I have become one of those people

Penn Yan, New York
Finger Lakes Region
USA
Thursday, July 5, 2007
3.12pm

I have become one of those people who lets his travel blog wither away when he returns to his home country.

Before I left I had time at work to look at people's travel blogs. I was always annoyed when someone just stopped making entries. What the heck happened to them? Now I have become one of those people.

Making blog entries is like exercising or eating healthily. No one really wants to hear excuses about why you didn't to it; you should just do it every day. So I won't go into a long introspective analysis about why they haven't been there.

Andy (hobotraveler.com) is great: he says just write whatever comes into your head. He is right, of course, and that is why he has thousands of web pages and thousands of readers.

To fill you in: I am working at a winery helping with production and retail sales. I am in a beautiful area of the world, the Finger Lakes of New York State. It is not a very well-known travel destination. However, it is becoming better known.

I have that contradictory feeling I had in other places I have visited. The place is beautiful and I feel lucky to see it. However, as the area inevitably changes to accommodate more visitors, some negative effects are occurring. This is the contradiction that is cloaked in the words "development" and "globalization".

I grew up here, but I have been away for a long time. So I am both a foreigner and a local. My ties here are more permanent than the tourist, especially if I decide to live and work here. But I see the place through a foreigner's eyes at times.

Every day I have memories of specific moments of my travels. I might remember having breakfast at the hotel near Khao San Road in Bangkok or the hotel in Madurai, Tamil Nadu, India or the guesthouse in Kaza, Spiti Valley, Himachal Pradesh, India.

If you wonder if I am aware of how much more I can do with my website: I am. I imagine I am as aware as anyone. I have hundreds of digital photos to put online; different ways of organizing the information that I learned about places I visited; personal reflections on my travels; stories to tell; and maps to make.

I have gotten kind emails from readers. One suggested I put my finances up. He is absolutely right. This would help a lot of people. It is the kind of information I was looking for before I left. Another reader encouraged me to write a book. Receiving these emails is very gratifying.

My idea with this website has been that this website is about "places" rather than "travel". Wherever I happen to be should be subject matter for the site. So I have wanted to write about places in the U.S. as well as abroad. Like a geographer, I should write about the unique things about a place that a person who has never been there would find interesting, and that a person who has lived there all of his or her life never noticed.

While traveling, even though I wasn't "working", I still had internal conflicts over whether I should be "seeing things" or "working on the website". If I had let it, the website could have taken all of my time and I wouldn't have actually done anything.

Now, I am letting my life become even more complicated by working, and working without a set schedule. I also let myself become conflicted about what I should write about, since I am living in a place that is very familiar to me.

These are actually perennial problems with writing, and, just as exercising or eating right, I should "just do it".

I have become one of those people

Sunday June 3, 2007
10.39pm
Finger Lakes region
New York State, USA

I am working at a vineyard and winery in the Finger Lakes

I started working at a vineyard and winery several weeks ago. Today I collected soil samples from the vineyard. They will be sent to a commercial laboratory for analysis to determine if there are enough nutrients in the soil for the vines. In this area the following grape varieties are grown: Vignoles, Seyval Blanc, Chardonnay, Riesling, Cabernet Franc, and Lemberger.

Soil coring tool and sample bags in the vineyard

Coring tool filled with soil sample after coring

Primarily I have been helping with bottling. Tomorrow we will bottle Vignoles. Bottling wine is a matter of keeping a multi-step process running smoothly. The wine, which has fermented over the winter and is now ready to drink, is stored in a very large tank. The wine is pumped from the tank through a series of filters to a bottling machine. The machine is automated. At one end a person loads the empty bottles onto a bottle-width conveyor. The conveyor takes the bottles to be filled with wine and corked. Next the machine places foil capsules over the mouth of the bottle and heat-shrinks them in place. Then the bottles are automatically labeled. Lastly, another person takes the bottles as they leave the conveyor, places them in cases, and stacks the cases on a wooden palette to be stored.

View from the vineyard on the rainy afternoon I took the soil samples

I am working at a vineyard and winery in the Finger Lakes

6 May 2007
3.42pm
Keuka Lake, Finger Lakes region, New York State, USA

I'm dreaming of tropical beaches

I will be doing something and my mind will flip back to some moment that occurred in the past fifteen months.

Most often I have a vision of the beach on Malapascua Island in the Philippines: white sand, aqua water, ocean breeze, perfect temperature, low humidity, palm trees, and a dive shop a sixty second walk away.

The beach at Malapascua Island, Philippines, February 25, 2007.

Sometimes it has been to Krabi, to some weird happening going on after dark in town involving foreigners and locals and eating and drinking.

When I have gotten my hair cut I flash back to barber in the "American barbershop" in Mysore cutting my hair or the place in Makati, Manila, Philippines, or the one in Leh, Ladakh, Jammu & Kashmir when each time I stopped there was never any power to run the clippers. There was that place in Madurai, Tamil Nadu, India with the hand-powered clippers with the dull blades which gave me the most excruciating haircut.

I have visions of the steep valleys and high mountain peaks of the Himalayas in Himachal Pradesh.

All of the vendors near Khao San Road in Bangkok, Thailand on the street brightly lit by the tropical sun come back to me.

I get a thousand little flashes of the schools of shimmering fish under which I snorkeled near Ao Ton Sai near Krabi, Thailand.

New Smyrna Beach in Florida reminded me of the beach in Calangute, Goa, India, although the beach at New Smyrna is nicer. But the beach at Malapascua beats out the beach at New Smyrna.

The beach hut at Malapascua Island, Philippines, February 24, 2007.

I'm dreaming of tropical beaches

Saturday, May 5, 2007
6.28pm
Keuka Lake, Finger Lakes Region, New York State, USA

I've been bopping around the east coast of the USA the past two months

I've been bopping around the east coast of the USA the past two months. I've been to two weddings, seen relatives on both sides of my family, caught up with college and grad school friends.

I landed in New York City, and stayed with friends in Jersey City, New Jersey. I flew to Florida for a Disney World wedding. I flew to Rochester, New York, to stay with family in the Finger Lakes region of New York State. I drove for my niece's first birthday party in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Then I went to visit friends in Washington, DC. After that I went back to Jersey City again for a wedding in Connecticut. And just a week ago I flew back to Florida to visit family in New Smyrna Beach.

The weather is finally turning warm here. I watched the lake go from frozen to melted. Still, though, people talk about how warm it is and it still seems cold to me. It's about 65F or 70F during the day.

The Finger Lakes region is devastatingly beautiful and I keep finding myself looking around all the time. I really don't like to talk about it because we'll get more people coming here than there already are.

I've been bopping around the east coast of the USA the past two months

20 April 2007
Penn Yan Public Library
Penn Yan, Finger Lakes, New York State, USA
6.15pm

Advice from the grave for a young traveler

On the road from Canandaigua to Gorham in the Finger Lakes in New York State, there is a graveyard at a crossroads. The crossroads intersect in the middle of rolling farmland. The graveyard is little more than a hillock with old oak trees surrounding it. The graves date from the the early nineteenth century, and the trees probably do too.

The gravestones are crumbling and some broken pieces are piled next to the trunk of a tree. One in particular stood out for me. Apparently people would sometimes choose a standard verse for the carver to put on the stone.

A gravestone of a certain Luther, son of David (and ?) Elizabeth, died Jan. 30, 1810 aged 2 years (10 months?) & 20 days, has this inscribed:

Behold young traveler as you pass by,

As you are now so once was I.

As I am now so you must be.

Prepare in youth to follow me.

Advice from the grave for a young traveler

Penn Yan Public Library
Penn Yan, Finger Lakes, New York State, USA
20 April 2007
5.01pm

SkypeIn is useful for the homeless traveller

Yesterday I set up a SkypeIn account for myself. SkypeIn is a Skype service in which I choose a U.S. phone number. The phone number is not associated with a mobile phone or landline. Callers dialing the number can speak to me if I am on a computer connected to the internet and I am logged onto the Skype application.

SkypeIn is a separate product from two other products offered by Skype. SkypeOut allows someone on a computer to call people in certain countries as if they were calling from a telephone exchange in that country. As a result the cost is low -- for many countries it costs US$0.021 (2.1 cents) per minute. The Skype product refers to two people at computers using the Skype application to talk, the use of which is free.

What is even better is that SkypeIn comes with a voicemail account. So when I am not logged into Skype (which is most of the time), the caller can leave a message for me in voicemail. I can check the voicemail whenever I am on a computer that has Skype running and has a broad-enough band on the internet.

As I am still a homeless traveller in the U.S., this service may still be useful to me. At the moment the prepaid T-Mobile SIM card on my mobile phone is out of the T-Mobile network range. So people could call me on the Skype number.

The real clincher is that calls may be forwarded from Skype to another number. So I can forward calls to the number of the house I am staying at or to my mobile phone if I know it will be in range. If the call is not answered Skype voicemail will pick up the call. Since I get a new SIM card and, consequently, a new mobile phone number each time I change countries, forwarding phone calls from a single U.S. phone number could be very useful for keeping in touch with people in the U.S.

This service is really useful as a U.S. number to leave for banks, credit card companies, and online retail companies. All of these entities want a U.S. phone number at which someone can be reached. Leaving an international number generally is not acceptable. If I had a SkypeIn number registered with all of my financial institutions when I was in India, I perhaps would have found out about outstanding credit card fraud more quickly when my wallet was stolen in New Delhi.

In short, the service lets someone have a permanent U.S. phone number that they can use, maintain, and check while they are in another country for long periods of time. It is usually not possible -- and it is almost always not economically sensible -- to maintain a U.S. landline or mobile phone if someone is going to be out of the country for more than three months. Maintaining an identity for financial and tax purposes in the U.S. is partly dependent upon maintaining a phone number. (The other major component of maintaining an identity in the U.S. is maintaining a physical address. This is a huge topic, and for the American traveller is confusing and even Kafka-esque.)

The price for this convenience is US$12 for three months or US$38 for twelve months. It can be set up, maintained, and paid for online from anywhere in the world. As of this writing, other countries for which SkypeIn numbers may be obtained are Australia, Brazil, Denmark, the Dominican Republic, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong S.A.R. (China), Japan, Poland, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.

SkypeIn is useful for the homeless traveller