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First Dispatch

Today was a very good day. Last night? Apprehensive. But today, ah, today was the introduction to a world I’ve never known. We’ve all been to Nowhere. It might have been in the middle of Seattle or Saskatchewan. It might have been at a Zen monastery, a no-man’s-land border outpost, or a bungalow in a nameless beach town. You may have found Nowhere on a sultry summer night in Paris when you’d spent your last euro and had no place to sleep; or on a midnight jeep safari in the Botswana bush after you’d blown your last spare tire, with your campsite a distant pinprick of light; or in the comforting cocoon of an all-night train compartment, sharing soul-secrets with a total stranger. Nowhere is a setting, a situation and a state of mind. It’s not on any map, but you know it when you’re there. This time it has taken, as it usually does, a tremendous amount of energy and an open mind to get to Nowhere. This time, Nowhere is Mae Sot, Thailand. I tend to prefer the places that Lonely Plan
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Partly Cloudy Chance of Rain

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“The first of November is the end of the rainy season and the beginning of clear skies and cool nights,” Markus said in a promising tone. It had been precipitating in Mae Sot for three unrelenting days. My usual ten minute bike ride to work in the mornings with an occasional rain peppering had turned into something of a ride of doom which inevitably left me showing up to work sopping. For three days it was the same; get soaked in the morning; show up to work pruned and damp; sit a puddle behind my computer underneath water weighted clothes until the end of the day. One of the downsides to traveling with nothing more than a daypack is dampness. Seeing in how it was Halloween night and Markus had completed building yet another playground for migrant schools in Mae Sot, spirits were high and the wet week was becoming a distant memory. Halloween night felt a lot like Washington; dark and moist. It ended up raining so hard that night the golf-ball sized drops sounded like they mig
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South Bound

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When a person rolls into town on an iron donkey people ask questions. We must look like a couple of lost gypsies. Buggy (unaffectionate bike name) has a massive yellow bag mounted on a single axle trailer with a broken rear fender that rubs on the wheel. Kitchen equiptment and other essential crap hang off in all directions. We must look lost, but we seem to be making a lot of friends this way. Rodrigo is a guide here in Pucon. He popped out as soon as our wheels stopped rolling and offered a place to pitch the tent. Yesterday he took us up a dirt road towards volcano Villarica. We crossed three ridges and swooped up through several different glacial fed rivers before ditching the bikes and hiking up to a waterfall. Rigo is full of life and knowledge. He´s a guide on the volcano and super fit local adventure buddy. We are tentatively planning to race the Ironman Pucon 70.3 here on the 16th. The town is nestled between a massive lake and subtropic mountains. We´ll be
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