my travel gear

My plan was to be in SE Asia until the end of March. However, I am prematurely back in Taipei, because I somehow unknowingly had my bank card eaten by an ATM in Thailand, thus cutting off only source of money for travel and quite abruptly ending my trip. This means I have more time to putz around and blog, and I’m sure an account of my travels in SE Asia will show up in a post very soon.

Anyways, I tried to pack as lightly as possible for my one-month SE Asia trip. My final pack weight came out to be 9 kg, which I think is actually heavier than necessary (I aimed for 7 kg). But being a lifelong over-packer who only started shaving down on baggage weight while serving in the Peace Corps, due to the bare-bones lifestyle, I always pack a few things that are considered “just-for emergencies”.

Bags

• * Osprey Kestral 48
• A small 13 liter bag that folds up into a tiny size

* To me the pack is a traveler’s most intimate piece of equipment. I looked around for YEARS finding my perfect travel pack. The Kestral 48 comes pretty close as being the favorite pack I’ve ever used. It’s robust, has awesome pockets and features, and very versatile. I’ve used it in the backcountry in New Zealand, weekend trips across Taiwan, and as my main pack through SE Asia. It even comes with a rain cover, but this seems to be the norm for large backpacks these days.

Electronics

• * Unlocked Samsung Galaxy S2
• Canon 550D + 18mm-55mm kit lens + polarizing filter
• BlackRapid RS-7 sling strap
• One extra camera battery
• 2 32gb SD cards
• 1 SD card reader
• chargers for phone and camera
• 1 universal voltage converter
• 1 pair headphones
• 1 64gb flash drive

* A smartphone like the Samsung Galaxy S2 can do everything…Angry Birds, videos, music, internet, Skype, and a backup camera. There’s no reason to bring a computer given the versatility of smartphones.

Clothing

• 2 pairs of boxer shorts (best thing to sleep in!)
• 3 pairs of quick-dry underwear
• 2 pair shorts, one of which converts into pants
• 2 bras
• 2 tank tops
• 1 long sleeve shirt
• 1 fleece
• 1 rain coat
• 1 hat
• 1 pair of shitty looking flip flops
• * 1 pair of Barefoot Merrell trail glove
• 2 pairs of socks
• 2 t-shirts

* I am averse to wearing shoes and socks in hot climates. I regretted bringing my Barefoot Merrells. Unless you are absolutely sure that you will be trekking in SE Asia, do not bring any shoes. You can easily buy new footwear if your flip flops fall into an unfortunate demise.

Toiletries

• 1 small bottle shampoo
• 1 bar of soap
• 1 small tube toothpaste and toothbrush
• 1 clothesline
• 1 pair nail clippers
• 1 small bottle sunscreen
• * 1 small tube roll-on bug dope
• 1 small bottle hand sanitizer

* Ditch the natural citronella oil bullshit. I’ve tried them all and they don’t work as well as DEET-based repellents. And bug dope is essential. There’s a lot of mosquitoes everywhere in hot, wet, and humid SE Asia.

Med Kit

• * 1 bottle probiotics
• bandages
• ibuprofen
• hydrocortisone
• anti-histamines
• antibacterial ointment
• 1 thermometer

* With capsules full of healthy gut bacteria, probiotics have been shown to decrease or alleviate travelers diarrhea. Be sure to get the kind that don’t need refrigeration.

I brought a pretty bare-bones med kit because I knew that medicines are cheap and widely available in SE Asia, especially Thailand. For example, I bought a full course of Norfloxacin (antibiotics for bacteria-induced diarrhea) for only 4 dollars. Oral rehydration salts are really cheap as well, priced around 1 dollar for five packets.

Other

• 1 headlamp + extra batteries
• small repair kit with Tenacious Tape, duct tape, and superglue
• earplugs and sleeping eye mask
• 1 water bottle
• journal and 2 pens
• * 1 Southeast Asia on a Shoestring Lonely Planet guidebook
• 1 extra pair glasses

I have always loved owning Lonely Planets. I do not like traveling with them. With the availability of ubiquitous internet, I found myself looking up travel information more on my smartphone than my guidebook. Next time, I would purchase a guidebook for researching my trip and then scan/copy the relevant pages so I don’t have to haul a brick around. Lonely Planet also conveniently puts PDFs of all their guidebooks on their websites, available for download at a fee.

Documents and Important Things

• * passport, ATM bank card, credit card, ID
• photocopies of passport, ID, bank card, credit card
• extra passport photos
• copies of all flight itineraries
• some back-up cash in the form of USD

* I have traveled extensively for years and years without ever misplacing anything. After losing my ATM card in Thailand, I will never travel without two cards anymore. It is such a rookie mistake, but also not. So many people lose their cards on the road, including seasoned road warriors. Momentary complacency and simple human error can cause you to drop your guard and make mistakes. Prepare for this by opening another account and have some emergency cash saved in it. Use that as your backup money source if your primary account becomes inaccessible.

Douliu is the capital city of Yunlin County in Taiwan.

This year, I was lucky enough to be in Taiwan when Lunar New Year (LNY) was being celebrated. Every year, LNY falls on a different day on the Gregorian Calendar, always around late January or early February. I wanted to spend LNY with my grandparents and auntie up in Taipei, but I was somewhat coerced into going down south to celebrate it with my paternal family. According to tradition, this is how its done. I personally find this tradition to mildly sexist, but like with many instances on my trip back to Taiwan, I have learned to swallow my opinions. Sometimes, swallowing too many undivulged opinions result in a proverbial vomit, often getting my sweet ass into trouble with my elders. But what is said cannot be undone, and with apologies profusely given, I have struck a truce with traditions and customs that I don’t agree with.

With my nebulous mini-rant out of the way, let’s get into the details of how we celebrated LNY in Douliu. Douliu is a small-ish city in the middle of Taiwan, serving as the economic and governmental capital of Yunlin County. This is where my dad grew up, and where I spent many summers of my childhood melting in the heat and humidity. Compared to Taipei, it has a very tame and laid-back vibe, with really not much to do in terms of recreation, entertainment, and nightlife. But like everywhere else in Taiwan, Douliu is not lacking in tasty food and drink. And with food playing a central role in LNY, the meals were certainly delicious and opulent during this year’s celebration.

LNY is arguably the most important holiday that Taiwan celebrates. I cannot profess to be an expert on LNY, as this is the first time that I’ve experienced it in its full glory. I’m sure there are PhD dissertations written on the traditions, history, religious ceremonials, etc involved in this ancient holiday. So I can only give a very subjective and condensed description of this celebration.

New Years Eve: (除夕Chuxi)
Chuxi (New Years Eve) is a day for making offerings to ancestors and Daoist deities. Specially cooked foods are offered at home shrines and temples. Paper money is also burnt to ensure that ancestral spirits will have money to use in the realm that they dwell in. The process of immolation is the transformation that allows the corporeal money to be transferred to the spirit world. A big evening meal is also held to celebrate the coming of the new year. Our Douliu shrine is the top floor of my grandparent’s house, which my grandpa maintains immaculately with an everyday incense offering to the bodhisattvas and deities.

New Years Day: (新年 xīnnián)
While Chuxi was for home worship, Xīnnián is a day for going to the temple and paying respects to Buddha and deities. My family and I went to a large Buddhist complex to pay respect to the Buddha Matreiya (also known as the Laughing Buddha in the West). More paper money was burnt at the small shrine holding our ancestor’s cremated ashes.

Days 2 – 15 of the New Year
On the second day of the New Year, married women return to their side of the family to spend the LNY celebration with their families. More eating ensues. Lots of firecrackers are set off, often snapping me out of my binge-eating stupor. Some hardcore people celebrate every day of the New Year until day fifteen. Personally, my digestive system started surrendering after day two. I spent the rest of LNY resting, fasting, and watching all of the existing episodes of The Walking Dead. Not the most auspicious of beginnings.

Although a pungent odor of sewage still wafts up your nose whenever you cross paths with a storm drain, Taipei has morphed into a attractive and livable city. The sub-tropical environment has blessed the island nation with a plethora of fruits and vegetables, all of which are showcased in Taipei’s delicious food scene. Taipei’s nightlife may not be as crazy as that of Bangkok, but it is vibrant in its own right, with beehive-like night markets taking the center stage rather than bars and clubs. Taipei is also one of the most open Asian cities for the LGBT community, which is a humungo plus for me.

While my cultural and ethnic heritage is deeply rooted in Taiwan, I cannot say that I am Taiwanese. By virtue of my language abilities, my Taiwanese friends have told me that they can barely tell that I was born in the states. There are others who comment that I have a distinct air of a waiguoren (foreigner) about me, and that it’s painfully obvious that I was not born and raised in Taiwan. The Taiwanese love to categorize and label, and most of the time I don’t fit any category, often confusing the people I meet. Although I am ABT (American Born Taiwanese), I’m also not like other ABTs. Although I look Taiwanese, my mannerisms are a dead giveaway that I’m not.

Despite this identity confusion, I have developed quite a love for this country. Hearing people speak Taiwanese places me within a bubble of familiarity. The food is nostalgia revisited, a dream that has been salivated over while serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer and backpacking through New Zealand on a diet of 2-minute noodles. My family here, my parents were born here, my roots are here. And I’m happy to be back.

Being in the Peace Corps means having a good chunk of time to pursue interests that you would otherwise not have time to do. Personally, I’ve had some time to play with songwriting.

Turning on the Sound of Silence

Let me preface by saying that I’m a lover of cities. I am fueled by their energy and intellectually drawn towards these buzzing beehives of human community, innovation, and art. Growing up in Seattle and later attending the University of Washington, the sounds of a city was my daily soundscape. While serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer, I would often orchestrate this soundscape in my dreams, recreating the rumbling hum of wind speeding between skyscrapers, the murmur of people in coffeehouses and libraries, and the roar of busses as they careen down highways.

All these sounds are indicative of a community constantly in motion. In order to slake the chaos of a large and diverse population that is always changing, barriers are erected to categorize and organize those who dwell there, both in the form of physical structures and micro-communities. And since city-dwellers are in perpetual flux, their walls serve a second purpose of easing the human discomfort towards change and the unknown, where like-minded individuals would find their kin in a micro-community that suits them. Cities are simultaneously chaotic and controlled, large in population but small in the number of people you can know genuinely, and full with eccentric individuals who maintain their uniqueness while also falling into the flow of encompassing trends. I was living within these dichotomies during the first twenty-one years of my life. It was when I joined the Peace Corps that I started reflecting on the differences between city and village life, and the lessons that can be learned from the daily soundscapes of both environments.

It came as a bit of a surprise to others—and on some levels, myself—that I would want to spend two years living in a small village with no electricity and plumbing on the archipelago nation of Vanuatu. All the dichotomies of a city were erased and replaced by a community that is small in population with very little anonymity, doesn’t celebrate individuality and innovation, and is neither chaotic nor controlled. The sounds of a cityscape were suddenly gone and replaced by crowing roosters, soft thud of bare feet on a dirt path, and the rumbling waves of the Pacific. Take away all the churnings, whirrls, beeps, and vrooms, of post-industrial engineering and you get the sound of silence—a silence that isn’t vacuous and empty, but a silence that emphasizes the sounds of life and the deep rumble of the ocean and earth. This silence helped me appreciate aspects of life that are ignored in a technology-driven community, especially an integral part of life that is so often avoided and shunned: death.

In the west, death is often pushed into the background of our lives by medicines and treatments that desperately try to reverse its inevitability. And so death often comes as a crippling shock when it shouldn’t, and the living mourn heavily by clinging to the memories of the past and lamenting the disappearance of a desired future. The ebb from life to death is commonplace in daily rural life in Vanuatu. Poor health care and ignorance about the rudiments of hygiene and health knowledge contribute to frequent deaths in village communities. In many villages, the dead are mourned for five days only, after which their past life and deeds are put to rest into the memories of the living. But within these five days, an unearthly chorus of wails surrounds the dead in a cloak of sorrow, adding a heavy layer to the soundscape of a village. Everyone in the village participates in The Wailing, asked to join the cacophony of sadness with the family of the dead. These are five days when the family will do nothing but mourn, with the rest of the village joining them by supporting the family with food and comfort. But after the five days, the heavy layer of wailing is lifted and life goes on as usual. The death event is no longer acknowledged, and the dead is placed behind the living. Men and women go back to the gardens to work the crops for the weekly market. Smiles once again appear on faces. Life goes on.

The most valuable lesson from listening to and living within the sounds of silence is understanding impermanence at a deeper level. Even though they don’t have the modern conveniences of hot showers, modern medicine, and comprehensive education, ni-Vans intuitively understand life’s impermanence more than many developed communities. They are reminded of the changing nature of their environment every moment by their soundscape. The thud of a fallen papaya from an over-encumbered tree will soon become rotten but will later regrow to bear more tasty fruits. The frantic clucking of a dying chicken will fertilize the ground with which farmers will use to nurture their crops. The wails of family members for the dead will transform into namesakes for newborn children, allowing the memories of the deceased to continue in future generations. The ebb of life is resonant in the village. Every moment, things are rotting and regenerating, dying and birthing.

For those who live in cities, occasionally turn off your daily soundscape and turn on the sound of silence. Wander out to the wilderness to reconnect with the earth. Build and maintain a community of close friends and family, and try to reach out to different niches and micro-communities. Travel. You will find that the sound of silence isn’t foreign to human beings, and that it’s been with us since the beginning of existence. You will find that the sound of silence manifests impermanence. You will find that turning on the sound of silence will allow life’s challenges to become more manageable, because you realize that they certainly can’t last for eternity.

The fundraising has now closed! Thank you so much to everyone that supported this project. The total raised amount is 790.40 USD, far exceeding my goal of 450 USD. Thank you so much for your generosity and kindness! Look to this blog for updates on the Camp GLOW/BILD in Ekipe Village!

Hey friends! I am asking for some help in raising money for a youth camp that I will be holding in my community, Ekipe Village. These camps are called Camp GLOWs (Girls Leading our World) and BILDs (Boys in Leadership Development), and they aim to equip the local youth with leadership skills that will enable them to become active and helpful members of their community.

The camp will be a four-day seminar for approximately 30 youth that will be held in early February. The following topics will be covered.

• leadership and team building skills
• public speaking skills
• decision making skills
• the meaning of respect and trust
• domestic violence awareness
• adult reproductive health awareness
• HIV/AIDS and STI (sexually transmitted infections) awareness
• arts and crafts
• soap making and other ideas for income generation
• sports and exercise

My goal is to raise $450. The money will be used to ONLY fund the camp, which includes buying the necessary materials for the sessions and food items to feed the participants. If the total donation amount exceeds $450, the money will be donated towards the Ekipe School and Ekipe Health Committee.

If you are interested in donating, please click on the “Donate” link below to pay securely via PayPal.

Thank you very much!

Like puppies.

The children in my village LOVE music, and singing is a sure way to attract a large number of kids to your home. And I find this to be true with a lot of kids in general. That’s why there are so many sing-a-longs CDs/DVDs/tapes/media made for kids. Humans have a natural gravitation towards melodies and it starts at a very young age.

So back to how incredible it is to hear children sing. It all started with a truck ride back to my village on North Efate from a day in Vila. Of course I was listening to my music device and of course I was listening to one of my favorite songs of all time: U2’s “With or Without You”. I was mouthing the lyrics and jamming to its epic tune, and it suddenly occurred to me, why not turn lyrics into a teaching tool? Why not teach English poetry through song lyrics?

I decided that I would form an after school program that is dedicated towards allowing children to practice their reading skills. And to give some variety from the narrative writing that they usually read, I have them read lyrics from chosen songs after an hour or so of reading from a children’s novel. After allowing them to discuss the meaning of the lyrics, I play and sing it on the guitar. Then they sing it with me. We then discuss simple questions like, “From the lyrics alone, do you think this is a sad or happy song?” and “After listening to the song, now is the song happy or sad or neither?”. The goal of this is to give these ESL kids a chance to gain a wider breadth of the English language, to read material that they would normally not read in school. More importantly, the goal is to get them thinking about English writing as a means of creative expression, not only through the words alone but the music that accompanies the words.

The songs that I choose are very benign, of course, and have no less-than-pure implications in their meaning (although I do have the secret wish of having these kids sing “Hotel California”, simply because it is an awesome song to sing). So far, we have done “Blowing in the Wind”, “Let it Be”, “Five Hundred Miles”, and “Puff the Magic Dragon”. Lots of Bob Dylan. LOTS of Peter Paul and Mary (Because they are my muse and musical heroes, and once upon a time I was in love with Mary Travers). Lots of Beatles. In general, lots of folk songs.

Back to my original premise, it is incredible hearing these kids sing and harmonize to a song like “Blowing in the Wind”. The meaning of the song is so in line with the hippie ideology that so permeates the Peace Corps mentality. And perhaps because of the church culture here, people have the incredible ability to sing and pick up melodies. And the natural ability to harmonize.

It’s fucking beautiful.

It’s difficult to delve into the psychology of a village but I will attempt to do so. I will first preface by noting that every volunteer’s site is drastically different. A Peace Corps volunteer who lives on a small island called Makira has a gorgeous white sand beach that overlooks different shades of cerulean and blue. I, however, have an ugly coastline. Some volunteers have very tightly knit host families and people who feed them all the time. Due to the proximity of a large market on Efate, my village is very market-oriented and somewhat reluctant to share their food. On the other hand, there are some amazing people in my village, a really motivated headmaster at the local primary school, some really great teachers, and darling kids. AND, Vila is just under an hour away which makes logistics so much easier.

Okay, so pictures speak louder than words right? Right.

No.

One must earn the title to be a Peace Corps Volunteer. As you progress (or regress, depending on how you view the situation) through training, you begin to realize that training is another way for Peace Corps to remove people who are not suitable for this job. I should correct myself by saying that Peace Corps places us in situations where some people eventually remove themselves from service, once they find that shitting in a stinky bush toilet for two years is too much to handle.

So here we are in the final week of training, all 39 out of the original 41 trainees. We’ve gone through some hard stuff, some sickly stuff, and some dull stuff. But in the end, the majority of us are sitting here in the Coconut Palms Resort with its awesome wireless internet and showers—not always hot but we don’t complain because we are so easy to please now—awaiting the swearing-in ceremony coming Thursday November 4^th. I’m finding that I am looking forward to swearing-in more than university graduation. Training was challenging and fun, and becoming a full-fledged Peace Corps Volunteer is a true honor. Not that the UW wasn’t challenging, but Peace Corps training is an experience that is wholly different from anything that I have ever encountered.

So I don’t really know how to frame this post besides making it a FAQ-type format:

You shaved your head?!?!

Yeah, and I have a nicely-shaped head. I think I will be keeping my hair super short. A shaved head and big loopy earrings go well together. And I can go on and on about the convenience of this haircut.

Training is finished (Awesome)! What will you be doing for the next two years?

My training village is Ekipe, and my permanent site for two years will be Ekipe as well. Ekipe is a village on the north end of Efate, one of the most heavily trafiked islands in Vanuatu—perhaps because Port Vila, the capital city, is located here. Volunteers are usually NOT placed in their training village, so my placement is quite unusual. But apparently, the chief asked for me to stay in the village and Terekea, the PC Community Health Program Manager, was considering that I stay in Ekipe during the first few weeks of training. Funny how things work. I’m very happy with my placement, as I’m not interested in being in the middle of a remote island jungle, but I’m also not interested in being in the city. I have no electricity and the chickens/pigs run amok in my village, so I’m not exactly living a posh lifestyle, but I’m close enough to the capital so that I can access whatever I need within a reasonable time frame.

As far as what I will be doing, it depends on what the people of Ekipe need. I was thinking about starting out with some health classes with the older kids, as I don’t like young children. A smokeless stove project is also a possibility, as well as a project involving better village waste disposal. Another idea is organizing a Camp GLOW (Girls Leading Out World) that focuses on health and health science. And as a side project, I want to form a “Mamas of Ekipe Choir” as the mamas here can all harmonize beautifully.

What I really want to do is give Ni-Van women a chance to have control over their general wellbeing, and give men a chance to respect and understand women better.

What do you eat?

I am practicing cannibalism.

All kidding aside, my vegetarian diet makes the already unsophisticated cuisine boring. But I get a lot of organic fresh fruits and vegetables. I try to avoid the national dish called laplap and its sister dish called simboro, which is grated manioc OR banana OR yam baked with fresh coconut milk on hot stones. The resulting concoction has a texture similar to daikon cakes in Taiwan, but without the delicious flavor and taste. It is bland and too filling for my liking. Simboro is simply this concoction wrapped in aelan kabis (island cabbage which is similar to Chinese spinach).

Otherwise, aelan kakae (island food) depends a lot on which island you reside on. For example, Efate people eat plenty of white rice and bread, which I absolutely despise. So after being fed seven weeks of white rice and bread, and being someone who usually eats sprouted whole wheat bread, I vow never to eat anything white again. The truth is, whole grains would never survive out here, and the fatty acids in the kernel would go rancid quickly. But I plan to grow a lot of my own food: a lot of fresh ginger, cucumbers, tomatoes, aelan kabis, kumala, manioc, taro, popo (papaya), etc. I am excited to literally throw seeds in the ground and watch the vegetable grow without the use of fertilizers and pesticides.

Au natural.

Is there really cannibalism in Vanuatu?

Apparently, cannibals exist in what we call the “bush” in the island of Santo. But gnomes called lysepseps also live on some remote islands. Yes. Gnomes. So take all of this with a grain of salt.

What about black magic?

YES. Belief in black magic is deeply embedded in the psyches of people here. For example, you must take in your laundry hanging on the clothesline at night because a black magic sorcerer can touch them and curse you. When I shaved my head, my host parents asked if I disposed of my shaven-hair properly. When I said that I simply threw it in the bush, my host parents freaked out and said that a sorcerer can take my hair and curse me. There you go.

I’m still counting my fingers and toes every night to make sure that black magic didn’t take it away.

What are bucket baths like?

Amazing. I think I will be doing bucket baths when I return to the US. So efficient and it saves water. But the occasional hot shower is very nice.

I plan to make a few more posts before I leave for Ekipe again. So stay tuned for news about the swearing-in ceremony.