Life & Near-Death in Cambodia

Half my life ago, when I was twice the idiot I am now, I flew to Cambodia to meet up with two friends who were riding tandem bicycles around the world. This was my first trip to a country without a sanitation department so naturally I was pretty excited.

The plan was for me to ride on the back of one of their bikes as we pedaled from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap and out to the temples of Angkor. When I say the plan I really mean my plan. The plan, according to my friends, was not only to cycle across Cambodia and the rest of the world but to live to tell about it.

My plans tend to lack such detail.

Virtual Vacation - New Orleans, USA

New Orleans, I've always said, is the only place in the United States where you'll find culture of any substance. But of course this isn’t true. There are pockets of organic, uncontrived character in every corner and plain of the American west where Native American traditions still survive.

Culture goes back a long way in the New Orleans area, further even than the earliest gumbo recipe. Watson Brake, in northern Louisiana, is a burial mound complex thatwas constructed over centuries by a hunter-gatherer society. Dating from about 3500 BC, they are a thousand years older than the Pyramids of Giza.

Virtual Vacation - Chur, Switzerland

The town of Chur sits like a decorative knick-knack among the Alps of eastern Switzerland. The streets of the old neighborhood are a storybook come to life. The Plessur River flows down from the southeast, cutting a straight line through town, joining the fabled Rhine out on the northwest skirts. The verdant alpine slopes up above watch over Chur like loving grandparents. The surrounding countryside is replete with vineyards, keeping the town in good spirits.

If you aren’t checking flights by now I don’t know what else to tell you.

If you are checking flights, be prepared. Chur sits in the middle of a rough circle formed by Zurich, Munich, Salzburg, Venice, Milan and Geneva. The intolerable wonders of Paris and Vienna are slightly further-flung but eminently accessible. What hell to have to choose which city to fly into! You’ll then have to tolerate being whisked headlong into the Swiss Alps via a train system that is the transportation equivalent of satin sheets.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Virtual Vacation - Mae Salong, Thailand

Mae Salong is a quiet mountain ridge village in the highlands of northern Thailand. Once part of the Golden Triangle opium trade, Mae Salong in 1961 became a refuge for asylum-seeking members of China's anti-communist Kuomintang (KMT) forces. Known today as Santikhiri, Mae Salong is a subtly exotic island in the sky. Getting there on a bicycle is an excruciating kind of fun.

In 1949 approximately 12,000 anti-communist rebels fled the Yunnan Province of China and hid out in Burma before eventually crossing over into Thailand. For a while they supported themselves through their involvement in the healthy opium trade, but in the 1970's the Thai government made them an offer: help the Thai government put down their own communist uprising in exchange for Thai citizenship and a solid pat on the back. One condition of the agreement was that they give up their opium habit and replace it with something more healthy. And the Mae Salong tea industry was born.

Today

Again, someday...

The kids were up and playing and laughing long before usual. Maybe it was the sunshine streaming through their sheer window curtains. Maybe it was the temperature – perfect for a rolling around on beds that, like the air itself, feel warm and cool in turns. My oldest crept into my room, without knocking as always. ‘Good morning Daddy,’ he said, a broad smile on his face or so it appeared through the fog of sleep still hanging like a blanket over me. The clock on the wall said 6:40. ‘Good morning,’ I mumbled. ‘It’s not seven yet, is it…I’ll see you in a little while...’ My kid knows the rules. He also likes to ignore them, perhaps in hopes that I will too and we can enjoy ourselves a little, something I was much better at once upon a time.

Both my boys asked for cereal for breakfast. ‘Regular Cheerios and Honey Nut Cheerios, mixed!’ I’m only too happy to oblige – there aren’t many lower-maintenance ways to feed your kids. This is my oldest child’s last week of kindergarten; he has done extremely well, in both learning and making friends. I moved the family here last September, two days before the start of the school year, two days after they’d returned from Japan. Into a new town. Into a new home. A hectic transition, confusing at times for the little ones. I’m glad they like it here.

The neighbors across the street put a basketball hoop up recently, right there along the curb. It’s adjustable; the rim sits at eight feet for now. My son is getting pretty good at tossing his red kickball up and in. We used to have to rush out the door every morning to catch his bus; now he’s ready to go early. ‘Do we have time to play basketball?’ he asks with hope in his eyes. ‘You bet,’ I tell him. It feels good to get the blood moving on our own terms.

We had to get the other two moving early as well; my daughter had an 8:30 appointment with the neurologist. She’s been working with a physical therapist (perhaps ‘working’ is not the right word for a fifteen month old but for the rest of us it is) because she has not developed certain skills she should have by now. For the past three weeks we have done our best to stretch her legs as a runner would, to loosen up the muscles she has so far grossly underutilized. And she seems to be making progress; she can now sit up for a time without losing her balance, though we have to first help get her into a seated position. Her therapist has been pleasantly surprised by the quick improvement. The neurologist, however, has prescribed an MRI. His assessment this morning included the possibility of mild cerebral palsy.

My wife enjoys taking the kids to the library, for story times and the various activities they make available to moms (and dads) with young children. This morning my younger son got to paint, his new favorite thing. The kids all made suns with paper plate and some parchment. My son was the last one to finish – he didn’t mind one bit, he was only concerned with turning every triangular ray of his sun bright orange. My wife and I did our best not to rush him while wondering if we would make it to the bus stop on time to meet our proud little kindergartener. The year has gone so fast. His school is not giving his class a graduation ceremony. I doubt he has given this any thought but my wife and I are kind of disappointed. Tomorrow he’ll come home early, on Friday he’ll come home even earlier, and that will be that. No celebrating the culmination of their year as growing children; no moment for them to feel special. Or maybe it’s us parents who want to see our kids celebrated, so adorable in their little caps and gowns.

As my boys climb out of the car they both tell me that they are hungry. ‘You’re always hungry,’ I say right back, saddened somewhat by the lack of levity in my own voice. My three-year-old just got out of diapers and has begun going to sleep without needing mommy or daddy next to him. These things I should be ecstatic about; on the inside I am, but on the outside I keep finding other reasons to tell him he needs to grow up. Both of them decide, before they get to the door, that they want to stay outside and play soccer. Occasionally they’ll play with each other but mostly they want to play with me. Each of them, separately. And there’s no reliable solution to keep both of them happy.

I roll our blue rug out on the grass and sit my little girl down. I want her to watch. I want her to want to imitate her brothers playing, just as she likes to pretend to talk on the phone like mommy and daddy do. I hope to somehow encourage her, to make her feel motivated to be a regular kid, running through the grass in the warm sun, kicking a ball around. Who knows if a kid her age has the capacity to think in such terms, but I’d like to believe a few new neurons will start firing as she sits there awkwardly, taking things in with those big beautiful eyes. It can’t hurt; after all, this is Nature’s way, isn’t it?

Last night I threw together two short posts for this blog, which was once a series of writings on life and travel abroad but has morphed into a mishmash of thoughts, appropriately paralleling my presently unstructured life. They are both rather sharp-edged pieces, sarcastic of course, tinged with anger for the way some things work in this world. As I read them over at the library this afternoon my words came across as insignificant, my condemnations trivial. What kind of man spends his energy on things like this when his daughter needs physical therapy and an MRI?

I posted a picture on facebook, of my son’s reading chart for school. He’d been asked to color in one rectangle for each book he read. ‘Create rows of colors, or columns or patterns’ was the teacher’s gentle suggestion. After four or five rectangles he got bored and decided to turn the last ninety-five boxes into the flags of ninety-five different countries. I almost cried when I saw what he’d done. Later I’d yell at him because he couldn’t hold his little bug cage still so I could coax into it the housefly we’d just caught together.

On Twitter I traded messages with someone who reached out to me, asking if I’d like to write for the website he has been developing. ‘You seem like an interesting guy,’ he wrote. He’d seen the things I’d written regarding the 2011 earthquake – or he’d tweeted about it anyway. ‘We’re always looking for writing that adheres to at least semi-high standards.’ That a stranger would take the time to reach out with a kind word feels good. We all like to feel appreciated. I just wish the pay were better.

From another person’s feed I linked to an article written by a woman named Jennifer Miller who, along with her husband, decided life was for living, not merely making a living. They sold their things and set out with their four children on an eighteen-month round-the-world adventure on bicycles. Five years later they are still rolling. I read not about any specifics of their travels but of the woman’s philosophy about the path they have chosen, engrossed with one family’s passion that I would so love to infuse into mine. I’d pack us all up and leave tomorrow if I could. But there are logistics to consider. And the kids are much too young for bikes. But they are young enough to adapt if we went on such an extended journey, and I begin wondering if someday, long after they’ve gone down their own separate paths, if they’d feel they enjoyed their unorthodox childhood.

I received an email from an old friend today, about the death of a guy we both used to play Little League baseball with. Same age as us. One of the best in the league back then. Now gone. My friend didn’t mention how, and I didn’t ask, unsure why it really might matter anyway. Outside the library I saw a neighbor of mine, sitting on a bench in the gentle afternoon sun, watching his granddaughters play on the playground. He’s seventy years old, looks years younger, and has lived in this town all his life. He used to ride his bike along dirt roads to get to school, when he wasn’t riding his horse. There were once only 1,500 people in the community. ‘Everybody knew each other,’ he said. ‘You couldn’t do something wrong without seeing your father waiting on the front porch with his belt in his hands when you got home.’ Most of the land around here used to be farm; all summer they’d meet in front of the fire house to buy, sell and trade vegetables. ‘Now you can’t, it’s illegal,’ he says. I listen to him tell his stories and I can’t help but agree that life in those quieter, simpler times would be hard to beat.

I rode my bike home, thoughts of community and school and work and MRIs in my head. My family and I could probably travel for less than we are paying in rent each month. It would also be extremely taxing on all of our kids, to varying degrees in line with their ages. I’m not working right now – or rather, I’m working my tail off with a number of literary pursuits, I just haven’t created much income from it yet. But I believe in time I will. I have to. We are not starving by any means. But the present cannot go on forever.

My wife believes in me. My kids in all their young, misguided perceptions think I am worthy of their admiration. I love them like crazy, yet there are times I wish it were just me. Me and my bike and the never-ending road. Simpler. Quieter. And, I believe in my darker moments, better. What comes of feelings not acted upon?

It is now 2am. All these things are now yesterday. I sit here in the dark of another day, certain – hopeful – I can be what my family needs someday.

I just don’t know about today.

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.

Going By The (Immensely Popular and Profoundly Flawed) Book

We were making unbelievable time; seriously, I thought we had entered some kind of worm hole. The trip from our hostel (way overpriced – and no breakfast) back to Bratislava Station went much faster than the initial walk across town to the Linoleum Sheraton now that we knew which way was hore. We hopped a train to Trenčin, a small city with a quaint old town and phenomenal ice cream, then traveled on to Ružomberok via a silky smooth connection in Žilina. (Switzerland, I thought at this point, had nothing on Slovakia’s rail system – except maybe in the sanitation department…and in overall comfort…and on a baseline decibel level.)

Right outside Ružomberok Station we jumped on a bus (after a stuttering, embarrassing back-and-forth with the driver). The seats and aisle crammed full of students (wonderfully forgiving of our bulky bags), we stood for the ten kilometers down the road to Vlkolinec, an idyllic one-dirt-road village whose residents’ lives have been turned upside down since its appointment to Unesco’s World Cultural Heritage list. After a prying look around we would take another creaky bus back to Ružomberok for our last train ride of the day; if things continued to proceed as they had since our fortuitous encounter with that blessed street vendor in Bratislava we would make it to Liptovsky-Mikulaš in plenty of time to find a place, fire up some dinner and relax as the sky turned dark over Jasná and the peaks of Chopok Sever. We started walking, me pushing a suitcase, a loaded pack on my back, my wife pushing our son in his stroller right behind. According to the map in our guidebook, Vlkolinec was right there along the main road…

I see that Lonely Planet recently printed its 100 millionth book. To this bit of news I imagine reactions would vary. ‘What’s Lonely Planet?’ This from the majority of folks (including somewhere around 80% of Americans) who do not own a passport. ‘Yeah, I love Lonely Planet!’ This from the great majority of backpackers who buy big expensive backpacks for their long hikes from luggage carousel to bus at the curb outside, from another curb straight to reserved hostel room, back to mini-bus at the curb to the next reserved hostel room, to a waiting tuk-tuk driver ('all the way at the end of the street??'), to …

Then there are those who just shake their heads.

This is where I fit in.

I bought my first LP soon after I got to Japan. The sucker is a shade over 900 pages, I would have left it on the bookstore shelf if I were only going to be in country for a few weeks or even a couple of months. But my plan at the time was to spend about five years here, so I figured I’d get plenty of use out of it – which I have. I was initially dismayed, and still am, that there was not in those 900 pages one single mention of my new hometown of Fukushima - and barely five pages on the entire prefecture, all of them devoted to the Aizu-Wakamatsu and Bandai areas (the latter well worth seeing). Also included was a half-page ‘map’ of the Bandai Region (I will expound on LP’s cartographic incompetence in a bit). Not a word on Fukushima City – not Hanamiyama, nor Jo-Raku-En nor the fact that I now lived there.

LP’s tongue-in-cheek slogan – ‘Almost too much information’ – is a credit to their sense of humor as much as it is a jab (likely unintentional) at their average customer’s mindset. I’m glad Mr. Groundwater brought up the example of Vang Vieng, Laos in his article. When I rolled into that same town at 10am on a flawless day, the only life I saw was in the form of a couple reclining in a café watching Friends. Are you kidding me? Blue skies, gentle temps and some of the most amazing karst scenery in all of Indochina and you two slugs are lying around watching morons making stupid sexual innuendos to canned laughter? This is what happens I guess when paradise turns popular: the outsiders pour in, the locals pander to their creature comforts (and who can blame them?) and suddenly, just as Yosemite falls victim to Curry Village, the amazing beauty of Vang Vieng becomes mere backdrop for the gluttony, sloth and stupidity that has become the norm. Groundwater maintains that if LP doesn’t turn paradise into a plundering ground someone else will. This I find wrongly forgiving – if I don’t sell your kids coke someone else will so don’t blame me for Joey’s deviated septum – but maybe I’m pointing the wrong finger. After all, a guidebook is supposed to guide you to the greatest treasures a land has to offer.

Unfortunately, now there are 100 million people out there following blindly along.

My personal stance with LP has nothing to do with their success and the associated decline in the average traveler’s propensity to go anywhere without being told where that 'anywhere' should be (not to mention their ongoing neglect of my continued presence here in Fukushima). What I raise issue with is something I’ve been fed on several occasions: false facts.

There I was in Phnom Penh, my first real travel experience, armed with my LP Cambodia, picked up at Bangkok's Don Muang Airport for a mere 30 bucks. Two friends were on their way, cycling into town from Băttâmbâng and Sisŏphŏn and Thailand and San Francisco. I was hungry; I was sure they’d be ravenous. I flipped through LP's pages and pages on Phnom Penh until I found what I was looking for – a description of a village past the outskirts of the bustling city with a row of intimate local establishments where we could eat and talk and soak up a slice of (as yet) unexploited Cambodia. Two hours later I was apologizing profusely to my two friends plus a third girl, also traveling by bicycle, for leading them along this dark, deserted road to nowhere. There was nothing out here, ‘just over the bridge and down the road’ as my so-called guidebook had assured me.

We did eventually come upon an amazing sight: a massive outdoor banquet hall filled with red carpeting and kitsch, karaoke machine still blaring for the guests who had by all indication long since gone home.

At least the kitchen was still open.

On the way back over the bridge we had to run from the cops. We will never know why.

Among the many disclaimers LP puts forth in their books, one of them states (quite correctly) that ‘Things change…nothing stays the same.’ Apparently this covers the disappearance of entire communities.

By the numbers, Lonely Planet is the king of guidebooks - much as McDonald’s is the king of hamburgers. Personally I would rather go hungry than fork over any amount of any world currency to the Gilded Arches. Similarly, I would now, before even glancing at a LP map, resort to any means of finding my way – asking the locals (with their wildly varying ideas of how far ‘not far’ is); translating road signs (often necessary outside of the main cities and off the main roads); muddling through a Japanese guidebook (easier said than done) or just going with my internal gyroscope and getting lost – which is pretty much the same as following a LP map anyway.

In the Thai border town of Mae Sai (the northernmost point in the country, separated from Tachilek, Myanmar by a modest river and a ten dollar donation to the oppressive Burmese regime) I had a choice to make. My destination was Mae Salong, a village of Chinese refugees and tea, high in the hills to the southwest. Right from the door of my hostel was a road that, according to Julian, the hostel owner (who got rip-roaring drunk the night I was there and spent hours falling on the floor and screaming not-so-nice four letter words at his ex-wife over the phone) led directly to Mae Salong. In this case, however, directly meant winding around, through and, most worryingly, up and down and up and down the many miles of mountains that stood between here and there. (Did I mention I was traveling solo on a tandem bicycle?) ‘It’s bloody suicide,’ Julian warned me as he cracked open the evening’s first bottle of 100 Pipers scotch.

I had a guidebook with me – a 240-page work of genius (check out the price) written on the premise that some people out there still prefer adventure and intellect over hand-held surety along the cattle trail. This book was only four years old, but in that time a lot had changed (including the paving of a once-impassable road out of Takeo, Cambodia which, had I known, would have caused me to miss out on miles of back roads, a spectacular bout of haggling for a boat ride with people who I don’t think had ever heard another human being speak in such a language, and a sweaty two hours being held and interrogated and (fortunately) not subsequently jailed by one then a group of Vietnamese officials). Plus all the maps were hand-drawn and not to scale and not exactly intended for cyclists bent on dying in the hills of far north Thailand so only a few main roads between the more significant towns were included. And virtually none of them had numbers or names.

Getting to Mae Salong would be a climb, I already knew that. What I wanted was a non-lethal route to the base of that climb. I scoured Julian’s library of tattered books and found, to a mix of delight and dismay, a recent LP Thailand. The map showed a straight line leading directly south out of town; this would be the same smooth, flat road I rode for the last three kilometers into town after coming in from a side road out of Chang Saen. Cool. It looked like an easy 20 kilometers to Huay Khrai, where I would bang a right onto another straight shot west to Ban Pakha, then roll straight south to Pa Miang which would from there bring me around to the day’s ascent.

To make a simple story long and convoluted, that straight-as-a-ruler road west to Ban Pakha started winding and rising and snaking north until I swore I was almost back in Mae Sai. Lucky for me it is near impossible (and certainly not advisable) to eat an entire kilogram bag of lychee in the course of a single evening and I had something left over from the night before to lubricate my system as I looked at the road still rising and twisting out of sight ahead of me. That road did eventually lead to Ban Pakha, a place I was by now positive no LP writer had ever been to or passed through. Then for the next four hours I pedaled my bike up and down the most ridiculous stretches of road I have ever almost puked on. This, I decided, was the mountain road that led away from the door of my hostel; the road Julian told me to avoid before he started in with his histrionics; a road that passed not a single shred of human evidence beyond its own curbs and the bridges that crossed the streams that ran between these golden-grassed monsters.

Mae Salong itself was fantastic – and not a single LP in sight.

I say without exaggeration or sarcasm that I’m sure no one involved in any LP Thailand has ever seen Ban Pakha or even bothered to scout out the area. What other excuse could there be for having a straight line represent that serpentine road leading up into the hills? What defense for claiming the existence of a Cambodian village that doesn’t exist? Maybe I was being naïve or unrealistic, but I had a hard time believing anyone would include in a guidebook – from the most popular guidebook company in human history – made-up information on places they have never visited.

Until I realized that at least one person has written for a guidebook about a country he never visited.

On the map in the Czech Republic & Slovakia LP – which I’m guessing is pretty much a copy of the old Czechoslovakia LP with a revised intro and a new cover – Vlkolinec is denoted by a circle situated directly on the road we and forty kind, patient students had just rumbled down. Perhaps what threw this particular LP writer off (assuming he or she even bothered with the bus ride down from Ružomberok Station – or the train out of Bratislava) is the bright and very visible arrow-shaped sign right there along the road pointing toward a side road and, ostensibly, Vlkolinec. A full hour of pushing our luggage and our kid up this desolate (and in a few places blessedly shaded) road and we came upon another sign for Vlkolinec – pointing up a steep road that, indicated by the cartoonish tourist map next to the gravel lot for the tour buses that can’t make it any further, led another two kilometers up to the village of Vlkolinec where, at least in the drawing, everyone is happy.

After trying and failing for that first hour, within minutes of turning up this new and maddeningly steep road we managed to hitch a ride. Then afterward we really hit the jackpot when we bummed a lift from a guy who had been selling jars of honey out of his car and was just pulling away to head home when I threw myself in front of his grill and asked him if he was going toward Ružomberok Station by any chance.

We made it to Liptovsky-Mikulaš just in time to find the tourist office (open until 5 according to LP) closed at 4:30. I ripped through a couple of pages searching for accommodations listings before I shoved that so-called Backpacker’s Bible in my pack and we walked on up a residential road. Within minutes we came upon a man who, by good fortune and historical border shifts, spoke German (as do I, more or less). Next moment he’s on his phone calling a friend to come pick us up to whisk us to their home with a very comfortable guest loft apartment from where we could watch the sky grow dark over the peaks of Chopok Sever.

I can’t say for sure because I didn’t check, but I would have bet this place – this neighborhood and this woman’s house – wasn’t listed in our LP. God-willing, it will stay that way.

Flights of Fancy

My wife’s wallet is fat with stamp cards. Card for the gas station, card for the camera store, card for a curry shop I don’t think she’s ever even been to. She doesn’t even like curry. I myself don’t have the organizational skills to keep track of a stack of store cards, even if I did possess the inclination to hold onto them or the capacity to remember to use them. My wife hands me a supermarket card as I am heading out the door of the apartment, and by the time I’m walking through the automatic doors two minutes later (assuming I hit or ignored all the traffic lights on the way) I’ve completely forgotten about it.

Really, it’s hard to exist in Japan without amassing at least a modest collection of these insidious little gimmicks. I have a mess of them in a drawer from the haircut place up the street; I never bother or remember to bring the last one I got but I feel culturally insensitive if I don’t let them make me a new one. And every time I promise to bring my others to combine them and see what sort of discount I can get on my next cut. I may have enough to take over the place. Then once I do I am going to get rid of the stamp card system.

Before Japan outlawed free plastic bags at the supermarkets they gave out little green stamp cards to encourage people to reuse their old bags. I’m a pretty green guy, I reuse anyway, but I kept my ‘green card’ (get that double entendre?) (no wait, triple!) and after twenty eco-friendly trips to the market I got a buck off my eighty-dollar bag of rice. Once I did forget my card and they politely insisted they make me another one, the extra paper cancelling out the good of reusing my old bags but hey, this is the system.

I can’t even be bothered with frequent flyer mileage clubs. Fortunately, the wife can. She is a wizard with those alliance connections. (Okay, wizard is male but I can’t think of the female equivalent, unless it’s witch, a term that does not apply to a woman who gets me a free flight somewhere – but can apply when I forget to use my stamp card at the supermarket.) I think she’d flown exactly once with Alitalia when she sat down at the kitchen table one day with a stack of pens, two clean notebooks and a pile of mileage cards and mailed point reports from every major airline in the world, including a couple that didn’t even exist anymore. After two days of nothing but cheese sandwiches and No-Doze she had figured out how to squeeze Alitalia for two free tickets from Milan to Casablanca. And now, it seems, she’s done it again.

Even though my older boy is now three and thus eligible to fly for the same price and fuel surcharge as the average amateur sumo wrestler, my wife managed to score three free seats from some Asian carrier or another, valid in the next couple of months within a radius that includes Hong Kong, Guam and Saipan. A little time in any of these would be the perfect antidote to winter and the sprawling disaster area that is the unplowed Fukushima road system.

Instead we’ve decided to head over to the world’s most recent political and military center of instability.

Nine years in Japan and I’ve yet to see Korea. This of course does not count transfers I’ve made at Incheon International, which resembles a high-dollar shopping labyrinth with an airport attached. But if the two Korean airlines I’ve flown give any measure of what awaits, I think I may be able to look past the occasional overhead DPRK missile.

I look forward to airports and flights almost as much as I look forward to the place I am going. I’m serious, this is not a typo. An airport’s atmosphere is so often a reflection of the country it is almost like taking a glimpse into the present state of affairs of that country. A stopover in Beijing two years ago was a display of everything I heard about the city itself as it was preparing for the 2008 Summer Games. The floors and handrails and glass were so polished my eyes began to hurt after a while; then I opened a door to what I thought was a bathroom and saw a grimy room full of dirty peasant children attaching elastic strings to those baggage tags you’re supposed to fill out. Meanwhile, as a group of cheery-eyed young girls laughed and played with my then-one-year-old boy as he crawled around on the spotless floor, a man with rubber gloves and a forensic evidence kit worked the trail of prints and drool my son had left behind.

Mohammed V International in Casablanca had palm trees lining the road curving gently into the terminal area, where not a single person could be seen working save for the hordes hawking taxi rides. Casablanca itself was just like this – except for the part about the palm trees. Papeete Airport in Tahiti (also known as Faa’a International) was intimate, open and right on the water (on reclaimed land, apparently), and was electric into the wee hours with a crowd that seemed more local than traveler. That I didn’t have enough time on my layover to take a stroll down the street seemed regrettable until the guys at the currency exchange counter invited me into the back room for a round of bourbon and cokes. I’m trying to reconcile this with the fact my wife does not have an Air Tahiti Nui mileage card. On the other end of the good-times spectrum, at any airport in the US the security borders on paranoia. But once your shoes and belt and bodily orifices are cleared of all explosive devices you can go pick up a gun at Wal-Mart.

It’s tougher to see the soul of a country from the flight crew, but in some cases the resemblance is amazing. For our three hours from Milan to Casablanca, and back again a month later, the Alitalia crew didn’t quite seem to remember there were actually passengers on board. On a trip to the bathroom I passed an attendant sitting and reading a magazine. She didn’t look up because, I am convinced, she forgot she was at work. Or, perhaps just as likely, she didn’t give a cannoli. This contrasts with the cabin crew of any flight on any Chinese airline. They are keenly cognizant of your presence, and are quick to convey how annoyed they are by your inconvenient existence. The baggage handlers are an equally perturbed bunch, as I have witnessed both in person at the check-in counter as well as indirectly at the luggage carousel. Flying a Chinese airline is like buying any other Chinese product, and I will leave it to the reader to decide just what that means.

But by and large I love and prefer Asian airlines. Admittedly I am hormonally biased but the female flight attendants are generally beautiful creatures, a mix of swan, silk and lotus flower. They are polite and engaging and they give you free beer. By the end of the flight I don’t even care where I am. A couple times I’ve forgotten which country I’ve even landed in but wow didn’t that one attendant have the sweetest laugh. If my bags are in good shape at baggage claim I can assume I am not in China. If the customs officer doesn’t treat me like I’m the Emperor then I’m not in Japan. From there I don’t care which airport I am in, and the less it looks like Incheon the better if my theory holds true.

Leaving Phnom Penh International was like getting off a hotel elevator and expecting the lobby but instead stepping out into a back alley. For me this is not a problem; I don’t want a concierge when I travel. I want to be hit immediately with whatever the country has in store for me, and that can include a military presence or a sense of anarchy. Phnom Penh International did not disappoint in either of these.

Bangkok’s relatively new Suvarnabhumi Airport (also known as the ‘Airport of Smiles’) is, like Bangkok itself, big and modern and chaotic. Seven floors all connect in practicality via a series of long moving walkways which are heavily magnetized (like the floor of the prison in the Travolta/Cage classic Face Off) to keep luggage carts from becoming lethal weapons of rolling destruction. The same seven floors are also connected in atmosphere by a huge atrium, giving anyone anywhere in the terminal the sense that this is a big and wonderful place that can take you out with one faulty magnetized walkway. On the ground floor cab drivers swarm the new arrivals, while backpackers pound on the Internet kiosks that keep eating their coins. My first time in Suvarnabhumi, once I’d realized I wasn’t in Amari Airport (where I landed on my first trip to Thailand), I decided to find a quiet corner and try to catch a little shut-eye. I ended up spending the night in a little-used and evidently little-known room on the seventh floor, next to a cordoned-off Buddhist altar and in faint earshot of the ongoing bustle of Suvarnabhumi and of Thailand itself.

So what to make of Korea? Both Asiana Airlines and Korean Air provide, based on my limited experience, excellent service (provided by excellent flight attendants). The good folks at Asiana Airlines even went so far as to put the bike tool they confiscated from me at the gate into a padded envelope with my name and flight number on it so I would have no problems retrieving it once we’d landed in Kuala Lumpur (which aesthetically resembles nothing in Malaysia except the Petronas Towers). Yet Incheon itself gives an impression of ultra-modern, ultra-soulless ambition. I suppose I’ll just have to wait and see for myself, up close, what Korea is all about. With visions of beef barbeque and kim chee and crowded marketplaces full of people whose words I don’t understand, I’ve got pretty high hopes.

Add a crew of silky, swanlike lotus flowers to the equation and I’ll have no problem when my wife wants to go a second time so she can use all those new stamp cards.