But for now we are young/ Let us lay in the sun

And count every beautiful thing we can see

Top Five Favorite Hotels

1. Boddhi Tree Del Gusto in Phnom Penh, Cambodia

Perfect and peaceful afternoon cocktails on the French colonial teak veranda, while dazed and gasping after tours of the S-21 Genocide Prison and Killing Fields. 

2. Cheong Fatt Tze Mansion in Penang, Malaysia

 
In Penang, a strange and fantastic island mix of Indian, Chinese, British colonial and Malay culture, a gorgeous Cantonese ode to color, feng shui, and thunder.

3. Sindu Mertha in Sanur, Bali

Mostly because it's the kind of dream house we'll most likely never afford in the US, but could see ourselves designing conceivably in, say, 2024, when President Clooney names me ambassador to Indonesia. In fact, we spent a full 30 minutes deciding from which rooms our mothers-in-law—confused and frightened after being forced to spend their golden years somewhere on a remote Islamic island (at least until they discovered the joys of kopi luwak mochas)—would knit and bingo away their days. We liked it.

4.  The Imms in Chiang Mai and Bangkok, Thailand

We probably spent no less than three total months at these two hotels. Cheap. Nice pools. Air conditioning. Al-Jazeera English on TV. Enthusiastic security guards. Random Sino-Arab-Persian-unicorn decor. Usually ready and welcoming at 6 a.m. when we'd stumble blearily off an all-night bus ride. 

5. Naga Hill in Chiang Rai, Thailand

Me: "So do you guys want to get dinner in town or what."

Dad, already in lotus-pose: "I'd hate to leave this feeling that we just arrived in a place of magic."

6. Something Something Guesthouse in Hong Kong 

Efficient and thrifty. 

Haha! Ha!

Ha!

Ha!

On the plus side, I was nearly mugged walking back there down a dark side street late one night, only escaping by winning a footrace to a (well-lit) 7/11, pretending my iPod was iPhone, and calling in some muscle. Mama grizzly-style. Rawr. Never try to separate a drunk and cornered freelance writer from his computer.

What a beautiful dream/ That could flash on the screen

In a blink of an eye and be gone from me
Soft and sweet
Let me hold it close and keep it here with me

Two weeks left. I've been instructed to stop being "cold and indifferent" about leaving. Time to start reminiscing then, in list form: 

Top Five Cheap Things I'll Miss About Living in Thailand

1. Dinner

I'm not sure when we'll again be able to order appetizers, a fresh-caught grilled fish, a giant bowl of green curry, and two or three beers for the price of a Starbucks mocha.  

2. Haircuts

I usually end up looking like Ben Affleck in Good Will Hunting for a few days (cutting thick, curly, caucasian hair is like doing heart surgery here) and I'm invariably told that I'd be handsome if only I'd let them shave my beard. But $6 for a cut, two shampoos and a head massage ain't bad. The transvestites at Gay Cuts in Bangkok soothe my soul. 

3. Taxis

Clean, cool, comfortable, and $5 for an hour-long crawl across Bangkok in rush hour traffic. Ideal for naps. No buffaloes, sex, AK-47s, or durian allowed. 

4. Costco runs to Burma

Knock-off carnival. On our occasional visa runs to Tachilek, a wild west border town in Myanmar's infamous Golden Triangle region, we always return loaded down with fake Ray-Bans, boardshorts, pocket knives, exotic beers, animist idols, pirated DVDs, samurai swords, and bottles of South African wine. No yaabaa or viagra, please. 

5. Massages

Two hours for $6. Massages are my idea of tickle hell, but apparently this is a good deal. I guess.

6. Face Surgeries

Reunification Express

(a country is adjoined by one ribbon)

I haven't really mentioned how much I loved Vietnam, so I'm going to spend my last three weeks in Thailand talking about it.

Con and I took the train through Vietnam. I love trains. There's ample video of me singing songs about trains as a kid. Trains trains trains.

Con hates trains.

Because monsoon flooding had taken out a bunch of track in Central Vietnam, our train crawled down the coast for most of the night. We arrived in Da Nang five hours behind schedule. The delay made Con and just about everyone else thoroughly grumpy by the time we limped into town. I was exhilarated.

Our cabin had power outlets and leg room and beer (all I want in life are power outlets and leg room.  And beer.). I watched Apocalypse Now while rolling through a full-moon DMZ at midnight (too obvious?), and chugged down Vietnamese Big Sur with my head out the window.

It's hard for me to travel like we do without feeling like I should be working all the time—on a beach, atop a boat, in the most beautiful places in the world, etc. But, with no WiFi, there was nothing much to do but watch a country that we once invaded slip by—a country whose history makes my work seem so small—nothing to do but journey, and read books about power and war, and stare at the ocean, and try to begin sorting out what two years worth of these aching, elusive travel experiences have meant on this—likely the last—grasping, hopeful one of them.

I could've ridden for days. Trains trains trains.

Power Couples

(and yes, our trip cost $100 bazillon per day as well.)

Design Flaw, Revisited

Ha Noi 1000 Nam Thang Long

(Happy 1,000th birthday Hanoi)

The city's all buzzing and boozy and full of phở and light. We got there just in time.

 

 

 

 

 

Far from home, take the big game down

Two years here. Three months left. Time again to blog with fury.

Here's to everyday feeling a little bit like this:

volcanoes, cont'd.

4 a.m. hike up Ganung Batur, Bali, Indonesia

also.. more eyjafjallajokull!

Eyjafjallajökull. Me.

*Note: All photos, except one or two, by Rick Johnson. Vocals in Sigur Rós video also by Rick Johnson. Jim Wilkins on bells.

Iceland is all hot and bothered about something (you could say it lost its cool). 10 years ago, a ragged group of us tried to climb over that very same volcano, and it sent us scampering back the way we came with our tails between our legs. It's a very stubborn hunk of frozen igneous.

This led my brother-in-law yesterday to make a point: "I like how you have some sort of tie-in with most of the big current events."

Well... yeah. That's the goal.

So—at the expense of flightless travelers everywhere (including my sweet Swiss-stranded sister—tie in!), tulip farmers in Kenya, and the fledgling global economic recovery—check it out!

We did a 10 day trek that we called the Fire and Ice Tour (yes... we made sloganed shirts), because the island is very much just that. It was two weeks of glaciers, snow caves and hot springs... and even a hot rock that melted my pants. Obsidian (volcanic glass) littered the ground. Hardened lava flows from a 1994 eruption had been unhelpfully dumped all over the trail. At one point, we spent a full hour dropping huge ice blocks into a boiling pond, and at another, we spent a full day slogging uphill through what one of our crew referred to as "mile after mile of endless volcanic shit." I want to go back tomorrow.

It's the most visually otherworldly place I've ever been. Like the moon, if the moon wasn't such a freaking fascist. The midnight sun creates these sorts of six-hour-long sunsets. And the whole time we were basically aiming for the middle of these two giant ice caps — one of which was, per my prescient plans, Eyjafjallajokull.

Big white thing in the back:

Eventually we got there, camped right beneath it, and planned a marathon trek over the pass separating the ice caps and back down to the coast on the other side. Something like this:

Sigur Rós - Glósóli from Sigur Rós on Vimeo.

"Don't try if there are clouds on the icecap in the morning," the sweet Icelandic lady at the last campground warned. The next morning there were clouds. Unhappy clouds:

And we went anyway. We thought we could get up and over before the storm hit. I don't know why we thought this. That's frigging absurd. And so we climbed right into the teeth of this spittin' angry whale of a storm. Whale storm!

It actually wasn't so bad until the storm hit about two-thirds of the way up. Then we huddled and stared at the most ice-cappy part of the ice cap for an hour or two, sent a couple of former Army Rangers ahead to scout it out, and got second thoughts when Rangers returned with reports of densing (verb?) visibility, Katrina winds, and flying pebbles. Flying pebbles turned back Hitler at Stalingrad. Pebbles!

So we very literally staggered home. Some of us getting flipped:

All of us losing our pack covers (a giant pack is the last thing you want on your back in that kind of wind). All of us losing our way at one point or another.

All thrilled to see the sweet Icelandic lady waiting sans smirk to mother us into a (thankfully vacant) warm cabin with hot showers. The next day we ate whale or something, drank Spanish wine, and swam here:

Anyway... the point of this story is: I was there, man. Once. When it was silent. Before it was cool to have your travel plans shat on by an Icelandic volcano.