This is a crocodile in a burlap bag being carried off the boat we took from Siem Reap to Battambang, Cambodia (one of the crocs of "stepping over the crocodile" fame). This crocodile was subsequently laid on the bank next to the other bagged crocodiles. We believe they were all on their way to a crocodile farm.

This is an elephant in the Lucknow zoo in India, giving itself a bath of dust.

This is the view from the pickup truck we rode from Pursat, Cambodia to the tiny settlement of Bramoy. It gives you a good idea of what the countryside of Cambodia looks like.

Here are some dancers who performed for us at the restaurant our friend Asmat took us to in Tbilisi, Georgia. We did not speed up this video in any way.

I liked the way the gold leaf on this image of the Buddha in Bangkok fluttered in the wind.

This is our friend Gujinder and his family at his aunt and uncle's home in Haryana, India. Gujinder is the one who gets all serious and frowns when he realizes he's on camera. He never smiles for the camera, as a policy.

This is one of the illuminated boats that floated down the Chao Phraya river in Bangkok to celebrate the water holiday of Loi Krathong.

Virtually any time one enters the gates of the Mahabodhi Temple in Bodhgaya, India, one will see a party of devotees prostrating themselves in a fairly athletic manner at the site of Buddha's enlightenment.

There are a lot of these brass band clubs all around northern India. People hire them for weddings, but I think sometimes they just play for fun.

At the Thanjavur temple, the statue of Nandi the bull regularly receives a ritual bath of foodstuffs. This video shows Nandi bathed in turmeric. While we were watching, Nandi was also given water, milk, and daal.

The public parks in Thailand are great, especially in the evening, when everyone's out to get their workout. There are strength training machines that anyone can use, and people are out jogging and taking aerobics and dance classes.

Finally, the reason I thought of posting all these videos. Sarah and I saw some cute puppies at the Goreme Open Air Museum here in Turkey. We're amidst some really cool rock formations with dwellings carved out of them; the whole region of Cappadocia is covered with them. But they don't make good videos. Cute puppies do. So I was asking myself, "Is this (banal) video worth posting to our website?" And that was when I realized that we had barely posted any videos at all. Thank you, cute puppies!

The national street snack is sunflower seeds. Georgians are champion seed eaters. Seed-and-cigarette sellers, who hold about the same position in Georgian city society as drum-playing buskers do in NYC, abound on the corners. Groups of wisecracking kids and pairs of whispering matrons won't be seen in the open without their paper cones full of seeds, rising through their peeling fingers to their crunching chompers. It is with great enthusiasm that the Georgian masses deplete the avian food supply.

Georgian voracity is certainly not limited to seeds, though. Georgians feast on a grander scale and a more regular basis than any people I've ever heard of. Day after day, when we were guests at one or another homestay, we would be expected to tuck in the untuckable, with a tremendous spread before us, as Georgian guests around us nonchalantly dug in, telling us this was how it was done every day. Our longest feast, clocking in at five hours, was on the occasion of the impromptu visit of a family member's boss and some coworkers to David Zandarashvilis's homestay in Sighnaghi. We ate homemade cheese and yogurt, home-cured pork, baked beans, beef stew, cole slaw, sauteed scallions, sprigs of tarragon and parsley, and braised spinach, along with oodles of puri, the standard, banjo-shaped bread that's eaten with every meal. And there was toasting throughout. Before coming to Georgia, I never realized how inexhaustible the subjects of toastable cheer really were. But there must have been thirty toasts that night, none of them ever descending to the dull specificity we prefer in America. There was a toast to Georgia, of course, as well as toasts Success, to Family, to Brothers, to Women, to Friends, to The Future, and so on. Twelve people consumed twenty liters of homemade wine that night. Sarah and I have sworn that, at least on the more important days of each month, we will fete our friends and family with a shadow of that tremendous hospitality.

Georgians automatically cross themselves three times when they pass a church, whether they're in a bus or walking on the street. It is, I'm given to understand, not always an expression of religious sentiment, much of which died out under the many years of atheist soviet rule. Instead, it's a kind of compulsory hocus pocus. But Georgians, who have the second-oldest organized Christianity in the world, are going back to church. Right now, it's a country with a lot of reverence for the trappings of the faith, and younger people are attending church in greater and greater numbers. Visiting fifth and sixth century churches, I was interested to see seven year olds who already had a routine dictating which icons they kissed, which they bowed to, and which ones they knelt before, lighting a candle. But I wasn't only playing the spectator. Having grown up Episcopalian, visiting Georgia was the first time on this trip that I felt welcome to participate in a religious service, and the first time that I felt a real resonance with my own spirituality. This is not to say that other holy sites we've visited were meaningless to me, but the Georgian church felt more accessible.

I want to thank the Georgian friends of ours who are reading this for showing us such a special time, and I want to encourage my friends who are visiting Europe to include Georgia. We'll put a lot of pictures of Georgia up on our Flickr site (the link is on the wandery homepage) soon.

Around 10:30, Hannah and I go downstairs to the enquiry window to check on our train again, and hear that it is now expected at noon. By 11:30, when Patrick asks, they’re saying it will arrive at 1:15, and by 12:30, the projected time is 1:45. The train is clearly getting later and later at some progressive rate, and it starts to seem like a Calculus word problem (because aren’t all math word problems about trains?), which I gigglingly transcribe (“If an Indian train is scheduled to arrive at Gaya Junction at 9:00 a.m....”) and Hannah dutifully graphs out in her journal. Our calculations suggest that the train’s arrival time is an exponential curve approaching 2:00 p.m. And 2:00 is just about when it pulls into the station, which Hannah and I, old Math Team buddies that we are, congratulate ourselves on, because we’re nerdy like that.

On board the train, we settle in for some lounging in our berths and study up in the guidebook to figure out a strategy for finding a guesthouse. If all had gone according to plan, we would’ve had an eight-hour train ride that got us into Kolkata by 5:00 p.m., which seemed like a fine and decent hour to go looking around for a place to stay. But now our train is running at least five hours late, and getting later by the hour, putting us on target for a middle-of-the-night arrival, which is never fun in a new city. Still, we pick out a first choice hotel and a couple back-ups that are just down the block and hope for the best.

It’s 11:00 p.m. when we finally arrive in Kolkata, and we grab a quick dinner in the train station food court, because we weren’t able to eat on the train -- another glitch in the system, apparently, since usually you can order meals on the trains; I guess because this one was originally scheduled to arrive before dinner time, there was no provision for dinner service. So, 11:30 or so, we get in a taxi and head for Sudder Street, the backpacker district, which should be packed with budget accommodation. After several wrong turns and stops to ask for directions (to what should be one of the more common taxi destinations in the city), our driver pulls up to the Hotel Diplomat, which is locked up and gated. A staff person is roused only to tell us that the hotel is full. We unload our stuff from the taxi anyway and proceed on foot around the corner to a couple other guesthouses that had been recommended in the guidebook.

The scene is the same. A locked gate, a sleepy-eyed man stumbling up to it to say the word “Full,” a continued trudge down the block. Four places have turned us away, and we’re starting to feel like Mary and Joseph on Christmas Eve, when an old man in a blue sarong hands us a business card and says, “Come, come.” Without much choice, we follow him further through the narrow street and down another block. The first place he takes us to is full. The second place has two rooms -- they’re 800 rupees, which is three or four times what we’d normally hope to spend, but we’re desperate enough to take a look. The first is small, windowless, but clean -- so we ask to see the second.

The young woman leads us up a tiny, ladder-like staircase, opening a trap door to allow our backpacks to fit through, and all of a sudden we’re presented with a doorway that we’d have to duck to fit through -- it’s got to be all of four and a half feet high -- but I’m starting to duck down, assuming the hallway will be taller on the other side -- only it’s not. Hannah, stooped over with her backpack on, obligingly follows the woman down the child-sized hallway as Patrick and I wait in the stairwell, where we can still stand up. “It’s just like that scene in Being John Malkovich,” I say. Meanwhile, Hannah too is assuming that once she makes it through the hall, the actual room will be full-size. But no, it’s got four and a half foot ceilings too. And no window. “But it’s very clean,” the woman says, and Hannah can’t help but chuckle a little bit as she stoops her way back to us. “Have you guys seen Being John Malkovich?” she asks. We thank the woman for her help, but say we’re going to keep looking.

We pass a family sleeping under blankets in the stairwell of the hotel on our way out, and that’s starting to look like a better and better option. Our blue-saronged friend tries to lead us down an even darker, narrower alleyway, to which we say thanks but no thanks, and when I knock at the next dark, gated guesthouse, the guy there tells us he has a room with three beds, only 300 rupees. We take a look, and despite the boarded up window, strong scent of mold, and large black stain running up the wall from a cluster of charred electrical wires, we decide it’s time to end our search and settle in for the night. The guy puts fresh sheets on the beds for us, and turns on the fan, and eventually we all fall asleep.... Only to be woken by him poking his head through the door the next morning at 8:00 a.m. (because apparently the bolt on the door doesn’t actually work) to ask for our passports. We’re like, “can’t this wait an hour or two?” but no, it can’t. So we get dressed and get our check-in forms filled out and head out to find breakfast and look for a new hotel, because staying in that one again is definitely not an option. It stinks like a damp basement and the pillows are lumpier than a bag full of socks and clearly, electrical fires are a not-uncommon occurrence.

But we do find another place, slightly better (though still kind of moldy-scented), and then the next day, trying again, end up where we are now -- a hotel with rooms that doesn’t smell of mold, with comfortable pillows and even cable TV so we can watch Bollywood movies and episodes of Hot Seat -- the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.

I’m incredibly grateful to finally be in a place where I can sleep through the night and wash my clothes without fearing they’ll be infested with mildew spores before they’ve had a chance to dry. Especially because, in all other respects, Kolkata has been a really fun and interesting place so far. The food has been fantastic -- it deserves a whole separate essay -- the museums interesting, the parks lovely, the architecture beautiful, and the shops enticing. In fact, I would highly recommend a visit to Kolkata to anyone planning a trip to India; I’d just recommend booking a room in advance, or at least trying really hard not to arrive in the middle of the night.

More updates (and new photos) soon -- for now, we’re off to do some more shopping and sightseeing. Much love.

We’ve been in India for three weeks now, and already I feel like I have a book’s worth of images to relate, and many years’ worth of fodder for discussion and questioning and study. This is a country with an incredibly rich and diverse history and culture, and it’s also a country with a lot of problems, all of which feel complex and daunting and interrelated.

But all this ambivalence I’ve been feeling -- this emotional whipping back and forth, a hundred times a day, between things sacred and profane, beautiful and hateful, life-affirming and agonizing -- can make it really hard to figure out how to begin to tell the stories. But enough equivocating; I’ll just try to dive in.

In the last update, Patrick described our first few days in Delhi, which we spent recouping from jetlag with Season 3 of The Wire, and our amazing luck for meeting warm and welcoming people in the city of Chandigarh. As if on cue, just hours after Patrick had posted that entry, a friendly gentleman waiting next to us in line to purchase train tickets invited us for dinner at his home that evening. We spent a nice few hours with the Prakash family, talking about India, America and New Zealand (where many members of their family now live), and looking through an album of wedding photos from a granddaughter’s recent wedding. By the time we left Chandigarh, we’d added whole pages of contact information to our journals from the numerous friends we’d made, and were feeling pretty amazed by all the attention.

The next day, we headed east, up into the low foothills of the Himalayas to the town of Rishikesh, which lines the banks of the Ganges near its headwaters, and is known to some as the “yoga capital of the world.” We went there to meet up with one of my best friends from DeKalb, Hannah, who’s been travelling in India and Nepal since October. It had been a couple years since I’d seen her, but within minutes we were laughing and talking each other’s ears off, just like we used to late at night over tea in her dad’s living room or parked in my driveway for hours, unable to end the conversation. The three of us spent five fun days in Rishikesh together -- eating yummy thalis and steaming hot apple samosas, hiking to a waterfall, listening to the nightly chants of the aarti ceremony on the banks of the Ganges, and even watching one of the omnipresent street cows munch its way through a flaming pile of burning rubbish one night.

During our time together in Rishikesh, Patrick and I talked Hannah into travelling with us for a little while, and on Monday the 29th we all headed down to Haridwar, an hour’s bus ride from Rishikesh, to spend the day exploring before catching a night train to Lucknow. In Haridwar, we poked through shops selling glittering bangles, Indian sweets, colorful fabrics and gleaming stainless-steel dining ware in a bazaar that lined both sides of the narrow, winding streets. We walked down to the banks of the Ganges, where pilgrims were participating in bathing ceremonies along the ghats -- stair-steps leading down into the water.

On board my first night train in India, I unfolded the stack of clean white railway-issue bedding and climbed into my narrow upper berth -- Hannah below me in the middle berth, and Patrick an arm’s length away on the upper berth across from mine. I slept lightly and fitfully on that ride, unable to find a comfortable position, and arrived in Lucknow with that strange sensation that the world is still rocking back and forth around you, even when you’re on solid ground.

Lucknow is the capital of Uttar Pradesh, and marks a good midpoint between Haridwar to the north and Bodhgaya to the southeast, which is where we were headed; it’s also a city with a lot of Mughal history. The Mughals were the Muslim rulers of vast swaths of India during the 16th and 17th centuries; Shah Jehan, a Mughal emperor, was the builder of the Taj Mahal. We were looking forward to checking out some Mughal architecture and sampling some Mughlai food -- tasty mutton dishes and spicy kebabs and thin crepe-like roti breads -- before continuing our journey to Bodhgaya.

We also took advantage of the Lucknow branch of Fab India -- a rapidly expanding chain of clothing and home decor shops (there’ll be one in the U.S. any minute now) -- to purchase some salwar kameez outfits for me. Salwar kameez -- a knee-length top with split sides worn over baggy pants with a long coordinated scarf called a dupatha -- is a common outfit for Indian women, and a helpful tool for western women hoping to combat some of the stares and occasional street harassment by Indian men that can result from even conservative western clothes. (An added bonus of the salwar kameez top that I was grateful for yesterday is that it actully provides a fair amount of privacy when squatting to pee in a rice field -- the long split sides form a sort of screen. You never know when that’s going to come in handy.)

From Lucknow on February 1st, we took another night train (on which I’m happy to say I slept much better) to the city of Gaya in the state of Bihar -- currently the poorest state in India, with a largely rural population. Our destination was the nearby town of Bodhgaya, where, 2550 years ago, under a banyan tree, Siddhartha Gautama attained enlightenment and became the Buddha. The fourth generation of the Bodhi tree -- planted from a cutting of a cutting of a cutting of the original -- still grows at the Mahabodhi temple in Bodhgaya, marking the spot of the enlightenment. Consequently, Bodhgaya is the world’s holiest pilgrimage site for Buddhists, and there are dozens of temples scattered throughout the town, representing various countries with Buddhist traditions -- Japan, Bhutan, Tibet, Cambodia, Thailand, Sri Lanka. A large community of Tibetan Buddhists spends part of the winter here, and the Dalai Lama is a frequent visitor.

As luck would have it, we arrived in Bodhgaya on the same day as His Holiness the Dalai Lama, and were able to attend a reception the following day at which he spoke after enshrining some Buddha relics in a newly built temple. The town was packed over the weekend -- with hordes of maroon and saffron-robed monks and nuns; crowds of white-sari-swathed Sri Lankan pilgrims; bands of beaded and dreadlocked westerners from dozens of countries; and swarms of bowl-waving beggars of all ages. Bodhgaya has been growing steadily quieter throughout the week as we’ve stayed on.

The main reason we’d come to Bodhgaya was to visit a friend of Hannah’s, whom she’d met at a Hindi language school they both attended a couple months ago up north in Mussoorie. Diane Kirwin, Hannah’s friend, is the founder of a nonprofit organization, KIRF Bodhgaya, that is setting up schools for poor children in some of the villages around this area. We were able to visit two of the schools yesterday and meet the children. I think we were all impressed by how much they had already learned in the limited time the schools have been running -- they could recite and recognize all their English letters and do complex arithmetic problems; some kids even had quite a bit of English vocabulary. At the same time, it was clear how vast the needs of these poorest-of-the-poor communities are. Many of the children are malnourished, and their parents -- mostly tenant farmers of the lowest, untouchable caste, called Dhalits -- have little hope of breaking the cycle of poverty without a significant amount of assistance -- far more than the local development community can yet provide.

On Saturday, after a little over a week here, we’ll be leaving Bodhgaya -- saying goodbye to our small and tidy guesthouse, which has been pleasant enough despite the clouds of mosquitoes that seem to be breeding in the bathroom and flowing in from the open stairwell to the roof; and to the friendly owner of the store across the street with whom we chat every evening while we buy bottled water and crackers; and to the eclectic assortment of Tibetan, Bhutanese, Chinese and Indian food that graces the menus of the restaurants throughout town; and to Diane and the other KIRF Bodhgaya volunteers we’ve met here.

Our next stop is Kolkata, where we’ll bid a sad goodbye to Hannah after a few more days. After a week in Kolkata and the surrounding area of West Bengal, Patrick and I will endure our longest train ride yet -- nearly 30 hours -- down the east coast to Chennai (a.k.a. Madras) and the state of Tamil Nadu. I’m excited to continue our explorations of this crazy subcontinent, and will try to update you on some more of our adventures, frustrations, and observations soon. Much love to all.

Despite our reclusiveness over the past several days, we've had some great luck meeting people.

On the way home from breakfast that day, while discussing how Iran might very well be gorgeous and full of hospitable, gracious people but we would never dare terrify our parents by going there, we stopped at a chapati stand and met a woman on her way to do yoga for a few months in Rishikesh, the "Yoga Capital of India." She, too, had just arrived in Delhi, and we had the honor of introducing her to chapati and sambar, having made its acquaintance when we were in Malaysia. Yes, we were having chapati sambar on the way home from breakfast. That's how we do.

On the four-hour train to Chandigarh, we sat next to an Indian guy just slightly older than us who works for Western Union in Nepal, Bhutan, and northern India. It was interesting to talk to him, because the web of remittances between those countries and other places around the world can describe so much about the way people migrate, and the bilateral economic relationships between various countries.

The next day, I went on a long walk through this city. It's not really a great walking city; it's really spread out, and there aren't that many sidewalks. But there are a lot of parks, and I was mostly interested in getting a closer look at how the whole thing worked, and I got that. I ran into an older Hindu guy who invited me to watch him play drums at his temple that night, and then come to his house and look at his album of photos of himself with architects he's met. His first assumption when we ran into each other was that I was an architect. I guess that's why most white guys come to this city. There are hardly any western tourists here. I think it's possible that this is what it'll be like throughout most of India. Maybe India gets four times the number of western tourists that Thailand gets, but since it has about thirty times the land mass, tourists are rare. Unfortunately, when I showed up at the temple to meet this drummer later that day, he was nowhere to be found. I don't really know what happened there, but it's unfortunate that I missed him.

Yesterday, Sarah and I walked through Nek Chand's Fantasy Rock Garden, a mazelike sculpture park constructed of rocks and waste material that would make Philadelphia's Isaiah Zagar drool his tongue off. In there, we met Guvinder, a Sikh fellow a few years younger than us from a village in the neighboring state of Haryana. He's a fascinating guy, great to talk to, and we ended up spending the afternoon talking and then going to a Bollywood movie called DHOOM 2, reminiscent of El Mariachi except with cat burglars and excellent dancing. We may visit him at his family's home in a couple weeks.

This morning, on our way up to our hotel room, where I was going to complete this entry, Narinder Singh, whom we had met outside the building a couple days before, was waiting for us with a gift: a bracelet, a banana, and a rose. While Sarah was burdened with these, I wrote a little hello in a kind of guest register that Narinder carries on his person at all times. I gave him our web address. Hello Narinder!

It seems like India has a magic combination of many english speakers, rare tourism, heavy crowding, and general friendliness that makes it hard, even for rather shy folks like Sarah and me, not to meet a ton of people. I wasn't expecting it at all, but I'm having a lot of fun.

I’ve mostly been glad about that. In the best cases, it lets us take people’s advice about where to go or what to do; it lets us stick around for longer in the places we’re intrigued by and hightail it out of the places that we’re not so into. It has allowed us to luck into being in the right place at the right time more often than really seems fair sometimes; we were at Bromo for the full moon, in Penang for Deepavali, in Phuket for the Vegetarian Festival and King Chulalongkorn Day, in Bangkok for Loi Krathong, in Phnom Penh for the Betty Ford and the GT Falcons show at the Rock Zone, and back in Bangkok for the King’s birthday festivities.

The flip side of playing everything by ear is that it can sometimes result in feeling aimless, like we’re not sure exactly why we’re going where we’re going next, or what particularly is the point. We didn’t start out the trip with a specific research question or plan of exactly we wanted to get out of it -- the thing about travelling the world is that the world is very big and very complex and very interesting, full of far more sights and sounds and foods and people than we could ever see and hear and taste and meet. Often that complexity is fascinating and exciting, but at times it can just become overwhelming, and those are the times when we start to question what we’re doing.

But for that reason too, making it up as you go along has its benefits.

As of yesterday, all of our vague plans have been pretty drastically altered. My dad’s mother, my grandma, had a stroke just after Thanksgiving. She is in a rehabilitative hospital, and my family is heading down to Tulsa to spend Christmas with her. Talking on the phone with my parents the other night, on a frustratingly delayed international connection on my cell phone, in our hot fan room in the New Siam guest house in Bangkok, all of the emotions started to come together -- the bouts of aimlessness I’d been feeling, the occasional boredom, even, and now this family crisis that tugged at my heart.

I tossed and turned all night, and then Patrick and I talked through options all the next day, gaming out airfares and budgets and itineraries, and then that night I called my mom and asked how she’d feel if I came home for Christmas.

I think we both started crying.

So now we have a few last days to say goodbye to Bangkok, a city where we’ve spent a combined total of almost three weeks over the past couple of months, and which we have really come to love. We’re sampling new hawker foods and eating some favorite standbys -- mango and sticky rice, guava shakes, coconut yogurt, whole fried fish, steamed dumplings.... We’re going for long walks and sitting in parks in the early evening watching high school kids learn swishy choreographed dance routines from fabulously hip teachers. We’re strolling through markets, keeping our eyes out for a few last souvenirs. We’re riding the skytrain and the river ferry. We’re taking more photographs.

In addition to Bangkok, we’re saying goodbye, for now, to Southeast Asia, a part of the world that has come to feel very familiar over the past four months and that I know I’ll want to return to in the future. After a couple weeks in the states with family, we’ll be heading down to Mexico and Central America to continue our world travels.

I feel good about this decision, and glad that it’s a choice we were able to make. As I said to my mom, what’s the point of flying by the seat of your pants if you don’t sometimes fly off in some completely unexpected direction? I feel very lucky to be able to spend this time with my family. And I feel energized, too, about the prospect of continuing our travels in a wholly different part of the world.

Meanwhile, I’ll drink another Chang or two, try a few more hawker treats, and bid a fond farewell to Bangkok on Friday morning.

Earlier this week, we had started to get to a bit of a burnout point in the trip -- feeling not as energetic and excited about the places we were going and things we were experiencing as we had been early on. The heat is part of it -- the end of the rainy season has meant that Cambodia during the middle of the day is pretty much intolerably hot unless you're inside under a strong fan, and that limits what activities you can do. It also doesn't help that even $5-a-night guesthouses here almost uniformly have cable TVs in every room, and, having been deprived of TV for months, we went on a little bit of an HBO/Cinemax/Star Movies binge (and watched some really bad movies, like The Perfect Man, and some so-bad-they-were-almost-good movies, like Tomcats, and the occasional good movie, like The Searchers).

But there's nothing to snap you out of a funk like meeting some great people, and that's one of the other things I'm thankful for. In Pursat, a provincial capital about three hours northwest of Phnom Penh, where we were last week, our moto driver Vuthy ended up becoming a friend. He spoke great english and we spent a fun day exploring the beautiful countryside around Pursat with him, visiting temples and lakes and taking in the spectacular views. It's a shame that there's no such thing as high-speed internet in Cambodia, because we have some gorgeous pictures of the electric green rice fields and lakes rimmed with water hyacinths and mountains off in the distance. The Cambodian countryside is really incredibly lovely, and so going on a moto ride to any particular destination (a temple or waterfall or what have you) is mostly about the journey getting there. Having the chance to explore it with someone as fun as Vuthy made it particularly special. If you're in need of a moto driver in Pursat, let me know -- he comes highly recommended.

After Pursat, we headed down to Phnom Penh, where a friend of ours from college, Daniel, has lived on and off for the past four years or so. He's got a whole network of friends here, and we immediately found ourselves invited to a gathering at a bar where we met some other fun people. On Saturday, a big group of Daniel's friends went in together on chartering a boat for a Mekong river cruise in the afternoon and early evening. There was beer and chips and some people put together a delicious crab boil -- we had a great time and met some more cool people. It was great to be at a party after so many months of solo travel. Later that night, some of us headed over to a local bar called the Rock Zone to see one of Phnom Penh's only real rock bands, Betty Ford and the GT Falcons. We drank cheap and tasty Beer Lao and rocked out.

All the new people have helped re-energize us, and we're both feeling pretty excited about what's to come, although we're not sure quite what it is. We're headed down to Kampot in southern Cambodia for a few days, and then back to Phnom Penh next weekend for a day or two, but afterwards, it's still up in the air. We'll likely be heading to Laos or Thailand, but it might end up being Vietnam or Nepal? We'll keep you posted. Lots of love and we miss you!

The trip began when we were picked up at our guest house at six a.m. to make a seven a.m. boat departure. A pick-up truck already filled with seven people and their backpacks pulled in to Smiley's Guest House and the four of us standing there -- me and Patrick and a German couple -- stared incredulously at the remaining space in the back of the truck, wondering how we were all going to fit. Fortunately, three of us instead were invited to climb into the cab, behind the driver, our knees tucked up to our chins and our backpacks in the back of the truck, added to the pile. What we didn't realize is that we weren't the last stop. There were in fact four more people to pick up. It was a clown car by the time we pulled onto the road to head for the boat dock -- six people in the cab and at least ten, plus all those backpacks, in the back.

On board the boat, the seats quickly filled up, and some people headed for the roof of the boat. Again, we weren't done picking people up. Along the route, through Tonle Sap lake and up into the river to Battambang, we passed through a number of floating villages, where people live on houseboats of sorts, tethered together, close to floating shops, restaurants, and gas stations. The boat would blast its horn as we pulled into each village, and sometimes a family would paddle out in a little wooden canoe, and hand off a passenger and suitcase to the boat before waving goodbye and paddling back home. One such late arrival was travelling with more than just a suitcase -- the boat crew helped him heft burlap sack after burlap sack on board. Some they put down in the hold in the front of the boat, and others they carried down the aisle to the back, near the door to the W.C.

We all started to notice that the burlap sacks were wriggling.

The word went around -- crocodiles. We all turned around in our seats and watched what was clearly tails twitching through brown cloth. The sacks did seem securely sewn shut, and Patrick said, "They probably know what they're doing with these things. They've probably got this down." And I said, "I'm glad I already used the bathroom, because now you'd have to step over the crocodile."

We'd been on the boat for two hours or so at that point, and we'd been told it was about a three-hour trip. But three hours came and went, and when we pulled over for a lunch stop for the driver at a little floating convenience store, that seemed like a bad sign. So a few hours later, it became clear what had to be done. "Okay," I said to Patrick, "I'm going to go step over the crocodile."

I'm writing this from an internet cafe in Battambang, where I'm happy to report we arrived, safe and sound with all our limbs intact, after a six and a half hour boat ride where we took way too many pictures, which we'll post next time we have a high-speed connection.

Tomorrow, we're headed a little more off the beaten track, into the Cardamom Mountains, to hopefully see some nature and wildlife and maybe experience a little bit more of rural Cambodia. I'll let you know what we find. In the meantime, the next time you're on a road trip or at a bar and find yourself having to use some less-than-pleasant facilities, feel free to say you're going to step over the crocodile.

The other aspect of the Veg Fest is that many of the devotees, in addition to giving up meat etc., also perform a range of other ascetic feats, from hot-coal walking to bladed-ladder climbing to, most commonly, piercing sharp objects through one or both cheeks and out their mouths.

What type of objects do people stick through their faces, you may be wondering. Patrick and I compiled a list of things we saw pierced through faces during one two-hour parade the other day (links are to photos, not for the squeamish).

Things we saw stuck through people’s faces:

Swords
Skewers
Parasols
Umbrellas
Beach umbrella
Rainbow-colored plastic straws
Giant Chupa-chups lollipops
Two-inch thick red candle
Large paper fan
Flower baskets
Metal rod skewered through dozens of oranges
Bicycle pump
Hubcap
Robot action figure
Cymbal on stand from a drum kit
Bathroom sink
Kitchen sink
Wrench
Pruning shears
Chandelier
Long beans
Flower bouquets
Leafy branches
Thorned blooming cactus branches
Ten-foot sapling
Badminton racquets
Power drill
Scale model of Eiffel Tower
Huge butterfly wings on a rod
Flag advertising local beer garden & restaurant
Flag saying “Long Live the King” in Thai and English
Miscellaneous other flags
Chair
Handcuffs
Barbed wire
Semi-automatic rifles
Battleship

So that is a whole list of things I never really thought I’d see. And between the food and the festival, covers much of what we did in Phuket for over a week. Seriously, we ate, watched (and marched in) parades, ate some more, browsed around in antique shops and art galleries, ate more, watched movies, and, um, ate some more.

Now it’s a few days later, and we’ve been loving Bangkok. Patrick’s parents have joined us here, and the four of us are bound for Cambodia on Monday. I’ll try to update the blog more frequently with little updates on where we are and what we’ve been up to -- but it may be a little hectic over the next month as I’m also trying to do National Novel Writing Month again this November -- and so far it hasn’t been all that easy to find the time to get my daily writing done.

Happy fall to all of you in cooler climes -- enjoy the changing leaves and the crisp apples. It’s still 90 degrees and humid here most days, and the only time I get to wear a sweater is in movie theaters, which Thailand chills down to about 55 degrees. Lots of love.

For example, was I at all interested in riding motorcycles back in Philadelphia? No. But in Southeast Asia, everyone uses them, everywhere, and you can rent one for around $5 a day just down the block from our guesthouse, and it started to seem like a good skill to learn. Patrick was the more gung-ho of the two of us; he worked on me until I thought it was a good idea, and yesterday, we rented ourselves a bike and started practicing in a nearby parking lot. Patrick got good enough after a few hours of stops and starts and figure-eights in the parking lot that by this morning, while the day was still cool and the Saturday morning traffic light, we went out for a little spin, me riding on the back. (Both of us in helmets, and yes, we were very careful, for all of you with mothering instincts.)

In the same way that I wasn’t interested in motorcycles until they were all around me, I wasn’t nearly as interested in knowing the history of Islam and the details of Muslim practices of faith until I was living smack dab in the middle of them. It’s not that I was uninterested, exactly -- it’s just that, like with motorcycling, it didn’t seem like enough of a priority, or have quite enough relevance to my life for me to make the time for it. On that front, we were fortunate enough to stumble on a book called No God But God: The History, Evolution and Future of Islam, by Reza Aslan, in a bookstore in Kuala Lumpur. Both of us tore through the book, which is an engaging, fascinating read. I recommend it highly and wholeheartedly to anyone who finds themselves thinking “I wish I understood a little bit more about Islam.” It has a nice balance of storytelling and academic credentials, and Aslan does a commendable job of writing about religion in a way that is deeply respectful of faith while still allowing room for questioning and understanding the roots of sectarian rifts, politicization of religion, and more. Did I say I highly recommend this book already? Good. Moving on, and back to this whole notion of learning.

My mom is an educator, a specialist in early child development, and one of the phrases that’s coming to my mind now is one I learned from her: emergent curriculum. As I understand it, emergent curriculum means viewing the world around us as full of learning opportunities, and paying close attention to the questions children ask and the things they notice in order to teach the world as it comes. I’m sure there’s much more to it than that, but in my mind, the most important part is the attitude: the willingness to be aware of the world around us, particularly the parts that we don’t understand, and to seek out information about the things that grab our attention.

And the thing is, back in my regular life, I didn’t make much time for that kind of awareness. I mean, I read a lot back home -- more than I’m reading now. And I watched interesting movies and had interesting conversations with people, and sometimes took art classes or went to museums or lectures. I was certainly learning. But most of the things that I read about or talked about or thought about were things that I already thought I might be interested in.

We define ourselves by our interests, don’t we? I know I do. I think of myself as someone who is interested in writing, and American history, and politics, and art, and music, and so on. And it’s even more specific. We define ourselves by which authors we like, our favorite movies, our top five bands, our favorite restaurants. And I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. I don’t think it is; knowing what you like, what you value, what makes you happy, is a good thing to know. But it can end up forming ruts that get deeper and deeper until it’s hard to see over the edges and remember you’re even in one. There’s plenty of interesting stuff in the rut for you -- that’s how you got there in the first place. (Maybe one of the reasons emergent curriculum works so well with young children is that they haven’t formed their ruts yet, so they’re still interested in everything.)

So I guess that’s what going halfway around the world does -- it takes you not just out of those ruts, but way, way far away from them. So you’re not really able to fall back in, even if you wanted to. And in some cases I do want to -- there are certain parts of life back home that I miss frequently and reliably, and that’s a good thing, in my mind. I wrote in my journal that missing those things (friends; baking bread; walks through Rittenhouse Square; flowers from my garden; much more) -- that missing them feels like being pleasantly hungry before a meal. I have an appetite for life back home in Philadelphia, and I know that the things I miss are things I truly value. And I’ll get back to them.

But for now, I’m over here, kilometers away from my well-worn ruts, learning to ride a motorcycle and eating roti canai, thosai, idli or appom for breakfast every morning. This is the current routine.

This is another thing I’ve been wanting to write about: how fast the new becomes the routine. We’ve been in Malaysia for a month, and it’s been a slow month, largely due to a series of ailments that kept us from moving on from places as quickly as we might have. There was strep throat and heat rash and more strep throat and there were many visits to doctors. (At some point later in our travels, Patrick and I have vowed to write up something about our medical experiences abroad. So far, between the two of us, we’ve seen four doctors and been prescribed about fifteen different varieties of pills and creams and nasal sprays. We seem to be progressing toward full health, so knock on wood that it’ll stay that way for a while.) So while recuperating, we spent a full week in the Cameron Highlands, and now have spent just over a week here in Georgetown on Penang Island.

And after traveling for a couple months, it now takes just a day or so for a place to start to feel familiar, for each new guesthouse to start to feel like home. And so spending a week in the same place feels almost like living there. We almost immediately develop habits -- favorite restaurants, favorite streets. We start to recognize the dogs and the hawkers, learn the names of shops. We figure out which vendor has the best ais kacang (pronounced ice ka-chang; a specialty in Penang -- a mountain of shaved ice in a big plastic bowl topped with cola syrup, red beans, creamed corn, various jellies, and condensed milk -- you have to trust me when I tell you it’s delicious), and we determine which used book seller has the best deals.

And then, when it’s all so familiar that we’ve forgotten what it was like a week ago never to have been here, we leave. And the next place goes from exotic to familiar in the time it takes us to ditch our backpacks, wash some clothes, scout out the closest internet cafe and the first good breakfast place. Which is not to say that we’ve learned everything there is to know about any of the places we’ve been -- just that they all have come to feel approachable, relatable.

Tomorrow, we’re headed to Thailand, to Krabi and the beaches of the Andaman coast. It’s just a bus ride away, which makes it seem so close and easy that I have to keep reminding myself it will be an entirely different country, with a different language, different food, different culture. But even the process of making that transition may start to feel familiar, once we’ve been to a couple more countries. Changing money, getting new SIM cards for our cell phones, figuring out the first few key phrases -- those are things we have already done, and will continue doing throughout the months to come.

So I suppose that brings it full circle, to something else travel is teaching me that I hadn’t planned on: it’s teaching me that I can adjust to new things pretty damn quick, given the motivation. And that’s another good thing to know.

These suckers were swarming the banks of the tidal river that runs into the ocean through Melaka. Sarah, who is the better wildlife spotter between us, noticed the first one. It was jarring. The expressive face of a withered human was peering out of the water, propped up on a rock, its tail end disappearing into the depths. Was it an amphibian? It had no front legs. It had, we convinced ourselves, only fins. It skipped off, swimming across the top of the water. Another one came up and started trotting around on land. This one was confirmation that there were no legs, only fins and a tail. We sighted another, then more. We decided for a few minutes that these were creatures at some life-cycle stage between a tadpole and a frog. A Malay family came by, obviously on vacation too, and we pointed these things out to them. The man gave them a glance, totally blasé, and said, “Fish.” He consulted his wife, then said something like “Gembing.” We tried to express our enthusiasm, but they just smirked and moved on. They did pay some attention to the gembings; the man stamped to scare them and make them stir up the water, entertaining the little boy. Like a dad in Philly might do with squirrels or pigeons. Basically, the message was, these are no big deal.

The first sighting was all at high tide. There wasn’t much room for the mudskippers to run around. But when we came back the next morning, the tide was low, and they were all over the place. They’re really fast, and they come in all sizes. They bounce across the top of the water and then scoot across the land, leaving tracks like plant stems with leaves shooting off the sides - the stems from their tails, the leaves from their fins. Also, like the prairie dogs of the riverbank, they were popping in and out of little holes in the mud, looking around, and generally darting every which way.

They were pretty cute in some ways, and absolutely revolting in others. This is not a clean river, by any stretch. It’s filled with trash, gutter runoff, and, I’m sure, worse stuff that I don’t know about. The mud these fish are rooting around in is basically the decayed effluvia of the surrounding area. It’s gotten me to worry about whether I’m eating mudskipper when I sample the fish curries in restaurants here.

Other sightings in Melaka: a tree strung up with so many lights that at night, it was a virtual Manhattan of screeching birds. I mean, noise pollution and a serious need for a modernized sewer system. Also, a couple of pretty large monitor lizards hunting on the banks of the river as we biked by on our rickety rented mountain bikes our last day there.

After four days in Melaka, we took a bus up to Taman Negara (which translates to simply, “National Park”), where we were supposed to see wildlife. We did, after a while. On our first rainforest hike, we saw a crew of monkeys chilling in the canopy. They were fun to watch until they started peeing at us, then we got out of the way quick. There were peafowl brazenly walking within a couple meters of us, more monitor lizards, and giant ants crawling along the path with us. We came across an enormous centipede, at least 20 cm long, and took a video of its amazing leg action.

We probably spent the longest time watching a family of wild pigs rooting through underbrush and eating leaves. Their occasional grunts seemed so homey and contented, it was comforting. At some point, the mother went off to feed her seven piglets, and we couldn’t go to watch because we would have been in the way of the other four adults charging across the path to join them. We knew what was happening only because of the loud squealing we heard coming from that direction.

Now we’re in the Cameron Highlands, a cool-weathered hill station on the way to Penang, and I imagine we’ll be here for a while. Sarah and I are both recovering from various maladies, and the weather here is just so pleasant, aside from the fact that it rains every afternoon. There is plenty of canopied jungle to hike through, and we aren’t even sweating through our clothes when we’re done. In general, the abundance of plant and fungal life here is just incredible, unrivaled by anything I’ve seen in the US. Everything is green. Every tree has bromeliads and moss growing off of it and vines hanging from it. I guess that’s what you get with lots of sun and lots of water, even at a moderate temperature. Actually, we decided that the plants growing on the forest floors here would be perfect choices for house plants back at home, because they live in low light, at a constant temperature that’s ideal for humans.

We haven’t had as many animal sightings here, but there have been some. There was some weird asian squirrel that ran up a tree in front of us on our first hike, and a few shy lizards. On another hike, some monkeys seemed to be following us around and hooting, but they wouldn’t show themselves; they just hooted and chittered from the branches. We’ve seen a number of cool birds here, including one very small one, maybe a finch, that hopped and looked around so jerkily that I thought it must be some kind of clockwork machine.

It’s raining today, not just in the afternoon, but since the morning. Sarah and I are catching up on our reading and writing. No nature sightings except what we can see out the window.