As we steered our motorbikes along the left shoulder of traffic-choked East Chaofa Road on a bright Saturday morning in central Phuket, I could feel the sun searing through hapless layers of 55 SPF sunscreen I’d slathered onto the back of my neck, my forearms, my feet, and my thighs. Tomorrow my skin would be scorched and beam with a dull, hazy-red glow; sunburned tourist red.

Wonderful.

Parched and hungry and roasting like skewers of barbecue meat on a charcoal grill, we pulled over for a short pit stop at 7-11 to relubricate and cool down the bikes. (A recent geographic survey determined there are three 7-11s per square mile for every one human in urban Thailand.)

Our journey to the west coast of Phuket began about an hour earlier in sleepy Panwa, on the southeastern tip of the island, where we were bunkering down for three nights in a slick, poolside junior suite at the Radisson Plaza Resort Phuket Panwa Beach, otherwise known as The Mouthful. The plan was to take East Chaofa Road south from Phuket Town, then cut across west on Rt. 4028. That would take us to Kata Beach, where we’d cool down with a refreshing swim in the sparkling Andaman Sea, then continue north on 4028 along the shore to Karon Beach and, out of morbid curiosity, Patong Beach.

That was the plan, anyway.

We fostered no utopian dreams of finding a paradisaical beach free of touts and tanning tourists on the west coast of Phuket. There’s a good reason why up until now–after two extended trips around Thailand, then nine months spent living in Bangkok–we still hadn’t visited the country’s largest and most-touristed island. We’d heard and read horror stories about overdeveloped, overpriced, overrated Phuket, and recoiled at the thought of joining the consumerist hordes and seeing a sad, unseemly side of a country we hold so dear. We’re no beach snobs, but there are plenty of options in Thailand and this place just wasn’t high on the list, at least not until we could afford, say, the secluded luxury of the five high-end resorts lining exclusive Bang Tao Beach.

Yes, our expectations were suitably grounded as we zoomed towards Kata, the road increasingly lined with shabby hotels, generic tourist shops, faux Thai restaurants, and crappy pubs the closer we got to the sea. Before we knew it, we found ourselves in the heart of Package Tourist Candyland.

The narrow streets, crammed with the same fast-food chains found in most Midwest US strip malls, teemed with painfully sunburned tourists stumbling over each other in tiny pairs of underwear passed off as bikinis and Speedos. I expected it to be unsightly here, but it was shocking just how far down the vacation shit hole it had fallen. We hadn’t even reached notoriously trashy Patong yet; this was Kata, which one guidebook claims “manages to maintain a laid-back character.”

Down an alleyway snaking off the main strip, we finally caught a glimpse of the beach and parked the bikes in a crowded restaurant parking lot. I gawked at the squandered paradise laid out before us on an arc of soiled white sand blanketed with beach chairs, umbrellas, and overweight sunbathers bobbing up and down in the water like donuts in coffee. This is what millions of people fly halfway across the world to Thailand for every year? We decided against elbowing our way through the masses and searching for one of the few tiny squares of unoccupied space available, skipped the swimming, and hopped back on the bikes. Next stop: Karon Beach.

We didn’t stop at Karon, though, except for gas from a roadside fill station, where the gas was pumped from a big, rusting drum with a handcrank by a Thai youth of about 13, maybe 14 years old. Already disillusioned and a bit disgusted by the rank stench of consumptive tourism all around us, we pressed on with the grim mission, due north for Patong.

If Kata is the Fifth circle of Beach Hell, Patong is the Ninth. I struggled to find any redemptive signs to cling to. Tourists crawled through this recklessly developed eyesore like ravenous ants on a rotting piece of meat; Thais seemed exhausted by the rigors and shifting, unreasonable demands and expectations of this ongoing foreigner onslaught. It was a scene as regrettable as it was repulsive, and no place to linger longer than necessary, which was all of about 10 minutes. We’d seen enough.

We backtracked down Rt. 4028, taking the fork left at Kata Beach and speeding east until the intersection with East Chaofa Road, where we took a left. The sun was still beating down–is this what it feels like to be microwaved?–as we raced towards Phuket Town, missing our turnoff onto unmarked Rt. 4023 once, twice, a third time, before we finally lucked onto a side road that wound through a residential area of the Panwa peninsula, and eventually dumped us back onto 4023.

The Radisson was a short ways down the road. The resort’s security guard pushed up the silver bar at the parking lot entrance as we pulled in: after the hedonistic carnage we’d experienced on the west coast, it felt like he was opening the gates of heaven.

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Happy 4th Birthday, Perceptive Travel! To celebrate, we’re giving away some neat stuff to a few lucky readers. To join the fray, leave a comment on our anniversary post.

I almost walked right past it, until the little historical plaque happened to catch my eye.

Today it’s called the Brown Building and is part of NYU (New York University) in Greenwich Village in lower Manhattan, but one hundred years ago tomorrow, March 25, 1911, it was the site of a horrific fire that led to changes in labor laws and public perceptions of immigrants.

When I craned my neck upwards that day, I saw the windows from which people had jumped. I stood on the very sidewalk where they’d landed. Some say that folks jumped knowing that their bodies could be more easily identified if they died that way instead of burning.

We’ll never know if they really thought that, but can you imagine making such a decision in the last minutes of your life?

It used to be called the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory building.  The young, mostly female workers there churned out “shirtwaists;” the Gibson Girl-style blouses that were fashionable at the time.

The cotton that the shirts were made from was incredibly flammable. It all happened so fast….

From a tribute on National Public Radio about tomorrow’s commemoration – A Somber Centennial for the Triangle Factory Fire:

“Most of the people who perished in the fire were Jewish or Italian-American women — and several of the victims had been in the U.S. for a very short time. Scores of workers jumped from the eighth and ninth floors of the 10-story building to their deaths. It was their only way to escape the flames — doors were locked to prevent theft, the building’s single fire escape collapsed, and after several trips to rescue workers, the elevator broke down.”

How many tourists, NYU students and other passersby walk past every day, scurrying with their books, preoccupied with their thoughts, never knowing what happened eight to ten floors up?

One eyewitness to the jumpers that day went on to become President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Secretary of Labor – Frances Perkins.

She never forgot what she’d seen; here’s her 1964 lecture at Cornell about Triangle.

I highly recommend David Von Drehle’s excellent book “Triangle: The Fire That Changed America“ and you can also see the Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition website and the Chalk! project (volunteers use chalk to inscribe the names of the dead in front of their former homes, all across New York City, on the anniversary of the fire.)

Can you hear the history of the buildings you see? Listen to the whispers….

(This week is Perceptive Travel Blog’s 4th birthday – hurray! – please leave a comment on our anniversary post, and you’ll be entered to win some fun prizes.)

(If you like this post, please consider subscribing to the blog via RSS feed or by email – the email signup box is at the top of the right sidebar near the Search box. Thanks!)

Across the world this week, writers are letting you in on their favorite things about New Zealand, as the people of that country work to recover from the earthquake Christchurch and invite you to visit. One of my favorite things about New Zealand is the music, and I’ve a particular song ringing in my mind.

When you go to a music festival or a pub night anywhere in New Zealand, one of the songs you’ll quite likely hear as the music comes to a close is called Just One More Chorus. It has a melody which invites singing along, and the opening verses readily evoke the spirit that evening’s end at musical gathering brings out.

The song was written by a Scotsman, Davy Steele. It was one of the last songs he wrote before illness took him, and he did not have the chance to record it himself. In the way songs travel, though, New Zealand based singer and songwriter Martin Curtis learned it while he was at a festival off the the far north of Scotland, on Orkney, and brought it back to his home in New Zealand. Though Curtis does not often record work by other musicians, he chose Just One More chorus as the closer of his album Gin & Raspberry. That album, released in 2008, is still ranked as one of the the best selling folk albums in New Zealand.

Curtis often writes about the history and the landscape of New Zealand. He has produced a dvd called Otago My Home, in which he explores places important to his music, and is at work in another featuring New Zealand wildlife and nature. Steele’s musical friends in Scotland recently gathered to create a tribute album to the songwriter, called Steele the Show. Steele’s son Jamie is among those who sing on Just One More Chorus on that album.

Davy Steele’s song has words which take a moment of sharing music deeper, as well.

No matter what accent, no matter what tongue
When people love singing they all sound as one
This gathering of singers will go on and on
Join in the chorus
Of just one more song…

Liz Lewis, whose posts you read here regularly, is a resident of Christchurch. So it is a song for you, Liz, and a nod as well to the #blog4NZ project, through which writers are raising awareness of New Zealand as a travel destination, with the purpose that travel to New Zealand is a way to help the country recover from the earthquake.

This is also Perceptive Travel’s birthday week — we are turning four years old, and you could be in with a chance to win several fine gifts for yourself. Leave a comment at this post from Sheila Scarborough to join in.

Much to my surprise, I was crying.

I had been attending a conference in Auckland, New Zealand, and slipped away in the late afternoon to see Karekare, a rather famous black sand beach on New Zealand’s north island. I raced gathering clouds and fading light as the car twisting through mounding green hills, the Waitakere Ranges. When I slipped off my shoes to walk towards the surf, the sky had become gray. In the shadow of a cliff, I waded across a shallow creek that had turned silvery in the light.

After walking for a few minutes, I picked a likely spot and spread my jacket out on the sand. I sat down, gazed out at the sea. The tide was low, and silver water turned forth white, and then pale turquoise, crashing up against a tan jagged rock that looked like an eroded pyramid.The scene was so beautiful, I could feel my brain scrambling to process it.

Which is when the tears began.

The mystically inclined might say I was sensing the history of the place: in 1825, one Maori tribe massacred another here.

I’m not, though, and as I rummaged in my pockets for a bit of tissue or a napkin, I just felt overwhelmed. It’s a major traveler’s cliché, to say that one is overcome with the beauty of place, “there are no words”, and so on. And yet, sitting there and watching a tiny band of blue sky slowly gaining on the clouds as the weather cleared, I was aware that it was the beauty of the place that had dealt my composure its final blow.

In the six weeks prior to sitting on the beach, I had been to China and back, Buenos Aires and back, and there I was in New Zealand. I had lost track of time zones, continents, miles.

It is said that when coping skills are exhausted, crying is automatic and instinctual. It is said that crying discharges tension in situations when an individual can’t properly cope. It is said that tears themselves release stress-related biotoxins, and that emotional tears contain different chemicals than the tears that come from cutting an onion.*

Catharsis: from the Greek, to cleanse, purge, purify. Catharsis cleanses the mind of suppressed emotions, through a release of emotions.

Cathartic crying: occurs “when an unresolved emotional distress is reawakened in properly distanced context, in which there is an appropriate balance of distress and security.”

The beauty of Karekare was cathartic. I was so startled by my tears that I almost started laughing.

This post is part of the Blog4NZ campaign, a post-earthquake effort to spark New Zealand’s travel industry. This one’s for you, Liz Lewis! Less shaky days ahead.

Hey, it’s Perceptive Travel’s fourth anniversary! Comment on Sheila’s post here and you’re eligible to win a bunch of fab prizes.

_{* References: Medline; Medline Plus,  Journal of Clinical and Social Psychology; and my very own copy of the Oxford English Dictionary.}

_{All photos by Alison Stein Wellner}

Happy Fourth Birthday to us at Perceptive Travel Blog!

Yes, on March 21, 2007 we launched this blog as part of the Perceptive Travel webzine.

Says editor Tim Leffel,

“Perceptive Travel set out to be a different kind of webzine, one that ignored ‘the rules’ of online publishing and put out quality narrative writing by creative book authors. In turn I wanted the blog to be different too: instead of joining the sea of top-10 list posts, ‘best beaches,’ and other disposable travel writing fare, we set out to focus on quirky places and stories that you wouldn’t find anywhere else. I think we’ve succeeded and thankfully, over 1,800 RSS subscribers agree.”

From the jumble of Don Quijote stores in Japan, to space geekery in New Mexico, to finding silver linings in Oslo, Norway, we continue to cover the globe with an eye for the striking, the unusual and the thought-provoking.

I still remember Tim’s call for contributors in early 2007 on the Travelwriters.com BBS; he said that among other qualifications, he was looking for the sorts of people who had blogging experience but who also had piles of books-in-progress on their nightstand.

After a look over at my own growning nightstand full of books at varying stages of reading progress, I thought, “Wow, maybe he means someone like me….” After a brief exchange of emails and sending links to my work, I found myself writing for the blog along with Antonia Malchik in New York (we call her Nia) and Steve Davey in the UK. I’d never met either in person but it did not seem to matter – we chattered in the comments of each other’s posts and popped emails back and forth with thoughts and questions.

Circumstances changed, people came and went. Nia and Steve left to pursue other interests, and Liz, Alison and Brian came in, with Kerry and her musical insights as the most recent addition (did you catch her post on the Bahrain and Scotland musical connection?) Again, of all of my fellow authors I’ve only managed to briefly meet Alison and Tim in person, but it’s never mattered. We hear each other’s now-familiar voices both in the posts we create and our periodic conference calls on Skype, where we yammer away and wander off-topic until Tim good-naturedly herds us back in to do business.

It’s a special opportunity to be given the freedom  to write about what fascinates me, what nags at me and what makes me want to throw things, and no one ever says, “That’s too obscure” or “No one will care about that.”

Thanks to all of our readers for being with us, cheering and commenting along the way….and to all of you who thrilled at my post about seeing the world’s longest grain elevator in Hutchinson, Kansas….well, you’re in a particularly special club.

We’ll be doing two things this week – celebrating our anniversary with posts and giveaways, and supporting one of our own writers, Christchurch NZ resident Liz Lewis who has suffered through more than her fair share of earthquakes recently. The Blog for New Zealand project March 21-23 (Blog4NZ on Facebook and hashtag #Blog4NZ on Twitter) gives us a chance to talk about Liz’s country and show our support for her and her fellow Kiwis.

Blog anniversary giveaways include an “Austin pack” (two music compilation CDs and an Austin music lover’s T-shirt, courtesy the Austin Convention and Visitor’s Bureau,) a copy of Tim Leffel’s The World’s Cheapest Destinations guidebook or one of the short-sleeved versions of our comfy Perceptive Travel T-shirt from our Travel Tease store.

All you have to do to have a chance for one of our prizes is leave a comment on this post.  Yep, that’s it!

We very much appreciate your readership, your comments and your support over the past four years – may we all enjoy many more posts full of unique and fun travel stories.

UPDATE:  And by using Random.org to pick, the giveaway winners are….

**  Birthday Present One (the Austin pack) – pam

**  Birthday Present Two (Cheapest Destinations guide) – Dominique

**  Birthday Present Three (Perceptive Travel T-shirt) – Deb

We’ll be contacting the winners for mailing info, and THANK YOU so much to everyone who commented and sent us kind wishes.

ALSO: What a nice surprise: TripBase just selected us as one of their 2011 Environmental Blog award winners. Thanks for the recognition of our efforts to support sustainable travel!

(If you like this post, please consider subscribing to the blog via RSS feed or by email – the email signup box is at the top of the right sidebar near the Search box. Thanks!)