Tuesday, February 26th, 2008
After I’d calmed down enough from Toul Sleng prison to breathe, we headed back to the bus. We had a little time left before the rest of our group reappeared, so J, N, and I dropped in to a shop that sold handicrafts made by women. The place was full of beautiful silk scarves, beaded handbags, little toys made from raw silk, pretty little bags… The women sat on the floor, piles of sparkling beads and glowing threads in front of them in little baskets. They were relentlessly cheerful and friendly, testing out their English, working away on their detailed projects, and they were all missing limbs.
On the streets of Siem Riep and the approach walkways to the Angkor temples, groups of musicians played traditional Cambodian music, a rhythmic, repetitive, hypnotic sound that blended with the heat and the dust. It was all minor keys and strumming percussion, the sound of mediation. (There are some mp3s here.) The musicians sold CDs, smiled and nodded when we dropped our spare change in their baskets, and they were all missing limbs and/or were blind.
Cambodia breaks your heart in so many ways. If you’re looking to help, here are a few organizations that could use your money.
- Adopt a Minefield works not only to clear mines, but to provide prosthetic limbs and training to landmine victims.
- Artisan’s Association of Cambodia provides support to groups making and selling fair trade handicrafts. The site’s a little weird to use, but if you click any of the icon thingies scrolling across the bottom, you’ll be taken to online stores where you can buy fair trade crafts – and Cambodian silk is really so pretty.
- Kiva is a site for administering microloans to small scale entrepreneurs; their Cambodia applicants are here. (Reader and guest blogger Lisa made a NEV inspired donation, and that rules.)
- Stay Another Day is a website that lists sustainable and community minded projects. Their Cambodia section is here. We visited a handful of these places while we were in Cambodia, some on purpose, some just because we fell in the door. If you’re traveling, make time for any or all of these places.
[tags]Cambodia, land mines[/tags]
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Saturday, February 23rd, 2008
Q: How was the food?
A: It was great, mostly. We had one weird meal in a rather nice place in Saigon – the food was gummy, fishy, meaty, slimy, all the things we did not want it to be. I don’t think this was bad food, I think the mistake we made was that this was a specialty restaurant. Their menu said they served the cuisine of Hue – and we had no idea what that was. We have terrific Vietnamese food in Seattle (andThai) so most of the time, the choices were surprisingly familiar. Khmer food (that of Cambodia) was a little dull, stewy and mushy, compared to the bright flavors of Vietnamese and Thai.
Breakfast could be a little challenging. It’s hard to make your belly psyched for fried rice or noodles at 7am. Pho (a Vietnamese soup) was commonly served and sometimes, if it smelled good, I went with that option. We ate a lot of omelettes, fresh fruit, and perfectly awful white bread toast. The coffee in Vietnam was usually great, in Cambodia, not so much so.
Q: What were the hotels like?
A: Crappy. We stayed in one nice place where the breakfast was first rate, the bed was comfortable, and the room was quiet, but that was the exception. In general, they were the crappiest of crappy roadside motels. Fourth use bedding and towels, damp bathrooms with questionable sewers, rooms that were mildewed, musty, noisy, and not very nice. But totally within expectations. This was a budget trip and we were not expecting anything better than what we got, so we were never disappointed. It’s not like they sold us a luxury hotel and we ended up at the No Tell Motel. They were exactly what we thought they would be. I hear there are lovely hotels in Asia. I wish I could say I’d seen some of them.
Q: How did you get around?
You name it. In the cities, we walked, mostly, with the occasional taxi or tuktuk ride. We spent a fair amount of time on private buses, we took an overnight train and slept four to a prison cell cabin, we took a few flights, we used the tuktuks, rode in a cyclo, and did some boat trips. Planes, trains, automobiles, bicycles, boats, scooters… we did it all.
Q:Was it scary? Did you fear for your safety, ever?
A: The scariest thing, no contest, is when you cross the street for the first time in the city. You have to go contrary to everything you have learned and step off the curb into moving traffic. It’s insane and terrifying. As for personal safety, threatening behavior, fear of thieves and pickpockets, any of that? I never once felt like I was at risk, and I like to think my radar is fairly tuned. We were told that Phnom Pehn turns nasty at night, but we didn’t experience it directly because we listened to advice and didn’t roam the streets after dark. Hanoi, Saigon, and Siem Riep were all lively at night – again, the scariest thing was crossing the street. Think stepping out in traffic is scary in daylight? Try it after dark when there’s barely enough lighting to see anything but headlights. Damn.
Q: How do the Vietnamese feel about Americans and the war?
A: The only time the war came up at all was at the Cu Chi Tunnels War Memorial Theme Park and Shooting Range. (My renaming scheme.) A crazy percentage of the population is below 30, so they don’t remember the war. Vietnam is barreling towards Western style capitalist consumption at a breakneck pace, so I’m pretty confident they aren’t even thinking about “The American War” as it’s called there. You’re surrounded by a population of 20 somethings in t-shirts with bad English on them (I saw one girl in a pink “Brittney Spear” shirt), they’re wearing knock off Western brands – Dolce & Gabbana, Addidas, Nike, you name it, they’re toting cell phones and hauling flat screen TVs home on the backs of their scooters so they can watch MTV Asia… the war?
I think it would be totally different if we’d had the chance to talk to anyone that had lived through the war. But everyone we encountered was young, young, young. I talked to a nice kid in a coffee place that was studying English and IT. I’m guessing he thinks about eating my job a lot more frequently than he thinks about the Johnson/Nixon years. We were walking opportunities for capitalism, not “the enemy.” People were really nice to us.
Q: How did you like the tour? Did you enjoy traveling with a group? What were the people like?
A: We had a very congenial group. Sure, they drove me nuts from time to time, but they were totally fine to travel with. Our group skewed old, to the disappointment of the two 20something girls who were along, I’m sure. There were two other demographics, ours, and retirees. We had great travelers, experienced, adventurous, easy to get along with, good company at breakfast, and sometimes, incredibly funny. It wasn’t the people that made me dislike group travel.
It was the schedule. I am a glacially slow traveler. I love to sit and watch, I like to fuss over the visual details. If I like a place, I spend an extra day, if I don’t, I get the hell out. While we did have plenty of free time – this was not an obsessively controlled journey and everything, from breakfast to bedtime, was optional, there just wasn’t enough time at the places I enjoyed to satisfy me. I wanted more time in Hue, Phnom Pehn, and Siem Riep and that was just not going to happen. I could deal with the crappy hotels, the personalities, the odd breakfasts, and any number of other trials, but I was very frustrated with what seemed to me like rushing about. The pace may have been quite reasonable, but it was too fast for me. Solo, I’d do the same trip in two or three times the amount of time.
Q: Wow, your pictures are awesome. What’s in your kit? What’s the trick?
A: Aw, shucks. Okay, enough modesty, they RULE, don’t they! I’m totally psyched about the photos! No, thanks, seriously.
We travel with two cameras, a Lumix DMC-TC3 – a fantastic little point and shoot – and an older Canon Digital Rebel with the now retired (aka broken) Sigma 28-300 lens. We carry loads of memory and extra batteries, always. J carries the Lumix, I shoot with the Canon. The Sigma lens isn’t great, but I will absolutely replace it because it is perfect for traveling light.
Sometimes I’ll get a technical question about how we shoot, but the honest truth is that we don’t focus as much on the technical as we do on being active about taking pics. What’s that mean? It means the camera is always handy and we take a ton of photos. A ton. When everything is moving, I take several frames in sequence – that increases the odds that I’ll get what I want – and if the light is low, I often hand the SLR to J because he has a steady hand. We’re a good team.
Q: Did you have a great time?
A: It was intense. It was overwhelming, exhausting, and sometimes, after six hours out and about, I just couldn’t take it anymore. Yeah, of course, we had a great time, but there’s a lot more to it than that.
Q: Where are you going next?
A: Well, I’m going to do some technical work for a client downtown, so I think I’ll go to the bus stop on 35th. We’re going camping on the Washington Coast in April, but that’s all we’ve got planned for now. I’d say that I think we’re done traveling for a while, but I really hope that’s not true. It doesn’t look like I’m winning the Martinique popularity contest, so I don’t think we’re going there. <Sigh.>
Any more questions? I’ll happily answer them; just leave them in the comments.
[tags]travel, Vietnam, Cambodia[/tags]
Posted in Southeast Asia | 3 Comments »
Wednesday, February 20th, 2008
Chau Doc is a busy border town with dusty streets and tin roof buildings and TV antennas. Our hotel sat on the edge of the river. Behind us, the motorcycles buzzed around offering rides, on the other side, river traffic floated back and forth, rowing or spewing fumes behind noisy diesel engines.
It’s impossible to tell where the town stops and the river begins. The houses are high and leggy off the water, but there are floating docks and floating buildings and then, houseboats… J and I watched the sparks fly from a floating welding shop while next door, a place that was stacked high with giant ceramic drums did nothing at all. “How’s that welding guy get his power?” J asked. “I don’t want to know.” I said, picturing an extension cord running through a plastic tube across the decks and through the water to a hookup somewhere on land.
We skipped the group motorcycle ride because I’d had enough motoring for the day, opting instead for a walk through the market. In retrospect, I think the moto ride may have been the more placid choice as the Chau Doc market was hot, close, intensely smelly, and full of mystery. The vendors fairly ignored us because there’s very little for tourists on display, though one funny dude seated in front of a pile of pig’s trotters shouted at J. “Mister! Mister! You want to buy?!” We both looked down at the pile of hooves before looking the comedian in the eye. Then we all started to laugh, the vendor showing a checkerboard smile of missing teeth.
Everywhere there were giant piles of produce and stacks of dried fish. There were great stinking vats of mysterious gummy substances, slick with goo and shiny in the hot light. There were piles of paper mache masks and decorations for Tet and noodles, noodles, noodles. There were kite shaped flags of dried squid and flip flops and plastic soup spoons and bonsai trees. Skinny guys pushed carts through the crowd, girls in dust masks rolled scooters around, it felt like we were the only Eur/Americans in a giant maze of food and noise and smell. I paid way too much for a couple of Mandarin oranges and we went back to the hotel to sit on the balcony and watch the light change over the water. It was very hot, in the high 80s or low 90s and even with sunset, the heat didn’t abate. I peeled the oranges and breathed deep of the skins to chase away the memory of the smell in the market.
Our hotel room was a cell with only a piece of glass block for a window. We had an air conditioner that made a shocking amount of noise and a fan that occasionally caused all the other electrical devices in the room to shut down. Our door was right next to the reception desk and to get in and out, we had to climb over the extension chord that was powering the twinkle lights on the tree in the lobby. The hotel restaurant was on a floating platform on the river, requiring navigation of a rickety series of gangplanks and stairs. The dirty sheets were a weird nylon substance and the mosquito nets were full of holes. The whole place was hilariously bad, a joke that would have worn thin in a big hurry had we not been staying only one night.
After a deeply unsatisfying sleep – interrupted repeatedly by a thwacking noise that I like to imagine was a circuit breaker repeatedly blowing, we shuffled into the early morning to board the boat to Phnom Pehn.
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Monday, February 18th, 2008
I love this picture that J. took as we were walking to our table at a restaurant in Saigon. It perfectly captures the feeling of being there, the noisy blurry mess, the vibrancy, the off kilter feeling, everything. (It’s probably a good time for a reminder that J. takes a lot of the pictures you see here on NEV, he has an excellent eye and a steady hand.)
It was a hot night and we were going to eat BBQ in a courtyard restaurant that’s popular with locals and expats. The place was packed, the waiter was expecting us. The ceiling was covered with geckos, the air was fuzzy with smoke. We sat at a rickety table in the back and drank Tiger beer by the bottle. I was frustrated by the menu – there was nothing I wanted – and ordered badly.
J. had crocodile, which he ate after grilling the raw meat over a charcoal burner. I’m sure the waiters don’t get hazard pay but they earn it, hefting blazing hot ceramic buckets full of smoking charcoals over your head and placing them in the middle of the table on a metal plate. I had fish, it was fried and dry and full of bones. I tasted the crocodile – I found it a weird cross between chicken and fish; I’d probably overcooked it because it was tough and chewy.
After dinner we went to the rooftop bar at the Rex Hotel, a fancy place with a cover band playing the Greatest Hits of the 70s. The Carpenters are alive and well in Saigon, Simon is still singing with Garfunkel, A Daydream Believer can still hook up with a Homecoming Queen. I filled my unsatisfied belly with coconut ice cream, eaten out of a real coconut and washed it down with Perrier. It was, without question, the most expensive thing I ate in Vietnam.
As soon as I’d finished, I was finished. I had to go back to the hotel right away, do not pass go, do not collect 200 dollars. There were a few instances during our travels when I was so utterly overstimulated, so completely undone by sensory overload that I had to get into my room as fast as my feet would take me. This was one of them. I was cooked.
People typically ask the same questions about the trip. “Was it fun? Did you have a GREAT time?” If I hesitate in reply it’s not because it wasn’t fun or because I had a lousy time. Yeah, it was fun, yeah, yeah I had a great time. But that’s nowhere near enough. The socially appropriate answer is probably, “Yep, it was fab.” But the more honest answer is that it was intense.
It’s why I like that picture so much. Sure, those people are out having a great time. But wow, so much more is going on.
There are a few pics of Saigon added to the SE Asia set, here. Also, almost exactly a year ago, I wrote a piece about how much I wanted to go to Vietnam. How ’bout that?!
[tags]Saigon[/tags]
Posted in Southeast Asia | 3 Comments »
