Myanmar - the ride

February 12. Arrive in Yangon with the visa unprinted. It's a uniquely strange sensation to be back in a place that is, and should be, so alien to you, and yet have it feel so familiar.

February 14. Yangon to Pantanaw, 50 kilometers ridden of 94. Walk into 999 Shan Noodle for the second time in a row and the waiters recognize us and shout, "Four avocado! Four avocado!" We had ordered four avocado smoothies the night before. Hit the road at 2:30, a most unideal time, heat approaching 100 degrees. Day one. The enthused shouts of support and thumbs up from the cars and motorbikes passing, and from the restaurant stalls we roll by.

February 15. Pantanaw to Kyonpyaw, 62 kilometers. Took what is assuredly the longest urination of my life in the dark hours of the night. Why do people equate up with good and down with bad? He's been going downhill. She's on the up and up. Heaven is up. Hell is down. Frankly, as a cyclist, going downhill is one of the best things. And one of the beauties of it all is that you can't have up without down, and vice versa. They are complements and necessities to each other.

February 16. The placing of flowers in the spouts and smoke pipes of the tractors and trucks. "Mingalaba" resounding through the fields as we pass. At a rest stop I order mohinga and the guy comes over with a bowl of soup and a bowl of spices. I decline. Everyone around starts laughing, him repeating, "Sati! Sati!" I assume it means mild. Or, these westerners can't handle our spices.

Kyonpyaw toward Gwa, 50 kilometers ridden of 104. Awake at 5:30 because the air conditioner keeps shutting down. We don't roll until 7:45. Breakfast delays, and Corey is not keen on waking so early. Egg fried rice. Re-jerry-rigged the fender. A beautiful Burmese dawn, cool, smoke in the distance, an ancient Buddha at the end of a rustic staircase and a massive statue beside it. Hitched with a big rig hauling oil drums and 50-pound rice bags, driven by a father and son. A rest stop of curry, then onward through the gnarly climbs on a road of potholes and dirt. Corey finds a speaker. We put on the Rolling Stones. Cut to an accident with an SUV coming around the bend.

February 17. Mingalaba, hello. Jezutenmadey, thank you. Gaundeh, tasty. Shimay, all finished. Slackline workshop number one of ten, in the fishing village of Gwa, on the western coast. An impromptu introduction at the town school, and a rousing success. None of the kids had ever seen a slackline, and we could barely understand a word each other said. After the two-hour session the school has its own rig, and the students have the skills to rig it, begin exploring the ways to balance on it, and take it down. We're looking forward to seeing their progress, and to continue pedaling across Myanmar, planting the seeds of this sport.

A massive success, and completely off the cuff. A solo attempt. Corey was on a different timeframe. I set up in front of what turned out to be a school. A huge crowd of girls watching as I rigged, which took a while. I was rusty, and especially rusty at primitive rigging. Hein Min Zaw translated, and he was an awesome guy. Someone asked if I was Stephen Danes, a man who had bike-toured the world and been in a Myanmar newspaper.

February 18. Gwa to Ngapali, 146 kilometers. Rolling out by 7:07, a record, and the cool air holds. A winding rural road, barely a vehicle on it. Small villages and shanties. Shelters running from hay domes and tarp tents to wood-and-thatch huts, old wooden frames, and houses that look almost western. I keep hitting my head on the roofs. Thankful for the helmet, until Corey points out that the helmet makes you less aware of the space, and that my head sits higher in it. I'm still glad to keep it on.

Seeking food, we crash a wedding. Endless food brought out as soon as we arrive. A tiny village, and still they fold us in, hours before the procession. Learning new words from the bride and her friend. Endless laughter at my pronunciations. Such a festive, collaborative process, all generations there. They not only allowed two random sweaty, dirty foreigners to roll up and enter, but then immediately fed them, and shared their space, their time, their laughs, and their practices, just hours before a wedding procession. It reveals much about the unfiltered, compassionate, ultra-hospitable, no-nonsense character of this culture and its people. A cauldron of meat stirred with an oar. An ox cart with massive, ancient wooden wheels. Music blasting from the PA for every village nearby. I discover what seems like a staph infection.

Workshop number two of ten, Ngapali beach, set up just before sunset. That only gave us time to introduce the line to three kids, and they took to it immediately. Two of them took over, dueling and making fast progress. One of them, Mein Au So, the boy in blue, was a crusher, on his way home from English class at the other end of the beach. Within half an hour he could sit, lie down, and hold a half lotus. That enthused frustration that comes when you're learning something you really want to figure out. As the night divided the day we realized the spot was in his backyard. He said he would practice and show his friends. We expect him to become the local ringleader. He kept slacklining into the dark, and stopped when he realized his mom was waiting with dinner.

February 19. Worked out on an outdoor gym. Crab curry. The woman who runs the place is extra nice. I go in back while the food is being prepared and there's a huge pig. Filming him, I collide with a sharp wooden edge in the roof and wish I had the helmet. Only when I sit down to eat do I realize it drew blood. She comes over with a bandage, puts it on my forehead, and says, "You're very beautiful."

A great low-key line on the main beach. Mein Au So again, set to become the disciple. All-around smart, a natural. Scoping out foxy girls through the rails of the restaurant. The absurdity of the American and European habit of closing a conversation with, "Well, it was great meeting you." Totally unnecessary gift-wrapping. I don't need you to explain to me what just happened. Brought on by a Finnish girl's rough, bizarre turning of her back on us after the conversation, and walking away.

February 20. Ngapali toward Ann, 90 kilometers ridden of 219. A strange morning. Corey tells the Gallery Guest House about the construction noise that ran from dawn through mid-afternoon both days we were there. He says they should have warned us, and that we'd like to pay 25,000 kyat a night instead of 35,000. The man says, "You won't find a room like this for cheaper than $35. Okay, you pay nothing." Corey, hoping he isn't misunderstanding: "Oh. Really? Are you sure?" We saved $34 across two nights of somehow free lodging.

Fifty-eight kilometers from Ngapali to Taungup in what was surely 100-degree heat. A super late start, because I had to double back for sand dollars at the slackline spot when we were already five kilometers out of town. I get back to Corey in Thandwe, reach into my pocket, and I still have the key. I ask a hotel owner in Thandwe to hold it, so someone can tell Kipling Bay, so they can tell Robert at the Gallery that we are deeply sorry. We didn't pay, with their permission, and we left with the key.

The heat is brutal half an hour in. Halfway through the ride I can barely hack it. On the verge of heat exhaustion.

February 21. Rest, and a slack day in Ann. I'm keen to get us out of the digs we stayed in, grime on top of grime. I find a spot on the map at the road for the mountain crossing. We gamble, pack the bikes, and roll at 10:30 in the heat. The whole way I'm thinking that if there's no guesthouse, Corey is going to kill me and I'm buying breakfast. Climbs, dusty descents, and then a GUEST HOUSE sign. Brand new. Opened one week ago.

The workshop at the town school across the street was probably the best yet. Ann. All ages, a big crowd of curious, smiling locals. Kids trying to duel and tandem and hold lotuses after I show them. Applause after my runs. One guy, Thuy, takes charge and really gets it. He tells the kids what I advised. Arms out, eyes straight ahead, breathing. He's stoked, and he challenges me to a duel. We put him in charge of the line, the rigging and the derigging. "Too much mountain!"

A dream that Will Smith killed himself inside the house across the street from the Marietta childhood home. It was thought to be some Scientology brainwashing. A book about "The Bird that Flies On," which read like a deceitful coded justification, and a move toward suicide as a solution.

February 22. Rest day two.

February 23. Ann to Magwe, 105 kilometers ridden of 160. The toughest climbing I've ever done, or on par with Cerro de la Muerte. Women doing the road work. An old lady hauling a huge boulder uphill like it's nothing. On this ride I began to reckon with the truth that the Bedrock sandals I brought weren't going to hack it. Knee pain forces a hitch. I convince Corey to join, in spite of both of our ambitions to ride 100 miles.

February 24. Magwe to Yenangyaung. Corey rides 30 kilometers. I ride 10, then hitch with Eric. "Phil, you're every man in the world to me. You have a great body. Seeing you pleases me." With Matt Barry at Phil's lake house. What instructions do ministers give to their brethren when binding their captors. Spread the gauze. Pull.

February 25. Workshop number four, Yenangyaung, Magwe. A special one on many levels. After the hardest road to date, the Ann mountain pass, we ended up at Lei Thar Gone, "A Gentle Breeze," the guesthouse whose profits are reinvested in the founder's school next door. Light of Love Private High School provides free education, uniforms, daily rations, and medical care for more than 100 children in extreme poverty, and for many others orphaned by AIDS.

Eric Trutwein returned to his hometown of Yenangyaung after retiring in 2002, alarmed at the poverty among the town's children. He began taking care of thirteen orphans, housing them, feeding them, and teaching them. There were too many kids to care for that way. He opened what is now one of the only licensed private schools in Magwe, a place that has come to change these children's lives, and that has put some of them through college.

We happened to be there on their last day of school, when every child with a summer birthday is given one massive party. We were lucky to be part of their day, to see their smiles, and to gift them a rig. Eric, whose generosity is only exceeded by his grace, put his son in charge of the line. We taught him the setup and the take-down until he had it. These children have a new toy when they come back in three months.

February 26. Yenangyaung to Bagan. Corey rides 113 kilometers. I ride 70 of them, then hitch.

February 27. Bagan, 20 kilometers. Tudirkulosis. Redneck TB.

February 28. Bagan to Mount Popa, 60 kilometers. A selfie stick is a selfie's dick. Happy birthday. What do you call it when a Buddhist takes a photo of himself? A not-selfie. Breaking a hotel negotiation stalemate over three eggs. "We need many eggs." Usually the stuff I eat in the morning, by the next morning, I see that shit. Ninety-nine miles, but a hitch ain't one. Ninety-nine miles, but a sketch ain't one. Anal Lewis.

February 29. Popa to Taungtha to Myingyan, 83 kilometers. Corey rides 44 and hitches the rest. To find a toilet I have to pantomime a hole in the ground and a stream of pee. Pantomiming sleeping in a bed at a restaurant. A monk shows up to bring us back to the pagoda, only to find immigration waiting.

Workshop number five, for the books. The monks at Taungtha. We're pretty sure they are the first Buddhist monks to have slacklined. They have a setup now, and the knowledge to rig it and take it down. It might be an addition to their morning meditation. They opened their doors and offered us a room. We came back from a late dinner and immigration, intelligence, and the police were at the door. Foreigners are not allowed to sleep in monasteries. We packed up and rode 25 kilometers at 10pm to the nearest town with an approved guesthouse. The elder monk pantomimed a sobbing face behind the officers' backs. Three cheers for genuine humanity, and three jeers for unnecessary government bureaucracy. An intelligence officer followed us on a motorcycle with no headlights for the first 10 kilometers, to be sure we didn't veer off. An absurd sight, and a bizarre end to a beautiful day. We edited the clip together on a phone at a roadside hut, halfway through a 100-kilometer ride, hiding from the sun.

March 1. Myingyan to Kyaukse, 100 kilometers. An epic dirt road. Near sundown a woman passes on a motorcycle and shouts, "Good morning!" Reminiscent of my purposefully distorting time. Interacting with Myanmar is a special thing. And the slackline is translinguistic, which really allows for some special interaction and bonds.

March 2. Rest day, Kyaukse. Magnum Micro. For large needle dicks.

March 3. Kyaukse to Aungban, 105 kilometers, with a hitch for the last 55 on a big rig. Corey rides 35 and takes a bus. When you find yourself cycling a valley that's suffocating on the worst air you've ever seen, you hitch with a rig straight out of Myanmar Mad Max. They took us 4 kilometers in a dilapidated mutant vehicle, stopping on the uphill to bang on the engine from underneath. Every bit helped. We climbed out of the worst of it. A factory belching who-knows-what. A sad sight, and literally breathtaking. Stung by a bee on my side while coasting downhill. Our fates on a collision course.

March 4. Rest day, Aungban. Burmese roulette is when you drink from the large, supposedly purified jugs, and take your chance at giardia. Unending supplier of supposed revelations. As of today, 870 kilometers ridden in Myanmar.

March 5. From Aungban, a day late and a leap day besides. The bizarre culmination of a theory that Ray was on the same track as me, seemingly to the day and nearly the location, with his food poisoning. Corey as well, ill again at Bagan, on my birthday, the same day and place where I became ill a year before.

A heartfelt, belated thank you for all the birthday wishes. It's always a special treat to read family and friends, new and old, in both senses of that word, from near and far, and recall times and words shared in the past, the present, and surely the future. The birthday was thoroughly enjoyed. Sunrise at the temples of Bagan, this time from below, looking up at the balloons. Then cycling through the heat with partners in grime, Corey and Ray, to Mount Popa, and teaching slacklining to Buddhist monks in a monastery on leap-year day, which I conveniently conjoined to my February 28th. A very special experience, and truly icing on the proverbial cake. Blessings. Roots are invaluable.

Life is reinforcing in me the importance of universal communicators, such as smiles, laughs, and slacklines. And that we are all the same person. If I'm ever feeling down, lonely, or bummed out, I'm reminded to try to truly put myself behind the eyes and ears of those around me, and I'm reminded, with the clarity of the chills that run through the body and the mind, that we are all the same person. That there is no separation between the observer and the observed. It's a construct.

I'm also repeatedly being taught here that we have it too easy in our culture. We've become so decontextualized from the life processes required to survive, and so far flung from what is actually necessary, that we fall into the cultural malaise of dissatisfaction that seems to pervade the west. I think that's one of the main reasons I go on these tours. To put back into myself the energy required to move from one place to another. To put scale back. To reinsert myself into the environment, with all its fluctuations in temperature, people, locales, and air.

And speaking of air, wow, I'm being taught the importance of healthy air. We're here in the dry season, so the particulates from the forest fires, the burning trash, and the occasional disgusting factory are really floating and remaining in the air, almost suffocating valleys and the people living in them. Disturbing, and affecting, and fucking angering. I'd like to blame the Chinese for the factories. But it's going to take more than immediately installed regulations to curb this. Large-scale improvements in education and energy sources are needed now.

As for artificial intelligence, it disturbs me. We don't need it. I don't want it. And the collusion of corporate tech giants with these emergent fields should give no small rise of concern to any discerning individual.

March 7. Aungban to Nyaungshwe, 50 kilometers. We rode the checkpoint with headphones blaring, even as he walked into the middle of the road saying, "Stop!" We floored it through, and then he and another tourist cop intercepted us on a bicycle. I had told Ray to pretend we couldn't speak English. I broke into Spanish while he kept saying we had to pay 12,500 to enter the Inle area. I kept answering, in Spanish, that we were only passing through. Ray pulls out a map. I make up some bullshit story about riding down to Loikaw to catch a plane. They weren't entirely convinced, and they let us go, saying they'd be looking for us in Inle.

We peace out laughing at the narrow miss, and only later realize we have gone 6 kilometers past the turn to Nyaungshwe and the eastern road. On the map the turn is right after the checkpoint. Fearing a reencounter with the police, we consider our options. A guy pulls up on a motorcycle and asks if he can help. He runs a boat. We loaded the bikes onto his tiny boat and crossed the lake.

March 8. Nyaungshwe to Sankar, 67 kilometers. Riding the eastern road south, I catch a sign for coconut juice out of the corner of my eye. Knowing Ray, I say, "Hey, coconut juice!" He answers with a righteous "Yeah!" and slams his brakes. The ride was 3 kilometers old.

March 9. Sankar to Loikaw, 74 kilometers. Gnarly heat and a nasty road for most of it. Twice Ray leads us down a non-road, an earthed rocky path. A man gives us bananas and water. The roadless traveled onward.

March 10. Loikaw, a rest day, 5 kilometers. Swept into the celebrations for ten-year-old girls. Invited to dinner after riding with their parade. Unreal energy. Invited to another one in the morning. A glimpse of the spiders in the Master restaurant bathrooms, per Ray's warning.

March 11. Around Loikaw, 15 kilometers. Greeted in the morning by the Mad Hatter. Padaung village. Isabella. A slackline workshop.

March 12. Packed and ready for a 6am departure, and my helmet is gone. I frantically realize I must have left it at the restaurant the night before. I fly over there. Every cool minute flashing past. Nobody answers my desperate calls. The dogs go nuts. I climb the fence, trespass, roam the grounds, and finally wake the people in the back.

March 13. Gaun-Day's Inn.

March 14. It was completely by coincidence that we woke on Saint Patrick's Day among the people and grounds of a Myanmar Catholic church, hosted by the ever-smiling Father Matthew. Coincidental, because we never know what day it is out here. We also slept there by absolute necessity. The first half of the Taungoo Pass, 106 kilometers, a cumulative 8,091 feet, through sweltering, demoralizing heat to the remote jungle highlands of Kayah. The light was leaving. No legitimate lodging for 60 miles. A jungle swarming with untold poisonous creatures, and littered with unexploded landmines.

Refuge in the brothers' quarters of Sacred Heart Church was a saving grace for we exhilarhausted psyclists. A workshop, and a permanent rig for the village children in the church forest, was the small token we could offer the people of Yado and its parish. The surreality of being in this land, navigating immense cultural and linguistic barriers, surely casts a special spell.

Father Matthew plans to install posts and have the line directly in front of the church. He was happy to offer lodging and aid to any friends who find themselves in that valley. You might be invited to a house blessing, and to drink rice wine with him and fifty onlooking villagers. If smiles are contagious, Myanmar is the sickest place in the world. It is indeed the land of smiles.

A program that could compile all of your personal communications and notes, through every outlet, chronologically, and give you a glimpse of your thought processes and relationships through time. The priest uses a whiskey bottle filled with holy water to spray on people.

March 15. In the middle of the jungle, an ice cream man on a motorbike, serving a family. He goes inside and puts on a full Karen army getup for the photos. The glorious ecstasy of the shaded straw chair after switchback upon switchback in 100-degree heat. Addled, I gush over the cardboard cookies. Ray stops me. "No, they're not good." I protest. "They're amazing." "No, no they're not." Laughing in hysterics while children crowd the straw hut that's housing us from the sun. Uncontrollable giggle fits, the kind that would get you removed from class. Four thousand feet. A hundred degrees. Exhilarhausted. Pigs. Chickens. Painted faces. LSD.

Ray being taught Karen, writing the phonetics, corrected with a distorted set of phonetics, brain scrambled, grappling with heat exhaustion, conflicting linguistic schemata, and high-grade lysergic acid at once. A high and stoked Karen guy on a motorbike, amazed we were there, his broken English sounding almost Costa Rican. Horseflies on Ray whenever we stopped, drawing blood from his ankle. The evilest-looking tropical hornet you'd never want to see, perched on the saddle, bursting at the thorax, inspecting every corner, eating years of accumulated sweat. You'd almost think he was doing you a favor. In reality he is clearly plotting his next nest.

A man pantomimes the road and the drought, low yields, high heat, and repeats our route to every woman who passes, amazed. Stoked brutality. After arriving at Leik Tho, the rumored outpost, the El Dorado of the Karen hills, we sit down to mohinga in the shade, seeking only a break from the climbing, and are almost immediately joined by a smiling drunken man, staring into your soul, babbling in a language even his own countrymen don't follow. The plainclothes policeman. Dogs that say both get out of here and come back soon. Our uphill feats to stay ahead of the mutant people-movers comprise the slowest heist of all time. Letting one pass, puttering uphill: "Alright, if we catch them, they've got problems." Wrist Rayta on the downhill. Planting the seeds of "we love you."

Using the kilometer signs only when they suit you. Counting down all day. Later, losing the light: "32 kilometers? It can't be to Taungoo. It must be some junction beforehand." Ray swallows a moth in the dusk bugfest. Entering back into Buddhist realms, and Christian realms intermingling. Salt. "Saaah! Saaaaah!" Blank stares. I pantomime the shaker and she hands me hot sauce. I find the sugar. She lights up. "Ohh, saaaaa!"

March 16. I describe to Ray in detail my glorious, anal-expanding shit in the morning. Ray goes to wash his face and is overwhelmed by the stench of the turd I unknowingly forgot to flush hours prior. Out here we share the road with people-movers you can't find in the western world, either because they're illegal, or because they never existed in the first place. We have reality shows of simulated survival. If that doesn't spell a twisted disconnect from reality, I don't know what does. Ray and I pick a point on the map independently, to check an alternate route, and choose the same random spot, 76 kilometers from Taungoo. Synchronicity continues. 1,288 kilometers ridden.

March 17. Nine cumulative man-hours on my bike, about five different spots, a revolving cast, including a restaurant guy on a motorbike who chauffeured us from one to the next and stayed about three hours. In the end all I was asked for was 3,000 kyat. Middle of everywhere.

March 18. Taungoo to Pyu, a hitch to Nyaunglebin, Nyaunglebin to Shwegyin, and a truck back. 114 kilometers. The Sarah Palin endorsement clip was about the last I could stand of this demagogue. Let me be as clear as possible when I tell you that that clip right there is representative of why the rest of the civilized world has lost a great deal of respect for the United States of America. The fact that Sarah Palin once found herself on a ballot for one of the highest offices in the land should be appalling to each and every one of you watching. The fact that this clip comes in concert with her endorsing a reality TV show host for president is absolutely mortifying. Understanding that she was, at one point in her deluded existence, the governor of an entire state should mobilize within you a fundamental understanding of the need to have a basic level of engagement in the political process. If it does not, or if you are one of those that has come under the illusion that Barack Obama, a Nobel prize winning, Harvard educated constitutional scholar, is destroying the founding documents of our country while simultaneously holding the belief that Sarah Palin or Donald Trump, a morally bankrupt businessman who openly threatens crimes against humanity, is just what will make this country great again, you undoubtedly share in, just by sheer egregious stupidity and associative ignorance, a large portion of blame for much of what is wrong with the world today, and may whatever God you pray to have mercy on your diseased, wretched soul.

March 19. Nyaunglebin to Kyaikto. 25 kilometers ridden, 62 hitched. If we create AI to do all these "basic" tasks for us, then we will always be dependent on them. And who even knows if they'd be cool with being slaves. True freedom can never come out of dependence. I bet Jason wishes that something like farming could just be done by AI. Growing and gathering food is our deepest, most sacred and animalistic connection to the land. How do you think so many of these spiritual ideas, and this appreciation for the beauty of nature, began? Humans, nature, food, life, and beauty were not so separated in pre-civilization societies. I believe technology is an amazing tool to increase connection and the unity of humanity, and can help us out, but to let it do all the most fundamentally human tasks is ridiculous. We are not at the stage to simply be contemplative consciousness. We are still so physical, low vibration. We will get to that point when we transform our own minds and spirits, one by one, into higher frequencies.

Making AI available for everyone, in this society that is so intensely chaotic and violent, is extremely dangerous and childish. It wouldn't give people the chance to evolve and work through their own journey to that state of simply being. It would jumpstart things way too fast. People wouldn't be prepared. Humanity is not nearly prepared enough. There are theories that when we reach higher levels of consciousness we will not require as much of those animalistic activities. We will have surpassed that intensely physical, survival-based stage of evolution. We then wouldn't even need AI to take so much burden. We will have freed ourselves from the burden of simply surviving. That cannot happen until we have faced our own demons, as individuals and as a society, and done the hard work ourselves. Perhaps AI will be helpful at some point, but it shouldn't be created until we truly know the implications, know how it could truly be controlled, whether it could work in unity with us, until we get smarter as a species, and stop looking for the easy way out and work on our own enlightenments. Until then, don't look at survival tasks as drudgery, but as a way to connect with the glory of the universe. Growing food, getting water, building your shelters, connecting with other beings. Things like commuting for two hours, checking your email and Instagram, going clothes shopping, are overly complicated activities, and aren't good enough reasons to create another being.

March 21. Kyaikto to the Kyaiktiyo pagoda, 15 kilometers walked. Then Kyaikto to Hpa-An, 35 kilometers ridden and 83 hitched. Total kilometers ridden, 56. We're operating at a perpetual deficit of inactivity. Total kilometers ridden as of today, 1,483. Hitch pull-ups. Ray fighting the angry lashings of a badly fastened tarp on the truck. Gazing up into the black, a grand parade of stars gazing back, offering infinite chosen adventure, paths and beacons, you lack nothing to guide you into that limitless future, where present merges with eternity and all of the mythological symbols are made known to you and become self-luminous.

March 22. Four kilometers in Hpa-An.

March 23. Ten kilometers in Mawlamyine.

March 25. What were they knowing? What chapters are they writing, and what pages filled with whose words are they recalling to contemplate and comprehend their present? Being so far flung among these people from the other side of the planet reminds me that we share the same breath on this Earth, yet our simultaneity is incomplete. When I return home, as their sun rises over the Andaman Sea, so does mine set into the Pacific. As they brace for the sweltering, punishing dry season, I am shivering through the dead of winter. There has surely been a precise instant when we gasped the same air for laughter, found ourselves reeling in rapture, bowled over by beauty, grappling with grief over some forgotten memory, woken from a dream of identically inconceivable joy. In this way I'm reminded that regardless of what corner of the Earth we inhabit, independent of our cultural conditioning, in spite of the myriad, infinite deviations that occurred to give rise to our separate existences, we're all the same person. We're all watching the same sun set.

Our corner of the Earth wedges into our character, shaping what we are and defining the angles with which we fit into the world. As you experience more corners of the Earth your angles slowly cease to be switchbacks, steep climbs, and sharp corners, horizons all hidden from view. Gradually your paths become rounded turns and rolling hills, around which and over which you can glimpse what is ahead. You can see beyond, finding infinite commonality. In this way, border lines and labels dissolve.

In a terrain teeming with life and activity, utterly alien and yet still completely human, unfiltered by any language you can conceive or comprehend, you find yourself experiencing, observing, interacting with other people at a level akin to how you first absorbed the world, when you spoke to the twilight and listened to the stones, conducting a constant séance in a language before language could say what you had to say. It takes that unfiltering, that obliteration of preconceived notions, to arrive at the heart of the human experience, at the capital-T Truth. That we're all the same person.

Love off-grid. Loving off grid. Democrazy.

March 26. A monk at the Kipling pagoda bids us farewell with "Peace and dreams." Need to confirm that. Laughing at the absurdly typo-ridden English book used by the monk and the teachers.

March 27. Mawlamyine toward Ye, 70 kilometers, then a hitch to Yamling.

Nine slacklines, nine communities. Gwa, Rokhine. Ngapali, Rokhine. Ann, Magwe. Yenangyaung, Magwe. Taungtha, Mandalay. Loikaw, Kayah. Yado, Kayah. Hpa-An, Karen. Dawei, Tanintharyi. We've kept in touch with many of them. They're slacklining, and progressing.