lostwon

Ive been told that the Hooghly River, a smaller branch off of the Ganges River, is considered holy to the Hindu people of Calcutta. Apparently that’s why people come in droves, seeming ignoring the obvious state of the river, to take a quick dip in the putrid, frothy, chocolate milk colored waters. It must hold some significance that someone like me, holding nothing resembling blind faith, just can not quite grasp. I normally don’t like to sit down and scribble out my observations of a place in which I’ve just arrived. Im in a brand new country, experiencing everything that comes along with landing in a completely foreign land but, this place is different. Id like to be able to soak up my surrounding for a couple of weeks, letting my thoughts marinate in my ... read more

The smell of vomit slowly wafts up from one of the seats behind me, followed by a slight sound of gurgling turning to a somewhat more assertive heaving. As I’m rattled out of my shallow slumber, my eyes slowly focus on a form of artistic script more closely related to hieroglyphics than my own boring handwriting. The sing-songy chant from the young boy slowly, carefully, making his way down the aisle towards me reveals that he is hawking something that looks like small quail eggs. Exactly the sort of food that I learned not to try during my time spent in the Philippines. But, I can’t be sure. To me it sounds like he is saying O-mi-o over and over again in changing pitches. As my senses sharpen, I realize that I must be back in ... read more

Its kind of like apples without oranges, Santa without his scary little elves, the Lone Ranger without Tonto, or in some obscure way, God without El Diablo. The story of our time spent on the Indonesian island of Flores would not be complete without first mentioning the time we did on her neighbor, Sumbawa. Having spent just under twenty-four hours on the Island That Shade/Rain Forgot, I am hardly the expert, but when 21.5 hours starts to feel more like a month, you know that it is time to move on. On an island with a landmass larger than Bali and Lombok combined, which is to say that you just might be able to find it on a world map, the trans-island “highway” seems excessively long. In fact, the highway seems to have been planned by ... read more

A thought crossed my mind while sitting in the Indonesian Embassy in Kuala Lumpur. Ive found that foreign embassies are the perfect places to just sit and think, especially when you spend the entire day waiting for your ridiculously high number to be called in order to then, find out your fate concerning entry into their country. “If all goes according to the new “plan”, we sure are going to be spending a lot of time in a country that we originally had no plans to visit.” Awaking early and sprucing ourselves up in our Sunday finest, we were going to march down their, flop our ragged passports onto their desk, and leave with shiny new two month entry stickers, in no time flat. The Indonesian embassy workers must not have been too impressed with out ... read more

“Farang Song!” The words proudly rolled off the tongue belonging to our most recently acquired Thai friend, with the excitement of a child learning his first dirty word in another language. It took only a second for my attorney to realize that our 5’6” middle-aged companion had stretched his inadequately short arm over both of our laps and into the glove box. Retrieving from the glove box a tape labeled Biggest Hits of 2000; he popped it into the stereo. “Tom Jones?” “Yes. Tom Jones!” our driver proudly proclaimed, but he was already off in his own world doing an extremely entertaining personal kareoke session to Tom Jones’s super-uber-mega hit, Sex Bomb. Exchanging quick knowing glances, the two farangs in the tiny two person truck, instantly realized that this was just one of those situations that ... read more