Massive Road Trip starting from Vancouver (Alex’s Mom) to Olympia (Aunt Ilene) and down to my grandparents in Las Vegas. After Vegas we’ll head across the southwest along I-40 and hit pieces of the old Route 66 along the way.

Current Location: Munster, IN

Like much of Indonesia, Yogyakarta lies in a region ripe for natural disasters. The highly active Mount Merapi looms in the distance. Merapi is often called a “decade volcano” because it erupts roughly every 10 years. So, last week when I read that Merapi erupted, I immediately emailed Bowo to see that he and his family were OK. They were, but Bowo’s work in disaster recovery put him on the front lines of the evacuation efforts.

Last week he sent photographs of the reality there which I have included in this post. From his email, he said refugees now number over 100,000 and Merapi is still spewing toxic gases and ash. The probability of a second eruption remains high.

CNN and BBC have covered details of the disaster. My purpose in writing isn’t to cover the events, but to reflect on the connections made through travel. While its nice to visit sites, the most lasting impressions are from those you meet along the way. News reaches you in a different way when you know someone living through the stories.

The news articles bring everything back to mind – the shopowners, taxi drivers, children and everyone you saw living there. The fact remains: there is not much we can do from thousands of miles away, but Bowo, his family, and the thousands of refugees are in our thoughts and prayers.

Buyuk Han. A ‘Han’ is an old travelers inn, this one was built in the 1500s and restored in the 80′s. Today it stands in the Turkish part of Nicosia and has small shops, galleries, and a cafe downstairs.

See more Cyprus photos or check out the whole lot on Flickr.

See more Vietnam photos or check out the whole lot on Flickr.

1. Renting an automatic is double the price
2. I’m tired of feeling like a pitiful wimp. The dialogues go like this:

Me: Do you have automatic transmission?
Rental Guy: No, why?
Me: I don’t know how to drive manual
Rental Guy: Oh… (said while squinting, and wondering if I am in fact, a man)

With two weeks in my wife’s hometown, Braila, I went looking for a Scoala de Soferi (Driving School). But I didn’t want just any driving school. I wanted to learn on the most difficult car possible: a Dacia.

The Dacia brand is one of the few remaining Communist-era auto-makers. New ones have gotten a make-over, but old ones still putter along highways, slowing down everyone but the horse carts. It took a week to find a Scoala that hadn’t yet upgraded to a new model. I saw Gigi’s blue Dacia stalled at an intersection: “That’s the one”, I thought. I ran up to his car and wrote the phone number on my hand.

Driving with Gigi only had one major issue, and that was the non-stop instructions. A new one came every quarter of a second, and in Romanian: “Signal. Make a left. Clutch down, change in second…” on and on for two hours. I wanted a difficult car, not a difficult teacher.

The other problems were common to driving in Romania: pot holes, horse carts, livestock, farm equipment and a general lawlessness. When we got out into the countryside, I drove with my arm out the window. Gigi said I drive like Americans on TV. He thought we drive that way because our roads have no pot holes.

After four lessons, I feel comfortable enough to drive like a grandma on the highways. The real test will be our two week road trip. Lets hope Gigi prepared me well.

Arrival involves a treacherous half hour of hair pin turns, drop offs, and patches of flowing rain water and mud. We hired a car and driver from Bac Ha, the nearest town. Opening the door felt like stepping out of one century and in to another. Baskets of vegetables, ducklings, and chicks lined the dirt path with dozens of women wearing a cladiescope of colors. Among many differences of hill tribes of Vietnam, the Flower H’mong are distinguished by the colorful and elaborate costumes.

Squeeling Pigs

Alex and I both glamorize the past. Modern life has an increasing number of blinking gadgets calling for our attention, and so we imagine a calm world of communities closer to nature and one another. A bloody cockfight brings us back to reality.

The livestock section is the noisest part of the market, and the piglets are the most vocal. Their screams cut through the din and will stop you in your tracks. Each is repeatedly shoved in and out of a burlap sack. Their struggle seems to be some demonstration of health.

There are surprisingly few tourists for how close we are to other sights. The area is known for great hiking, and it’s mid-June. An older group of French couples showed up earlier, but half hour later they were gone. It is clear that tourism is already having an impact. A few stalls are filled with crafts and kitschy souvenirs. The vendors are dressed in modern clothes, and are more aggressive when white, camera-toting prey appear.

No Whole Foods

Walking through the bewildering chaos, its hard to believe we inhabit the same planet. Back home, our grocery store is a monstrous buzz-word friendly pile of “green”, “organic”, and “fair trade” stuff. Well paid consultants design every detail from the font (Archer, by HF&FJ) to color schemes and aisle spacing.

Yet, hygiene considerations aside, most of the goods here fulfill the eco-mindset requirements. The produce is grown by a small scale, local farmer who can rarely afford pesticides, or GM seeds. Even carbon emissions are negligible, as much is pulled to the market by horse or oxen cart.

Witnessing the daily struggles here makes much of our modern worries feel absurd. Just before leaving for the market I was stressing over deadlines for a marketing campaign, which had to be ready for Monday. The beautiful thing about travel is not so much the landmarks and sightseeing, but rather the sense of perspective, and coming face to face with the reality of our world.

All of us are here to see the Rafflesia, the world’s largest flower. Every tour agency in the highlands offers a trip to see the flower, usually combined with a few other stops to make up a full day. The schedule is ambitious so our guide keeps us moving quickly over rocks, puddles, and strange insects.

Queue Up

When we arrive at the Rafflesia, we find a group of British tourists there with their own guide. So in the middle of the jungle we queue up for photographs. When it is our turn we crouch down to take photos from every conceivable angle. As we find out from Ravi, the Rafflesia is not a true flower, but a parasitic fungus feeding off jungle vines. It also had flies all around it and smelled like rotting meat. These “flowers” take 5 years to bloom, then only live for 6 days. Once the photo shoot ends, we’re off again back down the trail.

After the rafflesia, our tour has four more stops, ending at the Boh Tea Plantation. Nearly every Cameron Highlands tour will have a stop at a tea plantation. Striking, bright green bushes cover the rolling hills as far as you can see. The heads of migrant workers pop out amongst the bushes while they trim young leaves from the top. There’s only a few minutes to take it all in before we pile back in the Land Rover for a visit to the processing area, cafe, and of course, the gift shop.

Selling the Tour

Our tour including several of Cameron’s “Highlights”, but the fast-paced agenda didn’t allow much time for reflection. Full Day tours tempt you with their list of activities. And it is true, the tea plantations and Rafflesia are on every guidebook’s list of sights. Throw in a few more interesting stops and the lure is even greater.

Marketing brochures appeal to the increasingly common checklist mentality. You can “do” the Highlands by checking off A,B, and C. The problem is that all your left with is a superficial impression. Worse still, it perpetuates the lack of options offered by tour operators.

At its best, travel lets us work past our preconceived, media-fed, ideas and to see a place and people as they really are. But it only works if we slow down. You can’t understand someone’s life when you speed past them on a bus.

Padiddle

Any guidebook will tell you to bargain hard in South-East Asia. Shopping around gave us an idea of what was on offer, and we arrived prepared at the rental car agent. He tried to give us a Nissan for 80 ringgit ($25 USD), but after some back-and-forth we got a Proton, a Malaysian car, for 60 ringgit ($19). The bartering process doesn’t come naturally to me, and I want it end as soon as possible. This time I left feeling like I’d done well.

The car gave a constant, low rumble from the beginning, but for only two days it seemed trivial. 5 km down the road I notice the speedometer doesn’t work. Another 5 and Alex sees the window levers are snapped off. It wasn’t until night fall that I found one headlight burned out and the other about to go.

Datai

With our jalopy we drove to the north side of the island to crash The Datai, a luxury resort which practically owns the Datai Bay beach, and the lush jungle grounds on the hill above. Private villas are nestled amongst the trees along a path down to the beach. I feared arriving at a gated entrance with our rumbling, unwashed car and windows that couldn’t be rolled down. Luckily no such gate existed, and we spotted a staff parking lot near the entrance and tried to look decent before entering the hotel.



The lobby was what you would expect, soft earth tones, lots of wood and a large veranda overlooking the pool where pairs of pasty white people like us lay reading novels. But we came to see the beach, so we headed down the hill on a path past the private villas down to a second pool, a bar, and finally the beach.

The beach was a quiet, secluded crescent of white sand on protected bay of the Andaman Sea. It was the prototypical idyllic tropical scene calling you to spend your days splashing around and laying in the shade.

Exclusiveness

Later that day we had a ferry ride to Penang, and I kept coming back to The Datai in my mind. At first it seems wrong to own a beach, and charge $400 a night to see it. Yet, the largest beach on Langkawi is crammed with vendors, noise, and general over-development. How can serenity be kept without turning the place into a club for the wealthy? Tourism volume brings more money to places that need it, and you certainly can’t blame Langkawians for trying to cash in when other opportunities are scarce.

Everybody who travels has a story of how a place used to be, before development came and ruined it. For travelers the solution has been to keep searching for unspoiled places further and further from an expanding beaten path. But must we collectively keep consuming places and and throwing them away before finding a new one to mess with? I suppose it comes back to the idea of sustainability, but so far sustainability isn’t so lucrative.

On our first full day, we were walking around Chinatown and saw this:

After our flight from the US, we stayed a few weeks in Singapore with our friends Bogdan and Cristina. Alex posted a bunch of photos from the Singapore Botanical Gardens , but there’s a couple more things worth sharing.

On our first full day, we were walking around Chinatown and saw this:

Now anytime I hear The Eagles I’ll think of a Chinatown line dance.

Most of our meals in Singapore were at hawker centers, usually the one just outside Bogdan & Cristina’s apartment. Hawker centers are a collection of food and drink stalls – many of them specializing in just one dish. Back in the 70′s, Singapore started building these centers so street food vendors wouldn’t congest traffic, and would have better access to running water and refrigerators. Groups of apartment buildings have a hawker center in the middle and it serves as a gathering point for friends and neighbors. Here is ours on a busy Saturday morning: