Film footage of my one week traveling through Bangkok, Thailand (minus the 2 days spent in bed while dying of food poisoning)
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Our cab driver, Hani, looked like George Clooney. He lit a cigarette, asked for 25JD up front, and came to a stop on the side of the road before ushering us into an unmarked car. There was a lot of hand waving and what seemed like friendly arabic, some money changing and then he left us. Damn him, he left us.
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The intricate design and high vaulted corridors of twisted rock had me convinced Petra was some sort of elaborate modern hoax. A fantasy world brought to fruition. It wasn’t until I had wandered the city streets myself that I began to process Petra as a reality; plainly panorama before me.
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Few places compare to the Canyonlands of Southeastern Utah. The sheer size and gravity of nature at its best. The innate sense of freedom; the euphoria of standing still amid a waste of wild air. Wadi Rum is one of those places.
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It was cool enough to wear a sweater, and the sun was setting when we found a hilltop spot to sit and stare out at the Sea of Galilee, the Golan Heights and Yarmuk Gorge. The ruins of Umm Qais (Gadara) were at our back, Israel to the left and Syria to the right.
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I woke up on the seventeenth floor, suspended above a city beneath an overcast sky; misty roads winding through stacks on stacks of white stone structures. When you live for months at a time in a place void of rain, mist, and cloud; moody mornings are more like million dollar moments.
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In Bahrain you drive on sidewalks and park where you like. You hear English so often you forget you're in the Middle East; you hire tailors to craft the designer stuff you see while sipping mango juice and paging though fashion magazines.
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Away from the ongoing project that is Manama, the landscape of the Middle Eastern land unraveled into ribbons of oil pipes and oceans of sand.
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I lived in the Middle East for just over six months, and still I only caught small glimpses of a world and culture I never imagined myself visiting, much less living.
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After three nights at the Grand Hyatt Muscat, we traded our suite for an SUV and drove from Muscat into the nether, sans GPS. The road was straight and went on forever, dotted with feral donkeys and curiously constrained camels.
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Our first tuk-tuk cost us just 10 Baht, and the driver dove right into a much-rehearsed scheme-laden script. We expected as much, being foreign and all, but his lack of creativity was almost endearing.
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The sun was long gone as Justin and I sat on a pier looking out onto the Doha skyline. There were four or five fishermen to our left, and a couple dressed in thobe and burka to our right.
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A little bit about Bahrain, a tiny island in the middle of the Middle East, opposite the bridge to Saudi Arabia. I had landed in Bahrain six weeks earlier on a flight from Sri Lanka, at the height of summer, when temperatures hovered somewhere around 114.
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I returned yesterday from a whirlwind trip that was somewhat last minute - and fantastic. We flew across the Gulf to celebrate a friend's birthday in true Dubai style - complete with pink limo, champagne service and a dance floor on the 43rd floor somewhere downtown. In a word: extravagant.
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