Howdy everyone!

Greetings to you from very chilled-out Chiang Mai, in the north of Thailand. We’ve been here almost two weeks now, and found it to be an unexpected but great place to relax and recharge our batteries for the next bout of whirlwind activity and non-stop sight-seeing and experience-living. We leave for the Philippines (the “homeland”!) in a few days, and this seems like a good time to purge a few things from my mind, share the thoughts with you, and be ready to begin an altogether new chapter in a variety of ways.

I haven’t had a chance to write about all the awesome things we’ve been doing and seeing since we left off in India…I think that was about a million years ago? I have sat down to try dozens of times but the depths of even the simpler experiences have proven to be too engaging for my tendency for long-winded descriptions. Before I know it, I end up with 20 pages on my hands when I intended two paragraphs, and I haven’t been able to manage to whittle down my accounts of all the fun stuff we’ve done into acceptably abbreviated bite-sized portions. I’ll keep trying on that, but for now what I can do is fill you in on what’s going on in my internal world, if not yet all the millions of things that have happened in the external one.

A part of me has been in a bit of a mental bog lately. You see, Ray and I realize that everything we do in this world and especially online can have potentially far-reaching and long-lasting effects. This can be both a less-than-favorable or even downright bad thing, or it can be an absolutely awesome thing (we definitely aim for the latter, of course). The thing we’ve found though is that where those lines are drawn isn’t always especially clear, or that those lines sometimes aren’t drawn at all, and it just comes down to a personal decision.

For example, we came up here to Chiang Mai eager to do some of the “hilltribe treks”, both to stretch our legs (and in my case, my comfort zone, as I despise hiking, solo ascent of Humphreys Peak in Flagstaff before departure notwithstanding), as well as learn about the different people of the country. I especially was interested in the Karen Long Necks, of whom I had first heard while on a visit during college to Ripley’s Believe it or Not museum in Los Angeles. But as soon as we got up here, we were beseeched by two of our new travel friends from a meet-up of fellow travelers and bloggers, both of whose perspectives and opinions we admired and respected, not to partake in the “human zoo” and to stay far away from the treks. I had never even heard of the Long Necks aside from the random trip to the random museum in LA, so I never would have guessed they’d be touristed heavily enough to have become a dehumanized spectacle. For that, I was glad for the heads-up to exercise some serious ethical consideration, rather than just going blindly and ignorantly and contributing negatively and negligently to an existing problem. But at the same time, I was still interested in seeing them in person, and if there were legitimate concerns about the industry that maybe other tourists should be made aware of, a part of me felt like “but if I were to see the situation firsthand for myself and in turn be able to spread awareness knowledgeably”, mightn’t that offset my negative “ethical carbon footprint” ten-fold? …What to do?

Or the tigers? We’ve visited two facilities that enable an up-close-and-personal experience with tigers, one in Kanchanaburi and one here in Chiang Mai. Online research yielded not just the how’s and what time’s to get there, but also surfaced questions from people who had done it before, and had me watching out for signs of drugging and asking myself the questions of whether this was right or wrong to engage in and whether we should be there, no matter how rare an opportunity. What to do?

Ping pong shows? Are we contributing to the degradation of women by attending what has got to be one of the oddest inventions on the face of the earth? Or is it yet another side of Bangkok and human reality that should be known, acknowledged, and brought to discussion? What to do?

Live crucifixions? Is it utmost devotion or religious mockery? Am I a conscientious traveler for following through my opportunity to experience such an undeniably fascinating, if disturbing, act of human belief or am I another idiot gawking tourist making a spectacle out of a solemn occasion with my very presence? What to do?

Burma/Myanmar? It’s a country that doesn’t even register as a blip on our radar as mid-20s, 9-5er Americans. Or at least it didn’t on mine, especially not before planning this trip through the region, and even then just enough to cross it off the itinerary because it was maybe unsafe, and apparently broached all kinds of ethical issues to visit anyway. So I just crossed it off the list of Asian countries since I’d never heard much about it before anyway, unlike say Japan or China. But being on the ground here, it has come up several times, and in fact has unilaterally been encouraged to go visit by people who have themselves been there and who we consider to be good, ethical, mindful and responsible travelers (including, most enthusiastically in fact, those who opposed visiting the Long Necks). There are still considerations certainly, but there are ways to minimize the negative impact, meanwhile providing ourselves with some potentially very enlightening and enriching personal experiences and understandings unique to this sole time and opportunity. Done “correctly”, with our visit if we could contribute good things directly to people who apparently need it, and furthermore be able to spread greater awareness of some facts and realities, not just about these far-off people and their far-off situation but about things we as a global society really probably ought to be thoughtful and aware of…What to do?

And lastly, on the question of “correctness”: this blog and site, and along with it, the way we live our daily lives over here. I’ve defended our decisions in the comments section of the blog before, but thanks to another recent one, I think it’s time to explain our broader scope with this trip once and for all, because frankly I’m tired of the “Travel: You’re doin it wrong!” mentality.

We haven’t posted nearly as much throughout this trip as we had hoped and thought we’d be able to because it’s been so happily full-on. However, at the same time we birthed the idea of the trip, we also birthed the idea of essentially launching our own sort of small business with said trip by gearing it to generate some sort of sustainable income, largely through this site, to help keep us traveling, as well as to build upon more once home. We figured books, talks, articles, and whatnot would also be eventually forthcoming, but unless someone approaches us to do them along the way, they would probably be relegated to post-trip, when we would have more time and focus to put into finding and pursuing the opportunities. So for now on the trip, we decided we’d work at honing our skills (primarily writing and programming respectively), our style, our voices, and our work-experience. This isn’t actually a “career break” or a “vacation” to us. It’s an awesome trip as well as a chance for us to find and create who we are and who we want to be professionally. And hopefully in so doing, we’ll also generate some on-the-road supplemental travel funds through our site and through the opportunities having the site enables us to have. We’d saved as much as we could for the trip of course, and I hope it will be enough for all we want to do for as long as we want to be gone…but there’s no way to plan for sure for a trip this long. People ask what our daily budget is sometimes, but we don’t have a daily budget; there’s no way. You can’t calculate 20 countries’ worth of budget in 20 different kinds of currency over a 3-year period in a hugely and constantly fluctuating economy. And money considerations aside, writing and sharing is cathartic for us, comforting for friends and family who care about us, and potentially useful for total strangers interested in similar lifestyle pursuits or lifestyle careers.

But there’s been a constant running commentary in my mind that is crowding out my ability to function for myself. I’m tired of it, and I’m giving it the big shove-off. This is my life, dammit. I put 100% of myself into every moment I’ve got, everything I do, and try to do my damnedest with every person I meet. While this is, I would think?, a positive characteristic outwardly, it can be prove to be a little maddening when you’re stuck inside the head with this person, which I am. I want (Ray and I both want, actually) to share this journey with all of you that we know and all those that we might, and to form our experiences in such a way that might somehow benefit your life as well. We want to be available too for maybe others who are interested in doing similar things, chasing similar seemingly-difficult and challenging dreams and ideas, but don’t know how or if it’s worthwhile to go for it.

But we get so stuck on how to best maximize our voice and our chance for public platform to express ourselves, we end up getting ourselves stuck on trying to answer an impossible question of “How” to do that, and so remain mute. This bothers us because by being absent from the site, in essence we’re being absent from half of the trip we wanted to take and half of the experience we set out to have. I realize now after facing a string of other unanswerable, non-black-and-white questions within the trip like whether it would have been worse to experience the “human zoo” for myself or if it’s worse now that I didn’t, that my nagging internal question of “How” best to share this trip is also unanswerable. So the reason the site has been un-updated more than not is two-fold: sure we’re busy loving the hell out of this trip and petting tigers and standing on elephants and diving underwater and seeing temples and world treasures and all that awesomeness (as the commenter was so concerned we’d somehow not be doing on the trip, back in January when we thought we’d take his concerns to heart). But it’s not like that’s all you DO on a 3-year journey! We get tired after a few days or a few weeks of go go go go go enjoy enjoy enjoy enjoy every day. Because GUESS WHAT! On a round-the-world (or round-Asia) trip, it’s not all about sight-seeing, doing, interacting, carpe diem-ing, and running around seeing awesome things constantly. Omg our heads would explode.

It’s also about finding a balance; learning about yourself and just how many awesome experiences CAN I take in a row before I really just want to watch an episode or 30 of House? You learn about what’s important to you, and what’s not. In my case, I’m also learning how to find my voice and when to use it, and what it sounds like, what I WANT it to sound like. That’s an important part of this trip for me, and an important part of my life and future. And you know what, random commenter who is happy to judge anytime we dare decide to work on the site and share what we’ve done ALONGSIDE petting tigers and visiting the Taj Mahal twice in five months, yet is too cowardly to use your name (or even the same name twice?…Yeah, we know.)? I don’t care if you aren’t enjoying our journey. I don’t care if you think we are living our lives wrong and can’t believe that we would concern ourselves with something like our HARD DRIVE CRASHING and taking thousands of words and photos with it. Then piss off and stop reading!

I was trained as a writer and a photographer, and this is what I DO. This aspect of the journey to me is just as big as the trip itself. It IS the trip itself to me, as it is to Ray, who loves learning about and running this site (as well as his new tech-travel-focused one, www.thetravelingcoder.com). We didn’t take this trip to run away from things. We didn’t take it to avoid our lives or the things we’d worked up to for all our lives previous to the Phx-Chicago-New Delhi flights we stepped on in August. This is a CONTINUATION of our lives, not a break from it. When the living-out-of-a-backpack and crossing some 20,000 borders over these three years comes to a close, I’ve got books upon books to write and photos to publish, and students to talk to/teach/learn from, and I want to be on top of my game and ready to hit the ground running with that. Ray’s got sites to build and run and things to program and pupils to share it all with. And we LIKE that, that’s where we’re looking forward to going. This trip is helping us get there. And in a funny, twisted sort of way, so have you.

I have thus far spent a lot of time passively or actively taking in others’ opinions and thoughts to ensure I wouldn’t by oversight deny myself the bigger picture that I seek. But now that we’ve started seeing what kind of personal decisions are out there to be made, and with this most recent comment on our blog, I have realized a major chapter has been turned in our journey and in my development as a traveler, writer, and a person. Maybe we won’t make any money after all, because no one liked what we had to say. But with this newest comment, I realized some people aren’t going to like what we have to say no matter what. OH. WELL. We’re just going to do our best, and they can go sit on it. So while I will always endeavor to keep an open mind and take peoples’ suggestions and even criticisms into consideration lest they have a good point that I am overlooking that may in fact resonate with my sense of truth and correctness, as someone I really rather have to get along with and not be annoyed by, I am also ready to break free of the degree of self-doubt and self-consciousness that I have consciously or unconsciously been living under since we began this trip. We are not n00bs anymore; we’ve been on the road almost 8 months and while there is always more to aspire to and others worthy of aspiring to be like, I for one have a pretty good idea of how I want to change my approach thus far.

Yep you might end up with an occasional (or frequent) post on here that is longer than the “most-blog-readers-prefer” allotted pithy 5 paragraphs or more palatable “10 Reasons Why You Should…” lists. And even if this is by rights a travel blog/site, you may have to deal with my philosophizing frequently enough to warrant its very own post tag, and all you wanted was a description of what the beach in Phuket looked like. I may even tell you about how we’ve spent two weeks in Chiang Mai, a place that has all kinds of cool stuff to see and do, museums, whitewater rafting, more temples than you can shake a stick at…and “all” we have to show for it is a sweet visit to the tigers, a visa run to Burma and Laos during which we saw the awesome white temple and drank cobra-infused whiskey with two new Kiwi friends, several yes AMERICAN meals and some excellent MEXICAN food (yep which we “could have stayed home and gotten” – but we didn’t stay home! So SHUT UP, voices in my head!), two visits to the awesome Sunday night market, and a sudden and possibly heartbreaking (prognosis still forthcoming) hard drive crash, but besides all that in two weeks…we did a WHOLE LOT OF HANGING OUT IN OUR ROOM, staying up ridiculously late, sleeping in ridiculously late, and enjoying the hell out of getting to do whatever we feel like doing – or NOT doing whatever we DON’T feel like doing, even if we “really should”. I felt guilty about doing such 3 months ago when we were in Varanasi. I don’t feel guilty about it this time.

Now it’s just the reality of the matter; this is a long ass trip, and we are in it for the long haul. Thinking that we can just be go go go all the time in every place we go is not just unfavorable, it’s stupid. And I have but a simple brain; if I’m going to be able to even attempt to hash out answers to those impossible questions like “should I witness things firsthand so as to be better educated about them or not”, I need my downtime, and my writing to process it all. I will share some of it publicly for anyone who wants to glean either insight about me personally as one of your friends/family members, or who wants to see an insider’s look at what life on the road is like, what some of the issues are out here (whether or not I can figure out in the time allotted whether they are “right” or “wrong”) and insomuch as I can, help you to do the same if that’s what you endeavor to do.

I’ll do my best here on the fly, but the perfect and polished version of all this will just have to wait for my book. But if you’re waiting for the perfect and polished version of my Life, and I’m talkin to you one more time before I banish you from my mind forever, buddy: this is the best you’re gonna get. Take it or leave it.