davethegrinch.net

Dave says:
Call it blasé, call it naive. Perhaps it’s experience but more likely I’m just lazy. Which ever way you look at it, being an hour outside Luang Prabang and only now picking up the trusty Lonely Planet is possibly a little insane. But then traveling all this distance for a two week vacation is equally so. Sarah, dear Sarah, who just a few short years ago, didn’t even own a passport has organized this whole trip with efficiency and an esprit d’corps that comes only with experience. And now I have nothing left to do but cram the country as presented to me in the culture, history, environment and food& drink section of the ever present travelers bible. I am not ashamed to admit that it’s that last section I study the hardest; the others, I am ashamed to admit, make me sound more knowledgable than I truly am for the benefit of  these digital correspondences back home.
Speaking of which, I apologize in advance if I’m blasé/naive/lazy or just out of practice in this regard too. It’s been many months since I last busted out the travel writing chops but I’m sure, any second now, my long perambulations, pretentious use of arcane vocabulary and overuse of the humble comma will re-emerge into the style you know, love or barely tolerate.

I digress (of course I do). My tardiness in the guide  book reading department is compounded by the sheer amount of missed opportunity I’ve had in the last 32 hours. Door to door, four flights across a good portion of the globe – 32 hours in transit.  I feel like an astronaut. Around the clock I have dined on the finest individually portioned facsimile of gourmet food my ticket class deserves and then performed my ablutions in a three foot square plastic Boeing porta-potty.  I maybe getting too old for this. Ironically, I’ve just finished my last airplane meal on this leg and it was surprisingly good. US airlines have seriously lost the plot because the meal I just enjoyed on a two hour flight in a propeller driven airplane to one of poorest countries in world was so much better than the complimentary bag of pretzels you get on a seven hour flight on a 757 across the richest country in the world. Shame on them and shame on us for putting up with their capitalistic approach to something as basic as a halfway decent meal whilst they insist on continuing the aires of high standards of service.

Oh, right. The facts not the hyperbole. I’m sorry. Seattle to San Fran : 1.5 hours / 4 hour layover. San Fran to Hong Kong: 14 hours / 2 hour layover. Hong Kong to Bangkok: 2.5 hours / 2 hour layover then finally, and not a moment too soon, on to Luang Prabang in just under 2 hours but really, at this point it’s all rather irrelevant and somewhat ridiculous. I would argue that the prospect of such a journey is worse than the actuality but my ass really hurts so I know that’s not the truth. I’m not entirely sure how Cathay Pacific can legally get away with the plastic seats they’ve installed in their 747s. The cushion was micro-thin and the seat reclined by sliding forward rather than the backrest raking backwards. This allows them to condense even more traveler per square foot. Now, at the risk of stereotyping, most the passengers were Chinese and they can do that village squat thing for ages – maybe it was fine for them  but my skinny white occidental ass needs to be pushin’ a little more cushin’ if you know what I’m saying.

Hong Kong is the gateway to the east and especially the airport. Witness the Asians with their matching Burberry luggage and woolen scarves (it’s seventy five degrees outside) and amuse yourself with the westeners heading into Asia in all their newly purchased adventure clothed glory. It’s the modern equivalent of pith helmets and safari suits and sends the imperialistic message that western technology can overcome eastern traditions or climate (both assumptions are incorrect). My favorites however are westeners heading home, released from shackles of gore-tex and bedecked in their touristy, tie died hemp freedom. Me? Well I’m wearing the same beat-up and faded travel clothes I wore everyday for two years. They been laundered against rocks and repaired with big stitches of mismatched cotton. I love them and when I put them on I feel like Indiana Jones pulling on that leather jacket and donning the famous hat – another adventure has begun.

I love it. I love it all. Wouldn’t you?

Dave Says,

Here are ten random meditations on Sydney.

1)   The shops open at 9am. Have you ever been in a department store at 9am? It’s quite a displacing sensation. It feels as if you got up to go to the shops rather than getting up and deciding to go to the shops. It’s not right. There are other things that don’t feel right when you’ve just arisen from your nightly slumber such as seeing a jazz band, wearing black tie or eating oysters.

Read the rest of this entry »

Dave Says:

Consider the value of a dollar. Now consider ten thousand of them. The distance between Vancouver, Canada and Auckland, New Zealand is eleven thousand kilometers. I’m going to round that down to ten thousand kilometers because I’m an international business bigwig to whom one thousand anythings is just a mere rounding error. Here’s some math:

$10,000 / 10,000km = $1 per km

I’ll leave you with that for a moment.

Read the rest of this entry »

Dave Says:

I have a suntan. I also haven’t shaved for nearly two weeks. Both feel good although the former didn’t feel quite so good at first and the latter is starting to itch so probably won’t feel quite so good for much longer. We leave tomorrow. No doubt my skin is looking forward to that more than the rest of my body. I can hear and see the surf from our little caravan situated in the garden of the hostel we’re staying at in Opotiki. Our friends from Seattle, Kurt and Lisa have joined us. They are on the start of a seven month sabbatical in NZ and coincidences in this small world being what they insist on being, we were able to meet up and enjoy a few days together. They are settling in well to their new adventure and I have stopped baby-sitting them. They didn’t really need me to do that but I can’t help myself. I’m always meddling in other people’s ability to think for themselves. Read the rest of this entry »

Dave Says:

It’s been too long since my fingers put those two words and one punctuation character together. This is a macro blog of a micro trip. But we are back. Back on the road, back in hostels and back in New Zealand. Things are different. Not NZ, that appears to be pretty much intact. But we’re different – circumstances are different. For the record, for posterity and to clear the air of any pretense, I’m here in NZ sucking on the teat of corporate America; sent down under (almost) to sell my company’s wares to corporate New Zealand. In return for the subsidized pleasures of an industrialized road warrior, I/we get a subsidized vacation back to a country we love. I refuse to bore you with the economics of this trip – suffice to say that it actually saved us no money at all but rather financed a luxury beyond a point we would have spent anyway. A last minute plane ticket for Sarah equals the price of two reasonably advanced bookings and three nights of expense account excesses in a major metropolitan city would have been beyond the depth of my wallet or indeed, the willingness of my thrifty fingers to delve in anywhere near to it. To atone for these sins, I sit writing this in our sparse, non-en-suite room in the Raglan Backpacker’s Hostel (albeit on a rather nice MacBook Pro). Read the rest of this entry »

Dave says:

I suspect that I will not be the lone voice in the blogsphere this week. Tomorrow stands as a great test of many people, one person and approximately the whole internet. As the great empowerer (I literally reference the internet and figuratively the president-elect), thousands of people will flood its being with the thoughtful and the thoughtless. I write this on Monday January 19th 2009 for no other reason than should tomorrow the internet crumble under the weight of the inane, insane and inspired, my ramblings will have made it out there as a monument to nothing but my own musings.

My daily observation, (a resolution I made at the beginning of the year along with my desire to decrease my dogged overuse of parenthesizes to communicate a side thought) was marshaled from two segments of seemingly unconnected radio both over employing either the preposition or the concept of the word “like”. The first radio report was an interesting, if not slightly over patriotic piece on NPR: a compilation of inaugural speech snippets from President Coolidge to President G.W. Bush. Each president was telling the expectant masses they are great but could be greater and each, even the last, sounded inspiring and confident. However, the hidden subtext to these sermons from the political pulpit was the desire of each new president to be ‘like’ a predecessor. Quote: as Jefferson said, as Lincoln said, as Roosevelt said, as Kennedy said and, surprisingly, as Reagan said are all really to be interpreted as ‘As I Said’.  It is fair to say we all wish Obama to be ‘like’ these presidents also. If you take a bushel of American presidents and thrash out the chaff, you are left with a great man. It is not that we wish Obama to be ‘like’ this great man, we insist he actually become it. Nothing less will suffice and nothing more can be achieved. Obama is about to become America, a metamorphosis that even the most of American of presidents, George Washington, could not achieve. Washington was elected by the small self-appointed American Congress before there was even a government to speak of, to lead a population of mostly illiterate peasants – the unwashed masses. His greatness of office was mainly defined by just being George Washington. Obama’s greatness of office has already occurred: he is the first African American president. He must do more than be ‘like’ his heroes, he must be a hero if he is to eclipse that greatness already achieved. Read the rest of this entry »

Dave says:

And so, first, an apology. What a way to leave our loyal readers. After all we’ve been through together, the ups and downs, highs and lows, ins and outs and I (we) leave you hanging somewhere in New Jersey lamenting dead relatives. That was not the way we intended to honor you and for that we beg your forgiveness. There is/was a method to the madness however. I wanted the last entry in this travel collective to be the denouement, drawing together the sights and smells of our adventures into a neat little package with a pretty bow on top. But this task caused great consternation and ultimately frustrated failure. Perhaps you could draw your own conclusions but, apart from that being disrespectful to you, we just didn’t think you could do it. It’s not that we underestimate your capacity for understanding and reason, it is that we have come to note that our travels are just too big for encapsulation. We have not come to terms with the shear width and breadth of them ourselves yet, so to expect our family, friends and casual voyeurs to formulate a precis of our voyages goes beyond the reasonable. Nevertheless, we live in a summarized society so, with apologies proffered but no retractions offered, here is the superlative list we all crave: Read the rest of this entry »