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 Nepal. The story is long, and the world so alien, that it will take several entries to recount it fairly, so I apologize in advance if I bore you (as I surely have done with ... read more

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 Karen people (pronounced kuh-REN). Natives of Northeast Burma, tens of thousands of Karen are in refugee camps this area of Thailand, having fled political persecution and a gruesome, bloody rebellion against the SPDC (formerly SLORC), ... read more

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 wax The end result is jagged walls of rock riven with caves, cracks and stalactites. In laymans' terms, you get some extraordinarily beautiful cliffs. When I left off in my last entry, I was on ... read more

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 of Khao San Road to avoid being confronted with too many people like myself. The place I went to, Shanti Lodge, is about 1 KM north of Kho San road and is an oasis of ... read more

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 to an outsider in a strange city, the entire experience can seem a bit flat, like watching a hive of bees, which has many complex behavious, but which seems, to the uneducated eye, like so ... read more