Nepal

Hello all,
A week ago right now I was dropping down over the mountains and into the Kathmandu valley in an airplane that was very literally falling apart on the inside, with windows so burdened by the collected dust of fifty desert years that you could barely see past them, shaking violently as the wind pitched us in all the directions you don't want to be moving in the air. About thirty feet from the ground I still could make out no sign of the runway or any piece of land I could convince my mind would be suitable to build an airport upon, so when the engine suddenly kicked in the afterburners like "oh shit we're going to land on earth not runway" it made perfect sense, and when we did finally land on the farthest southern edge of the blacktop I imagined all of us on that airplane communally let our muscles and minds relax and return to the dim and comfortable pulse of the still living world.
All of this after 40 hours from Lincoln to Omaha to Chicago to Frankfurt to Delhi to here. I was very glad to have arrived.
Since my flight from Delhi was rescheduled, then rescheduled again, and then finally delayed another hour I arrived like five hours later than I had told Josh and Urte to be waiting at the Kathmandu Peace Guesthouse, but shortly after I arrived they came walking down the hill yelling my name and we all hugged and got down to the very serious business of bullshitting and making very big decisions like how to get to Tibet and what part of all the many beautiful parts of Nepal we should spend our time in.
So we ate some Momo's, these little balls that look like dumplings filled with vegetables then wrapped and either steamed or fried, and then set about the task of going to different travel companies to find the best prices. As of right now the Chinese government doesn't allow any foreigner into the Tibet region without being part of an organized tour approved by the Chinese. So, I couldn't just take a jeep to the border of Nepal and Tibet and cross by foot as can be done at so many borders across the world. This is a bit annoying but also financially taxing, as tour companies can charge pretty much whatever they please, knowing travelers have no other recourse if they want in to Tibet, which many travelers, Josh and I in the utmost, do. We were lucky enough to find a man named Suman whose tour was hundreds of dollars cheaper than anywhere else in town and also a very nice man to have a conversation about Nepalese politics with, headhunters, matricide and all. So we basically give him a stack of cash and he goes about dealing with all the Chinese bureaucracy for us, the visas, the Tibetan permit, the tour while in Tibet and the train ticket from Lhasa out of Tibet into China, a ticket which we have to prove we have before entering the country and which has to be for a train leaving right after our scheduled tour is over. The Chinese really don't want you in Tibet unsupervised, like a big overprotective father, but more Asian and militaristic.
So we booked with Suman and set about finding a trekking company to take us into the mountains. After quotes from multiple companies hawking all-inclusive three day tours we found Tiger Travel who would rent us a guide for $20 bucks a day, and we could be left alone to fend for ourselves where food and accommodation are concerned, which we'd rather do anyway as these things are very cheap here. So they rented us Lama, a very kind 28 year old of small stature from the Tamang ethnicity with a big smile and a wife named Maya and a young boy named Adus. He spoke passable English and taught me wonderful Nepalese that sounded so good coming out of his mouth but was wholly ruined when I would speak what, to me, sounded exactly the same as what he had just said. So for the next three days we walked deep into the Shivapuri National Park up some very steep terrain to Chisapani and then on to Nagarkot while I shouted Timonie Costishow (how are you, surely not spelled this way but it's how it sounded) and Chutow Hai (goodbye) at some very confused villagers. I received a reply only one time.
After three days of quite intense hiking and drinking coffee on the rooftops of hotels we returned to Kathmandu to spend a couple more days before leaving tomorrow morning for Tibet for our 8 day trek. After that we'll take the Tibetan railway across the frozen tundra of the Tibetan plateau for 36 hours towards Xi'an. If you haven't heard of this railway, go google it now. It's only like five years old and is one of the most striking examples of modern engineering (as well as colonialism and human rights abuses, but that's not for right now); the train travels across frozen earth on a rail suspended above the ground. The cabins have to be pressurized and extra oxygen in available upon request, and we, as white lowlanders, will probably need it. In some strange proof of genetic connectivity, Josh and I have both had a severe fetish to ride this train since we heard about it independently years ago.
Tonight we go to say goodbye to our good friend Qayoom, the rug purveyor and owner of Rug Up Originals. We met him our first night here and have been visiting him since. He makes us tea and tells us stories of all the people he knows. Last night we gave him a framed picture of us and then took him out for pizza. He gave us these beautiful prints of Everest taken by his friend Jeff Bodz. He is seriously in love with Urte. He would trade his rug shop for her. He will be missed by all of us.
Tibet tomorrow. Josh and I are giddy like children.
Love,
B

The last month

I've done an awful job of keeping up with this blog and now that I've been sucked into the whole Facebook thing it's doesn't look to be getting better anytime soon. That being said I'll try to give a brief overview of our time since leaving Indonesia.
First we flew out of Denpasar on Bali to Kuala Lumpur to walk three hundred steps up into the Batu Caves with over a million Indians in Arizona-style heat and the next day we caught a train to Taman Negara the biggest national park in Malaysia and the oldest rain forest in Asia to hike and pick leaches off our feet and eat meals on large platforms floating in the river for a few days before taking the Jungle Railway north to Kota Bharu where we got stuck in a great guesthouse that had a television and a box of hundreds and hundreds of dvd's so I stayed up every night until seven in the morning then slept until after noon and did the same thing for five days until we had finally had our fill of movies and decided to cross over into Thailand for the second time and we spent the next two days on the train traveling from the very southeastern corner to nearly the northern border to Chiang Mai where we did a lot of walking and eating and music playing with some new friends and after a certain time every night we did a lot of saying no to the prostitutes which gets old really fast and after a few days of really enjoying ourselves in one of our favorite new cities we took a very small very cramped bus five hours north to Pai where we relaxed in the mountains and enjoyed the cold weather for the first time in quite some time and met back up with our two new favorite people Faye and Luke from England and the four of us went on the most epic motorbike journey 200 KM into the mountain range and back and near the very end Nate crashed coming around a very sketchy hairpin turn but other than some cuts and bruises he is just fine and since Thailand only gives out 15 day visa stamp for anyone entering the country on foot we were forced to leave earlier than we would have as Northern Thailand is one of the nicest places we've yet been so the four of us caught a bus to Chiang Rai to spend one last night in Thailand that wasn't all too exciting as I had spent the night before in the throws of a horrible fever and somehow passed it on to Nate for the day but luckily the next day we woke up and felt much better and were of to Chiang Khong on the Laos border and after crossing the Mekong on a small boat and then paying our $36 visa fee we were in Houay Xai to spend one night before taking the 2 day slow boat to Luang Prabang which was truly slow but such a great time as we met three more people to add to our growing posse, Lisa from Holland and Alex and Will from England, and a river cutting it's way through enormous mountain passes with Laos on your left and Thailand on your right is not a bad backdrop to spend a couple days viewing and after the first days trip we stopped in small Pak Beng for the night where we found out about a local celebration that we were invited to attend and when we got there it was about five hundred locals drinking Beer Lao and dancing quite badly to live music so naturally I fit right in so we all drank and danced for a while before retiring to our guesthouse where they shut of all the water and electric at a certain hour and the next morning we had to get up far too early for our second day on the boat which was much different than the first as my seat was directly next to the engine and it was so deafening that I couldn't hear anything or carry any type of conversation and it took a good day for my hearing to fully come back after arriving in Luang Prabang but it eventually did and now I have a great story of my nine hour boat journey with what sounded like a helicopter directly beside me and either way it was worth it because Luang Prabang is so lovely and slow nestled between rivers and there are three vegetarian buffets that all cost 5000 Kip (about 60 cents) and everyone sells fruit smoothies and there's even a bowling alley where I proved my incredible bowling skills by bowling a 96 two nights ago on Nate's 28th birthday and right now there are seven of us traveling together and somehow we all really enjoy each other's company and have plans to stay together for the near future and Will has even changed his plane ticket to Australia to stay and travel through Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam with us until Nate and I fly to Hong Kong on the 27th of April so it will be a nice change and a different mode of travel for us for the next seven weeks and we're both really looking forward to all of it but before any of that today we rent bicycles to cycle around the city for a few hours before wondering the night market, eating some cheap vegetarian food and settling down on the roof of our guesthouse with a great view of the city for some beer Lao, cards and conversation until the early morning as we've done every day since we've been here and will probably continue to do until we find some reason to leave the incredible peace covering the city.
Love to all,
B

Good things

Twice in the last two weeks I have found myself in truly alien landscapes, looking around only vaguely understanding where I am, putting it all together very slowly, allowing myself to be taken by it and relegating the understanding to a later day.
The first was at Gunung Bromo, an active volcano in Eastern Java, which constantly spews a steady stream of sulphur and rests in the shadow of another much bigger volcano that shoots ash into the sky every ten minutes. The very lazy take a far too small horse from the base of Bromo to the foot of a staircase that carries you the rest of the way to the summit, but I, along with Anna and Joanne my two new Dutch travel partners, decided to hoof it for the twenty minutes it takes, half amused and half horrified by the fat tourists weighing down their horses. At the summit you stare into the heart of it, a very unusual chalky color flecked with deep maroons in places, then turn to view the surrounding hills and flat lowlands, giants buried in the earth with their spines exposed, colors as rich as you think possible.
The second was the very next day a few hundred kilometers further into East Java at the Ijen Plateau, a place I new almost nothing about before I came other than that it was to be something beautiful, and to some, quite amazing. What I was never told before is that you are going there to witness humanity in a form completely incomprehensible to most, to see a mountain and it's crater merely as a backdrop . As you walk the hour hike to the top of the mountain you begin to see many workers coming up the hill behind you carrying two baskets suspended between a plank of bamboo. At the moment you have no idea what it's used for. The farther you go up, the more workers you see, and eventually you notice that some of them have incredibly large pieces of sulphur rock filling both baskets. When you finally reach the summit you look down into the crater and see the small sources of sulphur leaking out, the brightest blue lake, the fluorescent yellow and dark red walls, the sand trails snaking through the water; then you see to the very bottom, a very, very long and steep way down and you finally realize what these men are doing, where the rocks are coming from, and how completely impossible it seems that men as old as 60 are carrying out loads of sulphur weighing upwards of 150 lbs from the bottom of a volcano up a steep and extremely perilous path only ever wide enough to barely squeeze two people by at the same time, then all the way down the mountain to unload, a journey they can complete twice a day working ten hours each day, being paid the equivalent of US$6 a day. Every one of these men works for 20 years or until they die, which many do from falling, exhaustion and heart and lung problems due to the fact that they are constantly covered and breathing in sulphur, sometimes so thick that you can't see a few inches in front of you, dependent upon the wind to shift to clear the path again. I walked all the way down the path to the source of the sulphur, talked to many of the workers, saw exactly how they were working, got horribly in the way, surely made their jobs more difficult by my presence but not one of them didn't smile and say hello, offer to give me a sulphur rock or ask me for a cigarette that I wished I would have bought a pack of just to give away. None of us, myself, Joanne, Anna, or Kendra and Irene my new American travel partners could make any good sense of it at the time, and even days later we are still enjoying being completely baffled by it.
I decided to follow Kendra and Irene into Bali, and they invited me to come to Pemuteran with them, a small beach village with few tourists, kind locals and good food. Nate eventually met up with us there, and we all snorkeled every day and spent a lot of time relaxing. After four days we had made many new friends and I had traded my t-shirt with Bang Bang, the cook at our favorite road side food stall.
Nate and I are now in Ubud, after a disastrous trip to Kuta to try and find a bar that played the Super Bowl but failing. It's perfect here, everyone loves art and music and the Balinese culture is evident in most everything you see. Today we played with monkeys and Nate almost got his face eaten off, tonight we'll see a gamelan and dance performance, tomorrow maybe some white water rafting then meeting back up with the girls, the next day touring the countryside, Friday to Denpasar to catch a flight to Kuala Lumpur, Sunday the Indian festival of Thaipusam, after that we have no idea.
For those of you worried, last night Nate and I finally found a bar to watch a replay of the Super Bowl, and it was only fitting that the two Arizona boys were joined by another traveler living in Seattle who was from Pittsburgh. The locals working the bar had no idea what we were watching or why it made us so happy.
Love to all,
B

Indonesia

Nate and I have been in Indonesia for about ten days now, starting in Jakarta for two days and then on to Bandung for one night. We quickly grew tired of the traffic and the noise and the general rush of both cities, so we moved on as fast as we could, as Indonesia only gives us 30 days on our visa.
Most of our time has been spent here, in Pangandaran, a sleepy beach city (at least outside of tourist season) with good waves for surfing, at least one large rainstorm a day, and food for 80 cents. I've have done almost nothing outside of read, swim, run, eat, walk, sleep.
Nate has taken up surfing, and since it's cheap to learn and to rent a board here, he has decided to stay for a while. So, tomorrow I will be taking off alone for Yogyakarta, where I'll spent a few days traveling around the area to see Borobodur, the Prambanan temples, the Dieng plateau and Gunung Merapi. Then I'll head East to Solo, then off to Gunung Bromo before reaching the Easternmost tip of Java to catch a ferry to Bali, where, at some point and some location, Nate and I will meet up again to fly back to Kuala Lumpur by the 6th, our last legal day in the country.
(About a minute ago there was a massive motorbike accident outside the internet cafe that wiped out about ten motorbikes. Everyone seems alright though.)
But, on the 1st of February I will be desperately seeking out a bar or restaurant or any place that has a television and is broadcasting the Super Bowl so I can watch the Cardinals win their first championship.
Love to all,
B

New Year

Don't have a lot of time, but a quick update that Nate and I had a very lively time in Kuala Lumpur on New Year's Eve in which we probably walked well over 15 miles all over the city to catch all the millions of people celebrating across the city.
The next day we woke up early to catch a bus to Melaka, an old historic city once taken over at different times by the Dutch, Portuguese and British, resulting in quite a mix of peoples and architectural styles. We've been here for the last five days, which should say a lot about how much we enjoy this city.
Tomorrow morning we wake up very early to walk a few miles to the bus station, then catch a bus to Singapore where we'll spend two days before catching a ferry to Batam, a small island just off Singapore that is part of the Indonesian island of Sumatra, from where we'll fly to Jakarta, a short hour and a half flight away.
Happy New Year to everyone.
Love,
B

Langkawi to Kuala Lumpur

So after nearly five weeks in Langkawi, Nate and I made the rather quick decision one morning to leave Langkawi to head for Indonesia. We planned on going to Penang to catch a ferry to Medan in northern Sumatra, but the ferry was sold out so we caught a ferry to the mainland of Kedah, got a cab to Alor Setar, took a bus to Butterworth and then finally a ferry in Georgetown on the island of Penang. Once we arrived we realized that the ferry for Medan was sold out for three days, so we made another hasty decision and made a brand new plan to head south for Kuala Lumpur, to either catch a ferry from somewhere nearby, or keep moving south. Before leaving Penang early the next morning for KL, we went to our favorite Indian cinema in town and saw Silambataam, a Bollywood movie about a devoted Hindu who turns out have a killing machine waiting inside of him, only to be released when coaxed out by the violence of others. Luckily for him, he is also an extraordinary singer and dancer. Very good stuff. Three hours long.
Last night, our first night in Kuala Lumpur (KL), we met up with our friend Pitt who we had met in Langkawi, who is the brother of a good friend of ours in Langkawi named Aji. He works at an incredibly nice bar near Bukit Bintang, the main shopping district in KL, called The Social. We ended up hanging out with him as he worked for a few hours, and somehow the Langkawi trend continued and we didn't have to pay for a single drink. Nate and I figured our tab would have been close to 200 RM, nearly $60, not because we drank a lot but because alcohol is incredibly expensive in mainland Malaysia, and especially KL. Once again we were shocked by the kindness of the people here, and promised to buy Pitt a meal the following day.
Today we plan on walking around the city and finding a used book store, maybe going to the lake gardens and the city center tonight, and tomorrow we plan on waking early tomorrow to go up the Petronas Twin Towers, something I have wanted to do since I was a young boy.
And the decision we're facing right now is this: catch a ferry from Klang, a nearby city, or travel south to Melaka to catch a ferry to Dumai (Sumatra), or possibly head for Singapore to catch a ferry to the small island of Bitam and then fly into Jakarta (on the island of Java). Knowing the two of us the decision will be made on a whim as neither Nate nor I possess the ability to plan ahead, nor do we really want to.
We'll let you know when we figure it out.
Love,
B

Back in Langkawi

Nate and I made it back to Langkawi a week ago and realized very quickly that the tourist season was in full bloom. Apparently Malaysian students all across the country get "summer" break during December and January, and many of them, along with Europeans and Australians and all manner of white folk, flock to the island at the same time. So, with a little help from our old landlord from our last time here, we got what may have been the only room left in Langkawi. She had to spend an hour just getting it ready for us, and she charged us a ridiculously low price in accordance with it's quality (there was no water). The worst news, however, was that she no longer had a room to rent us out for the month.
So for the few days we stayed there, we started thinking of moving on, back to the mainland to see what the rest of Malaysia was like. But then we met Lan and his girlfriend Joanna, who own the only local art gallery right on the main road. We initially just stopped in and started talking to the two of them, with no intention or motive, but somehow the topic of us looking for a place to rent for a month came up, and within half an hour we had been invited to come and live with them for 200 RM a month, 150 Ringgit less than what we were willing to pay for a guesthouse. The next day Joanna took us to look at the house, which is set back from the main road, about a five minute walk from the beach, and secluded nicely by palm trees and local families. We loved it right away. We have our own large room, a big kitchen we can use to eat for cheap, a living room with cable tv and dvd player and a separate space for the shower and the toilet, something I've learned I greatly enjoy. We moved in on Monday and have been busy settling into life in a home, buying groceries, pillows, sleeping bags.
We also rented motorbikes for the first time, and spent two days riding all over the island. We rode to the top of the highest mountain on Langkawi (890 KM). We saw many small fishing villages as well as the five star luxury resort beaches where they told us we couldn't sit in the chairs or swim in the pool before we were anywhere near either of them. We watched monkeys tend to their children. We saw a Chinese man crash his motorbike into an SUV and flip. Nate road on the wrong (right hand) side of the road a few times. We have made a firm decision to rent a motorbike for the entire month we'll be here, and with the help of Lan who gives us all the local inside information, we found a shop that will rent one to us monthly for 250 RM. Most bikes are rented daily for 20-35 RM, so this would save us tons of Ringgit.
Life has definitely slowed down. We don't have to think about moving or how to get to the next city or when to catch the ferry or the bus or the train and it's a nice change of pace for a while. We've watched a little television, which is very different when you haven't watched one in a while. Luckily Lan only likes to watch National Geographic and Discovery, so at least we're learning. We cook at home now instead of eating out every night. We went out for Joanna's birthday and met even more great people, like Vladimir the Russian, Johan the Swede, Wan the Malay artist, Zool the Malay husband of a very rich local German. Nate met a Malay girl that he likes. Lan very quickly told him she was bad news. People are very good to us and treat us like old friends. We can't walk down the street without seeing people we know and having a conversation. I can't say I've ever felt that way anywhere I've lived.
All is well, more soon.
Love,
Brent