Spring Garden

left: Flower about to open















left: Our plot in the foreground













left: Baby broccoli


















left: Almost done planting!

Sorry!

If you are one of my one or two loyal readers, I must appologize: I have been a pathetic blogger as of late. One post a month for the past two months? Sweet Jesus! A dead, armless, once-blind, computer hater (you know, one of those "Email? Ughh!!! Only hand-written letters for me, they're more pure..." folks) could have blogged more than I have in the past few months. I truly am sorry. Sound the sirens, wake the junkies, close the schools, and tell the hermit crabs to peek out of their shells once again, the blogging drought has ended. Monsoon season has arrived!

I've been a busy man recently. We had two guests out from Hawaii last week, and I've also been spending a lot of time getting the garden planted and ready for the summer season. I put the blog on the back burner. But it's back cooking again, so pop up that popcorn, crack that Sierra open, put on your hideous Lazy Sunday Sweater and Day-After-Thanksgiving Sweatpants and enjoy the posts!

Where the Hell are the Photos? And a Great Read

I know, I'm looking for them too. My camera's battery charger died a quick, sudden death last month so my camera has been out of commission. I'm in the process of getting a new charger. I'm hoping to steal a few pictures from the Photographer in Residence to put up on the blog. Coming soon, I promise.

Oh, by the way--I just finished reading A Million Little Pieces by James Frey. I don't care if he made a few parts up, the memoir is awesome. I couldn't put the thing down and read 200 pages one day at my desk at work. It's based on his experiences dealing with multiple addictions in a rehab center near Chicago. Literary critics have their panties in a bunch because he admitted that he fudged a few parts to make the story more "dramatic"--like the part about him going to jail for 3 months (he really went for 3 hours). And the part where he drives his car into a police officer (he never did that). Who gives a shit? The book is still great and he challenges readers and critics to debate the boundaries of autobiographical writing. I also dig how the book is paragraph-free and filled with tons of random capitalization. The writing flows naturally (even though parts of it are made up, ha!) and the story is...well...unbelievable! It's a great read, just take it with a grain of salt.

Fire Drills Ain't No Joke in Japan

So I witnessed my first school fire drill the other day. It was scary. It was so real and the atmosphere so tense that I had to constantly look down to make sure I wasn't burning from the flames that I couldn't see but knew must have existed. There was fake smoke everywhere!! I don't know how they did it, but the blokes from the fire department (yes, they're on hand during the drill to oversee everything) made sure the first floor and courtyard were blanketed in thick, white smoke. The students, calm as cucumbers, walked in an orderly fashion into the gym (it was raining heavily outside) and quickly formed rows according to class. Very few students spoke, the lines were perfectly straight. When all students were accounted for by their homeroom teachers, the principal gave a speach. Then the chief of the fire department gave a speech. Then each homeroom teacher had his/her students form a small circle so they could discuss how to save fellow students and teachers in case of emergency during a fire. I found this part very Japanese--discussing how to preserve the strength of the group in case disaster strikes. No one is left behind, the classes leave as a unit, even if each kid has to drag out a body.

The Fourth Time's a Charm!

I don't want to go on and on about it because I'll end up wanting to crucify someone, but after four failed attempts, I've finally passed my driving test and earned (read: bought) my Japanese Driver's License! I failed four times for ridiculous reasons, each time I paid over $20 to take the test again, each time I was informed about driving lessons that are offered by the Dream Driving School that is affiliated with the Japanese DMV, and each time I wanted to strangle the neck of the sad sad human being that failed me. I waited two hours and paid another $20 to pick up my license. I'm glad to be done with the whole scam. I'm convinced any politician could win any election in Japan if he/she promised to reform the corrupt DMV's policy and procedures. The Japanese DMV angers everyone, and anyone who wants to drive legally in Japan has to bow down to it and smooch its boil-covered ass. Burn in hell Japanese DMV!

Hiroshima and Kyoto!!

Jenna and Matt, our two friends from Maui, came out to Japan to visit for two weeks. Luckily, we had off during the first week of their visit for Golden Week (a string of national holidays in a single week in May = Golden Week in Japan). Armed with a tiny, under-powered car, enough snacks to fatten up a horde of Japanese high school girls with Kate-Moss-crushes, and the confidence that comes from driving with a seasoned mechanic like Matt, we loaded the car so that not a single ray of sunlight could make it through the rear window and drove six hours down to Kyoto.

For three nights we stayed at our favorite guesthouse and wallowed in the hospitality that Kazuo, the owner of Guesthouse Bon, showers down upon each and every guest. We stuffed ourselves with sushi, vegetable tempura, miso soup, natto, and sake. By bike, we visited temples that Col and I have come to love and also explored new areas of Kyoto we have never seen before. The more I visit Kyoto, the more I fall in love with the city. Its coffers are filled with temples and artwork older than the hills yet its nightlife and fashion are saturated with the ever-changing energy and charisma that only a country’s youth can generate. Modern shopping districts scratch the backs of ancient temple gardens. Its darkest allies on the darkest nights are safer than New York’s most well lit thoroughfares on the sunniest days. People smile and bow if you make eye contact with them on the street. If the sun is out, the banks of its main river are lined with picnic blankets and street performers. It’s a city as a city should be.

As always, we left Kyoto with that empty feeling in our chests that kids get after they hastily finish eating an ice cream cone…topped with extra sprinkles and chocolate sauce…and about 20 cherries. Even though we didn’t say it as we drove away, we all were thinking, “Shit, what other place in Japan could possibly be cooler, what food could be better, what accommodation could be more comfortable?” The skies were overcast when we left, and spending another night at the guesthouse to wait for a sunny day to make leaving less depressing seemed like the most rational thing to do. But alas, the lure of visiting Hiroshima was too strong and Kazuo’s guesthouse too filled with other guests for us to stay another night in Kyoto, so we re-filled the car to the brim with stuff and headed off down the highway.

A long drive is most easily endured when one chooses to use a well-fortified castle as a rest stop. Or so I’ve heard. So we decided to stop at Himeji Castle on the way to Hiroshima. The castle, called the White Egret for the sweeping, curved stone walls of its foundation and its white color, is perched high atop a rocky bluff that looks out over the city. Upon first seeing the six-tiered fortress surrounded by a jagged maze of outer and inner walls, it became immediately clear to me that anyone throughout history who thought he could overtake this thing must have been a complete idiot and/or some distant, power-hungry relative of the Bush family. Logic begs would-be imposters to drop their weapons at the city borders and run for cover. The sheer number of weapons racks, reserve ration rooms, archery holes in the walls, trap doors, and look out points in and around the castle let contemporary visitors peek back in time (or stare teary-eyed at the present and into the future) to days when power could (can and will) be yanked out from under popular leaders like a greased rug by men with big armies, bigger wallets, and small regard for anyone other than themselves and their friends. The inside of the castle was set up like a museum, filled with old scrolls, weapons, paintings, and descriptions of the castle’s various inhabitants and the dramatic ways in which it was acquired by warring government officials in centuries past.

When we visited the castle, the winds were strong, and as we stood on one of the upper balconies, my hat blew off my head. When the nearest castle guard saw my green hat flipping through the air like a flapjack in a hurricane, he immediately used his walkie-talkie to contact the guard on ground level. The guard below fished my hat out of a tree while the top guard literally ran down a four flights of stairs to retrieve it for me. A guard in America would have laughed and said, “Ooooo, shit out of luck, kid! Serves you right, next time don’t wear your hat on a windy day!” It’s going to be very hard to leave this country when my contract ends…very, very hard.

When we arrived at Hiroshima at 10:30 p.m. with no hotel reservations, we did what any sensible traveler in a similar position would do: We searched high and low for the flashing fluorescent lights of the nearest love hotel. Love hotels, from all I’ve heard about their tacky inner sanctums and all I’ve seen of their gaudy exteriors, are truly awesome. Because many married Japanese couples live with their extended family in small living quarters, finding a time and a place in the house to knock boots and stink up the joint with hard-earned sweat requires skills that not even Sherlock Holmes possesses. The nights are quiet in Japanese neighborhoods because the walls are literally paper thin, often being nothing more than a sliding shoji screen door, and maternal and paternal in-laws, sleeping under the same roof in configurations cast and set by the selective hand of Alzheimer’s and other late-onset illnesses, could easily hear the moans of their offspring (a sound no parent, young or old, wants to hear). Romance digs more private playgrounds.

Love hotels offer couples privacy for a few hours or an entire night. If you’re traveling and looking for a cheap place to lay your head, love hotels are the perfect alternative to staying in an expensive Japanese ryokan.

Apparently no couples in Hiroshima have sex because we couldn’t find a single damn love hotel in the hour and a half that we drove around looking for one! I guess all of the babies that are born in the city’s hospitals come from parents who fornicated outside of Hiroshima’s city limits. All of the vibrating bed salesmen pass Hiroshima by. Neon lights burn out instantly if they are ever turned on in Hiroshima. Blood-red satin sheets loose their sheen if they are ever spread across a bed in Hiroshima. Heart-shaped Jacuzzis, when filled with hot water from a spigot in Hiroshima, break in half instantly.

Because there are no love hotels in this famous phoenix of a city, I’ve come to the conclusion that Hiroshima is allergic to loud, sweaty, destructive, heart-attack-tempting sex. The only sex that could possibly be had in a city with no love hotels is quiet, quick, dutiful, quota-filling, quickie-in-the-closet-while-the-kids-have-their-piano-lesson-downstairs sex. I could be totally wrong with this conclusion, but from all outward appearances, love is in dire straits in the City of Peace. Hmmm…City of Peace. Actually, yeah, wait a minute, shouldn’t Peace and Love always go hand and hand? Isn’t nothing more arousing from a biological perspective than a tranquil and peaceful environment? A creature can’t satisfy its primal urges if security and safety are not first…well, secured. Sex and Extreme Danger speak foreign tongues and can’t properly introduce themselves to one another at dinner parties. It’s been argued by evolutionary biologists that most males climax after less than two minutes of direct sexual stimulation because being in a state of heightened sexual arousal makes one vulnerable; all of the unlucky blokes that foolishly chased orgasms with crossed-eyes and mouths agape for 20-30 minutes in centuries past were killed off while in the act by other men or large predators. What we are left with today is the sexually efficient, the men who can do the job in a flash and get back to their senses before tragedy strikes. Consensual sex hides from war and violence. Very few people get turned on by smoke and mortar fire. A calm meadow, an apartment set aglow with afternoon sunlight, a quiet stroll by the park after dinner on a fall evening—these are the scenes that prime the pumps and set the stage for Arousal’s matinee and Climax’s encore. The City of Peace, one bisected in every which way with quaint, restaurant-lined alleys, canals, and stretches of grassy parkland, should be love’s amusement park, a place where couples can act on erotic impulse at the drop of a dime. Instead it’s love’s salt flat, love’s Antarctica on a winter night, love’s city dump.

In the middle of Hiroshima sits the Atomic Dome, a government building that refused to slide quietly into the radioactive ashes of a city brought to its knees by the nuclear sword of war. The concrete shell of the building, thanks to dozens of braces and metal crutches, has stood for decades and, according to the mayor who christened the Dome, “will stand forever” as a monument to the memories and lives destroyed or affected by the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The structure stopped me in my tracks when I first laid eyes on it. Surrounded by modern buildings, taxis whizzing by with places to go, grass and flowers radiantly alive in the sunlight, the Dome seems alarmingly out of place. It looks as if it has been ripped from the pages of a graphic history textbook, one that details the history of some barbaric, lawless place somewhere far, far away. Any other place, but not here. Not this place that sweats prosperity and stability and vitality from every concrete pore and park bench. But the Dome is part of the Hiroshima that was lost, and its eerie presence reminds every visitor of the dangers of nuclear war.

The following thoughts streamed through my mind like electronic ticker tape when I first stood before the Dome with tears welling in the corners of my eyes:

Holy shit, how much force must have been exerted on this city to rip such large chunks of concrete and brick away from this building?

Those steel beams, the ones that the building was built around, are completely twisted and melted. How hot must it have been at this exact spot some 60 years ago?

Everything around this place has been built in the last 60 years. Wow. Wow!

Everything around this place was destroyed to this degree or completely flattened.

Everyone in that building died instantly.

Everyone in that building died instantly.

Everyone in that building died instantly.

I can’t believe my government did this to another group of people.

I can’t believe any government could do this to another group of people.

Has President Bush or any other dumb fuck wasting money on developing nuclear weapons arsenals ever been here to see first-hand the effects of nuclear war?

After we spent time at the Dome site, we walked across a bridge to the Peace Park to go to the Peace Memorial Museum. The museum, with a smartly priced admission of 50 yen (about 45 cents), was spectacular. It was filled with information about Japan’s military exploits leading up to the war, copies of letters and memos sent by U.S. government officials and officers before the bomb was dropped, huge photographs of Hiroshima after the bombing, and photographs and artifacts of and from people burned or killed by the bomb.

I was shocked by how gruesome the entire ordeal was for the people of Hiroshima. I know it seems that the effects of an atomic bomb blast would obviously be gruesome and horrific, but until you see the photos and see the wreckage, you have NO idea of the way in which humanity and science intertwine in a split second after an atomic blast, the other-worldness of it all. In the 1-2 kilometers surrounding the epicenter, there was no gray area, no pocket of hope or miracle—every living thing was immediately incinerated like a bale of hay being dropped onto the surface of the sun (at 7,200+ Fahrenheit, the ground temperature soared as if the whole of Hiroshima was being enveloped by a solar flare), every building destroyed, no questions asked. It’s a final weapon that gives no breaks or pardons.

The U.S. government censored newspapers and photographs for years after the bombing to try to prevent the world from knowing exactly how horrible the blast was. After the bombing, generals and government spokespeople wrote about the incident using strategic jargon and referred to the incinerated innocent civilians as “casualties” and Hiroshima as a “target” that had been “successfully affected” to make the mass homicide seem as clean as a daisy. The reality of what happened in Hiroshima is heavy and pock-marked with the moans of charred children, the bone-chilling images of Truman, Churchill, Stalin, and other rich men smiling and sitting through huge round table discussions in which the fate of 200,000 people was toyed with like a fucking yarn ball, and the fact that hundreds of thousands of families were sliced apart in a single second partly because the U.S. government needed to justify the massive expenditures it was pissing away on its nuclear development program—creating ends, dropping ends out of the sky on innocent people, to justify their means. The museum made me sick to my stomach. It made me furious. And it wasn’t seeing the pictures of bomb victims—many were children ordered to help prepare the city of Hiroshima for war by clearing fire lanes and preparing rations—that made me most nauseous. No, seeing images and reading letters that came from the other side of the Pacific forced my jaw to clench and my eyes to water with rage.

The letters sent between war generals and Truman’s administration made me irate. They were filled with language that was clearly designed to let Truman and the American people sleep at night, language that covered up their murderous actions with soft words and focused fantastically on the future instead of the present. Gone are the days when world leaders charge into battle at the front of the cavalry with raised swords and fiery eyes. Now, spineless, blue-blooded men in suits who have never thrown a punch (let alone fired a gun) can slyly sit behind closed doors and order up the destruction of a country like they’re ordering a fucking hamburger. And for what? To preserve the high standard of living they’ve been tricked into believing they require to survive?

Dropping bombs and engaging in war is clearly a game leaders play with generals and soldiers who are merely pawns lubed up for action with some strong doses of synthetic confidence and sense of purpose. Accomplish your mission! Fight with honor! Your country is counting on you! This type of thinking is both over simplified to the point of abstraction and is far from critical. After a while, the reality of war fades into the flames of the funeral pyres and no one remembers which far off world leader first spit on the shoe of some other world leader. To bomb is to admit diplomatic defeat, which makes a bombing country a cognitively pathetic member of the global community. Bombing is easier than talking and making compromises and it requires far less creativity and tolerance. The museum proves to visitors that war is a sham, nothing more than a tragic play with lead villains trained by dynastic mentors and a supporting cast comprised of the ignorant and/or easily-impressionable. The extras roped into performance against their will, the innocent civilians without speaking roles, are killed off beyond the edges of spotlight illumination and never named in the play’s credits. Ughh! Just thinking about Truman’s smile and those ice cold, hollow letters makes my stomach turn.

After leaving Hiroshima and driving for a few hours, we set up camp out behind a rest stop on the expressway (in Japan, you can set up a tent by the side of the highway and sleep soundly without fear of being slaughtered or raped, it’s wonderful), and made our way back to Ueda.

Two Weeks in Thailand

Before we went to Thailand, Colleen asked if she could organize the trip and deal with all of the nitty gritty details once we were in Thailand (buying bus/train tickets, getting us back on track after getting lost, finding places to stay, etc.) as a way of preparing for her trip to Central America in the fall. Knowing that her help would relieve me of all of those potentially frustrating travel duties and allow her to feel more comfortable setting off on a longer trip, I agreed to let her lead me around a foreign country like a helpless baby. I stepped in only when my failure to do so would have resulted in a wasted day or half day of travel. To Colleen’s disappointment, I intervened within a few hours of touching down in Bangkok after Col took us to a bus terminal with busses bound for Rayong as opposed to our preferred destination—Ranong.

We were standing before the ticket counter under the harsh glow of sometimes faintly flickering/sometimes glaring fluorescent lights and a dirty white placard that read ‘Rayong’ in red letters, three ticket cashiers were squawking at us with nothing but ticket commissions on their minds, the heat was twisting our patience taught in the heavy night air, and at the last moment I decided to look at the map to double check the spelling of the city name. Rayong is not Rangong. I got the name of the bus station we should have traveled to (one that sat across town, an hour away by taxi through Bangkok’s perpetually clogged commuter arteries) and we set off.

For $10, we each bought tickets for a nine-hour overnight bus ride to the port town of Ranong, a seafood mecca that gets its heartbeat and energy from the aquatic jewels of the Andaman Sea. Ranong is also home to a small, dusty pier from which a few boats leave daily to take visitors out to the quaint island of Koh Phayam, a destination recommended to us by two other JETs back in Japan. After a sunrise moped ride from Ranong’s bus terminal to the pier, Col and I walked into town to eat breakfast and fill the three hours before the boat departed with that wide-eyed, soak-everything-in silence that washes over any traveler who is plopped down in a completely foreign environment.

Stray dogs roamed the dirt streets that zigzagged out from the pier toward the center of town. All of the dogs seemed to have been painted with a sandy, brownish color and infected with a near constant itch. I never once saw a flea or other parasite on any of the dogs I saw in Thailand, but with coats full of dirt and sand in an environment that tries to melt away anything that is unfortunate enough to exist away from the water’s edge at midday, dogs always scratch themselves—it’s part of being a dog in Thailand.

As the sun timidly peaked over the horizon, women in large plastic boots with faces covered in dried white paste (used to make their skin smooth and protect their faces from the sun) started emerging from small shacks and ageing homes. When we reached the main drag in Ranong, people were bustling about, old pick-up trucks sagging from the weight of people cargo in their beds were whizzing up and down the road (nothing quite makes you feel like an outsider like 10 workers in the bed of a pick-up truck slowly turning in unison to stare at you—only blank, tired faces among them—as the truck passes), women with impossibly large buckets of flowers and food balanced atop their heads slowly walked down the sidewalk with a runway model’s precision and grace, and sidewalk restaurant owners primed their stoves and uncovered ingredients to prepare for breakfast customers.

We sat at a small restaurant, Col ordered and ate breakfast and tea for $1, and we walked around the corner to follow a steady stream of women and men wearing knee-high rain boots. Our noses alerted us of the early morning commerce before our eyes could: the scents of fish, standing pools of saltwater, dirt and dust, and cigarette smoke swirled and blended in the steamy morning air. At the end of a street lined with colorful mopeds and pick-up trucks was a massive fish market. I was amazed by what I saw before me: Piles of fish three and four feet high dotted the concrete platform like colorful growths on wet cement skin, buckets of baby Hammerhead sharks steamed under ice in the morning sun (I later learned these sharks were killed so their fins could be used to satisfy the Asian appetite for shark fin soup), dead eels sat coiled in neat rings with glazed eyes, lobsters lay in rows based on tail size, and all around me people were inspecting fish, haggling over prices, and loading trucks with massive quantities of seafood.

left: You like shark fin soup? If so, this is what you inspire.

There were so many infant fish (sharks being the most alarming for me) that were caught before they were mature enough to spawn that, just by the looks of it, the whole operation seemed far from sustainable. Even if this market was held once a week, the amount of seafood dragged from the depths to fuel it over the course of a year seemed too astronomical to go unnoticed by ocean-focused environmentalists. I just kept wondering, How long could this possibly go on? At what point will these fishermen be unable to find these mountains of fish in the sea because of their own overfishing?

When we made our way back to the peer, pairs of other young travelers were sitting, chatting, and waiting for the ferry. All were tanned, all had backpacks, all looked tired and hot, most had European accents, and all smoked cigarettes as if each drag would help cool them down or miraculously help add weight to their airy, awkward, introductory conversations with each other about subjects that had clearly been discussed a thousand times on their trips already—“Oh, yeah, Ko Samui is way too touristy” or “Oh, yeah, I loved Ko Samui. Best party I’ve ever been too” or “If you want your basic open water cert the cheapest place to get it is…” or “The diving sucks there, but I had great dives at…” or “The Thai people always…” Anxious, they smoked and rolled cigarettes and smoked some more.

A man emerged from a new, silver pick-up truck to greet us. The top three buttons of his shirt were unbuttoned, revealing a hairless, tanned chest and a few gold chains that were flamboyantly out of place amidst the dust, the shacks, the dogs, and the people milling about in worn clothes and flip flops. In that Thai-English haggler’s dialect that sounds alarms in the ears of all white people that visit Thailand, the man approached Colleen and I and demanded, “Hey friend, where you going today?”

We told him.

“Oh that’s nice place. You want to eat or drink or party at my bungalows some night on other side of the island, you call me. You need anything, you call me.” He scribbled his name and number on the back of a business card and handed it to me. His name read Mr. Pot. He smiled and approached a couple of other travelers.

The ferry arrived and took us past tired fishing docks and retired boats out through the open sea that surrounded the island. When we stepped foot on the island’s pier, the recruits were waiting.

“Hey where you staying? You want bungalows?”

“Hey mister, free taxi, you come to Coconuts?”

“Real cheap place, ocean views. Come with me!”

Luckily, we didn’t have to appear vulnerable and flip through our guidebook and try to haggle over a price out on the pier because we already knew we wanted to follow our friends’ recommendations and stay at a place called Bamboo Bungalows. We easily found the Bamboo Bungalows representative and she shuffled us over to two mopeds. We each hopped on the back of one and held on for dear life with heavy backpacks strapped to our backs as the mopeds sped away from the pier. (There are no roads on the island so we sped over tiny sidewalks that allow seasoned moped driver’s to reach speeds that easily scare the shit out of anyone unaccustomed to being on the back of a fast-moving moped.)

left: One of the main intersections on Koh Phayam. The building on the left is a store that sells mangoes, cashews, sarongs, and pineapples.

Koh Phayam is largely undeveloped with only small clusters of development surrounding the island’s few sand beaches. Most of the island is covered with groves of cashew and coconut trees. The cashew trees were loaded with yellow pear-shaped fruit. One bulbous cashew casing sticks out of the end of each fruit, and it is this casing and the softness of the nut inside that make cashews a difficult nut to prepare for market (casings must be individually split, nuts must cleaned, dried in the sun). The branches of the cashew trees hang over the moped sidewalks and litter them with rotting fruit that squishes under the thin moped tires. A few houses stood perched atop pilings amidst the wilderness. Families lounged in the shade underneath the houses as children played on the ground and adults lay in hammocks. War news would have trouble taking hold here, I thought as we drove up and over small hills; the warm island air pulled at the curls in my hair and made my driver’s black, straight hair flap in my face.

left: The trail that leads through the Bamboo Bungalows compound.

Bamboo Bungalows is a beautiful little place at the water’s edge on the island’s eastern shore. It is surrounded by a few other bungalow places and bars on the beach, and most of its bungalows come with views of the sea. Hammocks swing in the breeze in random locations around the property because…well…because there’s no bad place for a hammock by the beach. There is a large, tiled outdoor cabana that draws customers from other bungalow resorts (each resort has its own cabana as well) for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. There are a few kayaks and mopeds available for rent. A woman with wide, dark eyes and a brisk duck footed walk named Gail plays the role of manager and her five-year old son could occasionally be seen lounging like a lizard under the afternoon sun or pouncing on the laps of a few of Bamboo’s “long term guests,” the ones who basically live there for extended periods of each year by constantly extending their tourist visas.

left: Our bungalow

When we arrived, a young girl approached us and showed us around the property to look at bungalows. We took one a few yards from the sand for $10 a night. The bungalow had a porch with two addictively comfortable chairs, a nice bed with a mosquito net, a bathroom with a rain-fed shower and sink, and an overhead light that was only operable from 6:00-11:00 p.m. The girl gave us the key and walked away and we had a few moments of pure bliss: We felt as if we had found paradise for $10 a night and, for the next two weeks, we had nothing to do but wallow in it. It was worth flying to Thailand for those few brief moments, moments so caramelized in happiness and concentration on both the present setting and the enjoyment waiting in the wings of the future that no sharp thought or memory of work, tears, life, death could pierce them. I did what anyone feeling complete joy in a beachside bungalow would do: I put on my bathing suit and ran at full speed down to the ocean as if it would vanish into thin air at any moment.

left: The view from the porch of our bungalow

For a week we ate excellent curry dishes, drank fruit shakes a few times a day, and devoted significant chunks of our time to swimming, bodysurfing, reading, and walking on the beach. I have never felt more relaxed in my life. Never. I reached a new high low. At one point in the week, I said to Colleen, “I now know that it takes approximately 4 days of reading, eating good food, and participating in little activity for me to completely unwind and shed every shred of stress that builds up from sticking with the daily grind.” I reached a point of constant relaxation where I woke up early but calm and at peace, I walked slower (if and when I needed to walk anywhere at all), I felt no shame in nodding off into Nap Land while reading on the porch or beach in the middle of the morning or afternoon, and I felt incubated in a calm and pleasant aura that seemed as if it would never dissipate.

left: Feet and anchor

Now, I know that this state of relaxation is impossible for one to maintain if any sort of challenging job and/or bustling community/family life is thrown into the mix, and I think that’s OK. I wouldn’t want to lead a catatonic existence on the porch of a beach bungalow for the rest of my life (although many expats—usually older, single males it seems—do move to tropical developing countries, turn their pasty hides dangerously dark from lounging in the sun, and finish out their days like modern, suspiciously inactive conquistadors); without activity for more than a week, everything about my being atrophies and I feel like a slug.

A shirtless 20 year-old Thai man named Alif approached us when we sat to have our first meal. He is short, tanned, and appears naturally muscular. A self-professed lover of women, Alif is a smooth talker with a bright, wide smile and a name that, according to him, “no woman forgets.” Despite his attitude toward women, one that at first appeared innocently jouvenile but slowly started reeking of chauvenism as the week progressed, Alif possessed a level of maturity that seemed at odds with the smooth skin of his youthful face and I was quickly tempted to ask him how old he was after we started talking. Alif asked us about Japan after learning we were JETs and explained that he once worked with a few Japanese people in Ranong. He had fond memories of his time spent with his Japanese co-workers and remarked that Japanese people were polite and kind. He said that he enjoyed working at Bamboo Bungalows because the place had an older clientele and he thinks older people are more interesting to talk to than younger people. He has a 26 year-old girlfriend who lives in Germany whom he met at Bamboo Bungalows last year. Throughout our stay, Alif frequently joined our conversations and sat down at random tables during meals to talk with guests. I never could quite figure out his role at Bamboo Bungalows, but I think he was there to converse with the guests and help take a food order or two for the kitchen every once in a blue moon. When I asked him if he liked working at Bamboo Bungalows (a question that answered itself as I was asking it—I basically asked, Do you like eating good food, talking to interesting people from around the world, and taking two hour naps in a hammock wrapped in ocean breezes every afternoon?—he smiled and said, “Oh yeah! It’s much easier than fishing!”

left: Snake in palm

As the week unfolded, we met different guests at Bamboo Bungalows and settled in. The first time I saw Tim, a tanned athletic man in his early 40s who usually roams the compound shirtless, he was kayak surfing the small, glassy waves in front of Bamboo at sunrise. His kayak, he later explained, was purchased on the east coast of the U.S. and dragged out to Thailand because it was hard for him to find a sleek surf kayak in a third world country (understandable!). He spends six months out of the year in Thailand and has spent “the last four seasons” at Bamboo Bungalows (a season for Tim lasts six months). How he made/makes a living back in his home country of Canada remains a mystery although he made one comment during our stay about eagerly awaiting the 15th of the month because a large of amount of money was going to be wired to his bank account. In places like Thailand, you don’t ask well-tanned, middle-aged expats what they do/did back home because, chances are, they don’t want to talk about life back home and everything they ran from.

left: Soccer goalie on the beach

When I asked Tim why he keeps coming back to Bamboo as opposed to other places, why he dragged his kayak across the world to this specific beach, why he continually makes day long “visa runs” over to Burma so he can keep living in a foreign country on a tourist visa despite all of the ethical issues associated with a visitor living as a resident incognito (not paying taxes, only choosing to revel in a country’s perks while turning a cold shoulder to its problems, etc.) he said, “Man, this place is special. I’ve traveled all over the world. I’ve lived in Honduras, done South America (I find this expression very interesting and many travelers use it—“I’ve done Europe”—like a continent or country is something that can be completely understood or explored in a month or a year. Done deal, country mastered, next country please. Silly.), spent a few years traveling Africa, and I’ve rarely seen places like Bamboo Bungalows and Koh Phayam. Where else can you leave $10,000 worth of photo equipment in your unlocked bungalow and not worry about it? Security is not an issue here, and that’s a rare thing to find these days. I can ride the kayak each day, the food’s great, it’s cheap. For me, it’s paradise.” He’s lived all over the world, survived in places that would scare the shit out of most people, and cut through endless amounts of red tape at countless border crossings. Tim seemed like a nice guy you’d never want to cross.

We met Ian, a professional photographer who lived in Cambodia for six years in the late 1990s. He currently is making a living from doing candid children’s photography in which he shoots pictures of kids in their natural environments instead of within the confines of a studio. His mini-portfolio that he travels with was inspiring and beautiful. It’s filled with unique images of children hanging from trees, hiding in forts, and jumping on trampolines. He also carries shots from his travels and has a knack for portraiture. I got lost in the lines and wrinkles captured in his pictures of old Cambodian women and felt, even if only for a split second, like I could understand the labor that filled their pasts. His pictures reveal the lives of his subjects and have earned him various photo prizes and cover spots on Cambodian magazines and newspapers.

left: Boulder on the beach

He was at Bamboo on vacation and was about to head back over to Cambodia to shoot for a project he’s working on that attempts to capture images of various aspects of Cambodian culture that are disappearing as Westernization and tourism change Cambodia. One of his main subjects that he’s been working with is rural boxing. There are many boxing rings and training centers out in the countryside of northern Cambodia that are slowly dying off. With photos, he documenting the extinction.

When Ian lived in Cambodia, the country was a lawless place in which “everything was both possible and impossible at the same time.” Out in the market behind his house during his stay in Cambodia, he could have, if he wanted to, purchased hand grenades for $5, AK-47s for $10, and kilos of pot for a few bucks (I never did find out how frequently, if at all, he spent a few bucks at that market. Somethings are best left to the imagination). For the most part, his experiences in Cambodia were positive and he was never once harmed or threatened by the bandits that are known to roam Cambodia’s dusty roads and demand tolls from drivers. He has been to Angkor Wat “about 30 times.” His advice to Colleen after learning that she wanted to go to Cambodia to shoot this summer: “Stay off the backpacker circuit. Go out into the villages, hire a moped guide for the day to take you to the places foreigners don’t visit, do a home stay. Just get off the fucking backpacker trail. Get off it.”

We met Michelle, a German man with a warm smile and a love for Bamboo’s banana fritters—fried pieces of battered banana served with sweet milk. Michelle has made four or five trips out to Thailand in the past and has ended up staying at Bamboo longer than planned each time. This year, he spent his entire five-week vacation (people in Europe are sensible enough to realize that 5-10 vacation days a year—the American average—is a fucking farce, one that reveals Corporate America’s true feelings about employee welfare and status) at Bamboo. After some prodding, he reluctantly agreed to talk briefly about his job in Germany and said he worked in a court office. His girlfriend has a daughter back in Germany and he wants to take both of them to Bamboo for next year’s five-week getaway. Michelle was genuine and extremely kind to us during our stay in Koh Phayam. He’s the type of guy anyone would be lucky to have as a long-time friend.

left: Minnow Pipeline

I loved how Michelle used the expressions “This is shit” or “This is really nice” in conversation. He would say things like, “After Germans started using the Euro, shopkeepers raised their prices even though the Euro was not that strong compared to our old currency. This is shit man. This is reeeally shit.” Or “Every time I come to Thailand in the past, I always think, ‘Man, I’m going to stay at Bamboo for one week, maybe two.’ But I always stay longer. This time I stayed for the whole five weeks. This is reeally nice, man.”

We met Babet, a young doctor in her late twenties from Switzerland. She had just finished up a year of working at a refugee camp in northern Thailand near the Golden Triangle. The camp had 40,000 tents (one family/couple per tent) and faced a staggering number of medical cases a day. Malaria, Dengue Fever, and Typhoid raged through the camp population like fire through dried wheat fields and Babet spent most of her timing consoling and helping the sick. Deaths were commonplace and were seen as something that could be slightly managed rather than prevented. She miraculously avoided infection during her stay at the camp. Her future plans: return to Switzerland, visit family, and return to either the same refugee camp or another camp in a different developing country.

left: Clam collecting

Every morning, Babet would spend about an hour doing yoga and exercises on the beach. She ate lite meals at the Bamboo cabana and jogged down the beach often. Despite her healthy eating and exercise habits, she, like most Europeans we met in Thailand, smoked cigarettes regularly.

below: Longtail boats in the bay. All fishermen on Koh Tao use these boats to fish.

After a week, we left Koh Phayam, took a midnight ferry over to an island called Koh Tao, and haggled our way through a horde of moped taxi driver’s to a hotel called Tropicana. The hotel was wedged in between other hotels and bungalow places on one of the island’s bays. When we dropped our bags and sat down on the bed in the hotel room, we wished that we had stayed at Bamboo. Koh Tao was overdeveloped and filled with internet cafes, dive centers, bungalow places, bars, and money exchange counters. It was another beautiful island thrown to the backpacking wolves. We tried to avoid all of the places that were swarming with backpackers (mainly the bars with drink specials and Christmas lights and the main road in front of the ferry dock, the one lined with Western restaurants and bars) and spent most of our time in and around our hotel.

left: Sandbar at low tide. Bungalows on the hills in the background.

I did two boat dives and saw some spectacular soft and hard coral. The water was warm and clear, although the fish were very similar to the ones I saw off the coasts of Australia and Hawaii. We went snorkeling and Colleen braved the deep water and overcame her fear of sharks for a few hours to swim out around a rocky point on the edge of one of the bays.

We left Koh Tao, took an overnight bus to Bangkok, and spent the day in Bangkok before our flight. When we arrived at Khao San Rd., one of Bangkok’s shopping districts, at 5:30 a.m., prostitutes were already anchored to their johns—young backpackers who looked broke and scruffy. I was shocked to see the prostitutes showing an interest in young backpackers as I thought that surely they would want to focus their energies on older men with money to spend, men that go to Thailand specifically for its sex industry. If, however, a girl only asked $10-20 for her services, I guess a large spectrum of men could foot the bill.

As we walked down the dark, narrow streets in the thick night air, girls walked arm and arm with drunken young backpackers and laughed like they thought the mens’ jokes were funny. Col and I were hungry so we sat down at a restaurant/bar that was open 24 hours. There was a large crowd of prostitutes and Western backpackers still drinking at 6:00 a.m. and we watched the debauchery as we waited for our food. Some of the men were so drunk they didn’t realize when their sober prostitutes refilled their glasses (the girls sipped from one or two glasses of beer all night as the men drank, as packs of men often drink, as if they had something to prove, taking huge gulps of beer). It was amazing watching laughing, red-faced young men carry on conversations as focused prostitutes kept their glasses filled with beer. I couldn’t help but wonder if some of these drunk backpackers had any vague idea of the events that awaited them in their near futures (mainly—have sex, pass out, and get robbed by the kind girls that had just been ordering them drinks all night). I watched silently as a few men stumbled off with girls, swallowed up by the humid darkness beyond the reach of the restaurant’s lights with barely a burp echoing off of the closed storefront gates.

The rest of the day played out as follows: followed an expat freelance writer’s suggestion and went to an amazing outdoor flower and food market, went to a temple called Wat Pho, met a man who said he was bus driver and who gave us some “advice” on sights to see in Bangkok, later found ourselves in a bodega jewelry store filled with dusty jewelry and surrounded by 10 women trying to pressure us to buy jewelry (we later found out this is a common scam in Bangkok: taxi drivers sweet talk foreigners into visiting jewelery stores and the taxi drivers get kickbacks by way of free gas or commissions from the stores), went back to Wat Pho and saw the gold reclining Buddha and his stunning feet made with the most intricate Mother of Pearl inlays I’ve ever seen, went back to Khao San Rd., had lunch and shooed away all of the heckling street performers and salesmen that tried to sell lighters and stuffed animals to us while we ate, walked down Khao San Rd. amidst hundreds of backpackers and looked at all of the knock-off clothing and backpacks, walked past eight or nine backpackers getting their hair braided into dreadlocks on the side of the road by Thai people with hair braiding stalls, and stopped to have a drink.

When we sat down at an outside table at the bar, I met an interesting man from Belgium named Steffan. Steffan has lived in Khao Lak, Thailand for the past year to help rebuild buildings that were destroyed in the tsunami. In Belgium, he taught classes on basic construction principles to students who had no background in construction but an interest in the field. He was living in Khao Lak and paying rent on a small apartment, paying for his own food, and travel expenses with no financial support from his volunteer organization. He had originally planned to stay two weeks, ended up staying a year, and now feels as though he could never go back to paying construction gigs in Belgium. He wants to volunteer as long as places exist in the world that could use his services (basically, until he dies). Volunteering in Thailand has changed the way he views money and success. I felt inspired after talking to him and felt excited about the volunteer opportunities I will seek out when I travel around the world after I leave Japan.

We caught an airport shuttle bus back to the airport and had a horrendous nine-hour delay on our flight back to Japan. I won’t go into the details, but the delay was the result of our ill-chosen airline’s incompetence. A warning to all travelers: DO NOT FLY AIR INDIA—EVER! In talking with other passengers who frequently fly to and from India, we learned that 10-24 hour delays are not uncommon when flying Air India. The plane was falling apart (a leaking toilet and flooded cabin aisle were the initial causes of our delay), the flight crew failed to complete safety checks and demonstrations (passengers closed their overhead compartments as the plane was rolling around the runway), and the management literally ran away from angry customers at Narita Airport.

AGAIN, IF YOU WANT TO FLY SAFELY AND AVOID DEALING WITH A SORRY SHELL OF A COMPANY— DO NOT FLY AIR INDIA!

A Wooden Penis Doesn't Shrink in Cold Weather

Fertility festivals take place on Feb. 12 each year across Japan. We went up to the Niigata area to witness one of the festivals. A large wooden penis is housed in its own shrine and taken out once a year for the festival. It's mounted to a wooden frame and women ride it around in the street. Riding the penis gives women good luck. Before the penis is ridden by the women, villagers stand in line for a chance to pray to it and stand next to it. The snow fell and the air was cold, but seeing smiling women riding a wooden penis warms the soul in a way that allows one to endure even the harshest weather.

left: People in line to pray to the town's wooden penis. Stone penis sculptures point toward the sky at the base of the roped tree.













left: Sake with dead fish floating around in the cup. I didn't try any, but it smelled delicious.












left: Before any villagers could ride the wooden wang, three women in kimonos did the deed and posed for pictures as a way of starting off the festivities.










left: Securing the cock, the man in the black hat guides it home with his hand.












left: Colleen riding a 7 foot penis













left: Col loving the ride



























left: Man in the crowd

Zenkoji Temple in Nagano City

left: Zenkoji Temple in Nagano City. This is the third largest wooden structure in Japan.











left: Lion sitting on top of incense pot in front of
the main temple













left: Beautiful lion

















left: Sculpture at Zenkoji

















left: This figure was stunning. It stopped me dead in my tracks when I saw it at Zenkoji.

















left: Porch of main temple































































left: Man in front of street entrance to Zenkoji

















left: East meets West for a milkshake and fries (click the picture for a better view).












left: These girls have just come from high school graduation (diplomas come in the form of scrolls--see the red boxes in their hands). The yukatas they are wearing are rented for the occaision. Some girls wear traditional kimonos to graduation and pay $1,000 or more to rent them for a single day. My school has asked girls to stop wearing kimonos, and instead girls are asked to wear simple black dress suits because of the expense. On graduation day, kimonos separate the Haves from the Have-Nots. The yukatas are a bit cheaper, but still expensiveto rent.

left: Pagoda at Zenkoji

Karaoke Professionals

My friend Dan came out to visit for a week. We tried to pack as much as we could into one short week. One marathon three hour karaoke session turned Dan, a karaoke-virgin, into a true believer.

left: Col

















left: Col, Alice, Jason, Mike













left: The visitor from the east, one of my best amigos, Dan












left: Without a tamborine, one must improvise

Snow Monkeys

A small dog chained within range of soiled bed sheets greeted us as we made our way through the entrance of the ryokan. We were too tired from a day of snowboarding to let the familiar yet disturbing smell of ammonia deter us from our immediate goals: sit in hot water, dress, eat. We dropped our bags in a 16 tatami mat room that had been outfitted with seven sets of bedding (the scene eliciting in us those faded, fuzzy, stubborn memories of sleep-away camps and after-lights-out conversations that trick us into dreading aging and missing the unsalvageable ghost wreckage of time), changed into cloth robes called yukatas, and forced our sore muscles to carry us over to the onsen. The worn wood that lined the onsen tub, wood so weathered it looked as if it had deflected the slow ripples of onsen water for centuries, felt soft and smooth on the skin of my neck.

We shattered a conversation when we walked into a small family-owned ramen shop that doubles as a living room. The sitting family quickly bustled about to make us feel comfortable and showered us with politeness. We took our seats around a kitchen table that encircled a kerosene heater. A commercial-laden Olympic broadcast was droning on in the background on a TV set in the corner. Above the TV, a perfectly spherical wasp nest watched over the room from within a beautiful glass cube like some sort of natural security camera. The food was excellent and the owners bid us adieu with a bag of seven large apples.

I awoke the following morning excited for the day’s main activity: we were going to see a type of macaque found nowhere else in the world (I’m told), a monkey with a red face and an affinity for lounging in hot springs. We packed the cars, drove and parked, and walked 30 minutes up into the mountains to reach the Monkey Park, a place marked and advertised by numerous signs and pictures of cartoon monkeys.

After passing an alarming amount of retreating foreigners on the tree-lined path up to the park (a potential warning sign that one is about to feel like or be in the company of a tourist-culture-junky with a prize-winning photo fix always just out of reach), we paid 500 yen (about $4.50) and walked around a small building that overlooked a river-split gully. What I saw before me took me by surprise: there were monkeys everywhere and they seemed to be in complete control of the surrounding landscape. No cages or chains were in sight.

Revealing facets of their character using human mannerisms (forcing all Christians in attendance to truly question their beliefs on evolution), the monkeys were scampering up fences like convicts with the warden’s blood on their hands, lovingly and painstakingly grooming each other on boulders like mothers picking sand out of their daughters’ hair after a day at the beach before an evening dance recital, shitting on white, virgin snow like drunks unexpectedly thrust into bowel emergency after a long winter rock concert, playing in the trees in packs like five-year-olds at recess, squawking and chasing each other up the mountain like flirting adolescents with a first kiss floating in the near future like a low-lying cloud, and sitting lazily in the hot spring pools like elderly people enjoying a dip in the Jacuzzi after a doctor-recommended stroll on the treadmill.

Everything would have been serene had I not been there to witness it. That’s right, my footprints, much like the small bundles of excrement that dotted and stained the frozen white landscape like meteors sent from a distant fecal galaxy far far away, seemed to clash with their surroundings. My presence, along with that of about 20 other Monkey Park visitors, hijacked the monkey magic that floats thick in the air in gullies populated by wild monkeys and replaced it with an invisible sludge of tourist indulgence. The worlds of man and monkey don’t mesh as well as one would have expected. Monkeys ran past high heels to pick up seeds thrown—by the thousands—onto the park grounds to keep the monkeys coming back, day after day. People (myself included) snapped dozens of pictures hoping to preserve the heady reality of exoticism that incubates beautiful things like fleeting steam. A park employee put pieces of an apple into a clear plastic tube so a throng of onlookers could watch as monkeys used a small stick to reach their familiar prize. Monkeys clamored over a ‘Live Monkey Cam’ as two women stood before the camera’s glare and tried to hold five-minute-smiles and a handwritten note for a friend back home (five minutes, according to the one woman, is the amount of time one must wait to guarantee a captured image on the Monkey Cam). Just the sound of it…Monkey Cam…irks me. Traffic and Cam are two words that can be seamlessly wed: Traffic Cam. Nothing wrong. But Monkey Cam? Something about it seams ridiculous.

We stood in awe of animals that were conditioned by years of exploitation to care little about us. One-way-fascination is hard to swallow in certain situations. Sure, watching an animal while unnoticed from afar as the animal goes about its business is exciting and informative. But seeing monkeys scamper around feverishly to collect peanuts, seemingly unaware of the clicking cameras and jostling onlookers looking on, made me feel as though I was participating in a carefully contrived play, complete with pauses for audience applause.

National Geographic’s appeal often lies in the intensity with which animals and humans stare back at readers, seemingly stuck in a coma of interest and puzzlement and engaged in a silent, captivating dialogue with the photographer. The joy in owning a dog comes from figuring out the ways to get it to wag its tail. Would anyone love an animal that seemed parasitic in nature and was completely unalarmed by and indifferent toward other creatures in its environment? The monkeys, although technically ‘wild,’ seemed very domesticated and could care less about the people around them. I couldn’t help but feel like my admission fee had helped buy the handfuls of peanuts that the employee was scattering to keep the monkeys eating peanuts to keep people coming to make more money and buy more peanuts to keep the monkeys eating peanuts to keep the people coming to make more money and buy more peanuts to keep the monkeys eating peanuts…

Is it wrong when environmental tourism exploits animals and their environments so that the managers of the tourist operation can survive? I don’t know, to answer the question would be to put more value on one type of life compared to another, to say a human life is more important than the life of an animal. Wildlife reserves in developing countries, however, allow indigenous people to survive. It seems safe to say that, unless it’s a matter of human survival, unless there is no other way for a family or group of people to survive and earn a living, any type of animal exploitation is unjustified.

Seeing the monkeys was fascinating. Seeing them forces one’s mind to wander into the coffers of one’s personal historical perspective, into the ‘Beliefs’ wing of one’s cognitive library. Did I leave the park cloaked in awe and feeling little and shrunken down to size just as I’ve felt after seeing other types of wildlife in their natural habitats? No. Instead I felt hungry and felt human and felt absent of that powerful buzz that comes from being overwhelmed by natural purity. I would have loved to have stumbled upon the monkey gully nestled up in the mountains 100 years ago. I don’t think, however, I would have enjoyed sticking around to watch the aftermath of discovery that seems to inevitably give birth to admission fees and peanut-throwing park employees.

left: Me on the box in the park

















left: Col flying higher than she's ever flown before! It's hard to tell from this pic, but she has already cleared the gap and is actually on her way down here. I could not believe my eyes when I saw her flying through the air like this. I held the camera out and snapped two photos hoping that at least one would come out.









left: Me on the frighteningly long rail













left: Kid's table at the ryokan