days of hiking. We were ready to sleep in a proper bed. So we headed to the town of Aguas Calientes on the first possible bus to see if we could get an early train back to Cusco. We soon learned that we could not. Aguas Calientes is named for some naturally occurring hot springs that many choose to relax in. Having nothing better to do, we decided to check it out. These naturally occurring hot springs appeared to be nothing more than a glorified kiddie pool. We did not partake. So what else could we do? We headed to a smoky pool hall to play some pool with Oscar. Except that the pool tables were actually snooker tables, but we were playing with the standard-sized balls (snooker tables have much much smaller pockets). Even funnier were the posters hanging on the wall - most were of skimpy (and mildly unattractive I might add) bikini models from girlie mags. But one poster was of, I kid you not, Leonardo di Caprio. I'll leave it to you to come up with your own joke. The train ride home was long and boring and for the most part uneventful. Except that I lost my fleece somewhere along the way. And it wasn't just any ordinary fleece (and no, brother Neeraj, it was not an Old Navy performance fleece either), it was the fleece liner to my American Eagle ski jacket that I had at home. So now I'm bummed. Oh yeah - at one point, we actually did a pair of switchbacks on the train itself (forward, backward, then forward again), presumably to get up the mountain a little further or something. Very strange. Back at Hostal RumiPunku, we were relieved to finally be back in civilization. And we were anxious to get some food reminiscent of home. Somewhere along the way, all of the food started tasting the same. It seemed as though Peruvian food used the same spices in absolutely everything: cinnamon, oregano, and cloves. Don't get me wrong - it tasted good. But not good enough to only have this taste for every meal for a straight week. So we went to a restaurant to have a Western burger. Unfortunately, it tasted the same as everything else! Ack. Saturday, September 4th Had a wonderful wonderful sleep last night. Just exquisite. And relaxing. Very nice indeed. We were heading back to Lima this afternoon. In the Cusco airport, we met up with "The Leprechaun" and chatted for a bit. Apparently, he was from New Zealand. I guess we were a tad off on that one, eh? After arriving to Lima, we had a lot of time to kill - it was 3pm or so, and our flight home didn't leave until midnight. So, we headed back to Miraflores to eat at a restaurant we had eaten at two weeks before - because the food was good, and because the waitress was really pretty. Well okay - one of those reasons was Zach's rationale for returning, and the other was mine. We also both bought some insanely cheap original artwork from local artists there. We probably got ripped off, but it was still a ton cheaper than anything to be found in the States. On our way back to the airport, we took a detour to go to the P&G Lima plant. Zach's brand new plant manager had just been the plant manager at this plant in Lima, and told Zach to swing by, no matter what the hour or day, and someone would be able to give us a tour. Well, security and the shift supervisor at the plant didn't feel the same way. So they called the new plant manager at home on a Saturday night, and Zach had to talk and explain his way out of this one. And then they kept our business cards. We left thinking that the first thing we needed to do when we got back to work was to talk to our own plant managers and explain the whole thing, just in case the new Lima plant manager was pissed. As far as I know, we are both still employed. Alas, we have come to end of my tale. I hope you enjoyed it and didn't fall asleep too much. And Zach, hopefully I didn't miss anything or humiliate you too much. Until next time, adieu. Next time may not be that far off - my brother and I are headed to Costa Rica for a week in December. And for those of you who have had the pleasure of meeting my brother, you know that I'll have plenty of stories coming from that one. As always, please let me know if you want me to add someone else or subtract you from the distribution list. I'd hate to be categorized as spam. -Paraag Tidbits: 1. Peruvian establishments accepted both the local currency (Soles) as well as US Dollars. My recommendation is to always go with the local currency, to ensure that you are not subject to the whim of the establishment with regards to exchange rate. For the most part, people wouldn't accepted bills that had the slightest rip in them or that were old or worn. And older coins that had become a bit more rounded and smooth were also not acceptable to many. I think I saw nicer US Dollars there than I ever have over here. 2. Brand names often do not cross borders well. Our guide for this portion, Oscar, sported "N_gga" brand sunglasses, as in The Chappelle's Show's "N_gga Please" brand cereal flakes. I took a picture of the glasses for your viewing pleasure. Another example? Bimbo - a bakery company like Entenmann's or Wonder or Pepperidge Farms. Every morning, we'd get up and say, "Ain't nothing like some Bimbo cakes and Anis Tea to get your day started" (Anis is a type of herbal tea, that we purposefully mis-pronounced for the humour of this phrase). 3. What is up with European guys and capri pants? That's clearly a fashion statement that didn't need to be made. We must have come across at least 5-6 guys wearing these, and every time it took every ounce of energy to keep from making fun of them out loud. So we made fun of them to each other. And now I am making fun of them to you. Isn't life grand? 4. In Huayllabamba, Rolando's nephew (couldn't have been more than 3 or 4) was crawling all over the place (up on rocks, in and around a 4 foot sink, etc.) and at one point got hold of a knife and was carrying it around. No one seemed to be concerned at all. My sister's house, on the other hand, is completely baby-proof - from cabinet latches to gates to padding on every conceivable furniture edge, and so forth. Now I can completely understand why she is doing this, but certainly at some point we do more harm than good with childproofing everything. At some points, kids have to learn by experiencing. At some point, we've sanitized our lives so much that we can't live in the real world anymore. Ever wonder why the locals aren't the ones getting stomach viruses or blisters or colds or flus or anything like that? They've built up their immunities. I'm sure that I'll continue the trend and fall right in line with everyone else (a la childproofing and whatnot), but it makes you wonder. Or at least, it made me wonder. 5. If you want more info about our hiking trip, you can visit www.qente.com. For the most part, I would recommend them. From what I could gather, they paid the porters well (some outfits pay extremely poorly) and they were a class company. And the gear was top-notch. We had top quality tents, top quality sleeping bags, and top quality mattress pads. They certainly didn't skimp on price or quality.

The Peruvian Misadventures of Zach and Paraag, episode 1

2004-09-11T18:19:00.000-04:00

I've been at it again, though it has been a while since I've last written in this forum. But true to my word, my next travails have indeed been to the land of the Pervs, ummm... Peruvians. But this time, I did not go it alone. My Buddy Zach joined me to keep me company. My Buddy Zach and I are good friends from our short time living in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, home of everyone's favorite talk-show host, Rush Limbaugh. Yes, I do hold the honor of having lived in the hometown of His Largeness (or is it His Annoyingness?) in great esteem. I should have a plaque on my wall. Saturday, August 22nd Thanks to my pretty healthy travel schedule while working in P&G Cincinnati Engineering, I was blessed with many Delta Frequent Flyer miles. I finally used them. So, me from Philly this afternoon to Atlanta, then on to Lima. My Buddy Zach was flying from Kansas City to Atlanta, then on to Lima. By now, you are likely wondering why I keep referring to My Buddy Zach as "My Buddy Zach". Normally, I refer to most of my friends as "My friend ", but for some reason, Zach always seems to refer to his friends as "My Buddy ". Which reminds me, of course, of that little kids' toy that used to plug the TV commercial airways non-stop years back - "My Buddy, My Buddy... Wherever I go, he goes...". You know... for that doll (it certainly wasn't an action figure) for little boys. Remember? Okay, fine. That was a tad on the obscure side. But you're a better person for having read through this. Trust me. You'll thank me later. Really. Oh yes... back to the story. Zach's plane from Kansas City had a "mechanical failure" and was cancelled. As we all know, "mechanical failure" is shorthand for "not enough passengers". I'm in a complaining mood at the moment, so humour me. Net: Zach was re-scheduled for a later flight to Atlanta, then to Miami, and then to Lima overnight via American Airlines. So, Zach left me a message with the airline to go on to Lima and he'd meet me at the hotel. Sounds like a foolproof plan to me. Sunday, August 23rd It was not a foolproof plan. I awaken in my hotel room at 5am to a knock on the door. Standing in the doorway is Zach and his little Camelbak backpack. And that's it. His bag was not as fortunate as he to make it to Peru. After unsuccessfully attempting to get a few hours of sleep, we got up and hit the phones to get an answer regarding when to expect Zach's bag. The American Airlines rep at the Lima airport opted to take a laissez-faire "what bag?" approach to helping Zach out. Needless to say, he was a tad on the peeved side. The phone lines were not doing a much better job, so we opted to head back to the airport. We were originally scheduled to leave today to go to Cusco by plane anyway, so the airport wasn't exactly out of our way to begin with. Again, the American Airlines rep was less than helpful. After confirming with Lan Peru that we could move our flight to Cusco out a day, Zach decided to hit the phone lines again. An hour later, Zach had a hoarse voice, 40 Soles ("So-les" = Peruvian currency) less in his pocket, and no better idea what the heck happened to his backpack. At this point, our theory rested on a missed "hand-off" from one airline to the other. Bags? We don't need no stinkin' bags! Zach is about 5-6 inches taller than me, so my clothes were not about to fit him. He was also beginning to get cold since his one pair of shorts wasn't doing a good job in the body heat conservation arena. So we got a taxi and headed over to Miraflores, where we could eat, shop, and get a hotel, not necessarily in that order. Hold a sec, actually it was in that order. How to get to Miraflores? Why, that's simple - just hail the nearest slimy commission-seeking taxi driver you can find. We did rather exceptionally well at finding a slimy taxi driver if I do say so myself. I just did. We had lunch at a very exquisite and romantic restaurant on a pier jutting out into the ocean. Too bad that we weren't quite looking for an exquisite and romantic restaurant. Zach's not that cute. No es el guapo. Funny story (not funny ha-ha, but funny nonetheless)... throughout the trip, Zach tried his best to speak Spanish using the French he had learned in high school and whatever Spanish words he had learned through media and pop culture (think: yo quiero taco bell, rico suave, living la vida loca, etc.). So, he kept commenting "muy guapo" whenever he meant to say that something was very good, which is "muy bien". People looked at him funny for that, and then they would smile because of the big smirk on his face. After lunch, we went shopping, where Zach found much to his chagrin that he is sized a little too large for Andean people. He couldn't find any pants that would fit him. If his bag doesn't show up, he'll be in a world of trouble. We might have to go swipe the clothes from other tourists, a la James Bond, Spaceballs, or any other movie where the protagonists lure unsuspecting clothed beings into their realm only to konk them over the head and steal their threads. Hey, that rhymed. I'm the rapper, he's the DJ. We finally escaped from the slimy taxi driver after checking into the Hotel Nirvana (also spelled Hotel Niervana). It would not be a stretch to say that this was far from a Niervana: the beds were damp, the room was humid and funky-smelly, the toilet handle had to be jiggled to stop flushing, the pool was not quite swim-worthy, and there didn't appear to be any other hotel guests. Be afeared. Be very afeared. Monday, August 24th Went to the airport again. But this time, we went to actually board a plane. I stood in the line for Lan Peru to get our boarding passes to Cusco, while Zach roamed the airport in search of his bag. Miraculously, it appeared - most likely not due to any efforts from the crack team of American Airlines customer service reps stationed in Lima. My theory is that they were just about to open the bag up and divvy the booty (especially the non-Andean-sized pants) when Zach walked in and ruined their plans. And they would have gotten away with it if it weren't for those meddling kids. The Lan Peru line was an adventure unto itself. The line wrapped around itself many times, and well beyond the Tensa-Barriers that they had allocated to this line. With all the people cutting through this way and that way, the lines started blurring more into a mass of confusion, finger-pointing and accusations were flying in many different languages. My guess is that it was probably France's fault. Once we got through this line, we were honoured to stand in another line to pay our airport taxes, and then in another for the security checks to permit us entry into the boarding area warehouse. No real gates. Just a temporary building structure - you board a bus which will take you to your plane. Your takeaway from all of this is simple: Lima sucks. Any good guidebook will tell you the same. In fact, this may not be a bad criterion by which to judge guidebooks when you are looking for a good one. One hour or so later, we were landing in Cusco, a town built in a plateau in the middle of the Andes mountains at a pretty darn high altitude (3300m ~ 11,000 feet ~ 2 miles). You would think that it would be very easy for someone to come down with a case of altitude sickness at this height. You would be right. And that someone was me. It didn't take much exertion to be out of breath (like carrying your bag up a flight of steps to the hotel room) - it's a humbling experience. After a few hours of walking around the city exploring (and looking for trail shoes since I left mine in my car), I started coming down with a bit of a fever and a headache and had to crash at the hotel for a bit. Zach, being the dedicated athlete he is, decided to bite his thumb at my frailty and go for a jog out in the town. Big fat show off. We also got an orientation for our first big adventure of the trip: a 4 Day / 3 Night rafting expedition down the Apurimac River, which is known to be one of the 10 best rivers to raft in the world. Danger is my middle name. Tuesday, August 24th After a night of restless sleep, multiple bathroom trips, and lots of shivering, I broke my fever and felt great. This is a very good thing, because I think Zach would have made me go on the trip even if I were feeling like absolute crap. Of course, I probably would have thanked him if that were the situation. This morning, we embarked on a long van ride to the put in spot for the rafts: 1 hour of paved roads, and 4 hours of pothole-laden gravel road, including descending several thousand feet via switchback roads. But we learned many a thing on this short journey. For example: - Though the entrance to a marketplace may be flanked by bloody carcasses of meat with eyeballs seemingly staring right at you, there could be packaged food available beyond the entryway. Like Oreos. - Instead of putting placards out on the lawn with your chosen political candidates running for office, the Peruvians paint the ballot number of their candidate of choice on the outside of their walls: #3 and #7 are very popular. I think I'll probably vote for one of them. It was pretty darn compelling advertising. Finally, we arrived to the put-in location, and it quickly dawned on me that something was very very strange: we were the only ones in sight. No other rafting companies or tourists or anything. Just us. And us consisted of me, Zach, Colin (the other tourist), Juan (our rafting guide), Willie (the cargo raft guide), and Diego (the safety kayaker). 6 guys and 4 days of Class IV-V rapids. We were excited. Except that we were not known as Paraag, Zach and Colin for the duration of this trip. In the Peruvian Spanish accent of the guides, our names became Prague, Sack, and Colon (as in Cristobal Colon). After lunch (cheese and potato casserole - not so good), we spent a few hours assembling and loading up the rafts, going through rafting safety training, and of course, doing whatever it took to squeeze into our hineys into the wetsuits. I was incorrectly deemed to need a medium sized suit by the tour organizers - I'm actually cringing in pain as I write this. Fortunately, my knees broke through the knee pads and ripped the seams a bit to provide a little bit of relief. This also came with the price of very odd farmer tan shapes on my knees once the trip was done. But I'm getting ahead of myself. After a vigorous hour and a half of rafting (I'm being facetious), we pulled ashore and began to set up camp. We had rafted several Class II and III rapids - enough to whet an appetite, but I was hungry for more. Unfortunately for me, my appetite would have to wait until the next day. We soon found out that this rafting company is the only one to do this river in 4 days. The other companies do it as a 3 day trip. The rationale was that we would be able to take our time and not rush through the mornings to get out into the river, and we'd have plenty of time to get settled in the evenings in the new campsite before the sun went down. This was true. We indeed had plenty of time. The campsite was pretty cool. We had our sleeping tents, a dining tent, a bathroom bucket (complete with toilet seat), a propane stove and plenty of food. The guides cooked every night, and started us out with a steak this evening. Not too shabby at all. I think we all came in assuming that we'd be living on a steady diet of PB&Js for the trip. Just as we were about to get the greatest campfire ever witnessed by man up and going, God decided to rain on our plans and send us to our tents. We learned a valuable lesson that night: whence you doth be sleeping on a slight slope, don't situate your sleeping bags with your feet on the uphill end. It just doesn't work so well. You all are more than welcome to try it too and see what you think. And there was much rejoicing. Wednesday, August 25th We woke up in the morning and took our own sweet time eating, and tearing down the tents, and packing up, and loading up the rafts, and everything else. Somewhere around 9:30 or 10am, we finally set off. Today, the rapids got a little bigger. We got some IIIs and IVs finally. We also had a surprise guest: the sun. For the past several days, we were fiercely debating whether or not we were misled in grade school, and that perhaps the southern hemisphere didn't really see the sun ever. But fortunately, the sun came out and proved that we were taught correctly. This is good, since it would have been a shame to have to burn all those elementary school science books. That would not have been muy guapo. It didn't take long for the sun to hide behind the clouds again, and the threat of rain came back on. So, our guides decided to raft through lunch and make it to the campsite. No big deal - it was nice to get a full four hours of rafting in. We did have our first few portages today as well. A portage rapid is where the rapid is deemed to be too dangerous for us simpleton tourists, and we are forced to walk around the rapid whilst our guides soak in the glory of running the rapid. So what if the raft will barely fit between a big ass rock and a big ass cliff and has to be run sideways? So what if there are plenty of underwater caverns that you could potentially get sucked under and drown? So what if getting tossed from the boat is an absolute certainty? We paid for death defying rapids and signed our lives away already, dammit! Let's get it on! Well, okay maybe not. These guys had our safety firmly set as the utmost priority, and I suppose that was very comforting. But I still felt like a big wuss for having to sit on the rocks and watch. Call me an idiot (I'll help, "You big fat idiot!" - doesn't that feel better?). Two of our guides, Juan and Diego, are young guys who are good friends and roommates and usually go on these trips together. Nonstop throughout the trip, they were trading barbs in their slower-than-normal-conversation broken-English. Juan would yell out, "Hey fella... you betta watch-a yor back!" as he tries to steer us to run over Diego and his kayak. Just pure unadultered comedy, these two. After making it to the campsite, the clouds went away and the threat of rain disappeared. Oh well. We had the entire afternoon to bask in the nice weather and do anything we wanted to, in this very remote area of the mountains. Yes, it didn't take long until we were bored out of our minds. So we did what anybody would do - we invented Peterball. Peterball is a variation of Bocce Ball, using stones from the riverbank instead of wooden balls (since multiple painted and evenly-weighted wooden balls are not naturally occurring in the majority of campsites along the Apurimac River). And Peter means rock in Latin or something like that, and hence the etymology of the game name, Peterball. Please pay attention, there will be a quiz at the end of this e-mail. This is good stuff. By the way, I'll have you know that I am the undisputed Peterball king - undefeated and unstoppable. Don't dare and challenge my greatitude, or you shall fail. Hail me. We did get our campfire of the century up and going this evening. But there were no smores. Very very sad. Colin did share with us a true horror story about some unfortunate extended legal battles that he and his wife had been through with a psychotic illegally-subletting landlady. Damn lawyers. The stars were out in full effect and we got to see the Southern Cross, and Orion, and some convoluted scorpion that really just resembled a random smattering of stars. The moon was out in full effect too, so we couldn't see the stars so brilliantly, however we also had no need for flashlights. You take the good, you take the bad, you take it all, and there you have the facts of life. I am compelled to provide a bit of side commentary here (as if you would expect anything less from me). Melissa - you are a very lucky woman, and I think we should all be so fortunate to have the relationship that you and Zach have. Without fail, every time we saw spectacular scenery, you could see it in Zach's eyes that he would have enjoyed it 10 times more with you by his side. It brought a tear to my eye. Thursday, August 26th I just realized that I haven't ranted and raved about the scenery - que lastima! As you will see with the photos, it was all surreal. It was amazing to round a corner in the river and have the steepest and tallest mountain you'd ever seen appear in front of you. They all looked like they must have been fake, because it was too spectacular to be real. Couple this with our solitude - not another person in sight - and it was too much to try and soak in. I spent many hours in the mornings and afternoons just staring with mouth agape. And I was left wondering if the mountains of Fiordland in New Zealand when I kayaked in Milford Sound a few years back were comparable - I honestly don't know. We did manage to spot some wildlife as well, but not too much - a deer, a fox, some wild parakeets, an otter, and some ducks. Parakeets in the wild - just doesn't sound right, does it? I guess I just never envisioned parakeets being able to live in anything other than a cage! When we finally got on the river this morning, it didn't take long for the sun to come out. And this time, it stayed out in all it's glory for the bulk of the day. So, if we weren't getting wet, we were getting hot. Fortunately, the Apurimac River doesn't have many long stretches without rapids. The guides were raving about this and told us that they've been kayaking and rafting around the world and still love the Apurimac back home the most. After a few invigorating Class IV rapids, we stopped for lunch in a nice little side beach encampment, where the sun continued to beat directly down on us. After lunch, all of us were scrambling to find shade, but there was little to be found. I managed to contort my body and lie down along a rock in a sliver of shade that it was providing, though I had to move slightly every five minutes to maintain the cover. Finally, after the guides decided they were ready to go, we launched off again. And Juan was very nice to us and took us to a cliffjumping spot. It didn't look very high when we approached it, but this could be because the mountain extended much much much further up behind it, dwarfing the leap we were about to make. Regardless, it seemed pretty darn high from the ledge. I got it on film, so you can judge for yourself. At some point today (or it may have been yesterday - all of the days kidna blurred together after a while), Zach asked Juan what a particular rapid was named. They have names for all of the rapids, and most of the names had interesting stories behind them. Well, this particular rapid had no name and no interesting story behind it. Inspired by one of the catchphrases of my friend Saravanan, we asked to name this one "B#&$% Betta Have My Money", and tried our best to explain as best we could what that meant. I'm not very confident that they will keep this name for this rapid though. After a two portages and a several more Class II and IV rapids, we got to our last campsite. After setting up the tent, Zach and I decided to go on a small hike. We found lots of rocks, and some unidentified creature holes, and many garbage trees. I call them garbage trees because it seemed that every branch had a bit of a plastic bag stuck to it or some other refuse. The trees had pricklies on them that grabbed anything that went by, so our guess was that when the water level rises in the rainy season, any garbage left behind by the stupid humans in the campsites was washed away and caught by these trees. Very sad to see. Friday, August 27th Ahh... we were taking down our tent and packing up our clothes in the dry bag for the last time this morning. More importantly, squeezing myself and all my parts into the wetsuit for the last time. Felt kinda good and felt kinda bad. We had pancakes this morning, but there was no syrup - only some strange caramel like spread. So I ate it plain with butter. It was good. But not as good as the few strips of thick bacon we had yesterday morning. That was ummm... ummm... good. We had a Class V rapid this morning - it was incredible. How do you describe a rapid? Okay - the raft went this way, and then it went that way, and then we went down this drop, and around the side of that rock. See? It just doesn't do it any justice. So you'll have to trust me on this one - it was damn good. We wanted to portage ourselves upstream and run it again, but Juan just laughed us off. Next up was a swimmer's rapid - we were permitted to hop off the raft and lie back on our lifejackets feet-forward through this next rapid. Now, I've done swimmer's rapids before, and usually they're pretty dinky. And given that these guys weren't about to allow us to do any rapids where there was danger involved (as evidenced by one, maybe two, questionnable portages, in my mind at least), let's just say that I wasn't expecting much. I expected wrong. These were some vicious rapids that they unleashed on us - I probably swallowed a few litres of water. And the water was freezing! A strange dichotomy of temperatures: on the one hand, the sun was beating down on us in a rather hot fashion, and on the other hand, the water was a real weenie-skrinker. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. But when we were asked if we wanted to do the next set of swimmer's rapids, we unanimously don't-ed. The end was drawing nigh, and we pulled up on a shore and started carrying everything up a hill. One by one, we took up the dry bags, the coolers, the paddles and oars, and the rafts of course. Just as we were finishing, another group of rafts passes by, completey shattering our illusion that we were the only ones on the river. It was kind of heartbreaking and eerie in a strange sense. And the worst part? The majority of the tourists on these rafts that passed us were women, some of them fairly attractive women. Colin and Zach didn't mind so much, but I think Juan and Diego were a bit envious of the other guides. The trip back to Cusco was quick and uneventful. But we did get to witness some locals carry a live hog wrapped up in burlap and attempt to get it into a local bus. My guess is that they were taking it to market to sell or something. Also, we got a very beautiful view of the adventure that lies ahead - the van driver pulled over so that we could stop and gaze at Salkantay Mountain. But at long last, we got back to the hotel, and immediately fought over who would get the first shower. Let's just say that after 4 days, there was some massive body funk abound. Okie doke. I'm all out of stories for the first week. I'll leave our second adventure in Peru for my next update. As I'm sure you're figured out, this trip is already over, so I'm writing this on memory. We were camping too much to have enough time for me to write these along the way and get this to you in a more real-time fashion. But you'll survive. I have faith. -Paraag Tidbits: 1. During my Brazil trip travelogues, I fathomed that Spongebob Squarepants must be billed as SpongeRoberto SquarePantalones in Spanish-speaking countries. I was unfortunately wrong. The little fella goes by Bob Esponja. Though personally, I like my loose translation much much better. It would be much more muy guapo. 2. As with most 3rd world countries, Peru also requires you to throw your toilet paper into the wastebasket rather than the toilet. This is strictly enforced by the TP Police. It takes about 4-5 to really get used to this. And, as I've found, it takes about 4-5 days to un-learn this habit as well once you return home. Steve - you may want to make sure that you use your own bathroom for a bit until this unwanted habit completely goes away. 3. It's official and has been confirmed. Zach is indeed the only person who voted for GWB to ever travel a 3rd world country. As with every tour group in a 3rd world country I've been on, as soon as the tour guides found out we were Americans they asked us who we voted for. For some strange reason, they find it very curious that someone who lost the popular vote could win the election in what is touted as the democracy of democracies (Yes, Zach - I know that the US is not really a democracy, but most people do not know that). When Zach answered Bush to their question, they were shocked - they had never met someone with that response. Somehow, I don't think they asked the "who did you vote for" question so much after the Clinton-Dole election in 1996. I could be wrong though. 4. If you want more info about our rafting trip, you can visit www.apumayo.com. We were extremely happy with these guys - they were extremely particular about making sure that we didn't leave any garbage or refuse (even human) behind. And quite often, they picked up garbage that other tour groups had left behind.

Farewell to Brazil

2003-11-30T18:20:00.000-05:00

Well folks, I'm back in the good ol' US of A now. But before I get too caught up in the swing of things, I'd probably better finish my Brasil chronicles. But first, let's go to Viewer Mail: Question #1: Paraag, you're my idol. But something is troubling me. Was Spongebob Squarepants on TV in Spanish or Portuguese? Please let me know how I can be as cool as you. - AV, New York Answer #1: Ahh... yes. Good question indeed. The problem is that they were speaking so fast that I couldn't tell if which language it was, though I suspect that it was indeed Portuguese. I did happen to catch the opening line though - "Ohhhhhhhhhhh, Quien vives en la pina de bajo del mar? SpongeRoberto SquarePantalones!" (okay I made that last part up) Question #2: What is a sasquatch anyway, a type of squash? I adore the ground you walk on. The next kid I have named Paraag will be named after you! - SL, California Answer #2: No. A sasquatch is a very hairy creature from the depths of the jungle or arctic or other fully unexplored area - kinda similar to a Yeti or Bigfoot. Question #3: Did you get a passport stamp when you went to Argentina? I wish my brother were as cool as you. - NGM, California Answer #3: I tried to get a passport stamp, but instead the Argentinian mounted police (well okay, the border patrol folks) decided to put a cheesy stamp with a toucan on it saying "Recuerdo Argentina Cataratas Iguassu", which means "Remember the Argentina Iguassu Falls". I think I should sue them for ruining an otherwise rather spectacular passport, if I do say so myself. And I do. Sunday, November 23rd Woke up early this morning to hop on a bus for a supposedly 12 hour bus ride to the town of Curitiba. I spent my waking hours on this bus trying unsuccessfully to go to sleep. Even though I was prepared this time for the shock of super-duper air-conditioning, I could have still used a sweater. Fortunately, I had my mp3 player with me to help pass the time by - about 3-4 hours of pretty darn good music, if I do say so myself (I just did). I'm thinking that perhaps I should add Radio DJ to my list of potential careers. After the Great Perfume Fiasco of 2004 occurs, I might be on the street looking for a new career path. Who knows? Somewhere along the way, we were stopped by the Brazilian Highway Patrol, who went through all the luggage and pulled a couple off of the bus to further inspect their luggage. Two hours later, the couple re-boarded the bus with a far lighter load. From what I could gather (from watching and wildly guessing), these folks brought some stuff over from Paraguay (where goods are less expensive) and were trying to smuggle them through and sell at a higher price elsewhere in Brazil. It was all confiscated. But at least I did get to watch a really bad Japanese film with Portuguese subtitles at an unnecessarily high volume level. That's always a recipe for a good time. In Curitiba, I walked into my hotel and was pleasantly surprised at just how beautiful and elegant the place looked. Which probably explains the look of shock on the receptionist's face when she saw me walk in with my backpack, baseball cap and sandals. The room was really amazing (comparatively speaking) - I wish I had more nights here just for this! It even had 4 movie channels (2 HBO, 2 Showtime) on the TV! Monday, November 24th By now you're all wondering why the heck I'm in Curitiba. Well, I'm not going to tell you. Okay, I'll tell you, but you have to let go of my arm first. There's a highly-lauded 4 hour train ride from Curitiba, which sits high up in the mountains, to the town of Paranagua, which is a small city on the coast - a 4 hour train ride, a 4 hour train ride (think Gilligan's Island). The reason for the lauds to be high is that the track was constructed many many years ago (late 1800s) when the equipment didn't exist to carve up the mountainside for a direct path and the technology didn't exist to build very long stretches of bridge. The result? A train that weaves in and out along the incredibly steep mountains through the jungle. While beautiful and spectacular, it actually just reminded me of My Old Kentucky Home, and the Appalachians therein. Though I suspect that these mountains were a tad taller. Well, the Paranagua train station is being rehabbed, so all the train passangers had to get off halfway at the town of Morretes instead. Many passangers simply turned around and took the train back to Curitiba. Not me. That would have been kinda drab. So, I took a public bus (with a bunch of other random backpackers) down to the coastal Paranagua. Since all those backpackers were headed down along with the locals, the bus was packed like peanuts in a Snickers bar. Simply maneuvering my arm to reach a distant handrail with which to brace myself was an adventure in itself. I was just thankful that no one had any rampant out-of-control B.O. issues. Paranagua was a small little town that had that distinct coastal smell and feel to it. It was a rustic town - I don't know what that really means, but trust me. Rustic. After spending a few hours walking around the town and then randomly ordering and eating some lunch (I have no idea what the waitress was saying!), I found a shady perch next to the mostly uninhabited little beach where I just sat and read a book and wrote in my journal for about 2-3 hours. Very simple pleasures. I returned to Curitiba and spent the late afternoon walking all around this city - it's a pretty good size city with lots of young people in it due to a few universities. I had a nice time people-watching and window-shopping along a 6-7 block pedestrian mall and a few small city parks. It's a very clean and developed city as well - it felt like any other small Western city might feel. They even had a McDonalds kiosk solely dedicated to ice cream. Alas the time had come to board an overnight bus to Rio. This really sucked, since I had been in the sun (the sweaty sticky sun) all day and didn't have a hotel room where I could shower and feel Zestfully clean again. A wet-wipe would have to do. In case you've never tried it before, it doesn't really work too well. But it works better than nothing. It didn't take me long to realize that I didn't do well booking a comfortable bus for the overnight journey. This one was your standard bus - no extra legroom and no lower leg-rest pad. And, as expected, it was freezing. Needless to say, I didn't sleep too well. And it didn't take long to get sick of my mp3 collection - there's only so many times you can listen to Coolio's "1,2,3,4" and that Apache Indian song "Boomshakalak" (theme song to Dumb and Dumber). Well, okay, you can only really listen to those 2 songs once without getting sick of them. Then you realize how little song-writing capability Humpty had with his "Humpty Dance" song, and suddenly your DJing aspirations have vanished. I guess I had better make sure that the Great Perfume Fiasco of 2004 never materializes. Tuesday, November 25th I returned to Newton's Rooftop Hostel this morning to finish out my stay in Rio. I entertained the idea of going to a proper hotel with the standard amenities, but was leery of spending my last few evenings by my lonesome (try not to cry too much). After cleaning up and settling back in a bit, I went on a tour of the other major tourist trap in the city - the Cristo Redentor statue (or Christ the Redeemer). This is a huge 100+ ft tall statue that sits atop one of the prominent mountaintops in the area, and is visible from most areas in the city - it's by far the Empire State Building of NYC, or the Gateway Arch of St. Louis, or the crackpipes of Detroit, or the ummm... we don't really have a defining edifice in Cincinnati, do we? Before making our way to the statue, the tour van took our small group to a favela tour. Favela is the Portuguese term for slum. There's plenty of little shacks and shanties covering the mountainsides. After all of the available land was taken to build these shanties upon, the residents built upwards, adding another shanty level to their shanty. This new level most often looks nothing like the level below and the transitions are far from seamless. The result? It looks pretty darn shanty. It was still neat to see though - they all still had electricity and water and the basic amenities. But it's really hard to describe without showing pictures. After stopping a few times on the ride up the mountain for some beautiful postcard picture views, we were at the top of the mountain at the statue. As expected, it was swamped with tourists. And all the tourists (myself included) were taking their turns in front of the statue doing the Cristo Redentor pose. Oh yeah - let's see, the Cristo Redentor pose is similar to a tightrope walker with arms outstretched. There was one little boy from somewhere in the States who refused to do this pose because he didn't want to look like a bird, instead he opted for a Statue of Liberty pose. Kids. Once again, there was a storm brewing in the distance and we had to leave or get soaked. The rain was accompanied by some very strong winds - several of us had to get out of the van at one point to help move a large fallen tree out of the way so that we could get down the hill. Good thing I'd been working out. When I got back to the hostel, I quickly realized that there were only a handful of people staying there at the time, and only one person was to be found anywhere. Though I was hoping to go hit the bars and check out the local scene, it was not to be this evening. Wednesday, November 26th After catching on my sleep, I took the subway and a local bus to the entrance of the the Tijuca Forest, which is an impressive National Park right in the middle of Rio. The object for today - see a bit of nature by way of hiking. Before I go too far, I must say that the subway ride was surprisingly comfortable and enjoyable (as far as public transportation goes). The trains were very frequent, spacious, clean, quiet, and hobo-free. Another neato-keato aspect was that the floor was covered in a rubber mat material, which allows a rider to not have to hold on to a handrail as the train is starting or stopping. This fascinated me, perhaps more than it should have. One of the primary rules of hiking is to not do it alone, especially in an area where you have no cell phone, can't speak the language, and have no one who will look for you if you don't show up. But I was still determined to see a bit of nature, so I pressed forward. After getting a trail map, I selected a trail that was relatively close to the road in it's entirety - the major attraction on this route were several grottos (rock formations of some sort). The forest was gorgeous, though I was continually focusing on evading insects and anything that sounded like a snake. Had I come to a Rio a few months later, I am told that the forest would be full of very colorful butterflies and flowers. But, as you know, I was here now. About 30 minutes into this trail, I walked into a clearing next to a pretty steep cliff. I would have sat down and relaxed and soaked it all in for a bit, but there were some teenagers making out and I was ruining their lack of adequate parental supervision. Problem was that I couldn't figure out where the trail went from here, and helping me out was clearly not in the forefront of the teenagers' minds. I spotted a trail and took it. It followed the rock cliffs around quite a ways and then seemingly disappeared. I had no idea where I was, and so I was tempted to turn around and make my way back, but there were a few rather challenging stretches of mountainside that were easier to climb up then get back down. Finally, I heard a stream and a small waterfall, spotted it on my map, and just headed in that direction. From there, I still couldn't find the trail, but I stumbled upon a few locals who gladly offered to lead me back to the road. I was fortunate in that one of them spoke English - she was a ex-ballerina/stage actress who had spent several years in Ft. Lauderdale developing her second career as a "healer" (using crystals and stuff like that). She had recently returned to Rio and was working on opening her business here. The world is full of interesting people. After making it back to the roadway, I decided to stop giving my dear old mother heart attacks and stick to simple trails from here on out. There was a 5 hour trail that I wanted to do, but I was a little too worried about getting lost, especially since I had forgotten to bring my headlamp along. When I returned to the hostel, I was fortunate in that there were new travellers who had joined. I was unfortunate in that they were all lame and didn't want to go out. And it was raining, so it was hard to argue with them. So a small group of us sat around and drank beer - me, Fernando from Peru, and two Swedes. Unfortunately, the Swedes were not members of the bikini team, nor were they female. Actually, those fellas told me that they had never heard of the Swedish Bikini Team. I refuse to believe that the SBT is a figment of American imagination. Hold strong. So this just means that I'll have to come back someday to partake in the almost-legendary club scene in Rio. Thursday, November 27th My last day here! I spent the morning packing up, and then headed out to the beach with Tamara, a girl from Holland who had just come into the city. We walked along the Copa, Copacabana beach, and then went over to the Ipanema beach right around the corner and plopped down to enjoy the beach. Since I am not in much of a need of a suntan, I decided to brave the ocean a bit and try my hand at bodysurfing since the waves were a pretty good size. I caught a few good ones, and had my shorts almost ripped off by a few others. The sky was cloudy and overcast, but it was still shockingly bright and hot outside - I could feel my skin burning. So after a few hours, we walked back to the hostel. My original intent was to go hang-gliding this morning. Rio is awesome for hang-gliding because there are mountains so close to the beach, and so you can launch off from high off of a mountain and land on the beach. This is exactly the type of activity that you know I live for. But, they shut the site down due to high winds. The bastards. I wasn't able to go with Option #2 either - scuba diving, since there was not much available in the area. Argh! I did get my heart rate up for the departing flight though. After a taxi scheduling fiasco at the hostel, I finally got into a cab 2 hours before flight time with a 30 minute average taxi ride to the airport. But there was un-average traffic on the road - I ended up reaching the airport 45 minutes before flight time for an international flight. In the States, I wouldn't have been permitted on the plane. Fortunately, the standards are not as strict in Brasil, though they were very close to closing the United counter. So, does that count as an extreme sport? Tidbits: 1. Getting food at a restaurant in Brasil for one person is difficult - the portions are huge and enough for two. So, there is a proliferance of "by the kilo" self service type places, which are pretty good. For my final meal in Brasil, I had a good-sized filet and lots of tuna sushi for about 4 bucks. 2. By the numbers: # nights spent away from home = 11. 4 of those were in a hostel with no air-conditioning. 3 were spent in a proper hotel room. 2 were spent in a bus. 2 were spent in an airplane. Net? I'm a idiot. Okay, that's all for now. I hope you've enjoyed the latest installment of my chronicles. I'll be headed back down to South America next year for a few more weeks, hopefully, to do some hiking in Peru on the Macchu Picchu trail. If anyone's interested... -Paraag

Greetings from Brazil

2003-11-26T18:21:00.000-05:00

So, as I´m sure you´ve figured out from the subject header by now, I´m in Brazil. Why Brazil? Because United egged me into it by having a great last minute airfare deal, and I still needed to get a South American passport stamp. That´s a good enough reason, right? And since so many of you enjoyed these weekly updates last summer, I figured I´d capture my travels with an encore presentation (I hope I'm not being too presumptuous here). But alas, I´m only here for 10 days, so it won´t last very long. Monday, November 17th Went to work for a half-day this morning (though my co-workers would claim that it wasn´t really work), and headed down to Philly in the afternoon where my overnight journey to Rio de Janeiro in Brazil would begin. Actually, I should be spelling the country as Brasil. How in the world did we manage to mini-butcher the country´s name by substituting a ´z´? Regardless, Brasil has a nice ring to it. Which got me thinking... what the heck does United States mean anyway? Aren´t most countries a group of states that are united? Perhaps it meant something 227 years ago before we were a country that the individual states were united against the British oppression (damn Brits!), but now it doesn´t make all that much sense anymore. I mean look at Canada, even they have a real name (sorry if you were expecting a Canadian joke there, but my new boss is from that village, eh?). In any case, my point is that nothing happened today. The whole country-name thing was simply filler material. Oh wait - I did meet the most obnoxiously rude airline hostess that I've ever encountered in my life. Tuesday, November 18th I actually landed in Sau Paulo first, which is the world´s third most populous city in the world. The view from above confirmed this. I couldn´t spot a park or futbol field anywhere to save my life - the whole landscape was just covered with rooftops, even up and down hills. Really strange. After catching the connecting flight to Rio, I decided to take the city bus to my hotel. I´m always a little leary as to how to get to my hotel in any new country, because I know that there are a ton of airport scams. And since I had absolutely no clue where I was in relation to my accomodation or how much it should cost, and I couldn´t really converse with any of the natives to figure it out (everyone speaks Portuguese), I took my chances with the $0.75 city bus, which would also give me a nice tour of the city in the meantime. Well, at least, that´s what I thought. I got a good tour of traffic jams. It took about 2 hours, I think. Since I don´t wear a watch, keeping track of time has been a minor recurring issue this entire trip. So Rio is pretty darn hot. I got off the city bus in the Copa, Copacabana area (yes, the same one of Barry Manilow fame) and walked about 6 blocks in the oppressive heat to my hostel. By the way, before I forget, oppressive is the word of the day, so every time you read it, you must scream as loud as you can, as if I were Pee Wee Herman and this were my Playhouse. Yes, I stayed in a hostel in Rio. Since I´m traveling alone, I had no idea how I´d meet up with anyone unless I did this. It was a good choice. Everyone there spoke English and was really really friendly. The place is called Newton´s Rooftop Hostel, and ran me a whopping $8 per night. It´s pretty neatly decorated and has a deck on the rooftop where all of the backpackers hung out at night, speaking English and drinking beer. I even had dinner with them up there - we ordered out for some Domino's! Let me tell you - Domino's makes a mean margherita pizza down here with fresh basil leaves. By the time I got here, it was already late in the day and it was crazy hot. So I just stayed here and chatted with the other backpackers. Yes, that was lame and very un-Paraag like. However, I chalked it up to my required "adjustment period". The rooms didn´t have air-conditioning, so I didn´t sleep very well. Neither did my three hottie female roommates (2 Austrians, 1 Hollandaise?). Because of the heat, okay? Because of the heat. The oppressive heat. Wednesday, November 19th After waking up in the morning and peeling out of bed - it was sweaty-sticky, you know, from the heat. Really, from the heat. I mean seriously folks, get your minds out of the collective gutter. Can I continue here? As I was saying, after I got up and had a shower and a basic breakfast, I wandered over to a few travel agencies to set up the remainder of my itinerary. I really had nothing planned at all when I left and tried to figure it out on the plane. Unfortunately, there was no way I could really do any hiking in the Amazon - it´s too far away. And besides, I didn´t get a yellow-fever injection or the remainder of my Hepatitis injections from last year. Bad Paraag. One of the things that I booked was a half day tour in Rio today. We saw the Maracaña Stadium, which is the largest futból stadium in the world, holding close to 200,000 people in it. That´s pretty large. But the highlight of the trip was the double cable car journey up to the top of Sugarloaf Mountain (Pao do Açucar). From there, you can see the entire city and realize what an odd selection of locations this is to have a city. There are mountains everywhere, and the city pretty much exists in all of the valleys. So, some of the areas are only connected by a few tunnels here and there. Kinda neat. While I was up there, I saw some dark clouds coming in from the horizon and tried in vain to catch a bolt of lightning in a picture. Of course, then the thunderstorms hit us on the mountain and we were stuck for about an hour. But the rain was a welcome addition after the oppressive heat (are you yelling yet?). I met a guy from New York during this trip - he was wearing an NYPD shirt similar to the one my brother owns (as well and millions of others), but this guy was actually NYPD. And he added another example to back my long-held theory - most policemen are arrogant, egotistical jerks. Perhaps they have to be, though. The only policeman I've met personally who wasn't a jerk was one of my techs (ex-police) in Cape Girardeau, MO. But then again, I was his boss... In the evening, a few of us from the hostel went out to a restaurant to get some of the local food. Most meals here in Brazil are pretty darn large and are recommended for two people. That really sucks for me since I´m traveling alone. But in this situation, it worked out well - two of us split a filet mignon platter. So, I was expecting something like 10 oz for each of us or something like that. Rather, it looked like each of us got about 24 oz of beef - a filet, no less. It was even better than Outback Steakhouse. I had a hard enough time finishing off the beef than to even begin worrying about the creamed rice that came with it (eww...). And it was gooooood (like Jimmy Dean). After our marathon meal, we strolled over to the Copa, Copacabana waterfront at one of many small stalls set up there and had a few rounds of the local favorite, caipirinhas. It had a few different liquors in it, so it kinda resembled a long island ice tea. Except that a small glass was all of 3 Reals (= $1 USD). That´s almost as cheap as New York City bars. But hanging out on the beach, sipping some drinks, and chatting with other English-speaking people was really awesome. Thursday, October 20th Peeled myself out of bed this morning and headed down to the Copa, Copacabana beach. It´s pretty long. Around the corner from the Copa, Copacabana beach´s end is the Ipanema beach (as in that song "The Girl from Ipanema"), but I didn´t get that far. I simply strolled around, enjoying the cloud cover and medium heat, people-watching, and making sure that I wasn´t being robbed by the "accidental bump" move. There were plenty of people playing beach volleyball - but not normal beach volleyball. This futból crazed place was playing with futból rules - no hands or arms, including the service. It was pretty darn cool. I thought to myself, "I can´t do that". I also had the pleasure of seeing the sasquatch himself cruise down the beach on a bike. Twice. After a few hours of strolling, I headed out on my first adventure. An 18 hour bus ride to Foz do Iguaçu. Or at least my travel agent said it was 18 hours. The good book (a.k.a. Lonely Planet travel guide) claimed that it was a 21 hour ride. There were no flights available for a few more days, and they were pretty darn expensive anyway. Surprisingly enough, the bus was really really comfy - much better than any bus I´ve seen in the US in fact. Attached to the back of the seat in front of you is a pull down cushioned pad to bridge the gap between the edge of the seat and your footrest. And the seats reclined a ton too. It was like having a Barc-o-lounger in the bus. You remember the oppressive heat I was complaining about? Well, the Brazilians go all out with the air-conditioning. Before long, I couldn´t go to sleep because my knee-caps were frozen (really). It took a while to muster up the courage to charade my way into explaining to the driver that I was freezing my knee-caps off and needed to get into my bag to get some cloths of warmth. Friday, November 21st So I'm still in that gosh darn bus. Until 2pm or so - that ended up being 23 hours. I was in a great mood. Fortunately, I had purchased a package tour that included a tour of the Brazilian falls and 2 nights at a hotel - a real hotel. After a wonderfully refreshing shower, the tour guide took me on my own personal tour of the Brazilian Iguacu Falls - the Falls are split between Argentina and Brazil. But before seeing the nice birds-eye view of the falls, I took a different 2 hour tour that culminated in a boat ride into the spray of the falls. It was incredible - we got absolutely soaked from the spray of the waterfalls. It was so intense that you couldn't even open your eyes to see the falls. So as I was saying, the falls are split between Brazil and Argentina. But much like Niagara falls, this split is not even. Most of the falls are on the Argentinian side, but Brazil has a nice overview of the entire thing - they built a walkway out on top of the river to the tip of the falls to give some nice close-up views. Regardless, the Niagara Falls (and even the Victoria Falls in Africa) pale in comparison. These falls are much much taller and 10 times wider. Simply breath-taking. No amount of time would have been enough to let it soak in - it was that amazing. I'm really at a loss for words to describe it - I'm just glad that the imagery is still fresh in my mind! Saturday, November 22nd Today, I took a full day tour of the Argentinian side of the Falls with my hotel tour guide and a few others. We had a few hikes to get to some amazing vista points of the Argentinian side - spectacular. It's kind of like how the Canadian Horseshoe Falls are so much more impressive than the US Niagara Falls, and then multiply that by 10. And I guess that I really can't call it a hike so much - all the walkways were comfortably paved so that anyone could do it. This was good for my tour group, since the others in the group were all over 60 years of age. But similar to the Brazilian side, these paved roadway did extend out to the edge of the falls. Regardless, I was a bit bummed since I was hoping to do some real hikes and see some of the wildlife as well. I came away with the realization that any time I go and see a natural wonder like this in the future, I should do it on my own terms if possible such that I can sit and stare for any amount of time I want. But, I did see a toucan. I named him Sam. He's my very bestest friend. For dinner that evening, I did something that I probably should have regretted. I had sushi in a third-world country. Probably not the best idea I've had so far, but then again, considering the lack of pure adventure on this trip thus far, perhaps it was necessary. Though it's well past Saturday, I'll split this up into two e-mails and finish the rest later when I get home. As I've said already, this trip has been very much Kix-like: mom-approved. There's been no rolling down hills in large inflated plastic balloons, no go-carting steep slopes sans railings, no jumping off of cable cars with a rubber band around the ankles, no riding on top of a truck (no seatbelt!) through curvy roads, and no near death experiences by scooter. I'll try to change that by the next e-mail. Tidbits: 1. Pregnant women here walk around with their bellies hanging out. Not that this is wrong or anything, it's just something I'm not used to seeing. I suppose it's seen as a natural stage in life that doesn't need to be hidden. In fact, one of the very attractive Brasilian MTV VJ's was very noticeably pregnant. I don't think this would fly very well in the US. 2. Now I'm as much a Telemundo fan as the next person (just ask my new roomie Steve of Brit-land), but some shows were just not intended to be dubbed over in Spanish. Like Spongebob Squarepants. 3. Lastly, if anyone wants a soccer jersey, let me know soon and I'll try and get you one. They look pretty darn authentic down here, and there's a multitude to choose from. Let me know if you have a specific team that you want and I'll see if I can find it tomorrow. My guess is that they are running less than $20 (probably $15). 4. Brits and Aussies (and perhaps all Europeans) go to the store and buy a slab of beer. A slab is pretty much a 12 pack. So, the conversion factor in use here is 2 slabs = 1 case, or 1 slab = 0.5 cases. Let me know if you need more time. - Paraag

Trip Update #14 - En Finito

2002-08-22T18:58:00.000-04:00

Yeah, okay. So I'm a tad bit late with this one. Just withhold your payment - that'll show me. If you do have service complaints, please register them at www.biteme.com. Have a nice day! :-) Alas, this will be the final update. I leave in about 40 hours. My mother is so happy. I think she has one of those digital countdown clocks on the wall. You know, like those clocks that were all over the place a few years back counting down to the new millennium? Hmmm... New Years 2000 was probably the single largest event in mankind that rendered the most clocks unusable. What a waste. So, do they go to clock heaven or something? I think it's sad that they come to such an abrupt meaningless fate. I know I wouldn't want to be a millennium countdown clock, would you? All right, enough babble. To the "Where's Paraaldo?" verses: Monday, August 12th Woke up in severe pain. Last night was the single worst night of sleep I've had in a decade. Something hit me hard. Must have been the pizza. A little too happy for my tastes. Damn that Herb. I'm sure the beer had nothing to do with it. Nooooooooo. Somewhere around noon (I think), I crawled onto the backseat of a motor scooter for a tour of the city of Phnom Penh, Cambodia. First stop: The Killing Fields of Choeng Ek. Those of you who have seen the movie called "The Killing Fields" will already know that Pol Pot's regime in the late 70's (I think) exterminated 2-3 million Cambodians for being educated or for being suspected dissidents. About 10,000 people were buried in mass graves at Choeng Ek. One of the memorials gives you a real hard gut check - it's a bunch of glass-door cabinets filled with stacked exhumed human skulls. If that doesn't make it hit home, nothing will. Next stop was the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. This place was a high school turned prison camp turned museum, where Pol Pot sent the educated people and suspected dissidents prior to sending them to their execution and mass burial at Choeng Ek. Unbelievably depressing. Last stop was the Royal Palace and Silver Pagoda. Due to my late start, I only had about 30 minutes to spend here. I would've liked to spend 3-4 hours - mainly to have somewhere a little more cheerful to recuperate from my rough night and not so perky early afternoon travels. This place was gorgeous. I think it's even nicer than the Royal Palace in Bangkok. If you remember, I commented on the Bangkok Royal Palace that it was so beautiful that I didn't even know what to take a picture of. I almost felt like I was doing a disservice to a building or structure if I didn't photograph it. Well ditto that here. Times two. Tuesday, August 13th Took a boat up the Mekong River to Siem Reap today. At least I think it was the Mekong River. I've done so much travelling on the Mekong River so far, that I'm gonna stick with it. I've already made the Mekong - Yukong joke, haven't I? Anywho, this boat wasn't a normal looking boat. Oh no. It resembled a submarine that didn't quite submerge, or perhaps something out of Jacques Cousteau, but only 0.0 leagues under the sea. In any case, it was fast, so I was there by noon. After fighting the huge crowd of hawkers trying to get me to go to their guesthouse on the back of their scooter, I hopped onto the back of a scooter of a guy who somehow had my name written on a piece of paper. The element of familiarity goes a long way when you're surrounded. Oh yeah - so you're probably wondering what the heck is in Siem Reap, Cambodia. Nothing really. But it is abnormally close to the single greatest Ancient Wonder of the World. I speak of course of The Temples of Angkor (insert dramatic sound clip here), of course of course. These are a collection of temples built by the Khmer kings over a span of 600 years beginning in the 11th century, the crown jewel of the lot being the tremendous Angkor Wat. Sorry - can't really describe it. So for dramatic effect, just imagine something so beautiful it's inconceivable, and then nod your head (much like Stifler and little bro gazing at the computer screen) and smile. I'm getting a little ahead of myself here. The only thing I saw today was one temple, called Phnom Bakheng, which is perched on top of a hill. After climbing the steep slope of the mountain, and then the steep steps of the temple, I sat around for about an hour or two waiting for the sun to go down with a bunch of strangers. Actually, I take that back - several people that I had met on my Vietnam Mekong trip were there too. Anyways, we didn't know when the sun actually set because there were too many clouds in the way. But we imagined how nice it would be to watch the sun set. And there was much rejoicing. Wednesday, August 14th Went Wat-watching all day today. From seeing the sunrise at Angkor Wat at 6 am to seeing the sunset at Angkor Wat at 6pm. Wat after Wat after Wat after Wat. But here's the condensed play-by-play in between the Angkor Wat visits: The Bayon, The Baphuon, Phimeankas, Terrace of the Leper King, Terrace of Elephants, Ta Keo, Ta Proehm, Bantaey Kdei, Preah Rup, Bantaey Srei, East Mebon, Ta Som, and Preah Khan. Some were very very large, some were quite small. Some have been fully restored, others are in the middle of restoration, and still others are left untouched. Since they were built over a 600 year span, there area a vast array of religious and architectural differences among them. In all cases though, the level of stone carvings was just exquisite. And seeing these ruins in the thick of the jungle, in some cases it was the jungle literally in the ruins, was unreal. I spent the last three hours or so of my sightseeing exploring Angkor Wat. This alone was worth the trip into Cambodia. Infinitely better than Borobudur and Prambanan in Indonesia. For the last hour, I sat perched outside the Northwest Stupa of Angkor Wat listening to music on my MP3 player, staring out into the distance in the general direction of the sun, which was unfortunately still playing peek-a-boo behind the clouds. You just don't get to do that every day. Thursday, August 14th Started the long painful journey back to Bangkok today, courtesy of A/C minibus. The first leg of this journey to the Cambodian border was by far the more interesting. Cambodian roads have not been touched since the 60's. In fact, it was hard to tell if there was really any pavement at all - the roads were dirt for the most part, with severe potholes and tire trenches. We were limited to about 15 kmh for about 7 hours. Some of the other silly tourists in the minibus thought it'd be a good idea to try and sleep through it. All they got was a hard smack in the head from the window as the bus shimmied from side to side. Dummies. Along the way, we passed a few vehicles that were broken down due to simple mechanical issues such as total axle failure or the pansy left-front-wheel-snappage-offage. And a few other vehicles that had simply driven over the wrong spot on the wooden bridge, and subsequently partially falling through. In each of these cases, we just drove around them. At 15 kmh or less. In one instance, we were diverted through a few farms to avert a truck-stuck-in-bridge scenario. The farmers had all set up makeshift tollbooths for the rerouting. Something tells me that they were in on the bridge failure. Friday, August 16th I think the digestive system should have a reset button or a purge button or something like that. I've had some issues over the past few days. Thankfully, today was the end of it. I was waiting till I got in Thailand because I didn't quite trust the quality of medication available in Cambodia. Wow. Those are words that I never thought I'd utter. I spent the day shopping for the most part. I would tell you what I bought, but then I'd have to kill you. Okay I'm lying. I can't kill you. I'm in frickin' Thailand. The only other thing of note is that I went to see Men In Black 2 today in the movie theatres. Not bad at all. And they didn't even play that accursed song. As in New Zealand, seats were assigned. Just before the movie, everyone was required to stand up "to pay your respects to the King", while a national anthem of some sort was played over the sound system. Immediately following the movie, all the teenage girls were chatting on their cell phones. Saturday, August 17th - Thursday, August 22nd Left for the island of Ko Samet on Saturday, where I'll cap off this extensive and extremely-tiring journey. I'm just wiped out completely. I haven't stayed in one spot for more than two days in three and a half months (with the exception of Sydney). Don't get me wrong - I wouldn't trade the experience I've had for anything. I'm just really really tired. To the point that I don't think I enjoyed Angkor Wat as much as it deserved to be enjoyed. So Ko Samet is supposed to be the relaxation therapy. I didn't do a damn thing the whole time. My room was a shanty bungalow with a full-size bed in it (with mosquito net, thank goodness). The roof was made of tin. The walls were made of something resembling basket thatch. I just sat around. Read a few books - for those of you keeping track, I've finished Naked by David Sedaris, Masquerade by William Kienzle, The Fifth Mountain by Paulo Coehlo, and I'm almost done with The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (no relation to Patrick). Began a morning jogging routine. Even tried my hand at body surfing. Watched some movies, including Blade II, Men in Black II (again), The Matrix, and Meet the Parents. The weather has been perfect. Perfect for me that is - overcast the whole time. I'm too tanned as it is, so this allowed me to venture where I wanted to without concern. The bar at the place I stayed at was pretty cool. From 10pm to midnight every night, they have this thing called Toss-Up. You flip a coin to determine whether or not you pay for your drink. I won four out of five - so I paid a total of $1.50 for five gin and tonics. Can't beat it. Today (Thursday), I got on a boat to come back to Bangkok. This gives me a day and a half in Bangkok before catching my early Saturday morning flight back home. Which gives me plenty of time to partake in Bangkok's bustling trade of... umm... on second thought, let me change the subject. Have you seen my baseball? Yes mom, I'm being good. I promise. I won't be engaging in any activities that could result in body parts falling off. Really. I promise. So that's it. The end. Over. Kaput. Zoinks. Jeepers. Bif! Zok! Whap! If you're expecting some grand essay on "things I've learned" or "the meaning of life", I'm afraid I'll have to disappoint you. I'm working on it. But I'll leave you with a few thoughts. (Bill N. - please skip to the bottom. This is the sappy stuff that you will undoubtedly give me grief over!) - No matter where you go, people are inherently the same. There is no such thing as a country full of evil people. There are just some really bad governments. Sometimes, it's not even a bad government - just a government that we don't agree with. - Religion is for the most part the same everywhere too – just in a different color wrapper. Everywhere people are looking for guidance in a mysterious world that seems uncontrollable at times. And everywhere, the basic tenets of all religions can be summed up to the golden rule of "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you". It's a shame that most wars are attributed to religious differences. - It's really a shame that we as people revere money as much as we do. Knowledge and understanding are worth far more, but not given as much credit. As a result, I think as a society, we have our values way out of whack. As the adage goes, money can't buy happiness (and Weird Al adds "I guess I'll have to rent it"). - Nothing humans will build will ever be as spectacular as that which has already be created. Nature is by far the most spectacular thing I've seen on this trip. And it's free (or at least it should be). - A trip to a third world country really puts some things in perspective. Why is it that a child with (what we consider in the West to be) absolutely nothing in a third world country can be perfectly happy kicking a ball of twine around, and a child in a "developed" country will yell, kick, and scream about not having a Playstation 2? Simplicity has some benefits that we've lost the ability to see. I'm not, by any means, advocating a move to the 500 years ago. I just think it might be helpful to sit back and think about what I think I need and what I really need every once in a while. I guess I did have an essay in me after all. If you don't agree with me on some of these thoughts, that's cool too – they are somewhat personal thoughts anyway. We'll just agree to disagree. I'm not really looking for a debate here, but I'm more than open to a discussion at some point with any takers. Over a good bottle of wine. Or Franzia. So long. Farewell. I hate to say goodbye. Adieu, adieu, to you and you and you. Those of you in Cincinnati, stop by and see me sometime. I'd love to catch-up. I'll be back on late Saturday night. Those of you not in Cincinnati, drop me a line. I've disconnected my cell phone, so just use my home phone - 513-871-5830. -Paraag Tidbits: 1. Cell phone coverage in Asia is far superior to the U.S. Everywhere I've gone, the tour guides, bus operators, boat driver, etc. has relied extensively on the cell phone for last minute changes and whatnot. Everywhere. 2. There's a bar in Siem Reap called Angkor What? Guess someone beat me to that joke. Dammit! 3. When in Asia, always remember to have plenty of bottled water handy. It's not a good feeling to get up thirsty in the middle of the night only to realize that you can't drink out of the tap. 4. Following on #3, but the locals must drink out of the tap. And they're A-Ok. Amazing how our privileged lifestyle in the West has also made us more susceptible and prone to sickness. Kind of counter-intuitive. 5. Just remembered one that I meant to write way back in Australia. Rayman can definitely appreciate this one. If you're lactose intolerant, don't drink a glass of milk in the morning without taking the proper medication. Even if you think you can "muscle" your way through it. P.S. A sincere thanks to the countless people who have e-mailed me compliments and such. I'm going to miss writing these as much as or more than you'll miss reading them. And from what I can tell, there's a whole group of people that I don't even know who are getting forwarded these from other people. Feel free to drop me a line or e-mail - I'm kind of curious to see where it ends.

Trip Update #13

2002-08-13T18:57:00.000-04:00

I'm in trouble - it's the accursed 13th update. Or perhaps it's a good sign, since I've survived the 13th week. Hmmm... Monday, August 5th On the road again this morning - this time to a town called Hoi An. Hoi An is a picturesque little town situated about 5 km from the beach and boasts a fabulously untouched "Old Town" area for the romantics in all of us. See? I really could be a travel guide writer. After finding a room acceptable enough for me (i.e. cheap), I headed out to take part in Hoi An's favorite pastime - shopping. This area is famous for getting custom-tailored clothes at bargain basement prices. Who am I to buck a trend? So, I checked it out. Having no idea what I was looking for, I walked into a shop and stood there rather cluelessly. This reminds me of a rule that I learned at work that I clearly paid no regard: Have a plan. I had no idea what I wanted to get made at all, and no idea how much I wanted to spend on it. Sensing correctly that my mind was blank slate to be manipulated, the salesladies did rather well - convincing me to order 2 pants and 5 shirts that evening. Total: $60. They would be ready tomorrow at 11 am. I can't even get pants hemmed that quick or for that cheap in the States. Next item on the agenda was squaring away travel plans for the next few days. Like any sane person, I went to see Mr. Phuc (pronounced "fook"). Normally I don't comment on making travel plans - it's a given that happens at every city I've visited. But I couldn't not tell you about my new friend Mr. Phuc (pronounced "fook") now, could I? That Mr. Phuc (pronounced "fook"), he's a good guy. Tuesday, August 6th Agenda for today - nothing major. Just relax. Since I've been pretty much non-stop since getting into Vietnam (well, probably since Bangkok, actually), I figured I'd just relax for a day and have nothing specific on the agenda. Except for shopping. So I swung by the tailor shop to check out the clothes. I didn't know clothes were actually supposed to fit like this. It's amazing. I can never find my size in pants - it's virtually impossible. So I usually have to buy pants and have them hemmed for an additional charge. This also results in the pants being a bit baggier than necessary. But not these pants. I would have to get some more. And these shirts! Apparently, I have long arms for my torso size. So, to get long-sleeve shirts that fit my arms, I end up having a whole lot of shirt leftover to tuck into my pants. But not these shirts. I would have to get some more. In a few short minutes (or about an hour), I had ordered 3 more pants, 1 more shirt, a 3-piece black tuxedo, and a ¾ length gray Cashmere jacket - all for $110 more. Not bad. And I thought that this stuff was cheap in Bangkok (sorry Rayman!). And to top it all off, all of this stuff would be ready this very evening. I'm not making this up. There's also a bunch of art galleries here. So I perused and browsed to my heart's content. I picked, bargained, and purchased three pieces. And, of course, I'll end up spending a heck of a lot more on getting them framed in the States than I spent on the actual piece of art. Surely this isn't the way it's supposed to happen. After spending 2 hours and $50 in the post office to send 7 kg of clothes home (ETA Winter 2002), I was pooped. So much for a day to relax. And I didn't even get to hit the beach. I was so pooped that dinner consisted of the water and Pringles that the tailor shop gave me as parting gifts (see? Pringles are universal). Wednesday, August 7th Got a cab to the airport in Danang this morning to catch a flight to Saigon. I wasn't feeling in such top shape – the evidence points at my gourmet dinner from the previous evening. So, when I got to Saigon, I found a room and then crashed for a few hours before walking around. Saigon is a bit of a misnomer - it's actually Ho Chi Minh City, which has 16 districts in it. District 1 is the concentrated downtown area, which is called Saigon. The older generation still calls the entire city Saigon though. All of the buildings around here are very very narrow and long. So is my hotel. My room is on the 4th floor - #402. Somehow, this translates to having to climb 5 sets of stairs. Haven't quite figured out the math on this one yet. Thursday, August 8th Still not feeling too great, so I slept in this morning before heading out to see the Saigon sights in the afternoon. First stop - Emperor of Jade Pagoda. But I couldn't see any jade anywhere, and there certainly wasn't an Emperor hanging out there, so I was confused. This time a little more than the standard level of confusion typically lingering in my head. But there were a whole lot of turtles in a shallow pool at the entrance. Does that count for anything? Next stop - the Notre Dame Cathedral. It's just smaller than the one in Paris, that's all. And a tad bit out of place. But it's all good. Lunch was spectacular - sushi platter for $6. Hit the spot. While $6 for a meal in Vietnam is actually more than I've had to spend so far, I needed some sushi badly. Cooler heads prevailed. After lunch, I headed over to the War Remnants Museum, which has on display loads of stuff leftover from the American War - bombs, planes, tanks, bullets, other weapons. Everything. It used to be called the American War Crimes Museum, and then they changed the name because they were worried about upsetting American tourists. I wonder why? The exhibitions were a bit eye-popping and unnerving. Clearly they were only showing one side of the story, but it was still rather compelling stuff, which left me in a strange state of questioning and gloom. So my next stop was actually a nice one to make - the Mariamman Hindu temple. After having seen so many Buddhist pagodas and wats over the past month, it was nice to step foot into a Hindu establishment again. Even if the interior of the temple was completely painted in tacky pastel colors not befitting a temple in any way, shape, or form. Later on that evening, I purchased a pirated copy of a book by Robert McNamara (U.S. Secretary of Defense during the first half of the war) called: In Retrospect - the Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam. It's pretty good actually. He does an excellent job of explaining why decisions were made going into the war and how our involvement slowly escalated much further than anticipated. If wars are your thing, this is a good book to get. Friday, August 9th Took a full day tour today to go see the Cao Dai temple and the Cu Chi tunnels. More on each of these shortly. But now, a word from our sponsors. Please spend the next 3.0 minutes singing "Nod Your Head" by Will Smith to yourself as part of the Men In Black 2 commercial. I've even seen these commercials here. This song is ridiculous. Isn't 'Nod Your Head" a line in the Hokie Pokie or something? What's next? "Pick Your Nose"? "Lick Your Palms"? "Scratch the Small of Your Back"? "Walk Like an Egyptian"? So Cao Dai is this religion that this Vietnamese guy founded in the early 1900s. Or I should say, he had some visions and then established a forum within which to convey this vision. In a nutshell, it's very dark and rather cramped. The religion, on the other hand, is a combination of Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism. Strangely enough, it also reveres Victor Hugo as a saint or prophet (I forget which). In any case, we saw this huge complex north of Saigon which used to be wholly owned and operated by the CaoDaists. And we watched the noon prayer service. Then we got back in the bus. The Cu Chi tunnels (not to be confused with the Cu Chi Cu Chi Cu tunnels - which are 2.5 times better) are an underground network of tunnels in the predominantly Communist village of Cu Chi, which the Vietcong used to thwart the American and South Vietnamese army during the war. We saw all sorts of pain-inflicting booby-traps, often involving multiple metal spikes or nails being lodged somewhere in the victims body. They didn't do any live demonstrations unfortunately. I would have paid another dollar for this. The tunnels themselves were where the Cu Chi villagers lived to survive the intense air bombing campaigns from the US planes. They were Vietnamese sized too. They doubled the height of a 60m stretch of tunnels for us tourist types. Even then, I was fully squatted down and had to waddle like a penguin to keep from crawling on all fours. My hairless head did not provide any cushioning from bumping into the hard ceiling every once in a while. Your hairy people take this for granted. Saturday, August 10th Said Sayonara Saigon this morning (yes, if I had left in the evening, it would have been Goodnight Saigon) and embarked on a 2-day trip to the Mekong Delta region, ending up in Cambodia somehow. And what a trip it ended up being. Other than being in the guesthouse overnight, the group of us on this tour were in some mode of transportation virtually non-stop. As you can guess, I didn't really see much of the Mekong Delta region which produces vast quantities of rice in Vietnam. But I did cruise down the river for 5 hours, constantly trying to wave back at each and every single local kid who yelled and screamed with their arms waving in the air. Pretty neat. There really isn't too much to report from this trip. The guide didn't tell us a damn thing about the area. But I made some new friends on the trip, so I guess that's worth something. But the guide sucked, and the food sucked - i.e., the mind and the body were left in a most unstimulated fashion. Sunday, August 11th After getting some breakfast, our main task for the day was to go to Cambodia. But first, we were loaded onto small little canoe boats for a little boat ride through a floating village. Each of these small boats was powered by a small Vietnamese lady rowing from the back. Probably not the last time that I'll be pushed around by a woman... ;-) (you see - there's my mom, and then, oh yeah, my boss is female...) Next, I hopped onto a speedboat for a 3-hour cruise to Phnom Penh in Cambodia. Along the way, we had to stop at the Vietnamese and Cambodian border crossings for the passport validations and visas and all that. The Cambodians gave me a bit of a hassle - they seemed interested in the fact that I carried an Ohio driver's license, whereas it says New York in my passport (since I was born there). Amazingly enough, the only other people in our tour group that were hassled just happened to be the only other two non-whites. Hmmmm. Now I'm not a math major, but... At Phnom Penh, we were greeted by a hoard of fans. Or actually a hoard of hawkers trying to get us to go to their guesthouse. This is kinda cool actually - you can bargain with them right there and try to get a cheaper price. But how can you really bargain down a $3 room? So I picked one and went with it. I was bored, so I walked around. And then it happened – a torrential rainstorm came down. So I did what any other hungry person would do. I went into a gas station mart to get some good food and wait out the rain. Had some instant Ramen noodles and an Ice Nescafe. Yum Yum. The rain was brief, but it wreaked absolute havoc on the roadways - apparently the drainage system is ill equipped for anything more than a light tinkle. A few of us who were on the Mekong Delta trip decided to go out for some drinks. So we hit the Foreign Correspondent's Club and had beer draughts for $1.20 (which is actually expensive!). After a few, we decided to get some pizza at Happy Herb's Pizzeria down the street. The waiter was happy, and the customers were happy as well. Can't get enough Happy Herb. Joy. For a nightcap, we hit a nightclub where the beer was even more expensive. But this place looked really neat - it was decorated such that it could have easily passed for a nightclub/bar in any major city in the States. But it was in Cambodia. Played some pool. I tend to do much better in pool when I'm not focusing on what I'm trying to do. If I think too much, I end up botching the shot. All right, that's enough for today. Even though I'm a few days delayed in sending this. Oh well. By the way, this is your second notice that your subscription is running out. Only two more issues to go, and then you'll have to get your own travel stories. See you soon. -Paraag Tidbits: 1. There is one indisputable fact about this entire region - Asians like body hair. No idea why. But not a day goes by where there isn't someone marveling at my arm hair or my chest hair. I've even had random strangers come up to me and pinch a tuft of chest hair from behind my T-shirt. Unsettling actually. It's been hard to restrain myself from shoving them away and yelling. 2. The dresses that Vietnamese flight attendants wear are hot. They just are. You should check one out someday. 3. The unit of currency in Cambodia is the riel, as in get riel. But most people just use US Dollars, and then use riel for change smaller than 1 dollar. This makes it very very hard to bargain down prices, since the numbers being discussed are very low to begin with - going down a dollar represents a significant percentage change.

Trip Update #12

2002-08-05T18:57:00.000-04:00

As I briefly mentioned in my last correspondence, I left out a key piece of info in my previous update - namely the shaving of the head. Seeing as though I had another month to go before I get back home, it was clear to me that this may be the last chance at hair experimentation I would have without having to suffer the consequences of a disastrous outcome in front of friends and family. So, I had them set the razor to 1 and clip off anything they could find - which admittedly was not much to begin with. And all this for the equivalent of $1.33 - almost as cheap as what I pay Marcus to cut my hair. Those of you with short hair have experienced the ticklish sensation that you get when you run your hand across the freshly clipped hair. So, I've found myself at random times unconsciously playing with myself... err... running my hand across my head... err... well just forget it. So, ummm, yeah. How 'bout them Mets? Sunday, July 28th Went with 10 other random people strategically summoned from around the globe to Halong Bay for a 3 day/2 night adventure, including two who were very fine eye candy indeed. As my brother would say, rrrrrrrr... So the breakdown of peoples: an older couple from New Zealand, 5 Caucasians on vacation from jobs teaching English in South Korea, 2 female medical students from England, and a Taiwanese-American girl who just finished 2 years of teaching English in Japan. And me. You know me. Halong Bay (insert your own "Halong ago did you go to Halong Bay?" joke here) contains over 3000 islands. And these aren't your everyday normal J.C. Penney catalog islands either - they're special. The only way I can think to describe it is to imagine a flat piece of shale. Now imagine 3000 of them sticking out vertically from the sea. Defies imagination? Damn skippy. I spent the entire trip waiting for Judge Gravity to knock 'em down. The first stop on the boat cruise was a very large grotto. I don't know whether it was a grotto or not - looked like a cave to me. But I suppose they can call it whatever they want to, so grotto it is. It was nice, but it was packed with tourists and, of course, naturally occurring paved walkways and neon fluorescent lighting. The sooner we got away from the crowds, the better. The other passengers agreed. We anchored for a little while for a brief swim. I preferred diving to swimming though. Actually, I should say that I attempted to complete dives off the second level of the boat - back flips, front flips, pikes, triple axles, you name it. The dive usually ended with comments approximating "That had to hurt" from the audience that was cheering me on. We had dinner served on the boat, and it was excellent – it wasn't chicken fried rice! Our hotel for the evening was this very same boat. A number of people slept up top. By the time I got up there, all the spots were taken so I slept below. Monday, July 29th Though the dinner was fantastic, we had a ho-hum breakfast. A baguette and some scrambled eggs. I have never eaten so many darn eggs in my life. That's pretty much all they'll serve at any establishment for breakfast. And I am now thoroughly sick of them. I want my oatmeal. We headed to Cat Ba island (a few of us sang "Rock the CatBa"), where we deboated and had a nice long hike up a mountain to get a different view of Halong Bay and the islands contained therein. Nice hike. Very hot. Lots of sweat. But a beautiful view. I think you all may be sick of me talking about beautiful views. After another rousing exhibition of incomplete dives (which resulted in severe calf cramps as well as some "pain in the ass"), we deboated again on the other side of Cat Ba to go to our hotel for the evening. There is a ton of construction going on here to help support tourism - apparently Vietnam is very new to the tourist circuit. We all hit a nightclub tonight, which was an excellent peek into the Vietnamese pop culture. First, we got to witness several karaoke acts of Vietnamese songs. Then, we were treated to Michael Jackson's "History" video montage (which felt eerily right at home in Communist Vietnam). Finally, there was dance music. Normal dance music. But nothing else was quite normal. Let's see... there was the one big screen showing music videos that had nothing to do with the dance music being played, there was another big video screen showing old Tom & Jerry cartoons (my favorite part), there was a long repeated sound clip of cheering fans being played alongside said dance music non-stop, and to cap it all off there was the occasional sound of a horse neighing (over the sound system). The horse was the clincher by far. Never saw it coming. Tuesday, July 30th It rained all night long, and this continued all day today. After we boarded the boat to head back to the mainland, the wind picked up as well. Soon, it was difficult to see anything outside, and there was a rumour of a typhoon in the area. I started singing the "Gilligan's Island" theme song. But, we got to the harbor just fine. Everything was soaked in the brief walk from the boat pier to the bus though, and we were treated to a very wet and crammed 3 hour drive back to Hanoi. Back in Hanoi, I did a lot of nothing for three hours before heading on my next trip - an overnight train to Sapa, not to be confused with Napa, which is similar but very different. Wait... most of you probably didn't get that joke - a common phrase that everyone hears in the broken English from locals in Southeast Asia is "same, same, but different". I have decided to make this phrase part of my daily vernacular when I get back to the States. I urge you to consider the same. Anyway, there was only one other person on this trip with me - Valerie from France who works in marketing/sales for, strangely enough, Kimberly Clark. So I thrashed her and told her that P&G is king and that we take no prisoners. Okay, I didn't. And I didn't ask her for a job either. Wednesday, July 31st Arrived in the Lao Cai train station of northern Vietnam (right on the Chinese border) at 6:00 am. From there, we had another short and cramped minibus ride to Sapa. I quickly learned that all the travel agencies in Hanoi prettymuch sell their Sapa area tours to a hotel in Sapa, who then figures out who just came and for what tour and attempts to organize it all at the last second. Since I paid a budget price, I don't really have any room to complain. But it's pure unbridled chaos. This Sapa tour is kinda like the Chiang Mai tour I did in Thailand. Same, same, but different. And better. Though not little and yellow as well - that would be Nuprin. It's supposed to be a trek in the middle of nowhere to see the ethnic minority villages in the hills. So this was to be educational as well as adventurous. The countryside is very hilly - yet these villages still manage to somehow grow rice on the mountainside. Impossible you say? Ludicrous? Flabbergasting? I dare say not. Not. What they do is carve out steppes (that's British for steps) in the mountainside so as to have many many level surfaces to retain water for the rice crop. Yes, the retaining water phrase does have potential for a joke, but I would fear for my life upon my return if I made such a wisecrack. But I digress... So we headed off with our guide Trang down into the valley to check out some of the hill tribes. The first village we came across was a Black Hmong village. This tribe is especially adept at training the very pretty little girls to be very skilled salespeople of their woven goods. You can't imagine how hard it is to turn these children away. If you buy something from one, the rest try to give you a guilt trip by saying "But you didn't buy something from meeeeeeee." All of these kids speak very good English too - after all, they have been peddling these wares every day since they could walk to English speaking strangers. Needless to say, these hill tribes were far from untouched by civilization. Our first night was spent at the home of a family in the Giay tribe. Trang cooked us an expansive meal - six dishes plus soup and rice. Unbelievable. And very stomach expanding as well. Our beverage of choice during the dinner? Shots of rice wine, which were eerily reminiscent of the lao lao rice whiskey that I had consumed in Huie Xay, Laos. This was not all though - Trang and I shared three very large bottles of Chinese beer to cap it all off. I slept well that night. Other than having to get up to use the facilities. Thursday, August 1st Happy 28 and 1 month birthday to me! It rained nonstop last night. And it had been raining virtually nonstop yesterday as well (even during our trekking). This made for very muddy ground and overflowing streams. On more than one occasion, our hike forced us to walk shin-deep in water thus thoroughly soaking my non-waterproof sneakers. I spent the rest of the day making squishy sounds with my feet. Nonetheless, the trek was still really nice. Just soaked up the scenery and visited a few more tourist-overriden ethnic minority villages. Even so, I was happy to end the trek and get back to the hotel where a shower happily awaited me. And my feet were happy to be out of the wet shoes and into some wet sandals. Friday, August 2nd Today was low key. The rains stopped, so the heat became overbearing again. Thankfully, I only had a short 3 hour hike on the menu this morning. Saw some waterfalls and then soaked in the scenery a little more. Same, same. But different. Late in the afternoon, a minibus took a bunch of us tourist types back to Lao Cai to catch our train. There was still over an hour to pass before the train left, so a few of us decided to eat at the "Friendly Cafe" - not to be confused with the misspeled "Frendly Cafe" across the street. This restaurant/cafe/eatery-of-some-sort had a dish listed and then a price under a column labeled "Good" and another price under a column labeled "Better". In other words, you could pay a little more for a little extra something-something. But this something-something was at the sole discretion of the restaurant and the menu gave no hint as to what the difference was – you had to ask. In some cases, the better version would have skin-off chicken, or you'd get mushrooms in the dish as well or something like that. It was just different. Not same same at all. Shared a cabin with three Frenchies on the train. There's a whole lot of Frenchies visiting Vietnam - an inordinate number. I've met very few French travelers prior to arriving in 'Nam, but now it seems over half of the travelers are from there. Saturday, August 3rd Arrived in Hanoi early this morning. Since I had scheduled a night bus to the town of Hue (without the News) later that evening, I had all day to wander and roam the city. So, I went shopping. Shopping in Hanoi is interesting. Stores selling similar wares are often clustered around one another. So you end up with a street with nothing other than stores selling electronics, and another street selling metal cabinets, and even a street (Al Bundy's own personal nightmare) selling women's shoes. I didn't buy much... just wandered around. Got a fake adidas fishing hat for a little more than a dollar - the acclaimed black Puffs hat (donated by one Edmund J. Miller) that can be seen in many of the photos posted online was alas stolen by pirates in Chiang Mai. That, or I left it on the bus - I forget which. Before hopping on the bus to Hue, the tour agency guys asked me to join them for dinner. So, I got to eat what Vietnamese people actually eat for dinner after all. Pretty tasty stuff - presented in a Tupperware container too. Sunday, August 4th Got into Hue early this morning and checked into a dorm room at a hotel for $2.50 a night. Can't beat it. I just think it's kinda neat that so many places quote prices in US Dollars. Well, perhaps neat isn't the correct word - how about freaky? After settling in for all of 1.5 seconds, I hit the town. Hue was an old capital site for Vietnam back in the day (a phrase which means "I don't know when"). So, one of the big ticket tourist traps is to go check out the ruins of the old capital. I tried to do this as best I could without suffering from heat exhaustion. For the afternoon, I joined a 5 hour motorbike tour of the surrounding areas arranged by a lady named Thu. There were 8 tourists and only 6 brothers of Thu to drive the motorbikes, so I got to drive my own. This proved to be a pretty risky proposition, but for Mom's sake, I'll spare the details. The bike tour was neat - saw more ancient ruins, and tombs, and pagodas, a Buddhist monastery, and a Japanese covered bridge. You know, all the standard stuff. And no, there were not Japanese people covering the bridge - the bridge is both covered and in Japanese style. Took a very well needed shower, and unfortunately the weather is so hot here that there is no cold water coming out of the tap. It sucks. Can't even count on a shower to cool you down. Kicked off what was certain to be a banner evening by watching a really really bad movie on Cinemax (no idea how they get Cinemax here), and then a Will Smith concert on MTV. You can imagine my ecstasy. 7 of the 8 of us from the bike tour met up at Thu's cafe for drinks - we ended up hanging out here till midnight or so, when Thu's brother threw us out. So we decided to wander the streets. Immediately, tons of bicycle rickshaws offered their transportation services, which we promptly declined. Then someone got the bright idea that it might be fun to drive one of these things. Before I knew it, we had commandeered 4 bicycle rickshaws, loaded our group (which now was about 11 people) plus the rickshaw drivers on them, and began racing up and down the empty streets. I didn't win, but I did have 4 passengers on mine, so at least I have an excuse. I have a vague recollection of racing someone on foot over a bridge... and somehow we ended up at a makeshift bar (it was a bunch of plastic chairs under a tarp) and ordered a round of beers for everyone - rickshaw drivers included. Finally, I decided to stumble back to the room because I had yet another bus to catch in the morning. As luck would have it, my opinion of where the hotel was located was incorrect, so I wandered around the streets aimlessly for about 30 minutes before figuring it out. But by then I was hungry, so (being the smart guy I am) I decided to get some food at this shady nighttime roadside restaurant operation - consisting of large pots with food, undersized plastic furniture, and a what amounted to a Sterno can. I think I had some sort of chicken soup - with a quarter of a chicken (it was cooked). I haven't had any digestive problems yet, so I think I got lucky this time (that's twice today!). Okay, this is pretty dern long. I'll leave you be now. Hey - only two more updates before I'm home to write the last one. I'm sure that my mother is very happy to know this. Love you too Mom. -Paraag Tidbits: 1. The unit of currency of Vietnam is the dong, which offers up all sorts of crude typical male jokes like "How much dong do you have on you?" and the like. Sheesh... men. Can't live with 'em... can't kill 'em. 2. A whole lot of travelers from other nations ask me who I voted for. When I reply Gore, they tell me that every American that they have met has replied similarly, and so they cannot understand how Bush won. And in case you haven't guessed, our faithful leader is not all that popular outside of the States. And two interesting items courtesy of the 5 teachers from Korea: 3. Kids in Korea begin going to school from roughly the age of 3 or 4. Many children go to private schools at night in addition to public schooling during the day. And they literally spend all their free time studying - often till 1am. Then they wake up at 6am and begin the cycle again for 6 days a week. 4. When President Bush's proclaimed that North Korea is part of the "Axis of Evil" during his State of the Union address is extremely negative, South Koreans were pretty upset. Public sentiment there is that there is even now only one Korea, that unification was just around the corner, and that Bush's comments set them back 5 years. No word on what governmental sentiment is.

Trip Update #11

2002-07-27T18:56:00.000-04:00

Since I've booked the next 6 days solid and I'm not sure if I'll have access to the Internet, I figured I'd send this one out a little early. Hope ya don't mind... Before we continue, I have a correction I need to make: C&C Music Factory sang "Things that make you go Hmmm" and "Gonna make you sweat". "Pump Up the Jam" was sung by Technotronic. Now that you are thoroughly maxxed out on useless information... Monday, July 22nd From the sleepy little border town of Huie Xay in Laos, there are two ways to get to Luang Prabang, where there's actually people living: a slow boat or a fast boat down the Mekong River (opposite of the Yukon). In true Paraagian fashion, I took the fast boat. The fast boat takes 6 hours to complete the journey. Remember the longtail boat I described a few weeks back? This boat is very similar, except that the boat itself looks like it was meant for racing. And definitely not meant for comfort. We each had an area of about 2 ft x 2 ft to sit in, meaning that we were inhaling our knees for the entire trip. It's like an upright fetal position in fact. It would have been nice if it took six hours. But it didn't. The boat kept breaking down - I have a picture of this guy working on the motor with a machete, a hammer, and an iron spike. This is engine mechanics at its finest, folks. Take notes. After changing boats twice, and changing the propeller twice, we finally made it to Luang Prabang. The Mekong River itself is a funny river. To begin with, there had been heavy rains the last 2-3 days in the region and the river was already high because of rainy season - so this river was moving fast. But it was chaotic too - there were whirlpools everywhere, along with completely random waves coming out of nowhere. And the weirdest thing was that the river seemed to change level at it's own whim - my understanding was that gravity was a universal law and would dictate that the level be flat or descending. Perhaps I'm in some alternate universe. Tuesday, July 23rd I rented a motor scooter to drive around all day today. This was great fun, especially since I've never really ridden a motor scooter much in my life, let alone one that is manual shift. Thankfully, I didn't hit anyone. Or at least, not on purpose. Luang Prabang is famous for its Buddhist temples. Go figure. So I went temple watching for a good portion of the day. Temples are known as "wats" here and in Thailand. My favorite temple names so far: Wat That, Wat May, and Wat Pho. If I were to establish some temples, I'd add Wat Dahey, Wat chostep, and Wat Yoolookinat. I could go on forever here... Doesn't take much to amuse me, does it? In the afternoon, I rode 30km one way to the Kwang Xi waterfalls. It being rainy season and all, there was a boatload of water tumbling down the mountain - just awemazing (I'm getting tired of using the same old adjectives to describe things, so I'm going to start making words up). But I think I liked the scooter ride just as much as the waterfall itself, especially since the vast majority of the road was unpaved dirt road, where I had to maneuver around potholes and water puddles. Overall, Laos is much greener and less developed than Thailand - that's the alluring part of this country. As such, you won't find top-notch accommodation or anything fancy around here. It's a nature enthusiast's paradise - just so untouched. And the Internet connections are slow as all heck out here. Wednesday, July 24th Rode in the back row of a bus for 7 hours with my knees to my chest, heading south for a town called Vang Vieng. This town is pretty much a small tourist industry and that's it - no real town or village. Really quite a shame. But why? Because this area has some wowtacular mountainsides and caves. In fact, the number one activity for people to do here is rent an inner tube and float down the Nam Song River just to take it all in. So, I did that. Beauty. The mountains are just holeymoleyiscious - looks like a crazy large piece of shale just jutting out of the ground, and a layer could just flake off at any given moment. But it doesn't. Had a really interesting snack from an Indian street vendor - a roti filled with bananas and chocolate (rich chocolate Ovaltine in fact). Mmm, mmm, good. By the way, I leave for home in exactly one month. Terrifying. Thursday, July 25th First off, happy birthday to my big brudder Neeraj. Did a full-day kayaking/spelunking trip today with 13 other fine individuals - by the way, spelunking is the fancy-pants term for cave exploring. This was incredipendous. I got to have my own kayak too, though it wasn't complete with spray skirt and all - so I couldn't practice rolls or anything. But it was still a lot of fun to tool around a bit. The thing that made today a hit though was the spelunking. The second cave we went into was waterlogged, so we had to swim into it in the complete dark. Only the guides had lights, so we were just kinda feeling around to make our way through. Finally, we reached dry land inside, though it was not so dry. We were pretty much walking on mud. This cave served as a home to the locals for 4 months while the U.S. was carpet-bombing the area during the Vietnam War to keep the North Vietnamese from using Laos as a land crossing to the south. There was even a toilet (big hole in the cave), a kitchen area (room with a vented roof), and a large sleeping area. We continued through the cave for another hour or so, none of us knowing in the least what to expect since the guides didn't bother telling us about all this before. I was totally fine with this, but a few others were really disappointed and upset, which I can completely understand. We were scrambling up steep muddy banks several times - no doubt a slip had the potential to fall for quite a ways in the darkness and potentially hit a rock and break something. We even got to slide down a mud-chute into a water pool - I enjoyed this so much that I climbed back up and went again! After squeezing through a very narrow crevice (I could barely fit through it!), I was outside at last. Free at last, free at last. But now where to? And walking in the forest with no shoes? Not only the forest, but also ankle-deep in mud... or at least I thought it was mud until a distinct smell arose. Needless to say, many of us spent some time in the muddy river trying to clean off said "mud". And a nice long shower was in order when I got back to the guesthouse. Friday, July 26th Rode for four hours in the back of a pick-up truck to Vientiane (capital of Laos) this morning. After finally reaching the backpacker area, I did something I should have done before - read the guidebook. After realizing that Vientiane is kinda like Jakarta in having a lack of things to see or do, I went to a travel agent. Fortunately for me, there was still a flight left this afternoon for Hanoi, Vietnam. So, I took it. At the airport, I bumped into an American fellow (Rob) who I had met in Luang Prabang. So we hung out the rest of the evening around Hanoi and just chatted. It was really nice to just talk with someone who's from the same country - it'd been a while. Especially since we could compare notes about our observations and such about everything. I think this is the first Communist country I've ever been in. There seems to be an abundance of red flags everywhere, and plenty of people dressed in a military-looking uniform. But otherwise, Hanoi seems like a normal city. In fact, some have apparently termed it the "Paris of the Orient", a fitting description since Vietnam was under French rule until independence some 55 years ago. There are still many French remnants left in the landscape, architecture, and even food (baguettes are quite common to see on the streets). Saturday, July 27th Spent the morning booking up trips for the next 5-6 days. Then the afternoon was left to explore the city. First stop - Ho Chi Minh Museum. This place is weird - don't even know how to describe it. But they had a room with a bunch of Picasso stuff in it - made no sense at all. UNESCO has designated Ho Chi Minh as being a great leader, and this is the guy we were fighting against in the Vietnam War. Of course, you won't see the U.S. side of the story here. In any case, it's clear that I need to brush up on my history a bit. The rest of the day, I just wandered around the city, checked out a few pagodas, strolled by some lakes, etc. This city has a strong potential to be a really romantic place to spend some time. I've definitely had my fill though. Since I'm not much of a city person, I'm pretty happy that I leave tomorrow morning. By the way, it's frickin’ hot out here. Till next week, -Paraag Tidbits: 1. Pringles are everywhere. I mean absolutely everywhere – even in a small itty-bitty village along the Mekong River between Huie Xay and Luang Prabang. It appears as though they are a bigger hit outside of the U.S. than in the U.S. 2. Red Bull apparently was created in Thailand. It is sold in this area in glass containers that resemble medicine bottles. And it's cheap. Really strange to see. 3. In Laos, the highest denomination bill is 5000 kip, which is equivalent to roughly 50 cents. So, people pretty much walk around with a stack of bills. Larger purchases are made with Thai bahts or US Dollars. 4. Laos and Vietnam both drive on the right side of the road. So, what happens at the land crossings between Thailand (left side) and Laos? Does the road do a twist? Or are there just a bunch of head on collisions?

Trip Update #10

2002-07-22T18:55:00.000-04:00

Well, I'm getting closer and closer to being back on schedule... Monday, July 15th Woke up after a second night in paradise - a floating guesthouse on the lake in the middle of nowhere, Thailand. This is the last day of my three day excursion with C&C Jungle Tours (not to be confused with C&C Music Factory - remember "Pump Up the Jam"?). The first item today was to take a rather uninteresting jungle walk over a mildly barren hill and along a paved roadway for about an hour with a guide who didn't speak English. Not quite sure what I was supposed to get out of this, so I just smiled and said thank you. This is an essential tool to survival in a foreign land - the smile and thank you. Learn it well, my young apprentice. The next item was a much better jungle walk, for which I was joined by 6 other people on random trips with this C&C Jungle Tour company. After about an hour's journey, we reached a cave - and a very unlit cave at that. Another non-English speaking guide-type person proceeded to light up an oil lamp and motioned for us to follow him. Somehow it escaped this whole crew that having one lamp for seven people through narrow entrance passages on rocky and slippery terrain won't quite cut it. So four of the other tourists backed out, leaving me, the guide, and one other person as the lone spelunkers. And of course, I was last, so I couldn't see a damn thing. It was fun bumping into very hard rocks with my head and knees and toes and shins and all that. Really it was. Trust me. It was worth it though - the feeling of venturing into a cavern barely able to maneuver through narrow crevices only to find yourself in a huge room is kinda cool. The last item on the agenda was to ride the railway over the actual Bridge over River Kwai, but some other girl got really really really sick and had to be rushed back into town. Somehow, this meant that I couldn't be dropped at the train station, but being in the situation I was without being able to communicate effectively, I simply smiled and said thank you. Almost forgot - the mountains in Thailand are rather peculiar looking. The silhouette of the mountains against the horizon is very random. Imagine a 5 year old's scribble or doodle of one continuous line across a page; this is what the mountains look like. Tuesday, July 16th Not feeling very well today. Tough luck. I had already booked a day trip to Ayuthaya, which was one of the previous capitals of Thailand. The first capital was Sukothai, then Ayuthaya, and now Bangkok. In each case, the new capital was established after the Burmese took over the existing capital and ruined and pillaged it. Needless to say, Thais are not generally fond of Burmese people. Ayuthaya was neat - bunch of old buildings made of brick with Buddhas everywhere. I think Mojo Nixon should rewrite his song "Elvis is Everywhere" to "The Buddha is Everywhere". Though the place was interesting, there's only so much of ruined buildings that I can take - they all start looking the same after the first 15 minutes, regardless of the function of the structure in its previous life. So, I was quite ready to go by the end of the day. Back in Bangkok, I boarded an overnight bus to Chiang Mai, which is way up north in Thailand. Thanks to my comfy down-feather travel pillow (recommended my Scott), I was able to catch some zzzzzzz's. Wednesday, July 17th Arrived in Chiang Mai at 6am. After wandering around a bit to check out hotel prices and trekking prices, I settled on a place called "Nice Place". This is a rather apt name, since it says it all in one phrase. You know that it's not a crappy place or a wonderful place, it tells you right in the name. Life would be so much simpler if everything were so named - KFC could be "overpriced fast food" and Taco Bell could be "drunk/hungover food" and White Castle could be "dain bramaged food". Chiang Mai is Buddhist temple central. There are over 200 temples in this town. So, I spent some time looking around and checking out a few temples. It's just really neat to walk along what appears to be a normal everyday street by most people's definitions, and then all of a sudden be confronted by this beautifully constructed and adorned multiple-level golden A-frame roofed temple every few blocks. Just strange. And kinda cool. At 6pm, I met a bunch of people that I would be stuck with over the next few days on a trekking expedition in the mountains of northern Thailand. We were given an overview of the expedition and what we needed to bring. Then we were let loose. To get better acquainted, a few of us went out and grabbed some dinner and drinks - nothing major. Another relatively low-key day. Thursday, July 18th Began the trek this morning. After having a Nice Shower, checking in my bag and my valuables at the Nice Safety Deposit Box, and getting some Nice Breakfast, we were on our way. There were 13 of us: 5 Brits, 3 Dutch, 3 Americans, and 2 Kiwis. The split was 7 guys, 6 women - not bad at all. We were headed to an area called Pai, which was a good 4-hour drive away. So, we packed into a songtaew (the pick-up truck with a canopy) with our 3 guides and the driver and off we went. Since there was not nearly enough room for us all to sit, two of the guides stood on the tailgate and held on to the roof. Slowly, we started trading places with them for a change of pace. Then, one of the guides hopped onto the roof. Not to be outdone, I hopped up there and joined him. Don't worry - we were wearing our seatbelts! :-) I've been known in the past to drive my car on cruise control and standing up so my head is through the open sunroof - this was a similar sensation. (From the audience, a collective "you idiot!") After our 4-hour drive, we arrived at a Lisu hill tribe village. One chief guide Chan explained the Lisu traditions and conventions, and then we were on our way for a 2-hour hike through the jungle to the next village, where we would stay the night. The path was extremely slippery, so it didn't take long before people were falling. Soon, we even devised a scoring system for falls - 1 point for minor falls and 3 points for major falls. By the end of the two hours, we had lost count because one of the British girls apparently had Teflon for shoes and kept us laughing the whole way. At the Lahu village, we played a little soccer (I was goalie, as usual). My team lost, but not until I was replaced at goal and moved to forward, where I scored two goals. Yes, they were off two very good assists, but hey - I scored! No, I didn't take off my shirt a la Brandi Chastain since I wasn't wearing a shirt. We all had dinner soon afterwards - a homecooked Thai meal, family style with all of us sitting in a big circle. After dinner, the village kids came and sang along with the guitar for us - incredibly adorable. You know how kids sing - with no regard for pitch, volume, rhythm... brought tears to our eyes. Our sleeping quarters were one huge room with a bunch of mattresses on the floor - very communal. The shower was a tap flowing into a bucket. And the bathrooms were umm... squatters. Many of you know what squatters are, and many do not. Those who do not, please ask me some other time for a description. So we sat around, sang songs, drank beer, smoked cigarettes (mostly), and just got to know one another. Really a wonderful day. Friday, July 19th Woke up late this morning and didn't get out of the village until 11:00 or so - a full two hours behind schedule, or so they told us. It had rained all night, so the points were sure to rack up today on the slip-o-meter. But, we were all given walking sticks to use. Apparently, this was the missing link - we recorded a very low number of falls. Oh well. We stopped by a waterfall after a two hour hike to rinse off the thick layer of sweat, sunscreen, and bug spray. Very refreshing. After lunch, we hiked another hour or so before mounting up for an hour long elephant ride. This was incredible - the scenery was gorgeous untouched jungle, and we were riding on elephants. The pictures are sure to be stunning. Of course, just riding on elephants wasn't enough, so we got a hold of a few slingshots and tried to pelt each other with balled up leaves. When am I ever going to get a chance to do that again? After another brief hike, we arrived at a Karen tribe village, where our head guide Chan was from. Same type of setup as the night before. This evening's activity was a local game, which was eerily like a drinking game, except whenever someone messed up, they were the recipient of a char smear on their face from the underbelly of a cooking pot. Different. Saturday, July 20th Our last day on this trek - boo hoo! The major activity today was a 2-hour bamboo raft trip. The raft is as follows – a bunch of bamboo stalks tied together. Then three of us plus a guide are placed on each raft. Each of us has another bamboo stalk to push against the stream bottom to propel us along. This quickly became competitive as we were trying to steal the sticks from other rafts, tip them over, or any number of crazy ludicrous things. But it was definitely good fun. My boat won, which ironically had all three Americans on it. The other American fellow wasted no time in chanting "U.S.A." repeatedly, to the groans of everyone else present. Apparently, it's a commonly held belief that Americans are very arrogant. This fellow was not helping the cause (through the chanting and other conversations that he had with folks). I'm sure that people from other countries to an extent are hearing what they want to hear, but I can see some truth behind these allegations. Most people also claimed that I am very different from the typical American that they meet. So I don't quite know what to believe. But, I guess whether we like it or not, we are all ambassadors of our respective countries and we just need to remember that. This 3 day trek may have been the highlight of my trip so far -it's difficult to say. I just had an incredible time in an incredibly beautiful area. It was simply perfect. Sunday, July 21st Hopped on a government bus for a 6 hour ride to Chiang Khong. This was a luxury bus, fully equipped with A/C. Unfortunately, the A/C was too strong and I froze my tail off. Oh well. Chiang Khong is a border town from which I crossed the Mekong river to get into Laos. Laos is a country - really, it is. Go look on the map. In fact, Hank Hill's neighbor Hanh is from Laos. So I spent the night in this sleepy little town on the Laos side called Huie Xay, not to be confused with the neighboring towns of Louie Xay and Dewey Xay. My room was the most basic possible - a full bed with four walls and not much more. In fact the four walls weren't really finished walls - my side of the wall had the beams exposed. But there were some friendly spiders that were sharing the room with me. Bumped into a guy that was on the bus from Chiang Mai with me at a restaurant and I ended up hanging out with the group he was with for the rest of the evening. They were enjoying a few bottles of the local rice whiskey. Before I myself partook, I figured that I should examine the bottle. It read "1999 Bordeaux". Oh well, bottoms up! After finishing this bottle, the waitress told us that they were out. I think she was secretly trying to get rid of us, since one person in our party was busy feeding his dinner to the shrubberies. Till next week, -Paraag Tidbits: 1. It's rainy season here. This means that it's impossible for clothes to dry, so my bag smells like umm... wet underwear. Yecch! 2. The humidity also causes it to not take much to begin sweating. And sweating is like "breaking the seal" - once you start, it's difficult to stop. 3. The unit of currency in Thailand is the baht. To pronounce this word, imagine Arnold Schwarzenegger saying "Baht I don't want fries with that" and there you have it. 4. I've had a strikingly small amount of satay in Thailand. But I've had enough chicken fried rice to last me a lifetime. This is the "fish and chips" or "cheeseburger and fries" of Southeast Asia without a doubt.