But they're going to kill the snake

My Lonely Planet guidebook’s description of the speed boat ride to Huay Xai (Laos) used terms like “ludicrously dangerous” and “mortality rate”.  In the end, it was the fear I saw in my guest house owner’s eyes when I asked her to book me one of these death-commutes that changed my mind.  I’d ignored a similar look in Guatemala when deciding on a chicken bus trip out of San Pedro and lived regret it.  This is how I came to be where I am right now; on a slow boat to Huay Xai, a two day trip from Luang Prabang (Laos) that includes an overnight stay at Pak Beng (Laos).  It’s not so bad.  Watching the tall cliffs along the Mekong River meander by while drinking a big Beerlao and listening to some Brand New on my iPod isn’t a bad way to spend a day (or two). 

Things happen quickly here.  Last night I was sitting on the front steps of my guesthouse in Luang Prabang, uncertain about where I would go tomorrow when a Swiss guy (Lukas) sat next to me and we started discussing our travels.  He’d just finished a semester abroad at a university in Bangkok and was traveling Thailand and Laos with three friends.  Two of his friends were also Swiss, the other (Hanna) was German.  Before long, he and I and his friends and a few other guests from the guesthouse had taken over the front porch.  Not long after that, Lukas suggested we get some Beerlao and that started a mildly epic night that ended with a restaurant employee politely requesting their table back that we’d pulled out onto a sidewalk and were using for a German drinking game called “south north” (or something like that).  This gang had spent four months studying in Bangkok followed by four weeks of traveling.  They had some advice on where to visit in Thailand and where to avoid.  They told me Burma shouldn’t be missed and filled me in on what to expect there.  They suggested I tag along with them on a tubing trip in the center of Laos.  However, I need to start working my way back toward Bangkok if I hope to have time to visit Burma.  They were good people and I’m glad I met them. 

In my last blog post I discussed my tour of Dalat and the evening at the bar “Saigon Nite”.  An episode that I didn’t note was the conversation I had at a large table of drunken locals as I waited for my Dutch friends outside of our hotel.  How I came to be at this table was an invitation from one of our Dalat tour guides.  He and some friends play pool and drink each night at a small place attached to the hotel I was staying at.  I, being one man, was ready to go out well before the two girls I was accompanying, so I decided to spend my extra time having a drink with my tour guide and his friends.  I found them sitting at a big picnic table outside a really small bar that was filled almost entirely by a large pool table.  It was cold out and everybody was wrapped tightly in their jackets and in front of each were multiple bottles of beer.  Some were still full, most were empty. 

There were five men at the table, but only one spoke and he spoke a lot.  He was a loud, gregarious, chubby man (by Vietnamese standards).  His name was Thrang (or something like that).  He had a plate of dried shark meat that he dipped in a hot sauce and shared with me and the rest of the table.  He asked me where I was going and where I had been and was, like many I’d met here, very interested in what I thought of Vietnam.  He laughed loudly at his own dirty jokes (about naked women, tomatoes, and cucumbers).  His laugh was a mix of doctor evil, Dracula, and jaba the hut.  It was maniacal.  It started explosively and ended abruptly.  When his laugh died, he would look me intently in the eye and then continue with whatever the hell it was he was trying to tell me.  Then he said something that got my attention.  I can’t remember exactly what his phrasing was, but it was something along the lines of; “After our war with America, I have one problem with America.”  He looked around the table, but I’m pretty certain nobody had any clue what he was saying to me (whether due to drunkenness or lack of an understanding of English, but most likely it was varying portions of both).  He went on to tell me that his father had served under an American commander and that this was something he was very proud of.  He said that when a hill needed to be taken, three Vietnamese leaders were chosen to lead the assault and that his father was always one of the ones to lead.  He said that his problem with America is that we “went away”.  I think he is among the minority here, but I don’t know.

But, that’s not the reason I’m telling you about Thrang.  It was something he said later that I reflected on many times in Hanoi and Sapa.  He said that I will find the people of the south nicer and that I should maybe consider telling people in the north I’m Russian (maniacal laugher).  He said that the north is poorer.  He said that their lives are harder and they are not as friendly.  I figured a little less friendly would be OK.  People couldn’t get much friendlier than what I encountered so far.

Hanoi, Vietnam;

Thrang was so right.  I’m not going to write much about Hanoi.  It’s a loud, dirty city filled with people who aren’t particularly fond of me or anybody else from what I can tell.  It wasn’t all bad.  I’ll share some of the highlights and oddities and I’m sure a few other things that you wouldn’t consider either odd or interesting. 

On Christmas Eve I met an Australian girl named Elyse at a nice café called Koto across the street from the Temple of Literature.  I’d just left the Ho Chi Minh mausoleum where I’d seen Ho Chi Minh’s embalmed body protected by four Vietnamese honor guard soldiers with bayonets fixed and reflected on the fact that he was adamant in his wish that he be cremated.  After I left the mausoleum, I was approached by a Vietnamese man who asked if I was American.  He was thrilled to find out I was and announced the fact to the crowd around us (pointing at me like a circus animal and excitedly announcing “American!”) and then asked to get a picture with me.  Then a line formed.  For the next minute or so I was posing with various Vietnamese in the shadow of the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum.  It occurred to me that it might be a natural human emotion to feel a bit humiliated by what was occurring, but I didn’t.  I had nothing to do and all day to do it.  If I could make a few people’s day a bit better, why not?

So, anyway, Elyse wanted to eat snakes.  In a country that had “dog markets”, a snake restaurant wasn’t a huge surprise.  She suggested that we take a tour of the areas outside of Hanoi the next day.  The highlight would be a snake market where we would eat at a snake restaurant.  Elyse was cool and I figured a snake meal would be a memorable Christmas brunch, so I agreed. 

It turned out I agreed to much more than I thought I did.  The evening before the snake market, Elyse and I went to a bar called Mao’s Red Lounge (the name screams Christmas Eve fun).  There, we met an Englishman (john?) and a Canadian (jett) that both taught English in Burma.  I got a familiar not-so-thrilled-with-americans-in-general vibe from the Englishman, but they were cool nonetheless.  Elyse mentioned the snake plans and our new friends filled us in on what we might encounter.  Jett talked about seeing a snake slaughtered, snake blood, and a still beating snake heart.  I thought that they were just having fun with us.

Snake Market (on a dirt alley somewhere outside of Hanoi);

Jett wasn’t just having fun with us.  On Christmas Morning I met Elyse at her hotel.  Our tour guides showed up a few minutes later on their motos.  We visited a silk market and a flower auction (highly entertaining – hearing a Vietnamese auctioneer is a life experience).  Elyse and I looked at each other for a moment when it was time to go to the snake market.  We had concerns, but we shared a silent determination. 

We got on the back of our respective motos and started our long trip to the snake market.  We drove for about 25 minutes through congested streets, down a highway, over a long bridge, past random street vendors and cows grazing in city alleys and roadsides, and, finally, through many dirt alleys until we got to our destination.  There were no other falang (tourists) around.  In fact, we’d seen very few falang since we left the hotel. 

The restaurant grounds had one small building on it that housed the cooking area.  Otherwise, it was a small pond with multiple dining areas built on stilts above the water.  Bridges connected each dining area.  It was a traditional sit-on-the-floor place.  We were shown the snake cages that housed a variety of water snakes and cobras.  One of the hosts took out a cobra.  Elyse and I stood well back.  (I actually held a cobra once many years ago at a festival in Pennsylvania.  It had been devenomized by a man who later died of a cobra bite.  Even small baby cobras can kill you…but I digress).   Then he took out a water snake and handed it to me.  Our hosts (two of them) then showed us to our table, one still carrying the water snake.  Elyse and I agreed on the “small” meal, which we both thought saved us from witnessing the snake slaughter.  We were wrong. 

Once Elyse and I realized that they were going to kill the snake in front of us, we both panicked a bit.  Nobody at the restaurant spoke any English at all, so Elyse called her hotel so that they could translate for us.  She explained that we ordered the” small meal” but that “they’re going to kill the snake” and then handed the phone to one of our hosts.  After a brief conversation he handed the phone back and hotel employee told her everything was fine and that we were only getting the small meal, but that it was expected that we witness the snake slaughter.   

So here it was; the place where my own squeamishness and empathy towards the snake met a local cultural expectation and I need to decide which side of the fence I was going to land.  I eat meat.  I will continue to eat meat throughout my service in Namibia as it is a big part of their diet.  All the meat I’ve ever eaten was killed well out of my site except for the occasional fish caught on my yearly UPS fishing trip.  This will not be true in Namibia where I will have to get used to witnessing, and likely participating in, the slaughter of animals for food.  In any case, this is how I justified what I was about to participate in, rightly or wrongly. 

Our hosts brought us to our table and set out a small mat upon which they placed two medium sized glasses with lemon grass stalks sticking out of each.  One poured rice wine (whiskey really – 100 proof) in both glasses while the other held the snake.  Then each grabbed an end of the snake and pulled it taut.  The man holding the head of the snake folded the head back forcefully and then folded it once again.  He then took out a small knife and inserted it just below the fold.  He opened up about a 3 inch slice in the snake belly and then pulled out what turned out to be the heart.  I don’t know if the word for “artery” is the same in Lao as it is in English, but the man holding the head said this word and then the other man sliced a small part of the guts and blood came pouring out into the rice wine  in a deep red cloud.  He then sliced the heart out and put it in a shot glass and handed it to me.  It was still beating.  I was still looking at the beating heart when one of my hosts poured rice wine into the shot glass and then motioned for me to drink it.  I swallowed everything in one shot and then looked at my hosts and then at Elyse and felt like my day had just ended.

I wish I could say the meal was good, but it really wasn’t.  Snake meat is very dry and though the restaurant tried its best to dress it up, it just wasn’t very good.  On our way out of the restaurant, a man (I think the restaurant owner) was sitting at the front gate with a bong (very common here – used to smoke a hairy type of tobacco).  He packed the pipe and then handed me the bong.  I took it and drew a puff while he held his lighter to the tobacco.  I blew out a puff of smoke and he seemed please and said something to me in French.  It was a strange day. 

So, that was Christmas brunch.  I hope yours was equally memorable.  Moving on.

Sapa, Vietnam;

I did a two day/three night trek north of Hanoi.  The hike was based out of a town called Sapa which is a remote farming town on the mountainous border with China.  Farming terraces for growing rice were carved into the mountains side as far as the eye could see.  It was interesting to see how the locals lived, but their existence was so tainted by tourism that it was hard not to feel like I was looking at my own negative impact on the world as opposed to how other’s live.  Sapa was a tourist zoo and I was as much a part of the reality of the place as the locals, which sort of defeated the purpose of visiting a remote farming village. 

I met some good people on my Sapa trip.  I met a man who was evacuated after the fall of Saigon.  It seemed he had a very good life in the States.  He was a retired software developer that coded programs used to analyze space shuttle stress data.  He was traveling with his wife and daughter (soon to be law student) and they all lived in San Francisco.  The four of us shared a sleeper cabin on the ten hour ride to Sapa.  The father and I spoke for a long while about his life in Vietnam as a child.  He’d grown up in Dalat and was happy to hear I’d visited there.  He said that he’d once gotten caught swimming in the Dalat lake which was strictly prohibited because of frequent drownings and that the police took all of his cloths and made him chase their car naked through the city while they threw out one piece of clothing at a time.  He said he and his friends would camp every weekend and he said his childhood there was a very happy one.  

I don’t know what the average age is in Southeast Asia, but I’d put it at about seven.  There are kids everywhere.  My tour group visited a primary school.  The kids all had the hand writing of a calligrapher and seemed to be working on pretty advanced math for second graders.  The school had a small house on its grounds that many of the teachers lived at.  Images of Ho Chi Minh were everywhere.  

The men in Sapa, my tour guide explained, work extremely hard most of the year.  He said that there are some months where there is very little for them to do (like now) and that during these times they spent their days completely drunk on locally made rice whiskey.  He said they start drinking in the morning, nap in the middle of the day, and then drink more in the evening.  Walking around Sapa you saw almost no men at all.  They were all inside somewhere, sleeping or drinking.  We saw a fight between two men.  It was pushing mostly and seemed to be over the placement of a small rock on one of their properties.  The men here wear only western cloths and the women only traditional dress.  They were quite poor and their houses were very simple and totally un-insulated (it gets very cold here). 

Luang Prabang, Laos;

I flew from Hanoi to Luang Prabang the day after Christmas.  Flights in Southeast Asia are cheap ($100-$200 range). Laos is very laid back.  It’s much quieter than the other places I’ve visited.  You hardly hear any horns whereas in other countries horns seem to be the primary form of communication.  The street vendors stand quietly as you walk by.  The voices in the markets are a bit hushed.  Tuk tuk drivers rarely call to you.  Buddhist monks are common in Southeast Asia, but, here, boys and men in saffron robes are everywhere.  Laos seems to have a lot of the good qualities of Southeast Asia and less of the dark underbelly you find in other countries. 

I took a Lao cooking class.  After days of hiking and sightseeing and markets, it was a really nice change of pace.  The others in the class were all fun.  They were all teachers except for one Lebanese man (Richard) who did video editing for Aljazeera.  He said his job was interesting but very stressful.   I learned quite a bit in the class.  Lao cooking is 95% prep work and 5% cooking. 

I went hiking at some waterfalls outside of town.  They were so pretty that they almost looked fake.  Emerald blue water flowing down a series of perfect waterfalls.  That night, I ate dinner at the night-market with a Malaysian traveler (Ben) I’d met hiking.  The food area at the market was a long alley with food stands on both sides and a small corridor through which people walked and looked at what was being offered.  A plate of food was 10,000 kip (about $1.25).  A bottle big of Beerlao was the same.  Each food stand had a clear incandescent light above it so that everything was either brightly lit or in complete darkness.  The thinnest crescent of moon burned orange above the tuk tuk drivers hunting for fares at the dark edge of the alley.  The electricity briefly cut out touching off a loud cheer from the crowd.  The whole scene had a rich-beautiful -creepy feeling to it.  I was also extremely tired.  Traveling like this can be exhausting. 

Pak Beng, Laos;

This is the only town on the Mekong River between Luang Pragang and the Thai border.  It’s here for only one reason and that is to serve as an overnight spot for people traveling the river.  I ate dinner and breakfast at the same restaurant.  The owner was nice and her little daughter would sit with me while I ate.  She spoke to me constantly.  I had absolutely no clue what she was saying but she seemed very pleased with the conversation. 

I hope you enjoyed this post.  I’ve got a few more hours left on this boat and then I’ll be in Huay Xai.  I hope everybody is enjoying their holiday season.  Thanks for reading.

Weasel Poo Coffee

It’s becoming obvious to me that my original plan of posting a summary of my travels every two weeks isn’t going to cut it. I see and experience so many odd and new things here that by the time two weeks roll around, I have way too much to put into a single blog post. So, expect more frequent posts going forward. I’ll touch on my recent visits to Phnom Penh Cambodia, Saigon, Mui Ne (Vietnam), and Dalat (Vietnam).

 

Phnom Penh;

I love Cambodia. It’s a fun, wild, and high-energy place. The moto traffic here makes Bangkok look tame in comparison. It’s a bit hard to describe, but I’ll give it a shot. Imagine motos (gas moped), bikes, busses, large trucks, cars, and pedestrians in droves all mashed into tight streets, all moving like they are a single organism, all with a zero room for error. The motos far outnumber any other vehicle on the road. Some move quickly and some slowly, all seem to be looking out only for themselves, but also seem to share a desire to not crash (but will push the risk of a crash to a degree that would seem insane to a westerner).

Just learning how to cross the street here is a challenge. I went through the same process on this front as I’m sure all others do. I stood on the curb of a seemingly impenetrable blur of rushing humans on every type of transportation device thinking crossing would be impossible. Then a local woman calmly walked past me and into the melee. She was accepted as another piece of the moving organism and walked quite calmly (but carefully) across the street as the moving motorists adjusted an inch to the left or right so as not to hit her and she, in turn, adjusting her pace to accommodate a mutually agreeable path. They don’t waste an inch of space on the streets of Phnom Penh.

 

A different way to experience this is on the back of a moto, which is a common way to get around the city for cheap. Moto drivers constantly ask passing westerners if they want a ride somewhere. Taking a ride on the back of a moto to anywhere in the city during the daytime costs between 50 cents and a dollar. At night, it’s 1.50 to 2 dollars and the ride is totally worth the price of admission. You really never know what’s going to show up in front of you as you weave through the traffic. At any moment a car could back into traffic, a woman could wander into the street holding her baby, a waitress with a tray full of food for a table on the other side of the street (really), a trash truck could decide to make a u-turn. You’re so close to the vehicles around you that you could write your name on them. But nothing surprises a Phnom Penh motorist and no obstacle is impassable, even if it means riding down the sidewalk for a few yards.

I can’t really talk about Phnom Penh without touching on the next subject. These next three paragraphs are not ones to share with the children. Skip it if you’re squeamish or sensitive to violent subjects;

Cambodia is still recovering from the Pol Pot Genocide from 75 to 79 and the years of conflict and unrest that followed. It wasn’t until 1994 that the final Pol Pot loyalist surrendered themselves. Two common tourist stops for visitors to Phnom Penh are the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum (located at the s-21 security prison), and The Killing Field of Choeung Ek. Both were the scenes of horrible violence and murder. The S-21 prison and the killing field are both raw and untouched, appearing very much as they did when the atrocities were occurring. Blood spattered walls and blood crusted mattresses at Tuol Sleng sit as they were when the Vietnamese took the facility in 1979. Bone fragments, teeth, and clothing fragments in the mud at Choeung Ek. A monument was erected at Choeung Ek containing the 8,000+ skulls exhumed here. They are organized by age and sex. Men, women, and children were tortured and killed. Even the smallest children were not spared (and their end no less brutal than the adults’). Many of the skulls bare the marks of their violent end, often by pick axe, steel bar, hammer, or machete. Bullets were rarely used to execute victims as they were too expensive.

At S-21, I was fortunate to meet one of the very few who survived incarceration at the prison. He was an artist named Bou Meng. He was allowed to live so that he could paint pictures of Pol Pot. His wife was imprisoned at the same time and was executed at the killing field. He was very friendly (like all of the Cambodians I met) and was very curious about what I thought of Cambodia.

Today, things are starting to look up for Cambodia. There are construction projects all over Phnom Penh as foreigners are starting to invest in their tourism and export industries. Their GDP grew 7.5% last year and the owners of the hostel I stayed at say that they’re seeing a steady increase in business. The increased investment is not seen as a good thing by all as many of the poorest are being forcibly driven from their homes without any relocation assistance to make way for new construction. Apparently, this sort of thing is occurring all over Cambodia and is a regular news topic.

Evenings and leisure in Phnom Penh;

I caught up with my friend Camilla, who had also traveled here from Siam Reap, on my last night. We walked the Mekong River water front which is loaded with bars and cafes on one side of the street and a huge park on the river side of the street. It was a good place to sit and drink some Saigon beer and watch the churning crowd of people. It’s all one big mix here, the wealthy locals, the homeless, the tourist, the vendors. There were street entertainers and a children’s dance-group competition which was hilarious.

When I wasn’t out and about in town, I was hanging out with the folks at my hostel which was a cozy little place that is home to ex-pats and backpackers. I met a German newspaper reporter that was doing a story on human trafficking and an Irish artist who had gone on a 3 week vacation with her sisters to Cambodia over a year ago and never left. She now tutors the Prime Ministers nephew in English. Both lived at the hostel and didn’t have any plans to leave Cambodia anytime soon. I could see why. Western money goes a very long way here if you live simply, the town is full of travelers from all over the world, and the locals are very friendly.

My next stop after Phnom Penh was Saigon (Ho Chi Minh’s City center) – again, this next paragraph is not appropriate for children;

While I wasn’t crazy about Saigon, it sort of had the deck stacked against it after my experience in Cambodia. It’s a constant party, which would have been just fine by me 10 or 15 years ago, but now it’s just all a bit too much. It’s clearly a place westerns come to behave badly. Once the sun goes down, the party starts and you can’t walk a block without having just about everything under the sun offered to you. “Marijuana? Girl? Boy? Coke? Heroin?” The offering is done somewhat subtly and it seems targeted specifically to westerns.

No matter what bar you enter in this neighborhood, the process seems to be pretty similar. You sit and order a drink and about 30 seconds later a young woman is sitting next to you asking you where you’re from and where you’re going in and if you are married, etc. At first, I thought that these were prostitutes, but it turned out that in every bar the hostesses do this. Their goal seems to be two things, 1) to get you to stay and drink more, and 2) to get you to buy them a drink (more money for the bar). The bars that are fronts for prostitution are easy to spot; 5 to 10 girls sanding at the doorway of an otherwise empty bar all yelling for you to come in and have a drink. So, yeah, the town is just sort of seedy like that.

I did visit some interesting places. The most interesting was the Independence Palace (central command of the losers in the US/Vietnam conflict), where much of the inscription machines, radios, phones, maps, and furniture have been left just as they were when the tanks came to invite us to leave. I had planned to visit the War Remnants museum, but it closed early. Much disappointment on that one for me, I had looked forward to seeing how the Vietnamese viewed the conflict today.

The real highlight for me here was the family I stayed with. Many shop owners also live and rent out rooms all in the same building. My particular owner was an artist. Her name, after about 30 tries, we both agreed I could not pronounce. She runs the art shop in which every piece was painted by either her or her brother. She told me about her home town and her parents (also artists). She told me about her recent trip to Bangkok, which was a first for her. When I asked her how much she works she told me nearly every day from morning until night. She has some hours off a few times a month and will take some days off a few times a year. She looked a bit sad when talking about this. Not long after I arrived, she asked me to help her load pictures from her camera onto her computer. She then had me sit with her and her sisters and a niece at a small table. She put out a big pile of this small orange like fruit and we all ate it and talked about their lives and my life and where I was going and if I was enjoying my visit to Vietnam.

It seems the people I meet here never stop working. Tuk tuk drivers (cart pulled by a moto that seats 2-4 people), who spend most of their time looking for a fare, start early in the day and work late into the night spending most of that time asking every passing white person “you want tuk tuk? Where you go? We go now”. It can be a pain to walk down the street and be asked these questions every 10 seconds, but I recognize that they are all competing for a small bit of the tourist money to bring home to their family and that their job is very much like fishing; you need to constantly cast your line if you want to catch something.

Organized crime is also active here (easy to believe). When talking about school with a waiter at a small café, he jutted his chin toward the street and said quietly to me “Saigon mafia”. I looked out in the street and, though it was filled with the usual chaotic mass of people, I immediately saw who he was referring to. Two men, both wearing plain dark cloths, walking in lock step with their hands deep in their pockets, acting as if the people around them were little more than ghosts, both with their eyes on the street ahead of them. They walked straight and didn’t move or adjust their path for anybody. I saw them again later in the day and followed them when they turned down an alley. They stopped at a tattoo shop, one entered, the other stood outside, presumably standing guard.

It’s odd to me how everything is so out in the open here and mixed. The good and the bad. The legitimate restaurant, shop, and hotel workers, and street vendors, and homeless, and prostitutes, and criminals. The ceaselessly hard working locals and the wild everything-at-their-fingertips tourists who are quite at their leisure, all mix with motos and exhaust fumes and music into a single image of Saigon.

Mui Ne, Vietnam;

At 8PM on the 16th, I exited Saigon on a “sleeper bus” (imagine a bus with three rows of beach lounge chairs, stacked two high and you’ll have a pretty good idea of what a sleeper bus is) heading to the Vietnam beach town of Mui Ne six hours away. There is no shortage of learning experiences when you’re traveling a country like Vietnam and my trip to Mui Ne wasn’t an exception. My lesson; never trust that the bus assistant is going to tell you when it’s your stop. In my case, it was a comically bad moment to have to learn this lesson.

When I got on the bus, I clarified to the attendant that I was going to a specific address in Mui Ne, which I wrote down and handed to her. She seemed confident that she knew where it was and said she would let me know when to get off. However, at some point during the night, the female bus attendant vanished and was replaced by a man who woke me up at about 2:30AM saying “your stop, your stop”. “Super”I thought, and hopped off the bus. It took me about 2 minutes to realize I wasn’t at my hotel and about 5 minutes to realize I may not even be in Mui Ne. I was in the parking lot of a large, seemingly abandon resort. I saw no signs of any other hotel up or down the street. It was dark and all I could hear was the wind rushing through the dunes and the waves crashing on the shore. I figured I could do one of two things. Sit here until dawn and see if somebody shows up, or start hitchhiking back toward Mui Ne.

I decided to walk back in the direction the bus had come from, assuming based on the time that we had passed Mui Ne. I would pass a locked and dark resort about every 10 minutes. Every so often a stray dog would emerge from the darkness and regard me from a distance before retreating again. I wasn’t scared or worried and was actually somewhat amused at the fact that I had just been abandon on the Vietnam coast in the middle of the night. About 40 minutes into my walk, headlights appeared on the road behind me and I turned and put my hand out. It was a big dump truck and the driver seemed to understand I was trying to make it to Mui Ne. He drove me for what seemed to be about 5 miles to a resort and pulled in and pointed to the guard sitting in a small hut at the entrance. The guard’s English wasn’t very good, but it was a hell of a lot better than my Vietnamese. He understood I was trying to get to Mui Ne, but he wasn’t familiar with the hotel I was looking for. He got on his phone spoke to somebody for a bit and then told me to sit and pulled out a glass and poured me some tea.

I was there for about 10 minutes when I heard a moto approaching. On it was a young English speaking Vietnamese man who seemed very familiar with all things Mui Ne. He told me that the hotel that I was booked in was on the very far side of Mui Ne, about 25 miles from where we were. I asked if he knew a closer place in Mui Ne, which he did. In the end, I was at a beautiful resort with a beach front room for $15/night. The staff was awesome.

There’s not much else to say about Mui Ne. It was a nice change from Saigon. The beach was beautiful and watching the fishing families work was a new experience. I met a couple other travelers, but spent most of my time zipping around on a rented moto and checking out the local sights. The streets here were a bit calmer than other towns, but they had the added complication of small packs of cows that would emerge just about anywhere and cross the street at their whim. The memory of weaving through a herd of cows on my moto in Mui Ne will stay with me.

Dalat, Vietnam;

Dalat is very different from the rest of Vietnam. It’s high in the mountains near the Cambodian border. It’s a big farming area for Vietnam, producing much of the vegetables and coffee used in the country. I took a day long motorcycle tour here with two new friends, Anke and Marika, both from Holland. We visited a coffee farm (where they make a type of coffee that uses only beans that were digested by a weasel –it’s considered a delicacy here and costs about 5x what a normal cup of coffee costs), a mushroom farm, the elephant water falls, a local ethnic minority tribe known as the “mountain people”, a rice whiskey producer (samples where nice), a silk factory that started with cocoons and ended with the finished products (picked up some gifts for mom), and a large mountain top Buddhist temple. The whole day was a blast. We had lunch at one of the tour guide’s family’s house (also coffee farmers). The food, as usual, was amazing.

That night, Anka, Marika and I found a funny little bar called Saigon Nite run by an older man who liked to crank American rock music. It was a slow night for the bar, so the three of us drank 75 cent beers and the owner joined us to play pool until late and then we weaved our way back to the hotel through the alleys of Dalat.

Right now;

I flew to Hanoi on the 20th, which is where I currently am. I leave for a two day trek in Sapa, Vietnam at 8PM tonight. I’ll return to Hanoi on Christmas Eve to meet up with Anke and Marika and some other travelers for Christmas Eve and Christmas and then I’m off to the famously laid back country of Laos.

As I noted earlier, I’ll be posting more frequently so as to avoid such long posts as this. I hope everybody is doing well and enjoying the holiday season back home. Thanks for reading!

Attack Duck at Angkor Wat

Hello All. I got to Bangkok without issue and spent my first full day touring Wat Pho and Wat Arun (Wat = Temple). Buddhism is the major religion here and images of Buddha are everywhere. The temple Wat Pho has the largest collection of Buddhas (Buddhi?) in all of Thailand. The architecture, statues, and ceremonies around these temples are amazing to see.

I was fortunate to be able to see a ceremony for a boy becoming a monk. All males in Thailand go through this when they turn 20. The ceremony I saw was just the first step, after which they spend anywhere from a few weeks to over a year studying at a temple.

Bangkok is bedlam.
There are vendors of every sort on every side walk and sometimes right in the street. Pedestrians have to fend for themselves as there don’t seem to be any rules as to where somebody can
drive a moto (motorcycle) in this city.

I spent my first two nights here in a very un-backpacker way at a courtyard Marriott. I still have tons of Marriott points left from my days as a consultant and figured two nights
adjusting to the 12 hour time difference would be excusable. I used my one full night here to hit a few of the night markets and party areas and, in the process, learned their sky train
and bus system (with a lot of help from the locals who are all extremely friendly). Something about learning a public transportation system in a foreign country gives me great satisfaction. The night was fun and I met some other travelers and a few locals and caught a hilarious (intentionally so) Thai cover band at little hole in the wall bar.

I exited Bangkok for after less than 48 hours as I have a lot of ground to cover in the next 7 weeks. I took a bus to the Cambodia border which took me a front-row seat to the massive damage caused by the worst flooding Thailand has seen in over 50 years. After having seen how packed the sidewalks in Bangkok were with vendor equipment and motos and awnings, it was
easier to make sense of what I was seeing outside the city. Massive piles of garbage had been bulldozed on every block. Destroyed cars and furniture and sandbags were everywhere.
Water damage on the houses looked to reach 2 to 3 feet high and a muddy muck covered all of the sidewalks and streets. This went on for miles.

Crossing over into Cambodia from Thailand is like stepping back in time. The people here are very friendly despite widespread poverty. The Cambodian Civil War followed by the Kampuchea “reconstruction”, which resulted in 1.7 million deaths (of a population of 7 million) over three years (1975 –1978) and the subject of the movie ‘The Killing Fields’, followed by a 10 year
conflict with Vietnam. You see very few old people in this country. If you’re not familiar with what occurred here from 75 to 78, look it up. It’s as interesting as it is jaw droppingly horrific.

The temples at Angkor can’t really be described in words, or really even photos. Multiple temple
structures built between the 9th and 15th century. The largest and best preserved, Angkor Wat. It’s hard to comprehend how something so big and complex was built by hand nearly 1000 years ago. It seem every inch of the stone walls and columns are etched.

I have so many new experiences here daily that it’s hard to decide exactly what to write about and so I’ll stick to highlights and random thoughts;
Total lunar eclipse party in the streets of Siem Reap Cambodia with my new friend Camilla (backpacker from Sweden). Like something out of a movie. Hundreds of people (old, young, Cambodians and tourists) drinking and dancing under a total lunar eclipse.

The food is amazing and seemingly everywhere you look. There’s and endless variety. Street vendors set up early. I try to eat and travel like the locals, so I’ve had mostly food from the market and some street vendors.

The smell of smell of Siem Reap; a mix of cooked meat, incents, car exhaust, and clay

It’s so cheap here. Yesterday’s expenses; hotel - $7, breakfast - $2, Lunch - $2, Dinner for
two - $5, having clothes washed for me - $2.

The local beer, Angkor, is 50 cents a draught.

Siem Reap means “Siamese defeated”, which is a not-very-subtle jab at Cambodia’s Thai neighbors who had taken control of this city at one point and were then pushed out.

Gasoline is offered in old 40oz beer bottles and then siphoned into the gas tank via a plastic hose.

This is the landmine capital of the world. There are still many active mines and you are reminded to never stray from the path while hiking.

Telling an aggressive duck at Angkor Wat that wanted me to move from where i was sitting "you're not the boss of me" and subsequently finding out that the duck was the boss of me (much to the entertainment of all who saw).

I promise some photos soon. I have some good ones, but posting them from a slow connection takes an eternity.

That’s all for right now.
I’m currently on a bus to Phnom Penh (Cambodian capital). After that, I’m off to Vietnam where I hope to catch up with some friends of mine from Italy. I hope all is well stateside. Thanks for reading!

the best laid plans of mice and men

Welcome to my first tsunami dog blog post. This will, for the most part, be a blog about my experiences preparing for and serving in the Peace Corps. I still have a few more months until I actually leave (March 14), but want to get into the habit of blogging again. Also, I’m planning a backpacking trip to Southeast Asia for December and January which will provide me with some good blogging practice.

So, as most of you know, I’m going to be a Peace Corps Volunteer in the African nation of Namibia. If you’d like to learn a bit about Namibia, you’re in luck. Matt Lauer just did an episode of “Where In World is Matt Lauer?” on Namibia. There are 7 videos with an irritating commercial at the beginning of each, but totally worth it. You can find them here;

http://allday.today.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/11/07/8678801-where-in-the-world-is-matt-the-skeleton-coast-in-africa?chromedomain=overheadbin

I’ll be a Health Extension Volunteer working on various community health and HIVAIDS initiatives. I don’t have much else to share about my specific role or location in Namibia yet. From what I can gather, you really don’t find out much until you’re in pre-service training. So, for now, I’ll just tell you about my application process and some other plans I have to fill the time between now and my departure.

Between the application process and preparing for Peace Corps service, I was quite busy for much of the last year (well, up until May, but more on that in a bit). The application and interview process is very involved (endless forms, applications, interviews, essays, references, doctors, dentists, x-rays, eye exams, blood tests, and a lot of shots). I sold my house. I also sold or gave away pretty much everything I owned. I made arrangements for my dog, Gomez, to be cared for. I organized all my finances and other such considerations. I got lucky and sold my house at the precise moment I wanted to (just after finishing my MBA and before the beginning of the summer). And, finally, I moved into a rental house in Watkins Glen for what I thought were going to be my last three months in the states prior to shipping off in September.

But, the best laid plans of mice and men often go astray. Two weeks into my summer at Seneca Lake, I received a notice from Peace Corps that my departure was delayed indefinitely. They even left open the possibility that I may not be placed at all. Now, I had already sold my home. All my “stuff” was not my stuff anymore. But, Peace Corps was dealing with the same budget issues that many other federal agencies were. So, it was just a bad situation that nobody wanted to be in. I just had to be patient and hope for the best.

This state of uncertainty went on until late August when I finally received my official invitation to serve in Namibia starting on March 14^th. My lease in Watkins was finished at the end of August. Luckily, I have plenty of family who were willing to take me in. So, I’ve spent the last three months bouncing around Virginia, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania with siblings and my parents and weekends on friends’ couches and the like.

The delay also opened up some other interesting possibilities. Since there was really nothing stopping me from taking a few extra months and doing some personal travel, why not? A close friend of mine, Ellen, had taken a trip to Southeast Asia years ago. She loved the experience and had great stories from her trip. I never thought I’d be in a position to take a few months off of work to do a similar trip. Yet, here I was, in that exact position.

So, in two weeks, on December 6^th, I ship off to Bangkok. I’ll spend 7 weeks backpacking through Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, and Burma. If you want to be notified when I update this blog, just add your email address in the box over there on the right side of your screen, or you can click "follow" at the top of your screen, or you can subscribe to this page if you’re hip to that whole thing, or you can do it the old fashion way and just check back now and then. I’ll do my best to post a few times a month. Depending on where in Namibia I end up, the possibilities of frequent posts could go from totally feasible to completely impossible. I guess we’ll all find out. Thanks for reading.

-jim