John Lithgow

[Note] This is only a very slightly fictionalized account of our train ride to Blackheath.

* * *

Shortly after boarding the train from Sydney to Blackheath, John Lithgow popped into my head for some reason.

“Hey Jen.” I said. “You know who I think about sometimes? John Lithgow.”

Jen gave me a quizical look. “Yea...” she trailed off, sounding curious.

“Do you ever think about John Lithgow?”

“Yea,” she replied. “Sometimes.”

We smiled at each other. “He's just so easy to think about.” she mused.

“Yea, exactly. That's so strange....how appropriate he seems. He just fits. It's so comfortable...just riding the train and thinking of John Lithgow”

“Yea...” she agreed. “It really is.”
“That really is strange, though. I wonder why he comes to mind so naturally?”

“Well, he's a very prominent actor.” I replied. “I mean, he was in 3rd Rock forever, and did a whole bunch of other stuff.”

“Like what?”

“Er, well I don't really remember right now. Plays, I think. He did, like, all kinds of plays.”

“Plays like what?”

“I don't know...I saw part of a tv documentary about him once. He just did all these plays, and other things. He's been on all these different shows. He's like John Malcovich....he's just kind of everywhere, you know?”

“Yea, I mean, clearly he's a very accessible concept.” she said.

“Yea. I think this is just, like, his time, you know? He's just....present in our culture.”

“Yea.” she agreed, thoughtfully.

We lapsed into our own private thoughts about John Lithgow for several minutes. Jen, who had been staring vacantly at the rail map across the aisle, suddenly exclaimed “Oh my god, Dave! We're on the Lithgow line.”

“Hmm?” I said.

“The end of the line. It's Lithgow.”

“Oh.”

“Yea.” She said.

“Er, Yea...” I said. “But....you know....all that stuff about John Lithgow is still totally true.”

“Oh yea, definitely.” She said.

Epilogue

This happened two weeks ago, and we have thought of John Lithgow several times since. Sometimes many kilometers from the Lithgow line.

According to the IMDB and wikipedia, John Lithgow has acted in more than 17 plays and numerous films, including the 1984 smash hit The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension.

Also: We're back from another 4-day camping trip! Posts to follow updating you about our work with the Norman's, our bushwalking, and our new year's!

Camping Part 3

On the 2nd morning, we packed up camp again. We discovered that the trail we were going to hike was closed, so we decided that instead we'd hike north and exit one town north of Blackheath on the rail line and take the train back.

One of the things we liked best about the Grosse valley is how big all the vegetation is.

Even though it was a dry morning, all the plants were still wet and we were totally soaked for the first few hours because we had to push our way past plants taller than us in many places on the trail.

Here's Jen squeezing the water from her socks.

We found a nice spot along the river to stop for lunch.

Here's another shot of our lunch spot from a rock near the center of the stream.

There were lots of these beautiful beetles, which our hosts later told us were called Christmas beetles because they only come out during Christmas time.

A few hours after lunch, we lost our trail. It took us up a hill and then dissolved entirely. Here's where we dropped our packs to try and figure it out. (Eventually we discovered an earlier fork we had missed with our real trail on it).

We got to our campsite around 3 or 4, and had a little snack in the nearby stream.

I also found an awesome bug that had caught a ride on my backpack.

On our way out the next morning we found this sign for hikers coming in.

It definitely seemed a pretty rough track to us =)

We also found these delicious-looking creatures on the way out! There were tons of them in the pools leading up to the falls where we exited.

After a fairly strenuous climb out of the valley, we still had to hike about 10km into town to take the train back. So we hiked for several hours down a road that looked like this for pretty much the entire way:

We made it to the train station around 1pm, just in time for one of the hourly trains headed back towards Blackheath.

We're planning on doing another 3-day hike around this area sometime soon--either during or right after Christmas. That's it for now!

Camping - Part 2 - In which Jen spots a Wallaby

When we woke up it was foggy and beautiful.




We stopped back at the overlook before starting our descent (the same place I took the vista shot in the last post) and we couldn't see anything in the fog. The descent was quite steep, but it was a well tended trail (unlike the remainder of the trails we would walk).




The sky had more or less cleared by the time we reached the valley floor.

After awhile things started to dry out as we continued through a meadow of ferns.

Eventually we reached our next campsite at the blue gum forest (blue gum being another name for eucalyptus, apparently).




We set up camp for a second time and went on a hike around the valley.


One of the trails led us over this log.

Jen was less confident in her ability to balance...



Later, when we were back at camp, Jen saw a wallaby when it hopped directly through the center of camp. Unfortunately I was off in the woods. More photos and animal sightings to come...

Camping in Australia's Blue Mountains - Part 1

After paying $10 a night for hotels for the last 4 months, it was a real blow to pay $100 for much worse accommodation than we were used to in Sydney (lovely city though it is). But camping is free (and awesome), so we bought some rail tickets for the small mountain town of Blackheath, 2.5 hours outside of the city. Here's Jen at Sydney's central station:


And here's the station at Blackheath.

From there we met our future hosts--a very nice family named the Nortons--who would keep our non-essential camping things (such as laptops) until we returned. They dropped us at the trail head, and we hiked a (very) short way to Perry's Lookdown, a camp site on the edge of the Blue Mountains.

We pitched our tent, and felt very satisfied with ourselves.


We usually like to find out what might kill or injure us before we camp in a new place, and in the Blue Mountains the answer is snakes and spiders. The funnel spider is a particularly venomous variety. We spotted the web of one on our way to the lookout.

Right next to the lookout is a large wind-eroded rock face, which was also impressive.


Rain clouds started to gather as we walked back to our tent, and it started to drizzle shortly after our return, not letting up until morning.

Sleeping in the Singapore Airport

www.sleepinginairports.net has awarded Singapore the best airport for sleeping in several years running. After spending a wonderful night there, we can tell you first hand that it's better than many hotels. The airport features:

- Free massage chairs
- A butterfly garden
- A fern nature walk
- A segue driving course
- A free 24-hour-a-day movie theater
- Free xboxs to play
- Special sleeping areas with very low light, comfortable fully reclining chairs, soft music, and a small waterfall.
- And, of course, 24 hour food courts and coffee shops.

In case you're not sure what to do with yourself on your layover, the airport has its own magazine with recommended schedules of airport activities depending on how long you're staying.

There were lots of Christmas decorations while we were there, including this death-star-like ornament.

Sometimes it would open and an illuminated ball with a surprise inside would wind its way down a spiral track. (The openings were rare and unpredicatable, though, so I only managed to capture one from far off).


Here were some delicious treats we enjoyed. They were called "pancakes" but were more like filled muffins. We found them at a bean-curd specialty shop that only soled things made from bean curd.


Here was our snack! Two of the pancakes, and some soft, delicious, flavored bean curd.


Later, at the food court, I went to the soup stall where I could choose 6 ingredients and have them make a soup from it.
Delicious!


Here's Jen with the death-star.

And me at one of the foot-massage stations.


A lot of the good stuff was past security, and so we couldn't get to it until British Air started early check-in at midnight. So we spent about midnight to 4am wandering around inside the airport, sampling its many pleasures.

Quick update

Hello again everyone!

We're happily landed in Sydney, now. sleepinginairports.net rated Singapore as the #1 airport to sleep in, and they weren't kidding! It was better than most hotels! But that report will have to wait as we are quite tired. Tomorrow we're headed to camp in the Blue Mountains and may not be back on the internet for a week or so, but we should have some good stories when we come back!

We love to sleep in the airport

Hello everyone!

Tomorrow morning we fly from Ho Chi Minh city back to Singapore where our plan is to ramble around a bit during the day, and sleep in the airport. The next afternoon we fly to Sydney, arriving at 9:45pm......at which point we will also sleep in the airport.

Hopefully the re-collection of our camping gear will go smoothly, and then we're either taking the train into the blue mountains or a bus or train to a yet-to-be-identified work-exchange opportunity.

There are a huge number of crazy work-exchange postings. Here were a few that we particularly liked:

"Volunteer Opportunity on 16th Century Sailing Ship. In this program, you will live and work alongside the ship's crew in the daily operation of the vessel as a dockside floating museum. You will receive training in 17th century seamanship including terminology, knots, sailing, maintenance techniques, etc."

or

"Some of our children are at boarding school and they need their horses exercised....Polocrosse experience is not necessary but if you have played before we may be able to help you play for the season."

or

"Do you enjoy being nude? Helpxers [sic] needed at our 3 STAR Rated Nudist Resort with Free Accommodation & Facilities."

Actually, there were a few postings from folks living in the Gold Coast area who were looking for people to help them set up a website...which is certainly in line with our experience and skills. (more so than cattle wrangling or designing and building yurts, which were also postings we saw).

So, more updates to come...probably from airports.

Ho Chi Minh City

This picture, taken right down the street from us, captures our experience of Ho Chi Minh City pretty well:


And actually, we love it.

It has a huge variety of restaurants and street food. It has bookshops, coffee shops, ice cream shops, bakeries, and plenty of free wireless internet. Often, if you're sitting on the street (as I am now), the shops will come to you. I'd say once every 10 minutes or so, a book vendor walks past to offer me a book:

(Actually, these are illegal copies of books--nicely bound, but copied pages nonetheless). Yesterday we walked past a storefront where, for a fixed price, you can fill your ipod with music from their huge (illegal) library of tunes.

The density here is striking. Down the alley where we're staying there are probably about 20 different hotels. They are all one room wide, 4-8 stories tall, and several rooms deep. Here are some of them across the alley from us.



Almost all of them have either a restaurant or a tour-agency on the ground floor, so there are about 10 each of those. And that's all within about 100 yards of our hotel.

I've been eating delicious rice porridge for breakfast and pho for lunch for several days now and it's been fantastic.

More conversation with the monks

Talking with the English Teacher

The Monastery's English teacher seemed to want to give me a short lesson on Buddhism. Two of the novices and I had been talking about other things when he leaned in, and asked in significant tones "May I ask you a question? What do you think is the cost of suffering?"

I looked confused for a minute, thinking vaguely that suffering was the cost, then that this might be some kind of trick question, and finally that this earnest man would not be trying to trick me. "Cost of suffering?" I ask.

"No," he says, "cost of suffering."

"Oh, cause of suffering?" I ask.

"Yes. What do you think is the cost of suffering?" he asks again, leaning backwards, arms folded.

The correct answer, I know, is "desire", but I don't think that saying this word is going to lead to anything interesting, so I mumble something about lots of causes, but a big one being that people worry they're not good enough and people won't like them. The novice seems interested in this, but the English teacher remains inscrutable.

"Desire!" he announces, after my short monologue. "Desire is the cause of all suffering."

"And how can you prevent suffering?" he asked. I ventured that my mom taught me to imagine the worst-case scenario, and then realize that (mostly) everything would still be ok, even in the worst case. (If things don't seem ok, I often try and foster a perspective from which they do seem ok, after all). This usually works for me. It helps me worry less, and the worry was the cause of my suffering.

"Meditation!" he announces. "This is the best way." I don't doubt the utility of meditation, but I'm more of a pluralist--I'm not into "best ways" so much.

Talking With The Novice

Fortunately, the novice was far less dogmatic and we talked more about specific situations that make people unhappy, and good practices and habits.

He was surprised to learn that I wasn't Christian. He didn't know the word atheist, but I told him that maybe the word wouldn't really tell him what he wanted to know about me anyway, so I suggested instead that I study philosophy. He brightened at this and said he also studies philosophy and that it was also like a religion because it would help people to get along better, which is, he said, the real purpose of all religion.

He also mentioned that sometimes when he tells tourists about Buddhism they react very negatively and tell him it's bad. I have to admit this surprised me because the general tenants of Buddhism seem so innocent and unobjectionable. I asked him why he thought that was. He said: "I see that you hear an idea and think: is this idea good or bad? I think these people hear an idea and think about who said the idea. And if they don't like who said an idea they will say the idea is a bad one." I thought this was a very fair point. My friend Nick and I once had a very long talk with some Jehovah's witnesses on our front porch in San Francisco. Their main point seemed to be: read the bible, it's got a lot of great stuff in it. Our main point was: sure, the bible does have some good stuff in it, but so do lots of other books, so shouldn't we all be trying to guide our lives by finding what's good in all different kinds of sources? Their unequivocal answer was: no.

I asked him if the novices and monks in Cambodia were vegetarian, or if they ate meat. He said they are only vegetarian when they go on meditation retreats. Later, when it came out that Jen and I had been vegetarian for a long time, his first question was: "you mean, every day??" He seemed surprised and impressed and told us that he had often thought about doing that because he always felt really good coming back from a meditation retreat, but that it seemed hard to him. I told him that meditating for 12-hours a day in a retreat sounded really hard to me.

After the novice and English teacher left, I continued talking with a shy boy who had only been listening before. He said he was unsure of his English (though it was, in fact, excellent). He told me he had come from a small village outside of Battambang, but had been too poor to afford a room or food, so he has been living and eating at the monastery for free for the last 10 years with his younger sister. (He turned out to be 20, though he looked younger). He was not a novice. This monastery, as many in Cambodia, apparently, also ran a school and boarding house. (And, apparently, its services aren't restricted to men, either). He was hoping soon to go to the University in Battambang and study information technology.

He also verified something we'd read on the Internet: that government employees earn about $20 a month. That was, in fact, the salary of his friend who worked as a police officer. This partly explains why literally the entire town of Battambang is so solicitous to tourists, and why virtually everyone speaks at least some English. Tourism dollars really make an impact. When you walk down the street, most people will smile and say a friendly "hello", and children always smile and wave. If you look confused, virtually the first person to walk past will ask if they can help you. We were paying $6 a night at our hotel, and $1-$3 dollars for a meal. $6 is slightly more than a week's salary. If $30,000/year is a good estimate of a government salary in the US, the equivalent price of a room would be $625 a night. It's not clear to me how valid such comparisons are, but definitely something to think about.

Going Out With The English Teacher

Before he left, the English teacher had mentioned that he wanted to take me to a special visiting market from Vietnam. I kind of waffled about it and ended with a definite maybe.

So, when I showed up in the evening, it made some sense that he was surprised to see me. But he immediately became very excited and confided to me joyfully: "This will be my first time walking with a foreigner! That's you!" He went to change and returned wearing a nice button-down shirt.

The market was about a 10-minute walk away, and I definitely began to get the feeling, as we ran into his friends and acquaintances, that I was being shown off. Every few minutes he would stop to shake hands and talk for 30-seconds, gesturing towards me, then the market, beaming all the while.

When we reached the market, it turned out instead to be a gigantic, sprawling street fair. I was definitely the only tourist, and about a head above anyone else there. There were innumerable food stands of all kinds, carnival games, and two grubby farris wheels with metal cages instead of seats. When it started, I saw why: it was spinning at least 3 or 4 times as fast as any ferris wheel I'd ever seen.

Since before we left, my host had been asking if I was hungry, to which I'd consistently told him I had just eaten and was not. Once we were at the fair, he gestured towards various food stands to ask if anything looked good. Since we had talked before about being a vegetarian, I told him that I was still very full--and, anyway, all of these stands were selling meat and I only eat tofu and vegetables! When he asked if I would mind if he ate something, I told him to please go right ahead!

He returned with two skewers of barbecued shrimp and told me he had gotten one for me. I thanked him very much, and re-iterated how full I was. I said I would love to try one, though. He insisted that he couldn't eat two skewers, and I felt I couldn't argue any more. It was definitely pretty ok.

As we continued to walk, he next bought me a persimmon from a fruit stand--the only non-Cambodian fruit they were selling, incidentally. Then, over my objections, proceeded to buy us two bottles of water. I sipped the water and ate the persimmon as we turned for home. He almost immediately gave his to a beggar.

He knew I was also a teacher, and said that my students might ask me next year about how it was in Cambodia. I wanted to know if there was anything he would like my students to know about Cambodia or the Khmer people so I could be sure to tell them. He didn't say it so directly, but his message was definitely: tell them they will really like it if they come to Cambodia, because we are very friendly to tourists, it is very safe, and we will love them here. The plaintive tone reminded me of the comment a crafts vendor made to me in Bali. She said: Without tourists, we have nothing.

Siddhārtha in Battambang

After leaving Siem Reap, we took a bus to the much smaller town of Battambang. Conducting my usual perambulation, I found this wat near the river.

In addition to the usual adornments, this one had several striking statues.



,

It seemed to me that these scenes were a kind of warning or rebuke. Both depict an apparently rich and important person ignoring the misery and suffering surrounding them. The man appears understandably uncomfortable and is clearly trying to hurry past.

While I was resting in the shade, I ended up getting into a long conversation with one of the monks and the monastery's English teacher. When I asked about the statues, the monk told me that they were to remind us that suffering and death are an unavoidable part of life. I asked if the man on the elephant should be doing something to help. The monk said that it is good to help each other, but when I pressed him about whether that was the point of the statues he seemed confused.

I finally figured out what was going on when he said that the rich man was Siddhārtha. (In retrospect, it seems like something that I should have thought of earlier, but there you go). I remembered from the novel Siddhartha that he had lived a sheltered life as a teenager. When he finally left home and saw old age, suffering, and death for the first time, he was so upset that he decided to lead the life of an acetic in effort to overcome them. With this in mind, the monk's original explanation made a lot more sense. The point really has nothing to do with people's rights, duties, and obligations to one another. It really is a reminder about cultivating the right inner attitude towards what is, after all, your own situation. It was an interesting contrast.

The Salesmen of Angkor Wat

We've encountered many creative and persistent vendors in our travels, but none nearly so tenacious as the 10-year-old kids selling postcards (and other things) around the ruins.

Here, for example, is the conversation I had with a 10-year-old boy as I sat and sipped my coffee at a small stand:

boy: Hey Mister! You buy my postcard?

me: No thanks.

boy: Where you from?

me: The US. California.

boy: Sacramento!

me [a little surprised]: yea!

boy: Obama town!

me: er...sort of. I think he's actually from Chicago.

boy: You want to buy my postcard now?

me: No thanks. I don't really need one.

boy: Yea, you need 10!

me: er...thanks, I really don't buy things, though. I don't need anything.

boy [without pause, pointing]: You need that coffee.

me: oh yea, um, that's true. Maybe you should sell coffee, then next time I'll buy from you.

boy: You buy from me this time.

I had to give him points for creativity, until I had an eerily similar conversation with a little girl at a different temple site. She also knew the capital of California, and also informed me, after I told her "I don't need one", that I needed 2. Someone has been training these kids.

I actually watched two kids chase after a German tourist, running the other direction, yelling "ONE DOLLAR! ONE DOLLAR! YOU BUY!"

To give you an idea of the kind of markup, we stopped in an admittedly touristy looking restaurant on our way out of one of the sites. We looked at the posted prices, $5-6 per dish, and immediately turned around. The waitress rushed over and covertly told us she could give us a discount. I said I would really only consider it if we could eat for $2 or less. She immediately, without pause, accepted, because it was still a decent profit.

All that said, we managed to escape a lot of the aggressive commerce by riding our bicycles to alternative entrances. All the sites have 4 entrances, with only 1 or 2 used as tourist entrances. We usually just went to the other ones.

Angkor Thom

Angkor Thom is the most recent, and one of the most impressive of the ruins around Angkor Wat. Angkor Wat was built by a Hindu king, and dedicated to the Hindu god Vishnu. By contrast, Angkor Thom is a Buddhist monument. Its most notable feature are the numerous giant faces atop the gateways and spires. They are thought to represent the Bodhisattva known in Cambodia as Lokesvara, and to Buddhists elsewhere as Avalokitesvara--'the Lord who looks in every direction.' The serene and meditative features are thought to be modeled on those of the god-King Jayavarman VII (AD 1181-1219), the builder of Angkor Thom.

Here's a collection of some of our pictures: