So, you want to ride a motorcycle around a tropical paradise island in the Indian Ocean?

Mentally prepare yourself for a head on collision with a tanker truck going 85kmph on a one lane, gravel road in the pouring monsoon rain. Stare down the high beams from a 4x4 passengered and driven by piss drunk 18-year-olds on a terrorizing joyride. Swerve too far in panicked desperation and nosedive into the meter-deep aqueduct, or worse, into a volcanic gulley. As the late Hunter S. Thompson would say,
"Whammo. Game over. Meet the sausage monster."

If at some point your nerves resign to take a break on some village road, dont hit the chickens or the children criss-crossing the path. If you mistakenly park in front of some Bali-hound's territory, stare him down, slowly get on the bike then rip on the gas because its a contest of acceleration. Once your off, its a day at the races and the mutt doesn't distinguish between your right calf muscle and a frightened hare.



The road is only traveled alone. My short-lived Mexican com padre didn't understand that there is no such thing as a "Wrong Turn". This is the most vital wisdom to possess when setting out on a motorcycle journey in a foreign land. If you are equipped with this info:
put on a helmet, you cocky maniacs
fill up with $1.20 worth of Petronas
and
Punch it.

Other pieces of advice:

Avoid the templed; just like in most places in the world they are hives for cheats, scam artists and villains.



Steer clear of monkeys. They are shameless thieves with razor incisors and rabies, and they move shadow quick.



Go fast, but never rush. Those in a rush are blindfolded, straight-jacketed comatose cannonballs on a mindless bullet's-route to the grave.

If you are a circum-navigator, days are long, but bear in mind that 12 hours on a saddle is a creampuff latte frappe cake-dance compared to endless clicks on a smoked-out Chinese bus in the hinterland.

Jalan




Jalan




I'mashyo!

Harvest

I've lived a life of discipline
I've lived a life that's free
of all the must's and have to's I thought were chaining me

The wind of chaos blowing
muffled twirls of sand
you cannot build much anything
on such a shifting land

We've heard the word
called "entropy":
that in the end, you lose.
but movement is necessity
up or down: you choose



~~~~~~So, in misty Bali days

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ as warm seas lazy roll

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I choose the life of discipline

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ its my world,

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ after all.

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I wandered into a dull and lonely place
the empty warmth of passionless womb
where acid fires sobered down to warm coals

Sharpness rounded off into uninterested, heavy stones
dragging themselves around with no real zest to amble

It was not lack of answers
I've always found a way to overcome and enliven and progress
once I have a question

These sullen windless days of travel
it was a lack of questions that stilled the air
where your body moves
but you don't go anywhere

The guardians stepped in

as they did in the beginning

and sparked my life with wonder


Archetypes
Perception
Mayans
Nature of man
Physicas
Language learning
Music theory
Emotions
Subconscious

I've dug up grist for the mill.
Now I can travel with a purpose again.
And see these wild Sumatras with intention.

Thanks to a Mexican Castenada
the moon under mystic seas
the wrong season
and Mescalito


---

Terima Kashi!
Suksmon!

---

These psychic nations I visit are somewhere along the physical route I trace. Burning across China, sloshing through muddy and slow Sumatra and hopping to Bali - It all becomes something in the ventricle factories.

"How to live"
has been the unmistakable central point of my voyage
It's not so difficult to see anymore
I witness before me the new and vast battlefield of the mind
that requires a constant effort

I can share little of value with my future self other than to canonize the hard-wrought principles that have transformed my decisions:

1. Simplify
2. Purify
3. Let Go
4. See Objectively and Analyze

and principles that have increased my joy of life:

5. Make Music
6. Meditate
7. Connect

and Buddha's three marks to witness everywhere:

8. Impermanence
9. No Self
10. Suffering

And that's it. All this time these 10 things have consumed my psychic energies for good or for worse. The more energy I put into these 10, and the less I waste on the twirling dance of hedonism, chaotic questioning and future-past quagmires, the more effective my life is and the more full of a human I feel.

Brief Thoughts on a Long Time Gone

Its a puzzle how the future becomes the past, or more appropriately, doesn't. I sit here writing this, conjuring up how I felt sitting in my friend Joe's apartment in Osaka looking over maps of the Middle Kingdom before I took the slow boat to China; the mind was so tied up in a future that never came to pass. I'm laughing. I see it as extra potent in this very moment because here I am again, tying and untying the future with my mind, in a similar fashion as I have done so many times just substitute the name of the country.

Its nothing like I thought it would be
and it never is - that's the mystery
one step at a time
I get ahead, or stuck behind
like a candle unto my two feet
I see what you want me to see
the future
remains open to me
the mystery
it sets me free

To know it and to live it; it is a slow development I've witnessed throughout the course of my journey. I can only hope one day to truly have no worries (mate).

---

After all, everything worked out in China...

More or less.

Speaking of which,


Less is more,

especially when dealing with the barrage of noise, pollution, and violent foreignness of China. It is, for any accurate measures to be taken in relaying the feeling and the observation and analysis, a different planet.
But I won't be able to describe it. Who could really describe the subconscious impact that the Great Civilization of the East would have on such an isolated, unawares and sheltered Midwestern boy?

I don't understand what happened or how what I saw and felt will change me as it gestates in my deep subcortum. I know many times I wanted to get out, to fly away, but that I took China like medicine. It was too much for me, and I sought shelter often. At the end of two months, I still didn't feel like I had a handle on it, even in a slight regard. China is another life.

And Tibet is another China.

Wild, massive and dangerously hungry dogs make there presence known around every (wrong) turn. Big skies you can touch with your gritty fingers. Dark flocks of vultures ripping human flesh from a corpse on the frozen tundra, 4000 meters above the world. Salt and fat boiled in a tea, mud houses, yak, bus rides through eternal fields of low, hard ochre and mossy green plains. In the barely breathable air, pink yellow sunrises hang on loosely to the rarefied mists. Time begins in the morning and ends at in the twirling indigo galaxy of your spacious mind. Tushi dey leh.

Tibet made me realize, just now in my recollection on its wonder, that I cannot realize how magic life is while im in it; it still requires me to reflect to see just how unbelievable and fleeting the magic of the world is.

It is so hard to be where we are, to live right above our shoes every day, especially when discomfort, fear, malnutrition and fatigue cloud my eyes, but these demons that haunt the road less traveled are no more ferocious than routine and boredom. I must uncloud my eyes. The world is so real, sparkling, even in the evil mud of Sumatra. My insignificance and smallness is so apparent when I get out of the way and the universe cuts through the clouds on strange lucid days.

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