HUGE in Asia

Back at the beginning of our trip, when I was just a young buck with a passport and a dream, I used to enjoy asking other backpackers about their favorite stop during their travels. Their answer would invariably begin with “Ohmygod, that’s so hard…that’s so hard…”, which would be followed by tales of Malaysian bungee jumping, full moon parties, or the hot Turkish chick whose name was totally unpronounceable. Of all these responses, though, the one that I remember distinctly came from a middle-aged Chinese man who had been traveling or living abroad for the past three years. After he absorbed the question, he paused for a long moment, and then, staring a million miles over my shoulder, he replied, “Mongolia. In Mongolia there’s room to breathe.”

When we arrived in Ulaanbataar two weeks ago, I thought that guy had been messing with me. While Mongolia’s capital doesn’t spin its web as tightly as Tokyo or Hanoi, it certainly has its fair share of pollution as well as a handful of mildly annoying quirks. For example, one out of every five cars in UB inexplicably has its steering wheel on the right-hand side. This sounds like it should be the source of one of those lighthearted “Oh, Asia!” moments, and it is, until you’re crossing the street and the guy sitting in the driver’s side of the car coming at you is half-asleep, eating a sandwich with both hands. Terrifying.

After a few weary days in UB, we decided to leave the city and go on a 10-day horse trek through a national park a few hours to the north. I can’t really articulate our sudden impulse to travel across the steppe on horseback, seeing as how neither Kai nor me had ever ridden before. In the end, I guess that riding horses in Mongolia is a little like smoking pot in Amsterdam or attending a dog fight at Michael Vick’s house: while it may seem inappropriate or dangerous out of context, given the time and place, it just feels right.

Soon after we showed up to Terelj National Park, we were taken by a local fat cat to a stable, where a bunch of grizzled men and mistreated horses were milling about. From the rabble emerged four figures–two men and two horses–that would come to define our time in the outback.

Our main guide had a Mongolian name, but we only knew him by the title with which he was introduced–Horseman. From the moment we laid eyes on Horseman, we knew he had all the makings of a hall of famer. His face and eyes were heavily worn from fifty years of riding into wind, but he maintained an effortless smile that erased the chasm of experience between us. Horseman’s sidekick, El Mongolito, was a legend in his own right. Exhuberant and playful, Mongolito was an upstart in the horse game and complemented his father figure perfectly with his wild riding style and his ability to build ridiculously big fires for no real reason.

Spiritual Guides: Horseman and El Mongolito
Our two horses, Penzoil and Simon, revealed their personalities more slowly. My horse picked up his name from the motor oil company’s slogan–”Stop. Go. Penzoil.”–which accurately described its forward movement. Kai’s steed was deemed Simon when it became clear that he was unable to lead because he couldn’t process that the other horses existed when he couldn’t see them.

Though we had some truly low moments on the trail, I think I’ll look back on it as one of the most memorable times we’ve had in the last eight months. Our days were spent mostly on the saddle, swatting away horseflies or ducking against a wall of rain as the landscape changed gradually from an empty valley bordered with blond hills to a thick forest and back. At night, we sat around a fire and flipped through our Mongolian phrase book to try and learn more about our guides. They quickly put to rest our future potency concerns, as Horseman claimed five kids and El Mongolito told us he was already on the board with three.

While I’ll probably forget about the most of the details of the trip, there are some moments that I know will hang with me. After feasting one night on fish that we had caught from an uninhabited lake, we reclined on its beach and thought about how far from civilization we had come. Soon, the sun had fallen behind a mountain that encroached on the lake, but if you looked across the water into the distance, you could see that it was shining bright as noon, an invitation to tomorrow.

Prepared for Chaos? 

My Songkran post will have to wait a bit. Tomorrow, Nate and I head off to the mountains in Northern Mongolia. Our journey has taken us into some wild places, but this might be our biggest leap of faith. To be honest, we really have no idea what we’re doing. First, we’ll be renting and riding horses, but neither of us have ever ridden one. Second, we just bought about six days worth of food, but we’re going out for ten. I just finished writing a “Happy Father’s Day” email to my pop telling him that he might never see me again. This is what it’s all about. Worst case scenario? Nothing happens and we play Crazy Eights for ten days. 

 How do you get on that thing?

Copyright laws or I Just Read A Book And Want To Talk About It

I just read a book called “Free Culture” by Lawerence Lessig, a law professor from Stanford. Anyone who has interest in internet video, blogs, and new media should certainly check it out. In the book, Lessig addresses copyright law and how the internet, or rather the reaction of certain powers to the freedom that the internet gives us, has changed our ability to be creative. He points out that we’re so obsessed with obeying copyright that people are now practically incapable of building off of other’s work without becoming a felon or fined a ridiculous amount.

When we started this blog Nate wrote a post about the “Long Tail” that got us thinking about the struggle between new media and old media. Copyright law is yet another place where this battle is being fought. The truth is that HIA has broken the law about a hundred times since we started this thing (watch my favorite infraction), and while I won’t justify ourselves with anything higher than ”Aerosmith made our video better“, I do think that the future of vlogs rests in the ability of low budget groups to use and experiment with the past.

Good or Bad?

Wallstrip, a vlog started in December of 2006, is bought by CBS for a huge chunk of change. On one hand, it’s sweet that internet video can make so much money. On the other hand, is anyone else worried that Big Media is buying up internet talent? On a personal level, how can you turn down the big bucks? I would take a few million for HIA. College hoops players leave early for the riches of the NBA. On a larger scale, however, I think we should hope that the most popular shows stay independent. In a time when Hollywood is so focused on making franchises, and TV content is being made by the same people who distribute it, I was hoping that the internet would be different.

Will We Ever Go Huge?

Ok seriously, how do you market a vlog? No really, explain it to me. I’ve been emailing people, and Nate facebook messages. That’s all I’ve got.

Goldenstate of Mind Loves China

Golden State of Mind is the blog of choice for any die-hard Warriors fan, but has anybody else been following their ridiculous push to draft the Chinese star Yi Jianlian. My spider sense predicts a career 14 and 6. Just like to say that my spider sense also predicted that Dunleavy would suck, Pietrus and Biedrins would become best friends, and that Kerry Strug would land that crazy vault.

 

 

The trip back from Laos to Hanoi, as our last video and Kai’s post let on, was a wild one.  After I gave my bike to a farmer (the exchange basically consisted of me yelling at him from across a huge field, pointing at the bike, and leaving), I was miraculously picked up by four businessmen traveling back from Dien Bien Phu to their families in Hanoi.  For the first few hours of the car journey, I was still in shock from parting with Kai and the bike and didn’t really say a word, but that night we stopped in a small town called Moc Chau where we had a feast of a dinner and drank vodka until we spoke more or less the same language.  The next morning, we got an early start but were held up when the driver pulled over to buy a wounded possum from a man on the side of the road.  Yep, I was back in Vietnam.

The first time I arrived in Hanoi almost six months ago, the place was a buzzing confusion.  I remember checking into my guesthouse, where some grizzled backpacker told me to be careful in this city because “people steal things,” and then going immediately up to my room to lie down, look at the ceiling, and think about what I had just done.  

But three months and 75 or so towns later, coming back to Hanoi felt strangely comforting.  Yesterday, as watched two old Vietnamese men crossing a street arm-in-arm while hundreds of motorbikes swarmed around them, I was reminded that this city follows its own internal logic that can only really be absorbed by letting the place wash over you.  Of all the places we’ve been so far, Hanoi I will return to first. 

So the circle has been completed, the bikes have been ditched or sold, and the next phase is upon us.  Tonight, we’re getting in a train bound for Beijing, China, a place that I know almost nothing about except that they don’t allow you to search certain things on Google.  I guess I’ll have to learn on the fly.  Stay tuned…       

As you might have gathered from the latest video, Nate and I had an eventful trip back to Hanoi after leaving Chiang Mai a little while back. When we left the northern Thai city, our bike’s were still capable of motion, but that’s about it. Even so, we dared to tackle the mountains of Southeast Asia , mostly because our Vietnam visas were about to expire.

Here’s the bad:

My bike, Oscar the Grouch or O.G. as he’s become recently, has a bent frame. When you ride behind me you can actually see my front wheel as clear as day. It’s not huge a problem, but it’s a pain when you dodge a large rock only for it to knock into your back wheel and send you flying upwards. The other thing with O.G. is that at high RPMs the engine begins to flutter. It’s a massive loss of power that coincides with some really sick sounding backfires and I really haven’t experienced the speed that I enjoyed earlier in this trip. In all honesty, me and Oscar were the single fastest thing in Vietnam three months ago. Now? I’ll go into that in a bit.

Nate’s bike, the Black Pearl or B.P., is literally a piece of shit. My apologies to Nate but there’s just no two ways around this. Nate loves his bike and he’s done everything he can to mend it, but the Pearl has responded with nothing. Among a plethora of problems, the Pearl has a dying generator coil, and so there isn’t much spark in the ol’ engine. His bike hardly ever starts without a push and has as much power as a seventy year-old on a razor scooter. Despite my own frustrations towards his Minsk I was the original flag-bearer of the “we’re going to get our bikes back to Hanoi, no matter what the cost” mentality, and so I have a strange affection for B.P..

The good:

The Warriors won game three.

We set off. It was imperative that we kept moving forward towards Vietnam, but our bikes had other ideas, so we put them and ourselves on a boat down the Mekong river; we rode a van through the Laotian mountains, and we took a pick-up truck into Vietnam. When we finally reached our original country, 500km from Hanoi, we had ridden just about everything but our bikes.

Way back when, riding down the length of Vietnam back in February, I enjoyed imagining myself on a trusty steed. O.G. was my horse and I cared for him accordingly, I think we all did. It’s wasn’t uncommon to see Nate talking to Pearl or Zach petting Phil or Alan feeding Gnosis a handful of grass. What I’m saying here is that these bikes have personalities and if you treat them right they will take you on a wild adventure. For the most part, that’s what we did (with the one exception of Cambodia which kicked everyone’s ass - our horses and our self-esteem. I came away with four scars as a nice cherry on-top).

I’m going to stick with this horse analogy. For the last 1500km I’ve been riding a wounded horse. Occasionally I’ve been walking it. Nate’s horse, on the other hand, is dying. He’s been strapping its limp body to his back everyday and carrying it up mountains and across rivers. We’ve all known it for a while, but the Pearl should’ve been put out to greener pastures a long time ago. Carrying a horse… we were doing it because they did it for us.

If you understand what I’m saying, then I hope you get why Nate had to leave B.P. on the side of the road in Dien Bien Phu. We had just put a new generator coil in the bike and we were excitedly driving up a steep hill when his bike died for the last time. We couldn’t start it. I told Nate that we could try something, put it on a truck or maybe roll it back to a nearby city, but he just looked at me and said, “It’s time.” He was right. We said goodbye, and Nate jumped on a truck going to Hanoi.

I was left on the hill exactly 480km away from Hanoi. For truly the first time on this trip I was alone… well I had my wounded horse Oscar.

That day we rode and rode. The experience was surprisingly similar to the final level of Mega Man, the Nintendo classic. In the first eight levels you fight bosses and learn new skills. Then, in the final level, when you finally go up against Dr. Wiley you have to use everything you’ve learned to beat the game. Within 15 minutes of riding I had to change my clutch cable, then my front brake broke. About an hour later I was riding up a hill when Oscar decided to fall asleep. I sat there for a while wondering whether or not I was going to have to leave him in a deep slumber while I hitched home, until I decided to turn around, wake him up by rolling downhill, and then quickly U-turning the bike back uphill.

Along with the motorcycle trials, I also had a unpleasant return to Vietnamese cuisine. In my first two meals I was given dog after explicitly asking for chicken. The second time around the cooks actually walked over to me and started laughing while yelling, “Dog! No Chicken! Dog!” There wasn’t much I could say, except, “When you come to America, I’ll feed you… human.” Honestly, is there anything else I could have said?

I slept that night in a small town called Moc Chau. The owner of the guest house I was staying at woke me up at 5:30 in the morning by tossing the sheets off my bed. Nothing else to say really.
In my second day, I experienced the good and the bad with Oscar. Occasionally we would find our groove and hurl past everyone, then, almost as quickly, we would sputter and belch and slow down to a crawl. The bikes we had just passed were now passing us, and I would look off to the side of the road as if to say, “Oh, look, another beautiful rice field, I think I’ll slow down and watch it.”

Around 4pm I arrived back in Hanoi. My heart was beating fast and I gave Oscar’s gas tank a good pat. We did it. Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh to Phnom Penh to Siem Reap to Bangkok to Chiang Mai to Laos to Hanoi. It was an accomplishment that I’m really proud of, and I thank my lucky stars that my bike somehow survived the whole ordeal. God knows, I had very little to do with it.
Now I’m looking for a buyer. The time comes when you got to say goodbye, and for the right price anyone over here can hello to my beloved bike. Objectively, you’d never buy this thing. Subjectively, this horse has got heart. Seriously, folks, think Seabiscuit. That’s my O.G. Nate’s bike is more like Barbaro.