Joe and Dick in Southeast Asia

Ten reasons we are happy to be back in Thailand

2008-03-01T23:58:00.003-05:00

1. On the way into Bangkok from the airport at 6 Friday morning, the taxi driver answered a call on his cell phone. His "ring" was a small child's laughter.

2. Our friend Poe Suwatchie phoned us at the Pinnacle Hotel to welcome us "back to paradise." He always says this---and then laughs, because he knows it is both not true at all and entirely true.

3. At the hotel, we had trouble making outgoing calls from our room. We notified the front desk, which placed our calls for us. Also, within minutes a cheerful guy appeared at our door carrying two screw drivers.

4. Soon after we arrived, Joe walked around the corner to use the ATM. He reported back that among the food vendors set up on the sidewalk---selling exquisitely aromatic noodle soups, dumplings, meat on skewers, seafood salads---were two young women with an espresso machine. He bought a cup and it was excellent.

5. We slept for a few hours Friday morning---after having sat zombie-like on the plane from Bombay through the night---and then ordered tom yam and tom ka gai from room service. It was the best food we ever ate---until we went out from the hotel later and ate again.

6. The small shop down the street where we use the internet still has---along with eight or ten computers---its own seamstress.

7. On Saturday morning, we had an appointment at 9:30 to meet Henry Nyan Htun, the manager of Peace House Travel, the Burmese agency arranging our upcoming visit to Myanmar. It took us a while to get across Bangkok, and we arrived at 10, concerned that we had kept Henry waiting. He came in at 10:10 and said, "Ah, you're right on time."

8. The "letters" page in The Bangkok Post is as lively and free-wheeling as ever. On Thursday, deposed Prime Minister Thaksin returned to Thailand to face charges of corruption. A letter on Saturday said, "I wonder if upon his fanfared return Mr. Thaksin took some time out between kissing the ground and getting into his limo to take a look around at his great achievement, Suvarnabhumi Airport. I wonder if he noticed the poor acoustics, the meager and filthy restrooms, the stained and cracked floors, the flimsy baggage carts, the endless snaking lines waiting to clear customs...." The new airport, built by cronies of Thaksin, isn't quite that bad. And plainly the letter writer had never been to Bombay or Newark.

9. Today, Sunday, local elections are being held all over Thailand. No alcohol was served in the country yesterday and none will be served today. Also, coincidentally, a ban on smoking in most public places went into effect yesterday. We saw French and German tourists in the hotel lobby looking anxious.

10. After Africa, and especially India---a nation of Larry Craigs---it's nice to be back in a country where being gay is just fine. I'm setting a Strachey book partly in Bangkok. (We're dining with a gay police official, a friend of Poe's, on Tuesday.) The book begins:
"Mr. Strachey, do you believe in reincarnation?"
"I've never given it much thought."
"So you won't mind my telling you I think the whole idea is perfectly absurd."
"Go ahead."

test

2008-01-02T11:39:00.000-05:00

This is Dick with a test posting on January 2. Will it work? Let's see.

Hmm

2007-04-19T02:49:00.000-05:00

Inexplicably, English is back. So here we go.

Change of scene

2007-03-31T02:03:00.000-05:00

Democracy is a sometime thing in much of Southeast Asia, and Thailand is no exception. It is one of the few things we're not so crazy about here, and neither are most Thais. A constitutional monarchy since 1932, the country has been run by military governments off and on for about half that time. Some of the regimes have been harsh, as in the mid-1970s and early '90s, and some have been fairly benign, as is the case now. Yesterday the Army-appointed prime minister, Surayud Chulanont, did not declare a state of emergency over anti-goverment demonstrations, so today Bangkok is relieved over that.

The educated Thai middle classes were not sorry to lose Thaksin Shinawatra, the elected leader dumped in a military coup last September. The evidence keeps mounting that Thaksin was a crook who evaded paying taxes and hid assets (his housemaid was discovered to be a multimillionaire) and who packed the courts and regulatory commissions with cronies. (Currently roaming the globe and allegedly plotting his return to power, Thaksin might instead fit in nicely over at the Bush administration.)

What really did Thaksin in, apparently, and gave the Army no choice but to oust him, was this: he publicly criticized the king. Lese majeste shocks the conscience in Thailand, and it is illegal. Most Thais think of their kings as bordering on the god-like, a belief buttressed by their having had quite a few good ones. The present king, 80-year-old Bhumibol Adulyadej, on the throne since 1946, is loved for his humility and tireless good works, especially among rural villagers. (These villagers are the same people who elected Thaksin, whose health-care and other rural initiatives may now be in jeopardy.)

The lese majeste charge against Thaksin is hard to pin down; at a rally in the North last year he complained about a "charasmatic figure" who was getting in his way. Not murky at all were the actions of one Oliver Rudolf Jufer, a Swiss 57-year-old living in Chiang Mai. He got drunk, spray-painted posters of the king, was caught doing this by security cameras, and on Thursday was sentenced to ten years in prison. The Swiss foreign ministry said that "our compatriot was arrested on the basis of clearly established legislation," and the Swiss have no plans to intervene.

Tomorrow we fly to the one country in Southeast Asia that doesn't even pretend to be democratic. Burma, renamed Myanmar by the military dictatorship, is where you go in the region to see unchanged ancient Asia. Internet access is available in some places, but discretion might be in order. So if the blog is studiously apolitical over the next two weeks---lots of pagodas in the mist, flying fishes playing, etc.---that's why.

Note to those admirers of Joe's wonderful photos who might have said to yourselves that it looks as if we have been wearing the same clothes for three months. Well, yes.

Cooking classes at The Chiang Mai Thai Cookery School

2007-03-29T05:16:00.000-05:00

Water chestnuts in sweetened coconut milk with ice cubes.

Sounds gross but it's really good

Sompon Nabnian, chef and owner, with a student

Tasting the product

Another good dessert, banana and coconut cake steamed in a banana leaf

The sheltering sky....or close enough

2007-03-29T05:12:00.000-05:00

The culprit

Twelve attendants for each patient

Pictures of Halong Bay

2007-03-29T04:17:00.000-05:00

Junk trekking

We weren't the only boat in the bay

Upper deck

Yes, we had our own bathroom with hot water

Dinner on the boat

A boat like ours

It was so tempting

This elderly woman beckoned to me that she would row me around a bay. Though the thought was unimaginable to me, I succumbed. I figured she really needed the money. She rowed one way and, much to her amusement, I rowed back.

A coal barge

A fishing village

Waiter takes a break

Kids selling fruit to passing boats

Selling shells

Hanoi

2007-03-29T02:04:00.000-05:00

Our swell digs in Hanoi

Swimming bladder soup, a possibility for the airlines?

A cheerie howdy-doo folks

Ho Chi Minh's tomb

Gardens

The French influence around Hoan Kiem Lake in the old Quarter

Cooking 11 Vietnamese pancakes at once

Sidewalk mechanics are everywhere

Toys in the evening

Selling thread

Thousands of school children at the Ho Chi Minh complex

Protecting the dead

Hanoi, assorted pictures

2007-03-29T01:32:00.000-05:00

Centuries meet

Inspecting her purchase

Cilantro?

More Hue Pics

2007-03-28T05:32:00.000-05:00

Gate and moat at Citadel

Gentle stone

Good role models, hats are a plus.

April plans

2007-03-28T05:21:00.000-05:00

Burma is on. I got the go-ahead from the leg doctor today. We fly to Yangon (Rangoon) on Sunday, April 1, visit Mandalay, Inle Lake, Bagan and one or two other places. Then it's back to Bangkok April 14 and home on the 20th.
How about those pictures of Joe's! And there are more to come.

The grounds at the Tombs of the Nguyen dynasty

2007-03-28T05:11:00.000-05:00

Coconut vendor

Stonework

Lake house

Train to Hue

2007-03-28T04:36:00.000-05:00

Grandeur in Hue

In our train cabin

Snug as a bug

Our verry expensive hotel

(and you can see why) ooh-La-La

Hue market and fishing village pictures

2007-03-28T04:15:00.000-05:00

A few more sales will end the day

Chilli seller

Having a smoke

Generations

Counting her money

Selling spices

Woman in white

Scavenging in the market garbage

Removing the garlic skins

Clothes washing

These kids followed me around the alleys of the fishing village

Boats delivering goods to market

Portable restaurant

Banana seller

Lucky

2007-03-28T04:05:00.000-05:00

As Joe and I climbed out of a Bangkok taxi in front of our hotel Sunday afternoon, the driver said to us, with a sweetness not usually associated with Taxi drivers, "Good luck to you!" Joe said later, "Every time somebody says that, it just breaks your heart."

That's because in Thailand the utterance is not a routine "Have a nice day." It is a frequently used expression of a deep belief in the power and importance of luck, and it is often said with real feeling.

This taxi driver was not anybody we knew. But it had been a long ride across the city. (We had hiked a mile on foot and then ridden two ferries to a distant wat and were practically crawling on the pavement in the pounding heat when we finally flagged down an air-conditioned cab for the return trip.) The driver spoke enough English to chat about his sister, who is happily working as a cashier in untropical Colorado. When we parted after half an hour of friendly small talk, it seemed like the most natural thing for the driver to say, "Good luck to you," and as has become our habit, we wished him good luck also.

People throughout Southeast Asia believe in luck and in the signs and rituals that will make them luckier. These beliefs are vestiges of the Brahmanism and animism that suffused Buddhism as it spread eastward from India. While Americans say "good luck" to one another, and usually mean it, the expression lacks the weight and feeling it carries in a culture where good luck is actively courted and bad luck kept at bay through charms and rituals. (There is also something about that added "to you" that makes it feel more genuine, almost intimate.)

Amulets can ward off bad luck and just about every Thai wears one or more, usually on a gold chain around the neck. These charms usually bear the likeness of the Buddha or of a revered monk. Amulets with especially formidable magic are bought and sold for large sums. Monday's Bangkok Post ran a story about a woman in Nakhon Si Thammarat who cornered the market on an amulet whose value shot up after the funeral and public cremation of a "well-respected local aristocrat" who was a big believer in this particular talisman. Duangchanok Amornsak said she had been making only 10,000 baht a month ($350) as a dance teacher, and now she takes in as much as 200,000 baht selling Jatukarm Ramathep amulets, as well as related books, pictures and T-shirts.

Many of the amulets came from India, where they were originally sold to pilgrims visiting Buddhist holy sites. Different amulets offer different kinds of protection. Among the most specialized are "palad khik," which literally means "deputy penis." These linga-shaped charms are worn by men at waist level to protect the genitalia against harm. Some women carry them in their handbags to stave off purse snatchers.

To bring good luck in business, romance or any other area of life, Thais and others in the region make regular offerings of cash, food, incense and flowers at the spirit houses built on posts in front of most structures, at temples and shrines, and at the "lak muang." That last one is the "city pillar," a centrally located tall, lotus-shaped object that can be especially helpful when offerings to it are generous. The cash, or whole chicken, or pig's head left at the lak muang, in addition to bringing the donor good luck, will end up at the nearest wat.

Machinery apparently works better when it is garlanded with marigolds. We have seen flowers atop boat engines, on taxi and bus dashboards and, in Hua Hin harbor, dangling from a Thai Royal Navy gun turret. (We are curious about Thai Airways but have not gained entrance to a cockpit.) People often wrap fabric around trees thought to be sacred, mainly banyan and fig, and stuff flowers and incense into the wrapping. At Wat Arun on Sunday, a banyan tree near the prang (Khmer-style tower) built by Rama II (it looks like a Buck Rodgers "futuristic" tower, except it is embedded all over with multi-colored broken Chinese porcelain) had been festooned with gifts left by dozens of good-luck seekers.

Some of these gestures and rituals are lovely to behold, but not all. In Cambodia, and perhaps elsewhere, farm kids capture birds and stick them in cages. These birds are then sold near shrines to people who release the birds, hoping this "gift" to the birds will bring good luck. But why not leave the birds alone in the first place? One might expect Cambodians in particular to be less whimsical about captivity.

Do these rituals "work"? People swear by them and cite instance after instance of success in life or danger averted through the use of charms---and conversely of ill fortune that is the result of an insufficient or mis-application of magic. The woman selling amulets in Nakhon Si Thammarat, seems to be onto something, though. This is where Buddhism perhaps overrides older beliefs. She told the Post, "I don't try to persuade anyone to believe me or to buy the talismans from me. There is no point in owning the amulet but not behaving well. Jatukarm Ramathep will only protect decent people, bringing them good luck."

In the United States, we might suspect that her attorney insisted that the amulet seller provide this caveat. But the Thais really do a nice job of having it all---of running a modern society that works reasonably well, and at the same time observing all sorts of colorful (to us) superstitions that in their unscientific---even anti-scientific---ways would seem to impede progress and yet somehow don't. There is a kind of tender complexity to people in this part of the world, especially the Thais. It is a sometimes incomprehensible nimbleness of mind and spirit that is part of what makes them so beguiling.

Ho Chi Minh City

2007-03-28T02:48:00.000-05:00

Traffic pattern?

Offices under the reunification Palace, cheery

Summer 2008?

Taken... by cyclo

The beauty of decay

The Saigon River

Bad architecture, beautiful patterns

Typical telephone and electric wires

Historical account of events outside The City Museum

What can I say?

Pictures of bus to Ho Chi Minh City

2007-03-27T07:53:00.000-05:00

Reality intrudes

Passengers ride on the roof as well as inside,

flocked by vendors

Our swanky digs in HCMC

Pictures from Sihanoukville, Cambodia

2007-03-27T07:43:00.000-05:00

View from our bungalow

A rock at sunset

Bungalow Dick writing again

Pictures from Phnom Penh

2007-03-27T06:49:00.000-05:00

Garbage dumped from the shrine at the top of the river bank

into the much used Tonle Sap River

Lotus vendor

Beggars outside shrine

Parallel worlds

Street food

Hanging with dad

Living on the sidewalk

Hanging around with the BBQ pigs and

chatting on the phone

The back yard

Wigs waiting for their moment

Cyclo driver at home

Palace rules

Being good

Coal vendor

Maugham second thoughts

2007-03-25T03:38:00.000-05:00

Based on his introduction and too little else, I wrote on the blog that in his 1930 memoir of a 1923 journey across Southeast Asia, "The Gentleman in the Parlour," Somerset Maugham was "above-it-all." I picked the book up again and went right through it and realized my facile put-down was unfair. It's true that Maugham never really engages "the natives." But he isn't condescending either, unusual for European travel essayists of that era. It leaves Maugham melancholy that he speaks none of the local languages and so is unable to connect. Joe and I have been fortunate; to the extent that we have been able to interact with Thais, Laos, Cambodians and Vietnamese at all, it's because so many educated people in the region speak passable or good English. No such luck for Maugham.

Maugham's single sketch of an Asian is of an English-speaking Burmese woman who exacted a historic revenge on a French official who jilted her. Using her royal court connections, the woman learned that the Burmese king, Thebaw, had made a secret deal that gave the French control of Mandalay. The spurned lover ratted the French out to the British, who marched on Mandalay and overthrew the pro-French king. Maugham's other portraits, of Europeans he encountered on his trip---a Frenchman who advertises in a newspaper for a wife; an Italian priest alone in the jungle converting Buddhists away from a philosophy he respects; a Brit who tries to buy respectability but can't---are all pointed, as well as maybe-too-tidy in a way that hints of embellishment by this gifted creator of tales.

Maugham never mentions that did not travel alone. The preface to the Orchid Press edition of "The Gentleman in the Parlour" reveals that accompanying Maugham on his journey of several months was his "lifelong companion," Gerald Haxton. This omission by Maugham seems disingenuous, though I guess that a popular male author in the 1920s could not repeatedly refer to "my boyfriend Jerry" without paying too heavy a price.

On the blog, I wrote little about Angkor Wat, chosing to let Joe's pictures show the great Khmer temples. But Maugham's prose descriptions are very fine, and they made me wish we had not visited the temples only in bright sunlight. Of the main temple, Maugham says, "It is an impressive rather then a beautiful building and it needs the glow of sunset or the white brilliance of the moon to give it a loveliness that touches the heart. It is grey veiled by a faint green, which is the color of the moss and the mould of all the rainy seasons it has seen, but at sunset it is buff, pale and warm. At dawn when the country is bathed in a silver mist the towers have an aspect that is strangely insubstantial; they have then an airy lightness which they lack in the hard white light of noon."

In a few pages, 159-166, Maugham provides one of the best explications of Buddhism I have read. He readily takes to it, a "way of life rather than a religion." Buddhism's acceptance of the transitory nature of all things seems so sensible to Maugham, and it makes him happy. His opinions about "share my beliefs or you die!" religions are unfavorable. He loves the Buddhist idea that earning merit through good behavior will get you an easier time of it in a future life. Of reincarnation, however, Maugham also says, "There is only one fault that I can find in it: it is incredible."

Was graduated with honors

2007-03-25T03:22:00.000-05:00

Joe is back from cooking school in Chiang Mai. We'll be home April 20, and here's the menu:
Thai hot and sour prawn soup; Thai style fish cakes; green curry with chicken; Thai fried noodles; spicy minced chicken salad; water chestnuts with coconut milk.
Then: Panaeng curry with pork; fried fish with chilli and basil; Chiang Mai curry with chicken; sweet and sour vegetables; spicy glass noodle salad; black sticky rice pudding.
Then: chicken in coconut milk; fried mixed mushrooms with baby corn; red curry with fish; fried big noodles with thick sauce; papaya salad and sticky rice; steamed banana cake.
And then: fried big noodles with sweet soy sauce; steamed fish in banana leaves; yellow curry with chicken; chicken with cashew nuts; spicy prawn salad Northeastern style; bananas in coconut milk.
And finally: clear soup with minced pork; spring rolls; roast duck curry; chicken with ginger; chicken in pandanus leaves; mango with sticky rice.
Let's eat!

Oprah would frown

2007-03-23T22:54:00.000-05:00

Here are some notes, most of them cribbed from William Warren's "Bangkok," on the ghastly Anna Leonowens, of "The King and I" fame.

No well-born Victorian lady, and possibly part Indian, the decidedly un-Deborah Kerr-like Leonowens was a widowed, struggling teacher in Singapore when Thailand's King Mongkut (Rama IV) hired her through an agent to educate his dozens of wives and children. He got more than he bargained for---not including "Hello, Young Lovers" and all those other haunting tunes, and no choreography by Jerome Robbins.

Famously broadminded, and well-educated to boot, Mongkut had already embarked on an ambitious program of Bangkok modernization when Leonowens sailed into town in 1862. It was Mongkut who shrewdly played the colonial powers off one another and kept Thailand independent. He was a busy man, and there is no evidence that during her five years in Bangkok Leonowens influenced the king in any way at all or that he took much notice of her.

This did not keep Leonowens (the odd name came from Thomas Leon Owens, her late husband) from journeying onward to yet another land of opportunity, the United States, where in 1870 she published "The English Governess at the Siamese Court." Most of it was made up, possibly with the help of a ghost writer. The book was followed in 1873 by "Romance of a Harem." It also was rife with lurid fabrications, and some sections were revealed at the time to have been plagiarized.

Here, from the first book, is an example of Leonowens' prose style. She is describing her arrival in Bangkok with no housing arrangements having been made for her and her young son. "The situation was as Oriental as the scene, heartless, arbitrary insolence on the part of my employers, homelessness, forlornness, mortification, indignation on mine... My tears fell thick and fast and, weary and despairing, I closed my eyes and tried to shut out heaven and earth; but the reflection would return to mock and goad me that, by my own act, I had placed myself in this position."

Lucky for her, missionaries had built a Presbyterian church, which Leonowens noted as her boat pulled in. "The gentle swaying of the tall trees over the chapel imparted a promise of safety and peace, as the glamour of the approaching night and the gloom and mystery of the pagan land into which we were penetrating filled me with an indefinable dread." Want tuk-tuk, lady?

Leonowens' partner in literary crime was Margaret Landon, author of "Anna and the King of Siam," an American bestseller in 1944. The wife of a Christian missionary in Thailand, Landon added yet more fantasy, including an early romantic life for Leonowens and palace influence that was pure hooey.

Landon's book was the basis for a movie, in which short, brown, copiously blackhaired King Mongkut was portrayed by Rex Harrison. Yul Brynner played him in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical that followed. More recently, Jodie Foster, who should know better, starred in "Anna and the King," an unsuccessful re-make with a weird anti-globalization slant (according to the negative New York Times review) that was filmed, judiciously, in Malaysia.

Thais find the entire phenomenon incomprehensible. It's a shame---all those good songs in the service of a bizarre lie.

Nose against the glass

2007-03-23T02:32:00.000-05:00

I set out to see some of old Bangkok. Joe was not due back from Chiang Mai for another day, the leg doctor had given me the A-OK, and I had just read William Warren's keen and flavorsome "Bangkok." This is a short history of the city by a careful historian and good raconteur, an American Southerner who moved to Bangkok on a whim in 1960 and got contentedly stuck here. Warren has written over 40 books on Thai culture, gardens, arts, crafts and cuisine. He knows his way around, and I let his book lead the way.

The sun was blazing down, so I carried a bottle of water and took my time. Much of my westward route toward the Chao Phrya river took me through areas of Bangkok that are generic new Asia: glass office towers, Honda dealerships, foreign embassies with small consulates and big trade missions. Except for the foreign flags, I could have been strolling along U.S. 1 in Fort Lauderdale or New Rochelle.

My more or less arbitrary destination was the Oriental Hotel. According to Warren, there's not much left of the original 1887 Victorian structure, just some remnants of the "authors' wing," where Somerset Maugham survived a bout of malaria in 1923. I like literary ghosts (Joe and I once tried unsuccessfully to have Lady Brett Ashley paged at the Crillon bar), and it was at Maugham's shrine where I wished to leave a metaphorical offering of some sticky rice and green papaya. I thought, too, that I might have lunch in the Oriental's handsome garden, which I had glimpsed from a river ferry back in January.

Over the first mile or two of my trek, I found lamentably few traces of old Bangkok. On Sathorn Road, a main avenue, I spotted one old Thai wooden house on stilts, surrounded by a high stucco wall topped with barbed wire---an admirable crank's attempt to stave off the inevitable. Down a few side streets there were rows of dilapidated two-story shops, examples of the concrete buildings of no architectural distinction that make up the bulk of the city's residential and commercial stock. Since the business and family lives in these buildings spill out onto the streets, and with food vendors set up and thriving in front of many of them, they do provide relief from the tedium of the bank towers.

On Charoen Krung (New Road), one of Bangkok's first business streets, built in 1861, I began to spot remnants of the old city. (Bangkok was a fishing village until 1782, when Rama I, the first Chakri Dynasty king, moved the Thai capital south from Ayutthaya, which had been destroyed by the invading Burmese.)

Paralleling the river, New Road is still the bustling business center it was a century earlier, when Chinese merchants introduced commerce to a still largely agrarian people. In Ian Buruma's "God's Dust," a Sino-Thai journalist insists to the author that "one hundred years ago the Thais knew nothing. The Chinese taught them how to weigh, how to buy, how to sell." The Chinese have been largely integrated into Thai society---sharing business ventures with the Thai elite, adopting Thai names---though today many of the gem, coin and antique shops along New Road are still Sini-Thai-owned, as are bank and insurance companies. (In a spasm of vaguely anti-Chinese sentiment in the late 1930s, Prime Minister Phibun changed the country's name from Siam to Thailand.)

Few of the buildings along New Road appear to be 19th century, but some look early 20th---filthy old wood and stucco jobs with corrugated iron roofs, big louvered windows and balconies with ornate stained balustrades. Some of the office towers going up behind the early buildings try to echo their architecture. One of them, with about thirty stories worth of cramped, semi-circular neo-classical balconies, looks as if it is covered in boils.

I found the Oriental Hotel but never got in. Meeting me halfway up the flower-lined driveway was a hotel employee---wearing a jacket and tie I would describe as not so much natty as gnatty---who declared that the Oriental had a "dress code," and I would not be admitted wearing my knee-length shorts. This supercilious chap invited me to visit the hotel's clothing shop across the street, where I might purchase suitable attire. "Well, then, my good fellow, I suppose I shall just have to dine elsewhere, at a venue less absurdly pretentious!" is what I did not think to say. Instead, I said something like, "Nnff."

It's just as well. The new section of the Oriental looked like one of those comically overpriced TwelveSeasonsRegencyEightStarJudithKrantzSleptHere Reagan-Bush-era joints designed and operated for people who if they didn't stay in one of these places might begin to wonder who they were. And while I'm at it, the hell with Maugham, too. Last night I started reading his "The Gentleman in the Parlour," about his 1923 journey across Southeast Asia. It is observant but arch and above-it-all. Before we left home, Sheryl Julian, the Boston Globe food editor, provided Joe and me with an excellent four-point set of Rules to Write By. (Joe is working on something for Sheryl now.) Rule Number One (Maugham should have had Sheryl as an editor): "Don't be annoying."

Mellow Bangkok

2007-03-20T01:42:00.000-05:00

When we first arrived, January 4, Bangkok felt like a real Asian beast of a city. But after Saigon and Hanoi, it's a pleasantly sleepy burg. The air is foul and hot---a hundred degrees yesterday---but most places we might go are air-conditioned. Drivers obey the sensibly situated traffic signals and rarely honk their horns. Major arteries have pedestrian bridges, eliminating Buster-Keaton-like hairraising crossings; no need to risk your life for a pair of spring rolls. A sky train runs through the main hotel and shopping (and fuck show) district, and there's a new subway line, too. ("Hua Lamphong's up/Khlong Toei's down/The people ride in a hole in the ground.")

Apichai Chairoj, the surgeon who checked out my leg yesterday (it is mending nicely), was wearing a yellow shirt. This meant it was Monday. A few years ago, the since-toppled Thaksin government suggested that every Monday Thais wear canary yellow polo shirts to honor King Bhumibol. It's the same bright shade of yellow that's on the royal flag, and Thais look good in it---a caucasian tourist I saw in one of the shirts appeared bilious. There's a good chance that somebody in the government received a kickback from the yellow-dye cartel, but Thais still enjoy an opportunity to show their love for their king and about half the population wears yellow on Monday.

Dr. Apichai wore a yellow dress shirt with a natty tie. He was patient with my questions, ready with answers, and businesslike. I asked what bug might have bitten me. I was hoping it might have been one of the insects I ate in Chiang Mai, a nice bit of karmic turnaround. The doctor said, however, it could have been any insect, and a secondary infection developed when I scratched the bite. ("Nixon bugs self.")

Yesterday's visit to Bangkok Nursing Home Hospital, including the doctor's fee and replacement of my grandiose bandage with one more petite, cost $47.52. While this was little to me and my mighty MasterCard, Poe said BNHH's rates have gone up 15 percent in six months and middle-class Thais like him are getting squeezed. Sound familiar?

We have some good pictures of Poe, Joe and me outside BNHH in front of the hospital's spirit house. I had nothing with me to offer. But some rice and fruit had already been left, apparently placating for another 24 hours the natural spirits that had been displaced by the modern hospital building. (In Asia, Joe and I are enchanted by beliefs which when encountered at home have us looking for an exit. We know perfectly sane Americans who believe with all their hearts in astrology. I once took the opportunity to ask Bob and Barbara Wheaton's friend, the renowned Harvard astronomer Fred Franklin, what he thought of astrology. Fred chuckled.)

Adding to the pleasure of being back in Bangkok was dinner Sunday night with three enjoyable farangs, two of whom we were meeting for the first time. It's the Peace Corps mafia at work again. John Finn is a friend in San Francisco of Joe's and my friend Mike Learned. John (PC-Korea, late '60s or early '70s) works with Mike on LBGRPCVs, the ex-Peace Corps gay group that Mike helped found and now heads. (The group's lobbying efforts help keep the Bush-era Peace Corps enlightened and legal on gay policy. This is a long way from my Ethiopia training program in 1962 when a couple of trainees vanished overnight; we later learned that they had been discovered by the FBI to be "sexual deviants.")

John and his partner of 27 years Art Desuyo are visiting Bangkok, a city they love so much that they plan on retiring here as soon as the Dow Jones stars are auspiciously alligned. Now John does donor-development computer work for non-profit groups, and Art locates office space for companies around the world. They had been extremely helpful to Joe and me via e-mail as we were planning our Southeast Asia trip. With John and Art for their current visit was their old pal Marty Dishman, the gay-bar and one-room-luxury-hotel pioneer we met in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

Over an assortment of Thai goodies in the Just One garden, this congenial group swapped tales, Peace Corps and otherwise. And Marty---with Joe and Art long ago having achieved such status---was inducted as an honorary Returned Peace Corps Volunteer, up to but not including the Sargent Shriver secret handshake. Just kidding about the handshake, though by now many partners, spouses and friends of RPCVs can, their looks often suggest, barely tell us from the Masons.

Medical care in Thailand

2007-03-18T02:41:00.000-05:00

Too bad, the antibiotics didn't work. Apparently they were not potent enough, and the bug-bite infected leg got worse. On Friday night, the manager of the Hoa Linh Hotel in Hanoi gazed with horror at my swollen, inflamed lower left leg, and declared, "Oh, must go to hospital! Must have cut!"

Cut? Nah. The crack New England medical team that had advised me via e-mail had warned that whatever I did, DO NOT HAVE AN IV ANTIBIOTIC DRIP IN HANOI. "Cutting" sounded unwise also.

Balancing the risks, we decided to wait a day and take advantage of the reputed excellent medical care in Bangkok, to which we were booked to fly Saturday morning. It was the right decision.

When you set foot in the Bangkok Nursing Home Hospital, on Convent Road, you feel like Paul and Joann arriving at Canyon Ranch. This institution's very existence is plainly for making you---you and very, very few others---feel comfortable and safe and confident that everything will turn out just right.

The smiling BNHH staff, dressed in pale, pale purple, make it all so easy and quick. But not too quick! You never feel rushed. The staff are all so solicitous, you half expect them to smile and present you with an orchid, the way we're told the attendants do in first class on Thai Airways. Walking into BNH Hospital makes you think of how warm and welcoming it must feel for the thousands of men and women from all over the world as they arrive in this hospital for their sex-change operations.

It was our friend Poe who had recommended BNHH---and informed us of the speciality of the house---and the medical care was as top-notch as he said it would be. The physician I saw within 20 minutes of our arrival, a Thai woman in her forties, peered at my leg, and pronounced, "Ah, insect bite." Not uncommon, apparently. She listened to my saga, then soon had me laid out and surrounded by nurses. A local anesthetic was administered, and the doctor proceeded to slice open my leg and squeeze out copious hideous matter. I asked if I could look, and the doctor said, "Oh, no, it is not bee-yoo-tee-fool."

We were in and out of BNHH in just under an hour. On the spot, I was provided with a stronger antibiotic, Zithromax, and an anti-inflammatory, Arcoxia. I received instructions for returning every day for five days to have the dressing changed (I did so today, Sunday), and was directed to return Monday at 9:30 a.m. for a onceover by another surgeon.

Total cost yesterday, $168. Today, $20. Arriving in an American ER the way I did would almost certainly have meant giving up much of the day, and the cost would have been $1,000-plus. I paid BNHH with my Mastercard and received documents that should speed reimbursement by AARP when I get home.

It was bad luck that I was bitten by some wretched bug---and that now I must prop my foot on a pillow and frolic about Bangkok only minimally. But I was lucky to be in Thailand for treatment; each of the other countries in the region could have been problematical. When we phoned Poe yesterday, he said, "Oh, you have come back to paradise!" Thailand is not quite that, but in the absence of the genuine article, Thailand fakes it beautifully.

Last night, the three of us went to an outdoor place called Just One, near our hotel. In a warm breeze we sat under the flowering trees and ate perfect tom yam soup, duck red curry, chicken wrapped in an aromatic herb (whose peculiar name I've forgotten), kale with spicy fishballs, and deep-fried morning glory leaves.

We heard about the snowstorm in the U.S. Northeast, and Joe asked me if I would rather be in snowy Becket or in Bangkok having pus drained out of my leg. Easy answer to that one, believe it or not. As a precaution, we have postponed our Myanmar foray by a week. But we get to stay in Thailand---Joe will go back to Chiang Mai for a few days of cooking classes---and so we can hardly be disappointed.

Plans

2007-03-16T05:21:00.000-05:00

We just obtained our visas for Myanmar at their embassy in Hanoi. We thought we might not be let in. Joe listed his occupation as "artist," and the clerk wanted to know, "Yes, but what is your job?" They are very suspicious. Journalists are routinely denied entry. I listed my occupation as "teacher-retired," and that was okay. Apparently I looked harmless and they did not Google me---we thought the International Herald Tribune reprinting a piece I did for the Globe and the Eagle might be a problem. But it wasn't.
Tomorrow we fly to Bangkok for six days with the jolly Thais, then on to Yangon (Rangoon).

Halong Bay

2007-03-16T02:49:00.000-05:00

It should have come as no surprise when several dozen boats in Halong City Harbor began honking their horns at other boats, trying to make them get out of the way. We marveled at this. It was one of the few moments in a two-day excursion, however, that wasn't both eye-filling in all the best ways and perfectly serene.

A three-hour bus ride east of Hanoi, on the Gulf of Tonkin (for those of us around in the '60s, these names reverberate), Halong Bay has over 3000 islands rising out of its vast green waters. Most of them are tall limestone karsts covered with vegetation and riddled with caves you can crawl through. It's another Unesco World Heritage site. After visiting the Citadel in Hue, we weren't sure Unesco wasn't too promiscuous with this designation. But Halong Bay, one of the planet's natural wonders, is worth preserving for sure---and for ridding it of the garbage and oily discharges that get dumped in it.

At first we wondered if heading for the seashore on a drizzly day wasn't a mistake. It usually is. Once out on our boat, however, we were enchanted by these hundred- and 200-foot-tall strange gray-green mounds appearing and then vanishing in the mist. (See Joe's pix, up soon, for a sampling.)

The boat was a two-deck wooden junk, with a viewing and dining area, and six small but not claustrophobic cabins for the 12 passengers. Each cabin even had its own tiny reasonable facsimile of a modern bathroom. (Lonely Planet described the toilet facilities on one Laos boat trip we didn't take as "a dark hole in the deck.")

Our fellow passengers were a companionable group, and included Lynn, the Vietnamese-American dermatologist, her Vietnamese-American boyfriend Tom, an ER physician, and two Indian-American internists from New York. (They gave me a group consult on a bug-bite infection on my leg; they agreed that the Cipro I was taking would work, but why not add some faster-acting Doxycyclin, which I could purchase in Hanoi over the counter? I did so, for $1.25. My immunizations for this Southeast Asia trip, paid out of pocket (Joe's were covered by his Blue Cross-Blue Shield), came to more than $1,600 at the Berkshire Medical Center travel clinic. Makes you wonder.)

The food on the boat was good---numerous Vietnamese fish, pork and vegatable dishes---and we stopped at a floating fishing village, complete with floating primary school, to purchase additional delicacies that the boat's cook served up a few hours later. Joe and I had some oversized prawns and two crabs the size of hubcaps.

The crew of six were helpful and easy-going. One man in his mid-twenties spotted me reading Neil L. Jamieson's "Understanding Vietnam." (The cover of my Chinese knockoff copy lists the author as Nell L. Jamieson.) The guide asked me what I learned about Vietnam in this book.

I told him I had only just started reading it and was learning about traditional Vietnamese culture and the role in it of the ancient Chinese concept of yin and yang as a way of finding balance and harmony in societies, families and individual lives. I discoursed on yin and yang for two minutes, acting as if I knew what I was talking about. The guide produced a student's copybook and made notes on what I said.

The young man (whose name I regret I have forgotten) told Joe and me that he was not religious but his family was. His parents and seven brothers and sisters are all rice farmers who go to the pagoda to pray. He was the only member of his family to leave the village, and he was ambivalent about that. He has a higher income but dislikes the noise, dirt and expense of Hanoi. His family envy his income but not his way of life. And he envies much in their lives---the serenity, the ease of working only a few hours a day when it's not planting or harvesting season, the order, the predictability. He said with a laugh, "No TV in the village. Just rice wine. Cheap."

The guide says he misses village life---in Hanoi, "I think too much"---but he said sadly that he cannot imagine ever going back. It's too late---he is somebody else now.

Hanoi

2007-03-16T01:24:00.000-05:00

There's no getting away from it, stuffing and waxing a dead man and putting the corpse on permanent display is rather odd. Ho Chi Minh didn't even want this. A man of simple tastes, he had requested a simple cremation. But he is far too potent a symbol in Vietnam not to have his image---or his actual self---flogged mercilessly by the regime. And even among the solid majority of Vietnamese who now appear to regard his socio-economic ideas as crackpot, Ho is still revered as the man who devoted his life to freeing the country from French and then American domination. He is their Washington, Lincoln and FDR rolled into one.

Imagine, though, visiting the Lincoln Memorial in Washington and rather than finding a majestic marble Lincoln, gazing instead at the Great Emancipator's actual corpse, propped up, smiling benignly, and lit like Judy Garland at Carnegie Hall. For some of us, the impulse is to snicker. Snickering is not explicitly forbidden at the Ho Mausoleum---as are wearing shorts, taking pictures and putting your hands in your pockets---but with white-uniformed armed guards all around, I would not recommend it.

Ho's glass sarcophagus rests deep inside a gargantuan stone mausoleum built between 1973 and 1975. Both it and the Ho Chi Minh Museum next door apparently were designed to inspire reverence and awe. Perhaps they do for the thousands of Vietnamese who queue up each day to file quickly past the bier; it takes about an hour to get in and out. But I was reminded of Ada Louise Huxtable's useful term "the architecture of brutality." She was referring to Mussolini's Rome and Nelson Rockefeller's Albany.) You get the feeling that the Soviet Union, Ho's chief benefactor, might have had a hand in his memorial. In fact, the corpse is shipped off to Moscow for three months each year, October through December, for refurbishing.

About the museum, suffice it to say that it views Uncle Ho, as he is often referred to, favorably. There's an enormous heroic bronze statue, a lot of official documents, and photos of Ho laughing with children. Missing are any savage LBJ caricatures or gloating displays of Jane Fonda chortling next to North Vietnamese anti-aircraft guns. Such things are more likely to turn up in Hanoi, maybe because more American tourists visit there. You do come upon the front end of an Edsel crashing through a wall. This failed Ford model from the 1950s is meant to symbolize the bankruptcy of capitalism. Tell it to Toyota, everybody's favorite car here.

Completing the Ho complex are the Presidential Palace, once the chateau of the French governor general, and two small houses where Ho lived until his death in 1969. On display are his easy chair, small bed and the entrance to his bomb shelter.

If this group of monuments and buildings presents a convincing picture of what I would call the good Ho---the nationalist liberator---another Hanoi museum currently features an exhibit, remarkable for its candor, that indirectly lambastes the bad Ho, the Marxist-Leninist theoritician. It's at the Museum of Ethnology, a fascinating place with displays about the beliefs and daily lives of Vietnam's 84 highly variegated tribes and ethnic groups, but into which somebody has snuck a show called "Hanoi life under the Subsidy Economy---1975-1986."

That's the period when private property was largely abolished in Vietnam and production of food and goods was collectivized. It was nuts. Everything came to a screeching halt. People suffered terribly. Many starved---though not Party members, who had access to special food and other shops. The Ethnology Museum display and an accompanying documentary film show and tell about life then. Also, bravely, they show the willingness of writers and artists to criticize this "inefficient" system with their "controversial" plays and articles. It was this protest movement---led by writers, professionals and monks---that resulted in the economic reforms of the late 1980s that got the country functioning again. In this stunning exhibit, there is no mention of Uncle Ho.

Hanoi was founded by the Emperor Ly Thai in the year 1010, but the French built the city we see today and they did a nice job. The pleasantly congested Old Quarter, where we're staying, feels like the Paris Left bank, and the late 19th century newer sections look and feel like the Right Bank Paris of grand Beaux Arts edifices along tree-lined boulevards and avenues. Gorgeously designed and maintained parks surround the city's several lakes, making Hanoi a superb walking city (if you can figure out how to get across the street without getting creamed.)

The climate here is more Mediterranean than Parisian---cool, wet winters and hot, dry summers---so the buildings of Hanoi open up more readily to let in air and light. (It's still winter here and we haven't seen the sun since Saigon.)

Because high local property taxes are based on width of frontage, both the oldest and newest buildings are "tube" houses. These are skinny, four- and five-story brick and stucco places, often with the family business (capitalism is back) on the ground floor. With their formal balconies and elaborate perdiments and finials, they are quite handsome. And the colors are either soothing---honey, ochre, pumpkin---or sometimes delightfully jarring---chartreuse or electric blue.

The buildings in the Old Quarter are more ramshackle and the narrow streets home to a commercial life that at first glance seems chaotic. Street vendors, most of them squatting on low stools, take up much of the sidewalk space not hogged by parked motorbikes. A woman with a brazier next to our small hotel, the Hoa Linh, specializes in dried squid. The smell leaves an impression. Others are hawking fruit, vegetables, chilis, coffee and noodle soup. It's illegal to set up shop on sidewalks, so cops are either bought off or vendors get chased away and then return the next day. Space is alloted through an arcane system of seniority and who-you-know, and sometimes turf wars break out.

We learned how this works from Lynn, a Vietnamese-American dermatologist from Atlanta who spent her first twelve years in Saigon and knows the drill. It was also Lynn who confirmed our suspicion that the obnoxious loudspeaker announcements that crackle through the streets late at night and early in the morning are "propaganda." It's the regime bragging about its accomplishments and reminding people that, while life may be tough for most of them (a good salary in Hanoi is $100 a month and farmers make around $20), they are still better off than they would be under "imperialism."

While the loudspeakers make a dreadful racket, most of the din in Hanoi is from motorbike horns. Drivers roar through unregulated intersections at high speed honking, beeping, bleating and sqawking, and everybody else had just better get out of the way. This somehow works, though accidents happen. Joe saw two large farangs on top of an overturned moto and driver, everyone somehow uninjured. We met a Filipino couple who said traffic in Manila is hellish but Hanoi far worse. Joe's theory is that in a society where it's uncool to lose one's cool, and where political opinions are rarely openly expressed, people vent with their moto horns. This jibes with what the American writer Mo Tejani said in Chiang Mai about Thai drivers. Speaking of roadway behavior, Mo described Thailand as "Freud's country."

Some miscelaneous pictures

2007-03-12T06:45:00.000-05:00

Glue wine?

A little friend

BBQ rats

Cashews

A good read

The Killing Fields, Phenom Penh

2007-03-12T06:42:00.000-05:00

Viroth's Siem Reap, Cambodia

2007-03-12T06:34:00.000-05:00

Tuol Sleng S-21, Phenom Penh

2007-03-12T06:24:00.000-05:00

Bayon

2007-03-12T06:12:00.000-05:00

Bayon, Siem Reap, Cambodia

2007-03-12T05:39:00.000-05:00

Peddler

Turtle biting man

Cooking a bird

The aristocrats

Woman anoyes with her husband who is smoking too

much something

Banteay Srei, Siem Reap, Cambodia

2007-03-11T21:59:00.000-05:00

Angkor Wat, Siem Reip Cambodia

2007-03-11T21:42:00.000-05:00

Wedding photos at the temple

Library

The mobs in front of the temple

We'll always have Hanoi

2007-03-11T07:02:00.000-05:00

Arrived this morning at 9:30 via Vietnamese Airlines from Hue. Fast, pleasant and, at $53, cheap. Ho Chi Minh must have loved Paris---he brought it back to Vietnam with him! We'll report in a few days.

Good reading

2007-03-11T06:44:00.000-05:00

1. "The Quiet American," by Graham Greene.
2. "When the War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution," by Elizabeth Becker. This masterly account of that dreadful period finds dark strains in Cambodian history that prefigure Pol Pot. But it indicts the U.S. and China almost equally for a horror that was not inevitable.
3. "Off the Rails in Phnom Penh: Into the Heart of Guns, Girls, and Ganja," by Emit Gilboa. This short (but still a little padded) book of memoir/reportage is good about Hun Sen's post-Pol Pot thuggery and about the farang "flotsam" that washed up in Phnom Penh just after all the wars were over.
4. A wonderfully smart and poignant essay by Peace Corps old girl (but much younger than a lot of us) Darcy Meijer, about her teaching years ago in Gabon and then two decades later in Ho Chi Minh City. It's online on John Coyne's indispensible PeaceCorpsWriters.org at http://peacecorpswriters.org/pages/2006/0611/611wr-meijer.htm.

Incidentally, all of the above, except the online essay, are Chinese-mafia cheap knockoff copies we bought in Cambodia or Vietnam. Legitimate editions of these books were nowhere to be found. I did ask a bookstore clerk in Siem Reap if Elizabeth Becker would be receiving royalties on my purchase of her book, but the fellow pretended not to understand my question.

HCMC-Hue

2007-03-11T04:50:00.000-05:00

What Vietnamese trains lack in romance, they make up for in efficiency. If Metro North ran long-distance trains with sleeping cars, this is what they would look like---there's not a lot of romance in socialism. But the Hanoi-bound Reunification Express pulled out of Saigon Station---also non-atmospheric; was the French terminal building bombed?---promptly at one on Wednesday afternoon and delivered us on schedule Thursday morning at 8 in Hue.

The train's four-berth compartment was spartan, the bedding freshly laundered, and the one meal provided---rice and soup Wednesday at 5---edible. Two Vietnamese men entered our digs at 190:30 p.m., climbed to the upper berths, and went to sleep.

The train was plain but the scenery rich. Our window was only a little filthy, and anyway we could go out into the corridor, lower the window there, and hang out. (And warm up---the non-steerage cars of the train were frigid.)

At an average speed of 47 miles per hour (according to the Lonely Planet Guide, our god), the train rumbled across tropical hill and dale. There were the usual reassuring palms and banana trees, and rice fields, and also miles and miles of cashew groves---the Vietnamese, like the Cambodians, mostly eat the fruit (shaped like small bell peppers but pinkish) and sell the nut that grows off the bottom.

Sheets of veneer lay drying in the sun. There were cornfields, and bean vines growing up poles the size of telephone poles. We thought we saw big peppercorns drying on tarps, but those could have been dark beans. Once, Joe said, "This is the train trip we wanted."

Near the coast, we passed through a strangely arid area, like northern Mexico, and then it got wet again, with egrets posing in rice paddies, and then it was dark out, and we got out our books.

I read Graham Greene's "The Quiet American." (Or, it turned out, re-read it---I realized I had already read it in some past life, i.e., before leaving Pennsylvania.) On the train, I came to a passage where the decent, naive young American official Pyle, in Saigon in 1953 or so, worries to the older, harder British war correspondent Fowler that if the Viet Minh communists defeat the French, and "if Indochina goes..."

Fowler replies: "I know the record. Siam goes. Malaya goes. Indonesia goes. What does 'go' mean? If I believed in your God and another life, I'd bet my future harp against your golden crown that in five hundred years there may be no New York or London, but they'll be growing paddy in these fields, they'll be carrying their produce to market on long poles wearing their pointed hats. The small boys will be sitting on the buffaloes. I like the buffaloes, they don't like our smell, the smell of Europeans. And remember---from a buffalo's point of view you are a European too."

This book was published in 1955---not bad. Greene was dead-on about the futility of the West's attempting to fiddle around with Southeast Asia. But the 500-year forecast I'm not so sure about. Like the rest of us around at the time, Greene did not know then about climate change. I haven't seen any forecasts about what global warming might mean for this region. But what if the monsoon rains double in intensity and inundate everybody and everything? Or what if the rains drift elsewhere and leave Southeast Asia high and dry?

Vietnamese agriculture has survived communism; these people are far too practical to muck up their own food supply. But can farmers here survive an American culture of SUVs and every tot brandishing a Weed Whacker? And of half of China and India in their own versions of carbon-dioxide-spewing Model Ts? And what about Saigon's own millions of fossil-fuel-eating motorbikes? Whatever the case, we're likely to know in far fewer than 500 years whether or not the small boys will continue sitting on the buffaloes.

In Hue, the handsome old Nguyen dynasty capital, just south of the pre-war "demilitarized zone," we adapted up again. In a droll attempt to gain good Internet access, we booked an upper-mid-range hotel called the Huong Giang. But with all the gleaming marble and stainless steel, and with all the daintily appointed rooms featuring bamboo elements that were decorative rather than structural, and with all the chirpy "Good morning, Sirs"s and "Have a good meal, Sirs"s endlessly raining down upon us, many things in this place did not work so well.

The computer set-up---or "business center"---was a washout. A hotel worker tipped us off early not to bother. "The connection is not good," she said anxiously. Twice or more daily, we witnessed seried rank upon seried rank of Alsacians and Milanese glowering at computer screen informing them that "this page cannot be displayed." We thought of it as The Room of Throwing Up the Hands. (None of the local Internet cafes were up to the task either. Joe got two photos onto the blog at another hotel, until we were politely chased out for not being hotel guests. I'm posting this from Hanoi, where Joe has some hope of uploading pix.)

Worse could happen to us than a funnily inept hotel---we know that. Mai pen rai. Not, however, at 90 bucks a night, 50 (or 80) more than we customarily spend. But we'll long remember the Huong Giang. One night we saw a farang tour group seated inside the off-the-lobby Korean restaurant (we suspect the hotel is Korean-owned) gotten up in colorful silk "oriental" costumes as they fumbled with their chop sticks. One morning when the maid asked Joe, "Did you sleep well?"---all the staff have been hilariously over-programmed---he replied, "Very well, thank you. And how did you sleep?" That stumped her. At breakfast yesterday, where the swags on the buffet table reminded Joe of "cartoon ponies' eyelids," a large tour group arrived which Joe thought looked just like "the Pittsfield Country Club crowd." (You know who you are.)

Good things about so far unduly maligned Hue: It's a pretty, mid-sized city of French-built avenues and tree-lined streets on two sides of the Susquehanna-like Perfume river. The restaurants are good, with local specialties such as tasty glutinous rice cakes with crispy shrimp suspended inside, and a flat, pasta-like shrimp concoction that's steamed inside a banana leaf. Plus standard (i.e., superb) Vietnamese chicken, beef and pork soups and fried dishes. (A French place makes a mean house salad that I wolfed down without middle-of-the-night consequences. Travel in this region really has changed in that regard. The sign outside the Red Piano cafe in Siem Reap, Cambodia, promises "Style-Quality-Comfort-Hygeine-since 2002." And it was true. The bottled water is safe too. The label on the Uy Mey New Day Pure Drinking Water bottle in Phnom Penh guaranteed "Pure water, testing through DEIONNIZED highly isolating substance and germ, keeps in high quality.")

The other attractions in Hue include the Citadel, a fortified imperial complex built in the early 19th century. It was badly damaged in a post-Tet offensive major battle in 1968 (a cyclo driver whose services I declined yelled after me "Citadel---American bombs! American bombs!") and then left to crumble by the communists, who saw it as a relic of Vietnam's feudal past. Ten years ago the city of Hue saw tourism potential in the Citadel, and now it's a Unesco World Heritage site under restoration.

The Citadel is fun to amble around in, but even better is the Thien Mu pagoda, south of town. You take a "dragon boat" down the river to get there. The 1844 seven-story pagoda is an imposing tower with a lot of history, the most compelling being modern. The monks here organized protests against the crooked and repressive Ngo Dinh Diem regime in the 1960s, and again in the 1980s when the communists were behaving similarly.

In 1963, a Thien Mu monk, Thich Quang Duc, was driven to Saigon in a robin's egg blue Austin sedan---it's on display near the pagoda---and publicly immolated himself to protest Diem's treatment of Buddhists. The news photo is part of history. Madame Ngu, Diem's sister-in-law, applauded this "barbecue party." Later that year, Diem was toppled---and murdered---with the approval of the CIA.

Even more architectually impressive than Thien Mu is the tomb of the Emeror Tu Duc (1848-83), built in the 1860s. This series of gracefully executed stone and brick buildings and monuments is set on some friendly low hills among groves of pine and frangipani trees. The emperor's geomancer, or feng shui expert, made sure the site had the approval of Tu Duc's ancestors.

More importantly for visitors today, the designers produced hyacinth ponds, moats, walls and buildings---residences, temples, family sepulchres, stelae---that were so elegantly and organically woven into the landscape that they give the sensation almost of having floated into place. (Actually, forced labor was employed.) Even the shadowy woods---the day we were there was overcast---felt protective and welcoming, a fine place to be laid to rest or just to take one.

Siem Reap

2007-03-08T07:00:00.000-05:00

Dick and Riem Bundrath at Angkor Wat

Colonnade at Angkor Wat

A night in Saigon

2007-03-06T22:39:00.000-05:00

Joe had been telling me I was missing something memorable by not taking a nightime ride on a xe om. He had done it the night I was out of commission. Xe oms---aptly pronounced "zooms," I think---are motorbikes whose drivers cruise the city looking for fares. They are far more common than the metered taxis, and cheaper.

So last night, needing to go to a distant part of the city, Joe found the moto guy who had driven him several times and hangs out at a particular corner. That driver located a buddy moto guy, and off the four of us went.

I was Audrey Hepburn behind Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday all over again, but this time with elements of The French Connection, Bullitt, GWTW (the flight from Atlanta as Sherman approached) and maybe Potemkin (now I know how the baby felt). Plus, of course, Bugs Bunny and the Roadrunner.

It was terrific. The motobike traffic's movements are fluid, and you feel like you're part of great series of rivers rushing up and down the landscape, somehow crisscrossing and intermingling and constantly reforming anew. It has the same fluid intricacy of a hydraulic system, or of Disney at his best, in Fantasia. You know you could fly off and land on your unhelmeted head, and it'd be curtains, but some Buddhist living-in-the-moment feeling takes over and you are at peace in the steamy chaotic Saigon night under a full moon. We did see one minor crash; a truck hit a motorbike, then maneuvered and hit it a second time. The moto guy was unhurt but irked. My driver said of the truck driver, "Oh, beya, beya!"---he'd been drinking. But I knew that wasn't going to happen to us. (Joe said later he wasn't as confident as I was.) Bill T. Jones choreographed for his troup a thrilling dance I've seen twice, about dancers moving at high speed underwater trying to find the surface. It's done to Mendelssohn's bubbling and soaring octet, and last night I thought I had just a taste of what it must feel like to be part of that dance.

A day in Saigon

2007-03-06T21:37:00.000-05:00

Three museums offer exhibits on the American war. They are pretty much in the same section of the city, so yesterday morning we set off on foot before the day heated up. After half an hour a cyclo driver spotted us consulting a map. Ken-like, he assured us that we still had a long way to go to the Museum of the City of Ho Chi Minh City. Then one of his confederates appeared, and we climbed aboard the two bike-rickshaws. We were suspicious, but we were already sweating through our T-shirts. The museum, yes, was only a hundred meters farther, and we had been mildly scammed. But you do want to help the cyclo drivers. Many were teachers and other professionals under the old regime and were denied employment under the communists. They barely survive. Joe's driver, though, cheerfully remarked midway in the short ride that he had been Viet Cong. Joe could think of not a single appropriate response.

The City museum is in a former French palace set among lovely gardens and less attractive artillery pieces. It depicts, mostly through photographs, the history of the communist struggle in Vietnam, dating back to the 1930s, then the French resistance and the American. There are tableaus of smirking workers and heroic portraits of Ho Chi Minh and other notables. The texts are full of the lingo of the era, lots of French colonialists, American imperialists and their puppets and lackeys. It feels loony, not just because few people on earth employ these terms anymore without irony or embarrassment, but because the museum is in a neighborhood that in significant ways now resembles downtown Fort Lauderdale. Look out one of the museum's big windows and you see the HSBC Bank tower. (In Luang Prabang, I saw a farang tourist wearing a red T-shirt with a gold hammer and sickle on the front. Sondheim: "First you're just a sloe-eyed vamp/ Then somebody's mother/ Then you're camp.")

The Reunification Palace is the former presidential palace of President Thieu. Built in 1963, not a great year anywhere for architecture, it's Texas A&M Student Union-modern on the outside, Scranton Sheraton on the inside. Down in the basement you can visit Thieu's bunker---it is spare---and then hike up to the roof to view the helipad from which the last American puppet flew into oblivion in April, 1975. It's a singularly unattractive place, but it's a perfect historical artifact. It instantly conjures up images of American diplomats in crewcuts and skinny neckties grinning and urging a corrupt regime to hang in there, guys, there's light at the end of the tunnel.

The War Remnants Museum is hard to take. Again, it's mostly photographs. It's got all the famous ones---you know what they are---plus many, many more that are far more graphic. These are the pictures of atrocities and grotesque bombing wounds and injuries that Americans are kept from seeing for reasons of "taste." To its credit, the museum also shows the grief and suffering of American soldiers. The awful tiger cages of Con Son Island, where the Thieu regime kept political prisoners, have been recreated here with convincing detail. The most depressing thing at the museum is a documentary film about the effects on civilians of Agent Orange and other toxic defoliants the U.S. dropped by the B-52-load on many areas of Vietnam. The filmmakers assert plausibly that a million Vietnamese were killed, sickened or deformed by what amounted to chemical warfare. In some regions many of the families had painfully deformed children. We've seen some of the survivors on the streets of Saigon, where they sell lottery tickets.

Sihanoukville-HCMC

2007-03-05T04:21:00.000-05:00

The young Swedish couple, Malin and Yohan, who had just taken over the Malibu Bungalows, said they hope to remain on the mellow Cambodian seaside for five years of "just breaking even." Unless they are opera fans---the port of Sihanoukville has a commercial center and a beach area but not much else---it should be a satisfying sojourn on the Gulf of Thailand.

The Malibu is eight or ten thatched wooden bungalows spilling down a steep hillside among banana and lime trees, with a quiet beach at the bottom, rocky on one end and sandy on the other. Yohan said, "When Swedes travel they don't travel to somewhere but from somewhere." The Malibu, though, is worth any effort to reach. It has a beflowered, terraced restaurant above the cottages serving banana pancakes for breakfast and rice dishes or club sandwiches for lunch. A few hundred yards to the north is the Sokha Beach Resort, an $180-$500 a night joint with an air-conditioned gym and guards to chase the riffraff (us) off their beach, but lacking the sweet simplicity of the Malibu ($35). We stayed four nights.

Bus travel in Cambodia can be good where the roads are decent. We traveled from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh by bus, then down to Sihanoukville. So the $16, eleven-hour trip from Sihanoukville to Ho Chi Minh City seemed like a good idea, and it was. The air-conditioned Hyndai coaches are roomy enough, plus on the windows you get bright pink curtains with white ruffles. Joe said he felt as if he was perched inside a sea anemone. I thought I might be in Barbie's playhouse. There were music videos, too, about young Cambodian couples having relationship issues, which on the rockier segments of highway neatly combined lovesickness with motion sickness.

One of the things you feel inside a Cambodian bus is powerful. The might-makes-right highway rules make for a speedy trip. The driver was not reckless, but it was his clear intent that everything and everybody should move aside as he barreled along. Every several seconds he blared his horn to make sure his intentions were known across the land. Ducks and geese and tuk-tuks scurried, sometimes with nanoseconds to spare. Once, Joe said---though not loudly---"Somebody should take that horn away from him."

We switched buses in Phnom Penh, and the conductor coolly appraised our Vietnam visas, which we had obtained in Sihanoukville. The bus company, Sorya Transportation, wanted no trouble at the border. And there was none. The Vietnamese immigration station resembled a Florida Turnpike Burger King, and the staff there moved us along with an almost identical cool indifference. (One immigration official did ask Joe if he wanted to buy a phone card.)

The first thing that hits you about Vietnam is its infrastructure. That is, it has some. Laos, poor to begin with, and Cambodia, ravaged by the loss of an entire generation of smart, skilled people, often just barely seem to function. Vietnam welcomed us with an impeccably maintained four-lane highway and crowds of people along it looking well-groomed and purposeful. Many of them appeared to work in the tidy garment factories we saw. Even the rice fields seemed greener. In two areas the fields were dotted with dozens of kids flying kites.

In late afternoon, as we approached Saigon (as it's still called by most of its residents), the crowds and traffic thickened and then thickened some more. Soon we realized we had seen the future, and the future was riding motorbikes! It wasn't just a sea of motorbikes, it was galaxies, entire milky ways of motorbikes. It was a Busby Berkley "Gold Diggers of 1935" production number of endless bevies of motorbikes that just kept coming and coming and coming. It wasn't done with mirrors either. Vietnam's 60 million people own over 8 million motorbikes, and the highest percentage of those are in Ho Chi Minh City, population 6 and a half million. In the midst of this, our bus felt like a big (inedible) bug being carried along on a sea of army ants. Not militaristic army ants, though. As in Bangkok and Chiang Mai, the men and women on HCMC motos looked serene in their nicely ironed shirts and slacks as they maneuvered silkily in the fuming borderline-chaos.

We had heard conflicting reports on HCMC. Foreigners who had lived here came to love it. Visitors often weren't so crazy about it. The rap is, it's big and hard to get around in---imagine New York with no subways and few buses and everybody on motorbikes---and the people are pushy and and always on the make. Oh, but wait. That IS New York with motorbikes. And many of the same things we like about New York---the good-natured brashness, the variety, the mental keenness and agility, the center-of-the-known-universe confidence or even arrogance, the neon, the racket, the sense of danger and possibility---you feel all this every time you walk out the door in HCMC. It's New York-East. Or, since they were founded around the same time, maybe New York is Saigon-West.

Not that I have walked out the door of our hotel, the Bi Sai Gon in Minihotel Alley, as often as I would have liked. I came down with a case of the toot-toots (I blame some dubious Cambodian fried rice) 12 hours after arriving here. With the help of antibiotics and the exquisite pho (chicken rice-noodle soup) from our little hotel's little restaurant, I am almost fully recovered. And so we'll have a report in a few days---maybe from Hue, where we go by train on Wednesday---on Joe's busy HCMC life (still no photos for the blog, alas), and ours, which is about to resume.

Note: Our visas call this country the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. But the Vietnamese are plainly too smart for Marxism. Their charging-away economy---8 percent a year growth---is pure market mayhem, and it's working. Their politics are still Leninist, though, and you have to wonder how long that can last. That question---here and in China---has to be the big one in Asia's speeding-motorbike future.

No pix for now

2007-03-01T09:19:00.000-05:00

Sihanoukville has its seaside charms but not its computer charms. So none of Joe's wonderful recent photos will appear on the blog soon. We're hoping for better facilities in Ho Chi Minh City, where we arrive Saturday. They had all those tunnels. Maybe they'll have Adobe Photo Shop.

Phnom Penh

2007-02-28T21:59:00.000-05:00

A February 11 New York Times travel piece offered the opinion that Phnom Penh may be "the next Prague." What happened to Berlin? Dubrovnik? Harrisburg?

There's no doubt, though, that with Cambodia's economic and political stability apparently assured for the immediate future by the thugs who run the place---the Hun Sen government buys off or eliminates opponents---the country's capital, once the "pearl of Asia," is fast rebounding from decades of civil war and post-war turbulence. And like Prague after the Soviet pullout, the hustlers, in both the good sense and the bad sense, are turning up on schedule.

Hundreds---thousands?---of young farangs are arriving to teach English and enjoy the vibrant cheap-as-it-gets night life. (As in other countries of former French Indochina, English is now the global-connection lingua franca. Yesterday Joe heard a French woman screeching at a hotel clerk. She was suffering the double ignomony of an uncleaned room and of being required to complain about it in English.)

Most tourists visiting Cambodia now fly directly to Siem Reap and Angkor Wat and skip the formerly problematical capital, but that's changing. Along Sithowath Quay, the riverfront restaurants and cafes are packed every night with farangs and East Asians enjoying good Khmer, Thai, Italian and French food. At Borane, a Cambodian place next to our hotel, we had the best sweet and sour tom yam soup (chicken, lemon grass, galanga, mushrooms, kaffir lime leaves and tomatoes) we've had anywhere. Our comfortable quayside hotel, the Star Royal, was nicely troppo shabby genteel, a place where Prince Phillip might end up if he began to hit the bottle and Helen Mirren chucked him out. The water and power cut out from time to time, but never for long.

The bad hustlers of the New Prague, arguably, are the foreign investors and developers whose bribes and kickbacks keep what may be the most corrupt government in Asia afloat. Hun Sen and his crew, former Khmer Rouge officials who broke with Pol Pot in 1977, have renounced their communism but not their crude means for maintaining control. In 1997, the coalition that won a United Nations-supervised election was forced from power in a bloody coup engineered by Hun Sen's Cambodian Peoples Party. The result was mild tut-tutting at the U.N. and a few years of punishing economic sanctions before it was back to business as usual. The king, Norodom Sihanouk's no-account son, has no influence over anything. He presides at ceremonial occasions in a palace room (tourists are allowed in on most days) that is decorated and furnished like the lobby of the Boston Statler-Hilton in 1964.

With its million-plus residents, Phnom Penh is coming along--- development is filtering down and helping workers---but it's still on the threadbare side. Most of the tile-roofed French colonial buildings are gone, and the four- and five-story cement apartment blocks that have replaced them could use a coat of paint. There's no mass transit system, so both the narrow streets and the network of wide boulevards built by the French are gridlocked in the morning and late afternoon with motorbikes, tuk-tuks and---it's pretty depressing---SUVs driven by farangs and by Cambodian businessmen and officials and their bodyguards.

(The country is up to its fried crickets in guns. Armed robbery is no longer routine, as it was a decade ago, but it's not all that rare either. A tuk-tuk driver wanted to take us out to a shooting range, a big tourist attraction. "Americans like guns! English too!" The government, however, has apparently halted the practice of farangs paying money to blow up farm animals with bazookas.)

Generally speaking, driving in Cambodia is on the right but it's not a hard and fast rule. Phnom Penh has few traffic signals and no stop signs. Vehicles take turns bombing through intersections at high speed. Pedestrians are at risk. The best approach is to proceed slowly but with a confident demeanor and let the traffic waters part around you. (We made it out of town alive. We're now in easygoing Sihanoukville on the Cambodian coast of the Gulf of Thailand. We came by bus---intercity public buses are pretty good, especially if you love karaoke videos---and we'll leave by bus on Saturday for the ten-hour ride to Ho Chi Minh City.)

The Phnom Penh sights that will stay with us, of course, were Tuol Sleng and the Killing Fields. But there were non-heartbreaking attractions, too. The Royal Palace, with its golden pagoda spires against a brilliant blue sky, is thrilling to behold. As are the golden Buddhas and the emerald Buddha in a long gallery whose floor is all silver. (The Khmer Rouge, trying to stamp out Buddhism and art, both deemed rotten, destroyed 60 percent of of the palace's treasures. Pol Pot left the rest as a tribute to the long-ago Khmer empire. Why did he leave 40 percent and not 90 or 10 percent? This is unclear.)

The National Museum, in a grand red stone Victorian building, has a good collection of Angkor stone carving. Though it is not displayed as well as are the carvings stolen by the French and shown at the Guimee Museum in Paris.

The contents of the Phnom Penh New Market aren't special---it's a kind of Asian Wal-Mart---but its architecture is. Built by the French in the 1930s, it's one of the largest domed spaces in Asia. From a distance, the mustard-yellow, Art Deco, multi-layered structure looks like Ruth St. Denis's hat. The market is arranged oddly inside. Right next to the fine gold jewelery section is the fresh meat section, with glistening animal-innard swags as a backdrop to the duller gold necklaces and bracelets.

The best Phnom Penh attractions were, as is usually the case, the endlessly unfolding exhibits of Khmer daily life. With exceptions, these are nice people to be around. They don't grin as easily as the Thais, and they are not so seductively sedate as the Laos. But they seem to manage their frayed lives with both energy---a feat in this heat---and quiet dignity. We'd be happy to come back here.

One bright morning we went hoofing it (phoofing it?) around the city to see where we might end up. Joe has never met a back alley he did not wish to wander down, so there was a good bit of that. In one roasting third-circle-0f-hell corridor, women were tending boiling cauldrons of water over charcoal fires. Joe wondered if maybe they were selling hot water to hotels. They didn't seem to be doing laundry or making soup.

We rode back to the riverfront that day on cyclos. These are rickshaw-like contraptions, half bicycle but with a single seat in the front, pedaled by ragged, frail men who often have no homes and sleep at night on their cyclos. I felt like some aristocratic twit Hogarth would have savaged. We salved our consciences somewhat by paying these two guys two and a half times the agreed-upon $2 per person price---even though they got lost and didn't take us to where we wanted to go.

S-21 and the Killing Fields

2007-02-26T04:12:00.000-05:00

As you approach the place, it looks nice enough. Maybe like a secondary school where a Peace Corps volunteer landing a rare posh urban assignment might have enjoyed two stimulating years in the 1960s or '70s. But as the tuk-tuk draws closer, you notice a couple of tour buses parked nearby, and then the barbed wire.

In 1975, airy, spacious Tuol Svay Prey High School, just outside Phnom Penh, was converted by the Khmer Rouge into Tuol Sleng, Security Prison 21, or just S-21, an interrogation, torture and detention center. Now it is the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. The place shows the history of, and serves as a memorial to, 17,000 of Pol Pot's Cambodian and other victims who either died at Tuol Sleng or were trucked out to the killing fields of suburban Choeung Ek to be stabbed or, more often, pounded to death.

Persons brought to Tuol Sleng were instructed to complete a "biography," as in seventh-grade English class. If you admitted to being a "new" Cambodian (educated, urban, professional) and not a "base" Cambodian (the peasantry), that status alone almost certainly got you killed. Most urban Cambodians were quickly shipped to the countryside to die of starvation and overwork when, literally overnight, Pol Pot turned Cambodia into an agrarian concentration camp. But people considered especially dangerous---former government workers, teachers, students, technicians and monks, as well as all members of their families, young or old---ended up at Tuol Sleng. Many lied on their bios, but they were usually found out.

Families---an institution deemed outmoded---were mostly split up. People were packed into small rooms in leg irons. They could not speak or even change position without asking permission. Most were tortured. One of the ten prison rules (see upcoming photo) was this: "When getting lashes or electrification you must not cry at all." A piece of gym equipment in the pretty courtyard was used to hang people upside down until they lost consciousness and then to dunk their heads in the fertilizer bucket to wake them up. On display at the museum, along with other artifacts of torture, is a water-boarding device.

Under torture, people confessed to crazy things. A monk or a student might admit to being a "CIA agent." People named names of other "traitors to the revolution," including family members. The museum brochure includes these lines about the 10- to 15-year-olds who worked as guards: "Most of them started out as normal before growing increasingly evil. They were exceptionally cruel and disrespectful toward the prisoners and their elders."

At the museum---which is essentially the prison as it was discovered in 1979 when the Vietnamese drove Pol Pot out of Phnom Penh---the fetid cells and instruments of torture are hard to look at, but the thing that makes visiting this place close to unbearable is the photographs. Every prisoner had a mug shot taken. New arrivals too weak to sit up were strapped in place. Like the Nazis, the Khmer Rouge, so proud of their work, recorded everything. Galleries of the museum contain wall after wall of these faces staring into the camera with awful fright. It's like some high-school yearbook exhibit from hell. There are many photos, too, of the mutilated bodies of those tortured to death. In one cell, a museum visitor had left two frangipani blossoms next to a steel bludgeon.

The museum contained graffiti. Some looked as if they dated to the building's high-school days: a John Wayne-looking cowboy with a revolver, a sketch showing the workings of a human heart. The other graffiti were scrawled across photographs of former prison employees. In the accompanying text, these men expressed regret for the bad things that had gone on, but they said they had just been following orders. The writing slashed across these faces apparently by museum visitors---surviving family members of victims?---was in Khmer script, so we were unable to read it.

In an hour-long documentary film by French-Cambodian director Rithy Panh that is screened at the museum, an old lady who lost a daughter and son-in-law to Pol Pot's "socialist great leap forward," is perplexed. She says she cannot understand why the Khmer Rouge so ruthlessly broke up families. She said at age 70 she is supposed to know certain things, but that inhuman practice she cannot for the life of her figure out.

A younger female interviewee recalls how in the countryside communes friends and those few family members still together stopped trusting one another. Or people chose not to confide feelings or opinions because to do so might jeopardize not just their own lives but the lives of others. This same woman said "even the floors were listening" for rule breakers. Spies hid under the raised bamboo houses at night. One girl was overheard quietly singing a pre-revulutionary pop tune. She was taken out and killed that night, and her bloody clothes displayed at a "meeting," as a lesson to others.

We had lunch with the tuk-tuk driver we had hired for the day. Mr. Bora, a quiet, dignified man in shades and a baseball cap, spoke a little English. He told us he had lost both his parents and two brothers to the Khmer Rouge. He didn't say exactly how. When we asked him how he thought this thing could have happened, he shrugged and looked away.

After lunch, Mr. Bora drove us in his sputtering three-wheeler out to Choeung Ek and the Killing Fields Memorial. This is the orchard where nearly everyone who survived S-21 ended up after a few months. Walking around under a scorching sun, we saw the pits where the bodies of nearly 9,000 men, women and children have been exhumed, with thousands more still buried nearby. We saw the tree where loudspeakers were hung to mask the moans of those being bludgeoned or pick-axed to death. We saw the sturdy tree the executioners slammed the children against to finish them off. We saw the fragments of bone and clothing unearthed by the weather along the pathways. We saw the tall Memorial Stupa, where over 8,000 skulls are stacked on shelves behind glass, arranged by age and sex. Then we rode into the city, with its life and bustle and pleasant cafes along the Mekong esplanade.

Did Joe and I have to go and look at S-21 and Choeung Ek? Not really. We debated whether or not to go. And we would fault no one who came to Cambodia and said, yes, I know it happened, but I can't bear to get that close to it.

But we're glad now that we went. It's part of human history and that greatly interests us. It means, too, that we're somewhat more likely to be among those who notice if something like the Cambodian holocaust ever starts to happen again. What would we do if we did notice such a thing? We don't know. But we hope something.

Note

2007-02-24T20:13:00.000-05:00

The copy desk has been busy. A cobra spreads its hood, part of its neck, not its head. Gay life in Laos and Cambodia is pretty okay, not are pretty okay. Yeah yeah.
The copy editor, Bill Ullman, also points out that adapting up and adapting down are among the great pleasures of travel. He recalls the fun of staying with Peace Corps volunteers in their Sierra Leone villages when he worked there in the sixties, and then returning their hospitality by putting them up---on his boss's dime---at the Ritz in London.
Joe and I are in Phnom Penh. We like this place for many reasons, not the least of which is its spelling. The big question here is, do you or do you not visit the killing fields and the museum of Khmer Rouge horrors? They both appear on tuk-tuk drivers' signs listing tourist attractions not to be missed. We're here for just three days, so we have to decide soon.

Cambodia

2007-02-23T02:14:00.000-05:00

It's an appealing jalopy of a country, steaming and clanking, with odds bits and pieces of its past flying off in the dust, and currently fueled almost entirely by the mighty engine of industrial tourism.

Cambodia is an old country, but young, too. The great Khmer empire dominated Southeast Asia from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries, but now half the population is under the age of 15. Urban gerontologists will be bored here, for Pol Pot murdered most of the city people for the crime of having been educated. From 1975 to 1979, Cambodia lost a third of its six million people through disease, starvation, mass execution---often bludgeoning, to save money on bullets---or from being worked to death in the fields by Maoist lunatics.

There are individual and collective memories of that savage time. Yet most Cambodians---the survivors, the eager and busy young people---seem to be looking ahead. An American who lives in Siem Reap thinks the skull-and-crossbones image of Cambodia is perpetuated largely by the foreign press and by NGOs that think they need it for their fundraising.

While the Cambodians' need to move on has to be respected, the West cannot afford to forget its complicity in one of the century's most horrendous genocides. It was the Nixon-Kissinger carpet bombing of eastern Cambodia, along with the joint U.S.-South Vietnamese invasion, that recruited hundreds of thousands of Khmer soldiers, who believed they were joining a movement for independence, not the mass murder of their own people. And after Pol Pot's removal from power in 1979 by the Vietnamese, the West kept this despot and his land-mine-planting guerrillas going for more than another decade in western Cambodia, as a check on the Vietnamese. As an American here, you just want to slink away.

Most Cambodians, however, want you to stay. Beyond a shaky garment industry that's vulnerable to changing trade agreements, Cambodian income is largely dependent now on tourism. Two million visitors came to Siem Reap last year, almost double the number of the year before. Like Joe and me, they came to look upon and often climb over the the dozens of Khmer temples, of which Angkor Wat is only the magnificent centerpiece. Hotels and restaurants have opened by the dozens. The center of Siem Reap, a city of about 100,000, feels more like Cancun than Asia. At night, it's carnival time in the teeming---and steaming---open-air cafes and restaurants. You can get Khmer fish amok or a club sandwich, a pineapple shake or Beer Lao, a lady massage or a man massage. Most of the tourists are Asian---Korean, Chinese, Japanese---or European. You hear an American or Canadian accent once in a while, but this place is a bit out of the way for them. And then there's that Killing Fields image.

Through a fortuitous mix-up, Joe and I ended up in a hotel that's about as far as you can get from the Cambodia of the 1970s. Viroth's Hotel is run by a young Frenchman, Fabien Martial, who also has a nearby restaurant with the same name. Viroth is Fabien's Cambodian boyfriend. After another hotel reservation fell through, we sought the Internet help of Martin Dishman, a friend of two friends of a friend of ours in San Francisco, and Martin speedily booked us at his friend Fabian's small hotel. It's pure Miami South Beach, and it's a wonder. Our air-conditioned room---the daily high here is at least in the mid-90s---is both so comfortable and so lovingly stark, so Ian Schrager-in-the-heatstroke-belt, that we were barely able to unpack our shabby little possessions fast enough to get them out of sight. There's a gorgeous small-tiled swimming pool of many shades of blue, a third-story rooftop breakfast terrace under thatch, and---best of all---a staff that has been unfailingly helpful in arranging for rides or a guide or a mixed-fruit shake. We were able to remember the day manager's name, Nirong, because Nirong could do no wrong. All this for US $50 a night.

Joe and I are adaptable, and while at Viroth's we had to adapt up, in other ways in Cambodia we have had to adapt down. The country is really ramshackled. It's poor and it shows. The roads are a mess and traffic is chaotic. In Bangkok, you look twice each way before crossing the street; here you look five times. Cambodia also has more animals on motorbikes. That's what I said. Cambodia tied a Lao record for most riders piled onto a motorbike---five---but set new records yesterday when we observed the following: four people on a motorbike, the woman at the rear end clutching at her side the feet of several live upside-down ducks; and two large live hogs, hogtied, on their backs, resting atop a metal frame on the back of a speeding motorbike. We also saw a pickup truck with twelve people in the back seated atop cargo that spilled out onto a metal tailgate extension, four people in the cab, and one on the hood. And this truck was moving right along.

Along many of the dusty roads, along with the fruit and vegetable stands, are vendors with shelves stacked with bottles we thought were filled with amber cooking oil. But the plastic and gas bottles, we learned, are filled with gasoline. These places are gas stations. Joe saw one where all the containers were Johnny Walker bottles.

The people here are mostly gentle-natured in that Southeast Asian way we've so happily gotten used to, but the hardness of the urban poor is all around us, too. Joe hates it that we can't buy a postcard from every skinny kid who approaches us. The guidebooks say don't encourage the hard sell, but you constantly fear that if you don't buy this child's temple-photo book or that child's bottle of hot Coke, the kid won't eat tonight. We don't know that. What we do know is that the Big Hustle is bad for everyone's dignity, if probably necessary for some people's stomachs.

NGOs, often justly criticized for their posh staff lifestyles and sometimes wasteful ways, are probably doing good work in Cambodia. Anything should help. We haven't seen that close-up, but we have met a few non-NGO ex-pats who impressed us a lot. A French hotel-staff trainer named Geoffrey, staying at Viroth's, is sponsoring the education of an orphan. This is especially worthy, for the "socialist" government hasn't built any significant social safety net. (On a street in the restaurant area, we saw a physically handicapped band of musicians playing for donations; some appeared to be land-mine amputees.) We came in on the tail end of a cocktail-party fundraiser at the John McDermott Gallery, which features the American owner's gorgeous platinum prints of temple scenes. McDermott raised over $10,000 for the Siem Reap children's hospital.

Helping McDermott and his wife was Martin Dishman, whose bar is just across the street. We had heard about Martin from John Finn and Art Desuyo, pals of Peace Corps old boy Mike Learned. John and Art have provided Joe and me expert guidance on navigating aspects of Bangkok and Siem Reap. They alerted us that there was this fabled character in Siem Reap who had opened the first gay bar there and we had to track him down. Tracking Martin down was about as hard as tracking down Rick Blaine in Casablanca, to whom Martin has been compared. He's a presence here.

Homosexuality in much of Southeast Asia is not stigmatized. Buddhism has no opinion about it and neither do the governments. The governments are trying to crack down on child sex trafficking. And we have read of gay farang men caught with gay Asian adult men and victimized in police extortion schemes. But apparently this is rare, and gay life in Thailand is open and healthy, and gay life in Laos and Cambodia are not quite so open but pretty okay otherwise.

Martin is a nice-looking, forty-something American with alert blue eyes and a quick mind who figured out back in Indiana that he was attracted to men, and realized a little later in San Francisco that he especially liked Asian men. He worked in the hotel business in Thailand and, ready for some independence and seeing an opportunity when it stared him in the face, he opened the Linga Bar just over two years ago. On a busy bar and restaurant street that's closed to cars, Martin's place has a chic-but-comfy San Francisco feel to it. The customers are a mix of young and old, foreigner and Cambodian. You do see some Cambodian lads cadging drinks---and perhaps other assets---from farang gents of a certain age. But Martin stays out of that. He says he just sells food and drinks.

There's a lively warm feeling about Martin's place. You sense that it has been a liberating influence in people's lives. (The name is the Sanskrit word for phallus---a middle ground between the Blue Parrot Bars of the U.S. in the 1950s and the gay restaurant in Bangkok---oh, those irrepressible Thais--- called Eat Me.) Martin is plainly adored by his staff and customers. He is mister gay-go-to-guy in Siem Reap.

Martin also owns a one-luxurious-unit "boutique" hotel called The One Hotel Angkor, where he asks $250 a night and gets it. (Web site www.theonehotelangkor.com.) He's talking about opening another place in Luang Prabang and maybe eventually move to that quieter Lao scene. It would be hard for a lot of people to imagine Siem Reap without Martin. But even Rick left Casablanca when the time had come to move on.

Another impressive man we met in Siem Reap is Riem Bundrath. He was our guide for two days, at the standard rate of $25 per day. He accompanied us to Angkor Wat, Bayon and other temples---see Joe's pictures, which will be up soon. In addition to answering nearly all our questions about Khmer history, art and architecture, this small, sad-eyed, thoughtful man was open and forthcoming about his own life and philosophy. The temples were grand and mysterious, but the most memorable moment in the two days was yesterday, late afternoon, when we were all three hot and tired, and sat down to rest near the top of the Bayun temple.

This eleventh century wonder is said by the Lonely Planet Guide to be one of the most "mysterious"of the temples. But we found it's bas reliefs of Khmer daily life illuminatingly mundane, and even humorous, with a scene, for example, of a woman butcher working hard and scowling at her husband, who is off to the side smoking a water pipe. The mystery, we guessed, was in the huge smiling stone faces on four of the lotus-blossum-shaped towers. What were these faces smiling at?

Riem---whose father, if we heard Riem correctly, was murdered by the Khmer Rouge for eating a piece of fruit---sat and told us the story of the Buddha and his enlightenment. We heard about Siddhartha and his restless youth, his search for a "better way" to live morally and earn a better future life or even achieve nirvana. We heard the entire story in about 20 minutes---the turtle as an incarnation of Buddha that walked on lotus blossums, the cobra that spread its head to protect the Buddha against a rainstorm---and the way the Buddha's followers, like Riem, who was a monk for three years, can find peace and acceptance when life is very hard. We thought Riem thought we needed to hear him tell us this story, and we did.

It's hot

2007-02-22T06:15:00.000-05:00

We've been in Siem Reap for under three days, and we've already entered exquisite-twelfth-century-bas-relief rehab. Been to five amazing Khmer-empire sites, including glorious Angkor Wat. Cambodia is also of very considerable interest otherwise. For now, we can say authoritatively of the city of Siem Reap, Pol Pot would be dismayed. And, yes, it's hot here. More soon.

Note

2007-02-19T21:08:00.000-05:00

The photo of two women in Khout's village who appear to be making whiskey from rice are doing just that. It's the village lao lao factory.
In an earlier posting I think I said sticky rice was high in glutin. Rice does not contain glutin. Sticky rice is sometimes erroneously called glutinous just because it is sticky. (Incidentally, we saw a sign outside a cafe here in Luang Prabang offering "glue wine." We'll never know.)
In a few hours we fly to Siem Reap, Cambodia, and Angkor Wat. A main tourist attraction in Siem Reap, we have read, is the Land Mine Museum. In Cambodia, tourists get to cover all the bases.

Sunset from the Sunset Guest House in Nong Khiaw and off we go down the Nam Ou river

2007-02-18T06:47:00.000-05:00

2007-02-18T06:35:00.000-05:00

2007-02-18T06:08:00.000-05:00

2007-02-18T05:57:00.000-05:00

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2007-02-18T05:16:00.000-05:00

Trip down the Nam Ou river

2007-02-18T05:05:00.000-05:00

Back in LP

Panning for gold

Khout's village

2007-02-18T04:38:00.000-05:00

2007-02-18T00:58:00.000-05:00

Weaver
Descending into the valley
Working the field

Betal nut enthusiast

2007-02-18T00:06:00.000-05:00

Off to work... again

The end of the day
Land use restriction map posted in each town

Spirit guard

2007-02-17T23:48:00.000-05:00

I gave some BBM books to a Hmong orphan who wandered to this village on his own when he was seven. For the last two years the Akha families have taken turns caring for him. He seemed very loved and was captivated by the books.

Separating the pounded rice

Spinning cotton thread

Detail with French coins and nail clipper

2007-02-17T23:35:00.000-05:00

BBQ fish, stuffed with ginger, scallions, chili, salt and sugar

Late afternoon

The fascination with the new books from BBM

After dinner singing, drinking, smoking and chatting

2007-02-17T23:20:00.000-05:00

Village life

Breakfast in the sun

A man making brooms

A house in a field

Off to work

2007-02-17T23:10:00.000-05:00

Akha spirit house

An Akha classroom

Morning unfolds

Akha trek pictures

2007-02-17T22:58:00.000-05:00

Rice and pumpkin fields

Ken Keo, No Lu and Joe

Cooling off, again

Lunch by the falls; pickled veggies, BBQ buffalo, sticky rice, pork larb

See the Nam Ou pix

2007-02-17T04:31:00.000-05:00

Joe's photos of the boat ride on the Nam Ou River (previously misidentified by me as the Ou Nam, what can I tell you) say it all. But let me provide some context and a few observations. The amazing photos will appear on the blog soon.

The trip from Nong Khiaw down to where the Nam Ou spills into the Mekong just above Luang Prabang takes about six hours. There's no scheduled service. So you can either put your name on a list and hope some Aussie backpackers interested in the flora and fauna and not in finding new locales in which to hurl undigested beer will show up soon and share the expense of hiring a boat, or you can cough up (block that metaphor!) $140 U.S. and hire a boat and driver on your own. We chose the latter, and it may well have been the best $70 each we ever spent.

We had passed the night comfortably at Nong Khiaw in a place called the Sunset Guest House, overlooking the river and beneath the enormous limestone escarpment that looms over the little port town. This weird tower was just the beginning of the day's geological wonders. We had coffee with the boatman, a serene man of fifty or so, and then he poled us out into the river and turned downstream at 8:35. We had the entire 18-passenger boat---four feet wide and maybe 30 feet long---all to ourselves. Joe's camera was poised.

It was cool and misty when we left. The pea-soup green river was as unperturbed as the boatman. The foliage along the shores was so green it looked like Laos might have been designated as the earth's primary supplier of chlorophyl (sp?). The main road to Northeast Laos ran along the road for a way, and then it veered away and we were in the wilderness.

Around 9:30 the mists around the mountaintops burned off, the sun brightened everything for miles, and we saw it all, one of the topographical wonders of Laos and the world. Some of the mountains were shaped like unexcavated Mayan temples. Others were pure karst, thrusting limestone draped on the less precipitous sides with trees and vines. Others looked like the "fairy chimneys" of Capodoccia, except with flowering-tree corsages. Who knew that poinsettias grew on trees and not just in little plastic pots at K-Mart? One mountain was shaped just like Aya Sophia in Istanbul, minus the minarets. Other mountains in this multi-sectarian geological territory were like enormous Buddhist stupas, and still more were like mossy stones out of Wordsworth from a land of giants. There were saw-toothed mountain groupings. There were mountains that looked like the White Mountains of New Hampshire, except be-jungled, and with villages of communists instead of Republicans at their bases (like Vermont). There were ancient banyan trees crawling with ropey flowering vines and dendritic plants drawing their nourishment from the larger trees. It was dramatic as all get out, and yet when we glimpsed the village life along the wider shores we saw that the landscape was friendly, too. I had the idea that this paradise is what Pennsylvania might have looked like had the God of the Quakers and Mennonites been a nicer guy.

There were rapids along the way, and sometimes the boatman had only a ten-foot channel in the much wider river to rush through. He was good, and if he was relying in part on the boulder spirits for assistance, we never knew it, for he was too busy steering and checking the river ahead for signs of trouble. No flower petals were tossed, though from time to time Joe and I fed the gods an empty banana or tangerine peel. The boat's draft was under a foot, we estimated, and a couple of times we felt light scraping. Some channels had been marked by bamboo poles or clusters of anchored drinking-water bottles. We wondered what had to happen before the Nam Ou was declared no longer navigable until the spring rains came, but luckily we never found out on our own.

People along the shores were villagers whose fishing, herding and agricultural lives were familiar to us by now. But a couple of unusual sights were groupings of people on islands panning for gold. Some of them had rigged up mechanical contraptions for sifting the current as it passed across the river bottom. We also saw some elaborate home-made hydro-electric projects, with propellors in the water churning up juice that ran up wires strung on the usual bamboo poles.

We hit the muddy Mekong at one and were in cozy Luang Prabang by two. That's where we are now, catching up on blogging, photo processing, and laundry until Tuesday, when we fly to Cambodia.

Khout's village

2007-02-17T03:04:00.000-05:00

Khout Vixayphone runs the tiny storefront that Big Brother Mouse Books opened a couple of months ago up north in Luang Namtha. He's a slight, handsome, thoughfully talkative twenty-three-year-old who graduated from the teachers college in Luang Prabang and then taught for several months before going to work for BBM Books. Khout (pronounced somewhere between koot and kuh-oot) could have stayed with the company in more up-to-date Luang Prabang, but he chose this frontier town because it was near his beloved home village.

The day after Joe got back from his trek, we hired a tuk-tuk and joined Khout for the ride on a bumpy dirt road the two kilometers out to the hamlet where Khout grew up and most of his family still live. Unlike the distant Akha village, Khout's village (whose name we failed to write down) had government electrical power and other amenities. But the sensible houses were much like the more rural structures, except solider, with harder woods. The government is trying to get people to switch to brick and there were a couple of those. Deforestation has brought flooding in many areas, including Khout's village, which was inundated last June, causing the loss of many animals. A number of houses in the village had satellite dishes, but also the customary array of chickens running loose, hogs and dogs stretched out in the dusty streets. The homeowners rice and other fields were a short walk on the edge of town.

Khout took pride in showing us around. He pointed out the efforts at modernization, though it was the peace and quiet and connectedness among the villagers that he talked about most fondly. It seemed to seem to him an ideal life. He loved the ways people helped each other out all the time and then hung out together. He was known wherever he went and talked about the families in each house. We met his non-English-speaking mother, who was preparing vegetables for the evening meal, and his live-at-home brother, who sat off to the side as we enjoyed some cool water, and who has a "problem." Joe diagnosed the problem as Down's Syndrome and he was probably right. Khout said it was this brother who looked after him when he was a tot and they have a close bond.

Khout was not blind to dissatisfaction. He said many of his secondary-school classmates broke off their educations, married early, and some now felt a bit trapped. He spoke of the bad effects in the village of both excessive drink and of television. (TV may replace opium as a Lao opiate of the masses.) Khout's own life took a sad turn recently when he broke off his engagement because his girlfriend did not like his parents. Also, her mother was a troublemaker who was better left out of the family picture. The wedding banquet pumpkins were piled in a corner of the house uneaten.

Khout's father works in Luang Namtha for the Ministry of Culture. He rides his motorbike from the village to his town office each day. This probably means he is a good communist party member, but the few times we provided Khout with openings to talk government and politics he did not pick up on these openings. Luang Namtha was the site of a major battle in the 1970s civil war, and there's a large heroic statue of General Kaysone, the Lao-communist George Washington in the center of town. I did ask Khout which side his village was on in the war. He sidestepped the question, but he said at that time "brother fought against brother," and it was terrible. He perhaps exposed some Pathet Lao family sympathies when he talked about the war as being between "the Americans" and "the Vietnamese." Not "the North Vietnamese." For U.S. leaders, the war was about ideology while among most people in Indochina it was about liberation from foreign powers.

Khout went to teachers college on scholarship and so is obligated to teach in public schools for three years. However, his work with Big Brother Mouse Books is considered so valuable by the surprisingly flexible Ministry of Education that his BBM job can count toward his obligation. The ministry is right to do so, for Khout is dedicated and energetic about getting good books into the hands of Lao children. Joe had some clever ideas about signage and promotion, and Khout picked right up on these. One of Khout's disappointments has been in discovering how few of the teachers he comes into contact with are as eager and hard-working as he is. Many become teachers because it's the only job they can get.

Khout invited Joe and me for dinner at the BBM store, where he lives in a room in the back. His cousin and her friend, both students at a private school in Luang Namtha, cooked a dinner for us of sticky rice, crab jeow, bamboo shoots, chili sauce and grilled strips of water buffalo. It was lovely. The five of us sat village-style on a bamboo mat on the floor, since Khou's former girlfriend had made off with the only table. The girls were "too shy," Khout said, to use their English with us. But we had the feeling they understood everything we said.

Good trek---part II

2007-02-17T02:10:00.000-05:00

can be done up in minutes with ivy leaves, green onions, ginger, fish sauce, meat if you have any, and then served with balls of sticky rice.

The Akha bamboo house where Joe and the guides had dinner was on stilts with cracks in the floor. Debris from food preparation was shoved through the cracks to the hogs and chickens below. There was no waste. Dogs came by and licked the kitchen floor clean. From time to time, one of the women fixing dinner placed a finger against one nostril and expertly shot snot from the other nostril through a crevice. No fuss, no muss.

Joe arrived in the village unexpectedly, he learned, and walked into a housewarming party that had already been underway for 24 hours. He was warmly welcomed to the celebration and was passed a communal cup of lao-lao, home-brew rice whiskey. Hoping the alcohol might kill some of the bacteria in the banana-flower salad he had just eaten, he partook, sipping from the area of the cup just over the handle, and he thought, oh, yes, yes, I remember this taste. Lapsing handily into his old debauched ways, Joe wondered if maybe the partiers would offer him one of their Chinese cigarettes---many adults and children were puffing away and tossing back the lao-lao---but no one did.

The new house, like those owned by its neighbors, was perched on a breezy steep hillside. Joe said the landscape was like that in a mannerist painting, with the eye taking in both the overall ethereal green and blue beauty and the crude and exquisite details. The house had been built by all the villagers. The socio-economic structure is Amish-like, with private ownership of rice paddies and vegetable plots but joint effort on big, single projects like buildings. The women who sell produce in town or roadside markets for cash take turns going to market so there's never a glut that will drive prices down. Kenkeo told Joe that a rooster crows at 3 a.m. to waken sellers going to market and another crows at 6 a.m. for buyers who need to be awakened.

With their cash---which also comes from producing more rice than they need for themselves---villagers buy tools, clothes and household items. In one Akha village Joe stayed in, a Chinese guy with a bundle of shirts on the back of his motorbike had come by, so everybody was wearing the same shirt, except with different colors.

A few houses near streams get electricity from small hydro-electric generators Joe said looked like Hamilton Beach mixmasters. He didn't know what the power was being used for---lighting maybe---but he did note ominously that at a few of the more prosperous looking houses bamboo frames had been put up to hold---oh, yes---satellite dishes. One house had a cross at its roof peak and Joe asked if these people were Christians. No, Kenkeo said, somebody had hung a stereo speaker up there.

The Akha are animists. Each village has a bamboo "spirit gate" at or near a main village path. Through this portal no bad spirit is permitted to pass. Joe was careful not startle any children, for doing so could frighten their souls away.

While Joe thought these villagers plainly liked their lives, there were also indications of hunger for more. Joe carried along ten Lao-language children's picture books from Sasha Alyson's Big Brother Mouse reading and literacy project (www.BigBrotherMouse.com) and gave them to teachers to pass out at the village school. The teachers were grateful and the kids mesmerized. Apparently there were no other books in the village, except for the teachers own instruction manuals. Teaching is done on rough blackboards. Marxist governments are generally good at spreading literacy---how else to indoctrinate the population? But Joe got the idea---reenforced by another encounter I'll report on soon---that not much learning was going on at these rural schools. Also, the young teachers, who earn $30 a month, were supplementing their incomes by selling the pupils packaged noodle soup and candy.

Joe loved his trek (if I had quit those Chinese cigarettes sooner, I'd have been able to go along, too), and he didn't get sick or have to speak the Akha words "my arm is broken." He said the villagers were like the Dutch in the way they are clever and industrious about making what little they have work for them so brilliantly. And then, when work is done, relaxing together and enjoying one another.

Good trek

2007-02-16T23:33:00.000-05:00

Both Thais and Laos are famously sentimental about their home villages. The one thing Laos almost always ask us when we've gotten to know them a little is, would you like to visit my village? On his three-day trek, Joe came to understand why the Laos consider their villages peaceful and spiritually pure refuges from Lao urban life, which itself seems to us pretty laid back.

It's not being naively romantic to state that, despite many hardships, Lao rural villages---where nearly all the country's six million people live---are good places for making a fulfilling life. People like the airy, hardwood and bamboo houses they inhabit. One can be put up in three days. There's more than enough to eat. Rice crops are abundant, as are fruit and vegetable gardens, and most people keep chickens, hogs, and maybe some cattle and water buffalo for meat. The government has done a decent job bringing water to people, saving labor, and helping with irrigation schemes that can double annual crop yields. The nominal "communism" in rural Laos---unlike the somewhat more meddlesome urban variety---seems benign, and these practical, easy-going people are allowed to just get on with it. As in Vietnam, it's not the state that's withering away, but the Marxism.

While modern health care and education are still rudimentary and badly lacking, people do surprisingly well with fat-free healthful diets and by thoroughly exploiting their intimate knowledge---Joe found it just uncanny---of the natural environment.

No one else signed up for Joe's trek, so he had his Lao guide, Kenkeo, age 28 (no relation to Hotel Ken of Pakbeng), and his Akha guide, Nolu, age 20, all to himself. It was a revelation. The two men's connection to their natural surroundings was so total, so organic, that Joe came away with enough basic knowledge about living off the land that he might be able to do it himself, in lush Laos if not in the less generous landscape of Becket, Massachusetts.

Bamboo is not just for building and making tools such as bird and fish traps, it's for eating. The tenderest shoots are below knee height, the next tenderest are knee to waist, the least tender waist to chest. Steamed bamboo shoots are tastiest dipped in some chili paste mashed fresh with a wooden mortar and pestle. A palatable soup can be done in

shortie

2007-02-14T08:49:00.000-05:00

It's Wednesday night and the internet cafe is about to close. This is just to say Joe's trek was excellent. A full report will follow in a few days when we return to Luang Prabang. Tomorrow we head for Nong Khiaw, a garden spot, we hear, and then a boat (!) trip down the Ou Nam river to LP. More soon, we think.

Slow day

2007-02-12T23:24:00.000-05:00

It's Tuesday morning and Joe gets back this afternoon from his trek. I just re-read the brochure for his three-day "experimental tour" called "The Akha Experience." Among the Akha village activities Joe is partcipating in are: "bird-watching and collecting bamboo shoots and medicinal plants"; "cotton-spinning, making and playing with children's toys, or pounding rice"; "feeding the pigs"; "enjoying a post-dinner massage provided by the young woman of the village before going off to listen to the courting songs of the youth at the courting grounds."

Speaking of massage, both Thai and Lao "traditional massage" are awfully nice. At the oldest temple in Bangkok (14th century, I think), there's an ancient chart showing how it's done. Joe and I have been happily worked over in Budapest and Istanbul, and the Southeast Asian variety is similar. Except here the people are slighter, and the masseurs and masseuses seem to employ more of their body weight, not just their muscles, in manipulating the customer's muscles and joints. There are massage emporiums just about everywhere, and its lovely. "Massage parlor" is not, by the way, a euphemism for sex parlor. There's little commercial sex in Laos, and in Thailand they've never heard of euphemisms. (Some generally legit Thai massages may nonetheless include, for men, a "happy ending"---a term I would have thought Friendly's had trademarked.)

Massages represent one of Indochina's many guiltless pleasures. Now here's a list of farang guilty pleasures we've enjoyed:
Oreos. They are everywhere. Buy Nabisco stock. Now.
Pringles Potato Chips.
The croque monsieur at Le Cafe Ban Vat Sene in Luang Prabang---as good as any in Paris.
Mike's Burger's in Chiang Mai---"Converting vegetarians since 1979." Mike's is ten stools on a street corner and offers the same great burgers, fries and onion rings as Big Nick's, at Broadway and 77th, and with the same carbon-monoxide sidewalk ambiance.
Sleeping in. We keep meaning to get up at six with the monks and watch their ritual of going door to door with their rice bowls. Finally, on our last full day in Luang Prabang, we dragged ourselves out of bed at 5:30 and headed downstairs. The hotel door was barred and padlocked, and the staff weren't up yet. We went back to bed.

From our best-and-worst collection---
Worst menu item we still haven't tried: deep-fried water buffalo gums.
Worst name of a restaurant in Luang Prabang: Poupe Pizza.
Best menu notation you won't find in a restaurant in Becket, Massachusetts: "Let us know how spicy you'd like your jeow."

More soon, when young Joe returns.

Far North

2007-02-11T23:02:00.000-05:00

Approaching Luang Namtha late Friday afternoon, Joe remarked, "We're way out there now." We were. The name refers to the northwesternmost province of Laos and to its main city, or, more precisely, small town. Both are named for the dreamy, foggy-in-the-morning Nam Tha river, a navigable waterway in the monsoon season but too shallow now for commerce. We're just 40 miles from China and maybe twice that distance from the "wild and wooly" Burmese northeastern frontier.

The description of northern Burma came from Bill Tuffin, owner of the Boat Landing. That's the eco-friendly lodge where we're staying and our main reason for making our way up here. Famous among eco-tourism and adventure-travel organizations, the Boat Landing has five two-unit bamboo bungalows overlooking the river and the water buffalo grazing on the other side. Its atmospheric restaurant---wooden tables and benches under thatch---specializes in Lao dishes like duck soup made with bits of a sweet, edible wood, and the local "jeow," chili paste that's eaten with balls of sticky rice.

By "sticky rice" I don't mean rice cooked ineptly by me, but a variety of high-gluten rice grown throughout the higher elevations of Indochina. People eat it with their fingers, which do get a little sticky. You must not lick food off your fingers, though. The Lao believe only animals should lick themselves.

A rangy, soft-spoken American in his mid-forties, Tuffin was a Peace Corps volunteer in Thailand in the 1980s and returned to Southeast Asia as soon as he could manage it. He helped found Green Discovery, the eco-tourism group, and with his Lao wife opened the Boat Landing in 1999. Its aim is to promote "small-scale, low-impact tourism." Tuffin's mission statement says his business (probably in his wife's name, as foreigners cannot own property in Laos) helps visitors appreciate local customs and resources, and he encourages local people to "value their natural resources more deeply."

Designed by Tuffin, the guest cottages are lighted with a combination of town and solar power. All the hot water is solar. The pure-water containers in rooms are refillable. This eliminates throw-away plastic water bottles whose ubiquity in recent years has brought better health to Asia but also higher fossil fuel consumption and mountains of trash. The Boat Landing uses all local farm products, such as the sweet tamarind jam we spread on our breakfast baguettes.

Because he's busy running the lodge---one day he spent a lot of time helping a nervous German family whose Visa card had quit on them---we haven't seen as much of Tuffin as we would like. He sat down with us for a while Saturday night, and we had to prioritize our practical and nosy questions. Can we cross into Burma from up here? No, the Burmse military has effectively divided the country into fiefdoms and the Northeast border is closed. How was Tuffin's Peace Corps program? A good one, he said, and added that for him the Peace Corps was "a life-changing experience." I said I knew what he meant.

Getting to Luang Namtha (pronounced Loo-AHNG Nahm-TAH) was not the ordeal we thought it might be. Money made the difference. Instead of paying $10 for the "public" bus---about which we had had some bad reports---we forked over U.S. $150 for a minibus arranged by the Boat Landing. That's big bucks for us, but we're under budget overall and the cost was not much higher than the air fare would have been. (We learned that the "problem" with the Luang Namtha airport is that it doesn't exist. The runways have been torn up for reconstruction.)

The minibus fee was money well spent. The driver was both skilled and cautious on the mountain roads, which often had switchbacks so abrupt it seemed impossible that we could negotiate them without having the vehicle end up on its roof, like a plane turning too tightly. Much of the road on the eight-hour ride was bone-rattlingly bumpy---many potholes in the Lao PDR await their Marxist-Leninist Al D'Amato---and from time to time we had to pull over so the driver's female companion could shrug apologetically and hurl out the door.

And yet. Here is an excerpt from Joe's journal: "The vistas are breathtaking. Around every bend there's another view that would have made Bierstadt drool. The biggest difference is that plunked in front are these bamboo houses, water buffalo and rice paddies. Clusters of bamboo burst forth like bouquets of ostrich feathers. It's all so lush, and it looks so friendly perhaps because we have no real sense of the harsh life required to exist in the midst of this beauty. Our ignorance keeps us from reading the braille of the landscape."

Not bad for somebody whose primary medium is metal.

Joe, in fact, is fast learning about the hard lives of the Lao rural poor. As I write this on Sunday for posting on Monday, he is off on a three-day, two-night guided trek run by Green Discovery (formerly Mistah Kurtz Tours) among the Akha people, one of the region's hill tribes. There are about 600,000 Akha in Burma, Thailand and Laos. They are not Buddhists but worship ancestors and natural spirits. The Akha are known for their farming and hunting skills. Like most mountain Laos, the Akha employ Swidden (slash and burn) rotational agriculture. This practice works all right with low population density but becomes unsustainable as populations grow. That's happening now in Laos.

I was bemused when Joe brought along on our trip a Lonely Planet "Hill Tribes of Southeast Asia Phrase Book" he had picked up at the Globe Bookstore in Cambridge. But when he set off with his backpack this morning at seven he had the tiny volume tucked in his pocket. Among the Akha sentences he will be prepared to speak, should the need arise, are "Have you built a toilet?" and "My arm is broken." The blog will provide a full report on Joe's trek upon his early return. (Described as "strenuous," this trek was one I chose to forgo.)

Another line in Joe's phrase book is this: "I do not wish to smoke opium." The drug is commonly used in these mountains. Some tourists come here for opium, risking terrible punishment by the Lao government. Numerous times in Luang Prabang, a guy on a motorbike glided up to Joe and me and asked, "You want opium?" Most of the aid the U.S. provides this destitute country is DEA money for anti-drug law enforcement and subsidies for farmers willing to switch to crops other than poppies. But opium is where the money is and everybody knows it.

That includes the CIA, which in the Vietnam-war era kept opium production in Laos humming along in order to please the opium-using and -selling Hmong people, who were U.S. allies against the communists. But that was then and this is now. America giveth and America taketh away.

A few notes on Luang Namtha town, which I have been exploring while Joe has been trekking.
Flattened during the second Indochina (Vietnam) war, Luang Namtha is back on the map. It's an administrative and market center and just beginning to gain a toehold in eco-tourism. With its broad streets, mostly red dirt, its long vistas of green hills, and it's low wood and cement buildings, the place is a kind of troppo Blanding, Utah. But instead of a Mormon Church it's got a Department of Propaganda. And in place of a Dairy Queen there's Manychan's Restaurant, which serves a weird and tasty salad of banana flowers, tiny eggplants and long green beans. Another eatery is called Chama, next to the Internet cafe we use (there are at least three), and at lunch today it listed a "cheese sandwich" special for 12,000 kip, about $1.20. I ordered one. The sandwich arrived as a fresh baguette containing lettuce, tomato (just button your lips, all you germophobes), cucumber and onion. But no cheese. Why? I didn't ask, but they probably ran out.

Okay, then, let's talk about "it." By "it", I mean---this is Laos, not Thailand---whether or not to eat uncooked produce. Joe and I don't think the old rules apply anymore--eat only what is cooked or can be peeled---or at least not exactly, and not in all of Thailand and Laos.

These guidelines are still to be strictly observed at street stalls, where sanitary conditions remain iffy. But in restaurants that depend on tourists, precautions are now taken to keep from poisoning the customers. We've eaten salad selectively, and here we are. Joe had one 24-hour bout of the bacterial hebbie-jeebies, and I've had a couple of minor disturbances. But in none of these cases do we think fresh produce was the culprit.

Of course, stay tuned. Joe's hill tribe phrase book says you must always eat any food offered to you by an Akha tribesman. Otherwise you will be considered an intruder or a thief. At the exact moment I am writing this---7 p.m., February 11---Joe may be out in the hills somewhere being either poisoned or arrested. We'll find out.

Moving on

2007-02-08T06:27:00.000-05:00

Tomorrow, Friday, we head north to Luang Namtha and some trekking---or in my case "trekking"---and other Lao rural charm. We'll miss limpid Luang Prabang and will get back here at some point. The Internet situation in LN is uncertain, so blog readers may not hear from us for a while. Not sure about that.
We hear it's very cold in the U.S. Here in the Lao mountains it sometime drops into the fifties at night. So we know what it's like.

Pix

2007-02-07T03:57:00.000-05:00

Using a computer with Photo Shop, Joe was able to get the photos up. Here they are.

Dick and Sasha Alyson in Chiang Mai

2007-02-07T03:55:00.000-05:00

2007-02-07T03:48:00.000-05:00

New and old propellors

Installing new propellor

Rescue boat and our boat

Welcome to Laos

2007-02-07T03:40:00.000-05:00

Turbulence

More turbulence

Boat people with cargo

Offerings on boat engine

2007-02-07T03:33:00.000-05:00

A boat like ours

Hot shower

Instructions for hot shower

Hotel rules (Ken tried to sell us weed)

2007-02-07T03:25:00.000-05:00

Quiet River

Water buffalo

Along the Mekong

The cliff in daylight

Pakbeng---Ken's hotel at left

2007-02-07T03:17:00.000-05:00

Dick in our digs in LP

Monks on the loose

Bridge over Nam Khan river

Nam Khan bridge

Bank of the Mekong

2007-02-07T03:10:00.000-05:00

Waiting in LP market
Our neighborhood in LP
Morning prayers
Wat Xieng Thong

Pictures continued, we think?

2007-02-07T03:06:00.000-05:00

Sticky rice offering
LP street scene

2007-02-07T02:41:00.000-05:00

Staircase at Phousi

Slow with pix

2007-02-07T02:13:00.000-05:00

We're having trouble uploading photos. Yeeesh. We're working on it.

Meanwhile, a correction: It's UNESCO, not Unicef, whose World Heritage Team has designated Luang Prabang a "historic preservation site."

The Big Brother Mouse Web site is at www.BigBrotherMouse.com. Have a look.

There's a delay in getting Joe's wonderful photos up. But here's an excerpt from his journal.
"Remnants of grand staircases left by the French remain leading down to the river. It's perfectly peaceful here and brilliant green, with rich soil and craggy limestone. The only audible sounds come from boat motors which announce themselves gently and disappear just as delicately propelling the long, thin workhorse boats up and down the ever generous river. The boats fan out like tassles at the bottoms of the staircases, and it is a meeting of the cultures. Both remain unchanged. The boats are purely practical and the staircases elegant in their regularity but lumbering and self-important. Neither seems to have influenced the other."

Plans: we found a way to get to Luang Namtha and we'll go there Friday for five days. The Boat Landing, the eco-tourism lodge where we'll stay, arranges rides for patrons. So instead of a ten-hour bus ride it will be a nine-hour ride in a van with some other Boat Landing people. Sounds good. And it's just as well that the airport up there is closed. Foreign embassies urge their citizens to avoid Lao Aviation, the local airline. Its Chinese Yun aircraft are referred to here as "tuk-tuks with wings."

More boat and Luang Prabang

2007-02-07T01:53:00.000-05:00

View from atop Phousi hill

Mekong journey and Luang Prabang

2007-02-06T08:26:00.000-05:00

Temple at royal palace

River town

2007-02-05T22:15:00.000-05:00

Mark Elliott's eccentric and helpful "Southeast Asia: the Graphic Guide" (Trailblazer Books) lists only a few "special dangers" in its section on Laos. One is the temptation of opium, and another is unexploded American bombs in the Plain of Jars. The one that resonated with Joe and me was "forgetting to leave."

Places you like, like Luang Prabang, often remind you of other places in which you have been happy. There's a bit of small-town Ethiopia here with the green hills, the lively marketplaces, the suddenly quiet side streets after nine at night. But what hit me last night around ten, while Joe and I were wandering back to the Sayo Guest House after a late dinner, was how much this town on the Mekong reminds me of Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, in the summer of 1949---or at least Lock Haven as I remember it when I was ten.

Only a few cars were out and about. From open windows and doors you could hear low voices and maybe a little pop music. The streetlights at corners burned a warm orange. The air was still and felt clean in your lungs. The Mekong reflected the big yellow moon. Inside Luang Prabang's white stucco houses with red tile roofs people were no doubt leading lives as complex as the lives of the grown-ups in the Susquehanna Valley of 1949. But the evening calm of Luang Prabang is precisely the mysterious hush that excites a lone ten year old, and last night it wrenched me back happily. There's more than one Gaugin (sp?) imitator here. But the Frenchman's paintings resemble life in Laos only superficially---Tahiti is a long way from here---and the artists I keep thinking of in Luang Prabang are Wood, Benton, Sloan, Hopper. The Lao people live their daily lives very much in the present, of course, but this place feels to me like a lost world I had unexpectedly recovered.

Stretching along a narrow peninsula between the wide brown Mekong and the green and creek-like Nam Kahn, this town of 70,000 people was Laos's political capital off and on from the 14th century to the late 19th, and its cultural and religious center from its founding until now. For 700 years Luang Prabang was the center of Lane Xang, the Kingdom of a Million Elephants and the White Parasol. Royalty survived the French, here for 75 years, but not the communists; in 1975, when the Pathet Lao took over, the royals were taken off to a cave and not seen again.

Luang Prabang is the holiest site in Lao Buddhism. Its 43 wats mean it has more monks per capita than any other Lao town. At six in the morning a drum is beaten at each temple, and all the monks stroll out in their orange robes and the townspeople come out of their houses and offer food. The wat across from our hotel, Wat Xieng Mouane, is a center for teaching monks the vanishing arts and crafts of preserving and maintaining the town's deteriorating wats. This program is supported by Unicef---which has given Luang Prabang world heritage status---and by the Norwegian and other governments. From our second-floor window in a French villa-turned guest house, we can see the monks carving Buddha statues and we can hear their chanting in the late afternoon.

A monk novice engaged Joe in conversation---most are naturally friendly and like to practice their English---and showed him around the monks' cramped quarters. Before Joe departed, the young monk tied orange cotton bands around Joe's wrists for good luck. "How long should I keep these on?" Joe asked. "Maybe forever," the monk said.

It's cool here this time of year---70s daytime, 50s at night---and it's a perfect time for ambling around beneath the palms and tamarinds and discovering the wats and other town institutions in an unhurried way. There's Phou Si, the hundred-foot hill, with a view of the entire town and the two rivers and the distant mountains on all sides. The royal palace is a museum now, with treasures such as a golden howdah for the king to sit on atop his elephant, and many Buddha images of stone, plaster and concrete, nearly always covered in gold leaf. In a glass case is a gift from the United States of America, a little model of a moon-landing module that looks like it came from Ka-Bee Toys.

Tourism is what keeps Luang Prabang afloat these days. The modest main street is known informally as Tha Farang. It is lined with restaurants and cafes, and travel agencies offering tours to "the Buddha caves"---caves where disused crumbling Buddha statues have been stashed---and something called "the whiskey village." Instead of going to those, Joe took a one-day Lao cooking class. And yesterday we hiked a mile or so out to the edge of town to the main market where the Laos get their food, and marveled at the variety of meat and produce that this poor but fertile country manages to come up with. (Farming was collectivized in 1975 and decollectivized ten years later when people began to starve.) The more exotic items were cakes of congealed water buffalo blood---it's the reddest red we ever saw---and a Mekong weed that is toasted with sesame seeds and served with a chili and buffalo skin chutney. We had some of that and it was of interest. Joe will do a blog entry on Lao food, which isn't as complex and exciting as Thai food but is satisfying in its quieter way.

Speaking of which, the Laos are surely some of the sweetest people on earth. (Pakbeng Ken was an abberation.) If the Thais are sweetly, pleasingly goofy, the Laos are sweetly, pleasingly serene and reserved. There's no highway mayhem here, or "fuck shows." Which is not to say the Laos aren't interested in modernizing selectively. There's a hunger for modern education and modern communications you can feel when you talk to them, and English is a tool Laos see as essential to joining the modern world. Even the communist government gets it. Political opposition is still forbidden, but otherwise it's a market economy and the educational system is only superficially, half-heartedly ideological.

A good Peace Corps-style project under way here (the Peace Corps just started a program in Cambodia but isn't in Laos) is Big Brother Mouse. This is the publishing operation mentioned in an earlier blog posting and founded by American Sasha Alyson. The company puts out children's books in Lao and Lao and English. Previously, kids here had only badly written school texts and otherwise had to read books in just-English or Thai. Sasha and his Lao co-owner and staff have signs all over Luang Prabang urging tourists to give children books instead of candy. And they urge trekkers headed out to the mountains to carry books to village children. Big Brother Mouse has a retail shop and a practice-your-English storefront in LP and another office up in Luang Namtha in the North. I'll get Sasha's Web site and post it on the blog for anyone interested in supporting BBM, either financially or by popping over here to help out in the office.

Our vague plan is to remain in Luang Prabang a few more days, move on, and maybe come back later. We may go to Luang Namtha, where a former Peace Corps guy runs a well-respected eco-tourism center. But the airport up there has been closed for two months on account of "problems." And the nine-hour bus trip over bumpy, dusty roads sounds as if it should be avoided if possible. So we'll see. A big part of the pleasure of this trip has been surprising ourselves.

Walk the plank--II

2007-02-04T01:41:00.000-05:00

A late start and the propellor mishap meant that we did not reach Pakbeng, where we were to spend the night, until sunset. All the berths were already taken by the main boat landing, however. So our boat was forced to squeeze in between two other boats some distance away.

As we approached Pakbeng we had seen electric lights in the little town high above the Mekong. It looked so inviting after our day of too much adventure. No lights worked on the boat, however, and no light shone around the bow area where passengers began to disbark. Joe had wisely brought along LED camp lights attached to headbands, and we donned these. Other passengers brought out flashlights. It took quite a while for us and the other passengers to retrieve our bags and backpacks from the pitch-black stern area. And then we stood for maybe 30 minutes more waiting for the queue to move forward and off the boat. When we got to the bow we saw what the holdup was.

The boat had parked at the base of a cliff. Passengers were toting their bags across an eight-foot plank, the Mekong murmuring in the blackness below, and then---could this be happening?---we found ourselves clambering up a steep rocky hillside. Joe had his pack on his back and made it across the plank. My bag had been snatched at some point by a "porter"---a guy who rushed on board and grabbed the bags of three people and placed them all upon his slight back and shoulders---and I walked the plank and called for my porter to follow me up the escarpment, which he did do. I felt bad for this scrawny guy, but I wasn't about to carry my bag up this cliff in the dark if I could help it, and in this commie non-paradise I did not wish to interfere with any blossoming entrepeneurial spirit. Joe later said this surreal scene looked like the monkey house at the Whipsnade Zoo, except half the monkeys were wearing backpacks and the other half were holding flashlights and shouting, "You come my hotel! You come my hotel!"

About 50 feet up the cliff, the ground started to level out and Ken showed up. He was shouting, "Sir, let me help you! Sir, sir, you come my hotel. Sir, let me help!" Ken is the guy who, in Africa and Asia, shows up. When a farang is in trouble, or is just standing somewhere looking puzzled, Ken shows up. (He is named after a real Ken who, eight years ago, saw Joe and me looking befuddled in rural Zimbabwe and showed up to help us out.) Ken may be a swindler. Ken may be a good samaritan. Ken may be a poor student eager to practice his English and perhaps collect a small fee. Ken may be an aspiring local businessman. Or he may be a combination of all of the above. Some Kens are to be avoided, though at first you're never sure which ones. Joe was wary of Ken of Pakbeng, but I wanted to throw my arms around him and his low-watt flashlight and let him lead me off this unfortunate cliff and up to a pleasant inn where a nice Penang curry would be served by candlelight. Joe asked, "Does your hotel have hot water?" "Yes, yes, hot water!" Ken lied, as I retrieved my bag from the porter, passing him a Thai 20 baht note, a generous sum in Pakbeng, which he accepted before launching a search for the owners of the other bags he had run off with.

Ken's hotel, at the end of a long, high street lined with perhaps 20 guesthouses and restaurants, looked OK, especially after the Chiang Khong smell-o-rama of the night before. So we checked the room and agreed to his 500 baht ($15 US) outrageous overcharge. "Where's the hot water?" Joe asked. "Ah, hot water!" Ken cried, and brandished a large thermos. He explained that the power went off in Pakbeng at ten p.m. and wouldn't come on again until the next night. So hot water had to be stored. In Ken's thermos.

Ken ran off to gull some other boat people---within seconds he had four Bulgarians in tow---and we tidied up as best we could before venturing out and locating a perfectly pleasant candlelit restaurant, where I had my curry and Joe had his, and we pondered what day two of our boat trip down the Mekong might have in store for us.

As it happened, Ken's bed's were clean and comfortable and kept us warm in the mountain chill air. In the morning, we came upon a street vendor selling baguettes (a legacy of the French in Laos) stuffed with ham, cheese, onions and peppers, and we bought one to share for breakfast and two to take on the boat. We were back on the river by 9:30 for the ride to Luang Prabang. The seven-hour journey was beautiful and uneventful.

Walk the plank

2007-02-03T23:16:00.000-05:00

The first sign we might be in a for a rough couple of days came in Chiang Khong, on the northeast Thai-Lao border, where the guest house we had booked was a dump run by a family of sour Chinese. I resorted to an old Peace Corps trick of inserting wads of toilet paper in my nostrils in order not to gag when entering the WC. Thank you, Sargent Shriver, for preparing me for Chiang Khong, lo those 45 years ago.

Thursday morning looked promising, cool but bright, and the crossing of the Mekong on a long-tailed skiff was thrilling. Joe and I both thought, this is the SE Asia we came here for. And as soon as we landed at Hoi Son on the Lao side of the river, we knew we were somewhere else. The efficient, easy-going Thai immigration officials had had telephones and computers in their cubicles; officials of the Lao Peoples Democratic Republic sat at tables next to bulging file cabinets, and scratched out notations on ledgers as long queues of farang backpackers stood watching in wonder. Above the Lao officials hung the national flag---the flag of the Pathet Lao, which took over in 1975 when the U.S. packed up its last cluster bomb and departed the region----and next to that a hammer and sickle. We hadn't seen one of those for a while.

Thailand had paved roads; Laos had red-dirt roads that threw up a fog of iron-colored dust as we rode by tuk-tuk to the main boat landing. Thai travel agency personnel in Chiang Mai were cheery; the Lao woman who checked our credentials and handed us bundles of kip, the useless-outside-Laos local currency, was tense and beset. The Dutch kid who had been on our bus from Chiang Mai watched all this and declared, audibly, that he'd heard the Laos were "lazy." But he plainly did not know the difference between the differently energized and those sapped and ground down by a hopeless system.

By mid-morning we had negotiated the Lao bureaucracy and filed down a set of concrete steps to the muddy and churning Mekong a hundred feet or so beneath the town. Up here in the mountains, the Mekong valley is narrow and all the towns and villages along the river are up on hillsides. This makes for gorgeous views but also for a lot of clambering up and down. The two boats bound for Luang Prabang, 140 miles downstream, held about a hundred passengers each.
Each wooden skiff is eight feet wide and maybe a hundred feet long. Passengers sit two by two on wooden benches arranged as on a slave galley ship. There's not much leg room. The sides are open and protection from the sun is provided by a wood and metal canopy, atop which crew members sometimes scamper noisily. The rear of the boat is enclosed and contains the diesel engine---garlanded with flowers to propitiate the engine god---and a room where baggage is heaped, plus the two WCs, which Joe once visited and declared not too bad. Also at the rear of the passenger cabin is a woman selling beer, bottled water and Lay's potato chips.

The passengers on our boat were 95 percent farang backpackers, mostly European and Australian, nearly all in their twenties. A Swedish lady and I were the token oldsters. Even Joe---who turned 48 in Chiang Mai---said at one point, "I'm so glad I'm not young anymore." By that he meant he was no longer obligated, as the packers seemed to be, to consume large quantities of Singa beer at night and then feel rotten in the morning. The urge among the First World's young to travel long distances in order to puke in countries with weaker currencies is a peculiar one. Though by and large the kids we met on this boat were altogether decent sorts doing good work back home---teaching handicapped children to swim, rescuing animals---and they were not the heedless rave and party crowd we'd seen in Thailand. They were a hardier breed, and their hardiness was about to come in handy.

The Mekong flows fast through the Lao mountains, with jagged rocks jutting out of the muddy water and others lurking just below the sometimes turbulent surface. It's a job navigating, and the boat's captain, at the front of the passenger cabin wearing a shiny blue jacket that read Body Body Body, rarely took his eyes of the river. But he must have miscalculated a bit, and about 40 minutes into the journey, at 11.50 a.m.---I made a note---a current caught us weirdly and dragged us over a rock.

We heard a scraping sound and the boat lurched. Then the engine quit. We were maybe 75 feet from shore. Joe said, "The propellor must be gone." A crew member bounded onto the bow with a long, thick bamboo pole. He alternately took soundings and used the pole to shove us away from more rocks. A small boy we believed to be the captain's son also leaped onto the bow, stripped off his red T-shirt, and began to wave it energetically at a boat like ours except with no passengers that had recently passed us heading upstream. The man with the pole was now guiding us toward the river bank, which luckily was broad and sandy. The German man seated in front of Joe and me pointed at the other boat, which was turning around, and said, "It's the rescue boat." You could see people all around us thinking, "Rescue?"

It is inevitable in situations like this one that into your head pop the cliches of American journalism about Asian boat disasters.
"Authorities believe the boat may have been overloaded."
"Earlier the captain had been seen drinking."
"Survivors said the crew saved themselves and left many foreign tourists to drown."

But it was not our day to make headlines. The rescue boat not only showed up in short order but had a spare propellor on board. Our boat was poled and dragged to the beach. We all took off our sandals and climbed ashore and lolled about by dunes as welcoming and friendly as those at Wellfleet. The new propellor didn't quite fit over our boat's drive shaft, but a hammer and screwdriver were brought to bear on a protruding bit of steel. To everyone's amazement, the boat had been refitted and we were on our way again in under an hour.

Now there was some apprehension in the air. Mostly, though, we went back to enjoying the green mountain vistas and watching the villagers on shore with their water buffalo herds and small vegetable farms on the hillsides. It was so ancient Asia, so peaceful.

But wait. Trouble soon erupted again. While we had passed through a number of rapids, which the captain had negotiated skillfully, apparently he had again erred. For there were sudden loud cries from the bow to "Sit down! Sit down!" We were really barreling along, through crags and boulders and whirlpools, barely missing some of them. More cries of "Sit down! Sit down!" The German ahead of us, who stood and gawked frequently, had to be personally instructed to take his seat. ("The boat may have capsized when all the Bavarians aboard rose as one and rushed to starboard.") Joe, by the rail, said, "Oooo---whoa." ("Lipez said, 'Wheaton's last words to him before they were separated in the chaos were "Oooo---whoa.'") Should we have been reassured or alarmed by the actions of the captain's wife? For she was praying and hurling flower petals over the side at the boulder spirits for all she was worth. I pointed this out to Joe, who said, "Maybe it's just garbage." But an Englishwoman seated up front told us later, not it was flowers, and the woman was praying like crazy.

And then we were through it. And sailed on. The Aussies had another beer.

[Sometimes the power here in Luang Prabang goes out inexplicably and I'm afraid I'm going to somehow lose what I just wrote. So I'm going to post this on the blog and then continue this entry on the next posting in one minute.]

Good company

2007-01-29T22:41:00.000-05:00

We had dinner on Sunday with Mo Tejani and last night with Sasha Alyson. Mo is the American writer I mentioned in an earlier posting who wrote a memoir called "A Chameleon's Tale" (not "A Chameleon's Life," as I previously reported). Mo first came to Thailand as a Peace Corps volunteer in the 1970s, was smitten with the place, then settled here about ten years ago after a career with a variety of international aid agencies. Now he does journalism and is at work on another memoir.

A big, easy-going Indian-American (originally from Bombay, his family was expelled from Uganda by Idi Amin in the early '70s), Mo is sharp and funny on the Thailand he adores and says he will never fully understand or be part of. He says he's a citizen of the world now. Affectionate and forgiving about Thailand's foibles, Mo is scathing about the corruption and incompetence he witnessed year after year in US and other aid programs. Too few of them, he says, looked for trustworthy local people to carry out manageable step-by-step projects. They relied instead on gigantic, sometimes demented, schemes dreamed up by the World Bank or USAID. Mo agrees that Thailand's ousted Prime Minister Thaksin was a dangerous crook. But he says Thaksin got some excellent programs going: micro-loans; grants to villages for self-help projects; expanded health care for the rural poor.

Mo is also amusing about the American young backpackers traipsing around Thailand whom we have ourselves observed with dismay. These are not the serious trekkers. They are the thousands of often bratty kids who come here to party. They congregate in packs and tend to be clueless about local mores and etiquette. Their obliviousness on environmental matters made news a few years ago when a popular backpacker novel, "The Beach", about a shallow yuppie who finds meaning by becoming a shallow backpacker, was filmed here with Leonardo DiCaprio. The movie-makers themselves destroyed a forest and an entire beach while filming, and the normally patient Thais were so outraged that the project was nearly shut down.

Also unamused by the packers (we've had two consecutive bash-the-American-young-fests) is Sasha Alyson, the founder of Alyson Publications, the pioneer in American publishing for gay readers in the mid-seventies. Sasha sold his Boston-based company to Liberation Publications, the outfit that puts out The Advocate, about ten years ago, started an adventure travel company, then sold that before moving to Chiang Mai in 2003. He had a Thai boyfriend, and while that relationship didn't last, Sasha's enchantment with Thailand did. He says now that "I'm here to stay."

We much enjoyed our reunion with Sasha last night. We hadn't seen him since a visit to Pittsfield more than ten years ago. With him for a dinner of tom kha gai and green curry at MD House--The Delicious Restaurant was Sipon, a young Laotian, with whom Sasha has founded Laos's first significant publishing house. When he first visited Luang Prabang, the pleasantly somnolent former Laotian royal capital, Sasha saw that the only books in Lao were boring school books put out by the communist government. Otherwise people had to read in Thai or English. Sasha's strong suspicion that a great hunger existed for books in Lao has been borne out by the steady sales of the eight or so titles now available from Big Brother Ant Publications. So far, it's children's books in Lao or Lao and English. A broader list is in the works. A small NGO backed the project initially, but now Sasha is funding the expansion himself. Farang volunteers help out, too. Joe asked if the backpackers pitch in, but Sasha said no, it's older people, including an American computer whiz and his wife. They were tourists who walked in off the street one day and stayed. We'll meet them when we arrive in Laos later this week.

Notes about this blog: no more postings until we get to Luang Prabang. Tomorrow we go by bus to the Thai border, stay overnight there, then continue on Thursday by slow boat down the Mekong, stopping overnight somewhere and arriving in LP late Friday afternoon.

Thank you to Bill Ullman, now the blog's official copy editor, at a rate of 4 baht per day. He told me how to spell exaggerate, Liege, etc. (He was disappointed that people here don't appreciate Yul Brynner, Ullman's "favorite Thai.")

Thanks, too, to Frank Kelly for e-mailing all the lyrics to Noel Coward's "Mad Dogs and Englishmen (go out in the midday sun)", including the immortal line: "The natives grieve when the white men leave their huts/Because they're obviously definitely nuts!"

More trek pictures

2007-01-28T05:10:00.000-05:00

Retired elephant camp

Elephant with trekkers

Elephant camp

Water buffalo in dry rice paddies

Trail view

View from camp---day one

Bull with typical wooden bell

Grandmother and granddaughter chewing betal nut

Husband and wife splitting bamboo for leaf roof

Leaf roof and side

Fallen tree bridge

Joe hydro-massage

Trail view

First night quarters

Sun cooking dinner

Second night dinner

First night dinner

2007-01-28T04:38:00.000-05:00

Philippe bargaining for moonshine

L'il Cinder

Third day waiting for breakfast

Second day breakfast

Welcome back to Chiang Mai

Wat-sponsored "ambulance"

Street food---quiche-like dish cooked in banana leaves

Cooking class---Joe's own Penang curry

Bugs to eat

Palm reading

Seated monk

Monk novices and Boy Scouts at wat

Monks accepting offerings

Monk funeral

Pictures from Chaing Mai and trek

2007-01-28T04:26:00.000-05:00

Reclining Buddha at Wat Prah Singh

Hill and dale

2007-01-27T23:19:00.000-05:00

The trek, a plus overall, was more arduous than we had anticipated. Our fears that it might be "too touristy" were groundless. Remember Outward Bound? What about Camp Crozier, the early Peace Corps "confidence-building" camp in Puerto Rico, aptly named for the first Peace Corps volunteer to die overseas? Then, of course, there were William Holden and Jack Hawkins in "Bridge on the River Kwai," sweating, grunting and hacking their way across Burma and much of Thailand.

But I exagerate. The trek was simply, as advertised, a rugged three-day hike. No piece of cake, but doable for most of the 14 backpack-toting trekkers and two guides in our initial group. The guides were local hill tribesman in their early twenties whose first language was Karen, Thai second. They spoke serviceable English, the lingua franca for the French, Scot and Swedish couples, four Koreans, one Belgian, one Australian, plus Joe and---tagging along on the trail---me.

I thought the Swedes, in their fifties, would fade before I did. Beefy and florid, the husband looked like an excellent candidate for a heart attack. But I had forgotten that serious trekking is in the European DNA. Most of them scamper up and down the Alps and Dolomites as effortlessly as Americans hop into SUVs with names like Explorer.

But it was I who, near the end of the first day, opted for a girly-man "short cut." This meant that for the final segment of the day's travels I was placed upon a motorbike behind a man smelling unmistakably of rice wine and to whom I clung as he bounded up and down jungle trails to the "homestead" where we all spent the first night.

If I were 31, I would have been embarrassed. But I am no longer 31, as I was often reminded. If our chief guide, a sunny fellow aptly named Sun, had asked me one more time, "Are you okay, bapa?" I'd have poked him in the eye with my bamboo walking stick. But his concern was genuine---Thais are the most visibly empathetic people I've ever met---and when I inquired about the motorbike option for significant portions of the second- and third-day activities, this was easily arranged.

It seemed as though 80 percent of the walking was uphill---shouldn't it have been 50-50?---and Joe and several of the Europeans also found it demanding. The air was thick and the sun diamond-bright, as in Africa. The trails, used by hill tribe villagers for moving themselves and their water buffalo about, wound through groves of banana and loganberry plantings and, more often, tall forests and high bamboo thickets. On some terraced hillsides were rice paddies, brown and dry until the May monsoon rains arrive. Our route often paralleled a gushing stream, from which some farmers had diverted water in PVC pipes for plots of soybeans, kale and onions. Our rest stop was by a multi-tiered waterfall of stunning force and beauty. We could hear its roar a half mile before we got to it. We bathed in the sandy pool by foot of the lowest fall and cooled off. That so much water was cascading through these mountains in the dry season was an indication of the vastness and lasting effects of the spring monsoon deluges.

Joe pointed out that we should not have been surprised by all the clambering up and down, for this was a "hill tribe" trek. Thailand's chao khao---"mountain people"---make up under one percent of the country's 65 million population. Many are not Thai citizens. They are former semi-nomadic people from Burma, Laos and as far away as Tibet who are now being gradually integrated into Thai society. They are distinguised by their languages that bear no resemblance to Thai and by the clothes the women wear, black with horizontal stripes of pinks and purples. They are also darker-skinned than southern Thais, who value light skin (you don't see Thais darkening themselves on the beaches), and they sometimes make fun of the tribespeople as hillbillies. Many chao khao are also Catholic instead of Buddhist; at some point the French got at them.

Thailand, unlike its neighbors, was never colonized. The beloved King Chulalongkorn, on the throne from 1868 to 1910, kept the European powers at bay using what the British writer Basil Hall Chamberlain calls "protective mimicry"---modernizing on your own terms before somebody does it for you on theirs---and by ceding parts of Burma to Britain and much of Laos and Cambodia to France. (Chulalongkorn was the king in "Anna and the King of Siam" and the musical "The King and I." Thais consider these popular farang entertainments crude caricatures and Yul Brynner ludicrous.)

The Karen village where we spent the first night of the trek was lovely. Spread over a high hill, the farming hamlet was a mix of traditional Thai bamboo houses on stilts with woven leaf roofs, and newer dark plank houses with corrugated fiberglass roofs, built with the help and encouragement of the government. The newer houses are solider, safer, more healthful, and they last. They have the traditional wide overhang and spaces between the verticle planks and under the eaves for good ventilation. The big one we stayed in---the extended family who lived in it apparently doubled up elsewhere---had a semi-detached kitchen of such clever design that the smoke from the cooking fire on the low floor was drawn instantly up and out under the eaves. A solar panel---devices sponsored by King Bhumibol---stored enough battery power for two florescent tubes to light parts of the interior, albeit dimly, from sunset until around eleven.

Joe and I watched Sun cook the trekkers' evening meal. Over a wood fire, a single large wok rested on a tripod of bricks. By candlelight, three scrumtious dishes were prepared in the wok, one by one, all with local produce that had been grown organically, another government initiative. First came cucumber soup, then Thai green curry, then stir-fried mixed vegetables.
Rice, also grown in the village, had been cooked in a pot earlier. (In the room where Joe and I and the French couple slept, under mosquito netting and atop mats on the floor, there were a dozen or more immense sacks of rice, apparently a season's supply.) It didn't take Sun more than an hour to put together this simple but perfectly executed meal, which was served by candlelight on a long, low table on an upstairs porch. Most diners sat on floor mats, cross-legged, backs erect, and others of us (the Swedes and I) did the best we could. (Joe referred to this tableau as "lotus-position dressage.")

The evening's entertainment included clapping games and laughter around a campfire the guides built, and Sun's jolly and often successful attempts to get the trekkers to try the local rice home brew. (Shyly, we demurred.) Earlier, Sun had told Joe he wished he didn't drink so much. Alcoholism is an apparent real problem in rural Thailand. The prep cook for our dinner was another of the guides, a younger guy who slugged down some rice wine at every opportunity. While he was slicing vegetables, he looked away briefly and deftly vomited away from our dinner. One of the women helping out casually cleaned up the mess. No fuss was made. Mai pen rai.

Before we went to bed, Joe and I walked under a sky so devoid of light pollution that the constellations became brilliant in the way the ancients must have seen them. You could imagine how people looked up, found order in this reliable show that felt so near, and thought surely it had to be connected to human events. And by believing in this connection sometimes made it true. (During a financial crisis in the 1990s, a Thai prime minister had his birth date---and astrological sign---officially changed and notified an astrologer. It didn't help.)

Post-lights-out sounds included one of the Korean girls, I think, weeping softly as she returned from a trip to the single WC (about which the less said the better). She seemed unable to locate the Korean encampment and, in the darkened funhouse-like maze, perhaps feared she would climb into someone else's. Joe said he heard someone throw up, probably from the rice wine; I guessed the Scot or the Aussie. Then there was distant snoring, then nothing---until the cock crowed and the dogs began to bark, and it was time for day two.

After a breakfast of scrambled eggs, bread, pineapple and watermelon, the trekkers set off at ten. Some had slept poorly and seemed apprehensive. Brazenly, I lolled about for another hour before my chauffeur arrived. He was an altogether pleasant young man who had not been drinking. I eagerly leapt aboard his motorbike, like Audrey Hepburn behind Gregory Peck in "Roman Holday," except larger. Within an hour, I was at the campsite for the second night. It was a sun-dappled glade by another waterfall with traditional bamboo houses, cool and comfortable, and with bottled water and banana chips to snack on. It was in this exquisite spot where I wrote the words that you just read.

Joe and the rest of the trekking party staggered in around four. They had been reduced in number to seven, not through death or grotesque injury---to my amazement---but because some of the original 14 had opted for a single-night adventure and were now on their way back to Chiang Mai, our Paris. All the trekkers said it had been a hard go. Henry, the Scot, had fallen and hurt his hip. Bo and Lena, the Swedes, were discussing the motorbike option for day three. Joe was soaked with sweat and said I had chosen wisely. I did miss, he said, a hill-tribe hamlet untouched by the modern world (pictures soon). The trekkers happily refreshed themselves under the waterfall as the guides made preparations with a wok and a wood fire for dinner at six.

Our congenial group---Henry and Lika, Bo and Lena, the Aussie Alex (a plumber who traveled half the year), Phillipe, the lifeguard from Lieges, Joe and I---sat at a picnic table that came up to our chins and dined on green curry and a pumpkin stir-fry. The meal had been prepared by the previous night's prep cook (yes), and the pumpkin dish---a few of the ingrediants had been lost along the way---was not up to the standard to which we had become accustomed.

After dinner, we sat by the fire as the temperature began to drop. Then it dropped some more. Then still more. We were high up---5,000 feet? 6,000? So by the time we left our sandals at the door of the trekkers' sleeping house (Thais find wearing shoes in a house disgusting, like walking on the dining-room table) and slipped into our slender sleeping pouches, we knew we were in for a chill. Few slept well, or in some cases at all. The green curry had been busy, so when I made my way at 1:20 a.m. out to the WC (about which the less said the better-II), others soon followed. Flashlight beams sliced through the jungle night as in a film-noir manhunt in a swamp. It was quite beautiful in a Fritz Lang in the tropics kind of way.

[What does it mean that so many of the cultural touchstones I think of for describing the trek are filmic? Probably that my trekking knowledge and experience are limited. But that's not all. Some people come to the East to learn to be contemplative. To me this has mainly meant trying to recall the lyrics to "Mad Dogs and Englishmen (go out in the midday sun.")]

Day three was still rough for the trekkers, but by lunchtime the hard part was over and the pure fun began. On the morning of day one we had had a wonderful elephant ride at a camp for retired logging elephants (see pix). Day three finished up with a one-hour bamboo raft ride---three trekkers and an oarsman to each 30-foot raft---down a fast-moving but altogether agreeable stream, with much splashing and laughter and crashing into other rafts and a few overturnings. Pure Thai sanuk.

Then, an hour later, smelly Chiang Mai looked and smelled good.

Death March

2007-01-27T06:37:00.000-05:00

We're back from the trek! It was wonderful! More soon!
Dick and Joe

spirit house; street food; monkey mountain; street scenes

2007-01-24T09:25:00.000-05:00

Hua Hin dinner with Poe and Simon at their house, dessert fresh pineapple, mango and sticky rice and two custards, palm sugar and coconut

2007-01-24T09:08:00.000-05:00

Whatevah

2007-01-24T04:18:00.000-05:00

Joe is over his bug, our hill trek is set to start tomorrow, and today we set out for the Chiang Mai zoo. It's about four km from the center of town, so we flagged down a red taxi and agreed on a fare of 40 baht. The driver picked up another three passengers along the way, some Thai schoolgirls, then pulled over about halfway to the zoo and announced to us, "No go zoo." We were instructed---with a smile---to climb out. The driver didn't charge us anything. Plainly he had gotten a better deal. Were we incensed? Nope. Mai pen rai.

Mai pen rai means don't bother or never mind. It's a kind of Thai manana (tilda over the first N), isshi negga (Ethiopianists will get this), what the hell, whatevah. It means, these things happen and let's move on as best we can. It's partly a way of adjusting to the daily realities in places where the machinery doesn't hum along as well as it does in Amsterdam. It probably also has elements of Buddhist non-confrontationalism and acceptance of life's vicissitudes.

Mai pen rai crops up a lot. I wrote a long blog post a few days ago that refused to go anywhere. At my request, the Thai kid running the Internet cafe came over to help me. And when he somehow managed to make the whole thing I had written disappear without being posted, he chuckled and suggested I try a different computer. Mai pen rai. Our hotel, the Top North, has an odd system of parceling out rooms. The owners seem to want to keep the place full, so if you show up and they've got an empty room they'll give it to you. And once you're in, you've got squatters' rights. They don't know when Joe and I are leaving and haven't asked. But some people do apparently make reservations and show up expecting a room. I have witnessed some poignant scenes at the front desk. Mai pen rai.

A corralary to mai pen rai is keeping a jai yen. That's a cool heart, meaning even temperament, instead of a jai rawn, a hot heart, meaning hot temperament. To lose your cool in Thailand won't get you anywhere. The Thais just find it embarrassing and start looking for an exit.

Joe and I have adjusted nicely to mai pen rai. He is naturally patient, and I had run into variations of it previously in Peace Corps days and know how to turn it on and off. Also, we're in Southeast Asia for three and half months, so we're in no hurry. Anyway, there's something soothing about being among people where the level of social tension is so low.

Do Thais repress a lot of anger? Probably. They've got their kick-boxing---one Thai a week dies from this sport---and their highway mayhem. The country has the highest road-accident fatality rate in the world. (We've seen entire nuclear families lined up on motor scooters. Joe says it looks like the children are the airbags.) The driving is skillful, but its aggressiveness is not so Buddhist. And a recurrent line in news stories about bus crashes is, "The driver fled the scene." Mai pen rai.

We made it to the zoo---just flagged down another paddy wagon. It should have been a good zoo but it wasn't. Although the animal enclosures were cageless---using moats and spaces to separate the viewees from the viewers---the territories seemed too constricted and the animals were listless. But it was hot and so were we.

In Zimbabwe, seven or eight years ago, Joe and I met a Peace Corps volunteer working in animal preservation. When I told her how thrilling it was to see "zoo" animals out in the wild, she argued that zoos have their uses, too. They educate and sensitize people about the importance of these animals, and then these people support programs like "Save the Elephants." True enough--- though in Chiang Mai we just wanted to save the zoo animals.

Here's more mai pen rai. Problems at the disastrous new Bangkok airport keep piling up. Now it's not just cracks in the taxiways but in the runways, too. I quote from today's Bangkok Post: "Admiral Theera said the cracking was increasing, including those found at the northern end of the eastern runway and the southern end of the western runway. The immediate solution was to advise pilots to avoid cracked areas.... He admitted that dodging the cracks would inconvenience the pilots and that partial closure of the runways to facilitate repairs might be necessary." Meanwhile....

Here's a more reassuring quote about Thailand. In 1923 Somerset Maugham visited Bangkok. He came overland from Rangoon and arrived feverish with malaria. The manager of the Oriental Hotel told Maugham's doctor to get him out of there, as his death in Bangkok's finest hotel was not what the hotel wanted. Maugham survived---for 42 more years---and wrote wonderfully about Bangkok's wats. He could have been writing about Chiang Mai's. This is what we see every day.

"They are unlike anything in the world, so that you are taken aback, and you cannot fit them into the scheme of things you know. It makes you laugh with delight to think that anything so fantastic could exist on this somber earth. They are gorgeous; they glitter with gold and whitewash, yet are not garish; against that vivid sky, in that dazzling sunlight, they hold their own, defying the brilliancy of nature and supplementing it with the ingenuity and the playful boldnesss of man. The artists who developed them step by step from the buildings of the ancient Khmer had the courage to pursue their fantasy to the limit; I fancy that art meant little to them, they desired to express a symbol; they knew no reticence, they cared nothing for good taste; and if they achieved art it is as men achieve happiness, not by pursuing it, but by doing with all their heart whatever in the day's work needs doing."

Toot toot

2007-01-22T03:43:00.000-05:00

It is Monday and the hill trek has been postponed. Joe has a stomach bug. He is gobbling Cipro and guzzling fluids, and the situation has already stabilized. He should be fit by tomorrow.

This morning I went down to PM Tours to cancel our participation in the trek. Miss Nu, the nice lady who called me a girl, was there. I told her Joe was ill and we would have to postpone. Mimicing Joe's chief symptom, Miss Nu bent over and asked, "He go toot-toot?" Yes, I said, he has done so, in the night, more than once. And she produced a package of powder for replacing electrolytes. Are there ANY occasions where the Thais employ euphemisms? Not to our knowledge.

Have I spelled electrolytes correctly? Should mimicing have a K in it? Still more mysteries.

Thank you to Sydney Lipez, Barbara Wheaton and Bill Ullman for coming up with sources in the U.S. for galangal root. You're all in for it now!

It's a day of R&R. Joe is lying in the sun by the hotel pool, by the coconut palms (and German ladies smoking French cigarettes), and I'll go join him. A nice way to recover from anything.

One other thing: at lunch today, also by the hotel pool, I overheard a German (I think) woman complaining to her Buddhism teacher that she had come to the East to find wisdom, and she hadn't gotten her money's worth. She was pretty convincing, too.

Eat bugs---part 2

2007-01-21T09:01:00.000-05:00

Corrections (Joe is looking over my shoulder):
The fish sauce went onto the grasshoppers but not the grubs. Grubs are better crispy. The roach-like thing was a cicada, Joe thinks. He says now we are looking for lightly battered, deep-fried pandas.
In an earlier entry I said 10,000 tourists a day arrive in Thailand. The actual number is 30,000. Ten thousand of them are from the West.

A mystery we are trying to solve: Our health is generally good, but Joe's nose is running and we both have occasional bouts of spaciness. It's not the altitude; Chiang Mai is only about 1,200 feet. Is it the sun? The incense in the air? The green curry soup we have become addicted to? And what about the exhaust from the tuk-tuks, thousands of motorbikes and "red-taxis" (pick-up trucks outfitted like paddy wagons that you flag down to negotiate a fare)? These vehicles seem to have no emission controls, and a kind of black-lung fog hangs over the city like something from a 1950s bad sci-fi flick. Joe just noted the hundreds of farang trustafarians on the streets here---it's a kind of Chiang Mai Summer of Love---and wonders if the atmosphere is a result of a kind of constipated spiritual heat inversion. We invite speculation about this additional mystery of the East.

Joe, who had his excellent all-day curry-making class today, also asks: Does anyone know where fresh galangal-root is available in the US? This is urgent!

Tomorrow (Monday) we head for the hills. More when we return.