So I’ve been looking to go back to Asia for most of the summer now, but have been discouraged by the price of tix. I went in ‘05 and even in Jan of ‘06 for around $800, but lately couldn’t find anything under $1100, and the difference in that sum is considerable when you know that once I’m settled in Laos I plan to budget about $15 a day. There was some oil fiasco most of the summer, and though the barrel price had dropped considerably by Labor Day, and the pumps reflected this, the airlines are hurting so bad they won’t let go anything gained - anything that justified the higher ticket prices. Finally I became resigned to paying a higher price and making the trip shorter. But there is a nagging fear that dogs the budget airline shopper: who’s about to run a supersale as soon as I buy this other ticket?

So it’s set now, Nov.2 I fly to what is not my first choice city (unexplored Hanoi) but still remains mighty Bangkok (the entire time I’m over there I dance around and carry a little boom box playing that obnoxious 80’s song, I think by Taco, ‘One night in Bangkok and the World’s your oyster…’ the ladies, and ladyboys just love it) and so wasn’t really suprised to open the travelzoo newsletter and see fucking $450 to BBK r/t from either Chicago or Denver, places I could have reached by bus and still have the trip come out way less, had money to buy gemstones to finace the entire venture and finally put that asshole Tom Shane out of buisness once and for all. Ho hum, but I comfort myself in knowing I would have had to fight like a dog to get a seat through any of those bargains and would have only one month by their limitations as opposed to the 5 and 1/2 weeks I’ll be enjoying. Still, the universe laughs - you just know it’s going to happen, then it does.

I also must console myself by thinking the way a friend does when he always mentions how amazing it is that we can go to the other side of the planet so quickly for half the cost of the ticket, when you look in the past at a journey that may have taken lifetimes/years/months and at a relatively higher cost. Of course, I subscribe to the idea that much of the journey is just getting there, so I would have loved to try it the way they did too: aboard a streamship; hearing the timbers creak in a sailing ship after being shanghi’ed from Portland (the most notorious port on the west coast into the early 20th century); stops on the way - seeing the King’s original longboard surfers in Hawaii; the spice islands of Indonesia; the Edo period in Japan; the opium wars in China; seeing Marco Polo and the monks steal silk, gunpowder, pizza and pasta from China; Kubali Khan setting up the first postal system across the vast expanse his daddy had whopped ass on; trying to get a grasp on Hindu cosmology by experiencing things from the origin-listening to whacked out yogi’s make starchatter; hunting mastadons across the Bering Strait; being a mite suckling off some wayward seagull who brings you to the strange new world…