It’s easy: just go to the right column of this Home page, and scroll down to article subjects, and click on 2009 Asia Adventure and it will take you to the first blog, Shangri-la; Journey into Myth, search for Reality.

When you get tired of reading, looking at picture or videos, you can just bookmark the blog where you are, so you can start where you left off, the next day, or week. At some point, I’ll have the posts on their own Adventures page, when I decide on a format.

Even if you think you’ve seen all of the posts, you will find things you missed the first time around. If you missed checking for a few days, you probably missed something interesting! With my short term memory, I’ll find something interesting! And don’t forget to look for our articles at Just One Opinion; many of them have basis is what we have learned during our travels.

Your comments are still welcome. Enjoy!

Man throwing a net on a backwater of the Mekong in Cambodia

“With coarse rice to eat, with water to drink, and my bended arm for a pillow – I have still joy in the midst of these things. Riches and honors acquired by unrighteousness are to me as a floating cloud.” Confucius

Before we began our Asian tandem bicycle adventure, I read Confucian quotes and often couldn’t relate.  This I chalked up to lack of depth on my part, and perhaps the enigmatic (to us) nature of Eastern thought.

Muddling my way through jet lag on our return, and as one friend opined, postpartum depression at the end of another adventure, I pondered the above Confucianism anew, and discovered I suddenly understood. Oh, I had known the surface meaning, from earlier adventures involving discomfort, danger, but not the full depth of his thought. I suddenly noticed that he says, “…have still joy…”  not “…still have joy…” as I had first read it. His meaning was hidden from me until I had eaten enough coarse rice, drank enough wood smoke infused water and slept sufficient times with my bended arm for a pillow.

To have a still joy, a quiet joy, a joy devoid of external condition, of riches or renown, is to have a profound joy, a lasting joy. I will look back on the past four months for as many years as I have left. I will remember the struggles, the discomforts, the challenge of the unknown, even the moments of  near panic, and I will smile. Confucius traveled China, seeking knowledge, seeking deep understanding. And Claire and I did also.

On this blog we have shared the light moments as well as the challenges and discomforts. I hope in coming months, as we integrate the lessons learned and share them, that you will be enriched through our seeking. And then I hope some of you will open a new path for learning, and seek out the adventure that fits your nature and capabilities. We all have the desire to continue to grow, to explore the previously unknown, no matter our age or condition in life. To suppress that desire is to suffer loss.

Here’s to your adventurous 2010, and beyond.

Happy New Year

Happy Christmas from Bangkok

Happy Christmas from Bangkok, from Bob and Claire and Lucky. P-bear, Lai Lai and Foster send their best wishes from Tucson.

We’ll celebrate by crossing the International Date Line on Christmas Day. Does that mean we get Christmas twice?

Happy Christmas

Claire and Bob Rogers

PS. See a video of us having a look-back at our Shangri-la journey from Bangkok, Christmas Eve day.

Guardian Figure at Wat in Bangkok; Scary eh.

Claire: With so many temples and shrines around Bangkok, a poor tourist can’t go wrong visiting any one of them–they’re all beautiful. The best part is that the less famous of them still stand apart from the hustle-bustle of the city and provide a welcome relief of quiet and reflection without the crowds to interfere. Morning is a good time to observe Thai acts of generosity and devotion. Put down the camera, pocket the map, forget the time and just take it all in.

Golden Stupa

Bob: This is the second long tour we have ended with a stay in Bangkok. After 11 months cycling around Australia, we spent 10 days here, and this time we cycled from China and will spend eight days here before flying out on Christmas Day.

It’s very easy to lose a week in Bangkok. It is more Western than it was when we were here last nearly 10 years ago, but still exotic, still endearing in so many ways. The people are beautiful, the traffic reasonable, compared to China, and the food, the food, heavenly, and inexpensive. Oh, the weather is not bad either, after you become accustomed to sunshine and 90f.

The air quality has improved, or perhaps it is the season, with reliable winds each afternoon; there are fewer motorcycles and more cars, a bad thing, but the motos and tuk tuks are now mostly four-stroke and cleaner.

Bangkok is a great city for your first taste of Asia. Among large cities of the world, it is a Shangri-la.

Longtail Boat on Chao Phraya River

Fertility Linga Among the Fish at a Neighborhood Market in Bangkoki

Orchid, one of many found all over Bangkok

Stupas and Offerings in Bangkok

Most Important Buddah In Thailand

Woman Making Offering At Market Shrine in Bangkok

Beautiful Wat architecture in Bangkok

Peppers In Bangkok Market

Bangkok, Stupa in Wat

World's Largest Reclining Buddah

Monitor Lizard in Bangkok Canal

Thai Tour Bus

Bob:
This tour bus/truck accident had to be fatal. The truck was
destroyed, and from the looks of this bus, the driver and tour leader were killed, and no doubt some passengers.

The wreck was probably less than an hour old, and I almost felt like I knew someone on the bus. We had dinner with a Dutch tour guide, Fritz, who was cycling through Cambodia on holiday, but he wasn’t to be back to work yet.I think the feeling came from the way the Thai busses have such spectacular and individual paint designs. It makes them feel almost personal to me.

We have seen the immediate aftermath of many, I repeat many, accidents on this 2854 mile tour. We saw an accident the first day out of Chengdu, China, and it didn’t let up.

Motobike Wreck Scene Painted On Pavement in Vietnam

In SE Asia they mark the pavement with white paint, showing the outlines of where the victims, and their vehicles came to rest. The first few of these fairly fresh markings were a bit shocking, but we became accustomed to them. The bent bicycle, with a person lying motionless in a rice paddy of Yunnan Provence, China, was more personal.

The majority of the accidents were motorbikes, with bicycles coming in a close second. In most of SE Asia, motorbikes outnumber autos and trucks 50 to 1, but bicycles are just on the bottom of the food chain.

Zippy is now safely in Left Luggage at the airport. He is a bit the worse for wear, but the great Thai food to be had in Bangkok will, over the next several days, repair us sufficiently for the flight home.

This is our second extended visit to Bangkok, the first being after our year cycling around Australia. It’s a facinating city, and we will be sharing pictures and hopefully some videos.

We fly home Christmas Day. After the New Year we will take time to reflect on the journey in search of Shangri-la, what we found, what we learned, and what it has meant to us.

Zippy shrink wrapped and ready for China. The wheels are in two other boxes, along with tools and sharp objects, a third bag will carry tent and sleeping bag for the high mountains. We’ll carry cameras and the computer in carry on. We hope all of this gets to Chengdu at the same time we do, unlike our first experience with China and air travel.

The packing is always such an epic. But since these trips are usually Zippy’s ideas, we can’t very well leave him behind.

One more day to get things done.

The High Road to Shangri-la

We leave September 1 for Chengdu, Sichuan, China to begin a tandem bicycle tour of SW China and SE Asia. We begin in Chengdu, Sichuan, where the earthquakes killed thousands last year. We will visit some pandas and probably visit our first important Buddha statue before heading into high country where the Himalayas transition from the Tibetan plateau, giving birth to all the great rivers of SE Asia. After a long crossing into Yunnan, we will drop into the sub tropics of Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia and end probably in Bangkok, one of our favorite cities.

We are feverishly making preparations: Zippy, our 38,000 mile Cannondale mountain tandem. He’s our precocious teenager. Though still strong, he always requires a complete rebuild from the frame up, because the places he takes us are hundreds or thousands of miles from a modern bike shop. We like him to start out without the creaks and grinding noises he will acquire after rain and grit take their inevitable toll. Claire sewed patches on holes and weak spots of our 38,000 mile Cannondale panniers (no they are not sponsoring us). We are far to sentimental to buy a new bicycle or panniers; we’ve come a long way together. I’ve been gathering all the tools necessary to fix almost anything that might go wrong in a few thousand miles, though as I learned on our Silk Road Crossing, I can’t carry replacement parts for every eventuality.

Claire is working on her Chinese, and I will, as usual, smile and use various vigorous hand signals attempt communication. The airlines are making it more and more difficult to travel with bicycles, let alone a tandem, so after painstakingly rebuilding him, I have taken him apart, down to the smallest package possible, and it still exceeds the maximum size, but is underweight. We are hoping for compassion from the agents.

There will be more preparation pictures, and another message from Lucky the rescued Panda who is going back to China with us.

There will be many more posts along the way than there were for the Silk Road Crossing; we’re taking a netbook so you can travel with us. Be sure and bookmark this site and check it often. We appreciate your good wishes.