Tag asia

We (Mike and Lauren) are happy to announce that we have a new team member who will join us for the 2010 Mongol Rally!  We asked Bill to write up a little announcement and some information about himself for our site.  We have also posted some information about him on our Mongol Rally Sponsorship page.

Bill (Verbatim from Email):

Bill and his Motorcycle

I am from the deep South; Huntsville, AL to be exact.  Up until the age of 23, I never really left the country (the border towns in Canada and Mexico not really counting).  But then with my job as a mechanical engineer with a pulp and paper equipment design company, I started leaving the country and visiting far off locations, a lot of the time, on my own.  This is when the travel bug really bit hard.  I had always liked the idea of going new places; I went 1000miles away from home for college at RIT in Rochester, NY.And I was always going on road trips and traveling around with my buddies in high school.  But I never knew how much fun experiencing other cultures in other countries could be.  Also, the challenge and adventure of figuring out a new place and exploring…sans guidebook…is exciting.  It’s almost like being a secret agent.  Especially when I get phone calls in the middle of the night or first thing in the morning asking me to run out to China or Brazil or Russia, or any other number of countries on just a few hours notice.  Which is what my job entails now.  Now I’m a a mechanical engineering consultant that specializes in supervising the erection, commissioning, and startup of mill equipment.

So all I do now is travel for work, and luckily my wife Jacqui works through the internet so she travels with me the majority of the time.  The only problem is that for work, I end up going to a lot of the same places over and over again and only get to see a new place occasionally, so I need vacations like this where everything is different and there is constant movement.  As my wife says, I don’t relax well…

I try to live life by the mantra “Nobody says you have to order an entree in the restaurant of life, you’ll only be here once! Order the sampler, try as many as you can before you’re full; odds are one of the items on this menu does more for you than you ever thought. And if I’m wrong, tell the waiter that his menu sucks, throw the cook aside and invent your own masterpiece. Just pour ’em all in, all your favorite ingredients. With enough imagination, any combination will work — there are no recipes for the paths still awaiting discovery.”

We are very happy to have him on our team.  Thanks Bill and welcome to Abandon the Cube and the 2010 Mongol Rally.  See you in London!

Cover Art

If you have ever been to China, then Lost on Planet China will be full of inside jokes only you and other China travelers will understand. His insight into the psyche of the Chinese was amusing and comical, but hardly deep. It would be fair to say that more than half of the book was taken with Troost’s comical musings on the Chinese way of life, with the remaining bit concerned with telling where and what he was up to while romping around the Middle Kingdom.

Troost, who is perhaps most well known for his forays on lost islands, isolated from humanity. Now he has traveled from serenity to the world’s most populated country, and at times his frustration with the density of human life is apparent. While many may feel this is a drawback to the book, anyone who has been to China can laugh along with him as he remains frustrated at people pushing him in line, cutting him on the subway and spitting all over ever piece of bare land.

He considers briefly bringing his family to China with him, but decides against it due to the excessive amount of pollution he encounters during his travels, and that’s not to say he didn’t try to find a breath of fresh air while in Asia. Having lived in China for several years, Troost was apt in his assessment of the state of air in China, but he is also a bit jaded since he spent such a large amount of time on a tiny island in the middle of the ocean—aka the epitome of a fresh air location.

Troost has a very unique writing style. At first it was hard to get into, but after a chapter or two his cheeky textual habits become cute in a quirky way. Having read another book of his, The Sex Lives of Cannibals, which describes his time in Kiribati, I feel that not only has his writing improved, but his sense of humor has expanded a great deal, making his new book a pleasure to read.

Cover Art

Chuck Thompson is an infamous name in the travel industry. He has been a long-time critic of how Americans perceive the rest of the world, that is to say – as a series of isolated resorts in various exotic locations ripe for development and full of charming tanned locals. Thompson’s uniquely bitter tone throughout the book lends to the overall sarcasm of his message– that the travel industry is flawed and presents only the best and most cheeky aspects of international forays.

In Smile When You’re Lying, Thompson gives perky little insightful tales from his own past that involve excessive amounts of cocaine and marijuana done with Alaskan State Government officials, various visits to go-go dance halls (aka brothels) and a ridiculous amount of drinking with all sorts of unsavory characters. Despite this, he manages to weave an attention-grabbing tale of what it is like to travel as a rogue (albeit flawed) writer, a tale that leaves me wondering what his wife (mentioned in only half of his trips abroad) thinks of his new book.

His brief stint as the editor of Travelocity Magazine gave him the push he needed to launch his travel writing career to new heights. While he has a job most travelers can only dream of, he does little but mock the industry, scorn the results of travel, and defend what “it used to be like” in Thailand, the Philippines and Alaska. Nevertheless, the book’s writing is top notch and the illustrious wordsmith has traveled to over 35 countries on assignment, making him one of the better researched travel writers in the business, and a very lucrative one for him at that.