This blog is great when we have the time / fast internet connection to support longer posts with a lot of pictures.  However the Tumblr site above will let us give brief updates on our whereabouts and post a couple of pictures with ease.

We leave this weekend, fleeing the land of Thanksgiving revelers, cell phones and bailout debates for this year’s annual exodus.

We fly into Saigon so we can get pages added to a passport at the US embassy and then intend to work our way over through Cambodia.

By December 6th, we have to be to Bangkok to catch a flight home. In the meantime, we hope to marvel at Angkor again, get lost in the spooky Bokor Hill Station and ride a bamboo train with the locals.  Anything more than that is just icing on the rice cake.

Thanks for checking in - hope you enjoy the journey almost as much as we will!

If you’ve an inkling to see more pictures from my last trip (a brief felony-on-the-lam like streak through Guatemala and a week in Honduras) they’re up in my handy new gallery in which you can not only live to regret ever saying “Hey - when do we get to see your trip photos?” but offer comments on your favorite snapshots.

Isn’t life grand?!

Just click here: www.trekfeet.com/gallery/main.php?g2_itemId=1823

I could present you with half the cards in my hand and you would see only a tale of Central American adventures.

I’d tell you of New Years Day morning, when I wandered out of a drowsy mountain town to ruins from another lifetime, framed by fog and jungled canopy. And they were amazing - smaller and yet somehow almost prouder than Machu Picchu. They were ornate and deliberate and purposeful - as if these Mayans had time or inclination for pride and ornamentation, not just sense and survival. I’d assure you it was a joy to snake through them, taking photographs in the still cool air and hike up the falling down pyramids tucked away in the far back, like a clearance room.

I’d reach back further and tell you I spent New Year’s Eve with David and Bill - 70 something ex-pats who adopted me from the town bank and brought me back to Bill’s house to meet his Honduran wife. Well, Marta, Bill, David, and I - we drank Margaritas at their favorite bar in town and ate cheese, looked at old family photos and played with their monkey and children back in their living room. David lost a hand in Vietnam and had a fabulous hook performing in its absence and rosy cheeks roused by holiday cheer of one form or another. Bill’s portion of our rambling stew of a conversation alluded to a previous nuclear family in the states, an American government he no longer knew and dozens of Honduran venture capital adventures into which his two good hands were deeply plunged.

I’d share the afternoon spent riding a broken painted horse up the mountainside and then hiking to a tiny village where the kids were delighted to see pictures of themselves magically appear on the screen of my digital camera. I’d introduce you to the wonderful American and British women who were volunteer journalists at a Honduran paper, who made me laugh for hours with their stories and bickering over dinner and Salva Vida beers and international card games.

I’d smile and remember the sound of endless showers on the rain forest outside my island room and bbq crab dinners eaten under thatched roofs by a candle light that ebbed and flowed with the wind.

And it has been that kind of trip.

It has showcased gorgeous, tough scenery and numerous flamboyant characters and - due to Kraabel’s inability to break away from murderous work hours - a lot of solo time to read and journal and just get centered again. (That new agey summary is for you, dad.)

But I could also show you a different family of stories that string together a necklace of delays, downpours and cancellations.

I could tell you about hobbling up steep, slick cobble stone streets alone in the rain, dragging my bags across a pitch black town at 4 am to catch a bus. Flashlight in one hand and a small, never used pocket knife in the other. And I did catch that bus - which rumbled and swayed over mountain switch backs and then deposited us wordlessly half way through the journey for an unexplained and unexpected half day layover.

I’d tell you about days of canceled ferries and outraged masses of Hondurans trying their damnedest to get home to the islands after Christmas visits to mainland family. Killed flights. Tropical storms. Days waiting and then finally arriving on an island just in time for the gods to really release the heavens. When you hear “days dwindled away on a Carribean island,” you will be jealous. Until you see the rest of the hand: Raw, insect bit legs on the unseasonably cold dark island deluged with downpours and conquering winds, meekly awaiting the return of electricity.

It’s never just one or the other, is it?

I’m usually guilty of over optimism, an abundance of enthusiasm. It is such sweet joy to hit the road, any road, that sometimes I bring back only the cards that will inspire you.

To be honest, this trip was not about inspiration.

It has been a lesson in patience, in surrendering to the tide, in letting go and finding enough in just reading in a hammock, sheltered from the storm. Looking at pictures of Kraabel and thinking about the jokes he would make if he were here to enjoy the latest debacle, the newest roadblock in the journey. Watching the rain fall on all these foreign forests, just waiting to be nourished. Being quiet. Not demanding anything in exchange for nothing being demanded of me.

It has been a mellow time. The challenges and the rewards reaching some peaceful equilibrium that leaves me both happy I came and met this latest slice of world and vividly remembering how much I have waiting for me at home.

So that’s the whole tapestry this time - the magical, the frustrating, the exquisite, the solitude. The heads and the tails.

All in all, it was still a pretty good hand to be dealt.

But for today, I’m going to level with you.

I’m sick as a dog from some unknown but surely delicious meal and either the mountain descent left us mostly paralyzed or Kraabel has begun to beat me in my sleep. All I know is that every muscle in my body hates me and I shrieked in pain stepping off a curb on our ill-advised walk this morning in search of breakfast and traditional medicine.

I couldn’t be happier!

But before I retire (aka roll back over into the fetal position), a quick recap of the trip so far:

A 15 hour flight deposited us in Hong Kong - a city I fell in love with at first sight last spring. Coming back to her this fall was a warm reunion: The enchanting skyline, the gentle pitch of the romantic Star Ferry, the silent, slow motion Tai Chi each morning in Victoria Park and most importantly, heapings of hot salty fried calamari.

In the less-than-24 hours we had in town, we covered an impressive number of sights, walked for hours upon hours and then caught the ferry for Macau.

Macau feels like exactly what it is - the half charming, half tawdry love child of Portugal and Asia rising from the South China Sea. Colonialized and developed by the Portugese and eventually handed back to China when such aggressive nation building fell out of fashion, the island is now a hodge podge of European cathedrals and cobble stone alleys and South Asian noodle joints, curio shops and of course, casinoes. Gambling is legal in Macau and from what we saw it is also BIG business. The Wynn hotel and casino stood glimmering at sea’s edge and behind it a line of “less tasteful” local casinos sashayed and shimmied and fanned out across town. For my taste, a half day was enough time to admire the strange concoction, enjoy a great meal and get on to our next destination.

The next couple of days were spent adjusting to Borneo - a welcomed, warm and far less developed change of pace. We explored Sunday street markets where secular and Christian Malaysians and hundreds of veiled Muslims bought and sold goods to one another in surprisingly respectful harmony. We toured history museums bringing us from tribal heritage to the long line of British Rajs to Borneo’s latter day division between Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei. We ate, we walked, we snapped a million photographs and just enjoyed the peacefully exotic.

As Kraabel pointed out after we landed in Kota Kinabalu that first evening at midnight (still sans hotel room), we’d made it through three countries in less than 24 hours. Heading out to an all-night curry joint, jet lagged and oblivious to sleep patterns, I could only grin in response.

This is the dream.

Head lamps.  Mole skin.  Thermal long underwear.

Bolivianos, West African Francs, Thai Bahts. Drain plugs. Sleep sheets.

Yellow fever cards.  Sarongs. Flip flops.

Check.

We pace the house and deliberate packing lists with the shared understanding that we must be prepared for anything.  Thin nylon rope may be a necessity should our planned mountain climb go terribly wrong ala that tragic fellow who, trapped in a crevice, had to hack off his own arm (I really only mentioned that horrific story so I could use the word “crevice,” which I pronounce in my head with a jaunty British / French Canadian hybrid accent - “crehvaaasss…”).  The army-issue mini can-opener my dad gave me? Of course; should we stumble upon some Lost-inspired buried hatch resplendent with ancient generic tins of processed meat, it’ll be our salvation.

100 percent Deet. Cipro. Polarized camera filter. Waterproof Uno cards. Journals. 900 page book. Q-tips.

We’ve got it all.   

And yet…. And yet, we have not a single hotel room booked - even for our initial night in Hong Kong on a busy national holiday.  We are not entirely certain of our destinations other than “Borneo” at large and Mount Kinabalu in general.  After that….well, we have to fly out of Bangkok eventually.  The highlands or islands might be a nice diversion, but then again, Cambodia is enticingly close.  The route we’ll weave between the certainties of arrival and departure is still the unknown lottery, hidden under that alluring flinty silver.

And that’s the paramount fun of the adventure.

This is the rub I love most - in the trips and in my companion. The fact that he shares this giddy, brave new world, colonial explorer mentality is such a delight.  No matter we’re flying commercial coach instead of chartering steam ships and indigenous crews to cut a swath into the heart of darkness. Kraabel is still as drunk as I on the notion that there is unexamined territory left to conquer, unfathomable experiences yet to explore.  

Back home, the biggest mysteries in so many routine days are whether Crazy Mary will show up to paint at the coffee shop today and how many periwinkle Morning Glories might appear on the vine.  

Lovely secrets in their own right, but I will admit, I am craving Headhunters Trails through thick sweating jungle, where your heart beats slow and heavy in the heat.  I am dying for frantic, pungent markets where you watch your step and your bag.  I am counting the days until I hunker on cold mountain tops enchanted by the view, lungs clamoring for breath and hands for cameras.  I am longing to negotiate, barter, navigate, take chances. I am ready for eating and transportation to be a gamble and an escapade.

And just in the nick of time, the next adventure arises.

We leave Thursday. We’ll be gone just under two weeks.

These are the knowns.

Everything else is ours for the finding.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borneo

 

Six Thanksgivings ago, I spent the holiday week with her.  We ate Taco Bell because no one was around to tell us not to. We took long drives in her new car, pretending it was only to admire the mountains, forgetting our destination was the oxygen wholesaler.

We sat in the dusky dark of her living room, TV at an ignorable volume, and had the slow easy, inconsequential chats of family and old friends.  Talking with her was a waltz.  A lovely, warm, thick like honey waltz through Sinatra and terrible bosses, the challenge of relationships and celebrities, books and the husband she loved more tenderly after he was gone.

At night I laid in the guest bedroom and listened to her hold her head and moan almost imperceptibly in pain. 

They don’t tell you, she said, that chemo makes your bones ache. 

And I couldn’t imagine anything more horrible, more unfair and tragic than my beautiful, fearless grandma hunched up on her couch, cradling her own head and crying under the assault of drugs that were supposed to rescue her from this damn disease.

In the daytime, we talked positively. Always.

I thought she’d beat it.  She was too strong, too good, too optimistic.

But then, five thanksgivings ago, she was gone. 

Twenty years ago, she taught me to play Gin Rummy at a Formica table in a narrow aluminum cabin on Green Mountain Reservoir.  We’d sit in the warm kitchen, or out on the back deck, watching the hang gliders drift down the other side of the valley, into the gut of the Rockies.  And she’d nurse a Coors with one hand and keep an endless ledger of our games with the other.

In the whole rest of my life no one has indulged my appetite for games, for silly Rummy the way she did and that simple generosity earned her a fiercely guarded spot in my heart no time or distance could erode. 

One of the last times I talked to her, she had just been delivered bad news. Spreading cancer and diminishing odds. And we agreed the situation was “shitty.” That was how she spoke, which only made me love her more. 

She wasn’t really milk and cookies and bible verses. She was a sharp wit and cold beer, chicken and dumplings, moxie and a love of crocheting. She was elegant, plain blouses she had slowly pinned and sewed and years of quiet journaling. She was tai chi and painting lessons, independence and pale lace-lined dressing gowns that still smell like her.  She was all enigma and comfort.

A night or two after we learned she had died I wrote in my journal “I can’t help but think that the brightest bulb in the marquee of my life has gone out.” So dramatic, so self absorbed. 

So oddly accurate.

To know her was to have her focus.  To feel sincerely that she was your most loyal supporter, wisest adviser, most adoring cheerleader.

Now, I miss her hands most of all.  You can’t imagine the softness of her skin, softer than suede or cashmere. Dryer lint - this is the only comparison I can make.  Her cheeks, her hands, her arms, they were all so linty soft you lingered in the hugging, in the squeezing hello and goodbye.  My mom has that same ambrosia skin and sometimes, even five years later, just a moment of pressing my cheek to hers still chokes me up. 

One Christmas a decade back, my grandma sent me a book of poetry by a newspaper columnist she had read all her life. I’d never have guessed we shared that interest, but the book was beautiful - love sonnets to Colorado and its slate blue mountains and the golden Aspens that shook and shimmered silently while we buried her five Octobers ago. 

This time of year will always be her.  I will talk to her out loud even more often than usual and will ache for her suddenly in the early brave colorings of these long green trees.

Death has a way of sainting people, of framing their best portrait as the final word on character. I don’t know if that gesture is a gift to the legacy or the living. But it is a comfort nonetheless.

To me, she will remain the picture of gentle strength and endless grace. She is the resilient woman who raised three dynamic and compassionate daughters and two tender sons who were good uncles and better fathers.

I don’t know how well I really knew her. But I loved what she showed me and I am content to imagine the rest of her privacy was just as sweet.

I don’t think we’ve overbuilt her monument.

And I still can’t believe her song is gone so soon.

I love you Grandma Jean.     

Morning Star      By Thomas Ferril

It is tomorrow now
In this black incredible grass.

The mountains with luminous discipline
Are coming out of the blackness
To take their places one in front of the other.

I know where you are and where the river is.

You are near enough to be a far horizon.
Your body breathing is a silver edge
Of a long black mountain rising and falling slowly
Against the morning and morning star.

Before we cannot speak again
There will be time to use the morning star
For anything, like brushing it against
A pentstemon,
Or nearly closing the lashes of our lids
As children do to make the star come down.

Or I can say to myself as if I were
A wanderer being asked where he had been
Among the hills:  “There was a range of mountains
Once I loved until I could not breathe.”

I’ve been thinking lately about purpose and passion.

About whether what we do defines us and if we have an obligation to choose a life and all its actions as if it does.

Largely, that question bellows out at work – an area over which it seems I am always struggling to find a balance.

I tend to see and sort things in polar piles. This is all good, that is all bad. The bad ought to make you jump ship immediately. And if it is good, well, you aren’t working nearly hard enough to honor it.

I’m not sure I’ve been able to pin down a palatable understanding of our purpose as it relates to work yet. It seems that if we love or thrive on a career too fervently, it tends to become a performance arena in which all but a façade of ourselves is lost.

On the other hand, isn’t there something morally distasteful about spending so much of yourself and your time contributing to a cause that doesn’t move you at all – or worse, repels you? Is defense of our self and our autonomy a good enough reason to just go through the motions?

But it is more than work, really. What do our financial decisions and spending habits say about us? My sister and I have been talking a lot lately about the idea of having a consumer footprint. Forget about carbon emissions – do I really want to leave a trail of needless, impulsive acquisitions behind me? What does that say about what I value? And what I don’t? What does it say about what I gather and why I keep it?

Of course I am held in this idealistic trance of minimalism only until I break in self preservation and lunge for a massage or a new shirt I don’t need or a $4 iced chai because it brings instant, quiet pleasure.

There has to be contentment in balance, I think.

Peace, balance and contentment must be the loveliest words in the world.

But they lack the fire of purpose and passion.

And I can’t decide which flame draws me to it more strongly.

*          *          *

The other day my travel companion made an offhanded comment about a trip we took this spring not really being blog worthy. It was an entirely innocent remark about a short, last minute holiday and yet I wholeheartedly disagreed – a new reaction I found both satisfying and convicting.

How many times have I rolled my internal eyes at luxurious trips or vacations to commercial sounding destinations?  Written them and their travelers off because they weren’t edgy or adventurous or purposeful enough?

How shallow.

The most hopeful thought I have every day is that I am surrounded by beauty and joy and the exotic and overlooked mysteries no matter where I go. And I know that sounds so trite and Pollyana-ish. But if I can’t conjure excitement for the possibility of adventure in every day, I’m afraid I might miss it when it displays a bold and spectacular show somewhere down my literal and figurative road.

I’d rather be too delighted, too keen than to risk becoming jaded and miss it all.

So in celebration of adventures of all breeds, I give you far too many photos of lovely little domestic moments that are making me happy here and now, common treasures fully worth preserving and passing on…

These days just kill me. 

Energy clusters and crouches in my legs like unspent dynamite and suddenly I am 10 years old again and I think I could run for miles, blinded by whipping hair and sunshine.  Smiling so hard it is deafening.

This weather - this irrepressibly optimistic, invincible sun and warmth - has me swooning.  And I can’t sit still.

My bike got stolen last fall from a thicket of brush behind the house. It wasn’t a particularly nice bike - which made the crime all the more mean spirited in my book.  Why wouldn’t you steal someone else’s fancy bike and leave my humble runt alone? Which was in turn a ungenerous thought and perhaps the cause of preemptive karma.

But last week, after weeks of pursuit, my dad — who is the king of investigative shopping — helped me find a beauty of a bike from two wonderfully crunchy grad students on Craigslist. 

Let me tell you how deeply I love this bike. 

Let me tell you how I ride it around the lake every morning and feel untethered and indestructible.  I charge past the frowning joggers and am in turn overtaken by churning road bikers in flaming spandex like disciplined insects.  And I don’t even feel a competitive flinch.

I listen to Regina Spektor, whose irresponsible passion and husky refrains suit this season to a tee. 

"They’ll name a city after us
And later say it’s all our fault
Then they’ll give us a talking to
Because they’ve got years of experience
We’re living in a den of thieves
Rummaging for answers in the pages…"

And

"Suppose I never, ever met you
Suppose we never fell in love
Suppose I never, ever let you kiss me so sweet and so soft
Suppose I never, ever saw you
Suppose you never, ever called
Suppose I kept on singing love songs just to break my own fall"

Sigh.

Do this for me - take a bike ride and stand up to pedal.  Forget what you look like and just enjoy the purposeful orbit of your legs, the stretch of your arms to the handlebars, the feel of the wind on your face. 

Listen to embarrassingly melodramatic and joyful music. Put on the stuff you secretly adore but scoff at on your way to the Current if anyone else is in the car — Journey, showtunes, Frente, whatever.  Listen and bike like a kid again - because it feels so damn free. Pretend you’re escaping, not burning calories.  Pity everyone else.  Grin.

Last weekend, Kraabel indulged my every energy laden impulse.  We biked, we paddle boated, we played wholehearted tennis in the thick midday heat. We stood in the copper creek and built mental blueprints of seaworthy rafts. We golfed and he didn’t even blanch when I rolled up my pant legs like a hillbilly and sent half my drives sailing into forested muck and city ponds.  We built up impressive sweats and wore out clean clothes and had more genuine fun than I could buy at any price.

Tonight, I sunk my hands deep into pitchy wet soil and planted a trough full of flowers. Just for the hell of it.  Just because the unexpected color and scent makes me smile as I walk past.

Tomorrow I will get up early, before the sun is strong enough to confess the weather.  And I will push off the curb and bike away down my quiet street again.

Someday, I will finish stories of distant treks and exotic adventures.  

But right now, I can only think to drink deeply of these days and go to sleep exhausted.

And so happy to be so. 

After a bus ride from Hong Kong to mainland China, I hopped a teeming two night/three day train through some astoundingly beautiful countryside – steep valleys sloping down to river beds and yawning wet fields, sheer cliffs pierced with the glowing caves of workers camped down for the evening. The trip was like a rolling tour of every village featured in “the hero returns!" scene of every epic Chinese movie filmed in the past ten years.

It was a long quiet ride in a sea of Mandarin and I arrived at Chengdu — a pretty little town and the hopping off point for journeys to Tibet – ready for camaraderie.

Fortuitously, Chengdu is renowned for making mates out of strangers.

As part of their ongoing campaign to fastidiously govern Tibet and happenings therein, China has tightly restricted routes and methods in and out of the state – severely limiting overland public transport entries to an often unfeasible approach from the distant northwest. (NOTE – I’m happy to report this trip was taken before the trans-Chinese railroad from Shanghai to Tibet was finished. Not that the idea of hundreds of tourists shipped in like fresh cattle to trample this sacred plateau on a daily basis is unappealing or concerning or anything…) 

Most visitors – even the ever-frugal backpackers – typically concede to fly in from the nearest Chinese hub: Chengdu. To circumvent the additional Chinese requirement that all visitors to Tibet be part of a formal tour group, entrepreneurial guest houses in town collect teams of backpackers, sell them cheap airline tickets up in to Lhasa, a tourist permit and van service to and from the airport – thus constituting a package deal to satisfy any prying government eyes. 

I met my group at a far too early hour at our beautiful Ming era hostel on the morning of our flight to Lhasa. While the entire crew enjoyed a bit of banter through the interim of our flight and van rides, a small and unusual fraternity of us eventually broke off and quickly solidified.

We were an odd and international squad: A slightly dazed and incredibly well traveled Ukranian named Vladimir who lived in Moscow and was forever disappearing without warning for extended communion with the monks; an at once girly and intrepid engineer who worked in Antarctica half the year and enjoyed exotic travels for the remaining six months; Jason, a Canadian engineer working in Beijing for a year and his demure and feminine Chinese girlfriend; and my previously mentioned friend McKay, an avid outdoorsman and mountaineer who eventually talked me into leaving my better senses in Lhasa for a five day trek over two mountain passes in virtual wilderness. 

 But first we had to catch our breath.

We spent the 45 minute truck ride from the air field into Lhasa proper in a communal awe-struck trance. The car flew past indigo lakes framed by tattered strings of prayer flags and craggy leafless trees. We strained to capture blurred photographs of roadside murals of the holy Buddha etched on to boulders – not yet knowing we’d pass a dozen more on every hike and drive. 

Tibet is one of Those Places, and we were feeling it. We’d picked up and carried ourselves into Shangri-La and we were heady on dreams of silent monasteries and Himalayan peaks, the Dalai Lama’s motherland and the face of religious oppression. The car was thick with that palpable sensation I’ve described before – that unshakable feeling that you’ve sneaked past the guard or outsmarted the laws of society or limits of human nature in order to land at such an unthinkable pinnacle. For those first few minutes after touchdown, Tibet was Timbuktu and the source of the Nile, Siberia and the Milky Way – and we were driving into the shroud of an enigma to capture its reality.

I don’t mind that the description surely seems melodramatic. If you’ve traveled to a dream, you understand what I mean. And if you haven’t yet, I am all too happy to assure you it is every bit as intoxicating as you’d dare to imagine.

Even now, so many months later, I keep Lhasa preserved as a miniature kingdom in my mind.  A snow globe of cold-pressed scents – the chill of thin air and the drifts of incense leaking from every corner’s monastery, the thick warmth of yak momos frying and the comfort of hot, sweet jasmine tea. It is hazy hushed mornings, afternoon bike rides on ancient models, the thunder of unexpected flurries and the chant of monks futilely and formally debating as they have every day for centuries.

But all that is yet to come.

For today, we leave the story as it begins. A quixotic band of traveling misfits, migrating from across the globe to reach this hub of imagination together…  

I know conventional wisdom awards the country a monopoly on solitude and peace. 

But I promise you there is no quiet like the city on a morning like this. I cannot keep myself inside on these rare days - nights when the snow insulates the city walks and the lampposts cast a muted glow up into the purple canopy of the cloudy dome.  Hazy afternoons by the lakes where your ears search for any sound and report back only the faroff swish of cross country skies and what must be the noise snow makes as it falls on to piles of itself.

Today, I trudged past cafes where steamed glass windows presented a silent show: Family joints where waitresses navigate towheaded kids chasing dogs through slicks of melted snow. Elitist coffee shops where the wi-fi crowd sit in wire rims and uniform black and admire the weather during downloads. Past businesses abandoned for the day, amphitheaters without audiences, a gamble of sidewalks alternately plowed by industrious neighbors and neglected by lazy blocks still tucked into Sunday morning rituals. I barely noticed a noise the whole time I was gone, but I took in every wordless sight - of drifted doors and frosted branches, dog prints in shin deep walks and this black and white world reflected back even more elegantly in bay windows.    

Maybe it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but there is nowhere in the world I’d rather be when the heavens open than in a city - if only for the contrast.  Today, we are unhurried, observant and slow to speak…a better version of ourselves.