I have a photo album up of the trip to Singapore and Malaysia here. You can also link to it from the slideshow on the right.
-Robert
Saturday, May 8, 2010
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
How to save money in Kuala Lumpur
When you go to the KL Bird Park, before you buy your ticket, go directly to the restaurant, which is in the treetops of the aviary, and have lunch on the veranda. By the end of it, you'll probably have had enough of the birds and feel like you don't need to pay the entrance fee to see some more.
Despite all the signs saying not to feed the birds, they've obviously been tamed. I had some kind of black bird with a bright orange and yellow markings hop on my table and pluck the chicken out of my curry before I could react. This was on the placemat directly in front of me -- less than an arm's length away. If I was looking at a caged bird I couldn't have been closer.
The waiter brought me another serving, and I moved to a table further from the rail, but I was still menaced throughout the rest of the meal by a hornbill and a half dozen storks. And to think of all the hiking in leech-infested forests and bicycling through rice paddies that I've done to see their kind from a hundred yards away.
-Robert
Despite all the signs saying not to feed the birds, they've obviously been tamed. I had some kind of black bird with a bright orange and yellow markings hop on my table and pluck the chicken out of my curry before I could react. This was on the placemat directly in front of me -- less than an arm's length away. If I was looking at a caged bird I couldn't have been closer.
The waiter brought me another serving, and I moved to a table further from the rail, but I was still menaced throughout the rest of the meal by a hornbill and a half dozen storks. And to think of all the hiking in leech-infested forests and bicycling through rice paddies that I've done to see their kind from a hundred yards away.
-Robert
Monday, May 3, 2010
Malaisia
Some trips just don't go well. I'm going to cut this one short and head "home" to Saigon in a few days instead of attempting to continue on a comprehensive tour of peninsular Malaysia.
It's hard to put my finger on the problem, especially since I was so gung ho for this a couple weeks ago, but it's fair to say I'm not feeling like the benefit is worth the costs. The loneliness and inconveniences and discomforts are no worse than my other extended trip, but I'm having trouble getting below the surface and feeling like I'm learning or experiencing anything. So much walking around looking at things without understanding and not connecting holds less attraction -- this week anyway.
There is one discomfort that is greater here: I'm further south than I've ever been except Singapore last week (when we took cabs everywhere), and the sun is really oppressive. From about 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. it takes all my will to step out of a shadow.
What I've seen of Malaysia so far I really do like, though. The few people I've talked to have been sincere and friendly. I'm in Melaka (a.k.a. Malacca), which is an interesting place historically. It was a Portuguese colony almost as far back as Columbus went west. Arab and Chinese traders were leaving their mark before that. The Dutch kicked out the Portuguese, and the English kicked them out, and Indian and Sri Lankan immigrants have been arriving all along. You can see the marks of all this history in the oldest parts of town. There are European buildings here older than any structure in North America, including a church where St. Francis Xavier was interred for awhile. It was strange to stumble across that and find Malay Muslims posing for pictures in front of it.
I'm disappointed in myself for not forcing myself further down the trail to see if the spirit returns in another location. But I feel like I've had enough. I'm moving on to Kuala Lumpur tomorrow for three nights and have a flight booked for Friday.
-Robert
It's hard to put my finger on the problem, especially since I was so gung ho for this a couple weeks ago, but it's fair to say I'm not feeling like the benefit is worth the costs. The loneliness and inconveniences and discomforts are no worse than my other extended trip, but I'm having trouble getting below the surface and feeling like I'm learning or experiencing anything. So much walking around looking at things without understanding and not connecting holds less attraction -- this week anyway.
There is one discomfort that is greater here: I'm further south than I've ever been except Singapore last week (when we took cabs everywhere), and the sun is really oppressive. From about 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. it takes all my will to step out of a shadow.
What I've seen of Malaysia so far I really do like, though. The few people I've talked to have been sincere and friendly. I'm in Melaka (a.k.a. Malacca), which is an interesting place historically. It was a Portuguese colony almost as far back as Columbus went west. Arab and Chinese traders were leaving their mark before that. The Dutch kicked out the Portuguese, and the English kicked them out, and Indian and Sri Lankan immigrants have been arriving all along. You can see the marks of all this history in the oldest parts of town. There are European buildings here older than any structure in North America, including a church where St. Francis Xavier was interred for awhile. It was strange to stumble across that and find Malay Muslims posing for pictures in front of it.
I'm disappointed in myself for not forcing myself further down the trail to see if the spirit returns in another location. But I feel like I've had enough. I'm moving on to Kuala Lumpur tomorrow for three nights and have a flight booked for Friday.
-Robert
Thursday, April 29, 2010
Singapore
Ilene and I are in Singapore for what are really her only days off during the Fulbright project. It takes something of an adjustment to handle being here. On the one hand, prices are comparable to what we'd experience on a long weekend in New York, which we can afford and shouldn't worry about. On the other hand, they are astronomical compared to what we are used to and the budget we've been living by in the rest of Southeast Asia, and we have trouble making the mental and emotional switch. We spent more on taxis yesterday than we spend in two months in Saigon.
We're also somewhat awed by the comparative luxury of it. Singapore seems like a miracle next to everyplace else we've been in Southeast Asia. The cleanliness and order and economic activity all feel a little overwhelming and we stand around gawking like tourists. Frankly, skimming around on the surface in our touristic way, it feels like paradise.
I love how genuinely multi-ethnic it is. Walking around Little India and Chinatown and the Arab quarter (which is underplayed in the guidebooks if you ask me) is a lot of fun. We can hear the call to prayer from the Mosque across from our hotel room and smell the cooking from the Indian restaurants in the street below.
The best part so far has been the food. Mainly we eat at hawker centers, something like the food courts of an American mall, except that instead of chain restaurants with facades signifying different ethnic cuisines, these are all mom and pop stalls whipping up the real deal. We split up and collect Indian samosas and Malay laksa and Thai curry and Chinese soups and rotis, pratas, etc. and some fantastic coffee and tea, each for about 3 Singapore dollars per serving, and meet back at one of the tables in the center to feast. I told myself I was going to treat myself to a dose of familiar Western foods while I was here, but I've been having too much fun at the hawker centers to get around to it.
On Wednesday we went to the Singapore Zoo, which is gorgeously designed to get you a good look at the animals. We could walk around below most of the birds, apes and monkeys, and you have to watch out that they don't wizz on you. I could watch the African storks soaring around all day. Seeing the very rare white tigers was once-in-a-lifetime. The Komodo dragons were a lot bigger than I ever imagined.
Back in our neighborhood for the evening, we stumbled across the Museum of Chinese Opera, which is really just a tea shop with a lot of photos of opera stars on the wall. It would be like Lombardi's in the West Village calling itself the Museum of Italian-American Heritage. We sat and had a pot of tea and some cake while a woman played several numbers on a kind of Chinese harp. She asked about us and our travels afterward and answered my questions about scales and time signatures on the music she was playing. The harp has just a five-note scale, but an amazing variety of technique is possible on it.
Yesterday was our luxe city respite day. We walked around the botanic gardens and the orchid gardens and then hit the Orchard Street shopping strip, which makes Fifth Avenue and Chicago's Miracle Mile look dowdy. We had dim sum for lunch between a few of the malls, and when the afternoon rains hit we used the underground passages to get down the street to a cinema and saw the new Marin Scorcese movie.
More museums today, and I have to find the bus station to buy my ticket for the next stage. We split up tomorrow -- Ilene on a flight back to Saigon and me to wherever the bus goes in mainland Malaysia.
-Robert
We're also somewhat awed by the comparative luxury of it. Singapore seems like a miracle next to everyplace else we've been in Southeast Asia. The cleanliness and order and economic activity all feel a little overwhelming and we stand around gawking like tourists. Frankly, skimming around on the surface in our touristic way, it feels like paradise.
I love how genuinely multi-ethnic it is. Walking around Little India and Chinatown and the Arab quarter (which is underplayed in the guidebooks if you ask me) is a lot of fun. We can hear the call to prayer from the Mosque across from our hotel room and smell the cooking from the Indian restaurants in the street below.
The best part so far has been the food. Mainly we eat at hawker centers, something like the food courts of an American mall, except that instead of chain restaurants with facades signifying different ethnic cuisines, these are all mom and pop stalls whipping up the real deal. We split up and collect Indian samosas and Malay laksa and Thai curry and Chinese soups and rotis, pratas, etc. and some fantastic coffee and tea, each for about 3 Singapore dollars per serving, and meet back at one of the tables in the center to feast. I told myself I was going to treat myself to a dose of familiar Western foods while I was here, but I've been having too much fun at the hawker centers to get around to it.
On Wednesday we went to the Singapore Zoo, which is gorgeously designed to get you a good look at the animals. We could walk around below most of the birds, apes and monkeys, and you have to watch out that they don't wizz on you. I could watch the African storks soaring around all day. Seeing the very rare white tigers was once-in-a-lifetime. The Komodo dragons were a lot bigger than I ever imagined.
Back in our neighborhood for the evening, we stumbled across the Museum of Chinese Opera, which is really just a tea shop with a lot of photos of opera stars on the wall. It would be like Lombardi's in the West Village calling itself the Museum of Italian-American Heritage. We sat and had a pot of tea and some cake while a woman played several numbers on a kind of Chinese harp. She asked about us and our travels afterward and answered my questions about scales and time signatures on the music she was playing. The harp has just a five-note scale, but an amazing variety of technique is possible on it.
Yesterday was our luxe city respite day. We walked around the botanic gardens and the orchid gardens and then hit the Orchard Street shopping strip, which makes Fifth Avenue and Chicago's Miracle Mile look dowdy. We had dim sum for lunch between a few of the malls, and when the afternoon rains hit we used the underground passages to get down the street to a cinema and saw the new Marin Scorcese movie.
More museums today, and I have to find the bus station to buy my ticket for the next stage. We split up tomorrow -- Ilene on a flight back to Saigon and me to wherever the bus goes in mainland Malaysia.
-Robert
Friday, April 23, 2010
April 30, 1975
The holiday coming up this week is pretty significant -- 35 years since April 30, 1975, which is known around here as Reunification Day. Westerners usually refer to it as as the Fall of Saigon.The iconic images of that day to Americans are of helicopters taking off from the roof of the U.S. embassy, landing on crowded naval carriers and then being shoved into the sea to make room for more evacuees. To the North Vietnamese, the American evacuation was a sideshow, and the iconic images in Vietnam now are more like the one included here -- of the tanks smashing into the gate of the presidential palace.
The park in the photo is still a park, a few blocks from our apartment, where young people gather to make out in the evenings. Two blocks up the street, at the end of the park,towering over the Notre Dame Cathedral, is Diamond Plaza, a modern shopping mall and office building. On the top floor is the gym we go to, and from the treadmills there we can look down this street. The gym is our largest extravagance here, an overpriced respite from the heat and noise. Being from southwest Missouri, I always say hello to the people I've met there who went to college in Oklahoma -- oil industry people who now work for Conoco Phillips, which has offices in the building. (Another oil connection: After 1975, the Vietnamese government used the U.S. embassy as the headquarters for Petrolimex until the resumption of diplomatic ties.)
After my workout I like to go to a French cafe on the edge of park to get a ham and cheese sandwich, probably my second-biggest extravagance here, and watch the comparatively sane traffic. As I was sitting there today, I watched workers setting up bleachers and scaffolds in the street, which had been closed off in preparation for public celebrations this Friday. I'm curious to know what that includes, so I'm disappointed I'll miss it, but we'll be away on a holiday during Ilene's only real break during the school term. (May Day is also a holiday here, and the two days together make for a four-day weekend for most workers.)
In going away, though, we're not so different from any other Vietnamese I've talked to, who all seem to have an attitude about it pretty much like the attitude most Americans have about Memorial Day; if they can't make it to the beach, then it's a good day to hit the sales at Diamond Plaza and see a movie. Green Zone, the new Iraq War movie, is playing.
-Robert
Evening out with friends
We went out with friends to celebrate our friend's birthday -- dinner first, then donuts, which in Saigon is a sit-down affair. I think it's funny how whenever I go out for comfort food like donuts, ice cream, or pizza I'm always the oldest person there. In Vietnam, it's mostly teenagers who eat these foods.Our friend brought her intensely photogenic niece along. If she looks familiar, it's because she resembles her older brother who was the star of my photo collection from our trip two years ago.
In all of the pictures after that last one with the donut, she only appears as a blur streaking around the adults at the table.
-Robert
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Pictures from Thailand and Laos
I have an album of pictures up from my trip to Thailand and Laos. You can link to it from the slideshow on the right or go directly to it from here.
In summary
It's only been 19 days, but somehow during this time . . .
I've had flight delays, bus delays and train delays. I've been let off on the wrong street, in the wrong neighborhood and in the wrong town. I've had my chain come off. I've had tuk-tuks breakdown mid-route. I've ridden VIP, first-class, second-class and too low class to bother charging money for. I've been bitten by mosquitoes and by bedbugs. I've been attacked by leeches. I was hit in the crotch by a kid who was irritated I wouldn't buy gum from him. I had a train porter intent on goosing me every time s/he passed down the aisle. I've weathered the contempt of several French people. I've been laughed at and yelled at. I've been chased out of alleys by stray dogs. I've been in sand storms, thunderstorms, power outages and a state of emergency. I lost my hat. I lost my water bottle. I lost my way. My ATM card stopped working. I ran out of repellent. I ran out of q-tips. I got sunburned. I strained my back. I banged my head numerous times and wore a long scab across the top of my head most of the trip. I had vertigo from too much motion and tripped over my bed. I ate peppers so hot that I had the hiccups for hours. I had a traditional Thai massage. My new hat has an ugly salt stain around the brim, and I've developed a constant craving for potato chips. I've been forced to drink instant coffee. Worst of all, I've been forced through necessity to eat bananas, and I really don't like bananas.
But it was a good trip. I wish I was young enough to keep going for a few more weeks.
-Robert
I've had flight delays, bus delays and train delays. I've been let off on the wrong street, in the wrong neighborhood and in the wrong town. I've had my chain come off. I've had tuk-tuks breakdown mid-route. I've ridden VIP, first-class, second-class and too low class to bother charging money for. I've been bitten by mosquitoes and by bedbugs. I've been attacked by leeches. I was hit in the crotch by a kid who was irritated I wouldn't buy gum from him. I had a train porter intent on goosing me every time s/he passed down the aisle. I've weathered the contempt of several French people. I've been laughed at and yelled at. I've been chased out of alleys by stray dogs. I've been in sand storms, thunderstorms, power outages and a state of emergency. I lost my hat. I lost my water bottle. I lost my way. My ATM card stopped working. I ran out of repellent. I ran out of q-tips. I got sunburned. I strained my back. I banged my head numerous times and wore a long scab across the top of my head most of the trip. I had vertigo from too much motion and tripped over my bed. I ate peppers so hot that I had the hiccups for hours. I had a traditional Thai massage. My new hat has an ugly salt stain around the brim, and I've developed a constant craving for potato chips. I've been forced to drink instant coffee. Worst of all, I've been forced through necessity to eat bananas, and I really don't like bananas.
But it was a good trip. I wish I was young enough to keep going for a few more weeks.
-Robert
Saturday, April 10, 2010
Eyewitness to injured at Bangkok protests
From the perspective of an ambulance rallying point at Phrapinklao Bridge in Bangkok, it appears that the police got the worst of this evening's confrontation with Red Shirt protesters. I saw approximately 60 people loaded into ambulance boats to be ferried to hospitals, and the injured police outnumbered civilians about 2:1. A few of the injuries appeared quite significant. Earlier in the evening, crowds on the bridge had unguarded access to several military vehicles on the bridge and vandalized them. One American couple I talked to said they saw protesters near Khao San Road throwing "molotov cocktails" and firing guns at the police.
First, these caveats: I don't speak the language, I don't know the ground, I talked to almost no one, and I tried to honor the spirit of my promise to my family to stay clear of the protests by keeping some distance when the action came to me. My understanding of what I saw is necessarily very limited, and the broader pictured painted by the professional media is already different from what I observed in one spot.
I didn't get close enough to get very good pix in the dark. I have some video but won't be able to upload it until I'm at a better computer set up.
At about 5 p.m. Saturday, I walked out on to Phrapinklao Bridge to see if I could observe the protests in the distance down Phrapinklao Road, which was closed to four-wheel traffic. (Motorbikes and tuk-tuks seem to be able to go into barricaded streets.) About that time, some protesters were beginning to cross on foot toward the rallies. About 6 military vehicles -- buses, jeeps and trucks -- were left unattended on the bridge, apparently by police or soldiers who had walked into the city earlier. Navy boats, some with cannons, were patrolling below the bridge, and a military helicopter flying over the protest area occasionally came near. The pedestrian traffic began to accumulate to jeer the boats and helicopter and then began to vandalize the vehicles parked there -- tires flattened, wires ripped out from under the hood and water poured into the oil reservoir. Children were playing in the driver's seats of the buses. Later in the evening I saw one of the buses on fire.
At about 7 p.m., ambulances, usually a pickup truck with about 4 medics riding in back, began rallying in the street underneath the bridge, heading toward the protest sites and returning with the injured to carry them to ambulance boats waiting at the pier underneath the bridge. About 5 boats were queued up in the water at a given time.
Police or soldiers in riot gear were the significant majority of who I saw brought in. Many limped to the pier under their own steam, their injuries not apparent, presumably affected by tear gas. All the police I saw had riot gear -- usually still wearing shin guards and shoulder guards. I saw two elderly men short of breath, which I also assumed was from tear gas. Many other injured were carried on stretchers. Some were quite bloodied up. I saw one civilian being given chest compressions. Two civilians were laid down on the cement to be bandaged instead of being taken directly to the boats, and their hair was soaked in blood. One police or soldier apparently had a broken leg that needed to be splinted before he was moved.
For about one hour, I counted about one arrival every 3-4 minutes. Beginning about 8 p.m. and for about 30 minutes, the arrivals started to pour in more frequently. There were usually more than 2 ambulances on the scene at a time, and it was quite chaotic getting the injured to the boats. Sometimes, a tuk-tuk or hired motorbike would arrive with passengers who were apparently asking after the wounded and then running down to the pier. About 8:30, the ambulances on the scene began to leave without unloading their injured and other ambulances raced by without stopping, presumably to another rally point or hospital.
It began to quiet down under Phrapinklao Bridge at that point. In places the pavement was stained with blood and littered with rubber gloves and bandages. Piles of shields, batons and other riot gear were left behind.
As of 10:30 I can still hear an occasional siren on Phra Athit Road.
I never heard any explosions or gunfire from where I was.
I also saw signs of violence earlier in the day. In a taxi on the way to Phra Athit Road ffrom the northern part of the city at about 3 p.m., the taxi got stuck in a traffic jam near the western end of Si Ayuthaya Road, which was blocked to four-wheel traffic. As I walked a few blocks south through the jam, I couldn't see the protests in the distance. An ambulance became stuck in the traffic near there, and while it was stuck, a motorbike driver came up Si Ayuthaya with a passenger holding a bloody bandage to his head. When a medic jumped out of the ambulance to help him in, I could see that his shirt was already bloodied from a previous case.
During that time, some local people were standing around on the sidewalk watching in the direction of the protests and listening to handheld radios, looking more concerned than they had earlier in the day and yesterday. But for the most part, the rest of the city has seemed remarkably unaffected by the protests in their midst. I've had 3 different taxi drivers seem genuinely surprised after a month of protests to find themselves stuck in traffic. Street markets and other commerce are carrying on like normal, even quite near the protests. Whenever a few soldiers are seen waiting around, nobody pays any attention to them. Tonight, just beyond the line of ambulance boats and navy boats, regular dinner cruise boats continued passing back and and forth. Some TVs and radios in public places are tuned to the news coverage, but not all.
Over the past couple weeks in the north and even in Laos, I frequently saw people gathered around televisions in bus stations and cafes to watch "red shirt TV," the channel broadcasting the protesters speeches. That's the same channel that the government forced off the air two days ago and again yesterday after the protesters briefly took control of the TV station and had it back on the air.
-Robert
Friday, April 9, 2010
Ayutthaya is kind of a jerk
You know that weird problem when you meet your close friend's other close friend for the first time and you get off with the wrong foot with each other and it never really gets sorted out but hardens into real animosity? They're probably perfectly nice, and it's probably just the result of a simple misunderstanding. But you can't help it. You just don't like that person very much, and you have to try hard to get along civilly with them when circumstances force you together. And they probably think the same about you.
That's me and Ayutthaya. I think Ayutthaya is kind of a jerk.
Even a state of emergency beats hanging around there. I caught the first minibus out this morning to Bangkok.
-Robert
That's me and Ayutthaya. I think Ayutthaya is kind of a jerk.
Even a state of emergency beats hanging around there. I caught the first minibus out this morning to Bangkok.
-Robert
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Khao Yai National Park
The pair of shoes I brought that were supposed to last the whole trip and serve for town and trail are now the color of leech guts. I think I'll do some shopping when I get to Bangkok.
I left the weird little camp in Nong Khai on Monday morning not sure where I was going. I had a couple destinations to the south in mind and headed for the bus station armed with too little information and hoping for the best. I found a bus to Pak Chong, the jump-off point for Khao Yai National Park and grabbed that. Unfortunately, it was a local, second-class bus and took 10 uncomfortable hours. Plus the porter put me off in the wrong town a little north of Pak Chong. For awhile I had no idea where I was. I spent another hour wearing my backpack on the back of a motorbike at highway speeds before I got to the guest house.
I have to say, for any other travelers headed this way, I second the recommendation of the two guest houses mentioned by Lonely Planet here -- at least on the grounds of friendliness and helpfulness. The place I landed at didn't have enough guests for a tour the next day, and very generously steered me to the next hotel, even though it lowered their chances of eventually getting up enough for a tour. The owner also gave me a lift to the train station this morning.
The day-long trek in the park was incredible. It was a slow, quiet hike in the morning through jungle and hilltop grasslands, mostly on the look out for birds. Our guide was a genius at setting up his telescope in a hurry to give us a look, and he had a knack for working the controls on strange cameras to get pix through the telescope. We spotted long-tailed broadbills, great hornbills and wreathed hornbills (which make a tremenoundous whooshing sound when they're flapping their wings), macaques, a family of white-handed gibbons and tons of butterflys. I spotted one insect that our guide had never seen before, so I'm going to pretend I discovered it until I learn otherwise. I had a kind of pincers on the tail that grabbed at a stick when we prodded it. We played with a cottony-looking kind of caterpillar that can jump from its perch and float off in the wind.
And we saw leeches. So many that our guide was kind of freaking out. I had more of them on my shoes and ankles than I could count sometimes, and in places the ground was so thick with them it looked like beard stubble. (They stand on one end and wave the other end in the air looking for something to jump on.) I foolishly wore black pants, so I couldn't tell if they were getting above my leech socks or not. We got out the industrial strength DEET that I was carrying and did an experiment and determined that it helped, and I emptied my precious supply sharing it with the pair of Swedes I was with. They were built like Olympians and perfect in every other way, so I doubt leeches would bite them anyway.
The leech socks seemed kind of besides the point when we went looking for crocodiles. We spotted one, but only the bottom half of it. The other 5 feet were in the shade where we couldn't see it from our distance. We also spotted baby and adult monitor lizards, which looked tough enough to bully the crocodiles, and Indonesian water dragons.
After lunch we had a long rest at a gorgeous waterfall. Not safe for swimming, unfortunately. Then the rest of the day and early evening was spent driving around looking for wild elephants. They are common enough in the park that sightings are frequent, but we didn't have any luck. We did see guar, sambar deer and barking deer and more birds and primates.
It's a gorgeous park and was a privilege to see it. I would love to get deeper into it on an extended stay. I missed seeing the nightly exit of masses of pink-lipped bats, which would be in the tour on a second day.
My train leaves the tiny Pak Chong station for Ayattuya in a few minutes, and that should be my last major stop before a few days in Bangkok and flying back to Saigon.
-Robert
I left the weird little camp in Nong Khai on Monday morning not sure where I was going. I had a couple destinations to the south in mind and headed for the bus station armed with too little information and hoping for the best. I found a bus to Pak Chong, the jump-off point for Khao Yai National Park and grabbed that. Unfortunately, it was a local, second-class bus and took 10 uncomfortable hours. Plus the porter put me off in the wrong town a little north of Pak Chong. For awhile I had no idea where I was. I spent another hour wearing my backpack on the back of a motorbike at highway speeds before I got to the guest house.
I have to say, for any other travelers headed this way, I second the recommendation of the two guest houses mentioned by Lonely Planet here -- at least on the grounds of friendliness and helpfulness. The place I landed at didn't have enough guests for a tour the next day, and very generously steered me to the next hotel, even though it lowered their chances of eventually getting up enough for a tour. The owner also gave me a lift to the train station this morning.
The day-long trek in the park was incredible. It was a slow, quiet hike in the morning through jungle and hilltop grasslands, mostly on the look out for birds. Our guide was a genius at setting up his telescope in a hurry to give us a look, and he had a knack for working the controls on strange cameras to get pix through the telescope. We spotted long-tailed broadbills, great hornbills and wreathed hornbills (which make a tremenoundous whooshing sound when they're flapping their wings), macaques, a family of white-handed gibbons and tons of butterflys. I spotted one insect that our guide had never seen before, so I'm going to pretend I discovered it until I learn otherwise. I had a kind of pincers on the tail that grabbed at a stick when we prodded it. We played with a cottony-looking kind of caterpillar that can jump from its perch and float off in the wind.
And we saw leeches. So many that our guide was kind of freaking out. I had more of them on my shoes and ankles than I could count sometimes, and in places the ground was so thick with them it looked like beard stubble. (They stand on one end and wave the other end in the air looking for something to jump on.) I foolishly wore black pants, so I couldn't tell if they were getting above my leech socks or not. We got out the industrial strength DEET that I was carrying and did an experiment and determined that it helped, and I emptied my precious supply sharing it with the pair of Swedes I was with. They were built like Olympians and perfect in every other way, so I doubt leeches would bite them anyway.
The leech socks seemed kind of besides the point when we went looking for crocodiles. We spotted one, but only the bottom half of it. The other 5 feet were in the shade where we couldn't see it from our distance. We also spotted baby and adult monitor lizards, which looked tough enough to bully the crocodiles, and Indonesian water dragons.
After lunch we had a long rest at a gorgeous waterfall. Not safe for swimming, unfortunately. Then the rest of the day and early evening was spent driving around looking for wild elephants. They are common enough in the park that sightings are frequent, but we didn't have any luck. We did see guar, sambar deer and barking deer and more birds and primates.
It's a gorgeous park and was a privilege to see it. I would love to get deeper into it on an extended stay. I missed seeing the nightly exit of masses of pink-lipped bats, which would be in the tour on a second day.
My train leaves the tiny Pak Chong station for Ayattuya in a few minutes, and that should be my last major stop before a few days in Bangkok and flying back to Saigon.
-Robert
Sunday, April 4, 2010
Vientiane and crossing the border
I can't quite put my finger on why, but I couldn't connect with Vientiane. I was there from late on a Friday to early on Sunday, and the whole time the place seemed deserted and lifeless to me, like the financial district of an American city on a Sunday. Maybe that's how the downtown is, and there's probably a little more hop to the place out past the circle of monuments in more residential districts. But it seemed strange to me that there was almost no street life along the riverfront. There was no night market to speak of. This morning at breakfast, across from the cultural hall, I counted minutes going by without a single vehicle passing. This is a totally unfair way to judge a community, I know. It just reminds me of how hard it is to really learn anything about the places we visit without having a local guide to help us connect.
I decided to cut the visit short, but I did find enough to keep me busy for a full day. Haw Pha Raew, a former temple now used as a tiny museum of religious relics, was interesting. Across the street Wat Sisaket was especially beatiful. When I nodded hello to a monk there, he wanted to chat for awhile to practice his English and get my email and had his friend take his picture with me. They were visiting from a town in the south, taking in the city sights themselves. (Monks go on vacation, too, I guess. In Luang Prabang, I felt bad about getting up early to mix with the famously obnoxious tourists taking pictures of the famously picturesque morning march by the local monks to beg for alms, until I saw another monk -- presumably visiting from out of town -- taking pictures himself.) I explored the gifts shops and picked out a few things that can survive the backpack. I stopped into a well-known silk shop -- Carol Kennedy Designs -- and talked with the shop clerk for awhile. She tells me Carol is from Connecticut, too. I went out to the suburbs Wat Sok Pa Louang for some more meditation practice. I stumbled across a nice little Japanese restaurant and ate very well there. I loved most of the hot Lao coffee I had, by the way. The iced coffee, not so much. The Vietnamese still lead in that category.
This morning I hired a tuk-tuk to take me to the Friendship Bridge, 20 km out of town, and I wasn't sure we would make it. It seemed slow and a little sick sounding from the start, and we did break down about 10 minutes into it. I sat under the canopy while the driver disassembled some of the guts and got it going again. It's about 45-minutes by ailing tuk-tuk, probably 20 minutes in any other vehicle. I didn't see any other westerners at the border crossing, and I did a lot of wandering around in confusion, once walking through a checkpoint without getting checked.
I'm at a rustic traveler's camp in Nong Khai, Thailand for now, pretty and quiet (in a small-town way, not in an abandoned-capital way, like Vientiane.) Pushing on south tomorrow.
-Robert
I decided to cut the visit short, but I did find enough to keep me busy for a full day. Haw Pha Raew, a former temple now used as a tiny museum of religious relics, was interesting. Across the street Wat Sisaket was especially beatiful. When I nodded hello to a monk there, he wanted to chat for awhile to practice his English and get my email and had his friend take his picture with me. They were visiting from a town in the south, taking in the city sights themselves. (Monks go on vacation, too, I guess. In Luang Prabang, I felt bad about getting up early to mix with the famously obnoxious tourists taking pictures of the famously picturesque morning march by the local monks to beg for alms, until I saw another monk -- presumably visiting from out of town -- taking pictures himself.) I explored the gifts shops and picked out a few things that can survive the backpack. I stopped into a well-known silk shop -- Carol Kennedy Designs -- and talked with the shop clerk for awhile. She tells me Carol is from Connecticut, too. I went out to the suburbs Wat Sok Pa Louang for some more meditation practice. I stumbled across a nice little Japanese restaurant and ate very well there. I loved most of the hot Lao coffee I had, by the way. The iced coffee, not so much. The Vietnamese still lead in that category.
This morning I hired a tuk-tuk to take me to the Friendship Bridge, 20 km out of town, and I wasn't sure we would make it. It seemed slow and a little sick sounding from the start, and we did break down about 10 minutes into it. I sat under the canopy while the driver disassembled some of the guts and got it going again. It's about 45-minutes by ailing tuk-tuk, probably 20 minutes in any other vehicle. I didn't see any other westerners at the border crossing, and I did a lot of wandering around in confusion, once walking through a checkpoint without getting checked.
I'm at a rustic traveler's camp in Nong Khai, Thailand for now, pretty and quiet (in a small-town way, not in an abandoned-capital way, like Vientiane.) Pushing on south tomorrow.
-Robert
Saturday, April 3, 2010
To the capitol for provisions
I'm in Vientiane for provisions and a haircut. Yesterday I spent a long 10 hours on the bus from Luang Prabang, an exhausting ride with constant winding on switchbacks on a narrow mountain highway. I swear there wasn't a 100-yard straightaway or a bridge the whole way except for a brief period on a valley floor near Vang Viang. I feel like I did a thousand ab crunches just holding myself upright in the rocking bus all day. The scenery was as weird and dramatic as advertised. Today was all about laundry, chocolate and freshening up. Luckily my hairstyling needs are as easy to communicate here as in Vietnam.
I could have had a tougher trip, though. Along the way, I met Jim Harris, a retired school principle from Wausau, Wisconsin who had been traveling by bus for three days. He was in the far northern interior where he camps for 6 months a year working to find and clear unexploded ordnance from villages and farmland. (He's also been a big help pointing me to a hotel and other sites in Vientiane.) Check out the nonprofit organization he and his wife started at www.wehelpwarvictims.org.
-Robert
I could have had a tougher trip, though. Along the way, I met Jim Harris, a retired school principle from Wausau, Wisconsin who had been traveling by bus for three days. He was in the far northern interior where he camps for 6 months a year working to find and clear unexploded ordnance from villages and farmland. (He's also been a big help pointing me to a hotel and other sites in Vientiane.) Check out the nonprofit organization he and his wife started at www.wehelpwarvictims.org.
-Robert
Thursday, April 1, 2010
Luang Prabang
Laos might be trying to tell me something. I had another run-in with the weather yesterday. The guest house where I'm staying is an old Chinese shop-house style building overlooking the Mekong with a balcony. There's no glass in the windows, so I keep the shutters shut, and it's dark as a tomb in there. Yesterday I woke up from a nap to the sensation that rain was starting outside. I go out to the balcony to collect my laundry, and I though I had stepped into a hurricane. The flying debris from the trees drove me back inside, and I was watching the action through a crack in the door when the transformer on the pole across from the balcony blew it's circuit breakers and threw off a shower of sparks. Now it's dark in the whole building, and I grope my way downstairs to sit with the hotel staff while they watch from the doors. Once it died down, people got to work picking up the chairs and tables and potted trees that got tossed around the street. I sat down with one of the kids who works at the hotel and watched the clean-up while we swapped life stories. He wanted to know what happens to airplanes when they encounter a storm. He can't imagine they survive, and I explained it the best I knew, though I don't really get it either. When I went out later, the electricity was out all over town, and when it came back on, I assumed it had at my guest house also, but I returned about 8 p.m. to discover our block was still in the dark. Now I'm in a hundred-year-old wooden box full of lit candles. Thankfully it didn't last. I sat on my balcony in the dark for a couple hours listening to the neighbors chatting with each other and watching the electrical crew work on the transformer.
Luang Prabang has atmosphere coming out the wazoo. Because it's a Unesco World Heritage site, all the old quarter is well-preserved, and it does feel like stepping back in time if you squint until you don't see any tourists. It's fun walking around the side streets early in the morning and the evening sampling the food and checking out all the galleries and shops. Yesterday I hiked up to the top of the hill in the center of town for the views of the mountains and the two rivers and then hiked on the old bridge over the Nam Khan to explore the some of the poorer neighborhoods.
Today was a cycling trip -- 33 km in 6 hours. I was paired with an out-of-shape Afrikaaner who never made it to the top of any of the hills without walking. To be fair, it was a pretty tough ride -- that's the second time the "easy" outing was about all I could handle. We visited several rural villages, had lunch in one, visited a silk factory and took a dip in a nice swimming hold in the Nam Khan. At one point I hijacked the itinerary so we could visit the village school and we stood outside the windows of the three small classrooms disrupting the lessons. It was just before lunch break, thankfully, and when the class monitor came out to ring the bell -- an old car wheel that she banged with a rock -- a cheer went up inside, and the children walked home singing songs together and yelling "bye bye" to us.
I am dog tired, but loaded up with calories. I've been eating the most delicious salads and fish and tofu dishes. Tonight I had grilled water buffalo skewers.
Next up, a long day of traveling by bus to Vientiane to spend a few days there.
-Robert
Luang Prabang has atmosphere coming out the wazoo. Because it's a Unesco World Heritage site, all the old quarter is well-preserved, and it does feel like stepping back in time if you squint until you don't see any tourists. It's fun walking around the side streets early in the morning and the evening sampling the food and checking out all the galleries and shops. Yesterday I hiked up to the top of the hill in the center of town for the views of the mountains and the two rivers and then hiked on the old bridge over the Nam Khan to explore the some of the poorer neighborhoods.
Today was a cycling trip -- 33 km in 6 hours. I was paired with an out-of-shape Afrikaaner who never made it to the top of any of the hills without walking. To be fair, it was a pretty tough ride -- that's the second time the "easy" outing was about all I could handle. We visited several rural villages, had lunch in one, visited a silk factory and took a dip in a nice swimming hold in the Nam Khan. At one point I hijacked the itinerary so we could visit the village school and we stood outside the windows of the three small classrooms disrupting the lessons. It was just before lunch break, thankfully, and when the class monitor came out to ring the bell -- an old car wheel that she banged with a rock -- a cheer went up inside, and the children walked home singing songs together and yelling "bye bye" to us.
I am dog tired, but loaded up with calories. I've been eating the most delicious salads and fish and tofu dishes. Tonight I had grilled water buffalo skewers.
Next up, a long day of traveling by bus to Vientiane to spend a few days there.
-Robert
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Slow boat to Luang Prabang
I don't know if I'll ever be able to convey how fun this has been. I feel so fortunate to be getting this experience, despite an unadvertised hike and an unadvertised swim during our cruise down the Mekong River.
On Sunday morning I left Chiang Mai, Thailand by van with a lot of reluctance. The night markets and the atmosphere of the old city and the sois in the morning made me want to stay awhile longer. The drive was about 6 hours through the mountains heading northwest to the small town of Chiang Khong on the border with Laos at Houayxai. I took a room at the $6 bungalows where the van put us off, and I started to regret that I was taking three days of surface travel to get where I was going. The further into unfamiliar territory I get, the more I become part of the package tours and well-beaten paths, and my traveling companions are mostly kids 15 years younger who don't often make a great first impression. And most of the conversation is strangely repetitive -- how far, how long, how much. I'm the odd man out not just because of my age but because of how short my trip is -- only two-and-a-half weeks. Most of these guys are on the trail for 6 months or more, spending weeks and months at each stop. They think taking a $6 room for myself is extravagant.
One girl from Belgium told about meeting someone from Liverpool, and they've decided to travel together for awhile. She says casually, "We've been through a lot together." It sounded like a platitude, but then she went on to list several misadventures, any one of which would have made me call off my trip -- motorbike wrecks, sleeping in hotel lobbies, run ins with the police, stitches, stolen passports, cellphones, cameras. "At least I didn't get me ATM card stolen," she said. "Though I did lose it later on."
I didn't have the confidence to hoof it down to the ferry in the morning and navigate my way across, through immigration and onto a boat. I signed on for the package. Because I signed up late, I was regularly two steps behind for awhile. Passports usually get sent through in a batch, and mine wasn't in it, so my group and guide ferried across without me, got a tuk tuk to the slow boat without me, etc. After awhile I started to think my name was, "Hey-he-made-it."
We shoved off at 10 a.m. on Tuesday, about 80 of us I think, but there was plenty of room to move around. The boats have a handful of comfy seats up front, first come, first served, but the consensus after awhile is that sitting there makes you less sociable. Most people move around a lot getting to know their fellow passengers. Some of them, I was just as glad not to know -- the ones laden with bottles of counterfeit Johnny Walker and Stolichnaya or who showed up glassy eyed after meeting up with the tuk tuk drivers in the shadows the night before. But I had a good time playing guitar with two lads from Leeds, talking literature and movies and politics with 2 kids from Slovenia, talking American football with a Danish girl who had been an exchange student in South Dakota. There was only one other American on the boat and a few Canadians. Everyone wants me to answer for Bush.
We had a lot of time to talk -- 8 or 9 hours each of the two days to cover 300 kilometers, and by about noon on the second day, I had to resist a persistent urge to jump in and swim the rest of the way. But the views along the way were unforgettable. I'm tempted to describe it as a wild river, but I know that technically that means an un-dammed river, and the effects of damming upstream in China were the most prominent feature. We rode low in the riverbed, poking along slowly from one side to the other to find the deepest channels.
But it looked wild to me. Enormous rocks and sandbars and beaches bordered us on each side, and the mountains walled us in. We saw almost no signs of habitation -- presumably the villages were just out of sight over the bank. But every half hour or so we'd come across a handful of people doing some kind of work down at the bank -- fishing, digging for shellfish, washing clothes, panning for gold. There was a constant haze from the slash and burn field prep on the mountainside.
About half-way down the first day, we had a little bit of an adventure. The water was too low, and the captain pulled in along a sand dune and started gesturing for us to get out. I should say, this is one of the few situations I've been in where none of our guides spoke any English. For two days we were dependent on speculation and sign language. The only passenger who was a local, a monk, started hiking down river over the dunes, and the captain kept yelling "Go!" So we followed the monk. (Our guess was that the captain needed to lighten the load to get over the rapids, but it turns out we actually needed to hike down to another boat that met us below the rapids, and our bags were ferried down on skiffs.)
We hiked over the riverbed for about 15 minutes and were having a good laugh about our little adventure. "They didn't say anything about this because at the guest house." I remember pausing to take a picture of the long line of us strong across the rocks. Then a few minutes later I turned around to take another picture, and I see a rain cloud squeezing down the valley toward us. A minute later we're in a sandstorm unable to see where we're walking, and then a minute after that we're in a downpour. It was the first drop of rain I had seen in about 12 weeks, and I had forgotten there was such a thing.
Just about then we arrive where the next boat is waiting at a sandbar just across a tiny little puddle that we'll have to cross over. The wind is blowing so hard that the boat is banging into the skiffs and pulling against its mooring, which is just a stake in the sand, and the captain and the ferryman are all yelling at one another. The gangplank is wobbling all over the place, and everyone is afraid to climb it, so traffic is backing up on the sandbar. As we get down to the bank, it turns out the puddle is deeper than expected and people are going up to their thighs. In a flash, like an animal instinct perhaps, all the European men have their pants off. It was like a United Nations of weird underwear. Some people are tripping and going down in the puddle. I saw one girl who had a streak of sand across her teeth and gums before it was over.
I got across safely with my camera dry, but like everyone was caked in wet sand. Once we got on the boat, because the tarps had been let down the sides, it was too dark to see, and we were like panicked cattle looking for our backpacks to find our jackets. Once we got underweigh, and the rain stopped and the tarps came up, we were pretty cold, which is something else I had forgotten could happen. Later on we talked to some people traveling upriver, and they said they got hail, so I guess we were lucky to miss that.
We put in for the night at the half-way point, Pakbeng, a trading post for carrying goods from Thailand into the interior. There are only 200 families there, the one road is only half paved, and they just got electricity a couple years ago. Down by the river, almost all the activity is guest houses and restaurants for the boats full of tourists. Unfortunately, there wasn't enough time to look around the village any. It was pitch dark by the time we were done showering and feeding on second helpings at the cafes.
The 9 hours the next day was less eventful and even a little bit sunny for some of it. More great scenery, long passages with no sign of life and the regular reminder of big the world is. We arrived at Luang Prabang just at dusk, and the town makes a great impression that way.
-Robert
On Sunday morning I left Chiang Mai, Thailand by van with a lot of reluctance. The night markets and the atmosphere of the old city and the sois in the morning made me want to stay awhile longer. The drive was about 6 hours through the mountains heading northwest to the small town of Chiang Khong on the border with Laos at Houayxai. I took a room at the $6 bungalows where the van put us off, and I started to regret that I was taking three days of surface travel to get where I was going. The further into unfamiliar territory I get, the more I become part of the package tours and well-beaten paths, and my traveling companions are mostly kids 15 years younger who don't often make a great first impression. And most of the conversation is strangely repetitive -- how far, how long, how much. I'm the odd man out not just because of my age but because of how short my trip is -- only two-and-a-half weeks. Most of these guys are on the trail for 6 months or more, spending weeks and months at each stop. They think taking a $6 room for myself is extravagant.
One girl from Belgium told about meeting someone from Liverpool, and they've decided to travel together for awhile. She says casually, "We've been through a lot together." It sounded like a platitude, but then she went on to list several misadventures, any one of which would have made me call off my trip -- motorbike wrecks, sleeping in hotel lobbies, run ins with the police, stitches, stolen passports, cellphones, cameras. "At least I didn't get me ATM card stolen," she said. "Though I did lose it later on."
I didn't have the confidence to hoof it down to the ferry in the morning and navigate my way across, through immigration and onto a boat. I signed on for the package. Because I signed up late, I was regularly two steps behind for awhile. Passports usually get sent through in a batch, and mine wasn't in it, so my group and guide ferried across without me, got a tuk tuk to the slow boat without me, etc. After awhile I started to think my name was, "Hey-he-made-it."
We shoved off at 10 a.m. on Tuesday, about 80 of us I think, but there was plenty of room to move around. The boats have a handful of comfy seats up front, first come, first served, but the consensus after awhile is that sitting there makes you less sociable. Most people move around a lot getting to know their fellow passengers. Some of them, I was just as glad not to know -- the ones laden with bottles of counterfeit Johnny Walker and Stolichnaya or who showed up glassy eyed after meeting up with the tuk tuk drivers in the shadows the night before. But I had a good time playing guitar with two lads from Leeds, talking literature and movies and politics with 2 kids from Slovenia, talking American football with a Danish girl who had been an exchange student in South Dakota. There was only one other American on the boat and a few Canadians. Everyone wants me to answer for Bush.
We had a lot of time to talk -- 8 or 9 hours each of the two days to cover 300 kilometers, and by about noon on the second day, I had to resist a persistent urge to jump in and swim the rest of the way. But the views along the way were unforgettable. I'm tempted to describe it as a wild river, but I know that technically that means an un-dammed river, and the effects of damming upstream in China were the most prominent feature. We rode low in the riverbed, poking along slowly from one side to the other to find the deepest channels.
But it looked wild to me. Enormous rocks and sandbars and beaches bordered us on each side, and the mountains walled us in. We saw almost no signs of habitation -- presumably the villages were just out of sight over the bank. But every half hour or so we'd come across a handful of people doing some kind of work down at the bank -- fishing, digging for shellfish, washing clothes, panning for gold. There was a constant haze from the slash and burn field prep on the mountainside.
About half-way down the first day, we had a little bit of an adventure. The water was too low, and the captain pulled in along a sand dune and started gesturing for us to get out. I should say, this is one of the few situations I've been in where none of our guides spoke any English. For two days we were dependent on speculation and sign language. The only passenger who was a local, a monk, started hiking down river over the dunes, and the captain kept yelling "Go!" So we followed the monk. (Our guess was that the captain needed to lighten the load to get over the rapids, but it turns out we actually needed to hike down to another boat that met us below the rapids, and our bags were ferried down on skiffs.)
We hiked over the riverbed for about 15 minutes and were having a good laugh about our little adventure. "They didn't say anything about this because at the guest house." I remember pausing to take a picture of the long line of us strong across the rocks. Then a few minutes later I turned around to take another picture, and I see a rain cloud squeezing down the valley toward us. A minute later we're in a sandstorm unable to see where we're walking, and then a minute after that we're in a downpour. It was the first drop of rain I had seen in about 12 weeks, and I had forgotten there was such a thing.
Just about then we arrive where the next boat is waiting at a sandbar just across a tiny little puddle that we'll have to cross over. The wind is blowing so hard that the boat is banging into the skiffs and pulling against its mooring, which is just a stake in the sand, and the captain and the ferryman are all yelling at one another. The gangplank is wobbling all over the place, and everyone is afraid to climb it, so traffic is backing up on the sandbar. As we get down to the bank, it turns out the puddle is deeper than expected and people are going up to their thighs. In a flash, like an animal instinct perhaps, all the European men have their pants off. It was like a United Nations of weird underwear. Some people are tripping and going down in the puddle. I saw one girl who had a streak of sand across her teeth and gums before it was over.
I got across safely with my camera dry, but like everyone was caked in wet sand. Once we got on the boat, because the tarps had been let down the sides, it was too dark to see, and we were like panicked cattle looking for our backpacks to find our jackets. Once we got underweigh, and the rain stopped and the tarps came up, we were pretty cold, which is something else I had forgotten could happen. Later on we talked to some people traveling upriver, and they said they got hail, so I guess we were lucky to miss that.
We put in for the night at the half-way point, Pakbeng, a trading post for carrying goods from Thailand into the interior. There are only 200 families there, the one road is only half paved, and they just got electricity a couple years ago. Down by the river, almost all the activity is guest houses and restaurants for the boats full of tourists. Unfortunately, there wasn't enough time to look around the village any. It was pitch dark by the time we were done showering and feeding on second helpings at the cafes.
The 9 hours the next day was less eventful and even a little bit sunny for some of it. More great scenery, long passages with no sign of life and the regular reminder of big the world is. We arrived at Luang Prabang just at dusk, and the town makes a great impression that way.
-Robert
Saturday, March 27, 2010
The root of all suffering is desire to get up and stretch your legs
Sunday a.m. here. I have a bus ticket to Chiang Khong and am leaving Chiang Mai shortly, with reservations. I had a good time the last couple days.
Yesterday I hiked over to the other side of the river to check out some temples there and to wander the quiter residential streets. The soi -- lanes -- off the main streets are fun to explore. They are mostly residential, except in the backpacker areas where a lot of homes are converted into guest houses and internet cafes, and most of the homes have nice gardens. I stopped at one little patio cafe run by Indian immigrants and had a really refreshing masala iced tea. I'm definitely going to find the recipe for that.
Back on the river I signed on for a short cruise on a scorpion tail boat. It's a corny tour for 15 dollars, just a few miles total all in the city limits, looking at architectural highlights along the river. We saw a couple of enormous beautiful Banyan trees estimated to be over 500 years old and that had dozens of Kingfisher birds roosting in them. We stopped at a little canteen and had some great delicious rice and lychee juice.
The upside of these overpriced tours in the off season is that you can get the guides off their patter and talk to them a little and to any other guests along. I thought I would have the boat to myself, but at the last minute a couple of Australians showed up. One was a professor and the other a grad student of peace studies in Melbourne and they are in Thailand for 8 weeks for a retreat at a conflict resolution camp of some kind at a Buddhist monastary. They said they are quite isolated and wearing white pajamas the whole time and not seeing much of Thailand except for their fellow novices, but they got a one-week furlough to run roughly the same path I am taking in two weeks.
In the evening I went to the Saturday walking street, which is what they call it when they close off a street for a market (on a Saturday.) The vibe at this market is very different from what I've learned to expect in Vietnam. There's a lot more variety and originality in the arts and crafts and a lot less cynicism. All the vendors seemed to enjoy being there and were having a good time talking to customers, which was mostly locals instead of tourists. It's a good thing for my budget that I'm carrying everything with me on my back, otherwise I would have spent a fortune on souveniers. Everywhere you go, there are musicians and dancers performing for tips. The best part of the market was sampling from all the different food stalls. A typical serving was either $.17 or $.34, so for about $1.50 I sampled about 5 different dishes I had never heard of or seen before.
In that same neighborhood, I went to Wat Sisruphan were they have informal conversation tables with the monks and quick introductions to meditation, where we learned to get in touch with our suffering. I had a head start; see my previous post on my difficulty sitting on the floor.
-Robert
Yesterday I hiked over to the other side of the river to check out some temples there and to wander the quiter residential streets. The soi -- lanes -- off the main streets are fun to explore. They are mostly residential, except in the backpacker areas where a lot of homes are converted into guest houses and internet cafes, and most of the homes have nice gardens. I stopped at one little patio cafe run by Indian immigrants and had a really refreshing masala iced tea. I'm definitely going to find the recipe for that.
Back on the river I signed on for a short cruise on a scorpion tail boat. It's a corny tour for 15 dollars, just a few miles total all in the city limits, looking at architectural highlights along the river. We saw a couple of enormous beautiful Banyan trees estimated to be over 500 years old and that had dozens of Kingfisher birds roosting in them. We stopped at a little canteen and had some great delicious rice and lychee juice.
The upside of these overpriced tours in the off season is that you can get the guides off their patter and talk to them a little and to any other guests along. I thought I would have the boat to myself, but at the last minute a couple of Australians showed up. One was a professor and the other a grad student of peace studies in Melbourne and they are in Thailand for 8 weeks for a retreat at a conflict resolution camp of some kind at a Buddhist monastary. They said they are quite isolated and wearing white pajamas the whole time and not seeing much of Thailand except for their fellow novices, but they got a one-week furlough to run roughly the same path I am taking in two weeks.
In the evening I went to the Saturday walking street, which is what they call it when they close off a street for a market (on a Saturday.) The vibe at this market is very different from what I've learned to expect in Vietnam. There's a lot more variety and originality in the arts and crafts and a lot less cynicism. All the vendors seemed to enjoy being there and were having a good time talking to customers, which was mostly locals instead of tourists. It's a good thing for my budget that I'm carrying everything with me on my back, otherwise I would have spent a fortune on souveniers. Everywhere you go, there are musicians and dancers performing for tips. The best part of the market was sampling from all the different food stalls. A typical serving was either $.17 or $.34, so for about $1.50 I sampled about 5 different dishes I had never heard of or seen before.
In that same neighborhood, I went to Wat Sisruphan were they have informal conversation tables with the monks and quick introductions to meditation, where we learned to get in touch with our suffering. I had a head start; see my previous post on my difficulty sitting on the floor.
-Robert
Friday, March 26, 2010
Countryside tour
This morning after breakfast I started trying to organize a tour for myself outside the city. The feature activity around here is treks to hang out in the villages of the mountain tribes that still live in the area. I would really like to see that, but the tour operators give the impression that its all pretty boilerplate and structured, not to mention smarmy, and I don't really have time anyway. I'll see about trying something like that in Laos.
But I wanted to see the countryside a little, so negotiated an itinerary and price with a sorng taa ou driver. The main public transportation source here is a kind of freelance cab consisting of a small red Japanese pickup truck, usually about 20 years old, with a kind of roof over the bed and two benches. The drivers try to put together a bunch of passengers going the same way, but it's the slow season here, and there's usually only ever one passenger.
I'm lousy at haggling and vastly overpaid for this trip, but at least I got to sit in the cab with the air conditioning and my driver's collection of B.J. Thomas CD's. We spent about five hours together talking politics and life stories. He's pretty frustrated with the current government both on the practical grounds that they're all talk and don't do anything (i.e. poverty and jobs) and on the principled grounds that they didn't get in power by democratic means. He's refreshingly (compared to Vietnam) keyed up about the insult to democracy, and he wants to see an election. He didn't say so, but I got the impression he's in favor of the protests that are off and on in Bangkok in recent weeks.
He's 60 years old and remembers growing up in Bangkok when everyone traveled either by bicycle or on the canals. He prefers Chiang Mai. He worked at a U.S. army PX during the Vietnam War. He lived in Saudi Arabia for four years doing construction work and then went to Libya for the same but broke his contract after 6 months because there was no food he wanted in the markets. His son is a driver like him. His daughter just graduated from Chiang Mai University and teaches English at a local high school. His mother is 82 and still strong, and she lives with him.
Our first stop was Was Phra That at the top of Doi Suthep. Mt. Suthep is supposed to dominate the landscape, but it's so hazy here, from the seasonal burns by the farmers mostly, that I didn't know there was a mountain until we were driving up it. Judging from other pictures I've seen, I missed getting a great view from the top. The temple was really interesting with all the vendors selling snacks and incense and prayer bells along the steps climbing up to it. Around the outside, children from programs teaching traditional dance put on performances for tips.
Next we drove north of the city to the Mae Sa waterfalls. It's the dry season, but these still have a little action to them. It's a series of 10 short falls along a path of about a mile or two that I hiked up pausing along the way to check out each of the pools. I picked out the one that looked best and on the way down put to use the fancy traveling pants and lightweight pack towel I brought, zipping the legs off and getting in for a dip.
Lunch was one of the stands at the park entrance selling grilled chicken and fish and spicy papaya salads. My guide dropped me off back in the old town section of Chiang Mai at the City Arts and Culture Museum, an old royal administration building converted into a city hall and finally into the museum. It focuses on the history of the city, which I'm glad I learned about, because I didn't get before how it was planned out and why it has so many temples. (I'll just refer you to the Chiang Mai entries in Wikipedia and Wikitravel.)
I loved my dinner last night at Taste From Heaven so much that I returned again tonight to try some other dishes. Plus they have free internet for customers, which is kind of weird for a proper sit-down restaurant, but here I am.
Another day in Chiang Mai gleaning what I missed, I think, then the bus to Chiang Khong on Sunday to cross into Laos on Monday.
-Robert
But I wanted to see the countryside a little, so negotiated an itinerary and price with a sorng taa ou driver. The main public transportation source here is a kind of freelance cab consisting of a small red Japanese pickup truck, usually about 20 years old, with a kind of roof over the bed and two benches. The drivers try to put together a bunch of passengers going the same way, but it's the slow season here, and there's usually only ever one passenger.
I'm lousy at haggling and vastly overpaid for this trip, but at least I got to sit in the cab with the air conditioning and my driver's collection of B.J. Thomas CD's. We spent about five hours together talking politics and life stories. He's pretty frustrated with the current government both on the practical grounds that they're all talk and don't do anything (i.e. poverty and jobs) and on the principled grounds that they didn't get in power by democratic means. He's refreshingly (compared to Vietnam) keyed up about the insult to democracy, and he wants to see an election. He didn't say so, but I got the impression he's in favor of the protests that are off and on in Bangkok in recent weeks.
He's 60 years old and remembers growing up in Bangkok when everyone traveled either by bicycle or on the canals. He prefers Chiang Mai. He worked at a U.S. army PX during the Vietnam War. He lived in Saudi Arabia for four years doing construction work and then went to Libya for the same but broke his contract after 6 months because there was no food he wanted in the markets. His son is a driver like him. His daughter just graduated from Chiang Mai University and teaches English at a local high school. His mother is 82 and still strong, and she lives with him.
Our first stop was Was Phra That at the top of Doi Suthep. Mt. Suthep is supposed to dominate the landscape, but it's so hazy here, from the seasonal burns by the farmers mostly, that I didn't know there was a mountain until we were driving up it. Judging from other pictures I've seen, I missed getting a great view from the top. The temple was really interesting with all the vendors selling snacks and incense and prayer bells along the steps climbing up to it. Around the outside, children from programs teaching traditional dance put on performances for tips.
Next we drove north of the city to the Mae Sa waterfalls. It's the dry season, but these still have a little action to them. It's a series of 10 short falls along a path of about a mile or two that I hiked up pausing along the way to check out each of the pools. I picked out the one that looked best and on the way down put to use the fancy traveling pants and lightweight pack towel I brought, zipping the legs off and getting in for a dip.
Lunch was one of the stands at the park entrance selling grilled chicken and fish and spicy papaya salads. My guide dropped me off back in the old town section of Chiang Mai at the City Arts and Culture Museum, an old royal administration building converted into a city hall and finally into the museum. It focuses on the history of the city, which I'm glad I learned about, because I didn't get before how it was planned out and why it has so many temples. (I'll just refer you to the Chiang Mai entries in Wikipedia and Wikitravel.)
I loved my dinner last night at Taste From Heaven so much that I returned again tonight to try some other dishes. Plus they have free internet for customers, which is kind of weird for a proper sit-down restaurant, but here I am.
Another day in Chiang Mai gleaning what I missed, I think, then the bus to Chiang Khong on Sunday to cross into Laos on Monday.
-Robert
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
From Saigon to Chiang Mai
I arrived in Chiang Mai, Thailand about 9:30 this a.m. after about 26 hours straight of travel. Air Asia did not impress, and I've had a few unique travel hiccups to go along with the usual delays and annoyances. I had a few hours between my flight to Bangkok and my train out, which I planned to spend exploring around the train station, but I got lost looking for Chinatown instead of getting lost in Chinatown, which is the usual point. My ATM card isn't working in Thailand for some reason, so I've had to dip into my plans C and D for cash.
I had a second-class sleeping berth, upper. Once the beds are made up, these are in the style of sleeper cars you see in old Hollywood movies like "Some Like It Hot." I don't believe they used real cars for those scenes, though, unless Jack Lemmon is under 5'9". What is it about me and the rail systems of Southeast Asia that I can't stretch out in my bunk? The transvestite who was our attendant must really suffer. She was 6'3" easy.
Before the beds are made up, the bottom bunk is two bench seats facing each other, and I was seated with a Belgian massage therapist who spent the last two months snorkling around peninsular Thailand, getting tattoes based on her own drawings of lotus flowers and meeting some really great people. I wasn't one of them, apparently, because once the train was moving, she wanted me to take an empty seat so she could fold down her bunk early.
Most of the train trip was in the dark, but the last few hours were after dawn, and it was nice seeing the countryside, though it is awfully dry. Chiang Mai is in the foothills of the mountain frontier with Burma, so we were climbing low hills through a lot of it. In the morning I talked to a couple from Holland while we watched the scenery, and they congratulated me on Obama finally signing in universal health-care coverage. I had to break it to them that it wasn't quite that yet.
I'm at a guest house run by . . . well, this was going to be the third story in a row about a northern European! I better cut it out. Let's just say that there are a lot of signs tacked up at this guest house. I have all the information I need in order to do the right thing.
More about Chiang Mai when I've caught up on sleep and formed a proper impression. Pictures are going to have to wait until I get back to Saigon.
-Robert
I had a second-class sleeping berth, upper. Once the beds are made up, these are in the style of sleeper cars you see in old Hollywood movies like "Some Like It Hot." I don't believe they used real cars for those scenes, though, unless Jack Lemmon is under 5'9". What is it about me and the rail systems of Southeast Asia that I can't stretch out in my bunk? The transvestite who was our attendant must really suffer. She was 6'3" easy.
Before the beds are made up, the bottom bunk is two bench seats facing each other, and I was seated with a Belgian massage therapist who spent the last two months snorkling around peninsular Thailand, getting tattoes based on her own drawings of lotus flowers and meeting some really great people. I wasn't one of them, apparently, because once the train was moving, she wanted me to take an empty seat so she could fold down her bunk early.
Most of the train trip was in the dark, but the last few hours were after dawn, and it was nice seeing the countryside, though it is awfully dry. Chiang Mai is in the foothills of the mountain frontier with Burma, so we were climbing low hills through a lot of it. In the morning I talked to a couple from Holland while we watched the scenery, and they congratulated me on Obama finally signing in universal health-care coverage. I had to break it to them that it wasn't quite that yet.
I'm at a guest house run by . . . well, this was going to be the third story in a row about a northern European! I better cut it out. Let's just say that there are a lot of signs tacked up at this guest house. I have all the information I need in order to do the right thing.
More about Chiang Mai when I've caught up on sleep and formed a proper impression. Pictures are going to have to wait until I get back to Saigon.
-Robert
Monday, March 22, 2010
Inflexibility
Sometimes we get invited to have dinner at the homes of friends and colleagues, which has been wonderful.
One of the charming parts of family life here is that meals are often served on the floor like this. I knew from experience on previous trips that I didn't have the flexibility to do this comfortably for even ten seconds -- or any of the other socializing that is routinely conducted while crouching or sitting on the floor -- and I really tried my best to do a lot of stretching in advance and while we are here. But I'm not smiling in this picture -- I'm grimacing in pain. And we haven't started eating yet. I was hobbled for about three days afterward.This meal a couple weeks ago was at the home of one of the young faculty Ilene works with. She and her husband, a college instructor in another field, share a small apartment --3 rooms the size of the one you see here in a remote district of the city-- with the wife's college-aged sister, a new baby, and a live in nanny, who is a widow from their hometown. That tells you something about the relative costs of real estate and labor here.
All the food shown here is terrific. The salad seen in closeup I want to mention especially. I forget the name, but we have it pretty frequently. The gray pieces that resemble pork are actually the inside of the rind of jackfruit, fried along with the shrimp. There's usually something cool in it like lettuce, along with peanuts, onions, hot pepper slices and some fish sauce. You eat it by spooning some onto the white crackers, which are made from rice flour.
-Robert
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