Back to Boston

And so it is that I am back in Boston- the travel adventure is officially over but luckily I have a great new one (out of a great new apartment) to take it's place.

After two months of asian wandering I spent two weeks eating, drinking, beach hopping and strolling around italy.  It felt funny and slightly wrong to be back in the western world but I can't say I was unhappy with the wine selection. Or the sanitation. Or the shopping. Okay, italy was awesome too....

 I spent my last week in asia at bingin  beach, Bali and I can't put into words how much i loved this place, so I'll let the photos speak for themselves. I'm glad to know that thatched hut, cobbled stair beach paradises still exist. Bingin, I hope you never change.

As hard as it is to accept that my travels are coming to an end, I am grateful for all I've gained- new friends, glimpses into beautiful new cultures, slightly improved paddle fitness, an excellent tan, and so on...  But what I am most thankful to be taking with me is a renewed awe for humans and what we are capable of.  From watching world class surfers in Bali to yogis in India to climbers scaling cliffs ropeless above the Andaman sea, from visiting ancient Angkor wats to roman ruins to modern Thai skyscrapers, from touring recycling plants in the Mumbai slums to meeting the not so uncommon traveller or tour guide who spoke over 5 languages, and from being able to call home from my iPhone to experiencing the perfect efficiency in Singapore, I was constantly amazed at what humans have been able to do and build. How incredible that we are able to climb, surf, swim, run, build, cook, share, heal, bend, drive, dive, teach, learn and love in the ways that we are.  We really are amazingly versatile. 

I am also very thankful for all of the kindness I stumbled across in my travels, often from total strangers.  I managed to spend 70 days travelling without having a single thing stolen, and almost every interaction I had was a positive one. So to all of the beautiful people I have met over the past few months, I hope that our paths will cross again, and thank you for making this time all that it has been.

I saw this trip as being a once in a lifetime treat at the outset, but now I thoroughly hope that this is not the last time I am able to travel this way. If nothing else, there is no way I am letting my life (or even the next decade) pass me by without returning to bingin beach. Andrew, I hope you're up for it! 

This will be my last blog post, so thanks to everyone for reading, even through sappy posts like this one. Having never done this before i was pleasantly surprised by how much i enjoyed posting and receiving positive feedback from all of you. I only hope I can repay the favor one day when you set out on your own adventures.

To all of my faithful readers, i.e. the 3 of you who read this blog... Maybe 4 now that Brooke has discovered it (even though he was the one who encouraged me to do it! And yes Brooke, I did send you the link about 2 months ago in an email. And you responded and asked why I was awake at 7am on a Sunday). But I digress.

To all of you, I am sorry for the tardiness of this post.  I have been extremely busy indulging in all of my favorite things. I have to say I feel slightly guilty that my travel has been so darn easy and spoiling! I envisioned slightly more challenge and hardship but the road in SE Asia is so well traveled that other than the occasional 15 hour bus-ferry-van-bus travel days and scam attempts, it's been smooth sailing.

 Lately I have mostly been beach hopping. I spent a week in Railey and Au Nang with Hilary who graciously decided to take a last minute vacation to join. Highlights- the Railey beach itself (see photos), seeing muay Thai fighting, and "soloing" which means rock climbing without ropes above the ocean so you either fall or jump into deep water. I got to about 40 ft a few times and learned that the best way to avoid panic is to jump the second you reach the top.

My next beach destination was  Koh Samui where Leigh and I spent a glorious night in a luxury hotel with about 30 couples on their honeymoon- and they were all about 45 too so maybe honeymoons for marriage number 2 or 3. Next was Koh Pangyan for the half moon party- pretty much the exact opposite of a honeymoon, this was a neon paint covered rave in the jungle full of drunk 20 somethings that ran until 6 am. Taking a ferry to Koh Tao and doing my first day of scuba the next morning was an unwise choice, but seeing eels, giant grouper, barracuda an clown fish on the dives that week made it undoubtedly worth the while. Highlights- everything about scuba, lady boy cabaret, beers on the beach for sunset and fire dancers.

All of this have been peppered with amazing weather (and thankfully Ac rooms for respite from the 95 plus days), piggish amounts of Thai food, sampling of excellent new fruits and lots of attempts to call Andrew (I know I know you're in class... But pick up your phone!).

I managed to round out all of this indulgence with a few days in Siem Reap, Cambodia to see Angkor Wat. The temple ruins have been just as extraordinary as everyone said but what I have been most pleasantly surprised about is how much I like the town itself, especially the markets.  Plus there are so many Khmer variations of fried noodles for me to sample (much better than my microwave noodle bowls)  and they are all so savory and flavorful! Thank you, MSG.  Being in Cambodia has also made me how little I know about the Vietnam war and SE Asian history so I've been trying to learn as much as wikipedia on my iPhone allows.

Bedtime for me now- another 12 hour travel day lies ahead.  But only two more days until Bali!!

Wat Po, Bangkok

Railay Beach

Rock climbing in Railay

Romantic infinity pool with Leigh, Koh Samui

Off the scuba boat in Koh Tao

Koh Tao Sunset

Angkor Wat

Festivals

I have happened into the good fortune of going to two huge festivals in the past two weeks- one in Varkala, India and one in Chaing Mai, Thailand.  Festivals are a wonderful (and also very efficient) glimpse into a culture- plus they tend to be a unique way to interact with locals.  The thai teenagers attacking my "Farang" self with super soakers during Songkran might not have spoken english but that kind of interaction doesn't really require any language.

 The festival in India was, I think, for a Hindu god who was a reincarnation of Shiva and the god of the local temple.  I tried to learn about Hinduism a bit more while in India, and although I think I have a slightly better handle on it, there are so many gods and demi-gods and reincarnations of the gods (I think like 10,000) that I never quite got a complete understanding of what the festival was really about.  Regardless, the last night there was a massive parade that involved people on fire, crossdressers, elephants, firecrackers, and several floats that looked like they would have fit in well at Mardi Gras.  One of the floats had a giant TRex on it.  Not sure what that had to do with the Shiva reincarnate.  

Songkran in Chaing Mai was a bit more wild- basically its a city wide water fight where you can't walk outside without someone dumping a bucket of water on you or drenching you with super soakers.  Its a bit like a combination of Seafair and Bay to Breakers, but with more families and slightly less blacking-out.  The highlight of the 2 days was when we invited ourselves onto a pickup truck holding a bunch of Thai guys, one of whom was dressed up like a sexy (female) cupid and was dancing on top of the cab most of the time. 

Sadly I have no photos since my camera would have gotten soaked if I had taken it out.

The rest of my time in Chiang Mai included visits to Buddhist temples, wonderful meals with Julia and a trip to the farm where she has worked for the last year.  Her Burmese family there were great hosts- they made the most delicious BBQ short ribs I have ever had and showed us some sweet Burmese dance moves.  The temples I have visited have been ornately impressive and beautiful, but I've been surprised how organized and institutionalized buddhism is here. The temples are full of people praying to Buddha figures, and although I had always thought of Buddhism as more of a philosophy than a dogmatic religion, it looks just like every other religion I've seen, and even has rights-of-passages similar to Judaism and Christianity.

I'm now in Bangkok for 2 days where I am checking out more temples, etc. before heading to Krabi with Hilary and then Koh Samui and Koh Tao with Leigh.  If I blog for the next 2 weeks, it will probably be pretty boring- I doubt you'll want to read about me chillin on a beach. I have also changed my plans a bit and decided to go to Bali for a week- I don't know anything about it other than that I will get to surf more there, so if anyone has been there and has any advice, let me know!

Disclaimer for photos: the computer I am using right now won't let me upload photos from my camera so for this blog I am working from my Iphone camera and photos friends have emailed me- credit to Ieva for a few of these!

Drummers at Varkala Festival

Firewoman at Varkala festival

Buddha and I at Wat Doi Suthep

Monks on the Ferry

Hello from Varkala!  As I write this I'm sipping on an apple-beet-carrot juice (Lizzy you would love the fresh juice selection here), eating some lunchtime momos (great tibetan dumpling things), and looking out the window of this internet cafe at the Varkala cliffs and beaches.  So basically, life is great here.

I ended my time in Mumbai with some great food and tourist activities, and headed south for a few days in Kovalum (beach town #1) before coming to Varkala (beach town #2).  My days have been filled with clear morning surf sessions at palm-forest-lined beaches, giant group brunches in the Soul and Surf garden that are definitely superior to Rex's (sorry Tim), afternoons of lounging and reading, amazing curries and tandooris, frequent power outages, elephants and firecrackers, yoga, dramatic thunderstorms, and finally attempts to get cool enough to fall asleep in the 85+ nights.  Though all of these things add up to a happy Deb, what has really made my time so special this last week has been the people that I have met.

The Soul and Surf crew (Soul and Surf is the surf /yoga retreat in Varkala) has a wonderful cast of characters.There's the british couple, Ed and Sofie, who run Soul and Surf, plus two british couples and a Singaporean couple staying there as well.  All wonderfully witty and fun and incredibly welcoming and friendly even though I'm here by myself and about 8 years younger than most of them.  Out at the surf beach we met Richard, an Australian about my age who is traveling with his Mom, who is in her late 60s and has platinum blond hair and is generally awesome.  Richard is the best surfer I've ever seen in person and yesterday he taught this little Indian boy to swim which was incredible, partly because it was so adorable but mostly because this boy was about 7, from a small fishing village, and somehow had never been swimming before.  It seems that most Indians who are not active fisherman, even people from beach towns and fishing villages, don't swim.  Women wade in in their Sari's, if at all, and most everyone watches us surfing as if we're a freak show, except for the one fisherman who has learned how to surf in his fishing kayak, which he frequently capsizes in bigger waves.  Other than our surfing fisherman friend, the waves are wonderfully empty.

Richard introduced us to Joy and Casey, an enigmatic couple from Malibu who live in Mumbai and spent an entire dinner semi-lecturing on the concepts of duality, Dharma, and reincarnation among other topics. Casey said things like "So everything is polar right? For every yes there is a no, for every up there's a down, for every positive pole on a molecule there a negative one. So we're the same way.  Your 7th chakra is negative and your first is positive, and so if you can move your energy towards your head, your positive pole, then you will be closer to Dharma.  It's very simple but by sitting at a computer all day we're pushing all of our energy down and moving further away".  Normally this sort of monolouge would make me either laugh or gag, but the way that Casey spoke about these ideas seemed a little too humble and honest to be contrived.

Another colorful dou here is Laurie and Varghees; they are our surf guides with all of the style and mannerisms you would expect from SoCal surfer dudes, except that Laurie is from the UK and Vargees is from a town near Kovalum.  There is a small surf school there where I guess a Danish guy is helping kids stay in school and also learn to surf- Varghees came from that program and is now also helping to run it.  Ieva is a surfing, yoga-teaching American who is a sommelier on Nantucket in the summer and travels in the winter- she is like a cool older sister and I trust her enough that I actually agreed to ride around town on the back of her scooter, which turned out to be much more fun and breezy, and less terrifying, than anticipated.  Mom, please do not have a heart attack, I promise I am being safe!

Kumari is the last person that I can't leave out-she has a one-table restaurant in her backyard in the jungle (you can't get there by car you have to walk the last bit on a dirt path) that serves the best food I've had in India, and probably some of the best vegetation food I've ever had period.  I can say I enjoyed it immensely despite the cow shed about 10 yards away that frequently emitted urination sounds.  Kumari makes 13 different curry-based dishes for her guests and because I heard she hates having photos taken, I was only able to capture the food itself- the picture below gives you an idea, although it really doesn't do her, or the food, real justice.

I will be sad to leave Varkala when I take off for Thailand in a few days, and I highly recommend this place to anyone traveling around Asia.  In addition to the surfing and beaching there are many other things to do here (temples, festivals, backwater tours, safaris etc) that I haven't even gone into in this post.  Sorry for being so long-winded on this one, and if you have made it to this point in the post, thank you for reading!  I'll report back after the craziness of Songkran in Chaing Mai has ended and I'm back on some beach in southern Thailand.

The Jeep.  We fit 9-13 people+surfboards in this lovely little blue coach every morning.

View from the Kovalum Lighthouse

An elephant getting his morning bath at Neyer Dam Elephant Sanctuary.  This young elephant was not being well behaved- his trainer is attempting to get him to sit down in this photo.

Kumari's curry magnificence



Laurie, Ieva and me at J-Bay.  San Franciscans, please note the baywatch swim suit from Bay-to-Breakers; never thought I would use it again but it turns out to be much better than a rash guard for surfing!



On day four in Bombay.  And what a colorful four days it has been- one part vegas high-rolling, one part tour of a developing country, and one part Mexico beach vacation.  

The vegas high-rolling part: All I will say for this is thanks to a glorious party and evening of clubbing that Win and Hilary arranged last night, I am a bit out of sorts this morning, but will attempt to write a blog post anyway (as a have a computer for the first time since I've been here).  Also, a huge thanks to Win for being such an excellent host this week!

The tourist part: One of the highlights of my time so far has been the slum tour I took yesterday.  An NGO called Reality Tours runs a tour of the Dharavi slum and uses the profits to fund a school and community center there.  Dharavi is the largest slum in Asia and holds over a million people; it is also where slumdog millionaire was filmed.  The tour guides really focus on trying to show you the entrepreneurial and positive sides of the slum, of which there were a surprising number.  The most notable is the full-scale plastic recycling operation which is carried out in small, unventilated, low-tech spaces and on rooftops.  The slum was striking, depressing, smelly, and sometimes uplifting in most of the ways you might imagine, but one thing I was continually impressed by was how clean the people living there seemed to remain given the conditions they were in.   I felt like the women in their vibrantly colored saris generally appeared much cleaner and nicer that did our group of tourists who had all spent the night in clean hotel rooms or apartments with showers, rather than in 5x10 rooms with no beds and five other people.

Another thing that has been interesting is how lush and green this city is.  Although it is incredibly dirty, and all the buildings look moldy and dilapidated (even if they are new and beautiful inside, which a few are) due to the heat and humidity and extreme pollution, Mumbai can still look quite beautiful because of all of the street trees. A great case study in how greenery can completely transform an urban landscape.

The Mexico beach vacation part: Details for this part of the trip make for a boring blog post, but include absolutely delicious food, an anthropologie inspired-yoga studio, and hanging out at resort pools.  Hopefully some spa-ing to come soon.

I am heading to Varkala (in Kerala) on Wednesday, and assuming I can find a computer and some internet there, I will write another blog post then!

I miss you all and would love to hear updates! Please send me emails!

At the gate of India

At Nariman Point

At Jain Temple Rebecca and I stumbled upon

Street Scene

View from Win's Patio

Scaffolding India-style (sticks of bamboo)

             

As promised, several scenic couples photos from Carlsbad Caverns, New Orleans and Smith Lake Alabama, plus one of Andrew chowing down a beignet.  The southern road trip was a great time- Lot's of BBQ, deep-fried everything, bluegrass, cowboy hats, and sunshine.  Ended with stops at JT's in Pitt, Sarah's in New York, Hannah's, and of course Andrew's glorious dorm room in Boston.  Thank you to all of our hosts along the way!

I am leaving for Mumbai tomorrow- Please send me updates, I am sure I will be missing everyone in the US!

Made it to New Mexico!  Andrew arrives tonight, so many scenic couple photos soon to come.

Thanks to Corey and Anna for hosting Tim and I in two amazing ski towns.  Also, thanks to Kaitlin and the Packard team for the GPS- you kept me from getting lost many times on my Park City to Albuquerque drive today!