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I’m in Bangkok now (it’s hot) and Azure will be coming over in about a week. We’ll then fly directly to Bali, Indonesia, where we’ll spend at least a month, maybe two if we can get our visas extended. After that we fly back to Seattle via Bangkok on February 12. We’ll have a week or so at home, then head to France for Part II of the trip, as it worked well last year.

You can enjoy all our posts at http://www.quarteryear.com, but this site will no longer be updated.

I spent four days on my scooter wandering this little region to the north of Tours, France, blown away by the access the scooter was giving me. When I pulled off the main highway onto this tiny road that might as well have been private, these two horses (and a third one erased) were just posing for me. I was realizing the dream of riding a scooter in the countryside with a nice camera and all the time in the world.

Nobody at home knows where I am; nobody here knows who I am.

2001
The night I returned home from three months in Paris I had a dream: I was arriving back in Paris and I said, “I’m back, I’m finally back.”
That winter I woke up in the evening, my roommates were gone for the break and I kept one room warm in the top of the house. Mine was the only light in the neighborhood. I would be awake the whole night, depressed, and during the day I’d sleep and I’d dream, “I’m back, I’m finally back.” I didn’t see daylight for a week.
But things got better, as they do, and I met a girl who I’d known for a year. We secretly danced in the dark under trees. We fell asleep tangled in her bed and then I’d dream about being in Paris, being back, finally back.
I’m sure I studied around this time because I remember walking to German class in the snow and swearing at it for visiting Seattle in March. I took the class because I’d met a German in Paris and schemed to go back and woo her with my painful conjugation of simple verbs. But the scheme faded as the snow melted and I kept waking up tangled with the girl on white sheets, waking from the Paris dream again and again.
I had the same dream, warmer, later in the Spring, after we fought about nothing and I walked home alone, looking up at the trees drip in the rain. We had fought about the world: I thought it was incurably sick, while she was more optimistic, and I slept alone, tangled in sheets in my warm room.
Despite her optimism, we stayed together through the summer. At her cabin we swam in fresh water. I pulled myself up the ladder to lay on the dock in the sun, the boards scratching my chest. We swung in a hammock and slept there together in coins of sunlight, and I dreamed of Paris.
In winter I woke up, untangled, alone, in Paris, I was back, finally back. I descended dark stairs to a wet, stony street and walked in the rain on a bridge. I wandered the Left Bank until I found a hotel and carried my things up dark steps to the desk. A young man smiled and motioned down the hall. I walked down the hall and stopped at a door, behind which she waited, asleep, tangled in white sheets.

We got into Punta del Diablo so late that we couldn’t really tell what the town was like, or even how close to the ocean we were. The next morning I woke up at 6am with the sun and when I stepped outside this man was walking up with his thermos, cigarette and the ubiquitous yerba mate.

To drink it, the Uruguayans fill a gourd with the tea leaves, then pour in hot water. They drink it through a special straw that has a filtered end so it can draw in the tea without taking the leaves. When the tea is gone they pour in more water.

When I saw him I asked if I could take a picture and only really snapped this one shot, the first shot I took in Diablo, and the best.

If anyone from Punta del Diablo is reading this and knows this man, I’d love if you would contact me.

Bert Teunissen photographs people in their own kitchens and dining rooms in a series called “Domestic Landscapes.” The photos are gorgeous, shot inside by natural light, but they’re also uncomfortably intimate like we’re looking at the inside of a person’s skin, not just their kitchen. Most of the series are shot in Europe (it’s broken up by country on the website) but there’s one series from Japan during which I kept asking, “Why is he shooting these people at a restaurant?” I guess I’ve never been in a Japanese home….

I’ve spent a lot of time in people’s houses as well, but in the US I rarely come across a home that exhibits a personality’s corners the way Teunissen’s European homes do.

The other website I’ve been loving is the David Lynch Interview Project. The filmmaker has sent a team across the US to conduct four-minute interviews with locals and they talk on a variety of subjects, but often about themselves.

While window washing I’ve had a lot of four-minute conversations and though I don’t think such passing glances can give a full picture of a person’s life, it tells you what they want you to hear in four minutes.

by Mike

I was in India during the tsunami. I was eating dinner with a friend in a restaurant that sat at the top of the beach and we started hearing waves, the Arabian Sea, which was a surprise because it was low tide. People were shouting and I ran to the front of the restaurant to see Indian men knee-deep in water, grabbing chairs and tables as they drifted away. I thought, “How desperate they must be to think about chairs and tables when this is happening!”

The people in town were spooked because they’d never seen the ocean act like this. It had been reliable as the moon until this point, then suddenly it hits the front of the restaurants during low tide. People fled. I ran to my hut to grab my valuable then went inland. Palolem is a one-road town from which one other road takes people away from the beach and back to the rest of India. That one road was packed with traffic and we walked past rickshaws and cars, past policemen who were uselessly directing traffic. I asked one policeman if he knew what had happened and he did: There was a big wave at 8:30pm or so, but the biggest was yet to come at Midnight. Of course he knew nothing, but the police wanted to appear to be in control, so they made up a story and stuck to it.

We went to the closest building that looked safe: a 3-storey hotel made of concrete. The owner was sending people to the roof. There were about 8 Westerners up there, one of whom had a cell phone, so I texted Azure that I had evacuated the beach and was now safe on top of a hotel. I didn’t know the tsunami was a big deal at that point (I didn’t even know it was a tsunami), but I assumed that it could potentially be. There was a pair of old hippy ladies on the roof, the kind of people who had come to India in the 70s and never left. One had worked for Mother Theresa, she had a puppy with her. We slept restlessly under the stars that night, and at some point I was prodded awake and led downstairs. The owner let us sleep on his floor – about 6 of us and a puppy – but it was more comfortable than the roof.

The next morning I went back to the beach and saw that the damage wasn’t too bad – there were a couple restaurants that had been hit hard, but the restaurants on Palolem weren’t much more than a collection of chairs & tables in front of a kitchen. Other than that the beach just looked dirty. The soft sand above high-tide wasn’t so pretty anymore. Since the initial wave, the sea retreated, then pushed back high onto the beach, then retreated, over and over again as if it were sloshing back and forth between India and Arabia.

Over the next few days the restaurants with TVs were packed, CNN or BBC giving us the details: 13,000 dead… 30,000 dead… 50,000 dead… 80,000 dead… and with each number was the feeling of wanting to wrap small around your aching heart but having to face a swell of souls so towering and powerful you couldn’t see the whole thing in one glance. Who can understand 100,000? And when I’d had enough of the TV I would walk out of the restaurant toward my hut and, for god’s sake, be approached by men on the beach wanting to sell me something: Jewelry, scooters, a room at their huts, a nice fish dinner. There were 100,000 freshly dead people, many of whom were their countrymen, and they took no break from trying to profit. At the time I was so angry, I glared intensely at these men through my red eyes and tears on my cheeks, hoping they would feel it, hoping they’d take a break and mourn. Still I don’t understand why they were selling immediately after such a tragedy. Maybe it’s only in our culture (or my mind) that profit & sincerity are mutually exclusive.

Later, I heard this story: On the day before the tsunami – Christmas Day – an old widow finally came out of her house after many weeks of mourning her husband’s death. She was dressed in black and she walked down the beach with a couple people on either side of her. She looked at the Western tourists, sunbathing in revealing clothes. She looked at the Indian men trying to sell sell sell to the Westerners. She looked at the restaurants and groups of huts that crowded the beach and hogged electricity, that blocked access by Indian families who had lived there for generations, that represented the materialism and greed spread wide down the beach. She angrily pointed to the sea and said, “That water is going to come and wipe all of this away.”

There were other signs, too. Christmas night was an awful night: a full moon with dogs that were going nuts, dog fights breaking out up and down the beach. The local men were lighting off fireworks that were way too close to other people, and I got uncontrollably drunk on just two glasses of whiskey. I knew something wasn’t right, and I told my friends that I was going to bed early. I threw up all night. Not that I could have seen it coming, of course, but in retrospect, the craziest, scariest night in all my time there was by far the night before the earthquake.

I was on the beach in India on a night when tens of thousands of people died on the beach in India. I never wondered or cared why I survived, I consider it luck. But I stepped back to look at my life and made sure that I was living the way I wanted with the person I loved.

by Mike

Azure and I have had plenty of health care encounters abroad, so I thought I’d tell some of the fun stories about how we get treated when we leave our own country.

Chipped tooth, France 2001
I chipped my tooth biting into a sandwich (yep) and called a dentist recommended by a friend. His office was in his apartment. He had no receptionist, no assistants, just a chair and his tools in a room adjacent to the kitchen. I hadn’t asked how much it would cost, so as he worked on me I worried that I’d get ripped off.

When he finished, about 30 minutes later, he asked for “50 francs and a pint of Guinness.” That calculates to about seven dollars and a pint of Guinness. A few weeks later he came into the bar and I gave him his drink as the second half of my payment.

General badness of the body area, India 2004
For $2 the local doctor saw me right away and, after consulting, told me I should go to the private hospital. I went to the hospital and checked in with dehydration & a fever. They were going to inject me with a fever reducer, but then noticed that I was sweating. They asked if I’d taken paracetamol, and I had. That’s what they had in the syringe.

To treat the dehydration they were going to put me on an IV and rehydrate me right into the arm, but not wanting to be injected in India, I asked if there was another option. They said I could get some electrolyte packets and mix with water (Gatorade, essentially). They didn’t ask me to pay since they ended up not treating me (in the US the price of a consultation like this is enough to dissuade someone from seeking treatment).

Here in the US, when we go to the doctor we want SOME kind of evidence that we’re being heard & treated, so they’ll prescribe us some pills. Apparently in India their preferred consolation is an injection – that’s why they were going to give me two injections of treatments I could take orally.

Ear infection, France 2005
I waited in the doctor’s office in Chateau Neuf de Pape for about 2 hours before finally being seen as a drop-in. The doctor spoke to me in English even though I tried to speak in French – he wanted to make me more comfortable. He prescribed me a $10 course of antibiotics and charged me $10 for the visit. Cured like pork.

Broken teeth, Thailand 2006
It’s a crazy story, but the long & short of it is that I chipped a tooth (the picture above) and the dentist saw me the same day. I had the tooth fixed and three cavities filled, then a teeth cleaning. It was around $30. The side-note to this story is that, once again, I didn’t want to get an injection, so I underwent all this tooth fixing without any Novocain, only Azure’s hand to squeeze.

Fake rabies, Thailand 2006
Azure thought she might have rabies because a friendly dog licked her on the elbow, so we went to this stunningly beautiful hospital in Bangkok. It looked like what I imagine a 5-star hotel looks like. After an hour wait (again as drop-ins) we were taken back to a specialist for this type of fake disease. She was a great doctor – understanding and patient. Azure would be ok and we payed $15 for the peace of mind.

It was light at 4am because we were so far north and I laid on the couch where I woke and watched the men get ready to go fishing. For a few minutes I pretended I was doing serious independent travel and imagined describing the scene in my dispatches home: “These men are obsessed with coffee. They drink it every morning, at least two cups, and then bring a thermos with them on the boat. When they run out of coffee on the boat everyone crashes and takes turns napping on the narrow benches. They play cards late into the night and laugh constantly and have dedicated their lives to fish.”

I tried to pretend that they spoke some exotic, fucked up language like Portuguese, so I couldn’t understand what they were saying, but my imagination was burdened by my relationship with my dad, by my friendship with Michael & his dad Mark, by old memories of my dad’s friend Fred. The four of them shuffled around the room reaching for coffee cups as they pulled on their jackets and talked about fish. I could understand every word.

We walked up the bank of the Situk river occasionally hollering, “No bears!” so that we wouldn’t surprise a grizzly who might be snacking around the corner. We cut down to a sand bar on the river. Michael and Mark headed into the river, up to their waists, watching sockeye weave between branches and splash under trees. They cast, let the lure bounce on the bottom with the current and slowly reeled it in, hopefully right across the nose of a fish.

From the bank we heard eagle chatter echo down through the woods and onto the river and we pointed quietly, but excitedly, when others glided overhead. A pair of chatty eagles crossed the river upstream from us then drifted downstream until they landed on an evergreen branch above us, still chattering. I told my dad to grab the video camera but as soon as I opened my mouth they shut up, alarmed by my voice. I felt foolish for not having established a whistle-based language before the trip to the river, but I’ll never make that mistake again.

The eagles sat on their branch watching us for half an hour, completely silent. Just watching. No worry about the future, no regret about the past. Just watching. I wish I could focus as well. The previous night I meditated on the couch and while trying to clear my mind – pieces of jokes or advice or opinions echoed in my head. Nonsensical phrases bounced around in my dad’s voice. I could understand every word. Looking up at the eagles I wondered whether chatter bounced in their minds, whether those birds – so tuned to the rhythm of the present – were enlightened. When one meditates, is he trying to be more like an eagle or less like one?

I tried to sense the rhythm of the place, again tuning out voices. The water sounded like it was just tapping the pebbles on the shore, it was a constant clicking at our feet. Other eagles chattered in the forest and there were many birds talking regularly. Every few seconds a sockeye would splash around. Deep in the glowing green woods, branches cracked.

Originally published at The Wanderlust Review.

Y’all want to know about our finances anyway. I’ll keep it oblique so there’s still a sense of wonder and enchantment.

Az and I budgeted about 50 Euro per day for us as a couple this winter, which works out to about $1000 per person per month, not including airfare. We spend less traveling than we do at home.

Here’re 20 tips for traveling Europe on the cheap:

Tip 1: Travel with a partner. Save on accommodation, split meals & taxis, free massages, share toothbrushes. AWWWwwww….. Stop paying strangers to hold hands while you walk through the park.

Tip 2: Learn the language. You’ll be closer to people’s hearts if you can communicate with them, and for that reason opportunities will knock. You’re also more likely understand when someone’s telling you about other/better options and it’s less daunting to get off the beaten path.

ACCOMMODATION
Tips 3-10: Spend as little as possible on accommodation. Unofficially, SEVENTY FIVE per cent of our daily budget went to accommodation when we were paying for it, in fact the price for a hotel room was sometimes so high that we would start the day over budget. Yucky! By spending one night in a free place we can halve the price of a night at a hotel.

And the math doesn’t lie: spend half as much and travel for twice as long.

There are a lot of ways to do it: Wwoof, Couch Surf, Servas, Global Freeloaders, Help Exchange, rent an apartment, stay in a hostel, stay in a pension, ask for a good price for a longer stay, offer to exchange services, visit places where you know people who would welcome you in their homes….

Tip 11: Stay in a place with access to a kitchen. So you can cook instead of eating out.

Tip 12: Get away from the tourist areas. The tourist areas attract money-obsessed locals (as is the case everywhere in the world). They’re good at business which means they’d punch their own mother to make a buck. Break the cycle of violence, try to deal mostly with businesses that don’t cater to tourists.

Tip 13: Rent/buy a scooter/car/bike. The more independent you are, the more options you have. Most of the places we stayed would have been next to impossible to find without our own transportation. It’s also possible to do this and save money on transportation, especially if you can buy & sell for the same price.

Tip 14: Stay in one place for a longer period of time. Develop a routine. You’ll learn what’s cheap, what’s a rip-off, where you can go for free. There will also be less urgency to experience everything before you have to run to your next destination.

Tip 15: Stay in one place for a longer period of time. Moving costs money. When you arrive in a new place you might need to take a taxi, to sit in a cafe to kill time, to stay in a too-expensive hotel because you didn’t plan well, etc. There are a lot of costs associated with changing places besides just wasting your precious time.

EATING
Tip 16: Buy your food from local markets. Some have the idea that it’s cheaper to eat crappy fast food, but in fact eating the absolute healthiest is the absolute cheapest: raw veggies, salad, pasta with tomato sauces, water from the tap. Our bodies & wallets love going vegetarian.

It’s hard to get past the pride of wanting to “eat bouillabaisse in Nice” just so you can say you did. But food doesn’t have to be your ego’s crutch every meal. Ordering vegetarian food in Thailand, one says, “Gin mung.” That means, “I eat like a monk.” We should eat more monk-like anyway.

Tip 17: Carry food staples with you. Have you ever been so hungry that you panicked and splurged on, say, two bottles of liquor for lunch? Oops! You’re less likely to repeat that classy performance if you have some snacks with you at all times. Our to-go bag includes jam, cheese and some fruit, olive oil, salt a bottle of water and some cutlery. To complete the meal we buy a fresh loaf of bread, some wine and a jar of Nutella, then picnic somewhere beautiful. See video below (it’s just 7 minutes of us eating in beautiful places. I won’t be offended if you skip it).

Tip 18: Eat at small local places if you do want to eat out. It’s best to ask locals where they go most often, as it’s usually a sign of good food at good prices. In France there’s almost always a plat du jour (daily special) which is the best deal.

Tip 19: Split meals. Our bodies & wallets love eating less.

GENERAL
Tip 20: Don’t buy crap you don’t need.

Whether you’re traveling with your partner, a family member or a close friend, you GOTTA establish expectations beforehand because chances are you’ll want to tear their throat out just because they eat pudding with a Swiss army knife or something like that. Love the people you love. That’s my motto.

I wrote up these points in the first person (“Here’s what I promise I’ll do”) because I can only be responsible for my own actions & reactions.

A contract for traveling with someone you love.

Dearest Travel partner,

To me, a successful trip means _____.
(visiting museums, relaxing, talking to a lot of people, getting drunk and sleeping on benches, renting an apartment, getting a job, finding a spouse, I’m not sure yet).

Travel Partner

Is there anything else you would include, five loyal readers?