This blog will have a surprise ending.  I guess it was a month ago that I went to Hong Kong, writting this from Xi’an by the way.  And a week before Hong Kong was the national holiday, and Alice and her husband and Xeng jing bing and I all went to mountain chicken head down in south Henan, just for the weekend.
That was a nice weekend, Alice is my good friend and a teacher at my former school.  I have talked about her here before, remember?  She often tells me how jealous she is that I get to travel around the way I do, so I figured we would plan to have an adventure together.  First we were going to go to Huang Shan which is one of the five important Taoist mountains, but it was a holiday weekend and we couldn’t get train tickets so we instead figured on mountain chicken head.
But I started to tell you about Hong Kong, got all sidetracked.  I will come back to Chicken head, first Hong Kong.  I also have to remember to tell you about my last few days here in Xi’an, I’ve been having a blast, and I promise if we make it to the end their will be a big surprise ending.
So Hong Kong.
Hong Kong is great, I mean it!  Imagine this: Hong Kong is one of the biggest and I would assume most econamically prosperous cities in the world.  Got to be, no?  It is huge, and the night sky line is dotted with giant glowing neon corrperate logos, some as big as foot ball fields.  And every single person is from every single different corner of this ever shrinking planet, and the streets are teaming with them shoulder to shoulder hustling and bustling, always on their way, always moving.  And their are so many museums and things for tourists to do, and the subway is so easy and fast that only an asshole with money to burn or to show off would have hubress enough to own and drive a car.  And the side streets really are links to times past, the narrow stone roads wind and vendors scream and food steams and banners strung up from one side of the street to the other wave in the wind, and in the morning you can see little old ladies doing Tai Chi in the parks and in the late afternoon you can see them in their shops or behind their street stahls asleep and every so often incense from a hidden way temple wafts through the tepid air.  It is a huge place and it makes you feel tiny and it is doublessly amoung the greatest of all metropolis’.
Now imagine this:  Their is an island 20 minutes away from Hong Kong island by ferry, it is almost as big as Hong Kong island.  One would assume that human nature being human nature, that place would be covered with starbucks and mcdonalds, paved and covered, high rises and all the rest, right?  That is what I would have figured, but no, I would have been wrong.  Lantao island, which is (like I said) almost as big as Hong Kong island, is kept pristeen for hiking and camping, aside from the occasional fishing villiage that lines the shore, and always has I would think.  I took a bus to get to the giant Buddha statue and it took two busses over an hour to get to the other side.  Think about that, instead of developing they just left it the hell alone.  I really love Hong Kong.
The big Buddha was maybe thirty feet tall on top of a mountain and it was way cool.  Somehow no matter where you stood in front of the thing the smile followed you.  Across the parking lot was a monestary which was recomended by George from Shangqiu.  George had lived there for a few days, I didn’t have that kind of time, I had to mess with sorting out my visa, which was the real reason for my trip.  The monestary was very calm and very peaceful, singing was in the air and a cool breeze rustled the leaves in the trees.  The Monks all smiled as I passed, and I could see how one could live in such a place.  It was so peaceful.  I had to stop and sit under a tree for the better part of ten minutes, just drinking in the scene.  Man, what a wonderful feeling.  I could show you pictures of the place but it wouldn’t make your soul thump, no man.  You just got to go to feel that.  And the place is so filled with love and quiet, I don’t know about you but growing up in a less than religiously active family kind of left me feeling strange and out of place in a church.  Like I might do the wrong thing, or fart loudly mid serman (and have to sit in my own pew, HA) or kneel when it is time to bow or duck or whatever they do.  I once took communion by mistake.  It was at a funeral or wedding or something and everyone else was lining up to go to the front and someone said I didn’t have to and I said that I didn’t mind as if they were worried about putting me out, so me not wanting to offend anyone by poo pooing their weirdo ritual I ate the cookie.  Does that make me Catholic?  I certainly hope not.  The point is that when in a temple on a mountain top filled with smiling monks I never feel uncool or out of place, and I know almost nothing about Buddism beyond the basic starter shit that you all know too.  I know I can’t see myself meditating, and aparently they don’t eat meat, which I enjoy doing.  So maybe I will just be a bad Buddhist, if it makes me happy to feel nice when I go to a Temple than I don’t see that I am hurting anyone, although I do feel like a poser at times.
Buddha doesn’t seem to mind, why should you?
So after the Monestary I took a trail that took me up the side of a mountain.  I didn’t go the whole way, it was really steep, but I did go really really far, and I sat on the side of a cliff, I hadn’t seen another living person in an hour.  On the other side of the valley below was another mountain, on top of that mountain I could see the giant Buddha where I had been earlier, now it was tiny.  I got to thinking about the old me, the guy who wouldn’t have really wanted to go tearing up a mountain alone.  dependent on other people’s help, sad, no direction.   And I got to thinking back on the whole year and a half I have had.  I thought about where I had been, and you know it occured to me that I am proud of myself.  I have backpacked through seven countries, and I did it alone on my own steam.  I don’t like to brag, but it is important for us to recognize that we arn’t neccesarily the shitty people we make ourselves out to be sometimes.  I am lucky sure, but I am strong enough to make it, the strength to endure as the Ramones song says.  That is what I was thinking all alone up there on that mountain, looking out across a valley at the giant Buddha.  After a while I walked down that cliff a little bit taller than I had walked up.  Then I saw bees and freaked out running, I don’t like bees.
Yeah yeah, so the week before that I was doing mountain chicken head with Alice and her husband and Xing Jing bing.  Xing Jing Bing is a former student of mine from my days at the highschool and a current student of Alice’s.  I gave him the name, and it means crazy boy.  I called him that in class one day and the whole class stood and gave a screaming ovation in agreement.  That may have been the longest laugh I ever got out of a class of kids, I do so love making them laugh.  The train ride over was long but the Henan province is green and beautiful now, not all grey and brown and dead looking like it is in the winter.  This time of year it is green with yellow flowers, it looks like Monet’s take on a Chinese farm landscape.  So we were climbing the mountain, and it turns out that Alice has never been in the woods before.  Ever, no shit.  So she wanted to stop and play in the creek every five feet which was funny and we were in no rush.  A few times we went tromping off the trail into the forrest, she had such a great smile the whole time, I was mainly enjoying how much she seemed to be enjoying everything, she was a child on Christmas and it was a cool thing.  Gidy would be a good word.  Xing Jing Bing ran ahead of us up the mountain and we found him climbed all the way up a damn tree which was almost hanging over a straight cliff on the edge of nothing, his crazy ass had no idea how to get down, like a cat.  He had to jump and I caught him.
The mountain itself was nice enough, but everyone said it looked like a chicken head and I couldn’t see it.

quick note, I am in a public internet cafe right now and the guy in the computer two computers down is totally looking at porn, but he keeps hiding it thinking nobody can see.  He just caught me looking and I laughed at him.

The next week I went to Hong Kong, and the week after that I was back teaching.  That week the first two days I had to give my kids a talk about some sad stuff that was happening, the second two days I brought cake and we had a big party.  I fed them all cake and then we had a talent show, anything the kids could do, even stupid talents, I explained that if anyone could fart on command then they were the grand champians of the whole school but nobody could, or would own up to it if they could.  I did have a few kids that could do some cool stuff, dancers, singers, Tai Chi, kung fu, one kid wrote me a message on a desk with cake icing.  They were really sweet.
TERRACOTTA WARRIORS, COME OUT TO PLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY
TERRACOTTA WARRIORS, COME OUT TO PLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY

This week I am in Xi’an, I came up for the long weekend with Wei, by good buddy.  Wei is the coolest guy I know in China and we will always be friends.  I hope he doesn’t mind if I tell you this, I don’t think he will, but Wei’s wife left him a couple of months ago, he loved her so much.  Wei was all broken up and came over to my house several nights, we drank beer over it and I tried to be a brother for him.  Over the past month he seems to have been able to rebuild his life.  He has strength I may never know, he seems almost OK with things now.  I admire him a great deal, the way he has kept it together, he is hurting though, you can see it the poor guy.  So we figured we would go to Xi’an togther.  The train left Shangqiu at 6 pm and arrived at 5 am,  we had seats instead of beds so I didn’t sleep but maybe one hour, Wei managed to get maybe three I guess.   When we got in at 5 we figured we would just say fuck it and go straight to the terracotta warriors.  We had that silly no sleep energy, and after a hearty meal of a big mac (the Mcdonalds in Xi’an doesn’t do breakfast) we were off and made the hour bus ride only to find out we were an hour early.  The sky was dark that morning, at 8 am foggy chilled wind whipped around and the temperature was dropping.  Birds were going bat shit crazy, shooting like bullets all around in a frenzy, tree tops were bobbing around like rowboats in rough sea and the sky was getting dark.  A storm was in the mail, Wei and I were both in tee shirts.
Wei and I ran into the complex which had three large buildings just as the sky open up in freezing buckets.  Everyone else was running into the close one, but I could see one with a roof that was arched like an airplane hanger, this jived in my mind with pictures I had seen of the Warriors so I said we should go to that one first.  Well it turned out to be the biggest chamber and what’s more the place had one security guard, 6000 stone warriors, 70 chariots, god knows how many horses, and Wei and I.  Our own private army inspected by us alone.  This was a rush in itself, but the greater thrill was the sight of the warriors.  I mean these things really are amazing.  I knew they had different faces but they also have different body types, some fat, some skinny, some old, I saw a few that looked like teenagers, some tall, some short.  Some slouched slightly.
And did you know that they know these 7000 warriors all together are just the tip of the iceberg?  They know that the pits close to the tomb are more impressive and of larger numbers.  Did you know that?  One reason they have not dug them up yet is they are still not quite sure where to dig, often burial mounds were built near a tomb to trick robbers.  Also there is the problem of the oxygen.  In 1974 a farmer was digging a well and found the statues by mistake.  They say that when they opened the chamber the statues were all painted but the sudden burst of air made the color fade within ten minutes.  They are waiting until the technology is up to the challenge, so I’m told.
The warriors are guarding the tomb of  Qin dynasty Emperor Qinshihuang who started the great wall at age thirteen, and at the age of thirty seven was able to conquer the other six warring city states and for the first time unify China under a central government.  He created unified systems of law, weights and measures, and written language.  He also killed a lot of people and was known as an all around evil bastard.  For four decades after his death people were building terracotta warriors to guard his tomb, and what kills me is when they were finished they buried and hid the whole thing.  One of the greatest artistic achievements in man’s history and they didn’t want anyone to ever see.  To them it was all in honor of their fallen Emperor and about following his wishes, they performed this miracle for one person, following his orders to the letter, losing many workers lives in the process.  And all for a guy who was already dead.
I just finished reading a really good book that my ace Carson sent me.  The book is called Stiff and it is all about the way our society uses dead people for science and it is about what will happen to our bodies when we are not alive.  In the last chapter the author talks about what she thinks she will do with her remains.  She leans towards something simple and points out that when a person’s last wishes are elaborate and complicated or expensive it is really a way for the dying person to ensure that they can still exert their will over their families even after death.  So if people are still making statues for me four decades after I check out then you can all say that I was just as much of an asshole as Qinshihuang, Emperor of the Qin dynasty.

Three months ago I was in Macao at the same hostel I have told you about, the one which I had given the fake name Septembers to, so as not to embarass the real people with the likes of me.  This last time was my fourth trip, I use it as an in and out point for other countries.  I was hanging around the hostel and luck presented me with these two new wonderful friends, they were a pair of young lovers from Burma.  I will say this but I would really like to stress that I am not just saying the following statement, rather, know that I am meaning it like a motherfucker: they may be the nicest people I have ever meet.  They were so sweet and immediatly wanted to become good friends with everyone they met.  That day they met me and friends we became.  The girl was named Nyi Nyi and was from a Buddist family and Nandor’s family was Muslim.  They are running off to study in another country and plan on getting married even though their families will not approve.  Nandor told me that Nyi Nyi had a secret wish to boast to her family that she had had a very great day in Macao and I promised I could make that happen, and the next day we could all three go to the China Embassy to sort out our visas together.  We went out that day and saw everything in that town, and I told them I could show them a great time because I happened to be the Prime minister of Macao, and so they called me prime minester the rest of the day.  We all laughed easy and had a day which proved highly boast worthy, at the end of which they took turns using the hostel computer to send all the photos I had taken home, boasting had comenced.  One night they wanted me to watch a movie they had downloaded on their laptop.  They said it was a movie about their country, so I said sure.  The movie wound up being Rambo 4.  If you are unfamiliar with Rambo and what he does I would refer you to parts one through three, part four is more or less the same thing but this time it’s in Burma.  He kills so many people, all soldiers from the Burma government, the best part is when Rambo uses a land mine to explode a whole entire mountain, shock waves are sent all around and he just barely escapes.  I asked them what they thought about Rambo doing this in their country and they loved it.  The Government of Burma is one of the worst bunch of bastards in power anywhere and Nandor and Nyi Nyi kept telling my how great Rambo (not Sylvester Stallone) was for making a movie which lets everyone know about their government.
The next day we went to the China embassy early, I had gotten the letter the school had faxed to the hostel which requested that I get a worker visa for the next six months.  This is because the school didn’t want to spend the money on the right kind of teacher visa as I was only doing one semester.  So The friday before I had dropped off my paper work and now just had to come and get it, imagine my suprise when I picked up my passport to find a two month worker visa instead of a six.  More on that later.
Meanwhile I hadn’t talked to Nandor or Nyi Nyi in the past Three months, but we have been emailing the past few days.  I just got word that Nandor has heard from his family and they are ok, but Nyi Nyi hasn’t gotten word from Hers yet, and it has been a few days.  If you pray please do so for these people, and the people of Burma while you’re at it.
The other cool thing about that trip to chicken head mountain (jigongshan) was that Alice’s husband Jack had a friend who worked in a nearby hotel and spa.  We got the fancy treatment for free, yes we did.  We got to go to the pool, hot tub, suana, work out room (I lifted a little) room of comfy chairs with attatched TVs, archery range, and even a rock climbing wall.  So it turns out I can’t rock climb, maybe I was never meant to.  It was pathetic.  The best was on the bottom the guy with the rope was a skinny little Chinese kid, I fell of the wall at one point and my droping hoisted this dude in the air like a kite.  After that I went back to the pool.
Alice and Xing jing Bing had never been swimming and didn’t know how.  I am glad to say that after two days I had them both doing a mean dog paddle.  Alice was funny, every five minutes she demanded that I watch what a good job she was doing and I would tell her what a good job she was doing and she would say “really” and I would tell her “really really good.”
Ok, now back to Hong Kong.  I had to get up really early and catch a subway under the harbor to get to the line for the China Embassy one morning, which actually isn’t an embassy but it has some other funky name because Hong Kong is part of China.  At any rate I got there an hour early to find the line already around the corner.  I had a book but found myself vastly more entertained by people watching all the folks from different countries.  I was armed with my passport and a letter which had been written by my school just like before.  This was at the end of my two month working visa and I was now missing work to be here.  The coolest part was the school was paying for my train and my visa.  The guy who I work with at the school had said that they would do the hotel too, the day I left he laughed and said no, they would not.  He always tells people what they want to hear instead of the truth, always leaves one guessing.  But a paid trip to Hong Kong ain’t all bad, especially a week after a three day weekend climbing a mountain with friends.
So they finally let me in the building and I went upstairs and got my id photo taken and after 20 minutes my number was called and I presented my papers to the lady in the window.  The paper made the her frown, she was not at all happy.  She looked very concerned.  The lady in the window was less than pleasant.  A little on the touchy side.
The paper, it turns out, is pretty much just a piece of paper with a simple message in Manderin, ‘please give this man a worker visa for two months.  Thank you’ and then an official stamp.  It had no date, it had nobodies name, it had no address, it had no contact email or phone number, it didn’t even have the name of the school, all of which were needed.  Any idiot could have typed this up, it proved nothing.
The guy at my school has done this before, you know?  It is only illegal in the strickest sense of illegal, the term illegal itself has another connotation in China.  I just found out the small taxi’s made of motorcycles, the ones I take every day are “illegal” but it only means they have to pay the cops a fine when ever the cops want shake down money.  Hundreds of them whizz around the streets every day and nobody goes to jail or cares.  This worker visa instead of a teacher visa has worked before for our school, hell it worked for me two months ago.  Now it didn’t seem to be working.
I told the lady in the window the line of bullshit just as I had been instructed.  I said I was a visiting scholar, whatever that means.  A worker visa is for like, say if you are building a bridge or something.  They look the other way, or always have before.  The lady in the window said this would not work.  She said I was either a teacher or a tourist, if I was a teacher I need a teacher visa and either way the maximum I could have was one month.  That is because of the Olympics, the stupid Olympics, they are cracking down and unless you are only going to Beijing for the games they don’t want you in the country, so the longest tourist visa is one month.  She looked at my soon to expire visa, a two month worker visa, that really got her mad.  She told me to step out of line and rewrite my form and get a tourist visa or nothing at all.  Friends, this was an ‘oh shit moment’.
I paced, I freaked out.  It took me a half hour to find a coffee shop with a public internet and another half hour and three cups of coffee waiting for my turn.  I wrote to the guy at the school, it was a very careful dance on the line of not burning my bridges but diplomatically allowing them to know my concern.  I will not teach on a tourist visa, I told them.  That is just plain stupid illegal not wink wink illegal like the worker visa thing, and if caught they would ammend my passport and I might not get back inside China.  I said I wanted to go on teaching, my plan was to get the tourist visa just to reenter and have the school change it to the right teaching visa.  Now the line was endless and I spent the next five hours waiting.  I made friends with a dude from Turkey and we passed most of the time with good conversation.  He had to pick up his kid from school and was freaking out so I gave him my number, which was lower and only cost me ten more minutes.  But he was a nice guy and he really did need to get his kid from school so I didn’t mind.  So I applied for the tourist visa and arranged to pick it up the next day.
I spent a lot of time wandering alone in Hong Kong.  A big city with nobody to share it with is a lonely scene.  I know because I am in Beijing now.  Man, it is weird just walking around, going to museums alone.  Eating alone, last night I wanted to hit up a bar, there were so many good looking ones, but a bar is just sad if you are solo, for me anyway.  I ate snake on a stick and nobody was there to tell me how gross it was.  I watched the Jet Lee Jackie Chan movie last night, which is good for the fighting and a few funny things.
So I went back to my city, my Shangqiu with a one month tourist visa.  I wanted to keep teaching, I didn’t want to leave early.  The worst would be the students, my wonderful students who have worked so hard for me, surely the school would be able to fix this, no?

ready for the surprise?

Manuels at 8, Monday night, see you there.

CHINA ADVENTURE DISCLAIMER

CHINA ADVENTURE DISCLAIMER

CHINA ADVENTURE DISCLAIMER

The occasional choice swear word aside, I have always tried to keep this blog appropriate for the zoo going children, as my friend Danger Woman (super hero for the disabled and karaoke song bird of justice) would say. I have all sorts of people reading this thing, my mom for example. The following adventure is all about Malaysian porn, my surviving a death defying jungle motorcycle crash, and eating psychotropic mushrooms inside a volcano. So here is the thing, if you are the sort of person (and I am talking about my mom, for example) who does not care to read about such things, maybe just skip this adventure all together. As for everyone else, if I don’t have your attention by now, I don’t suppose I ever will.

The following was copied from a now nearly destroyed notebook from the road

MALAYSIA

So next I did a few days in Malaysia, just to sort out my visa.
Spending only a few days in a country is a bit of a tease, the Malaysian people are so wonderful. But it is almost as expensive as Singapore so I had to split pretty fast. I will tell you one highlight from Malaysia, here goes.

I went to a city called Malacca, once a major hub for sea trade back in the pantaloon and pirate days. Lots of cool old buildings with colonial influence. Also lots of museums, which I spent the day exploring. After going to the maritime museum, (which aside from being housed inside a big ship was not very interesting) I happened upon the customs museum, which was free. I am still not all the way sure why I should be at all interested in the customs house in Malacca, or why it deserves a museum, but free is free and they had air conditioning besides so in I went.

And most of it sucked, there was a huge room with pictures of the customs staff from the 20s, 30s, and 40s, each of which had an aristocratic white guy in a white suit with a white tie sitting center front. The white guys in each picture were flanked on all sides by a lot of Malaysian looking guys in uniforms, proof of how things must have worked when it was a colony of Great Brittan. Dullsville. Nothing was in English. Boring, stupid, dumb.

In the back they had a display of obviously plastic toy guns. I assume that this is the area where they show the kind of things that they confiscate at the border, but I am in a museum looking at a crappy 99 cent plastic cap gun display. Dullsville. Then further back was a wooden statue of a naked woman with her legs spread. Hmmmmm. Behind the woman was a room with a long slit window at eye level, like the door to a speak easy from an old movie, a red button was next to the window.

I pushed the red button.

The instant my finger left the red button a light popped on in the far right corner of the small dark room which I was peering into through the narrow slit window. Under the light I could just make out what looked to be centerfolds from smutty magazines of nude woman. A recorded voice started frantically narrating in Malaysian, the voice was really going for it, narrating like it’s life somehow depended on it. Very soon that light cut out and another light cut on in the opposite corner, this time they were all wooden statues of people having sex. Still more narration, I couldn’t tell what the man was saying about the statues but I could tell the he was really starting to come to a boil about the whole thing. That light shut off abruptly. You may think I am making this next part up but I do have pictures, in the center of the room a light popped on illuminating a tall three sided column with shelves all the way up. Sitting on each shelf was some kind of sex toy, dildos, anal beads, I couldn’t see what else, because as soon as this light came on, column started spinning in place at a high speed. I was mystified at the sight of this totem pole to perversion, this five foot phalus of spinning filth, this mighty Malaysian masturbatory monolith. And you could tell that the narrator was going absolutely crazy. The spell seemed in my memory to have lasted ages, but I am sure it was only a few seconds. When that light shut off a TV moniter in the back of the small dim room came to life, I was starring into the moaning eyes of a white woman on the screen. As the camera panned back I could see a number young men who may well have been causing the moans, actually I could only see the backs of their heads. 1970’s music had taken the place of the narrator, and after a few more seconds the whole thing all went dark and quiet.

I stood there like a fool, wondering if I had really seen what I had just thought I had seen. After pressing the red button five more times I concluded that I had.

The other cool highlight of Malaysia was that when I came to Kuala Lumpor which is a huge city, a group of young school students took me with them on the bus, across town, and helped me find the right bus to take, even though I am sure that they didn’t need to go anywhere near there. As I was thanking them I told them that they had really made me think very highly of their country. Then I took a four hour bus ride through amazing beautiful forests and jungles. I want to go back so much. But like I said, it was a bit expensive, cheap by US standards but steep for me, so I had to split.

SUMATRA

The boat landed in a port town called Dumai, a dusty undeveloped place with one or two story shop fronts along with a sparse landscape dotted with shacks, very little else going on. I paid a guy to take me to the long distance bus station, me hanging off the back of his motorcycle, which is a common taxi in South East Asia, especially the poorer parts. I think that for these guys the motorcycle is the single thing they own outside of their families shack and their clothes, and the motorcycle becomes a very important tool for transportation, revenue, as well as the hauling of large amounts of goods which is achieved through a precarious balancing act. Today, the cargo which was being balanced on the back of the bike precariously happened to be me with my pack pulling me backward as we speed down the dirt roads dodging the multitude of other bikes along with occasional chickens.

At the station I bought a ticket for Lake Toba, more on that later. The ticket office was a large concrete block room, empty aside from a desk in front and a wooden pick nick table. The locals were friendly enough and I had many hours to kill so I sat with them and passed the time of day. After a while, a Swede showed up also trying to get to Toba, and together we walked down the street to the bus station. While we waited, the Swede took the opportunity to show off his fancy bug zapper, which was an electrified tennis racket. He was so proud of this thing, and with little else to do we took turns trying to fry the fly’s, many locals watched with casual interest.

A guy approached us, a teacher at a local school, could we speak to his kids to help them practice their English? He explained that when he heard that we had gotten off the boat he had been running all over asking everyone trying to find us, and his school wasn’t far away and it would only take a little while. The Swede said no, we should stay put so as not to miss the bus. I said if the guy wanted he could go and get his students and we could talk to them right there at the station. Delighted, he ran off and a little while later two motorcycles arrived carrying 10 kids. They seemed a little shy and nervous at first but opened up with time. They were seniors, off to Jakarta next year, they were very sweet and just as nice as they could be. The Swede asked them about arranged marriages which made for an awkward moment, but they said it was common practice, and they told us that they really didn’t mind because they had total faith in their parents judgment. Different place, man.

It was so much fun talking to them, they reminded me of my Chinese students. Their smiles and laughter gave me a real kick, it was an energy that was warm and sunny, and it made me feel so happy for hours, like being high on goodness. The goodness filled me up and when something as powerful and unstoppable as the smiles of children from other countries hits you, you smile back.

HELL BUS

The bus from Dumai to Toba was all night, it sucked and sucked and sucked and sucked. Man, it sucked horrifically. The main transit artery of Sumatra is a two lane road, potholes and dirt. The game seems to go as fast as you can in the wrong lane, laying on the horn until the oncoming traffic becomes too much of an impending inevitable eventuality, then jump back into the safety of your lane with whole inches left to spare, and bonus points for making the entire bus damn near wheelie in the process, sending all lose items and people sailing and jerking around like rag dolls with whiplash. This all night chicken game went along with loud blasting Indonesian pop music (granted, it is a million times better than Chinese pop music) and no AC. The driver was a very sad man, I decided, obviously depressed to the point of suicide. I wondered why he didn’t just get it over with quietly at home, with a rope or poison or pills, I wondered why he seemed to be trying to take us to the other side with him. He was putting his foot on the floor on the turns. Anyone who has ever played any nintendo driving game as a child (F zero, Grand Turismo) knows the simple rule that you do not accelerate on the turns, that is common sense. He would have to slam down on the breaks in order to keep us from flying into a ditch which caused the whole world to come to a crashing hault. Who does that, blog believers, WHY? The best part of the all night suicidal bus ride came when we got to a mountain pass with no road. The solution had been to bulldoze dirt into a huge ridge that was not flat on top, so we went down a cliff of sliding dirt.

This was the only time the whole night the driver switched off the music, we went very slow. The driver may have been suicidal, but he wasn’t crazy. I noticed that every passenger sat on the edge of their seat, eyes wide. Half way down the slope on the bottom of the ditch we could see another bus which had landed wheels up. This sight did not instill confidence.

Later, I slipped a green army cap over my eyes and tried like hell to get some sleep, and in the dead of that night, while being violently shaken, my head bopping around like a baloon in the wind, in the endless night at some point, somehow, I found myself happily dreaming.

Soon after the Swede woke me up by shaking me, he wanted to know if I wanted some cookies. I most certainly did not. I was not very nice about it either. Insult was added to injury at 5:30 Am when the driver reached for the Rod Stewart box set, which blasted at us all morning. The only song they didn’t play was Maggie May, the only good Rod Stewart song I know of, aside from when he was with Faces.

Finally, early the next morning the bus stopped some place and they came and told us to get off and gave us our shit. This was clearly not anywhere near lake Toba, and nobody could speak any English and it really looked like we were now being kicked out in the middle of nowhere. Well, first thing the Swede went ape shit, hollering so the veins in his neck were bulging, his face getting all hot. I tried to stop him, and the more he hollered the more people they seemed to find who could not speak any English. Now they were trying to get us on a mini bus, and the Swede was arguing that we had already paid to go all the way to Toba and we would not pay again. I pulled one guy aside and talked to him, after a short while I realized that these poor people were trying to explain to him that this was just a transfer to a free mini bus that would take us the last two hours of the trip, it was included in the price and at no point had they tried to cheat us. If you are ever in a situation in another country were you are confused and lost and scared, don’t just start screaming, nine times out of ten if they are out to cheat you it is obvious and you see it coming and even still, the ones trying to cheat you are not necessarily bad people anyway, just poor people who don’t have many options. In any event you catch more flies with honey, it is often just a misunderstanding and if you get hot at these people they just shut down and become embarrassed and you wind up looking and feeling like an ass. So the Swede calmed down and we had our own little mini van the rest of the way, and by all rights I should have slept after my all night suicidal hell ride, but this leg of the journey took us up up up through mountainous jungle roads along cliffs and through canyons with amazing scenery and monkeys hanging out by the side of the road doing their monkey thing, and the sky was blue and soon we could see Toba. Ah Toba. The second I layed eyes on the place I was home.

But more on that in a second. first I have to tell you when we got to the city on the shore of lake Toba (we aimed to ferry to the island in the middle, you dig) we were tired and I was running around trying to find someone who would give me a not crazy rate on Chinese yuan. I came back to find the Swede sitting with a fat man who was so nice he wanted to give us a ride and tell us which hotel to go to. Here is the rub, this is a very common and obvious ploy. You get a ride to the ferry and then they follow you to a hotel and then when you get there the hotel owner has to charge you more money to cover this fellas finders fee. The reason I avoid this is the simple reason that one can never be sure how much it would cost without the fee and it eliminates the chance to shop around to find the best price or spot. Sometimes I am so tired or a place is so remote that I am grateful for the help, but Toba is very much on the map so I wanted to just do it by myself. The Swede was all about it though, the fat man told us that this hotel had a couple of Swedish girls staying there. This news came as a powerful revelation to the Swede. He proclaimed loudly, loud enough for everyone in the place to hear “Wow, that is so great. I really want to get a blow job!”

I managed to convince the Swede that we should just hoof it, it wasn’t that far and we were better off figuring it out for ourselves. As we walked the Swede began stopping at every single shop, regardless of what they were selling. He was suddenly on a mission to find some shit called 7 up revive. I have never heard of the stuff, but he had to have it. Every place he went he asked for 7 up revive, and each time they had no clue what he was talking about, and each time they desperately tried to make him happy with some other soda. Each time we walked away, each time they came after us trying to go down on the price, wondering what was wrong with the coke they had or with their store that we wouldn’t want to shop there. Every single place, very soon I found this embarrassing. When we got to the ferry port the fat man was waiting for us with a grin. We had missed the boat and had to buy a ticket with him, for a jacked up price no doubt. I could see a boat with people getting on, so I thanked the fat man for his time and kept walking. We got on the boat which hadn’t left after all, and then……
TOBA!

TOBA!

TOBA!

Ahhh, Toba. Lake Toba is so big that it shows up on the Sumatra map.
It is a massive lake surrounding an island inside a super volcano. The encircling rim looms above and looks like a mountain chain, covered with a combination of ultra bright green lush short grass, jungle, as well as the occasional cascading waterfall. Toba was one of the largest volcanic eruptions in earth’s history, so I’m told. In the past few years they were finally able to piece together that a long misunderstood mystery ash that was popping up as far away as Iceland originated from the Toba eruption a few million or so years back. It is far enough above sea level for a cool breeze to stop the equatorial sun from murdering but still just right for swimming. This is the place, the greatest place I have ever been aside from my friend Caroline’s lake house in Georgia, which is mainly great because of memories of friends and barbecue. This is the place I needed, this is the spot, the place where the rest of the world is replaced with maybe going for a swim, maybe a nap in a hammock, or a beer. This is the place that makes you cry later in lament for being confounded with the curse of being stuck any other place on earth. This is a place where your soul smiles. You can not look in any direction in Toba and not see the most amazing scenery your heart or mind could ever take in, it makes the jaw hang. The blue of the sky is a brand new kind of blue, as is the brand new green of the surrounding hills. This is it, man. The air is full of happy and a guitar or a drum is never far out of reach, the tourists are the cool smiling friendly, undemanding kind, and the locals are even nicer. The days are endless and the nights are cool under a sky of deep stars and in the evening, in the distance, you can always hear the music of the Batak people. No shit. This is the place. This is the place. Oh god, this is the place.

The first three days I did nothing. I read a book by the lake, I drank beer, I swam, I talked to other travelers, I ate, I napped. This was my whole objective in the first place, just chill the hell out in paradise. I met a way cool musician from Germany named Peter Subway,
(http://www.petersubway.de/deutsch.htm) he started in Berlin playing shows on the subways now he travels all over the world playing on trains. He is a regular at an island I made it to a little later in my trip called Pulau Wei, and was on his way to Jakarta. He told me that the trains in Jakarta are moving market places with local musicians, he was going to go and jam. And I met a 19 year old white kid from California who had been riding his bike (push bike yall) from Istanbul. His crazy ass had been through north Iraq, he said that at that time the north was fairly stable, but still. He had also been through Pakistan, he said that the nicest people in the world were in Pakistan. He also told me that he had tried to go through Iran but they wouldn’t let him in. Next he was going to Malaysia, then through Thailand to Laos then China to Hong Kong, then home. It occurs to me that I would at some point love to travel this way, me and my bike across a country. I need to get into better shape first though. Me and this kid went climbing up the mountain one day to the water fall and I found a real difference in climbing speed between me and a 19 year old who had come from Istanbul by bike. Can you guess who was stopping and panting blog believers?

I wound up staying at a place called Liberta on Tuk tuk (the name of the island in Toba). Just in case you found the willsanderschinaadventure while doing a google search on Liberta guest house, let me tell you that it is among the nicest places I have ever stayed. I was paying $2 American a night for my own private bungalow with bathroom and cold shower. Cold shower is normal, as hot shower would be silly in the heat of Sumatra. It is run by a guy named Moon, a hell of a nice guy. He is mentioned by name in the Lonely Planet. He spent his days playing chess with anyone fool enough to challenge him and a lot of times many of us sat and watched the games in the shade taking refuge from the afternoon sun. One day I found myself eating pizza by the chess table, Moon and a Frenchman were in fierce battle.
The Swede was quickly bored by the chess game and left, returning promptly with the bug zapper which nobody cared about. He provided endless commentary on the size of the mosquitoes he was nabbing, one was small, one was big, one had stripes, one was a fly. We did our best to ignore him, so he started waving it over the chess board. The Frenchman swatted one on his leg, the Swede protested that the man should have used his wonderful device. We ignored him. He pouted and left, rejected and sad. Nobody cared about his bug zapper, even though it was so clearly important. Poor guy.

I met a guy from Manchester named Mark, we became fast friends. He had heard about a local wedding on the other side of the island and we crashed. The locals didn’t seem to care, it was outside and we stood in the corner watching the scene. One man was leaping around with his eyes all rolling around in his head in a trance like one of the faithful at a pentecostal snake handling poison kool aid drinking tongue talking ho down babtist type church. Everyone in the place was drinking Tuack, which was my first exposure to the stuff. Tuack is a bright yellow and thick potent wine that ferments on its own in the tops of palm trees. They actually don’t have to do a single thing to it, just pull it out of the tree and put it in a plastic bag and serve. More on Tuack later.

That day I remember that Mark and I wandered around the island, and wherever we went young girls called to us from their shops like sirens pulling Greek sailors to the rocky shore, but damn if it didn’t work. We went in these places and hung around making the girls giggle. We hung around buying beer and food but in the end we realized that none of the girls wanted anything from us further than our business. That night we went clubbing at a place called Brandos, which only had two woman on the dance floor. We went to a place called Ellios where I had a girl rub herself all over me for me to buy her drinks. After I bought her a beer she proceeded to ram her big butt into my crotch. We danced for a while, I think that is just how she gets drinks, and I suppose that she does this every night with somebody, still I didn’t care. After I left that night I heard later she started trying the same thing with Mark.

The next day Mark and I hung out at the guest house and wrote a song on his guitar about his dead Grandmothers nipples, which was very amusing to the both of us. That night I hung out in my favorite spot on the dock next to the water with a book, just relaxing. That night Mark went out to the clubs again looking for girls. He couldn’t find me so instead he wound up taking the Swede, who apparently creeped out the girls and was a weirdo, the way Mark tells it. And Mark told me he had followed the Swede around all night in his quest for 7 up revive, this time, lo and behold he actually found a bottle. He was so happy he turned it upside down and downed it in one go. After doing so, he complained to Mark that 7 up revive made him feel sick.

Some days Mark and I wandered around the island, rice paddies and hills with small villiages. Always chickens clucking around, water buffalo, and always small children. All the English these kids seemed to know was “Hello”, “Bye bye”, and “Fuck you”. I don’t think they really understood what any of it means, they would smile and say “hey mister, Bye bye, hello, money, money, fuck you, hello, bye bye”. And I would smile back and wave and say hello and bye bye, what else am I going to do? I doubt they knew what they were saying, maybe they just hated us, either way they were way cute. Mark and I were walking at one point and a little girl who was playing in her front yard waved her little hand and smiled and said “hello”, then her much younger brother, maybe 2 or 3 came running out of his front door butt naked and poking his penis with one finger calling “hello”. So we laughed about that one for quite a while.

EVIL KNIEVIL I AM NOT

One day it occurred to me that it was high time I saw the rest of the island, which is around 50 KM around, so around eleven I rented a motorcycle off Mr. Moon. Moon’s bike was a bit more expensive than some of the locals who were hanging out, but I didn’t care because I knew Moon and I trusted Moon. I trusted his smile and I trusted his breakfast and I trusted his chess game and I trusted that the motorcycle wouldn’t crap out on me mid day, and I trusted that he wouldn’t trump up some unforeseen preexisting problem with the thing and then try to charge me for it, I have seen that happen. He gave me a xerox copy of a hand drawn map of the island (which I trusted as well) and he gave me a smile and told me he would put the rental on my tab, not to worry, so off I went.

I was zooming along the coast, I decided to head to the North, the folks hanging around in the hammocks told me that following the road to the South was no good, the roads that way were shit. I was cruising along, the mighty lake on my right side, the mountain on my left. Perfect. I saw empty guest houses which would have been full in the Toba hey day, which I understand was around 97. Since then people have forgotten Toba, terrorists in the North and the bombings in Bali, the Tsunami, shorter visas all helped deal the death blow to Toba’s draw, now it is blissful and empty of tourists and the guest houses and hotels that still dot the shore are abandoned, landmarks from another time. I saw while I drove through an endless street market with endless stalls and endless bodies running to the street calling to me, ‘come in, come in’. I kept driving. It was easy to picture that one day not so long ago this street was filled with families from Europe, Dad with a belly pack and obnoxious straw hat, Mom with her lonely planet guide book, the kids running around as kids do, now a ghost town, just me and Moon’s motorcycle speeding through and not slowing. I went to the hot springs, but didn’t get in. Hot springs are rarely nice, sometimes, but not often. These had been pumped into a dingy looking swimming pool and the smell of sulpher was killing me. I did see a huge iguana cross the path while walking up.

So I kept going, for a time I went along a road that didn’t go anywhere, then doubled back. Next I shoot up up up up the mountain to get to the top of the plateau in the middle of the island. Along the way I had to stop often to survey the world of green on which I now was standing on top off. At the bottom of the mountain were the shacks and buildings the locals had put together, beyond that was the shimmering lake, and beyond that was endless green that rolled its way all the way out to the horizon.

The top of the mountain was mostly farm land, it was such a large area one quickly forgot that this was a mountain top. The lake was a bit on the small side, especially in comparison with the rather gigantic lake surrounding the entire area, a lot of farms and the occasional ox. It was just about that time that I noticed my gas gauge was just above the red. I stopped and asked some locals who looked at the gauge and when I told them I was heading for Tuk Tuk they smiled and said I had enough. So onward I went. The map I had showed the road to Tuk Tuk becoming a wavey line, this seemed to coincide with when the road became dirt surrounded by jungle. I figured this must be the last leg of the road and it didn’t look very far on my map, if I was in fact where I thought I was so I kept going. Soon it became clear that this was never intended to be a road for vehicles of any sort, I had make it through huge sections of deep mud, which was a warm spray all over my legs and face from the tires spitting, the whole bike was bouncing along, sliding and bounding and skipping in the mud, trying not to go so fast that I lose control or so slow the tires start to spin out, the best thing seemed to be just to fucking gun it, a few times I found myself almost thrown into the bushes. The first of these were short but they became longer and more ridiculous the further in I ventured. Now it was seeming like I was running along a dry creek bed, the gravel underneath was slippery under the tires, but it seemed crazy to turn around now, I was finally getting past the mud areas and I didn’t want to have to go through that again. But some stone cold realities were not going away, my knuckles could feel each of these facts as they gripped the throttle tight, just as sure as they could feel every bump and stone.

One: It was late in the day, maybe 4:30 or 5, I was running out of daylight, and I was going further and further into the jungle.

Two: I was running on fumes at best, only a matter of time before I am pushing this sucker.

Three: The guys who told me to come this way and that I needn’t worry about gas were clearly assholes.

Four: I was about to sleep in the jungle. Alone, without water or food.
I was getting noplace fast. I stopped and got off the bike, just to curse a little. When I was done I decided to scout off the path down the hill to see what’s what. I climbed into the bush, promising myself that I would not lose sight of the bike, trying to make a lot of noise to scare away snakes and god knows who else. Soon I started seeing what looked like a break in the tree line where it seemed like the whole world dropped off. That must be the edge of the mountain, which I reasoned meant that I was not going to find a path down the side as I had been hoping. I remembered a very slight trail I had passed up the road a piece that could very well be leading off in the direction I wanted, so back up through the bush I climbed and made it back to the bike, a little dirtier with a million bug bites, but now with a slight tinge of hope. I turned that sucker around a doubled back up the road for a good ten minutes, gambling everything that I could make the trail and that it would be my salvation.

Good news, that trail lead me out of the jungle, the tree line ended and the road was semi paved, lots of potholes and loose gravel, but all in all an improvement. I was on top of a mountain, man it was spectacular in every direction. Now I could even see Tuk Tuk, a tiny speck in the distance. Soon I even saw a local kid on a motorbike, I flagged him down. Now, he didn’t speak much English but I showed him my gas gauge and he understood and motioned for me to follow. He took me around the corner to a barn where a guy came out with a couple of soda pop bottles full of gas, I think a 2 litter was less than a dollar and I was good to go. Two problems solved, now which way do I go to get home? Once again the kid wanted me to follow.

He lead the way down a steep steep hill road, it was almost going straight down the mountain. I would not be stretching if I told you it was like a 70 to 75 degree angle, and the road was half paved, half potholes and all the way covered with very loose rocks which ranged from gravel to baseballs. My throat was in my balls and I rode the breaks which was causing my back tire to start spinning and bouncing all over as the rocks shot out from under, I felt like I was sliding head first. Soon I felt the back tire loose the road altogether and it shot forward to the left side, for a split moment which is frozen in my memory for all time the whole bike was leaning all the way over to the right and for just a second I realized that there was no way to play this that wouldn’t end with me whipping out down the side of this mountain, and I realized that something very shitty was about to happen and that at the very least it would hurt.

I landed on my right side, skidding with the bike on top of me. I didn’t skid far, a few feet maybe, I wasn’t going very fast. But try as I may I couldn’t get the thing off me. I must have hollered when it was happening because the kid saw me and came running to help. He lifted the motorcycle off me, my right arm was bloody, by right leg was skinned from the top of my foot, (inside my shoe, still can’t really figure that one,) all the way up my thigh. I walked with a limp and cursed a little more. Yeah yeah yeah, I was lucky I didn’t kill myself and I know it.

It occurred to me that it had been several hours since this had been fun just before it occurred to me that the plastic case for the headlight on the motorcycle was cracked and had a hole. This made me feel like a total fink. Mr. Moon had trusted me, I had clearly let him down. This hurt far worse than my physical injuries, and on top of my guilt I wondered how much of my trip budget would have to go to fixing his motorcycle.

Now on top of everything else I had to get back on the fucking thing and continue, now with fresh wounds giving credence to my fears. It gets better too, around the corner from there, and about 300 feet down the road stopped, and when I say stopped, I mean man, it stopped.

Shit. It looked like a mudslide had taken the road into a deep gorge, straight up and down cliff and then far across the gorge another cliff with the rest off the road. I sat on the cliff looking down into the abyss and you know what I did? I laughed and laughed and laughed. I was trapped on top of this mountain in this island worse than Giligan, what the hell was I going to do now? What is worse that a motorcycle going down a 70 degree rock slide slope? How about going back up. No way this was the way down, no way at all.

Soon the kids brothers appeared out of nowhere and wanted to carry my bike down the cliff. I said no at first but gave in quick, I was so beat and hurt and just wanted to find a way out. They took the bike down a trough of mud that cut along the cliff, I followed and found my feet submerged in what would have made perfect grey sculpting clay up above my socks. Each step slid me further down the cliff and deeper into the clay, soon I was knee deep, and I watched these two kids carry this motorcycle through all this with almost no effort. Once on the bottom the kids revved the throttle and rode across the canyon to the other ravine. Next one climbed along side the bike, straight up the cliff, with one hand on the edge of the cliff and the other on the throttle of the bike. The other kid ran up the cliff behind, or I should say directly under the bike trying to hang onto the seat to make it go the right way. This was the damnedest thing I have ever seen and if I had a camera it would be on youtube. After they made it to the top with a revving and kicking motorcycle I had no excuse not to follow up the cliff, now covered in bug bites, sweet, blood, mud,
and fury. The two kids asked for a high price hoping I wouldn’t bargin too far down, I didn’t bargain at all, I didn’t have it in me. I paid them more money than I had paid for anything so far in Indonesia, but all in all after what they had gone through risking their lives and pushing this bike all the way through the mud and up the side of a sheer cliff, I decided they had earned ten dollars.

The whole way back I was worried sick about the bike, and I felt like I had let Moon down and I was worried that he would charge me a lot of money to fix it. When I got in, I dragged myself into his lobby and asked the kid at the desk for him. They got him off his hammock and with deep regret I showed him the bike, and he couldn’t have cared less. He seemed to think his brother had done that to the bike ages ago and was more concerned with my cuts. He gave me a jug of homemade stuff to put all over myself, it was thick and had a label with some Butak looking guy who seemed angry about something. I used the stuff and granted, my cuts healed fast, but in the middle of the night I found my leg and arms covered completely with ants so I had to take a shower.

PSYCHODELIC VOLCANO, and the papers want to know whose shoes you wear

The night before the motorcycle day I had once again found myself drinking at Bagus Bay, where the 21 year old Batack bartender, Fernando had taken to calling me bruduh. That night I was drinking with a rather tall and lankey muppet of a person named Haiky. His eyes had a weird way of always being too wide, as if always expressing supreme enthusiasm. Haiky is a cab driver from Finland. When I asked him how a cab driver from Finland could afford to go all the way to Indonesia he almost screamed “I sell weed!” At this point I floated the question of Mushrooms, as I had been toying with the idea but hadn’t found anyone to trip with. Weed and shrooms are grown on the island and the signs on the walls of most restaurants reassured me that things were cool. The sign on the wall of Bagus Bay read
‘Mushrooms: go to the moon. Tea or omelet.’ So Haiky and I agreed on the next day.

The next evening I limped into Bagus Bay with fresh cuts and local ointment all over and found a group of people waiting on us. A nice couple from London had agreed to come along for the trip and so had Fernando, the 21 year old bartender who called me ‘bruduh’.

I might as well mention here that I had not done drugs of any sort for a few years. My standing drug addiction involves mushrooms taken once every two years with friends and in a cool place. This seemed the perfect place and it had been just about two years since I tripped at Carolines lake house with Blake and Amy, I asked for mine in tea form. We all carefully watched each other as we drank the shit down, it was putrid brew indeed. At the bottom of the cup was a pile of greenish muck, which I opted to eat as well, nobody else did. That may account for why I was tripping so fucking hard later and they weren’t. I call it getting your money’s worth, blog believers.

And that night Peter Subway went and got his guitar and he spent what must have been all night hour after hour (I am kind of hazy on a cohesive timeline for what should be obvious reasons) playing a concert for us until his fingers bled. The highlight of the show for me was when I was really peaking, peter went into space oddity by David Bowie, and man, I was Major Tom. Here is the part I was feeling the most from the whole song

This is Major Tom to ground control, I’m stepping through the door,
and I floating in the most peculiar way, the stars look very different today

That was cool. I will never be able to hear that song again without thinking of Toba and that night. And for a long time I found myself outside alone laying in the grass on my back starring at the moon, which seemed to have the face of an ex girlfriend, and all around the moon the clouds formed landscapes of mountains and cities and circular geometric patterns, and the moon was so so so bright it was blinding. At one point I worried, really worried that I might get a moon burn. And as I layed out there I started to want to hang out with Mark, Mark this guy I had only known one week had become my best friend and as fucked as I was I wanted to hang out with Mark who was this cool guy from Manchester, but I couldn’t seem to tear myself away from the moon. Soon I heard Mark calling me, he had wondered where I was and I told him I had been off hallucinating so I went in and listened to Peter Subway with everyone else for a long time, Peter Subway fucking rocks, by the way. The man is a jukebox, there was no way he could be stumped all night he played and sang, then at one point Mark started singing about his dead grandmothers nipples just to fuck with me. The local girls asked me how I was doing and I said “I’m fine, thank you, and you?” Which is what my Chinese students always say whenever you ask them that question, and everyone laughed at me, but it was cool. And Peter Subway knew how to play a song by T-rex. Then I was playing on a series of different sized drums along a line in descending pitches like a xylophone of bongos, after a while I realized it was night time and I asked if I was keeping people up and they said maybe I was so I felt bad about it.

I found myself on the dock with Haiky, the Finish taxi driver and we dipped our feet in the water off the dock which felt so fucking good and we starred up at the stars and the moon and Haiky agreed that the moon was so amazing and we played with piles of seaweed which was laying around, and it was so interesting and I told him about China and about living there and about how my life was really great and about all that really mattered to me anymore was happiness and he agreed with me and we laughed like idiots and he looked just like a fucking muppet.

As the night wore on we all wound up in the wee hours sitting around a table slowly coming down with Peter Subway (god bless him) still playing and singing for us. And as we all came down we felt immense euphoria and glee and our smiles were stupid and our eyes were heavy. We sang along with every song he played, oh and the British lady had discovered Tommy the dog early in the evening and the entire night she sat there smoking with one hand and petting Tommy with the other, by the time I wasn’t tripping anymore I noticed that Tommy looked like just about the happiest dog I had ever seen. I noticed that Fernando started cleaning the place and working, which didn’t seem right to me so I cleaned the place for him and told him to sit, that he was not working tonight, and he sank back into his chair and called me bruddah. So cleared the empties off the bar and washed it and went around dumping the ashtrays and everything else. And I sang blister in the sun with Peter and it was the sort of odd situation where one didn’t feel at all strange singing in front of a whole room full of people, I usually don’t sing, but I like doing it so I don’t know what is the issue and why I shouldn’t. And we started drinking wine and started getting drunk, and Mark disappeared with a local girl, and just before the sun came up we all gave each other teary eyed hugs, strangers a few days before, now brothers and sisters, soon we would make the pretense of emailing each other and maybe if were are lucky we may see each other years from now, someplace. I would like that anyways.

MEDAN

Next I went to a city called Medan, hoping that I could just show up and find teaching work as I was running out of money, but no such luck. I stayed at the be all and end all of shit holes. In another blog I had to change the name of a place I stayed in Macao and of the owner in case someone found it by chance on the internet I didn’t want to hurt their business. I will tell you the real name of this place, it actually deserves infamy, in fact, if nobody has ever died in this shit hole I am surprised. The place was called Rona’s guesthouse formally sputnik and it cost a dollar a night and when Rona showed me the room it was a stall with exactly two things, a thin mattress on the floor, and a fan. When she showed me the room she said “It’s got a mattress ,and a fan, and everything.”

The front porch was the headquarters for an ever vigilant garrison of international drunks, too ugly to get laid or tolerated elsewhere so they all wound up here. Their leader was an old man from Australia who never wore a shirt and looked just like Abe Vigoda. He repeatedly hollered things like “Fuck the world, mate, that’s what I say.” Always followed by bellowing laughter, and the locals all laughed hard when he called them Orangutans, but I noticed that they weren’t laughing quite as hard the next night when he was still saying it. He was still laughing though, and how. Oh, and there was also a young guy who seemed to worship the Australian who kept lighting his own farts for the Australians approval, which never seemed to wean. I tried to talk to someone else and the Australian wouldn’t have it. Some guy tried to tell me about his trek through the jungle and the Australian hollered, “Jungle, why would you want to go there? I lived for six years in the Jungle, I almost got eaten by a tiger. Fuck the jungle, that’s what I say mate.” He was the kind of man who would have made excellent food for an animal, but displayed little more worth.

So Mark and I bounced and found an alley way where the locals drank Tuak, the bright yellow palm tree wine, and we did that for a few nights and got ourselves fucked up, lord. The local folks seemed pleased that we had found their little alley, not many foreigners do I take it, and we were treated like guests. They told me that just one farm harvests all the tuack daily for all of Medan and they get a hundred US a day, which actually doesn’t come to all that much when you consider the labor they have to hire for the job as well as the trucks and everything else. But one dollar will get you a kool aid pitcher full and that is plenty for you and a friend. Tuack gives no hangover and no headache, and when you are really gone it is impossible to notice, it is not until the next day when you calculate that your behavior was making no sense.

One night the locals started fighting, one guy left. They made a call and a dude showed up on a super nice motorcycle, big dude. When he showed up the trouble seemed to go away, we figured he was local mafia enforcement. Mark actually asked him, are you Mafia? Which would get your ass shot with the real thing in America, so the movies tell me, but the guy smiled and thought we were funny. I heard a story from a local over Tuak about the mafia boss in Sumatra, a man named Onu. I actually heard that name around a few times, Onu is known from the North all the way to the South. A man told me with certainty in his eyes that Onu can not be killed by bullets, and if you shoot him he will laugh and then shoot you. And if you are trying to kill Onu,
he will turn into a chicken. I am not making this up, Onu the mafia king of Sumatra is said to be able to turn into a Chicken at will. Tony Soprano couldn’t do that. In the alley in Medan Mark and I had really deep drunk discussions on the subject of our life, really deep shit, and I walked away thinking differently about some things in my life. It reminded me of drinking at the railroad tracks with my friends in the ATL. We wondered the streets looking for girls or alcohol, or tuack. Finally we parted ways, I stayed around a few more days and ran into Haiky which was cool. Then as we were leaving he tried to rip me off, this is after I spent an hour trying to wake his sorry ass up off the floor of the bathroom in the morning at Rona’s so he wouldn’t miss his plane, but I don’t want to tell that story, he didn’t rip me off by the way, but he tried and it pissed me off and he was trying to be sneaky about it.

Next I went to an island called Pulua wei which was amazing and well worth another entire big blog but I don’t feel like it. And then the snows his south China so I couldn’t go back and I went back to Toba a second time and was greeted like a returning hero. Fernando was so happy to see me, and some dog had puppies and Fernando named one of them Will after me, which makes me more happy than I can say. This weekend I got to go to Hong Kong to sort out my visa mess, and I guess I will wind up telling you about that. But now it is late and I want to get this finished so I will now put it up without a single proof read. If you bothered to read all this mess, I thank you.

Landed in Singapore, I guess it was a week ago now, seems like longer. Singapore was a very strange place. Just a bit too clean and way too modern to have any business in South east Asia. It was here that the fucker American piss ant kid got cained for spray painting a car a few years ago, lousy little so and so. It is here that it is illegal to chew or sell gum, ride your bike in the park, litter, jay walk, murder people in or out of a rage, detonate fire works, and while I think some one was pulling my leg I heard tell of a fine for neglecting to flush after a number two. The rest of them are real and levy heavy heavy fines or worse, so they say it is the safest country in the world. Calling Singapore a country is like calling Rhode Island a state, really just a technicality but size wise it is smaller than greater metro Atlanta, I would guess anyhow. cleaner too, and safer.

I stayed at a backpacker hostel called Betel box which was a cool spot run by hip funky kids in their 20’s who would often sink beers with us in the common room. The dorm I was staying in was a large room with 10 bunks holding 20 people, all of whom now know that I snore, or so I understand.

Among the people in my dorm were a couple from India along with their five year old servery developmentally disabled son. His limbs were too small for his frail body and useless leaving him confined to a baby stroller where his mother was spoon feeding him when we first met. He was also ;mentally disabled but it was hard to tell the extent without being able to speak his language. I talked to them for a long time, the boys father told me that he had been offered a good job in Boston where he could get good medical care for his son but his application for US visa was denied. So here they were, having traveled to Singapore to find a doctor and a job and a place to stay and a new life in a strange place and for hope that their son may get just a smidgen better if he were to get the right treatment they couldn’t find in India. They had given themselves one week, after which if still empty handed they would go back to India. The boys father seemed to glow with such optimism he talked of his problems with a broad smile which refused to be defeated. He seemed to be a rock for his wife, she looked like she need it. I heard myself telling them that my mother used to work with kids like their son, as it came up in conversation. Their faces lit up and he almost jumped up and down as he told his wife who sprung out of her chair. I tried to calm them and explain that my mother couldn’t really do anything to help them but he said it would be so good to talk to her about their son and I gave them her email.

That night I hung out in the common room striking up conversations with the other back packers and struck up conversation. There was one guy from Austraillia in town for two weeks to study mui thai boxing, a couple of kids from Wales, some Aussie girls. A bunch of us went the next day to the little India section and then wandered around looking at Hinu temples. We got lost for a while in the down town area trying to find a street that wasn’t fucking there. As we were looking at the map, there was a very real flash of a moment, just one tick, one little pop in time before which the air was filled with air as opposed to massive heavy sheets of crashing water, where as after the afore mentioned pop we were instantly cursing the heavens, soaked to our skin, and running like hell for shelter which wound up being a veranda roof of a nearby building. We were stuck there for quite a bit, lost and wet, having to speak up to one another over the screaming rain which was punctuated with scatter shot thunder all around. Monsoon season you know. I went running off to scout where to go, came back drenched only to realize that everyone else had decided on a nice, safe, dry cab to the very posh, very pretentiously historic raffles hotel, fine I said.

Very instrumental white people used to hang around out in the Raffles hotel all the way back to the Dutch colonial days, I think. Dutch east India movers and shakers would sit around and smoke cigars, talk about trading spice for beads and about how fine it was to be so white in Singapore in those days and they barked orders at the help and laughed at how funny it was to see them wearing the proper clothes of non-savages. They also sipped a drink called the Singapore sling, which was invented here at the Raffles hotel and has the appearance of a five star gourmet frilly umbrella drink that wouldn’t really get you drunk and cost too much money. I was right about the money part and we all passed, so I can’t comment on it’s buzz quality. One glass of that shit cost more that two nights at the backpacker hostel, so we all had the cheapest thing they had, English tea which came with little silver tea pots and finery. Somebody went to the john and came back raving about how nice it was, so soon there we were soaking wet in tee shirts under a glowing chandelier talking about going to the toilet and about shit and we all giggled ourselves silly much to the chagrin of the staff of the Raffles hotel. Next time you want to seem smart to your friends and annoying to your bartender just order a Singapore sling and say “from the Raffles in Singapore, don’t you know.” Fake British accent is optional, but well worth the effort I would say.

So we drank that night and a few backpackers left and a few more left and we all had the same conversations with each other about where we had been and where we were going and what country we were from. There was a German girl who just seemed completely rude to everyone, and another German girl who was way cool. This one decided that the next leg of my trip would involve her and a dude she had met at a conference that week.

They were stuck in Singapore for the weekend, having been there for over a week on a conference. I turned out to be a fortuitous option, you see I was on my way to an island off the coast of Singapore where I was catching a ferry to Sumatra Indonesia, this was as far as my plan went. So they figured we could all hang out on said island for the weekend and they could escape Singapore with it’s hustle and bustle and chill the fuck out on a beach, and I figured that I could hang out too. The connection island, Paluo Bantam, is a shithole from what we had heard and read, so we opted for the close by Paluo Bintam. The half hour ferry took almost two hours, and we landed in a very remote looking city. They were surprised to see us and everyone started in with their desperate offers of taxis, and hotels for us. The customs was a desk where they asked Ines how long she was staying, she said two days and they took our passports, and asked for ten dollars american each. I ponied up and waited, when my passport came back it said 7 days, which was not good. I asked for a 30 day visa and they explained that I should have said so, they only thing to do now was to turn around and go back to singapore and come right back. I didnt want to do that and just decided to have a good time and figure it out later, I still had 7 days.

We hired a car to take us to the east end of the island where all the cool shit is supposed to be. We finally made it to a guest house that was a network of long pier walkways that stretched far out over the water. At the end of the walkways were the bungalows, hanging over the ocean. We stayed up all night, drank every drop of tiger beer they had under a limitless star filled sky, the water so perfect. We laid on the dock and talked endlessly about how happy we were to be there, how perfect our lives were at that moment, and we talked about other things too. Danial is a few months from a PHD, his thesis concerns the cleaning radioactive water, so I picked his brain for a while about alternative energy and about climate change and the future. I asked him if he thought we were all fucked. Good news, he says we are not fucked, and he is a smart guy. so that is good news, no? And he talked about his girlfriend and we talked about traveling and there was a family from Malaysia who were staying there and fishing all night, they smoked some fish on sticks and brought them for us. It was a great night.

Next day we mostly slept, I laid in a hut over the sea and read a book, sipping beer and eating peanuts. Day after that, we all got up early and rented two canoes and paddles out to a nearby island to go snorkeling. We walked around the island, untouched and heaven by the way. The water was so clear and a slight breeze made the blazing sun forgivable, momentarily. We went to the middle of the ocean where there was a sand bar in the middle which we could stand on. The edge of the sand bar were coral reefs for snorkeling. Lots of clown fish (little nemo) and cool black spikey things and schools of fish, the occasional eel. We were about twelve feet up, so you could hold your breath and dive straight down and look around. that afternoon we went to go to the port city where I found out the boat to sumatra was leaving the next morning so I stayed at a guesthouse there called Bongs. Bongs is in the lonely planet and located (no sign mind you) in an sub alley off another alley, which seemed to be filled with a combination of police drinking around a card table and prostitutes. At bongs I met a chap from Amsterdam and we went for lunch. As we were leaving the guy who ran the place asked if we liked music and wanted us to quiz him, name any song. On the wall he had a picture of Madanna and I said like a virgin which he knew and we told him how smart he was, he looked disappointed. a dude took us to a place where they started pilling trays of food all over the table. We tried this and that, the guy was eating too. The bill came and was close to $14 American, they were charging as much for each small bowl of food as a whole meal anywhere else, so we had been had. I sat there refusing to pay. Finally we put down $8 which was still way too much but enough so we could leave without trouble from the locals, who all knew where we were staying. My new friend and I then took a boat to a nearby island to see some ruins of Muslim forts and mosques, which was ok.

That night we drank beer. the old man who ran the place once again asked us to quiz him and so we did, started easy and he knew everything. Then I said, ok, what about Telegram sam. Figured I would test him, without thinking, through heavy accent he said T rex. I sat up, amazed. The guy from Amsterdam said I wanna be your dog and he said Iggy and the stooges. This guy really did know his shit. so for hours we all tried to stump each other. He asked me who wrote the song come on feel the noise and (like an idiot) said quiet riot, he corrected me. FYI it was slade. Then we tried movies and I ruled but he did manage to get me once, I had forgotten that Nichole Kidman was in Days of Thunder. Not the kind of info I store. But still, this guy was so cool, his favorite all time was Zepplin and I told him that John Bonham was my hero. So if you are into music and on the island Paluo Bintam, check out Bongs, kind of a shit hole but good fun.

So next I looked at my choices. The US embassy In Sumatra is in Medan, which puts me in good position to go to a lake in a volcano crater, which is on my list. I am here now, actually. The problem there is what if they just say they can’t extend my visa and I have to leave and come back? Than I would have gone to the south end, spent all day and night in a bus, just to have to leave. So on the night before I decided I would just say fuck it and head to Malaysia. Which I did.

more later
w

It was January 7, 2007, The fateful day when my plane touched down at Beijing International. I landed confused and befuddled. Disoriented and ill suited to meet the calamity of my new everyday facing me, pessimistic about my odds. One short year later I am stronger, wiser, and just a little less fat. I’ve lived had good days, sad days, great days, plus some regular ones too. I’ve been sick, concussed, lost, misunderstood, beat up, smitten, and hung over. I’ve taught, traveled all over the darn place, I climbed mountains, rocked out, and my only regret is that my Chinese still sucks, but getting better slowly. I met good people, had good food, I had weird shit too, and it ain’t over yet by a long shot.

It was over one year ago that Marcus started this website for me. Back then, I remember he asked if I wanted to sign up for the one year or the two year deal. I laughed, no way I will even be there one whole year, just do one, no problem. Well, earlier this week the domain expired, and Marcus fixed that shit with a quickness. I was momentarily scared that the site was gone, but Marcus fixed everything. He is the man you guys. So in the meantime happy birthday to all of you that have been reading my diary this year. Keep the emails coming.

I am writing by pen in a notebook (originally) on a four hour bus from Guangzhou to Zhuhai. I took a 20 hour train from Shangqiu, the same trip as the one I wrote about in the post car 13, this time with a bed which made all the diff. China by train is really quite pleasant when you have a bed. I traded the bottom bed with a girl for the middle of the three bunks. The bottom bed is considered more desirable by the Chinese, but by day becomes the bunk on which everyone sits and chats on. It is for this reason that I much prefer the upper beds where I can relax with a book, laying around all day, watching China slug by from the window. So it was nice, aside from the girl on the bottom bunk making a cell call in the middle of the night waking everyone up, including the baby who once awake, made her adorably screaming presence known for the duration.

So after that bus ride to Zhuhai I made it to Macao. I can’t remember what I told you about Macao the last time but this is my third trip and also my third time at Septembers bunk hostel. Septembers is a two bedroom apartment at best with 2 double bunk beds in one room, one double bunk in the other room, and a third double bunk in a utility closet. The big dorm from where I am now writing, has not been redecorated since the days it was a little kids room, still sporting cartoon puppies frolicking on the wall and glow in the dark stars on the ceiling. The place is owned by a dude from Bangladesh named Joe. My first stay here a girl in the dorm had left her passport on the China side and Joe, being the knight in shinning armor type, arranged for his brother to pick it up and bring it to her. He also spent ten minutes trying to convince her she really ought to have sex with his brother for his trouble. Only fair, reasoned Joe. That was where I met Ben, an ex big deal entertainment lawyer from New York (he reped 50 cent among others) who one day said the hell with it and threw a party where he gave away all his stuff and has been traveling for the past several few years. He was a gambler and we hit the casinos. He told me he used to own a Cadillac he kept in Los Vegas and a Cadillac just for Atlantic city. We all were talking about the fact that Macao beats Vegas in gambling revenue, we couldn’t figure it out. Ben came back the next day after winning enough to pay for his whole week in Macao, and he reported that from what he could tell, Chinese people could not gamble, hence big winnings for the casinos in Macao. He was playing black jack and said he saw people with a four showing and they wanted to stay and keep betting. There is no other card that you could have that would make that a good hand. So according to 50 cents old lawyer, Chinese people can’t gamble.

That was the same week I came in with a cheap bottle of bum wine and split it with Joe. When I told him I was American he took the opportunity to praise George W Bush Endlessly, which I didn’t know how to respond to. That is the only time that has happened. Weird. That was on the way to Thailand, I went back through Macao on my way home from Thailand a month later. That time in Macao I met up with an Australian dude who has been traveling Asia for the past ten years chasing woman. We went out hitting bars but ultimately we had no luck, nowhere to take them, was his point. Can’t take them to the bunk hostel. That time I stayed at Septembers Joe had drastically overbooked. I get the feeling that Joe doesn’t turn away business. I wound up sleeping on a cot next to the front desk, crammed next to another cot. Right now (when this was first written by notebook) a cot sits next to the bunk comfortably cramming 5 in this tiny puppy room.

Earlier tonight I was talking to Joe, I asked him about the old man who was there the last couple of times I was there. This was an old Korean guy who always sat smoking in the corner with his shirt off, always watching American professional wrestling. I thought he worked there. Joe told me that the old man didn’t work there, he was a gambler who’s family had told him he wasn’t allowed to go to Monaco for gambling anymore. He had a real problem and was losing all their money. He had actually been missing for several months and finally his family found him, sitting in the corner of Septembers Hostel smoking and watching wrestling all day, gambling all night. I mentioned what I had heard about Macao making more money off gambling than Vegas. Joe gave a sage nod and said he had heard that too. Then he said “The Chinese are naturally good gamblers. It is in Chinese peoples blood. Like eating human flesh.” I asked him to repeat, and he talked of times in WWII during the Japanese occupation, times of awful famine. He said in those days people ate their babies, “turned their babies into soup” I believe were his exact words. And so, according to Joe Chinese people are good at gambling because eating babies is in their blood. I told Joe that I had had dog in China, but never baby soup.

Joe is a good guy, he likes to talk, and he wants to help. And I will gladly stay there on my way home at the end of the vacation I am now on.

I am in Singapore at the moment, last night I met up with a posse and tonight we are going to a night safari in the Singapore Zoo. Georganna and Andy tell me that the Singapore zoo is amazing. I can’t wait.