Thailand, 23 Aug 2006 --

Cara and I got away from the chaos and constant noise of Bangkok yesterday afternoon and took a three hour meditation class at a buddhist temple.  It was definitely some good, relaxing stuff, and I enjoyed it a lot.  I don’t know that I could ever get really good at meditataion, though…my mind wanders a lot.

Apparently, buddhist meditation (for beginners anyway) is all about constant awareness of what each part of your body is doing, feeling and intending to do.  For example, one of the exercises we did was a walking meditation.  The routine pretty much goes: stand, walk 6 paces, turn 180 degrees, repeat.  The key, though, is that the whole time you’re thinking to yourself about what your body is doing.  As you stand, you think ’standing, standing, standing’ (in a calm, soothing voice of course).  Then you think ‘intending to walk, intending to walk,’ ‘lifting,’ ‘moving,’ ‘dropping’ (for the actions of your foot) and so on.

If you’re uncomfortable or need to itch or something, you think ‘itching, itching, itching.’ The buddhist teacher leading the class claims that most ‘discomforts’ will go away if you simply ‘note’ them.  If this doesn’t work for you and you need to scratch:  you think ‘intending to scratch,’ ‘lifting the arm,’ ’scratching,’ ‘dropping the arm,’ ‘etc.’

This was all well and good…and if it weren’t for one inch and a half long cocroach, I might be well on my way to buddhist zen-ness at this very moment.  As we began the walking meditation, I saw my giant roachy friend start crawling across the tile floor of the basement room in the monistary in my general direction.  After I walk my six paces, I close my eyes, stand, turn, open my eyes.

With my back now to the roach, I’m now left wondering what he’s up to back there…and so instead of soothingly thinking ’standing, standing, standing’ my train of thought is more along the lines of ‘cockroach….cockroach….cockroach.’  I know the buddhist master teaching us to meditate swears that acknowledging a ‘discomfort’ is just supposed to make it go away…but in the case of the roach somehow this didn’t seem to happen.

Fortunately, I never got to the point of: ‘turning,’ ‘walking,’ ’squishing giant roach with bare foot’ but I’d definitely say my state of mind wasn’t as peaceful as it could have been.  Stupid buddhist cockroach.

Thailand, 22 Aug 2006 --

Finally made it to a webcafe cheap enough to allow me the time to post some pictures.  Enjoy!

thailand, 21 Aug 2006 --

–i appologize in advance, but the shift key at this particular 40 thai baht/hr internet cafe doesn’t seem to work much…so i deny responsibility for any of the following punctuation and spelling mistakes.

saturday we met up with a friend of mine from work who just happened to be out here.  over dinner, he told us of his growing thai massage addiction, and offered to buy his two dirtbag backpacker friends (that would be us) a one hour thai massage.  having just experienced and enjoyed my first ever professional massage earlier in the day (we opted for the budget 1/2 hour option at wat pho, the best regarded massage school in bangkok), we accepted.

when we showed up the next day, it turned out that my friend had booked all of us for a 2 hour massage in the ‘vip room.’ i accept in advance all of the forthcoming jokes about the ‘happy ending’ and the ’special finish.’  i assure you, this wasn’t that kind of place and cara was next to me the whole time…though my friend did have his personal favorite girl, number 24, and i can’t attest to what happens when we aren’t around.

at any rate, yeah…two hours of thai massage is a long time.  i won’t say that all the pushing, pulling, twisting, and popping felt good…but when it was over my backpack felt 20 pounds lighter.  it’s a surreal experience…mostly i kept my eyes closed, but at some point i opened them to see the masseuse pulling on my leg with both hands while pushing on one of the muscles in my leg with her foot.  i had to bite my lip to keep from laughing.  i guess i must have flinched a few times, because the woman giving the massage kept saying ‘ok?’  in my defense, though, i never told her to go easier on me.

in the interest of coming closer to our $40/day budget, we’ve moved on from the atlanta hotel to a guest house on khao san road: the tourist ghetto of bangkok.  for $6/night, we get what amounts to a large walk-in closet with a double bed in it.  the lock on our door is of the miniature luggage padlock variety…no joke.  you can’t beat the location, though…within easy walking distance of all the major bangkok sights and with what our lonely planet claims is one of the best bakeries in town right downstairs!

Thailand, 18 Aug 2006 --

I woke up at 3am this morning (also known as 2pm if you ask my body clock) and lay staring at the ceiling for a good hour and a half.  Then I gave up and read by the glow of my headlamp for another hour and a half so as not to disturb Cara (who seemed to sleep for a solid 9 hours…bah).  Ah 11 hour jet lag…I missed you so.

Our hotel is near one of Bangkok’s many red light districts (really, just the simple act of walking into a bar makes you fair game as a John here).  I am finding, though, that having Cara around makes for pretty good prostitute repellant.  This is definitely not a bad thing. 

 I just read online that some skeezy guy wrapped up in the Jean-Benet Ramsy murder has been hanging out somewhere here in Bangkok.  This just further reinforces the point that you can find anything in the back sois of this city if you look hard enough.  Seriously, you can find a ‘district’ for anything here.  Throughout the course of the day, districts Cara and I wandered through included: the monk bowl district, the giant plastic buddah statue district, the assorted crappy car parts district, and the partially disassembeled playstation district.  Each of these ‘districts’ includes not less than 10 shops selling a virtually identical selection of items fitting the district’s description.  Good times.

usa, 13 Aug 2006 --

In preparation for The Big Trip, I’ve put a lot of thought into how I’m going to make shooting with a bulky DSLR camera work for me on this hostel-to-hostel, minimum budget trip work for me.  From what I understand, one of the main purposes of this “Internet” everyone is talking about is to share information with the general public (that and looking at porn, I guess), so I thought I’d give a little back and post my list of photography gear, and my logic for what I’m taking.  Worthy of note: this is only the second bit of useful information I’ve contributed to the internet, with the first being my kunaffe recipe that exactly one complete stranger was able to find thanks to google.

My camera is the Nikon D70s.  It’s the camera I’ve been shooting with for a little over a year and a half now, and I love it.  The only other camera I considered was the D200, but that was impossible to find when I ordered my D70 a few months ago, and was probably more than I wanted to spend anyway.  The only feature that stands out as something I may miss is that I hear the construction is more rugged.

My only lens is the Nikon 17-55mm f/2.8 AF-S.  This set me back quite a bit of cash (if you want to know exactly how much, you can look it up on Amazon and send me an email telling me just how crazy you think I am for dropping that on a lens).  At least Nikon was nice enough to give me a $100 rebate on it.  I love to shoot low light situations with available light, and I’ve found that all my favorite pictures from recent trips have been from fairly close in, so hopefully this will prove to be the ideal lens for me.  It does seem a little heavy, but it’s supposed to be very rugged…which is good.

In the past, I’ve felt trapped inside mosques, temples and such by lenses that didn’t go wide enough like the Nikon 24-120mm VR.  Also, since I want to get better at “breaking the wall” and talking to people when shooting candids I figure the shorter 55mm will keep me from chickening out and shooting from a distance.  I was going to take a Nikon 50mm f/1.8 prime, but that got the axe in the interest of lightweight packing.  I had placed an order in April for the Nikon 18-200mm VR that everyone is talking about, but Amazon twice pushed the delivery date back and eventually said they wouldn’t arrive until September…so yeah, not so much an option.

As far as storage goes, I’m not taking a laptop so this took some thought.  I’m only carrying four 1GB Lexar Professional 80x CF cards.  I’ve had enough strange problems with larger sizes in the past to be skeptical, and I don’t want to be stuck waiting for a giant card to fill up so I can back up the images and send them home.

For long term storage, I eventually settled on the Apacer Disk Steno CP-300.  This is a device that burns straight from CF cards to DVDs.  A lot of people seem to be using hard drive solutions lately, and in particular many people recommend using an iPod.  I just don’t trust hard drive devices to hold up to the way I’ll probably end up abusing my gear on this trip, and my iPod craps out frequently.

In playing with the CP-300 so far, I’m pretty happy with everything but the fact that it seems to be a little picky about the DVD media you use.  I’ve had the best luck with DVD-Rs, and the general opinion seems to be that -Rs are better than +Rs for archiving anyway.  The funny thing is that not all -Rs seem to work.  My current brand of choice is Sony, which is good because I’d think they’d be fairly easy to find in Asia.

So with all those pieces, the workflow will go something like this:  I have the camera set to shoot RAW+JPEG Basic.  I want to have the flexibility of coming back with RAW adjustments later, but I need the ability to upload JPEGs from web cafes while we’re on the trip.  After I fill a card, I’ll burn it to two DVDs, verify the images and wipe the card.  Once I’ve burned four CF cards to a DVD (totalling 4 GB), I’ll mail one copy of the DVD home and keep the other.  Once my mom (who was kind enough to offer to help me out) confirms that she’s received a given DVD, I’ll be able to throw away the backup copy that I have with me so I’m not stuck dragging around too many.

Sounds simple enough, right?  Guess we’ll see starting in a few days….if you don’t see pictures starting to show up in the gallery I guess that means I forgot something obvious.

usa, 13 Aug 2006 --

With the beginning of our trip only two days away, I took two steps today that made it abundantly clear that the beginning of the adventure is finally upon us:

First, I made the first two days of reservations at The Atlanta hotel in Bangkok.  Cara and I don’t intend to do much advance accomidation planning on this trip, and the majority of the places we’re hoping to stay don’t even take reservations (or take credit cards, or probably have telephones for that matter).  Still, we figured rolling into town at midnight after an 18 hour flight and under the influence of an 11 hour time change wouldn’t leave us in the greatest shape to go searching for a place to stay.

The Atlanta is awesome.  I saw it last time I was in Bangkok, and wishing I was on the kind of trip where I could stay there was one of my first inklings that maybe work travel isn’t the best way to go.  Their lobby is like something straight out of a 40s black and white film, and every where you look there are signs posted on the wall basically telling you that the customer is not, in fact, always right.  Quirky doesn’t even begin to describe the place.  They generally only take reservations by fax, but I talked to the heavily british accented owner on the phone, and he was kind enough to make an exception for us.  On its website, the Atlanta claims to be popular with:

“cultured occidentals, with writers, academics, artists, cinema & theatre and other professional people, with dreamers and innocuous eccentrics.”

I’m not sure which (if any) of those groups Cara and I fall into, but our 600 baht (about $16 US) will be getting us a third floor “you get what you pay for” room with air conditioning.  We would have gone for the unairconditioned room for $2 less, but that would also have meant a shower with no hot water and we figured we’d splurge on our first night in town.

The second thing I did today that made me realize that this trip is going to be a reality was to pack.  What does one take on a several month backpacking trip around asia?  I’ll tell you:

• (1) Backpack, 3500 cubic inches
• (1) Small day pack
• (3) Short sleeved shirts
• (1) Long sleeved shirt
• (1) Pair shorts
• (1) Pair zip off pants
• (3) Pairs underwear (I was thinking about just going commando, but thought I’d want the option)
• (1) Light fleece
• (1) Rain Jacket
• (1) Pair of Chacos
• (1) Pair hiking shoes (damnit, couldn’t force myself to go with Chacos alone)
• (1) Pair long underwear
• (1) Warm hat
• (1) Baseball cap
• (1) Pair socks (Cara loves it when I wear socks with my Chacos)
• (1) Nikon D70 SLR with 17-55mm f/2.8 lens (I hope I don’t hate my camera after lugging it around Asia)
• (1) CF Card to DVD burner
• (1) Travel sheet
• (1) Spoon
• (1) Bandanna
• (20 ft) Clothes line
• (1) Mosquito headnet (This may still get the axe)
• (1) First aid kit
• (1) Small towel (Ford Prefect would be proud)
• (1) Drybag (for the camera when it pours)
• (1) Pair sunglasses
• (1) Small toiletry kit
• (1) Roll of toilet paper (Everyone says this can be key)
• (1) Pocket knife
• (1) Bottle of doxycycline (Malaria pills)
• (1) Headlamp
• (1) Notepad and pen
• (1) Book (The Amber Spyglass)
• (1) Watch
• (1) Passport
• (2) Credit Cards
• (1) Debit Card
• (1) Copy of Lonely Planet - Southeast Asia on a Shoestring

I plan to take the pack as carry-on luggage (yes United, length + width + height is less than 45″, thank you very much) but sadly thanks to our friends with the exploding toothpaste in the UK, we’ll have to check a small box of toiletries and the knife.

So there you have it, 30 lbs of stuff that will hopefully be all I need to get by in Asia for 6+ months.  Actually I’m sure it’s more than enough.  Since I started traveling so much, one of my favorite sanity-saving mantras during packing for trips has always been “As long as you’ve got the tickets, the money, and the passport…anything else you forget doesn’t really matter.”