A few months ago I did an interview with NationTV 22 in Bangkok for the show Mong Rao Mong Lok / มองเรามองโลก.
zooming
me & Veenarat Laohapakakul, who asks wonderful questions
Here’s the full show that aired this weekend in Thailand –– it’s in Thai, but the interview is in English with subtitles! Hope you enjoy:
Just over a week ago, Charlotte and I left Aotearoa New Zealand for Thailand. After four months of trying every possible boat option we could think of (as a passenger on a cargo ship, working on a cruise ship, working on a yacht, etc.), nothing was working.
The plane ticket to Bangkok was cheap. I packed my bicycle in a cardboard box. We flew.
Airports are for poetry.
(Here’s the final stanzas of one of my favorite poems by Naomi Shihab Nye: “Gate A-4”)
It was a strange feeling, being on a plane after having avoided air travel for so long. My feet hurt. The air was so dry. Cargo ships are loud, but airplanes are louder.
Two flights, an 8-hour delay in Melbourne Airport, & a taxi ride later, we caught the sunrise in our open arms… and then promptly fell asleep.
A friend from my hometown is kindly letting us stay at her flat in Sukhumvit. We’re way up on the 16th floor, witness to power lines // roofs and trees.
Out of frame: taller buildings // bright bright lights // loud loud traffic // rain // thunder // every building has its spirit shrine.
Judging from observations, the spirits like to drink red Fanta.
People bow at the spirit shrines as they pass. I have so much more to learn about the place of religion in Thai life, but I love what little I have picked up so far.
Spirit trees, like this one in Chinatown, are protected from being cut down.
I’m starting to get in the habit of drawing things to give my writing brain a break. You can see more sketches at drawingsbydevi.tumblr.com.
Up on the balcony, Charlotte and I ate our first dragon fruit. It tasted like a beetroot walked into a kiwi fruit––savory and delicious.
Then we started the quest to find Charlotte a touring bicycle. I’ll be writing more about this in the future; the saga is ongoing. After a few false starts, we’re nearly there!
Vrrroooooooom. Look out, world, there’s a singer on wheels soon to join the ranks of touring cyclists doing cool shit. Rumor has it that Charlotte has started a theater blog, too…
Speaking of which, if anyone knows of venues in SE Asia / beyond that would like to host Charlotte to sing, do be in touch 🙂 Best bet is if there’s a pianist or other instrumentalist to accompany her.
Three things to know about Bangkok:
ONE: It’s hot. Well yes duh, Devi, it’s hot.
This is not Boston heat, folks. It’s not Fiji heat, either. It’s hotter, even, than most days in Tuvalu (plus more traffic, more population, and greater distances between places, so moving in Bangkok means reckoning with CARS, MOTORCYCLES, TUK TUKS, TAXIS, PURELY DECORATIVE CROSSWALKS, NONEXISTENT SIDEWALKS, EVERYTHING). Step outside in the middle of the day in Bangkok and you’ll be dripping with sweat within minutes.
Bangkok heat is the kind of heat that is exhausting to walk in.
TWO: Crossing the street is an adventure. When I say “an adventure”, I mean: it’s stressful: a full-body kind of stress. Pedestrians don’t have right of way: cars and motorcycles do. There are a few pedestrian overpasses, thankfully.
THREE: The only drinking water is bottled water. More on this later, too. Having access to safe drinking water that flows from a tap (or from the ground) is a huge privilege. I wish it didn’t have to be that way.
FOUR: Everything is wrapped in plastic. I’m doing my best to refuse as much plastic as possible, but the stuff is everywhere. Drinks come with straws. Bananas in the 7-11 come wrapped in plastic, and then the cashier puts that bundle inside another plastic bag for you to carry out of the store.
The saddest bit, as we all know, Is that all that plastic goes to the water, and then into the sea. We’re on track to have more plastic than fish in the sea by 2050.
I met up with Madeleine Recknagel, an activist working to change the culture of plastic use in Bangkok. She’s a cool cat. You can learn more about her work on her blog.
Thanks for showing us around some of the temples, canalas, and back alleys, Madeleine!
SPEAKING OF MEETING UP WITH COOL FOLKS:
That’s Li Murphy at left, and Awais Hussain at right, both Harvard Class of 2015. Li co-founded Harvard Undergraduate Beekeepers. Awais was head of Harvard’s spoken word poetry group Speak Out Loud, and also does awesome things in physics and philosophy.
We went trampolining and had a yummy dinner at a night market. Awais did his first front flip. Li told me a story about water buffalo.
collecting stories at the night market — the cardboard sign lives!!!
AND OH MY GOODNESS, so much has been happening that I almost forgot:
Charlotte and I visited Sema Thai Marionette, a puppetry company dedicated to working with underprivileged children and doing research into Thai puppetry traditions.
We went to their morning performance of a show about the Rambutan Prince at a school in town, and then hung out at their puppetry workshop for the rest of the day.
The team of puppeteers helped me translate my cardboard sign into Thai…
…so now I’m ready to collect stories on the street. Thank you so much, Sema Thai Marionette! It was so wonderful to get to know the whole troop, and to spend some time with the puppets, too.
Charlotte and I loved the bicycling marionettes––
… the pedals even moved! 🙂
More soon, lovely people of the internet. For now, I’ll leave you with some street art from the neighborhood. Wheels on wheels.
Over and out,
Devi in Bangkok
I love it here.
… I wrote a piece for the Guardian that went live a week ago:
Check it out: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/bike-blog/2015/sep/21/one-bike-and-1001-stories-on-climate-change
A big THANK YOU to everyone who has supported me and continues to support me up to this point, esp. to Peppe and Jeanie, who let me stay up late for three nights in their kitchen in Mackay writing this thing, and to Caitlin Kelly, who coached me through it.
I love writing in kitchens.
Balancing three time zones (east coast USA friends to help edit, editors in London, and myself here in Queensland, Australia) was no easy task but I’m happy to say that I’m alive and kickin.
Thank you.
I couldn’t do this without all your help.
More soon.
xo
d
This trip is magic. Really. Last night I pulled into a tiny town called Mt. Larcum just before dark, unsure of where I would pitch my tent for the night. About 15 minutes earlier I was on a road that felt like it would never end, complete with unhoppable fences on either side that made stopping to camp impossible.
I chased the pink sunset and asked the clouds to please let there be a good surprise around the next corner.
And there most definitely was! My surprise was sitting with a loaded bicycle at a picnic table: Nico. Nico is Italian and 29 and just finished a coast-to-coast ride through the center of Australia, and is now cycling south in search of work to replenish his funds. Every 20km he stops to smoke a cigarette. On one forearm he has a tattoo that says “Viva la vida.”
Nico doesn’t have bags on his bicycle and instead tows everything in a trailer made to carry a child. We quickly realized that switching to Spanish was easier than English & spent the night telling stories from the road, cooking spaghetti, and stealth camping in a rugby field next to the school. We bonded over the simple fact that meeting people on the road gives us energy. So many spoken and unspoken truths. A light rain fell. A whole family of kangaroos grazed and hopped. The little joeys were adorable.
This morning Nico & I went our different ways, though there’s a chance we’ll be in Southeast Asia around the same time early next year. It was so much fun to meet a new friend!
I scribbled this brief meditation on why I do what I do halfway up a mountain pass during a 100km ride from Agnes Water to the Boyne Valley. I love hills. They reset my legs and my head and my heart.
the flat bit before the long gravel climb
I see cycle touring as a form of active listening––listening to myself and the world around me.
Do I feel safe? If not, I move on. When I am hungry, I stop and eat. When I am thirsty, I take a sip of water. I’ve grown to know when my period is coming based on the phase of the moon.
churning waters at Rainbow Beach, QLD, Australia. My travel motto? Go with the flow.
And collecting stories––where do I even begin?
The bicycle is a tool for connection. A conversation starter. A form of movement I love that can take me across borders of nation and gender and class and age.
(I am me. I can never be anyone else but me. I am a white middle class almost 23-year-old cis woman from America. There’s no taking that away. But in listening I give the whole of myself––my ears, my heart––to a storyteller.)
On the bike, I become fluid.
I am in my element. I am free.
Last night around dusk I went to the grocery store in a coastal town to buy supplies. I pulled up with my (unloaded) bicycle and was about to swing my leg over the top tube when a blonde woman with a Canadian accent smiled and said: “Hey, you must be one a big bike tour!” She could tell from the racks alone.
We got to talking and five minutes later I was riding to her house to stay the night. I planned to leave in the morning, but we stayed up late sharing stories and woke up to tend the garden, mounding dirt over the potato sprouts. By midmorning we were having too much fun sharing stories about water births and floods and gratitude and decided it was too late for me to leave. Then we rode our bikes to the beach.
On the way, Peg & I stopped at a path that goes through the edge of a national park / wildlife reserve. Holy goodness was it gorgeous out there. The walk winds through a swamp and a paperbark forest, alternating between wooden planks and stepping stones––tall cylinders of concrete––that are almost submerged in the wet season.
Right now the ground is dry, dry. There’s less than a foot of rainwater in the tank. We take short showers. The trees held me as we walked. Butterflies flew over our shoulders. It was a scene straight out of a storybook.
Some twenty years ago, Peggy traveled from Canada to Osaka to work as a ski instructor and an English teacher. She lived on the 13th floor of an apartment building in the city. One day she opened her door and stared straight into “the most gorgeous blue eyes attached to the most gorgeous man I have ever seen.”
That guy was Pete, who later said that when he saw Peg, his tongue rolled out across the floor and he had to roll it back up again before he could talk to her. Pete had a dream two years before this chance meeting on the 13th floor. In his dream a woman was walking down the beach with a child in each hand. When he saw Peg, he knew that she was that woman.
Talk about a love story, eh?
My favorite question to ask couples is “how did you meet”?
Peg relocated to Australia to be with Pete and raise their family. They have two teenage kids and live ten minutes from the beach. Pete is a woodworker and Peg works for a company that makes shampoo and dishsoap and vitamins, etc. for a safe (toxic free) home. This morning she gave me a purple pendant to wear as a necklace that gets rid of bad energy. I’m into it.
Peg introduced me to a new word: “furking.”
“It’s a combination of fun and work,” she explains, “which is more or less your life collecting stories on the bicycle, yes?”
I couldn’t help but nod. I learn so much from the people I meet along the way. May the work and the fun in our lives always be joyfully intertwined.
While it’s lovely to unexpectedly stay in one place for a while, I hope to sleep outside again soon. I miss my five billion star hotel.
And as much as I enjoy being transient, I’m looking forward to growing a vegetable garden somewhere down the line. I will pour my heart into that veggie garden. It will be delicious. When I mound potatoes, I will think of Peg.
It’s 5:55pm and almost completely dark, but the days are getting longer down under. Minute by minute. Heat-wise it already feels like summer to little New England me. Chances are I’m going to bake and sweat and bake some more for the next few months. Not that I’m complaining. It just requires carrying more water.
And this is my bliss.
During my time in Agnes Water I had my last surf for the foreseeable future with a handful of neighborhood kids. I can’t stop smiling. From here on up it’s reef reef reef (and no surf beaches).
A few nights ago I dreamt that I was swimming with turtles in the most glorious blue waters — hopefully that dream can become a reality!
I love water.
I wonder if I’ll ever live in a place with a surfable beach. I would be out there almost everyday.
My sock tan game is on point.
Great Barrier Reef, here I come!
Hi all! I’m happy to announce this newest installation in the series of interviews––in which I make myself bower bird-like, gathering voices of people who are doing cool things in the world.
There is so much beauty, so much blue! Take a step into the nest…
gathering, gathering…
Jean Chong of Cycle Write Blog is a volunteer cycling advocate in Vancouver. Prior to this work she was active for over a decade in organizations dedicated to social justice and race relations in the Toronto area.
love that hi-vis!
Jack (Hans-Jurgen) Becker is an active proponent of cycling and combined mobility of cycling on transit and public transportation, as an activist and as a consultant. Jack is a principal of Third Wave Cycling Group Inc. and is based in Vancouver, BC and Calgary, AB. Prior to retirement, he worked for a national oil firm and was a weekend beef farmer in Ontario.
Both Jean and Jack have lived a car-free life for the last 23 years.
It was a pleasure to learn a bit more about their activism.
Devi: Tell me a story about water or climate change.
Jean: I live in downtown Calgary, two blocks away from the river near a popular bike-pedestrian path.
In June 2013 I was evacuated along with nearly 100,000 residents after the Bow-Elbow River overflowed its riverbanks in city of Calgary. On the evening of the flood, the police alerted our condo building to evacuate. I didn’t believe it because I didn’t see our neighbourhood listed on the city’s website. I should have known because during a short evening stroll to check the rising river, foot patrol police told me to return home.
I evacuated at 3:30 am after the city website announced that the downtown light transit rail (as well as my workplace building) was flooded. Standing outside my building, I could hear the mighty river’s floodwaters roaring into the night. More about the post-flood time here: https://cyclewriteblog.wordpress.com/2013/09/03/major-flood-or-disaster-do-transportation-habits-change/
There are now public murals by the river that flooded at the base. This art installation will be removed by end of 2015 as per contract.
The second story is just a personal regret and wish:
I regret I didn’t travel to Asia 20 years ago. Car use in China is so much higher now because car ownership is still a status symbol there. Less blue sky days and air pollution would bother us, especially my partner who is far more allergic to pollutants and airborne particulate matter.
Devi: What inspired you to start taking bike trips? When and where did it happen?
Jean: I bought my first geared bike in 1992. My first bike trip was later that autumn in Vermont. I started taking bike trips with Jack just about 5 months later.
Jack: People around my work and in the bicycle club that I rode with at that time took cycling trips. As my leg muscles developed and I was riding longer trips, touring seemed to be the way to go. I always enjoyed traveling and had done much by car and other modes of travel within North America and Europe, so it seemed that touring by bicycle was the way to go.
Devi: Why do you ride a bike?
Jean: I gave up my driver’s license in my early 20s. I had problems learning to drive and was never comfortable driving on expressways. I would be a danger to others on the road. I’ve had the occasional nightmare where I’m driving a car and panicking.
For the last 23 years I have cycled to work, to shop, to get around, as well as for fitness and touring. I walk or use public transit in really awful weather.
Jack: I need to get exercise. My body demands that. Getting exercise by bicycle was much more interesting than being in an exercise room or swimming.
I use the bicycle for transportation to work, shopping, meetings, and any other purpose. I do combine trips with other modes of transportation when it makes sense: transit, rail, planes, ferries, etc.
Devi: What projects are you working on?
Jean: For the past few months I’ve been recovering from a head injury. Another cyclist collided into me while I was biking in Vancouver on New Year’s Day. I lost my memory for 6 hours that day.
My injury made me realize how much we rely on our brain for every movement of our limbs and turns of the head, for vision and cognition, to recognize objects, sounds and screening out lesser information. Our brain is a powerhouse for processing information every waking moment. No wonder why I was so tired post-collision. For several weeks, just to read emails for 15 minutes or walk, then microwave a bagel, made me tired. Only now am I phasing back into my full-time job.
John: I’m working to develop an organization that promotes cycling touring in British Columbia called CyloTouringBC.
Devi: What are you most proud of?
Jean: I am most proud of what I have created over the years: what I’ve written, painted, articulated and occasionally translated into volunteer work and paid jobs.
I’ve had the incredible privilege of meeting and learning from a very diverse range of people from all walks of life in both my working career and in volunteer work. I am passionate about social justice matters, information literacy, active transportation, and the development of liveable communities.
John: During my 23 years as a cycling advocate, I am proud to have seen the growth of cycling for transportation and infrastructure design that is more human-oriented than engineering––and those are words coming from a person with an undergraduate degree in civil engineering!
Devi: What do you see as the “big issues” in your home right now?
Jean: Alberta is Canada’s primary oil and gas industry driver. Our big issues include fracking and questions on water contamination as well as earth stability and oil sands extraction. Oil sands extraction is only temporarily suspended by some firms because of the drop in world oil prices. Sour gas from gas flaring is a long-term air pollutant.
Some resource extraction and processing activities are hundreds of kilometres away from Calgary but the major companies have their headquarter offices in our city.
Another problem is the prairie mentality that we have to surround ourselves with lots of space. This expands urban sprawl because we have no natural barriers except for the river. Many long-time citizens here are moving at a snail’s pace to understand the health and social benefits of ensuring communities are built to incorporate active transportation with services and shops located near by so that we aren’t always car dependent.
Our city has mushroomed to nearly 1.3 million people in past few years as Canada’s fastest growing city. But affordable housing has not kept pace. There are some socio-economic problems in certain communities that require trained professionals and counselors that speak non-English languages. In Toronto and Vancouver, where I’ve lived previously and still visit, there are well-established multilingual social services and strong, articulate community advocates who are also teachers, health care professionals and counselors who develop programs and work hard with the government on funding. Their issues and efforts to solve social problems, are reported in their local press frequently. This is not the case in Calgary. Here’s an example.
John: Our “big issues” are lack of commitment from government, staff, planners, and engineers to move towards truly sustainable. vibrant, liveable cities than move away from cars.
Devi: Who inspires you?
Jean: Doris McCarthy, a Canadian painter who died several years ago. I had the chance to meet this gracious and prolific artist in Toronto when she was nearly 90 years old. I have read three of her autobiographies and have a painting of hers. She was a gregarious artist and teacher who shared with other artists and students. There are photos of her painting outdoors in the Canadian Arctic in the snow and of her ice skating on her house property pond when she was in her 70’s.
Doris McCarthy at work in the Arctic
Devi: What are you reading/listening to right now?
Jean: On the Map by Simon Garfield is a history of maps from medieval to present. Some of the earlier maps were jammed with information describing place details, local things seen, something like a precursor to our infographic.
John: Baroque music.
Devi: What is your favorite place on earth?
Jean: Anywhere with mountains by ocean, forest and clear blue skies.
John: Vancouver, France, or the Rockies, touring on my bicycle.
Devi: What’s your favorite word?
Jean: Passion.
John: Optimism.
Devi: Is there anything else you’d like to add?
Jean: May you have many tailwinds.
John: I’m interested in how you are going to use the information and what conclusions or theories you are trying to work towards. Enjoy your travels, wherever they may take you.
That’s all for today! Be sure to check out Jean & John’s work online and drop them a line of support.
http://cyclewriteblog.wordpress.com
True fact: cycling is how I got through my last heartbreak. And you know what? I regret none of that. While on long rides I write apology letters to people I need to forgive––and yes, that includes myself––to the rhythm of my legs pedaling. I sing to myself: P!nk and The Indigo Girls and love songs I make up dedicated to none other than my bicycle. I moo to the cows and they do not moo back. I did get one successful return-baa from a sheep the other day, though, which was the cause of much excitement.
I’m not a doctor, but cycling is a form of healing that I highly recommend.
This piece of art by Aliana, one of the solo female touring cyclists on the WOW (WomenOnWheels) Wall. Check out her gorgeous sketches atwww.artsywheels.wordpress.com
One Bike, One Year 