What are we doing??

We've had no significant adventures to report recently. Mostly we're just living the good life here in Chiang Mai.

Chiang Mai is blanketed with excellent restaurants which we've slowly been working our way through. Every few nights I get a lot of cheap and excellent sushi from the night market. We also frequent a number of vegetarian Thai places and eat a lot of Tom Yam and Tom Kha soups, papaya salads, various kinds of curry, and mango with sticky rice. There's one of the absolute best north Indian restaurants I've ever been to here, as well as a great Mexican place, and a "California-style" burrito place (run by a young guy from New Orleans, actually). We just got back from an all-you-can eat vegetarian dim-sum buffet, which was awesome. We'll probably go back to that and take pictures next time.

There's also a shockingly large number of excellent used bookstores here--better than most cities in the US, in fact. So we've been doing a large amount of reading. I re-read 'Anna Karenina', a pretty good sci-fi book called 'Timescape', and a few collections of nonfiction essays. I'm currently reading Jared Diamond's book 'Collapse', and Karen Armstrong's book 'A History of God', both of which are pretty interesting. Oh yea, and a really amazing autobiographical book called 'Planet of the Blind' about the author's experiences growing-up blind. It's some of the most vivid, descriptive writing I've read in a long long time. Jen has been reading from the same pool of books I have, only she's also read several poker books as well.

So, life is great! Sometime later this week or next week we plan to do another cooking class, and go on a rock-climbing trip which we're very excited about, but in the mean time things are pretty quiet.

Zip lining through the jungle

Another popular tourist activity we thought might be fun was taking a series of zip-lines through the jungle, about an hour outside of Chiang Mai. There's over 2km of zip lines spanning 18 platforms (including a few where you rappel down). Now you too, can experience the fun!

Here's another one with Jen coming in...

We went in a group with a French father and son (who live in Bangkok), an elder French couple (from France), and a British guy who has been teaching English in Chiang Mai for 6 months. Though it was early in the morning (7:30!), we timed it just about perfectly because it started pouring rain just as soon as we had finished.

Though we're sad we didn't see any gibbons, it was certainly a fun way to see the jungle!

Special Feature: Jen Cooking (In Pictures)

Thai Cooking School

One of the main tourist attractions in Chiang Mai are the dozens of Thai cooking schools, all of which offer slight variations on the same basic model. For between $25 and $35 dollars you get a market tour in the morning to buy your ingredients, and then cook 6-10 dishes over the course of the day, taking home a small cookbook of recipes.

After doing a bit of research we decided to go to "The Best Thai Cookery School" run by Permpoon Nabnian. Though we were already familiar with most of the basic Thai ingredients, it was still exciting to see how cheap, plentiful and fresh they were in the market. We saw the 3 major types of Thai basil, fresh turmeric root and galangal, fresh tamarind, young bamboo shoot, freshly grated coconut, and freshly pressed coconut cream.

Though we weren't going to be cooking any fish, I liked these fish ladies in the market.

Then it was back to the owner's house and our own individual kitchen stations.

First I cooked a Tom Yam soup and Jen cooked a tofu soup with a coconut milk broth. Then we made some spring rolls, a papaya salad, and sticky rice with mango, all of which we ate for brunch. Then we took a quick break to walk around their kitchen garden in the back and admire all their chili plants.

After our break, Jen cooked a delicious green curry and I did a Panaeng curry. We didn't make the curry pastes for these ourselves, but that's fine because we've done a lot of that before, and we have the recipes they used for their curry paste.

Here is a shot of Jen cooking her next dish: pad khi mao. (My noodle dish was a pad thai).

Though completely unnecessary, they thought a memorable way to end the last dish would be with a huge ball of flame.

They were right, it was a lot of fun =)

Here's the simple mixed vegetables that eventually emerged from under the fireball:

And Jen's dish of tofu and cashew nuts.

Finally, we sat down again to eat all our afternoon dishes.

All in all, it was a fun and delicious day, and we're excited to come back and set fire to all of your kitchens!

Views around Chiang Mai

We've been in Chiang Mai several days now, but unfortunately most of them have been spent a little under the weather in our hotel room. We seem to be on the mend now, though, so here's a few shots from our recent walks about town:

This is a market a few blocks away from our hotel...

Some apartments and shops down the street from us...



Our street...


One of the shops on our street...

The local machinist...



The nearest major intersection...


Down by the moat that surrounds the city center...



One of the many Wats (Buddhist temples) in the city...



The entrance to another Wat close to our house with an interesting pattern on the gate...

We've seen many Buddhist monks in their saffron robes about town, as well as many more Wats. The most exciting thing to see is definitely the night markets, but those are difficult to photograph so unfortunately they might never make an appearance here in pictures.

We're going to give ourselves one more day to get completely better, then take an all day cooking class!

Odds and ends about Jakarta

Even though we spent 3 days in Jakarta, we didn't end up seeing very much of it. At the end of the bus adventure post I mentioned the roach-infested hotel of our first night. In the evening when Jen took the lift down to the front desk, a very conservatively dressed Muslim man (white robes, ash) who also happened to be in the lift asked her first: "married?" nodding approvingly when Jen said she was, and then: "Muslim? Christian?" I thought it plausible that he was trying to make as much friendly conversation as he was able, but it is kind of disturbing (though not surprising) to think that these two questions are the most important ones for him. Saddening, really. (Though I suppose he might think the same thing of us, who are apparently so dismissive of the two things which constitute the meaning of his life).

For our next two nights, we booked in the more upscale Ibis Hotel which was probably the nicest hotel we've yet stayed in on our trip. The economic inequality in Jakarta was striking. This was the view from the stairway of our nice hotel:

Only a few blocks away were the run-down neighborhoods with open sewers. We saw on the news that a week before we came there had been a large fire in the north of the city which burned down almost 6000 family units, leaving virtually all the former residents homeless. A few blocks away in the other direction is far and away the fanciest mall Jen and I have ever been in. Stanford mall isn't even on the same scale, and Jen says it was far fancier than anything in Las Vegas. It was even fancier than the very expensive mall attached to the twin towers in the KLCC in Kuala Lumpur. Security to get in to the mall appeared pretty tight--metal detectors and a search. Presumably this is because of the bombings of other such buildings of western luxury.

Since we were feeling a little overwhelmed after all our difficult travel, and by the whole atmosphere of the city, we mostly stayed in the room, the coffee shop in the mall across the street, and the occasional walk down a nearby street famous for its street food.

Another detail that struck us, however, was the movie posters in the mall across the street from the Ibis.

In case you can't tell, this is a hand-painted movie advertisement. It was very surprising.

All in all, we decided that Indonesia was starting to overpower us, and that maybe it would be best to go early to Chiang Mai in Thailand. Our next stop would have been Sumatra, but they had just suffered a devastating earth quake. There were so many unanswered questions about how things would go for us there, and our recent trip had just about exhausted our desires for difficult adventurous travelling, so we booked our plane flight and were off.

We flew back to our old friend, the low-cost carrier airport in Kuala Lumpur, arriving at 11:30pm, and stayed the night there to catch our 7:30am flight to Chiang Mai the next morning. Let me tell you: the KL airport is a happening place. From midnight straight through to the morning, it was teeming with people and all the shops remained open. It was pretty awesome.

Bus Horrors: Episode IV

You would really expect us to have learned our lesson about overnight buses, but being the foolhardy optimists we are, we decided to try our luck again on a bus from Jogja to Jakarta.

It was, without a doubt, the worst bus experience we've had yet.

I should note, before I begin the tale, that our bus was scheduled to depart at 2:30pm the day after we spent all night climbing Mt. Merapi (because an overnight bus ride isn't enough of a challenge in itself). We really know how to plan 'em, don't we? Even though the bus was 30 minutes late, the ride started out auspiciously enough--no confusion about whether it was the correct bus, no uncomfortable chair deformities; I was feeling tiredly optimistic.

The trouble began with the first stop, however. Just as we were drifting off to sleep, we pulled over to pick up the usual band of jolly young musicians strumming guitars, loudly scraping metallic cans, and belting at the top of their lungs, who accompanied us for about 10 minutes down the road. Jen and I have excellent ear plugs which we researched on the Internet, and even they were only able to bring the music down to simply "loud". I half heartedly tried to sleep until the musicians came right up to my seat and one screamed "HEY MISTER!" I opened my eyes as their lead belter cleverly observed at the top of his lungs, "YOU SLEEP?" I glared while he grinned, and the rest of his merry band extracted coins from the other passengers. (I was surprised they didn't also ask me, but maybe he'd felt that they'd extracted enough payment as it was). Relieved that they were leaving, we were somewhat disconcerted to find they had merely been exchanged for another group, who, though kind enough not to single me out, were no more conducive to sleeping than the last group.

Eventually the entertainment ceased, and we were actually able to sleep for a few hours until our evening restaurant stop. This bus had no food vouchers for us, though, so Jen and I just split a fruit tea.

Upon returning to our seats, I discovered that a leak had sprung somewhere above me, showering my seat with a slow but steady dripping. A small crowd of onlookers gathered round, smiling and sympathetically shrugging their shoulders. A few indicated a dripping motion with their hands and said ayer--water--with helpful smiles. Mustering all the ad hoc engineering prowess we could on a few hours sleep, we tried to use our medical tape on two plastic bags to span the dripping and divert the flow elsewhere. This actually seemed to work for several minutes, and visibly impressed our fans who looked back and forth at each other with raised eyebrows and nodding approval. I probably should have guessed that some of the water had been pooling, however, and a few minutes later, the accumulation dumped on me all at once. (I have to admit I was too distracted to notice the local reaction to this new development.)

We had pulled out of the restaurant parking lot by this time with a new musical act to accompany my soggy defeat--a woman who sang indistinctly into a large boxy amplifier to a cassette tape of what sounded like Muslim lounge music from the 70's, if there ever was such a thing. As I attempted to sit comfortably in the relatively dry (though somewhat sticky) aisle, the woman inexplicably decided that it would be more equitable to the passengers in the back if she sang while repeatedly pacing the entire length of the bus, forcing me to hover indeterminately wherever I could manage.

Mercifully, she was soon paid-off and our bus driver pulled to the side to let her out again. And then, finally, it was quiet. And we continued to sit. Quietly. My curious neighbors all strained their necks to the front and several stood. After another few minutes of sitting, the bus shuddered briefly as the motor struggled to turn over in vain. Looking around, I was somewhat heartened to see that my neighbors (still standing) met the prospect of an impending calamity of their own with the same expressions of placid bemusement with which they had watched me earlier. We had been told by different sources that the bus ride to Jakarta could take anywhere from 6 to 12 hours. Maybe, I thought, this is one of the reasons why--just a built-in cost of taking the bus sometimes.

The cabin lights turned off, and we all sat in the dark for several minutes as nothing appeared to happen except for the drivers exiting the bus to smoke. No one else moved. The bus was extremely hot and stuffy. It was impossible to open any of the windows, and without circulating Jen expressed concerns about a possibly dwindling air supply. The others appeared quite content to wait as long as necessary, but, after a brief discussion, we elected to join the drivers outside. For all we knew, they had called for another bus to be driven from Jogja to pick us all up. For some reason, I remember sitting on a tree root outside our broken-down bus, in the middle of the night, and deciding that I actually felt quite happy.

As it turned out, another bus wasn't necessary. They opened a panel near the rear of the bus, releasing a huge cloud of smoke. We were ushered back to our seats (really, our seat and the aisle), and after several more lurching attempts, the bus started up and we were off again. Jen and I traded off turns in the aisle, and, after attempting to wipe the water from above me, I even braved the wet seat for a time (until the drip returned with a vengeance). As it turned out, our bus would break down by the side of the road two more times before dawn, each accompanied by sitting, a cloud of smoke, and our eventual successful re-departure.

I woke up just before dawn in the good seat. Jen was standing in the aisle next to me, whispering something excitedly about it almost being dawn. The development out the windows was also starting to appear denser and more like a city. Perhaps we were almost there! The bus made several stops on seemingly random street corners or small side-streets as Jen slept in the chair (we had switched again), and I drowsed in the aisle. After some time, we noticed that, though we had never (to our knowledge) stopped at a bus station, only about half the passengers were left. And we continued to wind down small streets, randomly stopping now and then to let the better informed among us out.

I felt confident that we were eventually terminating at the central bus station (after all, what else would they do?), yet the bus showed no signs of doing anything so reasonable. I thought about asking the driver, but it seemed difficult not knowing the words for "bus" or "station" or "stop". Eventually I wandered to the front, put on my best smile and said optimistically: suka saya Taxi, ya?--I like Taxi, yes? Then, pointing to the address of our pre-booked hotel, I said Di mana Taxi?--Where is Taxi?

The driver looked surprised and started laughing and shaking his head, saying Jakarta and pointing behind him. This seemed to us a bad sign, especially as it now dawned on us, looking around, that there were only 4 people left on the bus. Eventually, we worked out that we were now 20km past Jakarta, and getting back there would require taking a local bus to the bus station, followed by another coach bus back to Jakarta. This sounded complicated, and we had not slept well.

We decided to get off on a big street and try and figure out how to get a taxi back, cost no longer seeming a significant issue to us (it's nice how our trips seem to give us adequate psychological preparation for the sacrifices they eventually demands of us). The drivers gave us our backpacks, and, as we stepped to the ground, we said, with urgent voices: "2 more, yes?" and gestured to the underside of the bus where our other two bags were. "Ya ya!" they said smiling as the door closed, and the bus pulled into the round-about.

Screaming at the top of our lungs, we chased the bus for about a block before it noticed us and stopped again. To their credit, the bus operators appeared a little sheepish as they figured out what we had been saying, and they opened the lower compartments to get our other two bags.

An hour later, we had succeeded in taking a taxi (for the same price as the entire bus ticket to Jakarta) back into the city, arriving a neat 20 hours after we had initially departed Jogja.

As a denouement to the saga, the hotel we'd pre-booked turned out to be in a strange converted warehouse. The entrance to the hotel was a loading dock, with the front-desk sitting like an island in the middle of a vast open floor. Though the rooms did boast the advertised air-conditioning, they were also seriously infested with cockroaches. Our mini-fridge "mini-bar" from the advertisement was empty except for the infestation. We don't usually go to fancy hotels, but after our series of misadventures we felt well justified in booking the next two nights at the beautiful Ibis Hotel.

Even though this was our worst bus trip yet, it certainly hasn't hit the rock-bottom of my imagination, so maybe we'll roll the dice again another time!

More Mt. Merapi

Hello all!

It's about 1:30 am and we're staying the night in the airport in KL before our flight to Chiang Mai tomorrow morning. Since this is the most reliable internet we've had in awhile, I thought I'd post some more media of Mt. Merapi.

First, a few photos that were taken by a very nice Swedish couple who were kind enough to send them to me:

Here's a shot of some of the steaming rocks at the top.

A shot that looks like it was taking as we were climbing back down that does a good job of showing how high we were...

And one of many beautiful sunrise shots from the top....

Now two videos:

The first is my hand-held panorama right before dawn proper:

The second shows us carefully picking our way down from the summit.

Climbing Mt. Merapi

After booking an all-night bus from Jogja to Jakarta for the next afternoon, Jen and I decided that instead of sleeping, we should spend our last night in Jogja climbing the volcano Mt. Merapi. A local tour company picked us up at 10pm and drove us 2 hours to a small homestay at the base of volcano where we enjoyed a cup of coffee and met 2 other couples who were going to climb in our group—one from France, and another from Finland.

The air was a crisp 60 degrees or so as we set out walking through a heavy fog around 1am. One of the three Javanese guides headed our party, followed by Jen and I, the other couples, and the other two guides bringing up the rear. Though Mt. Merapi stands almost 9,000 ft, in the foggy night you can't see where you're heading, or how far you've come. There was no peek to be seen above—only a foggy black with our individual pale patches of trail ahead and the snake of other lights trailing behind. We walked in silence, climbing slowly but steadily up, with only the lead guide ahead of me singing softly to himself. I was starting to feel quite tired when the lead guide suggested a rest for a few minutes in a small clearing. Everyone had turned off their lights and each of the couples sat apart, huddled in their own few feet of dark. The fog had disappeared, it seemed, long ago, and a ruddy three-quarter moon was visible through the loose covering of trees. Jen heard movement in the bushes a few feet from us and my pale, dying headlamp revealed two small shining eyes peering out of the bushes, disappearing a moment later with a rustle.

The trail became both rougher and steeper when we set out again. Though my light could distinguish the trail from its sides, it was difficult to find firm foot placements and I slid unsteadily several times. My high spirits from the first break dampened with each indistinguishable step, and my mind began to dull with the effort. Sustained exertion can be surprisingly mental—convincing yourself at each moment to keep moving. With nothing but silence and night, there isn't much to focus on, as the French hikers would later tell me, except your thighs. The lights trailing behind me began to space out further and further. My pace became too slow to mark the tempo for the songs my mind used to drive my steps. Just at the point I felt I had to ask the head guide to rest, he announced “1 or 2 minutes”.

During this break, we could see thousands of twinkling lights far below us, extending into the distance. It was like looking down from an airplane that's just dropped below the cloud line, foregrounded by the silhouette of a row of tree trunks.

The fresh feeling I had setting out from our first break lasted less than a minute when we continued our ascent. At times, the trail abandoned switch backs entirely and simply climbed straight up, requiring us to pull ourselves up using slim trunks, roots, and the occasional rocky outgrowth. My mind long ago lost the energy for music, as I now mentally counted off each step, repeating at every hundred. I made an effort to pace myself; not falling behind the lead guide, but by trying to relax in the extra bits of time at the edges between steps, previously overlooked by my forward straining. A second time I felt myself so tired that without a rest I couldn't go any further and resolved to call to the guide. But, again, before I could do so he stopped at another small clearing, waiting for everyone to catch up and rest.

We continued in this way for several more marches. The trail became steeper still though, and our rests more and more frequent. The trail had left its dirt behind and now alternated between slabs of large rough stone, shallow coverings of fist-sized porous rock, and gravel. We had also left behind convenient clearings—for our rests we simply paused in place, squatting along the rocky wall of our climb; vertically scattered by 15 feet or more. Though it was still too hot to wear a jacket as we climbed, it was now too cold to be stopped without one. The lights in the distance below coalesced into a dense and delicate web which our guide told us was the city of Solo.

Finally the trail flattened along a windy ridge. Above us, we could still see the silhouette of the final peek. Our guide told us it was 4am. The trail disappeared entirely when we reached the base, and our guide chose a snaking path up through the volcanic scree. We slowly and carefully scrambled upwards for almost an hour. We now had to place our feet carefully, and often dislodged a small slide of porous stones anyway. As our path became steeper, it was frequently necessary to use our hands on the sharp rocks. Despite the cold wind, the air was filled with the harsh smell of sulfur, and vents released a steady flow of hot steam around us as we climbed. I thought about book 3 of Lord of the Rings.

We pulled ourselves to the top around 10 minutes before dawn. Looking East from the summit, we had a 180-degree view of a vast ocean of clouds below us, with a small mountain peeking through them in the distance. To the south, a sickly yellow wall of steaming, sulfurous rock, and to the North, a view of neighboring mount Merbabu, climbing to approximately 10,000 ft.

Sadly, I left the memory card for my camera back in the hotel, but we had our small handheld video recorder, so here's a shot from the summit at dawn.

And another shot of Jen ambling around the summit.