A Clever Lady and a Burmese Baby

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Burma is a closed off country. Before spending time on it’s border I’d never heard much in the way of specific news or descriptions of problems in Burma, only that it was a rough place. Indeed it is a rough place, particularly for those who born into the Karen people group. From what I understand the Karen sided with the Allies in WWII, which was fine until the war was over and the allies forgot them in the treaty writing and left them at the mercy of their Japan sympathizing countrymen. Ethnic cleansing is the name of the game the controlling party in Burma now plays. One of the best health decisions a Karen person can make is to sneak across the border into Thailand and try to make a new life. Life in Thailand is relatively safe, but not easy: no I.D., illegal status, no access to health care or property rights. Being a refugee is a real drag, but when the alternative might involve literally being dragged down the street behind a truck, beaten, and killed, you go the refugee route if you can manage.

Bamboo School, where we spent the last ten days, exists to help Karen refugees, particularly orphans and other option-less children. Catherine Riley-Bryan Is affectionately known as “Momo Cat” by her “Bamboo Kids” and friends in Thailand. She told us that even though she’s old enough to be grandmother to her bamboo children, she prefers the Thai word for motherly endearment (Momo) since grandmothers are called “Pee Pee” (grandfathers, as it so happens are called “Poo Poo,” perfect right?).

Before Momo came to work in Thailand she did everything from earning the prestigious honor of Business Woman of the Year in New Zealand and Australia, to piloting rescue helicopters, to marrying a Manchester United footballer and traveling the Premiere League circuit on the arm of an Athlete. As Jeremy put it, “this woman has really lived.” Eventually she and her footballer settled down happily on a ranch in New Zealand, but when her husband died God began leading her through another astonishing series of events that has ultimately landed her on the Thai-Burma border having a rip-roaring good time running an orphanage, clinic, and ambulance service.

Momo is the kind of lady who gets things done and has a good time doing it. For example (and examples abound -I can’t listen quite as fast as she can tell stories), she was having a problem with some of the villagers releasing their goats on her property and eat her seedlings at night. She didn’t know who the culprits were so she corralled the goats and spray painted them hot pink. The next morning she hopped in her truck and drove down the hill till she spotted the hot pink goats, then had some words with their darker pink (blushing) owners.

It was inspiring to see how Momo serves God, and to hear her excitedly explain how thankful she is that God has given her a purpose. Even the lady who has “lived” finds she’s getting a lot more out of life now, as a servant to the poor, than she was back in her wheeling dealing days.

For my part, with only ten days at Bamboo School, I caught the vision but couldn’t quite figure out my place in the work. Hard work is a value that Momo is instilling in her kids, and they‘re catching on. There’s a schedule for chores; by the time I’d go hunt down a broom I’d come back to find the girls had finished sweeping already. The boys took Jeremy and me to cut Bamboo in the jungle for a new wall in the main building (the dorms and guest houses are straight out of Swiss Family Robison: floors, walls, and ceilings all from bamboo -these are two story structures, too). We got schooled in machete technique, and learned that, at home in Burma, these boys would likely have been cutting teak wood in addition to bamboo, and loading it on the family elephant (evidently it’s quite common for a successful family group to have an elephant, a strong one runs about $2000).

If I said, “I learned more from the bamboo kids than I possibly could have taught them,” I wouldn’t be being philosophical, I didn’t know how to split bamboo to make flooring, how to cut jack fruit, or how to feed a baby. I’m slightly ashamed but largely relieved to say that I still don’t know how to change a diaper -a skill that’s important for the older bamboo kids to know since they take care of their baby brothers and sisters.

One thing Jeremy and I know a little bit about is pouring concrete without much in the way of tools. We were able to put some of our energy, and your “Good Samaritan” money, to that end. We spent a day running plumbing and building forms in preparation for the pour, but the pouring day was the most fun: Bucket brigades with a median age of nine. I had a good laugh when I remembered and hummed the “Little Rascals” theme song. After we finished the floor for the “club house,” we “he-men” took the afternoon off and headed for the swimming hole. Everything was O’Tay.

-bjorn2bwild

Squeeze the Throttle and Point ‘Er South

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I fell in love with traveling all over again on the second half of our two-wheeled Vietnamese odyssey. My South Vietnamese premonitions were unfounded. The dense, feverish, mosquito infested jungle I expected never showed itself. There were wide open spaces and green hills under blue skies that had me wondering if we’d taken a wrong turn and ended up in Tanzania. The mighty “former rain” which had so thoroughly inundated our first week on the road left us unimpressed by the “latter rain” (about 15 minutes of drizzling…refreshing, really) two days before we reached Saigon. Mostly it was blue skies and balmy breezes. Perfect riding weather.

Bike trips are for dreaming. With nothing to listen to but the wind and the sound of my own thoughts, my imagination went totally bonkers and I got really excited about life, and the things I’d like to do with mine. I changed prospective medical specialties three times during the 800km of Ho Chi Minh highway that separates Hoi An and Saigon. Also it became momentously important to me that I own and run several businesses before I die: hot dog stand, peach orchard, ergonomic design studio, and ice cream parlor. As if all that and medicine won’t keep me busy enough, I solemnly vowed I would learn to sew (well enough to make suits and gowns) and that my culinary repertoire was in grievous need of expansion and would require an ample dose of attention when I get home. Do they have online Home/Ec classes for travelers?

We covered half the length of Vietnam in the last three days of riding. We were up with the sun, and in the saddle almost until dark. Every couple of hours we’d stop to stretch our legs and treat the sweaty hinder regions to some revitalizing breezes. A motorcycle trip, as it turns out, isn‘t a bad past time for a guy who‘s foot is out of order. I could keep up fine as long as we were on the road, it was the stopovers where Jeremy would have to pick up the slack in running errands and getting food and water.

Jeremy, as a rule, makes excellent consumer decisions, so I was happy in my handicap state, to leave hunting and gathering up to him. Everything he scrounged up was great, with the exception of the onion ice cream. That was foul. However, the irony in the fact that the ice cream truck, in rural Vietnam, drove off with it’s speakers blaring “It’s a Small World After All” was sufficiently delicious to leave me with a palatable memory of the experience as a whole.

As we finally entered Saigon I remember thinking passively, “Don’t Crash! Don’t Crash! Aaah there are cars everywhere I‘m gonna die!!.” Luckily I was able to postpone my foray into the maniacal throng thanks to the fact that I ran out of gas. What luck! After I hop-pushed my bike (still in one foot mode) to the next gas station, I realized I was having electrical problems to boot and had to use the kick start to get her going again (her name was Christine by the way…I christened her Christine for the sheer joy of making such an alliterative declaration). .

The goal was to drive to Saigon and sell the bikes. Christine made it to Saigon, and I suppose I should be thankful, but upon arrival, as a bid farewell I suppose, she hit me with a $25 repair bill (this might not sound like much, but it was by far the most expensive tab I ever paid on her behalf…stuff’s cheap in Vietnam). Christine got a makeover and I posted her on Craigslist and also taped a for sale sign to her. She sold easily, and for a good price, as did Jeremy’s bike who’s name escapes me at the moment.

Speaking of paying tabs on behalf of girls, I had a date in Saigon with a Vietnamese girl. Her name translates as “Picture” and as far as those go I thought she is well composed. She has a really cute smile. My attempts to get her to smile turned quickly into flirting, which turned into a date. She picked me up on her motorbike and we went to a restaurant on the river for rice-paper wraps. I was worried that people would think she was a prostitute and that I had hired her (a tragic amount of that business does go on in Saigon), but I think our laughter was too genuine to create that sort of confusion. It was a really fun date, her English vocabulary can‘t keep up with her sassiness. I thought it was cute when she would talk herself into a corner and want to express herself so badly that it looked as if she might explode. She said I could only be her boyfriend if I stay to live in Saigon. It didn’t work out.

Crash

“Uh oh. I’m gonna hit him.” I said to myself as a topsy turvy motorbike laden with a towering bundle of sugar cane veered unexpectedly into the full illumination of my headlight. My next thought was, “huh, so this is what it’s like to slide on asphalt.” By the time friction had finished grating me to a stop my main thought was, “man, I‘m afraid that may not have been healthy for my skin.”
Nothing hurt too badly as my body automatically dragged my motorbike to the side of the road and felt around for belongings that had escaped their bungees during the main event. I was happy to be alive and conscious, and it wasn’t until I managed to move my whole junk-show off of the tarmac that I realized the gravity of my situation: It was dark (we hadn’t yet reached a town with a hotel…so we had continued into the night), Jeremy was gone, my motorbike didn’t look good, I was in a very rural part of a third world country, I could feel my shoe was filling with blood, I had no idea where the nearest clinic was, no one around me knew any words in English or had any way to help me get anywhere.
Thankfully the guy I hit was fine (had he been hurt I might have found myself in jail or the recipient of some vigilante justice). He pulled his motorcycle to the side of the road and started giving me emphatic instructions. He may as well have been speaking Vietnamese (uummmm.) Another guy came along and picked my bike up off of it’s side. He started bending and kicking mangled parts back into alignment. He pressed the starter and, hallelujah, it started!
I fumbled around for ten minutes, reattaching my belongings to my motorbike and wondering what I should do. I hoped Jeremy would realize I wasn’t behind him anymore and come back. Every time a bike would pass I would shout his name. I couldn’t see who was on the passing bikes behind their blinding headlights, and since I was off to the side of the road I wanted to make sure Jeremy didn’t pass me if he came back looking for me.
Jeremy hadn’t returned and I knew I needed to get some medical attention. I didn’t know how bad I was bleeding, so I was worried that if I was really bleeding I might get light-headed and crash again if I tried to ride to the next town. I had a prayer and started down the road.
Jeremy was waiting on the side of the road less than a mile away, it was a big relief to see him. I took my shoe off so we could assess the damage. I couldn’t see the biggest gash (it was on the bottom of my foot) but Jeremy told me it was big. He wrapped my foot tightly in his bandana, but then I couldn’t fit it back into my shoe. I asked him if I could just wear his shoe, I figured his size 15 could accommodate my foot, bandage and all. He gave me his shoe and we started trying to figure out how to get to the next town that might have a clinic.
We were relying on sign language to ask for help and directions and we weren’t getting anywhere fast. Finally (this was a huge answer to prayer) we happened upon a kid who spoke English. He didn’t speak well, in fact he probably knew about 14 words, but it was enough to tell him I would pay him to lead us to the next town that had a hospital. We followed him about 15km to Thai Hoa. I rode with my injured foot slung up over the handle bars to keep it elevated.
The hospital was exceedingly primitive. A man lay grimacing on a table with a splint on his leg that consisted of two sticks bound together with a bunch of tape. As his friends hoisted him up from the table and carried him hurriedly through the door they came within a centimeter of slamming his injured leg into the door jam. I wondered what kind of care I could expect.
I presume the man who worked on me was a doctor. He said (through our 14 word interpreter) that we would have to come to his house so he could stitch me up. It seemed curious that he couldn’t do it at the clinic, but there was no way to ask why. We struck out again on our bikes, following the doctor across the small town and down a dimly lit alley to his home. I knew I was about to get some serious stitches, and I was pretty nervous, wondering whether or not this guy had any anesthetic.
Turns out he did have anesthetic, and other than the fact that his flea ridden dog sat right next to him as he stitched me up, it was a fairly sterile procedure. He produced several syringes and vials of mysterious serums which I hoped were antibiotics. All the labels were in Vietnamese so I just had him hit me with everything he had.
So now it hurts to walk, but luckily it doesn’t hurt to ride a motorbike. So we’ve continued our trip down Vietnam. The interesting thing now is that we’ve realized we would have been better off buying jet-skis than motorbikes. The flooding they mentioned in the news. They weren’t joking. We’ve driven through torrential downpours for the last few days. I’m trying to keep my foot from getting infected, but it’s a bit tricky since it has to spend it’s days in my soggy right shoe.
Now we’re in Hue, the old capital of Vietnam. I’ve made an invalid out of myself, mostly laying in bed keeping my foot dry. Jeremy runs errands and comes back wide-eyed with stories of people in canoes going down main roads. I really wanted to do a motorcycle trip because I was feeling like the train/bus method lacked a certain element of adventure. It hasn’t been hard to find adventure on the motorbikes. Not hard at all.

-bjorn2bwild

Youth In Asia

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I’ve been indulging my audio book addiction, and it’s left me with little time for blogging. But I’ve got about 20 min so I’ll hammer out a quick update (I‘m writing fast, please excuse my grammar errors and my developing tendency to slip into Vietnamenglish):

Here’s what we’ve been up to since last time I wrote:

-bamboo raft down the Li River (look up online -grand scenery) to reach Southern China.
-tasted (just one sip) snake wine -it’s rice wine marinated in a bottle full of dead snakes.
-spent 3 days rock climbing in Yangshuo, China -very epic, see Jeremy’s blog.
-rented bikes for 80 cents a day and got around with out peddling by grabbing passing vehicles.
-got massages -the girl who worked on Jeremy was a lot cuter than the guy I got.
-long lists are boring…so this one is ending.

I hadn’t realized that U.S. citizens can’t get Vietnamese visas at the border, so we had to go to Nanning, in Southern China, to get our papers sorted out at the Vietnamese consulate. Nanning is a regular city. Tourists don’t go there. There’s nothing particularly remarkable to see but that made it a really neat place to spend a few days. People were genuinely curious about us since we were foreigners. Mothers would bring there children over to us and prompt them to say the four words which constitute their English vocabulary: “hello, how are you?”

From Nanning we took a bus to Hanoi, Vietnam. We had our first major hiccup at the border. Jeremy could not convince the Chinese officials that he was the long haired guy pictured in his passport. Despite a whole pile of documentation and identification, including his birth certificate, there was no convincing them. Finally we got out our computers and dug for pictures to demonstrate Jeremy’s Jeremy-ness. I had happened to snap a picture of him cutting his long hair off when we were in Cusco, Peru, so I made a little slide show documentary of the evolution of Jeremy’s hair-do. I’m not sure if the slide show was the reason, but after much ado they finally let us into Vietnam.

Vietnam: Central America is to the U.S. what Vietnam is to China. It got a whole lot more primitive and a whole lot less organized as soon as we crossed the border. Super fun! The people we‘ve encountered are incredibly sweet and enormously helpful. “We want help you first -more important. then maybe second we can make some money,” the pretty lady at the hostel desk said with here beaming smile when we asked here why she was so nice.

I should mention the youth in Asia. This was a big topic in ethics class and I never fully understood why. Anyway, in this part of Asia the youth are splendid. We are regularly befriended. Their help is extended. But my rhyming has ended. For the past two days two youth in Asia have helped us find, buy, and fix up the two scooters we‘re going to drive the 1700 miles to Ho Chi Minh City (plus possible detours into Laos and Cambodia). It’s time to hit the road….blessings, I’ll catch you later.

-bjorn2bwild

Seedy Trains and Rice-Filled Plains

The rising sun of the Japanese flag flew proudly aboard the Su Zhou Hao ferry as we bid farewell to Osaka. We were at sea long enough for the sun to set and rise twice more before a leathery crewman clambered to the top of the bridge to lower the Japanese colors and hoist China’s bright red, yellow star-studded banner. Our landing in Asia proper was nigh. The individual “chugs” of the low rpm engine could be heard as the Su Zhou Hao slowly, but unrelentingly moved out of the swelling Pacific and into the mouth of the Huangpu River to Shanghai.

As we approached the dock an astonishing cityscape peaked through the smoggy haze. On the Huangpu’s Northern bank lies the Bund, a massive but carefully tended walking thoroughfare along the river. Cascades of pink petunias hung from every light post along the wide stone walkway. The Bund lies between the river and Shanghai’s old European quarter where merchants of colonial days have left telltale architectural fingerprints.

The newest and biggest skyscrapers are across the river, both they and their dancing reflections in the river are clearly visible from the Bund. In the past 30 years more skyscrapers have been built in Shanghai than New York City has ever built. The city’s crowning architectural gem is, as ought to be expected here, actually a pearl -the Pearl Tower. The tower is something like the Seattle Space Needle’s big brother. However instead of a saucer on top, the Pearl Tower has two enormous globes (pearls), one on top of the other, adorning its slender frame.

It was in Shanghai that Jeremy and I first encountered the baffling Mandarin language. So far this is what I’ve learned: The word for “horse,” ma, is also the world for “what” and “mother.” Subtle tonal differences allow the trained ear to distinguish between words. You would think context might help convey meaning when foreigners inevitably blunder. If you’re ordering a dish at the corner restaurant, “horse” could likely be found the menu, but “mother” would probably not be offered. The funny thing is how bad the Chinese are at cross-tonal guessing. If you don’t get the tone right it just doesn’t register.

It’s not fair for me to say they’re bad at it, it’s their language after all and for them there’s never a need to guess. Tones positively distinguish one word from another. It just that when you climb into a cab and ask to go to qingwa (a nearby university), it seems like the cab driver should be able to figure out that you want to go to the university and not to “frog” which is what you inadvertently said as a result of mismatched tones.

I memorized a few Chinese phrases that I hoped to use when ordering food, but when I tried to say them the confused expressions I received told me my tones were wrong. I had to revert to the Russian roulette method for ordering food -pointing to something on the pictureless menu and praying. Finally I struck upon a good idea. My IPod can record voice memos so I had a bilingual friend record a few Chinese sentences for me that I anticipate may come in handy. Now I have two sentences to play back in perfect Chinese: ”May I please have my noodles with eggs or tofu instead of meat?” and, “Hi, I am Barack Obama, President of the United States, nice to meet you.”

“Seedy.” That’s the best word I can think of to describe the railway passenger car Jeremy and I endured for 20 hours between Hangzhou (our first stop after Shanghai) and Guilin, where we arrived yesterday. I looked up the word seedy and sure enough they actually had a picture of our railway car right there in the dictionary. Further etymological research confirmed my suspicion as to the history of the word. Sunflower seeds are the snack of choice onboard Chinese railways (I think they help with boredom and motion sickness). People eat piles of these seeds on the train, and thus produce even bigger piles of saliva soaked husks. Very little effort is dedicated to helping the shells find their way to a garbage receptacle. The shells litter the benches and tables; shells on the floor stick to shoes, dirty diapers, and every manner of neglected garbage. So it was here in China that “seedy” came to be associated with general filth and degeneracy. Words are fun, huh?

I have developed what I think is a worthy criterion by which to judge the places I visit. It’s called the smile quotient. Chinese people are quick with smiles (even on seedy train rides) and have earned a high smile quotient. Japan is ahead of China when it comes to automobile manufacturing. So the “miles per hour” award goes to Japan, but China is the clear leader when it comes to “smiles per hour.”

Flags

Bjorn’s Blog

Flags

“You going see many flags.” The hostel manager explained to us over the phone in her broken English. Great, it should be easy to find then right? I quickly became frustrated with the directions, it was my understanding that these flags, which allegedly adorned Tokyo’s JGH hostel, would pop into view and guide our weary souls to the beds and showers we badly wanted. Even after retracing our steps we’d spotted no such flags. When we finally stumbled upon the doorstep I was ready to share a piece of my mind with the manager, but I realized the description of the flags had been correct. She must have meant “mini flags” not “many flags.” Had we been more attentive we easily could have spotted the flags from the road with an average pair of binoculars.

Tokyo, the big city of little flags, is not my favorite place. It’s a massive conurbation of cities (I think it’s the biggest metropolis in the world). Aside from a few parks there’s nothing like countryside for a long way in any direction. We did find hospitality. We were very lucky to be given a tour, and treated splendidly, by one of my dad’s classmates. Certainly Tokyo has a rich history and unique sights, but I’m finding it to be a sad place.

The desire for material wealth and career success seems to have a strong hold on the Japanese psyche. The job market in Tokyo is uber-competitive. Professionals and students struggle under colossal workloads and massive amounts of stress. The speedy Subway trains are frequently delayed by people looking for a way out. Jumping in front of the train is the preferred method of suicide.

As I travel I’m always looking for cultural elements that have value; I like to live eclectically, so I’m always looking for ideas that are worth borrowing. Latin siestas, sauna bathing like the fins, and the bidet method for post-fecal cleansing (our smear method is quite primitive when you think about it) are examples habits I think are worth adopting. Now I’m in Japan, trying to figure out what these folks do right. The public baths and simple floor plans of years gone by seem beautiful to me. But sadly the current state of affairs leaves little room for human interaction. Ear buds and smart phones serve as the only companions for hoards of lonely strangers on commuter trains during short trips home between long work days. Hopefully escaping Tokyo will revitalize my outlook on the country as a whole. We’re taking a bus to Osaka tonight.

Our flight to Japan included a 15 hour layover in Seoul, Korea. Even though we arrived in Seoul in the evening, we had an eventful, if short, Korean foray. You could call us “lucky scuzzes.” (Turner, Jessi)….(MLA way of giving literary credit where it’s due). As it turns out the night of October 9 is Seoul’s annual fireworks festival. The city was charged; millions lined bridges and streets, jostling for a better vantage point from which to see the shimmering display.

After the show we caught the tail end of a bustling evening in Namdaemon market. The market is the place to get right into the think of the culture, and to expose your palate to local flavor. Unfortunately for me, Korean food is my least favorite of the Asian collection; however the friendliness with which it was served makes up for what I think is a major lack of deliciousness. We ate in a tiny restaurant and watched a Korean soap opera with the three other patrons. I’m sure the consternation on my face, as I muscled down pickled vegetables, rivaled that of the unlucky lady on the TV screen who’d been betrayed

A kind, enthusiastic, slightly chubby 19 year old named Kim Taehyung was our volunteer guide on the way back to the airport. We were in trouble, unable to read the transit schedule in Korean and also unable to understand Kim’s well intended advice which came in the form of an epic Korean monologue. Jeremy finally managed to convey our urgency; our plane was leaving first thing in the morning, and the transit system was about to shut down for the night. Kim decided he better just go with us. We didn’t make it all the way to the airport before the transit system closed, but Kim made some phone calls and had us stay at a Jim Jil Bong (Incredible sauna/spa that has a sleeping area and makes a great place to spend the night). Kim insisted on paying for our night at the spa and wrote down our travel needs (in Korean) so that we could hand the instructions to a cab driver in the morning.

Nudity is mandatory at Jim Jil Bongs. There are separate areas for men and women. A troop of boys (8-14) years or so joined us in a steamy tub and gigglingly practiced their English on us. We were having too much fun to sleep. I finally laid down in the sleeping room on a small matt, but when I got up to pee somebody stole my matt. I ended up sleeping for a couple short hours on the wood floor with a stack of books for a pillow; eventually I opted to skip sleeping and headed back into the sauna.

So that’s how it’s been. Three more days in Japan and we’ll be ferrying to mainland Asia. There are ferries from here many Asian ports, including Vladivostok, Russia which is the city through which we originally planned to enter Asia. Since we’ll inevitably visit Russia in two months or so, catching the trans-Siberian railroad, we’re thinking of heading to Shanghai and seeing South East Asia now rather than starting in Russia only to retrace our steps.

Straits: Financial and Bering

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I’m in Sitka Alaska, the Russian capital of the Americas until the U.S. purchased Alaska (19 cents per acre) in 1867. 150 years ago there was regular ship traffic hauling payloads of otter pelts between here and Russia. At that time it was, of course, impossible to cross the Bering sea by plane, these days it’s quite a trick to cross without a flying.

Ten days of “shaking the bushes” up and down the Alaskan coastline, and we are well oriented with the challenges of floating to the Orient. It’s like this: After 9/11 cargo ships have very stringent security mandates and only a handful of freighters in the world are licensed to carry passengers, exactly zero of these visit Alaskan ports. Occasionally cruise companies run trips from Alaska to Japan, but these are prohibitively costly, and long gone by late September.

I made my best effort to leave no stone unturned (no number uncalled), but every time the search would slam to a stop against someone’s utterance of the word “impossible.” Nearly at my wit’s end I finally caught word of a fishing company out of Dutch Harbor (the port from the show “Deadliest Catch”) that dry docks a couple of boats in Yokohama, Japan after the Aleutian Cod season. I managed to reach them by phone and was elated when the crew manager enthusiastically suggested we hire on for the trip across Pacific.

The Cod season lasts through October, so those boats will cross in early November. The thought of waiting for more than a month is a bleak one, especially as the first snows are falling. The year’s last ferry to Dutch Harbor from mainland Alaska (a four day chug) leaves right away, so waiting in Anchorage (land of friends and warm coffee shops with internet) is not a possibility.

I was busy getting my courage up for a bone-chilling, lonely, expensive month in Dutch Harbor (wondering if we’d be able to find work on a fishing boat in the mean time) when the crew manager emailed me. They were already overstaffed so the owner regretfully said he wouldn’t be able to hire us. They, like freighters, are not insured to take passengers, so our invitation was withdrawn. This was our last good lead. Upon receiving the news we surrendered and decided to fly. The relief to not be spending a grim October in Dutch Harbor took the edge off of the disappointment of having to fly.

I reckon what we wanted to do could be done. But especially this late in the year it’s no longer worth the time or money to us. However, we were close, both figuratively and geographically: We visited Sarah Palin’s home in Wasilla and were able to catch a glimpse of the Kremlin from the veranda. Haha, I mean that kindly though. If anyone is sympathetic with her for that statement it’s me. Alaska and Russia are dang close. We drove the Sunbeam to Denali Park’s Wonder Lake, where we were only about 600 miles from Russia. Private vehicles aren’t allowed in Denali; that’s another good story.

Visitors to Denali are prohibited to drive their own cars into the park, they must climb aboard clamoring Park Service buses and take in the sights through little glass rectangles. We unwittingly arrived at Denali’s gate too late in the season for tourist buses. The tourist season had already ended. They told us we were out of luck, but they also told us about the Denali CarPass Raffle. For a few short days the whole park was open to winners of that raffle. All we needed was to win a raffle that had taken place months earlier.

Evie (the dreaded girl from the last blog ) was still with us in Denali. Back in Seattle, when she had joined us, I remember wondering if her arts and craft kit (markers, giant drawing pad, and even ceramics for us to paint) was really a necessary item considering there were three of us (two of us quite tall) traveling in one compact car in which we planned to sleep. I remember expressing my concern as I was wedging myself into the driver’s seat while simultaneously performing a churning act with my legs in an attempt to unearth the accelerator so we could go. Evie is too sweet to discriminate against any of her belongings, so she brought all of them, but this time it payed off. The craft kit included everything we needed to get our raffle pass. We began sign production.

The signs were to ask for people’s raffle passes as they were exiting the park. “What rhymes with “pass?” we asked ourselves, trying to come up with clever lines for our ad. We tried hard to think of how donkeys were relevant to Denali park, but in the end we went with a great line Jeremy thought of. “We’re low class, give us your pass!” And it worked. We gained full access to the park and had a great day among the moose and grizzles in the shadow of North America’s grandest peak, Denali (20,320 ft).

From Denali we headed to Anchorage, the last leg of the trip for both Evie and the Sunbeam. We pulled into Anchorage thanking God that our little $800 car had been such warrior. Jeremy listed the car for sale on Craiglist.

Jeremy, a horse trader at heart, had seen online (back in California) that cars sell for a lot more in Alaska than they do in California. This was part of our reasoning for buying the car, we hoped to offset some of our costs by profiting on its sale. We sold the car (on the way to church, incidentally….our ass was in a ditch) for twice what we payed for it. The profit from the car covered, nearly exactly, the cost of the gas we burned between Los Angeles and Anchorage. We actually underestimated what the car would be worth up here. Jeremy hasn’t had time to remove the Craiglist ad so he’s still getting calls everyday. The girl we sold it to offered us more than we were asking and flipped out with glee when we finally made the exchange.

We are over budget for the trip, but between Jeremy’s horsetrading skills, the generosity of friends, family, and our “store” visitors, we’re still crossing our financial straits (all but the Bering). Church members have been forthcoming with meals, beds, and cheerful smiles. Two Alaskan brothers, who we met on the way through Columbia, gave us a free ride from Anchorage to Haines (where I, of course, changed my underwear). Some kind folks payed for our auto insurance, and more recently a very gracious couple bought us ferry tickets all the way from Alaska to Washington (all the flights to Asia go through Seattle anyway, so flying from Seattle is cheaper and means we’ll only fly once).

We’re sitting on the ferry now, a few hours south of Juneau. We just saw a pod of humpbacks, one narrowly escaped being struck by the ferry. Some Dall porpoises are chasing us. I love it!