Tag Archives: Travel

Travel log: Malaysia

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I used to live with a guy named Al. Al in many ways was a total freak. The stand out sign of his freakishness was giant bowls of Maypo with frozen blueberries stirred into the otherwise gruel-like meal. It was a meal that could occur at any of the 24 hours in a day and would often leave a blueish gray cast of spills and crusted tableware all over the apartment.

Al also called himself a writer. He would watch and look and examine and write in his imagined grotto. One day I came home to him transfixed by a can opener, which he was twirling to view at every angle and at every gradation of open and closed.

Caught in his study, he explained as a writer one must at all times carefully observe everything, even minutia to a minute detail. All was fodder for greatness.

I think his plan was to be as Melville was to whaling, but his passion would be kitchen utensils.

Al puzzled me.

His contention, his philosophy was that all writing is at its core was observation. He was a watcher. He existed in the square rooms of our apartment never venturing beyond the journeys he concocted between his temples and behind his forehead.

At the same time, I was studying journalism, writing that by its very nature stepped back to observe and report. Aloof from the messiness of human existence, we were taught to remain factual and by extension allowing the story to create its own structure remaining neutral in the telling. I suppose this training had me thinking Al was onto something.

But, my favorite journalists just might be Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson. They, in the sense of Neal Cassady, Ken Kesey and The Electric KoolAid Acid Test, got ON the bus.

Many years later, I found my own tribe of writers and storytellers. Not quite out there in the wilderness of the 1960s and 70s, they did not ascribe to stories coming from afar, cool observation. Nope, stories came from going balls in and doing something.

Which, in all apologies, brings us to today. Holy fuckballs (as I like to say in countries where the locals are unlikely to be able to translate, I did take a long-winded path to today.

Today, I had round two sparring with the kung fu master who bloviated that he is one of 10 elite in the ‘hood called Malaysia who can tap out impurities and do something good to your chi or qi or chee (definitely not chia). My qi has positively been beaten into submission.

For a couple of bucks, I succumbed to a type of massage that literally involves a long series of backhand slaps to my areas of arthritic pain. By the way, I grew up hearing the word arthritis and thought of diseases and treatment. In these modern days, it’s medical shorthand for the fact of my cartilage deteriorating and my bones rubbing together, nothing more interesting.

In the spirit of travel, adventure, story telling, sucking the marrow from existence, I figured the investment was worthwhile on two scores.

First, I have back and leg pain and it sucks and I exercise and try to work out the kinks and strengthen my core and it persists and it sucks. Anything that could remove the suck would be fine indeed.

Second is just the awesomeness. I have a story to tell and pictures to show.

I have these:

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I also have this one of my knee. Grace and good sense preclude me from posting the worse bruising on my ass.

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Best of all, we get too bring home magical and mystical and therapeutical bottles of oily elixir of mystery.

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My back and leg are sore as I type this missive. But, if all goes well, in 2 days time I shall be healed. He promised me that soon I could do things with my legs I couldn’t before. I’m hoping that means ballet.

Of all of it, it’s a traveler’s dream of “authenticity.” The master’s rap was solid, peppered with references to the Chinese, qi, cultural superiority and my yin mixing with my yang. Westerners like me, we can’t take pain of treatment like the Chinese can.

The promises were wonderfully rich with self-promotion and mystery. He had skills and powers and training that few possess and to which he wouldn’t give a name.

I can’t decide which experience I like more–His burning my back, literally, with the heated ember of a block of incense, the visible bruising or the manifestations of health represented by the color and texture changes of my beaten flesh. Perhaps it’s the sum of it all.

So I wait, and I’ll report back if I can plie and jete like nobody’s business as the bruises subside and the oil seeps into my wounds.

Random thoughts at 40k

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I’m more or less comfortably sitting in my sky chair, going from one side of the globe (California) to the other (Kuala Lumpur). As the crow flies it’s a fucking long ride. Different continent, different languages, different everything and far. That’s how I conceptualize travel.

I grew up packing snacks and loading up a station wagon to cross a state line. New Hampshire wasn’t even 100 miles a journey, I don’t think, but journey it was. A day could be set aside preparing and anticipating. However, if it weren’t for the signage, you really couldn’t tell you were somewhere different.

I yearned for travel as a kid. Plotted my escape from suburban torpor. Imagined exoticism, adventure. If asked at age 12 my retirement plans, I probably would have said a round-the-world ticket that never stops.

I’ve been places now past my wildest imagination. Safari in Africa, whitewater rafting the Nile, street food, temples, snake charmers and even a snake temple in Malaysia, shopping in Bangkok and Singapore, Edinburgh’s Fringe, punk bands in London, the tops of the Eiffel Tower, Empire State Building, the Golden Gate, and the Grand Canyon. Crunching snow underfoot in Yellowstone, and shooting guns in early summer outside of Yosemite.

It seems kind of fake to me, the one who couldn’t figure out the logistics from my bedroom daydreaming.

But, here’s the dark side of my experiencing some of my flightiest dreams. I am not a comfortable traveler. I ache with erratic sleep and temperature changes.

I never factored in dehydration and back pain while fantasizing.

Fortunately, I can eat pretty sturdily. I only have two gastrointestinal complaints in years of trekking. There was the incredibly tasty, succulent crab in Thailand that carried so much more. Nota bene: the public toilets in Bangkok are unparalleled in quantity and quality.

The less said of finding myself tangled in mosquito netting in a pitch black Ugandan night groping for the bathroom, the better.

But, where food is fine, sleep is elusive. It doesn’t arrive when it should, if ever. Even now, an almost 20 hour flight that took off at 1 a.m. to my body’s clock, sleep should have been a given. I dozed fitfully repositioning myself and never really getting to bliss for about 5 hours, and that unsatisfying stint was with the help of modern pharmacology.

Of course, a soupçon of the sleeplessness could be my hard-wired anxiety. We snagged the easy mobility and ample leg room of the emergency row. It’s a great perk — not only have I had room to do some stretches for my back, but we’re behind the galley and the bathroom. Plenty of water, and an extra snack and easy plotting for personal relief.

“But at what cost?” My brain says. Will I really be able to fulfill my promise to read and follow instructions and help evacuate the plan in the case of an actual emergency? Do I have the strength and dexterity to rip off the door and inflate the slides?

Who can sleep with that kind of pressure?

By the way, I’m wondering about the age of this flying vessel. There’s roughly a million built in ashtrays, on the bathroom doors inside and out, near the galley and around the sides. How the hell long has smoking been banned?

In hotels, sleep is much the same. I lay awake in the downiest of featherbed counting the hours until daybreak. (Back in the olden days when I might have occasion to visit strange beds, not sleeping was a great coping mechanism. I was up and out before the damage could be assessed, a ship sailing out of port and into the horizon before the dude knew what hit him.)

Maybe Morpheus will give me a little something something this trip.

Otherwise, if you ask me now to channel that 12-year-old’s view of retirement, travel dreams have gone to sleep. Now, retirement will be a cushy couch and a fluffy, warm blanket at home.

Where the fuck am I?

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Dateline: Nighttime. Not in the Serenghetti.

Even without the local labeled wine I drank, thank you Russian River for rolling along next to some grape vineyards, I'm sitting here in 11 shades of crazy.

I may be sleepless from a flock of flamingos yakking it up all night and day. I predict sun cutting in at a sunrise kind of hour, slicing my canvas walls and eyeballs into some kind of daytime. I'm not sure, but I think that's what the sun will do or what it thinks it ought to do.

Before said wine and some huge ass barbecue pit ribs, I watched giraffes. Later the Big Dipper smacked itself onto my retina like a picture book constellation. Straight up, the stars are right where they say they are in the guidebooks.

Where the fuck am I? I am in the craziest place on earth. In California. Nay, in wine country in California, hard by Santa Rosa and Calistoga where folks go to see geysers, rejuvenate in healing waters and drink the local fermented libations, that's where I am. I'm also some place where some other folks imported animals. African animals.

In California. We're all just chilling. I'm smack dab in it. Me, the giraffes, the lemurs, the monkeys we are all from someplace else. But now we are here. Here in California.

You can look it up. Safari West, it's called. I'm not in Africa and neither are the animals from there.

Looks like we all might live.

 

The story I meant to tell

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Arghhh. I just began some navel-gazing, introspective, intellectual vomit. Then I remember that I might be the only person who ever reads this page, and I didn’t want to read that kind of boring shit.

So I scratched the dandruff off my head and remembered the thing I meant to write about a month or so ago. God, no wonder I feeling like I’m getting older, I keep letting time slip by me.

To whit, the story. There’s one great thing I love about traveling, and maybe it could be true the next town over, but it’s definitely true when you are far away, no one’s talking your language and every thing feels strange, foreign if you will. It’s when your brain sort of gets into the place where your normal routines just don’t apply, and your willingness to do anything is expanded canyon wide.

The best travel stories are the ones in which the teller knows for a brief flicker the rules weren’t for him, but invincibility was.

Obviously, I have one of those stories.

Penang is an island state of the coast of the mainland of Malaysia. Not far off the coast, mind you, there’s a bridge. Parts of the area are as over overdeveloped as a place that’s been trod as part of a trade route since the 15th century can be. But other parts are wilder with narrow winding roads and hills green with rain forest-y overgrowth.

Thanks to the narrow, winding roads, and maybe a island vibe of not entirely giving a fuck, the locals are repudiated throughout the country as the worst drivers around. The local paper’s stories of traffic gore kind of bear out that reputation. Alongside the usual vehicles, there are swarms and swarms of folks on tiny motorcycles, slightly more roadworthy than scooters, warning in and out of the traffic havoc.

It probably means something that both M. and I come from places that have renowned bad drivers. At least his home state doesn’t have the equivalent of Massholes, like mine.

Anyway, whenever I’m there, between looking the wrong way when crossing the road, on account of that driving on the left thing, and the nutty drivers, I figure I might get picked off in the streets.

On the other hand, we’re in vacation mode. Nothing can touch us.

Near our hotel there was a network of women handing out flyers for a manicure, pedicure, reflexology, massage, whatever you want we got kind of place. Actually, it was four places, and there was one woman who we kept seeing in front of a different place every day. Turns out she owned all four places, and, while to the tourists they might have seemed like different places, for her they were part of a continuum.

One day, walking across the street from one of the places with time in our hands, an older woman called to us the usual sales pitch. We called back does she take credit cards, because we had no cash. She said, “yes.”

One thing I’ve figured out from traveling. — if you are in a tourist area and seem agreeable to spending cash, a good chunk of the time the proprietor of a business or her staff will agree with you. There is time enough to sort out the negativity, and from the outside they just want you in the door. “Sorry, cash only,” doesn’t get you in the door.

Tricked again, we entered the cash only business. And the old woman who brought us in was an affable problem solver. She turned right to M. and told him not to worry he should start on his foot massage, she would simply take his ‘wife’ on the back of her motorcycle, and we’d go to the ATM. She called it her “moto,” and given that she was approaching or had surpassed 60, I actually didn’t realize what she meant at first.

With a borrowed helmet on my head, I sweatily clutched her matronly love handles and headed down the road. Even though I couldn’t completely understand her Chinese accented words over the roar of the engine, I gathered that she was going to take a couple of back roads to keep us out of traffic.

Check. I’m on the back of a motorcycle, driven by a stranger on some back alleys of an urban area on and Asian island.

In retrospect that could have gone awry.

I laughed when I came back and told someone the story. She reacted, “Oh my god, there could have been people waiting down the alley or outside the ATM.” For all I knew, it could have been a ruse to mug a tourist.

That had never occurred to me. I was thoroughly in the travel headspace where you go with the flow and everything works out. Here I am to testify.

I wonder if my demise will be in a foreign back alley some day. I have to admit, I’ve always relied on the kindness of strangers.

There's a reason they all died there, I think

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I think there’s a reason so many celebrities are found toes up in hotel rooms. Janis, John Belushi, David Carradine. Is there any space on earth as weirdly distant and alien than a hotel room somewhere in the universe.

I’m currently sitting in a bed about 75 miles due south on the scenic coastal highway from my own bed. The occasion is signing up for a workshop for work. Apart from meeting fatigue, waking up extra early to drive that 75 miles and it being the end of the day, I’m just feeling bone tired from being all by my lonesome in that wall-crawling, restless, fidget way hotels bring on in me.

I want to be home. I’m not sure I’m designed to actually learn and think in a conference room. Maybe that sentence should be full stop I’m not designed to learn.

It was actually an interesting day, where I got to see how organizations can walk through getting to a message and a plan for getting it out there into the ether. Communicating and all in important circles. There was even an ex-governor in the room.

Sadly, I’m more voyeur than real playa this time around, and it’s going to be a tough slog in my row-hoeing workday world to use what I learned.

I got back to my room and paced. I took a shower out of boredom. I deep conditioned my hair, because I had an abundance of conditioner and time. I inventoried my miniature toiletries.u

On a regular Wednesday night, I’d check email, scan some news and various websites and maybe write right here. Telly on in the background.

It’s the same here. But it’s not the same.

Here, on the same coast I can hear from my house, faraway from M. whose snoring I can’t hear right now, I’m thinking of hotel rooms and dead famous people. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your point of view, I’m just as far away from an errant speedball, deadly bump of coke or bag of heroin.

(Of course, such a level of drug use is beyond me, just as elusive as the celebrity I don’t enjoy.)

Very little from very high

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I wrote the following in the middle of the stratosphere on Tuesday night. Alas, no wifi on the plane, and i only just remembered to hit publish now.

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As I grabbed my iPad and headed cross country, I promised myself I would write a little. Here I am, at the veritable end of my journey, writing just a little.

I just don’t have the writing mojo I used to have or thought I used to have or used to think I had. Sadly, reuniting with writerly friends did nothing to spur me on to feats of literary limping, as is my usual style.

To be fair, the friend who is part drinking buddy, part platonic soulmate who generally makes me feel more than I am and better for having tried than not to have done at all, was quite busy. You gotta forgive a guy for not indulging in deep, penetrating faux-intellectual self indulgence and midnight literary aspirations when he’s mid-nuptials.

On a complete side note, this wedding, his wedding to the soulmate who, I think, he really needs, was an end to an era. Many many many units of time and various locations ago, we somewhat boozily, single without romantic prospects and unsure if we wanted the entanglements of another relationship, promised ourselves to each other, provided the planets aligned and deemed it so.

The main condition was that he would have to hit 40, which, a decade my younger, is still years off for him, and by arithmetic I would be a ripe old 50. We would both have to be single without others on deck or in the wings or any other metaphoric closeness.

Of course, being as I moved across the whole of the United States to be with another guy, I arguably fired the first salvo in the dissolution of our pact. Not to mention, we’ve been as good as married for the past six years or so, cohabiting and all, albeit without the legal paperwork.

(Here’s another completely parenthetical, non sequitur diversion. I just had my bodily fluids churn and various muscles clench in fear in the middle of the stratosphere in the middle of this jet in the middle of a flight. I have never heard my name over the loud speaker, and I have never been asked to ring my call button. Until now.

Once I got over my instinctual panic for some kind of horrible announcement, I gave myself a quick frisk and realized my pocket was now unbuttoned. Yup, a new privilege of American Express membership. My name can be read off the card as it sits on the floor of the toilet of an airplane.)

It was a fun wedding especially in that I got to see some folks I rather like. But, I do admit, I’m not a fan of the wedding in general. I don’t know what is missing somewhere in my cerebral cortex, because I simultaneously understand and respect the ceremony, and I don’t.

Why the need for ritual and public promises? I totally get being with someone, and increasingly I now understand the legal rights marriage bestows. Hell, wedding rings even make sense to me, even though I resent their history of marking chicks as chattel.

I have performed publicly. I have performed publicly in a state of undress. I have performed publicly in a few U.S. states and one foreign country. Yet, the idea of standing up there and telling a crowd or even just a smattering of folks what they already know–namely that I planning on sticking with M.–is incompressibly frightening to me. Like stage fright with a soupçon of agoraphobia.

My friends did it twice, once in her home town and then again in his. I think I’d be weakly cowering in the corner if I ever have to do that.

Of course, my eldest brother outed my being the weak link to my uncle. As many might assume, he had thought it was M. who was the holdout. I think it’s a little bit of both of us ducking the party more than the commitment.

Romantically, on phones separated by 3,000 miles, M. suggested that maybe we’d have to do it if only to put the familial nagging on both sides and across two continents to rest.

Is nagging a valid reason? Probably as good as any, like my desire to have M. enforce a “Do Not Resuscitate” order, when my body has started to have enough of this world, or M.’s to have me chuck his ashes into the sea.

Then there’s the nice part of our togetherness and all. Who better to stay with than the one with whom you’ve made a happy life?

Meanwhile, while I pondered all of that, I got to see parts of my family and relics of my old surroundings. I’m not calling my family relics, we’re all getting older, but not that old.

Fortunately, I didn’t have to see the chunk of family or friends that are stressful. That’s another worry about a wedding. I imagine there is no elegant way to leave out people who’ve seen you as a bare ass naked baby, even if you would like to write on an invitation “only show up if you plan on not being too crazy or a total dick.”

I’m pretty sure Emily Post and Ms. Manners wouldn’t even waste the ink explaining why that ain’t done.

Then, there’s a whole other group of folks that I wouldn’t be able to send an invite to that read, “stay home and enjoy your own life, nothing to see here” to avoid their making a fuss or having to find an outfit or driving or getting a babysitter or having to leave the house at all on my account.

I have thrown good parties in the past and have made myself the center attention, but weddings seem so compulsory. They should be just as optional and more fun than when I used to let people get drunk on my back deck before watching July 4 fireworks from the Cambridge side of the River Charles. Has anyone ever felt that way about attending a wedding?

Better to keep it small. If only I can convince M. (and a passel of other people) that two might just be enough.

Coming home?

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I don’t have a house here. The places I have lived are now occupied by strangers, sold to the highest bidder. Still and all, I was Massachusetts born and bred.

And, now I’m back again. I’m lying in my nephew’s bed, a bed in which I have never slept. He’s away at school, just to clear up that we’re not the sort of family you see in newspapers, shaking your head and wondering how does that ever, ever happen. No, my nephew is safe, and I lack the predatory spirit.

I’ve never been in this bed, because punk ass little sister that I am, when I moved out of state I returned usually with M. in tow. My big sister got this room, while encoupled or ensconced as M. and I are, we got the bigger room, the veritable suite where my older nephew sleeps.

It doesn’t feel like home anymore. I think it’s because I am in a bed and a room in which I’ve never lain my head. Definitely not the familiar surroundings you hear the cliches drop as “home.” I am with family and very comfortable and grateful for their hospitality; it just ain’t home.

As if to greet me, Logan Airport had a special surprise as I landed in the old, hometown airport. I swear to fucking god on high and all of the saints and spirits, that I saw the meanest boy I ever dated on the escalators.

For a split second, I thought about shouting his name, in order to watch him turn his head in my direction. Then, as I rose up on my escalator and he sunk metaphorically and literally downward on his, I could flip him off. Perhaps a double-handed, two middle fingers raised salute with a lot of wagging and emphatic gesturing.

I opted for dignity and not ever engaging with him again and silently rode up the moving stairs.

I sometimes feel badly that I actually, without kidnapping or water boarding, dated him for so long. It’s hard to explain the mental illness to the very nice, polar opposite man and life I have now. There should be an acronym like “AA” for explaining a stage in a woman’s life when her ultimate choice was a bad one.

The acronym would also help provide the evidence that the hatred I feel is unusual but sane. I reserve it for one person. I’m pretty sure any other guy I dated I would have greeting across the escalators civilly. Hell, I later helped one get a job and then was a good colleague at work.

Best of all of seeing this ghost the moment I landed “home?” He was looking overweight, dumpy and old. A look wholly incompatible with the sun, lemon trees, boogie boarding, enjoyment having life I have now with M.

Sleeping around

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Between the work retreat in Napa and this weekend, I’ve been spending too much time staring at imaginary cracks in strange ceilings. We spent the weekend in the big city of San Francisco on ocassion of their marathon. I hung around in boutique hotel chi-chi-ness whilst M. ran until his natural resources were depleted and stopped at 26.2 miles.

What I know is, I don’t sleep so good on strange bedding and surroundings. I imagine my slutty years were all about insomnia really. I mean if you’re out partying and you crash somewhere, if you know you won’t sleep, you have to occupy your time somehows.

Now, without the excess boozing and the sedate lifestyle, I’m left to lying awake and feeling miserably tired. On the plus side, the early morning self-recriminations are nowhere to be found.

If whining about sleeplessness isn’t enough, in addition to luxury hotels I’m done with cuisine. For about 7 solid days, I’ve dined out on finely prepared, sumptuous food, and I’m bloated and overstuffed. Bologna on whitebread is the level of richness I could currently stand.

To summarize, I think I’ve just mind-melded with the emotional depth that is Paris Hilton.

Back in the U.S. of A.

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cub winking

I’m back at work, back at home, back in the U.S. and just plain old back. It’s nice to be back, and I’m hoping after about seven days of sleeping normally, I might even feel back to my old self again.

Meanwhile, I’ve started going through a half a million pictures of Uganda. I took tons. Some of the cream of animal depictions can be found here:

Animals in Uganda.

There will be many more to come, along with a lot of verbiage I suppose. For the short term, though, I plan to try to shake what is probably an ordinary head cold, but I imagine to be a rare tropical illness.

It felt like walking would have been faster

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It took a whole lot of plane time, but we made it to Kampala, Uganda. Unfortunately, my very impressions from the airport to the hotel were dimmed by the darkness of night and the fact that I wasn’t able to sleep on the plane.

From San Francisco to Washington, DC, we logged six hours on Friday in the air. On Saturday, starting in the evening, it was first 8 hours from Washington, DC to Amsterdam, and then somewhere in the fuzzy Sunday morning another 8 from Amsterdam to Kampala. I just flew in from the U.S. and boy are my arms, and every other part of me, tired.

Finally, after all of that flying there was another 45 minutes or an hour to get to the hotel by bus.

All of the flying happened after a four- or so hour meeting where I got to meet my fellow travelers and hear about some of Uganda’s history and issues. It was a long weekend, but not in the usual, restful sense.

Today, Monday, we started early with breakfast, Uganda’s first woman veterinarian, followed by a few hours at our nation’s embassy and an afternoon with agricultural researchers. I wish I had slept last night to be better able to process the information. Perhaps tonight exhaustion will will out over my lifelong neurotic tendency to lie awake in strange beds. I envy folks wh0 can fall asleep anywhere and on a dime.

As for my first photos and first thoughts, they’ll have to wait until a good night’s rest and the ability to think clearly. I’m afraid tomorrow morning’s 7:30 a.m. start for an outing at Lake Victoria doesn’t bode well for my sleep fantasy.