Road Tripper's topics - tribe.net

Getting ready to travel

maroonbaboon — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 01:47:05 GMT

leaving for Humboldt on the 22nd. Anyone here interested in hearing about it?

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Great buses available from honest activist, buses helping the Poor Fight Imperialism

patrick — Sat, 20 May 2006 16:02:23 GMT

I'm a travellin' fool, mostly to the third world. Lotsa time in Central America, the Caribbean, and SE Asia.
I also travel by my buses, I have 27 or them, so if you need a bus, parts, or just advice, just yell

I'm still new to this tribe thing, but I am a nice person, and have the best buses in the world. I use school buses to haul medical and material aid to some of poorest places in the world (Haiti, Chiapas Mexico, El Salvador, and Nicaragua) and buy and sell them, and bus parts to support the project. I take every penny i make and convert it directly back into school supplies, medical supplies, tools, generators, and whatever the folks ask for specifically, (no junk, no used clothing) and then drive it down in person (except Haiti, that's $6000 thru the Panama Canal. Ouch)

I sell buses to folks that are 100% functioning in every way when they leave my hands, and also give any body thirty days to return the bus if unsatisfied. Nobody ever has, but it's OK, I'll just sell it to somebody else. you will also get a lifetime of free advice before and after you get a bus from me, I'm avaiable 7 days a week within reason, and after having dismantled 14 buses, and owning about 60,I am pretty knowledgable about their inner workings. Also got lots of good used bus parts, at the best price anywhere in the US. Ii have no overhead, just my Mazda mini truck and some tools.

I have a website (below) so you can check out my work. have a good one

Patrick Young
1970 Gillig Splendocruiser
Spicer 5 speed --fully manual
Powered by 8V79.5 CAT NA
4 wheel drive (the back ones)
Aka
the Wheelchair Project
Fresno, CA
http://www.fresnoalliance.com/wheelchairproject
(559) 251-3814 (559) 244-1042
WheelchairBusProject@yahoo.com

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boat travel

monamoore — Sat, 14 Jan 2006 04:27:36 GMT

"Traveling the hippy trail" in Asia involves having a year or two to meander through countries on the suggestions of fellow travelers. You might be sitting in some cafe or at a hotel bar and someone comes along and they have a grand story to tell. How they traveled upriver in Kalimantan to a long house where JOJO put them up for 5 cents US a day. Next thing you know you are off; heading to Kalimantan all because some crazy Australian said it was an amazing ride.
I had been on this ride for 4 months. I was living in an illegal hotel in Singapore that a Canadian woman had told me about in Candi Dasar, Bali. These hotels are basically huge apartment buildings, which have been abandoned. Some kids take over a floor put a bunch of mattresses on the ground and charge travelers little to no money to stay. I had been there a month and my money was running out. I had a return ticket from Bangkok. I knew I had to get to Thailand. I made friends with two Singaporeans and a mutt of a 16-year-old (Cambodian, Indonesian and Chinese) trollop. They invited me to live with them in the projects, "Suicide Apartments" as they lovingly called them. This was due to the apartments possessing the highest rate of suicide in Southeast Asia. There I was living with the kids, their apartment was one big room about 15 by 20 feet. The room was one of 50 on a floor in a building about 15 stories high. Each apartment held a family. This meant uncles, aunts, grandmas, mom and dad with their kids. You could understand the suicide rate when you looked up at the building and saw the skyline was filled with 50 more of exactly the same. The math of people filled my mind and it dwarfed the overpopulation I had grown up with in NYC. It reminded me of when I was a little girl in New York. I had to be younger than 6 years old and I remember standing on the corner of 86th and West End Ave and the night was coming on. I could see the lights in all the windows in the buildings. I thought each light meant there was a person inside and each person had as much going on inside of their brain as me. I looked around at all the buildings with all the windows and all the lights on and it blew my little mind to think about how much thinking was going on. Then I figured no one could be thinking as much I was and dismissed the whole notion.
Back in Singapore, the mutt, I will call Shakti, because I can't recall her name anymore and it is more sensual. Which she deserves because she was love on two feet. Pure smooth carmel skin and shiny black hair, full lips and 16 with the mind of a 30 year old hustler. We became very good friends very fast. I am not sure why but we just understood each other. Shakti was modeling for photos and wanted to introduce me to her photographer. I went with her - she spoke to him at a separate table and they kept looking over to me- then he invited me to join them. He was a thin Chinese man with strange eyes. He told me he would be interested in photographing me and was prepared to pay me 20,000 Singapore $'s for the task. I sat and looked at them, he shifting in his chair, her bored and ready to go meet her next mark, wishing I would say yes so we would have more $ in the house. All I could think about was how my mom would think if she had a look at her daughter in some nude pictures so I said to him " no thanks I don't think my mom would appreciate your aesthetics" and we were off again. This time we met some old German guy at a fancy hotel. He worked at the embassy. He was not to happy to see me, as he bought us drinks and realized Shakti nor I were going to join him upstairs.
So I passed on a life of prostitution and nudy pics in Singapore and started to work the front desk at the illegal hotel I had once stayed in. One day a man came in, he had no bags his hair was bleached out white from the sun and it hung over his ears. His skin was red and leathered from sun so it made his smile a glowing white ”, he spoke with a heavy Australian accent and asked me "Can I put this notice up here." He was referring to a large bulletin board covered with withered pieces of paper with ancient messages from travelers left for others; messages like "Sally, we waited for as long as we could - went to Chang Mai. See you down the road." or " if anyone finds my mind please leave it at the front desk." I said sure and asked him what was on the post. He said he was looking to crew a boat to sail to Phuket, Thailand. I jumped - really? I took the job there on the spot. Thinking in my mind I would be hitting the high seas latter that week. It was not so. I moved on to a small island off the coast of Singapore. When I lived in Suicide Apartments I thought I was straying off the hippy trail, on the island I knew I was off it. We took a small fishing boat to the island then a dirt road a few miles to a beat down dock. It was all very unofficial and far from the view of the harbormaster. This is where smugglers thrived and made their entrances into a country, where you could get put in jail if you spat on a sidewalk in the wrong part of town. Singapore had a really weird two-faced life. It had once been “the port town” of Asia filled with all the accoutrements of being “the port town”. Mainly hookers, drugs and non- stop partying. Then the police force and government cleaned the red light district out. The whores, thieves, drug dealers scattered but they were still here. The sailors still came looking for them. So the city looked clean but you could feel the stifled insanity in people and the streets. This was a town meant to rage and howl and it was whimpering. On the way to the boat David Fox, the ships captain, introduced me to his new crew: a British man named John and a French Canadian man name Jean-Claude(or JC). David explained the boat we were bringing To Phuket was a 30’ sloop made of Fero cement. “Cement?” I asked. When we stood on the dock and looked at the boat; it looked like a floating piece of New York City sidewalk. It was grey and rough and there were holes in the side where you could see the steel frame. David told us the boat had been sitting in the water for some 20 years and had probably been motored down from Vietnam carrying guns after the war. It had been abandoned, David picked it up for near to nothing. John looked at me and raised his eyebrows as he said ”greeaat” Captain Dave ignored him and continued “the amazing thing about this boat was that it is made from a cement that has air in it – which makes it heavy, about 30 ton, but the boat is wider and shallow like a racing boat so it will really move once we get a wind.”
“Have you sailed it?” I asked
“No.”
“Hmmmm…well cool.”
Silence.
David grabs our bags and we board. It was amazing the amount of space that was inside- it was living inside a New York City sidewalk, but loft like inside. I was just happy to be on the water again. I had been sailing and racing boats since I was a kid and the sea was like home.
We started to work on the boat in the next few weeks. The boys were not as pleased to be on board as I was and soon asked if they could go back to town for a few days. I stayed much to Captain Dave’s pleasure as he decided I was to be the first mate. The boys were glad for this. We worked on the boat and it was time to register her with a name and let the Harbor Master know she existed and would be hitting the open waters soon. David started saying names out loud to me one day as I mixed up the epoxy that I was using to patch a 10” hole on the bow. “ How about sea-men” he chuckled like a little boy saying something naughty. I looked at Jean Claude and rolled my eyes “How about cment.” I responded; they both looked at me then at each other. “That’s fuckin' geeenius,” David said JC agreed and so it was Cment. One day I was drawing a picture from a character on a blanket that David had on board. It was a blanket he had picked up in Timor, Indonesia and it had a weird alien looking creature on it. I started to draw this figure making it my own. David came up on me and asked if I would paint the name of the boat on bow and stern. I told him I would do it but I wanted to do so in a graffiti style, because the boat reminded me of New York. I also asked if I could make a stencil of my drawing and put it on as well. He agreed, I asked for three colors of paint. Red, yellow and black, because David had taught me these were the colors of the aboriginal flag.
I set about painting the boat, with the graffiti style, Cment blazed across the bow and stern. The little stencil of this alien like figure danced along side, I called the figure the aboindoalien, due to it’s roots in the Indonesian blanket, the colors of the aboriginal flag and it’s alien like appearance. One day we were working on the boat the boys were back on board and David said, we were ready, he wanted to take her out that day to see how she sailed. We got ready and set out off the East coast of the peninsula. The thing you need to know about cment and this maiden voyage is that she had no radio, it was the 1987 so there was no digital radar or navigational systems, it was a compass the wind and a motor. We left without even checking out with the harbormaster. The only one who knew we were gone was us and maybe a Chinese fisherman.
Cment motors out and we raise the sails. The wind is good and strong and we are moving. There is nothing more invigorating then to work on a boat, have no idea if it will sail, then be willing to set out on the sea and see her go. We were out for about 4 hours and then it started to get dark, not in a nighttime kinda darkness but in a storm kinda darkness. David started to smile, “ Now we are really going to see what this baby can do.” There are many different storms you encounter on the sea. There are light rains, heavy winds, heavy rains. And then there is something Captain Dave referred to as a “Sumatran”
Which is a little mini hurricane that comes up quick of the coast of Sumatra and has a quiet eye in the center. SO if you get caught in it you know it is going to hit again after a period of quiet, but constant wind. So into the Sumatran we sail. The wind was huge and we dropped the sails and fired up the motor. Everyone is in raincoats and the waves start to pitch the boat. The storm set in and it poured, the waves rising some 6’ above the boat. The ship is thrown up and down. It was one of the most violent storms I had ever been in and I looked at the captain, he was very intense, the smile had fallen from his face and was focused at the compass and the horizon. The rest of the crew huddled inside. I sat on deck, I watched the waves and I thought about the lack of radio, how no one in the world knew where we were, and I felt for the first time in my life that I could be wiped of the planet and no one would know and I realized at that moment how insignificant one life can be. Especially how vulnerable my life really was. When you are 20 years old and feel invincible this is a very new and very big idea. Then there was Captain David standing strong by the wheel, not afraid and willing to take on the storm and anything the sea had to offer. I admired him and I wanted this kind of life. That was why I was there. The storm tested Cment that night. We motored back in to the little island of the coast of Singapore. “She’s ready I reckon, we’ll find one more crew and be off at the end of the week.” So I was off to town to say my goodbyes. I told my friends from Suicide apartments I was leaving. They knew a local kid who wanted to go so he joined us. He had never sailed and it was a risk but David seemed keen on taking what he could get. He wanted to sail straight through; no stopping, except for fuel and some fresh food. 10 days up the Malacca Straits to Phuket. I spent my last night in town and called my dad to tell him what I was doing.
Ring ring..”hello..
Hey dad it Alexandra.
…Young lady do you know it is 4am…
uuuum no dad sorry I ….um its 10am here…I uhhh just wanted you to know we are sailing up the Malacca straights tomorrow to Phuket. I wanted to let you know I am going to Thailand.
I had a knack for calling my Dad at all hours of the night. Part of being young and oblivious to anyone but me I guess. I think maybe a part of me wanted him to know where I was. For anyone to know just in case, you know, maybe something happened.
Wide awake now my Dad gets out of bed and it’s 4am in New York City and he is waiting for the Times to get delivered. He makes his coffee and sits there till the thunk at the door comes, he goes to the door and opens the paper. The headline reads:

PIRATES ON THE MALACA STAIGHTS

The end.

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music

MissKate — Wed, 16 Feb 2005 02:50:56 GMT

what music do you like to listen to in the car?

fav. road trip cd?

compliation mix?

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welcome tell us about a trip you've taken

monamoore — Fri, 28 May 2004 00:00:54 GMT

where you been? where are you going ? show us pics?

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From San Fran to Eureka

Pfuni — Thu, 27 Jan 2005 20:47:32 GMT

Hey I am planning a RoadTrip towards Eureka, California. Has anyone suggestions on what I sould not, in any case, miss?

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what's the strangest trip you ever took - real or in your mind?

monamoore — Fri, 30 Jul 2004 04:20:50 GMT

my strangest trip started of at the Ronald McDonald Circus at the Duquoin Illinois State Fair . A girl friend and I were doing a circus tour - show jumping . We helped tear down a Carousel and that is when it all started - The carnies we were aiding were drunk and the driver of the semi was drunker than most and actually rolled out of the tractor and almost into a face plant - we helpped pack the ride up then got the hell out of Illinois going the oppisite direction of the carnival for fear of drunken carny semi drivers. On we went to St Louis to meet up with Circus Flora. Only to find the were parked in a Museum of Carousels ...round and round we go ...the circus was lovely - very family oriented and we felt we had found a new home - met some friendly folks - someone who was a member of the native American Indian Church and was in possesion of some very small fungus that had been blessed by a shaman. We were nearing the end of our stay knowing it was time to head home and get back to our real Jobs at the Big Apple Circus.. so bag of fungii in hand we set out to Brooklyn munching all the way - the ride was smooth and youy didn't really notice how much you were hallucinating until you entered a truck stop restroom and saw the stall walls vibrateing and blowing in a breeze from thhe hand dryers. Onward to Brooklyn we arrive and walk into the tent on a hot summer day - there are people rehearsing the new show in the ring acrobats bobbing up and downwith ribbons inthere hands that are all streaming from the toof of the tent - we both blink as we can not believe they are mimicing a carousel and around and around we go ... home at last - I turn to an old friend and say can you hold onto this for me. a brown paper bag cluthed between his hands he looks inside to find half a pound of tiny little mushrooms...yum

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Road Trips anyone?

Richard — Tue, 13 Jul 2004 22:49:31 GMT

I have a lot of driving experience, looking for other travelers to hit the road with.

Currently seeking peoples to tour Michigan and surrounding Great Lakes areas.

Also seeking peoples for quick trips to California.

Anyone interested or need more info let me know.

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