SLIDESHOW-First Days in Delhi

CLICK HERE or on the image to view slideshow.

Our first days in Delhi were an eye opening experience. Even the most seasoned traveller's find arriving in Delhi a trying experience. Nothing can truly prepare you for what you can come across. If you can imagine stepping into one of these photos then you can begin to get an idea of what it is like.

INDIA Awaits

As I sit here on the cold tile floor of Bangkok’s Don Meung International Airport, waiting to board our Biman Bangladeshi Airways flight to Dhaka, Bangladesh and then on to Delhi, India, I am overcome with a sense of anticipation, anxiousness, nervousness, and excitement. India has been a mecca to myself and Malcolm. Ever since I can remember wanting to travel, I always thought of the day when I would hike the mighty Himalayas or wander down cobblestone streets filled with colours, scents, and sounds that conjure up images of saris, silks, sitars, samosa’s, and sadhu’s. India is known for its ability to inspire, frustrate, thrill, and confound all at once. It is a multi-dimensional technicolor country, with each region offering its own food, culture, religion, and geography. We have been told that the poverty is confronting and alarming and the sheer crush of humanity can turn walking down a street or entering a train station a struggle. However, the rewards are tremendous, as the culture is so rich, it’s religions among the oldest.
As we only have a limited amount of time, we decided to not try and do the entire country but rather focus on one region so we could fully appreciate what it has to offer. Our trip will see us in the north where most of India’s main spiritual sites and musical offerings are located. We begin in Delhi where we will be staying with some friends from Santa Cruz, Jessa and Mike who live there now. From there we will head up into the Himalayas and to Mcleod Ganj, where the Tibetan government and people in exile are located and where the Dalai Llama lives and teaches. I cannot think of a better place I would want to spend my birthday! We will be taking some classes in Tibetan music and volunteering our time teaching English to newly arrived Tibetan political refuges. We also hope to take in a small lecture taught by the Dalai Lama himself. From there, we will be doing some trekking in the Himalayas and then down to the yoga and spiritual epicenter’s of Hardiwar and Rishikesh. We will be doing yoga and meditation while there as well as taking some traditional Indian music classes. We then head south through Delhi again to pick up some traditional instruments and then it will be off to Varanasi, the city of Shiva, the holiest city in India where pilgrims come from all over to wash away their sins in the Ganges. From there we will either continue heading east along the north of India to Bohdigaya, home of the Bohdi tree, where the Buddha achieved enlightenment, Buddhism’s most revered sites, or we will head up to Katmandu, Nepal depending on the time and money we have left. Nepal has some instruments that we are very interested in so we are hoping to make it there. We finish our trip in Calcutta, the intellectual and cultural capital of the nation, known for its Bengali dance, music, film, and food, and unfortunately, its squalor and poverty.
. We are looking forward to sharing the many sites and sounds that we will be encountering there and know there will be no lack of photos and video. The only thing that we can hope for is that we will have access to fast internet connections to upload our images. Expect the unexpected…

VIDEO-Editing Video

CLICK HERE or on the image to stream video.When we have any sort of downtime, this is how I spend it...editing video, sometimes literally for days on end, ecspeically when we are in Bangkok at Happy House, our home away from home. I can easily just get into a zone as evidenced by this video.-Ben

Kaura featured in The Music Edge

KAURA featured as 'Spotlight Artist' on NAMM website The Music Edge alongside Ministry, Franz Ferdinand, and Thrice.

We were interviewed just weeks before taking off to travel by the Music Edge and you can check it out by CLICKING HERE

Thanks to Paul Coover for sticking it out in the LA traffic (-:

VIDEO-Phang Nga...God's Playground

CLICK HERE or on the image to stream video.

Phang Nga National Marine Park in Southern Thailand is truly one of the most stunning places we have ever been. We chartered a long tail boat that took us through this archipelego of islands and limestone pieces that jut out of the water like they had been dropped from the sky. You may recognize the island to the left as Scaramaga's hideout in the 1973 James Bond film 'The Man with The Golden Gun.' This video does not do justice to it but it is all we can do.

What so funny about peave love and understanding?

Elvis Costello said it best.
What’s the meaning of this?…This is the one question that we’ve been asking ourselves recently. The subject of this question is pointed to the violent and destructive energy that’s been following us, and in general, seems to be erupting all over the world lately. When we arrived in Northern Thailand, Chiang Mai and Pai were just recovering from disastarous flooding which took lives and livelihoods of people living there. The next tragedy to strike was the furthest from us but closest to hit home when Hurricane Katrina decimated Louisiana. What was almost more atrocious than the damage done by the hurricane was our own countries efforts to help the people in need. Then hurricane Rita hit not more than a week later at just about the same time a typhoon ripped through the Northern Vietnam in our hemisphere. All of the global unrest seemed strangely parallel to the violent energy that was present in our immediate surroundings. Everything from witnessing a man being beaten in the street on Khoa San road to seeing two street vendors quarrel, leading up to the man beating the woman in front of her child. This was the cresendo to our own run in with the group of Thai men who attacked us. Yet it didn’t stop there. Once we left the scene of Ko Phang Ngan, we walked onto the set of yet another violent play when we arrived on the peaceful island of Ko Phi Phi, where one evening while sitting on our porch we heard a gunshot ring out, only to find out the next morning that it was the sound that took the life of a local man who was shot dead on the floor of his shop, and who we had spoken with a day earlier. When we arrived on Ko Phi Phi, the locals were just getting back on their feet after the Tsunami of last Decmber. Some of the people we met there had lost their entire family and everything they had owned, but they, themselves, were still alive, trying to find a way to live with their loss. Then after leaving the islands we heard of the bombings in Kuta, Bali where we had just been weeks before. This tremor was just the precurser to destruction of the earthquake which shook parts of Pakistan and India. So again the question was asked….What’s the meaning of all this!? Well it’s hard to say exactly what the ‘meaning’ of all this suffering is but maybe the answer to that question isn’t one that ends with a period but rather one that ends in a question. Maybe the question is really one that we should be asking ourselves…asking us to look around ourselves and at ourselves, to see the connection between the destructive energy in the world and the destructive energy within us. Maybe instead of finding an answer to our question we should find a new question…”What’s the meaning of this, and how is the energy that I put out related to this.” Am I a part of the suffering in this world or am I part of the healing of this world. Are the choices I make choices which help or choices which hurt. Maybe through the experience of suffering ourselves we might be able to identify with the suffering of other people or another country…and recognize it as the same.

SLIDESHOW-Thai Islands

CLICK HERE or on the image to download slideshow.

Even though our time on the islands was cut short by circumstances beyond our control, we still managed to have some adventues and make the most of it. Enjoy

SLIDESHOW- Ko Phi Phi, Survival

CLICK HERE or on the image to download slideshow.

The day after Christmas last year, Southern Thailand and India were rocked by one of the biggest Tsunami’s ever recorded. One of the hardest hit islands was the beautiful island of Ko Phi Phi. It is a very small island about 2 square miles with only half of that inhabitable. The islands population including tourists was at 8,000 at that time of the year and all live or were staying in that small area which has a beach on either side of it. The destruction was huge, over 2,000 people lost their lives, 104 children lost one or both parents, and 70% of the building were destroyed. Thai people do not use banks, so many lost all their savings that were stored in boxes or under their beds. Even though the international outpouring was huge, Thailand, a country which prides itself on its independence and its healthy distrust of western interests, refused any foreign aid. This had made things hard for the people as not one foreign relief agency such as Red Cross or Doctors with Borders ever arrived on the island. The only non-profit that has helped was one set up on the island by a foreigner called Help International Phi Phi. www.hiphiphi.com. They work they have done is incredible and they have organized the volunteer efforts that have been underway since December. We went to the island in order to volunteer and fuel the economy with our money as nearly 100% of the locals make their money through tourism. Upon arriving on the island, judging by the locals attitudes and demeanor, one would never suspect that these people had most likely lost everything, including loved ones, and that they were just getting back on their feet. This is evidence that their strong spiritual faith in Buddhism truly keeps them going. We were welcomed with smiles, and genuine gratitude from the people we met. The island is really coming along with new guesthouses, restaraunts, and other businesses opening everyday. If any of you are going to Thailand soon, I would recommend going there, even if you don’t want to volunteer, there is plenty to do with boat trips, snorkeling and scuba diving, and some great beaches that are being cleaned up everyday by people like me and you. If you would like to see some footage from the Tsunami hitting Phi Phi so you can understand the scale of the wave, you can find it at www.issuespotter.com
We had a very rewarding time on the island being there deepened my understanding of life, death, and change, the main ideas that I seem to be coming to grips with wherever we go on this journey.

An Important Note About the Videos and Slideshows

The videos and slideshows on our site have music and audio accompanying them and should be listened to at a good level to get the full experience. If you are listening to them on wimpy laptop speakers, do us a favor and plug in some headphones, it will make the world a better place...
Also if any of you are having problems watching the videos or slideshows, double check to make sure you have Quicktime on your computer. If not, there is a link on the right hand side where you can download it for FREE on apple.com. If that still does not do it, please e-mail us, as we are trying to make this glitch free. You can still surf the net while downloading our videos as they open in a new window or you can always right click and save it to your hard drive to watch later. Thanks

VIDEO-Broken Notes

CLICK HERE or on the image to stream video

We tried. Twice. We wanted to bring a guitar with us so that we could work on song ideas while we were away. The first guitar was stolen…the second was used as a weapon against us and thus being destroyed as a result. What began as peaceful and inspiring morning of playing guitar and doing yoga on the top of a mountain turned into the site where we would moments later be accosted by 5 local Thai men.
As with all of our destinations for this journey, we had a specific intention for everywhere that we had chosen to go. Our final stop in Thailand before heading to India was to the Southern Thai islands. Here we were hoping to tuck ourselves away on a beach-side bungalow, to spend our days reflecting on all that we’ve seen and experienced thus far and to channel all of our thoughts and energy into writing music. Throughout our trip, everyday has been one adventure dove tailing into the next, with very little time to have absolutely nothing to do. So having days where there’s nothing to do, is to have a blank canvas, begging for us to paint it with the colors of our experiences. We figured that there was no place better to have nothing to do than on a tropical Thai island. However this idyllic setting was soon marred by an experience that neither Ben nor myself have ever encountered, and for the life of us, never hope to encounter again.
One morning after attending a yoga class high up on top of a mountainside on the island of Ko Pha Ngan, where there was a platform overlooking the entire beach cove, we decided that spot would be a great place to bring my guitar and let our creative juices flow. What better backdrop could there be for allowing us to work through all the little ideas we’d had along the way but never had the time or place to really flesh them out. So we made the hike up there and sat for a while enjoying the view and the pleasant experience of having nothing to do but be creative. While I played some guitar, Ben took advantage of the wonderful view and stared his yoga routine. I then noticed out of the corner of my eye that there was a group of Thai men coming up the path to where we were. We recognized one of the men as being the owner of the restaurant and bungalows nearby. The platform where we were was abandoned and run down like it had once been used but since forgotten. We figured that he was probably the property owner of the land so I initiated our introduction with an extended hand and a warm smile to greet him as he approached. His response to my friendly invitation was not at all what we were expecting. My handshake was not met with an open palm but instead with a closed fist wielding punches. You can imagine the state of shock and confusion we were in. Without any sort of provocation we were being attacked for what seemed to be a harmless act of trespassing. I jumped up, with my guitar now in my hand being held like a bat to use as protection. We still weren’t sure exactly what his intentions were. We didn’t know whether he was just trying to scare us to get us to leave or whether he was seriously looking to get into a fight. At that point the fight or flight mode kicked in and I had to decide what to do. I quickly took in my surroundings and noticed that there were about 4 other Thai men waiting with a look like they we’re anticipating the moment when they could jump in. In a split second, I made the decision to refrain from retaliating, knowing that if I took a swing at this man that I would soon have four other guys on me, beating me to a bloody stump. So I tried my best to avoid him while at the same time trying calm the situation by talking to him to find out why he was so furious. It soon became apparent that his intentions were not to get us to leave his property but rather to keep us trapped there so he could continue to vent his violent aggression. This was just the beginning of the dread we were already feeling. By this time one of the other guys, had picked up a long baseball bat sized log and had his arms cocked back about to take a swing. Whenever Ben stepped in to intervene he was threatened with raised fists and was outnumbered, overpowered, and frustratingly unable to do anything but try to reason with these people, who were incapable of clear thought. At that point everything became a slow motion blur. I don’t know what happened or what I did exactly but the next thing I knew I was fighting my way out of the grip of one of the guys who was trying to knee me in the face. Only the fleshy part of his thigh was making contact with my cheek, so miraculously my nose didn’t get broken and my blood stayed on the inside of my skin. Freeing myself from his grip, I was no longer worrying about knee caps kissing my chin but now saw the first guy charging at me with my own guitar in his hands and the look of determination in his eyes. This might sound completely absurd but the dilemma I was facing was how to avoid having my face broken by my guitar while at the same time trying to save my guitar from being broken. I don’t remember what my resolve was but from inspecting my wounds afterwards I put together that I had used my forearms and hip to block his swings. Unfortunately (or fortunately as the case was) after impacting my body several times, the guitar finally gave way and cracked in half. For some reason this seemed to satiate his violent temper because he threw down the broken pieces and began to walk away. With a wounded body and ego, I gathered up the remains my guitar and hurried down to our bungalow where we packed our shit and got the hell off of that island. We stopped at the police, but it is doubtful they will do anything as the police here are a joke and corrupt as all hell. We later ran into a woman we had met on that beach and she told us that one of the men who had surrounded us had beaten up her british friend, for confronting him when she had found him cheating on her.
Being that both Ben and I choose to lead a life of non-violence, this experience was without a doubt completely foreign and utterly disturbing. I believe life presents you with experiences that you can choose to learn and grow from. Whatever the actual ‘lesson’ was in this case, I think what we experienced was simply seeing the other side to the beauty and love that we have known and experienced in our lives. Embracing only the aspects of life which we find comforting, loving and beautiful isn’t truly embracing all of what life is. Life is dualistic by nature…light and dark, positive and negative, pleasure and pain, love and hate etc, etc, etc. The more one opens his/her eyes to let in the light, the more aware one becomes of the dark…the two sides of the same coin. What side the coin of life lands on seems, at times, to be no more than that of the toss of that coin. What isn’t a coin toss is how we choose to learn and reflect upon our experience of the side that’s showing.
Well, it's off to Ko Phi Phi where we hope we can rinse away this feeling we have.

Swimming in the Stars

Last night, we got to experience the wonderful phenomenon of phosphorescent plankton in the ocean. For those of you who do not know what phosphorescence is, when swimming through it if appears in psychedelic bursts, making it look like constellations were coming off of your fingers. To people who do not know what is going on, one would think you are dreaming it is so magnificently surreal. What they actually are is microscopic plankton, that when disturbed give off a bright greenish glow. I went to sleep that night imagining what a whale must look like swimming through a glowing trail of plankton on a moonless night. For those of you who live by the ocean, check it out if you can as it only happens during certain times of the year, but is a once in a life-time magical experience.

Island Bound

After an overnight bus, two minivans, a ferry, and two trips in a Sangthaew (a pickup truck with two benches in the back, we arrived on the island of Ko Pha Ngan in Southern Thailand. An island paradise where you can relax, meditate, snorkel, hike to a number of waterfalls or dance your ass off every night to drum n bass, psychedelic trance, progressive house, or breakbeats until you drop in the sand. Most people who come here are young and the islands population swells depending on the time of the month. Pha Ngan is notorious for its full moon parties where sometimes 20,000 foreigners,(usually Brits) descend on the island for a few days as an excuse to get sloppy drunk on what are called “buckets”. These are a notorious Thai invention that consists of a bottle of Sam Song Whiskey, a can of 150 (which is the Thai version of Red Bull and actually contains Amphetamines), and Coca-Cola. It comes in a plastic bucket with straws and gives you the feeling of being drunk while the 150 gives you energy and a speedy feeling…not my cup of tea. On top of that the music at the full moon parties is cheesy (house music with diva vocals) and the beach where it takes place looks like a garbage dump afterwards as these people think it is the local Thai’s responsibility to clean up after them. Well, we didn’t want to have anything to do with that so we decided to come to the island at the very exact opposite time where there is a much cooler and mellower version called the Black Moon Party that takes place at a waterfall and has some great DJ’s. We are really using this time to record some musical ideas in this tropical setting, meditate and do yoga daily, swim in the crystalline blue waters and catch our breath before we leave for India.
After Pha Ngan we are heading off to Ko Phi Phi to volunteer there and help bring the island back to life. It suffered extensive damage and thousands of people died and lost everything they owned. Just going there helps breaths life into the economy and is a tremendous help. Many tourist offices in Chiang Mai and Bangkok tell people that you can’t go to Ko Phi Phi and that there is no where to eat and stay in order to keep people there, which is untrue. Everyday, a guesthouse, a dive operation, or a restaurant opens proving how resilient these people are. We are looking forward in doing our little part to help these people after they have been long forgotten as people’s attention turns to other disasters like Katrina.

VIDEO-Muslim Fishing Village on Stilts

CLICK HERE or on the image to stream video.

While we were in Southern Thailand, we chartered a boat to take us around Ao Phang Nga National Marine Park. An archipelego of islands and limestone formations, one of the most stunning places we have ever been. Amidst all these small islands is an entire community of muslims who live in a village on stilts above the water. They make their money from fishing and from people like us who stop to eat and take a look. Check it out...

VIDEO-Chinese Vegetarian Festival

CLICK HERE or on the image to view.

Arriving in Phang Nga, we were happy to hear that festivities for the annual vegetarian festival were taking place there. We were able to witness some truly amazing sights and sounds, only a few of which we were able to capture on film.






Unfortunately, we can only offer these stills of the more dramatic moments:

VIDEO-One from the Vault

CLICK HERE or on the image to stream video.

This video didn't get uploaded while we were in Cambodia in late August so we wanted to get it up for you. The poverty is Cambodia is alarming. The annual average income is less than $1,000 a year! Because of that many children an a very young age are forced to go to work to bring in extra cash. The site of these children hawking gifts or just outright begging is heartbreaking. Give thanks for your childhood...

From the North to the South

Aside from taking in all the musical offerings of Chiang Mai we also took the opportunity to learn a bit of Thai cooking and take part in a vipasana meditation…well…that’s what it was supposed to be; what it actually was we’re still not quite sure. We went to a small introduction to learn about vipassana so that later that evening we could join in this weekly ritual. What we saw when we got there was nothing at all what we thought it would be. Normally you might think of meditation as a subdued process of turning inward to find a place of quiet emptiness within yourself. What we witnessed was a room full of what seemed to be hysterical people yelling, crying, speaking in tongues, shaking and spitting into bowls while gurus walked from person to person waiving their hands, yelling some gibberish and placing their hands upon the hysterical people’s heads. We believed the intention of this process was to bring the individual to a state of utter exhaustion by chanting Tamma Tamma Tamma (which means ‘Karma’ in Thai) over and over again, louder and louder until the person reaches their limit and breaks down on a physical and emotional level. Thus arriving at a place of peacefulness similar to tensing your whole body by squeezing all of your muscles and then letting go to enter a state of deep relaxation. It wasn’t quite the experience we were expecting but an experience it certainly was.
CLICK HERE to view some footage from that evening

When it came time to leave Chaing Mai it felt like we just barely managed to finish up all our loose ends and make it onto the bus which would take us 12 hours back to Bangkok. From there it would be off to the islands of southern Thailand, where we could find a beach bungalow and settle into a groove of working on all of the musical ideas we had been coming up with over the course of our trip thus far.

SLIDESHOW-Fire Dancing

CLICK HERE or on the image to download (2mb)

Fire Dancing with staff or with chains (poi) is an ancient art that can be traced back to many countries in the AustralAsia part of the world particularly the Maori's in New Zealand. Today, it can be found all over the world and has a strong scene in San Francisco. I was really looking forward to getting to the Thai islands as I would be able to get back into doing it as it had been years since I had last lit up. I first learned 6 years ago in Australia, and have some friends who really take it to another level( check them out Here.) It was great to get back into it again as it is a truly invigorating and wonderful artform. Enjoy-Ben

SLIDESHOW-Northern Thailand

CLICK HERE or on the image to download slideshow. (6.5 mb)

Northern Thailand is beuatiful with a very different atmosphere than southern Thailand. We spent time in Chiang Mai, Thailand's second largest city, and the small town of Pai. Both had been flooded weeks before we arrived and Pai was still recovering with many buildings and businesses destroyed. Chiang Mai has over 300 temples and it seems like you cannot go a block without passing one. This lends the city a very holy vibe and it is a great escape from busy Bangkok. Enjoy