Five Seven One

A striking characteristic to our recent trip to New Caledonia is my lack of reflection. The ease and health of the place and people has a surface beauty that may not be so superficial. It’s really hard to tell in a 10 day visit, but everything about the island lent to an immediate state of well being. Dealing with a lack of adversity has never sat well with me psychologically, but in this instance it seemed very natural. Maybe I am just getting old or maybe we were in the presence of a better way of life.

New York is a place where every aspect of a developed culture has been carried to excess, and what is left now is the aftermath. It is a place where 90% of the people you meet are atrocious self-promoters, a true stage for the talented and tragically ambitious. We spent seven years in NY, and now that we have moved to the other side of the world I think it is fitting to make a post about this great city.

Umphang is located in North Western Thailand along the Myanmar border, and is home to Karen, Thai, Shan and other minority ethnic tribes. To get to Umphang you fly into the town of Mae Sot and take the 164km winding road through the Thanon Thongchai Mountain Range. This road is the only access from Thailand, there is another road that will take you to Myanmar, but to enter the country you have to leave your passports at the border.

In the north west of Vietnam, near the Chinese border, high in the Hoang Lien Son mountain range you will find the town of Sapa. To get there we took the overnight train from Hanoi. The ride was rough and noisy, but we were fairly comfortable in our private sleeping car. Near dawn we awoke and gazed out the window at the villages along the train tracks leading into Lao Cai. For a brief moment we caught a glimpse of a child that couldn’t have been more than three climbing down a ten food garden wall naked and seemingly unsupervised. I couldn’t help but think how hearty such an upbringing would make a person.

Traveling in Spain for me was like a second coming of age. Barcelona embodies all the confusion, passion, spontaneity, creativity and uncertainty that make the pubescent mind so wonderful and frightening. It is a combination of dissipation and focus with a lack of experience to distinguish the two, which gives its diverse residents youth and optimism.

So the story is this. I was hired to production design a Bollywood movie in Georgetown, Guyana. I was given numerous signs that taking this assignment was a bad decision. Before I left NY almost the entire crew quit because of the insane ramblings of our very proud Indian director. The script was terrible, I won’t go into detail, but I did have make my first trip into peep world to buy a dildo, which was to be used as a prop in a scene where a penis transplant is taking place and somehow a cat enters the operating room, steals the removed phallice and runs out of the hospital. Anyway, my assistant, Dave, and I decided to stay with the production, because we wanted to go to Guyana.

Coming form a western culture, the realities of traveling in South East Asia is a sounding for the compassion you have as well as the degradation you can bear whiteness to. After passing through customs at Angkor International Airport you immediately get a glimpse of the ignominy in which the descendants of the once great Khmer Empire live. Gaunt men with beautifully symmetrical faces and large eyes hustle every weary traveler as they exit the airport with an unsettling frantic desperation.

Coyote Gulch can be accessed from the Red Well trail head 31.5 miles down Hole in the Rock Road. Which is located a few miles southeast from Escalante Utah. There are a few links at the end of the article with more detailed instructions and maps.

The Bridger Wilderness Area in the Wind River mountain range is located just a few hours south of Yellowstone National Park. This 428,169 acre expanse of jutting majestic mountainous land, rises out of Wyoming’s terra firma to its highest point on the top of Gannet Peat at 13,804 feet above sea level. The mountains are interlaced with cold, crystal clear, high mountain lakes. Black and Brown bears and the occasional wolf pack roam the lower elevations. The knowledge of which, at least for a city boy like me, puts your psyche into an atavistic tension that makes you feel like you are part of the great Mana.

Iceland earns its handle, “the land of fire and ice”, nowhere better than Vatnajökull Glacier. Every inch of landscape on this stretch of Iceland’s southern coast shows signs of millions of years of abuse and upheaval. The glacier seems to be sitting quietly, revealing itself through the massive fissures it has created in the volcanic mountains. Vast fields of black sand, caused by volcanoes erupting underneath the glacier are a reminder of floods rivaling the flow of the Amazon that have laid waste to lichen covered plains. Around the base of the glacier large inland lakes form floating icebergs thousands of years old.