I’m currently typing this on a flight to Bangkok. I’m about an hour in — it’s about 10 hours, total — and it’s a rather uncomfortable mix of nerve-wracking and boring. Boring, because I get to sit in one place for 10 hours, although there’s an ample array of books and movies and television shows available. Nerve-wracking, because I’m still not really comfortable with flying, even a year in of travel.

It’s an irrational phobia. Not even that, really; I have absolutely zero fears about accidents or terrorism.¹ But it’s this atavistic reaction when I hit any sort of turbulence. Minor bumps I can just ignore, but the larger and longer it gets and it triggers all sorts of great stuff: sweating, tremors, a rapid pulse.

So I generally stick to short hops, less than three hours, where I can white knuckle it if need be. But this might be a loophole. More modern planes² and large planes in particular are better at riding out turbulence. So I’ve skipped the Xanax for once, and despite some pilot’s warnings and a few bumps I’m doing okay so far. Mostly hoping I’ll manage some sleep.

There’s not much to speak of for the last few days in Oslo. I stayed with a friend, and the two of us stayed in almost 100% of the time. I caught up on some writing I was postponing. I napped. I nursed my leg.³ I watched all three John Wick movies.⁴

I did get out briefly to see Tomba Emmanuelle, Emanuel Vigeland’s mausoleum. I’d seen his brother’s sculpture park the last time I was in Oslo, which was amazing, and this was as well, for totally different reasons. It’s a bricked-up church — apparently Emanuel decided to turn it into a mausoleum after the windows were put in — and it’s absolutely covered in floor-to-ceiling murals depicting the journey of life, from birth to love to parenthood to death. There’s very little light, so you can barely make out most of the shapes on the walls or the sculptures in the corners.⁵ And it’s a vast echoing chamber, so you have to be incredibly quiet, as any noise you make⁶ reverberates throughout the chamber.

It’s a somber, foreboding place, in other words. Most of these people don’t look to be all that happy to be a part of the grand panoply of life. Well worth taking a rainy afternoon out of your way to see, and it’s not entirely depressing. Rumor has it he always resented the greater fame his brother gained as an artist, so he intentionally made the only entrance a little small and placed the urn with his ashes above the door — ensuring everyone would bow to him whenever they visited.

But I’ve left Oslo in winter (never the best time to visit) for the tropics, halfway across the world. Despite my World Traveler designation, I’ve been spending 80% of my time in Europe and the UK. Consider this at least a partial attempt to fix that.

It’s frightening, even more so since I’m flying into a region which, in the past few weeks, has become the epicenter for the latest viral terror. There’s no telling how nervous I should be.⁷ I have a dear friend whose been having nightmares of my going and getting sick, which isn’t encouraging.⁸ But I just have a gut feeling that it’s not as bad as it seems. There have been fewer than eight cases in Thailand, all but one visitors from Wuhan. I can avoid crowds⁹ and can change my itinerary if the news changes.

But beyond that, I think the news wants us to be scared. It drives attention. It also makes us all frightened of one another,¹⁰ and frightened people build walls and throw others into camps to try and feel safe.That’s not to say there’s no risk — obviously there’s a risk — or that it’s wrong to be cautious. Just that there’s a lot of unfounded panic out there, and I don’t think we get past the current political moment if we let ourselves listen to it.

So I’m heading to Bangkok, and from there I’ll be traveling around the region.¹¹ I don’t really know what to expect. But if I did, then what would the point of traveling be?

Next: Chiang Khong to Ban Houayxay
Prev: Kiruna (KRN) to Oslo (OSL)

Footnotes

¹ Although I do notice our flight path is skirting along the edge of Russia’s airspace, which if it holds up is going to pass straight over the Crimea and then edge us just north of Iran before heading over Turkmenistan and Afghanistan. Quite curious what those political concerns will do to our route.

² I’m on a 787 Dreamliner

³ I’m beginning to think I’ll need to get it looked at again. The problem is after any given stretch of lousy days it always feels better than it has since I injured it. So it doesn’t really seem to be getting worse, and it certainly seems to be getting better. Slowly. Week by week. We’ll see what a couple months of tramping over temple ruins does to it.

⁴ I had heard good things, and was generally impressed even given that. It’s got smart, stylish fight scenes; some really clever worldbuilding; and for a movie that features dozens of headshots a surprisingly minimal amount of gore.

It knows it’s goofy, and it plays into it. And it’s pleasantly amoral — there’s never the suggestion that the world needs Good Guys With Guns™ to protect people from Bad Guys With Guns™, just that a huge secret economy of assassins exists and it’s run by the same evil rich assholes who run everything else.

Also, I’ve got a fantastic idea for a Continental larp which I will gladly blab about at anyone who expresses the remotest interest.

⁵ I spent at least a minute staring at a sculpture of a woman reclining before I realized she had given birth.

⁶ If, say, you accidentally slam the heavy iron door behind you because nobody warned you about it

⁷ Literally, there’s no telling, because we haven’t got nearly enough data to figure out how contagious it is, or how deadly, or any of the dozen other details you need to do a proper epidemiological estimation.

⁸ Although apparently in her dream I caught it from bush meat. More specifically, I caught it from the bush meat company I founded (and called “Big Bush Meat Global”) because I am apparently even more of an idiot in her dreams than I am in real life, and that’s saying something.

⁹ I guess Soi Cowboy will have to wait. I think I’ll manage the disappointment.

¹⁰ How much reporting on the virus is already tipping into a warmed-over yellow peril?

¹¹ Although not China, which I’ve already visited.