No Expectations

"Take me to the station
And put me on a train
I've got no expectations
To pass through here again
Once I was a rich man and
Now I am so poor
But never in my sweet short life
Have I felt like this before
Your heart is like a diamond
You throw your pearls at swine
And as I watch you leaving me
You pack my peace of mind
Our love was like the water
That splashes on a stone
Our love is like our music
Its here, and then its gone
So take me to the airport
And put me on a plane
I got no expectations
To pass through here again"

- The Rolling Stones









The amount of patronage that comes with travel writing makes me incredibly self-conscious about what I do and do not say. Some writers display their words like trophies, confusing their own agenda with the makings of a good story. Most of the time no one gives a rat's ass. That’s where most travel writing fails. Oh Dear. I know these pages (if printed) will become haughty, self-fulfilling, pieces of shit collecting dust on the mantelpiece one day. The 15 minutes it took me to write that sentence adheres to my reluctance towards writing in general. Some stuff should simply remain unwritten, so, uh, pardon the esotericism? But herein lies the problem: I have a lot to say and I want to be candid. Not that I think I’m any good at synthesizing all my experiences into mere sentences. I just want to share. So what’s a girl to do?

This is a question I asked myself the last few nights aboard the ship. I was overwhelmed with such a sense of good fortune that I felt with every breath I took, the world in its entirety might come crashing into my lungs, choking me to death.

The last few nights aboard the ship, I hardly slept. In my most delirious state, I was chanting “No sleep till Brooklyn” like some hardcore charlatan: "Our manager's crazy - he always smokes dust He's got his own room at the back of the bus Tour around the world - you rock around the clock. Plane to hotel-girls on the jock." (I have no idea how I know the lyrics- the brain is a mysterious thing.) But other than the occasional sing-a-long we remained rather mum on our impending exodus.

The last few nights aboard the ship, I was relying on the ship’s crap crack coffee (my patron saint) to maintain balance and function. I wiped my clammy hands on my sweatpants. I couldn’t kick the anxiety. My hands were shaking so much as I tried to pour myself another cup, I spilt that shit down the front of my water colored-stained shirt.

The last few nights I started to question myself. I started to question a pattern of misrepresentation of the non-western world. I started to think about Culture and Imperialism. I started to confront the complex and ongoing relationships between east and west, colonizer and colonized, white and black. I started to self-doubt.

On the last night, it hit us like a ton of bricks: THIS IS IT. Unbelievable. The ship can get under my skin, I thought, but it won’t for much longer, I cried. Despite my edge, I wanted the ship to forever be under my skin like a chunk of lead or ingrown hair or a slab of scar tissue.I got the urge to shove a pencil into my veins like a booster shot, sublimation for the pain I felt as we inched closer and closer to home. Aforementioned, the brain is a mysterious device--especially at sea, where your point of view is determined by the waves and the sky.

We laughed out loud sitting inside the ship and silently wept on the deck chairs, which we arranged in a circle like a dissembling rock band in group therapy. We laughed on the inside and then cried in our beds; we pinballed like this for the next 48 hours. The ending felt like a
riddle
wrapped in a mystery
inside of a train wreck.

The next morning we sat in the sun for five hours and watched as the porters manned the dreaded crane that transported our backpacks and suitcases to the shore. Oh the shore! This is the last place I go, I thought to myself. Where was I going? Our cab ride to the airport hotel was the last. On the trip, cabs and their drivers held potential dramas, the stuff for good story making. As we pulled up to the Sheraton Hotel I didn’t want to get out. Put me under the crane, put me under the cab, I’m a dying wayfarer. I can feel it in every square millimeter of my depths.

I bathed in an American shower for the first time in months. The hot and cold faucets were correctly labeled; the tiny bottles of made-in-china shampoo were perfectly lined on the porcelain tub. My temples hurt from too much sun, then a lack of sun, the crying and the fatigue. We shut the blinds and took a nap. The dying orange sun eventually woke me. I was also hungry but I couldn’t stomach much. (That's what happens when I'm sad.) We bought snacks and I picked at my chips like a bird (That's what happens when I'm sad.)

Outside, the balmy night air was so cloying, sickly sweet, I almost lost my dinner of Cooler Ranch. I asked the concierge where the closest conveienent store was. “M'am, I strongly advise you not walk these streets at night. They’re not safe.” The streets of Fort Lauderdale, you say? I wanted to tell him I avoided the kidney ring in India, the Yakuza of Tokyo. Hi-ya! I wanted to tell him I wasn’t afraid of Florida.

Colin, Martha and I forged a half mile to the gas station and bought three 40s of OE. We sat knees to knees on the fluffy bed. We flipped through photos. Reminiscing felt preemptive. We listened to Room On Fire on repeat. “The End Has No End” over and over and over again. My face was a Petri dish of sea salt and tear salt and sweat and sunscreen. We made a mess of that room. I felt a mess myself. But everything was in its right place: the shower caps, the Holy Bible, our clothes on the floor and our souvenirs stored deep in our hearts. Lounging on the hotel beds was the kind therapeutic laziness we had come to know well. We curled up into little fetuses and slept like little babies and I dreamt about a now distant reality: the ship.

The last night on the ship, Martha pointed to the sky, “You can see the atmosphere.” This is the zenith, the climax, I thought. The layering night colors were stacked on one another like a birthday cake: green, blue slowly becoming thinner, fading into the rich black star-spangled frosting. It was almost too rich. Should I blow out the candles already or what?

The sweeping trade winds smelt like sawdust, tarnish and cinnamon Toast Crunch. I was desperately trying to cling onto the moments like a manic monkey hugging a tree branch. When one is tired and on the water the mind is a thorny vehicle. Did I already mention this?

The world, as some say, is your oyster. I’ve always felt like this should be a term of reproach but then the meaning dawned on me....

This is perhaps the most clichéd thing I could say now, but I hope I can be charmingly blunt: I felt invincible. I think others did too. I recognize the dangers of an extended adrenaline rush: lemme travel to ungoverned spaces, the breeding grounds for terrorists; lemme make a life out of nothing; gimme a yacht and I’ll host dinners with cabinet members and the bon vivant in our make believe plutocracy; gimme a map and a compass until we sail into the whack of a cyclone.

The water stirs something remarkably disturbing inside. If I could see my reflection in the ocean water, I think I would see myself change as the days change. I had purple bags under my eyes the size of my packed suitcase. The ship was unusually quiet as, to borrow from Thoreau, "The mass of men live lives in quiet desperation." Was this the calm before the storm? Tomorrow there will be a different point of view, I thought.

We said goodbye to Colin. I cried so hard in the airport. I hated being another statistic. Salsa Verde stomach acid bittered my throat. Eating a chili pepper is supposed to release endorphins on the tongue. I wiped my eyes, but I didn’t feel good. Airports can be purgatory: the waiting, the crowds. Martha, the sweetheart, bought us chocolate and soda and I stopped my whining.

I woke up on the airplane to the skyline of Manhattan, the microcosm. I sighed at the beautiful buildings and my own preferences for the spare and the modern. I felt high in many senses of the word. There was sand in my shoes. My hair was standing on all ends. I felt like the cough syrup soothing and seeping my own throat. But my limbic brain throbbed. I should have just beer bonged those 40s back at the hotel. Gimme diabetic shock and some brain damage. I don’t want these feelings! I don’t like it like this! I put on my iPod

"Well we were the people we wanted to know and we're the places we wanted to go," sang Isaac Brock.

Martha and I chased the setting sun all the way back. It felt incredibly allegorical to watch the sunset for four hours. Not only because all my stories end this way, but because I was finally heading west after traveling east for months. Yet I felt as if I was reverting, not soaring, as I inched closer and closer to Portland. I eventually calmed down. I don’t know how or why. But when I did, it was the kind of peace I had strived for my entire life. And when I woke up, I was home.

Twilight of the Idols

In travel there is a persistent dichotomy between a country's government and their physical nature, with often a strong narrative element--quixotic, cautionary, satirical-- between the two. It seems as if the greater the country's provisional shortcomings, the greater its ecological beauty. Perhaps we can blame this on the rape and pillage by the First World.

Beauty and cruelty are subjective terms, but it's hard to deny Guatemala's radiance and violent vigilantism. The difference between the ramped criminality and the breathtaking people, ocean and sun reminded me of the overlapping weights of the world.

Though sunup highlights a softer side, I have a proverbial preference for twilight. It is during this time of limbo that I suffer from a somewhat crippling introspectiveness(?). That said, watching the sunset over a chain of Guatemalan volcanoes was the greatest moment of my life.






But who cares?



When we reached Guatemala, I thought,"Whoa, we've come full circle. Back to the New World! Ho ho ho!" We were so close to the Bahamas, our starting point, I could practically smell the conch shell salad, the rum-drunk pre-teens, the perfectly thonged asses.

Colin and I lucked out and nagged the front seat of the van. I sat between him and our driver, straddling the stick shift. We stayed at 90 mph the entire hour it took to drive to Antigua. The drive was a great way to see the countryside of the highlands, the horses, the fauna and the mangrove forests. We weaved between the colorfully modified American school buses, also known as chicken buses. For whatever reason, Colin and I were exceptionally talkative.

In Antigua, we ate huevos rancheros and drank café con leche and watched a young Guatemalan woman paint a mural on the restaurant’s wall. What a life, I thought, to paint and listen to music and drink Guatemalan coffee all day. What an absolute desirable bohemian existence.




As others shoved fifths of Jose Quervo into their backpacks, Colin and I wandered the charming colonial streets, admiring the landscape. The buildings are painted my favorite shades of blues and yellows. I peeled off a paint chip and put it in my pocket for safe keeping, a good luck charm.

Then I scribbled my initials on the release form that the boys at OX gave me in order to indemnify themselves against any personal injuries that I might incur during the hike. Our tour guides were three grizzly American expats. (One of them hailing from Alabama via Portland--small world!)

They knew the names of the children who greeted us at the base of the volcano. The children were some tiny babes. They laughed. But collecting walking sticks to sell to tourists instead of attending school is sad. I had a hard time returning their enthusiasm.

The hike was through a forest trail. We set up camp just before the sun began to set. The girls let the boys pitch the tents.We poured the wine into the tin cups and said goodbye to the sun. We could see volcanoes from every direction in the dim light. We were told a man once fell through the shifting rocks, succumbed by the lava. We talked about what that would be like. I thought about the playground game, Lava Monster. My main goal here is not to die, I thought. The heat will melt your brain. Are we on the moon, I thought. The gravel shifted beneath our feet with every step we took and the hot rocks stole the soles of our shoes.

We roasted marshmallows over the river of lava, as chunks shot out of the mouth and burned our pants. Everyone just stood, shell shocked, starring at the lava: I. AM. MAN.

“This is some real-ass shit,” Some girl kept saying. I wanted to know what she meant by "some real-ass shit.” How "gangster" of us to climb a volcano....

Back at the campsite, we could see the lights of Guatemala City. The arid land cityscape reminded me of one of those meaningless drives through the chaparral hills of Redlands, when I was bored and upset by my seemingly stagnate life. Central America holds some native mystique, but my initial idea of Guatemalan peyote yielded reluctantly to a box of warm red wine and vicarious hallucinations.

Sitting in the gravel, starring at the night valley did a number on my neurotransmitters. It was an almost alien experience, an existential moment without parallel and one that I will never get back. I got no sleep that night but somehow woke up very early again the next morning for a sunrise hike that kicked my butt into creamed corn mush.

It rained that day in Antigua. I debated whether or not to buy a poncho. Colin and I took an expensive cab back to the port for a change of clothes. I referred to this as a “$60 shower.” We fell asleep in the cab, drool down our respective chins, and woke up to more rain clouds. We returned to Antigua.We skipped through puddles and watched the thunderstorm. We drank “Cuban Missile Crisis” shots. I laughed a lot. I danced at a bar. I was elated.




I woke up more confused (and bare) than ever. There were slight flashbacks to a couple arched wooden doorways, a scraped knee on the cobblestone, and the backseat of a police car. I once read that a true philosopher doesn’t separate himself from life, but places himself in it. I was happy and confused, but more so confused by my happiness . I tried to glue together the pieces but they were as flaky as the blue and yellow paint chips in the pocket of my dress, which was mysteriously laying wet on the floor.

Sitting in the backseat of the van, drowning in the smell of cigarette smoke and alcohol, we kissed Guatemala goodbye as we drove to port. And then I sat on the deck of the ship as we departed to sea. Antigua and the mountains faded into the twilight. That’s when I realized, for whatever reason, this, yes, this was the greatest moment of my life.






But I don’t care…

South Pacifist

A productive day on the ship means I have done my writing, exercised, folded my laundry, and spotted some sea life. Be this one’s definition of extreme reality or absolute surrealism, I don’t really care. I’m content as heck.

“Woke up, gotta outta bed, dragged a comb across my head.”

I walk up two flights of stairs and grab a cup of coffee before class. I walk in circles; I walk up and down the stairs. I’m feeling like the gerbil in the exercise ball.

Just when I think I’ve had enough, I start to enjoy myself.

I doodle more fat humpback whales instead of study my zoology.


A boy took off his shoes in class. This is not a cruise, God Damint!

I looked around for the source of the smell and that’s when I found his bare feet. He stretched and leaned back and his hair swept my computer screen. Please don’t do that, Christ.

I can’t believe this is school.

I wish I had those sketcher skate shoes to get from point a to point b. I'd be the fastest person on the ship. I'd be famous!! Like Wilma Rudolph or a cheetah or something..

My seasickness is under control, no thanks to the sea patches that dilated my pupils the size of Hershey kisses. I could go for a Hershey kiss right about now.

Sometimes I’m sick and tired of traveling, and now I’m complaining, “I’m sick and tired of traveling.” But more than not, I’m feeling grateful, so very grateful for these adventures and opportunities.

Every day a steward cleans my room. How sweet. I’m going to miss feeling entitled.

I’m a bum in my coffee-stained boxers and terrycloth hotel slippers and wrinkled t-shirt. If I’m tired I go grab some caffeine. If I’m awake I take a dip in the pool.

I’m hit in the head with a ping-pong ball 4 or 5 times while waiting in line for a Coke on Deck 7.

When the wind blows, I change out of boxers and graduate onto, that’s right, sweatpants— quite the artfully chic ensemble… er.

Everyone is addicted to solitaire, the computer game.

We eat dinner at six sharp, and tiptoe around the kind Filipino man who polishes the banister and the other kind Filipino man who vacuums the spotless ceiling and dusts the clean carpet.

We fantasize about foreign food but I’m always down with waffles.

Oh man. Waffles.

I sneak food out of the dining room in my green bag. I’m going to miss dinners. We sure can stretch out a dinner. We sure know how to laugh.


I’ve familiarized myself with Martha’s Simon and Garfunkle collection:

“Cecilia, you're breaking my heart
You're shaking my confidence daily
Oh, Cecilia, I'm down on my knees
I'm begging you please to come home.”

Hey, we don’t throw our time away sitting still.


We pushed our beds together and we lie on top of one another like some sunning sea lions. We bark , braid hair and scratch backs.


The sun sets like a Cecil Rice painting. Everyone eats dinner outside, propping cameras, clapping their hands when it sets as if it’s Jesus Christ’s final performance at the Bellagio.

I stare at the “ocean of noise” until everything on the ship is out of focus; until I’m learning to drive out of focus everything in view; until I’m realizing what unfolds is supposed to; until I’m losing face.

I’m going to miss those things that are very far away. I’m going to miss missing things. I’m going to miss doing things there’s no reason in doing.

As I’m writing these squibs on the beach in Hawaii, I’m becoming more and more nostalgic for the moments that haven’t even happened yet. I surf Waikiki, I drink gin and juice, I throw bottles into the Pacific, and I go with the flow. I feel what Palahniuk wrote in “Invisible Monsters” is true: Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everybody I've ever known. Yes, it’s hell to write while traveling, but I can’t help but not write. Sitting on this beach is the most bittersweet feeling. And it’s a new feeling, but in some weird way, it also feels deep-rooted.

My concern with coming back to America is twofold. First of all, the states pose little to no challenges compared to other countries— or at least challenges I find stimulating. Everyone in Hawaii speaks English and a miscommunication in English is a big deal because if you can’t clearly express your needs, wants and desires to another person who speaks the same language, well then, you’re lost.

“Listen buddy, if you can’t tell me where the nearest Taco Bell is, well then,… we have a beef.”

I almost feel indignant being an American in America. Finding the Taco Bell was hard enough.

I’m in America, and I expect everything to be well-located, and if it’s not convenient then I don’t know if I believe in the American way anymore.

Secondly, being back in the “United States” (I put this in quotes because I refuse to think Hawaii is actually a state) means I am that much closer to being home.

I’m not ready for that.

Big in Japan

"I walk the streets of Japan till I get lost Cause it doesn't remind me of anything"






Japanese Cowboys
Mr. Roboto
Recreational whaling
GODZILLA!
Where is the Hello Kitty factory?Yoko Oh-No
Dance, dance revolution
Blossom, not the TV show
Japanimation
Some modern ninjas
Spray, Bidet, Flush, How Fun!
Sailor Moon & Dragonball Z
As seen on the Cartoon Network Fashion
"The cars are lighter, the wheels are slick. when you drift, if you aint outa control, you aint in control"
-Tokyo Drift, The Worst Movie Ever
A lonesome samuari
Outside the Pokemon convention
A Japanese school girl


…and that was Japan.

Speaking of Kung-Fu

Hong Kong

The morning we ported in Hong Kong, the Chinese government climbed aboard the ship and took our temperatures with some futuristic infrared light device, uh, thingy. I don’t know how they did it. It’s science, I’m told. Whatever. I was confused. Still am.

Later as I walked around China, I scribbled plenty of question marks in my secret little notebooks. Plenty of confusion. I hid these notebooks, my freedom speeches.

But rumor had it if you were with temperature, you were not getting off the ship. Chinese rules. OH SHIT. I was still feeling less than healthy after Cambodia. Do I have a temperature, I panicked? Hong Kong, wait for me! My face flushed. Oh jeez, oh man I’m burning up, I cried. Do I feel hot? Christ, I’m never going to make it off!

Turns out I’m fine. Just sun burnt.


Everyone but me was stoked for the Great Wall. Wait. The Great Wall? It’s just a wall. Not that it’s not impressive--it’s an impressive wall. Wall. Yeah, I just have no desire to visit a wall. Tell me, what’s the point? To say I’ve climbed the greatest Wall in the world? No thanks. Not this time around. My self-infantilizing is probably starting to annoy some but I don’t care.

I am more concerned with China’s future. And I’m more excited for the street fighting; the Kung Fu. The no-bullshit, no-frills Chinese attitude. The fact that China’s people forgo any kind of pretense. If once their patience was strained, their engineers are now renegades. Those cats as fast as lightning are the warp and woof of China’s modern success. I’m here to say that China is very far ahead of us. And, duh, The Great Wall is overrated.

And what do the Chinese people think of us patriots: We all have AIDS, we are fat, the American media is too liberal, we have sex in streets, we all own guns. I try to tell them this isn’t so. For one, I refrain from street sex and I only go to McDonalds twice.

The Chinese teach me if it doesn’t wrinkle, it’s not 100% silk. I see this in the marketplace. The gloriously wrinkled market.

Early that morning, Austin and I ran onto a ferry and crossed the harbor, somehow losing Kendyll and Carly a long the way. The fog is intense. The girls find us. We take a bus through the hills. We drink some cheap beers and look at the gray sea. We are in yet another marketplace.

“Buy some Tahitian pearls,” someone suggests. I’m not really into pearls, nor is anyone I know. So no thanks.

I can’t believe I’m in yet another marketplace. "No thanks, No thanks, No thanks." I’ve said this everyday since leaving the States. I’ve said this to countless people, in a myriad of ways. And now I’m saying it again. If one thing is consisten throughout the world it is that humans love to shop, shop, shop.

I’m afraid of a lull in conversation, and I’m buzz-drunk. I might blurt out “Tibet” just for a rouse. Don’t mention Tibet, don’t mention Tibet, don’t Mention Tibet. I walk around with this mantra on repeat, my hands in my pockets. Maybe I should buy a pearl necklace and shove it in my mouth just so I’ll shut up. I can’t find anything else to buy. Everything really is exported. I find champs-- rubber stamps with red ink. I’m tempted to give the champ maker my name just to see the design equivalent. But I’m afraid there is something inherently wrong with my aura, and the champ design will resemble a moose or a crack pipe. I try to tell the vendors I’m trying to this new thing: I want to unlearn something everyday in order to digress to a more primitive state so I can be more in-tune with nature. They don’t understand. Maybe I should pickup a book and learn some Mandarin in order to explain, but that means more learning less time for nature. We leave the marketplace and look at the water.

We want to skateboard to sneaker street but there are no skateboards to be found. We jump in a cab. Turns out there are no sneakers to be found either. We ask our cabbie to take us there but he doesn’t speak English so he puts Austin on the phone with a translator.
“Yes, SNEAK-ER STREEEEET,” Austin says.
“I never heard,” the translator insists.
(As a disclaimer, we’re not quite sure this fabled street truly exists, but we’re kinda desperate- and persistent.)
“You know,” Austin turns to the backseat for support. “Nike, Adidas, tennis shoes?”
I nod.
“What you want,” she yells over the receiver.
I roll my eyes. We past a H & M earlier in the day. I suggest we go there. I suggest it because we humans like to shop.
“How you spell street? What street? Snea-kuh?,” I can hear her.
“How about H & M. Is there a H&M?” Austin asks her.
“Why you spell snea-kuh street H & M ??!!” She's pissed.

That night I encounter some fresh kicks. They were on the feet of my new Japanese friends. They gave us the directions to La Fawn Kai. We were going to squeeze into a cab - all eight of us- but we couldn’t fit. Our cab follows their cab to the Rugby World Cup street party. I couldn’t loose my Japanese boys. Their flock of seagull haircuts stood out in the masses like glowing halos. The Japanese boys were actually more like a gaggle of swans lost amongst a flock of raging, horny Billy goats. But then after a pint of whiskey, I lost everything- including my lunch of wasabi peas, the only Chinese-Chinese food I thought I could keep.

A few days later I’m in Shanghai, at a Hot Pot restaurant, suffering from Chinese restaurant syndrome. I scoop MSG into my boiling pot of ham water. Colin orders the Bovine Pizzle and eats every last bite. He doesn't know that Pizzle is animal penis.

Shanghai is cold and harsh. We don’t know what to do with ourselves. I drink rice wine, and we sing karaoke for three hours until I loose, not my stomach this time, but my voice.

Where the hell is all the kung-fu? I get out of Shanghai.

My first immediate draw to Suzhou is the city’s magnolia trees. I am attracted to many other things —the pagodas, the bridges, the bicycles —but there is something particularly endearing about a magnolia tree in China. The Magnolia reminds me of the Buffalo Bayou. I’ve never been to Texas, only the airports. The tree reminds me I want to go to Texas. I was so comforted by the familiarity of the tree that the Chinese gardens—a place designed for meditation and appreciation of nature—seemed unnecessary. However, I decided to give the gardens a chance.

The classical gardens of Suzhou date back to the Zhou dynasty of 221 BCE. The city of Suzhou became a cosmopolitan destination for merchants and traders after the opening of the Grand Canal. Marco Polo dubbed it the "Venice of the East." The city saw a proliferation of garderns during the Ming and Qing dynasties and the wet climate of Suzhou, with an annual rainfall of 43 inches, is ideal for the flourishing plant life found in the garden.

I weave around the garden. I’m freezing. I haven’t been this cold since I left Portland in January. I weave between the Bamboo, the resilience, the Pines, the longevity. I’m recognizing the disparities in life, the hard and soft, the water versus the rocks. The Ying. The Yang. So much symbolism my head is spinning.

What isn’t important to the Chinese, I think to myself.

I am instructed by the tour guide to take off my shoes and rub my bare feet across the stones of the path. She takes off her heals. I think it’s weird that a tour guide—whose job it is to walk around all day—would choose heals over loafers. Maybe she got lost trying to find sneaker street. Or maybe it’s a matter of fashion over practicality. I mean, I’m standing in a garden for chrissakes—how beautiful and yet unattainable.

She rubs her tiny, tiny feet over the stones. People say I have small feet, but hers are microscopic.

“This increases one’s circulation. It improves one’s digestive system.”
“No way!”I follow in her foot steps. Literally. It felt great.

I sit with a group of Chinese art students as they sketch the thatched roofs of the pagoda, the crescent-shaped doors and the bonsai trees. For some, looking at a piece of art is a personal experience. I look over their shoulders. They're talented, I tell them. I find that walking through a garden is such a shared, public experience that it becomes a lesson in socialization, not musing. I’m talking. Not thinking. But then I start thinking. And I’m thinking of Nelson Algren because he suggests,

”For pratically everyone can feel. If you can’t do that, of course, you’re gone. You can’t go out and get a new set of emotions. But if it’s simply a matter of not knowing anything, that’s not so serious; because most writers don’t. But they do develop an ability to listen. To listen to people talk. And in the talk of people, especially of those on the streets, lies an endless wealth of story-stuff.”

I agree with his words, but uh, damn, I’ve talked to so many people, I’ve listened to so many people, I have a notebook full of writings, but for what? Like the Great Wall has made a mountain out of a molehole, I’m afraid that my stories are not important, just self-important.

I walk down the garden path. I find a quiet pond. Oh my god, I’m itching in my skin. Chinese water torture. I can’t do this meditation thing. Someone tells me that jumping koi are good luck. There’s a good story behind this. I see no fish. And as fast as lightning, I'm gone.

Deerhunter-Gatherer

Vietnam

It is hot, perhaps 90 degrees in the quiet Siem Reap airport, where I am lying on the marble floor, sick as a dog. I make it to the bathroom and vomit until my stomach acid corrodes my wisdom tooth. Though I am wrapped in Austin’s sweatshirt, I remain freezing. No matter: I am on my way back to the ported ship in Ho Chi Minh City.

One minute I am miserable with heatstroke, the next I am sobbing in a Cambodian temple, and then I’m passed out on a Vietnamese airplane. That seems to be the theme. The parasite came and left before I knew my whereabouts. It’s binge traveling, I suppose.

I make it back in one piece and sleep.

I wake up in Vietnam and the collective is on an important mission for shoes. I want to say, "Get a life. We’re in Vietnam!" But that’s the point, we’re in Vietnam: home to some great knock offs—particularly those shoes named after people ( Clarks, Chuck Taylors, Jordans*.)

(*On a side note, Michael Jordan was at the Atlantis gambling when I stayed there in January. Some of my friends were lucky enough to play a hand confirming that yes Michael Jordan The Great has a gambling problem. Jordan shoes are not cheap abroad, contrary to what I initially believed. This was re-confirmed in Hong Kong. I should’ve found Jordan and asked him for a pair when I had the chance. Does he carry them up his sleeve like a magician? I sure bet he does.)

People are searching for bootleg DVDS. They are as brazen as they are commonplace--generally a hybrid of two equally shitty films i.e. “I Am Legend: Blonder than ever.” Vendors sell helmets on the side of the road like those in India retailing coca-cola bottles loaded with gasoline. Or kindergarten Lemonade stands in the United States. Maybe my children will sell gasoline in bottles instead of lemonade. I sure hope not.

Along with the challenge of shopping, crossing the streets of Ho Chi Minh is proving to be one of the greatest dares. We call this ‘Nam-ing': find a local, hold their shirt and shuffle between the bumper of a taxi and the tire of a motorcycle.

After splitting a bottle of Russian champagne in the park across from the Rex Hotel, I am climbing upon the back of a motorcycle. This would be a “never would I ever” without the liquid encouragement. I hold onto the hem instead of the strangers back. I am singing Electric Light Orchestra to myself: “Accroches-toi a ton reve, Accroches-toi a ton reve, Quand tu vois ton bateau partir, Quand tu sents -- ton coeur se briser, Accroches-toi a ton reve.” We are weaving between taxis and flocks of pedestrians. We are flying, motorcycle Zen.

We are now at the grand opening of the Volcano Club. I am walking into a lava lamp of the future-- ironic because lava lamps take me back to '95. There are a series of doors that lead to the dance floor, the nucleus. Drinks are $10 USD. Kendyll and I are grooving with a few black tie businessmen and a women wearing a purple tube top as a dress. The laser light show burns my retinas. Inhaling the dry ice is shoddier than smoking a gun.

I ask a friend what he did that day. “I walked by a sex store and saw the Borat bathing suit in the window but I didn’t go in because the door said ‘if you touch my balls, I cut off hands.”

We are now hunting for food. We find a tiny Japanese restaurant. People quietly sip their miso as we giggle like two buffalos in a china shop.

I am sharing my reoccurring dream with Kendyll. It involves a decrypted Russian warehouse-turned hotel, similar to an old storage building in industrial Portland. The halls are pitch black, and I can only get from room to room via candlelight. The only room I’m looking for is the bar. The dark bottle green walls in the bar turn a tart chemical emerald and the ceiling wax (not sealing wax) melting down the walls is collecting on the mangy Persian carpet. A carousing lamp and a candelabrum light the room. There is a large fireplace and many empty burgundy claw-footed chairs. The bar only serves vodka to my dismay. Kendyll confirms this is true: Russians exclusively drink vodka to her knowledge. She worked at an orphanage in Russia one summer. We decide to take the Trans-Siberian Railway from Moscow to Mongolia one day. I hope this dream is a prophecy. I would really like to go to Russia.


This next day it hot too. Our bus pulls off the side of the highway. We are at the home of photographer Hoang Van Cong. The exterior of house is hidden by jungle fauna and decorated with junk. Like the yard, his appearance is disorderly. He wears a camo jacket and a green cowboy hat adorned by thirty or so buttons. I wonder how long it takes to lace his combat boots. He’s petite, perhaps 5 feet 5. But I like this. It’s like he’s throwing up a big middle finger to methodical militarism.

I have been to many museums and palaces in Asia. Each houses an anthology of gold headdresses, coronation palanquins, bronze snuffboxes, teapots and paranoiac security personnel. But this junkyard pageant is a different can of worms.

He is giving us a tour of his menagerie. I step on a can of soda, while dodging the dishes that litter the ground. A stump acts as a makeshift table. There are chopsticks and rotting Dorian fruit. An American flag sticker decorates the side of his Atlas motorcycle. I thought it was only in America that the backs of our vehicles shit out our patriotism.

There is also a luxurious golf cart and a restored army jeep with wheels equipped for the tangle forest terrain. The jeep has seated the likes of Tim Page and Al Rockoff. Cuong trips over a flower vase and laughs. We are now inside his garage-turned-studio. Not surprising that the garage is also a mess of porcelain pots, books, old newspapers and arbitrary collectable antiques. It is only later that I discover Cuong’s ceramics are family heirlooms, some of the most valuable artifacts in all of Vietnam. But more notably, the walls of the garage are lined with horrifying photographs of the Vietnam War.

"I tell everything through my works. You can see me through my works.”

I open a photo album to a picture of the Clintons embracing Cuong so tightly he almost resembles Chelsea on graduation day. It’s charming. The covers of the photo albums are also charming, albeit creepy: teddy bears, pink unicorns and tabby kittens all hold his life’s collection.

His business card reads, verbatim, ”If you want to review the Vietnam most, please visit museum. Then you will women and children have suffered most, please visit museum. Then you will chance to talk with the ‘living witness’ the museum owner as well. By his whole heart, the owner of this 1st private museum in Vietnam has built a memorial to commemorate about 200 friends and colleagues who lost their lives during their lives during the Indochina War 1945-1975. This is a place to preserve the culture of human beings.”

The questions of war are becoming formulaic. “BECAUSE I AM CRAZY,” is his response to almost everything. I am tempted to ask him about Iraq, and proxy wars, his thoughts on the assignation of Hariri, the Syrian government, a Sunni uprising. “Because I am crazy” couldn’t explain the New World Order. Would he be impressed that Robert McNamara’s colleague and friend is sailing on the ship and sleeping 2 floors above me? And Desmond Tutu’s personal secretary enjoys bowls of oatmeal just as much as I? I’m impressed that he is a friend of Nick Ut, photographer of the Pulitzer-Prize winning shot of the naked Vietnamese girl escaping the napalm strike. Cuong would enjoy the ship. He would have a lot to say but he would circumambulate my questions as most do. We’d probably end up playing volleyball on sunny days. When it rains, we would doodle humpback whales, drink Chai and play Taboo.

I stop fantasizing.

I focus upon the topics at hand. He was 16-years-old when he started taking photos. He tells me he stared with a Nikon F single-lens reflex. He lost it in Laos. The communists thought he was in the CIA. He was thrown in jail when his wife was pregnant. When he got out, he had a seven-year-old son.

I am imagining him rubbing elbows with fellow journalists James Fenton and Hunter S. Thompson during the fall of Saigon. I read Thompson went to seed and bought a gun during his visit.

A soldiers most powerful weapon is not the weapon itself but his construction of the enemy.

Cuong tells us that a bullet hit him between the eyes. Twice. I am staring at his forehead. Where is the scar tissue? I really want to press my palm upon his forehead because I, too, am crazy.


I am wishing I knew more about the war. Part of my knowledge of the war comes from “The Deer Hunter.”

Under my breath, I quote the famous line from the film, "One bullet. The deer has to be taken with one shot. I try to tell people that, they don't listen.”

No one is listening to me either. I’m sitting in the corner playing Russian roulette. I’m so tired. I don’t know if I’m going to make it.

The Man Who Sold The World

Thailand

One night in Rome, perhaps one of the more precarious nights of my life, I went to a bar with a Danish girl and two American boys I barely knew. It was across town in a different district from where I was staying. I wanted to go back because I had enjoyed myself the previous times I had been there. We took a cab and no one spoke on the ride. Earlier in the night, I had the option of a taking a motorcycle ride back to Jessicah’s apartment but I’m glad I didn’t because that night, as I later discovered, the driver of said motorcycle was in an accident and broke his arm.

At the bar we ordered drinks. Then I realized something was wrong: The Danish girl had disappeared. I asked the guys if they knew where she could be.

“You speak English,” they questioned.
“Uh. Yes, I do. I’m American.”
“No way. NO WAY,” the other guy stammered. “You are TOTALLY Danish. Or Thai.”
“Yes!” The other one screamed. “Say something in Thai!”

I felt really uncomfortable. Are they making fun, I thought. I started to walk away.

“Where are you going? We’re about to watch the sunrise.”
“I’m not Thai,” I insisted. “I’m American.”
I wasn't embarrassed by the comparison, nor proud to be a patriot.

I never found the Danish girl; I was abandoned with two acidheads, no Italian, no taxi, a sunrise over some ancient ruins contemplating a question I have not forgotten: Can I pass for a Thai lady?

I learned I cannot pass for a Thai lady my first day in Thailand.

In appropriate fashion, Thailand commenced with a first: a Singha Lager in the Bangkok airport. We had a three hour layover before the island of Phuket with very little to keep us occupied. My partner-in-crime, Smith Scarborough and I agreed Singha is better than Tiger Beer and Tiger Beer is better than Chang. My friends laughed at my physical contrast to the Thai lady trying to sell me jasmine massage oil in the Duty Free. “Ah, you tall lady.”

I brought along Paul Theroux’s “Fresh Air Fiend,” and while waiting, I read something remarkably allied to what I’ve been experiencing lately. He says,

“It is simply not possible (as romantics think) to lose yourself in an exotic place. More likely you will experience an intense nostalgia, a harking back to an earlier stage of your life. This does not happen to the exclusion of the exotic present, however; in fact, what makes the whole experience thrilling is the juxtaposition of present and past—Medford dreamed in Mandalay.”

That night in Phuket, after settling into our white linen beach resort and while digesting our first authentic Thai dinner, our waitress told us to go to her favorite “hotspot.” We later found her on top of the bar, straddling a pole. And this, I feel, is an appropriate time to say my time in Thailand got progressively more and more, for lack of a better word, bizarre.

I had some (but not enough) beforehand knowledge of Phuket thanks to restless nights and the lulling comfort of the Travel Channel. The program “21 Sexiest Beaches in the world” claims Patong Beach is one of “ top sexiest beaches in the world.” In the whole wide! Tthe beach is nice--Bombay blue water, champagne sand- but the district of Patong is too crude for words. Fat Austrian men and baby Thai prostitutes? Not sexy. For example, the bar where we found the waitress was called Penitentiary Bar. Her “hotspot” was next to the G-spot Bar, Wet Dream Bar, Pussy Galore Bar (I could go on.) We walked the streets with those who do it professionally. We maneuvered through the hundreds of bars all stacked on top of one another like Janga blocks. I played a few games of Janga and Connect Four with a prostitute. I lost. She was a professional.

The next morning, three hours after Bangla Road, I woke up for a boat ride to Koh Panak (or the James Bond Islands.) My personal guide, clad in a baby blue Playboy shirt and silver teeth, rowed our inflatable canoe through a cave of bats. The cave got increasingly smaller and smaller until I was lying flat, praying that the limestone wouldn’t scrap my nose off. At the end of the cave, we were greeted by the light emanating through the hong: an open-air, cliff lined, cylindrical tidal lagoon connected to the outside world only through stalactite-filled caves.

We paddled around the mere and I giggled at the monkeys on the rocks. They sat an arms length away and I wanted so badly to shake their hands. I climbed onto a Thai rowboat and the fishermen let me conduct taxonomy on the multi-colored crabs. I sat criss-cross-apple-sauce on the rowboat bench because there were stingrays swimming in the puddles of the boat’s floorboards. We paddled through the Mangrove trees. I would’ve etched my name + blank into the bark had I my pocketknife. Instead, I watched my guide (who I referred to as Number 2 because there were two of us and we were in James Bond territory) reach into the water, collect clay off the rocks and rub it on his face. I was really enjoying myself; it was nice having some peace and quiet. But of course, there comes a rising action with a rising tide.

I suppose Number 2 and I drifted too far because by the time we got back to the aperture in the sea cave, the tide was up, and we were trapped. Our exit strategy, as Number Two pantomimed, was to first deflate the canoe, suck in our respective ribcages and pull ourselves through. It didn’t work. I jumped ship. Initially, I wouldn’t have minded the impervious pea-soup swamp had Number 2 not muttered his only English of the day: piranha. I quickly dove under water and swam through the cave opening. When I surfaced, I was in the dark, holding my breath from the stench of guano. There is a scene in the movie Anaconda where a parasite swims up the urethra of a man wading the Amazon. If I said I had no anxiety about the water I would be lying. Another canoe had made it, and with the help of those on board, I climbed onto the lightweight boat just as Number Two pulled ours through. We made it out of the dark and out to sea, where we sculled through floating ocean garbage that I had mistaken for chum. As we drifted through beer bottles (perhaps Namibian), I pulled a few leeches off my arms, and counted the bug bites on my legs: 5.

On a separate island, I went beachcombing and pocketed some keepers (sadly no conch shell.) The molting layer process of the ecdysiast by the crustaceans reminded me of the striptease the boys oogled over the night before. Smith perfected the art of shallow water handstands. We laughed at the overweight Germans and their itsy bitsy leopard print bikinis. I kept the figure in mind. The salinity was too intense for my eyes. I opted to cannonball off the boat and swim along the rafts like a water dog. I may or may not have seen a shark fin.

That night, Austin, Whitney, Smith and I sat down for crab curry at a hole in the wall restaurant that served bloody marys in body shaped-glasses. Not long after ordering, the dinner party was caught in a Thai monsoon. One hour and a couple margaritas later, the bartender laughed as she caught me put 7 beer cozies in my purse. The various $8 Thai massages were catch-as catch-can; we sang-along to catchy songs while drinking Hong Thong. I crowned Steven Tyler and Akon the Kings of the Wild Frontier because their music is the world over. I did, however, escape Michael Jackson in Thailand and I was (and still am) incredibly grateful for that. I closed my eyes when an audience member caught a banana at a local “performance;” we unknowingly walked into a three-story brothel and we probably caught the clap just from breathing the stuffy air; I caught a cold after moonshine skinny dipping in the Thai sea; I swam to a floating heart trampoline and watched fireworks; I caught my dress on the door of the hotel roof; I caught some fried fish at late night food stands; in the early morning swimming pool, I was caught by hotel security and reluctantly dragged by exhausted butt to bed. When in Rome, right?

The following morning, I climbed upon the back of a 40-year-old elephant and embarked on an all day jungle safari, through the Karst topography, the lush mangrove forests, the limestone mountains, the plants, rivers and animals. The jungle rain was beautiful, but callous. I stopped and watched sap drip from the rubber trees for ten to fifteen minutes though it only felt like a minute or so. The rubber, as our guide informed me, is sold to the factories that make us our Nike Dunks and Trojans.

In Thailand, you can sell, or buy, anything. “Who actually buys this sh-t?” I initially questioned. I bought some over the counter cold medicine at a Thai pharmacy that made my eyeballs flip and gush. The med was going to be my only purchase but the street vendors were relentless.

“Good buy. Same, same,” the vendors insisted.

I saw some interesting stuff. Here is a short list of stuff for sale: ping pong balls, laser pointer, thongs, big-belly Buddha statues, porn, batteries, Billabong t-shirts, silk boxers, CD cases, vibrators, luggage, henna tattoos, hemp purses, magnets, Jergens lotion, knives, nail polish, leather shoes, mascara, Nerf footballs, pookah shells, dried maggots, your sister.

What ever happened to the Buddhist objective of nonattachment? I would love to practice some form of material emission but I know that is only a pipedream. I suspect that after anyone visits a Buddhist country, they too, are drawn to the religion in one way or another. Nirvana would be nice, but I hold onto somethings too tightly.

At the Thai Royal Palace, I was told not to point my feet at the bronze statue of the Buddha, and because I felt a strong affinity for Buddhism that day, I obeyed the rules for once. I even bowed towards the Man like the real worshippers and silently sat in Buddha hood. “I am,” as it goes, “an ever changing aggregate of feelings, discriminations, compositional factors and consciousness.” The more and more I encounter the “bizarre,” recognize metaphysical connections, visit beautiful sites, survive near fatal mistakes and lose my inhibitions and my mind, the more and more I believe in a higher power.

Alright, alright, alright
Oh Jesus
I love You and Buddha too
You are un-nameable
You are unknowable
All we have is metaphor
That's what time and space are for

Here goes my Deus Ex Machina.

My first impression of Jesus Christ was on TV. I remember watching the crucifixion one Easter morning and it horrified me. Ever since, I’ve avoided religion altogether, which I find unfortunate. My dad told me that when he went to Catholic school, a little girl pissed off a nun and was consequentially beaten with a yardstick. The girl, though badly wounded, laughed uncontrollably. I am starting to feel like that little girl who doesn’t know how to appropriately react to an inappropriate situation; I am in the midst of a nervous breakdown.

One night in Bangkok, I was looking to buy fried worms from a street vendor when I saw a man on a motorcycle skid on the wet pavement and flip off his bike. I didn’t know what to do. “That guy just ate sh-t on his motorcycle,” I said. He got up and walked away unscathed. Everyone was horrified. But I didn’t do anything. I think it’s because these days everything I do is so thoughtless. I'm horrified by that.

This is an argument widened by my oblivion to those things I’m not looking for. For example, while hunting for personal abstractions, wandering the midnight streets, I passed a baby elephant and a congregation of lady boys not noticing the exotica until my friends pointed it out. “You just walked past a baby elephant. And lady boys!”

Last night I saw upon the stair A little man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today Oh, how I wish he’d go away...

-- “Antigonish,” Hughs Mearns

Paper Bengal Tiger

India

Before I truly wake up in the morning, in those 5 seconds between cataplexy and cognizance, I feel as if I can change everything about myself and I have everything to look forward to. I still feel like a little girl sleeping in my little girl bed. However, I woke up to India in a strange fashion. I knew I was there before I was awake. It’s as if my third eye had been dialated. My actual whereabouts and mental state were very much closed-circuited that morning.

And speaking of idiosyncrasies, it is very strange to read a news article on an “international” website about a very “foreign” country when you are in—or within proximity to—that very country. No man is an island. The night before, I read about the attack on the Sri Lankan Cricket Team. I looked up from my computer and I could see the island from my ship window.

Last December, SAS changed the itinerary thanks to the thug-pirate pastime of capturing the Gulf of Aden. We were supposed to be in Egypt, in that very marketplace, the day of the mosque bombing. Instead, I was in Cape Town, meeting some friendly people and “talking sh—t about [their] pretty sunset.” When SARS broke out in 2003, SAS was on its way to Vietnam. They bunkered in the sea for 2 weeks, not knowing where their next port would be. We’ve come to expect the unexpected.

For one thing, the smell of India is something one cannot prepare for, nor for this purpose, accurately put into words. I said, “Charcoal baby goat flesh” but no one agreed with me. Martha said it smelt like “sh-t.”

For security purposes, we were advised not to hang out at western establishments such as malls, but we went to one to see an authentic Bollywood movie and we spent the next day exploring the many little shops for authentic trinkets. It just so happens that we caught the red carpet premier of a Tamilnadu original. It’s not too surprising, however, as Bollywood cracks out something like a billion films a day. The drama we watched, or better yet tolerated, is called Naan Kadubul and it is creepiest, seriously most bizarre film I have ever witnessed. Like the smells, I can’t seem the describe it.

Our cabbie, Madu, took us to a beautiful Hindu temple, but he wanted us to know he was a Christian or in his words, “a good Christian.” These days, I find myself missing sacred places of my own: the Metoulious, Laurelhurst Park, and 43rd Ave. Madu took us outside the gates to a fenced pond. We threw cornballs into the murk and watched catfish gather and surface. A crowd gathered too. (Again, the human condition.) A girl outstretched her hand for a snack.

“Why in the hell am I feeding the fish,” I asked myself.

Madu took me to buy a sari. It took twenty minutes for the two women to properly fashion it. They plopped a black bindi in the middle of my forehead as if it were the cherry on top. Madu called me his daughter and friend, but mostly his daughter. Then he called his real daughter on his cell and I talked to her briefly. She is a first year student at the all women’s university and is late for her exam. He claimed I look like her. “Same face. White.” A girl in my art history class complained that she couldn’t find light makeup in India. “Michael Jackson would have a hard time,” my professor jokes.

We went to a hookah bar. I finally had a waffle. We bought Madu a cappuccino. He’s never had Italian style coffee, but he loved it. We all shared a Café Zabaglione and agreed the Italians make the best coffee. I thought of Italy and I thought of home and the people I miss. Some of the people are going to work everyday, some of them aren’t working at all and just killing time; some of them are dead and some of them are doing god knows what in countries very far away from where I am.


On a whim, we decided to take an overnight train to Bangalore. The train was less Darjeeling Limited than anticipated. (No sweet lime or $6,000 belts.) There were bars on the windows, filth, babies crying, and some scary looking dudes—really unromantic. For some time, I was feeling less spiritualized than I had hoped. I didn't sleep, just shivered. I played a game of solitaire in my head and said my mantras. I watched a man watch us. We giggled, what in the hell are we doing here? I felt very ponderous and uncomfortably comfortable. This is a perfect place to have an existential crisis, I thought. A man sat down.

“What do you eat for dinner in your home?”
Colin laughed uncomfortably, “What?”
“Where are you from?” He asks Colin.
“America.”
The guy chuckled. “Black man in White house. I like.”
We smile. He smiles. We were all smiling quite a bit actually.

We got to Bangalore about twenty minutes after the sun arrived. We were fatigued, and decided it was best if we just went back to Chennai, but the station was sold out of tickets. Dang it. So we found a rickshaw driver who jackknifed his way through the chaos to another train station where it took us three hours to find and buy first class tickets. We sat in the waiting room until ten. The sun was hot, we, exhausted, so we went to a hotel bar and drank whiskey cokes until four. We crawled to the train station as if we were walking the plank. I was hot and bothered by my sweat-drenched dress, in a cacophony of people selling flowers and carrots and duffle bags, all gawking at us: the only foreigners in the whole damn city. We were advised not to go to Bangalore because of the threat of terrorism. If anything, I felt like the radical. The whole situation, though sketchy in retrospect, was laughable at the time. I mean, what else were we supposed to do? We only brought a backpack full of goodies and 7 hours worth of loaded questions. We joked the entire ride back.


In a rickshaw ride to buy pirated DVDs, Martha brought up an excellent point: people live lives we will never know. That’s hard for me to accept because I want to know everything. But moreover, I am also very grateful for everything I've worked for and everything I've been given.

From the comfort of the tour bus, I saw women in their day-glo saris climb onto different color buses, separated from their husbands. Bride burning is a problem for India. I saw lots of poverty, which is also a problem. To many, problems present themselves as a scenario with a cause=effect, beginning, middle and end. Despite my crippling imagination, I did not see the projected Gordian knots, and therefore, had a hard time picturing a man setting his wife on fire just to collect a dowry. It’s hard believing in such evils, but then again, it’s hard not to.

My inexperience is also a problem because I was the victim of many little problems. One example involves our rickshaw driver, who refused to drive us to port and demanded more rupees to walk us through the dark tunnel that led us to safety. Like Shiva’s outstretched arms, there were arms of beggar children everywhere, grabbing and clinging to my dress. Startled, I jumped and instinctively grabbed the hand of the driver (the same a-hole who got us into the mess in the first place.)

In my favorite writings, someone goes into the belly of the beast. I wanted to explore. The kids were adorable and laughing and more notably, they asked for pens! Not salvation. Sometimes I want to be the Jonah, or moreover, the Shiva soapboxed on the dwarfed the manifestation of arrested development. But I am no saint. I am still very much an adolescent. And India, the paper Bengal tiger, consumed me but didn’t scratch me out. I enjoyed myself as I played in its belly. It allowed me to look beyond the superficial, and into the substance of world.

Like Jonah, I was vomited out three days later, unharmed but a little bit older.

Pleasures of Exile

The ship’s resident marine biologist admits he was drawn to the study of sea life after watching the black and white Tarzan movies, where the hero falls into a giant clam and struggle between man and, well, giant clam ensues. Such a film plot wouldn’t inspire me to become a marine biologist; it would inspire me to write better movies. But he looks like a natural whale watcher; he has a wondering eye.







“Tomorrow, we’ll be in Mauritius! Ah Paradise ! Paradise is wonderful AND beautiful…, ” another professor goes on. She’s rehearsed this lecture in front of her mirror (girls can tell.) I use the term lecture loosely. I wouldn’t consider an hour’s time of elusive idioms to be educational.

She’s having a go at her interpretation of the Mark Twain quote, “… Heaven was copied after Mauritius.” Twain operates on what I just now recognize as Credo quia absurdum, and so, during this time abroad, do I. I’m afraid I move through days believing I am entitled to forget and start over--my litany of observations. This may be a parable of either my life at sea, or my life itself. Paradise is all in the mind. I’ve come to understand. It cannot exist independently of it.

As a result, I jumped aboard an orange catamaran in academic pursuit of finding the mythical clam, and this fabled paradise—just another day. I went snorkeling through schools of electric blue fish. I dove down farther, scraping my belly on the ocean floor. I saw an albino eel. I swam as far as I could until I could no longer hear the boat’s reggae music, and I no longer had the energy to swim. I floated on my back and made snow angels in the Indian Ocean. I started to cry so I put my snorkeling mask back on, and fogged up my goggles.


My ideal island would have lots of sand, and coconuts, and jungle and no people.

Afrikaan & Afrikaan't

It would be easy, and perhaps insipid, to write about South Africa for what it is on the surface. Seemingly, South Africa is beautiful and exotic- the landscape is unmatched and the culture diverse. But to unveil South Africa for what it’s worth requires a certain amount of backbone- I’m cutting into a layer cake here. The greatest anomaly being I’ve had time to process all that I’ve witnessed, and South Africa still doesn’t make sense. There’s icing, and then there’s filling. Even more so- as a writer with an innate desire to document everything-I’m too baffled by my South African experience to write about it. That said, this is the smaller version, the cupcake.


We celebrated our summit of Table Mountain on Long Street in the City Bowl of Cape Town. I window-shopped the boutiques that were once theaters housing anti-apartheid demonstrations.

We ate at Café Royal, a newfangled restaurant/lounge analogous of the famous Piccadilly establishment. I sampled the world’s greatest milkshake. Seven of us ordered a pitcher of vodka lemonade for $7 USD. I needed a reality check. I consulted my map and placed myself geographically. “There,” I pointed at the Cape of Good Hope. “That’s where I am.” The actuality of my location will never fully sink in.

At Royal, we befriend Matt, a “freelance contributor for GQ.” I double-checked the validity of this via Goggle. (I’ve become such a skeptic, unfortunately.) “YOU. SOUND. LIKE. YOU’RE. FROM. LONDON,” I screamed from across the table. As it turns out, I’m right. Matt of London Town relocated to Cape Town to work as a “strategist” for a company dubbed Luxury Branding-how vague and post-structural! We’re intrigued at this point. Matt presents himself as the archetypal Albion, a Pete Doherty aspirant. He hands me his business card, and I examine it à la Patrick Bateman. No water mark but still nice. Actually, I haven’t the clue what qualifies a reputable business card. I purely appreciate minimalism, simplicity and plane Jane vanilla milkshakes. The point being, my stack of business cards will one day fill the sea.

We ended up at an Irish pub of all places. (It was hard to resist the karaoke.) Everyone was wasted, and soon enough, Long Street transformed into Bourbon. We American Eagles of Death Metal captured the watering hole. I watched as people galloped between clubs, scraped knees on concrete jungle, and avoided the little Oliver Twists who pulled at sleeves and purses. I had to stop. One kid told me his parents were dead, and he wanted to go home to India. I sobered up immediately. It wasn’t fun anymore; I had endured my share of shooters and squalor.


The next morning, after a cup of coffee, I remembered plans to surf. The pay phone, my only mode of communication, also happens to be the single most unreliable mode of communication I can think of. Sometimes calls work, sometimes they don’t. There’s no rhythm or rhyme. I might as well put pen to paper, shove my messages into beer bottles and chuck them at waves at this point. I cursed my sailor mouth off. Now what?

We all agreed on rugby. Cape Town’s Stormers, as I’m informed, play for Western Province Rugby Union, while the national team, the Springboks, is the current holder of the Rugby world Cup. Needless to say, rugby is popular in Cape Town. I’m sure my rugby ignorance bothered a lot of natives. It’s not a touch down, I learn. I like rugby a lot more than American football. Actually, I like most everything more than I like American football. Through the luck of the draw, we somehow ended up with terrific third row seats and I somehow ended up on the Newlands stadium screen, blowing my nose.

We followed the rugby crowd to techno night at the Springbok Bar. The word Springbok is ubiquitous in South Africa: a mint- Kahlua shot, a rugby team, a barbequed gazelle. “Get me a springbok” could mean a number of things, so I avoid the word entirely.

The Springbok Bar turns out to be some rockabilly dive. A guy stole a mop out of the hands of the janitor and humped it.

“Do you want to boogie?”
“No.”

Whilst avoiding the dance floor, I watched a street brawl from the safety of the bar deck. The police managed to tackle the instigator (a Hugh Grant look-alike), but not without a struggle. He continued to kick and scream at the black cabbie until he was tasered and dragged into the ass of the drunk-tank.

I asked around and soon realize this fight scene is, on average, a bi-weekly occurrence for the Springbok: a belligerent white man leaves the bar and gets into it with a black man on the street. “Just another day at the office,” a bouncer tells me. “You should’ve seen the shit last night.”

Crime rates are soaring in South Africa. The private security force is the highest grossing workforce in the nation. Cape Town, within the past few years, has become the murder capital of the world.

I slept for three hours that night with one eye open, woke up in a daze, and took a 2 hour drive to the renowned South African wine lands. I was exhausted, but the thrill of getting out of the city and drinking wine all day kept me going. And the ethereal, almost eerie, countryside took my breath away.

Ladies and gentleman, South African wine made my list of favorite things ever- I want to bathe in viognier everyday. It’s like drinkable, delicious Aveda Conditioner. I want to send the Dutch a thank you letter in a bottle for “discovering” such fertile soil and planting those grapes of wonder. I also want to spit my seeds into the sea.

We arrived at a park on the banks of the Eerste River. Is this one of my lucid dreams? Hey, you wanna pet a cheetah? Heck yes. Curl up in the sun like a cat and take a nap next to a lagoon? Go for it. Right when I was craving a muffin- BAM- a bakery appeared like an oasis. I pinched myself black and blue. I went on a solo excursion around the park, a solitary traveler for once! I discovered pony rides and cute little yuppie couples buzzed off Pinotage. For real? Is this Michael Jackson’s wayward ranch? I stumbled upon a craft fair. Of course, I can’t really justify buying a cheetah pelt but I understand why tipsy tourists have fetishized the spots. We had an African buffet of game (not really sure what I ate) at an outdoor restaurant with face paint and tree houses!





Our tour guide bragged about the nostalgic Dutch architecture, the Cypress trees that line the Dutch cemetery, the general store with antique bottles of sassafras. That’s neat; Colonial Good Hope is way more exciting than Williamsburg.

“Hey look! Dutch Reform Church!” My tour guide pressed his fat finger against the car window. I’ve become an expert in discerning churches by this point.
“What’s going on over there?” I asked.
“Oh just a township- AND ON YOUR RIGHT, the famous University! Have you visited the Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens? Just lovely! Oh Watch out, zebra crossing! Ho ho ho. ”

This bothers me, like the dust under the carpet.

Don’t mind the traffic accident, the dead bodies on the stretcher.

Don’t mind the eight foot walls and the electric fences blocking the faultless views of the beachfront flats.

When I got back to the ship that night, I couldn’t sleep. I was too haunted by the beauty of the valley, the faces of street children, the barbed wire, the blatant denial, and most of all, the illusory reality I’m living.

"The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea -- something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to. . . ."

-Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness


In a deeper sense, even after the centuries of discrimination and retribution, anyone who wants to explore a land of paradoxes can do no better than South Africa, which keeps up in dichotomy just as easily as it keeps up in appearances and sugar-based coatings.