stockholm syndrome.

Weekend was a flurry of pink champagne, electropop and skipping sleep.  Woke up at 4 am in our hotel room at the Jupiter with ringing ears, throbbing feet and a throat scratchy from singing because

this girl. is. phenomenal.

We now measure time in B.R. and A.R.: Before Robyn and After Robyn.

Portland and our current girl crush plum tuckered us out, but once I come down from this high I might be able to put some words together about the whole unreal experience... life is so sweet.

little bavarians.

Happy 27th, Marlo A. Hartung!  As usual, you are full of great ideas: escaping the rainy city for the vibrant leaves and peaceful fog of the mountains to celebrate your old age?  Sign me up.  A girl could really get used to sleeping in a beautiful cabin all snug as a bug and waking up to this view with her coffee:

Yes, PLEASE!

I would also not complain, not one bit, about drinking wine all night and espresso all day, wandering Leavenworth and practicing our German (but only amongst ourselves, let's not get too cocky here), visiting the cheesemonger and the antique vendors and spending autumn time with the laaaadies.  I don't ever want to leave, but someone must return to civilization to introduce lederhosen and 10 foot horns and Ricola to the unwashed masses.  Das sigh.

expats.

A Vancouver birthday weekend with the girls is just good clean fun, and the mere fact that we aren't in college anymore, heading up with frat brahs for morning boozing and "formal dances," completely revolutionized the experience.  Three cheers for trying to be grownups!  We stayed right downtown in the fancy Westin like big girls, ate good sushi like big girls, spent too much money on clothes and booze like big girls, and had an incident with a crow at the border that will become our new meal ticket once the video goes viral. 

Things about Canada that have changed since we were heading up there for countless fratty trips in college:

1.  Added stress of now having to show your passport at the border, like Canada thinks it's a different country or something and not the 51st state.  It's like sorority rush because you reeeeeally want the border guard to like you, even though HELLO, you're CANADA; it would be your great honor and pleasure to let us in.

2.  There are things to eat there that aren't pitchers of beer or street cart hot dogs at 3 am (even though those items still haven't lost their luster).  In fact, they have entire other food groups available for consumption, some of which are even on the food pyramid!

2.  They have daytime in Vancouver!  I literally never knew this.  Previous experiences led us to believe there is only rainy nighttime spent trying to avoid your date, who is geting a leeetle too handsy after the aforementioned pitchers.  Observe, the city from a sunrise walk on a lovely bridge:

  We crossed back into the US of A with renewed hope for our northernly sisters.  A beautiful autumn weekend in one of the world's most gorgeous cities, surrounded by maple leaf paraphernalia at every turn?  We don't mind if we do, happy birthday Shauna! 

good morning, vietnam.

Some shots from our last days in 'Nam. As you can tell, I just really like saying,
"our days in 'Nam."

Heading home in Mui Ne

Hauling in the nets

Biking along the coast of the South China Sea, sweating against the breeze and finding neighborhoods where no other tourists seemed to have discovered. The adults all gave us sidelong glances, wondering what we were looking for in the small fishing town, but the toddlers and kids burst from excitement and yelled "HELLO! HELLO!" from the sidewalks.




I included this shot because right after I took it, a security guard grabbed my arm and growled at me "NO PHOTO OP HERE." The house behind this wall was really fancy... I wonder what famous person lives here?

Intense game of chess on the streets of Saigon

The streets are a constant, chaotic mess of motorbikes on all sides, none of which seem to obey a single traffic law. Upon sighting a driving school, my sister mused, "What do you think they actually do there?!"

Rollaway gas stations for tiny motorbike gas tanks! This same kid helped me the day before when I needed aspirin and he needed to practice his English. "If your head hurts, you should see a todoc!" he insisted. "A todoc!"

"I should see a doctor?" I asked, and his rubbed his head sheepishly.

"Yes, a doctor I meant!"

our days back in 'nam.

How we made it to this happy point, giddily frolicking by the South China Sea, was one of those travel days that really made us wish we weren't the hoi polloi and could travel by jet instead of with the riff-raff.

By the numbers:

Three (3): botched cab rides in which one of the parties left angry and/or shafted

Fourteen (14): hours on a bus getting from Phnom Penh to Saigon to Mui Ne, listening to terrible Vietnamese pop (which has replaced Bolivian pop in my mind as officially the worst music ever created)

One (1): French gentleman with overwhelming body odor on our bus

Hundreds (100s): minutes wasted at the Vietnam border, perhaps the world's most inefficient system EVER created for entering a Socialist Republic

Three (3): hostels attempted before landing in paradise

What up, Vietnam. Let's party. Also, I'm aware that I resemble Lieutenant Dan in this photo, but let me remind you what an adept swimmer he was, so it's not at all dangerous to jump in a pool in such a condition.

love from angkor.

I'll let a recent email from Peter Fotheringham handle this post, because describing a wonder of the world like Angkor Wat seems to be beyond me at this moment. Here are his words and a few shots from the hundreds of phenomenal ones that basically took themselves:

"Visiting Angkor Wat and the surrounding temples made me so happy to be a human being living in a time period where witnessing physical beauty is so accessible. Think about it, in the same year you witnessed Iguasso Falls and Angkor Wat. We are so lucky."

trekkies.

We spent our last day in Thailand trekking in the yungle outside of Chiang Mai: riding elephants, bamboo rafting, hiking through rice paddies and meeting old Karen people in a suspiciously touristy village.

But did I mention RIDING ELEPHANTS?! Because if I forgot, let me clarify: it was UN. REAL. Here's Mom, now known as the Elephant Whisperer because it appears to be a soul connection between these two.

Let it be known that if I could somehow work an elephant into my normal morning commute, I would be thrilled. My sister has requested that I not include here the shots of her gripping the side of the chair and looking less than thrilled "because we were sliding all around mud on the back of a FREAKING ELEPHANT" but I think she'd agree with me-- this was completely Jungle Booky mind-blowing.

sleeper train.

Is there anything in existence more old-fashioned and romantic than traveling by sleeper train?



Amy accused me of having a crush on overnight trains. Well, who wouldn't?




You get to pretend you're in a movie from the 40s (in my mind I have a porter to carry my trunk, which is filled with fitted skirt suits, lots of hats, red lipstick and a slight British accent).

You pull your curtain shut, let the tracks rock you to sleep...


...and in the morning you wake up in a totally new place.

hello bangkok!

I'm too tired to think of a played-out joke about the word Bangkok because we just spent an entire day cavorting through the streets of this city with the suspected drug-czar, and my good friend, Peter Fotheringham.
Just kidding about the drug-czardom, he wanted me to say that. He's actually a really upstanding citizen who knows Bangkok like the back of his hand, lives in a fancy apartment with a pool, and is willing to put up with us. Peter is one of those people who will drop comments like, "Oh, and then after the World Cup we went on a surf trip to Mozambique, which was amazing!" without sounding pretentious in the least.

So today we visited beautiful wats and ate gorgeous food and hopped into water taxis and drank thick espresso and talked about Thai royalty and Noam Chomsky and photography and language and Peter slowly opened our eyes to the intrigue of a place like Bangkok, a massive city with a thousand stories on every corner. Days like today make me feel like I could just travel and travel forever just to see a new face or hear a new prayer.

please don't stand in front of the dear leader.

He may look like your fun hipster grandpa, but trust me, you do NOT want to mess with this man.*

At this point in my life, the closest thing I've come to experiencing Communism was drinking vodka with Russians in Prague almost exactly two decades after the end of the Cold War. I won't say it was really heavily focused on the relative merits of democracy, either, so in terms of a cultural experience it was more theoretical than anything. That changed on Friday, when Mom and I headed north-- but not too far north, because that would involve getting shot on sight.

"Nothing normal happens here. EVER."

To set even a pinky toe on the border of North Korea, here is what we had to do: wake up at 5 am, take the subway for an hour to the USO office, take a bus for another hour and arrive at the edge of the DMZ (Demilitarized Zone), switch buses and go through a kind of "indoctrination" into the UN-- "No pointing, no waving, no gestures that North Korea could interpret as hostile, no bags, no photos unless we are in specific zones." We signed waivers that declared if we got shot or kidnapped, the military wasn't responsible for whatever we did wrong. Then we took another bus through the Joint Security Area and became aware that we were suddenly in the weirdest place we'd ever encountered, and it was only 9:30 am.

"We're watching you, you Western capitalist pigs." (please note the man with a camera, trying to be sneaky in the lower left window)

As our baby-faced military guide recounted 60 years of Korean history in ten minutes, I was pretty much losing my head with excitement because how many times have I sat in a foreign policy class trying to figure out how to save the world and never actually pictured the front lines of where all the negotiation happens? I almost peed from excitement and nerves. The DMZ is the most heavily militarized border in the entire world, and one of the most fascinating stretches of land I have ever set foot on, as it's a line that divides two completely disparate worlds that share a name. It's the difference between a swiftly growing Asian economy that's connected with the rest of the world and a socialist, totalitarian police state with one of the world's strictest (ie. craziest) dictators. You heard it here first, people: Kim Jong-il is CRA. ZY.


Left foot in democratic South Korea, right foot in nuts-as-all-getout North Korea




The stare-down that is border patrol.

Let me expound. In brief, North Korea is absolutely batshit, and the people there think they are the only country in the world that has it all figured out. They are 100% utterly convinced that Kim Il-ung is God and that they are living the dream. I could fill a book with all the bizarre things we heard about the personality cult that keeps North Koreans in line, and how juvenile it is (in a super-deluded and dangerous playground bully kind of way), and how hell-bent the regime is on keeping North Korea isolated from just about everything that exists. Here's a sampling:

1. The negotiation room that sits on the border, evenly split between North and South, has to be cleared out by two armed soldiers before tourists can enter. They used to only have one, until two years ago, when the soldier securing the back entrance was ambushed from the north side of the building by NK military, who broke through and tried to drag him across the border. Now ROK soldiers have to hold onto each others holsters or link arms when securing the area. To this I say, "what the hell?"


2. In an effort to avoid the land-mine-ridden DMZ but still sneakily invade South Korea, North Korea dug a bunch of tunnels, one of which was later uncovered with the help of a North Korean defector who had helped build it. North Korea then denied having built the tunnel, like a dumb kid standing in front of a broken lamp holding a baseball bat, despite the fact that the dynamite blasts were pointing south and water was draining north. Finally, they admitted having built it, but claimed it was an old coal mine (in an area that's almost entirely made of granite). So, in the most believable cover-up in the history of mining, North Korea PAINTED THE WALLS BLACK. "Nothing to see down here but some old coal! Run along!"

3. Checkpoint Charlie: Shane from Vice Magazine said something about this spot being one of the most dangerous places in the world, since you're standing surrounded on 3 sides by a totalitarian dictatorship, but I found it just pretty eerie. I mean, technically we aren't looking at Kabul or Mogadishu here, but the possibility of massive war is, I suppose, what made the Cold War so quietly powerful in the first place. Here's a shot of the sham town Kijong-dong, with the tallest flag pole in the world to show everyone how awesome and powerful North Korea is and designed to lure South Koreans across the border to join this utopia. But it's a lonely town-- these buildings are all empty; a facade created to give the illusion of bustling prosperity. And you can't see it in this photo, but there are wave blockers lining the southern border to prevent any outside information from entering the country. Our guide told us that "recently, Chinese airwaves have been infiltrating, and that's a really good thing for North Koreans." How do you know your country is in huge trouble? When getting media from CHINA is a step up.

North Korea has a bad thing going. Development is stunted and the standard of living is, relatively speaking, quite low. This photo is a snapshot of the Korean peninsula by night-- there's China on the left, and Seoul glowing like a firefly, and an eerie void in between. That's North Korea, a state that allows its denizens zero control over just about everything (including their own thought processing capabilities) and recently demanded 65 TRILLION DOLLARS from the US as reparations for damages incurred since the Korean War. This is why I never would have succeeded in my original plan to be a diplomat: how do you not laugh when Dr. Evil asks you for a million dollars in all seriousness? It's too much!

Kim Jong-il is a character begging to be made fun of, but when it comes down to it, this is a huge tragedy. This man holding razor wire kind of says it all-- his family was split down the middle and the two paths they took could not have been more disparate. The scariest part about North Korea is that their citizens have no clue how bad it really is-- they think they're experiencing utopia when it's actually more like hell on earth.


Here is the Vice Guide to North Korea-- pretty much the most fascinating 45 minutes you could spend today, I recommend you getting involved so we can experience the mind warp together.

*Amy mentioned that if I post this entry, my blog may get blocked from her computer since South Korea is pretty into censorship when it comes to issues of the North. Everyone is sooo sensitive around here about brutal dictatorships! However, the free press shall conquer yet again when we land in Bangkok on Thursday!

en route.

Dear Asia:

Ok! We're on our way, but I want to set up some ground rules before we land on your sesame oil soaked shores so we're all on the same page here.

1. Feed me. I want to roll home as a little ball of happy chubbiness brought on by rice noodles and kimchi. But I don't care how cultural it is, I'm not eating canine, so don't EVEN try to slip it into my pad thai.

2. Keep your sex trafficking away from me. I'm so not joking. Also, I don't want to see more than one girl shoot a ping pong ball out of her hooha (just one, because I've heard too much about it, but no more than that, capisce?).

3. Please don't let me get into a tuk-tuk crash, get malaria at Angkor Wat, robbed in Siem Reap, hit by a tidal wave at any point, or bit by a rabid dog. I forgot to buy travel insurance. Whoopsies!

4. Okay, Cambodia, I've heard some stories about you and I will say this: if you actually have abandoned babies in the streets like they say and if you really leave them lying around in my line of sight, I am really going to need some ideas on how to smuggle them past US Customs in my backpack on the way home. Just saying. Little documentation help, please.

5. If some fluke "accident" happens and there is an incident at the North Korean DMZ, DO NOT SEND BILL CLINTON TO COME GET ME. I know he rescues girls who cross that border from 12 year prison sentences and all, but I'm a little nervous about the jet flight back to the States, if you get my drift. I'll do the hard labor in Pyongyang instead, thanks.

So glad we had this chat, Asia! If you need me, I'll be enjoying the free drinks on KoreanAir and landing a little disoriented in Seoul, so come pick me up in front of the airport. Toodles.

bollywood calling!

Excuse me, I have to take this.

ATTENTION EVERYONE: I AM INVITED TO AN INDIAN WEDDING.

Hitha is getting married in Hyderabad in December (look, there she is at her engagement party, looking all pretty) and I'm invited. I've only seen Monsoon Wedding half a dozen times! I only rented the VHS copies of Lagaan from Blockbuster like, whenever possible because I thought it was the best story ever! It's like The Universe, by way of Hitha Palepu's engagement, has extended it's starry hand my way and beckoned me towards a real-life version of the weddings I'm obsessed with-- the kind where everyone wears saris and has henna on their hands and plays cricket and sings a lot with really beautiful voices and their cups overfloweth with joy and HOLY BRITISH IMPERIALISM ESCAPEE will I make it to that wedding if I have to scrape together the meager scraps of what's left of my bank account and live in a box in Belltown upon my return.

tacoma: the elephant in the room

We have finally reached the Mecca of all Colombian voyages: Cartagena is the most beautiful city on the continent. I'll post some pics soon to prove it, but first, a dose of reality from a portly Italian gentleman we met in the bus station on our way out of Medellin.

Jaime is a big guy, speaks English well enough to incorporate phrases like "butt-ass naked" into his vernacular, and has lived all over the world for business. This includes Mexico, Colombia, Japan, Germany, Texas, and everyone's favorite All-American City: TACOMA, WASHINGTON. I almost launched into my old high school debate standby of how underrated my hometown is, but he beat me to the punch with his own opinion.

"For all the dangerous places I have ever lived, and all the warnings people have given me about Central and South American cities, I have never ever lived in a scarier place than Tacoma. Oh my gott, is it terrible there."

*I want to point out here that my poor father's nerves are absolutely frayed this year-- with one daughter in South Korea (thisclose to Kim Jung-Il, that crazy a-hole) and the other traipsing around FARC-filled jungles without a man to protect her, the man has been stressed out and just wants the whole family back at home where they belong. Once he hears that the most dangerous part of our lives, statistically, was actually when we were at home as kids, his whole paradigm is going to shift majorly.

The Italian then went on to tell us that his house got broken into and his car got stolen on two separate occasions during his stint in TacTown. "I would rather live in Bogota or Mexico City than Tacoma any day," he added.

This makes me feel two things: a sudden affection for the place I was born, and a feeling that the world is way, way smaller and less scary than a lot of people think. Tacoma's like the younger sibling with a learning disability in the Puget Sound family... and darnit, don't you just love it all the more for that?

international smugglers: that'll happen.

I'll be succinct: crossing the border from Cotacachi into Cali, Colombia was an effort. After getting grilled by a creepy old man about our incomes and possessions ("I will be your friend! I invite you two to my house!" he offered effusively. "We have enough friends," we answered warily) and got offered a $10 taxi ride by the bus assistant that would most likely have turned out to be some kind of jaunt into the jungle to take all the white girls' stuff, we fortunately joined forces with a rotund Ecuadorian, his sweet wife and energetic baby and got our newest passport stamp with zero hassle.

Ok, it's not like we weren't expecting to get to know the military really well on our way through southwest Colombia, but the bus ride into Cali was REALLY a stop and go affair. Men with machine guns as big as my leg cleared the bus shortly after we left Ipiales, and we stood around on the side of the road as they examined passports, crawled around the luggage hold, and looked stern. This happened four more times on the journey, with variations. Once they tore apart the driver's area, banged on the ceiling looking for trap doors, and scowled at us as they gripped our passports ("They are looking for something specific!" our new friends said. "Something must have happened!"). At 3 am, as we pulled into the outskirts of Cali, we realized that WE WERE THE ONES DOING THE DRUG RUNNING FROM ECUADOR when our driver stopped the bus, a mysterious, darkened doorway appeared from a sketchy building, and he and his assistant lept from the bus, quickly unloaded four large packages wrapped with garbage bags and duct tape, and sped off into the city. UM? Pretty sure those weren't blanket donations for Haiti.

But for all the varieties of military and police and riot officers and other peace-keeping measures that are ubiquitous in this country, we have only been greeted by wonderful people on every side. After an uneventful day in Cali, we arrived on yet another overnight bus in Medellin and stumbled into the early morning light more than a little disoriented. The only other people we saw was a literal army of 18 year old army recruits, standing around with the aforementioned machine guns and looking like it was military picnic day or something. Within 30 seconds, we had a thick clump of about a dozen of them begging to help us. One particularly short one took it upon himself to hail us a cab as the others explained the neighborhoods in Medellin and were being all-around adorable. They loaded our backpacks into the cab trunk and waved goodbye sweetly. At that moment, we knew fully that we were in a superbly unique place that would be hard to leave.

We're on the three week countdown until we fly out of Bogota, and if anyone has any ideas on how to extend that to another two months, let me know.

50 hours in cuenca

Highlights of the Cuenca phase:

--Seeing shrunken heads at the Museo del Banco Central (almost as good as mummies)
--Cappuccinos at the Panama Hat Museum
--Hiking up to the top of the mirador over the city and meeting an old couple with a new litter of puppies and a new photographer friend who made sure we were safe at the cemetery.
--A few hours at a dangerous new bar with a bullfighter theme and $1.50 tequila shots. One needs to be careful with such a discovery, we found.
--Unintentionally yelling "NO DOY" simultaneously at our new friend Kevin, who gave us a withering look and asked when the last time we had been apart was. None of your business, Kevin! Jeez.

robbers, tarantulas, and hippies

The SUPER COOL thing that happened as we were trying to leave Peru:

All my cash, credit card, three sets of presents and the coin purse from our godchildren in Bolivia: STOLEN. Right out from under me. Right when we were trying to cross the stupid border on an overnight bus. When we got off the bus from Mancora, I was massively irritated and the first thought that came to mind was something along the lines of, "Cool, take all my money. I'll eventually go home and earn that all back-- and then some-- and you can stay here in your pitiful 3rd World thievery. Enjoy that." Then I remembered I'm supposed to be praying for my enemies. I struggled with that one and would have ALMOST concluded the Peru expedition with a bitter taste in my mouth if it weren't for a couple of things. Firstly, the kind man at our bus line office who found me an obscure computer (the only one with internet) in the station so I could cancel my card, and who counseled me with such gems as "Money is like water! It'll flow back to you in no time!" and reminded me that I was still safe. It's amazing how good-hearted, well-placed people can turn a situation around. Secondly, Marlo reminded me that we were heading to pure nature to live on Neverland Farm, which would be a perfect time to escape from using money at all and, as she put it, "really focus on a good mental cleanse" so we could start Ecuador on a positive note. Mental cleanse, brainwash, whatever. Let's do it.

We found ourselves arriving in Loja, Ecuador at 5 am, ready to move to a farm but having had the complicated directions stolen as well (maybe the most annoying thing about getting robbed is when they take the things that mean absolutely nothing to them, but everything to you. I met a Canadian girl who had a thousand dollars of things taken from her in the main square of Quito, but the thing she cried most about was her journal). Essentially stranded, we slept in the bus station for three hours until the town opened up and we could get to an internet cafe to REWRITE the 5 paragraphs of instructions. Finally, after two busses into the highlands and a long hike that was no easy jaunt with our backpacks on, we arrived at Neverland Farm.
Let me take a moment to describe what we THOUGHT we would be doing, based on the website:
Drinking farm-grown coffee, smoking farm-grown tobacco, eating farm-grown fruit and learning about sustainable organic agriculture. Not to mention getting our own hippy names (MoonBeam?PeaceWart?) in the process. What we did do was come to understand what it actually looks like to live on a hippy commune. We lucked out and had a vegetarian chef from Denmark cook us all our meals, ate veggies from the farm, and showered in the outdoor rock bath. Added bonus: new litters of kittens and puppies to play with, as well! What we were not up for was sharing an outhouse with tarantulas, finding spiders with weird fangs outside our door, having a leech colony waiting to attack from an unknown location, and having all our stuff permanently damp from the highland forest dew that seemed ubiquitous. I think we knew it was time to call it quits when, in a midnight attempt to avoid the outhouse, I accidentally peed on my Lulus. *Flashback to age 5, when my cousin tried to convince me that it was easy to pee in the woods. I got my grey sweatpants all wet and was mortified when we passed a cute 1st grade boy on the hike back. Since then, I have avoided the squat pee maneuver at all costs, besides that one time in the Bolivian desert where it was either "bano natural" or a UTI.*

So, with our new army of wonderful hippy friends left securely behind in their hemp beds, we made the trek back out of the woods and headed for safer ground in Cuenca, more than ready for a place that wouldn't either rob us blind or make us feel high-maintenance for not wanting bee hives in our living areas. Chau, puppies.

life's a beach.

A brief synopsis of what happened in Huanchaco:

1. Met an artist named Joan Louis on the beach, whose paintings have been exhibited on three continents, who got drunk on pina coladas and hit on my mom, and who became our new favorite Peruvian almost-famous person with the sweetest heart ever.

2. Saw the ruins of Chan Chan and Huaca Sol. We figured that seeing ancient Mochica and Chimu civilizations would make up for the fact that we wouldn't see Incan ruins in Machu Picchu. We were wrong. Not that the second largest adobe metropolis in the world and a couple of Unesco World Heritage sites are anything to scoff at, but HELLO, building in sand isn't as cool as building on the side of the Andes. Fact.

3. Favorite picture of the last four months: slightly drunk taxi driver. Absolute unawareness that he was in the way. Mom with Flat Stanley outside Arco Iris. Pure gold.

4. No peeing.