I will recap the past fifteen months in overview format in my next post. This should not be hard to do; I have something like thirty five hours of sitting down to do before I pop up in Indonesia, not least of which will be seven and a half spent propped against a wall next to a sea of snoozing grandmothers and small children in Doha int'l airport, Qatar. No complaints here though--Qatar is a ridiculously comfortable airline, and aside from winning the lottery and doing the trip on Singapore Airlines (or in any business class ever), it's about as good as it gets for an mega-flight.
The only thing I AM bummed about is the loss of an opportunity to actually stop over IN Doah, which would have, hilariously, ended up as my first trip to the middle east. The loss of the layover is collateral damage from my decision to extend my trip home. I arrived in the States for the holidays on December 14th, and had a wonderful Christmas with my family at home, new years with my girlfriend in DC, and had originally intended to jet back out on or around January 12th. However, there was more I wanted to do here before I picked up the backpack again (to be detailed in a further post), so I bumped my flight back by another month. Unfortunately, I lost what was going to be a thirteen hour layover in Doha, intended for an all-night citywide ramble, poking around the restaurant district (supposed to be a delicious spot) and checking things out before crashing back on the floor of the airport pre-flight. Instead, I land at 7 something PM and am back in the air, bound for Jakarta, by 2:30 AM. We'll see, though. There may be time for a little bit more exploration, if I push it.
So, that's all for now! Finishing up the process of getting ready, trying to make sure I've got what I need and have replaced all the things that have worn out or otherwise died since my last trip home:
Brown leather shoes: not designed for motorcycle riding in floods. Pants: khakhis/dockers are also not compatible with regular motorcycle use, nor with Indonesian sweet soy sauce. Shirts: SAS (Sweaty American Syndrome). They will sadly never be the same. Hard drive: the "my passport" is not built for dust, water or travel grime. Laptop: innards replaced for free by Dell. +1 for warranty! I suppose Timorese power surges are not kind to a computer. The Dell repair guy: "I have...never seen this happen before. See? It [the heat sink/cooling fan]'s all blackened and scored...how does that even happened?!" Ipod: replaced by Apple. +2 for warranty! Hard drive failed in the line of duty. Suitcase: completely shot, metal sticking out, zipper separating from bag, wheels sound like the New York subway. Not a stealth bag). This does not include the items which apparently grew fed up with my adventures and simply jumped ship along the way. This includes my headlamp; the thing was a real veteran item, been with me since I started college and stuck it out through four summers of backpacking in the wilderness. Toughed it out through six months of blackouts in Banda Aceh. Managed to sit patiently in my bag, unused, through two months of mostly-stable power in Jogjakarta and a bunch of months in Jakarta. I think, though, that's where it drew the line, and somewhere between getting on a bus in Bangkok to head overland to Cambodia and flying out from Jakarta to start an office in East Timor, the little guy bailed out of my bag, went AWOL and never came back. I'd like to think some old Thai busdriver is now using it to climb up into his cot in the baggage compartment of his bus, or maybe a Cambodian moto-chariot driver gets some use out of it fixing a broken axle or two in the middle of the night. And yes, parts of Cambodia are full of moto-chariots. Motorcycles with two-wheel trailers bolted onto the back. The contraption is called a Remorque.
(The Batman remorque, hanging out in Siem Reap, Cambodia)
I also managed to part ways with both my regular glasses and my sunglasses while living in East Timor. The glasses? I have no idea. They made their way out into the wider world sometime around the Dili Marathon. Note: I did not run in the Dili Marathon. Nor did I participate, in any official way. However, I did wake up very early that morning and stumble out into the sunshine to photograph my friends and other random participants as they stumbled past my road up the hill towards Taibessi market. Got some good shots too! More to come in another retro-post.
The sunglasses were a real tragedy. A pair of prescription ray-bans that came free when I got my regular glasses last December. They served me well on bikes, motorbikes and motorcycles for nearly a full year, and many a morning they spared my eyes riding into the sun on the morning commute down the coast in Dili. They made their bid for freedom on the mountain road from Balibo to Maliana, ten miles from the Indonesian border in Timor-Leste. We came down the mountain in a driving monsoon rain, riding slow (motorcycles), the last leg of an all-day ride to the western edge of the country then south to the city of Maliana. This was less than two weeks before I left the country. The rain began to let up, the sun started to go down, and the sunglasses were so caked with water and road grime that I could barely see. I made the foolish choice to take them off, mid-ride, and hang them off the neck of my poncho until such time as I could safely stop and stow them in the bag strapped to my bike. Best intelligence indicates the glasses were aware of this lapse in judgement and, once hung in place and knowing I was distracted by wet, crumbling road, seized their chance and jumped. I only hope the Timorese child playing by the side of the road who finds them will discover that my prescription inexplicably matches their eyes, and provides them with an almost magical level of polarized clarity.
And that's it, for now. More to come as I take other breaks from putting my things back into bags
