Our big trip this year was a 32-day excursion to Southeast
Asia January 12 through February 11, 2018; we visited Hong Kong, Myanmar,
Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. There
was a hiatus from extensive foreign travel as we moved from one state to
another, bought land, and built and moved into a new home. That was our full-time activity for the better
part of two years. We are now back into
travel mode and hope to regale you with more tales of our adventures in the
future.
This series of essays and photographs is organized by
country in the order in which we visited them and is designed to capture what
we saw and our reaction. It will be our
unvarnished, non-politically correct opinion of SE Asia as seen through our
eyes. This is not an arm-chair tourist
guide designed to feature only the most beautiful aspects of any given place or
people. There is great beauty to be seen
and wonderful people to meet in all of the places we visited, but this covers
the good, the bad, and the ugly as viewed by us. We hope you enjoy our retelling of our
journey as much as we did experiencing it.
Hong Kong
Our first day was long and exhausting; 19+ hours flying time
from Denver to Hong Kong with a couple of hours layover in LA. Jet lag had us in its grip for a couple of
days. Of course, that was the point of
stopping off there first. The day after
our arrival, we went into discovery mode and caught a Big Bus, which took us
every where on the island we might want to go and then some. It was one of the best bargains we found on
this trip.
The population in Hong Kong is hugely dense—about 6,500
people per square kilometer and most of them are stacked on top of one another
in high-rise buildings. In comparison, using
that ratio, the entire population of Montrose county could fit into less than 1
¼ sq. miles or 800 acres there. That, my
friends, is dense! The concrete canyons
are amazing—even on a clear day (and we lucked into 2 of them) most of the
streets are shady most of the day. While
the temperatures were warm in the open, a jacket was necessary in the canyons.
In addition to a tour of the financial district, Stanley,
Repulse Bay, and Aberdeen on our first day, we took the iconic Star Ferry across
to Kowloon and enjoyed morning tea at a ritzy hotel. The history of HK is fascinating, too. The British acquired the island in the 1840s
as the spoils of the first opium war with the Chinese. From that acquisition began the journey that
resulted in HK becoming one of the greatest commercial successes on the planet and
which grew from a few hundred people to more than 7.5 million today. The Brits had negotiated a 99-year lease in
1898, thinking it was a good deal—we are not too sure that they were feeling
the same way when they turned over the governing of HK to the Chinese in 1997. That said, to outward appearances the place
seems to be running smoothly, but we suspect that there is plenty of strain
when it comes to actual governance.
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| Star Ferry |
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| Star Ferry |
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| Repulse Bay |
Day 2 found us taking
the Big Bus once again, this time to Victoria Peak via the tram. The weather was beautiful and almost clear—somewhat
of a rarity this time of year. The views
from Victoria Peak are spectacular. Like
everywhere else on this island, it was teeming with humanity. We got there early, so the line was small,
but an hour or so later it was awful. We
finished the bus loop around the Causeway area and returned to our hotel to
rest up for dinner and to get organized for our flight the next day.
It's hard to try to capture the sights, sounds, and smells
of this teeming pile of humanity. HK is
a true international city. One can't
begin to count the number of different races and religions encountered in a
single day. Our photos can show you the
concrete towers and the swarm of people, but the smells of HK (perhaps all of Asia),
are indescribable. We never fully
adjusted to the variety of aromas which assaulted our senses every minute we
were there. Food vendors of every stripe
are on every street and they create a mind-boggling array of aromas.
The sounds, of course, are a cacophony of languages, traffic
noises (blaring horns, sqwealing tires, roaring engines, and screaming sirens),
and perpetual construction racket.
Truthfully, over half the city seems to be under construction all the
time—more buildings of every kind and highways.
The largest employment group seems to be construction workers followed very
closely by bus drivers. Public
transport, by necessity, seems to be quite good here. The highways on HK look like a huge pile of
linguini; they are over and under one another, stacked high, and buried deep,
and the whole thing is in perpetual motion all the time—that may be a little
hyperbolic because we imagine it slows up sometime between 3:00 & 4:00 A.M.,
but we slept through it.
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| Street Scenes |
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| Street Scenes |
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| View from our Hotel Room |
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| View from our Hotel Room |
Housing is another interesting problem—actually, the cost of
housing is the problem. For example, a
271 sq. ft flat near our hotel sells for around HK$6M. Using the equivalent ratio of US$ per sq. ft,
our home in Montrose would set one back US$6.9M—egad!! There are other, more expensive, areas of HK if
you are inclined to home ownership. It's
easy to see why home ownership is becoming exceedingly difficult here.
Day 3 we woke up to smog so thick you could slice it with a
knife. The visibility was less than ¼
mile. Half the population was wearing
surgical masks—they were the smart ones.
We asked, “Where the heck did we put the masks we packed just in case?” Fortunately, Day 3 was our departure day, so
we didn't have to put up with it for too long.
It was truly unhealthy! Sadly,
this would be a theme of our SE Asian trip.
We encountered dirtier air in Beijing in 2009, but our experience on
this trip was similar.
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| This was in the Hong Kong Newspaper the day we left |
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| Smoggy Morning Outside Our Hotel |
MYANMAR
Yangon
The second leg of our SE Asia trip took us to Yangon,
Myanmar (Rangoon, Burma, in British colonial days). What one is struck with immediately in this
8-million + person city is the bone crushing poverty. As you can imagine, there are lots and lots
of people everywhere you go. Without
sounding like an encyclopedia, we'll add historical and statistical tidbits as
they occur to us in the writing of this blog.
But right off the bat, one is baffled by the fact that they drive on the
right even though 90% of the vehicles are configured for left hand driving. Why is that you may ask? Well, it turns out that one of the many
governments or dictators this country has had since winning its independence
from Great Britain in 1948 decided to rid themselves of all vestiges of
colonialism and that included driving on the left in the British manner. Anyway, it is all very confusing.
The vast majority of the people here are Buddhist (85%) even
though there are 156 different ethnic groups. That means lots of visits to
temples, pagodas, and monasteries; all of that translates into lots of monks
and nuns.
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| Novice Monks Line up for Lunch |
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| Novice Nuns' Flip Flops |
Every collection of people has their oddities. Sometimes it is gastronomical, other times it
is sartorial. People in Myanmar, both
men and women, young and old, wear a sarong-like garment called a Longyi. While not universal, it is certainly
ubiquitous. Its use is reminiscent of
Pacific Islanders—flip flops always accompany it.
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| Our Guide, Joe in his Longyi |
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| Joe Wearing His Longyi |
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People Bathing in Irrawaddy
River in Their Longyis |
Listening to stories of the country's political history is
like reading a bad novel. Good novels
coalesce around one or two themes, less good novels need many twists and turns,
allowing none of them to resolve the conflict; so it is with Myanmar's
political history. Without offering an
interpretation, let’s just say that Myanmar's people have yet to find their way
and are residing in what can easily be called a state of perpetual chaos. Economically, Myanmar ranks about 74th
in GNP out of 191 countries. The USA is
first. Tuvalu is 191st. Tuvalu?
Don’t ask.
One of the most amazing pagodas we saw on our entire trip to
SE Asia was in Yangon. The Shwedagon
Pagoda, most frequently referred to as the Golden Pagoda, is the most sacred
pagoda in Myanmar. It houses the relics
of the past four Buddhas, a particularly astonishing feat we’re told. At Shwedagon and all the rest of the pagodas
we visited, we (and the thousands of other visitors) took off our shoes to show
our respect. While there, we were able to make offerings to planetary posts of
the days of our birth. For example, we
are Thursday/mouse and Wednesday/elephant respectively. We dutifully went to our respective stations
to anoint its Buddha with water. Can't
tell if it has made a difference, but we are both still kicking, so it
apparently did no harm. Karma being what
it is should not be tested too much.
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| Shwedagon Pagoda |
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| Making an offering to Buddha |
Shwedagon Pagoda sits on 14 acres (there are about 114 acres
of land around the pagoda) and is about 326 ft high—it is festooned with gold
leaf. It was started around 588 BC and
has been maintained since that time by a variety of Burmese Kings; therefore,
it is quite venerable. At the very top
of the pagoda’s spire is a diamond orb which contains 4,351 diamonds totaling
1800 carats. The apex diamond is 76
carats.
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| Shwedagon Pagoda |
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| Shwedagon Pagoda |
A visit to a monastery/nunnery is necessary in Myanmar—there
is no shortage of them as much of the education in the country is through the
monks and nuns. The country’s
educational system is poor, and the people are poorer, so it is difficult for
them to go to government schools (private schools are exceedingly rare),
therefore, most kids go to monasteries and nunneries for their educations. We visited one such place, the Kalaywa Tawya
Monastery where more than 1,000 novices and nuns examine the purity of Buddhist
scripture and conduct modern academic studies.
We arrived at lunch time and were amazed by the order of the
activity. Hundreds of novices
(youngsters from ages 7 or 8 to upper teens) were gathering for the noon meal that
they had acquired that morning by walking the streets seeking alms. As former educators, it surprised us that
that many young people could conduct themselves with no riotous
behavior—indeed, with almost no noise what-so-ever. Locals regularly help feed the monks/nuns as
they do not own anything or conduct any business unlike folks in other
religious orders. All they have they
acquire via alms.
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| Monks & Novices at Lunch |
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| Monks & Novices at Lunch |
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| Monks & Novices at Lunch |
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| Novice Nuns Lining up for Lunch |
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| You Want Some More Rice? |
Yangon is also home to Myanmar’s most revered reclining
Buddha. Begun in 1899, this massive
image of the elegant Buddha is resting on its side in a six-story pagoda is
more than 200 ft long.
Myanmar's people are the most polite and gentle folks that
we have ever encountered. We felt
completely safe there, yet from outward appearances we should be petrified to
show up on the street. That grim reality is no more evident than in the village
of Dala, a housing area/village on the west side of the Yangon River, where
some 100,000 people call home. These
people come from out-lying regions to find work in Yangon but cannot afford to
live in the city. They literally live in
shacks that have no running water—daily, someone from the family goes to the
local reservoir to haul buckets of water for that day’s use. Because there is a water shortage, each
family is restricted to how much water they can draw each day. Our photos show it better than words can
describe.
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| Street Scene in Dala |
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| Housing in Dala |
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| More Housing in Dala |
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| Collecting the Daily Water Ration |
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| Collecting the Daily Water Ration |
Marketing for every kind of goods—veggies, clothing, meat,
fish, all manner of groceries, and motorbikes--you name it, it can be found in
huge outdoor markets as well as along the streets. Markets are everywhere, and we visited many
of them.
Pollution is awful here, too. There are a vast number of cars and buses
belching out whatever it is they belch out.
Outdoor cooking with charcoal and wood prevails. The air smells as bad as it looks—we were all
suffering from pulmonary allergies.
There is no obvious effort by anyone to bring the situation under
control.
Yangon, as well as our next two stops, will be too
quick—just 7 nights total in Myanmar. A
fast visit really provides just an impression rather than any understanding.
Bagan
We had a relatively short flight from Yangon to Bagan,
roughly 2 hours in a 72-passenger domestic airline turbo-prop that wasn't
full. Bagan is the home of “4 million
pagodas.” That is hyperbole, there are
only about 2,370 pagodas and temples in and around Bagan. However, these ancient structures are
literally everywhere.
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| Loading Plane Bound for Bagan |
Seemingly impossible, the air quality in Bagan is even
worse. It makes for some glorious
sunsets and sunrises, but it is very hard on the respiratory system—wood burning
smoke mostly. On our fist morning, there
was a large hot air balloon lift right at sunrise and we managed to get photos
from our hotel balcony. We also caught a
great sunset on a boat ride on the Irrawaddy River the previous evening—there
is no rest for the intrepid traveler.
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| Sunset on the Irrawaddy Near Bagan |
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| Balloon Rise at Sunrise in Bagan |
Speaking of no rest, we took a two-hour horse cart ride
amongst the pagodas. It was bumpy and
dusty, but a genuine hoot. We were able
to get up close to 100s of pagodas and temples that would have been otherwise
difficult to get to.
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| Pagodas in Bagan |
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| Your Friends Aboard A Horse Cart |
At this point, one would think that some Buddhist philosophy
would have rubbed off on us because of the amount of time we spent in pagodas
and temples, but that was not the case.
However, we still had plenty of time as we would be visiting many other
Buddhist countries before this trip would be over. Our tour company, Overseas Adventure Travel,
markets itself as OAT. We have decided
that really stands for one of two things: it is either “Old American Travelers”
or (and our favorite and no less accurate) “Oh, Another Temple.”
Mandalay
We wrapped up our visit to Myanmar with a two-night stop in
Mandalay. Rudyard Kipling made Mandalay
famous (or infamous) with his poem “Mandalay.”
Some see the poem as a glorification of colonialism; however, we suspect
those people are academics who are always looking for something provocative.
However, to be fair, there are some significant geographic inaccuracies in the
work. Since Mandalay is in the center of
Burma, it is improbable that one could see the sunrise across any kind of bay,
or, for that matter, see any part of China.
The poem's narrator is a retired British soldier who misses Burma, its
women, and its loose morality. He laments that the only easy women in London
are scruffy house maids; not so in Burma.
Comparing Burma to old Blighty, Burma wins out in his mind: better
climate, more attractive women, and no 10 Commandments getting in the way of a
good time. Ah, nostalgia!
Our guide in Myanmar was Joe. He was a 35-year old Burmese who lives in
Mandalay. The eight of us who did the
pre-trip to Myanmar fell in love with this guy.
He was very personable, and his English was very understandable. On one of our back-alley excursions, he took
us to his parents’ house (where he still lives) to meet them. (Interestingly, the photo of the old woman
that opens this blog was taken in this back-alley.) He said he rarely did that
but found us to be so harmonious that he wanted us to meet one another. He is getting married in April and the two of
them will move into that house with his parents (he recently added a bedroom
just for them). It was very common in SE
Asia to find many generations living together in really small spaces; even
people who seemed to be moderately well off lived with extended families and
poor people were stacked like cord wood.
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| Joe and his Parents |
We continued our quest to visit all the temples and pagodas
in Myanmar. The largest book in the world
is at the Kuthodaw Pagoda, where all of Buddha's teachings are etched on 729
Tripitaka Tablets, each in its own building; quite a staggering site to
see. While fascinating, we didn’t take
the time to drop in on each tablet for a read.
Mandalay is a city that relies on scooters for
transportation. All three cities that we
visited in Myanmar have had lots of scooters, but Mandalay is awash with
them. Indeed, our bus was swimming in a
sea of scooters everywhere we went. In
addition, traffic control devices and signage are simply suggestions, not
mandates. Everyone drives with one foot
one the accelerator and one hand on the horn.
Traffic is a cacophony of competing irritations.
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| Scooter Traffic |
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| Nuns Dodging Traffic to Collect Alms |
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| Scooter Parking Lot |
Mandalay is also strewn with pagodas and temples. One of the more interesting ones sits atop
Mandalay Hill. It requires a gawd-awful
ride in a truck-like “bus” that the locals use for public transport, but barely
accommodate a large Caucasian (particularly a tall one) to reach the base of
the pagoda/temple because the road is so narrow and twisty. Anyway, after a long and bumpy ride, the
stalwart traveler is rewarded with a beautiful pagoda/temple and a 360° view of
Mandalay with the Irrawaddy River meandering through the city. We arrived near sunset, so were doubly
rewarded. There was some annual
celebration going on where monks from all over SE Asia come to Mandalay to
receive handouts to help support them for the coming year. Apparently, there were 20,000 extra monks in
town. Not surprisingly, they wanted to
visit the same pagodas/temples at which we were stopping. (As an aside: monks from different countries
wear different color robes: tangerine, maroon, orange, etc.: it was quite
colorful.)
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| Myanmar Transportation |
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| A Plethora of Monks |
A boat trip on the Irrawaddy River to visit Mingun was a
feature of our Mandalay visit. As we
will reiterate frequently in these essays, a component of an OAT trip is
interacting with locals on a different level than is typical of most
tours. Our boat ride upriver to Mingun
was another such experience. We saw one
of the world’s largest ringing bells, and, yes, we got to ring it—apparently,
one rings the bell after performing a good deed, so he/she can share with
others the merit he/she has earned.
Local lore holds that it can be heard for miles around.
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| Pre-Lunch Snack of River Fish |
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| Street Vendor in Mingun |
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| Ring That Bell, Big Boy! |
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| Old Buddhists have to go Somewhere |
The world’s longest wooden Buddhist bridge once again
captured our imaginations and challenged us to creative photography—not that we
always succeeded, but we always tried. A
popular activity for Burmese planning on getting married is engagement and
pre-wedding photos at popular places.
The U Bein footbridge that stretches almost three-quarters of a mile
over the shallow Thaung Thaman Lake is one of the most popular spots in
Mandalay, especially at sunset. As was
true throughout our trip, there were throngs of people. It’s not until you are forced to do
everything en masse that you realize
what a quiet, uncluttered life you live in the confines of your own community
and home.
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| U Bein Bridge |
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| Sunset from U Bein Bridge |
THAILAND
Bangkok
Living in a small rural community and having not spent much time
in cities these past few years, we found ourselves pretty overwhelmed with
their intensity and sheer density.
Bangkok offered us no respite.
Weighing in at about 12 million, it is the biggest city we have visited
in quite some time—it is also the largest on this SE Asia trip (although Saigon
is giving it a run for its money). The traffic is mind- boggling. Here, too, scooters are wide-spread, but
there are also many, many cars, buses, taxis, taxi scooters, sky trains, and
subways. And the hordes that are not in
vehicles are walking the streets. Whew!
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| Bangkok Traffic |
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| High Rise Buildings in Bangkok |
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| Electricity Grid |
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| Chinese Owned 7-11s are Popular in Thailand |
Thailand has some 65 million residents, 90% of whom are Thai—the
remainder are a mix of Chinese, Cambodians, and Burmese. There is not the same level of ethnic
diversity as was true in Myanmar. One's
first impression of Bangkok is of a vibrant modern city. On closer inspection, it has large slums with
very dense conglomerations of patched together housing.
The eight Myanmar travelers were joined by six folks who were just
doing the Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam part of the trip. In a study of group dynamics, it was
interesting to see how the group would react to becoming larger after seven
days of togetherness. As it turned out,
we had nothing to worry about. We all
fit together pretty well and there was little in the way of competition or
conflict among the members.
The newly comprised group under the guidance of our new trip
guide, Wichien, visited two sets of temple ruins the first day. In the city of Ayutthaya some 50 miles north
of Bangkok, UNESCO World Heritage Sites beckoned. Home to 33 kings from many dynasties, it was
the capitol of Siam from 1353 to 1767.
So wealthy was it, that it was often described as “2,000 spires clad in
gold.” Sadly, for the Thais, Burma
attacked and destroyed the temples, stole the gold, and lobbed off the heads of
all the Buddhas.
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| Decapitated Buddhas |
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| This one got his Head Back |
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| More Decapitated Buddhas |
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| Temple Ruins |
On our second day in Thailand, we visited the Grand Palace. Masses of humanity were everywhere. There were so many people that had the site
not been extraordinarily beautiful, it would have been truly unpleasant. As it turned out, we were there for the
changing of the guard—an unexpected treat.
This grand palace, a sprawling compound of ceremonial halls, gilded
spires, and ornate buildings was the home of Rama IV, the monarch who was
romanticized in the musical The King and
I. The grounds sport a 26-inch
Emerald Buddha—actually, it’s carved out of Jade, but who’s being picky? The temple Wat Phra Kaew houses this beloved
figurine, which is so valued that the king himself changes its robes for each
hot, rainy, and cool season.
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| Grand Palace Crowds |
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| Your Friends With Their New Friend |
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| Palace Pagoda |
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| Palace Temple |
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| Changing of the Guard |
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| Here Come Some More |
We explored the Chao Phraya River and an off-shoot canal by boat
to, once again, get a better flavor of how local people live and make a living
along these waterways. We had a great
lunch at a small family-run restaurant following a cooking demonstration. Fred got roped into helping make our lunch of
Thai Pad. It turned out to be excellent. It probably won’t win any Michelin ratings,
but it was good enough for an OAT group.
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| Typical House on the Canal |
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| Fred Preparing Lunch a la Thai |
Continuing our traveling ways, we took an hour and half bus ride
south of Bangkok to experience the Thaling Chan floating market. It was captivating. We rode a small motor boat (5-6) passengers
to the market. Once there it was
wall-to-wall boats and people. What
undoubtedly started out as a market for locals to buy veggies and other daily
necessities has turned into a gigantic tourist attraction. Locals still come to buy necessities, but
they have been joined by a gazillion souvenir sellers. The result is
mayhem. Of course, we joined right in
with the throng and even left some of our money with local vendors in exchange
for souvenirs.
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| Souvenir Peddlers |
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| Mamma-San Selling Veggies |
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| Local Goods Venders |
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| Do You Want Some Potatoes? |
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| How About Papayas? |
Following the floating market, we hopped a fisherman's boat for a
visit to a mangrove forest restoration area right on the Gulf of Thailand. At the mangroves, which we could aid by
planting new shoots, we were joined by a troop of monkeys seeking a handout. They were not disappointed as there were
plenty of bananas available for that purpose on board the boat. We passed, but others in our group did
not. We imagine the monkeys appreciated
the largesse.
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| Fishing Village |
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| Hey, Mack, Toss Me A Banana! |
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| Some of our Group Planting Mangrove Shoots |
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| Some Not |
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| Fishing Village |
We took a dinner cruise on the Chao Phraya River our last night in
Bangkok. The lights adorning the Royal
Palace and many temples and pagodas were a delightful adjunct to the excellent
Thai food we ate as we floated this broad waterway. The food we encountered on this trip was
great. Fortunately, we are fond of Thai
and Asian food. We have eaten more rice
on this trip than we have in a year at home, but, of course, that’s why we
travel—new and unique experiences.
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| Royal Palace From Our Boat |
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| Royal Palace From Our Boat |
LAOS
LUANG
PRABANG
Our flight to Luang Prabang was mercifully short. The old prop plane was like the ones we used
in Burma; no head clearance and even less leg room. Laos is much smaller than either Thailand or
Myanmar—only 7 million people with 49 ethnic groups. Hence, there is a lot less congestion here. As is true elsewhere in SE Asia, everyone
cooks with open wood fires leading to lots of smoke pollution.
We visited the biggest and best temple in Luang Prabang—Xiengtong
Temple. While nice, it was not as
elaborate or large as the ones we saw in Myanmar. This city was once the old royal capital of
Laos and it reflects its history with quaint architecture. One of the many Laotian kings who died lay in
state at this temple for three years. He
was wrapped in tobacco leaves to preserve his body, which led the author to
reflect on Willie Nelson’s recent bi-op, Roll
Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die. But
we digress.
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| Moasic with beads |
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Where King Wrapped in Tobacco
Laid in State |
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| Xiengtong Temple |
A common feature of most temples that are also part of royal
palaces is a building for the king to lie in state after he has died. All of the subsequent kings who die lie in
state there also. It’s ironic that a
group of folks who spend their entire lives trying to establish themselves as
gods plan ahead for mortality that shouldn’t be necessary if they were to
actually become gods. Xiengtong is also
a popular spot for pre-wedding photos.
We were fortunate enough to be present when one such couple was having
their photographs taken. The traditional
costumes (a necessity it seems) were enchanting.
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| Aren't They a Handsome Couple? |
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| Betrothed |
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| We'd Bet They Are Going to be Really Happy |
The town has become quite the center for various kinds of
adventure tourism and, hence, attracts lots of Caucasians (mostly Europeans and
Aussies) who are in an unending quest to defy death. As a UNESCO World Heritage Site, it is also
very popular with tourists of many ilks.
We made an early morning visit to a village that specializes in
paper-making and silk-making and weaving.
The paper-making was fascinating.
They use the bark of the Mulberry tree, peeling off strips of bark. The bark is soaked until it becomes very
soft. The bark is then pounded until it is mushy; fred was cajoled into helping
with this task, too. Finally, the mushy
bark is soaked until it becomes a fibrous mass of glop (notice the precise
scientific names used to describe the end product), which is then spread out on
screens, decorated, and set to dry. The final product is very strong and
attractive. These people also use a
low-tech method of making silk. They use
a small number of hatched silk worms who then create the silk. Later, after making thread, they weave it
into colorful scarves, table runners and such.
We are the proud owners of one such piece.
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Fred Pounding Mulberry Bark
For Pulp |
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| Designing a Paper Wall Hanging |
We cruised the Mekong River up to a village that specializes in
making rice whiskey. It is really
terrible stuff. Not only did it taste a
lot like what kerosene must taste like, it had snakes and other critters in
it. Apparently, the varmints in the
hooch make it some kind of herbal treatment for what ails one. It was not among our souvenir purchases. The local people have also constructed a
Buddha shrine in a cave right next to the river. The Pak Ou Cave is filled with thousands of
Buddha icons. Locals and visitors are
continually adding to the menagerie. It
is high enough above the river that it doesn’t fill with water during the
monsoon season.
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| Rice Whiskey With Snake |
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| Pak Ou Cave |
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| Hundreds of Buddhas in Pak Ou Cave |
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| Lots of Tourists & Local Visit the Cave |
Laotian massages do not have the same reputation as Thai massages,
but for $8 USD per hour for a very deep massage you can't go wrong. After a long day on the river, it was a
delightful experience.
The favored mode of transportation in Luang Prabang is the
Jumbo. These are small truck/scooters
they carry about 6 passengers comfortably; the Lao manage to get twice that
many into them. The streets in the old
section of town are too narrow for larger vehicles, so the Jumbo is the way to
go. It costs about $5 USD for most
trips.
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| Our Guide, Wichien, Dodging a Jumbo |
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Those Suckers Weren't Easy
to Disembark |
Various members of our troop had been passing around a chest cold
caused by pollution and sleeping in air conditioning. For two days, it was fred’s turn to have the
crud. It turned out that 14 of the 16 of
us wound up with this bronchial infection.
At least one person probably had a low dose of pneumonia. While fred stayed in the hotel with an
assortment of drugs, including antibiotics, in an effort to get better, the
remainder of the group visited a school and had a community lunch in a Hmong
village.
Susan loved visiting the village and said it was one of the
highlights of her trip. The group was
welcomed by the Communist village chief, who poured each of the group a small
glass of village-made rice whiskey. She
noted that he sipped a bit with each pouring, surreptitiously sipped a bit
between pourings, and by the end of the ritual was a bit loopy. When asked why he was chief, she was told the
Communists selected him because of his high morals and sobriety. At lunch she asked how many of the other
villagers were Communist. The headman’s
wife shook her head. “None,” she said. We saw the village blacksmith hammering the
knife he was forming on a shell casing anvil made from American bombs. The group met with the village shaman who
performed a ritual dance and who also demonstrated his agility with his
crossbow, used to kill rats. The local
Hmong primary school is supported by OAT/Grand Circle Foundation; we saw the
toilets OAT had built for the children when we visited the school. The group gave gifts to the Hmong teacher,
and we were enthusiastically greeted by the children.
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| Susan Gifting the School Teacher |
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| Grateful Kiddos |
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| Headman |
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Kiddos Learning
|
VIENTIANE
OAT always includes a home hosted dinner where a small group of us
(4-6) have a traditional meal with a local family. On this trip, our home meal was in
Vientiane. Along with another couple,
Susan and I had dinner with a four-generation family who prepared for us a
traditional Lao dinner (with our help).
A traditional dish that Laotians have is green papaya salad. They mercifully made a batch that was edible
for us as they normally serve it with a huge amount of red pepper that will
literally take the hide off your tongue.
It was a delightful evening. Two
of the men spoke English, so we managed to have a great time as well as a great
meal. One of the men was a university
student. His brother-in-law, a university graduate, worked for the Laotian
Lottery. We learned a lot about life in
Laos from regular people that evening.
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| Our Laotian Home-Hosted Dinner |
Since Vientiane is the capitol of Laos, we saw the Presidential
residence as well as several very impressive embassies. Vientiane also has an arch that resembles the
Arc d’ Triomphe in Paris (the French, after all, were the European colonizers
of Laos) called the Patuxay Victory Gate Monument.
This city, as is true of most in SE Asia, is home to an impressive
stupa, PhraThat Luang (pagodas are called stupas here). The Great Sacred Stupa,
a national symbol of Laos built in the 16th century, also has a
reclining Buddha made of gold. A couple
was having their pre-wedding photos taken at this site, too. As almost always, they were festooned with
the traditional Lao wedding costumes.
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| Great Sacred Stupa |
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| Great Sacred Temple |
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| Posing With The Buddha |
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Pretty Fancy Footwear on
that Prospective Groom |
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| Reclining Buddha |
A real treat for us was the opportunity to meet with a monk for a
discussion of his daily life and practice and have the opportunity to pick up
tips on meditation. This was mesmerizing. Those of us who meditated with him felt that
it was the best meditation we have ever had (our Catholic members from Georgia
passed, thank you very much). Perhaps it
was because we were all totally exhausted and really relished the opportunity
to sit mindlessly still for a little bit.
On the other hand, perhaps some of his devoutness rubbed off on us. After all, he gets up a 4:00 a.m. and meditates
for an hour every day and has been doing this for 10 or more years. In any event, we are all still talking about
our experience. After the meditation,
the monk showed us how he dresses in his robe.
It’s a complicated process that involves a sheet of fabric bigger than a
king-sized bed sheet that he systematically wraps around his body with no
buttons or zippers at all.
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| Meditating Monks (one in Orange is a Novice) |
Hard to get through a country without some discussion of politics,
Laos is no different. Because of the
extensive American bombing of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which was on Laos’s
eastern border, there are tons of unexploded ordinance in the country. There is and has been a significant effort to
find and disarm these devices.
Immediately after 1973 and the end of the war, 400-500 people per year
were maimed or killed by stumbling on to these bombs. Today, that is down to fewer than 20 per
year. Better, but still way too many. The USA has been an active player in the
removal, primarily through funding. We
visited COPE, an organization run by the Laotian government that is leading the
effort to help people who have been injured.
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Examples of some of the Artificial Limbs
Distributed by COPE |
CAMBODIA
Phnom Penh
The Killing Fields of Cambodia impacted us in ways we had not anticipated. We were, like most of you, aware of Pol Pot
and the Khmer Rouge. However, since it
was far, far away, we had not internalized what had taken place. After all, it was the mid-1970s and we had
just escaped our own national nightmare.
To have it slammed home in our comfortable old age was startling, to say
the least. It is clearly one thing to
know about something intellectually and something else again to visit the
actual spot of these atrocities. Bones don't lie, and they do make an impact.
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Memorial at Choeung Ek
Killing Fields |
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| Close-up of the Memorial at Right |
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Overview of the Killing Fields'
Mass Graves |
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| More Grizzly Samples |
S-21 was a notorious re-education center. Actually, it was a pipeline to the killing
fields. A former high school converted
into a center for torture, it has been preserved as a remembrance of the
genocide that took place there and other places in Cambodia. During our stop at this place, we had an
opportunity to meet with one of the few survivors and to hear his story. He managed to get through S-21 without
winding up in the killing fields, one of the very few to do so. Because they accidently discovered he could
repair typewriters, he was given that job and, hence, avoided being sent to the
killing fields—talk about serendipity. He
was one of the handful who were able to testify at the trials of some of the
perpetrators. Bizarrely, fewer than 10
people were ever charged and punished for these crimes. Indeed, some members of Pol Pot’s regime are
still in high places in the Cambodian government today.
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| There are rooms full of photos of victims |
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| Leggings used for confinement |
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| On the grounds |
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| Torture Tools |
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| Chum Mey S-21 Survivor & Your Friends |
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| Prison Cells |
Because it was such a traumatic day for us, our guides decided we
needed a little activity to let off steam and get outside our mournful funk. Before dinner, they took us to an amusement
park for a ride on bumper cars. We kid
you not. Almost all of us piled into
carnival style bumper cars and smashed the hell out of anyone who got into our
way. Essentially, we collectively
thought it was ridiculous, but it did turn out to be cathartic.
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Foreground - Young Sam, our Phnom Penh
Guide & Fred |
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| Susan Readying for the Fray |
On a lighter note, the next day we visited the Royal Palace with its Silver Pagoda. The King of Cambodia is a figurehead (and a Buddhist monk as well), who was put in place to placate the people as they love the idea of a monarchy. However, he has little or no influence on running the country—similar to the Queen in the UK.
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| Royal Palace |
 |
| Silver Pagoda |
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Spirit House on Palace
Grounds |
Siem Reap
Our only day-long bus trip took us 200+ miles north from Phnom
Penh to Siem Reap, home of Angkor Wat.
Getting a closer view of the countryside did not alter our view of
Cambodia much, except for the fact that rural Cambodia is more destitute than
urban Cambodia. Along the way to Siem
Reap, we stopped to help a Cambodian woman catch and cook tarantulas (with
which she supplements her income by selling them on the street) and learned
about how rice is grown and harvested.
Some of our intrepid travelers tried the tarantulas as a pre-lunch
snack, but your friends were not among them.
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Fangs have to be removed to render
them non-toxic |
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| Lunch is served |
As we have mentioned many times in this blog, part of OAT's goal
is to provide travelers with opportunities for learning and discovery. In that vein, the next day we took a boat
ride to a floating fishermen’s village.
Along the way, we stopped off at a small village to take a ride in a
traditional ox cart—an interesting but exceedingly bumpy ride. Our guess is that most rural Cambodians ride
scooters rather than ox carts but do use them to haul freight and grain.
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| Rice spread out to dry after harvest |
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| Your Friends on an Ox Cart |
In the fishing village, we met with a woman who was a
mid-wife. She had personally given birth
to 10 children in the small floating house they lived in. As the only person available to pregnant
women, she delivered something like 100 babies during her career—she is still
practicing. One of our group members, a
retired pediatrician, was fascinated by this woman and her practice. She also asked a lot of interesting technical
questions, none of which stymied the mid-wife.
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| Mid-wife with her medical kit |
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| Floating Fishermen's House |
 |
Prepping fish to make
fish sauce |
Almost everyone comes to Siem Reap for one reason, to visit Angkor
Wat. We were not much different. We did do other things, but most of our group
was here for the temples. We arrived
just after daybreak and as the park opened—good thing, too, as the place was
already crawling with people. We had to
cue up for half an hour to climb the stairs to heaven on the third level of the
temple; a pain, but well worth the wait.
What makes Angkor Wat so impressive is its sheer size. It is not more beautiful than many we have
seen, but it is much larger than most—96 square miles. It is also very old—constructed between AD
800-1200. It had been abandoned and then
reclaimed fairly recently. The temple is
a monument to both Buddhist and Hindu beliefs.
Parts of the temple complex had been completely overgrown with
vegetation until found by the French in the 1800s. Many edifices still have tree trunks running
through the walls—left to help hold up the now crumbling structure.
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| Angkor Wat Here & Below |
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| Ruins in Angkor Thom Here & Below |
We concluded our visit to Angkor Wat and our day with a sunset
stop on the shores of the moat surrounding the compound. We drank Cambodian whiskey and ate local hors
d’oeuvres: snake jerky, water buffalo jerky, sticky rice cooked in bamboo
tubes, and frog legs. Yummy! It sounds icky, but it was all actually
pretty tasty. In any event, we all had
smiles on our faces, but that might have been the whiskey.
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Our Siem Reap Guide, Sam,
Displaying our Whiskey |
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| Smoggy Sunset at Angkor Wat |
VIETNAM
Saigon / Ho
Chi Minh City
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| 1975 |
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| 2018 |
This city surprised us.
Unlike the other large cities we have visited on this trip (Saigon has
11 million people), the city center is incredibly modern and new. The place has changed dramatically since the
Communists decided to loosen up. Following
the end of the “American War,” they were incredibly tight-assed, banning
religion, land ownership, and enforced any number of other restrictive
measures. Ten years later, it became
apparent to them that their economic system was not working; shoot, even the
Russians were abandoning strict communism at that time. The government decided to recognize some
forms of capitalism and three religions (Buddhism, Catholicism, and a
conglomeration that is a lot like b'hai).
Since 1986, Vietnam has become a hot economic engine, welcoming
investments from all comers and doing very well as a result. Communist government workers still have the
best jobs.
OAT trips, as we’ve mentioned continuously in this blog, feature
learning and discovery as a primary focus. Sure, there are shopping opportunities and we
see most of the same tourist attractions, but in between, we see life as the
locals live it. In Vietnam, that
included a trip to a back-alley residential neighborhood where 24 people were
living in about 400 square ft (one exceedingly small bathroom & hardly any
kitchen to speak of)—egad!
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| Back-alley Housing Area |
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| Cooking Area for 24 People |
Even with the cramped quarters people were generous. A street vendor graciously took Susan to her
own home to use a restroom when told she needed facilities—Susan was relieved
to discover that they were regular western facilities and not one of the more
common squat toilets, although, at the time, it wouldn’t have mattered. On a more
touristy front, we spent a goodly amount of time at the presidential
palace. Much of the history of the
American War with the communists was enshrined there.
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| Presidential Palace |
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| Conference Room |
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| President's Office |
The Mekong River has been a theme for us since Laos. (Have we told you that the 2,700-mile long
“mother of all rivers” starts in the Himalayas and passes through Tibet, China,
serves as the border for Myanmar/Laos, Laos, Cambodia, & Vietnam?) Our trip to the delta region was a great
highlight. We walked the back “streets”
of a village in the delta and then caught sampans for a ride up a canal to a
coconut candy maker’s place. Although not
experts, we can now discuss with some authenticity the manufacturing of coconut
candy. We sampled it at various stages
and were given the opportunity to purchase some. Following our “factory” visit, we cruised up
and down several channels within the delta and had a great lunch at a
river-side restaurant.
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| San-pan Ride |
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| Shaping the Coconut Candy |
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| Cooking the Coconut Candy |
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| Peeling a Coconut |
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| Wrapping the Candy for Boxing |
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| Coconut Milk on the Mekong River |
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| Elephant Ear Fish for Lunch |
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| We must have liked it! |
No trip to this region is complete without a visit to the Cu Chi
Tunnels. Actually, one’s trip can be
complete without that visit, but it makes for interesting cocktail party small
talk to have been there. The tunnels
were first developed to aid villagers in this region north of Saigon fight
(avoid, actually) the French, whom they were trying to oust from their country
in the 1950s. We should have been paying
attention! Anyway, the tunnels were thought-provoking. While they were extensive in this particular
region, they played only a minor role in the entire conduct of the war. We met and talked with a former Viet-Cong who lived in these tunnels and was injured early on.
Visitors to the tunnels are invited to climb down into them and
see what it might have felt like.
However, none of us will ever know what that was really like. Too many quandaries. First, it takes a particular mind-set to be
willing to live underground with little or no headroom voluntarily for extended
periods of time. Secondly, they were
much smaller (5 ft or less tall & 80 lbs. or so) people than westerners and
the tunnels were built by them for them.
Try shoving a 6’ 2” 200 lb. person into one of those and it’s a whole lot
like being a sausage. Well, we tried
it—for a short distance anyway—and are no worse for wear, but probably couldn’t
do it for any length of time or distance.
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| Cute little guide, Tam, always clowning around |
On a lighter note, we spent an evening traveling the streets of an
excessively busy Saigon in a cyclo-rickshaw, attended a water puppet show,
finished up the evening at a Vietnamese beer garden—it wasn’t Octoberfest in
Munich, but it wasn’t bad. Tet was
February 16 this year and Saigon was awash with lights and flowers (thousands
of marigolds and mums) everywhere in preparation for the big day. The lunar new year is a time for families to
hold reunions and make offerings to those who has passed on to another
world. Traffic was horrendous everywhere
we went as the city filled up with people returning from wherever; you could
feel the bustle in the air. While
kibitzing with a street food vendor one day, we noticed a young woman hanging
around, listening to our conversation.
Lo and behold, she was from Texas and just home for a visit with family
for Tet and wanted to hear some American English; we had a nice chat. It’s a small world and you never know who you
are going to run into.
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| Water Puppet Show |
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| Water Puppets |
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| Rickshaw Ride in Saigon |
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| Serious Traffic in Saigon |
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| Streets Decorated for Tet |
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MOT HAI BA-DO
(1-2-3 Cheers in Vietamese) |
This is generally the part of the blog where we try to arrive at
some sort of summary and draw meaningful conclusions from our observations and
travels. This, being an especially long
trip (32 days) with many stops in six different countries, is more complicated
than usual. However, since we brought it
up, we might as well try it.
Southeast Asia is a teeming mass of humanity. Every city and country is awash with
people. Most of them are
impoverished. Without witnessing it, one
cannot imagine the living conditions of the vast majority of people in the
places we visited. Most still cook on
open fires outdoors. Pollution is a
significant health issue caused by the open fires, vehicles of all kinds, and
industrial emissions. SE Asia is scooter
land. Most people can’t afford cars, so
they travel by scooter (public transportation was great in Hong Kong, but
dubious everywhere else). It was common
to see entire families (mom, dad, a kid or two) piled on a scooter buzzing down
the road. Even more amazing was the fact
that we never saw a scooter accident.
Scooters are notorious polluters because of the 2-cycle engines they
usually use, so the use of millions of them certainly aggravate a serious
problem.
The people of SE Asia are wonderful. They are polite and helpful. They are also incredibly patient. They tolerate political mayhem & corruption
with an “oh, well” attitude and the notion that this too shall pass and get
better if they wait long enough-- acceptance that drives this American
nuts. It must be the Buddhist influence
in their lives as no other explanation makes much sense to us. History has shown that circumstances do ebb
and flow here, but it’s hard to know if things are better or just different.
Mighty kings and kingdoms have come and gone over the centuries,
invaders have put their mark on the place and have then been thrown out. Nationalism is alive and well. People can’t criticize their political
handlers publicly—dissenters still “disappear” with great regularity in every
country in this region.
Our guides always answered every question we had, but almost
always it was on the bus, not out in public.
We soon learned to not ask awkward questions until we were on the
bus. We should point out that every
guide (and we had six altogether—five locals and a trip leader) said they were
afraid to answer some of our questions about their government even though they
did so honestly—frequently, you could see the pain on their faces as they
grappled with answers. For example, our
Cambodian guide grew up in a refugee camp on the Cambodian/Thailand border
during the Pol Pot era (he was forced to spend a year as a guerilla fighting in
the jungle as a 14-year old—had he been caught he would have wound up in the
killing fields). His calm demeaner and
straight forwardness was incredibly refreshing considering what he had lived
through.
You are beginning to get the feel for why it is so difficult to
give you a nice summary with a bow on it for this trip. It is complicated and our reactions to it are
no less complicated. Fred was somewhat
startled by his reaction to Vietnam.
While he only served on a ship in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964, he was
surprised that his emotions about that time which had long laid dormant popped
up soon after arriving in country. It
cannot be explained or ignored. Part of
it might have been quizzing from fellow travelers which brought up much that
had long been suppressed. Either way, it
is not easy approaching this trip with sanguinity. However, doom and gloom does not fit at all.
Myanmar probably was our favorite stop even though it was clearly
the most impoverished and suppressed politically. This is the land of pagodas and
temples. The vast number of them was
nearly overwhelming; they ranged from golden edifices to vast areas of
ruins. The Burma people (a name they
call themselves) are gentle souls who were generous and polite to a fault. They consistently showed respect for others
with actions and simple gestures. We
found no one who supported the military’s inhumane treatment of the Muslims on
the border with Bangladesh. There are
156 ethnic groups in Myanmar, so conflict is a way of life. Indeed, many of those groups are still
fighting for their own freedom.
While intellectually stimulating, travel such as this trip is
exhausting. One’s daily routine is
upset, you eat strange, but interesting, food, and your sleep patterns are all
messed up. We visited 11 cities and
numerous villages in our 32 days, plus we rode on airplanes for approximately
58 hours from home to home—we don’t even have any way to count the hours we
spent on buses, boats, and walking, but it was a bunch. All of that said, we had a wonderful time. Sure, we are still jet-lagged after being
home almost two weeks, but our memories of our trip are all happy memories that
we will carry with us the rest of our lives.
We don’t know where we will be going next, but you can count on us
sharing it with you.
