Bangkok is amazing. Stinky, swealteringly hot, smoggy, loud, filthy, and amazing. Lunch was delicious and cost less than $1.00. I just got measured for some dress shirts and slacks and we’re off to dinner now, to be followed by the night market. Flying to Krabi in the morning.

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

I’m in a delightfully modern two-story suite outside New Plymouth tonight, and the king-sized bed waiting for me upstairs is almost a foreign concept at this point. It has been ages since I’ve slept on anything larger than a twin, and not having my feet hang off the mattress edge will be a welcome luxury.

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.

I woke up in a hostipal bed at 5am on Saturday morning (March 1st).

Okay, let me back up.  I met a couple people at Moose McGillicutty’s after work on Friday and had a drink and an order of fish and chips.  We then wandered around looking for the right place to go into downtown, you many know that I despise going out around the Gaslamp area.  We settled on Star Bar on E Street where we had a couple drinks and bantered about work.  From there I said we should hed to Hamilton’s in South Park, and everyone agreed so I jumped on my bike and raced up the hill into South Park and chugged a couple pints of water before everyone else got there.  I introduced myself to a man there who had a dog and I told him how much I miss having a pet like that around to play with.  As far as I know I was fine when I left the bar to ride the 2 miles home from Hamilton’s.

The story after that had to be gotten from a phone number I found stuffed inside my backpack on Saturday afternoon.  Apparently I managed to run myself into the trunk of a parked car halfway home.  The man I talked to heard a crash and checked outside and found me laying unconcious in the road.  He called an ambulance and I was taken to the hospital and cleaned-up.  They did some scans to make sure I hadn’t broken anything and they came out clean, no broken skull.  As soon as the nurse said I could leave I did.  I jumped on my bike, stupid idea, and rode home from a Hospital near SDSU.

I am alright.  I came out of the whole ordeal with a fat lip, a bruised nose, a little skuff on my hairline, and a pretty bad headache.

New rule, no riding home from a bar alone.

I remember an occasion in high school when I discussed with a friend what it would be like if a year’s worth of rain fell all at once—dozens of inches of water falling as a solid sheet before slamming into the earth. We talked about how odd it would look, and how much damage the phenomenon might do.

The rain that fell at dusk reminded me of that hypothetical deluge. We got indoors after a spectacular boat tour through Doubtful Sound just in time to watch the sky abandon its moisture in a completely manic frenzy. Every horizontal surface had standing water on it. All the gutters along the roof failed, unable to shunt off the volume quickly enough. Visibility was comically reduced. I thought back to the monsoon rains that seemed to visit San Diego every April, but this was far more impressive.

The best part of it all was staying dry while nursing a beer. (Speight’s Gold, my favorite NZ ale thus far. Brewed in Dunedin.)

Kiwis don’t rinse the soap suds off their dishes before placing them in the rack to dry, and I’m ready to hypothesize that some sort of related glycerin buildup in the brain is what’s causing so many people down under to hallucinate that mullets are fashionable. Maybe it’s the Eurotrash influence, too. I’d rant about the crocs, but that particular epidemic is scorching the States as well.

As did Troy in Amsterdam, I heard Mambo #5 on a ‘modern hits’ radio station while on the freeway in Auckland. Tangentially, it seems kids my age have yet to get past the house techno that the Bay Area so thoroughly wore out in the 90s. I tried to name-drop Justice or SebastiAn, but if it doesn’t have a Roland 505 with the Cliché knob set to MAX, I guess some people just can’t be bothered. To be fair, I saw hordes of Keffiyeh-wearing hipsters in Wellington, but I was too shy to throw myself at them and ask about the latest Iron & Wine album like a lost, dehydrated waif begging for water at the edge of a desert oasis.

Meanwhile, I’m more tan than I’ve been in years, and am running, so to speak—trying to stay ahead of the throbbing, ominous thunderhead of existential crisis gathering on the horizon. (A very common theme for young adults, really, and I invoke it mostly in jest. Mostly.) I never thought living out of a suitcase for weeks on end could come so easily to an anal-retentive bore like me.