India Photoglut Pt.1: Don’t Milk the Mountain Goat

Friends, we have arrived, at last, in India. India: land of cows. Land of curry. Land of Kolkata. Other things beginning with a percussive /k/. Fully one-half of our Big Wild Asia Megasojourn occurred within India, and I have lots and lots to say about its ups, its downs, and its soggy, curd-filled middles. But before we get to that, let us now, as we always must, sit through a round of Michael’s photography. Don’t think you can just traipse in here and scoop up only the words. Sometimes you need to endure my other hobbies, so that I can give the old word-grinder (that’s what I call my brain) a rest.

India: let’s look at it.

Vietnam Photoglut: Bay of Descending Pretty Things

And thus we have reached Vietnam, dear travellers. Having already been to righteous ‘Nam before, I was excited to return: to see new cities, to explore new sites, and to eat so much soup that my belly grows distended, pops, and floods a low-rent hostel room with local beef and vermicelli. We hoofed around the north, the south, and that middle part, and all of it was very pretty. When I returned to Canada, I learned how to use my copy of photoshop starting with these very pictures! (Interesting sidenote: the main photo my friend used to teach me photoshop is not included here. We chose this photo because it included a pony, and also an enormous pony boner which she spent careful time removing and replacing with with sky or grass or whatever was behind the horse. Scrubbing the photo of that equine erection helped to illustrate the majority of the tools I wanted to learn how to use anyway. This file is still saved on my computer, under the filename “horsedong.jpg”. Don’t ever use my computer.)

What was I talking about? Oh. Vietnam sure is great!

Laos Photoglut: Monk River and Abandoned Buddhist Statuary

Friends, we have come once again to the borderlands, to the threshold of another strange country. New roads, new mountains, new forests. New soups. As always, I have battalions of words doing Civil War re-enactments in my brain, fighting towards the frontline of my keyboard. What do I want to tell you about first? Monk boys leaping into a quick-flowing river on a hazy summer day? A hidden forest atop a magical waterfall? The looming spectre of dozens of dead Australians, wrecked by crystal methamphetamine and poorly placed rope swings? The words fall over themselves attempting to get out, I am strangled and left silent by having just too many anecdotes. In lieu: the fine art of photosmithing. Bask.

Mid-Thailand Elephant Extravaganza

Prepare for elephant time.

Jan Peng is eighty years old and has a marigold wound through her ear. She is blind in one eye, a wound from an old handler when she reacted to some slight or another. She is enormous and still strong, and grows cautiously used to our presence, mostly because our presence necessarily includes all the watermelon and banana she can eat.

Most of the elephants here have seen hard lives. They’ve been broken and worked from a young age, either used for logging or corralled into the tourism industry. There are broken bones, ruined limbs, blind eyes. They are mighty creatures, but that has not meant safety from cruelty. Still, the park is safe. The mountain is safe. They have this forest, and this river, and this field.

Thailand Photoglut: Imagine Some Dumb Pun on “Phuket”

Well, dear friends, it’s that time again. The tumult of words I have for you to describe my vacation is virtually endless, and yet those words still take time to percolate. To simmer. To stew. I must add delightful verbal spices and boil off my various grammatical cul-de-sacs before I can present you your fresh, steaming pile of sweet, sweet essays. And so, let us bask in pictures of Thailand which, as you may already know, is a very beautiful place. Elephants! Golden temples! Stunning beaches! Fire-breathing dragons, perhaps! It’s a land of wonder. Let’s go.

Malaysia Photoglut: Do You Want to Break Free?

During the few times where we were not sitting in food courts being entranced by mostly-Mandarin karaoke singing (but for one charming Chinese-Malaysian nymph that sang a bunch of Queen, but we’ll save those stories for another time), we occasionally went sight-seeing. Sight-seeing! Us! Doin’ things in another country! Malaysia is a country of fairly interesting and harmonious triarchal multiculturalism, resulting in wicked-cool temples and mosques and mandirs wedged in all over the place. It also does good things for their cuisine. They are also maybe the nicest people on the entire planet.

But you didn’t come here for my stupid words, or my dum-dum observations of Malaysian culture. Those are for next Tuesday. No, today, you are here for the pictures! Lubricate your eyeballs with vaseline and get ready to look at things!

Taipei Photoglut: Liver Delivery

As I am currently fending off a particularly noxious strain of fever and insomnia, my ability to cogently string together human communicative fragments into your beloved, bourgeoisie “sentences” has declined. It took me three tries to write that sentence, and I’m relatively confident it was in English. If not, take the various constituent parts and construct, if you will, a hilarious insight about me, the world, or the human condition. I know you can do it.

While I convalesce, here are some vacation photos from Taipei, a quaint little burg in northern Taiwan, with some mad dumpling skillz. Watch and read and maybe don’t expect a lot in the way of interstitial commentary.

Bali Photoglut: I Can’t Wait For Egging Season

Oh, what a deceitful writer I am. You see, while I seemed to be plugging away in the word mines, gaily chipping at verbiage ore to polish and refine and bring to you, my doleful consumers, I was actually not here. I mined all these glorious gems of literary spew weeks ago! Really, I was in Indonesia and Taiwan for the past two weeks while the internet aided me with my gentle ruse. Though you thought me sweating profusely over my keyboard, furiously slamming my worn, calloused digits into the letters, I was actually drunk on a beach somewhere, which is really my natural state. Will you forgive me? I imagine you will when you cast your eyes on this here photographia.

Did you know Bali was mad pretty? Let’s talk about it.

Tokyo Photoglut: A Vending Machine for Every Occasion

I have a lot to say about Tokyo, most of which I will probably say very soon in this space. But for now: Tokyo, Japan is weird in every single way I could possible have wanted it to be, and a weekend is nowhere near enough time to revel in its glorious absurdities. That said, we certainly did try–I don’t think I’ve ever travelled so hard, hoofed around that much of a city, nor seen so many things in so little time. I was well-fed and well-weirded and my eyeballs were never without things to gawp at. Every last yen I spent (and that’s a lot, because, as you may already know, HOLY CRAPBALLS Japan is expensive) was worth it for an unyielding battery of bizarre. Let us feast our eyes on both the nutty and the pretty, both of which Tokyo has in abundance.

Busan Photoglut: The Fishening

The prescient amongst you may have foreseen that my claims to have new words for you were folly, and that actually, instead, you would have to endure some more of my photos! I know, I know: I am a cruel and capricious writer, and you thirst for my words, and my continued holding back is like a metaphorical, ongoing cinnamon challenge of choking silence, but soon I will return to you with words. Like Friday.

I took my cousin Zack on a weekend trip to sunny seaside Busan, Korea’s answer to California, without any of the surfing, bros, or puku shell necklaces. Such beachtown obnoxiou-phernalia was replaced, instead, by enormous aquariums, open-air fish markets (which many guides to Korea proudly claim to be the “smelliest place on Earth!”), numerous encounters with tentacles, and enormous swaths of beautiful coast. Also lanterns, because I seem to only ever go to Busan on or before Buddha’s birthday. Anyway, behold: Busan!