Richard Goes Pogonic: December 2008

I'm a little off the blog at the moment, as the round the world trip has taken a sudden turn away from the usual traveling adventures. Rather than bumming around SE Asia, sleeping in dorms, eating at cheap greasy street shops and haggling over a few cents with merchants, Shannon and I are now spoiling ourselves rotten in Hawaii. We touched down on Kauai island on the 17th, and are now spending our days relaxing on beaches, hiking in the mountains and biking through the very muddy paths. It's actually not all that relaxing, since we've spent most every day doing some moderately to extremely strenuous activities, but it is quite enjoyable, especially having nice things around like flush toilets, laundry machines and the ability to cook for ourselves.

One of the trips we undertook was an 8 hour hike through one of the muddiest, boggiest trails I've ever imagined much less hiked on. Our ultimate goal was through two different water-diversion tunnels, blown through some mountain ridges in the 1900's. We hiked (and often crawled) for 4 hours through the sludge before arriving at the first tunnel, which was over 1.5 km long. The 2nd tunnel eluded us just long enough that we weren't able to crawl through it, as we were losing sunlight much too quickly, but now I'm half-way torn between crawling through the sludge again to find the mysterious 2nd tunnel, and just avoiding the whole disgusting ordeal and just enjoying other things Hawaii has to offer. There's still plenty more tunnels, hikes, caves and waterfalls to see, but it's hard to give up on something when you've come so close to making it. The tunnels themselves (or the one we saw) were pretty impressive, nearly 6 feet high the whole way through with nearly a foot of water running along it. A flash flood probably would have wiped us all out, but I think fearing that only made it more fun.

Anyway, Hawaii is great, but it's hard taking the time to write about what's happening. Traveling overseas in non-western countries has something much more mystic and unexpected to it, where even the smallest details of your day make for an interesting story. Getting lunch can turn into a 3 hour challenge, bedrooms come with uninvited houseguests (people or bugs usually), and every day includes not just thoughts of what to do but also where to go and how to get there. You find that you have to be "tuned in" or "turned on" every waking moment just to really appreciate or even understand what is happening around you, where as now, even so far away from home, I can almost shut down and just coast through life, munching on comfy food, sleeping in a comfy bed, driving from point A to B in my comfy rental car, hardly worrying about a thing. And if anything goes wrong, the world speaks my language and hardly a soul is worried about hassling me for a dollar every time I ask them so much as the time.

Not that Hawaii is all monotony and cakewalks. I'm with my brother Steve and his wife Laura (and there two litle kids Max and Nash, the cutest little bundles of joy and occassional poop you've ever seen), and Steve is pretty gung-ho for doing something advernturous whenever he can. Our last Hawaiian adventure took us to a barely touched remote lava tube (so deep and long that had our lights burned out, we would never have emerged), and a 4 hour hike on along a hunting trail to the caldera of a still active volcano. The volcano trip was pretty freaky, and I'm fairly certain of all the dicey things I've done that had the highest likelyhood of killing me (and the whole family). There's nothing quite as "out there" that we have planned for this trip so far, but there's still 8 more days to find something nutty.

We're leaving here on the 1st of January (though we'll be spending New Years away from the family in Honolulu since our flight leaves super early). From there, we've decided to forego Vietnam and spend some extra time in Indonesia. Running around Laos and Cambodia had Shannon and I feeling rather cramped for time, sort of as if we would arrive in a country, spend a few days finding all the great stuff to do and see, then leave before we actually had a chance to do it. And so, we're putting all our traveling eggs in one basket, and doing Indonesia as best we can. I figure the surfing, beaches, islands, etc. should be what we're looking for, and everyone we met on the road had very little pleasant things to say about the Vietnamese travel industry. As someone (or some book) put it, the "Tuk Tuk" drivers there are so anxious to have your business, they'll drive over you just to get to you first. They'll then charge you whatever price they feel you should pay and never budge from it no matter how ridiculous it is. And so, nice as the country itself sounds, there's enough junk to go with it that I don't mind saying "no" to it this time. Maybe next trip. Anyway, till the next blog, thanks for reading!

Rich

Putting up pictures online sometimes is a giant, giant pain in the backside, so I decided to try and throw up a whole crap-load at once. I think I'll have to keep them smaller though from now on (if you click on them, you get the full-sized image) since it takes about 5-8 minutes to load each picture.

Shannon and I have arrived and now left Cambodia. The pics here are all from our time there, which was quite short, only 6 days.

We went to Phnom Penh and Siem Reap, the two major tourist destination is town. Phnom Penh is the place to go to learn heaps and heaps about the Cambodian genocide, Siem Reap is where you'll find Angkor Wat. Both are absolutely mind-blowing, though in very different ways. I got a little overwhelmed by Phnom Penh, and at the prison/torture camp, I spent the last hour just sitting in the courtyard, rather exhausted from a day of skulls, graves, pictures of victims and stories of people who both died and survived the genocide horrors.

The sights at Siem Reap were amazing, and I'm sad I didn't get more of the great pictures we took online. Hope you enjoy them, I'm gonna leave it at this here, since we're now in Vang Vieng in Laos, and internet costs about 4 times what it should. There seems to be an internet cartel in town, with all the internet spots either savagely overpriced, or painfully slow. It's a nutty town this Vang Vieng, and I often think I've been transported back to some beach town in North America. Oooh, gotta run, enjoy the pictures!!