The End

From the banana and sweet potato hills of Uganda to the banana and sweet potato hills of Papua New Guinea, my round the world adventure has come full circle. Now, at the end of it all, I am struck with an overwhelming warmness and appreciation for all the folks who gave me a place to stay and lent me a helping hand along the way. Amazingly, I have traveled for the better part of a year and rarely had to find my own accommodation. So whether I stayed with you for one night or one month, thank you so so much for your generosity. It has meant much more to me than affordability. You wonderful people have given me the reassuring comfort of kindness that sustained me all the while. And now, I am slightly obliged to extend the same courtesy to you. If you ever need a bed or a tour guide in California, or wherever I end up for that matter, I'm your man.

How about a short logistics recap on the trip. It all started in August of 2008 with Engineers Without Borders in the village of Nkokonjeru, Uganda. We partially successfully made mud stoves for more efficient and cleaner cooking, amongst other things. I rafted the first few kilometers of the Nile getting washed about in several class 5 rapids. November was spent exploring the island of Zanzibar off the coast of Tanzania where I lazed about with white sand at my feed and coco palms over my head. This was a mellow time for me where I observed others fasting for Ramadan and managed to read all 1,136 tiny print pages of Atlas Shrugged as well as doing a scuba course. October I crossed Tanzania below Lake Victoria to reenter Uganda where I spent a week on the exotic lake Bunyoni with its terraced hills and unstable canoes. The rest of the month was spent between Nkokonjeru and the capital, Kampala, where I attempted to contribute to a university hybrid vehicle project without much success. Never the less I enjoyed some dusty bars and plenty of televised English football matches. Go Arsenal! I heard they play Man U. in the Champions League semifinal. What a match that will be. Relief in the form of fermented grains came my way in November when I relocated to Belgium and joined the boys at Group T in Leuven on their electric vehicle project. It was winter in Europe and beautiful and I had a blast. I also joined my friend Jason from California in Holland for some fun and exploring. We did Amsterdam, Den Hauge, Delft and later we became the tourist and made that ridiculous music video in Copenhagen and Sweden. Some where in the mix I made my pilgrimage to Gelderland and acquired the secret recipe to spinning bitches (translation from Dutch for a French toast like food). I spent Christmas eve in a Moscow airport on my way to India for a wedding engagement party and to be reunited with my good friend from Australia, Kartini. India was India showing me amazing ancient cave temples, providing delicious foods, and generally being a trip and a half. I got Chicken Pox for some silly reason in Mumbai then beached it up in Goa where I happened to learn to para glide and picked up fire dancing. Then Some time in February I made it to Nepal for a brief visit, crashing Mike and Corinne's pad and discovered an ancient (10 years old) battery powered public transportation system to compliment the cacophony of temples. To kick off the Buddhist new year 2136 I hiked to over 12000 feet into the yak and Tibetan Himalayas. Before leaving I treated myself to some sick threads fulfilling my wildest paisley fantasies. I only gave Sydney 10 days but they were very important ones containing my 27th birthday and heaps of nostalgia from six years prior. Finally, mid March, I zoomed off to Papua New Guinea where I kicked it with Sally, the coolest person ever. We built an industrial fruit dehydrator, hung out in some villages, did some snorkeling, and read a pile of books which frankly could have been better. Echart Tolle, whew.

Thats it. Now I'm home in California. And California is home. It is my friend, it is my mother, it is my community. Leaving home and looking back I realized that everything I am looking for is here. So many times I had the privilege of answering the question of where I am from with a proud and resounding, “I'm from California.” Oohs and aahs inevitably followed but not always for the right reasons. Most foreigners just think about a sunny, beachy Los Angeles and want to hear stories of movie stars. But that's not what makes California a great place. The photo above is a picture I drew in my notebook to describe where I am from when people asked and didn't know. Here we have it all, geographically, culturally, economically. Find the life you want in California. California isn't just great it is also where my roots are at, something I have learned to value recently. I know the language here, have a phatty social network and a mastery of fun things like transportation and shopping. So yeah, California, or Oregon possibly, is where I want to be for the foreseeable future.

With that said, I now have a new network of friends and acquaintances around the world which only invites more business and pleasure abroad. Being away I have fallen in love with California all over again but I am far from being bored with travel. On the contrary. The things I have experienced and seen in the past several months have only whetted my appetite to see more because, of course, there is so much out there and all of it is interesting. In due time I will be traveling again.

Finally, I must share the one thing stands out as the most important experience of this adventure. In a word, grief, the grief of loosing the affection of a girl I love, a girl who I left in August expecting to forget about but never did and who, bless her heart, managed to let go of me and find beauty elsewhere. It is a bit embarrassing to admit to this emotional lameness but avoiding the subject all together would be like describing the contents of a room without mentioning the massive elephant taking a dump on the carpet. Being me, I would have to mention the elephant. This experience of grieving lost love isn't one I am able rationalize very well. A bit of grief seems reasonable to me but consuming grief that overshadows every day of the last however many months strikes me as a bit wacky. The important part isn't why or how but simply that it happened - real emotions, real pain, really surprising. I had fully anticipated this round the world trip to be an extroverted experience, one where my time would be spent soaking it in and causing a ruckus. Instead, it has turned out very introverted. I still soaked and ruckussed but I also found myself on a heavy introspective quest to resolve my pain that has yet to bear fruit. Don't worry, I am still a very happy person by any measure, but just one who has been taking a serious emotional ass whipping for a while now. So what can I take from this? Well, pain is an awesome teacher. I doubt I'll be running away from a happy loving relationship anytime soon. Perhaps this has just been a serious case of the lonelies and reintegration into a social community, perhaps meeting a new girl, will solve everything. Then again, maybe I have some nasty deep seated issues with attachment to be dealt with internally, or something heavy like that. Its hard to say. At any rate, I don't think I am a very good loner. What I have learned, in a substantial way, is that life is not necessarily a straight line. This lesson has been a long time coming for me and I have a feeling it is something everyone gets to learn sooner or later. Now is my time.

Back when I was a teenager the motivation for this round the world adventure was born. It came from a fear of quiet complacency, of taking the path laid in front of me and ending up being quite unremarkable in my own terms. So I vowed to myself that I would strike out into the great wide world with absolute freedom for an entire year and give myself every opportunity to imagine what my life could be like, no strings attached. In doing so I hoped to squash my fears of not living my life to its fullest and gain the confidence to choose whatever path is most me. To this end I have succeeded. Ironically, it has been through humility, not the cockiness I showed up with, that I realized how I can be whatever the heck it is I want to be. The trick is just to pay good attention to that inner me and not get distracted by some fantasy identity I cook up. Easier said than done but I think I've got a good start.

So what is next? Well, I have a whirl wind May and June reconnecting with old friends, going to my brother's wedding (Yay for Tom and Kendra. May you live happily ever after.), and continuing my early retirement with a fun filled retreat to Kauai. Hey, why not? Afterward I will finally, regretfully, have to come out of retirement and find a job. I have my sights set on Bay Area or Portland, engineering for a greener tomorrow, or whatever pays the bills. I know, I know, the economy sucks. Lets see what I can come up with.

Boom Shakalaka Gaia and thanks for reading,
EVG

Potholes New Guinea

Suddenly, the whole ritual of the Easter Bunny, chocolate, and a painted egg hunt didn't make much sense with respect to the resurrection of Christ when I tried to explain it to Sally's uncle, Sally, on the porch of his jungle village bush house. Us Westerners sure can be weird. Sally, the uncle, definitely knows about Jesus, most likely better than I do, and eggs and bunny rabbits to boot but I found myself fairly completely unable to make any sort of connection. Can someone please help me out here? Anyhow, it was a happy Easter. We visited a beautiful jungle village where Sally, my friend, has relatives. I spent a couple days there earlier in the week and got a taste of the simple life. Lunch is usually a pile of plantains, still in their skins, barbecued wherever one might happen to be. Anyone got a match? A dip in the lazy river afterward seemed to be a requirement. If I was thirsty there were plenty of coconuts at hand to drink from and everyone carried a handy coconut opener aka bush knife aka two and a half foot saber for just the occasion. Thankfully I am fond of coconut juice. The family I stayed with had an amazing garden with rice, sweet potato, bananas, plantains, yams, kasava, taro, coconuts, and lots of cocoa. Everything was for their own sustenance but the cocoa which they sold in town for good money. I got to help harvest some rice which was surprisingly fun. I guess the novelty of seeing rice coming from the ground and not a bag was enough to get this city boy excited. Afterwards I had the privilege of getting high on buai (beetle nut). I had tried it a few times before with no effect but for whatever reason I this one time I was feeling wicked. Check that one off the list. Locals chew buai more than they drink water. Its pretty fun because you get to chew a big fresh seed thing then dip some stem bit in crushed coral powder and add it to the mix which turns bright red. Just chew and spit, don't swallow. If you have good ingredients and get the mix just right the high should be something like tobacco. There are some fantastically frightening grins waking around all red lipped with black stained teeth from all the buai chewing.

I also fulfilled my snorkeling fantasy. I had been psyching myself up for this moment since I was a kid pretending to be a seal by swimming about at the bottom of our pool in Fresno. I can remember how it felt so lovely to zip around weightless under water. I have been snorkeling many times before and found that not much is more interesting to look at than tropical marine life. My father was an exceptional swimmer and when he went snorkeling he would ditch the snorkel and dive deeper than I could comprehend to look for shells. I wanted to do the same, to dive deep deep deep and be one of the fish, to look around as if I lived there too, like a scuba diver without the bulky gear and noisy breathing. I had a good go at it in Zanzibar but the coral I found wasn't quite the spectacular scene I was looking for. Anyhow, I found what I was looking for. We took a small taxi dingy out to a small island preserve to have a swim, a picnic, and spend the day. I had heard the coral in PNG is some of the best in the world and since most of it is scheduled to die soon (something about climate change) I was eager to get a look. It was the spectacular scene I dreamed about with sprawling plates and people sized barrels of coral. Squigglies were everywhere with the most delicious bright colors on the funniest of shapes all swaying and swimming about in the weightless underwater world that is the ocean. I got to take my time and deep breaths, one after the other. It is a fun game to play, skin diving. Just as you are running out of breath you spot something you just have to come back with more oxygen to have a look at.

While its sea gardens and village life is quite fantastic, Papua New Guinea also has an ugly side, the towns. There are only three or four places worth calling a town in the whole of the country and they have all turned into centers of crime and pestilence. Its not that Fresno or even SF doesn't have similar criminals, we all lock our doors and plenty of neighborhoods have barred windows, but here in PNG they define the towns. People from the bush, mostly men, migrate to the towns looking for work and when there is none they turn to crime - robbing houses, holding up cars and buses, dirty deeds for hire. A fantastic tension develops between the the jobless locals and the wealthy expats cruising about in new trucks running construction and mining companies and the like. A major industry in Papua New Guinea is security. Fences and armed guards are found everywhere. My friends fairly rural dwelling, just outside of the mountain town of Goroka, recently acquired full time security guards after some sketchy incidents. A house Sally and I were house sitting was broken into while we were enjoying the beaches in another town. The security guard was tied up. Two of the thieves were caught and are in jail awaiting trial. Apparently the robbery was a drunken operation and not a very tight one at that.

In the midst of it all I managed to get some engineering done. Sally has a fledgling dried fruit export business, bananas and pineapples, and I got to help her design a drying chamber for the new coffee husk burning hot air blower she got from Brazil. We spent a week and a half building the furnace with a prototype drying chamber getting sidetracked every which way with electrical issues. Can you believe that after a masters degree in mechanical engineering I didn't know the difference between three phase and single phase electric motors? But now I do. I'll never be fooled again. So that was fun being useful and learning a bit.

Now it is time to come home. The flights are booked, an insane four day blitz of seven flights to get from point A to point B, Port Moresby, Cairns, Guam, Tokyo, Honolulu, Seattle, San Francisco. Credit card sky miles aren't all they are worked up to be. I have got a day in Guam and a day in Honolulu to kill so maybe I can get some more snorkeling in.

Next blog will be written from Fresno, the exciting finale. It will be time to make up all sorts of far fetched conclusions about my adventure so I can derive some meaning from it. So stay tuned!

Its been great PNG. I'll be back some day, hopefully before all the coral is gone.

Fire and Lightning

I was in line at customs preparing myself for an eight hour layover at the Delhi airport on my way to Sydney from Kathmandu, woot! Out of the corner of my eye I glimpsed a curious sign that read, “Airick Vain Gelthens,” being shown by a less than enthusiastic man to the queued up travelers. I did a double take. Could someone have a name so bazaar yet so similar to mine? When in line for customs in a developing country one should never take chances, so I flagged the gentlemen down. “I think this could be me,” I told the vacant eyed airport employee with the sign. He was satisfied and gave me another paper with a name and number on it. I did my best to suss out the purpose of this vague and slightly disconcerting message but all I could gather is that the number was for a travel agent who urgently wanted to talk to me. Thankfully I still had my cell phone with airtime on the Tata Indicom SIM card so after a successful visa check I sat down with my luggage to eat a sandwich and ring the mystery number. I was confident there was just some simple misunderstanding I could ignore or smooth out quickly or that there was actually an Airick who wasn't me but then I could also imagine some catastrophic disaster waiting for me on the other end of the phone. I took a deep breath. Indeed, the number was for me. The travel agent I purchased my Kathmandu to Sydney tickets from in Mumbai over a month prior somehow knew I didn't have a visa for Australia. Ouch! Was that my fault? I swear she told me I didn't need one. She advised me to get an online visa and she would book a flight for a few days later. She had already canceled my tickets for the flight that evening. It was as if India were an inescapable vortex sucking me in and I might be stuck there forever. I hung my head and drug my bags to the prepaid taxi stand to head into the heart of the beast, the Delhi backpacker slum.

Amazingly, I was able to get a visa equivalent for Australia instantly at an internet cafe, a drunk Canadian in a dirty stained T and beads of sweat on his forehead cursing at his Facebook behind me. There was still time to catch my original flight! Enthusiastically, I rang my agent to organize the tickets and rushed off to the airport at 21 mph in a CNG three wheeler. I was relegated to the waiting list but it didn't matter because by midnight I was sitting on a plane ready for fifteen hours of in flight, back of the seat movies courtesy of Air Thai.

Then there was ten days in Sydney, Australia. Thanks Kartini for the beautiful and loving home away from home. There was instantaneous mingling with lovely friends from six years past with wonderful friends of their own for me to meet. It was a cascading triumph of joy. I had my twenty seventh birthday. I wont go into details since my mother reads this blog but let me just say that someone brought three bottles of sparkling wine and they were all empty by the end of the night. We also happened to find a steam sauna. There was camping and fire dancing on the beach complimented by an offshore lightning display. That was super cool but my favorite highlight from my time in Sydney was lecturing third graders about the Earth Goddess, Gaia. They totally got it.

Now I find myself in the fabulous island nation of Papua New Guinea in the twilight of my great adventure. My awesome friend, Sally, is taking care of me here. PNG is a wicked place. It ain't so big but has heaps of rainforest, second only to the Amazon, with the worlds largest butterfly (I hope I see one) and the best snorkeling anywhere. And of course awesomely colorful tribal life. I am pretty relaxed with my month here, keen to do some snorkeling, maybe go on a trek or two and otherwise hangout. I brought a pile of books to massage that ranges from spiritual enlightenment to global catastrophe. I will have read more books this month than ever before, probably five. I am a slow reader. I am also working on my CV and gearing up for a safe landing in the lovely California. Ill blog again from Fresno. Here we go.

Instant Noodles!?

The morning after the wedding I hopped into a great big winged metal global warming machine with dozens of others and we flew to Delhi then Kathmandu where I rocked my Pierce Coop connection and met up with my lovely friend form Uni Mike Slouber. Mike is living in Nepal for the year studying Nepali and Sanskrit for his PHD work at Cal. Pretty cool eh? He is also spending some quality family time with his wife Corinne and two baby daughters, Anna and Lilly, two years and two months old. Thanks Slouber family for letting me stay in your spacious apartment and feeding me good home cooked food. The steamy hot showers were a nice touch as well.

Kathmandu is a lot of things. It is the capital of city for an epicenter of Eastern spirituality with plenty of devotees, shrines, temples, and spiritual merchandise. It is also very polluted. The rivers running through town are stinky toilets and on a bad day the hazy air beats Delhi's for opaqueness. Nepalis are keen to the pollution problem, however, and are often seen wearing urban survival masks to filter out some of the gunk before they breathe it in. There is also battery powered electric public transportation! Thats right, three wheeled electric cars carrying a dozen or more commuters all over town. There are hundreds of these Safa Tempos (Clean Busses) operating in the city every day and they have been around for a dozen years competing successfully with their C02 emitting counterparts using way primitive lead acid technology. It makes me wonder why we are unsure of electrics in the West. Ok so these guys only go 25 mph but that's kinda nice and they only cost a couple thousand bucks. As you can imagine, I am stoked on Safa Tempos.

After a week of hangin' with the Sloubers and doing some more shopping (I got a silicon mouthpiece for my teeth grinding at night and some wild paisley pattern clothes made for the price of a big night out in SF) I went on a fancy big hike in the Himalayas. Looking through a Lonely Planet I chose the Langtang Valley hike which ascends from 4,000 feet to 12,000 feet, wow, with peaks up to 23,000 feet towering above. The hike took 6 days with an extra day on a sketchy overloaded windey cliff side bus ride to reach the beginning from Kathmandu. I had my pick of lovely lodges to eat and sleep at along the way up and back. No sleeping bag or camping stove necessary on this adventure. The day I started happened to be Tibetan New Years, 2136, the celebrations of which lasted the whole of my hike. At one particularly memorable instance I was getting drunk on home made rice beer, Chawng, before noon at 10,000 feet. The new years fried bread twists handed out to guests quite readily was my favorite trail food. The bread is best when served with a steaming cup of Tibetan tea, or Yak fat with salt in hot water. The scenery was spectacular, on par with Yosemite back home. I saw plenty of Yaks as well, grazing on the late winter brown thorny alpine bushes. On my way down I bumped into a Buddhist ceremony parading my way. Dozens of villagers were carrying sacred texts wrapped in orange cloth to the local monastery where they would be read by monks for blessings. Singing and dancing around an altar of Chawng at the monastery ensued with plenty of food and drink after wards. It was all a beautiful experience. I highly recommend it.

On the bus ride back, not quite as overloaded, I had my very own Nepali spiritual enlightenment experience. Painted onto the side of a village shop in the brightest of colors was my very own spiritual mantra, "Boom Saka Laka." Back home I had been awakened to this prayer in a dream and had been using it accordingly but it wasnt until now that I discovered its true meaning here in Nepal. Just below the sacred mantra is written a reference to the great one, Instant Noodles. The great Western learning Easter sage, Michael Slouber, says that the Earth is Food so Food is the Earth. This whole time I had been chanting to Gaia, "Boom Shaka Laka Gaia," but really I should be chanting to instant noodles, "Boom Shaka Laka Instant Noodles!" Thank you oh holy noodles which cook so quickly when added to boiling hot water and are conveniently seasoned with a small packet of MSG for delivering me from my material prison.

Next stop, Sydney Australia.

Rajasthani Wedding

So I trained it up from Goa to Jaipur only about an Amtrak's 10 hours late because of a derailing ahead of us. I bought some pirated DVD's of Indiana Jones, James Bond, Lord of the Rings, and Kung Fu and watched Octopusy on my laptop like a geek showing off. The Kung Fu turned out to be King Kong. Some kid also repaired some zippers for me for a few cents. I was quite impressed.

I haven't shopped at all during my travels because I didnt want to carry anything extra around with me but I decided to go on a massive spree in Jaipur and ship a parcel back home. So I spent the better part of a week getting ripped off in jewelry stores, buying cashmere wool shawls, etc., but it was loads of fun and now I've got plenty to share when I get home just in case I need to make new friends. I also had three suits tailored. Two for myself, a fabulous white linen Colombian drug lord suit and a blue pinstripe three piece business suit. And one for my brosther, a gray pinstripe three piece business suit.

Then I got to try out my new fits at the wedding. The ceremonies lasted two days with delicious catered lunch and dinner. The brides father owns a fabulous restaurant near by. The first evening were song and dance performances from friends and relatives. It was quite impressive really. The second evening was the ceremony. The princely groom rode in on a white horse, waited for his bride to be on a throne, then lassoed her with a flower necklace. At midnight, after several hours of photographs with the hundreds of guests, the actual marriage ceremony began at a temporary altar with the remaining guests sitting around it being served tea and coffee. The ritual has to be hundreds of years old with Sanskrit recited and dozens of steps involving parents, throwing rice, fire, smudging colorful stuff on foreheads, etc. At three in the morning they were married. I have several weddings to attend back home this summer (big congrats to my brother Tom and his fiance Kendra!) and it will be fun to compare traditions. So that's my second Jaipur wedding in Just 5 years and I am not even close to tired of them yet. Thanks Kochar family for inviting me!

Just before the wedding I got caught up in a Bollywood movie. I found myself spending the day wearing a cheap British officer uniform circa 1930 on a fancy movie set by a lake for the day. Mostly I just sat there but it was quite the eye opener to be inside a movie set and watch all the works that goes on. Look for the Bollywood movie "Veer" when it comes out in a year or two. Its an action romance musical and should be a big hit.

Hippie up in Goa

OK, where did I leave off last. I think I was in Bangalore recovering from a late curse of Chicken Pox last I wrote. The Pox really wasnt so bad. I was lucky to get away with mild fever for three days. Going to Bangalore ended up being a big mistake. I spent most of my efforts busing across town to the Tata Indicom service center to have my mobile modem service repaired. In a week there was no success to I took the loss and threw in the towel. I guess the future of information technology is not for me, not quite yet. My big Bangalore highlight was test driving a REVA, India's own electric car. Short but sweet. I also randomly visited a non proffit, Anti Corruption Agency, and learned all about India's systemic funds filching woes.

On a whim I set off to Goa to recharge my social life and boy am I pleased I did. I landed in Benaulin then bounced up to Arambol after a couple days seeking out the young writhing masses. There they were, European, jobless, free, and getting tan on the warm cow infested beach. Arambol is where it's at. Beach huts from $4/night with restaurants and bars line the sand (my hut was enviably the most exposed with a door that landed me directly in the beach traffic). Hella hippie outfit shopping lined the one street with swirly colors and Ali Baba pants everywhere. I bought nothing expecting to get my fix in Jaipur. And the water is bath temperature with happy little waves to play in.

A short walk around the hill at the end of the beach and you will discover a small paradise with another beach, isolated and backed by a clean and swimable fresh water pond. The ridge above this beach hosts lovely conditions for paragliding. For $30 you can go tandem. I opted to throw down $120 and spend the week learning to do it solo. My instructor was a super tanned Dutchman renamed Madu by his Guru, Osho. Everyone was talking about Osho. Apparently he was arrested in Oregon at some point. Madu is a wise paraglider and heatedly advised me not to do it as he could provide no insurance or responsibility for my life. But I thought, "Isn't that how did people do things before trial lawyers?" Besides, how could I say no to flying free like the birds, soaring effortlessly, hundreds of feet above the earth and what a view. This was definitely my style. The grin on my face says it all.

I also picked up a staff and started to learn to spin fire. Flying like a bird, playing with fire, stupid things I know but hey, I made it right? Actually, I never got around to using fire. I just practiced my moves.

Yeah, Arambol was loads of fun. Lots of new agieness going on. One of my favorite spots was the magic park where you can receive a sermon on The Great Freedom (short moments of awareness many times is the road to salvation) in the morning, and participate in a contact improv session after dark eating vegan chocolate cake in the mean time. To all my alternative minded, hippie, burner, circus friends, go to Arambol if you get the chance.

I will leave you with an especially insightful ditty David, my slightly cynical English friend, and I picked up from a group of spiritualizers on the beach at sunset. "Everything is magnificent. The waves are coming in. The waves are coming in" Repeat until you are the last one there. A hand drum helps as well.

Mumbai-o-listic

I had big hopes for my week in Mumbai, a list of companies and non profits to visit, and the big city nightlife to captivate me. Unfortunately, I will always remember Mumbai as the city where I got Chickenpox. I know, right. What the heck? I am definitely too old to get Chickenpox and most certainly no where near my mother's loving care. Oh well.

Before I got feverish and rashy I managed to enjoy myself and do a bit of exploring. My first night I was whisked away by Kunal, the lucky gentleman just engaged in Jaipur, to a rooftop birthday party under the full moon. Friends and family sang amplified Bollywood classics until the neighbors called the cops. Everyone was singing along to dozens of songs from decades ago. As it was explained to me by Kunal, The movie culture here is more of a religion than a pastime and of course it is all about the songs.

Next to the hotel I first stayed at was a massive Hare Krishna temple so I poked my head in for a look. It was quite ornate with plenty of marble, sparkling gold and silvery trim, and brilliant draperies with matching holy men. My Hare Krishna experience is limited to hippie festivals which is much less impressive than witnessing the source. Honestly, I always though it was some sort of cult. More cultish, that is, than a regular once a week sort of religion. So I bought a book from the temple gift shop to educate myself, Introduction to Bhagavad-gita, basically an intro to Krishna's version of the bible. And thats how I was converted. I'm not coming home anymore. Come visit if you would like. Just kidding.

I also snuck in a lovely sunset walk along Juhu beach. I was lonely as heck but delighted by the massive stretch of sand and throngs of Mumbai'ites out getting messy in the low tide. Strangely, I couldn't see the horizon because of the nasty air pollution which I learned more about later. The water was warm but too brown for my blood. Lots of fun games like cricket, capture the eel, and dodge ball were going on. With nightfall a carnival scene emerged with silly electronic fortune tellers along with vendors selling crappy, glowing, spinning toys from china.

My one sightseeing splurge was to go on a guided Slum Tour. Sounds miserable but the idea of the tour is to show a fun and highly functional slum with massive recycling industry, leather production, pottery, etc. My favorite part was the machine shops where they made their recycling shredders. Shoes and eye protection? Yeah right. Saddest part was watching toxic black smoke pouring from a kiln burning old paint cans. There were workers with their faces in it.

I wasn't so interested in sight seeing and such so I visited the Indian Institute of Technology to see what I could learn about transportation and pollution in India. I actually got to give a presentation to a dozen transportation students and some professors. I told them what I thought about stuff back home and asked them about theirs. The students were disappointingly shy; I probably looked cooler and more important than I actually am. Basically, India and Mumbai are all about trains. Six million folks commute by train every day just in Mumbai. I took the trains to get around too and they were great, came every three minutes, pay if you are in the mood, no doors, people pooping next to the tracks. The professor I talked to about air pollution had just finished a massive study to characterize the city's air which is cool because it is the first of its kind and signals a shift to awareness and possibly action.

Later I moved to the backpacker ghetto to make friends and share some company. Unfortunately, thats when I got the evil skin blistering poultry virus only meant for children. I was first incorrectly diagnosed and given antibiotics but disappointingly that didn't pan out. I just holed myself up for a few days in my spacious hotel room, had weird dreams, and commiserated with my Chinese come Australian roommate, Yan, who just had thousands of dollars of camera equipment stolen and is taking rabies medicine for a dog bite.

A really important thing to come out of my time in Mumbai is that I'm coming home early! I realized I'm not up for 6 more months away from home and especially not wandering around alone in scary places like India and China. So, I'm gonna visit my friends in Nepal, Papau New Guinea, and Australia and be home around April 18. Don't plan a party or anything.

One last thing. I had a beer at a table with a grenade crater under it from the November attacks. Pretty cool eh? Security was high.