with Cara Lopez Lee, author of They Only Eat Their Husbands, a memoir of adventure in Alaska & around the world
The thing that has excited me most about the controversy over the Transportation Security Administration’s new enhanced screening is that it has found people on both ends of the political spectrum agreeing on something. It turns out a lot of people, liberal or conservative, don’t want the TSA looking at or fondling their naughty bits.
“In Pattaya, it is hookers. Here, it is treks,” a stranger said to me in a restaurant in Chiang Mai, Thailand. It was an unusual pick-up line, but factually right on the money. Just as the beach-town of Pattaya was known for prostitution, the mountain town of Chiang Mai had become a mecca for travelers who want to “trek” through the hill tribe villages of northern Thailand. Trekkers claim to want to get a feel for indigenous people like the Hmong, Karen and Mien by sleeping in villages they get to by foot, elephant and raft.
I was one of them.
I was walking through a ghost town with no ghosts. Maybe that’s why it never whispered any clear answers. Ancient Akrotiri was a city of 30-thousand souls, until they vanished, every last one of them.
“It’s not contagious,” I repeated, as friends backed away from me in horror.
I couldn’t resist telling a travel tale involving skin-tunneling parasites. In turn, my friends couldn’t resist shifting back just a hair, although they insisted they understood there was no chance of worms leaping from my body to theirs. It didn’t help to explain that I wasn’t even sure I had schistosomiasis.
“Schi-what?”
