So I guess it’s become a regular occurrence by now, but I feel particularly bad about putting this entry off for as long as I have. It’s been over a month since I left Southeast Asia (and almost two months since I left Vietnam), and I’ve had a lot of great experiences that probably won’t make these pages, but I’ll try to distill the last two months of my life into something interesting, or at least mildly entertaining.
On June 25th, the 50-person turbo-prop plane that I had booked through Lao Airlines (the model was actually called a Fokker 70…confidence inspiring, no?) landed at Luang Prabang airport in Northern Laos. Laos is a country I knew little about before leaving for my trip (I think my only knowledge came from an episode of Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations). However, everyone I met as I traveled through the rest of Southeast Asia said it was awesome. Some people talked about the temples, some people talked about the beautifully unspoiled nature, and everyone talked about how incredibly laid back everybody was. From what I could tell in my six short days in Luang Prabang (the cultural capital of Laos), they were a ll right on. Luang Prabang is a small, touristy town that sits at the junction of the Mekong River and one of its larger tributaries (which I believe is called the Red River). The town contains more Buddhist temples than you can shake a stick at, and was also the former seat of the Kingdom of Laos. As a result, the whole place is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. This means that although there are practically more tourists than locals in town, it has at least developed in a (relatively) tasteful manner. Aside from visiting about a dozen beautiful temples (most of which you can see in my pictures), one of the high points of my stay in Luang Prabang actually involved a trip out of town to a gorgeous waterfall. The waterfall (a major tourist attraction as well as a popular local hangout) was absolutely beautiful. I had a great time hiking around it with Anchorette (a Dutch woman who I met in Hanoi and actually wound up traveling with for a couple of weeks) and Matt and Emily (a British couple who I had met in Phnom Penh and ran into again in Luang Prabang almost a month later). After our hike, we jumped in the water around the base, and I ventured out onto a slippery tree limb to try a rope swing. I hadn’t seen anyone else try the thing, and it was a good 15 feet above some water that was not that deep. These kinds of things are not usually my forte, but after about three minutes of hesitation (and in no small part because these two really cute German girls were egging me on), I went for it. It was awesome! Everyone cheered, and Anchorette got a great picture of me too. I felt pretty brave…until three six-year-old Laotian kids sprinted up the limb after me, launching themselves off the rope without so much as batting an eye.
My time in Laos was so short that I really don’t know what else to write here. I do know that it is a place I would love to go back to and explore more. I think there are some regions of the country that are about as far from the standard tourist itinerary as you can get, and the people are all so incredibly laid back…it just seems like a great place to go and drop off of the map for a while.
From Luang Prabang, Anchorette and I flew (again in a trusty Fokker 70) to Chiang Mai in Northern Thailand. I spent a few days there, enjoying the awesome street food, checking out a few cool temples, and taking a cooking class from the female, Thai equivalent of Mussolini (which was scary, hilarious and educational). We also happened to be there for the Buddhist festival that celebrates the start of the rainy season, for which there was a pretty sweet parade complete with about 50 floats and great costumes (from traditional Buddhist attire to cross-dressing “lady boys”). The town was cool, but to be honest, my mind was already on the next leg of my trip. After an eleven-hour bus ride, and one last day in Thailand (which ended with a delicious dinner courtesy of Jang and her entire family), I flew out of Bangkok just after midnight on July 7th.
I had been in touch with Chris Bixby (my roommate and one of my best buds from Bowdoin) while I was in Vietnam, and we made typically last-minute plans to meet up in Southern Sweden on July 7th. Because I was already flying direct from Bangkok to Helsinki, this meant that all I had to do was land in Helsinki, fly to Copenhagen, Denmark via Riga, Latvia (courtesy of AirBaltic and yet another pair of Fokker airplanes, this time the even smaller Fokker 50!), and hop a 45-minute train from Copenhagen to Lund, Sweden, where Bixby’s contact family (from his time studying abroad in Stockholm) had a summer cottage. Three flights, one train ride and five countries in about 18 hours…no big deal.
After nearly two months in Southeast Asia, I don’t think I could have picked a better place than Scandinavia for some good old culture shock: people were almost all tall and white, almost everyone spoke great English, the climate was mild and all modes of transportation were clean, safe and efficient. Despite the sharp contrast, however, Sweden was a ton of fun. Bixby and I spent one short night in the summer cottage near Lund (which was beautiful…see the pictures), four long nights at an outdoor music festival between Lund and Stockholm (no pictures of this because I lost my camera in a mosh pit…damn), and another six days in Stockholm. Bixby’s contact family hooked us up every step of the way, giving us a place to stay in both Lund and Stockholm (their kids were home alone in the capital for the summer, so we stayed with them), and even lending us camping gear for the music festival. The festival was an absolute blast, and included artists as varied as the Dropkick Murphys, the Killers, the Madness (“our house, in the middle of our street!”) and Ludacris (his first gig in Sweden, pretty ridiculous). We met some really nice (and hilarious) Swedes as well as a few Finns, we drank a lot, and we pretended not to notice that we were at least 4 years older than most of the people there. Stockholm was fun as well. We got a chance to relax, do some laundry (thank GOD), party it up at a few clubs and see a good part of the historic old town, which is quite nice…ok, it’s no Rome, but worth a visit. Oh, and the cheese! Such good cheese! I got a little too excited about it, and ate way too much of it, but it was the first time in almost three months I had seen the stuff.
From Stockholm I took a ridiculous overnight ferry to Helsinki. I say ridiculous mostly because it was described to me by a number of (admittedly pretty drunk) Swedes at the festival as being an anything-goes, all-night party boat, but in reality was more of a window into some cheesy disco scene from a low-budget 1980’s porn movie. Still, it was pretty entertaining to watch the Bulgarian cover band set the scene as a guy in his mid 20’s spent about two hours trying to dance with and smooth-talk a group of girls that could not have been older than 15. More of a good story than a good time, but the views at sunset from the deck somewhat made up for the terrible music and skeevy atmosphere.
I had one day in Helsinki, part of which I spent walking around and checking out the impressive old town (I liked it a little more than Stockholm), and part of which I spent with a Finnish girl who Bixby and I met in line at a liquor store in Sweden. Linda took me to her favorite park, her favorite Ice Cream place and one of her favorite restaurants. Overall, it was a good day.
The next morning I flew to Istanbul where I met up with Hope, who would be my travel companion for the next three weeks. Our time together started out with a bang…well, more like a thwap. We checked into our hotel in Sultanhamet (the historical quarter of Istanbul) and wandered past the Blue Mosque, the Hagia Sofia, the spice market, and down to the waterfront. Hope had never been to Asia before, and we had no big plans for our first day, so we decided to take a ferry to the Asian side of the city (Istanbul straddles Europe and Asia on either side of the Bosphorous). Literally within five minutes of setting foot in the Asian continent, Hope tripped and fell flat on the solid marble sidewalk. She fell so hard and so fast that I thought she had broken at least one bone, if not several. In fact, her bones were fine, but her chin was not. A crown-shaped claddagh ring (you know those Irish rings that everyone in Boston wears if they have a drop of Irish blood in them?) that she wears on a necklace went straight into the underside of her chin. The result was a small but very deep puncture wound that started bleeding…a lot.
Hope waited next to a busy intersection, bleeding like crazy, while I ran to get two bottles of water and as many napkins as I could find. By the time I got back, she said a few dozen people had gawked at her, a bus driver had pulled over and given her a single tissue paper, and about five people had pointed her in the direction of the nearest hospital. After one attempt to get a consult at said hospital (where the only English-speaker was an Iranian patient who looked to be deathly ill), we looked up the “American Hospital” in Hope’s Lonely Planet, hopped a ferry and a taxi, and within about an hour she was stitched up and good to go. Throughout the whole thing, Hope was a complete champ. Minutes after she fell, we were already cracking jokes about it, and after she got the stitches it was like nothing ever happened…except for the occasional joke I made at her expense. I couldn’t resist, her bandage was pretty hilarious looking. It was definitely not the best experience, but it did make for a pretty good “my first time in Asia” story for Hope.
The rest of our two weeks in Turkey went a lot smoother than that first day. From Istanbul, we worked our way south down the Asian coast through Çanakale (near the ruins of Troy), Selçuk (near the ancient town of Ephesus), Fethiye and Faralya (two small coastal towns). Our last stop along the Mediterranean was Antalya, a popular tourist destination with a really nice old quarter, some tasty restaurants and a great archaeological museum. From Antalya, we headed inland to see the surreal rock formations and cave dwellings of Cappadocia (see the pictures here, words don’t even begin to describe how cool-looking this stuff was), and finally back to Istanbul. As far as ruins and mosques go (of which we saw a ton), I’d say the most impressive were Ephesus (which is one of the best-preserved cities that remains from the Roman era) and the Hagia Sofia, which has a dome about the size of St. Peter’s in Rome, but is almost one thousand years older. My reaction when walking into that place was comparable to the first time I saw St. Peter’s, or maybe even the first time I walked into the grandstand at Fenway Park…pretty awesome.
The most fun I had in Turkey was definitely on our first (and only) day in Cappadocia, when Hope and I were looking for a good way to see as many of the bizarre rock formations and gorgeous valleys as we could in a short period of time. We had the idea of renting a scooter, but when we let it slip that neither of us had ever ridden one, the rental agency was not having it. Instead, they suggested we take a tour on an ATV. This seemed pretty tacky at first (the Lonely Planet guide simply calls these 4x4s “objectionable”), but our friends at the agency (everyone at every agency in Turkey is your friend) gave us a pretty solid price, so we decided to take a two-hour tour of the major sites.
We were told to stay behind our trusty guide (who was on a scooter), and what immediately followed was the slowest and most embarrassing drive through town I could have imagined. We figured out later that he was probably making sure we weren’t just going to kill ourselves the second we went faster than five miles per hour, but it did not set high expectations for the rest of the ride. Things changed quickly, however, when we got off-road. He took us up some scary, steep, rutty hills, through the occasional mud puddle, and down into some pretty X-treme valleys, all at a pretty good clip. Every time we buzzed by a group of people peacefully walking along I felt like a huge asshole, but I can’t lie, the rest of the time I was having an absolute ball. Hope did her best to take pictures of the gorgeous landscape that surrounded us without flying off the back of the thing, and we stopped occasionally so our guide could give us some background information. By the end of the ride, we were covered in dust and hungry as hell, but I honestly couldn’t stop grinning for a good two hours. It was wicked fun.
From Cappadocia, we took a twelve-hour overnight bus back to Istanbul. Hope flew out the next day and I flew out a day later, but we met up again in Budapest for another week of fun.
We had fun in Budapest, although I have to say it wasn’t a city that grabbed me the way Istanbul did. There were definitely some cool sites, including a cave church, some a really nice cathedral, and a park (actually about 15 minutes outside the city) that was basically a graveyard for old statues from the communist era. Maybe because it was summer time, and a large portion of the population was out of town, but the city didn’t seem to have the exciting vibe I had been expecting. Still, the sites were cool, the food was delicious, and the company wasn’t half-bad either. Our “double bedroom” in the hostel was also a ridiculously spacious apartment, complete with a kitchen and private bathroom…so that didn’t hurt either.
After seeing most of the major sites in Budapest, and finding ourselves with a couple of days left over, Hope and I decided on a whim to check out a small town in Northern Hungary called Eger. There wasn’t much information available on the town, but it seemed like a nice enough place, it was in the middle of Hungarian wine country and there was a small B&B that had a room available at the last minute so we went for it. Even though the quaint historic center of the town could be crossed on foot in about ten minutes and it wasn’t exactly nightlife central, we wound up having a great time in Eger. We checked out a historic castle that had taken part in Hungary’s many battles against the Ottoman Empire, and we rented bicycles for an awesome day trip to Beautiful Women Valley.
The women in Beautiful Women Valley, also translated on some signs as “Valley of the Nice Women, did not turn out to be particularly nice or beautiful. They did, however, serve cheap wine…good cheap wine…and lots of it. As it turns out, the “valley” (one of Eger’s main tourist attractions) is actually more of a large cul-de-sac around which about thirty or forty wine cellars are carved into a small hillside. The idea is that you can walk around this small park and sample some of the best wines Hungary has to offer (which turned out to be pretty damned good, by the way)…it’s kind of like the Epcot Center, but with more alcoholism. The places will give you a glass of wine for around fifty cents, or they’ll charge you a fixed (and very reasonable) rate per liter if you want to bring your own vessel (some Hungarian families were stopping in with five-gallon gas cans). We arrived on our bikes at about one o’ clock in the afternoon, “tasted” seven different kinds of wine, and barely managed to pedal ourselves the half-mile back into town at around four o’clock (unrelated side-note: fixing a derailed bicycle chain is much easier before drinking nine glasses of wine).
The next day we hopped a train to Budapest and said our goodbyes. Hope got on a train to Vienna, and I took yet another top-notch discount airline flight (this time on Hungary’s Wizz Air) to Rome. I was sad to be losing an awesome travel companion, but I was also pretty excited to be back in a country where I understood the native language and could just kick back and relax…on a goat farm.
My plane touched down in Rome, and everyone on board immediately burst into enthusiastic applause. This was followed by an hour-long wait for my bag at baggage claim. When it finally arrived, my contact lens solution and the strap that I use to put the thing over my shoulder were both missing…for no apparent reason. I was definitely in Italy. I spent one brief and practically sleepless night in a shitty hostel by Rome’s Termini station, where I met my brother the next morning. Mike and I spent the better part of that day getting to Anghiari (a small town in Tuscany, near Arezzo), and our host picked us up around six o’ clock.
I had found Brent through a website called Help Exchange (www.helpx.net), an online directory for people who offer free room and board in exchange for some kind of work. He runs a small artisan goat cheese-making operation, and staying with him for a week turned out to be an awesome idea.
As you might guess from his name, Brent Zimmerman is not exactly your quintessential Italian goat farmer. He was, however, a top-notch host for Mike and myself, and his farm was a great introduction to the whole Help Exchange experience for me. He was born and raised in rural Michigan, but has been living in Italy for the past twenty years with his partner (both business and otherwise, as Mike and I quickly figured out) Alessandro. Alessandro does most of the number crunching (he is from Milan originally, but holds an MBA from NYU), and Brent runs the farm with the help of Valerio (a rough-around-the-edges-but-softie-on-the-inside Romanian guy) and his enormous white dog named (what else?) Boner.
Brent also has one more quality that separates him from your typical Tuscan goat farmer: he works like crazy…all the time. Although he was reportedly having a “lazy week” when Mike and I stayed with him (the month of August is more or less a universal vacation time in Italy), he still kept himself busier than most people that I know with full-time jobs. He made cheese deliveries, spoke at luncheons, showed us some cheese-making basics and “slept in” until 6:30 a.m. every day…I’d hate so see this guy on a “busy” week. Mike and I helped out when we could, cleaning the cheese room a few times, “helping” Valerio with the cheese-making process (who was incredibly patient with our uselessness), and even doing some roadwork on a property a few miles from the farm that Brent and Alessandro rent out (see the pictures, it’s gorgeous). Mike and I had a two bedroom, two bathroom guesthouse to ourselves, and we had a great time. The scenery wasn’t too shabby either.
After our week in Tuscany was over, Mike and I made our way down to Naples, where we met our parents for ten days of full-on vacation. It was great to be back with the family again and, despite my Dad’s nasty cold, we had a lot of fun exploring a part of Italy I had never seen before. The city of Naples itself, apart from being pretty damned hot, was almost empty. The month of August, like I said, is vacation time for Italians, and the big cities empty out pretty much everywhere, but especially in the South. We were only there for two days, but we managed to get some tasty seafood and (of course) some delicious pizza (served the right way, no meat, no cheese, just delicious tomato sauce, garlic, oregano and a dash of olive oil). We also saw the archaeological museum, which has an absolutely incredible collection of ancient Roman sculpture.
After Naples, we spent two nights on the Island of Procida, just off the coast. The small island is actually the most densely populated in the Mediterranean, with around 10,000 inhabitants and a lot more visitors (I think we found about half of the people that were missing from Naples on this little rock). Seen from a distance, or from on top of one of it’s own small peaks, it’s an incredibly beautiful island, with dramatic cliffs falling away into gorgeous water, dotted with the occasional crowded, pastel-colored harbor, but from the ground level, most of the island is more like a large-scale rat maze. Houses crowd the tiny streets, and taxi rides around town approached some of my experiences in Southeast Asia as far as overall ridiculousness is concerned. We continued to eat tasty seafood, however, and we also spent a day on a nice (if crowded) little beach with crystal-clear water.
From Procida, we hopped a ferry and a taxi to a rental car agency, I got the keys to our new car, and we drove south and across an impressively large mountain range to Ravello, a small hill-top town overlooking the Amalfi coast. Our rental house was absolutely beautiful, and the view from our porch was tops. I have to say that the Amalfi coast in general raised the bar for what I now consider a “nice view.” Enormous mountains, covered with lush, terraced vineyards crash into some of the most beautiful water I’ve ever seen in my life. I’m sure a lot of other people can describe it better than me, and my pictures will help, but I’m not sure they even really capture that beauty fully. It was unreal. In Ravello, we relaxed, ate well (including an amazing meal on my birthday at a two-star restaurant called Rossini’s), and got lots of sun. We also explored some towns in the area (Amalfi, Maiori, Minori, and Atrani), spent a day at Pompeii (which was incredible, see the pictures), and even rented a small motor boat to catch a view of the coast from the water. Driving on the roads around Amalfi was definitely an adventure, and I think I enjoyed doing it a lot more than my family enjoyed coming along for the ride, but I managed to go the full six days on the incredibly twisty and narrow roads without putting a scratch on our car, so that was good. After traveling on a budget for so long, I honestly felt kind of spoiled on this “grown-up vacation”…but I can’t say I was complaining. It was a lot of fun, and I’m really glad I got to see my family.
Fuckin’ hell, that was a long one, huh? As I finish this, I’m sitting on a high-speed train from Naples to Bologna, where I’m going to meet up with Anita, one of my Italian roommates from study abroad. As usual, I’m bummed that the last part of my trip is over, but I’m also excited for the next step. Although my plans after Bologna are completely up in the air, possibilities include Sardegna and/or Tunisia...not too shabby, right?
