a tall personality

I plunge off the bus. It trundles on and I am immersed in stillness that rings loud like the whoosh and whir of water in your ears while holding a breath. Like water it starts to seep inside and I notice the sound of every leaf that touches another, the path of each passing insect, the whip and wisp of owl wings in the willows. In awe I wonder, who made this? As if someone must have done it. Stillness whispers back. This is not a gift to me.   It is me, and I am it.   The ways we are separate are of my own creation and volition.   My clothes, bug spray, bear spray- they are barriers I want. But I don't want them. But I do. A storm sweeps toward me, its soft appearance from afar is a disguise for fury, I have seen the masquerade before (in me).   I don't need to see it coming, I feel the air change, I smell it.   I want a barrier.   I fortify myself inside a rampart of raincoat and rain pants.   I wait in the downpo...

Finally, my stomach was on the mend, and I was off to Sumatra to visit the small town of Bukit Lawang, a launch point into Gunung Leuser National Park, aka THE RAINFOREST! Rainforest is a buzzword in US culture, especially in elementary school for some reason.  "Save the rainforest!  Medicine comes from the rainforest!  Cute animals live in the rainforest!  'The man' is cutting down football fields of rainforest every day and only YOU can stop it by donating your pennies!  If we lose the rainforest we all will suffocate and die!"  So, if you went to 2nd grade in the United States, you know there is a lot of hype about the rainforest. Which means I had been anticipating this visit for at least 20 years. To top it off Gunung Leuser happens to be one of the very few places in the world you can see wild orangutans.  I researched many different spots to go and decided on this one.  It almost broke my heart that being sick might have prevented the tri...

I woke up early the next morning when it hit.  The dreaded fate of so many travelers.  Food poisoning.  We don't know what it was from.  We had a fancy Italian meal for dinner, and for lunch we had food that had been stored in the boat for who knows how long, at who knows what temperature and cooked who knows how well.  We suspect the boat food was the culprit but we'll never know.  Chelsea also wasn't feeling well but she wasn't quite as sick as me. All I could do was go from lying in bed to the bathroom and back.  No eating.  No sleeping.  No medicine would stay down...or up...or in...you get the picture.  Thankfully I have some great friends with experience in medicine and/or traveling abroad who talked me through what to do (thanks to Liz and Jackie!).  Chelsea was so good and kept me supplied with water and plain bread when I needed it to take medicine. We were flying out of Labuan Bajo that afternoon...which was going...

We woke up as the boat started moving towards our next destination, Padar Island.  The sunrise was beautiful.  I relished it because it was also the only part of the day I wasn't on the verge of death by hot climate.  Overall, I would say the views were beyond anything I have seen anywhere, including Prince William Sound and the Nepali Coast of Hawaii. The last time I was happy for the next few days...kidding...kind of Padar Island was the next stop.  It was straight out of a magazine, as long as you didn't look too close.  Notice the small text of the sign, "would be more beauty without trash." It's hard to see, but almost everything you see on the beach is trash and it's RIGHT in front of the sign.  I don't know if it was due to how the currents flow, or if boats waiting for tourists dump trash in this bay.  Either way, it was pretty sad to see in one of the most beautiful places I have ever been. OK.  Can we talk ...

The day started out so good. Smoothie bowl with fruit from a little local bakery This view for breakfast. We went down to the dock to board our boat, which was supposed to be a really nice tourist boat.  Clean, cabins with AC, nice places to louge in the shade, the works.  But instead we boarded  a pirate ship.   Probably. The guy who ran the tour company put us on the boat and sent us on our way before we really had the presence of mind to ask questions. After a rocky and worrisome departure where the engine kind of worked and the youngest crew member was swimming in the water to pull the boat...we looked around.  No AC. Broken fans.  Bugs all over the mattresses.  Dirty boat.  Nowhere to sit, just a big box in the middle of the boat, and an upper deck for scorching yourself with the equatorial sun if you so chose.  Crew that did not speak English. OK wait what oops.  Save us. I have worked on boa...

After resting in Jakarta, learning how to use money, not drink water, call a taxi, say thank you in Indonesian Chelsea and I confidently headed for the town of Labuan Bajo on the island of Flores.  It's a little fishing village that has semi-recently exploded with tourism because it's a major port city for anyone wanting to visit the islands home to the Komodo Dragons.  (Why people want to go to Bali rather than visit Komodo Dragons is beyond me!).  Turns out when small towns in third world countries explode with tourism it does not always come out looking like a resort...They have a little airport, a harbor, and main-street lined with businesses while the physical infrastructure seems to be crumbling under the unplanned-for heavy traffic.  It's very interesting and in many respects a lovely place. Chels and I had a plan to land in Labuan Bajo early in the morning, and get on a boat that same day that would take us to some beautiful islands, feed us, drop ...

On the plane from Hong King to Jakarta I sat next to an Indonesian woman who spoke a little English and helped me fill out the customs form since the English translation didn't make a lot of sense.  I thought I had a certain thing that is very normal and legal to have in the US that apparently is NOT OK to have in Indonesia, and can be punished by the death penalty (turns out I didn't have it, but I didn't know that until later).  I showed the woman the word for what I had in Indonesian and she looked at me horrified and said, "You're going to have biiigggg problems!"  Well, I spent the rest of the flight petrified, thinking about the movie "A Brokedown Palace" and spending the rest of my life in prison in a third world country. Turns out it's not terribly hard to get through Indonesian customs, and no one looked at or in my bags, or at my customs form.  And I figured out later that I didn't have anything that was a problem.  But I was s...

A cheap ticket to Indonesia means loooonnnnngggg layovers which is why I had about 8 hours to kill in Seattle.  I took the train to Chinatown in search of ramen.  I found a place, but the moment I stepped inside and the door with the little bells on it shut behind me, every ounce of my intuition told me I was taking up too much space.  (I was wearing a backpack strapped to another backpack with a raincover over it, so I was somewhat conspicuously bigger than my regular size.) There was an insistent sign declaring patrons should wait to be seated.  I stood in the doorway eyeing the only empty table, hoping the host would soon notice me and end my occupation of the most inconvenient space imaginable. Water dripped off the rain-cover of my backpack which I shifted around to avoid sprinkling on other diners in the crowded hole-in-the-wall place.  However, the shifting resulted in even more water spraying off my pack and jacket.  I endured the death stares fro...