Dear Loyal Readers, I apologize most abjectly for my failure to post anything on this blog about the last three months of my trip last year. It's not that it hasn't been in my thoughts. I think my reticence stems at least in part from the profound difficulty of summoning memories of places so different from New York that they seem little more than a fantasy. However, of all the places I marveled at, the one that returns to my thoughts above all the others was my trek to Mt Everest base camp, in the remote reaches of the mountains of [View Full Entry]

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The town you come to when you enter Laos from Chiang Kong, Thailand is Huay Xai. Huay Xai is nothing more than a half mile of crude wood and concrete buildings slouched on the east shore of the Mekong river at the bottom of a hill. Most of these buildings are budget hotels or general stores selling shampoo, potato chips and cola, with two or three tourist shops sprinkled around at the center. It might seem a poor introduction to Laos, as the cities that followed were almost all more charming than this one; however, this is exactly the reason that [View Full Entry]

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Which of these things does not belong? Mae Sot is a strange place. It seems like an ordinary, run-of-the-mill, forgotten town, with a couple of dozen streets woven together haphazardly just a few km east of the Burma border. There are a couple of Buddhist temples, a main street lined with mundane shops, and a busy market heaped with vegetables, fruit, fly-buzzed meat, and fishy fish. One item for sale that I hadn't seen before were buckets heaped with a fetid grey paste - after some research, I learned that it's fermented fish paste, a staple of the diet of the [View Full Entry]

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When I last wrote, I had just completed three days on a scuba liveaboard in the Similan Islands. When I got back to solid land, I took a bus from Khokkloi, a town in Southern Thailand where I asked my Scuba operators to drop me off, to Bangkok. The trip took 14 hours, but I slept through most of it, and I was able to write off most of the $12 fare to the cost of nightly accommodations. I arrived at 8:30 and checked in to my old friend, the Shanti Lodge, written about previously. Whenever I return to a city [View Full Entry]

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Long, long ago in a hemisphere far, far away, sea creatures with carboniferous skeletons swam about in the ocean, living, playing and eating each other. The dead ones built up on the ocean floor where they were compacted into a sedimentary rock called limestone. Some millions of years later, when the underlying tectonic plates decided to move, the rock was thrust up above the ocean surface and sea became land. Rain falling on these newborn cliffs, being mildly acidic from CO2 in the air, percolated through the somewhat alkaline rock, dissolving and reshaping it in a manner not dissimilar to melting [View Full Entry]

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Hi All, Sorry for the long interval since my last update. If the internet is a superhighway, I'm on a potholed dirt road right now, and so this entry will be pictureless and brief. After leaving Istanbul and touring around Turkey for two weeks, I decided that it was the wrong season to see turkey, and, so, packed my bags and set a course for... Thailand! I arrived about 6 days ago. I'm now in Ko Pha Ngan, a small, somewhat remote island in the Gulf of Thailand. I've been scuba diving and doing my best to sit still on the [View Full Entry]

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My plane touched down in Bangkok on November 18th at 9:30 in the morning. The blast of steamy air that oozed through the cracks in the corridor leading from the airplane to the terminal reminded all the passengers that they were just a short skip from the equator. Escaping the airport in Thailand exercises muscles you didn't know you had, as place names in Thai are often quite difficult to transliterate and pronounce. I had to talk to a few cab drivers before the hotel I had chosen could be positively identified. I selected a spot away from the tourist ghetto [View Full Entry]

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The latter part of my stay in Istanbul brought me chronologically from the Byzantine era into modernity. I wrote about all of the major sites I visited last time. I pick up on Saturday morning when I had to rub my eyes when I looked out the window. Was I really seeing what I was seeing? I had to open the window and stick my hand out to make sure it wasn't some strange illusion. Yes, in fact, it was true! It was snowing! In Istanbul. Surprising to an American who thought that Turkey was always hot and tropical, the Turks [View Full Entry]

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Do you want the good news or the bad news first? Good? My rain gear works extremely well. The bad? You can guess. It has rained on three and a half of the five days I've been here. I should warn you that the photos won't be as stunning as they could be, as they are all shrouded by a layer of mist between subject and lens. Cities are hard to appreciate alone. By nature, a city is a place where many people pack into a small space, thereby deriving benefits from cooperation and sharing of public works, resources, etc. But [View Full Entry]

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Well, after a summer in New York, I am finally starting on the second leg of my big trip. I touched down in Istanbul yesterday morning, and I plan to do a tour of the countries of the Middle East deemed safe enough to visit. I awoke this morning, my first here in Istanbul, to the swirling, undulating chants blaring from loudspeakers in the Blue Mosque near my hotel, the sound vying with the clamorous slap and swoosh of the wind and rain that has been flogging this ancient city since last night. OK, to be honest, it didn't wake [View Full Entry]

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