December 26, 2006 by zankbennett.

From Bangkok, took a 13-hour overnight bus ride to Surat Thani, the jump-off point to get to the main Thai islands in the southern Gulf of Thailand.
The bus would stop every few hours for food/bathroom breaks. The double-decker bus had a video system and they played American movies with sound at, roughly speaking, about 100 dBA at 2 metres…about as loud as someone yelling in your ear. So I watched most of it with a finger stuck in my right ear…then out my headphones on to reduce the sound. It was brutal. Loved it. The bus had disco balls and colored flashing lights on the ceiling. The interior was every color imaginable. This love-bus took us to the connection point where we had to wait 2 hours for the mini-bus to the ferry landing….all very exciting. The 2 hour ferry took 5 1/4 and everyone was throwing up. Mmm!

Ko Samui is a aquare-ish island shaped like Portugal & Spain. I stayed on the north coast in Hat Mae Nam with clear views of the island Ko Pha-Ngan to the north.
It was quite windy for the four days on the island and so while it was beautiful, the water was never clear enough to snorkle.
Days were spent scootering around the island and visiting waterfalls and finding amazing food for very little $.
The main beach, Hat Chweng, was bananas with people and clubs and tourist stores everywhere.

All the stores/stands sell Diesel, Ray Ban and everet other brand like I’ve never seen. Want a Rolex? $3. Want some sued trunks? $10. Want the latest jeans from any label? $10-20. It’s ridiculous and everywhere. How about some pad thai for lunch and a Gucci watch? No problem!
Aly’ from SD, has been here on this leg of the trip and We’ve been having a blast seeing all of this.
Christmas was really mellow. The Thai people don’t celebrate Christmas so it’s not a big deal here. Refreshingly so. We went out for dinner with a pair of German girls from the bungalo next-door and had a great time. We sat at a table about 3 metres from the water and small, lapping waves. No windows, just open sky and water and far-off lights of Ko Pha-Ngen.

Today, 26 Dec, it’s off to Krabi, a great jump-off place to reach many of the famous and most beautiful beaches that were hit by the tsunami, two years ago this month.

Everything’s going very well, with some comedic adventures sprinkled in…
-my WAMU visa card, the one that has been cancelled FIVE times by “fraud prevention”, has become demagnetized. I’m still too upset to comment on this one. Please send money and the name of a REAL bank!!!! My phone bill to them alone could sustain a Thai island for months.
-I left my mini-guitar in the first bus today. Got out and realized 20 seconds later what I’d done. White-boy was hailing-ass down the middle of the street after the bus waving arms wildly…I actually passed a couple of mopeds as I weaved in and out of the moving traffic Caught the bus no problem. Everyone got a good laugh.
-although not offensively loud, (or maybe my tolerence is high) they’re playing Thai music now on this bus and the karaoke monitor is showing the words. They’re SERIOUS about it here. It’s glorious.
-a few minutes ago I pulled something hard out of the bite of rice-cake I was chewing. It was a metal staple. I’m having a difficult time with this one. It’s much worse mentally than the rock I pulled from my mouth last week while munching a good plate of pad thai; I really chewed that staple good! My mouth tastes like chewed metal now.

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December 19, 2006 by zankbennett.

More bullets from the land that I just can’t seem to be able to describe any other way!  Pictures are all from Cairo, the first time there.
-Saw a truck on fire, from the engine.  Men were jumping out of the cabin while the truck kept on moving.  Told my taxi driver.  He just smiled like it was a normal occurance.
-Dust.  EVERYWHERE.
-Cab driver had this a capella song playing for like 35 minutes straight.  It was sung in Arabic.  About 20 minutes into the song, the singer, actually, starts to cry.  The song crashes to a halt, the singer regains himself and continues until, 10 minutes later, I get out of the cab.  For all I know, this song could still be going on!!! wow.
-I’m looking at this piece of bread for sale by a ferry-side vendor in Aswan.  I point to one in the middle of a huge pile of bread just at one of the pieces in front falls on the (so disgusting I cannot describe it) ground.  A guy picks it up, tosses it back up to the middle of the pile and smiles at me as he prepares to serve me the piece I was oggling originally.  I walk off with a look like I’d just seen Jesus and the guy has the nerve to give me a death-stare for not buying the piece of bread I originally pointed at.  Mmmmm!
-Pulling into Cairo at end of overnight train ride.  We were stopped just shy of the station for 45 minutes. The conductor, sadly, had a heart attack.  I hope he is well.
-Bikes there have foot brakes.  Isn’t that a yo-mamma joke…?
-One of the taxis I took had a rear-view mirror made of a regular piece of cut mirror…the edges of this thing were sharper than razors!  Unbelievable…and if you think there’s a seatbelt that works in the whole country…. lol!

This is THE tourist shot.

I’m about 175 meters up in this picture…Ha ha!

Me and Mohamad, my taxi driver with the Giza pyramids in the background.

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December 19, 2006 by zankbennett.

Hong Kong:
3-hour flight from Bangkok to visit James,

(with our up-side-down glasses on!)

the cool guy I originally met on this trip, in Portugal.  I’ll be here for 7 days to visit and explore the area.  Staying on a great island called Lamma.  It’s such a bizarre place.  There’s a huge expat community here and those who aren’t speak perfect English.  It seems that everyone knows everyone else here.  I’ve met quite a few people so far and am really loving it.  Today is my second day, and already I have friends to greet in the streets.  There are no cars allowed here, so the “streets” are nothing more than pedestrian walkways.

Well, now, back in Bangkok and at the same tired hotel… ;)  Soon to the islands…

I was under the weather for my first few days in Hong Kong.  Good for some R&R.  James started work (at Chick on the Run, none the less!) the day after I arrived, so I was on my own.  I explored the island of Lamma and, when I felt better, went for a run from our town to the next town up, near the peak.  James’s girlfirend Pam suggested we gather a crew and go for a hike up the main peak on Lamma.  It was a great idea and we made the round-trip in about 5 hours!  Good, steep, rugged climbing.  Very overgrown and steep.  Brush was occasionally overhead for 20 meters at a time.

Spent some time in Hong Kong city.  The ferry ride from Lamma was about 30 minutes and then transport in the town was quite simple.  The shopping is insane.  They have electronics that we’ll likely never have in the US…and this matters to ME!! ;)  I bought a simple picture storage-device/ viewer.  Now I don’t have to worry about my memory cards filling up…

Took a tram to the top of Hong Kong island for the spectacular views found there.  Amazing architecture.  Everything’s so clean…the lines, the streets, everything.  I had set my timer to 2 seconds and was just spinning around to the camera in this shot. 

At night after James would get off work, we would go to one of the pubs on the island.  It wasn’t inexpensive, either.  Prices were just below those in the US, save anything electronic.  Food could be found cheap, but often it was not.
one particular evening, we got a whole crew together for dinner…picture…

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December 19, 2006 by zankbennett.

Aswan:

Easy, quick Train ride to Aswan.  Easily found the nice hotel room.  They had folded a towel into a cobra snake and left that on the bed.  Apparently, someone thought this was a good idea.  I looked under the bed like 50 times making sure the cloth snake didn’t have any cold-blooded friends…

The markets in Aswan were more of the same…impossible to walk by without endless hastling.
First day in Aswan…the most impressive part of Egypt..the Karnak Temple.  Amazing pillars there.  A forest of 158 pillars, so tall and mighty greeted me just 100 metres into the temple and proved the most impressive part of the whole trip, as far as sights went.

I spent the second day exploring the west bank of the Nile and the toumbs found there, then rode a Camel over to a nearby monestary and an unfinished obelinsk.  The camel was real unhappy, so I just walked most of the way.  I felt like I was in one of those movies where the actors are stranded out in the middle of nowhere and the sand-combed dunes extend as far as sight allows.  It was beautiful.

The overnight train was easy and, on my last half-day in Cairo, wandered around a couple churches and markets I’d wanted to see…well, not really, but people told me not to miss them!  ;)  so, after begging a hotel manager to allow me to store my bag and guitar for a day…I was off on foot.  I’m still surprised I didn’t get hit by a car or that I wasn’t in a car accident.  Driving there is an art.  Truly.

Left Egypt, en route to Bangkok, Thailand.

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December 19, 2006 by zankbennett.

Another day.  Another loss of words.
-Luxor-

Spent the morning at the Temples of Karnak.  The columns at hypostyle hall were enough to reduce me to a giggling child.

They were so tall.  And there were 158 of them, all in one area.  I just started laughing as I looked up at their height.  There are no descriptive words, so maybe a quote written about Karnak is apt,
By Amelia Edwards:

**
It is a place that has been much written about and often painted; but of which no writing and no art can convey more than a dwarfed and pallid impression…The scale is too vast; the effect too tremendous; the sense of one’s own dumbness, and littleness, and incapacity, too complete and crushing.
**

Met a group of school children there today.  All about 10. They wanted to take a picture with me so I could go home and show everyone what the Egyptian children look like.  I was ready to engage in some sort of mass adoption.  Beautiful children!

A woman just walked by the café where I’m having lunch.  She had a massive bag balanced on her head.  Walking.  There’s another with a huge pan of something.  Balanced.

Just crunched into the Egyptian bread (like a cross between naan and pita) than came with lunch.  It’s not supposed to crunch…that’s the sand…baked in…let’s you know it’s made here and not like Wonder Egyption Bread or something!!!  It kinda brings a smile.

Last night, walking along main drag here in town, was invited into a place where the Egyptian bread is made.  Very cool!  For a small tip, the guys working there let me try the hot bread and take a look at the whole process from the giant mixer to the conveyor belt oven where these guys turned out maybe a hundred pieces per minute.
…..

Luxor 3:
Took a sunset felucca ride last night along the Nile.  It was ok, but there was hardly any wind so the boat made no headway against the current. In an hour we’d gone only about 30 meters upstream.  And after haggling with 563,242 other boat captains before getting a ride I really didn’t want it at all.  The badgering here is unprecidented anywhere I have ever been.  If you’re outside, anywhere, you can expect to have al least two people talking at you, or yelling if you don’t respond.  ”No, thank you”, quickly became my first Arabic phrase!

Then, after a nap, I took a nice walk around the central Luxor Monument.  I heard a band playing and walked up to the window and was quickly beconed in.  They were filming a music show for TV. I listened for a while and when the last song was over, met the guys in the band who let me play a rababa, which is the instrument that gives Egyptian music its unique sound and atmosphere.  I love it, but couldn’t do much useful on the rababa.  It was a great experience off the well worn tourist path.
This morning (01 DEC) off to Aswan, a three-hour train ride south.  Tomorrow night, it’s an overnight trip back to Cairo…then a LONG flight to Bangkok.

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