The flight from Tokyo to Bangkok lasted like 5 seconds. I sat down and gave a piece of choclate to the kid sitting next to me and then the attendant was waking me up. I felt like someone had beat me with bats. I slept in some weird pretzel position and needed like 10 full minutes for my legs to work. I do the customs thing and the lines and the papers and the baggage am kinda anquious to be done with moving around and want to have a shower at the hotel and stuff. I quickly shuffle out of the airport and the blast of hot air hits me and I instantly remember that you can no better rush in Thailand then you can mail your cousin in Florida a snowball. I sit on a bench and decide to punish myself by watching eveyrone else in the taxi line get cabs. As I sit there trying to notice all the small things I start to take in the Thai language. It's very tonal, very mid-range nasal. The entire language is 'humid'. I can't understand hardly anything they are saying but you can imagine their accent and the idea they are trying to convery: "It's so hot. Let go find a swimming pool and drink Mai Tais." Even the amount they move their mouths is less then most other Asian language. Their greeting (hello) is Sawaydee Cop (sauw-wa-dee Kahp).... I imagine them saying: "It's sooooooo Hooooot." in the same tonality and syllables. I then imagine them not saying it but instead holding up a little sign with it written on it in fancy Thai font because it's too hot to even talk. Then I decide it's not really that hot. And it starts to rain.

I spend precious little time with my Thai friends and so a bunch of leg work for the trip and make arrangements to have the Thais do all the paperwork on my return trip to Bangkok. We talk about Burning Man and how exchange programs are the opposite of dropping bombs on Iraq. We talk about the kids on the Soi (block) and how one of them is HIV positive and the parents of the other kids don't want him playing with them. I can't see how one child could give another child HIV, but don't have the language skills to articulate it. A cursed child doubly cursed. These kids have so little to begin with. I'm shocked that they are tested. The Thais take me and Jeff out to dinner. The get me drunk and get Jeff to eat pork... although he will only admit to eating 'pork water'.

We fly into Kunming China. Holy SheepShit. Fist of all, after I ate roast duck in coach and washed it down with orange juice, then coffee then fucking Conyak... hot towels and soccer highlights... we are stunned by the size of the city by the airplane. Makes SF look like a village. Massive landscape. Huge downtown. Clean. But old. Plain. Awkward. I know, how can a city be awkward... but it is. It's like.... clunky. It's the Herman Munster of cities. The streets are double wide... half of it is for motor traffic half for bikes. It works. It's enviable. Problem is their 'block' is like 10 of our blocks. I walked around the block and it took 2 hours. I started to walk around the block in the day and got back after dark. Walk around the block. I went through 3 different neighborhoods. Walked into a store that was like as big as a Walgreens and had shelves and shit... they were all full. Little boxes. Products. I had no idea what they were. It could have been drugs or food or software or fuses.... I have no idea. I was baffled. I thought i was lost and asked someone for directions. She pointed and hit me. I said thank you.

It is for no reason in particular that I decide to wear priest robes on the rest of the trip. I look ridiculious. People are staring at me and have no idea what to think. They just look like priest robes. It's really a choir robe. Anyway, I'm wearing it and I like it. It's comfortable. It's keeping the mosqitos off me which is important as I'm not on anti-malarials and while I'm in Western China, there is a small chance of infection. They keep me cool and scare the shit out of children. I must look like Darth Fucking Vador. The robe is black and go past my ankles. The colar is like a priest color without the white middle part.It's like a nehru colar. With my asian hat at a distance I look like something from the 15th century. My backpack has a pair of shoes hanging off it, a sleeping bag hanging off it, 2 jakets, a hat and another bag. I look like the top of a Gautemalan bus. I'm a walking junk store. I have enough balloons with me to start an internation incident.

Chinese food. Here, the food is Chinese food. I never thought of Chinese food as the food that Chinese people ATE.... I only thought of it as the food they MADE... made for us to eat. I just never really thought that they eat Chinese food, being Chinese and all. They eat it. It's like, food to them. Regualr food. Duh. If I opened a restaurant here I would make macaroni and cheese and peanut butter and jelly sandwhiches. Same same.

Tibet is like a bridge too far. We want to travel over-land. The only way the Chinese Government will let you do that is with a tour group led by a Chinese tour company. It's expensive and the reports from other travelers are monsterous. We decide to leave Kunming and travel by train (18 hours) to ChenDu. From there we think we will have a better chance of traveling overland, but can also fly into Lasha. I want to travel overland so that I can aclimate to the 15,000 feet altitude instead of flying in and falling on the floor. 15,000 feet is taller than any mountain peak in Colorado. The drive is also said to be spectacular. I hope we can do it. So far we have spent hours talking to crooked travel agents, reading other tourists guide books in (chinese) restaurants, arguing about what is a fact and finally deciding to see if we fare better in Cheng Du. There is another problem: pages of the internet are blocked from China. Like, all the Lonely Planet pages. Google. Yahoo stuff. Search stuff works on minute then the next minute it's blocked. We are in a communist country. If you type google and put Tibet in the search field you get blocked. I don't know how they do that but it's totally real. We can't do research. We are asking our friends to cut and paste Lonely Planet pages for us. The fucking guy from the hotel internet cafe is looking over my shoulder. OJ's guilty. I just know it...