I spent one night in my usual guest apartment at the hospital, got caught up with school stuff the next day, then took the overnight train north to Chiang Mai. I’d booked ‘Second-Class Fan’, but the train car seemed a bit more worn out than my previous Thai train. And just my luck, there was a gaggle of drunken Australian kids at the far end of the car. Fortunately, I had my I-pod and could drown them out for a couple of hours.
I met a German guy named Victor on the platform as we disembarking from the train early the next morning. We caught a Tuk-Tuk into the town and walked around a bit pricing various guesthouses. We took rooms in a clean place set down a quiet narrow street. My room had hardwood floors and a mattress on the floor, and a nice bathroom. It was a bit upscale from what Victor chose but I felt like splurging. He was spending eight dollars a night and I was spending something like eleven or twelve. We walked around the neighborhood a bit before Victor decided to go take a nap. I was lucky to come across the Paris Bistro, a cafe fronting the street where I had a good latte and something to eat. Over the next couple days, I visited with the British manager and his Thai wife, enjoyed a few lattes and salads, and the free Wifi.
The following day, I took songteow to The Chiangmai Adventist Academy, located about an hour out of town in a rural area of fields and low hills. The academy is a school (primary through high school) set on a 100-acre complex with a two-story academic building, a new church, and a dozen other buildings including boy’s and girl’s dormitories. I met and interviewed an American named David Bell, who gave me considerable information about the school—and later I met his wife Annabelle, a kind woman who provided me a thermos of hot water so that I could drink the hot chocolate and tomato soup that Faye had packed for me back in Bangkok. One morning, I had breakfast with them in their home, and the following day I went with an American guy and his kids to see some waterfalls. These falls were rather fun because they were flowing over calcified rock—allowing us to easily climb up or down the rocks over which the water flowed.
Mae Sariang and the Adams Family: I checked out of my Chang Mai Hotel and caught a tuk-tuk outside to take me to the bus station. In fact, the same guy who had brought me to the bus station a day earlier to buy the ticket. He’d laughed and joked all the way there but I couldn’t understand what he was doing—due to his poorly accented English and the blowing of the wind. So this morning, waiting for the minivan’s departure, I took a few thousand baht from the ATM at 7-11.
The ride to Mae Sariang was comfortable enough in the minivan, and we arrived into this small town after three hours. I noted one main street lined with shops, and at a bus station that was little more than a gravel parking lot and a few bamboo cafes, I met the Adams. They were sitting in their ‘ambulance’, a gold-tinted and somewhat well-used pickup truck with a back covering. Paul Adams, in his forties, is tall with graying hair. A man from rural Montana, he and his wife Lena have been in Thailand about a year. Together with their four kids, they live a rustic life in the Thai hinterlands that most back home could never imagine—taking care of over 100 children from an ethic minority, many of whom have escaped from Burma.
After the introductions, Lena said that we’d be going for lunch first. “We almost never get to town,” she said. “So this is a treat for us.”
“How far away do you live?” I asked.
“Oh, it’s about three hours from here, on the Burmese border. Actually a no-man’s land between Burma and Thailand.” I couldn’t believe that this couple had been willing to go three hours (each way) in order to pick up a total stranger that had told them he was collecting inspirational stories. The café where we drove for lunch consisted of several small booths in a garden; the owner and waiter was an animated fellow in his thirties, full of good humor and spouting decent English. After our meal of various rice dishes, we hopped in the truck, Paul and I sitting in front and Lena with nine-year-old Josiah and his older sister. During the long return trip, we passed fields and hills and jungle and villages, all against a backdrop of jungle-covered mountains—and the mountains were mostly in Burma. Lena, originally from Sweden, told me about their life: “It’s primitive,” she said. “A plain wooden house, a couple of rooms, no western toilet. And the conditions for the Karen people are much worse. There are refugees that after crossing from Burma just settle illegally along the river and survive anyway they can. They’ll hunt, fish, eat fish, bugs, rats.”
Here’s the thing: most Americans (most anybody) have never heard of the Karen (pronounced Ka-reen) people, who live in parts of northwestern Thailand and in Burma. They are victims of a continuing civil war in Burma but there is also a Karen ragtag army. The politics of who is fighting whom is complex, but tens of thousands are now in Thailand. Some survive on the land, others remain in refugee camps. The Adams family take care of over 100 children, some of whom are orphans, and all of whom live in various plain wooden ‘rooms’ built on stilts. Lena and her twenty-one-year-old daughter Melissa act as ‘nurses’ for the kids and villagers from the nearest villages. “Without training,” Lena said. “Although my second daughter, Maria, just returned from the States where she had months of emergency medical training.” There’s also a nurse living on the grounds with her two teen-aged sons.
Some three hours later, Paul pulled the pick-up into a rough dirt driveway and parked in front of the house. Tall trees, including a row of teak trees, and jungle growth, surrounded the home, from which extended a large wooden porch about seven feet off the ground. Barely a kilometer or two away stood a range of green-covered mountains. Tall graceful palms were abundant, down here and on the mountains. This was the quintessential jungle wilderness, in my mind.
I could see right away that ‘primitive’ was the correct adjective, and yet Paul and Lena and their hard-working kids all have carved out a home here. Past the door were two metal cabinets, one filled with medicines, the other with books: titles included This Day with God, Quintessential Herbs , Village Medical Manual, and Cooking. The main room were a couple of mats, and aside from a couple of black plastic trunks, a short two-foot high little table in one corner, and a dinky fridge, the place was wide open and empty. “Very often we keep the sick kids in here,” Paul told me. “Last night there were four patients spending the night.” The vertical windows, I noted happily, all had glass-paned shutters that swung out and were screened. Things wouldn’t be crawling or flying in as they had at the Maddocks’ place in Phenom Phen.
Paul indicated a door leading to a second large room. “We sleep in there.” Three or four floor mats lay beneath their individual mosquito netting. There was also a kitchen and bathroom at the back of the house—the bathroom was truly Thai. The toilet was one of the squat affairs with a concrete basin beside it filled with water. One poured water into the toilet after use in order to ‘flush’. In the next stall, a larger such basin filled with water was for hand washing, etc. On a table was a two-burner propane stove, a few cooking implements, a table for chopping veggies and a plastic bucket or two.
We’d arrived shortly before dark fell, and Paul said that we’d go down to the evening worship, held in the girl’s dorm. He led the way as the family hiked down a dirt pathway through some low trees, on either side of which were huts here and there. Not even huts, just bamboo and wood floors supported by poles and a simple roof. The girl’s dorm was such a structure about eight feet off the ground. I followed Paul up some steps and onto a platform where dozens of kids of all ages sat on the floor watching a man who read from a Bible. He spoke in Karen so I have no idea what he spoke of.
As soon as the Adams and I had sat down, the kids all rose to sing a song of praise. Considering that all these kids are either temporarily or permanently away from their parents, and that their lives had been filled with hardship, their faces showed contentedness, their voices as they sang with gusto. After the song, we sat again. One little girl was so cute that I chastised myself for not bringing along my camera (no chocolate for me for a month!). She couldn’t have been more than five or six, and wore a pink and red dress and a strange high hat. Her bible was open on the floor in front of her and she gazed down at it. A few of the smaller lads sitting next to me, not more than four or five, smiled shyly at me, cute as hell. Josiah sat with them.
In front of the house, a bit later, I met Gail, a tiny lady in her fifties, I’d guess, who hailed from Montana. She’d been here for a few months, along with her sons Bradley and Micah, and had been an answer to prayer; she was the lady who dealt with the serious medical issues. Her son Bradley, 16, drove their makeshift pickup “ambulance” almost daily to the nearest hospital or clinic, usually with Gail in attendance. Micah, 14, had a lot on his plate for a kid: he was teaching math at the school (on the second level of the bamboo platform); he also owned a scooter that he used to make medical delivery runs. Gail, a chipper woman with a clear desire to serve the Lord, said, “I usually wind up going early most mornings to the hospital with patients.” I asked her how long she might stay in Thailand. “Oh, I’m moving here.”
My sleeping arrangements were simple: a mat on the living room floor with a tent of mosquito netting over me. “We’re in a severe malaria area,” Lena explained. “The most prevalent is the kind that affects the brain. It’s extremely painful.” Just what I wanted to hear. “And it gets cold at night, now,” she added. I got the loan of a jacket, which I put on. It wasn’t cold yet, but I was determined to protect my sweet blood from the bite of a mosquito.
The morning came way too early! Life starts returning to all manner of man and beast around 5am; Paul had told me that on a good morning when they could sleep in (in other words, when patients didn’t bang on the door), the family might rise and shine as late as 6am. As they retired to their family sleeping room, I stuffed in my earplugs, downed a couple of melatonin, prayed I wouldn’t need to pee in the middle of the night (I’d been told that there might be a frog or a scorpion in the bathroom), I tried to drift off to sleep. Lying on a hard floor does not make this an easy task. If I lay on my back, after a few seconds my lower back hurt; if on my side, my shoulder hurt. My pillow was my jacket, which I had taken off and rolled up. It wasn’t chilly yet, but I had taken one of the woolen blankets to cover up with. “They’re new,” Paul had said. “The old ones you wouldn’t want. Sick kids and other patients have all kind of left their marks on them.”
So at 5:30am, I awoke to Gail rummaging in the medical cabinet, speaking softly to some Karen individual that I could barely see in the shadows; the sun hadn’t risen yet. Already, the family was stirring in their room, and one of the girls came out with a flashlight and entered the kitchen. I tried to catch a few more winks of sleep, but soon enough was up and looking out at the scene from the front deck. The fields near the house were covered with mist and the mountains were shrouded. After awhile, we sat about the living room with plates of hot rice covered with yellow bean broth and slices of fresh pineapple. I craved tea or coffee but was thankful to the Adams family for their generosity in letting me stay here. I’d interviewed them a bit the night before and gotten good information; tonight, there would be more.
Micah showed up with his scooter helmet and ate a plate of breakfast.
Lena asked him, “Are you going to pick up the saliva specimens from the village?” Not something one hears everyday at breakfast, of course. He said he’d have time to do that before he began teaching at 9:45. Paul suggested I go along to get some pictures of the village. “It’s just a couple dozen huts near a stream in the middle of the forest; they’re all refugees.” I said I’d love to and outside put on the helmet that Micah offered me. Maria, the girl who had studied EMT in the States, was going to follow on a second scooter. The road was well paved with lots of twists and turns and forest on either side. As we sped down the road, the morning wind was cold. We’d gone no more than three kilometers or so when Micah shouted out, “I don’t know where Maria is. She should be right behind us.” We doubled back, and rounding a bend, saw Maria sitting in a ditch on the side of the road, the bike several feet away where it had crashed into the brush. Micah pulled to a halt and we got off. “You okay?” I asked. She was rubbing her head but wasn’t crying or anything.
“Yeah, I think so,” she replied. “Just let me sit for a moment.” I walked over to where Micah was standing. He asked, “Did you get hurt?”
“No, I don’t think so, but I lost my shoes.” Micah and I pulled up branches, kicked back leaves, and finally Micah picked up an orange flip flop, broken and unusable. He straightened the bike, hopped on and started it. The engine turned over and it purred, so he drove it up the slight incline to the road and shut it off. “Least it runs,” he said. “Not like when Andrew crashed.” Andrew was the volunteer I’d visited with at the Maddocks’ place in Phenom Phen. He’d visited here several weeks earlier. Maria stood, a bit wobbly at first, and showed us a bleeding toe. “I think it’s broken,” She said, very calmly if you ask me. We advised her to go back home. Without shoes, Micah pointed out, she wouldn’t be able to walk on the rough paths going to the village. So while Micah used his pocketknife to cut off part of a plastic piece that had broken on her helmet, Maria climbed on the bike and started it. She zoomed off and Micah and I started off again for the village. I was thinking how resourceful a young man Micah was. How many fourteen-year-olds back in the States were accomplishing so much in their early adolescence? Not many, for sure. And all in a foreign country under difficult conditions.
The Karen village was barely a village. The huts looked like something out of a South Pacific movie—though more bamboo than palm fronds. Here and there, squatting around a fire or sitting on a bamboo platform, were people in little more than rags. A number of pigs and piglets (cute things) ran here and there, snorting and playing. Chickens joined in the fun as well. And kids, little ragamuffins, grinned and smiled and waved at me. Micah and I crossed over a primitive hand-built bamboo bridge that forged the stream and walked to the hut where he was supposed to pick up saliva samples. Coming out of the hut, he said, “They didn’t get delivered. It’ll be afternoon, so we might as well go back.” Re-crossing the bridge, I noted that there weren’t any roads. Or paths, really. It’s like the village was set down on field of dirt from which a few plants grew.
The rest of the day was busy for Paul and Lena and the kids. Paul was supervising the homeschooled lessons of both Anna and Josiah, their youngest, as well as keeping things clean and doing the odd job here and there. There were patients for Lena and her daughters to contend with, and the principal of the school came up to help translate on the front deck. I did some schoolwork and talked to Anna a bit, who also got permission from dad to show me around the school again. I observed a group of a dozen students at their English lesson—the kids sitting on the lower platform beneath the raised bamboo structure. They scrawled lessons on sheets of paper; the teacher of the class, Emily, sat cross-legged beside her students, writing words on a small whiteboard. Up on the main floor, Micah sat in front of a group of urchins learning math.
In the evening, the house became a mini-clinic. It quickly became evident that I wouldn’t be spending the night alone in the living room. The little girl who was brought in suffering from brain malaria needed to remain here for the night; another man, whom Nurse Gail had spent the day with at the distant hospital, was practically in a coma I gathered, and was spending the night out on the deck. Three other children with scabies came in to wash in the bathroom but then left. By 9pm, Paul had erected three big mosquito netting covers with mats on the floor. In one were two sick little girls; in the middle ‘tent’ was a sick lad with Nurse Gail spending the night beside him to make sure his condition didn’t deteriorate. And the last one was mine—thankfully closest to the bathroom. There’s a feeling of ‘camping’ in the air, but for the Adams and Gail, this is routine; it happens a lot.
My admiration had increased tenfold these last 24 hours. What these people were accomplishing was inspiring. And I hadn’t even heard the story yet about the demon possession.
Lena Adams, an educated woman who strikes me as imminently practical, told me “Demon possession is real.” But she said that I ought to hear the story from Gail, who was witness to the whole thing, along with her son Bradley. So as the children were sleeping beneath their protective mosquito awnings, Gail told me, with Micah breaking in to add bits of the narrative that Gail had forgotten. The story revolved around one particular twelve-year-old girl, the daughter of the camp cook, who had been possessed. There were several bizarre elements to the story: an attacking Burmese army, a cook who had offered spirit sacrifices, the theft of Micah’s wallet, and demons dancing in waterfalls. All of this, of course, will be in a book I’m writing, so I’ll just skip on over to my return to Bangkok for the time being. But keep an eye out for the book (or article)!
In pre-dawn chill, we woke, prayed and piled into the ‘ambulance’, Paul driving, and me riding shotgun. Lena, Anna and Josiah sat in the back for our two-hour drive to the town of Mae Sot, where I would catch my bus to Bangkok. On the way, as dawn began to creep up over the jungle-clad hills, Lena told me more stories about their life. At one point, too, we passed the United Nations refugee camps that house thousands of Karen refugees; There were bamboo and wooden ‘huts’ by the hundreds and hundreds, mile after mile. I would have loved to go in and see but that required a UN pass.
We arrived at the bus station and said our good-byes. I’d miss the Adams. I told them that I thought their work was inspiring, and not for the first time imagined my own life and those of nearly everyone I knew—lives where the quest for material blessings seems to be the order of the day. Well, I hoped I could make some alterations to my lifestyle once I got home.
The all-day bus was fine if not tiring; my seat companion was, once again, a young monk with a shaved head. The guy spent all his time staring straight ahead with hands clasped in his lap. Probably some sort of discipline-meditation act. I arrived in Bangkok at around 6pm, bought my ticket for Ubon, and wandered over to the KFC to feast on chicken and mashed potatoes, which I did while checking email. Thank heavens for free wifi.
The all-nighter to Ubon chugged along at 30-40 mph at times. I enjoyed my sleeping berth with curtains pulled shut while I listened to my I-pod. Arriving early, like 6:30am, I caught a tuk-tuk to the hotel where Carla had made a reservation for me. I was staying this visit at Natseri Mansions, the four-star hotel owned by Napat.
Basically, I had a nice five days to visit with Carla, Napat’s family, and Andrew, the owner of Peppers Café, where I frequented during my second trip to Ubon. Again, I rented a bike and enjoyed pedaling the streets of my old home-away-from-home. The only oddity was a meeting one evening at the church between myself and Carla on one side, and the dog-owning Filipinos on the other side. The pastor moderated. The plan was to address the issue of the pet dogs—a couple of which had attacked students—and why four Filipino families living on church property continued to let them run loose after having been instructed by the conference to get rid of them. Carla had seen one little boy—one of the school’s students—being attacked, barked and snarled at mostly, by a black beast, and one of the creatures even stole a sack lunch that one little girl had brought to the school to snack on before her English lesson. I myself had been barked at and chased while passing on my bike, and it amazed me that these four families had utterly disregarded the conference’s demands. Not only that, but because Carla had emailed her superior about the matter, the Filipinos held her in contempt, shunning her and acting in a most unchristian matter.
The meeting was a farce. The young Thai pastor was reluctant to even bring the matter up, and only when I forced the issue, did he agree to the meeting. He’s a nice guy, but so typically Thai, hated confrontation. One Filipino couple, a woman named Betty and her husband Toto owned 2 dogs. Wynn and 'Boy', another couple, own 1 black dog who tends to nip at heels. Also, there was Esther and Fred, who had 5 dogs now. Lastly, there was Chris and Joy, who own no dogs but were at the meeting. Joy was a wonderful woman, very kind. I’d seen her at two Sabbath services leading out, translating Thai into English. Her husband, alas, was the most sarcastic of the group at our meeting and utterly unfriendly. He’d also been fired from his position of school director a year or so earlier. Well, the meeting produced mostly insults to Carla (one woman even had the nerve to suggest Carla wasn’t a good missionary); Betty and Esther made a lukewarm promise to tie up the dogs, but the pastor pretty much said that sometimes they do things their own way ‘in the field.’. I pointed out that dogs attacking human beings was not a simple matter of autonomy. Well, we stood for prayer, in a circle, and one Filipino man who had been observing did a pretty decent prayer of reconciliation. The pastor suggested we all join hands. When I glanced over at Carla, she was crying so I gave her hand a squeeze. How can human beings, particularly Christians, treat each other so horrendously? It never failed to amaze me that ‘religious’ folks—be they Christian or Muslim—could possess an unfathomable depth of cruelty. After the meeting, outside in front of the church, I asked Betty whether she could be friends with Carla, her retort was, “No, it can’t be again.” Well, so much for forgiveness.
I biked to Peppers Cafe to have breakfast and see Andrew one last time. The Australian rustled up some delicious French Toast in no time, and I relished in the breakfast and my last edition of the International Herald Tribune. We talked about Ubon's barking, snarling dogs, traveling, and how he found it hard to keep a cook employed. I was sad to exit the cafe for the last time. Peppers Cafe has probably the best breakfasts in all of Ubon, and certainly Andrew's positive and friendly attitude only makes the place that more desirable.
On my last evening in Ubon, Napat’s family invited Carla, Angel and myself to lunch after their English lesson at the Kodak Shop. Angel didn’t come along, unhappy with me for getting involved (but as I told her, isn’t it any human being’s business to get involved when injustice is apparent). Napat, Sita, her brother Pi-nut and his wife were all there; we had a great lunch and exchanged emailed addresses. When Carla asked me how I would be getting from the hotel to the train station, Sita said, “Oh, we will be taking him.” A rush of gratitude overcame me, and I reflected the difference between this generous family of Buddhists and the type of Christianity I’d seen at the little church. Anyway, I spent the rest of the day biking around, a little sad that my long journey would soon be at an end, but I was also looking forward to the train ride from San Francisco to Omaha.
That evening, Pi Nut, Sita and Napat met me as planned in the hotel coffee shop and we then walked through the garage to their car. Somehow, my dusty old backpack didn’t have any right to be placed in the trunk of a shiny BMW, but I stuffed it in and off we went. At the station, they walked to the platform with me as night fell. The train was available for boarding, so after a couple of pictures and a round of hugs and handshakes, I waved as they left.
The too-well air-conditioned train delivered me back to Bangkok by early the next morning, and I took a taxi to the hospital and checked in, napping for a half hour or so. Dr. Nick and Faye had left the day before for California and a well-deserved furlough. I claimed my insulin from Panit, the Call Center manager who had been kind enough to store it for me in her flat, had a visit, and then went off to do a bit of sightseeing. Over the last two days of my Asian experience, I played the tourist and shelled out the ten bucks to see the Royal Palace—a complex of ornate and gorgeous temples that impressed even me after all these weeks of temples. In the night, I walked through Independence Square, where the celebrations for the King’s birthday were in full force. Throngs packed the square, the temples were alit in all their glory, and the smiles of the people told me that they were pretty happy with life. I myself happily wandered dark streets where spillover groups from the square walked, talked and laughed.
It’s ironic that I don’t remember much about my last day in Asia. I’d been to Independence Square and other places in Bangkok often, so I did nothing except relax, walk a bit, and pack to go to the airport in the mid-afternoon. The flight back, on China Airlines, was fine—and long at something like fifteen hours. The Pacific remained far below me and invisible. On long flights---particularly across the Pacific, one becomes sort of catatonic, numb. You watch a movie or two, down the chow they give you, stretch your legs in the rear of the cabin, and hope the ordeal is soon over. When finally the pilot announced that we were descending on our approach to San Francisco International Airport, my heart wasn’t the only one to lift. I wished he hadn’t mentioned the temperature: forty-eight degrees Fahrenheit. I had been sweating the day before.
San Francisco’s skies were gray and a bit drizzly for part of the afternoon. I wandered around the Haight with “Jim”, a young Japanese guy I’d met at the hostel. This was his first day of a month-long trip to the USA. We explored a bookstore, mostly to keep out of the cold air, and took a couple of bus rides. We ate supper at an authentic Chinese restaurant in China Town. Climbing a narrow set of wooden steps, we came into a narrow and none-too-clean dining area all of seven or eight feet in length. A half dozen goofy, silly teen females sat about waiting for their food to arrive. The place looked utterly Chinese, that is to say cluttered and filthy, and I was disappointed with my sweet-and-sour chicken, the taste of which was more sour than anything. The chicken wasn’t the gristle and fat of Hong Kong or Beijing, but had it been served in an Omaha restaurant, there would have been a lawsuit, I imagine.
I’d been to San Francisco several times in the last few years, so seeing the sights wasn’t so important. I enjoyed meeting a few interesting characters: the African-American city bus driver with whom I chatted and chuckled as we passed down Market street. The old man who boarded the bus and glanced around for a free seat (there wasn’t one), and to whom I offered my seat. “Thank you, sir,’ he said, and we struck up a conversation that covered quite a lot of ground—mostly political in nature. Out of the blue, he said, “…and what the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians, absolutely horrible. All that talk of ‘never again’, why don’t they remember what Hitler did?” He’d shake his head. “And I’m Jewish! I’m in exile from my family.”
“Quite a few Israelis are against their own government,” I added.
“More than quite a few!” he added. “The majority. But Americans don’t know it.” We came to his stop and as he debarked, he said, “It’s been a pleasure talking to you, sir,” he said. And we shook hands.
And then there was Matthew, in his late fifties but looking a bit weathered and worn. We met at breakfast in the hostel dining room. An Indian guy in his twenties had just arrived in the city looking for work (likely planning on working illegally) and Matthew had taken him under his wing. Explaining to me, he said, “I don’t know what it is but I’m always able to help people. I do that, I volunteer at the soup kitchen back in Denver.” I asked him what line of work he was in and he chuckled. “Unemployed at the moment. I’ve got some stocks but they’re not doing too well.” He was an interesting character. I learned that he’d dabbled in the business world, the IT world, played with stocks—mostly unsuccessfully. But he’d tell me about getting clothes at the Goodwill, and here during his five days in San Francisco, he was relying on the free hostel breakfast and then trips to Safeway. He wasn’t riding any public transport, just walking. And yet in the midst of what was obviously a lower point for him economically, Matthew was willing to help out this Indian fellow he’d just met. The first item was to locate him a more permanent place to stay. “I’ll find him a place today,” he said. “I just have this magic touch with helping the poor.” Obviously, though, that magic touch didn’t extend to his own financial success.
The Amtrak trip across the country was a joy; my first winter crossing of the American West meant I’d have plenty of snow to view. In fact, snow blanketed most of the Sierras, the desert flats of Nevada, and by the time we got to Salt Lake in the middle of the first night, big flakes of snow were coming down. During the second day, the snow stopped and the scenery was breathtaking in eastern Utah and Western Colorado: the low ranges that precede the Rockies were all images of green-brown pines, tens of thousands of bushes, snow, frozen ponds, the Colorado river with ice blocks floating slowly. The whole wilderness was a winter wonderland, and I shared it with an interesting collection of folks:
•Richard: a forty-something Californian whose ex and kids lived in Boulder. He wore his gray hair slightly slicked back and was unfortunately suffering the pain of a bruised knee, the result of a meeting between his leg and the boarding door of the train. Fortunately for him, a witness included the wife of a prominent attorney in Boulder. I gave him my vial of Tylenol. During one of our several conversations, we came up with a list of Dick Cheney’s crimes against humanity.
•Rabbit: yes, Rabbit is the guy’s name. In his late twenties, he and his girlfriend Cijay sat with Richard and I in the dining car during dinner. Note: Amtrak seats passengers together. I was convinced after one minute that Rabbit was gay as can be, but when he talked about his ex-wife, 13-year-old son, and cuddled up to Cijay, an attractive young woman, I was stumped. He’s smart about IT, though. The small company for whom he works just invented a complex system of server networking that HP just purchased.
•Taj and Mary: Taj was an Indian from New Delhi, also in IT. He and Mary, his Canadian wife, were making a big train trip across the entire USA before flying back to India. Mary kind of weighed upwards of a couple hundred pounds, I estimated, but had a laughing kind soul.
•Joe: the Amtrak employee in charge of the snack area in the lounge car. He gave free coffee refills to me as we chatted about travel, Dubai, and which were the best Amtrak routes.
•Eric: In his fifties, apparently, but seemed older, somehow. Rabbit, Cijay, Taj and I were playing UNO at night in the lounge car when Eric wandered by. He asked us if we were playing UNO, which seemed an odd question, but we said ‘yes’. “I loved playing UNO years ago,” he said, so we invited him to join us. He sat down but started rambling about how he’d been on 3 trains in one week, and related a hard-to-follow story about someone trying to kill him and his grown son in Ohio bringing him out to live next door.
Along with this cast of characters, I enjoyed a winter wonderland; in fact, we all enjoyed a variety of scenery. But when the train pulled into Omaha on a blustery and snowy morning at 6am, the conductor announced that there would be a smoking break here. “If you wish to stand outside and stretch your legs, you may do so, but you may wish to keep in mind that it’s a chilly zero degrees!”
I’d imagined my homecoming: a chilly but sunny day, and I’d walk the two blocks into the Old Market and enjoy a cup of coffee before boarding a city bus to take me out to western Omaha. The plan evaporated as soon as I stepped onto the platform and braced myself against a freezing wind. I hobbled along in my woefully inadequate light jacket towards the station to catch a taxi. Forget the bus; the pain wasn’t worth it. I looked up at the train, saw Eric at the window of the lounge car, and thought about all the people I’d met on this trip. Smiling, I hurried on to the station.
And that’s the end of a seven-month journey.
The transport stats:
FLIGHTS: (11)
• Omaha to Chicago
• Chicago to London
• Frankfurt to Beijing
• Beijing to Hong Kong
• Chengdu to Lijiang
• Guilin to Kunming
• Bangkok to Phuket
• Ubon to Bangkok
• Bangkok to Phenom Phen
• Phenom Phen to Bangkok
• Bangkok to Taipei
• Taipei to SFO
TRAINS: (58)
• Somewhere in bloody England to near Glenn
• The Hague to Hannover
• Hannover to Berlin
• Berlin to Brno
• Brno to Bern
• Bern to hiking place
• Hiking place to Bern
• Bern to Milan
• Milan to Venice
• Venice to Belgrade
• Belgrade to Thessaloniki
• Thessaloniki to Sofia
• Veliko to Bucharest
• Bucharest to Brasov
• Brasov to Vienna
• Vienna to Hannover
• Hannover to Hamburg
• Hamburg to Copenhagen
• Copenhagen to Oslo
• Oslo to Trondheim
• Trondheim to Oslo
• Oslo to Copenhagen
• Copenhagen to Hamburg
• Hamburg to Hannover
• Hannover to Basel
• Basel to Bern
• Bern to Lausanne
• (Somewhere) to Bern
• Bern to Lyon
• Lyon to Brussels
• Brussels to Cologne
• Cologne to Hannover
• Hannover to Frankfurt Flughafen
• Frankfurt flughafen to Cologne
• Cologne to Hannover
• Hannover to Celle
• Celle to hamburg
• Hamburg to Hannover
• Hannover to (town)
• (town) to Hannover
• Hannover to Stuttgart
• Stuttgart to Munich
• Munich to Salzburg
• Salzburg to Munich
• Munich to Hannover
• Hannover to Frankfurt flughafen
• Frankfurt flughafen to Hannover
• Hannover to Frankfurt
• Hong Kong to Beijing
• Beijing to Chengdu
• Kunming to Guilin
• Laos border to Bangkok
• Bangkok to Ubon
• Bangkok to Chang Mai
• BKK to Ubon (2nd time)
• Ubon to BKK
• SFO to Omaha
Long distance BUSES: (16)
• Sofia to veliko
• Heathrow to Cambridge
• Cambridge to London
• London to southhampton
• Southhampton to London
• Lijiang to Kunming
• Guilin to Yangshua
• Yangshua to Guilin
• Kunming to Luang Prabang
• Luang Prabang to Vientiane
• Railay Beach to Bangkok
• Phenom Penh to Siem Reap
• Siem Reap to PP
• LIjiang to TLG
• TLG to Lijiane
• Mao Sot to Bangkok
BOATS: (2)
• Ipswich to Hoek Van Holland
• Lake Geneve
SCOOTERS and Tuk-tuks: dozens!
1 weak horse
