Hi Guys,
There are several themes of this trip that we would like to bring to
the forefront before we get started. 1. we love trains. 2. eric
walks at about an 8.5 and I am about at a 5, so I pretty much jog
everywhere like a ninny. 3. when in doubt, put a donk on it (we will
explain later). 4. missed trains are an opportunity for clean sheets.
5. resist all temptation to bum-rush doors when you are laden like a
camel (jmel) with a backpack heavier than you, a small backpack on the
front (though helpful as a bumper), and a duffle on the side,
especially if your backpack has a number of pendent, heavy, and
ungainly items (water bottles, shoes, smelly socks…). You'll probably
trip on the uneven, tiled, and wet landing, and nearly have to patron
the man in the square selling teeth, because you'll have knocked yours
out. Dr. Styrt would have been very unhappy. 6. climb things, but if
it's a sand dune, hold a touareg man's hand. 7. if a young, loose,
western woman ends up in a kitchen with a bevy of touareg men, don't
assume that she wants to be there, or that she's able to leave when
she wants. She'll give you grief for it later. 8. Muslims don't
drink alcohol (at least not in front of other muslims), but their tea
is filled with enough sugar to get you drunk. 9. give snake charmers
and monkey owners a wide berth when walking through squares, because
you never know when one of their keep might be flung in your direction. 10. eat
jamon. 11. you don't need a reason to drink, but free tapas is a good
one. 12. tailless monkeys love pasta, and have soft hands. The cable
car operators that feed them have large nose growths. 13. don't EVER
order a tuna burger from a snack stand, unless you are Russian and
"its for someone else." Harty says these are too many themes, and
they're not really themes, so here is some elaboration, but the rest
can be left to your imagination, or maybe we'll satisfy your remaining
curiosities at a later date.

1. We trained basically the entire length of Morocco, only to get on
a ferry and two buses, for a total of, I don't know, about a million
hours on the road. Finally ending in Gbralt via walking across the
main runway in the shadow of "the ROCK", which was dramatically up-lit
at night. Directly related to theme 4. It became necessary to train
all day when we went to the Mkesh train station only to find out that
the last train left 15min prior to our arrival. Our grand
Gibraltarian arrival (10:30 at night into an abandoned town) is
related to the tuna burger fiasco, theme 13, and the disgruntled
Russian. In case you are curious, a tuna burger of Gbralt is a burger
with a can of tuna upended atop the patty, including oil and tuna
juices. We couldn't help but laugh---and we learned another valuable
lesson, don't laugh at a Russian or his food.

3. Put a donk on it; handy in more ways than you would think! The
Berber people use donks to transport their food/supplies/wares great
distances. The surprising det is that the donks are unaccompanied,
giving them the freedom and the opportunity to peddle the goods
elsewhere for a larger profit margin. Silly old donks, those saggy
old baggies (we met a crazed brit who favored all of these "desert"
expressions, ie "saggy old baggy", and have adopted them into our common
parlance).

6. if there is a dune to climb, a car to climb on top of, anything
really at a higher elevation----CLIMB it, the view is better and the
journey will be worth the hassle.

7. As a loose western woman, I feel it is necessary to interject my
own voice in the retelling, seeing as how I had limited agency in the
actual event. The camp was very clearly rigged with trip wires that
would alert men from all corners of the camp whenever I walked out of
the tent/hut alone. Thring! A bell would go off, and they'd come
running, would zharah (my Arabic name, meaning flower, enormously
popular) like to look at the stars, make some tea---you name it,
anything to get you alone. As an aspiring journalist it was easy to
agree to long talks with nomadic Toureg people, they just happened to
be men about my age with other ideas. Oh well what can you expect from
a loose western woman?

8. They call their green/mint tea "Tuareg whiskey," and they drink it
as if it were whiskey. After seeing the iceberg-size chunks of sugar
go into those tiny teapots, we were understandably sugar-rushed when
forced to drink 12 cups in one day. So, it turns out they don't need
real whiskey to get crazy. The British version of the hokie-pokie is
called the oakie-kokie, and somehow, us, 2 brits, and about 6 touareg
men ended up doing the pumped up British version around a desert
campfire. It was probably the tea. It seemed more like a nature ritual
than a nursery song…or maybe just desert magic. In other tea news, we
drank some at a 100 year old man's home, with his granddaughter
sitting in the corner, in the bowels of the ancient Kasbah, a
labyrinth of houses and apartments and mosques and stores so dense
that light barely filtered in through tiny light wells above. Then
Sarah got henna, and I sat and chatted with our guide's "big mom" and
aunts and tried to ignore the aljazeera propaganda playing on tv. They
were lovely.

Enough for now. In a few hours we catch the bus to my dinky little
town, as always with our themes and lessons in mind. It will be nice
to have 3 days in the same place, which we haven't had since last year
(in Madrid), then we soldier on, to Sevilla and beyond.

Love love love

Sarah and Eric

Happy New Year
If I had to guess how new years would go, I would never have guessed that it would have been anything like this. Not twenty steps out of our front door we found ourselves being overtaken by a funeral procession. Just as Eric was going to be clocked by the corpse we figured out that we were being waved aside, and we stood by and let it pass before moving on to the main square. The center of the city-- the whine of the snake charmers, and the strange hazy dust made the mammoth space seem even larger. There is no simple way to walk the stalls and avoid monkeys on chains and projectile snakes. Oranges are stacked and squeezed; the juice matches the color of the buildings. An old man dressed in white, with a table, and an umbrella has roughly 15 pairs of dentures on one crate, on the other, nearly 500 teeth an inch thick spread out for shoppers to peruse. A tooth shop, I wonder what type of molar I will choose? Do I pick one that already has a flashy filling, or a simple one that may blend into my other assorted dentures? How to choose teeth? I don’t know, maybe I will make my choice tomorrow? Within three hours there we bore wittiness to a fast paced funeral procession, an aggressive snake throw, a tooth vendor, and were nearly crushed by a two horses that stutter stepped into us and pushed us against the wall. The first day of the new year and it is not business as usual.

fervent and admirably unsentimental

"Had I been compelled to tun back now, I would never have known the new landscape hidden behind the woody hill that shut off my horizon, nor penetrated the mystery beyond that other rosy-coloured one which stood behind it, not climbed the pass which, still farther traced and mauve soft line on the sky between snow-white peaks.  Forebodings still arose in my mind only to fade in there powerlessness to disturb those wonderful hours."

My Journey to Lhasa

Alexandra David-Neel

Days in the Golden Triangle

Thailand's North Boarder; The river was wide and slow.   The Kok River's still water did not run deep, the banks were shallow and our bamboo raft kept running aground and sticking in the mud.   The journey was a slow dirty one, and just the one we had traveled to the northern boarder of Thailand to take.   My sister Katie, three Brits,  two Thai raft experts, and I, cooked, slept, lived, and smoked  a little, for four days, on a 30 bamboo poles--all strung together. 

Sitting single file on the bamboo we floated on down the river.  At sunset the oarsmen stuck the raft in the mud and got out, so the five of us got out too.  We walked through a drained rice patty to a village.   It became clear that we were going to be spending the night in the bamboo hut next to the cows so we put our bags down there.   For dinner we had noodles and too much rice wine.  We went to bed.   

In the middle of the cold night the hut was really warm, half awake I was surprised how cozy this hut was compared to the others I had sojourned in recently.   I opened my eyes and over Katie's shoulder, through the slats in the bamboo there was a fire.   I tried to wake her up but she ignored me, there was a squeal that she couldn't ignore and she was awake.    In our sleeping bags we shuffled to the door,  the hut where the pigs and cows were next to us was on fire and the pigs were being carried away.  There was shouting and squealing, and then it seemed like the ordeal was over.   Katie and I didn't sleep, or talk,  we were ready to run if we needed to: we didn't know where to go.   

The sun was hot in the morning and the hut where the animals had been was much closer then it had seemed,  Myanmar was much closer than we had known.   The fire in the middle of the night was set by a Burmese ethnic group that had been all but exterminated by the government and frequently burned and stole from villages across the boarder.  We were closer to danger than we thought.

Our journey began because we had a few extra days.  Our journey ended in the same way it began, in the mud on the river banks of a city that we didn't know, with a few days to kill.  In the meantime we lived for a bit in a hut--and on a raft, in the golden triangle.   We booked two tickets to Cambodia.

disaster

San Diego CA, A disaster; for ten dollars at the farmers market I bought a fake wedding band to take to India.  I wore it this weekend to a party, an ugly sweater party.  The result of the sweater and the ring was; although not unpredictable, completely undesirable--may take the sweater to India instead of the ring.