The Mother of All Vacations

Pui awoke to my not so subtle suggestion "If you're going to make this plane you've got 3 minutes to get all your shit in the car!" This was the last day of her month long trip to the states; her plane was leaving back to Thailand in less than an hour; we were no less than 30 minutes from the airport. It was painfully ovbious that both of the alarms I set to wake us up had failed miserably. This is why you pack your bags 100% the night before. I would gander that I set the landspeed record in a monster truck record between Jackson and the airport. She made it through security exactly 15 minutes before the plane took off (mind you it was an international flight). And thus came an end to our adventure around America - showcasing the best and worst our country has to offer.

This would have been a great time for me to blog throughout the last month. We had new adventures just about every day and plenty of stuff to write about. Alas, I waited until I find myself sitting on a plane back to Thailand myself (a week later). So I'm just going to go for the list of everything. If you would rather not read and just check out the photos, here is the link.

Our journey took us from Jackson Hole WY through Yellowstone, Cooke City MT, Laramie WY, Boulder and Golden CO, Manhattan NY, Brooklyn NY, San Francisco CA, Marin, Las Vegas NV, Denver CO, Estes Park CO, Lander WY and back to Jackson.

• In 30 days we had 67 breakfasts, lunches, and dinners with different groups of friends. This was the most rewarding and exhausting part of the trip.


• Met my family (first time not on Skype). It went fabulously.


• Expored the city of Jackson in its enitrety.


• Hiked to the top of Jackson Peak


• Drove accross Yellowstone and saw the Old Faithful geyser erupt


• Spent the night in Cooke City Montana and enjoyed not having cell reception


• Got up super early and spotted grizzlies, black bears, wolves, eagles, moose, elk, deer, and bison at the North East entrance of Yellowstone


• Rode the Tram up Rendezvous Peak, made a Pui-sized snowman with 6 ft. snow drifts that fell on Sept. 6th.


• Drove down to Star Valley and played golf with my family. My dad made the best chicken either of us have ever had.


• Drove accross the state of Wyoming and stayed with a good friends in Laramie.


• Spent a day scrambing around Vedawoo climbing area. Summited a rock thingy.


• Went to a University of Wyoming football game. We lost 51-6.


• Did shots of Jager at the Library, the quintessential college dive bar.


• Walked around the campus and showed Pui where I went to school.


• Drove to Boulder, CO. Our friend from Thailand put us up. Made a Thai dinner for he and his family.


• Summited Green Mountain in Boulder. Bouldered around on one of the Flat Irons.


• Went climbing at the Boulder Rock Club.


• Visited the American Alpine Museum in Golden, CO.


• Drove to Denver and got a plane to New York. Had an awesome exploring the city for the next 5 days.


• Walked from 125th street on the Upper West Side all the way to Washington Square Park, zig zagging accross the city (I don't reccomend this unles you want your fiance to get really mad at you)


• Watched some pigeons crap in Pui's hair three times in 5 minutes (I got hit once). Uncontrollable laughter ensued.


• Went to an Off Broadway show :: Fuerzabruta: LOOK UP (it was killer)


• Introduced Pui to all my old favorite restauarants all over the city. I had a few 5000+ calorie days.


• Walked accross the Brooklyn Bridge


• Took the Staten Island ferry and explored Staten Island for 2+ hours.


• Went up and explored the Cloisters at the top of the island.





• Went to a Yankees game and got on the Jumbotron. The yankees lost like 10-3.


• Went and visited a friend in Brooklyn and went climbing at the climbing gym with him (where we also met the 17 and under female national champion - she is 11)


• Spent the better part of an afternoon drinking champagne and eating chocolate fondue.


• Hopped on a plane to San Francisco.


• Walked around a large expanse of the city, including Fisherman's Wharf, accross the Golden Gate bridge, the Castro, the Mission, etc.


• Met several good friends from Thailand who showed us some great sites: including Gierradeli Chocolate Factory, Twin Peaks late night (outlook of the whole city), 3 naked dudes walking down Castro street.


• Checked out Alcatraz



• Took a ferry to Sausalito and had way to much drink at a brewpub, watched a beautiful sunset riding the ferry back.


• Lost my wallet.


• Hopped on a plane to Las Vegas.


• Met a friend from high school who took us to what may be the best Thai restaurant either Pui or I have ever eaten at (this includes any Thai Restaurant in Thailand).


• Walked the strip. Twice.


• Ate at Denny's.


• Went to a Cirque Du Soliel at the MGM called KA.


• Did some 'light' gambling.


• Flew back to Denver and drove to Lyons (north of Boulder). Stayed with more friends from thailand.


• Drove back to Boulder and breakfast with Denali's family.


• Drove to Estes Park to check out the hotel they filmed 'The Shining' in.


• Drove to Wild Iris climbing area in Lander and scrambled around for the afternoon.


• Made a Thai dinner for my Mom and Dad which I think they really liked.


• Got Pui to the airport with no time to spare.

I want to thank all of our friends who were so kind to take us in, take us out, and have us over. Both Pui and I had one of the best months of our lives in no small part to everyone's generosity. I'll soon be putting together our wedding website and hopefully I can get everyone that we enjoyed hanging out with so much to come see us in Thailand in 2011.

My favorite thing was the people...

I've never really understood this when I hear other travellers talk about their travels. I've been to places I really liked the people, but compared to the food, the scenery or the activities, my selfish side has always opted for the the later. Cambodia was the probably the first time I've gone anywhere that I was more interested in interacting with the locals than I was seeing the sights.

First off when you come to Cambodia, make sure you bring a lot of $1 bills. The strip clubs are fabulous! Seriously though, the primary currency here is the American dollar. When you are cruising around the temples the children come out of the woodwork to sell you things and invariably everything costs around $1. Seeing these five year olds running around in the dirt with no shoes on with big smiles on their faces and it's impossible not to want to buy whatever they are selling. However after you've got your pockets stuffed with bottles of water, little Buddah statues, postcards, etc. you can only handle so much of the same stuff.

So on day two of temple crusing, Pui and I switched tactics. We went to the market early in the morning and loaded up on bags of apples. Whenever someone would come up to you to sell you something you just smile and hand them an apple. If they keep trying to sell you something (which is second nature), you just give them another apple. Usually after the second apple, they are smiling and talking about something else entirely. Of course, after the word gets out that there is somebody handing out free apples, you've got 10 kids getting queued up. No matter what, we were continually running out of fruit. I must say though at the end of the first few days of our apple giving NGO, it felt like we could cure the injustices that have befallen Cambodia with a car full of apples.

Then came the last day of the trip. Pui and I had already gone through all of the temples, seen all the local sites and had an entire day to kill. We both agreed that our favortie thing so far had been interacting with the kids in the temples and why not take our last day and buy all the fruit we could carry (roughly $100) and visit as many places as we could to hand it out. The basic plan was to visit the smaller temples first and then hit up the mother of all temples, 'Angkor Wat'. The morning went swimingly. We saw a lot of the same faces we had seen in the previous week and everyone was incredibly friendly and grateful.

When we got to Angkor Wat though, it was a different story. Our car was immediately surrounded by 20 kids trying to sell us things. When we got out of the car with fruit it turned into utter chaos, and not in a good way. Using our previous tacticts of just handing out one apple per person didn't work here at all. These were much more seasoned street urchins, many of whom were used to taking advantage of genorosity at the detrement to others. When it became obvious that some kids were ending up with 20 apples and others with none, we trusted some of the friendlier kids to hand them out (as obviously we were ill prepared to deal with the intracies of aid distribution on a wider scale). Surely they would be more fair with each other. Not even close! The second I would turn my back to get another bag out of the car, the kid in charge of distribution would bolt over to their house, hide the entire distribution bag and then get back in another line, begging for apples. They would stealthly switch between Pui and myself. We now had roughly 50 kids surrounding us with no way to remember who got what. So then I get the bright idea of starting a line. How could that go wrong? I get the kids in a line and then have Pui keep track of who has gone through the line. After about 2 minutes of this, you had the 'trickier' kids running in the opposite direction of the line, circling around and then cutting in front of the others. Then there was the great 'baby scam'. You would have some guy come up with a baby. Of course you're going to give a baby an apple before anyone else. However 30 seconds later I would see someone new with a baby. Six babies later it dawned on us that it was the same baby getting passed around to different people. I'm pretty sure that baby never saw any of those apples.

Seeing that I've been quoted as saying "I've been quoted as saying "I absolutely loathe misbehaved children. I simply dislike well behaved ones.", it's interesting that I loved hanging out with these kids so much. I'm not quite sure how I'm going to swing it yet, but I would like to get a non-profit going that is pretty much as simple as me collecting around $1000 and going to Camodia once a year for my visa run to buy a truckload of fruit for these kids. (also make sure you check out my new cambodian photos to the right)

The 101st Use for the Internet

As annoying as I find the Blue Mountain cards you get for every little occasion, I was actually charmed (at least temporarily) by the new (to me) animated cards that you get to put your face on the card and they animate. Even more so when I found out that you can put not only your face on there, but the face of your loved ones. To top it off you can pick the worst photos of your loved ones that they have ever taken and put them in there without their consent (and then post it on the internet). Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Highway Yangshuo

After driving back and forth to the different climbing areas for the past 3 weeks I have developed a pretty good understanding of the workings of the highways in rural China. I've been either taking mini-buses, riding bikes or taking motorcycle taxis up to an hour out of Yangshau.

In the states traffic has such hard a fast rules. Each driver has their own lane; bikers have their own lane; pedestrians even have a lane to call their own (sidewalk). If you veer outside of your lane there are immediate consequences: you're either going to get a ticket, hit somebody, or at the very least piss somebody off.



In China there still seems to be the three lane system (lets say six to cover an entire road- and to be entirely clear here, I mean: 1) shoulder- 2) biker lane- 3) driving lane - 4) driving lane - 5) bikers lane and 6) shoulder). However in the Chinese system any one vehicle seems to feel entitled to use up to four of these lanes on a need based basis. To explain this point, lets say you have some one walking in lane 1, motorcycle in 2, car in 3, and an oncoming motorcycle in 4- and a giant (and I mean enormous) truck behind the car decides he needs to be in front. Also let me make a point here that faster traffic always thinks it needs to be in front. There is no getting stuck, there is just pushing ahead until you more or less force the other vehicles out of the way. The standard procedure is for the truck to hold on his horn and partially swerve out into oncoming traffic. This has the effect of getting the car to push over the motorcycle who pushes over the pedestrian and forces the oncoming motorcycle to go over to the shoulder. There are no yellow lines here. Usually accidents wil happen when 5 of the lanes are already full and someone goes for a pass. Here is some hair-raising video of what it is like driving in Yangshuo.

The O.C. Disorder

If you've known me for little over 10 minutes, it's probably pretty easy to pick up that I'm about as OCD as you can get without requiring medication. Actually, maybe I do require medication, but I've never been diagnosed. I think when I decided to eat vegetable stew for 3 meals a day / 7 days a week for 3 years of my twenties, I became resigned to the idea that obsession would have more pull over my life than common sense. When I went out to set the world distance record for handbiking (non-amputee division), that theory would be solidified all the more. So it should come as no surprise that given enough free time, good weather, and lack of distractions, climbing would overtake my life. Oddly enough, I don't even come close to having enough talent to set any climbing records; in fact I feel like I'm barely grazing the edge of climbing mediocrity.

When I came to China last year with my friends Marshall and Josh, it was a much more balanced trip of climbing and discovering the culture. We visited local hot spots, went out hiking, tourist caves, meat-dog farms and the like. This year I'm pretty much climbing every day. You're supposed to climb 2 days on, 1 day off; however if you don't care how poorly you're climbing or how mangled your fingers get, you really don't have to stop. Climbing every day will decrease your performance and in turn make you an overall worse climber. And thus the constant struggle I seem to face with athletics and OCD. I guess it comes down to what your goals are; climbing well or keeping a smile on your face by just being out there. Here is a video of one of the projects I worked on while in Yangshuo.

Limmony Snickets and a Very Unfortunate Series of Events

I'm surprised I've never heard the phrase 'back-shadowing'. Back-shadowing would be a sweet sister word to forshadowing. It would mean when an event happens and you can trace the origins of that event back to 3 or 4 other obvious events that should have foreshadowed that something big was going to happen, but you didn't pay attention. That was a pretty sloppy description, so let me just get right to the story to explain.


The final product was the following situation:

1. Stranded in a Chinese Airport with a canceled flight due to the protests in Bangkok


2. Stranded by myself with no friends in sight


3. No credit cards or ATM cards


4. Less than $10 on my person (not enough for cab fare to Yangshau, 1.5 hours away)


5. No one that spoke English to help me


6. I didn't have any phone numbers to call someone for help

These are the moments in traveling where you really have to buck up, or at the very least wait it out. I guess you could cry yourself to sleep in a corner and someone would come and help you eventually. Before I get to how I got out of it though, here the the moments of back-shadowing that led up to this.

1. Stranded from protests: We have been discussing at length over the last few months the deteriorating political climate in Thailand. After rioting and coups and re-re-elections, this was bound to happen.


2. Stranded by myself: I came over travelling with 3 friends. They all wanted to go back on the 22nd. That wasn't enough climbing for me, I had to stay 4 more days til the 26th. The 26th happens to be the day that the airports in Bangkok shutdown. My friends got home just fine on the 22nd.



3. No credit cards/ATM cards: So a week before I came to China I had my wallet stolen in Thailand. Right out of the glove compartment of my friends car while we were climbing. They got all my cards, driver's liscense, video rental card, subway punch card, etc.



4. No money: So after my credit cards and ATMs were stolen, I figured I would just travel with cash. Except for the exchange rate between Thai Baht and Chinese Yuan buys and sells at about a 28% loss to me. So I decided to just have my friend that I was traveling with use his ATM and then I would repay him when I got back to Thailand. The $10 I had left when i got to the airport would have been perfect had I not been stranded


5. No way to communicate: I clearly remember standing in a book store in Yangshuo that morning and picking up a Mandarin phrase book and thinking, "I'm not going to need this now, maybe next time."


6. No phone numbers- I should know better by now. Always have atleast 1 business card of a hotel or a business or something. I had all the contact info for the place I was staying on my mobile phone. Unfortunately, that got stolen with my wallet.

So I'm sitting outside of the airport trying to figure out what I'm possible going to do. The airport in Guillin is about the size of the Jackson airport and probably just about as far from town. Then a couple of Chinese people walked past me and for I could understand what they were saying, because it turns out that they were speaking (and were) Thai. Turns out that they were on the same canceled flight. Neither of them spoke English, but they could speak fluent Chinese. So we went back inside, talked to the ticket counter, they pulled up the website for China Climb (my friends in Yangshao), got their phone number, called them, China Climb sent out a taxi, and the rest is history. They helped me with all the money stuff until I could get some money wired from Thailand.

I'm stuck in China now until I can fly back, but there are much worse places to be stuck in the world. I had a feeling I was tempting fate with the Limmony Snickets haircut; it was really only a matter of time.

Visiting Old Friends

Food is often one of the defining factors of a great vacation. I remember 5 years ago I got this mini-sized hamburger in Washington Square Park at the Shake Shack in N.Y.C. It was soooo good, that to this day, that stands as my number one reason to get back to to N.Y.- to eat another one of those burgers. (My good friends Chris and Josh come in at a close second.) I had a similar love affair with some noodles and Seschwan beef last year in Yangshuo, China. So when I found out that one of my compadres at the climbing shop was going to be interning in Yangshao (at chinaclimb), I couldn't think of a better opportunity to reunite with an old friend (the noodles). So I'm here for a few weeks climbing, eating noodles, and blogging. Pui had to stay behind because she is saving her vacation time to come back to the states next summer. However Pui's boss, Josh Morris and girlfriend, Kat and Kat's brother, Dtaw are all here with me. One of my goals for this trip is to get some sweet climbing photos with the hair, so stay posted!