Surface Impressions of Phnom Penh

Ilene and I and our friend Tuan spent a few days in Phnom Penh at the end of the last week. The main purpose was a conference of English teachers in Southeast Asia that Ilene and Tuan attended, and as usual I just tagged along for my own pleasure.

I liked the city a lot and wished I could have stayed longer. For sightseeing, it can be exhausted pretty quickly and I would get bored before long, but as a place to live and work, it compared favorably in some ways to Saigon, at least in the very brief time I had to form an impression. With work to keep me busy, I think it would be an interesting place to spend some time. Some of the differences are just because it is smaller than Saigon, like Chicago has a saner pace and more elbow room than New York. But I guess it also compares favorably to some smaller cities in Vietnam I've been to. It had an openness to it that's hard to put my finger on. (In a very important way, the country is measurably more open, being a multi-party state.)

The poverty there is appalling even compared to what we're used to seeing in Vietnam, and on the bus ride back, Saigon, a city that usually seems to me to be pretty down-at-the-heels, appeared positively thriving from the fresh perspective of a couple of days in Cambodia. Still, the little I saw of Cambodia gave me the impression that it was poised for a leap forward. I saw so little of it that I should probably keep my mouth shut and not try to form conclusions, but to give just one example, I was struck by the apparent contradiction of a country that could afford to provide so little education but where the level of foreign-language ability seemed to surpass Vietnam's. Or, despite the poverty, how it was still possible to buy certain creature comforts that aren't available at any price in Vietnam. Books, for example.

An anecdote to illustrate. I stopped at a literacy program called Open Book on Street 240 and chatted awhile with the French woman who operates it. It's a kind of book bank and drop-in tutoring center for children, and it's filled with used and donated books -- the kind of stuff I've been collecting since my last trip to Vietnam and struggling without success to get here since the customs laws forbid me shipping them to Vietnam. Then she showed me another part of her enterprise -- the children's books that she publishes. They are translations from English or French into Khmer or vice versa of existing children's books she finds useful for the instructional programs. She sells them to other schools, using the proceeds to help distribute more books for free. She has published about 20 titles this way in the last few years.

When I saw them I thought back to a related experience I had in Vietnam on my last trip when I became acquainted with the owner of an art gallery. She publishes catalogs of the shows they put on, but that has been a far from easy experience. She has to navigate a labyrinth of bureaucracy, paying tributes along the way to get all the stamps and approvals and tolerating revisions to her copy so that every artwork finally ends up with the same bland descriptions. In Vietnam, every artwork as an illustration of the spirit of the people resisting the foreign aggressor. This is after she has already done her best to self-censor at the beginning of the process. At the literacy program in Phnom Penh, I asked how she was able to get her books published. She just did it, she said. She didn't need anyone's approval.

Well, that was my big learning experience, and this entry was supposed to be about the sight seeing. I went to all the temples and museums the guidebooks recommend and loved them. I hung out with the religious students at the temples who wanted to practice their English conversation for awhile. We went to the night market where the shopaholic came out in Tuan. I had breakfast every morning on a rooftop cafe overlooking the neighborhood Wat and watched the monks parade out in their orange robes with their rice bowls to beg for their daily food. I wandered the streets for hours as I do in every city I visit, buying innumerable bottles of water and making myself a spectacle on odd streets where tourists don't have any business. I loved riding in the tuk-tuks. I walked along the riverfront park as the moon rose and watched the population congregating for exercise and prayer and ice cream. I avoided the sites commemorating the genocide, but it seemed you could feel the loss and mourning in the air still. It reminded me of the raw-nerve feel of New York City about two years after 9/11 -- the occasional sense without it being said aloud that something terrible happened here. It felt like everyone was under age 30, as if everyone had been conceived in grief.

I tried as much of the local food as I could, but it was hard to get out of the tourist rut, and we had a lot of crummy food, too. I didn't learn a word of Khmer. I didn't see anything outside the capital except from the window of our bus on the highway to the border crossing. I'm reminded again of how fortunate we've been in Vietnam to have local connections who help us get out and see things that that foreigners usually don't. I wish it could always be that way, but our initial experience in Cambodia was necessarily much more limited. I hope I can go back sometime.

-Robert

Rock Star in Asia

Ilene Crawford, a rock star in the TESOL world of Southeast Asia.

New photos up of Cambodia trip

I put up a new slideshow on the right hand column of photos from our Cambodia trip. Also, you can click to it here.

Really Stupa'd

We're safe and sound in Phnom Penh. Ilene's been at the conference, and I've been touring every Wat and Stupa in town, overdoing it and overheating as usual. Of course, we're away from our own computers, so pictures have to wait until we're back in HCMC.

-Robert

Happy Tet

Have a happy Tet and much luck in the year of the tiger.

Easy Riding near Dalat

The guidebooks recommend an outfit in Dalat called Easy Riders, a co-op of motorcycle riding tour guides that all wear the same blue and red jackets and hang out at a cafe across from the Dreams Hotel and, as is customary with any successful enterprise here, have their brand diluted by copycats. Did we get genuine Easy Riders? Impossible to know for sure. But we did feel like we got good guides and a good bargain. We hired a pair of buddies at $23 each for the day, got on the back of their Hondas and set off in to the countryside.

Actually, I think we might have got special treatment, either because we were lucky in our choice of guides or because, like everyone else in Dalat, they were charmed by Ilene. Outside of downtown Saigon, people are quite taken by her ability to speak Vietnamese. Before long, all the tour was being conducted in Vietnamese, and I wasn't learning much of anything. They have a standard route to different sites in the countryside, and at the first couple stops we saw other Easy Riders and their passengers, but before long we we popping into visit families our guides knew. We stopped at one wooden house along the highway on a hunch that the family there would be making a special meal in preparation for Tet. They were not, and they looked annoyed when we showed up in the doorway to interrupt their lunch, but our guide announced, "She speaks Vietnamese!" (I understand that much Vietnamese myself.) And they had a long conversation about how this miracle occurred.

Our primary destination was Elephant Falls (pictured below), which was beautiful and powerful (and this is in the dry season.) We stopped at some neat temples, a strawberry farm, a coffee farm, to tour a silk factory, to visit a guy who makes silk worm nests, another guy who makes brooms, flower farms (one of the primary products of the area), and an abandoned U.S. military airstrip.

The area is beautiful but is unfortunately marred by the sight and smell of trash fires and random roadside garbage dumping. The Vietnamese we talk to about these and other social ills, like the traffic, always express annoyance at their fellow citizens. The bad behavior is "in the culture" they say, and people need to be educated about correct behavior. Our guides were a couple of old-timers who had seen a few things, and it's always interesting to talk to those guys about life in Dalat over the last 60 years. I think it's better if I save that for another time, though.

-Robert

Hiking Pinhatt Mountain

This week we went to Dalat for three nights. It's a small city originally founded as a retreat by French colonists, and it is refreshingly cool there. It's in the central highlands about 300 kilometers north of Ho Chi Minh City, but at a much higher elevation, with dramatic valley drops and beautiful scenery. The cool temps can be deceptive, though -- it's still a tropical sun up there and wears on you.

Since the city has a reputation for being a tourist trap with few sites to keep you busy, our plan was to spend the first two days on side trips into the countryside and use the last morning before our flight home to see the city, but I had a bad case of traveler's tummy that kept me in the hotel the last 24 hours, so we didn't see much of Dalat itself. Luckily we got in our two excursions first.

We stayed at Dreams Hotel, which is recommended in the guidebooks, and that's the second time I've had good luck that way. Owners that are nice and outgoing and helpful make all the difference, and the people at Dreams were terrific. The woman who ran the place with her husband and children and grandchildren had all the flight and bus schedules memorized and seemed to know everyone in town, and she saved us a fortune on a taxi to the airport by calling in a guy she knew.

Our first trip, pictured here, was with Phat Tire, an "adventure tour" company that puts together mountain biking, kayaking and trekking (i.e. hiking) trips. For hikes, they list easy, moderate and difficult trips, and we assumed there was some grade inflation to scare away people who tend to get ahead of themselves, but thank goodness we chose the easy hike, because there was nothing easy about it. It was 14 kilometers total, with plenty of up and down before we started the ascent of Pinhatt Mountain. (No one was ever able to explain the name to us.) The next day I was suffering.

As with other trips we've taken in the past, we had our personal guide for the whole thing and a driver to drop us off and pick us up. The first picture is from the trailhead, overlooking Dalat. The second picture is of a reservoir -- Tuyen Lam Lake -- that we ascended to after a couple hours. It's known as the most beautiful lake in the area, and everywhere we walked we saw the signs of development -- roads cut through the forest for new resorts, big areas cleared for golf courses, billboards advertising the tract housing that will be going in.

The other pictures are approaching the mountain, the ascent and at the top. If you look at the picture from the summit, where we started is on the ridge between the lake the city beyond it.

After so much time in Saigon, the quiet and clean air felt a little unreal. It's the dry season now with no fog and not much in bloom and signs of grass fires everywhere. There are a lot of other pictures that tell the rest of the tale in the slide show on the right -- our guide, Minh, preparing a picnic lunch with the supplies he hauled, Ilene feeding an elephant at a park back at the lake, taking a boat across the lake to our pick up point.

Next up, our motorcycle tour around the countryside with the Easy Riders. Check back tomorrow.

-Robert

Cam Ly Airfield

This is the remains of Cam Ly Airfield, a hilltop runway a few kilometers from Dalat that was the drop point for U.S. troops operating in this area after 1968. Our motorcycle guides took us by here on our tour of the countryside.

-Robert

Ups and downs in Dalat

We returned last night from an eventful trip to Dalat. I want to tell about our hike in the mountains and the motorbike tour, but recovery is going to take awhile. In the meantime, check out the pictures here, and please check back.


-Robert

The most expensive bowl of pasta ever

The other day, I accepted a challenge from friends to make a dinner of American food in our apartment. The first problem with that was the limits of the kitchen -- no oven, a propane camp stove that I didn't know how to turn on, and no pots, pans or anything else larger than a saucer, no cutting board, no counter space, and no way to communicate at the markets. The second problem is my limited repertoire. I like making desserts -- in an oven. And it's been more than 10 years since I made any kind of chicken, beef or pork dish. When I cook fish, it's usually on the grill.

So, brainstorming what I could make on a stovetop with minimal complication with ingredients I could buy here and that might taste plausibly foreign to our Vietnamese guests, I settled on pasta, which I was able to buy at great expense at a market here that specializes in "gourmet" import food. They also had sauce in a jar, but I was pretty sure no one would be impressed with that, and I didn't have the gear for a homemade sauce. So I decided on tossing it with olive oil (again, not easy to find) and pan fried fresh Mekong River shrimp that I marinaded in cajun spice, which I found in the import market, along with cilantro and bell peppers. I found some really good looking Parmesan, but it was being sold by the gram, so I decided on a bland feta cheese. There were no greek olives, so we settled on cocktail olives with pimento. Desert was Pepperidge Farm cookies, which I think really are almost like homemade.

The whole affair was a reminder that travel is the art of compromise. Can you see from the picture that I'm using an aluminum teapot to cook the pasta in?

The one thing that wasn't a compromise was the bread. I found a bakery here that is the real deal. (Schneider's on Pasteur across from the palace, if you're in the neighborhood.)

The whole thing took me about five different shopping trips over a few days, and the least expensive ingredient was the kilo of shrimp.

This was actually an "iron chef" kind of party, and after the pasta (which our guests picked at very politely), Tuan prepared fried spring rolls and all the fixings.

Which was familiar territory, but he did introduce us to one new item -- a kind of soft drink prepared on the spot with a syrup from tamarind juices, mixed with hot water, then poured over ice and the chewy pits of tamarind and sprinkled with peanuts. It was very sweet and tasty. I wish I had gotten the name of it.

This wasn't even the most exciting part of the evening. Don't ask about the plumbing disaster that unfolded in the middle of it all. I'll just say that washing the dishes was also a reminder that travel is the art of compromise.

-Robert

Every little bit helps

When it comes to understanding how money works here, my meter seems to be off. At home, I've spent a lot of time helping to communicate the message that when it comes to philanthropy, every little bit helps, but sometimes I can't understand how so little a little bit here can mean much. I'm assured that it does.

Yesterday, we joined a day-long "charity trip" organized by the English conversation club that we've been involved with. This kind of thing happens a fair amount before Tet in the way Americans might contribute to toy drives or food drives before the holidays. This trip was to a hamlet in the province of Ben Tre, which is in the Mekong River delta about three hours drive from here. (Ben Tre is famous for two things -- the sweetness of the coconuts and all coconut products and for a battle in 1959 between Vietcong guerrillas and the South Vietnamese Army that is generally considered the first battle of the civil war. The heroine of that battle is memorialized with a street named after her a block over from us in HCMC.)

When our friend Tuan invited us on this trip a few weeks ago, he said they were hoping to raise 3 million dong -- about $170 -- to buy school supplies for the children at an elementary school we were visiting and that there were about 120 pupils. They have been passing the hat at the weekly English club gatherings. I assumed that, as often happens here, I had misunderstood in some way, but I heard right. Four busloads of us went six hours round trip to distribute what by my reckoning were pretty modest gifts.

This was on a Sunday, and all the kids turned out in their school uniforms along with teachers and the principal and a lot of their parents and grandparents. When we arrived, they were all lined up in the school yard to yell "Hello!" The kids mostly eyed us suspiciously, and then the college kids organizing things started the games and loosened everyone up. There was singing and poetry recitations and bags of salty snack foods and balloon inflating contests. Parents stood in the ditch outside the school yard wall peeking over the edge and laughing. Most heartbreaking was girl about 12 years old standing outside watching. She was too old for this school and, I suspect, any other.

Finally all the "dignitaries" lined up (that's me and Ilene, a couple other foreigners on the trip and all the senior citizens) and the children were marched by us one rank at a time for us to hand over the goods -- a plastic bag for each child with two notebooks, a box of crayons, a few pencils, a pencil case and a plastic toy. If you went to Big Lots and bought what all this in bulk, it would have cost you about $1.50 per child to do this. It cost more to keep my hydrated for the day.

Like me, the college kids were taking a lot of pictures, and even from the position of my comparative wealth, I could see how enormous a gap there was between those city kids and the children we were visiting. With their cameras and cell phones and fashionable jeans, they looked almost foreign in that setting themselves. And these are people who I feel embarrassed to let know that I sometimes treat myself to a $4 cheese sandwich when I get homesick.

I was talking afterward to an older woman who had joined the trip. She is a school administrator who is really smart and accomplished, but I think in her whole life she will never be able to buy the trans-Pacific plane tickets that we buy routinely. From her perspective, it was wonderful to be able to make these gifts. How, I asked her. How poor could you possibly be that so little could be meaningful?

Those notebooks and pencils are a lot, she insisted. Their parents just can't afford it. The school tuition is free. The school clothes were donated by someone else. The plastic bag of school supplies are make-or-break. As it happens, that represents about a half day's income for a household in rural Vietnam. She was inspired herself to get more involved with this school. She wants to see if she can get them some books. (You can see in the slideshow on the right that there aren't any books in the classrooms.) Or some training for the teachers who she guesses are following the model of whatever meager education they got themselves in similar circumstances.

I've also spent a lot of time with nonprofits at home communicating to donors that you get back more than you receive, and that's always the case here. It's good for the spirit of course, but this time we got paid back immediately with a fantastic spread of food at a neighboring church. They set up a dining room in the driveway, hung up some tarps for shade, fired up the kitchen in back and stuffed us with shrimp and chicken and coconut and rice all raised in the delta. You wouldn't believe how good this food tasted.

-Robert