Please Don't Stop the Music

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  Paro, Paro, Bhutan
Saturday, April 26, 2008

I spent a LONG day of travel from Mabul via KL to Bangkok to position
for Bhutan. The car service for the hour route to the airport broke
down on its way to get me and there were no taxis in the village where
I was dropped off. What the hell was I going to do? Public bus of
course. I boarded a small van (think transportation for a high school
tennis team) and it was filled to the gills with locals. Here we go.
Well, there were about ten minutes of silence as I imagined they were
sizing up why I was smashed in this small bus and the lack of chatter
of any sorts was more than a little awkward. Then a sixty or so odd
man to my left shouted something up to the driver. What happened next
was unimaginable. The driver pulled on a plastic box in the cieling
and a small flat screen popped down. As if it were happening in slow
motion I watched him press the power button. The screen energized and
to reveal a placid scene of a modern apartment block and two clean
cut Asians looking lovingly at one another as they playfully cut
vegetables I knew this could only mean one thing....
KARAOKE!!!!!!! The words popped up, the music kicked in and people on
the bus started to just go for it. I was ecstatic. Why on Earth would
anone choose another form of transportation when the public vans were
cheap and brimming with Malaysian Idols. Borneo is called the Kland
beneath the wind" but the moniker should read "the land of the answer
is blowing in the wind". Huge for my life.

I met a Dutch guy named Marco at the airport who was traveling the
same route from Borneo to Bangkok. He was a fishing fanatic and had
been travelling between remote fishing villages in Indonesia,
Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand over the last 18 months to live
with the villagers and fish. Not a bad way to spend some time. We
chatted for a while and ended up geting seats next to one another,
asking about our travels and trying to see what new spots should be
popping up on my radar. After hearing his stories about the cities he
visited between villages and his "activities" there I realised he was
not only trolling for barracuda but also had a lure out for young
women of the region. Yup he was a sex tourist. Plain and simple. Things
got awkward from that point of enlightenment and I feigned sleep for
the entire second flight to avoid any other over-shares.

This blog is going to need to go silent for the next two weeks as I
leave the modern world and embark on a 16 day trek through the
Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan. "Basic" would be an understatement when
it comes to describe this hidden country. With television not being
introduced until the 1990s, internet just arriving in a limited
capacity, daily power blackouts (that is in the"big cities with the
capital having a whooping 15000 people...yup many universities are
larger) and the national past-time being archery this is going to get
intense....almost as intense of my love for run on sentences.

I'll catch you all on the other end!

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