Until Next Time...

So it's the end....for now.

As my plane bumped and dipped eastward over the Rocky Mountains, I looked down through the clouds at the dirt roads and faint trails. I wanted to ride them. There I was, almost home, but not quite, and I was dreaming of the next one. Nepal, Laos, Cambodia, China, Turkey, Costa Rica, Peru, Argentina, and Chile, just for a start. Those places make the hairs on my neck stand on end. The future is big and bright with new adventures. I rode three thousand miles, walked over two hundred, climbed seven mountains, wandered twenty-eight beaches, and ate at least sixty scoops of ice cream. That's not big enough. How can I fold my arms, sit back, and say "well, that's that" now that I've tasted the sweet nectar of sunrise over an open road? It's just the beginning.

People can have their Marts, McDonald's, humongous vehicles, suburbs, wonder phones, electric ab-shockers, and battery powered mops. I'll take the road, the birds, the wind, and the trees as my version of freedom. They can have their greed, spite, malice, and prejudices. They can even sling them at me if they want. The more distance I go, the more places I see, the more people I meet, and the bigger my perspective gets, the more I realize the pointlessness and insignificance of such things.

On the gigantiod plane that took me east across the Pacific, I watched The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Benjamin is watching a sunrise and says; "You can be mad as a mad dog at the way things went; you can swear and curse the fates - but when it comes to the end, you have to let go."

So go watch the sunrise over the ocean. Go sit on a mountain top and listen to a glacier pop in a distant valley. Go walk into a paddock and roll down a grassy hill. Go find some sand dunes and jump from their tops. Go to a wild, rugged beach and watch the big waves kick up gold mist. Go to where there is dense green and life all around. Sit and listen. Let go.



Somewhere approaching the edge of the desert, the road was long




In Lightning Ridge someone abandoned their Opal potch sifter

In the heart of Australia, I rested for a night near some wheat.

Bright orange moss grows on the rocks of Tasmania.

Ancient uplifted stones protrude from the hilltops of central Tasmania

Some of those stones have been pushed high above peat and buttongrass.

At the top, one can see in every direction.

The wind and the rain bleach dead wood preserved by the cold.

Colored beetles are going places on tiny round feet.

Roots are exposed where thousands of people have walked the Tasmanian forest.

At the tallest mountain, a cold lake rests in the cushion plants.

In a valley below, the harsh sun has found a red leaf.

Near the Tasman Sea, a plant twists to strengthen against the constant wind.

At the foot of the Western Arthurs, grand views are beheld.

Sun warms the cold land in southwest Tasmania.

Tiny droplets condense on miniature plant tongues.

Rocks crackle under foot as a ridge is crested toward Mt. Anne.

A pandani plant collects the calm rain before a snow storm.

The Tasman Sea reclaims what is left behind.

Tiny seed pods open with fire and leave rows of frozen lips.

The gloss black paint on a lighthouse door shines like chrome.

Expensive beach boxes line the sand in Melbourne.

A second visit to the Black Spur was a walk through the calm wood towers.

At the foot of Mt. Ruapehu, I was sweating in the cool air.

At the foot of the desolate cinder cone, an Eden exists.

In New Zealand, the sand is endlessly carved by the tides.

Where it is dry, it is pushed by the wind.

If it were windy on the moon, it may look like this.

Dr. Seuss may have been inspired by pancake rocks.

Ferns with the width of a man's arms grab the rare sunlight on New Zealand's west coast.

One might expect to see a triceratops just beyond the trees.

A dragonfly takes a breather, then heads off on a mission somewhere.

A droplet comes to rest before continuing its watery business.

Boards creek under foot and dark reflective water laps at the shore.

Rocks once carried by glaciers glow orange and wet with brine.

Someday, another glacier will come and sweep away the paddocks.

For now, New Zealand's sheep munch away in the glow of warm days.

On the Cascade Saddle Route, the kea birds squeak, and legs burn.

Bangkok's smog seems not to have left a smudge on the Buddhist temples.

Walk through the legs of a steel monster when you fly from Thailand.

Wet hams

Yes, Thailand was a pretty good destination to end the trip with. Bangkok city overloaded my senses, and the Islands of Kho Samui and Kho Phagnan provided some much needed relaxation and plenty of opportunity to get my hams wet.

Arriving in Bangkok was a shock. Ask me what it was like, and I'll ask you if you've seen Blade Runner. A sea of sky scrapers with under a cloud of pollution almost too thick to see the blue of the sky through, giant billboards as long as a city block, a five-story, rotating, illuminated, cylindrical, dot-matrix display atop a fifty-story building displays an animated advertisement. Exiting the eight-lane elevated concrete freeways where Japanese supercars whiz by burping fire from the tailpipes, takes you down to the crowded streets of neon lights, buzzing tok toks, sizzling food carts, and vendors selling scorpions, eels, and miniature turtles.


In the day, we went walking. One road was apparently the place to buy wood doors, and Noel and I strolled along sniffing the scent of freshly cut exotic wood. Another street was apparently the place to go to buy a huge gold Buddha. Dozens of shops selling the same Buddhas. They come shrink-wrapped. Another street was the place to go to buy crappy trophies, another, portraits of the king waving from a white balcony, another, mini temples on top of poles. Those come shrink-wrapped too.

We went to a few different Buddhist temples, and this one was the best. It wasn't the fanciest, or biggest, or weirdest, so there were no tourists there. There was some sort of festival or gathering, and all the Thai people welcomed us with smiles and sparkling eyes. The monks in orange robes smiled at us with such loving sincerity that it made the grime and greed of the city seem far away. I was glad to be in Bangkok.

We stayed on Khaosan road, which is a great place if you like beer-swilling, shirtless frat boys and being mercilessly pestered by street vendors selling worthless crap. This poor girl has a job selling plush dead monkeys. I caught her enjoying a moment of peace.

A tok tok is a motorized contraption that has the front end of a motorbike, and a two-wheeled cab on the back to ride in. The Moon Bar is a bar on the roof of a sky scraper where one can take in views of the city at night. We tried our best to explain to the tok tok driver what the Moon Bar is. We flew down the highways and darted around alleys before arriving at an illuminated blue building shaped like the moon. After more hand gestures and descriptions, we made it to the real Moon Bar, only to find we were banned from entering because we were wearing shorts. I thought getting tossed around like a ragdoll in the back of a tok tok for an hour was just as fun anyway.

The new Bangkok airport is a behemoth, and it made me feel like I was in the future. The terminal is like a huge glass and concrete cube, and the concourses are shaped like giant caterpillars. In the terminal, an announcement came on the speakers, and it was so far away and echoy that it was completely unintelligible. This place is too big for announcements.

Kho Samui was what you see in magazines and brochures. On the second day, the waves were big. We waded out in them, and it was impossible not to laugh as the waves rose up over my head, came curling down on my skinny frame, sending my feet skyward and the back of my shaggy blond head into the ocean floor. I'd get back on my feet, shorts pulled half way off, rubbing my eyes, and opening them like slits just in time to tilt my head back and see the next wave coming down with a ridge of white dancing and slapping at the top.


Bungalows are the thing to rent here, and you can get a crummy one for a few bucks a night. This river smelled like sewage, so maybe these were cheap.

One night on Kho Samui, we played pool with a couple of prostitutes that worked at the bar at our bungalows. The one that was on my team looked like she was about fifteen. She and I also played several games of "Connect Four," at which she repeatedly schooled me. At some point, I realized I was probably wasting her time, so I wandered out in the warm rainy night to sit alone on the beach. If you've never sat on a beach at night, you should. The ocean is like ink, and the sky blends into it. The waves seem to materialize out of emptiness, and their white crests boil out of the darkness like apparitions. Sheets of foam rolled up around me before curling back and disappearing into the dark like the tentacles of a frightened creature. I sat motionless for some time. Lightning flashed blue-white on the sea, and the rain soaked my clothes.


We went exploring one day and found an abandoned resort. The place looked like a scene from Jurassic Park after dinosaurs had stomped thorough munching up all the tourists. The pool had evaporated leaving a couple feet of brown water and was full of dead leaves and mosquito eggs. The dance floor was covered in pieces of ceiling that had fallen in. The rainforest was slowly reclaiming the whole place. Just next door, a new glamorous resort was under construction.

The next beach we found, Had Rinn, was on the island of Kho Phagnan just to the north. This beach was classy, and it shows off it's class with a row of shacks that compete at night to sell "buckets." A bucket is a little plastic beach bucket with a bottle of booze and a soft drink to go with it. The proprietor of a shack will mix the swill for you and it is to be consumed from the bucket. In my opinion, the bucket is the ultimate symbol of the stumbling, round-faced, slack-jawed, sweaty, shirtless, vomit-breathed, shit-for-brains frat boy culture. This beach is great if you're a fan of drinking your brain into nothingness, and stumbling around making a turd of yourself hooting slurred meaninglessness like an overgrown child carrying a pink plastic bucket.

On the last night here, there was a lot of that going on while I was trying to read myself to sleep. Our bungalow was pretty far away from these shacks, but the house music was so loud that it made the boards buzz. It was like a pounding headache that lasted til four in the morning. I sat up reading and cursed it.


Had Rinn wasn't all bad. Here, we got to play table tennis with some local kids. The little girl made a great score keeper, and the boy was quite skillful. He would play calmly, then whip his arm and shoot the ball as hard as he could. One of his shots hit me in the bicep, and it stung like a hailstone.

We rented a couple of motorbikes one day and went buzzing around on the steep dirt roads of the island. Luckily, the bikes had knobby tires, because some of the roads were more like mountain bike trails, and the little motor strained up the hillsides. With the bikes, we discovered a much more chill beach north of the drunk jerk party beach. This would be our destination for the next day, and we would spend the rest of the time chilling out there. On the way back to drop off the bikes, I did something I knew my mother would disapprove of. I twisted the throttle and the bike rocketed up to 60 mph on the narrow winding concrete road. It wanted to go faster, but that just wouldn't have been safe.

Fire twirling is pretty big in Thailand, and this Thai dude with his black jeans and pointy black balaclava looked like an evil masked henchman.

That night, we were hanging out with a couple Swedish girls, and after dinner on the beach, we discovered little sparkly things in the shallow waves. Here it was again! The same phenomenon I saw back in New Zealand. This time, however, the water was not too cold to swim in. Swimming in the phosphorescent algae caused our limbs to illuminate with ghostly blue light. We spent a long time in the glassy ocean water watching the particles of light trail form our submerged hands, twirling in the eddies and currents round our fingers before winking out. Hold a hand still under water, flick one finger, and a swirl of slow moving sparks erupt from the fingertip. It's no wonder people used to believe in magic and wizards. As much as I tried to take a photo of it, the light from the particles is just too faint. I settled for the above photo, which is a long exposure panning across the beach.

Finally, I found green papaya salad! March 15th was Green Papaya Salad Day, and I had wanted to write "Happy Green Papaya Salad Day" in the sand, and take a photo of myself holding up a big bowl of it, but it proved difficult to find at the touristy places where we were staying. Finally, we got to go to a local festival where some more authentic Thai foods were available. The green papaya was good, and reminded me of spaghetti squash. With my salad, I got half a chicken and sticky rice. Yum.

Noel is doing some yoga here with his head under water. It's good for the sinuses.

One of the typical longtail boats. These are beautiful boats with car engines mounted on the sterns. Unmuffled and loud the boat is driven by swiveling the entire engine. Some of the smaller ones like this one have Volkswagen engines, and some of the bigger boats have diesel truck engines.

Our bungalow, set back from the beach a bit and surrounded by lush gardens and raked sand. A place like this can be had for about twelve bucks a night.

On my last night, I was rewarded with a light show on the beach. Dogs love beaches, and they seemed to like the pink sky too.

Back at the airport, I ate at a Japanese burger joint called R Burger. I had a "Chicken Ume Burger" whatever that is, on a "white bunzu + collagen." The "bunzu" was white as paper with an "R" branded in the top. As revolting as this all may sound, it actually tasted delicious. R Burger's motto is Healthy Food, Beauty Good, Smooth Service. I don't know about healthy, but the service was definitely smooth. Everyone can use a little smooth service now and then.

Waiting for my flight back to Australia, I had some time to take photos from the inside of the giant caterpillar.