Bon Jour Vietnam

Okay, so this post is about 9 months overdue..but hey we've been busy.

So where did we leave off? Laos I think. Well we actually finished our trip in Vietnam but we never got around to posting anything about it..so here it goes.

Vietnam was great..one of the easier countries to plan our travels through..we started in Hanoi in the north and headed south.

Vietnam is the quintessential image of french Indochina. This is probably insulting to Vietnamese nationals who have fought several wars in the last century to secure their Independence from among others the French and the Chinese but hey..

Anyway, Hanoi is a cool old colonial city where modernity has intertwined itself with the old world in the form of cellphones, neon lights and narrow cobbled streets overflowing with mopeds.

From Hanoi we migrated south to the cities of Tam Coc, Hoi An, and Hue. Each with its own indelible charm. Tam Coc is like Halong Bay with out the bay, instead a river winds its way through a myriad or karstic outcrops and nook and cranny villages. It's reminiscent of villages and farmers, of dragons and mystics. This was probably the most magically scenic areas we had visited on trip.

In general Vietnam was one of the most photogenic countries we went to.

Colorful market stall in Hoi An.

Man tending field with Buffalo

Boat Lady in Tam Coc. Often, they'll use their feet to oar the boat.

We spent a day with a local family. This was the son. He kept shooting ruubber bands at everything.

Festival near christmas time.

It rained often and the motocyclists would don these coloful rain capes making the whole street seem like it was was filled with supeheroes.

Net Fisherman near Hoi An.

street vendors galor. This one selling flowers.

more street vendors. This one was carving Budha heads.

All good things come to an end

After eight months on the road without hardly a care in the world, having adapted to living out of a backpack, and being constantly stimulated with new sights, people, and culture, we finally bit the bullet and flew stateside to reunite with our long lost loved ones. It is with mixed feelings being back - yes, traveling was spectacular in too many ways to list and truly an experience of a lifetime, but it's great to be back on home turf. Hurray for home cooked meals and having a home base! We can go on and on about other things we've missed most but we'll save that for another day.

Looking forward to catching up with everyone! :)

Merry Xmas to all~!

In love with Laos

After Cambodia we flew north into Laos. Laos is a beautiful country with a bit of a black sheep history. Originally a Khmer vassal state, Laos was know as Lane Xang which translates to 'land of a million elephants'. Some 600 years later, during the 'secret' part of the Vietnam war, Laos could have easily been called 'Land of a million bombs' as the US dumped close to 2 million tons of bombs on Laos to curb the influx of NVA and Chinese supply lines (for purposes of comparison, about the same amount of bombs were dropped on Europe..by all sides..during World War II). To this day, many of these bombs remain unexploded and kill on average at least 1 person and 4 cows a day in Laos). Fast forward another forty years and it seems that with 40% of its population under the age of 14, Laos is now the land of a million children.

Our first stop was the capital city of Vientiane, home to the Laos national symbol Pha That Luang stupa. Vientiane is a relatively sedate town with a humbled (and crumbled) mix of traditional Lao, French colonial and Soviet modernist architecture. We spent a day here taking in the site (ok, maybe it was sites) and had a fresh river fish dinner at sunset on the silty banks of the Mekong.

Next day we flew on a Chinese made prop plane courtesy of Lao Airlines to the UNESCO heritage city of Luang Prabang.

LP is where our love affair with Laos really started. Despite the recent tourism fueled gentrification, this city was possibly the most romantic place we have been to yet in SE Asia. It has that quintessentially colonial Indochina look and feel to it with its narrow streets lined with traditional Laos and 19th century French inspired cedar, teak and bamboo bungalows, interspersed with gardens of lazily swaying palms and lotus ponds and many gilded wats.




We spent a cool five days just relaxing and enjoying the serene scene.
We watched locals making rice cakes and fishing.



We wandered the local markets full of rug, fruit and handicraft vendors.




We watched a local cultural heratige show put on by some of the towns kids.


One little one was so captivated by the show...

..that he eventually joined in.

We cruised longboats up the Mekong to some caves and handicraft villages and got our feet wet at a local waterfall.



The one mole on the face of this beauty was when someone stole my shoes from out front of our bungalow. Who steals shoes!~ Seriously. This is the last thing I would have expected in a country where it is customary (and often compulsory) to remove your shoes before entering most buildings and where the sandal clad natives don't even wear western shoes. Who steals shoes? Especially my shoes with their orthopedic insoles and countless gritty layers of sweat, road dirt and cow crap collected from 4 continents.

Then as if to laugh barefaced at my barefooted misfortune, fate would have it that the very next day while searching for a shoe store we walked past a street vendor selling what else? that's right..used western shoes.

Unfortunately my shoes were not to be found amongst the other lost soles, and alas we found no store selling any shoes remotely close to my apparently sasquatchen foot size of 10.5. So with the sun setting on our trip and with a pair of $5 sandals strapped to my feet for the remaining 2 weeks, we decided to give up the hunt and head up the river to the remote (as in only accessible by river) village of Muong Ngoi for what else..trekking.

On the way to our boat we stumbled across an Hmong new year celebration where the teenage girls and boys line up facing each other and toss balls and pick-up lines back and forth in a colorful courtship ritual.


Once they spotted a toe-headed falang (foreigner) though the Hmong stopped their games and quickly gathered to stare at this blond wonder as he beat a stick of sugar cane against a rock..kinda funny actually.

While in Muong Ngoi, we trekked to some local villages and hill tribes. Crossing streams and hiking across acres of rice paddies we came upon a village wedding and shared some beer and lao lao (rice whiskey) with them.

One of the three most magical things about Laos is the utter lack of modernity that most of the country lives in. Unlike other developed or developing countries we have traveled through, Laos is still pre-industrial in a lot of ways. Bamboo is the material of choice. Young men hunt squirrels and birds for meals rather than for sport. Rice farming is a subsistence activity not a commercial enterprise. Food is cooked in simple pots with simple tools.





Another magical thing about Laos is it's river culture. In Laos, the river is the main street and the life blood of the village, connecting it to the next village and the rest of the world. It is the site of many of their productive, social and cultural activities. Families bathe, launder, travel, play, fish and forage weed from the many rivers sluicing through this karstic terrain. They divert it to flood the rice paddies and they stab it with propellers attached to dynamos to generate electricity from the currents. We found the combination of the river and this 'simpler' life to be soothing in a zen sort of way...something about the cool clear water crawling along its ancient course seemed to set a different pace for life..time slowed from morning to night.


One of the biggest differences between this world and the rest of the world that we have seen is that the trash here is 'clean'.. well, clean like the dirt from a garden would be clean. Unlike the synthetic and toxic refuse from modern industrial cultures, the trash from these villages in Laos mostly consists of scraps of bamboo, dried palm fronds, cuttings from the recent rice harvest, and maybe some broken pottery or dried dung cake which they burn.

Everything else is recycled. Anything remotely mechanical in nature is used to create some much needed piece of equipment. For instance, anything roughly circular is quickly bolted to an axle and strapped to a piece of wood for use as a wheelbarrow. Hinges, nails, pulleys and latches are all collected and reused. Old bicycle tires are cut into strips and used as rubber waterproof lashings for the boats. Broken cups become ash trays, broken ashtrays become plant pots..etc. Aluminum is collected and smelted into propellers for the long boats. Plastic bottles are used to distribute the uber popular fermented rice wine (lao lao) dripped from makeshift stills (themselves usually made from old oil cans and bits of glass and rubber tubing).


I do wonder though that if the scope of production in these 1500 people villages were scaled up proportionately to something the size of Los Angeles, and if the resulting organic trash were burned, what sort of air pollution it would cause..would it make Los Angeles seem clean proportionately?

Despite these morning and evening piles of fire that cloud the valleys in smoke though, Laos still seems fairly ecological friendly and was as close as I have seen to the edenic models of sustainable subsistence economies touted by many luddite environmentalists. The downside to all of this of course is that life in Laos is hard. We had a hard time finding anyone over the age of 50. The Lao live a laborious life rowing and hoeing, they mature fast..getting married by 17 with a handful of kids by 30..then dead by 55. Any decent medical care by western standards means having to travel to neighboring Vietnam or Thailand...which explains the low life expectancy, high infant mortality and low median age.

But every cloud has its silver lining and so the third magical thing about Laos was all these young'uns running around. We saw more kids laughing, playing games, and running naked down the riverbanks to wave 'hello' than in any other country we have been to yet. Here's some fotos of the kids and their games that made Laos such a light hearted delight.

'Let's jump out of the tree' game

'volleyball'

'climb the pole' game

'roll the old bike tire with the stick' game

'knock the cards over with your shoe' game

'let's get naked and say hi to the boatload of tourists' game

'volley ball with our feet' game

'jump over the string' game

the girls

GQ

underoos

cool and the gang

umbrella

Helen and friends

what they going to do with all that monk, all that monk..in that tru(n)ck

Khmer Kountry

After Thailand we flew to Cambodia to continue our tour of South East Asia. Cambodia is a strange country..it seems plagued by really bad luck. Since the fall of the Angkor empire in the 15th century they have been pillaged and plundered by their neighbors the Thais, Chinese and Vietnamese, they have been sweltered and stifled under the unbathed armpit of French colonialism, fought a civil war and war with Vietnam, then endured the genocide of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge regime. It's as if Cambodia has been wearing a 'kick me' note taped to their back for the last 500 years. Only since 1998 has Cambodia enjoyed a relatively stable and democratic independence.

Needless to say that when we landed in Phnom Penh it was markedly less rosy than it's glossy plasticized neighbor Thailand. Still we decided to give the city/country a chance. We decided to do some homework and visited the killing fields and Tuol Sleng prison. Tuol Sleng was actually a converted high school (how's that for irony), it was where the Khmer Rouge maintained, interrogated and tortured it's political prisoners before sending them to the killing fields for their disposal.

In Tuol Sleng we saw the various torture rooms and photographs of the victims.







In the killing fields, where millions of Cambodians were executed, we walked amongst the many mass graves and circled the 6 story memorial tower filled with exhumed human skulls.






Having satisfied our curious morbidity we opted for a lighter scene and headed towards Boeung Kak, a flood lake of the great Mekong, for some beer, fries and sunset where we were joined by young boys offering 20 minute paddle powered boat rides around the tidal muck for 1 US dollar.






The next day we ventured to the Royal Palace and Silver Pagoda. Why it is named the Silver Pagoda we're not sure as we never actually found a 'silver pagoda' but still it was refreshing to see some of the country's more resplendent past. While riding our tuk tuk back to the hotel we crossed paths with saffron clad reincarnates of the fab four.








We then toured the Russian market, named for its popularity with Russian ex-pats (i.e. KGB operatives and other ideologists) in the 1980's. The market was kinda funny..real dark and grimy..like an old industrial warehouse..but with food stalls and everything from gardening tools, to machine parts, to children's crayons and finger and food stalls for sale. Made for some good fotos.









Unfortunately, PP began to grow on us. The city's children are sent out by their parents to sell various goods (water, books, trinkets, etc) to the tourists..problem is the kids aren't nice..or at least they don't take 'no' well. One of the things Helen and I have gotten good at on this trip is the polite decline, "Oh no thank you." or "No Thank you we already have" and so on. To our dismay these well honed niceties didn't work on the precocious prepubescent peddlers. They had a two fold technique. First, they would lure us in with their highly trained 'how to sell to tourist' educations, which, by the way, far exceeds the standards of American education.. in geography and foreign language skills at least. To start they would say hello and then bonjour..then ask where you're from. When you answered they would name the state/country capital and then say 'hello' in your countries language (from my observations they seemed to know 'hello' in German, Italian, Japanese, Chinese, Korean and Dutch). If this first approach didn't work and we tried one of the aforementioned excuses why not, they would counter with a rebuttal. Here's a real example:

Child "Hello"
Helen "hello"
Child "where are you from?"
Helen "California, but my parents are Korean"
Child "California, capitol is Sacramento, USA. Korea, capital is Seoul, 'Ahn young hah sae yoh' "
Helen "wow, you're very smart!" -- actually impressed
Child "would you like to buy a book"
Helen "no thank you we just bought a book and we haven't read it yet" -- this is true..I had just purchased the book from a previous tadpole and had it sitting on the table in front of me..
Child "well maybe you buy this also" -- holding up a different book..
Helen "no thank you"
Child "why not"
Helen "because we have many books already"
Child "well maybe you buy for your family then"
Helen "No thank you, we have too much too carry already"
Child "I sell to you for 2 dollars"
Helen "no thank you we don't need"
--after another five or so minutes of this..
Child "you're a stingy girl..STINGY GIRL!..." -- then he stomps off about 15 feet and begins pouting and muttering under breath 'stingy girl' for the next 15 minutes..

after several days and several rounds of this our conscious was on the ropes..we needed to escape. So we took a bus north to Siem Reap to visit the famed temples of Angkor Wat.

Halfway into the 6 hour bus ride our bus breaks down and affords us the opportunity to see rural Cambodian life.







After a 20 minutes wait we hitched a ride on another bus going the same way, which was great because the first bus was sooo gauche...and was also still broken down.

A couple of hours later we arrived in the tourist town of Siem Reap and found a bed for the night. Next day we ventured into the ancient city of Angkor.

Angkor was amazing. The scale of this city and its buildings were impressive, putting most of Europe's grand designs to shame with it's intricate temple spires towering over acres of carved rocked and hundred foot high heads..all encircled by concentric rings of columned walls and square moats. But despite being the country's largest national monument it is still a living place with tribal Khmers farming the land and native trees clawing their way down through the ancient edifices; with incense peddlers, Buddhists wats and monks, and Khmer crafts ladies and school children.




















Painstakingly it was those pugnacious pipsqueaks that again drove us from the area. This time it was my fault apparently as I 'promised' that "maybe I buy a water later" and then after explaining to me loudly that in Cambodia maybe means 'maybe yes..not maybe no' she said some things in Cambodian to or at me that I'm sure weren't pleasant.

In summary the temples were great..I liken them to the temples of Chitchen Itza in Mexico. PP is an ok town if you're interested in Cambodian history otherwise it is unremarkable and apparently has a gun problem. Siem Reap is good for a couple of days to see the temples but otherwise is very crowded and touristic.

We felt bad for Cambodia actually. They have had such a rough past..and we really wanted to do our little part to help the economy and support their burgeoning tourist industry..but the attitude of the touts, especially the little ones, is unrelenting and eventually unbearable. We stayed 7 days in this country, the shortest time in any country we've visited to date, before flying out to Laos.

on the bright side got some more monk and buddha fotos.

Another night in Thailand

So yeah Thailand...what a place. Thailand, like most countries as we have been learning, has it's regional differences; the 'cultural' north is ruled by temples and hill tribes, the south is all vacation with it's powdery white beaches and bathtub warm water. Despite these slight cultural differences however the country seems to share a common love for celebration. In our travels Thailand has proven to be one of the most celebratory cultures we've encountered. They celebrate anything it seems. The King's birthday for example..it's in December..but they began celebrating back in October with ribbon-framed, near billboard sized portraits of him 'administering' over every major intersection and traffic circle and with the entire country dressed in pink and yellow shirts in honor of his majesty's favorite colors.

We were lucky enough to stumble across one of the two major yearly celebrations. Loi Krathong, on the 12th full moon of the year, celebrating the life giving force of water and nature with an offering of floating lanterns set adrift in the ocean or lake..sort of a Thai Thanksgiving. Songkran, the other festival around new years in April, is apparently a celebration of rock's magnificent defeat of scissor.

In Chiangmai we spied some monks assembling some rather large lanterns..
It was still about a week before the full moon when we started to see the Loi Krathong celebrations begin. It was our last night in Chiangmai and we ventured to the normally scheduled Sunday night market; but this time the market was gearing up for the 12moonwater festival with markets, music, traditional Thai dancing performances and even a couple of sumo wrestling bouts.

We shopped the market and watched the local bands set up..
We passed many colorful monks and penitent children..
We watched a repertoire of traditionally costumed dancers filter onto stage fluttering fans and twirling umbrellas, bowing in and out of the rhythm of the twangy string and drum music..

..until a troupe of retirees showed up dressed in weird zebra and red leopard print kimonos and began swaying and undulating their way arthritically up onto stage and into these large egg shaped things floating in a glowing pool of water..ok so there wasn't really any egg pods or glowing pools of water but with their staccato'd swaying, porcelain smiles, and eerily unfocused gaze it still reminded me of the rapture scene from Cocoon. Luckily this ended as soon as the mother ship arrived. And then the sumo started. Though strikingly similar to a Discovery channel show we had watched recently on strange sexual perversions (fuzzy costume fetishes and other weird Freudian infantile regression issues) this was quite fun to watch.
The next day we decided to heed wise words and make our way south. Our next stop was Sukhothai, seat of the original Thai kings. Here we rode bikes around the ruins of the ancient temple city. Reflecting on the many lakes and temples..


and reclining before many grand buddha.
After Sukothai it was back to Bangkok where we hitched a ride on a bird and flew south for the winter to Krabi, home of some world class scuba diving and rock climbing..neither of which, unfortunately, were we planning or prepared to do. But I don't think you can visit Thailand without the compulsory visit to the beaches of the south.

The south is the perfect place for those tired of Hawaii / Cancun vacations. It really is like the post cards..all limestone cliffs, emerald blue water and sunsets.

The downside to this is that it really is like the post cards and so it is quite crowded and touristic; an unwelcomed change from the more cultural and traditional feel of the north that we had acclimated to.

After a couple of days in Krabi we made our way to the Gulf of Thailand to the island of Ko Phangan. We stayed here for a couple of days and got to see the actual moon-water celebrations, it was neat to see all the families lighting their sparkling lanterns and floating these out into the waveless ocean as a sign of thanks..




After a few days cruising the island on motobike we had to head back to Bangkok to pick up our flight into Cambodia. On the way back we visited a famous floating market..this was quite a neat scene with all the local farmers out on their paddle canoes selling their flora and fauna to the main town stores. Basically this part of Thailand is all water-logged..so the farmers simply divert streams off the near by river and flood their orchards..they then paddle between the trees to collect various fruits and vegetables (bananas, oranges, bamboo, pineapple, etc) and then paddle straight to the river front market to sell direct to trucks, families, and restaurant owners, etc.










After the floating market we made our way to the new Bangkok International airport (which is quite a cool piece of architecture), ate our last Thaifood meal and said our goodbyes to Thailand along with promises to return.

end

Gobble Gobble!

Happy Turkey day to all our friends and family!