Left Hand Path

"Hey Ho Chi Minh! HEY!"

That's what a motorbike driver yelled at me as I walked by him this morning, referencing my Ho Chi Minh t-shirt, which displays the iconic bearded image of Ho with his name and years that he lived emblazoned on the bottom.  I have two of these shirts, in gray and white.  I also have a t-shirt that says "Danger! Mines! Cambodia!" in English and Khmer, an Angkor Wat t-shirt, a black t-shirt that says "Victory will be ours" with the Communist star on the bottom and "www.dogmavietnam" on the back, as well as the newest addition to my collection, a t-shirt with a Vietnamese soldier brandishing an AK-47 and "I am ready to fight the Americans" written in Vietnamese (I'm assuming the shopkeeper translated this correctly, of course.)

It's my last full day in Ho Chi Minh City and in Vietnam, and I'm feeling nostalgic.    It's been an active three weeks and I've seen most of what I've wanted to see in Vietnam (places I didn't see which I will be sure to check out on the next trip include Mui Ne beach, Phu Quoc Island and the central mountain town Dalat.)  I joined a two-day cycling tour through the Mekong Delta on April 23-24 with a great local company called Sinhbalo which took us to the a small island where we biked through small villages for a few hours each day.  The paths were winding and narrow and sometimes consisted mostly of sand, which made for an active ride even though it was mostly level ground.  Even on the narrowest paths we would sometimes have to move very carefully to the right to avoid the ubiquitous motorbikes.  Children would yell "Hello! Hello!" as we passed and would often walk or ride perilously close to us as we passed, which proved challenging to me as I was still working on my balance for most of the trip, it'd been at least 15 years since I last rode a bike (not counting motorbikes in Goa and Sapa).  I met this fun Dutch couple from Utrecht on the trip who were moving on to Nah Trang next and I encouraged them to that perfect little restaurant there Pho Cali and sample the finest Vietnamese iced coffee in all Vietnam...

In the morning, we visited the Cai Rang Floating Market, near Can Tho, and it was one of those moments you see in movies, the Mekong filled with boat after boat with its wares spilling everywhere. Many boats would set up a pole in front with a sample of their product so buyers would know what the boat was selling.  I took many pictures.  We piled on top of one of the local boats and ate pineapple and surveyed the chaos.  Conical hats and Vietnamese junks and fruit and fish filled my line of sight.  Aside from the boat's motors (which looked like they'd been lifted from cars or motorbikes) and the ever-present tourists, the scene seemed primitive and timeless.  The old woman at the front of our tour boat guided us around with a long stick she used as a makeshift rudder.  Sometimes women in neighboring boats would grab hold of our boat and offer to sell us cans of soda glistening with sweat from the ice which kept them chilled.  The Dutch woman Corrine was a big softie and admitted that she felt bad for not buying a coke because the little Vietnamese boy in the boat looked so disappointed when no one bought anything.  I told her about the markets in India where I first saw a woman beggar walking around with what looked like a two to three month child in her arms and the jolt of guilt that I felt, which subsided incrementally as I witnessed the same calculated display a second, third, fourth and fifth time.

On our way back into Saigon, we passed through rush hour traffic and this is a spectacle that really has to be seen to be believed.  Motorbikes fill every inch of the streets broken-up only occasionally by a car or a bus and the noise pollution from all the honking fills the air.  Amazingly, it is actually possible to cross the streets as a pedestrian in Siagon, although it's an art and best not attempted by amateurs.  You have to stare directly at the incoming motorbikes as you carefully and methodically cross the street and they will alter their trajectory to accommodate your passage.  It's important that you walk in a steady line so the drivers know where to move.  Don't slow down or change your pace.  I never tire of watching the traffic.  I especially enjoy watching the women drivers.  Vietnamese women are incredibly hot, no doubt about it.   However, because Vietnamese women so strongly covet white skin, they will often cover themselves from head to toe despite the blistering heat and humidity of South Vietnam.  They will wear the motorcycle helmet with sunglasses and a face mask which serves the dual purpose of reducing inhalation of the pollution but I think most importantly keeps the sun's rays from darkening the face.  Women will wear t-shirts and cover their arms with what look like long thin gloves that go past their elbows.  I've seen women wearing the full get-up and a hoodie despite the fact that the temperature hovers around 40 degrees Celsius.  Never underestimate a woman's vanity as a motivating force.  Take a look here.

For me, there are two essential archetypes of the Vietnamese women.  The first one is the woman riding a motorbike.  The first variation on this iconic image is the slightly tomboyish helmeted look of the female motorcycle driver, with the long black hair trailing out of the back of the helmet, usually to at least halfway down the back and sometimes to the waist.  Often they will wear jeans, but more beguilingly will calmly drive their motorbike through horrendous traffic wearing high heels and a mini-skirt.  I still haven't quite figured out how they manage to do this given the limited mobility afforded by a mini-skirt.  Did I mention that Vietnamese women are super thin and trim and have amazing legs?  Another variation is the young girlfriend riding behind her boyfriend with her legs carefully folded sideways across the seat.

The second archetype of Vietnamese women is women wearing the traditional Vietnamese dress, called "ao dai."  This is a long flowing tunic with a slit down each side worn over a pair of loose-fitting white, black or colored pants.  The dress splits into a front and back panel from the waist down.  There are many variations on this basic theme and they almost always look spectacular.  Take a look:  on bikes with face masks and from behind and Holy shit, dude.

A friend of mine went to a tailor in Hoi An which was filled with women wearing these dresses and I went back with him for every fitting just so I could sit around and watch these women walk around in these incredible dresses.  My friend took a picture of me with five or six of these women and it's a complete disgrace, I'm totally sweaty and disgusting with a dazed look on my face and I'm surrounded by petite and perfectly poised Vietnamese women.  Vietnamese women are really hot.  This is not an opinion; it is fact.  They may seem foreign, but no doubt they hang out and gossip about boys like women the world over.  I saw one young Vietnamese woman in Saigon driving a motorbike while wearing a t-shirt that said "Friends are forever - boys are whatever."

Culture Clash

Vietnam intrigues and exhausts in equal measure.  Its wealth of history and sophisticated culture and untouchable cuisine have been endlessly rewarding.  As a tourist, however and unfortunately, I have too often over the past two weeks experienced the people of Vietnam as a drone of voices clamoring for every conceivable way of separating me from my money.  The dollar sign syndrome.  I came here with good intentions and I have no regrets, but I've grown increasingly frustrated with the rough behavior of the Vietnamese, especially now that I finished my tour and I'm traveling solo.  I'm sick of getting ripped off and barked at.  And last night I finally lost it over this shit.

After a while, the usual scams become obvious and predictable.  The taxi driver who changes the price at the last minute for some bullshit reason (to be fair, taxi/ rikshaw/ tut-tut drivers the world over basically suck).  The dude at the train station who leads you over to somebody else driving to the hotel and then demands 50,000 dong.  Some scams are more subtle.  For instance, I spent the last few days in Sapa, a mountaineous town in Northern Vietnam near the border with China.  There is no airport up there, so people arrive via overnight train.  I booked a hotel room at the Cat Cat Hotel, Lonely Planet's midrange pick, and they assured me that they could book a train for me.  Booking a train is a bit strange in Vietnam, I believe you are only allowed to book trains the day of the trip, so it's tricky.  A local operator in Hanoi delivered what appeared to be a train ticket to my hotel, after much confusion and waiting around.  So far, so good.  I got to the train station and when I tried boarding the train, they insisted that I go to the restaurant mentioned on my ticket and collect my ticket there.  This despite the fact that the train was boarding.  It turns out that I didn't have a proper ticket, but rather a "receipt" which I was supposed to present at the restaurant identified on the piece of paper and there I was to collect my ticket.  In other words, a way to force you to eat at this restaurant before you get on the train.

I should first tell you a bit about sleeper trains.  They usually leave around 9 or 10 in the evening and arrive at some horrendous hour, like 4 or 5 a.m.  Aside from being uncomfortable -- and some are worse than others, the train from Hue to Hanoi just about jarred my teeth loose, it was so bumpy -- this creates problems with hotels because you have to check out late and check in obscenely early.  Or you just end up waiting around in the early morning marinating in your stink, which is what I'm doing as I write this, in a deserted hotel lobby in Hanoi at 5:30 a.m.  The soft sleeper trains are 4 to a room, 2 bunks on ground level and 2 up high.  The last two times have been okay, except for the drunken, stinking Chinese dude on the way to Sapa who reeked of cigarettes and snored like a freight train.  The older, French-speaking Vietnamese dude in the cabin last night/ this morning had an even harsher snore, that would occasionally end in this protracted gasp-hiccup-wet gulping monstrosity that I had to block out with music from my iPod and earplugs jammed way up into my ear canal.  He slept so hard that his French compatriots had to wake him up when we arrived at the train station.

So naturally, the idea of taking a sleeper train is unpleasant enough without having to chase after my ticket.  In Hanoi, just after the dude had told me to go to the restaurant, this woman appeared magically out of nowhere and produced an envelope from which she extracted my ticket.  Savvy to the scam on the way back, I knew that I would have to appear at the restaurant identified on my train receipt prior to departing Sapa for Hanoi.  The van provided by my hotel dropped everyone off at the restaurant, so apparently this scam is embedded in the system.  I decided to eat something with the Dutch couple I had met on the train there and then collect my tickets.  The Vietnamese waiter who doubled as ticket procurer immediately reassured us when we got to the restaurant that he would have our tickets in five minutes.  30 minutes passed, nothing, and at this point, my temper flared and I basically lost it.  I went over to the guy and demanded my ticket.  "5 minutes."  I paid for my bill and then demanded my ticket again.  He told me to meet him at the train station, a 2 minute walk.  I went over there with an American guy Bob who I had met a few minutes before.  When we got to the station, the restaurant guy tried to pass off another receipt as an actual ticket, and it took around 10 minutes of freaking out and demanding my ticket again and again and again and then 20 minutes of waiting around to get the ticket.  The Vietnamese people working at the station were taken aback by my anger, but I was fed up and didn't give a shit.  I literally sat in front of the dude from the restaurant and said "where's my ticket where's my ticket where's my ticket" until he finally figured his shit out.  I think the Dutch couple were a bit taken aback by my temper and obvious aggravation.  Normally I would've cared a bit more, but I'll never see them again. 

It's difficult to describe the feeling of vulnerability and exposure you feel when you are in a foreign country with unfriendly people who are constantly trying to rip you off.  It's unnerving.  Bob compared the behavior of the Vietnamese to Prague right after the wall went down, when people felt no real compunction to be nice to you in order to get your money.  Maybe it's one of the last vestiges of Communism in Vietnam, I don't know, but in every other way Vietnam buzzes with the money-making capitalist instinct.

I was not pleased that I became so angry. I like to think of myself as tolerant of cultural differences.  Opinionated for sure, but also open-minded.  But the fact of the matter is that when you actually settle into a new country, even for a short time, there is a honeymoon period when everything is new and amazing and if you stick around longer that honeymoon period ends and you are confronted with otherness and the experience can be disconcerting and even repulsive.  The negative aspects of my culture, which I assume are readily apparent to most foreigners, require little enumeration and ironically my disenchantment with my own culture was on the principal instigators of my trip and this exploration of otherness.  To state it succinctly:  Sometimes you just hit a wall.  ("Every man has his breaking point.  You and I have one.  Walt Kurtz has reached his...")  There is another layer of irony here, because despite my disenchantment with some aspects of my country, when traveling abroad in Vietnam and other places in Asia, there is an instant "us v. them" bond that develops between Westerners, even those who have only just met.  And for me, this is especially so with Americans that I meet.  The further you go, the closer you get.  I'm more of an American than I realized.  I had to travel to Southeast Asia to figure that out.

A couple hours after I wrote this blog, I had breakfast at this Vietnamese chain restaurant that serves delicious Pho (Vietnamese beef noodle soup) and cafe sur da (Vietnamese iced coffee with sweetened condensed milk).  Perhaps the most perfect breakfast.  And later that night I wandered around Hanoi and marveled at all its little side streets and its sizzling urban energy... I fly to Ho Chi Minh City tomorrow morning and will probably go on a 2-day bike tour of the Mekong Delta on the 23rd.  So life is good....

Tram Ton Pass

Today I met up with the crew from the Czech Republic and we decided to rent motorbikes and head to Tarm Ton Pass, which Lonely Planet describes "a seriously spectacular ride" up the mountain to the highest mountain pass in Vietnam.  It might be spectacular, but we never quite figured that out because the fog remained impenetrable the whole time.

We rented the motorbikes on the main drag in Sapa, where tourists are repeatedly deluged with requests to buy various clothes and jewelry from the local Montagnard tribes, and an equally incessant barrage of offers for "motorbike".  We made it down to the end of the street where a crowd of motorbike folks congregate and proceeded to negotiate price.  Bizarrely enough, the young Montagnard girls speak near perfect English and often volunteer to translate, which smoothed things along nicely.  Iget the impression that most of these girls learned English from talking to tourists.  I was a bit nervous about driving a bike.  My only previous experience riding a scooter was in Goa, where the scooter had only one gear.  But I did a test run and it proved surprisingly easy, as I was driving on the right side and the bike was semi-automatic so even though I had to switch gears, doing so did not involve the use of a clutch, you just had to push down with your foot.  So far, so good.

However, some kind of disagreement about who would get to rent our bikes erupted and the dude I just paid 80,000 dong threatened to bash in some dude's head with a shovel.  Fortunately, things calmed down fairly quickly and we were on our way.  We gassed up and headed out of town on the road that our not-so-trusty map told us would lead us to the pass.  The road detiorated quickly into a mess of have paved gravel and the occasional patch of mud, and we flagged down a passing driver to determine if we were on the right track.  Indeed we were, despite the decrepit condition of the roadway.  Visibility became increasingly worse until I could barely see 20 feet in front of me, although fortunately the two Czech dudes (both of whom were driving their respective girlfriends) took the lead.  During the period of worst visibility, huge buses would appear seemingly out of nowhere and we would have to swerve to the right at the last minute to avoid them on the narrow road.  It wasn't quite as treachorous as my nighttime ride through Goa, but it definitely felt unsafe at times.  We drove along for less than an hour when we ran across Thac Bas, the silver waterfall, over 100 meters tall.  After about an hour or so more of driving through pea-soup fog, we passed by the Pass without even realizing it.  We drove a bit further, but eventually gave up and turned around.  I began to have a blast driving the motorbike at this point, open road and hardly any cars and we could see the road pretty well.  I opened up the throttle and entered the zone.

Finally, we made it back to Sapa after around 4 hours of driving and ate lunch. Wild pig and str fried Sapa vegetables with garlic.  Then the Czechs decided to check out another village, but I was tired and went home.  I may be the laziest tourist in Sapa.

Sapa

I'm currently in Northern Vietnam, near the border with China, in a mountaineous town called Sapa.  I took the overnight train from Hanoi and met two couples from the Czech Republic who are traveling together, and I linked up with them today for a trip to a neary village.  I barely slept on the overnight train, so I decided to head back around noon and crashed in a big way.  I also met a couple from Holland on the train and they decided to stay at my hotel, which is called the Cat Cat Hotel, with rooms sprawled over the side of a mountain.  The view from my room is spectacular, although unfortunately this morning the horizon was shrouded in mist and the morning was a bit rainy.  The ground is steep and I'm rapidly forgetting what it's like to walk on level ground.  There are local ethnic tribes who live in this region, and many of the young children speak amazingly good English and even when in ethnic garb will pop up at internet cafes talking on their cell phones.  An older woman from one of the tribes offered me opium and hashish on way into a restaurant, I could barely believe it.

I'm enjoying the peace and quiet after a couple of days in chaotic Hanoi, which marked the end of my 12 day tour through Vietnam with Gap Adventures.  Overall it was a very good experience, I made at least one good friend and managed to cover a lot of ground in a short period of time.  It was also great to have a crew of folks to travel with, as too much solo travel can be a drag.  I like being alone but sometimes it can be too much, especially so incredibly far from home.  I met this dude Charlie on the tour who I almost definitely never would've befriended under normal circumstances, as he's about 40 times as conversative as me, an investment banker who thinks about nothing but closing the deal and his bottom line.  But he's a good traveling companion and weathers my verbal abuse with good humor and tosses it right back.  So I'll see him again in June, possibly in Borneo and definitely on a tour of Indonesia that will take us across the island of Java and end up in Ubud in Bali.

If you've been following my blog, you'll know that I anticipated Vietnam the most eagerly of all my destinations.  I've been fascinated by the country and by the war with America ever since I saw Apocalypse Now for the first time at 9 years old.   Landing in Ho Chi Minh City and knowing that I was in Saigon was a very emotional experience for me.  But the Vietnam of today seems to have little connection to the past.  It's a very young country and while I saw many sites commemorating the war, it's a country that is very much in the present, full of energy and a desire to change and improve.  As a tourist, this can be a mixed bag, as the Vietnamese can be very aggressive with tourists and everyone seemed to have a story that involved getting scammed in one way or another.  It's not that Vietnam is the only country that does this, but it tended to be a little more intense here and overall the Vietnamese are a bit rougher in their tone than Cambodia and definitely Thailand.

One of the highlights of the trip so far was when Charlie and I visited the DMZ (Demilitarized Zone) in central Vietnam near the city of Hue.  We gazed across the Seventeenth Parallel that once marked the division between North and South Vietnam.  We wandered around the site of the battle of Khe Sanh, which some considered the American's Dien Bien Phu, although it was more of a diversion than anything else, committing American resources to a useless battle as the North Vietnamese prepared to launch the Tet Offensive in South Vietnam.  I drove by the Citadel in Hue which famously flew the North Vietnamese flag for a few weeks during the Tet Offensive.  We also saw the Vinh Moc tunnels in the DMZ, which had three levels and were ventilated by a breeze coming from the neighboring beach.  The Americans poured bomb after bomb into the area and bomb craters were everywhere, but the second explosive in the only digger bomb to score a direct hit never exploded and the Viet Minh used the hole as a ventilation shaft.

Snake Village

Warning: This blog is not for the faint of heart.  Proceed with caution.

Today we traveled 7km northeast of Hanoi to Le Mat, also known as snake village.  The first place we stopped at wanted to charge us 250,000 Dong per person (about $15.50), an exorbitant price in a country where you can eat a healthy breakfast for 40,000.  This was after some Vietnamese dude pulled out a live snake and barely managed to stay out of range of its poisonous fangs.  Then they dragged the snake into the back and shoved it into a bag.  A few of the women on the tour felt a bit faint after witnessing the spectacle.  The next place only charged 100,000 big ones so we agreed and walked in.  Two dudes proceeded to grab a snake and cut open its stomach, draining out its blood into a glass and then pulling out its heart and bladder.  They repeated this three times and the hearts kept beating for several minutes outside the body.

We went upstairs and sat down at the table.  There were 12 of us and on top of each plate was a little shot glass.  Our waiter began pouring snake bile into the glasses.  I was feeling way crusty and hangover from last night's overindulgence and between that and a healthy sense of trepidation about what I was going to eat, I felt a bit light-headed and queasy.  It only got worse after the dude mixed up the snake bile with rice wine and then plopped a snake heart into my glass.  Me and my friend Charlie and a couple others obligingly sucked it down.  I even let the snake heart sit on my palate for a few seconds and tried to chew it, which proved to be just about impossible, way too stringy, so down it went in one piece.  Next our waiter poured unadulterated snake blood into our glasses and we drank that down as well.  It didn't taste like much, and even though freshly drained from the snake, it was lukewarm and a bit salty.  Then we were treated to snake cooked 11 different ways.  The best way for me was fatty and decadent tasting, somewhat reminiscent of duck.  There was rice fried in snake fat.  Etc. 

 

Ho Chi Minh to Hoi An

I want to cover a lot of ground during my 3 weeks in 'Nam, so I decided to join up with a tour.  We started in Ho Chi Minh City on Sunday and are currently making our way up the coast.  Ho Chi Minh (formerly Saigon) was pretty much what I expected, particularly the chaotic traffic.  The Vietnamese wrinkle is the ubiquity of the motorcycle and motor scooter.  Looking at the roads, it often looks like a horde of locusts swarming around the odd car or truck, I'd say about 80% of the roads consist of 2-wheelers of various kinds, bicycles included.  We went to the Cu Chi tunnels some 40 km outside of Ho Chi Minh, an elaborate network of tunnels built before and during the war with the U.S.A.  We got to crawl through a hundred meters of the tunnel and it felt claustrophobic as hell despite the fact that it has been enlarged twice for (fat Western) tourists.  We emerged dripping wet with sweat and with a new appreciation for the indescribable toughness and dedication of the Viet Minh.  There's a shooting range set up there as well, so I shot 10 rounds from both an M-60 and of course an AK-47.  Packed a punch and loud as hell.

The War Remnants Museum in the city was unrelieved grimness, picture after picture of destruction brought on not only by the war with America but wars all over the world, from Angola to Iraq.  A sobering experience.  There were pictures of Vietnamese folks deformed by Agent Orange that I could barely look at.

The next stop was a sleepy little beach town called Nah Trang, highlighted by the most exquisite cup of coffee I've ever tasted at a Lonely Planet recommended hole-in-the-wall called Pho Cali.  Hazelnut iced, absolutely sublime, nectar in a cup.  I'm also quickly falling in love with the Vietnamese dietary staple Phở, a simple dish of white rice noodles in clear beef broth with thin slices of beef.  It's light and tasty especially with some basil and lime mixed in.  Most of you know that I adore Vietnamese food and the food here so far has lived up to all of my expectations, absolutely amazing!  The final verdict is not yet in, but I'm probably gonna have to give Vietnamese food a bit of an edge over Thai, as much as I love Thai food.

We've already taken a couple of sleeper trains, and this morning we arrived at around 7 a.m. in Hoi An, a gorgeous little town on the coast, left largely untouched by the war and boasting some charming French architecture.  Another beach town.  Me and this American dude from the tour have been hanging out a lot and we went to the beach today.  As expected, we were deluged by the usual requests for food, trinkets, beads, etc. while lounging away our day, but my friend came up with the ingenious solution of using some choice Vietnamese phrases to stave off the unwanted attention.  The phrase "I have diarrhea" in Vietnamese had a magical deterrent effect on the food vendors.  Pretty amusing stuff, and an excellent opportunity to learn some Vietnamese.  Most people are happy to teach foreigners a few phrases in their native language and the Vietnamese are no different, and we ended-up drinking a beer on the beach with a 23 year-old student who started out trying to sell us pictures but then gave up and just began hanging out.

On a completely unrelated note, I recently finished reading JG Ballard's brand-new autobiography Miracles Of Life.  Ballard is one of my favorite writers and I've been reading his books basically all of my adult life.  He's most infamous for having written Crash (not to be confused with the shit Academy Award winning about racism in L.A.) and most famous for Empire of The Sun.  Reading his autobiography was a moving experience, especially the last chapter in which he announces that he's dying of terminal cancer.  Very sad.

 

 

Tomorrow I start my first tour of 'Nam.

No shit.

Anyway, I've always wanted to say that.  Tomorrow I fly to Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) and the next morning I join a tour that will look at some sites in Ho Chi Minh before heading up the coast to Hoi Ann, Da Nang, Hue and Hanoi, with a stop in Halong Bay.

I've really enjoyed Thailand so I decided to return in May after I get back from Australia and check out Chiang Mai in the north and the beaches in the south.  Found a good deal with Thai Air for 3 domestic flights for $199, so I snapped it up and got my tix!

It's been a hectic trip so far.  My itineray since I left the states, as best as I can remember and including places I haven't yet visited but intend to, is as follows:

5-Jan-08 Depart Philly For Frankfurt
6-Jan-08 Arrive Mumbai
7-Jan-08 Arrive Goa
26-Jan-08 Arrive Pune
02-Feb-08 Arrive Chennai
2-March-08 Arrive Shanghai
21-March-08 Arrive Bangkok
26-March-08 Arrive Siem Reap, Cambodia
31-March-08 Bus to Phnom Penh, Cambodia
3-April-08 Arrive Bankok
5-April-08 Arrive Ho Chi Minh City

Travel up the coast visit Hoi Ann, DaNang, Hue, Hanoi and Halong Bay.  May travel to Sapa in northern Vietnam.

17-April-08 Arrive Ho Chi Minh City

(Vietnam travel: Nha Trang, Hoi An, Hue, Halong Bay, Hanoi, Sapa, the Mekong Delta.)
27-April-08 Arrive Singapore
30-April-08 Arrive Jakarta, Indonesia
2-May-08 Fly to Sydney, Australia, arrive 3-May-08
12-May-08 Arrive back in Jakarta
13-May-08 Arrive Bangkok
16-May-08 Arrive Chiang Mai
20-May-08 Arrive Phuket
25-May-08 Arrive Ko Samui, head to Ko-Phangnan

28-May-08 Ferry from Ko Phangan to Ko Samui, to Hat Lami beach

31-May-08 Hat Chaweng Beach, Ko Samui

2-June-08 Arrive Bangkok

6-June-08 Arrive Jakarta, travel across Java to Pandangaran, Yogyakarta, Gunung Bromo.  Arrive in Bali and travel to Lovina, Ubud and Kuta.

26-June-08 Arrive Jakarta.

1-July-08 Arrive Hong Kong

6-July-08 Arrive LAX

15-July-08 Arrive Seattle

23-July-08 Arrive Philadelphia

Currently, I have a flight scheduled to take me back to L.A. via Hong Kong on 30-May-08.  However, I will be pushing that flight back so I can travel through Indonesia.  I want to see the monuments of Prambanan and Borobudur and check out the volcano Gunung Bromo, all on the island of Java.  Then I want to go to Bali and learn how to dive (although I might do that in Phuket).  Then I plan on spending a few days in Hong Kong before heading back to the States.  I arrive in L.A. and will stay there for a bit with friends, then up the west coast, maybe to SF and definitely Portland and Seattle.

Cambodian Queens

So, I've had some mixed feelings about Phnom Penh and Cambodia in general.  Totally fascinating country, but there's an edge that can sometimes make me uncomfortable.  I think it has a lot to do with the fact that, due to the last 30 years of civil war and consequent decimation of the population, it's a very young country and it has a raw, undisciplined energy.  It's both exciting and occasionally off-putting, and the fact that the weak economy has opened up access to some unsavory markets is tough to swallow, although to be fair I haven't directly encountered any of that stuff, just read and heard about it. 

But there are also a lot of positives here with the youthful energy, and last night I got a taste which was one of the highlights of my time here.  It was a drag show with some unique Cambodian twists. Homosexuality is only slowly becoming accepted here, and a friend of mine who lives in Phnom Penh predicted that it will be like Thailand within 10 years, in terms of gay friendliness.  We arrived just as the first drag show ended, and we had to sit through quite a bit of karaoke before they returned to the main event.  One of the intro acts was a crew of Cambodian breakdancers, mostly in their teens, but there were two little dudes who couldn't have been more than 5 or 6 years old who would occasionally step up and do headstands and dance around.  I don't use this word often, but it was very cute.  There was an innocence and friendliness to the whole event that was quite charming.  Then some queen incongruously banged out some air guitar to the proto heavy metal sounds of Deep Purple's "Highway Star."  One of the first queens came out in an elaborate dress that kept slipping down past "her"nipple line as she flirted with two dancing boys on stage.  The queen couldn't have been more than 15, but there was nothing perverse about the act, it was all in good fun.  Although I'll bet she'll be a skank ass bottom in about 5 years!

The nightlife tends to end very early here, but the club was still kicking when we left at 1 a.m.

Edit:  By way of clarification.  My friend "A" (guest blogger of 23-Feb-2008), expressed concern that my "man-hating lesbians" comment from my "Wild West" blog referred to her and her GF, an old friend of mine (I refer to them as "my lesbros".)  Not so.  In fact, it's an old joke I use on my friend who shall anonymously be referred to as "MHLF" who once made the mistake of telling a story of how, as an undergraduate at Reed, she got totally hammered and somehow ended-up on top of a student building catapaulting tampons (thankfully unsoiled) at unsuspecting (no doubt heterosexist) males unlucky enough to be passing by.  I use this anecdote as an excuse to designate her as "my most favorite man-hating lesbian feminist", a comment that invariably annoys her and earns eye-rolling and other visible forms of consternation.  However, she's known me long enough that despite my more unfortunate characteristics (such as being a straight dude), I've apparently been grandfathered in and she patiently tolerates my blatant button-pushing.  You have to wonder why, she already has a younger brother who enjoys getting on her nerves, no need for another one!  (I'm a younger brother and I can assure you, youngers brothers are some of the cruelest, most remorseless and morally bankrupt human beings on the planet.) MHLF got some payback right before I left for Asia in January, though, when she asked everyone at the table at a going-away get together to say something about why they would miss me, knowing full well that such a protracted display of sentimentality would be like fingernails across a blackboard for a sincerity-avoidant sarcasm addict like myself.  The urge to flee came suddenly.

The Killing Fields

Dith Pran, the Cambodian man who coined the term "the killing fields", died on Sunday.  Today I visited the Killing Fields, just 14 km south of Phnom Penh in Choeung Ek, as well as S-21, a notorious Khmer Rouge prison in which thousands were tortured and killed.  Both experiences alternated between the utterly grim and the mind-numbingly banal.  To save bullets, the Khmer Rouge would beat prisoners to death by smashing the back of their heads with bamboo sticks.  The monuments were characterized by this mixture of brutality and primitivism.    S-21 consists of a Phnom Penh high school refurbished with makeshift cells and torture chambers.  Everything about the design and feel of these rooms is mundane and unmemorable, were it not for the fact that thousands died there.  There was a row of rooms on the bottom floor of the buildings that contained only some crude metal instruments lying on a barren bedframe.  Above the bed in each room there was a picture of a manacled body lying on the bed presumably awaiting torture or interrogation.

Some rooms simply contained prison photos of people murdered in S-21, often in prison fatigues, essentially identical to pictures of inmates at Auschwitz.  Some of the rooms were partitioned into tiny prison cells using wooden walls.  A few more rooms contained histories of both people who died at S-21 or were rumored to have died there, as well as testimonials from some of the guards and former members of the Khmer Rouge.  I saw a documentary on S-21 in which the filmmaker took several of the former guards back to the prison and had them go through some of their daily routine.

In the center of the killing fields lies a temple containing shelf after shelf of skulls excavated from the fields.  One of the most disconcerting aspects of traveling in Cambodia as a Westerner is dealing with the constant barrage of entreaties from people who want your money.  Often it's taxi drivers, but there was a sizable crew wandering around the killing fields begging for money, mostly young boys.  I had to wonder if any of these boys understood what the killing fields represented.  The population of the country is so young that I fear that the message of their recent history is already being lost.

I have one more day in Phnom Penh, and while my journey through Cambodia has been both eye-opening and fascinating, it has also been a bit disconcerting.  Cambodia has been ravaged over the past four plus decades and while it finally has peace, it still has a long way to go to rebuild.  The poverty and violence of its wartorn past has created an atmosphere of intensity and at times desperation that can be difficult to stomach.  The first thing that I saw when I got to my room in my guesthouse in Phnom Penh was a sign declaring that child prositution is illegal in Cambodia, complete with a picture shot from behind of a Western man leading a child up some stairs.  I really hope that's the last time I see that in a hotel room.