Home Cookin’

Country roads,

Take me home,

To the place,

I belong,

West Bloomfield, Michigan,

Good ol’ suburbia,

Take me home,

Country roads

Before I began my trip I told myself I would not plan things too far in advance and so would allow myself to be open to different options when they appeared.  That makes me a hard person to travel with for many people but when you’ve got an open schedule the last thing you want are commitments to weigh you down.  In March I booked my ticket from Jakarta to Bangkok the morning of.   In October I booked my ticket to Jordan two hours before the flight, and consequently got extra curiosity at airport security.  And the same thing is what brought me home.  As I went to bed one night in Aleppo, a beautiful and old city in northern Syria, I just felt like I would rather be at home.  I wanted some home cooked food and to hang out with my family and friends.

I decided to sleep on it and see how it felt in the morning.

After breakfast and walking around the old city, I found myself at an internet café for over an hour, catching up with the world and fantasy football and reading a humorous email exchange about my good friend Mahk’s upcoming wedding.  His name is actually Mark but being from Boston he pronounces it Mahk.  And that’s pretty much what confirmed my decision.  I couldn’t think of a better way to come back home, seeing college friends at a wedding.  I fired up Skype, called United Airlines and half an hour later I had a confirmation number in hand.

As with any big decision I’ve ever made, I kept asking myself if I didn’t royally screw up.  I still had plans to go to Turkey and Armenia and Lebanon.  I had planned to stay a full calendar year abroad.  But I felt the adventurous spark which I had had the whole trip just wasn’t there any longer, where every little thing would jump out and draw my attention.  Now pulling the camera out of the bag was a bit of a chore.  So all those other places are just going to have to wait.  Sorry guys.

And just to hedge my bets, I booked my ticket with an open return to Frankfurt so I do have a foot in the door to head back.  Just in case…

Even the bags are ready for a break

Take me home BMI!

I was a pregnant snail

carry me caravan

take me away

take me to portugal

take me to spain

andalucia with fields full of rain

i have to see you

again and again

Carry me caravan

Take me away

Take me to Portugal

Take me to Spain

Andalusia with fields full of rain

I have to see you

Again and again

Now that I’ve been on the road for a year, I figured it’s a good time to take stock of what I’ve been lugging around. Surprisingly, I have very little of what I began with. I began my journey with my 70 liter Jack Wolfskin backpack fully loaded and that was supplemented with a 30 liter bag that was equally full, although that was mostly due to the dozen cans of Guinness beer I was taking as a gift to my friend Vivek in Chennai. Who knew that in one of the biggest cities in India you would not be able to buy Guinness, or really any other imported beer?

The bulk of my luggage was trekking gear for the two treks I was going to do in Nepal. I had a super-ultra warm sleeping bag, a pair of Vasque boots that took up an incredible amount of space, a fleece, thick trekking socks and many other cold weather items. Traveling with all this gear is not a lot of fun. You’re basically immobile and putting all that stuff on and off trains and buses is a real pain. According to a travelers’ newspaper in Cambodia I would be classified as a pregnant snail, which is when you are carrying one big backpack on your back and a smaller one on your front. I knew early on that I had way too much stuff and so I’ve been shedding weight throughout the trip and now I’m traveling with just one very manageable bag.

Thanks to international shipping via low-cost-and-slow-delivery sea cargo and faster-but-costlier air mail I’ve been sending packages home from India, Nepal, Indonesia and Thailand. Total weight sent home is now between 40-50 kgs, almost 100 lbs. And thanks to the “you don’t really expect all of your things to make it home do you?” shipping service lottery from India, the actual weight that will be delivered to my parents’ home will be about 10 kg less than that.

So what’s left from the original cargo? Here’s the list:

• Jack Wolfskin backpack – I’ve had this bag for ten years and taken it everywhere and I have to hand it to those Germans. They really know how to make a durable bag.
• North Face pants – these are the MVP of the trip. They double as shorts and I’ve worn them just about every day for the past year. I have worn them on five long distance treks. They were khaki upon initial purchase but are now a rugged gray color thanks to washing them with a new pair of black boxers.
• Helly Hansen thermal shirt – this is a super durable long sleeve thermal shirt that I’ve worn during treks and as an under layer on cold nights. Amazingly it is still white and even survived a three year old expressing his artistic side on it with a blue marker. If you do any hiking in cool weather, you might want to pick one of these up. They’re about $30.
• H&M long sleeve shirt – simple, basic brown shirt that I wear when it’s cold.
• Blue American Apparel tshirt – a super comfortable tshirt. Thanks Sophie!
• Green tshirt – I bought this in Paris four years ago and it’s an all-time favorite.
• Green rugged shorts – they’re just about done
• White lightweight long sleeve shirt – I hardly wear this but somehow I’ve still kept it
• Five boxers – somehow my boxers are super durable and I haven’t yet had the need to buy a pair of knockoff Calvan Klain boxers.
• White running socks – they are no longer white but they are still socks
• A toiletry bag that I got from the Lucent medical department when I worked there back in 1997. Who would have guessed the bag would outlast Lucent?
• A packet of twelve sewing needles that I have yet to use even one of. I brought them along in case I got any blisters while trekking. Now that I think about it, even when I did get a blister I didn’t use them.
• Gillette Sensor shaving handle – thanks to the kind people at Gillette it is possible to buy replacement cartridges anywhere in this world and in case you’re wondering, they are ridiculously overpriced everywhere.
• A pen from the New York New York casino in Las Vegas – I don’t even remember packing this pen but it somehow found its way into my backpack. On a down note, I lost my Xythos space pen somewhere in India. Bummer.
• My iPhone – One of the neatest things for traveling. It’s a music player, it’s a Skype phone, it’s a web browser, it’s an alarm clock, it’s an emergency camera, it’s a movie player for the long journeys, it’s a currency converter, it’s a game center (chess and Simon are big hits) and if you get it unlocked it’s a mobile phone in every country you go to. And it’s always a conversation piece.

And that is all that is left from the original contents of my backpacks. If I made a list of what I no longer am carrying with me that would be about ten times as long as this; books, bags, hammocks, sleeping bags, boots, clothes and basically just about anything else a family of four would need to live comfortably.

I have since added a few new things to my cargo like new shirts, an MSI netbook (a small very portable laptop) and my rather big Nikon SLR camera which was graciously shipped to Bangkok for me by Thad who emerged victorious after another battle of storage-unit-Jenga.

I must admit that even though I have whittled down my cargo to just the one backpack, I do still get backpack envy when I see someone travelling lighter than me.

But at least I am no longer a pregnant snail; I am now just a regular old snail.

In Chennai

Greetings from my friend Vivek’s home office. I’m choosing to sleep here tonight since it has A/C and the guest bedroom where I slept last night only has a ceiling fan. And it is HOT today. Over 90 most of the day, and humid and sticky. Plus this morning there was a rolling blackout from 6-8 a.m. and the ceiling fan just shut off which turned the room into an instant sauna. Turns out these blackouts are an everyday thing. I guess you just get used to it.

We’re on the outskirts of Chennai, formerly known as Madras. Vivek’s house is about a mile off of the main road down a ridiculously uneven, bumpy dirt road. One of these things the government says they’re going to fix but just haven’t quite gotten around to doing it. Vivek says it’s because the right politician hasn’t been greased yet. It did make for a fun scooter ride today as I took his wife Vidya’s scooter and he took his motorcycle and we took a ride around the ‘hood. We are near the “IT Highway” right now, which is a long stretch of road where a lot of technology offshoring goes on. And wouldn’t you know it, there is a mini-real estate bubble happening right now with lots of office buildings going up but now a few of them are beginning to have troubles renting them out. Maybe the U.S. can bail them out too.

I’ve seen probably over a hundred stray dogs in my first day here. They are everywhere. I just found one hiding under this computer desk I’m sitting at. And lots of cows too. They’ll just be hanging out in the middle of the road, between the lanes, and since they don’t kill any cows over here, most male cows end up just doing this their whole life. Some unfortunate few will get put to work hauling stuff around but otherwise they’ll get castrated and just set free. What a life. Except for the castration part.

It’s common for people to have a cow at home that they keep around for milk. Vivek wants to get a cow for this reason, says it saves money in the long run. And you outsource the maintenance of it. Someone comes over, takes care of the cow and milks it. And for payment they take half of the cow’s output. Sounds like a good deal to me. I’m trying to convince Vivek to get the cow this week while I’m here so I can check it out. Vidya on the other hand wants nothing to do with a cow. I’m interested to see how this one plays out.

On the health front, so far so good. I have gotten about 10 mosquito bites so far. There’s just no avoiding them. Vivek has a mosquito zapper shaped like a tennis racket that you literally swing at the bugs and they get zapped. You can see them light up and hear the crackle as they burn to death. It’s actually quite fun if you manage to kill them and not get bit.