Our time in Bali included a magical few days at Villa Bukit Segara a private residence that has been converted into a 4 room hotel. The staff are wonderful as is the hotel and grounds. As you will see in the video, the boys spent most of the time in the pool and Aleix and I relaxed in the shade reading books. It was a welcome break from the more intense traveling we had been doing for months, and set out on again after our stay there.
We circumnavigated Bali over a few weeks and in Thailand we explored Bangkok and then traveled to Phuket. Both countries presented us opportunities for unexpected experiences and interactions with nomadic travelers from elsewhere in the world as well as Balinese and Thais who wanted to talk about the world and share their life experiences.
Our time in Jordan was too short. The exceptional sense of history and natural environment was only trumped by the warmth and hospitality of the people.
We stayed in a Bedouin encampment, we approached Petra from the North overland by camel and a dramatic hike through the mountains, floated in the Dead Sea and got to know Jordan and its people.
It is Bryce’s favorite country of the trip so far. Wadi Rum was an adventure and everyone we encountered was thoughtful in our conversations about the state of the world, and the difference of opinion on that topic made these conversations fascinating for us and the boys.
I have a collection of photos of our experience that I will post, along with some of the stories, in the weeks after we return home
It is hard to capture several weeks in South Africa in three minutes. We traversed several wildlife parks including Thula Thula, the park established by Lawrence Anthony the author of The Elephant Whisperer. In Pilanesberg (a self-driving park) armed with water, snacks, and our camera we spent the day maneuvering our compact rental car up dirt tracks and down dry river beds periodically passing signs that read, “Do not get out of your vehicle. Dangerous animals.” Within feet of elephants, lions, rhinos, water buffalo, warthogs and other animals we sat quietly in awe.
While in an open jeep tracking two young lionesses we realized that we had inserted ourselves between them and the prey they were stalking. The wild elephant matriarch and her herd at Thula Thula are described in detail in Anthony’s book. We were lucky enough to encounter her and her family on two different days. To meet her and look into the eyes of a 30-year-old elephant whose story we had read, as she considers you across a few feet of open space was incredible.
We spent two days and a night in Soweto with a family whose elders were forcibly moved to Soweto when the Apartheid government demolished Sophiatown, a thriving mixed race area in Johannesburg, in 1955. We toured Soweto with a woman who had been a student in the Soweto student uprisings of 1976 as a young girl. The youngest of the students marched in the front of the protest in hopes that police would not fire on them. Between 200 and 700 students were killed that day. Our guide was shot and subsequently arrested and interrogated.
And, we spent some time in a shantytown with a young man and his brother. They live in one of the hundreds of shacks; no plumbing, no heating, and one electric light run off of a hotwire that is tapped into a nearby electric pole. The government places portable toilets around the periphery of the town that are emptied twice a week. Drinking and cleaning water is drawn from communal taps.
In contrast to our time in Soweto, we spent two nights in an airbnb with an Afrikaner host, a semi-retired financial and political journalist who spent 30 years writing for an Afrikaans language daily paper, in one of the most affluent section of Johannesburg. He shared a direct and articulate critique of today’s ANC and its current leaders. A critique that aligned with what we heard in Soweto and elsewhere.
There is a sense that the ANC is living off of its legacy. One black activist we spent time with in Soweto argued that the racial apartheid of the past has morphed into an economic apartheid that benefits current corrupt political leaders, regardless of race.
Our adventures and experiences in South Africa rival anywhere else we have been.
One of our goals on this trip was getting the boys PADI open water certified, which we accomplished in the Bahamas. Since then, we have gone diving in Thailand and on the Great Barrier Reef. This is a video compilation of our first few dives in the Bahamas.
After a few days of recovery at “Mike’s house” in Vientiane our family of four was off to our next stop on our around the world adventure. North, to the city of Luang Prabang. We had planned for the city to become our base for four days, we ended up staying eight. So far, we tend to slow down rather than speed up.
The city and the surrounding area is home to about 50,000 people and until the communist takeover of the country in 1975 it was the seat of government and royal capital of the Kingdom of Laos.
The city is also home to a number of temples and monasteries so encountering groups of monks is a common occurrence. The old city sits on a peninsula between the Nam Khan and Mekong Rivers. Over the last eight to ten years it has become a more frequent stop for travelers who previously would skip northern Laos in their travels through Vietnam and northern Thailand. It seems as if nearly every resident has either opened a guest house, small shop, or restaurant. The ambiance is relaxed and the people are as friendly as anywhere we have been.
The city also has a few characters as well.
One of whom is Ruth Borthwick an Australian who runs a book exchange and one of the nicer restaurants in Luang Prabang along with a cooking school which we attended. Ruth’s uncle was the Australian Ambassador to Laos in the 1970s when Ruth’s parents were assassinated in a bus between Luang Prabang and Vientiane. One twist in the story is that her father was the twin brother of the ambassador. Of the 35 passengers on the ambushed bus only four were killed. It seems quite likely that the real target was the ambassador.
Ruth is a woman of strong opinion, many of which we agreed with while others we did not. It was an excellent experience for the boys to encounter someone who was of strong opinion and willing to engage in a discussion on the state of the world.
The book exchange is set up as a one-to-one trade with a small fee that goes towards putting books in Lao schools. Or, if one doesn’t have a book to exchange the books can be purchased for a reasonable price with the proceeds going towards school books. We left Ruth with all of the hard copy books we had devoured in China and tried to minimize the number of new ones we added to our packs.
The cooking class was excellent, as you can see from the photos. We met some great folks including a fun couple from Vermont. Colin was gung-ho from the start while Bryce was a bit hesitant at first and then stepped it up on the second dish. By the end of the second round of meals both boys were clearly in charge of our respective teams with Colin directing me as his “sous chef” and Bryce giving Aleix directions on what to do next.
Before we got to the cooking, we of course had to source ingredients. This involved a short ride to the market and a detailed tour of the market. As many of you know, Aleix and I have been vegan for the last few years but have abandoned that constraint (please don’t tell my cardiologist) for this trip.
A walk through the meat section of the market did push Aleix back towards the vegetarian end of the spectrum for several days. The photos don’t sufficiently reflect the variety of ingredients to be had and the sheer number of individual vendors.
Also in the photos above is a bamboo bridge across the Nam Khan river bridge, lit with a long white ribbon of lights at night. There is also a shot of it from the shore during the day. The bridge is put up at the end of the rainy season and replaces the 5 people at a time ferry boat that crosses the river during the rainy season. In the neighborhood across the river down a dark residential road past a temple is a wood fired pizza restaurant. You know you have arrived when you see the “pizza” sign in the front yard. The restaurant is around back in the rear of the house that doubles as an English language school. The owner is Canadian. He teaches school during the day and five nights a week cooks pizza and serves beer to customers who eat at tables in his garden. And, such is the reality of Southeast Asia.
We decided to save money and travel through China by train on our around the world trip. In addition to costing less than internal flights, we replaced the hassle of airports with the adventure of train stations! In the extreme, this decision meant a transit time of 26 hours from X’ian to Gualin instead of three hours had we traveled by air (a one-and-a-half-hour flight plus one and a half hours at the Xian airport.)
There are several classes of service on overnight trains in China. The highest class of service is a “soft sleeper” which is the way to go. Each compartment has four bunks (the two lower bunks serving as seats during the day.) As a family of four this was ideal. [This is a fairly good guide and description of the options. http://www.travelchinaguide.com/china-trains/soft-sleeper.htm] The train code (K,T,Z,D reveals whether a train has a soft sleeper option.
The compartment has an insulated coffee pot and at the end of each carriage is a hot water boiler the size of an upright coffin bolted to the wall. Whenever a passenger needs hot water for tea, coffee, or noodles, they walk to the boiler at the end of the carriage with the thermos. The water coming out of these contraptions is often 50 percent steam! Any concerns about the water harboring stomach ache inducing bacteria evaporates in the billowing steam and seeing the scald marks on the floor of the train.
Every Chinese person we talked to about our train trips told us, even if we only had two or three words in common between their English and our Chinese, that the food on the trains was “not good” and “price high.” So, like every other Chinese passenger we boarded the train with bags of food. In our case, oreo cookies (easy to find in China) and popcorn tub sized containers of instant noodle soup. We survived on this combination for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Just before we left China we donated several tubs of noodles to fellow travelers at a youth hostel in Beijing. It will be awhile before instant noodles are appealing again.
With only a few exceptions, every town we traveled through was surrounded by a ring of under construction apartment blocks. Mile after mile of multistory cinder and brick buildings, some complete but most between 25 and 80% finished. We would awaken in the morning, open the curtains and there they would be. The hollow dark holes that would (maybe) someday be apartments looking down on the passing train. Operation “Opera No No”
As I was hauling our suitcases up to the overhead rack and the boys and Aleix were discussing bunk assignments, we were hit with a blast of militaristic Chinese music from a scratchy speaker above the window. As we settled in and waited for the train to get underway the music continued. We couldn’t understand it but the tone certainly sounded like the singer was encouraging us to be energetic and strong in pursuit of something. The sound was so scratchy that honestly I think even a fluent Chinese speaker would have had a tough time understanding the words.
This was about 7:00pm and you could see on everyone’s faces the growing concern that the music would be with us for the entirety of the 26-hour trip. Colin found the volume control and with a smile quickly turned it down to “zero.” Sadly, the knob just kept turning, after six or eight revolutions even Colin, often our optimist in these situations, had to admit it was having no effect.
Another five minutes passed and our hope that the train getting underway would stop the music hadn’t come to pass.
“Ok,” I said, “remember that cool leatherman tool we bought with the screwdriver that is TSA approved? And, that I debated buying because we probably wouldn’t use it. This is its moment. Colin, close the door, all of you face the door and get ready to stall if the conductor tries to open it.”
I dug around in the backpack and emerged with the tool.
As I climbed up onto the upper bunk and positioned myself to unscrew the offending speaker, Colin coined a phrase that has become our touchstone when we are somewhere loud. He cheered, “Operation Opera No No is underway!”
It took a fair bit of effort to unscrew the speaker cover with dust and grim falling on the lower bunks and across the table. At one point we heard the conductor moving down the corridor. I scrambled to put the partially unscrewed cover back in place. For those of you who are old enough, the whole scene had its comedic qualities reminded me of the frequent scenes in the TV show “Hogan’s Heroes” where Hogan and his crew would move quickly to block Sergeant Shultz from seeing the hidden trap door.
The conductor passed by and I went back to work. Inside was a half dozen wires but I was able to locate the poorly taped connection that was causing the static, and with a gentle tug, silenced the speaker. I screwed the cover back on and we enjoyed silence for the remaining 25 hours. Well, actually that isn’t quite true as every 20 or 30 minutes until late in the evening and starting again at 6:00 am the next morning a vendor would come down the aisle offering snacks, drinks, or trinkets at high enough volume to penetrate the compartment walls and doors.
My father likes to say, “The difficulty with communication is the illusion it has been achieved.” In setting up our trip to The Great Wall we had asked to be taken to the least traveled portion of the wall that was accessible from Beijing. While we didn’t want to spend days getting to a remote section, we hoped that with a bit of effort we could get to a spot where we might sit quietly and ponder the architectural wonder in relative solitude.
Somehow what they heard was “we would like to see the most significant portion of the wall near Beijing.” As one might imagine, the “significant” section of something might be visited by a few more people than a “remote section.”
After a 90 minute drive we found ourselves in a traffic jam of buses full of tourists. A serious traffic jam, to the point where folks were bailing out of their buses to walk along the side of the road. As you can imagine we began to suspect we weren’t headed anywhere remote.
The guide explained that with all the VIP traffic to this section traffic can be a nightmare. Oh boy. Eventually we began crawling forward again. It reminded me a bit of arriving at the Disneyland parking lot but with more food stalls, no attendants providing directions, less space, and no lines painted in the parking lot.
After securing tickets, not a quick experience, we rode a gondola a short distance up to a higher point on the wall emerging into a crowd of Chinese tourists reminiscent of a group of SF Giants fans all in good spirits crowding through a tunnel jostling to get to their seats.
(As a side note, of the 1.3 billion citizens in China, my data indicates about 1/3 are armed with selfi sticks ready to be deployed at a moments notice.)
The guide pointed up the steep incline along the top of the wall (jam packed with folks making their way up) and said she would meet us “back here” when we were done. As she wandered off looking at her cell phone, we joined the masses (moving against the tide wasn’t really an option anyway) and slowly moved upward.
A light moment in the traffic flow.
I think Aleix’s face says it all.
About five minutes up the wall, I pulled everyone over to one side and we huddled against the railing. As the tide of happy tourists flowed around us I said, “Ok, clearly this is not what we envisioned.” Everyone’s eyes were a bit bugged out and Colin, being the shortest of us, was looking especially distraught. “We have two choices, we can be upset that this isn’t the experience we expected, which would be understandable. Or, we can decide to have a different experience, laugh at our predicament and embrace it.”
If I had hoped for a response along the lines of “Yes, Dad. Great idea, let’s do it!” I was disappointed. I could tell that if I called for a vote, option 1 was going to be a clear winner.
I tried again, “Look this is clearly a two on a scale of one to ten.” Colin’s quick response, “Really Dad, a two? I was thinking maybe one and half.” In my best Marty Feldman voice from Young Frankenstein I struck back with, “Well, it could be worse…could be raining.” That did it. We all laughed and the fun began.
Embrace the chaos!
We merged in with the crowd, exchanging “ni haos” with our jostling neighbors. We stopped for photos with the boys leaning out over the wall, talked about the poor air quality (we should have been wearing masks according to the US Embassy monitoring system) and posed for photos with folks.
Colin opted to embrace having his hair ruffled by the ladies who were declaring him cute, rather than groaning, and Bryce was a hit with the teenage girls asking for photos with him.
Aleix and I held hands (partly out of affection and partly to not get separated in the crowd) and I tried to take pictures of the portion of the wall not open to tourists so I would have them as a juxtaposition to the reality of our experience.
Hazy reality and “de-haze” filter.”
As we moved with the mass of humanity down the wall towards the exit we realized that we were headed away from where we had left our waiting guide. I mumbled to Aleix, “Holy cow, she thought we were going to go up the wall and then turn against the tide and make our way back to her? What the hell?”
We came to a juncture in the path along a large barricade and boy do I wish I had photos of what we did next. If we could only get over the series of barricades we could get back to the entrance and then “flow” with the new arrivals back to our guide’s resting spot. A Chinese gentlemen was standing next to me, clearly pondering the same thing. Our eyes met and he jumped up on the wall and around the first barricade. Not hearing a shout from an authority figure I turned to my team and said,”OK, what the heck…Geronimo!” to which Colin responded with a grin as he jumped up on the barrier.
We took a shot of the barricades on our way out, not during our escape!Just before the barricade jump
We all made it over the series of barricades! Not quite as fast as the other folks who joined us in our escape but with grins on our faces. The guide was a little surprised when she looked up from her cell phone to see us coming from the direction of the entrance.
We headed back down in the gondola to the parking lot area and started the search for our driver and his van. We asked the guide if this site was always this busy, “Oh yes, she said, very important to Chinese history, everyone comes here.”
A final note in the experience: As we made our way back to central Beijing we passed a section of wall that had only a few folks on it. Aleix asked the guide, who was texting in the front seat, “How come we didn’t go to that section?” Our guide’s response, “This part not so important.” The boys both giggled at their mother’s barley audible groan.
We are in Montreal–a quick stop between the Bahamas and Beijing. I acknowledge that this may be the first time anyone has typed the previous sentence. When we were booking our flights from the Bahamas one of the most cost effective routes was via Montreal. Once we determined that, we did a little research and discovered that adding a few days in the city, versus four hours in the airport, actually brought the ticket price down.
That resulted in my turning 50 here, instead of in Beijing. I can’t imagine a better birthday. We started the day with a brisk walk (in 22 degree weather) to the nearest metro stop, about 1.5 miles away, followed by a 5 stop metro ride and another walk to the Chinese Consulate where we stood in line for an hour to follow up on some visa issues. Once that was done, it was off to breakfast and then a metro ride across town to buy dust masks from the Canadian equivalent of Home Depot and mosquito repellent and bigger Teva’s for the boys at MEC, the Canadian version of REI.
At one point, as we walked along an industrial street on the outskirts of town, we stopped and took a picture of ourselves reflected in a dark window (above.) We were part way into a two mile walk from the metro station to the MEC store along a multi-lane highway. We were all telling stories as we walked along–no cell phones, no internet, and in no real hurry. I can’t imagine a better hour than that.
We returned to our AirBNB apartment, dropped the boys off and headed back out into the cold to buy gyros from the pizza/greek joint a couple of blocks away. After a couple of hours of working on reservations and language apps (it turns out the roughly 70 percent of the words in Thai and Lao are the same, but pronouns, negatives and a lot of common words are not) I am writing this and going to bed.
Everything that I did today, I did with Aleix by my side. I can think of no better partner with which to explore the world, relive and laugh about the adventures of the past, and dream about the adventures of the future.
This week I was certified as a PADI Open Water Diver. When we first arrived we had to do tons of paper work, get our gear, and get into the pool. In the pool we practiced and learned skills that we needed to dive; we spent all day in the pool doing this so that we could go on a open water dive the next day.
The next day we got on a boat and went out to the David Tucker wreck first–it was amazing–my first look into the under water world. From the moment I did that first giant stride into the water to when I hauled myself back out I was in a whole different world. We were the only humans there, visitors in an amazing new world in which the corals were the plant life and the fish were the dominant species of the reef with crabs scuttling around feeding and hiding. The human race knows more about the surface of Mars than about what lies beneath the waves of our oceans.
The next dive we did that day was called “James Bond” because they sunk the ships for the James Bond movies, Never Say Never Again and another one. One of the wrecks used to be a plane but we could not tell because it was so old and covered in beautiful coral. After we saw the wrecks we swam through a coral tree forest that our instructor had planted.
The next day we got back on a boat and went out to the sand chute. We swam along a 6,500 foot drop off that went from 60 feet to 6,500 like a cliff. It was slightly terrifying but awesome. After that we went to one of the of the only natural wrecks here. We swam up to the propeller and the rudder, saw the breach in the hull, took pictures of us holding femurs (don’t worry they were fake. a prop from a movie shot years ago) and saw a Caribbean reef shark.
“Hello! Welcome to Stuart Cove’s dive shop!” The first words I heard on my journey to becoming a diver. My family and I walked into the shop and registered for my and my brother’s dive lessons. The first thing we did was a bunch of medical forms and various paperwork. Then we got our gear and went to the pool. After learning how to put on our gear properly we jumped into the pool. The first confined water dive was fairly basic. We reviewed skills that we had learned in the e-learning section. We were also taught new skills. We did the rest of the confined water dives that day, they ranged from easy skills to more advanced skills that we couldn’t complete in confined water. The next day we dove in the ocean.
Breath, pause, breath, pause. Everything moved in slow motion. Sluggishly, I swam onward, breathing deeply, looking around me. That was my first dive in the ocean. I was amazed; I had only seen coral in aquariums and models.
Diving felt dream-like, nothing felt real under the water, but it was very very real. I felt weightless, like I was in space. However, it took a few more dives in order to get used to maneuvering in a three dimensional environment. After riding on a boat for a half hour we geared up and jumped in the water. After our descent we, my family and GG our brilliant instructor, gathered in a circle on the bottom and practiced certain skills that we had to do in the ocean. For example, I had to take a deep breath and take my regulator out of my mouth, breathing small bubbles, I let go of my regulator. Then, leaning to my right side I windmilled my arm and found the regulator, I placed it back in my mouth and cleared it by blowing forcefully into the regulator. I then breathed a cautious breath. Luckily I had successfully cleared it of water, I was able to breathe normally. After exploring the wreck that we were diving near, we surfaced and got back on the boat.
The second dive that day was much like the first, except we were at the two James Bond wrecks from Never Say Never Again and Thunderball.
That night I slept very well.
The next day we dove on “The Wall.” The Wall is essentially a, well, wall. It goes from 60 feet to 6,500 feet. It starts shallow, then it becomes a void. We dove along the wall after doing skills and it was freaky. There were fish everywhere and corals growing along the wall, it was very impressive.
The last open water dive we needed for our certification was amazing. We dove on a huge natural wreck of a transport ship. We first had to do a few final skills like a swim test, but after that we were able to descend onto the ship. We could see inside the hull of the ship because there was a large hole on the top of it. There was coral growing inside the ship and on the hull. We even saw a shark swim by the ship! This dive was the best so far.
