So we walked down to see the parade. When we got there, an all-girls Catholic school was marching, all dressed in matching red sweaters and each with a yellow balloon tied to her wrist. And they kept coming and coming, getting progressively younger and shorter, until all you could see from one end of the street to the other was a sloped carpet of bobbing yellow and red. An unexpected way to start our vacation.
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Yellow balloons in Cuenca
Woke up Saturday morning to the sounds of a marching band outside our hotel room. We'd been upgraded (just because) to one of the best suites in the Hotel Santa Lucia, housed in an 18th century mansion in the center of Cuenca's old city. I swung the wooden doors to the balcony open, stepped out, and saw a parade passing by the adjacent block.
Sunday, January 10, 2010
Hiking on a honeymoon
January 10, 2010 In an incredibly luxurious boutique hotel called La Sireneuse. Very romantic. On Tuesday hiked for seven hours on glacier Perito Moreno. On Wednesday hiked seven hours in El Chalten. On Thursday hiked ten hours in El Chalten, including a difficult trek up to the base of Cerro Fitz Roy to see the Laguna de Los Tres Madres, a glacier fed lake. Blustery, rainy conditions, very challenging. It made getting to the lake feel special. When we finally got there, windblown and chilled to the bone, Courtney and I huddled behind a rock and ate our cheese and lettuce sandwiches, washed down with some of the clearest water I've ever had, fresh from the glacial lake.
Friday we traveled to Bariloche, and yesterday we walked around the area where we're staying. Fabulous meals here in Bariloche, great wine. This is the romantic part of the honeymoon. Fluffy robes and puffy duvets. Champagne, cherries, and a jacuzzi. How nice it is to be pampered.
Friday we traveled to Bariloche, and yesterday we walked around the area where we're staying. Fabulous meals here in Bariloche, great wine. This is the romantic part of the honeymoon. Fluffy robes and puffy duvets. Champagne, cherries, and a jacuzzi. How nice it is to be pampered.
To El Calafate
January 4, 2010 Travel day to El Calafate, in preparation for our big trek on the glacier tomorrow. Sitting in a cafe, writing this. Courtney across from me reading. I have a new hat. Glacier, here we come!
Chocolate eclairs and kosher steak
January 3, 2010 Went to the San Telmo fair and the Malbec museum. More ice cream, more kosher meat. We have meat coming out of our nostrils. I've eaten steak for the first time in years, and I think I can last a few years more now. Unintentional aversion therapy. When I was a kid, I would beg my mother for chocolate eclairs, and finally, so sick of my constant demands, she got me a bakers dozen and told me to have as many as I want. I ate all of them, and felt so ill I wanted to crawl into a hole and disappear. Haven't had a chocolate eclair since.
Went to a great local restaurant. We were too late to sit down, but ordered empañadas to go, and then ate them on the street, in the rain. Soooo good. Our best food experience so far.
Went to a great local restaurant. We were too late to sit down, but ordered empañadas to go, and then ate them on the street, in the rain. Soooo good. Our best food experience so far.
Meat and milongas
January 2, 2010 Had an uneventful Shabbat day. Went to an uncharacteristically unfriendly Chabad for services, then napped and wandered around the neighborhood we were staying in, Palermo Soho. An interesting neighborhood, trying hard to live up to its namesake. There's even a restaurant called Mott. It's a convincing facsimile, though it felt a little silly for us to be there, since the real thing is just a subway ride away.
That evening we finally satisfied Courtney's craving for a good steak. Went to El Gallope, a kosher parillo, or steak-joint, recommended by a friend back in New York. It's a no-frills place - you order a steak, you get a steak, and nothing else. But man, what a steak. And a very good kosher wine: Tariag. For a full cup of mitzvahs. No kidding. But the malbec was excellent.
Jones satisfied, we then went in search of Tango. We wanted to avoid the glitzy shows with tourists bussed in and out, and instead found a local Milonga, or dance hall, to attend. We got there at one in the morning, and the floor was packed, with lots of talented dancers. There was a good mix of couples dancing exclusively with each other and singles asking each other to dance. Fun to watch the dynamics -- how the men asked the women to dance, how people approached each other, seeing chemistry fail or succeed. The dancers were wonderful, ranging in age from early twenties to late seventies and beyond. A beautiful thing to do on a honeymoon.
That evening we finally satisfied Courtney's craving for a good steak. Went to El Gallope, a kosher parillo, or steak-joint, recommended by a friend back in New York. It's a no-frills place - you order a steak, you get a steak, and nothing else. But man, what a steak. And a very good kosher wine: Tariag. For a full cup of mitzvahs. No kidding. But the malbec was excellent.
Jones satisfied, we then went in search of Tango. We wanted to avoid the glitzy shows with tourists bussed in and out, and instead found a local Milonga, or dance hall, to attend. We got there at one in the morning, and the floor was packed, with lots of talented dancers. There was a good mix of couples dancing exclusively with each other and singles asking each other to dance. Fun to watch the dynamics -- how the men asked the women to dance, how people approached each other, seeing chemistry fail or succeed. The dancers were wonderful, ranging in age from early twenties to late seventies and beyond. A beautiful thing to do on a honeymoon.
Ministry of special cases
January 1, 2010 - Went to the Recoletta Cemetery and stumbled upon a good tour guide giving a walking tour of the area, which we happily joined. His English was excellent and the tour well organized and thought through. He would talk about the dirty war and then share his own stories of witnessing kidnappings as they happened. Reminded me of talking with Cambodians about the rule of the Khmer Rouge, which happened around the same time. The scale of the murder in Argentina wasn't as large, but for those touched by it, the wounds are as fresh.
Takeaways from the walking tour: Argentinian politicians are crooks, only a fool keeps their savings in an Argentinian bank, and the country's recent history is alternately a tragedy and a farce.
Courtney talks a lot about Nathan Englander's Ministry of Special Cases, which she finished reading just before we came to the country. It's about a Jewish family during the Dirty War, and lots of the book's period details keep popping up on our tours here. For example, mothers and their murdered children, the significance of cemeteries, and nose jobs. Nose jobs are important in the book, and to hear people tell it, plastic surgery is quite common still today.
Ate more ice cream. Freddos, a small chain of ice cream places that has since been superseded by Persiccos and Una Altra Volta as the it places for a good scoop. But the original isn't fading away, and the one we went to outside of the Recoletta cemetary had a 15 minute line.
Afterwards, went in search of some restaurants that had been recommended. Note to self: things close on New Year's day, especially in Buenos Aires. I felt like we were in some dystopian last-person-on-earth film, walking around that city. Not a soul to be seen for blocks on end.
Went to shul Friday night at Bet Hillel, the congregation where a specific style of musical, celebratory services in the Conservative movement got started. If you go on Friday night to B'nai Jeshurun on the Upper West Side, which unitl recently had an Argentinian head rabbi, you will see a very similar service. Nice service, though both of us fell asleep during the sermon -- Spanish is a very soothing sounding language when you can't really follow what's being said. As we left, we encountered another American couple, from the bay area, who, as we talked with them, revealed that they were also on their honeymoon, and had gotten married the same day as we did.
We hung out with them all evening, a very serendipitous meeting, and a nice start to Shabbat.
Takeaways from the walking tour: Argentinian politicians are crooks, only a fool keeps their savings in an Argentinian bank, and the country's recent history is alternately a tragedy and a farce.
Courtney talks a lot about Nathan Englander's Ministry of Special Cases, which she finished reading just before we came to the country. It's about a Jewish family during the Dirty War, and lots of the book's period details keep popping up on our tours here. For example, mothers and their murdered children, the significance of cemeteries, and nose jobs. Nose jobs are important in the book, and to hear people tell it, plastic surgery is quite common still today.
Ate more ice cream. Freddos, a small chain of ice cream places that has since been superseded by Persiccos and Una Altra Volta as the it places for a good scoop. But the original isn't fading away, and the one we went to outside of the Recoletta cemetary had a 15 minute line.
Afterwards, went in search of some restaurants that had been recommended. Note to self: things close on New Year's day, especially in Buenos Aires. I felt like we were in some dystopian last-person-on-earth film, walking around that city. Not a soul to be seen for blocks on end.
Went to shul Friday night at Bet Hillel, the congregation where a specific style of musical, celebratory services in the Conservative movement got started. If you go on Friday night to B'nai Jeshurun on the Upper West Side, which unitl recently had an Argentinian head rabbi, you will see a very similar service. Nice service, though both of us fell asleep during the sermon -- Spanish is a very soothing sounding language when you can't really follow what's being said. As we left, we encountered another American couple, from the bay area, who, as we talked with them, revealed that they were also on their honeymoon, and had gotten married the same day as we did.
We hung out with them all evening, a very serendipitous meeting, and a nice start to Shabbat.
New Year's eve in Buenos Aires
My most vivid image from our first day in Argentina, which happened to coincide with the last day of 2009, was of calendar pages. At around 4 pm on New Years Eve, Courtney and I were walking through Buenos Aires' famous Plaza del Mayo, where Evita and Juan Peron would whip crowds of supporters into a frenzy. As we wandered the neighborhood, the streets were abandoned, and papers were littered everywhere, as if we'd just missed a ticker tape parade. It wasn't until Courtney looked closer that we saw most of the papers were calendar pages, small and thin, the kind you might find in a cheap desk calendar.
We had come to the plaza to see the vigil of the Mothers of the Disappeared, a group of women whose children are among the 30,000 people kidnapped, tortured and killed during Argentina's "Dirty War" in the late 1970s. Since 1977, they have come to the plaza every Thursday at 3:30 p.m., initially to march in protest, and recently to hold a silent vigil in rememberance. We got there late, too late for the vigil, but we did see the mothers schmoozing and hugging their supporters. Courtney commented that it felt like we were crashing a family get together.
Later, we walked behind the Pink House, where the president holds office, to the river behind it, and wandered down to the Punta de la Mujere, a Calatravi designed (and donated) pedestrian bridge that is supposed to suggest the gestures of the tango, but made me think of the sails of a boat. The structure is so graceful and thin, it seems like it might catch the wind and start floating down the river alongside the boats.
It was on the shore of the river that Courtney and I had our first encounter with one of the most important attractions in Buenos Aires: the helado, or ice cream. With all the people who had recommended it to us, we had decided (without actually discussing the matter, because some decisions are so obvious they make themselves) that our honeymoon would double as an ice cream tour. In our four days in Buenos Aires we were destined to have helado at least once a day, if not twice, and always at a different store. The verdict (so far): Freddo's Tramontana beats all comers, but Persicco's powerful mint chocolate chip/coffe double scoop comes in a close second.
To celebrate the new year, we ate more ice cream, then took the recommendation of our concierge and went to a restaurant that turned out to be pretty mediocre. But we sat next to a couple of porteños (natives of Buenos Aires) who made the evening more interesting. The man, in his twenties, was short and thickly muscled, with slicked back hair and a tight shirt unbuttoned to his sternum. Across from him was a woman old enough to be his mother. Actually, we found out, it was his mother, and he turned out to be a sweet, gentle soul. As Courtney pointed out, there's definitely an Argentinian machismo and ego to his style, but there's also a family-oriented welcoming instinct that he embodied as well. When new year came, everybody got up and started dancing, and this guy went to every individual in the restaurant and kissed him or her on the cheek. He's fairly upper class (he works in his father's shippings business and speaks French, Russian, English, Spanish,German, and Portugese), but still seemed representative of this odd combination of egotism and friendliness that runs through Argentinian society.
Afterwards, Courtney and I went on the roof deck and danced into the morning to music and fireworks.
We had come to the plaza to see the vigil of the Mothers of the Disappeared, a group of women whose children are among the 30,000 people kidnapped, tortured and killed during Argentina's "Dirty War" in the late 1970s. Since 1977, they have come to the plaza every Thursday at 3:30 p.m., initially to march in protest, and recently to hold a silent vigil in rememberance. We got there late, too late for the vigil, but we did see the mothers schmoozing and hugging their supporters. Courtney commented that it felt like we were crashing a family get together.
Later, we walked behind the Pink House, where the president holds office, to the river behind it, and wandered down to the Punta de la Mujere, a Calatravi designed (and donated) pedestrian bridge that is supposed to suggest the gestures of the tango, but made me think of the sails of a boat. The structure is so graceful and thin, it seems like it might catch the wind and start floating down the river alongside the boats.
It was on the shore of the river that Courtney and I had our first encounter with one of the most important attractions in Buenos Aires: the helado, or ice cream. With all the people who had recommended it to us, we had decided (without actually discussing the matter, because some decisions are so obvious they make themselves) that our honeymoon would double as an ice cream tour. In our four days in Buenos Aires we were destined to have helado at least once a day, if not twice, and always at a different store. The verdict (so far): Freddo's Tramontana beats all comers, but Persicco's powerful mint chocolate chip/coffe double scoop comes in a close second.
To celebrate the new year, we ate more ice cream, then took the recommendation of our concierge and went to a restaurant that turned out to be pretty mediocre. But we sat next to a couple of porteños (natives of Buenos Aires) who made the evening more interesting. The man, in his twenties, was short and thickly muscled, with slicked back hair and a tight shirt unbuttoned to his sternum. Across from him was a woman old enough to be his mother. Actually, we found out, it was his mother, and he turned out to be a sweet, gentle soul. As Courtney pointed out, there's definitely an Argentinian machismo and ego to his style, but there's also a family-oriented welcoming instinct that he embodied as well. When new year came, everybody got up and started dancing, and this guy went to every individual in the restaurant and kissed him or her on the cheek. He's fairly upper class (he works in his father's shippings business and speaks French, Russian, English, Spanish,German, and Portugese), but still seemed representative of this odd combination of egotism and friendliness that runs through Argentinian society.
Afterwards, Courtney and I went on the roof deck and danced into the morning to music and fireworks.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
To Sen Monorom
I'm sitting in a cracked, faded, blue plastic chair on the side of an anonymous road in Eastern Cambodia, stewing. I'm on my way to Sen Monorom, a distant city in the hills of the Mondulkiri district, and the bus that was supposed to pick me up is now three hours late. Lonely Planet compares Sen Monorom to Wales with fewer trees and more sun. It's supposed to be beautiful and not yet overrun by tourists, though that last part will change once the new road linking it to Phnom Penh is finished. But for now, with construction still under way, it remains an unspoiled little spot off the tourist track.
Way off the tourist track, as I'm discovering. My back's been killing me lately, so I brought a ticket on a big, comfy, tourist bus, as opposed to finding someone on my own to take me in the back of a pickup truck. I didn't realize (and wasn't told) that taking the tourist bus involved a layover. When the second bus finally picks me up, I'm in a foul mood, taking little comfort in the cushy seats and air conditioning. I've spent the last four hours wishing I'd found a pickup. My mood improves when we hit the dirt road, though. I imagine sitting in the back of a truck eating all that dust, and I decide that, even with a four hour wait, I'm happier where I am.
Then it starts raining. My first thought is that I'm happy to be dry. But the rain starts making the road slick, and now that we're getting into hill country, the road is getting narrow and steep. Ahead of us, a van is stuck going up a hill, and we have to stop behind it. The van spins and spins its wheels, getting nowhere. The driver turns off the bus, opens the door, and he and the conductor get out to help push the van.
They don't do much good, and soon some other Cambodian riders get out to join them. Unusually, this tourist bus has more locals (about 20) than tourists (7). The folks pushing the van don't have much success, and I go out as well. The rain is a light, persistent drizzle, not so terrible to be in, but it is turning the ground into an increasingly wet mud. My boots sink a little with each step as I walk in the rain. I love my boots deeply, if for nothing else than their trade name: Waffle Stompers. I've had them for fifteen years, and it shows. I start to feel mud seeping in through the deep cracks in the soles.
A group of eight of us are starting to make some progress with the van, but it's slow going. Every time we manage to give it some forward momentum, it goes about ten feet and then gets stuck again. Eventually, though, we get it to a point where the road is just slightly less mushy, and it manages to get up a bit of the way on its own power. I get back on the bus and it starts trying to get up the same path.
The bus is having a harder time on the road than the van. The huge wheels make a distinct whirring sound as they spin fruitlessly against the mud. I glance out the front window, and notice something strange: the road is moving sideways. The road's only supposed to move sideways out the side window. I turn to the side window and see the road coming forwards, and I realize the bus is sliding sideways and backwards down the hill.
I'm not the only one who figures this out. Soon, mostly everyone is outside, standing in the rain and watching the bus fishtail back and forth across the road. There's a deep, steep dropoff on either side of the road, so standing in the rain seems like a much better option than risking one's life in the bus. People are recruited to start pushing the bus, and soon most of the passengers are grouped around the huge behemoth trying to coax it further up the hill. All the spinning wheels and non-stop drizzle has turned the road to mush, and our efforts feel increasingly futile. It's starting to become apparent that the chances of this bus getting over the hill are slim to none.
The tourists start talking to each other about alternate plans. Unfortunately, none of us speak Cambodian, and none of the Cambodians speak English. We have no idea how far we are from Sen Monorom. Somehow, a figure of 15 km comes out as our distance from the city, and though we can't figure out who actually said that's how far away we are, we soon come to accept it as a fact and start discussing how long it would take to walk 15 kms. It's 5:30 in the afternoon, just past sunset. In an hour, it'll be pitch black.
The seven tourists divide into two camps -- the keep-pushing camp (all men) and the start-walking camp (all women). I want to stick with the bus and keep pushing, along with Richard and Hugo, two tall, thin, bearded backpackers, British and French respectively. In the hoofing it camp are two Frenchwomen, Julie and Emilie, and an Irish woman named Jo. Jean, a Chinese tourist, is keeping neutral.
The men resume their pushing, but the whole thing is becoming ridiculous, and as the bus starts sliding back towards the edge of the road, dangerous. The women have given up on us and are watching all this from under a tree at the top of the hill.
Way off the tourist track, as I'm discovering. My back's been killing me lately, so I brought a ticket on a big, comfy, tourist bus, as opposed to finding someone on my own to take me in the back of a pickup truck. I didn't realize (and wasn't told) that taking the tourist bus involved a layover. When the second bus finally picks me up, I'm in a foul mood, taking little comfort in the cushy seats and air conditioning. I've spent the last four hours wishing I'd found a pickup. My mood improves when we hit the dirt road, though. I imagine sitting in the back of a truck eating all that dust, and I decide that, even with a four hour wait, I'm happier where I am.
Then it starts raining. My first thought is that I'm happy to be dry. But the rain starts making the road slick, and now that we're getting into hill country, the road is getting narrow and steep. Ahead of us, a van is stuck going up a hill, and we have to stop behind it. The van spins and spins its wheels, getting nowhere. The driver turns off the bus, opens the door, and he and the conductor get out to help push the van.
They don't do much good, and soon some other Cambodian riders get out to join them. Unusually, this tourist bus has more locals (about 20) than tourists (7). The folks pushing the van don't have much success, and I go out as well. The rain is a light, persistent drizzle, not so terrible to be in, but it is turning the ground into an increasingly wet mud. My boots sink a little with each step as I walk in the rain. I love my boots deeply, if for nothing else than their trade name: Waffle Stompers. I've had them for fifteen years, and it shows. I start to feel mud seeping in through the deep cracks in the soles.
A group of eight of us are starting to make some progress with the van, but it's slow going. Every time we manage to give it some forward momentum, it goes about ten feet and then gets stuck again. Eventually, though, we get it to a point where the road is just slightly less mushy, and it manages to get up a bit of the way on its own power. I get back on the bus and it starts trying to get up the same path.
The bus is having a harder time on the road than the van. The huge wheels make a distinct whirring sound as they spin fruitlessly against the mud. I glance out the front window, and notice something strange: the road is moving sideways. The road's only supposed to move sideways out the side window. I turn to the side window and see the road coming forwards, and I realize the bus is sliding sideways and backwards down the hill.
I'm not the only one who figures this out. Soon, mostly everyone is outside, standing in the rain and watching the bus fishtail back and forth across the road. There's a deep, steep dropoff on either side of the road, so standing in the rain seems like a much better option than risking one's life in the bus. People are recruited to start pushing the bus, and soon most of the passengers are grouped around the huge behemoth trying to coax it further up the hill. All the spinning wheels and non-stop drizzle has turned the road to mush, and our efforts feel increasingly futile. It's starting to become apparent that the chances of this bus getting over the hill are slim to none.
The tourists start talking to each other about alternate plans. Unfortunately, none of us speak Cambodian, and none of the Cambodians speak English. We have no idea how far we are from Sen Monorom. Somehow, a figure of 15 km comes out as our distance from the city, and though we can't figure out who actually said that's how far away we are, we soon come to accept it as a fact and start discussing how long it would take to walk 15 kms. It's 5:30 in the afternoon, just past sunset. In an hour, it'll be pitch black.
The seven tourists divide into two camps -- the keep-pushing camp (all men) and the start-walking camp (all women). I want to stick with the bus and keep pushing, along with Richard and Hugo, two tall, thin, bearded backpackers, British and French respectively. In the hoofing it camp are two Frenchwomen, Julie and Emilie, and an Irish woman named Jo. Jean, a Chinese tourist, is keeping neutral.
The men resume their pushing, but the whole thing is becoming ridiculous, and as the bus starts sliding back towards the edge of the road, dangerous. The women have given up on us and are watching all this from under a tree at the top of the hill.
The mud is unbelievable. Most of the roads seem to be manmade, huge hills of dirt that have been piled up by the tractors and bulldozers we occasionally see as we trudge along. The persistent drizzle is returning the hills to their primordial state -- my feet sink deep into the road with every step, and when I try to lift them up, there's a sucking sound as the mud tries to pull them back down. Richard and Hugo are walking barefoot now, because the mud kept sucking the sandals off their feet.
As night falls, even the die hards are forced to give up on the idea of getting this bus anywhere. Even if we could get over this hill, there's another one after that, and a further one beyond. We get back on the now still bus and consider our options. The bus has become a damp, humid, mud-soaked nightmare -- nobody wants to sleep there. We could wait for the next 4x4 vehicle to come through and try to hitch a ride, except that not a single car has come by us in the hour we've been stuck. The roads behind us have probably become as impassable as the roads ahead. Or we could try walking.
Walking it ultimately is. All the tourists have backpacks except Jean, who has a wheeled suitcase that's handy in an airport but utterly useless here. A monk from the bus, wearing nothing but his saffron sarong, quietly comes up beside Jean, lifts her suitcase onto his shoulder, and starts walking with her. I pair up with Jo, the Irish woman, and a Cambodian father follows slightly behind us, his two-year old son perched on his shoulders.
I start going over all the technology I somehow felt obliged to carry with me: plug adaptor, cell phone, iPod, 3 different power cables, electric shaver, USB keys, and worst offender of all, my 35 mm SLR digital camera. Not to mention more books than I need. On a sunny day the weight makes me feel like I'm trudging through molasses. Now that I actually am trudging through something like molasses, I yearn for cement.
The rain is light but constant, and the road is slick and unpredictable. It is soon dark, and I pull out my flashlight and light the way for the four of us. Jo and I share backgrounds and travel stories as we walk. The stories seem distant, even a little surreal, as we walk through the rain and mud.
There are insects everywhere, a constant flow of them around the group of us. They're drawn to our flashlights and they create a small cloud around each group. It makes me think of Pigpen from Peanuts.
My backpack is, at this point, wrenching my body with every step. Jo and I have lost track of the rest of the crowd -- we think everyone's gone ahead of us, though the Cambodian father and son have stayed with us. We occasionally pass another car that has given up driving, with its residents huddled together. We also sometimes pass construction vehicles with the crew ensconced inside.
After an hour, we very suddenly come upon the entire busload of people grouped together near a massive tractor. Apparently, they've collectively given up on walking to the nearby town, and have regrouped to figure out what's next. I decide that I can't take one more step with my backpack on and so I knock on the door of the tractor to see if the driver will let some of us sleep there for the evening. Eventually, we get him to let Jo, Julie and Emilie in, and I abandon my backpack under the tractor. The women promise to deliver it to me when we all safely (we hope) arrive in Sen Monorom tomorrow.
The rest of us, lacking any better plan, continue walking, a little over twenty people in all. We go for about twenty minutes when, miraculously, two bright lights come shining through the rain from behind us. We all stop and wait as the lights come closer, eventually revealing themselves to be connected to a new, beautiful, heroically huge four wheel drive truck easily making its way up the hill. The flatbed is completely empty, and the driver seems to be happy to let us all pile on board with our luggage. I didn't know twenty people could fit into the back of a truck, but you learn something new every day. It's insanely packed. There's nothing to hold onto if you're in the center -- the only thing keeping you stable is the press of the other people around you. I think about what it's going to be like with the truck bouncing and sliding through the mud. From somewhere inside the pile of people, the two year old boy that had ridden his father's shoulder next to me and Jo for the last hour starts to cry, and I wonder if I had a two year old whether I'd let him be on that truck, or whether I'd get into it myself if I had a two year old waiting for me at home. Looking at it from that perspective, I decide it's better to walk.
To the bewilderment of pretty much everyone, I extract myself from the pile and hop back into the mud. The truck starts off, and I walk after it, watching it go up one hill, then another, and then another, getting smaller and dimmer, until it goes over the highest hill and its red tail lights blink into oblivion. I hold my hand to my face to see if I can see it, but I can't. I start to wonder if maybe I made a mistake.
But at least I have my flashlight and no backpack to weigh me down. I start walking and soon discover something new about the distribution of insects around light. There are, it would seem, a finite number of gnats, mites, mosquitos and the like, and they apparently distribute themselves evenly around light sources in a given area. So if you have, say, 20 people spread out along a road with a bunch of flashlights, then the bugs aren't so bothersome. But if there's only one light source around for kilometers, they swarm.
The bugs are soon clouded around me as dense as rain, and then denser. They carpet on my neck, down my shirt, on my face. I try wiping them from my lips, but it's like trying to use a windshield wiper in a monsoon.
So I orient myself on the road, turn off my flashlight, and start walking in the darkness. It seems like the only reasonable thing I can do. I figure I can briefly turn the flashlight on every five minutes or so to orient myself and then hope that nothing trips me up along the way.
It's slow going. It feels like the longer I spend between flashlight blasts, the faster I go, so I start stretching out my time in the dark. But I also find that my imagination starts working overtime on what might be waiting in the dark. Are there bears in Cambodia, I wonder? Do they go out in the rain? How about tigers? Is there such a thing as rain ants? Visions of horrific deaths start coming into my head -- prolonged maulings, horrific vivisections, so many different ways of getting eaten alive. And underneath it all, a recurring worry that's the only realistic concern of the bunch -- I wonder how long my flashlight batteries can last.
After about thirty minutes of this, I've worked myself into quite a frothy terror, so that when I hear voices singing from the bottom of a hill, I literally start running towards them. I step down the hill and my legs sink into the dirt up to my calves. I half walk, half slide down the hill. It's probably a Cambodian construction crew settling down for the night.
I get there and find three Cambodians who have carefully set up a series of hammocks one directly above each other, allowing all of them to barely fit into the compartment of a small bulldozer. I gesture to them that I'd like to join them in the compartment. They mime back to me: fat chance. I somehow manage to mime to them the extent of my terror and desperation, and they take pity. One of them hops down and leads me to an even smaller bulldozer with a tiny, one-person driving cabin. I climb up the ladder, pop open the door, and climb into the driver's seat. Even with the door open, it smells overwhelmingly of vinyl. The kind Cambodian smiles at me, shuts the door, and walks away. In about thirty seconds I feel like I'm in a vinyl sauna -- I'm quickly drenched in plastic-smelling sweat.
I open the door to try to cool things down, but as soon as I do the light in the cabin pops on and the bugs start coming. I can't win for losing. Then I see it -- at the top of the hill, in the distance, a moving pair of bright lights. It's going in the oposite direction that I want, back towards the bus, but I don't care. I scramble down the ladder and sprint towards the hill. There's no traction on the hill, so the only way to scale it is to claw my way up on all fours, sending clumps of mud cascading behind me as I pull myself along at a maddeningly slow pace. All the time, I'm glancing up, watching the lights getting closer and closer. If I don't catch this truck, I think, I'm just totally screwed.
I finally heave myself onto the road when the truck is only yards away. In my manic rush, I'm about to jump in front of it, waving my hands and screaming, when I remember the condition of the roads, and realize that doing so might be a bad decision. I have to hope that waving my hands and screaming will suffice.
Happily, it does. The truck skids to a halt (there's no such thing as a graceful stop in these conditions), and I run up to open the passenger door. The Cambodian in the front passenger seat turns to me and says, in perfect English, "Need a ride?"
Turns out that the truck has been sent by the bus company to pick up the passengers and their luggage. They apparently passed the other truck on the way, not realizing that it contained all the other passengers. I tell them what happened, and that the only people left to pick up are the girls camped out in the cabin of the construction truck, but they insist that they have to go to the bus. So for the next half hour we drive all the way back to the bus, fishtailing madly the entire time. When we get to the bus, no one's there, of course. On the way back we stop at the construction truck, but the girls aren't there - the driver says they flagged down another 4x4 and hitched a ride, along with my bag. So we proceed the rest of the way to Sen Monorom.
We pick up a few other random people on the way back, including a woman with a piercingly loud voice who dominates the conversation the entire way. I can't understand a word of it, though it's clear that the topic gives the woman cause for great surprise and offense. By the time I get in it's 9:30 at night. When I stumble out of the truck, my feet feel like they have ten pound weights attached to them - all the mud that had collected in them made them heavier and heavier, but I never noticed the cumulative effect. I find a hostel, and, shockingly, my bag, and am relieved beyond words to take a shower. The water in the shower turns a dark, dusty red.
The next few days in Sen Monorom are great. The seven tourists all eventually find each other and hang out in various configurations. There's nothing like trying circumstances to build friendships, nothing like a crisis to bring people together.
As night falls, even the die hards are forced to give up on the idea of getting this bus anywhere. Even if we could get over this hill, there's another one after that, and a further one beyond. We get back on the now still bus and consider our options. The bus has become a damp, humid, mud-soaked nightmare -- nobody wants to sleep there. We could wait for the next 4x4 vehicle to come through and try to hitch a ride, except that not a single car has come by us in the hour we've been stuck. The roads behind us have probably become as impassable as the roads ahead. Or we could try walking.
Walking it ultimately is. All the tourists have backpacks except Jean, who has a wheeled suitcase that's handy in an airport but utterly useless here. A monk from the bus, wearing nothing but his saffron sarong, quietly comes up beside Jean, lifts her suitcase onto his shoulder, and starts walking with her. I pair up with Jo, the Irish woman, and a Cambodian father follows slightly behind us, his two-year old son perched on his shoulders.
I start going over all the technology I somehow felt obliged to carry with me: plug adaptor, cell phone, iPod, 3 different power cables, electric shaver, USB keys, and worst offender of all, my 35 mm SLR digital camera. Not to mention more books than I need. On a sunny day the weight makes me feel like I'm trudging through molasses. Now that I actually am trudging through something like molasses, I yearn for cement.
The rain is light but constant, and the road is slick and unpredictable. It is soon dark, and I pull out my flashlight and light the way for the four of us. Jo and I share backgrounds and travel stories as we walk. The stories seem distant, even a little surreal, as we walk through the rain and mud.
There are insects everywhere, a constant flow of them around the group of us. They're drawn to our flashlights and they create a small cloud around each group. It makes me think of Pigpen from Peanuts.
My backpack is, at this point, wrenching my body with every step. Jo and I have lost track of the rest of the crowd -- we think everyone's gone ahead of us, though the Cambodian father and son have stayed with us. We occasionally pass another car that has given up driving, with its residents huddled together. We also sometimes pass construction vehicles with the crew ensconced inside.
After an hour, we very suddenly come upon the entire busload of people grouped together near a massive tractor. Apparently, they've collectively given up on walking to the nearby town, and have regrouped to figure out what's next. I decide that I can't take one more step with my backpack on and so I knock on the door of the tractor to see if the driver will let some of us sleep there for the evening. Eventually, we get him to let Jo, Julie and Emilie in, and I abandon my backpack under the tractor. The women promise to deliver it to me when we all safely (we hope) arrive in Sen Monorom tomorrow.
The rest of us, lacking any better plan, continue walking, a little over twenty people in all. We go for about twenty minutes when, miraculously, two bright lights come shining through the rain from behind us. We all stop and wait as the lights come closer, eventually revealing themselves to be connected to a new, beautiful, heroically huge four wheel drive truck easily making its way up the hill. The flatbed is completely empty, and the driver seems to be happy to let us all pile on board with our luggage. I didn't know twenty people could fit into the back of a truck, but you learn something new every day. It's insanely packed. There's nothing to hold onto if you're in the center -- the only thing keeping you stable is the press of the other people around you. I think about what it's going to be like with the truck bouncing and sliding through the mud. From somewhere inside the pile of people, the two year old boy that had ridden his father's shoulder next to me and Jo for the last hour starts to cry, and I wonder if I had a two year old whether I'd let him be on that truck, or whether I'd get into it myself if I had a two year old waiting for me at home. Looking at it from that perspective, I decide it's better to walk.
To the bewilderment of pretty much everyone, I extract myself from the pile and hop back into the mud. The truck starts off, and I walk after it, watching it go up one hill, then another, and then another, getting smaller and dimmer, until it goes over the highest hill and its red tail lights blink into oblivion. I hold my hand to my face to see if I can see it, but I can't. I start to wonder if maybe I made a mistake.
But at least I have my flashlight and no backpack to weigh me down. I start walking and soon discover something new about the distribution of insects around light. There are, it would seem, a finite number of gnats, mites, mosquitos and the like, and they apparently distribute themselves evenly around light sources in a given area. So if you have, say, 20 people spread out along a road with a bunch of flashlights, then the bugs aren't so bothersome. But if there's only one light source around for kilometers, they swarm.
The bugs are soon clouded around me as dense as rain, and then denser. They carpet on my neck, down my shirt, on my face. I try wiping them from my lips, but it's like trying to use a windshield wiper in a monsoon.
So I orient myself on the road, turn off my flashlight, and start walking in the darkness. It seems like the only reasonable thing I can do. I figure I can briefly turn the flashlight on every five minutes or so to orient myself and then hope that nothing trips me up along the way.
It's slow going. It feels like the longer I spend between flashlight blasts, the faster I go, so I start stretching out my time in the dark. But I also find that my imagination starts working overtime on what might be waiting in the dark. Are there bears in Cambodia, I wonder? Do they go out in the rain? How about tigers? Is there such a thing as rain ants? Visions of horrific deaths start coming into my head -- prolonged maulings, horrific vivisections, so many different ways of getting eaten alive. And underneath it all, a recurring worry that's the only realistic concern of the bunch -- I wonder how long my flashlight batteries can last.
After about thirty minutes of this, I've worked myself into quite a frothy terror, so that when I hear voices singing from the bottom of a hill, I literally start running towards them. I step down the hill and my legs sink into the dirt up to my calves. I half walk, half slide down the hill. It's probably a Cambodian construction crew settling down for the night.
I get there and find three Cambodians who have carefully set up a series of hammocks one directly above each other, allowing all of them to barely fit into the compartment of a small bulldozer. I gesture to them that I'd like to join them in the compartment. They mime back to me: fat chance. I somehow manage to mime to them the extent of my terror and desperation, and they take pity. One of them hops down and leads me to an even smaller bulldozer with a tiny, one-person driving cabin. I climb up the ladder, pop open the door, and climb into the driver's seat. Even with the door open, it smells overwhelmingly of vinyl. The kind Cambodian smiles at me, shuts the door, and walks away. In about thirty seconds I feel like I'm in a vinyl sauna -- I'm quickly drenched in plastic-smelling sweat.
I open the door to try to cool things down, but as soon as I do the light in the cabin pops on and the bugs start coming. I can't win for losing. Then I see it -- at the top of the hill, in the distance, a moving pair of bright lights. It's going in the oposite direction that I want, back towards the bus, but I don't care. I scramble down the ladder and sprint towards the hill. There's no traction on the hill, so the only way to scale it is to claw my way up on all fours, sending clumps of mud cascading behind me as I pull myself along at a maddeningly slow pace. All the time, I'm glancing up, watching the lights getting closer and closer. If I don't catch this truck, I think, I'm just totally screwed.
I finally heave myself onto the road when the truck is only yards away. In my manic rush, I'm about to jump in front of it, waving my hands and screaming, when I remember the condition of the roads, and realize that doing so might be a bad decision. I have to hope that waving my hands and screaming will suffice.
Happily, it does. The truck skids to a halt (there's no such thing as a graceful stop in these conditions), and I run up to open the passenger door. The Cambodian in the front passenger seat turns to me and says, in perfect English, "Need a ride?"
Turns out that the truck has been sent by the bus company to pick up the passengers and their luggage. They apparently passed the other truck on the way, not realizing that it contained all the other passengers. I tell them what happened, and that the only people left to pick up are the girls camped out in the cabin of the construction truck, but they insist that they have to go to the bus. So for the next half hour we drive all the way back to the bus, fishtailing madly the entire time. When we get to the bus, no one's there, of course. On the way back we stop at the construction truck, but the girls aren't there - the driver says they flagged down another 4x4 and hitched a ride, along with my bag. So we proceed the rest of the way to Sen Monorom.
We pick up a few other random people on the way back, including a woman with a piercingly loud voice who dominates the conversation the entire way. I can't understand a word of it, though it's clear that the topic gives the woman cause for great surprise and offense. By the time I get in it's 9:30 at night. When I stumble out of the truck, my feet feel like they have ten pound weights attached to them - all the mud that had collected in them made them heavier and heavier, but I never noticed the cumulative effect. I find a hostel, and, shockingly, my bag, and am relieved beyond words to take a shower. The water in the shower turns a dark, dusty red.
The next few days in Sen Monorom are great. The seven tourists all eventually find each other and hang out in various configurations. There's nothing like trying circumstances to build friendships, nothing like a crisis to bring people together.
Saturday, January 31, 2009
Bus tales
There are, generally speaking, two kinds of buses one can take as a tourist in Vietnam and Laos -- "Tourist" buses come in various flavors of luxury, but all share at a minimum air-conditioning and reclining seats. "Local" buses never have air conditioning and usually have seats that feel like wooden benches covered in vinyl. The only tourists on a local bus are the brave, the curious, the impoverished, or the bamboozled. The only locals on a tourist bus are the driver and the guide.
A few images from three local bus rides I've taken this week.
In Vietnam, from Danang to Hue, about 3 hours:
-- I get to the bus station, and the bus conductor, a woman with a red sun hat flopped over her head and one of the cloth air filters so common here covering the lower half of her face, tells me that the ticket price is 100,000 dong, or about six and a half dollars. This seems outrageously high for a three hour local bus, but my pack is heavy and I don't see another choice, so I pay up. I ask for a ticket, but she claims there are no tickets, and starts pushing me onto the bus -- always a bad sign when someone you've just given money to starts pushing you away from them. On the bus, a friendly university student with good English reveals the real price: 35,000 dong, and all I needed to do to get a ticket was walk 15 feet and take a right to get to the ticket counter. The conductor is obviously pocketing all my money herself, and that, combined with the size of the fraud and the feeling of getting ripped off once too often, goads me into action. I get off the bus, go to the ticket counter, and gesticulate my complaint as expressively as I can. Miraculously, the clerk speaks English and is even sympathetic to my cause. She gets on the PA system (!), calls the conductor in, and gets me my money back.
-- Every seat is filled and the bus bundles out of the station. About half a kilometer out, the driver stops, the doors open, and the conductor starts pulling more people onto the bus, taking their money but again offering no ticket in return. She is surely pocketing this money, along with the driver. Apparently, with so many people waiting at this corner to board, this is a known loading spot -- I can't imagine that the bus company doesn't know about it too. Soon there are people on stools in the aisles, standing in stair-wells, sitting cross-legged on the floor. People start complaining of the stuffiness, of feeling sick. Ultimately, the conductor's greed (or need) overrides even her own comfort, and she ends up sitting with her bum perched on a metal railing, in order to make room for just one more.
-- We've been driving for a few hours. A husband and wife are squeezed against each other; he's on a stool in the aisle, she's sitting on the floor, pressed against his knees. Their six-year old daughter is sitting in the mother's lap. Mother and daughter lean against other and try to fall asleep. The father feels motion sick and dabs a green liquid that smells like menthol on his upper lip and neck. None can get comfortable, or rest. The daughter starts to cry. The father bends over, puts his head next to hers and starts singing softly. She joins in, a simple, lilting, Asian folk melody. Both seem comforted. Later, I offer the daughter an orange. She offers me some seeds that you crack open with your front teeth. We all spend the last half hour together, cracking seeds and extracting their tiny fruit.
Hue, Vietnam to Savannakhet, Laos, about 10 hours:
The first three hours are in air conditioned comfort, but I discover after we cross the Vietnam-Laos border that the rest of the trip will be on a local bus. This is contrary to what the tour operator promised when she sold me and my fellow passengers the tickets. Some of the other passengers lose it when they look in the stifling hot bus, and see that there aren't any seats remaining, only stools. I grab the best spot left available, the stairwell - from my perspective, it has more leg room than a seat, and lots of air.
Later, at a stop along the way, I look outside and see the silhouette of the bus on the ground, with the conductor scrambling about on the roof to untie and throw down bags. I pull my camera out. The image of the conductor's scrambling shadow next to the passengers looking up at him will make, I hope, for a pretty picture.
In Laos, from Savannakhet to Pakse, about 6 hours:
I get to the bus station early to get a seat, and when I board there is an overwhelming smell of garlic. I soon see why - under every seat lie two large mesh duffels of garlic cloves. I have to sit with me legs in the aisles because the garlic leaves no room for my feet. Piled in various places around the bus are bags of rice or fruit, chickens, and a long electric generator. The top of the bus is piled high with baggage and goods.
Once we get going, the bus makes frequent stops for people to mount and dismount, and to make deliveries. At every stop, the air stills, and the heat becomes stifling. Somehow, in spite of all this, I manage to fall into a daze that borders on sleep.
I am awakened by what sounds like an invasion of chicks, a large flock of them coming from all sides. I blink my eyes open, and feel like I'm still dreaming - everywhere I look there are skewers. Chicken skewers, beef skewers, skewers of fried dough powdered with sugar. They are grouped in triplets and quadruplets, spread apart like fleshy golden fans. They bounce up and down through the windows, poke towards me in the aisles. The vendors wielding them, women and children, seem to outnumber the passengers, and their stylized sales calls, chanted over and over again in an incomprehensible Laotian, sound for all the world like a flock of chirping, chirping chicks.
A few images from three local bus rides I've taken this week.
In Vietnam, from Danang to Hue, about 3 hours:
-- I get to the bus station, and the bus conductor, a woman with a red sun hat flopped over her head and one of the cloth air filters so common here covering the lower half of her face, tells me that the ticket price is 100,000 dong, or about six and a half dollars. This seems outrageously high for a three hour local bus, but my pack is heavy and I don't see another choice, so I pay up. I ask for a ticket, but she claims there are no tickets, and starts pushing me onto the bus -- always a bad sign when someone you've just given money to starts pushing you away from them. On the bus, a friendly university student with good English reveals the real price: 35,000 dong, and all I needed to do to get a ticket was walk 15 feet and take a right to get to the ticket counter. The conductor is obviously pocketing all my money herself, and that, combined with the size of the fraud and the feeling of getting ripped off once too often, goads me into action. I get off the bus, go to the ticket counter, and gesticulate my complaint as expressively as I can. Miraculously, the clerk speaks English and is even sympathetic to my cause. She gets on the PA system (!), calls the conductor in, and gets me my money back.
-- Every seat is filled and the bus bundles out of the station. About half a kilometer out, the driver stops, the doors open, and the conductor starts pulling more people onto the bus, taking their money but again offering no ticket in return. She is surely pocketing this money, along with the driver. Apparently, with so many people waiting at this corner to board, this is a known loading spot -- I can't imagine that the bus company doesn't know about it too. Soon there are people on stools in the aisles, standing in stair-wells, sitting cross-legged on the floor. People start complaining of the stuffiness, of feeling sick. Ultimately, the conductor's greed (or need) overrides even her own comfort, and she ends up sitting with her bum perched on a metal railing, in order to make room for just one more.
-- We've been driving for a few hours. A husband and wife are squeezed against each other; he's on a stool in the aisle, she's sitting on the floor, pressed against his knees. Their six-year old daughter is sitting in the mother's lap. Mother and daughter lean against other and try to fall asleep. The father feels motion sick and dabs a green liquid that smells like menthol on his upper lip and neck. None can get comfortable, or rest. The daughter starts to cry. The father bends over, puts his head next to hers and starts singing softly. She joins in, a simple, lilting, Asian folk melody. Both seem comforted. Later, I offer the daughter an orange. She offers me some seeds that you crack open with your front teeth. We all spend the last half hour together, cracking seeds and extracting their tiny fruit.
Hue, Vietnam to Savannakhet, Laos, about 10 hours:
The first three hours are in air conditioned comfort, but I discover after we cross the Vietnam-Laos border that the rest of the trip will be on a local bus. This is contrary to what the tour operator promised when she sold me and my fellow passengers the tickets. Some of the other passengers lose it when they look in the stifling hot bus, and see that there aren't any seats remaining, only stools. I grab the best spot left available, the stairwell - from my perspective, it has more leg room than a seat, and lots of air.
Later, at a stop along the way, I look outside and see the silhouette of the bus on the ground, with the conductor scrambling about on the roof to untie and throw down bags. I pull my camera out. The image of the conductor's scrambling shadow next to the passengers looking up at him will make, I hope, for a pretty picture.
In Laos, from Savannakhet to Pakse, about 6 hours:
I get to the bus station early to get a seat, and when I board there is an overwhelming smell of garlic. I soon see why - under every seat lie two large mesh duffels of garlic cloves. I have to sit with me legs in the aisles because the garlic leaves no room for my feet. Piled in various places around the bus are bags of rice or fruit, chickens, and a long electric generator. The top of the bus is piled high with baggage and goods.
Once we get going, the bus makes frequent stops for people to mount and dismount, and to make deliveries. At every stop, the air stills, and the heat becomes stifling. Somehow, in spite of all this, I manage to fall into a daze that borders on sleep.
I am awakened by what sounds like an invasion of chicks, a large flock of them coming from all sides. I blink my eyes open, and feel like I'm still dreaming - everywhere I look there are skewers. Chicken skewers, beef skewers, skewers of fried dough powdered with sugar. They are grouped in triplets and quadruplets, spread apart like fleshy golden fans. They bounce up and down through the windows, poke towards me in the aisles. The vendors wielding them, women and children, seem to outnumber the passengers, and their stylized sales calls, chanted over and over again in an incomprehensible Laotian, sound for all the world like a flock of chirping, chirping chicks.
Monday, January 5, 2009
A delicacy I think I can miss
A few weeks ago, I was sitting in the living room with the family I was staying with, and they offered me an egg. The mother finds it amusing that I'm a vegetarian, and there was a mischievousness in the way she offered it to me that told me maybe I should pass. She then cracked it open to reveal an almost mature baby duck. Everyone at the table started cracking theirs open and slurping out the delicacy and its juices. You have to spoon out a little of the meat, but mostly you eat it like an oversized oyster. Very popular in Vietnam as well.
Lao life lesson #85
In Lao, this is how you sing happy birthday:
Happy birthday to you,
Happy birthday to you,
Happy birthday, happy birthday,
Happy birthday to you.
Keep it simple.
Happy birthday to you,
Happy birthday to you,
Happy birthday, happy birthday,
Happy birthday to you.
Keep it simple.
Monday, December 29, 2008
Cultural misperception #238
Lao people can't pronounce my name. Whenever I introduce myself, they say back to me, "Lor-en." I try to correct them, but they just say Lor-en again, like I'm some exile from Krypton. I'd thought that the 's' sound was simply not in their language, or else they just couldn't hear it. But in my Lao class the other day, I learned something that made me re-evaluate. In fact, the 's' sound shows up in plenty of places in the language, but it's never, ever seen at the end of a word. So when the Lao say my name back as Lor-en, they're not mispronouncing, nor are they mis-hearing me. They are, very simply, correcting me.
Saturday, December 27, 2008
Going deaf at a New Year's party
Laotians are often very shy around me, especially the data entry folk (aka operators) at DDD. These are the people DDD has been set up to help, young people from disadvantage backgrouds who might not have an opportunity for a technology career otherwise. Many of them come from the countryside and have never spent time around a falang (foreigner) before. I've had some women literally turn around and run away from me when I try to explain something to them.
Get them into a group, though, and it's a different story. Last night was DDD's annual new year's party, attended by about 150 operators and the rest of the Laos staff. I was the only falang there, and I wasn't intimidating anyone - this was a rowdy, raucous bunch, with plenty of Beerlao loosening things up. Some of the new trainees put on skits, and though I didn't understand a word, they were hysterical. The skits were little morality plays, and the ones having the most fun, both in the skit and onstage, were the bad apples. The audience was pretty funny too - they have a thing here when something noteworthy happens onstage, the audience screams. Literally, high pitched screams at the top of their lungs. I had to get to the edge of the audience because when I was in the middle I thought my eardrums were going to burst.
And then there was the dancing. They started with traditional Lao style dancing - men and women dancing in a circle, men on the inside (so they can't scope out the other side of the cirlce), women on the outside. But from there it got progressively more modern, until they got to house music with lots of shaking hips. It's a new global generation here, and they're light years away from the old one.
As at any DDD event, there were plenty of disabled people, and just like a normal workday, there's no separation between the fully abled and the disabled. With all the wars, and all the UXO (unexploded ordnance), seeing disabled people is much more common, both here and in Phnom-Penh, than in the U.S. Seeing efforts to "mainstream" disabled people is at first very touching, and then, hopefully, if it works, entirely mundane. The presence of crutches or the absence of limbs becomes just a fact, and not a remarkable one. It's such a visible sign of tragedy, but it must be hard if you're the one with the disability, trying to get over it and get on with your life, to have people thinking "how tragic, how tragic," every time they loook at you.
Get them into a group, though, and it's a different story. Last night was DDD's annual new year's party, attended by about 150 operators and the rest of the Laos staff. I was the only falang there, and I wasn't intimidating anyone - this was a rowdy, raucous bunch, with plenty of Beerlao loosening things up. Some of the new trainees put on skits, and though I didn't understand a word, they were hysterical. The skits were little morality plays, and the ones having the most fun, both in the skit and onstage, were the bad apples. The audience was pretty funny too - they have a thing here when something noteworthy happens onstage, the audience screams. Literally, high pitched screams at the top of their lungs. I had to get to the edge of the audience because when I was in the middle I thought my eardrums were going to burst.
And then there was the dancing. They started with traditional Lao style dancing - men and women dancing in a circle, men on the inside (so they can't scope out the other side of the cirlce), women on the outside. But from there it got progressively more modern, until they got to house music with lots of shaking hips. It's a new global generation here, and they're light years away from the old one.As at any DDD event, there were plenty of disabled people, and just like a normal workday, there's no separation between the fully abled and the disabled. With all the wars, and all the UXO (unexploded ordnance), seeing disabled people is much more common, both here and in Phnom-Penh, than in the U.S. Seeing efforts to "mainstream" disabled people is at first very touching, and then, hopefully, if it works, entirely mundane. The presence of crutches or the absence of limbs becomes just a fact, and not a remarkable one. It's such a visible sign of tragedy, but it must be hard if you're the one with the disability, trying to get over it and get on with your life, to have people thinking "how tragic, how tragic," every time they loook at you.
Monday, December 22, 2008
Soylent Green is...
The creatures interred at the Lao Zoo are a sad looking bunch. Limping deer with matted hair, depressed macaques in cages that reek of urine staring off into space like they're stoned, a psychotic baboon pacing back and forth in an endless fury in its cage, angry cockatoos hellbent on pecking each other to death, and the star attraction, a geriatric Asian white elephant with what looks like a bad case of psoriasis.
It's a huge facility, with spacious, well adorned habitats, but many of them sit empty. With an admission charge of 2000 kip a person, or about twenty five cents, the zoo can barely afford the upkeep on the animals. There used to be two hippos there, but they both died recently, and the rumor is they starved to death because the zoo couldn't afford to feed them. There are a few signs posted that say not to feed the animals, but it's hard to take them seriously when they're outnumbered by vendors selling bananas and radishes to throw over the fences. Perhaps it's the zoo's way of dealing with their financial difficulties.
Because of the sanctioned feeding of the animals by visitors, the animals have become trained to trot up to the fence at the sight of any human, open their mouths, and wait. Deers, monkeys, elephants, ostriches, porcupines. They all do it. Even the crocodiles. And let me tell you, you haven't experienced creepy until you've stood on a walkway over a crocodile habitat and looked down at ten perfectly still crocodiles in the water below, all of them with their jaws propped open, waiting.
Yes, ten, and there would have been more had there been room in the water. There are at least three huge crocodile habitats, maybe more, and probably over 100 crocodiles resident at the Lao Zoo. There are so many they're literally crawling on top of each other. It was weird. Here's a zoo with this tragic collection of decrepit creatures, except for the crocodiles. Maybe that's what happened to the hippos.
It wasn't until later that I heard a plausible explanation of what the hell is going on. I have no idea if it's true, but the rumor is that the Lao Zoo, in order to stay solvent, has surreptitiously turned itself into a crocodile farm. They raise the crocodiles to slaughter them and sell the meat and skin. It's like a zoological version of Soylent Green. Crocodile meat gets good money here, and the skin can fetch a good price too. I can't see how they can afford all those crocodiles otherwise. It's not like it's cheaper to feed them than it is to feed the monkeys.
The dangers of being tall in a short country
I keep whanging my head against door frames. The first time it happened I was going to the restroom in an Internet cafe, and I didn't notice the door was built for someone half a foot shorter than me. I saw stars and fell down, more stunned from the surprise of it than anything else. The proprietor had to help me get up.
The second time wasn't against a door frame, but against the rusty tin metal cover of the food stand outside of DDD. I was leaning in to choose a banana and smacked my head against the sharp tin edge, leaving an L shaped divot in my forehead. Now whenever I go to that food stand the Lao lady who runs it makes sure I stand well away from her roof.
The third time was the worst. At DDD, they have these metal roll-down gates that they lock at night, and when it gets late but people are still there, they roll them part way down, to just the perfect height for knocking out tall foreigners. I was in a rush to leave and I was wearing my glasses, which take out my peripheral vision. I smacked into the door at full New York walking speed, once again knocking myself down, and leaving a sizable bruise right in the middle of my forehead. The night watchman, a jovial sort, reacted like he was watching a replay of a soccer accident on TV. He whistled at my forehead and started retelling the incident to the passerby who started gathering around me, with full pantomime. Now, every time he sees me, he points at my forehead and looks at it with concern for a moment, then breaks into giggles and starts telling the story over again to anyone who happens to be nearby. The pantomime seems to get more animated every time. He especially seemed to enjoy telling the part where I fall flat on my ass.
The second time wasn't against a door frame, but against the rusty tin metal cover of the food stand outside of DDD. I was leaning in to choose a banana and smacked my head against the sharp tin edge, leaving an L shaped divot in my forehead. Now whenever I go to that food stand the Lao lady who runs it makes sure I stand well away from her roof.
The third time was the worst. At DDD, they have these metal roll-down gates that they lock at night, and when it gets late but people are still there, they roll them part way down, to just the perfect height for knocking out tall foreigners. I was in a rush to leave and I was wearing my glasses, which take out my peripheral vision. I smacked into the door at full New York walking speed, once again knocking myself down, and leaving a sizable bruise right in the middle of my forehead. The night watchman, a jovial sort, reacted like he was watching a replay of a soccer accident on TV. He whistled at my forehead and started retelling the incident to the passerby who started gathering around me, with full pantomime. Now, every time he sees me, he points at my forehead and looks at it with concern for a moment, then breaks into giggles and starts telling the story over again to anyone who happens to be nearby. The pantomime seems to get more animated every time. He especially seemed to enjoy telling the part where I fall flat on my ass.
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
The fate of the Gamla vultures
I had a post from last summer about dead vultures in the Gamla, a nature preserve in Israel. The Gamla at one time hosted the largest group of Griffon vultures in the world, but last summer, almost all of them mysteriously dropped dead. Turns out that there were ranchers who were doing battle with either each other or with the wolves. They fight wolves by laying out poisoned carcasses for them to eat. And they fight each other by poisoning each other's cattle, which in turn kill the vultures.
I learned all this at a restaurant called Suki Soup on the outskirts of Phnom Penh. I was at a DDD dinner, sitting next to an Israeli who happened to be the head of the forest rangers in the Golan.
I learned all this at a restaurant called Suki Soup on the outskirts of Phnom Penh. I was at a DDD dinner, sitting next to an Israeli who happened to be the head of the forest rangers in the Golan.
Laotian basketball players: short but fast
One of the sons in the family I'm staying with introduced me to a pickup basketball game here in Vientiane, usually attended by about half Laotian and half Westerners. Yesterday I went there with a colleague from work and an Israeli-American he'd met traveling. It's a great workout, and an interesting place to compare Western and Laotian cultures. The Westerners are always the ones complaining about calls and about unfair play. The Laotians are very competitive, but abhor confrontation. They never contend a call or claim mistreatment. The typical Laotian saying is "Bo pah nyan", no problem.
After the game, I went for Chinese food with my colleague nad the Israeli. Adam and I were on bikes, and Chuck had walked, thinking he'd get a tuk-tuk after. We finished around 9:30, and of course, none of us had thought about the fact that Vientiane shuts down at 9. There wasn't a tuk-tuk anywhere -- anywhere! We were about 3 miles from Chuck's guesthouse, so we started to walk our bikes back with him. There was almost no one on the road. One woman on a moto passed us by and smiled, but that was about the only interaction we had. We got about a half-mile along, when the same woman came up behind us on her moto. She spoke English, and she'd come to give the Israeli a ride, wherever he wanted to go. Just cause she saw we were stuck. This was not an atypical experience here.
After the game, I went for Chinese food with my colleague nad the Israeli. Adam and I were on bikes, and Chuck had walked, thinking he'd get a tuk-tuk after. We finished around 9:30, and of course, none of us had thought about the fact that Vientiane shuts down at 9. There wasn't a tuk-tuk anywhere -- anywhere! We were about 3 miles from Chuck's guesthouse, so we started to walk our bikes back with him. There was almost no one on the road. One woman on a moto passed us by and smiled, but that was about the only interaction we had. We got about a half-mile along, when the same woman came up behind us on her moto. She spoke English, and she'd come to give the Israeli a ride, wherever he wanted to go. Just cause she saw we were stuck. This was not an atypical experience here.
Type-safe Traffic
I imagine that someone looking down from a great height onto the tuk-tuks, motos, and Lexus SUVs buzzing around the streets of Phnom-Penh would be reminded of a bee-hive -- a seemingly random, crowded press of motion which in some incomprehensible way allows the participants to get where they wanted to go. I, being the computer nerd that I am, came up with a programming metaphor.
There are, roughly speaking, two types of programming languages: type-safe and non-type-safe. In a type-safe language, if you create a variable that's an integer, it stays an integer. If you try to stick a decimal number into an integer variable, the compiler will wave it's finger at you with a nasty tsk-tsk-tsk. It's constraining, but it forces you on a basic to be organized in your thinking.
Non-type-safe languages, on the other hand, don't pay attention to variable types. Any variable can carry any data. Programming in these languages is a liberating experience. You want to be an integer? You're an integer! Wanna be a string? No problem!
Phnom Penh traffic is totally lawless in the same kind of liberating way. Want to go the wrong way down that street? Great! Need to turn into oncoming traffic? Go ahead! In Phnom Penh, the shortest route to your destination is always the best route. And if you're in a tuk-tuk and late to a meeting, it's a happy experience.
Non-type-safe languages are more efficient to work in and you get faster results. The only problem is, if you don't impose your own discipline, the applications you write tend to crash a lot more often.
There are, roughly speaking, two types of programming languages: type-safe and non-type-safe. In a type-safe language, if you create a variable that's an integer, it stays an integer. If you try to stick a decimal number into an integer variable, the compiler will wave it's finger at you with a nasty tsk-tsk-tsk. It's constraining, but it forces you on a basic to be organized in your thinking.
Non-type-safe languages, on the other hand, don't pay attention to variable types. Any variable can carry any data. Programming in these languages is a liberating experience. You want to be an integer? You're an integer! Wanna be a string? No problem!
Phnom Penh traffic is totally lawless in the same kind of liberating way. Want to go the wrong way down that street? Great! Need to turn into oncoming traffic? Go ahead! In Phnom Penh, the shortest route to your destination is always the best route. And if you're in a tuk-tuk and late to a meeting, it's a happy experience.
Non-type-safe languages are more efficient to work in and you get faster results. The only problem is, if you don't impose your own discipline, the applications you write tend to crash a lot more often.
Teaching XML to the hill tribes
I was staying Luang Prabang, a city in the mountains of Northern Lao, and after a delicious meal at a restaurant called Tamarind, I wandered into what I thought was a simple photo gallery next door displaying the work of Lao adolescent and teen photographers (another Kids With Cameras-type project). Though the place does indeed display the work of budding Lao photographers, its primary function is to serve as a library and free computer center for Lao kids who normally wouldn't have access to computers or books. The place is called @MyLibrary, and I had a really interesting conversation with the founder about teaching kids who have absolutely no context for what you're trying to teach them. Everything you might take for granted when teaching Western kids has to be thought through again.
For example, @MyLibrary is creating some tutorials in Lao made by kids for kids. One of the first videos is intended to teach how to format a list in Microsoft Word. Turns out teaching the formatting part is easy. Teaching kids what a list is and why you'd want to make one is the hard part. These people, many of whom are hill-tribe people like the Hmong, have never needed to make a list before, have never thought about it. So well over half the video is a brilliant little animated story showing someone going through a very inefficient shopping trip, and then showing how the trip could be made much easier with the use of a list. Only after they've established that do they go into the details of how to create and format a list using Word.
I'm faced with similar issues right now developing training materials for DDD. Except instead of having to teach folks about lists, I have to teach them about XML, Unicode, and binary numbering systems. Finding stories anad metaphors to explain these concepts to hill tribe villagers is going to be an interesting challenge.
For example, @MyLibrary is creating some tutorials in Lao made by kids for kids. One of the first videos is intended to teach how to format a list in Microsoft Word. Turns out teaching the formatting part is easy. Teaching kids what a list is and why you'd want to make one is the hard part. These people, many of whom are hill-tribe people like the Hmong, have never needed to make a list before, have never thought about it. So well over half the video is a brilliant little animated story showing someone going through a very inefficient shopping trip, and then showing how the trip could be made much easier with the use of a list. Only after they've established that do they go into the details of how to create and format a list using Word.
I'm faced with similar issues right now developing training materials for DDD. Except instead of having to teach folks about lists, I have to teach them about XML, Unicode, and binary numbering systems. Finding stories anad metaphors to explain these concepts to hill tribe villagers is going to be an interesting challenge.
Scars of the Khmer Rouge
I don't think you can spend a day in Cambodia without encountering the wounds left behind by the three-year reign of the Khmer-Rouge, whether you notice it or not. It's even more pronounced now that I'm in Laos, and I can compare the easygoing openness of the Laotians with the reserve of the Cambodians. The Cambodians I met were all extraordinarily warm, friendly, giving people, but you don't have to dig too deeply to hear about their trauma.
Two examples. The first week I was there, a boat racing festival was held which brought a million Cambodians from the countryside into the capital of Phnom Penh. They have fireworks every night for four nights, and pedestrians pack Sihanouk Road, one of the main streets in the city. Conveniently enough, I happened to sit next to a Cambodian who taught English for a living, and got to hear much of his life story. He's in his mid-30s, so he lived through the Khmer-Rouge as a child, and he told me much of his life story in reverse, starting with his recent divorce and going backwards. He didn't show much emotion throughout -- not when he talked about his wife leaving him, or about the difficulties of dating at his age in Cambodia. But when he spoke about working in the fields under the Khmer-Rouge, his eyes filled with tears.
I went to the Cheoung-Elk fields, the infamous "killing fields," with a Cambodian guide. The fields are a mind-wrenchingly disassociative experience. They're beautiful. All the buildings were long ago torn down, and now the fields are lushly green and peaceful. It's quiet and serene, and as you walk along the path, you occasionally see slight depressions in the ground with a string tracing the perimeter. It's easy to miss what they are if you don't notice the small signs in the corner that read, "Please don't walk on the mass graves."
As we walked through the fields, my guide told me his story, in a soft voice and with a nervous smile. He was about five when the Khmer Rouge came to power. He was taken from his parents and had to work in the fields. The Khmer Rouge set impossible quotas for the rice production, and the penalties for missing them were severe, so what people would do would be to lie about how much rice they produced and give most of their harvest to the government to sell to the Chinese. If they had actually produced what they said, they would have enough left over for themselves, but of course they couldn't, so most people starved. My guide's brother, who was nine years old, worked day and night to try and produce enough rice. He died during that time, not because anybody shot him. He simply worked himself to death.
I also went to the Tuol Sleng prison, but didn't ask the guide to go with me, and I'm glad I didn't. The killing fields were hard enough. Tuol Sleng wasn't dissociative at all - it was the most vividly horrible place I've ever been to. It's a former high school turned into a prison cum torture center. There are three buildings placed perpendicular to each other to form the school courtyard. The buildings have been left exactly as they were found when the Khmer Rouge fell and the prison was liberated. Coils of barbed wire cover is everywhere. The torture chambers on the first floor, former classrooms with institutional tile floors, still have the wrought iron beds that prisoners were bound to, with the shackles still attached and blood stains on the floor. They have pictures of the bodies that they found there, still chained to the beds. The only thing that they changed was to take the bodies away. Of 17,000 prisoners that passed through Tuol Sleng, 12 survived.
I'm starting to understand the reaction many Cambodians have when I asked them about the movie "The Killing Fields" (which I watched on the plane over, and highly recommend). They generally say that it only begins to capture what actually went on.
My colleague Ben Magarik has a great blog where he captures his observations of Cambodia and politics. Here's an interesting post comparing the genocides in Cambodia and Rwanda.
Two examples. The first week I was there, a boat racing festival was held which brought a million Cambodians from the countryside into the capital of Phnom Penh. They have fireworks every night for four nights, and pedestrians pack Sihanouk Road, one of the main streets in the city. Conveniently enough, I happened to sit next to a Cambodian who taught English for a living, and got to hear much of his life story. He's in his mid-30s, so he lived through the Khmer-Rouge as a child, and he told me much of his life story in reverse, starting with his recent divorce and going backwards. He didn't show much emotion throughout -- not when he talked about his wife leaving him, or about the difficulties of dating at his age in Cambodia. But when he spoke about working in the fields under the Khmer-Rouge, his eyes filled with tears.
I went to the Cheoung-Elk fields, the infamous "killing fields," with a Cambodian guide. The fields are a mind-wrenchingly disassociative experience. They're beautiful. All the buildings were long ago torn down, and now the fields are lushly green and peaceful. It's quiet and serene, and as you walk along the path, you occasionally see slight depressions in the ground with a string tracing the perimeter. It's easy to miss what they are if you don't notice the small signs in the corner that read, "Please don't walk on the mass graves."
As we walked through the fields, my guide told me his story, in a soft voice and with a nervous smile. He was about five when the Khmer Rouge came to power. He was taken from his parents and had to work in the fields. The Khmer Rouge set impossible quotas for the rice production, and the penalties for missing them were severe, so what people would do would be to lie about how much rice they produced and give most of their harvest to the government to sell to the Chinese. If they had actually produced what they said, they would have enough left over for themselves, but of course they couldn't, so most people starved. My guide's brother, who was nine years old, worked day and night to try and produce enough rice. He died during that time, not because anybody shot him. He simply worked himself to death.
I also went to the Tuol Sleng prison, but didn't ask the guide to go with me, and I'm glad I didn't. The killing fields were hard enough. Tuol Sleng wasn't dissociative at all - it was the most vividly horrible place I've ever been to. It's a former high school turned into a prison cum torture center. There are three buildings placed perpendicular to each other to form the school courtyard. The buildings have been left exactly as they were found when the Khmer Rouge fell and the prison was liberated. Coils of barbed wire cover is everywhere. The torture chambers on the first floor, former classrooms with institutional tile floors, still have the wrought iron beds that prisoners were bound to, with the shackles still attached and blood stains on the floor. They have pictures of the bodies that they found there, still chained to the beds. The only thing that they changed was to take the bodies away. Of 17,000 prisoners that passed through Tuol Sleng, 12 survived.
I'm starting to understand the reaction many Cambodians have when I asked them about the movie "The Killing Fields" (which I watched on the plane over, and highly recommend). They generally say that it only begins to capture what actually went on.
My colleague Ben Magarik has a great blog where he captures his observations of Cambodia and politics. Here's an interesting post comparing the genocides in Cambodia and Rwanda.
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