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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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