The Wide Wild West

(Exciting pictures after the text)


My first car meant a lot to me. Not because I bought it myself, or knew how to work on it, sliding underneath like a grease monkey or anything like that. I was fifteen when I started driving by myself in my own car, because New Mexico is insane and apparently thinks that letting kids who aren't even sixteen drive by themselves will somehow make our drunk-driver-ridden speed-demon-racing roads better. Not that I was complaining at the end of my sophomore year. Hell no, I was psyched. Living in Santa Fe, none of my friends were even close to my neighborhood. Driving was the beginning of hanging out in parking lots, playing hide and seek in cemeteries, and of course, reveling in the two weeks per year the plaza had actual grass. For me, like so many American kids, driving=freedom.

So it was kind of a big deal when my car was totaled near the end of August. I wasn't in the car, and no one was hurt-- the most important thing, obv. But the damages exceeded the value of the car, and so it was time to say goodbye to my dashboard (what had become a somewhat shabby assortment of doodads and plastic toys glue gunned all over the surface, see picture, but which I had recently replaced with astro turf and an awesome jungle scene) my teenage bumper stickers (Weezer, Keep Your Rosaries off my Ovaries, 98.1 Radio Free Santa Fe) every inch of my beloved 2001 Passat Wagon. I drove cross-country three times in that baby, taught three friends to drive stick shift in it, and slept in the back several times. Both of the driving pictures above are of my pal the Passat. Damn, what a car.

My extensive preamble can lead to only one thing: a new car. (Let's face it, living in California with a 72 lb. dog, a car is still essential.) K and I had been planning a trip to Santa Fe, and we left a couple days after the car was kaput. Once in Santa Fe, we (me, K, and my mom helping) used this dealer guy, Fred, to secure a new car. This time I had to pay for it myself-- sign of the times. (That I've grown up, not that the economy is in the toilet and my dad refused, though that is true, too.) Long story short, Fred wrangled me a Subaru Impreza WRX which is, not so coincidentally, the kind of car he has. It's more performance than I need in a car, but a hatchback, has decent gas mileage, and room for Belly. I really like it. K needed to go home and take care of the babies (fetch them from their babysitters) so my sister D and I struck out West for California.

We took mostly two lane highways because that's so much more romantic and fun and Blue Highways than the interstate is. That, and we've both been across 40 gazillions of times and it's ugly and dull, with the exceptions of the red cliffs near Grants and Gallup, and the Flagstaff area. So instead we struck off though Northern, New Mexican mountains and forests, and as it got dark, skirted Monument Valley in Arizona. Just north of Santa Fe, the landscape opens up and is wide enough, and full enough of mountains and mesas that dip into valleys and canyons, that the sky starts to look almost purple if you stare straight up for a long time. If the windows are down when you’re driving, the wind smells like snow melt or cotton wood fluff or charred pinon, depending on the time of year. We also drove across what an old friend of mine termed "Navajo Country" and so made lots of references to that, as we drove by tepees (no, really) silhouetted against Shiprock.

There is no landscape in the whole world I like better than that of the American West.

When we got to Page, AZ (right on the Utah border and next to Lake Powell) every single motel room in town was full because we were right next to Lake Powell and it was summer, and also because there was some sort of weird French convention going on, probably a discussion of how great the Euro is. We got vanilla milkshakes and bean burritos and cried a little (OK, a lot) at the prospect of having to sleep in the car after a long day, but in the end that is what we did. In the parking lot of a Holiday Inn Express, where we freeloaded off of their lobby bathroom facilities and password-protected Wifi. Even when greasy and weepy, the MD girls know how to charm a hotel clerk in a pinch.

The next day took us through Utah, where we stopped near an unusually clear blue lake (see the picture) surrounded by fishing and ATVing rednecks. A mother duck swam nearby with her ducklings, and we restrained ourselves from kidnapping one. We stopped in Ely, Nevada, which is right over the border in time to wander around the town before it got dark. This is all I have to say: fucking sketchy. The "casinos" there were like mini museums-- stuffed animals of all tooth and claw, miniature everything, model trains, and lots of old, obese white people who seemed pretty thrilled that you're still allowed to smoke indoors at casinos.

This was the second time I'd driven across Nevada, and it was better than the first because we listened to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows on CD. We'd both read the book the previous summer, but it's so intricate and long that we'd forgotten lots of plot details. Driving across the desert at 95 mph listening to the book was almost better than reading it for the first time. Mostly because driving in Nevada is a trip. We saw very few other people on our long lonely road. I think highway 50 is appropriately termed "the loneliest highway in America". You can drive really fast, because there's nobody else, and we didn't see any cops. The highway shoots straight across huge valleys, which look like they're going to go on for hours until you abruptly come up against a spiny mountain pass. Up and over, and into another colossal valley, past derelict gas stations, suspicious government explosions (really) and lots and lots of Joshua trees. The cemetery pictures are from just outside of Ely. So are the tree pictures. We considered leaving some of our own shoes, but we liked them all too much.

Indochine in Pictures

Not really, I just like that word. A few shots from Thailand and Malaysia. In the one where I am wearing a jaunty Peter Pan leaf hat, I am riding an elephant!

Mary Haldeman Dayton April 12, 1927- August 30, 2008

It might be a bit uncouth, or in poor taste to post on my personal only kind of themed definitely sort of irrelevant blog about my gramma's death. But I don't care. She died not unexpectedly at the end of August and I miss her. Here is what I read at her memorial, and above is a picture of her that was in her newspaper obituary. I think it's kind of a weird picture, but it is one she really liked of herself.

The summer before I went to college, I met my gramma in Aspen for the chamber music festival. We spent five crazy, stressful, but mostly wonderful days together. That year in my writing classes at school, I wrote a short story about our vacation. I’m going to read an excerpt from the story—a bit from the middle, and then the end. It’s not quite linear and a bit disjointed, but please bear with me. I’m picking up at a part during which I’ve just biked into town from our condo.

In front of Dior, I locked up the bike next to expensive and gorgeous mountain bikes from Italy. I wanted ice cream and to play in the street fountain like I had when I was six. My dad had splashed in the fountain with me that day; he’s always been the sort of father who doesn’t mind getting messy or looking foolish while playing with children, his own or otherwise. My grandmother is the same way, and I knew if I asked her, even
when I was nine, or eleven, too old to get in the fountain, she’d have come anyway.
I stopped at Clark’s on the way back to pick up more wine, bananas, English muffins, coffee filters, a sling in a size large, and some magazines. Pedaling back up the hill was difficult with my grocery bags balanced on the bike’s handlebars.
Neighbors were fixing hamburgers on the grill when I got back, and I heard kids splashing in the pool, but in our apartment it was quiet, except for the drip of the humidifier, which sounded a long way off in the next room.
“Gramma?” I called, not very loudly. She was asleep, where I had left her. I stood over her and noticed that her eyes were opened slightly, and that I could see little slits of glassy blue. She breathed slowly through her nose and was snoring slightly. Her hair, dyed strawberry blonde and so much thicker than mine, was freshly cut, styled and perfect. Her nose is my dad’s, with a bump on the middle. My sister will have the nose too, in four or five years. The three of them look alike, but I look like my mother.
I studied my grandmother’s still face and thought she was beautiful. Her mascara was slightly smeared, and the ends of her hair curled around her chin; she looked so lovely, lying on her back and snoring.
She had sprayed her perfume, and I put my face into the bedclothes that smelled like her. My gramma wears a lot of perfume; whenever she comes to stay, the whole house smells like her for at least a week after she leaves. From the nightstand, I dabbed it on the insides of my wrists and brought them to my face periodically for the rest of the evening.
I was pulling my pajama pants on when my grandma knocked on my door.
“Del, what do you say we make a trip to the Little Nell? For martinis and oysters?”
She was dressed in a dark blue dress closer to royal in color than navy, Ferragamo shoes, a very nice Hermes scarf, and went bare-legged. It was summer in Colorado, she said, and nylons wouldn’t be necessary. We both put on lipstick (hers coral and mine hot pink) and decided to walk there. Downtown was still fairly busy; it was a Saturday night in a tourist town, at the end of the season, and most of the hotel rooms were full.
“Do you think jeans are OK for the Little Nell?” I asked my grandmother.
“Oh, sure.” Flick of the wrist. “It’s a bar. A very nice bar, but a bar. We used to stay at the Little Nell, in the old days.”
We sat at a table by the window.
“Oh, waiter?” my grandmother trilled, fluttering her fingers. Her hands gleamed with rings and bracelets.
“Two vodka martinis, please. And a dozen oysters.”
We sipped our martinis together. I tried not to wince, while she let hers roll around in her mouth and down her tongue slowly. Our oysters came and we both slurped them from their shells, covered in lemon juice and dotted with horseradish.
“The first time I had a raw oyster was in San Francisco,” I said, “when we were there for Bruce and Lynn’s wedding. We were having dinner at some place down by Fisherman’s Wharf and you made me try one.”
I don’t think she knew how glad I was, how secretly special I felt that I was drinking martinis with her, that I would be able to tell this story at family gatherings fifteen years later. It was a strange sort of premature nostalgia, brought on because for five days in August she was all mine.
We sat quietly. I ran my finger, dipped in water, around the rim of my glass, making a high, resonant note sound, until I realized it wasn’t appropriate, even if we were among the last people in the bar. It was a classic hotel bar, with large red leather chairs and mahogany paneling and ashtrays for old men’s cigars. It was almost empty except
us; it wasn’t the sort of place one went to dance or get drunk on a Saturday night. My grandmother stood up delicately in her black heels.
I took her hand as we walked out of the Little Nell. When I was younger, my gramma never made me hold her hand, but I liked to anyway. People watch her when she walks, and I really don’t think she’s ever noticed. She’s not the sort of woman who bothers with other people’s glances. She grew up thinking she was ugly because of her red hair, which makes her less vain than she might be otherwise.
“Mon Dieu! Those oysters were exquisite, weren’t they, dear?” My grandmother says ‘Mon Dieu’ instead of ‘Oh my God’ because she thinks it makes her sound continental. And it does.
The concierge tipped his head at her and said “Good evening, madam,” as we left the hotel. She smiled, and inclined her head.

Melaka, the Straits of Melacca

In the Cameron Highlands, we were taken on a comprehensive tour of a tea plantation, a butterfly farm (which also had examples of all sorts of exotic insects, reptiles and amphibians) and a strawberry farm. The tea plantation tour reminded me a bit of the tours we used to take on IHP. And man oh man, would my IHP compatriots have had a field day. Apparently, all of the tea-pickers are migrant Indonesian workers who pluck for the equivalent of pennies a day, six days a week. It looked like a pretty shitty set-up, but I didn't know what to say to our guide other than "huh" and a lot of asides to everybody else about how that sounded pretty exploitative. The plantation was overrun with field-tripping Chinese middle-schoolers, and I was glad to depart for the Strawberry place which was small and did not appear to run on close-to-slave-labor and I had a really delicious strawberry milkshake.

After the Cameron Highlands, we journeyed South on a "super luxury VIP bus" (which basically just meant huge squashy seats) to the capital city of Kuala Lumpur, or KL. KL is kind of just another huge Asian city, but much easier to get around than Bangkok. (Which is pretty much the extent of my intimate knowledge of big Asian cities, unless we're counting India as "Asian") KL has a skytrain and a Chinatown and a weird park called the Lake Gardens that is basically their version of Central Park, and lots and lots of shopping malls. I enjoy shopping, but malls kind of make me want to kill myself. I got excited about going to Top Shop and finding some cute pants that fit really well, but that was about the extent of it. Also we went to a fancy watch store with the sole purpose in mind of asking them how I should clean my stainless-steel watch which gets really grimy and leaves gross marks on my arm. Fantastic tip: use an old toothbrush and toothpaste. My watch was super-shiny and gleaming afterwards, and I annoyed the crap out of Lacey pausing to admire the shininess and glinting the faces' reflection across the room like Tinker Bell.

Lacey and I spent the first half of our full day in KL in a soulless, air-conditioned shopping mall housed beneath Malaysia's Twin Towers, the second-highest buildings in the world. They actually had a pretty neat aquarium, with manta rays we could touch and huge sharks in an overhead tunnel and adorably-translated "fun facts" about aquatic life. After lunch, we wandered half-heartedly around the deserted Lake Gardens, probably so desolate because it was freaking hot and really humid. They had a weird sort of mini-zoo, with regular sized deer and also mouse deer, which may be indigenous to Malaysia. We were the only people at the zoo, and fed the regular-sized deer green leaves which we hoped weren't poisonous.

That evening, we partook of group-karaoke in a swank place with a cold/hot/dessert buffet, deals on booze, and private rooms. I only do karaoke when tipsy or with people I will never see again, so Lace and I made sure to cover both of those bases. We did a duet to "Summer Nights" (I was mostly John Travolta) and I did Crocodile Rock, among a few other songs. Fun and kitschy, but we still peaced out early.

We're in Melaka for the night, a historically important fishing port that like Penang, passed colonial hands between the Portuguese, Dutch, and British. We took a guided tour this afternoon in a tricked-out bicycle rickshaw, and had some seriously amazing fusiony/continental/tapas food at a yummy little place on the river. We're not here for very long, which is sort of too bad because it seems like a pleasant little town, in a lazy-dazy way. On the other hand, I'm jonesing to get home to my boy, dog and cat. I'm planning on slinging a couple Singapore slings, and heading on my merry way back across the big blue ocean. I love traveling, and I think I need to go abroad at least once a year to convince myself that I know what I'm doing. Also I just love it. But once a year is probably enough.

High time for high tea

We are now in the Cameron Highlands, first mapped and charted by a British dude called Cameron, and thusly named.

It's VERY British here. We're staying at the Hill View Inn, which is run by Indians, but bears resemblance to so much bad fake-Tudor architecture. The Inn is a basic B&B and reminds me quite a bit of Fawlty Towers, what with its chintzy English decor and gloomy corridors.

After the beach, where we spent another pleasant day with bouts of rain and sunshine, we crossed the border to Malaysia and spent two nights in Georgetown, on the island of Penang on the Western coast. Penang also reeks of colonialism, mostly in the architecture. Lacey and I had amazing Indian food, toured a nineteenth-century mansion where Catherine Deneuve filmed IndoChine, ate some seriously weird dim sum, were awakened at 5 AM by Ramadan prayers being broadcast throughout the city, and I caught a cold. The tour we're on moves quite quickly, which is good and bad. Bad beacuse its exhausting and my immune system gets mad at me, good because we're getting to see a great deal.

In Penang, we visited Southeast Asia's largest Buddhist temple which was a labyrinth of huge golden Buddhas, pagodas, swastikas, kiosks selling everything from Jesus wall-hangings to incense to t-shirts, and a huge concrete bowl called the "liberation pond" containing hundreds of turtles. Apparently, turtles are good luck, but these turtles were piled on each other, and sort of sluggishly moving around looking for vegetables people dropped for them. There was a guy picking his way across the turtles collecting rubber bands that people dropped with the vegetable bundles, and also collecting dead turtles and depositing them in a plastic bag. Cultural differences indeed.

Today we had a psycho bus driver take us from the straits of Melaka to the Cameron highlands. First off, he was a just a terrible driver-- but he compounded this by reading the paper while he drove, taking his hands off the wheel and stretching deeply whenever he felt like it, and chain smoking all the way up the windy mountain highway. I haven't been this terrified on a bus since Mr. Machen kept dozing off on the way to the Gila in 10th grade.

Tomorrow we're going to tea and strawberry plantations, and to a butterfly farm, all of which the highlands are known for. It's quite cool here-- I almost don't have enough clothing and will probably sleep in my socks. We're here for one night only, before heading to Kuala Lumpur, the capital. We're going to have dinner in the second-tallest buildings in the world. KL, as it's called, is supposed to be a lot of fun.

Off to nibble on the rest of my Cadbury bar and take more miracle Asian cold meds before bed.

Tasting and Complaining

The Thai prime minister is being forced to step down because he hosts a cooking show, and apparently, this is in direct conflict with his ministerial duties. No one's talking about it in Krabi, though, the southern Thai beach province where we're currently shacked up.

Lacey and I are pretty sure that the other members of our group think we're puritans. We've been going to bed really early, don't like going out on the town with them, and both have been wearing one-piece bathing suits. We've decided to cultivate this image for entertainment purposes, and it's also useful because we don't really feel like hanging out with them.

We have been having a wonderful time, though. Elephant riding our last day in the jungle was great, especially on the way back because I got to sit on the elephant's neck. His name was Hamun. My legs dangled down behind his ears, and I rested my hands on his head. Elephant skin is terribly rough of course, but also covered with bristles, a bit like a boar. First though, we sat on a seat thing fixed to his back like a saddle, which involved a lot of bouncing around and trying to shift our weight. I somehow thought it would be more glamorous, like a maharajah or a dignified Queen Victoria or something, but riding on Hamun's neck was much more graceful, for both of us.

When we got to Ao Nang, the town in Krabi where we're staying, it was raining. This is because it rains more during September than any other month of the year in Krabi. Again, we did not bother to check this while we were making expensive decisions about where to go on vacation. Still, it's very nice here. Today we took a boat snorkeling beach tour of nearby islands with the rest of our group, and actually lucked out with partly cloudy weather. I am now bright pink despite repeated sunscreen applications. We went to the beach where the Leo DiCaprio movie of a few years back, "The Beach" was filmed. It was sort of disappointing, because there was a lot of litter on the beach, and this seems antithetical to Leo's "I'm such an environmentalist" stance. OK, so it's not solely DiCrapio's fault that the beach has fallen on shabbier times. But it is sad.

The rest of the tour was lovely and quintessentially tropical. The snorkeling was decent to very good, and the scenery was definitely wow-worthy. Limestone cliffs in weird formations, gravity-defying foliage, and twenty-five different shades of blue.

On our way home, we ran back into the clouds that'd been hugging the coast all day, and the weather turned very quickly. I joked to Lacey that it was just like
"The Perfect Storm" which was funny until the boat crew busted out the lifejackets and insisted we put them on. I'm not exaggerating when I say the ride back was extremely intense and slightly scary. It hailed on our heads, I got hit full in the face by the tops of many, many waves, and I think my ribs are now compounded into my tailbone from so many slams of my butt into the seat. The ride was exciting in an "oh my god we're going to die but not really" kind of way, and once we'd arrived safely on shore, I decided it was a safe bet that we're more badass than Leo. Yes, for sitting through a storm and occasionally shrieking. To console ourselves, and partly for medicinal purposes, we drank hot chocolate laced with Thai brandy when we got back.

Malaysia is next, the day after tomorrow. Ten hours on a bus. Ugh. Hooray for snacks and sleeping pills.

Hearts of Darkness

Among the many, many differences between me and the Thai people, this is one of the more unfortunate, and one of the more obvious: I sweat a lot in this climate. Thai people don't. As Lacey gracioulsy pointed out on our first outing into the streets of Bangkok, "Your face is covered with little droplets of sweat."

We had set off across the city in search of a super-cool contemporary art space/"concept mall" called Playgound, that turned out no longer existed, or was under extensive renovation or something. (uh, hello, memo to Lonely Planet) Then we went looking for a vegetarian restaurant called Tamarind, which was empty and bore a for rent sign. (See previous parenthetical aside) So we wandered around the up-market rich Thai people/ ex pat area of Bangkok (wayyy across town from our hotel) when it started to storm. Thunder, lightening, the whole bit. This was real, tropical, torrential, typhoon-style downpour. They don't call it the monsoon season for nothing.

Me: Lace, did you know this was the rainy season?
Lacey: Um. No. Did you?
Me: No idea... Hmm. Maybe we should have checked that before we left?

We made it back across town with a cabbie who shreiked whenever we hit a big puddle, or the rain got more intense, or we narrowly missed a tuk tuk. Not exactly reassuing, but he expertly navigated the roads-tunred-rivers and dropped us off at the hotel soaking, but fine.

Then, joy of joys, we got to take an overnight bus! This really reminded me of IHP, though we only did that once, and it was something we planned on our own. The bus was decorated in shimmering pastels (blue, purple and pink) and there was a psychadellic falling leaves theme throughout. We purchased dinner at the bus stations' 7-11 (which seems to have a total monopoly on the convenience store market here) and I ate a really intersting "crab stick and mayonaisse sandwich", "super extra barbecue" potato chips, and a heart-shaped doughnut with no hole from Dunkin Donuts. Just as we were settling down to sleep, the bus people provided, for our entertainment, some weird movie about a monster in a lake I think, starring James Van Der Beek of massive fame from the piviotal TV series "Dawson's Creek". It was dubbed in Thai, and they played it twice, back to back, even though everyone was asleep. The ride was not as awful as I'd originally anticipated, due to the indespensible "Simply Sleep" and of course earplugs.

Still, we crashed hard, for two hours, when we got to our jungle bungalows. Which are really awesome. We're right on the edge of Khao Sok national park, deep in the oldest rainforest IN THE WORLD. I suppose it's rather unfortunate that I'm reminded of every Vietnam movie I've ever seen-- but really, it DOES look just like Apocalypse Now! Huge limestone cliff/mountains protrude out of nowhere, and the jungle is dense and everywhere, and green green green-- I'm half expecting a bald Marlon Brando to be spying on us from behind a tree. We went tubing this afternoon, down a lazy river; it was wonderful, and pictaresque and again reminded me of too many movies. Then we went to a temple where we fed monkeys and took pictures of them (kind of fucked up and exploitative, but the monkeys seemed to enjoy it) and then we came back to our resort/hotel place and drank tropical drinks and ate delicious Thai food. (Dynamite, no surprises there.)

The rest of our group is mainly unfortunate, and no, I'm not just being an asshole. There are the pair of Irish girls I've decided to call Paris and Nicole, but with bad teeth, who light up their cigs at every available opportunity. There are two Scottish couples who look alarmingly alike, beyond their pale creamy complexions and rust colored hair, only I like one of the couples and not the other. (The one I don't like wore raincoats while we went tubing) There's also two British boys who are barely eighteen and behave accordingly, a sweet Japanese guy called Masa that I want to make friends with, two girls from Wales who are fine, and the only other Americans, lame Bostonians who actually FLEW here from Bangkok because they couldn't stand the idea of an overnight bus. Come on. I may bitch and moan, but I also know when to suck it up.

Lacey being quiet and shy, and me having a penchant for whispering more obviously than I think I am in front of people, I don't think our fellow group members are going to try especially hard to make friends. This suits me fine, as I am here to be with Lacey, and see stuff, and eat, and get as many more massages as possible.

Our one pineapple daquiri each seems to have gone straight to our heads, and I'm tired from too much movement and too little solid sleep. It gets dark quite early here this time of year (by seven PM) and I think I'm going to wash and then sleep sleep sleep.

ALSO-- We're going to ride elephants tomorrow!