fresh n juicy chunks of oyster :: RTW travel blog

It's raining outside but maybe tomorrow it will get better.
The beauty of the London summer is that you never know when it is going to end. In its impermanance and unpredictability it is much like travelling - in fact it is much like life.
Maybe that's why I've been having difficulties drawing a line between the two.

Life in the past few weeks has been as incomprehensible to me as ever. There was no culture shock, no hard cut-off point, no gentle let-down even. Strangely enough it feels not much different to when I was on other continents a short while ago.

London may indeed be the least different place I've been to this year: it seems like the whole world has left its mark here and even though this is the English people's natural, if not optimal, habitat it is decidedly less English than say Khao Sarn Road.

On the tube the other day I saw an office lady in exile reading a manga while hanging from the ceiling-grip. In London, every stranger's face I see reminds me why I've longed to be here so long. Maybe it is the icy gaze that Londoners carry like a shield when travelling the Underground - an icy gaze that often melts enough on a sunny day to let you glimpse inside of them for just a minute.

This town feels like it is brimming with possibilities, gritty darkness, pollution and oh-so-many lives, living, drifting and waiting to collide every day and night.

And through the age-old but extensive public transport system everyone becomes a traveller: the late-middle-aged German tourists talk loudly and congenially of irrelevant things; the bird and bloke lie passed out on the last Jubilee-line tube in booze-stained school uniforms, his hairy white legs sticking out of his schoolboy shorts; the suits commute to and fro mostly with apathetic frowns on their faces maybe thinking of how it will all end; hordes of multi-ethnic students mill about, some possibly with higher purpose and enthusiasm on their minds and the crazy prophet in his dirty trenchcoat hurls sermons down the carriage like ball lightning while asking for small change.

No one is a stranger for long in London; everyone becomes a part of the landscape here.

As have I again; London is good at forgiving absences.


[I have no idea why it has taken me so long to post the final entry - maybe I was afraid that once I do post it this trip will be truly over and the reality of it all will hit.
Maybe it will hit tomorrow when I start a full-time job though...
In case this will be the last post I also want to thank everyone who has kept in touch with me throughout this year and everyone who has checked in on this blog every so often. It's been a pleasure to write (mostly) and has kept me entertained during many a lonely hour - I hope it has done the same for some of you. I also hope that some of the pictures may have brought back memories of places or encouraged some of you to hit the road.
Safe travels.]

Delhi was pure chaos as though Shiva herself had descended on the place. At least that's pretty much all that I could glimpse in the 54 odd hours I will have spent here. I have to admit that after being faced with this chaos I gave up and chose to wind down; the trip as I had known it was ending - a fact I had only become aware of with around 28 hours remaining. Somehow the End had crept up on me silently and I wasn't sure what to do with it.
At that point I had only left Kathmandu 27 hours ago but it felt as though I had been in Delhi for much longer than that. On the other hand I also felt that I had been in Kathmandu for just a few, intense days but alternately it also hits me that I may have spent a lifetime there without knowing. Everything has stopped making sense to me and maybe I have lost the concept of time; I will attempt the unravelling.

Around 40 hours ago I was running late on my way to Kathmandu's airport. I had caught a taxi and was crawling out of the city slowly. Meanwhile the wild emotions the place had thrown at me where all blended together smoothly and undiscernibly: a continual background buzz. Maybe Kathmandu's been rather confusing to me.

On my first day in the land of Tenzing Norgay I was staring and marvelling in true greenhorn fashion at everything. Kathmandu is a pretty exciting city but I guess I must have shown too much excitement. A friendly jewellery seller took pity on me, took me to his office and said I could make 5000 Euros by bringing some pieces of coloured glass back to Germany in exchange for letting him steal my identity. He proudly showed off photocopies of passports and credit cards of previously satisfied customers; it looked more like a police file of murder victims with their photocopied faces staring blankly at me from their passports so I decided to seek my fortunes elsewhere. Back on the street some guy walked up to me wafting at me the most ragged, scruffy $100 dollar bill I have ever seen. "Change to rupees?"
Still, it all didn't bother me too much, even when shopkeepers, drugdealers and hotelowners of Thamel (Delhi's Khao Sarn with a twist) had convinced me that there was an entrance fee to get into Freak Street (the shabbier alternative to Thamel: 30 years ago it was the playground of the hippies, now the place is quietly falling apart - but it's doing so with charm).
I assumed the lie was an effort to keep the few tourists in Thamel; business has hit rock bottom in Kathmandu, it is low season for trekking and the country is in the middle of a civil war which is discouraging even more visitors. From the stories I hear of the Kathmandu of only 10 years ago it is barely a shadow of its former self and some of its people have turned bitter.
And like always it's started from the top. The politicians are corrupt as are the institutions. The locals are hurried off the streets at 10pm by cops armed with whistles and AK-47s. Anyone out after that time is prone to be extorted by the police. The tourists on the other hand can walk through the empty streets completely impervious - the police have orders to leave tourists alone and I have the sneaking suspicion that anyone caught mugging a foreigner will be summarily executed or just disappear. Even the Maoists go out of their way to leave tourists unscathed: they courteously make sure all the foreigners have left a building before bombing it.
One night I overheard a traveller in a bar shouting, "Yeah, I really want one of those Maoist receipts. It'd make a great souvenir!"
Back in Thailand this would have undoubtedly reaffirmed my unjustified loathing for the world and humanity and have swiftly led to the onset of a minor depression. But I'm ok now. I have accepted humanity as essentially flawed, individuals as potentially good and tourism as inevitable. I even ate pizza in Kathmandu.
And I followed the advice of a guesthouse-owner as he took a pause from playing the guitar as the foreigners' conversation started getting too political: "You guys just come here and don't worry about a thing! Nepal is meant for chilling and enjoying yourself."
The dichotomy may be uncomfortable and the political system in shambles but worrying about them is a luxury most people on the streets can not afford.
And Kathmandu is just meant for getting lost in, regardless of politics. Even on the last day I could not quite figure out the layout of the romantic and twisty alleys winding around and away from each other. I would navigate by instinct with a low success rate through the dirt, the traffic without rules and the squares with Hindu stupahs, temples and other stuff I am too uncultured to understand. But it was all incredibly satisfying, never knowing what or whom you will bump into.
The Nepalis in general have to be some of the best people on the planet even though 95% were having identical conversations with me ("which country?", "how long you been in Nepal?", "how long will you stay in Nepal?", followed by "oh, what a shame" in response to my answer.) But they have good hearts and deserve to live in a happier place.

However, in my unfortunate way of travelling I have constantly been leaving places, their worries and their joys behind me. Just like I left behind the taxi driver who had put his meter into a special tourist-hyperactive mode for the last minute of the journey to the airport, doubling the fare. I was relieved that I had made it out of Kathmandu without getting too badly ripped off, losing my identity and/or dignity. And I was happy about the people I'd met and the smoothie of emotions that was still buzzing.
That is, until I exchanged my left-over Nepalese rupees into Indian rupees at the airport without counting them first: an invitation for getting the worst rate possible which I promptly did. No space for argument, the system had gotten its cut from me after all.

And that's about as much unravelling as I'll be able to do. Stuff still doesn't make sense, especially with my plane leaving Asia in a few hours but I will advance the following definitive theory of time in an effort to imbue some reason into my chaos: non-Einsteinian relativity of time is a symptom of being in places for too short a time and of sleeping in too many different beds every night (which sounds either far worse or far more glamorous than it actually is).
Yes, I am very confused at the moment. But at least I'm buzzing still.

[Maybe my confusion will clear up soon with a more constant bed and home: my flight leaves to Frankfurt tonight, followed by Amsterdam and then London. There'll be a final post coming up in a week or so (I write while wiping a tear from my eye).
Meanwhile click here for fuzzy pictures in Album Nepal 1 - Kathmandu and Album India 1 - Delhi.]

The speedboat rapidly skimmed along the surface of the Mekong as though its waters were frozen; I was on my way out of Laos like Redux on fast-forward but unusually I found myself looking forward to Khao Sarn Road.
An hour earlier at a river-side restaurant I was flicking through my pictures from Laos as a Dutch package-tour group arrived in other ultra-light long-boats powered by screaming engines from hell. In fact it was the same jovially jabbering group that I had waited behind a week earlier at the Thai-Lao 'friendship-border' visa office and because of whom I had missed my Bangkok-organised sheep transport to Vientiane. I looked at their surreally tinted and flickering week-old picture on my camera's humidity damaged LCD and it felt like I was looking at a different world as though through an intense opium dream. I imagined that they must have seen a hundred times as many temples, hilltribes and waterfalls as I had in the same time but I wasn't jealous, I had no regrets. Laos had been worth it; I had seen enough even though I had seen nothing and hadn't budged an inch from the beaten track.
I guess Laos should have been exciting, fascinating and wild to me. And when compared to Thailand it certainly is - the combination of low-season, malaria, poverty and a 'communist' regime seemed to be keeping the visitors at bay slightly, meaning there is still the 'undiscovered'. From Luong Prabang for instance there were the hilltribes to visit, either on a "meet the primitive people" tour (as literally advertised) or by carving up dirt-tracks in the middle of nowhere independently on a motorbike.
Instead I picked up a book at a guesthouse, Graham Greene's The Quiet American, and found that this world of fiction was so much more exciting, fascinating and wild to me than anything I could be seeing in Laos with my own two eyes. In all honesty what was I expecting to do in my limited time there? Ride up to some 'primitive hilltribe people' and gawk at them as though they were Jawas from Tatooine? Did I expect being welcomed by them with open arms, opium pipes and just before leaving back to town being offered (but politely refusing) the chief's beautiful daughter in marriage with a dowry of fifty mountain-goats and one small, white elephant? What could I ever offer them that could possibly enrich their lives? They didn't ask for me to visit them just like they never asked for the wars about communism and drugs that have ravaged their countries and lives for years; Greene's fictional character Fowler had this to say: "they don't want to be shot at, they want one day to be much the same as any other and they don't want our white skins around telling them what they want."
The morning after I finished the book I just lay in bed. The roosters were crowing like crazy, it was raining outside and I crawled happily back into the loving arms of sleep and dreams that tasted like softly rolling flowers.
Like every day in Laos I would check out of the guesthouse several hours later, sit in cafes and enjoy Laos vibes (which may be some of the best in the world). There was no-one telling me what I wanted and I carried all my possessions on my body not even psychologically encumbered by a backpack. Thus I floated homelessly through Luong Prabang and its surroundings on my rented bicycle only finding a bed for the night once I needed to sleep. It is an exhilarating feeling of freedom and independence.
But strangely that feeling has not left me now that I'm reunited with my multi-ton backpack and have been drawn back in by the magnetic and etherising pull of Khao Sarn Road. Most people here are still as ugly as they were when I left them a week ago. But maybe I have stopped taking sides like Fowler tried to or I'm looking forward to one day being much the same as any other soon. I am on the home-stretch of this journey but I don't mind, for now I have the keys of Paradise...

[Click here for Album Laos 1 with the photos - nothing of touristic value or otherwise to be found.
Tomorrow morning I'm catching a flight to Kathmandu. It's been nice knowing you South-East Asia, until next time.]

At Kho Phang Nan's Full Moon Party I was almost decked by the reek of hour-old alcohol as a Brit pressed his sweaty, glo-painted face against mine and put his arm around me in that disgustingly repulsive way only drunk people can do. He proceeded to enlighten me with his philosophies and inconsequential theories on European football. Then he suddenly spat on the beach, by now littered with bottles and garbage in all directions, and told me with a sort of excited gleam in his eyes, "This is what I do to Thai women!" He spat on the sand again, "That's what I do. Like this. They disgust me!" Before he could sling his arm around me again I kind of mumbled something about having to get back to dancing and ducked off. He proceeded to stagger through the theme park that had been erected in his honour.
These are the new kings of Thailand and all I could do was wonder who in fucking hell gave them passports.
But when the near full moon outlines the palmtrees in a pale glow and you see the thousands of people on the beach having fun it can seem incredibly beautiful. Nice from far, far from nice for just as suddenly the image is prone to slide into an infestation that has claimed ownership of this island with bright lights and Western music.
But not just the Full Moon Party is alien to this place. There are the so-called 'less discovered' places that at first seem like paradise. 'Bottle Beach' lies in a bay that as of now is only accessible by boat (although a paved road is obviously in the pipeline): a perfect beach, not many people around, comfortable beach-side bungalow huts, four restaurants/bars serving comfort food from home and showing movies from Hollywood. It is the fantasy of the archetypal beach come to life, the frame of mind that is Beach and that we have been taught from a tender age by holiday brochures and our media, it is a valid excuse for laziness that people do not dare afford themselves in their lives of work and skewed horizons. But like all dreams it is incredibly fragile and requires serious self-deception to work as intended: "Yes, I deserve this relaxation; yes I deserve to be pampered by the locals; yes, I deserve to hang out with other pissed people from my country. Yes, I am special!"
I too felt special for the first day or so on that beach but then I suddenly couldn't take it all anymore: the sterility, the lack of stimulation and the scattered sunbathers who were flipping themselves scientifically like overcooked omelettes in frying pans striving for the perfect tan. And so I fled the beach for the Full Moon Party and my encounters with an army of pissed Europeans encouraged by buckets (literally) filled with medicinal-grade Red Bull, Whiskey and Coke, hordes of Israelis doing what they do best and a couple of cats who were digging the music and the mushroom shakes. I closed my eyes to all the broken eggs that had gone into making so many omelettes and started digging too until the next morning.
And then I fled again on the first boat away from the island back to Khao Sarn Road, Bangkok, a Yangshuo West Street on steroids.
In South America there were times when I used to be excited to bump into people who spoke English; here I have started despising them and they are everywhere. This country ain't big enough for all of us so my only option is flight yet again, facilitated by ultra-light travel made possible by great luggage storage facilities here.
Thailand is not the place for me. It is too difficult for me to see the country and the, I suspect, amazingly rich culture which runs almost invisibly alongside the backpackerism. I am tired of being shuttled from door to door by A/C'd 'V.I.P.' buses like lazy sheep with 50 other backpackers; I don't want to eat any more overpriced tourist food and I can't deal with seeing locals who are jaded and filled with impotent aggression after dealing with the scum of our societies.
A traveller should be invisible and float through places leaving behind no demands for anything that's not already there. Instead we have systematically made Thailand our whore for life: this is the colonialism of the 21st century that will make other countries slaves to our economies and values. And the sad thing is that we were the only ones who could have changed it by behaving differently and not wanting the world to become our circus. But it is all already too late: there is too much money to be made and too many livelihoods that are intertwined with ours now; no one is interested in change. In a few years time even the backpackers will probably start disappearing to be replaced with the reliable income of package tourists and after Thailand is full it will be time to export Khao Sarn Road to Laos, Myanmar and everywhere else in the region - although in all likelihood this has already happened.
Goodbye sweet world; goodbye sweet dream.

[Disclaimer: The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of God, your uncle or anyone in particular. Any reference to people living or dead is purely coincidental, etc...
That should cover my back from Thai-o-philes. And to clarify for the purists - Thailand is a beautiful country with beautiful people and I probably only have myself to blame for sticking to the beaten track. It's just that the beaten track is so bloody wide here and I have no time, as always.
At any rate piccies from Thailand can be found here. My camera is going to the dogs to from humidity in China so the photos kinda suck.
I am heading to Laos on a V.I.P. bus in an hour. There I will look like a monkey with a 'utility-belt' that contains all I will take but at least I'll be able to flee a place with only 2 seconds notice if required.]

It is near midnight. A thunderstorm is brewing overhead; flashes of lightning bathe the sky like bright white sheets that threaten to descend in a biblical flood. My skin is sticky with dried sweat and I long for the air to release its payload on me and the dirty streets of Guilin. But within this oppressive humidity and the crowd of locals laughing and drinking loudly at street foodstalls something feels different than it has for a while; it feels real.
The train from Beijing was the last time anything felt this real - all too real in fact in the bargain 'hard seat' class carriage to Guangxi province down South. These were probably the most uncomfortable 24-hours of my life; I ended up sleeping in the aisle for want of legroom. But I was a curiosity to everyone on the train, attracting stares and students eager to practise their English. It felt like it meant something like that exhilerating feeling of being somewhere you have never been before.
Then I made my way to Yangshuo, recommended to me by some random travellers as a nice place to go. The place to be in Yangshuo is West Street which has possibly earned its name by being a street for Westerners: bars, cafes, hostels, trinket souvenir shops and travel agencies are packed side by side. As I enjoyed my dearly missed English breakfast on the first morning there, however, some feeling started to creep up on me but I couldn't quite place it.
Later that day as I was sipping on coffee (a rarity in China) an old lady in tattered robes and the traditional, conical Chinese hat was slowly walking up and down the street. She came over to me and out of her basket she slammed down a plastic bracelet on my table. I picked 'no thanks' out of my vast vocabulary which had increased to an incredible repertoire of four phrases; she scowled at me and started yanking at my wristband from Bahia which is by now barely more than an ugly piece of string. She shouted something angrily in Chinese, presumably calling it ugly. After another minute of 'no thank yous' she walked off but it was then that the feeling that before I couldn't place crystallised: it was sadness.
It was a sadness about this town which lies in one of the most beautiful areas of the world and how it had become an entertainment centre for the traveller and how that once beautiful old woman had become frustrated and jaded by our being there. I imagined how she would have been content driving her family's oxen or working the rice fields; as hard as such a life would be at least it would not destroy her soul and spirit. I and all the foreigners there were responsible for what has happened. No amount of 'but we are helping the local economy' can truly excuse the transplantation of our ugly culture into beautiful places and into the minds of beautiful people. Yangshuo, albeit in China, was my first whiff of the fabled South-East Asia and its backpacking culture made infamous but legendary by books such as The Beach and common traveller-folklore with all its pretensions and high-horsedness.
But you get used to it and after a while the guilt starts to fade; I started noticing the old lady with a basket full of fruits hooked under her tiny arm and the cutest, most sincere gappy-toothed smile that has ever graced me; I 'discovered' the areas of town where the locals eat delicious foods and don't speak English; in a bar at night I had conversational English classes with the sweetest group of schoolkids from the city, brought here by their parents to practise with native speakers; and then there was the countryside, just minutes away by bicycle and where the people still drive their oxen and farm their rice-fields - where the world is still ok in my simplistic view of it.
In the city of Guilin meanwhile the downpour has come and I have walked back to my cheap hotel by the railway station. The cool rain on my skin felt amazing and even the female shopkeepers and small boys on the side of the road who tried to interest me in business with some hookers did not overly disturb me. But as I lie here on my lonely bed in this dirty room there is a suspicion growing in my mind: once I enter South-East Asia proper all this is just going to get worse...

[But all is not doom and gloom - the football commentary in China has improved miraculously and I am also one giant step closer to 'home': I bought a flight to Bangkok but am now looking for the best path out of this city.
Until I do check out Album China 2 with the snappies of Guangxi.]