Starting today, I’ll once again be in motion — first to Bangkok, then to San Francisco, then to see my family in Kansas (a part of the United States which was recently proven to be literally flatter than a pancake), then back to San Francisco to prepare for some more adventures. This transit — especially my time in Kansas — will be very rushed and busy, so I probably won’t have much time to post on this blog. I hope to be back and blogging in a week or two. In the meantime, scroll down (or surf the links at left and right) to catch up on recent travel tales, travel quotations, and travel advice.

“Fortunately, you don

In a matter of days, I will move out of my south Thailand apartment, pack up all my belongings (which I hope to fit into two check-in bags), and — after seven years of traveling and living on or near this grand continent — leave Asia. I’ll share details of my new travels in time, but for now I want to reflect on what it’s like to sort through your belongings on the eve of a big move, making tough judgments on what you will keep and what you will throw away. In particular I’m thinking about clothes.

Some comedian (I think it was Jerry Seinfeld) once remarked that men have an odd, sentimental relationship with their clothes. We might go through dozens of girlfriends in the course of five years, but we have trouble parting with, say, a trusty old pair of five-year-old underwear that is only being held together by a few “underwear molecules”. In that spirit, I would like to eulogize a few items of clothing that have served me well in the last two-to-twelve years — items that evoke vivid memories even as I gently place them in the rubbish bin. (Click links for pop-up picture of item in question; WARNING: This promises to be my most self-indulgent post since my sentimental ode to Jane’s Addiction earlier this summer.)

Beloved clothing items that I am throwing away:

• Cambodia souvenir t-shirt
  I’ve traveled through nearly 40 countries over the last five years, successfully fending off countless souvenir t-shirt vendors — but once, near Angkor Wat in March of 1999, I gave in to a very cute and persistent Cambodian 6 year-old and bought a gray t-shirt that bore a picture of the Cambodian flag. It cost me about $2, it fit perfectly, and I’ve worn it about once a week for four solid years. Unfortunately, it now smells like four years of sweat that even the toughest detergent can’t defeat, and it will have to go.
• Tan (formerly gray) Gramicci shorts (picture N/A)
  Gramicci makes wonderfully functional rock-climbing shorts, and this tan pair actually dates back to a gray pair I wore in college, which blew a seam when I worked as a landscaper in Seattle in the summer of ’93. Since Gramicci stands by their product, I traded the gray pair for a tan pair, which I wore constantly during an 8-month van trip around the USA in ’94. By ’96 they were frayed and worn out, so I retired them to a drawer in Kansas. I brought them out of retirement in ’02, and I slept in them here in Thailand until the waistband-cinch blew out some weeks ago.
• Aigle cargo pants that were turned into shorts
  Like the Gramicci shorts above, my Aigle pants are the legacy of a pair of khaki pants that served me well for years, until coming apart at the seams during an expedition in Laos in ’00. I was on assignment for a Conde Nast article at the time, and Knut Bry (see pop-up picture above), the photographer, give me his spare cargo pants. They were lightweight and full of pockets, and they fit me perfectly. Unfortunately, six months later in India, I was attacked by a dog in Himachal Pradesh, and one leg of the pants was torn to shreds. Later, in Pushkar, I had them sewn into shorts, and these shorts worked splendidly until about one month ago, when I overloaded the cargo pockets and tore the cloth open.
• $1.35 Wal-Mart faux Swiss Army knife (picture N/A)
  Not clothing, technically, but an interesting story. Just prior to the Laos expedition in ’00, I was home visiting my family in Kansas, so I decided to stock up on gifts for Laotian villagers. I bought a bunch of cheap wristwatches and pocketknives from a Vietnam vet Wal-Mart employee who — when I told him where I was headed — regaled me for thirty minutes with harrowing stories of his time in Laos 30 years earlier. Later, in the Hin Boun basin of central Laos, the backcountry villagers loved the wristwatches (which they wore to show status and sophistication), but had no use for the cheap pocketknives (which were useless in an area where tools are used daily and must be durable). Hence, I used the pocketknives myself over the next two years, throwing them away when they gave out (and they gave out fast). This knife was the last of the half-dozen I’d originally bought, and it’s hopelessly bent out of shape — mainly from opening beers.

Worn-out clothing items that, in my weakness, I could not bear to throw away:

• North Face safari shirt
  I inherited this shirt from Tom Bourguignon in Cairo’s mighty Sultan Hotel back in ’00. Tom claimed to have originally stolen it from his roommate in New York, but it turned out to be too small for him, so he gave it to me once night when I needed a collared shirt to attend the Cairo Opera. I later wore it in the Libyan Desert, during my hike across Israel, and while bicycling down the Irrawaddy basin in Myanmar (among other places). Unfortunately, I washed it with a pair of black pants I’d had made for me in India, and the dye turned the North Face shirt to a really ugly bluish-tan color. I haven’t worn it much since — but, as I was about to toss it out the other day, I noticed that it’s still in good, functional shape. Plus I’m wearing it on the cover of my book
  .
• Gray (formerly tan) Gramicci shorts
  I purchased these on a return to the USA in ’00, and they’ve proven wonderfully useful and durable. Originally tan, they turned gray during the same load of laundry that defiled my North Face shirt (above). The left cuff-seam blew out in ’02, and Max Arcangeloni‘s wife sewed it up for me; the right cuff-seam blew this year and I had it sewn in the Ranong market for 5 baht. These shorts are beginning to fray and very well could be retired, but they’re wonderfully comfortable, and I’m wagering on getting another good year out of them.
• Josef Seibel shoes (picture N/A)
  I originally got these sturdy brown brogans on a pro-deal while working at an outdoor store in ’95. I later wore them every day for two years while teaching English in Korea (’96-’97), and the heels wore out. I retired them on return to Kansas, but I had my parents bring them to China with them in ’01, and I got them resoled on Khao San Road in Bangkok for 400 baht. I’ve worn them since at everything from Bangkok’s St. Andrew’s Ball to my classes at the Paris American Academy. They’re looking battered at this point, but they’re too dependable to toss out just yet.
• George Fox cross-country t-shirt
  This t-shirt is one of the finest items of clothing I’ve ever owned. Originally issued my when I was running cross-country for George Fox in the fall of ’91, it’s been everywhere with me: performing with Swizzlefish at Portland’s legendary X-Ray Caf

Earlier this month, while traveling through France, I managed to get myself arrested at a casino in Normandy.

This is certainly not the best way to begin a day-trip to the French coast, but — as I’d told my travel-writing students the previous week — it is a good way to begin a travel story. Not getting arrested, necessarily, but setting the hook. Implying drama. Creating interest. Giving the reader something to come back to. And, most importantly, promising action.

In writing about a place like France — and Paris in particular — it can be easy to forget the element of action. The setting there is so lovely (and the culture so deep) that travel writers are tempted to lose themselves in describing and romanticizing a city that has already been over-described and over-romanticized. As T.S. Eliot once noted, “the chief danger about Paris is that it is such a strong stimulus,” and any writer is tempted to passively gush about its wonders without really working to understand them.

This is always the chief weakness among my students’ essays at the Paris American Academy (where I teach a travel writing seminar each summer). Last summer, for example, a student presented me with an essay about Chartres Cathedral that was little more than a bland ode to the glories of architecture. After a bit of questioning, I discovered that — in addition to being guided around the cathedral by an eccentric British dullard — this student had in fact been attacked by pigeons at Chartres. Dullards and pigeons, I told him, were what he should write about — and he ended up with a truer evocation of his Chartres experience than any architecture manifesto could have accomplished. Similarly, one of my students this summer turned a French train-trip essay into a strained homage to Proust — when, in fact, the highlight of her train trip had been sharing lunch with an Israeli eel biologist. “Skip the dead guy,” I told her. “Write about the living one.” Indeed, no matter how many adjectives and historical tidbits you pull out of your literary hat, action and dialogue can enliven a travel story in a way that description never can.

The problem for me, however, is that — even having spent an accumulated month in the city over the past couple years — my real-life Paris adventures have been utterly lacking in action and dialogue. Elsewhere in the world, I’ve managed to raft down the Mekong, hitchhike across Poland, and chat up the teashop eccentrics of India — but Paris has this way of turning me into a mute, drooling aesthete. I wander around the city eating amazing food, drinking fantastic wine, and staring at beautiful women — but no significant action ever comes of it (no, not even pigeon attacks or encounters with eel biologists). Hence, describing my time in Paris threatens to lapse into the kind of dreamy, italicized clich

“Are we ready to think of all humanity as a living tree, carrying on splendidly without us? We easily regard a beehive or an ant colony as a single organism, and even a school of fish, a flock of dunlin, a herd of elk. And we easily and correctly regard an aggregate of individuals, a sponge or coral or lichen or slime mold as one creature — but us? When people differ, and know our consciousness and love? Even lovers, even twins, are strangers are who love and die alone. And we like it this way, at least in the West; we prefer to endure any agony of isolation rather than to merge and extinguish ourselves in an abstract ‘humanity’ whose fate we should hold dearer than our own. Who could say, I’m in agony because my child died, but that’s all right: Mankind as a whole has abundant children? The religious idea sooner or later challenges the idea of the individual. The Buddha taught each disciple to vanquish his fancy that he possessed an individual self.”
–Annie Dillard, For the Time Being (1999)

Late last week, humorist Dave Barry (with a little cajoling on my part) linked my “Power-Struggle Between Butter and Margarine in Germany” interview to his weblog. If you haven’t yet seen Dave Barry’s blog, you’re missing out on one of the finest daily link-collections of humor, bizarre news, and downright nonsense to be found online. Where else, for example, can you find links to pictures of people duct-taping one another to ceilings, a website that encourages people to tape pictures of Jeff Goldblum in public toilets, and (for the travel-minded) a list of animals that you can and cannot bring into Italy (common lizards, mice, frogs, marmots, and up to two monkeys are allowed; hares, pigs and rabbits are verboten)?

“In every arable soil in the world we grow grain over tombs — sure, we know this. But do not the dead generation seem to us hard and still as mummies, and their times always faded like scenes painted on walls at Pompeii? We live on mined land. Nature itself is a laid trap. No one makes it through: no one gets out. You and I will likely die of heart disease. In most other times, hunger or bacteria would have killed us before our hearts quit. More people have died at fishing, I read once, than any other human activity, including war.”
–Annie Dillard, For the Time Being (1999)

“There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it always has been: a people busy and powerful, knowledgeable, ambivalent, important, fearful, and self-aware; a people who scheme, promote, deceive, and conquer; who pray for their loved ones, and long to flee misery and skip death. It is a weakening and discoloring idea that rustic people knew God personally once up a time — or even knew selflessness or courage or literature — but that is too late for us. In fact, the absolute is available to everyone in every age. There never was a more holy time than ours, and never a less.”
–Annie Dillard, For the Time Being (1999)

“Vulnerable or not, the United States is too powerful compared to the rest of the world, and the nature of the “war” it is fighting is too diffuse and long-term, for Americans not to return to some degree of complacency — although they may never again reach the height of hubris that prevailed on September 10. Contrary to President Bush’s fighting words, this is not a war for existence or for survival; the “enemies of freedom” that he referred to in his eloquent September 20 speech to Congress are not the Germans or the Japanese after Pearl Harbor, powerful industrialized nations bent on challenging American hegemony; they are mere ragtag holdouts, tiny “cells” of misfits who failed even to seize power in their own small home countries. However dangerous it might be, this global war is more like a mop-up mission, courtesy of U.S. special forces, the CIA, and the FBI.”
–Michael Hirsch, reviewing David Halberstam’s War in a Time of Peace in Foreign Affairs, Nov.-Dec. 2001

Over at Tim Leffel’s blog, the World’s Cheapest Places author has an interesting post called Why Travel Around the World? The post is a response to a message thread at the Lonely Planet Thorn Tree, where a woman who has been planning a round-the-world trip is discouraged by her family and friends’ attitude toward her trip. “Her parents harp on her for ‘wasting all that money to go traveling’,” Leffel writes, “and her friends give her grief for not going out on the town with them like she used to.”

Indeed, as excited as you are about your own future travels, the lack of support and interest from family and friends at the outset can be frustrating. (And, as I say in Vagabonding the same thing will happen when you return from your travels, so you’d best mentally prepare for it). Leffel offers (and expands on) five reasons to ignore the apathy of your family and friends and travel anyway.

• 1) You’ll learn far more than you ever did at a university.
• 2) You’ll be a hundred times more knowledgeable about world affairs.
• 3) You’ll have a stronger appreciation of what you have and how lucky you are to be born in a developed country.
• 4) You’ll see the world when you’re young enough to enjoy it, not when you’re old and need to be pampered.
• 5) The economy is in the toilet now anyway.

Of these travel motivations, I was most struck by the logic of #5. With the economy so slow these days, what better time is there for travel? Day-to-day expenses on the budget travel trail are actually cheaper than food and rent at home — and instead of having a gap of unemployment (or semi-employment) on your resume, you can list your travels instead (and reap a wealth of international experience to boot!).