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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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Haleakala: The Fast Way

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*Photos: Eddie Gianelloni --> Haleakala: The Fast W ay “Mainland, yea?”   Biting the top of her knuckle, the old wooden desk creaking as she leaned in heavy.   Pressing the phone to her ear and tripoding her elbows on the desk, she listened close for a few more seconds then looked up at me and asks: “So the dogs came after you?” her tanned forehead crinkling into the shape of a ‘V’.    “Well, no.   Not really.”   Pausing mid sentence and putting myself in the ranchers boots on the other end of the phone line; this must sound ridiculous.   A runner from the mainland with no shirt and short shorts wanders off his ranch into the Kaupo General Store and wants to know why his dogs, specially trained to protect the livestock, come after him when he runs towards the livestock. Meg presses the old phone back to her ear then leans back in her springy office chair: “Okay, thanks John, got it.”   I wander aimlessly in the cubical...
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Yet Anoher Junction

I’m searching for a way to transcend the experience... When the bus dropped us off at the junction of the two roads there wasn’t much we could do. I had been riding my bike for 1,115 kilometers through the northern stretches of Thailand and Laos. My visa for Vietnam started in two days, I needed to rest while still covering ground; I didn’t know what to expect and was too tired to care. In retrospect, I think the driver had the mid-way drop off planned before we departed. At 7:30am a mother, her small child, a middle aged man with worn through dress shoes, the Iguana and I loaded the flatbed-turned-bus in the junction town of Vieng Thong. At 7:45am the bus-driver pushed the front seat forward, pulled out a bamboo-bong, walked out to the road, smoked himself some opium, then came back and starred blankly at the front drivers side tire. Five other Laotians trickled over twenty minutes of philophosphorizing followed. Half-hour later the stoned driver was wheeling the tire in...
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