Ode to the Sinking Princess

We were drinking to the Mekong
But the ship was thirsty too
And after we had gone to bed
She'd taken quite a few


We rocked her back and forth but still
Her slumber it was deep
So with pots and pans and cups we bailed
And the princess...stayed asleep

And since we could not find a prince
Whose kill could make her rise
We plunged the bails into her hull
To reclaim our sunken prize

For seconds, minutes, days it seemed
We bailed and bailed some more
Til finally the princess could
Be dragged upon the shore

For but a moment we rejoiced
But the party was too soon
For her heart was clogged and waterlogged
Oh! Could this be her doom?

"Oh Doctor! Doctor!" We implored
To every foreign ear
"No I'm not one," they seemed to say
"Though I know one who is near"

The doctor came with medicine
And tools to fix her heart
So silently and soberly
We watched him work his art

The key it turned! The fuel it burned!
The princess was revived!
Though time and money both were lost,
Our journey had survived!

I am not a superstitious man
But of a better name I dream
Instead of "Sinking Princess"
Why not "The Floating Queen?"

Just the day after our little catastrophe, we were able to help out this guy who had stranded his boat. He was starving, and all we had were sunflower seeds and oranges, which he stuffed into his face.

This sinking incident happened after our first night camping out. We have since made it to Luang Prabang (though it took almost 5 days), and after doing a bit of obviously much-needed work on the boat here, we're going to continue to Vientiane.

The river life is a good life. We wake up early, brew some coffee over the embers from the previous night's fire, pack, then hit the river.  We drive in hour long shifts, stopping occasionally if we feel like eating or swimming.  It gets dark at around 6, so at about 4:30 or so we start checking out beaches to see where we want to make camp for the night. After we find one that meets our criteria: big, flat, plenty of dead wood for a fire, and no standing water/mosquitoes, we pitch our tents, make a fire (where occasionally a scorpion will stop by to chill), and cook whatever we were able to find in the previous town, though any dinner is delicious after a day in the sun.

Mekong River, somewhere near Pak Beng at 7:00 AM

The villages we stop in are certainly off the beaten path. Silent stares follow us as we walk through the towns making the universal hand-to-mouth gesture that says "FEED US."  The locals are always happy to invite us into their houses and watch as we eat their rice and fish.

I can't get Proud Mary by CCR out of my head.

Also, if anyone knows what could be causing a strange rattling sound, similar to loose pennies in a drier, our engine would be glad to know. Some data: we heard the sound yesterday after running the engine in the hot sun for a full day and the propane tank (yes, propane) that we were using was almost empty. At a near idle, the engine was good, but with any sort of throttle the sound came back. Adjusting the choke (higher gas:air ratio, which seemed strange) seemed to help a bit. Today we had no problem.

Happy Thanksgiving from Lao, the land without turkeys!

Sinking Princess Takes her Maiden Voyage

We did it. Cyril, the Swiss, Romauld, the French, and I are the proud owners of the Sinking Princess, as we have named her. We met for breakfast at 7 30, got our money at 8 30, and by 10 am we were taking the inaugural cruise around the Mekong.



Sinking Princess sets sail. You control the throttle with a rope that you tie to your big toe.




The Mekong is thiiiis big.


This feeling is indescribable. We actually own a boat. After an hour on the water or so, we took it back to shore to buy supplies and make some minor repairs with spare bamboo that we found lying around.

Our deck had some holes. But nothing a machete and bamboo couldnt fix.

This took quite a while, especially the thorough spraying of the boat to get rid of ants and cockroaches. This is going to be our transportation and lodging for the forseeable future, so might as well make it nice.

Just two hours ago, we realized that all the boats on this side of the river are flying Lao flags, so we figured we ought to do the same. We went to the flag shop to make our purchase, then got to talking. Shouldnt the Sinking Princess have her own flag?? OF COURSE SHE SHOULD.  So, we designed a flag and brought our idea to the seamstress. She laughed, but was very helpful.

There was a language barrier, but the hand of a sinking princess piercing through water is pretty much universal. She knew what we wanted.

This woman was good.  Within 40 mins or so, she had taken our sketch and turned it into a flag. While she was making it, we wandered around her house. On the wall, I saw her son`s physics homework. It turns out that 15 year olds in Lao learn how to add resistors in parallel and series. This is awesome.



To all my former tutees reading this (if any), can you, using your incredible physics knowledge, tell me what those equations on the bottom represent?

 So, it was a great day. We bought a boat. We fixed the boat. We even bought a flag. Tomorrow morning the Princess sets sail.



We are all pretty proud of our flag.



Spongebob Cheeseboat

Okay, it has been a while since I posted last, but I have good reason. I have been stuck behind the bamboo curtain of Chinese oppression where blogspot is blocked.

But besides that, China was amazing. Lots of stories, interesting people, and so on... but my Chinese update is going to be brief because I can barely type out of my excitement for todays development. But that will come at the end...

So, China in a nutshell...

• Train to Guilin, met guy who bought me tea and lunch and quizzed me on particulars of the english language.
• Slow boat to Yangshuo. Four of us on a bamboo raft (well, it was advertised as bamboo, but really was PVC. Less sexy, more buoyant) 
• Yangshuo is a backpacker city for sure. It is completely overrun with tourists, but for good reason. The town is surrounded by these giant jagged mountains that look like teeth coming out of the ground all around you. After about 5 days of biking, rock climbing, hiking, and unexpected barbecues on the beach, I had finally packed and brought my backpack to a small restaurant for breakfast. I had eaten at this place a few times already, so the owner new my name and complained to me Andy, my staff is all sick. I have no one to wait tables. (sorry, limited punctuation on this keyboard) So I decided to be her waiter for the day in exchange for free meals. Pretty fun, despite not being able to speak with any of the clientele. 
• Long Ji Rice Terraces. Wow. Amazing, but a sort of amazing that needs a 360 degree camera to describe. Since I lost my camera in Guilin, no luck.
• 18 hour train to Kunming. Yikes, this was interesting. But not in a way that I would recommend to others. Chinese men eating, drinking, spitting, and smoking late into the night made sleep impossible. Not too mention the fact that the train was so crowded that people were standing in the narrow bit of legroom between seats. Still, it got me to Kunming for cheap.
• In Kunming I got to stay with my cousin Karen. Wound up crowdsurfing to some expat bluegrass band on halloween night while dressed as a character from a movie i have never seen.  

Me and my Kunming Kuzin Karen.

• Ahh okay, this is taking too long. So, then I went to Dali. There is a fun story there that I probably should not publish. I also hiked a mountain and slept at the top in my comfy little japanese tent. Very nice to wake up and see the stars.  This does not happen often in China.

Home away from home

• Next Lijiang. Lots of Chinese tourists and some old shit. Fine. The biking was really nice, and the foliage was interesting (see photo).

My interest in this particular plant was purely academic. Marijuanna, you see, is a gateway drug and I, for one, want nothing to do with this despicable intoxicant.

• Tiger Leaping Gorge Trek. Wow. Great two day trek, EVEN THOUGH I dropped my only water bottle into a pile of donkey grossness a couple hours in.

Pretty cool right?

• Traveled around with some Montrealians for a while, made it back to Kunming, hung out with cousin some more, blah blah blah, then went to Xinshuangbanna, a region in southern China, for a couple days before finally heading to...

LAO, (no S, btw, means you are totally in the know). I love China for all sorts of reasons. The people, the food, the scenery, the language (the fact that the characters represent MEANING rather than PRONUNCIATION has a huge effect on how Chinese people read I think. I had a great conversation about this in Spanish with a Chinese woman who couldnt speak English) But Lao is paradise.

I have only been here 4 days or so now, and everything moves sloooow. To get between cities, you just stick your thumb out and grab a lift from a passing truck. It is amazing how quickly you can get from A to B by hitching. Not that there is any rush here.

Okay. Lao. On the first day here, while cruising in the back of a truck following the banks of the Mekong river, I realized that this was the place. This was where I could finally live out my huck finn fantasies of slowly meandering down a mighty river at whatever the hell sort of pace feels right. But, instead of the Mississippi, I would be on the Mekong. And instead of a runaway slave, I would travel with whoever wanted to go in on a boat.

I found two people who wanted to do just that.

So yesterday, at 8 am, we started boat shopping. Armed with our only weapon, a piece of paper with the words we would like to buy a boat written in Lao, we started approaching people on the banks of the river.  90% of these people dont understand what you want. Of the rest, 90% do not own a boat. Of the rest, 90% own a canoe that would not be big enough for our purposes. Of the rest, 90% either do not want to sell or want a ludicrous amount of money. But for two days we battled these statistics (it wasnt all work though. We wound up at a Lao funeral, and man do they really put the FUN back into funeral. The bereaved insisted that we take many shots of Lao Whiskey with them and we, of course, did what we could to ease their pain). But eventually (about 2 hours ago), we found our man and our boat.

Our boat. Suggestions for a name are welcome. The title of this post is the best we have come up with so far.

We put a deposit down, and tomorrow we will pay the rest. The plan is to spend about a month or so on this boat, traveling down the Mekong through Lao, then Cambodia, then Vietnam. Of course, this is assuming no problems with the boat, borders, our health, Cambodian Cannibals, etc... We should have no problem sleeping on beaches or small villages on the way, and we are hoping that villagers will be able to sell us all the food we need as we go. Tomorrow will be spent buying supplies, food, fuel, etc... and getting the boat ready to go. The next morning... to the Mekong.  Vientiane, the Lao capital, is probably about a week or so away by boat, and we will have to stop there for a week to get our Cambodian visas, so expect an update then.

I've Found Him

Repeat: I've found him

To everyone who knows Calvin, you're welcome. You can sleep knowing he is safe. To everyone who doesn't, I'm sorry if you thought this would be an interesting post.

"Dude, this guy just on sighted that five eight. Clean"

One of the best things about couchsurfing is that you get exposed to your host's hobbies. My host in Seoul, Danielle, is a big time rock climber.

So on Friday after she got out of work, Danielle and I took a train 4 hours south to Youngsa popo (I am almost definitely spelling this wrong), a waterfall in Korea with lots of good climbing around it. Instead of paying the $18 for the train ticket, we just sat on the floor of the cafe car, which is apparently a popular thing for frugal Koreans to do.

Most of these men were at least a little drunk when this picture was taken.
So was the photographer (that's me!). 

When we got to the station at around midnight, we still had an hour hike to get to our campsite. Hauling a pack with a tent, cooking equipment, ropes, and carabeners for an hour through the dark really makes you appreciate a place more. 

Sometime in the night her climbing buddies had arrived, but we woke up first. Danielle was anxious to get climbing, but didn't trust me to belay her, so I got the first climb of the day. This climb was a "lead" instead of a "top-rope" climb.

If you know climbing lingo
   skip the next paragraph
else
   keep reading
end

Top rope climbing is the one you do when you go to a rock gym and get in your harness and climb using the rope that is already there. This is 100% safe, because there is never more than a foot or two of slack in the rope, so falls are harmless. With lead climbing, the only thing that is already there are little bolts drilled into the rock face and it is your job to clip your rope into these bolts. The bolts are vertically separated by about 10 feet though, so you get quite a bit of slack in the rope when you are above one bolt but haven't et clipped into the next.

Anyways, this makes lead climbing way more intense and falling much more frightening. Luckily, I successfully completed my first climb without falling (it was a really easy climb though. A 5.8 difficulty level which is basically the bunny slope of rock climbing).



Coming down from first climb.

Her friends were pretty hardcore. They were climbing things that looked like vertical walls with only an occasional crack or bump to grip.

Badass.

More people showed up. We climbed, we ate Indian food, we drank, we had a jam session around the fire. We slept. Next day, more of the same. Climbers (well these climbers at least) are very easy to get along with.

Camping breakfast is the best breakfast.

We were riding dirty for the train ride back, but nobody asked for tickets again, so that was nice. A Korean woman and her 7 year old daughter (that's Korean years btw, so 6 year old by US standards. In Korea you start at 1) talked to me for an hour and wanted to see every picture in my camera.

Thanks for the candy Korean girl!

This was a great weekend. I am finding that I really don't care much about exploring big cities. I can't really appreciate the uniqueness of a city unless I've lived there for months, and since I don't really want to do that I think for the rest of my trip I will try to just duck into cities for a day or two and then head to the smaller towns as much as possible.

Except, of course, for Hong Kong.  Tomorrow I will fly to Hong Kong, and when I do I will be legally stranded on the island. Hopefully I will be able to quickly and easily get my visa for mainland China and then move on. But I am very excited to see Calvin and Nick.

Where the streets have no names...

I think Bono was talking about Korea (the streets really don't have names here). In fact, I think this song is about the frustration the singer felt as he wandered the unnamed streets of Seoul for hours looking for the Chinese Embassy, and how, once he finally found the embassy, read a sign that said "for Chinese Visa must to go to Chinese Consulate," and then how, after more wandering and eventually finding this consulate, he is told that the consulate no longer gives visas to foreigners so he must find a travel agent, and then, in the second verse the singer finds this travel agent who then informs him that as of July 1, 2010 it is impossible for foreigners in Korea to get a visa but luckily, the song's resolution comes in the last verse when the singer's former ticket to Beijing is rerouted to Hong Kong, where visitors don't need visas. This is the only correct interpretation of this song.

Interestingly enough, my travels have paralleled this song perfectly. Anyways, everything is all set now. I have a flight to Hong Kong on Monday where I should be able to get my visa for China without a problem. Oh, I also have a passport!

Page 51: a reminder not to be an idiot.

Two reasons for shortening the Korea portion of my trip. The main one is that I am not going to be able to get a job tutoring, which is what I had originally wanted to do as a way to replenish some of the money I spent in Japan. The second is that I am really excited for China, and want to go somewhere BIG where I can do some camping. So far my trip has been exclusively to islands and I'm ready for some mainland roaming (okay, Korea isn't really an island, but travel-wise it is. The North Koreans are stingy with visas).

But the place I'm staying in is cool. My couchsurfing host lives right on top of the US base here, which means wake up marches at 6am everyday.

The view from my host's balcony: US humvees and barbed wire.

This area of Seoul is an interesting little example of cultural positive feedback. What started (I'm guessing) as a small army base brought a small number of shops and restaurants catering to US citizens, which brought some tourists, which brought more shops... Now, anywhere within a 1-2 mile radius of this base you see as many white people as you do Koreans, even though only a very small percentage are with the army. From the little cultural seed of a small army base, a gigantic tree of whiteness has sprouted in the middle of Seoul. I don't know how I feel about this sort of cultural homogenization. Part of me wants to say its awful and we need to preserve all these cultural differences that make travel such an interesting thing to do, but I think I'm only saying that because I have the luxury to. For a Korean guy with a family, he is probably quite happy to open an English language bookstore if it means he and his family can live a bit more comfortably. I don't know, but it is still kinda sad, and it is this sort of thing that makes me prefer visiting the (so far) untouched smaller towns.

Anyways! My host is really into tattoos and I am going with her now to talk to the woman who has been named "The best tattoo artist in Korea" by some magazine that knows about tattoos. She is planning on spending $1000 on a custom-designed, full arm tattoo (called a sleeve, for those who are as unhip as I was yesterday).

Camping in Japan!

So my mom used to run the international club at Champlain College. When I was 9 or so I would go on trips with them to Boston and Montreal. Many of the students were Japanese, and they liked trying to talk to their advisor,s (I don,t know where the apostrophe is on this keyboard, so comma=apostrophe) shy son. 

Anyways, I got in touch with some of these students and, 14 years later, have spent the last week hanging out and staying with some of them.

There was something like 7 layers of mountains here.

Two days ago, a few of us hiked to the top of Mount Takao, where there were spectacular views and an all-you-can eat/drink beergarden. 

Cook your own octopi!

After the beergarden, we took the cable car down the mountain and hiked in the middle of the woods. We were the only people in miles from what I could tell. I taught the art of marshmallow toasting to Chiemi and Yoshiko.

Our campsite had a very nice bathroom.

SO, now the plan is:

1. Get new passport today. I hope it is ready.
2. Fly to Korea tomorrow.
3. Get Chinese visa, hang around Korea for a week or so. I was going to stay longer, but it looks like it would be really hard to find a job tutoring English. If anyone knows a Korean student who wants to give me money to talk to him, let me know.
4. Go to China. Stay for a long time.