Photos

If you're still checking this site, that's a little odd, but appreciated. I've put a select 200 photos on the following website. Check it out at your leisure, and pass it along to anybody who may be interested.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/7677440@N02/

I suggest looking at the pictures through the three country sets found at the right side of the page, rather than through the main pages; the chronology is a little more accurate that way.

Thanks for reading/viewing.

- Andy

Your Turn To Write

In the Bangkok airport now, keeping you updated to the very end.

For those of you that have been with us from the start, and to those that have joined along the way, thanks for reading. Knowing there's at least a small audience has forced me to post more frequently than I might otherwise have. It's also allowed me to digest a little more coherently my experiences on this profoundly informative and perspective-jarring journey.

If you have been reading, please sign the guestbook (i.e. leave a comment). I'd love to know who's been on the other side.

Whoops, getting kicked off. "Not free internet, sir. Not free internet."

Coming Home

It is currently 8 PM in Bangkok, and in about eight hours, Andy and I will be boarding a shuttle to the airport, aiming for a 6 AM arrival for our 8 AM flight.

At 8 AM, we will board a flight for Hong Kong, followed by a flight to Vancouver, followed by a flight to New York, accounting for a grand total of a little more than 26 hours airport-to-airport time. At that point, Andy and I will go our separate ways; he to crash on a couch then head back upstate, and I to sleep on a chair in JFK awaiting my morning flight back to O'Hare.

It's a weird feeling, knowing that the end is so close. It's hard for me to really get my head around it or to believe that this is all coming to an end. It feels like it just started-- I'm writing this post from the same place I first checked internet in Bangkok 11 weeks ago. We've made new friends and gotten into some hairy situations; Andy's been robbed twice, I'm on my third pair of sandals; I crashed a motorcycle and tore up my arm, Andy was intimidated by a gang of marauding kittens...and we've had a great time throughout.

There's no doubt that this trip has had its ups and downs for me, and I feel as though I may have posted (on the rare occasions when I did actually post) more on the downs than I would've liked, or at the very least I would've liked to balance it out with more positive posts to reflect the true balance of my feelings on this trip-- undoubtedly falling strongly toward the positive side of the scale.

I'm definitely a wiser traveler than I was in mid-January, and I'll take that with me on my future journeys. Hopefully, I'm a slightly wiser and more conscientious person in general, and I can take that with me in my day-to-day existence, regardless of in what part of the world I may find myself.

I'd like to thank everyone for reading the blog and for sharing your input and wise comments, if you've taken the time to do so. If not, thanks for just reading. I'm not entirely sure where I'll end up next, or if there will be any blogging in my future, but I am happy that this one is here to look back on.

Thanks again for reading, and hopefully I'll be able to catch up with many of you in real life instead of over the internet very shortly.

Wish us luck for the journey home.

Bringing It Full Circle

After a slightly rocky transition from travel to vacation mode, as noted by Alex below, an exceedingly pleasant week was passed in the sunny, relaxing, and generally decompressing beach community of Thong Nai Pan Noi. Eating regularly at select locally run restaurants, playing volleyball daily with the same local kids, and meeting great Thais and tourists alike, I felt the week to be, as hoped for, a culmination to the past 80 or so days of travel.

Keeping the 2,000 baht in my large pack rather than on my person wasn't the smartest move, but secreting it away in the recesses of a small, locked pouch seemed sufficient to deter any would-be thieves through the duration of our 11-hour bus ride back to Bangkok. Not so, evidently.

The theft, while certainly discouraging my recently renewed enthusiasm for Thailand, served another and undoubtedly more useful function. Having been robbed of slightly more money at the very start of the trip, on a similar bus en route to Northern Thailand, this morning's financial collapse brought the entire trip to an odd sort of conclusion.

I met an Italian man in a restaurant today. He has been travelling around the world for 12 years, funded primarily by certain fortunate stock decisions. At a certain point of our unanticipatedly lengthy talk in Italian - his fluent and mine rather broken - we came around to wrapping up our divergent conversational strains. He offered a rather pithy bit of unifying philosophy: it's not important what life gives you; what's important is how you respond to it.

Two thousand baht is not a lot of money in my personal grand scheme; it will get me two days' rent in New York City. But together with the similar occurrence at the start of this trip, it's given me a chance to reflect on how I've responded to the overwhelming stimuli of the past two and a half months, punctuated by these two nearly identical endpoints.

Because, as the Italian said, it's not what life gives you, it's how you respond to it.

The Cutest Threat Ever

Ever the thrifty one, I chose to sleep in the cheapest bungalow I could find.

Looking past the gaping holes in the floor and the sparse furnishings, I deemed the 6 ft x 8ft room sufficient for my time here on the beach. I figured I wouldn't be spending many waking hours within the dank hole where, I presume, souls go to die; and indeed I haven't.

The first night in my cell, however, was regularly punctuated by aggressive scratching sounds issuing from somewhere within the wall/ceiling above the door, a sort of half-inside and half-outside DMZ between myself and the mosquitoes. I immediately began imagining scenarios in which I may soon have found myself: a raccoon - the first documented in SE Asia - clawing through the mosquito net over my bed; a baby monkey attacking my face; a chain of red ants suddenly surrounding me; and so on, to the detriment of an otherwise pleasant night's sleep.

I hustled outside the next morning to investigate the situation, and soon discovered tiny heads and perky little ears peeking out over the rafter above the door: a mother cat with at least three tiny kittens nestled around her, frozen in fear while I stared them down.

You guys are welcome to stay there again tonight, just as long as you take care of the raccoon, monkey, and red ants.

travel and vacation

For the past 9 or so weeks, Andy and I have been traveling. While it has certainly been nice to take a break from the working world, especially as we both had somewhat trying schedules back home, it has not been what either of us would consider a vacation.

A vacation, in my mind at least, conjures up images of relaxing getaways, spending money rather nonchalantly, and not particularly challenging oneself. That is far from what the vast majority of our trip has been. This is why I find myself a bit vexed now that we have entered vacation mode at the end of our travels.

Our island adventure on Ko Pha Ngan was planned at the start of the trip as a way to wind down after trying travels, a bridge between adventure and re-entering our lives in America. I think we may have started the wind-down a bit early though, as I find myself somewhat bored after a week on the beach, with another week to go before we head back to Bangkok and back home. I realize it sounds terrible to be complaining about being stuck on a beautiful beach on a Thai island and that many people would happily trade their wintry climes for a week on an island somewhere.

The issue is that this trip was a way of challenging myself and growing as a person (cheesy as that may sound) and I don't feel like I'm getting any of that from my time here. I'd rather be working toward something positive back in America, ideally having grown and employing what I've learned in these past several weeks. Working on my tan and paying too much for food and lodging (compared to the rest of our trip) just seems wasteful at this point.

The point of this post isn't to complain about my situation, though that seems to be what I've done. Rather, it's to hopefully demonstrate the difference between travel and vacation, at least as I see it, and to explain how my travels have made me less interested and less fulfilled by my current vacation. After everything Andy and I have seen and done, there's only so much pleasure we can get from seeing sweat-drenched aging stoners dancing goofily to trance music as the sun rises.

I'm ready for my next adventure.

Back in Thailand

It is a bittersweet feeling that welcomes me back into Thailand after nine weeks in the neighboring and much different countries of Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia.

Bangkok is just as expansive and bustling, but having experienced the much dirtier, sweatier, poorer, and more crowded cities of Vietnam, it is considerably more navigable and less daunting. Thailand's infrastructure - tourist and otherwise - so vastly exceeds that of the communist countries to its east, that it is difficult to recognize a personality beneath the veneer that is presented to travellers. One receives the Thai Tourist Package, a well-tested collection of Things To Do, mass produced for the millions of backpackers passing through the country every year.

Coming back through Thailand will certainly lessen the reverse culture shock that is often so strong upon returning home, packed as one is with new insights and perspectives. I already feel closer to New York than to Phnom Penh, the abject poverty and filth of the latter fading in the bright city lights of capitalism.

I find myself - most definitely unfairly - almost resenting Thailand for its affluence in the midst of such destitution. While certainly much poorer than many nations, it stands as the only country in SE Asia that was spared culturally stagnating colonialism, cruel invasion, and devastating war. Thanks to the events of recent decades there is a commerical and economic gap between Thailand and the rest that seems almost insuperable.

Travelling from Siem Riep to the Thai border we rode an ancient bus (our second of the day: the first had no brakes), crowded and sticky, down a dirt and rock road through the middle of dried up rice paddies, dust covering us from head to toe. At the border we transferred to another bus for the trip into Bangkok; an air-conditioned double decker VIP cruiser that smoothly sped along an autobahn-quality highway.

Of the countless things this trip has taught me, two stand out: Communism, for all its cachet as a hip political idea within intellectual liberal arts circles, in practice devastates people's lives. Second, so does war.

Back home I fear it will be easy to slip back into blithe ignorance and self-righteousness, forgetting that I am one of the luckiest and richest residents of the world, but I hope not.