all around the world

trip review

2007-07-29T13:05:00.001Z

my completed round the world trip 2006-2007:

(Ireland was also part of my trip)

For anyone stumbling through here now, this blog chronicles over a year of my travels and activities around the world between June 2006 to July 2007, ranging from my home in the Pacific Northwest, through Central and South America, stints in northern Africa and Europe, travel through the Middle East, northern India, and southeast Asia. To view the posts from a particular area, please click one of the following links:

North America | USA, Canada
Central America | Costa Rica, Panama
South America | Peru, Ecuador, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Brazil
Europe | Spain, Ireland, Bulgaria, Turkey
Africa | Morocco, Egypt
Middle East | Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel, Egypt
Asia | India, Thailand, Indonesia

My travels were made possible through the University of Washington's Bonderman Fellowship, which is a grant designated for independent international travel. For further information about the fellowship, visit:
http://depts.washington.edu/uwhonors/current/bonderman/

For more questions about my travels or anything else, email me at
spencerscomet@gmail.com

or facebook me at
http://washington.facebook.com/profile.php?id=10713238

To view more pictures, please visit my flickr page at
http://www.flickr.com/photos/spencerscomet

Thank you for visiting,
Spencer James
August 2007

what an epic year

2007-07-26T02:14:00.000Z

What an epic year... over the last10 months, I traveled in 20 something countries on four continents, surfed in three oceans, explored two major mountain ranges, and lived in deserts, trekked on glaciers, rafted on rivers, and saw pretty much everything in between. I felt more lonely and homesick than I imagined possible at times in South America and India, and then experienced unbelievable levels of euphoria, like when I was allowed into Syria and when I surfed Impossibles for the first time. I made new friends in most of the countries I visited and caught up with old friends in Spain and Bulgaria; I maintained my belief that the Pacific Northwest is the most beautiful area in the world but found numerous places that contend for a close second. I experienced the famous nightlife of cities like Buenos Aires and Beirut, and celebrated Christmas in Patagonia, Carneval in Cadiz, Saint Patrick's Day in Ireland, and Orthodox Easter in Bulgaria. Here are a few more statistics and superlatives:

general favorite countries - Argentina, Ireland, Syria, Lebanon, Thailand, Indonesia
countries that I have yet to grow a thorough affinity for - India
most commonly seen weapon - AK-47 (omnipresent in Uruguay, Lebanon, Kashmir)
hours on buses - 300+
longest bus ride - 21 hours from Montevideo, Uruguay to Florianopolis, Brazil after some idiot threw a rock and broke the window
flights - 25
countries visited with State Dept. travel warnings - 4 (Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Indonesia)
most volatile area visited - southern Lebanon and Kashmir (tied)
safest country visited - Chile (Ireland were it not for my Dad's driving)
most listened to music on my iPod - Red Hot Chili Peppers
best album for bus travel - Eric Clapton Unplugged
most memorable meal - Filet Mignon with Casillero del Diablo Cabernet at an Argentine steakhouse in Quito, topped off with Dulce de Leche
best wine - Malbec from Mendoza, Argentina, from a winery that I visited with five Irish guys
est. average number beers/glasses of wine per day in Argentina - 4
total number drinks in non-Turkey Middle East/India - 5
average servings of beef/day in Argentina - 2
number of beef items on the McDonalds menu in Delhi - 0
best nightlife - Kuta, Beirut, Buenos Aires
best waves - Impossibles, Bali
most cherished item that was stolen - Chaco sandals
favorite travelers - Irish
new hobbies - skimboarding, sandboarding, motorcycles, sketching, writing, canyoneering
friendliest/most hospitable people - Lebanese and Irish
# of times I hope to ever drink Nescafe again - 0
methods of transportation - walking, car, bus, motorcycle, ferry, river raft, bicycle
nationalities that people have assumed I was - (after talking to me): American, Canadian, Irish, English, Aussie, Argentine.... (before talking to me): Uruguayan, Lebanese, Israeli, Egyptian (seriously!)
worst hostel - Hostelling International, Madrid
best hostel(s) - Oasis in Seville, Bauhaus in Istanbul
hotel with most character - Talal's New Hotel in Beirut (anarchists, journalists, wanna-be journalists, and dudes who sit around smoking nargileh all day)
best cities - Buenos Aires, Jerusalem, Dublin
least favorite cities - Lima, Delhi
most expensive accommodation - $120/night (houseboat in Kashmir)
cheapest accommodation - $3/night (hostel in Arequipa, Peru)
most expensive city - Dublin, Ireland
cheapest city - Damascus, Syria
best airport - Singapore (free internet!)
worst airport - Alexandria (I seriously thought I had found a bomb sitting in the corner of the "terminal")
least probable occurrences - running into Rula in a flamenco bar in Seville, getting a visa on the spot to visit Syria
number of books read - ~25
favorite books read - The Kite Runner, A Monk Swimming, Shantaram
best ruins - Palmyra in Syria, Baalbek in Lebanon, Petra in Jordan
best architectural sights - Temple Mount in Jerusalem, Taj Mahal, Aya Sofya and Blue Mosque in Istanbul
best natural sights - mountains and valleys of Kashmir, Fitz Roy in Argentina, Sahara Desert in Morocco
number of times I've been convinced that a country has the most beautiful girls and/or best food - 6 (locations will remain undisclosed)
% of people I explain about the Bonderman Fellowship to - ~40%
country with highest priority to quickly return to - Indonesia (next summer, inshallah!)
speaking of inshallah, number of religions I learned more about - 5 (Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, Islam)
best homesickness remedies - best of craigslist, clean airports, changing countries, seeing my dad in Ireland and my family in Chile

It's pretty tedious to try to remember anywhere close to all of the things I've seen, particularly because this trip has been so segmented. My travels in South America felt like a completely different trip than my experience in Europe, which was in turn completely different than my journey through the Middle East. Indonesia didn't feel like a part of my "Bonderman" journey at all, but instead more like a vacation that I tacked onto the end of a completed eight month trip.

Sometimes I flip back a few months in my blog or on flickr, and I can't really fathom that I was actually, say, driving in a jeep in Kashmir next to the Pakistan border with a bunch of guys from Jammu who didn't really speak English. What really stuns me is the fact that I did everything I set out to do. It seems like that doesn't happen very often with big ambitions. Something always gets sold short, doesn't work out, or something else gets in the way, but here I am in Bangkok, about 10 months after leaving home, and I've visited Tierra del Fuego, Seville, Israel, and Kashmir (the places I originally proposed on my Bonderman application), spent almost two months surfing in Bali (a dream for me since I started surfing), and met a slew of incredibly interesting people from around the world who I hope to see again in the future. I guess throughout the trip I assumed there would be some disconnect, that something wouldn't work out, that I'd go home after eight months, change my plans dramatically, or whatever, but...no.

I hadn't thought about this until now, actually. I mean, it was so easy a year ago to be writing that I was going to be traveling to these places, seeing these things, but when the reality sunk in during those first weeks in Costa Rica of how lonely and strange extended independent travel actually was, I think I had some doubts about how far I would actually go. I remember reading something in a book called Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk when a guy traps these writers in his house after they had signed up for a "writer's retreat" there. They're complaining that they can't write in these conditions, and he replies, "what stops you here is what stops your entire life." I remember reading that (or listening to it, since it was on my iPod), and thinking how relevant it was. Things that could distract me and disrupt my ability to travel and enjoy the places I was so privileged to see were the same things that could throw off any of my life's ambitions and plans...I had to get the proverbial dirt off my shoulder (I wonder if Jay-Z and Chuck Palahniuk have ever been referenced in the same paragraph).

So, I did. I stopped getting mad because the water made me sick or because someone cheated me out of a peso or two, did things as I wanted to do them, and lost my hesitations of changing plans or making drastic decisions. I read at some point on the UW Honor Program's website that the Bonderman Fellowship was intended to "foster independence", and I was a bit surprised when I read that, because it wasn't one of the usual cliches that are attached to international travel. But it was true - independence had been fostered, and I lost the need to seek approval of what I was doing from anyone except myself. I wanted to go to Lebanon the night I flew into Amman, so I bought another flight and went. I wanted to properly see Kashmir, so I flew to Srinagar and went overland through the heart to Leh. I told the relevant people about these plans after I made them, probably occasionally to their consternation, but I lost the feeling like I needed to ask permission or gain anyone's approval except my own.

Similarly, I felt like when I started my trip that as a Bonderman Fellow, there were certain things I should and shouldn't do. I shouldn't travel in western Europe, spend too much time surfing, or have an overly active social life. When I headed to a beach to surf or went out for a night with people from my hostel, I felt somewhat guilty, like I should be on some dusty 30 hour bus ride in central Africa or talking to some village chief in Borneo. And this is probably true to a large extent - there are definitely more meaningful things to do in one's travels than drink vodka Red Bull with backpackers in a club in Rio, but then again, some of my most vivid and best memories of this trip are from the people my own age, both locals and travelers, who I wouldn't have met if I was sleeping in some obscure suburb in an effort to unearth some deep crevice of "culture."

The last segment of my trip in Bali was simply two of the best months of my life and basically consisted of surfing all day and going out all night, and I don't have a single regret about deciding to spend so much time there. Sure, I could have spent the time traveling through more of southeast Asia and checking out the temples of Angkor Wat, the islands of Halong Bay, and the culture of Changmai, and those things would have been great, but I think they would have been just photographs, whereas I know I'll never forget the people I met and the waves I surfed in Bali. I don't want to be too serious, though. It's hard to go wrong with 20 grand to spend and a whole world to explore.

Anyway, I thought this last post before flying home would just be numbers, but I started writing and suddenly there's several paragraphs above me. It's 10:20pm on the 26th here. I have to be at the airport in 5.5 hours. I am deliberating staying up until my flight leaves so I can sleep all "night" (my day, Seattle's night), but after 10 months of safe travel, I don't want to tempt the travel gods into making me sleep through my flight.

In less than 30 hours I'll be able to say that I traveled around the world!

AirAsia

2007-07-25T04:54:00.000Z

It seems like all too frequently I find myself in strange, partially inexplicable situations like being in the hot and humid Kuala Lumpur airport at 7 this morning wearing half a dozen t-shirts, a raincoat, and a zipup hoodie (all at the same time), and being laughed at by a group of girls as I methodically stripped off the layers and crammed them into a small bag.

Now I'm in Bangkok for two days, next stop - Seattle.

the Bali List

2007-07-21T03:45:00.000Z

The things I'm going to be missing in about 10 hours when I fly out of Bali:

Driving motorbikes on sidewalks and going the wrong way down one way streets being acceptable ways to deal with traffic or navigational woes, and the general void of speed limits and driving rules
Warung Indonesia
"Hey boss! You want transport, motorbike, surfboard, magic mushrooms?"
basically every surf break on the Bukit Peninsula, but particularly Balangan and Impossibles
MBarGo, Skygarden, and other venues of Kuta's chaos-themed nightlife
Never being more than 5 minutes from a surf shop
My daily perusals of surfboards
the people I've been hanging out with - Welsh, Irish, French, Swedish, South African, American, etc.
Everyone smiles so much here! I haven't been home in almost 10 months, but I seem to remember smiles or general expressions of happiness are sort considered faux pas
It's a strange thing to miss, but I've developed a bit of an attachment to daily injuries I seem to accumulate

Anyway, I couldn't have picked a better place to end my trip, though I am a bit relieved to have escaped unscathed from the last month and a half. Being in Bali kind of keeps you on your toes...there's this t-shirt that says something like "Indohazard: perfect hollow waves, sharp reefs, terrorism and bomb threat, volcano explosion, .." and some other stuff, but it's probably not an exaggeration...I mean, you take something slightly less than safe, like riding a motorbike, and then stack it on top of driving on the left in the middle of chaotic traffic, and then stack that on top of the fact that you're driving to surf heavy Indonesian waves that send a number of people away on crutches or with any sort of injury possible...and then you do this every day. I am definitely, definitely coming back here.

2007-07-15T03:07:00.000Z

A week or so ago I made a few trips on my motorbike up the island to some other beaches and then inland to Ubud, which is a little bohemian (first time I've ever used that word, I had to google define it to make sure) town in the middle of a bunch of rice paddies. I've been pretty much in paradise out on the Bukit Peninsula, but the rest of Bali that I've seen was quite beautiful, too, and seeing it while driving a motorbike really topped the experience off.

I got a lot of surfing in, too, and did some fishing and snorkeling when it was flat. I'd forgotten how great fishing is, oh, and one of my several dozen ambitions for when I get home is to take up spear fishing.

The girls who work at my hotel started calling me Snapper (as in red snapper, the fish)partly because they can't say my name and partly because I came back sunburned one day. The nickname has grown on me.

An American expat I know got me a second one month visa with a connection he has at airport immigration.

I got hit by my surfboard at Padang-Padang and had to get stitches in my face, so I can't surf for another few days now, or even swim in the pool. Walking around Kuta with a large dressing on my face gets me a lot of double takes, which is mildly satisfying.

An Irish guy I know got a pretty bad cut on his foot, too, so we've been regulars at Legian Clinic in Kuta. I also got a sizable burn on the back of my calf from the muffler on my motorbike, and a nice accumulation of cuts and bruises on my hands and legs from surfing Balangan. Since I can't surf, I've spent a lot of time oggling surfboards at the several dozen surf shops in Kuta, and I bought a number of new t-shirts.

It's disturbing how many times on this trip I've seriously considered the possibility of terrorist attacks when making plans. There's a massive memorial for the 2002 bombing at the actual site of the attack on Legian, which is right next to several other popular nightlife haunts. I went out several nights in the last week with a crew from Dreamland, which was great after a few months of having a low key social life, but matter-of-factly discussing terror threats and levels of security at different nightclubs is a little hard to stomach. Indonesia is the fourth country I've been to with a travel warning from the US State Dept. - Lebanon, Syria, Israel being the others - but it's the only one I've been to where I feel like the threat has Westerners as the deliberate targets. That is supposedly the case for Syria, but there were so few Westerners there that it was hard to take seriously.

Anyway, sorry about the blogging hiatus, but I'm always somewhere between just writing about another surf session or wanting to write something conclusive about the last 9.5 months, but I don't know, it seems like everything is already there. I never had a definitive moment or period that resulted in a then-and-now thing. I was homesick and lonely for most of my time in South America and rarely felt that engaged, I generally kind of lacked direction or resolve in Europe, I loved every minute that I spent in the Middle East, India was a vivid little anomaly of big mountains, Thailand was truly relaxing and easy, and Indonesia has been, well, see the posts below. What I really wonder about is what would have happened if I did my trip the other way around - started in Asia, continued through the Middle East, Europe, and finished with South America. It's hard to imagine that I would have loved South America like I've loved Indonesia and the Middle East, but I think one of the reasons it's so easy to enjoy my time here is that the end is tangibly close. I think the fact that I had so much ground to cover and time to spend when I was in South America made it difficult for me to just relax and enjoy the scenery and experiences.

hat trick

2007-07-02T10:48:00.000Z

I surfed three world-class waves today - Padang-Padang, Impossibles, and Balangan...well, I only caught one wave at Padang-Padang, because it was closing out there so I paddled down to Impossibles. Impossibles was firing! Barelling overhead lefts, steep take-offs, long rides, and only a few guys on the first peak. After surfing there for a few hours, it died out a little so we headed back to Dreamland, refueled, and headed down to Balangan to surf a sunset session. Balangan is sketchy at low tide! The wave breaks about 20' from this rock shelf that is exposed, so when you're on the waves you're looking right at the land, which is counterintuitively at the same level as your surfboard. I caught one wave that was so long that my legs were burning at the end, a claim I've only been able to make on a dozen or so waves in my life. I had been feeling a little down the last few days from being sick and just feeling kind of tired of doing the same thing every day, but these two sessions quickly revived me for the last...lets see...THREE weeks of my trip!

Want to see something beautiful? Check out these pictures of the lineup at Padang-Padang and Impossibles:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/85476058@N00/309024580/
http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=surfing+padang+bali&page=3
http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=surfing+padang+bali&page=2
http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=surfing+padang+bali

Sorry, I have still yet to really take any photos here...my camera is just shot, the lens cover doesnt really open or close, batteries never work...mostly I'm just lazy.

productivity

2007-06-27T02:41:00.000Z

I have been unusually productive lately. Here is a list of my recent exploits:

Visited a temple at sunset and watched an Indian-Balinese dance that culminated with a guy dressed as a white monkey kicking flaming piles of straw at the viewers
Surfed five sessions in a single day
Caught the two biggest waves of my life - solid double overhead!
Broke a skimboard that I recently purchased(I consider my various destructions to be productive)
Befriended an Irishman
Started sitting deeper than anyone else at Balangan and thus catching all of the best set waves, and actually connecting several sections!
Broke into the one-month-remaining point, closing in on the gone-for-nine-months point

The surf has been ridiculously good lately. I had a short session this morning before breakfast, and then while eating breakfast watched a few pro surfers ripping up the shorebreak, pulling into barrels within spitting distance of the sand. An Aussie guy was shooting on a Nikon D200 with an 80-200 lens and got some incredible photos, and made me want to break out my camera again since its been lying dormant basically since I arrived in Bali. I also picked up a bad little virus or something that has made sleeping less-than-pleasant, but it is also all the more motivation to get out and surf to flush saltwater through my sinuses and clear my head. Anyway, see you all in a month!

Uluwatu

2007-06-22T00:00:00.001Z

I surfed Uluwatu yesterday...it humbled the expletives right out of me! It wasn't even a big day by Uluwatu standards, but I was scared the entire time I was out there. I surfed a section aptly named Racetracks, which is just one of 4-5 different peaks at Uluwatu. I caught one set wave which was the biggest left I've ever caught in my life, and just barely dropped in before getting smashed by the lip and thrown around underwater for some time. The rest of the session I was kind of twitching with adrenaline and in complete awe of the surfers on the same peak, some of whom were likely pros. I was paddling up a wave face at one point while a guy was dropping in right next to me, and the wave was quite easily twice his height...I mean it just dwarfed him. If you actually froze the wave and measured the wave face, it was probably 12-15', which looks really %$#^in' big when you're lying on your stomach looking up at it, though as a surfer I have to make some ridiculous underestimate and say that it was a 5-6' wave, which actually adheres to physics where the "wave height" is only half of the total amplitude. I only caught one more wave after the first one, but the session still felt like a success.

The experience starts with arriving in the cluster of warungs and small buildings at the top of the cliff, where you can see waves breaking along the Uluwatu lineup and eventually extending into the Padang Padang area, then onto Bingin and eventually to Dreamland and Balangan. Then you walk down these steep flights of stairs down the cliff and end up on this little patch of sand in a canyon/cave that extends into the ocean. You paddle through the canyon, which surges as waves come in, and then you're in the open water where you have to paddle and duck dive for 10 minutes until you can make it outside. Unfortunately it is an incredibly crowded lineup, with at least 20-30 guys on each peak. As serious as the wave is, I was surprised by the fact that I felt like I could have surfed it okay were there not so many people, since on any wave you paddle for you have to worry about whether you're dropping in on someone, whether someone is dropping in on you, and whether there are people paddling out who will be in your way. The best part about surfing there though was the fact that it was my fourth session in one day! I went to bed at about 9pm, sunburned, exhausted, and still feeling the adrenaline.

check out these pictures of uluwatu! i didn't take them but i found them on flickr:
here is the cave you go through to get out:
http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=328069496&size=m

uluwatu on a big day:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/petermbyron/487940320/

the lineup:
http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=445857497&size=m

another big day:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mguire/523528752/

anyway, my countdown timer tells me that I arrive home in 36 days. I really want to see more of southeast Asia, but life is just so good here in Bali that it's hard to entertain the thought of going elsewhere. Though my Indonesian visa is adorned with a large "NON-EXTENDABLE" stamp, apparently if you talk to the right guy on the right day and pay the right baksheesh then this detail is conveniently ignored and you can get another month added, so I'll see how that works out.

a day in Bali

2007-06-19T08:18:00.000Z

I wake up to some subtle light and the sound of pounding surf. In my pre-caffeinated state, the idea of getting out of bed is a bit repulsive, but the crashing waves are too great of an attraction. I slip on some flip-flops and look at my watch. 6:30, my average time for waking up in Bali. On two beds in the open-air common area outside my bedroom Clemi, an English sponger, and Ben, an Indonesian-speaking San Diego expat are still sleeping.

Downstairs, I smile a selamat pagi to Made (Maad-ee) and Ketuk, two of the four girls who run the warung from 6am until whenever people decide to go to bed, usually around midnight. The staff at the warung (called Robby and the Kid) are so friendly that I feel bad whenever I order any food or drink, and incredibly long hours and complete void of any days off do not seem to dampen their spirits or inclination to smile constantly. I'm not sure where Lolly and the other Made are, the other two girls working there, so I walk out to the beach to check the surf conditions.

The tide is fairly high but on the ebb, and looking north at some swells wrapping around the headland indicates that a dawn patrol at Balangan will be a suitable substitute for coffee, at least for now. Bali often suffers from morning sickness, which means that the winds stay onshore until mid-morning, when they start howling offshore and creating perfect conditions. This morning, though, the winds are already offshore, sending massive amounts of spray off the back of each breaking wave. It takes me about 10 seconds to adequately and favorably assess the surf, so I turn back inside to grab my board.

Already in my boardshorts, which has been the case since arriving two weeks ago, I pull on a neoprene vest to combat the morning chill, surprisingly prevalent despite our proximity to the equator. I pull my board off the rack on the wall, run a bar of surf wax over it, and grab my reef booties, a necessity for surfing the sharp reefs of Indonesia.

Walking down the beach towards the headland, the swell looks promising, and a slow adrenaline surge begins. I pull on the booties and wade into the water, slipping and stumbling over the rocks as bout after bout of whitewater hits me. I get waist-deep and wait for a set to pass me before committing and jumping on my board and sprint-paddling out past the lineup. Once a safe distance from the shore, I turn and begin the quarter mile paddle around the headland to the peak at Balangan, a reef/point break that is often uncrowded at this time of morning.

15 minutes later, I'm at Balangan's first peak with four other guys, all quiet, somberly staring out at the horizon, a demeanor commonly found in early morning lineups. A set materializes, and I stay to the outside, wanting to get my bearings before paddling into overhead waves steeply crashing onto shallow rock reef. Four waves later the lineup is empty and a fifth wave is on its way. I reevaluate, decide my bearings are sufficient, and paddle for the quickly-steepening wave.

A gust from the offshore wind sends a nice package of spray into my eyes as I feel the wave under me, temporarily blinding me. Fazed but still confident, I take a few more strokes than normal, feel that infinitesimal moment when gravity begins dictating your direction of travel, and I'm on my feet, left foot forward, back to the wave.

The sun is rising over the land in the distance and glaring right in my eyes. Looking down the face of the wave with the lip overhead, I can tell that it is going to close out, giving me two options - crouch and charge backside into a closeout barrel, probably resulting in a swift regurgitation over the reef, or straighten out into the flats and try to gracefully bail.

I choose the latter, point the nose toward the beach, and let the whitewater buck me off my board. Not knowing the water depth, I land flat and wait until the wave passes me to put my feet down. The water turns out to be knee deep, meaning I have to wade out until it is deep enough to paddle. As I do this and fight against the surging waves, I get swept by the current down the beach, making it a long paddle back to the peak.

This cycle repeats a few more times, and after an hour I paddle back to Dreamland, opting out of the walk because I want the exercise. Outside of Dreamland, the surf has picked up a little, and I catch one wave and again get hit hard by the wind's spray in my eyes. This time it completely blinds me before I can get to my feet, and I end up riding my board on my stomach, wiping the water out of my eyes and enjoying the ride despite the horizontal arrangement. Close to the shore, the wave suddenly reforms and I jump to my feet, duck into the barrel, and get whomped by the collapsing lip.

The wave ragdolls me, dumps me on the sand, and returns to the ocean. I stumble to my feet, feeling every cubic inch of my body teeming with euphoria, pick up my surfboard, crack my neck, and stumble up the beach to my warung, where I bid all present another selamat pagi, the morning being very good indeed.

I order a massive fruit salad and a Bali coffee. The coffee quickly makes friends with the other endorphins already entertaining my system from the morning surf, and the fruit salad, composed of bananas, papaya, pineapple, and melon goes down in a flash.

I head up to my bedroom, grab my helmet and keys, and go find my motorbike in the chaotic cluster of machinery known in Bali as a parking lot. I fire up the sad little 125cc engine and zoom up the rutted dirt track to the main road, fantasizing about riding my Santa Cruz in the hills above Port Angeles in a few months. On the paved road, I accelerate and in 10 minutes I'm at Swell, an internet cafe (emphasis on the cafe) that makes its presence obvious with a massive breaking wave built out of cement, complete with two surfboards. I smile yet another selamat pagi to the girl working there, and it is reciprocated with a beaming smile, a common sight in Indonesia. Indonesians, they say, have a smile for every emotion, which means that you have to take smiles just for what they are.

Sitting down at a computer, I put a bootleg copy of The Eminem Show into the CD drive and open up Gmail. The inbox is empty except for the daily message from my mom and some announcements and whatnot from the Honors Program. Early in my trip, I was disappointed when I checked my email and hadn't gotten anything from my friends and other acquaintances, but at some point between Morocco and Turkey my day-to-day happiness stopped being contingent on such exchanges. It took longer than it probably should have, but the change was liberating.

The email from my mom is replied to and the University announcements skimmed, and I say hello to a few friends on Gchat. Out of habit I open my blog and hastily scroll through it, as if someone else might have updated it, and browse through craigslist. There being nothing of particular interest, I chat for another 45 minutes while checking swell reports and log off. I pay a dollar for my hour on the computer, and jump back on my bike and roar towards Kuta, a 30 minute drive down hectic roads filled with swerving semis, families of four on a single scooter, and well-dressed women with pink and gray helmets stylishly maneuvering their motorbikes through narrow gaps between racing trucks and jeeps. As they pass, whiffs of perfume temporarily overpower the diesel fumes.

After a few turns of short radii and jaunts going the wrong way down a one way street, I am in the downtown of chaotic Kuta. I stop at the Rip Curl factory outlet where I browse through surf gear with my eyes glued on the surf flick playing on screens in every corner, and find a pair of boardshorts that are marked down to 50 thousand rupiah, about 6USD. They'd be 50USD anywhere else, and I grab them and a new tube of Dermatone, a 36SPF sunscreen spiked with zinc oxide favored by alpine climbers and ocean-going surfers. Outside of the store, I hand a guy 1000 rupiah for the parking fee and suddenly bored of Kuta, decide to head back to Dreamland. First, though, I whip along the waterfront, touts offering me taxis and motorbikes (note the irony) on one side and a chain of western staples like McDonalds, Dunkin Donuts, and Pizza Hut on the other. I turn right up Poppies II, a narrow street packed with surf shops and stores selling t-shirts with the Bintang (Balinese beer) logo or simply the word "Jiggy-jig." Don't ask.

I eye a few surfboards, tempted by the "Australian quality, Bali prices" proclamations but decide I want to get back to Dreamland. I race back, accustomed now to driving on the left side, and 25 minutes later I'm surprisingly still intact and back at the entrance gate. I hand the guards 2000 rupiah and bounce back to the parking lot.

I walk down the beach to my warung. The tide is high now and the narrow slip of sand remaining is barely enough room to accommodate the plethora of sunbathers. I grab my book, The Historian, my fifth since arriving, and spend a few hours reading, breaking up the chapters with short body surf sessions in the beachbreak. By 2pm the sun has wasted me, so I go back into the shade and order some nasi goreng, an Indonesian variety of fried rice, served with an egg on top. I down a liter of water and sit back and write for an hour, occasionally having to say "no thank you" to the vendors offering sarongs and massages.

By 4pm, the tide is getting low and the waves seem excited about the prospect of less water. I put down my book, grab my board, opting out of wearing anything on top this time, since the sun is still high enough in the sky to keep me warm, and dive through a few shorebreak waves. Paddling out, I feel strong and capable, at least more so than I did in my first session a week and a half ago. Just a few minutes later I'm at the peak, which sits a surprising distance from the shore. There are only a few surfers out now, and we establish peace with the universal gesture of a slight head nod. I know that in an hour there will be 25 guys sitting on this peak, so I set about getting some waves.

The first set shows up, and I paddle over the first two. I'm set up perfectly for the 3rd, and I start paddling for it. A longboarder is outside of me, and we both drop in. I give a little shout, he looks back and sees me, and ducks up over the top of the lip, leaving me with a head high virgin wave face in front of me, one of the most satisfying sights imaginable to surfers around the world. I make a few pumps to generate speed and head for the lip, doing a long top turn to cutback that returns me to the curl of the breaking wave. By now the water has gotten deep, though, and the wave suddenly dissipates in its present state, reforming as a smaller swell still en route to the shore.

I paddle back out feeling on top of the world and catch a few more waves. True to my prediction, there are soon two dozen guys jostling for space and its impossible to get a wave to yourself. Not wanting to sour my mood, I paddle for the shore, not at all tired but completely content.

I shower to rinse the salt and sand off, and put on a tank top. You know you're getting used to the tropics when the sleeves of a t-shirt seem oppressively confining, and so it has been since arriving on this delectable island. I grab my book again and settle into my favorite table, which sits right above the sand on the porch overlooking the ocean, and watch the silhouetted surfers race along the wave faces with the setting sun as a backdrop.

When you're near the equator, the sky turns black immediately after the sun dips below the horizon (no green flash this time!), and thus the offshore entertainment turns from surfing to the constellations of the southern sky, though the Big Dipper still hovers just above the horizon to the northwest. The lights of fishing boats slowly appear offshore as they return from or embark on their respective missions for tuna, Red Snapper, squid, prawns, and lobster.

Watching the boats makes me think about dinner, and ordering a tuna steak I wonder which one of the distant lights it was caught on the night before. At 27,000 rupiah, tuna steak is a splurge for Indonesia, but it equates to only 3USD, so I don't feel bad. The steak is fresh, tender, and delicious, so I savor it as I talk surfing with the other people sitting around the table.

As the evening progresses, the Chili Peppers, Offspring, Linkin Park, Jack Johnson, and 50 Cent frequent the warung's sound system, making me feel right at home and once again deliciously euphoric. Surfers and beachgoers sip their Bintangs and laugh at stories of each others various endeavors. I abstain from the drinking for another night, feeling incredibly healthy after not drinking since leaving Turkey several months ago, and the surfers, true to their relaxed nature, ask no questions. I can't resist another fruit salad, though, as it seems like the perfect way to top off another day on the Indonesian island of Bali, my new ideal for paradise.

stepping back a few years/continents

2007-06-16T23:53:00.000Z

Finally a writer gets it right:

"I highly recommend extended contemplation of the Mediterranean to provide enlightenment, especially when meditating on future criminal activity"
A Monk Swimming

The Amalfi Coast, Italy from when I studied in Greece in 2005

I had the best session of my trip last night. The waves didn't look that great from the beach, but on a whim I paddled out and in a relatively short session got three big set waves, two great rights and one reeling left that I dropped in deep enough to spend most of the wave just outside the barrel and pulled out of by gleefully flying high above the lip sans surfboard. Needless to say, I couldn't wipe the smile off my face for the rest of the night, and one of the girls who works at my hotel told me that I hadn't really stopped smiling since I arrived a week ago, which seems to be an inevitable product of spending any time in Bali. I've been feeling stronger and healthier than at any other point on my trip, and the great surf and strong Bali coffee, which bridges the gap between Turkish coffee and French Press, combine to create overwhelmingly high levels of energy and general euphoria. The vitamin D doesn't hurt, either. Other than surfing, I've been spending most of my time reading and zooming around on my Honda. I've been averaging a book every day and a half or so, and I'm quite sold on the fact that motorbikes are the best form of transport in the world, albeit the most dangerous as well.

A few nights ago I was sitting on my surfboard way offshore and watching waves come in, and though I knew it on some levels, I suddenly realized that I had been dreaming about coming to Bali (I didn't even know where it was, I thought it was close to Madagascar for some reason) to surf all of these famous waves since early in high school, and that I was here actually doing it, and that recognition was surreal. So many dreams are abstract, but sitting out in the lineup and looking down at Uluwatu and Padang-Padang, two surf breaks that regularly grace the pages of every surf magazine on earth, was completely tangible and the fact that I was sitting there in the middle of it all and that this had been my dream for so long just startled me and was a great feeling.

sunset session at Dreamland last night... when a set comes in at this time of day, the lip of the wave is clear and because of the lighting the surfers are sillhouetted as they ride the waves, while the waves are a beautiful orange-green color

drops of oil

2007-06-13T01:28:00.000Z

From The Alchemist:

A certain shopkeeper sent his son to learn about the secret of happiness from the wisest man in the world. The lad wandered through the desert for forty days, and finally came upon a beautiful castle, high atop a mountain. It was there that the wise man lived.

Rather than finding a saintly man, through, our hero, on entering the main room of the castle, saw a hive of activity: tradesmen came and went, people were conversing in the corners, a small orchestra was playing soft music, and there was a table covered with platters of the most delicious food in that part of the world. The wise man conversed with everyone, and the boy had to wait for two hours before it was his turn to be given the man’s attention.

The wise man listened attentively to the boy’s explanation of why he had come, but told him that he didn’t have time just then to explain the secret of happiness. He suggested that the boy look around the palace and return in two hours.

“Meanwhile, I want to ask you to do something,’ said the wise man, handing the boy a teaspoon that held two drops of oil. ‘As you wander around, carry this spoon with you without allowing the oil to spill.’ The boy began climbing and descending the many stairways of the palace, keeping his eyes fixed on the spoon. After two hours, he returned to the room where the wise man was.“Well,’ asked the wise man, ‘did you see the Persian tapestries that are hanging in my dining hall? Did you see the garden that it took the master gardener ten years to create? Did you notice the beautiful parchments in my library?’ ”

The boy was embarrassed, and confessed that he had observed nothing. His only concern had been not to spill the oil that the wise man had entrusted to him.

“Then go back and observe the marvels of my world,’ said the wise man. ‘You cannot trust a man if you don’t know his house.’ ”

Relieved, the boy picked up the spoon and returned to his exploration of the palace, this time observing all of the works of art on the ceilings and the walls, He saw the gardens, the mountains all around him, the beauty of the flowers, and the taste with which everything had been selected. Upon returning to the wise man, he related in detail everything he had seen.

“But where are the drops of oil I entrusted to you?” asked the wise man.

Looking down at the spoon he held, the boy saw that the oil was gone.

“‘Well, there is only one piece of advice I can give you,’ said the wisest of wise men. ‘The secret of happiness is to see all the marvels of the world, and never to forget the drops of oil on the spoon.’”

The shepherd said nothing. He had understood the story the old king had told him. A shepherd may like to travel, but he should never forget about his sheep.

Dreamland

2007-06-10T01:53:00.000Z

Sunset from my hotel in Dreamland last night

Dreamland is more than living up to its name. Yesterday morning I payed $55 to rent out a little Honda motorbike with a surfboard rack for a month and made my way though the hectic streets of Kuta and down the coast to Dreamland. They drive on the left here, and so riding a motorbike with my heavy backpack and surfboard on the side on some rather hellish roads probably wasn't the safest thing I've done, but I made it okay and I'm staying in an absolutely idyllic little spot on the beach. The surf is right out front, there are no mosquitoes, no rain... unfortunately during my first session I broke a fin, so I had to come back to Kuta today to pick up a replacement.

Other than that, everything is going pretty well, except for the fact that I am getting incredibly excited to get home...which still doesn't happen for a month and a half! A few weeks ago when I was in Leh I glanced at a guy's computer screen in an internet cafe and he was starting an email with "at fecking last I am coming home" (apparently Brits spell out their accent), and I'm looking forward to writing something to that extent in a month or so. Falling asleep to the pounding surf last night must have tricked my mind into thinking I was home because I had all kinds of complex dreams about people from Port Angeles who I haven't thought about, let alone seen, in several years. As homesick as I am, I appreciate the fact that I love where I'm from enough to miss it while I'm away. I frequently meet travellers who seem less than excited about going home to England, Germany, Israel, etc., while I've been borderline euphoric for pretty much this entire trip about the thought of returning to the northwest.

If any surfers out there reading this want to feel insanely jealous, then check out this map of where I am:
http://www.wannasurf.com/spot/Asia/Indonesia/Bali/

back in the southern hemisphere

2007-06-08T09:39:00.000Z

Oh man, since flying into Kuta on the Indonesian island of Bali last night, I've barely been able to wipe the smile off my face. Cheap surf shops, beautiful smiling girls, and perfect waves are everywhere. Today I browsed around a bit and picked up a nice 6'4 T&C roundtail (that's a surfboard, not a girl), and tomorrow I'm heading a few minutes up down the coast to a place called Dreamland, aptly named since there are like 12 reefbreaks within 10 minutes. Kuta Beach is where the Bali terrorist attacks in 2002 and 2005 were, and now shops here sell these t-shirts reading "osama don't surf" and "fuck terrorists." Amen.

photos from Thailand

2007-06-06T05:59:00.000Z

Last night a Kiwi guy and British girl made some quip about Starbucks, and I coldly told them that any coffee shop that had closed as a result of Starbucks was probably a bad (I may have used different language) cafe to begin with.

I don't know, I don't even care for Starbucks that much, but my response was the result of two things - my general inability to pass up an opportunity to play devil's advocate (particularly with hippy-ish/liberal backpackers/climbers), and my usual lack of tolerance for anyone who disregards anything that relates in some way to me or my home. As a result in the last eight months I've found myself defending plenty of things that I'm otherwise sometimes critical of - Starbucks, the USA, Americans, the American education system,, and almost anything else that is trendy to dislike.

Anyway, it seems that I generally don't get along that well with other travelers and backpackers. The travel community is still a bit foreign to me. When I get to hostels, my instinct is usually just to be alone and to feel out the city or country independently, and so I usually do. I see other travelers arrive and they instantly fall in with small groups and within a day or two seem intertwined in the gossip and lives of the other people staying there. My aversion to this isn't because I dislike the other people (well, sometimes I do) because most travelers are fairly friendly, easy-going people. I think it has more to do with the communal attitude that pervades most hostels and travel communities. My dad knew what I was talking about and put it well, calling it a "we're all in this together" mindset...I just kind of cringed at the sound of those words.

I'm also disturbed by the fact that ambition seems to be a faux pas among backpackers. Small talk regarding lives back home kicks off most conversations, and when (and if) I explain that I'm studying biochemistry and want to go to medical school, somewhat of an awkward silence often follows. Eyes shift back and forth, the question is directed at someone else, and if they respond that they "work half the year bartending so they can travel the other half the year" then they'll be granted acceptance with slight grins and nods of approval.

The same thing happens when I talk at all about what I've done on this trip. I've been to 23 countries in the last eight months, and frankly I'm proud of it. I went through a phase when I regretted it, and believed I should have spent more time in fewer places to see them more thoroughly, a feeling which grew from my conversations with other travelers. Eventually I realized that becoming a veritable Indian or seeing every square inch of Egypt wasn't my priority, though I didn't criticize travelers for whom this was the case. I may not understand how smoking pot for two months on the beach on Goa or lounging around eating banana pancakes in Laos is "understanding the culture", but really, I try to not be critical.

Anyway, enough ranting. I have met a number of exceptionally interesting and accepting travelers who I try to stay in touch with, and like I said before, most travelers are friendly and easy to hang out with. Here are some pictures from the last week in Thailand:

Longtail boat off of Ao Nang

I forget what this is called, something like fireballing, but basically it consists of twirling and spinning flaming chains around one's body...whatever it's called, it makes for a nice long-exposure shot

Sunset from Tonsai Beach

Matt from Wales backflipping off a deep water solo

Jo from England (from the Starbucks thing) and Matt on a stormy day in some islands near Railay

The hand on the right had been stung by a jellyfish the day before

On my snorkeling trip

A longtail boat...kind of the transportation staple for the Andaman Sea

I fly to Singapore tonight, which is a tiny city state island off the southern tip of the Malay peninsula. I'll be there for a day, then tomorrow night I fly to Kuta Beach, a surf mecca in the south of the Indonesian island of Bali. Kuta is kind of a party town, so I'm going to head out towards Uluwatu which is a world-famous wave and is close to a lot of good reef breaks. I have three plans for Bali: buy a surfboard, surf for a month, leave tan and healthy to finish off the last part of my trip in good form.

To see where I've been/where I'm going, here's a link to a map of southeast Asia:
http://encarta.msn.com/map_701513325/Indonesia_(region).html

10 things

2007-06-04T09:12:00.001Z

10 reasons for Thailand being a contender for my favorite country in the last eight months:

Pad Thai
Climbing on perfect rock off a perfect beach with the ocean 20 feet behind you
Instead of asking "how are you?", you ask "have you eaten yet?"
Thai massages
Panang curry
When you smile at people, they actually smile back at you (think about it, Spain)
Thai iced tea
Discount airlines! 30-40 dollars for domestic flights, only 40 dollars for my flight from Krabi to Singapore
It's cheap
It's beautiful

In other news, I went snorkeling yesterday and jumped off the boat when it was a little too shallow and planted my foot into a not-so-friendly sea urchin that was well-endowed in the spines department. It was quite painful, but the upside was that I had been wondering for some time just how bad those things would hurt, and I got to receive first-hand enlightenment.

If this internet wasn't so slow I'd post some pictures, but I ended up changing my plans as predicted and I'm flying to Bali in a few days via Singapore. It sounds like there isn't anything to do in Singapore except spend money, so I'll probably spend a few hours on the internet to upload pics from Thailand and stuff.

One other note - I've been gone for eight months!

dispatch from Thailand - poaching pools and deep water soloing

2007-06-02T09:50:00.001Z

I continue to love Thailand. Today I spent the morning with a group of people going deep water soloing, which combines three of my favorite things - climbing, free falling, and the ocean. Basically you climb up a somewhat overhanging rock climb that is over the water, climb as high as you can (there are no ropes...you just wear rock shoes), then fall. The last part isn't necessarily intentional, but around Railey there are climbs anywhere from 4' to 60' off the water, so the falling part requires a bit of technique. Pool poaching is just finding nice resort pools to go for a swim in, despite the fact that you're staying in a $2.50/night bungalow the next beach down.

The normal climbing part of being here is going pretty well too. I was feeling pretty soft after eight months of little physical activity and even more months since my last rock climbing, but I managed to onsight a few 5.10d's and get up a few 11's. The rock here is sharp so my fingers are slaughtered after only three days, and the rental shoes that I've been using are far from legit. I've been climbing with a guy who, of all things, played lacrosse for Bainbridge Island.

Anyway, the plan is to be here for several more days, head over to Phuket to do a diving course, then go to Malaysia. As usual, though, this will probably change.

lesson one from southeast asia

2007-05-31T12:03:00.001Z

Jellyfish in the Indian Ocean have much more painful stings than their Pacific breathren, which isn't to say that Pacific jellyfish can't cause their share of pain...but now I've experienced both.

Besides that, life is good here. I'm on a healthy diet of climbing off the beach, swimming in the ocean, $7/hour massages, and the best food of my trip. I'll leave the part about more moquitos than you can possibly fathom and the sweltering humidity to your imagination.

Why I already love Thailand:

2007-05-29T07:53:00.000Z

Kashmir and Ladakh

2007-05-27T10:32:00.001Z

Lightning storm over Dal Lake, Kashmir. The buildings in the foreground are houseboats, and the blurry line in the water is a shikara streaking past. This was the most dramatic lightning storm of my life. It lasted over an hour with nonstop thunder and brilliant, massive flashes of light in every corner of the sky. Pounding rain, too.

"If there is paradise on earth then it is here, it is here, it is here in Kashmir"
-Mughal Emperor Jehangir

Conversation on Gmail with my mom:
mary: I think people that grow up on the water have a really hard time leaving it..
me: well said

I am increasingly homesick for almost everything that exists in the Pacific Northwest - family, friends, the Olympics, the Cascades, the Strait of Juan de Fuca, my bike, Port Angeles, Trader Joes, good coffee, my computer, cool weather, watching bad TV and movies, eating cereal...and to think I could have all of those things in a week... Oh well, I'm still happy about extending my trip by two months, though I am definitely slipping into countdown habits. This also reminds me that I have two more months to get bitten by a rabid dog and to somehow require an evacuation that costs half a million dollars, so I can justify buying travel insurance and a rabies shot.

Dal Lake at sunset

Not many travelers visit Kashmir these days. Reason for this is obviously the violence that poisoned the area in the late 1990's, and Bill Clinton's '99 proclamation that Kashmir was "the most dangerous place on earth" echoed in my thoughts as I stepped off the Airbus after a two hour flight from Delhi into the most militarized airport imaginable. The security process just to leave the airport was more serious than entering most Central or South American countries, but once I cleared a driver from the houseboat that I booked in Delhi picked me up and whisked me through the chaotic streets of Srinagar to the edge of the relatively peaceful Dal Lake, where a shikara (a Venitian-style gondola with an Indian flair) carried us to the Persian Palace, my houseboat for the next five days.

Solider heading home after work

Riding in a shikara

On Dal Lake

The history of the houseboats on Dal Lake is actually a bit interesting. During the Raj period, when India was a British colony, the Mughal royalty spent their summers in Kashmir to escape from the brutal heat of the lower areas. The British naturally followed suit, but the maharaja of Kashmir didn't permit them to buy any land, so the Brits built little floating houses all over the lake, and thus lived for free.

At sunset...one of these days I'm going to drop my camera in the water taking pictures like this

I spent most of the five days just lazing around on the houseboat itself, and only got dragged off once to check my email and once to visit a Kashmiri textile shop, which the owner kind of tricked me into, since like everywhere east of Morocco the carpet sellers and hotel owners and taxi drivers all have their hands in each others pockets. Tourism used to be huge in Kashmir, but the industry basically ceased to exist after the conflict in the 1990's, and while there may have been Indian tourists around, I didn't see any obvious westerners during my stay there. Eight months after leaving home, I've become very weary of places where tourism is the only industry, and Kashmir is definitely a case of this.

There isn't much to do on Dal Lake except take pictures of shikaras

Four nights on Dal Lake was enough and I was feeling quite homesick and lonely, probably due to my iPod and a few books being my only company. The long bus ride from Srinagar to Leh passed through some exquisate green valleys with snowfields and scree slopes tumbling right down to the road, though sitting in the very back of the worst bus I'd ever been on didn't make enjoying the beauty very easy. About six hours into the ride the bus arrived at the bottom of the Zoji La pass, where we had to wait for the once-a-day military convoy to escort us up switchback after switchback on a road so narrow that an arm out one window could touch the cliffside while an arm out the other could drop something off the cliff. The pass topped out a few thousand feet above the valley, and I think there was quite the collective sigh of relief when once again there was a reasonable amount of horizontal ground on both sides of the road.

Road alongside a river on the drive through Kashmir

One of the interesting things about going over the pass was that almost instantly we left the lush, green scenery of Kashmir behind and entered the dry, desert environment of Zanskar. In the next four hours of the bus ride I repeatedly had to get off the bus and register with various military checkpoints, since the fact that the Line of Control with Pakistan was practically within spitting distance from the left side of the road makes the area particularly volatile. The lack of hostilities in the last few years makes the 60,000+ deaths in the last 15 years really validates Clinton's declaration in '99, since that iis when the majority of the violence occured.

The mighty Indus River - this curves over through Pakistan before emptying into the Arabian Sea

All of these signs alongside the road to Leh had funny little safety warnings, like, "A cat has nine lives but not the one who drives" and "Go easy on my curves"

Some kind of herder at work

After the first day's 10 hour bus ride, I ended up in a small town called Kargil, which was one of those pit-stop kind of holes that you never thought you'd find yourself in. I got in a quick night of sleep in a sketchy hotel, and woke up at 5 the next morning to find a jeep to take me the rest of the way to Leh, which is the capital of Ladakh. Fortunately I found a family from Jammu who was hiring a jeep, and I rode the 8 hours to Leh squashed in the improvised back-back seat. The scenery on the way was just incredible, though, and I talked a bit with the other guys in the jeep. Just as the green valleys of Kashmir had given way to the arid deserts of Zanskar the day before, the crescent-mooned mosques of the Islamic west gave way to the prayer flags and monasteries of the Buddhist east on this drive, and I was surprised to hear that a bit of conflict had been simmering between the two faiths in recent years, since these were two faiths that I associated with peace and tolerance, though I guess land is land and people will always fight over resources.

Roadside sex ed...this must be the worst pieces of wisdom I've ever heard in my life...I'm not really sure how it is advice, come to think of it.

The end of the Karakoram range colliding with Kashmir valley

As beautiful as the scenery was, after two full days of driving I was thanking some kind of deity to find myself in Leh, which is in a region known as "Little Tibet" for both its Buddhist influence and desert environment. Leh is at almost 12,000', and so I took it easy for a few days and didn't do much besides wander around the small town and laze around my guesthouse. The altitude wasn't really affecting me, but it seemed like a good excuse to not do much, and I've been in the market for those lately. I do owe some ancestor of mine a large thank you because I haven't had any problems with altitude in any of the places that travelers usually succumb to bad headaches and nausea, such as Cusco, Lake Titicaca, and Quito.

Prayer flags on the palace in Leh

More prayer flags

I was feeling lazy after a few days of this, though, so I talked to a local guide service and arranged a three day trek through some of the neighboring valleys. It was kind of weird for me to hire a guide to do a trek, but I had no equipment with me and zero interest in wandering around unmarked trails and roads in the Himalaya for three days, so I coughed up $45/day for what turned out to be the most enjoyable and luxurious backpacking trip of my life. The guide cooked amazing dinners, the best food I've had in India, and a horse carried all of our gear, so we just had to carry light daypacks, which turned out to be a saving grace since the trek ended up being between 80 and 90 kilometers long. On the last day we went up and over a 16,400' pass, which was the highest I'd ever been and gave us great views of the valley we had hiked up and the neighboring Indus River valley. I would have liked to do more trekking while I was in Ladakh, and as nice as having a guide and horse was, I realized that a lot of the fun gets taken out of things like this when you don't have your friends or family to do them with.

Beginning of the trek...pretty bleak, huh? The Indus River is to the right

The Indus River

A gompa that the trail weaved through on the second day

In the valley approaching the 16,400' Stok La pass

My guide Stanzen working on the best food I had in India

Looking back at the valley from the top of Stoh La

Switchbacks in the snow

After one more day in Leh after the trek, I flew back to Delhi in a spectacular hour long flight that took us over the tops of the dramatic Himalayan peaks in the Himachal Pradesh region. As much as I admire travelers who can love cities like Delhi, I didn't have the slightest interest in seeing anything more than a shower, a computer screen, and a 747 bound for the Far East, so I planned my flights as such and spent only 12 hours in Delhi before heading back to the airport to head to Bangkok for the last segment of my trip, which will go throughout southeast Asia but begin and end in Bangkok. After eight months of almost nonstop backpacking, one of my primary goals for this segment is to spend as little time on buses as possible, and as much time on the beaches and in the ocean as possible. It's funny, I found it really hard to relax on beaches and just bum around and surf during the first part of my trip, but now it is the only thing I want to do.

Kashmir and Ladakh were the best parts of India for me, but since I have free internet right now I'll write a bit about the other few places I saw. The bus ride from Jaipur to Agra turned from four hours into six hours, and when I arrived in the dark I could see the outline of the Taj Mahal in the distance from my hotel's rooftop patio. I had half of a small beer - the only alcohol I'd had in a month and a half - and woke up the next morning feeling painfully sick, which made visiting the Taj Mahal a little less pleasant and a little shorter than I would have liked. I walked all around and inside of it, sketched a rough picture, and headed to the train station.

There is a picture of the Taj on this India tourism magazine I have, and the caption said, "And to think that these days men get away with giving chocolate and flowers"

In the train station I thought I was clever by buying an "unreserved" ticket, since the train left just a few minutes later. I stepped on one carriage and found 100 people in a 50 person car whose iron-bar windows and piles of trash made it feel like some kind of prison. I sat down next to a guy on a bench, and he looked at my ticket and said, "This is first-class. Your ticket is for unreserved, at the very back of the train." Oh. I got off the train, walked past what were apparently the second-class cars, and found my "unreserved" car, apparently the lowest class possible, at the very end of the train. The platform had ended some time ago, so the door was at shoulder level, and as I confirmed that this was indeed where I was supposed to be the train started to move. I had both of my backpacks on, the larger one weighing about 40 pounds and the smaller one about 15 (you owe me for this wine, dad!), but despite all of the weight I managed to climb up a ladder into the door as the train pulled away. Inside I found that every square inch of possible sitting space was being more than occupied, and the only place for me and my two backpacks was at the end of the car in the short hallway to the two lavoratories. Now, bathrooms in India are pretty heinous. Some of the worst I've seen on this trip. Bathrooms in trains or buses tend to be pretty atrocious. So you can imagine what its like to be sitting next to two toilets in India in the lower-than-second-class section of a train...on an incredibly hot, 110 degree day...when you're already being seiged by nausea and other unpleasantness.

After an hour and a half, a guy who had been sitting in the exit doorway with his legs hanging out disembarked, and I was quite grateful to take his place. I rode for half an hour in this position, slightly worried that someone might trip and push me out the door, but at the next major station a guy came up and presumably said something to the effect of "what the hell are you doing?" in Hindi and ushered me into the next car, where I felt like the luckiest person in the world to ride the remaining four hours to Delhi on a wooden bench seat.

That is pretty much my story for India. Two and a half weeks for one of the largest countries in the world...considering I have ten months for this trip, you would think that I'd want to spend more time here, but India is such an anomalous destination that I think a trip to India has to be a trip in itself. The preceding eight months had exhausted my tolerance for long bus rides, dirty cities, and the other obvious discomforts that India has in spades, and I really just wanted to see the mountains, relax and trek a little, and get out.

My drawing of the Taj in my tent on the trek

Fighting in Lebanon

2007-05-25T09:41:00.001Z

It is strange and haunting to watch CNN and see the firefights and bombings plaguing two cities that I spent time in a month and a half ago - Beirut and Tripoli. I'm really sorry this is happening. In the short 10 days that I spent in the country, the Lebanese people endeared themselves to me with warmth and hospitality that was a little uncanny, considering the 16 years of civil war, conflict with Syria, and war with Israel that is in their recent history.

I am glad to see the US is providing aid to the Lebanese military now, but the irony is not lost on me that Israel didn't get more than a slap on the wrist from the US and Europe following its month-long bombing campaign of everything south of (and including) Beirut last summer, particularly since it left unexploded cluster bombs (essentially war-legal landmines) scattered throughout southern Lebanon.

Anyway, I wouldn't be nearly as tuned into this matter had I not been there so recently, but if you're interested in the conflict, here are a few articles:

US military aid 'lands in Beirut':
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6690751.stm

Large blast hits Lebanese capital
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6678687.stm

The Lebanese crisis explained
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6173322.stm

My blog posts from Lebanon

Anyway, I just got back from several days of trekking in the mountains and valleys around Ladakh, so I'll have all kinds of pictures and stuff to post as soon as I get to a faster connection.

Composition

2007-05-22T03:33:00.003Z

Somewhere back in South America, I briefly acknowledged the relevance of photographic composition. I didn't know what it meant or that it was a popular term in the photography world, I just caught a glimpse of the fact that how I framed and what I included or excluded in a picture made all the difference. I usually just looked at things in terms of the subject. If the subject(s) of a picture were present and clear, then mission accomplished. What I started to notice, though, was that the angles of the lines of elements an the percentages and proportions that filled the frame could actually enhance the subject and give the photo a context based on my terms. And most importantly, the composition was the integral part to just making the photo have aesthetic appeal.

Fitz Roy, Argentina

I didn't actually attach the word "composition" to this concept until someone defined it for me some months later, and once that connection was made I had a much better understanding of how composition affected other things, particularly writing.

Like with photography, I thought writing was about focusing on an idea and reasoning your thoughts related to that idea. I associated flowery language and big words with good writing, and assumed that if I didn't like or understand something then it was the result of my own shortcoming. I never considered that the composition of words and grammar in a piece of writing could highlight the focus in the same way that secondary elements in a picture can emphasize aspects of the main element. I also started to realize that writers extend loans of trust to his or her readers by carefully placing details and themes that subtly serve the main point. It seems that writers must feel a bit threatened and scared that readers will fail to connect strategic details or to decipher softly introduced parables, and that these kinds of elements have to strike a delicate balance between hiding enough to create allure and promoting themselves enough to be noticed and utilized.

That is a bit of a digression, though. The reason I started to think about the composition aspect of writing was a section in my Lonely Planet Middle East about the Quran. It said that read in its original language, academics consider the Quran to be a literary masterpiece based on the poetic syntax and aesthetic qualities of its composition alone, meaning and religious significance completely aside. What I took from this was the fact that compositions of words can hold appeal in themselves, regardless of their relevance or ultimate meaning, and that this was true for anything from text messages to guidebooks to works of fiction. Like with photographs, you can create geometric designs and proportions with combinations of words. Maybe this is all a bit evident, but I had just never considered it until recently.

One of the things that made me start looking at the actual nature of composition and how elements functioned together was by sketching. When I first sat down next to Will from England outside of the Siq in Petra and started trying to draw the Treasury, I was trying to draw the whole structure at once. I was attempting to translate what I saw onto paper and while I'm sure gifted artists do that with ease, I failed miserably. So instead I looked for things that were familiar - vertical lines, obvious proportions, and basic geometric shapes. Instead of trying to draw a header as it appeared, I just saw that it made an apparent 30 degree angle with the column, so I drew a 30 degree angle. It reminded me of the scene from The Matrix when Morpheus and Neo are fighting, and Morpheus admonishes Neo, telling him "stop trying to hit me, and hit me."

If I broke the monuments and mountains down into angles and proportions, then I could notice motifs and patterns, and how these characteristics affect the aesthetic of the structure or the geographical explanation for the mountain became more clear. I saw that in famous buildings, every line and proportion had some function or explanation, and that in nature, there was always an underlying pattern or trend even within an imposing appearance of chaos. Physics and chemistry give nature the same elements of composition that architects and engineers give buildings and structures.

Maybe my realization of composition wasn't a life-changing revelation, but things don't have to be life-changing on a grand scale to be useful or interesting. When I first got my Moleskin, I wrote the odd page filled with day-to-day breakdowns or impressions of experiences and sights. Since I started to think about compositions, the pages have quickly filled with crude sketches, useless little combinations of words and sentences, and anything else that pops into my head and seems aesthetically pleasing. And the more I think about composition, the more I can see how it can affect and compliment anything from the way you dress to how you cook to how you organize your obligations and ambitions...it seems that living itself can be a creative endeavor.

Neogothic church, southern Ireland

Trip Highlights

2007-05-20T04:57:00.000Z

I've been meaning to do this for a while, and the first time I jotted down all of the most interesting places and experiences of my trip to date I looked back and realized that almost everything I'd seen was on the list. I just arrived in Leh after a two day drive from Srinagar, and since it is at about 12,000' I thought I'd take it easy for a day to acclimatize and this seemed like a good project, so here you go - the highlights of my trip so far:

EarthRiver trip on the Rio Futaleufu - luxury camping, amazing food, beautiful scenery, oh, and one of the most famous whitewater rivers in the world
Machu Picchu - worth every Peruvian sole
Fitz Roy, Argentina - spectacular mountains and some of the world's best steak and wine? What more could you want?
Favelas in Rio de Janeiro - this wasn't a "highlight" in the normal sense, but visiting these communities that overlook Rio was one of the most interesting things I've done on my trip
Seville, southern Spain - Spain the way I always imagined it
Sahara camel trek, eastern Morocco - incredible desert scenery, a friendly guide named Abdul, staying with Berber families in the middle of nowhere...and all the Arabic lessons you want
southern coast of Ireland - stormy weather, Irish accents, and guaranteed proximity to a Guinness tap
Syria - spectacular desert and ruins, endless hospitality, and practically zero travellers
Petra, Jordan - a hidden city that rivals Machu Picchu
Kashmir and Ladakh - largely untouched by travelers, perfect weather, unexpected diversity...oh, and this mountain range called the Himalaya

Namaste from Kashmir

2007-05-16T07:24:00.000Z

My first part in India went as expected - I visited the Taj Mahal, suffered from a redefinition of bad public transportation, got so sick I couldn't eat a bite for three days, and experienced Delhi, which manages to be among the hottest, most polluted, and most crowded cities on earth all at one time.

Fortunately I quickly escaped Delhi and flew to Srinagar, which is right in the heart of Kashmir. I noticed that the mountain tops seemed much closer than they usually do from 30,000' on the two hour flight, and these were just the Himalayan foothills. In Srinagar, I booked four nights on one of the antiquated British-built houseboats from the Raj period floating on Dal Lake. My houseboat, called the "Persian Palace" is moored about a quarter mile from the shore with a cluster of other houseboat, and is owned and managed by a friendly Muslim family who has been treating me like royalty, though I'm sure the fact that I spent the entire first day and a half in my room recovering from my bout with "Delhi belly" is causing some gossip.

I have definitely been feeling very under the weather lately, constantly dehydrated despite drinking 3-4 liters of water a day, and every time I stand up I get a horrible head rush. Dal Lake is still very beautiful, though, and I realized this morning that I haven't seen a single westerner since leaving Delhi. The serenity of the lake and the surrounding hills and mountains reminds me a lot of home, though the plethora of colorful houseboats and calls to prayer definitely make it a little different. Last night I saw the most magnificent thunder and lightning storm of my life, with unrelenting lightning bolts lighting up the entire lake for more than an hour straight.

I'll be here for two more nights, then I'm catching a two day bus to Leh, which is in the Ladakh area sometimes referred to as "Little Tibet." The trip there should be pretty spectacular, and it parallels the Line of Control that separates Indian Kashmir from Pakistani Kashmir. The Pakistani side houses the Karakoram and Hindu Kush ranges, which I would love to visit, but unfortunately have to save for some point in the future.

Because of the slow or nonexistant Internet, I probably won't be able to upload any pictures or write much in the next two weeks, but I'm sure I'll have plenty to share after I finish up this part of my trip.

Oh, and Happy Birthday, Mom!

welcome to India

2007-05-11T15:52:00.000Z

After a long and strange night of flying and laying over in the Sharjah (UAE) airport, I was greeted by sweltering heat (at 4am! the sun wasn't even up yet!), disagreeable ATMs, and money exchangers who didn't want my Egpytian pounds. Fortunately a friendly rickshaw driver brought me to a functioning ATM on the way to my hotel so I could get some rupees, a friendly hotel proprietor let me crash in an air-conditioned room for several hours until my room was ready, and yet another friendly rickshaw driver showed me around the absurdly chaotic streets of Jaipur for several hours for 200 rupees (about 5 USD). Exhausted by the lack of sleep and unbelievable heat, I finished the day with a delicious spicy chili rice dish and a few mango lassis, and now I am en route to bed. Tomorrow, Agra!

wonders of the world

2007-05-09T21:35:00.000Z

Believe it or not, but the idea exists in some travel circles that the pyramids of Giza are less than spectacular. This myth was shattered to pieces and swept into the Nile for me today, because these massive structures lived up to every ounce of hype, the touts were hilarious and good-natured, and here, I have the pictures to prove it:

I've seen some amazing pictures of the pyramids when the sky is blue, but it was grey all day when I was here...still great, though.

I always expected the Pyramids to be this anomaly in the middle of the desert, but the city of Giza (basically an extention of Cairo) actually comes right up to the edge, but then after that it's all desert.

Check out the size of the base blocks compared to the guard

Another masterpiece in the Spencer-draws-crappy-pictures-of-world-monuments gallery...I'm glad that I added "in Egypt" to the title, just in case I forget where the Pyramids are

I also always thought the Pyramids were smooth, like the blocks had been shaped to make one continuous slope from the top to the bottom. I knew the core was composed of square blocks, but I thought the outer blocks were cut with an angle to look more seamless.

Looking up at the top section of the Great Pyramid

Though it can be useful at times, I generally loathe the Lonely Planet's ThornTree forum. It seems to be frequented by a dozen or so well-traveled people who have nothing better to do than refer to each other by their respective handles and dismiss and criticize any lesser-traveled person who dares ask a question. If you write a post and hint that you'll be in a certain country for less than, say, a lifetime, you'll almost immediately be pounced upon by some guy who professes to have "been on the road for 40 years" (that expression just bothers me) and insists that if you only have only a few weeks for a trip in Europe then your life is a disaster. Ughh...this kind of attitude just makes me a little sick, because I think if there is one gift travelers should bring back home, it is encouragement to others to undertake travel, whether its for one week or one year. This kind of attitude isn't just on the ThornTree; it is often in hostels and such as well, but the reason I brought up the ThornTree is that several months ago I came across a post where people put up the most overrated attractions, and the Pyramids were somewhere on that list.

I got the impression from talking to other travelers and reading other blogs that distaste for the Pyramids often arises from the ubiquitous touts and camel drivers (camel..eers?), and it is true - they are everywhere and very persistant. But I think the travelers who complain about this would enjoy themselves much more if they would actually treat the vendors and touts as human beings and not just give every person who says a friendly "hello, sir!" an immediate cold shoulder. The touts in fact generally have a great sense of humor and are very good-natured, and if you just exchange a few friendly words before moving on then the experience for both parties is much more positive. I'd rather joke and speak a few words with two dozen touts and postcard-vendors every day than see the two dozen massive billboards that line every mile of freeway in a number of western countries, and the fact is that both exist because they simply work at least some of the time, and travelers don't need to treat the guy trying to sell them a ride on his camel as some unhuman enemy. Like most of the six and a half billion people in the world, he's just trying to make a living.

The Sphinx is actually smaller than I always imagined, but then the Pyramids are much more massive than I thought so I guess it balances out...

The Pyramids of Giza are one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World:

Temple of Artemis - Selcuk, Turkey - once one of the most complex temples of the ancient world with a marble sanctuary and a tiled roof
Mausoleum of Halicarnassus - Bodrum, Turkey - a white marble tomb, 135m high, built by a provincial Persian king
Hanging Gardens of Babylon - Babylon, Iraq - perhaps-mythical gardens built by King Nebuchadnezzar II for one of his wives, elevated high above the ground and irrigated by the waters of the Euphrates
Pharos of Alexandria - Alexandria, Egypt - 120m high lighthouse in Alexandria's harbour, which guided sailors for 1500 years by using fires and light-reflecting mirrors
Pyramids of Giza - Giza, Egypt - the only ancient wonders to survive the test of time; the Great Pyramid was built over a period of 20 years by 100,000 workers using 2.3 million limestone blocks
Statue of Zeus - Olympia, Greece - an ivory statue to the Greek god, seated on a throne and draped in gold
Colossus of Rhodes - Rhodes, Greece - a 36m high bronze statue to the sun god, Helios

Considering I typed all of that out from my Lonely Planet, I think you need to take a second to imagine a 120m-high (almost 400 feet) lighthouse that operated for 1500 years and a massive (120' tall) bronze statue placed on a beautiful Greek island. Yeah, the Pyramids were in some serious company, but I think they definitely merit a place on any list of wonders, and most definitely should not be considered "overrated".

In other news, I bought a ticket out of India this morning with JetAir, which will fly me from Delhi to Bangkok on May 28. I was a bit sad to definitely take Pakistan off my itinerary, but I ended up with a stamp from Israel when I exited into Egypt that would most likely bar my entry. It's okay, though, since I am already planning a more trekking-and-climbing trip to that region in the future. I'm also incredibly excited for southeast Asia, particularly Indonesia since it will be the dry season there.

...and I thought it was hot in Egypt

2007-05-08T08:09:00.000Z

check this:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=weather+delhi

(47 C = 116 F)

Anyway, I'll do that one thing suggested by that cliche...something about crossing bridges as you get to them.

Egypt has been great so far. I spent three days in the idyllic ex-but-kind-of-still-hippie haven of Dahab not doing much besides loafing around, snorkeling and swimming, and looking over at the Saudi Arabian peninsula, which just across the water. I finished several trashy novels and spent too much time on the internet, looking at somewhat irrelevant things like Santa Cruz bicycles and best-of-craigslist (this has generally been a symptom of homesickness for me). The snorkeling in the Red Sea was great - I saw lots of cornetfish, which are as thick as, oh, an OtterPop, say, and a few feet long. There were tons of great coral formations, too, and I saw this one gruesomely ugly fish that kind of blended in with the reef. I am definitely going to take a diving course when I get to Malaysia, since seeing all of the people diving made me realize that SCUBA is a great thing to learn, particularly since there is so much great diving in the PNW. One other note about Dahab - I think I bought counterfeit sunblock, because despite a rigorous sunblock-application regimen, after the first day of snorkeling I could practically fit in with some of the tropical fish I saw.

picture of a cornetfish from wikipedia

After a few days, I took an 11pm bus to Saint Katherine's Monastery, which is at the foot of Mount Sinai, where according to the Bible Noah received the 10 commandments from God. Climbing Mount Sinai took about two hours, so I got to the top at about 4am. I rented a blanket from a guy for two dollars and fell asleep on a rock, there being only a handful of other people on the summit. I woke up two hours later to hundreds of tourists watching the sunrise and a local guy yelling at some Russians to get off the roof of his temple (Hey!! Ruskis! Get DOWN! No climb on my temple!"). Not exactly the picture I had in mind for this peak of Biblical fame...

old woman watching the sunrise from the top of Mount Sinai...while I was up there, several groups of people started to sing softly, making me realize that for most this was much more than just a mountain and a pretty sunrise

another view from the top..

I hiked back down to the monastery, where I discovered there was no bus that would help me get to Cairo until 1pm. It was 7:30am, and as much as I love sitting around a dusty, hot, vendor-filled parking lot for six hours, I decided to pay a guy 30$ to drive me an hour down a desert road to the intersection with the Cairo-bound highway, where I could presumably waive down some kind of bus. And waive I did, except the bus I flagged turned out to be a rusty, grumbling Toyota manned by two guys. One guy was the driver, and the other guy didn't do anything except talk to the driver, but they definitely both were employees of whatever company sends minibuses careening around Egypt. A few hours of pure, unadulterated hell followed. The road was dusty, the minibus was incredibly hot and loud, and the springs of both the suspension and the seats had crumpled into retirement some years ago. And the drivers were as sketchy as ever.

A few hours after I boarded, the bus broke down in the middle of the desert. The two guys ripped apart the floorboards to gain access to the smoldering engine, and after 30 minutes didn't have anything to show for their efforts except considerable grease on their hands and grimaces on their face. My Arabic is a little hazy(read: nonexistent), but I basically ascertained that we were screwed. They sat on the other side of the highway and smoked their cigarettes, which seem to be the solution to a lot of unsolvable problems in the Middle East. Meanwhile, I found a 2'x4' block of shade behind the van, and noticed a Toyota Air Filter box adorned with big, bold letters reading "BFE". For a reason which a few of you out there will understand, I couldn't help but shake my head and laugh when I saw this.

Anyway, after another half hour or so I saw a big Pullman-style bus on the horizon, so I waved my arm and the bus stopped. I bid ma salaama to the two guys and stepped aboard. Climbing into an air-conditioned bus out of the sweltering heat of the Sinai desert ranks as one of the greatest feelings of my life, and two hours later I was in Cairo. They were a nice two hours, though. We went under the Suez Canal, and when I looked back I could see these massive freighters moving magically across the desert, since the actual water was masked by fields of grass and buildings. Very cool. I finally arrived in Cairo, and in the tradition of all my entrance to major world cities paid too much for a taxi ride to my hotel. Exhausted after an unusually productive day of climbing a Biblical mountain, using sketchy desert transportation, breaking down in the middle of the Sinai, and arriving in the chaotic mess of Cairo, I went to bed and slept 12 hours.

fishing on the Nile River in central Cairo

I visited the Egyptian Museum today, which was incredible and filled with thousands of artifacts. Tomorrow I'll visit the Pyramids! Then its a day in Alexandria and an evening flight to Jaipur, India, where it sounds like I'll be greeted by nice heat wave. Sorry about the shortage of pictures, but my camera is definitely approaching its last legs after two months of brutal desert dust and sand, so I've been giving it a bit of a rest lately.

Kashmir thoughts

2007-05-03T16:28:00.000Z

I could stay in the Middle East for another month, particularly if the summer heat wasn't so imminent, but lately my thoughts have been turning towards the mountains of northern India and the waves of Indonesia, so a few days ago I bought a ticket from Alexandria, Egypt to Jaipur, India via Sharjah, a city in the United Arab Emirates. Jaipur, Agra, and Dehli form a nice little triangle in northern India, so by flying into Jaipur I'll be able to see the Taj Mahal en route to Dehli! In Dehli, I'm hoping to get a flight or a bus to Manali, which would be a good gateway into the Jammu/Kashmir region of northern India/Pakistan. Hopefully I'll be able to buy a guidebook for India in Cairo, since WikiTravel has proven pretty useless for transportation details of the region.

I have been traveling for seven months now. They went by very quickly, but on the other hand it seems like an incredibly long time ago that I was flying over the Olympic Mountains and Strait of Juan de Fuca en route to San Francisco, and thinking back to my travels through South America makes me feel like I'm thinking of a different trip altogether. I can tell now that extending my trip to 10 months was a good choice. I could be going home in a month, which would be great, but I've realized that seeing southeast Asia really makes my trip complete, well, as complete as a 10 month trip around the world can be. I've met a number of travelers who subtly reprimanded my itinerary for trying to visit too many places in a relatively short amount of time, but my friend Jonah advised me to not worry about spending enough time to "do a place justice", saying that the Bonderman Fellowship is sort of a "CliffNote to the world", and I've adopted that attitude in the last few months and decided to see everything that I feel like, which is in fact pretty much everything.

Anyway, about Israel.

When I left the Jordanian border, the smiles and friendly ahlans that punctuated my overwhelmingly-positive Middle East experience to date disappeared, replaced by grumpy Israeli border officials bent on finding a hole in my story. Upset at my Syrian and Lebanese passport stamps (I was secretely pleased at their discontentment), they grilled me with questions and asked me the same thing repeatedly. They made me wait for two hours, which was actually probably a record low for the Israeli border, and searched my backpacks, making themselves look rather foolish (at least to me) by missing a bag filled with propaganda from a certain group beginning with the letter H from eastern Lebanon. I won't say what it was, but I can assure you that I would have recieved a swift kick back into Jordan had they found it. Unable to find any problems or holes in my story, they finally deigned to let me into Israel.

On the five hour trip from Eilat to Jerusalem, the bus took a 10 minute break at a rest stop. As I stood outside a small store, I noticed three girls getting up from a lunch break. They were probably about 18 and were wearing the modest Israeli military uniform, not an uncommon sight in Israel since military service is compulsory. They slung normal school backpacks over their shoulders, and an M16 (um, a big gun) over the other, and continued gossiping and laughing as they walked off. As I watched this strange juxtaposition, thinking that they were only a year or two older than my little sister, another girl walked by and climbed back onto the bus. She was stylishly dressed in flare jeans, a white tanktop, and big designer European sunglasses. A handgun was holstered to one hip, a spare magazine on the other. Watching this with a watermelon popsicle in my hand, I suddenly felt very, very naive and immature, and I recalled an Israeli girl in Argentina telling me that she thought the compulsory military service was good, since it "makes you grow up very quickly".

The bus drove north along the Dead Sea, and while the landscape was mostly rocky and dull, at one point we passed by a series of caves. With the Dead Sea at my right and a brief version of history in my head, I realized that this is where the Dead Sea scrolls could have been found. The signs were in Arabic script as we drove through the West Bank en route to Jerusalem, and as soon as they changed to Hebrew lettering I knew we were in Israel. A few minutes later the bus emerged from a tunnel with the old city in Jerusalem to the left side, marked by the Dome of the Rock glimmering in the evening sun. Despite the ungodly number of weapons everywhere in Israel and the sudden void of hospitality that pervades the rest of the Middle East, Jerusalem is simply a spectacular city. Fascinating history, beautiful buildings and architecture, and incredible religious significance make it a great place to visit, whether you're a historian, religious pilgrim, or art buff (I am none of those).

Here are a few pictures which I hope will give some idea of what I'm talking about:

the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount

Prayer papers crammed into cracks on the Wailing Wall

Palestinian schoolgirls on the Temple Mount

What I was writing about in the last post...I've gotten into the habit of trying to draw some of the things I see. Obviously my drawing skills leave a little to be desired, but like I said before, when I try to get a grasp of the proportions and details I find myself noticing a lot of things that I would have otherwise missed

All Orthodox outside the Wailing (Western) Wall in the old city in Jerusalem - many of them reading the Torah in Hebrew script and praying, and a number of tourists putting their hand to the wall and praying as well.

View of the Wailing Wall

Palestinian schoolgirls outside the Dome of the Rock

I took so many pictures of this, so here is just one more... the Dome of the Rock is one of the most spectacular structures I've ever seen

The Damascus Gate into the Muslim Quarter in old Jerusalem - despite always introducing myself as an American, the Palestinians I met here were the friendliest and most welcoming people I met in Israel, echoing the incessant hospitality I experienced in Syria and Lebanon. Surprising and captivating, considering my nationality.

A Russian Orthodox church on the Mount of Olives

Orthodox dressed on the Mount of Olives, with the Russian church behind

view of the old city in Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives

The Arabic Middle East is hot, dusty, almost no one speaks English, and getting a fair price is a constant (but generally good-natured) battle, but there is something that I understand here, and despite the discomforts I always feel comfortable. In Israel, everyone spoke English, transportation was punctual, and I didn't have to worry about getting amoebic dysentery from a tomato, but as soon as I entered I missed the sketchy street food, crazy drivers, bargaining with everyone from taxi drivers to hotel proprietors. I remember several months ago I looked forward to flights, because a few hours in the air-conditioned sterility of airports seemed like a welcome relief from the reality of the country I was in, but now the western-ness of Israel was no match for the aura and hospitality that made the rest of the Middle East so endearing.

The Lonely Planet turned out to be right - the people of the Middle East are truly the highlight of a visit here, particularly in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. They are hardworking and ambitious, but not greedy, devoutly faithful and religious without proselthyzing or being holier-than-thou, proud, but not self-righteous, loyal to their culture and lifestyle without being critical of others, often poor, but never desperate...I have not seen these unlikely combinations anywhere else in the world, and of all the beautiful and interesting things I've seen in the last seven months, this is what I wish I could share with everyone back home.

And now to end this on a lighthearted note...

Ned: Homer, I've got a fozzie of a bear of a problem. Y' know, Maude and her mother were visiting Tyre and Sidon, the twin cities of the Holy Land. They must've kneeled in the wrong place and prayed to the wring God because, well, they're being held prisoner by militants of some sort!

Homer: Militants, huh? Well, if I were you, I'd kick their asses.

Ned: Well, in any hoodily-doodle, the embassy says it's just a routine hostage-taking, but I have to drive to Capital City, fill out some forms to get 'em out. Could you possibly watch the kids tonight?

Homer: Uh, gee, I'd really love to want to help you... Flanders, but...uh...Marge was taken prisoner in the...uh...Holy Land...and...

I visited Tyre and Sidon several weeks ago! Anyway, I am on the Sinai in Egpyt now, and I went snorkling in the Red Sea today....in the Red Sea!

"Vast, echoing, and Godlike"

2007-05-02T13:17:00.000Z

No man can live this life and emerge unchanged. He will carry, however faint, the imprint of the desert, the brand which marks the nomad; and he will have within him the yearning to return, weak or insistent according to his nature. For this cruel land can cast a spell which no temperate clime can match.

TE Lawrence, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom

Wadi Rum

Petra is the Machu Picchu of the Middle East - a hidden, lost city, known for centuries to the outside world through only myth and legend, despite being of utmost importance to the ancient empires. Sitting between Damascus and Cairo, and within easy reach of the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea, it held strategic importance, and the endless stream of tombs and temples suggest its spiritual significance as well. The sheer expanse and unbelievable complexity of the city make it unlike any other ancient site in the world, and the fact that it eluded the western world despite its size and age until 1812 hints at its incredibly improbable location - at the end of a river canyon.

A 1.2km long siq, or canyon, forms the memorable entrance to Petra. It is actually not a textbook canyon, but instead an extended crack in an incredibly large rock caused by geological forces. The siq narrows to about 10' at times, and the walls on either side are generally at least 70-100 feet in height. And keep in mind that you walk through this for 1.2km, though you hardly notice the length since you're anticipating the sight of the magnificent treasury around every corner. If you have ever seen Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, than you'll recognize the view from the last part of the siq:

Exiting the Siq after walking 1.2 km through an incredible canyon and seeing the Treasury, which is carved out of the wall makes the entrance to Petra one of the most dramatic imaginable...

I visited Petra with a guy from England named Will. When we exited the Siq and saw the Treasury, it was a spectacular sight, but the sun wasn't quite right, so I wanted to wait around to get a better picture. This wasn't a problem, since Will wanted to sketch a picture in his unlined Moleskin, a tradition for him at sights throughout the Middle East. He suggested that I do the same, and offered me one of this sketching pencils. Never having been much of an artist, I was reluctant but had nothing else to do, so I took up his offer and started trying to put an idea of the proportions and lines down on paper. Immediately I was glad that I took his suggestion. I found that when I was trying to sketch the Treasury as opposed to just looking at it, all kinds of minor details, substantial motifs, and hidden patterns jumped out at me, none of which I would have noticed without trying to draw them. The sketch in the end was of course quite poor, but it didn't really matter to me since I was so surprised and pleased at the things that I had consequently noticed.

Another view of the Treasury in Petra

We got to the Treasury at about 7am when there were only a few other people wandering around, but within an hour or so it became quite crowded, albeit with better light. Anyway, can you believe this thing is carved entirely out of the wall? Unbelievable!

After leaving the Treasury, we continued along another canyon until finding a trail that branched off. After hiking and scrambling for about twenty minutes, we were on top of the "rock" that the Treasury was carved out of. Another few hours of hiking and scrambling brought us along a ridge past other tombs and temples, and then back down through a series of carved out stairs and passages to the "ground level" of Petra. One of the things that distinguishes Petra from other ancient sites I've been to is that its complexity makes it easy to do some of your own exploring, and despite the 400,000 visitors that come every year, it is quite easy to find some tombs and ruins to have to yourself. And like Machu Picchu, the natural elements of Petra are the overwhelming factor in its beauty. Swirls of vibrant colors are on virtually every square inch of most of the tombs, and the contrast of the deep blue sky with the red rock suggests that the natural aesthetic of the area was as important as its strategic location.

The sky in this came out overexposed, but try to imagine the white on the right being a dark shade of blue...this is why I need a filter for my camera! Oh well, the rock swirls are enough, and these kind of patterns are everywhere in Petra.

Don't worry, Mom, this is safer than it looks...see the carved stairs on the left?

In some areas, this little tomb in itself would be an attraction. In Petra, it is just one of many along a side trail that no one walks down.

Bedouins live all over the area around and inside of Petra, so almost wherever you walk there is someone offering you tea, a ride on a camel, mule, or some kind of chariot-looking thing that race down the Siq carrying lazy tourists

Eventually Will and I made it up to the monastery via a spectacular hike along carved-out steps and through and over small gorges. The monastery is, like every creation in Petra, massive, and it sits at the top of a hill that looks out over Petra and the surrounding landscape, and you can even look over at Israel. I was taking some pictures there, and a small local boy wandered up to us and shyly said, "give me water, please". At many tourist attractions around the world children ask for pens, gum, candy, stickers, etc.. In Palmyra, for example, a boy trying to sell me some necklaces pulled out an Eclipse gum tin and asked me for more. After seeing tourists places for seven months, I'm used to hearing this, and I guess this is why I just ignored him for a few minutes and kept taking pictures. Suddenly it actually hit me - he wanted water, and while I was a bit wary about how easily and smoothly he asked the question, there was no way I could turn down a small child asking for water. In fact, I was kind of disgusted with myself for telling him no several times.

I had about a liter and a half left, so I was hesitant to hand over my whole bottle, but I found a postcard in my backpack and made an oragami cup, which is the only oragami thing I could ever manage, but he was delighted at my skill and immediately gulped down seven or eight cups. I was a bit astonished at how thirsty he actually seemed to be, so I ended up just giving him the rest of the bottle, still a little uncertain about why he was so thirsty, since despite being in the middle of the desert, Petra has a lot of facilities. Later, on the walk down from the monastery, I saw him and a friend on the trail and he got really excited and started hugging my legs and wouldn't let go until an older guy came along and reprimanded him, even though I was laughing and pretty amused by the matter. Anyway, I wasn't sure what to think of the whole thing, but like I said, you can't refuse a thirsty kid (or anyone, for that matter) water.

A young local kid bringing his mule (or donkey...I don't know) down from the monastery

The Monastery

They carved these out of the wall! They're so perfect...

Inside a massive tomb - the colors and the swirls on the ceiling are natural

the Royal Tombs of Petra

Bedouin guy overlooking Petra

One more view from the Siq...I think this is later in the day

We ended up hiking around Petra for about 10 full hours, all in the hot desert sun, so by the evening we were both wasted and headed back to the hotel to watch Indiana Jones, since it is somewhat obligatory after seeing the Treasury. I had to wake up for a 7am bus to Wadi Rum the next morning, which has some of the best desert scenery in the world and is where TE Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) lived and came up with the words for The Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

In my typical style, I showed up at Wadi Rum with no reservation or idea of how anything worked, but within a few hours I was getting in a dusty Nissan 4x4 with a family from Poland and heading out into the desert with a Bedouin guy named Tamam. I should have explained this earlier, but Bedouins are basically nomadic Arabs who live in the general desert area of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. They live in one area until the plants that their animals graze on are gone, and then they pack up and move somewhere else. They wear the keffiyeh and agal, respectively being the checkered scarf and the rope that keeps it in place.

The scenery of Wadi Rum was truly spectacular. Growing up in the PNW left me with a natural preference for the mountains and ocean, but every time I see the desert I'm left a bit speechless. It seems like the emptiness and openness would be bleak and uneventful, but then you look at patterns of color and wind in the sand and the sporadic sand dunes and meek plants sprouting up, and it seems as stunning as a jagged mountain range or stormy coastline.

the road in Wadi Rum going straight into the desert

Tamam driving

Different sand colors

One of the most renowned characteristics of the Bedouins is their hospitality, which made my trip into Wadi Rum particularly memorable. The desert extends in every direction, but you still come across the odd tent, and when you walk past the Bedouins insist that you come in and drink some tea with them. When a traveller passes by a Bedouin tent, their mentality dictates that their first instict be to offer tea and food and hospitality, since they may be the ones walking the next day and you'd inherently offer them the same. Even though I was obviously not a Bedouin, I still got invited into tents and the guys who lived at the place where we stayed were really friendly and seemed genuinly happy that we were there to check out their camp.

From inside a Bedouin tent

Ancient carvings on a cliff in Wadi Rum

Tamam and his Nissan

Tamam climbing up to the bridge

Tamam on top of the bridge

Being a typical traveller, I was a bit less modest than Tamam about making it to the top...

This is the Bedouin camp where we stayed the night

I'm not sure what I'm doing here, but I appear to be playing air guitar and dancing some kind of jig

a bit more normal

Tamam eventually pulled into our camp after several hours of driving through canyons and checking out sand dunes and massive cliffs. A 65ish year old Aussie guy with a Ph.D in biochemistry and an English guy joined our camp, and the six of us set off for a hike across one of the desert "fields" to find a spring one of the Bedouins had mentioned. Along the way, I noticed that the wind had made the plants create patterns like this:

Anyway, I thought that was cool, but maybe it was just the biologist in me stunned that plants could sprout up in the middle of this completely arid environment.

One of the Bedouins making tea in the camp where we stayed

Desert flora

Campfire at night

Despite their simple lifestyles, the Bedouins really know how to cook, and they have quite a unique style of cooking. They basically bury this big cylinder in the ground that has fire and coals, and drop this two-tiered grill down inside, where the heat slowly roasts the whole onions, potatoes, and meat. They cover the top with sand to keep the heat in, and then have to dig the unit out when they want to access the grill. After a few hours, the onions were crispy on the outside but biting into one yielded a sweet, liquified inside that mixed with the lamb and potatoes was positively delicious. With dinner they served sweet tea ("Jordanian whiskey", which I also heard called Moroccan whiskey in the Sahara), and rice and soup.

One of the Bedouins pulling the grill out

After dinner, familiar constellations and an almost-full moon lit up the sky, and my lifelong inability to resist a starry night had me walking out a quarter mile from our camp to take some pictures and admire the moon shadows and illuminated cliffs in the distance. Coincidentally, the other desert experience I had, in the Moroccan Sahara, was also complimented by a beautiful full moon. When I eventually wandered back to camp and thanked the Bedouins for dinner, I found the Aussie and Englishman huddled around the fire pouring gin and tonics, complete with ice from the hotel freezer from the night before. The Englishman had bought the supplies at the duty-free shop in Amman, and seemed shocked, concerned, and a bit sad when I said that I hadn't had anything to drink for a few weeks.

They offered the Bedouins a drink, but in their adherence to Islam they graciously declined, surmising the devotion to their faith that I have continually noticed and grown to really admire in the Muslim countries that I've visited. The generally unwavering adherence to these rules seems to suggest that their relationship with God is one of complete respect. Allah may forgive them for sinning, but that doesn't mean they abuse this gift, and while this observation is based just on my limited experience with the Muslim world, I suspect that my future travels will reaffirm my existing impression.

I've also grown to admire Islam's acceptance and acknowledgement of the other monotheistic faiths, a tenet that I think is overwhelmingly ignored by the west. The existance of God is summed up in the Shahada, one of the five pillars of Islam: "There is no god but Allah, and Mohammed is the Prophet of Allah". The misconception that Allah is different than the Judeo-Christian is common, but the Quran clearly states that the ahl at-kitab, or people of the book (believers in Judaism or Christianity) cannot be enslaved or persecuted, and consequently Muslims view Islam as simply a refinement of the older monotheistic faiths, but not superior or different. Mohammed was simply the prophet who put this refinement into words, "Quran" meaning "recitation". Thus politics created the conflict between Hizbollah/Hamas/Palestine and Israel, not religion, at least as far as my understanding goes.

Anyway, gin and tonics were passed around to the non-Muslims in the group, and a few of us stayed up late, solving the world's problems and discussing our travels under the stars. Eventually people wandered to their Bedouin-style tents, but still incapable of resisting, I slept under the stars.

The next morning I had to wake up early yet again to head back to the town and get on a crowded, cramped bus for Aqaba, my last stop in Jordan and my first sight of the Red Sea. In Aqaba I caught a taxi to the Israeli border, which is where this blog is going to end since I have quite a bit to write about Israel and no energy to do it. I am in fact in Jerusalem right now, and so hopefully I'll be able to write about Israel tomorrow or the next day.

The Wadi Rum desert in the morning

swimming in the Dead Sea is an extreme sport

2007-04-28T15:27:00.000Z

I can't seem to write a coherent thought today, but I wanted to put up pictures of the Dead Sea before Petra steals the show, which I'm sure will happen tomorrow.

So the rumors are true - you can indeed float in the Dead Sea, and even read a newspaper or book, if you should so desire. I left Damascus after an invigorating hammam experience, which for 5USD included some seriously abrasive scrubbing, a massage, and all the time in the steam room that I wanted, which turned out to be quite a bit. After a shared taxi ride to Amman, a short bus ride to a hotel in Madaba, and a taxi ride the same evening to Amman Beach, I found myself completely covered in mud and floating on top of the water in the incredibly saline waters of the Dead Sea, about 8 times more saline than normal saltwater, to be exact.

I don't mean to sound paranoid, but the Dead Sea sits at over 400 meters below mean sea level, and I became a little nauseous when I was standing on the shore and looked up and thought about more than 1200 feet of water sitting above me. The health benefits of the area quelled my thoughts about massive flooding, though, as the area has been renowned since ancient times for its healing qualities. From Wikipedia,

The Dead Sea area has become a major center for health research and treatment for several reasons. The mineral content of the waters, the very low content of pollens and other allergens in the atmosphere, the reduced ultraviolet component of solar radiation, and the higher atmospheric pressure at this great depth each have specific health effects. For example: persons suffering reduced respiratory function from diseases such as cystic fibrosis, seem to benefit from the increased atmospheric pressure.

I made the mistake of shaving on the morning that I visited the Dead Sea, which is a little ironic since I've been shaving about once a month during this trip, and this is the one place where the guidebook explicitly advises one not to shave, since even the tiniest little abrasion results in an unrelenting sting. While I was floating and looking up at the sky, I heard a blood-curdling scream about 100 meters away. These two girls (girls all swim fully clothed here, and that often includes the full head scarf and such) seemed to be drowning each other, and within seconds six or seven guys were running and swimming out to help them. I'm not exactly sure how it happened, but they both seemed to have ingested a tiny bit of the water, which, at 53% magnesium chloride and 37% potassium chloride, is apparently incredibly painful on the sensitive skin near your eyes and inside your mouth/throat. Anyway, they seemed to be okay eventually, but I really don't think I've ever heard anyone sound like they were in that much pain before.

The next morning I met a friendly French couple in the lobby of my hotel. They were hiring a taxi to drive them down to Petra via the Kings Highway, and I jumped at the opportunity to see the famously-beautiful landscape that the road winds through. Unfortunately the weather was a bit hazy, so we missed out on the beautiful contrast between sky and land that often characterizes this kind of scenery, but the dramatic folds and rolls below the unwaveringly drab and gray sky reminded me of a ruffled version of the Atacama Desert in southern Peru, and it was spectacular despite the flat light. The driver brought us a few kilometers off the road to a tiny village called Dana that looks out over a massive canyon and a nature reserve. The area reminded me a little bit of the area around the Black Sheep Inn in Ecuador, and if I wasn't so intent on seeing way too many places in the next two weeks I would have spent a night or two there. Anyway, an hour later we were in Petra where I checked into a place called Cleopetra Hotel. Clever, huh? Tomorrow I'll explore the ruins and hopefully the weather clears up a bit. Like I said before, I can't seem to coherent-ize my thoughts today so I'll let the pictures take it from here. Oh, and thanks to people who leave comments on these blogs; I appreciate it! Who are you?

Sunset over the Dead Sea from the Jordanian side (you're looking across at Israel here)

Again, looking across the Dead Sea at Israel

Jordanian family doing the mud thing next to me on the shore of the Dead Sea at Amman Beach...the guy's children were putting the mud on his back and he sent his son over to do the same to me. Jordanians are friendly like that, but I'm pretty glad my dad never sent me to a mud-up a stranger.

Me floating! Unfortunately I didn't have a newspaper read to dramatize this.

A mosaic map of ancient holy sites in the Jordan-Israel area

from Dana

Bedouins along the road to Petra

Crusader castles never seem that sightly to me, but I guess the Crusades in general were not particularly admirable...despite the lack of aesthetic, these castles are quite impressive. This is in Karak.

The Brazen Serpent Monument created by Giovanni Fantoni on the top of Mount Nebo, overlooking the Dead Sea and Israel. Mount Nebo is where Moses apparently set his eyes on the Promised Land for the first time, and where he subsequently died.

Another mosaic on Mount Nebo...I just like this because you can read the Greek script saying "Euphrates" in the lower right corner. The other three corners had the names of the other important rivers of antiquity...the Tigris, and I forget the other two.

more of Syria, creativity continues to wane

2007-04-26T07:23:00.000Z

falafel frying in Hama

"Quit emailing me about chemistry and go eat a falafel or something"
-Conner

I think about home, the UW, family, and friends every day, but in the last few weeks a consortium of emails regarding housing and apartments, classes, degree requirements, registration problems, taxes that I didn't pay, and plans for the summer have made the fact that I am indeed going back to my life in the USA very tangible. On one hand, I have three months of travelling left, which is a lot, and I'm incredibly excited for the rest of the Middle East, seeing northern India, and then finally finishing my trip in southeast Asia, but on the other hand, the preceding seven months makes the final three seem like nothing, and as strange as it sounds considering how long three months of travelling is, I get a little stressed sometimes because it feels like I have hardly any time left, so I try to take a step back to gain some perspective.

everything is in Arabic script here...everything. and transliteration is quite difficult, and in the case of posters apparently about bees or honey, it's probably not worth the time.

Feeling a little weary of the backpacker scene convinced me to check into a nicer hotel when I arrived in Damascus, and I only spent one night there before heading up north to Hama. Hama is known for these massive wooden water wheels called norias that transport water from the river up into aquaducts. The river running through the desert made the general area relatively lush and green, so it was a pleasant area to spend a day in. However, in spite of the ambition I had for seeing a lot of Syria, some serious ennui sank in after walking around Hama for an hour. I suddenly didn't understand why I was in the middle of Syria looking at massive water wheels; they were impressive, but I doubted that I was really that interested in them. I felt like I should be trekking in India or surfing in Indonesia, or at least doing something that held some real personal interest. I'd vaguely felt this way before, but it hit me really hard all of a sudden, and suddenly the prospect of another bus ride to another town repulsed me, so after spending one night in Hama I headed back to Damascus and started working on my visa application for India.

one of several massive norias in Hama

I was walking down a street in Hama, and these three kids started talking excitedly to me, and making gestures with their hands to indicate a camera. I took out my camera, kneeled down, and took a picture of the three of them, and then showed it to them on the LCD. They whooped with joy, and pretty soon there were several groups of kids around me asking for pictures, which I dutifully took and displayed to their delight.

more of Hama

a poster of Bashar al-Assad, Syria's president

juice vendor in Damascus

The visa application was easy enough and set me back 70USD, but after not having to pay for a Lebanese visa and getting into Syria for almost nothing, I didn't feel too bad. The people running the embassy were quite friendly, and I got the impression that they hadn't seen too many Americans showing up to apply for an Indian visa. I had to wait several days for it to process, so I stayed two more nights at the same hotel in Damascus, not doing too much besides wandering around the old city and reading four paperbacks in a row - two murder mysteries, Angels and Demons, and a nonfiction book about a piano shop in Paris. You come across some interesting things at book exchanges in foreign countries, though I actually learned a lot about pianos and Paris from this book. Whether that will ever be useful is still up in the air.

burkas and bread

in the old city in Damascus

I spent two nights in Damascus, and while I still wasn't in the mood for travelling I really wanted to see the ancient city of Palmyra (from the Greek Παλμυρα, which is pronounced the same), which is in the middle of the desert, four hours from Damascus, and only about 60 miles from the border with Iraq. As many ruins as I've seen on this trip, Palmyra still turned out to be incredibly impressive. Heliopolis and the Colosseum may be massive and dramatic, but Palmyra's setting in the middle of the desert combined with their incredible sprawl over several square kilometers put it on par with any other ancient site I've seen. It was originally a stop for caravans crossing the desert, then became part of the Greek empire for a few centuries, got taken over by the Romans in 200ad, became Muslim in 600ad, and finally met its end due to an earthquake in 1089. I can't get over the fact that these are the same Greeks and Romans who held Cadiz, the port city in western Spain that I visited about two months ago...these empires were massive!

I saw these collapsed columns in ancient Olympia, Greece, and instead of being one column like this one they were composed of stacked segments. I cannot fathom how they made this so perfect and elevated it, and how it was strong enough to survive toppling over.

The Tetrapylon in Palmyra...for once, those Greek roots from 8th grade are useful!

Main road in Palmyra

I love those few minutes right before the sun sets, when you can visibly see it moving, because it seems like the only time of day that you can consciously feel the earth rotating, and see which way it is rotating. Sunset from the Arabic Castle in Palmyra, with the Mediterranean somewhere (way off) in the distance.

the Arabic Castle at sunset

Syrian landscape

Palmyra...

I actually arrived in Damascus on a crecent moon, which seemed particularly appropriate, but here it is a half...

My Middle East guidebook has a 15 page section about Iraq, and opens with this introduction:

Long ago in the fertile valleys between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, the great civilizations of the age were born. Modern Iraq was ancient Mesopotamia, from the Greek meaning 'between two rivers', and it was here that human beings first began to cultivate their land, where writing was invented and where the Assyrians, Sumerians, and Babylonians all made Iraq the center of the ancient world.

With the arrival of Islam, Iraq again took the center stage. Islam's most enduring schism - between Sunnis and Shiites - was first played out on Iraqi soil. Baghdad also became one of Islam's greatest capitals, home to the Abbasid caliphs whose reign has become a byword for Islam's golden age of learning and sophistication.

The country remains rich with the resonance of a glorious history, but recent history has dealt less kindly with IRaq. Under Saddam Hussein, widespread political repression and conflicts with Iran, Kuwait, and the West earned Iraq international infamy and also drew the attention of international human-rights organizations and Western armies in equal measure. Indeed in recent years, few countries have experienced such external interference as Iraq has, culminating in the 2003 American-led invasion of the country.

Iraq has now dominated international news headlines for more than a decade for all the wrong reasons, just as Vietnam did three decades before it. The country's future is uncertain, with Iraqis struggling to eke out an existance and build the institutions of a democratic Iraq against the backdrop of political and religious tension, and amid the numbing constancy of terrorist attacks.

Iraq is now one of the most dangerous countries on earth, but few countries can boast such a rich history. When the country gets back on its feet, it will be one of the great travel destinations of the Middle East.

-Lonely Planet Middle East

The way the author wrote that passage sends tingles down my spine. They seem to point out so many things about the history and character and relevance of Iraq in so few words, but at the same time it seems objective and quite clear. Anyway, I liked it, so I wanted to share it.

camel in Palmyra

I forget the name of these things, but they are everywhere in the Middle East. A little kid gave me one on a bus, and it really wasn't that pleasant to eat.

The incredibly friendly people, rock-bottom prices, delicious food, and relatively easy transportation would be an easy basis for me to characterize Syria as "amazing", and of course those things are all present and true, but the thing that I really can't get over is the country's geographical position. From this internet cafe in the center of Damascus, I could walk five minutes and get on a bus to Kuwait, take a taxi to Jordan or Lebanon, ride a train or a bus to Istanbul, take a few buses and find myself in Jerusalem by the end of the day, or Egypt, for that matter, and if I had a visa I could get on a short flight or bus ride to Baghdad, Iraq. And when I consider the borderline civil war occuring in Lebanon between Hizbollah and the current administration, the suddenly-escalating Hamas-Israel conflict, and the war and insurgencies in Iraq, being in Syria puts me right in the eye of the storm. However, the storm doesn't seem to be moving, because Syria is easily one of the safest countries I've ever travelled to. The omnipresence of genuine hospitality and friendly-natured people is a completely surreal, and the complete void of any real crime or violence is similarly hard to fathom.

I've met quite the array of people here, too. I was eating lunch in a cafe a few days ago, and a guy came over and struck up a conversation. I was surprised that he knew where Seattle was, since usually I just have to resort to saying "California" since the only other places people know of are Washington DC and New York, so I asked him if he had been to the US. He said no, but then he said he was from Mosul, Iraq, and he worked as a police officer there so he knew a number of American soliders, several being from Seattle. We talked as he drank a cup of tea, and he explained that his family was still in Iraq and he was trying to get visas for them to come into Syria. Syria lets in a number of Iraqis who are trying to escape the conflict in their country, which I admire, but I find it quite sad that they let virtually zero Palestinian refugees in. I find this particularly hypocritical since Syria does not recognize Israel as a legitimate nation. Lebanon seems to be one of the only Middle Eastern countries that is at all welcoming to Palestinians, which is probably symbolic of their ongoing vendetta with the Israeli regime.

Coming back from the Indian embassy today, the taxi driver asked where I was from. He spoke no English, but I've basically deducted that "where are you from" usually follows the basic conversation formalities of "sabaa al kayr" (good morning), "salaam aleikum" (peace be upon you), and "kayf haalak" (how are you). Answering "ameriki", he seemed startled, looked at me, and said, "George Bush bad", which I nodded in agreement with. He rambed a bit in Arabic, and I heard the name "bin Laden" mentioned, so I said, "bin Laden bad?", which he nodded vigorously in agreement with. He then broke down his political opinion for me: "Bush, bad. bin Laden, bad. Cheney, Rice, bad. al-Assad, very good!"

The obsession Syrians have with their president, Bashar al-Assad, is quite fascinating. You see pictures of him on everything - cars, buildings, t-shirts, keychains, walls, hanging from street lamps... The Bush administration has a serious issue with his laissez-fare attitude towards Iraq, Hizbollah, and Hamas, which to a certain level I understand, but for Syria al-Assad's political stance have been fairly progressive. Eh, make up your own mind: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bashar_al-Assad

I thought Peru was bad, Ecuador could be a little sketchy, but my award for the worst (or maybe best) drivers in the world goes to Syria, Lebanon being a close second. Squeezing way too many cars laterally into a two-lane highway and the national obsession with passing makes me really appreciate the relative serenity of highways back home, where I curse if I have to accomodate a logging truck merging onto 101 by slowing from 60 to 50. And all of this incredibly-dangerous driving is put to the less-than-beautiful soundtrack of every conceivable tone of car horn in the world being constantly held down.

I saw this sign as I was on the bus from Palmyra back to Damascus, and my camera was in my backpack so I drew a picture of it when I got back. It's not spectacularly interesting or anything, but still, a sign pointing to Baghdad isn't something you see every day.

As long as I'm posting pictures of things that I drew in my Moleskin, here is my guide to Beirut:

Travel in Syria is a bit more difficult than other places I've been. None of the signs are written in the latin alphabet, let alone the English language, and very few people speak any English at all. There are very few travellers here; I think I read that for every 100 travellers in Egypt there is 1 in Syria. It is kind of a shame, because Syria has an incredible amount to offer anyone from backpackers to older luxury coach tourists. There are medievel castles, ancient ruins, Mediterranean beaches, and in my opinion the constant smiles accompanied by "ahlan wa salan!" (welcome) is reason enough to visit. Syrians are phenomenally good at seeing the person instead of the passport, and in spite of the optimism I generally feel about the world, I think it's truly depressing that our world leaders can't see what is so obvious to their constituents.

me in a souk in Damascus

Oh, I almost forgot the best story of all - how I ended up on al-Jazeera (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Jazeera). When I was walking around the ruins of Palmyra, a young woman and a few guys came up to me. I suspected they were touts, but they seemed professional and asked if I would help with their film project. They said they were with al-Jazeera, and when I introduced myself as an American the woman laughed and said, "oh, so maybe you don't like us too much?" I laughed and said that I had been watching al-Jazeera in English back at my hotel, and that I had no problem helping them. They were making a program about children working as guides at tourist sites, so they filmed as this young boy showed me around the ruins, and even filmed us doing some cheesy introductory dialogue. I was laughing the entire time, but they seemed pleased enough and thanked me profusely when I left. I'm not sure when it is going to be aired, but if I ever decide to go into media I'll have something to put on my resume!

Well, inshallah I'll be able to pick up my passport and Indian visa this afternoon, and if that is the case then tomorrow I'm going down to Amman, Jordan in a service taxi. If you want to see the rest of my pictures from Syria, the set is on flickr at this address:
http://www.flickr.com/gp/24935645@N00/P5Sunj

Syria (creativity is waning)

2007-04-25T18:16:00.000Z

One of a few kids spending a hot day jumping into the river in Hama, Syria

I have a lot to write about Syria, including how I ended up on al-Jazeera (as in, "al-Jazeera has released a new video of Osama bin Laden..."), my trip to the ancient city of Palmyra (spectacular ruins in the middle of the desert), and other random things as usual (I drew a picture of a sign that I saw and I read a book about pianos), but not right now because this keyboard is sticky and I'm tired.

made it to Syria!

2007-04-20T15:56:00.000Z

"It is said that when the Prophet Mohammed first looked down from the mountainside onto Damascus, he refused to visit the city because he wanted to enter Paradise only once, and that was when he died."
-Lonely Planet Middle East

The ubiquitous Arabic phrase "in sha'Allah" (God willing) really exemplifies my attitude towards getting into Syria when I woke up this morning in Beirut. I was skeptical that I'd be falling asleep that night in Damascus, but my prayers to the travel gods were answered in the form of a two week Syrian visa issued at the border! I showed up at the border with no visa, no hotel reservation for the night, and with no letter from my embassy, all of which are usually required for a Syrian visa. Even better, I only had to pay 16USD! Ironically, this is less than any non-Arabic nationality has to pay, and much less than it would have cost if I had actually applied for it advance. I had to wait two hours while they faxed Damascus, but when it came back affirmative I walked across the border and found some taxis waiting. Oneof the drivers said $20 for Damascus, I balked, turned around, and put my thumb out at the BMW passing by. The guy glanced at me, pulled over, and drove me the 40km to downtown Damascus for free. He didn't speak much English, but on the way he asked me all kinds of questions, particularly about my car and my life back home. His lack of English and my lack of Arabic created quite a void between truth and reality, as after dropping me off he drove away thinking that I was a doctor living in California who drove a Subaru Impreza. The Subaru thing used to be true, the doctor thing will hopefully be true, and I generally am not interested in the California thing becoming true, but anyway, I was grateful for his help.

Anyway, here are a few more pictures from Lebanon that I didn't get around to posting before:

Maybe this hints at the massive size of these columns in Baalbek

This is what the sludge at the bottom of a cup of Turkish coffee looks like...I love this stuff (the coffee, not the sludge)

Olives in a souk

So we were walking through this souk, and this soldier comes up to us with sizable brown grocery bag in his hands, grins, and asks if we wanted to buy his hashish. Eastern Lebanon, along with being the ex Hizbollah headquarters, used to grow copious amounts of marijuana as well, but now it seems to be a military operation. This guy was comfortable enough with it to have his picture taken...

This kid kept yapping away at Arabic to me, and in my mind was saying all kinds of deep and insightful things about the state of the world. What do you think he was saying here?

In the courtyard in Heliopolis in Baalbek

Anyway, I am going to save Damascus for later and head up north tomorrow morning. I'm very excited to see the rest of Syria, since there are all kinds of amazing ruins, mosques, souks, and Mediterranean villages to explore...I'm so glad I made it here.

Temples, Azerbaijanis, and Nargilehs

2007-04-19T08:18:00.000Z

On my way to this internet cafe this morning, I noticed a soldier walking up the street. It was about 9am, and he was apparently on his way to work. In one hand he had some kind of lunch box, and in the other hand he was holding his AK-47 like you would a briefcase. The bored, tired expression on his face suggested that to him, it was just another day at the office...

A few days ago, I went on a day trip to the eastern side of Lebanon with a girl from Hong Kong and a girl from Melbourne, who had just gotten into Beirut the day before, and their obsession with haggling that I saw over a few days really bothered me. It started when we were looking for a service taxi from our hotel to the bus station on the other side of Beirut. Service taxis are common in the Middle East, and they are basically cars that operate as buses, so there are fixed fares from point A to point B. We hailed one, and he told us it would be 1500 livres each (about 1 US dollar), since we were going through two service zones, which cost 750 each. They wouldn't have this, and started trying to bargain him down. I told them that it didn't work like that with service taxis in Lebanon, since they have fixed fares, to which they responded with a hint of gloating that since they were girls, they could get whatever price they wanted. I shrugged and let them embarrass themselves for another five minutes, before they finally got into the car, lightened after offloading most of their dignity, and we sped across town. Of course, when we reached the bus station, they still didn't want to pay more than a thousand each, and after they argued with the poor guy for another few minutes, the girl from Hong Kong, Bella, consented, and the Aussie girl, Jo, huffed that she didn't have 500. Sick of the matter, I tossed the guy a 500 coin, and not particularly heart-broken at the loss of 30 cents, started looking around for a bus to Baalbek.

"All of Lebanon cried when they destroyed this bridge," a Lebanese woman told me as we drove through the improvised detour underneath. Israeli rockets hit this bridge that connected eastern and western Lebanon last August.

Later, in Baalbek, they would just lie to the vendors, and after hearing a price for something, they would divide it by four and say that the guy up the street had offered them this price, which, of course, hadn't actually happened. Vendors can be good actors, too, and come up with a thousand reasons for selling their t-shirt for a price, but as the girls stood by their requested 75% discount, the guy was visibly offended (eyes are the only facial feature that can't lie, as far as I can tell) by their persistence and refusal to budge, and I really respected the fact that he didn't give in, particularly since we were three of six or seven tourists that we saw there.

Bargaining, bartering, haggling - whatever you want to call it - is completely normal and expected in many countries, particularly in the Middle East, and almost anything you buy you need to bargain for; it is just part of the culture. These girls crossed the line, though, and I've seen several travellers do the same thing in last six months. "It's not the money, it's the principle," they'll argue, ignoring the fact that the seller feels the same way. A few cents isn't going to change his life any more than it is going to diminish theirs, but the principle of pride is much more important and respected in the Middle East than it generally is in the west. "This isn't what the locals pay" is another common argument, which is also often true in souks or bazaars, but then Lebanese locals probably aren't buying t-shirts that say "Lebanon", and if they were they wouldn't be forcing the seller to speak English and they'd probably be actually treating him with some respect. Like I said before, bargaining is completely essential for almost anything in most of the Middle East, but these girls and other travellers I've seen take it to an extreme that makes me a little uncomfortable.

Anyway, those notes aside, the ruins of Heliopolis in Baalbek just blew me away. I've seen the Colosseum, the Parthenon, Delphi, Ancient Olympia, Mycenae, Troy, Ephesus, and Hierapolis, but these are the first ruins I've seen that I couldn't quite believe. Their magnitude was way beyond the human scale, and I didn't blame ancient historians for believing that they were built by giants. The magnanimity of the Temple of Jupiter makes you a little nauseous to stand next to, and its remaining six columns alone impressed me more than any ancient site I've ever seen. What is called the "Small Temple" is a massive building which is actually larger than the Parthenon, so if you've seen the Parthenon maybe you can get a grasp of how magnificent these temples were. Some of the foundation blocks under the Temple of Jupiter are incredibly massive, and one is estimated to weigh at least 1000 tons. No one knows how it was transported there.

This is larger than Athens' Parthenon, but it is called the "Small Temple" here

No justice here...if I was standing next to one of those columns, you probably wouldn't even be able to see me in this. These are something like 24 meters high, and probably eight feet thick. Temple of Jupiter.

In Baalbek we met a Lebanese-Russian couple living in Azerbaijan. The guy had grown up in a village near Baalbek and had brought his Russian fiance to meet his family before their wedding. He insisted on buying us lunch in Baalbek, and then proceeded to drive us all around the area and to a small Christian community a few dozen miles away to meet his aunt, who continued the hospitality by serving us coffee and chocolates. He was really proud to show us around, and I definitely was not hungry for dinner that night as he stopped at least three times to buy us more food, usually in the form of Lebanese desserts and sweets. More than happy to share his view of Lebanon's history and politics, he talked incessantly, interrupted only occasionally by lighthearted jokes from his fiance. He drove us all the way back to our hotel in Beirut, and invited us to join them for a drive up north the next day to see Byblos and a few other nice areas. I think I said something like this before, but if you had told me that morning when I woke up that I'd be touring around Lebanon with a Lebanese-Russian couple from Azerbaijan in a few hours...I don't know how to adequately end this sentence. But I would have been surprised.

True to their word, they picked us up the next day and drove us to some spectacular viewpoints of Beirut and to some more ruins in Byblos. The rest of the ruins in the world will be hard-pressed to top Heliopolis, but it was nevertheless a pleasant area to walk around, and I bought a small Lebanese cookbook, to add to my increasingly-heavy backpack that is now home to a large, fragile plate from Cappadocia, a bottle of wine from Bulgaria, a bottle of olive oil from Turkey's Aegean, and numerous other souviners that I've picked up after sending stuff home with my dad in Ireland. And speaking of home, I now know when I'll be there, and it is definite this time, since all flights except for this single seat appear to be sold out between early June and mid-August. Barring falling in love with a Lebanese girl and spending the rest of my life smuggling weapons for local militant groups (the former is particularly probable), I fly from Bangkok to Seattle on July 27, thus being gone from home for 10 months. Eight months is a very long time to spend backpacking, and if I was headed home in early June I would be content and proud of what I'd done, but 10 months of backpacking in several major regions of the world pushes this year into a different realm, at least in my mind. It doesn't sound like that much more to me now, but when I think about everything that happened in the first two months of my trip, and everything that I've done in the last two months, I can appreciate the possibilities. For that matter, my program in Greece my freshman year lasted just over two months, and if there was ever a life-changing experience, that was it...so I'm quite excited to see what the next 3.5 months hold for me.

Rabih, Layla, Bella, and Jo and a statue that overlooks the Mediterranean and Beirut

All this sponteneity - changing travel dates, deciding to come to Lebanon, flying to Ireland - is expensive, but I think the Bonderman Fellowship purposely affords such a luxury. I have no doubt that with meticulous planning and no dramatic spontaneity or indecision, I could have done almost the same 8-10 month trip for 10-12 thousand dollars, and I think the excessive grant amount is to make you comfortable with flexibility and sponsors you to practice independence.

When I arrived in Beirut on the night of the 11th, the manager at Talal's asked me how many weeks I would be staying. I laughed, thinking that I'd only be in Beirut for two or three nights, but now it is eight days later and if I wasn't so excited to see more of the Middle East, I could stay in Beirut for at least another week. However, tomorrow I'm going to catch a bus to Damascus, Syria, where if the stars are aligned and the travel gods answer my prayers I'll get a two week Syrian visa.

To continue what I was writing about on the previous blog, I had an interesting little conversation with the guy who runs Maklouf, a little shwarma shop across the street from Talal's. He asked me where I was from, and responding "America", he smiled and said ahlan wa salaan, Arabic for welcome. "I like Americans," he said in accented English, "they are always very polite." Thinking about this, I realized it was true. I met more Americans who spoke some basic Arabic in Morocco and Lebanon than any other nationality, and people in both countries love it when foreigners try their language. The response to me asking "kayf haalak?" (how are you?) or "sabaa al kayr" (good morning) is always the same - a delighted smile accompanied by "ah, you speak Arabish!?" Then they'll tell you about their third cousin who lives in Baltimore and want to know all about your experience in their country. I've quickly grown to love and admire some aspects of the Islam religion and the Middle Eastern culture - the hospitality, the unwavering spiritual devotion, and ability to be constantly optimistic in the omnipresent face of adversity and danger. According to the Quran, Allah is sometimes partly manifested as a visitor, which probably gave rise to the Lebanese saying, "Guests are a gift from God."

There are somewhere between zero and a thousand more things to say about Lebanon, but I think the story from Baalbek does it some justice. Say a friendly Marhaba, and suddenly you're whisked away to meet family, eat incredible food, and see little pockets of the country that are far from the nearest bus stop. People use the word "juxtaposition" to describe Turkey, but as I sit in this ultra-modern department store where I ordered a caprese salad and got a free laptop to use for as long as I want, while being able to look out the window at the street where Hizbollah supporters are staging a protest that has the world's attention, I can't help but think that it more aptly describes Lebanon.

Layla and Rabih, the couple who drove us around for two days, puffing away at grape-flavored shisha in a nargileh in Tripoli. The fruity scent of nargileh smoke is everywhere in Lebanon, but I'm not complaning. Last summer, this guy from high school showed up to our apartment one day and declared his intentions to buy a hookah. He managed to do this at one of the small stores on the Ave, and then proceeded to spend basically two full days shuttling said hookah between our apartment and Ariel's, and smoking strawberry-flavored shisha at every moment in between. I think he finally made himself sick and headed back to Port Angeles, and come to think of it, I never did see him after that... Anyway, I am telling this story because he would be in very, very good company in Lebanon - the nargileh is like a household appliance here.

Paris of the Middle East

2007-04-15T15:03:00.001Z

Walking around Beirut at night makes you feel like you're in a rap video. Lamborghinis, Hummers, and Mercedes prowl the narrow streets, vying for parking spots in front of the glamorous clubs and making their presence known with aftermarket exhausts and thumping bass lines from the latest western pop music. Girls who could pass for a young Shakira (who, incidently, is half Lebanese...funny the things you learn in high school Spanish) flaunt designer handbags and sunglasses, wearing clothes that make you wonder if you are in Milan or Paris, because surely this couldn't be the heart of the infamously suppressive Middle East, right? Behind the doors and bouncers wait 10 dollar Almazas and LCD screens filled with Johnny Knoxville and Bam Margera, both being consumed by the always-well-dressed and seemingly insomniac Lebanese youth. An image-obsessed culture, sure, but also remarkably friendly and unpretentious.

Maybe this isn't the image you had of Lebanon (it certainly wasn't what I expected), but it isn't hard to find any of your preconceptions, either. Armed guards are everywhere, at least two or three per block, and by "armed" I don't mean they have a .38 strapped to their waist, I mean they cradle Kalashnikovs in their hauntingly-youthful hands. I actually didn't think too much of this until I was talking past the American University of Beirut and thought about how incredibly strange it would be to walk down the Ave and see this kind of security. Well, security is a subjective word. I'm never sure if an omnipresent ready-for-combat militia makes me feel more or less safe. Camo-painted tanks are posted everywhere as well, usually with a soldier manning a huge machine gun on top, creating an all-too-visible military presence that suggests some severe anticipations.

Tents for protesters in support of Hizbollah in downtown Beirut

Hizbollah supporters have staged a long-term protest a few blocks from my hotel in front of a beautiful modern mosque. When I first walked past the compound of makeshift tents draped with Lebanese flags, I thought it was a Palestinian refugee camp, since those are all over Lebanon, but when I asked someone back at my hotel he told me it was a Hizbollah protest of Fouad Siniora, the current Lebanese prime minister. Their basis for protest strikes me as being a bit strange. In 2005 Rafiq Hariri was assasinated, and Siniori and the US accused Syria as being involved, and so when Siniori came into power, he created an investigative tribunal for the matter, which irritated Hizbollah. The Lebanese constitution mandates that all ethno-religious groups be represented in the cabinet, and so the Hizbollah members of the cabinet resigned, and thus their current protest is that Siniori's government is unconstitutional. Maybe I'm oversimplifying things, but that is how I understand it and so the whole protest seems slightly ironic. The guy who told me that it was a protest turned out to be a professional travel blogger, and on his blog he contends that the US State Department would classify all of the protestors as "terrorists", but the protest is in fact currently passive and walking past the tents doesn't suggest my general image of terrorism.

The landmark mosque next to the protesters

I spent a few days walking around Beirut, wondering at the Hizbollah propaganda and protests and walking along the waterfront, which was dotted with fisherman and young people rollerblading and jogging. The American University of Beirut campus was a pleasant area to walk through, and it is more or less the choice education for Lebanon's wealthy youth so everyone spoke English and the student newspaper, which I read through, was in English. I also took a bus out of town to go to the US Embassy, since I need more pages in my passport, and I must say that I was a little surprised at appearance of the embassy. I had an image in my mind of mile-thick perimeter walls, security cameras everywhere, American soldiers patrolling the exterior...but in fact it was just a small complex up on a hill protected by some Lebanese security. Unfortunately I couldn't get passport pages on a Friday for some reason, but another curious thing happened on my trip out there. I stopped to buy a banana(fruit with peels are best friends for travellers) at a litte fruit stand, and the guy wouldn't let me pay. Confused, I tried to insist, but he just smiled and waved me off. So I got a free banana, which I guessed was just the result of him being too lazy to ring me up or something. On the way back from the embassy, I stopped at another fruit stand, and grabbed a few oranges and bananas, and again, they wouldn't let me pay. I really insisted and kept handing money over, but they wouldn't accept it, so once again I left a bit bewildered but sort of warmed as well.

Fisherman on the waterfront in Beirut

The next day I ventured up north on a bit of a whim, and almost got stuck for the night in a small mountain village. I took a bus to Tripoli, which is the northernmost city, and caught another bus to Bcharre, which is in a valley in the mountains below a small ski resort. The road up to Bcharre slowly winds up mountains, leaving the Mediterranean behind, and dramatically skirts cliffs and small pockets of the ancient cedar forests that made Lebanon famous in the ancient world. Bcharre is famous for being the birthplace of the Lebanese-American writer Khalil Gibran, and was a scenic little town to spend a few hours in. I went into a little cafe noted in my book and got some delicious hummous that was completely different than anything of the same name that I've ever tried, and as I was leaving the owner asked me where I was going. Laughing, he told me that the last bus to Tripoli had left 30 minutes ago, and that there was no other way to get back to Tripoli or Beirut. I tried unsuccessfully to hitchhike, and then a boy told me that no one would be driving to Tripoli at that time, so I ended up having to pay 30 USD for a taxi to a town at the bottom of the mountain from which I could catch a bus.

Farmers Market on Saturday in downtown

The following day I went with a British guy studying Arabic in Damascus to a small town in the south called Tyre. Only 20km from the Israeli border, Tyre has suffered dreadfully from the constant Israeli incursions, and bomb-destroyed buildings from the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war have a frighteningly high occurence. There wasn't too much to see in Tyre, but we spent a few hours wandering around the souks and along the perimeter of a Palestinian refugee camp. Due to the Palestinian refugees and civilian casualties of the 2006 war, the UN is all over Tyre and we constantly saw UN-flagged vehicles and uniforms. Just a little background on the conflict - last July the Lebanese paramilitary force/political party/satellite terrorist group (depending on your politics) launched rockets at Israeli border villages, creating chaos which gave another unit the chance to sneak across the border and capture two Israeli soldiers. Three other Israeli soldiers were killed in the raid, and Israel almost instantly responded with massive airstrikes on southern Lebanon reaching up to Beirut and a naval blockade of Lebanon. Israeli ground forces also invaded southern Lebanon and occupied certain positions until October 1st, well after the Lebanese and Israeli governments approved UN Resolution 1701, which called for a ceasefire, withdrawl, and disarmament. A thousand people died in the conflict, mostly Lebanese, and 200,000 Lebanese became refugees in an area particularly volatile and dangerous due to unexploded cluster bombs.

You see this everywhere, particularly in southern Lebanon - Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hizbollah

When I was walking around Tyre, I saw a local woman buying some nice jewelry. A few weeks ago I was watching some movie, and this woman in the movie told this Buddhist parable (it was told less eloquently than this, but I couldn't find the quote from the movie):

A man of Chan was walking along the ledge of a high mountain path when he was suddenly confronted by a tiger. To escape, he grabbed hold of a sapling and lowered himself over the edge of the precipice. While he clung there - the snarling mouth of the tiger a few feet above him and the base of the cliff a quarter-mile below him - he felt the sapling's roots slowly begin to tear away. He could find no foothold or anything else to grab. As he dangled there, wondering what he should do next, he noticed a strawberry growing out of a cleft. He picked it and ate it and remarked that especially considering the time of year, it was particularly sweet.

About the tensions here - I'm not going to judge a 3000+ year old conflict, but what I will say is that the Lebanese that I've met(and everyone I've met here, which includes Egyptians, Palestinians, Jordanians, and Syrians) are unwaveringly friendly, curious, and appreciative of anyone seeing their country. Actually, I'll make that into a superlative - they're the friendliest people I've met on my trip, and they find the fact that I'm an American irrelevent. A generally anti-American paradigm in Lebanon would be legitimate. The Israeli precision-guided bombs that flattened the south last summer were shipped express from the US government, but nevertheless the Lebanese continue to differentiate between "American" and "American government". Many individuals I've met in the last six months can do this, but they have to think about it and they expect you to prove it to them, thus the I'm-from-the-US-but-I'm-from-the-west-coast-so-I'm-not-bad* complex in a lot of travelling Americans that irritates me to high (low?) hell. I'm not naive, I know there are strong exceptions to this probably within a few hundred feet of where I'm sitting, but like the Lebanese, I'm not going to judge a country by a few extremist conservative old men.

Fisherman preparing their boats in Tyre

The day after visiting Tyre I woke up early for another attempt at the embassy. It lies an annoying 30-minute bus ride north of downtown due to the atrocious traffic of Beirut, and when I got there and passed through security, a very unpleasant girl working at the embassy told me that I'd have to come back the next day to pick it up, which I really did not want to do. I asked her if maybe I could just wait for an hour while they processed it, and she snapped something back about all of the other work they had to do. In the window next to me, a tall American man was angrily and loudly complaining to a consular officer about something that somehow revolved around him being arrested in Lebanon and consequently being unable to exit the country, since he had to pay some fine that he couldn't afford. I'm not sure what the officer said to him, but the man shouted a few more angry words about Lebanese prisons and stormed off. Thinking that they probably had to deal with this kind of crap all the time, I turned back to the girl, smiled, and said "Okay, I understand, I'll come back tomorrow, if you're sure there is no way to get it today?" She seemed slightly ataken back by this, but she muttered something about seeing what she could do, went to the back, and 10 minutes later I had my passport back with 26 fresh visa pages. It's important to develop instincts to know when being pleasant and polite will get you what you need, or when you need to pull out the arrogant prick card. I chose correctly this time, and thank God because that ride up north in a hot stuffy minibus is hellish.

More farmers market in downtown...decidedly normal considering the massive political protest right next door

I'm staying in a small budget hotel called Talal's New Hotel in the Gemmayzeh district next to downtown. The manager of the hotel is a Lebanese-Colombian who speaks English, Spanish, French, and Arabic, and spends every evening puffing away on one of six waterpipes stored in the commonroom, so there is always the fruity aroma of flavored tobacco smoke. Several other Lebanese guys spend the day sitting around the common room with him, though what they do at the hotel is not entirely clear. A few nights ago, a girl from Hong Kong showed up. She came into the common room where the manager greeted her with a cold soda and cup of tea that he hands to everyone arriving. She sat back on the couch for 30 minutes or so, then finally asked if she might see the room. The manager seemed surprised at this request and said, "oh, all of our beds our full...but if you know any other hotels I can call them for you," and proceeded to call several nearby hotels listed in her book. All of them were full, so he let her sleep on the couch in the common room for the night. In Spain, you could show up to a hotel with a month-long reservation and you'd be lucky to get a smile upon arrival, let alone cold drinks and tea, but little welcome gestures and steadfast hospitality with no expectations in return are inherent in Lebanese culture.

Until a few months ago I would not have guessed there was snow and mountains in Lebanon, let alone skiing. Bcharre, where I almost got stuck for the night.

The allure of Beirut thus doesn't lie in a spectacular skyline or dramatic setting, but rather behind its walls, where you'll find outgoing and friendly people whose optimism has been unfazed by 15 years of civil war and continual strife with their southern neighbors, nightlife that easily rivals that of Buenos Aires and Madrid, but without the pretention, and of course one of it's most famous exports - some of the best food in the world. I wish everyone could see this city.

outside of my hotel in Beirut

*other variations of the I'm-from-the-US-but-I'm-from-the-west-coast-so-I'm-not-bad complex include "I'm from the US but I didn't vote for Bush," "I'm from the US, and for that I apologize," "I'm from the US and now I'm going to look at you with this pathetic reproachful expression on my face and beg for forgiveness," or worst of all, "I'm from Canada." If someone is ignorant enough to place a watermark of George Bush or other stereotypes of Americana over you, you shouldn't give a damn about their approval or friendship.

(belated) april fools

2007-04-12T06:16:00.001Z

I'm not in Amman, I'm in Beirut! I flew into Amman last night from Istanbul, walked from the Arrivals side to the Departures side, waited for an hour and a half on stand-by, and got a ticket just a few minutes before the flight left. The flight was only an hour and arrived at about 10:30pm, and a French - Lebanese couple I met on the airplane gave me a ride to my hotel. I'm truly at the end of the Mediterranean. I

goodbye to the west

2007-04-10T10:07:00.000Z

I've been falling off a lot of curbs lately. Not in a metaphorical sense or anything, I've just been kind of clumsy when I'm close to curbs. They must be more slippery here.

Anyway.

An Aussie in Pamukkale described Turkey as "Middle East light", and my flight to Amman tomorrow should put me right in the midst of things. My guidebook refers to Jordan as being in a "tough neighborhood", and I've been a bit infatuated with the Middle East for some time now, so this is probably the part of my trip that I've anticipated the most. In particular, I think seeing Jerusalem when I drop into Israel will be pretty amazing. I'm being fairly (completely) flexible about my plan there, as I only have a flight into Amman and then nothing else definitive. I'll most likely fly out of Cairo or Alexandria sometime in early May to India, but I first have to get a visa for India in Cairo, as well as a flight to Mumbai or Dehli.

In other news, I bought a shirt in Istanbul, thus expanding my wardrobe by 50%. In math, and I can't remember if this was in 4th or 11th grade, we had to do some kind of story problem where you have x shirts, y pants, and z shoes, and then you calculate how many possible outfits you can wear. I have more to say about the American education system later.

I had a great day and a half in Sofia and being able to meet with Bilyana was especially nice. She showed me all around the city, which was filled with beautiful churches, kids skateboarding, blue skies, trendy cafes, and quite a bit of Cryllic script, which I continued to find very satisfying to sound out. It seems that all the countries I visit share two common characteristics - delicious food and the most beautiful girls, and Bulgaria definitely did not break this continuum. The hostel I stayed in was a little strange, though. Called the "Art Hostel", it was three parts art gallery, one part hostel, and was almost completely empty except for one girl from Arizona. She shocked me by thinking that I was from Australia after talking to her for five minutes, particularly since I thought being around Laura, Kate, and Amber for 11 days would if anything fortify the American aspects of my English, but apparently not!

Bilyana also brought me and one of her friends out of Sofia to this beautiful little monastery in the mountains. It was especially cool because it was Easter so there were a number of families and people out enjoying the sunshine and the tranquility of the area. In Bulgaria there is this tradition where on the first of March you put on this little red bracelet, and you can't take it off until you see a stork or the trees blossom. When you can finally take it off, you hang it on a tree branch, so there are these little red bracelets hanging all over the place.

A strange thing happened on the overnight bus trip from Sofia back to Istanbul. As soon as I sit down for a long bus trip, I usually start to think quite a bit, and so I usually pull out the cool little Moleskin journal that Em gave me for Christmas. I don't really write down day-to-day happenings in it (well, I did for the first few days), but rather just random little thoughts and combinations of words that I think sound nice or interesting. None of said thoughts or words are on my blog, in case you were wondering. Anyway, when I sat down and pulled out my journal, I thought I had lost my pen, which was my only pen, and this weird wave of panic hit me, like when I would be driving to work in the morning and realize that I forgot my coffee back at home. Panic as in, how am I going to function? I guess when you're essentially alone for six months you kind of find your crutches in strange places. I did find my pen after a while.

Pictures from Sofia:

Bilyana and me in front of the Saint Alexander Nevski church

Saint Alexander Nevski

In the lower right corner you'll see a group of Sofians with their standard size beer bottles - 1.5L! Ahh...drinking in front of the National Library. Classy.

Bilyana lighting a candle at a monastery outside of Sofia

I still got an Easter egg (several, actually) for Easter! Also some traditional Easter bread called Kozunak

Some flowers in the monastery...I feel compelled to take a picture of something manly like a tractor or sword now to compensate

The National Theater

Bilyana's friend Sonia lighting a candle

a Russian Orthodox church in Sofia

just a few pictures from Troy:

theater ruins

I have an admittedly shallow taste in movies (and most anything, come to that), and I will confess that seeing Troy in Brazil really made me want to see the ruins, even though they aren't as substantial as Ephesus. I was surprised, though, to find the same Trojan Horse that they used in the movie in downtown Canakkule.

It was a little hazy in the distance when I was at Troy, but here you can see the Dardanelles off in the distance. I guess the area in between would be the battlefield in the Trojan War? More pictures from Troy: http://www.flickr.com/photos/spencerscomet/sets/72157600060784454/

I've been gone for over six months now. Six months ago I thought 10 hours was a long bus ride, ...I'll finish this thought later.

wrapping up Turkey and an Easter in Sofia

2007-04-08T16:55:00.000Z

Turkish food porn

After lounging around in the sun for a few more days in Olympos, we caught a few buses that took us several hours up to Pamukkale, which apparently used to be one of the most famous tourist destinations in Turkey, as it houses the world-famous calcium deposits that combine with some natural hot springs to form a series of beautifully blue and white pools that cascade down what is best described as a stagnate flow of calcium that kind of looks like a ski slope. The springs and pools made it a natural excuse for a massive Greek and then Roman thermal spa resort, which explains the very substantial ruins that sit behind the calcium massif. Sadly in the 20th century several hotels were built right on the calcium and used the water for their own supplies, which damaged the area considerably until it became a UNESCO-protected site. The whole area is a little hallucinogenic and kicking up calcium dust when you walk through the pools is a bit surreal, but I think the ruins that formed the ancient city of Hierapolis were the best part. The theater and agora were massive and well-preserved, and I found it very cool to see ancient Greek and Latin written on the same pieces of stone. I asked a tour guide in Ephesus about this, and it turns out that when the Romans inhabited the city after the Greeks, they just kind left things as they were and chiseled in their own thoughts or words or whatever was written above the Greek.

The Pamukkale pools in the distance

Collapsing arch in Hierapolis - I think it's pretty impressive for being two millenia old

In the agora at Hierapolis

More Hierapolis

Laura kicking up calcium dust in a Pamukkale pool

"Block falls" by Spencer James. This seems like something you would write a haiku about.

The people here must have strong bones with all this calcium in the water, though the general consensus (and by that I mean the consensus by the four of us) was that the town had a slightly in-bred feel.

More pools...

The Hierapolis theater

After a night in Pamukkale it was down to Salcuk, which is the town next to the famous ruins of Ephesus. The ruins of Ephesus were complete with the 3rd largest library of the ancient world, a brothel, a beautiful agora, and of course the enormous theater that you'll probably see if you see pictures of Ephesus. So, a good story about how the ancient world worked follows. Apparently the library was connected underground to the brothel, so when married men wanted to visit the brothel, they told their wives that they were going to the library. The women, impressed at their husbands' dedication to study, didn't complain until they all realized that their husbands were spending quite a bit of time in the "library", so they sat outside and waited. Their waiting was unproductive, so they went into the library, didn't find their husbands, and probably using deductive reasoning (the library was right down the street from the brothel) they figured out what was going on. This was all explained in a Turkish accent with less-than-perfect English, which made it even more humorous when I heard it.

Sophia...wisdom! Seems like a good thing to have a statue of in front of a library. Maybe this is where the wives waited for their covert-brothel-frequenting husbands.

These were three great girls to travel with...tons of laughs, zero drama, all kinds of suggestions about how to shorten the English language (uncoordinated --> unco, university --> uni, etc.), and multiple profound comments (e.g. "Life is pretty much the longest thing you'll ever do, so no hurry..." - Laura)

A lady in a village near Salcuk working on some flower and tea goods

Among the many things that made me wonder in Turkey were random nails hanging from the sky

I solve the mysteries of antiquity

The beautiful agora of Ephesus

Outside the library of Ephesus

The library of Ephesus - 3rd largest in the ancient world!

This image doesn't seem to be working...

The Serbian-Turkish couple running our hotel...apparently they got married 13 days earlier, having met on the internet

We were on a quest to find this church in Salcuk, and we came across this group of several guys sitting around outside the castle. We asked them about the church, they told us about it and since it was fairly expensive to go into, two of them offered to take us up into the castle, which is closed to visitors. After climbing through a hole in the fence and climbing up the hill that the castle sits atop, we entered through a crumbling gate and spent an hour or so walking along the perimeter walls and seeing the old mosque and stuff inside. There is even a tunnel that supposedly leads to Ephesus! Being inside the massive complex with no one else around was great, though I'm not sure the Turkish guys would have been as excited to play tour guide had I not been with three girls.

This is how I like to buy my olive oil - fresh and sold in plastic coke bottles...classy, huh?

The theater in Ephesus with the agora in the background.

I am only putting this on here because as soon as I uploaded it to flickr, someone posted a compliment and told me to put it on the flickr group called "Soap". I didn't even know there was such a group, but it turns out some people like to take pictures of soap. Anyway, it's olive oil soap.

We all spent another day or so in Salcuk before sadly splitting up - Amber and Kate headed back to Istanbul for their flight, Laura ferried across to Samos to foray across the Greek islands (hopefully avoiding whatever cruise line it was that just sank a ship off of Santorini), and I worked my way up to Sofia to visit my friend Bilyana who I met in Greece when I studied there. My trip up to Sofia didn't go particularly smoothly. I took a bus up to Canakkale and spent a night there, and visited the ruins of Troy in the morning. The ruins of Troy weren't spectacular, but Troy is cool because it is Troy, and it is quite breathtaking to look across a field and see the Dardanelles, where the Myceneans supposedly landed to wage the Trojan War a few thousand years ago. Canakkale is also the access point to Gallipoli Peninsula, which outside of the movie that we had to watch in 10th grade history called "Gallipoli", I haven't heard too much about, but it is more or less a WWI Normandy Beach for Australians and New Zealanders. Unfortunately I did not have time to do a thorough visit of the memorials and museums in the area, as I had to catch a bus up to Edirne, a small town on the border with Greece and Bulgaria. I did like these words that was placed at one of the memorials by Ataturk:

Those heroes who shed their blood and lost their lives, you are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side in this country of ours. You, the mothers who sent their sons from far away countries wipe away your tears, your sons are now lying in our bosoms and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land they become our sons as well.

With the seemingly endless wars going on in the world, reading things like this gives me some hope that in the not-too-distant future we'll be able to freely and safely visit and have relationships with places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Sudan, etc. For me, it's a little hard to fathom, but then again Vietnam has become quite the tourist destination in the last decade...

Anyway, after the five hour trip to Edirne, I quickly found out that no one in the town spoke much English, at least no one who might know anything about buses to Sofia. The people in the bus station were clueless, the staff at my hotel spoke no English, and all of the tourist offices were closed for Easter. All I could deduct was that the access point into Bulgaria was at Kapikule, about 20km from Edirne. I reasoned that since Sofia was the big city in Bulgaria, if I could just get into Bulgaria than surely there would be all kinds of options to get to Sofia, which is about 350km from the border. Whenever I come across problems like this travelling, I just assume things will work out, and since this assumption has yet to let me down, I keep making it, which I know is going to come back to haunt me one of these days. Anyway, the next morning I caught some sketchy minibus to Kapikule, where, surprise-surprise, no one spoke English and there was nothing about a bus to Sofia. Still, I walked across the border, which must have been a mile wide, and got my passport stamped. I had to pass through three different "stands" (two for Turkish immigration, one for Bulgarian), and in each one the officer seemed baffled that I was walking across. They asked me in broken English where my car was, and I said I was going on a bus, to which they responded in an even more confused tone, "where bus?" I found that rapidly speaking a few words in English and gesturing towards Bulgaria got me nods of approval. Borders are the worst places in the world. You just always feel like you might get shot at. When I passed through Bulgarian immigration, though, I literally turned around and saw a shiny white bus right behind me. I thought that a bus that looks like that would either be used for massive drug transportation or for legitimate tourism, but in either case it would be headed towards Sofia so I asked the driver. He growled something back at me but then the attendant came out, along with several passengers, and told me that it was going to another town from which I could catch a bus to Sofia. Having no better options, I paid my five euro and jumped on, and ended up at a small Bulgarian city after an hour or so. Here I found that there were no buses for several hours to Sofia, so I had to wait in a sketchy bus terminal for about four hours, during which time I memorized some Arabic greetings and questions.

A nice thing happened when I entered Bulgaria. I was looking at a sign written in Bulgarian script, and I sounded out the letters based on their Greek equivalents, since the Bulgarian alphabet adopts some characters. Surprisingly, the sounds added up to "Plovdiv", which I knew to be a Bulgarian city, which was immensely satisfying. I couldn't have done that had I not taken modern Greek and bothered to remember it when I was in Greece. Greek is a very cool language in that you can combine words in a given sentence any way you want, so if you're tricky you can add aesthetic to anything you say, and as Bilyana taught me, Bulgarian works the same way.

I finally made it to Sofia and found a hostel and called my friend Bilyana, who I know from studying in Ioannina. If someone had told me three years ago that in three years time I would be going from Turkey to Sofia to visit a friend who I met studying in Greece, I would have been quite surprised, to say the least. I guess that's how life can work out sometimes, though, but thinking back about the different friends I've made around the world is probably one of the single most rewarding things about my travels. It was really great meeting up with Bilyana...I mean, how cool is it to show up to a rather remote city and know someone to get dinner with and learn about the city from? I exchange so many emails with so many people and I'm always a little hesitant to do so just because actually seeing them again someday always seems a little far-fetched, so when it actually happens it is quite satisfying.

Ruins, calcium deposits, and a little town called Troy...

2007-04-07T17:05:00.000Z

The pools at Pamakkale

More later, I'm not in a writing or picture-posting mood, and for the first time in a month I don't have free internet.

beauty to live up to

2007-04-02T06:01:00.000Z

The ship sailed into the last harbour and anchored to leave no more,
There was no longer any hope from wind or daylight.
After the light carried by dawn had left Captain Eudemos,
There buried the ship with a life as short as a day, like a broken wave.

(poem inscribed in Greek on a tomb in Olympos)

more from the mediterranean

2007-03-31T06:44:00.001Z

The fundamental thing that I love about the Mediterranean is that it's the Mediterranean. Nowhere else I've been comes close to competing with its unique combination of ancient history, beautiful natural scenery, architecture worthy of the world's envy, delicious food, and famously dolce far niente attitude towards, well, everything. I mean, the place has an island dedicated to the God of wine. I've been to five Mediterranean countries now - Spain, Morocco, Greece, Italy, and Turkey - and one thing I've been able to conclude is that their common neighborhood transcends any political borders.

ancient Greek poetry on a tomb

looking over the beach and river mouth at Olympos

I'm in Olympos right now, which is sort of on the corner between the Aegean and the main Mediterranean. There's a beautiful creek running down tree-filled valleys and through the town before finally emptying into the sea in a very tranquil manner. Ancient ruins literally, um, litter the sides of the road, and everywhere you look you can see an ancient wall, arch, bridge, etc.. I walked down the beach towards a jagged rock on the western end, and there were ancient bricks scattered in the sand like they were just ordinary rocks. There is ancient Greek script on many of the walls and on some tombs, very satisfying for me since I still remember most of my Greek alphabet from studying in Ioannina. I'm almost completely sure that if I come back here in 20 years, everything will be protected or roped off, and unlike now, you won't be able to freely clamber over the walls and turrets.

something about Marcus Aurelius...

Anyway, I am here with three girls from Australia who I met in my hostel in Istanbul via a conversation something like this:
"What's your name?"
"Amba"
"Emma?"
"No, Amba"
"Oh, Amber"
Laughing, she drawled "Amberrr" in what would become a continuum of them pointing out my American/westcoast/small-town accent and me realizing that I really do speak more slowly than most people. At some point in high school I realized that my natural way of speaking was fairly inaudible to most people (it's useful sometimes, like when you say something stupid but no one hears), and after being around mostly Europeans, Aussies, and South Americans in the last six months I've also kind of seen that for some reason it just takes me longer to say words and sentences. The nice thing about Aussies though is that giving each other a lot of shit is a sign of friendship, and based on this criteria I quickly became friends with Amber, Laura, and Kate.

i'm a lucky guy - me, Laura, our guide Aysha, Kate, Amber

Anyway, they had bought a series of bus tickets and hostel accomodation for very cheap, and the inertia that I previously noted that was keeping me in Istanbul was quickly kickstarted by the prospect of travelling cheaply with three girls from Australia, which is probably a bit of a no-brainer. Inertia, after all, can go either way - it keeps you in one place or it keeps you moving, and I needed the latter because Turkey is a big country and there are tons of beautiful things to see.

The first place we went was Cappadocia, a big consortium of massive mushroom shaped rocks that have housed various churches, monasteries, and living quarters for several thousand years. Our hostel was actually inside a cave, and was run by a beautifully friendly family who I think were especially nice because it is still the low season and so they aren't seeing too many people passing through. I guess it is low season for a reason - it snowed after our first night there, but by the end of the day it was all melted.

Fairy chimneys in the snow

a Cappadocia valley filled with fairy chimneys and small communities

We spent three days in Cappadocia. The first day was a free day which we spent exploring some canyons and making up theories about how and why the cave houses had been built, since all you can really see now are the crumbling holes for the windows and some eroded stairs/climbing holds to access the doorways. The second day we took an extensive tour led by a Turkish girl with a great accent and wearing aviators of northern Cappadocia, which included hiking through a snow-filled valley filled with mushroom rocks, the open-air museum, a tour in an (apparently) famous ceramics workshop, wine-tasting, and a buffet of delicious Turkish food. The second day we took another long tour of southern Cappadocia, which included visiting an incredible underground city that was used to hide from invading armies(the locals would block the entrances with huge rock wheels, throw hot oil at the enemy through a small hole, and then drink wine out of the enormous vats that seemed to be on every floor), doing a several hour hike through another valley, and touring a jewelry factory where I was awarded with an egg-shaped piece of seafoam for knowing what Cappadocia means - place of beautiful horses.

this guy is apparently a somewhat famous ceramics artist, and every one of these pieces are handmade and painted by hand

are ruined caves still called ruins?

That night we took a series of bus rides lasting about 14 hours in total to get to the idyllic ancient town called Olympos on the Mediterranean coast. If Mount Olympus in Greece is where the gods lived most of the year, Olympos must have been their summer vacation home because it is absolutly beautiful here, as I explained above.

hanging out on the Olympos beach with beach-going pros

this place is so incredibly beautiful, and you just stumble over places like this when you're walking to the beach...

more Istanbul

2007-03-25T18:26:00.000Z

I went out with a group from my hostel last night again - two girls from Germany, a guy from LA, and a guy from somewhere in the midwest. The clubs in Istanbul are great - not as pretentious as those in Spain and no cover charge, and one that we were in last night had a really good band playing covers of a lot of western pop music. Ever heard Black Eyed Peas with a Turkish accent? We didn't get back until 7 or 8 this morning, making most of the subsequent day rather useless for anything but sleep, but by 3pm a few of us were awake enough to go find a boat to take us up the Bosphorus Strait towards the Black Sea, Europe on our left and Asia on our right. That thought was a little surreal, and I was trying to imagine what the shoreline looked like a few thousand years ago...Roman temples, olive trees, maybe people in togas? There were several mosques on both sides of the strait too, and the Turkish mosques are great to look at. They all have two minirets that are twice as tall as the main structure, so you can see them sticking up all over the city. From deep in the Bosphorus Strait, you could look way back up and see the Blue Mosque and Topkapi Palace in the distance.

Istanbul is turning into another Buenos Aires, meaning that the longer I stay here the more I don't want to leave. They both share the same great nightlife and a comfortable-yet-foreign feel, and that's not even to mention the I still want to see all of these other sights in Turkey, but it is hard to leave a place that you are having a great time at. It's like the surf-travel maxim - never leave good waves in search of other waves. I do want to see these things though, so maybe I'll try to slip out tomorrow morning and head for Cappadocia.

There are a lot of great people staying at my hostel, most being that rare breed of travellers who do extraordinary things but remain modest and remarkably unpretentious. I get kind of wary of the (usually) omnipresent backpacker self-righteousness, so this place has been a welcome relief. Eh, it's probably not just backpackers who are self-righteous, now that I think of it. Most people love to talk about themselves, but there are few things I appreciate more than a person who does great things but adopts humility over conceit as a result.

Anyway, I don't know what I'll be doing next, but I am reluctant to leave Istanbul. Inertia always gets the best of me. More pictures from Istanbul soon!

cool ıstanbul

2007-03-24T14:22:00.000Z

"Should we go to a club in Europe or in Asia tonight?"

Interested in everything, commited to nothing...

2007-03-24T08:46:00.000Z

That was a quote from a book my dad brought for me from home, and it's something that kind of bothers me about myself. I thought that spending these eight months travelling would "fix" it. I thought I'd be able to clarify my interests, or "re-examine my passions", as one other Bonderman Fellow put it. At the very least, I thought I'd be able to choose an undergraduate major and be comfortable with it, but when thinking about the future and what I want to do when I get back home I always find myself back at square one. It's not that I doubt my interest in biochemistry, it's that I have a hard time ignoring my other interests in English, photography, computer science, foreign languages, engineering, math, physics...Physics!? I hated physics, and I was terrible at it, but it still just fascinates me, and I wish I had more time to study it and take more courses so I could become better at it. But then how could you not want to learn about photography?

In my biology class last year the professor gave a little talk about different biology tracks and majors at the University of Washington, and he explained what astrobiology was. He talked a little bit about astrobiology research at UW, and in my mind the wheels were already turning, thinking about what a cool thing it would be to study and whether I could somehow fit it into my education. I hadn't said anything, but my friend Megan sitting next to me seemed to know exactly what I was thinking and said, "Spencer, no".

And the same thing happens everywhere. In the guesthouse that I'm in right now, I've met several pretty interesting people. One girl is 28, from North Carolina, and has been travelling for the last 18 months. She taught English in Taiwan for 10 months, travelled throughout southeast Asia, and then did an overland trip from Beijing to Krygistan. A guy from Vancouver has been studying tea ceremony for the last five years and wants to start a tea house in Istanbul. Serving tea doesn't deeply interest me, but I'm so jealous of the fact that this guy really cares about it and that he is willing to go out on a limb and dedicate some time and energy to the matter.

I guess I've just been waiting for the right "click". I thought when I started at UW that I'd take a class, something would click, and I'd know what to do with my life. Whether everything clicked or whether nothing clicked, I'm not sure, but then I ended up in Greece spring quarter, and suddenly I needed to travel more and speak more languages. But then chemistry and math still interested me...and then I got the Bonderman Fellowship, which certainly wasn't conducive to pursuing an academic interest, since the only perspective that I've gotten on my education to date has been that every class that I've taken has been in some way pretty damn cool, whether I actually enjoyed being in the class or not. Education is like climbing mountains - it's not that fun when you're actually doing it, but the feeling of accomplishment is completely worth the hardships, and occasionally you get amazing views along the way.

My friend Jonah and I have talked about this, except concerning sports. We're both skiers, climbers, surfers, and mountain bikers, and we both played lacrosse in high school. We were both pretty good at all of these, but consequently we never became great at one thing, and we agreed a few times that it might have been better to not spread our interests so thin. Sometimes I've thought that I should give up an interest to focus on my other ones, but then I can't imagine my life without, say, climbing, and I laugh at the idea of giving it up. And as I explained above, the exact same thing seems to be the problem with my education. I just can't imagine not studying natural sciences, but it's still so hard to ignore the fact that I really like to read, write, take pictures, learn about history, etc.. It doesn't help that my family is so damn supportive and my friends are so damn talented, either. I mean, look at my roommates last year. Mick could talk off the top of his head about pretty much any writer or philosopher I asked him about and speak French and play various instruments to boot, Vann was a $%#ing genius at physics and math (have you ever known anyone who can go to parties all night and 4.0 a physics midterm first thing the next morning, and especially at UW where getting a 4.0 is next to impossible?), Dylan had just been studying in South Africa and is now in New Zealand, but could always be found writing papers about Plato a few hours before they were due...and while these academic abilities are one thing, these guys were all great athletes as well, climbing regularly, running marathons, working 12 hours of industrial construction a day. And more important than any of that, they're all just good guys and completely down to earth. It probably isn't surprising that I became interested in everything that they are. This isn't even to mention my friends doing independent chemistry research, studying dance, working on hot shot fire crews, finishing at the Air Force Academy, working for NGOs, volunteering in Central America, doing social work in Ghana, etc.. That is a pretty substantial "etc.", if you think about it...

Then there are my sisters, two of the most talented people I'll ever meet. Emily is twenty-$%@$%ing-three and almost has a Ph.D, but she is also a distance runner and can play the mandolin and paint and teach and motivate grumpy freshman to learn about Conrad and Freud at 8:30am. Having been a grumpy freshman at one point, I can attest that this is a very admirable feat. And Emily and I both look up to Martha, even though she is our little sister. Martha is a genius flutist (fluter, as James says), shrugging off things like qualifying for All State and All Northwest despite being only 16, but then she is also a brilliant athlete, being captain of varsity soccer and getting all kinds of awards for that. I worked my ass off to get 4.0's in high school; Martha does it without even trying...I seriously just don't know how. I think she must look up to James for this kind of music-athletic-academic combination. In just over four years, James somehow finished a degree in neurobiology at Oberlin but also studied violin at their Conservatory - it will probably take me at least five years to get a degree in just biochemistry. He also apparently just won some 15-people-in-the-whole-world violin competition, but he'd never be the one to tell you. It is pretty uncommon to look up to someone for an amazing ability and for their modesty. My parents just force me to compete with them without even trying - my dad is one of the most creative people I've ever met and builds the most beautiful houses on the Olympic Peninsula, but can tell you about any current event and pretty much any historical topic you ask him about, and has all kinds of great stories about commercial fishing in Alaska as well. My mom emailed me yesterday, casually saying that she is going to Krygstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan this summer, which are only a few of the dozens of exotic countries that she's travelled to, and my was instant (and competitive) response was, dammit! She's always one (or ten) steps ahead of me! Those are some of the remotest, most difficult countries in the world to travel to, and it's just no problem for her.

The point of all this bragging about my friends and family is that if I didn't have so many great people to look up to around me all the time, then I probably wouldn't find myself being infatuated with pretty much anything that comes my way, since like I said before I want to be good at everything that they are, and they're all good at so much. As great as it would be to have one great passion, I definitely prefer these people, and I'll just hope that commitment comes my way, but in the meantime I'll stop looking for it.

Mosques and carpet shops

2007-03-22T17:27:00.000Z

It was a rainy day in Istanbul, so I wandered through the Blue Mosque, toured the Topkapi Palace, and got a lot of friendly hassling to buy a carpet in the bazaar. Being inside the Blue Mosque was like being inside of Rome's Parthanon, if several more Parthanons were built on top of it. Colorful Arabic calligraphy, mosaics, and various other designs adorned most of the walls and ceilings. Almost invisible chains hung several dozen feet from the ceilings to hold arrays of dim lights, providing just enough light to see without but saving the famous interior from being gaudy.

Maybe this is why selling carpets is so popular in the Middle East - they cover every inch of every floor of all the mosques, including the Blue one.

So I walked into a carpet shop. The proprietor Hamed immediately brought me tea, despite me saying that I didn't have any cash and that I was just looking. Laughing, I maintained this statement as he pulled out carpet after carpet, each one with very obvious price tags showing outrageous prices (1600 USD for a 2'x4'?). Taking it upon himself to give me the "best deal possible", he then offered me a "special student discount" price of only 400$. I never saw this technique in Morocco, but unfortunately for him I was not pursueded.

The beautiful Aya Sofya at night

I wonder how many pieces of Turkish Delight this guy would sell were it not for "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe"

The Blue Mosque at night

I also bought my next airplane ticket today - April 11 from Istanbul to Amman, Jordan. Landing in Amman will give me access to Israel, and then from there I'll continue into Egypt. I still need to buy my ticket from Egypt to India, and for that matter, a visa for India too. I think I can get one in Cairo. Unfortunately I decided to focus just on western Turkey for this trip, my reason being that I don't want to stretch my time too thin and I'm already planning on doing a more extensive Middle East trip through Iran and eastern Turkey and Syria in the future.

The Topkapi Palace was just spectacular, and I didn't even get to see it on a sunny day. The Ottomans built it overlooking the Bosphorus Strait on Seraglio Point to house the various sultans during four centuries of their rule, so basically the estate was at one time the power seat of a great empire in what might be the single most strategic and important position in world history. Pretty impressive, and I don't even know very much about history.

The foggy Bosphorus Strait - looking over at Asia!

Istanbul

2007-03-21T17:37:00.000Z

Fountain near the Blue Mosque at night

Istanbul is amazing. The Blue Mosque is just massive and dominates every view in the neighborhood that I am staying in. I landed on the Asian side of the city and took a bus across the Golden Horn channel of the Sea of Marmara to the Sultanahmet area, and the sheer magnitude and elegance of the Blue Mosque and Aya Sofya all but took my breath away as we approached. All day long these birds soar above its minirets and domes. The lights come on at night and you can still see the little white figures soaring through the shadows and floodlights. It's just beautiful, and like Morocco, delicious aromas drift out of every doorway. Anyway, I love it.

so I ended up in Ireland...

2007-03-20T14:12:00.000Z

Following my last post, I flew to London as expected for a three day layover before flying to Turkey. The first day and a half was mostly consumed by trying to get my MasterCard to work and consequently not eating or doing anything. For reasons unknown to me, Washington Mutual did not have a problem with all kinds of use and withdrawls in Morocco, Spain, Brazil, etc., but when I get to the country in which my wallet is least likely to get stolen they suddenly decide to freeze my account. Anyway, I got it to work and spent a day visiting the Natural History and Space Museum, since I saw all of the other big sights the first time I came to London a few years ago. The Natural History and Space museums, by the way, are absolutly incredible. I thought half a day would suffice to check them out, but it felt like I barely broke through the surface. Incredible exhibits and displays on every imaginable topic...evolution, volcanos, physics, flight, space, etc.. It kind of pains me to say this, but it actually made me crave the various lab classes that I took in the last two years because the overwhelming theme in both museums was that scientists and science and the relationship between the two are simply amazing. The creativity, ingenuity, and pride that went into all of the great discoveries over the centuries...I don't know, it just astounded me. There is a great quote by Einstein that sums up the impression that seeing those museums left on me, "There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle." Anyway, the surprise part of my story...the evening before my flight to Istanbul, I get an email from my dad saying that he is flying to Ireland for a week the next day. Being incapable of resisiting a trip to Ireland and having felt fairly worn out for the preceding few weeks, I changed my flight to Istanbul and bought a ticket to Dublin for the next morning. The sponteneity in itself made me think that it was a good idea, since my spontaneous decisions have always been my best ones, or at least my most productive ones, and I've been really wanting to see Ireland for the last few years. Also, it was going to be Saint Patrick's Day! Here are a few pictures from my Irish stint:

This just kind of makes me laugh...

On the river in the beautiful city of Galway. My friend Rachel is transferring here.

Oh God...cold perfection.

They have this drink in Ireland...

Saint Patrick's Day carnage...this is the middle of the afternoon

Like most surfers, I tend to underestimate wave size (no one knows why we like to call 10' waves 6' and 6' waves 4'), and I think this wave had probably a 15-18' face. Even though my interest in surfing has kind of waned in the last year or so, big waves, or any waves for that matter, still entrance me whenever I see them. This was on the Dingle Peninsula and around every headland was another bay with massive waves breaking from the northern Atlantic storms.

This church is neogothic. I have no basis for this assertion. It looks a little surreal.

Me and the old man on the Ring of Kerry

Sunset on the Dingle Peninsula

Somewhere on the Ring of Kerry

Travelling with my dad was great, and being in Ireland helped revamp my enthusiasm for travelling and for the rest of my trip. Sadly in the last five months I became a little numb to the fact that every single day I see things that are beautiful, exotic, different, etc., and so being with someone who was just on a short break gave me some better perspective on how cool the things that I have been seeing really are. If I was leaving for a three week trip to Turkey from the United States, I would be excited out of my mind and filled with enthusiasm, but I had been thinking of it as just another stop along the way.

Sorry for the two week break from my blog, but writing on this thing just feels like an indulgence. And indulgences can cause some strange form of guilt. If I didn't feel this way and if I had my computer with me, I would probably be writing 4-5 times a week because it is so enjoyable, much moreso than writing in a journal.

Anyway, I am in Istanbul now, so I'll get around to writing about it here as soon as possible. I hope everyone is enjoying their spring breaks!

Marrakech

2007-03-06T15:30:00.000Z

My pictures from Marrakech are here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/spencerscomet/sets/72157594573498477/

I am feeling too lazy to post the pictures or write much after the long post below, but I will say that I finally decided to shave, but lacking adequate resources turned to a Berber barbar who spoke no English. He used a real razor blade (as in, I had a dude who didn't speak my language with a knife to my throat for 20 minutes), left me with a moustache, and now I do not get called Ali Baba everywhere.

In Marrakech, you can buy glasses of fresh squeezed orange juice for three dirham, watch snake charmers all day, and eat snails in the middle of a plaza. The main plaza is a pretty exciting place to just sit back and watch, and the medina is great to walk through. The 10 days in Morocco have been great, but I think it was just enough for me. There is definitely a lot more to see, especially on the coast and in the Marrakech area, but I've picked up some momentum and I'm ready to keep moving.

I fly to London tomorrow with easyJet, and then I have all day on the 8th to walk around and speak English. Then in the early morning on the 9th I fly to Istanbul, where I will land on the Asian side of the famous city, spend two hours navigating public transport to find my hostel, and then presumably spend a week or so.

Camel caravans and moon shadows in the Sahara

2007-03-05T17:46:00.000Z

from left to right: guy from Poland, guy from Brazil, me, guy from Poland, guy from Poland, Rula, girl from Brazil, Abdul

Rula and I took an overnight bus trip from Fes to a small (tiny) frontier-type town on the Sahara called Merzouga, where over a few glasses of mint tea we negotiated a price for a two night camel trip in the desert. We ended up settling for 800 dirham each, about 100USD, making it one of the more expensive things that I have done so far, but since you can't exactly go to Hertz and rent a camel and go find your own Berber family to stay with, I knew it was worth it.

Gabriela and Matheus, the Braziliansm and Polish guys on top of the dune at sunset

Two Brazilian students from London and three guys from Poland were on our tour as well, and a Berber man named Abdul led the seven of us for a few hours in the afternoon to the first place that we camped. We climbed to the top of a tall dune near the campsite (tall being like 800 feet) and watched the sunset as the moon slowly rose behind us, illuminating the entire landscape with an eerie white light that made it feel like we were on another planet. I think it was one of the first times that I have seen my shadow from the moon. There being no shortage of light, we stayed at the top of the dune for another 45 minutes after the sunset, and eventually wandered back to the camp to drink more mint tea and eat tajine, a traditional Moroccan dish that is like a big stew of vegetables and meat without the broth. Abdul made me memorize the Arabic numbers from 1 to 10 (wahad soos tlata arbaa khamsa sitta sabaa temeniya tisaud ashraa), and eventually we fell asleep under the stars. The desert bakes during the day, but it gets very cold during the night and I was very ready to get up and move around when the sun started rising early the next morning.

One of the Merzouga sand dunes

Watching the sunset...I like the water bottles in this picture

The Brazilians and Polish guys were only doing one night, so they headed back to Merzouga with one of the guides while Rula and I continued with Abdul. Being quite sore in a predictable location after my two hours on the camel the first day, and remembering my promise to my mother to one day bear her some grandchildren, I opted to walk for part of the second day.

Our camel caravan...I am the fourth back in this picture

After a few hours in the sand dunes and a few hours in the Black Desert near the border with Algeria, we arrived at a modest clay house belonging to a Berber family. The constitution of the family remained somewhat of a mystery, as there were two or three women weaving, three kids, and a few men who made a few brief appearances, though not at dinner. The kids of the family completely fascinated me. There were two little boys, Hassan and Mohammed ("Hammed"), probably aged 3 and 9. The little girl, Naminya, was probably 7 or 8 and seemed to have the full time job of taking care of Hassan. Watching how seriously she took it and how much she doted on her little brother and kept him out of trouble (though sometimes encouraging it) was constantly entertaining and endearing, and I could have taken hundreds of pictures had I not felt a little uncomfortable about snapping away. At dinner, though, I let them play with my camera, which they loved, and ended up getting a few shots.

the cute - the two older kids in the Berber family, Naminya and Hammed

and the not so cute. This is what I look like these days. I do not always wear my shirt as a turban, just when I am riding camels under the Saharan sun.

Abdul serving us tea in the Berber home

The oasis near Merzouga

The morning on the third day had us saying goodbye (as well as you can say goodbye when you don't speak Arabic) to the family and riding for a few hours back to Merzouga. I was still sore but figured that I would not be riding camels too often in the future, and walking through sand can be kind of exhausting. Later in the day we made it back to the town near Merzouga and realized that there were no buses to Marrakech, the famous market city that was to be our next stop. Two Germans that we met in Merzouga had the idea of hiring a grands taxi, basically a taxi for long distances, to take us on the 10 hour drive across the Atlas Mountains to get there, and having no better options, we payed the 400 dirham (about 50 USD) each and settled into an ancient Mercedes driven by a guy who spoke no English. I felt likeI was getting some kind of stomach flu, making the entire non-AC'd trip quite uncomfortable, though I would hardly say that the other three passengers who may not have been sick would have said otherwise.

A "fish" (salamander) that Abdul magically pulled out of the sand while we were on the camels...

After a particularly painful last two hours, we pulled into Marrakech near the famous (don't worry, I had never heard of it either) Medina and found a cheap hotel down an alley filled with them. I have plenty to write about Marrakech too, but I will save it for the next post. For now, some more pictures:

Full moon rising over the Sahara...I think it will always fascinate me that it is the same full moon that people living here two thousand years ago saw and also the same one that everyone back home saw. On a rather depressing note, apparently there was an eclipse on our second night in the desert that no one knew about and that I slept through. It would have been pretty spectacular to see an eclipse in the night in the Sahara.

One of Abdul's friend's children

Abdul leading Rula and her camel Jimi Hendrix

Naminya trying on my sunglasses...I think she pulls them off better than I do

Hiking to the top of the dune at sunrise

the rest of the photos are at http://www.flickr.com/photos/spencerscomet/sets/72157594570939962/

I need to start reading more; it seems like I can neither write nor come up with the right word in everyday conversation. I read a lot in South America and since getting to Spain, I have not really read anything. I fly to Turkey in two days and I think that the Aegean coast would be a pretty idyllic place to read the Iliad and Odyssey, so maybe I will spring when I am in London and buy the two.

"My friend! Amigo! Monsieur!"

2007-03-01T18:20:00.000Z

That is what you hear when you walk through the Medina in Fez, Morocco, as child after teenager after man tries to offer you a tour in the medina, tea in his carpet shop, or a pastilla at his cafe. The medina is an incredible place to walk through - scents of Moroccan spices drift out of doorways and restaraunts, interrupted only by the occasional hint of apple tobacco being smoked in a distant hooka. Arab music floats out of virtually every shop and cafe, and calls to prayer echo through the chaotic alleys four times a day (actually five, but I'm usually not awake to hear the first at sunrise). There are dozens of mosques throughout the medina, but only a few are open to non-Muslims, and walking into a mosque, removing ones shoes, and kneeling for a prayer towards Mecca, Saudi Arabia seems more like a subconscious routine than a religious ritual. The people here continue to be very nice, even if they are not trying to sell you anything. As I walked down the street from my hotel this morning, two women wearing burkas started speaking French to me. Assuming an alterior motive, I asked if they spoke English, to which one of them replied (in perfect English), "We just wanted to welcome you to Fez...are you enjoying it here?" I answered yes, and they asked a few more questions before moving on, probably unaware that their friendliness had just made my day.

Looking over the medina from a rooftop terrace

Looking out from inside a mosque

Selling spices in the medina at night

A mosque in the medina

Fez at night

Anyway, I ran into Rula again here, and the two of us are going to venture to a desert area (being Africa, that doesn't really narrow anything down) near the Algerian border and try to do some kind of trip in the sand dunes, so hopefully on the next post I will have some desert pictures to share.

Blue rues in the Rif and burkas in Morocco

2007-02-27T18:03:00.000Z

Hale, a backpacker from Texas, buying chocolate in Chefchaouen

After Granada, I took a half day bus trip to Cadiz to see my friend Katie from University of Washington, who is studying there with a UW program. It was great to see her and talk to some other students from UW, and it was fun to see one last night of Carneval, since it was finally wrapping up after the week-long celebration. I owe Katie indefinitely for making my life much, much better since she was willing to take some (read: lots) of my stuff back to Seattle so I didn't have to carry it. Early the next morning I went two hours down to the windsurfing capital of Tarifa and jumped on a ferry across the Strait of Gibralter to Tangier, Morocco.

My introduction to Morocco

Tangier was kind of seedy, as port cities tend to be, but when you enter a nation influenced and sometimes controlled largely by traditional Islamic values and rules, shock is the overwhelming feeling. Though I say that Tangier was seedy, I also must say that I felt safer there at night than I did in any city in South America, and I think crime involving tourists is actually pretty minimal. Of course, you can't enter a new continent without making a typical tourist mistake, and in my case it was allowing myself to be befriended by an older man named Shahid, or something that sounded like that.

Night in Tangier

As I was asking about the location of a street after getting off the ferry, a guy walked up to me and said that he knew where it was because his aunt lived there. Having no other options, I followed him five minutes up a hill and found my hostel, which was strangely "closed" for the day (I had never heard of a hostel being closed before), but they still let me drop my backpack before I ventured back onto the streets. Shahid was a very nice guy and spoke perfect English, claiming that he had lived in Portland, Oregon for several years. I was suspicios of this and of his intentions, since it is fairly common in South America as well as certain areas in the Middle East for someone to show you around for a few hours and then demand that you pay them, whether you asked for their company or not. Shahid was too nice to just blow off, though, and I didn't have a hostel to escape to since mine was closed until 6pm.

He insisted on showing me the medina and some other areas in Tangier, and while I appreciated his help, I also knew his motive and wasn't really interested in hiring a tour guide for the day. I didn't know how to handle it, though. I can respond to aggression or antagonism by people trying to sell me things, but dismissing politeness is a little beyond my capabilities as a traveller, especially after coming from Spain where the words "politeness" and "travellers" do not seem to coexist in the minds of many of the locals. However, I really wasn't in the mood. "Sorry, I know this is rude of me, but a lot of times in South America people will offer to show someone around and then ask for money...I need to know if that is what you are going to do, because I do not need a tour guide right now," I said apologetically. Shahid stopped, looked at me, and seemed crushed by this, and explained that he was not a bad man. Then he mumbled some stuff that I didn't fully understand and mentioned something about coffee. I assumed that he wanted a cup of coffee in exchange for showing me around for the preceding 45 minutes, which I thought was reasonable and I wanted coffee anyway, so we went to a streetside cafe and talked about Morocco and the US and various other things for an hour. I payed all 10 dirhams (about a dollar) of the bill and got up, hoping he would get the hint and let me wander off, but no, he insisted on staying with me. I still didn't know how to be blunt and cold to someone who was this polite and nice, so we walked for another half hour or so through some different streets. The whole time I was trying to come up with a way to leave, but I ended up just saying that I wanted to walk by myself. He held out his hand and asked for money, which I had anticipated, and I asked him how much he wanted. "Oh, whatever you think, it doesn't matter," he said, as if the thought had never crossed his mind. Frustrated at his ambiguity earlier when confronted with my suspicians, I gave him about several Euro that I had in my pocket from Spain. He glared at me and said angrily, "What is this? You think this is anything?" I honestly didn't know, and while I had been acknowledging my mistake in accepting his company the entire time, I still had never explicitly asked for his help or anything else, and his sudden change in attitude was just annoying. I gave him another 30 dirham, about 3 or 4 dollars, and walked off frustrated.

I wasn't frustrated at Shahid, who was just trying to make money in an area where it doesn't come easily, and I know that if he explicitly told every tourist that he walked up to that he was going to ask them for money later then he would never make anything at all. Instead, the principle of the whole matter and my inability to respond appropriately annoyed me. I knew what was happening as soon as it started, and I should have shrugged him off right away, but like I said before, I just did not know how to refuse or be blunt to someone who was polite and speaking perfect English. I really did not want to let the whole matter punctuate my first day in Morocco, a country that I have wanted to visit for some time, with a bad feeling, so I retired to an internet cafe for a few hours and then went back out for a fresh start.

A very typical image in Chefchaouen

The next morning I caught a four hour bus ride to Chefchaouen, a small village in the Rif Mountains. On the way, a tall guy wearing a djellaba said hello to me. Suspicious of another Shahid, I asked where he was from. Texas being the answer and Hale being his name, we struck up a conversation, and upon arriving in Chefchaouen, managed to get quite lost before finding a hostel. It's easy to get lost in Chefchaouen, and as long as you aren't hungry and carrying a large backpack, it is quite pleasant as well. The walls are almost all a surreal light blue color, compared in my guidebook to a blue meringue. I haven't had such a dessert, but I'll take their word for it since I couldn't come up with a metaphor to do the amazing hue justice. Apparently the Jewish community started the tradition, and I think it probably has to do with keeping the houses cool in the hot African summers, but the aesthetic is valuable in itself.

A typical sign in Chefchaouen - a group of young women walking around, apparently on their way to school or work...the guys just seem to sit in their shops and try to sell hash to me

Another typical sight in Chefchaouen - a short blue doorway

Chefchaouen is wedged between two somewhat jagged hills in the Rif Mountains, and seems to run downriver from where a small spring comes out of the ground. There are a few villages and ruined mosques nearby, and on the walk to one of the nearby mosques I ran into Rula for the third time in a week and a half. I am fairly confident that we will run into each other at least once or twice more. Morocco is a large country, but the route between Tangier, Chefchaouen, Fez, Casablanca, and Marrakech is fairly linear, so deviation isn't very likely.

Looking over Chefchaoen from a mosque

View from inside the mosque

With no particular reason, I have been wanting to experience and travel in an Arab country for some time, and I think Morocco is a great introduction. Despite the strange first few hours, I already love it here, and I think this is mostly the result of the people. Unlike in Spain, everyone actually smiles at you and loves to try their English or Spanish. I would sincerely work hard in Spain (and all of South America) to speak Spanish well, and I very rarely felt like this made a difference in how people responded to me. I'm not talking about every single person, of course, but in general in Spain if I went to a store to ask directions or to buy something, I would just recieve cold looks and curt answers. The people in Morocco, and those of Chefchaouen in particular, constantly ask where I am from, how I like Morocco, and any number of other questions. True, some of them follow up with the ubiquitious "You like hash? I have good stuff!", but not all of them...in fact, not even close. Most just seem genuinely curious and friendly.

Sunset in the Rif Mountains

Mirrors in a artisan shop

This is what chipped paint after several decades of constant reapplying...

Whoops, sorry this is rotated

Coca-cola and burkas

Warmth and hospitality are image that I've had of Arab areas for sometime, but you can't escape from the other preconceptions as well. In Tangier I saw a woman wearing a full burka for the first time, and in Chefchaoen I heard my first call to prayer, a long-lasting Arabic wail coming out of a distant loudspeaker. Seeing a woman wearing a burka is certainly different, especially considering that I was in Rio three weeks ago, but the general impression that I get in Morocco is that it is more of a traditional style than an suppressive force. Many women, and virtually all younger girls, do not wear them, and as you can see in the picture above, even those who do choose to wear them often accompany the head dress with the same clothing you would find a hundred miles north in Spain.

Blue walls and tile patterns

The people in Chefchaouen have an adversion to being photographed, which is pretty understandable since it is a small town and a fair number of European tourists come down for a few days. I completely understand and respect this, but still wanting to get photos of the locals and not wanting to be obnoxious about it, I developed a covert strategy. Basically I put my camera on the rapid shutter mode so it takes pictures continually, and when I walk down a street I just hold the camera by my hip like I am just carrying it and hold the shutter. The result is dozens of blurred, misframed pictures, but there is occassionally a good one. I feel a little disputed about this and I probably shouldn't take any at all, but I think it is the act of taking a picture and not the picture itself that that is annoying to the people, and they don't see me in the act. National Geographic sent a guy to Afghanistan a few years ago to find the woman on their famous cover from 20 years ago, and the article about finding her a second time said that she remembered feeling angry and confused about the guy who originally took her picture, so I guess the response is a little inevitable. If one of the dozens of people who show up to UW every spring to take pictures of the trees in the Quad turned around and took a picture of me, I would be kind of annoyed at the moment but then probably immediately forget about the matter, so I will just try to continue to be discreet and hopefully not offend anyone.

One of my covert picture operations

In nearly all the streets of Chefchaouen you'll find dozens of rancuous youngsters running around, laughing, playing tag, and occasionally whalloping each other. They love to say things in Spanish and English and I constantly hear "Hola! Como estas!?", followed by shrieks of laughter and excitement.

Another strategy - take a picture of a mirror with the subjects as reflections. Little girls are actually the most adamant of all that no pictures get taken of them.

Cadiz and Cordoba; tangents and Granada

2007-02-23T14:43:00.000Z

Cadiz did turn out to be a little rough around the edges, at least compared with Seville, but it was nevertheless a great little city. The area, being the oldest port in the world, is absolutely steeped in history and is filled with crumbling towers, castles, and like the rest of Andalucia, personable little avenidas. I arrived the day after the main Carneval celebration, though there were still continually people and groups singing and performing throughout the streets and in all the plazas. Being alone in the middle of a big celebration is uncomfortable for me. Solitude can feel normal in traditional spectator situations, but trying to slip through the enthusiastic masses of people who had looked forward to this celebration for months made me feel that much more isolated. Like the Chili Peppers say, it wasn't a place for playing solitaire. What seems even more unusual to me is that when I was in severely less social environments, like Patagonia, I felt completely normal and unaware of my isolation.

Just in case you forget where you are, this huge tower reminds you...

In a less coincidental situation than before, I ran into Rula again at her hostel in Cadiz, and like before, it was great talking to someone without having to explain myself and also to hear her thoughts on the Bonderman, because the general nature of the fellowship has been on my mind a lot recently. Lately I've felt very unsatisfied with my approach to the whole opportunity, not in terms of logistics or itineraries, but more with regard to my general attitude toward the experience. I've been striving to live in the moment and absorb what I'm looking at and try to really appreciate it, whether it is a cathedral, conversation, or natural wonder, but I have not been very successful. In some situations, namely Fitz Roy, Machu Picchu, and Seville this happened, but generally it doesn't come easily, if at all. Everything is beautiful in retrospect, of course, and when I look back at the pictures in a year I'll forget that when I was taking the picture of La Mezquita I was thinking about plans in Morocco, but I'd like to get better at absorbing and appreciating at the most appropriate hour, the present one. This frustration has been making me feel surprisingly and overwhelmingly stressed out, and I think Rula put it very well when she said that despite the Bonderman Fellowship having no strings attached, "there are all kinds of hidden strings."

Carneval celebrations in Cadiz

I left Cadiz after spending two nights there and headed for Cordoba, home to the famous La Mezquita, a Roman Catholic cathedral that prior to the reconquest of Spain by Christiandom was the 2nd largest mosque in the world. Similar to the increasing Mexican influence as you travel south in the US, you notice considerably more signs and hints of Arab culture as you move towards Morocco in Spain. The food gets a little spicier, the architecture gets a little more eccentric and colorful, and Arabic script is written everywhere. La Mezquita was very rich in Moorish art and Arabic writing, but at the same time was clearly a Roman cathedral complete with chapels and an enormous Rennaisance nave that apparently was somewhat controversial upon completion. The various Mediterranean-based empires throughout recent human history seem to have been quite resourceful, as instead of destroying the previous empire/religion's buildings and monuments they just kind of redecorate them to suite their tastes/God(s).

La Mezquita

So for Lent I gave up shaving, but not wine...maybe it should have been the other way around

La Mezquita

Inside La Mezquita...these columns are somewhat famous as they are made of jasper, onyx, marble, and granite...actually I don't think that is why they are famous.

A quick rant about Hostelling International - their hostels tend to have this incredibly sterile and modern personality. Case in point, the HI hostel in Cordoba was in a tiny plaza in the Jewish quarter, a beautiful little area filled with quirky streets and cafes and colorful buildings. HI basically painted a large building entirely white and put a huge gaudy electronic sign on the facade and adorned the area next to it with an obnoxiously large HI symbol. Unless your back is to the building, the sight of the plaza is basically ruined. A hostel can easily be modern and comfortable without looking like it is a law firm from the outside, and ignoring this concept seems to be fairly common with Hostelling International.

Anyway, after Cordoba I headed to Granada, home to the the Alhambra, a huge Moorish fortress complete with a palace. The sheer expanse of the place made me wish I had a panoramic camera, as a single photograph does the magnamity little justice. There are fountains and reflective ponds everywhere, and though it was overcast when I saw it, normally the Sierra Nevada provides an awesome background. All of Cordoba also sits below the massif, and it's hard to imagine a more appropriate setting for the fortress and home to the monarchs of the great Moorish empire. When you walk through the various hallways and into the hundreds of rooms, intricate carvings of Arabic script and symbols decorate the walls...almost every single wall. I don't think Arabic is particularly easy to write, let alone carve into rock, and the detail that went into the carvings was truly incredibly, and even as a dilletante when it comes to history and architecture, I was very impressed. I guess Spain makes everyone want to be a bit of a Renaissance man.

This guy is going to do great things in his life...I can tell

The first night in Cordoba I went on a little tapas tour with other people from my hostel and we went to several little places that amazingly give you a free plate of tapas if you order a drink. There were two girls from the US with us, and they started complaining loudly when the bartender wouldn't let them pay with credit card. Their complaint was that if they went to get cash, they would have to use their debit card at an ATM, consequently taking money out of their own account, while if they used their parents' credit card then they wouldn't have to pay. Of course, in 30 seconds of acting like this they completely fortified all of the stereotypes of American culture that the Europeans we were with might have otherwise forgotten, but I was a little skeptical that they would act like this back home.

We tend to live up to ourstereotypes when we are away from home. Americans act more arrogant and nationalistic than we actually are and Europeans (sorry to generalize a whole continent) act more liberal and progressive than they actually are. In my experience at home, Americans are rarely passionate about America and we are as good at criticizing our government and culture as anyone. When we travel, we miss the safety and efficacy of our society, so we embrace patriotism to an exaggerated degree. Similarly, Europeans seem to be much better at voicing progressive and liberal ideas than acting in a way that promotes these ideas. When I studied in Greece, I was often surprised and a little aghast at how blatantly racist some of the Erasmus students could be, and a continent that regularly uses 20$ RyanAir flights to take weekend trips to Rome or Amsterdam is in no position to criticize anyone's environmental policies. Driving a 50mpg SmartCar is great, but if you're driving it to Charles Gaulle to EasyJet a 747 over to Dublin for a football match, then, well, you're doing the environment no more favors than the LA soccer mom driving a Hummer. And have I ever evidenced the first clause of the second sentence of this paragraph by now...

Canadians and Americans tapa-ing together

In a tapas bar in Granada

Beauty and the Beast

Seville by night

2007-02-19T13:25:00.000Z

one of my new interests is apparently taking pictures of fountains, and just to prove it you'll have to look at several more of these if you read the rest of this post

Seville's Catedral at dusk

Ever seen a Starbucks and a carriage in the same picture? Actually, there are so many of them now that you probably have...

El Catedral at dusk

In Spanish, verbs end in -ar, -er, or -ir. Sevilla is the name of a guy, I think, so when I saw this sign I thought someone had come up with the idea to make the name into a verb, so this would kind of mean "to Sevilla yourself", which I thought was kind of cool. The next day I walked past again and realized it was an art store - Sevill Arte. I'm still saying it means to Seville yourself, though, because everyone should.

Rita, my partner in crime for photographing Sevilla at night. If you ever want to know anything about Lisbon or how to take pictures at night, talk to her...I wish she would put her pictures on flickr because they were great.

Plaza de Espana in Seville - the most famous and beautiful of all of Spain's plazas

Another fountain...

Plaza de Espana again

Near the cathedral at dusk

Looking over Plaza de Espana from a balcony

I ended up spending about eight days in Seville, a little long considering it is a small city but inertia got the best of me. Plus, I loved it here, as you can probably tell from the pictures. Great people, tons of things to see, and more than anything just an addicting atmosphere. I finally moved onto Cadiz, and found it packed from Carneval as it is home to the biggest Carneval celebrations in Europe. Consequently I couldn't find a place to stay and ended up in a dungeon-like single room in a less-than-glamorous pension, but it was pretty much the only available place in the area. Cadiz is supposedly the world's oldest city, and it smells like it, too. I wrote to my mom that it was a like going to Clallam Bay from Port Angeles. I know it has all kinds of merits and that Seville has all kinds of problems, but I just had such a great time in Seville that Cadiz will be hard-pressed to do better. I've found that you can be in pretty dull or bad places but if you meet nice people and have a great time, you'll think that place was amazing, and similarly you can be in beautiful places but if you don't meet the right people or you're sick or something, then you won't think much of the place in retrospect. I kind of brought the bad-hotel-in-Cadiz thing on myself, though, since I have gone the entire trip without making a hostel reservation and felt somewhat proud of it, and ignorantly thought that showing up to one of the biggest celebrations in the western world without a place to stay wouldn't pose any problems.

Anyway, I have more to write about Seville and Cadiz and about a hundred other things too, but I no longer have the luxury of free internet (Oasis hostels are gifts from God for travelers), so those things will have to wait. Or maybe it will keep raining and I'll decide that spending a few euro an hour on internet isn't such a bad thing.

Seville

2007-02-13T14:30:00.000Z

Orange trees in Seville

I have been in Seville for four days now, mostly just enjoying the pleasant atmosphere but also checking out the famous Catedral and Alcazar. Seville is probably one of the most enjoyable cities that I have ever been in, and I don't think anyone could object to getting lost in its unorganized labrynith of pedestrian streets and plazas. Temperature-wise it is one of the hottest places in Europe, so even in the middle of winter the climate is pretty agreeable. You even occasionally catch a citrusy scent from the hundreds of orange trees that adorn many of the sidewalks and the Alcazar gardens.

Who invaded Spain in the 8th century? Artwork in the Alcazar in Seville

(Does anyone know what I am alluding to there?)

Seville's cathedral behind one of its hundreds of orange trees

Ironically, Seville's beauty isn't why it was one of four places on my Bonderman proposal. It is the setting for the most famous chapter in The Brothers Karamazov, The Grand Inquisitor, and the name "Seville" got stuck in my mind after reading the book when I was studying in Greece two years ago. Punctum is a term that I learned as a freshman from an Honors seminar called Damage and Repair taught by Frances McCue:
A tear or rip in an artistic piece, emotionally connecting the viewer to the piece
In my Bonderman essay I explained that Seville was a punctum for me in the book, probably partly because the name is just euphonic but also because the violence and destruction of the Spanish Inquisition that Seville housed sprung from some pretty grim beliefs defended by the main narrator of the chapter, an old man known as The Grand Inquisitor.

On a tapas mission late at night

"Yeah...I believe in like, energy and stuff...you know?"
-girl from the US staying in my hostel

One of a dozen sculptures by Igor Mitoraj in Plaza Nueva

In the beginning of the chapter, Christ performs miracles for the tyrannized people of Seville, and is promptly arrested as a heretic by the Grand Inquisitor. Visiting him in jail, the Grand Inquisitor explains that the presence of Christ and his miracles will hurt his mission to oppress humanity to such a degree that they actually become happy in their ignorance. He argues that mankind would prefer to suffer physically under his tyranny over suffer mentally and emotionally under the freedom that they would otherwise experience, and in adherence with this principle he burns hundreds of heretics in a public arena in Seville. The Grand Inquisitor explains that most of the public respond to his violence more than Christ's love, and that since presenting this choice to the public would cause so much anguish, he is doing them a favor by removing the possibility of the latter. Sorry, I don't really understand most of the chapter (or the book, for that matter), so this is a bad explanation, but it is just written in such a coarse manner with so much pessimism about the integrity of mankind that I couldn't really help but be drawn here.

I don't know who Debod is, but this is his temple in Madrid

Getting tapas in Seville

On a less dreary note, I went to a flamenco show a few nights ago, which I surprisingly found to be really cool, though I guess you can never really go wrong with sangria over tapas and a beautiful Andalucian girl dancing to Spanish music. I may have said this before, but Seville is great at satisfying all my preconceptions about Spain.

Flamenco artists in Seville

In what may have been the least probable thing to happen in the history of the Bonderman Fellowship, I randomly ran into Rula (also a 2006 recipient) in the aforementioned flamenco show. The sheer improbability of this actually made it a little unsurprising, though the more I think about it the more it kind of blows me away. I mean, we both had to end up in Seville at the same time, which isn't particularly strange, but then we both had to mention to the same guy that we were travelling on a fellowship from the University of Washington and then that guy had to make this connection and then we both had to end up in a flamenco show at the same time and then that guy had to randomly run into me, recognize me, and point out Rula, who happened to be sitting only about 10' away. If another Bonderman fellow ever hears the sentence "hey, there is another girl traveling on your fellowship sitting over there" then I will be very surprised. It was very nice to talk to another traveller without having to explain why and how I was travelling and also to hear about some of the places that I'll be visiting in the next few months. It also made the world feel very, very small.

Possibly the only photo taken of a Bonderman Fellow by another...Rula and Seville's Catedral at night

My dad gave me a necklace with this guy on it - Saint Christopher in Seville's Catedral

Reflection in the Alcazar

The Cathedral during the day

A monument in the cathedral to Cristo Colon (Christopher Columbus)

Seville plaza

So, a very random and unlikely occurence combined with a rather strange reason to even be here has made my time in Seville pretty interesting. Similar to Tierra del Fuego, the first place on my Bonderman proposal, I have just felt at home in Seville and while I can't put it into words, I just knew why I was here when I arrived several days ago. The punctum thing is starting to evidence its merit. Anyway, I will be here for a few more days at least before heading out to Cadiz or Granada, and in the meantime here is the passage from The Grand Inquisitor that first introduced me to Seville:

And behold, He deigned to appear for a moment to the people, to the tortured, suffering people, sunk in iniquity, but loving Him like children. My story is laid in Spain, in Seville, in the most terrible time of the Inquisition, when fires were lighted every day to the glory of God, and 'in the splendid auto da fe the wicked heretics were burnt.' Oh, of course, this was not the coming in which He will appear, according to His promise, at the end of time in all His heavenly glory, and which will be sudden 'as lightning flashing from east to west.' No, He visited His children only for a moment, and there where the flames were crackling round the heretics. In His infinite mercy He came once more among men in that human shape in which He walked among men for thirty-three years fifteen centuries ago. He came down to the 'hot pavements' of the southern town in which on the day before almost a hundred heretics had, ad majorem gloriam Dei, been burnt by the cardinal, the Grand Inquisitor, in a magnificent auto da fe, in the presence of the king, the court, the knights, the cardinals, the most charming ladies of the court, and the whole population of Seville.

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

How I ended up with a heart-shaped balloon and other stories from Madrid

2007-02-12T17:47:00.000Z

On one of the three days I spent in Madrid and on one of the many walks I took through the city, I ended up at Plaza Mayor, which is the most famous plaza in Madrid as it was the home to the autos-de-fe (trials of faith) held during the Spanish Inquisition. The beautiful plaza was enclosed by three story buildings painted in bright colors and adorned with architectural features that easily satisfied my dilettante tastes, and in one corner a young woman was performing magic tricks. There was a fairly large crowd around her, and I walked up to the outskirts as she was finishing a trick. She proceeded to say that she needed someone to help her, and before she even finished her sentence I somehow knew that it was going to be me, and sure enough, after looking around the entire crowd, she walked straight towards me and dragged me out in front of the crowd of about 150-200 people. I tried to protest by saying that I didn't speak Spanish, but this didn't seem to matter as she immediately had me helping her with various tricks on a unicycle. I may have been more of a crowd-pleaser had I not immediately said that I was from los Estados Unidos, as this seemed to draw a few groans and frowns from the crowd, but apparently my assistance was admirable enough to merit some applause from the audience and a heart-shaped balloon from the magician at the end.

Several other strange instances also marked my time in Madrid. Having just visited two of the most crime-ridden cities in the world, Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, I thought I was on easy street and that it would be impossible for anything bad to happen. However, after returning to my hostel after walking around for several hours on the first day, I discovered that someone had opened the backpack I left in the room and helped themselves to several rather useless items, such as a battery charger with no batteries, my Petzl LED light, a small camera tripod, a camera case that for one reason or another was holding my shampoo, and a pair of liner gloves. I went to bed feeling angry at the world, but when I woke up and talked to some other people in the hostel I found out that I had gotten off pretty easy. One guy had 100 euro stolen from under his pillow and two guys had their jackets taken from the room. The worst case, though, was that of a Brazilian student who had been working for two years in Brazil to pay for university in Spain and had 1500 euro (yes, 1500) taken out of his backpack when he was walking down the street. Why someone would carry almost 2000USD in cash on them was a little beyond me, but I really felt bad for him since he consequently had to abandon his plans to study there. Finally, another Brazilian girl had 500 euro taken from her purse in the same manner. Hearing about these made me feel a little bad for being so upset about the few small things that the mystery room thief took from my backpack, but thankfully I had all of my important/valuable things with me so I didn't lose anything too important.

Another surprising thing about Madrid was the lack of good hostels. I thought that since it was Europe, and Europe is basically synonymous with hostels and backpacking, then there would be all kinds of great options, but the one I ended up at (which was supposedly one of the better ones) was markedly unexciting and unfriendly, and didn't seem to care that someone (presumably one of their staff) was stealing things from the rooms.

Finally, one more interesting thing about Madrid was the huge number of Starbucks. I didn't see a single one in all of South America, but suddenly they were on every street corner, selling little cups of irony to the hoards of anti-American Europeans. Just as a warning, at some point during my trip it is very probable that I will go on a several-page, highly-cynical rant about the hypocrisies of European and Australian anti-Americanism and about the anger I feel when another American confesses to me that he or she pretends to be from Canada, but for now I will spare you since I am in a great mood after making it to Seville (pronounced Seh-veeya for those non-Spanish-speakers out there), which already promises to be a great little city, and is the second of the four places I originally based my Bonderman proposal on.

What is euphoria?

2007-02-09T15:37:00.000Z

For me, flying into Madrid, feeling cold temperatures, walking on clean streets, and being able to carry my wallet in my back pocket for the first time in four months.

A Cidade Maravilhosa

2007-02-08T16:47:00.000Z

This is my last post from South America as I fly to Madrid at midnight tonight on Air Pluna. I just thought I would put up a few pictures from the coast in southern Brazil and write a few things about my few days in Rio de Janeiro.

Parati

View of Parati from a boat that I took a short trip on with some other travelers

Trimaran anchored off a Parati island

Our captain

View from my Parati hostel in the morning

Some Argentines staying at my hostel

Look closely and you can see infinity...

Rio de Janeiro - A Cidade Maravilhosa

Sugarloaf Mountain and Copacabana from Corcovado

Fortunately it cleared up so I actually could see what was on the sign

This gives an idea of the actual size of the Christ statue...

Favelas in Rio de Janeiro

If you have seen the movie City of God then this might be of some interest to you as I think (I haven't seen the movie yet) the movie generally takes place in a favela in Rio. I had heard about taking tours through the favelas for a few weeks, and several other travelers seemed to think it was one of the best things in Rio to see. Favelas are shantytowns in Rio that sprung up as a result of people from rural areas moving into the city to look for work. Brazil has a law that says that if you start living on a spot of land and no one pesters you about it for five years, then the land becomes yours, and consequently hundreds of acres of land on the hills that crash into Rio became favelas. The favelas and their residents are largely protected and controlled by drug lords, and the police forces in Rio generally stay clear of the areas. The result is somewhat surprising - the areas are almost entirely void of theft and violence (outside the actual drug community, of course) because the drug lords wish for the police to continue to stay out of their territory. Despite the lack of crime between the residents of the favelas, they are not safe for tourists to visit alone which is why several companies who have relationships with the drug lords started operating tours through the areas.

I wasn't sure what I thought of taking a favela tour as the idea alone seemed pretty voyeuristic, and from any perspective this is fundamentally true, but one of the consistent trends in articles about favelas and tours was that the residents thoroughly appreciate outsiders seeing their homes and their lifestyles. It's not that they want us to see their poverty and what they don't have, instead it is their interest in showing that they have a very regular and safe lifestyle in spite of their poverty, which is largely furnished by the drug community, which also subsidizes education and health care within the areas. Our guide made it fairly clear that the residents take a great deal of pride in what they have built from nothing and are not seeking people to feel sorry for them, which I think is a fairly universal theme. It seems particularly noticable in the United States, where often the wealthiest people with the least amount of resistence in their lives exploit and exaggerate any hardship or background flaw as much as possible, while those with less take much more pride in what they have earned and accomplished and do not elaborate on what has hindered their lives.

Kids playing basketball in a school in a smaller favela

At one point I got a little separated from the guide and was walking down one of the incredibly narrow passes between the buildings, and I heard these girls shrieking with laughter and pointing at me, and having my camera in my hand I pointed it up which caused even more laughter.

In contrast to most major cities, the poorest residents in Rio live above the wealthy and have some of the best views

Some of the great artwork being sold in the largest Rio favela

Looking across an area of a smaller favela

Don't get me wrong, Rio and the favelas are steeped in poverty and most of the residents in Rio would have no interest in visiting one of these areas. It is not something to glamorize or romanticize and corruption in the government in Brazil has caused the majority of aid money for the favelas to be redirected into the politicians' pockets, and the drug trade is one of the only ways for younger favela residents to rise above what they were born into. Sadly, 90% of those who enter the drug trade are dead by the time they are 25, a statistic that really shocked me. Still, due to the drug lords, most of the residents have access to health care and education, which is pretty rare for shantytowns in cities like this.

Rio de Janeiro

2007-02-06T09:44:00.000Z

Four months after leaving Port Angeles in a process which involved 9 flights, around 210 hours on buses, 7 ferry rides, and quite a bit of walking I arrived in my final South American stop, Rio de Janeiro (pronounced Hee-oh Juuh-nero), spiritual home to the samba, Carneval, and the world's skimpiest clothing. Though I only got to spend two weeks here, Brazil has been incredibly beautiful, particularly the coastal town of Parati (pronounced Para-chi), and I have some pictures to upload but unfortunately there are virtually zero internet cafes in Rio and my hostel, which is even more cheap than it is sketchy, charges several times what I am used to paying. I guess when you are a carioca and you live within spitting distance of Copacabana and Ipanema and you can't look sideways without seeing dozens of beautiful people then the internet isn't as interesting. Rio isn't all Christ statues and perfect beaches, though; it is quite literally very rough around the edges, as this article evidences:

http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/articlenews.aspx?storyid=2007-02-05T140845Z_01_N05399667_RTRUKOC_0_UK-BRAZIL-VIOLENCE-RIO.xml&type=worldNews&WTmodLoc=World-C3-More-6

Strangely enough, I haven't heard anyone actually talking about this in Rio, I just randomly heard it on CNN yesterday so I looked it up this morning.

Anyway, I will upload pictures and write a little more about what I have been up to if I actually find an internet place. I have been incredibly tired the last three days, presumably from the 95 degree weather that Rio is currently enjoying, but I am trying to get out and see everything as I fly to Madrid on Thursday, making the next 48 hours or so my last in South America.

Photos, lists

2007-01-30T21:39:00.000Z

Two last photos from Argentina...

Being fairly ignorant about the Falkland Islands war before I came to Argentina, I was surprised to find out how much it meant to the Argentine population, who refer to the remote, bleak, and overwhelmingly useless islands as the Malvinas. The story basically goes that in the early 80s, the current Argentine president was suffering in popularity, so he thought that nabbing the Falklands from the British would help matters. The queen of England was also having popularity problems, though, and she promptly sent British troops that easily (though not bloodlessly) humiliated the Argentines right back to the mainland. One of the problems that Argentina had with the conflict was that most of the actual residents of the Falklands prefer to earn pounds over pesos, since pounds are worth around six times more than the Argentine peso. Thus, with no other viable strategy, the Argentine government apparently decided that printing these "The Malvinas are Argentine" signs would, if nothing else, give their constituents a boost in national pride.

Why you would bother seeing this movie if it wasn't called Snakes on a Plane, I do not know...

Now some photos from Florianopolis, Brazil:

It is hard to see in this picture but the little pink things on the table are tiny squids

I have been traveling for about four months now, and though I have been a little lazy during the last few weeks in terms of getting out and seeing things and stuff, I have also been thinking a lot about the rest of my trip and what I want to do and see. In particular, I have been reading a lot about the Middle East since I bought a LP Middle East book, and I am getting very excited to start exploring some of those areas. The most difficult question that I have been thinking about lately though is when I should fly home, since I do not have a ticket home yet. I am anticipating that traveling through Spain, Portugal, Morocco, Italy, misc. Balkan states, Turkey, Egypt, Israel, and Jordan will take around four months, which means that by the time I finish that segment up in Cairo it will be June and I will have been traveling for eight months. Sometimes I think that it would be easy to continue plowing through Asia and spend another month and a half in India and Pakistan and the last month and a half in SE Asia before flying back home in late August. My realistic side (which does make the occasional appearance) tells me that after traveling extensively in Central/South America, western Europe/Morocco, eastern Europe, and the Middle East I will be exhausted physically and mentally. I have also considered the fact that a month and a half (or even three months) in India and Pakistan would barely do those areas justice, and that the same can be said for SE Asia. Thus, I can basically narrow my post-Middle East trip down to four options:

Marathon - fly from Cairo to Katmandu on AirArabia, travel to Delhi, to Islamabad, do some treks in the Karakoram, return to Dehli, fly to Bangkok, do the SE Asia loop, fly Bangkok or Jakarta - Seattle at the end of August. Problems: This would be exhausting and the time, effort, and $$ needed for a trip to Pakistan might be better saved for a more extensive trip in the future. Then again, it is never a good idea to assume trips in the future.
India and Thailand - fly from Cairo to Mumbai, travel for a few weeks in southern India, fly to Bangkok, spend a few weeks in Thailand before flying back to Seattle in July. Problems: I would be skipping the Karakoram, which is one of the areas that I wrote about for my Bonderman application.
Pakistan - fly from Cairo to Jaipur, India, and head immediately to Islamabad to spend a month or so in the Karakoram. Travel back to Delhi and fly to Bangkok for my flight home. Problems: Lot of transit time between India and Pakistan, still not really sufficient time in Pakistan.
Eight months - Finish after eight months like the Bonderman Fellowship stipulates. Problems: I would end up skipping things, and I would probably get home and wonder what the rush was.

The fundamental problem with this decision is that I know that any one of these options is possible. It would be hard to see everything and travel until September, but I know I could do it, and similarly I know that I would be delighted to be flying home in four months, though it would be hard to deal with skipping one of the areas that was originally a highlight on my itinerary (the Karakoram). Anyway, it is a lot to think about and since flights back to the US probably won't get any cheaper in the next two months, I probably need to make a decision sooner rather than later. Maybe flying into Spain in a week and getting a change in scenery will put it in better perspective, but in reality it will probably just make it more confusing.

Those questions aside, I spontaneously came up with a short wish list:

A two day layover in Port Angeles en route to Spain - drop some things off, pick some things up, and recharge a little bit
A tourist visa for Syria - reading my LP Middle East has made me desperately want to visit Syria, Lebanon, and Libya, but the process is very complicated for Americans. I am not ruling it out, though...
A passport from an EU country - not only could it get me out of the Israeli passport stamp stigma (which I will explain later), but it would also save me from certain visa costs and problems

Deus É Brasileiro

2007-01-30T19:21:00.000Z

The bus ride from Montevideo to the Brazilian city of Florianopolis was supposed to take 18 hours, but on the way into a bus station some hooligan hurled a rock at the window, shattered it, and thus delayed our trip by three hours. Even more inexplicable than why someone would want to break a bus window was why the process of taping a big piece of cardboard over the hole took two and a half hours, but I eventually made it to a hostel in a beautiful little beach community on the east side of Floripa. Florianopolis is a long island filled with tiny towns and white sand beaches, and despite being a fairly popular destination for South American tourists it seems to retain a pretty natural, undeveloped feel. Speaking of South American tourists, being at a beach filled with heaps of Brazilians on summer vacation is a great way to feel quite unattractive in a short amount of time.

I usually try to avoid making relatively unfounded over-generalizations about the inhabitants of two of the largest countries on Earth, but I will say that in my short experience Brazil is friendlier than one of its neighbors to the south that ends in -gentina, especially considering that virtually zero travelers speak more than a word or two of Portuguese. The difference is comparable to going from the United States into Canada. Exceptions definitely exist on both sides, but as I would say in general that Canadians are more friendly. For example, today I went to a bank because my WaMu Mastercard wasn't letting me withdraw from ATMs. I assumed that the banker would not be able to tell me anything even if he did speak English, and that the long line of people with more pressing issues would probably make him annoyed that I was asking a question at all, but he turned out to be very helpful and drew me a map to several other banks that he thought would work with my card.

Anyway, after spending three days in Florianopolis I caught a 10 hour night bus to Sao Paulo, which is where I am right now. Sao Paulo translates to San Pablo in Spanish, and then onto Saint Paul in English, and it is also known as Sampa to Brazilians, so before I knew all of this it was a little confusing to understand what people were talking about since I heard all three names commonly used. I should be here for a day or two before venturing onto Pirati (another coastal community) and then onto Rio. I will try to post some pictures later tonight or tomorrow, though I have been pretty lazy with the camera lately so don't expect too much.

Visa and Spanish

2007-01-24T20:27:00.000Z

I got my passport back today complete with a Brazilian visa and aconsulate receipt saying that the $140 fee was because that is what Brazilians have to pay for a visa to the United States. Curious, I looked this up on the Brazilian US Embassy website, where it confirmedthat Brazilians do have to pay $100 for a tourist visa. Fortunately, I did not plan to spend more than a week and a half in Brazil as my visa only has a 15 day validity, though it is valid for multiple entries.When I applied for the visa, I actually did not know whether I had a yellow fever vaccination. The guy asked me for proof, and I handed him a little packet of yellow papers that Hall Health gave me before I left, and the yellow color was evidently all he needed to see as hedidn't bother to actually check the contents. Speaking of vaccinations, I am going to be supremely disappointed if I don't get bit by a rabid dog at some point as the rabies vaccination I got back in August turned out to suck about $1000 out of my WaMu account. $1000 could buy you two comfortable months in Argentina, and the more research I did about Rabies vaccinations the more I realized that they are unneccesary as long as you stay within a few days of a hospital. Frustrating.

I've been drinking profuse amounts of yerba mate lately, mostly because drinking it is sort of an experience in itself. The process involves filling your mate (usually some kind of hollowed out coconut)with yerba mate leaves, though you have to put the bombilla (a metal straw with a strainer at the end) in first. Then you add hot water, let it sit for a few seconds, and choke it down.

I have also spent the last few days walking around Montevideo, which is a very pleasant city. It has the highest living standard of any city in South America, and though I have not been to Switzerland I get the impression that Uruguay is indeed the "Switzerland of South America", as I have heard it called. I would have liked to have taken a bus up to some beaches in the north, but because of the 35ish hoursI will be spending on a bus to get up to Rio, I have been trying to minimize bus time. I get on the 18 hour bus for Florianopolis, Brazil on Friday afternoon, and then I fly out of Rio on February 8th.

With the exception of the few weeks that I will spend in Spain, I am going to really miss the comfort that knowing Spanish has brought me during my time in South America, and I'll apologize in advance for the conceit found in this paragraph. I've learned a huge amount about the language and its dialects, and I can now pretty easily determine whatcountry a native speaker is from based on their accent. There are athousand little idiomatic discrepencies between regions that are pretty fun to listen to and try to use. Argentines, for example, sometimes swap syllables in two-syllable words, so "cafe" becomes "feca" and so on. They also use vos instead of tu, which was not taught in my high school Spanish classes. Argentine Spanish is my favorite, though when I first flew into Buenos Aires it sounded like a completely different language to me and took some getting used to. Bolivians try to talk you into buying their handicrafts by saying"pesitos" instead of "pesos", which effectively turns a price of 10 pesos into a more reasonable price of 10 little pesos. You can add ito to any Spanish noun to dimish its size, but Bolivians are the only ones I have heard using this with pesos. Spaniards have alispy way of pronouncing their "c" sounds, so "Barcelona" is pronounced "Barthelona". Despite how fast most people speak Spanish, they manage to articulate every sound in every word, but Chileans speak Spanish the way Americans speak English - very quickly and without much articulation. Regardless of whether they speak English, almost all of my conversations with South Americans and Spaniards are in Spanish now, though sometimes my ability to speak and understand mysteriously disappears completely and I have to resort to English or silence. Some of my prouder accomplishments with Spanish in the last four months include talking my way into a student discount despite not being a Peruvian student, explaining my ferry predicament and getting a ride to Villa O'Higgins, and teaching an Argentine girl how to do Sudoko (she also said I had good Spanish, and getting a compliment from an Argentine is not easy).

There are a number of Brazilians in my hostel right now, and despite their similarities on paper, Portuguese and Spanish sound dramatically different. A guy from Brazil did tell me though that I should be able to get by fine with English, and that most Brazilians would rather talk in English than in Spanish. I'll see how it goes, though, andI'll try to learn some Portuguese in the process, since I will be spending a little time in Portugal in a few weeks.

Two additions

2007-01-22T23:14:00.000Z

I came across an interesting article about a recent travel trend which evolved as a result of tourists' interest in seeing impoverished or war torn communities around the world. The URL is http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070120.wxreality20/BNStory/specialTravel/home
and I think it is worth reading through, especially if you are interested in travel ethics.

I looked at the little counter at the bottom of the page after I updated my blog today, and I was startled that it was at 1100 hits, especially since the counter is based on individual IPs and not multiple visits from the same IP. It really made me wonder where all of the hits are coming from and how they came across my page, so I added two things to the side - a guestbook and a thing I got from Jennifer Lee's blog called a ClustrMap, which shows the location of visitors. Even if I don't know you or if you stumbled upon this blog randomly, I would really like to know who you are and how you found it, so I would love it if you can take a second and just say hi on my guestbook. And of course I want to hear from all of my family and friends too, so sign away...

Click here to sign.

Also, I added a few blogs and some descriptions to my list of other travel blogs...check them out here.

(This should confirm what a nerd I truly am, though I think a lot of you were already aware)

On another side note, I finished Anna Karenina by Tolstoy today. My first reaction (this was while I was reading it) was to compare it to the two books I've read by Dostoevsky - The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment, and I liked both of those infinitely better than I liked Anna Karenina. But then I thought about it a bit more (I do have a lot of time on my hands) and decided that I couldn't closely compare the two authors just because they are both Russian. I liked Moby-Dick a lot better than The Sun Also Rises, but I don't know if it's very legit to compare my affinity for the books just because Melville and Hemingway are both American. Russians do know their shit, though, and the translation of Anna Karenina that I was reading was particularly easy to read because on all of the names the translator dropped the -ovitch and -ovna (informal patronymic Russian middle names take the name of the father and add those endings for males and females, respectively, so if I was Russian and had a son named Jorge, he might be addressed as Jorge Spencerovitch, though if I was Russian I don't know if his name would be Jorge).

Anyway, sign my guestbook.

Spence