MandyAndBryan.com

Despite the romantic notions some people may have regarding world travel, not every day involves discovering the latest Shangri-La in a perpetual voyage through faux-Shambhala bliss. Sometimes, you have those days where sunrise over your tropical island paradise is obscured (ever so slightly) by the torrential downpour of the first contestant in this year’s monsoon season.

Monsoons are absolutely fascinating, for the first fifteen minutes. After that, you find yourself bored with sideways rain and roundly berating an entire culture for its inability to open internet cafes before eleven o’clock in the morning- at least there’s cheap beer on this rock.

In the dreary afternoon haze that followed the monsoon, we were so bored that we spent an indeterminate period of time watching two cats attempt to have sex and fail miserably, in part due to some confusion over the order of the ‘Ready, Aim, Fire’ sequence.

We then ate lunch and walked back to our room, at which point I drank an entire can of stout while watching a snail crawl along the beach. In anticipation of your disbelief, I have provided documentation of the aforementioned event:

For future reference, snails don’t have the best sense of direction, and seem to travel in some sort of LSD-induced figure eight (much like Spaghetti Junction, for you Atlantans). As an aside, I really want some spaghetti. Do you have any idea how hard it is to find a decent Italian food in a Muslim country in Southeast Asia? We did manage to find a deaf guy in George Town who made some wicked garlic bread, but that doesn’t have anything to do with monsoons amd I wish you’d quit bringing it up already.

As a new low, after acquiring some new seashells on the beach, I decided to model this year’s edgiest beachware fashion from the Little Mermaid collection. (If we get sued by Disney, we’re going to start charging for this stuff, so keep a lid on it, people.)

I can not believe we give this stuff away for free.

It’s all a matter of perspective really.

In KL we splurged and spent over half a days budget on a bottle of wine, cheese, grapes, and chocolate. At home, I consume all of those things on an almost daily basis and don’t think twice about it, but here I haven’t really had them at all. I know some people think that we should just eat local foods while we are here, but I don’t think those people realize how boring fried rice and noodles get after two months. Also, it’s tough to give up your favorite foods for long periods of time. Other travelers get it. On seeing our spread of delicious treats one British guy remarked,”you guys are living the dream.” I have to be honest, it was pretty wonderful too. It certainly wasn’t the best quality wine or cheese I’ve ever had, but I swear it tasted better because I wanted it so bad. To other nomads like us, that is the dream- just a small taste of home, of normality.

To people sitting at their desks, drinking wine and eating cheese isn’t a big deal. They could do that when they get home. To them, waking up listening to the ocean and knowing that you have no particular place to be is living the dream. I won’t lie, that’s pretty fantastic too. Today, I did some yoga on a deserted beach in the morning and we’ll spend the afternoon drinking duty-free beer* that cost us about 40 cents each and staring out at the sea.

That’s why balance is so important. Too much of one thing and you’ll always want what you don’t have. In all the convenience stores here they sell whitening cream right next to tanning lotion. We’re never satisfied, are we? The tourists come here looking to fry themselves to a brown crisp on the beach while the local girls walk around under umbrellas. Everyone wants what they don’t have.

Think your life is just ho-hum? Well, next time you pet your dog, drink some wine, or have some bacon remember that there are backpacking nomads in Asia that might not kill someone, but would punch someone in the face for that kind of pleasure. Be happy with what you have, and if you want something else make it happen. There is nothing stopping anyone reading this from doing what Bryan and I are doing. Yeah, you have jobs and houses and stuff, but so did we. If this is what you want, you’ll find a way. We did, and I’m glad everyday. But don’t expect perfection and paradise either. You’ll miss stuff that you took for granted at home, but if you want it bad enough, you find what you want just about anywhere.

*For anyone that read the above statement about drinking beer that knows me and how much I hate beer, I can explain. It’s called Shandy and it’s beer with enough lemon flavor that it covers up some of the disgustingness that is the taste of beer. Bryan said it’s close enough to real beer that I can refer to it as such, and I feel like such a big kid finally drinking beer.

We’ve left George Town on Pulau Pinang; today we are on Pulau Langkawi, and yes, I say ‘on’ instead of ‘in’ because in Malay the word pulau means island. You might want to write that down, since that little tidbit might save your life someday should you ever find yourself caught in a bizarre deathtrap by a trivia-obsessed Bond villain. That would be totally awesome, by the way, since I would be virtually unkillable by said villain. Sadly, my knowledge of foreign languages, obscure sketch comedy actors, and the torque ratings of European engines will never get me into an Aston-Martin Vanquish, which happens to have an even 400 lb-ft of torque in the v12 model and has probably been driven by neither Robin Duke nor David Koechner. I’m not really sure how to work foreign language films into that, so you’ll just have to make due with two out of three, which is perfectly acceptable according to Meat Loaf.

All digressions aside, it will probably be more useful for you to take note of the fact that Pulau Langkawi, along with the entire state of Kedah, is duty-free, meaning that alcohol is finally priced normally relative to the local economy. What you may find surprising is that, despite being a haven for alcoholics, this state is one of the most conservative Muslim areas in the country. The island is a bizarre dichotomy of liquor stores and mosques; of girls in bikinis and women in burkas; of drunken British expats and… well, more drunken British expats. So far it’s been a nice place; tomorrow we plan to rent a scooter and cruise around the island, a plan with no possibilities of going awry whatsoever.

You may notice that you can now rate individual posts. We’re doing this primarily because we’d like to make it easier for new readers to realize that we are probably the most awesome people on the face of the earth.

Damn, we’re helpful.

To get you started, we’ve populated a few of our favorites (complete with Tornadoes, Hate Mail and of course, Ninjas) which you can locate just to the right of the Random Image, so if you have any older favorites, feel free to go back and rate them! The one thing we’d like to remind you is that we know you love us already, so you don’t need to rate mundane posts like this one or the one before it a 5/5 just because of that. Yes, this is directed at our parents, in particular Mandy’s mother. Anyhow, we’d like the most popular list to really be the best posts, so be honest.

Also, we’re undecided as to whether we should allow comment ratings. I like the idea because it makes public opinion more obvious on the Caption Contests, but Mandy doesn’t want people to withhold comments for fear of being ridiculed. My response, of course, was that if people fear ridicule they probably shouldn’t be communicating with me in the first place. What do you think?

Someone recently asked me if we had a general plan for the trip, and I had to think about it for a minute. We like to make plans, but they’re really more guidelines than hard & fast rules. Yesterday over lunch we added Central Asia to our itinerary, but then eliminated everything but Kazakhstan based on cursory research, so we added a few other countries like the Republic of Georgia. It will change tomorrow if not sooner, I assure you.

(For those that haven’t been following along, this is as far as we’ve mapped it out: we’ll go from Malaysia to Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos and back into Thailand. From there we’ll fly to India and stay for a couple of months before flying into Kazakhstan and heading west through southern Russia, Georgia, Armenia and into Turkey, before heading north into eastern Europe.)

But as I said, it will change. For example, up until about 11:00 last night, we were planning to head to northern Sumatra (that’s Indonesia) tomorrow, but then we realized that over the course of the day I’d acquired a horrible farmer’s tan, so we should head to the beach to even it out. Hence, early tomorrow morning, we’re going to Pulau Langkawi on Malaysia’s northwest coast; it’s a veritable paradise of duty-free alcohol, and believe me, the duties are steep in a Muslim country.

So anyway, about the plans- yeah, sort of.