TrekFeet

I never promised you coherence… April 29, 2006

For the linear minded among us (heaven help them), here’s a boring old timeline of where I’ve been, where I am and where I hope to safely go in the weeks ahead:

December: France and Italy

January: Spain and Morocco

Late January to mid February: Togo and Ghana

Mid-February to early March: Burkina Faso and Mali

March: Kenya, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (yeah, I’ll explain that one soon)

April: Egypt and Jordan (Three weeks in the middle east with your parents provides some great blog material. Here’s a preview — my mom got molested on the Cairo subway by a surprisingly determined female pickpocket. Good times.)

May: Asia… in one form or another

In all seriousness, I should be thanking you guys for persevering through wandering recaps that have less focus than an acid trip. You deserve a medal. I’ll try to steal one for each of you from Chinese soldiers (Just kidding China, if you’re reading this. Which you probably are, Big Brother. I joke!)

So that’s where I’ve been.

Where I am is, oddly enough, Hong Kong. A dynamic, complex, utterly charming city flanked by what has got to be the world’s most beautiful harbor.

The skyline is like a massive lego city set on fire - there are just rows and rows of these towering monuments to commerce and technology all aglow in technicolor splendor under the cloudy night sky. And in their shadows is a medley of millions of kind, fashionable and old fashioned Cantonese eating dim sum from street stands and no-name joints and chatting on their state of the art cell phones. I spent last night riding the Star Ferry (which is every bit as dramatic and fabulous as I had hoped), wandering Kowloon and Hong Kong Island in search of street markets and eating turnip cake and fish stew with my roommate - a delightful expat named Francesca.

I never actually intended to be here.

Having certain negative feelings as I do about a certain rather bossy government…

However, after Syria refused me a visa (They literally ripped up my application when I said I was American. Guess they haven’t forgotten that little “Axis of Evil” comment after all. I had such optimistic dreams for the country, was certain we were going to love each other - only to be cruelly rejected. I felt like I had finally gotten up the guts to ask Syria out on a date and they shot me down flat - didn’t even soften it with that old “it’s not you, Erica, it’s us” nonsense. I actually teared up.) my hopes to travel from Jordan overland to Lebanon and Turkey kind of went out the window. Plan B was India and Nepal….until a friend with far better judgment and intel than myself pointed out that Nepal was on the verge of civil war. Sigh. Can’t these countries schedule their political upheavals more conveniently?

After careful investigation and painstaking planning (Read: Staring at a map of the world for a couple of nights and randomly poking my finger down), I decided to head east. Really east. And now, as previously stated, I am in Hong Kong with a newly procured Chinese visa and a train ticket to mainland China on Monday.

The loose plan is to try to make it to Lhasa, Tibet entirely overland in the next couple of weeks. And after that to recuperate from altitude sickness somewhere warm and friendly: Vietnam? Laos? Thailand? Not really certain yet, but I promise I’ll let you know all about it….within at least two months of it happening.

Take care of yourselves!

PS - It’s time we have a State of the Blog Address about certain annoyances and aesthetically unpleasing features - giant white spaces at the top of the page, odd gaps after apostrophes, occasional crap writing, etc.  

With the random computers I depend on these days - often powered by gerbils or child-labor - coupled with the lack of time I have to spend prettying up this place, the ugliness simply can’t be helped. 

(Read: I suck at web design and don’t care to perfect my skills when I could instead be eating curried beef noodle soup at the little shop on the corner.) 

I sincerely apologize to your eyes and promise to do better next time I have a mid-life crisis and take off roaming around the world.

Cheers!

Hard to think we’re lucky without realizing who was not. April 25, 2006

I sat down in the airport in Dubai, UAE this morning to write another rambling post about destinations changing but the adventure persevering, my inability to stay in the Middle East as planned and Nepal’s civil unrest blocking my trip there — basically, how the whole world can be spun to relate to Erica.

A charming town with a fantastic little family restaurant called Al Capone’s, where we ate at least once a day.  A little family restaurant that was decimated in yesterday’s bombing.

And while I appreciate the President’s quotes of condemnation and the media’s scramble to determine responsibility and fit this latest tile into the Middle East’s developing political mosaic, it all seems kind of insignificant in contrast to what this means in practical terms.

Say for instance, how many of Dahab’s Egyptians and Bedouins died to score this point.  How many more Americans will tsk-tsk and stand vindicated in their belief that the Middle East is full of deranged terrorist.  How many more people around the world will think this act sums up the region more than the Muslims we met — almost all of whom told us two things:  1.) You are welcome here.  And 2.) We all worship the same God - what should it matter if we do it in different ways?

I am thinking about the guys who waited on us at Al Capone’s, who greeted my family every night like their own family and came to chat while we waited for our food. Who laughed proudly when the rest of the town’s restauranteurs teased us about always favoring Al Capone’s. Who shook my dad’s hand firmly and didn’t care that he was American or Christian. Who treated us with respect and warmth. 

And I wonder how many of them died in the bombing. Or probably more realistically, how many lived.

I’m thinking about the little local girls – impossibly beautiful little girls – who climbed barefoot through all the beachfront restaurants like trapeze artists, under tables and over walls, smartly bantering with the tourists and selling their little braided bracelets.  And I wonder if the mastermind behind this “warfare” thought about that collateral damage.

Three foreigners were killed and a town full of vacationing Israeli families was probably terrified. And that is undeniably tragic.  

But it seems like relatively small stakes in comparison to the toll the village itself will pay.