nostalgic insomnia

It's been hard, now that we're back home, to find the motivation to actually write the post I'd promised about the last days of our trip. I started writing something shortly after our return, but as we've slowly sunken back into the "real life" we'd left 4-plus months ago, and as I've been struck with the undeniable feeling that "for all my travels, I've gone nowhere," my sense of inspiration seems to have drained away. But in an effort to not completely give in to the inevitable post-trip malaise, I've finished the post that I'd abandoned (also added some funny pics to my entry about the Waitomo caves), and for what it's worth, here it is:

Saturday night, our first night back home, I didn't get to sleep until about 4:30am, woke up the next day around noon, felt surprisingly alert for the most of the day, but then that night, couldn't find my way to La La Land until 5:30 (and Maya, who'd passed right out Saturday night, didn't get to sleep until 6 or so) - strangely, our jetlag seems to be getting worse. It's as if our insides are trying to will their way back to foreign soil.

It didn't help matters that I had just finished watching High Fidelity on TV, which had left me introspective and nostalgic, and then, trying to fall asleep in bed, I was reading this weird-as-fuck book called Samedi the Deafness that our old friend Fish had given to Maya earlier that day when she'd met up with him and a few of her other college friends. If I didn't feel like I was tripping out already, this absurdist little tome was dragging me deeper into a drippy, waking-dream dementia of sorts. (If this sounds like a recommendation, it isn't - I've since given up on reading the book, which, unfortunately, didn't seem to be going anywhere.)

It's really no wonder that Maya and I are all out of whack. The final push home was, as I said in my last post, truly epic - 3 flights over 72-some hours, with a day and a half in Toyko stuck in the middle. The first flight, from Auckland to Bangkok, was 12 hours of hell (though not quite as bad as the 14-hour flight from NYC to Tokyo that kicked off the whole trip) - there were no less than 3 babies in our seating section, and they took turns wailing their pudgy, wobbling, barely human-looking heads off. I watched two movies - the totally unnecessary Invasion of the Body Snatchers re-re-remake, The Invasion, (starring Nicole Kidman, who's becoming increasingly alien-like herself) and the totally unnecessary sequel to an unnecessary sequel to 2 awesome movies, Live Free or Die Hard - both of which sucked. Our next flight, 5-plus hours from Bangkok to Tokyo, was, by comparison, almost relaxing - completely infant-free, it was possibly the quietest flight I've ever been on. I even got in a few winks of rest, but still, when we landed in Tokyo, I was very glad that we'd switched-up our itinerary to include a night's stay on solid Japanese ground - another 12 hours in the air, as had been originally planned, and I'm sure Maya and I would have both lost our shit, hijacked the plane with the plastic cutlery packaged with our air-meals, and brought everyone down with us into a deathly escape at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.

But if we thought we had paved ourselves a smooth way home by stopping in Tokyo, this delusion was quickly dashed once we arrived at the hotel (we thought) we had booked a few days before. When tried to check in, the staff couldn't seem to find our reservation. The young Japanese man at the frontdesk (who looked all of 15, an impression encouraged by his ridiculously oversized suit jacket) asked us in very broken English if we had a printout of our booking confirmation. We didn't (we had discussed printing one out after we made the reservation in New Zealand, but since we hadn't needed any such printouts over this entire trip, we decided against it), but Maya noticed that there were two computers with free internet access over in the corner of the lobby, and we told the young dude that we could show him our confirmation email. So we logged into my hotmail account, and the first thing we see is a new message from the site through which we had made the reservation; the email had been delivered during our last two flights, and basically, it said that the hotel we were standing in was all booked up - the "confirmation email" we had received in the first place, it turns out, hadn't actually confirmed a room, just that we had tried to book a room. Like we didn't fucking know that.

Maya and I looked at each other, and with a silent, telepathic nod, decided to bluff. We found the original confirmation email, opened it, and showed this to the hotel staff, pretending that the second email didn't even exist. After much bumbling around (they couldn't seem to figure out how to get the printer to work, and because their English wasn't so great they were trying to translate the confirmation e-mail into Japanese via an online translator), they printed out a copy of this, and brought it back to an office behind the frontdesk. Maya and I waited nervously, trying to think up a plan B, which ultimately went something like this: Put our big backpacks into storage in the lockers at the nearby train station, and go to Shibuya and "Love Hotel Hill," and stay in a Love Hotel. The complication here was that, for some unknown reason, none of the 3 or 4 ATMs we'd tried so far were accepting my bank card, and so we had no cash on us to actually pay for a locker - or for a subway ticket to Shibuya, for that matter. In short, we were looking pretty well fucked.

But miraculously, the staff fell for our bluff and when they finally reappeared, they bowed numerous times, apologized profusely, and said that while they did not have our reservation, they did have a room, and they would give us the rate at which we had made our online booking. All was well and good, except that the hotel only accepted cash, of which we had none. This problem was remedied pretty quickly though - we did have a little over $150 in U.S. dollars, so we found a bank, changed this to yen, then we planned to catch the subway to Shinjuku where we knew there was a CitiBank (my bank) from our previous visit to Tokyo, and hopefully we'd be able to sort out my ATM card issues there. On the way to the subway, however, we found a 7-Eleven - from our previous visit we knew that the chain has ATM machines that accept foreign cards, and that proved to be the case here, and we were able to take out some much-needed cash.

Once this last misadventure was out of our way, our day and half in Tokyo was fucking awesome. Tokyo had been wet, hot, and humid when we were there last. Now it was chilly and windswept; the trees, bare; the air, smelling of winter. It was comfortable and familiar in a way that filled us with pride - we knew Tokyo - and yet different enough to be exciting all over again. We went back to "Electric Town" in Akihabara, where we shopped for twisted toys and ogled maids. We went back to Harajuku, where Maya shopped for boots (unfortunately, without success). And just a few blocks from our hotel in Ueno, we stumbled on a little shrine where we noticed a group of maybe 10 men wearing matching kimono-type outfits and standing in formation in the courtyard, holding a long bamboo ladder on their shoulders. Curious, we joined the small cluster of bystanders that had gathered around - this included a middle-aged man nonchalantly holding the leash of possibly the most disgusting dog I have even seen: it was mostly pink, almost completely hairless, with scratches and scars over its body, and a football-sized tumor/goiter dangling from its stomach. The diseased canine was quickly put out of our minds, however, as the men we were watching slowly lifted the bamboo ladder up on one end, standing it up into the sky; they used staves with metal hooks to hold the ladder in place, and then, to Maya's and my amazement, one of the men fearlessly scrambled up the visibly wobbling ladder. Once at the top, he flipped, twisted, and twirled about, balancing himself precariously on the improvised structure, saluting the heavens with various kungfu-like hand gestures and improbable poses.

Eventually, he climbed back down the ladder, improbably still intact, and another man scrambled up, taking his place, and doing his own set of ritualistic acrobatics. This man was followed by yet another. Maya and I looked on, truly astounded, as the few other bystanders around us (all of whom were Japanese, I think) gasped, applauded each move, snapped photos, and shifted to get a better view. It's completely random shit like this that makes traveling in a truly foreign part of the world like Asia so remarkable - there is always a surprise just around the corner; sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad, but your mind is guaranteed to be blown.

And sometimes your taste buds, too. The one thing we were absolutely determined to do while in Tokyo again was to revisit the restaurant Sushizanmai - the memory of the fish we'd eaten there during our first time in Japan had had us salivating like Pavlov's dogs many a time over the last 3-plus months. And when we went there the night before our final flight back to NYC, the food did not disappoint. Here's just one of the many sushi orders we consumed (till we were sick) that night - clockwise from the top left: fatty tuna, broiled fatty tuna, medium fatty tuna, pickled ginger, egg, chives, and horse mackerel.

I don't know if I'll be able to eat U.S. sushi ever again...

home is where your ass is

It's 3am, and for those of you who were worried, we're home, back in Krooklyn. Maya is fast asleep, I'm wide awake and jetlagged as fuck. Not sure if I'm still on New Zealand time or Japan time or, more likely, Martian time. Either way, it definitely feels strange to be back after 4 months of backpacking, stranger than I had expected. Our neighborhood seems somehow like a skewed version of my memory of it, and our apartment looks slightly alien, like some artist's recreation of our apartment with almost imperceptible alterations that you can't quite put your finger on but that fuck with your subconscious mind. it doesn't help that are also some unmistakenable alterations as well, care of Maya's niece Anna and her boyfriend, who were housesitting/subletting the place while we were away. For instance, both the DVD player and VCR were mysteriously unplugged from the TV, and the ethernet cable unplugged from our cable modem with the telephone line plugged in where it should have been... There's a cigarette burn in our couch, and when we first came in, no sheets on the bed... Where are we?

The trip back to this final and right now seemingly most foreign of destinations was epic and exhausting - 3 flights spread over 3 days. I'll post about all that shit, most notably our day and half in Tokyo, soon, hopefully tomorrow if the mind clears. Right now I need to try to find sleep.

out of the darkness and into the light

This afternoon Maya and I begin the long trip home. We have a 12-hour flight from Auckland to Bangkok, then a 2-hour layover, and a 5-and-a-half hour flight from Bangkok to Tokyo. Our original itinerary next had a 5-hour layover in Tokyo and then a 12-plus hour flight back to NYC in store for us, making for a absurd total of 30-plus hours straight traveling time. Fortunately, we were able to reschedule our flight from Tokyo to NYC and sneak in one last day in Tokyo, where we plan to, well, eat sushi. That's the extent of the plan, really - eat sushi and shake off some of jetlag cobwebs from our heads. Maybe the strangest thing about the trip home is that we'll be traveling backward in time - our flight from Tokyo leaves on the evening on January 5th, and even through the ride is over 12-hours long, we'll be arriving home on the same date and at almost exactly the time that we left Japan. Visiting Tokyo feels something like visiting the future anyway, so maybe it makes sense...

Yesterday we drove back to Auckland from Waitomo, an area best known for its insane cave systems and its flourescent biomasses of glow worms. The Kiwis, as their driving suggests, are total maniacs, adrenaline junkies bar none, which makes New Zealand a great place to engage in all sorts of extreme activity that a layperson off the street just wouldn't be allowed to partake in Stateside. For instance, on the caving trip that Maya and I took while in Waitomo, after an almost ridiculously cursory rappeling tutorial, we found ourselves rappeling (or "abseiling," as the Kiwis call it) down two separate long, narrow cave tubes plunging down into the earth. The first channel must have been, at least, 20- or 30-feet deep; the second, no less than twice as long. I had the dubious honor of rappeling down first - even before our guides - which meant I was lowering myself all alone into utter darkness with only the lamp on my helmet to light my way. It was truly amazing - and I was too busy focusing on my rappeling technique and on the twisted formations and tiny passages I had to navigate through to think about the movie, The Descent, which might have made me slightly more hestitant to proceed if I had.

Once inside the cave, we tightrope-walked over a log bridge across a subterranean chasm, were led by our guides through various squeeze-spaces and claustrophobic chambers, and then rode a zip-line (or a "flying fox," as the Kiwis call it) through an unlit cavern hall full of stalactites and stalagmites!

The only thing that wasn't awesome about our spelunking adventure? The totally dorky blue-and-orange jumpsuit coveralls and white rubber boots that we had to wear.

Other highlights of our four days in Waitomo include:
- Walking by flashlight along a nature trail in the middle of the night and occasionally turning off our lights to see thousands of glow worms in the darkened foliage around us.
- Exploring a small but surprisingly deep and winding cave by ourselves and discovering a wall covered in ginormous Wetas, a gnarly prehistoric insect native to New Zealand.
- Taking a boat-ride cave tour and drifting along a subterranean river beneath dense constellations of glow worms.
- Discovering that the goat living next door to our Bed & Breakfast had broken free from its chain and stationed itself outside the door of our bungalow, where it was bumping its horns against the glass, holding us hostage inside.
- Eating our New Year's Eve dinner at the Huhu Cafe, the one good restaurant in tiny Waitomo Village (population: 45), where we were staying - it was our second time in two days eating there, and the place is really amazing, with a totally delectable tapas menu. We had lamb medallions with toasted cous cous and mango chutney, green-lipped mussels with bacon and baked cheese, goat cheese tart with an amazing salad of pears, walnuts, and something called "rocket," to name a few of the dishes sampled.
- Stopping at the Otorohanga Kiwi House & Native Bird Park on the way back to Auckland and seeing the Kiwi bird in the flesh. We felt like we couldn't leave New Zealand without actually seeing one of the creatures, since they are such a part of the country's culture (such as it is) - not only do the locals call themselves "Kiwis" but every native brand's logo seems to feature the bird in some way. And what a strange, silly (and surprisingly big) bird it is. When we first saw the female Kiwi (the House has two birds - a male and a female) running inside her pen with her awkward loping gait, Maya and I both started laughing outloud.

But for all our adventures, in many ways, driving around New Zealand reminded us of being in small-town America - except with crazier accents, crazier driving, and many, many more sheep. It also reminded us of why we live in New York City - which makes coming home just a little less difficult.