Would You Get Naked?

Photo by Rob and Stephanie Levy via Creative Commons

Well, would you? If you have the balls (pardon the pun), you can march into Wicked Campers in Australia wearing nothing but your backpack, and receive a free day's van rental. Check it out: Backpackers Offered Nude Discount

For a backpacker, every penny saved adds up to additional days on the road, so this begs the question: how far would YOU go to get something for free?  And where do you draw the line?

I honed my penny-pinching skills in New Zealand and Australia, and perfected this art by pitching my tent in the backyard of many hostels, taking people up on their offers of free lodging, and hitchhiking (something I would never even consider doing in my own country).

In Adelaide, poor Ian was drunk at a bar with his buddy, Geoff, and the two of them struck up an innocent conversation with the backpackers. Ian happened to mention that he had room in his home for two of us to stay; the next morning, still hung over, Ian answered the door to find two grinning Americans reminding him of his invitation. He agreed to the deal, and the next day, my travel companion and I turned up with our backpacks and settled into his daughter's bedroom.
For a week.
And then another week.
He definitely got more than he bargained for because we were working on closing another spectacular deal, a free ride from Adelaide to Perth.

Adelaide to Perth is a three-day road trip across the Nullarboor, the vast, empty plain that runs across South Australia, save for a few emus and wombats. Some dude named Wayne, whose name I found on a hostel bulletin board, was helping to broker our safe passage across the Nullarboor with a truck driver who hated to drive alone. When the ride finally came through, there was nary a moment to spare; this ride was leaving in a hour. We scrambled out the door, and I'm sure Ian was relieved to see us go.

Enter Hippie. He was an enthusiastic, scrawny guy with shoulder-length hair, skin tight jeans (can that really be comfortable?), and a great attitude, and he was thrilled to have company. He defied all truck-driver stereotypes the moment I laid eyes on both him and the stuffed animal dangling from his rear-view mirror. He tossed our backpacks into one of the new cars that he was hauling on his three-trailer semi, and seated the two of us in the cab of the truck.

In the cab with Hippie

Hippie talked and talked and talked. When he stopped talking long enough to go to sleep (he had a little bed in the cab), I stretched out in the back of a brand new station wagon tethered to his trailer. I showered at the truck stop, learned a little bit about how to drive a semi and observed life on the road. And after three days, he made true on his promise and delivered us to Perth. For free.

The free ride with Hippie was trumped a few weeks later as two of us hitched up the west coast of Australia on a route that coincided with the tour of a Beach-Boys-esque band called the Delltones. Picked up by two roadies for the Delltones near Carnarvon, where we were too early for the banana harvest, the guys tried to convince us to join the tour. We begged off and spent a lovely few days in Coral Bay snorkeling on the Ningaloo Reef, and then carried on hitching our way north.

Nearly a week later, a taxicab driver in Broome mentioned that the Delltones were in town for a gig that night. My friend and I looked at each other and knew what needed to be done. We ran around Broome until we found the band, and ended up on the road with the Delltones from Broome to Darwin. We saw a few shows, slept on hotel room floors, and gambled with the guys at the casino when we reached Darwin. Here are the guys we trusted to drive us up the coast hard at work:

Peter & John making it work.

To come full circle, I will loudly proclaim that there was NO nudity involved in any of this wheeling and dealing. I found Australia to be full of friendly, hospitable people with no ulterior motives, and came to understand that traveling without an agenda allowed wonderful experiences to unfold. And as for lining up nude for a free day's car rental? Not my style.

Of Mosquitos and Malaria Drugs

Malaria Drug Fakes! Yikes. Africa and Asia are apparently rife with fake malaria drugs, and yet these are precisely the places in the world most affected by malaria. Pills with poor chemical makeup are common, as are full-on counterfeit pills. And then there are the pills that contain some of the right ingredients, but not enough to kill the insipid parasite that is malaria, leading to resistance that allows the virus to migrate and become even more virulent.

After five months in Australia and four months in New Zealand, malaria was the boogeyman that haunted me as I embarked on the South East Asia leg of my travels. I knew it was out there, and that it was serious. I knew that prophylactic medication was part of my rite of passage into Indonesia, but I wasn't happy about it. I had learned a thing or two about malaria, and it scared the daylights out of me, but the stories I heard about the drugs were equally as frightening. There was Lariam, one of the better medications, that was said to cause neuropsychiatric issues and insane, hallucinatory dreams that I dubbed "Lariam dreams." There was chloroquine, which seemed to be the drug of choice among backpackers, that could also cause stomach problems (which were a given in South East Asia anyway), mood disorders and hair loss. Good stuff.

As I understood the disease and the treatment, taking the pills didn't prevent you from contracting malaria; the only way to make that happen was to avoid being bitten. Once bitten by an infected mosquito, the virus makes its way to the liver, multiplies, and then spills out into your bloodstream. It is at this time that you first feel the effects of the disease, and the medicine begins to work its magic, helping to alleviate your symptoms and eradicate the virus. Because you are supposed to start your treatment one to two weeks before entering a malarious area, I found myself in a travelers clinic in Darwin, Australia, the week before jetting off to Timor, Indonesia.

I allowed myself a shot of gamma globulin to help boost my immune system, a prescription for choloroquine, which required me to begin my once-weekly regimen immediately, and a responsible overall checkup and gynecological exam, because it had been about a year since my last checkup. And just like that, I was on chloroquine for the next six months.

Within one-and-a-half weeks, I found myself on the island of Flores, Indonesia, in a place of astounding beauty. Rolling green rice terraces dotted the landscape, the hills and mountains were hidden amongst misty clouds, and I was preparing for a midnight trek up Mount Kelimutu for a view of its multi-colored crater lakes at dawn.

I was only about two or three pills into my regimen, and didn't seem to have any side effects at the time, but the night before my trek, I came face to face with a terrifying image. I sat on the front porch of my guest house watching a pale, gaunt, shaking man pick at his dinner. Unsettled but intrigued, I struck up a conversation with him, and asked him if he was OK. He explained that he had contracted malaria, and was on the back end of a terrible bout of illness. Fever, chills, shakiness, weakness, uable to eat, he had lost 10 pounds in a week. Horrified, I probed for more information.

"Were you taking medication before you became ill?"
I visibly winced when he answered, "Yes."
Nosier then ever, I asked, "Do you know where you picked it up?"
"Yes," he surmised, "it was probably on the island of Sumba."

I made a mental note to cross Sumba off my list of preferred destinations, and pledged my allegiance to the malaria prevention gods. One of my fellow trekkers, Brendan, a fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants kind of guy, eschewed the visit to the travel clinic in Darwin. Flat broke, he opted to wait until he arrived in Indonesia to buy his pills, where he knew they would be cheaper. A hilarious episode ensued when Brendan attempted to communicate to the driver and sidekicks of our tricked out disco van from the airport that he needed to stop at a pharmacy.  

The van stopped in front of a building, and an old man with no teeth wrapped in a batik sarong emerged from behind a counter peppered with large, unmarked glass jars full of different colored pills. He was so delighted to see foreigners that he came around the front of the counter and kissed me on the cheek. Minutes later, Brendan emerged from the shop with a plastic bag full of white pills, wondering what on earth he had just purchased. Hopeful that they were in fact malaria prophylactics, Brendan swallowed the first one, and we went on our way.

As far as I know, I stayed tropical-disease free during my six months in South East Asia. By the time I weaned myself off of the chloroquine, I was having some stomach distress and muscle cramps. Although I was unsure if the symptoms were from the chloroquine, or anxiety about my return to the United States after 16 months, I know I dodged a bullet. When I again returned to South East Asia for a trip to Borneo many years later, I indulged in some Lariam therapy. The hallucinogenic effects were lost on me, but I remained in a dream-like state in the gorgeous, monkey-clad jungles of Sabah, and once again skirted the tropical disease blues.

Hello Kitty, Take Me Away!

And she's off....Reuters photo

Oh yes, it is true. The king of cute has invaded the friendly skies. Taiwanese airline Eva Air has branded a few jets with Hello Kitty and her posse. But they didn't stop at the paint. 

Behold, the Hello Kitty travel experience, from check-in,

Kiosks! Reuters photo

to dining.

Kitty dessert - Reuters photo

This is how you do it, people! Marketers take note. Sanrio company knows how to do it, and there are millions of teenagers and adults in Asia who subscribe to Sanrio's "cute" ways. With a simple company philosophy, "small gift, big smile," they have been wowing the world for over 40 years with Hello Kitty and her some of her many pals like badtz maru, cinnamoroll, and hangyodon, who looks like this:

What does this guy do?

What's not to like!? Founded in Japan, the beloved Hello Kitty has been embraced by the Japanese and the rest of Asia, and there are entire subcultures that revolve around this beloved feline. Head on out to Harajuku in Tokyo and observe the Hello Kitty streetwear:

Harajuku girls - hellokittyforever.com

Do we have the equivalent of this in the United States? It seems like our teenage girls are more into wearing risque clothing than trying to be cute. Although, who says you can't do both?

Lady Gaga inspired - tokyofashion.com

I had some fun encounters with Hello Kitty's ugly step-brother, a big-eyed, green frog, who went by the name of kero-kero-keroppi back in the day. It appears that his name was too much to pronounce, because on Sanrio's website he is now just a studly frog referred to as keroppi. He was good enough for me, though, and I sported his look for the one and only Halloween that I spent in Japan. How did I do?

I kinda want to go. I mean, come on, salted nuts,

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buzzfeed.com

and exclusive accoutrements? Taiwan, here I come!