Thule on a Bike Named Drifter

 

 

 

Deb loaned me a camera (thanks!) and I very quickly gave up on it.  Because this is Norway, and the splendor here isn’t a single vista or panorama, but rather the absurd endlessness of its mythological grandeur.  Any direction, as far as legs or eyes wander: looming peaks crashing down to thunderering fjords, spewing mists of waterfalls stretching to heaven, edged by timeless sod-roofed farmsteads looking ludicrous as they cling to breathtaking overviews: everwhere a delicate carpet of pink and purple flowers splashed with petals of yellow flame, and puffy baby sheep nibbling at your toes: how does one fit all that bullshit into one frame?  Not me.  If you want to know what rural Norway looks like: google it.  But I guarantee even the best photographer with the finest gear won’t do it justice.

And of course, no picture could possibly capture the greatest treasure of Odin’s realm: the thing that fills me which so many emotions I can hardly bear: Allemannsretten, the right to be.  Allemannsretten: “All Man’s Rights”: the codified set of laws which say, simply, that everyone  has a natural born right to exist in space, to move their body anywhere they wish, and enjoy this beautiful earth.  Yes: there is private property ownership in Norway.  No: it is not held to the exclusivity of others.  Here you have the basic human right to explore, to forage, and camp, anywhere.  Thule’s beauty is for all: here I don’t need to worry about being shot, being run off, being arrested or ticketed simply for being somewhere.  When we look across this landscape, it is ours, it is accessisible, and it is free.  There are fences in rural Norway: they are for sheep.

But wait, what??  How can this be a mind-bending or earth-shaking thing?  Isn’t it… you know… the most basic reality of existance: that we’re in a physical form, we take up space, we move around and sleep and eat?  How deeply insane is it that, as an American, laws of exclusive property ownership have been so deeply engrained that Allemannsretten seems in any way special or amazing?  As one Norwegian I met years ago explained passionately, “These laws are stupid! They weren’t even passed until 1957: before that everyone just knew that we all have basic access to the land, what do we need the laws for?  Of course we have a right to exist, we’re human, aren’t we?”  Allemannsretten has brought literal tears of joy into my eyes, as well as literal tears of shame: because my own country’s deeply unjust false reality has been instilled so deeply into my brain that my passive thought process accepts it as the natural state of being: I’ve internalized the toxic kookooness of our system to a degree which makes me, my culture, and my country all profoundly sick.  I come from a place where the word “freedom” is so violently crammed down our throats that we never have bandwidth question it, yet the basic, natural born right to exist in space does not exist, and we accept this as the inevitable, unquestionable reality of the matter. “American Freedom” : the lie so big we don’t even have the capacity see all of it.  To say that the United States was built on stolen land isn’t even quite true: because for something to be stolen someone must first own it, which, to my understanding, isn’t how our nation’s original habitants viewed land.  Before our arbitrary, unjust concepts of exclusive ownership were genocidally slapped and sealed across the physical and mental landscape, people simply were: living in accordance to that natural law which says: yes, people exist, they have to do so somewhere, and by nature of being born that is what they do.  Yet at home my own national parks are prohibitively expensive for me to even enter, and when I peacefully camp at night I worry about someone coming to shoot me, with the full protection of the law, simply because my body is existing on space which they artifically own, even though they can not possibly occupy all of it.  I’ve been woken in the middle of the night on “public land” by armed police telling me I have no right to be here, there, or anywhere, and that I must either cease to exist or hide outside the protection/permission of the law.  And I’ve slept scared.  So here, in Norway’s breathtaking vakkert landskap, when I search for a camping spot every night, and my criteria get to be where I’d like to wake up, or what feels accessible, dry or cozy, but somewhere in my culturally engrained brain I’m still looking for a place to hide: I’m filled with an overwhelming and complicated set of emotions.

 

 

Important things being said, on with the bike tour narrative:

 

I guess you could say I ended up in the wilds of Norway via a chance encounter a few years back with a nude bookstore owner in Arizona’s Sanoran Desert (“Of course I’m the owner, who would hire me?  I’m a nudist!”)  This led to a lasting friendship, and percipitated a meandering series of events taking me from the Slabs to real-deal wild-west claim-jumping torquise with a Greece sun-dancer and dynomiting our way into Arkansas earth with a toothless guy named Bobby… no no, too many steps: reeled back:  I landed a job for an intense Austrian gemlord in Tucson, proved myself worthy, and was invited on a helicopter-mining expedition to Norway: hunting a rare pink zoisite called “thulite”.  This validation of being a career adventurer saw all my carefully held morals around not flying wadded up in a little ball and thrown out somewhere over the Atlantic: professional treasure hunter!  That was in 2017, and for the past three summers I’ve been returning to the profound, rugged beauty of Trondalog to chop it up, put it on a helicopter, and sell it for $20/lbs.

The work is in a stunning mountain forest/swamp ecosystem next to a pristine lake and thundering waterfall, miles from any sign of human habitation.  The work is painfully hard: the team of German dwarves and myself use heavy drills, followed by heavy sledge hammers, followed by heavy lifting, on repeat all day every day for 9 or 10 days, then the helicopter comes, the rocks fly away, and I’m left in a daze.  For all this, I am not paid in money.  Rather, the boss buys my plane ticket, and gives me a small share of pink rocks shipped to Tucson, AZ, where I pick them up the following winter and sell them all to my club-footed Afghani mobster contact named Hefiz for a tidy sum.  When all all accounts are figured and barrels of rocks are liquified to stacks of cash, it’s probably the highest paying job I’ve ever had.

But the reward isn’t simply monitary.  Not only do both ends of the work (mining and selling) involve high degrees of adventure, but the open ended plane ticket opens the door to fun times.  I’m able to drag a couple weeks of work into a couple month’s vacation: the first time I came was probably the best trip of my life: after mining I randomly stumbled into a multi-week gathering of Scandinavian freaks and weirdos who wrapped me in love in high in beautiful mountains: making lifelong friends, eating, singing, snuggling, and skinny dipping under fresh throbbing waterfalls, then smashed my way south via Norwegian freight train to make my now-annual pilgrimage to my favorite place in the human-inhabited world: Copenhagen’s squatter community of Christiania.  The following year, other than my pilgrimage, I didn’t spend much time in Scandinavia, but rather used the return ticket to reposition myself to New York, hitchhiked up explored up through New England and Maine, crossed into Canada, and lived a lifelong fantasy of riding freight all the way west through that wild and beautiful country.

This year, though, I’d been fantisizing about doing something truly special.  Before last year’s journey was even complete, I’d hatched a plan to bike tour from where we mine (near Trondheim, just shy of the arctic circle) all the way south to Copenhagen.  And so, a week before I flew out, I brought my rusty old bike into a local bike shop for some advice, and was met with; “Oh no.  No way: you can’t tour with with thing.  This thing is a total piece of shit.”  What!?!  I took it to a different shop for a second opinion, and was met with an even more firm, “Uh ah, no way, this bike isn’t fit to ride let alone tour with, and it’ll cost more that it’s worth to even get it halfway where it needs to be.  Frankly, this bike sucks.”  Oh, was I ever sad.  My bike tour dreams felt like they were crashing around me.  Until…

Wait a minute: no!  I’ve done this before, I’ve junk biked around the world!  I towed a shopping cart through the damn Balkan mountains, and everyone said that was impossible, too, but I fucking did it, and it’s probably the best memory of my life, what do these bike nerds know about being a hobo?  Not a damn thing… not a damn thing.  So, with about 48 hours before catching a plane, and very little understanding of what I was doing, I started opening up hubs, trueing wheels, re-winding derailer springs (giving up and buying a new derailer), taking stuff apart, squirting grease indescribinately, blow-torching seized parts, popping chain pins, and generally turning my old bike into many many many seperate pieces of metal which I anxiously shoved in a box and stuffed onto a plane, along with a couple 5-gallon buckets of food (who can afford to eat in Norway?), all my mining equipment and a whole lot of bungie cords.  Quick time-space warp, a couple weeks of hard work mining, and bike tour was ready to begin!

 

But Lo!  I can never do anything the easy way…  Walker the Foolish, Walker the Dumb: I made one huge, critical mistake.  Unforgivable, really, especially given that this is my FOURTH trip to Norway, not my first rodeo, so to speak, yet  I came to one of the rainiest places on earth, to bike tour, without ANY proper rain gear.

This is enormously, unfathomably stupid, and I would be punished for it nearly nonstop the entire way down Norway.

I’m writing these words in Stavanger, on country’s south coast, where I’m waiting for the boat to Denmark, and the final 400 km (flat!) push to Copenhagen.  So how has bike tour been?  Well, it didn’t rain EVERY day, but it did rain every day except two.  And when it rained, it REALLY rained.  In fact he past two weeks up and down and up and down Norway’s breathtaking, rugged coast have honestly been extremely, brutally, (not using these words lightly) physically and emotionally painful.  It’s been the most prolonged, unrelenting, and inescabably wet I’ve ever been (and I grew up in the Pacific Northwest).

I pedalled myself sick, I pedalled myself hypothermic, I pedalled myself really really really tired.  Before Stavanger I took no days off, and slept indoors only once, when a very nice woman took pity on me wet and bedraggled on a ferry and invited me home. I pedalled until my wheel exploded, then I pushed my bike until I could pedal again.  I went hard: as hard as I could: it was actually kind of dangerous and very stupid.  I whimpered: never before in my life has this sound involuntarily come from my body and brain, it was such a primal, exhausted, beaten sound: it scared me.  This trip has been unbelievably beautiful, and not without joy, but much (most?) of it really did feel like Dumbledor drinking that poison.

So, why am I sharing all this?  Have I dusted off this old blog for sympathy, to rant or complain?  No: it’s not.  I have a point to make.  I’ve learned something important in this life, and I want to say it:

I believe, without a shred of doubt, that there is enormous reward to pushing yourself through something hard.  In Stavanger now, with a couple days rest at a friend’s house under my belt, I don’t for one second see this bike tour as anything short of success, anything short of wonderous, anything short of divine.  I know there is value and growth in misery.  I think that we, as humans, try so hard to escape suffering, surround ourselves with so much comfort and security, that we loose a huge part of what it means to be alive.  I see this poisoning us from within: it leads to crippling emotional, psychological, and even physical problems, and ultimately robs us of so much beauty that the world has to offer.  Discomfort to me is infinately more desirable that lost lifeforce for the fear of discomfort: and we can never learn what we’re made of until we push ourself to the edge.  And then keep pushing ourselves, and never stop pushing ourselves, because that’s where we find our true strength, and learn deep lessons about who we are.

Why am I writing this?  I’m writing this because I want YOU to bike tour.  No, I don’t want to you forget your raingear and be hypothermic and miserable, and you won’t, because you’re smarter than that, but I want you to do something really really hard that scares you and you’re not sure if you can do, and then I want you to DO it and I want you to know what that feels like.  I want you to conquer something very difficult on a road somewhere, and in doing so unlock something special inside yourself.

You don’t need a fancy bike, you don’t need real panniers, and you don’t need a lot of money.  You don’t need to be in shape, you don’t need to be a mechanic, and you don’t need lightweight camping gear.  You don’t even NEED need raingear (although you should bring rain gear). All you need: all you really need: is yourself.  And I believe in you.

I just want you to pick a distant place on some map, and tell yourself “I’m gonna get there, by the power of my own two legs.”  And then I want you to do it.  It’s as simple as that.  You don’t need to go fast, you don’t need to compete, you don’t need to be in some wild foreign land: you just need to do it.

You might not like this part, you might not think this is possible, but I don’t want you to just go for a weekend, or a few days. I want you to really go somewhere.  I want you to be able to see that distance from outer space.  I want you on the road for at least a month.  Because the first week doesn’t even count, and the second week is just starting to settle in: it’s the third week, and the fourth, where the magic begins.  Because that’s when you really settle into it: that’s when you begin to live on the road, not just visit: that’s where it becomes your new norm, and it’s in that space that you really start to learn what’s important, what isn’t, and that’s where the change starts to occur.  It might sound inaccessible, but trust me, please, I know what I’m talking about.

And when you’re on a mountain pass and your bike breaks down and you don’t know how to fix it: it might suck but you’ll figure it out, because you have to.  In doing so you’ll unlock something so powerful within yourself that you never knew was there: something tranformative that will permanently change your vista of life possibilities.    And when you’re exhausted and think you can’t go on, but then one pedal stroke at a time you go on, you’ll learn, and know, that you can do oh-so-much more than you ever thought you could.  And when you crown the other side, and shoot down into some glowing valley somewhere and it’s the most profound thing you’ve ever seen: you will have earned it. Because bike touring isn’t all misery: not even close.  As many people have heard me rave, the happiest memories of my entire life have been bike touring.  Other than being hit by a car my current tour is going about as poorly as a tour could reasonably be expected to go, yet still almost daily I’m filled with ecstasy and sheer joy.

And you’re gonna do that: you’re gonna go up and down mountains and do things you never knew you could do, and yes: you’ll be totally fucking miserable sometimes and you’ll crash and it will hurt, but don’t worry about that because in the end the treasure you experience will incomporably priceless.  And personal.  Because what you will earn, what you’ll have for the rest of your life, is an emotion impossibly rare in our daily lives: you will have triumph.  And it will change you, for the better, I promise.

The Revolt

 

I just put out a new book, and its fantastic.  Buy it!

 

Train Song

Nearing the one year anniversary of returning home, I am pleased to announce the sale of a book I wrote, Train Song.  This is part one of my round-the-world epic, and focuses on the journey’s first 6 months spent riding trains, hitchhiking, and working around North America.  Its a good book, and would also make a great gift.  Thanks for supporting me, enjoy!

$10 + $4 shipping and handling.   Or find me and I’ll sell you one for $10.  Or equivalent trade.  Its in some book stores, too, but you’ll just have to figure out which ones.

BOXCAR LOVE

Boxcars home over the Cascades Summit crowned the best, worst, longest, hardest, funnest and most terrifying trip of my life.    Every superlative applies.

I’m eager to get on with other things for a change, but a few important words before I go (or stay, rather):

Thanks world.  Thanks for one hell of a trip.

Thanks for flocks of sheep in the Caucus Mountains, Tibetan yaks and a Balkan Fox.   Crow feathers whistling in bike spray.  Here’s to the gardeners speaking forty different languages, forest canopies, and 24 lonely train songs.        Barren deserts, city squats, tropical jungles and arctic sun.                Cold wind.             Ocean Stars.

Hundreds of camp sites and coworkers around the world.

I’ll always remember fourteen good shoes and the two feet that shredded em.  Hats off to one good hat.   One donkey, two good bikes and a canoe.

Here’s to the good people who traveled with me:  You know who you are.    You’re family.   Live hard, ride free:  If you don’t see me tomorrow; know I died as I pleased.

Thanks to well over 300 total, random strangers from every corner of the globe who pulled over to give me a lift.   Everywhere I’ve gone I’ve been showered with meals, stories, drinks, and all the tea in China.  Strangers is strange lands handed me keys to their homes.  One guy bought me a Persian rug.  You opened up your families to me; your Gods and your lives.  We laughed together.   Thank you so much for literally keeping me going.

Warm stoves on cold nights and showering away tropical blaze.  And then you poured me more tea.

Most of all Boxcar Love to the Curve:  25 Moons, and one Rising Sun.

Thank you.      Muchos Gracias.       Merci, Danke schön.     Tusen Takk.    Grazie.  Hvala.      Teşekkür Ederim,  Spas,  Didi Madlobt.    Teşekkülar.  Raxmet,  Spasiba, Kop Rakhmat.             Xièxie.  Thuk-je-che.       Khawp Jai Li Li, Akun Sheran,  Cám ơn.            Terima Kasih Banyak.    Much love.

 

-S.B.              EBD ’12-’14

Life at the Lizard Palace

Squatting is my catnip.  Fun.  Fulfilling.   It is the perfect synthesis of adventure, ideals, camping, stealth, nesting, and the total joy of one’s labor directly meeting personal needs.  I remember my first squat – not just sleeping in an abandon building but really owning it and making it a home – years ago at The Crumble.  I remember how the little fibers of my body and tissues of my heart all sang to me: bringing direct action and tangible change to long-held personal beliefs on property ownership and at the same time the thrill of living outside the law and having a very active relationship with the place I lived.  That was five years ago, and I haven’t paid a dime on rent since.

But never have I ever had a squat like the Lizard Palace…

The story I heard was that it was abandon because of transportation difficulties – being only practically accessed by boat.   I heard that the Thai family who owned it were now just holding onto the property, waiting to re-develop when a road is eventually built to that side of the island.  Whatever the story, I got the hottest tip of my life from a drunk Australian lady one day.  “Oh yeah,” she slurred.  “There’s an abandon resort at the very eastern pinnacle of the island.  It’s really hard to get to, though, it takes like an hour hiking over a really steep footpath – so nobody really goes out there.” And I was sold.

What is this abandon resort?  Let me explain…   The hot sweaty climb through jungley bird sounds and swingy vines to hop roots and ruts on a washed-out footpath drops to a deserted bay with crystal blue waters.  Hugging the hillside are a dozen wooden bungalows, and near the waters edge a large concrete hotel with open-decked beach bars and a breathtaking rooftop patio.  All abandon.  All deserted.  All mine.

A few years of dilapidation leaves its regular marks: colorful graffiti which blends so well with the bright jungle and a confetti of broken glass in the big hotel.  Broken boardwalks and completely lost pathways to the bungalows.  But here in the tropics, a different kind of disintegration is rapidly engulfing the building:  the jungle’s green is eager to devour.  Vines twine and roots wind – claiming very clearly that this is a wild space.

Above it all, overlooking it all from the hill, is the old presidential suite.  The LIZARD PALACE.  My squat.   On the third-story shady balcony I pitched my tent and scavenged furniture – light breeze tinkling chimes of seashell and bamboo.  The second story is my kitchen, and first thing every morning I pick a fresh bouquet of tropical flowers.

The island is Koh Tao – a tropical mecca in Southern Thailand where cheap diving, cheap drinking and good coral have created the busiest dive resorts in the world.  I came here because I was broke and it seemed like a good place to try to hustle some magic tricks, but its really not my cup of tea:  TOURISM is God:  the island is overrun with expats and one hardly sees an Asian face.  Aussie Pub crawlers rule streets and for nearly-Western prices you can get sub-par pizza, Indian, Mexican or pot-roast, but no where serves good Thai food.  The beaches are crowded and dirty and the coral is dying from the high acidity of surface run-off.

But not my beach!

My beach is private.  I swim around naked and scream at the top of my lungs because no one can hear me.  I build bonfires and smoke my snake skin.

A friend gave me a scuba mask and I spend my days eating mushrooms exploring the weird underwater world of bizzaro-land:  neon itty-bitties swirl around doofy big-lipped Parot fish while bright Seargant Majors zip from Trigger Fish, Nemo lurks in the anemones, Mooray Eels hide in the rocks and the occasional Blacktip Reefshark glides through big shoals of flickering silver bellies.      When I work in town I overhear the divers talking to one another:  “No waaay!   You saw a sea turtle??   I dive every day and I never see sea turtles!  They’re so rare!”.   And I laugh and smile to myself… because on my side of the island, I know exactly what time of day the sea turtles cruise by and where they like to hang out. My side of the island.

My side of the island also has rocks.  The pinnacle itself is a rocky outcrop with deep coral below, and perfect for cliff-jumping.   Occasionally tourists book onto specialty charter boats or sign up for the “Rock Climbing Adventure Hike!” where a guide hikes them out to jump off the rocks – but usually I have it all to myself. Big rocks, big jumps:  big enough to make me nervous, then give me butterflies, then give me a moments pause to think, then smack me hard plunging down down down into the world of octopus and alien fish.   That’s my shower..

My toilet is the Bat Shack:  one of the bungalows with the best view where all the Flying Foxes (bats as big as cats) hang upside down:  I ripped out some floorboards and let the stilted architecture take care of the rest while I enjoy the view.

I have a dreamy, slow life.   I wake up with zero dollars in my pocket: climb around on some rocks, swim with sea turtles or explore the jungle.  Cook some lunch, put on my ratty magic clothes and hike a peaceful jungle trail into town, do some magic, make a few dollars, eat some food, get drunk if I feel like it (getting drunk for free is the easiest thing in the world when you’re a magician in a tourist town:  people will happily buy you 15 $2 beers before they tip you a dime…), then eventually make my way back down the spooky jungle trail with bats eating the bugs out of my headlight, and just enough adventure to feel good without being scary.

Then repeat.

Its so damn cool to wake up with nothing, put faith in the fact that the day will work out, have the day work out, then go to sleep happy with nothing.   If I wasn’t in such a damn hurry to try to find a way home, I could live this paradise life for a long time.   So in the end I only stayed at the Lizard Palace for about a month.

But in that time, one day…

———————————————————————————————————————————————————–

Journal entry from… oh wait, there’s no date on it.   From early September, maybe:

I just saw a cat.  I JUST saw a cat.  A BIG cat.   I was reclined on my mattress sofa drawing the above picture (this is all written underneath so snake doodles).  I turned to grab the snake skin, to try to look at the markings, and a strong wind rippled across the balcony, scattering my papers.   I was noticing at the moment how silent everything was, I was really just thinking that, slipping down the stairs in bare feet.

There, on the landing, a huge thing dove into the brush.  It was big enough that my first thought was “Water Monitor!”.   But the way it moved couldn’t have been more different.  It shot like a phantom through the green tangle and dry leafs hardly making a sound.  I didn’t see it’s head – in the flash of the moment I have no idea how bit it was – but just as it flew past me and disappeared, I saw a long, beautiful tail.  It was golden, thick, with gorgeous, wild markings.   And unmistakably feline.

I’ve never felt so awed before.  I stood breathless, mind racing for a moment before a timeless, numbing wave of gratitude and happiness crashed over me.   I just stared into the silent bush for a long time, everything seemed so surreal like some amazing drug.  It seemed like all sound had been sucked out of the world.

After some time I climbed the stairs to find that the page I was looking for hadn’t flown over the balcony at all.

Wow.

————————————————————————————————————————————————————-

I scoured the free guidebook listing all the mammals on Koh Tao:  no wild cats.   I nonchalantly asked around:  “no no,” I was told by the adventure tour guides down on Pub Street, “absolutely no wild cats.”     “No no,” the Thai boat guys told me.  “No cats.”

But they’re all wrong.

I don’t know what I saw and I don’t care: all I know is that I’ve never felt so lucky in all my life.   Ever.

And it gave me a profound hope for all wild beauty – the endangered and the ‘extinct’ and the Big Foots, too.   The crumble of the Lizard Palace proved to me that the earth heals and reclaims itself – its just waiting its chance.    And when it does, I’ll be there enjoying the view.

Island Magic

Hello.   I’m a magician here on the island.  You’ve probably seen me:  I’m the guy walking around with a fox tail hanging out of my hat.  You may have even been approached by me if you’ve ever eaten in one of the tourist restaurants where I work.   “Would you like to see some magic?”  I would have asked.  Most likely your answer would have been ‘no’ – or a blank stare – but perhaps you would have obliged.  And in that case, I would have begun my routine:

“My name is Walker, I’m a Cascadian magician and storyteller.”   You pick a card.  “My own story started in 2012, when I left home heading east.”   Your card disappears.   “I had this thought that maybe I could magic my way around the world without flying.”  Your card reappears.    “As with magic, a lot of unexpected things happen when we travel.”  Your card changes.  “I wasn’t expecting to get kidnapped hitchhiking in the Middle East or to nearly freeze to death in the Soviet Caucuses.”  Your card bounces into my pocket.  “Nor was I expecting to conquer mountain peaks with my own two legs, or fall in love in a perfect snowball fight frozen forever in time.”  Your card jumps in your pocket.   “But unexpected things happen, and we deal with them and appreciate them as they come.”  Your card takes flight and zooms around the restaurant.  “Like for me: arriving in Thailand flat broke – I dust off some old magic tricks and try to hustle a few tips.”   Your card bursts into flames.  “So that’s what I’m doing now:  trying to make a few baht and/or sell this little Magic Book I wrote-”  A magic book appears – with your card printed into the back cover.   “So if you’d like to help me out, if you’d like to be part of my magic and my story, I would surely appreciate it.”

At this point you look up to me and say:  “I am zorry, we dooz not zpeak Engliz…”

Or, alternatively, you haven’t seen any of this magic because you’ve been staring up at my hat:   “Is that a snake on your head???”

“Yes, a Reticulated Python, to be exact.  Its the largest snake in the world and being poached out of existence by the skin trade.  I have this matching belt and matching notebook.”   Your card changes colors.  “I didn’t kill this snake – there’s a story behind it.”  Your card appears on the ceiling.

“I was walking home one night – its about an hour hike on a footpath through the jungle to the abandon resort which I’m squatting on the other side of the island – and at the top of the ridge where the one other house on the trail stands on bamboo stilts, a small pack of dogs were going wild.”  Your card appears in your shoe.  “For the past several months, I’ve been dirty and shifty-looking enough to make dogs quite nervous, so I figured the commotion was about me and picked up a few rocks to do battle.”  I rip your card into tiny little piece and eat them.

“But when I got up close, I realized it was actually an enormous snake that they had just attacked, leaving it barely alive bobbing its head around.”  Your card is restored.  “The Thai guy came out of his house with a flashlight, and together we stared open-mouthed at the huge serpent.  It was a full 3 meters long.”

“The next day, walking back to work, I was suprised to see the dead snake kicked to the side of the trail.”  Your card spits water in your eyes.  “‘If that’s still here when I come home,’ I told myself, ‘I’m going to eat it.’  And it was.  So I took it.  I took it back to my private moonlit beach and skinned the whole thing by candlelight.  By the time I finished, the sun was coming up, I was too exhausted to butcher her, not hungry in the least, and ended up wasting enough good meat to feed three families (this is the tropics, unrefridgerated skinned meat will go bad in an hour).  But I kept the beautiful skin, hanging it in the back room of the presidential suite where I live.”   Your card sings ‘happy birthday!’

“I woke up just an hour or two later to some bumping and thrashing sounds.  Groggily – barefoot in my underwear – I went to investigate.  And nearly crapped my pants when I saw a HUGE reptile tail wip-slither around the corner.  ‘ITS ALIVE!’ I screamed.  Then, more rationally, ‘Its attracting more snakes somehow!’   I grabbed a 2×4 and crept around the corner to get a better look.   “#@(%!!!!!!!   KAMONO DRAGON!!!!”   I was staring at – not a snake – but an ENORMOUS, terrified lizard:  easily 2 meters long with a foot-and-a-half tongue.   As it turns out, its wasn’t a Kamono Dragon, but rather a Water Monitor, which is a close cousin, and the second biggest lizard in the world.   But I didn’t know that at the time.  All I knew was that it was trying to get my snake skin, and that I was going to fight it with a 2×4.”   Your card jumps around the table and imitates a 2×4 brawl.

“I battled the dragon out of one room, into another, both of us terrified, and him suprisingly clumbsy in his frantic waddling, until it was trapped in a tiny little room with no escape.  Here we hit a stalemate and stared at each other.  Jesus, his tongue was long…   ‘Well,’ I thought.  ‘I’m going to go zip myself in my tent and hope this situation blows over.’   So I crept backwards – on guard – and slipped away.”

…

…

…”And?”  You say.

…

…

“Is this your card?”

…

…

“Can I have some money now?”

The Things We Carry

“My tent.”

My precious tent.  One pole snapped in an arctic gale, one snapped hiding from hookers in bushes outside Venice, snapped again in a freak storm on the Black Sea, each lovingly splinted with garbage tubing and rubber bands.  Patched from fire-ants eating their way through in a Florida carnival, burns from reading by candlelight, snags from jungle prickles – stains and smells from who-knows-where- homemade camo spray job – and the new zipper I sewed on is busted already.   I’ve called this tent home longer than I’ve lived anywhere in my adult life. I can set it up and tear it down blindfolded in a pitch black rainstorm.  One unforgettable morning in the Gobi desert,  it flew.  But how many more splints and patches can it take?  How long before it – like everything else – must be retired?

It was an interesting question my friend posed to me:  “What do you have now that you left home with?”

What did I have when I bid a painful farewell to the home I built and loved in Cascadia?   My backpack?  Nope.  Passport, sleeping bag, pad, clothes, jacket?  Nope, nope, nope nope nope.  The goat tail I swore to myself I would take all the way around the world?  Nope, lost it.  Nearly everything I own has been worn out, traded in, stolen, broken or simply vanished.   What do I have that’s mine, and that links me to a real home?

Not much…

My hat:      Battered, worn out, embarrassingly shoddy.  But its flown the tail feather of Cascadian owl, one from train-kill pheasant, flight feather of a Balkan Jackdaw, a seagull’s white wing glowing under stars in the middle of the Atlantic, the stripes of a young Middle-Eastern desert hawk, a Golden Eagle feather fished out of the Tibetan headwaters of the Mekong River, a Southeast Asian fighting cock and the wisdom of the traveling Hoopoe.   When people meet me these days, teasing me about the holes in my headgear is among the first topics of conversation.  What they can’t see is how much its been through with me, how little else I have, or how badly I want to see it adorning a scarecrow in certain special garden.

Now, on the eve of ripping my heart open to say goodbye to another home, I take stock in what I have…  Three things:  My beleaguered tent, my tattered hat, and one very small flag…

My journey has been largely about home – losing, finding, returning.  I don’t know how to define “home” – that’s beyond what my brain can do – but I do know its not just a place where you live.  I’ve lived in 9 U.S. states and 7 countries on 3 continents.  Not home.    And I also know that in my life I’ve been incredibly blessed (or cursed) to have my heart root deep in two different places.  Many people go their whole lives without knowing “home” – and while I might not be able to describe what it is, I know for sure that I’ve had two of them.

So when I left back in 2012, and made the decision not to fly, what I was really trying to do was explore the vast physical, emotional and spiritual space between these two homes.   I packed my tent, my hat, a bunch of stuff which is now strewn around the planet, and a small Cambodian flag…

Unlike the tent or the hat, the flag hasn’t got much practical use.  It flew off the back of my homemade bike trailer through the Balkan Mountains – my stubborn announcement to the world where I was heading regardless the feasibility.  But for the most part, its sat quietly next to my heart alongside my memories of this strange and mysterious land.

I was 22 years old when I first moved to Phnom Penh – a complete random accident which I never planned on – six months later I was living in a remote village without electricity or running water.  All together I’ve spent two years of my life living and learning in this little country – a metamorphosis which I would unequivocally point to as the most life-changing experience of my life.   My ego will forever think of my life in terms of “before Cambodia” and “after Cambodia.”   My life, lifestyle and world outlook were all profoundly shaped beyond words.

But its been hard, too, living a double life with a two-chambered heart.  One of my best friends in America once looked at a picture of me on the Mekong and said:  “I can’t believe that’s you.  You look like a totally different person!”   Yes, very observant.  Because, in reality, that’s not the same ‘me.’  You don’t know or understand that Walker any more than my friends and family in Cambodia would understand yours.  I have two lives, two personalities, and two communities which I care very deeply about.       And for years now that truth has caused a lot of pain.

There is no one place I feel complete – no one family where I totally belong.  I think that’s why I’m always restless.  So I left one home bound for another – with a little flag in my pocket to remind me where I was headed.  It took two years – but my feet spanned the distance which my soul has held.

When the time finally came, it was with mixed emotions that I re-entered Cambodia.  Its not always an easy place to be.  It was a positive joy to introduce my childhood friend Ed to some of my lifelong Khmer family: to give these two worlds a slight glimpse of one-another.  And of course it was incredible to be back on my stretch of the Mekong – and by handmade wooden boat, no less!

But the further the river wound into my own memories, the country’s sinuous depth wove its familiar pattern over my chest.  Love, panic and pain bled into one another – this is not a place I can just visit.  This is a places which reaches inside a grabs me – binds me and drowns me.  I’ve cut those cords twice before – moved away – and I know what that cost me and how long it took to recover.

This time I looked around a took stock:  I’m exhausted.  My brain chemicals are whirled and the circuitry smokey from a two-year barrage of cultures, languages, miles and uncertainties.  I’m constantly two steps (little steps) away from nervous breakdown.  Cambodia was supposed to be my home-base: my homecoming, my return.  But it terrified me.  And I can’t summon the strength I need to do it again.

There is a Vedic tradition to wander the world, see its mysteries, and return to meditate upon them.  Afterwards, again they into the world and return to meditate.  And a third time, but this time the meditation is permanent.  I hadn’t come back to Cambodia to visit – because that’s impossible for me.  And I hadn’t come to live there, like I thought for two years I was coming to do – because I don’t have the energy for that.     I had come back to Cambodia to say goodbye.

Its no real way to live: torn between two worlds.  Eventually a person has to plant two feet or fall from both.  There have been times when I really thought I would plant them in NE Cambodia, on the banks of the Mekong.  But I guess that’s not my card.

So how does one say goodbye and ‘thank you’ to a place which has turned your life upside down?  How do you say goodbye to the people you have fiercely loved and been loved by?  How do you fold down half your heart and half your soul like a flag and tuck it in your pocket?

I have no idea.  It would take a much braver person than myself to answer that question.

Instead, I lied to myself and my family that I might someday return – tucked my tail and fled in the middle of the night.

I’m no longer naive enough to think that I can hold onto physical objects very long.  My blue and red flag, like my tent and my hat, will eventually blow away.    But there are other things that don’t fade, and for as long as I live Cambodia will be stamped into who I am.

Haunted Photos Revisited

Cambodia – will you ever stop stirring, pulling and ultimately shredding my heart into bloody strips of rice noodles?

The Phnom Penh city dump in Cambodia:  Toxic green fish ponds lurk under thin ice-sheets of medical waste, industrial poison and rotting carcasses of street dogs.  Large tracts are on fire, choking  hot brown fumes coat your throat, blur your eyes and sting your brain.   It is a place which rats scorn.  It is a place where nightmares run free.  It is a place where more than 400 families live hand to mouth – scavenging daily survival from the dunes of darkness.

 

Christmas, 2008:  I had just moved to Cambodia.  My friend Becky came out to visit.  Together we went to the dump armed with a backpack of disposable cameras.  To a group of gathered children, we demonstrated how to wind and shoot, explaining that we’d be back that evening to pay $5 a piece for spent film cartridges.   Then we probably retired to a shady balcony somewhere to sip coconuts.   

The images these young people captured are the most disturbingly beautiful I have ever seen.  A casual glance shows barefoot children enjoying a day at the beach – until close inspection renders sand dunes into burning piles of trash and driftwood shacks turn into homes.  To me they radiate both the deepest depths of misery and the soaring triumph of the human spirit.    They have adorned the walls of nearly every place I’ve lived these past six years.

But in my own selfish youth and carelessness, I committed a serious crime that day.  I walked away with these photos, treasured them as my own, shared them, displayed them, and even loaned them out at one point.   But I never returned to the dump.  These young artists, none of whom I’m sure owned a single picture of themselves, never so much as saw the incredible photos they created.   

This is the great wrong which now, six years later, we were setting out to right.

 

From the beginning, our mission felt doomed to failure.  The sun was slow-cooking our brains, all we had to go on were a few grainy prints, and we were searching for needles in a garbage heap.  We had no names or ages.   Where do children of the dump go?   There was a dark, unstated fear about the life expectancy…

But we set out anyways.   And somehow, miraculously, early in the day we had a hit:  “Yeah, I know him.  He’s my relative.”    YES!   And we got a point. 

The point proved hard to follow, and started us out on an odyssey through the deepest pits of urban poverty.   Wandering through countless scavenging stations where the poorest of the poor homeless Cambodians congregate to scrap metal and plastic, we showed everyone our pictures.  It was hot, nauseating and discouraging.   New security measures were in place at the dump itself: ostensibly to curb the rampant human trafficking of children, but more likely to cut down on the country’s bad press, so we couldn’t get out on the dump itself this time.  We were left stalking the scrap sites and shanty towns around the outside.     There were more than a few times I was ready to give up, but every time my old friend, translator and companion Saltia persevered and we would get another lead.

Slowly, a story started to unfold.   And a name.
             Mayk.
                   The smiling child on the dump, whose picture adorned my wall for years, was named Mayk.
                           Mayk.

“He’s married now,” we were told in one scavenger ghetto.
                                                                                 “He has a kid” we were told at another.
                                       And his name was Mayk.

Finally, exhausted and telling ourselves “This is the very last place we look,” we wandered through a shanty town built on the back beaches of the dump.   And we found Mayk’s mother.   “He’s working on the dump,” she explained, “he works there every day.”    She eyed us suspiciously, then wandered off to go grab him.   We sat in the blazing sun and waited.

Twenty minutes later a specter appeared:  a little bit older and a little bit taller, but the same wide, gentle smile.   We had found Mayk.   

He was friendly and warm.  19 years old, we squatted in front of his garbage-shanty and met his two-year old child.  “He’s ill,” he explained of the undersized, sickly-looking babe.  “He throws up.  I don’t have enough money to take him to a doctor.”

He smiled flipping through the prints we gave him.  “Yeah!” he says.  “I remember when you came before!”  And amazingly, he knew the other kids in the pictures.  “This one is my little brother – that one is my friend.  I still see them all – they’re all here on the dump.   I can help get these to them.”

After a relaxed, comfortable chat it was time to go.  “When will you be back next?” Mayk laughed.  And then:  “Goodbye, you made me happy to see you today.  Please always stay happy, I hope you are always happy.”

Cambodia – will you ever stop rolling hot tears from my eyes?  Will you ever stop smiling at me with that profound beauty of human endurance and spirit?  Day by day, life goes on in the Kingdom of Dragons. 

Good Rides

We rode out to a UNESCO World Heritage waterfall.  Deep in a protected jungle – water cascades down a series of crystal blue pools beneath a single mega-falls spewing over the side of the Lost World.  Tourists swarm around the rainforest-lagoony perfection while happy bald Theravada monks picnic on the banks.  But to reach the top of Big Daddy we had to stalk a long, steep-to-the-point-of-vertical path through the forest thick.  Climbing from hardwood root to root and tackling boulders on all fours, my heart swam in happiness.  Even despite the Western tourist chatter just barely our of earshot below us, I felt like a real-life explorer on some Indiana Jones expedition.   The feeling was doubled to reach the top and find a flooded forest with a solitary old man ferrying people around on a homemade bamboo raft.  On the way back down we basked and floated around in our own private tropical waterfall lagoon, which schools of little fish coming to nibble our dead skin (or, if Ed’s theory is to be believed, trying to eat us alive but they weren’t big enough yet).   We saddled back up and left feeling refreshed.  That night we camped in a peaceful thatch hut in the middle of a rice paddy, where we fried noodles over an open fire and a curious water buffalo stopped in for a cordial visit.   That was a good ride.

 

In the thick, primordial forests of northern Laos where the Hmong and other hill tribes cling fiercely to their traditional ways of life, we stopped for roadside phó.   Soon we made a friend.  Soon our friend went across the street.  Soon our friend got hit by a motorcycle and came limping back with a gnarly split toe.  “Hey, can you guys fix me up?” he gestured.   We did our best, and soon other villagers were coming up to us:  “Hey!  My toe’s messed up, too!  Can you fix this?”  We were in.  We looked around and saw that there was a major, full-village construction project going on.  In a town made entirely of wood, bamboo and thatch, everyone was coming together to proudly build an elaborate concrete sign for their new school.   “Can we help?”   Happy to have the extra hands, we spent the rest of the morning shoveling gravel, nailing boards, and holding stuff while the anarchic caucus of bandaged toes passionately debated the best ways of doing things.   During a lull in the activity we were kidnapped by a happy gaggle of village youngsters who wanted to show us their local swimming hole, their homes, and figure out how our cameras worked.  When it was time to go, we mounted up and hit the heart of one of Laos’s biggest jungles.  We pedaled empty roads with our jaws wide open, and spent the aftyernoon stopping to do field recordings and just giggle at the wild, often hilarious sounds of tropical birds and insects.            That was a good ride.

 

Not far from the Xayaburi dam site, and within the area which will become the dam’s reservoir upon completion, we encountered more butterflies that I’ve ever seen in my life. It was an odd juxtaposition: profound beauty coupled with the sadness of visiting communities about to be displaced, but being brushed by bright powdered butterfly wings will never fail to put a smile on my face.  SO many colors, SO many patterns.  Baby blue bizzaro-Monarchs, enormous orange-and-black numbers the size of a robin, and mint colored gals who I mistook for cabbage moths before they turned wing and showed me their alter-identity as electric drag queens.  I saw flying zebras, cheetahs, and a nazi-fly in silky black with a bright red armband.  A striped bumble-bee design I swear I recognize from some telecom corporate logo and a whole cloud of little baby baby baby whites.  Struggling relentlessly up and down steep, unpaved roads, it was without a doubt one of the most physically demanding rides of our trip.  But still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was riding in some sort of dream land.  So many butterflies.  So many, in fact, that I must confess I accidentally smacked into more than a couple.  For lunch we were taken in by a smiling Laotian family to sit cross-leg in a simple thatch home and eat sticky rice with pickled green mangoes out of baskets they’d just finished weaving.       It was a good ride.

 

Feeling like we were flying with our bikes unloaded, we tore around the vibrant, colorful city of Jinghong in southern China.  We spent happy days fishing and barbequing with locals, sampling new fruits and soaking in thriving chaos in the markets.  We camped next to a crazy squatted riverboat.  When it came time to leave, we did so in high spirits to be heading into a brand new phase of the river: stilted homes, tropical climate, new minorities and languages: all marking the true beginning of Southeast Asia.  The road was quieted and unpaved from construction, we sang and whistled and were utterly blown away by the river’s beauty.  The Mekong is rightly famous for its chocolatey brown waters, but for some reason on this stretch she drops the mud and cloaks herself in a rich, picturesque gown of green and blue.  Sunlight skipped and danced through the current.  I almost crashed my bike three times because I couldn’t take my eyes off the river.     I was love-struck.      It was a good ride.

 

 

I Laotian, the word for “hello” is “sabadee” – and after cycling through the country I probably have a lifetime average of saying them both the same amount.  Probably owning something to our slow speed and the rumbley, squeaky sounds announcing our arrival, everyone in Laos wants to greet us.  But particularly the children.  We took to calling it the “village sabadee alarm.”  The first kid would spot us and yell at the top of their lungs: Sabadee!  “Ope!  The alarm’s up!” we’d laugh.   Then from anywhere in the rippling sphere of earshot, kids come running.  Sabadee!   Sabadee!    Alone on in big packs:  Sabadee!  They position themselves in anticipation – knowing that something sabadee-worthy is coming down the dusty road, but not knowing what until we hugg and puff our way around the corner, smiles split wide open and the barrage erupts:  Sabadee!  Sabadee!   I’ve said ‘sabadee’ so many times, in a country of so few people I actually start to think in terms of percentage of the total population I’ve greeted.   Sabadee!  Sabadee!   This is my one memory which trumps all others cycling through Laos:  Sabadee!  Sabadee!   Ending every day horse and happy, thinking to myself:  “Man!   What a good ride!”

 

Its hot.  Sweat dripping down my nose, stinging my eyes and making my hands slip on the bars.  My water tastes like hot tea the flavor of plastic.  There is no shade, no protection, just the rising and falling of dirt road through wide-open rice paddies.  We’ve done 60km today and still have quite a ways to go.  My sun-stinging legs wobble, barely strong enough to push me over one more blazing hill.  Turning the crest, a moment to rest before pushing over the next hump, when what do I find before me?  A little cluster of monks around a motorcycle sidecar:  a rural Laotian ice cream man!  Twenty-five-cents, five little scoops of runny ice cream dolloped out on a piece of white bread, smothered in some bright sauces and topped with a second slice.  There in a rice paddy in northern Laos I ate the best ice cream sandwich I’ve ever had.      It was a good ride.

Mekong from the Sky

Writing from an abandon roadside thatch hut – taking shelter from driving rain:

“Well, I guess it wouldn’t be so awesome if it weren’t for all the bullshit!”  Ed smiles, picking himself up from a muddy bike wreck.  He’s victim to the most recent hazard of the journey: washed out dirt roads from the torrential Southeast Asian monsoon season.  So far we’ve been chased by dogs, hospitalized, frozen on mountain passes and baked in the brains by tropical heat.  We’ve damaged both camera lenses, lost priceless items and broken useful ones.  Second degree burns, wrenching diarrhea, and fights between friends.  Its been one of the greatest trips of our lives.

But following a river is a tricky business.  And not just because of roads and access.  Its tricky because – despite what it might show on a textbook map – a river is not a single linear watercourse.  If the Mekong is only the Mekong where its called the “Mekong” – then we have yet to even reach the Mekong – having instead been messing around on the same wterway by different names further north (Dza Chu, Lancang Jiang, Nam Khong, etc…).

So if the name “Mekong” is just an arbitrary linguistic distinction, then how do you define a river?  Its a much more confusing question than you might think…

We started our journey following the laughably oversimplified concept that a river is a direct course flowing from the furthest point possible to the sea.  But as we started traveling this watery road, a strange thing happened:  it got big.  Way big.  So big that it seemed there was more water flowing in our river from different places than from the original “source”.  Is it possible that our river has many sources?  Infinate “headwaters”?  Could it be that – unlike the single wavy line on our map claims – an aerial view of the Mekong would look like a huge, fibrous root system?

 

 

Writing huddled with Akse hill people.  Grandmothers with babies strapped to their hips and children soaked through from diving for fish.  Their day’s catch is flopping in hand woven baskets.  Its not the fear of getting wet that holds us all here: its the awesome, painful force and violence of the rain jack-hammering down on the corrugated tin roof:

Lack of roads and river navigability are constantly leading us away from the Mekong’s main channel.  Our bike ride today is one that we’ve had time and time again: following one of the river’s countless tributaries back to the Mother Water.  In a few short months we’ve seen icicles melt to trickles, creeks stream to rivulets and channels turn to the raging main artery.  And all this – from the tiniest dew drop to the mighty delta – makes up the hydrological wonder we know as the Mekong River.

Its a watershed.  Meaning, it is composed of every drop of water draining an enormous chunk of the world’s largest continent.  Its the flowing water we follow, but its also the water locked in the landscape.

Water and sunlight.  The two things on which all life on Earth depends.  And the two things found in explosive abundance in the tropical Mekong drainage.

Here in mountainous northern Laos, life booms rampant.  Rich moist soil soaks up into vibrant green foliage seeping from every crack.   Towering rainforest canopy and thick vines battling for real estate.  Each sucking, drinking, and exhaling back into the water table.   Local markets teem with exotic fruits – bright spiny Rambutans and wild free-form dragon fruit.  A scaly armadillo fruit gushing sweet sour perfection and dizzying variety of green, yellow and red bananas of every taste and size from baseball bat to pinkie toe.  Monkeys and wild elephants hide in the thick, and bright feathers chirp out the full gammot of a child’s ray-gun toy.  Loas is filled with life and fueled by water.

 

 

Writing from the hull of a wooden cattle boat – pulled up on a remote sandy beach waiting out the storm churning muddy water into an un-navigable froth bouncing out of its banks:

Every drop of water in every piece of life here eventually works its way back into the river’s main channel.  Our own piss and shit included.

In everyday Western life, we isolate and detach ourselves from our waste stream.  Here – beyond the land of toilets or landfills – this is not the case.  People utilize the unmistakable reality of a river system: the things you throw in it will never come back to haunt you.  Its nature’s great flush.  But unfortunately this attitude ignore the other golden rule of riparian ecosystems:  everyone here is upstream from somebody, and downstream from someone else.  As the region’s population blossoms and development brings increasingly toxic and non-biodegradable waste, its a major challenge to this ancient balance.

Because this region is inhabited!  Even in sparsely populated northern Laos, people are an unmistakably integrated part of this landscape.  Like the waters themselves, we’ve seen one culture flow into the next – often oblivious to all but their nearest neighbors – but all connected by this flowing waterway they call home.

People who live here quite literally have Mekong in their veins. The River is water, transportation, laundry, recreation, income, bathroom and waste disposal.  Fish and rice – domains of the Dragon.

 

 

Writing from a roadside noodle shop.  Hot hearty Pho:  make-it-your-own style with spicy pickled peppers and fresh mint.  The noodle lady’s son dashes in from the rain proudly presenting a flopping snake on a fishing line – the day’s dinner catch.

 

Ever since Yunnan in Southern China, every culture we’ve encountered has had its own special water rituals and festivals.  For the Dai people in the Xishuanbanna region, the Chinese national Dragon Boat Festival didn’t mean a whole lot, but each town and village traditionally holds its own water splashing fest.  A strange Han Chinese tourist spot puts a wall around a typically idyllic stilted village and charges admission to camera-laden tourists from Beijing and Shanghai photo-assaulting “China’s Thailand”.  Indeed, we’ve heard that Thai can be a better language to know out here than even Mandarin.  People and houses look different – and just outside the “Dai Village” walls, the twice-daily “authentic water splash!” ends, the stench of Native-reservation-come-Disneyland clears, and normal life on the river begins again.    And so does the rain.

I remember the rainy season in Cambodia.  It was regular: most of the season, anyways.  Every day it would rain about an hour in the afternoon.  You could practically set a watch by it.  It was one of the things I fell in love with about Khmer culture.  In the West, if there was a daily natural phenomena which entirely shut down everything, news casters would be counting up dollar figures in lost GDP revenue and it would be the number one complaint on every tongue.  But in Cambodia everyone gravitates to protected porches, where they smile lazily at one another and stare at the flooding streets.  Its a culture which has a word for recreationally sitting on the floor.

In the thick green rubber plantations and forest hills in Laos, the rain is a good deal less regular.  But equally as fierce.

The first few drops are big, fat and smack bare skin painfully.  At this point, you have a little less than three minutes to find shelter.  Because when it comes in earnest, it comes with a fury that will double you over and make it hard to open your eyes.  Forget any notions that rain is made up of sovereign, individual drops:  these monsoons come in sheets, curtains and blankets.  Its nothing like a high-pressure shower, its more like a bathtub poured on your head.  You find yourself drowning, swimming in a river from the sky.

Which is great for biking.  Or rather, great for not biking – great because sometimes biking becomes a tunnel of focus and attention and you forget that you’re really here to see, meet, experience and interact.  The rain forces you to stop, slow down and remember this.  Rain is a universal here: universally understood and appreciated.  When it starts raining, every house, awning, hut or store is fare game to get inside.  Because of these downpours, we’ve ended up munching mangoes with laughing grandmothers on a family porch, doing homework with village teens and messing around with fresh litters of puppies.  We’ve helped build a school and played village doctor because of the rain; sipped jasmine tea listening to rain, and smoked big ol’ crazy bamboo bongs.  It is an instant invitation to conversation, connection and laughter.  Then, as instantly as it started, it passes: and our wheels hit the road with a few more friends in our hearts.

 

 

Writing from the back of my BIKE.

Writing from the back of my bike.  Water flowing through my hair, sheeting my skin, slathering clothes to my body.  Writing from the back of my bike because – no matter how hospitable, how friendly and how kind – sometime there simply isn’t shelter.  Sometimes a lonely jungle road turns into a torrential river.  Writing from the back of my bike, barely able to open my eyes loosing all sense of direction, water suffocating, cleansing, purifying soaked flesh turning to water – water blurring a green world of lush life, hot sun and steam – Mekong water filling every piece of me every pedal stroke a stroke through the river’s vertical flow – Mekong pouring us along crawling, swimming inch by inch.  Mekong under our skin.  Mekong under our eyeballs.  Mekong under our toe nails.  Mekong in our brain circuitry.  Mekong from the sky.  And yes – Mekong in our blood, too.