Japanese travelers and the Cliff Hotel in Amman, Jordan

Posted on by January 6, 2011

     I’m contemplating where to stay when I go to Amman, Jordan next week to start my trip. My last time waaaaaay back in the 90’s I stayed where everyone stayed, the Cliff Hotel. It’s one of those places where you felt compelled to go for the information exchange with other travelers. I remember it also being horribly dingy and overcrowded and I kept bumping my head on the doorway as I entered; there was a deep groove in the wood from the many who had done the same before.

Cliff Hotel

     All the photos from my first Middle East trip were purposely destroyed, and it's a story that still riles me up when I think about it, but that's for another time. For now I only have paper things like this for memories.

     Google tells me that the Cliff is a magnet for Japanese travelers on their way to Iraq, though I don’t know how old that information is. The last time I read anything about the Cliff was in 2004; a Japanese traveler wanted to go to Baghdad to see for himself what was going on. He had been staying at the Cliff and the owners had tried hard to persuade him not to go, but the next anyone heard from him was in a video where he was beheaded.
     It seemed very Japanese to not be aware of the danger. There are little booklets in Japanese to warn travelers of the many scams and ripoffs in America, many over-the-top, but for other countries Japanese can be woefully uninformed.
     I love meeting Japanese and they are very interesting travelers, but it isn’t necessarily a good thing to stay where they stay as they can serenely endure the worst scumpit guest houses, a state of mind I have yet to achieve.

Hostels: to reserve or not to reserve?

Posted on by January 2, 2011

     Question: if you were flying to the Middle East, arriving at 8:20pm, would you have a hostel/hotel reserved? Is it a preposterous question? Who wouldn’t? I am hesitant. I like some serendipity and flexibility. I might end up Skyping a place and seeing how much availability they have, but I lament how much over-planning people do for their trips.
     If you have only a week or so to travel, I understand, but all the time on Lonely Planet’s Thorn Tree I see people asking for opinions of their long itineraries planned out to the day. I usually bite my tongue and don’t respond, but I say let yourself be swayed by events on the ground. I once stayed an extra few days in Tbilisi, Georgia when I discovered a film festival was about to start, and it became a highlight of the trip.
     This subject is a convenient segue to the sad fact that the least-viewed page on my website is the hostels page. So sad…good thing my therapist is on speed dial. Maybe people see the title and think they already know about hostels (I am thinking of changing the title to “Naked Photos of Me”), but it’s actually a one-man discussion of the pros and cons of booking hostels, whether to buy a IYHF hostel card, what hostels are like these days, a mention of sleepinginairports.net, and a photo of a couple sleeping in the airport in Athens, Greece, looking very comfortable.
     Still not intrigued? All right then, I’ll try and figure out how to use the self-timer on my camera… Khao San Fukuoka

Something for your weekend–The Dromomaniac gives & gives!

Posted on by December 30, 2010

Austin Powers film

     I got this film at a garage sale in Los Angeles. It's pretty cool, but what can I do with it? I'm afraid to sell it and have New Line Cinema's legal team all over me.

     Need to listen to something while on the go over this holiday weekend? How about an interview from 14 years ago about film? Just what you were hoping I was going to recommend? Yes!
     Don’t click away yet! Stay with me.
     It is from America’s only conglomeration of national public radio stations, the ingeniously-named National Public Radio, and it is an interview with two Chicago newspaper film reviewers, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert. Trust me on this: if you are the podcast type or need something to listen to while writing poetry to me, it fits very nicely.
     In the middle, inexplicably, they throw in a short interview with Martin Scorcese that is OK, but out of place, as Siskel and Ebert’s storytelling is enough for the whole show.
     This is the link. Feel free to vent below if I have wasted precious time out of your life that you will never get back.

Can I interest you in a little mood music?

Posted on by September 3, 2013

     Peoples! I have music to recommend! Since I am headed to the Middle East, you might be expecting something atmospheric and haunting–but no! It’s Japanese pop music by a band called Scandal. Seriously, look at this video. I think it is part of a TV show, so you can skip past the first 30 seconds as filler.
     What makes it special? The video is fun—you can’t go wrong with a band playing in the rain—but the looks on the girls’ faces for the four seconds between 1:18 to 1:22 are priceless. At the same time, it’s impossible to imagine any western director “wasting” those four seconds.

So, what do you think?
     While we are here, am I the last person to discover Flight of The Conchords, a duo from New Zealand? It’s hard to decide which is better, the performance on Letterman:

or the video:

Genius, or what?

From my inbox: a bald Indian girl (who else?)

Posted on by December 19, 2010

     I have a section on my website where I talk about the need to make fake onward tickets to show immigration, embassies and airline check-in counters. It was controversial when I mentioned it on Lonely Planet’s Thorn Tree, but I speak from my experience, and then I got this email from a reader in India:bald Indian girls
     “It is really a simple and easy read. your travelling stories and tips are to the point. I am from Mumbai and very recently I returned from South America. I was staying in Colombia and then I decided to travel for 7 months around South America. I don’t know why…but i guess because of the stress with the visa and all that, i made fake tickets, because i wanted to travel through south america by land and never take a flight but just because i am an indian everyone, everywhere wanted a flight ticket from me…and before heading to tabatinga, i went to the brazilian embassy with a fake ticket, they looked at it, i felt my heart beating fast (as it was the first time i had done it) and they just smiled and accepted it.
     So, i thought it will work again, i went to the embassy of argentina in sao paulo, (but this time I was tanner, slimmer, and bald, yes a tall, bald, Indian girl, not their scene) they rejected my visa, i had even made fake reservation at hostels, but they asked me have you confirmed the hostel bookings and i replied honestly ‘NO’ and hence he said, so it is no problem if you don’t get the visa…anyways, i continued to Bolivia, with fake modified tickets and to Peru, with fake tickets…and got it everywhere. Sometimes, just being an INDIAN can be so difficult travelling, but i have always and will always travel alone, so i can meet millions of new people on the road. I share the ideas on this website and i hope to improve or better myself as a world traveller.
     P.S. I even hitchiked in the north of BRAZIL…heheheh. and almost got killed, it has shaken me a bit but i hope i can do it again…”

     Thanks for the email! I had to beg her to let me use the photos, hence the black bars to protect the semi-innocent. Below is a “before” photo.

The weak Syria visa stamp in my passport

Posted on by December 17, 2010

Syria passport stamp
     You would think that for $131 I could get a decent-looking visa stamp in my passport. Alas, no. Did you know there is a Syrian consulate in Newport Beach, California? I can’t think of a more unlikely diplomatic post. When I think of Orange County, I don’t think of a dusty, less-than-prosperous Middle Eastern country, but maybe I am being too narrow-minded. Shopping! Celebrities! Sand! Sun! Surf! Syria!
     I wonder how the Syrian government decides who gets to work there. Typically such staff would toil in embassies in hellholes—I mean, less desirable locales—like Riyadh or Kuwait, but then there’s a chance to work in Newport Beach? And how many Syrians are in the area that this is necessary or what business interests are there? So many questions…
     Word on the street is that the Yemenis are scouting real estate for a consulate in Marin County.
     I always contend that the experience of dealing with a country’s embassy/consulate portends what the country will be like. In Syria’s case, I was told I could get a multiple entry visa, but they gave me a double. They were adamant that I had to specify which borders I was going to enter and exit from, but in the end it didn’t matter. They also said it would take 3-5 working days, but it turned out to be 11.
     Syria is going to be interesting.

Google Analytics scares me; naked 14 year old Russian girls?

Posted on by December 9, 2010

     When I log into Google Analytics, which shows in great depth everything you ever wanted to know about what’s going on with your website, it shows me the top 10 searches of how people find my website. There are the obvious keywords: “alternative travel”, “cheap flights”, “hitchhiking”, “devastatingly handsome California men”, etc., but it is always with some trepidation that I click further to see what other search words people use. There is the touching (“travelling to kiev alone”), the weird (“solo old women in toilet pictures only”), the puzzling (“how grow up from ass”), the weirdly puzzling (“japan squatting no pants”), and the disturbing (“naked russian 14 years old girls”).
     For the last one I should very quickly explain why my website comes up. If you go halfway down to the August 5, 2007 entry on my old blog page you will see how the words got mixed around and there is nothing lascivious. Nothing worse than this photo, anyway.

How The Dromomaniac saves travelers money

Posted on by December 5, 2010

reeeeeetch!

   An AirAsia barf bag. Unused!

     An aspiring Argentine traveler named Guido Blugerman wrote to me, asking to review his Asia itinerary. I am generally anti-itinerary and planning, but with a great melting pot name like that, I had to help. Part of his original plan was to fly from Taipei to Beijing, paying $400 for the privilege, but I pointed out that he could fly AirAsia via Kuala Lumpur to Tianjin and take the commuter train to Beijing.
     He looked it up and reported that it was $200 cheaper to do it that way. From looking at a map, who in their right mind would think it is cheaper to fly via Malaysia which is totally the wrong direction? The Dromomaniac! And since they are two separate flights, he can spend some time in fantastic Malaysia. Ta-da! Thank you! Thank you! Guido should really be mailing me $200 worth of his mother’s homemade chimichurri, but he’s young. I’ll let it go.
     I’m telling you, my cheap flights pages are long and it takes some time to go through it, but it’s ALL there.
     The Dromomaniac saves travelers money, example #24,533!

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