Archive for the ‘Southeast Asia’ Category
Monday, February 11th, 2008
The Bangkok Amulet Market isn’t on the street corners outside the Tha Chang boat pier, it’s further down the street - though there is a thriving business along the sidewalks - and this is the amulet making supply district. If you want your completed amulets - or statues or any variety of iconographic items for your home altar, you’ll find them in this neighborhood.
I bought three things - an actual amulet for protection and two hammered metal pieces that are just the prettiest things and have prayers or some kind of text scrawled around the images. I have NO idea what they say or what they are for and because this part of the city is not a touristy area, very few people are available to translate or explain.
The monks are the serious shoppers here, they are carrying eyepieces for close inspection of the goods, checking to see if the stones are real, perhaps, or if the image of the monk is the right one or who knows what… It’s a fascinating scene and we squandered more than enough time along the sidewalks and in the back alleys making amulet deals and watching others do the same. Note to self? Read up on the amulet market upon return home. Hell, you could Google it for me and then tell me about it later.
I gave away my Boddhisatva card to one of our fellow travelers who’d lost some stuff at the Cambodia/Thai border and in doing so may have jinxed my luck. I’ve been down for about 24 hours with a Very Bad Gut. My comrades have gone off to see the Royal Palace, I’m stuck close to our hotel because of my unpredictable insides. Like the broken camera, it could be worse. We fly out tomorrow, late morning, so today I have time for the antibiotics to kick in and to, um, let the situation pass. It’s a shame to miss a day out in Bangkok, but hey, things could be worse.
We’re back stateside tomrrow evening. Things will seem quiet and spacious and probably really boring by comparison. Oh, and cold as hell, I’m sure.
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Sunday, February 10th, 2008
For lunch, we had Thai food. It’s all very familiar, but hotter. Delicious plates of phad thai, a big soup bowl of green curry, and a new shrimp salad, swimming in lime juice, lemon grass, oh so delicious, oh so nice. I skipped the markets after lunch and headed back to the hotel to take a shower and a nap.
Julius is still not here - he opted for the bus crossing, I decided that the reason I work is so I don’t have to take nine hour bus trips across roadless areas when a flight will do just as well. I realized this makes me a spoiled yuppie, so be it. I am also clean and better rested than I’ve been since we left Seattle. I sprawled on the bed and listened to my iPod and then, nodded off for a hour or so of much needed unconciousness.
We are all wildly overstimulated. The temples messed with our collective subconciousness - not a person I spoke to made it through the dark sleeping hours without wild dreams. I had tigers in mine, J had a boat trip, I think, N was in a tiny dumbwaiter watching the light slice through as she went between floors, there were more, there were others. Wandering through the real life set of an Indiana Jones-esque movie will do that to your brain, as will the ghosts of ancient civilizations who carved vast stone bas relief murals of the gods and the demons churning a sea by wrapping a giant snake around a mountain, while dancing on the back of a monumental turtle. Trust me, it makes sense if you’re sleeping, or if you’re walking through the tourist overridden waking dream of Angkor Wat.
We have three nights in Bangkok, enough time to do some final shopping and hopefully, to find the place where cheap photo gear goes to be dumped on unsuspecting tourists. As pennace for taking the flight, I dropped my backpack and my telephoto lens snapped. It’s a drag, but not as much of a drag had it happened a few days earlier. J has the pocket camera - he’s very handy with it - and I have the Boddhisattva amulet in my wallet which I think includes a prayer for finding that which is needed. I don’t know what the Boddhisattva has to say about wayward photographers, but I think she’s on my side.
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Friday, February 8th, 2008
I was pretty sure my head was going to explode when I saw the gates to the Angkor complex, but when there were elephants inside, Actual Elephants… well. I walked up to them - there were five - and put out my hand and one of them started snuffling around with her trunk. “Bananas?” asked the girl standing there. “Bananas for elephant?”
I said no and my pachyderm friend was a little disappointed, but she didn’t turn away, she continued to reach for my hand, spreading a little elephant snot on my palm. I patted her on the bridge of her snout and she was warm and prickly. I’m not sure why I thought she would be cool, elephants are warm blooded after all.
You can ride an elephant around the temple complex and their feet are really quiet on the pavement, like they’re wearing big slippers with leather soles. They are quiet and still with ragged ears and skinny brown boys in dark green pyjama-like suits - they sit astride the elephant’s neck. I wanted to ride, but more than that I wanted to drive. J. said I had to go to mahout school first. I’m good with that, though I notice there were no female elephant jockeys.
The temples at Angkor are, oh, how can I describe them? They are exactly as wonderful and better than I’d imagined them to be. They are huge and everywhere, they are giant smiling faces of the Buddha and piles of carved stone discarded in dry fields. They reach for the muggy sky and are sprouting grass and vines and in some cases, entire trees. They are the fantasy temples of Tomb Raider and Indiana Jones covered in Japanese and German tourists. They are lace cutouts of dancers and square doorways etched with flowers. They are steps that are tall and narrow and long walkways supported by collonades. They are spectacular.
Everywhere tiny children try to sell pocket sized souvenirs, kids who are much too young to be touts, and yet, there they are, their hands pushing bootlegged copies of travel guides and strings of wooden beads and little handbags and scarves in your direction. They flock outside each tourist bus pleading, “Please madam you buy one dollar.” It’s not right, they should be swimming in the lake or playing soccer or something, but there are dozens, no, probably hundreds of them, pacing in circles around our whiter foreign selves.
We’re not buying, intentionally. The party line in our group is that we’re to buy only from sources that send the money to good causes, not from the street urchins, because they hand the money over to who knows where, it’s not putting food in their bellies or books in their backpacks. It’s heartbreaking, as so much is in this country. They’re almost always unfailingly polite, not as pushy as you’d expect them to be, and even, sometimes, funny. To say it’s sad doesn’t do it justice, but that’s the best I’ve got.
The heat was brutal today, one of our crew dropped to heat exhaustion around mid-day and I am carryng around a headache, but it’s worth it to be out there seeing the ruins in spite of everything. At the end of the day we climbed to the top of yet another stunning jumble of stones and looked out over coconut palms and mango trees into a darkening sky. We had hopes a storm might break the heat, but it blew off, leaving the same heat and dust that makes everything feel like we’re in a movie. We leaned up against the big stone elephants and prayed for rain.
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Thursday, February 7th, 2008
Guidebooks are full of advice about how to behave at religious sites. You’re not supposed to wear a hat, you are supposed to dress modestly, not show your feet to the Buddha, oh, and a bunch of other things that are relatively easy to manage. I did forget to remove my cap in the palace, to my extreme shame, but I was happy to do so upon stern reminder from one of the guides. Hey, it was very hot and it was keeping the sun off my melon. Oops.
But for the life of me, I could not stop gawking at the monks. They paced about the palace compound in saffron colored robes, their shaved heads brown and bare. Every time I turned a corner, there would be a pair of them, or more, striking a pose against the golden walls of the palace. They smiled, they nodded, they floated away on a cloud and all I could do was stand there, slackjawed, eyes wide, gawking at their extreme beauty. It’s all fine and well to tell you that it’s not polite to stare, but when you’re dumbstruck with awe by saffron and gold and brown and late afternoon light, I ask you this: What the hell are you supposed to do? Look away? I don’t THINK so.
The ornate palace compound teaches the unenlightened that you can not have too many Buddhas about the place. Also, silver elephants, stupas, potted palms, lotus flowers, silver leaves, and oh, why not add a few extra Buddhas, sleeping ones, reclining ones, tall thin elegant ones, and one or two made from solid gold just for good measure? It helps if you tile the floor of your Buddha room in etched silver tiles that click underneath your bare feet as you pad about admiring the Buddhas. And the monks.
Did I mention that the monks are absolutely stunning? And that it doesn’t matter if you see four of them in a “tuk tuk” - a motor scooter pulling a four person trailer - or two of them on the back of a scooter driven by a third guy, or just one of them checking his email at an Internet cafe or sending text messages on his cell phone while standing inbetween the tall white columns of the royal hall. If there happens to be one at the departures terminal sending off his brother or two of them wandering down the street underneath butter colored umbrellas, well, you’re no less likely to gawk. If you’re me, that is. You probably have much better manners than I do.
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Wednesday, February 6th, 2008
Our guide was three years old when the Khmer Rouge fell. He lost a brother and a sister, and his parents lost everything because they were urban intellectuals. He looked at me. “You wear glasses,” he said, “that means you are an intellectual. You are not going to the fields, you are going to die.”
I don’t know how other people manage, but when we walked into the monument at the Killing Fields, I just kind of fell apart. It didn’t help any that some guy was taking photos of his girlfriend in front of a pile of battered skulls with a sign that read “Females, Aged 18-29″or some such thing. I had to head back out the the entry way, it was all too much for me.
I thought it was important that I try again, so when we went to Toul Sleng, the prison where the Khmer Rouge held and tortured their victims, I did actually walk inside, but as soon as we were in the first room, I fell apart all over again.
Maybe it’s because I come from a tribe that’s historically been victims of genocide, or maybe I just have really thin skin. Maybe it’s because I was tired from the heat or maybe it’s because I experience the world through the visual. Maybe, maybe, maybe. I have to wonder what’s different about me than about the dozens of other people who strolled about the place, snapping photos of the remains of the dead and then, heading off to the souvenir stand. Tourism is a bizarre thing at the best of times, at the worst, it’s what it was today, brutal and full of cognitive dissonance.
I don’t understand the tiniest thing about Camodian history, but the people here are smiling and so attractive and friendly and mellow. When you give the barest glance to their past, there is not a moment that your heart is not breaking. If you pay attention, just a little bit, you realize that the guy behind the counter who hands you the hotel key was born in the time of the Khmer Rouge, or that the beautiful girl in the shop has parents who lived through impossible horrors.
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Tuesday, February 5th, 2008
I’d imagined Saigon in post-colonial elegance, but instead, it’s a post-industrial metropolis, a swirl of scooters driven by candy colored helmeted 19 year olds, nearly 9 million of them. I was absolutely wrong, Saigon was not the city I was looking for.
The good news is that Phnom Penh absolutely is. The fine grace of the temple and pagoda rooflines stands out against the French colonial architecture, river boats come and go at the waterfront, and there’s a style here that makes a person feel like they’re in a movie.
We had cocktails on the balcony at the Foreign Correspondents Club, the ceiling fans spin quietly above, the traffic buzzes and honks below, the mosquitoes find the one spot on your ankle where you’ve neglected to apply bug juice. It is hot and humid, so we are languid and lazy. It’s perfect.
There is, of course, a lot of ugly poverty and pollution, still, the air is thick and dirty, the river is brown and soupy. But I already know we are not spending enough time here.
Weather: 85+ and humid
Health: Still got that damn cough, but I really feel fine.
Funny: We took a cyclo ride around town. Trust me, it was funny.
I’d write more but this connection is just terrible. More to come.
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