Ryan Nee :: Around the World

The Ghosts of Chernobyl

2007-09-01T23:06:00.000-06:00

After my bizarre trip through the wallet-lightening border of Transdniestria, I ended up safely across into Ukraine and landed in the chaotic Kiev train station. Randomly, in the midst of the hustle and bustle, I ran right into my British friend Will, who I had traveled with a few weeks earlier in Bulgaria. I dropped off my stuff at his hotel in central Kiev, then headed out with him into the city.

I'm not sure what I was expecting out of Kiev, but I was surprised to find a bright and vibrant city full of historic churches, busy pedestrian areas, shady tree-lined streets, and restaurants galore. It was definitely a world away from the gray soviet-era mess I had left back Moldova. Will and I checked out the plaza where the 2004 Orange Revolution took place, scoped out some of the city's oldest cathedrals, bought a few old soviet souvenirs on the cobblestone Andreevsky Spusk, and dodged tons of wedding parties in Kiev's numerous public plazas which were swarming with photographers, happy couples in typical wedding attire, and old cars dressed up for the occasion.

Will and I also stopped by the fairly interesting Chernobyl museum, which thoroughly documented the infamous nuclear disaster, which took place in northern Ukraine back in the days of the USSR before the fall of communism. The museum was well done, but the following day, I went to somewhere much more interesting: the real thing.

Since about 2004, tourists have been able to go to the Chernobyl disaster area led by a guide from a few government-registered tour companies. Digging around online as I prepared for this trip, I read several passionately-written articles by journalists who had visited Chernobyl and the experience sounded too amazing to miss. These days, over twenty years since the disaster, the once-lethal radiation levels at Chernobyl have dramatically decreased, and are now fairly low — about the same as those found in any major city. There are still hot-spots and restricted areas, but much of the disaster area is now safe to visit. Following in the footsteps of journalists and increasing numbers of adventurous tourists, I signed up for a day trip to see it for myself.

Our group met up at a hotel in Kiev, then piled into a bus for a trip about three hours north toward the border with Belarus. The radioactive site is protected by two exclusion zones, where people have not been allowed to live since the reactor blew. Strangely enough, the area has become an unintentional wildlife refuge, home to a large population of wild boars armed with scimitar-like tusks and a surly disposition. Amazingly, some former-residents, mostly the very elderly, have been allowed to return to the exclusion zones and live in their old homes, just so long as they request no help or money from the government should they get ill.

As we passed through the outer exclusion zone, a few military policemen boarded the bus and checked our passports against the list of the day's official visitors. We continued along through a few more checkpoints and entered Chernobyl town, which is now home to more than 3800 international scientists and researchers studying the effects of the disaster. We were briefed a bit on what to expect, then headed off about ten miles north toward the site of the power plant complex itself. At the time of the explosion in 1986, there were four nuclear reactors running and two more being built. Incredibly, more than twenty years later, the unfinished Reactor #5 still sits frozen in mid-construction, surrounded by soaring cranes that will never complete their task.

A few miles down the road is the infamous Chernobyl Reactor #4, the center point of the disaster. The cause of the accident is hard to describe, and my art school brain had a hard time understanding the science of it all. What is clear is that the government of then-USSR was incredibly negligent and ultimately caused the disaster three ways: by allowing a nuclear plant to become poorly maintained, by allowing poor communication between staff on different shifts, and by allowing inexperienced workers trained for coal power plants to handle Chernobyl's night shift. On April 26th, 1986, these three forces created a perfect storm, and the world's largest nuclear disaster was born, with radioactive fallout estimated at more than 100 times that of the Hiroshima atomic bomb. So what did the USSR government do? They tried to cover it up.

But first, they had to stop all the fires from burning and get the reactor into a stable condition, a responsibility pushed onto a lot of young men who had no idea what they were signing up for. Apparently, for every five minutes served fighting the Chernobyl fires, the government offered men two years off from their compulsory military service. At the Chernobyl museum in Kiev, there is shocking video footage of these guys smiling and laughing as they go in to fight the radioactive blaze, giddy about not having to serve in the military. Little did they know, the government was also guaranteeing them a death sentence, and indeed, these men were the first to die from cancer and radiation poisoning just days after the disaster. Even after people started to die, the USSR seemed to have no plans to reveal the disaster to the world. In fact, it was initially discovered because the wind carried radioactive particles all the way to a Swedish power station, where workers frantically searched for a leak before realizing that the radiation wasn't coming from their plant. The news hit international papers, and Russia was forced to come clean. The official line of the government is that some 60 people died immediately, and around 4000 more from radiation-caused cancer. Given the extent to which Moscow tried to cover up the accident, the real numbers are surely much higher than that.

Today, there are still areas near the reactor which are extremely unsafe, depending on which direction the wind was blowing the radiation the day of the explosion. Even the area we went had relatively high levels of radiation — safe for short-term exposure measuring into the minutes, but not the kind of place you'd want to set up a tent and hang out. It was surreal to see Reactor #4 up so close, now covered in its famous concrete sarcophagus. Our professional guide assured that the levels of radioactivity were safe, but I definitely got comfort in seeing the groups of international scientists walking around the site in plain clothes. Here's a close-up of Reactor #4:

The most interesting part of the tour wasn't the reactor itself, but rather the nearby town of Priypat, where some 52,000 people lived. The city was built for Chernobyl employees and scientists as a soviet utopia, where the social and intellectual elite could live the high life. Supposedly, the residents of Priypat even had access to luxury goods like Chanel perfume from France. A full day after the explosion — on my third birthday, April 27th, 1986 — the soviets finally decided to evacuate the town, located only about a five minute walk from the radiation-gushing Chernobyl power plant. The evacuation was massive: the more than fifty-thousand people living in Priypat were loaded onto some 1100 buses brought in from all over the USSR to get the people out of there. Residents were told that they would need to leave for up to three days — they were never allowed to return.

Now, Priypat stands as a surreal soviet ghost town. And although in the twenty years since the Chernobyl disaster the town has been trashed and gutted by looters and slowly broken down by the slow grind of natural erosion, Priypat is still a haunting and fascinating look into a dark day in the history of man. We started with a tour through the Ministry of Culture, the heart of Priypat's cultural activities. The blocky grand foyer was mostly in ruins, but the soviet mural painting lingered as a relic from happier times.

The cultural center also housed a huge community theater, a series of smaller meeting rooms, locker rooms, a swimming pool, and a mid-sized gymnasium. In the gym, a few remnants of life shined out through the mess — a poster of a Russian boxer, a bulletin board with long-faded messages, and a few old gym shoes.

We ventured outside the cultural complex to an area where an amusement park once stood. With all the talk of evacuation plans, government negligence, and radiation levels, it's easy to forget that Priypat was a town just like any other, full of ordinary people. For me, seeing the frozen and rusted amusement park really drove home the human element of the disaster. A massive ferris wheel creaked as its joints ground in the wind. Wooden planks on the benches of a tilt-a-whirl are looked ready to succumb to nature. Rusty bumper cars sat scattered as if the power would come back on at any second and restart the once-happy scene.

From the amusement park, we entered one of the old blocky apartment buildings and climbed all the way to the top for a view out over the massive planned city. Along the way, we climbed through a few of the old apartments, where there are still beds, tattered wallpaper, and other items left behind by the evacuees. In one apartment, I saw cartoon stickers on the window and couldn't help but shudder knowing that the little kid who stuck them there probably sat in that room not knowing that invisible, deadly radiation filled the apartment's air for more than 24 hours before the town was evacuated.

Our last stop, and definitely the most horrifying, was Priypat's former school, where hundreds of desks and books were strewn about a cluster of classrooms. Soviet newspapers from the days leading up to the disaster are mixed into the mess, and in some places chalk was still barely visible on chalkboards. A music classroom had black-stemmed notes pasted onto the wall and broken vinyl records on the floor. In the kindergarten and nursery, dolls, toy instruments, and stuffed animals shared the floor with gas masks distributed during the disaster.

After our tour of the disaster area was complete, our group went through bizarre radiation-testing machines, then headed back to Kiev. Visiting Chernobyl was an unbelievably memorable and truly moving experience. Seeing a completely abandoned city with so many traces of people was bizarre, and caused a disconnect in my brain. It's easy to visit old ruined towns like Pompeii in Italy or Ephesus in Turkey and try to imagine how these cities must have been, but seeing a thoroughly modern city in ruins was a completely different feeling. In the nursery and kindergarten area, I couldn't help but try to put myself in those kids shoes. Because of the neglegence of a group of overzealous adults, kids my own age were invisibly invaded by cancer-causing radioactivity, giving them life-long illnesses with which they will forever have to cope. It was such an insane feeling, and not one I'll soon forget.

Here are a few more shots from around the sorrowful town of Priypat:

I'm writing this from London, where I arrived today on a flight from Sofia, Bulgaria. There's a lot of my trip left to write about, including my excellent adventures in Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro, and Albania with Gerni. Plus, my solo jaunt through Macedonia and the headline-grabbing region of Kosovo. But I'll have to save those stories for when I get home, so this will be my last blog entry while I'm on the road. Thank you all so much for reading along this whole time — it has really meant a lot to me!

In three days, I'm catching a flight across the Atlantic back to the good ol' United States of America, where I haven't been for more than a year. I'll spend just short of a week in New York with my old work friends, Steve, Jorge, and Charles. Then, I'll stop by Providence to see my old pal Austin, then to Boston where I'll fly on September 15th back home to COLORADO! I can't even tell you how exciting it is to type that. I'm almost home!

See you soon,
Ryan!

This country does not exist

2007-08-13T20:04:00.000-06:00

My loop through Turkey and Georgia brought me back to the intensity of Istanbul, where I met up with Matt Coyle, a good friend I've known since elementary school, who flew out to join me on the road for a couple of weeks.

Matt and I had a great couple of days touring around Istanbul, checking out the city's top-notch collection of historical sites. We spent some time under the gigantic tiled dome of the Blue Mosque, dropped in for a quick wander of the Grand Bazaar, visited a historic hammam bathhouse, and headed underground out of the sweltering heat into the Basilica Cistern. The cistern is a massive underground chamber of water, built in the 6th century during the reign of Roman Emperor Justinian. Through references in text, archaeologists knew of the cistern's existence, but they weren't sure exactly where to find it until they ran across a local villager who claimed to be able to catch fish from the comfort of his own home. The cistern was re-discovered, and now visitors can walk among more than 300 of the dramatically-lit columns that hold up the ceiling, including a few which are intricately carved. Matt and I both loved the experience.

We also visited the remarkable Topkapi Palace complex, the massive former home of the numerous sultans who ran the Ottoman Empire for more than 400 years. Almost like the Forbidden City in Beijing, the palace has a nested courtyard design, and each of the four courtyards had specific rules about who was allowed to visit. The first was open for public events, and the fourth only for the sultan and special invited guests. We toured the Harem, a eunuch-guarded housing complex for the sultan's army of concubines. Interestingly, the sultan's mother — often a former-concubine — was given most of the control over the concubine girls, and controlled the sultan's choice of ladyfriends with a heavy hand. The rooms in the Harem ranged from the elaborately decorated so-called Queen Mother's chambers, down to the humble rooms for individual concubines. On display in the palace itself are hundreds of artifacts ranging from gifts to the Ottoman Empire from China and Japan, to gaudy gilded and diamond-encrusted trinkets commissioned by the Ottomans to adorn the burial place of the Prophet Mohammed in Medina. Shockingly, they even had the arm bones of St. John the Baptist.

After getting our fill of historic sites, we headed out into contemporary Istanbul, visiting the Istanbul Modern museum, which had a great collection of Turkish modern and contemporary art, as well as some special exhibitions by international artists. Our favorite were the spectacular wall-sized photographs by Andreas Gursky, an artist who skews reality into surreal scenes that have to be seen to be believed. Matt and I also strolled along the main street in the Taksim neighborhood, a massive all-night party where we stopped to get some dondurma, a gooey Turkish ice cream which was delivered to us in a acrobatic slapstick performance by the hilarious seller.

We left Istanbul on an overnight train to Veliko Tarnovo, a small Bulgarian town dominated by hilly terrain and a winding river. The town's setting is really incredible — the houses along the river tumble down the hill as if they were frozen in the middle of a landslide.

We spent a few days exploring the town using our great hostel as a base, checking out the quiet cobblestone lane that was once historic Veliko Tarnovo's main drag, where we popped in for a look at an old family mansion, now converted into a quaint folk museum. We also visited the awesome ramparts of the town's Tsarevets Fortress, built and fortified by several conquering empires between the 5th and 12th century. The crown of the great fortress is a church filled with beautifully haunting modern frescoes painted by a Bulgarian artist in 1985. When a tour bus comes through and forks over enough money, the town puts on a surprisingly cool sound-and-light show on the castle's walls, which we backpackers watched along with the locals without having to pay.

On our many trips out into the small town for some aimless wandering, we were easily distracted from the historical sights by the swarms of stunning women parading through town. I've never seen anything quite like it. We also enjoyed eating ludicrously cheap meals in the town's many restaurants, where I tried one of my all-time favorite culinary mis-translations, nervous meatballs. Bulgarian food is inexpensive and excellent, and comes laced with plenty of meat, cheese, and potatoes — things that I was seriously craving the previous month in Turkey. One of the most popular dishes is a hearty stew served in a clay pot:

One of the strangest parts about Bulgaria is that the people nod their head to say "no" and shake their head to say "yes." It gets especially confusing at restaurants. You ask for a beer, the waitress indicates that this request is not possible, then returns with a big mug of beer. It's even more confusing with the nodding: you ask for beer, and the waitress nods to indicate that she'll be right back with your beer, then asks you to order something else. It was very strange. No, it wasn't. Wait, yes, it was.

We left Bulgaria and continued our journey northward across the border for a brief stop in Bucharest, the capital and largest city in Romania. On the traveler circuit, you don't often hear people describe Bucharest without somehow using the word "shithole" in their review of the town. As a result, we opted to tour Bucharest as a day trip. Along with our new Irish friend Tom, we had time to give the gritty town a wander, stop in for a look at the city's surprisingly good contemporary art museum, and take a tour of its massive Palace of the People. The monster of a building is the second largest on earth, only topped by the Pentagon in Washington, and is now used for government purposes, press conferences, and special events. The palace was commissioned by much-hated Communist leader Ceacescu, who carelessly leveled a historic neighborhood in order to build the gaudy palace, destroying two-dozen churches and synagogues and causing more than 70,000 people to become homeless in the process. One woman on our tour literally swooned with delight as we entered every decadent room, but for me, the building stands as a memorial to man's sad ability to occasionally bring completely idiotic ideas into reality.

Our next stop was Brasov, a mid-sized town in the heart of Romania's fabled Transylvania region. We stayed with Irish Tom in a private apartment, which is a good alternative to a hostel if you've got enough people to split the costs. Like Veliko Tarnovo, Brasov is one of the up-and-coming towns in Europe, and feels like it's teetering on the edge of having a big boom in tourism. It's easy to see why — the town has an incredibly pleasant atmosphere, and it's pedestrian-friendly lanes lead to one of my favorite town squares in Europe.

Romania is one of the poorest countries in Europe, and when I visited back in 2003, I had a distinct impression that the country felt completely doomed. People had little hope of ever joining the European Union, and it seemed like everyone wanted to get out of town. I remember leaving Romania with the feeling that the country was like a sinking ship, with everyone scrambling to fend for themselves and get out of there.

What a difference four years makes. Now, with Romania as a partial member of the EU, there's a buzz in the air and the place feels really exciting. People now seem to realize that although their country is still fairly poor, they are rapidly on their way to a much higher quality of life than they had during the pre-1990s communist days. Seeing a group of people in a country become proud of where they live was one of the underlying highlights of this trip through Romania.

We took a day trip out across the Transylvanian countryside to the town of Bran in order to visit the famed 14th-century castle where Vlad Tepes — better known as Dracula — supposedly spent a few years of his life. The little rooms spread out within the bright and cheerful little castle definitely don't conjure up images of bloodthirsty vampires, but we had a nice time checking out its stripped-down little rooms and sun-lit courtyards. Down below the castle are hundreds of cheesy souvenir hawkers which make most people want to get out of town as soon as possible. We stuck around and took a hike out into the small farming community of Bran, and were happy to find quiet village life largely intact despite the tourist trap in town, and there were plenty of little cottages, grazing cows and sheep, sunflower fields, and rusty old cars plying the dirt roads.

Back in Brasov, we happened upon a great little Renaissance Fair going on in town, where it seemed like the whole town showed up to watch the jousting competitions and drink cheap beer. Matt and I met a couple of Romanian girls who we spent the night hanging out with at the festival along with their friends. When the festival's beer supply went dry, we headed into town to get some more, and I casually questioned one of my new Romanian friends about his age before I got us both beer. "I'm only sixteen," he admitted, "but don't worry, I'll just go in and buy it." Before I knew it, he was coming out the door, his arms filled with four 2.5 liter bottles of beer. Ten liters of beer at 16! God bless Romania.

We left Brasov headed for a small town nearby called Sigisoara, an awesome little place dominated by its medieval citadel, a miniature walled city. Within the citadel are a few towering churches, quiet little squares, and tons of old pastel-colored houses and cafes. The town oozed with charm, and reminded me a bit of an even smaller version of Cesky Krumlov in Czech Republic, which I visited a few months earlier with my parents. We explored the town's history museum which had a nice scale model of the town, a collection of truly frightening historic gynecological instruments that looked straight out of a medieval torture museum, and spectacular views from the clock-tower on the top floor.

After a couple days soaking it all in, Matt and I left Sigisoara on a bus to Targu Mures, a nearby town served by WizzAir, one of Europe's newest in the group of no-frills low-cost airlines. Sadly, Matt had to fly back to the States in order to complete his National Guard service, so I was back on the road as a solo traveler. The two of us had a really great few weeks together on the road that I really only glossed over here — thanks Matt!

Somewhat randomly, there was an international music festival going on in Targu Mures, so I decided to postpone my planned journey to the country of Moldova and instead stick around town for the night. The festival was packed with Romanian and Hungarian kids who sang and headbanged along with their local rock bands. There were also a few international acts there too, and I caught an insanely fun performance by Gogol Bordello, a gypsy punk band of Eastern European immigrants now living in New York. The crowd was incredibly into it, and the whole place turned into a massive friendly mosh pit.

(video coming soon... maybe... these things are painfully difficult to upload. Here's one of them playing on TV in case you are desperately wondering what they sound like.)

Not having a place to stay, I wrongly assumed that the festival would not charge a camping fee, which they did. Since I didn't have a tent or a place to stay, I headed out into a field near the festival grounds and found a secluded spot where I could rest my head for the night. It was a freezing night spent curled up inside my waterproof backpack cover, but the upside is that it was free. And since I'm basically completely broke at this point, free is good.

The next morning, I dusted off the weeds, then spent a brutally long day traveling from Targu Mures near to a town near the Romanian-Moldovan border town of Iasi, where I arrived late at night. Shortly afterward, I caught the red eye train to Chisinau, the capital city of the poorest country in Europe and off-the-beaten-path traveling destination, Moldova. The only other travelers in my train were three hilarious Norwegian guys — Thomas, John-Erik and David — who provided some comic-relief from our dictator-like train attendant. We arrived in Chisinau and I was surprised both by the city's ultramodern train station, and by the guy awaiting my arrival with a placard bearing my name. Well, almost my name:

The Norwegian guys and I headed over to Marisha's apartment, one of the only budget accommodation options available in Chisinau. The place was filled with other budget travelers and had a really family-like atmosphere, and it was almost like a drama-free Eastern European version of the Real World. Something tells me Real World: Chisinau isn't ever going to make it onto the airwaves, and our massive soviet-era block apartment was definitely a far cry from the posh Real World house.

One of the Norwegian guys had a copy of the seventh and final Harry Potter book, which crippled any chance that I would sightsee in Chisinau, but I did reluctantly take a few breaks from the book to make a few day trips.

The first was to a country that does not exist: Transdniestr.

If you've never heard of it, that's because Transdniestr isn't officially a country, at least as far as most other nations are concerned. What the breakaway republic does have, however, is all the components of a country: its own government, flag, postal system, police, borders, and even its own currency, the Transdniestrian Rouble. It is also home to more than a half a million people. The bizarre country, formed as a long strip of land along the eastern side of Moldova, is doing its best to avoid outside influence, and clinging to the ideology of Lenin-era communism.

The major issue with trying to go to Transdniestr as a foreigner is just that — they don't want outside influence. Many foreigners who attempt to cross get turned back, or often heavily fined. Luckily, Marisha arranged her Russian-speaking friend Natasha to go along with us on a trip to Tiraspol, the country's capital city, which sits about an hour bus ride outside of Chisinau. At the intimidating border, the Norwegians and I handed over our passports to Natasha, who relayed them to the mass of border guards. She spent ten minutes arguing with the guards, as we tried to calm our nerves — word is that the guards especially dislike Scandinavians and Americans, so we had all the wrong bases covered. Natasha was able to talk our way in without paying the 30 Euro bribe they requested, but we were only allowed to spend three hours in the country, which was fine by me. We took a speedy tour of Tiraspol, which has the wide boulevards, awful soviet-era architecture, and massive public squares that you would expect in a Soviet city. It also has more than its fair share of monuments to soviet struggles, out-of-commission tanks, and statues of Lenin. It also had a noticeably heavier police presence than Chisinau, and Natasha had to yell at me at one point when I tried to photograph an off-limits government building. Despite all the communist influence, there were a few stores and restaurants open for business, and it seemed like time would eventually crumble the differences between Transdniestr and Moldova.

Our second day trip was out to a Cojusna Vineyard, one of Moldova's many, where we were given a tour of the long hallways of the dusty old cellars and the huge banquet-hall tasting rooms. Our cute guide showed us around and gave us her honest opinion on everything we saw: "This wall-hanging was woven by hand by a Moldovan villager over the course of eight years. I think it's really ugly." Thomas, John-Eric and I had our fill of the culinary smorgasboard and solid wine selection, which included a few whites, a few reds, a desert wine, and a port, some of which were bottles more than twenty years old. It was a really fun trip, and the underground cave-like tasting room made it a really memorable experience.

Chisinau itself was a town hit hard by a communist legacy, and lacked a nice old town district that most formerly-communist cities have. Chisinau feels like the very edge of Europe — still European if you squint and use your imagination, but it mostly feels burdened under the weight of communism. I spent a week living in Chisninau, mostly because it's among the cheapest places in Europe, but also because I was completely exhausted by traveling all the time, and having a home-base was just what I needed. After a relaxing week lounging around the apartment, I finally left Moldova headed for Kiev, Ukraine.

I climbed aboard the train and found my compartment with a bunch of shirtless and scruffy alcoholic men, who had scars that made them look like they had weathered one too many knife fights. At around 2:00 am, we passed through the Moldovan checkpoint and across the border with Ukraine. With one look at my passport, the stern green-uniformed border guard told me to follow him into the train corridor. "Bring your baggage," he added. On my 30-somethingth border crossing of the trip, this stood out as an unusual request, but I didn't have much choice but to follow him. My heart pounding, I grabbed my backpack and he led us into an empty train compartment, where he locked the door behind us. I tried to stay calm, but kept nervously glancing at the jet-black Kalishnakov assault rifle slung from his shoulder. He dug through my baggage for a few minutes, and told me to empty my pockets. He thoroughly patted me down, discovered and removed my moneybelt, and carefully flipped through its contents, apparently looking for cash. He spoke for the first time in ten minutes.

Him: "This isn't Moldova."
Me: "I know.... it's... Ukraine.... right?"
Him: "No, this is Transdniestria."

Holy shit.

Somehow a train I assumed would go directly north into Ukraine went instead southeast into Transdniestr. I knew I was seriously screwed, and I glanced over at my moneybelt to see how much cash I would be parting with in order to comply with the well-armed border guard representing a country that doesn't exist. Since I'm at the end of my trip and basically broke, all I had was 15 US Dollars and 20 British Pounds, the latter of which he stupidly passed up, not knowing they were worth more than double the US Dollars. Frustrated that he was trying to extort money out of the most broke dude on the train, he gave up, asked for my US cash as a "present," and thankfully let me get the hell out of there frightened, but unscathed.

Unfortunately, I'll have to leave you all stuck here on the border between Transdniestria and Ukraine, but I have come a long way since, and I'm now safe and sound in an internet cafe in Budapest. I'm headed west into Croatia tomorrow where my friend Gerni will re-join me for the final stretch of my trip, traveling through the former Yugoslavia.

With exactly a month until I return home, I have a packed schedule planned, and as a result, I might not be able to update the blog again before I return home. If that's the case, I really want to thank you all for reading this far — I'm almost there!

Ryan

Midnight Train to Georgia

2007-08-07T10:15:00.000-06:00

I left Turkey through the country's most remote border crossing, headed into the rarely-visited country of Georgia, a little place about half the size of, well, Georgia.

After a series of bus connections and hitching a ride in a private car, I finally ended up at the Turkey-Georgia border, which was little more than a few ramshackle buildings spread out over a field of wildflowers. Hours from the nearest large town and not served by public transportation, the border crossing is definitely the least-visited I've seen yet. In fact, I was the only one there. With a fresh exit stamp in my passport, the Turkish border guard opened the gate, but the Georgian guard was on a bathroom break, so for ten minutes I stood alone, stuck in the no-man's land between Turkey and Georgia. The Georgian border guard eventually returned, then had a look at my passport, came out of his booth, and swung his hand up high. I thought for a second he was going to hit me, but instead he shouted, "Welcome to Georgia! High five!"

Excited by the awesome first impression of the country, I was on a bus a few hours later headed toward Georgia's capital, Tbilisi. On the bus, I met a few great Georgian guys —Zura and Temo— who were eager to help me, and guided me all the way to the home stay I had arranged online, which would have been a rascal to find without their help. Later that night, I went out for dinner and drinks with Zura and Temo, who borrowed their parents car and drove me around to show me all the sights of their great city. Considering it is the capital of a very poor country formerly a part of the USSR, I was really surprised by how thriving Tbilisi seemed. The area where my home stay was located reminded me a bit of the gentrified parts of Brooklyn sans-hipsters (or, for that matter, black people), and the main downtown district was full of shops and restaurants, and had nice neighborhoods sprawling out from the main roads. I got the impression from Zura and Temo that people in Georgia are really proud of their country, and excited about its future. After a great tour of town, the guys took me out with Temo's brother-in-law for a huge dinner of Georgian specialties and a few rounds of beer. I was seriously humbled by the overwhelming hospitality shown by these guys. Here's a shot of Tbilisi's massive new cathedral, and then the guys with me at dinner later on that night:

The night was so fun, I called up Zura and Temo and we went out the next night for more great food. Georgian food is delicious, and is an interesting blend of a lot of different-tasting foods. I tried khinkali, massive dumplings filled with spiced meat, mtsvadi, roasted beef topped with an incredible savory tomato sauce, and khachapuri, a cottage-cheese filled breaded pie. Here's a shot of the greasy and delicious khinkali dumplings:

Since there are so few budget travelers in Georgia, the prime place to stay in Tbilisi is at a woman named Irina's family apartment, where beds fill every available space and travelers from all over the world come to stay for a few days. At the home stay, I met Nate and Michal, two awesome Americans who had spent the previous year volunteering in Israel, helping provide services to the large number of refugees who flee into the country seeking asylum from places like Sudan. We headed out for a day in Tbilisi together, and came across an incredible outdoor antiques market, which will definitely go down as one of the best markets I've seen yet. There were hundreds of tables covered in a random assortment of soviet relics, old books written in both Russian and the swoopy Georgian alphabet, portable record players, decorated tin boxes, musical instruments, and just about anything else imaginable. I especially enjoyed the edges of the market, where people set up shop on the hoods of their cars:

Nate, Michal and I took a day trip outside of Tbilisi to the impossible-to-pronounce town of Mtskheta, where there are a handful of World Heritage-listed churches. Compared to other churches throughout Europe, Georgian churches are really interesting because they feel much more like living places of worship than most. The soaring interiors of the Mtskheta cathedrals were filled with icon paintings and old gravestones from countless time periods, including the modern day. Like no churches I've ever visited, the layered history of the Georgian churches comes right up to the surface, and I instantly got a sense for the generations that have worshiped at each church. Since the ones in Mtskheta date from the 6th and 11th centuries, that's a lot of generations. Georgia's population remains much more religious than Western Europe, and anytime a Georgian person passes a church they pause to cross themselves.

Coming down back into Mtskheta from a church on a hill outside town, it came time to pay our taxi driver. We had agreed on the price of two Georgian Lari for the ride, but as we arrived, the driver suddenly insisted we pay 20 Lari — about $12. We refused, and the driver absolutely flipped out, screaming at us in the street, and threatening to call the police and have me arrested. If there's one thing I've learned on this trip, nobody on earth likes any more contact with their local police than absolutely necessary, so I called his bluff, and flagged down a cop to help resolve the dispute. Luckily, Michal speaks a fair bit of Russian, so we managed to get out of there agreeing to pay only 10 Lari to the irate driver. He made a big scene as we left and swore that he'd never forgive us for what we did to him. Sorry fella!

The next day, the three of us headed up toward the Russian border near the troubled region of Chechnya to a charming little village called Kazbegi, nestled in a deep misty valley. We stayed in the home of a welcoming villager named Bella, who Michal had read about online, and we found her place just by asking her townspeople if they knew where Bella's house was. Although Bella's family didn't speak any English, they were really friendly and welcoming, and Bella made us some outstanding homemade stew for dinner each night. I got a lot of exercise out in Bella's yard, while their polar bear sized dog tried his hardest to repeatedly pummel me in the balls, much to the amusement of their toddler grandson. All throughout town, there are chickens and pigs wandering around, and the quiet is only broken by gangs of local kids gathering for impromptu soccer games in the dusty streets. The quaint atmosphere and amazing location made Kazbegi a welcome break from the hustle and bustle of the big city.

We went on a hike up toward the large formerly-volcanic peak that rises above town, stopping along the way at the Tsminda Sameba Cathedral, a much-loved 14th-century church considered to be the most holy and important in the country. Perched high on the green mountain overlooking town, we stopped at the church for a picnic lunch and to enjoy the epic views, then continued our long hike up into the dense fog alongside big groups of cows grazing in the mountain pastures.

After a trip back to Tbilisi, I sadly parted ways with Nate and Michal and headed up toward the Black Sea coast town of Batumi. Popular with Russian vacationers, the town felt totally different than Tbilisi, but still had a lot of charm. During the day, I wandered amongst the city's nice historic architecture and great public spaces, and went to it's awesome little modern art museum. At night, I headed out along the waterfront boardwalk where tons of gorgeous Russian girls strutted their stuff en-route to glitzy dance clubs, dressed in their standard issue leather miniskirts and busty tops. I find going to dance clubs intensely awkward, so I opted out and hung out on a bench instead, spending most of the evening with a crazy elderly Georgian man who didn't speak any English and kept badgering me to give him cigarettes, even though I don't smoke. There's no feeling quite like being in a town full of beautiful women and hanging out on a bench with an old man instead — I highly recommend it.

I was sad to leave Georgia so soon, but with only a day to get back to Istanbul to meet my friend Matt, I crossed the border back into Turkey, then caught a 24 hour bus along the Black Sea coastline to Turkey's cultural capital. Luckily, the bus was only half-full — half-empty if you're a pessimist — so there was plenty of room to sprawl out. By the end, the bus attendant and I were good friends, and he consistently mocked me for wearing shorts, which he insisted were "pants only children would wear."

I made it back to Istanbul, and met up with Matt who I traveled with for the last couple of weeks. In the next update, I'll write about our adventures together in Turkey, Bulgaria, and Romania. I'm in Ukraine now, gearing up to meet my friend Gerni again for the final stretch of my trip, through the Balkan countries. I'm hoping to catch up the blog here in the next few days, so watch out for new entries soon.

Thanks for reading!
Ryan

P.S. -- No, I didn't actually take a midnight train to Georgia, unfortunately. For the sake of the story, I definitely would have if there had been trains available.

Photos updated: Turkey, Georgia, Bulgaria

Wild, Wild East

2007-07-13T15:10:00.000-06:00

Earlier on the trip, I read Dave Eggers' book You Shall Know our Velocity, and one of the characters commented a somewhat disappointing truth: that within the United States, you can find the vast majority of the world's natural scenery. Other than the rice terraces in Southeast Asia, deep fjords in Norway, and curvy mountains of Halong Bay in Vietnam and Guilin in China, I struggle to think of areas which don't have a fairly close match within the US.

Turkey's Cappadocia region is one of those few places.

Cappadocia is a collection of towns and villages famous the world over for its bizarre collection of houses and churches carved into naturally-occurring rock spires. I arrived in Goreme, a popular base for backpackers exploring the area, where I met up with my French Canadian friend Emmanuel who I met earlier in Turkey. We spent the day getting a feel for the great village atmosphere of Goreme, which retains a ton of charm despite its popularity. Many people still get around town by tractor or horse cart, despite cars and motorbikes now being the norm. Men gathered at a popular outdoor tea garden to chat and play endless games of backgammon and Turkish dominoes, and it seemed like every woman in town spent most of the day sitting outside the doors to their houses watching the world go by.

Scattered throughout the town of Goreme are hundreds of massive stalagmite-like rocks which blend seamlessly into homes, then back into rocks, then back into homes. Sometimes it was hard to tell what was natural and what was man-made. Although most caves in the area where abandoned by order of the government in the 1950s, many of the cave houses in Goreme are still functioning homes or hotels. My great hostel was among them, and for around seven bucks a day, I was able to sleep in a hand-dug cave room and enjoy a great breakfast each morning in the courtyard. It looked a lot like Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru's family home on Tatooine from the original Star Wars film, which greatly pleased my inner-nerd.*

*In case anyone cares, travelers are able to stay the real filming location that served as Luke Skywalker's aunt and uncle's home — Hotel Sidi Driss located in Matmata, Tunisia. I'm so awesome that I didn't even have to look that up. Did you hear that, ladies? Didn't even have to look it up. I also collect action figures. Call me.

Emmanuelle and I walked a few miles from town to the Goreme Open-Air Museum, which is a collection of impressive Byzantine cave churches carved into existence between 700 and 900. Despite their small size, the churches were absolutely amazing, and were full of original great folksy-looking frescoes painted onto the wall. We spent a few hours at the museum, wandering among the churches and monasteries before Emmanuelle caught a bus to start her journey back to Montreal. Here is the tallest of the cave structures and one of the brilliant fresco paintings inside:

I spent a full week in Goreme, just relaxing and lapping up the natural atmosphere. Plus, a bunch of people I had met earlier in Turkey all ended up staying in my hostel, so I had plenty of people to hang out with. I made a few day hikes out into the nearby valleys, each of which have dramatically different rock formations and thousands of abandoned cave houses to explore. The experience made me feel like I was twelve years old again — out in nature exploring the unknown, getting cuts and bruises, climbing into places I wasn't sure I should be climbing, picking prickly grass out of my socks, and pouring rocks out of my shoes. As I'd walk back into town at the end of my exploratory trips, I'd get treated to a surreal sunset each night over the rocks. I really didn't want to ever leave.

After a week, my friends at the hostel started asking me if I was ever planning on actually doing anything while in Goreme. Apparently exploring and sleeping weren't enough for them. To their credit, there was a lot to do in the region, and time had come to get out there and really sightsee. The Cappadocia region is very spread out — about 60 miles across — so I rented a motor-scooter for 24 hours, strapped on my helmet, and hit the road.

Speeding along a few miles outside Goreme, I made a couple of wrong turns and a huge family flagged me down to offer help. They were a group of about twenty Georgian Turk immigrants, and they were eager to feed me a hearty lunch of delicious homecooked multi-ethnic cuisine. The family was insanely nice, and gave me my first glimpse of the excellent hospitality of Turksish people away from touristy areas. Here I am with the family's male half:

I continued on toward the town of Urgup, where I stopped in at the Turasan Winery to see if I could score some free wine. The Cappadocia region has a long wine-making tradition, and apparently cranks out some of the best available Turkish wine. As I walked into the winery, the guy took one look at my disheveled appearance and blurted out, "You can try ONE red and ONE white for free, and anything more costs money." Was I that obvious? I feigned sincere interest and unveiled my arsenal of wine terminology, just to throw a little bit of sass the guy's way. The nose on this is exquisite! And the color! My word! Does anyone else taste a hint of chocolate? I'm getting a hint of chocolate!

After the tasting, I headed down into the quaint center of Urgup, which was quite a bit more upscale than Goreme and had a lot of pleasant cafes and nice restaurants. I stopped in at one place and celebrated its grand opening with the owner. Turkish people are quick to offer tea, and seem to genuinely enjoy conversation with foreigners, even if you don't buy what they're selling (usually lunch or carpets). I continued my look around town, and came across a huge area of hundreds of cave homes carved into the side of a mountain. Amazingly enough, I was the only tourist who seemed to know about it, and I had the place to completely to myself.

As the sun went down, I rode over to the amazing village of Ayvali, a quiet and untouched place with lots of locals who stared at me as I walked through town. Like in most parts of Turkey, the worlds of women and men were clearly divided. Headscarfed women sat in small groups out on the front stoops of their homes chatting, knitting and gossiping, while the men took their usual place at the teahouse, gulping down sugary tea and playing passionate games of backgammon or dominoes. The kids were thrilled to see me, and excited to have their photos taken. I continued on my bike winding through the rocky countryside to Mustafapasa, a quiet little town with a lot of delicate old Greek houses. Here are some shots from my day's journey:

The following morning, I used my last few hours of my motor-scooter rental and made the long drive about 30 miles south to Derinkuyu, a town famous for its labarynth underground city. The city at Derinkuyu is one of a number of underground cities spread throughout Cappadocia, inhabited for over 4000 years. Once inside, a nice local student offered to lead me around the caves so he could practice his English. He was pretty confident with his second language, which was odd because it seemed like he had never heard English before, let alone spoken it. The tour went something like this:

Him: Chooch da pote ayim.
Me: Oh... this room was a... uhh... hmm...
Him: Chooch! Chooch!
Me: Yeah, yeah... a... chooch.
Him: Yes, yes! Ha ha, chooch!
Me: (sees sign that says "church") Oh, a church!
Him: No! Chooch! Chooch!
Me: Right... chooch... sorry.

In addition to the chooch, there was also an underground school, winery, kitchen, graveyard, wells, impressive ventilation shafts, rainwater storage tanks, and tons of cave homes. The underground city went eight stories deep through a series of labyrinths and rooms, and made for a very cool and memorable visit. I parted ways with my wacky guide, who had trouble understanding the tricky English expression "bye bye," and explored the town a bit. Most visitors to Derinkuyu make a quick stop at the underground city on tours, but with the luxury of having my own wheels, I lingered around town and stumbled upon this dusty little outdoor market where I got a lot of curious stares and little kids venturing up to say hello.

Time came to leave the comforts of Cappadocia and head a bit more off-the-beaten-track into Eastern Turkey. After an overnight bus southeast toward the Syrian border, I arrived in the town of Sanliurfa at dawn, and to be honest, I was freaking out. It was 95 degrees already at 6:30 am. I was in one of the most conservative and Islamic cities in Turkey. The hot sun slammed into my face as I walked from the dusty bus station toward what I hoped was the town center. I didn't speak the language. I was alone. For one of the first times on my trip, I felt like I was in over my head. What the hell was I thinking?

My first day in Sanliurfa was rough. In Western Turkey, there are backpackers aplenty, and even when you spend the day out alone in the middle of nowhere, it is comforting to know that the comfy hostel awaits you each night. In Sanliurfa, I checked into a ratty and smoke-filled business hotel, where the disgruntled owner looked angrily at my passport, blew smoke in my face, and muttered, "Ooooooossssaaa." I figured that it wasn't wise to mention that USA is an acronym, not a word.

After a day, I quickly warmed up to Sanliurfa and I started to really love the place. The town is an important holy site for Muslims and Christians alike, and it was interesting to see the headscarfed locals mix with the Iranian pilgrims, who peered out at the town from the shelter of their black burkas. I visited the cave where Biblical Abraham was born, explored the town castle, and dropped some fish food into a pool to fatten up the holy carp outside the 13th century mosque, which are locally considered to be sacred. In the center of town is a great little courtyard, which formerly served as a caravanserai, the places where people trekking along the Silk Road route would stop for the night or engage in trade. Now, the caravanserai is packed full of old men, doing the only thing old men in Turkey seem to be capable of: sipping down glasses of tea and playing backgammon, cards, or dominoes. I loved the atmosphere in the place, and spent a half-hour there watching the old men's overwhelming passion for their games.

Spread in every direction away from the caravanserai's walls is Sanliurfa's incredible bazaar — the most interesting market I've seen on my whole trip. The winding alleys were piled high with goods for sale, and the air filled with the shouts of vendors advertising sales along with the dull pounding sounds of coppersmiths hammering metal into just the right shape. I held my breath as I passed the stench which poured out of butcher shops where freshly-killed sheep dangled from hooks, and piles of animal hearts were piled up as casually as if they were fruit. I was walking down an alley when I heard a cart rolling along, which turned out to be piled with bloody carcasses of dead sheep. The cart-rolling guys were so delighted that I wanted to take their picture, they invited me into their home and showed me stacks upon stacks of bloody fur they had laying around. It was like walking around in a vegetarian's worst nightmare. Here are the guys wheeling their carcass cart:

Interestingly, Sanliurfa directly translates as "Glorious Urfa," which became the town's name in 1984 after their rival town Antep changed its name to Heroic Antep, and Urfa upped the ante out of pride. I'm waiting around for the inevitable next stage: Extremely Heroic Antep and Unbelievably Glorious Urfa.

Sanliurfa is a town inhabited mostly by Kurds, the largest minority group in Turkey, numbering 15 million people within Turkey alone, mostly in the southeastern part of the country. A large chunk of the other Kurdish people are found in northern Iraq, which is the most stable and independent area of the post-Saddam era. As an American, I wasn't sure how I would be perceived in a heavily Kurdish city. On one hand, the War in Iraq and the Bush administration have destabilized an already unstable region, and have deeply alienated Muslim people, Kurds included. On the other hand, the US has provided one of the only chances at establishing an independent country of Kurdistan, something that many Kurds have wanted desperately since their people were divided among Iran, Iraq, and Turkey. The Kurds in Sanliurfa were eager to speak to me about the situation. Some loved America. Some hated America. Most despised George W. Bush, yet most supported the US-triggered fall of Saddam Hussein, who freely massacred Kurds. Some spoke out against US imperialism, yet simultaneously supported the War in Iraq. Some felt united wıth Turks and wanted to remain a part Turkey, and some demanded an independent state. The mixed feelings were understandable, although a bit confusing. To add to the complexity, the main organization fighting — sometimes very violently — to make an independent Kurdistan a reality is the PKK, a group labeled by the United States and other countries as a terrorist organization. Many Kurds carefully tread on a thin line, not publicly supporting the PKK for fear of imprisonment, yet quietly voicing their interest in an independent Kurdistan. It will be very interesting to see how the Kurd situation develops in the coming years as both Turkey and the US elect new leaders. Unfortunately for the Kurds, they have little control over their own destiny.

I ganged up with the few other tourists in Sanliurfa for a two-day trip to nearby Mt. Nemrut, one of Eastern Turkey's best sights. In my group was Wolf, a mammoth German man who looked like Arnold Schwarzenegger's father, who was going on this exact same tour for the 12th time in eight years. With so many amazing places to see in the world, I'm not sure why anyone would want to beat a dead horse to such an insane extent, but to each his own, I suppose. There was also Patrick, an inspiring Spaniard who is spending nearly three years traveling completely around the world by bicycle, raising money for community youth programs via his website. When he returns home to Barcelona, he plans to tour schools with an video of his journeys, to educate and inspire kids about the world around them.

Along with a group of others, we piled in a van and sped toward Mt. Nemrut, making quick stops at other interesting sights along the way. Our driver's broken-English and enthusiasm was hilarious — he constantly referred to everyone in our group as "my uncle!" We gazed in wonder at the enormous Attaturk Dam, one of the largest in the world, then were off to the famous left parenthesis of the Mesopotamian fertile crescent, the Euphrates River, where our driver encouraged us to take a plunge in its ice cold waters. 1-2-3-4! Jumping time! My Uncle! We stopped by a few other archaeological sites and caves, the most interesting of which was the beautiful Septimus Severus Bridge, built in 200 AD. As the sun began to go down, the van pushed uphill toward the summit of Mt. Nemerut, while our crazy driver insisted we take part in his constant singing:

Mt. Nemrut is famous for its nine-foot-tall stone heads, which were commisioned by King Antiochus as a monument to his greatness. His large bust sits alongside various Greek and Persian gods, and was built as a pyramid-style burial mound made to awe his followers, and help ensure his status as an all-powerful god for the rest of eternity. Unfortunately for Antiochus, his followers all died out, the world moved on from paganism to the Judeo-Christian tradition, and the statues of Mt. Nemrut were forgotten until they were rediscovered in the late 1800s by German archaeologists. Our group enjoyed watching the setting sun shine onto the statues from the from the insanely windy summit of the mountain. We returned again the next morning for an even more windy sunrise, but it was definitely worth the great views.

Back in Sanliurfa, I went on a day trip south to Harran, an extremely old town located just a few miles away from the Syrian border. Like many places in Turkey, Harran is an extremely old town. How old? Well, the town gets name-dropped in the Book of Genesis, right there alongside the creation of earth and everything. The dusty little village retains a very Biblical feel, with its unique beehive-shaped mud houses scattered throughout town. There's also some interesting ruins of another caravanserai, and one of the world's first universities. Here is one of the refurbished beehive house complexes:

I finally left the Sanliurfa area, on a night bus across the Kurdish part of the country. A remarkably annoying guy sat next to me on the trip so he could practice his painfully broken-English, and was driving me completely insane asking me questions until about 3:00 am, when we pulled into a town called Batman — seriously — where he lived. I was excited about both the town's name and that the guy was leaving, but his unintentionally hilarious farewell speech was the icing on the cake: "I... am.... Batman." Awesome.

Despite its perfect setting between the waters of Lake Van and the large mountains which rise above town, the town of Van is a gritty and gray city, and definitely won't go down as one of the nicer places I've visited on the trip. If a competition was held to find the city's most pathetic eyesore of a building, it would be a thousand-way tie for first place. With that said, on street level Van did have a fair bit of charm, mostly thanks to the large University which packs the town with young people and cheap cafes. My favorite part of town was the great Breakfast Street, where hundreds of people gathered to enjoy a nice outdoor feast each morning at one of about a dozen eateries. I had a really nice group of university professors from Western Turkey invite me over to their table for food and conversation, which made me feel at home.

Another morning I caught a minibus across the shimmering turquoise shores of massive Lake Van to a boat dock where I hopped aboard a short ferry to Akdamar Island. The island is home to a partially-ruined Armenian church, which had some nice interior fresco paintings and a ghostly atmosphere. The outside had interesting carvings of stories from the Bible — my favorite was Jonah in the belly of a whale, which was depicted as a fish with a dog head, since the artists had never seen a whale before and didn't know what one looked like. I also paid a visit to Van's sprawling castle, which towers over the farmhouses on the outskirts of town.

We drove north from Van — in a van — along the Turkish-Iranian border, and I was distracted from the gorgeous rocky scenery by the occasional military checkpoint, where gray-uniformed soldiers would give the van a quick search before allowing us to continue. At one checkpoint, festive flowerpots sat atop barricades as if trying to compensate for the inevitable buzz kill provided by the machine guns and tanks. I was the only foreigner in the van, and the troops gave my passport quizzical glances, but apart from a light frisking at one checkpoint, I made it through without any hassle to Dogubayazit.

The little town of Dogubayazit is dominated by the epic-looking Mount Ararat, which served as the resting place of Noah's Ark in the Bible. You may remember the story: God decided to flood the earth, so he asked Noah to collect two of each animal in the world — all two million species known to scientists today — and bring them to a boat which Noah built to house the creatures. It must have been one hell of a big boat. All the animals took a break from the food chain for 40 days and 40 nights, and everything worked out in the end when Noah's ark came to rest on the top of Mount Ararat. To be fair, most Christians view the story as a symbolic one, rather than a literal historical event. Still, there are several groups in the area who claim they have found the remains of the actual boat used by Noah. Either way, the soaring views of the highest peak in Turkey from Dogubayazit were seriously awe-inspiring.

Just outside of town on a secluded hillside is the Ishak Pasa Palace, an amazing castle built in the 17th century. With so many ruined palaces and castles throughout Turkey, it was great to see one that was still largely intact. The Kurdish palace was complete with several sunlit courtyards, dungeon-like basement rooms for servants, a series of simple and elegant bedrooms, a gorgeous dining room with lots of carved-stone patterns, and its very own mosque. I was really impressed, and the palace definitely one of my favorite places I visited in Turkey.

Heading toward the country of Georgia, I left Dogubayazit and stopped over in the town of Kars for a few days. I arrived in Kars at dusk, and the gritty town seemed strangely familiar. It reminded me almost exactly of Hill Valley in Back to the Future 2, when time skewed into a tangent and created an alternate, evil 1985. Everything in town seemed like it was falling apart. A dark cloud hung overhead. Fiery piles of trash burned on the streets unattended. Scruffy taxi drivers tried to lift my backpack into their rickety cars. A filthy homeless woman sprawled out on the floor of an ATM booth on a bed of trash and old newspapers. A rag-tag gang of kids scrambled up and tried to shine my shoes. My guidebook described Kars as "a bit rough around the edges," and I had apparently just arrived at the edges.

I checked into a hotel with a Turkish-speaking German named Ole, and we headed out together to explore Kars, which turned out to be a little bit more pleasant than I had first expected. Ole and I were invited into the campaign headquarters of a local political party, who were gearing up for the upcoming nationwide election on July 22nd. We shook hands and spoke to a few of the sharply-dressed candidates over tea, and I was able to relay questions through Ole about the future of Turkey's political scene, which was a fun experience.

The following day, we hopped in a car and went east to the edge of Turkey to Ani, a huge long-abandoned town which sits on the Armenian border. Ani was a primary stopover on the east-west trade rout of the Silk Road, and was a significant piece of many empires which swept through and conquered the area over the course of a thousand years. The town eventually ended up in the hands of the nomadic Mongols, who basically left the town to rot and most of the buildings crumbled. All that remains today is the gigantic old city wall, and a dozen gorgeous churches and mosques built by the various people who inhabited Ani. My favorite moment was in one of the ruined churches, when an Armenian tourist began to sing a beautifully haunting Armenian song giving the place a really eerie feel.

(video coming soon)

From Kars, I headed into the little-known country of Georgia for about a week, which I'll cover in my next update. I'm back in Istanbul now, and I've spent all morning fighting with the computer, and anticipating the arrival of my friend Matt Coyle who will be arriving here in Istanbul any minute now. We don't have plans yet, but we'll likely head into Eastern Europe for a while.

Thanks for reading this ridiculously long post! I hope you are all well.

Ryan!

Photos updated: Istanbul, Selcuk, Ephesus, Pammukale, Fethiye, Cappadocia, Sanliurfa, Mt. Nemerut

A Year Away

2007-07-05T09:00:00.000-06:00

On the morning of July 5th, 2006, I hoisted my backpack onto my shoulders for the first time. One year later, I'm still on the road.

The other day I was flipping through my photos from my first few days of the trip, and I couldn't help but smile. My clothes looked so fresh! I was so clean-shaven! I was so visibly nervous! So excited!

Now, my clothes now are tattered and frayed. My shirts are all faded and falling apart from daily use. Showering has become a chore, fresh laundry a luxury, and shaving has all but dropped off the to-do list. All my stuff smells truly horrible, and will be promptly burned upon my arrival home. My initial nervousness has been replaced by the casual confidence that came hand-in-hand with a year of being out of my comfort zone. Amazingly, my energetic excitement about travel is still there, although it has been laced with a constant feeling of fatigue. This never ending vacation routine can be tough sometimes, but of course, the good far outweighs the bad.

It has been an amazing trip so far, but I'll save all the sappy recollecting for my final update when I get home. For now, I'd just like to say thank you to all of you who have followed along so far. It gets pretty lonely out here sometimes, and I can't even tell you how much your comments, emails, and encouragement have helped me feel normal. After a year, I can't get over how amazing and interesting the world can be, and I hope reading my blog has helped you get a little bit closer to the small pieces of it that I've wandered across.

See you in September — in real life! I miss you all. Watch out for my next update about the eastern half of Turkey and my quick trip into the country of Georgia, where I celebrated my year away from home earlier tonight.

Ryan!

Turkish Delight

2007-06-24T21:25:00.000-06:00

I spent my last night in London curled up on the cold, hard floor of the Luton airport along with all the other backpackers and cheapskates with early-morning flights.

I arrived in Istanbul's outlying airport and took a shuttle bus across town, officially from Asia back to Europe. Istanbul's unique situation straddling two continents divided by the Bosphorous river, is a fitting symbol for the country of Turkey as a whole. The country has an odd set of neighbors, and sits sandwiched between the lesser-known countries of Eastern Europe, the western and mainland European influence of Greece, the troubled nature of the Middle East, and the independent spirit of the former USSR caucuses. Within the country itself, there is a huge and immediately noticeable divide between modernity and tradition, progressiveness and fundamentalism, secularism and spiritualism. The government of Turkey is being pulled by the Western parts of the country to modernize, reject Islamic fundamentalism, and push forward as a progressive nation in order to make a bid at joining the European Union. Those in central and eastern Turkey are more aligned with Turkey's history as a proudly Muslim state, and see the rapidly spreading culture of the west as an attack on their traditions and values. You've probably heard about the controversy around whether or not women should be allowed to wear head scarves in public institutions like universities. For now, wearing scarves is outlawed by the secular government, and the devout have responded with head scarves designed to look like popular Turkish hairstyles, which have apparently been enough of an effort to slip past the authorities.

One of my reasons for coming to Turkey was to see how a modern Muslim nation works — to see how the West might be able to adapt to Islam, and what it looks like when Islam adapts to the West.

I made it to the Sultanahmet neighborhood, where most travellers stay because of its close proximity to the big sights. Although certainly cheaper than London, Istanbul is not cheap, so I checked into the cheapest hostel I could find. For the first night, I had a 21-person room all to myself, which was a lucky break. The second night, however, a 20-person group of hyperactive 18-year-old New Zealanders showed up and turned the place into an instant party. And these kids took partying to a whole new level: In the course of 24 drunken hours, they had paraded through the streets nude, gotten into a fight, shot each other with fire extinguishers, broken a bed, gotten stoned, got attacked and bitten by dogs, started an outdoor pillow fight, and had gotten themselves arrested — twice. In the hostel room itself, alcohol flowed liberally, bottles were flying, smoke filled the air, and barely-clothed bodies swirled around the room without a care. And there I was, crotchety old Ryan Nee, in the midst of what looked like a crazy night on tour with Guns n' Roses. Here's a photo of my once-empty room, a few hours after they arrived:

I wasn't feeling great about these traveler kids traipsing drunk around Istanbul, because I pictured the city being a pretty conservative place. I mean, Muslim people don't drink, right? As I quickly found out, the Muslims in western Turkey have pretty relaxed rules about what you can and can't do, and the young people in Istanbul love to party. Actually, Istanbul has some of the best nightlife I've seen yet.

One night, I headed out with Jackie and Sarah, a couple of American girls I met randomly on the street, who have spent the semester living in Istanbul on a study abroad program. We went out with a group of their friends to their favorite hangouts in the Taksim neighborhood, an area packed wall-to-wall with hundreds of bars and clubs, all packed with people drinking Efes Beer and raki, an awful black licorice-flavored local booze. At the end of the night — around 6:30 am — people poured out of the bars into the early morning sun and staggered over for some drunken grub to the awaiting kebab vendors lining the streets. Here's a photo of the crazy-crowded Taksim area and a shot of Jackie and Sarah during our bar-hopping spree:

Drinking aside, I made it to some more cultural stuff as well. I visited the Grand Bazaar, which was full of 4000 shops aimed squarely at the tourist market. The covered bazaar is basically one of the world's first shopping malls, and I enjoyed walking through the historic alleys and checking out some of the overpriced antique shops. Ultimately, I found the neighborhood just outside the Grand Bazaar's walls to be infinitely more interesting, which was packed with local people buying everyday household items, spices, quick snacks, clothes, cheap electronics, and much more. The area made for phenomenal wandering and people-watching, and felt considerably more authentic than the Grand Bazaar itself.

Dominating the Sultanahmet area are Istanbul's two most famous buildings: The Blue Mosque and the Hagia Sofia, which mirror each other across a pleasant park. I slipped into the Blue Mosque in between prayer time, and was awed by its massive size. Finished in 1616, the open and airy building is filled with the faintly turquoise tiles which give the mosque its name. The Blue Mosque is a about as perfect as buildings get.

And then I went across the park to the Hagia Sofia, and was completely blown away.

I've always wanted to see the Hagia Sofia in real life, and the building lived up to everything I hoped it would be. Completed in 537(!) as the focal point of the Roman Empire — then ruled from both Rome and Constantinople — the Hagia Sofia was built as a Christian church but was converted into a mosque about a thousand years later, well after the fall of the Roman Empire and when Islam reigned supreme in the area. The golden mosaics and holy images were stripped from the church, and were replaced by dark walls, patterned Islamic designs, and the giant circular pendants covered in Arabic script for which the Hagia Sofia is famous. A handful of the old Christian mosaics survived the 500 years the building was a mosque, and are on display at the building, now a museum. I couldn't get over how gigantic the building 1500 year old building was — look at the tiny people in this photo for a sense of scale, followed by an up-close look at one of the few surviving Christian mosaics:

Another day brought me out across the river to an area with a lot of hip art galleries, botique shops, and musical instrument stores. Along the waterfront, hundreds of people lean along the Galata Bridge to try their luck at catching a fish from the river below. Meanwhile, the savory smell of cooking fish wafts up from the handful of restaurants nearby, attempting to lure the fishermen into packing up their poles and ending their fishing trip early.

Since I would be returning to Istanbul later, I opted out of the other tourist must-sees for now and caught a night bus south to Selcuk. I had heard great things about Turkey's buses, but after trying them out, I find them to be a somewhat awkward experience. First, there's a bus attendant (or sometimes two) who comes around every few hours and offers tea, coffee, water, or Coke. To keep the bus smelling flowery, the attendant sprays excessive amounts of air freshener into the air, then comes around and pours lemon-scented water on each passenger's hands to help us freshen up. Every hour or so, the bus stops for a long bathroom break and the attendant and driver jump out in order to wash the bus and check on the engine. On overnight buses, this process repeats all night long. All of the fanfare is kind of fun, but it takes a painful amount of time to get anywhere as a result. My ten hour bus to Selcuk spent about six hours actually driving and the rest of the time dicking around or washing the bus.

I finally made it to Selcuk — after a crucial bus-wash 15 minutes outside of town — and settled into Atilla's Getaway, which is like a luxury(ish) resort for backpackers. I made friends with Emmanuelle from Quebec, Matt from Sydney, and Eli from Berkeley, with whom I spent the better part of a week splashing around in the pool, getting some epic R&R, wandering around Selcuk, knocking a few back at the guesthouse bar, shooting pool, hanging out with other backpackers, and chowing down on Atilla's delicious home-cooked breakfasts and great communal dinners.

Eli, Matt, and I made the long walk across town to Ephesus, an ancient Greek city and one of the country's best archeological sites. Founded a very long time ago, in 1100 BC, the city was a bustling urban center by about 600 BC, but came into its own during Roman times a few hundred years later. Ephesus is the setting for the Biblical book of Ephesians, which is a letter that Paul wrote which attempts to illuminate the nature and glory of God for the Ephesian people, who Paul considered to be a gang of sexually immoral, drunken deviants. Paul's letter to the Ephesians is now one of the most important, revered, and moving pieces of the Bible. At least according to my quick Google search.

With all of this spiritual business in mind, the three of us gave some thought to the question: How could we learn from Paul's message and enhance our trip to Ephesus? And we naturally came to the conclusion that we should sneak through a hole in the fence to avoid the hefty entry fee. After a half-hour of bushwhacking, with some new scrapes and bruises adorning our legs, we finally made it in.

The ruins were really impressive, and we got there late enough in the day so that they weren't mobbed by tourists, who often pop over to Ephesus on day trips from Greece. The three of us loved climbing around on the extensive city ruins, checking out the spectacular 25,000 seat theatre, and wandering through well-restored Roman houses full of brilliant mosaics. My favorite part was taking inappropriate pictures of Eli at the old Roman toilets, who decided to give the facilities a proper test. Yes, his pants are really down:

Here are a couple of more traditional photos of Ephesus:

After a visit to the nearby Ephesus Museum back in Selcuk and a few days checking out the ancient sites throughout town, I said goodbye to Emmanuelle and Eli and headed off with Matt on a bus to Pammukale.

The main reason for visiting Pammukale is for it's otherworldly hill of white calcium carbonate deposits, which have formed into strange water-filled terraces over time. The site is also home to another ancient city, Hieropolis, the ruins of which are scattered on the plain above the bubbly white travertines. I had heard mixed reviews about Pammukale from other travelers, but I thought it was amazing. Oddly enough, the place was mobbed with Russian tourists, and I had a good laugh watching scantily-clad girls and their burly Speedo-wearing boyfriends pose seductively in front of the bright snow-like cliffs. Here are some photos, including one of me working on my pose in case I ever decide to audition for The Mickey Mouse Club — "Ryan!"

The little village of Pammukale completely clears out at night, so Matt and I went back to the travertines for sunset and had the place almost completely to ourselves, and enjoyed a few beers as we watched the sun fall over the gorgeous terraces:

The next morning, we were back on a bus, this time headed south to Fethiye, a harbor town sandwiched between rolling hills and the Mediterranean Sea. The town's interesting harbor is packed with hundreds of yachts which have sailed in from locations around the world, and many people seemed to be living in their boats right on the docks, having dinner each night on the decks of their ships. I went to Fethiye's bustling market on the town's weekly market day and watched the locals peruse for produce, and I tried my hand at haggling for a nice lunch of fresh fruit.

A few miles from Fethiye is a ghost town village called Kaya, which was abandoned after World War I by its former Greek inhabitants. After Attaturk came into power during the Turkish War of Independence, there was a massive transfer of populations as Muslim Greeks moved to Turkey and Ottoman Christians moved over to Greece. The population shift wasn't equal however, and Turkey was left with a lot of towns like Kaya which remained abandoned afterward. The strange ghost town made for a really fascinating day trip, and I spent almost a full day exploring the bizarre and empty place, wandering among more than 2000 houses being slowly eaten by nature, and marveling at Kaya's 17th century churches.

The next day, I decided somewhat randomly to splash out and try something I've never done before: paragliding. So, a group of people from my hostel headed over to the painfully tourist-trodden beach town of Oludeniz, which is sort of like Cancun but for British people, but also serves as the jumping off point for paragliding trips. We piled in a jeep and headed up the mountain on a perilous dirt road, which was more frightening than paragliding itself. We carefully strapped on all of our gear and were each assigned a dude who would be navigating our tandem flight. I was the first in our group to go, and with a short run down a hill, we were off, soaring high into the air above the blue water of the Mediterranean and the beautiful blue lagoon beach of Oludeniz below.

I know what you're thinking: amazing photo. Except I didn't take it — it's the promo photo from the paragliding company. It really was this pretty, however.

I was amazed at how quiet and peaceful it was flying through the air. Someday, I'd love to learn how to paraglide solo so I wouldn't have to have a Turkish man strapped to my back. I encouraged the guy to get crazy and do some tricks and he obliged by doing an insanely fast spiral straight down toward the sunbathers on the beach before swinging back up again toward the sky. The landing was hilarious, because we touched down right in the middle of the beach boardwalk, with overweight leather-skinned Brits scattering to get out of the way. Overall, it was a great experience that I'd definitely repeat.

I left Fethiye and spent the last week in the Cappadoccia region, which is full of truly unbelievable scenery of cave houses carved into naturally occuring rock spires. I wanted to get completely caught up on the blog today, but Turkey's internet is a real piece of work, and it has been a rascal even getting this much completed.

I am in the very Middle Eastern city of Salinurfa now, and plan to spend the next few weeks looping through Eastern Turkey, the much more off-the-beaten-track part of the country. After that, I'm back to Istanbul to meet up with my elementary school friend Matt Coyle who will join me for a month or so of travel in Eastern Europe. Did that make it sound like he's currently in elementary school? Because he's not. That would be awkward.

Thanks for reading,
Ryan!

I see London, I see France

2007-06-11T10:03:00.001-06:00

For all of you Ryan Nee-ophiles out there—which I'm sure are numerous—you may have noticed that I'm drifting pretty far off of my original itinerary. Well, that's because my parents offered to let me tag along with them for a week in Paris and a few days in London. And as far as I'm concerned, if someone offers you a week in Paris and London, you'd be an idiot not to go. So my original plans of going to Sicily and Tunisia are out the window, for now.

We landed in Paris as the sun set over the cloudy French sky, and I was giddy. My first big trip abroad (with Austin, Carrie and Josh — hi guys!) when I was 18-years-old started and ended in Paris, and it's a place that holds a lot of great memories for me. Once our flight landed, we caught a packed bus to the city center where we checked into our apartment, settling in for an intense week of sightseeing in the city of lights.

Our first day, we headed out into the city to stroll along the Champs-Élysées, Paris' famous shopping boulevard, which stretches from the monumental Arc De Triomphe all the way across town to the Louvre Museum. We followed our trusty Rick Steves self-guided tour, which gave us an insider's look at the world's most famous street. Along the way are many ultramodern car dealerships showing off both new models and futuristic-looking concept cars. We also popped in for a sniff at the massive Sephora store, which has a dizzying amount of perfume and cologne to try out, with professional scentologists ready to help find the right smell. We also had a look at a super-luxury candy store, where you could easily trade an entire paycheck for designer chocolate and truffles. Champs-Élysées is among the most expensive streets on earth, so most of the stores along the way are far too upscale for us Nee folk, but we had a lot of fun anyway. People who live in Paris, especially those shopping on the Champs-Élysées, are absurdly fashionable and are dressed to the nines at all times, even for a quick jaunt out to get a loaf of bread. With nothing but ripped jeans and the same ratty t-shirt to wear every day, I felt like I was single-handedly slumming the place up. Even the McDonald's on the Champs-Élysées had dressed up for the occasion:

The following day, we strapped on our iPods and took a tour through the heart of historic Paris—the little island which sits between the two banks of the Seine—following a free audio tour that my parents found online. With the podcast boom in the past few years, hundreds of these tours have become available, and I find them to be a great way to get an irreverent, informative, and low-hassle tour for free.

We started with a picnic lunch just outside of the gothic Notre Dame cathedral, whose famous flying buttresses have soared in the skies of Paris for more than 800 years. Once inside, the impressively tall structure and enormous stained glass windows were great to see as well. A few blocks away is the older San Chapelle cathedral, whose massive stained glass windows tell some of the key stories of the bible, and were used as a teaching tool back in the days where many believers were illiterate. They were also apparently able to miraculously see tiny images from large distances away.

Nearby is a somber deportation memorial, which remembers the French victims of the holocaust, represented by a narrow underground room containing 200,000 crystals, one for each killed. We gave the nearby neighborhood a wander, which was full of busy cafés, patisseries, and outdoor booksellers. We browsed the stacks at Shakespeare & Co. bookstore, which has served for nearly a hundred years as the Parisian hangout for English-speaking authors such as James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway. Later in the day, we caught the metro up to the Trocadero neighborhood, which has an epic view over the Eiffel Tower. Finished in 1889 as the entrance and showpiece of the Worlds Fair, the famous tower was set to be demolished after 20 years, but was kept intact for radio communication purposes despite public pressure to tear it down for being an eyesore. It is now the most visited monument in the world.

Paris is the greatest city on earth to learn about art. Many of the top artists throughout history spent time here painting, and it contains a handful of the best art museums on earth. We spent three days touring the city's amazing museums, which chronicle the incredible scope and dramatic changes in the visual arts over time.

We started at the small Rodin Museum, dedicated to the phenomenal sculptor Auguste Rodin, who is widely considered to be the best sculptor since Michelangelo. The museum, housed on his former home in central Paris, shows off his diverse work including the famous statue of The Thinker, and his emotional ground level statue The Burghers of Calais, which I had learned about in art history class and never really liked, but blew me away in real life. The sheer amount of great work the guy produced was staggering, and the three of us left feeling inspired by the artistic legacy a single person can leave.

We headed to nearby Rue Cler, a great place to get a feel for a quaint Parisian neighborhood. The pedestrian-only street has a handful of vegetable markets, fromageries full of stinky cheese, pastry shops, fashionable botiques, and more. We had a great lunch at a streetside restaurant, where I had a delicious entree of raw beef, which I had never tasted before. Here are the 'rents making the crucial cheese decision at a neighborhood market:

Our next stop was at the mother of all museums: The Musee d'Louvre. The museum's wonderfully simplistic glass pyramids, designed by Chinese-American architect IM Pei, were the star of the show in the recent (and awful) movie The Da Vinci Code based on the (equally awful) book of the same name written by Dan Brown. Thanks to the plundering and pillaging of Napoleon, The Louvre is home to the world's greatest collection of art, starting from the beginning of recorded history and stretching to about 1900. The museum is dauntingly large, so we tried to focus on the big stuff. We saw the requisite Winged Victory, Venus De Milo, and The Mona Lisa, but I especially enjoyed the massive collection of Egyptian artifacts, and the Italian Renaissance paintings, and the more modern Dutch paintings of everyday life. My favorite in the museum was the monumental Raft of the Medusa by Théodore Géricault who captured the brutal scene of death, cannibalism, and exhaustion on a shipwreck by making endless drawings of corpses at his local morgue before painting the grotesque picture.

The next day, our whirlwind art history tour continued where the Louvre left off at the Musee d'Orsay, the world's best museum of the ever-popular painting movement, Impressionism. These days, with an impressionist print hanging on the wall in virtually every cheap motel room in America, it's hard to fully grasp how controversial impressionism was at the time. Impressionists were shunned and hated by the academic art critics at the time, who thought the work looked like unfinished amateurish garbage. They pressed on anyway, forming a group and putting on their own art shows, attempting to give the impression of light and motion through their dabs on the canvas. The museum covers the early impressionists like Monet and Degas, then looks forward a few years as the style started to branch into different forms, as seen in the violent and emotional paintings by Van Gogh, or the almost mathematical pointillist dots of Seurat and Signac. The Musee d'Orsay building itself was great too — it was transformed into a museum from an old train station in 1986.

Later that night, we headed over to Montmartre, the neighborhood where many of the young Musee D'Orsay artists lived the bohemian lifestyle as they shaped the art world. We hiked up to the gorgeous white domes of the Sacre Couer church, one of my favorite churches, where there were tons of people enjoying a small outdoor festival. My parents and I hopped from booth to booth trying a handful of great regional wines, savory cheeses, and creamy paté. We loved chatting with the owners of each vineyard, many of whom were the grandchildren of the vineyard founders. We bought a few of the bottles we liked best, and slowly wandered down through hilly Montmartre along cobbled streets of busy cafés and old homes. We ended the night outside the infamous Moulin Rouge, now a super-seedy and touristy strip club district. Instead of joining the tourist hoardes to watch a pricey can-can show, we opted for a wine tasting and nice homecooked meal back at our apartment.

The next morning, we went walking through a very different neighborhood called Marais, the old Jewish district. There are a few remnants of Jewish history left in the neighborhood, but it is now mostly full of great parks, luxury shopping, contemporary art galleries, and cheap eateries serving up tasty kebabs and felafel. Marais is much less touristy than the areas with the big sights, which gave us a better feeling for how Parisians actually live. My favorite part about Paris is how drastically different the city feels in one area versus another, and Marais was one of our favorite areas we visited.

Nestled into the Marais district is the Picasso Museum, home to hundreds of pieces from throughout the famed artist's career including sculptures, paintings, ceramics, and collages. If you've ever seen a Picasso painting in real life, you probably had this thought flash through your mind: This dude is the best artist of the 20th century? Are you serious? More than any artist I can think of, you've got to see a lot of Picassos at once in order to fully appreciate the guy. Picasso experimented with art to an aggressive degree, and created an insanely large body of work that is stylistically all over the place. The art world had moved pretty slowly and cautiously prior to Picasso, until he opened the flood gates for modern and contemporary art. As a result, most of Picasso's pieces, on an one-by-one basis, are quite disappointing. Taken as a whole, however, you realize how brilliant, creative, and experimental the guy really was. It's hard to say which pieces he personally thought were successful, because nowadays they are all hanging on the walls of museums — from true masterpieces like La Guernica to some random time where he accidentally wiped some charcoal on a piece of paper — the good, the bad, and the ugly are all on display for the world to critique. The Picasso Museum in Paris, along with the one in Barcelona, are great places to get a feeling for the staggering scope of the man's life work.

We continued our epic art history tour picking up on the historical timeline again—this time where the Musee D'Orsay left off—at the Pompidou Center, which covers art from 1900 through the present day. The Pompidou building was designed by famed architect Renzo Piano, and caused huge controversy in Paris when it was built, because the building is exoskeletal — or, inside-out. All of the pipes, wires, boxes, and elevators are on the outside of the building instead of the inside, and all color-coded. Air is circulated through blue pipes. Water through green pipes. People are transported through red escalators and elevators. Electricity moves around in yellow wires. The building has become such an icon of Paris over the last 30 years, that it has found its way into the hearts of Parisians, who now seem to love the place.

Inside the museum was a wonderful collection of modern and contemporary art. For me, contemporary art museums are one of the few chances we have as adults to be a kid again — you get the chance to learn, allow your mind to explore, see new things, challenge the ways you think, and open up to new experiences. I always feel bad for the inevitable guy muttering under his breath about how his four-year-old daughter could make better art, because I personally find the contemporary museum experience to be tremendously enjoyable. It's more interesting than seeing painting after painting of pretty-but-trite images of angels swooping into the heavens, that's for sure. So many people get frustrated that they don't "get it" that they end up with the impression that contemporary art is some elaborate joke on the Average Joe. Although I don't have a great grasp of contemporary art history, most artists I have studied were ultimately very thoughtful and sincere about their work. Either way, it was great to visit the Pompidou to cap off our three day art extravaganza, from Mesopotamia to Michelangelo to Modernism.

My parents and I spent the next day apart, and I decided to go back to explore the area surrounding the Pompidiou, which has one of my favorite public squares and some of the best people watching in Europe. The neighborhood is also very young and arty, full of good street food, and a wonderful place to waste a day. Later on, I ventured over to the new Design Museum. The museum had a surprisingly huge collection, but focused mostly on fashion, furniture and product design spanning the last 200 years. Of course, the highlight for me was the graphic design area, which had original posters designed by Alphonse Mucha, Milton Glaser, James Victoire, and an awesome poster by design god and personal hero Josef Muller-Brockmann.

After an exhaustingly great week in Paris, we finally left on a quick flight across the English Channel to London.

As I arrived in England, everything seemed strangely, well, touristy. I quickly realized that it wasn't that things were touristy, but that everything was written in English. Having spent the previous 312 days in countries without English as a first language—yes, I counted—my brain started to equate English with tourism. Once I got over that, it was nice to be able to understand everything around me. Well, almost everything — about 10 percent of words are different in American versus British English. Bathroom is loo, first floor is ground floor, second floor is first floor, policemen are bobbies, the checkout counter is a till, elevator is a lift, the shopping cart is a buggy, soccer is football, fries are chips, and chips are crisps. Mostly, it's all understandable in context, but sometimes the British version of English is downright bizarre, like this little gem:

My parents and I spent the day at the Tate Modern, probably my favorite museum on earth. The museum is divided up thematically instead of chronologically, which causes very interesting artist mashups from different time periods who made work about similar subjects. The museum had an incredible audio-visual guide delivered on a PDA, where you could hear artist interviews, watch an occasional quick video clip of someone speaking, zoom in and hear about specific aspects of a painting, or see other works by the same artist to give context. They even had separate programs for kids, which my mom loved as a mother who took her kids to a lot of museums. The guide was so much more thorough, thoughtful, interesting, and useful than any other audio guide I've ever seen, and I really hope other museums adopt a similar system.

After a few nights of great and greasy pub food, it came time to part ways with my parents. We had a great three weeks together, and I really enjoyed our chats over a bottle (or two or three) of wine each night, and our action-packed days traversing Europe. I realized I'm a lot more like my parents than I ever imagined — my scrappy and frugal traveling style is apparently the direct result of the way I was raised. Over the three weeks, we rarely argued about where to go, where to eat, or what to do — the normal headaches of traveling with other people. I can't thank them enough for letting me tag along on their trip. Here we are having a bit of last-minute fun as my parents get packed up to go to the airport:

I moved from our hotel over to a nearby hostel, and settled back into the life of sharing everything with 50 other people, and living on the cheap. Although London is one of the most expensive cities on earth, there are a ton of free museums and events around town every day if you know where to find them. Unlike Russia, where you can easily spend 50 dollars per day just to survive, spending 50 dollars wisely and creatively in London can get you a really great day. For me, London has a lot of value for the money, considering how expensive it seems.

Since I had just been to London in 2003, I was luckily able to settle down for a few days of relaxation and take it easy. I did make it out to a few of the lesser-known sights around town, however. I stopped by the Serpentine Gallery, which is a serious force in the international contemporary art world, and an endorsement of your work or a show at the Serpentine can be a big boost in an artists career. I also strolled through Hyde Park on a weekend, and enjoyed seeing families picnic in the grass and people clumsily learn how to rollerblade. I stopped by an urban planning exhibit which gave some insight into how the city of London is planning to grow in the 21st century. They had a model of the 2012 London Olympics site, an extremely controversial topic in England right now, especially after the logo was revealed last week and virtually everyone—from peasants to professional graphic designers—absolutely hated it. Olympics aside, London has a surprising amount of new buildings including the playful new London City Hall, which looks like it's just about to topple over:

I took a break from my nerdy adventures in architecture, and went out to the Covent Garden area, a thriving and bustling center packed with shops, restaurants and great people watching. I had a fun night of shopping and drinking with Chelsea, who I had met traveling in Moscow a month earlier, and her friend Ashley, two American girls living in London on a semester abroad. We watched a football (soccer) game and drank, drank, drank the night away.

I sobered up and made the trip across central London to Whitechapel to visit the Idea Store, designed by David Adjaye, the same architect of new Museum of Contemporary Art | Denver in my hometown. I had met David in person because we used to do design work for the museum at my old office (okay, he asked me where the bathroom was and I nervously gave him piss-poor directions), so I wanted to check out one of his other buildings, which are mainly in London. The Idea Store was great — like a library, community resource center, and cafe all at once, it was exactly what libraries should be like, and it seemed very popular. The area around The Idea Store was fascinating mix of mostly Muslim and Hindi people, and I was one of the few white people wandering among the women in burkas or saris, which was really fun to see inside the city center. London is much more diverse than I remember it being on my last visit, which was a nice surprise.

On the opposite side of the library spectrum, I also made a stop at the British Library, which houses some of the most important works of literature ever created by man. Protected under glass, you can take a look at an original version of Lewis Carrol's Alice in Wonderland; the first-edition prints of several Shakespeare plays; handwritten scores by Beethoven, Chopin, and Mozart; a gorgeous gilded copy of the Qur'an from 1304; a wide array of hand-painted illuminated manuscripts; an original Gutenburg Bible; written copies of indulgences, the written promises purchased from the church to guarantee forgiveness from God; a landmark book from 1610 Galileo published about astronomy; a manuscript featuring stamps from the Stamp Tax, which ultimately started the US revolution and democracy as we know it; and four of the only copies that exist of the Magna Carta, the hugely important document from 1215 that took away the divine power of the king and started the movement which would ultimately lead to the governments which give us freedom today. Most importantly, they had original drafts of lyrics to Yesterday, Hard Days Night, and other Beatles classics, which are more important than democracy or freedom could ever hope to be.

Later, I stopped by Trafalgar Square, the setting for many of the political protests throughout London's history. I happened to stumble upon Critical Mass, an event which happens once per month in cities across the earth, including a very small version in Denver. The idea is simple: get a bunch of people together and cycle through the city in protest of the dominant car culture. As a result, traffic gets completely jammed up city-wide, and it has become a serious headache for city officials who don't often have legal grounds to keep bikers off the streets. Although I'm not a cyclist, I like the middle-finger-to-the-man aspect of Critical Mass, and it was fun to see some of the decorated bikes on the street:

The rest of my time in London was spent poring over exhibits at the Victoria & Albert Museum, which houses a great collection of international applied art. I also visited the small but interesting Design Museum, which featured some solid exhibits and a bathroom with the only Dyson hand-dryer I've ever come across, which was loud as hell, but completely dried my hands in about two seconds. On a rainy day, I spent a few hours wandering the huge Harrod's department store, where I found a lot of things I liked, but nothing I could afford. I laughed when I found a set of matched luggage that cost more than my entire trip — which would you choose? In the basement is a memorial to Princess Diana and Dodi Al-Fayed, the heir to the Harrod's fortune, who died together in a car accident in Paris ten years ago.

I mostly spent my time in London aimlessly wandering, my favorite activity, getting a feel for the distinct character of each neighborhoods along the way. I actually covered a gigantic portion of London on foot — from Gloucester Road to Kings Cross, and from Victoria to Whitechapel. My feet hurt.

I left London on a flight to Istanbul and I've been here in Turkey for almost two weeks now. I'm having a great time so far — mostly it's been a lot of partying, relaxing, and avoiding museums for fear that I will explode if I go to one more. There should be a Turkey update here fairly soon — I'm going to try to get completely up to date with the next entry, so watch out for that.

Thanks for reading this gigantic update! I really appreciate you guys remembering me, eleven months after I left home.

Ryan!

Also, be sure to check out my friend Lee's blog — Lee Saunders, Mexican — which chronicles his adventures living in Mexico City. I only wish my blog was this good: "Right angles were a completely lost concept on the street-builders of Mexico City. Pythagoras would shit a brick in this place."

Europe, at Last: Part II

2007-05-27T22:19:00.000-06:00

After our trip through Prague's Jewish Quarter, we left the city aboard a series of buses and local commuter trains taking us to the small southern Czech town of Cesky Krumlov. The word Cesky — meaning Czech — is a leftover from the days of Czechoslovakia, when towns identified themselves as Czech or Slovak as a part of their name. After the countries became independent, the names stuck, so many towns in the Czech Republic carry the Cesky name.*

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* Note: I have no facts to back this up, but it sounded right in my head. Maybe it's like San Diego, where nobody knows what it means. What's that? Saint Diego? No, no. Agree to disagree.¹

¹ Mom: this is a reference to a movie you haven't seen, or, more likely, a movie you saw and subsequently forgot about five seconds after you walked out of the theater. Okay, back to the blog.
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We arrived at night and strolled across the cobblestone streets before checking into our incredible apartment overlooking the Vlatva River, which winds hairpin turns through town, dominated by the enormous 13th century castle above town.

Our first day, we borrowed a few audioguides from the tourist office, and set off on a great tour of the city, which was founded back in 1302. We had a great time wandering amidst the old buildings, learning about the history of Krumlov and the people who live there, soaking in the beauty of the town. The town is full of cool little surprises that we would have never noticed without the guides, like family crests which have graced buildings for hundreds of years, or trompe-l'œil paintings which blend right into the architecture. Like Prague, Krumlov was left virtually untouched by the bombs of World War II, and many of the historic buildings have been renovated and restored thanks to extra income from the recent tourist boom.

The next day we went on a tour of the Cesky Krumlov's Eggenberg Brewery, which was led by a local woman who had lived in the little town her whole life. Unlike the borderline-propaganda Coors Tour offered in my hometown, the Eggenberg tour was scrappy, gritty, and honest about their beer. Our guide gave us an up-close look at the vats, tanks, and tunnels where all the beer is made, and like any brewery tour, the best part is the end. Eggenberg's was no let down — their dark beer is definitely one of the best beers I've ever had.

While my mom was out shopping, my dad and I made a stop by the progressive Egon Schiele Center, which houses some of the artist's work, along with special exhibitions. The famed painter Egon Schiele lived in Cesky Krumlov for more than a decade, but was ousted from town for being too weird. During his very short career before his death at age 28 of the Spanish Flu, he generally painted either scenes from quaint Cesky Krumlov, or disturbing and overtly sexual paintings of himself and his many girlfriends. His paintings were great in real life — a lot of the subtlety, texture, and detail gets lost when they are reproduced in books.

From Cesky Krumlov, we took a shuttle across the border into Austria to the railway hub of Linz, where we caught a train over to Salzburg, a mid-sized town which is famous for being the home of both Mozart and The Sound of Music. Since I'm an enthusiast of neither, I decided to opt out and instead climb up onto the town's plateau for a look at their new contemporary art museum, the Muzeum der Moderne. The museum has no permanent collection and featured work by only three artists. On display were huge prints by photographer Joel Meyerowitz of post-9/11 shots of Ground Zero in New York, who was granted access onto the site to document the process of clearing the wreckage, now published in a book called Aftermath. I especially enjoyed the carved wood sculptures on display by German artist Stephan Balkenhol.

We only stayed in Salzburg for one night, in a hotel that is almost 700 years old, which was a really fun experience. Over my travels, I can't get over how much history lies within each European town compared to the relatively short history of America. Being surrounded by thousands of years of layered history must provide European people with an enhanced sense of cultural tradition and vastly different understanding of the scope and scale of the world than we've got back in the States.

We spent the rest of our time in Salzburg braving the rain, hiking around on the wooded hill above town, and exploring the large town fort, which was never successfully attacked in its long history.

Our next stop was off to the little town of Hallstat, perched on the edge of a beautiful lake and surrounded by rolling mountains on all sides. We took the ferry from the train station, and I couldn't believe my eyes. Hallstat is surely one of the prettiest places on earth, and as we explored the town, I couldn't get over how absurdly beautiful the place was. And for such a little town, Hallstat has an staggeringly long history — the little salt-mining village was founded before Rome. Yes, that Rome.

One of the town's most interesting places in town is Hallstat's graveyard, where townspeople still come to honor the dead with candles and flowers each night. Since the town has so little land available, the bones are removed from the graves a decade after the person has died and kept inside an ossuary. Each family hand-paints the deceased person's name on their skull, along with symbols which stand for things like love, virtue, and honor. I found the 300-year old tradition really fascinating, but is rapidly dying out as more and more people in Hallstat choose to be cremated. Still, you can stop by the small ossuary for a look at more than 1200 skulls and bones of all the old townspeople.

We left Hallstat and hopped aboard a quick train to the nearby town of Melk, where we rented bikes and spent a few hours cruising along the Danube River. Along the river, there are hundreds of miles of bike trails which wind from town to town. Someday, I'd love to return to Austria and do a long bike trip stopping in towns along the way, but for now I settled on a nice ride with my parents to the next town over to grab a beer and watch the sunset over the river.

The next morning, we climbed up to the butter yellow and very baroque Melk Abbey on the hill just over our hotel. For decades, the gargantuan abbey sat in disrepair, but was recently renovated thanks to the sale of the abbey's original copy of the Gutenberg Bible (Johannes, not Steve) to Yale University for what was surely a massive sum of money. Part of the abbey is now a museum with oddly-designed exhibits documenting the changing face of faith, but I especially enjoyed the ancient leatherbound books in the library, the monumentally gaudy baroque church, and the sweeping views over the pleasant little town.

As we left Melk, we again climbed aboard Austria's truly impressive network of trains, this time headed for the country's capital of Vienna, or as the locals call it, Wein.

In my mind, Vienna has always been synonymous with boring music, stuffy old people, and formal gardens. As we arrived, I was surprised to find a really thriving and active city center full of arty hipsters, cheap food shops, and more contemporary art museums than you could shake a stick at. Many of the city's museums are grouped around an incredible courtyard full of amazingly cool lawn furniture, jammed with people laying around, drinking booze, and enjoying the warm spring weather. Since the museums protect the square from any traffic noise, the space was like a massive outdoor living room, and it will definitely go down as one of the best public spaces I've seen on the trip. I seriously couldn't get enough of this outdoor furniture — if only every city had as nice of a place to come and hang out.

Our one and only night in Vienna was spent just outside the city center, taking part in a long-held local tradition of sipping wine in outdoor wine bars. And as the old saying goes, "when in Wein, do as the Weiners do." Maybe that's why they picked Rome for that saying. Anyway, Vienna has a few dozen wine gardens, many of which are still functional vineyards, making small batches of homemade wine. Thanks to an ancient loophole in the law which allowing vineyards to sell wine tax-free on their property, wine bars sprouted up, and an excellent tradition was born. We had a very memorable night vineyard-hopping for a few hours, trying a few different wines and getting some delicious Viennese grub along the way.

Squeezing in as much as possible into our visit, my parents and I split up for our morning in Vienna before our flight to Paris. They went off to see some fancy crown jewels or something, and I went to three museums. First, the Leopold Museum, which houses mostly Austrian 20th century art including a large collection of delightfully disturbing work by Egon Schiele, and a whole room dedicated to the beautiful work of design bad-ass Kolomon Moser. Nearby the Leopold Museum was a small graphic design museum — the dim lighting and lack of staff gave me the impression I was the only person nerdy enough to actually go there. After checking out the nice little collection of old posters and products, I was off down the street to the gold domed Secession Museum.

The Vienna Secession was a movement in the art, design, and architecture world in the early 1900s whose small gang of members — led by painter and designer Gustav Klimt — devoutly believed in the power of then-contemporary art to change the lives and minds of regular people. They built the Secession building as a monument to their cause, and held regular exhibitions there as they developed and furthered what is now known as the Art Noveau style. In order to keep the spirit of the Secession alive, most of the museum is still dedicated to contemporary art, but the parts that interested me the most were the ones about the Vienna Secession itself. The two highlights were the gorgeous original copies of the Secession's self-published magazine Ver Sacrum, and Gustav Klimt's Beethoven Frieze, a large-scale mural painted in 1902 for an exhibition on the composer. The Seccession building itself was also a highlight:

We left Vienna and spent all of last week in Paris, which will be covered in my next update, along with London where I am now. My parents headed back to Denver a few days ago, so I'm back to frugal living and nights spent hearing other people snore at crowded hostels. Another change of pace is on its way: I'm headed to Istanbul on the 29th where I'll start a month-long journey through Turkey. Also, I just bought my tickets from London to New York, so I officially have a date when I'm headed back to the home of the brave, land of the free: September 4th!

Thanks for reading everyone. I hope you are all well.

Ryan!

Photos updated: Prague, Cesky Krumlov, Salzburg, Hallstat, Melk, Vienna, Paris, and some of London

Europe, at Last: Part I

2007-05-15T02:28:00.000-06:00

I left Moscow on an overnight train in the platskart class — the cheapest class available — which was like a big cattle car full of drunks, teenagers, and drunken teenagers. The beds in platskart are only about five feet long, so there are a lot of burly Russian feet dangling into the hallway at all times.

The following morning, I arrived in St. Petersburg and backpacked around town in search of a cheap place to stay, and ended up in a dark and dreary three-story hostel inhabited by only a couple fellow travelers. Few people choose to travel to Russia, and once I got there it was clear why. Russia is the only place I've ever been that I would consider anti-tourist. There isn't much of a tourist industry, and they show zero interest in ever getting one going. Getting a visa, including the fee to get "invited" into the country, costs around $130. On top of that, tourists are required to pay an additional $25 police registration fee in each city visited for more than 3 days. Once inside the country, you get very little value for your money. Major cultural sights and museums are absurdly expensive, and have a lot of hidden fees (i.e. you can't bring your backpack into the museum, but you can use the storage locker for five dollars). Basic living costs like hostels and food are costly too. If I'm going to pay nine dollars for a hot dog, that thing had better be wrapped in bacon. Finances aside, I found the people in Russia, apart from a handful of exceptions, to be tremendously unfriendly. Asking people for help or directions was nearly impossible, and people would often turn their back on me if I approached them on the street. Asking police for help or directions is even more problematic — I've heard many travelers complain about being scammed by Russian cops, who find an obscure flaw or minor error in your visa paperwork and demand you pay them hundreds of dollars in order to get your passport back. As a result, I got nervous and avoided speaking every time I passed a police officer.

All of these hurdles and annoyances aside, I did my best to enjoy Russia and St. Petersburg. I visited the world-famous Hermitage Museum on two separate occasions, which was surprisingly free for me to enter, compliments of my fake student ID card I bought on the street back in Thailand. The Hermitage is housed in the beautiful seafoam green Winter Palace, which is a nice architectural reflection of the brisk temperatures that sweep over St. Petersburg for most of the year. On my first trip inside, I wandered around trying to get a feel for the scale and scope of the massive museum, which houses an insanely large collection of everything from Egyptian mummies to classical sculptures, gilded Gothic paintings to products of the early 20th century European avantgarde. The collection is so large that if you spent five minutes contemplating each piece, you would be in the museum for more than three years. After a day of exploration, I decided to take an in-depth look at the great pieces by Rembrandt and other Dutch artists, as well as the museum's amazing collection of work from the late 19th and early 20th century from Picasso, Monet, Matisse, Rodin, and the usual suspects, which definitely rivaled any similar collection I've ever seen.

While I was in St. Petersburg, former Russian president Boris Yeltsin died, and much to my surprise, it seemed like nobody even noticed. Although talking to Russian people in English is like trying to talk to a brick wall in Piglatin, the impression that I got was that most people considered him to be a very flawed leader, causing the country more harm than good. People seem to have much more respect for current president Vladamir Putin, despite his recent heavy-handed crackdown on the free press.

My remaining time in St. Petersburg was spent wandering around in the freezing and overcast weather, trying desperately to enjoy myself. For some reason, I really had trouble connecting with St. Petersburg. Part of it definitely had to do with the language barrier — in Asia, it's much easier to deal with because you visibly look different than anyone else, so if there's trouble communicating, the local people immediately understand why. Coming into Europe and blending in, people give you dumbfounded looks when you don't understand them. While there was undoubtedly a lot of cool stuff going on in St. Petersburg, I felt like I was in a weird bubble by myself as I walked around town. For that and other reasons, the city didn't resonate with me on a personal level, despite the city's pleasant series of rivers and canals, pretty architecture city-wide, and cool Art Noveau storefronts.

My time in Russia finally came to a close, so I packed up my stuff and headed out to the airport to catch my flight to Berlin to meet my parents. I walked a few miles from my hostel to the airport bus pickup station only to find that the airport bus no longer departed from there, and instead picked up at a faraway metro station called Moscova. Okay, no problem. I jumped on the subway and listened carefully for Muscova over the loudspeaker since the city subway amazingly has no signs on the walls indicating which station you are in. I jumped out at Moscova and hurled myself up the escalator only to find myself out in some low-density suburb. I started asking people where to go and finally found a friendly and helpful local guy who actually spoke Engish.

Airport bus? Oh, you need to be at Moscova station.
I'm not at Moscova station?!
Ha ha, oh no... this is Moscova Gate station.
!^$%)$(

He helped me get on a bus to the real Moscova station, and told me exactly how to get onto the airport bus. Once at the station, I transferred to the correct bus and confirmed that it was indeed heading to Pulkovo Airport. I could finally relax. Twenty minutes later, I arrived, went through two security checks, and then tried to check in for my flight.

Uhh, sir, you are at the wrong airport.
Isn't this Pulkovo Airport!?
Ha ha, no no, you want Pulkovo Airport II.
Are you #$%@&@# serious?

I had the check-in lady write the name of the correct airport in Cyrillic on a piece of paper, and I bolted out the door, certain I was going to miss my flight. A taxi driver waited outside with a knowing smile on his face and subsequently refused to take me to the other Pulkovo Airport — a five minute drive — for any less than 40 dollars. I had too much pride to accept the bastard's extortionate offer, so I took the bus back to Muscova station in order to switch to Bus 13, which was apparently headed for Pulkovo Airport II. They dropped me off, and I eagerly waited for Bus 13 to drive by so I could flag it down and jump on. I saw it out of the corner of my eye, jumped on, and paid my fare. I was finally on my way to the right airport — now I could finally relax. Looking around, I noticed nobody else in the minivan had luggage. Then I noticed everyone was staring at me and my big backpack. Then I looked at the sign on the bus window and saw a big backwards "15." In all the confusion, I had boarded the wrong bus.

I shouted a long enough string of obscenities to make a sailor cringe, then started banging on the doors with my hand and yelling "Nyet! Nyet! Nyet!" My fellow passengers weren't wild about the crazy person on board, so they pleaded with the the driver to pull over. He eventually did, and I flung the door open and jumped out. With my huge backpack bouncing along on my back, I started sprinting backward, trying desperately to retrace where the bus had come from, hoping I could get back to find Bus 13. Suddenly, Bus 13 appeared like a mirage, and I jumped out in front of it, waving my arms violently, jumping up and down. Somehow, I got to the airport and through the security and immigration checks in time for my flight. Thankfully, after all that, the plane was well supplied with beer because I seriously needed a drink.

I made a quick layover at the brand new airport in Riga, Latvia, then was back in the sky again headed toward my favorite city in the entire world: Berlin.

Berlin is a city of contrasts. One one hand, Berlin has a compelling and relevant modern history, serving as the central focal point of the two major mega-events of our time: World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall — and the subsequent collapse of communism and the end of the Cold War. On the other hand, Berlin is an aggressively modern city, and is one of the leaders in the world in contemporary music, art, and design. Since more than 85% of the city's buildings were destroyed during World War II, the city is filled with a massive amount of contemporary architecture. Berlin is clean, green, liberal, friendly, and boasts one of the most extensive public transportation systems on earth. On my travels, I've found some cities hopelessly mired in the past, and some cities too forgetful of their roots. For me, Berlin gets it just right.

My first night in town was my birthday-eve, so I went out with some Swedish girls I met at the hostel for a long night of drunken shenanigans in Berlin's rapidly-gentrifying neighborhood of Mitte in east Berlin. The following morning, I sobered up and headed out to meet my parents, who cruised on over to the UK from America, and flew into Berlin that afternoon. The three of us met at a great ikea-clad apartment in the heart of West Berlin that my mom rented in the internet. We celebrated my birthday with a nice dinner on swanky Kufusterdamm street and had plenty to catch up on since I hadn't seen them in almost ten months.

The next day, we went on a walking tour which got us in-depth into the history of Berlin. Our first stop was the plaza where the Nazis famously burned piles of books they deemed inappropriate, now memorialized by an underground chamber full of empty bookshelves. Nearby is a plaque with a chilling quote written a almost a hundred years earlier by Heinrich Heine: "Wherever they burn books, they will also, in the end, burn people." Books written by Heine, interestingly enough, were among those burned in the plaza. We also stopped by Checkpoint Charlie, the only major exit and entry point during the days of the Berlin Wall, where our guide provided us with great information about how Berlin (and Europe) was divided after World War II, and how those divisions ultimately lead to the wall being built. Nearby is one of the few remaining sections of the wall that wasn't destroyed in 1989, which seems like a very distant memory for a city that no longer feels divided. We also visited the Reichstag, the building which served as the former center of power for the Third Reich, still used today by the government and now topped with a dome designed by famed architect Norman Foster. One of the highlights of the tour was the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, a simple labyrinth-like outdoor space full of gray slabs at varying heights which stand as a powerful reminder of the Holocaust without being forced or forceful.

Our epic few days of sightseeing continued with a trip to the Hamburger Bahnhoff, an awesome contemporary art museum with one of the most delightful-to-pronounce museum names on the planet. Within the museum's walls were a solid collection of silkscreens by Andy Warhol, bizarre and intriguing sculptures by Joseph Beuys, markmaking exercises by Cy Twombly, and awesome assemblages by Robert Rauchenberg, one of my favorite artists. The art was so well-presented and explained that even my dad enjoyed the work on display, even though contemporary art isn't really his cup of tea. Here I am pondering the Andy Warhol's portrait of Chairman Mao — a stark contrast from the one I saw just a few weeks back hanging over the entrance to the Forbidden City in Beijing.

Continuing my quest to see as much of Berlin's great architecture as possible, we paid a short visit to Frank Gehry's spectacular bank interior, located just off the Brandenburg Gate, which used to sit between East and West Berlin. The outside of the building was surprisingly tame given the architect, but the inside was very, very Gehry.

On our last day in Berlin, we headed to the Jewish Museum, designed by Daniel Libeskind, the architect of the recently completed expansion to the Denver Art Museum in my home town. The museum had beautiful spaces both outside and in.

Once inside, the museum had a surprisingly fascinating look at the history of Jews throughout time, bringing their cultural traditions and history to light. With several other Holocaust museums and memorials elsewhere in the area, the Holocaust was played down a bit inside the Jewish Museum, though it obviously was talked about. I found this Holocaust memorial art installation particularly moving, which was unlike any space I've ever visited in a museum:

We visited a few other museums and galleries, but much of the rest of our time in Berlin was spent at awesome restaurants, out at beer gardens, or sitting on our balcony sipping cocktails. One of the many great things about traveling with my parents is that they need a booze break every few hours, especially if we've done a lot of walking. "My feet need a beer," as my mom says. We finally left the artistic and architectural wonderland of Berlin on a cramped overnight train across the border to Poland, and arrived in Krakow the next morning.

Our cozy apartment in Krakow was a little bit away from the old city center, so we unsuccessfully tried to figure out how to use the city's tram system, which didn't seem to lead anywhere we wanted to go. We eventually found this very honest explanation of what was going on:

Krakow's old town is a really charming little pedestrian friendly area with a high-density of churches which serve the very devout, mostly Roman-Catholic Polish population. The streets are lined with a lot of outdoor cafes and shops, and the are filled with people strolling along next to the horse-drawn carts which clip-clop along through the historic old town. We were in Krakow during a Polish holiday, and it was fun to see vacationers from around the country touring the town alongside us.

It's hard to imagine that lingering just outside of Krakow, however, lies a far-from-pleasant place: the infamous former concentration camp of Auschwitz.

I've been to a lot of Holocaust memorials and historical sites in my life, and each time, a new thread gets woven into my understanding of the horrific events that took place under the Nazis. At the Aushwitz camp, now converted into a museum and memorial, the thing that surprised me was how much paperwork the Nazis did about each person they killed. I know that probably seems kind of minor, but for me, it had a significant impact on my understanding of the Holocaust. The Nazis, as evidenced in their endless stacks of paperwork, really believed that what they were doing was right. They thought it was just. Before, I had pictured the Nazis as a bunch of guys with hate in their hearts and brains warped by a brutal dictator, killing anything in their path. Something about seeing all of that paperwork made me realize how systematic and drawn out the whole process actually was. They were really trying to exterminate a race of people — and, completely disturbingly, approached it the same way any city would approach any civic project. For me, it added another mind-numbing and sickening aspect to the most horrific event in history.

On the Auschwitz site, there are still many of the old block buildings which housed the prisoners who were fit to work. The others—the vast majority taken to the camp—were executed as soon as they arrived. We walked through the crematorium where bodies were burned, and the gas chambers where thousands of unfortunate people—Jews, gays, gypsies, Soviets, and counter-revolutionaries—met their end. We saw the painfully crowded beds where people slept if they were lucky, and the standing-room-only prison cells they were taken to if they were not. We also saw truly shocking footage of the camp during the liberation by the soviets, where the few camp survivors look far too skinny to possibly still be alive. Yet, they remained, just barely. For the three of us, it was a heartbreaking and maddening place that we will never forget.

We spent our second day in Krakow going out into the 'burbs to the nearby Wieliczka Salt Mine, listed as a Unesco World Heritage site. Our walkthrough of the massive mine was led by a spunky guide who peppered the tour with salt jokes, and strangely kept accidentally referring the salt as "sugar." She later confessed that she works full-time for a sugar company, and this salt gig was just or fun. And probably also because they pay her to show up. Anyway, the tour took us through a series of underground tunnels, caverns, and massive underground churches where we were shown how salt was mined, and got a glimpse of what it would have been like to be a miner. My favorite part was the rickety ride back up to the surface on a tiny old mining elevator, which seemed downright dangerous. Here's a photo of the largest of several dark and salty underground cathedrals, in which virtually everthing was carved from salt by the miners themselves, rather than by artisans:

Traveling with my parents is a source of constant entertainment. I'm surprised to find that I'm not getting sick of them at all, depsite being around them pretty much 24/7. I can't even describe how nice it has been to have home-cooked meals, plentiful backrubs, and conversation with people who actually know me. Plus my dad's interactions with the locals are priceless. One of my favorites so far was with the guy behind the counter at a wine store in Krakow:

Dad: Do you speak English?
Guy: No.
Dad: Oh...
Guy: ...
Dad: Do you have... hmm.
Guy: ...
Dad: Do you have a reasonably-priced Polish wine that's not too overbearing, but that still has a nice flavor? Something not too expensive, but nothing cheap either. You know, like a nice middle of the road red, but preferably something local. Do you have anything like that?
Guy: ...
Dad: Polska vino?
Guy: No.
Dad: Oh.

We left Krakow after two days, headed for Prague on another overnight train. We stayed in a nice apartment out in Prague's suburbs, which gave us the feeling of being locals as we headed into town on the subway along with the morning commuters. For the last decade, Prague has been the darling of the world tourist circuit, and it's now a must-see on virtually every European traveler's itinerary. As a result, the city is swarming with tourists, like a big international fair with people from every corner of the globe. For better or worse, Prague feels like that little underdog rock band that suddenly burst into the mainstream.

To the city's credit, it really is as pretty as people say it is. Prague was left virtually unscathed by the bombs of World War II, and has one of the largest and most well preserved old town areas in Europe. Wandering the old town is a treat, apart from the super-touristy trinket vendors and groups of drunken Irishmen wearing "Czech Me Out!" t-shirts. Luckily, the hoardes stick to a few main paths, and we found it pretty easy to get off on a side street and meander through the old town away from the crowds.

On our first day, we made our way to the Alphons Mucha museum, a tiny place dedicated to the phenomenal designer who single-handedly defined the Art Nouveau style. The walls of the museum were graced with Mucha's amazing ten-foot-tall posters for actress Sarah Bernhardt's shows at the Moulin Rouge, which made him famous among the Parisian bohemians of the day. Later in his career, he returned from the hedonism of Paris to work back in his native land, designing lots more flourished posters and even the currency notes for the new country of Czechoslovakia. I loved the museum, and I'd definitely consider among the best small-scale museums I've ever seen. After the museum, we ate at a great place which featured lots of beer, hearty Czech food, and accordian singalongs:

My parents took a day by themselves to check out Prague's castle and churches, and I went off on my own for a long day of wandering and riding around aimlessly on Prague's tram system. Along the way, I found Frank Gehry's Dancing House, a playful building which looked like its name would imply, built in the mid-1990s along the river amid a storm of controversy for its design. I thought it looked great, and felt really at home standing by the historic Art Noveau buildings next door.

Our last day in Prague was spent touring the city's old Jewish quarter, a string of old synagogues which have amazingly been preserved to this day. One of the synagogues now houses a seriously moving Holocaust memorial — every wall is covered with handwritten names and hometowns of almost 80,000 Jews who were exterminated in the Prague-area alone during a three year span. It reminded me a bit of Maya Lin's Vietnam Memorial in Washington DC, and was equally memorable and powerful. We toured a few of the other synagogues, including the oldest in Europe, and another which was built by the Moors (the Moops). The highlight was the old cemetary where Jews for hundreds of years have been buried literally on top of each other due to a lack of space.

______
to be continued...

That's all I have time to write now — I'm in Paris now, and I have way better things to do than sit on the Internet. Thanks for reading, and I'll try to post another piece of this update soon! For now, my parents are keeping me insanely busy.

Ryan

China Rising

2007-04-21T09:51:00.000-06:00

My relaxing time with Bill and Vivien in Shanghai was a nice break from all the travel that I've done in the last nine months. Being on the road for so long has been great, but truly exhausting at the same time. The urge to sleep in the comfort my own bed never gets fulfilled, the desire to savor a delicious Chipotle burrito never comes to pass, and the itch to go out for a night with my friends from home never becomes reality. So, bumming around at my brother and sister-in-law's place in Shanghai is about as close as I've gotten to home in a long time. And it was a very welcome change of pace.

One night, we met up with a big group of Bill's students for a night of dinner and karaoke. The culinary spread at dinner was a whirlwind tour of things I'd never order — pig's hooves, chicken's feet, deep-fried crabs, and blubbery bowls of what looked like pure fat. Luckily, the students went overboard and ordered around thirty dishes, so there was still plenty to eat other than fat and feet. After dinner, we went to a private room at an upscale karaoke bar, where the students immediately got into the singing spirit. Bill's students apparently don't need to be drunk in order to sing in front of people, which was a new concept to me. As Bill's students encouraged the two of us to sing American songs, Bill and I encouraged the bartender to keep the rounds of beer flowing. Eventually, we Nee boys were boozed up enough to sing Hey Jude, Hotel California, and a handful of others to the glee and applause of the sober students.

The riverfront area in Shanghai known as the Bund is a good place to see Shanghai's past and future at the same time. On one side of the river are a collection of historic European and American buildings from Shanghai's days as a booming international trade town during the early 20th century. The Pu Dong New Development Zone lies on the other side of the river, where Shanghai's rapidly evolving skyline climbs up through the morning mist.

To get to the other side of the river, you can either take a short ride on a colorful and brightly lit "tourist tunnel" for a whopping $12, or you can just jump aboard the subway and go across in normal lighting for a mere 40 cents. As I emerged from the metro station, I found myself in a cluster of newly-built skyscrapers and construction cranes. Some of the buildings were elegant and graceful, and some shockingly ugly, like rejects from the set of The Jetsons, desperately wanting to look futuristic but looking crappy instead. One of the nicest buildings in the area is the current 5th largest building in the world — the Jin Mao Tower, designed by the famous firm Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill. As an architecture enthusiast, I splurged on an $8 ticket to see the views of the city from the 88th floor the tower, which was a great experience. The views of town were epic, and the Chinglish translations describing the building were priceless — one described it as "the first building in China with a surprisingly beautiful appearance." The view from the top down into the 53rd floor of the Grand Hyatt lobby was a really spectacular architectural experience.

photo here (I didn't have my camera)

After a few weeks in Shanghai, I finally said goodbye to Bill and Vivien and made the trip on the posh overnight sleeper train from Shanghai to Beijing, which was like traveling back in time ten years. I arrived in Beijing and was greeted by China's capital city with a deep breath of the polluted air and a trip on the rickety metro system, which was shockingly hard to navigate as an English speaker, which really surprised me given the rapidly approaching 2008 Olympics.

Thanks both to absurd communist city planning as well as preparations for the upcoming games, Beijing is currently a big disaster area, and I spent four days frustrated as hell as I tried to get from place to place on foot. Beijing looks like it was a city designed by giants — each block is painfully huge, and most blocks are occupied by a single enormous landscraper of a building. Walking from one side of the street to the other often requires a 20 minute detour down the block, through a pedestrian underpass, and a walk back up the other side. I've never seen anything quite like it. In other areas, many of the concrete communist structures are getting torn down and rebuilt as kitschy curved-roof shopping streets designed for tourists. One construction fence proudly proclaimed when the building was complete, "all brands will co-exist harmoniously in an ideal ancient streetscape for tourists." As China actively destroys its old hutongs—fascinating old narrow streets full of homes, restaurants and shops—it replaces the old buildings with charmless versions of the same thing. It's hard to properly describe, but it almost seems like China is in the act of self-Disneylandification, ignoring its actual culture in favor of a newer and more slick version of itself.

Curiosity brought me out on a bus to the Olympic area in Beijing's blocky suburbs to check out the venue construction. I had seen a rendering of the new national stadium designed by Swiss firm Herzog and De Meuron, and I wasn't sure what to think of the bizarre bird's nest design, but once I got out there and saw the massive building in real life, I thought it was really amazing. Here's a shot of the construction site, followed by one of the scruffy construction guys who are building it:

Despite my complaints about the city planning and complete disregard for historic preservation, Beijing definitely redeemed itself with three of the best attractions on the planet: The Temple of Heaven, the Forbidden City, and the Great Wall.

The gorgeous Temple of Heaven dates from the Ming Dynasty and is set in a pleasant park where people come to watch old people perform traditional Chinese music, or just relax in the park's peaceful atmosphere. I visited the temple five years ago with my parents on my first trip to China, and I went back because I really love the timeless elegance of the building.

The next day, I passed under the massive portrait of Chairman Mao and spent all day exploring the Forbidden City, an dauntingly massive series of temples, palaces, gardens and imperial buildings packed into 178 acres in the center of Beijing. Like much of the rest of Beijing, it was under heavy renovation, but I still had trouble making my way through the parts that were currently open. The Forbidden City is seriously enormous, and it would take weeks to fully explore it.

The following day, I decided to go on my hostel's "Secret Wall Tour," which takes visitors out to an unrestored stretch of the Great Wall of China. Normally I don't head out on gimmicky-sounding tours, but it got rave reviews from other people at the hostel, and it turned out to be really amazing. After a few hour drive into the mountains, our minibus driver dropped us off out in the middle of nowhere, and we were told to follow an old man dressed in an equally old blue Mao suit. Our elderly guide didn't speak any English, but he was absurdly charming as he took care of our group and led us on a few hour hike along the crumbling stretch of the wall. I had seen a restored section of the wall with my parents, so I'm really glad I got to see one that was still in disrepair and off the tourist map, for now. Plus, our guide was priceless:

As I was preparing to leave Beijing, I started to wonder whether the Olympics will be a good thing for the country. China wants and deserves to be in the spotlight right now, but I don't think the government is really prepared for how bright the spotlight will be. China has a very closed media system and no free press, and I'm not sure if the government realizes that the Olympics will be the most widely-covered event so far in the history of man. Think about it: never before have people been able to transmit information as quickly to one another as we can today. A protest on Tiananmen Square calling for freedom in Tibet, for example, could be instantly broadcast in the form of video, photos, text messages, and blogs via mobile phones, laptops, and cameras directly to the Internet as it is happening. Imagine if that was the case during the student protests in 1989: instead of one video of a student standing in front of a row of tanks you'd have a few thousand, all flying around the web instantly. China has been struggling to control the media as the Internet starts to push them to open things up, and by the time Olympics roll around, the effort seems like it will be futile. For more on this, check out this article about the Government's pre-Olympics anti-spitting campaign. I personally think people will be more turned-off by not being able to access Wikipedia, read Time Magazine, or update and read their blog while in China than they will be by the spitting. Anyway, in my experience, Chinese people are really proud of their culture and country, and on one hand I hope the cynical West won't come in and crash the party. On the other hand, I do think that something needs to be done about Tibet, the lack of free speech and press, and other issues which will certainly be raised in 2008. Needless to say, it will be a very interesting Olympics, where more will be on the playing field than just sports.

Side note: I just laughed out loud as I wrote that last sentence, which I admit is a bit ludicrous. Sometimes when I'm writing this blog I feel like I'm a crappy journalist for some small town (or worse, high school) newspaper. But for the sake of self-documentation, I'm trying to write about the things that I'm thinking about in addition to the things I'm doing, even if my reasoning is totally off-base and flawed. After I offended the Indian guys by my post a few months ago, part of me felt like I should be more careful about what I say here, but I feel like doing that will ultimately make the journal less interesting for people to read, and for me in the future as well. Alright, on with the blog!

I left Beijing early in the morning on the famous Trans-Siberian Railway. Actually, the official name is Trans-Mongolian Railway, and it is one of three epic train rides that goes across Siberia to Moscow from Asia. I boarded the train one morning and settled in for what is one of the longest railway journeys on the face of the earth.

With six full days to spend on the train, there was plenty of time to get to know my fellow passengers. There was Jack, a fascinating 84-year-old man who is traveling by train from Hong Kong all the way back to his home in Southwest England by train. He told me a lot of incredible stories from his life, including tales of fighting the Nazis in World War II. There was also Ryan, a Canadian guy who has spent the last 18 months slowly working his way around the world overland, getting across the ocean by working as a crew member on container ships and yachts. There was also Mike, a John Elway lookalike from Maryland who has been partying his way across the world on a break from his job as a navigator on a 300-meter long (three football fields) merchant marine container ship. There was also Graham and J, a fifty-something couple from New Zealand who decided to sell everything they own and live out of suitcases for the rest of their lives. Finally, there was Aaron and Ryan, two fun guys from Kansas who spent the bulk of the past year weaving around the world traveling both solo and with other friends, collecting incredible stories along the way.

Nobody in my 4-bed compartment spoke any English, but I kept the wacky Chinese women entertained with my hand motions and antics. The women didn't seem to understand that I didn't speak Chinese, because the full six days were spent with them saying something to me in Chinese, and then they'd repeat the same statement louder as if I'd suddenly know Chinese if they yelled into my ear. Our conversations generally went something like this:

Them: blah blah blah blah blah
Me: In case you forgot, I don't speak Chinese.
Them: BLAH BLAH BLAH! BLAH BLAH BLAH!
Me: I remain unable to speak Chinese.
Them: (look at each other thinking: This guy is an idiot.)

Despite the language barrier, the women were really likable and we had a fun time over the course of the trip. Plus, one of the women was a professional massage therapist, so she gave me free hour-long professional massages every day, which were amazing despite the lady thoroughly massaging my ears every time, which was as creepy as you'd expect.

At the end of the first day on the train, we had made it to the China-Mongolia border, where we went through customs and the train was broken apart and each car was lifted individually by massive hydraulic lifts to adjust the tracks to fit Mongolian (and Russian) train gauges. The coolest part is that they lifted each train car with everyone still inside. Here is a crew member sliding the new tracks in place:

We spent all of the next day cutting north through the vast emptiness of the Gobi Desert and the rest of Mongolia, the most sparsely populated country on earth. From the train, we'd occasionally catch glimpses of clusters of gers (Mongolian nomad tents), sheep grazing in the distance, or the occasional vehicle speeding along next to the train, but for the most part Mongolia seemed completely empty. In the afternoon we arrived in the suburbs of the capital city Ulaanbaatar, which I found fascinating because they looked like suburbs in America with gers instead of cookie-cutter houses. From the train, downtown Ulaanbataar looked like a dusty wild west town overtaken by soviet architects. Someday I'd like to go back and really explore Mongolia, but for now I had to settle on seeing it pass outside the train window.

At the end of the second day, crossed the border into Russia, which was a bit nerve wracking because the Russian cops are notorious for scamming tourists out of massive quantities of money. As we crossed, the guards did a fair bit of stomping around, shouting orders, and shuffling through my luggage, but I managed to sneak through incident-free. The elderly British woman the next compartment over was not so lucky: because of a mixup at the consulate, she didn't have a valid Russian visa and they made her leave the train and go back to Ulaan Bataar, costing her thousands of dollars in missed transit connections because of the delay.

The following day, we spent the majority of the morning chugging along next to the beautiful waters of Lake Baikal, which was so big it looked like a frozen ocean. I sat there as we moved along the lake between the towns of Ulan Ude and Irkutsk with a big smile on my face, enjoying the surreal view.

The next three days were spent on an epic push westward through quaint Siberian villages and blocky communist factory towns. Time passed fairly quickly as I read, listened to music, or played cards and drank with my friends on the train. My favorite part was the seemingly endless sunset every night as we followed it toward the horizon. On the fifth day, we crossed the Ural Mountains and officially entered Europe. On the last day we made the final crawl through the suburbs and finally arrived in Moscow.

The first thing I noticed in the city was the bizarre fashion sense most Muscovites seem to have. Most girls my age walk around wearing leather miniskirts, tiny fur coats, and liberally applied makeup as if they're headed off to some party with a 1980s prostitute theme. The surly and burly guys have an equally odd choice in clothing — the other day I saw a guy walking down the street wearing rhinestone jeans, a purple sweater, and leather vest, and sporting a rat tail and a moustache. The strangest part is that he looked at me like I was the fashion disaster.

Fashion aside, I was surprised at how European the city seemed to be. I was expecting it to be a somewhat dreary place, but I was pleasantly surprised to see how little soviet architecture there was in the city center. Parts of it made me feel like I was walking around in Prague or something, with lots of pastel-colored buildings shining down onto the scowling Moscovites below. After checking into an excellent-yet-expensive hostel in the city center, I headed out for a wander around Red Square, located only a few blocks from my place. The first thing I saw as I finally entered the square was the quirky and colorful domes of St. Basil's Cathedral.

As I predicted, Moscow is absurdly expensive. I paid $27 per night for a bed in a dorm room, and meals are costing me an absolute fortune. For the same price of a multi-course meal back in Asia, all you can get in Moscow is a saltine cracker with ketchup on on it. Okay, that was a little bit overdramatic, but it's unfortunately not far from the truth. I've geared down to two meals per day, and I'm still running about 30 dollars over my maximum daily budget. Apparently Moscow passed Tokyo in 2006 to become the most expensive city on earth. After visiting, I definitely believe it.

My second day in town, I went out with Chelsea and Paul, two friends I met at the hostel to check out the sights at the Kremlin. Our first stop was to see the Lenin Mosoleum, where visitors can shuffle past his disturbingly well-preserved body for a few seconds as the stern guards ensure visitors keep a brisk pace. Oddly enough, his brain was removed by Stalin in order to get a detailed analysis of the genius communist brain. Our next stop was the Kremlin's Armory, which houses a glittery museum full of a few thousand pieces of royal regalia, ranging from thrones and crowns to old gilded bibles and Fabrege eggs. The descriptions were in Cyrillic only and I've never been terribly into shiny gold trinkets, but it was fairly interesting anyway. Next, we went into the Kremlin, which is home to controversial Russian President Vladamir Putin, a handful of churches, a nice park, and a few other government buildings. For dinner, we went to a place called Moo-Moo, which serves (relatively) cheap Russian food, and I was very surprised to find that I really like Borsht, the famous Russian radish-based soup that I assumed only poor people ate. After that, we went back to the hostel for a night of heavy drinking and chatting until dawn.

Here's a shot of a statue nearby the Kremlin's walls and opposite Red Square:

I spent another day in Moscow visiting the Museum of Private Collections, which is full of artwork donated to the museum and kept in groups according to the person who donated it. The museum was completely different than any I've ever visited, because it divided art based upon one donor's tastes over their lifetime rather than by time period, art movement, or theme. Each room represented a chunk of a different donor's collection, and provided a biography of each person, giving insight into the nature of each collector based on their tastes in art. How does a historian's taste differ from an artist's or an engineer's? What drives people to collect art in the first place? I never really thought about these things before, but the Private Collections Museum brought these questions to light in an unavoidable way. On a museum high from such a cool place, I headed across the street to check out the Pushkin Gallery, which houses an incredible collection of work by European and North American heavy-hitters from the 19th and 20th century. On display were a slew of awesome pieces by Degas, Manet, Rodin, Pissaro, Renoir, Leger, Monet, Talouse-Lautrec, Van Gogh, Rodin, and Picasso. I left both museums feeling inspired.

I left Moscow last night on a sketchy-but-cheap overnight train and I'm now in St. Petersburg, home of even more epic artwork. I'm off to Berlin in a few days to celebrate my 24th birthday on April 27th with my parents, who are flying out and joining me for a tour through Central and Western Europe including Prague, Krakow, Paris and London! I'm ridiculously excited.

Ryan

Good Morning, Vietnam

2007-03-29T12:46:00.000-06:00

After I arrived an Hanoi, I was thrilled that the awful 25-hour bus ride spent sitting in a plastic stool was finally behind me. Well, almost behind me.

On my first few days in town, my brain did its best to enjoy and absorb the chaotic madness of the place, but my body refused to forget the pain and agony of the bus ride. Despite my best efforts to avoid inevitable sickness, I eventually ended up in bed sniffling, sneezing, coughing, with an achy head and fever, just wishing I could rest. Someone should invent a medicine to relieve these symptoms, but no such medicine exists.

Luckily, my room was equipped with a TV, so I settled in for a few days of channel surfing. There was plenty to choose from: the wacky Vietnamese news, the English-language propaganda channel from China, Bollywood soap operas from India, and a hilarious Russian talent-search channel. But I finally settled on an old favorite: a little station called MTV. And for the first time in a while, I experienced a serious case of culture shock.

I never noticed before, but virtually every show on MTV is about flaunting money. And when you've spent the day wandering around Vietnam, the contrast between MTV and reality is amplified. On The Hills, ultra-rich blonde girls from LA wander around LA shopping and partying, ditching their university classes, half-assing their jobs, and complaining about how tough their lives are. On Pimp My Ride, a kid jumps up and down with glee when he sees the Xbox and plasma TV the crew just installed in the trunk of his crazy new car. On TRL, video after video shows rappers flashing their bling to the camera. We all know that America isn't really accurately portrayed on MTV, but I started to wonder — do other people? Do they think this is how we actually live? I've met countless people throughout this trip that have shared with me their dreams of moving to America. What Hollywood-skewed vision of America do they have in their minds? Do they know that real life in America is mostly just a lot of driving and working?

After my sickness subsided, I snapped out of my sickly haze and was out exploring the streets of Hanoi. From other travelers, I've heard nothing but horrible things about Vietnam and especially Hanoi. After going there, I can tell you with absolute certainty: those people are idiots. Hanoi is awesome.

First of all, the traffic in Hanoi is some of the craziest I've ever seen. The streets of the old quarter are choked with motorbikes each speeding along while masterfully avoiding collisions. At every street corner, I'd stop to admire the chaos of the intersections. Here's a video to give you a feel for an average intersection in the old quarter:

And if that wasn't enough, this one shows you the staggering number of motorbikes on a major street. Watch how quickly the traffic transitions after the stoplight changes.

Aside from traffic, Hanoi's massive old quarter is an endlessly interesting web of disjointed streets and alleys. Every available space is used for something. Sidewalks are packed with vegetable markets, the contents of shops pour out into the streets and cling to every wall, and tiny stools packed with young people gather around hundreds of steamy street food options. Roving pointy-hat-wearing vendors from outlying rural areas ply the streets hawking fresh tropical fruit. Photos of former communist leader Ho Chi Minh still gaze down from many walls around town. Like other parts of Southeast Asia, Hanoi has a ton of leftover colonial architecture from the city's days as a part of French Indochina. I found Hanoi's buildings even more interesting, because each one is about five stories tall, but only about ten feet wide, giving them really unusual vertical proportions. Each street in the old quarter is named after the specific good that was historically sold there (i.e. Spice Street), and although the shops on each street are a bit more diverse now, many of the old names still ring true and remain easily identifiable. Here's are some products for sale on Gravestone Street:

A few months ago, I read an article in the New York Times raving about Hanoi's booming contemporary arts scene, so I spent a couple of days checking out the huge number of galleries around town. A lot of the paintings successfully blended western influence with eastern style without being gimmicky or reactionary. The art was definitely some of the best I've seen in Asia, and left me feeling refreshed and inspired after the temple-temple-temple routine that's tough to avoid while traveling in Asia.

I also stopped at the Hoa Lo Prison — better known as the Hanoi Hilton — where American prisoners of war were held between 1964 to 1973 until their release as the US pulled out of the Vietnam War. Most of the exhibits at the prison, now converted into a museum, revolved around the disturbing torture of Vietnamese inmates by the French back in the Indochina days. In contrast, the two small rooms dedicated to the American imprisonment were very flowery and made the Vietnamese captors look like compassionate saints. Look at the Americans playing cards! Doesn't that look fun? Look at them eat big meals! Delicious! Look this picture of a soldier smiling! Isn't prison the greatest? It was pretty far removed from the stories of torture and humiliation we've all heard about from the American POWs, but it was definitely interesting get a feel for the Vietnamese perspective. There were a handful of photos of the American soldiers who were imprisoned at the Hanoi Hilton, including some guy named John McCain, who I heard is running for some political office back in America— city mayor or something, right?

Although the language barrier mostly prevented me from talking with local people about the American war with their country, I was surprised at how distant most people seemed from it. More than 60% of people in Vietnam were born after the war was over, and young people seemed more interested in shopping, eating and going to school than they did in reliving the war. Considering that Vietnam was constantly at war for the bulk of the 20th century, I don't blame them. At one of the many great propaganda poster stores around town, I couldn't help having pretend conversations inside my head with the employees, who were all about my age.

Isn't this weird?
What?
That if we had born 30 years ago, I would be your enemy.
Yes.
I would be hunting you. Trying to kill you.
And I would be hunting you.
Instead you're trying to sell me propaganda posters.
Anti-American posters, yes.
Is this better?
Of course. Nobody dies this way.
Fair enough.

On my last day in the Hanoi area, I took a day trip out to Halong Bay, famous for its curvy limestone peaks jutting out of the water. Most people spend a few days sleeping on a boat, but I opted for a day trip because I still had a wicked cold and I wasn't feeling up to it. A bunch of us piled into a boat for a short tour around the gorgeous misty scenery, visiting a few enormous caves and a floating fishing village along the way. March is apparently the worst time to visit the bay, so the conditions weren't really ideal, but I thought it was still pretty damn impressive.

After a week soaking up everything in and around Hanoi, I decided to continue my northward push on a night train up to Sapa, a small Vietnamese mountain town famous for ethnic minorty villages and spectacular rice terraces. Although it's probably one of the top-three tourist areas in the country, Sapa wasn't a letdown at all. I stayed in a family-run hotel which was recommended by my friend Leila way back in India, and it turned out to be one of my favorite hotels of the trip. The family kept me well-fed and full of tea, and treated me like I was a long-lost cousin. The view from my room was a kick-ass panorama of the valley below and misty mountains beyond. Check it out:

Yes, I actually made an appearance in one of my videos. No, I'm not intentionally growing a beard, I'm just lazy.

The main part of town is packed with ethnic minority people, many of whom try to sell blankets, instruments and jewelry to tourists. The minority girls I talked to were hilarious, and I spent a lot of time chatting with them about their lives. There was a noticable tension between the ethnic Vietnamese and the area's minority villagers, and the impression I got from the girls was that in the past the minority communities were treated realy poorly by the Vietnamese. Lately, the tides have turned a bit in favor of the minorities — since tourism started heating up in the area ten years ago, the minority communites have been legitimized both in community status and financial security. Conversation was easy, because most of the minority girls spoke unbelievable English considering they had never been formally trained; most of them just picked up English by talking to foreigners every day. Here are a few of the charming villagers I befriended during my stay in Sapa:

I took a few day-hikes out into the villages surrounding Sapa, which are situated among the incredible rice terraces carved into every surface of the hillsides. With the endlessly hilly terrain, local farmers have no choice but to labouriously cut into the mountains in an attempt to create flat land. The result is some of the most incredible scenery I've ever seen. I loved getting out of town on my own where I could look out onto the terraces and watch the villagers go about their daily lives down below.

After a few days, I left Sapa early in the morning and crossed the border into China before noon, making a quick stop in the border town of Hekou, which wasn't quite as sketchy as most border towns, but was still filled with the requisite oddballs and prostitutes.

Very immature side note: my favorite thing about Vietnam is that the currency is called "dong" which means you can say "dong" constantly in situations where it ordinarily wouldn't be appropriate. Speaking of which, will you hold onto my dong for me while I go to the bathroom? Anyway, two weeks worth of dong jokes really pleased the part of me that never wanted to leave seventh grade. That part of me is also excited about being able to start sentences with "Back in Nam..."

From the border, I caught the night bus north to Kunming, the capital of the Yunnan province, and was dumped off there early the next morning after a fairly comfortable ride on a Chinese sleeper bus, which have midget-sized bunkbeds instead of seats. My plan was to continue the relay race and catch the afternoon train all the way up to Shanghai, but the train station was sold out of hard sleeper tickets for another nine days, throwing a major monkey wrench in my plans. I settled on the only thing they had left — an expensive ($100!) ticket aboard the 1st class soft sleeper train leaving two days later.

Without a China guidebook, I started to wander around Kunming looking for hotels and stumbled upon the crazy-popular Camelia Hotel, a backpacker favorite for its excellent dorm beds for only $3.50 per night. Stuck in town for a few days, I decided to settle in and check out the city. I had actually been to Kunming and other parts of Yunnan before, on my trip to China to visit my brother Bill after he moved here five years ago. Although most people outside China have never heard of it, Kunming is home to 3.8 million people — about the same amount that live in Los Angeles. It is one of the nicest and most livable cities in China, and has a lot of really nice pedestrian-oriented spaces, a few great temples, and lots of green parks.

My favorite free activity in Kunming was to hang out in the city's great public park, where people of all ages come to have fun. There were old people performing traditional opera to big crowds, tons of vendors selling great street food, a man expertly hitting notes as he played a piece of grass with an accompanying band. My favorite was the group of middle-aged couples learning the cha-cha, which was pretty hilarious — Won! Two! Sree! Cha-cha-cha! Here's a shot of a big group of people preparing for their reenactment of the Michael Jackson Thriller music video. Oh man, I wish.

Like in most places, I spent most of my time in Kunming aimlessly wandering. I must have wandered right past the ticket booth at the zoo, because suddenly I found myself surrounded by bears and lions. I quickly realized this wasn't a regular zoo, but rather, an awesome Chinese zoo. You see, there are apparently no rules at Chinese zoos, and you can do pretty much whatever you want to the animals, so there is a lot of interaction. You want to yell at the bears and try to get them to do tricks? Cool! You want to throw an ice cream cone in the cage and watch the lion tear it apart? No worries! It was pretty awesome, and the animals were going absolutely bananas compared the animals at the boring ethical zoo back home. There was also a dangerous-looking amusement park next door, which definitely added to the delightful zoo's allure.

Here are some scenes from around Kunming — the river which bisects downtown, a bridge at an amazing temple I visited, and some kids on the ride at the zoomusement park.

After a few days, it was time to use that first-class train ticket, and finally get myself to Shanghai. Despite my awesome compartment on the train, the 43-hour trip was pretty agonizing. The only other person who spoke English on the train was an 81-year old Chinese man who recently went deaf, which obviously made the conversation a bit one-sided. In typical Chinese fashion, people had their eyes locked to me for the entire 43 hours, which is not something I will ever get accustomed to. I mostly just read, listened to music and stared out the window as the scenery changed from the blue sky and minority villages of Yunnan to the gray industrial wasteland that dominates the center of the country. Here's a picture of me on the train. Look at that glorious expanse of space! First class indeed.

My brother Bill met me at the Shanghai train station, and we jumped onto the subway and sped off to his apartment, which is located next to a cool mixed-use development with shops, bars, and restaurants aplenty. When I visited Bill and my sister-in-law Vivien at the beginning of my trip, they lived out in the boonies an hour outside the city center, and now they live right where all the action is. I've spent most of my time here so far going out to dinner with their friends, sleeping as they get ready to go to work, checking out the city on my own, chipping away at their massive DVD collection, and enjoying Nanjing Road, the city's major pedestrian street:

I also went to the brand new Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art, which is running an excellent exhibition of interactive art pieces. Most of the work was really creative. I especially liked the portraits of people you could affect by calling a number on your cellphone. I also loved the one below, where you could record a three second clip of yourself, which would then be added to the end of a fast-motion series of every other clip recorded at the museum. Here's a video so you can get an idea:

At the top of my to-do list in Shanghai was to get a Russian visa, so I headed down early in the morning a few days ago to go get one. Once I found my place in line outside the Russian Consulate, I noticed that the building also serves as a school for all the consulate employees' children. It's a bizarre feeling to wait two hours outside what seems like some mysterious Russian fortress only to watch some eight-year-old with a Pokemon backpack give the guards a casual nod and waltz in like he owns the place.

A Russian visa is notoriously difficult to obtain and I spent a lot of time online researching exactly what documents I needed to bring with me. For starters, the consulate is only open to visa applicants for nine hours per week, so you have to time it just right. Also, Russia requires you to be invited into the country by someone, which poses a challenge for independent travellers. Naturally, hundreds of websites have popped up where you can pay $35 to get invited, and they'll instantly send you an official invitation via email. Once inside the consulate, I proudly handed over my mammoth stack of documents, confident that I had everything perfectly in order. I had figured out the system.

Okay Mr. Nee, everything looks fine. That'll be 150 dollars.
Wh... uhh... what? Are you sure?
Yes, I'm sure.
I thought it was only 50 dollars?
That is the fee for everyone else. For US citizens it is 150 dollars.
Oh my god. Wha... oh... okay... uhh...
Do you want to get the visa?
Umm... I don't... I don't know....
Sir, you must either pay for the visa, or step out of line.

I stepped out of line. I felt like someone had slapped me in the face with a bag full of bricks. For the last few weeks, I've been trying to come to grips with the fact that Russia is the most expensive country on earth. Hotels there are expensive, getting into the country is expensive, and food is expensive. Who would have thought that Siberia would be more expensive than Tokyo or London? What happened to days of bread lines and the old babushka ladies with the headscarf and unsightly mole? To give you some perspective, I've been able to live for about 20 dollars per day throughout most of Asia, and it's looking like Russia will cost more like 75 dollars per day — substantially over my maximum daily budget. The two weeks that I was planning to spend in Russia will likely cost me more than the two months I spent in Myanmar and Nepal. Is it really worth it? Should I figure out another plan?

After some discussion with Bill and Vivien and some research online about the cost to just fly over Russia, I eventually decided to just not worry about the money and just go ahead with my original plans. On my second visit to the consulate, it turned out that the visa actually only cost $100, so that made me feel a little better. So I'm going to Russia after all — but first, some more time in Shanghai and then on to Beijing.

Well, that should give you enough to read until I return in August. As you can probably imagine, updating the blog is a serious undertaking, so I really appreciate so many people reading it. Thank you!

Ryan!

Take a bite out of Laos

2007-03-06T05:11:00.001-07:00

A few days after Gerni left to go back home, I showed up at the Bangkok train station with the last of my Baht in my wallet, ready to splurge on a 1st-class sleeper car for the overnight train to Vientiene. But they were all booked. Okay, no problem — I'll just settle for a nice seat in second class. But those were all booked too. I snatched up the last seat in third class, and climbed aboard the 15-hour train to find my seat in what looked like a really awful subway car designed for midgets, scattered with people sleeping in every available space. After a rough night spent trying to prevent a crazy old man from sleeping and drooling on my shoulder, I made it to the Thai-Lao border where I shelled out 35 bucks for a visa to Laos, and arrived in Vientiene a few minutes later.

Throughout its history, the country of Laos has been the little white ball in a global game of ping-pong, getting passed around and taken over numerous times. In the last 75 years, it has been part of the Kingdom of Siam, integrated into French Indochina, occupied by the Japanese, established an independent kingdom, and again declared a French satellite state, seen military coups and counter-coups, had elections rigged by the CIA, declared itself an independent country again, became under-the-influence of Vietnamese communism, was heavily bombed by the United States, had hundreds of thousands of people sent to "re-education" camps, and became an independent democratic country. The history of Laos is staggeringly complicated, and I struggled to grasp exactly how its confusing history has affected the mentality of and culture of the country.

As I arrived in the capital city Vientiene, some of the effects of the country's unique history were easy to see. Gorgeous French colonial mansions shared the streets with blocky structures of communist concrete. Ancient curved-roof Laotian temples gazed down upon vendors selling baguettes and paté. Lao women in long patterned skirts sat at European-style sidewalk cafés along extra-wide communist-era boulevards. Luxurious French restaurants stand side-by-side with scrappy but delicious Lao hole-in-the-wall joints. As I explored the relaxed atmosphere of Vientiene, I was fascinated the unique cultural mix, which is enhanced by the employees of all of the foreign embassies and consulates spread around the small town. Here's a shot of one of many unlikely cultural matchups, the Lao take on the Arc de Triomphe:

With limited time to spend in Laos, I left the capital for a long backbreaking night on a local bus headed north to Luang Prabang. I arrived at 4:00 am, which is probably the worst time to get to a city. To make matters worse, I was befriended by a spunky early-morning jogger who wanted to practice his broken English (and annoy the living crap out of me in the process) as I walked in the dark through Luang Prabang, desperately looking for a room. The city's hotels were stuffed to the brim, but a long three hours of searching finally brought me to an affordable and vacant room — my new friend still jogging in place alongside me as I checked in.

After a much-needed nap, I was up and out checking out the beautiful colonial architecture of Luang Prabang, the entirety of which is protected as a Unesco World Heritage Site. Built largely under French influence and still well-preserved, Luang Prabang has a really different character from the rest of Laos, and the rest of Southeast Asia as a whole. The place was mobbed with tourists, many of whom were expats living in Vietnam on vacation in Laos during Tet, the Vietnamese New Year. Despite all the tourism, I loved exploring back alleys, the numerous historic temples, and the fascinating European-Asian feel of the town.

Like the rest of Laos, the French influence has left another big stamp on Luang Prabang: the people can cook like champs. I went on a serious culinary tour while in Luang Prabang, from relaxing with pastries and a newspaper in the comfortable European-style cafes, to dabbling in the local cuisine. Food in Laos is generally really light and fresh, not drenched in oil like a lot of the food in Asia. At several restaurants, I had làap, a delicious minced meat dish with greens and a handful of fresh basil leaves added to the mix. I also enjoyed tôm yám, a fish and lemongrass soup. Beerlao, the national beer, is one of the best beers in Asia, and for a change of pace, I sometimes stopped off at one of the town's many reasonably-priced wine bars. Desserts on offer were equally delicious — my favorites were pumpkin-coconut creme brulée, and homemade tapioca pudding topped with sliced bananas.

I also tried the Luang Prabang town specialty Jaew Bong, a paste made from ground chili and buffalo skin, which was prefaced on the menu with a warning about how absurdly spicy it is. Curious, I took the plunge and after a minute of chewing, the spice seemed pretty run-of-the-mill. But then, time suddenly came to a screeching halt. Waiters carried trays mid-stride. People around me sat with bites on forks held frozen near their mouths. Then someone entered the restaurant, and stuffed an entire orchard full of habañero peppers into my mouth and forced me to chew. A play button was pressed, and time started up again.

Holy... sh...
Something's... not... right...
With... oh.. no...
It's... so... spicy...
Oh.. no... oh.... man...
I can't... oh... it's... holy... god...

I glanced over at the waiter who smiled and waved as tears streamed from my eyes, and snot poured from my nose. I tried to douse my mouth with water. Then wine. Then rice. Then water. Then wine. Then rice. And it just kept burning. This Jaew Bong stuff made Thai, Indian, and Mexican food seem as tame as a jar of baby food. I seriously thought I was going to have to go to the hospital.

My favorite restaurant was a place called Tamarind, run by a Lao-Australian couple, which gives visitors an opportunity to both eat Lao cuisine and learn about it in the process. I ate there for lunch one day where I tried a sampler platter of traditional Lao food including dried buffalo meat, pickled vegetables and bamboo, spicy Luang Prabang sausage, and flavored pastes wrapped in lettuce. I returned for a Friday night dinner party where twelve of us sat at a big table where we spent a few hours chatting, drinking delicious Beerlao, and enjoying a three-course Laotian meal called Pun Pa as the owners explained the significance, history, and preparation of each dish. The food and company were wonderful, and the whole meal only set me back seven bucks. Not too shabby.

In between delicious meals, I did my best to get out of town once in a while. I randomly ran into my British friend Liz, who I traveled with for a few days way back in India. Along with her current traveling companions, we hopped in a tuk tuk and sped off through the thatched huts and rice fields of the countryside to visit a nearby waterfall which was truly spectacular. It had three big falls and a few hundred smaller ones, with shimmering turquoise-green pools laying between them like terraces. The best part was swimming around and jumping off of some of the smaller falls.

Later, I paid a visit to the Luang Prabang Provincial Museum, which had a really nice exhibition of contemporary art, which had a handful of excellent pieces by Luang Prabang artists about dealing with the rapid modernization of Laos. The main part of the museum was a recreation of the former king's palace, showing off his impressive collection of artwork. The highlight was definitely the Secretariat Room, which proudly displayed gifts he received from world leaders during the middle of the 20th century: from Japan, the key to the city of Tokyo and minimalist pots; from China, elaborate woven-silk scroll landscapes; from Russia, awkward soviet trinkets and a carved wooden box; from India, intricately carved ivory boxes; from Burma, patterned silver tea sets; from Australia, a wooden boomerang(!); and from the United States, a scale model of an NASA spacecraft, and a flag of Laos brought to the moon on the Apollo 11 mission. It made me wonder where all the awesome gifts the US Presidents have received over the years are stored — does anybody know?

The rest of my time in Luang Prabang was spent exploring the twenty-some temples around town, watching the neighborhood kids splash around in the river, helping a monk practice his English over the course of a few afternoon sessions, catching stunning sunsets over the Mekong, watching movies and reading books, and hanging out with people I met around town. I spent a few nights with Liz, my friend from my travels in India, and had some great beer-and-Uno sessions with Veronica and Erika, two delightful girls from San Francisco. One night, I rounded up 28 other people and we all squeezed into a truck for a night out at a sketchy Chinese bowling alley, the only place in town open later than midnight.

After a week of hanging out, I decided I better get moving, so I took the bus back to Vientiene in order to get a visa for Vietnam. I ended up in the bottom compartment of a double decker bus with a bunch of Lao guys who spent the eight hour bus ride getting hammered on lao lao (rice whiskey). Something about the curvy road made everyone on the bus sick, and about half the people threw up along the way. Barf bag in hand, it took a serious mental effort not to lose my lunch, and I was thrilled when the Pukemobile finally arrived back in Vientiene.

The following morning, I went to the Vietnam Embassy where I finally got my Vietnamese visa, which I wasn't able to get earlier because the embassy was frustratingly closed the whole week of Tet. With visa in hand, I decided to make a quick stop in nearby town of Vang Vieng before leaving the country. Considered to be the party capital of Laos—which isn't saying much—I wasn't sure if I really wanted to visit Vang Vieng. I had heard about the magic mushroom milkshakes and ubiquitous TV bars where dazed travelers spend hours watching episodes of Friends, and it didn't sound too appealing. I decided to go anyway, and was stoked to find two cool people on the bus—Brett, a trekking instructor and avid rock climber from Vail, and Becca, an stage actress from England—who were planning to stay a few miles outside of town at Vang Vieng Organic Farm.

The three of us arrived at the farm and settled in, and it was clear that the place was a world away from the party scene over in Vang Vieng. The farm mostly grows mulberry trees, which are used for tea, and used to feed silk worms and goats which in turn provide clothing and other food. Travelers are encouraged to volunteer at the farm, which is also doing amazing things for the surrounding village by building a community center and library, and by funding a school bus for kids who live outside the village. My fellow farmhands were all really cool people who I got along with really well, and I ended up sticking around the farm for a week. The atmosphere around the farm made it easy to stay too — the shining green mulberry fields and limestone mountains surrounding the farm were really beautiful, and families from the nearby village would come to the river next to the farm to play and bathe each night.

On a few nights, I went along with a bunch of the farm gang to help out at the nearby village school, which was started up by a Korean volunteer organization in conjunction with the organic farm. Since most of the village kids work on their parents farms during the day, the classes take place at night, and were divided up into two sections by age. I struggled helping the younger kids (age 4-12) learn the alphabet from awkward Korean-English workbooks, but once the older kids (age 13-20) class came around, I got into the groove of things. Led by my friend Brett who volunteered to teach the classes for a few weeks, the older kids classes were really great. Many of them were shockingly passionate about learning English, and seemed truly appreciative as we helped them understand new words and phrases. The school is completely voluntary, and 50 of them pour in every night with a hunger to learn from the foreign volunteers who show up every night to teach.

I also volunteered to make a good quality map of the farm, outlining not just the locations, but also the purposes of each building and highlighting volunteer opportunities at each stop along a self-guided tour. With the help of Becca and Brett, we got as much information we could about each part of the farm, and as a result, became much more connected with the overall vision of the farm. The map took forever, but it was really satisfying to be designing something again, which I haven't really done since I left my job eight months ago.

Although I didn't really get into the party scene too much, I did take part in Vang Vieng's biggest attraction: tubing down the river. Becca and I rented tubes one day and set off from the farm down the river. Along the banks of the two hour trip down to Vang Vieng are about twenty bars, each set up with zip lines and rope swings into the river. Although I was worried it was going to be gimmicky and stupid, I absolutely loved the tubing trip. There are few better ways to spend a day than to lazily drift down a river under the warm sun with a Beerlao in hand, looking up at the unbelievable limestone peaks soaring overhead, taking breaks to swing around on high-flying rope swings.

I had planned to stay two or three days in Vang Vieng, but I ended up there for an entire week thanks to the awesome group of friends I made at the farm. Each night we would gather for organic vegetable curry or spring rolls, chat and play drinking games, and each morning we would feed the farm's crazy-cute baby goats and get mulberry pancakes and mulberry milkshakes for breakfast. It was an awesome and unforgettable week, and I would have loved to stay longer, but with less than two months left to get to Berlin to meet my parents, I knew I had better get going.

Sadly, I only had time to see a few places in Laos and didn't really get a chance to dig in and get a good feel for the country as a whole. One area I'm sad I missed is the northeast part of the country, which is one of the most heavily bombed regions on earth, due to United States B-52s dropping thousands of pounds of explosives on the area during the Vietnam War on bombing runs to and from Thailand. The area is still plagued with landmines and unexploded bombs, many of which are unbelievably used to build houses; other travelers I met who went to the area reported seeing houses in villages built on stilts made of unexploded bombs. My knowledge of the Vietnam War is limited, and I would have liked to go there in order to learn more about the role of Laos in the war. It is definitely strange to travel to countries where thousands of people have been killed by your own countrymen, and the effects of the war are still visible all around. It is also humbling to have the local people accept me with open arms, despite a far-less-than-perfect track record with Americans.

Speaking of which, after a quick stop back in Vientiene, I climbed aboard a bus headed somewhere I never pictured I'd visit: Vietnam.

I got to the bus station and boarded the bus to Hanoi early in order to ensure I got a seat on the first-come first-serve bus. After more than an hour of staking my claim to a seat, I was forced out by the asshole driver, who gave my spot to his friends who then refused to give my seat back, not making eye contact and pretending they couldn't hear me yelling at them. As a result, I had no choice but to sit on a tiny plastic stool in the aisle for the 25-hour trip to Hanoi. It was probably the most uncomfortable 25 hours of my life, but it was definitely improved by the really nice Canadian people I met on the bus who offered me time on their seats to give me a break from sitting on the painful stool. At 2:30 am, the Bus From Hell got to the Laos-Vietnam border where we had to wait four hours for the border to open. Most people tried to sleep in the bus, but as I had no seat, I went outside and climbed atop the bus with the other people who didn't get seats and slept up there for a few hours. After crossing the border and more than an entire day spent sitting in the filthy and narrow aisle of an awful bus, I finally made it to Hanoi last night.

I'm here in Hanoi now, which has been really amazing so far. The city packed with full-on Asian experiences, but I'll leave Vietnam for the next post. As always, thank you so much for reading. Wish me luck on my next long journeys — I don't know if my body can handle another one like I had yesterday!

--Ryan

Photos updated: I've got most of them up, but I haven't sorted them yet. I'll get on that one of these days and erase this message once I do.

Burmese Days

2007-02-14T23:53:00.001-07:00

Although most of us wouldn't admit it, not a lot of people know what Myanmar is. Is it a soup? Some rare type of flower? A new player for the local hockey team? Calling it "Burma" instead, eyes light up.

The Union of Myanmar—known as Burma up until 1989—is the relatively new name for a Texas-sized country strictly controlled by an oppressive military regime. Many governments and news agencies have rejected the new name and government, still referring to the country as Burma, like in the recent State of the Union Speech, where the country got a brief mention as President Bush called for freedom in Burma. George Orwell's early book Burmese Days, written after he was stationed in the country as a British officer, is considered by some Orwell fans as the first part in a trilogy he wrote about Burma. The other two are his most famous books, Animal Farm and 1984.

Going to Myanmar is a difficult ethical question, and was not an easy choice for us to make. Many international activist groups believe that by visiting Burma, travelers are effectively voicing support for the country's horrible regime. Much of the tourist (and other) infrastructure throughout the country has been built by forced labor, and pumping in more money to the government could be directly going toward furthering human slavery. Tony Blair has asked British citizens to boycott tourism to the country, as has Nobel Peace Prize-winning Aung San Suu Kyi, the democratically elected (and subsequently jailed) leader of Burma. On the other hand, condemning the people of Myanmar to cultural isolation from the rest of the world doesn't seem like an appropriate solution either. The Burmese people are without a voice on the international stage, and one of the only connections they have with the outside world is through contact with international travelers. The issue is way too complicated to discuss at length here, so visit Voices for Burma for an excellent rundown of the pros and cons of visiting Burma. The site ultimately recommends what they call "small-scale, ethical tourism," which essentially boils down to traveling independently and reducing government spending as much as possible, which is what we decided to do.

Our flight from Bangkok to Yangon left early in the morning, so Gerni and I caught the last shuttle of the evening and set up camp in the Bangkok airport for the night to save a few bucks on a hotel room. Lasting just over an hour, our flight to Yangon—the capital city formerly known as Rangoon—was short, and before we knew it, we were through customs and whisked off to our cave-like hotel room. The few days prior had been an exhausting mess of running errands, hospital visits, and tying up loose ends, so Gerni and I took it easy for a day of sleep and casual wandering. But first, we had to get some money.

There are no ATMs in Myanmar and credit cards or travelers checks are all but useless, so the only way to get money in Myanmar is to bring all your money into the country in US Dollars. Changing money through government sources gives horrendous exchange rates, so everyone changes their money through the black market, which most guesthouses will do without hassle. The largest bill in Myanmar—1000 Kyat—is worth about 80 cents, so exchanging fifty bucks leaves you with massive stacks of cash.

Downtown Yangon reminded me a bit of the parts I liked about India — chaotic, bustling, and fun. Part of me was expecting to be transported into the pages of 1984, with brainwashed drones quietly moving about their daily lives. Instead, we found people out chatting at Myanmar's ubiquitous tea shops, hundreds of monks running daily errands, and people surprisingly trying to discuss the grim political situation with us, mostly in nervously hushed tones. Yangon's streets are strewn with a moving mass of people, trishaws, and impressively crowded pickups with people pouring out from all sides. Storefronts along the street were an equally interesting visual feast.

Before we left the city, we spent a day at Yangon's biggest attraction, and the country's most loved cultural site: Shwedagon Paya. Like the Golden Temple back in India, I immediately was captivated by the amazing place. Much more than just a single temple, Shwedagon is like Buddhist Disneyland, with about a hundred temples all competing for space around a beautiful circular courtyard. Gerni and I made the barefoot walk around the circuit several times, soaking in the atmosphere as the sun went down and the lights turned on. For good luck, we joined the locals and each added 24 cups of water (the number of our next age) over the shrine for the day of the week we were born. Born on a Wednesday, I had a trouble locating mine because in Myanmar there are officially eight days a week — strangely enough, Wednesday morning and Wednesday evening are considered to be two different days. Here's a photo of the paya followed by a video of the endlessly atmospheric courtyard:

The next morning, we boarded the first of many rickety buses we would ride in Myanmar, this time headed to Kyaiktiyo, home of the Golden Rock — one of the most important Buddhist pilgrimage sites in the country. We settled in at our cheap hotel, which set us back three dollars each for a clean room with attached bathroom and shower including breakfast, the standard (and absurdly cheap) cost for a room in Myanmar. From our place in the town of Kinpun, the only way to get to the Golden Rock, apart from braving the six-hour hike up the mountain, was to jump on the back of a packed local pilgrimage truck. We squeezed into the truck and sped along the bumpy dirt roads, causing everyone inside to bounce around like pilgrim popcorn. It made for a really fun trip though:

-- video coming soon --

After safely dismounting the truck, we made the final hour-long climb by foot along with everyone else. Well, mostly everyone else: if you get a thrill watching people suffer, you can rent four dudes to carry you to the top in a sedan chair. Despite the Golden Rock's importance to Myanmar's many Buddhists, I wasn't really pumped up to see it for some reason. How cool could a rock possibly be, right? As it turns out, really cool. Gerni and I did the pilgrim thing by adding gold leaf to the rock, and hanging bronze bells along the railing by the rock which joined the others to pleasantly clang in the wind. We spent most of the day there in the relaxed atmosphere, which made for great people-watching as the rock lit up under the light of the setting sun.

The next day, we boarded a bus for a quick day trip to Bago, a nearby town which seems to get a strange thrill out of trying to build the biggest possible Buddha statues. Unfortunately, most of the sights in Bago are government run, and charge a hefty 10 dollar entrance fee. Luckily, we were approached by some motorbike drivers who offered to take us to all of the town's major sights without paying the government fee. We climbed aboard the motorbikes and sped from sight to sight, avoiding government spending by going into back-door entrances or lingering just outside of ticketable areas. At one of the Bago's many enormous reclining Buddha statues, our guides brought us all the way to the ticket booth, where we were able to see the entire thing for a few minutes before getting asked to leave by the disgruntled ticket saleswoman. We saw several more reclining buddhas, Bago's impressive city paya, and even made a strange stop for a photo-op with a monstrous boa constrictor. Gerni declined to partake in the snake holding, but I held it around my neck like it was a... uhh.. boa. Later, we stopped in a large monastery where we arrived in perfect time to volunteer to dish up rice into the monk's plates before their 11 o'clock lunch:

After our short tour of Bago, we got on a seriously long night bus to the mountain town of Kalaw. The most frustrating part about travel in Myanmar is how absurdly long it takes to get anywhere. The distance from Bago to Kalaw is about the same as Denver to Cheyenne, which takes just shy of two hours on the interstate. In Myanmar, the same distance takes 15 hours. 15 hours!!! The country's national highways are mostly cruddy, one-lane dirt roads, which are full of broken-down buses, horse carts, people on bicycles, kids playing soccer, and slow smokey tractors carrying what seems like hundreds of people. The only other westerner on the bus was Michael, a really great Swedish guy on holiday from Sony Ericsson, who we befriended and ended up traveling with for the next three weeks.

At around 4 am, the bus stopped in Kalaw and we jumped out into the freezing air. My body was in shock because it was so cold — I've completely avoided winter since I left Colorado, and this was my first taste of it in almost a year. We found a hotel with big blankets and tried to stayed warm until the morning. Kalaw is a really pretty small town, but our real reason for stopping here was to go trekking. We researched a few options, and decided upon a three day trek to Inle Lake, where we were heading anyway. After a night eating delicious Nepalese and Tibetan food at one of Kalaw's restaurants, we were ready to start trekking in the morning.

We set off early with our fearless guide Jimmy, who led us for an amazingly cheap rate of $10 per day each including meals and lodging. We wandered through the tea plantations of Kalaw's countryside, had some nice pumpkin curry for lunch, and passed through several villages populated by curious ethnic minority people who were quick to offer us tea. Jimmy spoke the basics of several of the area's minority languages, so we were able to communicate with the people a little bit and find out more about their lives. We ended the night in Ywar Bu village, where we stopped for the night for dinner and sleep in a villager's home. The freezing cold, minimal blankets, and hard wooden floor made for a truly rough night's sleep — even on sleeping pills, I barely got a wink.

Our second day of trekking was spent traversing across gently rolling hills, covered in patchwork farms growing mostly chili, ginger, and tea. We passed through several villages, and stopped in for a quick stop at a rundown one-room schoolhouse, where the scruffy village kids went completely bananas for our entire half-hour visit. I made a failed effort to try to help the kids learn a few words in English — they liked screaming and jumping much better. Gerni made the mistake of trying to pass out candy to a few of the school kids, which caused their fellow classmates to attack him like a pack of cute little wolves:

We arrived in Hti Tain village at the day's end, where Jimmy led the three of us to our humble beds inside the town monastery. After two tough days of hiking and freezing our asses off in the villager's home the night before, we were delighted to find a tiny supplies shop in a corner of the town school teacher's house, stocked with a few snack options and bottled water. She also had beer! And cigars! I suppose it goes without saying what happened next:

We awoke the next morning early. Too early. At about 5 am, the devoted monks started chanting and didn't stop until sleep was only a distant memory. Despite the short night, we all loved listening to the chanting from the warmth of our thick blankets. We caught breakfast and headed back out onto the trail, weaving along past dusty farm roads past ox-driven carts, more excited kids, and farmers peppered throughout the rolling fields. We ended the trek in Indein village at the southern tip of Inle Lake, where we caught a longboat to the opposite side of the enormous lake where Michael, Gerni and I checked into a cheap hotel and parted ways with our guide Jimmy and our cook Mr. Beard.

Inle Lake is probably the most popular area for tourists in Myanmar, and for good reason. The sprawling lake and surrounding marshes are home to thousands of handmade thatched-roof huts built on stilts, which appear to float on the surface of the lake itself. I was quite surprised when we got to Inle how many luxury hotels have sprouted up along the lake's shores, mostly catering to 60-something French and Japanese couples on expensive (and often government-run) package tours. As we started to explore the lake, I was fascinated by the way the fishermen row their boats with one leg when they get tired:

We spent a day riding dangerously rickety bikes around the gorgeous shores of Inle, exploring the fascinating floating villages along the way. We also spent a day speeding around on a longboat, visiting a few tiny tourist-oriented factories along the way where we got to watch people weave silk, make paper, and craft raw silver into jewelry. We paid a quick visit to a quirky monastery where the bored monks taught cats to jump through hoops, which was as strange as it sounds. Another stop took us to a store run by a family of long-neck villagers, the vast majority whom live in other parts of Myanmar and Thailand restricted to tourists. It was interesting to see them in person, but I'm glad most of the long-neck villagers live in restricted areas to shelter the people from the obvious tourist draw of their unique and painful-looking tradition.

We left Inle Lake headed toward Mandalay on another typically long and painful overnight bus, this time with enormous bags of rice filling our legroom space. We arrived in Mandalay before dawn and scouted out the city's grim accommodation scene. The best room we could find looked like Gallagher had just checked out—stray hairs everywhere and a smashed watermelon on the floor—so the three of us made the quick decision to go somewhere else. Like, to a different city. We hopped aboard a shared pickup headed for Pyin U Lwin, about a two hour drive to the north. And just when I thought the pickup was full, it got fuller. And fuller. And fuller. And fuller. And fuller. In the end, there were 29 people inside a tiny Toyota pickup, plus around 10 more people up on the roof above the seating area. It was insane. I've been inside some impressively-packed vehicles in Asia, but this was a new extreme.

Pyin U Lwin was a really cool little town and the streets were scattered with some gorgeous architectural leftovers of the town's days as a British retreat from the sweltering heat of Mandalay. We spent two days soaking in the atmosphere, checking out the old 20s-era mansion-like hotels, and shopping for bargains in the city's phenomenal antique stores. The highlight was definitely our awesome ride to dinner one of the city's ubiquitous horse-drawn stage coaches, which make the town look like the movie set of an old Western.

Our next stop was the nearby town of Hsipaw a few hours further north. We stayed at Mr. Charles Guesthouse, which is the lively epicenter of the Hsipaw backpacker scene. Like Tibet earlier on the trip, not too many people visit Myanmar, so you end up seeing a lot of the same 20 people from place to place, which in Myanmar is a really good thing. The country's current off-the-beaten-path status has made it a haven for older, more experienced, and generally more intelligent travelers, rather than the party-till-you-puke crowd spread throughout Thailand.

Hsipaw was a pretty interesting town with lots of typically Burmese tea shops, dusty streets, and colorful outdoor markets. Our main reason for going there was to use it as a jumping-off point in our attempt to get to the very rarely-visited town of Namshan, a six hour drive north to do more trekking. We had dinner one night with a guy who had just completed the trek from Namshan back to Hsipaw, and he passed along the only "map" of the area that is available — a piece of paper with four towns written on it in Burmese script, plus a longer note in Burmese that says "Please help these foreigners find their way to Hsipaw."

Excited to have something to guide us for the trip back to Hsipaw, our next concern was to figure out how to get to Namshan. We asked around town, and nobody seemed to have any reliable information about how to get up there. Taxi drivers all said the road was too bad to drive on, and nobody was sure when the next cargo run was leaving town. After two frustrating days in Hsipaw struggling to figure out how to get up to Namshan, it became clear that the only sure-fire way to get there is to hitchhike. And hitchhike we did.

Gerni and I set out on foot, still accompanied by our Swedish friend Michael, and now with two new companions: Vincent and Isabelle, a delightful couple from France who we met a week earlier. The five of us walked for an hour along the road to Namshan and our prospects looked grim — not a single vehicle had passed us. Suddenly, a big cargo truck plowed by, so we flagged it down. The Chinese driver was ridiculously friendly, spoke a few words of English, and seemed delighted that we wanted to ride in the back of his truck. And better yet, he was going all the way to Namshan. We threw our backpacks in, and jumped aboard. We bumped along for two hours up curves and switchbacks along the worst road in history before the driver stopped to fill up the truck with more cargo. We held on tight as we laid down for the last four hours, crammed in the narrow space between enormous bags of tea and the ceiling of the truck, while we watched the misty mountain scenery zoom past.

At dusk, we finally arrived in Namshan, a small village in the foothills of the Himalayas. The tiny town surprisingly had a modest family-owned guesthouse, which had a friendly staff and a handful of blanketed beds on the floor for visitors. We explored town for a little while, looking out of place like a small white-skinned street gang, and got some very confused looks by the locals. We befriended the town drunk, then headed back to the guesthouse to warm our hands by the fire and settle in for a nice dinner before bed.

We hit the trail the following morning, our "map" in hand, headed for the first village on the list. When we crossed paths with people along the way, we pointed at the name in Burmese and they pointed the direction we should walk, guiding us from place to place. It was clear immediately that this trek was really special — the area has only been open to foreigners for six months, so we were likely some of the first foreigners the people had ever seen. As we passed by the teakwood village huts, people seemed fascinated by our presence, and loved looking at their photos magically appear on the screens of our digital cameras. One of my favorite moments was watching this elderly woman crack up when she saw her photo on Michael's camera:

In some villages, we were watched with curious stares out of windows or greeted with hearty waves, but one village took the cake the warmest welcome of the trek. As we arrived, word spread like wildfire that foreigners were in town, and we attracted an enormous crowd at a house where we were invited in for tea. About a hundred people of all ages—the majority of the village—watched us as we smoked cigars with the men and drank tea with the ladies as open fires burned in the house to keep everyone warm. One or two of the villagers spoke basic English, so we were able to communicate with the people about our families, our countries, and more. It's hard to do the experience justice in words, but was one of the truly special moments of the trip, and I'll remember it for the rest of my life.

The end of the first day, we ended up in Quan-Hai village, where the five of us showed up at the town monastery hoping they would allow us to stay there. The head monk was happy to have us, and helped us gather blankets and offered us a patch of space on the floor where we could sleep. We found a humble restaurant using our best spoon-in-mouth hand gestures, and attracted another big audience who curiously watched us play some post-dinner gin rummy.

The following day was a literally a long uphill climb, passing through more gorgeous villages filled with more cute kids. We ended the tough day early in Ko Ha, where we again tried our luck at the village monastery. After some awkward moments with the language barrier, they finally understood that we needed a place to stay, and agreed to let us camp out on the floor. Although it was in the middle of nowhere, the village somehow had electricity and we sat horrified as the young monks and their friends watched the finest of American television: a WWF wrestling match. We ate Chinese-style steamed buns at nearby family's home, who took us in as if we were long-lost relatives. Here's a shot of the family, the monastery, and some of the monks:

We were pretty exhausted by our third day of trekking, put we kept pressing on toward Hsipaw. We cheated a bit and caught a short ride on the back of a passing truck, and then cheated again doing the last few miles bouncing along as we hung on for dear life onto the sides of a speeding tractor. We arrived back at Mr. Charles, where Vincent, Isabelle, Michael, Gerni and I had a nice celebratory dinner at the nearby restaurant called Mr. Food (continuing the trend, the bookstore in Hsipaw is named Mr. Book).

The following morning, we were on the bus back to Mandalay for a little while, where we did our best to get online to bump our flight back a few days in order to give us more time in Myanmar. Internet access in Myanmar is brutally slow, expensive, and in the rare moment where you do get online, almost everything you want to visit is banned — Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo, Wikipedia, Blogger and the BBC included. We fought with the internet for a few hours before giving up, which meant that we'd have to cut our time in Mandalay short and get on the bus to Bagan, Myanmar's archeological wonderland, eight hours away.

But first, we stopped to see Myanmar's most famous political-satire comedy troupe, The Moustache Brothers. One of the brothers, Par Par Lay, spent seven years in a Burmese prison for telling jokes about the government, which was briefly mentioned in a scene in the movie About A Boy. He's now out of jail thanks in part to Amnesty International, and the group puts on a dance and comedy routine every night in English for tourists, who actually play a role in keeping them from being arrested again. With a steady flow of tourists pouring in each night, the government has no choice but to allow the show to go on, turning a blind eye to their anti-government commentary. Here are the guys at the end of the goofy show:

After a long bus ride the next morning, and with a looming deadline of a flight leaving from Yangon two days later, we hit the sights in Bagan immediately. We hired a horse cart and driver for the day for about seven dollars, and made our way around the unbelievable temples of Bagan. Like Angkor Wat in Cambodia we saw a month prior, Bagan is one of the best archeological sites on earth. An estimated 4000 temples (!) sit scattered on a wide plain stretching out into the distance, each with its own character and personality. I couldn't get enough of the amazing plaster carvings, the unique brickwork, and interior fresco paintings of each temple. And unlike the temples of Angkor, Bagan has relatively few tourists, which makes it easy to get away from the crowds and explore temples on your own.

Our second day, I rented a bike from our guesthouse that looked like a 1930's movie prop, and did a day exploring lesser-known temples, which I liked even better than the handful of popular ones. The sheer number of temples is completely ridiculous, and temples that would be a major cultural heritage site in any other city on earth are downright forgotten at Bagan. At one very forgotten temple, I found an elderly monk who had taken up residence inside the temple's 1000-year-old walls. He was surprised to see me in his home, but offered me tea and a banana as we did our best to communicate in hand gestures.

Unfortunately, we had to leave Bagan at dusk and get on a night bus to back to Yangon in order to catch our flight. Still in Bagan 12 hours before our flight left, we took a serious gamble on the bus, which reportedly took somewhere between 10 and 18 hours depending on how many times it broke down. Cutting it absurdly close gave us a second day in Bagan, so we decided to risk it. As the bus plowed across central Myanmar, we urged the driver to get there as fast as possible and even offered him money if he'd get us there in time to check in for our flight. I was a nervous wreck the entire bus-ride, checking my watch every five minutes and reporting back to Gerni — "we're not going to make it." At 6:00 am, we got to a huge city and much to our relief, it was Yangon. We quickly piled into a cab and told the driver to haul ass to the airport. He pulled over halfway there for a leisurely stop to get himself some betel nut (like chewing tobacco, but much more disgusting) and we both almost killed the guy. Go! Go! Go! Don't stop, man! Go! Go! Airport! Airport! Amazingly enough, we got to the airport in time and checked in ahead of schedule. Or flight left an hour later and we high-fived the successful journey as we made it back to the bustling commercialism of Bangkok.

After 24 days in Myanmar, we were able to get a glimpse of a country sheltered from the rest of the earth by means of propaganda and strict government control. I'm not sure what will happen in Burma in the coming years, or whether the people will ever be free. The places we saw, the crazy trips on a plethora of vehicles, and the experiences we had made it one of my favorite places either of us have ever been. But the thing we enjoyed most was the people. Since they see relatively few tourists, Burmese people are incredibly friendly, curious, and welcoming to travelers. Out of all the places I've been, the people in Burma are the nicest and most enjoyable yet. Here are some of my favorite people shots from our Burmese days:

I in Bangkok now, where I've been relaxing for the last week. Gerni and I sadly parted ways two days ago — he's off exploring Thailand for a few days before he heads back to Denver with stops in Macau, Hong Kong, and Los Angeles along the way. Tonight, I'll continue on the lonely road as a solo traveler on a train to Laos, cut through Northern Vietnam, then complete my massive loop of Asia back in Shanghai, where I started this whole thing eight months earlier. I'm meeting my parents for my birthday celebration in Berlin on April 27th, so join me here for the next two months as I leave Asia and attempt to go from Bangkok to Berlin overland.

Thanks for reading this epic post! I miss you all.

Ryan!

Photos updated: All of Myanmar. Check 'em out! I'm having some issues with one of my memory card, so I'm missing a few pictures from Bagan (and a bunch of videos), but otherwise they're all there.

200 days down, 200 days to go

2007-02-09T03:55:00.002-07:00

We're safely back in Bangkok after 24 incredible days in Myanmar! I'm working on uploading a ton of photos and a crazy-awesome blog entry about our journey, which ought to be up here within the next few days. For now, here's an entry I started typing before we left...

Well folks, crank up the Bon Jovi, because I'm halfway there. I recently passed Day 200 of my trip, which means that I'm officially over the hump and heading downhill toward coming home sometime in August. It's completely insane for me to think that the trip is only half over because it feels like I've been on the road forever, and I'm having a hard time remembering what life was like back in... uhhh... what was it called? America? I think that was it.

To mark this personal milestone, I'm going to do a little something different with this blog, and talk about a bunch of very random topics that have been on my mind over the last 200 days, but haven't squeezed their way into any previous blogs:

You wipe your ass with... what?
I'm not sure if you know this, but a surprising number of people in Asia wipe their ass with their left hand. And although handwashing (often sans-soap) is always an integral part of this undoubtedly messy process, I just don't understand why it happens in the first place. You would think that in the history of civilization, one of the first orders of business—stuck somewhere between the discovery of fire and the invention of the wheel—would be coming up with a way to not wipe your ass with your hand. Am I crazy here?

The White Skin Fee
Coming from the ethnic diversity of America, one of the most shocking things about Asia is that there are almost always different prices for locals (or anyone who looks local) and for us whiteys. Take the Taj Mahal for example, which costs about 40 cents for Indian-looking people and 16 dollars for foreign-looking people. In almost any Asian country, the same situation exists. If I buy a ticket on a bus, it will often cost triple what it costs the person sitting right next to me. If I want a banana at a store, I'm going to pay much more for it than an Asian person would. I suppose this is all fair enough, especially considering the overall economic disparity between Asia and the West. The only thing that's hard for me to mentally overcome is that if this same thing happened in America, you'd get sued. And your business would be over. Forever. Think if you walked into Sears and they had separate pricing for Indian-looking people who wanted to buy a belt sander than they did for European-looking people. People would go completely nuts! There'd be riots in the streets! But at the Taj, everyone just laughs it off. I'm curious to see how the globalized world will change this occasionally maddening aspect of Asia.

The Next World Superpowers
Having spent more than two months in each country slated to be the world's up-and-coming superpowers—China and India—I'd like to give you my perspective on things from a traveler point of view. First off, both countries are tremendously polluted, which will be a really big issue for them to solve with the help of the rest of the world. We all contributed to the mess by moving factories there to capitalize on the cheap labor and lack of pollution controls.

Pollution issues aside, one edge China has over India is it that China is set up for business in terms of infrastructure. If there is one thing that China really does well, it is building train lines, subways, excellent roads, etc. In twenty years, I'm convinced that China will be much more business-friendly than almost anywhere on earth infrastructure-wise. Meanwhile, India is a complete mess. Power goes out all the time, roads are swarming with people and potholes, it takes forever to get anywhere. And it sounds like fixing the problem in India will cause serious economic repercussions: when I was in Delhi, there were riots in the streets because the government was planning to enforce current safety regulations for retail businesses (i.e. not having stuff pouring out onto the sidewalk). It was estimated that up to 50,000 businesses in Delhi alone would be put into bankruptcy after the regulations were enforced. Eventually, the India the Superpower will have to deal with this issue.

On the other side of the coin, a big advantage India has over China is that the people seem to be born businessmen, where the Chinese, broadly speaking, are fairly bad at business. An example which illuminates my point: A Tale of Two Post Offices. In Lhasa, I showed up at the post office and tried to send a package only to find out that nothing could be sent without being wrapped in bubble wrap. Do they sell bubble wrap at the post office? Of course not. They informed me I needed to take the city bus three stops down where they were fairly certain there was a bubble wrap store. In the Calcutta post office, I was told that I needed to have my package stitched up in fabric and sealed with wax before I could have it sent. In a typically Indian way, just outside the post office, there were a few dozen people offering those very services. Indians pounce on businesses opportunities like their life depended on it (it does!), where Chinese people generally don't seem to even notice.

Where do you keep your gun?
A few months ago, after I told a local guy that I was American, he completely seriously asked me where I keep my gun at home. Throughout the last six months, I've met an amazing amount of people who ask me about violence in America thanks in part to our passion for the long-outdated Second Amendment. Unlike America, most countries in the first world (and even the second and third) have really low rates of violent crime and strict gun laws, and most people have a hard time understanding what the hell is going on in America. I definitely agree. Does anyone else find it embarrassing that it is statistically safer in Cambodia than it is in LA? Sure, removing guns might not solve the problem (although historically, it does), our country really needs to get it's you-know-what together in terms of violent crime.

And the Oscar goes to... some movie I've never heard of
I was excited the other day when I checked Metacritic and saw that the Oscar nominees were announced. Cool! I love Oscar season! Alright, let's see, for Best Picture here are the nominees:

Babel - never heard of it
The Departed - never heard of it
Letters from Iwo Jima - never heard of it
Little Miss Sunshine - never heard of it
The Queen - never heard of it

What the hell are these movies? What happened to the good old days of Superman Returns and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe? Have I been gone that long? The only thing that makes me feel better about being so out of touch is that my parents probably haven't heard of any of the movies either, and they're still in America.

Yes or no? Wobble is not an answer.
In India, when you ask people yes or no questions, one of the most common responses is a strange wobble of the head. The wobble can mean any number of things: yes, no, maybe, or I don't know. So basically, when somebody wobbles at your question, you're no better off than if they just stared blankly at you. Here's a sample wobbletastic transaction:

Do you have beer?
(wobble)
Yes?
(wobble)
No?
(wobble)
Okay... uhh... I'll have a beer... if you've got it.

The same goes for a lot of other countries in Asia. People don't like to be wrong, so they give you definite answers, regardless of whether they know the answer or not. As a result, it's crucial to ask questions like, "which way to the airport" rather than "is the airport this way?"

The Lonely Planet Effect
The Lonely Planet guidebooks are a huge cultural force around the world, but especially in Asia. Each country's guidebook is prepared by 2-5 people or so, and those few people's recommendations often have a staggering effect on the success of hotels, restaurants, and even cities. An author's recommendation in the book is like winning the lottery for many businesses, and it keeps them packed with independent travelers, at least until a new edition comes out. As a result, I've met a lot of fellow travelers who despise the books because of their amazing influence over where people go — I've heard the phenomenon described as the Lonely Planet Highway. With that said, the books are an insanely valuable resource, are very well researched and occasionally hilarious (like LP Cambodia), and are a great tool so long as you don't accept their word as the gospel about a place.

The letter between V and X
Throughout the last few months, I've met thousands of people from of all different races, religions, and countries, each speaking different languages and having different customs. With all this diversity, there are a few things everyone seems to have in common. We all live on a place called Earth. We're all human beings. We all laugh, we all cry. We all get sick, we all heal. For the most part, there's one more thing everyone has in common: nobody likes George W. Bush. For fear of getting carpal-tunnel syndrome, I won't expand on this topic too much, but I will say this: if the President of the United States is supposed to act as an inspiration to the world, he has failed miserably. The world is waiting patiently for 2008.

Hi, I'm Ryan... an architect from Denmark
One of the tough parts about traveling, especially in India, is that you answer the same few questions over and over and over and over and over. What's your name? Where are you from? What do you do back at home? After a while, I started to get bored of telling the truth, so I began to invent little fake personas for myself. Sometimes it gets me into trouble, like this conversation with a middle-aged Indian man at a temple:

Him: Where are you from?
Me: Canada
Him: Canada?! Great! Where in Canada!?
Me: Umm... in a suburb just outside Toronto.
Him: Oh! I love Toronto! I went there last year. What suburb?
Me: Well... it's somewhat near the CN Tower...
Him: Great, great! What do you do in Canada?
Me: I'm a mechanical engineer.
Him: No way! I'm a mechanical engineer too!!!
Me: Oh... man.... that's.... uhhh... amazing....
Him: What kind of stuff do you work on?!
Me: Um, well, I'm still in school.
Him: In Canada?
Me: Yeah... in... Canada....
Him: What classes are you taking?!
Me: I'm just at the beginning, but it's a lot of math so far!
Him: Ha ha! So many math classes!
Me: Yeah, the math is crazy! Ha ha ha!

After that, he introduced me to some of his friends (also mechanical engineers) and I had to fake it for another 10 minutes. After that experience, I've switched back to being Ryan the designer from Denver.

Now, on to a few random lists...

Things I miss:
+ You (awwww...)
+ Playing music with my friends
+ Mexican food
+ The old work gang from EBD
+ My brothers
+ Aimless wandering in the great city of Denver
+ Rocking out on the drums
+ Dr Pepper
+ Hot dogs n' High Life nights at T-Boz's place
+ Chipotle, Noodles and Company, Tokyo Joe's, etc.
+ Going to shows
+ Blokus n' wine nights
+ Parental advice close at hand
+ Lively banter and scrumble sessions with with the Poss
+ Taco Bell
+ Big City Burrito in Ft Collins: super potato on jalapeno cheddar w/ cheese, onions and lots of ranch. Heaven in a burrito.

Things I don't miss:
+ Driving
+ Doing my own laundry
+ Cellphones

Things I hated at first but grew to love:
+ India
+ Squat toilets

Books I've read so far:
+ Platform by Michel Houllebeq
+ Peace Like a River by Leif Enger
+ White Teeth by Zadie Smith
+ Holy Cow: and Indian Adventure by Sarah McDonald
+ Are You Experienced by William Sutcliffe
+ Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
+ Blink by Malcom Gladwell
+ Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
+ On Beauty by Zadie Smith
+ Life of Pi by Yann Martel
+ The Lexus and the Olive Tree by Thomas Friedman
+ Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
+ The Bridge over the River Kwai by Pierre Boulle
+ Less than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis
+ Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
+ The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
+ Motherless Brooklyn by Johnathan Levin
+ Number9dream by David Mitchell

The two books that have really knocked my socks off are Cloud Atlas and Middlesex. The Zadie Smith and Johnathan Safran Foer books were highlights as well.

In heavy rotation on the iPod:
+ Animal Collective - Feels
+ Black Eyes - Black Eyes
+ Bright Eyes - I'm Wide Awake It's Morning
+ Built to Spill - Perfect from Now On
+ Dave Brubek Quartet - Take Five
+ Dismemberment Plan - Emergency and I
+ Dismemberment Plan - is Terrified
+ Elvin Jones - Dear John C.
+ Green Fuse - D E F
+ Humble Ary - 7" + PST
+ Jimmy Eat World - Bleed American
+ John Coltrane - Ballads
+ Lightning Bolt - Hypermagic Mountain
+ Mates of State - Bring it Back
+ Miles Davis - Kind of Blue
+ Modest Mouse - Building Nothing out of Something
+ Modest Mouse - The Moon and Antarctica
+ Off Minor - Innominate
+ Rainy Day Regatta - Living as we do...
+ Tilly and the Wall - Wild Like Children
+ TV on the Radio - Return to Cookie Mountain
+ Why? - Elephant Eyelash

By the numbers:
+ Countries visited so far on the trip: 9
+ Number of different places I've slept: 104
+ Number of those nights spent on public transport: 27
+ Nights spent in monasteries/temples: 5
+ Most people I've seen on one motorcycle: 5
+ Most hours spent consecutively on one train: 40
+ Most hours on a bus: 15
+ Most consecutive days without seeing a cellphone: 24

Well, that about wraps it up for now. I'd really like to thank you guys for following along with me thus far. It has really helped me stay sane knowing that a lot of you guys read this every once in a while. And although sometimes I'd rather cut off my own foot than update the blog, I have enjoyed working on it, and I hope you've enjoyed reading it. Check back in a few days for a full wrap up of Gerni and my adventures in Myanmar, my favorite place I've ever visited.

So on with the next 200 days. Take my hand, we'll make it I swear.

Ryan!

Holiday in Cambodia

2007-01-14T06:55:00.000-07:00

Before I start, you might notice that this edition of the blog is a little bit text-heavy. Well... that's because my camera got stolen (I think) about a week ago! I know, I know. I'm pretty heartbroken, and I lost 300 photos from the last month which I won't be able to replace, but in the big scheme of things it's not too big of a deal. So, scattered around this post are a few links to other people's pictures on Flickr if you're having trouble picturing anything.

One of our last two days in Kuala Lumpur took us on a day trip to the nearby Batu Caves, which are home to the climax of a yearly celebration where followers of Lord Murugan (a Hindu God) complete an eight-hour procession across the city dragging large wagon-like idols, which are painfully attached their skin with what look like fish hooks. At the end of what must be an excruciating journey, the masochistic followers climb a final 272 steps up into the massive cave complex for a final celebration along with 1.5 million pilgrims and tourists who turn out every year to cheer them on.

Although Gerni and I missed the let's-injure-ourselves-for-god festivities by about a month, we still enjoyed checking out the enormous statue of Lord Murugan which towered over us as we made our pleasant and painless climb up the stairs. We entered the cave itself, which soared above us like a majestic European cathedral, only to be brought back down to earth by the cave's inhabitants: sketchy-looking gangs of monkeys fighting with each other and trinket hawkers who tried hard to sell us photos of ourselves with his lackadaisical iguana (thankfully, not a euphamism).

Our remaining time in KL was spent eating Swedish meatballs and going through the design-on-the-cheap maze at Ikea, getting one last hit of curry in Little India, and waking up early and joining the long line to see the views from the 41st floor sky bridge at the Petronas Towers. We caught the bus in the afternoon to the airport, where we checked into our Air Asia flight to Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia.

After a surprisingly great flight on an amazingly cheap airline, we arrived in the tiny Phnom Penh airport, handed over $20 for an on-the-spot visa, and headed out into the heat of the dusty city. The only way to really get around in Cambodia is on the back of a motorbike, so the two of us we sped off into the chaotic and crazy streets of Phnom Penh, hanging on for dear life. On first impression, Cambodia reminded me a little bit of India in terms of chaos and street crossings. I've really grown to love the third world, and I had a big smile on my face and butterflies in my stomach all the way to our guesthouse.

On our first day in Phnom Penh, we hired a tuk-tuk and driver for the day and went around town exploring the major sights of the city, which mostly revolve around Cambodia's truly horrific recent history. Our first stop was Choeung Ek—better known as The Killing Fields—where some 17,000 people were taken and brutally executed during the reign of the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979. Like the Nazi concentration camps spread throughout Eastern Europe, the Killing Fields were the site of torture, starvation, and murder. As we learned more about the killing fields, it seemed almost more horrific than the Holocaust because the Khmer Rouge didn't believe that human life was worth the cost of a bullet, so prisoners were often beaten to death with rudimentary tools and farm equipment. We took a quiet walk around the remains of the camp including a tree where children were tied up and beaten, large mass graves where bodies were haphazardly strewn and buried, and a temple housing thousands of human skulls, which stands as a somber reminder of the countless people killed by the Khmer Rouge regime.

Our next stop was to check out the equally horrifying Toul Sleng Genocide Museum, which was formerly one of many prisons spread throughout Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge regime before prisoners were transported into the countryside to be killed and buried. It is hard to say exactly why the government imprisoned and killed so many people — most were accused of treason, and it sounds like a 1984-esque situation where you could get sent to jail for doing just about anything that was considered anti-government. Throughout the museum are mug shots of thousands upon thousands of prisoners, ranging from little kids to the elderly, as they first arrived at the prison. Some of the faces looked frightened, some looked defiant, and some looked as if the light within their eyes had already faded. Although the exact number is debated among historians, somewhere between 1.5 and 3 million Cambodian people were killed in prisons just like this one over that four year period.

For me, the most interesting part of the museum was the collection of quotes and photos they had from former prison guards, many of which are still alive today. The exhibit showed photos of the prison guards then and now and included a quote from each. Many of them were only teenagers when they served as guards, and all were very apologetic for what they did, but claimed they had no choice. Most of them said that the Khmer Rouge, led by the dictator Pol Pot, was so brutal that the only way to protect yourself from getting killed was to become one of the government's henchmen. The exhibit was angrily and repeatedly vandalized in the Khmer language by Cambodian visitors, but I thought it was an interesting perspective that really added to the experience of learning about the history of the genocide.

Throughout the day, we made some less depressing stops as well. We visited the pleasant National Museum, which houses a lot of Cambodia's best sculptures and art from the Angkor period, which was a good introduction to our Angkor Wat visit a few days later. Gerni and I also wandered through two local markets which were crowded with locals and packed to the gills with amazing sights and smells. Gerni bought some t-shirts so he doesn't have to do laundry, and I bought a couple of expertly-photocopied fake Lonely Planet guidebooks for three dollars each. The Cambodian currency (Riel) is so unstable that people just stopped using it and started using the US Dollar instead. The handful of ATMs in Cambodia spit out US cash, and you pay for almost everything with it. Change is often given in both US dollars and smaller denominations of Riel, which made for some seriously confusing purchases along the way.

That night, we went out to experience our first in a string of about twenty phenomenal meals we had in Cambodia. Due to a big French influence from the colonial days, Cambodian food is crazy-delicious. Not only that, but they prepare incredibly good western food as well — without a doubt better than anywhere I've been so far on the trip. Gerni and I went to a classy French restaurant and splurged on a feast: we ordered a bottle of wine, three types of paté, two scrumptious beef fillet steaks, dessert, and coffee. All this for around fifteen dollars apiece for a meal which would have cost easily 75 dollars plus tip at a restaurant back home. Cambodia is truly cheap culinary heaven.

Since our time was limited in Cambodia, we decided to leave Phnom Penh and head down to the southern beach town called Sihanoukville. At the end of our six hour trip, we were dropped off in a chaotic flurry of hostel hawkers and motorbike drivers, who swarmed around us shouting and waving pamphlets in our faces hoping we'd go with them to their hotel. We waited until it had calmed down, then took off on a mototaxi to a guesthouse of our own choosing. When we arrived, I noticed that my camera was missing, and I think that it must have been taken from my pocket in the chaos right after we got off the bus. Oh well... life goes on. After seeing some horrific and humbling poverty over the last six months, I'm having a harder and harder time feeling sorry for myself when things go wrong.

Camera-loss aside, the beach town of Sihanoukville was really fun and relaxed, and was a world away from Thailand in terms of development and tourism impact. Along the beach, Cambodian people outnumbered foreigners by about 30 to 1, and we loved strolling along the sand watching families play in the water, teenagers light off makeshift fireworks, and kids build impressive Angkor Wat sandcastles as the sun went down over the clear water. One thing that surprised me was how modest Cambodian people are — most of the people in the water were fully clothed, and the few bikini-clad tourists looked uncomfortably out of place.

We spent two days relaxing and reading in Sihanoukville, which was exactly what we needed after all the traveling we'd done. Our hotel, in typical Cambodian style, cooked up insanely good food, including a night with a Thanksgiving-like English Sunday dinner, and a night with delicious Mexican food. We did ocassionally leave the room however. One day, we dropped by a wonderful Western-run place called the Boom Boom Room, which will transfer pirated copies of popular records to iPods for 75 cents each. They had thousands of albums to choose from, and even had some relatively obscure indie albums that just came out in the States. It's really illegal to be sure, but I was itching for some new music to listen to after six months on the road. Another day, I went across town to a bar called Snake House, where you can get drunk surrounded by about 50 live pythons, cobras, and vipers. They are in cages and everything, but it was still a tad bit sketchy. I've met some crazy people on this trip, but the idiot who decided to combine poisonous snakes with getting sloshed surely takes the cake.

In order to get insurance money for my stolen camera, I needed to go to the police station to file a police report. I asked the helpful staff at my guesthouse, and they recommended I go sometime between 9 and 9:30 in the morning because — and this is a direct quote — "that is the time the policemen are least likely to be drunk." Yikes. So, the next morning I headed to the station on the back of a motorcycle and arrived to find the officers stubborn and surly, but sober enough to help me file a report. They needed a copy of my passport, but didn't have a copy machine at the station, so I hired another motorbike to take me across the city to the nearest copy machine and back to the station. Still sober when I returned, they had my report prepared and I was off on my way. Whew.

Later that day, we left the relaxation of the beach town for a quick stopover in Phnom Penh, where we filled up on another multi-course fiesta of delicious French grub. The following morning, we were on another bus, this time headed north up near the top of Cambodia to the country's largest tourist attraction, the Temples of Angkor. If you are a fan of terrible movies, you may remember the temples—often called Angkor Wat by travelers—as the place where Angelina Jolie scurried around dodging lasers or whatever in Tomb Raider. If you're into history instead, you may know Angkor Wat as the largest temple complex on Earth, and one of the globe's most amazing and best-preserved archeological sites.

We bought a three day pass, and started out our first day getting all of the major stuff out of the way so we could spend the next two checking out minor temples. First was the Bayon, which was a temple topped with slate-grey spires which is popular for its 216 massive carvings of faces which smile down upon visitors. The place was packed full of mostly Japanese tour groups, but we still managed to find a corner or two of solitude where we could really enjoy the temple. The Bayon sits in the middle of a much larger walled city called Angkor Thom, which in the early 13th century at the height of the Angkor period, housed almost a million townspeople. The gates at the entrances to Angkor Thom were a highlight and were also carved with enormous smiling faces. We found some off-the-beaten-path areas where the spiderwebs outnumbered the visitors, then ended up in Ta Prohm, one of the most famous temples in Angkor (and the filming location for Tomb Raider). The temple looks like it's fighting an eternal slow-motion battle with the surrounding trees, which undulate as they grow from the temple's crumbling walls. We finished our day as Indiana Jones wannabes at the mother of all temples, Angkor Wat. The temple lives up to the hype, and made for a really fun visit. Gerni an I enjoyed sitting by the nearby ponds and watching the sun's last light of the day strike the five large spires of the temple.

Each night after the temples clear out, everyone heads over to hang out in the nearby town of Siem Reap, which is full of outdoor restaurants, bars, and shops catering to the masses of tourists who visit the temples of Angkor each year. Siem Reap was really fun, almost like Khao San Road in Bangkok minus all the asshole meathead party dudes. Plus it was full of amazing restaurants. Did I mention Cambodia has amazing restaurants?

After our second day soaking in all there was to see in Angkor Wat, I started to have my second major medical issue on the trip. My leg had felt numb for about three days, like it wasn't getting circulation or something, and after asking around online and doing some thorough research, it became clear that it might be a potentially fatal blood clot. Every article I read ended with, "call 911 or visit an emergency room as soon as possible." I dug through my guidebook and it said that despite all the tourism in Siem Reap, no hospital exists of decent quality. Faced with the Cambodian reality of no 911 service and the nearest high-quality medical care a 14 hour bus ride away, I started to freak out. Gerni helped calm me down, and I relayed my syptoms over the internet to my friend Tara back in America, who contacted a doctor for me. Still not sure what to do, we spent the night trying to find some Asprin to thin my blood for the time being. We were lucky enough to stumble upon a pharmacist who had lived in Colorado, who had Asprin and a lot of good advice. He also knew much more about blood clots than I had found out online, and seriously doubted that I had one based on my symptoms. However, since a numb leg could be easily be misdiagnosed, I made the quick decision that I should forfeit my final day at Angkor Wat and get on a bus to Bangkok as soon as possible. Luckily, there were seats left for the morning bus, and I headed through the Cambodian countryside toward the gritty border town of Poipet, and reached Bangkok later that night.

After a few days here in Bangkok, and I've been to three different doctors in the best and most well-organized hospital I've ever seen in my life. While they're not sure exactly what's wrong with my leg, they assured me that it is definitely not a blood clot or anything serious. At this point, the numbness has all but gone away, but they're keeping me medicated for a couple of days on antibiotics and a few other things, and they said it's safe for me to keep on traveling.

Gerni arrived here last night, and we both spent all day today tying up loose ends, doing laundry, and running errands (like buying a new camera!) before our flight tomorrow morning to Yangon, Myanmar. The country of Myanmar—formerly known as Burma—is very secluded from the outside world, and while there are a handful of places to access the Internet for basic contact, the blog will definitely be on the back burner until we get back to the well-connected world around February 10th.

Thanks for reading everybody, and we'll catch up with you here when we're back from Myanmar!

Ryan (& Ryan)

A Rainforest Christmas and an Urban New Year

2006-12-31T02:26:00.000-07:00

A whole lot has happened between the last update and now, so this is the longest post yet. Let's start with our journey from the island of Ko Phangan to the national park in Malaysia:

We knew it would take a long time to get from the beaches of Ko Phangan to the middle of Malaysia, but we had no idea it would take three full days of traveling. After a two taxi rides, a ferry trip, and two bus rides, our first night ended in a city called Hat Yai in southern Thailand. The rat-tacular city was shockingly infested with enormous rodents, and our dreary hotel was exactly how I pictured the apartment building in the first half of George Orwell's 1984, complete with a wretched group of zombie travellers with glazed eyes staring at a big TV screen in the lobby.

The following morning, we parted ways with Big Brother and the rats and boarded the pre-dawn train headed for the border. As the train pushed southward, our constantly changing group of fellow passengers began to slowly transition from the free-spirited, half-clothed Thais to the more conservative and covered Muslim Malay people. One of the reasons I wanted to go to Malaysia was to see a modern Muslim country that was culturally disconnected from the Muslim strongholds we all see so often on the news from the Arab Middle East. Except for the majority of women wearing head coverings, the style of dress seemed very similar to the west — jeans and t-shirts, jewelry, and makeup were common among most of the women we saw from the train window.

After we crossed hassle-free from Thailand into Malaysia, we planned to take a train from the border straight to the national park, but the train lines were all shut down thanks to heavy monsoon rains that flooded the tracks in several places along the route. So, we were stuck for the night in Kota Bharu, a city which is around 99% Muslim, making it one of the most Islamic areas of Asia. Except for one uncomfortable conversation with a fundamentalist taxi driver who blasted readings from the Koran over the car stereo and passionately ranted about US foreign policy, most of the people in Kota Bharu seemed fairly modern despite their deeply-held religious traditions.

Early the next morning, we climbed aboard the "jungle railway" — the nickname for the train from Kota Bharu to the national park. We knew that it wasn't an express train and that it would stop in every town, but in Malaysia they apparently use the word "town" very liberally — in my opinion, one dude carrying a suitcase standing outside a shack most definitely does not qualify as a town. Despite the painful slowness and absurdly frequent stops, the scenes from the train were beautiful, and the people-watching opportunities out the window were great too.

Finally, our seemingly endless three days of travel were over and we made it to Teman Negara National Park. Our first morning in the park, we went on a really informative nature walk which ended with a trip across a series of rickety bridges teetering high up in the rain forest canopy. Tom got completely freaked out, but Gerni and I were lovin' it. Here I am high up in the trees:

Our afternoon was filled with a trip to check out a nearby cave, located just outside a village populated by dark-skinned tribal villagers with large afros and no shirts, even for women. Except for a boom box (because if you're going to have afros, you must have a boom box) and some tarps to cover their huts, the village seemed like it had been completely untouched by modern life. I've been to some very small towns on this trip that I'd definitely classify as a village, but I've never seen anything quite like this. It was like taking a walk through an issue of National Geographic. After we shuffled like a weird white parade past the curious stares of the villagers, we headed into the darkness of the cave. A word to the wise: if you have a phobia of bats, do not go to the cave in Teman Negara National Park. As we navigated the cave with the help of a guide, we were completely surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of bats clinging to every wall. They brushed up against us as they flew through the cave, and the floor was completely covered in slimy guano (cue the Ace Ventura references). It was a really amazing experience, but not one for the squeamish. Back out into the bat-free air, we passed by the village again, then caught a ride back to our hotel on a small river-rocket boat, which was a blast:

On Christmas Eve, Gerni and I sadly parted ways with Tom who was going back up for another couple of days on the beach in Thailand before heading back home to California. The two of us spent the day on an absurdly difficult six mile hike toward a big hut in the middle of the rainforest where visitors can stay overnight. I know six miles doesn't sound very difficult, but the entire stretch of trail was like an obstacle course full of tricky river crossings, crazy-steep hills only climbable by rope, swinging on vines, quicksand-like mud, and spiked branches eager to stab careless hikers.

After coming across fresh sets of wild elephant and tiger tracks, we were very relieved to finally arrive in the hut before nightfall. We each took off our shoes only to find our socks covered in blood, thanks to the nasty leeches that had infiltrated our shoes during the hike. We desperately peeled off the sticky little bastards, wiped off the blood, and finally were able to relax enough to enjoy the gorgeous sights and sounds from outside the window of our hut, safely perched on stilt legs about 30 feet above the ground.

We woke on Christmas morning in the eerie blue mist of dawn with backaches from the plank beds in the hut, and started hiking back the way we came, which was slightly easier the second time around. We left the park on an afternoon boat to the nearby town of Jerantut, where we enjoyed a nice Christmas dinner of kung pao chicken before hopping on an overnight train south to Malaysia's capital city, Kuala Lumpur.

Since we came to Malaysia on a whim, I didn't really know much about the country or Kuala Lumpur. All I really knew is what I saw in the Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta Jones movie Entrapment which takes place in KL. (Although you might not have noticed the city at all, thanks to CZJ in that awesomely mind-erasing laser scene). I was surprised to see how ethnically diverse the city is compared to others in Asia. There is a solid mix of Indian, Malay, and Chinese people, along with a handful of other races blended in. Down the road from our funky hostel in the lively Chinatown area is a busy market with wall-to-wall knockoff vendors. Here's Gerni shopping for some pirated DVDs you can buy for a dollar each:

There's a great public transportation system here too. It's really easy to zip around town on the city's extensive and inexpensive light rail and monorail system. The system is so popular that the trains come every 2-3 minutes, and they're always packed to the brim:

We took the metro over to the KLCC shopping center, which sits under the awe inspiring Petronas Towers. When they were completed in 1998, the towers—the national symbol of progress and Kuala Lumpur's most notable tourist attraction—were the tallest buildings in the world. Although they've been overtaken in recent years by the crap-tastic Taipei 101 building, they are still huge. Huge isn't really the right word. ABSOLUTELY ENORMOUS is more like it. They're really easy on the eyes too. Here's a video so you can get a feel for the absurd size of these things:

After a few days checking out KL, we decided randomly to hop on a night bus to Singapore. Embarrassingly enough, I wasn't even sure what Singapore was before I went there. A city? A country? As it turns out, it's both. We had heard from other travelers that the country was boringly sterile, but I thought it was amazing there. I'll admit, Singapore does have some policies that sound a little bit like an overzealous middle school teacher is running the country. Gum-chewing is banned, you pay a hefty penalty for graffiti (they beat you!), there are very few areas to smoke cigarettes in public, and drug trade of any kind results in the death penalty. As a result, Singapore is immaculately clean, safe, and pleasant. It seems leaps and bounds more modern and progressive than anywhere else in Asia, or the rest of the world for that matter. Public transportation is cheap and top-notch, the people are smart and friendly, and the place oozes with charm. The city actively preserves historic buildings, and the streets are sprinkled with a diverse group of old Chinese shophouses, British colonial structures, modern skyscrapers, and more. Outside of the city center, much of the small country's natural landscape is preserved in the form of national parks. They have the highest standard of living in Asia and it shows.

A few weeks ago, I got done reading Tom Friedman's The Lexus and the Olive Tree which describes the process of globalization in terms of the balance and constant struggle between modern ways of living (represented by the Lexus car) and deeply-rooted traditions (represented by the olive tree). As a result, I've naturally been thinking about the places I visit in these terms. Singapore, more than anywhere I've ever been, seems to really have these two forces working together in perfect harmony. The city is quite diverse (for Asia at least), and it seemed like each culture's heritage and traditions were respected and encouraged, flourishing as a result. At the same time, they are investing tons of money into making their city a world-class cultural center and ultra-modern metropolis. To me, the country was living American ideals better than America does. I'm not trying to be overdramatic here, but Singapore stands as a model to the rest of the world. We were both seriously impressed.

I'm a big dork when it comes to museums, and I can tell you from personal experience that Asia's museums are generally pretty terrible compared to those in Europe or America. Singapore is noted for it's awesome museums, so Gerni and I went freakin' buckwild and visited six of them in 48 hours. Here's a rundown of the highlights from each, in the order that we visited them:

Singapore Art Museum   (visit website)
Home to a lot of really great modern and contemporary art, and almost all of it was from Southeast Asian artists from both Singapore and the rest of the area, which was neat to see. The highlight was a large exhibit about Chen Wen Hsi, one of Singapore's most influential and prolific contemporary artists, whose style over his long career dabbled in an awesome array of styles from traditional scroll-n-stamp Chinese-style murals to large abstract textural pieces to formal portraits in traditional European style. The museum made me want to go back to our hostel and draw, which is just about all you can ask out of a museum. Here's Gerni checking out Chen Wen Hsi's work:

Singapore City Gallery    (visit website)
The Urban Redevelopment Authority runs the great City Gallery, which documents and explains Singapore's urban past, present, and future development. Singapore is planning on expanding at a staggering rate, and they've already put a plan in place which would almost double (!) the size of their downtown. The museum was fascinating, and the exhibits really helped shed light on why the city outside the museum's walls was so amazing: because it was designed to be that way. Here I am checking out the large scale model of the city center:

Red Dot Design Museum   (visit website)
Each year, the international Red Dot Design Awards are given to the best product designs, and this museum houses and describes many of the recent winners. The winners were both individuals and students as well as large design groups from companies like Canon and LG. The product designs themselves were diverse too, ranging from household appliances to chairs to air conditioning units to vacuums, and a whole lot more. Our favorite was a student-designed one-piece backpacking stove complete with built-in windscreen and fuel tank.

Singapore Philatelic Museum   (visit website)
Normally, I wouldn't be terribly interested in a museum about stamps, but Singapore's museums had been great so far, so we decided to take the postal plunge and check it out. The museum was surprisingly great, and took an interesting look at both stamp history as well as history told through stamps. I especially enjoyed the oddities, rarities, and misprints section.

National Museum of Singapore   (visit website)
Our fifth museum stop was to visit the brand spankin' new National Museum, which is housed in and old building from Singapore's British colonial days, but has recently been updated with a contemporary addition. I've never studied architecture, but I thought the contrast between old and new buildings was absolutely gorgeous:

We wandered around the National Museum's incredibly interesting exhibits about the history of Singapore broken up into themes: photography, fashion, food, and film. The exhibit design was the best I've ever seen in my life, and it really brought the country's history alive, punctuated by a handful of stunningly-produced short documentaries scattered throughout the exhibits' numerous flatscreens.

We happened to visit the National Museum during its month-long grand opening festivities, and one of the month's many events took place while we were there: a performance by Project Bandaloop, a high-flying contemporary dance group from Oakland, California. So, I don't know if you've ever seen anyone do contemporary interpretive dance before, but... uhh... well, there's something sort of... awkwardly hilarious about it. It's really hard for me to keep a straight face while watching a guy wearing tights dance around a stage attempting to express the concept of suffering. It's just kind of weird. Like watching someone successfully try to cry on cue. Anyway, they eventually moved on to what the group is known for: mid-air acrobatic dance wearing harnesses, which I started to really enjoy the more the night went on. Here's a video so you can get a feel for it:

Mint: Museum of Toys   (visit website)
Our last of six museum visits, but definitely one of the best. Spread over a few floors were thousands of well-displayed and explained toys from all over the world, dating mostly from the 1940s through the late '80s. There were lots of early one-of-a-kind Mickey Mouse toys, memorabilia from Beatlemania, chinese ceramic dolls, and much more. For me, the highlight was definitely the Star Wars action figures, all in great condition in their original packaging, which I had never seen before in person. Although it doesn't help me win the hearts of beautiful ladies, I have a decent-sized collection of Star Wars memorabilia myself, and it was really cool to see some really top-notch pieces in the museum's collection. Another favorite from the museum was the 60s-era John F. Kennedy action figure complete with newspaper, rocking chair, and leg-crossing action. And as we all know, there's nothing that keeps the kids more entertained than watching JFK sit and read the paper. Look, he's even reading an article about himself:

We left Singapore on another overnight bus and arrived back here yesterday in Kuala Lumpur for New Years Eve. We went out for the celebration at the Petronas Towers where we caught a quick fireworks show and then went out to celebrate 2007 at the main bar street. Beer was too expensive and the bumpin' techno music was too terrible, so we drank until the early morning outside a gas station instead, which was much more our speed. Plus, we met a ton of great locals during our loitering spree. We're flying out of here on the 4th headed for Phnom Penh in Cambodia, so our next update will likely be from there.

Congrats, you made it to the bottom! I'm glad, because I've been working on this post for the majority of the year. Thanks for reading, and happy 2007!

Ryan

UPDATE! Every once in a great while, I check to see what keywords people are using to get to this site. Someone recently showed up thanks to Googling "how to make camel poop bread," which I'll definitely chalk up as one of the proudest moments of my life.

Lazy days in the hot winter sun

2006-12-21T03:21:00.000-07:00

Just after I posted the last update from Bangkok, Gerni and I were treated to the late-night arrival of Tom Garrett, our friend from back in high school. Tom graduated from UCLA, and less than 24 hours later jumped on a flight to Thailand to meet us. On our first day together, the three of us hit the town for a little while, showing Tom our favorite stuff around the city. The best stop was at the Japanese store Muji, where you can shop for minimalist, logo-free clothing and home accessories. I hope the store spreads into the States soon. As we headed home for the night, we squeezed into the back of a tuk-tuk and sped at a breakneck pace through the streets of sticky, sweaty Bangkok. We were going so fast, all we could do was laugh:

Along the way, we passed by a big pro-democracy rally, where hundreds of people gathered to protest the military coup d'etat in Thailand which occurred this past September. The protest was the first indication any of us had seen that people in Thailand even noticed the coup even happened. Before that, it seemed like life went on pretty much as normal for most people. Thais are apparently so relaxed that not even a military junta can bring them down. The military took over the country? Relax, guy! Hang out a while! Have a beer, fella!

The next day, we got on a night bus headed for the island of Ko Phangan, in southern Thailand. It was my 20th overnight stay on public transportation in the last six months, so I was able to sleep like a baby, but the other guys struggled a little bit with their first overnight bus ride. We finally made it to the island after a long ferry ride, where Tom's ultra-charming demeanor landed us two delightful new friends Jemma from Birmingham (England, not Alabama) and Anthony from London. The five of us got a couple of ridiculously cheap bare bones bungalows—$2.50 per person—on the west side of the island overlooking the clear green seas of the Gulf of Thailand.

Ko Phangan is one of the Thailand's biggest party islands, made famous by the over-the-top rave called the Full Moon Party. The parties are such a tourist draw that the always-entrepreneurial Thais also throw half moon and black moon parties, which means that there is always some lunar-related excuse to get drunk. Our bungalow owners packed fourteen of us into the back of a pickup, and we headed over to the half moon party, which was basically a big outdoor club where DJs spun the typical array of monotonous electronica, which was slightly less awful after a few rounds of beer. We had a good time anyway, but other people must have liked it more: the three of us were the only ones who made it back to the truck for our 4 am curfew. The others trickled back to their bungalows throughout the following day.

There was plenty to pack our week on Ko Phangan, and each of us did our own thing from day to day. Since everyone is so busy partying, much of the island is left untouched by travelers, and we took advantage as much as we could.

Tom and I, along with our new Oxford-educated friend Anthony, went on an all day hike into the thick jungle in the center of the island. The island's jungle looks strikingly like the set of Lost, and had a similarly creepy vibe. We climbed around some small waterfalls, splashed around in the river, and tried hard to find our way on the poorly marked trail which seemed like it had been forgotten over the years.

Tom and I went on an even more difficult hike toward the top of the island through incredibly thick jungle and rainforest. As we got closer and closer to Ko Phangan's summit, the jungle got thicker and darker. The trail was extremely faint and often non-existent, and the trek was often frustrating and confusing. At one point, we both heard something rustling about fifty feet ahead of us in the jungle. Huge branches snapped under the weight of a large animal, and Tom and I instinctively sprinted in the opposite direction as fast as we could. I broke off a tree branch along the way, and mentally readied myself to fight off whatever animal was behind us. I caught one glimpse behind me and didn't see anything, but we kept running anyway out of sheer terror. We stopped running after fifteen minutes, and made it back to the safety of civilization a few hours later. After research, we found out that there are tigers, leopards, and jaguars on the island, so odds are decent it was one of those. For all we know, however, it could have just been a monkey or something. Either way, it was seriously frightening.

Another day, the four of us rented motorbikes and sped around almost the entire island. We rode for hours through the city streets of the port town Thong Sala, then up across unmaintained dirt roads through the jungle to the northwest tip of the island to Ao Thong Noi beach, where Tom showed us all how to properly bodysurf in the gnarly monsoon waves. After being tossed around a bit in the ocean, we hopped back on the bikes and rode back across muddy roads and steep hills to Hat Rin, the main party beach and traveler area. We grabbed dinner, then cracked on our headlights and rode through the night like a motorcycle gang across the island back to our bungalow for our nightly porch n' hammock hangout session.

Here's me and Anthony on the bikes in Thong Sala and the four of us at Ao Thong Noi beach:

Tom and I got up early the next morning in order to try to get some more bang for our buck on our motorbike rental. In typical Ko Phangan style, one of the roads was washed out and looked impassable, so we tried to ride around the water through a big patch of dirt, which didn't work out either. The water on the road only looked about four inches deep, so I decided to just try to ride into from the dirt patch. As I started to move forward, the water seemed more like six to eight inches deep. Hellbent on getting through, I kept pressing on, and suddenly — oh shit! — I was up to my knees in water, and my motorbike was half underwater and the submerged motor stopped sputtering. I realized that I probably just completely ruined a $3000 motorbike, and that I basically just cut my trip short by about three months as a result. I started to completely freak out and Tom did his best to both keep me calm and help pull the bike out of the stubborn mud. Once we got it out, we washed the smelly mud off ourselves in the ocean and then came the moment of truth. Much to my surprise, and with a dramatic spray of mud from the tailpipe, the motor started. Crisis averted. The trip goes on.

During the rest of our time on the island, we did our fair share of reading and hanging out. Gerni tore through more than three books, and went hammocking like he's never hammocked before. Tom went snorkeling, and we all had an amazing few hours riding the waves on sea kayaks. We stumbled upon an incredible restaurant called Big Mountain that we all loved, so we ate there for every meal. Each night, we were treated to spectacular sunsets from our bungalow, with the islands of Ang Thong National Marine Park out in the distance.

We left the island a few days ago headed for a national park in Malaysia. It's been no easy task — we've been on an absurd amount of transportation since we left, and we're still not there yet. We're currently in Kota Bharu just on the other side of the Thai-Malaysian border, which we crossed earlier today. We'll hopefully arrive in the national park tomorrow, followed by a visit to the capital city, Kuala Lampur. Check back later for more on our Malaysian adventures.

Thanks for reading and Merry Christmas!
Ryan (and Ryan and Tom)

Photos updated: No updates this time — sorry!

Futuristic malls & ancient temples

2006-12-09T02:35:00.000-07:00

I picked up Gerni at Bangkok's spankin' new International airport and the two of us headed by bus to Khao San Road, the infamous three-block stretch of street that serves as Asia's largest traveler hub and biggest party center. The place is packed full of a diverse crowd — bearded hippies, sun scorched beach bums, chilled backpackers, Thai teens out on the town, frat house bros and sorority girls, young families, tattoo-clad shirtless meatheads, Thai working girls in ultra-short skirts, tuk-tuk drivers, elderly couples, Japanese hipsters, and a whole lot more. The wacky street is littered with shops selling Quiksilver and Puma knockoffs, cheap Internet, custom-tailored suits, fifty-cent pad thai, juice shops, bookstores, insect eateries (I tried a fried grasshopper), and about a thousand places to get a cold beer. It's not a good place to get a feel for Thailand, but it's a fun place to spend a couple of days, if only for the spectacle of it.

I hadn't seen Gerni (or any of my friends for that matter) in almost five months, so it was really great to finally see him. We spent a few hours catching up and he gave me some stuff from home. A new shirt to wear! A new pair of jeans! A pepper grinder! Candy! Money! A replacement watch! It's amazing what I get excited about after living out of a backpack for so long. My parents even sent a little travel-sized Christmas stocking along. Thanks guys!

Our first day together, we headed out to check out all Bangkok has to offer. We hopped aboard the Venice-like taxi boat for a trip a few miles down the river to catch the modern, elevated Sky Train. After a few hours outdoors we had enough of the absurd heat (95 degrees and 90% humidity) so we ducked into a mall on Siam Square in search of air conditioning. What we found—in addition to the delightfully cool AC—was the best mall ever built.

I don't really like shopping, and I generally find trips to the mall to be an irritating snooze-fest, but the Siam Paragon mall in Bangkok is a whole different story. Spread over eight stories, the mall is an overwhelming collection of multiplex movie theatres, ultra high-end boutiques, technology stores, the city aquarium, designer furniture outlets, a huge supermarket, plus shopping and restaurants galore. There's no way to really accurately describe how high-end this mall was, except to say that they had a Lamborghini store. With a Lamborghini parked inside for sale. Seriously. The place practically made Soho in New York look dumpy.

Here's a shot of one of many sets of escalators so you can get a feel for the massive scale of this place:

The food court alone was the size of a mall back home and had an endless sea of restaurants with every imaginable kind of food: Japanese sushi and dumplings, hot dogs and pretzels, exotic drinks, spicy Thai delicacies, coffee and espresso, American fast food, sandwiches and baguettes, Korean barbecue, Italian gelato, and more. We grabbed lunch from several restaurants, and then enjoyed a look around its luxury supermarket where Gerni got acquainted with new Asian brands:

In contrast to the mall, we also paid a visit to the Chattachuk Weekend Market, which is a sprawling, chaotic maze of tiny stores selling knick-knacks, paintings, antiques, food, souvenirs, puppies, books, and more. Each store is about the size of the car, and each one is packed full of as much stuff as humanly possible, which makes it virtually impossible to actually shop there. Regardless, we both thought it was really fun to get caught in the rivers of Thais and tourists flowing through the stalls.

Much of the rest of our time in Bangkok was spent eating the phenomenal food. My favorite food on earth—besides Taco Bell, of course—is probably Thai or Indian, so I've been in culinary heaven the last few months. The absurdly spicy Thai food incredible, and Gerni and I have been loving all of the strange and new flavors that I've eaten so far including fiery coconut curries, tropical sweet fruits, marinated grilled fish, and thick noodle dishes.

Since we'll use Bangkok as our base for exploring Thailand, we decided to get out of town for a few days and check out a few nearby areas a few hours north of town. Our first stop was Khao Yai National Park, just outside of the town of Pak Chong. Khao Yai is one of Thailand's largest national parks and its jungle setting is home to some stunning scenery and ferocious beasts. We joined up with a few other people for an all-day tour of the park, which was led by Steve Irwin-incarnate, a cheerful and crazy Thai guide named Mr. A.

We drove through the park on bench seats in the back of a pick up truck, and Mr. A would shout excitedly when his eagle eye landed upon wildlife. This guy could spot a tiny woodpecker from 100 meters away — it was incredible. After stopping to see toucans, hornbills, monkeys, bats, and giant squirrels, he shouted "python!!!" then jumped off the moving truck because he was so excited. Sure enough, there was a python slithering near the road, and Mr. A wasted no time to grab it by the tail.

"I'm like Steve Irwin!!!," he exclaimed.
"Steve Irwin died, man," we told him.
"I know!!! Ha ha!," he replied.
There was no keeping Mr. A down.

We got off the truck and went on a few hour walk through the thick jungle. Neither of us had ever really been in a jungle before, and I was loving every minute of it. Vines hung down all around us, tropical birds watched us from above, and the place was scattered with creepy spiders. This one is known as a horn spider — can you guess why?

Walking along the river, Mr. A spotted a crocodile about 15 feet away from us. The croc sat still with its mouth open waiting for lunch to walk into its mouth. It was pretty frightening to see a crocodile that close that wasn't behind a fence at the zoo. Luckily, Mr. A was smart enough not go to screw with the crocodile like Steve Irwin would have. We ended up at a couple of spectacular waterfalls, one of which was a filming location for the waterfall-makeout scene in the horrible movie (but great book) The Beach starring Leonardo DiCaprio. For scale, the blue spot at the top of this photo is a person:

Back in the truck just after the sun went down, we stopped for a minute on the side of the road and Mr. A spotted a wild elephant about 50 feet away. The elephant moved toward us, and the guides firmly told us to quickly and quietly get back in the truck. For a little while, the elephant ignored us, but quickly got irritated with our presence. It bellowed out a scream, aggressively raised its long trunk and ivory tusks, and started running directly toward the truck. We all shouted and the driver slammed on the gas and sped a few meters, and the elephant backed down. They eased the truck backwards so we could sit and watch the elephant again. Shortly afterward, the angry elephant charged again. A few more times, Mr. A tested the elephant's patience, and on the final time it charged us in a full-on sprint. We sped off, hearts racing, back to the safety of the visitor's center. I don't know if you've ever had a wild elephant repeatedly charge you before, but I can tell you from experience that it was scary as all hell. I damn near had to change my pants afterward.

We left Kao Yai on a train bound for nearby Ayutthaya, which is home to one of Thailand's best collections of ancient temples, spread across much of the old city. We rented bikes and did a self-guided tour to as many of the 12th century temples as we could. In one of the larger temple complexes, there is an amazing Buddha head which has been wrapped over the years by the growth of a fig tree.

Both of us really enjoyed wandering through the city's awesome temple collection, which is internationally recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage site. The city was the capital of the country—then known as Siam—until 1767 when it was attacked and burned or destroyed by the Burmese. What remains today surely isn't up to its original splendor before the destruction, but are still spectacular to look at. Here's Gerni climbing up one of our favorite temples:

Our next stop was Lopburi, a few hours by train north of Ayutthaya. The town has a really pleasant and laid back small town feel, which we both really enjoyed. Our room had a TV—a first for Thailand—but it unfortunately only showed Fox News. I'm glad to know that Bill O'Reilly is still being a dick in my absence.

We hit up the city's excellent and thorough museum about the area's culture, art and architecture, which helped make some sense of the temples back in Ayutthaya and the additional ones in Lopburi, built around the same time. I was surprised to find out that the area has had a close relationship with many European countries since the mid-1600s, which is reflected the odd Thai-European architecture around town.

Lopburi's claim to fame in Thailand is that it is home to a few hundred monkeys, which mostly seem to gather around one of the city's wats (temples). Gerni was smart and kept his distance from the creepy little bastards, but I got up close hoping to get some good photos of them. As I shot the photo below, two monkeys went on the offensive by jumping on my back. I freaked out and managed to shake them off before they were able to scratch or bite me, which was for the best. I guess that's why you get rabies boosters before you travel, eh folks?

So far, the two of us are loving Thailand. The Thai people are unconditionally friendly, and seem to constantly have a smile on their faces. The happiness is incredibly contagious, so we keep finding ourselves wearing big smiles as we enjoy the relaxed Thai lifestyle.

We're back in Bangkok now, and we're off to the airport tonight to pick up our friend Tom Garrett, who will join the travel train for the next three weeks. I hope winter is going well for everyone — I'm going to head outside now into the 75 degree evening air for a beer. Cheers, and happy holidays to all of you.

Ryan!

Photos updated: Varanasi, Kolkatta, Bangkok, Kho Yai National Park, Ayutthaya, Lopburi

The Burning Ghats

2006-11-28T07:12:00.000-07:00

The city of Udaipur sits on gentle hills overlooking a sprawling lake, and its big claim to fame is that the James Bond movie Octopussy was filmed here. The hills and winding streets reminded me of San Francisco, and the narrow alleys and relationship to the water reminded me of Venice, which when added to the distinctly Indian flare, made for a nice combination. Like in most Indian cities, the streets were dotted with people, rickshaws, goats, trucks, cows, cars, dogs, and even the occasional elephant. My hotel had a radical rooftop from which I ate superb home cooked meals and watch the sunset over the lake every night. It's also a stone's throw away from almost every area where they shot Octopussy, a movie which was filmed in Udiapur, in case you forgot to read that earlier.

Laundry and the lake palace:

Lal Ghat, the area where my hotel was:

Taking a break from the fort-temple-temple-fort-fort-temple routine, I decided to enroll in a few classes while in Udaipur. My two hour Indian cooking class was great, and I learned how to make some phenomenal vegetarian food including spicy paneer butter masala and everyone's flatbread favorite tandoori naan.

I also took a tabla drum lesson, which wasn't quite as good as the cooking class — my creepy instructor Krishna kept trying to sell me drums the whole time and informed me that I "play the tablas like a child." A one hour lesson only set me back about four dollars and I learned the basics, so I tolerated the humiliation.

My favorite sight in the city was definitely the Udaipur Maharana's collection of classic cars, which has been converted into a small indoor/outdoor museum for visitors. Unlike most guys, I'm not really crazy about cars, but I guess the Maharaja had good taste and he amassed what I thought was an amazing collection. There were more than 50 cars total including a flawless Model T Ford, some curvy Cadillacs from the '60s, and a couple of 1930s-era cars made by Rolls Royce. They even had the shiny black Rolls Royce Phantom III that bad guy Kamal Kahn drove around in Octopussy. Did I mention they filmed that movie here? The ticket price even came with an oddly-named "antique cold drink" which was a Coke which tasted like it too had been preserved since the '30s.

One of the dominating features in the area near the lake is the intricately carved Jagdish Temple, which was built in 1651. It can be seen in a few scenes of the James Bond movie Octopussy, which was filmed in Udaipur. Did you know that? The temple was great, but I enjoyed the courtyard outside more, which was full of some great photo ops of sunbaked saddhus.

On my third day, I finally broke down and took part in my hotel's awkwardly named "Nightly Octopussy Show" — hearing about the movie from shop owners all the time and not having seen it was driving me nuts. A word to the wise: don't ever watch Octopussy. It was easily one of the most ridiculous and awful movies I've ever seen, and I like almost everything — I even liked Highlander Endgame and the Super Mario Brothers Movie. This was that bad, folks. It was kind of fun to see Udaipur in the movie, and I was amazed at how little the city has changed in the last 30 years, but it was still excruciating to sit through all two hours of the awful film. And the funny part is that they refer to Udiapur as "Delhi" in the movie. Ouch! How do you like that, Udaipur!? Not so famous now, are you?

My last stop in peaceful Udaipur was the Bagore-Ki Haveli, which has been recently converted into a museum full of hit-and-miss local contemporary art, and some pretty interesting recreations of what the mansion might have been like in its heyday. The most shocking thing to me was the complete segregation of men and women in the house — separate bedrooms, separate sitting rooms, separate bathrooms, and separate game rooms. Men and women couldn't even play chess with each other in those days. Unfortunately, not much appears to have changed in modern India. The haveli is also home to the world's largest turban, which was about five wide, even though it doesn't look like it in this picture:

I left Udaipur headed for Agra on an overnight sleeper bus, which is probably my favorite way of getting around India. It only costs around a dollar or two more than a seat and you get your own tiny compartment which hovers just inches above the heads of the people sitting below.

In 1997, when the Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao was finished, the city transformed from a gritty industrial hub into a modern, world-class city virtually overnight. The city-changing quality the building had on the Spanish town was dubbed "The Bilbao Effect," and cities today strive for the same thing to happen to them. The Indian city of Agra is the reason why it's not called "The Agra Effect." Sure, it's got a great building. Possibly the greatest building on earth: The Taj Mahal. But the rest of the city is a total dump. Even the locals seemed to think so — when I told people I was staying for two days, they said it was one day too long. Yikes.

My first night in Agra, I headed across the river for views of the back of the Taj at sunset. In some odd fluke of city planning, there's nothing on the other side of the river except muddy banks covered in dilapidated villages, water buffaloes, stray dogs, and a handful of five-year-olds selling postcards. The capitalist American in me couldn't believe that land with million-dollar views had remained undeveloped, but it was neat to see a rural village in such close proximity to a city.

The next morning, I woke up well before sunrise and was third in line for the Taj. Travelers all around India complain about the excessive ticket price to get in — about 16 dollars. Word on the traveler rumor-mill is that Bill Clinton visited a few years back when the price was only a couple bucks, and mentioned that they could make a killing if they raised the ticket prices, so they increased it by a thousand percent. First Monica Lewinsky and now this. Way to go, Bill.

After forking over the cash, I finally made it inside and caught my first closeup glimpse of the stunning Taj Mahal. Completed in 1653, the building was commissioned by Emperor Shah Jahan to memorialize his second wife, who died during childbirth. His first wife received nothing but divorce papers. Probably because it's the most photographed building on earth, the Taj is one of the few places I've seen that looks exactly like I had pictured. With that said, it still was incredibly impressive, and I spent a few hours just hanging out staring at it as the sun came up and made the white marble glow.

Sick of sightseeing, I didn't accomplish much else in Agra before my long night train eastward to the holy city of Varanasi. The city is the major religious center of Hindu India, and it sits famously along the holy water of the Ganges River (pronounced gone-guh), which Hindus believe has healing powers. The reality of the river is probably the opposite, however, because the water is some of the most polluted on earth. Travelers like to quote the most awful statistic: the amount of fecal matter in the river is nearly 2000 times higher than safe levels for bathing. Still, that doesn't keep the holy from diving in and the locals from playing in the dangerously septic water. And you thought the rat temple was gross.

Except for the occasional nasty whiff of the river, walking along the ghats of Varanasi is an incredible experience. There are more than 50 ghats—the name for the sets of steps leading down into a river—and each one has its own personality. Some are specifically for bathing, some are used for doing laundry, some are infested with water buffaloes, some serve as home to stray dogs, some are calm and vacant, some and some are full of travelers and beggars. And two—known as the burning ghats—are where bodies are carefully submerged into the river's holy water before they are placed on logs and burned into ashes.

At first, you see the smoke. Then, along the stairs leading down into the river, you see piles and piles of logs. Then you see the workers, whose faces are covered in sooty rags. Then you see the mourning families. Then, the burning bodies.

I watched one woman—completely covered in fabric and flowers—placed upon sandalwood logs. Her son took a torch and ceremonially made a circle around his dead mother five times until he finally stuck the torch at the bottom of the bed of logs. The fabric around her began to turn black, and the outline of her body—once clearly recognizable as a person—started to erode as it burned. The family walked away and did their best to hold back their tears because crying is seen as bad luck and disrespect to the dead. Along the rest of the ghat, the same process was being played out a dozen times over. It's hard for me to accurately describe or analyze the experience, but I will say that I was surprised at how emotional I got watching all of that take place. Witnessing death in the form of human bodies burning was something that affected me and deeply resonated with me as a sight I'll not soon forget.

Away from the ghats, Varanasi is equally amazing. In the old city, the maze-like alleyways are the most narrow and confusing yet, and at night they turn into a lively market of souvenirs, open-air restaurants, paan wallahs, colorful bangle shops, and more. You have to watch your step, however — poorly-lit areas are like a cow shit minefield and one misplaced step could spell disaster. The traffic in Varanasi is definitely the most intense I've seen so far. The air in the streets vibrates with the clanging of hundreds of cycle rickshaw bells, covered in an earsplitting layer of motorcycle and car horns. Crossing the street is an act reserved for the stupid or the brave. A few quick videos of typical street scenes:

On my last morning, I went on an early morning boat ride along the Ganges with Sam and Brad, a delightful American couple that I kept bumping into the previous week. We lit candles, put them in banana leaf boats and put them into the water to float down the holy river. The city looked spectacular in the pre-dawn light, and the three of us all loved the hour-long trip.

I left Varanasi mid-afternoon on my last Indian train bound for Calcutta. I met some really cool Japanese and Korean guys on the train — one guy has spent the last five years snowboarding, traveling, and working short-term jobs as he follows winter around the globe in search of the world's best snowboarding runs. I arrived in Calcutta—currently known as Kolkata—and hopped on a 5-cent commuter ferry across the Hoolighy River, where I checked into Hotel Paragon, a fantastic guesthouse where mostly Korean and Japanese travelers had epic hangout sessions in the courtyard, playing guitars and singing Beatles songs. The main traveler area along Sudder Street has the distinct feel of a highly detailed movie set. Old-fashioned, bright yellow cabs move down streets lined with British-era buildings. Out of all the "traveler ghettos" in India, Sudder Street was definitely my favorite.

I spent my three days in Calcutta going to museums and art galleries. Museums in the city—and throughout the rest of India—are unbelievably sketchy and look like they were built, but never maintained, cleaned, or updated. I kept thinking of them as "museum museums," exploring the quirks and oddities of Indian exhibit design throughout the last century.

The first stop on my run-down museum tour was the Indian Museum, which was the city's version of the Museum of Nature and Science in Denver. My favorite room was the dusty "Plants in Service of Man" exhibit, which documented all the uses for plants in society. Did you know plants can grow things called vegetables, which we humans can eat? Or, did you know that trees produce something called wood, which we can use to build things like rickshaws or huts? I know, I was amazed too. In a different part of the museum, I was impressed with the lifelike sound effects of an aviary diorama, but then I realized it was just because real birds had actually made a nest there. Huh.

Somehow, the science museum was even more sketchy. It was meant to be an interactive and fun place for kids to learn about science, but thanks to India's thou-shalt-not-maintain-anything policy, many of the exhibits were broken. The ones that were working were often weird, or occasionally downright creepy. Take this exhibit called "Try to Touch the Doll's Head!," which demonstrated motion sensor technology. Kids are challenged to touch this doll's head before the motion sensor goes off and it drops down into a hole. I didn't know science was supposed to give kids nightmares.

In addition to the weird museums, I also made it to some great sights in Kolkata. The CIMA Gallery, although small, had a phenomenal contemporary painting and sculpture exhibition with several pieces by five local artists. All of the art revolved in some way around the theme of Bengal's mixed Anglo-Indian culture, and I left the exhibit inspired. I also visited the Park Street Cemetery was also an interesting look at the monumental gravestones of long-gone leaders of the East India Company, which dominated these parts during colonial India.

My last full day in India, I headed to the biggest theatre I could find to watch Dhoom 2, the action-packed Bollywood blockbuster that's out right now. One of the few things I knew about Bollywood is that they release the songs from the movie well before the movies hit theatres so that people can sing along and get really into the movies as they're watching them. Sure enough, I somehow knew a few of the songs just because I've been in India for a few months. The whole movie was in Hindi, so it was a little bit confusing, but I understood most of what was going on. Actually, I guess you could say the movie was in Hinglish, the weird Hindi-English crossover language spoken by the Indian upper middle class. Dialogue went something like this:

Oh my god! Hindi hindi hindi hindi hindi hindi. That's so cool, man! Hindi hindi hindi hindi hindi hindi hindi hindi hindi hindi hindi hindi hindi is all that I've ever wanted. Hindi hindi hindi hindi hindi. Oh, I know darling! Hindi hindi hindi.

Dhoom 2 is extremely controversial right now in India, because it features a kiss between respectable actors Aishwarya Rai and Hrithik Roshan — apparently it is the first actual kiss in a major Hindi movie. Scandalous! Anyway, the movie was silly and over the top, but a really fun cultural experience.

My two-month India tour complete, I parted with the chaos and boarded an airplane last night headed for Thailand. I'm in Bangkok right now, looking out the window of an Internet cafe as the afternoon rain pummels the streets. I got here this morning, and I'm loving it so far. Tomorrow morning I'm off to the airport to pick up my friend Gerni, who will be traveling with me for the next few months around Southeast Asia. Thanks for reading this whopper of a post.

Ryan!

Photos (finally) updated: Bikaner, Jaisalmer, Jodhpur, Udaipur, Agra, Varanasi. I also added the short street party video to the last post.

Deep in the heart of Rajasthan

2006-11-17T09:03:00.000-07:00

On my last day in Delhi, I thought I'd be a good little traveler and squeeze in one more sight before I left town, so I made my way to the large and looming Jama Masjid mosque in the heart of Old Delhi. The mosque dates from 1644, and to this day it remains an important center for India's huge Muslim population—the largest on earth. My favorite part was climbing to the top of one of the minarets which was packed wall-to-wall with people desperately pushing themselves toward the outside edges so they wouldn't accidentally fall down the spiral stairwell for a long tumble down the tower. The views of smoggy Old Delhi from the top were worth the danger:

After surviving the minaret mosh pit, I came back down to leave only to find that my shoes were no longer where I put them. I asked every official-looking person I could find about my shoes and they all just laughed at me and told me to go ask someone else. As the mosque shut its doors for the day, I came to grips with the fact that my shoes were gone for good, so I focused on the new problem at hand: finding a shoe store. With the help of a few very nice kids, I only had to go a few barefoot blocks through the filthy streets of Old Delhi before finding an 75-cent pair of flip-flops. Oh well.

To whoever stole my shoes:
1) You are a bastard.
2) There is a $20 bill hidden under one of the soles. Don't spend it all in once place.
3) I stepped in poop several times in those, so technically you are also a poop thief. How do you like them apples?

The next morning, I was up at the crack of dawn to get on my 12-hour daytime train to Bikaner. Seated near me in the train car was this poor Italian guy who was having an absolutely miserable experience in India. During the entire ride, he got hassled like crazy by relentless beggars, little kids wanting to polish his shoes, and people trying to sell him food. Sitting only a few feet away, I was almost completely passed up by all of these people. I don't know exactly what causes it, but the same phenomenon happens to almost everyone I've talked to — after a while of being in India, people just don't hassle you quite as much as they used to.

During the long trip, we passed through gritty cities and the stark Rajasthan countryside, punctuated by women in ultra bright saris, squatting mustachioed men, and kids excitedly waving to the passing train. On the outskirts of most cities lied cluttered, poverty-stricken shantytowns, which were simultaneously intriguing and disgusting, beautiful and horrific.

My first stop in Bikaner was to check out the Karni Mata temple located about 20 miles south of town. The temple is famously known as the place where a small sect of Hindus believes that they will be reincarnated as rats. As a result, the whole temple is swarming with a few hundred of the little rodents, which they regard as their ancestors. These weren't your typical New York City getting-fat-eating-your-delicious-sushi-leftovers-from-the-trash-can rats. These were sickly, scabby rats. Freaky rats. Indian rats. The kind of rats you had nightmares about as a kid. To make a gross thing even more disgusting were that pigeons and flies were everywhere as well, possibly in greater numbers than the rats. Karni Mata had clearly made it a mission to blur the line between Temple and Filthy Creatures Museum.

Despite the temple being completely disgusting, I really enjoyed the strangeness and absurdity of a place where rats are worshipped. A few local kids followed me around the whole time I was there, and insisted I took pictures of them with the rats. During one of my photo shoots, one of the rats pissed all over this kid's shoulder after which he pointed at the pee-stain, laughed and said, "mouse toilet!" Normally I'm pretty tolerant of people's faiths, but if your beliefs push you to the point where you proudly declare yourself a mouse toilet, you've gone off the kooky religious deep-end.

I spent the rest of my time in Bikaner checking out the cool city fort and accompanying museum, which had a surprisingly interesting account of the local British and Indian cultural mixture. My favorite part of the museum were the recreated table settings complete with placards describing the day's meal — from course-to-course was an odd mix of British, French and Indian cuisine. Also in the museum were photos of Indians donning gaudy colonial garb, and Brits dressed in ceremonial Indian costumes, with equally ridiculous-looking results.

One afternoon was spent walking around with a local kid who showed me all of the old havelis (beautiful historic mansions), the wild aromas of the local spice market, and the city's excellent Jain Buddhist Temple. The whole city is fairly tourist-free, which made it easier to meet local people without the fear of being scammed or harassed. Through the traveler grapevine I had heard really negative reviews of Bikaner, but I really liked it there, possibly because I wasn't expecting much. My hostel added to my enjoyment, and was a wonderful change of pace from the awful dump that served as my home in Delhi. Each morning over breakfast, I was treated to phenomenal discussions about global politics with the wise and worldly owner. After long days of sightseeing, I came back for a midnight trifecta of Seinfeld, Friends, and the Simpsons on the tiny TV in my room.

One of the compulsory activities for a traveler in Rajasthan is to go on a camel safari. To avoid sand dunes full of French tour groups and stoned Israeli backpackers, I decided to leave from Bikaner instead of the popular starting point in Jaisalmer. For only 15 dollars per day I was able to hire two huge camels, two guides, cooking supplies and food, a cart to carry everything. My guides were villagers from Deshnok and only spoke a few words of English each, which added to the adventure.

For two days, I rode atop my camel through rural Rajasthan's Thar Desert, past small villages in the barren brush, an amazing array of thatched-roof huts crafted out of the pale mud, and fields of dry looking crops making hearty attempts to grow in the desert climate. In addition to the many domesticated farm animals along the way, the route was also scattered with graceful antelope and fluttering white butterflies. People along the way seemed genuinely surprised to see a white guy in their neighborhood, and they often excitedly ran alongside me as I rode past.

Riding on a camel is not terribly comfortable. In fact, it is a lot like uncontrollably and aggressively humping—in all senses of the word—a big, farting blob on legs. By the time we got to the end of the first day, both the camel and I were exhausted from the days hump-a-thon.

My camel guides cooked our dinner as the sun went down over the dunes. Meals during the journey were a pretty elaborate production, and were surprisingly good. The guys would build a fire from sticks they gathered along the way, and cook up meal of spicy curried vegetables and potatoes over rice. They would add dried camel crap to the fire in order to make the chapati bread, which I did my best to stomach despite it tasting pretty horrible. We'd start and finish each meal with spiced chai tea, which they made out of fresh goats milk. And by fresh, I mean really fresh: whenever we passed a herd along the way we would stop, barter with the herder, and one of the guides would walk over and milk one of the goats.

Under a couple of thick blankets, I fell asleep under the bright desert stars, and woke up before dawn to the sounds of my guides already hard at work on breakfast.

After a long second day on the camel, we made it back to Deshnok where I tipped the guys big and then hopped on the bus back to Bikaner for my night bus headed westbound to Jaisalmer.

Jaisalmer is known in Rajasthan as "the golden city" and when I arrived it became clear why: the entire city is one color. One. No more, no less. The monochromatic golden hue spreads from the houses and havelis in old town, and sweeps up the hill where an awesome sandcastle-like fort sits proudly as it has for almost 900 years.

The fort and the rest of the old city are plagued with massive numbers of tourists, more than I've seen in any other Indian city. And while I'm not particularly against tourists (I am one, after all), it does make me uncomfortable to be a part of something that has such a massive effect on a local economy and culture. At the same time, I couldn't help but think that the city is certainly better off now as a tourist trap than it was as a military center when the fort was built — a fort full of tourists is better than a fort full of guns. Despite all the whiteys everywhere, the fort remains a really charming and wonderful place mostly because almost a quarter of the old city's population lives within its walls. I loved wandering its quiet alleyways, browsing its antique stores, and grabbing dinner and a beer looking out over the fort's impressive walls.

Jaisalmer's fort also boasts an awesome group of seven Jain Buddhist temples which were a maze of dusty, dark and intricately carved rooms. When I found myself alone in some of the dimly lit spaces, there was a distinctly Indiana Jones feel about the temples that I really loved.

On the last of my two days in Jaisalmer, I was given a tour around town by a delightful Brahman guy named Madhu, who gave me an insider's look into some of the best parts of the old city, a tour into the city's best havelis, and the city's serene lake. Along the way, we talked about both Indian and American politics, as well as lighter topics like Bollywood. Seeing a Bollywood movie is still on my list of things to do before I leave the country, but his description finally gave me an understanding of what it's all about. Your movie Titanic is Bollywood, sir. Titanic is wonderful. It is about love, heartbreak, passion, caste systems, struggle — everything you could want. If it had singing, it would be the greatest movie ever made. For months, I've been trying to understand the appeal of Bollywood films, and the Titanic-plus-singing comparison was as close as I think I'm going to get.

I left golden Jaisalmer on a bumpy night bus to the significantly larger city of Jodhpur. After some much-needed sleep in the guest house, I wandered outside to check out the city for the first time, and ran right into a parade celebrating a Muslim wedding. Right after I shot the video below, I was dragged into the middle of the circle and became the star of the show. Lucky for me, Indians seem to aspire to dance like nerdy white guys, so it didn't take much to impress the socks off of everyone with my dancing. For the next two days, random people on the street would recognize me and come up to compliment me on my dancing abilities. I've said it before: India is a strange and wonderul place.

Over the course of my two days in Jodhpur, I fell in love with the place. Many of the city's old buildings are painted a bright periwinkle blue shade which live up to its "blue city" name. It's easy to get off the tourist track here, and I spent a lot of time just wandering around checking out the little muslim butcher shops, seeing people weaving baskets or hammering tin pots, and enjoying the overwhelming smell as I walked past Jodhpur's many spice shops. The city also has the most delicious saffron lassis—a thick, spiced yoghurt drink—I've ever tasted.

The highlight of Jodhpur—and the dominating force of the city—is Meherangarh, the mother of all forts. Throughout India, there are a lot of impressive forts. Each city seems to have one. The one in Jodhpur stands as a big middle finger to all the other forts in India. I can imagine enemy soldiers approaching the fort hundreds of years ago getting close to the massive building and saying, well guys, should we... uhhh.... go home now, or what? This thing is that big.

The fort is probably the best preserved building in Asia, and the ticket price comes along with a phenomenal audio guide complete with sounds, music, fascinating descriptions, and interviews with key historians and people involved with the fort's history. After my long day yesterday wandering the complex, I made the long walk beneath its walls where I ended up by myself on the city wall overlooking the old blue town. I sat and watched shadows grow longer and colors brighter listening to the Sigur Ros parenthesis album on my iPod, which perfectly accompanied the breathtaking view. At one point, I just burst out laughing for no reason, just because I felt so amazing being in such an incredible place. It is times that like that which make me travel.

I'm currently in the lake city of Udaipur, which has been great so far. I'm taking a cooking class tomorrow, and I plan on taking a painting class as well, so I've got a few days rest before I resume finish up my whirlwind tour of India in Agra, Varanasi and Calcutta. Thanks for reading, and I'll leave you with the results of my adventures in bovine portraiture:

Ryan!

Photos updated: none this time, I only had time to upload the photos in the blog. Sorry!

Also, sorry about the two week wait from the last post. If you are truly desperate to read more travel stories, check out How Conor is Spending All His Money, which gives me serious blog-envy. If you're struggling to wade through his couple hundred posts over the last few years, you could start with this hilarious entry about nuts on an airplane.

Desert Camels & City Streets

2006-11-06T03:21:00.000-07:00

About a year ago, I watched an episode of my favorite adventure travel show Globetrekker about the world-famous Pushkar Camel Fair, where camel herders from around India come once a year to buy, sell, and trade camels. For me, it was one of two must-sees during my time in India (the other being the Taj Mahal, where I’ll be in a few weeks), so I made the trip over to Pushkar to check it out.

The first time I walked out onto the fairgrounds, I was totally blown away. Spread out into the distance, over sandy dunes thinly covered in spiky brush, were thousands upon thousands of groomed and decorated camels. Like wandering through an epic movie set, it was hard to believe that the whole thing was real. To make it even more movie-like, professional photographers and documentary filmmakers from all around the world weaved through the crowds.

Considering how many people and camels were camped out in the field the scene was strangely quiet, barring the bizarre screaming noise camels make, which sounds like a cross between a Wookie roaring and a baby crying. They’re not really wild about animal rights in the third world, and many of the camels were getting pretty seriously abused if they got out of line. Here’s a shot of some young herders laughing like crazy while they poked and prodded their poor screaming camel:

The fair’s main street area was buzzing with activity, and seemed to be more targeted toward the camel herders than it did toward foreign tourists. Brightly colored camel decorations hung from shop fronts alongside medieval-looking camel maintenance tools. Sketchy food stalls lined the small street, and snake charmers kept their cobras mesmerized as they poked their heads out of bamboo baskets. One snake charmer caught me off guard and heaved a snake basket up at me and the cobra inside lunged out at me and almost struck. Ha ha, not poisonous sir! Not poisonous! Ha ha ha ha. If he didn’t still have a cobra in his hand, I would have punched the guy in the face. Here’s some footage of the main street of the fair, with the snake charmer’s music in the background:

The actual town of Pushkar, about a fifteen minute walk from the fairgrounds, was a relaxing and wonderful place. With so many people coming into town for the fair, my hotel—a family-owned place strangely named Milkman—was packed to the gills. My room was hilarious: it was just a curtained-off area of the hotel’s rooftop restaurant which, despite the lack of privacy, had one huge advantage: free room service! All I’d have to do was stick my head around the corner of the curtain and order myself some cheap and delicious breakfast. A few minutes later, they’d bring the food right to my bed. It was delightful. I had a nice view from my bed too:

The awesome staff at Milkman organized an sunrise Camel ride through the fairgrounds, which I loved. My camel was absolutely nuts, and was the only one in the group that wanted to run everywhere we went, which made the ride genuinely exciting.

A few days after I got to town, the fair officially started. On the schedule were camel races, football and cricket games, camels and horses dancing, longest moustache competitions (!), and more. All the while, unofficial events took place around town like little kids perilously walking tightropes, folk musicians strumming guitars and singing, and street magicians captivating crowds of kids. The people watching at the fair was unparalleled — it was a bizarre mix of Japanese tourists with enormous cameras, stoned and barefoot saddhus, dreadlocked hippie Israelis, just-off-the-tour-bus Americans, camel herders in bright turbans, and green-eyed gypsies.

Unfortunately, the tooth pain that I talked about in my last update was only getting worse, so I had to miss out on some of the official events of the fair. After some serious internet research and advice from people on health message boards, I was left more confused about what to do than ever. Some said I had an abscess, some said I just had stuff stuck in my teeth, some said I needed a root canal, and some went so far as to declare that I had a neurological problem which could potentially lead to MS. On the night of Halloween, I decided enough was enough, and decided to head back to Delhi in search of a good western-trained dentist. Ten years earlier, I was gleefully dumping bags of candy on the floor examining the year’s loot, stuffing as many pieces of chocolate into my mouth as possible. And now, I was buying a ticket on a 10-hour bus on an emergency trip to the dentist. Sweet, sweet, irony.

Back in Delhi a few days later, my teeth were feeling much better by the time my appointment came with Dr. Kumar, a young American-born dentist who was trained in both India and the States. She did a thorough examination and didn’t see anything major wrong with my teeth — she thought that the pain might have stemmed from clenching my teeth at night, caused by high stress levels. Tomorrow I’m heading back to pick up my mouth-guards which I’ll have to wear at night. I know all of you sitting there at work reading this are thinking: High stress levels? You’ve been on vacation for 4 months! Apparently traveling in India is more stressful than I thought.

Since I’ve been stuck in Delhi for a little while, I’ve been trying to hit the sights that I missed the first time around. I visited the massive Red Fort, which formerly served as the throne for India’s maharajas before British rule, but is now a tourist attraction and central focus of India's annual independence celebration. The old spirit of the fort is kept alive by the armed guards who sit behind sandbags and have their guns pointed at you as you walk in.

I splurged on a guided tour, which was excellent despite my quirky elderly guide insisting on art directing my photos. No! Picture look bad from there! Come here sir. Here! Yes! Now take picture! Now! Better from here! I also visited the fort’s museum which was small but had a handful of really great expertly-letterpressed historic newspapers and letters during British rule and some stunning examples of calligraphy at its cultural high point. Outside the fort, I enjoyed wandering through Old Delhi, which is jam packed full of chaotic and overwhelming bazaars selling just about anything imaginable. The crowds are a little much for me in Old Delhi, but it’s definitely fun in small doses.

I’ve been hanging out quite a bit in New Delhi, which is more spread out, and more my speed. I went to the enormous India Gate, the country’s version of the Arc de Triomphe, where I chatted with a group of MBA students studying in Delhi for a little while. One of the girls—a super-hot girl, by the way—bashfully asked if she could get her picture taken with me. Because of India’s weird gender issues, it was the first time in more than a month in the country that a non-married female had said something to me. As we stood next to each other for the photo, I was feeling sassy so I threw my arm around her and pulled her close. The crowd of about 75 onlookers went absolutely bananas — people were laughing, hooting and hollering like they’d never seen anything like it. You’d get the same reaction from second graders in the States, not MBA students. Instantly, I was the king of India Gate. I was shaking everybody’s hand, taking dozens of photos, and being treated like a celebrity, just for being a white guy who put his arm around a girl for a photo. India is a strange and wonderful place.

The food scene in New Delhi is better than anywhere I’ve been since all the way back in Hong Kong, so I’ve been splurging almost every night on nice meals at classy restaurants. I’ve had some phenomenal Indian, Thai, Chinese and European dishes served in designer restaurants alongside Delhi’s young and hip.

It’s fascinating for me to see how Western and Eastern are coming together in new ways as the world becomes more and more globalized. At a not-so-classy meal at KFC (hey, give me a break, it’s delicious), I experienced my most globalized moment yet. In a European-style building built by the British colonists, I was served a spicy Chicken Tikka Wrap with a Pepsi by a multilingual employee. Next to me were a few Chinese tourists who headed to KFC eager for the tastes of home. On the stereo played the hot international single by Shakira (from Columbia) and Wyclef Jean (from Haiti). On the other side of me sat some ethnic Tibetans, and photos of Coloniel Sanders smiled down from the wall. The weirdest thing is that the unlikely cultural mix seemed, well, downright normal.

I’ve got a few more days in Delhi, then I’m headed West to Bikaner to continue my loop around Rajasthan. I’ll then make my way back East to Calcutta where I’ve got a flight booked to Thailand on November 29th. Thanks for reading another long post, and I hope you are all well.

Ryan!

Photos updated: Pushkar, Delhi

The highs and lows of traveling in India

2006-10-28T10:25:00.002-06:00

On my last day in Dharamsala, I made the short walk out to the small but very well curated Tibetan Museum, which told the story of Chinese occupation through the eyes of a handful of Tibetan refugees living in the city. It was particularly interesting to see photos of the young Dalai Lama accompanied by his entourage as they walked hundreds of miles across barren fields and snowy mountain passes as they escaped into India. So far, a staggering 1.3 million Tibetans have died as a result of the occupation — from murder, rape, torture, famine, and more. Without going on and on about the situation in Tibet, having visited both Tibet itself as well as refugee areas elsewhere certainly raised my own awareness of the Tibetan struggle — an issue I was only vaguely aware of before I came on this trip.

With only a few hours of sleep, I left the city for a crazy-early ride (3:45 am) on the most crappy bus in history headed for the holy Sikh city of Amritsar, about six hours drive to the west. The main attraction of the city for travelers and pilgrims alike is the Golden Temple, where foreigners can stay free-of-charge in dorm rooms. I managed to score a somewhat private room along with Simon and Carol, a cool couple from the UK that I met in Dharamsala. Just outside our door, masses of Hindu and Sikh pilgrims visiting the temple were camped out across the floor of the courtyard.

The scene during the day:

Even more bustle and bodies at 2:30 am:

Each day, the three of us were drawn like magnets to the Golden Temple. There is something truly magical about the place that is hard to describe. Thousands of people quietly move around the marble walkway surrounding the lake in which the golden temple sits. A line forms outside of pilgrims getting ready to enter the temple itself, where there are a few men chanting, praying, and playing instruments around the clock. After exiting the temple, Sikhs drink a few gulps of holy water from the lake. At night, everyone sits around the walkway to pray, meditate, or enjoy the serene atmosphere that the temple exudes. Simon, Carol and I must have spent ten hours just walking around the temple over the course of the three days that we were in Amritsar.

In addition to the Sikhs providing free accommodation, they also provide free food for up to 30,000 visitors per day, so I decided to go check it out. The experience of eating in the cafeteria totally blew me away — the whole process is like modern assembly lines, but it's all made with people. You walk toward the cafeteria and someone shoves a spoon into your hand. Then another hands you a cup. Then a plate. Then you follow the flow of traffic upstairs into a big warehouse-like room. You sit on the floor on a long bamboo mat next to the person in front of you. Just as you set down your utensils, the slop arrives. From a few feet up, a green pile of slop lands in your plate. Then white slop. Then orange slop. Then water in the cup. Then you hold out your hands and chapati (flatbread) gets dropped into your hands. Then you start eating. At coordinated times, people come by offering more of each color of slop. Although it looks pretty nasty, the food was actually really good — the green slop was like split-pea soup, the white was like rice pudding, and the orange was a sweet grain mixture. I loved the experience, so I went back a couple more times during my stay. Here are a few shots of the action:

During my stay in Amritsar, the single thing that impressed me the most was the people. Sikhs are probably the most considerate, generous and friendly people I've met on my trip so far, and you never feel harassed or scammed, which was a nice break from the rest of India. People love to get their pictures taken, especially the Sikh men — identifiable by the folded turban covering their uncut hair, long beards, steel bracelet and blade. I really enjoyed taking photos of people in the temple and out in the streets. Here are some of my favorites:

A few miles outside of Amritsar lies the India-Pakistan border, and each night there is a big and ridiculous border-closing ceremony with a lot of foot-stompin', silly uniform-wearin' nationalism on display. I piled in a minivan with a whopping 13 other people to go check it out, along with hundreds of Indian people who go to sit in the bandstands and cheer on their country's border guards. The somewhat goofy 15-minute ceremony, carefully coordinated between the two countries, almost made me forget that I was just a few feet away from Pakistan, somewhere I never pictured I'd be. Side note: The guy who drove me to the airport all the way back in Toronto was from Pakistan and invited me to stay with his family in Lahore during my trip. I gave it serious thought over the last few months, but in the end I decided that Pakistan just isn't a smart place to be right now, even though I've met several people who just went and they said it was amazing. I'll have to save that country for a future trip. See Mom, I'm making smart decisions!

I spent my final night in Amritsar celebrating Diwali, the biggest national festival — basically the equivalent to our 4th of July. Walking through the streets, kids light off sketchy fireworks, and while I was running away from one of them burning on the ground I made the biggest mistake you can make in India: stepping in the water. Along about half of the streets in India there is a foot-wide gap between the sidewalk and the buildings, where there is this disgusting, smelly water. It looks like a cross between sewage and that blue water they put the combs in at Cost Cutters, plus a coating an oily film on top and a swarm of flies buzzing around. Trying to escape one of these fireworks, I sunk my right foot directly into the absolutely nasty water, submerging it up to the calf. Holding back my own vomit and tears, I hauled ass to the Golden Temple, where I remembered seeing an area to wash your feet. It was like the end of The Crying Game or something: me sitting there under the foot-shower trying desperately to get that horrible sludge off of my body. It was probably the most disgusting thing that's ever happened to me — I'm seriously shuddering just thinking about it.

After I felt somewhat clean again, I enjoyed a spectacular fireworks show over the absolutely packed Golden Temple complex, then headed for the safety of my new hotel's rooftop where I enjoyed a 360 degree view of sketchy fireworks lighting up the the sky which lasted until the early morning.

The next afternoon I was off to the train station to take a 17-hour sleeper train to Jaipur, the capital of the state of Rajasthan. On the long train ride I was befriended by an incredibly nice Sikh family who generously fed me dinner and breakfast and insisted that I stay in their home next time I visit Amritsar. I was overwhelmed by the hospitality and it left me with one final great impression of the unbelievable kindness shown by almost every Sikh person I met over the previous few days. I was thrilled to be in India, surrounded by such great people.

And then along came Jaipur...

As I was researching for this trip, I read that India is one of the most difficult places on earth to travel with all of the hassles, ripoffs, sketchy situations, traffic, noise, smog and more. Whoever came home with those impressions of the country definitely spent a long time in the city of Jaipur. Every ten seconds or so, someone would come up to me and hassle me to give them money, to go in their rickshaw, to drink tea with them, to take their picture, to shake their hand, to buy them chapatis, to go to their shop, to buy gems from them, etc. Add brutal heat, thick smog, and deafening traffic into the mix, and only a few hours outside made me feel absolutely exhausted. It's almost as if 50 years ago, in addition to the regular classes at school — math, science, social studies, gym — they added a special Jaipur-exclusive course called How to Annoy the Living Shit out of Foreigners.

Despite the constant annoyances, I managed to see most of the city's big sights: the City Palace complex and armory, the numerous bazaars, the beautiful Palace of the Winds, and nearby Amber Fort. My favorite was definitely the Jantar Mantar, an fascinating outdoor observatory with enormous equipment dating from the early 18th century.

The best part about Jaipur—and I realize this sounds completely ridiculous—is that they have a freaking Subway. And a McDonalds. And a Pizza Hut. When you're sweating like crazy, you've got smog in your eyes, and people constantly surrounding you yelling to get your attention, American fast-food joints are transformed from restaurant into refuge. The headaches and hassles of Jaipur melted away with a little bit of air-conditioning, pop music, and a delicious meatball sub. Luckily, I met some really nice solo travelers at my hotel—Stu, Marc & Jac—who were feeling the same way about the city, so we all vented (at Subway) together. Just to give you an idea of how filthy you can get after a few days spent in Jaipur, here's a shot of Stu's feet:

To make matters in Jaipur even more uncomfortable, I started having an absolutely incredible toothache with extremely intense pain on one side of my mouth which lasted for a few days before I decided that I had better see a dentist. After searching for half a day, I finally found a place that seemed decently reputable. In the end, my visit was frustrating: the dentist just tapped on my teeth a little bit, took a few x-rays, and declared that I was fine. A few days later, I'm still in pain, so I'm debating whether or not to head up to Delhi to find a western-trained dentist.

I'm now hanging out in Pushkar, an awesome city to the south which is home to the internationally known Pushkar Camel Fair, which is taking place right now. I love the town so far, my guesthouse is awesome, and I'm back to having an great time. I spent a few hours over at the fairgrounds earlier today, and it was absolutely unreal. I'll talk about the camel fair more in my next update. If the jaw-pain situation calms down, I'll stay here until November 5th (the end of the fair), then continue my trip through Rajasthan. I'll leave you with a shot of my current setting, the beautiful and relaxing city of Pushkar:

Thanks for reading,
Ryan!

Photos updated: Dharamsala, Amritsar, Jaipur, Pushkar. Also, I was finally able to upload the video of me jumping off a bridge in Nepal. You'll have to tilt your head 90 degrees to the left to see it. Sorry!

Three very different towns in Northern India

2006-10-17T06:38:00.000-06:00

Leaving the concrete jungle of Chandigarh, I headed for the old British hill station of Shimla aboard the narrow-gauge railway—affectionately called the to the Shimla Toy Train—which winds its way over the course of eight hours through more than a hundred tunnels and even more switchbacks.

The town was once a summer home to the Britsh Raj, who came to get out of the overwhelming heat of Delhi. Shimla is a hugely popular vacation and honeymoon center for affluent Indians, and as a result the town has a really relaxed atmosphere and I enjoyed spending a few days people-watching, strolling along the British-colonial architecture, browsing the busy market street, and enjoying the delicious north Indian cuisine. Here's a video of Shimla's market street, followed by a few scenes from the city:

The only thing that prevents Shimla from being truly relaxing is that the town is chock-full of monkeys. Walking down the street, you’ll hear a bit of rumbling from a rooftop, and then — BAM! — a monkey falls from the sky and hits the ground in front of you. It gets a little bit freaky sometimes. The locals must think so too: they’ve shipped a bunch of the crazy monkeys to a park in Tajikistan. Here’s a shot of a sleepy monkey, followed by a video of a few monkey-acrobats:

Sightseeing options in Shimla are a bit limited, but I did check out lemon-yellow Christ Church which is only the second Christian church to be built in India. I also made the trip to the Himachal Pradesh State Museum, which was surprisingly great. Highlights from the small museum included intricate Indian miniature paintings, an excellent collection of old coins, a display of traditional clothing from different periods of time within the state, and an interesting collection of local contemporary paintings. There was also a small section about Gandhi, which included a fascinating letter he sent to Adolph Hitler in 1939, which begins, “Friends have been urging me to write to you for the sake of humanity.”

I left Shimla on a night bus bound for the little mountain town of Manali, a popular travelers hangout and a base for doing a number of outdoor activities in the area. One of my big reasons for doing this quick tour of Northern India was to try to get out of Delhi’s 90 degree heat for a little while. As I arrived in Manali just before dawn, it was clear I was going to get way more cold than I wanted: the town was freezing and teetering on the edge of winter. A lot like a Colorado ski town, I arrived at exactly the wrong time: it was too cold for summer activities, and the snow hadn’t hit yet to attract the skiers. I enjoyed myself anyway, hanging out in cozy restaurants, reading over tea, exploring the nearby villages, and navigating the crowded streets of the city center. Although I had started getting used to the trash and pollution everywhere, Manali’s otherwise beautiful mountain setting made it all seem so much worse. Trash seemed to cling to every surface, rivers and streams smelled like bathrooms, and the air in the town center was so polluted that I had to hold the arm of my sweater over my mouth in order to breathe. I’m not yet sure what to think of India’s astounding sanitation and pollution problem, but it will certainly be a major hurdle for them as they escalate into the first world over the next thirty years. Here are a few scenes of the mess:

After a few days in Manali, I was very ready to leave so I got on another night bus, this time bound for Dharamsala, which has served as the home of the Tibetan government-in-exile and the Dalai Lama, who came to the town in 1959 after barely escaping Chinese-occupied Tibet. In my first few minutes of walking through the nearby town McLeod Ganj where I’m staying, I experienced culture shock. This time the shock wasn’t a result of the trash, the hassles, or the poverty, but from something else: Americans. Throughout the last three months, I’ve probably come across a total of about 75 Americans. In the course of a single day in Dharamsala, I ran across at least twice that many. Eating lunch, I overheard pieces of a conversation: I can’t believe Steven Soderbergh directed that movie… it just seems so out of character for him, you know? I just sat there with my mouth open in shock. Hearing a mass of Americans talk about regular American stuff with each other was really weird for some reason. I suppose I’ve just gotten so used to not being able to understand what anyone is saying that it has become normal for me. All over town, it was the same story: You should buy that scarf here, honey, it’ll be a lot cheaper than back in Boulder. Boulder? As in… Boulder, Colorado? I don’t know what it is about Dharamsala, but it brings us Americans in droves.

I’ve been here for a couple of days now, and I am absolutely overwhelmed by the staggering amount of stuff there is to do here, mostly revolving around Tibetan culture. McLeod Ganj is the main Tibetan stronghold outside of Tibet, and the relatively small town is mostly Tibetan despite being in India. Movie houses around town screen movies about Tibet along with a handful of Hollywood blockbusters, you can sign up to learn the Tibetan language, get schooled in the basics of Tibetan massage, and more. I’m in the middle of a three-day Tibetan cooking class along with a couple of other foreigners, which has been fantastic. So far, we’ve had a day learning the ins and outs of making different types of momos (steamed dumplings) and a day making variations on bread. Tomorrow we’ll tackle a few different recipes of soup.

Yesterday, I paid a visit to the main Buddhist temple in town, located just a few steps away from the Dalai Lama’s residence, where he lives when he’s not on his regular speaking tours across the world. The temple serves as the main spiritual center for Tibetan refugees, who are forbidden by the Chinese to make the trip into Tibet to the Johkang Temple in Lhasa. The temple complex and foreign tourists alike are overwhelmed by the loud Indian visitors, who unfortunately seem to come to the temple just to get pictures with foreigners and practice their English. Here’s the first of many groups of people that took pictures of me — I know it’s really hard to distinguish me from the group so I’ll give you a hint: I’m the white one in the middle.

The other night, I went to a coffee shop to listen to a Tibetan refugee talk about the horrific ordeal he has been through in Chinese-occupied Tibet. When he was eighteen, he served as a monk in a monastery which was taken over by the Chinese, who imposed a strong set of rules on the monks so that the monastery would be run in harmony with Chinese politics. At risk to their own lives, he and three of his friends decided to rebel by putting up posters around town denouncing the Chinese occupation. They immediately fled the towns and lived in hiding for almost twenty days before they were captured and imprisoned. After three years and two different prisons where he sat in solitary confinement, he was transferred to a work camp where he was forced to work long hours inside a dangerous mine. After only a few months, he was horribly injured by a piece of machinery inside the mine; both of his legs were broken along with one arm, so he was taken to a Chinese hospital where they quickly declared that his legs must be amputated. Thankfully, he was granted the request to be transferred to a Tibetan hospital where he slowly got better, legs and all, over the course of almost two years. As he recovered, there was pressure from the Chinese for him to go back to the work camp. With the help of an old teacher, his doctor, and his sister, he was somehow able to escape Tibet and flee into India. He made his way to Dharamsala where he has been living for years as a refugee, but is trying hard to get Indian citizenship in hopes that he will be able to return to Tibet to visit his family and friends. Visiting is still a risky proposition, because he stands the chance of being imprisoned again for his old crimes, but he thinks that the Indian government will protect him from the Chinese.

It was a pretty heartbreaking story, and unfortunately, I’m sure ones like it could be told by many other people in town, and in other refugee communities in India, Nepal and other parts of the world. Even more shocking is that these horrific events are still happening. Just yesterday, a group of 42 Tibetans trying to flee into India over a mountain pass were gunned down by the Chinese military, killing a nun and a young girl and injuring many. The only reason word got out that this happened was because some western trekkers happened to be on the same mountain pass and caught the whole thing on video and in pictures. Since China’s government highly censors media and there is no free press, people living in Tibet and the rest of China will likely never hear about it ever happening.

Despite a decent amount of international pressure, Tibet remains under strict Chinese control. Although I’m only recently aware of all of these issues, it seems clear to me that the Tibetans have one big shot at gaining a truly autonomous province: the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. At no other time in the history of China will there be more foreign press in Beijing, and it seems to me that if enough people made enough noise, something substantial could be done about the Tibet situation, among other things. Although my brother would probably have a lot more insight into whether or not pushing China to change is completely idealistic (care to comment Bill?), it seems like if they ever would change it would be based on a huge amount of international pressure and potential national embarrassment. Here are two Tibet-related websites that you could check out if you’re interested in learning more or taking action:

International Campaign for Tibet

2008: Free Tibet

I’m planning to hang out in Dharamsala for a few more days because there’s so much to do, then I’m headed for Armitsar, located a few miles from the India-Pakistan border. Then I’ll make my way down to the desert towns of the Rajasthan state where I’ll spend about a month before flying to Thailand to meet up with my friend Gerni, who I’m quite happy to say will be traveling with me for a few months.

Also, while I was in Manali, I made it to Day 100 of my trip, which means that I still have three-quarters of my trip to go — a simultaneously scary and exciting thought. I was going to write a big Day 100 post with all of my thoughts and feelings so far, but I was far too busy traveling and the moment passed. I’ll just give you a quick and shallow summary of thoughts, realizations, and things I miss:

I really miss my friends — there’s nobody on earth like ‘em.

I can spend an unbelievable amount of time alone without getting bored.

I am hopelessly addicted to the Internet.

Time goes by really slowly when you travel. Austin told me it seemed like just yesterday when I left. For me it seems like its already been a year.

With that in mind: thirteen months is a reeeeally long time. Holy crap.

Good coffee tastes even better when it only comes around once a month.

People in Asia seem to have only heard of California, Florida and New York. It’s a strange feeling hearing myself describe Colorado as being “in between California and Florida.”

Beds in Asia are hard. So are pillows.

America is designed in ways I never realized before. Almost every object you touch in America has been considered and coordinated by someone. Every day, I have thoughts like, there’s something screwed up about this bus, or this sidewalk is really weird for some reason that I never had before in America.

Food I miss: Taco Bell, sushi, Dr Pepper, pumpkin pie, and fresh cracked pepper.

Books I’ve read so far: Platform, Peace like a River, White Teeth, Holy Cow: An Indian Adventure, Are You Experienced?, Cloud Atlas, Blink. White Teeth and Cloud Atlas are my favorites so far.

The album I’ve listened to the by far more than any other is Modest Mouse - Building Nothing out of Something. Other bands in heavy rotation: The Books, Black Eyes, Dave Brubek Quartet, Green Fuse, Tilly and the Wall, Lightning Bolt, Humble Ary, Mates of State, MIA, and Pearl Jam.

Well folks, that about wraps it up. Thanks for reading this absurdly long post. More than four pages in Microsoft Word — a new record!

Ryan!

Photos uploaded: I’m totally caught up with my photos, so go check em out! There are new photos from my trek in Nepal, Chitwan National Park, Delhi, Chandigarh, Shimla, Manali and even a few from here in Dharamsala. I’ll try to upload more videos from the last month, but for now I’m just going to focus on keeping everything up to date.

A day in Le Corbusier's Utopia

2006-10-10T06:39:00.000-06:00

After I walked home from the internet place last time I updated, I was frustrated that I wasn’t able to accurately describe the chaos of Delhi. Then I remembered: You have a video camera in your pocket, idiot! Here’s the area near my hotel — it gets even more intense than this once you add vehicles and animals into the mix:

The following morning, I jumped on a super-comfortable air-conditioned train headed north to Chandigarh the capital of the state of Punjab. The city is unlike any other in India: it is the planned vision of one man, and is considered to be the greenest, cleanest, and most orderly city in the country.

First, a little history. When India gained independence from Britain in 1947, the massive country was partitioned into three pieces based largely on religious divides within the country. The main Muslim area to the northwest was named Pakistan, the middle Hindu area remained India, and the Muslim area to the northeast became Bangladesh. The majority of the state of Punjab — mostly Hindu and Sikh — remained in India, but its capital Lahore became a part of Pakistan. Punjab was without a capital, and someone along the way decided that the state should just create a new city from scratch. After a long search for architects and planners, Punjab settled on famed Swiss-born French architect Le Corbusier to plan and design a modern metropolis. Only somewhat familiar with Le Corbusier, and with a growing interest in urban planning, I decided to make the trip to Chandigarh to learn more.

Side note: My brother Bill emailed me about the above history being partially incorrect, especially with regard to the formation of Bangladesh. But hey, what did you expect from someone who majored in design rather than history?

I arrived in the train station and was taken by auto-rickshaw through along Corbusier’s organized and orderly roads to Sector 17, the main part of town, where I got dropped off at the hectic bus station. Along the way I saw street after street of what looked to me like uninspired strip malls. Sure, there were a few really nice spots, but overall it looked a lot more like a sketchy area in LA than it did like Utopia. Crumbling utilitarian concrete structures filled every block — parts even reminded me of the war torn buildings I saw a few years ago in post-war Bosnia. There was no war here, however: just the remains of one man’s attempt at building a utopian city, fifty years later. Although I was determined to keep an open mind, one thought kept passing through my mind: holy crap, Le Corbusier was an idiot.

To try to make sense of this strange place, I walked to the nearby City Museum which carefully documents the planning and realization of Chandigarh all the way from India’s independence to present day. I spent several hours in the small museum poring over each display, trying to understand why such a smart architect would have intentionally created such a city. The more I explored the museum, the more I appreciated what Corbu was trying to accomplish. He planned residential areas close to restaurants and retail, but made sure to keep a buffer between high traffic streets and people’s homes. Schools, churches and parks were built within each half-mile sector so that each sector would become its own walkable neighborhood. Many of his ideas sounded strikingly similar to theories behind contemporary mixed-use town planning found in places like Belmar, Bradburn and Stapleton back in Denver. So what went wrong in Chandigarh? I headed back out into the city to try and find out.

I walked through Corbusier’s “Leisure Valley,” a pleasant park that stretches through the city on my way to the Corbu-designed government buildings in Sector 1. When I reached the area, I was again shocked by the unfortunately designed structures I found. A founder of the Purism movement, Le Corbusier believed that disguising or decorating a building’s structure — the concrete, brick and glass — takes away from the building’s purity. He also designed everything to be in harmony with the golden ratio, considered to be proportionately ideal. As a result, Corbusier only built “pure” buildings: huge perfectly-proportioned blocks of concrete. While I value the ideas behind his buildings and he was certainly part of an important era in the history of architecture, I think his buildings ultimately fail to connect and resonate with regular people, myself included.

I was getting sick of all the concrete and ghost-town plazas, so my next stop took me a few blocks away to another surreal place, again created by the vision and creativity a single person: Chandigarh’s Fantasy Rock Garden, created over thirty years by a local road inspector named Nek Chand. The surreal and whimsical place is full of pouring waterfalls, tiny weaving passageways, and hundreds of quirky sculptures made largely out of trash: broken dishes, discarded bracelets, and plastic electrical parts. The enormous place serves as a monument to Nek Chand’s incredible imagination, inspiring kids and adults alike to laugh and point with amazement as they wander the weird and wonderful place. There’s a shot of one of the bracelet sculptures below, but many more from other people here.

I headed over to the nearby Corbusier-made lake as night fell, where the whole town gathers every night for food, fun and people watching. This was the first truly successful Corbusier-creation I had seen yet — the small plaza was packed and everyone was having a great time.

I met a few groups of funny Indian guys who rattled off question after question to me about my life in America. Besides the standard two questions (Are you married? Do you have a girlfriend?), one guy asked me what I thought was the single biggest difference between America and India. I stupidly said something about America being really clean compared to India, which, although true, was unintentionally offensive. The more I thought about it, the biggest difference I’ve seen revolves around gender. Men here seem to exclusively associate with other men, and women with women, unless a marriage is involved. The guys found it completely unfathomable that I could possibly have friends that are girls — the concept is seriously alien to them. Marriages here are still mostly arranged by parents, but there is a shocking western trend coming into India: “love marriages.” While we walked along the lake, one guy whispered, look, there’s some western culture!, pointing to a scandalous couple making out behind a tree. Meanwhile, guys are constantly showing affection for each other publicly — it is normal here for guys to have their arms around each other or hold hands while they walk. After answering all the guys questions, I went with a few of them to one of their favorite fast food places where they stuffed me full of cheese dosa, sort of like a crepe or thin pancake. Here are all of the guys hanging out near the lake:

The next morning I walked around Sector 22 where my hotel was located, trying to get one last feel for Le Corbusier’s vision. Wandering through the residential area and seeing the built-in schools, parks and churches, it was clear to me that his ideas weren’t all bad. In my view, the biggest of Le Corbusier’s failures is the lack of architectural diversity and interest throughout the city. If he had gathered a group of fellow architects and had them each create five residences for his new city, then distributed each design around, the whole thing might have turned out better. If Corbu’s city was based upon the needs of people, he surely should have understood the basic idea that people are all different. Shouldn’t the architecture reflect that same diversity? But in the end, so long as I kept my eyes squinted a little bit, the city actually seemed like a fairly pleasant place to live. Indian people must agree: Chandigarh is considered to be one of the most posh and upscale cities in the country. I would love to return to the city in thirty years and see how Corbu’s city evolves along with India’s rise to superpower status in the world.

I’m currently in Shimla, an wonderful old British-era hill station, which has a very European feel and is apparently quite popular with Indians on their honeymoon. My quirky hotel room here looks like the smallest cabin inside an Eastern European cruise ship, or as my guidebook describes it, concrete bunker chic. I’ve spent the last day wandering around Shimla’s mock-Tudor architecture, and enjoying the people watching on the main pedestrian mall. I’ll write a bit more on Shimla later, but for now thanks for reading.

Ryan!

Also, a quick side note: Congratulations to my home city of Denver for being bold enough to complete Daniel Libeskind’s controversial design for the new wing of the Denver Art Museum, which opened to the public while I was in Chandigarh. I personally love it and some people hate it, but regardless of whether the building is ultimately “good” or “bad,” it seems clear to me now that more architectural diversity around town is almost always a good thing.

I don't think you're ready for this Delhi

2006-10-07T08:24:00.000-06:00

I awoke in Pokhara early in the morning and heaved my backpack on the top of the bus bound for Chitwan National Park, near the border with India. Five hours later I arrived in Sauraha, the town next to the park, where I met a guy from a nearby guesthouse who gave me a lift into town in the back of his jeep.

It was the day of the big festival in Nepal, and there were a lot of goats tied up around town awaiting their doomed fate. I asked the guys at my guesthouse if they were planning on sacrificing a goat today, and they told me it was just about to happen, and I could watch if I wanted. Curiosity struck, and I headed behind the hotel to see the action. The goat was tied up and a couple of guys were preparing tables and getting ready for the slaughter. My internal monologue: So I wonder where they're going to do it? It looks like maybe they'll put him on the table over there and hold him down or something. Man, look at the size of the blade on that… THWHACK! Without the fanfare or ritualistic celebration that I had pictured, the goat was cut into two parts, and both were spurting blood and jiggling around on the ground. In case you're squeamish I'll spare you with pictures from the carnage, but here’s the little guy eating his last supper.

The owner of my guesthouse invited me to a soccer game later in the day, which was a ton of fun despite the fact that soccer is a boring waste of time. The opposing team and all of their fans were driven in from a nearby town on jam-packed flatbed attached to the back of a tractor, and the rivalry seemed fierce. A crazy town-on-town brawl broke out near the end, and the game resulted in sudden-death penalty kicks. My team pulled through with a win, and I celebrated with my friend and a couple of players at a local restaurant eating momos (Tibetan dumpling), a post-game tradition. After that, we all went back to the guesthouse for dinner where we were served delicious spiced meat. Delicious, spiced, goat meat.

The next day I ventured into Chitwan National Park in style: riding atop an enormous elephant. The elephant ride was surprisingly great despite its popularity with travelers — we were able to venture off deep into the woods where we saw a rhino, deer, various tropical birds, and more. I really liked my elephant because he constantly kept knocking down trees and wreaking havoc on anything around him, which made the trip even more exciting. At the end of the ride, we made a scene as we trampled through the streets of Sauraha atop the elephant where we got dropped off to watch the elephants bathe.

Later in the day, I joined two guides and two Nepalese travelers and went on a canoe ride down the river where we entered the jungle hoping to see some more wildlife. We saw a crocodile, monkeys, more deer and birds, but didn't get lucky enough to see one of the parks 40 elusive tigers. The two-hour walk through the jungle was like being a kid all over again — our goofy khaki-wearing guides would signal for us to stop and we'd crouch down quietly looking for signs of wildlife. The guides were really knowledgeable, and would excitedly point out different species, plants, and animal tracks along the way. Overall, it made for a really enjoyable little adventure.

I spent another day in laid-back Sauraha, reading, eating, walking around town and enjoying the spectacular sunsets over the river. This was the calm before the storm, so to speak, as I was headed for the chaos of India the following morning.

Another early morning brought me to the travel office where I got in the back of a horse-drawn cart headed for the bus station. The horse seemed unusually pissed off, and kept jumping up and kicking the cart. I asked the driver why his horse was so angry, and he replied, "This horse is magic horse!" I figured it was just lost in translation, so I decided to quit asking questions. A few minutes later, the horse smacked hard into the side a moving bus as we went through an intersection. I jumped out of the cart and saw the horse lying on the ground, and I was certain it was dead or at least horribly injured. To my surprise, the crazy horse got right back up, shook off the pain, and we kept on going to the bus station. Magic horse indeed.

After a couple of hours, my bus ride from Sauraha brought me to the border town Sunauli where I breezed through customs and headed into India for the first time. The town was interesting because both the Nepali and Indian sides look similar, except the Indian side looks like it just got hit by a tornado and nobody seems to have noticed. I haggled for a cheap bus to Ghorakpur, the closest city on the main train line where I arrived as the sun went down. I pushed my way through the trash, touts and lepers outside the station and managed to get a ticket on the night train from Ghorakpur to Delhi. Unfortunately, I could only secure a ticket for second class which doesn't even guarantee you a seat, only a spot on the 16-hour train, meaning I could potentially be standing up overnight on a gross train. I grabbed dinner in the filthy, seedy area across from the train station where I met a cool Polish couple in the same predicament, and we banded together hoping to get a spot in the sleeper car.

The train pulled into the station and our hearts sunk as we saw the whole thing was completely packed to the brim. We pushed through the crowd, stepped over bodies laying in every square inch of the train, and quickly walked through the sleeper class trying to find an empty bed. Somehow, we found three beds, but we weren't sure if they were reserved or not. The Indians in the car told us to wait until the train guy came around, so we did. More than two hours later, he arrived and informed us that these beds were reserved for someone else. Heartbroken, it looked like we would spend the night standing up. The train man told me to sit next to him, and he told me that there was a chance that we could get the beds. "Beds are 150 rupees extra, plus... baksheesh," he said quietly. I've never been to India before, but I could get the gist of what he meant. We bribed the guy with a few extra dollars, and he let us have the beds for the night. In sleeper class, there is no air conditioning, no bedding, and no place to put your bags, so you just have to keep them in the tiny bed with you and try to use them as a pillow. It made for a rough night's sleep, but it's much better than standing the whole night, that's for sure. Here are my first three photos of India: the border town, the disgusting train station urinals, and the station’s waiting area. Not off to a great start.

The next morning we arrived in Old Delhi where we haggled for an auto-rickshaw to take us to New Delhi, a short distance away. We battled through the absolutely insane streets pushing past mooing cows, rickety rickshaws, daring jaywalkers, relentless beggars, piles of trash, horse-drawn carts and more, all swirling around in every direction. I’ve seen some pretty crazy traffic in my travels, but that ride was by far the most insane traffic I’ve ever seen. We arrived in the Main Bazaar, a somewhat crappy traveler slum where everyone (myself included) seems to end up. I booked a room on the fourth floor of a dirty budget hotel, which seems to be all there is in Delhi if you don’t want to shell out a ton of money. Picture the room that Tom Hanks got in the movie Big the first day that he was an adult — you know, the room where he cried himself to sleep.

I’ve spent my last couple of days in Delhi getting used to the chaos and doing a fair bit of sightseeing. I visited the National Museum which was good despite desperately needing some maintenance and a fresh coat of paint — my favorite sections were the delicate Indian miniature paintings, the historical arms and armor, and small Pre-Columbian exhibit. Next, I was whisked off in a 3-wheeled auto-rickshaw to the Tombs of Safdarjang and Humayun which were both architecturally interesting, particularly the latter, which was designed and constructed during the same movement as the Taj Mahal, just a few hundred years earlier.

After stopping off at McDonald’s for a curry-flavored Chicken Maharaja Mac, I headed to South Delhi to see one of the world’s few Baha’i temples. In my opinion, the Baha’i faith is one of the best organized religions on the planet — it places a lot of emphasis on equality, personal paths toward faith, elimination of prejudice, and world peace. The Baha’i temple in Delhi is famous for it’s stunning architecture: a gorgeous marble structure designed in the shape of a lotus blossom.

The rest of my time has been spent exploring the British colonial New Delhi, with its wide boulevards, European-style architecture, and swank boutiques and eateries. I have really enjoyed wandering around New Delhi, check out the shops and restaurants, and getting a feel for modern India. The contrast between India’s social elite and its staggering poverty are pretty amazing, and since I’ve only been here for a few days it’s hard to really grasp. I’m trying to learn as much about it as I can, so I’ll keep you posted in future updates as I explore the country.

It’s too hot for comfort here in Delhi, so I’m heading north tomorrow to cool off in the mountains for a few weeks to check out the sights before I make my way back down here to visit the colorful state of Rajasthan.

Ryan!

P.S. I hope someone picked up on my Destiny's Child reference in the headline of this post. I worked hard on that one. Also, I'm not totally up-to-date with photos, but I uploaded about a hundred from Kathmandu and my trek in Nepal, so take a look.