Bangerts Round the World

2012-05-29T14:22:00.001-07:00

If I were a letter in the alphabet and wanted to feel popular, I would probably be the letter K in the Turkish language. That or Y. Both those letters happen to be in the name of the town that was our next destination after Istanbul. How we chose Ayvalik is fairly random. We knew we wanted to spent time in Turkey somewhere in addition to Istanbul. Antalya sounded attractive, being on the Mediterranean Coast, but a long way from Istanbul. Ayvalik, on the Aegean Coast, and about five hours by ferry and bus from Istanbul, looked more doable, so that became our next target.

Getting to Ayvalik meant getting a taxi to take us to the ferry to cross the Maramara Sea to the town of Bandirma. There, we could get a taxi to go to the bus station to catch a bus to Ayvalik, which was three or four hours away. However, as we've found out more than once, there are the plans you make, and then there is reality.

The ferry to Bandirma didn't leave until 12:30, so we didn't have to worry about an early up and at 'em as we've had a few times on the trip. We got to the feribot port in plenty of time, and grabbed a bite to eat after getting our tickets. We had two sets of two tickets in separate rows. Annie and Marley were seated next to a Turkish woman who spoke little, if any English, but thanks to written notes and hand gestures and a little help from a Turkish-English translation app they managed to have a conversation about our trip.

The ferry ride was fast and smooth, just like I like my soft serve ice cream. (What?) It took about two and a half hours to cross from Istanbul to Bandirma, arriving there at around 3pm. Supposedly the bus to Ayvalik left at 4pm, so we ideally had almost an hour to make it to the bus station. Our confidence in that happening faded somewhat when a cab driver at the feribot port who didn't speak much English shook his head when I mentioned the bus to Ayvalik which gave me the idea that it had already left.

Turns out that was indeed the case when we got to the bus station and went up to the ticket counter. The clerk, who spoke virtually no English, conveyed to us the message that the bus had left an hour earlier. You would think they might want to coordinate the bus and ferry schedules a little better to have more ferry customers buy tickets for their buses, but I guess not. Our next option was to catch a bus to Balikesir, which left in about 90 minutes and then catch a bus from there to Ayvalik.

That process went fairly smoothly, and we actually got to Balikesir a little earlier than expected, which allowed us to catch an earlier bus to Ayvalik. It still took almost three hours before we made it to our destination, thanks in part to the number of what seemed to be random stops to let a passenger or two off around five or six times along the way.

Tara, our host in Ayvalik was very gracious on our arrival, sending a taxi driver to the bus station to take us on the ten minute drive to what would be our home for at least the next week. Tara, the same age as Annie and me, is a native of the U.S. but has lived and worked in Turkey for around 20 years, and loves the place and fits in very well.

One of the attractions about the place we booked with Tara in Ayvalik was the fact that it had cats. We left/abandoned six cats several litter boxes back home in Cincinnati and it's always been a treat for us whenever we've encountered some cats or dogs during our trip.

We were all thrilled at the presence of the felines in our latest home away from home. Ben and Marley were especially fond of having some furriness to keep them company and they both made blog entries expressing that.

My favorite was one named Daddy-O. That happens to be what Annie and the kids call me frequently, but that's not why I liked him. Despite having three legs, an oozing sore on his one remaining front leg, various scars and an overall disheveled appearance, he had a great purr, and was very friendly.

Daddy-O and the other cats seemed pretty happy to have some company and the feeling was definitely mutual.

Adding to our mutual contentment was the village of Ayvalik itself. We had read where it was a popular vacation destination for people from Istanbul and Ankara and Izmir in southwestern Turkey. That conveyed images of gelato stands and shops selling trinkets and t-shirts, and maybe miniature turkeys with a fez sporting the red flag with a white C and star that make up the Turkish flag.

Turns out, Ayvalik is nothing like that at all. Our house, which shares a wall with that of the owner, Tara, is on a hillside in the old part of town. The house is near the top of the hill, giving a nice view of the harbor and marina. On clear days, the Greek island of Lesvos is visible to the west and provides some beautiful sunsets.

The climb up and down the cobblestone street wasn't too bad, and helped burn off some of the delicious bread and bagel-like simits we were enjoying.

One of my favorite things to do first thing in the morning was to get up, take a stroll down the cobblestone street, and find a bakery. A freshly-baked loaf of bread cost the equivalent of a US quarter, and timed right, the purchased bread would still be warm enough to melt butter when sliced open back at the house.

As we returned to the house after eating dinner out one night, we were strolling down an alley when a woman standing outside her shop heard Marley speaking English. She spoke to us, asked us where we were from and struck up a conversation. Her name was Asu, (USA backwards, which we got a kick out of) and cooked food out of a tiny little restaurant that had two tables inside and two or three outside basically in the narrow. She offered to cook us some food sometime during our stay, an offer we promised we would take her up on.

Getting to know Asu, enjoying spending time with Tara and the cats, and immersing ourselves in the Ayvalik life prompted us to stay past our initial plan of one week. The village is beyond charming, and is safe and very friendly, especially if you throw out the occasional tessekur edemir for thank you and merhaba for hello.

Each Thursday, a massive market springs up in the narrow streets of Ayvalik. Our first Thursday there was our third morning, and I got up and hit the streets, confident I would go back to the same bakery for the third straight day. However, about five blocks from our house, I turned left to head to the street where I thought I would easily be able to get to the bakery, I ran right into part of the market.

It's a series of stalls and tables and tarps offering up all kinds of clothing, shoes, food, you name it-you can buy it. All I wanted to buy that morning was some bread and with all the vendors in place obscuring the familiar guideposts that I needed to navigate, I had no idea where the baker was.

I managed to wander the streets and find my freshly-baked bread and take it back to the house. Later that day, we returned to the market after meeting some fellow world travelers who we met through Facebook. Pete and Dalene, who are from Canada, have a slightly different game plan than us. They have been on the road for three years now, going from one house-sitting job to another.

After sharing some travel tales and picking up some great information from them, we dove into the market. They were nearing the end of a three-month house-sitting assignment in a town about an hour away, and had been to the Thursday market in Ayvalik before, so they knew the lay of the land. We especially enjoyed the wide variety of all kinds of fresh fruits and vegetables.

It's an engineering marvel that the vendors can somehow come into the skinny streets and set up the vast amount of merchandise that they bring to sell each Thursday. And then they tear it all down each time.

A major allure of Ayvalik is the location on the waters of the Aegean Sea. There are no modern hotels or resorts, and no building taller than four or five stories. It's probably a little more touristy during the high season months of the summer, but we really enjoyed the feel of a walk along the waterfront and seeing the small fishing boats docked there.

Enjoying the company of the cats, we did our best to make sure they were rewarded for their friendship. Being so close to the water, Ayvalik has an abundance of fish shops, and every other day or so, we would make a quick stop to get something yummy for the cats.

There were no major supermarkets within easy walking distance of our house, but there are several small shops offering a variety of drinks, snacks, beer, some wine-pretty much the normal choices found at a convenience store in the States. One thing I had trouble finding is butter.

Butter was a key ingredient to enjoying the freshly-baked bread, and one morning I set out with Ben in search of butter. Marley had burned through our initial supply by making popcorn in a pan the night before. I figured it couldn't be THAT hard to find butter at 9:30 in the morning. Oh yes it can! I walked past the bakery on my way into town, knowing that with the market not operating, I would be able to find it again on my way back to the house.

Part of the difficulty was that I neglected to look up the Turkish word for butter before setting out on our mission. Several times when I asked about "butter" I was pointed to water. Thanks, no I'm good there. We must have checked into a half-dozen stores or more and still had no butter. What do these people do if there's a waffle outbreak? I couldn't even find a tub of margarine. You would think I was looking for a kilo of saffron in a platinum-coated diamond-encrusted urn or something.

Finally I decided that since the bakery was located on something of a busy square, maybe there would be a store there selling the exotic delicacy of butter. Sure enough, when we turned the corner, two doors down from the bakery was a store, and inside: BUTTER!! My hands trembling with anticipation like when Indiana Jones finds the Lost Ark, I managed to give the clerk the right amount of Lira and still have enough to by some bread, returning home with my bounty after a 45-minute mission.

A few days later, needing butter again, I returned to the same store only to find they didn't have the same foil-covered slabs of butter. I hadn't looked up the word for butter (it's tereyagi in case you need that bit of knowledge) because I didn't think I would need it. I bought something similar, stopped for bread and discovered when I got back to the house that I was in proud possession of cream cheese. At least Marley likes that on her toast, so it wasn't a total loss. It wasn't like I came back with a tub of vegetables. I did manage later in the day to find a market that had some of the basics, including butter that came in the form of the rock formation from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Ayvalik is a truly ancient city, and not too far away are ruins dating back centuries. The ones that get the most attention and visitors are found at Ephesus, which was about three and a half hours away from our cozy cottage. Located only about 45 minutes away, are some ruins at Bergama, so we arranged for a taxi driver that Tara uses a lot to take us there one morning.

Hakkan showed up at our house to find something of a groggy group. I was tired after spending a couple of nights staying up with Daddy-O. His condition was deteriorating and his breathing was getting pretty labored and he wasn't purring like he did when we first arrived.

He still seemed to enjoy our company, and would occasionally sprint (as much as a three-legged cat could) into the house and plop down on some cushions on the floor. Sometimes he would try to get up on the couch and snuggle up against one of us, as he is doing next to my leg in the photo above. He reminded me very much of Bill the Cat from Bloom County, and I was really hoping at some point he would give me a good "ACK!!" but that never happened.

It felt good to be with Daddy-O through the night for a couple of nights, and he would wake up from time to time and seemed comforted when I would let him know I was there. He made it through both nights and his breathing even got a little better and his purr would return now and then. I still expected to just find him not breathing at some point, but he was still of this earth when we left with Hakkan for our trip to Bergama. Tara had a cleaning woman coming to her house, so we felt better leaving knowing at least someone was going to be around Daddy-O who we put back outside on the patio we shared with Taras' house.

The drive to Bergama was easy, with the roads in pretty good shape along the way. The main attraction is the Akropoli at the top of the hill over looking the city, but there are other remnants of the ancient and powerful society on the way there. The first stop was at the Red Basilica, or what was left of it.

One structure that's still fairly intact is a tall rotunda that has an opening in the top, allowing a round shaft of sunlight to illuminate the interior. Some parts of the basilica facade are on display there, with a description detailing what makes the carvings unique.

A half hour or so was all we needed there, so we made the short drive up the hill to check out the Akropoli. Just getting out of the cab there literally took our breath away. Not because of any stunning view, but because the wind was howling! Once we managed to get our balance and get to a place where we could anchor ourselves against the wind, the view was, well, breath-taking.

It was easy to see why this spot was chosen, it's the classic king-of-the-hill move. The view goes on for miles in every direction, and when the massive structures were in full bloom, the structure must have been imposing and intimidating for any would-be attackers.

There are informational signs at various points throughout the ruins describing how they were built and how they looked when they were first erected. The signs also provided us something to hold on to as we got buffeted by the strong winds. One of the signs said that there was no definitive knowledge of how the ruins were destroyed. An earthquake is mentioned as a possibility, but my immediate thought as I clutched the sign to keep from being blown to Ankara was maybe they were taken down by high winds. But I'm no expert on that.

We hadn't felt winds like this since the remnants of Hurricane Ike hit Cincinnati a few years ago. We managed to not get blown away and return safely to Hakkan, who drove us back to Ayvalik and our house and the handful of cats who shared it with us.

Our original plan was to stay in Ayvalik for a week. Two factors extended that amount of time. One was how much we were enjoying our life in the village. For the first time on our trip, we were really getting to know a place and its' people. Tara was proving to be a great host, helping us with her fluent Turkish to negotiate some transactions that would have been difficult for us gringos to do. We were enjoying regular stops at Asu's cozy cafe, where she would cook Turkish food for Annie and me and Ben, and serve up some home made tomato soup for Marley.

One of the local dishes in Turkey is a pasta called manti. We first heard about it in Istanbul, but didn't get the chance to try it there. We bought some pre-packaged manti at the market in Ayvalik and as we walked by Asus' place that afternoon, she offered to cook it up for us later that day. Her home-made manti is only available on Wednesdays, but the sauce she made for the bagged manti we bought was delicious. The key ingredient seems to be a garlic yogurt that combined quite nicely with the tomatoes she dished up. The following Wednesday, we had a first-hand taste of the difference in the packaged manti and the home made kind. The dish that Asu served up was some of the best food we had on the entire trip.

One grim reality that was unfolding was the condition of Daddy-O. Despite our constant care and attention, he wasn't getting any better. Most of the time he would just lie on the cushions on the floor, or hang out in the back terrace area. We kept a close watch on him, making sure that he was still breathing. About once a day, he would make a major move, sometimes hurrying into the house on his three legs, and collapse onto the cushions. It was almost as if he knew he didn't have many moves left and he was making the most of them.

Tara said she had never had to put a cat down, and asked us about the unfortunate experience we've had doing that with cats we've had over the years. We told her that it's never an easy thing to do, but it is better than watching an animal you love suffer. Daddy-O was quickly getting to the point where he had no quality of life, and it was difficult to watch him basically sleep all day. Plus, the life had gone out of his eyes, we even thought he might have lost his sight.

So the decision was made one morning to take him to a veterinarian. After I got the chance to give Daddy-O one final scratching around his ears, Tara and Annie and the kids gingerly picked up our failing feline and took him in.

As we expected the veterinarian decided to do the humane thing and put Daddy-O down. Annie and the kids and Tara brought him back to Tara's house where we had a brief tearful burial ceremony. Tara picked a spot where her turtles like to crawl around, and get fed and watered every day.

The loss we felt with the death of Daddy-O was more than made up by the friendship we gained from Tara and her collection of cats. Plus, she's living proof that it is possible to herd cats!

A second possibly sad development that was developing involved Asu. We walked by her cafe almost everyday, and one day, it was locked up. As we at lunch at a cafe around the corner, Tara managed to talk with some of the locals and find out that Asu was sick. We had about five days left in Ayvalik and really wanted to at least have the chance to say goodbye and hopefully another tasty meal.

The next three days as we walked through town, we would glance at Asu's spot and there was no sign of her. Finally, on our second-to-last day there, I spotted the man who helped her out at her place. He didn't speak much English, but let me know that Asu was fine and she was at her cafe. I went over, gave her a hug and she said she was over her illness and ready to cook for us again.

But instead of sitting on some plastic chairs in the alley sipping beer out of paper cups because we were a few hundred meters from the mosque, she would be serving up food and drinks at a new place near the water. She gave me the directions to her cafe and that night, we all happily walked over to the Komshu Cafe and Pub.

It was a massive improvement over her previous spot, which had two tables jammed into a small interior space and some chairs and a couple of tables outside. Her new cafe and pub had a half dozen tables, plus four barstools at the bar. The interior was freshly painted, with new tile floors and a TV over the door. You could tell how proud she was of her new surroundings. She wasn't up to full speed in the new spot, so we just had Ayvalik Tost and french fries, with promises from her to fire up some manti for lunch the following day, our final day in Ayvalik.

The thought of leaving Ayvalik stirred up in all of us the strongest emotions we had felt since that day back in late fall when we got on a plane and launched our trip. We had gotten very attached to so many different people and places in Ayvalik. The various people we bought bread and eggs and beer and wine from. The guy near Asu's first cafe who made frequent trips around the village on foot, delivering orders of the very popular Chai, or tea.

Asu became a true friend during our stay there, and at the end of another delicious meal on our final day in Ayvalik, Annie cried as we said our goodbyes.

She also teared up as we packed up and left Taras' cottage after 15 days there. We were all sad to leave the cats and the cottage behind, but the holes in our hearts were filled somewhat by the love we acquired for a very special place that we hadn't even heard of a few weeks earlier.

Ayvalik is for us, the epitome of what we want this experience to be about. It's great to see magnificent works of nature, like the 12 Apostles along Great Ocean Road in Australia, or Milford Sound in New Zealand, or the beauty of the mountain village of Sapa in northern Vietnam. And we've all gotten chills seeing amazing man-made sights, like the Great Wall of China and the Taj Mahal. And we'll all remember those experiences for the rest of our lives. But what we really want for this trip is to live like locals. To go to the small markets and restaurants, meet people like Asu and get to know them. Even if it's a guy in a Bengals shirt.

Ayvalik really gave us a sense of what it's like to live in a different part of the world. And for the first time, we now all have the same "favorite spot" on the trip.

Ayvalik really taught us a lesson: that sometimes seeing less is living more. Hopefully we are good students and we put that lesson to work in our lives over the next few weeks and months.

2012-05-16T08:02:00.001-07:00

Cats in Ayvalik

I love cats, so I like it here in Ayvalik, Turkey because, there are cats everywhere. Like when you walk out of your house there is a cat. Then you walk down the street you see a lot of cats. They usually hang out near places that have food, such as dumpsters and fish markets. They are usually pretty skittish because some of the people here don't like them and think of them as pests, so they don't always like humans. Some of them are nice and they let you pet them. They are usually dirty but some times they clean them selves and are clean and softer. I like how some cats know what cat is there friend because we go to one restaraunt and you see the same two cats together every time.

We have cats at the house we are staying in. We have about 6 cats here but sometimes we have 7 or 8 because we have some that hang around often. The cats we have are: Valerie who is a white cat with some black on her head, she is Marley's favorite.

Then there's Weasel, who is my favorite, he is orange on top and white on the bottom.

Also Salvatory who everyone likes he is just black with some white on his chest and belly.

There's Cow Cat who is black and white and everyone likes her a lot.

Then Yonja who is calico on top and white on the bottom. She is pretty skittish but I like her a lot.

Then one three legged old boy cat who everyone loves so much. We call him Daddy-o, he is orange and pretty dirty but he still cleans himself a bit. He isn't doing so well so we take care of him a lot.

They are all pretty chubby except for Weasel and Daddy-o.

We feed the cats a lot with fish and chicken. They all love it and always want more.
There is also a mean orange and white cat with no tail. We always have to shoo him away because he is not nice. Other than him I love all the cats here.

Weasel likes to sleep with me and is usually playful but sometimes bites you really hard, like he wants to eat you. We try to train him not to bite but it just makes him angrier. I still love him though.

The woman that owns the house we are staying in has a shop with six cats in it. Here are some of them.

There was also a cat who loved me so much this happened:

Sadly, we had to take Daddy-o to the vet and put him down.

We all miss and love him a lot. He was a great cat.

Europe-Asia, Asia-Europe: Enthralling Istanbul

2012-05-15T11:12:00.003-07:00

Of all the languages we've encountered in our travels through twelve countries so far, Turkish has been the most interesting. We had NO chance with Vietnamese, Thai, Cambodian, Malaysian or Chinese. The characters made it impossible to decipher printed words. We managed to pick up a few words and phrases at each location, and at least attempting to speak the local lingo would usually go a long way toward helping complete whatever transaction we were attempting to make.

Turkish is something of a dichotomy in that some words are wonderfully economical while others make your eyes spin. Like polis (police) and ofis (office). Then some other words attempt to use as many letters as possible. Such as teşekkür ederim for thank you. Really? I mean that looks like the sound you make when you sneeze.

We first encountered the Turkish language when we arrived in Istanbul from our stopover for four days in Abu Dhabi. Leaving Abu Dhabi didn't involve much sorrow. We were ready to get into Europe, and thrilled to get to Istanbul. The flight there was interesting if for no other reason than we flew over directly over Iraq for much of the trip. I wish I could report some fascinating image that we saw but from 38,000 feet all that was visible was sand. In golf terms, it was a big waste area. Local rules probably provide a lot of free drops. And I imagine you can ground your club pretty much anywhere.

We did get a good view of Istanbul as we prepared for landing. The city is literally on the Asia/Europe border, with the Bosphorus River providing a watery dividing line.

Our first night in Istanbul was spent in the Old City, near an area called Sultanahmet. I had found a place online that we really liked but it wasn't available until our second night in Istanbul. Our apartment for night one turned out to be in walking distance to some of the most iconic buildings in the ancient city, including the Grand Bazaar and the Blue Mosque.

Some things don't live up to their names. Like Great American Ballpark. I love the Reds and GABP is a definite improvement over Riverfront, but a more accurately descriptive name would be Pretty Good Ballpark That Should Have Been Built Turned Around So You Can See The Skyline. But the Grand Bazaar doesn't disappoint.

It's a sprawling complex of shops, almost all of which are inside of a building that dates back centuries. On our way there, I was thinking it might be like the Ben Thanh Market in Ho Chi Minh City, which was fascinating but also a bit annoying thanks to the aggressiveness of the vendors. That wasn't the case here at all. Occasionally you would have someone invite you into his shop as you passed by, but a friendly "no thank you" was all that was necessary to keep moving along.

The shops featured all kinds of products, from watches and jewelry to clothing to rugs. The Bazaar covers about sixty city blocks and features about five thousand shops. Almost like an outlet mall back in the States but without all the RVs in the parking lot.

The neighborhood surrounding the Grand Bazaar just oozes with character and history. There are no US-based fast food restaurants that we've seen so much of on the trip in other parts of the world.

A stroll up the hill from where we were staying the first night led us to a restaurant with some outdoor seating, called the Why Not cafe. A sign boasted of Pizza and Pasta and Kebaps so we figured we would find something to meet all our culinary needs.

Our server, Omar, set a good precedent for the friendliness of the Turkish people we would encounter in our first foray into Europe. He was very kind and courteous, and took time to show off his mad skills of making a rose out of a napkin. Marley happily sported it in her hair the rest of our first day in Istanbul.

Day two in Istanbul presented us with some time on our hands since we couldn't check into the next place we were staying until five in the afternoon. Cemal, who ran the 4-unit apartment we stayed in the first night, was kind enough to let us keep our luggage at his place all day so we could check out some nearby sights without lugging our bags around.

The Blue Mosque was about a fifteen-minute stroll from our apartment, and the weather was perfect. Mosques are the most distinctive part of the urban landscape in Istanbul, with their minarets dotting the hillsides.

The Blue Mosque was a quick visit, at least for us. It was built around 1610, which is about 25 years before the Taj Mahal was erected. It got me to thinking, did these sultans, kings and other emperors know about other massive temples and mosques being built in other parts of the world at roughly the same time? It's not like Sultan Ahmet I who had the Blue Mosque built was tweeting about it.

If he had been and including some pics in that tweet, other sultans, kings and emperors would probably have had mosque envy. It's gorgeous, with blue tiles that give the mosque it's name lining the interior walls.

As spectacular as some of the sights to be viewed inside buildings in Istanbul are, it's magic for me is out on the streets. We discovered that more on day three in Istanbul when we headed to the apartment we had booked for four nights. It was in the Nisantasi neighborhood, about a twenty-minute cab ride from our first place.

It's a more modern neighborhood, but still has a great feel, with shops and restaurants lining the streets. The experience was pretty much exactly what I hoped would happen once we got into Europe. I wanted to have a bakery to go to every morning to get still steaming hot bread and croissants. There are certainly plenty to choose from in the area around the Osmanbey Metro stop where our apartment was.

The roomy apartment was on a narrow street lined with textile (tekstil in Turkish) shops, so on the weekdays while we were there the sounds of Turks getting on with their day would waft through the windows with the early morning sun.

For much of our time heading into Istanbul and also while we were there I had the song "Wheels" by Cake in my head. In the song, John McCrea sings about a seedy Karaoke bar by the banks of the mighty Bosphorus. I didn't see any such establishment as we took a 90 minute boat ride up the river dividing Europe and Asia.

The boat was filled pretty much to capacity as it headed north, certainly the two or three row closest to both sides. One of the more interesting aspects of the trip was that the boat seemed to be filled mostly with locals. There were a few people like ourselves who obviously were not locals, but not as many as I thought there would be.

In her best "when in Istanbul..." mode, Annie went along with the Turkish tradition of drinking some tea, which is served with a sugar cube. Everywhere you look on the streets you see men carrying trays of tea at all times of the day. It added to the flavor of our river ride.

The only mistake we made was getting on the side of the boat that was furthest from the opposite banks of the mighty Bosphorous. We still had a good time cruising along looking at the ancient city and marveling at being able to see both Europe and Asia at the same time. It's a little more exciting than sitting outside at Don Pablo's on the river in Newport and marveling at the Ohio side of the river. Although, actually, some nachos and salsa would have been a nice addition to the cruise.

Once we disembarked (I like writing that word and love saying it!) we took a stroll across a bridge lined with men fishing. The bustling crowds on a sunny afternoon made for a fantastic stroll toward where we would catch a cab back to Nisantasi. We first had to check out a market teeming with freshly caught fish, and then walk down an alleyway which featured some hardware and paint, including a store that had the pigment out on the sidewalk in cans.

The energy of the people on the streets of Istanbul was contagious and we enjoyed just walking along, soaking in the atmosphere. The colors and the aromas combined with the intensity of the Turkish language made for a fascinating experience.

We managed to strike a comfortable balance of seeing and doing things and just enjoying our apartment and the neighborhood. Having good internet helped us plan for the next part of our journey, plus allowed for Ben and Marley to catch up on some school work through Khan Academy and help plan the next part of the trip as we head deeper into Europe.

As much we like to immerse ourselves in local culture, having good internet and a nice flat screen TV with some satellite channels was enjoyable as well. Three of the four nights we were there, the Fox Sports Channel carried the PGA Tour golf event from Quail Hollow in Charlotte, which is where I saw my first live professional golf back in the late 80s when a Senior Tour event was played there. It came on at 11pm, so the kids were done watching what they wanted to see, and I could kick back and enjoy what turned out to be a very competitive tournament.

It's always good to get some local knowledge in unfamiliar surroundings, and we got that in friends of friends of ours from back home. They were a married couple with a seven-month old son, and gave us some great options for meeting for lunch. The one we chose was on the banks of the Mighty Bosphorus near the base of the Bosphorus Bridge. The setting and company was spectacular and the food wasn't bad either.

After an enjoyable mid-day meal, Nuray and Can (pronounced John) were generous enough with their time to meet back up with us about an hour later at a restaurant near the Galata Tower that provided a spectacular view of Istanbul, looking east toward the Asian side of things. It was down an alley off an alley off an alley that we never would have found had it not been for the help of a local.

When we were planning our trip, probably the overall highlight for me was getting into Europe. I love the feel and the history of the place and Istanbul met both of those requirements.

We got a serious taste of the local fervor for football as we walked down a caddesi called Istiklal. It's supposedly the busiest pedestrian street in Turkey. The feeling was electric, in part because it was just a couple of hours ahead of a big match between Galatasaray and Bestikas at the football stadium close by in Istanbul.

Fans decked out in the local colors strolled along, singing songs. They politely ignored my attempts at getting a Who-Dey cheer going, and we were happy to see later that evening that the Galatasaray squad was victorious.

After spending five days in Istanbul, the other cities we will be visiting in Europe have a major challenge ahead of them. It's going to be difficult to surpass the atmosphere of this ancient city. The feeling on the streets was truly magical and the people were very friendly and the food fantastic. The only drawback was the occasional mish-mash of architectural styles.

Wonderful old buildings dripping with character would be neighbors to some modern monstrosity. It would be like building One Lytle Place in Cincinnati right next to Music Hall.

Istanbul is the perfect place to make the transition from Asia to Europe. Our few days there truly whetted our appetite for more experiences in Europe, and as Anthony Bourdain likes to say, I'm hungry for more!

Cats are a way of life

2012-05-13T11:52:00.001-07:00

During my entire life if someone wants to come to my house for the first time I have to ask,”Are you allergic cats or dogs?” Their answer has always been no but you might understand now that we are animal people. Let me explain.

Cats:

Marvin

Leon

Romeo

Abby

Ellie

J-Ro

That’s 6 cats. In one house. Taken care of by one family. Normal? No...Different? Yes...Crazy? Well, maybe just a bit. I am also going to take this time to mention that we have one dog named Sophie. And we miss her a lot and all but....we like cats more though. (Sorry Sophie)

Ok so now you are like “Umm What does this have to do with anything?”

“Well I am going to tell you!”

So with our cat obsession we were really excited to get to Turkey (NOT the food) because we heard rumors that they are EVERYWHERE! And they ARE! Which is awesome. So once we got to Ayvalik and we got to the house we are renting we were stunned! Right once you walk out of the cab they are everywhere. I mean everywhere. On the corners, in the middle of the road, hanging in window.

Cat people paradise

Left: Salvtori Right: Cow Cat

WARNING DO NOT GO TO AYVALIK IF YOU ARE ALLERGIC TO CATS! YOU WILL MOST LIKELY DIE FROM A BAD REACTION

Sorry just I didn’t know if maybe you were thinking about coming here but you were allergic cats so I thought I might warn you.

There are 6 cats that our neighbor (the one who owns the houses) likes and feeds. So we have taken over them and we cook them fish and chicken for dinner. (Yes we are that cat crazy) The cats are Valerie(my favorite)

Cow Cat (The Oldest)

Daddy-O (He only has 3 legs and doesn’t have much time left)

Salvatori (He is a very handsome black Cat)

Weasel (he is Orange and White)

(NO PHOTO SORRY)

Yonja (He is a calico) And if there are more i forgot.

On a side note they have 3 turtles that LOVE strawberries. And you can feed them them.

Valerie loves to sleep all day and cuddle. And she is very serious about her food (No one else will touch it)! So that is why I love her.There is a lot of her too (I will NOT be calling her fat. It is mean)

Cats are really a thing we love and it will be great to get home to see ours

Abu Dhabi

2012-05-13T08:05:00.002-07:00

At no point anywhere in planning our trip did we for one moment consider stopping in Abu Dhabi. The planning began in some form back in January of 2011, and we thought about several places that so far haven't made it on our itinerary. Japan and Hong Kong didn't make the cut for a variety of reasons. We pondered Moscow but it's a not really on the way to or from anywhere we wanted to go. So the capitol city of the United Arab Emirates was something of a last-minute addition to our itinerary. Istanbul had been in the plans for quite some time because of its location as a gateway from Asia to Europe. Abu Dhabi worked its way into the conversation after Annie got an email from Etihad Airlines offering a special "stop-over" deal going from New Delhi to Istanbul if we spent at least two nights in Abu Dhabi. That seemed attractive enough for us so we decided to add the Arabian Peninsula to tour ever-growing list of destinations.

There were two main attractions for us in Abu Dhabi. One was an amusement park called Ferrari World. Ben is nuts about Ferraris and other exotic cars, so spending some time in a place dedicated to those fabulous machines had a definite appeal.

Ferrari World had all kinds of displays and attractions that were Ferrari-themed, including plenty of vintage and classic models as well as the newest designs.

There are also attractions and rides, one of which was what was billed as the world's fastest roller coaster. All four of us climbed on board, not exactly sure what to expect other than speed.

O
M
G

!!!

I thought that perhaps they would gently ease you into the ride, possibly take you up to 150km or so and then get to the top speed of 242km on a straightaway. Oh, you hit top speed on a straightaway alright--the first straightaway right when the coaster starts. From a standing start, you reach 242km or about 150 mph in less than five seconds. After that it's a series of high-speed twists and turns that leave you breathless. Luckily the ride doesn't last very long, so the terror ends fairly quickly. Annie screamed almost the entire time. Ben and Marley did pretty well with it, and as I said right when I got off the ride: I'm glad I did it--I wouldn't want to do it again.

One thing I would do again is the racing simulator. You got strapped into a car seat and competed against other players on a simulation of the nearby Yas Island Marina Circuit road course. It was a blast, and my enjoyment was increased some by the fact that I was the winner in a race that included a 1-2-3 finish by myself, my son and my wife. What can I say, I've got mad driving skills!

Even with all the high-tech things to enjoy, the kids had the most fun racing Formula 1 (or for Talledega Nights fans, Formula Un) cars on a slot car track. We almost literally had to physically remove them from the racing layout when it was time to leave.

The other allure of Abu Dhabi was golf. The Etihad Stopover deal included a discounted round of golf at a variety of courses. I wound up playing the Abu Dhabi Golf Club, having chosen that one that unbeknownst to me was the site of a European Tour event every winter. The 2012 version was won by Robert Rock, who beat a pretty good field of players, including Tiger Woods.

I had a solo tee time, but by the second hole had joined up with Mauritio from Northern Italy. We had an enjoyable round on a very nice course. Not much in the way of any "oh wow!" holes, but a solid well-conditioned and very playable track.

It's a beautiful place, but will never be entered in a subtlety competition. It just reeks of opulence and wealth and makes one wonder what's truly being worshiped.

In another case of what a tiny little world we are taking a year to circumnavigate, we played through a threesome on the twelfth hole. They didn't look like locals and when we got up to them on the tee, from their conversation, I could tell they were from the States. When I asked them where they were from, they said "Cincinnati." I cleverly replied, "Me too!". A quick conversation revealed they were somewhat familiar with my work on the radio in Cincinnati. How cool is that? They were on a business assignment for a couple of years in Abu Dhabi and taking advantage of a rare day off to hit the links. It was amazing to meet some guys from my hometown on a golf course more than half-way around the world. Abu Dhabi is also home to a massive mosque that most visitors see on the ride into town from the airport. The numbers are staggering: The mosque is large enough to accommodate over 40,000 worshipers with the main prayer hall having a capacity of over 7,000 worshipers. Plus, there are two smaller prayer halls, with a 1,500 capacity a piece.

To enter the mosque, visitors need to be wearing long-sleeved shirts and long pants. For those who show up in short-sleeved shirts and shorts like us, appropriate clothing is provided. The females are given black shawls that cover pretty much the entire body, including the head. Males are provided with white robes that go to the floor. Once we had all the right garb on, I suggested to my family that we go get some pork chops. The kids didn't get it, and Annie rolled her eyes as we headed inside.

It's a beautiful place, but will never be entered in a subtlety competition. It just reeks of opulence and wealth and makes one wonder what's truly being worshiped. I know there are plenty of other churches, temples and mosques around the world that cost a lot to build, I've just never seen any like this.

Not being part of the local culture, society or religion, there were plenty of things about Abu Dhabi that I didn't understand. Like why hotels charged almost a dollar an hour for internet access. How about taking a small chunk of the $545 million spent on the mosque to create some free wi-fi hot spots. They didn't even have free wi-fi at the Starbucks at the mall near our hotel. Uhh, not that we went there, we heard that from, uh, other guests at the hotel, yeah that's where we heard that!

Being a last minute stop over, Abu Dhabi served its purpose. It gave us a taste of Arabian life and didn't come with the inherent pressure to see and to things that some of our other stops have come with. We definitely would be ready to see and do things as we eased from Asia to Europe in our next stop: Istanbul.

[edit]

India

2012-05-06T08:07:00.001-07:00

When I was first in radio in Charleston, West Virginia a tragedy in India was my first big break in the business. I had been on vacation with my family in the summer of 1985 at Dillon State Park near Zanesville Ohio. Upon getting back to the Capitol City of West Virginia, I was called into the radio station right away. That day, a chemical leak at the Union Carbide plant in Institute, just west of Charleston, forced an evacuation of a wide area and wound up with more than 100 people going to the hospital to be treated for mostly minor injuries, lung irritations and so forth. The story made international news, mainly because the chemical that leaked in West Virginia was a derivative of methyl isocyanate, which is what killed thousands of people when it leaked from the Union Carbide Plant in Bhopal India about 8 months earlier. It also caused a great deal of panic among the people of the area, with images of dead bodies, including many women and children, still fresh in people's minds.

Being a news anchor more than a reporter, I stayed at the radio station while we had a reporter at the site of the leak in Institute. Stationed at the station, I took the phone calls from the networks that called, looking for reports. I filed stories for ABC, NBC, CBS, CBC, NPR, some network in Ireland and the BBC. (I remember that when I filed my report for NPR, the person on the other end of the line who was probably wearing a sweater vest and some really hip glasses said, "that's fine, but could you re-do it and try not to sound so excited?") The network pay for the stories I filed made for a profitable few days. I made over $800 filing and considering my take home pay for two weeks work at that time was somewhere around half of that, I was living large.

Bhopal was not on the short list of our possible destinations in India. One of the main reasons we chose India was because it was a more affordable stop as we headed west toward Europe. Plus, it was a place that we felt we really had to include on our itinerary. Our airline ticket consolidator found us a decent fare from Penang, through China then to Delhi, so we were all in!

We had heard widely varying opinions of both Delhi and India as a whole before we left. Some said we just had to spend some time in India and see as much as we could of some of the amazing sights that no where else in the world offered. Others said April was the wrong time to go, that it would be way too hot. One or two other people said don’t go to India at all, it’s a dirty nasty filthy place. Our experience would end up being some of all of the above.

Our planning for India was done late into our time in China. We were so busy seeing things and traveling from one place to another in China that we didn’t have much time to plan for the next portion of the trip. I had sent out an inquiry to a company I found online, and the proposal they sent back was too pricey for us. Our ticket consolidator asked in an email if we needed any help in India and when I replied in the affirmative, he hooked us up with a guy named Sabir.

We never actually met Sabir. I think he’s kind of like Charley in Charley’s Angels. I spoke to him a couple of times on the phone and he seemed nice enough. As part of his package, he had a hotel in Delhi, another in Agra near the Taj Mahal, and another in Jaipur, which is the capitol of Rajasthan. Those three destinations are known as the Golden Triangle and make up a popular route for visitors.

Some research on Trip Advisor revealed negative reviews for the hotel he had selected for Agra, and Sabir made the change to a different hotel at our request. Since we booked the entire trip late into our China visit, I had already reserved a room at a hotel in Delhi near the airport for our first night, since we were due to arrive after 9pm.

Bad weather in China would delay our flight by almost four hours, so we got into Delhi at around 1:30am, local time, which was about 4am in the time zone in China that we had left that morning.

Fatigue has a way of weakening one’s resolve to unfavorable situations. Which is why Annie and the kids and I ignored the filthy conditions of the two rooms we booked at Hotel the Grace near the Delhi Airport. Kedar, who would be our driver for our entire time in India, looked a little worn out himself as he got our luggage into his van and he managed to find our little slice of paradise.

The bedsheets and bedspeads were dirty in both rooms and the walls needed a good scrubbing as well. But there were no signs of bodily fluids or bed bugs so we toughed it out, knowing Kedar would be back to pick us up in about 8 hours. Just to be clear, if you’re going to Delhi and need a place to stay near the airport, do NOT go to Hotel the Grace. The airport has some nice reclining chairs all over the place, just sleep there and get a cab in the morning. You're welcome.

Kedar met us the next morning after a terrible and late-arriving breakfast at the hotel you should not stay in, and he drove us about 20 minutes to the hotel we would be staying in that night, and again when we returned to Delhi about a week later. When we got to the hotel, we met our guide for the day. He introduced himself with a name that had way too many vowels and consonants, but who also did us the favor of saying we could just call him Mr. Singh.

Mr. Singh took us to a couple of interesting spots right out of the gate. One was an arch made out of sandstone to remember the soldiers who had died in World War I as well as in the war with Pakistan. It reminded Annie and I a lot of the arch in Washington Square in New York City.

It was another chance to put our by now well-developed skill of ignoring vendors and beggars into action. We’ve gotten that down pretty solidly after more than four months on the road. I’ve even managed to maintain my indifference when grabbed from behind on the arm as I was by a woman at the arch in Delhi. And we really didn’t need an umbrella or the hat that one vendor impolitely put on my head.

We carried out without umbrellas or hats to our next stop at the presidential palace. It’s beautiful, surrounding by an iron fence and walls adorned with images of elephants. Elephants are a common theme in India and seen as a symbol of good luck.

I don’t know if it was the stone elephants or what, but a short time later, we had the best Indian food I’ve ever had at a restaurant in Delhi. Fortunately for us and Marley before we left on the trip we started getting into Indian food, and Marley discovered that she really likes Garlic Butter Naan. Naan is a thin, almost pizza-like bread that is served usually either plain, with butter or with butter and garlic. Marley ate several pieces of garlic butter naan, while Annie and I loved some Butter Chicken and Lamb Rogan Josh and Ben enjoyed some grilled chicken. Good to eat some great Indian food in India.

Our first full day in Delhi concluded with a stop at the Lotus Temple, which is also called the Bahai Place of Worship. It’s a beautiful building with a design reminiscent of the Opera House in Sydney. People of all faiths are welcome to pray there and we joined the several hundred others making a late-day stop for some peaceful reflection.

The next day introduced us to two of the most memorable and amazing things in India. One was the Taj Mahal. The other was traffic in India. In attempting to describe what it’s like to be in a car or van or SUV in India, I’m struggling to find a word that goes beyond chaos. The only way I can imagine people driving like this in the States is if everyone decided to drive with their eyes closed. Our driver, Kedar, showed amazing dexterity and patience in navigating the streets, roads and highways leading from Delhi to Agra.

We learned that there is one basic rule of the road in India: There are no rules. And we learned that the locals say you need three things to drive in India: A good horn, good brakes and good luck. Drivers change lanes at random and whenever the mood seems to strike them, and seem fine coming within inches of the car in front, behind or beside them.

In city situations, drivers jockey for position with horns sounding constantly. Cars vans and trucks compete with motorcycles and tractors hauling huge bundles of grain as well as with wooden two-wheeled carts being pulled by camels. Just moments after I took this photo, this cart was rear-ended by a small car behind it. That led to some yelling with the driver of the car seemingly blaming it on a small child who had apparently crawled on his lap. The car took the worst of it, with some damage done to the grill and hood, but no injuries and no call to police, no exchanging of drivers license and insurance information.

Once you get out on the highway, it gets even nuttier. The “no rules” mantra really comes into play. It’s very common to encounter a motorcycle coming the other way on your side of a two-lane divided highway. And more than once, we came across one of the massive flatbed trucks that are colorfully decorated, coming directly at us in what would be the high speed lane. Kedar just chuckled as if to say, “what are you going to do?” and deftly dodged the oncoming truck.

Another thing that happens very often is cars or trucks making a u-turn or entering the lane of traffic you are in just plowing right in front of you, causing you to brake suddenly or make a quick turn to avoid a collision. Sometimes those last-second manuevers don't work as we saw more than once.

I’m gonna get to the Taj Mahal, but I would be remiss as your faithful world correspondent if I didn’t spend at least some time describing the trash situation on the streets. Trash is EVERYwhere. I mean everywhere. And it’s not just the random plastic bottle or fast food bag that we’re used to see blowing around streets and highways in the States. Huge piles of trash are left out all over the place and in many cases, you’ll see cows or pigs rooting through the trash.

You kind of get used to it, but then again you kind of don’t. Clearly it’s just part of the culture and way of life and there are garbage trucks seen from time to time. But the sheer scope of the garbage is stunning and honestly a bit depressing. At least for me. As was the massive amount of poverty. People living in tents and lean tos or on the sidewalk. In Delhi and again in Jaipur, we saw men and women and sadly children sleeping on mats on the sidewalk in the middle of the day.

We did see plenty of wildlife along the streets and highways. Camels are a regular sight, sometimes pulling a two-wheeled tractor with a load of goods, other times they would be down on all fours, waiting for their next assignment. The only thing we saw working harder than camels in India were women. It’s very common to see the sight that we’ve all seen in National Geographic or the Travel Channel or in books: women in beautiful saris, walking along with massive bundles on their heads. Many times they would be carrying huge sacks of grain that would snap the neck of most people from Europe or the States.

Another stereotypical sight that we saw a lot of was people hanging off the sides of various modes of transportation. The most common one was about a dozen people jammed into a tuk-tuk, often hanging off the back or from the sides. It would appear as though they would even be sitting on each other’s laps at times. We also saw many, many local buses just filled to overflowing with people and some of them sitting up on top of the bus. A local train that passed us by while we were in traffic on the street below a train trestle was also filled beyond capacity, with people sitting on the steps of the entrances and exits to the train cars.

It couldn’t be a more fascinating place just to observe a completely different way of life. And the best thing is, at this point of the trip with the many different societies and cultures that we’ve already seen in Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and China--Marley and Ben just take it all in. They never seem horrified by anything they see, and we’ve seen some things that we’ll never forget.

With all that freakiness as a backdrop, it makes seeing the Taj Mahal all that more spectacular. Our guide for the Taj was named Hosain. We felt a great connection with him right away. He had an authoritative yet gentle countenance, with lively brown eyes and an easy way with all of us, especially Ben and Marley.

He said he was one of only forty government guides in all of India. We felt very confident with him as he led us through the crowded passageways that took us to the Taj.

After pausing outside the main entrance to the Taj Mahal to give us some background, he did the coolest thing as he guided us inside. There is a high wall with a gate that leads to your first view of the Taj, and he led us inside a corridor and off to the right, asking that we keep our eyes at the back of his feet. Once inside the corridor, we could look up again, and he took the kids by the hand and told them to look at the ground again and walked them through the gate where he told them to look up and get their first view of the marvelous marble structure. He then quickly returned to the interior of the corridor and had Annie and I do the same thing.

When we emerged from the corridor, through the gate and lifted our eyes as directed by Kedar, we were confronted with a sight that was even more beautiful than the many photos we had seen of the Taj Mahal. The marble structure gleamed in the late afternoon sun as Hossain pointed out intricate details as we got close enough to touch the glittering walls.

The Taj Mahal was built by Shah Jahan, emperor during the Mughal empire's period of greatest prosperity. He did it out of grief over the death of his third wife, Mumtaz Mahal, who died giving birth to their 14th child. I guess it beats a bouquet of flowers at a gravesite.

The graves of the Shah and Mumtaz are inside the Taj Mahal and are fairly simple, yet still beautiful. Hosain ran a penlight along the surface of the walls to show how some of the colorful ground down stones were translucent. The attention to detail, especially considering the scope of the building is stunning. The Taj Mahal sits on the banks of the Yamuna River, and there had reportedly been plans to build a black Taj Mahal on the other side of the river and connect the two by a bridge.

Whether or not the Black Taj Mahal was ever going to be built or not remains a subject of great debate, kind of like how it is among baseball fans with the DH, or Pete Rose being in the Hall of Fame.

The other major attraction in Agra is the Red Fort, which we settled on seeing from the outside. Because really, after you've seen the Taj Mahal, everything else is just the Eiffel Tower at Kings Island. So, the next morning it was back in the van with Kedar to take the plunge in Indian traffic and head toward Jaipur, the "Pink City" and capitol of the state of Rajasthan.

It's never easy following up seeing something as spectacular as the Taj Mahal, but the Amer Palace just outside Jaipur holds it's own. It sits on a hillside just below a fort, that is protected by a wall that is 14 kilometers long, and has the appearance of a mini Great Wall of China.

The Amer Palace dates back to around 1592, about forty years before the Taj Mahal construction was started. One option for getting into the fort is to ride in through the Royal Gate on an elephant. While Marley and I stayed in the car and went in with our guide through the commoner's entrance, Annie and Ben made a truly royal entrance on top of a gentle giant.

The Amer Fort is another architectural marvel considering it dates back so many centuries. It also is the home to many monkeys. Several of them had tiny baby monkeys clinging to them as they jumped from spot to spot to gaze at the people who were gazing back at them.

Monkeys were also a common sight on the streets in and around Jaipur. They aren't aggressive and are obviously accustomed to people, even those of us who aren't accustomed to seeing them.

We didn't see any monkeys at the hotel we were staying at but did see a peacock up in a nearby tree. They have a very distinctive and very loud call and added to the ambiance of the exotic land we were enjoying.

A couple of days in Jaipur was all we had scheduled and all we really needed. We had a flight out of Delhi booked in a couple of days, so with Kedar behind the wheel, we headed in the direction of the Indian capital.

After seeing so many great sights the previous few days, we decided to take it easy our final day in Delhi. We had the services of Kedar for that day, and since our flight left at 5am the next morning, we had decided to forego the expense of a hotel room that we would have to leave at around 1am. So the plan was to go to a place that Ben had found online that sold Bugattis and Lamborghinis, and also make a quick visit to Old Delhi.

The salesman at the car dealership was very friendly and accommodating when we walked through the door and explained our story and that we just wanted to see what they had in stock.

Ben was thrilled to see a Lamborghini Adventator up close but was disappointed to be told that the Bugatti had been sold a few weeks back. The salesman also told us about a Ferrari dealer not too far away, so we decided to point our expedition in that direction.

We'll press "pause" on the proceedings for a moment for a question of you, dear reader. Have you ever seen a tree in the middle of a parking lot that didn't have some sort of barrier around it so that, say a tour driver with some people from the States on board didn't back right into it? Neither had we until we heard and felt a large crash as Kedar scored a direct hit on the tree.

Apparently the black sun shades in the back windows prevented him from being able to see the tree. The impact completely shattered the window and left a pretty good dent in the back door. You could tell the Kedar felt terrible about what happened, but we felt even worse when he said a different driver would be coming with a new van and that our time with him was done.

That news was a serious body blow for us. We didn't realize how much we liked having Kedar be part of our India experience until we found out our time with hime was done. He was a comforting security blanket in a country that can be a bit daunting to navigate. His driving skills were excellent, and we always felt like he was Allstate for us. Once we lost him, we lost much of our enthusiasm for the India portion of the proceedings.

Our new driver, J.P. smashed into a motorcyclist within about five minutes of taking over for Kedar, leading to shouts and shaking fists. He was nice enough but we had absolutely no karma with him. He drove us through Old Delhi, which was very interesting.

We also made a quick stop at the Ghandi memorial. It's for Mahatma, Indira and Rajiv. Our focus was on the Mahatma portion which gave us more of a sense of peace after our disappointing farewell to Kedar.

India, as much as, if not more than any other stop on our trip has left an indelible impression on us. As Paul Theroux writes, in India "the miracle…was that India was not a country but a creature, like a monstrous body crawling with smaller creatures pestilential with people – a big, horrific being, sometimes angry and loud, sometimes passive and stinking, always hostile, even dangerous." That sums it up fairly well, even if I have no idea what pestilential means, it probably has something to do with pestilence, which I'm pretty sure we saw more than once there. However, I have to say that Indian people were very friendly to us, and even with the abject poverty in full view at almost every turn, are very proud of their country.

India was a perfect closer for our time in Asia. It's a complicated, thrilling, enthralling, intimidating and spectacular place. Our trip would not be complete without a stop there. It's a stop I'm very glad we made.

China part èr

2012-04-24T06:03:00.001-07:00

Back in the day, as they say, WEBN, the FM rocker in my hometown of Cincinnati used to play new albums all the way through on Monday nights. On December 3rd, 1979 they debuted Pink Floyd's The Wall. Being a major Pink Floyd fan, I was excited that night to hear new music from what was one of my favorite groups at the time. The most chilling and unforgettable moment of the evening came at the end of side two, of the double-album set, when the song Goodbye Cruel World was finished. That's when WEBN first confirmed that there had been deaths at the Who concert that evening at Cincinnati's Riverfront Coliseum. I can still hear the words, "Goodbye cruel world, I'm leaving you today, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye" followed by the news that music fans had died in my hometown. Everytime I hear that, I flash back to the bedroom of my parent's house in Pleasant Run Farms in Cincinnati. I had thought about going to the show that night, but couldn't really afford it, and didn't have any friends who were that into the Who at the time. I had been to the previous concert at Riverfront Coliseum a couple of weeks earlier, featuring (ugh) Styx and recalled having to shove people out of the way to hold onto my girlfriend's hand as we tried to stay connected in the crush of people rushing to get the best seats in the soon-to-be-banned general admission show.

This will give you a hint of how my brain works in that when we got to the Great Wall of China, north of Beijing, I was thinking of Pink Floyd. We had been in Beijing for a couple of days, arriving there from Xian. The windy conditions that greeted us created a rare weather phenomenon for Beijing: clear blue skies.

Our guide in Beijing was a young woman whose English name was Nancy. As a guy, I've got a pretty good radar for knowing when a gal isn't into you. (Not that it's happened all that much to me over the years!!) Nancy was kind of there with us. There was no open hostility or anything, she just seemed to be going through the motions. Still, she performed her guidely duties efficiently if stoically.

Our first location with Nancy was the Temple of Heaven, one of the many historic sights around Beijing. She pointed out that in many of the attractions, the intricate artwork at the tops of most of the buildings had been re-done for the 2008 Olympic Games.

The good weather continued the following day when we visited the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square. As one might expect when the government is pretty much is complete control of things, there are no markers remembering the massacre in 1989 which brought the world's largest city center square into the living rooms of people around the globe.

The square is mind-boggling big and is the latest place on this trip where we have all said, I can't believe we are actually here. Nancy wasn't all that forthcoming with any local impressions or information about the June 4th incident from 1989. When I asked if the people were happy with the current government, she just smiled and shook her head, saying "not really." Then she quickly proceeded to start talking about the portrait of Chairman Mao that hangs over the entrance to the Forbidden City.

Like we had seen the previous day in the Temple of Heaven, a lot of the artwork on the buildings in the Forbidden City had been spruced up for the Olympics. Which, considering it is over 600 years old and has seen the changing of hands through various dynasties, wars, revolutions, etc etc, is certainly understandable.

The Emperor who built the FC certainly had it going on, as he had the pick of some three thousand concubines who were recruited from all across the country. They ranged in age from 14-20 (creepy!) and were said to be the most beautiful women/teenagers/victims in all the land. His wife, who had her own quarters, probably didn't mind as she certainly knew what she was getting into when she was selected to be the wife of the emperor. Besides, who would want to be around a sleazebag like that for more than a night or two anyway? Just make sure your signature is readable on the pre-nup and move on with your life.

While the temples are impressive, after a while, when you've been traveling as long as we have and seen as many countries and the accompanying temples, mosques, etc, they kind of start to run together. Whoever is ruling or in charge at the time of whatever country you happen to be in, builds something massive to show his power, or compensate for some other short coming. (Kind of like when guys in their 40s and 50s drive those tacky Corvettes from the late 70s and 80s.) Then, for whatever reason, they are no longer in power and the monument(s) they have built to themselves are ransacked, destroyed, defaced or re-done. It just goes on and on.

And it continued in our next stop at the Summer Palace outside Beijing. It's not all that far from the city, so it's not like this is the Park City getaway for some executive in Denver or even Cincinnati. The weather can't be all that much different from that in the city, but you know how those show-off emperors are. We see them today in board rooms all across the U.S.--getting massive stock options and golden parachute bonuses after pretty much leaving the company in worse shape than it was when they took over. But I digress.

The Summer Palace is beautiful, with a serene setting on a massive man-made lake.

Well, it would be a serene setting were it not for the thousands of visitors such as ourselves jamming into the place. Which makes this probably a good place to bring up one of the more annoying features about Asia, especially China: There's a LOT of people here and they don't share space well with others. And that's a trend that was very prevalant as much if not more so in India, as Annie and Marley discovered getting into the Taj Mahal.

It actually got a little freaky in a couple of spots around the Forbidden City with people jamming in to a small area to see inside one of the chambers. I mean, we don't behave that way in the States, expect for important stuff like bursting through the doors of Target at 4am the day after Thanksgiving. That's where being of a somewhat larger size by Asian standards came in handy. I'm polite to a fault normally, but I don't do well with being pushed around, especially by strangers and especially when I don't know it's coming. After a while, I started cross-checking and slamming people into walls like an NHL-goon. Okay, probably not that bad, but I let those around me know I wasn't going to be jostled without giving some back while realizing my dreams to someday be a U.S. diplomat in China were probably dashed. It also made us very much look forward to having some elbow room at the Great Wall.

Nancy had a good strategy for us the next day on going out to see the Great Wall of China. We had a couple of other stops to make, and I think she could tell that the kids especially got a little more disinterested as the day wore on, but she also knew that they were both looking forward to the wall. So on our way out to a section of the wall called Mutianyu, we first visited an area of tombs dating back to the Ming Dynasty. Being the idiot I am, I expected the tombs to be shaped like vases, and I was disappointed to find that not to be the case.

It was a pretty day, so we enjoyed the stroll through the area leading to the tombs, but were pretty much killing time before seeing the star attraction of the day.

The drive to the wall took over an hour and we made a quick stop for lunch before heading to the parking area where a cable car would take you up to the Wall itself. The cable car unloads passengers at the bottom of a series of stairways that lead up to the Wall. Heading up the stairs I did have strains of "we don't need no education......we don't need no thought control!" I managed to keep the lyrics to Another Brick in the Wall to a dull roar in my head and focus on what we were about to experience.

Seeing the Wall first-hand is breath-taking and one of those moments that you'll never forget.

Once you get up on top, you can see that it just goes on and on and on as far as the eye can see in both directions.

Ben and Marley, who can suffer from the occasional bout of fatigue from seeing all the things we've seen on the trip, were very enthusiastic about this particular stop.

I had a couple of different reactions to see this amazing piece of work up close. First was wondering how in the world something of this magnitude could be accomplished when it was. Second was, I'm thinking it's a bit of overkill. The section we saw is built along the ridge of a very rugged line of mountains. No invading horde in it's right mind is going to try to advance through this terrain without being the laughingstock of rival hordes!

We really enjoyed the ninety minutes or so we took to walk along the wall, looking to the north and south, imagining what the world was like when the wall was first built. And, unlike the cramped conditions we found at the Summer Palace and Forbidden City, there was plenty of room to move about without being pushed around.

The sheer magnitude of the Wall and knowing that we were seeing just a tiny portion of it really put things into perspective. Our time on this planet is so short when put into the context of an ancient landmark like this. It tends to make the little everday worries not so worrisome.

There was an added bonus to our visit the Wall once we headed back to the parking lot for the ride back to Beijing. A shiny red Ferrari was parked right next to our van and Ben really enjoyed getting a close up look at one of his favorite brands of cars.

We managed to get Ben up close and personal with some other exotic cars the next day in Beijing. After being so busy from the time we arrived in China more than a week earlier, we had a couple of free days to play with. Ben had painstakingly mapped out where he would be able to see Ferraris and Bugattis and Lamborghinis during the course of our trip and one spot was in Bangkok. The only problem there was the dealers that had the exotic cars were about a forty-minute trip one-way from our hotel, and Bangkok is a very difficult city in which to travel. I felt bad that we hadn't been able to see some exotic cars in Bangkok, so we were determined to make it happen in Beijing.

The location of our hotel in Beijing was much more favorable to seeing Ben's favorite cars as a dealer we found online was on the same street as our hotel, and only about a 15-minute walk away. We walked by a Rolls Royce dealer that had some beauties on display and came upon a dealership that had Maseratis and Ferraris. Our casual dress made it pretty clear that we were strictly window shopping as we made our way through the doors, but the salesmen were kind enough to let us look around without touching of course.

They also wouldn't allow any photos inside the showroom, but that didn't keep us from catching this gorgeous blue Ferrari digitally from outside.

The big prize for Ben was seeing a Pagani, and it just so happened a couple of blocks away was a dealership that carried those as well as a Koenigsegg. He hadn't seen either model in person ever, and was disappointed when the salesman standing in a not so welcoming fashion said that no, we could not come in and have a look around.

Ben was pretty disappointed and sulked a bit through lunch, so we decided to give it another go as we walked back toward our hotel. As we strolled by FFF Automotive, there were not one but three salesmen standing guard at the door. Annie had a couple of hundred Yuan stuffed in her delicate hands, prepared to try to grease the skids if necessary.

We managed to explain our situation and say that we only wanted Ben and not all four of us to get the chance to see the Paganis up close and only be inside for about five minutes. One of the salesmen spoke more English than the other and relayed our plea to the one who seemed to be the decision-maker. He kindly relented and Ben got to enter his own little nirvana.

The smile on his face when he came out of there was ear-to-ear and he couldn't wait to report back to his car. Seeing those machines up close put a real explanation mark on our time in China.

It's truly an amazing and challenging place. The people were friendly, as we find that a smile crosses all language barriers.

That's one thing we are finding consistently in our travels through nine countries thus far. People are as nice to you as you are to them. Maybe that's even something that we could put into better use in our day to day lives back home.

China, part 1

2012-04-23T06:07:00.003-07:00

A few days into the China portion of our trip, our twelve-year old son Ben declares he wants to learn a foreign language. Not Mandarin, but instead German. That would really help break down some barriers in a strange land: a blond-haired, blue-eyed pre-teen speaking broken German. The origin of this desire goes back to a trip Annie and I took to Berlin through WEBN radio back in 2005.

The Dawn Patrol broadcast for an entire week from the German capital in early June. I came home from there with a couple of soccer jerseys, including one that I discovered was worn by Der Deutscher Fussball Bund, or the German National team. Shortly after returning to the states, that team started competing in a bi-annual international competition called the Confederations Cup. Ich Liebe Dich! I was completely enthralled with their precise, methodical and very effective way of playing. It didn't hurt that they played well, losing to eventual champion Brazil 3-2 in the semifinals. Before long I had two other DDFB jerseys, including a really sweet long-sleeved personalized goalie jersey with BANGERT on the back. It is orange with black trim, making it perfect to wear to Bengal games. The colors showed my support for our NFL team, but at the same time (which unfortunately happened all too often) if things didn't go the Who-Dey way, I could say, (in my european wannabe superiority) hey, I'm a German Soccer fan, and we've won three World Cups. Oh-for-two in the Super Bowl? How sad. And what a stupid name for a championship game! Why don't you just call your national professional baseball championship something silly like the World Series?

My devotion to the highly successful German Football program continues to this day and has rubbed off on our children. Whenever Germany plays an important match, we hang our German flag outside our house in Madeira. And when the German team emerges with another glorious victory, I blare the German National Anthem over the speakers pointed into our backyard so the neighborhood can share in the glory. We try to keep the goose-stepping to a minimum, but sometimes that's a struggle.

Annie, Ben and Marley have embraced the whole thing, especially Ben. He had a white German jersey that he wore so much he ruined it. So one of our goals while in Asia was to find him a new German jersey, knowing that we could probably get one for a pretty good price. That happened in Malaysia not once, but twice. The first one replaced the white one that got trashed back home, and the second one was one that featured a color that we had never seen incorporated into the usual Red, Yellow and Black color scheme of the Germans: Green.

Turns out its their new 2012 road jersey for the 2012 Euro competition that we hope to catch some of during the European portion of our trip. We got both his new jerseys at great prices at the local market in Penang, and he was excited to have them with him as we headed into China, practicing his German on an app he downloaded on the iPad. For the next few days we were frequently asked by him: "Wie Gates est Ihnen?"

Our answer to that throughout our time in China would be "Sehr Gut!" We decided to go the tour route in China after doing a lot of research and talking to some people we knew who had traveled to China and a few who had even lived there for a while. It was very comforting to see our guide Peggy waiting for us at the airport in Guilin.

The main attraction in Guilin is the spectacular scenery, which we got to see our first day there when we took a cruise down the Li River to the city of Yangshuo. The river slices its way through and around tall rock formations the jut skyward on both sides of the water for almost the entire 63 kilometers.

The ride was a great time, with our guide Peggy occasionally coming up to us and pointing out interesting rock formations that we would be cruising by. We also made friends with a couple of guys from the States who were on a quick tour of China on a cultural exchange program.

The cruise ended in Yangshuo, which is a touristy but quaint town. Kind of like Gatlinburg without the fudge shops and Ripley’s museum and all the cars with Ohio license plates clogging the streets. We managed to find a restaurant that had options (pizza/pasta) for Marley and enjoyed a quiet dinner. The next day meant a return trip to Guilin, this time via our van and our guide Peggy, who gave us some good background on her home region during the 90 minute drive.

The Guilin area is home to some interesting rock formations, including one called Elephant Trunk Hill, which gave us the chance to do an O-H-I-O formation.

That honestly wasn’t quite as spectacular as the pictures we had seen led us to believe it would be. What was more spectacular than anticipated was the nearby Reed Flute Cave. It’s a subterranean series of chambers that were undiscovered until 1959. The interior is filled with the most amazing stalagtites and stalagmites that we had ever seen. The complex of underground rooms went on for what seemed like forever, each with its own unique lighting.

That evening, we took in a performance of a very unique musical show that took place on a lake. An outdoor ampitheater that holds about 2,500 people was near capacity for the show that depicts five different stories of the struggles and triumphs of local farmers and various tribes. The show was directed by the same group that put on the opening ceremonies for the Olympic Games that were held in Beijing in 2008. Mother Nature deserves some of the credit for the ambience as the setting was spectacular, with rock formations as a backdrop that would be lit up at various times.

The show also gave us our first taste of the impression we made on the local people. A group of Chinese women sitting to our right got one look at Marley and Ben and were squealing with delight at the sight of their fair skin. Several of them had photos taken with them, something that would happen many more times at various locations in China.

Guilin was a good starting point for us in China in more than one way. It gave us a good feel for what it was like to have a tour guide. Peggy was great, taking a strong interest in our needs without being annoying about it. She did her best to make sure there were food options available for Marley and was fine when we scratched an event or two off the list to avoid being burnt out.

As much as we have the goal on this trip of getting as local as possible, having a guide in a land as foreign as China is a welcome security blanket. If anything ever got squirrely, we could just get Peggy’s attention have her handle it. Sure beats having the US Embassy on speed dial. She also filled us in on the government's one-child policy, which her parents violated by giving her a sister. Peggy says her parents call her their "secret" child.

Guilin also gave us our first taste of our status as oddities among the local people. That would really become more common in Xian and Beijing. At first, it was a bit off-putting, but once we embraced the process, we had some fun with it, especially in Xian-more on that later.

And our first stop in China made us realize that the man who hockered up a loogie and spit it into the barf bag on our flight into Guilin from Malaysia was just doing what a lot of Chinese men do. It’s very common to hear the delightful sound of a man going deep to get a little extra and then enthusiastically spitting out a projectile, and usually right on the ground. Once you realize how often this happens, you start to notice some things on the ground that you really don’t want on the bottom of your shoe. No wonder we didn’t see anyone wearing flip flops.

Peggy got us safely to the airport the next day, where we said our goodbyes and got on the flight to our next destination of Xian. Once we got our bags, we headed out the door and saw the beautiful sight of a Chinese man holding a sign bearing our names. His English name was Kenny, and like Peggy, he was in his mid to late 20s, and very friendly.

He took us straight from the airport to that main attraction on our half-day of checking out life in Xian, the Wild Goose Pagoda.

It's a beautiful ancient building with an interesting history. But it's location created something of a fascinating juxtaposition. The local government had invested some money in reviving the surrounding area, bringing in some shops and restaurants, including the first Papa John's we've seen since leaving home in December.

There was also a Subway nearby, which provided a good location for lunch for Marley, who didn't eat the fish or chicken and rice provided on the flight from Guilin.

The next day would be our busiest one in Xian, and probably our most enjoyable for a couple of reasons. Kenny, our guide, took us to the ancient wall that surrounds Xian. It's the oldest, most intact city wall in all of China. We took him up on his suggestion that we rent bikes and ride around the top of the wall, about a ten-mile trek. As we got to the top of the wall, and Kenny was trying to do his tour-guide thing and give us a history lesson, he kept getting interrupted by passersby.

Several of them just HAD to get a picture taken with us. They were all very polite about it, and very thankful after they had gotten one or two snapshots with the fair-skinned people wearing shorts on a cloudy and cool morning.

The locals fascination with us continued once we got on our bikes and started pedaling. Many would stop and take a quick pic as we rolled by, and their faces would light up when we would smile and say, "Ni Hao!"

The trip around the top of the wall took about an hour and a half, and it was a great family time. We stopped a few times to catch our breath or take a photo or two before turning the bikes back in, and making our way through our throngs of admirers to get back in the van with Kenny.

The highlight of any visit to Xian is a trip to see the Terra Cotta Warriors. They are an army of thousands of life-size soldiers built under the orders of the first Emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang around 210 B. C. When things didn't work out so well for him, as would be the pattern for several subsequent Chinese Emporers, invading hordes did their best to destroy the warriors and they weren't heard from for centuries.

But then in 1974, some farmers digging a well uncovered bits and pieces of the warriors and the daunting process of rebuilding the warriors began and continues to this day. They are being reassembled in three separate pits. The most-impressive pit is the first one. There are an estimated seven thousand of the hand made soldiers in that pit.

It seems to got on forever, and one can only imagine the work it took and is still taking to restore the figures.

Their are several different kinds of soldiers, as well as horses that are pulling chariots. The work is also going on in two other pits. It really was an impressive if a bit self-absorbed. I'm guessing Emperor Qin Shi Huang might have been the Donald Trump of his time. And the experience set the stage for the most famous landmark in all of China which was next up on our agenda.

Three bedrooms, four pomeranians

2012-04-19T03:03:00.000-07:00

We left many things behind at home when we departed on our trip more than four months ago: Family, friends, our home, jobs, school, consistently reliable internet service, Skyline Chili, Graeter’s Ice Cream and our pets: six cats, one dog. Fortunately, we have someone renting our house who has four kids and one of them, his 7-year old daughter, just loves cats. Our dog, after an initial period of difficult adjustment, has settled into what seems like a comfortable existence with Annie’s sister. Still we miss them and have been pleased when we’ve come across animals during our travels.

In our very first stop in Fiji, a stray orange tabby cat helped us ease into our year-long life without pets. He loved to hang out with us on the porch of the house we rented there for two weeks, and we enjoyed feeding him as much as he enjoyed devouring whatever sort of treat we would put down for him. Rafael would disappear for a day or so but then make a biblical return which was always met with smiles.

Our next encounter with a dog or cat came when we stopped for the night in Lake Hokitika on New Zealand’s South Island. We had been looking through a guidebook for possible places to stay and a place called the Jade Garden Hotel boasted of having a couple of cats on the property. Sure enough, when we pulled in, found the place to our liking and got to our room, Puddy-Cat, (it’s given name from hotel management, not us!) pranced into our room. We all enjoyed having a tabby kitty around, even if it was only for one night.

After that, we were pretty much pet-free for the rest of our 27 day stay in New Zealand and our 35 days in Australia. We had plenty of animal encounters along the way. We enjoyed our well-documented obsessions with koalas, kangaroos and kookaburras in Australia, plus the occasional street encounter with someone else's pet like this Great Dane we saw in Sydney.

Then there was the water buffalo that briefly shared our trek in Sapa in Northern Vietnam.

Plus, Ben is sort of like having a pet with you a lot of the time.

Our animalless streak continued through the rest of Vietnam and Cambodia and into Thailand. Although, at times some of the meat dishes we ordered raised questions about the origin of the “beef’ in our stir fry.

The window for our stay in Southeast and southern Asia was starting to close as April 10^th drew closer. All the way back in July or August of last summer we had booked our tour in China with a departure from Penang. That location was chosen strictly because it was the most affordable way for us to get from Malaysia or Thailand or Vietnam into China.

Our search for a stopping point for a few days on the way to Penang from Bangkok resulted in us finding Krabi. When we were in Ha Long Bay, we talked to Paul from Australia who had done a lot of traveling in Thailand and he recommended Krabi as a good location for a family. The desire for at least two-bedrooms, a good price and free wi-fi led us to the Baan Sawan resort near the beach town of Ao Nang.

The only drawback to Krabi is that it’s not on the rail line that stretches through southern Thailand. In my previous blog entry, Staying Grounded in Thailand, I described our journey from Bangkok to Krabi. It involved a nine-hour train ride, followed by a pick up truck ride to a travel office where we got a car for a two and a half hour ride to Ao Nang.

It was almost ten pm when we finally pulled in to Baan Sawan. The property features 9 bungalows, plus a pool area where there is a bar which serves up drinks and where food can be ordered. We were warmly greeted by the man overseeing the property, a friendly Norwegian named Svein. As he showed us into our bungalow, we were welcomed by some unexpected additions.

Four Pomeranian dogs came scurrying into the room, and ran around us like we had known them forever. That became a pattern for our entire stay in Krabi. At least three of the dogs, and sometimes all four, would spend the night in our bungalow. Ben usually had two with him, while Marley would have another and sometimes another one would sleep with Annie and me.

It was great fun to have these little bundles of fur hanging out with us, and helped fill the hole left in our hearts by the absence of our herd back home.

If you’ve spent any time in the coastal areas of the Southeastern U.S., you’ve no doubt seen the signs that say Hurricane Evacuation Route. In this part of the world tsunamis are the concern along the coast.

Malaysia didn’t suffer as badly as Indonesia from the Boxing Day Tsunami of 2004. But still, there are frequent reminders of where to go and what to do should there be a tsunami warning sounded. We saw the sign shown above when we took a half-day longtail boat ride to Chicken Island from Ao Nang Beach.

Another enjoyable aspect of our stay in Krabi was the fact that the bungalow had strong wi-fi. Knowing we had a long travel day on our way to Penang, I downloaded some podcasts of the two-hour radio show that Tony Kornheiser of PTI fame does on ESPN 980 in Washington, D.C. It's great radio with a great supporting cast that makes the two hours of each show just fly by.

As we got on the van that would take us to Hat Yai, I got my ear buds in and fired up the first of about eight Tony podcasts I had downloaded on my iPhone. I knew that would help take my mind off the news that I had learned from Svein, the proprietor at the bungalows we were leaving.

I was talking to him about the next leg of our journey, saying that we were taking a mini-van to Penang, stopping in the town of Hat Yai in Southern Thailand. He then informed me that there had just been a bombing there that had killed a few people. He said it happened every few years and that since it had just occurred we should be fine, that there probably wouldn't be another one anytime soon.

I didn't share this information with Annie and the kids until after we were safely on our way out of Hat Yai. I figured it didn't do any good to have them be worried about it, especially Marley. There was no sense of impending peril as we drove through Hat Yai and I saw no sign of the violence that had happened just about a week earlier.

The ride to Penang was uneventful, as was our stay there for the most part. It was brutally hot, and the apartment we rented was at the top of a fairly large hill that was close enough to town to make it not worth while to get a taxi, but also meant a climb up an asphalt driveway that invariably would leave me sweating like Robert Hays in Airplane when he's fighting his demons trying to safely land the airliner. The positive about where we stayed in Penang was that the position of the apartment complex gave us nice ocean views that we enjoyed when we were able to wipe the sweat out of our eyes.

We also frequented a local hawker stand down in the village that featured a variety of food to keep everyone, including Marley (if it ain't pizza or pasta it ain't food!), happily fed.

The main thing that Penang did was provide us with a little down time ahead of what we expected would be one of the busiest and most exhilarating parts of the trip: the ten days we had booked in China.

Staying grounded in Thailand

2012-04-07T05:58:00.000-07:00

There's a great scene from the movie Best In Show where two of the characters, Hamilton and Meg Swan talk about how they met at Starbucks. Not at the same Starbucks, different Starbucks across the street from each other. Thailand is like that but only with 7-11s.

They are everywhere, at least in the two cities that we have spent the most time in while in Thailand, Bangkok and Krabi. According to Wikipedia, there are about six thousand 7-11s in Thailand, with HALF of those being in Bangkok. That's a lot of Slurpees. By comparison, there are about eight thousand 7-11s in all of the US, and Thailand is roughly the size of France and slightly smaller than Texas. It's such a part of the culture that in almost all of the shops selling t-shirts, you can purchase one with the 7-11 logo on it, and we saw more than one taxi driver sporting such a shirt.

Our world travels up to this point have also educated us on Pringles. They've been available pretty much everywhere we've been so far, even in the carts of vendors selling drinks and snacks on the streets of Vietnam. Ben and Marley have discovered that there is more than one variety of Pringle, and I don't mean variety of flavors. The "real" Pringles are the ones with a red and white logo on the paper cover that you peel back at the top of the can to get into the delicious salty snack. The imposter Pringles have just a plain white paper cover under the plastic lid at the top.

There is a definite taste difference between the two. Ben and Marley have further determined (thinking about all this makes me realize how many cans of Pringles we've eaten along the way!) that even the "real" Pringles can fall short of the ones we get back home. If the top of the can is taut or feels like it's puffed up with air inside, they've probably been sitting on a container ship somewhere for a while and are going to be stale. Who needs home-schooling when you've got these kinds of thought processes going on?

One of the most enjoyable aspects of our stay in Bangkok was the size of the apartment we rented. We managed to find a very affordable two-bedroom serviced apartment in the Pantip area of the city. Our mouths collectively hit the floor as we walked into the place for the first time.

It featured a large living area with a dining table, plus a big kitchen. Both of the bedrooms were about as big as the entire rooms of several of the places we stayed in Vietnam and Cambodia. Since late February when we left Australia, almost every single one of the places we rented saw us all sleeping in one room. The best bed configuration in those instances was one large double and two singles. We had that in Phnom Penh, Cambodia and in Hoi An in Vietnam. Other times, when there are three cozy doubles, we usually have Ben and I in our own beds and Marley and Annie snuggled up in the third double.

Despite the close quarters, we all got used to sleeping like that and would frequently do the "Good-night Jim-Bob" routine right after turning out the lights each night.

After a few weeks of that, all three of us were really glad to have some room to spread out in Bangkok. In what has become something of a pattern for us, we laid low our first day in Bangkok following a long travel day the previous day. In an effort to save money, we booked a bus ticket from Siem Reap to the Cambodian border town of Poipet. We had made friends through other friends of a Canadian native who had lived in Siem Reap for about 11 years. He suggested that we take the local bus to Poipet, walk across the border, and buy another set of tickets for the bus ride to Bangkok. We was going to be going the same way the same day and thought we would enjoy taking the bus ride together and he would help us cross the border into Thailand since he was spending the night in Poipet and leaving for Bangkok the following day to fly back to Canada.

Well, something got lost in translation with our local fixer/tuk-tuk driver Ratana, and the ticket we wound up getting was not on the same bus as our Canadian friend, Roy. The day started early with a 6am wake up call and we had bought the bus ticket to Poipet through our hotel, which promised free transfer to the bus station. The transfer vehicle turned out to be a pick up truck with a padded bench seat on each side of the bed.

The pick up truck took us to a bus that was parked among a couple of buses on some side street. We've done our best to go into "jellyfish" mode so far on the trip and we rolled with the flow in this instance, asking the men throwing our luggage on the bus if this was going to Poipet, and after being assured that it was, we got on board and figured we would look for Roy when we got to the border. Once again, Ben and Marley never complained or whined about our transporation arrangements, despite looking like we were on a family outing in West Virginia.

Four hours later, and still a short ways away from the Thailand/Cambodia border, we got off the bus and I managed to track down a ticket handler and, with Roy nowhere in sight, go ahead and secure four tickets to continue on to Bangkok. We paid more by splitting up the ticket instead of just paying for direct to Bangkok, but it was still only about $18USD per person.

Fortunately, when we got to the border, Roy was there waiting for us, with his adopted son Sinin. We lamented over how the ticket buying process didn't work out the way we hoped, but were happy that we still got to where we wanted to go.

That's us with Roy's brother on the right and his son, Sinin, on the left as we get ready to walk our luggage across the border into Thailand, and hopefully get on a luxurious, air-conditioned bus to Bangkok.

After being properly dismissed from Cambodia and going through the necessary documentation to get into Thailand, we met back up with the ticket seller, and the two dozen or so passengers and our luggage were put on pick up trucks and taken to a restaurant/rest stop for lunch. We were told cheerfully that the bus would be along in a half hour or so, giving us time to eat and enjoy the local restroom facilities. I'll just say this: at least the food was okay.

While we waited, different groups of people that were on the bus were put on mini-vans that held about a dozen people, and drove off at different times. I haven't ridden commercially on buses all that much, so I'm not exactly an expert but I started to think that maybe the mini-vans were going to be our mode of transportation to Bangkok. The four-hour ride to Bangkok.

Sure enough, after waiting for close to two hours, on a day where we had gotten up at around 6am and already been on a bus for four hours, we found ourselves in the back four seats of a mini-van that would take us to Bangkok. The van was WAY over-packed, as our feet rested on our backpacks and luggage, and the aisle that went to the doorway was filled with more suitcases.

Fortunately, none of us has any degree of claustrophobia and so we managed to endure the trip without imitating a psychotic Jet Blue pilot. There were a few stops along the way for fuel, and at one of those we enjoyed some very tasty chicken prepared by a road side vendor. It was also just nice to be able to get some fresh air and stretch our legs a bit.

The van/bus arrived in Bangkok after dark in an area where some taxis were parked. We managed to communicate where we were going and the driver took off into rush hour traffic that just crept along and made a long day even longer. But the extra forty-five minute wait was worth it as we got to our roomy accommodations, which put a smile in our faces and a song in Marley's heart. The 16th floor apartment had a roomy balcony with a nice view of Bangkok, providing a nice backdrop for the videos she likes to make of her singing Taylor Swift songs. Check out her Facebook page, they're actually pretty good, her dad said humbly.

One of the best ways to get around Bangkok is to take a boat along the Chao Phraya River. They're cheap, roomy and run frequently along the river, providing a good view of some of new and old buildings along the banks.

We took the boat in hopes of seeing the Grand Palace, a massive complex of temples not far from the Tia Thien stop on the river. Unfortunately, the temple complex was closed to the public for the day to rehearse for the funeral of a cousin of the king, so we had to adjust our plans.

After a quick lunch at a sidewalk cafe, we went into a smaller but still impressive temple complex called Wat Pho. It features a reclining Buddha that measures about 46 metres long and is covered in gold leaf. With Easter Bunny season approaching, I resisted the temptation to attempt to peel back the gold leaf and see if it was a Chocolate Buddha. Instead, we went along with the local custom and bought a small cup of coins and deposit them in the fifty or so pots that line one side of the long room holding the Buddha. We weren't sure of the significance of what we were doing, but it was fun to be part of the sounds of the coins dropping into the pots.

The complex was striking, with several temples and many Buddha statues. Some of the temples were closed to the public, but we still got to get a good look at many of them.

We couldn't stay too long at Wat Pho because we had a dinner date to get ready for. A friend of a friend married a man from Thailand and after spending the first 19 years of their marriage in Cincinnati, they decided to take their 14 year old daughter and their jewelry-making business to Bangkok in June of last year.

The timing of their move was impacted by the devastating floods that hit Bangkok late in 2011. Liz and her husband were forced out of their home for more than a month. We talked about that and other things, including Skyline Chili and Graeters over dinner at an Italian Restaurant. The discussion turned to mutual friends in Madeira and it turns out that Kira, their fourteen-year old daughter is best friends with the 14-year old daughter of the woman we are renting one of our houses in Madeira to.

Our time in Bangkok came to an end as we reluctantly left our spacious quarters to catch the 8:05am train to Surat Thani in Southern Thailand, which is as close as the train could get us to our next destination of Krabi, on the Southwestern Coast on the Andaman Sea.

The train was scheduled to arrive in Surat Thani at about 4:45 and the last bus out to Krabi from there leaves at 5, and the train station is about a 15 minute drive from the bus station. So we weren't planning on trying to rush to catch the last bus of the day. Instead, we had been told that we would be able to take a cab from the train station, for the approximately two-hour drive.

Knowing there was no timetable pressure for leaving Bangkok to get to Surat Thani, we weren't bothered by the fact that the train showed up late and as a result left late. The train was our chosen travel option strictly because of cost. We originally planned to take the overnight train, but those were all booked up. That gave us an extra night in our roomy rooms, plus the cheapest airfare I could find, (which would have taken us directly to Krabi) would have cost us more than 500 dollars US for the four of us. The train tickets cost less than $80USD for all four, so that became a pretty easy decision. Plus it came with a yummy free lunch, of some sort of mystery meat that I hadn't seen since Tates Creek Junior High in Lexington, Kentucky.

A long day on the train got even longer when we arrived in Surat Thani. The train took off about 45 minutes late and arrived about an hour and a half late. I had imagined a battalion of taxi drivers waiting for us, where I would boldly and shrewdly negotiate a bargain deal for the drive to Krabi. Instead, there were no taxis around when we arrived, just some guys with cigarettes dangling from their mouths asking us where we wanted to go.

Of the ten or so people getting off the train who disembarked without having Surat Thani be their final destination, we were the only ones going to Krabi. Surat Thani is also a stopping off point for people traveling to the popular island destinations of Koh Samui and Koh Phangan. The Marlboro Men herded us into a pick up truck with seats in the back to take us somewhere else in town where we were told we could book a ride to where ever we wanted to go.

My bargaining power effectively evaporated, we booked a car to Krabi for about twice what I wanted to pay and more than what it cost to get all the way to Surat Thani from Bangkok. Plus, the driver showed up with a trunk half-filled with cleaning supplies, so once again we enjoyed a ride hugging some of our suitcases and backpacks. Ahh, the glamour of worldwide travel! But, just like our long journey from Siem Reap to Bangkok would be worth it thanks to our spacious apartment, our 15+ hour trip to Krabi would be rewarded by an unexpected encounter with a quartet of furry friends.

Kampuchea

2012-03-31T08:14:00.000-07:00

The first time I ever heard the term Kampuchea was in the late 70s, when a benefit rock concert was held featuring several prominent artists of the time. Seeing as how I was in my prog-rock phase at the time, listening mostly to Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Genesis, Yes with a little Pat Metheny thrown in, the content of the concert had little interest for me. The Who, Paul McCartney, The Clash and Elvis Costello were the biggest names to lend their talent to the event. I, of course, had no way of knowing that some 32 years later, I would be riding on a bus into Kampuchea from Vietnam with my wife and two kids.

After 19 days in Vietnam, we got on board a bus to take us to Phnom Penh. The best part about that was the $11 per person cost. Every seat on the bus was taken, and the passengers were an interesting mix. Foreign travelers such as ourselves took up several seats, and we tried our best the follow the instructions of the woman who worked for the bus company, the Mekong Express. The only problem was, she didn't speak into the microphone very loudly, and her accent was so strong, even if we had been able to hear her, chances are we wouldn't have understood her.

The process of crossing the border from Vietnam to Cambodia included two separate stops where we had to take our backpacks with us off the bus, walk through a border station and then get back on the bus. The workers on the Vietnam side of the border had been well-schooled in a detached surliness, and had indifference bordering on hostility down to a science. The workers on the Cambodian side of the border were only slightly less unfriendly, but we made it safely into what was once known as Kampuchea, and continued on the six-hour trek to Phnom Penh.

Our arrival in the capital city presented us with our first opportunity to ride in a tuk-tuk. We knew from research we had done prior to taking the trip that at some point in Indochina we would probably be moving about via tuk-tuk. Getting off the bus in Phnom Penh we were met by several tuk-tuk operators and settled on one who had a friendly face and knew where our hotel was. His name was Bao, and after the short ride to the Billabong Hotel, we made arrangements for him to return the next morning and take us out to the Killing Fields.

Tuk-tuks are essentially the taxis of Cambodia. Most have an open-air car that seats four people and they are pulled along by motorbikes. Both locals and tourists use the services of the many tuk-tuk drivers who question any passerby if they would like a ride. If that's declined, they always say, "you come back later!"

The tuk-tuks give the streets a very exotic air and are actually very comfortable to ride in. There are more tuk-tuks than passengers to go around, so some drivers try to stand out from the crowd by painting their rides with a theme, such as Batman or Angry Birds.

I'm fairly certain Ralph Nader has never been to Cambodia because there are no seat belts to be found, but the drivers give each other enough room and even the cars, trucks and busses that share the roads don't feel like much of a threat.

They are an ingrained part of a society that is accustomed to moving about in tuk-tuks and on motorbikes that dart in and out of traffic at varying speeds and directions. Just like in Vietnam, we saw many families on motorbikes, some with four children (usually without helmets) hanging on to the driver and the handlebars as casually as you could imagine, as if they had been doing it all their lives, which I'm guessing they have.

The main reason for our stop in Phnom Penh was to see the Killing Fields, first made famous by the 1985 film of the same name. The bloody rampages of the Khmer Rouge in the mid-to-late 70s resulted in mass-murder sites scattered across the country. The one we visited near Phnom Penh is the one that is the focus of the motion picture and it's the site of a former fruit orchard, called Cheung Ek. It's about 15 kilometers outside of Phnom Penh, which meant a tuk-tuk ride of about 25 minutes.

The enormity of what happened there hits you gradually. The small admission fee gets you a headset where you can hear about the 18 stopping points, explaining the history of each spot, with background information on what led to the horror.

Some spots are where mass graves were found, some with as many as 450 bodies, others without heads. The one that really got to me was one where the skeletons of mothers and their children were found.

The grave there was surrounded by a waist-high bamboo fence where previous visitors had left bracelets around the bamboo, in memory of the suffering and death that happened there to so many innocent people. Marley added to the memorial by placing a purple and green bracelet that she had gotten earlier in the trip from peasant women in Sapa, Vietnam.

Another sobering aspect of Chueng Ek was the fact that more than thirty years after the killings, some bones and clothing are still working their way to the surface, a process that usually happened following rains. It was difficult to walk along and not step on the torn clothing and bone fragments and impossible to see the remnants of the living and not imagine the absolute terror their final moments on this earth were.

In the second-to-last stop, the recording on the headset described how the victims would be brought to Chueng Ek during the day, and then at night generators would be buzzing and Khmer Rouge anthems blaring over the loudspeaker system to drown out the screams of the people being beaten and hacked to death. That combination of sound was played in the headset at the site of another mass grave under a massive tree.

The final stop is a tall stupa, where the skulls of some of the nearly nine thousand victims are displayed. They are sorted by age and sex and speak silently yet loudly of one of the worst horrors mankind has ever done to its own.

As has happened more than once on this trip, I was very proud of how Ben and Marley took it all in, never complaining about the heat or trying to get the visit over with. It was a very hot couple of hours we spent there, and certainly not a topic that most 12-year olds, let alone adults are going to want to discuss over a meal. But a big part of this trip is to get outside of our suburban lives and learn about places and events that need to be experienced first hand to get a true education. And for us, Cheung Ek was that.

After one more night in Phnom Penh, we took the mid-day bus to Siem Reap, in northern Cambodia. This trip went a little more smoothly than the one that brought us to the capital city, mainly because there were no border crossings to navigate. There was one consistent theme to both rides: we got to watch a Jackie Chan movie each time! That now makes two Jackie Chan movies that I've watched/endured, neither voluntarily.

From time to time, I managed to tear myself away from the cinematic genius of a movie with not only Jackie Chan but also Rob Schneider and both Wilson brothers to take in the Cambodian countryside.
In many cases, it appeared the scenes that flashed by may have been unchanged for decades if not longer.

Such scenes repeated themselves time after time until they faded with the daylight, and we pulled into Siem Reap and met out personal tuk-tuk driver, Ratana.

Anthony Bourdain frequently talks in his show No Reservations about having a local fixer when you get to a strange and unfamiliar land. Ratana was that for us. A former co-worker of Annie knew someone who was familiar with Indochina and made several great recommendations for us, including a tuk-tuk driver he had met in Siem Reap. We exchanged emails with Ratana, told him the kind of hotel we were looking for and price we hoped to pay, and he delivered us by tuk-tuk to a place that met those needs. It was comforting to know we had a local to help us navigate any tricky situation that might arise.

After a six-hour bus ride, we took it easy the following day, having lunch in the village of Siem Reap. It's a bit on the touristy side, attracting thousands each year for the nearby ancient temples, but we still enjoyed the feel of the place, much like the feel we got in our favorite stop in Vietnam, Hoi An. A nice quiet day left us refreshed and recharged to take on the temples the following day.

Few things in life exceed high expectations, but the temples of the Siem Reap area certainly did that for us. The most iconic is the one in the photo above, Angkor Wat. It's commonly described as the largest religious building in the world, and is a fascinating trip back in time, going back almost one thousand years.

Inside is an amazing collection of carvings along all four exterior walls of the complex, with fantastic details, showing various battles and conquests of the Angkor kings.

We walked around the complex, reading from the guide I had on my iPhone which explained what each panel was. Then, we scaled a step set of wooden steps into the main tower in the center. It supposedly was home once to a statue of Vishnu, but that is long gone. Still, it was stunning to think of the accomplishment of the workers who built this almost one thousand years ago.

Some areas are in the process of being restored, and the towers have the unique look of years of erosion. The peaks look like drippings of candle wax, or a sand castle made by letting wet sand drip from your hands at the beach.

As impressive as the temple at Angkor Wat was, we liked the two others we visited even more. The second one was Angkor Thom , and was built by Suryavarman II.

Annie liked that one the best, but the one the kids and I favored was the temple at Ta Prohm. It's the one that is the least far along in being reclaimed from the jungle. Over the years, the jungle almost completely covered the rocks and stones that were built, and some how, huge trees grew out of what seem to be small cracks. The process produces some stunning sights.

Seeing trees totally engulfing some of the most magnificent structures of their time truly puts things in perspective and left me with the thought that when it comes to man versus nature, I'm putting my money on nature pretty much every time.

Some people spend three days or as long as seven days seeing the temples and there is plenty to see. That's not our modus operandi, especially when we are on as long of a trip as we are. One day and three temples was plenty for us, particularly on a hot day like the one we experienced.

On our final day in Cambodia, on the suggestion of Rantana, our aforementioned tuk-tuk driver/fixer, we visited a floating village. It meant a ride of about 25 minutes to a place where several boats that looked abandoned/on the verge of sinking were waiting to take their victims/passengers on a 15 minute boat ride to the rickety buildings that made up the village.

We gingerly stepped on board and I quickly noticed there were no life jackets. Oh snap! But I also noticed there were no body bags, so I did my best to appear calm for the ride through the extremely muddy water. The ride went smoothly and it was fascinating to cruise through the village, where many of the structures had TVs inside, powered by an on board battery.

It's another example of how differently people in other parts of the world live, something that we really wanted Ben and Marley to see.

Our time in Cambodia was short, but the memories and experiences we had there will last us a very long time. As will the local definition of "bus" as we found when we headed toward Thailand.

19 in Vietnam

2012-03-24T06:46:00.001-07:00

There's a song from 1985 by British keyboardist Paul Hardcastle that's been on my mind during most of our time in Vietnam. It's called 19, and it features the voice over from a documentary about the Vietnam War, along with audio clips from soldiers and some ABC TV news coverage about the war. The main focus of the words is that the average age of the combat soldier in Vietnam was 19, compared with the average age of the World War II soldier being 26. I had the song going through my head when we went to the War Remnants Museum in Saigon.

Saigon was the final city on our itinerary during what would wind up being our 19-day stay in Vietnam. Before arriving here, we didn't have a definitive plan on how long we would be there. We were arriving in Hanoi on March 3rd, and we had to be in Penang by April 9th to get our flight to China. During those 36 days, we knew we wanted to spend time in not only Vietnam, but also Cambodia, Thailand and Malaysia. The plan was to spend about 10-12 days in each country. But once we got an idea of how much there was to see and do, we knew we would be spending at least two weeks in Vietnam.

The official name of the largest city in Vietnam is Ho Chi Minh City, and that's the name listed on bus schedules and most maps. Most locals call it Saigon, so that's what we did during our four days there. We originally planned to take the overnight train from Danang to Saigon, but on either one of the two nights that worked with our schedule, the train was sold out. Fortunately, Vietnam airlines has several flights a day between the two cities, and we found one that offered a good fare at a time that didn't mean an early wake up call, and we were off on the voyage of just a little over an hour.

Karma came through again, as a woman in Cincinnati heard me on WLW when I phoned in a report from Hanoi. She sent me a message on Facebook saying that her son works in Saigon and I should get in touch with him. Turns out her son is a vice consul at the US Consulate in Saigon and had a three bedroom apartment overlooking the consulate. He offered us up the two spare bedrooms and some great local knowledge for free.

The consulate is in what our host, Joe, described as the nicest part of Saigon, with wide streets lined with trees and restaurants and shops. The view from his 15th floor balcony was beautiful and stretched for miles.

Down on the street level it was a different story. Motorbikes and scooters ruled the road just as they did in Hanoi, darting in and out of the busy traffic, and even speeding down the sidewalk during rush hour.

Saigon is a very modern city, and for the most part pretty clean, much more like Singapore than Hanoi. It still had plenty of Vietnamese flavor and we took advantage of some of the low prices to be found on shoes and clothing at some of the massive markets in the city.

The most famous one is the Ben Thanh Market which lived up to what we had read about it. The market is packed with stalls which are separated by what products they sell and grouped together. The pathways through the market are very narrow and at times you literally have to step over vendors sitting on little plastic stools at their booths. After negotiating to buy some shirts and some other trinkets, we tried to navigate our way toward the sunlight coming from the busy Le Loi street. Doing that meant running the gauntlet of some very aggressive vendors who emerged from their stalls holding up shirts and pants and shorts saying "Madame! Madame!" or "Sir! Sir!" We were very happy to make it successfully through that and back into the scorching heat of the streets of Saigon.

After spending most of our more than three months on the road talking to ourselves, it was nice to spend some time with Joe. He took us out the first night to a restaurant called The Black Cat. It was a unique place with some great food that features some monster hamburgers. Annie had enchiladas and raved about them being some of the best food that she had on the trip. The next night the kids stayed at home with some soup and macaroni and cheese while Joe and Annie and I went out for some pretty tasty Indian food at a restaurant that was a short walk away from his place. Nothing like sharing some butter chicken and lamb Rogan Josh with some Naan.

Our final night in Saigon was a blast. Joe invited some friends and co-workers over as he cooked some pasta with some yummy meatballs for a crew that immediately got along very well. The people who worked with Joe at the Consulate talked about the transient nature of their jobs, as they moved from assignment to assignment every couple of years or so. They took great interest in our travels and gave us some helpful suggestions of some potential locations. The night concluded with some karaoke and an exchange of emails as we added to our stable of friends.

The fun of the evening helped wash away the somber mood we felt after visiting the War Remnants Museum. The reviews we read before we went there spoke of the strong "anti-American" sentiment of the exhibits and displays. After viewing the three levels of photographs and some of the weapons used in the war between the United States and Vietnam, we came away feeling that for the most part, it was a fair representation of the fighting and the damage done to and by both sides.

Seeing the photos of the difficult terrain and the jungle setting that was completely foreign to US troops, I thought of a line from the classic book by Graham Greene, The Quiet American. The setting is Saigon in the early 50s as the French are fighting the Viet Minh. The author writes of the difficulty faced at that time by the soldiers from France: "A war of jungle and mountain and marsh, paddy fields where you wade shoulder-high and the enemy simply disappear, bury their arms, put on peasant dress."

The museum focused a lot on the horrors of napalm and Agent Orange. With that came a lot of pictures of victims of both and included some of young people with birth defects attributed to dioxin exposure from Agent Orange. An hour or so that was pretty much all any of us could take, so we retreated to the outside and the relative safety of the displays of US war power.

After almost three weeks in Vietnam, I'm no closer to understanding the language than I was when we first arrived in Hanoi. It remains a complete mystery, especially hearing it spoken. It's a little disconcerting to walk down the street as I did in Hoi An, past a shop keeper who barked something to his wife inside just as I strolled by. My hope was that he was saying something along the lines of "stop nagging me woman!" instead of "Honey, get me the knife-you know, the big one we use on the Americans!" In reality though, we've had no threatening or uneasy moments here and most people have been very pleasant and welcoming.

As our time here comes to an end, Annie and I have asked each other whether or not we would return to Vietnam. Our immediate answer was yes, especially to re-visit Hoi An. As much as we liked Hanoi, we would probably rather spend our time in the quieter, warmer southern city. It's got a civility and mystery about it that was very intriguing and appealing.

Our time in Vietnam was very fulfilling, challenging and invigorating. The situations and people that we encountered are exactly what we hoped to come across when we planned this part of the trip back home in Cincinnati. After three overnight train trips, two four-hour bus rides, a night on a boat, and a flight from Danang to Saigon, it's time to move on. And while we will have left Vietnam behind, we will take amazing memories of it with us on the rest of our journey and beyond.

Moving south, to the great unknown

2012-03-18T09:47:00.000-07:00

Being a native of Ohio and having spent most of my life there, going south has always appealed to me. When I was in college, I recall coming home late from a closing shift at the Friendly's Restaurant in Fairfield and seeing a TV commercial for South Carolina tourism. I was very intrigued and became determined to move in that direction. Within 2 years, I had a job in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. That would be the first of a few stops for me in the Tarheel State. Over the next 11 years I would call Raleigh, Asheboro and Charlotte home. Since moving back to Cincinnati, Charleston South Carolina has become one of my favorite getaways. There's just something about heading south that has an undeniable appeal.

I felt that familiar equatorial tug as we got on the train in Hanoi, on our way overnight to Hue. It was our third overnight train in six days, and our berths were a little barren at first glance. The overnight trains that we took to and from Sa Pa were warmly appointed with thick comforters and some cozy lighting and complimentary bottles of water. Not so much on this one.

The train looked to be from sometime in the Eisenhower era so did the mattresses and pillows. Dingy military-green paint that was scratched and faded gave the compartment a Cold War feel, as if we were refugees from behind the Iron Curtain.

One aspect of this trip that was an improvement over our previous overnight trains was the timing of our arrival at our destination. On the way to Sa Pa and then again on the return to Hanoi, both trains got in before 6am. That means they start to roust you around 4:30 or 5, then you get to the station, grab your bags and go to your hotel, feeling pretty much shredded for the day. This train, however, was due to get to Hue at the more comfortable time of around 11am. That produced the best night's sleep for all of us, and we got into the train station pretty well rested.

We used booking.com to reserve a hotel room in Hue, but it's a third party site, so I had no direct contact with the Waterland Hotel before our arrival. The boat we stayed on overnight in Ha Long Bay had no internet connection, but prior to taking that trip, I sent the Waterland an email, asking if they had a car that could meet us at the train station. That would keep us from having to run the gauntlet of taxi drivers and make sure we weren't getting ripped off.

Sure enough, as we worked our way out of the station, there was a man holding a sign with Bill Bangert on it. That was a sight for tired eyes, and we were all smiles as we met Mr. Vu from the Waterland Hotel and he led us to a taxi, to which he provided an escort for the fifteen-minute drive to the hotel.

The transition from Northern Vietnam to the middle part of the country was fascinating to watch from the window of our train compartment. Rice paddies, in the early stage of being planted in the north, were a brilliant green as we got further away from Hanoi. Every now and then, burial crypts could be seen among the paddies which were being tended to by peasants, using implements that had tilled the fertile land for centuries.

One thing that didn't change much from Hanoi was the gray weather. It was a bit warmer as we took a stroll toward the Perfume River, hoping to get to the ancient Imperial City complex. Several boats were lined up along the shore of the river, all looking of equally questionable riverworthiness status.

The woman operating the boat offered us a ride across the river for a dollar a piece, so we climbed on board and enjoyed the short cruise to the other side of the Perfume River.

The Imperial City dates back more than 200 years to when Hue was the capitol of Viet Nam. A walled-fortress, the property is bounded by a perimeter stretching over two and a half kilometers. Many of the original buildings were damaged or destroyed by the Indochina War and more so by the war with the United States in a bombing campaign in 1968. Still, it was fascinating to walk around the massive complex and look at the ornate and detailed architecture.

The complex also featured the chance to, wait for it: ride an elephant! Of course, why not, what could possibly go wrong?? With a variety of worst case scenarios cruising through my head, I gallantly ceded my spot on the three-person gondola/death trap on top of the massive killing machine with legs as big as my entire body to my wife and kids.

All the elephant seemed to care about was getting a big stalk of sugar cane and once he had that firmly grasped between his jaws, he paid no attention to the goofy tourists on his back as he gave them a ten minute stroll around some of the grounds.

Hue was a good transition point on the way to our next destination of Hoi An. More than one person we had talked to along the said Hoi An was their favorite spot in Viet Nam. The train heading south doesn't go to Hoi An, only Da Nang, which is about a half hour drive away. Our hotel in Hue offered us a car and driver for $45 for the three and a half hour drive, so instead of going through the hassle of booking train tickets then figuring out how to get from the train station in Da Nang to our hotel in Hoi An, we hopped in the car with a driver who spoke virtually no English and hit the road.

As often happens on a drive from the northern part of a country to the south, the sun appeared for the first time in over a week. The road hugged some mountains just north of Da Nang, and provided a sun-splashed view of the bay, which was the entry point for thousands of US troops during the war.

The drive through and past Da Nang was fascinating in part because just south of the city we saw several resorts and signs of more in the works. There was also signs of some developments that got started and never completed, which made us feel right at home as we pictured the hulking gray steel skeleton hovering over I-71 in Kenwood.

Among the resorts were two of the golf variety, one of which was a Greg Norman design. The other was the work of Colin Montgomerie.

It was certainly tempting to take advantage of the beautiful weather and play what looked to be a very attractive course, but with the family in the car, we continued to our destination of Hoi An. The city dates back centuries and many of the buildings, while filled with shops and restaurants, are very well preserved.

The slower pace of Hoi An, especially in the city's older section, was a welcome change from the frenetic scenes we saw in Hue and particularly in Hanoi. Walking along the ancient streets without having to dodge speeding motorbikes and scooters gave us a chance to exhale. Our hotel was happy to have us add three nights to our stay as we decided to make Hoi An our home for almost a week.

Pretty much everything about the town worked well for us. We walked around each day, shopping or finding a place to grab a bite to eat. As the sun sets the atmosphere rises along the river. Lanterns add a relaxing ambiance along the water, with people strolling along and vendors selling food and trinkets.

Our first night, we happened upon the scene after the sun had set, so we came back late in the afternoon the following day. That gave us the chance to see the scene slowly change from day to night, as the soft fading light threw long shadows on the streets as the lights of the lanterns slowly began to glow.

The city has a certain serenity about it, some of which is probably attributed to its ancient soul. Whatever the reason, it certainly captured our hearts and souls as we enjoyed the best of what Viet Nam has to offer.

If it's Wednesday, I have no idea where we are

2012-03-15T07:08:00.000-07:00

After just over three months on the road, it’s a daily, sometimes hourly struggle to remember what day of the week it is. The normal Monday-Friday workweek routine back home is completely gone.

The passage of time during our trip has instead been marked by location segments. We started in December with a two-week stay in Fiji, then one full week in Auckland. Since then, we’ve never spent more than five nights in one place, (that was in Singapore) and it’s frequently two nights and often one night. That has especially been the case in Vietnam.

We got into Hanoi on a Saturday, spent two nights in our hotel in the Old Quarter. We then took an overnight train to Sa Pa, spent two nights in the hotel there and then took the overnight train back to Hanoi Thursday night. After another night in the same hotel in Hanoi, we took a four-hour bus ride to Ha Long Bay, spending the night on a boat amongst the beautiful rock formations. The next day, we took the bus back to Hanoi, hung out for about four hours before taking the overnight train to Hue. That's a busy few days, and we were ready to slow down some as we headed south, which is the game plan a lot of people have back in the States.

Once we had made up our minds that we would be stopping in Viet Nam, we were certain that Ha Long Bay would be one of our stops. It's described by many as one of the most beautiful spots in a beautiful country. The bay is filled with thousands of rock formations rising out of the water, and more than 250 boats take tourists on excursions, some of them day trips, most over night. The tour guides and some tour books claim that there are 1,969 rock formations but that's inaccurate. That number has been used for a little over forty years, since 1969 was the year Ho Chi Minh died.

Our boat for the night was the Alova Gold. We boarded it at the busy wharf in Ha Long City, which was bustling with hundreds of other tourists getting ready to get on boats of all shapes, sizes, age and seaworthiness.

I think I've made the statement previously that as a swimmer, I make a good golfer. I can technically swim, meaning I can move my arms and legs about to propel myself through water, but I can't tread water. So I've never been that confident or eager to get on boats, especially without a lifejacket on. But after a quarter of a year on the road, and being in a wide variety of travel situations, I wasn't anxious at all. I did make a mental note of where the life jackets were stored, but felt fine as our skiff chugged it's way out to where our boat was anchored, belching out gray smoke that matched the skies above.

Our boat had a nice solid look, and I felt confident that our 24-hour cruise would not meet the same fate that happened to a tourist boat in Ha Long Bay a little over a year ago. We didn't tell the kids about that unpleasantness until after our tour was over, not wanting them to be up all night, listening for water creeping into the engine room, which Ben and I were bunked next to. I did briefly consider sleeping with a life vest on, or at least in the bed next to me, but I didn't want Ben to stop thinking of me as a fearless international traveler, so I left the life vests in our cabin untouched, but within reach in our cozy quarters.

Annie and Marley were in the cabin right next to Ben and me, one floor down from the main gathering spot for drinks and the very generous meals. We spent a good deal of our time talking with Paul and Jen, an Australian couple who had their share of world travels to share with us.

The tour including the option of going swimming if the weather was good, but since it was cloudy and in the mid-50s, that idea was tossed overboard. Instead the boat docked near a beach, where the group climbed the estimated 500 steps up to a lookout that provided a scenic view if not the oxygen masks we were hoping for following the steep ascent.

The other afternoon activity option was kayaking. Marley and I passed on that, while Annie and Ben teamed up and explored some of the hidden coves in this area that is supposedly inhabited by dragons.

If they saw any dragons, they're not saying, but they do occasionally exchange what can only be described as knowing glances. Dinner featured a chance for the passengers to help make some fresh spring rolls, which I think was just a way for the chef to get out of a very labor-intensive process. Still, he cooked them to perfection and we managed to get some bread and butter for Marley, so she was happy.

In fact, the next day, the crew gave Marley an entire loaf of bread and some pads of butter as a going away present.

The following morning dawned with grey skies again, but that didn't effect our final activity before heading back to the wharf and getting on the bus for the four-hour ride to Hanoi. The skiff took us to some beautiful caverns that wound deep into the mountainside

After about a half an hour or so of wandering through the path carved into the cave, we emerged to find a surprise: three monkeys hanging on the rock face of a cliff.

I'm no monkey expert, but all three seemed to have some sort of inherent sadness, as if they had recently lost a fourth member of their group. Still, they were fun to see as we said good bye to Ha Long Bay, and hello to another busy bit of travel in Viet Nam as we started to point our adventure to the south.

Worlds Collide

2012-03-09T07:27:00.000-08:00

When we were in New Zealand, I immersed myself in local culture by purchasing the 2-CD set, Best of Crowded House. They're a Kiwi band that had some hits in the late 80s and early 90s. Lame, I know, but it was either that or get one of those massive Maori tattoos on my face. The novelty of that would have worn off by the time we got to Wellington and would most likely have hindered my assimilation back into society when we returned home. I can just imagine the strange looks I would have gotten at the checkout counter at the Kroger in Madeira. Of course, I would have fit right in at Trader Joe's and possibly been offered an assistant manager's position on the spot. My point of all this is that there is a song on the Crowded House disc that has stuck with us throughout the entire trip. It's called Weather With You, and talks about everywhere you go, you take the weather with you, which has been an important factor for us, and has influenced our time at various stops along the way.

The weather we took with us to the mountain village of Sa Pa, Vietnam was flawless. We got to Sa Pa by taking an overnight train from Hanoi after spending two nights in that busy, frenetic city. Grey skies and light rain dominated our first two days in Hanoi, but on our third day there, the sun began to shine. The streets that were covered with mud started to dry out, making moving around the city much more pleasant.

We took advantage of the improving conditions to take a stroll on the streets with which we were becoming more familiar. A walk of about five blocks brought us to Hoan Kiem Lake, where a bridge, painted bright red, carried travelers across to an island which was home to an ancient temple. The day we were there, it was being used by a bride as a backdrop for some photos.

Once inside the temple, we soaked in the somber yet hopeful atmosphere amid a few worshipers, including one group that was led by a young boy, probably around 8 years old, who sang a beautiful hymn. He appeared to have a severe affliction affecting his feet which were discolored in mottled purple tones. His family was all there to support him. It was a very touching moment and we felt a bit uncomfortable with how to wander through but tried to send up our own prayers on his behalf.

After lunch at a café five stories above the frenzied street scene below, we got back to our hotel in time to catch the bus that would take us to the overnight train to Sa Pa. The four of us knew we loved overnight train travel when in the fall of 2010 we took an overnight train from Paris to Venice and we hoped for a similar experience in Vietnam.

The train station experience was a bit chaotic, as we tried to follow the transition from the tour bus to the train itself. Once we had our tickets and started to head for the train, we followed a tall woman who held a paper aloft for all of us to see. I was drafting her in my best Dale Earnhardt Junior move when suddenly Annie and the kids took off to the left, following a man in a white hat. He had snatched the train tickets out of her hands along with two of the rolling suitcases and strode across a couple of rail lines toward the coach that would carry us to Sa Pa.

I thought that perhaps he was part of the tour who was helping passengers get from the train station to the train itself. He hustled our baggage into our compartment, tossing the suitcases under the bottom bunks, and the backpacks up in a storage area above the hallway we had just come in from. It was when that process was finished that we realized this individual was an "entrepreneur". I tried to give him 100,000 Vietnamese Dong, or the equivalent of $5 US, but he pointed to all four bunks and held out five fingers in a demonstrative and almost threatening manner. Not wanting to have some sort of international incident erupt over a relatively small sum of money, I pulled out another 100,000 VND and he went on his way. I mean, what was I going to do? They won the war and all, and that carries some bargaining rights with it.

The train compartment defined cozy, with bunks on both sides. We settled in with some snacks and drinks, eventually turning the lights out, hoping to be rocked to sleep by the movement of the train as it headed toward the mountains to the north and west.

The train pulled into the station at Lao Cai right around 6am, with the skies just starting to brighten. Each of us held tight to our luggage and found the person from our hotel who had our names on a list and four spaces for us on a van. Forty bumpy and winding minutes later, we arrived at the Sa Pa Summit Hotel, perched on a hill overlooking the breathtakingly beautiful village below.

We booked the tour to Sa Pa through our hotel in Hanoi, and while we were a bit skeptical about how things would go at first, that skepticism faded quickly when the desk clerk handed us keys to two rooms. The rooms were at the end of the hall, each with two beds and both with great views from the balcony. It would be the first time since we left Australia more than a week earlier that we wouldn't all be sleeping in the same room. That would be a welcome change.

With our first trekking tour scheduled for a 9am meet up in the hotel lobby, we had about two hours to settle in, maybe grab some sleep and breakfast. Arriving in the lobby at the appointed hour, we saw the space filled with about two dozen travelers and about a half-dozen young women dressed in the garb of the local Hmong tribe. Vu, our guide, led us out of the hotel and down the hill toward the village of Cat Cat, a trek of only about three kilometers. Cat Cat sits at the base of the tallest mountain in Indochina, Mount Fan Si Pan, which rises more than 3,100 meters or more than 10,000 feet above sea level.

The trek, while short in distance, took us back centuries in time. Most of the homes we passed were huts made of bamboo, some with corrugated metal for roofs. Few, if any, had running water, evidenced by the scene of people huddled over a bucket, brushing their teeth outside in the early morning sun. Children, most just wearing shirts, amused themselves with whatever they could find to play with, be it a pile of pebbles, or a small basket of flower petals.

We and the other trekkers were shadowed by two to three Hmong women at a time, asking us to buy some sort of trinket or purse from them. The trek also took us by several huts where women, sitting in the shade, would say "come inside, looking around--you by something from me??". Almost every single one we passed implored us to spend some of what was to them our foreign fortune on something they had to sell, using the exact same words each and every time.

The trek took us all the way down through the village to a waterfall, where we took a 15-minute break before starting the trek back up the hill. Annie and Marley took the offer from one of the first motorbike drivers to come along, while Ben and I made it a little bit further before deciding to get a ride back to the hotel. That would prove to be a good decision, as we rested up that afternoon for a bigger adventure the following day.

Dawn broke early the following morning, with the sun rising over the mountains to the southeast, providing a dramatic start to what would be one of our most memorable days of the entire trip. We filled up on some breakfast at the hotel before meeting Vu again around 9am in the lobby. Ahead of us was a 12-kilometer trek down the mountain, into her village, where we would have lunch prepared by the villagers.

The weather we had with us for our nearly seven and a half mile trek was once again perfect: clear blue skies and temperatures in the upper 70s with little humidity. While once again we had Vu all to ourselves, we had plenty of company of other trekkers who had stayed at the Sa Pa Summit. They were in groups of six or more, as we all lumbered through the streets of Sa Pa with our guides and the Hmong women lurking nearby.

That's our guide Vu on the left, with two Hmong women trailing along with us, hoping that at some point we would buy something from them. Vu works as a guide for the tour operator that runs out of the Sa Pa Summit Hotel. She has only spoken English for a little over a year, and has been working as a guide for about seven months or so. She told me that she had learned her English strictly from tourists.

The Vietnamese government opened up the region to tourism about eight or nine years ago, and Sa Pa has become a popular spot. The area features dramatic terrain, with terraced rice paddies that hug the mountainsides.

The first one-third or so of the trek was pretty tame by trekking standards. We walked along a paved road, and stopped briefly at a shack where drinks could be purchased. Vu and some of the other women also peeled some raw sugar cane and gave chunks of it to us to munch on.

The sugar that our teeth squeezed out of the fibrous canes was not only delicious, it gave us some extra energy for the trek. Who needs a Snickers bar when you've got raw sugar?

Besides the herd of trekkers making the descent down the mountain, we ran into a more native type of herd. Going up the road in the opposite direction were some water buffalo, completely uninterested in the humans passing them by.

With their prominent and threatening horns, we gave them a wide berth.

Following that Close Encounter of the Horned Kind, our trek continued, with another stop about a half an hour later. This was were the intensity of the trekking increased dramatically. The guides took us off the paved road onto a dirt path that hugged the side of the mountain.

When I read the description of the 12-kilometer trek before we embarked from the hotel, I figured it was no big deal. It would probably be like hiking Red Bird Hollow in Indian Hill a few times. We had conquered that as a family with ease and I was confident that this trek, while a bit more challenging, was certainly within our hiking skill-set.

That confidence waned when I saw trekkers in front of us gingerly step off the path onto a trail that I couldn't see due to the steep incline. Marley was very reluctant at first, but as I looked down the path, I judged that staying to the left, as close to the hill as possible would be the best route. One of the Hmong women took Marley's hand and helped guide her down the hill, while I glanced furtively to the right, looking for a soft landing should the ground give way.

It was the most challenging downhill trek I had ever made, as we carefully placed our feet in whatever indentation in the path we could find. The descent grew a little easier as we got used to the process, and we made it to the bottom without incident or serious injury. Looking back up from the bottom gave us all a sense of accomplishment and relief, and serious gratitude for the van that was going to drive us back up the hill to our hotel later that afternoon.

Once we got to the bottom of the steep grade, we made our way through a series of rice paddies instead of going across a bridge that had no railings and that our guide Vu say the local government felt was unsafe.

That crossing was our last major trekking challenge before we stopped for lunch in a village that was accessed by another, more traditional bridge.

Once safely to the other side, we grabbed a chair and sat down at tables with the other trekkers and waited for lunch to be served.

The Hmong women hustled among the tables, serving up some chicken, cabbage and rice. I had asked Vu the day before about what would be served for lunch, and with that knowledge and knowing the limited palate of my daughter, we had bought some bread in one of the early portions of the trek that morning. That kept Marley's hunger down, but we got a nice surprise when Vu emerged with a plate of french fries that gave Marley her first opportunity to use chopsticks for a food she liked.

Refueled by a locally prepared and served lunch, we got back out on the trail, following our guide and the Hmong women trying to get us, mainly Annie, to buy a bracelet or some other object from her. Annie rewarded the woman's patience by purchasing a small purse that Marley wore, as well as some bracelets.

I had my own shadow in the form of a tribal woman who I had made eye contact with earlier on in the trek. I had made up some sort of excuse trying to brush her off, saying I had to eat lunch, maybe I would see her later blah, blah, blah, and I thought, honestly that she had gotten lost in the shuffle of all the trekkers, but after lunch, there she was, with her toothy grin, happy to see me again.

As we continued on our trek, she asked me about my children and shared that she had five of her own, all of which still lived at home, including her married son and his wife and her parents. I wasn't sure if this was true, or if she was trying to paint a portrait of how poor she was to this "rich" American in hopes that he would at least make a pity purchase. She was actually pleasant company as we strolled along among the ramshackle buildings and pigs and ducks. I finally decided to bite the bullet and buy a bracelet from her that we would bring home to someone.

The rest of the trek was a nice easy flat stroll through the village as we headed toward the pick up point. We did acquire an important culinary piece of information along the way, noting a sign that let us know that we did not want to, anywhere in our travels in Vietnam, order the Thit Cho.

Another bridge crossing brought us to a gathering area where the van would retrieve us and take us back to the friendly confines of our hotel. That meant it was time to say so long to our guide Vu who made our two days of trekking a truly wonderful experience.

It's difficult to describe the impact that spending a day and a half among tribal women in the mountains of Northern Vietnam has on a family from the suburbs of Cincinnati. We are from two completely different worlds, with diametrically different life experiences. Here we were, more than 8000 miles from home, spending time with a woman who in her 20 or so years in this world that we were trying to circumnavigate had never been outside of her village and it's surroundings. Initially, you would think we had nothing in common. Yet after our time together we parted with the commonality of decency, friendship and respect. I never ever felt as though she envied anything we had, even as we took out camera and iPhone to snap pictures of a world we would never know and send them back to a world she would never know.

In our nearly three months on the road, Vietnam is the first place I've felt that is totally different from anything I've ever seen or experienced before. The language, smells, food and people define "foreign". But this place, this crazy, challenging, frustrating yet magical land has given Annie and Marley and Ben and me exactly what we wanted when we started planning this trip 14 months ago: The chance to see another part of the world that could somehow give us an invaluable insight into lives that we would have only read about. Our time with Vu and the women of the villages we got to walk through will hopefully give us a lot to ponder for a long long time. I don't have the answers yet to the questions that this part of the visit are raising. But I'm looking forward to searching for those answers not only during the remaining days we have here in Vietnam, but also as we continue to challenge ourselves and our comfort zones moving into more strange and wonderful places.

Hanoi, a strange and magical place

2012-03-06T17:17:00.000-08:00

My first thought as we rode into Hanoi from the airport is that the name of the city must be the Vietnamese word for either noisy or dirty. The hotel we booked online in Hanoi agreed to provide a driver for $18, and it was a welcome sight to see a man holding a sign reading “Bill Bangert” once we picked up our luggage at the airport. We had read about the aggressive taxi drivers who would sometimes take fares places, and refuse to let them out of the car unless they paid more money. Our driver spoke no English, but happily loaded all our luggage in the large boot of the four-door sedan he was driving.

The sky was indecipherable as we headed into Hanoi. No blue sky, no dark clouds, just a mass of gray mist, completely obscuring the landscape. Most vehicles were covered at least to some degree by a thin layer of grime. All four of us sat in silence, watching the gritty scenes pass by on both sides of the car.

Many buildings were in various states of disrepair, some of them with wooden scaffolding erected to make restorations that in most cases seem to be in the abandoned stage. One word that kept coming to mind for me was squalor. Store fronts were dirty, with the floors littered with pools of water. That tableau repeated itself many times during the drive, which took about 40 minutes.

Our driver was first chair in the symphony of car and truck horns along the way. Drivers constantly sounded their horns, and it seemed to be mostly a way of letting whatever car, truck or motorbike they were nearing know of their presence. The painted lines on the three-lane highway seemed to be just a suggestion as drivers drifted along, coming extremely close to making contact.

The first real traffic pattern shock came as we exited the airport. The road we were on was the main one heading into Hanoi, and shortly after leaving the airport grounds, the traffic coming the other way runs right across the traffic heading into town. There are no stop lights, no Give Way signs, no roundabouts that seemed so charming in Australia and New Zealand. Drivers would feel their way through the oncoming traffic, and size didn’t appear to matter as large trucks would pause for smaller cars such as the one we were in. In a chaotic way, it worked, something we would see more of once we got deeper into Hanoi.

The hotel we booked happened to be in the Old Quarter of Hanoi, which we had read was the best location for travelers who wanted to get the feel of the charm of the city with supposedly French influences. I was a bit shocked when the driver put on his turn signal indicating he was about to pull over, and I looked to the left and there was our hotel. It looked fine, but the street it was on was much more crowded and cramped than I expected.

I guess I had anticipated kind of a lower rent version of a Paris neighborhood, maybe resembling one of the more outlying arrondisements that doesn’t attract as many tourists as those around the Champs de Elysees or Eiffel Tower, or even over on the east side of Paris, around Notre Dame and the Louvre. In reality, it appeared to be more of a rent-controlled section of New York back in the 70s.

A large part of the grungy feel was the drizzle that feel from the featureless gray sky, which turned the dusty streets and sidewalks slick with a thin layer of mud. Not wanting to look too touristy, I put on sandals instead of my running shoes to take a stroll out on the streets- as if my blonde hair, fair skin and blue eyes would allow me to meld right in with the locals if only I was wearing the proper footwear.

Before we left Australia for Singapore and Indochina, Marley had a bit of a meltdown one night, all upset about what she was going to eat in Vietnam. I had gotten online that night in our place in Brisbane and showed her that there were places that offered pizza and other Italian foods. In our hotel in Hanoi, I found a place that looked to be within walking distance, but with the ongoing drizzle and our complete unfamiliarity with the streets of Hanoi, we asked someone at the front desk to call a taxi for us.

I had written down the address, 98 Hang Trong, on a piece of paper and gave it to the taxi driver. He worked his way through the darkened, damp streets of Hanoi towards Pepperoni’s. It’s an Italian restaurant that definitely caters to Western tourists. As much as I would have loved to gotten down and dirty with the locals and tried some of the street food that was filling the air with amazing smells, our daughter, who has a well-documented limited palate, had only had a chocolate muffin for lunch and needed a decent meal. We got exactly that and enjoyed some free wi-fi to do our first check-in from Hanoi.

By the time we got done with dinner, the rain had let up enough, and I figured out that we could walk back to our hotel without too much difficulty. Our first foray into the streets of Hanoi were tentative at best. Traversing those streets on foot is an art form unto itself. There is the occasional crosswalk, and even a red/green-cross/don’t cross electric sign here and there. But most crossings are done randomly across busy streets filled mostly with motorbikes, with the occasional car or bus buzzing buy.

The key, as we had read, is eye contact. You take a look in the direction of where the majority of the traffic is coming from, confidently stride off the curb and walk with a stern determination toward the other side of the street. After a few successful attempts, it actually became quite enjoyable, and gives you a feeling of power.

Motorbikes are speeding toward you, but instead of plowing you over, they know the drill better than you do and manage to guide their vehicle past you with no contact. It’s an amazing display of synchronized chaos and it really works. I studied this closely from many angles, including from above a cafe and even with construction equipment involved in the equation, I never saw anyone even sideswipe another traveler. The whole experience added to the magic of Hanoi.

Navigating the sidewalks of Hanoi takes some talent as well. They are dominated by people on small plastic stools, crowding around some sort of cooking apparatus. People pull up stools and chairs and hunker down with plates, bowls and spoons. Cooks would be brewing up all varieties of concoctions, emitting an amazing array of smells.

There were also more established stands of food, many featuring what appeared to be intestines and other animal parts that we had no interest in sampling in any sauce. The scene was repeated on every single street we walked down.

The people walking along the streets with us were made up of more Europeans and Americans than I expected. Many wore the detached look of world travelers who felt Hanoi was just another stop along the way. For the more nouveau world travelers like ourselves, it was a challenge not to walk the streets with a wide-eyed wonder. More than once, we had to remind ourselves, that we were in VIETNAM. The scene of the most brutal war the United States had ever been involved in. We tried to explain to our kids that it would be a little like them taking a trip to Iraq in 40 years.

Having been born in 1961, I was just a little too young to be impacted very much by the Vietnam War. It was over by the time I was 12, and I vaguely remember the grim casualty counts being broadcast on the nightly news by Walter Cronkite and Huntley and Brinkley. My parents weren’t all that politically active, although I knew they voted Republican most of the time. They didn’t talk about politics or the war much, which in retrospect kind of disappoints me. Looking back, I would love to know what they thought about the turmoil that was going on at the time.

I have two memories of my Dad saying anything politically related when I was young. One was when I was at my maternal grandmothers house in Warren, Ohio and there was a newspaper on the kitchen counter featuring a photograph of Lyndon Johnson when he was still president. The photo was one where his mouth was wide open during a speech and my Dad said “That’s about all he’s good for!” or words to that effect. The other was when Richard Nixon, a man my father voted for twice, was announcing his resignation plans on TV. I remember that it was happening late at night, and my Dad told me he was glad I was seeing this, that it was an important piece of history of which to be a witness.

The thing that influenced my view of the Vietnam War more than any other was a book written by Philip Caputo, called A Rumor Of War. It was published in 1977, and my Northwest High School American Literature teacher named Burt Cameron had us read it when I was a junior, shortly after it was published. That probably caused a certain amount of controversy considering the book described some of the atrocities committed during the war by soldiers on both sides. It’s considered one of the most insightful first-hand accounts of what it was like to be on the front lines of the conflict. The book made enough of an impact on me for me to buy an electronic copy of it to read as we head from Hanoi into the mountains of North Vietnam and the picturesque town of Sapa. I’m hoping that reading this as we head into the heart of the darkness that was the defining event for a generation of Americans and Vietnamese will provide me a greater understanding of one of the darkest periods of American history.

Friends and strangers in Singapore

2012-03-04T03:28:00.001-08:00

I feel tall in Asia. I like that. As a 5’8” man, it’s unusual for me to be looking down at the top of people’s heads when I’m in the hotel elevator or on the subway. I’m not towering over people, but few people are towering over me, which is a nice change.

It’s easy to feel small in downtown Singapore, no matter how tall you are. The city skyline is jammed with massive skyscrapers, shooting upward like saplings yearning for sunlight in a dense forest. The most striking structure is the Marina Bay Sands hotel and casino complex. It gives the appearance of a cruise ship that fell out of the sky and landed on three tall buildings. There is an observation deck on the very top, but we never made it up there during our time in Singapore. The rainy weather, the quest for visas for Vietnam, and a mission to recover a misplaced IPad kept us occupied.

Singapore has a reputation of being a very clean and safe city, especially for one of it’s considerable size, and it certainly lived up to that. There’s no sign of homelessness, little if any litter, and no beggars at all. And unlike in most other big cities, there’s no visible police presence. In our five days there, we only saw police cars twice, and they were both in the exclusive neighborhood around the Vietnam Embassy. In New York or Paris, you are serenaded to sleep by sirens, but we didn’t hear a single one in Singapore.

A siren went off in my head when I returned to our hotel room after running an errand the day after we arrived. Annie and the kids wanted to know if I knew where the IPad was. When we travel on airplanes, I keep the IPad in a pocket designed specifically for such a device in a travel vest I brought along on the trip. It’s a Scottevest and it has around 27 pockets in it, for ID cards, your phone, sunglasses, maps, pretty much anything you don’t want to be carrying in your hands when you travel. A co-worker of mine at the radio station who travels a lot lent it to me and it’s been great. You load it up and feel a bit like a burro as you walk through the airport, but when you get to security, you take it off, put it in a bin and stroll confidently through the checkpoint, hands free. And the IPad was in the Scottevest when we got on the plane in Brisbane, but I got it out for Ben to use as we headed for Singapore.

Normally, the IPad is one of the main distractions on a flight, with all the apps and books we have loaded on there. But Etihad Airlines has a fantastic in-flight entertainment system called the Ebox, which offers a wide selection of TV shows, movies and games to enjoy for free during the flight. I slipped the IPad into the seat back pocket in front of Ben when we were getting ready to take off, and left it there when we de-planed in Singapore.

I felt horrible about leaving the IPad behind. I’m always on the kids about remembering things, and here good old Dad had failed big time. Part of the pain, of course, was the cost. We spent the money on the IPad figuring it was a good investment for the trip. We loaded it up with books to read, plus it had a lot of apps and was Ben’s major entertainment device. He played Madden Football on it, along with several racing games and some military games, as well as catching up with friends from back home via Facetime, including once when we were in Auckland.

I also found an app that Marley loved to play, where you run a restaurant and have to perform at a certain level to advance to nicer restaurants. We had several travel guides on it as well, which were very helpful as we planned our next step along the way from our current stop.

All that is running through my head as I’m trying to figure out if there’s any chance we could get it back. Annie, a veteran of the airline industry back in her days as a multi-tasker for People Express and an avid business traveler, thought it was a goner. I felt differently because of the experience we had during the flight from Brisbane to Singapore. Etihad provided first-class service and I was optimistic that the crew that goes through the cabin between flights would find it and deal with it properly. I knew I wasn’t the first passenger to leave a pricey electronic device behind, so I was hopeful as I called the Lost and Found department of Etihad at the Singapore Airport and left a voice mail message explaining my plight. That message was not returned for the rest of that day, and with no answer to a few more phone calls I made to the office, my optimism was fading.

I was still feeling pretty low as we went out for lunch the next day at the Marina Sands complex downtown. We took the very efficient and clean MRT Subway system from our hotel to the waterfront complex, looking for something to eat and then something to do. The Marina Sands features a massive high-end shopping complex, with several floors of pricey brands including Gucci, Louis Vitton, Chanel, Armani, etc, etc. It also included an “authorized Apple retailer” where I painfully noticed IPads for sale in the $800 range. That didn’t help my mood much as we hit the food court and found some pretty good choices for lunch, after which we planned to check out the Titanic Exhibit at the adjacent Art and Science museum. My mood improved when my mobile phone rang as I was digging into my Chicken and Rice. The caller was a woman from Etihad, asking for me. Why, yes, they had our prodigal IPad and I just needed to call the main office at the airport and make arrangements to pick it up. It was one of the better moments of the trip so far for me, and made the rest of the day very enjoyable.

It was just after the good news from the airline that Ben and I decided to get a couple of banana smoothies at a nearby stand in the mall food court. As the smoothies were being made, I glanced to the left and saw a guy in his 20s who looked to be wearing a Reds hat. My mood was brightened by the good news of the discovery of the IPad, I decided to go over and say hi. He didn’t appear to speak any English, but another person at the table spoke enough to understand me explanation that I was from the city represented by the white wishbone C on the red and black hat. He posed for a quick picture, and then Ben and I headed back to our table to finish our smoothies.

One of the main reasons we had chosen Singapore as a stop along the way was because Annie had a former co-worker who had moved there a little over a month before we were scheduled to be there. We were looking forward to seeing him, but he had a busy work schedule it turned out, and was only available one of the five nights we were going to be in Singapore, so we made plans to see him then.

We also had a friend from our neighborhood in Madeira who had just started a two-year assignment in Singapore with the San Francisco-based company he had worked for in Cincinnati. He had a busy work week as well, but managed to free up some time early one evening to meet us for dinner. Since he had done some previous shorter stints in Singapore, he suggested we meet at a local landmark, a mixture of a lion and fish fountain, which sprayed water out of it’s mouth into the bay. We picked a spot that had some outdoor seating and took in the view over some appetizers and drinks. The sun was setting and our companion informed us that pretty soon we would be treated to a light show that they put on every night from the top of the Marina Bay Sands across the water. The display was loosely timed to some electronic music that played over a series of speakers pointed toward the water. It went on for about ten to fifteen minutes, and was a great backdrop for catching up with a friend from back home.

We caught up with Annie’s former co-worker the next night at a food center a short walk from our hotel. The food center, or hawker stands as they are called, was one of a series of such places that Singapore is well-known for. We first saw one on Anthony Bourdain’s Layover show on the Travel Show a few weeks before we launched on the trip. They feature about three dozen food stands, selling mostly Asian food, with many tables and seating in the center of the complex.

The moment you walk into the open-air food center, you are approached by guys holding menus trying to get you to take a seat and then order food from their stands. We each found something that sounded tasty and all the dishes we chose were very flavorful and very affordable, most for under $10. The third and final night we ate at the hawker stand, we met up not only with Annie’s former co-worker but also a former Comair pilot that Annie and I had be-friended when we were out one night in Northern Kentucky about six or seven years ago. We hadn’t heard from him in quite some time, but he chimed in on Facebook when Annie posted something about being in Singapore. It was great to see him as well as we caught up on old times.

On our final full day in Singapore, I played a round of golf with our friend from back home who is on a two-year work assignment. We played the Marina Bay Golf Club, which is the only 18-hole public golf course in Singapore.

The main attraction of the golf course is the location, just across the bay from the Central Business District, giving players fantastic views of the Singapore skyline. The other dominating feature unfortunately is the construction visible all around the entire course. At one point, I paused and counted 29 cranes within view of a single hole.

The course also had several light poles used for the night golf sessions it offered a few nights a week. Those also took away from the peaceful feeling I usually enjoy on the golf course. But I tried to ignore that and focus on the golf and the good time I was having with my friend from back home and the other player we were paired with. His name was Anson and he told us on the second tee that it was his first time playing with "strangers" as he put it and he was a bit nervous about it. I pointed to my partner in crime from the states and told Anson that they didn't come much stranger that us, and that put him at ease some.

Anson seemed to relax some as the round went along and we cheered on his many good shots, including a birdie chip-in on the back side. Heavy rains forced the clearing of the course, so we waited out the delay at the restaurant on the golf course. We had a nice chat with Anson, as he talked more about the thought process he had when he got up that morning: call some friends and play with them, or forge into the unknown and play with strangers. After we exchanged business cards, I told him I'd like to think that the strangers he played with were now his friends.

Planes, trains and automobiles

2012-02-29T17:50:00.000-08:00

Annie loves airports, I love subway systems, Ben loves exotic cars and Marley loves Facebook. We've gotten plenty of airport action so far on this trip, just a bit of mass transit, exotic cars in Los Angeles, Sydney, Brisbane and Singapore, and Facebook when we’ve had internet, which has been sporadic.

The very first airport we flew through on this trip was one of our favorites. Detroit has some futuristic architecture and a ceiling over their people movers that changes colors. The airport at Savusavu in Fiji was the most primitive one we’ve ever seen: just a landing strip and a small cinder-block building.

The one in Lambasa in Fiji was just a little bit bigger, with a seating area and a place that sold snacks and soft drinks.

The Auckland Airport was very efficient, as getting through customs was a breeze. That process in Melbourne was more like mid-summer in Central Florida when there is no breeze and the humidity makes your sweat sweat. For whatever reason it took more than an hour to get through customs there, maybe because the Australian Open was going on.

The best part of the Brisbane Airport was the airline we were flying on to Singapore: Etihad. Our love for Australia made parting truly sweet sorrow as we boarded our flight for the nearly eight-hour long journey to Singapore.

Once on board, our sorrow started to subside as we enjoyed first-class service back in economy class. The flight attendants were very kind and friendly, and, we were informed by a PA announcement, fluent in just about every language you would want to be fluent in.

Australia became even more of a distant memory once we got into the free on-flight entertainment system, called the Ebox. It features all kinds of things to do to pass the time on a long flight, including games, TV shows, and movies. It also provided some entertainment during the pre-flight instructions on how to use an oxygen mask.

That individual is clearly not happy about the oxygen masks dropping down in flight. Fortunately for us, that scenario never played out as we took off, and headed north and west some 3300 nautical miles from Brisbane to Singapore. All four of us settled in, and flipped through the menu to choose our entertainment for the flight.

Annie and I both separately watched Ides of March, the George Clooney movie shot last year mostly in and around Cincinnati. I was a bit worried that the scenes of the Queen City would make me homesick, but I actually enjoyed seeing shots of our hometown. Plus, it helped make a long flight pass fairly quickly. Unlike our experience in Melbourne, getting through customs in Singapore took about ten minutes. We had heard great things about the MRT subway system, but were unsure of the logistics of getting where we needed to go on it, so we grabbed a cab and headed to our hotel, leaving the subway for later in our five-night stay in Singapore.

Finding a hotel in Singapore that could accommodate a family of a four in a location that was friendly to the MRT at a decent price was a bit of a challenge. I settled on the Hotel Royal, which boasted of a “family room” big enough for four people. When we checked in, we found a decent-sized room, equipped with a queen-sized bed and a single. And a lot of floor space. So, I went back down to the front desk and talked to the woman who checked us in. I asked if there was some other sleeping arrangement they had that would truly accommodate four people. She looked at me with a big smile and said quite cheerfully that, no, there was nothing she could do. Sure, we could get a rollaway for $50 a night. I quickly declined that option and headed back up to the room to report my findings to Annie and the kids.

Waking up the next morning, I carefully stepped over my son, still sleeping on the floor, to make some coffee for Annie and me. Early on in our trip, Ben established his fondness for floor sleeping, even when not one, but two beds were an option. When we were in Napier, New Zealand, I found a very affordable cottage, whose owner was willing at my request to give us a fourth night for free for booking three nights. It had three bedrooms, giving Marley and Ben their own bedrooms, which has rarely happened on our excursion. In that cottage, the room Ben had contained two single beds. Apparently unable to decide which bed to sleep in, he piled up the comforters and pillows and slept on the floor for our four nights there.

With that precedent established, he was the perfect candidate to spend the night on the floor in our “family room” at the Hotel Royal in Singapore.

One of the most time-consuming aspects of this trip as we go along is spending time at one stop, planning for the next. That reality meant that on our first day in Singapore we had to get to the Vietnamese Embassy and apply for visas, since we had already booked a flight to Hanoi only five days away. Before leaving Brisbane, I had researched the location of the Vietnamese Embassy, and it turned out to not be about 7 kilometers away from our hotel. The easy thing to do would have been to grab a cab and hit the embassy. But we had heard from a friend who works at times in Singapore that the subway system is extremely easy to use and very efficient. The subway stop closest to our hotel was a ten-minute walk away, so we lathered up in sunscreen, and hit the streets of Singapore, braving the sun, just fifty miles or so north of the Equator.

Getting to the Vietnamese embassy meant catching a ride on the North/South or Red Line to the Circle Comething or Yellow line at the Bishan station, and take the Circle Line to the Holland Village station. Once there, we navigated our way on foot on the twenty-minute or so walk to the Embassy. When we got off the train, I noticed that it was about 11:45 am. Having some familiarity with government workers going back to my time in the state capitol of West Virginia in Charleston, I was a bit concerned that we might be arriving at the embassy just in time for a lunch break.

Our stroll toward the small slice of Vietnamese land within Singapore took us past some very impressive large homes, most likely belonging to some highly placed diplomats. During our walk, I noticed a woman scurrying to and fro with some paper in her hand, clearly looking for an address with which she was unfamiliar, and she seemed to be facing some sort of deadline. After a while, she was heading in the same direction as us, and we could see flags flying high above an official-looking building that had a gate blocking the entrance. As Annie and I and the kids approached the complex, figuring it was our goal, the woman went into a full sprint, and when she got to the iron gate at the entrance, she slipped through an entrance and sprinted up the driveway.

When we got to the gate, I pulled out my Iphone to take a picture and noticed the time was 12:04. I then glanced at the gold sign on the marble post to the left, and saw the sign that said: Office Hours: 9am-12 and 2-4. (Typical government hours!) I then saw the words: Visa hours, 9am-12pm. No! That can’t be!! Instead of taking a photo to document another fascinating aspect of our journey, I herded Annie and the kids inside to see if we still had a chance to get our visa processing process processed.

Luckily, the workers inside the embassy didn’t seem in a hurry to get to lunch, and pointed us in the direction of the forms we needed to fill out to get our visas. Annie and I furiously scribbled in the necessary information as quickly as we could and gave them to the workers, who said we would get them back on Thursday. With that, we grabbed some lunch and took the MRT to Chinatown to check out that scene.

I’ve had the chance to experience subways and train systems in several cities, both in the states and in Europe and part of their charm is the grittiness on a variety of levels. Dirt, grime and graffiti are typically just part of the experience. The MRT in Singapore could double as a hospital operating room. The cars are extremely clean, as are the stations themselves.

Of the subways and train systems I’ve been on, only Zurich comes close the to cleanliness of the Singapore system. Passengers move about in a very orderly fashion, and instead of using paper tickets like most subway systems, Singapore uses green cards that passengers recycle in order to get their deposit back. It means no tickets strewn about the cars or station floors. They seem to be on to something.

Singapore has given us, and especially Ben, the chance to see some exotic cars. Our hotel room is facing a fairly busy road, Newton Road, and whenever Ben hears the throaty growl of a powerful engine, he’ll race to the window to see if he can catch a glimpse of the source of that beautiful noise. He’s been rewarded with a few Ferrari sightings, which we’ve also seen on the streets of Singapore. We’ve also seen a Lamborghini in Brisbane,

A Maserati in Sydney,

A Ferrari in Sydney,

And an Audi R8 in Auckland.

We saw several exotic cars on our very first stop on the trip, in Los Angeles back in December. The specter of seeing Ferraris, and Lamborghinis and Bugattis was one of the main reasons we decided to stay in Southern California for a few days before heading to Fiji. Ben was thrilled when we stopped in a few luxury car stores, where the level of patience with our window-shopping varied by location.

We hope to see a few more exotic cars in our last couple of days in Singapore, in part because we don’t expect to have that experience much over the next few weeks as we dive into Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand.

Easing out of Australia and our comfort zones

2012-02-27T16:42:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite lines from comedian Stephen Wright is “You can’t have everything—where would you put it?” That applied in a sort of inverse way to our 35 days in Australia. We flew into Melbourne near the end of January and were flying out of Brisbane five weeks later. Those two cities are about 16 hundred miles apart, and Australia is a country best experienced, we had been told more than once, on the ground. We wanted to see more of the country, but knew there just wasn’t enough time to see as much as we hoped. Our ground strategy proved to be a solid one as we wound our way first down the Great Ocean Road, to the south and west of Melbourne, then back to the east and north in the direction of Sydney and then Brisbane.

After spending much of our 27 days in New Zealand in the car, trying to see as much as we could, we opted for a more relaxed pace in Australia. Our time in New Zealand was marked by several one-night stays, which usually meant driving as far as we felt comfortable during the day, spending some time finding a place to stay, eating dinner, then watching a movie or some TV at the hotel or apartment or cottage. The decision to have more two-and three-night stays in Australia was more relaxing and gave us a much better feel for our various stops along the way. But it also meant leaving some things off the "to-see" list.

Going to Perth in Western Australia was completely out of the question and we wound up crossing off Adelaide in South Australia as well. That was just a little too far to the west to give us some doable drives back toward Sydney and then Brisbane. There was also the romantic ideal of renting a four-wheel drive vehicle and forging our way into the outback.

Our fear, however, was that the reality would be that you drive for hours on end to get somewhere where there is nothing. Back home in Ohio, we have Indiana for that, so we decided that the only Outback we would see would be in Kenwood.

Ayers Rock, or Uluru, also had some appeal. It’s a striking geological formation that lends itself to dramatic pictures and can be seen from outer space.

But the nearest town, Alice Springs, is a few hundred kilometers away from Uluru and a long way away from Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. So that was scratched off our destination list as well. Now that our time in Australia is behind us, I think most of the choices we made were wise ones.

Seeing Great Ocean Road and the 12 Apostles was spectacular. I’ve never seen anything like it and it was a definite highlight of our time so far on this trip.

We also loved our time in the seaside town of Lorne, which provided our first koala and kangaroo sightings, as well as the kookaburra, the bird that makes a very loud call that sounds like a series of laughs.

That gave us an idea for a new animal club, but we were a bit bothered by the only conceivable acronym: The KKK. While our group would have nothing but the best of intentions for animals of all species, including the human kind, those three letters together have something of an ugly past, so we tabled that one.

Those three creatures were certainly a reoccurring highlight for the entire family. We stopped by several sanctuaries where visitors could get varying degrees of contact with kangaroos and koalas. At one called Potoroo outside Merimbula on the Sapphire Coast between Melbourne and Sydney, we got to touch a koala for the first time. The keeper holding the koala for us to pet said she had never seen one in the wild, which made us realize how special the three sightings we had during our drive were.

Kangaroos are a bit more common and we saw several of them along the way, and at three sanctuaries got the opportunity to feed them. Annie was smitten immediately, and it’s difficult to resist their gentle nature and cute mannerisms.

We also discovered that they really like the spot at their lower neck and upper chest scratched. They will definitely be one of the things we miss the most about Australia.

Our transition from Down Under to Asia is going to mean some changes in the overall feel of the trip. Heading into Indochina means English won’t be the first language in many cases. Fiji, New Zealand and Australia have all be extremely easy from that standpoint. There are some phrases that take some getting used to, especially on Australia. How ya going, instead of how’s it going. Good on ya, rather than good for you. And they really do say G’day mate a lot. Another thing that you discover on an extended visit to Australia is that Foster’s is most certainly NOT “Australian for beer!” In my excursions into the bottle shops, I rarely if ever saw Foster’s for sale and never saw anyone drinking one during our time there. XXXX, Carling, Pure Blonde, Carlton Draught and Victoria Bitter seemed to be the most common. Of those, I’d have to say Pure Blonde was my favorite, it’s a pilsner, that goes down easy on a hot day or with a plate of fish and chips.

Much like in New Zealand, the people we encountered along the way in Australia were without exception very friendly. Everyone seemed happy to see us, and those that we engaged in conversation about the trip seemed to have a genuine interest in our adventure. We shared travel stories with many people, and picked up some good tips for our future destinations, which we plan to put to good use.

One other thing that sticks out as we leave behind the southern hemisphere is how just letting things happen has led us to some great experiences. A random stop in the town of Thames in New Zealand dropped us into an outdoor summer street festival.

Our arrival in Melbourne came about the day before Australia Day, their biggest holiday of the summer.

Our time there also co-incided with the Australia Open, with tennis festivities all around. In Manly, north of Sydney, we found ourselves in the middle of the Australian Open of Surfing, giving us a great taste of summertime life in Australia. A casual late-afternoon early-evening stroll through the Royal Botanical Gardens in Sydney gave us glimpses of several weddings as couples took advantage of a summer Saturday.

In the gardens we also saw hundreds of fruit bats, flying around and gathering in tall trees making a very unusual sound and emitting an unforgettable odor.

We also enjoyed the buzz of a massive crowd queing up for a movie showing at the Open Air Theatre of Sydney, with the Opera House and Harbour Bridge as a backdrop. None of those preceding events were planned, we just stumbled across them.

When planning this trip back home in the comforting cloak of familiarity in Madeira, one of the goals was to experience completely different cultures and surroundings. That’s a challenging proposition. Australia and New Zealand have been pretty easy. Driving on the other side of the road took a little getting used to, but there are helpful signs at every turn to KEEP LEFT. In Sydney, they did their best to help pedestrians to keep from becoming casualties.

But in many ways, the previous weeks have seemed a lot like visiting places in the States. The food is pretty much the same, with the exception of vegemite of course.

And “same” is not why we took this trip. It’s time for something completely different as we head to Singapore and then Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand. Bangerts, you're not in Madeira anymore!

Sun, surf and sand in Sydney

2012-02-24T14:19:00.001-08:00

My first job in radio was in Charleston, West Virginia. I started on Labor Day 1982 at V100, WVAF-FM. I got the job at the tender age of 21 after being an intern at 96 Rock in Hamilton, Ohio. What started as a 90-day internship in January of ’82, grew into a fill-in job at Rock 96 well into the summer. My news director there was Larry Davis, who now is a TV reporter at Local 12 in Cincinnati. He was friends with Bob Schumann who did some consulting work for V100, and he heard they were looking for an afternoon news anchor. He told Larry Davis, who told me, and I applied for and got the job, launching what I hoped would be an exciting radio career. It was one of the most enjoyable times of my life. There were about 4-5 newspeople, 6-8 disc jockeys and we were all about the same age and for most of us, it was our first job in the industry. The station did very well in the ratings, ranked number one in most demographics, and we had some quite enjoyable evenings out on the town.

Capitol Street in downtown Charleston had several nightspots and there would actually be something of a buzz when the V100 crew at whatever destination we happened to choose for the night. The radio station also had a softball team, the Killer Vs, and we would get rock star attention when our caravan came to town to take on the locals.

We would hang out with other media types in town, including some TV reporters we got to know while covering stories. One of them was a blonde who personified the reporter Don Henley mentions in the early 80s song Dirty Laundry: “there’s a bubble-headed bleach blonde who comes on at 5, she can tell you about the plane crash with a gleam in her eye…It’s interesting when people die, give them Dirty Laundry!” On one night when were were out on the town, the aforementioned reporter and I were casually talking and she noticed the University of Florida golf shirt I had on. I had gotten it earlier that year when I went to Florida on spring break.

It wasn’t your typical spring break trip for a 20-year old. My parents, in a rare display of discretionary spending, took me (par-TAY with Hank and Marilyn!!) and my cousin from Columbus, Jeff, who is a year older than me. The shirt purchase was one of those you make that is really satisfying. It didn’t scream out that you had taken a trip somewhere, plus at that time, I kind of liked the U of F. That was well before their ugly history with Ohio State in both football and basketball title games and before the whole Tim Tebow thing. Blondie asked if I went to the University of Florida, and-just because she seemed like someone who would believe this sort of thing-I told her yes, that I had been on the surfing team there. She seemed appropriately impressed and I got a good silent laugh at a harmless fib. Had the story been true, and had I gone on to become an accomplished surfer, I probably would have heard of Manly Beach in New South Wales Australia before we arrived as part of our visit to Sydney and discovered the Australian Open of Surfing.

Traveling constantly can be a bit of a grind. I mean, I’m thrilled to be on this trip, and the bonding going on with our family is priceless as are the incredible variety of experiences we are, well, experiencing. But packing up every two or three days as we’ve done in Australia after a month in New Zealand where we had several one off stops can wear on you after a while. On transition days, you spend a couple of hours just getting everything back in suitcases and backpacks and back in the boot of the car and hitting the road. I was starting to question the entire process until we got to Sydney.

We had gotten a wide variety of opinions on Sydney before we launched our trip and then, again, once we were in Australia. More than one person had told us that Sydney was the best city they had ever been to, while others, especially some people in the Melbourne area said it was just another big city. After spending a few days in Sydney, I couldn’t disagree with those people more.

Only a handful of major cities are blessed with a setting such as the one surrounding Sydney. Nature has provided a gorgeous harbor, that man (and woman I’m sure) has enhanced with a pair of iconic structures. The Harbour Bridge connects Sydney with the shore to the north and does so in a classic Art Deco style. The bridge opened in 1932 and is still the major thoroughfare for Sydneysiders to get to and from the northlands.

An even more recognizable landmark sits gracefully on Bennelong Point, just to the east and south of the Harbour Bridge. The Sydney Opera House is one of a handful of landmarks around the world where you immediately say, “I’m somewhere special!”

We took the ferry in from the north, having found a two-bedroom apartment in the seaside village of Manly, where (completely unbeknownst to us when we booked the place) the Australian Open of Surfing was going on. (More on that later) The ferry route winds it’s way south from Manly through a picturesque bay, with houses lining the hills on each side, giving it a very Southern European feel. The tops of the tallest buildings in Sydney are visible over the hills, but not the Opera House or Harbour Bridge. The anticipation builds as the ferry cruises closer and closer until finally, it runs past the last land mass, and there they are in all their glory.

The view is breath-taking and both landmarks are even more impressive in person than in photographs. To the right is the bridge, to the left is the Opera House, presenting a challenging decision on which way to go once you’ve gotten off the ferry. The Opera House was one of my top destinations for the entire trip, so we took a hard left and made our way toward the building that some describe as a series of turtles giving each other piggy back rides. A stroll around the outside of the building gave me an appetite for paying to go inside, but first we all had appetites of another kind to quench, so we grabbed a surprisingly affordable lunch at one of the outdoor cafes nearby. Annie and Ben were more interested in visiting the Sydney Aquarium, while Marley and I decided to book a guided tour of the Opera House.

The hour-long tour had many highlights, as we went inside the various performance halls in the building. We saw a performer rehearsing for La Soiree in the smallest theatre of the five that the tour took us to. The guide led us up a series of stairs, pointing out architectural details along the way, stopping twice to play a video providing background information on the planning and construction of the Opera House. No photos are allowed during the course of the tour, and that point was underlined more as we approached the Concert Hall. Inside, the Sydney Symphony Orchestra was rehearsing and early the day before, someone in a tour group apparently snapped a picture, resulting in a day-long ban on tours sitting in for a few minutes on the orchestra’s rehearsal. We all glanced around the group, eyeing one another and wondering who, if anyone, would be such an offender among us.

The tour guide unlocked the door, and when he opened it, out came the most beautiful sound I had ever heard. Rich notes cascaded from the floor below, as the musicians dressed in casual clothing worked their way through a section of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto #4, which they would be performing the next night. The beauty of the music brought tears to my eyes, but I’m admittedly the weepy sort. I get misty-eyed during that goofy intro before Bengal games when the silhouette of Paul Brown walks across the scoreboard and there is that little beam of light that comes from his eyes. I can’t watch the “wanna have a catch?” part of Field of Dreams without a box of Kleenex within reach. A little bit of red wine and Dvorak’s Symphony #9 and I’m a complete mess. But still, this was something that was very special, and it was even more so getting to experience it with Marley, who has shown some signs of musical talent. It's one thing to just see one of the world's most iconic landmarks, it's even greater to do that with your daughter. I know it’s something we’ll both remember for the rest of our lives.

Another thing we will all remember for quite some time is the Australian Open of Surfing that was going on. When we were trying to find a place to stay while in Sydney, more than one person mentioned Manly. Securing accommodation there was something of a challenge, but we managed to find a lodge with a two-bedroom unit that could put us up for three nights. Once we made our first trip into Sydney, we extended that to four nights, knowing we would want to check out the beach scene at Manly as well as make another voyage on the ferry into Australia’s largest city.

Manly had an incredible buzz going on as surfers and their followers filled the outdoor and indoor spaces of the city. A Surf Stadium had been erected along the beach, along with a Skate Bowl for the "sk8r boi" crowd. The day we chose to hit the sand was another one drenched in sun, and we plopped ourselves down on the beach. The surfers competed in heats of four, which lasted 20 minutes. They would each wear a different colored jersey: one in red, another in yellow, a third in black and the other in white. Some clearly had bigger followings than others, and one of the more popular ones was Matt Wilkinson. Commentary from a pair of announcers broadcast over speakers toward the water let us know that Wilco, as he is called, was considered one of the more colorful characters surfing had seen in the last few years, so we decided he was one of our favorites.

Another was Jordy Smith who was patient enough after competing to take the time to have his photo taken with many admirers of various ages, including a certain 12-year old girl from Ohio.

The excitement from the beach transferred to the streets of Manly. Restaurants and bars were overflowing with people, giving the scene the sense of something big happening. There was talk of members of Pink Floyd being in attendance, and a local weekly newspaper ran a photo of four guys who were supposedly part of one of my favorite bands of all time, but I didn’t recognize any of them. The guys in the photo definitely were not David Gilmour or Roger Waters, and not even Nick Mason. There was also talk that Tony Hawk, the skateboarding legend was around, but we saw no trace of him. Still, it was fun to see the crowds pouring off the ferry from Sydney during the late-morning and early-afternoon hours. The atmosphere was truly electric, and that just added to the buzz we felt from our time in the Sydney area. Who knows, maybe someday, we’ll be Syndeysiders, if just for a while.

Nowhere, man!

2012-02-14T13:00:00.000-08:00

Every now and then it’s nice to be nowhere. So far during our stay in Australia, we’ve seen many amazing sights, including several well-documented sightings of koalas, kangaroos and kookaburras. We spent several days in Melbourne, took a drive down the Great Ocean Road to see the 12 Apostles rock formations and spent some time on the Mornington Peninsula and Phillip Island. Those last two spots are very popular getaway destinations for people living in the Melbourne area. So we didn’t necessarily feel like we were off the beaten path very much, something that had been a goal of ours during the course of our trip. That changed when we got to the village of Seaspray.

Our post-Melbourne area plans were to drive along the Victoria coast toward Sydney, which is in the state of New South Wales. About 150 miles east of Melbourne is a stretch of sand called the 90-Mile Beach. I haven’t figured out why it’s not called the 145 kilometre beach, since nothing else here has been measured in miles. Our limited amount of research made it seem like an attractive destination, despite the fact, or maybe because of the fact that there are no significant towns on the sliver of sand that goes on uninterrupted for mile after kilometer after mile.

We were desperate for some internet access, and we found a cottage online offering free wi-fi in the town of Seaspray which had a rate in our price range. Nothing fancy from the outside, but the interior has been nicely renovated. There are no restaurants in Seaspray, and just a general store where you could buy a six-pack of Crown Lager for $25. I discovered that fact when I put the six-pack on the counter along with a bag of potato chips and the woman told me the total was $29. I was only half-way paying attention to her as I gave her a $50 bill and when she handed me back my change, I asked just how much the beer was. It wasn’t a look that could kill that was in her eye when I gently pushed the six-pack back in her direction and asked for my money back, but it was a glare that could have put me in ICU for a few days.

With little to choose from in Seaspray, we took the twenty-minute drive inland to the town of Sale leading to the discovery of several restaurants and a grocery store that didn’t have Manhattanesque prices for beer and other necessities. The vibe was definitely more laid-back and off the beaten path than what we’ve seen so far, and that’s been a welcome change. One disappointment was the fact that the beach at Seaspray featured waves that were a little too rough for us to feel comfortable with Ben and Marley launching their boogie boards into the water. It was Friday and the beach was only patrolled by the life saving squads on the weekend, so we waited until Saturday to head to the surf, and we had our few meters of the 90 Mile Beach to ourselves. We enjoyed the quiet setting there for the two nights we were in Seaspray, glad to be someplace that didn’t have a number of attractions featured in brochures at information centers all over the coast. On our way to Seaspray, we stopped for lunch in a town called Foster. When we went into the information site and started talking with a man working there, he asked where we were headed and we replied, “Seaspray.” His reply: “How in the hell did you find Seaspray?” We told him we found it online and were attracted by the free wi-fi. He seemed to find that an acceptable response and we were on our way to our little slice of nowhere.

We had gotten a glimpse of Nowhere at our stop in the town of Cowes on Phillip Island. Not far from the hotel room we rented was a waterfront park. At the entrance of the park is a sign bearing it’s name:

It took me a couple of glances to realize that Erehwon Park was nowhere backwards. That got me to thinking of a segment from Weekend Update on Saturday Night Live when Chevy Chase was the anchor. He did a story on the death of Professor Backwards, a comedian who had been shot to death during a robbery in Georgia. In doing the story, Chase said "Professor Backwards, the entertainer who had the bizarre ability to speak backwards, was killed today in College Park, Georgia. Passersby apparently ignored the Professor's cries of 'Pleh! Pleh!'" The kids got a big kick out of that, so now “pleh” has become part of the family vocabulary.

As we continued to move forward in our stay in Australia, we were closing in on our departure date of February 27^th from Brisbane. With about 2000 kilometers or about 1200 miles between Melbourne and Brisbane, we knew we had some pavement to cover. That led us to buckle up and drive about 400 kilometers or about 250 miles to the town of Merimbula, a small fishing village along the Sapphire Coast of New South Wales. The plan was to make it our mid-point stop before heading to Sydney, with the idea being to spend two nights there.

After our first night in Merimbula, we decided to add an additional night to our stay there. Turns out the extremely affordable apartment we were renting was a five-minute walk to a very nice beach. The waves were big enough for Marley and Ben to get on their boogie boards, but not big enough for us to be concerned about their safety in the water. They both caught some nice waves that gave them solid rides ashore. That made me feel better about the fact that we had been dragging around the boogie boards and beach chairs we bought in Lorne a couple of weeks earlier in the trip and hadn’t been able to use them.

Another factor in the decision to stay in Merimbula another day was the fact that we had purchased internet time that was good for 6 days. The plan we bought was one that allowed more than one person to be on a computer on the account at a time. That would let Ben and Marley to both be doing online schoolwork through the Kahn Academy.

Our next major move is toward Sydney. Heading into the trip, several people said Sydney was one of their favorite cities ever. Since we've gotten to Australia, we have talked to many locals who say it's just another big city and not to spend too much time there. Some of that could be due to the fact that it came from people in the Melbourne area and the two cities have something of a rivalry. Melbourne and the surrounding area was fantastic and something we all enjoyed. We're giving Sydney the same amount of time that we gave Melbourne: 4 days and 3 nights. We'll see if she can measure up to the best that Victoria had to offer.

Animalistic in Australia

2012-02-11T13:53:00.000-08:00

For the past couple of days I’ve had that silly children’s song about the kookaburra in my head. I don’t know why as a child growing up in Youngstown Ohio I had the occasion to sing a song about a bird in a gum tree on the other side of the world, but I did. The first couple of times it plays in your head, it’s a pleasant reminder of what certainly must have been a simpler time in your life. After about the fiftieth time it plays in your head, you’re ready to go on a kookaburra hunt while pondering what wine would pair nicely with some grilled kookaburra.

We didn’t have to hunt for the first kookaburra bird we saw, he found us. It was at the cottage we rented in the town of Lorne along the Great Ocean Road southwest of Melbourne. That’s where we saw a koala in the tree above the cottage when we first got there. The excitement over the koala sighting overshadowed the sight of the kookaburra, which was sitting low on a tree branch and didn’t flinch at all as we approached to get a good look at it. We didn’t know at the time that it was a kookaburra, or that it and others like it was responsible for the loud laughing sounds we would hear coming from high up in the forest in Lorne and in other places we stayed. Its identity was confirmed at a nature center later in our stay in Australia. The kookaburra has been a nice addition to our obsession with and study of koalas and kangaroos.

More than halfway into our 34-day stay in Australia, we haven’t seen quite as many kangaroo as I thought we would. The two places we’ve seen them the most have been in the coastal town of Lorne, and at the Gunnamatta Golf Course at St. Andrews Beach on the southern tip of the Mornington Peninsula. In Lorne, we would take about a ten minute walk from the cottage we rented up in the hills amongst the eucalyptus trees, and go to a field where we could see them from about 50 to 75 yards away. At the golf course, we got up close and personal with them, getting within about 25 to 30 feet away. We liked the golf course so much that we played it two days in a row. They’ve got a great $25 twilight rate and it was a quick drive from the cottage we were renting, plus being that it was late in the day, it gave us a better chance of seeing some wildlife. The roos were near the 8^th green both days. The first day, there were two of them and they didn’t seem phased at all by our interest in them.

The second day we played there, their roo twosome had grown to a threesome, and this time they were lounging just off to the side of the green.

At one point, they all laid down, just kind of chilling as we played through. Then, when we teed off on number 9, one of them stood up on his hind legs, and started scratching his chest and belly like a man getting up from his towel on the beach. It was probably providing a great laugh for the other roos, as he was probably mocking the silly tourists, taking their pictures and shooting their videos. For those of us not accustomed to seeing kangaroos in such a setting, it was great fun. The kids got a big kick out of the pictures and videos and we took when we got back to the cottage.

Like animals letting their young get used to the wild, we’ve been allowing Ben and Marley to gain some independence during this trip. We pick our spots, making sure the situation is safe for a pair of 12-year olds. There have been about three or four times we have made them dinner in whatever hotel room or cottage we’ve booked and gone out to have a “date night.” They seem a little too happy to get rid of Mom and Dad for an hour or so, but that’s fine. We’ve also sent them on mini-field trips, just to get them used to fending for themselves in an area that’s new to them. In Akaroa near Christchurch, we gave them some money to go to the grocery store to get some microwave popcorn (a staple on this trip since every place we’ve stayed has had a microwave) and some drinks. Kind of like at home when we send them down to Madeira Mart for beer, smokes and lottery tickets. Just kidding, Annie quit smoking after all.

When we got to Cowes on Phillip Island and were getting settled into our hotel room, we sent the kids out on an exploratory mission. The center of the village was just around the corner, so we gave them some cash to get some snacks and about a half an hour later they returned with a bag of goodies and some change and a useful recon report on the town’s layout. They seem to enjoy the freedom it gives them and you can see them bonding even more.

The main reason we put Phillip Island on our itinerary was the Penguin Parade. On the southwestern tip of the small island, Little Penguins, the smallest type of penguin in the world, return from the ocean at dusk every night. They cross the beach and make their way up into the sandy, bush covered scrubland, finding their burrows for safe haven for the night. The park has boardwalks that make their way from the visitor center down to the beach, where two viewing stands are set up. The stands hold a total of about 3800 people, and light poles provide illumination for the flightless birds as they waddle ashore in groups of about a dozen or so at a time. They hesitate as they first emerge from the water, trying to gain the courage for the most threatening part of their daily routine. The penguins pause from time to time, but then when they are about halfway across the beach, they lower their heads, stick their little feathery butts out and waddle with great determination toward the safety of the bushes and trees that cover the land where they have dug out their burrows. This is where the real fun begins for the paying customers. The boardwalks wind their way through the bushes and the penguins waddle inland right beside them.

On the night we were there, which happened to be clear, giving us a great view of the full moon, we got very close to penguins several times. The park rangers make it very clear that no pictures are allowed and they also informed the crowd that any attempt to touch a penguin would probably meet with a sharp response from the furry little creatures that apparently sport sharp beaks that they aren’t afraid to use. Fortunately, on this occasion of human/penguin interaction, no beaks were deployed in anger, and no blood was shed. It was an experience for which we had great expectations, and those were exceeded.

Another encounter with a young animal species happened completely unexpectedly as we drove from the Mornington Peninsula toward Phillip Island. It was early afternoon and we were looking for some lunch when we came upon a café at a working dairy farm. It featured some animal enclosures where we saw a young lamb and a young cow. In keeping with the trend we’ve had on this trip that started on our flight from Los Angeles to Fiji, the baby child lamb was a noisy little fellow. He bleated more than baaed, pacing around his enclosure, noisily announcing his displeasure at something or someone, possibly me. After all, I had the lamb skewers for lunch, the night after grilling some delicious lamb cutlets at our cottage in St. Andrews Beach. I tried to assure him that it was nothing personal, but I’m not sure he bought it.

Koalas have been more elusive during our time in Australia than kangaroo have. We had the one that welcomed us to our cottage in Lorne, but the only other one we saw in that area was in some eucalyptus trees on the dirt road leading to our cottage. A few days later, we were driving on a rural road from the Great Ocean Road area toward the Mornington Peninsula when I spotted a furry creature scampering along the right side of the road. It was a koala, who scurried up a tree. I pulled over and we all got out to get a closer view.

It was somewhat surprising to see one so close to the road, but there are road signs instructing drivers what number to call when they see wounded or dead wildlife. We haven’t seen any koala road kill, but we have seen a few kangaroos. The ones we’ve seen near and on Phillip Island have had red x’s sprayed painted on them. My theory is that they are members of a kangaroo gang, and got caught up in a joey deal gone bad, or perhaps it’s more roo on roo crime. You hate to see that.

We love to see koalas and we saw our share at the Koala Conservation Centre on Phillip Island. The park featured boardwalks that rose 10-15 feet off the ground and got viewers up close and personal with koalas. Every single one of them is adorable and we could post picture after picture of them in various stages of sleeping and eating and moving about their tree habitat. The boardwalk was set up very ingeniously, allowing easy movement in and out of where the koalas were hanging out in the trees, sleeping or munching on eucalyptus leaves. It’s just fascinating to see them up close. The most frequent response we’ve gotten to pictures of koala that we’ve posted on is requests to bring one back with us. If there was a way to do that we would. For now, we’ll just have to settle for the many pictures and memories they have given us.

Victor/Victoria

2012-02-06T17:21:00.000-08:00

I’m not sure we’re going to be in the state of Victoria in southeastern Australia long enough to solve it’s obvious identity crisis. The conflict is apparent on the license plates we’ve seen on the cars from Victoria in our first week here. One set of plates says: Victoria-On The Move

The other says: Victoria-The Place To Be.

Okay, which is it? Those seem to be a bit contradictory. If Victoria is The Place To Be, why would you be On The Move? If Victoria is On The Move, then clearly, it’s not The Place to Be. Back in the States, Ohio issues license plates that say, Ohio-the Heart of It All. What if Ohio started issuing another, separate set of license plates? Ones that bore the phrase: Ohio-the Small Intestine of It All. That wouldn’t make much sense and neither do these conflicting plates. Hopefully we won’t have such license plate turmoil in New South Wales or Queensland as we head toward Brisbane for our flight to Singapore on the 27^th of February.

We saw license plates from several Australian states as we loaded up from Lorne and continued south along Great Ocean Road. The primary lure for the portion of the proceedings: the 12 Apostles, or what used to be called the Sow and Piglets. They are rock formations along the Australian Coast that have been eroded away by wind and water over millions of years. The photos we had seen of them looked other worldly and spectacular and they did not disappoint. It’s one of the most beautiful sights in nature that I’ve ever seen. Perfect weather of temperatures in the upper 70s with a light breeze added to the experience.

Some locals told us the sight was even more spectacular in the winter, when the seas come up from Antarctica and slam into the shore with massive force. The forces that created this beauty are also destroying it. In the past twenty years, two arches that connected two of the rock spires have collapsed into the ocean. It’s an unstoppable process that speaks to the powerful forces of nature that constantly shape our planet.

Just to the south of the 12 Apostles is Loch Ard Gorge. At several spots along this part of Australia coastline, those powerful forces have carved a series of gorges inland. Loch Ard gets its name from a ship that smashed into the coastline there in June of 1878. The 37 passengers and 17 crew members were spending their final night on board the ship after 92 days at sea, having departed from London in March. A celebration had been held the evening before, as they expected to arrive in Melbourne the following day. A powerful storm had other plans for the ship, and despite the best efforts of the captain and crew, the ship was thrown against the rocks that lead into the gorge.

Only two people survived: a member of the crew, Tom Pearce and a 19-year old passenger, Eva Carmichael. Their survival can be attributed to the fact that of the several gorges along this part of the coastline, only this one had a sandy beach at its end. The others were just box canyons, leaving no way out.

After both Tom and Eva made it to shore, he found shelter for them and made a place for her to sleep. He eventually managed to find a way out of the gorge, (which to our disappointment was not pointed out in any of the many historical markers around the gorge) and find help. He would go on to live for another 22 years, continuing his career at sea, including some time as a ship’s captain where he survived two other shipwrecks. She would live for another 56 years, and despite their connection of being the only survivors of a terrible tragedy, their lives never intertwined. That certainly wouldn’t be the case these days. You’d see those two dragged out onto every morning TV news program on the 5^th, 10^th, 15^th, 20^th, 25^th, etc etc anniversary of the crash of the Loch Ard.

Our hopes were high that we would not be part of any anniversary of a nautical disaster on any level as we got in line to get on the ferry to Sorrento from Queenscliffe. We caught the 2pm ferry, hoping to get over to the Mornington Peninsula and find a place to stay before everything got booked up on a Saturday night.

Arriving in Sorrento, we were taken by the charm of the bayside village and hoped to find a place somewhere within walking distance of the shops and restaurants there. One of the shops was a beach house rental office and they had a villa available for $500 a night. That tidbit of information sent us across the street to the Sorrento information hut. The woman there explained that coming in after 3pm on a Saturday didn’t enhance our chances of finding anything in town. After a couple of calls, she put us in touch with the owner of a two-bedroom cottage in an area of the peninsula called St. Andrews Beach, about fifteen minutes from Sorrento. It was much more in our price range and even had a tennis court. The cottage, unbeknownst to me when we booked it, was within five to ten minutes driving of several quality looking golf courses.

Once we checked in to the cottage, I saw a book called Golf Courses of the Mornington Peninsula. I was stunned to leaf through the pages and see photo after photo of linksland golf courses that was reminiscent of courses found on Long Island. Everyone of them looked beautiful. The one closest to the cottage is Gunnamatta at St. Andrews Beach and is designed by Tom Doak, who just happens to be my favorite modern golf course architect. He designed Cape Kidnappers in New Zealand near Napier, where we stayed for a few days last month. It is situated on one of the most beautiful pieces of land I’ve ever seen for a golf course. The landscape is as dramatic as you will find anywhere, with fingers of land jutting out over the ocean, and fairway positioned as though they will melt into the sea below. Not a house in sight. I hoped to play there when we were staying in Napier, but the greens fee for a non-New Zealand native was over $400. I sent Cape Kidnappers an email right before we got to Napier, telling them all about the trip, the golf blog I was doing, and my man-crush on Tom Doak. I heard nothing from them while we were in Napier, and when we were at the Napier waterfront, I would look longingly to the south, and see the bluff of Cape Kidnappers and realize I would leave the area without playing there. A few days later, after we had made the ferry crossing from the North Island to the South Island in New Zealand, I got an email from Cape Kidnappers. They would be happy to have me play there at a reduced “media” rate of about half of what the regular foreign rate would be. I was crushed, knowing there was no way I could make it back to Napier to realize my dream of playing that course. However, as has happened more than once on this trip, good karma is appearing and I can’t wait to play the Tom Doak course here. Did I mention I like Tom Doak?

Special Ks

2012-02-01T17:03:00.000-08:00

The images that come to mind when thinking of Australia are as varied as the country itself. There’s the wide open outback, the glittering cities of Sydney and Melbourne on the southeast coast, the Gold Coast area just south of Brisbane, and of course, koalas and kangaroos. We had heard from friends who had been to Australia that kangaroos where everywhere, especially once you get out of the cities. Some had even talked about seeing roo road kill, and I had read where they are a real danger to drivers, especially at dusk and dawn, much like deer in the States. I had also heard and read that there were several sanctuaries where we could see koalas, and figured that was where we were most likely to see the adorable creatures that ewoks were clearly modeled after.

While in Melbourne, where we had good internet access for the most part, I found a cottage outside the coastal town of Lorne, which was offering a good post-holiday rate and separate bedrooms for Annie and I and the kids. The website for the Allenvale cottages featured a koala clinging to a tree branch, with eyes that begged you to fly Qantas airlines sometime soon. The picture didn’t show the koala lounging in a deck chair on the deck of one of the cottages, so it could have been a random eucalyptus tree, of which there are many in Australia. Still, I had hopes of spotting one during our four days there. I just didn’t expect it to happen so soon. I had just pulled our rental car (this time, a sporty-looking Holden Cruze, a model we had seen in New Zealand and hoped to rent in Australia) up to the side of our cottage and got out, and before getting anything out of the boot (a much more charming word than trunk don’t you think?), I looked eagerly up into the nearest eucalyptus tree, and there he was. Our own little one-koala welcoming committee.

After leaving Melbourne Saturday mid-day, we headed in the direction of Lorne, toward the Great Ocean Road. It’s a famous stretch of asphalt that hugs the Australian coastline for a few hundred kilometers. The cottage we had reserved was not available until Sunday night, so we needed a place to stay Saturday night, and thought we might be able to find a place along the way, possibly in the town of Anglesea. Being that it was the final weekend of the summer holiday in Australia, no rooms were to be had there, so we headed a half hour or so down the Great Ocean Road to Lorne. Luckily for us, the woman at the information center there who said they were also all booked up was wrong. We found a room big enough for us at the Lorne Hotel, and it was within easy walking distance of the beach. More magicality!

Knowing we would have a car for about a month, and that much of that month would be spent near beaches, we bought the kids some bargain boogie boards and they enthusiastically hit the water. They had a blast joining the hundreds of others in the water, learning how to work the waves to get the longest ride toward the beach. That fun continued the next day, a cloudless Sunday afternoon, a perfect beach day.

The sandy stretch was filled with people, many enjoying their final day of their summer vacation. Our cottage turned out to be available a couple of hours early, but Ben and Marley were having a blast and begged to stay at the beach, so we hung until almost three. Tossing our beach belongings back into the car, we drove up into the hills overlooking Lorne, and after a quick five-minute drive, we arrived at Kero Cottage and the greeting from the koala.

The koala in the tree just behind the cottage had our complete attention as we tried to get the best view of it. The interest was not mutual as it continued it’s afternoon snooze, leaning on a branch about thirty feet up. We unpacked and got settled in before heading back out to see what if anything the koala would do. After a few minutes, either out of hunger or being tired of the stares from the humans below, he/she slowly moved higher up the tree and started eating some eucalyptus leaves. Those leaves make up the entire diet of the koala, and the only time they drink water is if they don’t get enough out of the eucalyptus leaves. Our koala bellowed a bit, making a noise we didn’t expect from such a cuddly-looking creature. It’s much throatier and deeper than we thought it would be. Ben enjoys making what he calls dinosaur noises and he directed some of those toward the koala, who continued up the tree a bit with a few more bellows. We then silently agreed to co-exist, as he hunkered down on a branch with a belly full of eucalyptus, and we went back inside the cottage for some takeaway grilled chicken we had bought in town.

After dinner, we were getting ready to watch the Men’s finals from the Australian Open, with mi hombre Rafael Nadal taking on Novak Djokovic. Annie and the kids took a stroll down the road toward some horses that Ben and Marley had seen on a walk earlier in the day. Rafa and the Joker were about eight or nine games into the first set when Marley came running back down the path with breaking news: kangaroos! I followed her back to where there were about a dozen kangaroos munching on a pre-dusk meal. They are fascinating creatures, even when not hopping about. Their short front legs dangling as they lean forward to bite at some grass, then lean back up and look about, with their ears pointing up, making it seem as though they are about to ask a question. What a day! First the koala just outside our cottage, now a herd of roos a short walk away. We got a closer view of some kangaroos about the same time the next night. A path that trailed off the gravel road that led to our cottage followed a stream for a while, back tracking around the area where we saw the herd the night before. This time we spotted them across the stream through some trees. There weren’t as many as the night before, but here we were within about one hundred feet of them.

There were at least two females with joeys in their pouches. What an engineering marvel the kangaroo pouch is! When the mother leans forward to eat, the joey also gets the chance to much on some grasses as well. The roos seemed fairly interested in our interest in them, looking intently at us. Once they seemed satisfied that we were no threat, they would go back to their evening grazing, occasionally hopping from point to point.

It was great for the kids and for us to have this experience in a natural setting and not a zoo or sanctuary. Who knows, in three weeks or so when we leave Australia, seeing kangaroos and koalas might become comparable to seeing deer and squirrels back home, but for now, we were thrilled to see two iconic animals in their natural habitat. It was one of the main goals of the trip, one we weren’t sure would happen. Sometimes things work out better than you hope.

Love in Melbourne and not the just tennis kind

2012-01-30T17:34:00.000-08:00

Over the last fifteen to twenty years, I had pretty much lost my interest in tennis, both as a player and as a fan. I watched and played a lot of tennis in college and in the few years following that. I remember the great battles of the Borg/Connors/McEnroe days, rooting for Johnny Mac. Sure he whined too much, but I loved his passion for the game and the flair with which he played. To paraphrase a line from Hunter S. Thompson, he played like a man trying to control an inner frenzy. Once Mac faded from the scene, to be overtaken by Ivan Lendl and then Pete Sampras, no one came along that really made me want to follow the game again. Sure there were some good female players, but I would usually watch their matches for all the wrong reasons. My interest in tennis could be rekindling now that we’ve seen Melbourne and gotten immersed in the Australian Open.

From the very first moments we got off the plane in Melbourne, it was obvious the Aussie Open was going on. Signs and banners were displayed throughout the airport and along the streets, especially in the Central Business District, just a few blocks from Rod Laver Stadium. As we walked toward Kings Domain for the car show on Aussie Day, I noticed an information sheet posted outside a booth selling items from the Open. It listed the matches that were going on that day, and the headliner was Rafael Nadal against Roger Federer. I mentioned to Annie that it might be fun to catch that out at dinner or back in our hotel room. Going to the match in person would have cost us at least $500 and that wasn’t going to happen. We got back to the hotel room after dinner in time to catch the start of the match, and enjoyed watching two of the greatest players of this era go at it. I was naturally attracted to the way Nadal played and happy to see him prevail. His game reminded me some of McEnroe, in part because of the fact that they are both lefties, and also because he can pull off some amazing shots, just when you figure he’s about to lose the point. Marley followed the match pretty closely with me, knowing the rules from having played so much Wii tennis. Ben, who is really into sports these days, especially NFL football, struggled with the whole points/games/sets/match concept. I was unable to explain, even with 30-plus years of tennis watching/playing experience why you earned 15 points for the first two points of the game but just ten for the third. It almost makes it less of an incentive to continue playing. You figure, I’ve worked hard, run all over the court like my hair is in fire and been rewarded fifteen points for each of the first two points of this game, and now, you’re telling me if I do that again and manage to win the point, I only get ten?? No thank you, think I’ll take a nap.

The buzz of the tennis tournament was still present on the tram as we headed to the Queen Victoria Market, not far from the CBD. It’s a massive set-up, covering several city blocks, with food stalls offering fresh meat and fish and breads, as well as vendors selling all kinds of belts and shirts and shoes and trinkets.

One of the vendors had some Major League Baseball jerseys, including a #44 Reds Adam Dunn road jersey. The price was $45 dollars and considering how long it’s been since Dunn played for the Reds and the historically lousy season he had for the White Sox in 2011, I probably could have gotten it for much less. But then, I would have had a #44 Reds Adam Dunn road jersey, and who needs that? Certainly not me, and apparently no one else.

We were jonesing for some more mini-golf, and we saw an ad for a course advertising Glow Golf in an area called the Docklands. All we had to do was figure out which tram to take to catch the tram to that area, about which we had read good things. Having gotten a little directionally disoriented inside the cavernous market, we were huddled over a brochure that featured a Metlink map, trying to figure out which way to go. A woman passing by, with no prompting from us, asked if we needed any help. After we told her of our predicament, she kindly pointed us in the right direction and which tram to look for and what signage we would see and we were on our way.

The Docklands is a beautiful waterfront area, featuring some restaurants, ice cream shoppes, and stores, most of which are in a complex called Harbour Town. There’s no red and white lighthouse like you find in Hilton Head, but there are plenty of stores on the two levels, along with some salons. In one of those, Marley and Annie stopped to get pedicures, so Ben and I took a stroll toward the Glow Golf. As luck would have it, there was a game room right next door, so we engaged in some heated Air Hockey games, followed by a few turns on a NASCAR game.

Showing that all that time spent in our basement at night and on the weekends has not been wasted, Ben got the all-time fastest time on his game. I told him I was afraid that he would say in ten months that had been the highlight of his trip. Once we left Melbourne, however, and headed along the Great Ocean Road and pulled up to our cottage outside the coastal town of Lorne, I knew that wouldn’t be the case.