In my hand is a boarding pass and on it are three letters in bold: SFO. The ticket agent treated this as a very routine check-in. She tucked the boarding pass into my passport and handed it over the counter like I was just another passenger. Like I wasn’t someone who was about to…
Over these past six months of travel I’ve grown accustomed to many things I thought I never would. Non-potable water. Raw meat sold on street corners. Stray dogs that lunge and snarl at me when I’m out for a run. The filth and the confusion and the foreign languages…My eyes and ears glaze over these…
My neck hurts. It’s been hurting since three days ago when I awkwardly swung my backpack – which is the size and weight of a very fat five year old – onto my shoulders. “Use a chair,” David had advised before we parted ways in Phnom Penh. He, a veteran of back injuries is also…
I wish you could see us. Three not-small westerners on a motorbike – me sandwiched in the middle, my feet pressing into the tops of David’s while he tries to make himself comfortable on the few inches of seat we’ve left him at the rear. “You just have to push your way through!” My sister…
The streets of Vietnam are alive with them. The sidewalks too, from time to time. Motorbikes weave nimbly around one another with such controlled precision you might feel silly to fear them striking your jaywalking heels. Actually, probably not. I, for one, have developed a deep admiration for this two-wheeled species of transportation which, at…
Hanoi is a city turned inside out. Narrow buildings jam together like too many books on a shelf, and its doorsteps are alive with activity you might be more accustomed to finding behind the glass panes of a window. Do your eyebrows need plucking? The woman on the corner of Gia Ngu and Hang Be…
“You can call me Hiro,” she says to me. I’m standing in the sweltering open-air lobby of the Malé International Airport located on a tiny strip of land in the middle of The Republic of the Maldives. Hiro (short for Chihiro) is a petite Japanese woman holding a clipboard and sporting an enormous smile. She explains…
I call this blog ‘Somewhere Seeking’ but if I’m being honest, I have no clue what it is I’m actually looking for. Not that it’s beyond me to shortlist a few ideas, but those might more closely resemble goals – nasty little creatures that would threaten to snuff out Travel’s wide open allure and/or set…
I’m in Chiang Mai, Thailand, for approximately twenty minutes when I realize just what sort of place I’ve landed in. We’ve just come off of a weeklong ‘vacation’ from traveling: a much-needed (if not deserved) respite from sightseeing, guesthouse hopping, and zipping, zipping, re-zipping my enormous backpack. Koh Samui, in the gulf of Thailand, is…
“You’re going to be quiet for two whole days?” My sister says to me, her careful placement of emphasis making clear that the concept of silence is not what she’s in disbelief of, but rather that it is me who will attempt it. I feign offense. Signing up for a two-day silent meditation retreat in…
Yangon, where we begin our two-week tour of Myanmar, is not for the faint of heart. And ‘faint’ is exactly how I feel when our plane touches down sometime after ten pm. For the past day and a half I’ve battled a bout of food poisoning – most likely contracted during our farmhouse stay in…
Today we’re heading to Inle Lake in northeastern Myanmar. We had the option of taking a 12-hour overnight bus ride, or paying extra for an hour flight. It was an easy decision, but one I found myself questioning once we arrived at Yangon Domestic Airport, an astoundingly primitive operation. Put simply: buses don’t fall out…
It’s after dark when we reach the farmhouse where we’ll spend the next two nights. An opportunity to ‘immerse’ myself in Bhutanese culture, it is an experience I’ve been looking forward to in the same way I might a community service project on a Saturday. I know it will be good for me – worthwhile…
I brought with me to Bhutan a pre-existing interest in Buddhism. I can’t really remember what compelled me, but last March I enrolled in an ‘Introduction to Buddhism’ class in San Francisco. Yes, I could have bought a book – but you cannot ask questions to a book, and I had lots of those. So…
Bhutan, for whatever reason, decided to set up shop smack dab in the middle of the Himalayas. There isn’t a plain in site. The airport runway is couched in barely a valley where a dozen ridges collide, a predicament so unusual that the pilot warned us before the descent that we should not be alarmed…
Somewhere Seeking 