Spirit Journey

I am starting a new tour guide service for SE Asia. Primarily it will be Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand.

Spirit Journey

Wet Winter Wednesday

Antifreeze in my veins-

bones bend

under pressure of winter winds

and driving rains-

my skin, cracked like desert plains-

melody within keeps me sane-

without hate or disdain-

smile and skip

like childhood games.

Sweet Melody

Her eyes were fixated on the skies 

just above the eastern horizion

and my hands were focused on her legs

just beyond her thighs and

she sung a sweet melody

that made me want to cry but

her soul was so pure

my eyes remained dry

I couldn't look away

no matter how I tried

i lived a life and a half

every time she sighed

once she turned away from me

and something in me died

but I gathered myself like a man

and took it all in stride

contented by the fact that

her smile had never lied

my sweet melody

Everything is poison

Everything is poison

the foods we eat

the bed we sleep

the dusty wind

my cracking skin

the diet coke

life's dying hope

everything is poison

a life of sin

Phnom Penh

this cigarette

all my regrets

what we remember

what we forget

everything is poison

aspartame

the holy name

waging war

being poor

everything is poison

exhaust fumes

pending doom

metorites

diet sprite

high fructose

we eat the most

everything is poison

a homeless face

no saving grace

the corporate ladder

nothing matters

everything is poison

and yet

i will not quit

breathing in

making spit

pumping blood

made of mud

cause everything is poison

but life is the cure

And So the Sun

The sun sets in the west

some distant place

also my - home

vast flyovers

winding hills

snow filled balleys

wind swept plains

the stagnant decay of 

simple living

we grow fat from

the filler in KFC

and Mickey D's

consume factory made food

with delight

our waists grow

matching the distant

horizon

where the sun sets

in the West.

I long to head west

beyond the setting sun

if I am lucky

and fast

Arrival will be as the sun

rises in the East

shining on fileds of soy and rice

watching the glisten of

early morning fishing lines

catching sunrays

wrangling in food

made in nature

true delight

the enduring cycle of 

simple living

test and tuned by

time and tradition

Yes, the sun sets in the west

but rises in the east

finding a beginning in the end

reborn in the 

crimson glow of 

A new day

bittersweet rebirth

perched atop a spinning world

with two distant lands 

that both feel

like home

Why, How, When

I used to ask WHY
until I learned the excitement of asking HOW
But HOW has been replaced with WHEN
And it turns out that the answer is usually NOW - do something, Spirit Journey

My Life in Vietnam, Part 10: Get Out Now

I am going to skip ahead again by a day. There are events that happened at Hotel 68 that I am not quite ready to write about. But you should know that it is possible to hack into the in room surveillance system with a RF remote control, computer, and tv.  In fact, some entrepreneurial expats have found a way to do so. It is the greatest of breaches of privacy that I can imagine and my soul cannot easily rehash the events I am referring to. I accessed this system and having this knowledge made me uneasy. Afraid for my life.

“I have to get out of Vietnam!” This was my sole focus at this point. Leave. Every bone in my body, every muscle attached to those bones, every thought, every instinct yelled “get out now!” 

Bag packed, I checked out of the hotel and went across the street to change my USD for Vietnamese currency. There were strange marking on my bills and having only been in Asia for the last 3.5 years, I had lost the ability to tell the difference between real and fake US currency. I should mention that people in Vietnam often make fake currency to burn as a ritual sacrifice to the good health of their respective businesses. It is not uncommon to see half burned $100 bills littering the space between the sidewalk and road.  Burned money in the gutter.

New currency in my pocket, I walked up to Pham Ngu Lao street in the tourist district of Sai Gon and went to the first open travel shop I saw. I booked the first bus ticket to Cambodia. The woman at the counter told me that it would be about an hour wait and that I should be back in 45 minutes for a pick up. Given my state of mind at the time, I parked myself on a chair outside the entrance to the business and smoked a cigarette. I noticed a rather unfriendly man walk into the shop and start talking to the staff in what seemed like a mix of Vietnamese and Chinese. I am not fluent in Vietnamese, but I know enough to get the general tone of a conversation.

The man handed the woman something wrapped in paper and gave her a firm look. She looked nervous and shaken. That worried me. He walked outside and got on his motorbike. He drove a few meters away and stopped and pulled out his phone and began a conversation that I could not overhear.

Like most buildings in District 1, the travel agency’s front was garage style. The entire front rolls up to expose the business to pedestrian tourists. I was sitting on a stool in the front left, just outside the building. This gave me a complete view of the interior as well as a view of the street, sidewalk, and park across the street. The woman left the counter on the right side and moved behind the counter next to me on the left side. She unwrapped the paper under the counter and pulled out a red and white syringe.

Even in my heightened state of paranoia, I realized that not everything was about me. I mentally ran through the list of possibilities.

·               She had diabetes

·               She has a heroin problem

·               She has some other medical issue but the man did not look “professional” in any way

·               This was for me. (again, I was so freaked out at this point)

My fear was increased because she had moved to the counter next to me and we could have made physical contact without any effort. I got up and moved my chair a bit away from the building and put my back to a sign so that I was only accessible from the front. Feeling nervous, I asked for my money back and planned to go to another agency. She declined to give me my money so I grabbed my back and walked across the street to the park.

On the other side of the park I planned to grab a taxi and head to the airport. I saw the man from before on his motorbike and decided that maybe I should walk for a while and grab a random taxi. He followed, slowly.  I ended up walking about 1 km to the more expensive area near Ben Thanh market.

My Life in Vietnam part 9: Peak of Paranoia 2

My thought in taking a taxi was that no one could force me into an accident. I only had 2 concerns at this point: personal safety and finishing my last class. Part of insuring my safety was taking the out of place objects with me in my backpack to class. This was a strange class.

Instead of having a normal class with my student Thao, I talked to her for 3 hours about all the things that were going on in my life. I showed her the extra phone charger, sim cards, uv light, tags that only showed up under uv light, etc.  For the most part she was understanding and helped me stay calm. About 2 hours into the class, her phone rang and she stepped out to take the call.

When she came back, she said "there are things I want to tell you and I wish I could help you, but my English is not good enough.  Do you need money? Can I give you money?"  There was something in the tone of her voice that made me nervous. Really fucking nervous. I declined her offer of money because I felt like why would I take money from her that I did not earn.

Eventually we said our goodbyes and I got in a taxi. The taxi with the driver I mentioned in my last note. I was used to driving my motorbike and being very aware of my surroundings at this point. From the back seat of a taxi, I was even more aware. I had time time look at everything. There were two guys on a motorbike next to the taxi and they were carrying long metal pipes. Probably for construction of some sort, but also the right length to grab and beat the shit out of someone with. In front of them was a man, his wife, and a small child on another motorbike.  Behind the taxi were tons of other motorbikes, but a few were driven by people that I recognized from other staged almost incidents. Each bike was carrying "tools or supplies" of some sort that would be quite useful in a riot. . .

The motorbike with the family pulled in front of the taxi and was almost hit. I lost shit and yelled for the driver to stop. No accident. This was when I forced him to change directions and get on the highway.

Skip ahead to the map incident. . . The second time that I lost my temper in Vietnam - I am yelling "turn the fuck around. look at the road. what are you doing? stop the  car. stop the car! stop the fucking car!"

I looked at the meter and paid the fair and got out of the taxi with my bag, evidence, and started walking. We were still on the highway, but there was an intersection close by and I felt safer on foot.  After making it to the intersection I walked under the bridge and onto a side road that lead to Trung Hung Dao street. The people on the motorbikes slowly drove by me and made extended eye contact.  All I could do was sit down on the stoop of a building and light a cig and wonder what was happening to me.

Eventually I took the "evidence" out of my bag, made eye contact with one of the drivers and then I obviously placed everything on top of an electrical transformer on the side of the road. I started walking. He turned around, went back to the transformer and collected everything. I was only 2 km from my hotel, so I started the walk home.

My Life in Vietnam part 9: Peak of Paranoia

Some parts of this story are out of order and I am intentionally skipping some parts because I don't want to think about them or don't want it on facebook.  That being said, let me reorder.

I packed my bags at the hotel and also packed "evidence." 

During the mad dash around my hotel room I found a few things that I thought were important proof. 

1. My phone came with 2 phone chargers. One was a usb that connected to my laptop and the other to a power outlet. I found a third charger. (my speculation at the time was that this charger was another way of accessing data on my phone/pc. It was the type of charger that connects to the power outlet and also to the computer. The USB wire could be removed from the base.
2. USB speakers. The seal around the woofer of the usb speakers had been broken and crudely resealed with glue. I started to take it apart and look inside but as you can imagine, my mind was racing at this point. I took a picture with my phone and put the speakers in a bag of things I planned to leave at the hotel.
3. Old hard drive. I wrote down the serial number, took a photo, and also put it in the "leave behind" bag. (again, I had already tossed this harddrive once before after being told by the computer repair store that my music and photos from the last 3 years were damaged and not capable of being restored.)
4. The uv pen light - took it with me
5. scan bar code from fake laptop battery - took with me
6. toiletries - left behind. (anything that could be opened and closed I left behind partly because I was not quite sure what the angle was. Am I smuggling data, drugs, being poisoned, going to be killed in my sleep and made to look like a drug overdose, etc)
7. my clothes - took with me but went through pockets, seams, etc. Found 3 sim cards from my travels but the phone numbers on the sim cards did not match the phone numbers that were assigned to the phone when I inserted the cards (are this spoofed, hacked, etc) I did try to access the data on them but they were encrypted. took the sim cards with me.

I went downstairs, gave them the key to my room, got on my motorbike and left. I ended up getting a room at Hotel 68 on the corner of Bui Vien and the ally that runs paralled to De Tham.  This was morning.  I had one more class left to teach and then it was time to go. As you can imagine, I was extremely paranoid at this point. I did not feel safe driving or even being in Saigon. But I had a class to teach and had to deal with that committment. I sold my motorbike and decided I would take a taxi to my last class.

In a previous post I wrote about the taxi driver who turned back to me while holding a map and asking were I wanted to go. This was on the highway home from this last class. And, he did not not bother to stop the taxi.  We were in motion but both of his hands were on the map. I was sitting in the back seat and he was looking back at me.  What I did not write about before is what I noticed going on around me in the taxi-

My Life in Vietnam part 8: The Part You Have Been Waiting For

Ly left a UV pen light in my hotel room one night. Before she left, I had been cleaning and trying to lighten up my load for the trip home. I threw several things away including the old harddrive from the Samsung Laptop I came to Vietnam with, a deactivated credit card which I had cut into little pieces, receipts, cds, virus infected usb flash drive, and various other things. 

While cleaning, I opened the drawer to the wardrobe and found something strange. There was a grey man's long sleeve shirt, a plastic wrapper for some sort of electronic equipment, and wait for it --- a cardboard box that contained the battery for my IBM Thinkpad sl400 laptop. Except, there was a battery in my laptop.

I never bought a second battery. It turns out, the battery in the bottom of my wardrobe was the original one that came with my laptop. The one currently inserted in my laptop had come in that box and it had been modified to include a second mini harddrive, mini wifi card, and an IR receiver. (I opened it.)

By chance, I took the UV pen light that Ly left in my room and pointed it at the fake battery. WTF? I saw a scan code and serial number that I didn't notice at first. Long story short, I began looking at everything in my room: my clothes, electronics, papers, toiletries, etc. UV markings everywhere!

Then on top of the wardrobe I found drug paraphernalia. There was more under the mattress of the bed, behind the mini fridge, behind the toilet, under the sink, under the trash bag in the waste bin, (which is where I also found the cut up credit card that I had thrown out hours earlier.) This is by no means an exaustive list. Just know that I spent about 3 hours going through my things, throwing out anything that looked altered, and packing the rest away.

Once I packed my bag, I went right downstairs, checked out of the hotel, asked them to call the police and have them seach the room because I felt like something was wrong, and then got on my motorbike and found another hotel. 2 days before I fly. What have I gotten myself into?

Also, during this 3 hour clean up period, I found my old harddrive in the bottom of my bag. The harddrive that I had thrown out with the cut up credit card.

More to come.