Goodbye India!

Okay, we shall see how this goes. Tomorrow morning we fly to Burma for a month and will have no contact with the outside world, no internet, no phone. It has been a long time since I have posted, so I must do it now. The only problem is for the last 24 hours I have been on a crazy drug high.

Natalie and I started taking Mefloquine, an anti-malaria drug with some interesting side effects. It is said to give people wild lucid dreams, hallucinations, and is currently being blamed for making troops in Iraq go crazy after long exposure (cases include suicide and murder, personally I think maybe the pressures of war may have something to do with it, but I am no expert).

For us it is having the effect of cheap speed or some illegal diet pill like fen-phen. Makes you talk like a maniac, not be able to concentrate (or over concentrate and get really anal if you know what I mean (see what I mean, this is going to be a long tedious post!), and drive anyone around you totally insane (Natalie took it a week before me so I understand what it is like to live through it!) So, here we go…

(I wrote this next part the day before I started freaking out)

We did it! We made it for 3 months in India! I don't think I have ever done anything more challenging in my life. Although we did love it at times, India was pretty tough going (of course it still beats working!)

I have been really bad about updating this thing lately. The last two weeks in India were tough and draining. We moved around a lot which makes you feel less grounded. The tsunami happened and really shook us up. We dealt with almost all of our friends and family emailing us to say that they (you) were worried about us, some just to say they were glad we were okay (thanks for that, although it was difficult to read them all, it made us happy to remember that we have people who cared about us). We got bit a weird about the idea of leaving. There had been dozens of times when all we wanted was to leave India, but when it came time to go we started to get sad. Then someone would piss us off and we would be happy again. All that and we were in the most polluted cities we had ever seen in our lives. It was hard to breathe.

So after all of that Thailand feels like a home away from home. It is clean, beautiful and wonderful! The people are so kind and warm. No one hassles us, no one cheats us, the sky is blue, and we have smiles on our faces! We ran into a good friend that we had traveled with in India for 2 weeks and have been drinking and dancing in the streets (The tourist area in Bangkok is a huge indoor/ outdoor party).

We figured out how much money we had spent in India and found that we had just enough ($200 each) to fly to Burma. One of my favorite people when I was a kid was my great uncle Lynn (from whom I get my middle name) and he lived in Burma for some time, so I am really excited to be going. It is suppose to be nearly devoid of tourists and really hard to travel around due to lack of infrastructure. We got a sample of this when we spent 6 hours waiting in line for our visas! The place was run so poorly that there was almost a tourist uprising! It was so absurd it was comical... and maddening, but you had to laugh. Will post that story later.

Back to crazy drug influenced posting:


Bangkok is really cool. The tourist area is way over the top, but we are having a great time of it. It is literally a huge block(s) party every night of the week. Everyone is walking down the street drinking beer, music is blaring everywhere, and there is food and shopping lining the streets. There are VW vans all over that have been converted into nightclub/ bars. Well, the van is the bar and the nightclub surrounds the van. There is even a VW tattoo parlor in front of our guesthouse. When we got here the first morning it was about 6am and there were people still drinking in the streets, most of them western tourists with their Thai female “friends.” There is a lot of that around, in fact we are pretty sure it was going on in the room next to us (which was separated by about a ¼ inch of plywood, not the most sound-proof way to build a wall.)

Oh yeah, and there are prostitutes and “lady-boys” all over (or so I am told, I still down know who is who or if it is even true.) Lady-boys are Thai male transsexuals. Apparently this is really big over here and accepted in society. The problem is in the west it is not accepted, and when these drunk tourists end up in bed with a lady-boy, it can be quite a surprise for them. And yes, apparently the lady-boys are really good looking and quite easily can pass as woman. Seeing as I am still not sure if I have seen one, we aren’t talking about some tranny walking down Hollywood Blvd!

As fun as all that is, it is time to leave the party and go back to the kind of traveling we came here to do. Burma is suppose to be the type of place that doesn’t exist any more. The military dictatorship has closed the country off to outsiders; no outside TV, no internet, no email, no journalists, nothing. A lot of the time they won’t even let travelers visit. Someone we met 4 months ago said that he would be walking in a small village and children would run crying at the sight of him. They had never seen a white person before. This is the kind of experience that I have only dreamt of having, something that I didn’t think was even possible anymore.

So off we go. You won’t hear anything from us for awhile. We fly back into Bangkok on February 7th. So until then, I hope all goes well with you and we will check back in next month.