The inexorable drunken post; 2348y620391877ty.

Oh man, I apologise in advance. This dispatch is going to remind me why I don't usually drink. Only abroad, he says. Only abroad or when others buy at home.

Darkham - Erdenet - Tsetserleg; that's the route I've paved the past five-odd days. Three separate capitals of three different providences, each small and quaint with their own distinct charm, and coal plants, good ones. Darkham offered me mutton in a most welcomely digestable guise, Erdenet afforded me steamy dancing with perhaps the most ravishing woman I have laid eyes upon in my relatively lust-free life, but Tsetserleg I remain fondest of. For one thing, the name is so darned cool, pronounced Tsztszrliig, formidable rolling rrrr and spitting, whispery other bits (try it, and fail, over and over again). It's set amid the muscle-bound brand of mountains that romantics gawk at all day, which I did, one day, from inside a monastery destroyed 70 years in the unwarranted wrath of the Stalinist purges, which if you don't know about you should perhaps investigate, lest mass social injustices go unchecked. The kids around town were bright and curious and assailed me with questions I didn't even begin to understand, snotty-nosed, weepy-eyed, who laughed and laughed and laughed each time I tried my feeble hand at Monguloor, which cut deep man, deep, but then redeemed themselves by guiding me home to their humble family's gers to indulge in some airag, sweet liquid airag, newfound nectar of the gods, beside a tranquilising fire that crackled and sparked hypnotically. And at one eerie stage, there floated an ominous grey bloop of a cloud in an otherwise blue sky, which cloud I was sure would bring mass snow, but in actuality brought only wind, a lot of it sweeping through quickly, sudden violent gushes enough to topple camels, in it dirt which stung my skin sooo bad and elicited thoughts of Lawrence in Arabia, queerly. Also, during the sandstorm, a sheep stumbled off a cliff to a death I would not wish upon anyone, and I saw it all unfold with my own two eyes, and I was traumatised to the extent that I had to have a little lie down in my hotel bed thereafter. I think I might actually still be scarred or scabbing - you should have seen it, really, awfully horrible: slide, tumble, tumbling tumbling tumbling, bump and grind, launch, drop, freefall- splatter, red splayed everywhere. A daring Expressionist painting.

Look here: I have so much to write, so much to tell, but I have to digest and comprehend it first before committing it to paper. Plus, you know, I haven't had a beer for an entire half-hour now, I'm sobering up, and I think I just saw I person I know and like walk by outside, whom I will now chase down boisterously, like a drunk, like half the rest of UB's population at the moment, god help their livers.

Just know that I am healthy and looking forward to tomorrow.

Much love, Mark.

Sunset.

The sun is setting on the Mongolian leg. China beckons.

Muse, mountain, meditations.

Lunchtime in Erdenet:

Bruised bananas, apples, month-old watermelon seeds, 2.50pm at the apex of a modestly-sized mountain, bizarre tendrils of orange-pasteled rock outcropping, tattered Pico Iyer book in hand, right page shading the left from light, marginally north of town, vision opened up to the Himalayan-scaled copper mine to the east, economically flourishing but poisoning the sky locals pray to, beside me an ovoo breathing with the garish red blue and yellow of bedraggled prayer flags, a sudden whistle of wind, the glide-by of an eagle, its otherworldy squawk echoing echoing echoing, below us uninspiring biege tenements flaking, crumbling, destitute, loose grids of staid gers fringing them, a puff of dust in the distance rendered visible by the sun backdropping it, a furious squall of wind- no, a horse- no, a truncated truck whose engine I do not wish to hear and cannot quite yet.

Just sitting, gazing, nudging scree off the precipice I sit on, faithful old feet dangling freely beneath, listening closely to the big silence encompassing me, waiting unassumingly for the next move to occur, whatever that move may be, wherever it may take me.

This internet abode.

This internet parlour is a palace. It is stationed at ground level, with tall clean windows framing the ordered chaos of outside; female construction workers hammering away at roofs, smiling, and stolid policemen strutting by in perfect linear formation. Former parlours I frequented were semi-underground, warm bunkers with stained walls, unidentifiable odours, the netherworldy feel of a hide-out for spys and delinquents and recluses. From this seat though, I can lift my gaze at the end of each sentence toward those precious glinting windows and feast on the myriad of oddly gorgeous visuals comprising UB city. What it is like is a dream slideshow. It is quite the view. It is my portal in this moment to the world I am in.

And oh, how I love it.

Mindless banter, this one. And Peace Corps.

Erdenet. I just booked a ticket there, a gross industrial playland north-west of Ulaanbaatar, aboard an overnight train departing 20.55 tomorrow. They warn me it is a train laden with thieves that pose as crippled older men. All older men look crippled here, truly and non-posingly, such is the hardness of life on the steppes. But I will therefore pose as a poor man aboard the train - dribbly nose, threadbare clothing, minimal belongings; not such a departure from the norm, really - thus wisely deterring any untoward action from these notorious and wily thieves.

Once grounded in Erdenet, I'll leave. Its mechanical grate and grind will soften to a hum behind me, then a murmur, then nothing but a memory as I head south to Bulgan (pop. 11,500). The latter leg's transport remains unarranged, but that's the point. I'm gonna hitchhike, valiant Mark as I wish to be, the difficulty and drama of which should entail a proper hoot, unless I'm thrown in the back of a truck with skinned livestock, deadstock, and musty wood gatherings, Woodstock, in which case I'll leap overboard and begin forging a path to Bulgan step by literal step. This would also constitute a proper hoot, I think, unless of course it snows, in which case... there is no plan C.

Please leave suggestions for plan C in the relevant comment box.

If I make it to Bulgan, it will to be simple, peaceful, Mongolian. The day creeping by while I air my laundry by the hissing fire, fueled by dried yak excrement, the yaks staring at me from their pastures, bemused, as I wonder how the sky came to be so damn big here.

That kind of thing.

The Peace Corpers, numbers of whom have imperceptibly drifted in and out of my now very homely-feeling guesthouse over the past four-odd days, have converged in UB - this is what they so sensibly and economically call an otherwise tongue-twisting Ulaanbaatar, a tic I'll adopt herein - for their quarter-annual medical check-ups. They are a swashbucklingly fine bunch at large, on a personal and professional level, but were not and will never be nimble enough to retreat to their far-countryside gers without me solemnly interrogating them. I have managed thus far to glean stories, know-how, even the odd pearl of wisdom from of two of them, both female and 25. Will, the third known member, was also in the room at the time of interrogation, but unfortunately came across as immature and self-aggrandising, especially in recounting the tale of his near-death at age 18 of a sudden kidney-related seizure, which sent him to hospital for days and days and days on end, leaving him with a hideous scar that I think looks like a giant's winking eye, which scar we really did not need to see, Will, because it somehow also reminds us of mutton. Human mutton. Let's just forget about Will.

The other two Peace Corpers:

Sheila -

Sheila's from deep deep southern USA, and looks like she's from deep deep southern USA. Her hair is that strong gothic black, and if she didn't smile so often, I'd fear her as a witch. Instead I fear her mother. Sheila told us one enthralling rhapsody comprising her mother's religious persuasions. Her beloved mother is a Jehovah's Witness. She knocks on doors thrice-weekly to preach the word, and living where she does, consequently has guns drawn in the direction of her face more often than you and I do. The quip is: not Sheila nor her father subscribe to Jehovah (this is how I'm going to phrase it - Jehovah - unmockingly). Apparently a Jehovah's Witness cannot marry an infidel. There are no clauses preventing someone already married to an infidel converting to Jehovah, however, and thereafter maintaining that marriage. This is the model for Sheila's family. However, infidels don't exist in Jehovah's version of afterlife. So this means Sheila's mum will have no knowledge of her current-life's husband or daughter or family at large once she departs this world. This is the point at which Sheila's eyes started glazing over. When the rest of us started feeling like predators. Her father averred, upon her mother's swearing allegiance to Jehovah, that he'd file for divorce if she dared peddle Jehovah upon Sheila. Things have remained cohesive, if not a little awkward, within the household to this day. I think Sheila may have joined the Peace Corps to escape home, to add a sense of normality to her life, even if it entails two thoroughly abnormal years in Mongolia teaching uninterested students English.

Sheila is a strong and awesome girl.

Carrie -

Carrie's upbringing was more orthodox. Not worth mentioning really. She is a bespectacled nerd, a qualified journalist at home in Oregon, and is stationed right atop Chinggis Khan's birthplace of 700 hundred years ago, Dadal, for duty. A hundred miles from civilisation in every direction, and yet she seems to be in her element out at Dadal. Water from the river. Constructing her own ger. She is one steely and hardened nerd. She'd been only to Costa Rica, for two weeks, prior to coming to Mongolia, and that had been the only country on her travel resume. That was a delightful surprise to me.

Carrie recited all these great stories of modern-day marriages. Just prior to Chinggis' days, flirting and pleasantries and other futile formalities hadn't been, um, invented yet. They just kidnapped the girl they liked and forced her to marry them. Sound in theory, if not for the kidnappee's doting family, who'd retaliate by kidnapping her back, understandably. The two tribes would then be at loggerhead, conflict would snowball, and before they knew it everyone was at war across the country's entire expanse. Then Chinggis rose to power and united all the feuding cans with revolutionary methods, created an original script, imposed bold laws, and proceeded to conquer half the world without really trying. Anyway, Carrie said that where she's been working the past year and a half, the modus operandi of courting a wife via kidnapping is still effective! Thankfully though, the girls now have the prerogative to reject. Carrie says she sees, from atop the roof of her ger and with steaming cup of fermented yak's milk in hand, the occassional foreign horseman passing by at half-gait with head dangling dejectedly forward, mission failed, wifeless. She thinks Mongolia is the oldest place on earth.

I cannot disagree.

Also:
- Peace Corps receive 'allowance' each month, which they budget and spend accordingly. The Cass beers they were drinking were budgeted for.
- All three - Sheila, Carrie, Will - seemed unfazed but curious of everything; a testament to the power of travel, I thought.
- I wanted to join the Peace Corps for a while there, as a grasshopper, right up until I realised I had to be an American citizen to join, which I was and still am not. Last night, seeing and speaking and listening to these guys, reaffirmed my desire to join Peace Corps, or something like it. It is about the only time I have ever wanted to be an American.
- If you are in Perth on the 26th, go and witness the Zabiela show for me. He is the Chinggis Khan of the electronic world.

With love (and don't forget plan C) .... The end.

The third neighbour visits.

He came yesterday, a certain George W. Bush.

I was eating mutton shank soup, surprise surprise, when I saw him on television. I swapped to a seat more square to the broadcast. He walked beside Mongolia's Prime Minister - proprietor of a name I won't embarrass myself by trying to spell - rugged up in the requisite attire and that tight, smug, armed facial expression so many have come to distrust. Broadcast live from Sukhbaatar Square, where usually schoolkids on excursion mill around Sukhbaatar's statue like white around the yolk, teachers infusing their curious minds with a firm sense of history- but not today. The Square was cordoned off and guarded meticulously for George's arrival. They say this is the Old Mongolia making way for the New. I wonder if the kids knew what was going on, the identity of this stallion galloping from plains afar, the undressed intent of his visit? I wonder what their teachers told them?

Met up with Muugi and caught the trolley-car Squarewards. We wanted to participate in whatever this was. The trolley-car broke down half-way, portentously. We started running but Muugi fell. We walked the rest of the way, breath like cigarette smoke.

The Square: impenetrable. We inferred George'd leave for the airport soon enough, so manned the only road accessing the airport. Others shared the thought, lining the four-laned strip with hawkish eyes, anticipatory, hands in pockets. We added density to the crowd, waited. Boiled mutton permeated the air. A drunk couple stumbled out of a pub and began fighting. We waited, the sun retreating behind the clouds, the temperature nipping our innards, challenging all to stay. No-one left. It was the rare allure of capturing a glimpse of a figure whose every decision affects, shapes, dictates history, and the future, our future. Plus there were schools of Western news crews there, armed with shoulder-crushing cameras and pinecone microphones and a noticable lack of consideration for the sidewalks of Ulaanbaatar- and to be on television is a very cool and desirable and prideworthy thing, a notch on the belt is it not? Some people were there for that maybe. Police drove robust-looking four-wheel-drives along the strip at a miserable walking pace, blaring overly aggressive directives at the crowds through a loudspeaker, which were plainly ignored. We are the people! But in an instant the mobile police dotting the kerb every five metres received calls on their hip-radios, static buzzing febrishly, then ushered us back, beyond the footpath. Back, beyond the fence. Back, beyond the 24-hour banks and ger-apparel stores. So far back we had only tiny teasing vistas through which to view the man of the hour, hundreds off us pushing and shoving with pointed elbows and knees like hooligans furoring at a match.

And all this for a glimpse of George. A glimpse of George in a moving car.

Sirens and tension. A shiny black car. Two then five then a lull. Suddenly a limo - George! The crowd stirs, curious. Muugi boos and hisses. She makes a gun out of her hands and shoots George between the eyes. She is not covert about it. A policeman sees and his eyes read vengeance. But he is stationed in that spot, five metres from the policeman stationed at the next spot, and is his indignation is a tethered entity, something he cannot purge on a trigger-happy Muugi. She reloads her hand-pistol and draws it in the direction of the policeman. I beam. She does not show mercy, this Mongolian rogue, and fires with a bang and cackle. Muugi is the future of Mongolia, not Bush.

Meanwhile, shrill cries from across the road. A throng of caucasians, three with the American flag draped around their necks, holler their adulation for dearest George, whom must turn a bashful pink in response. The severity of their clamour is sect-like, scientologistish, like perhaps they've seen God, or Elvis, perhaps even Chinggis himself. I squint and see they span the gamut of ages - it is a family. Monday 21st November and I hope they haven't stolen a day off work and school to scream shamelessly for ten seconds as Georgeboy speeds by, left to right, wispy as a shooting star. And I even more earnestly hope they haven't arranged a trip to Mongolia, as a family, centred around a four-hour-in-total visit by one George W. Bush. This family was the most disturbing thing I have seen in a long and merciful time.

They finally shut the hell up.

It was all over, quick like a bee sting. I didn't see him, nor even his silhouette, so dark and private were the limo's windows.

An old couple were the first to cross the road that' d been forcefully vacant for so long. Her face so wrinkled it was hard to pinpoint her eyes. His back hunched and skin so caked with dirt he seemed Middle-Eastern. They both wore old dels, matching, on their backs threadbare sacks bursting with uniformly bundled fagots. They were bracing for the night's upcoming frost. They reached the middle of the road and stopped, gazed around, incredulous. The police, the fanfare, the barren bitumen of the road before them. They looked at one another with raised eyebrows and - I know this - thought: What's the fuss? Why the hubbub? These people are so queer. This world is so crazy.

They scurried along, oblivious and unaffected and true in every sense of the word.

The day was over. Bush had come and gone.

Addendum: One of the Peace Corpers, my favourite one as it turns out, received an invite to Bush's 13-minute speech yesterday in Government House. She apprised me last night on a bottom bunk that "it was basically 13 minutes of more babbly bullshit about Iraq. These poor, poor Mongolians."

* So check out these somewhat professional blogs if you crave a recount of Bush's visit from this side of the equator, which you ought to, because they're interesting:

http://www.mongolianmatters.com/

http://danzanravjaa.typepad.com/my_weblog/

http://gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/2005/11/george-bush-makes-history-praises.html

Marmots roam the slums of Ulaanbaatar.

This statue of Sukhbaatar beats in the heart of town. 'Hero of the revolution', it is he whom declared Mongolia's independence from the Chinese in 1921. A vast concrete concourse envelopes the statue, Goverment house abutting it, providing an opportune location in which to stage unruly protests, as demonstrated by the thousands of students that amassed there four days ago in opposition of steadily raising post-secondary tuition fees. Windows were broken, bodies clashed, but our infallible hero, Sukhbaatar, remains as intact as ever.

Urban Mongolia is not a spectacularly aesthetic place, least not in any conventional sense. Concrete and haze and dirt abounds. But during the wintertime, when the sun hangs at half-mast all day, startling shadow patterns come to dance across every ground and wall. It's then that one becomes stuck in a dream, a Tim Burton film, walking at half-pace so as not to miss any of the unpindownable prettiness of it all.

I do not know who this is. He looks like an archer. Most of the less-modern Mongolian men look like archers. However, I do know where this is: one slight neck tilt above my favourite Ulaanbaataran computer, which operates sufficiently with an entire two windows opened at once!

But not three.

A messy glimpse of the Mongolia Cyrillic. In this case, cutely, on a monastery wall.

Behind the buildings: the sunset, rendered bright and exotic by the many putrid toxins in the air.

It is so cold that an unwritten law exists:

Play not the basketball while fully inflated, or thou shallst forfeit a finger or two, they being such brittle little twigs.

Everything so endearingly ramshackle. Under construction. Work in progress. What's the point in rushing?

The House of Illusions. 6 minutes of pure pants-soiling terror.

Oh but it wasn't so hilarious once inside, was it now, Muugi?

Muugi Muugi.

There is a hidden little cafe just two deciduous trees down from the depressing metallic pavillion housing my current guesthouse, which just this morning was flocked by a cohort of young and promising Peace Corpers, whom I plan to pester with the most prying tapestry of questions the guesthouse has ever borne witness to, once I've conceived of an erudite gambit. But so because I've finally learnt the jigsawy ways of the Mongolian Cyrillic, I can tell you said cafe's name is 'Inji Cafe'. It took one minute of standing like a scarecrow in an Arctic-like wind in front the cafe's welcoming placard to decipher this much. Inji Cafe is the cosiest enclave I have lucked upon in Ulaanbaatar - and cosy is paramount in conditions that freeze livestock to death where they stand - is where I drink a lot of three-in-one instant American coffee for breakfast, by candlelight, green curtains festooning my booth. It also happens to be where Muugi drinks a lot of three-in-one instant coffee for breakfast, by herself, by candlelight, if not regaling lonesome travellers that aren't Russian, like me, with all the different jokes she can conceive of within the caste of fifty-six English words she knows, green curtains festooning her booth. There ensued a deluge of giggles, hiccups, miscommunication-induced silences, more guttural Mongul giggles and coffee, thence we'd arranged to rendezvous, 7pm, in the same booth we met, Inji Cafe, for a three-in-one instant coffee, and such and such and such.

7.05pm. I'm less late than usual. Mongolian wrestling on a derelict television in the corner, muted, riveting, two nylon-pinched men locked in an ambiguous embrace. The heavy-eyelidded staff watch, pretend to watch, slouched in seats-too-small by the crumbly wall. It's okay, I gesture, Allow me to find my own seat. I'll find Muugi. Around the corner ten radiant candles glow, one per table; forty spotless white plates shine, four per table, all dressed up with no-one to serve. No Muugi, nor anybody. I stand there like a cretin, re-planning my evening, suddenly dulled a few shades: tea, mutton, bed? pootuunghwa, cinema, bed? karoake, billiards, bed? No-one to play billiards with.

A muffled burp from the ether. I whisk around the corner to the farthest unexplored adjunct of Inji Cafe, trailing the burp, perhaps the first burp ever trailed. There's a booth in the corner with conspicuously drawn curtains-

Muugi.

She smiles a glittery smile. Pink blouse, bitten fingernails. The only girl in Mongolia with dreadlocks. Her first words are slurry: "5 beer, 4 coffee, 2 cigarette, 6 steam rolls. I am wait for you." I'm late, but she early, it seems. Her 'steam roll' is our 'spearmint gum'. I sit across from Muugi. With a portraited view she seems to sway, like I'd imagine most Russians on the Trans-Siberian to, side to side with the wobbling train, side to side with the vodka veins. I play-slap her on the cheek for galavanising purposes. She screams, overreacts, plays it up with sardonic gamemanship. She is an expert. But in doing so, she knocks over her (5th or 6th?) frosty pint of beer, maximum fanfare. Then silence. Two more beers arrive at once as a twisted facade emerges on her face. Something is coming. She stands up like a rocket in lift-off and stretches her arms into a biblical set of wings-

"Happy birpday to you.
Happy birpday to you.
Happy birpday to Muugi.
Happy birpday to you."

Muugi's birthday, Inji Cafe by my guesthouse, behind drawn green curtains.

Please stand now and join me in laughing at the entirely laughworthy night that ensued, awesome and absurd, with Muugi, my blithe Mongolian guide, who owns the dancefloor when she wiggles like a jack-in-the-box, who would rather ice-skate in shoes than sleep, who gives her money to the poor uncued, who runs from furious taxi-drivers sans paying, laughs echoing endlessly into the frigid night sky, and whom it is entirely probable has spent time behind bars for past indiscretions, such is the degree of her mischief. She is just the kind of bloodwarming company I need at the moment, and then some.

Hourglassed grains of Gobi.

Blue skies, cloudy skies, red and pink and burgundy sunsetting skies. Vast golden steppes, motionless. Steep rocky protrusions from the earth, streaked with snow, projecting huge inescapable shadows in which every nose won't stop twitching. Wolves slaying camels beside campsites at night. Lone galloping horsemen bisecting the horizon. Zero showers, neglected hygiene, every presupposition shattered. Beside the fire, star-spangled sky, milky milky way, breath transmuted to frost along the inside edges of the tent. Tinned horse meat for dinner. Hitch a ride, the soulful jounce of the camel over the dunes, toward more dunes, the neverending dunes, I an inconsequential flea on its back, a small and unremarkable crease in the lifeline of the Gobi desert, she who once played colosseum to the dance of dinosaurs that long ago, so long it's absurd. One day warped into eight, slowly but noticably, our tea running dry as the sun rose from its slumber, having chivalrously spanned four of the emptiest aimags - provinces - in this entire world, up and down and side to side in the most robust of Russian military vans, a throwback to the Soviet's near-century of of Mongolian governance. All along with nothing - nothing! - but the pure and vital majesty of nature to amuse and accompany us.

I pray the pictures we captured will do my four cosmopolitan friends and I's trip deep into the furthest bowels of the Gobi some slight sort of justice. But it's so very difficult to relay-

Everyone should visit the Gobi desert at some stage, any stage, of their life.

She is close to incomprehensible.

Goodbye Gobi. I will miss you as you miss the rains.

Ill-conceived blog posts.

The author has deleted this post. He posted it unwittingly, and is mortified. So it goes.

6 phrases you are unlikely to hear anywhere other than Mongolia.

1. "This evening's toilet is the third dune to the south. Please, for your own wellbeing, be wary of the wind, small bristly bushes, and bloodthirsty wolves which tend to roam in packs."
- In the Gobi desert, a visit to the toilet cannot be taken for granted.

2. "Where are they? This is the rendezvous point. Shit, it's just like those nomads to up and leave on us."
- In the Gobi desert, you can rely on the nomads' hospitality, but not on their whereabouts.

3. "We can take the bridge or we can take the river. Always better to be safe than sorry. Lift your legs kids, through the river we go."
- In the Gobi desert, the bridges are somewhat decrepit. Your truck may be the one that falls through.

4. "You two have been flirting the whole entire trip. Go get a ger for the night."
- In the Gobi desert, a night's worth of romance is best indulged in a ger. Actually, gers are all there are, whether you're lust-filled, lovelorn or otherwise.

5. "Uh-oh. No billiards today. It seems a cement-mixer has run into the billiard table."
- In Ulaanbaatar, the billiard tables sit on the sidewalk in the wide open air. This leaves them defenseless to the odd downpour of snow, tired homeless people's slumbers, and poorly driven cement-mixers.

6. "Hello sir. Today you may select from our three specialities: mutton with noodles, mutton with vegetables, or mutton with rice. We promise you our mutton is of the freshest variety."
- In the north, south, east, west and central Mongolia, they eat a lot of mutton. I am one meal away from turning vegan.

So for some unintelligible reason, in this wonderland of a country, I can update the blog but not access its actual website. Mongolia's only blemish, it seems. Thus each post's format and layout may be a little wonky and wayward, like ill-uniformed font and size and such. Alas, I have no way of checking to see if it is so, not until I'm entrenched in the bustle of Beijing in two weeks time. Until then, perhaps you could pretend it's all shonky because I'm writing while drunk, bladder full of the deadly Chinggis Khan, chosen vodka of real men. Though maybe in pretending so, you wouldn't be far from the truth.

A friend I've made here in Mongolia is an American named Parker, who says he's a novice at pool but is a very bad liar. I find it very hard to sink a single ball against him. He maintains a website documenting his travels which is a lot better than mine - www.parkersnyder.com, and perhaps, on a miserable stormy night while barricaded inside with the internet, you could check that out. He's working on a manuscript, too. That'll probably be worth reading if and when it's published. So keep your eyes peeled, and three cheers for Parker:

1, 2, 3!

To the hinterlands, Ulan Bataar, solo.

A pint of education.

Firstly, I am sorry.

The past week has been a blur of sickness and hangovers - sickening hangovers. Alcohol has earnt a sudden allure here in Bangkok, not because of the price (40 Baht/$1.50 per approximate litre [very full strength]), nor because drinking is the capital way of time-passing (sleeping takes precedence), and certainly, most definitely not because I'm a rueful bottle-buddying alco (there is no wood to touch!). But alcohol, true to the old adage, is for me a peerless social lubricant. Sorry for ignoring you in favour of it.

Travelling solo can be lonely, but only because there's too much time to think. Always have a book on hand, a language you're trying valiantly to grasp, a too-tight budget to constantly realign, a local girl that'll forever be out of reach but with whom the chase is enthralling, as to stave off a wandering mind. But at night, when the moon looks sick because of all the pollution, turn to alcohol. I'm a friendly kind of guy, non-judgemental and modest (really [extraordinarily] modest), but sometimes I struggle to find an appropriate gateway into conversation with a stranger, especially when that stranger looks like Nostradamus, speaks fluent Thai, smells like marijuana, and has been on the global highway for half a decade on end. Sometimes I become a little intimidated-

Enter alcohol. I befriend the Swedes, the Norwegians, the Germans and English and Israelis. We laugh untethered, share stories and opinions and stage moot arguments, buy helium balloons and set them free, watching as they shrink into little pinheads in the starlit abyss above. One more Chiang please. No more smalls? Shit, better make it large. Who are you? Oh, Lekz from Finland. Finland intrigues me. My email? Of course, I'd love to stay with you in Finland 2007 sometime. Will probably be October or later though, I have to repay a few debts first. Hey, thanks a million times over, Lekz. I think you're one cool mofo, even with a tattooed cobweb masking your forehead.

The stomach groans, the bladder bulges. I realise I can uphold my end of conversation with anyone, everyone. I realise these people love human interaction, that they're just like me, that the beards and piercings and tattoos are inherent parts of their character, just like a smile, or accent, or guiding philosophy. The sky lightens in hue. I am no longer intimidated, only curious. The next round is on me, dear friends.

The sun is now up, and I am sick and tired. I bid goodnight and godspeed to my new friends, most of whom I will never see again in this lifetime; I'm not exulted nor saddened. I hail a tuk-tuk in my new Transformers t-shirt, sullied by spilt beer. The ride is like a rollercoaster. The driver's name is Tavee, and I tip him handsomely. Fall into the hard cheap bed, out like a light and satisfied-

- So proceeded the week. And that's the explanation for a week free of any real valid blogging. Too difficult to write while the hangover hovers. But that week has now passed, and I have remounted the travelling tracks. Tomorrow at midnight, Bangkok will be beneath me, behind me. Mongolia and its chill will provide my plane with a tarmac. It is a good, exciting, and mysterious time to be me. I have sworn off the alcohol, but will remember the lessons it taught me: we are who we are, no matter how old or hippy or transexual, and we are all worthy of one another's attention. Don't be intimidated; just be. The treasures that lie within this multifarious cast of strangers are too profound to sacrifice for reticence.

Addendum:

This is a paragraph I wrote just prior to the week of controlled binging. I will finish it when I can. But in doing so, I'll have to rethink the first few sentences. Because now, a week on, Bangkok is my new best friend; the best friend with attitude, ego, and snarl, but who's seen and been through so much that you can't help but revel in its fury. Ahem:

Because this place is a giant vortex, sucking rookies like
me deep into its darkest loneliest pockets, and does not spit you out, but
rather leaves you to clamber your own feeble way out, toward the light, toward
sanity. I am weary of Bangkok, vigilant, because on my last wispy stay here -
duration: 4 days; three weeks ago - I assumed a different persona altogether,
and didn't even realise it till the advent of hindsight. This is a scary and
humbling thing, behaving out-of-character at 21 years of age, when you think
your entire personal constitution has been chiselled into hard and immutable
rock. Did I end up telling you about that episode? About the night I slept on a
damp wooden bench in a Bangkok park bordering the ever-dirty Chao Phraya river
with two homeless friends, whisky seeping from our pores, beside the
cannon-wielding fort that draws sightseers like a lamp does fireflies?

Oh, I didn't?

Goodnight and God bless, for now.