VWX

noreply@blogger.com (Jenny Ethan Henri Mac) — Thu, 24 May 2018 12:52:00 +0000

Good morning VWX

https://goo.gl/vB2Uw8

Ethan Martin
Ethan

noreply@blogger.com (Jenny Ethan Henri Mac) — Sun, 04 Mar 2018 11:21:00 +0000

hi VWX

https://goo.gl/GVgPft

Ethan Martin

Welcome!

noreply@blogger.com (Jenny Ethan Henri Mac) — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 00:05:00 +0000

Welcome to my travel blog. It's all old news now that I've stopped traveling, but feel free to look around anyway. Note the page tab up top titled "The Actual Route" for a map of everywhere I went.

Also! Here is link to my currently active blog as a Peace Corps volunteer in Namibia.

On the right you'll find all sorts of handy links. There are links to photo albums from most of the countries I visited over my year of flightless travel, there are links to the twelve articles I published in the Exeter News-Letter over the course of a year, and there is a blog archive categorized by month and year.

If you're interested in specific countries or regions, a rough guide for sifting through the archive is as follows:

East Asia (South Korea, Russia, Mongolia, China): September - December 2010
Southeast Asia (Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand): December 2010 - February 2011
Central Asia (western China, Kazakhstan): February - April 2011
Near East (Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkey): April - May 2011
Europe (too many to list, plus Morocco): May - August 2011

Alternately, use the search bar at the top of this blog to look for blog posts containing any keywords you're interested in. Thanks for visiting!

noreply@blogger.com (Jenny Ethan Henri Mac) — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 15:49:00 +0000

We've come to this, my final article in the Exeter News-Letter. Click here or look for the link on the right sidebar. It was a good year of travel, and a good year of articles.

Also worth noting is the 'Go and Do' sidebox on the page. It will let you know the details of a presentation I will be giving at the Portsmouth Library in April regarding my trip and travels.

Coming to This

noreply@blogger.com (Jenny Ethan Henri Mac) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 03:50:00 +0000

My penultimate column was published almost two weeks ago. I'm only posting this so late because I spent the last two weeks in a windowless room devoid of any time cues or outside contact. I was not in jail. I was participating in a sleep study because I'm poor because I spent all my money on the trip that this blog has documented.

As always, the link can be found on the right hand side, or by clicking here (or above). Enjoy it or suffer it while it lasts, either way, there's only one more coming.

Coming To This

noreply@blogger.com (Jenny Ethan Henri Mac) — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 15:54:00 +0000

Column number ten out of twelve has been published in the Exeter News-Letter. It chronicles my brief visit to Azerbaijan, and especially the walk I had around an old tank graveyard with, among others, the incomparable Jamie Maslin.

A new link has been added to the right-hand sidebar for your future browsing convenience!

Coming to This

noreply@blogger.com (Jenny Ethan Henri Mac) — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 02:29:00 +0000

My ninth travel column has been published in the News-Letter. Don't be afraid. Go ahead and click here.

As usual, I have added a link to the right-hand sidebar as well.

I suppose this might be as good a time as any to state the obvious and announce that I probably won't be posting much more on this blog as my trip is now well over. I might throw the occasional thing up, and I'll continue to post when I have new columns published - probably just three more to round it out to an even twelve over a year.

In the meantime I'm working on the finer aspects of being unemployed, pursuing international work opportunities, thinking about peddling my travel presentation to likely venues throughout the area, and writing a worthless novel as part of NaNoWriMo.

Thanks for reading!

A Talk at the Library

noreply@blogger.com (Jenny Ethan Henri Mac) — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 22:09:00 +0000

On Tuesday the 25th I'll be giving a talk at the Exeter Library about my trip. If you're in the Exeter Area, you should come out since nothing else happens around here on Tuesday nights.

From the library's promotional release:

The Flightless Journey of Ethan Martin

6:30 PM - 7:30 PM Oct 25, 2011

Join Exeter resident and world traveler Ethan Martin at the Exeter Public Library, as he shares his photos and stories of his 1 year, 30,000 mile trek through roughly 30 countries on 3 continents. Ethan grew up in Exeter, studied English at UNH and lived in Utah, Turkey and Korea. He has always had a love of traveling and made it his goal to travel by land and sea, across Eurasia to the Atlantic. In September of 2010, using monies he had earned teaching in Korea, Ethan began his journey, leaving Korea by boat and continuing on by ferry, train, van, bus, horse, foot and hitchhiking. Within a year, Ethan had accomplished what he set out to do and extended his flightless trip with a celebratory transatlantic cruise. Ethan will be telling tales of his trip, of the cities and the countryside, the people he met, books he read while traveling, as well as sharing some of the logistics of and the reasons for his overland trip.

The presentation is free and open to the public. It will take place in the meeting room of the Exeter Public Library.

I'll have some photos and and a little Google Earth tour of the places I talk about. Hope to see you there!

Coming to This

noreply@blogger.com (Jenny Ethan Henri Mac) — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 00:13:00 +0000

Yes, the daily retrospective photo has come to an end. I think we all knew it was going to happen sooner or later, and hanging out in the woods for ten days without the Internet was as good a time as any to quit.

However, I am continuing to write monthly travel columns for the Exeter News-Letter. Yet another installment has been published and can be viewed here. I even took the initiative to write my own headline and send in a few pictures along with the article. Click on the main photo to check out the sketchy dentist office I didn't patronize.

In other news, I will be giving a talk about my travels at the Exeter Library on October 25th. The show starts at 6:30PM. More to come on that.

To Olkhon Island

noreply@blogger.com (Jenny Ethan Henri Mac) — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 14:20:00 +0000

This is the ferry plying its way across Lake Baikal to and from Olkhon Island. We arrived after a bumpy van ride with an ugly but supremely happy-looking young Russian couple, a doughy Asian woman, and some guy sleeping in the front.

Neither the lake nor the island made a great first impression. As you can see, the sky and the water were both gray and cold. I snapped some pictures from a rocky outcrop, being most impressed by the sharp shoreline behind this shot. We watched the ferry slowly making progress and a couple dozen people, some on foot, a few in vehicles, boarded for the quick trip to the largest island in the world's deepest lake.

Irkutsk

noreply@blogger.com (Jenny Ethan Henri Mac) — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 04:33:00 +0000

October fourth, our first full day off a train since the day before we got on a train in Vladivostok. That's like five or six days. Exploring Irkutsk, which I think can be described as a generally unattractive city with some very pretty buildings, we strolled through a plaza by the circus, quite close to our under-construction hostel. There, men had horses and camels and other beasts for photo opportunities, little go-karts for children to tear around in, and there were legions of audacious pigeons with no qualms of snatching food out of peoples' outstretched hands.

I really like this photo for the soft color palette, the full extension of the pigeon's wings, the geometric shapes of the background, and the borderline-disgusted What-The-Fuck look of the girl.

Train, Day the Last

noreply@blogger.com (Jenny Ethan Henri Mac) — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 00:42:00 +0000

I'm a day late again. I know this. That's why on this post, you get to see not just a photo from last year's today, but a video too.

Three days on a train is a long time. You can sleep, read, listen to music, drink vodka and beer, eat, play backgammon, cards, and nap. There really isn't much more. I didn't mind it so much, but the nights were slightly stifling. Sitting in the dining car for breakfast, this is how Adam felt about the heat in the bunks at night.

He may well be loading his imaginary gun to blow his brains out.

Looking out the window in Siberia is beautiful, but even that can get old since there are days worth of the same view from the windows. Most of the variety comes from the time of day and quality of light. This is a brief video of early morning somewhere east of Lake Baikal, our last day on the three day train from Khabarovsk.

A Brief Stop

noreply@blogger.com (Jenny Ethan Henri Mac) — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 01:20:00 +0000

This is the Chernyshevsk-Zabaikal'skiy train station, located riiiight about here. The statue is the man the station and town is named after, Nikolay Chernyshevsky. We had a quick break here last year today at around 8:30PM local time, which was hours ahead of the official train time which is on Moscow's clock.

For three days, the only time Adam and I got off the train was at brief stops, between 5 and 25 minutes, at various stations such as this one. Generally, we'd get off and stretch on the platform a bit in our shorts and flip-flops, blending into the other passengers comfortably dressed in track suits and sweatpants.

Here's another photo of the station, from a more distant perspective with the tracks and entire building in view. Maybe it's an old photo, previous to some renovations or just not well shot, but it sure looks a lot shittier than it does in my picture.

Russia, Train 2, Day 1

noreply@blogger.com (Jenny Ethan Henri Mac) — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 04:03:00 +0000

I like long train rides, and last year's today was the beginning of the longest train ride I took the whole trip. We left in the morning and rolled past golden hills and blue skies. Fall isn't really the most popular time for tourists to ride the Trans-Siberian, and we were going the opposite way of most tourists anyway, so it was a relatively quiet ride on our first day, perfect for a couple beers in the dining car, contemplating the passing fields and hewn cabin villages.

Couchsurfing Khabarovsk

noreply@blogger.com (Jenny Ethan Henri Mac) — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 23:37:00 +0000

Marjana was the first person I ever couchsurfed with. She lives in Khabarovsk with her husband who later taught us how to play backgammon. It was a good thing we had arranged to surf with her, otherwise Adam and I would've showed up to town, been tired as shit from a lack of sleep on the overheated train, and probably just wandered aimlessly around town until we were fed up with being dirty and tired and clueless and we probably would've had a terrible time.

Fortunately we got to have a rest, a shower, and a tour thanks to Marjana. We went into town and saw the American Corner where she works. It's an office in a beautiful old library filled with all sorts of American comforts like flags and books in English. She brought us to an auction in a run-down orphanage, and also helped us work out our onward train ticket which would've been a huge mess if we had had to do it on our own.

Original post for more details.

All Aboard

noreply@blogger.com (Jenny Ethan Henri Mac) — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 23:29:00 +0000

I'm a day late again. And a dollar short. Oh well, here is a photo from a year ago yesterday.

This is a Russian man named Igor who speaks no English. He wandered into our compartment looking for conversation and drinking buddies. He spoke for hours, it seemed, and all we could do was say "da" and smile and wonder what the hell he was talking about.

Igor was intent on smashing down any language barrier by constantly repeating things he said until we pretended to understand. The only thing I did grasp was "vodka", a word he uttered just before disappearing to fetch us a bottle.

Nice enough guy, I think, but I was still relieved when another compartment mate of ours got on. This guy spoke English and eventually our English-only conversation cut out Igor enough that he decided to wander back to his own compartment.

The rest of the evening involved more vodka.

A Day on the Town

noreply@blogger.com (Jenny Ethan Henri Mac) — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 04:40:00 +0000

If you want to be an ass about it, I know it's already the next day and this is late. Just relax, there's a time difference or something.

We managed to drag ourselves out of bed and walk around the city, which is pretty small. We started at the end of the Trans-Siberian Railway, what would really be the start for us. There's a decorative locomotive sitting on the platform, and this post with the kilometer marker. It's a long ride to Moscow.

We moved on to mingle amongst a bunch of old people on land for a few hours off their cruise ship (traveling by cruise ship, pff, who does that?), walked past Yul Brynner's birthplace, hung out at a festive section of sea side and rode a funicular up and down a hill.

Funicular.

The San Francisco of Russia

noreply@blogger.com (Jenny Ethan Henri Mac) — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 03:19:00 +0000

The San Francisco of Russia. That's what the proverbial "they" call Vladivostok. It's the harbor, the hills and the diversity. Really, Vladivostok is apparently one of the most diverse cities in Russia, being so close to other east Asian countries and about half the world away from the extreme racism supposedly found in European Russia.

Last year today we stepped off the ferry and waited our way through customs, bags sniffed by a spectrum of mongrel drug dogs and intimidated by stern women in crisp uniforms who were decidedly unsexy.

This day was also the night of finding ourselves in a sort of speakeasy cinema pub located in an unlit nook behind an unmarked door down a dark alley off an obscure parking lot reached by an unassuming driveway tunnel that we were led to by a waitress-turned-tourguide whom we fortunately over-tipped in our new-country naivete.

I'm On a Boat

noreply@blogger.com (Jenny Ethan Henri Mac) — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 23:18:00 +0000

Sometimes people get confused when I say I traveled from Korea without taking a plane. "Did you go through North Korea?" No I did not, that place is fucking nuts.

I left on a boat, and went to Russia. This is the room of bunks Adam and I had shared with two other people. It was really comfy and a surprisingly nice boat. You could buy bicycles made by Hummer or Porsche in the lobby, and there were colored fiber optic lights and a big open deck.

We met some other American travelers and some Russian girls coming back from studying in Japan, and hung out in the otherwise empty nightclub.

Train to Donghae

noreply@blogger.com (Jenny Ethan Henri Mac) — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 23:23:00 +0000

Adam and I took an evening train to the port city of Donghae on the evening of last year's today. I should have appreciated the beauty of the the countryside more, but I was preoccupied with dealing with a last minute phone crisis until the sun had gone down and a genial but bad-breathed trainmaster decided to chat up us waygooks and show us cell phone videos of his wife driving in their car.

Adam's Birthday

noreply@blogger.com (Jenny Ethan Henri Mac) — Sat, 24 Sep 2011 15:36:00 +0000

Today is Adam's birthday, and it was Adam's birthday a year ago too. Happy birthday Adam. Here's a picture of you riding a mechanical bull near Suseong Lake in Daegu. After making rounds of the little amusement park which included shooting pellet guns, riding a mechanical dog, and me rear-ending my ex-girlfriend into a wall after she cut me off on the go-kart track, we hung out with a dog in a bow tie trained to ride scooters, ate Russian food for dinner and spent the evening with a voice actress from Seoul and her chubby friend. Ah, sweet memories.

A Retrospective Begins Because I Have Nothing Better To Do

noreply@blogger.com (Jenny Ethan Henri Mac) — Sat, 24 Sep 2011 02:44:00 +0000

Compared to traveling, not traveling kind of sucks. That's why I've been sitting around twiddling my thumbs for three weeks.

I decided to start writing up my notes and journals from the last year of travel. I'd like to write a book eventually, but what I'm doing now is just cleaning up a lot of sloppy diary entries and organizing thoughts and memories that aren't written down before I forget them.

What I'm writing now will not be a book itself. If it was, it would be boring as shit, and long as hell. I've written 15,362 words so far, describing only 18 days of travel. And most of those days aren't even interesting. A lot are from when I was sitting around in Korea recovering from an inguinal hernia surgery. When I get to the interesting shit, I'll probably be writing five or six times as much per day on average.

Either way, at this rate, my notes will work out to more than 300,000 words, or the length of about three novels if I ever finish.

So here's something easy I know I can do: each day I'll upload a photo I took exactly one year ago.

Thrilling, I know.

So up above, there you have it, the first photo of my daily photo retrospective. Go ahead, click on it. It's much bigger that way.

It was taken from Kristin's roof in Daegu. She let Adam and I crash at her place while she was off on vacation. The 23rd of September was the day after Chuseok. The sky was incredibly clear this day last year, compared to Chuseok the day before which was rainy and gray. Looking south, the mountains were especially crisp in the clear air. I recall that even the ugly cement high-rises looked nicer.

How It Ends

noreply@blogger.com (Jenny Ethan Henri Mac) — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 03:07:00 +0000

I really meant to stay up all night so I could watch the sun rise over New York City and watch Brooklyn Terminal approach, but I slept in a bit. Deciding to have a quick nap at four AM never works out the way you plan it.

Still, I did get up early enough to see the sky brighten as the ship backed in to the terminal. The Statue of Liberty was off in the distance, looking far more impressive than the first time I saw it, as a speck from a Greyhound window over the appalling pre-dawn roofline of Newark.

It was after five AM and the whole ship, all 2,400 passengers and 1,200 crew, were up. The Queen Mary 2 was restocking and leaving the same day, a pretty impressive feat when you think of how much food, fuel, water and so forth it takes to support three and a half thousand people for a week.

Only the stiff wasn't up. Someone died on the cruise. A "Code Alpha" was broadcast over the ship-wide PA as I was waiting around by the planetarium one day. The voice sounded of forced calm, and it was the first ship-wide announcement of the cruise other than daily transit updates from the commodore at noon. I figured one of the old people had a heart attack, especially after the "Code Alpha" was repeated not long after.

It's not such a strange thing, people dying on a cruise ship, especially this cruise ship. My estimate is that at least half of the 2,400 passengers were over 60. You're stuck at sea for a week at minimum, odds aren't bad that one of the 1,200 geriatrics will croak.

Up on deck in a hot-tub conversation, I was told that on the average transatlantic crossing six people die. The same guy also said in another breath that he was a 21 year-old retired mainstream gay porn actor ("300 scenes at $3000 a scene, you do the math") who'd been living on his own since he was eight and owned homes in Florida and San Diego. This was the same kid who claimed he would kick down his door if he got locked in his cabin when he found out to his shocking disbelief that the ship has no jails.

He wasn't a very reliable source.

But back to the stiff. After I met my father at the terminal and we got ourselves organized, he mentioned that he'd heard about a death on board and wanted to know what I knew about it, which was nothing other than a suspicion. He'd been told of it by a member of the terminal staff, and suddenly the "Code Alpha" made perfect sense.

I wondered if the hearse that passed us on 95 just outside of NYC was carrying one of my former fellow passengers.

Getting carted off on a gurney and taxied away in a funny-looking car was how it ended for one of the passengers, but for most of us, we just got off the boat early in the morning with none of the ceremony that greeted us as we embarked. No flag waving, no band, no gauntlet of servants in epaulettes. We stepped off onto the pavement of Brooklyn Cruise Terminal, and everyone went their merry ways, and it was as simple as that.

For me, it was the end of more than a cruise. I'd traveled roughly 30,000 miles without airplanes, stepping foot on four continents. I'd been happily lulled into an unshakable state of sloth on the Queen Mary 2, and was in no mood to haul my shit around New York City. I ditched plans to meet up with friends for a week before heading back to New Hampshire, and got into the car with my father who drove down just to watch the ship come in, and who was heading right back home with or without me.

It was one of the few times in the last year that I took the easy way out, but I felt I had earned it.

Coming To This

noreply@blogger.com (Jenny Ethan Henri Mac) — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 16:06:00 +0000

Article number seven has been published in the Exeter News-Letter. The link is on the right as always, or just click here. In this month's edition, I talk about language.

Though my trip is finished, I'll continue writing articles for the next five months to make the column go an even year. Enjoy.

An Arduous Crossing

noreply@blogger.com (Jenny Ethan Henri Mac) — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 04:01:00 +0000

It turns out that at least two of the seven sins are alive and well on cruise ships: gluttony and sloth.

I wasn't really too sure how the cruise would be, in terms of eating or dressing or drinking or whatever, since I'd never done anything so luxurious or white before. I brought my suit for dinners and seven bottles of wine for my cabin.

Life was not hard on the ship. Besides actually forcing myself to visit the gym throughout the week in a pale attempt to make up for a year of self-indulgent travel and consumption, time was mostly taken up by eating and sleeping and napping.

The food was good, but more importantly, there was an infinite amount of it. At the dinners whereat I snazzed myself up in my suit, I feasted in the Britannia, my assigned swanky (but not most swanky aboard) restaurant.

I dined on delicious and pretentiously named dishes such as cauliflower polonaise, pont neuf potatoes, chicken and wild mushroom terrine, fig and apple chutney, Indonesian vegetable bahmi goreng, tamarind-glazed duck breast salad, and herb-crusted rack of lamb, to name a few.

There was always a buffet elsewhere, usually with Asian food or grub classics like ribs or fries or roast pork. Room service was also available 24 hours a day, always a nice option at three in the morning after killing a bottle of wine and having a dip in one of the pools.

I came to eat so much that I eventually just started ordering two entrees at dinner, eating two breakfasts in two different restaurants, and eating when I wasn't hungry. If there is any place I can realize my fantasy of jumping into a swimming pool full of fettuccine alfredo, the Queen Mary 2 is probably it.

As far as sloth goes, I'd tell you all about it, but after all the naps and late mornings facilitated by the absence of windows in my cabin, I just don't feel like it.