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Tonight I sat down in a homey little restaurant, washed a pale yellow, in the center part of Ljubljana, Slovenia serving nothing but monster burgers made from horse meat. I went for the Menu of the day in which they threw in a salad, a Coke and a great little piece of carrot cake to wash down the burger that was easily as big as one of those frisbees you see the uncoordinated people (not excluding myself) flail around with on sunny and windy days at the beach between sunblock applications and prokadima games. The burger was so big that when I went for a bite near the middle of the masterpiece, both sides of my face got painted in a fancy dabbling of color from the three sauces that gave the horse burger it’s kick. After running quickly through 6 trees worth of napkins, I decided the rest of the burger would be enjoyed napkin free.

An American face plastered with a smorgasborg of thousand island dressing, mayonaise, ketchup, lettuce, tomato, jalapenos and little bits of horse at the front door was seemingly enough to scare away any potential customers, even vaguely interested, from spending their evening dining at the Hot Horse and left me with some time to reflect, in a sauce covered state, on the trip thus far. This afternoon, intimidated by rediculously high train and bus prices into Western Europe, I neglected the “overland” part of my trip and purchased a flight to my final destination, Ireland. Tomorrow night I fly from here in Slovenia to London, then onto Cork, Ireland where I will immediately start looking for leprechaun’s.

Not too long ago, a steaming hot day in Bangkok, Thailand found me double fisting pad thai’s and banana pancakes while negotiating a price on a tuk-tuk to putter me around town for a bit. I would slip into the air conditioned 7-Eleven every 45 minutes to buy my favorite Manoa Soda then be bargaining on Koh Sahn Rd. trying to talk a wrinkled, but smiley old lady down from $1.50 to $1.00 on a pair of flip flops, all the while motioning to the lady with the pad thai stand I was ready for another round… with egg please. After a failed attempt to be the shining new student in Coconut Monkey School in the Thai islands, I hopped over to Saigon, Vietnam and truly kicked off the adventure.

In afew pararaphs, here’s what I’ve been up to if you’re just tuning in, or, like me, need a refresher. I Pedaled the Cyclo driver around the old poor neighborhoods of Saigon and shared some dried jellyfish and beer over tales of Cyclohood before clammering up the monster sandunes at the kiteboarding town of Mui Ne, snorkeling and singing the “Star Spangled Banner” on the reefs of Nha Trang, being stared at and shunned before the My Lai Massacre Memorial then eating scary fish with some local farmers before embarking on my brutal 130KM motorbike return ride to Hoi An, and up to Hue for a ride along the old DMZ, a little dog eating and long chat’s with Aussie Vietnam War veteran Mick, then up to Hanoi to see water puppets and ‘ole Ho Chi Min, stuffed 40 years ago and still lookin’ like a champ, kind of like a big Peach colored wax Crayola crayon, out to Halong Bay for a few days on a junk boat amongst the incredible limestone islands and then somehow never getting to Sapa ending up at the border and jumping into China at Hakou from Lao Cai in Vietnam.

Here Beef Noodle Ninja…. where are you? That’s right, in Kunming China the BNN and I joined forces for the Panda Research Base and Chinese Opera in Chengdu before awing at the 2,000 year-old terra cotta warriors (and the porto-lets) in Xi’An, then a week in Beijing highlighted with the hide-n-seek game of the century with the guards on the Great Wall of China, and the fact that the hostel I was at had the Jack Johnson DVD “Live at the Greek.” Where Jack boldly notes that the “Spring winds came and blew my list of things to do away.” Priceless. And that’s where the Beef Noodle Ninja bowed out for a little time in Tiannamen square and the Forbidden City before the other Americans and I missed our first train to Mongolia, but got it on the second try.

A week out in the Gobi Desert driving through the landscape littered with fragments of residents who have fallen victim to the brutal, but beautiful desert found me riding “Napoleon” the camel and eating lots of camel and goat knuckle soup and sleeping in nomadic gers… the good stuff. A few more days of eluding pick-pockets in Ulan Batar and I made my way North into Eastern Siberia to Irkutzk, Russia to slide around on the frozen Lake Bakhal. Next thing I knew I was rejoicing in song and vodka with the special forces soldiers of the Russian Army, and the Shrek-like Juri for a 4 day run to Moscow on the true Trans-Siberian train. St. Basil’s Cathedral, Red Square and the Kremlin saw plenty of me as I also had my first go-round with www.couchsurfing.com, getting free accomodation from a 26 year-old corporate lawyer named Natashka that cooked a mean rice and bean breakfast.

Van Gogh, Matisse, DaVinci, and the boys all made an appearance at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg (A museum made up of 5 old palaces measuring 24KM in total length) while I shacked-up with a couple that took me in after meeting them on the train from Moscow. The little 3 foot babushka was in charge of the tea, while Igor made me drink vodka and cognac and Irena made me Borst (soup). Little Russian hospitality. Also hit-up the biggest zoological museum in the world, housing such prized stuffed things as Peter the Great’s actual horse. Looks more like a stuffed horse that got into a fight with a power sander. They also have Peter the Great’s stuffed dog on display and he looks much like a 6 year-olds paper-mache project that received no gold stars. But I guess if you were stuffed in the 1600’s, your allowed to look like the above mentioned specimens.

Overnight bus up to Helsinki, Finland for the big May Day (Their version of Labor Day) festivities. Although I stared solomly at this little cardboard float of crispy french fries that I paid 5 Euros for (US$6.38901 for a rough estimate) from a street vendor and decided this celebration must be for people with jobs and paychecks and decided I’d jump on the next days ferry to Tallinn, Estonia. Really cool medievel place topped off with the legendary stories of Jack Cedar (and they even had a few guys in tights selling stuff). On down through Riga, Latvia where I couch surfed for my second official time with a very nice law student named Inese. The International Ice Hockey Championships were in town so we got to see fireworks and went to an Irish Pub to watch Latvia’s opening game. On down to Vilnius, Lithuania to tackle Mr. Claw and give my everything to win the Gonzo stuffed animal that still resides right where Mr. Claw left him when I released the fire button on the joystick.

A whole sticky bus situation forced me to stop in Warsaw, Poland without any local currency at 5AM with a need to buy a ticket for the next bus to Krakow with no way to do so. Got on a later bus that dropped me off and I somehow sniffed out the only hostel in Krakow, Poland with bed bugs that made me look like I had that disease when you don’t drink enough orange juice- would that be scurvy? I scratched for 5 days like Woogie from ‘Something About Mary,’ as I fielded questions like, “Did you try and fight a bee hive?” In which I replied, “No, Asshole,” and ordered a few bed bugs to disembark off my forearm and relocate to the guy with the bee jokes. Spent an amazing day at Auschwitz, the site of one of the more deadly Nazi Concentration Camps between 1940-1945 where over a million and a half Jews, Pols, Gypsies, and many others from “unwanted” ethnic groups were gased, shot, hung, starved to death, beaten to death, worked to death and never heard from again. More to come on that.

From Krakow I shot down through Budapest, Hungary to check out the castle hill and had to sleep near an older couple that figured they could brave the youth hostel to save a few dollars. The nasaly woman began exclaiming, “Hank, this is going to be a long night,” when some Italian guys started singing at the top of their lungs in the shower and the booze began to flow. The big woman kept rolling over in her bed that was too small, readjusting her earplugs and repeating to Hank that, “on the rule sheet, it states that they are NOT to be DRINKING in here.” For which Hank had no reply, probably wanted a drink himself but knew that would cause drama and relationship problems on their picturesque Hungarian holiday. I almost ordered a few more bed bugs to disembark, but realized that one day I will be old, cranky, annoying and cheap as well. I called the bugs back to active duty on my neck and ankles.

An overnight train trip from Budapest, with 2 cool Australian guys and a Canadian girl brought me to Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovinia, the site of the bloody sniper and artillery led war from 1992-1995. Bullet holes still remain in every building and, in fact, the best mortar wound in the whole city is blown deep into the side of the hostel I stayed at. It’s very weird to see graveyards wherever there is vacant land, and all the graves are shiny new black or white marble. All sitting straight up with vases of fresh flowers and families still gathered around them. I noted that the birthdates range from 1905 to 1985, but the death dates are all between the years mentioned above. More on this later.

I took the bus from Sarajevo to Split, Croatia, then a ferry the next day to Hvar island- a beautiful meditteranean looking island (on the Adriatic Sea), topped out with a Venetian Fortress built in 1551. Spent 5 days here lounging around on the beach, too much Florida blood in me to get in the crisp water, anyhow most of the Canadians that braved the chilly sea, as if it was nothing, came out with jellyfish stings anyway. I just gathered up all the sun. On the afternoon of my birthday, about 8 Aussie’s that I had hungout with in Sarajevo showed up in Hvar and added to a good evening of festivities, which included, somewhere around dinner time, when I waddled off in a wine drenched spirit in search of my BIRTHDAY DINNER! I saddled up in a restaurant I had been eyeing while eating my crappy homemade supermarket sandwhiches the previous four days. I basked in a meal that brought me smoothly into my second quarter life. Although I might shoot for ‘5′ 25-year periods of living, the last 25 years, when I have 176 grandchildren to look after me, I’ll spend everynight in youth hostels asking the youngsters to change my diapers and bitch about them being too loud and developing my own lethal strain of bed bug that bites worse than a rabid pit bull. ”Did you get in a fight with a bee’s nest?” 

Last nights fun was spent on a ferry from Hvar to Split, a bus from Split to Zagreb (the capital of Croatia) that got in at midnight and then a bus from Zagreb here to Ljubljan, Slovenia that left at 2AM and got in at 5:30AM complete with a border crossing in which they made a scene of the American and asked for back-up forms of ID other than my passport and shimmered the hologram on the front page of my passport in the dim overhead lights of the bus looking skeptically at me as if I had just ran down to Kinko’s and made the thing myself. And while waiting in Zagreb, there was one other guy in the whole empty waiting room, but the guy with the little zamboni thing that shines the floor was all up on my feet as if the other 3000 sq.ft. of marble floors were all polished-up and done and the section just under the air pocket of my left shoe was keeping him from going home to his loving wife and last nights unfinished Monopoly game in which he’s about to buy Boardwalk. His eyes would roll back as he shook his head in disgust and turn his zamboni the other way, but just as soon as I would get back to my book, I would hear that damn thing coming in for another kill as I firmly planted my left shoe on the ground to make him stay another 33 seconds.

So tomorrow I will be in Ireland, having spread my immense wealth now through the use of Thai Baht, Vietnemese Dong, Chinese Yuan, Mongolian Taugrik, Russian Rubles, Euros in Finland, Estonian Krooni, Latvian Lats, Lithuanian Litas, Hungarian Forint, Bosnian Dinara, Croatian Kunas and Slovenian Tolars. I’ve got to find a leprechan. 

I find myself celebrating my 26th year of being a legend here on the island of Hvar off the coast of Split, Croatia. I’m taking some sunshine in refilling my Vitamin D stores after having been sapped of all that during the end of Russian winter. Although I can say I would love to be picking through the 50% off bin at the thrift store readying myself for a big night of Wack Pack,I can think of worse places to be. Todays itinerary…. do absolutely nothing and top it off with a little red wine on the beach.

Internet is getting more expensive as I travel West… but I’ll try to get the promised blog entries up at some point….

Life is a short glimpse of what this world’s got to offer and with every passing day we learn new things about ourselves and the passing world. When we become older, we are given a badge of wisdom, as if to say we have passed the test of life. We have consumed enough information about what it means to be a human, that we can reflect and teach others about the things we’ve been a part of and gained or lost from.

On the ferry from Helsinki, Finland to Tallinn, Estonia, I met an older man that had come from Stockholm, Sweden where he was visiting his brother for his 80th birthday. We got to talking and I learned that he was from a town about 100 miles outside of Seattle, WA. He had left Sweden when he was 15 years old to sail the open water. He ended-up in America where, a number of year’s later, he was drafted by the Army and sent to Vietnam to “stamp out communism.” Within 16 days of his arrival in the jungles of Southeast Asia, some kind of explosion (he still doesn’t know what hit him) left his right arm useless and sent him out of Vietnam to duty in Hawaii. He spent the next 30 year’s with the merchant marines sailing the world on old WW II steam ships as an engineer ensuring the boats made it to the destinations where they would be sold for scrap.

Over the duration of the boat trip and during the next few days in Estonia, I got to learn from Jack Cedars the short version of what he’d learned so far in life. We hiked all around town, I had Jack staying in the youth hostel, and never once did he iss a beat or even get out of breath. On our first night in Tallinn, a town that looks just like the midieval fairs you used to go to in 4th grade where nobody would look at you wierd if you were wearing green tights and a poofy Robin Hood-esque shirt or full body armor for that matter, we strolled past nice restaurants that looked a little too pricey and, upon Jack’s recommendation, settled on a Big Mac and an ice cream cone from McDonald’s. Estonia was the 83rd country he had been to and made it known upon our departure that “that’s enough for one lifetime.”

Jack had an opinion about everything, but was like hanging out with an old fraternity brother. In fact, a real old fraternity brother as next birthday Jack will be celebrating 71 years on the ticker. But we walked around the castles, ate classic backpackers lunch that was comprised of bread, some cheap deli meat, pickles, and a hunk of cheese that was shaved to edible amounts with a pocket knife. And all the while, I just kind of listened and learned from the things Jack had seen in his 71 years. His stories were like those you’d here if you were hanging out with Ernest Hemingway. He told of adventures on the high sea that I thought only happened to people with beards, hoop earrings and pegged legs.

Jack told me of a cargo ship he was sailing on from the US to Europe with 6 handcrafted sailboats on the deck. Things were going great until they ran into bad weather and 40 foot seas swamped the boat, washed all 6 boats off the decks and the ship showed up at its destination some days later, ragged, carrying no cargo from the intended shipment aside from the battered crew. He told me tales of sinking ships he’d been on, one in particular sank and the crew were hoisted out of the water a few hours later by a Norweigen Cruise Line boat that heard the S.O.S. calls and was in the area. They got clothes, a hot shower and an open invitation to the buffett.

I started writing down certain quotes Jack would spirt out in normal conversation, but to me they seemed like good ways to look at life. These quotes are not the kind you hear in English class. The kind some scholar wearing knickers, green tights, and a hat made out of a ferrett said in 1653. These are quotes from a salty sailor with an understanding of some of the very same principals as the guy in the ferrett hat, but just not put so eloquently. The first quote I scribbled down in my worn leather notebook was about Jack’s love of buffett’s that has been with him since being saved by the cruise ship many years ago. He raved about the buffett he had immersed himself in on the ship from Stockholm to Helsinki and had this to say about the return boat trip across the Baltic Sea back to Stockholm: “I hope it’s rougher than shit, that’s when I go to the buffett and eat, cause I’ll be the only one there when everybody else is sick.” Good point Jack

Jack excused himself for a few minutes from the cafe seat overlooking the Baltic Sea on the bow of the ferry ship. He came back and said, “You know my greatest fear on one of these boats is when you take a dump. You know if you were to flush your wallet down that thing, it goes so damn fast to, well, hell if I know where it goes.” This guys sailed all around the world and his greatest fear on the wide open seas is flushing his wallet down the high powered suction toilet on the Viking Line ferry.

We sat on a bench outside a mall in Tallinn and as we watched and commented on the girls walking by, like 2 dirty old men with one of us just slightly younger, but no less dirty (I’ll clarify for my mom here that ‘dirty’ from a woman’s perspective can just be defined as being a ‘guy’ or ‘male’) Jack told me more tales from year’s past. Jack’s on his 3rd wife now and had plenty of stories related to the problems with women. In fact, he ‘dated’ his current wife for 22 year’s before making the decision to get married to her, after having wretched stories from his first 2 wives, including 2 children that haven’t spoken to him in 30 year’s and a lot of debt. He said “I shoulda been born a queer, maybe then I’d be rich by now.”

Maybe when I get back to the US I’ll spend a day a week with Jack and write the national bestseller, ‘Wednesday’s with Jack Cedars.” Not that it would be anything like the hit ‘Tuesday’s with Morrie.’ It would be a lot different. First off, we would meet on Wednesday’s instead of Tuesday’s. And secondly, Jack Cedars is no professor, but rather a sailor. Something tells me my book would be a bestseller among Nascar fans and Busch Light drinkers everywhere. I would have to have it printed in larger letters with waterproof, camoflouge and scent free covers for better keeping in the deer stand. It’s not that the message of life, and what we try to extract from it, was different from Morrie’s, but the delivery was from a completely different point of view. From a rusty steam ship in a harbor of Vanuatu in the South Pacific rather than a scholorly meeting of academics. Everybody has something to teach the world.

Just as you don’t perform a quadruple bypass for the first time without consulting the knowledge of those who have done it before, make sure you consult those who have lived their lives and listen to what they say and digest those thoughts, taking from them what you can and allow the experience to sink into your very being. I’ve got a good quote from Jon Blaise, a young grade school teacher working with underdogs in San Diego, that was diagnosed last year with Lou Gherig’s disease,a so far untreatable breakdown of the body. As a lifetime triathlete, he trained for and completed last year’s IRONMAN Hawaii triathlon, the most prestigious triathlon in the world, even as his wrists and hands have started to weaken indefinetely. In his post race video (http://www.tristatetrek.com/ironmanshort.mov) he said “Live more than your neighbors, unleash yourself upon the world and go places. Go now, giggle, no, laugh, and bark at the moon like the wild dog you are. Understand that this is not a dress rehearsal. This is it, YOUR life. Face your fears and live your dreams. Take it all in, yes, every chance you get…”

Jack Cedars told me that although he is not rich, he has not always been happily married, and his kids don’t talk to him, he can’t look back at his life in regret, but rather celebrate the things he has accomplished and appreciate every moment and experience he has endured through his years on this planet. That’s life according to Jack Cedars.

Upcoming blog entries….
I’m in the war torn city of Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovinia surrounded by broken buildings full of bulletholes and mortar blasts from the war that ended here in 1995. I’m going to write about my experience in St. Petersburg, Russia with a big round artist that took me in after meeting on the train from Moscow……I’m going to write about my day at the sites of Aushwitz Concentration Camp outside of Krakow, Poland where me and my bedbug welts from a pest-ridden hostel bed went to learn a horrific lesson in humanity… and I’m going to put a little Cliff Notes version of the Bosnia-Serb-Croat war that took place on these cobblestone streets and killed over 10,000 citizens.

I found myself perched on a cold steel bench in the desolate bus station of Vilnius, Lithuania. Aside from a security guard that kept eying me as if at any moment I was going to spring to life and do something really really bad and a wirey old guy that would wake-up from his upright naps to eat apples then go back to sleep, I was the lone passenger waiting for the late night Eurolines bus #26 with overnight service to Warsaw, Poland.

As Louis Armstrong sang through my headphones what a wonderful world it was, I could relate to his attention to sheer beauty when I caught a glimpse of the “Mr. Claw” machine, with its bright yellow and red lights feverishly strobing in an attempt to attract those desirous of a stuffed SpongeBob Squarepants into dropping some coins into the slot and losing.

Everything else in the dismal station was dark except for Mr. Claw. Every now and again the prize clasping claw would spring from its dormant state and zip to the middle of the pile and give a little fake dip down towards the Nemo doll and just as quickly as it had made its approach, it would quickly squeel back to its corner. All the while a triumphant song belched out of the blown speaker and filled the empty waiting room with a sudden feeling intense excitement and possibility. Each time Mr. Claw did his dip, my heart rate would leap to a level that I am certain would qualify as a cardiovascular workout.

The machine boasted a portrait of Mr. Claw, a stout looking stainless steel pincher, with a big “you can do it” smile smeared across his face, holding a fluffy teddy bear with a matching smirk reassuring me that if I was to get off my bench, I was certain to return with one of these marvelous toys. I had some left over Lithuanian coins I needed to use, so after an hour or so of longing to play Mr. Claw, I waddled up to the big yellow box and slipped a few coins into the slot- never to be seen again.

I don’t think I’ve ever won a thing in the claw game, in fact, I don’t think ANYBODY has ever won a thing in the claw game, but there is something about that feeling of impossibility and the picture of Mr. Claw having happily snatched the smirking teddy bear that I simply could not resist.I carry everything I own on my back, and the last thing I need to add to add to my dirty socks and all the other crap in my bag is a super cheap doll of Gonzo that looks kind of like Gonzo, but not exactly like Gonzo so not to infringe on any trademarks.

SpongeBob, Gonzo, Nemo, Piglet, the boar from The Lion King, and something that looked like a hippopotomos strung out on crack with purple hair all smiled at me as I manned the joystickready to send Mr. Claw into the battlefield to catch one of their asses.

Mr. Claw sailed past a big horse and over a panda bear, too buried to even think about going after. I grazed the neck of a giraffe that had his long neck bent in half plastered against the plexiglass case covered in fingerprints where kids had notified their parents as to which wild beast they wanted to send the smiling Mr. Claw after to fail and drop the creature just when they think they have it. I centered the claw over Gonzo and felt my thumb nervously shaking as I lowered it to the red button that would launch Mr. Claw in a wild fury down to snatch and hoist my trophy animal to the winner’s box.

Two out of the three prongs on Mr. Claw secured themselves under Gonzo’s armpits with the third slipping right between his legs securing itself tightly on his nuts producing a textbook hoist formation. The triumphant music belched louder and my palms began to sweat profusely as the muscles in my right hand relaxed and my thumb slowly lifted from the red fire button. Up sprung Mr. Claw leaving Gonzo precisely where he had started. My nose pressed-up against the plexiglass trying to get the best view of Mr. Claw’s retrieval. The Mr. Claw soundtrack drizzled out to a decending scale of notes as to rub it in that I was going to leave this Lithuanian bus station Gonzo-less.

I was going to show up in Warsaw, Poland the next morning bearing no fruits from my date with Mr. Claw. I felt like the whole world was watching as I slowly back-stepped out of the aura of the Mr. Claw machine back into the dismal darkness of the station.

I sat back down on my bench and tried to go through, in my head, what I might have done wrong in my failure to secure Gonzo. Did I press the fire button too soon? Should I have gone for the pirate that had a retarded looking parrot on his shoulder instead? Maybe the panda wasn’t wasn’t THAT deeply buried and Mr. Claw would have hoisted him right into the winner’s box and the security guard and the apple eating guy would have put me on their shoulders and paraded me around the waiting room as the Mr. Claw speaker played a song of victory and jubilance. Would the guy on the riding floor buffer let me sit on the front of his zamboni and bask in the glory of my new panda prize?

I took my iPod off pause and allowed Louis Armstrong let me know that he still see’s “sky’s a blue” and “friends shaking hands.” I sunk lower into my bench and dined on a few crackers with cheese, taking them up a notch with a few drops of Tobasco sauce, trying not to be angry with Mr. Claw. From across the room I saw a turd colored anteater with his nose pressed firmly against the plexiglass scrunching his snout into an accordian-like shape. It’s going to be years, maybe decades before he gets to make that cannonball into the winner’s box. I realized that my loss in a well played game of Mr. Claw was water under the bridge, and tomorrow the sun will rise and life will go on.

I just won’t have a Gonzo doll sticking out of my backpack.       

To much Russian dismay, dirty looks and utter disgust, I squeezed through the corridor of the old green train carriage that was no rookie to this, the famed Trans-Siberian Railway. My overstuffed backpack with flip-flop curb feelers hanging off the sides raked down the side wall taking with it a few window treatments, a babushka and a picture of somewhere to beautiful to be in Russia that previously hung cock-eyed, but proudly from a tired stripped screw blasted through the cheap plastic frame. Apparently I wasn’t understood as I came barrelling through saying kindly, “Sorry ’bout that folks!” stripping the walls clean of decoration and the corridor clean of any occupants. I slung my bag onto the ‘pleather’ fold out bed thing that was going to be my home for the next 4 days, my flip-flop curb feelers laying covered in debris from the hallway walls.

The people in your immediate surrounding area on a long train can make or break your experience. While the Mongolian merchants (my ‘roomates’) on my Ulan Bataar- Irkutzk train had just looked at me and then, upon coming close to the Russian border, kindly given me a camel wool sweater as, what I presumed was, a gift. Only later did I realize I had joined the ranks of the salty booty smuggling pirates, like Blackbeard and the rest of the gang, when my Mongolian bretheren asked for the sweater back once across the border. It was ugly anyway- I don’t Mister Rodger’s would have even worn this thing.

After reading romantic and awe inspiring stories about the Trans-Siberian Railway on the internet when I first thought about doing this trip, I was sure my experience was going to be nothing short of amazing with a train car full of Anna Kournikova’s, vodka and maybe some of those people with the big palm fans lightly breezing me as I sip from my chalice with a pinky finger raised proudly, and very masculinly in the cool air. I plopped down on my pleather bed thing and looked up with a big shit eating American tourist grin to see 8 guys with shaved heads and emotionless faces staring at me like they were going to steal everything I owned before the train even left the station. I looked over at the berth next to theirs and there were more shaved head guys looking at me.

I started thinking, “Great,” from Blackbeard and his gang on my last train to these scary dudes that were sure to leave me with an empty backpack and a couple broken limbs within the first hour of the ride- things were looking good. One of them yells, “AMERICANZKEEE?!” Followed by all of them anxiously waiting for a reply. I starting trying to work out just what that might mean. Sounds a lot like “American,” but also sounds like “chimpanzee.” I figured nobody ever asks you if you’re a chimpanzee right off the bat like that, so I let a good ‘ole American thumbs-up join my shit-eating grin and let out my own version of “AMERICANZKEE!!.” My grin scampered away into a straight faced look of question and hope that they liked what they were seeing.

They all erupted in a joyous applause and the four on the bench closest to my drape covered curb feelers scrunched together tightly opening a 10 inch gap on the seat that, with a firm slap of the hand, was to be my home for the next four days.

The internet says you see all kinds of unique scenery and insists that you, “make sure you get a couple of good books to lose yourself in, ‘War and Peace’ is a favoured read on the Trans-Siberian.” I didn’t see shit because the 14 shaved headed guys turned out to all be coming home from their service in the Russian Army. Most of them were in civilian clothes, which had led me to believe they were thugs of some sort, but just as they had thought I was an American Chimpanzee at first sight, looks can be decieving and more of their buddies started coming down the stripped corrider in full fatigues, berets and bottles of booze. I had planned to get a nice little read when I got on the train that afternoon, but within 7 minutes of ripping down the train decor with my bag upon entry, I was staring at the bottom of a big plastic bottle of beer through the wavy liquid hops as it was raised above my head with 3 Army hands assisting me to get this party started off right.

Before we knew it, we were all singing the Russian National Anthem (I stress “WE” as alcohol makes you a specialist in areas you never knew possible- One such example would be singing the Russian National Anthem) The sun lost itself in a mess of birch trees protecting the remaining snow on the ground left from a very cold Siberian winter as we inched our way into the first of many kilometers (Frey- I still don’t know what a kilometer is) of nothingness.

The next few days were spent catching up on our days together in the Armed Forces- going through each others photo albums of pictures of friends, family and really big machine guns, RPG’s, grenade launchers, sniper rifles and things they’d blown-up. One of them spoke very basic English and was my saving grace for trying to figure out what the hell was going on. But after the first night they told me that they were my “security” while I was in Russia. I’m going to use that one as a ‘resume builder.’ Let me ask you a question, within 1 hour of boarding a train in the middle of Siberia, can you have a Russian Army dogtag around your neck, learn the Russian National Anthem and have a personal security team made-up of a few snipers, a group of special forces soldiers, and a slew of elite border guards?

The story takes a turn for the better here when a BIG drunk Russian that had stumbled up and down the halls for the first few days befriended some of the Army guys. That meant I was immediately called to duty a couple of train cars down at YURI’s cabin where he had cracked a fresh bottle of Russian vodka. Yuri is about 300 lbs. of Russian and wore only a pair of tight black jeans with a pair of blown-out boxers partially pulled out from either said. No shirt and lots of B.O. Yuri has about 6 teeth left in his mouth and a face full of scars, from what I figured has been a life of vodka infused brawling- a good new edition to my security squad.

Yuri’s thing was bear hugs and lots of hand shakes in between. At different points in time he would get all fired-up and decide it was time for a bear hug. Not even the Army guys could elude a Yuri Bear Hug. 300 lbs. of vodka sweaty ogor would come barreling down the corridor with a vapor trail of alcohol coming off his love handles as he desperately tried to pick-up on the scent of the lucky recipient. If Yuri even caught a small glimpse of you, it was all over. He would engulf you in a B.H. in a matter of seconds and drag you back, willingly or not, to take a shot of vodka with him. We worked out that Yuri is a furniture assembly control inspector somewhere in Siberia and was coming back to Moscow, the city that offered him all the pretty scars on his face.

At different small towns along the way, a few of the Army guys would get off to the excited howls and crying of Mom’s and families who hadn’t seem them in years. I joined all the Army guys as they would get off the train each time somebody left and have their little emotional goodbye. It was good fun to be a part of that.

Yuri and 2 Army guys stayed on until Moscow. The long ride ended with Bear Hugs all around and an amazing memory that has evolved into my own personal tale of a great Trans-Siberian adventure.

Tonight I leave on the 4 day train from Irkutzk in Siberian Russia to Moscow. I ponied-up and bought a ticket in the cattle class to have a little down home Russian experience. On the internet it says this stretch of railroad costs $240- The vodka drenched Russians and I will be chugging along somewhere behind that car in the $60 bad boy. I hope it has windows! Buuuurrrrrrrrrrr!

I scrambled to find the latch to open the big side door on the old Russian 4X4 van. My hand slipped a few times then gripped the electrical tape that made the handle whole again swinging the door wide open. I jumped out and sprinted about 40 feet from the van before spinning around in a crouched position, waiting for the big explosion. Peter ripped open one of our grocery bags fumbling to find a Coke, spinning off the cap ready to put the fire that was beginning to belch from the naked carburator to rest. Ama came running from the drivers side of the vehicle with a small red fire extinguisher, screaming in Mongolian as he pushed Peter out of the way and dressed the open engine compartment in a fancy pink foam.

This was the introduction to my week long Gobi Desert adventure into the unforgiving lands of Southern Mongolia. The 30 hour train ride from Beijing to Ulan Batar, the capital of Mongolia, was amazing as we carved right through the desert steppe I was planning on heading back into for a closer look. For most of the trip I found myself lost in the humid jungles of Belize in Jimmy Buffett’s “A Salty Piece of Land.” A good little adventure read if you’re up for it. The 3 other American guys from the Great Wall adventure couldn’t take the week long adventure as their Russian visas were running thin and they had to get into the country sooner than I did. I teamed up with an American guy named Peter from Seattle and a French guy named Brice from Burgundy, France. They had both been teaching English in Japan for the past several years. Peter is on his way back to Seattle, the long way, and Brice was just along for the ride, heading back to Japan when he gets to France.

The gnarly grey 4X4 van was sitting broken down on the side of the road, not 1 mile from where we had left from the UB Guesthouse. We first got hit from behind by a Land Cruiser sending the van lurching forward about 3 feet. Then as Ama, our 24 year-old Mongolian desert legend turned off road van operator (we have since decided, based on his desert abilities, that Ama was raised by camels in the heart of the Gobi), was working on the engine to try and make it find the light and come to life, the heat from the engine ignited the exposed gas left from removing the carburator. I saw the flame pipe up as I was getting an engine lesson watching Ama do his thang. After the whole screaming fire extinguisher incident, through sign language and a clear swipe across the neck, Ama made sure we wouldn’t tell the boss about the fire as he would certainly lose his job. So for now the fire, aside from being posted on the internet, is a secret buried deep under the dusty terrain of Ulan Batar.

Mongolia is much like I would think the Wild West once was. The capital city of Ulan Batar is home to a little over 1 million of the 2.2 people that make up the population of Mongolia. Four big power stations belch coal-infused smoke across the wind over the wood and corrugated steel outcroppings of shanty ger towns that make-up most of the city. There are no glorious skyscrapers or beautiful parks- mostly just old Russian buildings in severe disrepair with twisted rebar exposed through crumbling concrete with a few strokes of the original yellow paint still hanging on for good measure. Most people over the youthful hip-hop age wear the traditional del, which is like a big robe held together with a brightly colored sash of fabric tied around the waist. You don’t see many brand name stores or much of anything you reckognize. They use the cyrilic alphabet like Russia so things look pretty different.

As the shanty towns thinned out on our way towards the desert and we dropped off the paved roads of Ulan Batar onto the rutty dirt paths, the snowflakes were drifting along the wind and Ama popped in, what we would later find out was, his only tape. He started belting out these classical Mongolian tunes at the top of his lungs and I started to really drop into the whole experience of driving into this vast desert of Mongolia in the freezing cold, passing goats, horses and packs of camels grazing on the scrub grass guided by nomadic herders. Did you hear me say MONGOLIA? I thought this place was somewhere near Sant Clauses house until last week when I showed up on its front door step demanding adventure and camels. Adventure and camels I did get and a whole lot more.

We drove around 1500KM through different parts of the desert. From flat scrubby red dirt plains to mountainous ice rivers that were home to goats prancing around on the sharp rocks a thousand feet up. Every now and again we would spook a herd of a kind of rare gazelle-like animal (I can’t remember the name in Mongolian- but I can tell you that “hello” is “sain bain o”) that grazes out on the open land. They would take off like rockets with each hoof sending a little puff of dust up that was lit-up by the hazy sunlight and glowed a foggy orange color. They were gone before you knew it, on to a safer destination in the company of goats and camels instead of tourists in a big 4 wheel drive van.

Each night was spent with a different family, most of them herders of goats, sheep, horses and camels. They would fix us dinner, that was, without fail, thick floury noodles in a broth with dried goat or camel meat. I called it goat/camel knuckle soup because there were very few actual pieces of chewable meat. Rather there were tendons, knuckles, muscles and whatever else they had hung in the shed the previous summer to dry. My mind would wonder off to visions of a steamy hot Joey Bag of Doughnuts from Moe’s dancing around with his little aluminum wrapper slowly exposing that soft flour tortilla. And a big frosty fountain Coke would be joyously holding the Joey Bag of Doughnuts in the air twirling him around as tortilla chips explode in the air all around them asking me if I wanted black or pinto beans. Welcome to MO…. RRRRAAAACCCKKK! I would come down on some kind of goat ankle or maybe an elbow and my visions were lost forever onto the cold desert wind of the Gobi.

We rode big 2 humped camels in the freezing wind to a site where the largest dinosour remains in the world have been found. The camels didn’t seem to care much, and with my usual camel luck (In the Sahara Desert in Morrocco I got some kind of retarded camel with half a nose and a bowl movement and attitude problem) I got the camel that wanted to graze on the scrub and was clearly over the whole dinosour bone thing. I caught onto the guide that if you made a “Shoooo” sound and spanked your camel on the first hump, he would pick-up his pace. “Shooo”…. Whaaacckk! I was off. My camel looked around at me like he was about to leave me out there with the dinosour bones to become my own little tourist memorial of bones. I gave him the look right back sending the message that I was no rookie at Gobi cuisine and I would turn his ass into camel knuckle soup before he could yell “Uncle,” in Mongolian of course.

The amazing thing I love about deserts is that the cycle of life is very apparent out there. In our subdivisions and strip malls, we don’t really know what happens to people that die. We’re pretty sure they’re in those big fields of marble slabs and plastic flowers, but that’s just what we’ve been taught. Driving through the Gobi, it was not a rare sighting to come across a complete camel skeleton bleached perfectly white by the sun. That very spot is where the camel, whether old, sick, or turned into camel knuckle soup by an American tourist, took his last breath of desert air and collapsed, joining the others in camel heaven. The meat and most of the hair were long gone, but the bones were slowly being gobbled up by the orange sand that would bring the camel, or whatever animal, back to the desert that gave it life in the first place. It made life seem so simple.

My infatuation with roadkill was very apparent and Ama soon realized that I WAS going to pick-up every horse hoof and cow skull and tell him I wanted to tie them to the front of the van. He put up with it and when I’d come running over to the van with a new goat knee or something, he would dismiss me with a simple nod of his head. I would hang my head, drop my goat knee and 15 minutes later come running up with a complete camel backbone that I thought would look GREAT on the front of the van. The picturesque skull laying half buried in bright orange desert dust with a backdrop of a big sand dune and scraggly desert foliage never gets old to me. I took 673 pictures with such ingredients and will make sure to show any unsuspecting travellers interested in my pictures every last one of them.

The second to last day, we had stopped at a small village for lunch in a couple outlying gers. Peter, the guy from Seattle, had hit the Ulan Batar Vodka with avengence the night before and said he would stay in the car for a nap. We figured he was just hung over, but about 10 minutes later somebody ran into the ger and said Peter was lying outside of the van convulsing wildly. We got him into the ger and laid him down on the floor with a pillow under his head. He would be conscious for about 2-3 seconds and then his eyes would roll-up into his head and he would not be present for the next 10 seconds or so. After an hour of trying to ask him if he was epileptic during his brief stints of consciousness, he dropped into a ‘grandma’ seizure and began shaking uncontrollably as his eyes rolled back into his head and his eyelids fluttered like a hummingbirds wings. I tried to hold his upperbody steady while Brice held his legs. He started blowing bloody spit bubbles from his mouth and sounded like he was choking on his own saliva. I rolled him over on his right side because the earlier seizure had popped his left shoulder out of its socket. The bloody spit blew out of his mouth in big vocal choking coughs. After a minute it was over.

He didn’t become fully conscious until about 3AM that night. The family invited us to stay in their ger for the night and we would drive the entire next day to get back to Ulan Batar on schedule. Brice and I sat and ate goat knuckle soup and seemed just as worn out as Peter from the freaky happenings of a lunch time stop.

The Gobi was amazing and Mongolia as a whole is an intriguing country, filled with culture and tradition. I went to the black market, where the locals get anything they could ever want, and tried on about 50 pairs of Mongolian boots in an attempt to find myself a little souvenir from one of my new found favourite countries. If I made a face like the boot was a little small, there would be a bunch of yelling in Mongolian as people buzzed all around me and within 10 seconds, there was a new pair in front of me, ready for the trying. In the end I couldn’t find a pair that fit right, much to the dismay of the sales people. I figured I might be bordering on becoming a “blender” anyhow. If I show-up in America with a big robe sinched tightly with a bright orange sash of fabric, big leather boots up to my knees, and a hat made from camel wool, kindly turn me around and send me back to Mongolia.

Pretty average Sunday yesterday- Got up at the butt crack of dawn, ate my favorite Chinese street food delight- a pancake, egg, green onion, cilantro, chili masterpiece put together by my favorite girl that sets her stand up just South of Tianneman Square (same place where the government brought tanks in to simmer down a student lead pro democracy rally in 1989 and ended-up killing over 100 students and civilians to bring it to an end) here in Beijing. Took the subway to a bus to a minivan and hiked the Great Wall of China.

I’ve been in Beijing for about a week now, after leaving the Beef Noodle Ninja in some small town between Xi’an and Beijing and, more importantly, far far from here. I met-up with three other American guys, one of which I had met in a cafe in Bangkok at the start of my trip. They’ve got a similar travel plan so we’ve joined forces to raise that much more hell along the way.

The cast of characters goes something like this: Philip, 23, Michigan State graduate, going to work for BP after this trip- Brian, 23, University of Michigan graduate, going to medical school in Michigan after this trip- Omri, 23, small school in New York graduate, saved-up his ruples from a year as a trader on Wall Street to travel until the summer of 2007- Me, 25, no explanation necessary.

About 3 1/2 hours into our hike on the weathered stones of a portion of the Great Wall called Simatai (last “renovated” between 300-400 years ago and much less touristy than other parts of the wall) we reached the spot that, according to our hand written map scribbled on a ripped-out sheet of paper from the Lonely Planet travel guide by Philip’s friend from home that lives in Shanghai, who, after 109 straight days, became the first Westerner to traverse the entire Great Wall, we were to simply “jump over” the little fence that says to go no further. Beyond the fence, unrenovated remains stand crumbled like your mama’s coffe cake, but still in the shape of a wall, as they steadily climb through the Beijing haze to the highest point in the area.

Our makeshift map said to jump the fence and shimmy our way up the remains to the “Stairway to Heaven” that leads to guard tower #16 (we were currently stalled at #12) and from there take the switchback trails down the hillside to a path that runs parallel to the gondola back to the trailhead. We also wanted to throw in a bundled-up night of sleeping in one of these guard towers, where hundreds of years ago the Chinese defense used to keep a watchful eye on the Mongolian border to the North in an effort to keep out the invading opposition.  

The blue-inked map of the proposed route was apparently dubbed the guys favorite part of the Great Wall after 109 days on the thing. We certainly had to take his word, but when we arrived at the little fence and matching sign, it kindly let us know in a Chinglish kind of way that we would be fined 200 Yuan (about $25) if we crossed the fence into the untouched ruins. To our amazement, there were 3 security guards in over-sized dirty grey uniforms to enforce the crossing regulations onto the forbidden part of the wall. One of them even had a walkie talkie. We sat down to snack on some sugary sunflower concoction we had brought and think about how we were going to get past these “guards” to complete our intended objective.

A quick rundown to give you an idea of the 3 guards put in charge of manning the small brown sign and matching fence, safeguarding China’s treasured historic relic from people like us. There was a chief and two subordinates. Subordinate #1 clocked-in at around 15 years-old and just mimicked everything subordinate #2 did with a permanent grin on his face. Subordinate #2, in his droopy grey suit adorned with a “Beijing Security” patch on his left shoulder put his 15 or so years of life into question as he was climbing on the walls and yelling to us when he would strike a new pose as if looking for some acknowledgement of his wall skills or hopes of a photo opportunity. He laid on the horizontal boat-chain fence and played air guitar on the straw broom that Beijing Security apparently arms them with. The chief of the crew looked maybe 30 years-old and had a striking resemblance to ’Warren’ (Cameron Diaz’s mentally handicapped brother in the movie) in Ben Stiller’s “Something About Mary.” His grey pants were hiked-up over his pot belly to just under his nipples where the elastic waist band kept them firmly secured. His whole grey suit was offset with  a very professional looking pair of bright blue Converse All-Star-esque canvas shoes.

We came up with several different plans to get around these guys that were purely based on things we’d seen in movies and really had no real-life reason for working. We started with simple financial negotiations to try and pay them off. Chief would grunt a few things and Subordinate #2 would sketch his offer in the sand with a spare piece of the Great Wall. (I’m going to phase Subordinate #1 out of this story, but just know that the entire time he was smiling and playfully pushing around Subordinate #2 in a delightfully retarded  manner) They weren’t budging far enough on the price and only came down to 400 Yuan for all of us as opposed to the original 800 Yuan in “fine” money that the sign promised would be collected.

We got the chalk board out and ran through numerous possible plans, from spoiling them with cigarettes and sunflower snacks, to whooping them with the straw broom and hog tying them together in a guard hut leaving them for the next days rush of camera toting touristas. There’s no other way to properly describe these three than absoulute blundering idiots (and I’m going to call Chief ’Mongo’ from now on). Mongo would waddle up to Subordinate #2 (who will from this point on be called “Scooby”),give him a good push and give a grumbling caveman giggle when he flipped Scooby’s guard hat to the dusty ground. We couldn’t get over the fact that these three had been put solely in charge of guarding this national relic and further we decided that we suck at McGuyver-esque negotiations having failed in figuring out a way to get by these idiots.

The sun was perched on top of the thick cloud of haze that originates on the streets of Beijing and seeps out to blanket even this area 3 hours away from the city. As the sun threatened to start setting, we decided the potential consequences for getting past the guards and fence drowned out the potential experience of hiking the unrenovated wall on the other side and called to action our final plan. We would quickly sprint down the the old stone steps, through 4 or 5 guard towers and then FREEZE in hopes the guards would think we went all the way down to the beginning and continue down themselves.

Philip was running point as the mad dash began. Omri was second in line and Brian was shouting back to me that I wasn’t decending fast enough. I speed waddled down the stairs with my water, bananas, sun flower snacks, camera, sandals, etc. wildly bouncing around me, all firmly attached to my pack. I caught a glimpse of Brian’s shoulder as he spun-off the wall into a little spot behind several big boulders. Once all four of us were safely behind the rocks, we froze. Knowing the guards weren’t too far behind us, we stood in absolute silence waiting to hear their passing footsteps down the wall.

We shared hand signals and read lips keeping total silence as we tried to figure out what the enemies next move would be. As I stood in absolute silence, my mind flickered right back to acorn fights and intense games of kick-the-can from back when I was a self-proclaimed hide-n-seek legend. My concentration on my breathing to ensure it produced no audible exhaust took me right back to the days of hiding in closets for hours as my older brother, with the full support of my little brother, would be savagly hunting me to whoop me for some “wrong” thing I had done, like hit him in the temple with a fiercely thrown cheese wheel. (This is the extra short version of the one time I claim to have beaten my older brother-up, but the cheese wheel incident did not go unpunished so I don’t know if it counts as a clean vistory)

There we stood, frozen as if we were stuck in a photograph, on guard tower #8 of the Great Wall of China, saturated in one of the most intense games of hide-n-seek I’ve ever taken part in. The cool breeze blew the only sound, a cruising bird’s call, deep into our steady ear drums. Our eyes met one another and asked perfectly clear questions without ever saying a word. Where were Mongo, Scooby and the gang?

7 minutes passed before we allowed ourselves to breath regularly and come out of our frozen poses. The leaves rustled under our tired feet and we asked eachother the same questions we had a few minutes ago in sign language. I started to quietly exclaim that this was the most fun I’d had since the neighborhood kick-the-can championships back in ‘88 when Philip looked at us all with a straight face and said he thought that the stealthiest one of us needed to quietly creep out and survey the situation to see if the guards were gone.

At 25 years-old, “stealthy” is something I haven’t put on my resume in a good long while. We looked around to eachother as if we would clearly be able to disern just who was the STEALTHIEST of them all. After complimenting eachother with loss-of-word comments like, “Omri, I guess you look pretty stealthy,” the jury decided Philip should go undercover to scout out the East-West intersection at tower #8 and answer our earlier questions and try to get a visual of the guards location.

He gracefully manuveured his Saucony running shoes between the two boulders with the digital camera poised and ready to capture the survelliance photos. The other 3 of us stayed safely hidden behind the rocks so not to give away our location. Within a few minutes we were rejoicing as Philip’s briefing brought good news. He didn’t see the guards anywhere. High fives all around for Philip’s stealthiness.

A few more minutes of patiently waiting and we all crept back onto the wall where to our immediate left proudly sat Scooby, and to our right sat Smiley. Mongo was just down the wall a bit picking his nose, not ammused in the slightest by our daring get-away attempt. Something told me that we were not the first white folks to try and complete a task like this. We motioned that we were taking pictures (and not trying to allude them in a 3rd grade recess-like attempt) and gave Philip plenty of shit for boasting that he had thoroughly swept the area and saw no sign of the guards. (Philip’s STEALTH card has since been revoked.)

Mongo and Smiley went ahead to the end, lacking the patience needed as we stopped every other minute for classic photo opps. We were left with Scooby, a setting sun, and a failed attempt to conquer the Great Wall. We later likened it in American terms to visiting the White House and fully planning on spending the night in the Oval office and later jumping on George Bush’s bed with reckless abandon.

We sat on the steps overlooking the zig-zag wall heading West over the hills as it faded into the thick haze and ate the entire 2 days worth of food we had brought for the adventure right then. The sun danced through the haze in a few places lighting up the old tired stones with an orange glow like it’s done so many times before. We all agreed that that moment made up for not accomplishing our initial objective. Scooby gave each one of us a go at wearing his official guard hat and we laughed out loud with mouths full of bananas, tofu and sunflower snacks agreeing that our hide-n-seek skills have grown rusty with time. The haze drowned out everything else in the world and for that moment, we were kings in our own little world with the Great Wall of China and a setting China sun all to ourselves.

Along the road more travelled there are several distinct types of people you can’t help but to notice as they ruin your afternoons and sometimes even draw you into forced conversation about where you’re from, where your going, yaddeee, yadddaaa, blah, blah, blah.

I’d like to quickly mention two of these folks with the first being the Neck Breathers. This has been recently brought to a head with an incident just the other day where I was breathed on by a Neck Breather.

In this part of the world, there is no such thing as personal space. In America, we enjoy a permenent bubble of ME SPACE that surrounds us at all times. Kind of like a bubble. If somebody gets into your bubble, it can all be resolved with a slight ‘you’re in my bubble’ look and the person backs off in a complete understanding of the infringement.

I was in line to get across the Vietnam border into China and scooted forward as a Vietnamer became a China-er and the line became one person shorter. That’s when it started. I picked-up on a steady and rhythmic breathing pattern behind me. Kind of like the loud nasal breather that was always in prime form during quiet tests in school. It got louder and louder. I was no longer at the Vietnam/Chinese border, but in some sort of respiratory wonderland where all I heard was this humans breathing until, with the use of my periferial (or however you spell it) vision, I noticed an inividual bringing the heat on my starboard side. Closer and closer he got until his ricey dragon breath was raising the hairs on my neck with every exhalation like a feather in a cartoon. Up and down… up and down.

I thought I would see just how close this guy was comfortable in getting, and seeing that my neck was already all fogged-up, I leaned a little to my right in his general direction. He could have eaten the collar on my shirt for lunch, but he just stayed right there and neck breathed all over my neck. And I mean all over. He didn’t miss a spot. Up by the hair line, down into the collar, right, left, he covered ’em all. And this is just an isolated example of a run-in with a neck breather. They’re everywhere over here… but you don’t have to find them… they’ll find you.

At 6 feet 2 inches and as American as they come, I understand the international rule that I do not blend in ANYWHERE. I stick out like the travelling American I am wherever I go. Thus, I wear clothes that I would wear at home and do as a normal visitor to a foreign nation would do. There is a certain breed of people that firmly adhere to the ‘when in Rome’ philosophy of life. They believe that when they are in a certain destination or local, they must BE the destination or local. By this I mean that, for instance, when a Blender, as I will from now on call them, is in Southeast Asia, they find it absolutely necessary to wear Thai fisherman pants (kind of like capri pajama pants), a classic Vietnemese conical rice farmers hat, sandals made from tire treads like the Viet Cong used to wear, and the all important hand-knitted man-purse draped over a shoulder holding their not so local digital camera.

But it goes further than the dress. Often times Blenders will purposefully avoid conversation with such ‘tourists’ as myself. To talk to one of ‘us’ would just not be very local of them. They prefer to spend their time walking around showing people that they are very much like the local people or pretending that they have made great friends with a local person or group and stay close as to assume a ‘belonging’ to the culture.

In Southeast Asia, the local people do this kind of squat thing that I can only recall being able to do when I was 2 years-old playing with a toy truck or something on the ground. Everybody.. out of your chairs to give this puppy a go-round. Stand-up straight with feet hip-width apart and then just drop down into a squat slightly rotating your heels outward but feet flat on the ground. You probably fell over because it is very uncomfortable and hard to balance, but in Asia this is the norm and they sit like this for HOURS!

A Blender can be found amongst his peers in the full-on squat position. As a Westerner (and the victor of a SE Asia squat competition to see who was going to buy the beers) I can tell you that this position is very painful as it slowly cuts the circulation off from your feet on up to the knees. Your knees will cramp and your feet will remain asleep for at least 20 minutes after you come out of the ‘pose’ with a major ‘pins and needles’ sensation giving you the impression your feet are the size of the bear slippers in your closet. Yet Blenders continue to act like it is so normal for them to squat like this. ‘Back in London I always do this.’ ‘Let’s say I’ve got a few minutes waiting for the bus at home in Melbourne, Australia- I squat because it’s so comfortable.’ Bullshit! You’re a Blender and you know it!

Many times these Blenders have been travelling for 4 or 5 years straight and if drawn in to a conversation with a lesser being like myself that is only on the road for several months, they will be void of any excitement for any achievement you hope to part take in while your out and about. They’ve done it all. Train elephants in the Thai Jungle? ‘Like 3 years ago.’ Snowmobiling in Siberia? ‘It’s not that cool.’ Climb Mt. Everest? ‘Pretty good view at the top, but I wouldn’t do it for a 5th time.’

Blenders bloat themselves with this feeling of being the mother of all traveller’s on the road. The Guru’s if you will. ’I'm wearing capri pajama pants… that should tell you something. Look at this man-purse… hand-woven in a Tibetan village… you think this is new to me? Take a look at the hairs on my toes… I’ve dipped those hairs in 16 oceans, 7 seas, 43 rivers and a pile of garbage in Southern India when I was there for 7 months studying Bikram Yoga. I don’t even use a Lonely Planet Travel Guide. Look at me squatting, you probably think this hurts…. no…. it’s so comfotable I could fall asleep.’ Swings his man-purse to the other side, ’so what are you doing again?’

Watch out for the Neck Breathers and Blenders… they’re out there.         

So here I am sitting on the cold polished marble-esque floor in the atrium of an 8-story Chinese shopping mall in Xi’an, China. Oddily enough I’m eating a stick of beef jerky. This atrium is where everybody comes to eat the goodies they have purchased in the surrounding shops and having just purchased a yogurt, a coke, some walnuts and a stick of beef jerky, I’ve come to the atrium to enjoy my spoils. Only problem is that all of the dining tables are filled with, you guessed it, Chinese people.

I think of myself as a fairly fast person when it comes to raw speed. I’ve got a wrinkled blue ribbon, circa 3rd grade, that proves my point. It proudly claims that I came in first place for something- what that was I have no idea, but I’m sure it was a gruelling event of speed and fury and it pretty much firms up the notion that, ’this guy’s fast.’

I pranced around the perimeter of the dining area waiting patiently for a seat to open-up. But these Chinese folk are like nothing I’ve ever seen before in terms of pure aggression and lightning fast speed. As soon as somebody even THOUGHT about getting up, there were 6 Chinese people that came out of nowhere waiting for their seat. They were all laughing at the big American that would make a go at a semi-vacant seat, apparently, in super slow-motion like Frank the Tank in ‘Old School’ after he shoots himself with the tranquilizer dart. ’Seeeeaaaatttt Oooooppeeen!’

This brings me to why I’m sitting on the cold polished marble-esque floor of the mall. Their just too fast. But I’m going to hold my blue ribbon high in the air for a moment and blame this dining experience not on my lack of raw speed, but rather on the fact that I am currently under the rule of the Beef Noodle Ninja.

I left you all somewhere around Hanoi, Vietnam last time with plans to go to the far northwest corner of Vietnam for a little minority hill tribe experience. Now to me that sounds like some kind of scholorship I didn’t get in college, but everybody raved of the experience and I had to go along with it so not to sound like an idiot backpacker. So after spending 3 days on a junk boat kayaking, cruising and boozing amongst the 3,000 limestone islands of Halong Bay, taking in a very cool water puppet show in Hanoi, and watching Rodney Dangerfield at his best in ‘Caddyshack’ from the comfort of my $5 hotel room bed (the bitch came with HBO), I was off to visit the tribe minority hills… like any seasoned backpacker would do.

I was the only Westerner on the overnight train and as morning came I made sure I spouted out my desired stop in butchered Vietnemese to my 5 other bunk mates, all rested-up from sleeping on something that resembled an autopsy table, so not to miss the minority things. Vietnemese has 6 different tones- and for an example, the word ’ma’ means 6 totally different words based on your tone and inflexion. I’m pretty sure I must have kept asking my Vietnemese sleep buddies if this stop was ’small friendly squirrel’ or ‘green rhinocerous hair’ because I was still on the train when it reached the terminus- the Chinese border.

I just played it off like I never wanted to go to the minority place anyway. I decided to jump over the Chinese border that rainy morning (actually you have to walk as it’s a long bridge) after having my Visa checked and passport stamped. I took an absolutely miserable 14 hour bus to the city of Kunming in Southwest China. The bus kept breaking down on the dirt road we were travelling along.The greasy driver would rummage around behind his seat for a minute and pull out a few wrenches, slip under the bus and return back with a working bus ready for the next leg until it broke again.

In Kunming I decided to start the gastronomic adventure off with a little ‘local’ flavor and spoiled myself rotten with a dish of noodles, minced beef and peppers at the only restaurant I could find with a ‘Chinglish’ menu. (‘Chinglish’ is the minimum attempt to get a point across in English- like a hotel I stayed at made it clear on the rule board that you were not allowed to ’bring on fireguns, nuclear crackers or smelling bad things into hotell.’ You get what they’re going for… but not really.) I enjoyed every bit of the noodle dish and washed it all down with a cold Coke. Images of how great China was going to be began filling my head.

Dancing eggrolls skipped happily along the crumbling brick remnants of the Great Wall of China while a fire-red sun said it’s final fairwell. A samuri that looked a lot like Tony Nardi in a karate outfit slashed the sunset long ways to expose snow-capped mountains wrapped in blue sky with some of those minorities running around in green spandex suits throwing fortune cookies to everybody. The images started to blur a bit and there were flickers of fire breathing dragon’s and Jackie Chan giving me a kung fu chop to the gut. The Beef Noodle Ninja had struck.

At first I just felt full. Then Jackie Chan came back and Whap! Whap! Whap! right to the gut. And so it’s been for the last week… me and the Beef Noodle Ninja taking 18 hour train rides with our own roll of toilet paper. We’ve seen gardens and parks and sunsets. We’ve seen more train rides (China is VERY big!) and historical sites and cold polished marble-esque floors.

Today the beef noodle ninja and I went to the 2000 year-old site of the terracotta warriors. Dubbed the ‘Eighth Wonder of the World,’ this place was AMAZING! Rows upon rows of terracotta soldiers in battle form have been unearthed since a couple of farmers dug a well at the current site in 1974 and brought up ceramic remnants. So far, three pits of soldiers, horses and chariots make-up the UNESCO World Heritage Site with 6,000 statues and 10,000 bronze weapons having been dug up from as deep as 20 feet below the surface. The largest pit being about the size of 2 football fields end-to-end.

In ancient times the terracotta soldiers were discovered by the enemy and many were broken and burned. The soldiers are in lanes with jammed earth in between and what used to be a wooden roof above them. The site is still under excavation and there is reason to believe there are many other terracotta soldiers buried in the area. It is amazing to see the ash on the wood that was set a blaze over 2000 years ago. Check out the photographs page for a few pictures.

Here’s to the Beef Noodle Ninja!