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A Little More on Myanmar

2010-03-05T00:10:00.000-08:00

This trip to SE Asia is just about over. We're back in Bangkok for a few days of sightseeing and shopping, then we fly back to the Great Frozen North (where, from what we hear, it has been unseasonably warm. Though, if history is any guide, temperatures will plunge and snow will begin falling as soon as we step off the plane.)

This will be my last post for this trip, but I wanted to say a little more about Myanmar. A reader took issue with my perceptions of the country saying, basically, that I was missing the trees for the forest, or something like that. (See Comments under the previous post.) Evidently I had been deceived by Myanmar's exceptionally friendly and vibrant people, and had overlooked the fact that they are oppressed by a ruthless military regime.

The crux of the controversy is the Myanmar government's human rights violations which, frankly, are undeniable and indefensible.

The government continues to use forced labor to at least some degree, sometimes for public projects such as road building, sometimes for personal projects for the military elite, if what we were told in Myanmar is accurate. However the use of forced labor has declined in the last decade, according to one thing we read. We saw plenty of road building going on, but nothing that was necessarily forced labor. Road building in underdeveloped countries is backbreaking and labor intensive. We've seen similar road crews in Guatemala. But that doesn't mean it is forced labor. Of course, it doesn't mean it isn't either. But one shouldn't jump to conclusions based on what one sees out a bus window.

The government is authoritarian and paranoid and deals with criticism and threat harshly. Freedom of speech is restricted (though, unlike Lao and many other countries, freedom of religion is not). It was interesting to discover there were certain websites we could not access. Every once in a while instead of a page loading, a bright red "access denied" banner would appear. Of course, the fact that there is internet access at all is a remarkable thing in an authoritarian state. Access is not denied, just managed. Not always successfully, by the way. A lot of the public internet cafes we went to used proxy servers which circumvented the government attempts to censor content. Where there's a will, there's a way. And the people of Myanmar have plenty of will.

Old school restrictions on speech are more successful. The government is almost universally unpopular, as far as we could tell, but people are careful about what they say, and to whom. People are wary of spies who will report their comments to the authorities, resulting in arrest and imprisonment. The guidebooks caution travelers against bringing up political subjects because it might create trouble. However a number of people who could speak English brought up the situation to us themselves. One young man, a guide we had hired to show us around, told us about a friend of his who was imprisoned after admitting to a spy that he was active in the resistance movement. I asked him whether he was worried about talking to us, but he said he figured no one else around us would understand what we were saying. A number of other times people would just drop quiet comments, causing us to perk up our ears. If what we heard is just the tip of the iceberg, then the government has every right to be paranoid.

Another serious issue is how the government deals with the insurgencies in the tribal areas. According to reports it has been, shall we say, a little heavy handed. A lot of people killed. But insurgencies all over the world are messy like that. Just before we left we saw on TV a BBC interview with a general of the Kachin forces (one of the tribal groups) who boasted that the Kachin army is gaining new recruits every day, and that they are preparing to fight the government forces. In the north we were told something similar about the Shan army. These are just two of several insurgent groups fighting for independence. Again, if the government feels threatened, that is because it is.

The tribal insurgencies are nothing new. When the British annexed Burma to it's Indian holdings in the late 1800s it did little to administer the remote tribal areas. They remained apart from central Burma. When Burma gained it's independence from the British in 1948 the tribal areas still didn't want to become a part of the country, and that desire has persisted, at times resulting in open warfare. Resistance from rebel groups were partially responsible for the military takeover of the government, first in 1958, then again in 1962, with a brief elected government in between. (Actually, the first time was a voluntary "handover" from the civilian government, in an attempt to gain stability.)

So, tribal insurgencies have been an issue since before the military government came to power, and continue to be an issue. There is no reason to think that issue would go away even if Myanmar became a democracy.

Those are more or less the facts. So where is the controversy? For travelers it is simply this: to go or not to go, that is, should travelers visit Myanmar? I think the only reason that question exists is because of one person--the charismatic, articulate and beautiful opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who has been under house arrest (in her deteriorating family mansion) for most of the past 20 years. In 1991 she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and has been awarded several similar prizes. She speaks English and several other languages fluently. She lived and worked in New York, and was married to an Oxford professor who died in 1999. She still has two sons in the UK.

Did I mention she is beautiful? She is, but she is a lot more than just a pretty face. For starters, her father is a national hero, and a founder of the Burmese Army. (General Aung San was assassinated in 1947 when Aung San Suu Kyi was two years old.) Her mother was an ambassador to India and Nepal. She studied at Oxford and holds a Ph.D from the University of London. She led the opposition party in the 1990 election (the last one held) and in an upset victory her party won 82% of the vote. She should have become Prime Minister, but the military government overruled the results and put her under house arrest.

When Aung San Suu Kyi speaks people listen, and in 1995 she said tourists should boycott Burma because foreigners coming to the country was "tantamount to condoning the regime."

A lot of travelers who like to go to places like Myanmar tend to be not just adventurous, but conscientious. I don't think any traveler wants to condone or support Myanmar's military regime. But is it as simple as to go or not to go? I don't think so. Here's why.

Myanmar has clearly been affected by its mostly self-imposed isolation. It is less developed than neighboring countries and, as I noted in the previous post, feels like it is 30 years behind. That is not all bad, mind you. There are no western chain stores or restaurants, and few products from international mega-corporations. Most brands we saw which were at all familiar were Asian. I think the only western brand we saw was Coke which, face it, is everywhere there is any kind of civilization. Resistance is futile.

I think objectively the government's attempt to limit outside influences as the country developed following a century of British rule is understandable--up to a point. It is not the only government to do this. Islamic countries take certain measures to fight godless western influences. Even Canada rather feebly tries to fight "Americanization" by mandating a certain percentage of "Canadian Content" for all broadcasters.

But I don't think that isolation and secrecy is in the best interest of the people of Myanmar or, for that matter the government. The interests of the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive. For good or ill, people and places cannot opt out of the modern world and expect to thrive. The clearest example of that is North Korea.

The government has opened up the country quite a bit in the last few years, and has built a lot of hotels and resorts attractive to mostly high-end tourists. The cynical would say they are doing that to get more money to line their own pockets, which is probably at least partially right. But if that is all it is, then it is a risky strategy. The government has invested a lot of money in these projects, and tourism is very sensitive to any sort of bad PR. The government has every incentive to cast Myanmar in a positive light.

At the same time, independent, low-budget travelers are not particularly restricted. Sure, there are areas foreigners are not allowed to go, such as where there is insurgent activity. (Also areas of gemstone production, a big money maker for the country.) But for the most part we, and other travelers, had not problem going where we wanted, seeing what we wanted and talking to whom we wanted. We spent our money in shops and in the street stalls and mostly places that normal people patronized. Even if some of our money found its way into government hands, most of it went to regular people.

Yes, every guesthouse and bus company copied information from our passport, and there were occasional roadside checks of our documents (and those of the locals). But that kind of thing seems insidious only to armchair travelers. I've had my passport checked more often in Mexico. And if you are paranoid about a government tracking you, cut up your credit cards and driver's license, close your bank accounts, and never sign anything official. By contrast Myanmar's attempts to track travelers seem rather quaint.

So, tourists and travelers who come to Myanmar spend money, and bring information and ideas. Equally important most, if not all, return with an increased understanding of the country and the people. To be sure it is a mixed blessing for Myanmar, but on the whole I think it is positive thing.

What about those who choose to boycott Myanmar? For some it is a principled, if misguided, stance. They travel all around the world, including Cuba, China and the Islamic theocracies, which have political prisoners and other similar and perhaps more serious human rights problems. But because Aung San Suu Kyi said don't come to Burma, they don't come. For most people who champion the boycott, I suspect they don't go anywhere anyway, and any position they have is simply posturing.

If the boycott benefits anyone I think it is the political opponents of the military regime, many of whom are outside of the country. Part of a famous quote from Aung San Suu Kyi is that "Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it." I think a corollary to that would be that a desire for power corrupts those who don't have it. As I noted above, and in my previous post, democracy will not solve all of Myanmar's problems. If the minorities, who inhabit some of the country's richest areas of teak and gemstones want independence, and remain willing to fight for it, how will a democratic government respond?

The area that is now Myanmar has a complex and turbulent history, going back centuries. The current situation will take it's place in that history sooner or later. Elections are scheduled for later this year. The government did a bad job of rigging the last one, 30 years ago and had to overturn the results. It will be interesting to see what happens in this one.

Will anything change? As we were leaving one place someone said to us "Maybe things will be different when you come back. Things will change, if not this election, then maybe the next one." We hope to come back and see whether he was right.

Stupa-fied in Myanmar

2010-02-19T23:41:00.000-08:00

We’ve been in Myanmar almost three weeks. It feels like the place we were looking for on our trip to SE Asia. How could one not like a country with Spirulina Beer?

We got on the plane in Bangkok not knowing quite what to expect upon our arrival in the Yangon, the capital of Myanmar. Myanmar has the reputation of having one of the most authoritarian and oppressive governments in the world, a military regime that came to power in 1962. What would the oppressed people be like, and how would we be treated, we wondered.

A lot of travelers choose not to travel to Myanmar because they are afraid part of the money they spend will go to support the military regime, and that their very presence will somehow legitimize the government’s existence. On the other hand, does staying away somehow help the situation, or does it just allow it to continue in secrecy? We considered those arguments and more, both for and against, and decided we would come. Good decision.

While I’m on politics I’ll briefly address the question of whether to call the country Burma or Myanmar. Short answer: Myanmar. There are plenty of good reasons to call it Myanmar, starting with virtually everybody here does.

“Burma” was the name given to the country by the British during their occupation, because the majority of people are ethnic Bamar, or Burmese. The government changed the name to Myanmar in 1989. The official reason was to distance the country from its colonial past. At the same time a number of other place names were changed from their British-era names.

There is some ethnic tension between the ethnic Burmese majority and the non-Burmese minority—quite a few ethnic and quasi-ethnic groups. There is no reason the minority groups would want their country to be called Burma. In fact, quite a few non-Burmese areas would like to separate entirely, and refer to their area not as “Myanmar” either, but by its ethnic name, such as “Shan State.”

So we touched down in the capital of Yangon (formerly Rangoon, renamed at the same time as the country) with some excitement, and a little apprehension. Airport formalities were a nice surprise, one of the smoothest and quickest entries we’ve had. Not at all Orwellian. No cameras or fingerprint machines, just an overworked official in a booth stamping passports as fast as he could.

Look for signs of oppression, we kept telling ourselves. We weren’t quite sure what to look for. People at the airport were openly friendly and welcoming in a way we have never encountered.

That first impression has persisted throughout our trip. The more we have seen, the harder it has been to think of the Myanmar people as oppressed. Yes, they don’t like their government, and for good reason. The military regime operates the country like its own fiefdom.

People suspect government spies everywhere, and some have tales of random arrests and imprisonment to prove it. (Contrary to what we read and were told, plenty of people have not hesitated to express their views to us. It is, I think, one of the major benefits, to them and to us, of foreign travelers coming to the country—to hear about the situation first-hand.)

So are the people here oppressed? I think the word “oppressed” implies a certain hopeless passivity, and that does not describe the people of Myanmar. They have a sense of vitality and happiness. It has almost become a joke with us how much people sing here, just walking around, working, or other random situations. More than once we’ve been passed by a motorbike loaded down with several passengers—all singing at the top of their voices. “There’s somebody else singing,” we’ll say.

I think the right word might be “repressed.” They are not being held down, they are being held back. It feels like there is a lot of potential here. Eventually the government will change; there is supposed to be an election later this year. Whoever is in charge in the years ahead will have their hands full. A democratically elected government will be just the beginning.

Well, I better get on with the travelogue or I won’t have a place to put pictures.

For most travelers to Myanmar, particularly first-timers like us, there are four main destinations: Yangon, Mandalay, Bagan and Inle Lake. The four places form, roughly, a cross, with Yangon and Mandalay at the southern and northern ends, and Bagan and Inle Lake to the west and east. Getting from one to any of the others takes a pretty long bus or train ride—10 to 15 hours—and often at night. So far there are no tourist shuttles, as in many other countries. (There are package tours that carry customers around the country in big buses, but package tours are a money-maker for the government, so independent travelers avoid them.)

Like nearly everyone, we started in Yangon. Yangon is a big city with a lot of old buildings dating back to the colonial era (which, as Faye noted, look like they could use a good power washing). The streets around these old buildings were throbbing with small markets, food vendors, and people hanging out conducting all kinds of business. There was a stark contrast between the old buildings and the people below them. It was like one civilization living amongst the ruins of an earlier one.

There are two beautiful parks that any city would be proud of, as well as one of the most impressive pagodas we’ve seen (and by now we’ve seen a lot of them.) According to legend, parts of the Shwedagon Paya, or Pagoda, is 2500 years old. At its center is a massive gold stupa, gilded with gold leaf on the lower part, then further up covered with gold plate, up to a crowning ornament of solid gold and silver, with thousands of diamonds and jewels. It is topped with a 76-carat diamond. It is pretty impressive even if you’ve already seen enough pagodas and stupas to last a lifetime.

But we weren’t done with pagodas. Our next destination was Bagan, which is all about pagodas.

Bagan is a place that makes Yangon seem like a modern metropolis. More than 3000 pagodas and stupas are scattered over a large plain, some dating back more than 1000 years. In 1990 the government relocated people who lived in what is now known as Old Bagan, the area with the highest concentration of pagodas, a few kilometers south to what is now called New Bagan. The result is that Old Bagan, while not completely devoid of life, has a timeless feel to it. At sunset we (and every other tourist in Bagan) climbed to the top of one pagoda and watched as the sun bathed the ancient temples in a warm glow. It looked like the setting for an Indiana Jones movie. We spent a couple days exploring the area, by horse cart and bicycle, then caught a bus to Mandalay.

The road to Mandalay, it turns out, is bumpy and broken. We rode an old, rattling bus through a parched landscape. By the time we arrived we felt old and rattled as well.

Mandalay feels older than it actually is, just 150 years or so. For most travelers it serves more as a base to explore surrounding areas than a destination. It has all the hustle and bustle and grime of Yangon, but not much charm. The major attractions are a handful of old sites near the city with—you guessed it—pagodas.

Just south of town one pagoda has a quirky twist—a couple of large pythons have taken up residence around one of the Buddha figures. They have been there for years. Every day attendants lovingly wash and feed them. It is an idyllic existence for the snakes, except for all the people wanting to get their picture taken with them. The attendants gladly oblige, and make a little money doing it.

Another site is known more for its picturesque 1.8 kilometer teak footbridge over part of a lake than its pagodas. Tourists, local people and monks flock there at sunset for a stroll across the bridge. Quite a few monks study English, and many on the bridge take the opportunity to chat with English-speaking visitors.

We hired a car and guide to take us around. We don’t normally do that kind of thing, preferring to explore on our own. But we have found that here in Myanmar, a guide has been an invaluable source of information, and we’ve seen things we wouldn’t have otherwise. Our guide took us first to a workshop that made gold leaf, all by hand. The gold leaf is sold to devotees and applied to a well-known Buddha figure nearby, which has become thickly encrusted with gold.

A cluttered leather shop across the street caught my eye and I wondered over and found one of the strangest things I’ve seen—a skeleton, dressed in leather and a cowboy hat, with a microphone clutched in his boney hands. Around him were giant python skins, mounted skulls of unidentifiable animals, and random junk. I don’t know who he was. One friend suggested he might have been a former activist.

We continued north of Mandalay, up into the mountains of northern Shan state, to the town of Kyaukme (pronounced “chow-MAY”), The Shan are ethnic Chinese and make up the majority of that area, but there are other tribal groups as well. With another local guide, and a couple other travelers, we went on a two-day trek up into the mountains, passing through several villages, and staying overnight in a Shan village. We slept in the house of the local headman on the wooden floor in a communal sleeping room.

Our guide could speak the local languages, as well as English, and was familiar with the villages and the people in them. He helped with the language barrier, and we felt truly welcome. Unfortunately, sleeping on the floor felt truly uncomfortable. But the night passed and all was well. Our two fellow travelers were great company, and we all had a good time.

We returned to town on Valentine’s Day, which also happened to be Chinese New Year. The guesthouse where we were staying, the only place in the town licensed to deal with foreigners, was party central. For two nights there was a live band, dancers, and dozens of drunken locals enjoying the show. After our trek, and the sketchy night’s sleep, we weren’t thrilled with having a party going on outside our door—the rear of the stage was literally a few feet from our room. But the key to coping with that kind of thing is to join in. We lasted as long as we could, then went to bed in spite of it all.

We returned to Mandalay for a night, then caught a bus for the fourth of the big four destinations—Inle Lake, where we are now. If Myanmar has a tourist destination, Inle Lake is it. We’ve seen more package tourists here than anyplace we’ve been. That said, it still doesn’t feel touristy compared to other countries.

Like nearly everyone who comes here, we hired one of the motorized longboats to take us around the lake to visit various villages, markets and workshops where everything from silk cloth to cheroots to teak boats are all made by hand. What we found most interesting, however, were the floating gardens.

The lake is quite shallow, particularly near the shore. Vast areas have been converted to agriculture by forming rows of the floating lake plants and anchoring them to the lake bottom with bamboo poles. A layer of mud from the bottom is spread on top of the floating rows and then planted with all kinds of vegetables, and even flowers. Lakeweed is harvested and used as mulch on the growing plants. It doesn’t get much more organic than that.

We have about another week in Myanmar. We think our next destination will be a beach. Wherever we decide to go, it will begin with an 18 hour bus ride to Yangon. The closest beach is 5 or 6 hours further. It’s going to be a long day.

Southern Laos

2010-02-01T18:19:00.000-08:00

Most of the past week we have spent in a state of pleasant lethargy (which only partly explains the gap since my last posting).

We made it as far south as we could go in Laos, to an island in the Mekong River. The island, Don Khon, is one of a group called the 4000 Islands. The name may be accurate, at least in the dry season when the river is low. But only a handful of the islands are big enough to be inhabited, and most disappear during the rainy season when the river rises 10-15 feet.

There are three islands with accommodations for travelers. The two smaller, including the one we were on, got electricity just three months ago. The electricity is still of questionable quality, which is the other reason I have not updated for so long. Whenever I plugged in my laptop to recharge, everything got nearly hot enough to melt.

By the time we got to the island we were ready for a break. We had just spent five days in the Lao capital of Vientiane, which was about four more than we wanted to. But we had to wait for visas to our next destination, the country formerly known as Burma.

Vientiane is nothing to write home about— certainly not the seedy but fascinating French Indochinese city that has figured in numerous novels. Well, it still is kinda seedy. But we were offered opium only twice. Perhaps it has gotten tamer at the expense of being interesting.

There is a giant avenue resembling the Champs Elysée with the presidential palace (empty, as far as we could tell) at one end and at the other something that, from a distance, looks like the Arc de Triomphe. Though, as a sign inside the structure honestly notes “From a closer distance it looks even less impressive, like a monster of concrete.”

That may seem like a refreshing example of Communist self-criticism, but it’s not. The monument was built in the mid-60s, a decade before the Communists gained control of the country. The concrete used to build it was donated by the US, and meant for the construction of a new airport. Our guidebook notes that local expats refer to the monument as “the vertical runway.”

The Mekong River runs along one edge of the city. When we were there the riverfront, was being terra-formed along several kilometers to make a park with a walking/biking path. The project is being funded by Japan. Giant digging, dredging and bulldozing equipment were busy moving sand and changing the course of the river.

One evening, as we stood looking over the activity, a Japanese man, evidently in charge of the project, arrived with some subordinates. After ordering them around for a few minutes, he saw us and came over to us to explain in enthusiastic, but nearly unintelligible “Japanenglish” what was going on. We got the impression that it was going to be a very nice park, even though we were still fuzzy on the details.

The riverside is a popular outdoor dining spot during the evenings. The presence and activity of the heavy equipment affects the ambience, but that didn’t stop people from eating, drinking and watching the sunset over the Mekong.

When we were finally able to leave town we booked an overnight sleeper bus to our next destination, a southern hub called Pakse. Our bus, like a lot of the large, long-distance buses in Laos, was painted all over with bright, airbrushed graphics. Colored lights illuminated the vast engine compartment. It looked like a rolling bordello.

Inside, it was filled with bunk beds, like a long, narrow summer camp cabin. (So, I guess it might make a pretty good rolling bordello. But there’s not much privacy. It would probably make a pretty good mobile opium den. Not that I’m making any suggestions. I’m just saying…)

Before we left the station there were indications of mechanical trouble; there were ominous knockings from the rear, and the driver seemed to be having trouble with the lower gears. “This doesn’t look good,” I told Faye. But the driver limped the big beast out of town. As long as we were traveling at highway speeds in the higher gears everything seemed to be OK. But every time we had to slow down there was trouble.

Finally, in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere, there was a grind and a jolt and some heavy knocking sounds, and the bus died. With all the grinding gears it had been hard to sleep, so we weren’t entirely unhappy that we would finally get some peace and quiet. Most of us dozed for a couple hours before another bus finally came to pick us up—not a sleeper. Considering it was the middle of the night, we were several hours behind schedule, and we had gotten little sleep, the passengers seemed to be in pretty good spirits. I think everyone who travels in these countries half expects something like that to happen sooner or later.

About an hour from our destination, shortly after sunrise, somebody smelled smoke in our replacement bus and ran up to the to alert him. I think we all felt the bus operators needed all the help they could get. But the driver didn’t stop to see what the problem was. A few minutes later a tire blew out.

When our luggage was transferred from the other bus it had hurriedly been piled over a compartment where a spare tire was stored. So all of us piled off the bus as our luggage was being thrown out onto the ground, and tried to make the best of it. A humble Buddhist temple was on one side of the road and a little village was on the other. Some people dozed on the ground, while others wandered around and took pictures of the temple and cute village children, while our bus operators struggled to change the tire with hand tools.

Eventually, all of the luggage was thrown back into the bus, we all got back on and, with our fingers crossed, finally made it to our destination. For the next week whenever those of us who had been on that bus ran into each other, we felt a bond of kinship. We ate and drank together, and recounted horror stories and travel tales. (We were one-upped by a couple who came in later and had been on a small, overloaded vehicle a few days before that tipped over and skidded down the road on its side.)

We spent one night in Pakse and one night a little further south before arriving on the island of Don Khon. We had every intention of spending just a few days, then trying to squeeze in a little more sight seeing before we had to leave Laos. But that was before we started laying in hammocks and watching the Mekong River flow by. Soon we decided there was nowhere else we would rather be, so why go someplace else.

Life in general on the islands seems to flow at about the same stately pace as the river, though with the arrival of electricity that may be changing. There are numerous little family run restaurants and oddly, the food is really good at all of them. We wondered where all these people learned to cook like they do, especially considering that most of the kitchens consist of little besides a rice cooker, a few pots and a couple of woks.

As far as sight-seeing in the area goes there are some spectacular waterfalls, where the usually placid Mekong becomes a seething cataract as it flows around some rocky islands. And guys with boats offer rides in the waters around the islands, especially to the south where one can sometimes see rare Irrawaddy Dolphins. We managed to see a few, but from a distance as they swam in Cambodian waters.

A lot of entrepreneurs have bicycles for rent, which is a good way to get around, even though there is no pavement. There are some dusty roads, a few trails through the woods, and the rocky remains of an old rail bed built by the French.

Nearly all of our time in Laos has been spent along the Mekong River. We’ve seen it flow past cities, and villages and vast tracts of wilderness. It no longer seems exotic, as I felt it was when we first encountered it in the northern part of the country. Instead, it seems almost like a comfortable companion. We’ve seen it only in the dry season, when its waters are low and it meanders along like it has nowhere to go and months to get there. In the rainy season it will come alive again, as will all the rice paddies around it and throughout the country. We’d like to see it then. Too bad I don’t like rain.

There is much more to Laos than just along the Mekong, of course. I’m sure we’ll be back to explore other areas. We’ve just scratched the surface, but the drift downstream has been a good introduction.

Our next destination is Myanmar/Burma. (What’s in a name? I’ll try to explain it later.) I don’t know what the internet situation is there, so there may be another gap before the next post. Who knows? Much mystery lies ahead.

Temporal Field Distortions

2010-01-16T19:22:00.000-08:00

We left Luang Prabang feeling a little sick to our stomachs—which was an improvement over how we had felt the past two days.

A day or so after we got to town we discovered a street vendor selling a delicious all-you-can fit-on one-plate vegetarian buffet, for about $1. Such a deal. We ate there three nights in a row with no ill effect. We got done in by a restaurant. We decided to splurge and had some Indian food as a treat. You never know what’s going to get you.

But Luang Prabang also left us feeling a bit nauseous less literally. We never did quite warm up to it. It has been designated a World Heritage City by UNESCO and it certainly has some Old World French Indochina charm, as well as it’s own Lao/Buddhist character. Sunsets on the Mekong are very nice, especially seen from one of the riverside bars. But Luang Prabang also has an international airport with flights from several neighboring countries. It is just a little too easy to get to.

My first impression was that it was a place being smothered by tourism, and I still felt that way when we left town. As our mini-van drove around collecting other travelers headed southward like ourselves, I saw a couple on the garden patio of their hotel, eating their continental breakfast, dressed in their hotel-issued plush robes. I’m sure their room cost as much per night as we spend in a week or two on accommodation. I think the future of Luang Prabang belongs to people like them.

Ironically perhaps, our next destination was another legendary tourist-swamped town, but filled with a completely different class of tourists—young international hedonists. Think Spring Break in Ft. Lauderdale.

Vang Vieng is a very small town in a spectacular setting. A river flows along the edge of it. Nearby, beyond fields and rice paddies, clusters of tall limestone bluffs thrust up out of the river valley floor. Partially covered with trees and dense vines, the formations look like something from the prehistoric world. Energetic climbers scale the cliffs; the less energetic explore numerous caves and caverns in the limestone.

We rented a motorbike and drove past them, on miles of dirt roads, through creeks and several small villages of bamboo huts. People waved and children shouted out to us as we drove by. Several times we stopped to ask for directions. Between them not understanding our questions (or being able to read our map) and us not understanding their answers, we got fairly lost. We’re still not quite sure where we went.

In one village surrounded by stunning, jungle-covered limestone peaks, we stopped at a little shop that had been set up in the front yard of one of the small houses. We ordered a couple of sodas and chatted with the man and woman who evidently lived there. And by “chatted” I mean we talked, and they talked, and none of us had any idea what the other was saying.

Well, we did have a little breakthrough—Faye pointed to a satellite television antenna in the neighbor’s yard (villages aren’t what they used to be) and said, “TV”. The couple seemed to recognize that word, then told us the word for television in their language. It was probably Lao, but perhaps some other local language. It didn’t really matter because we would have had to spend the rest of the afternoon there repeating the word for it to stick in our heads. Didn’t seem worth it.

As beautiful and peaceful as the village and the countryside around it were, the town of Vang Vieng is something else entirely. The few streets it has, mostly dirt, are literally filled with bars, cheap guesthouses, restaurants, internet cafes, and travel agencies … and something else I don’t quite know what to call.

I have a theory that clumps of tourists cause temporal field distortions—odd little bubbles of alternate reality, areas of bizarreness that sometimes defy explanation. Viang Veng is famous for two things—and I’ll get to the second thing shortly. Around town, sometimes side-by-side, there are these open-air … I’ll just call them TV lounges. They are basically low tables with cushioned seating areas facing several synchronized televisions, all playing endless episodes of “Friends”. It is truly one of the strangest things I’ve ever encountered. Any time of day or night there will be people laying around watching these reruns—and sometimes the places are packed.

We may not go rock climbing, or mucking through caves, but we could not pass up participating in this bit of bizarreness. We sipped bad mixed drinks and lounged through several episodes one evening—Season 3 I think. It is amazing how short the episodes are without commercials, or maybe for some reason we just lost track of time. We finally stumbled out of the distortion field around 10:30 at night to make our way back to our room on the quiet side of the river, just as the rest of the town was getting warmed up for a night of partying.

Speaking of river, the other thing the town is known for is tubing. You can rent big inner tubes and a tuk-tuk will take you upstream a few kilometers and you float back to town. Or at least that is what the naive (us) think. I am a big fan of floating down rivers on inner tubes. It offers just the right combination of getting out in nature and relaxing. So we rented our tubes, climbed on a tuk-tuk crowded with mostly enthusiastic 20-somethings and got dropped off at the river upstream.

It was right about then that we got the feeling that “tubing” was some sort of euphemism. On the banks of the river were three or four wooden decks with bars, all with music amplifiers cranked up to 11, all completely packed with drunken kids (a lot of Australians—and nobody parties like Aussies!). Giant beams were tilted out over the river and cables with sort of zip line/trapeze contraptions ran between them. People would sail out over the river screaming and hooting and plummet into the river, sometimes gracefully, usually not.

The different decks competed for customers by throwing plastic bottles tied to ropes into the water towards people swimming or floating. People could grab the bottle and be towed (or rescued from drowning) to the deck of their choice.

Faye and I felt surprised and bewildered. We had come to go tubing and were mentally unprepared for the scene that met us. We seemed to be unable to shift gears, to adopt the new paradigm. Or maybe we were just too old for that kind of thing. I wasn’t quite ready to admit to that, but I really was looking forward to tubing.

I had spent every spare moment of my childhood summers floating down the river on truck tubes, and was completely comfortable now throwing my tube in the water and jumping off the rocks at the side of the deck, just like old times. But Faye got in a few yards upstream where she could wade in. By the time she got into the water I was already floating out in the middle of the maelstrom. It was surreal and crazy, and kinda fun.

The next time I saw Faye the current had pulled her into a calm area between two of the decks—well, calm water anyway, though otherwise anything but. She still hadn’t got the hang of navigating the inner tube and hadn’t really focused on what was going on with the bottles. I called to her to paddle out into the middle of the river where the current was. With a look of fear on her face she shouted “They’re throwing things at me!”

Maybe it was the shot of Lao whiskey someone had forced on me as I made my way across the crowded deck before I got in the water, but I thought that was hilarious. I wanted her to relax and enjoy it as much as I was, and I started to explain that the bottles were not projectiles aimed at her, but sort of like life preservers. Happy young people wanted her to come party with them.

But just as I started to say that somebody sailed out over the river on a trapeze and cannonballed right behind her. The look on her face told me that her fear had turned to terror. I heard her cry out—to me or to God, I don’t know—“Get me out of here!”

She managed to escape, and the rest of the trip down the river was pretty much what we expected tubing to be. We did pass a few more riverside bars. One tried to lure us in with signs promising “Psychedelic Mushrooms” and “Happy Brownies,” but we decided against those treats. Last time we checked it wasn’t the 60s anymore. Or maybe we were passing through another temporal distortion field.

We floated along the base of some fantastic limestone bluffs. Downstream a ways we passed a small herd of water buffalo nearly submerged in the river. At some point Faye said, “I’ll bet most of the people up there never float down the river at all. They’re all too drunk.” And it was true.

That evening, after the sun had set, a tuk-tuk packed with partiers, their inner tubes loaded on top, passed us in the street. Four Aussies rode on the rear bumper with their pants down around their knees, shouting and trying to hang onto the vehicle and a beer at the same time. I had finally learned the true meaning of “tubing.” If only I had known.

After a few strange but oddly enjoyable days, we moved on to Vientiane, the capitol of Laos, where we are now. We’ll be here for a few days, waiting for the Myanmar/Burma embassy to process our visas.

Slow Boat to Luang Prabang

2010-01-08T19:25:00.000-08:00

To me, that sounds like a good title for a novel—Slow Boat to Luang Prabang. The ideal length for such a book would be something one could read in two days, the amount of time it took us to get down the Mekong River to Luang Prabang from our departure point, Huay Xai (spelled a half dozen different ways, but pronounced “whey sigh”).

Huay Xai is just across the river from the Thai town of Chiang Khong, where we spent the previous night. I guess our river trip actually began with a short ride across to Huay Xai on the Laos side the next morning where we, and about a hundred other travelers jostled to get through the border formalities. Nearly all were about to make the same trip we were.

I hadn’t thought about Laos being a communist country, but several buildings near the boat landing were flying the hammer and sickle. Yet, as I bought a few provisions at inflated prices, and given a very poor rate of exchange for some Thai money, free enterprise seemed alive and well.

There were enough travelers to fill two of the long boats that carry passengers and cargo up and down the river. We got on board, settled in for the trip, and got as comfortable as possible considering we were sitting on wooden benches.

Most of the impressions I had of the Mekong River came from my memories of reports from Southeast Asia during the Viet Nam war. The Mekong took on a mysterious and mythic status. But as I thought about it, I realized those reports were from the southern end of the river, the Mekong River Delta. Whatever the realities of that end of the Mekong, then or now, where we were, much further north, was not what I expected.

The river flowed languidly past white sand beaches that would be the envy of any resort. Fantastic rock formations jutted out along the banks, or sometimes cropped right out of the water, all against a backdrop of dark green, mountainous jungle. Every so often we would pass a small village of bamboo huts. It is hard to tell much about a place just drifting past in a boat, but I was pretty sure I wanted to get off and live there.

The slow boats are called that not just because they are slow, though they are. The name distinguishes them from the “fast boats” that make the same two-day trip in six hours. The fast boats are basically small, river racing skiffs that hold a half dozen people. Every couple of hours or so one would rocket past us so fast I never did get a decent picture of one. The passengers, wearing life jackets and helmets, would glance over at us as they hunkered down in the speeding boat. I wondered whether they pitied or envied us.

As night fell we pulled into Pak Beng,a town about halfway between Huay Xai and Luang Prabang that exists only to service the passengers traveling between the two places. It wasn’t nearly as seedy as we had been led to believe. Maybe the place has improved recently, or maybe our standards aren’t very high. For about $9 we got a pretty nice room, and for about the same price had an excellent meal at an Indian restaurant down the street.

The next morning we and all the passengers from the two boats that had come down the river the day before learned we would be crammed into one boat for the remaining trip. We were not happy. As the boat got fuller and fuller I began thinking about the ideal novel again, that maybe it would be subtitled Mutiny on the Mekong.

Faye and I got on two hours before the scheduled time of departure—experience has taught us it pays to be early. There were already a handful of other passengers on board, as well as an elderly local man, sitting in the front row. An hour and a half later, when nearly all the seats were full and there were more passengers waiting to get on, the wrangler told the old man to give up his seat. So he got up and trudged towards the back of the boat.

A young American woman, traveling with her husband and pre-pubescent daughter shouted “No, that’s not right! Let him sit there!” Somebody asked, “What’s going on?” and the woman said, “They just made that old man give up his seat so a tourist could sit there!” I thought, “Look around lady, this is a tourist boat.” But I kept my mouth shut, unlike the American woman who kept on about the injustice of it all.

As a few young Brits, who had been waiting on the bank got on the American woman said to them, “You have a seat because they kicked out an old man.” With admirable restraint, and a charming accent, one said, “We weren’t waiting for a seat, we were waiting for a different boat.” Then they all made their way to the back of the boat, leaving the front seat empty.

As the boat finally left, the American woman got up from beside her husband and moved to the old man’s empty seat to chat with some friends in the next row.

Aside from that excitement, and the crowding, the second day’s trip was much like the first. People passed the time taking pictures of the passing scenery, reading, and listening to iPods Some were drinking large quantities of beer and whiskey. You could buy beer on board, but it took more foresight than I had to think of bringing your own whiskey. (We had tried some Lao moonshine made from sweet rice in the restaurant the night before. It was really good, and costs just over $1 a bottle.)

The boat arrived in Luang Prabang on the evening of the second day. LP, as people on familiar terms with the town call it, has been a popular tourist destination since the early 90s since the communist government eased restrictions, and it is easy to see why. The town is in a beautiful location, bounded by two rivers, the Mekong and a tributary, the Nam Khan. From the late 1800s until WWII the French controlled the area and buildings from that era remain, giving the town a colonial feel. (Another legacy from the French era is good baguettes and decent, affordable wine.)

It is the kind of place one might think Hemingway would feel at home—if it weren’t for all the damn tourists. The town’s charm is being smothered by tourism. (Yes, I’m aware of the irony of us coming to town and complaining about the tourists. Pot, kettle, etc.)

All along the main street there are only restaurants, shops, hotels and tourism offices, all offering the same tourist activities as the office next to them—excursions to local waterfalls and caves, treks to tribal villages, and going to elephant camps with the chance to learn how to train your own elephant.

Not that those things aren’t fun and interesting and all that. If they weren’t they wouldn’t be so popular. We certainly enjoyed our experience with an elephant in Thailand. But it sometimes it feels like you are stuck in some sort of meta-reality with all your fellow tourists, unable to experience anything real, only what is packaged and presented to you.

At some point a destination can turn into a Disneyland. I expect someday there will be kiosks where you will just go buy a ticket for whatever attraction or activity you want to do (“You must be this tall to ride the elephants.”) I guess that is the fate of popular destinations all over the world.

One always hopes to find an unspoiled jewel of a place, with natural beauty, friendly people, and hopefully a few good restaurants and Wi-Fi. But I suppose that is unlikely. Short of that I still think I would like to go live in one of those riverside villages in a little bamboo hut.

We plan on staying in LP several days, maybe a week. We’re just in the getting acquainted phase, exploring the town on foot in ever widening circles, walking up streets and down alleys, poking our noses into anyplace that looks interesting. So far, even with the annoying tourists, it still seems like a very appealing place.

Chinese New Year

2010-01-01T20:47:00.000-08:00

After an understandably quiet Christmas in this Buddhist country we started wondering where we should plan to be on New Year’s. We couldn’t justify dallying any longer in Chiang Mai, and we needed to be heading north in the general direction of where we would cross into Laos.

In Chiang Mai we had been talking with an interesting Thai shopkeeper, a young woman who came from a farming family in the eastern part of the country. In her business these days she traveled quite a bit, dealing with some of the hill tribes in the north. She suggested that we might find the town of Mae Salong interesting. It was Chinese, she said. Definitely odd, we thought, and maybe a special place to end the year and start the next. Except that to the Chinese, New Year isn’t until mid-April. But we had to find out what a Chinese town was doing in Thailand.

We took a bus north out of Chiang Mai to the end of the line, then got into one of the small pickups, with bench seats and canopy, that serve as public transportation in rural areas, as well as taxi’s in urban areas. Besides us and another traveling couple, the back of the pickup filled up with village people from local hill tribes dressed in bits and pieces of their traditional outfits. For the first time since we got to Thailand we were reminded of our travels in Guatemala.

Unlike the indigenous Mayan groups of the Guatemalan highlands who are the original inhabitants of the area, the dozen or so hill tribe groups of Thailand’s northern mountainous area are relative newcomers—migrants and refugees from Tibet, Mongolia, Southern China and other Southeast Asian countries.

As we learned, the most recent are the Chinese of Mae Salong, who are remnants and family of Nationalist Chinese soldiers who fought against Mao Zedong’s forces in 1949. While Chiang Kai-Chek’s faction fled to what is now Taiwan, a significant number of troops retreated into Burma, where they were attacked repeatedly by the Burmese. They were eventually expelled, some to Taiwan and others into northern Thailand. In the early 50s the king of Thailand, the same one who is on the throne now, granted the Chinese refugees in Mae Salong the right to remain and helped to foster aid projects for the area. The Chinese of Mae Salong maintain strong ties with Taiwan, sometimes sending their kids there to be educated.

By the time we got into town, the day before New Year’s Eve, Mae Salong was no longer the quiet little place it normally is. The handful of guesthouses were nearly full, taken by Thai vacationers who were pouring into town for New Year’s, and room prices had tripled. We didn’t have reservations, and the rather basic room we found had skyrocketed from $3 to $9 a night. In spite of things being not quite what we had expected, the town still seemed like it might be an interesting, off-the-beaten-path place.

Turned out that it was off the beaten path enough that we could no longer avoid the dreaded squat toilet, which was out in back, down some shaky wooden stairs.

The squat toilet, common throughout Asia but often optional in areas frequented by Westerners, is little more than a glorified hole in the ground. I can only assume that its invention predates the invention of pants, which are a logistical nightmare.

Not only that, Asians must be a lot more flexible than I am. I am nearly as uncomfortable talking about squat toilets as I am using them, so I am not going to describe exactly how they are used. But I’ll just say this: Getting down with the people if fine, but what if you can’t get back up?

The last day of the year we rented another little motorbike and explored the picturesque hills around Mae Salong. There are a number of villages of different ethnicities in the area. Though the Chinese mostly live in concrete houses, thanks to the aid given them, the other hill tribe villagers still live in small houses on stilts made entirely of bamboo. They are pretty decent structures and, given a choice, I think I would prefer the bamboo houses.

In years past, and even today, the cash crop for the Chinese and others of the mountainous area where the three borders of Burma, Laos and Thailand meet, known as the Golden Triangle, was opium. Thailand has been quite successful in eradicating opium production by a combination of punishment and incentives, and in the area around Mae Salong the cash crop these days is tea.

Terraced hillsides of tea bushes are scattered throughout the area, sometimes with rice paddies at the bottoms of the hills. In the town, tea flows freely. There are numerous shops selling tea and offering free tastings. At our humble guesthouse tea was not only complementary with every meal at the attached open-air restaurant, if we stood still for more than a few seconds in the lobby area a glass of tea would appear on the table nearest us. We drank a lot of tea.

For New Years, the Chinese of Mae Salong had geared up for the flood of Thai tourists with a tea festival. In an open area in the middle of town a couple dozen stalls of tea vendors vied for attention, urging tea tastings upon everyone passing by. And not tea bag tea, or kept-hot-on-a-burner tea—each cup was made fresh in a fascinating little process and served with some ceremony. We soon felt awash in tea, and guilty that we couldn’t buy a package of tea from every place that offered us a drink. (The tea was not cheap, probably about the same price as a similar quantity of opium. Perhaps they’ve taken the government’s “replace opium with tea” dictum a little too literally.)

The tea stalls were along the sides of the field; in the center were examples of the bamboo houses from several of the local hill tribes. Inside one was a sample family, and we were invited in for—you guessed it—tea. We sat cross-legged around a little fire built in a clever earthen pad built right on the bamboo floor. Our guilt finally overcame us and we bought a package of ginseng oolong.

During New Year’s evening at the festival people were lighting lanterns that would inflate with the heat of the flame and drift up into the sky, carrying with them aspirations for the new year. We left the festival before midnight, returning to our guesthouse, not far from the festival, to celebrate a little more quietly with others there. At midnight the proprietor opened a bottle of Thai Scotch, poured us all a shot, and we watched as scores of the lanterns floated up into the sky past the full moon. The night was warm and beautiful. It was a memorable New Year’s after all.

We are now in Chiang Rai, a small city not far from the border. Our Thai visas expire in a few days, so we’ll be moving on to Laos shortly.

A Slice of Pai

2009-12-29T02:50:00.000-08:00

After Chiang Mai our next destination was a small town up in the mountains of northern Thailand called Pai.

Pai was a hippie haven back in the 70s, along with legendary destinations such as Katmandu Nepal, Goa India, Kabul Afghanistan and a few other places. There are still echoes of that era in Pai with a lot of semi-mellow neo-hippies, Thai Rastafarians, New Agers and assorted characters, not to mention restaurants with brown rice, yoghurt and good whole wheat bread.

There is a nightly street market. But unlike the other markets we’ve enjoyed so far, most of the stuff in Pai is touristy souvenirs. There are, famously, 762 curves between Chiang Mai and Pai (which left me feeling a bit queasy on the way up). That figure is printed on every medium imaginable—t-shirts, post cards, license plates and more. Sometimes Pai is indicated in a numerical shorthand; 762 (number of curves), 1095 (the highway one takes to get there) and 58130 (the postal code). I guess a t-shirt with those numbers printed on it is a cryptic way of saying “I’ve been to Pai.” If you have to ask….

There was one thing at the market I found pretty cool; there were probably a dozen or so old VW buses that had been restored and converted into vending stands, including one that was a complete espresso shop. I almost expected to see one selling tie-dyed t-shirts and hookahs, but no such luck.

In spite of the tacky market, Pai is really a beautiful place. It is in a valley with heavily forested mountains all around. We rented a motorbike and putted around the countryside outside the town. We passed water buffalo and Brahma cows grazing in dry rice paddies, and saw a little of what rural Thai life is like. Very different from the cities where we’ve mostly been so far.

We got to Pai a couple days before Christmas. Since Thailand is a Buddhist country, except for some shiny “Merry Christmas” banners strung up on some tourist hangouts, Christmas passed largely unremarked. A few Thais, showing their cultural sensitivity, did wish us a Merry Christmas, and we had to remember it was inappropriate to wish them the same.

So, being in a country where the national symbol is the elephant, we decided to spend Christmas morning riding one. The day before we had ridden the motorbike out and petted some of the elephants available for riding; that was the closest we had ever been to an elephant, and we didn’t know quite what to expect. But the ride turned out to be an amazing experience.

Though the Indian elephants, which are what the ones in Thailand are, are smaller than their African counterparts, there is no escaping the fact that compared to humans, they are massive. Standing next to one makes you feel really small, and climbing on top of one even more so.

Riding an elephant, or at least the one we rode, is like riding a big cow—a really big cow. (And yes, I do know what riding a cow is like. Don’t ask.) Actually, it felt more like what I imagine riding a gentle dinosaur would have been like. Our weight seemed to be completely insignificant.

We rode a 50-year-old gal named Phenomn (middle-aged for an elephant, so perhaps there was an empathetic bond between us). Along with three or four other elephants and their riders, we went out through the countryside, which was a grand way to see it.

We could feel Phenomn’s muscles ripple under our overstretched legs. I straddled her neck and tucked my knees in behind her ears, which felt like a relatively secure position; Faye sat a little further back where she could hang onto a rope tied around the elephant’s chest. From my vantage point I could look down over Phenomn’s huge head, and I patted it every once in a while, or rubbed her ears, hoping to convey some affection. Sometimes elephants and their handlers grow up together in the same family. I’m not sure what Phenomn’s history is, but she did seem like a huge family pet.

After the trek through the countryside we rode into a river where the elephants sprayed themselves, and us. And then tossed us off into the water as many times as we cared to climb back on. It is an awesome feeling being thrown into a river by an elephant. I thought of Woody Allen’s line in Annie Hall, that it was “the most fun I’ve ever had with my clothes on”—in spite of my clothes being soaking wet.

In Thailand elephants have been domesticated for centuries. I’m not sure there are any in the wild anymore. They are basically the heavy equipment of farm animals, helping to clear forests and move logs. In areas travelers visit, such as Pai, some elephant owners make money giving people like us the chance to ride them. From the elephant’s perspective, it seems like it would beat working.

Later, Christmas evening, we treated ourselves to a massage. Unfortunately we couldn’t get massaged where we really needed it after straddling an elephant all morning—it wasn’t that kind of place. It felt wonderful anyway, but Faye and I walked a bit like elephants for a few days afterwards.

We left Pai on a Saturday morning, just as hordes of Thai weekenders were pouring in, and returned to Chiang Mai. I had to get some dental work before leaving Thailand, which I’ve now done. Though that experience went pretty well as far as visits to the dentist goes, it reinforced the truth of Einstein’s observation that time is relative—an hour in a dental chair is quite a bit longer than an hour in a massage chair.

Now that that is done, we are going back up into the hills of northern Thailand. We’ve been talking to a Thai woman who owns a shop in Chaing Mai and does business with some of the hill tribes. She has told us of a couple of places that sound interesting. Whether or not they celebrate New Year’s remains to be seen.

Chillin' in Chiang Mai

2009-12-23T00:51:00.000-08:00

I was going to say that Thailand is a feast for the senses. But in our experience so far it is more like diving face first into a buffet.

All the senses are indulged and stimulated to the point to where it is difficult to savor anything in particular. Sights and sounds, smells and tastes all mingle together. And if it all gets too exhausting one is never far from a row of comfy chairs lining the street with masseuses eager to rub your feet, back, shoulders or whatever. That’s about as sensual as it can get. But I am getting ahead of myself.

We arrived in Chiang Mai via sleeper train from Bangkok a week ago. We missed a lot of territory between the two cities, which is unfortunate. But we’ve enjoyed Chiang Mai so much that I know we would have regretted having less time to spend here. I don’t know how long we would have to be here before feeling that we’ve had enough, but we won’t get the chance to find out.

Chiang Mai is still a good-sized city, about a quarter the size of Bangkok at 1.6 million. But it feels manageable. Part of it, the “old city,” is surrounded by a moat. It is still a pretty big area, but at least you can walk from one side to the other in a half hour or so. Or at least you probably could if it weren’t for all the restaurants, shops and Buddhist temples to distract you.

Walking isn’t strictly necessary; there are plenty of taxis and tuk-tuks, the three-wheeled motorcycle contraptions, cruising around everywhere—and contributing to the general traffic problem. Just getting across streets can be a real challenge, but the vehicles—cars, taxis, tuk-tuks and motorcycles (there are about as many motorcycles as cars)—seem to be pretty good at avoiding pedestrians.

I mentioned sensual feasts. There are also literal feasts. Food is a big thing here. Seems like everyone is always eating, Us too. We’ve heard that travelers loose weight in Southeast Asia. But I don’t see how that would be possible in Thailand. Eating is as much, or more, entertainment as nourishment. I’m sure we could cut our food budget in half if we ate only when necessary.

We took a one-day Thai cooking class where we spent the day preparing, and eating, a several course meal. It was great fun, and at the end of the day we not only felt stuffed, but we had an appreciation for how fresh and basically simple Thai food is. We’re hoping we can remember enough to cook some at home.

We started the class by visiting a market to get the ingredients for the dishes we were going to prepare—ginger and turmeric roots, coriander and lime leaves, lemon grass, garlic and chilies. That is what Thai’s typically do, buying a little of this and a little of that to make the day’s meals. Or at least the ones that cook at home do. With so many street vendors selling prepared food I wonder whether anyone actually cooks at home. Why would they bother?

Anyway, we shopped for ingredients, and were able to get the teacher to identify a lot of things we didn’t recognize. Just the display of the vegetables, fruits, fish and other things were very attractive. Some of the vendors prepare little bundles of the fresh ingredients for soup. Just chop it up and cook it in a little coconut milk and you’ve got Thai fast food.

There are basically two kinds of markets, the “daily” markets where one buys food and household stuff, and artisan/product markets, aimed mostly at tourists and other shoppers. In Chiang Mai there is a big “night market” every night of the week that fills the sidewalks and a few mall-type areas along several blocks. And in another part of town there is a Sunday evening market that takes up a whole street for probably fifteen blocks. Both markets get so packed it is nearly impossible to walk. For both, vendors set up in the afternoon, and sometime before morning, disappear.

There are plenty of crap vendors, but a large percentage of the things sold are of remarkable artistry and quality. With so much to see it is easy to overlook just how good much of it is. You almost have to force yourself to stop and look at certain things and temporarily ignore everything else.

One of the most amazing and inexplicable things I’ve ever seen are the portrait artists. There were some very good ones doing quick drawings at the Sunday market. But the ones that really astound me are the ones in the nightly market who do portraits from photographs. I think they were using graphite pencils and brushes; the portraits look almost photographic. What I find inexplicable is that there are at least a couple dozen of these artists—mostly men, but a few women. I could understand one or two exceptionally talented people doing that caliber of work. But so many just defies explanation.

The Buddhists temples—and there a lot of them—are a visual feast, with ornate architecture and very intricate carvings covered in gold leaf. And, of course, lots of gold Buddhas.

Evidently 95% of Thailand is Buddhist, and the general outlook that Buddhism inspires is evident in the attitudes and actions of the Thai people. As opposed to the religions most westerners are familiar with, Buddhism is a very personal religion. It is focused primarily on becoming a better person, and encourages common decency towards others. That is an oversimplification, but it is the general idea.

Buddhist monks are not “caretakers of the flock.” In fact the “flock” takes care of the monks while they study and internalize Buddhist values. Thai people basically feed and cloth the numerous monks, giving them food, and voluntarily supporting the temple universities. While caring for monks is considered meritorious, becoming a monk is even more meritorious.

Some are monks for just a short period, perhaps as a child. Others study for several years and return to civil life as young adults. I don’t know the percentage of Thai males who are monks at some point in their lives, but it is pretty high. Even the Thai king was a monk for a while.

Of course, many remain monks for the duration of their lives. We attended some ceremonies for a venerated monk who recently died in his 90s. His remains were cremated. We didn’t see that, but his funeral pyre may have been the psychedelic flying elephant that had been built at his temple. Elephants are the national symbol of Thailand. There are elephant images and figures everywhere. But this colorful winged elephant was really something. Made me think the old monk was going to go to Nirvana (or wherever they go) with a smile on his face.

With some reluctance we are leaving Chiang Mai to go further north into the mountains, to Pai. Everyone says it is beautiful, so even though we’re sorry to leave Chiang Mai, we are looking forward to Pai. We’re going to have to come back to Chiang Mai for a few days before we go on to Laos so I can get some dental work done. Talk about mixed feelings!

A Few Nights in Bangkok

2009-12-14T19:55:00.000-08:00

We spent the first night of our budget trip to Southeast Asia in a Hilton Hotel…in Chicago. Our plane sat on the tarmac in Toronto for three hours waiting for the snow to let up to in Chicago, and when we finally arrived our connecting flight had already gone. We had left our winter clothing in Toronto, so we were not prepared to spend time in freezing temperatures.

The Hilton cost us three times our daily budget—even with the half off voucher given to us by the airline. Not a good start, but we’ve learned to be flexible.

In spite of continued snow flurries, and being on stand-by, we managed to get out of Chicago the next day. We flew on Japan Airlines, which was a real treat. The Japanese flight attendants were invariably perky and polite, qualities I’ve found lacking in the flight attendants on recent North American flights. At one point one offered me a spoon for the ice cream she had just given me. She bowed as I took it from her two outstretched hands.

The 12-hour flight to Tokyo, as well as the 7-hour flight on to Bangkok, was made as pleasant as one could hope for by such graciousness—not to mention three pretty decent meals, snacks between meals, complementary beer, wine and other beverages, and frequent offerings of juice, coffee and two kinds of tea. And moist, hot towels every so often. I know the folks in first class had more legroom, but I can’t imagine they were treated any better we were.

Air travel has become more and more unpleasant in recent years. On North American airlines (including Canadian) there seems to be a race to the bottom. You’re lucky to get a bag of peanuts tossed at you. It is nice to know that quality service is still available in some parts of the world.

At some point over the Pacific Ocean we crossed the International Date Line and Wednesday afternoon became Thursday afternoon. We got to Bangkok just before midnight, and by the time we got settled in our budget hotel it was about 1:00 a.m. Friday morning, though as far as our bodies were concerned it was 1:00 p.m. Thursday afternoon. We had some serious jet lag to deal with for the next few days.

Waking up later Friday morning after what was little more than a nap, we ventured out into the city. Almost immediately we felt like we had slipped into sensory overload. The sights, the sounds, the smells—and seen through the daze of our jet-lagged eyes, almost surreal.

I didn’t expect to like Bangkok; I generally don’t care much for big cities. We had thought of it as a starting point, but intended to leave as soon as possible. But after spending a few days here we’ve changed our minds. Bangkok is amazing. Even things that should be familiar seem different and exotic.

Even from the plane, as we were coming in over the city, I noticed the first difference—vehicles drive on the opposite side of the road. In the airport I got my first sight of Thai words, written in a script unlike anything I’ve ever seen. It is beautiful, but offers no clue at all as to how to pronounce words. Sometimes on street signs, menus or phrasebooks, there is a transliteration of Thai words, written in familiar letters. But that doesn’t usually help.

The markets are incredible, something that has to be seen to be believed. We visited one with more than 10,000 stalls covering 16 acres, selling everything you can think of—food, fine art, furniture, jewelry, electronics and probably enough clothing for everyone in the country. That much stuff in all one place just defies imagination.

Another large shopping center we went to was four and a half floors of just electronics and computers with seemingly everything except what I was looking for, a battery for my laptop.

Seeing all these products, it is not hard to believe that Asians will someday take over the world, not through any evil intent, but because they work harder. Even the production of common consumables seems to be labor intensive. We’ve seen tidy rows of baked goods shaped like animals, and colorful sweets that are miniature masterpieces, almost too beautiful to eat. I know much of Southeast Asian is poor, but in Bangkok at least, there is a sense of abundance, if not excess.

Speaking of food, I’ve never seen anyplace with as much food as we’ve seen in the markets and on the streets here. Food vendors are set up side by side nearly everywhere, many with small tables and benches for customers. In markets in stall after stall, fruit, vegetables, meat and seafood is piled high on tables or in baskets. Things slither and squirm in tubs of water. Much of it I don’t even recognize; some that I do—such as live water snakes or toads—I’d rather not.

Aside from reptiles and some other things I’m not going to touch, the food is delicious, and cheap. A good meal can be had for two dollars or less. Unfortunately a beer can cost as much as the rest of the meal. But a large mango shake costs about half that.

As bewildered as we felt our first morning in Bangkok, after spending a couple of days navigating to various destinations around the city we felt like we were starting to get the hang of it. Bangkok has a very good transportation system. There is an elevated rail and a subway—both quite modern. There are more than 250 bus routes. But the most pleasant and interesting mode of transportation has to be the riverboats that go up and down the Phraya River, which runs through the city. There are 30 stops, and for about 50 cents you can get on and off anywhere along the way.

Amongst travelers, particularly the “party‘’til you puke” crowd, probably the most famous destination in Bangkok is Khao San Rd., a small area packed with bars, cheap hotels, and hundreds of vendors catering to the tastes of the young and restless and wanna-be road warriors. It is a real circus, and interesting in a strange way even for the not so young. But we’re glad that we didn’t see it first thing; we would have had a very different impression of Bangkok.

Massage is a big thing in Thailand, and everywhere there are small places offering to rub just about anything. Faye had warned me to not even think of accepting the “happy ending” offered by some of the more, shall we say, full-service places. On Khao San Rd. we saw a place that offered “fish massage.” Sounded safe. It wasn’t exactly massage, but a pool of water you stuck your feet into and hungry little fish nibbled at them. Supposedly they eat off all the dead skin. I had to try that. I’m not sure the fish ate any dead skin, but it certainly was an interesting sensation.

As much as we’ve liked Bangkok, we are just getting started and are going to move on. Tonight we will take the overnight train to the smaller northern city of Chang Mai, a base for trekking into the mountains where the hill tribes live. We barely scratched the surface of Bangkok. Perhaps we’ll have time at the end of our trip to explore it a little more.

Alien Invasion

2009-12-01T12:19:00.000-08:00

Illegal immigration has been a contentious issue in the US for the past several years, especially around election time. We constantly hear about how aliens come illegally to our country, either sneaking in the back door to the American dream, seeking a better life and citizenship. Or, and this is what we hear mostly, that they are taking American jobs, using American health care, and bringing crime and disease into the country. Neither is true for most immigrants.

In past years the money immigrants from Guatemala send home has accounted for about 10% of the money in the country. Most come to the US hoping to make some money, then return home.

But the US economy, and political posturing, has had an impact on the Guatemalan economy, and on immigrants with hopes of a better life not in the US, but for their families back home. In the last year remittances have dropped by 70%.

A couple years ago, the last time I was in Guatemala, I learned that a half-dozen or so young people I know here had gone the US to find work. One in particular surprised me because he had a wife and two children, and seemed to be relatively well off compared to most of his neighbors in his village. But, his wife said, he thought he could earn more money in the US to send back to his family. A couple weeks ago he returned and he is happy to be back. I talked with him about his experience.

He made his way though Mexico, on foot and by bus, to the Texas border. There, with about 20 others, he crossed the mountains into the US. For a fee of about $1500 he was picked up and transported further into the country where he found work, mostly by word of mouth in the network of illegal immigrants. In the two and half years he was there he worked in several southern states, mostly packing vegetables.

I asked him how much money workers were able to send home. He said that if one can find steady work, a worker can earn about $1000 a month. Those who live frugally—eating cheaply and living in housing that some farmers provide, which is often crude shelters—one can send back $700-$800 a month. (Though it is very hard to imagine someone living on $200-$300 a month under any circumstances.)

More typically workers are able to send back half or less of what they make. He said he could make as much at home in Guatemala, and be with his family. But by the time he figured that out, he was stuck there trying to earn enough to pay for his travel expenses and enough to make the trip worth it.

For others the choice is not quite as clear. Manual laborers in Guatemala earn about $6 a day.

Another friend made it to the US, worked for six months—just long enough to pay his expenses—and came back. His story was similar, of a dangerous trip—riding freight trains through Mexico-- and hard work, low wages and poor living conditions after he made it to the US.

After telling me about how much he disliked working in tobacco fields, he was eager to show me the two souvenirs he had brought back—a picture book of North Carolina, and a book about barbecue. Evidently he had some fond memories of some southern cooking. He also asked me whether I had ever seen a Wal-Mart. That impressed him too.

As I mentioned before, the father of my godchildren is currently working in the tobacco fields of South Carolina, and has been there about a year. He works with about 60 other Guatemalans, all illegal, who sleep together on beds set up in a farm warehouse. He has told his family that he plans to stay for five years, but he may change his mind. Work in the tobacco fields, in addition to being very difficult and unpleasant, is dependent on the weather. Work is not steady and he has been unable to send much money home.

So that’s the reality of the life of at least some illegal immigrants. I suspect most have similar stories. It isn't what a lot of immigrants expect, nor is it what a lot of Americans think it is. It is a lot worse than either. The beneficiaries of the system—and the employment of illegal immigrants is more of a system than most realize—are the owners, who get people willing to do the work for low wages, and the American consumers, who get tobacco, produce, meat, construction labor, yard work, restaurant meals, manufactured goods, and more—at “reasonable” prices.

Think about it next time you hear a politician or right-wing pundit pontificating on the subject.

On a completely different subject, this is my last post from Guatemala this year. In a couple days I’ll be flying back to Toronto to pick up Faye, then we’re off to Asia. Look for an update from there in a couple of weeks.

Party Like It's 2012

2009-11-24T15:40:00.000-08:00

OK, that’s a joke. As far as I can tell here in Guatemala present-day Mayas either don’t know about the dire predictions of the end of the world in 2012 based on the old Mayan calendar, or they don’t believe it. Either way, it is life as usual, which means celebrating important events, some traditional, some not so much.

This past weekend my oldest goddaughter, Angelina, graduated from college with a degree in medical science. It is sort of a pre-med degree and she plans to continue and become a doctor. Such an achievement is not at all traditional amongst the Maya, but thankfully it is not as rare as it used to be.

Angelina and her family moved away from their village about eight years ago so she and her brothers and sisters could get a better education, which they have done. She is the second in the family to graduate, at the top of her class no less. Her older brother graduated three years ago with a degree in computer science.

After the graduation ceremony in the city on Friday, Angelina’s family, relatives and friends, and I, filled two vans—one rented, and the other an old pile of crap I’ve had an adversarial relationship with for years—and returned to their home village to celebrate. A few miles from the village we stopped and both vehicles were festooned with balloons and streamers. Just outside the village we stopped again to light off a string of firecrackers announcing our arrival. (Firecrackers—and much larger aerial bombs—are quite traditional and are used to celebrate virtually anything.)

In the past, higher education has been close to a dirty word in the village. When Angelina’s aunt went away to school, on her way to becoming a lawyer, the family told their neighbors she was serving as a maid in the city. There may have been some envy and jealousy of Angelina’s achievement (actually, I know there was), but as far as she and her family were concerned, it was not going to be kept secret.

Before returning to the village Angelina’s family and friends who live in the city and usually wear normal, western clothes—at least the younger ones—had changed back into their traditional village outfits. Angelina stayed dressed in the navy blue suit that she had graduated in. When she got out of the van in front of where her extended family still lives, she really stood out—literally and, more importantly, symbolically.

A couple of rooms had been decorated with balloons and streamers. Friends and extended family sat down to enjoy a feast of Mayan party food.

The staple of the Mayan diet is corn, usually tortillas, which are eaten at virtually every meal, including breakfast. In nearly every village household, every morning corn is ground into a flour, called masa, to make tortillas. And when Mayas party it means even more delicacies made from masa. (Alas, no cake and ice cream) Over the next couple of days I think I counted half a dozen different items made from basically the same thing, but cooked or seasoned differently, or of a different consistency—everything from rather dense tamalitos, which are lumps of masa steamed in corn husks, to a delicious drink called atol, which can be spicy or sweet. A dozen women were kept busy making the tamales, and boiling huge pots of chicken over open fires.

After filling up on corn meal and Pepsi, many of the guests at the party on Friday gave little speeches congratulating Angelina and her family. Or I assume that is what they were saying. The villagers speak a Mayan language that I don’t understand except for a few words. (Most also speak at least some Spanish, but not to each other.) One of the words I do understand is “Thank-you,” and there was a lot of that. Some of it was even directed at me, which was nice. Fortunately I also know how to say, “You’re welcome.”

Another feature of nearly all Mayan celebrations is a Catholic mass. The vast majority are at least nominally Catholic, and have been so for 400 years, since the Spanish Conquest. On Saturday the village church was decorated with more balloons and streamers, and lace, which made it look quite festive.

On Sunday all of us, dressed in our finest, including me, went to mass. Angelina’s mother was on her left arm, and I was her right as we led her family and friends into the church. I’m sure her father would have been in that position were he not working in the tobacco fields of South Carolina (illegally) trying to make some money to send back to his family. But he wasn’t there, so as her godfather that was my job.

I think I’ve been to a grand total of four masses before in my life, and three of them were when I became godfather of Angelina and her three younger siblings. It was all a little strange to me, and I tried to follow the cues of the others. We were in the front row—and I stick out like a sore thumb amongst all the short, brown villagers—so I knew I was being watched.

I may have gotten baptized; I’m not sure. I knew better than to take the hors d’oeuvres they passed around. But at some point Angelina, her mother and I were called up to kneel in front of the priest and he sprinkled water on us. It felt pretty good because it was hot in the church, and I would have welcomed another squirt or two. But I wasn’t quite sure of the significance of what had just happened, and didn’t think asking for more would have been appropriate. I’m sure the priest had already noticed that I had not been participating wholeheartedly in the ceremony.

After the mass, a bunch of us had another meal, this time bread, for a change, and hot chocolate. Then we hopped in the van and drove back to the city.

It was a remarkable experience to witness this event as part of the family. It is something the casual tourist, I think, could not imagine. People ask me why I keep coming back to Guatemala. It is for times like this.

On a different subject entirely, while I was in the village I got a chance to talk with a friend who had gone to work (illegally) in the US. After six months he decided it wasn’t worth it and returned. I heard another friend, who was in the US for two or three years, has come back too. I hope to talk with him next week. Little is heard about this issue from the perspective of the illegal immigrants, so maybe I can learn something.

Changes

2009-11-07T07:15:00.000-08:00

I am already nearly a week into phase two of this year’s trip: Last Monday I flew from Canada to Guatemala, where I’ll be spending the month of November.

I’ve been to Guatemala many times over the years, and it is a familiar place for me. Coming here seems not so much a trip or vacation as it does a parallel reality. It is like the difference between a dream world and a waking world. Which is which—which seems more real—depends on where I am.

For the first few days here I feel fuzzy headed. At night sometimes I am unsure of where I am (or totally at a loss). But then things solidify and come into focus. I recognize old friends, they recognize me, and I am ready pick up where I left off. The awareness of the other world fades and I begin having trouble remembering names and details from that side of the divide. Time seems to pass not in a straight line, but in loops on either side of the line.

I’m here a couple months earlier than usual. By now the rainy season is usually over, but there has been heavy rain off and on since I got here. This year the rainy season was unusually dry—the corn crop suffered. Everybody is shaking their head and mumbling about the changing climate. For a culture that is so heavily dependant on agriculture, such climate changes can be disastrous. A corn shortage will mean higher prices, and that means more people will go hungry.

I spent the first few days back in Guatemala in Panajachel, on the shore of Lake Atitlan. The lake is famously known as the most beautiful lake in the world. It is certainly one of the most impressive, with its deep blue waters and backdrop of volcanoes. But for a variety of reasons, nearly all man made, beautiful blue Lake Atitlan is turning brown, and in some places the shoreline is mucky and smelly. There are signs warning people not to swim in the water.

There has been plenty of finger pointing and rationalizing, but the reality is that the quantity of phosphate fertilizers, soaps and untreated sewage running into the lake has triggered a tipping point, and the lake is dying. There are some hopeful signs that authorities are taking the problem seriously and are preparing to do something about it. Aside from the ecological disaster, the longer the condition persists the more impact it will have on tourism, which is a major source of income for the country, particularly the Mayas who live around the lake. It is certainly in everybody’s interest to solve the problem rather than ignore it, as they have done for too long.

After a few rainy days in Panajachel, too cold to go swimming even if it were advisable, I took the bus up to Xela. Friends and readers of my past entries will know of my relationship of many years with a family here—four godchildren—a boy and three girls, plus their parents and an older brother. This has been a year of changes for them as well.

A few months ago the father made his way to the US, by foot and by bus, and is working in the tobacco fields of South Carolina. What possessed him to do that I have no idea. But I know the global economic trouble has had an impact in Guatemala. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

On the brighter side, the older brother, now 22 and still studying computer science in university, has a new wife and six-month-old daughter. I can’t believe he grew up so fast, but other than that it feels remarkably reassuring to see the oldest of the kids starting his own family. Life goes on.

The oldest of my godchildren, almost 20, graduates from her medical course this month and has been interning at a clinic in a nearby town. I believe she plans to continue with her medical education. Needless to say, I feel very proud of her.

The boy, second oldest, is at the point where he will have to choose a career and start taking specialized courses. He hasn’t quite decided whether he wants to be an architect or engineer. The two younger girls can put off such decisions for a little while longer, but they are doing well in the courses they are taking.

I don’t think any of them will have to contemplate being an illegal laborer in the future. Their parents, who have just a second grade education, had high hopes for them years ago when they first came to me and asked for help. I think we all can be happy with the way things have developed. The kids have a ways to go yet, but they have worked hard and have accomplished a lot.

I’m not sure what is on my agenda for the rest of the month. I know there will be a graduation party back in the village the family came from later this month. That should be fun. Hopefully the sun will come out sometime soon.

Surf and Turf

2009-10-16T10:35:00.001-07:00

I’ve been fascinated by the history of Eastern Canada and the Atlantic provinces. There are old buildings with dates I’ve seen only in history books. In places entire neighborhoods, perhaps out of simple neglect, have survived urban renewal and look like a set for a historical drama. If only they could talk.

Whispered stories fill the air in small cemeteries scattered around the countryside. Some headstones have little more than a name and date. Some hint of tragedy and the harshness of life a century ago; other inscriptions suggest an intriguing story such as the woman who, after one husband died “after an illness of 14 days”, married another man of the same last name, perhaps his brother.

The history of Acadia, as Nova Scotia was called by its original French settlers, is particularly interesting. The French and English fought numerous battles for control of the area in the 1600s. The English eventually prevailed and the territory became known as Nova Scotia (New Scotland).

There are still remnants of Acadian houses, and even some settlements populated by the descendents of the first Acadians. But in the 1750s the English expelled many of them. Some migrated to the territory of Louisiana, which was French at the time. There, the Acadians became known as Cajuns, and still speak a French dialect today.

The oldest permanent settlement in Canada is Annapolis Royal, near the southern end of Nova Scotia, founded in 1610. The French had built a settlement nearby a few years before, but it was destroyed by the English.

We took the three-hour ferry ride across the Bay of Fundy from St. John, New Brunswick, to Digby, a few miles from Annapolis Royal. The cold rains that had started a few days before had let up, and the day was fairly sunny and calm. The barf bags scattered around the ferry indicated that some crossings were not so smooth.

Had the water been rough we could have driven from New Brunswick. Nova Scotia is connected to the mainland by a narrow strip of land at its northern end. I’m sure within a century or two the Bay of Fundy will become the Strait of Fundy and the province will be cut off. Or, more likely, the waters of the Atlantic will rise and accomplish the same thing in a much shorter time.

We spent the first two nights near Annapolis Royal with Faye’s former mother-in-law, a very nice woman with a charming English accent with whom Faye has remained friends. She and her daughter’s family live in the country near the water where there are still remnants of dikes built by Acadians. Just down the lane is a small cemetery with headstones dated as early as the late 1700s.

In the early days Nova Scotia became a center for boat building, sea trade and fishing, particularly for lobster. Fishing is still a major occupation. (Nova Scotia is the only place I’ve seen lobster burgers on restaurant menus.)

Inland, there are fields as fertile as the sea growing, among other things, pumpkins big enough to climb into. Every year in the fall there are pumpkin boat races near Halifax, where hollowed out pumpkins are paddled across the harbor.

We didn’t spend as much time in Nova Scotia as we would have liked because of a cold drizzle that came and went. We stayed near Halifax one night and explored the city for most of the next day (unfortunately a Sunday). Halifax reminds me of a smaller version of Boston, probably because it dates from the same era, with historic old buildings of a similar vintage. The oldest Protestant church in Canada is there, built in 1750, still a magnificent building. There is a plaque in the church commemorating two sailors buried there who were killed in a battle against the American warship The Chesapeake in 1813.

By the time we got back to New Brunswick the sun had returned and we took some back roads to the area where the more respectable, English side of my father’s family settled. I found the grave of my great-grandmother, who died in 1900, and mention on a monument of a great-great-great grandfather who was one of the first settlers in a small community founded in the late 1700s. There were others to whom I am sure I am related, but it will take some more work to figure out exactly how.

I’ve always thought cemeteries were interesting, but wondering through the graves of my ancestors was quite an experience, enough to make me feel at least partly Canadian.

We had hoped to visit Quebec City and some other parts of the province on the way back, but decided we’d return again earlier in the season when the weather was better. Instead we drove straight through from western New Brunswick to Faye’s brother’s “cottage” in Ontario.

So, the cross-country Canada part of our trip is over (except for the part next spring when we drive back to British Columbia), but it was just the first leg of our journey. The next part will be something completely different. Stay tuned.

Roots

2009-10-07T19:01:00.001-07:00

As much as we enjoyed Quebec, we looked forward to getting into New Brunswick and being able to read road signs again. As Canada’s only officially bilingual province, signs are in both languages. At least it gave us an opportunity to learn what the French signs in Quebec had been trying to tell us.

In spite of having been to New Brunswick years ago on a quick trip with my parents, I didn’t have a clear impression of what it was like. Like the countryside of southern Quebec, there were beautiful rolling hills covered with trees in fall colors.According to brochures, the province is known for its covered bridges, and we crossed the longest one in the world. And according to road signs, we were to keep our eyes open for giant moose, bigger than cars.

I had more of a reason to want to visit New Brunswick than just the usual sightseeing. My father’s side of the family lived in the province in the 1800’s. My father was born in New Brunswick in 1904, shortly before his family picked up and moved to California, leaving little trace behind. I hoped to fill in some blanks in my knowledge of family history, and even more, find some official record of my father’s birth.

My father’s family was Irish on his father’s side and English on his mother’s. My grandmother’s family fled to Canada after the Revolutionary War, and came to an area settled by Loyalists who had been given land grants by the British Crown. (Though they were known as “Loyalists” in Canada, in the US the revolutionaries thought of them as something else.)

My father’s father’s side was Irish, and came to the area a little later. Though my grandmother’s genealogy is pretty well documented, I don’t know much about the Irish side beyond my great-grandfather, who was born in 1824 near where my father was born 80 years later.

Genealogical research is a lot like detective work, digging up little clues in various places, hoping one will lead to another. Fortunately with the internet, research has been easier, and some cousins have done a lot of work. But there were still plenty of questions to be researched. We poured through historical archives, visited several cemeteries and, most interestingly, were able to meet with some of my living relatives, including a 96-year-old cousin.

After a fascinating evening of listening to tales I realized that unlike my Loyalist English grandmother’s lineage, which is pretty distinguished if you go back far enough, in my Irish grandfather’s lineage there is little to brag about. There were some “characters,” to put it politely, but my aged cousin cautioned me, “This information is just for the family.” I promised.

La Belle Province

2009-10-03T18:20:00.000-07:00

After spending two tranquil weeks in relative splendor at Faye’s brother’s lakeside “cottage” we are continuing our journey, across eastern Ontario and Quebec. As before, we’ve avoided the urban areas as much as possible and have tried to stay on rural roads (not too hard to do in Canada). The flamboyance of fall has engulfed the countryside. The scenery has been spectacular.

It is hard to say which part of the trip we’ve enjoyed more; every place has had its charms. The rugged mountains and forests of B.C. are impressive. The open prairies felt fertile and peaceful. Ontario is full of charm and history, from small towns with houses built of limestone and brick to the magnificent nation’s capitol of Ottawa.

But Quebec is special. It seems like the kind of place we could easily spend weeks, or more. One town in particular had us both thinking we should pick up and move there, at least long enough to learn French. (Various places on this trip I have said “I could live here.” And Faye says “Remember, they have real winter here!” )

Speaking of French, it was a bit of an eye opener for me to realize that Quebec really is a French-speaking province. Spoken English was rare enough that when we heard anyone speaking it, we poked each other and raised our eyebrows. Written English was nearly non-existent. It took a while to get used to the fact that I couldn’t read anything.

For me, as an American, Canada is a foreign country, of course. But it doesn’t feel foreign, just a little different. Quebec, on the other hand, really did feel foreign. Mainly because of the language, of course. But with language comes culture, and it seemed to have a certain panache. Even mundane interactions felt a little exotic.

Quebec has been agitating for sovereignty for the last 60 years. The issue is the open sore of Canadian politics. Bringing up the subject is the surest way to get Canadians to argue about something. There are compelling views both for and against Quebec becoming it’s own country, but being there it wasn’t hard to think it already was. It certainly has one foot out the door. On the other hand, it probably never had more than one foot in the door to begin with. It has a complicated history.

I think the high point of our eastward trip through Quebec was something that would have seemed exotic in any language. We dropped into a Benedictine abbey located in the forest outside a little town for the mid-day Mass. The monks sang Gregorian chants in Latin, and other parts of the service in French. Since both languages are equally unintelligible to me, it was a very enjoyable musical experience, without any theological quibbles I might have had with the meaning of the words.

The monks support the abbey by making a wide variety of very good cheese. We bought a couple of small packages for our lunches, but we may have to go back for more on our trip westward.

We have moved on to the beautiful maritime provinces of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, but I will save that for the next post.

On to Ontario.

2009-09-19T10:35:00.000-07:00

We have reached Eastern Ontario, where Faye grew up, where one of her brothers lives, and where we will stay for a while.

Against the advice of several people, rather than taking the direct route to southern Ontario, through the US, we continued eastward from southern Manitoba into northern Ontario. (Yes, northern Ontario is due east of southern Manitoba, and is northern only in relation to the southern part of the province, which extends quite a ways south, to about the same latitude as central Oregon.)

“It is all just trees, trees, trees,” we were told. But it was also lakes, lakes, lakes, and was absolutely beautiful. Driving through hundreds of miles of trees we passed scores of lakes of all sizes, many dotted with tree-covered islands. The drive along the northern shore of Lake Superior was particularly nice, sometimes with clear vistas out across the lake and sometimes skirting coves and inlets. (There were more than 300 miles of that!)

We saw numerous signs warning of moose on the highway, but we didn’t see any. In fact the only notable wildlife we saw were some lake otters scampering across the road from one lake to another. Being surrounded by forest for so many miles, I was surprised we didn’t see more animals.

We left Lake Superior at Sault Ste. Marie, continuing eastward towards Ottawa (capitol of Canada, for non-Canadian readers) and drove along the Ottawa River. On the northern side of the river is the French Canadian province of Quebec.

Though Canada is officially a bilingual country—virtually all packaged goods are labeled in both English and French—in the western provinces there is little recognition of it. In fact, the only officially bilingual province is New Brunswick, one of the country’s eastern, coastal provinces. Quebec’s only official language is French.

But beginning in eastern Manitoba we started seeing more French language signs alongside English signs, and even heard French commercials on English radio stations. (There are French language radio and television broadcasts across Canada.) Winnipeg has a large French-Canadian population, and there is a section of the city that is entirely French. Here in Ontario we are hearing more French spoken (which, unfortunately, we can't understand.)

We’ll be visiting Quebec a little later, which, I’m sure will be interesting. In some respects Quebec is like a different country—and there are plenty of Québécois who think it is a different country. But for now we are spending some time in Ontario with one of Faye’s brothers, who is putting some finishing touches on a new “cottage.”

I put “cottage” in quotation marks because in Ontario the term “cottage” evidently does not imply small or rustic. Faye’s brother’s place is a beautiful and spacious timber frame house nestled in the woods overlooking a lake. It is an idyllic place in a mesmerizing location. But I think we could get used to it. There are plenty of little projects left to do to keep us occupied when we grow weary of cottage life.

Land, Lots of Land

2009-09-15T05:31:00.000-07:00

Canada’s prairies, stretching east from the Rockies in Alberta, across Saskatchewan and most of Manitoba, are a lot of not much, surrounded by next to nothing. I think the prairies are the kind of place you either love or hate, and I loved it. There are vast fields of wheat, some of it harvested, some waiting to be threshed. Giant round bales of hay lie scattered in green fields, with occasional fields of corn, sunflowers and other crops. This time of year, at least, the prairies are beautiful.

Small towns are strung out along straight roads. Some are barely alive, just a name and sometimes a slogan— Stoughton: The Crossroads of Friendship; Coronach: Where the Past Meets the Present;Esterhazy: Postash Capital of the World.

Our first destination after leaving Moose Jaw (Where You Want to Be) was a pilgrimage to Canada’s most famous, yet fictional, small town, Dog River. In six successful seasons the sitcom “Corner Gas” portrayed life in the small Saskatchewan prairie town. After the series ended earlier this year “Dog River” evaporated, leaving the actual town of Rouleau (Buckle of the Grain Belt.)

Truthfully, the visit to Dog River was one of the things I was looking forward to most on our cross-Canada trip. I wish we could have got there while the series was still being shot. There is not much there now, aside from the quiet little town that was there before the series. Part of the famous gas station and the Ruby Café is still there, though boarded up. Some of the existing buildings that were used frequently in the program are still there. The “police station” is now a coffee shop that sells souvenirs. (I bought a hat.) But I wasn’t disappointed. We saw what’s left of Dog River, and now when we watch the TV show we can recognize places.

Down the road a ways we stopped at another small town, Souris, Manaitoba, known for having the longest suspension foot bridge in Canada (but no slogan.) As we entered town we saw a couple selling homemade jams and jellies, so we pulled in. After we bought some Saskatoon berry jam and a jar of pickled vegetables we noticed we were parked in front of a little café. So we went in for lunch—homemade soup with garden vegetables, and a sandwich on homemade bread. Delicious.

We left with a loaf of bread, after being urged by the waitress to go see the swinging bridge. We did, and it was fun to walk across, and worth seeing. Getting to the bridge we drove past nice old brick homes that were testimony to a prosperous past, if not present. Souris was the kind of surprise that makes taking back roads worth it.

By evening we were in Manitoba’s only city, Winnipeg. After days on the prairies I don’t think we were ready for a city. I’m sure Winnipeg deserves a better review than I am likely to give it, so I will leave it at that. We spent one night, and part of the next day, then headed eastward into Ontario’s cottage country.

From Salmon Arm to Moose Jaw

2009-09-11T07:55:00.000-07:00

According to Mapquest the distance between Salmon Arm, British Columbia and Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan by the most direct route, the Trans-Canada Highway, is 741 miles, and takes about 14 hours to get from one place to the other. We avoided the Trans-Canada as much as possible, instead searching out back roads, sometimes dirt and gravel. So it took us nearly 1200 miles—and nine days.

None-the-less, we feel like we have made good time. As Robert Pirsig said in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the emphasis has been on good rather than time. We spent the first night camping at a hot spring (hard to beat that!) Over the Labor Day weekend we stayed with Faye’s brother and sister-in-law in Calgary, who took us places we would not have known about, including to a nearby town for a rodeo.

I had thought that maybe we could have a theme for the trip, visiting towns named for odd body parts, i.e. Salmon Arm and Moose Jaw, but there were not enough of them. We did wander through Wayne, Dorothy, Patricia and Millicent. But they were fairly close together and didn’t get us far. Wayne had a nice sign that said the population was 27. Millicent was so small that the name appeared only on the map. The two-lane country road that connected them was quite enjoyable, though.

Speaking of odd names, one of our side trips from Calgary was to the town of Vulcan. It was named a century before Star Trek made Mr. Spock’s home planet famous. But about 20 years ago, in a desperate attempt to avoid extinction, the town decided to capitalize on the name, built a model of the USS Enterprise, opened a Star Trek museum and began hosting a yearly convention.

The Star Trek museum wasn’t very impressive. But the dinosaur museum in Drumheller was something else. The badlands near the town is one of the best fossil fields in the world, with new examples of prehistoric animals exposed every year. Well-known paleontologists have excavated fossils for decades, and continue to do so. The museum is filled with giant skeletons and impressive recreations. Of course the town makes the most of the area’s reputation with dinosaur statues in front of every other business, including one so big that you can take stairs up to the top and look out over the town through its mouth. Close to life size, evidently.

We entered Saskatchewan on a dirt road in a provincial park that straddled the border. We laughed when we saw the sign welcoming us to the province because it made Saskatchewan look, shall we say, undeveloped. However, after spending a few more hours getting to Moose Jaw, we thought that maybe our first impressions were not that far off. (Apologies to our friends with roots in Saskatchewan.) We got back on the Trans-Canada Highway and stopped at the welcome center. From the promotional brochures we read it became clear that most places in the province have a hard time finding anything to brag about.

We got to Moose Jaw late this afternoon. As far as we can tell the towns major attractions are a giant statue of a moose somewhere, and some underground tunnels supposedly used by Al Capone. We’ll visit both tomorrow before continuing our drift eastward. We’ll get on some back roads and see what we can find.

Travelin' Shoes

2009-08-24T20:52:00.000-07:00

Nearly everything we own is in storage, and what is left will be there soon. In a few days we’re going to hit the road.

At this stage—looking forward—the trip is little more than bare bones. A window of time, maps, travel books, tickets purchased and bits of advice. All potential and possibilities. As Dr. Frank-N-Furter said, “Antici……pation.”

The plan at this point is to load up the car and spend a few weeks traveling across Canada, perhaps as far as the Maritimes, Canada’s eastern provinces. Faye’s two brothers live along the way, one in Alberta and one in Ontario. I have distant relatives from my dad’s side in New Brunswick. I don’t know whether I will be able to connect with any living relatives, but I know where some are buried.

I will go to Guatemala for the month of November to catch up with friends and family, and soak up some sunshine; Faye will stay with her brother in Ontario. A few days after I get back, in early December, we’ll fly to Bangkok to spend three months in Southeast Asia. The plan is to divide the time among Thailand, Laos and Burma/Myanmar.

Stay tuned…

Home of the Brave

2009-05-22T16:37:00.000-07:00

When did we become such cowards? What is the big deal about bringing the prisoners at Guatanamo to the US? The US has more prisoners per capita than any other country. If there is one thing we know how to do it is incarcerate people. This letter sent to Talking Points Memo from a Dutch reader puts it rather succinctly:

If you live outside of the US, or the US centric bubble. then the incredible stupidity of the this viewpoint is obvious.
Where does the World Court reside? It resides in the Hague in the Netherlands. the Netherlands has a population of 16 million (that are not allowed to bear arms or such).

The world courts deals with the worst of the worst, anything in Gitmo pails to what these folks have done.

Let's take those war criminals (of which dozens have been tried and sentenced) from the Balkan conflict as an example. Here is a group that still has lots of support (Serbs primarily) all across Europe. They are in cells in the Hague which is driving distance from their homeland. Not like some poor Afghan farmer totally divorced from his people, these people have strong support living with a few hours drive!! Almost nothing could stop them from attacking and trying to release there leaders (and heros), or at least taking revenge on the country they are incarcerated in. The REAL danger to this court pails to anything the perceived Gitmo people could possibly do.

Just look at the history of the Balkan conflict, its horrible geenocide and the people who did the killing, and then grab a map to see where the two countries lie, you will get the picture. Then do the same for the Afghan conflict ... Kinda makes you giggle.

But, do you hear the good people of the Netherlands on the streets demanding these criminals leave or cowering under their beds at night? No, it just might be that not all folks in the globe are NIMBY and some have the balls to realize that freedom comes at a price, and you never know when you will have to pay up in full.

Could it be that a small country in "old" Europe has more balls than the gun toting folk wingnuts of the US have?

Of course, the detainees we're warehousing at Gitmo were not sent there because they were a threat to the US, or the "worst of the worst." They were sent there because the Bush/Cheney administration wanted to put them somewhere outside the jurisdiction of US law so they could do things to them that would be illegal in the US. They wanted to be able to torture them. No habeas corpus, no fair trials, no human rights.

I'm sure there are plenty of Americans who are terrified at the prospect of having these "super villains" in the US. That's the whole point of terrorism, and Americans have been remarkably vulnerable. But I think the politicians are terrified of something else. If the detainees are transferred from Guantanamo to the US, the main difference would be that they would have to be treated in accordance with the Constitution and the Geneva Convention, just like any other prisoner. They would have to be charged with a crime and given a trial. That is what the politicians are terrified of.

And they probably have good reason to be. If or when the truth comes out, no doubt it will become clear that our leaders, in our name and with our consent, sank to the level of the of those we've accused of evil.

It is time everyone took responsibility for what they've done, torturers and terrorists alike. It begins with closing Guantanamo, transferring the people we've held there to a legitimate jurisdiction and either give them a trial or release them. In the process we need to look closely and honestly at how a travesty such as an extra-judicial prison happened, and take steps to make sure it never happens again. In the end the only meaningful victory against terrorism will be when we no longer feel terrified. Someday we may become once again the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Ironic

2009-05-04T08:57:00.000-07:00

I saw this headline on CNN yesterday: Canadian Farmer gives Swine Flu to Pigs. Here in Canada we've been reassured that it is still safe to eat Canadian pigs. However, one might want to avoid Canadian farmers.

It is always nice when Canada makes the international news. A while back I mentioned the severed feet that were washing up on the coast of British Columbia. Another headliner: last summer a one Greyhound passenger decapitated another one. (If you've ever ridden Greyhound, doing the same may have crossed your mind.)

These stories get more thorough treatment in the Canadian press, of course. In the Greyhound story, an editorial in Canada's leading national magazine wondered whether a Canadian character flaw was revealed in the behavior of the other Greyhound passengers who scrambled in panic over seats and out the door to get away from the passenger who was calmly cutting off the head of his victim. And the police who finally arrived at the scene and waited patiently outside the bus while the passenger with the knife cut off and ate parts of the recently deceased. Sometimes Canadians can be just too polite.

A story that has been making big headlines for months in Canada, though I haven't seen it on CNN, is about the airport police that tasered to death a Polish immigrant at the Vancouver airport. The passenger couldn't speak English, and because of some misunderstanding was trapped in the arrival area for something like 12 hours. Understandably he got more and more agitated as time went on. (I know the feeling!) Evidently the last straw for the police was when the Polish passenger brandished a stapler at them. I guess everyone has their breaking point.

The First Coming

2009-02-19T14:32:00.000-08:00

I had every intention of following up my last post, a parting shot at the outgoing administration (I’m averse to even naming it now), with a forward-looking piece on the implications of the new Obama administration. But a warm glow settled over me and I dozed off.

My blissful state was slightly disturbed by Obama’s recent unsuccessful attempts to tango with Congressional Republicans over the Stimulus Bill. That will teach him to dance with the one who brung him. The Bill passed anyway, so who needs ‘em? Maybe next time Congress can get things done with less drama.

The Republicans have settled into what they do best—a rear guard action designed to damage the prospects of everyone who doesn’t agree with them, even if it means bringing down the country. They had plenty of practice during the Clinton years, and I’m sure they will keep it up throughout the Obama administration. Things are different this time; people won’t soon forget the example of the last eight years of Republican rule.

Though you might not know it if you get your news from only US news outlets, Obama is out of the country today for the first time since the election. He is in Canada’s capitol, Ottawa. The brief visit, six hours or so, is largely symbolic, and has been embraced enthusiastically by Canadians—and largely ignored by Americans.

I’ve mentioned before how popular Obama is in Canada, considerably more so than even in the US. A recent poll shows 82% of Canadians like him, compared to a respectable 64% in the US. Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper enjoys just a 38% approval rate. In Canada’s multi-party political system, that is enough to put him in the Prime Minister’s seat.

Obama’s visit is a real balancing act for Harper. On one hand he is hoping some of Obama’s popularity will rub off on him. On the other, he doesn’t want to suffer in comparison to him. Harper refused to allow any questions at this morning’s photo op with Obama. It was strange, though perhaps not surprising, to see the press herded away without shouting a single question. (Canada’s favorite self-effacing joke is: How do you clear a swimming pool full of Canadians? You make an announcement, “Will everyone please get out of the pool?)

Considering the way Canadians in general feel about Americans, it is more than a little strange to here them gush over Obama. Normal Canadian caution and reticence has been entirely overcome by irrational exuberance. The other day a CBC talk show host reminded a guest who was going on about how great Obama was, “But he’s not our president.” The guest, a Canadian, insisted that Obama was everyone’s president. It feels weird, but in a nice way.

According to polls, all but a handful of Canadians feel that relations with the US will improve under Obama. In the US only a similar handful even know that Canada exists. A recent guest editorial in a national newspaper, written by an American, pointed out that maybe that isn’t such a bad thing. Americans pay attention to foreign countries only if they are causing trouble. (“War is how Americans learn geography,” as someone said.) I advised one friend here who noted how seldom the US thinks about Canada, “Cut off the supply of oil and see what happens.” The US gets more oil from Canada than it does from Saudi Arabia.

I don’t think Stephen Harper will be making any idle threats during Obama’s visit. Though many Canadians seem to think Obama is ushering in an age of international enlightenment. Harper, at 38% popularity, is struggling just to maintain the status quo.

Now that Obama has been to Canada once, I’m sure many Canadians are eagerly awaiting his Second Coming. Hopefully by then Canada will have a Prime Minister who doesn’t mind taking a few questions.

Asses and Elbows

2009-01-19T09:57:00.000-08:00

Today is Bush’s last day in office. Those words bring me more happiness than I can express. I’d like to breathe a sigh of relief and say “We survived,” but a lot of people—Americans, Iraqis and many others—didn’t, thanks to Bush’s policies and actions. Yes, almost 3000 people were killed by al Qaeda in New York on 9/11™. It was an attempt to terrorize the US, which, I’m sure, has succeeded far beyond Osama bin Laden’s wildest hopes.

Terrorism is the tool of the weak; it relies on the reaction of the victim to do most of the work. The loss of life at the World Trade Center was tragic. Loss of life always is. The financial loss was also significant. The attack was certainly a blow to the US. But it was slight in comparison to what Bush, and his enablers, did to the US, and to others countries, in reaction to the attack. Most of the terror we have experienced in the years since 9/11™.has been the result of Bush’s actions, not bin Laden’s.

Bush fanned the flames of fear at every turn. A paranoid public allowed his administration to record our phone conversations, search our homes without our knowledge, and even force libraries to reveal what books we read. Thousands of people are banned from flying, with little or no recourse or explanation.

People have been arrested and held on evidence that would be laughable except that their actions were labeled “terror related.” It has been a remarkably convenient label, short-circuiting the normal protections of our legal system. Such arrests and prosecutions are little more than theater, designed to give the impression that the government is keeping us safe (as are most of the security screenings at airports).

Has Bush kept us safe, as he claims? It’s impossible to know for certain. The self-serving cloak of secrecy the Bush administration drew about itself means we have to take his word for it. But consider this: those who would wish us harm have been able to rest on their laurels while we did more to ourselves than they ever could.

Bin Laden evidently is still out there, alive and well and able to record the occasional poke at the US with impunity. He is also able to exhort his followers to keep fighting. He doesn’t need to do much else. His propaganda is made more effective by the insensitive actions of American forces in the Middle East. I can’t see footage of soldiers kicking down doors looking for “bad guys” without cringing. All al Qaeda recruiters need to do is follow those soldiers around. The fault lies, of course, with the policy makers more than the soldiers. They are just doing what they are trained to do. But they do it in our name.

The Bush era will forever bear the stigma of one word above all else—torture. Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and waterboarding have done more damage to the image of America than anything else in history, in my opinion. For a country that seeks to inspire and lead by example, image is invaluable. Bush cashed in our image in exchange for fear and force. He governed like the bully he is.

I’d like to think that there will be accountability for the excesses and crimes of the past eight years, but it is highly unlikely. It would be a first for an outgoing American administration to be tried and prosecuted. But political malfeasance has never risen to this level. Historians and researchers will probably spend decades uncovering the secrets of the Bush administration, and may never uncover them all.

The election of Barack Obama has gone a remarkable way towards restoring the image of the US, though I suspect we will never entirely recover. Now the world knows what Americans are capable of. Obama has already made moves to distance himself from the policies of the Bush administration, vowing to order the closing of Guantanamo immediately after assuming office. It would be a nice touch if he placed George Bush under house arrest in Crawford, Texas, and banished Dick Cheney to whatever secret place he always fled to during trouble.

Starting tomorrow our country will begin the long road back. Bush, Cheney and the whole gang, from evil to inept, will be taking the road out of town. All I want to see of them is asses and elbows.

Left, Right, Left...

2008-11-13T17:36:00.000-08:00

Lest you think that every blog post for the next couple of months is going to be about Obama, here is something completely different:

Over the past year severed feet have been washing up on the southern coast of British Columbia left and right (mostly right). The seventh, a left, encased in a running shoe as were the previous six, just turned up. (One foot washed ashore on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington, so this is not just a Canadian phenomenon, though the nationality most of the feet have yet to be determined.)

So far only one foot has been identified; it belonged to a man who had been suffering from depression. The last time anyone saw him he still had both feet, so the speculation is that his foot, buoyed by the running shoe, floated off post-mortem. Two left feet have been matched to two of the right feet, though little or nothing else is known about their previous owners.

Canadian authorities are puzzled, but say there is no evidence of foul play. Of course there is little evidence at all, just severed feet wearing running shoes. Suspicious, I would think. I suggest looking into runners who were too depressed to take off their shoes before going swimming.

I have no idea what President-elect Obama thinks about this, but I feel certain if asked he would say something thoughtful and sensitive, which would make us proud and even more eager for him to take office.