We just flew to DC from Munich. The winds were gusting to 28 knots on landing and it was bumpy. During that communal quiet period on approach the sounds of people vomiting into their laps were audible from all corners of the plane.
We’re staying right next to the White House and went straight over to get a picture. It was ridiculously cold — colder than Munich. But, grace à dieu, no snow. This morning I spent 30 minutes scraping snow and ice off our rental car so we could drive to the airport in Munich. I might be done living in cold places.
Politics aside I always love being in DC. Tomorrow we’re going to visit the Air & Space Museum and the Smithsonian. And then we’ll drive down to Charlottesville to spend Christmas with my family.
On the flight over I finished Wind Sand and Stars which was exceedingly beautiful. It was written by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the author of The Little Prince and an early aviator in the French mail service. What those pilots did was clinically insane: searching for passes through the Andes and crossing vast stretches of the Sahara in tiny single-engine planes with almost no navigation or communication equipment.
If you find it read at least the chapter “Oasis” about meeting two young girls in Paraguay. It is seven pages long and you can read it standing up in the bookstore.
15 December 2010
We’ve been in Germany the last two weeks to see friends and family.
Bavaria is one of the best places to visit around Christmas. All of the towns convert their central squares into “Christmas markets,” selling hot mulled wine and gingerbread and wooden toys and other cute things.
These markets are wonderful in the snow, glowing and warm and smelling of Glühwein and freshly made waffles. There’s one particular booth I really like in Munich where they sell handmade dollhouse furniture.
There’s also a myth about a creature called Krampus, who plays bad cop to St. Nicholas’ good cop, punishing misbehaving children throughout the German speaking world. One night during advent, people dressed in Krampus costumes run through the Christmas markets scaring the crap out of little kids.
My German friends ask me what the Christmas markets are like in the US, and the first image to flash to mind is a stampede of obese people elbowing each other in the mouth at Walmart, Starbucks holiday drinks spilling everywhere.
If you want to see a fairytale Christmas that’s beautiful and unforgettable, come to Bavaria. We don’t have Christmas markets in the US.
What we do have is SantaCon. And the lights along Commonwealth Ave in Boston. And that famous tree above the ice skaters at Rockefeller center in New York. And a few years ago I was in San Francisco at Christmas and I remember seeing ballroom dancing in Union Square. And there’s peppermint bark from Williams Sonoma.
So, maybe when we get to Virginia in a few days, I’ll give those Starbucks Christmas drinks a try.
11 December 2010
In California, the mad, deep breath of deserts is never far away. The sky above San Francisco is often so dazzling a blue that it merits the overripe description of cerulean, or comparison to lapis lazuli. Its clouds are sea-born and formed in the odd depths of its mysterious bay, where the fog moves inland in a billion-celled, mindless creature, amoeba-shaped and poisonous, like a stillborn member of the nightshade family. Southern fogs calm me as they paint the marshes with their milk-stained fingers. The San Francisco fog is a silver-lined hunter of the predator class, and I always find it troubling. When I awaken to its fog horns, they sound like the exiled whimpering of a city in endless sexual distress.
As a Charlestonian, I know I am not supposed to bend a knee in admiration of a hill country of such amazing, brittle wildness. But San Francisco seduced me on my first visit to Trevor Poe’s flat on Union Street. In its profusion of roses and eucalyptus and palms, the city seems voluptuous and decadent in its very pores, a place that revels in folly and rolls around in the carcasses of human vice. The whole place feels graded, uplifted, maxed out; the views are all spectacular and aha-inducing. San Francisco is a city that requires a fine pair of legs, a city of cliffs misnamed as hills, honeycombed with a fine webbing of showy houses that cling to the slanted streets with the fierceness of abalones. You can spot a whale sounding in the waters between the Presidio and Sausalito in the morning, buy a live eel for lunch in Chinatown, see the Shakespeare Garden at Golden Gate Park in midafternoon, catch a wave in the Pacific along the Great Highway, inhale the unforgettable farts of sea lions on Pier 39, catch part of a gay-lesbian film festival at the Castro Theatre, get a book signed by Lawrence Ferlinghetti at City Lights Books, buy a drink at the Top of the Mark. Trevor Poe gave us this astonishing city as a gift, once he abandoned us to our less glitzy lives in Charleston.
— South of Broad, by Pat Conroy.
18 November 2010
I just came ashore from a two-day catamaran class on a Lagoon 380 and I’m eating a tuna fish and tomato sandwich in my favorite (the only) cafe at the Yacht Haven Marina in Phuket. When I got off the boat I took a shower in the marina’s public bathroom, and as I was pulling some paper towels out of the holder, I noticed an enormous tail protruding from behind the paper towels and waving around. It seems that a very large rat lives in there!
We’ve been here for nearly three weeks taking sailing classes from YachtPro. It’s been great. The marina has a small-town feeling, with a little breakfast cafe that serves great omelets and coffee and a choice of two restaurants for dinner, though only one — “Mama’s and Papa’s” — is any good (and it’s fabulous). Every night at dinner we see the same beer-soaked expats and boat cruisers. People who’ve quit their jobs and bought a boat and sail around the world. One family from Holland has a six year old girl and has been cruising since she was 6 months.
The boat people demographic is skewed. No smooth gaussian curves here. Mostly it’s dropouts and wastoids, weirdos and kooks, but these vary dramatically too. You have the bearded born-again Christian using numerological arguments to predict an upcoming “time of tribulation” and millionaire bachelors with too much sun and an emptiness in their eyes. Lots of people complain about the logistics of maintaining their boats, and these stories are always far too detailed.
But I like these characters and look forward to seeing them at breakfast and every night at dinner. One group of six spent a week trying to leave Phuket. They were hired to move a boat down the Malaca straits to Singapore and back up the eastern coast of Thailand. Every night at dinner we’d see them and they’d shake their heads and tell a story about a broken navigation light or missing papers. On the fifth night one of their crew declared the entire enterprise unsafe and flew back to California.
Altogether we’ve sailed nearly 300 nautical miles and spent ten days living and sleeping on boats, and I can now say that I’m certified (and maybe even qualified) to rent cruising catamarans and take our friends on island-hopping sailing trips — which was the end goal of taking sailing classes in the first place.
Along the way we’ve discovered that it’s pretty awesome to pilot your boat around the islands and limestone cliffs of Phang Nga Bay looking for hidden caves and isolated anchorages. Surprisingly we were often the only boat in sight – the low-season advantage, maybe.
Stephanie got the same certifications I did, which is nice, because either of us can man the boat competently and it reduces the workload (which is frankly already pretty low – especially, as I just discovered, if you have an autohelm).
Despite the stories we’ve heard, I do have a dream of some day sailing a long ocean passage on my own boat, preferably the Galapagos to the Marquesas. This takes 2-5 weeks, depending on the winds and how much you use the engine. But this will have to wait.
We’d always planned to take a traveling intermission around December, but we’ve just decided to go back West early for various reasons: so that I can finish my pilot’s license, and Stephanie can do some more rehab for her knee.
So in a few hours I fly to San Francisco via Bangkok and Tokyo (my first time landing in Tokyo! but only an hour there).
It’s been nearly four months in Asia. It feels like far longer, but I’m definitely not done traveling. There’s still India and China. And quite a lot of diving to do. And yet, I can already feel the gentle tug of ambition, calling me home to start another company; can hear the faint whisper of a distant dinner party, beckoning me back to friends and family.
O stay your hand, and leave my heart its songs. Just a bit longer out in the world.
4 November 2010
rubenvermeersch asked: Very interesting to read about your adventures! I was wondering: how much and what do you pack for such a long trip? How do you balance between mobility and utility? Are you travelling with just one 55+10 backpack or a pile of suitcases?
We try to focus on mobility, and count on being able to buy what we need while we’re traveling. I have a 55+10 backpack and Stephanie has a 65 liter bag, and neither bag is full. If your bag is full, it takes ages to pack. We want to be able to pack & go, so we leave a lot of empty space in our bags. I’d say mine is 60 or 70% full.
Here’s my full packing list:
- A pair of linen pants I had custom-made in Hoi An with very deep pockets. Super useful as nothing can fall out. These roll very compactly.
- Two quick-dry cargo pants and two bathing suits. One pair are the dorky kind with detachable lower-legs, which I’ve used once or twice.
- Two t-shirts, one long-sleeved shirt, one very light linen sweater.
- Two pair ex officio underwear (which I rarely wear, to be honest), and one pair of smartwool socks.
- A pair of Keen sandals I’ve been wearing for nearly five years that are in great shape. These shoes are indisputably ugly but very practical, and seemingly indestructible.
- Trail running shoes for hiking and working out.
- A big bag of medicine like cipro, amoxicillin, azithromycin, sulfamethoxazole/trimethoprim, pepto bismol tablets, dramamine, ibuprofen, etc. Our doctor gave us a handful of prescriptions before we left. These have, unfortunately, proved to be very useful as we’ve both gotten various infections.
- Kindle 3 (Amazon delivered it to me in Thailand)
- An incredible Petzl Zipka Plus head lamp. This is a very bright, pocketable and head-mountable light that makes it easy to see and be seen in areas with no street lighting (pretty common in e.g. Cambodia). I keep it next to the bed at night, just in case. A lot of people we’ve met have coveted this.
- 13” Macbook running Mac OS and Linux
- Panasonic GF-1 digital camera
- Underwater camera for diving
- Suunto Zoop dive computer
- iPhone 3GS with AT&T unlimited international data (works in Thailand, Malaysia and South Korea; didn’t work in Cambodia and Vietnam). We use an app called Expenditure to track our spending and (try to) stay within our budget.
- Unlocked Nexus One. You can get local SIMs with a month of data for about $20 everywhere we’ve been. If I’d known that, I wouldn’t have signed up for AT&T’s international unlimited data plan, which costs $70/month and has been useless half the time.
- A pretty small toiletry kit: toothbrush (replaced twice so far), toothpaste, razor.
- An MSR quick-drying camping towel. We’ve occasionally been somewhere with non-existant or disgusting towels, and this was a lifesaver.
- Deck of cards; useful when it’s raining and we’re stuck somewhere, or waiting for a bus, etc etc. We like to show people magic tricks, too.
- Fake poop, of course.
My whole kit weighs 9.5 kilos. You can definitely travel on a lot less than that, and my bag has been growing in the last few months, which I think is normal. I started out with a bag that was so empty, it made my mom nervous. I subscribe to the “buy it there” philosophy, which makes packing light easy, but I’ve also added a few things I’ve needed (mostly t-shirts) as we’ve been going along.
In the last week we’ve accumulated some sailing-specific items (gloves, books, rain jackets) that we’ll probably ship back to Germany before we leave Thailand.
27 October 2010
