Hello from a lovely little library in Tenerife! I’ve settled into one of my classic lazy periods so it’s feeling like pulling teeth to sit down and write this, which is all the more reason to knuckle down (I had a moment of doubt about this phrase and googled it—turns out both knuckle and buckle are valid?) and get this update out, hopefully kickstarting myself back into action more generally.

We left off a few days before my Agung hike and I have good news team—we did it! I got picked up at 10:30pm to drive over to the temple that I was going to start hiking from. We started around midnight, with the idea being to be at the summit for sunrise. I didn’t have exact details on the hike but had heard somewhat variable accounts—several people told me how incredibly hard it was, while a friend who’s spent a lot of time in the mountains said it was pretty whatever, and would only take a few hours to get up. I didn’t want to be the cocky idiot who says he can go fast and then misses the sunrise, but on the other hand I didn’t really want to sit in the cold windy darkness at the top for a few hours waiting for the sunrise.

The midnight start turned out, unsurprisingly, to be a lowest common denominator approach to the wide variety of people who sign up for this hike. The approach was to hike slowly, with several groups, and take extremely frequent breaks, where the guides would pull out their phones and scroll through tiktok or whatever. This was not exactly the experience I was hoping for, so after the second stop in the span of 45 minutes I asked my guide if we could just keep going and hike at my rhythm. She seemed mildly annoyed but eventually assented, and then was off like a shot. This turned out to be perfect—I hiked alone and at my own pace, but with a light off in the distance making sure I wouldn’t stray off track.

The trail is very short, less than 4.5km, but quite steep throughout. You pretty quickly get up above the treeline, and as you get closer to the top there is more and more loose rock/scree to clamber through. We had been hiking steadily for a few hours with one nice break, and I was just looking at my watch, thinking that it was about time for another break, when my guide said “OK, we’re here”. “Here” was a little indentation in the mountain face where we would make a campfire and make ourselves as comfortable as possible on the jagged volcanic rocks to wait for the sunrise. It was 3:50am—sunrise was at 6am.

Not ideal! I didn’t have a thermometer but it was cold as hell up there, with howling wind. The campfire did its best but there wasn’t really a good balance to be found of warmth vs smoke inhalation, so I mostly just sat there, cramped and freezing, for a good hour. The other groups then made it up and there was a bit more conversation and some breakfast, though there was also less room to stretch my legs out by the time there were 6 of us crowded around this tiny campfire.

Finally, a bit after 5:30am, we roused ourselves for the last ten minute push to be at the summit for sunrise. This was absolutely spectacular. The summit is actually several hundred meters above the crater, and as the dawn rose it was a positively dizzying sight looking over the edge to the crater below, with a small vent smoking away on one side of it. There was a small band of haze on the horizon, and it was beautiful seeing the blood red sun slowly peek out. Not only that but Mt Rinjani, the towering volcano on the neighboring island of Lombok, stuck its head out of the clouds next to the rising sun. Vibes at the top were great—there were a fair few people but it wasn’t overly crowded, and everyone shared that peculiar giddiness you get from lack of sleep, a long hike, and a truly awe-inspiring view.

And then it was time to head down. Several people had cautioned me that the way down was actually harder, as it was easy to slip in all the loose rocks, and it was murder on your knees. I certainly found it to be a brutal quad workout, but luckily not much worse than that, though I did slip and catch myself plenty of times. My guide seemed quite eager to get down and presumably get some sleep before her next climb, judging by the fact that once we got down around the tree line she started running most of the sections. I, being a good little boy, followed suit for a long while before finally realizing “What the hell am I doing? This is making it way harder for me and not only am I not in a rush but this is actually the exact opposite of what I’d like, which is to take my time and savor this beautiful landscape.” Unfortunately it took me a while to get to this realization, but I still managed to savor a bit of the descent.

That was pretty much it for big news out of Bali. I have to give myself a pat on the back for how well I managed my last weeks. I started getting rid of things early, started saying goodbyes early, and ultimately managed to get everything done with truly the minimum possible amount of stress. A whole new Phil? Only time will tell…

And then, Paris! I got to Paris in absolutely fine form considering I had an overnight in the Kuala Lumpur airport and three flights total. My welcome to Parisian life took place right at the airport—while I was waiting for a taxi a couple of the drivers got into a full on, strip off my t-shirt, let’s take it outside (they were already outside) fight. I didn’t follow what sparked it but evidently it was some friction between a driver in the official taxis line and another driver trying to intercept people and get them into his taxi instead. I let out a desperate chuckle when the official driver yelled “I’m calling the cops, we’re shutting this whole thing down!”. Always funny to be reminded of the Parisian worker’s pride and willingness to shut things down at the slightest provocation, but also after thirty hours of travel and no sleep I was really hoping to get a taxi. Luckily the line kept moving while he stayed at the front waiting for the cops.

My week in Paris was just exactly what the doctor ordered. My family in Paris are my mom’s cousins and their various children and grandchildren. As you can imagine we haven’t had the occasion to spend a huuuuge amount of time together over the years. But being with them was a great reminder of the impact of shared culture and being around your kinds of people. After years in Bali feeling out of place and struggling, in particular, to connect and joke around with people, my time in Paris was a balm for the soul. Lots and lots of laughs, truly insane quantities of delicious food (the bread! the cheese! the fruit!), and just generally feeling wrapped up in love, was absolutely perfect. My mom’s cousins split the burden of housing me so that I got to spend quality time with both, and I managed to fit in 4 meals with different combinations of family members, so that I was really able to get in some great chats with everybody. I was also lucky enough to be there for the Wednesday afternoon tradition of picking up the grandkids from school and eating/playing with them/hectoring them to do their homework, which was lots of fun.

Besides family time I also took the chance to go visit a couple of important sites from my Parisian childhood. One was the school I used to attend which, I have to admit, I didn’t even really recognize, hidden as it was behind a wall and with its new modern building attached. I did, however, recognize the bistro I used to meet my mom at for lunch during my terrible second grade year with the meanest teacher in the world. The other place I visited was the Racing Club, the incredibly fancy country club in the middle of the Bois de Boulogne where I used to go for tennis lessons with the French Tennis Federation. I couldn’t get inside but just peeking in the entrance at the big clubhouse building brought some memories back.

I spent a fair amount of my time in Paris musing about memory. We moved there when I was two and left a month before my ninth birthday. This is obviously old enough for me to have strong memories of it, but also a good long time ago. I can’t remember (hah) if I’ve talked about my aphantasia on here before (if not I highly recommend looking that up, or asking me about it), but one of the effects is that I think my autobiographical memories fade a lot faster/more profoundly than most people’s. The experience in Paris was interesting in this regard—there were very few things that I really specifically recognized, but Paris has a very distinct visual feel, and being there gave me a surprisingly visceral generalized reminder of the really happy, uncomplicated part of my childhood before friggin Milwaukee and my parents’ divorce made things more difficult. Impossible to say how much of this was really memory, as opposed to a general feeling of well-being at moving on from Bali and catching up with family, but either way it was a lovely time.

And now I’m here in Tenerife! The week in Paris flew by, the trip down to Tenerife was smooth and easy, and today marks one week since I got here. I moved straight into a shared apartment with a guy who I turned out to get along with really well—a world traveling Argentinean who’s also a freediving instructor. I also had a contact for another freediver, a friend of a friend who’d already helped me out a ton answering questions about Tenerife and even went to check out my apartment in person to make sure it wasn’t a scam. It was great getting to know these guys, but unfortunately they’ve now both left the island for the duration of my time here, so it’s back to square one. I also came down with a cold a few days ago so have been laying low, but I’m now on the upswing and in a couple of days will be ready to take on the world!

My place is in a cute little vacation/retirement-y town, right across the street from the ocean. There’s a nice promenade where I’ve already started taking lots of walks, and I’m excited to finally start jogging again after a several year hiatus. It is a very small town here though, so I’m also really stoked to get out exploring other parts of the island. Tenerife has a huge volcano in the middle of it and many distinct microclimates, depending on the altitude and whether you’re in the rain shadow. I’m on the desert side, where it seems to be hot and sunny pretty much every day—a nice reminder of the good ole days in southern California. In another couple of days I’m going to get out and visit the freediving school here, and then just start taking the bus to random other parts of the island to see what’s up and hopefully take advantage of some of the many hiking trails. So stay tuned!