The Land of Thai

As a self-professed Foodie, my last stop on this giant wander is most fittingly Thailand. Back home one of my favorite foods is Thai and when I discovered they had a country that actually specialized in this sumptuous food, a visit there was inevitable. Its like finding out there is a TacoBellLand or ChipotleLand. it is a mecca for people who get more excited for the next meal than what ancient artifact that may be looming in the background.
It was straight to Bangkok for me. I stayed not far from the infamous backpacker ghetto of Khao San Road and took went about the business of trying to eat 4 meals of Thai food a day. This is not a food blog (actually I have no idea what kind of blog this is) so I will spare you the probably boring-to-you details of what has been delicious other than it all has been. Luckily for me, I was able to meet up Jana Reid and her boyfriend Sean, with whom we both share many mutual friends back in our native Kansas City. They have been living and working in Bangkok for about 9 months and were nice enough to show the ropes and provide some insight into living in the craziness that is Bangkok. We did a bit of touring and they steered me towards some amazing Thai foods. They seemed to be thorougly enjoying their lives there I can see why as Bangkok possesses an allure and cool that swallows many people whole. Way up on the list of places to return to one day. I left Jana and Sean in Bangkok to head up north and then south, but I hope to rendevous with them to celebrate the end of this adventure before my flight back home.

The next stop was the northern city of Chiang Mai, where I spent the next two days exploring the area, with some friends Trilby and Emma, who I have run into at a couple points in the SE Asia circuit so far. By far the highlight of Chang Mai was the legendary Sunday Night Market, where the food stalls were endless and the goods stalls were all amazingly unique. A four hour walk didn't even cover the whole market. By far the best market I have seen in my life. Coming into a close second in the highlight department was the guesthouse pool that offered daily relief from the intense sun. It was all fun in games in the pool until the Kiwi grandfather I recruited to play Marco Polo with us hit his head on the side of the pool in an amazing display of tenacity and agility during the game. He is ok.

From Chiang Mai, the next stop was Pai, an old hippie town that has blossomed into a laid back home base for trekking trips around the region. For practically nothing my friends and I were able to rent motorbikes to explore the area. An activity I see as vital to seeing the best of SE Asia, although on this trip it would be the source of a bit of discomfort. Towards the end of the day yesterday, on a recon mission down a dirt and gravel road to find out about a place that supposedly had fishing opportunities, I found myself approaching two small dogs in the road immediately before me. Fortunately due to the terrible state of the road I was not going very fast, although it was fast enough to have to jam the brakes when the dogs did not scatter from the road, as in normal circumstances. It was all over from here. As I started to soar over the motorbikes handlebars, my first thought was that I had declined the $1 damage insurance on the bike and that that was probably a mistake. My next thought was that the gravel and skin are a terrible combination. I could have strangled those dogs....
Just like in the movies, it all came out OK. The roadrash was not pretty but my friends came to the rescue with the necessary bandages and beer. I also procured a hammer at my guesthouse to bang the bent bike parts back together enough to make no one the wiser.

Speaking of movies, I recently watched Taken and I am relieved my trip is almost done because I had no idea how much danger I am in of being kidnapped abroad and sold into prostitution by an Eastern European gang. Not only would be it scary but the health benefits and pay are atrocious. I'll take my chances back in the mean steets of Missouri.

Jumping on a bus and then a boat to the island of Kho Samet to ride this baby out. Maybe ya'll hear from me or maybe you won't.

Marco,
Polo

Angkor

When booking my bus ticket from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap the ticket seller asked me if I had accommodation yet there and I said "no." He told me that he could arrange free transport to a recommended guesthouse and that the moto driver would be holding a sign with my name on it at the bus station. Immature thoughts flooded my brain and the temptation to have some fun with the moto driver was too much to resist.

The town of Siem Reap primarily serves as the base for visiting the famous Angkor Temples. Angkor Wat was the most stunning and somehow I managed to drag myself out of bed in time to view the 5:30am sunrise at it. The Angkor Wat temple is the largest religious building in the world, yada, yada, yada... To put the temples in more understandable layman's terms, its where they filmed Tomb Raider. Was able to take some good pics of the various temple sites, which I will try and upload today for parties interested. Sadly, the best pic of the day was not captured by me. At one site, I was easily coerced into standing with a group of about 50 Asian tourists for a picture. Gladly used as there token Westerner. But the weirdest part was the Buddhist monk who insisted on holding my hand in the picture. I would like to think he was just recognizing the awesome aura radiating from me, although I suspect it was his attempt to cast out the devil he saw lurking within. Hopefully the former.

The town of Siem Reap itself has been quite easy to get used to. On this whole trip, the cheapest accommodation has been found here for $1 a night. This leaves room in the budget to participate in things like having the dead skin on my feet and legs eaten off by fish. Yes, you heard right. There was a pool of fish in town where they charge you to stick your feet in. A bizarre but amazingly refreshing experience. I am mail-ordering 500 of these fish back home so everyone can do it. Keeping regular goldfish never has felt so foolish as now, knowing what these fishies can do. The proprietor even told me the secret to his success: starve the fish. Genius!

Life became random yesterday, almost to the point where I felt like in the Truman Show. In a period of a couple hours I ran into 3 groups of people all mentioned on the blog in one way or another in the last 6 months. One group was Trilby and Emma, of the Wanton Pub Crawl in Hoi An, Vietnam. Another, and really not as random was the Brit and Canadian couple who taught English with me back in Laos, and most bizarrely, ran into one of the Americans I crossed into Israel with 6 months back. I have been looking for fake clouds and cameras in the "sky" ever since.

Busing on over to Thailand tomorrow morning. Will be seeing the bright lights of Bangkok by tomorrow night if all goes well.

Yours,
Mr. Huginkiss

Sad But True

Phnom Penh. Not the classiest place on earth but probably not the sketchiest either. The backpacker ghetto where most travellers stay was awash with overt propositions for sex and drugs. At least a quarter of the people at my guesthouse seemed to be either smuggler types or pleasure seekers, whatever the cost. The going rate on Life seemed a bit cheaper in this part of the world. However cheap it may be now, it is nowhere near its market level in 1975, when the ultra-communist leaderPol Pot and his Khmer Rouge staged one of the world's bloodiest revolutions. Cities were ordered empty, money abolished, and a total agrarian state was attempted. During the ensuing 4 year reign of terror, the Khmer Rouge managed to slaughter 1/4th of the population of Cambodia before the Vietnamese took control of the country in 1979. Justice has never been seen. Pol Pot fled and died in exile in 1998. Other leaders managed to live normally in Cambodia until natural death, except for the few who have finally been arrested. For current-eventers, you may have read that "Duch" the school teacher turned torture warden of the infamous S-21 is now finally on trial, although the proceeding is in danger of mistrial due to alleged corruption in the Cambodian judicial system. Not quite the story of justice one wants to hear about.


Anyways, the also infamous "Killing Fields" are located just outside Phnom Penh, so this in addition to the S-21 prison were necessary to visit while I was there. It was grim. The museum approach of the Killing Field is straightforward--Here is the field of mass graves and here are the bones to prove it happened.

The S-21 museum was alot more informative, containing chilling photos of alot of the 17,000 prisoners that came through there, of which only 7 survived. Interestingly they had documented interviews of many of the hundreds of S-21 guards now living back amongst the neighbors they formerly tortured. Most transcripts included the phrase "I was only following orders." A defense made popular by former Nazis on trial.

Think America is immune from such a inhumane mentality? Watch (or read up) on Yale's famous 1964 "Obedience Experiment" (remember it from Psych class?)in which the majority of Americans in the testing sample administered what they what they thought was a lethal dose of electricity to another audibly screaming person just because a person of authority told them to. Yikes.

What am I getting at? My usual nothing, but sometimes a dose of reality never hurts to penetrate the insular world we live in. For me, seeing places like the Killing Fields, the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, the sectarian hate murals of Belfast, etc. represent the shedding away of adult layers of innocence. If I see evidence of another religious or idealogical inspired atrocity, I think I will puke. I used to think being aware of all this was a totally necessary process but now I am second guessing that opinion.

Cue that Don Henley song,
Brian

PS. Sorry to piss in your Monday coffee. I promise to keep the next blog a tad more upbeat.

A River Rat

The 4,000 Islands. I don't really think it's an apt name for the area as only a handful of the Mekong river islands are inhabited but nonetheless it does paint the mental picture of tranquility. A place where people get aggressively idle. In general Laotians are already very laid back. Supposedly the French have a saying summing up the people of SE Asia--that the Vietnamese plant the rice, the Cambodians watch it grow, and the Laotians listen to it grow. (Mysteriously the saying omits something about the French selling the rice for their profit). Well, I have never listened to rice grow so I thought I should investigate this phenomenon. And no better place to do this than the river island Don Det.
No bigger than a couple kilometers in length, Don Det has become a must-stop for many travellers heading south to the nearby Cambodian border. The activities list on this locale starts with a stroll around the island and ends with hammock durability testing, with not much else in between. Sadly, sporadic electricity has been introduced to the island, leaving one to look forward to the 10pm power shutoff that returns the island to the desired quietude.

For the second time since I entered Laos I had a bit of an internal plumbing problem. The first time I was in the town of Savannakhet where I was able to buy medicine from a man with a proper bricks and mortar shop, that at least included the word "Pharmacy" (although probably misspelled) on the sign. I was not so lucky on the island. On the advice of the lady I rented the bungalow from I walked over to the underneath of a stilted house, where an old Laotian lady was conducting her trade. I gave her the polite gesture of patting my tummy with a frown to convey my ailment. She in turn made the gesture of eating food and then waving her hand frantically near her behind to show its violent exit. Umm, yeah thats about right...
She then opened her bucket o'toxins and placed all these pills in my hand.

Staring at 12 pills, mostly varied and unmarked, I asked her which ones I was supposed to take and she indicated "all of them." This posed a delimma as I maintain a high personal safety standard, which only allows me to take mass quantities of unknown pills unless I am being paid handsomely by a medical research company. Also, ending up dead on Don Det would spoil what I foresee to be a really fun summer, so I declined to take them right then and there, but bought them as not to hurt the feelings of this aspiring pharmacist. Lucky for me some other travellers offered up some of their more recognizable stock.

Other breaks in idle lazing were a bike trip around the island and the neighboring one. I had been spending the days in the company of 5 Germans I initially met in the village of Tatlo. A hilarious group that made the stay on the island pretty enjoyable. They regularly spouted bits of their German wisdom (they avoid drinking cold water on hot days--with the reasoning that the body has to use energy to warm it up in your body. Not sure I buy it, but it has some merit I guess) and I tried to pass along some practical advice on what to do when residing next to a river. My Missouri-borne wisdom told me that daylight imbibing and jumping off the riverside bar's wooden plank was a suitable pastime. Surely risking fun but also blindness, Laotian brand whisky sells for $1 a bottle on the island and provided the necessary ingredient for a good time by all.

Crossed the Cambodian border yesterday and I now find myself in the capital city Phnom Pehn. If my guesthouse can serve as a microcosym from what awaits me in the rest of the city, its a sunny place for shady people.

Lots of history to ingest today, so I will update soon.
BQ

Laotian Living

On my bus ride from Savannakhet to Pakse a friendly Laotian struck up a conversation with me containing much of the surface level-line of questioning that one can always expect from a local. "Where are you from? How do you like my country, etc.." The Laotian then abrubtly segued into "The U.S. dropped 100 million lbs of bombs in Laos. Killed many Laos people." It was said without an aire of condemnation but rather just a statement of fact of which I could only reply "yes, very sad" and think about how our fear of a failed political system (communism) has left a legacy of destruction in many parts of the world. A fews days later while trekking alone in the countryside I returned to the village to hear the caution about the unexploded mines and cluster bombs in the area. I only spent a little part of the trek off-trail, although enough that it did give me a momentary pause. The irony of an American stepping on an American dropped mine didn't escape my thoughts either. "Just desserts" is what I'm sure many would have thought, and who would've blamed them? Annually, these explosives kill and maim hundreds of Laotians 35 years after their intended use.

Once in Pakse I fortunate to be a guest of Bertrand and Lyne from France. Couchsurfers and true citizens of the world, Bertrand's work in the coffee industry had placed them in extended residency in Mexico, El Salvador, Dominican Republic and now they were gracefully gliding into middle age in Laos. They had been living in Pakse for over 3 years and were a wealth of information about all things Lao. With their experiences it was easy to sit back and soak in their advice and perspectives. Lyne talked of the linguistic benefits received by her children with their growing up abroad and Bertrand opined about the paradox that although Laotions are extremely good people, they are also hideously corrupt. Given his previous locales of residency this kind of statement held a lot weight.

The two were also able to provide some insight into the peculiar culinary habits of the Laotians. A market stroll highlighted their delicacies: beetles, frogs, chicken embryos--they eat just about everything Bertrand stated. Most revolting is the dish where they drain the contents of a cow's intestine into a soup. So, if someone says they had shit soup for breakfast, they are not making a metaphor for their terrible morning, they actually had it for breakfast. I however did not have shit for breakfast the next morning but instead parted with Bertrand and Lyne and followed their advice to head off to the Bolaven Plateau, where I was to end up spending 5 days in the village of Tadlo.

Set to the side of a waterfall and within walking distance to 2 others, the village was a nice place to assimilate into laid back Laotian living. The daily river-swim usually ended up with an elephant or two appearing out of the trees, ferrying people around the area.

I spent one of the days hiking to 3rd waterfall. I set out armed with it's name, "Tat-sung," which means "mighty wall." Well no, that's not actually what it means but I know you like information so just play along with it will ya? Although there is supposedly a trail all the way to the falls, a walkaround in a neighboring village threw me off it. No need to worry (I didn't hear of the mines until later), as I would occasionally stumble across farmers who would point me in the right direction when needed. Like the one I came across in an empty field, sickle in hand, spliff in mouth, and baby on his back. Tat-sung? That way.....

When I did reach it, its volume was significantly less than the other two falls, although it was several times higher. As the only one there it made for just about the most perfect jungle shower one could have.

Just when I thought I was wrapping up my time in the village an opportunity came up to do a bit of teaching. A Spaniard, who had been staying in the village for some time, hilariously announced at dinner one night that he had just realized that he had flight for home in 36 hours. In Bangkok. This presented a bit of an urgent problem as he and a teenage Buddhist monk had started an English language class for the village kids about a week earlier and now needed people to continue it as about 40 kids were eagerly showing up everyday. Myself, two Brits, and a German agreed to do it, although my motivation was more to counter the instruction of the Queen's English on the kids. "Listen kids, I know what their saying but its actually a trash can not a rubbish bin..."
The following day the Brits and German were leaving so I decided to stay another day to teach the class and hopefully rope some other travellers into carrying on the class. With an incredible guilt tripping ability acquired from my mother, I harassed all the other travellers in the village. "Oh the 4,000 Islands area sounds nice place to head to today..I guess the kids will just teach themselves English..."
With this I was able to get a Canadian and another Brit to assist the class that night and then I was off to the Islands myself.....

Hopefully the rumors are true and there is no electricity on the Mekong River island I am en-route to. If true, you'll hear from me next in Cambodia.

Cell phone turned off (if i had one),
Brian

Hanging a Left

Due to time constraints my northernly progress was halted and I decided that I needed to take a left. Or a trip west into Laos if you want specifics.
Arranging transport across a border is always a crapshoot. Inevitably plans, people, and modes of travel become sketchier around a border. So when booking passage from Hoi An to Savannakhet, Laos from one of the many booking agents I was a bit surprised when she said that because the border was not open 24 hours, the group I was to be travelling with ("yes, yes, there will be other travellers on the bus" she stated) will be spending the night in the dormitory of a guesthouse in a town neighboring the border. This prospect sort of intrigued me. Mostly because I began to think how interesting it would be to take say the passsengers on a subway carriage or other public transport and force all the people spend the night somewhere. You know, find out what really makes that old man tick that is manically jabbering to himself, or what is really bothering that goth kid giving everyone the stare down. But really this was not NYC, and the bus passengers were probably going to be the regular backpacker crew that is more or less cut from the same cloth, so the concept actually isnt that cool.
Due to the ridiculous business manner in which this trips are usually done, you buy a ticket from a booking office and basically you are at the mercy of what company they outsource the actual transporting. On a given trip you may come under the "care" for about 5 different transport "companies." This was to be my case on this particular trip. In the game of cards I drew and 7/2 offsuit and started on on a crappy bus that became crappier as I was transferred continously from one to another. And yes I was the only one going to Laos. So the grand social experiment of the public bus dormitory lock-in consisted of me being told to get off of the bus in some non-descript town near the border and to ride on the back of a motor scooter to some family's house, where I was to sleep before being put back on a bus in the morning. The tally marks in the weird experiences column on this trip just reached 65 by the way.
So early the next morning with my mode of transport slowly digressing from a bus to inevitably a Fred Flinstone car, I reached the border. As as the only westerner there, the moneychangers were on me like the proverbial stink on shit. It was a pretty painless ordeal however and amazingly after a brief staredown and prodding my last bus driver ditched his initial plans of leaving me there and pocketing the rest of my fare and grudgingly paid another driver to drive me the rest of the route in Laos.
Refreshingly the people in Laos are very laid back and don't quite have the nose for the tourist dollar like the Vietnamese do. I spent my first two nights in the quiet Mekong rivertown Savannakhet. This morning I woke up and drew another bad card hand and had a 6 hour bus ride where they packed them in like sardines. I was lucky in the sense that I had a window seat as I was able to drape my shoulder and right arm out the window the entire journey. I was not worried about possible loss of limb during the trip as the blood had left my arm in the first hour and the severation would have been painless.
On a good note, I am currently Couchsurfing with a nice older French couple who have a nice pad and great info on what to do in the area.