Front axle suspension overhaul

In the second installment of the E30 suspension upgrade story I continued with the front axle. Besides the Bilstein Sport shock absorbers and the H&R OE Sport springs whose counterparts I had already installed in the rear, I also decided to replace the control arms and the control arm rubber bushings. Only that being lazy and not wanting to deal with removing the tightly fit old bushing and squeezing in the new one (stories go that this is pretty tough) I decided to buy new “lollipops” with the bushings already installed. On bavauto.com a new bushing costs $12.95 while the whole bracket goes for $49.95. A waste of money, I know, but what the hell - it was Christmas. The next time I surely won’t be spending so lavishly; I’ll probably just upgrade to urethane or M3 bushings which are more expensive anyway. I also replaced all the self-locking nuts during this procedure, as the manual recommends.

Click on pictures to see the exact location of the parts and components referred in this article. Click here to see the full set of pictures.

Sensor wires

Start by loosening the wheel lug bolts, then jack up the front of the car and put it on jack stands. In the course of those few days of work I noticed that my floor jack has started to slip – it slowly loses pressure and gives way. That’s not a good sign; I need to replace it although it’s only a couple of years old – how long are those things supposed to last anyway? Besides, it’s still too low at maximum extension (13”); this is more noticeable in the front – with the car elevated there’s still barely any place to move around under it... Remove the front wheels. Disconnect the ABS sensor wire from the hook on the strut housing and unscrew the ABS sensor from the spindle (5mm hex wrench). On the left side, disconnect the brake lining sensor.

Brake caliper bolts

Remove the brake caliper mounting bolts and slide the caliper off the rotor. Attach the caliper to the car body to avoid damaging the flexible brake hose. Do not let the caliper hang on the hose. I used zip-ties for this job – there’s an adequately placed hook in the wheel cavity.

Caliper attached with zip-ties

Disconnect sway bar connecting link

Broken subframe tab!

Disconnect the stabilizer bar from the connecting link (the piece that’s attached to the control arm at the other end). At this moment I realized that the subframe tab that the sway bar supporting bracket was attached to was broken – my sway bar was kept in place by the two connecting links and by the right-side bracket – the subframe tab on the passenger’s side was still intact. I searched a little on the forums and it turned out that this is a common problem and the only solution, barring the replacement of the subframe, is welding. That sounds like a job for Boris, the Russian body mechanic that fixed my Jeep a few years back when I parked like an idiot and hit a garage pole.

Shock tower

Before disconnecting the lower ball-joints, give a tug to the nut on the top of the shock absorber rod, just enough to loosen it. This trick, courtesy of http://zoso.no-ip.org, will make the removal of the nut easier when the time comes (otherwise the rod would turn on its axis). Do not remove the top nut at this time – as long as the spring is not compressed and pressure is still exerted on the shock mount, this would be very dangerous. I sprinkled the gland nut with PB Blaster penetrating catalyst, just in case the threads had seized, and let it soak overnight.

Tie rod and control arm ball joints removed

Remove the tie-rod ball joint and the control arm ball joint from the strut housing. This was no walk in the park; the ball joint rods were stuck in their holes and I had to use pickle forks and a lot of force to release them. Maybe some PB blaster would have helped but I got so riled-up that I solved the problem by using a lot of muscle and I even hit the rods with a hammer until the darn things came out. I was gentle with the tie rod, which I was going to reuse, but I went berserk on the control arm joint. Despite all precautions I tore a cut in the tie rod protective rubber boot with the pickle fork. I see a tie-rod job in the future, just so that the suspension overhaul becomes complete...

Compress the spring

After disconnecting the three self-locking nuts from the shock tower I removed the strut, laid it on the floor and proceeded to compress the spring. By now, after using that compressor on eight springs (rear and front, 4 old, 4 new) I hate the thing passionately. It takes too much work, sweat and time to compress and release those coils. It bends and jams and I have to hit it sometimes with a mallet to re-adjust the clamping brackets. Luckily I don’t intend to do this again anytime soon. When the spring was compressed I removed the top rod nut, which was already loosened. I had to clamp the rod through the coils with a small pipe wrench while I unscrewed the nut. The original rubber shock absorber stop came out completely destroyed.

Removing the gland nut

Removing the gland nut that holds the shock in the strut housing was a different story... To do this by yourself you need enough leverage; you have to hold the strut in place while you clamp a pipe wrench around the gland nut and twist it. I didn’t have vise grips or any other locking mechanism and my left arm just wasn’t strong enough. Superpowers would have been welcome; by that time I was already beat tired. I remembered that someone on bimmerforums.com had suggested in an older thread that the strut be put back in the wheel during this procedure. That’s what I did, and I loosely attached it with two lug bolts. I stood on the wheel holding the strut housing under my foot while I clamped a large pipe wrench around the gland nut and turned – the nut came loose at the first tug. I lifted the bottom of the strut up a bit and hoisted it on some blocks of wood to let the oil drain out, and moved on to the control arms.

Disconnect the control arm from the frame

Disconnect the control arm rubber bushing bracket (aka "lollipop") from the frame. That’s no big deal; they’re held by two easily accessible bolts. The outer ball joint was already free, so that left the inner ball joint nut as the last point of attachment.

Sway bar removed

Control arm
inner ball joint nut

The inner ball joint nut was a major pain to remove. It’s not easily accessible and barely visible from under the car, so you have to feel your way around it. My socket didn’t fit in that place because there is a metal block behind the nut, too close to it to let the socket fit. Which left a the job to a regular wrench, but..., surprise-surprise, that’s a 22mm nut and I had no wrench that size (only the useless socket). During the subsequent late-evening trip to Schuck’s I found out that 22mm was not a standard size included in any of the metric wrench sets that were on the stands for sale. Luckily they sell one individually for a few bucks. Not a ratcheting wrench, a simple one, mind you. It took forever to unscrew that nut; loosening it cost me a good bruise on my hand when it finally popped. The passenger’s side is even more evil – the exhaust is in the way, and so is a small heat shield meant to protect the control arm rubber bushing from the heat of the exhaust. There is no place to wield a wrench in there, thus I ended up removing the stabilizer bar bracket and the heat shield to get a couple of inches of clearance so I could move the wrench. The nut finally gave up and surrendered. The disassembly phase was over.

Tighten the Bilstein gland nut

I began the installation phase by locking in the shocks inside the strut housings. Before you screw in the gland nut, don’t forget to place the white plastic ring that comes with the Bilsteins on the housing. This ring will hold the blue rubber boot that protects the piston rod from dust. To screw in the new gland nut I asked a friend to sit on the wheel and hold the strut in place under his foot while I operated the big pipe wrench. It dented the rim of the gland nut a bit but it doesn’t really matter. Legend has it that Bilstein sells a collar tool that fits on the gland nut, which you can attach a ratchet to. The tool doesn’t come with the shocks and you can’t order it from Bavarian Autosport. Someone posted the Bilstein part number 420017 for this thing, but I couldn’t find any reference to it on their web site catalog. So I used the wrench and it did just fine. I didn’t use any Loctite for this, I hope they hold well.

The tools of the trade

For the re-assembly of the strut I compressed the new H&R spring, and then I installed the new shock mount, reusing the rubber ring, the top spring retainer, and the washers, finally proceeding to tighten the top nut, with the compressor still attached. The tightening should be easy – you can put a 19mm wrench around the nut while you hold the hex-shaped top of the rod with an 8mm wrench. However due to a historic design accident, not limited to German engineering, the top rod nut goes inside the central cavity of the shock mount where it can't be easily reached. After some thinking and asking around I had to invent my own tool: a small 8mm socket, ¼” drive goes inside a large, deep 19mm socket, ½” drive. A 3”-long, ¼” drive extension is attached to the 8mm socket at one end, while the other end goes through the ½” opening of the larger socket and connects to a ratchet.

The magic strut tool in action

Holding the ratchet with one hand, clamp a pipe wrench around the 19mm socket and tighten. It’s still not perfect because of the need to use the pipe wrench, but there was no other practical alternative. I would have preferred a ¾” spark plug socket – the opening is exactly 19mm and fits the nut, while the top is hex-shaped and would fit a regular wrench. Unfortunately the top opening of those sockets is not large enough to allow for the ¼”-drive extension to pass through. Anyway, the resulting combination did the job perfectly. Some people have ridiculed it on the forums, proposing an impact wrench instead. That may have worked just as well but for three significant disadvantages: 1) Bilstein recommends against using impact wrenches with the top nut (big warning on the shock installation papers) 2) I would have had to mount the shock on the car with the spring compressor attached and remove the damn’ thing after the fact. There was not guarantee that the spring compressors were in the right position to make sure they would fit in the wheel cavity and would not be in the way instead. 3) Good impact wrenches cost big bucks and aren’t essential equipment for an amateur weekend mechanic.

Install the strut

I put the strut back in the car, supporting it with the jack; the assembly is quite heavy and doesn’t make it easier for you if you’re trying to hold it in position with one hand while attaching the three top nuts inside the engine bay with the other. You’ll need either a helper or the jack. Since asking the wife was out of the question... I attached the tie rod once the shock mounts were secured.

New lollipop

Next it was the turn of the new control arms. To squeeze the lollipop on the end of the arm I lubed the rubber hole (lubed, rubber, hole... get it?) with some dishwasher detergent (which would evaporate in a short time leaving the joint tight) and pushed. With some force the arm end slid through. At this point the Bentley tells you to attach the control arms back as soon as possible and lower the car on the floor so that the control arms can settle inside the new bushings. I took them at face value and the rest of the procedure was a sort of race against time (oh my god, omg, what would happen if I take too long???).

The control arm is in

The first thing was to tighten the inner ball joint nut, which was predictably a pain in the butt, as the removal had been. Then I screwed in the two bolts that hold the lollipops to the frame, and finally the outer ball joint nuts. As I was done with both arms I realized that the sway bar was still lying on the floor and it looked like it wouldn’t be the easiest thing to place it above the control arms. I tried unsuccessfully for a few minutes, but it was like trying to figure out a solution to Rubik’s cube – you’d figure out one side, but the other would come undone – then I gave up and detached one of the control arm bushing brackets. Sway bar in, lollipop tightened, brackets attached, calipers on, wheels on, go! I torqued all nuts to spec except for the two on the subframe. Those gave me enough grief just trying to fit them to their places – there was no way a torque wrench could have fit in there.

Timeline:

• Friday night – get a head start – jacked up car, removed wheels, detached sensors, removed brake calipers
• Saturday – removed struts, compressed springs, removed old shocks and springs, removed control arms and sway bar, installed new shocks in strut housings, went drinking
• Due to the last item on Saturday’s list, I woke up on Sunday with a hangover and no will to get dirty and do physical work, so I dragged it and made plans for the next day
• Monday I took the bus to work. That evening I bought parts for the makeshift strut tool, installed the shock mounts, and removed the spring compressors
• Tuesday evening – installed the struts, attached the tie rods
• Wednesday evening – control arms, done
.

I certainly learned a few things – I didn’t really have to change the control arms; the old ones looked good enough. But what the hell! ... In retrospect I bit more than an amateur like me could chew in one weekend. I’d recommend doing this in stages – one weekend the shocks and springs, the next the control arms, then the tie rods. Drinking on Saturday night may delay results. Even a professional mechanic, doing this on his own time, having to deal with wife and kids and grocery shopping, might find this job too much for one straight shot.

Worn-out rubber bushing

The handling is much better now – adding to the improvements caused by the new rear suspension, there are a few noticeable changes. In curves the car always felt like it was going to keep moving ahead and the only thing that brought it to the course I was setting was the fact that it was still somehow attached to the wheels. Curves are now much more stable, the handling is reassuring. There was also a noticeable front vibration propagated through the steering column at about 55-60mph, which I ascribed to the worn-out control arm bushings. That vibration is now gone. Other than that I’m left with a car that’s slightly lowered, (a bit less than 1 inch), a lot of bruises and I still feel like I’ve been working out lifting dumbbells for three days straight.

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Replacing shock absorbers and coil springs on the rear axle

This is not a travel post, it's a car post.

In my crusade to fix, upgrade and polish the old piece of junk (1988 BMW 325) I finally decided to tackle the rear axle suspension, which had felt horribly loose for a while. Moreover I kept hearing squeaking and screeching noises coming from the left side of the back of the car while driving. Since my car is primarily a daily driver and will never see the track in its remaining days on earth I chose to upgrade the suspension with Bilstein Sport shock absorbers and H&R OE Sport springs. This combination is supposed to lower the car but not too much - about one inch - and the ride won’t become too harsh as it would be the case with stiffer lowering springs.

Parts and tools:

• Bilstein Sport shocks (rear)
• H&R OE Sport springs (rear)
• Shock mounts for the convertible model (sturdier design)
• Self-locking nuts for the shock mounts
• Shock mount gasket
• Reinforcement plates – didn’t fit
• Bunch of metric wrenches and sockets
• Floor jack and jack stands
• Blocks of wood tp put between the jack and body
• Working light

Click on images for better-resolution photos.

The rear wheel
before the procedure

Shocks, mounts, gaskets and reinforcement plates are from Bavarian Autosport. The springs came from a guy who runs a high-volume automotive store on eBay. He had the best price, including the shipping charges, but in retrospect he was a deceitful jerk since he had advertised his product as “in stock” but instead had to order it from H&R. Because of this delay the package arrived in Seattle right as the snow storm was settling in, and then got stuck in the local UPS service center for 12 days before it was finally delivered. But I digress.

Right side shock mount

Left side shock mount, damaged

Start by raising the back of the car and put it on jack stands, of course. Remove the wheels.

Partially remove the trim in the trunk to expose the shock mounts. Bending the trim is not an easy affair; it’s relatively rigid and hard to peel off and snap out of the grooves where it’s tucked in. That’s when I noticed that the right side shock mount had to be broken – there was a 2-3 millimeter gap between the upper cupped washer and the rubber piece. What do you know!

Remove shock mounting screw

Support the trailing arm

Disconnect the shock from its lower mount on the trailing arm. Not supported by the shock, the trailing arm will drop a couple of inches. Be sure to support it before removing the shock mounting screw; the Bentley indicates that the sudden jerk of the trailing arm may damage the CV joints. I forgot to support the left trailing arm when I disconnected the shock absorber and it dropped quite sharply. Fortunately it doesn’t seem to have broken anything, the car rolls fine now; the Bentley understandably errs on the side of caution. Of course, I can never be sure unless I inspect the joints. After disconnecting the shock I supported the trailing arm with the jack for most of the time, to avoid unnecessary pressure on the joints.

The old Sachs shock

Loosen the two self-locking nuts that hold the shock mount to the frame. Supporting the shock from below, remove the mounting nuts and then the shock. In my case, if there had been a gasket between the shock and the car frame it has long ago turned into dust.

Broken left side shock mount

The right shock absorber looked worn out yet not too damaged, but the left one was downright broken. There is a metal tube which sits in the middle of the hard rubber at the center of the mount, that the shock absorber’s piston rod slides through. That tube was completely disconnected from the surrounding rubber. No wonder I had been hearing those noises coming from the rear left side of the car while driving! And no wonder that each time I went over a sudden bump in the road (like when the asphalt/concrete plates aren’t properly aligned, and the end of the current one is a bit lower than the beginning of the next) the whole back of the car felt like it was going to fall off.

Lowered exhaust, supported with zip ties

Next, the spring had to be removed. This needed a little more work.

The Bentley says to disconnect and lower the rear part of the exhaust system from the brackets that support it, to allow for more room when the trailing arm is lowered. I did just that, but in retrospect I think this step didn’t help much. I supported the exhaust by hanging it with zip-ties from the upper brackets.

Final drive mounting nut and bracket

Disconnecting the final drive

Final drive lowered

Again, to make more room for the lowered trailing arm so that the spring can come out, I disconnected the final drive from its mount and pulled it down. It didn’t go too low and I didn’t want to force it. This didn’t seem to create any significant room for the trailing arm which was already lowered to the maximum anyway.

Disconnect the stabilizer bar link

Disconnect the stabilizer bar connecting link from the trailing arm. This seemed to lower the trailing arm a little bit more, but again, there was no significant help (the stabilizer bar is called “sway bar” by some).

The old stock spring
ready to be removed

At this point the Bentley leads you to believe that the spring can be simply removed by hand, but I realized that any attempt in that direction was hoplessly futile since I didn’t have the necessary superhuman powers to compress the spring by my bare hands. With the trailing arm lowered to the max the spring was still compressed and the ends of the spring were snug against the rubber mounts. Moreover the top and bottom spring supports have conical protrusions that fit inside the spring and secure it in position. There’s no way that spring was coming out on persuasion alone.

Spring with compressor on

I squeezed in my spring compressor, but this was no simple task. There isn’t enough space to easily wield a wrench in there. While one of the spring compressor rods can be attached on the outside of the spring inside the wheel cavity, thus offering better access, the other one has to go on the opposite side, and gets wedged between the axle and the exhaust (on the left side) making the task of tightening the compressor bolts extremely painful. It took quite a while and a lot of sweat.

New H&R Spring compressed

New and old springs side by side

After removing the old spring, I tried to put the new spring in without compression, thinking that maybe its shorter size would allow for it – but that initiative was doomed from the start as well, due to lack of superpowers. I compressed the H&R spring and installed it, after which - of course - I had to uncompress it in place, which takes an equally frustrating amount of time. Make no mistake: operating a spring compressor on mounted springs is hard work.

Done!

After the spring was finally in its cradle I installed the shock (reverse of removal). The two cupped washers on the old shock mount should be reused but everyone says the self-locking nuts should be used only once. I’m not sure why and didn’t bother investigating yet, so I got new nuts.

I had also ordered the reinforcement plates that were recommended by other people and by Bavauto. These metal plates are supposed to go inside the trunk between the body metal and the shock mount nuts, but they didn’t fit on my model. On one side of the body plate hole for the shock mount, the body plate has some sort of reinforcement bar which is about a quarter of an inch high. The shock reinforcement plate is too wide and goes over that bar; as a result, it doesn’t sit flat on the body and the lock nuts can’t be tightened against it. Useless!

Wheel after "surgery"

The right side went easier due to the absence of the exhaust and the experience that I had already gathered by working on the left side. Finally, the car was ready to have its wheels back on and go out for a drive. However, as I was tightening the left-side shock mount to spec using a torque wrench, one of the threaded bolts broke in half and popped out with the nut on it. So close to victory, so close to showing off, so close to dinner! Damn it! Despair! Frustration! I didn’t want to keep the car lying useless on jack stands until I got a new mount so I installed the old right-side mount instead, which seemed to be still usable. On Monday I called Bavauto and they offered to send me a replacement shock mount at no cost. Great customer service! I hope it doesn’t get caught in the next snow storm...

After working on the rear suspension all Saturday I was planning to tackle the front the next day. But when I woke up I was in so much pain after the previous day-long workout that I had to schedule the front axle adventure for the next weekend.

Working Time - about 8 hours, with breaks. With more experience and better organization (the right tools always at hand, more space in the garage, etc) this could take significantly shorther, even for an amateur.

Difficulty - technically not too challenging, but it involves a lot of physical work.

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Third world prices in America

No-nonsense prices!
Click photo to see slideshow
or here for all those veggies

When I was traveling through South America, seeing the ridiculously low prices of fruits and vegetables I ranted on this site about our own grocery stores back home and the exorbitant prices they charge us for the same stuff. The only possible explanation for this rip-off is that it’s not a rip-off at all: we are subjected to a first-world standard-of-living tax that generously flows into an altruistic aid program that subsidizes the mom-and-pop grocers of the third world. Right?

It turns out that it doesn't have to be this way; the first-world sucker tax is optional. Upon our return, Angela has been struck by a sudden, lasting attack of anal-retentiveness and decided that grocery shopping needs to be done by a meticulous plan which will result in significant savings. Thus, for the last few months we have been shopping at the “Asian” grocery markets in the International District. I mean “Asian” in the blatant “most people who work there look vaguely Chinese” way. In those nondescript stores along and behind Jackson Street you can find not only the familiar fruits and vegetables sold by the ubiquitous Fred Meyer, Safeway or QFC, but also others that may require an advanced course in exotic foods before you can figure out what to do with them. The quality is nothing to balk at but the prices are the best part – everything is much cheaper than at the mainstream chain grocery stores. You spend 10 bucks and go out with three full bags. I took some pictures of their convincing price tags – and these are winter prices; in summer, the numbers are half.

Cheap stuff for tightwads

Unless these guys get all their produce straight from China like Walmart or grow them in their basement closets under halogen light bulbs year-round they would have to buy from the same producers like the big stores. They charge lower prices and obviously manage to stay in business and survive the tough competition. This begs the question, why don’t the major stores sell at comparable prices? The answer is, beyond any economic theory bullshit, because they can. For a variety of reasons, the average white American doesn't shop in Chinatown. If you live in the suburbs you have no choice or you just don’t know better – the Asian groceries are confined to a 5-block stretch along Jackson Street, a small and not too interesting neighborhood south of downtown. However the backbone of the American nation, the soccer moms and baseball dads of Seattle, don’t shop in the I.D. because the place is obviously unclean, unhygienic, unsafe and full of foreigners with dreadful accents, who might as well be terrorists. That leaves the minorities, a handful of liberal hippies and the expert-level white people who – like me – have embraced ethnic diversity. Of course, only as long as it comes to cheap food.

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Google makes the world grow stupid

It's imaginary, just like your intelligence

It’s no surprise that a blog called “Run the Equator” gets the majority of its hits from people searching the web for something or other related to the Equator. I run a counter on this site which enables me to see how many people have reached it and where the clicks come from, within the limits of geographic IP address mapping. Don’t worry, the counter doesn’t tell me your name, phone number or email address, but it’s very good at measuring stupidity, and there’s no better dumbness-gauge than the words people use in web searches. Words? No, it’s entire phrases and personal questions that people ask Google these days.

The undeniable fact that Google has indexed and catalogued the entire world of online information has led certain of us to believe that the sum of human knowledge is at their fingertips and no effort is needed to retrieve it. Once upon a time it used to be that you needed to read the manual first in order to be able use a tool. If you wanted to get a book on a certain topic from the library, you had to know how to use the index cards or explain your concerns to the librarian, and later on, when you had the book in your hands you actually had to spend some time reading it to get to the information you were looking for. All this sounds pretty darn complicated, doesn’t it? Don’t worry, in the age of instant gratification all these time-wasting efforts have been made obsolete by web search. Who needs a brain when you’ve got Google?

You can get most of what you’re looking for to come willingly to your web browser, depending on your level of skill in manipulating search keywords, but no amount of search and indexing will redeem some of the lost souls who land accidentally on my blog. For their lack of common sense they deserve house arrest without access to the internet and an interdiction to procreate.

Most people get to my blog looking for something simple and objective, which can be expressed in simple queries: visas, information about a certain country or place I happen to have visited and blogged about, hostels, vaccines for the tropical world, travel information. These boring internet surfers seem to have read the manual and don’t expect the web to be able to cure AIDS and slice bread.

A few clueless dweebs, exhibiting a fair degree of anonymous honesty admit that they don’t know where or what this equator-thing is. Fair enough – in this day and age, operating a computer doesn’t require any level of formal education, like going to school. These guys seem to be struggling in a desperate quest for trivial knowledge. Unless they are 8 year-olds, they have already lost the battle and will soon land a job flipping burgers for the rest of their lives if they don’t already do so.

The frosting on the cake are those who have thrown all gray-matter from the skulls into the trash can and would rather be plugged into the Matrix than exercise their atrophied brains, the part of the population whose cortexes have been leveled with a clothes iron by the digital age. These guys ask Google the kind of questions you would ask of an oracle. One who has all the answers to all the riddles in the Universe, or at least to everything involving the Equator. Let’s take a look at the existential problems these monkeys are struggling with. Some questions require algorithmic answers, which reveals a certain complexity of the problem they are trying to tackle, but the mere fact that they ask the search question in raw, human form reveals their total lack of common sense with regard to technology and its limits. Some of them are merely stupid, others completely nonsensical, more appropriate to the prior category, many are just brilliant. The grammar belongs to them.

• do you have to pass the equator to get to Turkey
• what towns are on the equator
• countries which run through the equator
• what's the distance of istanbul from the equator
• India is as much a country as the Equator
• continents that doesn't run through the equator
• frostbite near the equator
• map of india with equator on it
• equator shit time lapse
• honduras location due to the equator
• map of thailand equator
• where does the equator run
• visa to equator
• what rivers run away from the equator
• ten countries along the equator that you fly along
• I travel around the world but always in a corner i can cross the equator but only only make one trip
• a list of all country the equator run through
• turkey spain or egypt what is closer to the equator
• lands lieng on the equator
• the capital of the country that crosses the equator
• india south of the equator
• why is the Equator famous

Those queries come from the activity logs of the last month only. Too bad I didn’t save the rest. I wanted to make a top-ten out of it but I can’t decide which one deserves the Darwin Award...

For all of you internet-indoctrinated morons, get an atlas! Google maps would do just fine.

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So you want to know what my favorite place is?

"What was your favorite place?"

How's that for an answer?

I get this question all the time and it irritates me like a knitting needle stuck in my ear. Sometimes I think you ask it just to annoy me – but you’d have to be too devious for that, so I’ll go with the more reasonable assumption: that you’re opening your mouth only to ask the most predictable question because you don’t have anything to say, really. It’s a stupid question. I’ve been to 26 countries during my year-long trip; there wasn’t a lot that they had in common except that I had to eat, shit and sleep wherever I went, and the other tourists annoyed me equally everywhere… but I hardly think that’s a solid basis for a top-ten rating.

I don’t ask you if you like steak more than ice cream. Or whether Scarlett Johansson is hotter than Angelina Jolie. Or whether you prefer beer or coffee. Those, along with the one you keep asking me are stupid questions and do not deserve to be answered. Whatever the answer may be it doesn’t communicate any relevant information and is not going to advance the conversation in any way. It’s just meaningless chatting for the sake of it.

There’s a gazillion of reasonable questions you could ask, that may lead to a funny and interesting conversation. Let me help you a bit:

• Where did you have the toughest communication experience?
• Where did you spend the most money?
• Where did you have the craziest binge-drinking night?
• Where was the best diving?
• Where did you smoke the most dope?
• Did you get laid anywhere?
• Did you have to go to the hospital anywhere?
• Did you ever get scammed by a con artist and fell for it?
• Did you get robbed anywhere?
• Did you get into a bar fight anywhere?
• Did you steal from anyone?
• Did you run naked out in the street anywhere?
• Where did you have the worst diarrhea?
• Where did you make the best friends?
• Where did you have the worst hotel room?
• What was your weirdest experience?
• Were you ever afraid for your life?

But no, you all prefer to ask me the same inane question, one that doesn’t even have a relevant answer to boot. Look, I liked all the countries I visited and I hated some of them at the same time – sometimes for the same reasons. You could figure this out on your own if you paused to think for a second before opening your mouth, but since you’re so narrow and you lack any spark of imagination you keep asking me what my favorite place was as if I were 16 and I had to have a favorite movie, a favorite band or a best friend.

I think before I speak!

I should throw the nearest wireless mouse at you when I hear that question, but I’m medicated well enough so I usually restrain myself. Instead, if I suspect that the person I’m talking to has a bit of a brain left and would be able to see the error of their ways with a bit of help or if I believe that the question was just a momentary lapse into stupidity on the part of an otherwise clever individual (don’t we all?) I’ll say that the countries I liked fall into two distinct categories: those that you fall in love with at first sight, as soon as you get off the plane - like South Africa or Greece or Spain - and those that have to grow on you, like India, Laos and Bolivia. Aside of this coarse classification each country strikes you by one or more dominant attributes that make it unique: it can be the picture-perfect beauty of nature, the ethereal strangeness of the landscape, the good time you had with people you met, the rotting garbage lying in the open, the permanent harassment you were subjected to, the beautiful wild animals, the breathtaking diving on the coral reef, the raging night-life, the hot topless girls on the beach, the soaring snow-capped mountains or the delicious exotic food. You may prefer one or the other in certain situations but no single one tops the rest; I’d have to just pick one out of my ass. Not that you would care. You want clichés? Here’s one for you: stop asking me to compare apples with pears!

Even if I had a favorite country… how would it advance your knowledge of the world if I told you anyway? Stop asking me dumb questions just to be nice. If you don’t have anything to say, just shut up. Man, I hate people.

You want a list? I got one! You order it, stop asking me.

• I loved Mexico for the soaring Mayan pyramids lost in the jungle and its cheap tacos. And because it was the first destination on our trip
• Going to Belize because going there was a childhood dream come true
• I loved Guatemala for Antigua’s beautiful ruined convents and Tikal’s army of howler monkeys who scared me to death at 4 in the morning
• I loved Honduras because the bunch of guitar-playing hippie divers I met on Roatan reminded me of another time in my life
• I loved Ecuador because that’s where my Spanish unlocked its brakes. And because I met Michael and Mor in the Galapagos
• I loved Peru for the crushing dignity of its Inca fortresses and for giving me enough diarrhea to fill a bath tub
• I loved Bolivia because it’s the underdog of South America and the Altiplano made me feel like I was on the moon
• Argentina filled my belly with the greatest steak on the planet and gave me wireless internet in every coffee shop
• South Africa had the bluest skies I’ve ever seen
• In Namibia I floundered to the on top of a giant red sand dune at sunrise and saw lions having sex
• In Botswana I followed fresh animal tracks through the savanna and saw a herd of elephants coming out of the fog
• Zambia made me famous for fifteen minutes and helped me earn $1000 in royalties
• In Malawi I kept looking for the other shore of the lake while I sipped cold beer
• Tanzania showed me a place that redeemed all ugliness in the world
• Kenya… well, I didn’t really visit Kenya but it still had the coolest song in the world
• Egypt crushed me under millennia of history and showed me that sometimes locals just want to talk to tourists without demanding money
• In Greece I realized that I could drink tap water again but I turned into a wino instead
• Italy lead me back to Rome, and for a day I was an all-powerful pasta-eating emperor. Maybe Caligula.
• Spain had scores of delicious tapas and smoky crowded bars and Gaudi and pretty girls everywhere and Robert and Eva
• Romania is still where I return when I want to remember the smell of hay and fresh snow and roasted pig-ears
• I almost had my fingers amputated by frostbite for taking my hands out of my mittens to take pictures in front of the Hungarian parliament
• In Turkey I shed a tear for the defunct Constantinople and then gorged myself with pide and baklava in Istanbul
• India overwhelmed me with unusual sensations, crushed me with its mass of humanity and got me some peace of mind, if only just for a short time...
• Thailand explained to me what the song “One Night in Bangkok” was all about
• I loved Cambodia because you cannot believe that a place like Angkor Wat really exists until you see it
• In Laos I wanted to become a bearded, balding, homeless dope-head just to forget that I had to return home and look for a job...

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An open-ended list of things that pissed me off around the world (and still do)

I was going to call this one “Ten things that pissed me off around the world” but once I began to think about all the times I was annoyed, pissed off or wished I had a shotgun to blast someone out of their idiotic useless existence during the course of this trip I couldn’t stop counting and soon I used all the fingers of my two hands and took my socks off so I can start counting using my toes. Hence the current title.

• 1. White people waiting for a table in front of a restaurant in Cuzco.

  Why the hell would you want to stay in line for lunch with twenty other idiots wearing The North Face jackets at a place that has burgers, roast-beef sandwiches and steak fries at 3400 meters altitude in Peru? Because you’re too much of a coward to try to experience any of the local food in a city that has a million restaurants and because it looks very much like any joint you would find in your pathetic town back home, so it makes you feel safe. If you miss your own corner deli and their stinky pastrami so much, stay home.
  
  

• 2. Public service employees begging for a handout like they deserve it.

  This asshole day-guard walks up to me in the museum of Coptic Christian history in Cairo and asks me “You Christian?” “Yes” (I’m not but in Egypt you’re either Muslim or Christian, there’s no such thing as an atheist) “Me too, see?” (Shows me a cross. Grins. As if now we’re buddies) “I have 10 children. Give me money.” He’s following me through the building so I give him a 1-pound note to shake him off. He looks at me like I did him wrong “Only 1 pound? More! 10 children!” and stretches his hand again. Piss off. I took the pound note back and left him there. Asshole. If you really have 10 children and can’t care for them you should have gotten a vasectomy.
  
  

• 3. Listening to the same idiotic questions from other tourists you meet.

  Where did you come from? Where are you going next? Did you like X? Are you visiting Z? Shut up. It’s all the same. I didn’t talk to you, so stop talking to me because it’s obvious you don’t have anything interesting to say. Do something useful and leave me alone.
  
  

• 4. Dishonest hotel managers.

  So this place is a shithole and you still want me to pay in advance for four nights? And you told me 40 Euros on the phone and now it’s 50? How the hell did you get into Lonely Planet anyway? Their editors must be on crack.
  
  

• 5. Inane “must see” places that are just boring pieces of junk.

  If the top attraction in the city is the public library that exhibits some gorgeous murals from a celebrated local artist, just spare yourself the effort and time and don’t go there. Lonely Planet is on crack.
  
  

• 6. Imbeciles who show up early for everything.

  On our 40-day African safari our guide would announce every evening the schedule for the next day: “tomorrow morning, the wake up call is at 6:30, breakfast at 7, we leave at 7:45″. Each morning, as I woke up at 6:30, the other white people had already packed their tents. By 7, they were done with breakfast and were idling around casting passive-aggressive looks of disapproval at me. Bite me! I’m not going to bend to peer-pressure, I need my beauty sleep.
  
  

• 7. Yes, we have hot water. Yes we leave at 10am.

  Everyone lies. You’re just a big fat wallet on legs. Get used with it or bring a shotgun.
  
  

• 8. Rickshaw drivers in Asia.

  When you take a ride to town coming from the station with your backpack the driver always knows a great hotel, just around the corner – usually a shithole that gives them commission for every clueless guy they drop at their door. Those assholes all have an incurable ear disease – they can’t hear the word “no”. Maybe a jackhammer would help.
  
  

• 9. White people trying too hard to embrace local traditions.

  During the water festival in Chiang Mai everyone gets wet and everyone throws water about and nobody gets mad. But when you see a group made exclusively of tourists armed with buckets and water pistols, dousing every open-back taxi truck that passes - a day after the festival has officially ended - showing them the finger is not only ok, it becomes mandatory.
  
  

• 10. Paying 2 Euros for plain coffee.

  Seriously. Europeans are crazy. They should all grow a pair and boycott Starbucks but I’m afraid it’s too late, they’re hooked.
  
  

• 11. Local travel agencies that charge a heavy markup for stuff that you can get for less around the corner.

  And the morons who do not do their homework and keep paying, perpetuating the scams.
  
  

• 12. Fat balding Anglo sex-tourists trying to make dinner conversation with Thai prostitutes who don’t give a shit.

  You know who you are. And I stared and snickered at every single one of you just to make you feel even more self-conscious, defeated and worthless than you are.
  
  

• 13. Paying too much for poor service because you have no choice

  Getting on the island… cheap. Getting off the island… not so cheap. What are you going to do? Ask to speak with the manager?
  
  

• 14. Douchebags who rave about how awesome and spiritual India is.

  All you little shits who act elated, telling everyone who’s within earshot that “India is, like, soooo awesome, so spiritual, I wish I never had to leave, this is the best place ever, man! You don’t understand!” like you are the first person in the universe to ever get laid - go live in the slums on a less than a dollar a day like 90% of India’s population, without bottled water, internet and your stupid iPod, go sell paan or drive a rickshaw for a living and then come and proclaim your epiphany to the world. You are an idiot and nobody cares about your pseudo-intellectual bullshit and your condescending “enlightened” attitude.
  
  

• 15. Retarded teenagers checking their Facebook “walls”.

  You absolutely have to stay in touch or else your friends will stop loving you. And make sure you use all caps and poor grammar, it makes you look smart. “I’M IN THAILND LOL AND ITS SO KEWL WE HAD DA BEST PARTY YOUR NOT GOING TO BELIEV WHN U C THE PICTRES!!!!1” Seriously… better free that bandwidth for someone who has more important things to do, like uploading an angry blog that nobody reads!
  
  

• 16. Horrible European tippers.

  I don’t tip more than the norm (whose norm? mine!) because I think that some professions are already making lots of undeserved money. Take bartenders, for example: one dollar a drink? Are you kidding me!? But even I wanted to take a shotgun at the Euro-dipshits who dropped only 10 dollars in the tipping pot for the army of porters who, for four days in a row, had set up our tents, cooked our meals and transported all the heavy equipment on their backs running barefoot at lightning speed while we were trudging and sweating our way on the Inca trail for the sake of our crusty pathetic egos. Israelis, Aussies and Kiwis included at a discount.
  
  

• 17. Losers who visit the Coliseum and have no idea where they are.

  Who is this guy Octavian Augustus? Look, that statue is naked! (chuckle) Who built all these ruins? Was it the Romans? What's the capital of Rome? Not that anyone cares, but these people make us look like a nation of uncultured idiots and help perpetuate the stereotype that all Americans are stupid and they only know how to make war on other countries. Amen!
  
  

• 18. Jackasses on group tours, who show too much skin in public in Muslim countries.

  Nobody, anywhere, needs to see your lard bulging under your belly-shirt. If you happen to be hot you’ll get more attention than you want for that deep cleavage and the short skirt. Maybe some of those pious, innocent men will get into accidents turning their heads because of you. The traffic will be jammed for hours and I’ll be stuck in a cab without air conditioning, listening to bad music, until they dig the bodies out and remove the rubble. All because you showed cleavage. You monster!
  
  

• 19. Everyone else.

  Stay home. I hate people.
  
  

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Almost Famous

Down the drain

A few months after we left Africa, a blogger from Spain who maintains a popular site where he collects bits of information about interesting and strange places and events wrote an article about the adrenaline-junkies messing around in Devil’s Pool, the natural swimming pool at the edge of Victoria Falls, which we had visited in September. He assembled a few photos and videos off the internet and linked them to the original sources. Within days, my flickr picture set on Victoria Falls was getting thousands of views. I tracked the clicks back to the referring site, to find out to whom I owed this unexpected surge in interest – for once the view count of my travel pictures of exotic places was surpassing that of my older photos of drunk girls kissing in dark and noisy clubs.

Rich and famous... and beautiful!

By April, the story was making the rounds on the internet and a few news agencies caught wind of it. Devil’s Pool hasn’t been discovered yesterday; in fact tourists have been going there for a quick adrenaline-loaded swim for decades. But it looks like every generation needs to be reminded of the same things over and over. There’s just too much information floating around for us to be aware of; knowledge that isn’t in your face daily (and even that) is forgotten fast – how else would you explain the avalanche of movie remakes these days? Hollywood began by reissuing and updating movies from the forties, which were understandably unknown to most of the population currently living on Earth, but with each revamping project they are getting closer and closer the movies of our times – money-making entertainment machine has married attention-deficit disorder and their children are the placebo soothing pills of our anxieties. Soon they’ll be remaking next year’s movies today… but I digress…

A British online news agency contacted me on flickr and asked for permission to use my pictures – in exchange for publishing credit and compensation. I gladly agreed – who doesn’t want to be famous on the internet? – and they wrote a short article that appeared in the online versions of a few British newspapers. The reporter asked me for some quotes about my experience, which he wanted to use in the article. Among others, here’s what I said; this quote was reproduced without much journalistic adjustment:

“Being in Devil's pool is a serious adrenaline rush for the first few minutes. If you jump (you can also get in gently) it adds up to the excitement. The thought that you may get sucked away from the relatively calm waters of the pool and down the foamy hell into the pit makes you giddy with apprehension - although you have to stray far out quite a bit for that to happen. It's great fun - some people enjoy it quietly, swimming, looking, thinking, while others keep screaming to no end.”

I also told the reporter that we chose to go swimming in Devil’s Pool instead of trying bungee jumping because there would be plenty of opportunities for bungee in other places, but swimming at the edge of a 360-feet waterfall is not something you can do anywhere and anytime. That was quoted as “[…] said it was better than bungee jumping”. Well, damn you reporters! I have never jumped anyway, so I wouldn’t know.

Within days I also gave publishing rights to BBC Brazil and to Ripley’s Believe It Or Not. Before I could say “waterfall” my quote and pictures were syndicated in online newspapers and magazines around the world, translated from English into Portuguese, Polish, Turkish, hell knows what else, and even Romanian. They also made it into a printed version of the US entertainment magazine “In Touch” – which I am considering suing for millions owed to me in royalties. Wouldn’t you?

OMG! A child! Save him!
This guy had his share of online bashing

The readers’ comments online were mixed – half of the people adhered to the “this is soooo cool, I want to do it too” opinion, the other half supported the “these people are idiots, they should put themselves out of the gene pool” position. An even more divisive discussion went on about the people who had their children in Devil’s Pool with them: one group (consisting, of course, of people who have never been to Victoria Falls) kept screaming bloody murder “I can’t believe these idiots can be so reckless to take their children in the pool with them and expose them to such danger,” to which the second group would reply: “get a life, these children are obviously not in danger; if it were up to you, the social services would rule everybody’s lives and children would go to the playground swathed in bubble wrap.”

So, uhm… I’m famous! Do you want to hang out with me?

Note: not all photos featured in the articles listed below are mine. While all those news items quote my words and mention my name, the photos come from various sources. In some case, other Victoria Falls pictures have even been mistakenly attributed to me.
Some of the links below may become dead over time. The internet moves fast…

Article Links:

UK

South West News Service
Daily Mail Online
Daily Mirror
Metro Online
Times Online
Opodo Travel News
Daily Express
Atlas Direct
The London Paper
Essential Travel
The Telegraph
2by2 Holidays

Brasil

BBC Brasil
Ultimo Segundo
Globo News
Camera2
Jornal NH

Viet Nam

Viet Bao

Romania

Timis Online
Femina
Ziua
Click.ro
Cancan
Kappa
Informatia Zilei
Antena3 (hacked)

Austria

ORF

Croatia

24sata

Poland

Onet.pl

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Summary only...

Life after the road

  “Sir, are you finding everything ok?” the sales associate with a fake smile interrupts my moment of day-dreaming.
  “Yes, of course,” I say and I walk away, but I am irritated, and I don’t know if I’m annoyed more by the fact that she talked to me when I was obviously not trying to make eye contact or by her choice of words - the most aggravating conversation opener used by salespeople in the northwest.
 “Do you want to apply for our store Visa credit card today?” I am told later at the cashier’s desk, again, with a huge, unjustified smile.
  “No.”
  “Do you know you can save ten percent of your purchase price today if you apply for the credit card?”
  “Yes, and I still don’t want it.” Please stop offering me things I don’t need. Just ring me up and take my money.
  “Do you want to donate one penny for the Special Olympics?” the grocery store checkout clerk asks me.
  “No.” I look her straight in the eyes but my laser gaze misfires. I don’t care for the Olympics, special or not, and I only donated money once, long ago, during the Microsoft giving campaign, to a cancer research institute. I am a bad person and I do not want to save the world. I swipe the credit card; the cashier gives me the bag with groceries and before she hands me the receipt she takes a brief look at it, then turns back to me and says, sporting the same punch-me-in-the-face smile: “Thank you, mister Sturgeon.”

I give her the look of death again, but I don’t say anything. I’m back home and it’s generally considered impolite to tell people what you think, i.e. I really, really don’t want you to act like you know me and say my name when you thank me for shopping at Safeway; I do not need you to try to make me feel like I am at the neighborhood mom-and-pop store and you’re my best friend. And certainly I don’t want you to butcher my name mispronouncing it, which is more likely to happen than not.

Now that I can compare I realize that the salespeople at home are just as annoying as those from the Cairo bazaar, albeit a bit less aggressive; they just have a different style. I don’t know what is more pitiful or irritating – the impertinence and obstinacy of street-vendors and taxi drivers in third-world countries, asking you, the presumably-rich foreign backpacker, for prices five times higher than what they expect to get in the end, or the excessively obsequious and unnecessarily friendly attitude of American sales associates working for commission or simply being forced to apply what their management considers good customer service.

Urban bliss

Later that evening we have dinner at a local restaurant in Queen Anne. The over-the-top friendly waiter talks too much, and pushes the specials of the day at machine-gun-fire speed, his smile so wide and bright I could almost believe he loves being there with us more than anything else in the world. At the end of the meal I take the bill and add the tip, 15% before tax, plus a few pennies to round up. It’s been a year since I last had to figure out a waiter’s tip, write it down on a bill and do some post-dinner math. In most places we had just followed local customs – leave some coins to show that you don’t care much about the petty change in most small eateries; tip nothing in Europe or risk getting the “pathetic American sucker” look; add up to 10% in more upscale restaurants anywhere else.

New home

A trip cannot last forever; sooner or later, moving from place to place every few days becomes too exhausting and starts undermining the desire to travel; slowly, the need for some sort of stability, for a home, settles in. And now, a year after packing up and cramming all our belonging into a 12x10 storage room, we ended up back in the same town that we used to call home before this adventure started. There are quite a few things about Seattle that I did not miss during our year away. The semi-permanent rainy season is one of them. Having to pay 8 dollars for a plate of Thai food that used to cost me one dollar merely a few days before is another. The price of gas, the housing market, car and health insurance, being stuck in traffic on the way to work listening to an uninspired morning show on the radio…

I can’t let those things and thoughts take more importance than they are due. There are plenty of reasons why it’s fine to be back at home. During the past week I saw a few of my old friends: some have longer hair, some have lost a bit more of theirs. Some have lost or gained weight, others have more wrinkles around their eyes. But they are still the same people and I’m glad to see them again.

Hi sweetie!

I missed the way our beautiful little city shines on a sunny day, the clean, quiet tree-lined streets in the residential neighborhoods, and the views of downtown from the freeway. I missed drinking microbrew ales on tap at a local tavern, the Capitol Hill coffee shops and my favorite Thursday night hangout. I missed working out at the gym and having a proper bathroom. I needed to be around my horses, play my guitar, and maybe most of all, I missed my weathered, beat-up 1988 3-series BMW, which still needs new suspension, a few sensors and a replacement left-side door lock since thieves broke into our apartment’s garage more than a year ago. Maybe if I get a job I will be able to afford all that.

Strange as it sounds, after a year of keeping my brain in hibernation I miss having a job – just the exciting parts of it, the challenges, the rewards and the fun, not the stress and the occasional nights and weekends spent trying to meet a deadline.

Life is normal again. Or is it?

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Return address

We're back in Seattle. Life goes on, even after you've been traveling for one year. Updates soon... this blog does not end here.

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No one stays dry in Chiang Mai

Splaaaaash!
Click photo to see slideshow
or here for all Songkran photos

No one, really. Unless you lock yourself in your hotel room and order food delivery you will get wet sooner or later. During the three days of Songkran, the Thai new year festival, most of Thailand's population is locked in an extraordinary water-dousing fight match, which involves everyone who sets foot in the street, from children (the first to start, days ahead of the official festivities), to older people, to hapless - or willing - tourists. The only people who do not become targets for the buckets of water thrown at random all over town are the few brave street-food vendors who defy the flood hoping to make a penny - even wet people grow hungry sooner or later. In the general exhilaration, no one pours water on them on purpose, but bucket handles slip occasionally and aims are missed...

Caught in the act

The situation is especially intense in Chaing Mai, the second-largest city in Thailand, a town become famous precisely because of the madness that takes place on its streets each year between the 13th and 15th of April. The old part town is shaped like a perfect square with sides roughly one-kilometer long, and used to be surrounded by defensive walls and a wet moat. There aren't many bricks left standing from the old wall, but the moat is alive and doing very well these days. While the water-craze takes over the whole town, the streets that run along the four sides of the square are the epicenter of action and fun - that area sees more water per square inch in a day than the country sees in a week of monsoon rains. Pickup trucks jammed with wet people cruise along slowly, loaded with barrels full of water. Every now and then the merry passengers fetch a pail and throw it at the passersby. At the same time, in the snail-paced traffic, they are easy targets for the walking crowd. Once in a while everyone stops to refill their weapons of choice: buckets, pails or water-guns - from the moat, of course. The water is warm and brown, so you better keep your mouth closed when a pailful lands on your head. It may not be an easy resolution to keep, if you are stunned out of your senses by a sudden splash of icy water!

Hanging out at the moat
Click photo to see slideshow
or here for all Chiang Mai photos

I bought a big squirting water gun for the outrageous price of 200 Baht (which I managed to wrangle down from the original 300) - if you get caught in the middle of a war without a weapon, you pay dearly for the privilege of taking part in the hostilities. Half an hour later it broke and refused to squirt; after trying unsuccessfully to fix it for a few minutes I abandoned technology in favor of tradition and bought a small pail - it was easier to refill and inflicted greater damage - especially when I was able to sneak around the people who guarded their barrels of ice-water, steal a scoop and pour it on them. There's only one rule to the game - nobody gets upset.

Hungry!
Click photo to see slideshow
or here for all cooking school photos

The other highlight of our stay in Chiang Mai was the day-long cooking class on Thai food, which we took during the festival. After an entertaining visit to market, where we got acquainted with the various vegetables and spices, the following delicious dishes where cooked and subsequently devoured by each of us, seven farang eager to unlock the secrets of those exotic recipes:

• Stir-fried chicken with cashew nuts
• Deep-fried fish cakes
• Spicy Tom-yum soup with prawns
• Chicken green curry over rice
• Fish souffle in banana leaves
• Pumpkin custard pie
• Pad Thai noodles with pork and prawns
• Fried spring rolls

On our way back to the hotel we got drenched, but we managed to save our self-cooked dinner, thanks to the magic superpower of multiple layers of plastic bags.

Posted in a hurry from Bangkok, our last stop on this trip. Home is almost in sight!

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