After our adventures setting/dodging shit on fire in Chiang Mai, Maya and I headed back to Bangkok for a few days on our way to the island of Ko Chang. Instead of staying in the northwestern tourist center of town, we decided to find a guesthouse in the center of the actual city where we'd have access to more public transportation options, like the skytrain and the subway, instead of having to rely on assholic taxi and tuk-tuk drivers, as we'd had to during our first time in Bangkok. We also decided that maybe one of the reasons we hadn't enjoyed that first visit so much was because we hadn't embraced the city...in all its depravity. Seeking to remedy that this time, we jumped onto the skytrain and headed off to Bangkok's world-famous/infamous Patpong redlight district.
Exiting the Sala Daeng skytrain station, we first had to navigate through a narrow, sweaty, crowded gauntlet of street-vendor stands hawking bootleg clothing, bootleg music, and very real-looking military, police, and martial-arts weaponry. Then we hit the first of the two Patpong streets. Almost immediately, a Thai dude shouted out to us from the front of a dark club, "Sir, come in! bondage show!" Only then did I notice the mannequin in a ball-gag and leather S&M gear hanging above the entrance. Maya and I shook our heads politely, passed another club, where three scantily-clad Thai women were gyrating on the stoop while techno pounded from the venue behind them. And then the first of a seemingly endless line of solicitors approached us with the following totally insane pitch: "Want to see [insert 'Pingpong' or 'Patpong'] show?" He then shoved in our faces what looked like a laminated index card, on it printed a long list of mindblowing acts to be included in this show: "Pussy writing, pussy smoking, pussy horn, pussy bottle-opening, razorblades in pussy, fish in pussy," and so on and on... "You can see first - no pay," he continued. "If you like, then pay. Come, follow me."
These solicitors would then lead us, sometimes physically, with a loose grip on the arm, to the sketchiest-looking of the numerous clubs stacked on top of each other along the streets - dark, dirty doorways up narrow metal staircases on the second floor of whatever building (the one venue name that sticks in my head is "Super Pussy" in big neon lights). First-floor spaces mostly seemed to be your basic go-go and strip clubs, their open doors revealing stages jampacked with fairly attractive young Thai girls in bikinis or topless, rocking back and forth listlessly (it couldn't really be called "dancing" due both to the girls' lack of enthusiasm and the lack of space) to the thumping 4/4 beat. The more outre performances are religated to the upper floors, apparently.
The streets outside, meanwhile, bustled with a strange motley crew, due, in no small part to the fact that Patpong Street Number 1 not only hosts redlight fare but also a market full of stands selling T-shirts, watches, CDs, and souvenirs; so, while there are plenty of the expected types - aged sexpats, drunken fratboys, sleazy Europeans, glamorous kathoeys (on Soi Jaruwan, the gay strip), Japanese salarymen (on Soi Thaniya, the Japanese strip), and fast-talking solicitors - milling about, there are also plenty of everyday tourists and even families brushing uncomfortable shoulders with the rest. As we pushed through the throngs, Maya and I saw a cute little white kid, maybe 3 years old, cradled in her mother's arm; a Thai woman was pinching the child's cheeks: "Pingpong show, pingpong show," the woman was babytalking to the kid till the mom, understandably disturbed, pulled away into the crowd. We also noted a teenage boy, maybe 15, staring at the index card of a solicitor eager to whip him into a nearby den of iniquity; the boy's gray-haired mother tapped him on his shoulder: "I'll be across the street in the internet place," she said, as if sending him off to see the pussies at work and setting up their post-show rendevous.
As for us, after a few false starts (we followed a solicitor into one place, only to run into a white couple on their way out who told us not to go in (("It sucks - the girls just stand around and try to get your money," they said)), then we walked into another club to find that exact scenario being played out), we ended up seeing something of a Pingpong or Patpong show (still not sure which is the correct terminology). Attracted by the fact that no one was trying drag us into the place, by the fact that there were only matronly-looking women working the door, and by the cardboard sign promising that we wouldn't have to pay more than the price of a beer, we ended up sitting on a padded bench in the corner of a dark, dingy stripclub. The white dude next to us had two strippers - one topless; the other, completely naked - draped over him, giggling. In the section to our right, a whole crew of wrinkled, older white men was laughing and drinking with - and fondling - a number of strippers in various levels of undress. And on the stage in the middle of the room, 5 or 6 strippers were gyrating lethargically, with bored and/or pissed-off expressions on their faces. Except for the two girls with both their bras and panties on, the women were not hot at all.
Maya and I sat, sipping our beers, trying to touch as little of the walls, seat, and table around us as possible, and watched, barely keeping our jaws from hitting the floor. During our maybe half-hour there, we saw a woman blow a horn with her pussy, another woman pull a good 8 feet of rainbow streamers out of her pussy, yet another woman pour some clear liquid from a bottle into her pussy and pour it back out whereupon it had mysteriously turned purple, and then a final woman pull maybe 6 feet of thread out of her pussy - the thread had sewing needles hung from it every couple inches, and as she tugged the string out, she pinned paper flowers through alternating needles till she had a garland hanging from between her legs!
Now, I'm not really a stripclub kind of guy - as far as I'm concerned, a stripclub, at its best, is just an exercise in sexual frustration, and one that I'm paying for. That said, there was nothing sexually frustrating about this place because the whole thing was so profoundly un-erotic. And, perhaps, a little bit unsanitary. At some point, a middle-aged Thai woman (strangely, in her clothes) stopped in front of our table, and put out a hand for shaking. Not knowing what else to do, Maya and I reluctantly shook her hand. We all stared at each other for a few moments, then the woman pointed to her own teeth and smiled, then walked away. "Do I have something stuck between my teeth?" Maya asked me, completely confused by the interaction, as was I. (We later observed this woman giving apparently platonic massages to some of the other clientele.) Soon after, two chubby strippers, who had been "dancing" on the stage, came up to us, and put our their hands for shaking; again, not sure what else to do and not wanting to insult them, we shook their hands. They then awkwardly - though sweetly - tried to chat us up with what limited English they had, clearly campaigning for us to buy them drinks. It was definitely time for us to go.
As we dashed back out into the relatively fresh air, the matronly women outside thanked us for attending. And as we walked away up the street, the solicitors swarmed on us again, as they did every foreigner, tried to angle us into their clubs. "Want to see show?" Maya shook her head, proudly telling them, no thanks, that she already had.
When we finally turned the corner off of Patpong and onto the main strip, Maya suggested that we try to find a pharmacy where we could buy some hand sanitizer. Not a bad idea, considering the disturbing number of hands we had ended up shaking. We stopped in a few places, but no luck. Riding the skytrain back to our hotel, resisting the urge to scratch our noses or bite our nails until we'd had a chance to wash, we felt oddly content knowing that while Bangkok may have kicked our collective ass during our first stay, now we'd seen her naked.
Friday, November 30, 2007
Monday, November 26, 2007
a blaze in the northern sky
As I alluded to in my last post, when we were in Vang Vieng in Laos, we lost an email regarding a hotel reservation in Thailand. The reservation was in a Northern city called Sukhothai, and it was from November 23 to 25, which is when the city was holding its annual celebration of the Loi Krathong festival, also known as the Yi Peng festival or "the festival of lights." Since we couldn't find our reservation info and since hotels are booked up well in advance over the festival dates, we had given up on seeing the fest and instead extended our stay in Laos, scheduling our flight back to Chiang Mai for the 23rd. Then we relocated the email, but now it was too late - we tried desperately to figure out a way to get from Vang Vieng to Sukhothai in time for Loi Krathong but without any success. Resigning ourselves to returning and staying in Chiang Mai then, we contacted the guesthouse, the Trigong Residence, where we'd stayed our first time there; the proprietor emailed Maya back explaining that he was all booked up and that finding a place to stay over the dates of fest, which, it turns out, is also celebrated in a big way in Chiang Mai, would be very hard. He added, however, that if we really needed it, he would try to help - but we didn't expect much. We began to formulate contingency plans for returning to fucking Bangkok, the city that had so royally kicked our collective ass the first time we stayed there. As it turns out, the owner of the Trigong, going way beyond the call of duty, actually did email us back in a few days, saying that we were all good, he'd booked a place for us to stay!
So, on Friday, we flew back from Luang Prabang to Chiang Mai just in time for the start of the festival, which, let me tell you, was pretty fucking insane. Basically, the whole 3 days - actually, mostly the nights - are a pyromaniac's wet dream. First, there are the krathongs, little floats about a handspan in diameter made from a section of banana tree trunk and decorated with elaborately-folded banana leaves, flowers, candles, incense sticks, etc. During the festival, everyone buys one from vendors lining the streets, lights the candles and incense on them, and lets them go in the Ping river, which runs through Chiang Mai, until the water is full of flickering trails of light. Couples often float two krathongs together, which is apparently considered quite romantic by locals, so that's just what Maya and I did.
Second, there are the Saa lanterns, rice-paper lanterns-cum-hot air balloons that Maya and I first saw in the skies of Beijing. Vendors are selling these everywhere, too, and everyone is buying them (some of them are massive, even bigger than the folks purchasing them), lighting them up in the streets, and sending them airborn, creating a truly surreal sight: a night sky filled with constellations of slowly drifting orange flame (some of the lanterns also have fireworks attached to their bottoms, so they drop a trail of sparks beneath them as they fly). But not all of the lanterns make it that high - some are blown into nearby trees, where they burn themselves out; others aren't filled with enough hot air by the time they are let go and fall lazily back to the earth like lethargic comets. Maya and I, fortunately, had both the skill and the patience to successfully launch the two balloons we bought into the sky. Some say that the Yi Peng festival evolved from the Brahmin belief of floating away evil - if so, we floated whatever bad vibes surrounded us so far, far away that they turned into stars in the heavens.
Finally, there are all the fireworks and firecrackers. These, in every imaginable form, are also being sold by a gazillion roadside vendors, and everyone - but most kids and teenagers - are setting them off in the streets and over the river deep into the night. Sometimes it literally feels like you're in the middle of a warzone as you walk through the city, as explosions flash and loud cracks resound all around you, dangerously close, sometimes right under your feet or over your head. Nowhere did we feel like this more than when on the last, climactic night of the festival, we went on a dinner cruise on the Ping river, a boat ride that, though the food was ridiculously good - I had honey-roasted spareribs with som tam (Thai green papaya salad); Maya had crispy fried mushrooms with kaffir lime leaves and tom kah gai (Thai coconut-milk soup) - was the least romantic cruise we've ever been on. It felt more like riding on the boat in Apocalypse Now, down a river into the heart of darkness. Everyone on the banks seemed to be setting off fireworks or tossing firecrackers, all into the center of the river, as if the opposite shores were at battle and we, on the boat, were stuck in the middle. More than a few fireworks actually hit our vessel, a few exploding right against the side where Maya and I sat! By the time, we and the maybe 14 other passengers disembarked, we were all literally feeling a little shellshocked and more than a little relieved.
Add to the krathongs, the flying lanterns, and the fireworks, endless food stands, bands playing, Thai dancing and drumming competitions, parades on land and on the river, probably the biggest bazaar we've been to so far on this trip, and a square filled with lanterns (of the non-flying variety) and even trees made of lanterns (one of which, Maya and I are standing in front of below). Like I said, fucking insane.
As if the fest weren't action-packed enough, on Sunday Maya and I spent our afternoon, riding ATVs - through the jungle, past water buffalos and ginormous white, humped cows, by mysterious, massive clay jars sitting in banana-tree groves - and shooting guns at the Chiang Mai shooting range. Here I am blasting my Glock.
Maya, with her little .22.
And Maya again, with her very big sniper rifle!
Somehow it just seemed like a fitting way for us to celebrate Loi Krathong.
So, on Friday, we flew back from Luang Prabang to Chiang Mai just in time for the start of the festival, which, let me tell you, was pretty fucking insane. Basically, the whole 3 days - actually, mostly the nights - are a pyromaniac's wet dream. First, there are the krathongs, little floats about a handspan in diameter made from a section of banana tree trunk and decorated with elaborately-folded banana leaves, flowers, candles, incense sticks, etc. During the festival, everyone buys one from vendors lining the streets, lights the candles and incense on them, and lets them go in the Ping river, which runs through Chiang Mai, until the water is full of flickering trails of light. Couples often float two krathongs together, which is apparently considered quite romantic by locals, so that's just what Maya and I did.
Second, there are the Saa lanterns, rice-paper lanterns-cum-hot air balloons that Maya and I first saw in the skies of Beijing. Vendors are selling these everywhere, too, and everyone is buying them (some of them are massive, even bigger than the folks purchasing them), lighting them up in the streets, and sending them airborn, creating a truly surreal sight: a night sky filled with constellations of slowly drifting orange flame (some of the lanterns also have fireworks attached to their bottoms, so they drop a trail of sparks beneath them as they fly). But not all of the lanterns make it that high - some are blown into nearby trees, where they burn themselves out; others aren't filled with enough hot air by the time they are let go and fall lazily back to the earth like lethargic comets. Maya and I, fortunately, had both the skill and the patience to successfully launch the two balloons we bought into the sky. Some say that the Yi Peng festival evolved from the Brahmin belief of floating away evil - if so, we floated whatever bad vibes surrounded us so far, far away that they turned into stars in the heavens.
Finally, there are all the fireworks and firecrackers. These, in every imaginable form, are also being sold by a gazillion roadside vendors, and everyone - but most kids and teenagers - are setting them off in the streets and over the river deep into the night. Sometimes it literally feels like you're in the middle of a warzone as you walk through the city, as explosions flash and loud cracks resound all around you, dangerously close, sometimes right under your feet or over your head. Nowhere did we feel like this more than when on the last, climactic night of the festival, we went on a dinner cruise on the Ping river, a boat ride that, though the food was ridiculously good - I had honey-roasted spareribs with som tam (Thai green papaya salad); Maya had crispy fried mushrooms with kaffir lime leaves and tom kah gai (Thai coconut-milk soup) - was the least romantic cruise we've ever been on. It felt more like riding on the boat in Apocalypse Now, down a river into the heart of darkness. Everyone on the banks seemed to be setting off fireworks or tossing firecrackers, all into the center of the river, as if the opposite shores were at battle and we, on the boat, were stuck in the middle. More than a few fireworks actually hit our vessel, a few exploding right against the side where Maya and I sat! By the time, we and the maybe 14 other passengers disembarked, we were all literally feeling a little shellshocked and more than a little relieved.
Add to the krathongs, the flying lanterns, and the fireworks, endless food stands, bands playing, Thai dancing and drumming competitions, parades on land and on the river, probably the biggest bazaar we've been to so far on this trip, and a square filled with lanterns (of the non-flying variety) and even trees made of lanterns (one of which, Maya and I are standing in front of below). Like I said, fucking insane.
As if the fest weren't action-packed enough, on Sunday Maya and I spent our afternoon, riding ATVs - through the jungle, past water buffalos and ginormous white, humped cows, by mysterious, massive clay jars sitting in banana-tree groves - and shooting guns at the Chiang Mai shooting range. Here I am blasting my Glock. Maya, with her little .22. And Maya again, with her very big sniper rifle! Somehow it just seemed like a fitting way for us to celebrate Loi Krathong.
Friday, November 23, 2007
down the tube
It's funny how quickly shit changes on you when you're travelling like this. One second you're on top of the world; next, nothing seems to be going right. So it was in Laos.
We were enjoying Luang Prabang so much that we decided to extend our stay in the country and bumped our return flight to Thailand back by a few days. And since our experience in the cave temple on the opposite shore of the Mekong had been so fucking cool, we decided to go to the Lao town of Vang Vieng, which was supposed to have a number of Buddhist caves that you can explore, as well as a river - the Nam Song - that you can kayak and tube down, and amazing karst peaks akin to those in Halong Bay. We booked what claimed to be a 5-hour "V.I.P. bus" ride from Luang Prabang to Vang Vieng.
What we couldn't have guessed about the bus was that 1) it would have big speakers and a TV inside and there would be absolutely atrocious Lao karaoke playing for the first 3 hours of the ride. Think 3 hours of the shit below but worse...
2) that the toilet in the bus would be a particularly awkward hybrid of an Asian-style squatter and a western-style sitter, situated in the back of the vehicle, which bounced so extremely over the rugged, pothole-ridden roads that trying to keep your stream on target - there was also nothing to hold onto in the bathroom cabin - was just about impossible; 3) the vast majority of the trip would be on roads that were not only rugged and pothole-ridden but also winding through jungle-covered mountains along a nauseatingly serpentine course that had me fighting to hold in the vomit for much of the ride; 4) our lunch break would be in a shanty-town-like village in the middle of one of these jungle mountains and would include almost nothing that didn't look like it would make the latter fight against spewing, a losing battle (we ended up having some rice and bought some packaged chips and cookies); and finally, 5) 5 hours actually meant 7 hours.
Excruciating as this ride was, our first impressions of Vang Vieng suggested that perhaps it had all been worthwhile. As we neared the city, the landscape became even more dramatic than it had been, as otherwordly limestone peaks crawling with tangled foliage and vines reared up from the jungle floor around us. The bus finally dropped us off at the "bus station" - really just a big, dusty abandoned airfield along the road - and we caught a sawngthaew to our guesthouse, passing as we went the river and the jagged peaks rising above its shore.
That evening we stumbled on a fantastically chill bar along those same shores that had four or five little shacks on stilts with two hammocks inside each; we claimed a shack, sprawled out in our hamocks and watched the sunset, feeling perfectly relaxed and content as we sipped our bottles of Beer Lao to the tunes of Pink Floyd.
Unfortunately, this was just a brief respite. The next day we went on this caving trek that we had booked the night before. We were under the impression that it would be just us, another couple, and a guide, and that we would be taking one of the "customized tours" that the trekking place we'd booked the thing at advertised in big bold letters over beside its front door. Yeah, bullshit. We ended up being jammed into the back of sawngthaew with, it seemed, 20 other travelers so tightly packed that one dude had to sit on the floor and 3 of the guides had to hang on outside on the back of the truck. We had been told to show up at 9:30am, but the sawngthaew wasn't even ready for us until 10, and then it did a couple circles through town to pick up other passengers and a variety of kayaks and tubes before finally heading off out of town.
When we arrived at the starting point of everyone's various treks, we were all separated into groups; Maya and I into one with maybe 8 other people. Our guide - a fat, amiable Lao - told us that we'd be visiting four caves, tubing and swimming inside one, and visiting four villages. We couldn't hold our tongues, and Maya told him that we weren't going to any villages - we've been to enough already along our trip so far, and we've found that most are just poor and depressing and/or just an opportunity for the villagers to try to get you to buy their trinkets and shit. Our guide seemed a little taken aback and confused, but he agreed to arrange for a vehicle to take us back to town before the rest of his group went on to the villages.
Then it was off to caving. The first cave set a poor precedent - it was just a little nook in a cliff face with a big golden-colored Buddha in the back and an even bigger man-made "Buddha's footprint" in front. There was also a small altar in the opening of the cave where, our guide explained, you could shake this little shaker-thing, then take a slip of paper with Lao script on it off these little pads - the writing supposedly would tell your fortune. Maya, if you don't know already, is very superstitious and pretty into this kind of shit, so she shook the shaker and tore off a slip; she handed it to our guide for translation. He looked at it and hesitated before finally explaining what it said. "It says to keep an eye on your husband," he explained with a somewhat uncomfortable grin on his face. "He might have a girlfriend. Not now, necessarily, but sometime, in a few years." As if the cave itself hadn't been disheartening enough, now Maya was really distressed. And of course, I didn't help things by teasing her that this sounded like a really good fortune for me.
Then we went to the next cave, which ended up being adventurous as fuck but also absurdly dangerous. Let's just say that Lao safety precautions are basically nil. First, our guide asked the group if any of us had brought our own flashlights ("torches" he called them, as the Brits do); fortunately, Maya and I had, because, it turned out, he inexplicably only had 4 "torches" with him. These were divied up between our tourmates; Maya and I had been talking to this Irish guy and girl who had been traveling together through Asia about along as we have, and the dude ended up getting this headlamp that basically looked like a lightbulb attached to an elastic band and wired to a slightly sized-down car battery that you hung around your neck on a string. With him wearing this absurd contraption, we all climbed up and down these slippery, muddy rocks and into the dark mouth of the cavern.
Our guide, having given out his 4 flashlights, was holding just a tiny little candle and walking around in his flip-flops. We were all wearing hiking shoes or hiking sandles, and having a hard time with our footing, since the interior of the cave was essentially all mud and puddles. As walked deeper into the blackness, which was pierced only by our torches and half-assed headlamps, we passed a precariously narrow and deep crevass on our left, which the guide only pointed out after most of the group had already - fortunately, I guess - walked by it. The one safety precaution around this crevass? There was some barbed wire strung over it!
Around this point, the luckless Irish dude totally wiped out in the mud and fell into a filthy puddle; he righted himself, completely coated in dirt. His fortune wouldn't improve when we descended even deeper into the cave and he whispered to his friend that battery acid had leaked on his hand from his headlamp contraption and he said, "It really burns." Maya poured some of her water on his hand, and when our guide was alerted to the situation, he didn't seem too nonplussed and simply encouraged us to pour more water on the burn.
When we got into the third and final room of the cavern, our guide explained why caves were so important to the Lao and why so many were full of Buddha idols. Laos, it turns out, is the unlikely holder of the unenviable title of most bombed country in history - according to our guidebook, the U.S. dropped a ton of ordinance, an actual ton, on the tiny country every eight minutes for nine years during the Vietnam War! - and the caves acted as natural bomb shelters for the people.
Somehow extracting ourselves from this second cave, which, hardships aside, was really fucking cool, we went to a third cave, where, our guide explained, a Spanish dude had gone exploring by himself a few years ago and had ended up getting lost and dying a 3-days-distance inside its long winding channels. He said there was a lagoon inside, and we heard that there was a waterfall as well. Then we walked about 50 feet inside and he said we were going to turn around because it was time for lunch. Maya and I were like, That's it? What the fuck kind of "trek" is this?! All that build up for shit?!
So, lunch. Lao BBQ - meat and veggie skewers cooked over a little campfire - with fried rice and baguette, which we ate sitting on some tatami-like mats on the ground in a clearing among some banana trees. The food didn't taste bad, but I ended up getting the runs almost as soon - and very luckily, no sooner - as we got back to our hotel after the trek. After eating, we went to the fourth and final cave, a water cave in which we would tube and swim. Good thing, then, that the water was so absolutely frigid that Maya's toes went blue from just stepping in up to her ankles for a few minutes.
As he set us up with our tubes, our guide offered all of us those ridiculous headlamp contraptions with the hanging battery and the open wiring, which seemed like an insane thing for anyone to wear while in the water. I turned mine down, but the guide was insistent and Maya ended up wearing one, which kept on going out, then flickering back on, the entire trip through the cavern. As for the trip itself, Maya found it to be a journey through hell itself; I'm much less sensitive to the cold, and I found it to be pretty fucking cool, to be honest. We tubed deep into the cave, pulling ourselves on a rope strung along the rocky walls, and then we (well, mostly just me) swam in the small lagoon shrouded in darkness, where it looked to me almost as if we'd been swallowed by a whale and were swimming around in its shadowy ribcage.
When we finally got back to our hotel from the day's caving (mis)adventure, I got the aforementioned shits, then the next morning I locked up my backpack with what few valuables we have with us - which I've been doing this whole trip whenever we leave our hotel room - and then almost immediately afterwards, realized that I had no idea where the key was. While our new Irish friends, with whom we hung out for the next few days, were telling us about all the shit that they'd had stolen from them while in Southeast Asia, we were in the improbable position of having to break into our own luggage. I ended up trying to buy a bolt cutter from a local hardware store to cut through the lock, but had to settle for a wire cutter; using that, I wrestled with the little padlock for 45 minutes until it finally just popped open and I got into the bag, in which - surprise, surprise - it turned out, I had locked the key.
A variety of other things proceeded to go wrong - I won't go into the devilish details now (suffice it to say, we lost an email regarding a hotel reservation in Thailand, then found it only once it was too late to get back to Thailand to use the reservation; we were getting more mosquito bites here, in the most remote place we'd traveled to, than anywhere else in Southeast Asia so far; and some other shit) - but mostly the town of Vang Vieng began to get on our nerves. As beautiful as the surrounding landscape is, the place is a proper shithole. There are only three real streets to the place, and they're basically just all guesthouses, bars, restaurants, internet cafes, and trekking places, and 4, not 1 or 2 but 4, of the restaurants/bars play nonstop Friends episodes all day and night to steady crowds of young backpackers, most of whom seem to be basically just frat-boys and sorority-girl types but the Eurotrash version, which, take it from me, is even more despicable than the American version. And to what end are these young backpacking Eoropeans using the beautiful landscape? Put it this way, Vang Vieng's biggest tourist activity is tubing down the Nam Song and stopping at the numerous bars that dot the banks, some of which sell ready-to-puff joints. It doesn't sound like a bad way to spend an afternoon, but when you find yourself in a town that's been built up in the middle of nowhere in one of the poorest countries of the world, just around that singular pasttime, shit starts to seem awful lame awful quick.
So, after just 2 days and 3 nights there, we bought tickets for a minivan - we had heard that the minivan was much more comfortable and quicker than the "V.I.P. bus" - back to Luang Prabang, from where we were scheduled to fly back to Chiang Mai, Thailand. The morning of our ride, we showed up at the place where we'd bought the tix and where we were to be picked up at 9am sharp (originally advertised as 8:30), only to be told that the van wouldn't be there till 9:20. Then when the van showed up, it was far from "luxury", jampacked with locals, most of them with their luggage in their lap and their heads sticking out of the open windows, clearly panting for air; there was only the backseat left open for us, with shin-crushingly little legspace, and when we asked the driver if there was A/C, which we had been told there would be, he shook his head incredulously. Maya just about lost it - and justifiably so. She stomped back to the woman who had sold us the tickets and told her straightup that we were not getting what she'd promised and we wanted our money back. The woman hemmed and hawed, but eventually relented; and then we dashed to the nearest other office for bus/van tix and begged for spots on the 10am V.I.P bus, which was our last hope out of this hellhole and to our flight out of Laos the next day. Miraculously, there were 2 seats available (here's Maya in the sawngthaew to the bus station - her expression says it all),...
and after 7 nauseating - but, thank god, karaoke-free - hours back through the jungle mountains, we found ourselves back in what-felt-like the sanctuary of Luang Prabang, where, hopefully, our luck would change again but for the better.
We were enjoying Luang Prabang so much that we decided to extend our stay in the country and bumped our return flight to Thailand back by a few days. And since our experience in the cave temple on the opposite shore of the Mekong had been so fucking cool, we decided to go to the Lao town of Vang Vieng, which was supposed to have a number of Buddhist caves that you can explore, as well as a river - the Nam Song - that you can kayak and tube down, and amazing karst peaks akin to those in Halong Bay. We booked what claimed to be a 5-hour "V.I.P. bus" ride from Luang Prabang to Vang Vieng.
What we couldn't have guessed about the bus was that 1) it would have big speakers and a TV inside and there would be absolutely atrocious Lao karaoke playing for the first 3 hours of the ride. Think 3 hours of the shit below but worse...
2) that the toilet in the bus would be a particularly awkward hybrid of an Asian-style squatter and a western-style sitter, situated in the back of the vehicle, which bounced so extremely over the rugged, pothole-ridden roads that trying to keep your stream on target - there was also nothing to hold onto in the bathroom cabin - was just about impossible; 3) the vast majority of the trip would be on roads that were not only rugged and pothole-ridden but also winding through jungle-covered mountains along a nauseatingly serpentine course that had me fighting to hold in the vomit for much of the ride; 4) our lunch break would be in a shanty-town-like village in the middle of one of these jungle mountains and would include almost nothing that didn't look like it would make the latter fight against spewing, a losing battle (we ended up having some rice and bought some packaged chips and cookies); and finally, 5) 5 hours actually meant 7 hours.
Excruciating as this ride was, our first impressions of Vang Vieng suggested that perhaps it had all been worthwhile. As we neared the city, the landscape became even more dramatic than it had been, as otherwordly limestone peaks crawling with tangled foliage and vines reared up from the jungle floor around us. The bus finally dropped us off at the "bus station" - really just a big, dusty abandoned airfield along the road - and we caught a sawngthaew to our guesthouse, passing as we went the river and the jagged peaks rising above its shore.
That evening we stumbled on a fantastically chill bar along those same shores that had four or five little shacks on stilts with two hammocks inside each; we claimed a shack, sprawled out in our hamocks and watched the sunset, feeling perfectly relaxed and content as we sipped our bottles of Beer Lao to the tunes of Pink Floyd.Unfortunately, this was just a brief respite. The next day we went on this caving trek that we had booked the night before. We were under the impression that it would be just us, another couple, and a guide, and that we would be taking one of the "customized tours" that the trekking place we'd booked the thing at advertised in big bold letters over beside its front door. Yeah, bullshit. We ended up being jammed into the back of sawngthaew with, it seemed, 20 other travelers so tightly packed that one dude had to sit on the floor and 3 of the guides had to hang on outside on the back of the truck. We had been told to show up at 9:30am, but the sawngthaew wasn't even ready for us until 10, and then it did a couple circles through town to pick up other passengers and a variety of kayaks and tubes before finally heading off out of town.
When we arrived at the starting point of everyone's various treks, we were all separated into groups; Maya and I into one with maybe 8 other people. Our guide - a fat, amiable Lao - told us that we'd be visiting four caves, tubing and swimming inside one, and visiting four villages. We couldn't hold our tongues, and Maya told him that we weren't going to any villages - we've been to enough already along our trip so far, and we've found that most are just poor and depressing and/or just an opportunity for the villagers to try to get you to buy their trinkets and shit. Our guide seemed a little taken aback and confused, but he agreed to arrange for a vehicle to take us back to town before the rest of his group went on to the villages.
Then it was off to caving. The first cave set a poor precedent - it was just a little nook in a cliff face with a big golden-colored Buddha in the back and an even bigger man-made "Buddha's footprint" in front. There was also a small altar in the opening of the cave where, our guide explained, you could shake this little shaker-thing, then take a slip of paper with Lao script on it off these little pads - the writing supposedly would tell your fortune. Maya, if you don't know already, is very superstitious and pretty into this kind of shit, so she shook the shaker and tore off a slip; she handed it to our guide for translation. He looked at it and hesitated before finally explaining what it said. "It says to keep an eye on your husband," he explained with a somewhat uncomfortable grin on his face. "He might have a girlfriend. Not now, necessarily, but sometime, in a few years." As if the cave itself hadn't been disheartening enough, now Maya was really distressed. And of course, I didn't help things by teasing her that this sounded like a really good fortune for me.
Then we went to the next cave, which ended up being adventurous as fuck but also absurdly dangerous. Let's just say that Lao safety precautions are basically nil. First, our guide asked the group if any of us had brought our own flashlights ("torches" he called them, as the Brits do); fortunately, Maya and I had, because, it turned out, he inexplicably only had 4 "torches" with him. These were divied up between our tourmates; Maya and I had been talking to this Irish guy and girl who had been traveling together through Asia about along as we have, and the dude ended up getting this headlamp that basically looked like a lightbulb attached to an elastic band and wired to a slightly sized-down car battery that you hung around your neck on a string. With him wearing this absurd contraption, we all climbed up and down these slippery, muddy rocks and into the dark mouth of the cavern.
Our guide, having given out his 4 flashlights, was holding just a tiny little candle and walking around in his flip-flops. We were all wearing hiking shoes or hiking sandles, and having a hard time with our footing, since the interior of the cave was essentially all mud and puddles. As walked deeper into the blackness, which was pierced only by our torches and half-assed headlamps, we passed a precariously narrow and deep crevass on our left, which the guide only pointed out after most of the group had already - fortunately, I guess - walked by it. The one safety precaution around this crevass? There was some barbed wire strung over it!
Around this point, the luckless Irish dude totally wiped out in the mud and fell into a filthy puddle; he righted himself, completely coated in dirt. His fortune wouldn't improve when we descended even deeper into the cave and he whispered to his friend that battery acid had leaked on his hand from his headlamp contraption and he said, "It really burns." Maya poured some of her water on his hand, and when our guide was alerted to the situation, he didn't seem too nonplussed and simply encouraged us to pour more water on the burn.
When we got into the third and final room of the cavern, our guide explained why caves were so important to the Lao and why so many were full of Buddha idols. Laos, it turns out, is the unlikely holder of the unenviable title of most bombed country in history - according to our guidebook, the U.S. dropped a ton of ordinance, an actual ton, on the tiny country every eight minutes for nine years during the Vietnam War! - and the caves acted as natural bomb shelters for the people.
Somehow extracting ourselves from this second cave, which, hardships aside, was really fucking cool, we went to a third cave, where, our guide explained, a Spanish dude had gone exploring by himself a few years ago and had ended up getting lost and dying a 3-days-distance inside its long winding channels. He said there was a lagoon inside, and we heard that there was a waterfall as well. Then we walked about 50 feet inside and he said we were going to turn around because it was time for lunch. Maya and I were like, That's it? What the fuck kind of "trek" is this?! All that build up for shit?!
So, lunch. Lao BBQ - meat and veggie skewers cooked over a little campfire - with fried rice and baguette, which we ate sitting on some tatami-like mats on the ground in a clearing among some banana trees. The food didn't taste bad, but I ended up getting the runs almost as soon - and very luckily, no sooner - as we got back to our hotel after the trek. After eating, we went to the fourth and final cave, a water cave in which we would tube and swim. Good thing, then, that the water was so absolutely frigid that Maya's toes went blue from just stepping in up to her ankles for a few minutes.
As he set us up with our tubes, our guide offered all of us those ridiculous headlamp contraptions with the hanging battery and the open wiring, which seemed like an insane thing for anyone to wear while in the water. I turned mine down, but the guide was insistent and Maya ended up wearing one, which kept on going out, then flickering back on, the entire trip through the cavern. As for the trip itself, Maya found it to be a journey through hell itself; I'm much less sensitive to the cold, and I found it to be pretty fucking cool, to be honest. We tubed deep into the cave, pulling ourselves on a rope strung along the rocky walls, and then we (well, mostly just me) swam in the small lagoon shrouded in darkness, where it looked to me almost as if we'd been swallowed by a whale and were swimming around in its shadowy ribcage.
When we finally got back to our hotel from the day's caving (mis)adventure, I got the aforementioned shits, then the next morning I locked up my backpack with what few valuables we have with us - which I've been doing this whole trip whenever we leave our hotel room - and then almost immediately afterwards, realized that I had no idea where the key was. While our new Irish friends, with whom we hung out for the next few days, were telling us about all the shit that they'd had stolen from them while in Southeast Asia, we were in the improbable position of having to break into our own luggage. I ended up trying to buy a bolt cutter from a local hardware store to cut through the lock, but had to settle for a wire cutter; using that, I wrestled with the little padlock for 45 minutes until it finally just popped open and I got into the bag, in which - surprise, surprise - it turned out, I had locked the key.
A variety of other things proceeded to go wrong - I won't go into the devilish details now (suffice it to say, we lost an email regarding a hotel reservation in Thailand, then found it only once it was too late to get back to Thailand to use the reservation; we were getting more mosquito bites here, in the most remote place we'd traveled to, than anywhere else in Southeast Asia so far; and some other shit) - but mostly the town of Vang Vieng began to get on our nerves. As beautiful as the surrounding landscape is, the place is a proper shithole. There are only three real streets to the place, and they're basically just all guesthouses, bars, restaurants, internet cafes, and trekking places, and 4, not 1 or 2 but 4, of the restaurants/bars play nonstop Friends episodes all day and night to steady crowds of young backpackers, most of whom seem to be basically just frat-boys and sorority-girl types but the Eurotrash version, which, take it from me, is even more despicable than the American version. And to what end are these young backpacking Eoropeans using the beautiful landscape? Put it this way, Vang Vieng's biggest tourist activity is tubing down the Nam Song and stopping at the numerous bars that dot the banks, some of which sell ready-to-puff joints. It doesn't sound like a bad way to spend an afternoon, but when you find yourself in a town that's been built up in the middle of nowhere in one of the poorest countries of the world, just around that singular pasttime, shit starts to seem awful lame awful quick.
So, after just 2 days and 3 nights there, we bought tickets for a minivan - we had heard that the minivan was much more comfortable and quicker than the "V.I.P. bus" - back to Luang Prabang, from where we were scheduled to fly back to Chiang Mai, Thailand. The morning of our ride, we showed up at the place where we'd bought the tix and where we were to be picked up at 9am sharp (originally advertised as 8:30), only to be told that the van wouldn't be there till 9:20. Then when the van showed up, it was far from "luxury", jampacked with locals, most of them with their luggage in their lap and their heads sticking out of the open windows, clearly panting for air; there was only the backseat left open for us, with shin-crushingly little legspace, and when we asked the driver if there was A/C, which we had been told there would be, he shook his head incredulously. Maya just about lost it - and justifiably so. She stomped back to the woman who had sold us the tickets and told her straightup that we were not getting what she'd promised and we wanted our money back. The woman hemmed and hawed, but eventually relented; and then we dashed to the nearest other office for bus/van tix and begged for spots on the 10am V.I.P bus, which was our last hope out of this hellhole and to our flight out of Laos the next day. Miraculously, there were 2 seats available (here's Maya in the sawngthaew to the bus station - her expression says it all),...
and after 7 nauseating - but, thank god, karaoke-free - hours back through the jungle mountains, we found ourselves back in what-felt-like the sanctuary of Luang Prabang, where, hopefully, our luck would change again but for the better.
Sunday, November 18, 2007
ain't no phousi
As soon as Maya and I got back from our trekking tragicomedy we decided that we were done with the hyper-touristed bullshit of Thailand, and that very night we bought plane tickets to Laos. Yes, I said Laos. And yes, we didn't really know anything more about Laos than you probably do right now (the country hadn't been on our original intinerary). All we really knew was that just about everyone we'd encountered along our travels thus far who had been to Laos said that we had to go. They said that it was like Thailand when it was still cool, still relatively untouched. We went to see some Muay Thai fights in Chiang Mai that night (saw a dude get his arm broken, another guy get knocked out via an uppercut elbow to the chin), then went back to our room, packed up, and the next morning we called a few hotels, booked a room, and flew to Luang Prabang, Laos. (We had thought about getting there via a 2-day slow boat on the Mekong River, but then we heard that one of the boats had sank recently; everyone onboard had been able to swim to shore but had lost all their luggage. We opted to fly.)
As soon as we landed, it became apparent that we were in a different kind of Southeast Asian country. At immigration in the airport, the officers checked everyone's papers then handed each of us an illustrated pamphlet with "10 suggestions will help you enjoy your visit while helping us preserve our culture and traditions." These suggestions included: "5) We believe that kissing, holding hands, and other displays of affection with the opposite sex are private acts that should be done in private," and "7) Lao people are modest, and it's uncomfortable to see people who are not. Nude bathing at the waterfall, in the river, or while rafting, is never appropriate. Lao women wear a t-shirt and shorts covering from mid-thigh to shoulders; for men, shorts are fine. When in Laos, we hope you'll do the same." Woah.
When we exited the airport, more differences became apparent. Whereas in just about every other city we've visited, there's been an onslaught of cab-, tuk-tuk-, and whatever-other-kind-of-vehicle-drivers eagerly trying to get us into their whatever-kind-of-vehicle and take us to our hotel, here there was all of 2 sawngthaews (those crazy pickup truck taxis) for at least 20 some newly arrived tourists. We ended up bargaining for a spot and a poor whitey got kicked out of the sawngthaew he'd been sitting in to make room for us. Sorry, whitey.
Rumbling through town, we found Luang Prabang to be something like Siem Reap in Cambodia - but minus all the fancy hotels. Dusty roads, kids and livestock running alongside the street, a muddy river - the Nam Khan - with naked children playing in it, shacks woven from dried palm leaves... When we finally checked into our hotel, we found ourselves in a room with walls woven from dried palm leaves...
...and a dirty, dimly-lit, and altogether sketchy shared bathroom. There's a sheet of paper posted to the inside of the door listing "accomodation regulations," including "6) Do not allow domestic and international tourist bring prostitute and others into your accomodation to make sex movies in our room, it is restriction." What the fuck had happened in this place? (That night we could barely sleep due to the rooster crowing at all hours - that shit about roosters cock-a-doodle-dooing to mark the sunrise is a total myth, by the way - and then at 4am, the mysterious sound of drumming and gongs chiming, which we learned was the monks making morning music in the nearby temple. Needless to say, we checked out the next morning - though the place was worth all $6 that we paid! - and moved to a much nicer, quieter place - for the exorbitant sum of $15 a night - along the one trendy, touristy strip in town. This new place had a sign posted behind its bar: "Say no to child-sex tourists. Don't turn away, turn them in.")
Other things that tipped us off that Luang Prabang was a little different? When walking from our first hotel to explore town, we passed a flock of flamboyantly feathered chickens, including two roosters who were clearly facing off and engaged in some crazy fighting dance. When the electricity went out - twice - at the restaurant we were having dinner at. When a little boy monk in orange Buddhist robes walked into the internet cafe where Maya was checking her email and sat down to go online. When we learned that at 10:30pm quiet time starts in the city, and by 11pm all the bars and restaurants close because the locals need their sleep so they can wake up early to give alms to the monks (who are all over town, as are their wats, or temples).
Basically, we've been in Laos for 5 days now, and it's pretty much fucking ruled. Here are just some of the other highlights:
Climbing the mountain in the center of town, Mount Phousi, in the dark on our first night to reach the golden wat at top, which is lit up at night and can been seen for miles. We found a number of young monks and Lao locals amassed up there, a few of whom seemed to be practicing their English by either conversing with the few other foreigners there or by reading lessons out of their notebooks. This dude Ian we'd befriended at the Chiang Mai airport - a 24-year-old New Yorker who'd just been laid off from his soul-sucking investment banking job and decided to use his severance by travelling - told us that he'd heard about a wat in Luang Prabang where monks go to practice their English by talking to tourists. This, it turned out, was it. While Ian started conversing with an 18-year-old kid who told him that he'd had to drop out of school in order to work a construction job that pays $2 a day to support his family, Maya and I, feeling much less social, sat on a bench, watching the Mekong River in the moonlight, and made fun of a young white woman who we could overhear talking to one of the monks: She was ostensibly helping him practice his English, but it sounded to us like she was pretty obviously hitting on him.
Laughing at the names of various estalishments around town. You see, in the Thai and Lao languages, P-H is pronounced with a P sound, not an F sound, as it is in English. So, for instance, the Thai city Phuket is actually pronounced Poo-ket, though it's temting to pronounce it Fuck it. This being the case, think about how the word Phousi, as in Mount Phousi, would be pronounced. And think about how Phousi Massage, Phousi Gallery, Phousi Hotel, et al, would be pronounced. Needlessly to say, Maya and I were in hysterics.
Taking a sunset boat ride on the mighty Mekong river and riding on the tin roof of the long, narrow, otherwise-wooden boat for most of the ride. The view of amazing, the wind fresh and cool in our faces - all the stress instantly drained from my body...
About an hour into what had been an awesome ride, the boat pulled up to a floating fuel station, which turned out to be closed. Apparently the boat was almost completely out of gas because our driver then began shouting in Lao at any passing vessel, eventually hailing down two, which pulled up next to us to listen to our driver's plea. The second vessel agreed to drive us back to the dock and so we switched boats in the middle of Mekong and sped back to shore, laughing at the unrelenting adventure/incompetence that we've encountered in Thailand and now Laos.
Watching Sin City upstairs in the teahouse/bookshop L'Entranger Books and Tea, a cozy oasis of semi-familiarity.
Taking the local boat to the other side of the Mekong where we found ourselves on a trail where we came across no more than 4 other whities in the course of a whole day; we explored abandoned temples, crumbling in the jungle, overgrown with palm trees and vines, and we came across, at the top of a long stone stairwell, a cave temple locked with a huge padlock. Retreating to the nearest abandoned temple, we found a man, who looked rather like a bald young monk but in street clothes, and asked him if there was any way we could get into the cave. He said that we should buy a ticket - he directed us to a little ticket table sitting under a tree (tickets were 5,000 kip each (about 50 cents) - and that he had the key. Next thing we knew we were being led back down the jungle path to the cave temple by a maybe 10-year-old girl and a 5-year-old boy, both carrying flashlights (fortunately, we had brought our own along). They unlocked the door to the cave and led us inside. The cave was huge, winding and opening up deep inside the mountain, and pitch-black. "Buddha, no head," the little boy would say periodically, before flashing his light on the statue of a Buddha sitting among the stalactites in some subterranean corner - it's head, the kid correctly pointed out, broken off. The girl was mostly silent the whole tour; the boy, hilarious - making monster noises in an attempt to frighten Maya (she, of course, responded by making her own animal growls and sinister faces in the glow of her flashlight), singing bits of English-language (I think) songs, and telling us at one point to all turn off our lights - so that he could make even more monster noises in the absolute dark. Maya and I wanted to explore the cave even more, but the kids told us, "Sleeping," whenever we asked if we could go into a particularly shadowy offshoot of the cave; we think that they were trying to say "Slippery," but "Sleeping" made me imagine that we were the naively intrepid tourists in some horror movie and the kids were trying to warn us of the evil "sleeping" in the dark. When we finally emerged back into the light, the little boy pretended to shut the door on Maya, the little bastard, then when we tipped the kids a dollar each, the little capitalistic bastard asked for a second greenback since, as he explained, he had talked to us more than the girl. We just laughed - "You're like 5-years old," said Maya. "You get a dollar."
Exploring Khuang Si waterfall, about an hour's drive outside Luang Prabang - though our completely mad sawngthaew driver only took half an hour getting us there, whipping around the winding mountain roads as he did at terrifying speeds. The waterfall was gorgeous, multi-tiered and an otherworldly blue color due, we think, to its heavy calcium content, which had also built up strange stalactite-like structures along its banks (the photo below just shows the main section of the falls)...
We hiked to the top of the mountain alongside the falls (passing along the way a small animal sanctuary complete with bears who had been rescued from "bear bile farms" - bear bile is apparently a staple of Chinese medicine - and a tiger, who had been rescued as a cub from poachers), where we wandered through the jungle and, to alert any large cats that might be prowling in the area to our presence, we sang Pantera's "Mouth for War," Life of Agony's "Through and Through, and Metallica's "Fade to Black" complete with guitar solo to which we air-guitared along - if only some upsuspecting hippies had stumbled upon us up there. The truckride ride back was even more insane then the ride there had been - our lunatic driver was stopped on a number of occasions by herds of water buffalo loping about in the middle of the road, then he stopped to pick up three locals who piled in with a basket of vegetables; one unrecognizable veggie fell to the floor of the truck, and I picked it up to return it, but the Laos villagers shook it off, pointed that it belonged on the floor. Maya and I were confused. Then they placed a little baggie of cherry tomatos and a komquat-looking thing on the floor as well. Soon our sawngthaew stopped again, it seemed in the middle of nowhere, and the three passengers disembarked with a smile and a wave to us and our driver - it was then that we realize that they had left the veggies as payment for the ride! Our driver continued careening along the jungle road, then he suddenly screeched to a halt, calling back to a group of people hanging out in front of their palm-leaves-woven-shack-on-stilts; an older man runs over to the truck with a water bottle filled with a mystery clear liquid (it turns out to be Lao Lao, a 50-proof liquor distilled from sticky rice) and a shot glass, pours our driver a shot - "Oh, my God," says Maya outloud - which he downs in a smooth, unhesitating gulp. Then the older man pours a smaller shot and offers it to Maya who declines, then to me, who laughing at the absurd wrongness of this situation, accepts - if we're going to die, I might as well have a little buzz going. The man pours another a shot for Maya who relents this time. The shit is strong and warms us immediately. As Maya comments hopefully of our driver, "He'll probably actually drive a little more carefully now," and I think maybe he does. Either way, we ended up getting back to our hotel intact, and as we walked away from the pickup truck, having paid our fare (150,000 kip or about $15 for driving us there and back and waiting around 3 hours while we explored), our driver pantomimed puffing on a joint, asking us whether we'd like to buy some marijuana. We shook our heads and continued walking - as much as we've enjoyed exploring Luang Prabang so far, the inside of a Lao jail is one place we have no desire to see.
As soon as we landed, it became apparent that we were in a different kind of Southeast Asian country. At immigration in the airport, the officers checked everyone's papers then handed each of us an illustrated pamphlet with "10 suggestions will help you enjoy your visit while helping us preserve our culture and traditions." These suggestions included: "5) We believe that kissing, holding hands, and other displays of affection with the opposite sex are private acts that should be done in private," and "7) Lao people are modest, and it's uncomfortable to see people who are not. Nude bathing at the waterfall, in the river, or while rafting, is never appropriate. Lao women wear a t-shirt and shorts covering from mid-thigh to shoulders; for men, shorts are fine. When in Laos, we hope you'll do the same." Woah.
When we exited the airport, more differences became apparent. Whereas in just about every other city we've visited, there's been an onslaught of cab-, tuk-tuk-, and whatever-other-kind-of-vehicle-drivers eagerly trying to get us into their whatever-kind-of-vehicle and take us to our hotel, here there was all of 2 sawngthaews (those crazy pickup truck taxis) for at least 20 some newly arrived tourists. We ended up bargaining for a spot and a poor whitey got kicked out of the sawngthaew he'd been sitting in to make room for us. Sorry, whitey.
Rumbling through town, we found Luang Prabang to be something like Siem Reap in Cambodia - but minus all the fancy hotels. Dusty roads, kids and livestock running alongside the street, a muddy river - the Nam Khan - with naked children playing in it, shacks woven from dried palm leaves... When we finally checked into our hotel, we found ourselves in a room with walls woven from dried palm leaves...
...and a dirty, dimly-lit, and altogether sketchy shared bathroom. There's a sheet of paper posted to the inside of the door listing "accomodation regulations," including "6) Do not allow domestic and international tourist bring prostitute and others into your accomodation to make sex movies in our room, it is restriction." What the fuck had happened in this place? (That night we could barely sleep due to the rooster crowing at all hours - that shit about roosters cock-a-doodle-dooing to mark the sunrise is a total myth, by the way - and then at 4am, the mysterious sound of drumming and gongs chiming, which we learned was the monks making morning music in the nearby temple. Needless to say, we checked out the next morning - though the place was worth all $6 that we paid! - and moved to a much nicer, quieter place - for the exorbitant sum of $15 a night - along the one trendy, touristy strip in town. This new place had a sign posted behind its bar: "Say no to child-sex tourists. Don't turn away, turn them in.")Other things that tipped us off that Luang Prabang was a little different? When walking from our first hotel to explore town, we passed a flock of flamboyantly feathered chickens, including two roosters who were clearly facing off and engaged in some crazy fighting dance. When the electricity went out - twice - at the restaurant we were having dinner at. When a little boy monk in orange Buddhist robes walked into the internet cafe where Maya was checking her email and sat down to go online. When we learned that at 10:30pm quiet time starts in the city, and by 11pm all the bars and restaurants close because the locals need their sleep so they can wake up early to give alms to the monks (who are all over town, as are their wats, or temples).
Basically, we've been in Laos for 5 days now, and it's pretty much fucking ruled. Here are just some of the other highlights:
Climbing the mountain in the center of town, Mount Phousi, in the dark on our first night to reach the golden wat at top, which is lit up at night and can been seen for miles. We found a number of young monks and Lao locals amassed up there, a few of whom seemed to be practicing their English by either conversing with the few other foreigners there or by reading lessons out of their notebooks. This dude Ian we'd befriended at the Chiang Mai airport - a 24-year-old New Yorker who'd just been laid off from his soul-sucking investment banking job and decided to use his severance by travelling - told us that he'd heard about a wat in Luang Prabang where monks go to practice their English by talking to tourists. This, it turned out, was it. While Ian started conversing with an 18-year-old kid who told him that he'd had to drop out of school in order to work a construction job that pays $2 a day to support his family, Maya and I, feeling much less social, sat on a bench, watching the Mekong River in the moonlight, and made fun of a young white woman who we could overhear talking to one of the monks: She was ostensibly helping him practice his English, but it sounded to us like she was pretty obviously hitting on him.
Laughing at the names of various estalishments around town. You see, in the Thai and Lao languages, P-H is pronounced with a P sound, not an F sound, as it is in English. So, for instance, the Thai city Phuket is actually pronounced Poo-ket, though it's temting to pronounce it Fuck it. This being the case, think about how the word Phousi, as in Mount Phousi, would be pronounced. And think about how Phousi Massage, Phousi Gallery, Phousi Hotel, et al, would be pronounced. Needlessly to say, Maya and I were in hysterics.
Taking a sunset boat ride on the mighty Mekong river and riding on the tin roof of the long, narrow, otherwise-wooden boat for most of the ride. The view of amazing, the wind fresh and cool in our faces - all the stress instantly drained from my body...
About an hour into what had been an awesome ride, the boat pulled up to a floating fuel station, which turned out to be closed. Apparently the boat was almost completely out of gas because our driver then began shouting in Lao at any passing vessel, eventually hailing down two, which pulled up next to us to listen to our driver's plea. The second vessel agreed to drive us back to the dock and so we switched boats in the middle of Mekong and sped back to shore, laughing at the unrelenting adventure/incompetence that we've encountered in Thailand and now Laos.Watching Sin City upstairs in the teahouse/bookshop L'Entranger Books and Tea, a cozy oasis of semi-familiarity.
Taking the local boat to the other side of the Mekong where we found ourselves on a trail where we came across no more than 4 other whities in the course of a whole day; we explored abandoned temples, crumbling in the jungle, overgrown with palm trees and vines, and we came across, at the top of a long stone stairwell, a cave temple locked with a huge padlock. Retreating to the nearest abandoned temple, we found a man, who looked rather like a bald young monk but in street clothes, and asked him if there was any way we could get into the cave. He said that we should buy a ticket - he directed us to a little ticket table sitting under a tree (tickets were 5,000 kip each (about 50 cents) - and that he had the key. Next thing we knew we were being led back down the jungle path to the cave temple by a maybe 10-year-old girl and a 5-year-old boy, both carrying flashlights (fortunately, we had brought our own along). They unlocked the door to the cave and led us inside. The cave was huge, winding and opening up deep inside the mountain, and pitch-black. "Buddha, no head," the little boy would say periodically, before flashing his light on the statue of a Buddha sitting among the stalactites in some subterranean corner - it's head, the kid correctly pointed out, broken off. The girl was mostly silent the whole tour; the boy, hilarious - making monster noises in an attempt to frighten Maya (she, of course, responded by making her own animal growls and sinister faces in the glow of her flashlight), singing bits of English-language (I think) songs, and telling us at one point to all turn off our lights - so that he could make even more monster noises in the absolute dark. Maya and I wanted to explore the cave even more, but the kids told us, "Sleeping," whenever we asked if we could go into a particularly shadowy offshoot of the cave; we think that they were trying to say "Slippery," but "Sleeping" made me imagine that we were the naively intrepid tourists in some horror movie and the kids were trying to warn us of the evil "sleeping" in the dark. When we finally emerged back into the light, the little boy pretended to shut the door on Maya, the little bastard, then when we tipped the kids a dollar each, the little capitalistic bastard asked for a second greenback since, as he explained, he had talked to us more than the girl. We just laughed - "You're like 5-years old," said Maya. "You get a dollar."
Exploring Khuang Si waterfall, about an hour's drive outside Luang Prabang - though our completely mad sawngthaew driver only took half an hour getting us there, whipping around the winding mountain roads as he did at terrifying speeds. The waterfall was gorgeous, multi-tiered and an otherworldly blue color due, we think, to its heavy calcium content, which had also built up strange stalactite-like structures along its banks (the photo below just shows the main section of the falls)...
We hiked to the top of the mountain alongside the falls (passing along the way a small animal sanctuary complete with bears who had been rescued from "bear bile farms" - bear bile is apparently a staple of Chinese medicine - and a tiger, who had been rescued as a cub from poachers), where we wandered through the jungle and, to alert any large cats that might be prowling in the area to our presence, we sang Pantera's "Mouth for War," Life of Agony's "Through and Through, and Metallica's "Fade to Black" complete with guitar solo to which we air-guitared along - if only some upsuspecting hippies had stumbled upon us up there. The truckride ride back was even more insane then the ride there had been - our lunatic driver was stopped on a number of occasions by herds of water buffalo loping about in the middle of the road, then he stopped to pick up three locals who piled in with a basket of vegetables; one unrecognizable veggie fell to the floor of the truck, and I picked it up to return it, but the Laos villagers shook it off, pointed that it belonged on the floor. Maya and I were confused. Then they placed a little baggie of cherry tomatos and a komquat-looking thing on the floor as well. Soon our sawngthaew stopped again, it seemed in the middle of nowhere, and the three passengers disembarked with a smile and a wave to us and our driver - it was then that we realize that they had left the veggies as payment for the ride! Our driver continued careening along the jungle road, then he suddenly screeched to a halt, calling back to a group of people hanging out in front of their palm-leaves-woven-shack-on-stilts; an older man runs over to the truck with a water bottle filled with a mystery clear liquid (it turns out to be Lao Lao, a 50-proof liquor distilled from sticky rice) and a shot glass, pours our driver a shot - "Oh, my God," says Maya outloud - which he downs in a smooth, unhesitating gulp. Then the older man pours a smaller shot and offers it to Maya who declines, then to me, who laughing at the absurd wrongness of this situation, accepts - if we're going to die, I might as well have a little buzz going. The man pours another a shot for Maya who relents this time. The shit is strong and warms us immediately. As Maya comments hopefully of our driver, "He'll probably actually drive a little more carefully now," and I think maybe he does. Either way, we ended up getting back to our hotel intact, and as we walked away from the pickup truck, having paid our fare (150,000 kip or about $15 for driving us there and back and waiting around 3 hours while we explored), our driver pantomimed puffing on a joint, asking us whether we'd like to buy some marijuana. We shook our heads and continued walking - as much as we've enjoyed exploring Luang Prabang so far, the inside of a Lao jail is one place we have no desire to see.
Friday, November 16, 2007
where no man has gone before...yeah, right
Chiang Mai, the second largest city in Thailand, is about as far from Bangkok as you can get. If Bangkok is the metal metropolis (as my friend Rebecca suggested in her comment on my post about the city), all manic, hard, over-the-top, and relentless, then Chiang Mai is fucking hippie heaven, all organic food, flowy hemp clothing, rasta bars, and "trekking." Trekking, though it sounds like something that only Captain James T. Kirk and crew should undertake, is actually the catch-all term used by Europeans - and so by the Southeast Asian tourist industry catering to them - to describe going out into the jungle and being all outdoorsy. It covers everything from white-water rafting to elephant riding to hiking to remote hilltribe villages - all things that Maya and I did on the "trek" that we took on our second full-day in Chiang Mai. We're definitely not fucking hippies, but we don't mind a bit of adventure.
But if that's what we thought we were getting into, what we got was mostly misadventure; our "trek" was wild, but more because it was a totally half-assed, chaotic tourist safari than because we were actually going out and exploring actual nature. Our tour guide picked us up at our guesthouse at 8:30am - s/he turned out, much to our surprise, to be a particularly thickly-built lady-boy with burly man-hands and huge ankles (that said, her face looked pretty womanly) absurdly juxtaposed with a full range of the most flamboyantly gay gestures you've ever seen. S/he loaded us into a pickup truck with a metal railing, a roof, and two benches installed in the back (this sort of pickup truck-cum-taxi/bus, known as a sawngthaew, are all over Chiang Mai, in addition to the usual car taxis, tuk-tuks, and motobai) and then we drove to another hotel to gather the rest of our trekking group: two guys and one girl from Seattle who had just arrived in Thailand a few days before, an Australian chick who was on the last day of her 3-month journey-home-via-the-world after living in England for 3 years, a German woman (who I know nothing about), and a totally crazy Russian dude who'd just gotten off the overnight-train from Bangkok that morning and jumped right onto this tour with no idea where it was going or what it involved, and without putting on any sort of bug repellant.
The pickup truck roared out through Chiang Mai, and after maybe half an hour, deposited us at an orchid farm, of all things, a stop that had not been on our itinerary, as far as any of us knew. We all wandered around, glancing with vague interest at the alien-looking flowers, wondering what the fuck we were doing here, while our tour guide and the guides from at least three other tours that had just pulled up (none of whom were lady-boys) ate their breakfast under this rather luxurious-looking canopy set up in the middle of the garden. What the fuck, indeed.
We all waited by the truck for our guide to finish eating. S/he finally reappeared, sashaying out from amid the orchids; Maya, who had already had enough, asked him/her what our next stop was. The lady-boy told us, "7-Eleven."
Sure enough, after 10 minutes or so, our truck pulled up to a 7-Eleven (the convenience store franchises, much like KFC in China, are everywhere in Thailand), where our guide bought two bags of chips, and then it was finally off to the jungle, where s/he promised us that we would, first, white-water raft and bamboo raft, then visit the Karen longneck hilltribe, then ride elephants, then hike to a waterfall, and then call it a day.
The road through the jungle was part paved with massive potholes and part not-paved with even more massive potholes, and all of us sitting in the back felt every bump right in our tail bones and whiplashing necks. Our guide meanwhile sat contentedly up in the cabin next to the driver, reading a book - which I joked was probably White Water Rafting for Dummies, much to the horror of the Australian and German chicks, who were both particularly nervous about that portion of our trek. The booking agent in Chiang Mai with whom Maya and I had booked the tour had told us that because the roads into the jungle were so rough, our trek would have to take a truck instead of the air-conditioned van that less adventurous treks take; turned out that our truck was 2-wheel drive anyway, and as we thudded slowly up the road, we watched numerous air-conditioned vans rumble painlessly by us.
Finally our truck pulled over to the side of the road next to some wooden shacks where we saw big white-water rafts set up; our guide got out and shouted at some young Thai boys who seemed to be telling her that they weren't ready for us right now. Clearly pissed off, s/he got back into the truck and we rumbled onto our way to god knows where.
When we pulled over next, our guide explained to us that we would actually be hiking to the waterfall first. So we all tumbled out the back of the truck, stretched our aching bodies, and followed him/her as s/he sashayed up a narrow, crumbly path into the jungle, wearing just his/her flip-flops. After maybe a 15-minute walk, we arrived at probably the most anticlimatic waterfall I've even seen - there are bigger "falls" in the park 10 minutes from my parents' house in Pennsylvania. But the lady-boy seemed very pleased with where s/he'd guided us, and s/he proceeded to urge us to go swimming in the pool at the base of the "fall," which was about the size of a large bathtub. His/her English wasn't great, so s/he mostly urged us on by pointing, moving his/her arms in a swimming motion, and then clapping his/her man-hands excitedly together. None of us made a move towards swimming - Maya and I were definitely not going in because fresh water in Southeast Asia is somtimes known to harbor all sorts of unpleasant bacteria and parasites - except for the Russian dude, who didn't even have a change of clothing with him, as most of us did, but he whipped off his shirt, jumped right in (the pool turned out to be surprisingly deep), and did a couple laps (which basically meant that he lay flat on top of the water one way, then turned around and lay flat in the other direction).
On the way back from the "waterfall," Maya - who was already plenty pissed at how the trek was going so far - slipped on a stepping stone over a tiny creek and totally fell over into the water; fortunately, she caught herself with her hands on a rock, but not before she had completely drenched her sneakers (her one pair of actual shoes) and her pantlegs halfway up the shins and scratched up her knee. Now she was really pissed.
As we continued our walk back to the truck - and as I tried to calm Maya down - the crazy Russian dude ran off the path and up to a banana tree from which he plucked three mini bananas, tossing two to Maya and I. We glanced at them unsure of what to do with these "gifts," while he peeled his and chomped right into it. Our guide looked at him and us with a disturbed expression of his/her face. "Not good to eat," s/he said, shaking her head. The Russian dude spit his mouthful out; we tossed our bananas quickly back into the jungle.
Next stop: white-water rafting, which turned out - somewhat unbelievably, considering all that had come before - to be awesome. We were on a boat with the Australian and German girls, and our "captain," a hilarious hyperactive Thai kid who couldn't have been older than 16 and who tutored us in how to row our craft through the crashing waves and then shouted at us throughout the ride, "Forward! Forward!" "Back! Back!" "Down!!!" We all laughed and screamed as we rode the rollercoaster of the lurching river, and in the middle of the craziest rapids that our boat hit, Maya was fully launched airborn out of her seat and speared my lower back with her helmet-clad head. Like I said, awesome.
Drenched from head to toe after this ride, we moved onto the bamboo-boat riding portion of the trek. If Maya was pissed off before - at the orchid farm, 7-Eleven, her fall, her launch in the white-water - now she was taken to a whole new level of righteous indignation. Steered by standing Thai dudes with long bamboo poles, the bamboo boats didn't even float on top of the surface of the water but rather a good 6-inches below it, meaning that we all had no choice but to sit in the cold and assuredly dirty water (more on that in a bit) for the duration of the ride!Believe it or not, this is us on the so-called "raft"!
Now even more drenched than before - which shouldn't have been possible - we stumbled onto the bank and put on the dry change of clothes we had brought with us (and just about the only other change of clothes we have with us on this whole 4-month trip at all), then we piled back into the truck and went off for lunch - suspiciously tasty pad thai served up under a wooden canopy where skinny cats begged under our tables, head-bobbing chickens stalked around us, and the elephants we were about to ride stomped the earth. We've learned over our travels that there's no rhyme or reason to what food will or will not end up making you ill, and so no surprise here, though this lunch almost certainly should have had us retching, we never did get sick from it.
Elephant riding, which followed our meal, could have been awesome, if the poor beasts hadn't been so brutalized. The elephant Maya and I rode on seemed to be on his last legs, and we quickly fell far behind the rest of our group and their elephants (which we could see dropping ginormous poops right into the river which we had only too recently been riding down and sitting in); the kid sitting on our pachyderm's head in front of us (we sat on a precarious metal carriage somehow attached to the creature's back) egged it on and steered it along the muddy path by kicking his heels into its forehead and slamming a wooden rod with a nasty-looking metal hook on the end into its ears. By the time we had all-too-eagerly disembarked, the elephant had multiple bloody wounds on the sides of its head. Such treatment was particularly shocking since elephants are supposedly considered to be sacred creatures in Thailand. As we drove away I saw the boy with our elephant, bowing to it and saying "Thank you" to it - and then chaining it by its leg to a post.
The last stop on our trek was perhaps the strangest of all and in some ways, the most uncomfortable, but was still definitely a highlight for me: visiting the Karen longneck hilltribe. We hiked for a good 20 minutes into the jungle, crossing numerous streams and passing through banana-tree and bamboo forests. Finally, the shapes of wooden huts appeared from our of the thick foliage ahead.
The village that we entered was tiny (there may have been more of it somewhere deeper in the jungle where tourists are unwelcome) - no more than 10 huts - and there were also no more 10 longneck women and little girls (see below) sitting and standing around.
It was amazing and magical to see these people in person...
but it was also disturbing. I've read online some people describing the experience of visiting the longneck villages as going to "a human zoo"; it didn't feel that wrong and weird to me. But it was hard to know how to act around the tribespeople because the truth is that you were there to stare at them and take pictures of them (which we did only after asking permission from each person), not necessarily as oddities, but kind of... And it was weird how even the most outgoing and talkative members of our group suddenly starting speaking in hushed tones and how tense everyone got. It was hard to know how the longneck people themselves feel about the whole thing. As Maya and I read in our guidebook, the practice of the tribal females wearing those iconic brass rings that seem to stretch their necks (but actually compress their chests) had been dying out until it become apparent that the tribe could make money from it as a tourist draw, which makes any sightseer somewhat complicit in perpetuating what could be considered a deforming tradition. That said, the Karen tribe are refugees from Burma, and the money they earn by opening their villages to tourists may well by the best living they can make, and what they do to their bodies is beautiful in its own way - at least, I think so - and no more deforming than the extreme cosmetic surgery millions of white so-called-civilized westerners inflict upon themselves - so really, who are we to judge?
The one thing I know that I can judge at the end of that day? The trek. Lame.
But if that's what we thought we were getting into, what we got was mostly misadventure; our "trek" was wild, but more because it was a totally half-assed, chaotic tourist safari than because we were actually going out and exploring actual nature. Our tour guide picked us up at our guesthouse at 8:30am - s/he turned out, much to our surprise, to be a particularly thickly-built lady-boy with burly man-hands and huge ankles (that said, her face looked pretty womanly) absurdly juxtaposed with a full range of the most flamboyantly gay gestures you've ever seen. S/he loaded us into a pickup truck with a metal railing, a roof, and two benches installed in the back (this sort of pickup truck-cum-taxi/bus, known as a sawngthaew, are all over Chiang Mai, in addition to the usual car taxis, tuk-tuks, and motobai) and then we drove to another hotel to gather the rest of our trekking group: two guys and one girl from Seattle who had just arrived in Thailand a few days before, an Australian chick who was on the last day of her 3-month journey-home-via-the-world after living in England for 3 years, a German woman (who I know nothing about), and a totally crazy Russian dude who'd just gotten off the overnight-train from Bangkok that morning and jumped right onto this tour with no idea where it was going or what it involved, and without putting on any sort of bug repellant.
The pickup truck roared out through Chiang Mai, and after maybe half an hour, deposited us at an orchid farm, of all things, a stop that had not been on our itinerary, as far as any of us knew. We all wandered around, glancing with vague interest at the alien-looking flowers, wondering what the fuck we were doing here, while our tour guide and the guides from at least three other tours that had just pulled up (none of whom were lady-boys) ate their breakfast under this rather luxurious-looking canopy set up in the middle of the garden. What the fuck, indeed.
We all waited by the truck for our guide to finish eating. S/he finally reappeared, sashaying out from amid the orchids; Maya, who had already had enough, asked him/her what our next stop was. The lady-boy told us, "7-Eleven."
Sure enough, after 10 minutes or so, our truck pulled up to a 7-Eleven (the convenience store franchises, much like KFC in China, are everywhere in Thailand), where our guide bought two bags of chips, and then it was finally off to the jungle, where s/he promised us that we would, first, white-water raft and bamboo raft, then visit the Karen longneck hilltribe, then ride elephants, then hike to a waterfall, and then call it a day.
The road through the jungle was part paved with massive potholes and part not-paved with even more massive potholes, and all of us sitting in the back felt every bump right in our tail bones and whiplashing necks. Our guide meanwhile sat contentedly up in the cabin next to the driver, reading a book - which I joked was probably White Water Rafting for Dummies, much to the horror of the Australian and German chicks, who were both particularly nervous about that portion of our trek. The booking agent in Chiang Mai with whom Maya and I had booked the tour had told us that because the roads into the jungle were so rough, our trek would have to take a truck instead of the air-conditioned van that less adventurous treks take; turned out that our truck was 2-wheel drive anyway, and as we thudded slowly up the road, we watched numerous air-conditioned vans rumble painlessly by us.
Finally our truck pulled over to the side of the road next to some wooden shacks where we saw big white-water rafts set up; our guide got out and shouted at some young Thai boys who seemed to be telling her that they weren't ready for us right now. Clearly pissed off, s/he got back into the truck and we rumbled onto our way to god knows where.
When we pulled over next, our guide explained to us that we would actually be hiking to the waterfall first. So we all tumbled out the back of the truck, stretched our aching bodies, and followed him/her as s/he sashayed up a narrow, crumbly path into the jungle, wearing just his/her flip-flops. After maybe a 15-minute walk, we arrived at probably the most anticlimatic waterfall I've even seen - there are bigger "falls" in the park 10 minutes from my parents' house in Pennsylvania. But the lady-boy seemed very pleased with where s/he'd guided us, and s/he proceeded to urge us to go swimming in the pool at the base of the "fall," which was about the size of a large bathtub. His/her English wasn't great, so s/he mostly urged us on by pointing, moving his/her arms in a swimming motion, and then clapping his/her man-hands excitedly together. None of us made a move towards swimming - Maya and I were definitely not going in because fresh water in Southeast Asia is somtimes known to harbor all sorts of unpleasant bacteria and parasites - except for the Russian dude, who didn't even have a change of clothing with him, as most of us did, but he whipped off his shirt, jumped right in (the pool turned out to be surprisingly deep), and did a couple laps (which basically meant that he lay flat on top of the water one way, then turned around and lay flat in the other direction).
On the way back from the "waterfall," Maya - who was already plenty pissed at how the trek was going so far - slipped on a stepping stone over a tiny creek and totally fell over into the water; fortunately, she caught herself with her hands on a rock, but not before she had completely drenched her sneakers (her one pair of actual shoes) and her pantlegs halfway up the shins and scratched up her knee. Now she was really pissed.
As we continued our walk back to the truck - and as I tried to calm Maya down - the crazy Russian dude ran off the path and up to a banana tree from which he plucked three mini bananas, tossing two to Maya and I. We glanced at them unsure of what to do with these "gifts," while he peeled his and chomped right into it. Our guide looked at him and us with a disturbed expression of his/her face. "Not good to eat," s/he said, shaking her head. The Russian dude spit his mouthful out; we tossed our bananas quickly back into the jungle.
Next stop: white-water rafting, which turned out - somewhat unbelievably, considering all that had come before - to be awesome. We were on a boat with the Australian and German girls, and our "captain," a hilarious hyperactive Thai kid who couldn't have been older than 16 and who tutored us in how to row our craft through the crashing waves and then shouted at us throughout the ride, "Forward! Forward!" "Back! Back!" "Down!!!" We all laughed and screamed as we rode the rollercoaster of the lurching river, and in the middle of the craziest rapids that our boat hit, Maya was fully launched airborn out of her seat and speared my lower back with her helmet-clad head. Like I said, awesome.
Drenched from head to toe after this ride, we moved onto the bamboo-boat riding portion of the trek. If Maya was pissed off before - at the orchid farm, 7-Eleven, her fall, her launch in the white-water - now she was taken to a whole new level of righteous indignation. Steered by standing Thai dudes with long bamboo poles, the bamboo boats didn't even float on top of the surface of the water but rather a good 6-inches below it, meaning that we all had no choice but to sit in the cold and assuredly dirty water (more on that in a bit) for the duration of the ride!Believe it or not, this is us on the so-called "raft"!
Now even more drenched than before - which shouldn't have been possible - we stumbled onto the bank and put on the dry change of clothes we had brought with us (and just about the only other change of clothes we have with us on this whole 4-month trip at all), then we piled back into the truck and went off for lunch - suspiciously tasty pad thai served up under a wooden canopy where skinny cats begged under our tables, head-bobbing chickens stalked around us, and the elephants we were about to ride stomped the earth. We've learned over our travels that there's no rhyme or reason to what food will or will not end up making you ill, and so no surprise here, though this lunch almost certainly should have had us retching, we never did get sick from it.Elephant riding, which followed our meal, could have been awesome, if the poor beasts hadn't been so brutalized. The elephant Maya and I rode on seemed to be on his last legs, and we quickly fell far behind the rest of our group and their elephants (which we could see dropping ginormous poops right into the river which we had only too recently been riding down and sitting in); the kid sitting on our pachyderm's head in front of us (we sat on a precarious metal carriage somehow attached to the creature's back) egged it on and steered it along the muddy path by kicking his heels into its forehead and slamming a wooden rod with a nasty-looking metal hook on the end into its ears. By the time we had all-too-eagerly disembarked, the elephant had multiple bloody wounds on the sides of its head. Such treatment was particularly shocking since elephants are supposedly considered to be sacred creatures in Thailand. As we drove away I saw the boy with our elephant, bowing to it and saying "Thank you" to it - and then chaining it by its leg to a post.
The last stop on our trek was perhaps the strangest of all and in some ways, the most uncomfortable, but was still definitely a highlight for me: visiting the Karen longneck hilltribe. We hiked for a good 20 minutes into the jungle, crossing numerous streams and passing through banana-tree and bamboo forests. Finally, the shapes of wooden huts appeared from our of the thick foliage ahead.
The village that we entered was tiny (there may have been more of it somewhere deeper in the jungle where tourists are unwelcome) - no more than 10 huts - and there were also no more 10 longneck women and little girls (see below) sitting and standing around.
It was amazing and magical to see these people in person...
but it was also disturbing. I've read online some people describing the experience of visiting the longneck villages as going to "a human zoo"; it didn't feel that wrong and weird to me. But it was hard to know how to act around the tribespeople because the truth is that you were there to stare at them and take pictures of them (which we did only after asking permission from each person), not necessarily as oddities, but kind of... And it was weird how even the most outgoing and talkative members of our group suddenly starting speaking in hushed tones and how tense everyone got. It was hard to know how the longneck people themselves feel about the whole thing. As Maya and I read in our guidebook, the practice of the tribal females wearing those iconic brass rings that seem to stretch their necks (but actually compress their chests) had been dying out until it become apparent that the tribe could make money from it as a tourist draw, which makes any sightseer somewhat complicit in perpetuating what could be considered a deforming tradition. That said, the Karen tribe are refugees from Burma, and the money they earn by opening their villages to tourists may well by the best living they can make, and what they do to their bodies is beautiful in its own way - at least, I think so - and no more deforming than the extreme cosmetic surgery millions of white so-called-civilized westerners inflict upon themselves - so really, who are we to judge?
The one thing I know that I can judge at the end of that day? The trek. Lame.
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
do do that voodoo
For all of you in suspense about Eveline and the bloody ghost (in other words, all of you), here's an update - and one of the most fucking hilarious stories I've heard in a long time - she emailed me a few days ago:
so yeah, the ghost called (like 2 weeks ago) to tell me that the band [Voodoo Kungfu] was playing nov 6 (last friday) so i FINALLY got to go hang out with him, & it was quite a night.
i got my friend jamila to come with, & jamila brought her friend sarabeth. so we get there, pay the cover, & go in to the bar. i see the drummer but not the ghost. so after buying a drink & standing around for a few moments, i'm like, hmm, what am i supposed to do? so then i text the ghost that i'm there & he calls back being like, where are you, i'm here too. some confusion ensues (what with that whole little i-don't-speak-chinese thing) but we wind up meeting at the entrance to the bar. then he starts to go talk to the little window lady to let me in for free & i'm like, oh i already paid the cover. & he looks really disappointed & is like, oh no, you did? & i was like, yeah it's okay no worries. but inside i'm thinking something more like - you idiot, you could have told me AHEAD of time to call you before going in.
so then he's like, want to go backstage? so i go fetch my friends & we're like, okay we're going back stage. much to my surprise going back stage means going up onto the stage & into this little door in the back of the stage. & this btw is a really nice club, 2 floors, really great sound system, not a little dive like club 13. so yeah, we climb the stairs onto the stage, go through a door in the back, and walk into....the most brightly lit room in the world. it is like stark white, like it looks like it was painted yesterday, & everyone is sitting against the wall & there are 2 fluorescent lights overhead. i.e. a room full of dreadlocked chinese guys & their bored looking girlfriends all look up at us the moment we walk in & we're like, ack. & it's a small room & we can't totally speak chinese and - yeah. super embarrassing. of course the chinese guys, being chinese guys, jump up & insist that we sit on the couch even though it basically means they have nowhere to sit in this tiny little room, & we keep insisting no, & there's this long period where everybody's standing and insisting & blah blah & finally the ghost says in extremely loud, accented english, "puh-lease-uh sit down-uh!" so finally we all sit (with the guys who gave up their seats now perched awkwardly on various chair arms or for the ghost, on the coffee table) & . . . silence.
crickets chirp.
me, jamila & sarabeth kind of feel like we're on stage with a ring of chinese strangers watching us, all of them looking not quite unfriendly but also seeming to be thinking, "who the fuck are these people?"
there's a tubby, dorky looking guy next to me playing guitar & finally the ghost is like, give that to me. so then the ghost starts playing guitar. as jamila whispered to me, he was obviously feeling really shy/awkward & didn't know what to do with himself or how to talk to me so he just sat against the wall across the room like a teenage boy playing guitar.
okay this is getting way too long. basically we finally managed to chat a little bit, although a lot of it was pretty awkward because we sort of had to talk loudly across the room with the other people in the room on either side looking on, as if watching a tennis match. there was a lot of like, one person says something, the other person says huh?, we both scoot forward & lean way forward to be nearer each other to hear better, statement is repeated, statement is answered, we both sit back against the wall again, he starts playing guitar again, we ponder what to say next.
oh and, after that initial long awkward period of not talking & him playing guitar & looking down & me looking at the ceiling & around, etc., when he FINALLY spoke to me, do you know what the first thing he said was?
he asked me if i know bon jovi.
ok it might translate better as something like, "in america, have you met bon jovi?" but still.
i said i don't know bon jovi. then it occured to me that actually i have seen bon jovi, once, when he sang a song at this john kerry fundraiser concert at radio city music hall that i went to for free through work. so i tell him, oh i have seen him sing like one song from really far away. and then the ghost is like, "was he..." and i expect that sentence to end in "good" but instead he says, "good-looking?" i'm like, huh? oh. "uhhh, yeah i guess he's good-looking. i mean, he's getting a little old but, uhh, yeah, sure."
he said 2 more english phrases over the course of the night - "do you speak chinese?" (to jamila), and "tonight i break your fucking face," which is apparently a limp bizkit lyric.
at some point the opening band started playing & we're like, oh shit. we can't get out of this room now without walking onto the stage. at some point my friend jason & some others arrive & text me & jamila, "where are you?" & i have to write back, "we're trapped backstage. seriously."
at some point the singer & his girlfriend (i think) walk in & look at us kind of like, "who the hell are these strange people sitting in our backstage area?" & then disappear into the bathroom & then come back out & perch somewhere awkward (what with there being no place to sit thanks to me, jamila & sarabeth.)
the ghost managed to get less adolescent-boy-shy & even managed to come sit by me to chat for a bit. however, this involved him sharing the armchair with the tubby, dorky, but very nice guy next to me, who turned out to be a friend of his from back home, & the tubby friend would like stroke the ghost's arm or rest his hand on the ghost's back & stuff. & from my low angle it kind of looked like the ghost was sitting on tubby guy's lap while tubby guy affectionately stroked his arm & back.
tubby & i talked a lot, but because of his heavy accent when saying band names in english, it was mostly,
"do you like [insert name of band.]"
"huh?"
"[name of band.]"
"say that one more time?"
"[name of band.]"
"wait - spell that?"
"[name of band, spelled out in english.]"
"ohhhh! yeah i like them."
*repeat entire conversation several more times, inserting a different band each time.*
oh & it's also funny because whenever the ghost addressed me (by calling out across the room) he would say my chinese name, & since i never actually use my chinese name (i only gave it to him that night because he was gonna store my name in his phone & i assumed it would be harder to communicate my english name than just tell him the chinese characters to put in) there'd be like a split second where i didn't quite register that he was saying my name. so he'd begin a sentence "zhao yi" and it'd be like - beat of silence - oh wait that's me! ha.
oh and the BEST part of the night. talking to the drummer. I LOVE HIM. he has like the BEST personality in the world. he also, as i discovered when i went & sat by him & saw him up close, has one little patch of hair below his lip that is basically a soul patch dreadlock. yes, there is a tuft of hair below his lip that is dreaded into like a PERFECT cylinder that isn't any narrower at the bottom than at the top.
but so, i went over & was like, "i have to ask you - how do you know how to do mongolian throat singing?! where did you study it?" & in a nutshell, he was basically like, "it's the funniest thing - i never studied mongolian throat singing anywhere, i just kind of discovered out of the blue one day that i could do it!" but the explanation was a lot longer than that. THEN he's like, "when i was little there was this movie (or maybe cartoon?) that i used to watch, and it had this big scary monster on it who would yell in a really low growly voice, and i liked to imitate him. so i think doing that all the time built up my vocal chords so i can do mongolian throat singing now!" & then i *think* he said that his girlfriend is mongolian & gave him a cd of throat singing once, about 3 years ago, & he listened to it & was just kind of like, hey i bet i can do that. and he could. how fucking AMAZING and hilarious is that? also the singer & one of the other members of the band are taking throat singing lessons now from some old mongolian sage who lives by the lake that you guys were staying near. they're all also now trying to learn the kind of throat singing where you split your voice & can sing 2 notes at once!
also the drummer is from yunnan (very south of china), which explains why he's so short, hee.
oh and the mummy? totally hot. okay well maybe not to most people, but i found him completely hot w/o his makeup on. sadly he seemed to have a girlfriend. oh but at one point he like stood up right in front of me in the middle of the room & was doing all these big elaborate stretches and deep bends and swinging his arms around and stuff. like at one point i look up & his ass is right in my face because he's touching his toes.
& then of course when they finally performed they rocked and were amazing and it was even better than at club 13 because the sound system at this other new bar was AMAZING. and then of course, after the show the ghost & i are talking (well, barely, still not so good at the whole, how to talk to a girl thing) & this hungarian guy comes up to us and says he's a filmmaker & the band was awesome & do they have a cd & how can he get in touch with them, what's their website, etc. (i was translating for him.) and of course the ghost is just like, huh? cd? website? why on earth would a POPULAR METAL BAND have any of those things? so i'm like, they basically have nothing. then the hungarian filmmaker is like, don't you have ANYTHING? can i email you? how can i get in touch with you guys? finally the ghost comes up with the helpful tidbit that they can go onto baidu (the chinese equivalent of google) and search their name in chinese. uhhh, thanks. the guy presses some more and then finally the ghost is like, well i guess i can give him my phone number. so we wrote down his number for the guy & the guy said he had a translator he could get to call & talk for him. god it just KILLS me that these guys could actually be pretty big if they like, you know, had a manager who was with-it or someone who could speak english working wiht them or something but, nope, none of that. although on the other hand it's really cool that, given their apparent lack of any hitting-it-big dreams, they i guess do this for fun? and for like ,years, right? at least however many years it took the singer's hair to grow from that awful 'do in the DVD to the length it is now.
OH and i forgot to mention - the drummer is in 2 other bands. one is a pop rock band and one is . . . brace yourselves . . .
a flamenco band.
yup.
so yeah, the ghost called (like 2 weeks ago) to tell me that the band [Voodoo Kungfu] was playing nov 6 (last friday) so i FINALLY got to go hang out with him, & it was quite a night.
i got my friend jamila to come with, & jamila brought her friend sarabeth. so we get there, pay the cover, & go in to the bar. i see the drummer but not the ghost. so after buying a drink & standing around for a few moments, i'm like, hmm, what am i supposed to do? so then i text the ghost that i'm there & he calls back being like, where are you, i'm here too. some confusion ensues (what with that whole little i-don't-speak-chinese thing) but we wind up meeting at the entrance to the bar. then he starts to go talk to the little window lady to let me in for free & i'm like, oh i already paid the cover. & he looks really disappointed & is like, oh no, you did? & i was like, yeah it's okay no worries. but inside i'm thinking something more like - you idiot, you could have told me AHEAD of time to call you before going in.
so then he's like, want to go backstage? so i go fetch my friends & we're like, okay we're going back stage. much to my surprise going back stage means going up onto the stage & into this little door in the back of the stage. & this btw is a really nice club, 2 floors, really great sound system, not a little dive like club 13. so yeah, we climb the stairs onto the stage, go through a door in the back, and walk into....the most brightly lit room in the world. it is like stark white, like it looks like it was painted yesterday, & everyone is sitting against the wall & there are 2 fluorescent lights overhead. i.e. a room full of dreadlocked chinese guys & their bored looking girlfriends all look up at us the moment we walk in & we're like, ack. & it's a small room & we can't totally speak chinese and - yeah. super embarrassing. of course the chinese guys, being chinese guys, jump up & insist that we sit on the couch even though it basically means they have nowhere to sit in this tiny little room, & we keep insisting no, & there's this long period where everybody's standing and insisting & blah blah & finally the ghost says in extremely loud, accented english, "puh-lease-uh sit down-uh!" so finally we all sit (with the guys who gave up their seats now perched awkwardly on various chair arms or for the ghost, on the coffee table) & . . . silence.
crickets chirp.
me, jamila & sarabeth kind of feel like we're on stage with a ring of chinese strangers watching us, all of them looking not quite unfriendly but also seeming to be thinking, "who the fuck are these people?"
there's a tubby, dorky looking guy next to me playing guitar & finally the ghost is like, give that to me. so then the ghost starts playing guitar. as jamila whispered to me, he was obviously feeling really shy/awkward & didn't know what to do with himself or how to talk to me so he just sat against the wall across the room like a teenage boy playing guitar.
okay this is getting way too long. basically we finally managed to chat a little bit, although a lot of it was pretty awkward because we sort of had to talk loudly across the room with the other people in the room on either side looking on, as if watching a tennis match. there was a lot of like, one person says something, the other person says huh?, we both scoot forward & lean way forward to be nearer each other to hear better, statement is repeated, statement is answered, we both sit back against the wall again, he starts playing guitar again, we ponder what to say next.
oh and, after that initial long awkward period of not talking & him playing guitar & looking down & me looking at the ceiling & around, etc., when he FINALLY spoke to me, do you know what the first thing he said was?
he asked me if i know bon jovi.
ok it might translate better as something like, "in america, have you met bon jovi?" but still.
i said i don't know bon jovi. then it occured to me that actually i have seen bon jovi, once, when he sang a song at this john kerry fundraiser concert at radio city music hall that i went to for free through work. so i tell him, oh i have seen him sing like one song from really far away. and then the ghost is like, "was he..." and i expect that sentence to end in "good" but instead he says, "good-looking?" i'm like, huh? oh. "uhhh, yeah i guess he's good-looking. i mean, he's getting a little old but, uhh, yeah, sure."
he said 2 more english phrases over the course of the night - "do you speak chinese?" (to jamila), and "tonight i break your fucking face," which is apparently a limp bizkit lyric.
at some point the opening band started playing & we're like, oh shit. we can't get out of this room now without walking onto the stage. at some point my friend jason & some others arrive & text me & jamila, "where are you?" & i have to write back, "we're trapped backstage. seriously."
at some point the singer & his girlfriend (i think) walk in & look at us kind of like, "who the hell are these strange people sitting in our backstage area?" & then disappear into the bathroom & then come back out & perch somewhere awkward (what with there being no place to sit thanks to me, jamila & sarabeth.)
the ghost managed to get less adolescent-boy-shy & even managed to come sit by me to chat for a bit. however, this involved him sharing the armchair with the tubby, dorky, but very nice guy next to me, who turned out to be a friend of his from back home, & the tubby friend would like stroke the ghost's arm or rest his hand on the ghost's back & stuff. & from my low angle it kind of looked like the ghost was sitting on tubby guy's lap while tubby guy affectionately stroked his arm & back.
tubby & i talked a lot, but because of his heavy accent when saying band names in english, it was mostly,
"do you like [insert name of band.]"
"huh?"
"[name of band.]"
"say that one more time?"
"[name of band.]"
"wait - spell that?"
"[name of band, spelled out in english.]"
"ohhhh! yeah i like them."
*repeat entire conversation several more times, inserting a different band each time.*
oh & it's also funny because whenever the ghost addressed me (by calling out across the room) he would say my chinese name, & since i never actually use my chinese name (i only gave it to him that night because he was gonna store my name in his phone & i assumed it would be harder to communicate my english name than just tell him the chinese characters to put in) there'd be like a split second where i didn't quite register that he was saying my name. so he'd begin a sentence "zhao yi" and it'd be like - beat of silence - oh wait that's me! ha.
oh and the BEST part of the night. talking to the drummer. I LOVE HIM. he has like the BEST personality in the world. he also, as i discovered when i went & sat by him & saw him up close, has one little patch of hair below his lip that is basically a soul patch dreadlock. yes, there is a tuft of hair below his lip that is dreaded into like a PERFECT cylinder that isn't any narrower at the bottom than at the top.
but so, i went over & was like, "i have to ask you - how do you know how to do mongolian throat singing?! where did you study it?" & in a nutshell, he was basically like, "it's the funniest thing - i never studied mongolian throat singing anywhere, i just kind of discovered out of the blue one day that i could do it!" but the explanation was a lot longer than that. THEN he's like, "when i was little there was this movie (or maybe cartoon?) that i used to watch, and it had this big scary monster on it who would yell in a really low growly voice, and i liked to imitate him. so i think doing that all the time built up my vocal chords so i can do mongolian throat singing now!" & then i *think* he said that his girlfriend is mongolian & gave him a cd of throat singing once, about 3 years ago, & he listened to it & was just kind of like, hey i bet i can do that. and he could. how fucking AMAZING and hilarious is that? also the singer & one of the other members of the band are taking throat singing lessons now from some old mongolian sage who lives by the lake that you guys were staying near. they're all also now trying to learn the kind of throat singing where you split your voice & can sing 2 notes at once!
also the drummer is from yunnan (very south of china), which explains why he's so short, hee.
oh and the mummy? totally hot. okay well maybe not to most people, but i found him completely hot w/o his makeup on. sadly he seemed to have a girlfriend. oh but at one point he like stood up right in front of me in the middle of the room & was doing all these big elaborate stretches and deep bends and swinging his arms around and stuff. like at one point i look up & his ass is right in my face because he's touching his toes.
& then of course when they finally performed they rocked and were amazing and it was even better than at club 13 because the sound system at this other new bar was AMAZING. and then of course, after the show the ghost & i are talking (well, barely, still not so good at the whole, how to talk to a girl thing) & this hungarian guy comes up to us and says he's a filmmaker & the band was awesome & do they have a cd & how can he get in touch with them, what's their website, etc. (i was translating for him.) and of course the ghost is just like, huh? cd? website? why on earth would a POPULAR METAL BAND have any of those things? so i'm like, they basically have nothing. then the hungarian filmmaker is like, don't you have ANYTHING? can i email you? how can i get in touch with you guys? finally the ghost comes up with the helpful tidbit that they can go onto baidu (the chinese equivalent of google) and search their name in chinese. uhhh, thanks. the guy presses some more and then finally the ghost is like, well i guess i can give him my phone number. so we wrote down his number for the guy & the guy said he had a translator he could get to call & talk for him. god it just KILLS me that these guys could actually be pretty big if they like, you know, had a manager who was with-it or someone who could speak english working wiht them or something but, nope, none of that. although on the other hand it's really cool that, given their apparent lack of any hitting-it-big dreams, they i guess do this for fun? and for like ,years, right? at least however many years it took the singer's hair to grow from that awful 'do in the DVD to the length it is now.
OH and i forgot to mention - the drummer is in 2 other bands. one is a pop rock band and one is . . . brace yourselves . . .
a flamenco band.
yup.
Sunday, November 11, 2007
bangcock
So Maya and I are in Chiang Mai, Thailand, right now. We just got here after spending 6 frustrating, annoying, and very occasionally awesome days in the mad metropolis that is Bangkok. Maya's and my current mindset surely contributed to our issues there - the books that we've read on the subject of taking long trips like ours warned us that around the 2-month mark, most travelers start to tire and feel homesick, and as we've headed into the second leg of our journey, that has definitely proved to be the case: We're fucking beat, and a day rarely goes by during which one or both of us doesn't say, "I just want to go home." That said, Bangkok really was a pain in the ass. Since I'm feeling wiped out - and suffering from a bit of writer's block - here's just a quick rundown of the good, bad, and the ugly of the Bangkok we experienced:
Crazy and cool that its not just a myth: Kathoey, a.k.a. lady boys, a.k.a. Thai transvestites, really are everywhere. There are beautiful, completely convincing ladyboys hanging out and/or working at snazzy bars, clubs, and restaurants; there are chubby, stubbly, completely unconvincing ladyboys walking around the streets, arm-in-arm with their (real) girlfriends; and there are even teenage schoolgirl ladyboys brushing by you along the sidewalk in their school uniforms, which look very much like Catholic school uniforms, making for a truly amazing image to western eyes.
Seriously disgusting and disturbing that its not just a myth: "Sexpats" (humorously - and not totally inaccurately - described by wikitravel as a "Fifty-plus, bald, beer belly, stained shirt, lovestruck expression and a hairy arm wrapped around a girl too young to be their daughter") really are everywhere, too. Along our way through town, Maya and I saw all too many older white guys - most dressed not so much like the comic-book-store owner on the Simpsons, as the above description suggests, and more like Sonny Crockett from Miami Vice - walking around with a noticeably younger and slutily-dressed Asian chick. Ewwwww.
Fucking annoying that it is a myth: Thailand being the "Land of Smiles"? That's the country's nickname and its rep - smiling is the rule; people are friendly; frowning, arguing, and making a scene in public are taboo. So, as our time in Thailand approached, Maya had been telling me that I should get ready to smile a lot if I want to fit in there (if you don't know already, I'm not generally a big smiler). Well, no worries there, as it's turned out. The staff at our guesthouse is made up of 4 of the grumpiest, grouchiest women we've ever met anywhere (the only nice woman there doesn't speak a peep of English). The tuk-tuk and taxi drivers have almost all turned out to be assholes - metered taxi drivers routinely refuse to use their meter, while tuk-tuk drivers will literally drive away from you without so much as a word if your fare offer doesn't meet their expectations. Vendors at Chatuchak Market, which, like any Asian market, is supposed to be all about the bargaining, have refused to bargain with us (for bootleg metal T-shirts, which we had to have). It's as if they have come to see white foreigners as little more than walking wallets for the picking. And there is a strain of discrimination in the workings of the city - at some of the sightseeing locations, there are different entrances for foreigners and for Thai people; at some of the religious sites, where you are supposed to remove your shoes before entering, there are different places for foreigners to leave their shoes and for Thai to leave their shoes; and at the Ratchadamnoen Boxing Stadium, where we watched a string of Mauy Thai fights (more on that in a second), there's a separate section marked off for foreigners (though we ignored the sign and sat with the natives)! Well, I call bullshit. "Land of smiles," my ass. I'm not smiling. I'm fucking pissed. And Maya's probably even more pissed.
Possibly the cheesiest road in the world: Khao San Road. Think Bourbon Street, then add a stand at every half-block where young Asian women sit braiding dreadlock hair extensions to the scalps of tie-dye-clad pseudo-hippie tourists. Add carts selling grilled meal worms and beetles. Add fratboy-stuffed bars where bands play acoustic covers of that Umbrella song by Rihanna. Add hundreds of stands selling the most retarded "joke" T-shirts you've ever seen...
(Speaking of which,) Embarassing to be associated with, and perhaps the explanation as to why Bangkok seems to be so mean to its tourists: Bangkok tourists are the cheesiest we've met so far. In our guesthouse alone, there was some cheesy goateed-and-ponytailed European dude who wore, 2 days in a row, a T-shirt with "The Goodfucker" emblazoned on it in the font and logo of The Godfather trilogy. There was another dude wearing a T-shirt with "iPood" on it with a traffic-sign-style illustration of a person on the toilet, vomiting and, yeah, presumably, pooing. The tourists who weren't wearing retarded "joke" T-shirts like these, were wearing horrible linen ethnic clothing. And then there were all the French families travelling with their kids, who they left to play in the common space in their dirt-and-I-can-only-imagine-what-stained underwear. Oh, the manatee...
Strange and kind of creepy: How much the Thai love their king. There are huge posters of the dude everywhere, and in the markets, there are stands that exclusively sell photos of him - baby photos, kid photos, teenage photos, family photos, and on and on. Before a movie starts at the movie megaplex in the mall, they play a short trailer featuring the national anthem and rainy scenes of the Thai landscape with images of the king tumbling across the screen in raindrop shapes; sitting in the theater as this played, Maya and I looked at each other, then she (very intelligently, it turned out) looked back to see the rest of the audience (all Thai) standing reverently. Afraid we would be lynched if we didn't, we stood as well.
Awesome but brutal as all hell: Muay Thai at Ratchadamnoen Boxing Stadium, which we watched on our second night in the city. The stadium was as ghetto as it gets - dirty concrete bleachers/steps crawling with small cockroaches, the air buzzing with mosquitoes, the second and third seating levels separated by a chainlink fence. We sat in the second level where we were surrounded by the wildly shouting and gesticulating locals, just about all of whom were obviously gambling on the fights (just about all the other whities had paid the big bucks for the "ringside seats," which meant they got none of the true vibe of the matches and got to crane their necks up at the ring to see any of the action). We befriended a tattoo-covered little punk-rock Thai girl who was sitting next to us, and she talked us through some of the action, explaining that when the crowd shouted along with the fighters pounding on each other, they were basically shouting for the dude they had bet on to, "Hit!" Hit!" As for the fights themselves, 4 of the 7 we watched ended in knockouts, and in 3 of those, the knockouted dude managed to stand and walk out of the ring under his own power; one of them, however - a particularly lanky fighter, who couldn't have been older than 16 and whom I couldn't help but pull for, since he was the obvious underdog - went down cold and was carried out on a stretcher.
Awesome but shocking and kind of frightening: The monitor lizards in Lumphini Park. One day we went for a walk in what is basically Bangkok's Central Park. We were walking along this relaxing lake, over a bridge, when I noticed something big and reptilian crawling around near the walkway in front of us. "What's that?" I said to Maya. She squinted ahead. "Is that an alligator?" she responded, aghast. I looked closer. "No," I said, "I think that's a monitor lizard," showing off how many nature shows I've watched on TV. We crept closer, and it was indeed a big monitor lizard, no shorter than 4 feet long, creeping around, completely uncaged and uncontrolled. We got to within 10 feet of it, watched as it flicked its long tongue out, tasting the air...
...and then slid into the lake, and swam away. It didn't swim far though, exiting the water 20 yards away or so, right next to a Thai man who was napping on the grass by the shore - I was sure he was going to be lunch, but the lizard just positioned itself in the sunlight and sat there contentedly. We took our own seats on a bench in the shade and watched the strange scene. Next thing I knew I heard a loud rustling from my left, Maya let out a shriek and lept up onto her bench. Two other monitor lizards - a massive one, maybe as long as I am tall, and a smaller one, about the size of the original specimen - had scurried out from a nearby brush to within a few feet of us; the larger one, presumably male, seemed to be pursuing the smaller, presumably female (but in Thailand, as I said earlier, you can never be sure). I joined Maya, standing on the top of my bench. We watched these lizards, which eventually crept into the water like the first. To end this absurd tale, as we walked around the rest of the park, we discovered that there were ridiculously large monitor lizards hanging out everywhere, and none of the Thai people lounging in the park seemed to give a second thought about them. Monitor lizards must be like Thai squirrels, I guess - except big, scaly, and with possibly venomous saliva.
Totally awesome but totally sick: The Siriraj Museum of Medicine, which includes a museum of forensic medicine and a museum of parasitology. This place seriously put what had been the sickest museum Maya and I had ever visited - the Mutter Museum in Philly - to fucking shame. Just a few of the ridiculously gruesome artifacts we encountered (as we walked around the place, our jaws on the floor, along with numerous Thai families complete with little kids)? The actual head of a man who had been shot through the brain, preserved in a jar and bisected so you could see the path that the bullet tore through his skull and gray matter. Walls and walls of glass cases containing just about every body part you could imagine, all taken from people who had died various violent deaths - from tongues with bullet holes in them to a digestive system blackened and burst after its owner drank acid. Jars and jars containing all stages of fetuses, including one with an enlarged, alien-like head - small piles of candy and toys sat in front of these jars, left for the dead babies by museum visitors. The preserved watermelon-size scrotum of a man who contracted the Elephantiasis parasite, which swells its victims' anatomy - particularly the genatalia - to grotesque proportions. A long hall of blownup photos of death scenes, including those of children who had been blown up by Molotov Cocktails, crushed by machinery, or mangled in traffic accidents (many looked just like chunks of ground beef with hands and legs sticking off of them). A large clay urn in which, as the photos hung above it revealed, a boy had been cooked to his death. The complete preserved naked body of the Chinese serial child-killer and cannibal Si-Oui. For more in-depth description of the place with some pics, click here. Seriously, if you're ever in the 'hood, you gotta check this place out - it'll blow your mind.
Gaudy as all shit and tourist-swarmed as all fuck: Wat Phreaw Kaew and the Grand Palace. I thought it was like being at Disney Land - but without the rides.
Pretty fucking cool: Wat Po, which houses a massive 46-meter-long, 15-meters-high (you do the math) reclining Buddha.
Best random discovery: Battle of the Bands outside of the Bangkok CentralWorld mega-mall. We were just walking through some markets in downtown when we heard the crunch of a loud powerchord, and following the sounds, we found a huge stage setup right in front of the mall with hundreds of Thai seated and standing in front. A Thai metalcore band was rocking onstage. When they finished two songs, they walked to the front of the stage, and a panel of judges in a tent gave their critique (in Thai, unfortunately). We stayed for four more bands - a power-pop band, a Cranberries-like girl-fronted alt-rock band, an cringe-worthy emo band, and a totally hilarious funk band with a saxaphone player, a DJ, and a frontman-guitarist in a cowboy hat and a leopard-print jacket who pulled out the most painfully earnest facial expressions as he did his best Anthony Keedis impression. (The guy actually reminded Maya, and me, after she pointed it out, of this guy we call "Bidet." Jade and Lamb, and Anna, you know who we're talking about.)
Worst random discovery: The Thai horror movie we saw at the CentralWorld movie theater. The Spirit World. Do not, I repeat, do not see it.
Hair-pullingly frustrating: Trying to find true metal shit in Bangkok. Before we arrived, I had looked up what metal bars and stores there were in the city on metaltravelguide.com. It looked like there were a lot - bars called Immortal, Metal Zone, the Rock Pub, and Chaos City, and a record shop called Metal Quest - so Maya and I were pretty psyched. As it turned out, most of the places didn't end up being at the addressed listed on the website, and the ones that did - Immortal and the Rock Pub - fucking sucked (Immortal, though it was covered in metal band posters and stickers, played hip-hop and lame radio rock; and Rock Pub, when we went there, was completely empty, except for us and the 7-person staff, and was playing AC/DC and Poison concert videos on a big monitor). What made this all the more irritating was that all the local kids in Bangkok seemed to be wearing metal T-shirts - one night on Khao San Road (where we went haplessly hoping that Immortal would be playing metal) we saw Thai kids hanging out in Pantera, Metallica, Cannibal Corpse, Iron Maiden, White Zombie, Napalm Death, Skinny Puppy, As I Lay Dying, Killswitch Engage, and Avenged Sevenfold shirts! Out of desperation, I finally emailed the webmaster of this Bangkok-based metal webzine, siammetal.com, asking him where, oh, where were all the metal clubs, bars, and/or stores. He wrote right back, explaining that there weren't really any clubs or bars (and agreeing with me that Immortal and Rock Pub sucked), but that there were some metal record stores, including Metal Quest, which was, according to him, at a completely different address than on metaltravelguide.com. A few days later, Maya and I went to Metal Quest, which ended up being a tiny shop with no sign on the top floor of a mega-mall! I bought two CDs by Thai metal black-metal bands (the store only had three CDs by Thai bands), and we talked to the owner - a super-nice, awkward metal dude with limited English skills. He confirmed that the Bangkok metal scene kind of sucked - the only upcoming show was a big death/grindcore fest called "Bangcock," which is going down 3 days after we leave Thailand - and when we asked about all the kids in metal shirts, he explained that it's just a fashion thing, that a few popular emo bands have members who've worn metal T-shirts in videos and in concert, and so their fans have followed suit. But they don't listen to the music, he said with a resigned sigh. We had noticed that most of the kids we'd seen in metal tees had completely over-the-top emo haircuts, and we pointed out that to the Metal Quest dude. "Yeah," he agreed, making a diagonal slash across his forehead to indicate the kind of angular cut we meant. We all laughed. Not only had the Bangkok metal scene been excruciatingly hard to find, but all the kids who had seemed to be part of the scene had all turned out to be posers; at least, when we finally found a true metalhead, we could hate on the same shit together: metalheads hating lame emo pussies really is universal.
Crazy and cool that its not just a myth: Kathoey, a.k.a. lady boys, a.k.a. Thai transvestites, really are everywhere. There are beautiful, completely convincing ladyboys hanging out and/or working at snazzy bars, clubs, and restaurants; there are chubby, stubbly, completely unconvincing ladyboys walking around the streets, arm-in-arm with their (real) girlfriends; and there are even teenage schoolgirl ladyboys brushing by you along the sidewalk in their school uniforms, which look very much like Catholic school uniforms, making for a truly amazing image to western eyes.
Seriously disgusting and disturbing that its not just a myth: "Sexpats" (humorously - and not totally inaccurately - described by wikitravel as a "Fifty-plus, bald, beer belly, stained shirt, lovestruck expression and a hairy arm wrapped around a girl too young to be their daughter") really are everywhere, too. Along our way through town, Maya and I saw all too many older white guys - most dressed not so much like the comic-book-store owner on the Simpsons, as the above description suggests, and more like Sonny Crockett from Miami Vice - walking around with a noticeably younger and slutily-dressed Asian chick. Ewwwww.
Fucking annoying that it is a myth: Thailand being the "Land of Smiles"? That's the country's nickname and its rep - smiling is the rule; people are friendly; frowning, arguing, and making a scene in public are taboo. So, as our time in Thailand approached, Maya had been telling me that I should get ready to smile a lot if I want to fit in there (if you don't know already, I'm not generally a big smiler). Well, no worries there, as it's turned out. The staff at our guesthouse is made up of 4 of the grumpiest, grouchiest women we've ever met anywhere (the only nice woman there doesn't speak a peep of English). The tuk-tuk and taxi drivers have almost all turned out to be assholes - metered taxi drivers routinely refuse to use their meter, while tuk-tuk drivers will literally drive away from you without so much as a word if your fare offer doesn't meet their expectations. Vendors at Chatuchak Market, which, like any Asian market, is supposed to be all about the bargaining, have refused to bargain with us (for bootleg metal T-shirts, which we had to have). It's as if they have come to see white foreigners as little more than walking wallets for the picking. And there is a strain of discrimination in the workings of the city - at some of the sightseeing locations, there are different entrances for foreigners and for Thai people; at some of the religious sites, where you are supposed to remove your shoes before entering, there are different places for foreigners to leave their shoes and for Thai to leave their shoes; and at the Ratchadamnoen Boxing Stadium, where we watched a string of Mauy Thai fights (more on that in a second), there's a separate section marked off for foreigners (though we ignored the sign and sat with the natives)! Well, I call bullshit. "Land of smiles," my ass. I'm not smiling. I'm fucking pissed. And Maya's probably even more pissed.
Possibly the cheesiest road in the world: Khao San Road. Think Bourbon Street, then add a stand at every half-block where young Asian women sit braiding dreadlock hair extensions to the scalps of tie-dye-clad pseudo-hippie tourists. Add carts selling grilled meal worms and beetles. Add fratboy-stuffed bars where bands play acoustic covers of that Umbrella song by Rihanna. Add hundreds of stands selling the most retarded "joke" T-shirts you've ever seen...
(Speaking of which,) Embarassing to be associated with, and perhaps the explanation as to why Bangkok seems to be so mean to its tourists: Bangkok tourists are the cheesiest we've met so far. In our guesthouse alone, there was some cheesy goateed-and-ponytailed European dude who wore, 2 days in a row, a T-shirt with "The Goodfucker" emblazoned on it in the font and logo of The Godfather trilogy. There was another dude wearing a T-shirt with "iPood" on it with a traffic-sign-style illustration of a person on the toilet, vomiting and, yeah, presumably, pooing. The tourists who weren't wearing retarded "joke" T-shirts like these, were wearing horrible linen ethnic clothing. And then there were all the French families travelling with their kids, who they left to play in the common space in their dirt-and-I-can-only-imagine-what-stained underwear. Oh, the manatee...
Strange and kind of creepy: How much the Thai love their king. There are huge posters of the dude everywhere, and in the markets, there are stands that exclusively sell photos of him - baby photos, kid photos, teenage photos, family photos, and on and on. Before a movie starts at the movie megaplex in the mall, they play a short trailer featuring the national anthem and rainy scenes of the Thai landscape with images of the king tumbling across the screen in raindrop shapes; sitting in the theater as this played, Maya and I looked at each other, then she (very intelligently, it turned out) looked back to see the rest of the audience (all Thai) standing reverently. Afraid we would be lynched if we didn't, we stood as well.
Awesome but brutal as all hell: Muay Thai at Ratchadamnoen Boxing Stadium, which we watched on our second night in the city. The stadium was as ghetto as it gets - dirty concrete bleachers/steps crawling with small cockroaches, the air buzzing with mosquitoes, the second and third seating levels separated by a chainlink fence. We sat in the second level where we were surrounded by the wildly shouting and gesticulating locals, just about all of whom were obviously gambling on the fights (just about all the other whities had paid the big bucks for the "ringside seats," which meant they got none of the true vibe of the matches and got to crane their necks up at the ring to see any of the action). We befriended a tattoo-covered little punk-rock Thai girl who was sitting next to us, and she talked us through some of the action, explaining that when the crowd shouted along with the fighters pounding on each other, they were basically shouting for the dude they had bet on to, "Hit!" Hit!" As for the fights themselves, 4 of the 7 we watched ended in knockouts, and in 3 of those, the knockouted dude managed to stand and walk out of the ring under his own power; one of them, however - a particularly lanky fighter, who couldn't have been older than 16 and whom I couldn't help but pull for, since he was the obvious underdog - went down cold and was carried out on a stretcher.
Awesome but shocking and kind of frightening: The monitor lizards in Lumphini Park. One day we went for a walk in what is basically Bangkok's Central Park. We were walking along this relaxing lake, over a bridge, when I noticed something big and reptilian crawling around near the walkway in front of us. "What's that?" I said to Maya. She squinted ahead. "Is that an alligator?" she responded, aghast. I looked closer. "No," I said, "I think that's a monitor lizard," showing off how many nature shows I've watched on TV. We crept closer, and it was indeed a big monitor lizard, no shorter than 4 feet long, creeping around, completely uncaged and uncontrolled. We got to within 10 feet of it, watched as it flicked its long tongue out, tasting the air...
...and then slid into the lake, and swam away. It didn't swim far though, exiting the water 20 yards away or so, right next to a Thai man who was napping on the grass by the shore - I was sure he was going to be lunch, but the lizard just positioned itself in the sunlight and sat there contentedly. We took our own seats on a bench in the shade and watched the strange scene. Next thing I knew I heard a loud rustling from my left, Maya let out a shriek and lept up onto her bench. Two other monitor lizards - a massive one, maybe as long as I am tall, and a smaller one, about the size of the original specimen - had scurried out from a nearby brush to within a few feet of us; the larger one, presumably male, seemed to be pursuing the smaller, presumably female (but in Thailand, as I said earlier, you can never be sure). I joined Maya, standing on the top of my bench. We watched these lizards, which eventually crept into the water like the first. To end this absurd tale, as we walked around the rest of the park, we discovered that there were ridiculously large monitor lizards hanging out everywhere, and none of the Thai people lounging in the park seemed to give a second thought about them. Monitor lizards must be like Thai squirrels, I guess - except big, scaly, and with possibly venomous saliva.Totally awesome but totally sick: The Siriraj Museum of Medicine, which includes a museum of forensic medicine and a museum of parasitology. This place seriously put what had been the sickest museum Maya and I had ever visited - the Mutter Museum in Philly - to fucking shame. Just a few of the ridiculously gruesome artifacts we encountered (as we walked around the place, our jaws on the floor, along with numerous Thai families complete with little kids)? The actual head of a man who had been shot through the brain, preserved in a jar and bisected so you could see the path that the bullet tore through his skull and gray matter. Walls and walls of glass cases containing just about every body part you could imagine, all taken from people who had died various violent deaths - from tongues with bullet holes in them to a digestive system blackened and burst after its owner drank acid. Jars and jars containing all stages of fetuses, including one with an enlarged, alien-like head - small piles of candy and toys sat in front of these jars, left for the dead babies by museum visitors. The preserved watermelon-size scrotum of a man who contracted the Elephantiasis parasite, which swells its victims' anatomy - particularly the genatalia - to grotesque proportions. A long hall of blownup photos of death scenes, including those of children who had been blown up by Molotov Cocktails, crushed by machinery, or mangled in traffic accidents (many looked just like chunks of ground beef with hands and legs sticking off of them). A large clay urn in which, as the photos hung above it revealed, a boy had been cooked to his death. The complete preserved naked body of the Chinese serial child-killer and cannibal Si-Oui. For more in-depth description of the place with some pics, click here. Seriously, if you're ever in the 'hood, you gotta check this place out - it'll blow your mind.
Gaudy as all shit and tourist-swarmed as all fuck: Wat Phreaw Kaew and the Grand Palace. I thought it was like being at Disney Land - but without the rides.
Pretty fucking cool: Wat Po, which houses a massive 46-meter-long, 15-meters-high (you do the math) reclining Buddha.
Best random discovery: Battle of the Bands outside of the Bangkok CentralWorld mega-mall. We were just walking through some markets in downtown when we heard the crunch of a loud powerchord, and following the sounds, we found a huge stage setup right in front of the mall with hundreds of Thai seated and standing in front. A Thai metalcore band was rocking onstage. When they finished two songs, they walked to the front of the stage, and a panel of judges in a tent gave their critique (in Thai, unfortunately). We stayed for four more bands - a power-pop band, a Cranberries-like girl-fronted alt-rock band, an cringe-worthy emo band, and a totally hilarious funk band with a saxaphone player, a DJ, and a frontman-guitarist in a cowboy hat and a leopard-print jacket who pulled out the most painfully earnest facial expressions as he did his best Anthony Keedis impression. (The guy actually reminded Maya, and me, after she pointed it out, of this guy we call "Bidet." Jade and Lamb, and Anna, you know who we're talking about.)
Worst random discovery: The Thai horror movie we saw at the CentralWorld movie theater. The Spirit World. Do not, I repeat, do not see it.
Hair-pullingly frustrating: Trying to find true metal shit in Bangkok. Before we arrived, I had looked up what metal bars and stores there were in the city on metaltravelguide.com. It looked like there were a lot - bars called Immortal, Metal Zone, the Rock Pub, and Chaos City, and a record shop called Metal Quest - so Maya and I were pretty psyched. As it turned out, most of the places didn't end up being at the addressed listed on the website, and the ones that did - Immortal and the Rock Pub - fucking sucked (Immortal, though it was covered in metal band posters and stickers, played hip-hop and lame radio rock; and Rock Pub, when we went there, was completely empty, except for us and the 7-person staff, and was playing AC/DC and Poison concert videos on a big monitor). What made this all the more irritating was that all the local kids in Bangkok seemed to be wearing metal T-shirts - one night on Khao San Road (where we went haplessly hoping that Immortal would be playing metal) we saw Thai kids hanging out in Pantera, Metallica, Cannibal Corpse, Iron Maiden, White Zombie, Napalm Death, Skinny Puppy, As I Lay Dying, Killswitch Engage, and Avenged Sevenfold shirts! Out of desperation, I finally emailed the webmaster of this Bangkok-based metal webzine, siammetal.com, asking him where, oh, where were all the metal clubs, bars, and/or stores. He wrote right back, explaining that there weren't really any clubs or bars (and agreeing with me that Immortal and Rock Pub sucked), but that there were some metal record stores, including Metal Quest, which was, according to him, at a completely different address than on metaltravelguide.com. A few days later, Maya and I went to Metal Quest, which ended up being a tiny shop with no sign on the top floor of a mega-mall! I bought two CDs by Thai metal black-metal bands (the store only had three CDs by Thai bands), and we talked to the owner - a super-nice, awkward metal dude with limited English skills. He confirmed that the Bangkok metal scene kind of sucked - the only upcoming show was a big death/grindcore fest called "Bangcock," which is going down 3 days after we leave Thailand - and when we asked about all the kids in metal shirts, he explained that it's just a fashion thing, that a few popular emo bands have members who've worn metal T-shirts in videos and in concert, and so their fans have followed suit. But they don't listen to the music, he said with a resigned sigh. We had noticed that most of the kids we'd seen in metal tees had completely over-the-top emo haircuts, and we pointed out that to the Metal Quest dude. "Yeah," he agreed, making a diagonal slash across his forehead to indicate the kind of angular cut we meant. We all laughed. Not only had the Bangkok metal scene been excruciatingly hard to find, but all the kids who had seemed to be part of the scene had all turned out to be posers; at least, when we finally found a true metalhead, we could hate on the same shit together: metalheads hating lame emo pussies really is universal.
Wednesday, November 7, 2007
skyhigh, rock bottom
We didn't plan it this way intentionally, but it was in Cambodia that we reached the midway point of our trip. And in some ways our experiences over our 4 days in that country seemed to make a perfect - and perfectly imperfect - centerpoint for our travels. In Cambodia (the town of Siem Reap, to be specific), we felt as if we were as far from our everyday lives as we are likely to be anywhere on our journey, and we reached some of the highest and lowest points of the last two months; now we can start the slow descent/ascent home.
The highs were at Ankor, among the majestic, awe-inspiring jungle-entangled ruins of the ancient Khmer empire. At epic sites like Ta Phroem, where massive roots and trees literally grew up from and down into the stones...
The highs were at Ankor, among the majestic, awe-inspiring jungle-entangled ruins of the ancient Khmer empire. At epic sites like Ta Phroem, where massive roots and trees literally grew up from and down into the stones...
At Ankor Wat, which we explored at sunset...
And most of all, at Bayon, where we went on our first full day in Cambodia. It's the site that has been pictured in the title header of this blog all along, and finally climbing up among its towers in person and walking, standing, meditating among their huge, blissful stone faces felt like reaching a true milestone.
On our second day in Cambodia, we woke at 4:30am and drove to back to Bayon. There was a roadblock around it, but our driver found the policeman manning the entrance and got out and talked to him. Next thing we knew our driver was moving the roadblock. He drove up next to the temple, which was bathed in almost complete darkness, and parked, and with our flashlight leading the way, Maya and I climbed back up among the towers, the only people there, feeling as if we were discovering the ruins for ourselves in the twilight. Up there, hearing only the animal sounds of the jungle, we watched as the stone faces came to life in the light of the rising sun, and we found perhaps some little piece of our own nirvana.
And then there were the lows... Cambodia is a poor as fuck country with a dark, violent past and present - the Khmer Rouge, landmines scattered across the landscape... If we sometimes came across extreme poverty and the scars of history in China and Vietnam, in Cambodia, they were much more in our faces and seemed so much more desperate. What made it seem all the worse is that Siem Reap is a such a fast-growing tourist town and full of shocking juxtapositions between the oscenely rich - luxury hotels commanding literally thousands of dollars for a room per night - and the obscenely poor - reed-and-plastic-tarp huts housing multi-generational familes, sometimes just across the street.
- We visited a memorial to victims of the Khmer Rouge, a small wat pagoda with glass sides revealing a waist-deep pile of skulls, bones, and torn clothing: the remains dug up from nearby killing fields. When we returned to our car, our driver revealed to us that both his father and his brother had been killed by the Khmer Rouge.
- We took a boat tour of a floating village outside of Siem Reap, which has become something of the tourist draw despite - or perhaps because of - the fact that it is so astoundingly poor, full of tiny wooden boathouses crammed with multiple generations, and houses with walls of dried palm leaves and roofs of rusting tin, standing on precarious tree-stem stilts, sometimes up to 10 meters (about 30 feet) tall, above the waters, which rise and fall dramatically with the wet and dry seasons.
The families who live there do so because they don't have the money for earthen real estate and they subsist by fishing and by begging/selling cold drinks and bananas to tourists. Our guide was a very morose 24-year-old who claimed to live himself in the floating village and told us that he was supporting his two sick parents, both in their 60s, whom he lived with. He said that his two older brothers had been killed by the Khmer Rouge. Both Maya and I were skeptical at first - we've been trained after two months of travelling to suspect a scam in every sob story, and we wondered what the odds were that both our driver and and our guide here would have had family members killed by the Khmer Rouge. And we felt bad about our skepticism - as we discussed later, the Khmer Rouge slaughtered a fifth of the Cambodian population, so it was actually quite likely that every Cambodian had a fmaily member or a friend or an acquaintance who had been murdered.
- As our boat cut slowly through the water, villagers would paddle their boats up to us, begging for us to by drinks and bananas from them. On one boat, a tiny naked kid, maybe 2, stood wrapped in his/her two pet snakes, while his/her mom plaintively begged for tourists to buy bananas from her for a dollar each.
- Our boat stopped at a floating fish farm, where we found a large, waterfilled hole in the floor filled with huge, flopping catfish. We noticed more holding tanks up a short platform and walked up to see what they contained, and were shocked to find them full of at least 20 large crocodiles, lounging about in garbage-strewn waters. As we watched them, a teenager working onboard, pulled a particularly ginormous catfish from its hole and took it, wriggling, to a back area, where he hacked it into large chunks with a butcher knife. Then he carried a few of them, including the head, over to the crocodile pen we were standing over and hurled them in. The crocs lunged jerkily as the pieces landed, snapping at them, but then ignored the food and just laid there, frozen in their various positions of attack. The one thing moving in the pen, however, was the catfish's head, which was still very much alive, its gills pulsing with breath and its front fin periodically flicking in a gesture of understandable distress.
- Perhaps the most startling image of our visit to Cambodia: A boy, maybe 10 years old, wearing no shirt and with only one arm - the other, amputated at the shoulder - which he was using to row himself around the lake in a metal basin that he barely fit into, dodging fishing vessels and rocking in the choppy wake of the many passing vehicles; rowing himself between tourist boats in order to beg. Back when we were dodging scam artists in China, I had morbidly joked to Maya that once we got to Cambodia, she would look back fondly on a time when the people trying to get our money had all their limbs; watching this boy paddling away, Maya turned to me, reminded me of my joke, and said that, yes, right now she did long for those days.
While we are definitely glad to have made it to - and now out of - Cambodia, it's the one country we've been to so far that we're not sure we want to revisit any time soon.
Monday, November 5, 2007
punkass crusade
As I mentioned in my previous post, we're in Cambodia right now. We left Vietnam on Thursday, feeling much as we did when we left China: that we were saying goodbye to a newfound home away from home, one that we would like to visit again in the not-too-distant future. This was due in large part to the fact that we felt like we had made a real friend there: Max, with whom we had drinks the night before our morning flight to Cambodia. Maya and I had found a copy of the last issue of Revolver magazine I worked on before our trip (with Down on the cover) in a Hanoi bookshop that afternoon, and we showed it to Max, and we talked about how fucked up the music industry is, and he told us about the time he'd had a meal with Metallica's James Hetfield (who is apparently friends with Max's "mate" from Midnight Oil) and James wouldn't go anywhere without his bodyguard. After drinks, he dropped us off at our hotel on his motorbike (yeah, I know Maya and I vowed not get on one of the "damn things" again - but when Max is driving, it doesn't count) and bid him a fond farewell, promising to stay in touch. In homage to Max, here's a link to the Sir No Sir! anti-war flash trailer he showed us one day in his cafe - Punkass Crusade. It's pretty powerful stuff - check it out.
What else will we miss besides Max? The food. Delicious. All about fresh fruit, vegetables, and spices combined delicately with meat and fish. Over our two weeks in Vietnam, we had sizzling Cha Ca, a fish marinated in yogurt and spices grilled up at your table with veggies and served up with fish- and/or shrimp-sauce (and we ate it with an older Australian gentlemen we happened to befriend whose been eating Cha Ca at this one restaurant over the past 15 years and is writing a book on Vietnam); we had the most scrumptious Bun (pronounced "Boon") - a rice-noodle dish with sweet slices of beef, crispy deep-fried garlic pieces, sprouts, sprigs of cilantro, basil, and mint, and all sorts of other unnamed goodness - at a streetside family-style restaurant of questionable hygiene but unquestionable culinary talent; we had mouth-wateringly scrumptious fresh spring rolls, and fried spring rolls, and apple juices, lemon juices, strawberry shakes, slices of papaya, dragon fruit, and the list goes on... Did we pay for our culinary adventures? Occasionally. But we rarely regretted the days-after that we lost in our hotel bathroom.
On Halloween night, which was rainy and cold in Hanoi, we walked down to a movie theater that the propietress of our hotel recommended to us. (By the way, our hotel, Tung Trang, despite our somewhat frightening first night, ended up being awesome.) The theater was in a huge, western-style mall and had stadium seating and great sound and picture. We saw The Bourne Ultimatum, which we had missed when it was in theaters Stateside - and it rocked hard. The film, if you haven't seen it, ends in New York City, and seeing the familiar streets, buildings, bridges, and scenery of our hometown on the big screen, Maya and I felt a tinge of homesickness, which was made even stronger by the fact that sitting in the dark neverland of that mall movie theater felt just like sitting in a movie theater back in the U.S. When the film ended and we stepped back out into the dirty, barely lit, frenetic streets of Hanoi, we felt like we'd stepped right from America into Vietnam. The truth is that as much as Hanoi may have come to feel something like a home, we're still only visitors and our real home is half a world - and two more months - away.
What else will we miss besides Max? The food. Delicious. All about fresh fruit, vegetables, and spices combined delicately with meat and fish. Over our two weeks in Vietnam, we had sizzling Cha Ca, a fish marinated in yogurt and spices grilled up at your table with veggies and served up with fish- and/or shrimp-sauce (and we ate it with an older Australian gentlemen we happened to befriend whose been eating Cha Ca at this one restaurant over the past 15 years and is writing a book on Vietnam); we had the most scrumptious Bun (pronounced "Boon") - a rice-noodle dish with sweet slices of beef, crispy deep-fried garlic pieces, sprouts, sprigs of cilantro, basil, and mint, and all sorts of other unnamed goodness - at a streetside family-style restaurant of questionable hygiene but unquestionable culinary talent; we had mouth-wateringly scrumptious fresh spring rolls, and fried spring rolls, and apple juices, lemon juices, strawberry shakes, slices of papaya, dragon fruit, and the list goes on... Did we pay for our culinary adventures? Occasionally. But we rarely regretted the days-after that we lost in our hotel bathroom.
On Halloween night, which was rainy and cold in Hanoi, we walked down to a movie theater that the propietress of our hotel recommended to us. (By the way, our hotel, Tung Trang, despite our somewhat frightening first night, ended up being awesome.) The theater was in a huge, western-style mall and had stadium seating and great sound and picture. We saw The Bourne Ultimatum, which we had missed when it was in theaters Stateside - and it rocked hard. The film, if you haven't seen it, ends in New York City, and seeing the familiar streets, buildings, bridges, and scenery of our hometown on the big screen, Maya and I felt a tinge of homesickness, which was made even stronger by the fact that sitting in the dark neverland of that mall movie theater felt just like sitting in a movie theater back in the U.S. When the film ended and we stepped back out into the dirty, barely lit, frenetic streets of Hanoi, we felt like we'd stepped right from America into Vietnam. The truth is that as much as Hanoi may have come to feel something like a home, we're still only visitors and our real home is half a world - and two more months - away.
Thursday, November 1, 2007
call me lady boy
"There's a big difference between travelling and a vacation." That's what the Belgian woman we shared our soft-sleeper cabin with during our 9-hour train ride from Hanoi to the northern Vietnamese city of Lao Cai last weekend. Having done a little of both, I have to agree - travelling is work, it's a challenge, it's not just an escape; it's about escaping your life as it was but it's also about facing life as it is elsewhere and as it can be, in its most positive and negative extremes. The Belgian woman and her husband (both in their early 60s) told us about their extensive travels through South America, Africa, and now Southeast Asia, and we were pretty amazed - and then they revealed that all the trips had taken place over the last 3 years! When his wife left for a bathroom break, the husband explained that she had been sick - "She had a thing in her head" is how he put it in halting English - and bedridden for over 10 years, and so they had been unable to travel - or have children - in their youth. Now that she had finally recovered, they were going to see the world.
From Lao Cai, where we arrived at 6 in the morning, we took a public minivan on an hour-long, completely nauseating ride up narrow, serpentine mountain roads to Sa Pa, a remote frontier town that has become something of a tourist hotspot due to both its amazing landscape and its large population of Vietnamese ethnic minority tribes such as the Black H'mong and the Red Dao, many of whom still live subsistence-lifestyles in traditional villages.
Here's a view of mountainsides terraced with rice paddies and a river running through the valley that we caught on one of our hikes - the sort of sight commonplace in Sa Pa.
It was a strange visit that left us with mixed emotions, too complicated to lay out right now (you should know that I'm typing this blog in my hotel, outside in the jungle of Cambodia, where I just got bitten by a mosquito, and Maya's deathly afraid now that I just contracted the dengue fever... Basically, I'm literally risking my life for your entertainment). But here are some standout moments from Sa Pa:
- On our first day we hiked through the village of Cat Cat, where dirty children stared at us from the doorways of their familes' huts, and men and women glanced up at us - somewhat hostilely, it seemed - as they worked in their rice paddies. We passed a waterfall (which is where most tourists turn around) and then walked onward into the jungle. We had been trekking for maybe an hour and a half, when we ran into some people who told us that there was a village "maybe 5 kilometers away." That didn't sound too far, so we decided to go for it. Another hour and half - and two river-crossings - later, we found ourselves on an ever-narrowing dirt path, in the thick of the jungle, trudging up and down the muddy mountainside, with a dwindling water supply, and no village in sight. We had already turned back once when the path seemed to vanish - temporarily, it turned out - then decided to forge ahead. And we had run into a number of villagers, some carring insanely huge loads on their backs as they sped along the precarious path in their flip-flops(!), and some even seemed to encourage us, pointing us deeper into the forest, smiling, and saying "Village." But I'm sorry to say, we gave up - we were almost out of water and definitely out of time - since the sun would be down in the 3 hours it would take us to walk back to whence we came from. Of course, as soon as we actually turned around, the friendliest villager of all came up the path toward us, pointed in our original direction, smiled, and said, "Village," as if inviting us to follow him, but by that point, our minds were made up - mostly just to make ourselves feel better about abandoning our mission, we joked that the village was probably full of cannibals who were just pretending to be nice to lure us into their soup pots - so we politely declined and hurried back to semi-civilization.
- As we walked down to Cat Cat, we were assailed by the motorbike drivers all offering us rides back to the hotel once we got to the waterfall. Each of them asked us to look for them once we got there - and they all turned out to have weird, instantly memorable pseudonyms ready so they'd be easy to identify. One guy, in particular, stood out: he took off his baseball cap and showed us the moniker he'd scrawled on it in marker. "Look for me," he said. "'Penicillin.' That's me." It was such an awesome name, I actually ended riding back with him (for the fee of $1).
- Our first night in Sa Pa, we walked out into town and were assailed by young and old women and little girls selling all sorts of tribal goods - mostly, jewelry and enbroidery. One of them came up to us: "Earrings?" she asked, holding out a pair. "No thanks," we answered. "Do you smoke?" she quickly moved on. "Opium? Marijuana? Hashish?" It became a theme of our visit. We were offered drugs by, at least, four or five people, most of them middle-aged-looking ethnic-minority women in full tribal dress!
- On our second day, we went trekking through the mountains and through some villages with an 18-year-old H'mong guide named Zi (pronounced "Zah"). As soon as we set off, we found that a pair of "shadows," as we came to call them, had joined our little group: a little girl, maybe 9 years old, and a young woman with what looked like a gold tooth but turned out to be copper, who looked to be maybe 34 but turned out to be only 24. (As we would discover, village life does not age people well.) Here's our little crew (minus me, who shot the pic):
From Lao Cai, where we arrived at 6 in the morning, we took a public minivan on an hour-long, completely nauseating ride up narrow, serpentine mountain roads to Sa Pa, a remote frontier town that has become something of a tourist hotspot due to both its amazing landscape and its large population of Vietnamese ethnic minority tribes such as the Black H'mong and the Red Dao, many of whom still live subsistence-lifestyles in traditional villages.
Here's a view of mountainsides terraced with rice paddies and a river running through the valley that we caught on one of our hikes - the sort of sight commonplace in Sa Pa.
It was a strange visit that left us with mixed emotions, too complicated to lay out right now (you should know that I'm typing this blog in my hotel, outside in the jungle of Cambodia, where I just got bitten by a mosquito, and Maya's deathly afraid now that I just contracted the dengue fever... Basically, I'm literally risking my life for your entertainment). But here are some standout moments from Sa Pa:
- On our first day we hiked through the village of Cat Cat, where dirty children stared at us from the doorways of their familes' huts, and men and women glanced up at us - somewhat hostilely, it seemed - as they worked in their rice paddies. We passed a waterfall (which is where most tourists turn around) and then walked onward into the jungle. We had been trekking for maybe an hour and a half, when we ran into some people who told us that there was a village "maybe 5 kilometers away." That didn't sound too far, so we decided to go for it. Another hour and half - and two river-crossings - later, we found ourselves on an ever-narrowing dirt path, in the thick of the jungle, trudging up and down the muddy mountainside, with a dwindling water supply, and no village in sight. We had already turned back once when the path seemed to vanish - temporarily, it turned out - then decided to forge ahead. And we had run into a number of villagers, some carring insanely huge loads on their backs as they sped along the precarious path in their flip-flops(!), and some even seemed to encourage us, pointing us deeper into the forest, smiling, and saying "Village." But I'm sorry to say, we gave up - we were almost out of water and definitely out of time - since the sun would be down in the 3 hours it would take us to walk back to whence we came from. Of course, as soon as we actually turned around, the friendliest villager of all came up the path toward us, pointed in our original direction, smiled, and said, "Village," as if inviting us to follow him, but by that point, our minds were made up - mostly just to make ourselves feel better about abandoning our mission, we joked that the village was probably full of cannibals who were just pretending to be nice to lure us into their soup pots - so we politely declined and hurried back to semi-civilization.
- As we walked down to Cat Cat, we were assailed by the motorbike drivers all offering us rides back to the hotel once we got to the waterfall. Each of them asked us to look for them once we got there - and they all turned out to have weird, instantly memorable pseudonyms ready so they'd be easy to identify. One guy, in particular, stood out: he took off his baseball cap and showed us the moniker he'd scrawled on it in marker. "Look for me," he said. "'Penicillin.' That's me." It was such an awesome name, I actually ended riding back with him (for the fee of $1).
- Our first night in Sa Pa, we walked out into town and were assailed by young and old women and little girls selling all sorts of tribal goods - mostly, jewelry and enbroidery. One of them came up to us: "Earrings?" she asked, holding out a pair. "No thanks," we answered. "Do you smoke?" she quickly moved on. "Opium? Marijuana? Hashish?" It became a theme of our visit. We were offered drugs by, at least, four or five people, most of them middle-aged-looking ethnic-minority women in full tribal dress!
- On our second day, we went trekking through the mountains and through some villages with an 18-year-old H'mong guide named Zi (pronounced "Zah"). As soon as we set off, we found that a pair of "shadows," as we came to call them, had joined our little group: a little girl, maybe 9 years old, and a young woman with what looked like a gold tooth but turned out to be copper, who looked to be maybe 34 but turned out to be only 24. (As we would discover, village life does not age people well.) Here's our little crew (minus me, who shot the pic):
Our "shadows" followed us for a good 3 hours as we hiked by rice paddies, through creeks, and over hills, talking to us in what little English they knew. (Our guide told us that this was how she had learned English - by following tourists around and talking to them - which was impressive, considering she spoke the language better than almost any Vietnamese person we'd met in Hanoi). But Maya and I both had a feeling that as nice and friendly as our "shadows" seemed, they were really just trying to sell us shit. And that proved to be the case as soon as we arrived in their village and were bumrushed by at least 10 people selling the exact same stuff. The "shadows" then made it personal: "You're going to buy from me, right?" said the little girl, trying to use the fact that she'd walked with us to get the upperhand on the competition. Thing is, it kind of worked. We didn't buy much from them - just a small handwoven bracelet from the girl, who looked like she was going to cry if we didn't - but we felt guilty and weird and kind of used but still sad and really just all confused and conflicted as fuck. The trek had been cool; the landscape, beautiful; but we felt like shit.
- It didn't help that the villages and the villagers seemed so damn poor. At one point, we stopped for a break at this little canopied area, where many other tourists were already assembled, having cold drinks and eating snacks. Of course, all the guides and locals weren't eating or drinking, just chewing on pieces of sugar cane and standing on the outskirts (a few locals would occasionally step in to try and sell something). Maya and I sat there uncomfortably, and I noticed a little boy, maybe 4 years old, dressed not in the colorful tribal clothes of most the villagers but in filthy and torn western clothes; he was carrying what I presume was his baby brother on his back, who was wearing just a dirty T-shirt, no pants or underwear, and was crying his head off. Their parents were nowhere to be seen. I definitely didn't feel having a snack.
- Early in our trek, Maya mentioned to Zi, our guide, that a lot of the locals, particularly the young girls, seemed to be staring at me because of my big buffalo-bone earrings, which I had thought the tribal people might relate to since they also wear oversized jewelry through stretched ear piercings. She explained that in the culture of the various ethnic minority tribes of Sa Pa, men do not wear earrings, only women. The next morning, as I waited outside our hotel for the van that was going to take us the Bac Ha market 3-hours-plus away, a large group of adolescent H'mong girls started pointing and laughing at me: "You are man but you wearing earrings!" they tittered. Later that day, at the market, as I sat inside a restaurant, a teenage H'mong girl passed by, glanced at me, and snickered, "Nice earrings. Hehehe. Lady boy."
- During the neauseating rollercoaster ride to the Bac Ha market, winding up and down the mountain roads, veering past motorbikes and water buffalo, and through jungle-entangled villages, our guide - a 20-year-old H'Mong girl named Cha (with a copper tooth and big smile) - mentioned that I would probably look very hansome if I cut off my beard. She explained that right now I "look at bit like Ho Chi Minh." Personally, I don't see it, but you tell me...
- During the same ride, I pulled out my iPod at some point and started listening to the Pantera song, "5 Minutes Alone." Cha tapped me on the shoulder and asked if she could listen. "English song?" she asked. I handed her the headphones. She listened for a while with a rather inscrutable expression on her face, then handed the headphones back. "It was good," she said, "but do you have the song, 'Hello, Is It Me You're Looking For?'?"
- Coming back from the market, our van approached a large group of people standing around something alongside the road. As we got closer, we could see that it was a motorbike laying on its side, still smoking. And as we passed, we saw the bike's driver, laying on his back, not moving, his head covered in blood. The guy looked dead. Everyone in our van was silent for a while, then Cha explained that just two days before - our first day in Sa Pa - a man had died in a motorbike accident in the vicinity of our hotel. (In Hanoi, we'd seen a kid totally wipe out on his motobike in the middle of the street - amazingly, he'd jumped up and rode away, apparently not seriously injured. And Eveline's friend Ann had gotten into a accident while riding on a motorbike-taxi when she was in Hanoi a few years ago.) We already had been wary of riding on motorbikes - and had only ridden on two (Max's, then Penicillin's); now Maya and I vowed to stay off the damn things.
- One night as Maya and I strolled through Sa Pa at around 10:30pm, we passed three white tourists, 1 guy and 2 women, around our age or a little younger, skipping arm-in-arm and giggling with large group of prepubescent H'mong girls in the streets. "Who does that?" we wondered aloud, feeling a little dirty as we walked away. Sa Pa is a strange place... and tourists are strange people...
- Our last day in Sa Pa Maya and I were approached by this cute little old H'mong woman who didn't really speak any Engish but this didn't stop her from eagerly trying to sell us shit. (A little H'mong girl, who turned out to be a shark of a trinket-seller, also approached us at the same time - but that's a story for another day). She grabbed Maya by the arm, and as we walked, she walked with us and talked to us in her H'mong language while producing various wares from her satchel. Maya was saying "No thank you" and shaking her head to make sure the point was getting across - but it wasn't. The old woman kept walking with us, and when she noticed that her charms, as they were, weren't getting the job done, out of nowhere, she pinched Maya's ass! Maya started laughing hysterically, completely shocked, and the old woman started laughing hysterically, too. I thought she sounded stoned, so I started laughing, so we all stood there in the middle of the intersection and laughed. Maya said to me, "Ï have to buy something from her - she pinched my ass. That's, like, going beyond the call of duty."
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