THE ODYSSEY

i’m sad to report that my good friend, Claws Cartwright, passed away from a bout with feline lymphoma. claws was a kitty with lots of personality. for awhile there he toyed with kitty hippiedom, growing dreads on his sides. claws pawed around the planet in the company of miss julianne coffee (and others, myself included for a brief time a couple of times) for 14 years before succumbing to the cancer that finally had him breathing his last.

raise a glass or sprinkle some catnip for claws (a.k.a. “knuckles”) and think a good thought that he’s in that better place above earth, chasing mice and bugs and drinking from a heavenly bathroom sink tap that never shuts off.

yeah, i know, it’s been ages since i have updated Ye Olde Blogge. i’ve got a slew of new stories and tales of mad adventures in the arab world since my last post. i do not, however, have the time or energy at the moment to write. see, i’ve got a nasty head cold at the moment which i’ve had for over a week now and all i want to do is sleep and sleep and sleep…let me just say, though, that i have, sad and emotionally drained, left my humble family dwelling in cairo. i spent 8 days there after splitting dahab. i was in dahab for nearly 3 weeks. while dahab was chilled out and relaxing cairo was the polar opposite. mayhem, chaos and MORE. i loved it though and will return again as soon as possible. my special egyptian friend hassan gave me lots of useful arabic (arabian, according to locals) words and phrases to practice for when i come back.

yesterday, 23 july, i landed in cape town, south africa after a 7 hour flight from cairo to johannesburg, then a 2 hour flight from jo’burg to cape town. thanks to martin’s friend percy in hermanus, i have arranged to take several tours (i know, i know, backpackers don’t DO tours, but i just couldn’t resist these options). get this: cheetah petting! shark cage diving! wine tasting in stellenbosch! oh yeah, baby. south africa’s going to RULE.

am shacked up at the ashanti lodge (hostel) in cape town, just off the main backpacker area of long street which is, as percy puts it, cape town’s version of khao san road in bangkok. he’s not far off the mark either. the hostel itself is very nice and clean and secure and pretty much has everything i could possibly need from the bar/cafe to internet to travel and other information. my room is about $50 US a night and well worth it (although it’s freezing in there…there’s a good heater though) for the modern bathroom, common kitchen facilities next door and gorgeous victorian/african architecture – imagine a gingerbread house with wrap-around porch and that’s what the building is like. cute as can be. some highlights so far: good wine, coffee and pork products. HOORAH!

there will be more on my adventures in cairo soon, i promise, as well as the remainder of my stay in dahab. stay tuned, folks. i’ll be baaaaaaaack…

“welcome to egypt.” “where you from?” these are the questions posed to me day in and day out roughly 100 times a day here in egypt. occasionally, i become so exasperated by these annoyances (and others such as “you have beautiful smile. can i just talk to you for 2 minutes? just please 2 minutes!”) that i am beginning to make things up just to amuse myself and make things interesting (“i’m from egypt, can’t you tell?”) but mostly it just bugs the sh#t outta me dealing with these aggressive dudes. once in awhile i come across someone genuinely nice and quiet and will have meaningful conversations with that person. i have met such a person here in dahab, on the southern end of the sinai peninsula. this guy walid runs the restaurant across from the hotel where i’m staying and has shown me much kindness and generosity (discounts on food and drink, free drinks, complimentary sheesha pipes breaks, lifts in his 4WD car to the nicest beach, etc.). the conversations have been interesting and he’s taught me a bit about egyptian culture which is, of course, fascinating to the uneducated. he also taught me how to write my name in arabic! if i could do so here i would share this with you people, but i don’t think i can on this keyboard.  Read the rest of this entry »

early june: arrived @ london heathrow. afternoon. am happily communicating with the people in the same language i learned as a small child. two weeks of asking for things in english, being responded to in english, and actually getting what i asked for was sheer bliss.

i have a lot of good friends in england and in scotland. i made a few more good friends in the short time i was there. i will not soon forget any of them. the kindness flowed like a fine single malt scotch and i drank it up in spades. i was surrounded by record collections vast and impressive at the homes i visited (except at jonnie’s parents’ house in norwich). needless to say much of the conversations i had with these fine folks was centered on music: always a favorite topic of mine, as those of you who know me know very well.

first stop brighton. the weather was perfect on the first day and rained on the 2nd. i found the alley where the mod guy and girl, in a brief escape from the mods vs. rockers riot, shagged up against the wall in that movie Quadrophenia (quintessential mod flick from some 25 years ago). although the scene wasn’t the most poignant of love scenes ever created on film, it seems a fitting locale considering the characters were sleeping under bridges and on the beach and thus had no access to private domains for such rendezvous. ahem, anyways, so that was fun. my hosts in brighton, martin & lina, were nothing short of gracious and lovely. i hope to repay the kindness someday.

next stop: london. my hosts there, jo and matt, were also most kind and fun to hang with. they live in swanky notting hill. the visit started out well at an afternoon DJ gig matt was doing between bands at the Macbeth that went on late into the evening. many drinks were consumed. good to catch up with my peeps across the pond.

next stop: essex. specifically, bumbles green, nazeing (what a name, eh? wow! doesn’t get much more english than that!). helen came to collect me at tottenham hale and we drove down to essex to where she lives with her folks. they have a lovely country home with some horses in a field next door and lots of clean air. it pretty much drizzled the whole time. we walked around some woods and gabbed and had a nice visit. helen has traveled a lot on her own all over the world and so proved a valuable source of information for me as she has visited many of the places i’m visiting. i hope to have as good adventures as she’s had on hers. poor helen didn’t sleep the night i was there and so couldn’t really hang out the next day. got the train back to london, back to matt and jo’s, and hung out there for a day or so until it was time to catch a train northeast. met up with sonja, the friend i’d made in koh tao, for a drink and a bite. was good to catch up with her too and we swapped stories about thailand and she very nearly arranged for me to appear (vocally if not physically) on Big Brother. i was meant to call in and be interviewed about Big Brother. as it turns out, i was not needed. shame that my fifteen minutes of fame were so short lived – non-existent, actually.
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it was a sad day the other day…ı left koh tao on may 18 on the 9:30 am boat to koh samuı where ı caught the plane to bangkok ınternatıonal aırport. the samuı aırport ıs small and nıce not unlıke the aırport ın huatulco, oaxaca. it was sad because, as many of you already know, i left behind a few very special people whom i will not soon forget and will indeed see again one day soon. the buddha necklace i was given on may 1 remains a integral part of my wardrobe. the fond memories of my small bit of paradise and the genuine smiles i received daily from my south asian friends are forever imprinted in my mind. doubtless i will return there again and again and again.
ı arrıved ın bangkok after a short flight and after a couple of hours in the airport waiting area had a most pleasant surprıse ın the form of my frıend sonja whom i’d met on koh tao. turns out she was on her way to srı lanka and was waıtıng to go to her gate. we had not seen each other for a week or so and so had a great catch up and a few laughs and memory lane yucks. in the airport book shop i picked up a copy of “thailand fever” cowritten by a western guy and a thai woman and which is written in both thai and english. the book is a “how to” guide to thai-western relationships and although it speaks primarily to the western man-thai woman connection, it also has invaluable information on the differences in general thoughts and behaviors between the two cultures and how to work out the differences (eg., compromise, communication, expectation, family and monetary values, etc.) in order to successfully grow in a bi-cultural relationship. fascinating stuff and gave me some good insight as to why the thais act the way they do. doy, you say, they’re different. yeah, no sh%t they’re different. nobody could or would explain to me exactly how they are different, certainly not they themselves cuz how could they possibly explain these nuances to me, and so the book shed a bit of light on practical matters associated with close relationships with thais. this was an eye opener, although i doubt i’ll need to use many of the pointers myself (marriage, dowry, family commitments and monetary support for same), however it did explain the fundamental principles of generosity, loyalty and saving face even in circumstances where “noble lies” must be told in order to maintain harmony. the book also explained how the position of body parts (head and feet) are significant in how they communicate and show respect. for instance, one would never point his or her feet at something as that is considered offensive; nor would one touch another’s head as that is offensive too. one always sits below head level of the more respected or higher caste when they sit together in a room. there are lots of other tips to clue us farangs in on thai culture but these seemed the most important in my estimation. and it’s a funny little book with silly – but spot on – illustrations.
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sabaidee ka, dear readers. i’m STILL on koh tao enjoying (for the most part) my little bit of paradise. the bits i have not enjoyed so much include torrential rain storms, 100 mph winds (or at least it seems like they were that gusty), and the flying around of detritus (palm fronds, dead coconuts, sand, and various flora from up high and down low) during same climatic madness. another weird feeling i’ve had during all of this drama is that i am the only person remaining, and have been the only person for a couple of days now, at my bungalows besides the thai owners and few burmese workers. they all go to sleep fairly early and i suppose are used to the monsoons, but i am unused to such chaos from the heavens and i have found that sleeping through the night is challenging at best. fortunately, my bungalow is made mostly of cement but the thatched conical roof with its fiberglass windows way up high in the cone make me wonder just how secure these parts of the structure really are. so far, knock on bamboo, nothing has caved in or flown away, but the areas between cement and thatch are open, as are the windows which only have a few jail cell-like bars keeping out the larger critters and covered by thin curtains, allowing all manner of smaller debris to fly up and into my room. each morning i discover a whole new pile of small leaves and bits of seaside debris covering my floor and blanket. i have also had a late-night visitor when the winds and rain have been very heavy: a cute little gray rat. he/she is very scared of me and hides between the bed stand (the bed is up about 3 1/2 feet from the ground on a cement block with a thin layer of linoleum between it and the mattress) and bamboo bathroom wall (the latter being simply stalks of bamboo cut in various heights of about 5 to 7 feet. because thai plumbing cannot handle toilet paper, we have to toss our used paper into a bin and flush our business down with buckets of water. these buckets are usually placed right next to the loo so one can easily “flush” right after doing one’s business.
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after much careful thought and consideration, and due to some heavy influence from a certain person or persons, i have opted to give Malaysia and Indonesia a miss this time around. the fact is, now that it is early may i would only have about 9 days to travel south on overnight boats, trains, buses, etc. in order to get to borneo, bali & sumatra, and i simply don’t have it in me to travel that hard right now. then there is the sky and sea:
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first off, sorry folks for all of the profanity in the previous post. i sometimes wonder how it is that i can be so moronic and vented at you, dear readers. for this, i sincerely apologize.

so anyway, samui wasn’t a total loss. i got some business done there and had a sweet beach front bungalow in a place called Shangrilah. you can’t really go wrong with that. things dramatically changed, however, as i was awakened by TERRIBLE thunder and rain storms at about 4am. this hard rain continued throughout the morning and i feared that my 8am ferry back to koh tao was going to be a treacherous ride. as it turns out, the vessel was big enough and the seas calm enough that i was able to catch a few winks onboard without issue. those of you who know me well should know that i am not prone to any type of motion sickness, and so despite the lurching of the ferry i did not feel the effects whatsoever nor have any need for the free barf bags that were passed out by the crew (WTA folks, take note of this kind gesture). i still carry motion sickness pills just in case, but have yet to need to take any.
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dear readers, today is the Very Worst Day Of My Life (in 2008). my iPod with all of my most killerest, favoritest music has been erased at the internet cafe. i never should have left Koh Tao or this never would have happened to me. and all i wanted to do was make a lovely little CD with a playlist for my friends back on Koh Tao. now i have nada. i am PISSED AS HELL, PEOPLE.
*&^P#_(@#$%^

now, i must return to my shitty bungalow in shitty koh samui (where i never wanted to go in the first place and wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for a bit of post office business) and cry myself to sleep until 6 am when i will be awakened DEPRESSED AS HELL, PEOPLE, in order to catch the ferry back to Koh Tao (where i never wanted to leave in the FIRST PLACE). then, upon my return, i will have to spend a bazillion baht in the net cafe buying a bunch more %O#@)(*%$ songs to download so i am not without tunes for the rest of my journey. i cannot – nay – will not live without tunes.

this, friends, is what the Buddhists call karma. mine at this particular juncture is BAD.  please keep your fingers crossed that my karma improves soon because i do not think i could take this type of piracy again without doing some type of serious damage to someone or even myself. i beseach you to pray, people, for nothing but good karma to come my way.

next post i make i will have good news. this i promise.  happy birthday to me…

once upon a time on an island far, far away in the gulf of thailand there occurred an event so profound that all the natives went into a deep shock and everyone wondered if things would ever return to normal again. this island, called ko tao in the native language, had enjoyed for the last several years relative luxury with the delivery of electricity.

one day, without warning an event occurred that drove everyone out of doors and onto the beaches. the lights went out and the boats stopped running. the lights stayed out for two days and two nights. the inhabitants of the island arranged for ice to be brought from the cities to keep their eggs, dairy and vegetables refrigerated, not to mention the usual supply of cold beer. candles were lit and distributed to all of the houses and all of the inhabitants stayed up very, very late outdoors because it was too hot to be inside the houses.

another consequence of this event was that none of the longtail boats were running and no one could get off of the island safely until things were back to normal. the only thing to do was to wait out the event. those who were in need of transit to the mainland would have to wait until it was safe to depart. the more nomadic of the villagers, those who were used to coming and going from the mainland frequently, were forced to stay put. in order not to go stir crazy with island fever, these nomads simply lit the candles in their houses, joined the other natives on the beach (the more permanent natives) and waited it out in the darkness. it wasn´t much of a problem because there was fresh fruit and a good breeze from the sea to keep them cool at night, and during the day they could lie under the shade of the palms away from the blinding hot midday sun. Read the rest of this entry »