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December 29, 2004
Two ways to travel:
Anxious, or not.
A little trepidation about the upcoming trip in the last few days. We were dropping off Christmas gifts for my bro and sis-in-law on Sunday evening when he informed us of the tsunami and its consequences.
We'd been enjoying a lazy Sunday to celebrate the end of our holiday obligations, so we came home and turned on CNN immediately to see what had become of the people and places we'd been planning to visit.
Unlike Shrub. Rather than try to cultivate some goodwill, he's clearing brush around the ranch while some disaster-relief government guys manage to scrounge up about $35 million. The death count will be somewhere north of 100K, and they've offered as much money as we'd burn in Iraq over the course of a long afternoon.
By today, the footage by DV-enabled tourists has saturated the cable news nets. NetZero's made a mistake hiring fatuous wingnut/huckster Dennis Miller as pitchman. Is there any corporation Miller won't spread for, BTW? We were both browsing news sites this afternoon when She swiveled her laptop, to show off a photo of a compact car bobbing around a flooded lobby in Phuket. "I wonder which hotel that is," she mused.
Bloated bodies wash up on shore with each tide, to say nothing of the increased threat of cholera, malaria, typhus and who knows what. She made a helpful donation today to MSF this morning. She's good like that.
Last night, She sleepily gave me a sketch of a book she's reading, "Holy Cow." It's apparently a snarky memoir written by an Australian woman who visited India and swore she'd never return, only to move back years later with the love of her life. As you can tell, I read the jacket copy, and not much else.
After considering the author's well-documented culture shock, She let me know that she was vaguely concerned about my ability to go with the flow, if you will. I assuaged her concerns, as I've spent hours reading about what to expect from squat toilets. The answer: a hole in the floor, footrests, and a water bucket with a scoop.
I'm reading up now so I'll know what to expect when we arrive. But nothing would have prepared me for the tsunami that struck the Indian Ocean Sunday. Reading about beaches thronged with tourists and locals who were either swept out to sea or smashed inland on the face of a debris wave wasn't reassuring.
Scanning survivors' accounts, I reflected on the two hours plus each day we'd spend in the water when visiting Cancun. All of this is a convoluted, beguiling way of saying, "that could have been us. We might have been killed if we'd been there."
As my well-traveled Trustafarian friend recently told me, "there's only two things you can really worry about when you're traveling: make sure the girlfriend is safe and has shelter, and look after your money. Everything else is pretty much out of your hands."
Despite his sexist framing, I think he's pretty much on the money. Even a stoned clock is right twice a day.
So, I'm not going to worry about tsunamis, which are rare. I don't have money for a satphone, nor do I have any seismologist friends keeping tabs on me, so I'll have to CY mine own A when it comes to significant undersea landslides and the like. Squat toilets, on the other hand, I fully expect to encounter, so I'd better start spot-toning those quads, hams and glutes.
Speaking of two ways to travel, "traveling" is the straight-arrow spelling, but "travelling" is an accepted variant. I'll be using the former.
Posted by Your Protagonist at December 29, 2004 07:16 PM