Category Archives: Travel

We are Vikings!

Three years ago I spent the winter in SE Asia. I started, timid as a mouse, in Bangkok. It was not auspicious. I got bolder and left and went to Ayutthaya, to adjust to the climate and the culture and recover from the jet lag.

Ayutthaya is one of the ancient capitals of Thailand. It’s a beautiful place, and there are many ruins of old temples. The old city is surrounded by a river, so technically it’s on an island. One afternoon I took a long tail boat ride around the island:

We stopped at several sites along the way, visiting beheaded Buddhas,

Buddha heads,

and admiring the jackfruit trees.

There were two Norwegian couples on the boat ride with me, one that was middle-aged and the other quite young. We all went to the night market for dinner. We sat outside, in the dark, sweating our asses off at 7:30 at night. Apparently the only food I took a picture of was this fish, which was delicious:

There was also morning glory vines and frog legs. And beer. Which was the point of telling this story. For those of you who know me, you know I’m not a big drinker. I mean, it takes me at least an hour to drink a pint of beer. On a good day. At the night market, they had beer – but only the 22-ounce bottles. I tried to ask if they had the 12-ounce once ones and everyone laughed at me. I recall asking the people I was eating dinner with how they could drink so much.

The young woman turned to me, lifted her bottle and cheerily said, “We are Wikings!”

We all had a good laugh.

52 Photos: Crooked Lines

I have to admit, I was having a little trouble with the prompt this week. And then I started looking at my pictures from Yellowstone that I took last summer.

I LOVE this one of the wavy orange bacterial mats in the Grand Prismatic Spring disappearing into the fog:

Here’s the same spring from a higher (and clearer) vantage point:

This pinecone, with its zigs and zags:

And finally, these burnt snags, pointing into infinity, but not straight away:

52 Photos: All Dressed Up

Yesterday I returned from my week-long and now annual trip to Colorado to ski with my family. Last year I flew home with a bunch of guys who were returning from a motorcycle rally. Apparently their rally is the same time as my family’s annual ski trip. I had mentioned to my parents that this happened last year, and sure enough, when I got to my gate, there was a group of guys returning from their rally.

I am notoriously shy about taking pictures of strangers. I always like to ask permission, which I usually don’t screw up my courage to do. I was standing behind this man while waiting to board the plane. He had a freshly shaved scalp with an elaborate tattoo, a long, grey beard and this particular shirt on. I was admiring the design and asked him if I could take a picture of it. He gave me his permission.

As I pulled out my iPod to take the picture, though, the giant young man behind me gruffly said, “Don’t do that.” Before I could react, the man in front said, “I told her it was okay. It’s just my back.”

My subject didn’t make it easy for me to take the picture, so this was the best I could manage. After I snapped it, I apologized to the man behind him, telling him I didn’t mean to offend him. He waved me off, telling me there was no need.

The men, and they were all men, wore some variation of this Bandidos shirt. They marked themselves publicly, dressed up to signify their membership in this group. The second man’s behavior added weight to my impression of their cohesiveness. They had one another’s backs, literally and figuratively.

Here’s how other people interpreted All Dressed Up this week.

52 Photos: My Reflection

This week’s prompt was My Reflection

I took this a year and a half ago, when my little sister came out to visit the west coast and flirt with the idea of moving out here. I loved that this was the mirror on the outside of the photo booth, and the reminder that you are beautiful was etched into it.

We stayed at the Ace

just down the street from Powell’s in downtown Portland.

We did not heed the advice to “call your mother.”

In other words, we had the time of our lives.

52 Photos: Wide Open Spaces

I loved it when they painted the Space Needle “galaxy gold” in honor of the 50th anniversary of the World’s Fair. This is the view I have one block from my apartment. And while I do enjoy a good glimpse of the Needle, it’s always the Olympic mountain range behind it that takes my breath away.

One summer day we overheard two bikers as they passed this view – on a day when the mountains were particularly stunning and the Needle was its usual white. One said to the other: “Wow! Look at the … Space Needle.” We’ve added that to our repertoire of inside jokes!

And a couple of other “wide open spaces”:

I’ve been thinking a lot about Thailand, because it’s been three years now since I visited. This picture was taken in Ayuttaya, out in the countryside:

And this is Mt. Blanc, taken in France:

Fuji-san Appears on Time

This past September I traveled through Japan with my parents. My mom and I were heading back to Tokyo for our last few days. My mom was very excited by the possibility of seeing Mt. Fuji from the train, the closest we would get to this famous and sacred mountain.

We loved riding the Shinkansen, which is an elegant and efficient mode of travel. A little trivia: the seats are designed to swivel on their mounts, so you can turn them around. I loved knowing this. We even availed ourselves of this feature a few times, so we could face each other while we zipped through the landscape.

This was our last ride on the Bullet Train, and we are zooming past everything. It feels like we’ve reached the future. My mom gets more and more excited about seeing Mt. Fuji until she overcomes her own sense of propriety and asks a group of 4 women traveling together when we might see Fuji-san. They confer with each other and stop the conductor to ask him as well. Finally they arrive at a consensus: 2:45 p.m.

We continue to stare out the window, as if our eyeballs fixed on the horizon could make it materialize. At 2:32 (more or less), I catch a glimpse of what appears to be a volcanic dome, rising from the ground. I stand up and wave my arms at the demure group of ladies, pointing out the window. “Fuji-san,” I say to them. “Fuji-san.”

“No,” they tell me. They point to their watches and shake their heads, disappointed that I do not seem to understand how things work in Japan. Everything runs on its schedule, and the mountain will appear when it’s the right time. My mom and I continue to press our faces to the window, catching our breath as the mountain grows larger and larger. There are hills that occlude our sight, so it comes and goes. And finally, we reach the plain with an unobstructed view.

We turn to our Japanese travel companions and they smile at us, assured that it is now the proper time and Fuji-san has made its appearance. All is right with the world.

Week 30: On My Way

This week, for 52 Photos, the prompt was On My Way.

One of the things I observed during my trip to Japan was the groups of school children taking trips. We often came across them in the train stations, where they would sit quietly in the middle of the floor. Sometimes we saw them on the platforms, waiting for a train. There was even a group of high school students at the airport the day I left. Turned out, they were on my flight!

But my favorite picture that I snapped was this group of children with their bright yellow hats the day we went to Miyajima. They all had buddies and walked in neat rows. This small bunch had gotten separated, and they looked like ducklings to me. They were on their way.

I thought I’d throw in some actual ducklings:

And the famous Make Way for Ducklings in Boston:

Around the World in 40 Years

My friend H asked me some questions about travel on Twitter:
“How do you decide where you wanna go? Do you have a bucket list?”

I couldn’t respond in 140 characters, so I’m over here. Ruminating. I was first thinking I should make a list of all the places I’ve traveled. There are the places I’ve been that I didn’t choose and the places that I did choose. I’m going to go with the latter, since that list is smaller and I can remember all of them (I think).

1987: Israel
1999: Ireland
2000: Italy (although it wasn’t my first trip, but first time on my own
2003: Big Island, Hawai’i
2005: Oaxaca, Mexico
2006: Paris, France (not my first time to France, but first time on my own)
2011: Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia

Looking at this list amuses me, because it seems so random and full of holes. It doesn’t show all the traveling I’ve done with my parents, which in many ways prepared me for the trips above. But that doesn’t answer H’s question, either.

How do I decide where I want to go? It comes down to four things: do I have the time? Do I have the money? How willing am I to make the journey to get there? And does my sweetie want to go?

The trip to Israel is a little bit of a outlier, because I was in high school and went on a program. In many ways I was not on my own. BUT, it was the first place I heard about and I remember having long discussions with my parents, trying to convince them I was ready. There was a boy who was a couple years older than me, and he talked about the program. I remember he said something about how powerful it was to go visit a place where all this history he had learned in school happened. I was very drawn to that idea, that I could go visit a place with history. It would be many, many more years before I was to learn how much history about America had been elided and erased from my education.

Ireland because it was the only place my girlfriend said she wanted to go (outside the US). I could work with that. Italy because it was the second place my girlfriend said she wanted to go. I could work with that, too. Hawai’i because my parents had been there 20 years before. When I was a kid, I had a shiny, metallic hibiscus sticker that I had plastered on my dresser drawer that my mom brought back. Hawai’i sounded like the most exotic place in the world. And this is coming from someone who grew up in SW Florida! Oaxaca because we had friends living there for a year and the best places to visit are the places where you know someone. And we went for Dia de los Muertos, which was fantastic. Paris because pourquoi non? It was my birthday and I love France. It was everything I wanted it to be, except that dumb song, “Springtime in Paris” is dead wrong. It’s fucking cold. And then my epic trip to SE Asia, because I’d been wanting to go for years and no one else wanted to go. I was tired of waiting for them. I’d heard fantastic things, and I couldn’t spent another damned winter in Seattle without losing my everloving mind.

Do I have a bucket list? No. I have a rough list of places I want to go, and then there are the places that are possibilities, if conditions ever changed. I’m afraid of getting sick, so the entire continent of Africa is out (I realize this is ridiculous, but that’s fear for you). Except Morocco. I didn’t go to Burma when I was in SE Asia because of the political situation at the time, but I want to go back now that it’s changed. I realize I could just as easily get sick there. I still want to go back to France, to see the Black Madonna at Rocamadour (which I learned about in college) as well as the cathedral in Reims. Also want to go to northern Europe – Denmark, Holland and Scandinavia – at some point. I have friends there, who I met while traveling in SE Asia.

Next on my list is Belize. Why? It’s warm and sunny, it’s supposed to have fantastic birds/wildlife and snorkeling. When it’s up to me, I will always go where it’s warm and sunny. I guess that’s really the only requirement at this point in my life!

How do you decide where you want to go?

Lavaballs

I had heard about women-only cars on the trains in Japan, as well as some women-only buses in Mexico. So when I saw this sign, I had to take a picture of it.

Not a minute after I sat down, in the mixed-gender car I had entered, an older man came up to me and started gesticulating wildly. I thought he wanted to pull down the shade behind me, or something? So I stood up. He and I were roughly the same height (that is to say, short, around 5’1″). Next thing I knew, he had ousted me from my seat. He pulled down the shade and then sat down, spreading his legs as wide as was humanly possible and holding up his newspaper as a literal shield.

I had been lava balled. I first learned this term last summer, but the experience wasn’t new to me. I’m sure you’ve experienced it, too:

it’s when someone sits on public transit and, presumably for reasons resulting from an unbearable, scorching heat in their groin, must spread their legs wide. The vast majority of the time, this is a man. The vast majority of the time, they encroach on the personal space of a woman.

I could laugh, because there was plenty of room on the car, an open seat across the aisle with my parents and my safety wasn’t compromised. I had the privilege and freedom to laugh about it. My gentle father wanted to sock him in the nose. We were all “dealing with it.”

Starts with “C”

This week the prompt for 52 Photos Project is Starts with ‘C’.

Without further ado, I bring you this caterpillar who crossed my path on a hike in Japan:

How about some curvy cobblestones from the Kiyomizu-dera Temple in Kyoto:

And finally, some fancy chopsticks!

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
	1	2	3	4	5	6
7	8	9	10	11	12	13
14	15	16	17	18	19	20
21	22	23	24	25	26	27
28	29	30

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