Unkie Herb

It has been as pleasant as I’d hoped, and not nearly as dangerous as I’d assumed. Riding a bicycle around Toronto for the first time since I was twelve has been nothing short of liberating. I love slipping past traffic, smiling insolently for the drivers tapping on their steering wheels. “I’ve been that guy,” I think to myself. Ha ha ha.

I find myself noticing other riders more and more, as well, in a neck-twisting manner not unlike a dog spotting another across the road. A lot of people ride in this city. I like the nod of understanding one cyclist gives the other, as if to say, “You’ve figured it out, perhaps they will soon.” Little do they know that I am also a hated driver, albeit one that pays much more attention to cyclists that I did before. It’s funny how all it takes is a day riding around town to become much more accommodating to other two-wheelers. While I never feel particularly endangered on my bike, I know that all it takes is a single careless driver for some serious damage to be caused. You are much more vulnerable riding, and you are aware of it.

It has also furthered my ability to appreciate this city. I have already found, as I mentioned earlier, that being away for so long has refreshed my perspective, removed the jade from my eyes. I find that being on a bike expands that change of perspective, allowing me to venture into new parts of the city slow enough to absorb what I look at. I see things that I’ve looked at for years without seeing. I read signs, look in shop windows, stop to admire a skyline. I smile at children playing in the park, at an old couple sitting peacefully on a bench. I recently rode home along Queen East toward the Beaches during sunrise. I stopped at the bridge over the Don River and, for the first time in over twenty years of life in this city, I read what it says.

THIS RIVER I STEP IN IS NOT THE RIVER I STAND IN

How very Heraclitus. I cannot step into the same city twice. The name is the same, but it is different. The flow continues, evolving by the minute. Every day I step out my front door and the city has changed. I will explore it.

Share This

Good to be back in Toronto. I haven’t done anything but drive home from the airport and check the city skyline from the Gardiner Expressway, but I know I’m home.

It is sort of anti-climactic coming home now, after spending time with my brother and friends in Vancouver.

But, here I am, and I will be here for a little bit. I hope to see as many of you local types as I can before I find a job (sigh) and start saving up for next trip.

Watch out.

Share This

It’s so damn hard to keep from getting sucked in. I’ve already joined the global ego stroke that is facebook. Soon, depending on cash flow, I suppose, I’ll be getting my hands on a mobile. How long will it be until I’m cutting my hair, shaving and trying to find a job marketing a terrible product to stupid people?

I’m having a blast back here in Vancouver but I already feel like I’ve lost touch with some priorities that were so damn important to me only a week or two ago. Both nights this weekend involved pretty much the standard train of events that could have been expected back at Queen’s (my university). On Saturday I was taken to a booze cruise party to celebrate the birthday of two twins, girls my roommates from school have met here in town. We watched a hockey game over beers in the afternoon, spent four hours drinking heavily and mingling with some well-dressed socialites on the boat, then headed to a bar where the predicable amount of memory loss took place.

Now, as I said, it was a blast. Yet, at the same time, it was a massive cash dump (and I was much more stingy than my young professional friends) and a huge brain cell loss. Is this what I can expect? An inexorable decline into the Evan I so cynically refer to when people ask me about my trip? Is it an inevitable phenomenon? Is it necessarily negative?

I guess it’s good that I’m realizing the contradictions here, and finding myself concerned with them. I’m not stressed, but I am checking out photos from the trip to try and recapture some of the imagery that inspired me. I’m just glad I got off my ass and finally bought a laptop, because now I can begin my project. Perhaps I’ll go sit at some hippied-out cafe on Commercial Drive here in Van C and get some work done.

Or maybe I’ll just cruise facebook for another couple hours.

Share This

And I’m feeling good.

Still slightly jetlagged somehow and its playin some funky tricks on me. Yesterday I woke up at about 1:30pm after about 12 hours of deep sleep. Felt like crap most of the day, despite spending a wonderful afternoon walking Stanley Park with my brother.

Today I woke up at around 5:30 am, lay there for an hour, played Halo 2 (xbox) for an hour, then walked down to Commercial Drive. Stopped for a fair-trade coffee and organic muffin at one of the dozens of cafes along the street. Quietly bussling at 8am, it reminds me of any laid back strip of shops, restaurants and bars in Toronto. Read my first Globe and Mail in forever, which was such a refreshing change from the lowest-common-denominator style papers that pander to expats and english speakers in Asia. This newspaper actually challenges the reader, gives several viewpoints and questions the people it is quoting! Can you imagine such a thing? Analysis, critique!

Incredible.

I feel great. The weather here, while cold like a Bornean mountainside, is fresh and clean and crystal clear. My friends here are coming around to the idea that I brought some Asian sunshine with me when I arrived. I like the notion that I am partially responsible for such a general feeling of lightness (which is why I’m spreading it like butter). I found myself singing and snappin my fingers as I strolled home from my pulleverythingfrommyTaiwanaccountandputitintomyCanadianaccount trip to the bank. The mountains to the north peak out at me every time I cross a north/south street. I imagine I can taste some salt in the air.

Yesterday my brother pointed out that the smell of the ocean here reminds him of Cape Cod, a peninsula near Boston, rather than the beaches and islands he’s been to in Central America. I agree. The briny smell of a cold water coast somehow differs from the tropical smell. It is stronger and more pervasive, it wraps itself around you and lingers in your mouth. Down south the beach smell disappears when you close your eyes.

We saw a seal in the harbour area. After all my trips to all my places, I realized that this might be the first wild seal I’ve ever seen. Why do people go miles to see wild animals they’ve seen in zoos when they don’t just go check out the eagles, seals and stuff in their backyard. I did notice a girl taking photos of the seal. It made me smile, but then maybe she was a west-coast newbie like myself.

Two girls asked me where Granville street was on my first day here. I told them it was my first day here. They apologized, but it made me feel that maybe I can look like I know what I’m doing, even though I’m just wandering around. Something you learn when backpacking strange and possibly dangerous countries is how to look like you are at home, despite a big backpack, a big nose and a big guidebook. Body language is key.

Anyway… I wanted to get some ideas down, my rambling style notwithstanding. Really excited to start writing a book, gonna go make some friends at MDG computers. I’m getting sucked into Facebook, by the way, might see the rest of human existence on there soon enough.

Share This

My last night in Bangkok was pretty classic Asia backpacking. Met an Israeli guy by just making eye contact and then giving him a “what’s up?” He turned out to be real chill and when he found out it was my last night after two years in Asia, the party was on. Met up with a hippied out American girl and a Polish dude who grew up in Sweden, and we hit this bar where two Thai guys were singin Dylan and Hendrix covers. There we met a Scottish guy who convinced us that, bang for our baht, drinkin strawberry daiquiris was a better deal. Makes sense.

So, there we were, five people from five corners of the Earth, all gathered together listening to great classic rock covers pounding back bright pink cocktails. This has been my life for the past six months.

I am now in Vancouver. I’ve never been here before, and so far it seems beautiful. Inevitably, the weather is gray and drizzling. There was snow on the mountains on Vancouver Island. Instead of incense and car exhaust as I stepped out of the airport, it was pine trees and exhaust.

Glad to be (sort of) home. I love this country and I am excited to see it again, refreshed and with an open mind. I hope that my perspective will be expanded enough so I can experience it in a similar manner to how I experienced the fully new countries of Taiwan, China, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, Myanmar (Burma), and Malaysia. My time in Taiwan was great and my trip was unbelievable. Life changing.

So, if I met you in Asia I hope you are well and wherever your road leads I’m sure we will cross again. If you are in Canada I will be seeing you soon. I am considering making my way by land from Vancouver when I decide to head to Toronto. Either way I will be writing on here the whole time, so as long as you keep reading, I’m not going anywhere.

Thanks for helping me stay connected while I was away. I felt the love.

Share This

It was, unintentionally, a fitting finale to my forays in Asia. Just under twenty-three months after I anxiously boarded a United Airlines plane bound for Taipei (through Chicago, San Fran and Nagoya, ahem), I was the highest man in South-East Asia.

Standing at the peak of Gunung (mount) Kinabalu, being the tallest guy there, I was indeed higher than any other person - not on an airplane - between the Himalayas and Papau New Guinea. My head was 4096.8m above sea level, about 13,522 feet. Up there, I went through a series of my “highest evers”:

My highest sneeze, just a few meters below the peak, snuggled under a blanket I taxed from the guesthouse just under a kilometer below.

My highest urination, behind a boulder on the way back down, at about 3900m.

My highest sunrise, at the peak.

My highest whoop of joy, combined with welling tears of sadness and accomplishment, at the peak.

I had to fight the tears back, having met some hilarious other backpackers who needed to maintain their stereotypes of tough, bearded Canadians. But, after so long here and going through so much (both in terms of traveling and personal self-realization), I realized at the top that it was all over. That from here I have only a few whirlwind days to make it through Bangkok to Vancouver. That soon I will be back in the Great White North to begin my life again.

People constantly express sympathy for my life here being over. I deflect these thoughts with excitement, to see my family and friends (and food) after such a long time.

They tell me that it must be scary to be “going back to real life.” The response to this is easy, automatic: “This, here, traveling, is real life. That, there, the machine of sacrificed dreams for financial gain, is the bullshit. That is the lie.”

I believe this, and I trust I won’t forget it. It’s why I cannot see myself being in Canada for more than a year or so. Perhaps I’ll find a dream job, but my dream job doesn’t involve staying in Canada, so there you go.

Getting back to the mountain, it was intense though obviously not immense compared to the great mountains of the world. It’s less than half of Everest, and even lower than Everest’s base camp. Canada’s Mount Logan is 5,959, almost 2000m taller. But for someone who experienced his previous highest peak by motorbike in Thailand (Doi Inthanon, 2,500m), this was quite a step up.

The first day, which began around 9:00am, was a straight up hike six kilometers long, climbing 1500m in altitude. It wasn’t too bad other than the volume of sweat thanks to 100% humidity, which of course became very cold once we passed 3000m. I ventured by myself, splitting the guide costs with a Dutch guy and an Italian couple. The Dutch guy had climbed three mountains in Indonesia in the previous month, and so was a great motivator. We scaled these six kms in around three hours. We were the first of the day’s climbers to arrive at the camp.

That afternoon we watched Liverpool win on penalties over Chelsea (replayed, of course) at around 3300m altitude, while drinking tea and enjoying instant noodles. Our accommodation was four-bed unheated dorms, but the aforementioned blankets did the trick.

At two am we awoke and scarfed a quick breakfast of tea and eggs before leaving around three in the morning to make the sunrise. This part of the climb was done in bursts of energy followed by periods of complete lack of control. I’ve never experienced such oxygen deprivation, where your legs simply don’t respond to your mind and your lungs are screaming for mercy. Luckily, my bursts of energy got me to the peak (sixth out of more than one hundred climbers) pre-sunrise, around 5:15am. It was 2.7 kilometers long and around 800m in vertical distance. It was sheer mental determination, overpowering my body’s protests, that got me there.

It was incredible. For those of you in Vancouver: May 7th.

Share This