Elizabeth Backpacks

New Blog

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth) — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 18:09:00 +0000

Just a note to say, I've started writing a humor blog. Click here to visit it: http://accismus.wordpress.com.

I'm trying to write more this year - in part, because of the great response to this blog.

Knoxville to NYC

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth) — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 22:58:00 +0000

I’ve moved to New York City. Well, more accurately, Greenpoint, Brooklyn. I am furiously waiting tables at an Italian restaurant at Lincoln Center, and thinking about how I’m going to get rich and famous, or at least find something to do to kill time for the next however many years I’m blessed to live.

I’ve been in the Big Apple for about three weeks now, and I’ve noticed two things right off: (1) this city does not in any way resemble the rest of America; and (2) there are a great many immigrants here, and most of them seem to arrive here from their native countries and never move elsewhere. It’s strange to me that many people’s entire idea of America begins and ends with Manhattan.

I’m happy to be here, however, for the time being. It’s a super exciting place to be, and because every simple, daily task is a billion times more difficult here than anywhere else, you can get a feeling of great accomplishment from merely taking the trash out.

Other New Yorkers get really excited when they hear you just moved to the city, and they take it upon themselves to pump you up, as though you’re in your first stretch as a medical intern or paratrooper, or something equally difficult:

‘It’s tough, I know, but you’ve got a job, you’ve got an apartment – you’re doing really well. Just don’t get discouraged; keep a sense of humor. If you need anything, anything at all, just give me a call, because I know how it is, believe me.’

And then: ‘So, why’d you decide to move here?’ they all ask, as if it were an insane and possibly dangerous decision, even though they themselves live here.

I have absolutely no answer to that question. It just seemed like the thing to do.

--
As for my grand adventure, it’s only just now sinking in how amazing it truly was, and how much I did, in fact, learn from the experience. Sometimes, as I listen to some crazy, rich lady whine at me because her salad isn’t big enough, or as I shove my way onto a solidly packed subway car on the L line, I think about how just a couple months ago, I was swinging in a hammock in Laos. Other times, as I try to ignore the other servers’ never-ending belting of Hedwig selections, or as I listlessly consider getting up early on my day off to futilely wait in an endless line of non-equity actors for some off-off open call, I think back on riding around in a Cambodian tuk-tuk, or being gawked at by scores of Chinese, or meandering through the Malaysian jungle. And I am able to look at the city around me with a renewed sense of perspective.

--
If anyone is in the New York area, drop me a line at eurello@gmail.com! Also, I’m trying to write more these days; if you want to check out whatever I’m working on, take a look at http://www.myspace.com/yeselizabeth, where I will at the very least post updates on my progress.

Photos

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth) — Sat, 06 Jan 2007 16:47:00 +0000

At long last, I've got the photos posted. I had to post them in two different blogs, because for some reason, the first one stopped working. Here they are:

Elizabeth's Travel Photos

Elizabeth's Travel Photos II

Enjoy!

Penang to...Knoxville?!?!

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth) — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 11:28:00 +0000

Well, dear readers, I have returned home to the bosom of my family. No doubt this might seem abrupt; however, I had no definite plans for when my trip would be over. I figured I'd know when it was time, and in Penang, I realized it was time. I realized I was looking at future destinations less as 'what all am I going to get to see' and more as 'what can I afford to skip, so I can go ahead home and get on with things,' so I decided I'd burned out on backpacking for now and should see these other places some other time. So, instead of taking the ferry to Northern Sumatra as planned, I took four plane trips lasting over 48 hours and arrived in Tennessee on the evening of the 29th, very smelly and hallucinating from lack of sleep.

There are some people (I met plenty) who can backpack for years and never grow weary, but I am not one of them. Traveling gets very exhausting, what with having to find somewhere to sleep every night, long crowded bus rides, poor diet, and poor hygiene. But I think actually the most exhausting thing is having nothing productive to do on a daily basis. After the sun sets, you're generally looking at five or six hours of trying to find somewhere to sit and read. And that gets really, really old after awhile. Anyway, it's a new year, I'm 25, and I'm anxious to get started on building some sort of adult existence, hopefully involving an apartment, a career, a boyfriend, and feelings of legitimacy.

Of course, I thoroughly enjoyed my trip, and I will certainly travel again just as soon as I can. There are a number of things I will do differently next time. The top three are: (1) bring hiking boots; (2) not stick to the tourist trail (as defined by Lonely Planet); and (3) bring a traveling companion. A word on that last one: while traveling alone has a number of advantages, and while I believe it is usually reasonably safe to travel alone as a woman, and that, male or female, you should never put off traveling just because you fear going alone; still, I think all things considered, I would have richer traveling experiences if I had at least one person with me. Reason being, if you have a companion, you do not have to be so wary and guarded about your own personal safety. You can take more risks, talk to more people, and go more places. Also, you can split expenses.

I would like to thank all of you reading this blog for coming along with me on my adventure - the blog was such fun to write, and made me feel I could share my experiences with everyone I missed while traveling. I plan to revive it next time I travel. If you would like me to drop you an email when I start the blog back up again (and/or if you have any questions about my trip), email me at eurello@gmail.com. Also, I'm currently posting all my many photos to a blog; it's a time-consuming process, but as soon as I get them all loaded, I will post a link here. Hopefully in the next couple weeks.

Happy New Year, everybody!

Christmas in Cameron Highlands

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth) — Thu, 28 Dec 2006 03:11:00 +0000

Seems I'm bound to spend every bus ride trying desperately to hold in some bodily function; usually it's needing to pee, but every now and then, just to shake things up, it's needing to vomit. The bus trip to the Cameron Highlands was of this second type. The driver tore up the winding, mountain roads while every person on the bus squeezed their wrists, swallowed repeatedly, and tried to focus on the ever-changing horizon line. I made it, though. I was one of the lucky ones.

Tanah Rata is the main backpacker town in Cameron Highlands. The surrounding hills are green and covered in either jungle or tea plantations. The symmetrical rows of tea bushes give a sort of aligator-scale texture to the hills they cover. Tanah Rata itself is a one-street town, and that street consists entirely of Indian restaurants and minimarts. Everyone in town knows exactly where you choose to eat breakfast, lunch and dinner, and for any restaurant you choose to patronize, you are sure to deeply wound the feelings of at least three other Indian owners, who don't understand why the roti and chicken you had yesterday failed to bring you back.

I stayed at Daniel's Lodge, an extremely basic, hippyish backpacker run by the jovial, overweight Daniel, and two beanpole, identical fellows, Eddie and Gill, who are not actually related in the slightest, but who do accessorize with matching leather bands (Gill sells them on the main street some nights). The afternoon I arrived, a group of travelers was playing cards on the front porch. They told me it had poured steadily for the past two days. I went to dinner with the four people I ended up hanging out with the whole time: an ATWC-Toronto, Peter and Lavana, who are just out of college and very mild and pleasant; a chipper Brit named Jeff, who's working in New Zealand currently; and a Korean named Saemi (my only dormmate), who is studying tourism in KL, and who is forever being newly outraged at how little everyone seems to know about Korea. After dinner, we returned to the hostel: there's a fire out back every night, which everyone sits around while Gill plays folk songs on the guitar (mostly Tracy Chapman).

Luckily for me, the weather cleared up entirely the morning after I arrived, and was both sunny and cool for my hike. I'd picked an easy, introductory jungle trail, and was excited to walk along quietly in the woods, in contemplation of my life and its direction. On my way to the trailhead, however, I ran into an older Indian fellow, who I soon realized was this guide, Kali, who everyone uses when they need a guide. He's said to be the greatest guide ever; he's friendly and knows the Highlands up and down; he's 64, though he doesn't look it, and hikes every, single day; people pay him a lot of money to hike with them; and I was extremely annoyed when he decided to tag along with me for free. He was nice enough, and sure, it's great to have a guide and all, but I just wanted to walk along and think and listen to the birds, and instead, I was directed to look at millipedes and various plants, my palm was dyed with henna, and both my wrists were encircled with bracelets made of rattan. At the end of the jungle trail, we parted ways and I continued up the hill to the Boa Tea Estate, the biggest tea plantation, and had a very nice walk winding around the tea hills on a little goat trail.

Next day (Christmas Eve day and again, gorgeous weather), I picked the second highest mountain to hike and was walking to the trail head when I saw Kali going along in front of me. I jagged off the road and waited about ten minutes, before proceeding cautiously on my way. No sign of Kali anywhere and then, just as I reached the trail head, he popped out of nowhere from the other direction.

'Hello! Where you hiking today?'

It was a long day. After my initial annoyance wore off and I accepted the inevitable, I quite enjoyed Kali's company. He wanted to know if I still had my bracelets and, even though I told him I did (liar), he made me another one. And dyed my hand with henna again. After we hiked the mountain, we headed back to town by several other trails, including a closed one that Kali made himself that hops over several creeks. We hiked quickly and got back to town by early afternoon, but it was a long way, and I was exhausted and ready for naan. Kali left me to go hike another trail.

That night was Christmas Eve. Levana and Peter had somehow managed to find a Protestant church service in the next town (they're very wholesome), and Saemi and I went along. The service was in a meeting room on the eighth floor of a hotel, and the pastor ushered us right in, sat us front and center and sat down to tell us about himself. The pastor is a large, very Western Indian man who looks a bit like Colin Powell. He was raised a Hindu ('I used to put the hooks in my cheeks and everything!'), but became a Protestant minister in 2001.

'For years and years I lived in the West,' he explained. 'But never in all that time do I hear of Christianity. Only Catholicism.' (Saemi, a Catholic, bit her lips.) 'Only in 2001 do I hear of this thing, Protestantism, and I think, ah!'

After half an hour or so, the rest of the congregation poured in: all Chinese and Indian, with the Indian women all in traditional dress. Everyone was extremely friendly and welcoming. An Indian family sat at our table; the father asked Saemi where in China Korea was located. We sang hymns for about 45 minutes, standing and with a lot of chanting, clapping and raising of hands in between the hymns (the four of us, meanwhile, stood whitely, hands pinned to our sides, eyes pasted to the lyrics, lips moving minimally). After hymns, each of about five families gave a 'presentation.' These were mostly songs; the biggest hit was the pastor's model-gorgeous daughter who sang a Christian rock song, accompanying herself on the guitar.

Throughout the whole thing, everyone's kids screamed and cried and ran around, making it really difficult to focus. They were especially riled by the time the sermon finally began, which was on how nothing is impossible with Jesus. The pastor was very enthusiastic, but he went on about 30 minutes too long, especially since dinner was sitting to one side waiting to be served, and the kids had actually strapped on roller skates and were zooming around the tables. But the sermon wasn't over until the pastor had spent a good fifteen minutes reading a collection of Mother Theresa quotes, which didn't seem to relate to the sermon at all.

After that, we had dinner, followed by an interminable gift exchange (the four of us were given picture frames, which we in turn gifted to Daniel's as they wouldn't fit in our packs), and at 11:00, the party broke up. We all felt it had been a very nice Christmas Eve. On Christmas day, I did not hike. I lounged around the hostel, rousing myself for meals at various Indian restaurants. When night fell, I moved over slightly to lounge by the fire. In honor of Christmas, Saemi and I went halvsies on a bottle of (really bad) red wine.

It was a great Christmas altogether. If you ever have occassion to be in Malaysia over the holidays, I recommend heading to Cameron Highlands. Especially because, if it's anything like this year, all the lowlands will be flooded anyway.

Kuala Lumpur to Melaka and On

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth) — Sat, 23 Dec 2006 09:12:00 +0000

'Malaysia: Truly Asia' is Malaysia's current tourism slogan, but I think a better one would be 'Malaysia: A Nice Break From Asia.' With Muslims, Indians (and/or Bangladeshis) and attractive men who weigh more than me everywhere, Malaysia is quite a refreshing change of scenery. Besides which, people are so friendly here, almost as eerily friendly as Canadians. It's quite Western as well, and everyone speaks flawless English. Sadly, although Malaysia is far more modern than most SE Asian countries, its toilets are more along Chinese lines (oh, U-bend plumbing, why are you so elusive?). And room rates are higher, so I've plunged back in to the seedy, social world of dorms. Not many Americans seem to make it here. I've had a lot of these conversations:

'Where you from?'

'The States.'

'Where?'

'U.S.'

'I'm sorry?'

'America.'

'Ah, America. We don't get many Americans here.'

'No?'

'I have no problem with your country.'

I flew into Kuala Lumpur at 10:30 p.m., with no hotel reservation and no idea where I was going. I figured it'd be fine, but hadn't reckoned on it taking well over an hour to get into the city center. By the time I got my bags, got through customs, got on a bus, and was sitting there waiting for the bus to fill up before it departed, I realized that I would be wandering the streets of KL alone with my luggage and map at 1:00 a.m. I really started to panic, but at the last minute, an ATWC-mixed-European boarded and I scooted up and asked if I could come along with them to their hostel. It was a good thing I did, because we were wandering around the deserted city until after 2 before we finally found a room that wasn't horribly expensive: showing up in the wee hours does not put you in a good bargaining position.

Kuala Lumpur has a big Chinatown and a smaller Little India. There are a great many, packed markets, where you can see Muslim girls plowing through bins of headscarves to the tune of 'Loosen Up My Buttons' from a nearby pirated CD stall. I visited a Museum of Islamic Arts (many Quaran with elaborate calligraphy), a butterfly garden (okay) and a bird park (really cool). Currently, the East coast of Malaysia is pretty much shut down for monsoon season, but the West coast is supposed to be dry. It's not. It's raining a whole lot.

After a couple days in KL, I went down to Melaka for a night. Melaka used to be a big deal port town, which was passed amongst various colonizing powers. The Portuguese left the most architecture behind. I know I compare a lot of places to Gatlinburg, but the more I travel, the more I realize a lot of places are like Gatlinburg and Melaka is yet another: there are a great many museums (one even with a Ripley's exhibit), a lot of quaint, little shops selling clothes made of linen, the ruins of an old Catholic church on a hill, and two giant, heavily air-conditioned malls, all convieniently grouped together within walking distance. The most interesting museum was the 'Museum of Enduring Beauty', which featured displays on every painful, disgusting procedure, from corsets to foot binding to cranial mutation, people have endured to render themselves attractive. I also saw a hilarious sound and light show, which took place in a giant ampitheatre, in which three tourists were sitting, and mostly involved a highly dramatic retelling of Melaka's history through bullhorn:

'Ah, MMMMelllakka, city of light.'

[sound of horse's hooves goes on for way too long, ends in a big splash]

'What has happened?!?!'

'A deermouse has kicked your dog into the river, highness.'

'It is a mmmirrrracle! I shall call this a-place...MMMelllaka. After this tree.'

Meanwhile, lights went on and off, illuminating two trees at the base of the ampitheatre.

From Melaka, I had to return to KL for the night. I've really gotten out of the habit of dorms, and it's hard to get back in. I'm no longer used to waiting for a fat, hairy, weirdly-grunting Indian man to vacate a shower before I can use it, and then shower to the sounds of a giggling British couple next door, who apparently find nasty hostel showers a romantic setting. I'm also out of the habit of ignoring a loudly snoring German backpacker, while simultaneously ignorning the Malaysian hostel employee in the bunk above me, also being kept awake by the German and expressing his frustration by rocking the bunk against the wall and screaming 'Ai-yi-YI!' repeatedly. My last night in KL, I finally got up and took a shower at 4:30; I figured as long as I was awake anyway, I may as well take advantage of having the bathroom to myself. But there was someone in there.

I've since escaped to the Cameron Highlands, which is where I will be spending Christmas. I was surprised to find there is Christmas in Southeast Asia, especially in Malaysia, which is hugely Islamic. But I guess Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist or Jew, everyone wants to be in the black come New Year's.

I wish you all a merry Christmas back home. Gorge yourselves on cheese and chocolate for me!

Hoi An to Hanoi

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth) — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 05:27:00 +0000

On my last day in Hoi An, April and I ate at our cheese-and-chocolate restaurant three times in one day (same server each time, embarrassingly) and in between, we hired the tiniest, most ancient man we could find to row us up and down the river for an hour. I felt sure he would expire from the labor, but he had a grand time, starting water fights with the other boats and making us take his picture forty times.

After that, I felt I'd worn out Hoi An, so I went on to Hue and April and I agreed to meet up again in Hanoi.Hue features the ruins of a walled Imperial City built by some emporor or other in the 19th century. I walked all around it in the freezing, pouring rain. The city is also just South of the DMZ, so I took a bus tour of that the next day (also in the freezing, pouring rain). Once upon a time in Chicago, I took a bus tour of various sights having to do with Al Capone and the mob: all the relevant sights had long since been razed and built over, so the tour was mostly looking at parking lots and hearing about what used to be there. The DMZ tour was sort of the same deal. The DMZ itself has been resettled by rice farmers and now looks like the rest of Vietnam, and all the other sights just a single monument or bridge in the middle of nowhere. It was at least a 20 minute drive in between each sight, and half the time we didn't even get out of the bus when we got there. I did find the Vinh Moc tunnels interesting: over fifty, tiny tunnels constitute an underground city where families lived for years during the bombing, emerging only for brief periods at night.

The tour bus dropped me off at a depressing restaurant in the middle of nowhere, where I sat for nearly three hours before being picked up by the overnight bus to Hanoi. Unlike the bus to Hoi An, I managed to sleep this time, and arrived in Hanoi in the still-dark early morning feeling fairly rested. April and I met up around 7 a.m., and had the worst time finding a hotel room that I've ever yet experienced in my travels. Everyone we talked to was nasty, dismissive and dishonest, and the rooms were all dingy and overpriced. We were even installed in a room, only to be tossed out an hour later, because the girl we'd dealt with quoted us a price that was $4 lower than her horrid, rude boss really wanted for the room. This experience was to set the pattern for Hanoi overall.

This city blows, frankly. I've had such a terrible time here in every respect that all I want to do is go into a giant rant about all of the many ways I've been jerked around by everyone I've had to deal with on any level, but I know that that would only bore my readers and make me sound like a real baby, so I'm going to try very hard to resist. I will only say that the people of Vietnam in general and Hanoi in particular have really just been so terrible to deal with that if I had the readership, I would love to destroy the tourism industry in this country altogether. And I know it's not just me, because all the other tourists I meet say the same; we all just get together and vent. Just to give a few examples of how awful Hanoi truly is: April and I have now been called fat by multiple shopgirls for no reason at all, and had the clothes we were looking at ripped out of our hands; April was laughed at and mocked by bank tellers who'd screwed up her traveler's checks so that she couldn't use them (Sacombank - don't go there); everybody, from moto drivers to pineapple ladies, quotes insanely high prices (equivalent to asking a tourist for $5 for a Snickers bar or something), refuses to bargain at all, and when we won't buy, swears at us and tells us if we don't like it, to go somewhere else. I. Hate. Hanoi.

On a more pleasant note, we did escape Hanoi for three days and two nights, while we took a cruise around Halong Bay. There are many such tours you can book from Hanoi; the prices may vary, but in true Asian "same-same" style, the tours are all exactly identical down to each meal served. The first day, you board a mid-sized wooden boat and head out into Halong Bay, which is quite large and dramatically studded with many karst formations. You see a floating village: houses, shops and a school all on individual floating platforms. The villagers get around by boat and everybody has a big dog to protect their fish farms from sabotage by competition. You take a ride on a little kip through a couple of lagoons, after which the boy driving stops the kip far from your boat and demands a ludicrous fee from each person (his request takes the form of his slapping your leg repeatedly and saying, 'Money! Money!'). You visit "Surprising Cave;" the surprise is that it's about the size of a football stadium. You do some swimming and kayaking off the boat, which is probably a lot more fun when it's not December.

There was a Vietnamese-Australian family on our boat tour, and after dinner that night, some of us asked them how they'd ended up in Australia. The man had escaped there by accident when he was 13, just after the end of the war. He'd gone along with his best friend without knowing where he was going; next thing he knew, he was on a boat to Malaysia and couldn't go back. Two months later, he was a ward of the state in Australia. His mother didn't know where he'd gone, but as his father and brother were both in prison being reeducated (15 and 12 years respectively), she had enough to worry about. He saw his family again 17 years later, in 1994, when he had to return to Vietnam on a work trip. Because he'd lied about who his family was and where they lived in order to get his visa in Australia, he couldn't tell his work he planned to take a side trip to see them, so he also coulnt' warn his family he was coming. He just showed up. His wife's family had run away (from Dalat) in the middle of the night, Von Trapp style, when she was 10. They were both really frightened returning to Vietnam as recently as the '90s, but here it is 2006, and we were all chatting casually about it on a boat in the middle of Halong Bay.The tour was highly regimented. From one end of it to the other, we were herded and ordered about like kindergartners.

'Hello, hello, please,' our guide, "Rooster," would cry, round about noon. 'Lunch now. Lunch. Excuse me? Lunch now, please.'

And there he would stand until every, single last guest had proceeded to table.

'Excuse me, you will enjoy to sit on deck for 30 minutes and then we will dock at the cave. Please enjoy to sit on deck. Please enjoy to sit on deck now, this way. Thirty minute.'

No lingering at table, no napping in the cabins, all stragglers were promptly rounded up. We swam on day one and biked in Cat Ba National Park on day two, no matter that there was rain on the water day and sun on the land. There is a schedule and there is a plan, and the schedule has never changed and it will not change today, not for Ho Chi Minh himself, and sure as hell not for an American, three Canadians, two Germans and a family of Vietnamese-Australians. On day two, we relocated to a hotel on Cat Ba Island and took all our meals in the dining room there. On the first day, April and I were asked to sit with a table of strangers so that all the chairs at that table would be filled before a new table was started on. We declined and soon were joined by two of our friends, and the four of us were promptly served. A guy and his dad from our tour sat at the table adjacent to ours, and the guy started helping himself to some of our rice. A server immediately ran over and told him to stop; he and his father would be served their own food as soon as the two empty chairs across from them were occupied. No sooner, no later. Meanwhile, across the room, I saw several panicky servers make a girl get up and move across from her boyfriend (she'd tried to sit next to him) because that's where the place setting had been laid. Soon, we learned to work this system. Next day, we were all at lunch at some restuarant and had been sitting there for a good while without anyone approaching us (though they kept walking by and staring). We noticed there was an extra place setting at our table, and moved the dishes and chair to another table. Immediately, a woman made a beeline for us and asked us what we'd have to drink.

Also on the tour, we visited Monkey Island, so named because of the troops of wild monkeys living there. Tourists and locals alike love to feed the monkeys, though occasionally the monkeys will swipe sunglasses, etc. April and I went over and looked at them; we were standing some distance away, watching a family of monkeys turn cartwheels and swat adorably at each other, when suddenly one of them drew a bead on a large bottle of water April had and ran at us, hissing. Frightened, April threw her water bottle at it and it seemed to be mollified, when out of nowhere, an a giant, fat, red-faced, red-assed baboon of a monkey charged right for us, screaming and baring its fangs. It wrapped itself around April's (now rapidly retreating) calf and sunk its teeth into her ankle. At least, that's how it appeared from my vantage point as I frantically tried to keep April in between myself and the mad monkey (yeah, yeah, I'm no hero); but after she escaped, it turned out it hadn't managed to break the skin. For the rest of the day, we huddled down the beach, waiting for someone else to be attacked (no one was) while the monkeys threw the water bottle back and forth, and sat on it and stared at us. So, turns out monkeys are bad news.

On the other hand, the preserved carcasses of dead dictators are great fun for the whole family, as I learned when April and I attended the requisite viewing of Uncle Ho's corpse. Like everything in 'Nam, this is quite the procedure: we first had to go up to a little office and have our bags checked. April carries a tote, and the woman told her she had to carry her cameras, wallet and film, but they would keep the bag itself, as it was too big and thus a threat to HCM. But the stuff they told April to keep was everything in her bag and she couldn't carry it all without some kind of tote. There was much discussion in Vietnamese, and then the woman knotted her bag up so that it looked like a smaller bag, and gave it back to her. After that, we had to wait in some room where a filmstrip played on a loop (in Vietnamese) until a big enough group had assembled, at which point we all filed through a security checkpoint, had our bags x-rayed, and were instructed to place all our cameras and cell phones in special red bags provided for the purpose. Then, we went through yet another bag check office, where we deposited the red bags. Then, we arrived at the actual mausoleum, where guards looked through all our bags yet again. At long last, we were admitted to the crypt, where we quickly filed past Ho, serene and waxy under glass, and reemerged into the sunlight to go collect all our bags from the various places where they'd been deposited. Frankly, I think Uncle Ho looked fake - the Vietnamese can't even keep beer cold.

So, I'm still in Hanoi. My flight out isn't until Sunday night, so I get to stay the longest in the place I hate the most. April flew to Japan this morning. She stayed in Hanoi just long enough to have her wallet stolen out of her bag last night - all her money and credit cards. Helpfully, everyone at the restaurant knew exactly who'd taken it; less helpfully, they didn't think it necessary to alert April at the time. The policeman we filed our report with was embarrassed that he didn't speak any English and had to keep bringing kids in to translate. He was more interested in throwing his forms around huffily and striking official postures than in interviewing anyone at the scene. All things considered, I do not think I am being hasty or unfair when I say that Vietnam in general, and Hanoi in particular, couldn't suck harder if there was a fortune at the bottom of the straw.

Dalat, Nha Trang, Hoi An

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth) — Sun, 03 Dec 2006 05:34:00 +0000

Due to a mix-up with my bus ticket (I confirmed for the bus to Dalat at 7:30 a.m., only to be told when I phoned after no bus appeared that there was no bus that day and I would instead be going tomorrow, causing me to completely lose it over the phone so that they put me on another company's 1:00 p.m. bus) I ran into April again, and we've been traveling together once more.

From the beach at Mui Ne, we headed into the mountains. Dalat is a quaint hill town, where I was cold at night for the first time since China and also had a hot water shower for the first time since China. April and I optimistically rented bikes in the morning, and cycled round the lake, and then the short distance to Crazy Guesthouse, owned by an ex-film star, whose father (as many newspaper articles, tribute posters and shrines throughout the place assert) was 'right-hand man to Ho Chi Minh.' The guesthouse is indeed crazy. This woman continually renovates it and it looks a lot like the inside of the giant sea snail in that one Dr. Doolittle movie that no one ever remembers except me: it's all twisting stairways and low ceilings and tunneled paths into wings shaped like mushrooms, and little mirrored rooms tucked into the nooks and crannies. There's a big giraffe toward the entrance, and the actual rooms all have fireplaces shaped like huge, plaster animals with red lights in the eyes. They are theme rooms: the eagle for America, the bear for Russia, the ant for Vietnam and so forth.

Despite the coolness of Dalat, it is still a hill town, so April and I wore out on the biking pretty fast and hired motobikes to take us to a village. The village we visited is called 'Chicken Village,' because of the huge, stone chicken in its center (a gift from the government [??]). The village itself is very small and mostly farms. We wandered around and nearly got attacked by some dogs in the middle of a patty, only to be rescued by a farmer and given tea by his wife and son. They had a very odd guestbook in which various, random tourists had left little notes, all along the lines of: 'Very nice family. Gave us tea. Thanks! Pim and David, UK' and so forth. After that, April bought a woven blanket in which to tote around the baby she might one day have (the women who sold it to her let her try it out with real babies - the six-month-old slid out the bottom and the women laughed and laughed), and then we were at a loss for what else to do.

'And you already had your picture made with the big chicken?' said the fabric lady. The answer being yes, we went on back to Dalat.

Next day, we proceeded to Nha Trang, which is another beach town, and I don't really have much to say about it. We lounged on the beach all day, and my legs are now covered in heat rash. The mosquitoes in Vietnam have been unlike anything I've yet experienced (they find me even through my reeking screen of 50% DEET), so between the bites, the heat rash and the sunburn, I'm scratching myself so furiously even the locals look at me like I've no manners.

The bus from Nha Trang to Hoi An was a night bus, so we sort of killed time all the next day until it left. In my ongoing quest to get comfortable with massages, I finally reached the stage where I tried one involving oil. It was okay. I realize my traveling doesn't sound all that hard-core lately.

The night bus was 12 hours of torture. I'd heard a lot of horror stories about theft on night buses in Vietnam, and just before I boarded, I ran into a girl I know who had just had her bag grabbed by someone on a motorbike, in broad daylight on a busy street, even though she had it across her chest and was holding it (which I'd believed was a foolproof method to prevent purse-snatching)m - they'd just dragged her along behind the bike until (luckily) the strap broke. I put my money down my underpants for the bus trip. I was fortunate, really, because my bus didn't have that many people on it, so I was able to fully recline my seat and the one next to me, essentially sprawling across four seats as if they were a pallet. I still didn't sleep a wink. First of all, they shut all the lights out at 8:30, but then around 11, just as I was starting to doze off from sheer boredom, they pulled into a roadside restaurant, where all the Vietnamese lingered over dinner for an hour and a half, while the Westerners, having finished their Pringles, sat around bleary-eyed and boiling on the bus. We finally got back on the road about 12:15, only to stop again at 1: they put on all the lights and about eight men boarded the bus, chattering at the tops of their lungs. After that, the lights kept going on and off for the rest of the night for no real reason, and in no time, dawn broke and rain poured down. I met April at a cafe at 6:30 (we have open tickets with two different companies and so travel separately and have to meet up at predetermined cafes, which is really great, because it allows us to escape the endless hotel tour the bus companies make you go on in every city, as they get a commission for each guest they bring to certain hotels); we slogged around in the downpour until we found a decent hotel, and then slept until 2:00 p.m.

Hoi An is very pretty, with lots of early 19th-century architecture (that's nearly all painted yellow) and pedestrian-only (in theory) streets. The main point of Hoi An is to get all dresses, coats, boots and so on custom-made super cheap by the many tailors and cobblers here. They can copy nearly any design overnight. Any woman would be in hog heaven, except me, because, while I do really enjoy new clothes, the process of aquiring them always seems needlessly taxing. When faced with five million tailoring shops, you could start price-comparing and fabric shopping and browsing and trying on and getting measured and bargaining and thinking of what you need and what you already have and what you might like next season, or you could just...not. I usually pick not. So what I'm mostly doing here is trailing listlessly around after April, like I'm her put-upon boyfriend, and waiting for when it's time to eat something again.

Eating something turns out to be grand here, however: for the first time since I left home, I have now had real chocolate (not Hershey's syrup) and real melted cheese (not Kraft slices). I know that probably sounds like a dumb thing to get excited about to anyone reading this, but it's been nearly three months - the food in China was amazing, but all across Southeast Asia, every menu is a photocopy of the menu before it, and a person (well, a Western person) can only eat so many giant platters of fried, white starch before they want a bit of a respite. But every time you order Western food in Asia (and there are tons of places serving it), you get the most elaborately awful stuff for insane prices. It's kind of unbelieveable what they manage to do to quite simple things: you might, for example, order chocolate cake and what comes out is Ovaltine sprinkled on a pancake. I have no idea why Hoi An has cornered the market in chocolate and cheese in the region, but I'm glad to be here if only for the eats.

So far, Vietnam is my least favorite of the countries I've visited. It's just like Cambodia and Laos, except it's richer, so it has less excuse, and the culture isn't as interesting here, and the people aren't as friendly, and there's nothing I really care about seeing. It's just kind of bland, which is probably entirely my fault, as I'm sticking totally to the tourist trail here. But I think the North might be more interesting, and as I have a ticket out of Hanoi on the 17th, I'm really rushing up the coast.

Saigon

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth) — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 12:37:00 +0000

My Aunt Joan, a high school teacher in New Jersey, has a student from Vietnam, and when Aunt Joan told this student I was visiting her home, she very kindly hooked me up with her family. I called them my first night in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City, technically, although District 1, where I stayed the first night is still officially called Saigon, and locals tend to call the whole city by its former name) and they arrived at my hotel early next morning. Ms. Quyen, my Aunt's student's mother, does not speak English, so had brought along Ms. Anh, her daughter's English teacher, to translate. Over breakfast pho (Vietnamese noodle soup), they explained that where I was staying (the tourist district in the city center) was very dangerous and expensive, and I'd be more comfortable at Ms. Quyen's house.

So, I hopped on the back of Ms. Quyen's moto and she took me to her neck of the woods. I haven't written much yet about the whole moto thing, so let me take this opportunity to say that it is the most terrifying form of transport I have yet experienced, and it is also the main form in all of these countries. Everyone rides motos - whole four-person families crammed on one, women in short skirts riding side-saddle (which is tougher than they make it look), babies barely old enough to hold up their own heads loosely grasped by one parental hand, or even clinging themselves to the handlebars or the back of the seat. All motos drive at breakneck speed, do not ever stop, and frequently squeeze between turning vehicles or play chicken in the oncoming lane. When you cross a street in Southeast Asia (on foot, or by moto or bike), you don't wait for a break in traffic, because there will not be one; nor do you run (though every cell in your body is screaming for you to do so) because they'll hit you. Instead, you stroll slowly and purposefully into the street and allow all the motos, bikes, cars and tour buses to zip to either side of you. If you are on a moto, and the driver needs to turn left, she just turns into the oncoming lane and sort of wades her way across.

Ms. Quyen's house is very large and nice, and her husband is friendly and always laughing, and their little girl is adorable and shy and always prancing around like a little fairy. Most people in Southeast Asia try not to go out between 11:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m., as the sun is most intense during those hours, but about 3:00, Ms. Quyen took me out to see a few sights. Another general Southeast Asian thing I've neglected to mention is how much clothes everyone wears. I don't know where the whole 'light, loose, full-coverage clothes are better for hot climates than shorts and tanks' idea came from, but it's honky. I've tried it; within five minutes I look like I've been pushed in a pond and everything begins to chafe. In these countries, the Western tourists can barely stand to keep their naughty bits covered, but the locals wear full on jeans and jackets everywhere: not even light and loose! In the house, Ms. Quyen wore a light sundress, but every time we ventured out into the blazing sun, she put on jeans, a short-sleeved sweater, a cordoroy jacket, socks, leather booties, gloves, a wide-brimmed hat, sunglasses and a dust mask that covered the bottom half of her face. My refusal to wear a hat worried her no end.

We had a nice afternoon visiting a pagoda, friends of Ms. Quyen with an 18-year-old daughter who speaks English, and a giant Catholic church that makes liberal use of neon bars in its decor, then had some beef pho for dinner.

The next morning, I was picked up at 9:00 by Ms. Anh's 29-year-old son, Rene, who'd been instructed to take me wherever I wanted to go all day long and pay for it. I wanted to go to the War Remnants Museum, which used to be called The Museum of Chinese and American War Crimes, until the directors realized it was mostly a museum for Chinese and American tourists. Still, it's a museum totally filled with graphic photos of what my country did in Vietnam, and you don't know what awkward is until you're standing next to your new Vietnamese friend solemnly regarding a wall of blow-ups of My Lai. I should have said I wanted to go to the Fine Arts Museum. (By the way, I will undoubtedly sound hopelessly naive when I admit that, until I saw this museum, I didn't really realize just how bad things in Vietnam got. I believe most of these photos were published in the US at the time of their taking [except those of all the Agent Orange babies], but they're hardly the type of thing to be trotted out each decade in retrospectives, so they were new to me.)

Rene didn't seem to speak English at all, and didn't seem too chatty a guy in his own tongue, so I had no luck drawing him out. After the atrocity museum, he took me back to Ms. Quyen's for lunch (and a two-and-a-half hour rest), then picked me back up that afternoon, and took me to the former Independance Palace, the fancy hut in which the US helped install Diem before he got carried away killing monks and we had to take him out. These days, the building is called 'Reunification Palace' and I was surprised to find that it's, like, soooo '70s. There's even a gambling room done in pea green and orange, with a white, plastic circular sofa unit and a bar shaped like a wooden cask. In the basement were...more photos of American war crimes!!! A big group of women in the dark green uniforms tutted and gasped over the photos while I, the only foreigner in the room, stood around trying to look Canadian.

Rene didn't know what to do with me after that, so he took me home to his mother, who thought I might like another nap. I kind of flat-out refused to rest any further, and so we ended up talking for quite awhile about my travels and my budget. Ms. Anh and Rene were both thrilled to see my open bus ticket: for $22 through an agency, I'd booked a month-long open ticket all the way up Vietnam, with stops at each of the cities I wanted to visit, and I can just hop on and off. Rene has been wanting to go to Hanoi and Halong Bay, but they both thought it would be prohibitively expensive. They were shocked to hear how little I'm spending on my travels overall. I told them to get themselves a Lonely Planet. They got really excited.

After that, Rene took me for dinner (pho) and suddenly opened up and talked a blue streak in perfectly fine English. I don't know why he'd been so silent all day. Back at the Quyen's, we went on a family outing to the supermarket. I'd assumed Ms. Quyen had to do some shopping and we were all going along for an activity, but turns out we just went to show me the supermarket. It was a pretty impressive supermarket: an enormous two-story affair with an arcade, and packed with people.

Next morning, I left my new friends and went to Mui Ne, which is a beach town. Mui Ne is expensive (by SE Asian standards) and I had to flee my open bus (which won't let anyone off, but insists on taking you to each hotel on its list because the company gets a commission) to find a cheap(ish) room. But it is a beautiful beach, wide and white-sand, with clear waters. The fishermen all row around in these little basket-boats shaped like bowls and, because it's so windy, the sea is packed with kite-surfers. Have I mentioned that SE Asian women bathe fully clothed? Most of them wear long-pant, long-sleeved pajama sets. Meanwhile, many of the European women have trouble even keeping their tops on, which contrast makes the beaches here really entertaining. The local women glare at the Western women because they're naked; the Western women glare back because the locals all have perfect figures; the Western men have all rented local girls, so everyone glares at them; and the local men blatantly ogle the Western women, which pisses them and their boyfriends off at the local men. Oh, it's a high old time at the gay seashore!

Phnom Penh to Sihanoukville and On

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth) — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 11:55:00 +0000

Our first night in Phnom Penh, April and I took a walk out of the backpacker's ghetto (where the guesthouses all charge three bucks a night and make up the difference with the 24-hour bar out back), past the mosque (how I love chanting Muslims in the morning), into the alleys and industrial districts in the Northwest of the city, so April could get photos of picturesque squaller for her portfolio. We found squaller aplenty. The kids had bald patches in their hair, everyone had skin conditions, a beautiful woman posing for April started leaping around, and a roach ran out from her sarong. There was green, slimy, standing water around many of the houses and people were just going about their business through it, wading up to their waists.

I stayed in PP two days. The first, we went to markets and angered all the vendors by stretching out their wee, little clothes and then not buying them. The next day, we went to the Killing Fields and the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. The Killing Fields are a good way outside of town, and the roads there were so muddy the tuk-tuks kept getting stuck and passengers were asked to get out and walk to release them. There were also a lot of traffic jams, and April and I were thus trapped when our tuk-tuk was stopped next to a tour bus full of Asian people who leant over and snapped away at us with their giant lenses. I felt like an Olsen twin.

The Killing Fields is only one of many such sights throughout Cambodia. This one has been set up into a memorial, with a number of uncovered mass graves around a central glass tower, which houses thousands of skulls of victims. Our guide matter-of-factly pointed out the fractures and explained how each was killed: 'Hatchet, whap! Bamboo stick, shfft! Gun, bang!' He also pointed out all the many bones still scattered around, half-buried in the ground: 'This? You know? Collarbone. This here? Legbone.'

From the Killing Fields, we proceeded to the Toul Sleng Genocide Museum, which is in an old high school that the Khmer Rouge converted into a prison and interrogation facility. The museum is extremely grim, with all the cells preserved as found and blood still spattered on the high ceilings and walls. Most disturbing, however, are the rooms of row after row of photographs of the 17,000 inmates, who were all photographed upon their intake. Seven of them survived. They are men, women (some holding infants), teenagers, little kids. The expressions they wear are as varied as fingerprints: some look terrified, some resigned, some furious. A few are rolling their eyes. Nearly all the teenage boys wear the same carefully crafted smirk, most adults are trying for a poker face, the kids just look totally confused. Skulls may be gruesome, but skulls all look the same. Living faces are far more devastating.

After that, I was ready to lie on the beach awhile, so I went to Sihanoukville on the Southern coast and checked into a $2 room in the backpacker's district. I should have sprung for an $8 bungalow on the beach. If you're ever in Sihanoukville, folks, don't go to Weather Station Hill, no matter what the Lonely Planet says. It is a horribly depressing red light district. Two small streets of nasty, socially stunted, middle-aged white men sitting in bars and throngs of beautiful, giggling, teenage Cambodian girls pathetically fawning all over every Westerner in sight, even me. Not my idea of a beach vacation: I felt like a free black person on holiday in the slave-holding South.

The next day, however, I took a moto to a much nicer beach and spent an entire day lounging in a little bamboo pavilion and eating fresh pineapple, mango, and grilled prawns bought from ladies who come around with platters on their heads. I stayed there, drinking with friends, until all the motos had gone home, so I ended up crashing in my friends' room in my salty bathing suit. Next morning, I returned to PP and got the bus to Saigon the following day.

Genocide, prostitution and poverty, oh my! My next blog will be lighter, I promise. I'm in Vietnam now, and yes, they do all wear those hats.

Angkor Wat

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth) — Sun, 19 Nov 2006 10:02:00 +0000

Angkor Wat is the main temple in a complex of hundreds, built from the 9th to 15th centuries. There's a formula for viewing these temples: most people purchase a three-day pass for $40 and hire a tuk-tuk driver to cart them around. Most of the temples are built in levels and require climbing up steep and narrow stone steps. (Climbing down from Angkor itself, I freaked out a bit and inched down on all fours. I was thus powerless to do anything when a strong breeze blew my flowy skirt up to my chin and kept it there. Oh, I'm in so many photo albums now.) Other temples, such as the 'tombraider' temple (Ta Prohm), are long halls spread out through the jungle with trees growing into the walls and shafts of sunlight filtering in through the crumbling roofs. My favorite temple, Banteay Srei, is a very small temple, consisting of about half a dozen stone pillars covered in intricate stone carvings, detailed statuettes and chiseled scenes. Because of the delicacy of the carvings, Banteay Srei is often called 'Temple of the Women.'

Nearly every child in Northern Cambodia appears to spend his or her days at Angkor hawking postcards, flutes, photocopied guidebooks and the like. The children's sales pitches are as impressive as they are relentless. In addition to naming the capitals of every country and each of the fifty states, they can count to 10 in every language, living or dead (including Gaelic, would you believe), reeling them all off in a rapid, synchronized sing-song. They're also well versed in currencies from around the world - one little girl told April (who's Canadian) that she happily accepts loonies and toonies. Their patter is delivered in a consistent, whiny monotone and continues no matter how far you run, or how much you scream and cry.

'Hey lady, bracelet 10 for one dollar.'

'No, sweetie. Not today.'

'Buy bracelets, cheap cheap.'

'No, I don't wear jewelry.'

'Buy bracelets, give to your friends.'

'I have no friends.'

'Buy bracelets and send them back to me.'

'No. Go away now.'

'Buy bracelets lady, I go to school.'

...

'Buy bracelets madam, I give you peace and quiet.'

This from a lisping child of five. Their mothers all work at Angkor, runing food stalls outside the temples where tourists can buy bad fried rice at insane prices. The restaurants are identical, all in a row, and creatively named '1' through '10.' Each tuk-tuk driver does business with a particular restaurant and is supposed to bring his charges there to eat. While tourists look at the temples, their driver naps in a hammock in his restaurant and when the tourists emerge, the women attack.

'Lady, your driver sleep in here! Come in here, lady! Lady, you buy something to eat! Buy cold drink! Lady, lady, lady, lady! I KNOW YOUR DRIVER!!!'

And all the while, throngs of chanting, whining, suddenly-last-summer children flock about you, blowing flutes and flapping postcards. It's enough to drive a person absolutely stark, screaming mad. I do not know how the ancient temples retain their composure.

When you visit Angkor, you're supposed to experience sunrise and sunset within the park. The drivers (who, like everyone in every industry in Cambodia, stick to a formula that made some money once and absolutely refuse to divert from it in any way) take everyone to Angkor itself for sunrise and to a hilltop temple for sunset. The two events are equally embarrassing - a gagillion tourists point their cameras at the gradually lightening or darkening sky and snap fifty photos of each other's heads. Sunset was particulary frightening, as it involved a constantly replenishing stream of tourists throwing themselves, salmon-like, up the sheer side of a very high temple and then clambering back down with equal impatience after dark.

Of all the weary travelers at Angkor, I think the monks have it the worst. I imagine a pilgrimage to Angkor might be a truly meaningful experience to them - they surely at least know what the frescoes are meant to depict - but they have to spend the whole time being posed and photographed by various Japanese and Europeans who want to capture them against picturesque ruins, or from behind as the monks climb stairs, or flitting in between pillars. They're real good sports about it. At least the kids probably leave them alone.

By day three, April and I were templed out. Sure, the temples are ancient and breathtaking and all that, but all of them are...well, temples. By the end of the second day, I wouldn't have known any different if Chin were driving us up to repeats. So we asked him to take us to some villages instead. Non-tourist villages. We thought three was a nice, round number. In village number one, we visited a school. Like most schools in Southeast Asia, this one was packed with kids, but seemed to have no teachers. April and I wnadered into a classroom and the kids immediately reeled off 1 through 10 and the English alphabet. April and I then led them in some songs. Whereas American children might have questioned who the hell we were and why we thought we could wander in off the street and claim authority over their behavior, these children were charming and enthusiastic and extremely polite. After leaving them, some teachers found us and gave us a tour. The school is for four- and five-year-olds and has very nice facilities, sponsored by an organization called 'Caring for Cambodia.'

On the flipside, we also visited an orphanage that afternoon that could really use some caring. April volunteered at an orphanage in Thailand for five months, so has a particular interest in them; she struck up a conversation with the director of one who'd been holding the donation box outside a temple, and he'd invited us to visit any time. But apparently any time meant morning, because when we alighted from our tuk-tuk at two, he told us he'd kept the children out of school that morning becuase we were meant to be coming. We felt terrible. The orphanage currently has 15 kids and the facilities are a single pavilion with no walls. Every night, they move the desks into the yard and sleep head to toe on mats on the floor. The director told us excitedly about a facility he is building down the road, where he has obtained a five-year lease for $30/month, which is an improvement over the 4-month lease that is almost up on the current property. He walked us over to show us. The new place is currently a heap of 2x4s and another of bamboo poles, plus the house of the family who owns the property, which will have to be picked up and moved further back to make room for the orphanage. They had to be out of their current building and into the new one in 10 days. The director was optimistic.

After the orphanage, we had to go to Chin's girlfriend's restaurant for lunch, because she was pissed at him for something and he couldn't be easy until he'd talked to her. They're supposed to get married next year; Cambodians cannot even kiss until they're married. Chin is trying to save some money for a house for them (currently he sleeps on the lobby floor of a guesthouse in town, with the five other guys who staff the guesthouse), but he's a tuk-tuk driver and sadly, so is every other young man in Cambodia. There are about 20 tuk-tuks (not to mention motos) to each tourist, and Chin asked us if we had any idea how he could differentiate himself in the fray. We told him to just sit in his tuk-tuk and be quiet, rather than joining the storm of drivers who pounce on tourists as they come off the bus.

'If you grab us or run off with our bags,' we explained, 'We'll sit in a cafe all day until you leave, and never go with you.'

'You won't,' agreed Chin, 'But the Japanese will go where we push them.'

He thought a sign might help, but I think he's just screwed. Basically, you can't make money as a tuk-tuk driver, but there is no other job. Chin worked for this insanely fancy hotel for awhile and made $40/month.

April and I stayed an extra day in Siem Reap to attend a wedding party with Chin and his friends. In Cambodia, the party is the day after the wedding and each of the guests gives $10 to the couple, thus paying for the party. Because Chin brought two guests to this man's wedding, the man is now supposed to scare up two guests to bring to Chin's wedding next year. The party was in the country, so April and I were treated to a 45-minute ride over rutted roads on the back of Chin's moto. When our group arrived, we walked through the reception line, where we were wei'd and given a chocolate sucker, and then led to our table, which was piled with canned beer. Girls came around and constantly replenished our glasses with ice (they drink beer over ice here - even stout), and guys piled more cans on the table as fast as we could knock them back. Poor kids from the village came around collecting the empty cans. The meal was in courses and was devoured as rapidly as the beer was drunk. Ideally, you are supposed to toast before each drink of beer, which practice means you can scarcely ever get a fork to your mouth, so frequently do you have to stop and toast everybody at the table. After the meal, there was a brief spurt of dancing. The whole thing lasted two hours - no speeches, no socializing. Eat, drink, pay, get the hell out. But not before April and I were led up to be photographed with the wedding party: wearing our disgusting backpacker clothes, we were positioned on each side of the glowing bride, like giant, sweat-drenched bookends.

Wednesday must be the day for weddings, because we ended up going to another one that very evening. This one was a town wedding, which meant it was in a big, fancy restaurant in the city, and Chin and his friends scared up a car for us to arrive in. This party was bigger than the first, but almost exactly the same in all respects. I got a plastic chicken keychain in the reception line, rather than a sucker, and there was Johnnie Walker red label (which the Cambodians call wine, and seem to have no idea how to drink) in addition to canned beer, but the meal was nearly identical and eaten with the same frantic urgency. Directly after the last course was served, all the women (who were dressed to the nines with professionally done hair, and who no one had spoken to at dinner) got up and filed out. Women don't get to do a damn thing in Cambodia - all the girlfriends of the guys we were with didn't get to come to either wedding because 'they have to work.' When April and I expressed surprise that all the women were leaving so early, the guys all explained that women do not like to drink and smoke and so are very bored at parties and prefer to go straight home and never leave it again.

'Cambodian women,' they clarified. 'Very different.'

Shortly after this conversation, some drunk guy veered up and slurred an introduction into my face. I told him to go away, but the incident so upset Chin and his friends that we all left immediately. We went to a nightclub where six young girls dressed like deranged ballerinas sang whiny Thai songs, and the guys ate platters of venison and drank stout over ice until April and I positively fell asleep at the table.

Cambodia has a bad reputation among backpackers. I expected to hate it, to feel very unsafe and to find the people unfriendly and threatening. But it has ended up being my favorite of the countries I've visited so far. It's extremely poor here, and the people are clearly struggling, but I have found them delightfully friendly and open. They also have a sarcasm (or maybe a sense of irony) that is very Western, and I can relate to them better than I could the Chinese or Lao. Last night, I passed a tuk-tuk driver on a corner. A couple of his friends were sitting in the tuk-tuk helping him solicit passers-by. Suddenly, the entire tuk-tuk just fell over, dumping them all out onto the pavement, right as I passed by.

'Tuk-tuk, lady?' offered the driver, only half joking.

Savanakhet to Siem Reap

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth) — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 09:20:00 +0000

Perhaps it's only because 'Savanakhet'sounds like 'Savannah,' but it reminded me of a slow, Southern town in the States. On the day I visited, the streets were nearly empty, the pavement hummed in the constant heat, and people lurked around in what shady nooks they could find. I tried to locate the local museum (Savanakhet also has a dinosaur museum, which is hilarious to me, though I didn't attempt to visit it). I'd heard the museum was an old building with goats in front, and you had to turn on the lights for yourself. But there were several buildings in the area fitting that description, and the heat annhilates my sense of purpose. If things don't work out immediately, I think to myself, 'Well, why would I ever do this? It's not easy.' And I give up right away.

As I was listlessly looking for the museum, I found myself sucked into a Laos...well, I eventually managed to establish that it was a Laos housewarming party. I was there for about two hours, dancing endlessly and doing shots of beer (yes, they do shots of beer in Laos - China, too). Laos dancing is as relaxed as everything else in Laos, and involves a lot of rocking back and forth and paddling your hands in the air in front of you. Two young girls adopted me and taught me how to dance, and a pretty cute guy who said his name was Tiger (I don't know about that) sat by me and asked me the same question all day long. I never did understand him, but he never gave up (it sounded like, 'You making hum for one?'). Every so often, I'd get to sit down for a minute, but then the band (a keyboardist with speakers) would call me up to lead off the dance again, and away we'd all go. After I'd been there about an hour, a very tall fellow from Portland happened by and was absorbed. Everyone assumed we were together, and when they learned we weren't, they all thought we ought to immediately get together, because, as Tiger explained, 'Two Americans in Laos!' Just as I was beginning to wonder how I'd ever get out of this party, one of the girls turned to me and said, 'You go to your guesthouse now!' And that was that.

That night, I met a British gal named Louise at my guesthouse, and we agreed to travel together to Champasak the next day. Sounded simple enough, but that simple decision was the beginning of two days of confusing, exhausting travel on jam-packed, constantly stopping public buses, ferries, tuk-tuks and trucks. Each mode of transport had to be (1) located (no small task) and (2) haggled over endlessly in the hot, hot sun.

'One dollar, one person.'

'One dollar?! That's crazy! We paid less than that to come all the way here on the bus.'

'Bus have many people, I have only twelve people in truck. One dollar, one person.'

'It's only three kilos!'

'Then I see you walking.'

'Come on, be fair. One dollar, two people.'

'One dollar, one person.'

'No. We'll sit here all day.'

And so forth. At some point in all this traveling, Louise and I were joined by Portland from the party (Jason) and an Irish construction foreman named Aidan. The four of us stayed the night in Champasak, a very small town with the very ancient 'Wat Phu' not far outside it. The next morning, we cycled to Wat Phu, which is a Khmer wat built from the 6th to 13th centuries. It's Laos' second World Heritage sight, and it was worth the stopover. A long, crumbling road of flat stones leads to the first terrace, with a ruined "palace" on either side. Steep stairs lead from there up the mountain side to the main sanctuary, and behind that is a spring and some small shrines in the cliff face. There are many depictions of Shiva, Vishnu and other Hindu gods on many of the Buddhist temples in Laos (and Cambodia) because they began as Hindu Khmer structures.

After viewing the wat, we began day two of our traveling marathon, down to Don Khong, which is the largest of the islands in the Si Phaen Don, or 4000 Islands, area at the Southern tip of Laos. The traveling was just as arduous on day two, but we did manage to hitch a ride in the back of an Australian expat's truck for a good ninety kilos, and oh, it was bliss - no stopping, no slowing, no live chickens under my feet. We got to Don Khong just in time to meet up with a four Candadians and four Irish guys at a restaurant. Our party then drank every single beer in the kitchen, creating a terrifying glass forest on the table top. I left the group around 11, thinking they were hilarious and great fun. An hour later, the party relocated to a table just outside my open guesthouse window and raged on until 3:30, as I layed under my mosquito net thinking how much I hated them all and how not at all cute they were, and how Irish people and Candadians in general just suck.

Next morning, we all relocated to Don Dhet, which is a smaller, quainter (and thus more touristy) island south of Don Khong. I spent two and a half days there. It was lovely - I had a hammock on the porch overlooking the Mekong just outside my guesthouse door, and there was nothing to do all day but lay in it and read. At night, the town runs generators from six to about ten, and I'd shower and then walk up the pitch-black main drag and peer in the occasional lit bars clogged with Westerners until I found the Irish lads (who became funny again once I'd slept a full night). I'd have dinner and a drink or two, and then tiptoe back to my guesthouse (which had a ten o'clock curfew) and climb over the porch rails and down into the center courtyard. Every morning, the woman who ran my guesthouse would grill me, trying to figure out when I'd gotten back and how I'd gotten in.

'Last night, you walk walk walk walk? You open gate yourself? You come in through gate? Walk walk walk...down there? What time?'

'I don't know. Must have been before 10 - gate was open.'

'Hmmmmm.'

On Wednesday morning, I got on a minibus to go to the Cambodian border. The road there was...well, it wasn't. It was not so much a road as a great deal of holes strung together, and before we'd gone very far, the driver jerked off the road into a muddy ditch, tipping the whole minibus over to a terrifying angle and miring it there. We all got out. A public bus happened by. The public bus was waved over and a rope was tied from its rear bumper to something under the minibus. The public bus was so rusted and ancient, you could see right through it to the other side of the road. It started up and drove forward, and whatever the rope was tied to immediately broke off and fell in the road. The public bus took its rope back and drove on. Another minibus was brought and bags began to be unloaded. A long, long time after that, we arrived at the border, and another day of hard traveling officially began. I'd paid ahead to go all the way to Siem Reap in the Northeast, as traveling in Cambodia isn't too simple. We drove (in various minibuses) until 9 last night over the most unbelievably terrible roads. The minibus could only go about 20 mph and had to weave all over the road continually to avoid the worst of the potholes, and every so often it would veer to the edge and tip precariously. And then the oncoming traffic and the dogs and the nighttime driving...I kept my hands over my face most of the time. We finally arrived in Kompong Cham (we had to go nearly as far South as Phnom Penh on the 'new' highway (!) and then back North to Siem Reap, because the roads going straight West from the border to Siem Reap are too bad to travel on. We spent the night in a very filthy hotel and then got on a bus to Siem Reap this morning.

I am very glad to be here. Siem Reap is the city outside Angkor Wat, Cambodia's number one (and pretty much only) tourist attraction, and nearly everyone in Cambodia has descended on Angkor trying to get in on that gravy train. Getting off the bus, we were all swarmed by dozens of moto drivers waving signs and banners, and our bags which they were carrying off and putting in their motos. It was beyond alienating. The deal is, they give you a free ride to whatever guesthouse in hopes that you'll then hire them to drive you around Angkor for the next day or so. The trick is to find a good driver who speaks English well, and who won't screw you. I have joined forces with a Canadian girl named April, who is also traveling alone and wants to do three days in Angkor, and we found a really cool moto driver. Actually, he found us - as soon as we'd grabbed our bags, it started pelting down rain so hard we were in his moto and under the rain flaps before we knew what was up. We've hired him for tomorrow, and are supposed to leave for Angkor at the terrifying hour of 5 a.m. to see the sunrise over the wats. I'll let you know how that goes.

Vientiane and On

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth) — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 13:26:00 +0000

My mood, you will be happy to hear, improved upon arrival in Vientiane. Not that Vientiane's so wonderful - it's just a city. But it's a city that would exist whether or not tourists came and that's all I really required. Laos' capital is not nearly as well-kept as Luang Prabang. The sidewalks in Vientiane are particularly unwalkable: most of them are the outlines of sidewalks with great mounds of sand within, or they have trees planted all along that so fill the sidewalk you have to keep stepping in and out of the street continuously. It is also necessary to keep a lookout for big, open holes leading down into the sewer system. Vientiane has about five million more tuk-tuk drivers than it needs (I long to have a T-shirt printed up that reads 'I do not need a tuk-tuk' in Lao script), and not nearly enough decent guesthouses. I had trouble finding one with vacancies, and in my search was shown som truly dreadful rooms (bed in the middle of a restaurant kitchen, anyone?) for quite high prices.

I did a bit of sightseeing in Vientiane, like a dutiful tourist. There is a big stone arch in the middle of the city called the Patuxai, which means 'Arch of Triumph.' It's clear where the idea for the arch came from, and the concrete for it came from the US (which intended it for construction of a new airport, according to my Lonely Planet). Vientiane also has the Laos National Museum. Downstairs are several exhibits on archaelogical digs, of both the artifact and dinosaur bone variety. These exhibits mostly consist of photos and crude dioramas of the digs themselves. Upstairs are many rooms devoted to Laos' history. After a room or two on the French colonialists (including a mural depicting French soldiers snatching Lao babies from their mothers' arms and tossing them into a well), the museum basically turns into a warehouse of minor possessions that at one point passed through the hands of various 'revolutionary heroes.' For example: 'spoon used by Comrade X when fleeing the US imperialist and its puppets' and 'shirt button of Comrade Y from shirt worn while planning the liberation of the Lao people.'

I only intended to stay a day in Vientiane, but ran into administrative difficulties. First of all, the Cambodian embassy was closed on Tuesday because of the King's birthday, so I had to stick around on Wednesday. I then paid double for my visa because I didn't bother to check what the price actually was before having an agency sort it for me, all because I was too cheap and lazy to take a tuk-tuk to the embassy myself. Then, the guy at the late-open exchange counter (where I had to go because Cambodia had my passport all day) refused to change my traveler's checks because the signature on my passport (signed in 2000) didn't match the signature on the checks (signed in 2006). Why this would matter, I have no idea. The 'big' bank where he said they'd assume the perilous risk of changing my checks didn't open until 8:30 the next morning, and the last bus to Savannakhet (where I was headed) left at 9:30. I had to get money, though, because Vientiane was the last good shot before Cambodia to obtain US dollars, which I would need because Cambodia has no ATMs. So I cut it really close (though I still took time to haggle with three different tuk-tuk drivers on the fare to the bus station), but managed to get on the bus at 9:28. The bus then pulled right outside the station and sat there for 20 minutes, while vendors swarmed the aisle, spilling squid juice everywhere and leaning into my lap and leering at me.

The nine-hour bus ride started out pleasantly enough and slowly turned into hell on wheels, as long bus trips are wont to do. This bus made it all the way to Tha Khaek (two hours from Savannakhet) before breaking down. We all sat around the bus station there for well over an hour while they worked on it. And lucky for me, one of my fellow passengers sitting near me (all men, as the women disappeared somewhere as soon as the bus parked and didn't reappear until it left the station again) spoke English, so I got to have a lot of quality conversation with a genuine Lao person. Here's what he had to say:

'Where is your husband? Why you're not marry? You look for a husband in Lao? YOu like Lao boys? You cannot travel alone! Oh, with friends. Men friends? Where are your men? Why they're not with you? I have phone - we call them now to meet you. This lady want to know, do you like this boy? He will travel with you to Savannakhet. No? I have house - you stay tonight, tomorrow I take you to find you boyfriend. (Here, here, you like baguette? Take, take, I buy too much!) This boy, he not marry.'

And so forth. I have this conversation with everyone in Laos. Women just do not travel (or do anything at all) unaccompanied in this country, and it worries the hell out of everyone when I get on a bus alone. They feel it is up to them to remedy the situation immediately. I have kicked up my China lie (my boyfriend is at the hotel bar because he hates China and won't go with me anywhere) to a new, sturdier Lao lie (my husband is in Wherever already, because he had to go yesterday, because [something garbled to do with money said too fast for an ESL-speaker to grasp]). The most annoying thing about all this is that I would love at soem point to discuss something - anything - other than my imaginary husband and his whereabouts, but the conversation simply cannot move past his absence until he is reassuringly there in the flesh beside me. I guess women can travel the world alone, but their interactions with others are going to be limited and redundant.

At any rate, I finally made it to Savannakhet, before midnight and still single, so it could have been a worse day overall.

Vang Vieng

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth) — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 05:20:00 +0000

I have rarely witnessed anything as truly ludicrous as Vang Vieng. Droves of backpackers originally flocked to this town because of its position on the Nam Song surrounded by limestone karst formations and tons of caves, and in response to the influx, Vang Vieng has completely whored itself out. The main tourism-driven innovation here is the TV bar: bar-restaurants where patrons lounge on cushioned platforms, drink beer, eat "happy" pizza and watch multiple, blaring television sets that play DVDs of American sitcoms. It's tacky and horrifying, and I found one with The Simpsons and laid there for five hours.

A visitor to VV is expected to accomplish two things: (1) visit caves, and (2) tube down the river. I did one per day with my friend, Miriam (who is from Boston, but just finished university in London, and who I met in Muang Ngoi and have run into in every city since, because that's how it is in Laos).

There are a lot of caves around VV, some great, some crappy. Miriam and I saw four of them easily because we went by motorbike (sorry, Mom - we did wear helmets [but they were Lao helmets]). The first cave was the least-developed, and required us to shimmy on our stomachs through the mud after a very small Lao boy with a headlamp. We weren't really prepped for this. Miriam was wearing a miniskirt, and I had my eternal purse, which I had to launch down the cave ahead of me and then crawl after and retrieve. After traveling like this for some ways, Miriam and I succumbed to a laughing fit and were unable to squeeze along any further until it passed. We really mystified our tiny, non-English-speaking guide, who frantically directed his headlamp at all sorts of cave bugs and clumps of cave moss - I can only suppose in some effort to sober us up.

The second cave was bigger, with lights and stairs and things. Boring, actually, but there's a lovely blue pool outside by which we swam into the cave (in front of an audience of nine giggling, teenage boys). The final cave was the highlight: through this cave flows an underground river, and you have to sit in a tube and tow yourself through it by rope. The only light is your headlamp. The formations on the walls and ceiling are amazing.

The next day, we dutifully tubed down the Nam Song. Everyone who comes to VV does this, and there are a number of riverside bars, all with zip lines, and all playing the same Bob Marley cd on a loop. There's a hawker in front of each bar who screams 'BeerLao, BeerLao,' at the top of his lungs as you tube by, completely ruining any enjoyment you might have been taking in the truly gorgeous surroundings. As you tube past, they haul you in by bamboo pole (whether or not you care to go). In addition to BeerLao, the menus feature three different categories of substances that are not food. Strangely, the bars are mostly at the very start of the tubing route, and the two biggest are right next to each other. Miriam and I stopped at one of them, and met a hot (if vapid) American guy, but then a pockmarked, middle-aged Thai man who'd sent over an (unwanted) round plopped himself down in our bamboo hut and announced we should pay attention to him now. By the time we ran him off, the American was downriver chatting up some Brits.

I may as well take this opportunity to express my increasing disillusionment re: Laos. The country itself is beautiful, but traveling here is not quite what I expected. I feel I've been sucked into a current of tourism running south along the Mekong that is much more 'Cancun on spring break' than 'hippie trail.' I wanted to travel in order to learn about the world, not really to get trashed against a variety of backdrops. And if I can't manage to communicate authentically with local people, I at least want to meet interesting fellow travelers. I guess I had this romantic idea that I'd meet a lot of war-torn, haggard activists with fascinating pasts and exaggerated notions of their own social responsibilities - and in China, I did meet a few - but in Laos, it's all frat kids. Here's what I'd like to hear more of from fellow backpackers:

'I fear all my efforts in Sri Lanka were futile.'

Here's what I'd like to hear less of:

'Dude, you have to go to Chiang Mai: for ten bucks, you can totally wrestle a bear.'

Also, while I'm venting, all the fat, old white men here conducting around utterly bored and obviously rented Thai "girlfriends" is awakening in me an Eileen-Wuernos-type rage. I hope those girls are taking every last penny the losers have, and then I hope they kill them. Slowly. Perhaps I'm off-topic.

In sum, Vang Vieng = definition of 'clash of context'; backpackers in warm climates = too happy to be interesting; and men = totally ignorant of the concept of "league." I'd love to write something about Laos, but I can't quite make it out through the blinding screen of opium smoke and Friends episodes everywhere. I'm hoping things will get better south of Vientiane; I think most of this crowd hops back over to Thailand at the Friendship Bridge.

Luang Prabang

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth) — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 09:53:00 +0000

Between the Mekong and its Nam Khan tributary, Luang Prabang is palm-tree-lined street after street of French colonial architecture, travel agencies and Westernized restaurants and cafes. The city has been placed on Unesco's World Heritage list, so it's quite seen after. The first thing I noticed on arrival is that there seem to be more whiteys here than Lao. I thought perhaps I'd unknowingly flown to Charleston. It's an enjoyable city, however, with the typical, ultra-relaxed Laos atmosphere, and a huge night market with lots of cool linen clothes.

The wattage in Luang Prabang is out of control: my Lonely Planet guide says there are 66 wats in town, and it lists full blurbs for 22. I only paid to walk around the biggest one, Wat Xieng Thong, which is very glittery and impressive. Unfortunately, I was sporting my brand new Beer Laos T-shirt, which I soon realized was coming off as disrespectful. It was the only top I had with sleeves, though, and they're big into sleeves here.

During my walkabout day, I also hiked up Phu Si hill in the middle of the town, which offers nice views. Guess what was at the top?? Wats! I had a conversation with a young monk who wanted to hear about my life in America. I asked him how long he'd probably be a monk, and he wasn't sure, but he liked Luang Prabang, and if he quit being a monk he'd have to find some way to get a house. And then, quite apropos of nothing, he said:

'I have never been with woman. I am pure.'

'Well,' I said, after a moment. 'I'm sure it helps in your job.'

'I have no job,' he said, sounding offended.

You can't win with these monks.

Across from Phu Si hill is the Royal Palace Museum, which is totally worth seeing, although not really for the exhibits. The museum is in King Sisavong Vong's old palace, which the French were sweet enough to allow built in 1904, and the interior of the building is beyond impressive. The walls of the main room are covered floor to ceiling in murals of tiny Lao people fighting wars, celebrating, farming and so on, all made of tiny bits of mirrored glass.

After visiting the museum, I sat in the shade on the lower part of Phu Si hill, and was hard at work memorizing Laos numerals when I was approached by three little girls selling bracelets. After a half-hearted stab at selling me something, we moved on to more important matters like how old I was (I busted out my newly learned numbers: I am sip-haa), where I'm from and whether they might have a look in my purse. Presently it became clear that the proper thing in this situation was for me to make each of them a little present. The two youngest quickly grabbed up a pen and my broken mini-calculator and were satisfied, but the 15-year-old had fixed on my Maglite keychain.

'Wouldn't you like these Chinese coins instead?' I offered. 'From China!'

She wouldn't (although the little girls promptly got into a brawal over them). Nor would she accept orange-flavored lip balm, gum or a rhinestone bobbypin. The girl was no fool; she pointed solemnly at the Maglite.

'Look,' I said. 'I need to have this light to find the toilet when the lights go out in Laos.'

Finally, she settled for the lip balm, and we all put some on to seal the deal.

Yesterday afternoon, I took a minivan to the Tat Kuang Si waterfalls about an hour outside town. The falls filter down into a number of terraced pools, which are deep and blue and freezing, and filled with shameless foreigners in bikinis. You can jump from overhanging trees into them, and slide over the falls from tier to tier, and all sorts of good stuff. You can also climb to the top of the falls (which I did), and cross the brink, supporting yourself by a rickety, wooden fence (which I began to do, before coming to my senses). It was the most delightful afternoon I've spent in Laos, but sadly I left my camera at the guesthouse, because I knew I couldn't look after it while swimming, so I have no pictures of the lovely falls.

Upon returning to Luang Prabang, I ate a delightful dinner at a very nice restaurant on the banks of the Mekong, with sparkly lights in the trees and all. I followed that up with a wretched night of projectile vomiting. I won't soon forget it; the very geckos fled my room in disgust, and I fear they may be in for an encore. I'm spending the day recovering in overpriced, highly Westernized cafes, taking tiny bites of bread and pretending I'm at a Borders in the States. This whole city reeks of food. If I've recovered sufficiently by tomorrow, I'll head on to Vang Vieng, but in all likelihood, I'll be dead by then.

Luang Nam Tha, and Along the Nam Ou

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth) — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 06:32:00 +0000

Laos is not China, as the three Americans and I immediately realized upon arrival in sleepy Luang Nam Tha. We'd had a long day of taking a minivan over the most dreadful roads I'd experienced in China, crossing the border (totally hassle free - I got a month-long visa and all my RNB exchanged into kip without so much as having to wait in line), and finally riding in the back of a pick-up with a German girl who'd come (as Chris said) from Lhasa with BO.

Laos is all green rice paddies dotted with little thatched-roof huts, and small villages of bamboo bungalows on stilts, and smiling Laos people who don't stare at you and couldn't care less about your money. The Laos are mostly Theravada Buddhists, which means they have a moral imperative not to stress themselves with too much work or worry very much about the future, which really explains a lot of Laos (well, that and extensive US bombing). They also believe it's bad form to show strong emotions, so everyone's very chill, almost sedated.

Luang Nam Tha is a two-street town and consists of a lot of old French colonial mansions turned into guesthouses. We stayed in a gorgeous, spotless place with private bathrooms and hot showers for $2.50/person.

In Laos, you rise with the sun (between the roosters, the pigs and the monks, it's impossible to sleep in even with earplugs) and go to bed when it sets. There's no nightlife in Laos, and sometimes a curfew. I've been up at 6:30 every day and it's all I can do to stay awake until 9 p.m. Other random trivia about Laos: you leave your shoes outside when you go in a house or living area. There's only one beer in Laos, appropriately named 'Beer Laos,' and it's easier to come by than food (which isn't nearly as good as the food in China). One hundred US dollars yields one million kip, and the largest kip bill being 20,000, I'm toting a gangster wad that will barely fit in my purse. Laos is one hour behind China. At the border, I set my watch up an hour instead. I was the only one in the group with a watch, and we didn't realize we were two hours ahead for a couple days. It didn't matter.

I stayed in Luang Nam Tha for two nights and did very little. On Wednesday, I went to the bus station with the idea of proceeding to Udomxai. When I got there, it was 11:00 and a minibus was scheduled to leave at noon. The driver loaded up my bag and showed me a seat I could have, but I was not anxious to sit in a hot minibus for an hour, so I walked up on a porch and started talking to some Aussies. When I turned around not 15 minutes later, the minibus was an absolute clown car of Laos people and I had lost my seat. So had two utterly bewildered European ladies who'd bought their tickets at 9 that morning. 'We have tickets,' they kept repeating, irrelevantly. The next bus was supposed to leave at 2:30, so I ordered a bowl of noodles next door, but before they arrived, a giant bus pulled up and the confused ladies got on it. I paid for my unconsumed noodles, ran over to the bus and put my butt in a seat. And sat there for three hours.

At any rate, I eventually got to Udomxai, spent a depressing, dusty night there, and took a pick-up next morning to Nang Kiew, a small village on the Nam Ou river. The Nam Ou is one of the most beautiful places I've ever been. The mountains surrounding it are high and green, and the vegetation around the villages is tropical: palms and elephant ears and so forth. I tried to take a walk around Nang Kiew on arrival, but the broiling afternoon heat soon drove me back to my guesthouse's shady porch overhanging the river. I spent the evening drinking Beer Laos and talking to other travelers. By the way, I met a wide variety of travelers in China, but in Laos they all seem to be attractive, thin white couples, so to save space, I'll just refer to them as ATWC-[city-or-country-of-origin]. At Nang Kiew, I fraternized with ATWC-England and ATWC-San Diego (actually, he was Vietnamese, but whatever).

Here are some photos of Nang Kiew:

Next morning, I took a wooden long boat upriver to Muang Ngoi, another, even smaller village with a pretty wat at one end. Again, the afternoon walk proved too arduous, so I swung in a hammock all afternoon getting to know the other guesthouse occupants. Eventually, we drug ourselves out for pumpkin curry and sticky rice; I was on my floor mattress under my mosquito net by 8:30.

Here's some photos of Muang Ngoi:

The Muang Ngoi monks begin to bang the temple drums at 4:30 a.m. sharp (bless them), and at 6:30, they proceed down the main street. As the monks chant, the villagers run out to kneel and offer them sticky rice, which offerings constitute the monks' only food (they typically eat one meal per day). I believe most Laos males do a stint as a monk, sometimes just 40 days and frequently prior to marrying at the demand of the bride-to-be's family.

Sunday, I took a little hike up to a nearby cave, which was filled with a cold, clear stream and surrounded by gigantic butterflies. The butterflies in Laos are spectacular: monarchs, and those electric-blue shiny ones, and tiny florescent green and bright red ones, and on and on. Along past the cave, after fording a creek, hopping a stile and winding through a labyrinthine rice field under the roaring sun, you arrive at Banna Village, placed at the edge of a valley of rice fields with mountains on all sides (quite Cades Cove-ish). I walked up the main street, nodding and saying 'sabaidee' to each of the villagers, who were busy washing laundry, bathing children, arranging food in baskets and cutting old men's hair. When I reached the end of the village (which took half a minute), I repeated the whole exercise in reverse, and after that, I had no idea what to do in Banna Village: repeat my one-woman parade five more times? So I just walked the hour back to Muang Ngoi.

Photos of Banna Village:

The heat really got me on the walk back. I was dizzy and exhausted and spent the afternoon crumpled into a ball under my mosquito net feeling really ill. By dinnertime, however, I'd sufficiently rallied to relocate to my hammock.

Next day, I took a longboat back to Nang Kiew (with ATWC-German), where I was immediately approached by three ATWCs (-England, -Belgium and -Unknown) who needed a 7th for a boat to Luang Prabang. We had a placid, six-hour downriver ride, to where the Nam Ou joins up with the Mekong, and into Luang Prabang (Laos's second biggest city and number one tourist destination). We even had little chairs with cushions. Unfortunately, at a landing en route, our driver was given an enormous, not-at-all-dead fish, which he stored under the little wooden platform where he sat. The fish threw itself around with great violence before finally subsiding, much to the horror of all the ATWCs, but (except for the fish) we all made it to Luang Prabang safe and sound, and that is where I find myself today.

Pictures of the Nam Ou river scenery:

Kunming to Jinghong, and China Miscellany

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth) — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 02:56:00 +0000

Several days ago I flew from freezing, rainy Zhongdian to Kunming. Kunming is a big, fairly Western city (the last I will be visiting before Laos), and I had an errand list a mile long for my stopover there; however, I arrived exhausted and cranky, and managed to do nothing but stomp around the city acting like a jerk to all the vendors. The only fun thing I wanted to do in Kunming was visit the memorial museum to the Flying Tigers: Kunming was the end of the Burma road, which my grandfather drove in WWII. Turns out, however, that the Flying Tigers memorial is in Hunan somewhere (an older lady from New Mexico told me it's terrific), so no dice on that.

Early next morning, I boarded a bus to Jinghong. It was meant to be 9 hours, and we were sailing along pretty good until we hit the '22 km to Jinghong' sign, at which point the roads totally fell apart and we entered some sort of time warp. It was another two hours before we pulled into town. Also, it poured the whole way (it rained in Kunming, too). Apparently, Yunnan is getting record amounts of rain this year. They're having flooding and all sorts of problems. I did get to see a rainbow over some glistening terraced rice fields. It was the type of rainbow that is usually only a cartoon representation of a rainbow: a perfect semi-circle stretched across the sky, with each band in the spectrum distinct and visible. Of course, it was pissing down again another mile down the road.

Jinghong is really nice. It's a small, laid-back city in the Xishuangbanna Region of China - the little bit hanging down by Laos and Vietnam. After being in the Tibetan mountains just two days before, it was a shock to be surrounded by palm trees and oppressed by tropical heat. I've been hanging out with a group of three Americans also going to Laos (actually, they were in the crowd at the guesthouse at the end of Tiger Leaping Gorge). They're a lot of fun; on our first night in Jinghong, we ate for hours and then started a conga line in a Chinese night club full of preteens.

My Chinese visa was up tomorrow, and today I crossed over into Laos. Before I begin blogging about Laos, however, I have some final thoughts on China I would like to share:

Shopping: I know I've complained quite a bit about shopping in China, and it is one of my least-favorite things about this country. First of all, under Mao, it was official policy to charge foreigners five times the local price for everything, and this mentality persists. Granted, the money is nothing on an American scale, but when you're traveling a good while in another economy, you adjust to it, and it gets really old having to fight with everyone over every, tiny little bottle of water or packet of tissues. The problem, too, is that a lot of tour groups of older Westerners come through for a couple weeks, and they don't bargain or anything - they'll pay the huge sticker price, because to them it's nothing. So the vendors expect that of all Westerners and think you're being cheap when you won't pay four times too much for an ugly tank top. Also, just in general, the Chinese love to shop. There's so much crap for sale everywhere and people just grab it all up like mother's milk. It's worse than America. On the riverboat to Yangshuo, some guy in a boat rowed up to the window selling little marble dogs on necklaces, and everyone went wild - they were so pleased to be offered a purchasing opportunity after two full hours on the river without one. The girl next to me bought two identical dogs and sat there playing with them the rest of the way.

Communications: I think everyone should spend a bit of time in a culture where they don't speak the language. It has completely changed my perspective. You really have to keep your temper. So often, I find myself getting furious at some Chinese person who seems to be obtusely refusing to understand what I'm saying, even though it couldn't be clearer. For example, one time I wanted to buy some pickled apples from this girl, so I pointed to the apples, whereupon she dissolved into giggles and kept looking at her coworker, and just generally freaking out about it. While she was going through all these convulsions, some Chinese person came up, pointed at the same apples and was promptly sold a bag. All the while, the girl kept rolling her eyes and shrugging at me; finally, she gingerly held one apple out to me, as if I were the village idiot. About 98% of the time, people are really good at figuring out what you want from them; they'll focus up and usually they'll keep trying to communicate long after I've given up. But that other 2% of the time, they pretty much decide ahead of time that they won't be able to understand anything you say, and even if you point at Chinese characters spelling it out, they refuse to comprehend them. The other problem is that people get really, really worried about making sure you understand them. I have never been able to get someone to just bring me whatever in a restaurant - they're really afraid you won't like it, and if they can't talk to you, they get really tense. Adam had an interesting strategy for dealing with these situations. He carries around a little laminated picture of David Hasselhoff in his wallet (there's a reason, but it doesn't matter), and when a vendor's freaking out about making the Westerners happy, he slips it out and points at it. They lighten up.

Food and Its Effects: Speaking of food, it's really good here, and really cheap, and it usually likes me back, but not always. Of course, I am not as careful as many travelers; I'll eat anything. Last night, I had a chicken foot on a stick from a streetside barbeque (gristly). I can't resist anything weird. I prefer the Chinese restaurants to the Western ones, as the food is much better and cheaper, but the Chinese don't do ambience. They eat crouched over low tables in hot, noisy kitchens, and they down the food and go. Western restaurants are more set up for having a beer and reading your novel, so sometimes you pay for the peace. Speaking of beer, it really only comes in giant, 640-mL bottles here.

Toilets: Food leads to toilets, and if given the choice, I'll use a squat any time. Squats are great, because nothing touches any part of the bathroom except the bottoms of your shoes. Granted, they are usually pretty disgusting; however, troughs are much worse - long trenches with little half walls for privacy and no doors. Everyone lines up and lets loose. The Chinese often smoke while they go. Also, you can't flush toilet paper in China, no matter what type of toilet it is. It goes in the bin. I would think China would want to remedy this unfortunate situation immediately - a thriving economy's great and all, but you'll never get respect if your poopy tp's just lying there in plain sight.

Spitting: One thing China really is trying to remedy (via public service announcements) before the Olympics is the nationwide spitting problem. It's worse than you can imagine. Everyone - men, women, old folks, babies - has an absolute compulsion to hack up a giant loogie about as often as Westerners need to blink. You really never get used to it. The guy in the bus seat behind you, the little girl at the next table, the lady you're trying to buy a hat from: HWRAAAABRAAAGCCCCCCC-phtoooo. What do they have IN there?! Gerbils?

Responsible Tourism: Traveling through China (and I imagine other countries that don't see a mass amount of Westerners) you quickly realize that as you behave, so the entire West will be judged. So I really do try to keep my temper and be friendly and polite, no matter what. I'm not always successful.

Children: I have revised my previous opinions as to children. I love them now. Whereas adults always think you should give them money or sleep with them, children never want anything from you, except to look at your hair and your sandals and maybe have some of the cake that you're eating. And then if they say hello and you say it back, and you're willing to repeat that exchange ad infinitum, they'll think you're the coolest person on God's green earth. Speaking of children, babies and toddlers in China wear crotchless pants, and when they need to go (either way) someone just hoists them over a nearby bush or ditch.

Animals: There are a lot of young animals in China. There are no old animals. There are also very few birds.

Expense: I changed over $1,100 US in China. That's for one month, and I spent a bit less than that because I carried about $100 with me into Laos. Another person could have done this trip for a lot less: I did not bargain for the entire first two weeks, and I slept in single rooms rather than dorms. But then, I didn't buy beer for the first two weeks either. I did buy a good deal of bus tickets, a train ticket, two visas and a plane ticket. And a bunch of other stuff too. So, China is expensive for Asia, but compared to the US, it's very cheap.

Backpacking: I am quite likely the first backpacker ever to feel she brought too little with her. I brought a very light pack and I'm sorry for it. I've needed a lot of stuff that I did not bring, and I haven't wanted to spend my traveling time searching and haggling for it. I would rather have bought it in the US and brought it with me. Other travelers hate their giant packs. No matter how bulky your bag, however, the worst, most exhausting traveling companion is your own mortal body. Our bodies are super high maintenance. They have to eat up to three times a day, they need a lot of water, then they need to pee, then they're too hot, then too cold, then too wet, then they shut down for eight hours, then they start to stink and need to be bathed, then they're sick or burnt, then they need to crap, but they can't crap just anywhere...it never ends. I'm ready to divorce my body and carry on without it.

Photos! Photos! Photos!

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth) — Sat, 14 Oct 2006 06:56:00 +0000

Here are some photos! Because I'm so behind, here's just a random collection. I will try to be better about posting photos now that I know how.

Here's a young monk in Zhongdian (he's hopping off the roof):

And the monastery from a distance (note those blue skies):

Tibetans in a wagon:

Me at Tiger Leaping Gorge (yeah, this is actually how I look now):

Snow-capped peaks at TLG:

TLG:

Guests and dogs at the Higherland. This is where I dozed away three days:

A funny Buddha at the temple below the Higherland:

Bai dancers in Dali:

Views from the Cang Shan:

The Erhai Lake (which I biked around):

The city walls of Dali:

Well, that's it for now. That actually took me forever, but now that I know how to do it, there will be more to come.

Lijiang to Tiger Leaping Gorge to Zhongdian

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth) — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 04:07:00 +0000

Well, I hated Lijiang. I suppose I was tired, or in a bad mood, or maybe it was the holiday crowds, but my immediate reaction to the most loved spot in Yunnan was, 'No. Just no.' I did not like it. Yangshuo grew on me, and I found Dali enchanting for whatever reason, but I couldn't swallow Lijiang. Too touristy, too garish, too Disneyworld-ish. I was not charmed by the old architecture, the peaked slate roofs and winding cobblestone lanes and little bridges over canals. I was not delighted by the minority costumes, or the neverending stalls of printed bloomer pants and marble bracelets. I couldn't find a hostel I liked and then the one I finally took had the shower right smack in the tiny squat toilet. And folks, that's where I draw the line. I am not a princess: I will shower in front of, next to, beside, over, on top of, or even astride a toilet, but I will not shower in a toilet. That's counterproductive. So, I was dirty and tired and cranky, and I bailed out of Lijiang first thing the next morning. Every tourist I've met since says I should have given it a better chance, that it has quieter streets and so forth, but I'm not going back, so if you want to hear about Lijiang, you'll have to read it in someone else's blog.

North of Lijiang is another Yunnan must-do: Tiger Leaping Gorge. The Yangzi River flows through this gorge, which is one of the deepest in the world, and there's a trail winding along one side, overlooking the wide, muddy river, and dotted heavily with little mountain guesthouses. The mountains on the opposite side of the gorge are much higher, so much so that the uppermost peaks are actually snow-capped, so the views are really spectacular. Most people hike the gorge in a couple of days, staying overnight in one of the guesthouses. I planned to hike to Walnut Gardens, an area nearly to the end, but not quite, in one day, and then just catch a bus back to the beginning.

I met a fellow on the bus from Lijiang, Maarten, a coastal engineer who's been working in Sydney for the past couple years and is traveling on his way home to Holland. We stayed that night in Qiaotou, the little village at the start of the trail, and met up with two other travelers: Torsten, a Swede in conflict resolution, whose most recent assignment was Sri Lanka, and Kirk, an environmental enforcement agent from Sydney, who might fine you $200 if you flick a cigarette butt out the window in his neck of the woods. We all drank and talked politics and decided to get up at 7 to start hiking.

When I woke up, it was pouring. I had absolutely no desire to be battered and defeated by another muddy, flooded mountain trail, and thought I might just go on to Zhongdian, but then it stopped coming down, and I realized I could hike in my Keene's, which are waterproof (although open to mud and chicken droppings), so I chanced it. It turned out to be a great day: heavily misty and raining off and on, but we didn't get flooded, the mud wasn't too slick, and the trail, although steep at first, was a total picnic after my Cang Shan experience. We hiked at a good pace. Alongside the chasm, there were horses and mules grazing with bells around their necks, and many goats (Kirk let one suck on his finger for some reason, and of course was promptly bitten). The trail also heads through some pine forests and is crossed by a few impressive waterfalls. We met very few other hikers.

We reached Walnut Gardens by 5:30, but there were no buses going back to Qiaotou until 11 the next morning, so we all ended up staying at a guesthouse with this enormous collection of young and drunk Americans, Irish and Brits. The four of us sat up talking to a 65-year-old guy from California that we'd played tag with on the trail. Tom had actually planned to run the trail, but soon realized that was overly ambitious. I did not sleep, in part because the revelers didn't pack it in until late (drinking leads to dares, which lead to spats and domestic disputes), and in part because of the snoring of my traveling companions.

Next morning, we all split a minivan back to Qiaotou with a couple of the Irish kids. Maarten and I then caught a bus to Zhongdian, a Tibetan town that everyone had told me was disappointing. Many towns here and in Tibet claim to be Shangri-La, but the name is most frequently applied to Zhongdian. It's just an ugly little town, at 3200 m. and surrounded by almost desert-like terrain, but I find it charming, and it's nice to be somewhere that is not crowded. We spent yesterday looking at the massive prayer wheel that looms over the town (prayer wheels are cylinders, usually of gold-leaf, that are spun to release prayers into the heavens, and they come in all sizes, from the personal hand-held models monks carry around to huge ones like the one here), and the big monastary North of town. The monastery was a lot closer to what I'd expected Buddhist temple complexes to be like: packed with crimson-robed monks of all ages and reeking of yak butter (they make the candles out of it, and it is potent). Incidentally, there is yak in absolutely everything in Tibet: yak noodles, yak rice, fried yak, stewed yak, yak toast, yak tea, yak jerkey (which is actually delicious). I've eaten my weight in yak.

Yesterday was blazing hot, but because I arrived, it began to pour last night and hasn't stopped. I'd wanted to bike through the countryside today, but now I'm sitting by the stove at the hostel. Tomorrow morning, I fly back to Kunming and head South again. I'm mostly looking forward to changing clothes - I only have one warm outfit and have been wearing it every day and sleeping in it every night since I came down from Zhonghe mountain.

Re: Postcards and Pictures

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth) — Sat, 07 Oct 2006 02:40:00 +0000

A couple things:

I don't have many people's addresses, so if you want a postcard, you have to email your address to me at eurello@gmail.com. So far, the only people to get postcards are my grandparents and parents, Aunt Joan, Rheagan and Jenny. You guys should all receive yours in a couple years or so.

As to pictures, I deeply apologize for the lack of photographic evidence on this blog. I have to get someone to explain to me how to upload the photos, and then I have to spend the necessary 3-4 minutes per photo that it takes to upload them here. I promise I will try to take the time for this soon.

Higherland Inn

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth) — Sat, 07 Oct 2006 01:57:00 +0000

I returned to struggle again with the mountain, and the mountain won.

I'm just back from three amazing days staying at the wonderful Higherland Inn on the side of the Cang Shan. The Inn is run by Li Ping (sp?), who could not be nicer or more helpful. It's peaceful up there, and beautiful. It's cozy and the food is great. I wanted to live there, but all good things must come to an end.

My first night, there was only one other guest - David, from Mexico City via San Fran, who'd been up there several days and is about to do a 10-day silent meditation in India. It poured all day, so we sat around the main room, which is a glassed-in dining/sitting room, with a great view, a woodburning stove and a sort of sitting platform with cushions and blankets. At 7:00 every night, there's a big family-style dinner, and afterwards Li Ping taught us how to play mah jong.

I'd planned to hike the peak the next day, but it was still pouring, so I ended up drinking tea in the lodge all day, chatting with the drenched tourists wandering in from time to time. I was served three meals without moving an inch. Throughout the day, other guests arrived: Abby and Adam, two young guys from Colorado on a round-the-world, and a very quiet German girl who studies in Kunming. All the guests were exactly who you might expect to find in such a setting: backpackers heavily into outdoor activities and Buddhism. That night, over mah jong, we all (except for the German girl) determined to get up early and hike that peak, weather be damned.

Thursday morning was beautiful. We all had breakfast, and Li Ping made us sandwiches. We set up off the trail in good spirits. Everyone else was in nylon clothes and boots, with daypacks. I was in jeans and running shoes, wearing a pair of David's socks, and carrying my purse with a huge bottle of water sticking out of it and Li Ping's raincoat sort of jerryrigged onto it. I really need to go shopping for gear. We hiked for about an hour, and it began to drizzle. Then it stopped. Then it started again. Then we arrived at an outcropping of rock, and our joy at the unbelievable view (an entire unbroken mountain range spread away at our feet) was somewhat dampened by the storm clouds rapidly rising up from the valley.

We continued on up the trail, which by now was a series of rock cliffs needing to be scaled. It started to pour. The trail turned into a stream, then a creek, then a river. We'd been hiking in pretty consistent pattern: Colorado boys and David up front, me straggling along a bit behind them, Abby and Adam bringing up the rear. So I was by myself for each new challenge, and when I reached what was basically a rock wall with a waterfall crashing down it, started to scramble up it and nearly lost my lead-heavy and drenched jeans, I decided I would not be conquering the peak that day. I waited for Abby and Adam, and told them to tell the others I'd turned back. Not long after I'd begun gingerly picking my way down the river, I was joined by everybody else. We all slid down the mountain in the pouring rain. I was the last to reach the Inn, mainly because I stopped to eat my tuna sandwhich mere feet from the door, thinking there was a lot longer to go.

Li Ping, after she finished laughing at us, spent the afternoon constructing an elaborate forest of clotheslines and chairbacks around the stove, and tended to all our wet things in a sort of rotation system. All the other tourists who came into the Inn that day got to have their tea and cake under a dripping forest of Cool Max and North Face fleece.

Next morning, everyone said their goodbyes. Traveling is so strange - you spend a good bit of time with people, and then you exchange emails and all go off to other countries. It's a lot like summer camp. I was in no hurry to leave, because it was still pouring. I'd thrown away my soaked and muddy jeans, and my sneakers had only just dried (and been sort of burnt) by the stove, and I didn't want to start all over. David and I, and this really interesting older guy named Larry (who had come up the night before, and who's lived in China for six years now and all over the world before that) had lunch, and then sucked it up and took the chairlift down in the rain. It wasn't raining when we alighted in Dali.

Yesterday was the Moon Festival, and Li Ping had invited David and me to a party she and her friends were having at the Bookworm Cafe. It was a lot of fun. I ate until I couldn't move, and drank a good bit of this weird, mint green Yunnan liquor that makes your throat numb. Met a very interesting fellow - an older American with a long white beard who goes up to the Inn every Christmas dressed as Santa and bearing presents. He lives part of the year in China and the rest in Ireland, and has been in mainland China since 1980. I guess he has some bucks; he seems to have provided the seed money for a lot of the cafes and hostels and so forth run by the other guests. Li Ping's friends all seemed very cool and artsy. I didn't feel any more awkward than I always do at parties where I don't know anyone, even though at this one I also couldn't understand anything anyone said. It's amazing how little that matters: you just laugh when everyone else laughs and try to look self-sufficient and comfortable. And before long, everyone has too much to drink and starts to make fools of themselves, and then you don't have to speak the language to get it.

In a little minute here, I'm getting on a bus to Lijiang. I've really sunk into Dali, but it's more than time to get back on the road.

Dali

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth) — Mon, 02 Oct 2006 08:36:00 +0000

Yesterday, I viewed the three pagodas outside of Dali. According to the Lonely Planet, these pagodas are "among the oldest standing structures in southwestern China." Also according to the LP, they are free, but in fact, they are walled in and cost Y121 - Y62 if you have an old student ID (which I do). The pagodas are at the bottom of the park, and behind them is a never-ending series of temples with stairs behind leading to yet another temple, like those Russian stacking dolls. I hadn't gone far when I was abducted by some monks and bundled into a nearby temple. Before I knew what hit me, I'd lit incense, bowed all over the place and was seated at a table where complicated blessings were said over me and one of those freaking Buddhas on a string was lowered around my neck. I was then asked to sign a little book with my name and hometown, and then the monk shook me up for some dough. He thought a couple hundred would be appropriate. I did this really great thing I do where I lay my open wallet on the table and display the unimpressive contents.

'Eight yuan,' I said helpfully.

'No, no, no,' the monk said. 'Money! For the temple! One hundred.'

'I have Y8. As you can see.'

'No money?' whined the monk.

'No money,' I lied. Whereupon my necklace was repossessed and I was told to have a good day. I put Y5 in the donation box anyway, and the monk gave me a folded bit of paper with printing on it as I left, and shook my hand. 'For luck,' he explained.

Today, I'd planned to hike Zhonghe Shan, the big mountain to the West of Dali. Abby and Adam had done it on Saturday, and said it was terrific. The first leg of the hike consisted of flight after flight of well-maintained stone stairs. This is typical in China, where they think the only way to scale a mountain is to hew stone steps into the side. The stairs eventually gave onto the "Cloudy Tourist Path," which runs along the edge of the mountain, and affords what I'm sure are breathtaking views, although not today because it was raining and a big wall of white mist hung all around the mountain like a curtain. But that was dramatic in its own way, so I didn't mind too much.

At about 9:30, I arrived at the Higherland Inn, an adorable little lodge at 2590m on the side of the mountain, just above a temple. I went in to get some water, and met some chill Germans, and American and a gregarious Belgian. They were all staying at the Inn and having a leisurely breakfast, looking out the windows at the rain dripping through the trees. I told them I was going to climb up to the peak, on the path that runs behind the Inn and is supposed to be about a 5-hour hike. They said it was pretty muddy, what with the rain. I said I was sure it would clear up, and took off.

Well, it didn't clear up. And the path wasn't just muddy. It was washed out, not being very well-worn in the first place. And before very long, I was soaked and freezing, and realizing that I was doing a very foolish thing, and would likely end up sliding down the entire moutain on my bottom. And just as I was thinking this, a man plunged out of the bushes with a giant knife. He said something to me, and gestured at me with the knife. According to Lonely Planet, a German tourist was killed on Zhonghe mountain. I was thinking of him (or her) as another man with a knife joined the first. But then I realized that the man was just saying, 'Don't go up this path, you moron,' and that the knives were probably just for cutting the mushrooms they were each toting a sack full of. I agreed to turn back, but gestured that he and his friend and their knives should go on ahead of me. Before long, they headed off the trail into the woods and disappeared.

When I showed up at the Inn again, humbled and dripping, I was given a towel and some tea, and I sat around for awhile waiting for the rain to let up. About noon, it cleared up a little, so I headed home and promptly made another really stupid decision. I figured that, rather than go down the nice stone steps I'd come up, I'd instead descend via a trail marked on a little map I'd found at the Inn that seemed to go more directly into Dali. I forgot all about that mud. Oh, it was a long, slow trip down the sheer mountain side. I picked my way down a muddy creek bed, dotted with ice-slick rocks, and usually traveled by horses, whose hooves had further destroyed any footholds that might once have existed. The entire time, I was underneath a chairlift full of Chinese tourists ('Hello! Hello!'), and for a good three-fourths of the way, I clutched my giant water bottle in one hand, until I finally realized it was more of a drawback than an asset, balance-wise.

But at long last, I arrived back in Dali, now overrun with National Day tourists. I think tomorrow morning, I might head back up Zhonghe mountain with my pack and stay at that little inn for a night. It was a really cool place, and certainly more peaceful than here. And maybe the paths will dry out enough by then to hike. Right now though, I'm going to go sit in the courtyard and drink a giant Chinese beer.

Yangshuo to Dali

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth) — Sun, 01 Oct 2006 04:34:00 +0000

At 6:o0 a.m this past Thursday, I stumbled down the stairs at Lisa's Cafe and Hostel and found all the doors locked and barred. I had to catch the 6:30 express bus to Guilin, or I would miss my 8:50 sleeper train to Kunming, so when I found myself locked in, I panicked and ran all around the hostel, rattling doorknobs. Apparently, Chinese people do eventually go to bed, from about 4:00 to 7:00. I finally saw a light under a door back behind the kitchen, and roused the poor cook and her husband (who were catching a bit of sleep in their bunk, fully clothed). She was kind enough to let the jabbering foreigner out into the alley, and I caught the bus, although I had to leave my deposit behind at Lisa's. It was only Y20, and I still have the key.

And then came the sleeper train. Oh, sleeper train, sleeper train, may you and I never have occasion for future dealings. If you are lucky enough never to have ridden on one, I can now tell you that hard sleepers in China consist of six sort of bench-beds arrnaged in two tiers of three, in little un-air-conditioned apartments. The bottom beds are the largest (I had one of these), but they also serve as seats/card tables/dining rooms for all passengers during the day. The top beds are the smallest - little bitty slits up by the roof. My sleeper ride began at 9:00 a.m. on Thursday, and ended at 7:00 a.m. the next morning.

Luckily, there was a couple from NYC in my compartment, so I had people to talk to for the ride. Abby and Adam are doing a year-long round-the-world. They recently spent a month in Africa working on some sort of reservation for orphaned, endangered baby monkeys. When they're done with this trip, they want to start a family. They were going straight to Dali upon arrival in Kunming, and I decided to go with them, because I wasn't really keen to spend a night in a disco in Kunming. I've noticed in my travels that when I meet Europeans or Australians, they're usually traveling for a couple months, have been on many similar trips before, and are usually about 20 years old. But the Americans I meet are all older (late 20s to early 40s) and doing a much longer, more drastic round-the-world trip. The Americans were all propelled into travel by disillusionment or burnout or whatever, and the trip is a watershed. They've quit their jobs at home, and plan to move to a new city upon their return. It takes something major to shove an American out of America.

It took the Chinese a while to infiltrate our carriage. I think they felt they couldn't come sit with us three Westerners. Eventually, however, Adam got out his phrasebook and started talking to this really sweet, shy soldier bunking with us, and then everyone trickled over to look through the phrasebooks and guidebooks, and before we knew it, we were the most popular group on the train. Abby and I played cards with this woman and her husband. I'm not sure if they taught us the game, or if they thought we were teaching them the game; either way, the game made no sense at all, but we still played about 20 rounds. It was a lot of fun, except that the woman (who was very nice, and very affectionate toward me) kept moving more and more into my lap, until I was crammed up in this corner, and I was really hot and sweaty and feeling trapped. This couple were cops. There were a lot of cops in our train, and we realized after a bit that this was because two armed robbers were in the bunks next to ours. They were two boys who looked about 15, and were chained together at the ankles. Originally, we'd actually thought they had their bags chained to their ankles for fear of theft.

At 10, the lights went out, they made us close all the windows, and we all spread out on the filthy little matress pads. Another Chinese guy showed up, hauled himself into the bunk above me, and hacked a loogie on the floor. I scooted back against the wall. Our sixth bunkmate was a gorgeous, perfectly coiffed woman in a pale green silk suit, who'd hoisted herself into the cramped, broiling top bunk at the very beginning of the train ride, and came down only three times to visit the toilet, with nary a wrinkle or sweat stain on her suit. I didn't like her.

At about 6:00, some guy came around smacking everyone awake, and an hour later we arrived very abruptly and poured off the train. Some sort of weird skunk-tar stench had arisen from my mattress during the night and transferred itself to the backs of my bare arms. I could smell it for the rest of the day, and it made me gag. All I wanted was to get a hot shower, but first we had to use the toilet in the train station (horror, horror), get a bus to Dali, realize we were actually in New Dali, get another bus to Old Dali, visit a couple guesthouses and check in.

We're in dorms in a really nice guesthouse that's also a Korean restaurant with a peaceful courtyard. The beds are bunks (that smell like cedar) with screens you can close for privacy, and there's a dog here, and some little lovebirds in a cage, and washing machines and free Internet. I've been here for two nights now, and will probably stay two more.

Dali is adorable. It's a little walled city full of shops and cafes and so forth. It's a bit like Yangshuo, but bigger, and while it's as touristy, it's not as Western-touristy. Also, we're in the mountains here - they're plummeting up out of the rice fields from the West. The people around here are mostly Bai minority, and wear the traditional clothes, but there are also a lot of Tibetans. The Tibetans are larger people, with broader faces and high cheekbones. The women all have their hair wound in braids with brightly-colored bands woven in, and they seem to have a better sense of humor than the Southern Chinese. I'm able to joke with them a bit - if you do something stupid in front of them, they're more likely to giggle than to just gape at you as if you suddenly dropped from the sky. It's also not as crowded out here, and things are not as rushed. And one big reason for Dali's popularity among backpackers can be found growing along the roads.

Yesterday, I biked about 50 miles. I wanted to go around Erhai lake, a large freshwater lake just to the East of Dali, but the people at the ferry wanted to charge me Y80 for a ticket, so I cycled around the Northern end, through multiple little villages. Once again, breathtaking scenery. More rice fields spreading up to mountains, but these mountains are much larger than those in Yangshuo, and because it was a cloudy day, they were striped impressively in swaths of light and shadow. In the fields and along the roads, there were donkeys and cows everywhere. Every village I rode through seemed to be having its market day. At one point I was so busy staring at a parade of young men, who were going along singing and waving paper lanterns and wearing white kerchiefs on their heads, that I rode into a ditch, which totally made their day. I passed the halfway point, and immediately felt I couldn't go on, but by then it was too late. I had to press onto Wase, where there was a single boat that headed back across the lake to Xizhou at 5:00.

When I got there, there was a couple from Sydney, Trevor and Iris, who'd begun negotiating with the Bai woman selling boat tickets, but it was hard work. Iris is from Hong Kong, and speaks Mandarin fairly well (they speak Cantonese in Hong Kong), but the people here use a Tibetan-hybrid sort of dialect, and she and the woman couldn't really understand each other. After endless arguing, we finally got the woman down to Y20 for each of us (the locals were paying Y4). That's how it is in China; it's really annoying, but when you're standing on the wrong side of the lake from home, all nasty and knackered with your bike, and there is only one boat going back that day, you're not in the strongest negotiating position. Still, we paid the woman a lot less than she wanted, and she really thought I ought to buy a tablecloth at least. She followed us onto the boat with the tablecloths, and I said no for at least 30 minutes. I offered to sell her one of my passport photos (autographed, of course), but no dice.

When we at long last arrived at Xizhou and the locals began to unload the 90 burlap sacks of chestnuts that had been piled in front of our bikes, it had turned quite cold and begun to rain. We still had over 12 miles to bike back to Dali, and by this time, my thigh muscles had just quit. Also, my delicate parts were bruised beyond repair and joy of joys, there was a nice, long cobblestone road leading up to the highway from Xizhou. I just tried to turn off my mind and keep up with Iris and Trevor, but the ride back was certainly one of the most physically difficult things I've ever had to do.

Today, I'm taking it easy. I really need to buy a fleece or something, but all the warm things here are for men, and also, I just hate, hate, hate shopping here. As soon as you enter a store, someone comes and stands at your elbow and refuses to leave, obnoxiously talking up everything you glance at. And then the bargaining...how I hate the bargaining. I think I'd almost rather continue higher into the foothills in my hippie skirt and tank tops.

Yangshuo...Still

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth) — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 09:04:00 +0000

I have turned into the world's laziest tourist. I have seriously done nothing for four days. Well, that's not true. I've been hanging out at a lot of cafes with many Swedes, Slovaks, Brits, Israelis, Danes and so forth. And eating a lot of overpriced noodles and pancakes. And I bought a pair of wrap-around pants.

Also, I finally went biking yesterday. I left at 9 with two kids from my hostel and our guide, Julia. We rode through some rice patties, which was nice, and then we stopped by her house. She lives in a quite large brick house with holes in all the bricks, a dirt floor, and a massive stack of wood covering the front wall. The living room had what looked like giant oil barrels in one corner. She gave us some chestnuts and oranges, and then took us to Moon Hill (Yueling Shan in Chinese - too lazy to look up the correct spelling), which is a hill with a large arch-shaped rock formation at the top. The hole under the arch looks like a moon, hence the name. It's insanely hot and humid here, and climbing all those stairs was a trial. Plus, this little Chinese lady ran alongside me the whole way fanning me in the hopes I'd then feel obliged to buy some of her overpriced beverages. Oh, it was annoying, but there was no possible way to dissuade her from her self-imposed task. When I first arrived in Yangshuo, I felt awful about not buying the postcards and little wooden dolls and other bits of crap that all these cute old women, totally bent double under their giant baskets, are constantly shoving at everyone. Four days later, I have no sympathy whatsoever. These women are everywhere, and they continually bother you all day long. They will come up and set their basket of junk on your dinner table:

'Hello, postcard?'

'No, no thank you, boo.'

'Hello, postcard?'

'No, shay-shay, boo.'

'Hello postcard?'

...

'Hello postcard?'

'Hello postcard hello postcard hello postcard hello postcard?'

I kid you not. They'll even smack you with the postcards. And when one finally goes away, it's maybe two minutes before another one takes her place. What was I talking about? Ah, yes. The bike ride.

When we got down from Moon Hill, Julia tried again to take us to this mud cave that we'd passed on earlier, so we got out the map and showed her where we'd like to cycle. She was really nice about it, even though she was in jeans and long-sleeves, and riding a one-speed, and obviously not planning on biking until 3 in the afternoon, which is what we did.

We went through more rice fields, and some little villages, and for the first time in China, I was bowled over by the scenery. The rice fields spreading up to the mountains, and groves of citrus trees along the dirt roads, and the farmers trying to coax their oxen out of the little water ponds...oh, I'm sure it's a hard life, but the backdrop is truly stunning. By about 2, though, I began to fear I'd disgrace myself by collapsing. We were biking through a moist oven, and there was no shade anywhere, and I've developed a really embarrassing perspiration problem. By this time, I could have filled a wading pool by wringing out my clothes, and was glad to get back to my hostel and take a cold shower. It was a full five minutes before I was drenched in sweat again.

Yangshou has been good for me, I think. I've learned a lot from observing other travelers. I've gotten much better at bargaining, for one thing. I know I have, because whereas vendors used to finish a transaction by calling me 'beautiful, beautiful lady,' they now swear at me behind my back. Also, I'm ever less finicky. I've been wearing this outfit for two days now, and I slept in it, too. It's so awesome!

High time I moved on, though, and I'm taking a 22-hour sleeper train to Kunming tomorrow morning. I dread it. I've booked a bed in Kunming for two nights, but I fear I may have booked it in a disco. After Kunming, I'm going to go on to Dali. I couldn't find any rooms available there online, but after racking my brain for a perfect solution, I've decided to just go and take my chances with finding a room.

So, I wrote this back in Yangshuo, but it wouldn't publish, so now I get to add a little story: on my last night in Yangshuo, these kids from the boarding school there came around the hostel trying to scare up Westerners for this Wednesday night thing they do. They had little fliers promising free beer, and featuring little charicatures of hippies with huge backpacks. A bunch of us went over to the school, and we were distributed among several tables of giggling 17- to 18-year-old schoolkids, and chatted with them in English while they kept refilling Dixie cups of beer and complimenting our appearances. The school is a boarding school that teaches only English and computer skills. The students go from 7:00 to 9:00, but they do get three hours in the afternoon and weekends off. These kids were so cute. They were especially taken with Emil, my Danish roommate, and kept asking me if we were together (I tried to explain that we were just sharing a room, but it was lost in translation), and if he thought Chinese women were pretty and so forth. Emil is kind of shy, and quite thin and boyish-looking.

'Bloody 'ell,' he had to say of all the attention. 'Don't get that at home, I can tell you.'

There were a couple Westerners teaching at the school - an older Kiwi and a tattooed punkish Brit, and they led us in a game of 20 questions, and then we had to take about a million pictures (everyone does peace signs here). There was a huge banner over the school: 'Success in English...Success in Life.' None of the students could figure out why all the Westerners loved it so much.

Hey Mary Jane, if you're still reading this: MySpace won't load on any of these computers, which is why I never replied to your message. I don't think I have your actual email.

Yangshuo

noreply@blogger.com (Elizabeth) — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 03:01:00 +0000

Saturday I took my Li River cruise. Before we got on the boat, we had to take a bus to the loading place and once we arrived, the bus unloaded into an absolute swarm of Chinese tourists (sprinkled with Westerners) and I promptly lost sight of everyone in my group. I found them again inside a sort of mall thing, featuring a lot of little jade Buddhas on strings (those are HUGE here), and some Korean businessmen, who didn't really speak Chinese either, explained to me that we were meant to walk around and shop for an hour, and then we'd be sent to the boats. When that time finally came, the tour guide told me to follow this really spastic girl in a white tracksuit, who managed to get us to the right boat, but only after a whole lot of flapping around and checking and rechecking our tickets and pointing violently in all directions.

The boats were glassed in on the bottom level, and we all sat at tables and had tea. I ran up on top as soon as I could, which was much nicer, except that Chinese girls carry umbrellas around to guard themselves from the sun, so the view is always obscured, plus they aren't at all careful about jabbing out the eyes of everyone around them. The Li River lived up to its rep - it's broad and flat and placid, and surrounded on all sides by those great mountains, and filled with fishermen on bamboo boats and water buffalo and little white ducks and naked Chinese boys.

I met a guy (whose name I just can't even come close to getting) who's going on much the same Chinese tour as me. He was nice, but his English was bad, and it gets really tiresome after awhile to communicate across a language barrier, not the least because you can't joke or be sarcastic at all, and I find constant sincerity to be utterly exhausting. Plus, you can never rise above, 'So pretty!' 'Yes, pretty!' 'Beautiful country!' 'You go to Chengdu?' 'I hope to.' 'What?' 'Yes. Later.'

For some reason I expected Yangshuo to be a pretty, quaint little mountain town with a lot of backpackers. It's not. It's the most touristy place I've been so far. It's in a gorgeous area, but you can't see the mountains for the shopping. Just tons and tons of crap everywhere. Silk pashminas and wooden bracelets and woven purses and those freaking green Buddhas. I walked around in a really foul mood for awhile. I just hate shopping so much, and there's just so much crap everywhere! But on the other hand, one thing I've found problematic in China is that there is nowhere to just camp out for awhile - there are no Borders, and the Starbucks don't work the same way. You can't just sit somewhere public for hours and read, especially at night (because in daytime, there are the parks). Well, in Yangshuo all you do is sit on patios and read and have a beer and watch the tourists flow by. Which is really pretty nice. Also, there's a great deal of eye candy here, of the tattooed, shirtless climber variety. And all the restaurants have giant, IHOP-like menus with a page for Western breakfast, a page for traditional Irish breakfast, a page for Mexican food, a page for Italian food, and so forth, with all the usual noodles at the back. And everything here is in English. And there's so much coffee!

I invited myself to dinner with three people sitting across from me: two of them are girls from Chicago, and one was even involved with Plasticene Theatre - small world. They're on the first leg of a five-month round-the-world, and were with a Portuguese navy guy who'd been traveling with them for a couple days. We traded war stories, and they gave me some good advice.

I had to take the bus back to Guilin Saturday night, and return here yesterday morning, because for some stupid reason, I'd taken my hotel in Guilin for another night. When I got here yesterday, the bus dropped me off outside of town. I hate that. I was trying to read my map and ignore everybody, but one guy who runs a hostel kept after me to come look at a room, and since it would get me into town, I took one of the little motor cars up there with him. He showed me the room, and I knew I didn't want it; we started going back down the stairs, and I told him I'd look around and maybe come back. He began to bargain with me, and stood right in my path. I told him to let me by, and he said no, and I tried to shove past him, and he pushed me! So, I wailed on him, employing many elbows, and shoved my way past. There were a lot of people all around, so I wasn't really frightened, but it was certainly not a pleasant experience.

I ended up staying in my first dorm. It's not really a dorm - there are only four beds in the room, and only two other people currently staying there, and I really like the companionship. I think I will stay in dorms from now on. One of my roomates is an Australian girl named Emily who's working her way home after spending three months working in some program in Kazakstan. She's very cool. We had a beer and got massages, and then met up with the kids from the night before for dinner. I could get used to Yangshuo.

The only problem is, this ain't China. It is a nice break, though. Nothing's difficult here, and it's so easy to meet people. But it's not really what I came here to experience. I keep torturing myself with the idea that I'm not backpacking "correctly." I feel like a real traveler (as opposed to a tourist) would have hopped off the bus at one of those tiny, dusty farm villages, won over the locals with sheer enthusiasm and perhaps impromptu renditions of local pop tunes, and been tilling those rice fields alongside the people by noon the next day. I am not that traveler. But then I tell myself, I have only been at this for a week and a half and, you know, baby steps. Plus, I am a woman, and thus can never take any risks or do anything fun at all ever. But another nice thing about Yangshuo is that there are many, many seasoned backpackers here for me to learn from, and I'm picking up a lot from their tips and their general attitudes. I still payed way too much for a very ugly pair of shorts last night, but I'm learning. I'm learning.

I have a major problem on the horizon: National Week is the week of October 1st. That week, all Chinese tourists take to the road, prices shoot up, and rooms are scarce. Everyone (Chinese and Western alike) has told me it's nightmarish. I can't figure out whether to go somewhere and camp out for the week, and just pay too much and bear the crowds, or if there's some way to avoid it. Suggestions?