mongolian knobs (not as bad as it sounds)
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Welcome to my 'Hometown' of Portland...follow the river south through town, just down and to the left of Lake Oswego, you'll find a very amusingly named town. Apparently town fathers finally got a clue that tourists, especially British ones, were having a lot of fun, so the name no longer appears on maps- replaced by a blank spot- a bit of a shame, really. The old name makes you wonder if everyone in town is like David on The Office...
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I travelled with three polish guys, two polish girls, and another American who teaches at my university. Here Ana, a self-confessed ketchup junkie, demonstrates just how good ketchup can spice up any meal inside of a Mongolian yurt (Ger)
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a natural swimming pool at Soraksan National Park. This emerald-green water is quite a bit different than the turquoise/carribean blue color I photographed ten years ago.
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BUBBLY FOR BRATS...

From a shelf in a rural Mongolian shop, we bring you...Champagne for the kiddies! Why should adults have all the fun?
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? ? ?

Well, we thought the Berlin Wall would never fall, either....I really didn't know what to make of this poster I saw on a wall of an office near mine in Seoul, South Korea.
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Eerie rock piles constructed by bhuddist visitors to Whitelake, TseTserleg, Mongolia
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The office where I work, which was painted over the summer, adding this eerie John Carpenter feel to it. It's actually a much more cheerful place than this.
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NEWS FLASH!
Finally I discovered how to turn the 'Drunken Cowboy' video right-side-up, unfortunately the file size went wacko - over 400 MB at this point, ten times the original size before resampling. Anybody have any clues about how to resample without losing quality?
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"I Hope Your Sheep Are Fattening Nicely..."

This is probably the best shot I ever got out of a car window - it helped that the car wasn't moving at the time - and although I recognize the pictures that come before and after this, I really can't say where it is, though I'm pretty sure this bucolic scene was shot somewhere near TseTserleg, TseTserleg, Mongolia
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SHOVED by Herzog!

I'm a little bummed, gentle readers, not only because in a single week all my appliances went on the Fritz (a North Korean Electro-Magnetic-Pulse bomb?), including a new Samsung Washer, a standing fan, and my laptop hard drive. I'm bummed, like so many other naive computer users, because I hadn't backed it up properly. The drive failed with no warning; I left it on, went to get some tea in the kitchen and when I came back the screen said 'No OS detected' - worse than the 'blue screen of death', I didn't even have blue; my hard drive had just gone 'kerching' and left.

On the drive were some photos I'd taken from my recent trip to Bangkok - since I've been there twenty times almost, I hardly ever get any pictures worth the trouble of looking at. This time, however, was similar to my magical first trip to Bangkok 18 years ago. Back then, by chance, I was an extra on the set of Good Morning Vietnam. I had been in the right place in the right time, and had been able to meet and have a minute or two nearly alone with the great Robin Williams. This time, I got to act in a Werner Herzog film (Rescue Dawn) , and so, of course, I was holding my breath to see if I could meet the great director himself. Holding my breath, because the sort of on location shots that extras get to act in, are usually the kind of things relegated to assistant directors. So it might work out that I wouldn't even see the man from a distance.

I needn't have held my breath. Herzog was there, and before the extras were called up for our shot, he had us line up in our pilot outfits, sweating under the Pattaya sun, and shook each and every extras hand. This was extraordinary. I have been an extra for TV and movies maybe, oh, 10 or 15 times, and never, never, have I seen an extra receive any more acknowledgement than "You there! Move over there!"

He was a kindly man, and I took great pleasure in seizing his hand and reciting the cliche, "I'm a huge fan of your work" - at which he brightened, since on the set, Christian Bale (the star of the recent BATMAN BEGINS ) was stealing all the limelight - since he was also friendly and liked to hang out with the extras (in his makeup for the shot , scraggly beard, tattered clothing and all, he looked like somebody you could meet at a Koh Pangan Full Moon Party, or a junkie you would run into on Khao San Road).

Herzog didn't stop there, though. During the shots that we were in, he was in our midst, barking directions (in a nice way) and even shoving the crowd from behind (CAN YOU IMAGINE? I can tell my grandchildren I was SHOVED BY THE GREAT HERZOG! ). The high point came when, after giving orders to move one of the on-set speakers, a behemoth Public Adress speaker on a pillar stand, he ran over and grabbed the giant thing himself, nearly toppling it (it must have been at least 80 pounds) and started dragging it across the set while we all gaped at him, open mouthed. It wasn't so much the feeling that he was picky and wouldn't trust anyone on the set to 'do it right' - it's just that it was obvious to us that this man lacked any sort of feeling of superiority as a director, that there was no job beneath this man (I'm sure he would have been an extra, as did the assistant director at one point, if he had been the right age for the shot)

All in all, a great moment, and it nearly made up for the grueling 16 hours, the multiple takes that seemed identical (except for the actors flubbing their lines), and the heat aboard the ancient British aircraft carrier (it now belongs to the Thai Royal Navy), of which the assistant director said, "The good news is that they have air conditioning on the ship. The bad news is that it makes you sweat more than no air conditioning."

I had just purchased about five of his films from a pirate shop in Chetuchak market, so I felt guilty. I wanted to dig in my pockets, produce a 100 baht note and walk up to him and pay him his royalties directly. Now of course this is flawed logically, since I'd have to seek out the estate of Klaus Kinski, Bruno S., and so on, and pay them all 50 baht or whatever their share is - but it was an emotional response - I mean, I really like his movies, but at this point I'm totally unlikely to pay thirty or fourty bucks a pop (that's including postage to a non-Western country) plus risk losing it in the mail or to the customs guys (who reputedly have a preference for sports videos over art flicks), especially when I can browse in air-conditioned comfort in the Thai weekend market and pay 3 dollars a title.

Rather than get bogged down in the whole controversy over piracy and copyright and so-called intellectual property (which, the very word, presupposes the notion of a unique creation, a western construct invented by London Publishing houses in the 18th century and mistakenly supported by the Romantics) - rather than get all bogged down in that stuff, I just wished I could have walked up to the man and handed him my money, personally, directly - it would have been money well spent, if only we could somehow get around all the legal/societal taboos of such an act.

My niece's nickname - while combing a backstreet Bangkok market for good Christmas gifts, I came across this happy circumstance. Unfortunately this outfit is for a 2 year old, while my niece 'Beebee' is about 7.
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The Inside of the 'Disco Bar' from where we shot the famous 'drunken cowboy video' (I'll put it up as soon as I figure out how to make the image upright instead of lying on its side, since i shot the video with the camera turned 90 degrees)
This was what we might call a 'one horse town', though in the case of Mongolia, an expression like 'one car town' might be a lot more appropriate.

The Reddened Neck of our Dutch Companion Mark adds contrast to the blue of Lake Khovsgul, which stretches off to the left of the screen (North) some 125 kilometers to the Russian border.

A form of solar panel used for millenia by yurt dwellers, the 'cheese panel' is an ingenious invention that turns perfectly good sheep or yak cheese into dry, perfectly inedible briquettes, to stack for the winter, or even better, to give to your foreign guests to watch the expressions on their faces as the taste curdles in their mouths.

yeah, pretty geeky, all right - I took this photo in the ruins of Ghengis Khan's former capital. I couldn't resist because my mom used to run a business dresssing people up like cowboys and 'antiquing' the print with sepia tone - here was a lady doing almost the same thing we do back in Oregon - but for a fraction of a price ($1). The costumes were big and heavy, of course, and didn't open down the back with velcro the way ours do, so these people had twice as much work cut out for them.
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Reindeer encroach on our camping site before they are shooed off by the Ger Camp workers. In the background is Lake Khovsgul, on the border of Mongolia with Russia, and the deer almost certainly belong to a local family of Tsatan (pronounced like 'Satan' with accent on the last syllable) who live in teepees and only herd reindeer for a living (when they're not asking for photo money)
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Sour Grapes? No, Sour Horse Milk...

Bottles of Kumiss, or in Mongolian Cyrillic 'AIRAK', in a supermarket in Ulan Bataar - this drink, which possibly predates beer as a beverage, which fueled the fearsome mounted armies of the Khan, is made with mare's milk and a particularly vibrant bacteria - I experimented by bringing back a few liters to Korea, and innoculating ordinary (skim) cow's milk - within hours I had a slightly milder version of Airak. The original mare's milk version tastes like a mix between strong yoghurt and horse sweat, and varies between 1% and 5% alcohol content (a by-product of bacterial action, unlike yoghurt bacteria which produce lactic acid from lactose sugars in the milk). Airak cannot properly be called 'beer' because it uses bacterial instead of yeast fermentation - but Mongolia has some fine 'western' beers as well - among them 'Borgio' and a microbrew called 'Great Mongol Hops N' Malt'
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At a peebreak on the road to Khatgal, Khovsgul Lake, we engage in a minor digital camera piranha-style-frenzy. It seems many years have passed since we in The West made fun of Japanese tourists for the same kind of behavior - now I can understand the mentality (especially when you travel rough and don't want to repeat the horrific experience, but don't mind looking at the photos from the comfort of your home)

A reindeer bull grazes by the shores of Lake Khovsgul in Mongolia near the border with Russia. This was taken only ten meters away from our campsite/ger. If you look closely, you can see the trace of a broken hobble, as this is a domestic animal belonging to a local Tsatani family. Just the day before they had asked us for two dollars for taking a picture of their animals - and the next day they were all over our front lawn, free for the taking...