Staying in the Right Now

United Airlines CEO Jeff Smisek must not have read my post from July 8^th because soon after that sharp-witted dagger attack I received notice of my new Premium Silver Club status in the mail.  How he knew to mail my club member card to Japan and not New Jersey is a little freaky; maybe he did read my post and is trying to shut me up by playing nice. Not going to work Jeff, but I’ll take the extra legroom.

I’m sitting in a near-empty lounge in Narita’s Terminal 1. It’s 6:30am, I’m fresh off another overnight bus ride from Fukushima (typically, I got nearly zero sleep), and I’ve got four hours before first boarding call. Perfect. Time to relax and take in my surroundings.

I’m alone by the way; the wife and kids will remain in Japanfor a few more weeks. There have been many moments recently when I felt I couldn’t get away from the boys fast enough; the younger one clings to me like shrink wrap and hasn’t learned yet the concept of sharing toys, while the older one, as good as he tries to be in the face of the two-year-old fury that is his brother, can only keep his frustrations at bay for so long. Alone now, I can close my eyes and enjoy the peace of solitude. And I find that I already miss being able to look at my sons.

To my right, what once was a coffee shop is now a Subway. On the flat screen in front of these rows of seats (I’m taking up three of them) news bits pass by in an ambitious slideshow: the Japanese athletes have all returned with their Olympic medals; something’s going on with Greece’s economy; the Fukuoka Softbank Hawks won last night but their veteran leader Hiroki Kokubo has announced his retirement after recently getting his 2,000^thcareer hit. A virtual aquarium comes on screen (rays, eels, the world’s largest grouper), followed by a commercial for ‘NariTra’, a “multillingual” speech translation application.  Spellchecker apparently not included. Next a commercial for Visa, centered around a white guy in a blue shirt and khaki shorts doing a ridiculous happy dance on the side of Mt. Fuji, then in a restaurant, then on a sidewalk in London (all of it a different version of this). Who comes up with this stuff? And who pays the people who come up with this stuff?

On to the World Weather Map. The entire earth appears to be sunny except for two places – where I am now and where I am going.

They offer free Wi-Fi here at Narita Airport. The luggage carts are free too, as is the pleasant disposition of every single person working here. Contrast this with JFK in New York, where you get $4 carts, coin-op internet portals and a personality crapshoot with the odds stacked heavily against you.

At check-in I flash my shiny new Premium Silver Club Card and ask if there is any preferred seating open. The attendant smiles as she politely and apologetically tells me that unfortunately there is nothing available. I then ask if I can at least get a free beer; she giggles, either because she understands or because she doesn’t. I dump my two 49-pound bags, leaving me with a knapsack full of my son’s books and a cardboard tube with the map of Japan I bought my first week in Fukushima, eleven years ago. At the security checkpoint I realize I still have a thing of coffee in my pack; I apologize to the very nice people who just let me proceed to security, they very nicely let me go back out to the main terminal area, and I drag my backpack, my son’s books inside getting heavier and heavier with every step, back to the lounge to relax and polish off my room temperature home brewed sludge.

There’s that paunchy guy with the khaki shorts doing his jig again. Everything is on a loop, so I get to see all the rays and eels and grouper several more times, as well as the same news bits and the sunny weather covering the whole rest of the world. It’s eight o’clock by now – seems a lot of people don't mind eating Subway for breakfast. I flip through my passport; sadly, it expires next month. All those flights, all those border crossings, all those fantastic adventures…and here I am on my way back to the town I grew up in. One stamp tells me I entered Japanexactly one year ago today. Two dozen pages of other stamps make for a disorganized display of all the times I’ve criss-crossed the oceans in the last ten years. Now with my oldest kid starting kindergarten and the prospect of soon having to buy five tickets whenever the family travels together, I wonder how long it might be before I’ll be needing a new passport.

On my way to security for the second time I pass a currency exchange counter. From a side door two men in uniform emerge, one pushing a cart with a plastic tray holding two black boxes. BRINKS it says across the men’s backs. For a moment I consider screwing with them, joke like I am going to swipe one of those boxes from off the tray sitting out and open on their little platform cart. This is how to finally understand the limits of Japanese kindness.

Through security and on toward Gate 51, which is the closest gate down the hall to the left. This never happens. I always have to walk to the far end of the terminal. Maybe it has something to do with that silver card in my wallet? Out in front of the duty-free liquor shop a girl is offering free samples of Remy Martin XO, $165 per 700mL bottle, give or take. ‘You have any today?’ I ask her as I down my free shot. ‘Not yet,’ she replies, and I know I will never ever tire of these wonderful, sweet, smiling women.

I‘ve always assumed duty-free is a big joke: pay above-value prices so you don’t have to pay tax on it. Doesn’t anyone else get it? I have no idea how much a bottle of Remy XO costs normally, but I did check the price of a liter of Jack Daniel’s – 3,000 yen, or roughly $36. Is this a deal? Really? (No price check on the selections at Lancome and Estee Lauder, sorry ladies.)

The Coach store across the way boasts an illuminated sign with, appropriately, the Coach logo, complete with the requisite ‘est. 1941’ notation. And below this? ‘Since 1941’ it reads. I guess the people at Coach really want us to know when they started charging inflated prices for handbags. And, it seems, I will likely now remember. Next door is a Burberry store. From the back-lit photo of a man and a woman standing in the street on a foggy night, a cab behind them appearing ready to run them over, I’d guess Burberry sells either ugly overcoats or accident insurance. Further down the hall the ad for Loewe (which I know from my years of study is German for ‘lion’) from Madridshows a woman in a short and tight black dress in the process of passing out on a hotel floor.

I duck into the men’s room. Mounted to the corner inside my bathroom stall is a baby seat; on the stainless steel above is a large decal explaining that it is a baby seat and here are the three steps necessary to operate it correctly and safely, spelled out in two languages. And I’m thinking hey, if people can’t figure out how to use a baby seat without explicit directions then they probably shouldn’t be having babies. Then my playful curiosity kicks in and I spend two minutes struggling with the thing to see how far the harness opens up – ‘…stupid…flippin…baby seat!...Argh!’ – until I finally realize that the harness is connected and doesn’t actually open up.

At the bookstore I check the table of contents in 50 Great Short Stories. They’re all written by the same old names – Somerset Maugham, Edgar Allen Poe, O. Henry… So typical, so boring. ‘Hey what about Kato??’ Back at Gate 51 I try again with the silver card, but to no avail. (There’s always the consolation prize of a sweet and smiling Japanese woman telling me sorry, of course, which makes the effort worthwhile.) So much for this card getting me anything, though, and I decide I’m going to tell the flight attendant I’m an engineer designing new and safer nuclear reactors and I need space to spread out the blueprints I have in my cardboard tube.

The announcement goes out for all the Premier Club Snobs to board the plane first. Then the call for all us real people in economy class. The entire waiting area stands up; I stay in my seat since it’s much more comfortable than standing on a line going nowhere for ten minutes, which is what always, always happens at boarding time. Plus I get a good look at all the people I’ll be flying with – including two very nice looking young ladies, separate but both in close proximity. I won’t mention how young they are. Or how proximal. But one of them keeps looking over at me, obviously intrigued. And now I’m definitely not getting up.

It just occurred to me: when you fly to or from or within Asia you are going to be flying alongside a lot of relatively small people. Maybe I’ll get my extra little bit of room after all. Though none of this means your flight will be any less noisy or irritating if your neighbors are all Chinese and Korean.

What’s this? A man with a blue blazer is walking along the line with a small whiteboard, a list of names written in messy green ink. They’re all Vietnamese – except for the last one. ‘That’s me,’ I tell him. He doesn’t blink. ‘Come with me please.’

‘Mr. Kato?’ the woman at the counter asks as I step up. She knows my name I think to myself as my knees go weak. ‘Am I getting my free beer?’  ‘Better than that,’ she says, pecking away at her keyboard. ‘Economy is overbooked,’ she tells me. ‘We’re moving you up to Business Class.’

Good old Jeff.

So I’m settling into my seat, which more resembles my own personal cockpit. I’m playing with the buttons that make the seat recline all the way into a flat bed, while one of the flight attendants is smiling and cooing and trying to serve me a glass of sparkling wine.  I am so not telling the wife about this, I think. And I’m putting Jeff’s picture on our bedroom wall. Time ceases to have meaning as we sit on the runway burning fuel, waiting to be cleared for takeoff. The in-flight menu is eight pages long. The pillows and slippers are made of clouds. As the rectangles of rice fields below fall away and disappear I tell myself I don’t care if we never touch ground again.

The in-flight magazine is not United’s Hemispheres but ANA’s Wingspan. Yes, I am on one of ANA’s jets. In business class, did I mention? And the introductory message is not Jeff Smisek whining about how his industry is being regulated into the ground, jeopardizing (theoretically) his annual $16.8 million compensation package, but instead we have Shinichiro Ito thoughtfully summarizing the historical connections Japanand Seattleenjoy. Another flight attendant comes over to smile at me and give me a small ceramic plate of appetizers and ask me whether I’d like a Japanese or western style course lunch. She is really good at making me feel like she wants nothing in the world but for me to be comfortable and happy. Once again my most prudent move is to remain seated - as if there were any place in the world I’d rather be at this very moment.

I’m glancing at the car chase going on in front of me – Man On a Ledge, I've been wanting to see this movie – while I ponder the tiny appetizers in front of me. They look like works of art more than food. I’ve also got a fresh glass of Chardonnay; the flight attendant even turned my glass so the ANA logo on my cocktail napkin was facing me perfectly. I look at my plate. I don’t know how I should even eat this stuff. Olives, one green one black, pitted, with a ball of fresh mozzarella; roe wrapped in rice paper, placed on a paper-thin slice of cucumber…oops make that lime; the smallest muffin I’ve ever seen, cornbread maybe; and a shot glass of tuna salad topped with a jelly boasting a flavor I can’t place but I know I love. Wait, that’s not tuna. It’s…I don’t know, but it’s not tuna. Can’t be. Tuna is so…economy.

My little square ceramic plate cleared away, the flight attendant – one of them, I don’t know, there are a whole bunch of them and they are all so incredibly, magnificently…oh man somebody find me a thesaurus. She spreads a tablecloth over my tray. A smile. A bow. She wants nothing except for me to be happy.

God…

Forget it, I’m putting Mr. Ito’s picture on our wall instead.

Man On A Ledge: Ed Harris looks depressingly frail compared to when he played Brigadier General Frank Hummel in The Rock. Edward Burns looks skinnier too compared to how I remember him in his Confidence days. Even Kyra Sedgwick, a rail to begin with, looks malnourished. Must be that ugly red coat they’ve got her wearing. A Burberry probably.

A trip to the bathroom tells me why they don’t let people from economy use the bathrooms in business class: the hordes would pilfer all the free towelettes and toothbrushes and packets of skin lotion sitting there on the shelf.

Back at my seat and lunch is served. Along with a fresh glass of wine. Grilled flounder for the main course. Holy Schmoly what do they have back there, a freshwater pond? This stuff is nothing short of miraculous. As is the flight attendant smiling lovingly at me, asking me if I need anything else.

The woman across the aisle and a little behind me (I think her passport read Thailand) has been plowing through this thick binder of papers since I first boarded the plane. In front of her, meaning ten feet away from her, and a long stride forward of me, is an Asian man, maybe Japanese, with extremely neat and matted hair, eye glasses, a dark blue sport coat and, as far as I can tell from this angle, nothing on below except white boxer shorts.

The remainder of the flight consists of periodic sampling of the menu – udon and Japanese sake; fresh-brewed coffee and vanilla ice-cream; Spanish omelet with fresh bread and a nice Chilean red. I make another trip to the restroom, where I find out the people in business class can pilfer stuff with the best of them. I take in a couple more movies (The Tourist, Seabiscuit). I am showered with more beautifully endearing smiles than one guy with a silver card deserves. And, shortly before landing, I come across this quote from a Q&A session with Ai Futaki, among many things a freediver, meaning someone who goes sea diving without air or equipment:

Q: Does freediving change people?

A: It can change people mentally. Busy people live lives with themselves at the center. They don’t observe themselves from outside. When you learn freediving, you have to learn how to observe yourself from the outside and be calm. It is a kind of underwater meditation; not to worry about the past or future, what’s going to happen…to just stay in the right now.

Exactly, Ai. Just like me and my beautiful flight attendant friends.

Although I do kind of wish my family were here.             

** NOTE: I just researched the guy dancing on that Visa commercial. His name is Matt Harding, and my hat goes off to him. Check this out. The world needs more Matt Hardings.

Talk is Cheap. Our Fees are Not. Hey, Valuable Customer, Listen To This!...

'...And may the odds be always in my favor...'

Every time I want to fly west from Japan I go online thinking ‘This time, dammit, I am not flying a Chinese airline.’ And every time the cheapest fare is on another eponymous Chinese airline and I say to myself ‘Okay, dammit, but this is definitely the last time…’ And I promise in advance I’ll be making up for any and all unrequited expectations by going college with the free in-flight beer. (Apparently they know this and return the sentiment by going gorilla with my Samsonite.)

Flying between Japan and New Jersey is a more subtle tragedy.

In his State of Our Awesome Airline address in the beginning of this month’s issue of Hemispheres, United Airlines CEO Jeff Smisek goes on a rant against the dark powers at work causing his industry to lose $55 billion dollars a year. Poor guy. As I’m reading (a guise to make my kids become uninterested in me and not from any sense of commiseration with a man who just wouldn’t feel right paying himself a penny more than $1.2 million a month), that same smarmy Smisek appears on my personal in-flight video entertainment system screen. ‘We’ve got the most lay-flat seats in the industry,’ he tells me as I fight to wedge my feet around my knapsack, shoved under the seat six inches in front of me. He goes on with his State of Our Awesome Airline addendum by touting how many new planes they have, and how many new Economy Plus seats people somewhere are putting onto those planes. Conveniently he makes no mention of the sticking my twenty-pound two-year-old with the same fuel surcharge Bob the Elephant across the aisle pays, or the shitty disposable ear buds passengers are given for free…for now… or the fact he’s about to stuff my kids full of saran wrap greaseburgers for the next thirteen hours.



I’d say smug Jeffy is trying to capitalize on some (mis)perceived notion of passenger jubilation stemming from the TSA’s recent decision to let children (and terrorists) under twelve through security without having to take their shoes off.

This past week my family returned to Japan, bringing considerably less luggage than the last time we flew across the Pacific. Yet we are paying more this time because one of our carry-ons happens to be my baby daughter. She gets no food or milk or diapers for the flight, though she does merit a boarding pass and thus another Bob-the-Elephant-sized fuel surcharge. Heck, Jeff has to find any way he can to put a dent in that $55 billion dollars, what with a Board rendered powerless to touch his stock.

This is the first time my wife and I are flying with three kids. Based on having to live with three kids for the last three months we are not looking forward to the experience. Yet the baby is sleeping, my older son is engrossed in Cars the Movie even though I’m making him watch it in Japanese, and my younger son, the one with the three-second attention span, is curiously busy figuring out the touch-screen system which will with any luck take him about thirteen hours to master. I’m flipping through the movie selection too, which in itself is a form of entertainment if you’re paying attention.

Checking the kids’ movies with my older son I notice among the Family section listings a film titled Gorilla. Rated R. Among the many dramas is a documentary on the Brooklyn rap group A Tribe Called Quest. Twenty years ago, or even ten, I’d be interested in this solely for the music. If it meant I didn’t have to hear my kids for two hours I’d be keenly fascinated. Now a film like this is intriguing to me for a different reason: I like to know where people come from. And I don’t mean Brooklyn.

We’re seated in a regular row, with the regular amount of legroom. (I refuse to pay Jeffy extra for his ‘Premium’ comfort, no matter how far ahead of arrival I have to begin the process of extricating my feet from under the seat in front of me.) We tried to get bulkhead seats, where they can hang a bassinet on the wall for the baby – or for my backpack and whatever greaseburgers my kids haven’t eaten yet – but there was only one remaining bulkhead seat available. Predictably it was a middle seat. Perhaps also predictably, but what didn’t occur to me at first, was that a couple had (presumably) reserved their aisle seats online, leaving the middle seat open in hopes that no one would take it. Shrewd. It worked. The bitter side of me imagines these people were hovering over their computer, waiting until the system opened up for advance seating – much like people who camp out overnight outside of Walmart for Black Friday, but without the sleeping bags. I hate people like that. And that is exactly what I am doing next time I fly with the family.

The description of another movie in the drama listings goes like this: ‘While traveling through Europe on a train, an American male (male? What, 'priapean human' sounds too primal?) meets a young French woman (oh, sure) and spends his remaining hours with her before he leaves.’

Wow, grab me a pair of those shitty ear buds. At an hour and forty minutes long I can watch it six and a half times. This movie, by the way, imaginatively titled Before Sunrise, was directed by the aptly named Richard Linklater.

Linklater.

Link…later…

Exactly.

Okay, so I gave in and watched the trailer. Which has cleared up the next ten hours for me.

The blurb for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – a popular movie based on a wildly popular book from what I’ve heard – reads as such: ‘After being convicted of libel (yes, that classic thriller catalyst, libel!) Mikael Blomqvist investigates the disappearance of a wealthy patriarch’s niece from 40 years ago to restore his honor.’

It’s the singer not the song I guess.

A flight attendant is coming down the aisle with the drink cart. Now usually on an international flight you have three languages – that of the origin, that of the destination, and gay. But this woman reaches our aisle and asks my older son: ‘And huh-wood you like zum-sing to da-link?’ He can’t hear her because Lightning McQueen and his friends in Radiator Springs are having a ball in Japanese. I tap him on the arm and point to the woman. ‘She’s asking if you want zum-sing to da-link.’ He looks at her then looks at me. ‘WHAT??’

I guess those cheapo ear buds really work.

Meanwhile my younger son has slid out of his seat and bolted down the aisle while I sit trapped under my sleeping daughter. Ah well, it’s not like he can get terribly lost. And if he does I’ve still got ten hours to find him, which is more than Jodie Foster had.

That slickster Jeff Smisek takes every opportunity to sublimate his skewed message into our brains. The cocktail napkins sport the following bit of propaganda in big blue letters: ‘Planes Change. Values Don’t.’ Really Jeffy? Cut out food and diapers for infants but soak them for $400 in fuel surcharges. Let families with three small and wired children wait in line to board your awesome airplane while pandering to people who’ve bought into your Premium and Elite and similarly-named privileges. Six bucks for a can of Bud!! Planes Change. Values Don’t. I haven’t been fed such irony since the 2008 Olympics when Beijing, in between sending the military into Lhasa to quell demonstrations led by those ultra-violent Tibetan monks, tried to pass that ‘One World, One Dream’ bit of bull off on the world.

To top this off, Jeff adds a subtitle to his misguided self-aggrandizing napkin scratch: ‘Your priorities will always be ours.’ More precise would be something like ‘Your change in flight plans will always be our extortionist fee policy.’

When the kids finally settle down I tune them out and watch Hunger Games. What strikes me most about the movie is how the people from the districts show absolutely no hostility, no resentment, no emotion toward the selfish, self-serving, sadistic bastards in power.

'In order for you to really move forward, you can’t forget where you been at.’
~~ Jonathan Davis (aka Kamaal Ibn John Fareed aka Q-Tip aka The Abstract aka etc.) from A Tribe Called Quest

Maps Are No Fun

I’m not big on planning ahead. Or planning at all for that matter. Some might call me disorganized. I say I’m advennnnturous. It helps that I have the concentration span of a five-year-old at Disneyland after a breakfast of strawberry compote and whipped cream, but even if I know which country I’m in, traveling on the fly is a way to see things I’d otherwise likely never see – a forested temple, for example. A way-out-of-the-way village. An interrogation room.

I’d made it fine so far on my 2007 trip around Indochina, biking through Thailand and across Cambodia without a map. (I might have gone a few miles out of the way on occasion, missing a turn here or taking a wrong turn there, but if everything goes smoothly your stories in the end aren’t very good, are they?) Tomas, on the other hand, had a map – several of them actually, that he rotated through the handy-dandy clear plastic pocket on top of his handlebar bag. (This was back before the prevalence of iPhone GPS apps made it easy for your typical backpacker to not come back with any good stories.) Tomas and I had been traveling together since Trat, near where the Thai coast runs into Cambodia; we’d gotten split up twice in the Khmer Kingdom, once on our way out of Sihanoukville’s Wat Leu (I ended up going thirty miles out of the way that day) and again on our way out of the rarely-recommended coastal town of Kep, where we managed to lose each other somewhere along the fifty-meter gravel driveway of our guesthouse (he went one way around the barn in the middle of the path, I went around the other side and poof!).  Stephan had been on the road well over a year and had ridden thousands of miles with dozens of other fellow cycling travelers. He said he’d never lost anyone until he met me.

The solo ride from Kep to Takeo was fantastic – quiet roads and happy kids and perfect riding weather. Only the last few kilometers consisted of multiple lanes of truck traffic, and it was along this stretch that Tomas was waiting for me, on a shaded patio, sucking down spicy chicken and rice and ice-cold Pepsis. ‘What happened to you?’ he said through an ice cube. ‘Flat tire,’ I said. ‘About an hour back.’ Since that episode in the mountains of northern Japan I’m happy to say I always carry a bike pump.

Takeo, which can be spelled an infinite number of ways (Takau, Takev, Thakheew etc), boasts a rotary with a monstrosity called the ‘Independence Monument’ in the middle. Walking one way from this rotary you’ll find little besides decrepit streets, decrepit buildings and people hanging around along the edges of muddy, decrepit fields. This, we rationalized, was the perfect place for dinner. We found a joint with a few remaining un-upended tables, and after our decrepit dinner we walked around the rotary and found there was a nice side of town. In the morning we would head north, one of us leaving that rotary behind for good.

We rode through villages of wooden homes and bamboo fences, kids hanging around outside in the dirt yard, adults hanging out around machines that may or may not have been working. Before midday – and after an amusing episode at a crossroads lightly populated with people who didn’t know what a Phnom Chisor was – we reached Phnom Chisor, a temple complex sporting various states of disrepair, situated on the only hill (or mountain, depending on your personal distinctions) for miles around. All the way up the long staircase old people were selling brown paper bags of colored sand – apparently you are supposed to guess why – while young kids follow you around in packs, taking turns asking you the same three questions over and over. Not only does it seem that these three things are all the English they know, after thirty minutes you are pretty damn sure that they don’t even understand the three things they won’t stop saying. Until you tell them what will happen to them if they don’t leave you alone.

Turns out the colored sand is used in a sort of prayer ritual. Most everyone up top – Stephan and I were the only whiteys around – were spreading handfuls of the stuff around, in an area squared off with colored ropes. With my fingertips I gathered up bits of sand other people had spilled and joined in the somber fun. Tomas told me to buy my own sand or butt out.

A tour of the functional temple and its attendant ruins, long glances out over the dusty Cambodian countryside and we headed down the stairs to reunite with our bikes – assuming of course they were still there. They were, and after a ceremonial parting photo out on the same dirt road we came in on– it took forever to find someone brave enough to attempt to use my point-and-shoot Casio – Tomas turned to the north and Phnom Penh and I pointed my front wheel toward Vietnam to the east. ‘You sure you know where you’re going?’ Tomas asked. ‘That way,’ I said, pointing. ‘I checked your map. No problem.’ I knew Vietnam was that direction. Seriously, my sense of direction is uncanny.

I’d picked up the requisite visa for Vietnam a week earlier in Sihanoukville, guessing I’d hit the border around the 17th. And what do you know, trusting reader, today was the 17th. See? I’m organized and adventurrrrous. And according to my guidebook (I did have one – the greatest one ever created in fact, with minimal survival info and rough hand sketches for maps)(plus it was four years old – way outdated for the (relatively) rapidly-changing region) there was a border crossing, Khaom Samnor, between me and Chau Doc, Vietnam. There was also a river but I’d cross that bridge when I got to it – if there was one.

There wasn’t.

I’d been riding for so long it seemed the sun had gotten stuck on its way across the sky. I’d pedaled down dirt road after dirt road, each taking me further east, each a little narrower than the last, all of them rutted and pocked like mine fields (this was Cambodia after all). I passed through a town that may or may not have had a name, the streets all dusty and desolate, the river below packed with boats and mud and evidence of industrious if not prosperous humanity. I met a bright-eyed kid walking along the road, more like a path at that point, and gave him a ride on the back of the tandem, home to his leery-eyed, dumbfounded parents. Their look really should have been a bit of a clue to me, like everything else for miles around, that the road I was on was less traveled for a reason. But did you see Bourne Identity, when Matt Damon looks at that map of Paris for like five seconds and proceeds to escape the entire Paris police force chasing him through the streets? That was me with Tomas’s map of southeast Cambodia. Without the cops I mean. And the car, and the girl. All right the important thing was, I knew where I was going. And dammit if the road I was on didn’t come to an abrupt end under the trees along the edge of a river.

I saw a house, a boat and three people, none of whom seemed to know a single word of the English language – or any language for that matter. None of them seemed to have ever heard of a place called Khaom Samnor; one of them looked like he knew what the word Vietnam meant. Oddly, out here where one could rightfully suspect the people catch fish, grow vegetables and barter with chickens and pretty rocks, all three of them knew right away what a five dollar bill was. A minute later I was hauling my tandem down to the water’s edge and onto their boat, directing the guy at the helm to ply south.

As we motored down what I was hoping was the Mekong, I pulled out my passport. Blank stares all around. I opened it up and pounded the page with my fist, saying ‘Vietnam, Vietnam, stamp, stamp’ over and over. (Well come on, what would you say?) They nodded and half smiled like Grandpa when the battery in his hearing aid is shot and kept cruising down river. Miraculously, a Vietnam flag on a pole suddenly appeared, poking out above the trees on the far side of the (maybe) Mekong River. My guy pulled over and up to a rickety dock amid a cluster of about-to-crumble-and-fall-into-the-water houses.

I have no idea what all those people were doing there on that muddy riverbank, the air coated with an odor you could taste, cavorting like people who have no idea what to do on their first day off from work in twelve years but still enjoying the hell out of it. Of course, they’ve all been writing the same thing about me in their blog posts. But they were nevertheless damn happy to see me. And I was happy to see Vietnam. But just to be sure – and I am never this clear-headed, ever – I told my guy, somehow, that I wasn’t going to pay him for the boat ride until he took me to the official border crossing. To him that meant take me to the nearest – and likely only – place with any sort of authority figure hanging around in a chair worth more than any of those riverfront homes. We rolled down the street on the tandem, the townsfolk chasing after us, smiling and laughing and gleefully shouting something like ‘Kill him, whoever he is!’

We came to a green hut outside a gated compound. Inside a guy in a dirty white tank top was watering the lush garden grounds. The guy in the hut stared at my passport, my visa, me, my friend, me, my visa…and picked up a phone to ask someone to come figure out what the hell was going on.

They were very nice, these two, then three, then six, then eleven men, all standing around me, no one knowing what to do except keep me from leaving. Finally this kid shows up to let me know, in pretty good English, that I needed to personally thank every one of the men behind him for not tossing me in jail. I did, however, have that visa in my passport with today’s date, and I had the name Khaom Samnor scribbled in my notebook – luckily that meant something to one of the guys. ‘You need to get out of Vietnam,’ my young friend said. ‘Now.’

With his heavy-handed help I found a guy with a boat (my original driver, who was not allowed inside the compound where I was being politely and firmly accommodated, had given up and left forty-five minutes ago) who, for that same five bucks, would take me to the nearest village on the Cambodia side. From there I’d find another boat to that town with the dusty streets and all the boats (I will name it Kato for now) (alternatively Kateo, Katev, Katheew) where I had the option of sleeping in a temple (on what was by now an extremely empty stomach) or paying some other guy twelve bucks to take me to…Takeo.

Night fell as my fourth boatman of the day plied those grassy waterways for two hours, finally dropping me off and getting his twelve bucks. I looked around and put up my hands in that ‘What do I do now?’ way. He pointed down the road behind me – a road that led directly to the Independence Monument.

I slept in the same place as the night before. In the morning I found an ophthalmologist’s office, a few doors down from my guesthouse, and asked him which way to Vietnam. ‘That way,’ he said, pointing down a wide, newly-paved road – one that hadn’t yet been built when my guidebook was published. Two hours of smooth riding later I came upon the Tinh Bien border crossing, well south of where I’d made my illegal entry into Vietnam the day before. And much more accommodating.

So really, I didn’t need a map; I’d gone east, found the Mekong and made it to Vietnam – and back to where I started without being jailed, black-mailed or accosted. Admittedly, having an up-to-date guidebook might have helped me understand that the Khaom Samnor border crossing is, largely or perhaps exclusively, for boatloads of tourists traveling between Chau Doc and Phnom Penh. But then with the crutch of complete and correct information I wouldn’t have encountered that kid and his parents, met some of Vietnam’s most forgiving henchmen or set foot, eagerly and illegally, in that muddy, stinky riverside village.

If I’d been less organized I might have even experienced an overnighter in a Vietnamese jail.

Maybe next time.

House Sitting for the Irresponsible Budget Traveler

When you are on the road few things are better than having a place to crash for a night or three. Whether they be relatives (as was my good fortune last weekend), friends (like this past week) or former co-workers from eight years and fourteen time zones away (like tonight), having people who will welcome you into their homes is pure bliss for the traveler – particularly if your gracious hosts have young kids and/or toys to keep your own road-weary munchkins emotionally stable for another day.

If the gods of the itinerary are really smiling on you, your gracious hosts will, after providing you with free range of things, leave town.

But before that kid-in-the-candy-store giddiness gets out of hand, you’d be wise, fellow freeloader, to keep a few things in mind. After all, you might pass back through on your way home and want to crash again.

-- Not all appliances are created equal. Familiarize yourself with the finer workings of things like the electric stove and the washing machine. And the shop vac while you’re at it. Know where the fire extinguisher is. Pull the pin ahead of time.

-- Easy on the Nutella.People always say ‘Go ahead and eat whatever you want.’ – the unspoken caveat being ‘then replace it you scrounge.’ Don’t eat a lot of one thing; sample every open box, bag and container in the pantry, it’ll be impossible to tell how much you’ve scarfed. Same goes for the liquor cabinet.

-- Addendum to the above: Shuffle the canned goods around.

-- Don’t stress about locking yourself out or losing the house key. Pick a back window or side door and leave it unlocked and leave the key on the kitchen table, right on top of the note that says ‘Make sure everything is locked, including (that side door).’

-- Alternatively: Get a spare key made and tape it to your lower abdomen. Either way you go on this one, introduce yourself to the neighbors beforethey call the police.

-- We all have bad habits. Don’t leave incriminating evidence around, particularly in the kids’ rooms. When in doubt, don’t flush stuff either. Just be sure to take out the trash, a simple act of reputation-preservation which also scores points with your hosts, as they will think you are actually trying to be helpful. (Apply same concept to dirty diapers.)

-- Refrain from advertising on social media where you are house sitting. Forget about strangers, you don’t need your friends dropping by.

-- Sports fans: Know where the CANCEL button on the remote is for when the DVR suddenly starts recording two shows at once and totally cuts off the Giants game right when they’ve recovered a fumble in overtime of the NFC Championship game.

-- Bring and use your own laptop. Some people know how to find out where their pc has been, virtually.

-- Any pets in the house? Nip that potential disaster in the bud and lock the creatures out. They can’t tell on you. Then again the neighbors can, so let the monsters into the garage at night. Feed them beer.

-- Email people you want to talk to. Tell them your host’s phone number.

-- You don’t have to note what channel/station the TV/radio was on when you got there. You should, however, think about what channel/station the TV/radio is on when you leave. And how loud.

-- And come on, no matter how good that game/show/movie is, keep your ass off the crème sofa in the living room with the off-white carpeting and eat your damn pizza in the kitchen.

These pointers do not of course comprise an exhaustive checklist of ways to avoid house sitting catastrophe. They merely reflect bits of useful wisdom garnered from experience. Please feel free to add your own, and together let’s help maintain the good standing of the feckless, freeloading cheapskates of the world.