Hong Kong to Bangkok

On 4/7 we went to a gigantic jade market in Hong Kong where we picked up a little something for Macrina and got a watch that had Mao on it waving his hand as the seconds ticked. It broke before the day was done, but cost about 2 USD and was worth the laughs. In the afternoon we went to a massive sports complex in the downtown Kowloon district and played ping-pong. The people there were wearing jersey's and ping-pong specific shoes and were unbelievable. No one spoke English, but a woman signaled Ty and I to come play with her and her husband. They were really good and pretty much crushed us. Afterward I played there son and it turned into an epic cultural battle. He was like twelve and had a wicked forehand.
Later on we went to a park and saw flamingos, parrots, and a bunch of other weird birds.
A couple of hours before our flight to Bangkok Ty and Weldon went to see an Iranian film about a woman who marries a man and causes trouble in his family because she doesn't follow the Koran as strict as they all are accustomed to. They said it was a touch slow by American standards, but in Iran it was probably really controversial and interesting. Meanwhile, John and I hopped on the rail and headed as far out of town as we could to Sunny Bay. We had purchased some hand held fishing gizmos and some shrimp and were going to try to catch fish. Other people had been doing it all over town and seemed to do ok, but we had a rough time and didn't get a thing.
Ok, too much detail for a blog.
That evening we hopped a plane to Bangkok and slept the entire time. We arrived at 2330 and caught a cab to our hostel, a pretty out of the way building in a poorer district of outer Bangkok. At 0200 we watched Arsenal and Villareal play in the UEFA Champions league, and discussed with a Brazilian guy the sad state of his nations football system (a subject that he got a bit heated about).
The next day we all woke up around 0730 and headed outside. We had arrived in the dark and the streets were quiet so we had no idea what to expect. The streets were hot, crowded, and busy, and we had to walk single file because we were sharing a 1.2 lane road with people pushing their good to market, kids on motorbikes, taxi's, cars, and others on foot.
We were looking for food and Vietnam visas when a man overheard our English and in pretty good English informed us that he knew a place where you could get them cheaply. We were really skeptical because people had been hustling us like crazy, but we had also heard that travel agency's really could get them more quickly and more cheaply than you could by doing it yourself at the embassy. So the man hails us a 3 wheeled taxi (pictured in one of the photos and called a tuk-tuk) and it sped us away. Driving in this thing was insane. Way way way scarier than any roller coaster or theme park or anything. We were weaving through traffic and doing like 35 mph the wrong way on one way streets so we could pass buses. We literally had to keep our hands and feet inside the cab ( a difficult task because we had crammed 4 of us into a cab the size of a small love seat)or we would surely smash them on things that were zooming by. The travel guy turned out to be super cool, and helped us book transportation north by bus, 5 nights lodging in a room with AC and breakfast, a two night trek through the rural hills of Chaing Mai, elephant rides, river floating, and gave us a ton of maps and info about Bangkok, as well as get us our visas. We realized that it was very likely that the man on the street, the cabbie, and the travel agent were "ripping us off" by charging us about 2x the price that we could get all this stuff by ourselves, but at a whopping $200US per person it was worth having someone with some experience organize things for us.
We left feeling good about our plans, and went looking for food. It was about noon and starting to get hot, but we soon found some shade, got some water, and managed a 1.5 pound bag of deep fried bananas for 40 baht (around 35 Bhat to the USD).
Next we hailed another tuk-tuk, and went and saw the "Big Budda", the Royal Palace, a couple of Wats (temples - pictured), and got a bunch more food.
At 1900 Weldon and Ty caught a bus South towards some islands for a couple of days stay ( we will meet-up on Saturday) and John and I hit a massive supermarket, a bunch of street food vendors, and than retired to our hostel.
I will work on making these posts shorter (because no one really cares that we ate bananas), but it is really hard because everything is so different and intense that it is difficult to discern what is actually cool and what is just everyday life around here. Three quick things - The food is amazing. Tuk-Tuks are the scariest things ever (maybe youtube a video or something). And we are having a blast. John and I both wish Ben was here.

PS - Mom, sorry we haven't called, we can't figure out how to use the phones. Dad -we have been using the Internet at our Hostels .

World's longest Escalator

April the 5th we woke up and rode the world's longest escalator system. It ran for about 30 minutes and transported us through the financial district of upper class Hong Kong Island, through the more ghetto parts of town, and finally to within 600m of the "peak," a large hill that overlooks most of Hong Kong. It kind of spit us out in the middle of nowhere on a fairly busy street so we just started walking. 20 minutes later we arrived at a sign that led us towards the local zoological and botanical gardens. At first we were skeptical because there was only flowers and trees, and there was no entrance fee. Soon, however, we were surrounded in monkeys, dog sized rodents, 10 foot long pythons, 3 toed sloths, and a myriad of tropical birds. It was unbelievable.
Next we went to a market.

It would be silly to describe in detail what happened since noon that day and 2100 this evening because it has been so far outside of the spectrum of events that I have tried to use words to describe during my life before now. I will just make a few points and let you imagine.

We took a train to a Buddhist temple that had 40 foot long pieces of incense burning 100 at a time.

We shopped in a jade market that had 400 booths and 100000000 pieces of authentic jade jewelry.

We bought mango for 8 US Cents and they tasted fresh like dirt and sweet like honey.

We lied on the beach in the 24 degree C heat.

We collected half in square tiles that had fallen from a 1950s war monument and washed up along the beach.

We saw old women haggle over live chickens in a market and than watched the man slit their throats and drain them of blood before boiling them and giving them to the customer.

We saw bags of 6 live turtles for sale.

Hong Kong is Unbelievable. Alaska is a fleeting memory (except for my friends and family who I wish could be here to experience all of this unbelievable stuff).

Tomorrow we are going to go fishing on a small Island outside the main harbor. Afterwards we will pack up and leave our hostel and prep for flying to Bangkok.

I hope you enjoy the pictures.

I have been smiling the entire time we have been here.

This makes Euro 2007 look like a joke.

We are the only white people around most of the time.

Words can't do justice how unbelievable it is here.

Thanks for reading and spread the word about our blog. ( dad could you tell alex so he can hit up my covy friends - thanks)

Much love, Christopher Dunaway

P.S. The pictures are of a small temple, a very large cucumber, and a market street.

Settling in.

So I kind of feel like a dork for having a blog.
Yesterday after staying up all night we had some breakfast at a tiny "diner" type restaurant and the menu and waitress didn't do English very well. Weldon managed an omelet and I some fried beef, but John some how ordered the Won Ton soup with celery leaves, a floating fried egg , and two small hot dogs as garnish. After breckie we strolled around for a while, taking in the sites and people, and than went to the airport to get our bags. It was not terribly difficult to reclaim them.
The climax of the day was hooking up with the Ultimate Frisbee crowd here and playing disc in a field surrounded in monolith buildings. We had a great game for about two hours until ,during a five minute stretch, John started cramping from dehydration and I bid for a disc and took around 8 square inches of skin off my knees and left elbow. I had to pick rocks out of my skin for like 15 minutes and then the locals informed me that it was critical to properly dress all your wounds here because the humidity and overcrowding make infection a serious concern.
Fortunately we had our handy-dandy first aid kit and took care of business.
We met Weldon at the arranged time and he told us that he had got us a hostel. Way to go Weldon!! So we stashed our bags, met up with Ty (who had been on the beach) and went out for dinner and a "laser show" looking across the Harbor towards the skyline of Hong Kong. When we finally stumbled towards bed around 2030 we were almost unable to walk from exhaustion and over stimulation. We slept until 0800
This morning the boys are getting breakfast and I am looking into flights and visas. We have decided against Bali and Singapore, but are now seriously considering Laos and Nepal.
The plan for today is to ride the worlds largest elevator, do some fishing in the ocean, and catch some sun on the beach. Thanks for reading and I hope all is well in Alaska.

Day 1 (and 2, and 3)...

Origionally our flight left from Anchorage Alaska on 4/1 at 0230. Unfortunately the volcano was not co-operating and our flight ended up getting canceled. This would have been just a minor setback except that we were meeting tyler in the seatle airport. After three hours on the phone with Alaska Air, Asiana Air, and Orbitz.com we secured a ticket that would land us in Hong Kong on 4/3; only 24 hours later than we origionally planned. Unfortuantly, the flight left from Fairbanks and not Anchorage. So we headed north with Macrina (much love sis) and Nathaniel Ray. We drove through a blizzard (by hich I mean John drove and I slept and read books) and arrived at Tae Freeman's house in the evening. We slept on her floor and caught a plane the next morning at 0700. It was decided, as Tyler's phone battery was dying, that he would take the origionally booked flight and arrive a day before us, and that we would meet at the airport in Hong Kong.
Long story very short, we flew from Fairbanks to Seatle, Seatle to Seoul, and Seoul to Hong Kong. It took more than 48 hours from the time we left home to get to Hong Kong, and we slept in 3-4 hour chunks.
Upon arrival we learned that our bags had not made the airplane switch-over from Seoul to Hong Kong and that we would have to return the next day at 1400 to get them.
Minutes later we hooked up with Tyler who, frantically running about, informed us that the last of the public transit was about to close and we needed to get on the tram pronto. This was really unfortunate because weldon needed to charge his Iphone to get the address to our hostel and we didn't have the time. We tried to call his mom and have her look it up for us but the phone wasn't taking our coins. So we got on the tram with no destination in mind.
After a bit of bickering and travel induced frustration it was decided that Ty and Wldon would go to Ty's hostel and find an Internet Cafe so that we could look up the location of our hostel. It worked, and after a short cab ride of $100HK (about $12US) we ended up outside our hostel - Ty chose to stay at his own place because he had already paid for the night, and decided to meet us at our hostel the following evening. Bad news though; we showed up at our hostel around 0200 and they had sold our rooms already because they didn;t think we were comming.
And so we had a problem. Alone in Hong Kong, no place to stay, no public transit running, no map, no packs, no way to communicate with ty, no nothing.
So what did we do? Like any good americans, we went to McDonalds. The plan was to stay up all night and wait for the morning to find a hostel, get our packs, and hook back up with Ty.
And that leads us to now. We stayed in McDonalds till 0415 and than began to wander. We walked all over the quiet streets, through small gardens, closed markets, dingy alleyways, between skyscrapers, and along the water. At first the task seemed ominous, staying up all night with nothing to do and nowhere to go in a city that is most the way across the world from my life, but within minutes we were laughing and talking and having a merry good time. At 06156 we caught the first puiblic transit back to the main backpackers area and john and weldon are finding a place to stay while I start our blog. We are tired and stinky and dirty and generally a pretty ragged bunch, but our spirits are high and the sun is rising. Now it's off to get our bags and find Ty.