You know you've been in Southeast Asia too long when...

This starts to look like a reasonable lunch. (And darn tasty little buggers they were too.)

Also: when your pork-noodle salad contains something roughly the consistency of tripe, and you reassure yourself by thinking it must be seaweed, or some sort of fungus.

Laos, Land of Butterflies

Next up, Luang Prabang, Lao PDR. (Apparently, like so many societal ills, the ‘s’ was a Western addition.) I thought I’d booked on the Lao national carrier, but when I got tot the airport my flight was listed under Vietnam Airlines. Laos: Home of the secret codeshare. An hour or so later we landed in mountainous northern Laos. My taxi got thoroughly lost trying to find my guesthouse, which was not in town but rather about two blocks from the airport, on the banks of the Nam Khan River. If you go to Cambodia for the temples (and you really should go to Cambodia for the temples), you go to Laos for the nature. The scenery was just stupendous, with the little town of Luang Prabang set in a valley in the midst of a low but striking mountain range. A lot like the Dolomites, but tropical. The whole place was swarming with butterflies and geckos and also mosquitoes, which keep the geckos fed and give the malarial parasites a place to live.

My guesthouse, which goes by variations on the name Ecolodge Namsongsai, was a rustic sort of place. It consisted of a large covered area which served as reception desk, restaurant, and movie theater, and some wooden thatched-roof Lao-style cabins where people like me stayed. For $7/night, I got my own bungalow, complete with hot water, a fan, and a front porch/balcony looking out over the river. The plus side was that the setting was beautiful, with fruit trees and herbs growing all over the property, swooping butterflies, and a cool breeze at night. The downside of staying in a thatched roof hut is that you get up close and personal with the local wildlife, of the four-, six-, and eight-legged varieties. Even with the window screens closed, there were ants, mosquitos, large geckos in the roof, and one big brown spider that briefly tried to move in to my bathroom. Or maybe he just temporarily vacated when I proved a bad host. Either way, I was glad for the mosquito net and learned to ignore the scurryings in the night.

My first afternoon I stayed at the guesthouse. A late lunch in the restaurant proved to be the best cucumber salad of my life, dressed largely the same as the Thai papaya salad at Rice Pot but somehow infinitely better. It took about half an hour to come out, which I later realized was at least in part because the woman running the place had to walk down to the garden to pick the cherry tomatoes to put in it.

Day two in LP I decided to scope out the town. The walk in took about half an hour, but as always the scenery was gorgeous. Not for nothing is the town a UNESCO World Heritage site. I climbed Mt. Phousi to see the stupa on top, but admission was 2000 kip (roughly 25ȼ) and all I had was a $20 bill, and reasonably enough the guy selling tickets refused to make change. They do take dollars in Laos, but unlike Cambodia the local currency is preferred. Still, I got to see Buddha’s giant footprint in the stone, and the view, of course, was superlative, even if I didn’t quite make it all the way up. Several wats and quite a bit of walking later, I stopped for lunch at Tamarind. Their cooking classes were, disappointingly, cancelled for the month, but I ordered a tasting platter of Lao specialties and was once again blown away. Khmer food is good; Lao food is great. Luang Prabang sausage, water buffalo jerky, pickled Mekong river weed, spicy bamboo shoots, and some spring rolls rolled up in lettuce leaves made my lunch. It was so good I ordered a second course of noodle salad, which was overkill but still excellent. If you’re ever in LP, eat there.

Afternoon was the royal palace museum and more wats, and since my guesthouse didn’t have internets I found a little bakery with good fruit shakes and free wifi. My laptop was two miles away at the guesthouse, but at least I could check email on my iPod. Then back to the guesthouse for more of that salad for dinner, this time with green papaya instead of cucumber.

When I went to brush that evening I saw something brown scurry out of sight, which I assumed was a gecko. A minute later it came out again and turned out to be a rather large, furry brown spider. Not the giant yellow ones I’d seen in the gardens, but still big enough that I wasn’t going to reach under it to get the soap, or even really stand in the same room as it if I had any say. Probably it had heard I’d eaten its cousins for lunch down in Phnom Penh and wanted to see what’s what. When I asked the lady in charge if there’s anything they could do, she assured me that it wasn’t poisonous (‘just bites like an ant!’) and sent one of her employees to go help. He put a dish towel over his hand and tried to grab it, but the spider was faster and hid behind the bathroom mirror. So while he reached his bare fingers under the mirror to try to flush it out (!!), I hit the mirror with my sneaker a few times, to encourage it to leave. No trace of the spider, but instead a large gecko, maybe six inches long and fat, dashed out and exited through the wall fan. I didn’t get a photo, but he looked a lot like this guy: www.travelblog.org/Photos/3364829. He continued living in my ceiling and leaving behind turds the size of half-eaten Tootsie Rolls, but as long as those turds were made up of mosquitoes and spiders that was frankly fine with me.

The next morning a tuk-tuk picked me out a drove me, along with a few other tourists, 45 minutes into the countryside to Kuangsi waterfall. The guidebook says it’s ‘champagne-glass limestone’, whatever that means. It was, predictably, gorgeous. When you first walk into the park there’s a bear sanctuary, where they keep sun bears rescued from bile farms. A little farther up are some low falls and an area to swim, which given the climate was worth the price of admission by itself. The water was cold and so blue it was almost green. And farther still were the main falls. I started to hike up the side, but the path was more steep mud than anything else and I hadn’t had lunch. It was pretty enough from the bottom. We left just as a busload of Chinese tourists was arriving, which is to say, just in time.

I hung around at the wifi bakery again that evening until the night market opened. Mostly the market is kind of depressing – long rows of tents, all selling one of the same five things. The scarves were gorgeous so I bought a few anyway, but even the bags you could see the people embroidering were the same pattern as the bags two stalls down. Near the end was an alley lined with tables of noodles and grilling meat, so I walked down and, against my better judgment (there were tourists there! They still looked alive!), decided to stop for dinner. I chose one of the better-looking buffet tables (1 plate for 10,000 kip!), and heaped my plate high with various noodles, vegetables, and more of that amazing Luang Prabang sausage. I’ve heard it compared to Chiang Mai sausage, which I’ve never had, so all I can say is that it’s slightly grey in color and has an herbal, almost woody flavor. I have no idea what they put in it and frankly I don’t want to know, but damn it’s good. I sat down at a picnic table with two other backpackers and an old Australian expat, on a visa run from Phnom Penh, who told us stories about living in SE Asia and traveling the US in the ’70s and disagreed with me heartily on the allures of the call to prayer at 5am in Indonesia. He’d spent some time working for the Australian military in East Timor and disliked the Indonesians in general. Post dinner was a preventative Coke and a chocolate croissant at a café down the street, then tuk-tuk home for the night. When I got in, the spider was looking down at me from up near the bathroom roof. When I came back later to get ready for bed, he was gone for good.

My final LP adventure was elephant riding. It wasn’t the best tour ever – just half a mile or so down a path, then back again – but the elephants were darling and I had fun anyway. From there we drove to a whiskey village, which was even more depressing than the night market. The whole village seems to consist of stalls selling scarves and trinkets, until at the end you get to see a still, sample the whiskey, and hopefully buy a bottle. Most bottles included a snake, scorpion, or giant millipede for added medicinal power. We also passed a fire where they were smoking elephant skin to eat, and a stall selling bear and tiger teeth and various animal bits in liquid as medicine. As the bear sanctuary posters had implored, we did not buy.

And last on the morning's list was the Pak Ou caves, limestone caves on the Mekong filled with Buddha statues. The caves are more notable for the number of figurines in them than anything else, really, though the Mekong along that stretch is, again, stunning. Then back to town for a ginger shake at the wifi café and, since the restaurant I was looking for seemed no longer to exist, a dinner of papaya salad (excellent) and a Lao-style baguette (good but too much ketchup) from the night market. For the record, my stomach’s fine.

When I got back to the guest house I asked about having a Lao breakfast instead of bread and jam, so the next morning I met the proprietress and her assistant at 8am to go pick bamboo shoots. “Pick” really meant “hack with a knife”; those things are tough and woody before you boil them. Along the way we picked various leaves and mushrooms and chili peppers, and an hour later when I came to the restaurant it had all boiled into a delicious soup. Shortly thereafter the tuk-tuk picked me up for the airport, and the proprietress handed me a bag of tiny fresh-picked bananas for the road.

My guidebook tells me that the drive from Luang Prabang to Vientiane is one of the most beautiful in Asia, eight to twelve hours on winding roads through limestone karsts with stunning vistas of the river below. Stunning though it may be, eight to twelve hours in a minibus through winding mountain road was not something I was prepared to stomach, so I coughed up the ninety bucks for a plane ticket instead, and we passed over said scenery in 35 minutes. Still pretty from above, though the clouds do get in the way.

At the airport I met a Dutch backpacker who offered to split the cab into town, and we ended up at the same guesthouse. We walked around the city together for what was left of the afternoon. A quick bite at the Scandinavian bakery – excellent croissant, wifi – and then another procession of wats and French colonial architecture. Vientiane as a city doesn’t have a lot going for it. It’s small, without the charm of Phnom Penh or the scenery of Luang Prabang or the sights of Siem Reap. Most tourists in town seem to be just passing through, which is what I recommend you do if you end up here – don’t linger, just pass through. You can see everything in half a day at most. The food’s pretty good – we had some reasonably good if overpriced French for dinner, and I got a solid bowl of Lao noodle soup at a stand for lunch today – but I haven’t been blown away yet like I was in LP. In general, you can do better elsewhere.

So this morning I took my time getting out of bed, captioned some pictures, read my email, and had my Namsongsai bananas and some market mangosteens for breakfast before heading out. I spent nine dollars in postage to send six postcards home (is that what communism means out here? expensive postage?), and then hiked up the main drag to the morning market, where I ogled some more gorgeous Lao textiles, then farther up to Vientiane’s version of the Arc de Triumph, the Patuxai Monument. Rather than take the same road back again to the restaurant I’d picked out for lunch I decided to go a few blocks over to a smaller street, and in true Emily fashion promptly got thoroughly lost. How I ended up where I ended up, walking the wrong way in an entirely tourist-free part of town, is entirely beyond me. The proprietor of an internet café which clearly hadn’t seen a Westerner set foot inside it for years was kind enough to point me in the right direction. I gave up on my resto of choice for lunch and had the abovementioned noodles instead. Once I get this post finished I’ll head there for dinner, hopefully to have a delicious last Lao dinner. Tomorrow evening, hopefully after a productive day of grantwriting, I fly to Kuala Lumpur for a day, then on to Jogyakarta and Indonesia at last. That’s the plus of a boring town with good internet – you get things done. ’Til then…

Good Morning, Cambodia

(Wrote this three days ago, finally got it posted. No wifi at the hostel in Laos. Sorry for the lack of pictures; I'll try to fix that later)

Hello from Siem Reap!

Things got off to an eventful start when I woke up the morning of the 2nd with a stomach bug. There was no way I was going to be able to drag myself to the airport in that state, much less make it through security without puking on some poor TSA agent’s shoes, but luckily Emirates was able to put me on the next day’s flight without too exorbitant a change fee.

So on the morning of the 3rd I took a SuperShuttle out to JFK, then flew the roughly 22 hours to Singapore via Dubai. Turns out the trip to Asia is far less grueling when you’ve only got one stopover instead of five. (Thank you, last year’s CLS trip planners.) It certainly also doesn’t hurt that Emirates has a fantastic movie selection, though somehow on both legs I ended up next to men who couldn’t seem to keep their elbows on their side of the armrest.

Singapore was brief, and stormy. I arrived in the evening, had breakfast, and headed back to the airport to fly to Phnom Penh. Brief moment of panic when, because of the rains, all of the cab companies were fully booked, but E-Ching’s maid Maria managed to hail one off the street for me and I made it on time.

Next up was Phnom Penh. Frankly I wasn’t really sure what to expect from Cambodia going in. I was mainly there on the recommendation of friends and because when Borders was going out of business I found a Laos/Cambodia guidebook for cheap. It’s not a place you hear about much, or would generally thing to visit, probably largely given its fairly recent and entirely horrific political history. The Khmer Rouge were officially in power from 1975 until the Vietnamese invaded in 1979 and installed a government headed by Hun Sen, who’s still in charge 30 years later. But the civil war went on until Pol Pot finally died in 1998. It’s only since then that things have been relatively stable, if totalitarian. So its not surprising that Cambodia isn’t on the standard tourist route through Southeast Asia.

As it turns out, Cambodia is lovely. Phnom Penh was everything I’d hoped Bangkok would be – pleasant, walkable, friendly. Cambodians smile a lot, and the tuk-tuk drivers and trinket sellers will actually leave you alone after a no or two, unlike in a lot of other tourist-dependent economies. Phnom Penh actually felt more like Java than anywhere else I’ve been, if Java had more baguettes and monks and smelled like incense. Like Java, I took my life in my hands every time I tried to cross the street – good thing I learned the Indo way of doing it last summer in Malang (look the motorbike drivers in the eye, pray they go around you) or I’d still be standing on the corner by the hostel trying to get off the block. My hostel was a little place above an Irish pub, across the street from the national museum. For $14/night I got my own room and air conditioning. The first night I didn’t have the energy to do much but go find dinner. One of the first things I saw walking down the road by the river on Monday morning was half a discarded mangosteen husk – a good sign that I was going to like this country. On my way to a baguette breakfast I stumbled across a street market, and bargained my way into half a kilo of mangosteens for probably twice what they were worth but still very little. I wandered the main Central Market, then over to Wat Phnom, the temple in the center of the city. From there to lunch at Romdeng, an NGO that gives job training to street kids, where I ordered a dish of three deep-fried tarantulas with a lovely lemon pepper dipping sauce. Yes, I did just write ‘deep-fried tarantulas’. They were actually pretty good, though most of the flavor came from the spices. I started with the legs, since even though they were a little hairy, you didn’t have to think about what’s inside. The front end wasn’t bad either, though the fangs were definitely still attached. It was the back end that weirded me out, filled with stuff whose taste, color, and texture reminded me of the barbecue sauce left in the crevices of ribs after they’ve been cooked and before you slather a fresh layer on to eat them. Still good, but a bit of a mental hurdle. And if you ever come across a bag of Kampot peppercorns, do yourself a favor and buy some – that dipping sauce was fantastic.

The afternoon, once I’d had my siesta, was spent at the Royal Palace, a big Thai-style temple complex. Near the end I got caught in a downpour, which frankly was a relief after the humid heat of the day.

Next morning I caught the National Museum before taking a minibus up to Siem Reap. The five-hour drive north was fascinating, if rather longer than the ticket seller had told me. We went through the plains of central Indochina, all rice paddies and stilt houses and palm trees. More than once we had to stop while a cow or a water buffalo crossed the road. It’s not for the faint of stomach – contrary to my guidebook, the roads aren’t paved quite the whole way – but still a good way to see a bit of the countryside. By the time we got to Siem Reap it was pouring, and the roads looked like rivers. My hotel, Mandalay Inn, was run by a Burmese family, and the Burmese chicken curry I had that night in the hotel restaurant was pretty spectacular.

Apparently my Western stomach is so sensitive that just talking about street food is enough to make me sick, as I woke up the next morning a little under the weather. (Welcome to Southeast Asia!) I refuse to blame the hotel curry or the mangosteens from the market, on the ground that they were far to delicious to have any ill effects. Given that I was already a little off, I caved and bought a baguette sandwich from a cart for breakfast, which I ate on the hotel patio with a diet Coke. It’s amazing how good an ice-cold Coke can taste when it’s 8am and already hot as Hades, and you’re eating questionable street food. I have it on good (Mas Jake) authority that a can of Coke will smooth over many sins of questionably-sourced meals. I also now have good reason to believe that authority is wrong.

That day I headed out to the Angkor Wat temple complex, along with two other backpackers from the hotel and a guide to show us around. The temples are about 15 minutes by tuk-tuk out of town. Angkor Wat itself is the most famous, but the site covers all of 60 square miles. It’s currently the low season, so there’s far fewer tourists than at other, cooler, drier times of year, but there were still plenty of other people around. Angkor Wat is pretty impressive itself – 900 years old, covered in carvings of battles and scenes from the Vedas, there’s good reason they put it on the Cambodian flag. But I liked the smaller temples better. Ta Prohm, where they filmed Tomb Raider a few years back, is still half-collapsed and surrounded by jungle, with trees and vines growing out of the walls and through the roof. The best was Bayon. It started raining as soon as we got there, so the rest of the tourists cleared out and we got the place mostly to ourselves. 800-year-old stone temples, as it turns out, leak pretty badly in a good downpour. Bayon has 54 towers, each with four Buddha faces carved in them, facing the four directions. Walking up to Bayon, it looks like any other temple, with some towers and carved walls, and then as you get closer you realize that each of those towers is smiling at you. It’s incredibly serene, especially with the last of a cool rain coming down and nobody else around. Almost enough to make a Buddhist out of me.

By the time we got back to the hotel I was absolutely wiped, so I had the last of the mangosteens for dinner and crashed early. The next morning I woke up feeling like crap. My mystery-meat baguette come back to bite me, I expect. I spent most of the morning and a good chunk of the afternoon lolling in bed, napping and reading. (High point: in my quest for a light breakfast, I succumbed to backpacker cliché and discovered that my hotel makes the best banana pancakes I’ve yet found in SE Asia.) Whatever it was must have been bacterial, since some after-lunch antibiotics perked me up enough to go wander a bit through town.

One interesting thing about Cambodia (and Laos) is that US dollars are accepted, even preferred over the local currency. The whole country is like a giant dollar store – most of what you want to buy will cost you a buck. (Except an entry ticket to Angkor Wat, which’ll cost you twenty.) I walked through the craft market (ten postcards for a dollar, Kampot pepper for two), then over to Alley Street, the tourist area. If you read this blog last summer you know I can’t resist a good Dr. Fish foot spa, and for $2 for as long as you feel like staying I had to do it. Thanks to the evening’s downpour I ended up staying put for nearly two hours, and discovered the answer to a pressing question of backpackers everywhere – no, those fish never get bored of your feet. Two hours in and they were still going strong. Because I’m a pushover (and at that point a sitting target) I spent $7 on a painting by a kid with one leg and excellent English who said his favorite subject in school was math, and $1 on a bracelet from his sister, because how can you not? Dinner was bad Chinese food, then a stroll back to the hotel in the drizzle.

And this morning I packed up my stuff, had another plate of excellent pancakes (pineapple this time; they were out of bananas), and got on a plane to Laos. I’m currently sitting in a hut by the Nam Khan River, getting eaten alive by mosquitoes despite a heavy dose of DEET. But more on that later.

And we begin again...

Another summer, another chance to escape Pacific-wards. Tomorrow I finish packing, scrub my apartment, and scan a few library books, then hop a train to New York for some Xi'an Famous Foods and tickets to Anything Goes. Thursday I fly Emirates Air to Singapore via Dubai. And that's where it gets fun.


View Asia Tenggara 2011 (1) in a larger map

I'm lucky enough to have a Singaporean friend, E-ching, whose family's house I can crash at for a night. Then the next morning I'm off to Phnom Penh, followed by Siem Reap to see Angkor Wat, Luang Prabang in northern Laos, a quick stop in Vientiane, a day in Kuala Lumpur, and finally to Indonesia. First up is Jogyakarta, to get my head back in Indoland, visit some friends from last year, and see the Borobudor temples. Then Malang, for two linguistics conferences and more catching up with last summer's friends. And finally, around June 27th, I'm off to Papua. Up until Malang it's vacation - may as well see some sights while I'm in the area, and I hear Laos has some killer baguettes. As the crow flies from Luang Prabang to Manokwari is actually awfully close to the distance from New York City to San Francisco, but whatever, close enough.

The whole point of this trip, of course, is the fieldwork in Papua. I'll be spending about six weeks in Manokwari, talking to speakers of Wandamen, spoken by about 5,000 people, and trying to figure out what makes it tick. Many many thanks to David Gil at the Max Planck Institute's field station in Jakarta and the linguists at the CELD in Manokwari for making it all possible.

Papua of course is the 'exotic' part. It's Indonesia's eastern frontier, where until awfully recently there were headhunters and cannibals, and they still prefer yams to rice and, in some areas, still rock the penis gourd as everyday dress. (Googling 'Papua penis gourds' gets you photos of West Papuan highlanders, Martha Stewart, and Mike Huckabee. Go figure.) There's just over a thousand languages spoken on the island of New Guinea, and around 275 on the half that belongs to Indonesia. (Fun fact: New Guinea the second largest island in the world, after Greenland. Obviously they're not counting Australia.) The geographical nomenclature is about as confusing as it possible could be. New Guinea is the entire island, which comprises the country of Papua New Guinea (former British/Australian colony) in the east and the Indonesian region of Papua or West Papua (former Dutch colony) in the west. The Indonesian side is made up of two provinces, Papua and West Papua. Yes, those are both also names for the whole Indonesian half. The whole thing used to be called Irian Jaya, and the province of West Papua was West Irian Jaya (or Irian Jaya Barat), but that's now obsolete. I'll use Papua or Indonesian Papua to refer to the whole region, and West Papua to mean the region I'm in. West Papua covers the Bird's Head (Vogelkopf) Peninsula; Papua is everything east of that to the PNG border.

Manokwari, the city where I'll be staying, is right on the back of the Vogelkopf on Cenderewasih Bay. It doesn't have headhunters or cannibals; it does have tree kangaroos and hopefully not too much malaria. I'm told the snorkeling is great, and there's a rainforest to hike in just outside the city. It's the regional capitol, so there's an airport. Population is roughly 100,000.

After Manokwari it's back to vacation to decompress a little before I come back to the States and analyze 6 weeks of data. I'm thinking scuba on Pulau Sipidan and oranghutan watching in Sabah and Sarawak (Malaysian Borneo), but that's still up in the air. Home to New Haven on August 21st.

Some Further Reading:
The best site out there on Manokwari: http://wwwstaff.eva.mpg.de/~gil/wlp/2/about_Manokwari.html
The CELD: www.celd-papua.net
New Guinea: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Guinea
276 languages: www.ethnologue.com/show_country.asp?name=IDP
Papuan Spiders (a ways east of me, but still terrifying): www.flickr.com/photos/thirnbeck/476286834/in/set-72157594506163619/
Penis Gourds: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koteka
A map with labels: http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?hl=&ie=UTF8&msa=0&msid=208051619672953261737.0004a49dffe535e3a656e&ll=5.965754,128.056641&spn=39.826648,86.572266&z=4

Puravidaville

November 27^th, 2010, Juan Santamaria airport, San Jose, Costa Rica

Post 2 of 2 re: my tropical Thanksgiving getaway. Luckily for you, dear readers (assuming you exist), I'm at the gate roughly 6 hours early for my flight home, so this'll likely be a long one, to keep me entertained til boarding. Buckle up.

Shortly after my last post, I caught a bus from Colón into San Jose, a cab to the other bus terminal, ans then another bus out to Monteverde, a cloud forest reserve to the north, right on the Continental Divide. What was supposed to be a 5-hour ride turned into seven hours when we hit a mudslide. Not literally – it was a few kilometers ahead of us when traffic came to a dead stop. We sat, we waited, fruit vendors came on board and sold grapes, and finally one of them announced, in English, that they were blowing up a boulder in the road ahead and the wait would be about two hours. [collective groan.] Not entirely surprising, as mudslides and road closings are pretty common in Costa Rica after a big rain, and as it's right now getting near the end of the wet season, there's been rather a bit of precipitation lately. In other words, the boulders are a-rollin'. It was only about an hour and a half's delay, all told, and thank you Terry Gross for keeping me occupied through it. When we finally got to the work area it was pretty clear there was more than just a boulder being cleared; from the looks of things half a mountain or so of dirt had been scooped off the pavement.

At Monteverde – or rather, Santa Elena, the next town over, where all the carless tourists stay – I had three nights booked at Cabinas Vista al Golfo, in a package that came with a canopy tour and a night hike. Nice little place, if you're ever out there. On the bus out I'd run into Sunny, a classmate of Samantha's at Upeace, and her friend Lizzie, visiting from Georgia, and they decided to Stay at Vista al Golfo as well. New favorite drink, courtesy of the two of them – coconut milk, light rum, sugar, ice. And much needed after that bus ride, I have to say.

The birds woke me up at 6am Wednesday morning, and Lizzie and I caught a 7:30 canopy tour while Sunny stayed back and wrote a term paper. Turns out ziplines are awesome. The Tarzan swing I could have maybe done without – for those who haven't done it, you clip your harness to the end of a long rope hanging from a tree above, jump off a 40-foot-high platform, swing out over the forest, and scream like a girl. The ziplines, though, totally worth it. A piece of advice: whenever possible, book the 7:30am tour – our group had three people in it and moved along nicely; the 10am tour had 20 people and likely didn't. I hear the 1pm group was up to 33. No thank you.

12:30, so I'm taking a lunch break. The options are Church's Chicken, Schlotszky's Deli, Burger King, or Cinnabon. I should have gotten a posado to go at the soda where I had breakfast. Oh well. Brb.

$12 for a bag of Kettle chips and what, once I pulled off all the parts that had been contaminated with mustard, which the man at the counter neglected to mention in his otherwise thorough listing of ingredients (“what is 'the original, anyway?”), turned out to be roughly half of a ham-and-cheese sandwich from Schlotszky's. The Cinnebon helped, but I'm not even going to tell you what that cost me. Airports are ridiculous.

Anyway, Monteverde.

When the shuttle dropped us back at the hotel Sunny was still working on her paper, so Lizzie & I decided to walk back along the road towards the town of Monteverde. The views were gorgeous, though the hills were steep. We stuck our heads in a few art galleries, in one of which I spent far too much money on a gorgeous pair or earrings and a Costa Rican cookbook (I told you the food was good), and bought some handmade local chocolates at a cafe. (New truffle flavor: passionfruit.) We walked as far as the cheese factory, run by the American Quakers who settled the town in the 1950's while trying to avoid the Korean War, then turned around and met Sunny for lunch at a delicious, if somewhat upscale, 'nueva latina' restaurant. I had pork-and-plantain fritters, black bean soup, and ginger lemonade. Sophia's, the place was called. I'd go back for sure.

After lunch they took a cab back to the hotel to catch their shuttle to Mt Arenal, a volcano about 3 hours away where they were spending a few days. I took a leisurely stroll home, where I stopped at the Serpentarium and paid $9 to see a roomful of poisonous snakes in glass cages. Those were the only snakes I saw on the trip, and frankly I'm okay with that. Vipers are one species I'm okay with not meeting in the wild.

That evening was my night hike at the Santamaria reserve. It rained. A guide named Oscar showed me and four Germans around the trails, pointing out sleeping birds and insects and the occasional larger wildlife. Highlights were a mother two-toed sloth and her baby, a tree full of coatimundis, and a tarantula in a pipe. Very neat.

One of the perks of being a linguist: while my Spanish vocabulary at this point consists of the numbers on to ten, 'hola', 'gracias', and 'bien', I seem to have gotten good enough at saying those and at deciphering the usual greetings to convince people I speak Spanish, at least for a while. Which is pretty fun. Knowing Italian doesn't hurt, either, when it comes to pronunciation and reading menus. After my summer in Java I could barely get a word of Italian out; it felt like it had been painted over in my brain by the Indonesian. (Apparently I only have one slot available for languages starting with 'I'.) But all this Spanish seems to have excavated it again, hopefully not to the detriment of the Indonesian, though I guess I'll find out in class on Tuesday if I start coming out with 'buon giorno' instead of 'selamat siang'. (Though I did get to practice a bit with Samantha, when she turned to me at the Dutch ambassador's house and started speaking Indonesian so as not to be overheard. Do you know how cool it is to be able to turn and have a conspiratorial conversation in Indonesian at a diplomatic reception? Let me tell you: it's pretty fuckin' cool.)

Thursday morning, Thanksgiving, I took my own advice and booked a 7:30am guided tour of the Monteverde reserve itself. An older American couple and I spent three hours with our guide, who was incredibly knowledgeable about the park and everything in it. Again, more bugs, more birds, a coati at close range, and, after a number of false alarms, a quetzal. Quetzals are gorgeous birds, with a blue head, red breast, and long iridescent green tail feathers. They're native to the park, but apparently during the rainy season they decamp to drier climes, so we were lucky to spot one. How the guides spotted it (and half the other things they saw) is utterly beyond me; even after watching it through their telescope I couldn't find it again on my own. We also spotted a pair of howler monkeys, mother and baby again, eating lunch in a tree. Apparently howlers like to throw poo at people walking underneath; luckily we were far enough away to avoid that. And at the end was a hummingbird sanctuary, with roughly 10 of the 30 native species darting around, dive-bombing tourists, and swarming the feeders. The photos are great.

It was still morning when the tour ended, so after refueling with a cup of tea I headed back into the reserve and hiked a bit on my own. I didn't see nearly the amount of wildlife as before, though I'm sure it was there, but the plants and flowers and insects I did see were pretty stunning nonetheless. I went over a bridge suspended through the canopy and up to an observation point, La Ventana, where on a clear day you can see the Gulf of Nicoya on one side and Mt Arenal on the other. Well it wasn't a clear day, so I could see about 20 feet in any direction into a solid wall of cloud. Almost reminded me of the north of Scotland, with the mist and the wind. But it was a beautiful hike. Not a bad way to spend Thanksgiving – sure beats the hell out of watching old Bond movies and mashing potatoes, that's for sure.

At that point I'd had just about enough of that, so I decided to walk back to the hotel, which was a terrible idea. After a 3-hour nature walk and a roughly 5-km hike, a 6-km walk down a bumpy dirt road added up to more miles walked in one day than I'd really like to think about, and my feet reminded me of that every step of the way. And it rained. Started about 5 minutes in, continued in fits and starts the whole rest of the way. About halfway home I stopped at a bakery for lunch. No turkey available, so I had a chicken-and-veggie empanada and a sweet potato pastel. Close enough. And naturally, with aching feet, in the rain, I missed the turn into Santa Elena. The road I ended up on did take me to my hotel, but not particularly directly. The rest of the afternoon, in true Thanksgiving form, consisted of a nap.

Friday morning I moved on from the cloud forest to the volcano, Mt Arenal. My hotel offered a package with transport there, a volcano tour, hotsprings, and a night at a hotel in La Fortuna, which sounded to me like not a bad way to end the trip. The transport over was what's known here as 'jeep-boat-jeep': tourist shuttle over godawful bumpy roads to Lake Arenal, ferry across, and another shuttle into town. The roads on the first leg rivaled those in Java for sheer size and number of potholes – they make Rachel Carson Way look like a freshly-zambonied ice rink in comparison – but the scenery was gorgeous, especially on the lake. After an excellent posada lunch at a soda in town, the hotel drove me and a Dutch couple out to the Baldi spa for a 2-hour soak in the hot springs before another shuttle brought us to the volcano for our hike. Another fantastic guide – his name is Franklin, if you're ever in town – pointed out all the medicinal plants along the route (did you know a tea made from impatients is good for fever?), which ran through some rainforest and then up the lava flow from the major 1968 eruption, which destroyed two villages and first announced that this wasn't just another docile mountain. Since then Arenal's been one of the most active volcanoes in the hemisphere, and most of the time you can see lava oozing from its crater. Unless, of course, it's the rainy season, in which case you can see clouds. Oh well. But we hiked as far up the side as is allowed, which given how active the volcano is still leaves you about a kilometer from the crater, but is still pretty cool. On the way up we saw toucans and wild turkeys, and at the bottom, just after dark, gorgeous jewel-toned tree frogs. Costa Rican wildlife checklist complete. From there back to Baldi for dinner and another few hours in the hot springs. I hadn't realized earlier just how far back the complex went, and this time I and another girl from the hike, a geologist from Vancouver, discovered some waterslides and a spectacular hot pool with a waterfall and underwater lounge chairs. Worth missing the football for.

And then, this morning, I caught an 8am (carbon neutral – love this country) tourist shuttle back into San Jose to the airport. My transport options were that or a 4-hour bus leaving at noon, so if I was to catch my 5:30 flight I didn't have much choice but to show up very, very early. But they let me check my bag right off the bat, and between writing, reading my latest John le Carre, and browsing the souvenir shops for free chocolate samples (of which there are many), it's now about 10 minutes to boarding. I land in JFK around 2am, SuperShuttle back to the apartment, and stay for lunch and a Sunday matinee of Patrick Stewart's latest Broadway appearance before heading home tomorrow. So, until my next foray into interesting foreign places, adieu.

Welcome to Costa Rica

Question #1: Why do I always manage to catch a cold in the tropics? This one is mild, thank goodness, not like the monster I caught in Thailand that nearly made my head explode on the flight home. Three days later and I'm mostly back to normal. Still, I don't get it.

At the moment I'm in Ciudad Colon, not far from San Jose, Costa Rica. The big lesson so far: whenever possible when traveling, go stay with someone who lives in the country in question, particularly if the happen to be affiliated with a university which happens to be affiliated with the UN, like the University for Peace here in Colon, where my friend Samantha happens to be a student. Major perks. The rundown so far:

My plane to San Jose left JFK at 5am Friday morning, so I booked a Supershuttle to pick me up just before midnight at the apartment. Everyone else would be sound asleep by 10, I figured, so why not get out of the house early and catch a few hours' sleep at the gate rather than staying up late to wait for a shuttle at some ungodly morning hour, or worse yet trying to wake up at 2am to catch it. Well, that didn't work. My first mistake was a rather strong rum drink at Cuba Cafe with Monika earlier that evening, which made even midnight a difficult target to stay up for. I slept in the van on the way in, but when I got to JFK the security checkpoint to my gate was closed. Terminal 4 has a nice shopping concourse down an escalator from check-in but still outside security, so I wasn't stuck by the doors to outside (unlike a similar early-morning flight experience going to Bermuda senior year), but the concourse was bustling enough with airport workers and families taking 2 or 3am flights to god knows where - their gates, unfortunately, were behind different security points than mine - that sleep was impossible. The store just down the corridor whose theft alarm kept going off didn't help either.

(Side note - I was chilly there, so I wrapped my scarf around my head to keep warm. I definitely got some less-than-comfortable looks from passers-by. And yes, I took it off before I went through security - 3am enhanced TSA patdowns were not high on my to-do list.)

Just after 3 security opened to my gate. Surprisingly enough they didn't question the block of tempeh in my carryon. That would have been a fun explanation: "Well, officer, it's kinda like chunky tofu... Yes, you eat it. Well, I do anyway." Boarding was just after 4, and 5am we were in the air. I was out cold.

Copa Airlines isn't bad, by the way. The food's no better than you'd get on, say, Delta, but they give you real metal silverware, which I appreciate, and the leg room's no worse than any other coach seat. I'd fly them again.

Quick layover in Panama City and I got in to San Jose at around 11:30am local time. Taxi to Samantha's, and I chatted with the landlady for a bit until she & her fiance, Arvil, got home from class. After lunch we took the bus up the mountain to the UPeace campus, which is lovely. That night was an Asian cultural night, with food and performances from all over the continent. This being a UN school, they actually have students from quite a few countries - including one from Kyrgystan, whose food tasted Russian, full of dill (not that that's a bad thing), but whose traditional dress was awesome. From Indonesia there was a poco-poco dance and chicken sate; Samantha and I both wore batik.

Saturday morning we went to the market and had lunch at a soda, a traditional Costa Rican cafe-type place. The food here is nothing spectacular, lots of rice and beans and avocados and fried plantains, but it's good in a low-key sort of way. I had a drink made from the cas fruit, which tasted like the love child of a guanabana and a grapefruit. In other words, delicious. That night was a surprise 50th birthday party for the landlady, complete with a mariachi band, giant dancing traditional puppets, and the most spectacular birthday cake I've ever seen, all for about 80 of her closest friends and family. The puppets were the best part, big cloth-covered wire constructions that sat on the wearers shoulders with big paper-mache heads shaped like skulls, devils, policemen, and in one case, no head at all but just a bloody neck. The point seemed to be that they twirled and jogged around to the music and chased people, and occasionally snuck up behind you and bent down and tapped their head against you in an indescribably unsettling way. The pictures came out great.

Sunday was rainy and cool so we stayed in, struggled mightily to get some work done, and watched the Star Trek movie. Monday Samantha & Arvil had 6 hours of class, so I took a bus into San Jose. I saw the jade museum and the museum of pre-Columbian gold, which were pretty neat, and the central market, which wasn't bad, and wandered around for just long enough to realize that San Jose isn't that great a city, and took the bus back. That evening was a reception for UPeace students at the Dutch ambassador's house (again, the perks of UN affiliation), and they were nice enough to invite me along. Good wine, good hors d'oeuvres, a productive chat with one of the professors, and I get to say I went to the Dutch ambassador's house in Costa Rica. Not bad at all.

And today: packing, mostly, then at 2:30 I get on a bus up to the Monteverde cloud forest reserve. I was hoping for the beach but it's supposed to be rainy all week, so I figured I may as well go somewhere where the humidity's always 100% regardless, so what's a little rain gonna do? Already got the zipline canopy tour booked. Will post later re: monkeys & such.

Southeast Asia in a Kelapashell

This is gonna be a long one...


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Jakarta: The Big Durian

Funny it's called that, because Singapore, despite their best efforts, smells more like durian than Jakarta does. Then again, all of SE Asia smells like durian, so it's really just a matter of degree down there.

Anyway, I showed up in Jakarta on Thursday afternoon. At the airport I met another backpacker who pointed me towards the bus into town – I was headed for a taxi. His hotel was on the same block as mine so we decided to walk together from the bus stop. The problem was getting there. I would stop every so often and ask for directions in Indonesian, and get a response in Indonesian, and rather than following them he would then stop too and spend five minutes trying to ask the same person for the same directions in English, which in Indonesia doesn't work so well. Me: “he said we turn right at the next street.” Him: “Excuse me, how do we get to hotel Ibis?” Guy on the street: “What? I don't speak English.” (Much pantomiming and pointing to maps.) 5 minutes later: Him: “Ok, I think we turn right at the next block.” Me: “Oh really?” When we got there he asked me to find him on Facebook. Not likely.

My hotel, the Akmani, was awfully nice, way better than you could find in the States for that price. Jenny, a friend of mine from CLS, was in Jakarta for the week doing research, so we split the room. She said Jakarta reminded her of LA, and given that she lives there I'm inclined to believe her. As far as I could tell it was another Malang, if you made Malang 13 times bigger, with 50 times the traffic and some skyscrapers. It's big, grimy but modern, and sprawling, and the gridlock lived up to every horrifying rumor I'd heard. I didn't get to see much of the city, just wandered a bit around the backpacker district near our hotel before dinner than night and went down to Atma Jaya University for my meeting on Friday. The Mex Planck Institute in Leipzig has a field station at Atma Jaya where they do a lot of documentary work around Indonesia of the same kind I hope to start doing next summer, so it seemed prudent to drop by while I was in the country. I had lunch with the researchers there and got a lot of good advice on where to go and who to talk to – the deal in Indonesia seems to be that you pick what kind of climate you want, what kind of food you like, whether you want to be in a city or a village with beaches or mountains, and once you find a place fitting your criteria you're pretty much guaranteed to find a documentable language there too. Not bad. Getting home was an adventure – that damn traffic – and that night Jenny & I had dinner with a friend of Linda's.

Kuala Lumpur: Garden City of Lights

Saturday I flew back to Singapore – entry stamp #2 on my passport. The plan was to take a sleeper train to Kuala Lumpur that night, but I didn't feel like dealing with trains then so instead I went over to the AirAsia counter and bought a plane ticket up instead. Three hours later we took off – an hour late – and it was 1AM by the time I'd landed and taken a bus into the city. KL is like Jakarta in that if where you're going is more than two blocks from where you are don't bother to ask directions, cause nobody knows where anything is and you'll get three contradictory answers from three different people, so finding the hostel was a challenge. After about 40 minutes of wandering around Chinatown in a drizzle I finally managed to locate it. Not well marked (the hostel and the streets. Southeast Asia really needs to work on their street labeling.) My room was a little windowless cubby with barely enough room for the double bed and a fan on the ceiling, but at that point I was so tired I could have slept on the floor and not cared. The hostel turned out to be reasonably nice in the daylight, and they let me leave my stuff there while I wandered around the city all day.

If Singapore is like Miami and Jakarta is LA, then KL is like New York City, if New York had mosques instead of churches and palm trees instead of honey locusts. It was a place I could see myself living if the opportunity arose. I did a full tour of the city, or as close as you can get in a day. First up was Chinatown, which was far more interesting of a place in the daylight. From there I went over to the Central Market, where I bought some batik and did the fish spa again. In Bali the fish were tiny; if you were an Indonesian you might dry them and sprinkle them over your rice. In KL they were big enough to grill up and serve as appetizers, maybe three or four to a plate at a nice restaurant. When it comes to fish spas size does matter – in Bali it felt like a mass of little electric shocks, but here I could feel every little bite like a sandpaper suction cup on my foot. Not painful by any means, but certainly odd. And the big ones are far more efficient too – ten minutes with them had the same effect as half an hour with the little Balinese critters. After walking around in sandals all summer I certainly could have used more time, but there was lots left to see in the city so I moved on.

Next up was the MRT to the Petronas Towers. For the record, SE Asia kicks our ass when it comes to subway-type public transport. Faster, cleaner, cheaper. Case in point: Singapore, KL, Bangkok (both underground and skytrain). Even Jakarta's got dedicated lanes for city buses that zip right along when the rest of the traffic is at a dead standstill; they just need way more routes.

Anyway – the Petronas towers look huge, not because they're actually that huge but because SE Asia is short, both the people and the buildings. I don't think there's anything in Malang over six or seven stories, and even in the real cities the average building isn't over four. (Compare this to Manhattan, where anything under ten looks stunted). What with the Sears Tower and Taipei 101 and that new monstrosity in Dubai, Petronas comes in somewhere in the top 10 of tallest buildings in the world, depending whether you're counting by roof height or the top of the spires or antennae or what. Anyway, they're a landmark, and they look pretty cool from below. Tickets to the skybridge at the top are free but there's a limited number each day. On this particular day they ran out at 11:30am, and I showed up at 11:45. Damn. Still, I got to see the gift shop.

From there I decided to walk back towards Chinatown, which is an awfully long walk, especially in the tropics in August. First stop along the way was a tourist/cultural center, notable mostly for its air conditioning and public restrooms. Next door to that was a chocolate shop, which of course I had to visit. I apparently got there just after a big group of Chinese tourists, so I followed them around the store for the free samples. The coconut chocolates were (or course) delicious; the sesame/white chocolate ones were surprisingly good; and the durian truffles were about as horrendous as they sound. I've now tried durian as a cake, as a shake, and in chocolate, and it's official – it's gross. Fruit shouldn't taste like onions, onions shouldn't taste like fruit, and oniony fruit should never come near chocolate. Amen.

In the middle of KL there's a jungle called the KLCC Park . If this were New York it would be Central Park, but since it's Malaysia it's a jungle. It's centered on a hill with some hiking paths, and at the top is the KL Tower. I hiked my way up to the tower but didn't feel like paying the equivalent of about seventeen bucks for a ticket to the top, so instead I had some mediocre Indian food at the base and kept walking. It's an odd feeling, coming out of a jungle path and immediately being faced with a big ol' tourist attraction, complete with overpriced cafes, pony rides, and a flight simulator. Then five minutes later you're back in the forest, watching out for poisonous snakes with nary a soul in sight. At the bottom, back on the main road, was a forest conservation center, and out front were two museum staff, three tourists, and a monkey, who was climbing all over them. This particular monkey, it turns out, was about nine months old and named Norah. She may well have been a macaque, though I couldn't swear to it. The story is that she came from the park but was orphaned and adopted by the conservation center staff. When I first arrived she was sitting on top of a trash bin at about eye height. She took one look at me, got a look on her face like a cat about to pounce, and launched herself at my head. It was my sunglasses – never wear anything shiny when there's a friendly monkey around. She grabbed them and ran, then sat on the ground playing with them for a while before the staff managed to get them back. After being warned that she also likes to eat earrings I took out my dangles, but apparently that wasn't enough – in her next attack, Norah went straight for my ear and pulled out a stud. I managed to grab her hand before she could eat it, and we wrestled for a while before I got it back. But once I'd taken off the rest of my earrings and my watch she was a lot of fun. Baby monkeys are adorable.

From there I kept walking. I saw the Independence Plaza, where the first Malaysian flag was raised after independence in the sixties, got caught in a rainstorm outside the country club where Somerset Maugham used to drink (still members-only inside; I had to wait under the awning for the storm to let up), went into the Jamek Mosque (brought my own headscarf and jacket to avoid having to wear their ridiculous robes), just missed visiting the National Mosque, and got lost a few times. At 8pm I caught a train three hours south to Gemas, and from there started my trek north.

The Perhentian Islands: Pulau Surga

From Gemas the next morning I took the Jungle Line up through central Malaysia to Wakaf Bahru for the Perhentian Islands. There's an overnight train, but I'd read that the scenery was spectacular so I settled in for a long ride on the day train instead. It did not disappoint. At Wakaf Bahru I split a cab with a couple of other backpackers to Kuala Besut, a little town on the coast with ferries over to the islands. That province of Malaysia is especially conservative, and it's Ramadhan, so we had to wait another half hour for evening prayers to finish before the hotels and restaurants opened for the night. Dinner was delicious – thank you E-Ching for introducing me to the Malaysian/Singaporean deliciousness that is roti canai pisang, or a buttery chapati-style Indian flatbread filled with bananas and dipped in curry sauce. The hotel, not so much. What's with Malaysian hotel rooms not having windows? That's three for three. Which isn't that big a deal except that the bathroom smelled of mildew – this being SE Asia it was one of those tile rooms with a drain in the corner and a shower head next to the toilet, but instead of tilting towards the drain the floor just sagged in the middle, so the water never really went away. Bravo on the engineering there. The sink took its cue from the floor and didn't drain either. Classy place.

The next morning we got up to get to the pier at 6:30 for a ferry which, of course, didn't leave til 7:30. Ramadhan still, so no breakfast available. The “ferry” was a largish speedboat, and in about half an hour we pulled up to the pier at Coral Bay, the smaller and quieter of the two main beaches. Most places there were fully booked, even on a Tuesday morning, but I managed to find a little cabin – with attached bathroom! - for about $20/night.

Everything I'd read about the Perhentians described them as low-key, undiscovered, and underdeveloped, with gorgeous beaches and world-class diving, what Ko Tao in Thailand used to be before it got overrun with tourists (and before its namesake turtles decided it was too crowded for their taste and moved to Perhentian instead). I'd actually originally planned to go to Ko Tao, but decided tht this sounded more my style. I was right. There's two islands, Perhentian Kecil (the small one) and Perhentian Besar (the big one). Kecil, where I stayed, is cheaper and has more going on; Besar is quieter and more expensive. There's no roads, no cars, no motorbikes; just a bunch of speedboats between the islands and brick paths through the jungle to get from one beach to the other. No ATMs and few places that take credit cards, so bring your ringgits in cash. Guests are mostly European backpackers and a couple of Canadians – I don't think I met another American the whole time I was there. Two months in Java and a childhood of summer in the Adirondacks were good preparation for a week in the Perhentians – most places, mine included, have no wifi, no AC, no hot water, and electricity only twelve hours a day, so you can turn on the lights and the fan at night. It was, shall we say, bare-bones. (For the less-rugged, there's at least one or two places with all the modern comforts, but you do pay for them.) That said, if you've been sweating in the sun all day, and the water's been heated by the sun all day, a nice cool shower before dinner is actually pretty refreshing, and it cools down enough at night that a fan and open windows do the trick. It was a nice balance, a place where I could be alone after two months of constant group time in Malang but not isolated, since everyone from the guy at the shop where I bought my bottled water and paid for my room to the staff at the dive shop and the other divers and snorkelers were all super-friendly, so I was never lacking for conversation if I wanted it.

There's really nothing to do on the island other than eat, sleep, swim, and relax on the beach, so I did a lot of all four. My first day, after finally finding breakfast – no Ramadhan in a tourist economy – I found a snorkeling trip. In six hours we hit up five sites plus lunch at the fishing village on Besar. I'd been bowled over last year by snorkeling off the beach in Zihuatenejo; well Mexico's got nothing on Malaysia. The islands are surrounded by spectacular coral reefs and ringed by big granite boulders on the shoreline, which means that nearly anything that swims in that part of the world lives there. As my diving guide said later on, open up the fish identification book, close your eyes and point to something; chances are you just saw it underwater. There was a sea turtle, spotted rays, two black-tipped sharks, barracuda, sergeant majors, giant sea slugs, urchins, anemones with clownfish, angelfish, butterflyfish, normal parrotfish, giant bumphead parrotfish, mackerel, yellow boxfish, and plenty of other brightly-colored critters that I have no idea what they were. (The picture of the spotted ray was indeed taken at the Perhentians, but not by me - I pulled it off the internet.) There were even some monkeys on the shoreline at one point. My underwater camera had nowhere near enough shots on it; I can only hope some of them came out. (Mom? Dad? Christmas? Digital?) Of course there was a catch, which in this case was that the water-resistant sunscreen I'd slathered on actually resisted the water for about half a second before it ran screaming, and I got nicely seared all along my back and the backs of my legs. I'm talking Maine lobster red; sitting down was seriously painful for several days afterwards.

That didn't stop me from going scuba diving five times over the next three days though. Good luck getting so much as a freckle when you're 30+ feet down and wearing a wetsuit (though getting that wetsuit on and off was less than fun). The diving there is cheap, and even more spectacular than the snorkeling, especially after my second dive when the divemaster fixed my mask so it wouldn't fog up anymore and I could actually see. I ended up at a dive shop about three minutes' walk from my cabin, run by a Canadian named Shane with excellent abs. If I were Elizabeth Gilbert we would have fallen in love and had a passionate international affair; as is I admired his abs in the boat and wondered a bit if there was anything more than bubbles between his ears. In any case he was an excellent guide, and over the next few days I saw everything I'd seen snorkeling but closer up this time, along with huge porcupine pufferfish, triggerfish, nudibranch, wrasse, a Jenkin's ray, and again plenty of other gorgeous things whose names I've forgotten. All that time and money I spent getting certified last semester – totally worth it. I was supposed to leave for Thailand on Friday morning, but they were doing a dive to a pretty incredible site called the Temple of the Sea that day – 24 meters deep! Great fish! - so I stuck around an extra day.

The rest of my time was spent stretched out in the shade reading. Over the course of the summer I got through all three Steig Larsson books. My advice: read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The writing's a little awkward, and he name-drops brands left and right, but the plot's good. Skip the other two. Once he started getting into defected Russian spies and giants who feel no pain, he lost me. What is this, John Le Carre meets Carl Hiassen in Sweden? They both do it better. Stick to your little locked-room mysteries, Steig.

And the food. Not mind-blowing, like Singapore or Bangkok, but stick to the curries and the roti and you'll do pretty well. Anywhere in SE Asia with backpackers will have banana pancakes, which are worth a go, even if, like in Bali, they're more thick crepes than pancakes. Actually, the best ones I had were lime rather than banana. This being the tropics the juices were great, of course – two that stand out in particular were a bright purple dragon fruit on blended with ice and a carrot/apple/lime/honey, but I went through plenty of watermelon and soursop too. (Why are things like soursop and dragon fruit so hard to find in the US? And forget about mangosteen. If you want good fruit, go to SE Asia.) And every restaurant had an evening barbeque, with chicken and various kinds of just-caught fish grilled over coals and served with your choice of sauce. Again, go for the curry. I don't know what's in it – coconut milk, turmeric, deliciousness – but damn it's good. There's plenty of pizza and pasta and such on the island as well, but I don't know why you'd bother. Unless they put curry on top...

And I should say a word about the wildlife on the island. Fish, yes, and I mentioned the monkeys, though I only saw them from afar. Plenty of stray cats, this being Asia. But what sticks with me is the monitor lizards. You've seen them in zoos; they're related to Komodo dragons, carnivorous, and according to Wikipedia often smart enough to count. Luckily they're also reasonably scared of people. I surprised one lounging near the trail between the beaches one afternoon; it saw me and bolted. It was moving fast but I'd put it at around five feet long, which is entirely possible (again, according to Wiki). There was a smaller one, maybe three feet, that liked to hang around near my cabin and under my porch, which wasn't too disconcerting until I watched it march across the path and climb a tree. If it can climb a tree it can climb a porch. Or a cabin. And I'd heard something skittering around my roof the night before, which may or may not have been a cat. And I sleep with the windows open...

Bangkok: The Big Mango (who comes up with these nicknames, anyway?)

Saturday morning I finally tore myself away from the islands – and I was running out of cash; thank goodness the dive shop took Mastercard – and headed for the Thai border. 8Am ferry back to Kuala Besut, then I split an hour and a half long cab ride to the border town on Sungai Kolok. ($15 each. New York City this ain't.) You stamp out at a window on the Malaysian side, cross a bridge over the Golok river, and stamp in on the Thai side. From there it's a half-mile walk to the train station, and a 20-hour train ride in a first-class air-conditioned sleeper car to Bangkok. Or so I thought, based on the reading I'd done. Actually, on that particular day at least, it's a 24-hour ride on a fan-cooled train with seats that lean back a little. But I'll get to that. I arrived around 10am Thai time and my train wasn't til 2:20 (in reality 3:15, since when does anything happen on time in that part of the world?), so I wandered around a bit. I passed a market and decided to buy a bunch of bananas, since who knew what the food situation on the train would be and besides, southern Thailand is very Muslim and it was still Ramadhan, so there might not be anything til sunset. Thank god I did, too. I found a place serving lunch (heathens!) and talked to some Malay highschoolers while I ate. That close to the border everyone speaks Malay, which is nearly the same as Indonesian, so I got by just fine.

The train, when it finally arrived, was reasonably comfortable, at least for the first few hours. A few stops in someone handed me a note: “Hello, It's nice to meet you. I would like to talk with you. -Thailand” Well you know what, Thailand? I'd like to have a talk with you, too. First of all, this train. Special express, says the website? Then why are we stopping in every little podunk town between here and Bangkok? And it's hot and humid here – no more cool mountain air – even with the fans going and the windows open I'm sweating like nothing else. What happened to my AC? And my sleeper car, while we're at it? I was expecting a bed tonight, not a plastic-upholstered slightly-reclining chair. Also, Bangkok. Great temples and all, and the food's incredible, but why do I feel like I'm being constantly scammed? No, the government isn't subsidizing tuk-tuk rides specially today; you just get a cheaper ride if the driver takes you to a shopping center along the way because that way he gets a free gas card. So why do people keep telling me this? No, man on the corner, the temples and the subway aren't closed til 3pm for cleaning on Mondays, actually everything's up and running normally. Thanks for that. It may have actually been a Buddhist holiday, but frankly I'm starting to doubt it. National Fuck With The Tourist Day, maybe. (That can't be good karma.) And so on. Look, if you don't want me here just say so, alright? All this smiling and lying is not cool. (No, I didn't go talk to the guy with the note.)

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Thailand is beautiful, and large, and apparently full of cows, even more so than Malaysia. The whole place smells like delicious food; even when we were passing through nasty industrial zones on the outskirts of Bangkok somehow the smell wafting in through the windows was of lunch. The food situation on the train was less fantastic. Every so often people would walk down the aisles selling drinks, snacks, and sometimes meals in styrofoam containers. The problem of course, aside from the usual concerns about street food in tropical climates, being that I had no idea what was in them (and in this part of the world you really do want to know), no way to ask, and no way to understand the answer. Same goes for the price. So I ate bananas and coconut cookies. Again, thank god for those bananas. At one point in the morning a guy went past selling omelets over rice (with a cellophane top, so I could see it). I was hungry and getting sick of bananas, so I pointed, handed him what I assumed was too large a bill, and got what I hope was the right amount of change. It was an awfully good egg.

The southern provinces of Thailand, as I mentioned before, are Muslim to the rest of the country's Buddhism, and there's some separatist groups trying not entirely peacefully to win independence, so for the first eight or nine hours each car had a couple soldiers with machine guns for safety. Yeah, that makes me feel real good about my travel plans. It was mostly uneventful – a couple of times the train stopped in the middle of nowhere and the soldiers stuck their heads & guns out the window to look around, but that was mostly it. The one bit of excitement happened around 1am in lord knows what small town. There was some shouting in a car behind us before we pulled into the station, and everyone in the car was turned around, necks craned, to see what was going on. I don't speak Thai, so don't ask me. At the station the yellers got off, still far enough back that I couldn't see. It sounded like two or three men and one very shrieky woman. We sat there as they yelled for maybe forty minutes. Still no idea what was actually happening – maybe an argument? Maybe someone caught a thief? - but still it was interesting enough for everyone to stick their heads out the windows to try to watch. Finally we pulled away, and as we were going I heard from the station a gunshot, followed a few seconds later by a second. We kept going; I fell back asleep.

The other problem of all this was my sunburn. It had gotten less painful by the time I left Malaysia, but all this sitting was starting to really sting, and by the morning when I went to the bathroom I looked down and saw big chunks of skin peeling off my legs, probably prematurely from those damn seats. I looked like a victim of radiation poisoning, which actually I kind of was. (I'm still peeling from those damn sunburns, and it's September 1st.) That along with the heat and the fact that the seats really weren't all that comfortable made the last few hours of the trip rather unpleasant. Even gorgeous tropical landscapes get boring after 15 hours or so. I don't think I've ever been so happy as when we finally pulled in to the station in Bangkok.

The best part of Bangkok was my hostel. I was paying $12/night for a bunk bed in a dorm, but it was clean, and had hot showers, air conditioning, good wifi, and 24-hour electricity – I may as well have been at the Ritz. Also, across the street was a little place with a sign out front that said 'Duck House'. They served duck. Over two breakfasts I tried their duck soup and their roast duck with rice & chinese broccoli, both of which may have been the best duck I've had in my life. With a bottle of something to drink it came to a little under $2 a meal. Not half bad, eh?

The other great meal I had was on my first full day there. I was walking around the Democracy Monument (funny, that), and turned off onto a side street with a bunch of cafes. I picked one mostly by smell. They didn't speak any English, and I don't have a word of Thai, so I sat down and pointed to a picture on the menu. They pointed insistently at a picture of a basket of sticky rice to go with it, so I nodded. I swear, that lunch (which I found out later was larb) was one of the best things I've eaten ever. Again, I think it cost me about $2.

My first day was mostly temples, a lot of walking – Thailand has a wonderful subway and skytrain system, but it doesn't go anywhere near the parts of town with most of the sites – a lot of natives telling me I had to go see this or that site and pointing me to a tuk-tuk, which took me first to where I wanted to go and then to a tailor. Soon enough I gave up on those. The temples are gorgeous, of course, and I saw a lot of gold buddhas before the day was out. That evening I met up with my friend Fatima from CLS who's doing an internship at the UN in Bangkok for the fall and two of her friends at Khoasan Road, the backpacker center of Bangkok. We had dinner at an Israeli place – they'd been interning in a small town to the north for a few months and were somehow sick of Thai food – which was good but couldn't compare to the duck or the larb.

Tuesday I decided I was templed out, so I signed up for a cooking class at a vegetarian restaurant with a good reputation for such things. In the morning, after my duck breakfast, I wandered around the neighborhood of the hostel a bit and then caught a cab – no stops at tailors – out to the class. There were three people signed up but I was the only one who showed, so it ended up being basically a private lesson. The food was delicious, and I bought some of their curry pastes on the way out. That evening I got a foot massage and a mani-pedi, not as cheap as in Bali but still better than the States, an here they use nail polish. That night Fatima and her friends and I met up at the Vertigo Bar on top of the Banyan Tree hotel, one of the poshest spots in Bangkok. It's a rooftop bar on the 59th floor, overlooking the entire city. (Again, not New York – this was the tallest building around.) I had a Singapore sling – it seemed appropriate. The view really was spectacular. Not a bad way to spend my last night in Asia.

New York: The Big Apple

Wednesday morning I took a flight to Singapore, then had about ten hours to go back to E-Ching's house, repack all my stuff, eat dinner, and go back to the airport. It was a 24-hour trip from takeoff in Singapore to landing in JFK. My advice, next time you've got a long flight: fly Emirates. Seriously nice. There were hot towels before takeoff, blankets made of actual fabric, individual screens a great movie list – I saw Iron Man 2, Up In The Air, and The Men Who Stare at Goats; it was a George Clooney kind of day – even little stars in the ceiling when they turned down the lights. Before takeoff in Dubai – a 14-hour flight – they handed out little bags with a pair of socks, an eyemask, a toothbrush and toothpaste – I haven't seen that since I flew British Air in the mid-'90s. And, most shockingly of all, the food was actually good. Like, I enjoyed eating it. Mostly it was sort of Indian-leaning; I had a lamb dish, and one with mutton, and a chicken tikka wrap, as well as a nice European omelet. They even gave out metal silverware in coach. (Things I don't understand: going through security at the gate in Singapore, they confiscated my cuticle clippers. Since they're small enough to be legal to fly with in the US, I asked why, if it was special for flights to Dubai or what; the lady said you couldn't fly out of Singapore with them. I didn't point out that I'd already flown out of Singapore with them twice in the last two weeks. Come mealtime though I had to wonder – my cuticle clippers are too dangerous, but you give me a metal butter knife? Sure, that makes sense.) Anyway, landed In JFK, got through customs without a hitch – have I been near livestock? Of course not, there were no sheep walking past my house every morning or chickens in the streets. And plant products? Please ignore the coffee & tea & curry pastes in my bag, thanks. - took a cab to Jaime's and spent the night in Brooklyn. First thing I ate back was a slice of pepperoni pizza, and a bagel for breakfast. Friday morning I caught the train up to New Haven and now I'm home.

The one thing that's really struck me here is how quiet it is. No call to prayer five times a day, no kaki limas going past ringing bells or hitting sticks or yelling to advertize their food, no sari roti song, no sheep, no mufflerless sepeda motors, not even many cars on my street. Everything here is closed off from the street instead of spilling out into it like in Indonesia. Frankly, it's a little boring. Sorry, Connecticut. Plus I can't find tempeh for sale anywhere.

So that's the end of that. Congrats if you made it this far. I'll be writing again next time I go somewhere interesting, which hopefully will be later this year but who knows. Sampai nanti...