Aranui Trip Overview

I put together a little overview of the Aranui trip. Enjoy!

Code Oscar

After our long day of activities on Rangiroa, we all were on the ship, heading back to Tahiti. I'm not sure of the time, but I think I started doing my laundry around 4 or 4:30 p.m. and events unfolded shortly thereafter.

Dance class was happening in the video room, which puts what happened next between 5 and 6. Probably closer to 6 as the French meeting about the next day's agenda began happening in the middle.

Let's start with facts, what I saw firsthand, then move on to what witnesses told me.

FACT: I was in the laundry room, which is several flights down from where the dormitory is located on the restaurant deck. I was using the dryer—which takes forever—when something odd happened outside. Water sloshed all over the porthole. Here's a quick video of what the window looked like moments before the water sloshed all over--odd, I thought. The sea was still. Rogue wave? I wasn't sure. I shortly learned that the ship had made a tight, sudden turn to loop back to where we'd just been.

Raucous Times on Easter Island

P.S. This is a joke. Actually, this is what local people take their young children to, not what they themselves find fascinating. 

Elvis is Everywhere

Leaving Asia

I've packed up and left my bags at Sakul House hotel reception. I had a last pad thai—a disappointing one—and will get one last Thai massage before heading to the airport on the 3 p.m. shuttle.

The tourist bus doesn't run anymore from Khao San Road to the airport, but the shuttles are only 130 baht door-to-door. Unfortunately, I couldn't figure out how to use them FROM the airport, so for that I've been taking the airport train to Phayathai and catching a meter taxi from there.

The unusual here is normal now and I am not phased by much in Bangkok. When I think back to when I first arrived in June and remember how excited I was by a modern, clean room and sticky rice, I have to laugh. Small things struck me as delightful on my first day in after four months in Africa. I'd been excited by free bottled water and iced coffee. And of course, the chance to get my parasites seriously checked out.

The Chao Phraya River Seeps into Banglamphu

I went over to the river tonight, to see just how bad the flooding was in my part of town.

And I was amazed at what I saw. In a good way. When life gives the people of Banglamphu lemons, they make swimming pools.

Three Feet High and Rising

I caught the Chao Phraya river taxi down to Tha Thien—that's the pier by Wat Po—to meet my friend Lynne. The few of you who have been reading since 2001 may recall Lynne from when she dropped by to visit in Berlin in May, 2001, or from when we met up a few months earlier in Cambodia and Vietnam during MariesWorldTour.com 2001.

Lynne was in town en route from Myanmar to the UK (the Myanmar boycott has recently been lifted, did you know? Mindful tourism is now being encouraged). I headed down to Tha Thien to meet her and her traveling companion for a drink and dinner.

And when I got off the river taxi, I jumped off the boat and onto the pier as usual, along with six others. Two Dutch tourists walked ahead of me. Two tourists behind me were good sports and followed the Dutch guy off the boat, but two more saw what lie ahead and got right back on.

A Month in Ubud

My month in Ubud was charming, relaxing, and involved a lot of monkeys.

Click here to view this video directly on Vimeo. Bigger too. 

Mulu Park and Barking Frogs

Flights are cheap in the Malaysian part of Borneo. Really cheap. And that's good, because there are plenty of places in Borneo that you can't get to by road.

One of these places is Mulu National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage site that is full of caves and cool plants and animals. You can get there by a multi-day combination of boating and hiking, or you can take a puddle-jumper out of the city of Miri in Sarawak.

When I was trying to figure out where to go in Borneo, I didn't think about flying anywhere at first. That seemed silly and cost-prohibitive. But then I started reading about the caves at Mulu—which seemed like a must-see once I'd read enough—and flying was back on my radar.

Of course, there is a catch. Accommodation is limited and not at all cheap in comparison to transportation. Or rather, it is, if you're willing to sleep in a basic dorm in the back of someone's house, but the online information wasn't clear on this point, and I couldn't really visualize how Mulu worked based on the bits and pieces I read.

Little Wookies

The downside of staying in a smaller backpacker's lodge was that they didn't have a morning excursion going to the Semenggoh Wildlife Centre today. No one else had signed up.

No problem. I'd just wandered down the street to the much bigger lodge—Singgahsana—and booked onto their morning tour. And that's how I found myself listening to Curious George Rides A Bike en route to seeing some orangutans. A mom in the van was reading to her daughter.

Curious George barely got anywhere on his bicycle before we were at the park and offloaded onto hiking path. I followed a huge group of people into the reserve to see the morning feeding of the reserve's semi-wild orangutans.

"Wow, they are like short wookies," I thought, watching the orangutans sturdily meander onto the feeding platform. I watched for ages, until the orangutans left, aside from a shy mother and baby, who came down a tree on the other side where the ranger met them.

I had really started to enjoy my trip recently. And I wasn't sure I wanted to go back home anymore. Home is full of challenges, much harder than problems you encounter on the road.

This IS my comfort zone.

Here are more photos of orangutans and of the later part of the day when I went wandering around Kuching.

Archery! Cheerleaders! Drunk Guys!

Here's a better look at some archery matches in Bhutan. First, you'll see modern bows, then cheerleaders (and drunk guys), then the traditional bow match.

Darts in Thimpu

Here's one of the sights we stumbled over in Thimpu, on my second day in Bhutan. 

Darts are traditionally a men's game in Bhutan, but more and more women are getting into it. 

The women would encourage their own team and do the Bhutanese equivalent of "Hey batter batter" to the opposing team. When someone scored, they'd run to the center of the field, sing, and do a dance. 

Tsering and Tobgay could have watched this all day, but I was worried about getting sunburned, so we didn't stay too long. 

Tsering told me that Tobgay is quite good at archery, but that he himself isn't so great at it. Of course, that doesn't stop him from doing archery sometimes with his friends. It's sort of like going out to shoot some pool at home. 

To Ghum by Choo-Choo

Finally, I could see Darjeeling! The cover of fog was gone.

This city in the clouds is a lovely place, its culture influenced by refugees from Tibet as well as proximity to Nepal, Sikkim, and Bhutan. Advocates of the area becoming its own state call the area Gorhkaland rather than West Bengal—that discussion is ongoing, with no clear resolution in sight.

I took advantage of the perfect weather to go on the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, also known as the "toy train." Landslides had stopped the regular daily train journey down the mountain at the moment, but tourists could still take joyrides on the steam train from Darjeeling to Ghum, some 20 kilometers down the track.

You're supposed to buy your tickets the day before, but I've become completely slack in my planning, so I just trotted down to the station before departure time.

And the train was sold out. That's because the engine is antique—not just in a charming way, but the damn thing barely works as it heaves and puffs its way along the tiny tracks set into the road. The engine is so frail at this point—a ticket seller explained to me that "We are having some problems with our Indian engine"—that it can only haul a single carriage of tourists at a time. And all the seats were gone.

Except they weren't, because I was just a single person. One of the ticket sellers asked "How many," and I responded "One." He motioned me into an office where he wrote out a single ticket and hustled me into the last seat in the corner. And we were off!

The locomotive was on backwards.

The train had barely left the station before is stopped under a water spout, taking on water until the engine overflowed. The poor train looked like it wanted out of its misery.

We sluggishly went up the hill to a panoramic viewpoint, stopped for photos (and to shovel in more coal), then proceeded to Ghum, the engineer waving at friends as we went. Ghum has a small museum, which the passengers looked at while the locomotive turned around—now it was facing the right way—then the train pulled us back to Darjeeling.

Here's a little video of the train. And as an added bonus: Now I know what it was like to travel on steam trains in the old days. Because when I disembarked, I realized that I was covered in soot. (More photos are here.)

A Few Days in Varanasi

My alarm went off at 4:30 a.m. Ugh. 

Varanasi was almost idyllic this early and no one hassled me to take their rickshaw or photograph their monkey at this time of morning, as I straggled over to the budget hotel next door to the Radisson, to go on their morning excursion to the Ganges.

The excursion from the budget hotel was cheap, but I paid in other ways. Two of the other passengers were friendly and pleasant, but the third was a brash, loud Italian woman who would not shut up.

She was so loud and irritating that at one point, the guide muttered "If I'd known she didn't listen and talked all the time, I wouldn't have let her come."

Morning excursions to the ghats on the Ganges are one of the top sights in India, something that tourists make pilgrimages to, in order to watch the pilgrims wash in the holy river.

But hardly any pilgrims (or tourists) were here this year, with the river being high enough to flood the steps on all the ghats. The current was so fast on the river that the boats couldn't even run the whole circuit. We could only motor along half the regular route, up to Assi Ghat and back, and there weren't many people there doing their ablutions.

Here are more photos of Varanasi and of the onward trip to Darjeeling.

A Morning Elephant Ride

I dragged myself out of bed early—I had an elephant to ride before getting on the 9:30 six-hour bus to the Nepal-India border.

The lodge provided a vehicle to take me and two other guests over to the community elephants, and we climbed stairs up a wooden platform to gingerly step out onto the elephants back and then into the saddle.

I was hanging off the back this time—penance, maybe for having a good view last time I did this—and most of what I saw looked like this:

Hmmph.

By Bus to Chitwan

The sunny roads of Kathmandu were empty as the Citylink bus pulled out of town at seven in the morning. And as we started on our way to Chitwan National Park, I noticed that the roads were empty in the countryside too.

It wasn't until several hours into the journey that the Nepalese man sitting next to me explained that there was a public transportation strike today. Only the tourist buses and private cars were running.

That explained why so many Nepalese were on today's tourist bus.

We stopped for a rushed breakfast at a casual countryside rest stop an hour in, and I ended up drinking Nescafe across from a solo traveler who casually inquired as to my origin. Turned out she lived around the corner from my old Marvel office and taught at Hunter College.

The bus wobbled alone along the narrow, curvy road through the green foothills of Nepal. When we had a flat tire, no one seemed to mind. The bus staff whipped the old tire off and replaced it in a flurry of efficiency. The passengers loaded back onto the bus and were off again.

Impressions of a Few Weeks in Bangkok

Golden Bamboo Lemur-Spotting

The guide met me at the side of the road, just at the bottom of Centrest Hotel's driveway.

He hailed a local share taxi, which is a short pick-up truck with a covered bed and an open back. People spilled out of the back and sides. I wished I hadn't brought my luggage, but the guide said that it would be easy to flag down a taxi brousse in front of Ranomafana National Park when we were done looking at lemurs. I intended to catch one to Fianarantsoa, where I could switch to a taxi brousse bound for Antisirabe. I had plenty of time and I was looking forward to a bungalow at Green Park Hotel tonight.

We hiked into the park after I paid my admission fee.

Lots of other tourists this time.

But my guide had his ways of finding animals. In addition to trekking far away from other tourists (I hurt for three days after), today's tactics were less nefarious than last night's. He simply made a few phone calls to lemur-spotters, freelancers who roamed the park spotting lemurs.

Using this method, we easily found the golden bamboo lemur.

Here he is.

Here are more photos of the morning's hike.

A Whirl About Antsirabe

Here's a quick pousse-pousse tour of Antsirabe, Madagascar.

For those of you who cannot view the video, here are still photos of the pousse-pousse tour.

The Stamp Man Works

Here's another look at yesterday's rubber-stamp maker.