Events are overtaking my capacity to blog about them. Into the gap I've been posting status updates on Facebook. I spent the day reviewing the course itinerary with our redoubtable local organizer, Ms. Chadathip from the appropriately named Noble Truth Travels.
After a break for a nap and to struggle with a manditory transition to gmail at my University, and fiddling with a new song, I went downstairs to have dinner. It was 9:50. The receptionist stopped me and told me I couldn't go out after 10. He pantomimed soldiers with guns in the streets.
New York Times photo. To be clear, I have only seen the inside of
my hotel since this occurred. Out of an abundance of caution, I didn't even
get to grab dinner.
Well, there's one thing a professor in a foreign land likes to hear 2 hours before his students are due to land, and that's that the city they're landing in has a new curfew and people pantomiming guns. I returned to my room to find Mike Miller had posted a link to a New York Times article on a coup in Thailand, which certainly clicked with the receptionists efforts. I turned on the television to find the The National Peace and Order Maintain Council has a new hit program. It must be popular because it's playing on all channels in Bangkok now. It consists of a flag and the sigils of 5 armed forces, backed by shrill patriotic songs. I’ve been listening for about and hour. A news caster occasionally interrupts to provide updates. I cannot fault him for providing those updates in Thai. It increases my zeal to study the language more while I am here.
I was interrupted there by a reporter from the New York Post. He’d been calling hotels at random for the past hour and half asking receptionists if they could put him through to an Americans staying at the hotel. Talk about your shots in the dark. Not too impressive on the receptionist's mores for confidentiality. Still, I gave the reporter the update -- all quiet in Bangkok. I hope that was the right thing to do.
Here are some headlines from the Bangkok Post website: “Deadlock forces Prayuth to go for coup." Another article is entitled, "Some may call it a coup d'etat. Some may say it’s about time. Some may realise that it’s the only realistic solution to the political impasse." Hm.
According to the Bangkok Post, this is the 12th military coup d'etat in Thailand since the end of absolute monarchy in 1932, which is one per 7 years on average. Almost like an election cycle. Very sad.
Visas mean you'll need pictures. Lots of pictures.
Hard travel. I thought I'd left it behind, but somehow its in my blood. I knew there was a flaw in the plan of the Malay Peninsula. Simply put, there is no Malay train service to Malacca, namesake of the most traveled waterway on earth, the Straits of Malacca, and there is no Thai train service to the beautiful Andaman Coast which is the west coast of Thailand on the Indian Ocean. No train service means dealing with operators in a little concrete shacks with shifty bus tickets. On top of that in some fluke that even the ticket agent in Kuala Lumpur couldn't understand all sleepers tickets on that train had been sold, leaving me in "superior class," which, ironically, is what the lowest class is called to make you feel like you're not the lowest class. This is excellent practice for when the kids arrive.
Anyway, that much training and busing dulls the mind, but did give me enough time to tell one last pre-departure tale that wanted telling. The story of our visas.
This corner of the world has been tamed. First by Hindus and Buddhists migrating down the west coast of the Malay Peninsula, followed by Chinese traders and Islam. These ideas were in turn followed by Catholicism and mercantilism, brought by the Portuguese, and then the Protestantism and capitalism of the Dutch and then the British. Civilization has accumulated like lacquer, and the resulting infrastructure must be admired.
Like one of Singpore’s throwbacks to its British origins: the disembodied voice in the subway warns you to “mind the gap” as you exit the car. It must be ironic, though. There is about a ½” of space between the door and the platform. You would literally have to aim your stiletto heal to even notice it.
Even the rain has been tamed. This morning it came down outside my Chinatown hotel came from above like a cataract. From one colonial-style balconied side of the road one could race to the other, pass a few more shop fronts and come to the bus stop without getting any wetter. The bus came at the precise minute my map app said it would (I know – backpacking with Google Maps is cheating. A little). My long haul bus to Malacca slid through embarkation and Malay immigration without snagging any of the 30 passengers. The bus continues to glide along smooth asphalt – fresh white lines, guard rails and a median fiery with bougainvillea – that would be the envy of any highway department stateside. The rain has subsided and plantations of palms blur past. These are the edges of the green channel through which we’re passing. Nothing beyond is visible.
One day in Singapore and one cousin-in-law to hunt down after a long separation. I knew something was afoot, though, when I awoke with an old folk tune in my head. I played it a few times in the early 90’s but not for 20 years. It’s about freedom, about moving on. In honesty it evokes the freedom of death, but for me it was the freedom of laying down my burdens, of travel. When I learned how close to the ocean my hotel was, I realized I needed to make the first musical video blog of the journey. With apologies to Leadbelly and with some disconcertingly high notes,
Take this hammer carry it to the captain
Tell him I’m gone.
If he asks you was I running
Tell him I was flying.
Isn't Chinatown in Singapore a little redundant?
"It's even more Chinese," Krissy assured me.
Krissy and I are about to weigh into the Chinatown mayhem.
After getting re-situated, my cousin Krissy and I met up and wandered down the Singapore river, stopping the Museum of Asia Civilizations. Since they didn’t look too friendly to photographers I cannot provide photo-documentation, but at the same time the collection didn’t draw me to ask a guard or sneak a shot. It was nice, though, to learn about the Filipina’s experience in Singapore, relations with native Singaporeans, and general 20-something angst. Anita’s Filipino family is really interesting, and I’m always glad to have a chance to see them and learn the latest.
(Video and photos with iPhone and wide angle lens)
A flight from Minneapolis. The silence of a jumbo jet
following the sun around the Earth. By quiet consent all shades were down and
the lights were off in a barely successful attempt to convince the baby in row 23
that it was well past his bedtime. That baby taught me something. I no longer
wonder why airlines do not try to help their passengers anticipate jetlag simply
by setting the plane’s schedule to the destination’s time; for some passengers
and their parents it is achievement enough to survive for 12 hours in an
aluminum tube hurling through the air.
Sundown over a 757. Narita Airport. iPhone with fisheye lens FTW
Behind the lowered shades the sun was blinding, reflecting
off the tops of clouds. We passed close to Kamchatka where we will finish the
journey in 3 month’s time. I caught a glimpse of Aleutian islands through a gap, but the
peninsula remained shrouded. A rainbow welcomed our arrival in Tokyo. Continuing
on to Singapore, a gibbous moon rose over the Pacific and glimmered off my
wing. I passed through custom’s green channel at 2:30 in the morning less tarnished than I
expected.
Video #3: Age of Discovery
24 hours in transit provided enough time (and barely enough battery life) to finish editing the last of the pre-departure interview blogs.
This video is about the kids' perceptions of the wide world and what is awaiting us.
Video #4: The Road Ahead
A few folks have commented that it's confusing whose going where when and how we're getting from S.E. Asia to N.E. Asia. That is an accurate impression, by the way.
So this video outlines the route in more detail, with the requisite young commentary.
There are signs that it's time for the Tip to Tundra tour to begin. But they weren't the portents I was looking for. Would it be too much to have a dream of trekking through the jungled hills of Laos, or to stumble on an article about ponies in Mongolia? How about a break in the clouds with a beam of light shining from the West?
I get the raw, unprocessed portents. My bike got a flat tire on the way home from work yesterday. I was hopeful and in a hurry, so I cycled a further quarter mile. It will stay flat all summer. A sink stopped and in snaking it out I broke the pipes -- in two places. Kind of puts the ha in handyman. But I wasn't defeated -- I went to get the replacement pipes, only to leave them leaky and in need of a real plumber. Closing one of my handy zippy things, the zipper came off in my hand. I had to sit down. Sitting down I remembered all the office things that still needed done. I got 4 hours of sleep last night to help get as tired as possible when I got on the plane this afternoon. I'm clumsy and whiplashed.
It's not like this departure snuck up. Back in April I imagined there would be this clean break between the spring in the U.S. and summer in Asia. Starting today. Looks like life wants me to have mixed drinks, a cocktail of quotidian professor-all stuff intermixed with train reservations and tropical weather.
If that's what I get, I guess that's what I'll take.
A few numbers for posterity:
1: outfit sprayed with ecocide supposedly to repel mosquitos
2: copies of passport besides the original, stored in various bags
2 and 2: shorts and long pants
2.5: total TB storage across various devices and cards
3: lenses for my iPhone camera (yeah, I'm geeking out)
3.5: months on the road
4 and 5: t-shirts and underwear
6: graduate students left to fend for themselves over the summer (chin-up, guys, I know you got this.)
43: pounds of baggage. (Knowing that's just 20 kgs helps a little). It actually rattles in my backpack, but that's because my backpack is too big.
My step-father, Paul, was going to drive me to the airport later. With kisses and hard hugs the kids left for school this morning. Anita shed a tear on her way to work. Departures bring a tangy sentimentality. I miss them all already.
The departure is at hand.
Thursday, May 8, 2014
Here is the (much anticipated?) first video blog, about planning and scheduling. Enjoy!
In other news, the Russians called yesterday and said they had rushed through my visa because I was leaving so soon. Isn't that sweet. Go Seattle consulate! It looks like I might have my passport back in time to travel.
Sunday, May 4, 2014
Roseville, MN, USA
It's off to the doctor's office for an armful of medicine and a brainful of anxiety.
That night Anita and I got into a heated debate. Really. The doctor went through a litany of potential harms of traveling in East Asia -- the kids relay some of them in the video, but they couldn't keep up with the butcher's bill of hazards from nighttime mosquitos (malaria and japanese encephalitis), all-the-time moquitos (! denge fever), and the general warning not to operate motor vehicles at night. No wonder as a population so few of us hold passports (check out this story from Forbes celebrating that now a third of Americans possess passports although this "surge," such as it is, is largely due to increased requirements for travel to Canada and Mexico). Go to the Centers for Disease Control website is like opening a Pandora's box of suicidal mayhem (all the more so if you're inclined to check the box labeled "Traveling with Children").
I was asking, "Is there a better way to contextualize this material?" In the video our nurse, Mary, for example, pointed out you could die walking in the clinic's parking lot. Travel clinics use the tried-and-true tactics of driver's education movies to scare their patients into safer behaviors. Yes, but the subtext is, "Better to stay at home." My point was that people across Asia regularly face these obstacles. There are pharmacies and doctors. This is not terra incognita. Trust in the local people, was my argument.
But I hit a trigger. Anita took my concerns about how these threats were presented as being dismissive of the threats themselves. In fact, some might take the fact that I would consider going on such a trip at all as a nonchalant attitude toward the safety of my children. (That's a hook for comments, should the spirit move you.) She pointed out that the people most at risk when traveling to developing countries are immigrants who now live in North America or elsewhere in the developed world returning to visit family.
Of course there is truth in that, as well. And there is truth in the fact that we will get sick as sure as the sun rises -- the trick being to make sure it's not one of the nasty types that brings the excursion to a standstill or an early end. At the same time, I'm hoping there is a way to encourage us to go on these adventures, where the opportunity to learn something about our shared humanity and the distinctiveness of cultures provides a sufficient counter-weight to our homebody habits.
Many thanks to Mary, our nurse at the Travel Medicine Clinic who was game to be in our video blog. Thanks also to Darryl Harper, a dear friend from college and a great musician, for allowing us to use his groovy music from the Onus.
Saturday, May 3, 2014
Roseville, MN, USA
If you gotta start somewhere, but you don't know where, you
are the best justification there is for the public library.
Planning
Roads and rails are wonderful because they give you options. But options can be paralyzing. We knew we wanted to go generally from south to north. We knew we would have basically the length of summer vacation, which in our house is well known to Phineas and Ferb viewers to be 104 days ("There's 104 days of summer vacation / And school comes along just to end it / So the annual problem for our generation / Is finding a good way to spend it.")
I'm completely embarrassed to admit this, but Phineas and Ferb is not a go-to source for summer planning. It didn't take too long with an Excel spreadsheet for me to determine that our schools give us a paltry 80 days from close to commencement. (Funny, that seemed like a lot longer last summer.) Off to the Library
I finally read the fine print on my property taxes a few weeks ago and learned that I'm paying over $200 per year to the county library. Don't get me wrong, it's a nice library, but that means there are residents of Roseville who are eating my library lunch -- they're getting top value while I'm bottom-feeding on Amazon Prime. Well, enough of that. If we've only got 80 days of summer, we can't let this to chance. We need top sites; we need seriously moving stuff to anchor our itinerary; we need stuff that is going to blow three little minds on a regular basis. We needed guidebooks.
There are 3 kinds of travel guidebooks. The first guidebooks in history were travelogues such as those that have come down to us from the likes of the 14th century's Marco Polo, and Ibn Battutah. These argue that if you step outside your door it's amazing and you probably won't die. By the 15th century, after the collapse of the peace governed by the Mongolian Empire, this kind of travelogue morphed into something a little more conflicted -- like Afanasy Nikitin's travelogue in which all of his worldly possessions are taken from him a few miles after he steps out of his Russian door, or Nicolo de’ Conti, who was forced to convert to Islam upon returning from India through the middle east. The travelogue from an early tourist in Florida and the Gulf Coast, the 16th century's Alvar Nunez Cabeza De Vaca is hard to beat for grit in the face of improbable misfortune. These later travelogues indulged a sense of wonder about the wider world, but also suggested that travel was a powerful source of natural selection.
The second type of guidebook highlights selection, too, but not natural selection. The Michelin guides, originally developed by a tire company trying to get rich Frenchmen driving, started giving aways stars that people -- some people -- still covet to this day. I'll also place into this category the various travel photo folios. These guides fetishize the travel experience -- they lend to the impression that some experiences are more worthy than others; gather up your fist of dollars, folks, because this is really worth it. These guidebooks would be helpful for deciding which package tour to go on, for example. So yes, I got a dose of these out of the library -- they have the well-composed pictures taken at just the right moment to capture the imagination.
It was the third type of guidebook that we used to carve our route from amongst the many roads and rail lines of East Asia. Guidebooks such as the Lonely Planet and Rough Guides (no sponsorship deals yet) were the go-to source for determining whether point A really could link to point B -- for example, how do you get from Luang Prabang in Laos to China (yes, you can take a bus)? How often does the bus run (daily)? Are there good places to get off the train in Mongolia before getting to Ulan Baator to trek into the Gobi Desert (probably not)? The Lonely Planet's Thorn Tree forum and TripAdvisor.com also helped when it was time to drill-down.
Okay, so now we had guidebooks and, of course, the internet. What about constraints?
Real world meets real world
It is one thing to be an academic like me and tell your colleagues and graduate students that you're not writing papers or grants or supervising research for the summer. Somehow life goes on. It's quite another to be, like my wife, a physician and tell your large employer that you're outta here, so long, good luck. So she did some soul searching and determined that she could travel for a month. Furthermore, she had no desire to see Singapore or Malaysia (so much for the Tip), and frankly didn't care to spend too much time in Thailand. Here's what I loved about that: that meant she wanted to dive in to the adventurous parts of S.E. Asia right off the bat. But these constraints meant that if this was going to be a proper Tip to Tundra tour, that it was up to me. I would have to fly to Singapore (1.3 degrees N. of the equator); I would have to touch the Straits of Melaka for us all. So the tour would begin before my course in Thailand and before the 80 days of summer vacation. So be it.
With only a month, that meant she would be leaving the tour with 50 days to go. That is a shame -- after that it won't be "the whole family" overland. It'll be Dad and 3 kids. What are you going to do, though? We'll survive. We'll invite others to join us. We'll show them the photo spreads. In short, we'll do this thing.
But it did mean the first 28 days had to pop for Anita. No Thailand -- straight to Cambodia. Then Vietnam then, via the road-less-traveled into Laos and from Laos to Yunnan province in extreme Southwestern China. We'll be sending Anita off in Kunming.
From there on we focused on things we'd like to see as we head northward -- Terracotta Soldiers, the Great Wall, the Gobi Desert and the great steppes of Mongolia, Lake Baikal in Siberia and that extremely unlikely peninsula hanging off the edge of Asia: Kamchatka.
Comments or suggestions?
Next time I'll run-down the formalities of independently traveling with kids -- vaccinations, visas -- and give the skinny on what happens when formalities get exciting. Yes, formalities can be gruelingly exciting. Ack.
Thursday, May 1, 2014
Roseville, MN, USA.
1 May 2014. That seems like a date that marks the beginning of something. In this case it marks the beginning of the Tip to Tundra tour. This is the MacDonald family's adventure from the equator to the arctic circle in East Asia and overland.
Welcome friends and family. This blog is to be the repository for the people and pests, trains and towers, desserts and deserts that tell this story.
The Little Idea that Could.
Here's the brief history. In January 2013 I took a group of University of Minnesota students to Thailand to study addiction and Buddhism. To unpack that sentence is to understand many things: January is an excellent time to be in Thailand, magnified 10-fold by the fact that January is a not-so-good time to be in Minneapolis because some people think its cold. In fact, some people think Minnesota winters are so cold they spend the winter in Florida. We call those people snowbirds, and among the snowbirds is my mother. Did I mention that I have three children and a wife that works full time? So one of my wife's conditions for taking students to Thailand was that someone help with the kids, and my mother was willing to be recalled to Minnesota to help. Once. When the trip was over and I had returned home she said, "The kids are perfectly lovely," (she is a grandmother after all,) "but if you ever teach this course again I'm not coming to Minneapolis in January."
That's why this time I'm teaching my Thailand course in May.
But the more I thought about it and the more I looked in to it, the more I realized that traveling in May opened up a whole new set of possibilities. That is because teaching in May and June means the course ends just as the kids' school ends. Ergo, the family would be free to come join me in S.E. Asia after my class finished.
If the family came and joined me in Bangkok after my class, what would we do? How long would we do it? Crucially, what would we call it? (It is known that any good journey needs a good name.)
I remembered at some point finding a website called The Man in Seat 61. This is an amazing website for so many reason -- the zeal required to organize and update the quantity of information he has compiled simply boggles the imagination. What I had seen were the rail links that held Asia together. Since I first travelled to Asia as an adult in 1988, I've been infatuated by the transiberian railway -- the idea of going from the Pacific to the Atlantic through Russia, from the West to the East, by rail. But something new is possible that has only recently been opened to Westerners, or really anyone: traveling from South to North. No, the whole trip could not be done by rail -- the railroads end in Thailand and don't begin again until Vietnam or China. However, the intervening countries have plenty of buses and boats -- it was clearly a thing that was feasible to do... overland.
That's a Fine Plan, But...
What if we couldn't stand the kids? What if the kids hated trains? What if they shriveled under the weight of a backpack? What if Anita and I were raising kids wrong and they failed to have the love of travel their parents did? That would be bad.
MacDonald on the beach of Lake McDonald,
Glacier National Park
So we found a couple of weeks last summer to do our own little test drive. How can you test drive a Tip to Tundra tour? You can hop on a train, drag the kids along, stop at a couple national parks along the way to the coast and back. And that's just what we did. Yes, this one had a name, too: Tracks and Trails. We got on the Amtrak in Minneapolis and headed to Glacier National Park on the Empire Builder (more names). After scuffing our boots on some carefully screened trails we got back on the train and headed out to see friends and family in Seattle. Props to Walter, Todd and Joy! Then we got ourselves up to Vancouver and did the whole thing in reverse, stopping at Jasper National Park in the Canadian Rockies. Okay, okay, enough about that -- if you want more, here's a link to a silly video we made about that trip -- see if you can discern how much Gracie (age 7 at the time) likes hiking?
The bottom line was that the kids were terrific. They loved the train, they played well together, we bonded -- in fact, we liked our kids better traveling than we liked them at home. Okay, that's a terrible thing for a father to say -- indeed, we love them throughout and especially at home. But it's easier to like your kids, too, when they're being amazed and excited and pushing themselves to try new things and making up stories by flashlight.
By the time we got home, we knew the kids would be up for a longer trip. So planning got underway in earnest for the Tip to Tundra tour.
