Gendered Hiking 101

Over the years, Aaron has dragged me up and down many mountains (well, hills, really). In Bali, we learned that he has been doing it wrong the whole time.

We were staying in Ubud, a famous artists’ community toward the center of the island. While taking a long walk through some rice paddies just outside of town, we met a young man selling his paintings. (Seems like every man in Ubud is an artist, or a taxi driver, or both.) He had an effective pitch: “you don’t have to buy; just look and I will be happy.” So, we looked and then, of course, had to buy a small painting. After the sale, we chatted about Bush and the President-Elect. Everyone we met in Indonesia seemed pleased to talk about Obama and the fact that he had lived in Jakarta as a boy. He also tried to talk to Aaron about basketball, but that went over about as well as when he later mentioned to me that he likes guns, just like Bush does.

After a while, he told us about a waterfall just a short distance from where we stood, and said we should check it out. We figured a quick detour couldn’t hurt, and began to head in the direction he had pointed, but he offered to show us the way and so we followed. As we left the paddy fields and descended a slight hill, we passed his house, shrines to his ancestors, his angrily barking dog, and his friend’s penned cows, and entered the forest, where we were greeted by swarms of mosquitoes.

As the hill grew steeper, our new friend took my hand to help me down. Apparently, he was trying to teach by example. When Aaron did not pick up on this, he began to give Aaron explicit instructions: “take her hand now,” “put her hand on your shoulder now,” etc. At a couple of points, Aaron and I both thought I was doing just fine climbing down the hill without assistance, but our guide did not agree and shouted, “Stop!” and didn’t resume our hike until he felt Aaron was being appropriately chivalrous. I began to wonder if he thought I was a weakling who had never seen trees and mud before, but I felt a bit better when he told Aaron that his “wife” was a good hiker and that he had once brought a couple from Philadelphia to the waterfall and ended up carrying the woman down the hill on his back.

As we approached the bottom of the hill, which the artist climbs up and down every day to bathe in the waterfall, I realized that there actually wasn’t that much to see. It was a small muddy river with a small waterfall.

On the way back up, our new friend taught Aaron to grab my hips and give me a shove when we got to steep spots. The demonstration was a bit awkward (why is this stranger lifting up my shirt and grabbing my waist?), but the trick came in handy when I got lazy during subsequent walks under the hot sun in Bali.

I’m not quite sure why the artist had wanted to show us the little waterfall, and it wasn’t a question I could politely ask. I suppose he just liked talking with foreigners, like so many other friendly people we met in Bali. Whatever the reason, I was glad that on our last trip of this amazing year in Asia, we had yet another experience where I found myself thinking, “I’m so glad we lucked into this ridiculous situation.”

Here are a few shots from our trip:

Rice.




Another unexpected volunteer guide shows Aaron, sporting a loaner sarong, around carvings destroyed 80 years ago by an earthquake.




Monkeys licking bugs off of a wall.




Fruitstand at Mount Batur.




Fountains at the Spring Temple.




Worshipers at the Spring Temple.




Butterfly, chicken, rice paddy.

Better than Aluminum

Aaron and I spent last weekend on Koh Samui, an island in the Gulf of Thailand, celebrating our ten year (!) anniversary. We haven’t spent much time at the beach since arriving in SE Asia, and Koh Samui, which we’ve heard people call paradise, seemed like a good place to change that. We’ve also heard it called Pooh Samui, as the island is apparently renowned for “cleansing” spa diets and treatments. That sort of thing was not on our To Do list, however.

So, while in paradise, what did we do?

Well, we could have spent lots of time relaxing at our hotel…



Or getting massages in this little waterfront hut (to the right in the picture below)…



Or eating delicious pad thai…



Or we could’ve gone elephant trekking or swimming at one of the island’s waterfalls…





Or gone for a hike…



On our second day there, we settled on this last idea – a morning walk in the lush rainforest. When we spoke to the hotel staff about our planned hike and asked where on the island it might be best to start off, they told us, “No, no, no. Hot and far. Better to get motorbike.”

If you’ve read some of my prior postings, you know that Aaron has developed a motorbike obsession in recent months, so the staff at the hotel had said just what Aaron wanted to hear. In fact, he had started lobbying on the motorbike issue long before we arrived in Thailand. But I had read on-line that Koh Samui has the most motorbike fatalities in the kingdom. Having (sort of) conquered my fears and ridden a motorbike once while we were in Vietnam, I had no real need to get back on one. So we chose a new, closer destination we could easily walk to from the hotel and set out.

The road had no sidewalk to walk on, and was busy with cars and motorbikes… and, as seems to be usual in this part of the world, many of the motorbike passengers were very small children, most of whom did not bother to hold on… and women in skirts casually riding side-saddle at top speed… and no one was wearing a helmet…

So, you know what happened. The walk was aborted and we got a bike. Here we go again.



We gassed it up at a very nice roadside station (a table with some gas-filled whiskey bottles and a friendly attendant).





Now that we had the bike, Aaron kindly pointed out, we could get to all the island’s sights quite easily. We decided to head for a “secret garden” of Buddhist statues and other sculptures that a fruit farmer had built up in the hills. The main roads on the island were paved, but a lot of the roads into the interior of the island were nice smooth dirt.



Others were dirt, but not smooth in the slightest, and some of the roads were very steep and ridiculously narrow.

But don’t worry moms and dads, I insisted we wear helmets.

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One road was almost entirely washed out - all that was left for us to ride on was a path about a foot and a half wide, with deep ditches on either side. At one point, as we slowly climbed the narrow trail up the mountain, I told Aaron that I thought it wasn’t such a good idea, and that we should probably turn around. Yep, definitely turn around.

But he assured me that it was just like mountain-biking, which he has spent countless hours doing. Perhaps having caught a bit of Olympic spirit, he said something along the lines of, “I’ve trained my whole life for this moment,” and forged ahead.

We soon reached a freshly paved portion of the road… but it turned out the road was a little too fresh. It was, in fact, in the process of being built. My muscles, tired from clinging to the bike for hours, got a break while we waited for the workers to give us the go-ahead to pass.

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Eventually, we reached the secret garden.

Turns out the garden is not so much of a secret. As we pulled up to it, so did an elderly Thai woman and her family. They had traveled up in an SUV. She shook her head and laughed kindly at us, our helmets, our bike.

In addition to the garden, we saw a bunch of other beautiful and interesting things we probably wouldn’t have seen without the bike, including this postcard sunset we caught as we rode back to the hotel that evening.

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I was wrong about getting the motorbike. Aaron was right. So that’s once in ten years.

Dragon Deer

Just got back from a trip to Japan with my mom and Aaron. We saw temple after shrine after garden after carp pond after rock garden… which was amazing... and which will probably soon swirl together in my mind into one beautiful and well-kept blur, if that’s possible.

While in Japan we visited Nara, one of the ancient capitals. There are about 1,000 sacred deer roaming freely through Nara Park, and along the streets and around the temples and shrines, as well. The deer allow the tourists to photograph, pose with, and pet them, in hopes of getting the tourists to buy deer crackers to feed them. Some of the deer even bow their heads repeatedly, in a polite manner not entirely unlike how many Japanese bow to each other.







Aren’t they cute?

We saw lots of cute things while in Japan. They really know how to do cute there, and people seem to eat it up. There are a lot of these plush toy claw machine arcades, generally filled with adults.



Some things were so cute they were scary, though…



Anyway, back to the deer. Rather than bowing, some took a less polite approach to getting food. Aaron gave a cracker to one deer, and then seeking more snacks, she followed him around the park for quite a while, and eventually began headbutting him…





...which I thought was hilarious until later in the day, when a few of the deer I was feeding began prodding my hip and back with their antlers. And then one bit me – see below for a shot of the deer spit and grass he left behind on my shorts.



Aside from the overzealous deer, Nara was peaceful and pretty…

Lanterns along path to shrine


Art student painting in the shade


Prayer tablets hanging outside shrine


Sandals left outside shrine


We found Tokyo to be a big, fun, quirky city. Other than the run-in with the deer, I think the funniest part of our trip to Japan was when the three of us tried to board the Tokyo subway during rush hour with all of our luggage. Absolute genius! Unfortunately, I was too focused on shoving myself onto a train to get a photo.

comic book shop in "Electric Town" area of Tokyo


woman entering Tokyo subway


lantern plant


women dressed as maids, handing out flyers for a "maid cafe"



While in Tokyo, we visited the Tsukiji Market, the largest fish market in the world.





It doesn’t smell very fishy, but you can’t forget where you are as there seem to be baskets of fishheads lurking around every corner.

After the market, we went for a sushi breakfast at a restaurant down the street. I'm sure it was the freshest sushi I’ve ever eaten, but it honestly wasn’t all that appealing to me after sloshing around in the blood and guts of the market.

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We also went to Kyoto, where we stayed in a “Japanese style” hotel room, which was a lot cosier than it looks in this photo. Actually, no it wasn't - but it was clean and cheap and different.

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In Kyoto we visited the Fushimi Inari shrine, which has hundreds and hundreds of orange torii gates winding along wooded pathways. It felt exactly like The Gates installation in Central Park from a few years back (except for the Japanese writing on the back-side of the posts).

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We also visited a fancy food market filled with the now notorious $100 watermelons and all kinds of foods I couldn’t identify.

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Anybody know what this is?

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One day we wandered through one of the older neighborhoods in Kyoto and saw a geisha walking with a young man.

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I thought it was a somewhat rare sighting, but later we came across another few geishas out for a photo shoot. They seemed to enjoy the attention they were getting from the people on the street, so I took some shots while the professional photographer fluffed the flowers in one geisha’s hair. It was blazing hot the whole time we were in Japan; more impressive than the beautiful robes these ladies wore was the fact that they didn’t look all sweaty in them.

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