"I am having a cup of tea (via email) with a friend while sitting in a 4 star hotel coffee shop along a bank of windows looking out over the Yellow sea with my computer in my lap and free WIFI access to the Internet. Something my friend said to me has set off a flood of thoughts. Being a wanderer, crossing a different land among people who speak languages strange to one's ear...meditating in tune with the dreamy rhythm of train wheels against … [Read more...]
About Zoe Goetz
Before I began backpacking, in 2002 after retirement as a lobbyist, administrator and educator, and with my three boys grown and out of the house, a friend asked me to “report back to those at home what travel reveals about the human heart and what we have become in this world. To look beneath the surface of things to the heart of each day. Is God alive? Does hope exist? Are people still falling in love? Is everyone buying death as if it were cheap socks at a smoke sale?" I take this on. I look for clarity. I look for signs of courage…of strength of conviction rooted in heart…in an authentic identity, in myself as well as in others. I look for cheap socks…and death for sale. I have found it all. I am now an expat living in Oaxaca Mexico...again finding both sorrow and joy.
Burma: Poverty, Government Greed & Human Sweetness Part I
Burma Part I August 18 2002 Rangoon (renamed Yangon) Burma We took Thai Air to Rangoon. Bob left his Lonely Planet Guidebook Burma (renamed Myanmar by the military junta) on the plane and of course someone had pocketed it by the time we debarked. But we remembered the Yoma Hotel downtown and headed there. At the Yoma a French Canadian couple at dinner loaned us their LP so we could locate a bookstore somewhere in the city. Incidentally the … [Read more...]
Burma: Poverty, Government Greed & Human Sweetness Part II
Kalaw In a monsoon rainstorm we climbed off the train in this cool wooded hill station built during the British occupation. The locals laughed (with me) at my little paper sun umbrella I carried that I had bought at the umbrella shop in Inle. Only transport available was in a partially covered horse cart Driven by a kind old man. Off went the horse clipclopping with us along to the ironically named Dream Villa Hotel a few blocks away in the … [Read more...]
Our Time in China
The opening up of China is a stirring idea. A foreigner traveling alone today is privileged to see more of China than almost any Chinese has seen in his or her lifetime. I wondered what we could learn-traveling alone. Our images and ideas of China have surely been contradictory and distorted over time. In the years of the Cultural Revolution after 1966 tens of millions of Chinese had become the instruments of their own terror...a million were … [Read more...]
My Time in Vietnam
Part I Vietnam Hanoi September 24 Bob left Hanoi right away on the train for Sapa near the Chinese border to do some trekking among the colorful minority villages and then to spend three days in Halang Bay learning to kayak. It is probably not surprising that the relationship has taken a beating on this trip so we are traveling separately until we join a friend in Hong Kong on November 20 when the three of us will spend two months in … [Read more...]