We awoke once again at the Valantine hotel in Wadi Musa, and finding the hotel room no less grubby and uncomfortable than before, promptly checked out.

We loaded our stuff unto the cycles and headed down into the city to find food and then a bus station. We decided that asking directions to the bus station was best, since food would undoubtedly present itself en-route.

And it did. We settled down at a road side café, to drink a little coffee and feast on our standard meal of pastes and bread. Scott’s new hair and jagged beard were no less inspiring than they had been the day before, and as we munched breakfast, I found the hair on his head to have an effect somewhat like an orchestra crescendo or a particularly charismatic marching band on my demeanor. I couldn’t wait to get out of Wadi Musa and move on to more hospitable zones.

The bus station proved to be not too far outside of town, and it was easier to get to than it had been in Amman. We were in luck. We arrived just as a bus was loading with people to head to our next destination, a city called Aqaba. Finding the bus was easy. Getting tickets for anything close to the price a local would pay was a completely different story.

The ticket seller and driver of the bus had no shame in resorting to theatrics. They made all kinds of comments in English, punctuated with swears in Arabic, about our bicycles, the size of our backpacks, the recent changes in the price of gas, and the like. We stuck to our guns though, attempting to meet snarls with giggles, pacing around hoping that time was on our side, and eventually folding up the bikes to show him how small they got. This bus, unlike the one we had taken to get to Wadi Musa, had a roof luggage rack, which meant that there was also no reason for us to buy extra seats.

In the end, with the help of Claudia’s Arabic skills, and some polling of our fellow passengers as to how much they paid for their tickets, the powers that be were willing to reduce the price for us. And so we sealed the deal. I then climbed up onto the top of the bus, followed by Claudia. Scott handed the bikes up to us, and I used our bungees, supplemented by a spool of rope that the bus operator grumpily threw up at me to secure the bikes to the rack that was bolted onto the top of our bus.

With the bikes secured, I headed uphill to use the bathroom, while Scott and Claudia chatted with a very interestingly dressed, and massively sunglassed fellow. I managed to gain admission to a billiards hall not far from the station, where I was invited to use the bathroom, offered tea, and invited to discuss football. It was World Cup time, and Jordan was aflame with soccer fever. I failed miserably in having anything intelligent to say about the World Cup, but my business card was extremely popular among the clientele, who went to great lengths to show me how they were secretly drinking vodka from a bottle in a black plastic bag in the corner. The owner offered to walk me back to the bus, explaining that these men were bad Muslims, but very good customers.

I bid the billiards shop owner goodbye and joined Scott and Claudia to climb onto the bus. And with that we relaxed into the bumpy climb out of the valley that held Wadi Musa and across the desert toward the coastal town of Aqaba. While I had been in the billiards hall, Scott and Claudia had made good friends with the well dressed and massively sunglassed fellow, who now rode with us on the bus. He explained that he was a bartender in Aqaba, an unusual job for an Arab. He also wore a pair of very expensive looking Italian shoes, which Claudia had fallen in love with. He promised to show her where to buy them in Aqaba.

As I worked to unfasten the bikes from the roof rack of the bus, the driver yelled up at me to hurry. Not a very relaxed guy this one. I paid him no heed and took my time.

Our well healed and sun-glassed friend disclosed, as we were strapping our things to the cycle’s racks, that he knew of a cheap hotel, not far from here. So we followed him down the road. Aqaba was interesting. It was very hot, and quite humid. The sun blazed, and expensive cars whipped by us. This city was very close to the boarder of Saudi Arabia, and was rumored to be a kind of B-level Saudi vacation spot. Sounded like a place for AsiaWheeling.

The hotel he showed us to was not incredibly expensive, but not quite as cheap as what we were seeking. And unless prices had risen steeply since the articles we had read about this place on the web were written, we felt we could find a much cheaper joint… maybe even with Internet. It had been some time since we’d indulged in that luxury.

So we headed off, wheeling fully loaded, and stopping in hotel after hotel. None of them seemed to have Internet, but we were beginning to find cheaper options, which was encouraging from a budgeting standpoint, if not from that of  corresponding with you, dear reader. When the first three had no Internet, we gave up on that requirement, and began to select a hotel based purely on quality and price.

Eventually we settled on a very nice and delightfully affordable place, by the name of the Amira Hotel, which had been coincidentally run by another immigrant to Jordan from Egypt. We were beginning to learn that Egyptians offered us invariably a special deal based on Claudia’s experience in Egypt and her Egyptified Arabic. We were instantly celebrities at the hotel, offered a prime spot in the lobby to park the cycles, and shown, dripping with sweat from our ride, up to the room where we gratefully dropped our things down onto a giant king-sized bed, which dominated the room, shrinking even further the tiny table and dorm sized bed with which it shared the space.

Though the temptation to relax into the air-conditioning was great, we decided to put it off and take advantage of the last bits of sunlight to do a little bit of wheeling in Aqaba. The first goal would, of course, be to find and consume some more food, which turned out, as was becoming the trend in Jordan, to be an easy, delicious, but none too cheap task.

After another standard meal of pastes, breads and oil, we hit the road. The streets here in Aqaba were wide, recently paved, and gentle on the cycles in a way that those in Wadi Musa had not been. We took the cycles around in a big, loop, searching in vain for the fabled Aqaba coastline. We did not find the coast, but we did stumble across an interesting looking coffee shop, from which a fellow called out “AsiaWheeling!” as we drove by. This is always reason enough for a waypoint in our book, so we headed over to investigate.

It turned out to be a café run by none other than the best friend (and possibly lover) of the well healed fellow we had met on the bus here. We began chatting with them and soon found ourselves compelled to be their guests. So we took our cups of complimentary coffee and sat down to listen to the proprietor play us a tune on his Jordanian oud.

The coffee was great: thick, black and just barely sweet.  We were plenty amped by the time we managed to wheel away from this social engagement. Before we departed, which was by the way no small task, we asked for directions to the seaside.

Now we had read online, and it had been corroborated by Jordanians on the bus and in Wadi Musa that there was no such thing as a public beach in Aqaba. We are pleased to announce this is resoundingly untrue. There is a giant public beach in Aqaba.

In fact, it was quite the popular place. We pulled off the busy main road and onto a paved beach-side walkway, to wheel along at a slower pace, and take in the coastline. Most of the bathers were men, but some were women. Most of the women chose not to enter the water, keeping their bodies covered in the traditional way. But a few of them chose to use a certain halal wetsuit-type bathing outfit, which was totally fascinating. It seemed also that the Hotel Previa culture was alive and well here, as evidenced by this sign.

We pulled over at a very strange restaurant so I could use the bathroom, and when I emerged this fellow was riding Claudia’s cycle. He appeared to have enjoyed it greatly, and we explained to his great chagrin the folding capabilities and the jaw-dropping nature of the in-seat air pump. With another local sufficiently impressed by the majesty of the Speed TR, we got back on the road.

A few kilometers down from the beach, we took a moment to quell our urge to visit Saudi Arabia. They of course would not let us in. In fact, they don’t even issue tourist visas. But that was just all the more reason to want to go. “One day…” we told ourselves.

The sun was hanging low, so we headed back to the Amira to drop off the cycles. After a brief recuperation and frustrating battle with the reluctant air conditioner, we headed out on foot in search of food and further adventure.

Aqaba is a city that does not shut down in the evenings. As we headed out, we found it to be every bit as crowded as during the day, perhaps even more, with most of the shops still open, now brightly lit. There was some interesting, NRA style graffiti on the whitewashed walls, which we stopped to inspect as we rounded the corner onto a street filled with freshly roasted nut merchants.

The smell of nuts was so strong; it had us uncontrollably salivating before we even reached the first vendor. Luckily, all the shops were more than happy to give out samples. The nuts were piping hot and delicious. So we bought a mixed bag, and headed on in search of more snacks.

Next we found a shop with this giant chunk of homemade halva, of which we would certainly need a piece. We supplemented that with some drinks and chips, headed back to the hotel to call it dinner.

We awoke a little after 7:00 am, in the grungy confines of our room at the Hotel Central in Macau.

We quickly packed our things, piled them in one corner of the room, and walked out the door to find an overcast, quiet morning.

We strolled quickly around the corner to a certain pudding restaurant that we had seen the day before . Forgetting that we weren’t in China, we ordered a healthy selection of puddings, which turned out to be nearly $5.00 apiece. Blissfully unaware of the mighty expensive nature of our breakfast, we chased them down with a couple of very milky and none too caffeinated cups of coffee.

From there, we headed out, strolling in search of more coffee and information about hydrofoil rides to Hong Kong. We would need to reach Hong Kong in time to meet with a certain woman by the name of Rose. She had in her possession the key to an apartment where we would be spending the next week.

You see, dear reader, my mother was on her way to visit AsiaWheeling in the field, if you might condescend enough to consider Hong Kong “the field.” So Scott, my mother, my mother’s partner John, and I would be living in an apartment, as we took a brief pause from the trip in order to recuperate, eat non-local foods, purchase nonsense, and generally behave in an un-AsiaWheeling-esque fashion.

So with stomachs full of pudding, we climbed on the cycles, bidding a none too soon farewell to the Hotel Central. Fully loaded and bounding over the cobblestones, we pedaled off toward the ferry terminal. A slight mist began to fall as we rode, but not so intense as to greatly hamper our progress. We rode away from the casino district, along tree-lined streets, past churches, and brutalist housing projects.

There was a decidedly European feel to this new part of the city, and the farther we got from the casinos, the stronger it was. There were lines of expensive, clean, European cars parked along the side of the street, under the shade of old overhanging trees. Men and women walked their dogs and engaged in your stereotypical western Sunday morning newspaper-reading and coffee-drinking traditions. Moss-covered churches and bronze statues of men in feathered hats seemed to dot every corner.

It was Sunday, which was in this city the typical day of rest for domestic help. This meant that a great many off duty servants were also walking the streets, shopping, or carrying large picnic baskets. Many of the domestic servants in Macau and Hong Kong are from Indonesia or the Philippines, and so we would from time to time smell the delightfully telltale Indonesian clove cigarettes as we rode by parks or ethnic grocery stores.

We exited the mossy residential neighborhood and could see the ferry terminal straight ahead. In order to get there, we needed to wheel briefly against traffic. This was unusual for Macau, I guess, for despite my lack of proximity to any of the oncoming traffic, the maneuver produced a fair bit of horn honking. The terminal was quite large, and made of concrete, glass, and turquoise painted metal. Inside, we were able to buy tickets quite easily from an automated machine, though when we attempted to board we were told that additional bicycle passes were required.

Our boat was leaving in just a few moments, so it was with haste that we rushed around the station trying to find the proper place to purchase such a pass. In our hurry, we almost checked the bikes into the extended storage room, rather than onto the boat, but after a bit of sweating and running in circles, each bike was tagged with a long receipt stapled like prize ribbon onto the handlebar post, and we were admitted to a new waiting room. One of the walls of this waiting room was a giant floor-to-ceiling window, which give us a view of the rain outside.

The sea was choppy and gray. Underneath us, a rather large red hydrofoil bounced empty on the water. Soon, a buzzer indicated that it was time to board, and we joined the jostling crowd as it headed down a long gangway and onto a kind of tugboat that served as an extension of the gangway, and from this onto the hydrofoil itself.

Not many people had brought luggage large enough to require the extra tag along with them, so we had the entire forward luggage space to ourselves. This was good, for it seemed two unfolded Speed TRs and both of our packs pretty much filled it.

The ride was quick and startlingly smooth for the choppy sea. We whiled away our time reading about the history of the hydrofoil on the WikiReader, and soon arrived in Hong Kong. We were, of course, by this point starving. A man can go only so far on pudding alone.

So as we hoisted our cycles onto the many flights of escalators that were required to get up to street level, we began taking stock of our available time and constructing a plan. Before we could call Rose, we needed a SIM card, and before that we needed to eat.

To my great surprise, the street level side of the Hong Kong ferry terminal was not a large station (as one might expect for a giant passenger service), but a huge multistory shopping mall. We began walking our bikes around the mall in search of food. The wheels were wet with seawater and rain, so they made a fair bit of squeaking as we traversed the waxed tile floor, drawing all the more attention to what strange beasts we were here in the Hong Kong ferry terminal mall complex.

We finally settled on a Japanese Ramen restaurant. The workers there were kind enough to allow us to store our cycles near the computer terminal they used to manage seating and orders. We sat down and ordered the two largest bowls of Ramen we could find on the menu. Each bowl was nearly $8.00, more than we had spent on 10 bowls of noodles in China.

I waited hungrily while Scott headed off in search of an ATM. He came back laden with plenty of crisp fresh Hong Kong dollars, and shortly after that our noodles arrived. The Ramen was pretty good, not quite as good as Tan Tan Men, our favorite place in Bangkok, but very good. And even as I write now, I find my mouth watering a fair bit over a certain kind of fried gooey tofu they served in the bowl.

SIM cards were easy to find at the 7-11, though not cheap. The Chinese obsession with lucky numbers was alive and well here, and as we had noticed in the advertisements in the mall, most prices were rounded to the nearest figure that contained many eights. The SIM cards were 88 HKD, which was, by the pricing of the trip up until this point, highway robbery, but connectivity was important, so we purchased a couple.

Rose answered after only one ring. She had obviously been expecting us. She spoke very good English, and explained that she had spoken with my mother and knew all about AsiaWheeling. Her son, she explained, was an avid cyclist himself, and on the phone she offered his services as a cycling guide. We thanked her heartily, and she explained to us that it would be very easy to find the apartment. It was essentially a straight shot from the station. Between her directions and Scott’s mental map of the city (he had spent a semester studying at Hong Kong University), we too felt confident we could complete the ride in half an hour or so.  We started the wheel by the Shun Tak ferry terminal in Sheung Wan, where Scott was able to snap this single photograph during the hectic and high-speed ride down Hong Kong Island’s main thoroughfare.

Woefully wrong we were. We ended up riding for quite some time, through gently sprinkling rain, taking turn after wrong turn. In the end, we must have circumnavigated Rose’s apartment some three or four times. Apart from the fact that we were making Rose wait, the ride was quite enjoyable. Hong Kong is a very interesting city to wheel through. It is one of the least cycle friendly cities that we had encountered so far on the trip. There were no bike lanes or shoulders to be found anywhere. The traffic speed was high, and city streets organically turned into highways and back into city streets with such frequency that it was generally impossible to avoid riding from time to time on highways. The system of one-way roads, and the sidewalks that were positively clogged with umbrella wielding pedestrians forced us time and again to be siphoned off our route in one direction or another.

Eventually, however, we found our way to Rose’s door. To be honest, we actually rode past it, and pulled an Uber-Lichtenstein when we heard Rose calling out to us. As we pulled up, we discovered the situation to be even more embarrassing than we had feared. It was not only Rose that we had kept waiting, but her whole family. Rose, a strong confident, Hong Kong-ese woman strode forward and stuck out her hand, introducing us to her family.

We folded up the Speed TRs, and managed to squeeze all five of us into the lift. It was a tight squeeze, and we were all too aware of our drowned rat-esque scent. After we had risen to the 11^th floor, we climbed off the elevator, removed our shoes and entered the apartment.

It was like heaven. Cooled by multiple air conditioners, clean as a whistle, and sporting a truly fantastic view of the harbor and the city. We placed our cycles outside on the sizable balcony, and Rose explained to us how to connect to the lightning fast Internet. It was splendid, like a breath of fresh air. We were getting Megabytes per second down, and hundreds of kilobytes per second up. Amazing.

We hung around chatting about cycling and Hong Kong for a while, before Rose left us to our own devices.

Hong Kong. The perennial half way point of AsiaWheeling. We’d made it. It was time to take a deep breath before plunging into the middle east.

We left our room at the Hotel Central in Macau and headed down to the cycles. There was still plenty of space left in the sky for the sun to traverse, so we headed out in search of adventure. The traffic was thick with tour buses and taxis, as we rode back toward the hotel district. Our first mission was to buy bottles of water, but each shop that we stopped at seemed to sell water for a more ridiculous price than the last. Perhaps my idea of realistic pricing had been skewed by our time on the mainland, but I was aghast, rendered unable to bring myself to purchase that life giving and most basic necessity.

Instead we rode on, thirsty, pounding across the cobblestones, onto the smooth wide boulevards of Macau, past casino after giant glittering casino. There is a certain kind of architecture, use of a special kind of gaudy building materials, a certain relation of dimensions, which it seems is reserved exclusively for casinos. It’s somewhat distasteful, but also come-hither in a certain shameless way. Regardless, a landscape clustered with casinos is nothing if not interesting to wheel through. We decided, however, that the intensely casino-ed part of town might be, like Las Vegas, better experienced at night. So we rode on, stopping briefly for a delightful selection of famous Macanese egg tarts with iced coffees.

The island of Taipa lay in the distance, shrouded by ocean mists and connected to us by three elegant bridges. It was there, we decided, that we might be able to gain some perspective on this strange and expensive city in which we had found ourselves. We chose the central, and seemingly the shortest of the three bridges and headed out.

As soon as we left the spotless glass, giant chunks of pink marble, hideously golden, metallic painted shelters of the casino district, we found ourselves subject to quite a strong wind blowing off the Pearl River delta. In addition to the strong wind, the road had become rather narrow, and as we climbed onto the central bridge, the shoulder we had been riding on disappeared altogether. In a last-ditch attempt to avoid being killed by one of the many buses that flew by us, we decided to ride on the narrow and very high walkway that ran along our left side. This was much safer, but left us subject to a fair bit more wind, and was studded periodically with nasty obstacles, many of which required us to stop and hoist the bikes over or around them.

Once we made it over the crest of the bridge, we had gravity on our side, so I hoisted my speed TR over the two-foot drop back onto the road. From there, I did my best to cover the remaining distance in the smallest amount of time possible, riding in the center of the road, pushing with all my might against the headwind, trusting in the downward slope of the road, and hoping that my speed was close enough to that of a slow car to avoid too many nasty interactions with nearby traffic.

On the other side of the bridge, we pulled a left and began to ride along a much more relaxed seaside road. To our left, separated from us by a long thin stretch of salty marsh and a decent chunk of deep blue water, was the heart of Macau. Glowing and blinking in the afternoon sun. It was such a strange-looking city, full of bizarre buildings; it was easy to deem it nothing but a place to worship money and games of chance.

There had to be more to this place, we thought, so we rode on, toward the heart of the island. Here we found some more familiar Chinese characteristics: large blocky apartment buildings, noodle shops, and construction everywhere. In contrast though, it was strikingly clean, and the roads were all brand new and delightfully smooth. We could see what looked like the center of town in the distance, separated from us by a large cluster of identical concrete 20-story apartment buildings. Unfortunately, for all we could tell, the only way to get to the center from where we were required traversing a scrap metal yard, which it seemed would dump us onto a section of gravel roads through the back yards of these large apartment buildings. Since the dogs in this part of the world tend to be small and docile, we decided to head in.

It was a maze. As we crunched along on the speed TRs, we ended up many times staring at a peeling blue-painted sheet metal dead end. The thirst we had ignored earlier was beginning to return with a vengeance, and it was with great delight and not a tiny bit of desperation that we finally found the correct path and bounced off the gravel, over a curb and back into traffic. Luckily, right there, on our left was a circle K, the same chain convenience stores we had so often used in Bali. They were happy to sell us water at what I could at least consider to be non-predatory pricing. We bought six liters, and drained three of them there on the spot.

Refueled and full of new life, we headed out to explore this new island.  Though neither of us had any interest in gambling that evening, we nonetheless discussed the rules of various casino games, throwing around ideas about how one might hack them, given, for instance an unlimited number of plays or an unlimited amount of money. Could you develop a strategy that would be increasingly likely to make you money, or at least to break even for you in craps? What about roulette? We pulled the Speed TRs over near the island’s airport and sat down in the grass to work through our ideas on the Martingale system with a bit of paper.

Unsurprisingly, we found no such advantageous method. So we wheeled on, circumnavigating the island, through sections of dense urban residential structures, large open parade grounds, more casinos, and even a rather Providence-Rhode-Island-esque busted industrial section. As we made our way through the industrial section and found ourselves once again back at the bridge where we had started, we felt pulled toward the center of the island. It was mostly a large hill, on the side of which clung a fair bit of forest, a few parks, a cemetery, and what looked like a long snaking stretch of road.

But how to get there… We kept wheeling back toward the airport in search of an entrance. We tried a few paths, but once again found only dead ends. The sun was sinking low, and we began to discuss returning to the mainland for dinner when we passed an unassuming and very steep lane. We shrugged and gave it a shot.

Sure enough, this one poured onto a slightly larger road and that onto another. Then we were climbing on the main road. The purpose of this rather large, smooth, and spotlessly clean thoroughfare, it seemed, was to provide access to a large park and nature preserve on the top of Taipa’s central hill. The park was dedicated to the many ethnic groups in China, and as we rode, the sides of the road were decorated with statues dedicated to each ethnicity. Under each statue was the name of the ethnic group and a caricature of that type of person.  An ornately dressed woman represented the Naxi, while the Han man carried a trench-digging shovel.

The road was steep, and the sweat was pouring off of us as we climbed toward the top of the hill. I pulled ahead of Scott as he stopped to photograph some statues and we became separated. When I reached the top of the paved section, I kept riding, onto a packed dirt path, which wound its way around the crest of the hill and into the forest.

The sun was falling low in the sky, and the insects around me began to sing the approach of the night. The concentration of insects was, in fact, so great, that as I rode, they would hop across my path pinging against my spokes with a sound not unlike the country western spittoon.

At the end of this dirt path, I found myself at an outlook of sorts. It was a fascinating view. The sky was torn between light and dark. A fierce gray-blue rain was falling on the city of Zhuhai, which was just barely visible in the distance, while a golden ray of sun was spilling over Macau, which did its very best to reflect most of it back at us in radiant polished glass and gaudy golden splendor.

Soon the insects bouncing off of my legs on their miscalculated trajectories became an annoyance, and I began to wonder where Scott had ended up on his trajectory, so I turned back. I found Scott back at the trail head, gazing out at a similar view. We climbed back on the cycles, and allowed all that potential energy to convert to momentum, whipping down the hill and back onto the main thoroughfare at frightening speed.

The rain had moved from Zhuhai toward us and was beginning to fall in great cold drops, as the sunset spread orange and purple through the sky. We decided to take a different bridge back to the mainland, in hopes that it might have a larger pedestrian walkway, or even a decent shoulder on which to ride. And it was in search of this bridge that we worked our way from roundabout to roundabout, traversing the city of Taipa like Chinese checkers, and eventually following signs to the bridge.

It was a much larger bridge, which meant that cars had more lanes of traffic with which to avoid us, but we were still forced to choose between the shoulder-less traffic-filled road and a rather obstacle-laden, narrow, two to three foot high pedestrian walkway. It was raining now for real, and the sunset had faded into a dim pre-night orange gray. We chose the walkway.

It was the right choice, for the area on which we rode turned out to be much larger than initially anticipated, and even widened as we went. Cars whooshed by, and rain spattered against our helmets. All the while, Macau grew larger and larger, and the casinos began to light up with thousands of neon lights and LEDs. It was a glowing, pulsing, otherworldly light show, and we had the best view in the house.

I was suddenly forced to screech to a halt when I saw a large discarded television set looming, just barely visible in my path. It was perhaps the closest that I had come to a cycling accident on the whole trip to date. Crunching into that television would have no doubt knocked me off the three foot high path on which we rode, and likely encouraged the crushing of my body by a car. But let’s dispense with the macabre that could have been.

Back in Macau, the rain began to fall in buckets, quickly soaking us to the bone. We feared for camera and telephone as we darted through the narrow and traffic-clogged streets of Macau. The city was lit with that kind of surreal light that can only be produced by thousands of tiny moving and flickering sources. Traffic was mostly in a rain-related gridlock, and as tiny shadows danced on the periphery of each real shadow, we splashed across the pavement onto the cobblestone streets of the Hotel Central’s neighborhood.

We stumbled, sopping wet, and giggling uncontrollably into the lobby. It had been a great wheel.

By the time we had changed into dry clothes, the rain had stopped and we headed out in search of dinner. As we strolled, the streets glistened delightfully, reflecting the vast array of lights all around us. We ended up at a small Macanese restaurant, where we ordered dumplings, some eggy scallion pancakes, and a plate of sticky sweet pork. It was all quite delightful, and we chased the entire meal down with two ice-cold Tsing Tao beers.

We spent the rest of the evening wandering the streets of Macau, walking in and out of casinos, and studying the strange world that surrounded us. In the casino section of the city, every other shop is a jewelery shop, suggesting that when one feels they’ve hit the jackpot here, they immediately go out and secure the winnings in the form of gold or jewelry. Perhaps because such things are easily smuggled across borders? Regardless, it shows a more earnest attempt to use gambling to generate money for more than just one’s self. If I remember correctly our visit to Las Vegas during the AsiaWheeling planning process, that is far from the typical move in America…

Macau might be a place better described through images and video, so perhaps we should conclude this post with a brief gallery of our evening touring the casinos of Macau.

We awoke hungry  in our comfortable and roomy hotel room in Sa Pa. I guess the dinner of Bia Hoi and unborn chicken had not been quite enough for us. We headed out in search of Pho, and found and ate a fatty bowl of it with very little expenditure of time or money.

Now, escaping the Pho joint without letting everyone in a giant group of local Vietnamese men ride the Speed TRs and try on the Panama hats and sunglasses was a completely different story. It seemed that we spent easily double the amount of time spent on the entire Pho mission just navigating this little gauntlet. Finally, we were free to head out in search of coffee and more wheeling advice.

Both were quite easy to find at a coffee shop just down the road. Here in Sa Pa we were back in high tea country, so unfortunately the locals did not drink coffee as they had in Saigon and Hanoi. This made the black gold a little harder to find and more expensive than than it had been up to this point in Vietnam. As the result, this coffee shop was more of a tourist joint, and in it we met a Vietnamese-American woman, who told us of a certain waterfall, up in the mountains beyond and above Sa Pa. It would be a nice, easy, inclined ride, she explained, over her mocha-caramel-whipped-o-chino. Scott and I looked at each other. “Sounds great,” we agreed.

And we were off again, this time up and out of Sa Pa. And once again, with our departure from the city, the view opened up into a jaw-dropping vista of indescribable grandeur. As we grew farther and farther from the city of Sa Pa, the buildings that clung to the mountainside began to change, and the people who lived in them and worked in the land around us became more unique, less touched by the outside world.  The road simply got more and more beautiful, and the whole time we rode, we passed perhaps only one other vehicle. It was as though we had the mountain to ourselves.

We stopped at a particularly savage vista to take a few glam shots of us and the Speed TRs, when we were approached by a few young lads from the neighboring hamlets. One of them, presumably the leader, carried a small plastic bottle attached to his belt, in which he kept small snakes that he had caught and killed. On his finger he carried two small birds that, despite the fact that he waved them around , appeared to be permanently attached (live) to him. His crew were all younger, and were interested in, but wary of your humble correspondents. They came over to take a look at the camera when it was sitting on the grass photographing us.

We decided that these young lads might be, in fact, budding photographers and encouraged them to try out Scott’s Olympus, but they seemed nervous about the thing, and just getting them to touch it was quite a task.

Soon the leader of the gang began to give us the signal to get out, so we did.

We wheeled off the small road that we had taken out of Sa Pa and onto a large mountain road. Still traffic was very very light, but from time to time on this one we would pass motorcycles, and even the odd small truck. We were getting plenty hungry; our breakfast of Pho long turned into energy for cycling the elevation change, and just when we were starting to think about drastic maneuvers, a roadside fruit stand appeared on the horizon. We wheeled up to it and feasted on a kilogram or so of high country plums. These turned out to be some of the best plums I’d ever had in all my meandering life.

The scenery around us just never ceased to amaze, with a new type of farming taking hold. This consisted of large networks of rope and branches, hammered into the 45º pitch of the mountainside. In the safety of these networks, we saw people growing everything from corn to berries. As we came around the corner, we ran into a woman and her guide (a small girl) walking down the mountain from the waterfall that we were on our way to see. The woman turned out to be from Portland, Oregon, one of the wheeling capitals of the U.S. We talked wheeling for a bit, standing in the middle of the road. No cars came by during our conversation. And soon we warmly parted ways.

When we finally reached the waterfall, we were once again starving. There was a cluster of stands and restaurants around the entrance to the falls, but a price gouge was inevitable. We ate two lackluster and overpriced bowls of noodles at a nearby restaurant, and then bought a couple pieces of grilled purple yam from a woman at a roadside stand. The yam was tasty, and the noodles at least gave us new energy.

We looked at the falls from a distance, and at the cost of entrance from up close, and decided, as we often do: more wheeling.

<<pic of us near the falls>>

We kept climbing, seeking solace in the knowledge that unlike yesterday’s wheel, this one would terminate with a luxurious downhill. Up and up we went, making our way around a vast section of road that curved in on itself as it clung to the edge of a steep ravine.  It reminded me so much of a wheel Scott and I had taken at Colorado National Monument during our pre-AsiaWheeling tour of the U.S., that I found myself, for perhaps the first time on the trip, getting a little sentimental about AmericaWheeling.

And with that we reached the crest of the mountain road, the highest point of our trip to date. It was a glorious view, and positioned in the midst of appropriately post-apocalyptic bits of crumbling settlement and roadside advertising.

And then we had the downhill. Ah, to fly downhill. All that potential energy… more than you could ever use. We whipped down the mountain at the speed the road was built to be driven at. And with the ease of movement, the scenery around us seemed to come alive all the more. As if the parts of my mind that had been preoccupied with humping our way up the mountain could now be free to focus on the pure enjoyment of our enchanting surroundings.

We rolled into Haba, once again with the same thing on our minds: where to find more Pho.  Settling down for a few snacks at the same roadside stand as the night before, we encountered a Frenchman executing a “Tour du Monde,” who took particular interest in the WikiReader.

Meanwhile in Bangkok, while Scott and I had been stuffing ourselves at the many expensive aristocratic eating houses of that fine city, the people of Thailand had poured onto the streets in one great prolonged protest. They called themselves the Red Shirts, I believe in no small part due to communist tendencies within their political doctrine, but more primarily because they all wear red shirts.

It is technically illegal for a foreigner to engage in Thai political activism when in Thailand, and though (as you may already have gathered, dear reader) Scott and I have not brought any shirts of red color wheeling with us, we did know some foreigners who had made the mistake of wearing one during a protest. The protest had been going on for weeks now, with red-shirted people pouring through the streets, jumping around in the back of pickup trucks, wearing cowboy hats, playing patriotic music, and generally causing a ruckus.

It is my understanding that the primary goal of the Red Shirts is to create enough havoc in the city to convince the government to invoke a rule within the constitution that calls for new elections, should a significant number of people request them. Most of them wish to do this at least in part to give an ousted Thai leader by the name of Thaksin Shinawatra another chance at re-election. Taksin had been ousted by a group of people, many of whom were wealthy Bangkok elites backing a group of military leaders to take over and re-organize the government. These fellows wore yellow shirts, and were, at least at the time of this writing, more notoriously violent than their red shirted equivalents, having done such things as shutting down the Bangkok airport for a few days, and deeply eroding many foreigners’ faith in Thailand as a safe place to travel. Well, looks like the Red Shirts are moving in that direction as well.

In addition to that, there is discontent in Thailand because of the great disparity in wealth and development between Bangkok and the surrounding countryside. Most of the Red Shirts are country folk who have come into the city to make their voices heard. Many of them are also being paid a decent wage to do so by Thaksin and his organizations.

I’m not sure what it’s like to be in Bangkok these days, but while AsiaWheeling was there, it was not scary at all. The Red Shirts were so friendly to us, and appeared to be simply holding a large party in the streets, plastering Bangkok with many signs preaching their non-violent approach. As of late the threat of violence has been increasing. We can’t pretend to even begin to understand the complicated snarl that is Thai politics, so let it be said that the simple wish of this publication is for the peaceful operation of democracy in Thailand.

SIM City 2000 rang out bright and early not for the first time in Steve’s room. It was not really that early by most standards, but during our time in Bangkok we had become so shifted from the normal solar-based schedule that it might as well have been ringing at 3.00 am. We groggily extracted ourselves, grabbed our passports and computer bags and made our way down to the street. It was a Sunday, and the city was still mostly closed for business. We were quite easily able to find a cab, and we explained to the driver that we needed to head to the Ekamai Metro Station. We were not sure where that was, but we knew there would be a bus for the Cambodian border leaving from there at 9:00 am.

It turned out to be quite a way from Dane’s place, and by the time we got there, there was little time to acquire breakfast and coffee. With most of the shops closed, and even the noodle sellers still getting their vats boiling, we found ourselves strolling into McDonalds and purchasing two McEgg sandwiches and a couple of coffees.

It took what seemed like an hour for the sandwiches to emerge, and when they did we thanked them and hurried to the bus stop. When we got there, the rest of the passengers were already filling out their emigration cards: one for Thailand and one for Cambodia.

This was a special bus, just for visa renewals. You see, dear reader, it is true for people from many countries that Thailand issues on-the-spot 15-day visas upon overland entries. Thus could we gain the extra days we needed to fix Scott’s cycle by entering Cambodia for a moment and promptly returning to Thailand.  True, this would require the purchase of a Cambodian visa, but it was one of the only ways to re-legitimize our presence in Bangkok.

With our cards filled out, we forked over some money and our passports to a very sharp Thai woman who was running the operation. She was the kind of woman who is just solid gold for any organization of which she is a part. Organized, edgy, kind and mothering at times, and an all-controlling Voltron-type at others. Sort of like my mom. With her at the helm we felt great, and soon drifted off to sleep.

We awoke somewhere in eastern Thailand when the bus stopped at a convenience store/gas station complex.

It was then that we began to realize our fellow riders on the bus were all of a particular ethnic background, and were speaking a language that was somewhat reminiscent of Spanish. We later discovered that they were Filipinos. Why such a large crowd of Filipinos were all investing nearly $30.00 on a bus to the Cambodian border, a visa into Cambodia, and a ride back was beyond us. But, as always, we invite speculation in the comments.

We were all told to get off the bus and not to come back for 10 minutes. “Yes Ma’am,” we replied, and proceeded to wander the vicinity, checking out the surrounding timber farming operations, and purchasing a few cans of coffee from the shop.

When we returned back to the bus, lunch had been prepared and laid out for us.

We struggled for a bit at the calculus of picking up the trays that now sat on our bus seats and negotiating ourselves into position with the trays on our laps. With that success we could tuck into lunch and begin to wake up.

We were driving through beautiful country, though markedly poorer than anywhere we’d been in Thailand to date. The surrounding jungle grew thicker, and low laying mountains appeared in the distance. Meanwhile they played American crime thriller movies at maximum volume on the bus’s formidable entertainment system.

When we finally reached the Thai-Cambodian border crossing, we found it to be quite modest. A large reasonably ornate arch covered the Thai side, emblazoned with imagery of the king and the royal crests. The crossing was a stretch of gravel road. The Cambodians appeared to be building a competing archway, but it was still under construction, so was currently just a large cluster of scaffolding.

No one appeared to be working on it. Thai people in cowboy hats were crossing the border, perhaps to gamble or buy duty-free items. In addition, a reasonable traffic of gentlemen and women with wheelbarrows transporting all manner of goods flowed back and forth from both sides. The border itself was marked by a 30-foot-deep trench, at the bottom of which some water stagnated.

The border crossing was a bridge over this trench, and after we were stamped and officially exited Thailand, the same woman from the bus was there to meet us. She took our passports and hurried off, leaving us with only photocopies of our essential documents, bearing a passport size image our face stapled to them. “Back here in 10 minutes,” our woman explained “for shopping.”

We made our way across the bridge and were soon swarmed by children begging for money. We then realized that this was the first time in the past month or so that we had been confronted with pan-handlers. Thailand had been almost completely devoid of them. We wandered through the duty-free store, which certainly did feature rock bottom prices. A carton of L&M brand cigarettes, for instance could be had for a little over $3.00. That’s nearly the cost of one pack in Bangkok.

Back on the Thai side of the trench, our fine woman was handing all the Filipino passports back, and had yet to lay into Scott’s and my U.S.passports. Using this time as productively as possible, we chatted with a burly Dutchman with tattoos covering his arms who shared stories with us about working on offshore oil rigs in Angola.

“What are you doing in Thailand?” We asked.

“As least as bloody possible,” he replied, nursing a cigarette between his thumb and forefinger.

We loitered for a bit longer, taking in a number of strange royalist shrines that were there, along with an interesting set of rooster statues. When we finally got our passports back, they had brand new Cambodian visas, smelling like freshly applied paste, issued, signed,  stamped, and voided in the same instant. We gave our passport copies and pictures back to the Thai authorities, who dutifully logged them and filed us away. Then returned to the bus.

On the ride back, we spent most of our time watching “The Hangover” at maximum volume, followed by a violent serial killer flick, “Law Abiding Citizen” starring Jamie Foxx.  The hangover had subtitles that seemed to have been translated into a foreign language, and then back into English.  The film became surprisingly more enjoyable with this unexpected feature.

When we were not transfixed by media, we spend our time talking about what a strange place Las Vegas is, and what a strange place America is, and how much there is to both love and hate about our country.

Meanwhile, somewhere in Singapore, the shipment of parts which would save AsiaWheeling from stagnation and inoperability was stirring and assembling itself, poised to board some mixture of trucks and planes, and make its way to Bangkok where we would be waiting in Steve’ s (may his beard grow ever longer) apartment, to spring into action and resume AsiaWheeling.

We woke up bright and early in Sangklaburi, having changed our rooms at the P. Guesthouse from the three-bed room that Hood, Scott, and I had shared to a two-man nest, with a private balcony looking out over the lake. It was the same price ($6 per night) and we were thrilled.  But of course, we missed Hood.

Today was to be somewhat of an atypical day for AsiaWheeling, in which we would rent one of the many fine handmade wooden canoes they had down by the dock at the P. Guesthouse, for a little bit of good old-fashioned AsiaPaddling.

We ziplocked our electronics, but we prayed, for the sake of the Panama hats, that none of the local fisherman who so deafeningly zipped around the lake on unbelievably fast, long, and skinny motor boats, would come so near and so parallel to us that we would take a spill.

I took the rear position, and Scott the bow as we headed out into the lake. She was a good boat, fast, silent, and true. We were rounding our first curve, past dozens of houseboats, and fields of some crop we could not quite identify, toward what we had heard was the location of a sunken temple. Sure enough, a few more curves of lake later, we found ourselves at a truly ghostly sight. As you, dear reader, no doubt remember, this was a man-made lake. Before the time of the lake, a great temple had been built in this valley. When the valley was flooded, the temple was submerged completely, but now being the dry, and therefore, low season, the top floors of the building were once again revealed from the cloudy green waters.

We paddled some of the smaller sections of the temple, before beaching the canoe and climbing out into the main building.

The floor was covered in muck, but the old stones were still visible in places, especially where the floor had cracked, revealing another completely submerged chamber beneath us.

Most of the more intricate parts of the temple were broken or ruined by years underwater, but we were still able to make out some interesting and significant features.

The arrival of some truly vicious swarms of gnats heralded our return to the boat.

We kept paddling farther down the lake, where we found more floating villages, clinging to the shore,and more of those interesting large net-fishing devices that we had first encountered being used by the fishermen of Goa. We stopped to hang out for a bit with a roaming herd of cattle, all of which sported jingling bells, and found us quite engrossing, before turning and heading back.

Our whole time in Sangklaburi, we had been noticing a giant golden temple that loomed amidst the smokey mountains across the lake. This, it seemed, would make a wise next waypoint, so we pointed the canoe toward its shimmering majesty and started paddling.

When we finally reached the shore, we beached the canoe next to an interesting agricultural operation, where they appeared to be growing a kind of Asian cabbage and beans, the cabbage spread out on the ground, while the beans arched overhead on makeshift bamboo structures. We scrambled past the farm and up a steep crumbling slope toward a road. We followed the road up and around into the forest. First we passed a large, and quite deserted facility, which remained a mystery to us until we were finally able to ascertain, upon finding a giant charred oven, that it was a crematorium. Hauntingly fascinating.

Just then, we saw a bright red fox appear from the woods and look at us. He turned around and began to trot down another unpaved and overgrown road. It seemed like our best bet would be to follow him, so we did. And sure enough, each time we came around a corner in the road, he would be waiting for us, and upon seeing us continue to trot forward. Finally he led us to the base of the great gold temple.

It was closed for business, it seemed, and the doors were barred and chained. This, however, did not seem to have kept a small village of furniture makers and wood carvers from having sprung up around it.

It was the hottest part of the day, and most people appeared to be napping. In fact, it was so strangely deserted as to elicit some activity in that  part of the brain that is cultivated during the viewing of zombie films. So, you might forgive your humble correspondent’s mild alarm when a strangely loping child appeared as if from nowhere and began running at Scott. His body, poor thing, had grown unevenly, likely due to malnutrition and disease. He appeared to have a great deal of trouble seeing, but had locked onto Scott and made a direct hit, promptly embracing him in a prolonged bear hug.

As the duration of the hug lengthened, Scott began to grow uncomfortable. Finally, and quite gently, Scott disengaged himself from this child and we moved on, continuing our exploration of the temple grounds and the surrounding village.

Back in the canoe, we were getting hungry, and it seemed high time that we return to the city proper and find some food.

After settling up for the canoe rental, we headed into the town, where we feasted on street food: grilled pork on a shard of bamboo,

accompanied by a bag of fresh cabbage, basil, and hot peppers,

delicious northern sausages filled with rice and meat,

and spicy sweet shredded papaya salad, mashed to perfection with a large wooden mortar and pestle.

We were standing outside the train station in Kandy, Sri Lanka, when Scott agreed to continue fielding questions from the crowd of cab drivers and touts that had formed around us, drawn in by the allure of discovering the retail price of the Speed TRs, so that I could go inside and attempt to purchase another couple of tickets back to Colombo.

Unfortunately, all the seats in the Observation Saloon had been sold already, so we were forced to purchase second class seats, which were about $2.45 as opposed to $3.50 cents. Perhaps these train tickets can serve as an indicator to you, dear reader, why the $4.00 breakfast at Rodney’s seemed so expensive to us at the time.

Regardless of the expense, we had indulged in it once again that morning. However, having for the last couple days endured the giant pot of weak coffee that accompanied it, we had this morning asked to enter the kitchen and supervise its fabrication. In the kitchen, we observed, as we had feared, that no more than a tablespoon of actual coffee was added to the giant over-sized pot of water. However, now that we were in the kitchen, we felt comfortable rattling the pots and pans a little and requesting an increase in the strength. It was like night and day. Our entire experience was transformed as lucidity once again returned to AsiaWheeling.

So great was our feeling that before heading to the train station, we indulged in a little high-speed wheel down the road in the opposite direction of town.

It proved, as with all of our other experiences in Sri Lanka, to be more beautiful and less uphill than we had expected.

While in the other direction, the road headed down the mountain and into town, this one just skirted the side of the mountain affording us a glorious view of the jungle, rich with hidden waterfalls, little villages, and people in brightly colored clothes tending to rice and palm fields.

We made sure to stop for water along the way, at a very interesting roadside general store, where we met an old Sri Lankan man who was thrilled to chat with us in his native tongue, somehow conducting a full conversation without any overlapping vocabulary. This old man is the perfect example of a phenomenon that is becoming ever more apparent on AsiaWheeling: successful communication requires primarily only the will to communicate. Many times, when we are most vexed by an inability to communicate, it is because the other party is not willing to engage, not because we lack the means to convey information.

We stopped for lunch at the Old Empire Hotel for some delicious Sri Lankan fare.

Meanwhile at the train station, it was time to get the heck out of Kandy, and when we were confronted by the baggage personnel clucking at the bikes, we assumed that the same maneuver we had used in Colombo might serve us well here. But this time the baggage handlers refused to be subdued by the folding action and insisted that we load the bags into the baggage car. Despite our many protests, we were brought first to one luggage processing room and then deeper into the station to yet another. In each we were confronted by a different man, asking for a different amount of money, and offering a different answer to the question “will we be able to take the cycles on the train with us?”

Finally, Scott became exasperated, as our train began to blow its whistle, and demand justice. Meanwhile, I was attempting, with no success, to bargain the man down from the $8.00 per cycle that he was asking.

Finally, with only five minutes left before our train was to leave, we paid our $16 and followed a man who lead us through the turnstile and to the 2nd class car. Inside the second class car, we once again saw that there was decidedly no place for the cycles, and thought the fellow seemed to be indicating that we should just climb on, we insisted that he talk to the analogous fellow in the Observation Saloon and secure us a spot in the baggage compartment. Our baggage charging guide seemed a little reticent, but when we entered the Observation Saloon’s baggage car, the fellow inside seemed satisfied enough with the gigantic and now sopping wet $16.00 receipt, which I waved at him, sending little droplets of redissolved ink to and fro. He smiled and allowed us to lock the cycles to a piece of chain that dangled from one of the walls.

Now quite covered in sweat and totally sapped of all energy, we thanked the baggage team as though they had just delivered our son and collapsed into our seats. In no time the train was moving again, shrieking deafeningly against the rusty tracks, and cutting its way into the sunset.

Arriving in Colombo, we mounted the cycles and headed back to the trusty Hotel Nippon.

We pulled the bikes up alongside a charming colonial coffee house by the name of Koshy’s. It’s somewhat of a Bangalore institution, as I understand.

We were meeting there with one of Bangalore’s rising stars, a fellow by the name of Gautam John. We sat down with Gautam over a colonial breakfast of English-style ham and eggs, and plenty of coffee, tea, and toast. We were thrilled to hear a bit of his story.

Gautam began his career as an entrepreneur by starting his own food company. It was an ingredients supplier, providing mostly processed and dehydrated foods. The shop was named “Foods and Flavors,” and he grew it to a respectable 150 employees before striking out in search of something more existentially fulfilling. Gautam found what he was looking for when he joined Pratham Books, where he could draw on his entrepreneurial experience to help them grow their non-profit. He only planned to spend six months, but so far has logged just over two and a half years at the firm. Why did he do this? Certainly it was not the money. As Gautam explained to us, non-profit workers in India can expect to earn about 25% what they would in the for-profit space, compared to a much higher ratio in the west. “For me, it’s the mission of this organization,” he explained. He simply loves the fact that his work is helping his fellow Indians.

Pratham Books was a non-profit publisher, which focused mainly on children’s books. Now it is the largest children’s books publisher in all of India. Its stated mission is to put “A Book in Every Child’s Hand” and they are well on their way, with plenty more work ahead. Currently the company produces about 1 million books, which are distributed mainly by third-party organizations (both governmental and non-governmental) to children in Indian villages. In addition they distribute another 2 million of what they call story cards, more rudimentary short stories, delivered on folding cards.

“We focus on high value for the child by producing books with rich illustrations and with text in their local languages,” Gautam explained. They sell these books to their distributors at heavily discounted rates. Setting a price, no matter how small, rather than giving the books away, Gautam explained, aids in the perception of value associated with the product, encouraging its more efficient utilization.” We are a non-profit, but we run in a way that is very close to a sustainable stand-alone business.”

Gautam also does work at another non-profit called the Akshara Foundation, a service which couples nicely with his work at Pratham. This organization works to aid the government in measuring its own efficiency in primary and pre-primary education. They administer a system of tests that measure Indian students’ acumen in reading, writing, and arithmetic. “The three Rs,” as Gautam described them. “Our tests produce much better data than the Indian government… and they’re not always happy to hear it.” Over 325,000 children in Bangalore have undergone the testing. Using this data, the organization works to implement remedial interventions aimed at helping weak students to catch up.

The work being done by  Pratham and The Akshara Foundation is just another gleaming example of the thriving spirit of entrepreneurship here in Bangalore. At the end of the meeting, we presented Gautam and Pratham with a gift from AsiaWheeling and our esteemed partners at Openmoko: a Wikireader. The wikireader, as you may have noticed, is our faithful companion on AsiaWheeling, providing us access to Wikipedia in all its textual glory, all from the comfort of a hand-held, touchscreen-enabled, year-long-battery-life-endowed handset.

Pratham Books,  AsiaWheeling wishes you continued success.

When we wheeled up to the unassuming, and somewhat brutal exterior of the Janaagraha building in Bangalore, we were not quite sure what to expect inside, and it seemed to us a not-for-profit institution,  which purported to do an impossible number of things for free, which in America would certainly be done at great expense by government-contracted consulting firms. Furthermore, they were performing these valuable services, in addition to huge initiatives mobilizing voters, and raising public awareness of relevant social and political issues.  It seemed too good to be true. What kind of sham were they running inside this brutalist concrete building?

Inside, we were quite floored to find no sham at all. Just a whip sharp team of knowledgeable, passionate, and extremely motivated personnel, working hard on a Saturday to make Bangalore, and India as a whole, a better place to live.

The office was big, but not that big. Same goes for the team. The power was out in Bangalore at that moment, a reasonably common occurrence, but the office seemed hard at work in the window lit offices, working fiercely under still fans on computers that ran from the building’s back-up generators.

Our first meeting was with the voting and political literacy initiative. India is the largest democracy in the world, and many accuse it of crumbling under its own weight, unable to function due purely to its own massive scale and complexity. “This does not have to be so,” the folks at Janaagraha posit. And they are doing much to put their time and money where their mouth is.

In India, the makeup of a particular rural community is relatively static, but in the large cities like Bangalore, massive migration from rural areas to the metropolis make registering voters, disseminating information, and overseeing the implementation of projects quite difficult. Consequently, voter turnout in urban India lags significantly behind that in the rural areas. Janaagraha is doing a few things to help. First of all it has a dedicated team researching issues, aggregating local views, and disseminating relevant information to urban voters. It uses this data to promote certain candidates and attempts to streamline and simplify administrative tasks (like voter registration, error correcting in voter lists) through automation.

As the folks at Janaagraha explained to us, Bangalore has been without local government for the past three years. The elections have been stalled by outstanding court cases pointing at blatant gerrymandering of the city wards. “We might have local elections, hopefully, sometime in the next six months.” But even Janaagraha expressed significant fear of further delay. In the meantime government will continue to come down from the state level, which means that appointed Karnataka executives will continue to have absolute power over the decision-making process for the city. “A further issue is that state government has been unstable,” Janaagraha explained.

But voting is just one of the many issues that Janaagraha is addressing in the city of Bangalore. Traffic and urban planning are also foci of the organization. “We use what we like to call a systems approach,” a representative from the traffic team explained. The systems approach is basically a suite of strategies which, together, are hoped to address a given issue more effectively.

Some traffic-related examples of the “systems approach” are the encouragement of local citizen groups to participate in relevant legislation (bottom up), coupled with policy recommendations that take a regional perspective (top down). Janaagraha is recognizing that Bangalore traffic is the result of inefficiencies at both the microscopic (like a poorly designed intersection) and the macroscopic (like the layout of regional transport systems) levels . Janaagraha also produces a children’s book titled “Me and My City,” to help the city’s young people understand issues of urban transport and how the macroscopic geography of their city relates to day-to-day life.

Janaagraha is fighting for more transparency in government, pushing for a publicly available record of budgets and expenditures for publicly funded projects. Such a strategy would help to plug leaks in the system, such as the “March Rush,” familiar in one form or another to western publicly funded organizations as well – a scramble to spend the entirety of the budget before the powers that be re-examine the organization and decide the next period’s funding.

Another example of the Janaagraha systems approach is the establishment and publication of benchmarks for public projects and services such as electricity, water, and transportation for use by both the government and the populous in placing their public services development in a more global context. “Without a system of benchmarks, many officials will refuse to disclose data indicating their own substandard public services.” These benchmarks are quantitative, using a system of matrices and linear transformations to quantify and weigh various conditions. The results of the benchmarking studies are also made available at no charge to the public, obscuring only the parts of the studies that present national security risks.

Janaagraha also houses a non-profit consulting group, which provides pro bono consulting and technical assistance for public projects. This team concentrates on urban infrastructure and transport consulting, which they describe as “anything that affects the mobility of people.” Bangalore is about 8% roads. As Janaagraha explained to AsiaWheeling, studies indicate that a city of the same size and type is best served by surface area of 20%-25% covered by roads. This is one of the main reasons for the traffic problems in the city. So streamlining bottlenecks such as mergers and intersections is extremely important. And Janaagraha has been doing plenty of it: 28 projects in totality over the last two years. I was particularly interested to hear that one of the fellows, now hard at work re-designing Bangalore, was once doing the same thing not far from my home in Iowa City, Iowa.

Well, dear reader, as far as your humble correspondents can tell, here is a real-world organization where idealistic approaches to urban reform are being coupled with passion and smart management to implement real change in a part of the world where it is no easy task