now no hope of ever catching up . . .

• we've been back in attapeu for a few days now, but with one thing and another, i haven't done much blogging . . . to be honest, there's not a lot to report about life in attapeu. it's REALLY hot pretty much all the time - 85F in the shade at 7.30 am - and of course there's no air conditioning, just fans. heidi has introduced me to the local sugar cane stand just around the corner from her house where we go for cold drinks every couple days. the woman who runs the stand crushes the sugar cane in a machine in her front yard - the sticks go through like cloth through a sewing machine - and the juice is caught in a pitcher below. she pours the juice into a little plastic bag full of ice, puts a straw in it, and for just 2000 kip (about 25 cents US) you've got a cold, tasty drink made to order. she adds fresh lime juice to the sugar cane for a little zip, so the drink is tangy as well as sweet - perfect for the hot steamy afternoons here.
• just now the dry season is ending and the rainy season is on its way. we've had a couple of tremendous electrical storms since we came back though no rain until yesterday evening, when finally the dark clouds dropped some cooling showers on the area. we're back to heat and humidity today, though - and the sky is clear blue. although heidi and i sometimes go to the market for vegetables around lunchtime, hardly anyone else does. most people seem to stay indoors or in the shade during the hottest part of the day and do their shopping early in the morning. in fact, early morning is the only time you can buy cooked food in the market - soup, barbecued meat, etc. i guess it's too hot to cook out in the open the rest of the day.
• yesterday a lao friend of heidi and micah came over to fix and eat lunch with us. she made a salad using carrots, onions, lemon grass, a kind of thinly sliced sausage, lime, chili, and - the main ingredient - a sort of sponge that grows in rivers. she bought it dried in the market early that morning and soaked it in water before slicing it into the salad bowl. it vaguely resembled the beef brains in the meat case at my grocery store - yellowish white and honeycombed - but it had a crisp, slightly chewy texture, almost like thin cabbage, and the flavor was extremely mild. it was actually pretty good, better than i expected after hearing heidi describe it as a kind of algae or fungus collected from local water sources. i'm pleased to say that's the strangest thing i've eaten this trip - no barbecued dogs so far.
• well, i'm being antisocial now, shut up in the office with heidi's laptop, so i'll end for now and go see what's going on downstairs. it might be lunchtime . . . .

brief update

• hey guys, i just wanted to let you know i've been without internet for over a week now - that's why i haven't been posting. we've been traveling in champasak province, in the south of laos, and this is the first chance i've had to check email or anything. at the moment we're in pakse, the largest city in this part of the country. micah is sick, so we're staying in the city for a few days to give him a chance to rest in the air conditioned hotel (there's no air conditioning at their house, and it's been something like 98 F in the shade).
• so, we've been to see a huge waterfall and the ruins of an ancient wat (temple) which was part of the angkor kingdom, and also we stayed a few days on the mekong in a nice little floating cabin. we went swimming in the river two or three times a day - i'm horribly sunburned - and frances met some kids who came down to play in the water with her. so far, so good. i'll write more and post some pictures when i get back to attapeu - shouldn't be more than a couple of days.

new photos

• hey, just wanted to let you know i finally got around to adding a handful of new photos to some of my older posts - look at the ones from wellington, picton and qeenstown. enjoy! sorry i haven't put many pictures up - it takes forever.

vientiane

• well, i'm no longer counting bug bites on my fingers . . . but that's getting ahead of myself. there's not a whole lot to say about vientiane in terms of what we did - we stayed in a nice hotel with air conditioning, went to markets, and attempted to escape the heat with fresh fruit shakes at an assortment of cafes. we stayed through tuesday evening, when we boarded a 'sleeping bus' for the long trip to pakse. but i'll fill you in on that in a minute.
• vientiane is the capital of laos and really the only major city, but that doesn't mean it's anything like i would ordinarily think of as a major city. there are no skyscrapers - the tallest building is probably no more than ten stories, and it's not an office building, it's a luxury hotel by the mekong river. the main roads in town are paved, and there's lots of traffic, but at least half that traffic is motorbikes, usually carrying two or three people each, and not always traveling in the same direction as the rest of the vehicles. otherwise you see all kinds of suvs and other four-wheel drive vehicles, some cars and trucks, and loads of tuk-tuks, a kind of taxi that usually consists of a sort of mini-cab built onto a motorbike. in laos you drive on the right side of the road, but motorbikes making left turns often drive a ways on the left margin of the road until there's a break in the stream of traffic and they can dart across to join the people going their direction. add to this pedestrians, cyclists, and people pushing carts of goods for sale, and you have an idea of what a mess the roads can be. and off the main roads, the smaller more residential streets are often unpaved tracks in the dirt swarming with small children, chickens, dogs, cats, and the occasional goat.
• markets are also unlike anything i've ever seen at home - rows of vendors selling just about anything you can think of: cell phones, small home appliances, pirated movies, jewelry, fresh fruit and vegetables, clothing both made-to-order and off the rack, ready-made snacks, baskets, furniture, toiletries, raw meat, fresh fish, books, spices, cold drinks, school supplies . . . really almost anything you can think of. usually the stalls are laid out under a series of tent-like coverings to shade shoppers and shopkeepers from the sun, but recently a 'mall' was built in vientiane, complete with airconditioning and the country's first set of escalators. the areas surrounding the 'mall' is a market as i've described above, but inside there's an area for performances, a public toilet, and some food stalls and jewelry stands on the first floor. each of the three or so levels has food stalls, coffee stands, and an assortment of tiny shops, many not much bigger than the stalls in the market below. the indoor shops sell most of the same sorts of things as the outdoor stalls, though i don't recall seeing meat or produce indoors - mostly clothing, shoes, electronics, dvds, and jewelry.
• i didn't buy anything but cold drinks, but heidi bought a sin - the skirt most lao women wear around the house. it's a long strip of thin cloth about three and a half feet wide, which you have sewn into a tube, often at the shop where you buy it, but not always. you wear it sort of like a wrap-around skirt, folded over and tucked in at the top. since most lao people bathe outdoors, it's usually long enough to serve as a kind of cover-up. once the person is done washing, a clean one slips over the top, and the wet one drops to be rinsed and worn another day. also, since they're much wider than a western-style skirt, women can comfortably sit cross-legged on the floor without flashing the public.
• frances is home from her babysitter's house now - she goes out to play most of the day - so i'll sign off now and tell you more later.

now that i'm over a week behind . . .

• sorry guys, i've been mostly away from internet access for the last several days. now that i'm at micah & heidi's house, i can post more often, at least for the next few days until we travel over lao new year.
• so i think i left off with leaving new zealand - en route to bangkok, i stopped over in sydney for a long layover and spent the afternoon hanging out with andrew, a friend from chicago. he was vacationing in australia at the time and was in sydney for a few days, coinciding with my seven-hour layover. he met me at the airport, and though the woman at customs and immigration insisted i really didn't have time to leave the airport, we took the train into the city and then a ferry across the harbor to manly island, where we ate lunch near the waterfront. unfortunately the weather was terrible - we narrowly avoided getting soaked over lunch at the outdoor cafe - but i did get a nice view of the famous opera house from the ferry. and, as we waited on the ferry to begin the trip to the island, we noticed a massive cruise ship docked nearby. turns out it was the rhapsody of the seas, the same ship i'd seen in doubtful sound a week earlier! crazy. also the ferry was moderately exciting - crossing the open part of the harbor, the water was rather rough. andrew enjoyed it so much he said he planned to go again just for the ride after i went back to the airport. in spite of what the immigration officer said, i had no trouble at all getting back to the airport on time, and in fact it took less than twenty minutes to get through passport control, customs, and security, which meant i had an hour and a half to kill before my flight. i should have stayed out longer.
• the rest of the trip to bankok and vientiane was pretty uneventful. i arrived in bangkok in the middle of the night, got some baht, found the meeting point for my hotel, and was quickly shuffled onto a bus and off again into the hotel lobby. even late at night, the heat and humidity felt like a slap in the face with a hot wet towel after weeks in cool, mild new zealand. the next day i took a taxi to a big shopping mall, hoping to find an optometrist - and right there, four shops in from the entrance, was a place with shelves and shelves full of contact lenses. i was out of there in fifteen minutes with a month's worth of dailies. if i'd known it would be so easy, i wouldn't have extended my stay in bangkok for three days - i kind of expected i'd have to look around a bit to find them. i had all day to kill, and the mall was airconditioned, so i poked around, snacked my way through the various food stalls, used an internet cafe (i think that's where one of my more recent posts was typed) and got sort of lost in some of the off-the-main-walkway market areas. i bought a pair of capris - as i flipped through the rack at a tiny market stall, the proprieter said, 'i have size for you! large!' i've never been a large in my life, but in southeast asia, i'm kind of oversized, so . . . i swallowed my pride and bought the large. the woman was right, too - i put them on at the nearest toilet, and they fit like they were made for me.
• i stupidly decided to leave the mall around five that afternoon, which of course was rush hour - it took twice as long to get back to my hotel, and by then i was exhausted and pretty much ready for bed. next day i was a little sick and didn't feel like doing much, so i ate the 'american breakfast' included with my room (two fried eggs, one slice of ham, two cocktail-sized hot dogs, two slices of white-bread toast, and a cucumber/tomato/iceberg lettuce/shredded carrot salad with sickly-sweet salad cream) and hung around the hotel all day. i think i would have preferred fried rice or something - 'american breakfast' is the default morning food served to white foreigners at most breakfast-included hotels, but it's not much like what i usually eat at home. also the 'orange juice' is usually orange kool aid. but whatever, it comes with the room, so i eat it.
• and friday - i think that was the next day - i packed up my stuff (again) and headed for laos. the hotel staff seemed eager to get rid of me - they kept putting my luggage on the airport shuttle at every scheduled trip time starting at 9.30, even though i didn't need to be at the airport til late afternoon - so after a few rounds of this, i gave up and just went along with it. i spent several uneventful hours moseying around the international airport and had a delayed, though uneventful flight to vientiane. it took over an hour to get past passport control - first you wait to hand in your documents and apply for the visa, then you wait to get your passport back, then you wait to pay for the visa ($35 for americans, but it varies by country - and no matter where you're from, they only accept us dollars in cash, though i did see a few people successfully pay with thai baht). and then you get in another line and wait to get your passport stamped. by this time the luggage has been sitting in the baggage claim for ages - no waiting! - and the military police smile and wave you through customs and out into the lobby.
• heidi, micah and frances were all waiting for me when i arrived - frances, of course, did not remember me from my visit 18 months ago (she was under a year old at the time) and acted very shy at first, though she's certainly warmed up since then. (actually, early this morning she escaped from her mom and wandered into my room stark naked, demanding to know: bef! what you do? she seemed shocked that i was sleeping when she was ready to play.)
• this post is getting cumbersomely long now, so i'll have to fill you in on the last few days later - but now you all know i'm still alive and well and i can still count the mosquito bites on my fingers, though i suspect that won't last long. also the heat makes me awfully sleepy and lethargic. time for a cold drink.

kaikoura to christchurch to auckland

• so sunday morning i took the bus from kaikoura back to christchurch for one more night in dreamland . . . and a quick trip to the antarctic center. christchurch is the jumping-off point for most antarctic exploration so they've built a little museum where you can learn all about life in the big deep freeze. the museum has this room where they keep the temperature at 8 degrees C and then blow some fans through to make the wind chill something like -18 C - they provide coats and overshoes so people can experience antarctic weather. i skipped that experience since i just survived five months of chicago winter. i always suspected chicago was as cold as antarctica - we had weeks and weeks of that sort of weather. i think -18 C is about 10 or 15 degrees F, pretty balmy compared to some of the weather we had this winter.
• the other exhibits were pretty cool, too - info on which countries have stations and where, and pictures of the animals that live around the continent. seems like nothing really lives on antarctica itself - it's too cold, and surprisingly, too DRY. i'm still unclear on how a place with so much ice is dry - i guess the ice is just really, really old, and they don't get any precipitation to speak of, and of course it's never warm enough for the ice to melt. very strange. as intriguing a place as it is, i have no plans to visit. dad, if you're reading this, i don't know how you survived a whole year there. sounds miserable, though the penguins are pretty cute.
• oh, and the antarctic center has a bunch of penguins, too, mostly little blue ones with some kind of injury: broken wing (is it a wing or a flipper or what?), blind in one eye, missing toes, etc. these penguins are native to nz, so they can have a partly-outdoor, partly-indoor living area - no need to keep them on ice all the time. they're really small - no bigger than a cat (and i'm not talking about MY freakishly large cats, i mean no bigger than a NORMAL size house cat). and they really are kind of bluish, dark and shiny like a blueberry. they weren't doing much when i saw them, just huddling in one corner and occasionally waddling around a bit - pretty cute anyway.
• next morning (monday) i mailed a box of stuff back to chicago - no need for me to lug my shoes, wool socks, fleece tops, and assorted souvenirs around southeast asia. r2, if you're reading this, it should arrive at our house in a few weeks, probably by 21 april. can you let me know when it comes? then it was off to the airport again for the last leg of my nz trip - back to auckland for one night, and then on to bangkok.
• i didn't do too much in auckland that afternoon - looked around at the harbor, which i saw on my first day in nz, but was too jet-lagged to appreciate. also i picked up a few things i'll need in laos: extra strength insect repellent, check! can't have too much of that. i was pleased that i remembered which bus to take back to kitty & tim's house - no trouble getting there at all. i arrived just in time for dinner (lucky timing for me).
• so, it's off to bangkok next, with a quick stopover in sydney. more to follow!

comments welcome

• hey, i figured out why you all couldn't comment . . . for some reason, i had this thing set to accept comments only from people registered with blogger. that should be fixed now, so it's open season! be nice.

queenstown to christchurch . . .

before i go on, here's the view from the porch at the place i stayed in queenstown. the accomodation itself was nothing to write home about, but the view was to die for.

• this was basically an all-day bus trip, beginning at 7.30 am . . . i cannot stop torturing myself with early starts. the highlight of the drive was a stunning view of aoraki - mt. cook from tekapo, where the lakes are a shocking shade of turquoise - all natural, the driver assured me, caused by some kind of sediment run-off from the mountains. very weird looking - like no water color i'd ever anticipated seeing in nature - but stunning.
• on the recommendation of a woman at my hostel in queenstown, i booked a bed at dreamland, this out-of-the-way backpackers place in christchurch. i wasn't up to finding the place and lugging all my stuff twenty minutes' walk out of the city center, so i took a cab - they have these 'green cabs' in christchurch (also auckland and wellington) - the standard taxi in their fleet is a toyota prius instead of the usual gas-guzzling towncar. the place was worth traveling to - a small, quiet, super clean hostel with a friendly proprieter, cheap laundry facilities and 10mb of free internet included. i wished i could have stayed longer. if you are ever in christchurch, try to stay at dreamland - it's terrific, and apparently no one knows about it, because i had just one roommate in a five-bed dorm, and there appeared to be no one else there.
• next day i took the bus to kaikoura: destination whale watching. it only took about three hours to get there from christchurch, so i went straight to the i-site to book a spot on a whale watching boat. unfortunately, though i got a spot easily enough, the whales had moved out of the company's operating area, so i had to eat fish & chips for lunch, loaf on the beach and go shopping instead . . . too bad.
• i did manage to get on a whale watching trip the next morning (saturday), and just a few miles off shore, we saw a sperm whale. kaikoura is ideally situated for whales because it's near the edge of the continental shelf and a place in the ocean where two major currents converge, which brings a lot of tasty whale treats to the area. apparently it's a popular spot for adolescent male sperm whales, who spend about twenty years stuffing themselves before they reach sexual maturity and grow large enough to attract the females. the sperm whale we saw was familiar to the tour guides; they call him tutu. he was taking a breather on the surface - we could see his exhalations from half a mile away. after a short time, he dove for a feed, and we saw his tale flick above the surface: HUGE! and he's nowhere near full grown. tutu was the only whale in the area (they were listening for whale sonar with a kind of underwater hearing aid) so we hung around for an hour or so til he came back up.
• meanwhile we were taking in the scenery: blue sky, darker blue/green ocean, and lots of birds, including several species of albatross, one of which was taking a bath not far from our boat. apparently the albatross spends nearly all of its life at sea and even drinks sea water - it has its own water filter built in to remove the salt. amazing.
• we got to see tutu one more time - he came up for another short breather before diving again. on the way back to the marina, we also saw a huge pod of dusky dolphins - close to two hundred of them playing around the boat. they're much smaller than bottlenose dolphins, but still a lot bigger than people. i sort of can't believe i actually saw a sperm whale. you read about this stuff - whale hunting in the old days, the pictures of these massive animals dwarfing the whaling boats and yet somehow no match for the harpoons and the boiling pots. i'm not exactly a rabid environmentalist, but i can see why people go nuts trying to save the whales. they're magnificent.
• nothing else in kaikoura could really top whale watching, except maybe swimming with dolphins, but i got back from the whale watch too late for that, so i had to spend another afternoon walking by the beach. i'm having a rough vacation, let me tell you. do you feel less envious if i tell you the beaches in kaikoura are really rocky, not much sand at all? probably not. i'm just rubbing it in, so i'll have to close for now . . .

now, where was i?

• oh, yes, doubtful sound . . . a week ago. or more. so i decided i wanted to see the fiords (incorrectly named 'sounds' by the earliest european explorers - a sound is an inlet carved by the mouth of a river, whereas fiords are created by retreating glaciers), and i had time for just one, a day trip from queenstown. i picked doubtful sound over milford because it seemed more remote and less trafficked - a bit more expensive and time-consuming to get to, but well worth the effort.
• so the tour company sent a cab for me at 6.30 am - can't get away from those early mornings - and on the way to the departure point, we picked up a handful of other tourists. the coach ride was a good two hours (those of us going to doubtful sound had to get off and join up with another coach at a 'designated meeting spot' which appeared to be in the middle of nowhere) and then we took a sort of large water taxi/ferry for an hour-long ride across lake manapouri (sp?), where we were met by another coach for a twenty minute drive to the ship that would take us out on doubtful sound. meanwhile we really hadn't seen any other people besides those who worked for the tour company, and no homes or businesses - 'remote' was no exaggeration.
• the ferry ride across the lake was beautiful - calm water, little green islands all around, and so quiet, except for the sound of the boat's motors. unfortunately it became overcast and started to rain part way through the trip, though this wasn't entirely unexpected. the fiords are located in a temperate rain forest of the kind only found below 40 degrees latitude - they get something like 260 days of rain each year.
• the misty weather created a surreal atmosphere - when we left deep cove (where the tour ships begin their cruise of doubtful sound) i felt as if we were leaving the known world and entering some enchanted place - avalon or something. i wished i was on a much smaller, quieter boat - preferably a sail boat - because only the roar of the ship's engines broke the stillness, which was otherwise a deep silence punctuated by occasional bird calls. i'm not even sure how to describe doubtful sound other than isolated and surreal and enchanted - we saw just a handful of other water craft (a few kayaks, one or two motor boats, and closer to the tasman sea, a gigantic cruise ship, the 'rhapsody of the seas'). all around the granite walls of the fiord towered over us, nearly vertical but somehow still covered with lush vegetation: mosses, lichen, and trees all clinging to the sheer rock face. in some places, long scars in the greenery marked where a tree near the top of the cliff had fallen, causing a rockslide and tearing out all the vegetation below on its path to the water.
• we spent three or four hours on the water and cruised all the way to the tasman sea, where we saw a colony of nz fur seals sunning themselves on a rocky island - well, i guess they weren't sunning themselves, since it was still overcast, but they were resting after their night-time feeding excursion. on the way back to deep cove, we pulled into a little inlet and the captain shut down the motors and communications system for a few minutes so we could hear how quiet the place was - aside from the people rustling beside me on the prow of the boat, i heard nothing but a few birds and the breaking of waves. i've never been anywhere so quiet and dreamy and apparently untouched by civilization. it was a real highlight of my trip and kind of made up for the whole canyoning fiasco.
• unfortunately, it took as long to get back to queenstown as it did to get to doubtful sound that morning. . . i guess that's how it usually works. after the previous sleepless night, i was exhausted and slept most of the coach ride. i was thrilled to see that the sonorous sleeper had been replaced by a small, quiet-looking german girl. she said she didn't snore - what a relief. i slept like a baby and was out the door at dawn the next day for the next-to-last leg of my trip: christchurch and kaikoura!