Killing Batteries

Being that travel is effectively a perpetual exercise in ungraceful, humbling discovery, travel writers are often put in the position of writing about stuff that they knew little or nothing about before the trip. Moreover, the editorial understanding for these assignments is that the new experience or activity will be illustrated in the final article in a way suggesting that the travel writer gleaned a rather unlikely degree of expertise after only glancing time engaged in the new experience or activity. The exception is when it all goes extravagantly wrong, a la Bill Bryson, in which case wallowing in one’s ignorance and haplessness to further the tale and entertainment value is perfectly acceptable, encouraged even.

With a lot of rudimentary questions and follow-up research, the writer should be able to come off sounding like, at the very least, a passing authority on the new experience or activity, whether it be describing an albatross watching tour, firing a gun or being shoved into a helicopter for a day of “ultimate fly fishing.”

Food, alas, is another story. Intelligently writing about food requires hard-won knowledge and a vocabulary so immense that it’s quite literally a composite foreign language. One needs a working knowledge of French, Spanish, and Italian just to decipher a menu at a midrange restaurant these days, never mind the sadistic places that are intentionally composing menu items that make you feel like it’s your first trip outside the remotest mountains of Papua New Guinea.

But we travel writers can’t get by writing about kebabs and French fries all the time, so here’s a few tips for writing about food when you don’t know squat about the food in question.

1.    Talk around the words you don’t know – I satisfied my university Spanish proficiency oral exit exam by using this trick. I think I got through the whole thing using only three tenses. It was pretty badass.

Whether the name of the foodstuff in question was never provided or you were too drunk to take good notes, rather than incriminating yourself by using derpy phrases like “green crap” and “some kind of fish,” circumvent that knowledge gap with creative evasion.

Example: a forgotten three line description of locally sourced, obscurely prepared, exotic fish can be transformed into “I’d barely caught my breath from the chicken, before the fish course: a multi-colored festival of subtly flavored amazingness that caused my eyes to well up with tears of joy and my companions to emit noises that could have replaced the audio track of a porn film. Next was the fillet mignon, which was…”

See? What kind of fish was it? Who cares? The reader was transported to a place where stupid, unnecessary details are irrelevant and you pick up the thread (ideally) where your drunk notes made enough sense to resume writing in an authoritative tone.

2.    Replace complicated terminology with evocative adjectives and metaphors – This is one of my favorite tools, because not only do I bail myself out of exposing my ignorance and/or lazy note-taking, but I paradoxically make myself look super clever by getting all transcendent and shit to fill the hole.

Example: a complicated description of beef that you blanked on while writing the review can be changed to “A cut of beef the size of a baby’s head, emitting a thundering protein signature so powerful that it could’ve made a seismometer spontaneously combust. ”

3.    Make shit up – We couldn’t get away with this 10 years ago, but ever since eccentric, narcissistic chefs started inventing words and shamelessly printing them on their menus, forcing people to meekly ask their server to translate these pretend terms into English, there’s no reason writers can’t get away with the same thing. Most people won’t call you out on this practice for fear of exposing their food illiteracy, so just go for it.

However, this trick should be used judiciously. If too many strings of nonsensical words appear in your copy, the jig’s up.

A japerittio of pork.

Swathed in a pallia of mustard.

The piedeblanche of the quail, draunche in its own juices.

And so forth.

And that’s how you write about food when you don’t know squat about the food. Employed correctly, these tricks could have you writing food reviews for Bon Appetit in no time. Or you could cough up money for classes, read a mountain of books and waste pointless energy worrying about mixing up “simmered” and “sautéed” (whatever that is).

Remember last year when I went into utter seclusion for over a month, living on pizza and cheap wine, to painstakingly piece together my Romania Traveler’s Guide app (for iPhone, iPad and Android)? And remember how I said that it was the most thorough, human-researched Romania country guide in app history, hosted on the dynamic, user-friendly Sutro Media travel app platform? Well, it just got better.

I grossly underestimated the intrepid exploring instincts of the smartphone-equipped travel crowd. Even though I had exhaustive information on Romania’s six most visited cities (Bucharest, Brasov, Sibiu, Sighisoara, Cluj-Napoca and Suceava), as well as cataloging all the pertinent castles, churches, activities, top attractions, transport info, general trivia, history, culture, cuisine and Dracula stuff around the country, people wanted more.

I have followed up on this feedback by, well, going a bit nuts, quite frankly.

I have more than doubled the geographic territory covered in the previous edition of my Romania travel app. In addition to the destinations/attractions/information listed above, I have added the cities of Timisoara, Iasi (my former home) and the Black Sea Coast gateway cities of Constanta and Mamaia.

But there’s more! I listed all of the noteworthy towns and resorts along the Black Sea Coast. I added entries for the primary points of interest in the Danube Delta. Finally, I added all those bucolic, historic, sleepy villages in the peasant region of Maramures.

There is no equal in the app world for my Romania guide and, at the still low-low price of US$2.99, probably no better value for a personally researched Romania guide in any medium, except, of course, my Romania (and Moldova!) travel website.

And now for marketing business. With such an enormous expansion of my app, I’m going to need new reviews to reflect this enlarged amazingness. To that end, I have a pile of free download codes to give away to people armed with iPhones and iPads who would like to test-drive the app and, I hope, leave a positive review.

(Sorry, Android users, the Google Play store doesn’t offer this feature to publishers. Jerks.)

If you’d like a free download code (while supplies last) just leave a comment below and I’ll fire one off to you. Please use your real email address in the comment form so I can reach you easily.

Multumesc frumos!
(Thank you very much!)

My 12 regular readers will back me up when I say that I rarely write about food. It’s just not my thing. Restaurant reviews, yes, but an entire post devoted to the stuff I shoveled into my soup hole on a trip, no.

And yet, I’m composing this offtype post simply because pretty much all I did in Vietnam was eat, drink super sweet coffee, walk a bit and get massages. So, it’s either post this food jamboree or try to pitch the story to American Lazy F#%$er magazine.

I apologize for the crap photos. All of this was completely out of my control because a) crap camera, b) crap lighting, and c) crap photographer. Here we go.

Phu Quoc

I arrived on Phu Quoc, an island beach destination floating off the southern tip of Vietnam, a broken man. I’d done the exact opposite of my plan to rest and recover from jet lag in Singapore, then spent three days inhaling exhaust fumes and eating floating orange dirt while in the back of a tuk-tuk, along with walking, trekking and climbing around Angkor Wat. I am not ashamed to say that the most I moved during my three days on Phu Quoc was the seven minute walk down the beach to the massage ladies. So, I’m just posting a couple dishes from the hotel restaurant, which was surprisingly good.

Crab, egg and nearly invisible mushrooms with vermicelli. Not much else to add. It was crab-y, citrus-y and wonderful.

Terrible cellphone picture in terrible lighting, but this seafood stir fry, with shrimp, fish and squid, was about as good as one might expect when the seafood was netted a few hours earlier. Also, look! I’m drinking a beer! Insanity!

Saigon

I was all over the place here, from the most basic street food served from a woman next to a grill fashioned out of a dust bin, to the night market and proper restaurants. I ate 12 meals in 2.5 days. For you.

Stir fried beef and onions on orange rice, slung out of a cart manned by someone’s auntie. Not the most exciting dish, but typical of what you find on the street and super inexpensive.

Boiled snails served plain with chilli sauce. Basic and very brine-y.

“Bun mam.” This was amazing. Shrimp, fish and squid, served in a fish sauce broth with thick noodles. The thing that looks like an unflushed turd is a mini-eggplant. One of the best things I ate in Saigon, despite the eggplant.

Hoi An

I found two dishes I liked here in particular and kind of found myself in a rut.

“Cao lau.” A Hoi An specialty. Pork, greens and thick, brown noodles similar to Japanese soba noodles. This is served all over Hoi An and varies wildly. I had a back alley, single light bulb meal (hence unphotographable) that was sprinkled with nuts.

This, my friends, is banh mi nirvana. Glorious, wretched indulgence. Fans of Anthony Bourdain’s old show No Reservations may recognize this handheld, edible orgasm as it was prominently featured during his second Vietnam show. Let’s see, there’s pâté paste, two or three kinds of pork, strips of solid pâté, tomatoes, cucumbers, chilli sauce, mystery sauce, other unidentifiable stuff, a green onion and a fried egg! Holy mother of Buddha, it was ethereal. I ate three of these in about 24 hours.

Hanoi

Deep fried, breaded fish soup, found at a back alley stall with kindergarten tables and chairs and scooters whizzing by inches from our elbows. Again, nothing extravagant, just the everyday stuff you find littered on every street and down otherwise uninviting alleys.

“Bun cha.” This is a ridiculously super-sized portion of bun cha, a Hanoi signature dish. Grilled pork, noodles, herbs and a fish sauce broth all combined in a bowl to one’s taste. There’s also a side of pork egg rolls.

A salad of fried baby jackfruit with shrimp, pork and rice pancakes. Best thing I ate in Hanoi.

“Ram it” cake with shrimp inside. This was super sticky and this particular place went a little too light on the shrimp. But, pretty!

“Ethnic minorities’ sausage.” This was one of those things that tasted far better than it looked. At a glance, it looked like all the crap that even the dog wouldn’t eat after slaughtering the pig, but it was excellent. Also pictured, a ceramic thimble of powerful apple rice wine. I had a tiny carafe with dinner and could barely walk back to the hotel after. It must have had about 40% alcohol content, so nothing remotely resembling wine. Evil misnomer.

Egg coffee. Super sweet and frothy. Hanoi is known for this stuff and several other coffee variants, including…

Yogurt coffee, which did not taste like coffee and had to be eaten with a spoon.

And finally, coconut milk coffee. This was great. Like an indulgent, mini-cappuccino.

Someday, I suppose I should return to Vietnam and actually do some stuff, but in terms of cultural immersion, I think I nailed it.

I have been sitting alone in this tiny room for a very long time.

It seems so anyway. Time has a way of becoming deceptively elastic under certain conditions. Like how the three minutes it takes to eat a cupcake seems like eight seconds. Or, in this case, how time slows to a crawl when a stern man in Singapore’s Changi International Airport taps you on the shoulder while you sleepily wait at an immigrations window, leads you into a small room then disappears with your passport without elaboration.

Indeed, with your heartbeat quickly rising to something like 170 beats per minute, you feel as if time stops and you can see into the future. A future where, despite exhaustive proof of innocence, you are sentenced to be caned in public 115 times for something like “farting with aggressive odor” in Singapore’s rule-laden subway.

It is June 2005 and I have just finished more than five hectic months of travel in Southeast Asia (and parts of Asia), sometimes for work, mainly for pleasure and nearly all of it conducted during the region’s “Holy Shit It’s Hot Season.”

I am, and for this brief moment I am not remotely exaggerating, probably more physically and mentally exhausted than I have ever been in my life. The pace I maintained for my personal travels, the amazing amount of work that I cranked out, the oppressive heat and less substantial meals than I’m accustomed to have left me a shell of my former self. I am flying from Bangkok to Minneapolis – the long way, via London, due to an existing return ticket – and only a few hours into this sadistic 40 hour journey an immigrations stooge in Singapore has detained me for an unidentified problem.

My five months in Southeast Asia were, by almost any measure, downright wholesome. I did not take or buy any drugs. (Though, I was drugged.) I did not pay for sex, though it would have been easier and probably less expensive than my accursed mission to get passport photos taken in Bangkok. I did not wind up cartoon-like and slap the living shit out of several deserving asshats for conspiring to rip me off or inconvenience me purely for personal entertainment. I did not, to my knowledge, break any laws or offend anyone important. And yet, I am nervous that despite this pious record I have somehow unintentionally run afoul of some arcane rule (for which Singapore is famous) and am about to have the living daylights caned out of my travel-broken ass.

After what seems like 146 hours of confinement in this room, the immigrations stooge returns with someone who may be his superior, or possibly just a more gifted English speaker, and they stand before me, poised to deliver my verdict.

“Mr. Leif, there is a problem.” I hold my breath. “You do not look like your passport photo.”

There is no disputing this point. I do not look like the guy in my passport photo. It would even been a stretch to argue that the guy in that photo, taken two and a half years earlier, was a cousin. The guy in the photo was far paler, being that the photo was taken in January in Minnesota. The guy in the photo lifted weights and juggled frequently and was as such enviably muscular. And he’d let himself go a bit. A thin, almost uniform layer of fat had appeared on his body due to the absence of cardiovascular exercise, prodigious consumption of cream sauces and imbibing in enough Rum and Cokes each month to drown an adult hippo. All this showed on his slightly swollen face, which seemed even rounder what with the photo being taken from slightly below chin level.

Paradoxically, the guy sitting in the bare room in Singapore Airport was extremely tan, lean as a marathon runner, and somewhat worryingly gaunt in the face. For travel convenience, he had shaved his head down to the merest fuzz of blond hair. He looked haggard, feeble, in clear need of a cheeseburger and possibly a visit to a Level-1 trauma center.

The man in the passport photo weighed approximately 162 pounds. The man in the small room, I would be genuinely unsettled to learn when I stepped on a scale a few days later, weighed only 124 pounds – the weight I wrestled, just barely on some days, during my senior year in high school.

For a man of my modest stature and physique, this is a considerable weight change. Some of this weight loss was expected due to all the walking during my travels as well as the elimination of several soft drinks per day and multiple heaping piles of pasta each week. Also, muscle loss occurred without all the weights and juggling. For my size, a healthy target weight is probably 140-145 pounds, so 124 pounds was definitely bad news.

My travel pace, workload and lifestyle while in Southeast Asia aside, a key contributor to my shrinkage was entirely out of my control. I have – and this is not bragging, it’s simply a fact – an amazing metabolism. A glorious, borderline terrifying metabolism that unbelievably turns French fries into energy and microwave pizza pockets into muscle. If one weren’t a card carrying atheist, one might be tempted to assume ongoing divine intervention in order to explain my metabolism. Or possibly gamma radiation exposure, that also resulted in amnesia, while I was saving the world from an unstable, alien power source, because if we’re using our imaginations why not?

There has never been a downside to this wondrous anomaly until now. It appears, under the right circumstances, if this blast furnace inside me isn’t fed more generously than what is ordinarily available in a (reasonable) meal in Southeast Asia, it starts to eat me. Even while diligently eating three meals a day while visiting Singapore, Malaysia, Brunei, Thailand, Burma, and Laos, my uncontrollable weight loss persisted and was, in fact, the reason that I was now on my way back to the US ahead of schedule. After magazine assignments in Hong Kong and Japan, I returned to Bangkok positively ragged and almost devoid of energy. Absorbing my dwindling body mass in a full length mirror one night, it occurred to me that pushing on to Cambodia and Vietnam for six more weeks of travel might actually kill me.

A bit dramatic, perhaps. Could I have slowed down my travel pace, turned down some work and stuffed my face with pizza and pasta in order to put some weight back on and finish the trip? Maybe. But my instincts were telling me that the situation was critical. I needed to stop now, retreat to Minneapolis and recuperate or risk a health emergency.

But there was the small matter of these officious men in Singapore. I didn’t even want to leave the damn airport – my flight for London departed in five hours – but adhering to rules is something of a national sport in Singapore and so they could not let me continue.

After several anxious minutes, I was able to prove my identity beyond a shadow of a doubt with supporting identification and the officials, satisfied by my promise to not leave the airport, cautiously cut me loose.

I limped home, ate a million cheeseburgers (normal exaggeration quotient resumed), and slowly gained weight. Possible health emergency averted, yet I always regretted missing Cambodia and Vietnam.

That situation is about to be corrected. In a few days, I depart for an albeit abbreviated, but long awaited trip to finally complete my 2005 Southeast Asia tour, where I will at long last see Angkor Wat and eat six meals a day (estimated) in Vietnam. The giddying trip itinerary aside, the sense of closure this brings is tremendous.

As if that weren’t exciting enough, I will be traveling through Singapore with a brand new passport, including a photo taken just a couple months ago. Needless to say, it looks exactly like me and I will take great pleasure in showing it to everyone in Singapore’s airport, with or without invitation, and basking in approving comments like “Yes, Mr. Leif, that photo looks exactly like you. Now may I please finish my breakfast?”

[This is an edited and re-mastered excerpt from my 2005 travelogue, recounting my visit to Bario, in Malaysian Borneo.]

Myriad thoughts race through your mind when you are lost and alone at night in the jungle highlands of Borneo. Usually, this brain revving involves panic, urgency, and double attention to urethra control. However, my mind was almost entirely occupied with the question of “How the hell did I get lost in a place with only one fucking road??”

When I wasn’t cursing the growing legend of my abysmal orientation skills, I was mentally reviewing all of the native animals of Borneo that I had viewed from a safe distance behind chain-link a few days earlier at Jong’s Crocodile Farm. Then I sorted this list into what could conceivably be lurking in the highland bushes and finally distilled from that group an inventory of what could maim or kill me. Truthfully, it was ultimately a non-intimidating roll-call of small, furry, largely harmless creatures, but this did little to soothe me.

I had walked out of central Bario – a noncontiguous jungle village sprawled across a valley 3,280 feet above sea level in the Malaysian state of Sarawak – 45 minutes earlier at a fast clip. My objective, and temporary home, was Gem’s Lodge, six kilometers (3.7 miles) down a muddy jungle road. I had lingered too long in Bario waiting out a series of downpours and now the quickly setting sun and distant regrouping clouds were cause for concern, but I was optimistic. I knew that average human walking pace was a little over three miles per hour and if I floored it I could be at the lodge in about 45 minutes, just as total darkness was setting in and, with any luck, before the next round of showers caught up with me.

It was my first full day in Bario and I had spent the afternoon working in the Telecenter, the village’s pride and joy, catching up on neglected cyber-duties while simultaneously charging both of my laptop batteries. I had depleted both laptop batteries earlier in the day at Gem’s Lodge. Gem’s had been doing without electricity for four days, ever since the installation of a new diesel generator that made a lot of noise, but no actual electricity. The Telecenter is open four hours a day, five days a week, solar powered and sports a surprisingly speedy internet connection via a satellite feed. A 21st century marvel in 19th century Bario.

Bario is deep in the Sarawak highlands, within blow-dart range of the Indonesian border. Its population of roughly 800 people are spread thinly and widely over tens of kilometers in small settlements and longhouses in the surrounding jungle. The village is only accessible by the daily 18 seater prop plane service from Miri on the northern coast of Borneo and Marudi a town bordering the miniscule country of Brunei. Well, truthfully you can also reach Bario by journeying upriver and overland, but this is a grueling three week death march and no sane person has made this trek in over 30 years.

My choice to visit Bario was literally a spur of the moment impulse. During my short flight from Kuching to Miri, I happened upon the few brief paragraphs devoted to Bario in my Lonely Planet. My plan was to spend the night in Miri and then push on overland into Brunei the next day, but as occasionally happens when I see vague descriptions of very remote places, I suddenly had the urge to detour to Bario. After landing at Miri airport, I walked over to the tiny desk selling tickets to Bario, discovered that a plane was leaving in only a few hours and purchased a ticket. I then phoned a dubious number I found in the Lonely Planet of a guy who knows a guy who has a lodge in Bario (this is apparently how things work in remote jungle villages) and secured a bed.

A few hours later, I was standing in the diminutive center of Bario, comprised of a half-moon shaped collection of tiny shops, a couple cafes and the Telecenter. Despite the somewhat sketchy, but otherwise painless one hour flight to get oneself into Bario, there is a profound sensation of having arrived in one of the most remote, disconnected places you are ever likely to visit. People are sparse. “Roads” are grass and butter-soft dirt, peppered with incessant suspension snapping fissures. Electricity, when available, zaps out of modest generators and solar cells. Plumbing is via forced water coming down distant mountains.

Even if I wasn’t an enthusiastic walker, my options for getting around the far flung parts of Bario were limited. There are few vehicles, being that everything needs to be air-lifted in. Anything larger than a moped requires a ride on a specially chartered plane, costing roughly US$1,300. With Bario’s humble economy, saving up to buy and fly a tiny jeep into town is a life-long investment. Many people get by on motorcycles or bikes, but most simply walk.

I was traveling light for my furious, ill-fated walk to Gem’s Lodge, carrying my tiny day bag which held my laptop, the spare battery, power cable, camera, raincoat, water bottle and roll-on bug repellent. Even in the cool early evening, the jungle humidity combined with my walking pace had me drenched in sweat in minutes.

After 45 minutes of vigorous walking, it was utterly dark and I was troublingly in the middle of nowhere. Worse still, the road was now climbing a sizeable, unfamiliar hill. Though I was plainly not paying much attention earlier during my walk into town, I was certain I had not passed this particular obstacle.

Just as I was absorbing the inconceivable possibility of having somehow taken a wrong turn on a road with no turns, I crested the hill and saw lights. Knowing Gem’s Lodge was candle-powered at the moment, this cemented my status as being hopelessly lost and confused. Additionally, there wasn’t just one set of lights. Even through the murky night, I could make out a half dozen Kelabit longhouses grouped together at the bottom of the hill. I wasn’t sure about the etiquette of showing up unannounced at a longhouse after dark, never mind as a doofus foreigner, but I needed directions, so I headed toward the light.

The only ace up my sleeve throughout this self-engineered disaster, was my key chain light. The last time I visited Minnesota, a friend introduced me to the Garrity key chain light. Cracker-thin and less than two inches long, it casts a startlingly bright beam considering its size. This little miracle had repeatedly proven to be invaluable over previous months while stumbling through dark hostel rooms, preparing for bed while trying not to wake sleeping roommates, but now it was going to save my dumb ass from becoming a jungle rodent buffet.

I used the key chain light to guide me over a two-log wide “bridge” that crossed a thin marsh, separating the longhouses from the road. A small child standing on the nearest porch saw me coming and summoned an adult who thankfully spoke some English. I explained the situation and asked for directions, but deep down I was praying that someone would take pity on my sorry self, put me in their truck, or failing that, the village tractor, and drive me to my destination. Having just spent a week in the company of the Iban tribe, people who would give you their last insulin shot if you asked for it, I was hopeful the highland dwelling Kelabit tribesmen would be similarly generous and helpful. They were not. At least this guy wasn’t. He curtly gave me the dispiriting news that I had indeed missed a subtle, but vital turn nearly 4km back down the road toward Bario. Then he turned around and disappeared back into the longhouse without another word. I was on my own.

Not only was it full-on night, but the thick rain-cloud cover that I had been attempting to out-run had overtaken me. Mercifully, it wasn’t raining yet, but equally now the amazingly illuminant moonlight that had been helping me negotiate the dark road was gone. I was able to stumble along in the near absolute darkness, barely able to make out the course of the road, hitting the key chain light every few moments to scan for the innumerable potholes, ruts, fresh piles of water buffalo shit and muddy slicks that could lead to a leg-flailing, ass-first slide into the boggy, roadside trench.

Once in a while, way off in the distance, there was lightning. Assuming no further screw-ups, and I wasn’t overly-optimistic about this, I was looking at a minimum of another hour and 20 minutes of slow, careful trudging through jungle darkness, with a bag full of decidedly un-waterproof, expensive equipment. A rain shower would have been catastrophic. And let’s not forget the ever-disconcerting prospect of stepping on the tail of one of the little, cuddly jungle creatures, that I imagined sprouted six inch fangs after sunset and could accurately spit deadly venom into a man’s eyeball from distances of up to 10 feet.

Forty cautious minutes later, I saw the familiar sight of De Plateau Lodge. I had flown into Bario with De Plateau’s owner, Douglas, and I stopped to verify the brief, vague directions I had received at the longhouse. Douglas assured me that there was a turn-off just up the hill from his place that I had neglected to note both on my way into Bario that afternoon and again as I motored past while racing against time, light and the elements.

After finding the turn and cursing myself out in four languages for a solid five minutes, it was yet another forty minutes down atrocious, ankle-breaking terrain to Gem’s Lodge. This trek was enlivened by an incident where I unintentionally snuck up on two water buffalo half submerged in the roadside bog-ditch, an encounter that caused all three of us to yelp and evacuate our colons in unison with the speed and power of an airplane toilet.

Only moments after the hyperventilating from that event subsided I walked square into a horror film sized cobweb, impressively straddling the entire road. Had it not only been partly completed, I’m confident it could have detained a Doberman. As my imagination went hypersonic, visualizing the size of the mutant, blood-sucking spider necessary to create such a thing, my legs weak, my mind nearing irreversible madness, I finally spied the dark silhouette of Gem’s Lodge and faint candle light in the middle distance.

My concerned hosts were relived to see me and fed me a restorative meal as I recounted my adventure. Though I had been borderline hysterical only moments earlier, it was impossible not to laugh at the memory of it, especially that last-straw, excessive spider web fiasco. It was as if the jungle spirits wanted to get in one last kick to the ribs to punish me for being such an idiot before allowing my salvation. Lesson learned.

Long term world travelers are not exceptionally brave. They don’t fight fires or deactivate bombs or take 78 hour bus rides from Spain to Romania in the punishing heat of June (the sane ones don’t at any rate). Yet, world travelers frequently hear reverential comments about their bravery from friends, relatives and acquaintances. In truth, as most travelers will admit, crossing borders, coping with seesaw confusion and pantomiming several conversations a day all becomes relatively routine after a while. Not much more brave than ordering a hamburger in Norway.

That said, every once in a while, one runs across an individual that gives even a hardened world traveler pause. In my case, this person was named Shira.

I “met” Shira, a New Yorker, in an online travel discussion community. I was amazed and intrigued the moment that I became familiar with her situation. As a round-the-world traveler, she had several defining characteristics, any of which alone would have made her noteworthy, but all together made her pretty much my hero. Shira was:

• A solo, female traveler
• Completely deaf
• Only four feet (1.21 meters) tall

This woman’s determination and fearlessness slackened my jaw immediately. As I internalized this information and, as politely as possible, asked her the same questions about her situation that everyone else has probably asked upon meeting her, it came to light that we would both be in Sydney, Australia at the same time. We made plans to meet.

For me, this was not just a casual meeting. I had a tentative, super-genius plan. I was just getting some traction in my travel writing career and, knowing an amazing story when I heard one, I was hoping to write a profile on Shira and sell it to, I don’t know, the New Yorker? Oprah Magazine? I’d work out the details later.

This was 2004, four unyielding, exasperating years into the Bush administration’s policy of using fear and paranoia to suppress even the idle consideration of foreign travel for anyone, never mind a solo female. Moreover, during my time participating in the aforementioned online travel discussion community, one woman after another would join and start their posting legacy with questions like “Is it safe for a solo female to travel in ‘X?’” The ‘X’s in these queries ran the table from Thailand to, of all places, England. With Shira’s permission, I intended to correct the record and write a piece that would put some of those aspiring female travelers at ease.

And get me a byline in a huge magazine. But mostly for the ladies.

After a long, hot morning of getting lost in obscure parts of Sydney while futilely swatting at gnats so persistent that they could’ve made Buddha curse, I zeroed in on our meet-up spot in the neighborhood of Woolloomooloo. (A place name that I, unbelievably, did not make up.)

When I finally lurched up to the prearranged café, sweaty, exhausted and 20 minutes late, I found Shira perched on a bar stool, feet dangling miles from the ground, digging into a sandwich. I’d never had more than a few moments of interaction with a deaf person before and I was a bit nervous about how the conversation was going to progress. Of course, this was an everyday situation for Shira and in only a few moments we were communicating freely.

Initially we interacted partly through lip-reading/pantomime and hand written notes in her notebook, but after the sandwich we went walking and animated lip-reading was all we needed. It was surprisingly easy. I quizzed her about her trip, whether she was completely deaf (several dozen of Australia’s most shrill birds were having an eardrum-perforating screeching match in a park we walked through and I wondered if she was oblivious to it – she was), and other minutiae about getting through the day.

After roughly 90 minutes, we parted ways. I bent way over and gave her a brief hug and wished her luck. I was now convinced that writing a profile on Shira would be a comprehensive triumph, but the plan was shelved almost immediately and later forgotten as a variety of frantic travel plans formed and paying projects landed on my desk.

Apart from a couple short messages, Shira and I never spoke again, which, even now with Facebook, is common after brief on-the-road encounters. Unexpectedly, I eventually forgot about Shira all together. These things happen as one is inundated with years worth of new, mind-blowing experiences for every month they’re on the road, up-and-coming David Beckham-looking travel writer or no.

So far removed from that experience now, I was unsuccessful in tracking down Shira after I recently stumbled upon this part of my dusty travelogue. How long did she travel? Did she return to something approximating a normal life in New York? Did some other bastard write about her amazing resolve and get a byline in Oprah?

Are you reading this Shira? If so, say ‘hi’. And friend me on Facebook, naturally.

[This story is based on my very brief visit to Cook, Australia in December 2004.]

For a moment, I am utterly alone in Cook, Australia and it’s a little eerie. Effectively a modern ghost town, Cook looks like it was very recently wiped out in a post-apocalyptic bandit raid. Like when an inexplicably well-armed gang, led by a guy with a name like “Skull Fucker,” detonates a bomb that only vaporizes living tissue, leaving everything else in pristine condition, so his henchmen can loot supplies and pick up all the gold teeth littering the ground.

The buildings in Cook have been neglected, but are still standing and in decent condition. With a few nights and weekends of work they could be habitable again. In addition to rows of single-story dwellings, there is a two-story school house, a pool that has been filled in with dirt and even a nine hole golf course without a single blade of grass.

While Cook’s former residents probably moved out in an orderly, unhurried fashion, the unsettling scene suggests a panicky evacuation just before a volcano eruption. The town is littered with trash, old train parts, abandoned vehicles and gutted kitchen appliances, all strewn across yards, streets, and even deep into the outback behind the town like they’d fallen out the backs of rapidly departing truck beds.

That I also happen to be in one of the harshest environments on Earth is not helping my nerves. Australia is home to the deadliest… everything. There are more agonizing and extravagant ways to die in Australia than at an Iron Chef competition with Itchy and Scratchy. Nine of the top 10 most venomous snakes in the world are here. And there are spiders that eat those snakes. Crocodiles, sharks, lizards, frogs, pandas, butterflies… You name it and Australia has the deadliest version of it.

Like much of the outback, it also happens to be unremittingly hot in Cook. A dry heat, so intense that you don’t sweat, because the sweat evaporates before it has a chance to bead up. And, of course, it is quiet. So quiet that the quiet makes your ears ring. Perfectly self-possessed people routinely go insane in this kind of quiet.

And if you find yourself succumbing to the cuckoo-inducing quiet, hair-melting heat or an encounter with the world’s most poisonous ladybug while you’re in Cook, you’re categorically screwed because you are 2,193,765 miles from a reasonable medical facility. I made that number up, of course. This is the part of the story where I would drop one or two head-spinning statistics to illustrate how un-fucking-believably far Cook is from everything, but I can’t give you an exact distance. Cook is so far from Sydney and Perth by road that even Google refuses to compute it. I tried. So, under the circumstances “2,193,765 miles” seems like a fair estimate.

Thankfully I’m not really alone, because that would be idiotic. On the contrary, on the opposite side of these empty homes are a dozen or so Indian Pacific railway cars. This includes the car with the finely appointed, air conditioned, first class cabin with en suite bathroom that I’ve been occupying for the past 24 hours as well as the dining car where, in a short while, I will be devouring ostrich steak or kangaroo tartare or something similarly extravagant.

Unbelievably, I’m traveling from Perth to Sydney in this four star hotel on wheels for work. In what was easily the greatest triumph of my travel writing career thus far, I somehow managed to convince both a US travel magazine and the Indian Pacific marketing people that three days of me being lavishly pampered was in everyone’s best interest.

A number of my fellow passengers – those who did not immediately turn around and re-board the train when the searing heat punched them in the face – are not even 100 meters away, mingling around the Cook souvenir shop. I peeled away from the group to walk into Cook’s residential area, so I could peek into a few of the abandoned homes and indulge in the above reverie of being alone in this mind-screw of a place.

Cook was created in 1917 to support the passing trains on Australia’s brand new 4,352 kilometer (2,698 mile) transcontinental railway. The town happens to be located along the longest stretch of perfectly straight railway in the world, 478 kilometers (297 miles) without the slightest wiggle. Before the Australian railways were privatized in 1997, Cook had a permanent population of about 300 people. Since supporting the trains was really the only reason to be in Cook, when privatization happened, the town was quickly abandoned.

Cook now has a population of two, who, in addition to running the souvenir shop, maintain the still used diesel refueling facilities as well as sometimes hosting train drivers overnight.

Having thoroughly creeped myself out, I doubled back and completed my tour of Cook, sucking in the seemingly oxygen-starved, fantastically hot air, and taking pictures of some of the good humored graffiti left behind by departing residents.

Our stop in Cook was for only 30 minutes. Most of us were back on train in 20. Cook is not the type of place where you want to get left behind because you dawdled.

[This post is based on my experience during my first trip to Burma in 2005.]

As I was shoveling down yet another accidentally extravagant Burmese breakfast due to a communications mishap with the server, two trishaw (bike taxi) drivers sat down at my table and asked if they could practice their English with me. This all-purpose opening line was usually a precursor to some kind of offer of goods, services or a recommendation for their brother’s jewelry shop where I could buy and ship home a giant cargo container of precious gems to sell for a massive profit in my home country. Sure enough, the conversation quickly steered to my tourism goals in Mandalay and how I planned to get around.

I had no time or need for their trishaw-guided city tour pitch. I had rented a bicycle – the first time I would be piloting anything on wheels in months – and I intended to zoom around the city at high velocity to make the most of my limited time in Mandalay.

Not only is biking the quickest way to cover the great distances between sights in Mandalay, jockeying through the dense, every-man-for-himself traffic conditions faster than any other vehicle including motorcycles, but at a mere 1,000 kyat (US$1.10) for a full day rental, it’s also delightfully easy on the budget. Moreover, cycling in Mandalay provided an adrenaline rush only slightly less powerful than when I jumped out of an airplane in New Zealand, screaming like a little girl all the way down.

The traffic in Mandalay is particularly lawless in a country where most driving conventions are improvised and faith in reincarnation is vital. Certain death is faced and somehow miraculously avoided every few moments while plunging through traffic conditions that would make a New York cabbie weep. Trucks and buses (and trucks-being-used-as-buses) spew noxious clouds of exhaust, many of the rattling cars appear to have been salvaged from junk piles or lashed together with spare parts, and noisy motorcycles swarm around and through any available opening. The accompanying clouds of floating dust and debris kicked up by all this mayhem coat your sweaty body while you suck down the hot, fume-choked air. At the end of a full day of biking around Mandalay, you look like you really did something.

Although I have to assume that tourists must be seen on rented bikes on a regular basis, locals nevertheless stared at me like I was once-in-a-lifetime peculiarity. Every few dozen meters people were yelling and excitedly waving at me from the sidewalk or shouting out of passing vehicles like they’d just seen Aung San Suu Kyi riding a rainbow unicorn. I eventually realized that all this surprised merriment might have had something to do with the speed I was maintaining.

I’ve always walked with purpose, at a speed suggesting that I was running late for a job interview. Since becoming a travel writer, I’ve actually kicked the pace up a notch. You have to. I ride a bike the same way. Even if I have all the time in the world, I pedal like I’m racing for pole position. Apart from arriving at every destination in a flop sweat, this manic impulse never really had any social ramifications until I was riding among the Burmese people who, out of respect for the admittedly unrelenting heat, ride about as slow as a bicycle can go without tipping over.

As a result, I was blowing the doors off my fellow bikers. My freshly shaved, streaking bald scalp and breathtaking speed were turning heads in all directions. With the rate that I was moving, people usually only caught a blurred glimpse of my purple three-speed and flowery handlebar basket before I disappeared into a cloud of dust.

A pickup-truck-cum-bus carrying a bunch of rambunctious guys encouraged me to speed up and catch them, which I did, whereupon one of the guys hung out the back to take my hand and they towed me along for about two blocks. I was having a blast and covering some serious ground. On my first day alone, I managed to visit a gold leaf workshop, the train station for a ticket purchase, the Fort and Palace, and a host of monasteries, pagodas and payas scattered around the city.

Before arriving in Burma, I’d read several accounts, some of them pretty recent, of Western travelers and journalists being shadowed by sometimes pitifully disguised, unsubtle government stooges. Though I’d already begun to get some traction in my travel writing career, even if the government had some gifted internet stalkers who’d tracked down my work, I didn’t believe I was anywhere near worthy of being followed around.

But now it occurred to me that if I did have a government shadow in Mandalay, they were gone. Long gone. With the pace I was keeping, threading through the gridlocked traffic like I was fleeing agents in the Matrix, only a helicopter could have realistically kept up with me. The rubber I was laying off that bike probably took years off the life of the tires. I fell into a reverie, imagining my government shadow, or maybe shadows, a mile behind me, lying in the street, gasping for breath, legs in spasms.

My overactive imagination kicked in. In a flash, I concocted a tightly edited visual narrative of me shedding government shadows left and right with the same pandemonium and unintentional success of Inspector Clouseau. Racing by, I’d upset a stack of boxes which collapse on one pursuing shadow. The smoking, over-stressed tires exploding on the bicycle of another. The shadow on a scooter running out of gas and beating on the gas gauge in comic frustration. I’d startle a guy hoisting a piano with a rope, causing it to fall just behind me, defeating another shadow. Toe-tapping banjo music accompanying it all.

I filled two gratifying days in Mandalay like this. A Caucasian blur exploring the city, punctuated by heartening encounters with locals, reflective stops at mostly deserted religious sites, and a running daydream of thwarted government shadows littering the streets in my dusty wake. Cut to a low-level intelligence general in a far off government office, slamming his phone receiver down and angrily shoving a pile of papers off his desk, having learned that the slippery American had eluded him again.

[From my travelogue archives, the re-mastered account of my visit with questionably sane long distance unicyclists touring Norway's Arctic Circle region in June 2003.]

Stupefied disbelief mixed with moderate alarm. That’s typically how people reacted when I explained my race to the Arctic Circle to intercept a group of audacious lunatics – several of them good friends of mine – happily facing precarious weather conditions, mountains, fjords, reindeer skin beds and the unforgiving expenses required of traveling in Norway, all for the pleasure of unicycling 578 miles north from Trondheim into the Arctic Circle.

Let me quickly address the questions that have likely just popped into your head.

Yes, I said “unicycling.”

Yes, some people ride unicycles long distances for pleasure.

No, I am not kidding.

As I’ve declared previously, unicyclists are a special group of people. Serious unicycling is both physically demanding and unexpectedly dangerous, factors that, over time, seemingly result in a reduced capacity to feel fear and/or acknowledge anything less than agonizing pain. Mark my words, when the zombie horde sweeps across the land, massacring every human in sight, the unicyclists will be the last ones standing.

If you want to know how long someone has been unicycling and their level of devotion to the discipline, all you have to do is examine their bare legs. Substantial scar tissue between the knees and ankles from bone-jarring wipeouts, pedal lacerations and tire burns are an ongoing fact of life for serious unicyclists. Like the rings of a tree, you simply need to count the scars and permanent shin dimples to estimate a unicyclist’s longevity and skill in the sport.

Is it really a sport? Yes, unicycling is a sport. The unicycling community has annual and semi-annual nail-biting national and world championships respectively. Much like figure skating, routines are timed and judged for technical difficulty as well as artistic merit. A serious competitor can expect to practice roughly six days a week for a minimum of three hours a day to have a realistic shot at a title and that’s assuming one already has the proficiency that is only attainable through years of the aforementioned training schedule in the first place. Accordingly a skilled and dedicated unicyclist has all the muscle tone and conditioning of a serious athlete. The only thing that separates competitive unicyclists from mainstream athletes is that there are few if any lucrative endorsement deals to be had.

A rapidly growing sub-set of unicycling is the distance touring enthusiasts, which brings us back to this Norway insanity.

I caught up with the Norwegian Unicycle Tour (NUT) group in Bodø, a swollen fishing town of 42,000, located at a latitude of 67° 17’ north, well inside the Arctic Circle. The riders were in good spirits on their first of two nights in town, despite being sun burnt, exhausted and in a semi-stupor after traveling 63 miles (their longest day of the tour) on an unusually warm, cloudless day in the Arctic Circle. After unpacking and cleaning up, I joined the riders as they limped en masse to a nearby Italian restaurant where they tried to replace the approximately 5,000 calories that they burn daily, while recounting the sights and notable events of the day’s ride.

I’m told a barely plausible story about how one of the NUT riders fell asleep on her unicycle, drifted off the road and crashed into the ditch. The theme in most of the stories, however, is of course the violent double-takes and ensuing thrilled shouts from locals when 10 road-weary but cheerful unicyclists spontaneously appeared and whizzed through their towns.

I asked Andy Cotter of Hutchinson, Minnesota – the ringleader and organizer of the tour– what the heck he was thinking, or possibly inhaling, when he hatched the NUT idea. “We selected Norway for the incredible scenery and once we decided that we wanted to see the midnight sun, the Arctic Circle was the obvious choice.” Cotter, 35, is an enviably lean and muscular man with a youthful presence. He’s an HR database manager by day and a tireless unicyclist for just about every other waking moment. Cotter’s knotted legs are a veritable memoir of his 19 years on unicycles, including abundant national and world titles in individual, pairs and team competitions.

John Stone of New York City was already a grizzled distance unicycling veteran before the NUT. In addition to participating in the 2001 European Unicycle Tour, from Cologne to Barcelona (Over 1,100 miles in 19 days. Talk about chafing…) he once ill-advisedly rode a standard, unmodified unicycle 85 miles in a single day. “That was harder than any other long distance ride in my life,” he intoned. “By the end and for the next day, the pain was so intense I had to be bedridden with ice-packs on my knees.”

Unlike the other NUT participants, Stone does not spend a vast amount of his free time in a gym honing his technical skills on the unicycle. He is content with the challenges of distance riding and the social virtues of unicycling. “I have met many wonderful people who ride, especially those on the long-distance tours,” he explains. “[They have been] experiences that I liken to a miraculous and happy blending of summer camp and college.” Stone has aspirations of riding across the U.S. some day.

The unicycles used for distance riding are not the same ones you see in parades and in competition. The wheels and cranks are much larger and the tires have tread that is better suited for the road. Beyond those details, the road unis are custom designed by each rider with such options as speedometer computers, “drag brakes,” (without them, going downhill on a unicycle would be suicidal), modified handle bars, bike bells and even small rear racks for carrying tools and food.

In addition to the obvious bragging rights of having participated in the NUT, the unicyclists benefited from the extraordinary curiosity and friendliness of the Norwegians as they made their way through all variety of small towns and villages. They were warmly welcomed into far-flung homes by the side of the road when running low on water and in need of a bathroom, had half a dozen townspeople rush to their aid when their support vehicle broke down and even had quick pro bono welding repairs made to one of their unicycles at a truck stop.

Though stories of the apparent danger of falling asleep on one’s unicycle and rolling off a cliff and/or sharing the narrow, winding roads with cargo trucks whose high-speed wake vortexes threatened to blow them into the ditch were admittedly unsettling, I was nonetheless wretchedly jealous of the NUT adventure. Norway is one of the most speechlessly picturesque places in the world and the riders had the unremitting pleasure of viewing that awe-inspiring scenery as well as wildlife sightings that included moose, reindeer, fox and innumerable species of birds.

Though it wouldn’t be unicycling if some manner of lavish suffering weren’t involved. Rain, sleep deprivation, panicky sprints to waiting ferries and knee and achilles repetitive stress injuries aside, there were those sadistic Norwegian mountains. Imagine for a minute the state of your screaming quadriceps after powering up even a mild incline while balancing on a masochistic one-wheeled, fixed-gear contraption. No need for sympathy, they don’t want it, just imagine.

If you would like more information on unicycling, visit the Unicycling Society of America web page at www.unicycling.org.

All photos courtesy of the Norwegian Unicycle Tour

[From my travelogue archives, the re-mastered account of my visit to Bangkok's Pat Pong district in March of 2005.]

The mild to stern warnings issued by travelogues, a variety of barstool neighbors and my Lonely Planet ultimately did not do complete justice to Pat Pong, Bangkok’s formerly notorious, now verily mainstream sex show district. The first big departure from its popular depiction as a raging, in-your-face row of seedy venues staging the world’s greatest honey hole cabarets was that it was, in fact, apparently invisible.

Embarrassingly, I could not find Pat Pong on the fateful night that I had resolved to add this item to my list of Southeast Asia backpacker credentials. This was especially discombobulating as I had previously walked right past the damn street, twice, during quick daytime reconnaissance missions while heading for other objectives and taken note of the many conspicuous theaters unsubtly featuring the word “pussy” on their marquees. Now, it had all seemed to unnervingly disappear.

I finally realized after two passes that the naughty theaters I was seeking were totally obscured by a pop-up, raucous night market. Endless rows of tightly packed, temporary stalls now occupied what had been a bare, lifeless street only hours before, selling knock-off clothing, lighters, wood carvings and DVDs.

The people wandering around idly shopping weren’t the shady, nefarious, pocket pool types I had expected, but instead, backpackers and even whole families out for souvenir shopping. Once it dawned on me that my ping pong shows were somewhere behind the surge of bargain shoppers, I plunged into the market, ostensibly searching for a new pair of sunglasses.

Being an unaccompanied male, the prized beast in this unusual safari, sex show touts were soon on me like sharks on a chum line. They waved “menus” in my face that catalogued the remarkable and unlikely woo-hoo stunts I would see if I entered their theaters.

I refused to be led into any place until I’d had the chance to walk the length of the street and take in all the offerings. Lonely Planet had warned me to avoid the shows that didn’t admit women, so while duly comparing prices and menus, I inquired whether or not it would be OK to bring my “girlfriend” into the theater, who was just down the street buying a handbag. None of them refused my girlfriend request, but I wasn’t feeling too comfortable about any one theater, particularly the one where two guys and a girl came storming out swearing and making obscene gestures at the staff.

Each theatre had nearly the same offer: No cover charge and 100 baht (about US$2.50) per beer. This arrangement was the exact scenario that I’d heard would end in disaster, with exorbitant hidden charges and goons with machete scars blocking the door.

Finally, as I was going through the “Can my girlfriend come?” routine for the tenth time, I glimpsed two couples going up the steps of the theater I was being coerced into. I took this as a good sign and decided to follow them up. If they were going to screw with us up there, at least we’d have numbers.

When I crested the stairs I was met with a sensory overload of depravity. Mostly and completely naked women were everywhere. Six or eight on the stage at a time with another 10 or so mingling with customers. I was led to a recently vacated seat on the far side of the square, theatre-in-the-round style stage where I ordered a Coke and became engrossed in the show.

In addition to the constant gaggle of nude dancers on the stage at any given moment, once every five minutes or so a woman would come out and do a trick with her virginia. Some were pedestrian by Bangkok standards, like the “ping pong show” namesake trick of inserting ping pongs, then shooting them into a basket many feet away with uncanny accuracy, while others were decidedly unexpected. The latter category included tricks like inserting chop sticks, then using them, hands-free, to pick tiny rings up off the stage floor and hook them over a bottle; producing implausibly long strings of beads or flowers; a girl filling herself up with clear water from a bottle and then releasing the now red colored (!) liquid into a different bottle; a raw egg being inserted after which the girl thrashed and bounced all over the stage and reproduced the egg intact; a short tune being played on an inserted horn; a small banana being completely inserted and then launched out with surprising force; and a cigarette being smoked down to the filter.

I later learned that the woman who inserts and reproduces a live fish had the night off.

The room was full of voyeuristic western couples that had decided to get to the heart of Pat Pong much in the same way I was doing, with the glaring exception that they were in committed, healthy relationships, out for an evening of the bizarre and titillating while I was clearly a lonely, desperate pervert. I caught several audience members stealing glances in my direction, wondering what this despicable loner was doing on his own – and where exactly were his hands? I conspicuously placed both hands on the table.

An obese, 60-something year old man in full boat captain regalia strode into the theater and immediately had six girls fall all over him. It was pretty clear that he was a regular, as he could barely walk for all the naked Thai skin draped on him and I was still sitting alone, isolated at the back of the room with nothing but an eight ounce glass of Coke to fondle. The captain and his band of merry sex dancers retired to a corner where about five of them managed to squeeze into his lap, lavishing him with kisses and inviting him to suckle their breasts.

There was one other lone caucasian man in the theatre, about 18-years-old, who was stupid, reeling drunk. His antics notwithstanding, his status as the village idiot was punctuated by his outfit: a school boy uniform, with the shorts covering the knees, dress shoes, white socks, white shirt, half undone tie and cap.

When I entered this guy was wrestling with one of the girls, trying alternately to sneak his hand into her bikini bottom or stuff his face between her legs. Unbelievably the girl wasn’t particularly bothered by his advances and gamely played goalie, laughing on occasion and seemingly having a good time. Eventually she got bored or tired and left, which he took as an invitation to join the dancers on the stage. A few dancers were good natured and encouraged him, while others punched or kicked him if he got too close.

This scene had my undivided attention, mainly because in the good ol’ U.S., at the first sign of behavior like this, the school boy would have been hauled out to the alley by three sadistic bouncers and had his ass beaten to tartare. But there were no bouncers here. Indeed, bizarrely there didn’t seem to be a single visible male staff member in the entire theater. It was just the dancers and the waitresses, most of whom humored their drunken customer.

After being convinced to leave the stage, clown boy stayed out on the floor performing sloppy break dancing moves for our enjoyment, but he had long since worn out his welcome with the audience, being that by staying on the floor he was blocking sightlines to the girl that had jammed a blow gun into the holiest of holies and was now shooting darts at balloons across the room.

A cycle began that persisted the entire time I was there. The school boy went from his spot on the perimeter bench, to sitting on a stool by the stage, to sitting on the stage, to standing on the stage, to chasing various girls around the stage, to being helped off the stage, to wowing us with his dope dance moves and then back to the bench. He made to leave a few times, but always returned and inevitably inserted himself into the show again.

After about an hour, my snail-paced nursing of my Coke had finally resulted in a glass of ice. I was enjoying myself. In fact, I felt surprisingly energized and giddy, considering that I was ready to fall asleep during the train ride over. Despite my newly jovial spirit, it was almost midnight and I decided that I had better get out of there before the trains stopped running and I’d be forced to fork over cab fare.

I called for the bill and it showed the correct total for my drink. In fact, it suddenly occurred to me that my Pat Pong experience had gone off completely without incident. There was no hidden cover charge, no outrageously priced drinks, and no dangerous thugs lurking to rob or extort me. Just a wholesome night of seeing the wide ranging and astonishing potential of the female genitalia.

I got up to leave. As soon as I was on my feet, the room went wavy. I stumbled and had to catch myself on a chair. I weaved across the room, barely avoiding collisions with several immoveable objects and people and lumbered down the stairs with a two-handed death-grip on the railing to steady myself. What was going on? I was having a hard time clearing my head.

Out on the street, I staggered through the still raging market, confused and directionless. I finally found my way to the main road and gathered my thoughts. I had ordered a plain Coke, but even if they had screwed it up and given me a shot of alcohol, I didn’t recall tasting anything out of the ordinary. Holy crap, had I been drugged?

I fought to put the facts into place, but my head was a mess. I decided I had better get away from Pat Pong and back to the hostel. Half way to the train I stopped. Just a darn minute! I wasn’t going to let them get away with this! I went back.

My plan was to make note of the name of the bar and report them to the police. I managed to find the bar (I think) and stood for several seconds trying to read and memorize the name. This was very difficult in that not only was my concentration shattered, but the touts who had seen me leave just moments earlier were all over me again like I had never been there, trying to lead me back inside. I refused and after I was sure I had the bar name committed to memory, I headed back for the train.

By the time I was standing on the train station platform, I had forgotten the bar’s name. It took the whole ride home for me to piece together the name “Queen’s Court III,” though I wasn’t sure about the middle part. It was definitely “Queen’s something III.”

After making a no-brainer train switching error and going the wrong direction for a while, I managed to get back on track and eventually to the hostel where I immediately bought and drank a bottle of water to dilute whatever was in me.

In retrospect, the drunken school boy may not have been drunk at all, but only the victim of a few too many “Queen’s something III” specials. The couples in the room didn’t seem to be acting out of the ordinary, it was just us single guys. Chilling.

And that was that. I had experienced Pat Pong without incident, but just barely. It could have gone so disastrously wrong if I’d made the mistake of ordering one more drink.

So, guys, allow me to add two crucial pieces of Pat Pong countermeasure advice: Bring a female and order bottled water, unopened.