BART, barbecued filet mignon, and a gadget/water fountain/LED-studded jacuzzi in Hayward; baby turkeys and almost hitting a startled vulture with my bike; distressingly avant-garde ballet in Stern Grove, tandem bikes in Golden Gate park followed by spicy hot chocolate in Pacific Heights; smokey air and gibbous moons like blood oranges; river trips, toe-curious fish, deep and chilly water, skinny dipping and cliff jumping in a private sanctuary spotted on Google’s satellite maps; Troy Tuesday at Laszlo with amazing crab tostadas, Ratatat and sauntering home with bagged-up Sparks, walking miles around the Mission District in search of the perfect necklace; B movies and glasses full of Baby Guinness; baby fawns and picking blackberries; cycling and cycling and hill climbing and finally installing a second bottle cage so I don’t get dehydrated in the oppressive heat; seeing the milky way on after-dinner walks and finally learning to consistently locate Polaris; receiving bourbon in the mail that’s so good my brain stutters; a proper picnic dinner—baguette, camembert, goat cheese with herbs, prosciutto, garlic feta orzo, and an olive medley—in the park with cherries and a good Cabernet.

Duolab reunion next weekend!

Oh, and my Thailand shots are all on Flickr now too. Validate my leisure!

Above is a photo I took at Cathedral Cove in mid-February. Now pay close attention to 00:42 in the theatrical trailer I’ve embedded below.

Middle-aged woman in Hat Yai airport with “BURBCURRY” embroidered in a pastel rainbow down the leg of her jeans. [Probably one of my favorite engrish sightings.]

DOG BALLS
CAT BALLS
MOTH BALLS
[The ever-present stray dogs and cats were never neutered, naturally. Some of those dogs had the biggest nuts, and they were usually all chapped and covered in sand. Woo! I couldn’t even recall the last time I’d seen feline testicles in the states. As for the moth balls, well, they seemed to be the fashionable substitute for urinal cakes wherever we went. It was like peeing in my grandma’s closet.]

Brunch cooked by katoey! [I was a big fan of having my chocolate chip pancakes cooked by a ladyboy every morning on Ko Lipe. The novelty wore off by day four, but only a little. PS: The trannies in Thailand were all masters of bershon, especially those working at tourist-heavy restaurants.]

While things weren’t drug-addled enough to be called ‘gonzo’ in the sense that Hunter S. Thompson coined, there were definitely stretches of sensory overload during my too-short two weeks in Thailand. Beginning with the damp, scorching heat that slammed into me the second Fonty, Elise and Troy escorted me from the air-conditioned airport, the country felt like a rapid series of over-saturated snapshots. A Lomographic flip book, but invading all five senses.

Bangkok was bonkers. We invited it by staying on the periphery of Khao San Road. I could try to describe things in terms of globalization/tourism/culture flow, but I’m feeling less pedantic (read: less dickish) than usual, so I’ll say it like this: we were on a well-worn path, but one which is renowned for its healthy dose of anarchy. Chaos and knock-off designer goods stretched as far as the eye could see.

My first full day in the city was spent taking in the two opposite ends of its spectrum—the royal palace and its neighboring multitude of gilded monuments in the afternoon, then a ping pong show come night. The least depressing moments of the latter involved my cohorts being hit with flying objects. The rest was pretty tragic. (The pussy tricks, not the sacred royal treasures.)

36 hours after I landed in Bangkok, we flew south to Krabi. From there, a boat escorted us a half hour west to Railay Beach, which would be our home for the next four nights. ฿2000 ($62) per night got us an air-conditioned room and a spacious bathroom with a flushing toilet. The price—split four ways—was by far the most we would spend on lodging in Thailand. We were royalty! There was a pool 30 feet from our door! There was a busty Swedish girl sunbathing topless at the pool every afternoon! We tanned, we snorkeled, we ate, we drank, and we (well, Fonty) made friends with some of the rock climbers who flocked to Railay for the vertical limestone walls jutting from the ground all around us. We flirted with cheap Thai whiskey and took pictures of our butts in empty restaurants at 2:00 in the morning. Later, after a six hour pool+beer marathon, we slept for a few hours, hurridly packed our crap, and caught a boat back to the mainland at dawn.

From there, we took a ‘VIP bus’ (filthy, beat-up minivan) five hours south to Pakbara. Following that was a speedboat which sprinted us two hours west to the island of Ko Lipe. The island could be crossed with a 15 minute walk and was surrounded by the bluest, most beautiful water I have ever seen. We ate more cheap, awesome food, we snorkeled more (with equipment rented from Porn Resort), we drank in bars cobbled together from driftwood, and we spent many hours laying on white sand in the crystalline sunlight while young boys alternated between fetching us cold beers and sneaking ice into our bathing suits. One afternoon, as we read our books on the porch, rain fell so furiously that my first reaction was laughter. After what felt like an eternity of lazy, sun-drenched days, we headed back, opting to fly out of Hat Yai, which was only two hours’ drive from Pakbara.

Once back in Bangkok, we shopped. It was intoxicating—a helpful exchange rate paired with manufacturing abilities light years ahead of other tourist countries like Mexico. The knockoff Wayfarers and Burberry duffel I secured from Chatuchak market have yet to cease entertaining me. We all got massages ($12 for 90 minutes, natch) near Siam Square, which was full of trendy teenagers, complete with competing boy bands. We also trekked out to Kanchanaburi to see Erawan Falls (seven tiers, yo), and the tour included a tiger-petting stop. The day before our departure, the girls and I took a lengthy cooking class from an energetic woman whose maniacally type A personality had spawned four successful restaurants in Bangkok.

To get back to California, I first had to backtrack to Auckland. This meant two twelve-hour flights in as many days. Troy and the girls, on the other hand, got bumped to business class. Bitches.

This is on top of the fact that there are almost always one or two wild turkeys hunting for bugs below the deck to the west (sometimes a parade of two dozen or more will mosey on through), and on my first bike outing I noted both coyote and bear scat within 200 yards of the house.

Welcome to the boonies, population: me.

Despite the punishing jet lag, I had a blast dilly-dallying in SF for a couple nights after my return flight from Auckland. Within two hours of running the gauntlet at customs I was drinking noon-time beers with Kevin and the lil’ bro at their place of employ, and things only got better from there. Still on the To Do list: many return trips to Latin America Club, playing with Troy’s new fixie, drinking the Rambow boys under the table, and hopefully a house party or two with Mac’s new co-workers.

The return to my home town has been a bit surreal thus far, but there are a couple of exciting things coming up that should prove thoroughly engaging. Meanwhile, I’m like a walking blizzard as the too-good-to-be-true tan flees my body with traitorous assistance from the dry mountain air.

Thailand is still percolating. Bear with me.

My cat’s breath smells like two turds fucking.

Dostoyevsky: The only women who will put up with a mentally-overwrought emo twit are whores, and God is rad.

Tolstoy: Bitches be craaaaaazy. Can’t live with ‘em, can’t stop ‘em from cheating on you. Also, God is rad.

Fairly relevant, if you ask me.

I’m back in Auckland now, and I depart for SF tomorrow. I should have written about Thailand, but the country, the city, the people, the beaches and everything else seem beyond description. I’ll try breaking the trip into discrete portions and tackling it piece by piece. But not tonight. Later.

Did I mention it’s hot here? My eyeballs are sweating. My teeth are sweating.

I most recently dallied in Wellington after saying goodbye to the south island and ferrying back over Cook Straight. My last couple nights have been spent in a room shared with five other travelers, some of whom hailed from countries that shun deodorant. Despite its 300 busy beds, the YHA Wellington hostel was surprisingly efficient and clean, and I certainly can’t blame the establishment for the hygiene of my roommates. Within hours of checking in I found myself drinking a couple English blokes and a pair of Welsh girls under the table, and I won a complimentary Guinness t-shirt for my efforts. The next day’s wind gusts were strong enough to cause me and my fellow pedestrians to lurch about unpredictably as we walked—the “Windy Welly” moniker is well-deserved.

After speeding too quickly through the books I hauled across the Pacific, and being too thrifty to restock with overpriced fluff (outrageously, trade paperbacks are NZ$20-30 and every second-hand bookstore I sought out was picked clean of all but usual Danielle Steele garbage), I decided to purchase a couple meatier novels that could give me more bang for the buck. In other words, I bought discounted classics with an eye towards maximizing reading hours per dollar spent. I ended up with 1400 pages of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky (for NZ$25), and holy shit I can’t wait to wallow in some gratuitous laser-titty sex alien holodeck DNA-splicing spaceship moon-jewels crypto-jizz while my poor neurons work to forget that 19th century Russia ever existed.

Briefly, some other highlights that have transpired since I last posted: turned 25 in Invercargill, NZ’s southern-most city; bungy jumped from the Karawau Bridge 143 feet into the brilliant, turquoise river below; visited two glaciers in as many days; woke up and watched thirty-odd dolphins playfully cruise up the coast across the street from the night’s modest lodgings in Kaikoura; and ate for dinner a wild pig which had been shot in the expansive, grassy valley behind our motel in Blenheim.

Now to succumb to sleep while the river below fills my head with soothing white noise. Six days ’til Thailand. Six days ’til 50 cent beers, exquisite $4 meals, depraved ping pong shows, malaria medication, unbelievable waterfalls, even dirtier eurotrash backpackers, and drinking buddies who can sympathize with my unspeakably strong burrito cravings.