A Journey to Well Known Places

Quesadilla and margarita baby, I am coming home. I have more than a few trepidations about rejoining productive society, but I am excited to return to the people and places that I know and love. Besides, I am ready to come back. I am fortunate enough to still have a fair amount of money left and no real obligation to come back to (except for Bill’s wedding…..which is in no small part the reason I am coming back now as opposed to a couple months later). The point is I got to choose the time of my return. I am ready to come home. I meet a lot of people that are just beginning their adventure. My year long trip is about average, if not a little on the short side for many of the travelers that you meet in places like this. When I tell them that I have been out for 11 months, but now I going home, they just give me a look like I told them my dog got run over. No, seriously, it is alright. When I left home I had go greater ambition than to go as far and as long as I could. And in certain respects I have. I haven’t run out of time or money. I have just decided that I would rather reconnect with the people and places that I know and love than see another beach or temple complex. India is amazing and amazingly frustrating. There are heaps of places here that I am sure are just fabulous that I am completely brushing off for a night at the pub with my friends and some good TexMex. I was telling my travel plans to my friend Mary’s now husband, Garreth, and since he had been to many of these places there was much to talk about. Someone came up and asked what we were talking about and I replied, ‘Just my trip.’ He added ‘Only his life changing adventure around Asia.’ He was more right than I was. In terms of personal growth my expectations for the trip were minimal. I was less interested in growing than I was see, doing, and eating great things. In the process though I have learned a lot about myself and relearned a lot about people. Taking the time off of working for someone else and instead working for myself has been a grand experience. I have taken 25 years of back to back 2 week vacations. I have ridden almost every mode of transport that you can think of. I have met honest people and crooked people. I have been stolen from, lied to, misled, harassed and consistently overcharged for every good or service you can think of because of the color of my skin. I have also at times felt like a celebrity and an honored guest for the same reason. I feel quite a bit more self reliant than I was before I left. I have learned how to pick myself up again, so now I am much less afraid of falling. I don’t know where I am going to end up or what I will be doing, but I am optimistic about what lies ahead.

Ok, so My Top Five Asian Travel Experiences (In no particular order. Just picking 5 was hard enough):  

1.      The train ride over the Himalayas from the Gobi desert to Lhasa in Tibet

2.      Hiking Tiger Leaping Gorge in the Yunnan province of China.

3.      Three days touring the Angkor Wat area in Cambodia

4.      Learning to scuba dive in Malaysian Borneo

5.      Spending 12 days doing nothing on the Andaman islands in India.

I fly out of Delhi today into Portland. On April 16th I fly into Dallas and I will be in Austin by the first weekend in May. Thank you all for sticking with me this whole time. I hope my ramblings brought you a smile from time to time.

It started in China, not too long into my trip. The first three times I just blew it off. They were Chinese and maybe didn’t get the same exposure as Westerners. Then, in the Gobi desert, my fears were confirmed when a yet a fourth Chinese person point out the similarity and an American and an Israeli backed him up. I look like Bill Clinton. My initial reaction was a little surprise and more self consciousness. The Bill Clinton I remember was kinda fat with big bags under his eyes. I immediately set out to lose a little of my middle. Still it would happen. Eleven months later, a life of travel has reshaped my body. And I still get told I look like American president Beer Crinton. Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, Malaysians, Indonesians, Laos, Indians, Czechs, Irish, Canadians all have found the resemblance so striking that they will walk up to me in restaurants, or the taxi driver will turn around and the light and tell me, or shop keepers tell me while I browse, ect. It happens sometimes as often as several times a week. This week alone I have been told four different times. Since then I have come to realize that the image most other people have of Bill Clinton is not one of an out of shape and haggard man, but something altogether more positive. Bill Clinton was handsome and charming, even if a little personally unscrupulous. He is associated with prosperity and reasonable foreign policy; a popular man in Asia it turns out. People are still talking about how much they liked him. Now I take it as a compliment.

I saved one of the best for last. The Taj Mahal lives up to the hype. On my last full day of travel I got up at 4:30am so I could get down to the train station ... [Continue reading this entry]