A haphazard chronicle of my inevitable misadventures during a year in Vietnam and points east.

p.s. I'll be pitifully grateful if you send me email during my exile: TravelerKaty@hotmail.com

October 2002 November 2002 December 2002 January 2003 February 2003 March 2003 April 2003 May 2003 June 2003 July 2003 August 2003 September 2003 October 2003 November 2003 February 2006 March 2006 May 2006

 
Well, I'm going home! I realize I've been seriously lacking in the posting department lately -- I admit I got a bit burned out on keeping up with the blog here. But I thought I should at least update you all that I'm heading back to the U.S.A., just in time for cold and flu season. Oh, and incidentally, Christmas.

I do have some mixed feelings about it, though I'm very excited and have been mentally packing for the last week or two. Here's a rundown of my thoughts:

Things I'm Looking Forward To:

1. Mexican food. Mmmmm, Mexican food. It's almost obscene how I've been fantasizing about this. The other day I ordered Fajitas in a western (actually British) style bar/restaurant here in downtown Saigon. They came on a sizzling cast iron cow-shaped plate and looked suspiciously like a chunky mound of sloppy joes. It was served up with two tortilla halves, which had been cleverly baked for a few minutes so as to make them crispy and impossible to wrap around the sloppy joes without major leakage. For those of you who are picking me up at the airport, I expect a Mexican lunch.

2. Sweaters. I have not worn anything more sturdy than a short-sleeved blouse for the last six months (when I jetissoned my newly purchased coat at the end of my month in China) and I've taken to wandering through the Russian Market on my way home from the gym each day just to gaze at the coats and sweatshirts and sweaters that they have on offer.

3. Not Sweating. This would be a corrollary to #2 above. I effectively sweat for approximately 16 hours of every day. It's revolting, and all my clothes are falling apart since I (or rather, the maid) washes them so often. Walking a hundred yards down the street without breaking a sweat is something I haven't done in months.

4. Walking on Sidewalks. From the murky past I have this fading memory of this amazing land called "Seattle" in which I could go into a store, buy something (with a price tag right on it), then walk out and move to the next store all without having to step into the street itself!! No seriously, in this incredible "Seattle" place they have what they call "sidewalks", upon which people "walk". The "street" is where people drive and park, and they also have these things called "parking lots", where the citizens put their vehicles when they're not using them. Here they have something called a "sidewalk" where there is no "walking" allowed because of all the motorbikes parked, illegal restaurants, vendors, and scary holes.

5. Stress-free Street Crossing. Those of you who were reading in December understand my position on the Incredible Danger of Crossing the Street here in HCMC, when forced to navigate through teeming rivers of motorbikes. I have, in fact, recovered my lost rhythm in crossing the street, but I am looking forward to intersections in which vehicles stop for red lights.

6. A Bra That Fits. Here in Lilliput I am Gulliver, and ready-made clothes are not made to fit me. I've been bra shopping recently, not my favorite pastime at the best of times, but have found nothing even approaching my size. And let me just say that I'm really not that big a gal. I was at the big market this week looking at pants and someone actually told me they had my size: XXXL. Honest to god, 3X. I had to politely explain that even if that was my size here in the land of the tiny, I have NEVER been a 3X and there's no way I'm ever wearing such a thing. Anyway to get back to my original point, my mother, though she's not yet aware of it, is going to be taking me to the Leggs/Haynes/Bali outlet in North Bend on our way back home.


Things I'm Not Looking Forward To.

1. Western Prices. It's really easy to get used to spending $5 for dinner and drinks, or $4 for an hour-long head massage/facial/shampoo/haircut. It's going to be a rude awakening when first go to the supermarket.

2. No More Maid. For $13.50 a month I've been enjoying the services of Thuy, a terrific maid who comes in 3 times a week, cleans the whole house, does the laundry, picks up my room (!!!), takes out the garbage, and washes the dishes. Judging from my memories of my mother saying "I'm not your maid" on more than one occasion when I was a kid, I somehow doubt that this kind of service is in my future during my visit to my parents house.

3. No More Drinking Iced Coffee and Reading Imported Newspapers on the Patio of a Local Cafe. Even though coffee is damned good in Seattle, it's better here, and in Saigon it's not outrageously overpriced. I love being able to while away an hour or two chatting and reading while drinking delicious iced coffee with sweetened condensed milk. Mmmmm.

4. Leaving My Students. I really have enjoyed teaching, and my students are impressively disconsolate at the prospect of my departure. Vietnamese kids are great -- no attitude, and hard workers for the most part.

5. Figuring Out What to Do Next. This is a major problem, as I really think I can only justify sponging off my parents for a month or so. I may make a tour of relatives like the Poor Relations in Victorian novels, but eventually a decision really does have to be made. Dang. Being a grown-up is hard.

Copyright 2003 Katy Warren




posted by Katy at 9:50 PM

 
One of the joys of buying knockoff Chinese DVD's is reading their covers. Strange as it may seem, their manufacturers just don't seem to have the same commitment to proofreading that the original distributors of these movies might have.

Bulletproof Monk, for example, a fairly recent Chow Yun Fat movie, has Chow on the front cover but the back, next to the screen shots of Bulletproof Monk, is a summary of some Vin Diesel action flick called Knockaround Guys.

Sometimes the commentary on the cover is just odd. You know how they put big quotes from reviewers to get you interested in the movie? Legally Blonde 2, a pitifully lame comedy in which virtually nothing happens, tries to draw you in with the following quotes: 1. "A THRILLER THAT WILL GRAB YOU FROM START TO FINISH." (Larry King); and 2. LACKS AN EFFECTIVE VILLAIN OR NEMESIS. (Chicago Tribune). I can't argue with the latter, but either Larry is on some really good drugs or they pulled that quote from the wrong movie.

Die Another Day, last summer's James Bond film, features a paragraph in Chinese and a paragraph in Vietnamese. Sandwiched between the two is the following, and I quote: "the bridge of the Fleet Battlestation Ticonderoga, with its sweeping galactic views, to the desolate terrain of planet Klendathu, teeming with shrieking, fire-spitting, brain-sucking creatures, acclaimed director". Definitely the most unusual Bond yet.

But my favorite so far is the cover for Deliver Us From Eva, a romantic comedy with L.L. Cool J. In fact, I bought it for the cover alone -- I have no idea if it will be watchable, but I absolutely couldn't resist the tortured syntax they gifted us with. Since the small print is in Spanish, I suspect the blurb on the back was translated from English to Spanish, then Spanish back into English using one of those internet instant translators, then maybe in and out of Lithuanian or Hindi for good measure and then handed to handed off to someone's weird Chinese uncle to spellcheck. Here's a sample: "Related three mans total want to get away from the celibacy elder sister that they love wife the story of the love (Eva, add the cloth -- particularly, Gabrielle Union). The love apparently always have no the placeses not at, she although permit the good, hart is such as the iron: As long as a man that a few wordses she can let an alive with self-confidence feel elusive." Impressive, isn't it? Nobody can butcher the English language like the Chinese.

Copyright 2003 Katy Warren
posted by Katy at 12:45 AM

 
Life at Le Quy Don Jr. High -- Part 2

OK, to resume where I left off last week, when I get to LQD in the morning the kids are all in military formation wearing red white and blue uniforms and getting their extra homework checked. Once this is finished the evil part of the assembly begins, led by a bitter-faced man I privately refer to as Captain Bligh. He has "evil vice principal" written all over his discontented, hostile weasel-face, and is, as you can imagine, universally loathed by the students. He doesn't speak to me, but periodically he will come and glare at me and my class if we're being too noisy. I avoid eye contact.

The Captain stands at a podium in the front, in view of all students, and spends 10 minutes each morning (and the whole of the subsequent school assembly at 9:00) berating the students about how stupid and underachieving and monumentally useless they are, while teachers wander through the lines carrying long thin sticks (which I have yet to see used). Students who speak or laugh or otherwise misbehave suddenly find themselves the focus of the Captain's Skeletal Pointing Finger of Death: he points menacingly, then strides forward to grab the student by the ear lobe and haul him or her up to the front for a little public humiliation. It's really grim.

At 7:00 (or a bit later if Daily Harangue #1 runs especially long) the Captain signals a student assistant to begin the drumming, which in lieu of a bell system is how the students know when the next class starts or ends. All the kids march in formation to their classrooms.

OK, since I don't want you to get spoiled with long posts here at TravelerKaty, I'll leave the description of my actual classes for tomorrow. Besides, today on my way to school I was foolishly reading my book (the new Harry Potter, which is a knockoff photocopy and is already falling apart) and managed to do a face plant right on the sidewalk by failing to notice a slight rise in the pavement. No permanent damage, as usual, but since I broke my fall with my hands (only one bleeding) my right wrist is now killing me and I think I'll wait a few hours before I type again. Man, it's tough being a klutz!



Copyright 2003 Katy Warren
posted by Katy at 11:06 PM

 
My God, am I a slacker, or what? Sure, I promise "tomorrow", then "Monday", and here it is Wednesday (for you) and I still haven't posted. Well I have to make a confession. While I have indeed been busy (too many classes!) my real problem this week is that I have a new fabulous laptop that I discovered will play DVD's.

To those of you living in a typical American multi-media household you probably can't imagine how overwhelmingly thrilling this was for me. For the six months before I got back to Saigon I only stayed in hotel rooms with TV's a handful of times (I'm thinking you need to budget a bit more for that) and my house here in Saigon doesn't even have a radio, let alone a TV or DVD player. And I am a movie fanatic! Seriously, I even went to see Charlie's Angels and The Incredible Hulk while I was in Bangkok, two superlatively awful movies (and I don't have especially high standards), all because I HAD TO SEE A MOVIE. And this week, all of a sudden, I have access to all those movies that I've wanted to see over the last 14 months.

So forgive me if I went a bit overboard. Some friends loaned me some of their DVD's, and after an absolute orgy of viewing, I then went hunting around town for a good place to buy my own. This is not a difficult task, mind you. As I have reported previously, the Vietnamese have a very, shall we say, flexible attitude toward copyright laws. As you walk down the main tourist boulevard that runs from the big market to the Opera House, hawkers from the stores alongside wave knock-off DVD's and CD's in your face and promise ludicrously low prices.

The problem, of course, is that these are sometimes extremely bad Chinese copies, suitable more for using as a coasters than for entertainment. So I had to go someplace with English-speaking clerks, to whom I could explain the concept of "long term customer" so I wouldn't get palmed off with all the crap they sell to tourists who will never know until they fire up their machine back in Peoria and start to watch a shaky hand-held version of their movie, complete with audience noise and the occasional popcorn-fetcher crossing in front of the screen.

I ended up taking the recommendation of a friend and installed myself on one of the handy stools next to the DVD bins at the brand new SaigonTourist Department Store. In fact I was somewhat surprised to find them there at all. SaigonTourist is the official government travel conglomerate -- they run tours, buses, conferences, etc., and this year they've opened two ritzy (by Vietnamese standards) department stores complete with Western prices. The thing is, in the inaccurately named propoganda tool known as the Vietnam News, every week or two they run a story about how the government is cracking down on businesses who are selling counterfeit or smuggled CD's, cell phones, designer goods, you name it. Yet for a dollar and thirty cents I can buy a DVD of a movie practically before it's even released in the U.S. on the big screen, right in the government's own store. Call me crazy, but this set up sounds just the teensiest bit hypocritical to me.

However, I'm not complaining. I've been able to gorge on movies this week, and for the first time I've successfully convinced a Vietnamese salesclerk that if they are straight with me and actually give me the good stuff I'll come back for more (the Vietnamese pretty much live for the moment -- concepts such as customer service or relationship building are still very foreign to their business strategy). But don't fear -- I will do Part Two tomorrow. Really! I'm not kidding this time!

Copyright 2003 Katy Warren



posted by Katy at 5:37 AM

 
Did I say tune in tomorrow? I clearly meant to say Monday. I must have gotten those time zones mixed up or something.
posted by Katy at 4:00 AM

 
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

In the USA many parents and educators (justifiably) worry and complain about large class sizes. Year after year bills are proposed to limit the number of children per teacher or staff member, and all decry inner-city schools with more than 35 students per class.

I'm here to testify that these people have a very good point, but they have absolutely no idea how bad it can be. I defy any teacher to walk into a room of 64 6th graders sitting four to a desk, with no air-conditioning, constant traffic noise, little if any discipline, and without speaking more than a hundred words of their native language. Did I mention that these kids have perhaps never been called upon to speak English before this point? And that they are now up to Chapter 3 of their English textbook, entitled "Where are you from?"? And that they have absolutely no discipline? OK, now try to imagine spending 2 hours with this class, able to explain only the simplest exercise, game or song. I really believe that I should be going straight from this class to a therapist.

But you needn't feel sorry for me. (Not that I thought you would be -- my family is relentlessly unsympathetic, so I expect the worst from you.) My other three classes at Le Quy Don Jr. High School are fabulous, the kind of classes that make you think that teaching is a fabulously rewarding and entertaining profession. These classes are also huge -- between 40 and 60 students each -- but they are worlds away from the Waking Nightmare, as I call it.

But before I extol the virtues of my three good classes, I'll back up a bit and tell you a bit about the setup at Le Quy Don. The middle school is basically a big rectangular complex with a large paved courtyard in the middle, but that basic description doesn't really give a sense of how green and alive it is. The perimeter buildings are two or three stories high and each floor houses a row of high-ceilinged classrooms opening onto a wide hallway with balcony. All classrooms have a bank of huge windows that look out on the noisy street, and all the windows facing the balcony and courtyard are windowed as well for one fundamental reason -- lack of air conditioning. There are only a handful of classrooms that are fitted with air-con, and thankfully two of my classes are in these. During my other two I sweat like a pig; it's not a pretty sight.

The paved courtyard is not as stark as it sounds. It features towering trees which are surrounded, for some unknown reason, with colorful houses for birds. I suspect these pigeon condo complexes are not a favorite with the faculty, as they have been directed to park their motorbikes directly under them. Although there are badminton court lines painted all over, I've never actually seen anyone playing, but the area is used for Phys. Ed., which is accomplished in typical Vietnamese style -- lots of regimental marching and guided calisthenics. It looks deadly dull.

But the most interesting thing that goes on in this courtyard is the daily assembly. Actually, there seem to be several daily assemblies -- I teach for 3 hours in the morning and I see two of them, and they have to be seen to be believed. Each class makes two lines in their appointed space in the square, girls on the left, boys on the right, and they all reach their arm out to touch the next person's shoulder to ensure that they are an equidistance apart. It's telling that one of the first commands Vietnamese students learn when they learn English, right after "Open your book" and "Sit down", is "Make two lines." All students wear uniforms, of course. Boys are in white shirt, blue pants, and a red scarf tied around their necks like boy scouts. Girls have a more feminine puffed-sleeved white blouse, the same scarf, and a dark blue jumper. They all have "Le Quy Don" and their own names and class numbers embroidered on a patch on the front, and on gym days they wear official LQD athletic shirts and track pants with prominent Adidas logos. They look adorable, truly.

The first assembly starts at the god-awful hour of 6:30 a.m. Classes don't start until seven, and when I first started at LQD the kids were free until ten to seven, but apparently the administration decided that not enough mental and physical torture was taking place and some students were in danger of having a good time while at school. So now every day they line up a half hour early and have a lesson of some kind, some universal truths that all grades will benefit from, while teachers and monitors wander around and check kids' homework. That's actually the good part of the assembly.

For the bad part, you'll have to turn in tomorrow -- I'm off to teach another class!

Copyright 2003 Katy Warren
posted by Katy at 9:01 PM

 
OK, I have lost my mind and today accepted a job teaching 8 hours a week at a public middle school, with a minimum of 50 squirrelly students in each class. Reportedly, some of these classes have 70 students. I am clearly a glutton for punishment.

My first day is Thursday -- I'll let you know how things went, if in fact I survive.
posted by Katy at 8:12 PM

 
You may think I've just been a slacker these last few days, but really I'm looking for a job. Oh, and having lunch and dinner and drinks and coffee (depending on the time of day) with friends I lost touch with during my 6 months of wandering. Anyway, busy busy busy. Plus what I wrote about Bagan, the great ruined temple city in Myanmar, which was my next stop after Inle Lake, was really weak so I can't decide whether to bother putting anything on the website about it at all.

Oh well. When I get settled here (hopefully in a couple of days -- I'm doing a "demonstration class" for a potential employer on Monday) I'll do some more posting.


posted by Katy at 8:09 PM

 
Inle Lake, Myanmar continued

The Intha are Buddhist like most of the rest of Myanmar, so our next stop was at the Phaung Daw temple, the holiest religious site in the region. The temple houses five important statues, three Buddhas and two Buddha disciples, four of which are ferried around the lake on an ornate golden swanlike barge during the annual festival. Frankly, this place was weird. the temple itself was newish and hideously designed, and those important religious statues were just bizarre lumps of gold leaf to the naked eye, a bit like melting snowmen. It was a popular place to congregate, however,. Around the holy golden snowmen groups of men and women (usually separately, and many more men than women as naturally the women have to work) sat on the floor chatting, drinking tea or eating lunch. It's one of the things I really like about Burmese temples -- they serve as a combination of worship site, community center, and tea shop, in which families and friends can get together out of the heat and enjoy a quiet meal.

Much of our afternoon was spent going to combination factory/shops of various kinds in the various stilt villages. We saw umbrellas (and paper) being made, sink longyi woven, knives blacksmithed, silver jewelry fashioned, cheroots rolled, and boats being made. I bartered for one of the giant $1500 teak longboats, but the price just didn't drop low enough to convince me to purchase. I enjoy thse "factory" expiditions, actually. It's fun to see how they make these things, and it certainly makes you better appreciate the criminally low prices for everything.

After further meandering around the villages waving at excited children (don't they see tourists every day? How can they possibly maintain this level of enthusiasm?) and smiling adults as well, we went to relax and drink tea at the Nga Phe Kyuang monestary, a wooden structure on stilts with rusty metal crenellated roof built in the 1850's. Nga Phe Kyuang has two claims to fame -- a collection of excellent Buddha images in Shan, Tibetan, Bagan and Inwa styles each housed in ornately carved and gilded cases; and cats who jump through a hoop held by a crimson-robed monk. Naturally the cats are the big draw, hence the monestary's common name in English: Jumping Cat Monestary.

We spent an hour or so there, mostly sitting on the floor with the cats and chatting with the monk and with other tourists. For me, Jumping Cat Monestary was also the site of one of those "small world" experiences that we've all had at one time or another.

While walking out to see the view an older Frenchman spoke to me. He thought I was Spanish -- I'm sure he never would have talked to me otherwise. The French rarely talk to English speakers. But that's beside the point.

Anyway, we got to talking about where we were from, and when I said I was from Seattle he said HE knew someone from seattle, a woman who was married to an
American and then divorced and moved to Seattle.

Ah, I said. A hairdresser? Named Annie?

Yes indeed, he replied. He is good friends with her parents in Lyon. This strange Frenchman at a Burmese monestary knew my longtime neighborhood hairdresser. Now that's a small world.

That was about it for our delightful day on the lake. It was back to the pancakes and italian food of Nyaungshwe after watching the sun set over the mountains.


Copyright 2003 Katy Warren


posted by Katy at 7:02 PM

 
Inle Lake, Myanmar

The bus from Kalaw to the Inle Lake area was uneventful, though it gave me a waking taste of the quality of the roads between Inle and Bagan. Once you get off the main "highway" from Yangon to Mandalay the quality dorps precipitously -- narrow and bumpy. Basically Myanmar roads (the ones that are paved at all) have been patched so many times that the original pavement is often invisible to the amateur eye. The drive was lovely, however, through villages and pine forests, mountains and vast cultivated valleys.

I took the easy way out upon arrival at the junction 7 miles f rom Nyaungshwe, the town at the top of the lake -- I hired a taxi. No matter how adventurous I am when it comes to modes of transportation, it's still a pain in the rear to cart your bags on one of these pickups bursting with humanity and livestock.

Nyaungshwe was a nice little tourist town -- really one of the only towns in Myanmar that could fit that description. It boasted such rare amenities as email service (no web or web-based email though -- not allowed by the government), trekking guides, souvenir shops, art galleries, and not one but five restaurants advertising authentic Italian food. You can get Indian food too, but really it's all about the pasta in Inle Lake. Oh, and pancakes. Apparently the Thais or someone told them that tourists are wild for pancakes, so they're ubiquitous. My residence, for example, was called "The Teakwood Guesthouse and Pancake". And the pancakes were pretty good, actually, far better than the godawful egg and white toast breakfast featured at every other guesthouse in Myanmar.

The thing that one does in the Inle area is take a boat trip, so on my second day (I'm sparing you a description of my day 1 bike ride) for a shockingly low sum I did so -- $6 for the whole day, 8 a.m. to 6:30, split between five of us. I felt compelled to give our bouncy, smiley driver a $1 tip. I mean honestly, I spent as much on lunch as for the entire tour.

We started our day winding through the canals that separate Nyaungshwe from the lake itself, grassy islands nad floating cornfields rife with birds and grass and wood shacks on stilts. In the Inle Lake area, the market is on a five day rotation, so that every fifth day there will be a market near your village. One of them, Ywama, is in fact a floating market in which vendors ply their vegetables, household equipment, grain, textiles and tourist goods from boats in the canals that serve as the town's "roads". It was perhaps fortunate that we missed that one -- it has apparently degenerated into a primarily tourist market, which is expensive (for me, as I have little self-control) and not too interesting in terms of photo opportunities. Our market was in Kaungdaing, reached in our case by docking at a wooden monestary nearby and walking past a Buddhist temple, several souvenir stands, and some crumbling brick and stucco Shan religious ruins. The market was great, I took loads of pictures that maybe I'll post someday since it's difficult to describe the general business and variety of these markets.

It would be well at this point to describe the lake itself, which is unusual in some respects. The whole thing is about 21 km by 11 km, and is located 900 meters above sea level. It's surrounded by green, largely treeless mid-sized mountains, about the size and shape of the Blue Ridge or the foothills of the Cascades. None of that is unusual, of course -- what's amazing is how they use the lake.

Although the lake is quite deep and cleer, it is blooming with underwater and surface plants. Often the lake is many meters deep but you can only see to the tops of the swaying plants just inches below (or indeed above) the surface. Rather than just approaching this festival of weeds and flowers as a boating nuisance, centures of Intha tribe members have transformed the lake into a thriving agriculture and population center. And I don't just mean by using the fertile shore along the lake. Inle Lake itself literally supports 17 villages on stilts, and fully half the lake surface is devoted to "floating gardens".

When the phrase "floating garden" is uttered, my mind turns to Monet's Giverny paintings and the like. Nothing could be farther than the practical reality of Inle's version. Using the strong, viney hyacinths that float atop the lake, bamboo for structure, and other weeds to tie things together, the villagers pile and mix mud and marshy lake weeds to create actual floating rows of soil in which a wide variety of crops are planted. To keep the rows from just drifting away in the wind they are staked to the bottom with long bamboo poles, and the farmers plant, tend and harvest their crops all while kneeling or standing in long narrow boats that they often row using one leg. They row standing from the rear of the boat in kind of a figure eight -- this technique looks every bit as bizarre as it sounds. As I was there during the rainy season (which isn't too rainy there), tomatoes were the primary product, with hundreds of boxes of them being harvested each day. During other seasons the same floating dirt rows are used to grow garlic, cauliflower, cabbage, eggplant, onions, and even melons and papaya.

It's all incredibly impressive. Years ago I visited some "floating islands" upon which a minority tribe lived in Lake Titicaca in Peru. That experience was seriously grim - loads of begging children with rotten teeth, no visible industry or agriculture whatsoever. The contrast with these floating villages could not be greater. Despite the challenges inherent in living in a country like Myanmar, thse people were hardworking, healthy, clean (they bathe using the lake water a couple times a day), and though I suppose it is distantly possible that they were faking, were friendly and happy too.

Well, that's enough for now - I've got to go catch a bus to Saigon -- back to work this week!

Copyright 2003 Katy Warren

posted by Katy at 7:27 PM

 
Kalaw, Myanmar continued

I'll cut this account of the trek short and just relate the two most interesting things that happened during the remainder.

First, I learned one of the dangers of being a solo woman traveller. Dinner in the village was a deux with Sein (my guide) by candlelight (no electricity) and I think the setting may have given him some unwarranted ideas. After dinner, lying on our respective pallets in the main room, we engaged in a 30 minute "conversation" in which his part was to try to get me to sleep with him, and my part was to alternatively scoff, explain the idea's total impossibility, discuss issues of personal morality, laugh at him while trying not to hurt his feelings, and endlessly roll my eyes in the darkness at each new gambit. If he hadn't been such a teddy bear I'd have been alarmed -- it did teach me that there are potential perils to a woman trekking alone with a guide. One must choose one's guide wisely, or recruit other tourists to come along.

The second interesting thing that occurred was that during our day 2 hike back to Kalaw (in which incidentally I once again selected the lamer option without steep muddy trails) we happened upon a newly formed militia troop practicing ineptly near a village school. It seems that as a result of recent events (bloody massacre of democracy demonstrators, arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi, US embargo, UN pressure, Thai government interference) the generals went to villages and towns around the country and requested young male "volunteers" (read: forced labor) to join the militia and protect Myanmar from Thailand and the United States, the two most hated opponents. They didn't give them guns, of course. In fact, I have heard that for many months during actual military training the soldiers practice with wooden guns as it is all too likely that they will point the real variety in the direction of the government in one way or another. This crew of militia looked decidedly unenthusiastic about their assignment, for obvious reasons. Even rice farming looks better than an unpaid position under the boot of the Burmese military.

Copyright 2003 Katy Warren




posted by Katy at 1:29 AM

 
Don Det, Laos to Hoi An, Vietnam

I swore to myself that I would never again write an essay about a horrible bus ride, but holy mother of mercy was my journey from Laos to Vietnam an unmitigated horror.

It didn't help that I'd already been travelling all day when I boarded Satan's Overnight Express to Hell. I had left my lovely Don Det bungalow at 6:30 that morning and after 11 1/2 hours of boat, truck, tuk tuk, and local bus I arrived in Savannakhet hoping for a good night's sleep and an early cross-border bus in the morning. According to my guidebook this plan should have worked perfectly. According to the bus station officials, all of whom oddly possessed a "lazy eye", there was only one bus a day and it left at 8:00 pm.

So I had a choice of catching another bus in two hours or spending an additional 26 hours in Laos. I like Savannakhet, but according to the only other westerner in the bus station it had been steadily raining for three days there, which didn't sound like an enticing way to spend a day. I dug into my bag for my night bus essentials (inflatable pillow, sarong to be used as blanket in aircon buses, earplugs to protect from hideous Lao music, and melatonin tablets) and sat back to wait.

I have had good luck with night buses during my travels through Asia. I've often managed to get two seats to myself (by spreading myself and belongings out and emitting a hostile, antisocial vibe to all boarding passengers) and even in Laos and Myanmar I've usually had reclining seats. Sadly, this was a Vietnamese bus.

It may sound odd after my many months in the country, but I've never actually been on a Vietnamese public bus. Clever entrepreneurs years ago realized that Vietnamese buses are superlatively uncomfortable and slow, with overcrowding and farm animals and breakdowns and seats sized for the comfort of 12 year old children (or Vietnamese people). These farsighted businessmen bought some tolerable buses (not good, mind you, but clean, less than 20 years old and with a smidge more leg room) and started running them between all the major tourist destinations and most of the minor ones. As a result it's extremely rare to see a foreigner on a local bus. This is good in some ways -- at least you have a marginally comfortable ride -- but it does tend to isolate travellers from average Vietnamese people. A tourist here for just 2 weeks or a month may never meet a local person not involved in the tourist industry in some way, whether it is a guide or hotel worker or a kid selling tiger balm and lighters on the street.

The upshot of all this is that you have to be one unlucky slob to find yourself on a Vietnamese non-tourist bus, and I am that slob. When I first took a gander at the vehicle which was to be my home for 20 hours, I very nearly asked for my $10.50 back. No wonder the fare was so cheap. When we were finally allowed to board 2 1/2 hours later than advertised, we found not so much a bus as a large windowed cargo hold. Sure it had seats, but they were the narrowest immovable plastic-covered bench seats I've ever seen on long-distance transportation, maybe 3 1/2 feet wide for two people. The reason for this was the enlarged aisle, which presumably was designed to provide easier loading and unloading, but which effectively served to double the amount of storage space. The back quarter of the bus was piled with the personal possessions of the passengers (many of whom were Vietnamese store owners stocking up on cheap Lao merchandise) along with the paid cargo. The overhead shelf along the length of the bus contained hundreds of cans of baby formula, and goods were stowed under every seat, on the roof, in the hold beneath the bus, and in the crevices around the engine in back.

You're not to assume that because we had so much cargo they would correspondingly reduce the number of passengers. In fact they oversold the available seats, so after they escorted me and a 6'3" German to our seat at the back, a typically Vietnamese rock-concert-general-admission style melee ensued while each ticket holder fought to secure an actual seat. Clearly the bus conductor was aware that foreigners would inevitably come out the losers in this sort of competition. We're too polite, are unwilling to use our elbows, and the Vietnamese are quick and crafty and very, very determined.

As it happens, we may have been better off without a seat. While the German and I attempted to wedge our sizable selves into 3 1/2 feet of colossal discomfort, the losers in the Great Seat Race were busily rearranging the cargo to find the soft stuff -- bags of towels, toilet paper rolls, blankets, and foreigner backpacks -- to make the aisle into one long mattress upon which they could stretch out full length.

Meanwhile, the German and I struggled to get two minutes sleep at one time, sitting upright, practically on top of eachother, and violently jarred each time the bus (which unsurprisingly had very poor shock absorption) went over a rut. Did I mention that the Lao road was under construction, and therefore wasn't paved or even graded for mile after interminably painful mile?

These weren't the only annoyances along the way, of course. One odd practice of the aisle dwellers was that during each of our breaks, they would move undesirable cargo into the space that our feet and legs were supposed to occupy. Sometimes the item moved into our territory would just be a pointy cornered box (not comfortable to lie upon) but on one memorable occasion I picked up a bag containing a 3-foot long live lizard. Alarming, to say the least. Thank God I didn't find out until morning that those four plastic garbage cans lashed directly behind our seat were filled with water snakes, only one of which (to my knowledge) escaped.

The final annoyance of this journey was the sheer unneccessary length of it all. The distance covered was about 375 miles, which we accomplished in 20 hours for an average speed of 19 miles an hour. You may wonder how it is even possible to go that slow in a motorized vehicle. The answer is that we weren't in motion often enough -- when you spend seven full hours at the border it tends to affect your ETA. It seems that because we were carrying so much potentially dutiable cargo, we needed to get to the border early enough to secure a good place in line. Hence the 10:30 p.m. departure. We arrived at the Lao/Vietnam border at 3:30 a.m. despite a lengthy stop to watch David Beckham and Real Madrid eke out a tie in the final minutes with Villareal. The border opened at 7:00 am and though the passengers made it through in an hour, the bus itself enjoyed three hours worth of customs investigation and paperwork.

The rest of the trip was smooth sailing, or as smooth as the sailing can be on a bad Vietnamese mountain road in the back of an ancient torture chamber of a bus. I eventually made it to Hoi An, my final destination, at 7:30 pm, 37 hours after leaving my lovely bungalow with such high hopes of a comfortable journey. I will never learn.

Copyright 2003 Katy Warren


posted by Katy at 1:53 AM

 
Kalaw, Myanmar

It poured down rain that night. Normally this wouldn't have been a problem. It is to be expected during the rainy season, after all. However, my position at that point was a bit more precarious than usual, sitting in a village house on a mountain 8 miles from the gloriously paved streets of Kalaw. In other words, 8 miles of slippery, muddy track before reaching a hot shower. My performance thus far that morning did not bode well for a pratfall-free day -- I slipped on the mud steps to the outhouse during my first foray out of the house. Aaurgh. I really hoped for good weather during that trek.

The first day of the 2-day trek was quite nice, as a matter of fact. We set off at 8:15, wandering up and down the mountains on an excellent (read: dry) trail with great views. Of course, being from the Pacific Northwest I'm aware that great trail views often come at a price. In the northwest it's clearcutting that gives you wide open vistas, in Myanmar the view-concealing foliage has been replaced with agriculture. The fields and farms are scenic as well, of course, certainly moreso than your average clearcut. The Kalaw region being cooler and considerably more mountainous than the Ayerayewaddy Delta lowlands to the south, rice is comparatively rare there, and only grows in the dry variety. Steep fields of tea and corn abound along with vegetables and fruit trees.

One thing they don't have much of up there is handy logging roads. I watched a succession of Palao villagers walk by on a narrow trail carrying bundles of teak boards and wide planks on their heads (women) or shoulders (men). We did follow a rutted, muddy dirt road for a time and saw just one vehicle -- an ox-driven cart carrying heavy bags of rice.

We visited four villages in total, three Palaung and one, the one we stayed in, Danu. All were very Buddhist, a departure from the animist practices of most of the hill tribes I'd seen in Asia, though "Nat" or spirit worship is practiced alongside more traditional Buddhist activities in virtually every home in Myanmar. Each village boasted a monestary, rather sizable considering the populations of the villages themselves. All looked fairly prosperous by Burmese standards -- houses made of wood, UN-supplied fresh water, and plentiful food, though the life was impossibly difficult and simple to western eyes with no transportation, little if any electricity, the most basic toilet facilities, and hours of backbreaking manual labor each day. Primary schools were of the one-room variety, with middle school children walking miles to nearby villages daily.

After lunch at the most improbably placed restaurant you can imagine (3 hours walk from town, 45 minutes uphill from the nearest village) I was given a choice of route. The more scenic route took you through virgin forest and past the British-made reservoir, up and down muddy hills. I might have been tempted to take this route despite the high probability of a mud-caked backside, were it not for the ultimate trekking deal-killer for me: leeches. And not the ordinary kind of leeches either, the ones that adhere to you in the water if your skin is showing. These were land leeches, a species of which I was heretofore blissfully unaware, and they specialized in jumping on you. Plus they could bite through your clothes. Eeewww. When the reply to my question about how many leeches Imight be expected to frantically pick off my body was "Oh, many many", the decision was made. No scenic forest route for me. Instead we continued around the mountain with the lovely panoramic valley views and another picturesque Paluang village perched on its steep side. I felt I made the correct decision.

Myin Daik, the Danu village in which we spent the night, was a collection of ironwood and bamboo mat stilt houses near the top of a mountain. Our residence normally housed six people, two parents and 4 kids, and consisted of four rooms -- one large room for eating, sleeping, storing crops, making baskets, and daily worshipping at the family altar; two very small rooms that served as storage and hallway; and the kitchen, with a wood fire on a square hearth set into the floor.

I didn't see many adults during my wander around the village -- they typically work the fields until 6 or 7 at night -- but I was a big hit with the kids, who were quite willing to drag me around by the hand and play whatever pointless games I suggested in mime. Their favorite was a hybrid of Ring Around the Rosy and tag, and we had a great time running around and gorging ourselves on mangoes straight from the tree.

I'm getting really bored with this account of my trek (it's probably even worse for you), so I'm going to quit now and hopefully come up with something more entertaining for Part 2. Stay tuned.

Copyright 2003 Katy Warren







posted by Katy at 12:57 AM

 
Myanmar

You may believe that I am an observant person since you're busy reading all my observations, but my family knows better. If I have my mind on other things (if polled the family would describe this situation as "frequently" or "almost always") or am engrossed in a good book (also a huge chunk of my time) I could sit through an earthquake and later wonder where all the bricks came from. Basically I have to want to observe things. That's one of the reasons I love to travel -- everything is so different and interesting that I constantly want to drink it all in.

All this is to give you an idea how I was in Myanmar for five days before realizing that they have a different time zone there.

I have no excuse for this oversight. It's not as though the clues weren't there for a crack mystery reader like myself to decipher. For example, my buses always seemed to leave a half hour late. Had I just arrived from the states this might have tipped me off, but I had been in Asia almost 10 months. I expected buses to leave late.

My second clue was that everyone's clocks were wrong, and by "wrong" I naturally mean "different from my watch". You'd think that after the third or fourth time spotting a clock running that late some remote forgotten corner of my brain would have jerked awake, but I didn't really think about it at all. I mean, isn't it possiblethat the Burmese are just bad timekeepers? And the electricity is terrible there. I had power outages each of my first 4 days in Myanmar. That could really throw things off in the clock department.

Now if you think that anyone with a dozen brain cells to juggle could have cottoned to this time zone thing with these rather obvious indications, you're really going to question my ability to tie my own shoes when I tell you my third clue. Actually, it might more accurately be described as the first, since it was offered during the plane ride from Chiang Mai to Yangon. And to be fair, it might not be considered so much a "clue" as a "screamingly overt statement of fact." It went like this. The captain gave a little speech, in which he mentioned the time in Yangon. I looked at my watch in confusion, inspiring my seatmate, an expat teacher living in Myanmar, to state the following: "There is a half hour time difference between Thailand and Myanmar." "Ah, how strange," I commented.

Did I take this opportunity to change my watch? No. Did I store this valuable information away so I would remember to turn the clock back upon arrival? No. I dismissed the whole issue from my feeble mind like an old phone number. It was not until I was sitting at a tea shop waiting for my bus and facing two clocks, both of which informed me that I was 40 minutes early, that the dense clouds of obtuseness began to dissipate. After five days, I changed my watch.

You know the most remarkable thing about this whole situation? Not my stunning idiocy in practical matters -- that was known already. No, it was the fact that the buses in Myanmar had been leaving on time! Who would have thought it possible?

Copyright 2003 Katy Warren







posted by Katy at 3:48 AM

 
I have much more to write about my trip to Myanmar, but I keep getting interrupted at this internet place by roving bands of Vietnamese boys pounding on very loud drums and dancing around in those Chinese New Year 2-man dragon costumes. This one is the 3rd one in an hour and there's another dragon waiting to come in. I can't take the drumming for one more minute, so I'll try to post tomorrow.
posted by Katy at 5:30 AM

 
Don Det, Laos

I have a brother-in-law who is insane enough to do competitive mountain biking, and my bike ride on Don Det and the adjacent island would have been right up his alley. I decided that since I had opted to spend another day on the island, I'd at least try to attempt something more strenuous than lifting a glass and rubbing on mosquito repellent.

I rented one of the typical Lao one-speed bicycles, shiny purple with a passenger seat in back and a nice white basket up front. It was, as usual, complete crap, with no brakes to speak of and a seat that continually dropped down in back. This problem makes a bicycle quite difficult to ride -- you're basically clutching the handles not for steering or balance but to physically prevent your backside from sliding onto the rear wheel. Periodically I'd stop and pound down the front, after the bike repair geezer refused to try to tighten it a second time. By the end of my ride the bike was at least eight inches shorter tahn when I started.

That's not the part that would have pleased Geoff, of course, though I'm sure he would not have been caught without a handy socket wrench of the correct size. What he would have enjoyed was the trail itself, narrow and rutted, alternating rocky and muddy along eroding river banks, through dense forest and across bridges made of rotting and/or cracking planks. He would have been in his element. I, on the other hand, was a complete spaz, careening into the underbrush, falling over with tires mired in mud, and coming to a sandal-skidding halt (no brakes, remember) at the sight of any bridge, hill, or threatening livestock.

Apart from the mud the livestock was the biggest challenge -- chickens, turkeys, ducks, dogs and pigs running across the path unexpectedly (or strolling, as some ducks seemed to prefer), and cows and water buffalos planting their massive grass munching selves in mid-path. The cows I was okay with, blithely pedalijng buy (at an odd angle), but the water buffalos with their long sharp pointy horns and disapproving glares demanded more respect. For them I dismounted and slowly walked by, using the bike as a shield and avoiding eye contact. I learned after a while that they were more terrified by my presence than I of theirs, sometimes scampering backwards into the trees and rice fields to escape the threat of my bike/shield. I maintained my cautious approach, however. You never know when you'll meet a rogue buffalo with a grudge against tourists.

After all that effort I had the waterfall all to myself, and was able to sit and write and watch the mighty Mekong surge into Cambodia for two hours without a soul to interrupt me. It was worth the trip. In fact, the trip itself was worth the sweat, mud, and subsequent laundry time. The trail wound past bungalows, fishing villages, banana orchards, across a former French railway bridge, through a monestary and dense forest. The return journey meandered through the rice paddies past villagers in conical hats working the fields by hand and by buffalo, and at the end of it all a pineapple shake and several hours of restorative hammock time on my balcony gazing at life on the Mekong.

A great day.

Copyright 2003 Katy Warren
posted by Katy at 5:27 AM

 
Don Det, Laos

I liked southern Laos far more than I expected. Over the months I've grown somewhat jaded on the whole massive Asian river thing. Two days on the Ayerayewaddy in Myanmar was stultifying, and I've done boat trips on the Mekong in three different countries. I've seen more than my share of tropical agricultural basins and slow-moving brown water.

The Mekong in southern Laos is a whole different bag of rice, however, and forced me to see the river not as a meandering source of bathing facilities and irrigation, but as an unbelievably powerful force complicating as well as aiding trade in the region. The Mekong here is vast and yet moves dangerously quickly. The area surrounding Si Phan Don, or The 4000 Islands, is perhaps the most treacherous part of the river system. During the dry season when the river is low, this 50 km section between the Lao and Cambodian border sprouts hundreds of islands, thousands if you count every sand bar. Larger islands remain above water year around and contain self-sufficient Lao villages making a living by fishing the Mekong and growing their own rice, vegetables and farm animals in the interior.

But it is not the islands that make the Mekong virtually unnavigable along this border, it's the 15km of rapids and waterfalls as the river makes its most significant drop in elevation. These are not your serene waterfalls with lovely reflective pools to frolic in below. These are the sorts of waterfalls from which you keep a healthy distance for fear you will topple down a steep bank and be crushed to powder in the overwhelming rocky churning violence of the silt-filled water. The combined power of the Mekong itself, its tributaries and a good monsoon season makes for incredible viewing.

By contrast, everything on these islands is in slow motion apart from the river. On Don Det, the most rural and undeveloped of the islands that serve tourists, getting the drink you ordered is easily a half hour to 45 minute process, and the wise traveller orders her dinner at least an hour before she expects to be hungry. The delay is not generally due to a great demand or strain on the restaurant, either. The island was practically deserted, with no more than 25 tourists in total. After 3 days I pretty much knew them all at least by sight, and had had meals with over half of them.

After 12 months in Asia that kind of thing no longer bothers me, however. Speedy (or indeed accurate) service is not a familiar concept in Asia, particularly in Laos where they're fine with the fact that tourists have shown up unexpectedly but don't see any particular reason to alter their normal routines. My blood pressure would be through the roof if I let these things annoy me. Besides, when it takes 45 minutes to get the correct drink it means you drink less and chat more. Three hour meals are the norm rather than the exception among travellers who have found their way to this remote area.

Don Det is not the ideal destination for every tourist, I must admit, though it was perfect for me. It is reachable only by boat (duh, it's an island) and has no motorized land transportation. Indeed it possesses no roads whatsoever, just windy dirt paths that develop rather daunting mud puddles after the rain, which is frequent. Consequently, you must carry your luggage from the boat landing (a generous name for it, since it consists of a slippery bank with a couple of poles to tie the boats to) to the guesthouse of your choice, which could be anywhere from 20 yards to a mile and a half away. Fortunately there are many choices, all $1 a night regardless of their state of decrepitude and virtually identical in design -- stilted bamboo huts with bed, balcony, hammock, mosquito net and small oil lamp. Shared shower and toilet facilities (usually of the Chinese squat variety) are down the path, and it's wise to bathe before dark as the bathroom light is mysteriously located on the outside rather than the inside. I found out my 3rd day that the water we used was pumped straight from the Mekong. My hair could definitely be cleaner, but since mirrors and even sinks were obviously considered unneccessary luxuries, I didn't give it too much thought. I didn't see a mirror in 4 days and all the male tourists on the island were starting to grow beards.

It's a bit primitive for the average non-backpacking western tourist, but the benefits far outweigh the drawbacks. My bungalow was right on the river; I spit my toothpaste into the Mekong each morning. After a grueling day of lying in the hammock, taking a walk/bike ride/boat trip, and sharing a three hour lunch, I could sit in the restaurant of my guesthouse and watch the sun set opulently over the Mekong and the tropical mountains beyond while sipping iced lime juice (sometimes laced with Lao rice whisky --whew, is that strong!) and talking travel with people from all over the world. Don Det isn't paradise, but with indoor plumbing it could come pretty darned close.

Copyright 2003 Katy Warren
posted by Katy at 7:52 PM

 
Myanmar

Myanmar is the only place on earth (that I've visited -- I realize that's a huge proviso) in which Coke and Pepsi lack a stranglehold on the fizzy drink market. I imagine it's like Vietnam before 1995, when the mighty gods of international investment and marketing crushed the hundreds of little heathen local drink makers under their giant corporate sandals. Locals still talk about the incredible show that was put on when Coca Cola came to Saigon -- parades, hot air balloons, fireworks, etc. In Vietnam today nearly all the soft drinks are Coke and Pepsi products, and they do a booming business in bottled water as well.

In Myanmar you can get Coke, Sunkist and other western brands, but only in cans, and at prices 3-5 times higher than the local bottled versions. Interestingly, the names of all these local sodas are in English and generally not translated into Burmese at all. As a Burmese-deficient tourist, I could consequently go into a restaurant, bar or tea shop and order up a Fantasy Orange, Max, Star Cola, Quench or Crusher without fear of being misunderstood. I enjoyed my Fantasy Orange and Lemon Sparkling while I could -- in a few years they will both disappear in the wake of the inevitable Coke/Pepsi marketing and distribution juggernaut.

Copyright 2003 Katy Warren


posted by Katy at 1:07 AM

 
Kalaw, Myanmar

I arrived in Kalaw at 3:15 a.m. Have you ever arrived in a small town at 3:15 in the morning? It's perhaps the worst possible hour, though it's a fine time of day to enjoy silence and look at stars. Frankly, I had lost hope that I would ever see stars in rainy season Myanmar.

Fortunately, Sein, a local unlicensed trekking guide, was just crayzy or ambitious enough to regularly meet the 3:00am bus on the off chance that a tourist might be on it. It was a good thing -- I was decidedly dazed. The bus conductor forgot I was getting off there and neglected to wake me up, so I woke to the sound of KALAW KALAW KALAW, the Burmese bus call that signals a very brief stop. I was hardly ready. My stuff was half in the seat pocket, half in my spilling daypack; I couldn't find my shoes; I was sitting on my glasses (newly bent); and the first time I got off the bus I actually forgot my big backpack. It was not as swift an offloading as the bus driver would have wished, and I managed to wake all the other passengers in the process.

Sein helped me knock on hotel doors to find a room. Who'd have thought motels would actually be full at this time of year? I ended up at an expensive one (eight dollars!!!) but I'd have taken just about anything at that hour. And it was a great room -- big bathroom with hot water (though I couldn't get it to work in my frazzled state. Not surprising, really), beds with sheets, and carpet. Carpet!! You could sure tell I made it to the mountains. I hadn't seen carpet for months.

I spent my first day in Kalaw just shopping (I spent a fortune at the local market) and wandering. It's a picturesque and friendly valley, and I got hopelessly lost. The map in the Lonely Planet bears only the vaguest relation to the actuality of the Kalaw road system, and its makers were very parsimonious about street names. Through blind luck, or perhaps my infallible sense of direction, I made it back to town in 2 1/2 hours. It was a nice walk, through a monestary on a hill (no visible monks), and various homes, shacks, farms, minimarts (Burmese style, with fried snacks and packets of shampoo hanging from the ceiling), schools, cows, dogs and even a golf course, presumably to serve the military folks at the officer training academy located nearby.

Kalaw was used as a "hill station" during the British Raj (this usually means the British or whoever the colonizers were would come on weekends or vacations to escape the heat of the lowland capital cities). Having travelled extensively in former French Indochina, I can report with the authority of strong opinion and no design background that the architectural legacy left by the British in Burma is weak, at best. There are some buildings left, but frankly they're just not all that interesting. Decaying French colonial buildings emanate a rather decadent, romantic air, with their fine proportions and intricate details. Decaying British colonial buildings by contrast emanate a feeling of, well, decay. They look sturdy enough, but so boring that you hardly see the point of an expensive renovation.

More on Kalaw later - I took a solo trek! Well, solo apart from my personal guide, I mean.

Copyright 2003 Katy Warren
posted by Katy at 12:34 AM

 
Kyiaktiyo, Myanmar

I had been travelling half the day before I hit a major snag. By bus and truck I had made it to Kinpon village at the base of the mountain with the Golden Rock temple, but it seems that during the rainy season there just aren't many trucks going the rest of the way. So I sat myself down on a concrete bench in what seemed to be the women and children section of the truck stop and began to wait for us to reach the magic threshhold for the truck.

It was an easy trip up until that point. At the tea shop in the morning I met a former teacher with good English who helpfully got me on the right bus, one of the local variety in which you crawl over sacks of grain to get to your seat with the exposed springs. The next step, getting off the bus at the right village, was made easier by the fact that my guidebook has a big color photo of the Golden Rock on the cover. As usual, pointing and looking inquisitive did the trick, and a crowd of fellow passengers not only made sure I got off at the right time, but also found me a personal escort to guide me through the village to the trucks that would take me to the base of the mountain. Thankfully, my escorts also arranged for me to sit in the front seat with the driver for this leg -- there were already people hanging off the back and sides of the truck when I arrived. There is no concept of maximum occupancy in Myanmar.

So in Kinpon I waited with the Burmese ladies, played with the children, and began to get another taste of Rainy Season Tourism. When I arrived in the village the weather was decent; cloudy with some sunbreaks, as we say in Seattle, but here was the key thing -- I could see the golden rock from the village. That is critical -- if I could see the rock from the village, it should mean I would be able to see the village from the rock.

Unfortunately, we waited for 90 minutes for the truck to fill up. And this was no pitiful Toyota pickup this time, oh no. It was dump truck sized and wouldn't move without a minumum of 35 people. Mind you, many more than 35 could fit on this truck -- in Myanmar, a unit of public transportation is never too full to add more passengers or cargo. On my trip back, for example, we carried maybe 40 people plus 20 huge baskets full of durian (the stinkiest fruit on God's earth -- reportedly smells like rotting flesh, though I'm no expert on rotting flesh). There were six guys actually perched atop the cab and several hanging on the sides for dear life as we corkscrewed down the mountain at top speed.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. The truck, which winds up the mountain for 45 minutes, doesn't take you to the Golden Rock itself. It takes you to a parking lot surrounded by restaurant shacks from which you walk steeply uphill for another hour or so before you reach the government outpost where they charge you $6 for the privilege (this was one of the most annoying things about Myanmar -- very high admission prices which go not to the temple but directly to the repressive government of amoral generals. It became a bit of a game to avoid these fees in various ways.) The hike was a good workout, but I could see as I sweated my way up, swatting aside the sedan chair guys who were waiting for me to collapse in a panting heap, that I had waited for the truck for just a little too long. The fog lowered, and it started to rain. Incidentally, why do those sedan chair guys all stick so close to me on these hikes? I must look like I'm about to have a coronary.

After parking myself uninvited at the government checkpoint to wait out a sudden downpour (the guys there were quite friendly and bored with their jobs -- I found that most government workers loathed the government), I climbed the last bit, several precarious sets of stairs and a long marble walkway among temples and monuments. This was only precarious because of the requirement that you do the whole thing barefoot; with a little traction that marble wouldn't have been nearly so treacherous.

By this point, the temple complex was entirely fogged in. I gingerly made my way along, having painfully learned the lesson of slippery marble the day before, and just as I was thinking "hey, I could walk right past this damned rock and never even see it" I heard a loud "Hello Hello" from a young man who was running across the plaza toward me. Damned surefooted Asians. Anyway, I had indeed just passed the Golden Rock, so I came on back. It is indeed a cool thing, though it certainly doesn't glow in the rain like it reportedly does in the sunshine. Its billing as a "wonder of the world" on the t-shirts may be a bit of a stretch as well. The gilded rock, with a little stupa on top, is perched impossibly on another rock on a cliffside. The area is prone to earthquakes, and it is indeed remarkable that it hasn't just toppled over at some point. Here's a picture: Kyiaktiyo.

Despite the somewhat disappointing rock, no journey is wasted in Myanmar. The village at the base of the mountain was delightful, and even though they must see a fair number of tourists there, they aren't a bit jaded. Men, women and children alike say "hello" and "bye bye" somewhat interchangeably, and as I walked by mothers would point me out to their kids. The village is poor. In fact you can tell how far Myanmar is behind the other Asian countries by how few metal or tile roofs they have. The housing and shops in the southern country side are still, for the most part, built with bamboo, spare boards and stuff from the jungle; very picturesque for tourists, but I bet in the rainy season they really wish for a better roof.


Copyright 2003 Katy Warren


posted by Katy at 8:45 PM

 
My favorite headline from Thursday's Bangkok Post:

ACCENT NOW ON NIPPLES AND GENITALS.

And my favorite quote from the article, from the Thai Interior deputy permanent secretary on massage parlors:

"It turns out that some of them provide commercial sex to customers." Good to see that Thai authorities are right on top of things in Bangkok.
posted by Katy at 8:08 PM

 
Bago, Myanmar

My arrival in Bago, a town a couple hours northeast of Yangon, was greeted by a flock of hovering, chattering trishaw drivers. I went with Khin, the one with the best English, who said the magic words: 3-dollar hotel room. It was quite a blessing that I happened upon Khin (or vice versa, to be more precise). After checking into the hotel (about what you'd expect for $3) I contracted with Khin to wheel me around town for the afternoon in classic colonial style, all for a criminally low $2.

I should first explain what a trishaw looks like. There is a varation on this trishaw/rickshaw theme in every country of Southeast Asia, always involving a bicycle or motorbike and a place for one or more people to sit. Tourists and locals alike use them for short trips around town, and you will often see them carrying cargo as well. The Burmese version has the seat affixed to the side of a very sturdy bicycle. It's actually two seats, one facing forward and one backward, and these seats are definitely made for those with narrow hips. I squeezed myself in like a sausage.

So we set off to explore Bago. Did I mention it was raining? I suspect that if it hadn't been I wouldn't have leaped at his offer. There's only so much walking in the rain that I can take. It was still wet, huddled under my disintegrating Chinese umbrella in what basically amounts to a bicycle sidecar, but I covered a lot more ground in one afternoon than I would have on foot.

Our first stop was the largest monestary in Myanmar, housing over a thousand monks (though when in Mandalay I also walked past "the largest monestary in Myanmar", so this could be local hyperbole). These wasn't an especially religious monestary, as it was basically a school where all the students live like monks. And a more bizarre teaching method I have yet to see -- hundreds of sienna-robed, hairless monks sitting in lines on the floor of a large sanctuary reading aloud from Buddhist scriptures. The weird part was that they weren't reading in unison; they all went at their own personal pace, and much of it was sung or chanted. Loud, but eerily musical at the same time.

With my typical grace I managed to slip on a slightly angled section of pavement and fall flat on my back during our monestary visit. I was lid out absolutely prone on the wet tiles, wind knocked out of me and hoping I didn't have a concussion. Khin chattered nervously while miniature monks started to gather and stare in fascination. Eventually I hobbled to my feet with a new respect for wet marble. Hours later, despite multiple Mandalay Beers, I still had a headache, but the real pain was in my tailbone, which I knew the moment I tried once again to squeeze my generous backside into the trishaw seat . Those things are not meant for plus-size women with painful posteriors.

Still, I soldiered on. Our next stop was another monestary, this one (presumably temporarily) monk-free, but overloaded with gilded Buddhas. After that, Schwemawdaw Pagoda, the tallest stupa in Myanar at 114 meters. It's anotehr one buit to enshirine hair relics of the Buddha, and as an added bonus this one reportedly houses a sacred tooth as well. Mind you, you never see these hairs or teeth or whatever. I have no idea if they are even accessible. The most interesting thing about this stupa is that after the whole thing was destroyed by a 1917 earthquake they rebuilt the whole thing but incorporated a big chunk of the rubble from the original, kind of tacked on to one side. The stupa itself is very beautiful, don't get me wrong, gold and very well designed, but the asymetry of the added chunk gave Schwemawdaw more character and you get a bit sick of perfect golden stupas after a while.

Next stop was a cheroot factory -- a welcome shift from the religious to the secular. Cheroots, which are like small cigars, are more common than cigarettes in Burma, a country whose inhabitants are still so poor that most smokers buy their cigarettes or cheroots individually rather than in packs. Though cheroots are smoked by many, they are especially favored by wrinkled little old women at the market. The cheroot "factory" was the open first floor of a rickety wooden house in a Bago side street. One side of the room held huge woven bags of tobacco, the other had 15 women sitting on the floor next to low round tables rolling cigars. A girl typically rolls a thousand a day, working 7am to 5pm. Local women who can't spend hours at the factor roll a few hundred in their free time at home as a part-time job. They use d real leaves, not paper, that were cut to size and soaked in water to increase flexibility. The filter is made of corn husk and newspaper (and let me just say that the New Light of Myanmar newspaper fully deserves this treatment) and the filling is three-quarters tobacco, one quarter wood shavings, and I think they add or soak in tamarind and other flavors. Rice glue sticks it all together -- a 100% natural, carcinogenic product.

After a couple more buddhist sites we walked into a village (past an all-monk road crew -- you don't see those in Seattle, let me tell you) to watch women weaving the longyi, the sarong-like national costume of Myanmar. It's basically a tube of material, and unlike India and Thailand where this traditional garment is no longer in general use, Myanmar has been so isolated from the outside world that they haven't yet succumed to the lure of trousers. Both women and men alike wear the longyi, though in slightly different ways. Women fold the material over and tuck it in like a wraparound skirt, and their longyis are generally flowered or have designs of various types. Men's longyi are more complicated - they fold from both sides to create a complicated, decorative knot in the middle. Even in Yangon (described to me by one Burmese as the most cosmopolitan city in Myanmar) I'd estimate that 90% of the women and 80% of the men wore these garments, and it's even more common in the countryside. It's a delightful thing to see, graceful and lovely and so very foreign to western eyes.

Well, that was my day! Tomorrow I'll write about the Golden Rock Pagoda, a rock that's not so golden when it's pouring down rain.

Copyright 2003 Katy Warren
posted by Katy at 9:40 PM

 
Yangon, Myanmar

As is perhaps fitting in a country as religious as Myanmar, my first day was spent visiting buddhist temples.

Shwedagon Pagoda was a truly amazing place, clearly the sight to see in Yangon and indeed in the whole of Myanmar. Built on a hill in the middle of the city, it has four massive staircases (and two elevators for the feeble and the military) leading up to a platform covering over 12 acres with temples, stupas (solid semi- conical pointy monuments to the dead or to house Buddha relics), grand walkways and shrines surrounding the massive golden stupa. This stupa, rebuilt in 1769 and created to house eight hairs of the Buddha, is regilded every year and positively glows. In 1995 it was estimated to have accumulated 53 metric tons of gold leaf, not including the 13,000 solid gold plates covering the banana bud shaped top just under the Burmese umbrella-like thing that crowns all pagodas. The gilded umbrella itself is studded with over 5000 diamonds and 1400 other stones, including a 76 carat diamond. All that is for the benefit of the Buddha alone, since at 100 yards tall, it's impossible to make out the details on top with the naked eye.

Although its artistic and architectural features are most impressive, the best thing about Shwedagon is that it hosts thousands of worshippers every day. Families come to pray, listen to monks, and have lunch. The place is a constantly moving and bowing anthill of saronged Burmese making offerings to any one of the hundreds of altars and temples available. Many come after work to relax and unwind and see the sunset glint off the gilded monuments. Monks hold impromtu services for a handful or a crowd, and tourists mill about and soak up the atmosphere. It's a fabulous place, and perfectly captures Burmese life -- very religious, very family oriented, very simple.

My second temple of the day was decidedly weirder, but equally full of families. The Botataung Pagoda, alongside the Irawaddy River in downtown Yangon, also boasts a giant golden stupa and a number of Buddha hair relics. There the similarity ends. During World War II the RAF bombed the historical stupa at Botataung into rubble. When they rebuilt, they decided to go for a "happy blend of the ancient and of the ultramodern," according to the handy English brochure I got for my $2.

The weird part of this stupa wasn't the outside, which looked like a standard gilded bell-shaped monument with the usual stylized umbrella on top. The difference here was that they made the new and improved Botataung hollow, so you can walk right into it through a glittery antechamber. Being Buddhist and Asian they didn't stint on the shiny stuff inside, either. It was set up a bit like a hall of mirrors, with many angled walls and display cases holding Buddhas and statues of stupas and coin trees. The walls were made of thousands of small mirrors angled in various directions; the whole thing was gloriously tacky.

There aren't many tourists in Myanmar, and American tourists are even more rare and interesting to the Burmese. I had my own entourage throught my visit -- several children dogged my footsteps, repeating my every word in English. A monk was also intrigued by my presence -- he gave my whole arm a good squeezy feel. I'm thinking I'm going to need to do some upper body toning if this happens too often.

Copyright 2003 Katy Warren

posted by Katy at 3:53 AM

 
Yangon, Myanmar

Just south of the Sule Pagoda, a big gilded temple in the center of town littered with praying and lounging locals, there is a large British colonial-style building that I took to be City Hall. The street in front of it is blocked off, heavily guarded and punctuated with hundreds of cement-filled barrels and barbed wire blockades. Signs in Burmese and English identify it as a restricted area and warn against photographs.

Naturally I was a bit alarmed that a government building would need to be so heavily guarded. The place is practically an armed fortress just meters from a small playground and a constantly shifting crew of soccer-playing kids in the adjacent street. It wasn't until hours later that I looked more closely at my map. The fortress is not, in fact, the Yangon City Hall, but rather houses the U.S. Embassy. My suspicion is that the heavy duty security around it is not to protect from angry Burmese citizens, but from the Burmese government itself, who deeply fears and hates the U.S..

Copyright 2003 Katy Warren
posted by Katy at 3:53 AM

 
Yangon, Myanmar (aka Rangoon, Burma)

My first evening in Yangon I stupidly forgot my umbrella. Actually it was worse than that -- I remembered as I walked out of the hotel and felt the sprinkling, but as I was out of shape and staying in a windowless 4th floor walk-up, I immediately adopted a "hope for the best" attitude that went horribly, horribly wrong.

The good part of it was that I discovered that the Burmese are quite helpful and friendly and find sodden, dripping foreigners very approachable even when walking at a rapid clip. Before the rain started I was approached by only two people. The first was a very sweet girl who thought I looked confused while wandering through a temple (which I indeed was). The second was a long man who invited me to his monestary to practice English. (Is that a line? Hard to tell. He didn't look at all monklike.) After the rain, and in the dark no less, fully seven men offered assistance of various kinds (not that kind, get your mind out of the gutter). Admittedly, the first one wanted to sell me bus, train or planetickets at a markup, so he wasn't exactly The Good Samaritan. My second companion I couldn't get rid of. He saw me scurrying by and gave chase, determined to share his umbrella and make whatever conversation is possible when no language is shared. He did have some English, but not enough to understand "Why are you here" or "where are you going", so we adopted the English country village lane mode of discourse and talked about the weather. Or rather, we repeatedly exchanged exciting snippets of dialogue like:

Umbrellaboy: Rainy rainy!
Me: Yes, rain good! [I often find myself inadvertently speaking pidgin English in these situations]
Umbrellaboy: Rainy good good!

Sure, it was no My Dinner with Andre, but we were communicating, I had half an umbrella, and he was clearly thrilled to be providing it.

My next assistance came under a cement overhang, where Umbrellaboy and I paused to take a peek at my map. I had taken a somewhat circuitous route when leaving the hotel, had failed to note the address, and wasn't at all confident of my ability to find it easily during a downpour in a city with no operational streetlights. I was quite a sight by this point, hair cemented to head, clothes dripping in tandem with the raindrops, glasses uselessly opaque with fog. Apparently I wasn't as scary as I thought, as several men immediately came over to check out my map, make small talk, and give us directions. They eyed Umbrellaboy with some curiosity and I explained that I had no idea why he was following me. They accepted that without question; perhaps inexplicable whims are commonplace in Yangon.

Several blocks later another map check brought us two more helpers, a father and son who had learned English in Bombay. They examined the map and insisted guiding us personally, so I arrived back at the Daddy's Home Hotel streaming wet with three local escorts. Lord only knows what the hotel staff made of the situation. My only comment as I picked up my key at the front desk was a smiling "Forgot my umbrella!"

Copyright 2003 Katy Warren
posted by Katy at 8:56 PM

 
I'm back, and better than ever! Ok, maybe not better, but just as good as last month, and I've learned that I can live without internet access.

I'd like to wholeheartedly recommend Myanmar as a vacation destination for the more adventurous among you. You may be shaking your heads in skepticism, but it's really a great place, about which I'll tell you more over the next couple weeks. You can't expect me to write everything right off the bat, especially given how lazy I was about writing things while actually in the country and how backward the areas I'll be in over the next couple of weeks (southern Laos).

First a little background, since Myanmar hasn't exactly captured the imagination of American tourists thus far. In fact, in 4 weeks in the country I met only one other American, and she was actually living in Australia. The thing is, the only information we get about Myanmar is bad, and justifiably so since the government there is perhaps the worst in the world, or at the very least is in the top five.

So here's a pitifully brief recap of thousands of years of Burmese history, based solely on my faulty memory as I didn't bring my guidebook with me to the internet cafe. For thousands of years various kings held sway over most of Myanmar, at times stretching into present-day Thailand, and famously reducing Thailand's capital Ayuthaya to gilded rubble in the mid 1700's. The Thais are quite bitter about that little episode to this day, and the Burmese don't have very nice things to say about the Thais either. Anyway, these kings, particularly the ones during the Bagan era in the 1000's or so, cemented the hold of Theravada Buddhism over the country, but with an added animist element that gives Burmese buddhism a very different flavor than the rest of SE Asia. This is not to say that a single line of kings ruled over Myanmar for the many centuries. There was quite a bit of conflict as the various ethnic groups in the area -- Bamar (from which "Burma" was coined), Mon, Shan, Karen, etc -- fought for supremacy and control.

In the 1800's the kings got too big for their britches, moving the capital this way and that around the Mandalay area, declaring their invincibility and wasting precious resources that they should have been spending to shore up their lazy defense department in preparation for the Anglo-Burmese Wars. The British cleaned Myanmar's clock in a series of small wars, the result of which was the addition of Myanmar, renamed Burma, to the Raj, and the final movement of the capital to the previously sleepy southern delta town of Yangon, renamed Rangoon. (The British, with their legendary prowess at foreign languages, renamed every major town in the country according to the way they heard it, which of course wasn't at all close to the actual name in most cases. For especially difficult towns they just scrapped the old name altogether and replaced them with names honoring colonial officials. I can actually sympathize with this strategy, having just spent several days in Pyin Oo Lwin.)

For some years the British reigned fairly peacefully, controlling all of central and southern Myanmar and reaching agreements with the largest ethnic minorities around the edges (Shan, Karen) to allow them relative autonomy and control of their own regions. Still, the Burmese wanted out from under the Raj -- so unreasonable, all these obstreperous colonies fighting for independence. During the late 1930's General Aung San and a group of other Burmese officials went to Japan to get revolutionary training and the help of the Japanese in overthrowing the British. They played into Japanese plans, as the Japanese were eager to get a foothold in South Asia, and Myanmar would provide valuable ports and land access between SE Asia and India. It was a valuable property, and the blood flowed accordingly during WWII. It is said that nearly 2/3 of Japanese war casualties occured in Myanmar.

Though he and his army assisted the Japanese in invading Burma in 1942 and fighting against the allies until 1945, Aung San eventually saw the writing on the wall, and switched his army's allegiance to the British. In 1947, he negotiated independence from Britain and held elections. Sadly, he and six colleagues were assassinated later that year by a rival, before the country's independence went into full effect.

Despite this tragedy, Myanmar saw a few years of relative peace (in a typical tumultuous 3rd World style) until 1962, when Ne Win, a general who was not quite as committed to democracy as Aung San, staged a coup in which the parliament was disbanded and all members were summarily jailed (and remained so for 7 years). Through his "Burmese Way to Socialism" Ne Win nationalized all businesses, from the largest multinational down to the smallest fruit stall, and collectivized agriculture under the control of military members with little or no interest in the subject. Myanmar, which until 1962 had been the most prosperous country in SE Asia, began to starve.

By 1988 the situation was dire. The infrastructure was in shambles, the education system practically nonexistent, food scarce, and laws and regulations harshly enforced. Students and workers took to the street in protest, calling general strikes and demanding changes. Aung San Suu Kyi, General Aung San's daughter, led the charge, giving speeches throughout the country advocating peaceful resistance and rallying desperate citizens to the democratic cause. At first things seemed to be improving; greater press freedoms were allowed, Ne Win announced his resignation. It was a false hope, however. The old general was still pulling the strings, and at a massive demonstration in Rangoon in September 1988 the army moved in and slaughtered thousands. After touring the country to wildly enthusiastic crowds with her democracy message, Aung San Suu Kyi was placed under house arrest.

After losing the 1991 elections to the National League for Democracy (which they refused to recognize), the generals about-faced on the Burmese Way to Socialism and decided to embrace capitalism instead, slipping into bed with the Chinese and starting to ship Myanmar's natural resources (teak, rubies, jade, heroin) out through its northern border. The Democracy Movement continues to this day, and as recently as 3 months ago a demonstration was brutally supressed by the regime, with up to 200 beaten to death by stick-wielding thugs dressed as monks. Aung San Suu Kyi was arrested again, and has not been seen since that day.

Copyright 2003 Katy Warren

posted by Katy at 9:19 PM

 
After two months in Thailand (where did the time go? I really only intended to spend a few weeks here) I'm heading to Rangoon, Burma (or Yangon, Myanmar as they now call it) tomorrow. Since I won't have any internet access there, I won't be back here until then end of August, so check in then!
posted by Katy at 12:08 AM

 
Tham Lot, Thailand

I will never be a birdwatcher.

Let me be clear that this implies no criticism of birdwatchers. I admire their zeal, patience and general eccentricity, character traits I admire no matter what the obsession. In my case, although I posess zeal and eccentricity in some abundance, it's patience that I utterly lack. This was made glaringly clear as I visited Tham Lot Cave, a place where there are (reportedly) seriously impressive bird-related sights for the patient watcher.

There are actually three things that draw tourists to Tham Lot. That's not to say that there are alot of tourists there -- it's not exactly in the itinerary of most visitors to Thailand, and while it's not remote, exactly, it's also not the simplest place to get to, located as it is 7 miles up a windy disintegrating mountain road from a fairly minor village along the northern highway. Once you get there, you have a choice of two guesthouses and there's really no other accomodation or indeed restaurant options unless you head back to the highway. Fortunately the guesthouses that do exist are delightful.

But I digress. The three tourist draws are the birds (of which there were 187 listed on a series of posters at Cave Lodge, including the Red Whiskered Bulbul, the Chestnut-headed Bee-eater, and the White-rumped Sharma); the scenery and villages to which you can hike; and Tham Lot itself. "Tham" in Thai means "cave", and if there's any accuracy to Thai nomenclature, "Lot" ought to mean "humongous and unbearably stinky".

A visit to the Tham Lot cave takes over an hour and requires a guide with a very powerful lantern. This place was big, confusing, and had caverns on multiple levels reached by climbing alarmingly steep wooden staircases. And did I mention the river? You can actually raft or kayak through the whole thing. We walked through the first couple of caverns then hopped on a bamboo raft to get the full effect, with the poor driver actually pushing the raft from behind and helpfully pointing his flashlight at the ceiling whenever there was a particularly large bat community gathered. My verdict -- bats make annoying squeaky noises and they don't exactly smell like a flower garden.

You may think that I have once again digressed from my original point (birdwatching, in case you've forgotten), but in fact I have not, I am right on top of things here. Because we cleverly timed our little trip to the cave to coincide with another major tourist attraction -- the nightly return of thousands of swifts to this very cave. As our bamboo raft approached the downstream exit of Tham Lot, it became increasingly obvious that while the bat-only sections of the cave were no walk in a perfume factory, they were a veritable paradise compared to the caverns in which the swifts nested. Holy mother of pearl, was it awful. Seriously, the stench was so powerful in some places we began to debate the necessity of breathing. The distasteful aspects of this were compounded as we began exploring this final cavern with our guide, and realized that despite the uneven ground we could touch absolutely nothing. Every surface, including the stairs and their potentially life-saving railings, were encased in a toxic paste made of guano and feathers. After an interesting, if icky, tour of nearby caves in which the coffins of ancient civilizations remain, we returned to the cave opening for 10 minutes of deep breathing and yet another personal vow to avoid all caves, no matter how impressive. Unless gas masks and tanks of lilac-scented oxygen are distributed at the entrance.

OK, you've been very patient, and this is where I explain why I could never be a birdwatcher. We were told (misinformed) by our guide that the swifts would be flying in at 6 pm, which would translate into a perfectly doable 15 minutes wait. Thirty minutes later and there were still only a couple hundred swifts flying around and cruelly teasing us by having one or two peel off and jet into the cave every so often. A multi-family group of Dutch tourists arrived and reported that the real swift ETA was 6:30. So we waited. Mind you, I had no book with me due to my previous sodden experience with bamboo rafts. I suppose it's conceivable that I could be a birdwatcher if I could spend the majority of the downtime with a good book, but I'm thinking that birdwatching most likely requires "watching". By 6:30 I was pretty board with staring at the sky.

At 6:35 we started to get some real action. Hundreds of birds swirled and darted around in the darkening sky outside the cave entrance It was controlled chaos, as if they were preparing to form into a "he went thataway" arrow to tip off Elmer Fudd as to Bugs Bunny's whereabouts. Soon groups started swooping into the cave, and let me just say that these birds are well named. They're amazing flyers, are extremely quick and can practically make 90 degree turns. It really was fun to watch.

AS entertaining as it was, after 15 minutes of staring I felt I had the gist of it and was quite ready to head back to Cave Lodge for dinner and a big icy Beer Chang. We had been standing in the opening of this stinky cave for over an hour, and apparently the American couple I went with shared my attention span issues. As we approached the end of the path to the parking lot we crossed a bridge from which we could see our original upstream cave entrance, and were informed by more lounging Dutchmen that at any moment thousands more birds would arrive from their workday in Burma and simultaneously go home to roost with National Geographic quality precision and scope. So we sat down again to wait.

At this point, a true birdwatcher would have had no problem waiting for the Burmese contingent. After all, this is probably a pretty impressive bird sight, and the description of it sounds pretty cool for sure. I, on the other hand, was very figety, and had a great deal of trouble keeping my mind off my impending sweat-and-guano-removing shower and chicken coconut curry. So we left. Yes, we left with perhaps only minutes to wait for the amazing onslaught of Burmese swifts.

I am a bad tourist, and a worse birdwatcher, but the curry was fantastic, and the Beer Chang really hit the spot.


Copyright 2003 Katy Warren


posted by Katy at 1:16 AM

 
Mae Hong Son, Thailand

One thing I did not do while in Mae Hong Son was to visit the "Long-Neck Villages", villages of Karen Paduang refugees from burma who, as you may have seen in National Geographic or the like, wear gold rings (or actually one very long coil) around their necks. In actuality their necks do not lengthen, but since the rings depress their shoulders, collarbone and ribcage it looks that way.

Though these villages are quite a tourist attraction around here for both foreigners and Thais, I avoided it. The long-neck tradition was one which, no doubt thankfully for the health and daily comfort of these women, was dying out somewhat during the 20th century. It has been revived for tourism purposes and these villages come across as human zoos -- there are large walls surrounding them, you pay your $8 (foreigners pay only) to enter, and you can take photos of any and all exhibits, AKA women.

The issue is not black and white, of course. While in Thailand I read an article in the Bangkok Post in which some of these women convincingly assert that their life is better than when they were poor farmers fighting against the Burmese government. Getting your picture taken and selling souvenirs all day is certainly a less strenuous life than working in the rice paddies. On the other hand, there have been cases of Thais entering Burma to kidnap long-neck women from the interior in order to showcase them here in the border villages. For me, the whole thing just drew a big red line under my qualms about tribal tourism, and I don't need to promote this most egregious example.

Hmm, I see that I just wrote three paragraphs on something I didn't see while traveling in Asia. Really, I probably could have written a whole travel book from the comfort of my apartment in Seattle.

Copyright 2003 Katy Warren
posted by Katy at 10:18 PM

 
Mae Hong Son, Thailand

Mae Hong Son, the capital of Thailand's northwesternmost (is that a word?) province of the same name, has more tourists than Mae Sariang, but it's still very quiet in the off-season. It's in a typically lovely mountain valley with a wat up on a hill to which you can climb. I did, sweating off two pounds in the process, and the views were spectacular.

In order to see a bit of the countryside around Mae Hong Son, I rented a motorbike. Using the feeble photocopied hand-drawn map given to me upon arrival at the bus station on my first day, my aim was to visit Mae Aw, a Kuomintang village atop a mountain not far from the Burmese border.

Now, I'm embarassed to admit that I don't know thing one about the KMT, and my visit to the village did nothing to correct my ignorance. After a couple hours of gorgeous scenery and nervewrackingly steep uphill driving (made challenging by the crappy powerless motorbike I rented), I arrived in a village with practically no people. Sure there was the usual complement of kids playing in the roadand women observing from their porches. But sadly, during my brief visit I witnessed no aging revolutionaries drinking Thai whisky and reminiscing over the glory days of their misspent youth. Today Mae Aw (whose Thai name, Ban _____, amusingly means \'Thai Lovers Village') is pretty much the same as all other fairly prosperous Northern Thai mountain villages -- lots of young families, wooden houses and farmers.

On my way up to Mae Aw I visited another impressive waterfall, Pha Sua. Happily, I made it up and down this trail without encasing myself in mud. My way back down the mountain was decidely wet, so I detoured onto a side road in the hopes of finding a shelter from the deluge. After waiting out the worst of the flood I found myself at some sort of botanical gardents. According to my makeshift map I was at some sort of Summer Palace, but as there were no signs in English, no tourists, no English speakers and no palace in sight, I can't be sure that was my actual location. What it looked like was a beautifully manicured park, with gazebos and meeting areas, large greenhouses full of flowers and plants, and a rose garden atop a hill. I wandered in solitude for a while, responding to workiers who would call out "Hello Foreigner" in Thai, then headed back to the motorbike.

My final stop of the day was Tham Pla National Park, more commonly known as Fish Cave. This was not a cave I had to walk into, thankfully, but a truly weird cave into which hundreds of giant carp faught to enter. The streeam ran out of the cave, and in a couple of spots there were holes in the rock where you could look down and see the carp struggling upstream into the dark, ten deep as they struggled for position. Tourists, or rather "tourist", since I was the only one there, drop in bags of fruit and seeds and watch the fish go insane.

Well that's it for Mae Hong Son. A bit boring in the telling, I realize, but I can't always have exciting adventures.

Copyright 2003 Katy Warren
posted by Katy at 9:59 PM