First off, Happy New Year everyone (if anyone is still reading - not sure cause you lazy bastards aren't commenting!). I've fallen a bit behind on this thing because decent internet access has been surprising hard to come by in New Zealand - it was faster in Laos! Anyway...
On Friday Maya and I left Rotorua, feeling a little underwhelmed and a lot poorer financially (shit is so expensive in New Zealand that it's almost inevitable that we'll end up feeling ripped off); we drove about 3 hours south to Tongariro National Park where we planned to take on the Tongariro Crossing, a 17-kilometer (about 11-mile) hike that usually takes at least 7 hours to complete, and which, I just found out a second ago, actually had two people die on it last year. Basically, it's no relaxing stroll along the beach, and while Maya and I have some serious hiking under our belts - we made a 7-hour climb halfway down and back up the Grand Canyon last year - we're not exactly what you'd consider to be the outdoorsy, trekking types, so we (particularly Maya) were a little nervous going in. Our trepidation wasn't helped by the fact that we had booked only one full day (the next day, Saturday) in the area so we were praying for the weather to be on our side, and yet, as we drove through the National Park to our guesthouse, we found ourselves in an absolutely torrential downpour. Then as we arrived at our accomodations, an attractively rustic-looking ski lodge, we saw the hikers who had been stuck on the trail during the rain returning from their trek, and they looked miserable, all drenched from head to foot, covered in mud, and limping.
That night we packed our backpacks - with multiple layers of cloths, snacks, lots of water - and went to bed around 10:30 - the shuttle driving us to the head of the trail left at 7:30am the next morning and we had breakfast before that at 7, so we set our alarm for 6. Now, you should know that Maya has had an issue for most of our trip - the night preceding any activity that you would really want solid rest before (like, when we hiked the unrestored Great Wall), she hasn't been able to sleep. And such was the case that night. Even with the help of two pills and earplugs, when the alarm started beeping at 6am, Maya had only gotten a few winks of rest, and she was fucking pissed. "I'm not going to do it!" she said quite for a few times of the Crossing, "I can't do it." But while Maya can whine, pout, and scream with the best of them, when push comes to shove, she's pretty fucking badass, and when she finally calmed down, stepped into the hallway, which was freezing cold, and was shocked into awakedness by a cold blast of outside air, she decide to go for it.
Good thing we did, because the weather ended up being perfect, and Tongiriro Crossing ended up being possibly the most amazing hike we've gone on anywhere. We climbed through Martian-looking plains...
...up crumbly lava flows, past snow-capped peaks...
...above the rather vaginal "Red Crater"...
...right to the banks of surreally colored mountain-top mineral lakes...
...and to the side of the active volcano Mount Ngauruhoe. I think I said of the Great Wall of China that it seemed like something out of The Lord of the Rings; well, Mount Ngauruhoe literally is something of The Lord of the Rings - it was the stand-in for Mount Doom in Peter Jackson's movies.
And the long, steep, exhausting climb up the side of Ngauruhoe was the road to Mordor in the films. Like true nerds, Maya and I joked about Gollum hiding behind the corner of various crags and recited lines of Frodo and Sam's dialogue as we made our somewhat less epic and arduous journey (we finished the Crossing in just about 8 hours, including breaks for lunch and to snap hundreds of photos), feeling not unlike two little hobbits awed in the face of nature's majesty.
It's the day after Christmas here in New Zealand, or as they call it, Boxing Day. Don't ask me what the fuck Boxing Day is, but whereas nothing was open yesterday here in the rotten-eggs-smelling town of Rotorua, almost nothing is almost here today. (It took Maya and I 3 internet cafes before we found one that was open.)
Christmas away from home is always weird, I guess. Holidays (or birthdays, anniversaries, any of the things that normal people celebrate, really) aren't a big deal in my family, but Christmas has been the one day a year when I've always come home from wherever I was, and then, with my parents and at least one of my two brothers, went for dinner at my Aunt's place, where I saw her, her husband, my two cousins, and my grandfather. I don't see my immediate family that often, let alone my extended family, but I can't remember a year when I wasn't there for Christmas (there might have been one - I just can't remember it), so it is weird to be away, and so far away.
New Zealand has been beautiful - and fucking annoying. Part of this has to be our current state of mind as our trip draws to a close - it's like being stuck right in the middle between two worlds (home and halfway around the globe from home) and not being sure where we'd rather be, so we're not quite happy, no matter how we look at things. But it's also been annoying because, well, New Zealand is annoying. The weather has been annoying as fuck so far - it will be the most gorgeous blue-skied and sunny day one second; the next, you're caught under a thunderhead that's pissing down rain even as you can see those sunny blue skies right ahead taunting you. The driving has been annoying as fuck, too - whereas the roads are long, straight, and largely traffic-less in Australia (at least where we were), the roads in New Zealand are winding, narrow, occasionally unpaved, tipping over vertiginous cliffsides, and the native drivers are fucking maniacs - they drive retardedly fast even on the most serpentine strips, and because the roads are generally one-lane and full of blind bends, they end up tailgating you when they think you driving too slowly (i.e. not suicidally). The owner of our guesthouse in Rotorua explained that everyone in New Zealand starts driving at 15, and so there are a lot of inexperienced, hormonal drivers out there, and as a result a lot of bad driving, and a lot of accidents. Then there are the prices - like Australia, shit seems mad expensive. Of course, we're spoiled, having just come from Southeast Asia, but shit really is expensive. It's almost impossible to get dinner at a half-decent restuarant for less than $50 each; a music CD averages about $30; and most of the attractions charge, at least, $25 per person admission fees. We're fucking unemployed, so this shit is gonna break the bank quick.
Still, despite such obstacles, we managed to see some amazing shit. While staying in a beachfront hostel in Whitianga on the Coromandel Peninsula for a few days, we hiked through the bush, past rolling pastures...
...through tangled jungle, and by majestic coastline...
...to the world-famous Cathedral Cove.
Another day we went on a boat ride through the choppy surf (shit was like a rollercoaster) along the rugged, volcanic coastline, visiting small islands and strange crags rising from the ocean.
And in Rotorua (which is plagued by that aforementioned rotten-egg smell due to the town's biggest tourist draw: it's sulfurous geothermal activity ((geysers, bubbling mud pools, hot springs, volcanos, that sort of shit)), we walked through Wai-O-Tapu geothermal park, where we watched the Lady Knox Geyser erupt some 30 feet into the air...
...and walked among amazing formations like the Champagne Pool...
...and the Devil's Bath, all bubbling up from the earth's hot, acidic, mineral-pigmented core.
We also went to Mitai, a Maori village site where we ate traditional Maori food called hangi (meat and potatoes cooked on hot stones under the earth for 3 hours), watched a cultural show (not as cheesy as it sounds) complete with singing, dancing, a weapons demonstration, and the infamous Maori pre-battle pump-up ritual, Haka, which goes something like this:
After the show, our guide - this huge, intimidating, tattooed Maori woman - led us through the dark jungle to her tribe's sacred spring, which had massive eels swimming in it (she claimed that they had swum there over a period of 3 years from California and would likely swim back at some point to die), and had the clearest water Maya and I had ever seen. The spring also had glow worms gathered around its bank, creating eerie flourescent constellations over the water; our guide explained that the glow worms were actually not "worms" but the larvae of a particular type of fly - maggots, in other words - and that the glow was actually due to an enzyme in the larvae's feces. Basically, we were oohing and ahing over a bunch of maggots' glowing shit. Still, by the time we left Mitai around 10:30pm (we'd been there for nearly 4 hours), we felt like we'd learned a lot about the Maori traditions (including their insane facial tattoos), which was cool since the Maori are a much bigger minority in New Zealand than we had realized (everyone working at the Auckland airport, for instance, seemed to be Maori).
As for our New Zealand Christmas, it was a strange one indeed. We spent most of it hiking through the bush right around our rather remote moutainside/lakeside guesthouse just outside of Rotorua, a location we selected mostly to be away from that rotten-egg smell. True to the New Zealand weather pattern so far, it was raining for much of our hike, but it was still a pretty awesome time, something like walking through a prehistoric landscape of massive ferns and towering redwoods, everything covered with moss and strange fungi. We didn't see any dinosaurs, but the lake we were walking along - Tikitapu (Blue Lake) - is reputed to have its own lake monster, named Taniwha. While we didn't spot the beast, we did see lots of New Zealanders laying out "sunning" themselves and/or picnicing on the lake's sandy beach, and swimming, waterskiiing, and jetskiing on its waters, even though it was freezing cold and raining out. Those Kiwis are fucking crazy.
Drenched after our hike, and after some lunch, we drove into Rotorua, which was basically a ghost town and walked through the hot springs and bubbling mud pools in the free-access Kuirau Park. They were kind of underwhelming - but the playground in the park was awesome, all futuristic-looking and interactive, much cooler than any playground we'd ever seen in the States. We played on that for a while - two Maori kids stared at us the whole time like we were crazy - until the rain got too hard and we had to retreat to our car.
When we returned to the guesthouse, a huge French family has arrived for the night (which they would be spending in the room right next to ours), including mom, dad, two little girls (one 5; the other, 6), and a tiny baby, not even 6-months old yet. As we stepped into the main door, the baby was wailing its head off and burping - we were not happy. This whole trip, we'd been talking about how annoying all the Frnech tourists are, and how they all seem to bring their half-naked children along with them to the most ungodly regions of the world. "French babies" had become a common, half-joking pet peeve of ours - Conan O'Brien does a hilarious impression of a French baby sometimes, and I would do my (not-so-good) impression of his impression in dismay whenever we were confronted with some new Gallic brat. It seemed somehow fitting that the Christian God would have given us, the atheist and the Jew, our own French-baby roommate as gift on his son's birthday.
But as we cooked our rather bizarre Christmas dinner in the guesthouse's shared kitchen - a tomato, scallion, and feta cheese salad (Christmas colors, it turns out!); BBQ lamb chops; garlic and butter potatoes; and a horrible store-made apple pie that made me wish dearly for my Aunt Ellen's delicious homemade pie - the clearly very harried mom of this French family told us sympathetically that her baby was "not a screamer" and that we shouldn't have any problems sleeping. And as it turned out, the French baby made hardly a peep all night, and though I haven't gotten a solid night's rest since we arrived in New Zealand, Maya and I both slept better than we have in days. Our own Christmas miracle.
Though we'd only spent a week in Australia, by the time we left a few days ago, we felt pretty fucking satisfied. We'd snorkeled and scuba-dived at the Great Barrier Reef, we'd hung in a town full of kangaroos, we'd driven through "the bush," seen massive crocs chomping chicken wings and massive endangered turtles laying their eggs. We'd even enjoyed a stomach-bursting Aussie BBQ, care of our awesome Bed & Breakfast owners. Stuffed with grilled meats, and a couple liters of Bundaberg's famous ginger beer and rum-and-cola-in-a-can, we flew off for 2 weeks in New Zealand, the final country and the final 14 days of our epic trip.
And the first day we arrived in Auckland, New Zealand, an earthquake hit the country. But it was on the other side of North Island (which is the half of the nation we're spending our time in), and we didn't even feel a quiver. Which isn't to say that we're feeling fine...
There are definitely things we look forward to about coming home. We miss our friends and family a lot. And it will be great not living out of a backpack, and finally sleeping in our own bed. But I'd be lying if I didn't say that the imminent end of our journey has our hearts heavy and has a dark cloud hanging over the New Zealand landscape, as beautiful as it is (more on that to come). But while this is almost certainly the most awesome thing that we've done in our lives so far, we don't plan on it being the most awesome thing we've ever done, so maybe we shouldn't feel so bummed out after all.
With Malaysia sitting atop our list of countries to revisit (we'd made the most new friends there, spent the second shortest time - just a week - there, and of course, there's the fucking Thaipusam festival still to see), Maya and I headed off for a week in Australia. Arriving in Sydney felt at once comforting after the last 3 months of Asian insanity (we can actually drink the tap water?! No squat toilets?!), but also strangely anticlimactic. A safe western city - yawn. (An opera house shaped like a bunch of big clam shells - double yawn.) And after Southeast Asia, shit seemed really expensive (and even compared to the U.S., it is). The next day we were flying down to Hervey Bay, and from there we were renting a car to drive to Bundaberg and Bargara Beach, where we'd be spending 4 days, visiting the Great Barrier Reef, among other activities; so we spent much of our afternoon in Sydney looking for CDs to listen to during our forthcoming drive - the new Serj Tankian solo album and the new Dillinger Escape Plan album. There were tons of record stores near our guesthouse (which was in a trendy, Village-like area called Newtown), but we couldn't find the Serj album for less than 20 Aussie dollars (which is just about 20 U.S. dollars!) and the Dillinger for less than 30 dollars(!) (so we bought the former, passed on the latter - both are really fucking good, by the way; a warning from Maya about the Serj CD: "The songs might get stuck in your head and drive you insane!").
But if Sydney seemed anticlimactic after everything that has come before it on our trip, once we got down to the coast and started driving around "the bush," as the Aussies call it, the great Down Under did not disappoint. First, there was just the view from the plane of the coast, the ocean, the islands, and the Reef - simply stunning. We couldn't help but be filled with anticipation.
Then there was the driving - my first time driving on the "other" side of the road, which has been a bit of an adventure but not nearly as difficult as I had feared (my biggest problem is that I keep turning on the windshield wipers whenever I try to turn-signal). And the landscape has been amazing - wild, wide-open countryside; vast, dramatic skies; perfect clouds...
...and, we were particularly excited to come across, the occasional kangaroo-crossing street sign.
Most of all, it has been all those crazy Aussie animals that have made our time here so outstanding - in the last 5 days, we've had run-ins with technicolor fish, 4 of the 5 most venomous snakes in the world, hungry crocs, suburban kangaroos, a ginormous nesting turtle - and a little dog named Buddy (who belongs to the owners of the B&B, Golden Cane, we're staying at) that even Maya (who's generally terrified of dogs) can't help but like...
Technicolor Fish: On our first full day along the coast, Maya and I woke at 5am, had our "brekkie" (as the Aussies call breakfast), drove an hour and a half through the bush, and went on a 9-hour trip out on the Great Barrier Reef. First, there was a 90-minute boat ride bouncing over the high waves - we saw at least two other passengers puking from motion sickness - and then, once above the Reef, Maya and I snorkeled and even scuba-dived (our first time doing the latter) in the midst of the most ridiculous menagerie of tropical fish - I don't know any of their names (parrot fish? Long, thin tube-shaped fish?), but it seemed like basically every species in Finding Nemo, other than the sharks.
4 of the 5 Most Venomous Snakes in the World: Another day we went to this place called Snakes Down Under, where this crazy Steve Irwin-esque Aussie dude, Ian Jenkins, runs a little reptile zoo, where he handles 4 of the 5 most venomous snakes in the world (all 5 hail from Australia). Visitors aren't allowed to handle any of those, but they are allowed to handle a big python - and since I had just gotten a snake tattoo before Maya and I left the States, and since this trip is, in some ways, supposed to be about gaining new strength and facing old fears (a fear of snakes being one of mine), I felt like I had to partake. And you know what, I really wasn't freaked out at all - it's been so long since I've actually tested my supposed fear of snakes that, it seems, the fear has faded away without me even realizing it.
Hungry Crocs: At Snakes Down Under, this Jenkins dude also feeds what turns out to be an absolutely humongous crocodile. We had no idea of the beast's proportions as it was laying at the bottom of a small muddy pool in its holding pen; then Jenkins - holding a fresh, fully feathered chicken wing in his hand, and wearing a Santa Claus cap on top of his Paul Hogan hat - slapped the water with a long bamboo pole and the croc, which must have been 10 feet long, exploded out of the surface, sending water everywhere as if a bomb had gone off. The creature then crawled after him and snapped the wing from his fingers with an awful crunch. That's one powerful motherfucking beast - and one crazy motherfucking Aussie.
Suburban Kangaroos: Another day Maya and I drove to this small beach town called Woodgate, where, according to our B&B owners, kangaroos are known to roam the streets and backyards. As soon as we got there (around 12:30pm), we spotted three kangaroos bounding across the road ahead of us, but when we asked a grizzled old local when/where was best for 'roo-watching, he told us that the "nasty pests" are "like Mexicans" during the midday, spenting it just "sleeping in the shade," and really only come out in the afternoon. So, with some time to kill, we decided to go swimming - the beach was virtually deserted; the surf, high; the ocean, bathwater-warm. We didn't have any towels or our swimming suits on us, so we just stripped down to our undies and jumped in.
After a few hours and a quick lunch, we drove slowly through the town, looking for kangaroos - and they were fucking everywhere! Whole crowds of them - huge adult males, cute little ones, and even mothers with babies in their pouches - hanging out in people's yards along Woodgate's perfect suburban lanes, just lounging, sitting, standing, grazing, and staring back at us! It was bizarre and amazing, everything we could have hoped for - and yet as we repeatedly stopped our car, gawked, and snapped endless pictures, the locals just continued with whatever they were doing, almost oblivious to what was to them an everyday presence. Maya and I could only conclude that if monitor lizards are Bangkok's squirrels, then apparently, kangaroos are Woodgate's.
A Ginormous Nesting Turtle: Perhaps our most remarkable animal encounter was later that same day, when we went to the Mon Repos Conservation Park, a turtle rookery where visitors can see endangered loggerheads laying their eggs during their late fall/early winter nesting season. Maya and I got there around 6:30pm, and along with a group of maybe 40 other visitors, we were led by down to the quickly darkening beach, where, we were told, a turtle had been spotted crawling onto the beach. As we approached, however, we saw that the creature - which was huge, 3 or 4 feet long, and maybe half as wide - was making a U-turn back toward the water. The female scientist leading us explained that the turtle must have seen us and been scared off, but she said that another turtle was up on the beach not too far away and had already begun digging out her nest. Unfortunately, when another scientist went to check on this turtle, she discovered that it was a very young female who didn't seem to know how to properly dig her nest, and she had already abandoned her first attempt and was on to a second; the researchers didn't want us to disturb her in the middle of her struggles, so they told us to all sit on the sand and wait. As we were waiting, we spotted a dark shape emerging from the water directly below us; it was, most likely, the original turtle re-emerging from the ocean. The first scientist told us that we would have to all shuffle over while keeping low to the ground to get out of the way of the turtle without her seeing us and getting scared away again, so, in a truly absurd scene, all 40-plus of us crab-walked and crawled through the sand as the loggerhead lumbered out of the water and up onto the sand, seeming to follow us the whole way, forcing everyone to crab-walk and crawl even further. (Our undies were still wet from our earlier swim, so Maya got to do all this in a skirt without any panties on! Don't worry - the skirt was long and rather tight, so there was no free show for anyone.) Then we sat frozen for a long time as the turtle set up almost right next to the group and started making her nest. We ended up watching her for over 2-hours (till 10:30pm or so), as she meticulously dug out her egg chamber with her two back flippers, as she lay 129 eggs, as she filled up and buried over the nest with sand, and then, as she crawled back into the ocean. It was a ridiculously arduous process; big loggerheads are clumsy on land, and this one was clearly exhausted by the end. Plus, the turtles expel the salt that accumulates in them during all their time in the ocean through their eyes in what are known as "turtle tears," which meant that as this loggerhead labored through the night, she appeared to be crying. What made the experience all the more powerful and poignant was that this turtle, like many others, had misjudged her nesting spot, placing it below the high-tide mark, which meant that, if left there, her eggs would all drown. In such cases, however, after the turtles return to sea, the scientists move the eggs to higher nests that they have made themselves; and in this case, Maya and I got to help carry the freshly-laid turtle eggs into the new nest. Unlike snakes, I've always loved turtles - I had many of them as pets as a kid, and there's something about their solitary nature, the way they carry their homes on their back, their slow-and-steady approach to life, their old, craggy, wizen faces that really resonates with me. As Maya and I watched the massive loggerhead crawl back through the darkness into the ocean, knowing that her species is facing possible extinction, and that for all her hard work, the nest she had just made would have been doomed if it had not been for the scientists here, I realized that I had discovered another thing I like about turtles: their persistence in the face of futility, fighting the good fight even when defeat seems assured. Which is really what it feels like sometimes, trying to live a good life in this world of ours.
The day after the "canopy walk," we went to see the Batu Caves, one of the most important sites of Hindu worship in the world. Every year, during the end of January/beginning of February, thousands of devotees make a pilgrimage to the caves for the Thaipusam festival, where they engage in various acts of devotion, notably, carrying/enduring various types of kavadi or burdens. As good ol' wikipedia explains, "at its simplest this may entail carrying a pot of milk, but mortification of the flesh by piercing the skin, tongue or cheeks with vel skewers is also common. The most spectacular practice is the vel kavadi, essentially a portable altar up to two meters tall, decorated with peacock feathers and attached to the devotee through 108 vels pierced into the skin on the chest and back. Fire walking and flagellation may also be practiced. It is claimed that devotees are able to enter a trance, feel no pain, do not bleed from their wounds and have no scars left behind."
Unfortunately, we were a month too early for the fest, but the caves site was pretty fucking spectacular nonetheless. Here's Maya outside the main gate - you can see the stairway of 272 steps leading up into the darkness of the main cave, the Temple Cave... as well, of course, as the 120-foot-plus gold-painted statue of the Hindu diety Lord Murugan.
As you walk up the 272 steps, there are wild monkeys everywhere, playing in the nearby trees; leaping, sitting, and sliding down the stairway railing; and some, even crawling around the steps themselves.
We saw this one enjoying a flower garland left as an offering inside the cave.
And we saw another monkey taking a completely unprovoked and unexpected swipe at an Indian dude walking down the steps not far from us. So yeah, they may be cute but are not to be trusted.
The temple cave, as you can see, is fucking huge, and - as you can't see - is full of colorful tableaus depicting a variety of bizarre dieties in a variety of equally bizarre interactions (blue multi-armed women standing on little baby-sized men with handlebar moustaches; cows with the heads, and boobs, of beautiful women, etc.).
Me, below some of temple cave's many drippy stalactites.
After the temple cave, Maya and I took a personal tour of another Batu cave, the accurately-but-not-so-creatively-named "Dark Cave." Here we are before the tour in our spiffy spelunker's helmets. The highlight of the tour was probably when, about 10 minutes into the cavern, the walkway came to life with all sorts of creepy-crawlies - it was like something out of an Indiana Jones movie - most of which turned out to be cockroaches that live off of all the guano (bat excrement) dropped on the cave floor.
Finally, here I am standing in front of a big statue of an insane-looking green monkey-faced dude at the bottom of the temple cave. Can't pretend to know much more than that (Maya says that she read that he is the most rarely worshipped diety from the Hindu pantheon - can't imagine why).
Our visit has only made us want to come back during Thaipusam and see all the insanity for ourselves - if not actually "mortify our flesh."
Malaysia boasts some of the most spectacular rainforests in the world, and remarkably, some of it lies not far outside of KL. In fact, even right from inside the city, you can see deep green forest-covered moutains brushing up against the sky. In between visiting metal stores and rocking out at hardcore shows, Maya and I went to FRIM (Forest Research Institute Malaysia), a scientific jungle-study center that was only recently opened to tourists and which is still off the beaten track (though I can't imagine that this will remain the case for long). There we tackled the "canopy walk," a precarious 600-foot-long rope-and-wooden-plank trail hanging from the trees some 90 feet above the ground, right in the midst of the jungle canopy, where it's used by researchers. The walk was ridiculously bouncy and the structure seemed ready to snap apart at any second, and the views were amazing - we saw families of monkeys leaping from tree top to tree top, and, through occasional breaks in the tangled foliage, we saw the KL skyline, with its famous Petronas Towers, in the distance. Indeed, civilization as we know it seemed fantastically far away.
Unlike Beijing, where there are tons of metal bands playing live on a regular basis but almost none of them bother to put out albums, in Malaysia, there are tons of local bands writing, recording, and releasing albums, but there are very few live metal shows. Blame this on the government's last banning of "black metal" a little over a year ago and the subsequent raid of a metal fest in Kuala Lumpur and the detainment of over 300 of the fans and musicians there. Oddly, however, while Malaysian metal bands may be keeping to the studio and to the practice space for the time being, local and international hardcore bands seem to play out in KL almost every month.
In fact, during Maya's and my one week in the city, there was a big annual hardcore fest called Bridging Oceans 3, featuring Southeast Asian hardcore bands from Malaysia, Singapore (or "Spore," as the kids call it), the Philipines, and Indonesia, going down. I found out about it through this cool site, Malaysian Gigs, that I stumbled on while looking to see if there were any shows in KL while we were in town, and Maya and I showed up at the venue, the MCPA Theatre upstairs in the Chinese Assembly Hall - a rather official-looking convention center right by KL's Chinatown - bright and early at 1:30 in the afternoon this past Sunday, when the gig was set to go down. There was some kind of Chinese book fair taking place on the ground floor, which made for many awkward interactions between the black-clad and tattooed hardcore kids coming through to the fest and the very straightlaced book fair attendees. And on the second floor, right outside the MCPA theatre, there was a little exhibition in honor of Sun Yat-Sen, the first president of the Republic of China; all the hardcore kids seemed to find this hilarious, and many took photos of themselves giggling in front of a large photo of the communist leader.
In true DIY fashion, the gig didn't start until after 2:30, over an hour late, but other than that, there wasn't much that Maya and I could complain about - the show was pretty fucking awesome. The crowd was an amazing assortment of Malaysian, Indian, and Arab hardcore kids, including at least two girls in Muslim headscarves(!), many wearing shirts with "MYHC" (an acronym for "Malaysian hardcore" and a play off of "NYHC,"New York hardcore") emblazoned on them. As soon as the first band, a cool Malaysian quartet called Back on Track with an adorably nerdy-looking singer, hit the stage, the crowd went apeshit, moshing, circle-pitting, and skanking, sometimes with a weird synchronicity that suggested the violent choreographed dance routine of some bizarro hardcore boyband. Even more remarkable, however, was just how fucking friendly everyone was - kids smiled at us, said hello or welcome, some shook our hands, one complimented my Pantera T-shirt. And almost as soon as we showed up, a skinheaded Singaporean dude (named Yus) in a Madball basketball jersey came up to us, asked us where we were from (he was very impressed that we were from NYC since most of his favorite bands were NYHC groups like Sick of It All, Cro-Mags, and, well, Madball), and started introducing us to other people (turned out, Yus knew just about everyone there), telling us about the MYHC scene, and just generally shooting the shit. Later, in between sets, a random kid noticed that while everyone else in our general area, including Maya, had a chair to sit on, I was just squatting down on the floor, and in a truly unprecedented act of thoughtfulness, he lifted a chair from the stack behind him and placed it by me, gesturing for me to sit. He then chatted with Maya for about half an hour before excusing himself - "I have to go mosh," he said simply - and disppearing into the crowd.
As for the bands, they were totally solid, ranging from old school to new school, the more punk-inflected and the more metal-influenced. And some even cranked out a number of highly entertaining covers of songs that we actually knew, by bands including Hatebreed, Sick of It All, and Black Flag. The most popular act of the night had to be the Malaysian group xELEVENx, who had almost the entire audience piling on top of each other, trying to get to the mic to sing/shout along to every song which they clearly all knew by heart.
I ended up buying a CD of theirs (and a T-shirt of this "Spore" moshcore band, Overthrown), and Maya and I ended up hanging out at the show for nearly 7 hours, leaving only right before the final band, and only because we were absolutely starving. It turned out that My Chemical Romance were playing that night at the stadium almost exactly across the highway from the Chinese Assembly Hall, and when we walked to the nearby skytrain station after getting dinner in Chinatown, the My Chem show was just getting out. As we pushed disdainfully through the throngs of Malaysian emo kids (who were sopping wet because it had started raining midway through their outdoor concert - and probably because they'd been weeping along to every song), one of the kids, a young dude, looked at Maya and said as we passed, "So beautiful," followed by what sounded to both of us like, "Jew-bol," which Maya and I joked must be Malay for "Jewess" or something. I decided that while, yes, Maya is "so beautiful," she must seem extra-hot - like the forbidden fruit or something - as a Jewess in a Muslim land. Not to mention as a newly minted member of the MYHC scene among a sea of emo kids.
When Maya and I first started telling people at home about the trip we were about to embark on, some of our friends, family, and random acquaintances thought it sounded fucking cool; others thought we were fucking crazy; most probably thought the trip sounded fucking cool and we're fucking crazy. One of those who thought we were just crazy was Maya's cousin Felix. Felix is a few years older than we are, and he's a security guard for one of the building complexes down in our 'hood in Coney Island. He thought we were nuts, and in particular, he thought we were nuts to go to Malaysia, mostly because it's an officially Muslim country. "Be very careful," he warned us, adding to Maya: "And don't let anyone know that you're Jewish," advice seconded by Maya's mother.
So, right now we're in Kuala Lumpur, where we've been for the last 5 days or so, and as shit turns out, KL (as the locals refer to their hometown) definitely is Muslim - there are gorgeous mosques all over the city; women in headscarves and even full-on burkas walking everywhere, sitting in cafes, strolling through the malls; there are restuarants advertising things that no restuarant in the States would wisely advertise, like "Iraqi food" and "Iranian cuisine" - but it's also, well, not. For instance, Christmas is fucking huge here - there are decorations everywhere, carols playing in the shopping centers; it's fucking bizarre. And most of the men that we see walking with the women in burkas are dressed like total wiggers (or "miggers," or whatever the term would be). And the city is actually insanely multicultural, full of Southeast Asians, Chinese, Indians, Arabs, and even the occasional whitey.
If anyone thought we had reason to watch our backs in Malaysia (and they did), it has turned out to be quite the contrary: Kuala Lumpur has proven to be the friendliest city we've visited yet (and the safest and cleanest after Tokyo and Kyoto). Everyone smiles at us, random people say hello (almost everyone speaks really good English, which is the country's second offical language), and we've had almost absurdly congenial conversations with Malay taxi drivers, Bangladeshi waiters, the Iraqi dude at the internet cafe...
And we've eaten the best food - hummus and kabobs, grilled lamb chops, dim sum, "chicken rice" (which, as the name suggests is just chicken and rice but so perfectly prepared that we've eaten it almost everyday for lunch at a restuarant where we've become quick regulars) - and even more impressively, have yet to get sick (a first for any Southeast Asian country).
But maybe best of all, Kuala Lumpur is rock 'n' roll as all fuck. This is actually a very big surprise, not only because Malaysia is Muslim but because the country's Muslim government's National Fatwa Council has gone out of its way in recent years to ban "black metal" - by which they actually meant any heavy music listened to or played by people in black T-shirts, not just the church-burning, corpse-painted brand of metal commonly called by that name - in the country (for more on the bannings, click here). And yet, on our second day in KL, Maya and I went off to find this metal record store, Nebiula HM Shop, which is listed on the metaltravelguide website; we ended up at this shopping center, Campbell Complex, off the beaten tourist track, and on the 1st floor, which had not just the one, but four metal-oriented stores. Nebiula is the best of these, and it's run by this awesome dude Jaei, who's the vocalist of one of Malaysia's leading bands, Sil Khannaz. Maya and I talked to him for an hour or so, as he played us music by his band and a variety of other Malaysian bands (he had a good two shelves full of albums by local bands, way more than we've seen anywhere else on this trip, except Japan) and told us about the scene. He said that the Malaysian government has been "very difficult," and that after the ban on "black metal" (strangely, most of the local bands, even now, seem to play in that actual style), much of the scene had to be rebuilt from the ground up. I ended up buying almost 10 CDs, and he ended up giving me another 4 or so as "free gifts."
After Nebiula, we stopped by the other stores, and in one, we had the most hilarious interaction with the totally adorable middle-aged proprietress, who walked us through her shop's metal section, describing various products with the sweetest little voice: "Ooh, this band, they play death/grind. Very nice." "Slayer, 'Live Undead' T-shirt. Very old-school vibe." We were giggling almost uncontrollably the whole time, and Maya eventually asked the woman if she actually listens to metal, and she explained that metal is very popular and her customers always ask for that kind of music so she has to stock it, and she started listening so she would know about it and that she did like a lot of it. "Some people think it is just noise, but I think some is actually very nice," she said. Maya told her that she was a great saleswoman, but that the whole experience was very crazy, Maya said, like "having my mother trying to sell me metal," which is pretty much how I felt about it, too. (To be continued)
Returning from Ko Chang and swinging through Bangkok for one final night before our flight out to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, the next day, we went to the world-famous kathoey cabaret, Calypso, at the luxury Asia Hotel - where we definitely were not staying, by the way; our home for the night was a way more budget joint, coincidentally called the Malaysia Hotel. The Malaysia had been recommended to us by our old friend Max from Vietnam - he told us that it's a place with a dark past, the onetime hangout of serial killer Charles Sobhraj, who preyed on Western tourists in the Seventies, luring them to their deaths with promises of cheap drugs. Now, Max told us, the Malaysia was a gay hotel and the best budget place to stay in Bangkok - as long as you didn't mind all the "poofs mincing about," as he put it. We didn't.
In fact, staying at this notorious hotel with its blood-spattered history and going to see the Calypso cabaret seemed like the perfect way to bid farewell to Thailand - and to celebrate the eve of the 3-month mark (Dec. 5) of our trip.
The cabaret, in particular, was fittingly insane. The theater was exactly what you'd expect of a cabaret - all plush red-satin seats, little round tables with small, dim lamps on them, and overpriced drinks. And the show was a kitschy, flamboyant, sometimes hilarious mix of dancing and lipsyncing to classic showtunes, frenetic flamenco, cheesy Asian ballads, really cheesy techno, etc., performed by a cast of, I'm guessing, 50, at least 30 of whom were ladyboys. And not just any ladyboys, but the most convincing, glamorous, and, in some cases, dropdead gorgeous transvestites and/or transsexuals probably anywhere in the world (definitely click the link above for a look). As a straight man, I can say that it was truly a night of mixed emotions - attraction, dismay, disbelief, confusion, more attraction... Maya and I had read in BK magazine (which is kind of like Bangkok's Village Voice), that while, in the States, the average age that people have sex-change operations is in their 50s, the average age in Thailand is the mid-to-late 20s; this made me think that probably most of the ladyboys in the show were post-op and, for all intents and purposes, women, and so I didn't feel quite so conflicted admiring their voluptuous forms and sultry moves. As for Maya, this was one of the few times when she had no absolutely problem with me ogling scantily-clad "ladies." And she found my "issues" to be hilarious.
It was with similarly mixed emotions that we left Thailand the next morning. It definitely hadn't been our favorite country so far, and it wouldn't be our first to visit again, or our first to ever call home, but it had provided us with some of our greatest challenges and strangest - and gayest - memories.
Leaving Bangkok once again, we spent 4-and-a-half days on the island of Ko Chang for a little "vacation from our vacation," as I called it. We took a 5-hour-plus bus ride from Bangkok to the town of Trat, then a 15-minute-plus sawgtheow ride out of town through the jungle to the dock, a 20-plus-minute ferry from the mainland shore to the island, and a brief rumble along Ko Chang's one and only road before we finally arrived at the Paradise Palms bungalows, where we somehow lucked out and landed their "penthouse," a cozy little beachfront cabin...
...with a postcard-perfect palmtree-framed view of the ocean. The sun literally set over the lapping waves, right in front of our porch, bathing us and our room in orange warmth every dusk.
We came as close to doing nothing as possible for us. We swam in the warm, crystal water...
... (suffering through the occasional little jellyfish sting along the way), ate (lots of fruit, meat, and French fries), drank (Singha beer, and pineapple juice with a splash of rum), watched the sunset each day, and read. I had just finished reading an amazing book, Welcome to Hell, this Irish dude's absolutely gripping, harrowing memoir about his 8 years of wrongful incarceration in a Bangkok prison (while in Bangkok ourselves, Maya and I literally traded off reading chapters, we were so hooked); now on the island, I read another thought-provokingly relevant book, The Beach, the novel-cum-Leonardo DiCaprio flick (which I haven't seen, by the way - I can't stand DiCaprio) about backpackers seeking untouched utopia on a Thai island and finding much more than they bargained for. It's a derivative work - there's a little Heart of Darkness, a little Lord of the Flies - but a good read, nonetheless, and the author really nails backpackers in Southeast Asia: how they talk, brag, and dream, and how ultimately silly and deluded they often are - myself included, perhaps. That said, Maya and I weren't seeking any sort of utopia on Ko Chang, just a place to relax, to catch our breath, to get away from all the craziness of our trip so far. And in that, (despite Maya having to overcome her fear of canines by facing a few of the island's energetic beach dogs, and me getting some nasty coral cuts on my right foot and maybe even nastier sunburn on my back) I think we succeeded.
...up crumbly lava flows, past snow-capped peaks...
...above the rather vaginal "Red Crater"...
...right to the banks of surreally colored mountain-top mineral lakes...
...and to the side of the active volcano Mount Ngauruhoe. I think I said of the Great Wall of China that it seemed like something out of The Lord of the Rings; well, Mount Ngauruhoe literally is something of The Lord of the Rings - it was the stand-in for Mount Doom in Peter Jackson's movies.
And the long, steep, exhausting climb up the side of Ngauruhoe was the road to Mordor in the films. Like true nerds, Maya and I joked about Gollum hiding behind the corner of various crags and recited lines of Frodo and Sam's dialogue as we made our somewhat less epic and arduous journey (we finished the Crossing in just about 8 hours, including breaks for lunch and to snap hundreds of photos), feeling not unlike two little hobbits awed in the face of nature's majesty.
