TuuK-TuuK Playground

Unexpectly, I find myself vegemiting to cool and tranquil places today (the pool is next) after getting my ass beat by a girl, small and Thai at that, under the guise of what has been repeatedly sung to us in pestering yet mellifluous voices--the call of the THAI MASSAGE... oh lordly lord... and somehow, i find myself even more knotted up and sore than after the aches of last night's contorted midnight bus ride, the very aches which drove me to the massage house in the first place in hopes that the tuuk-tuuk missooouses could ward them off.... no such luck

But more importantly, today is the first of its sort, as have been each of the previous days that mark my entry into Thailand... a country which is a runaway storm of sensory discombobulation and juxtaposition.... smells of sewers are met with smells of roadside skewers, perplexed faces turn into aanoold-flexed smiles and welcoming visages, chaotic streets transform into tuuk-tuuk playgrounds that are as splintered just as much by carnage and road death as they are by whooping laughter and arbitrary waves.....

Thailand reaffirms that travelling can be a full-body effort, one to which a wallet is hardly even attached, and that Asia was waiting for me just as much as I had aspired to be with it....

A quick log log update.... started of on the wrong cheek and woke up on the wrong side of the toilet my first day - the fiery bowel movements induced by a party of red peppers (tragically drown in a liquid that poorly passed for soup broth, especially considering the volcanic way it exited) seemed to build callouses in my stomach lining, because my quest for the most mama made motorcycle kitchen has proved to be an ongoing parade not lacking in loin-longevity, which from now on i will deem lo(i)ngevity.... but happy times, how thai tuk-tuk mamas love feeding us.... we have now been fed by a series of thai(ron) chefs, from family food flops that were really only for english practice, to waterfall mamas with skewers in her smile, to random roadside stall seamstresses teeming with kiwi green golbuldy-gloop, and so many more unmentioned and as of yet unencountered, ALL of whom refused to let us pay them or give them something in return.... food is conversation here.... and its my favorite kind, the more nonsensical and tangential, the better.... families crowd around us, share whatever little they have brought for themselves, and turn tourism on its head as we find ourselves the main attraction....

i supposed we dont help the situation much, especially when you consider thanksgiving, when we transformed our feast to flood, boozed ourselves passively but massively, as though it were an IV after surgery, and wailed on guitars that refused to be tuned, perhaps in solidarity with our drunken melodies (if you could call them that), until the majority of the restaurant found itself magnitized to us, even though they persistently pretended not to notice the madness of us (a few hippies and bogans aside)... nor did we shy away from the spotlight two nights ago when a brief reprieve from a live band at a bar left a gaping hole that somehow eric, igor, and eventually i decided was our responsibility to fill, and perhaps bury, with renditions of friend of the devil, carress me down, and creep with aims of providing the thai watering hole with some "real american" tunes!

so yup, now there are three.... eric has been a synergetic addition to the madness.... thailand has been the perfect venue for euphoria (without its large junk problem), the people have been the perfect stimulant, and the food and TAMARIND CANDY has been the ideal fuel.... god the food is sooo good.... and soo much of an adventure, especially point-and-shoot untranslated menus that boil into a pot of tuk-tuuk

(in case you were wondering, not that my explanation is going to ellucidate anything, tuk-tuuks are thai motor rikshas which have become nothing short of an obsession and long running joke with us)

as for the laundry list:
life is good.... we've done a lot. snake farms with drunken black bears and equally intoxicated snake handlers, canal rides into the crevices and intestines of thai life, screaming scooters woven through thai road death on the path to ruins (thankfully and safely someone elses and not our own, though i have found the occasional fallen scooter on my foot quite uncomfortable), piling up as many non-sensical friendly encounters with locals who seem to want to babble to us as much as we to them, numerous visits to temples (wats they call them, which has morphed and entered into our vocabulary as "WAT PHO(r)?"), great stays in lush guest houses, mo(re)tor bikes buzzing into national parks with the same reckless abandon as the bugs that shared the road with us buzzed into our domes, and dripping and enfuriated sleep in midnight buses while clawing at our mosquito bites and bed bug bonanzas, all interrupted every few hours with meals and mamas.... and so much more of the little things that Thai me down

Coming next- trekking into the bunghole of thailand...

Lag time...

Lag time for both, how long its taken me to write, and how long its taken me to reach the feeling I've just recently gotten...

I'm in Sydney now, its been a sunny-spirited few days, regardless of what the weather itself has been up to. I wake up giddy and giggling, talking all sorts of nonsense, making silly voices, singing really cheesy, off-the-top-of-my-head songs about pickles and mangoes and all things random, picking at Igor's hair like a grooming-monkey, pulling at his armpit hair and chest hair in a way that prompts him to fling at me the worst of insults we have invented these days "You not my friend... BUG" a rendition of my little sisters feisty proclamations as a child, but in the spirit of the fly and mosquito infested Outback (amu, you NAT my fend, SNAKE!!)

And, its begun.... i mean, in my head, it finally feels that way... its been a wonderful few days.... and yesterday, on the wings of this elation, a brief and beautiful stint at the Royal Botanical Gardens, in a cove of grass receiving breezes of comical relief from the Albanian Rambo tree climber (who happened to be walking barefoot, backward in circles around a tree for good luck, and raving through a tourist garden train at us about Nicole Kidman, Aussie sheilas, the socceroos, and none other than our beloved Dubya), a long awaited epiphany, or rather, an aggregation and conglomeration of the weeks lagging behind in the shed belonging to my head.... a (s)head perhaps....our day of selling our car (more on that later) turned to these gardens for refuge, and the mist of green and pollen held me in a fatigued delerium, staring at a glistening bay across, engulfed by not just the towers urban life on the horizon, but by the wooden towers as well, their fronds bantering with the wind, and their depths which housed other lives, much more fluttering and buttering, colorful, and squirrely than those behind them....

here, with a dank lung and tongue, i felt that, on the heels of all the disillusionment of what happened in the month of endless and unchallenging roadtripping around australia, that what i had anticipated and what i had reiterated to all of you before i embarked on this journey about what i wanted to happen finally begun doing so.... i gave it a hard turn and got it, and myself, back on track....

in the words of my hero, Dr. Theodore Seuss Guisel,

"Out there things can happen
and frequently do
to people as brainy
and footsy as you.

And when things start to happen,
don't worry. Don't stew.
Just go right along.
You'll start happening too."

so a little background and recap.... about 3 weeks ago, igor and i plunged into the outback and went for the heart in the red center.... right off the bat, in an opal mining town we had a run in with a strange crocodile-hunting, baton-toting BOGAN (def. an aussie country bumpking, akin to the american REDNECK) who difused a severely intoxicated, homosexual aboriginee on behalf of a vomiting igor and his poor lap which suddenly, though not for the first time this trip, found itself weighed down by unwanted company.... yup, plop went the aboriginee, unbeknownst to igor....

we moved on, tearing through what we soon found out was a much larger country than the maps hint (at 130kms/hr, we were hardly making a dent in this country, which happens to be larger than the states).... made it to the red center, an alien planet unlike any desert we've seen before.... pictures to come once i get to india..... at Uluru (a massive monolith that seems to have just plopped down from space) we snuck our way into the lap of luxury in the shape of a $400 resort to steal a dip in their pool and ice for our cooler... someone above must have been watching because withing 10 minutes, we were getting urinated on by the sky!!! no joke, water coming out heavier than if it came from a bucket above your head, as we sat merrily giggling and watching all the hotel guests flee.... at least until we were as wet as we had been before we dried off out of the pool.... we moved on to uneventful, BOGAN nights in alice springs and another days worth of nowhere stops in the desert, chased out by flies and mosquitoes and our baton BOGAN friend greg.... no stop could be taken in peace, thanks to the scorching heat that heated our water to spa-temprature, unshakable flies determinted to get into every orfice your face has to offer unheeding of swats and slaps to yourself, mosquitoes(or mossies as ozzies call them) whose mini-plane drone kept our eyes bloodshot and verging on insanity every one of the next 10 nights we were to spend in the back of our car essentially on top of each other and burried in one another's armpits, poisoned by the mindlessly talkative bogans and their godforsaken ROADHOUSE CAFES, which left us dreading each and every meal of egg filled, factory stuffed ingredients wanton of any sort of sauce or flavor other than their tomato sauce (they even managed to fuck up ketchup!) to reiterate, NO stop, no hike, no meal was taken in peace... its touch to sit around in a car driving all day, and then be antsy to get back in a few seconds after you've escaped because there seems to be no place to relax or enjoy the outdoors.... the eventual fly nets helped, but aside from making us look like mossy walking trees, could not remedy all the annoyances and shortcomings of the outback....

our long awaited arrival to the beaches and tropics of queensland took us straight to a sri lankan curry house to relieve our tongues, a wateringhole to ease our minds, and a hostel loaded with showers (whoa!!) a pool, and a number of good people fo company.... we explored the surroundings of cairns, its waterfalls, craters, rainforsts, beaches, and wineries with a belgian couple who were a great addition to the adventure, until we headed further south, checked out more national parks and bogans....

at the WHITSUNDAY ISLANDS, frustrated with the fact that all we were doing was not doing at all but just seeing and appreciating, we were struck by the annoying fact that we felt like we were on vacation, and worse yet, that it was like a vacation in a land not so far away, where things were no challenge at all, they felt the same as america (in fact, to this day, i wake up and go for hours without realizing that i am 7,000 miles from home) and they were not what i had set out to do... this was not supposed to be a vacation for me.... sure we could pay for our "adventure tourism" but that would be much of an adventure, or as much of an acheivement as finding my own path with a little bit of creativity and effort, and a lot of learning.... so i grabbed the blinding and gawdy stack of sailing brochures we were supposed to decide between, stomped over to the trash like a pouting young child who didnt get what he wanted at toys'r'us, and unloaded the burden....

for a few moments, we say on the beach, leaning against a palm tree, and decided that either we need to find a better way to do this, or to just leave to thailand early.... just so happened a BOGAN sailor came to shore to get diesel for his boat, and after a little up and down, we convinced him to take us out for a day to the island, in exchange for a lowly $50 each... we spend the days learning how to sail a bit, fishing, snorkeling in the famous great barrier reef, hiking on the islands to primitive aboriginee cave paintings, and shooting the shit with him and his girlfriend.... we spent the nights feeding them whiskey and delving into the life of a bogan... hear numerous tirades of homophobia, an illiterate thesis that all abo-s are violent and it is the White man's burden to save them from the fire water of booze that talks them into burning their houses and their children and their children's toys and ruining all the "help" white folks give them.... as a side note, australia is extremely racist, and it is even documented in the legal code, which holds that native, dark skinned people may under NO circumstance purchase alcohol.... justified because everyone has convinced themselves "its for their own good".... we ended up buying a large bottle of rum for a couple of natives our age and had a good chat, and im not inclined to believe the stereotypes hold anymore true for them as they do for anyone else....

so off from the whitsundays, and down the coast, few beach stops, until we, in a drive to start DOING something rather than just SEEING everything, get to sydney and hunt for temporary jobs... we settle into a very nice hostel, the one im still at 8 days later, register our car, and scour the hostels for flyers for backpacker jobs, following one to the magnificient suburb of Terry Hills, to shovel horse shit into garden mulch bags and begin painting a coffee shop for a man who proclaims he has an idea a minute, feels obliged to share each and every one of them with us, and proceeds to tell us about how the shit business is "the shit" and thats why he named his company "KING POO".... oddly enough, my biggest regret about doing that for a day was that i didnt get a shirt with the logo.... otherwise, it was a good learning expereience and an interesting glimpse into labor jobs that soo many impoverished immigrants are forced to take back at home... and we got treated well and paid extremely well in comparison....

since then, we've come back to our hostel, made a ton of friends, and been highly active... we got a job at our hostel painting a room, and a little bit of labor, which i am happy to say has made me a little more handy around the house, it was a great and convenient job, paid decently.... meanwhile, we happened to sell our car for $700 dollars more than we paid (which amounts to more than we've earned in both of our jobs combined), so we basically got to drive WOMP WIRED SCRUMP THE HAGGARDLY RED ROCKET around for free, and even got most of our gas paid for.... this trip is turning out to be almost free! i've had this great sense of activity and accomplishment, and hence the elation i've described above, in juxtaposition with my previous disillusionments....

now just trying to enjoy the rest of our time in this beautiful city, and excitedly awaiting our departure to THAILAND!!! we leave in four days FOOS!!!
im absolutely ready to dive into asia and stay there for a long time....

in the mean time, please tell me what you've all been up to..

so until then, i disappear into the waters once again

catch you all on the flip side....

THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA