A Christmas Decoration

“This is a Christmas present and a wedding present to your Grammy and Grampa,” I said. “Let me explain…” And so my discourse started.

Kristin and Seeth were over for dinner. It was the week before Christmas and I had my only Christmas decoration out on the dining room table. It was a Christmas tree that I had inherited from my mother, which she had cherished and I had remembered as a child.

It was old. As old as memory and as valuable as such, too. And like all memory, it was as rich as it was fragile. And as old. For such is the value of memory.

But I digress. The item in question is a little tree, barely two feet tall. It stands on a table with a light bulb within and glass rods extending out from the center and ending in little bulbs around the plastic needles of the faux fir tree that it is supposed to represent. It’s quaint. It’s old. It’s 1950’s old. And I loved it. Love it. I love it still.

I pull it out every Christmas and plug it in. Well, I replaced the electric cord. The old one was cloth bound and looked like a housefire praying to happen, so I replaced it with an extension cord that I bought at Home Depot. One you might use to hook up Christmas lights in your window. Another habit of old that I miss. We used to have blue lights twinkling in our windows every Christmas season and casual decorations inside, one of them being the Christmas tree with its single light bulb and glittering nobs amongst the grassy verge. It looked grassy, anyway. Or green and fir-like.

“How old is that?” Kristin asked me. She had seen it before. I bring it out like a tired relic every twenty-fifth of December. It is my only nod to tradition. The only one I had left in tact as it were. Christmas. Christmas should mean something. Somewhere. And for somebody. Even if it meant nothing more to me.

“That?” I said. “You’ve seen that before. It’s the Christmas tree that I got from your Grammy. It was a present to them. A wedding present.” And then the story began.

“Your Grammy and Grampa were married while he was on shore leave from the navy,” I began. “It was Christmas 1945 and he was privileged to receive a holiday shore leave, which was not a thing to be taken lightly. You see, your Grampa had already served a stint in the navy long before the war. In 1931 when he was a young man in Kansas and his family had just lost their farm.

“Yes, it could have been from a Jimmy Stewert movie. Or a Warner Brothers cartoon with Snidely Whiplash coming to take away their farm in foreclosure. Except it wasn’t funny. It was real and Snidely didn’t twiddle his moustache. He just took their farm. In 1931 my father was an 18 year old boy in the depression era United States with nothing, nowhere, and not a hope of betterment. And they had just lost everything.

“So what was a young man from Kansas to do?” I posed. ”He chose the obvious. To go as far away from the center of the land he grew up in, as far away from Kansas as he could, which was an ocean. Pick one. Atlantic. Pacific. He was all there.” I willed for Kristin to understand. Understanding is such a terrible burdon.

“So your Grampa joined the navy.” I continued. “What else could an 18 year old farmer boy in a collapsing economy do?”

He got out five years later with an education you don’t get in school, then went back to school in Colorado. He studied machining. He was a machinist by trade.

Then when World War 2 broke out he knew he was on the list, as was every able-bodied man in sight. Not wanting to be raked into the army and assigned to one of its cannon fodder brigades, your Grampa re-upped with the boys in steel ships and bellbottom pants. He had seniority and made it all the way to chief before he left the service. That’s one level below ensign which was a commissioned rank. After nine years and a world war he had had enough.

And he managed Christmas leave in 1945. That’s nothing to sniff at. Most soldiers and sailors were mopping up after the mess that two world wars had left in their wakes and many had to serve in the interim. But Grampa had seniority and, well, rank has its privileges and so does experience and just plain the endurance of time, so he got a break for Christmas.

And he came home to his bride to be in Canterbury, Connecticut and made her his wife of fact on the twenty fourth of December, 1945. And they celebrated like every young couple does and received presents to celebrate their nuptials one of which was a Christmas tree lit with an electric bulb in the middle and illuminating glass rods that elucidated tiny pricks of light all over the tree. It was brilliant. And now it is mine.

Grampa, my Dad, left the navy early due to his aforementioned seniority which gave him an advantage over all of the young men returning from the war and looking for all too few jobs to provide for the all too many young families, mine being just one of the new, urbanite 1950’s families that were growing all across the country that was becoming something like none of us had experienced before. It was new. It was modern. It was urban. And it was electrifying.

“Years later, your Grammy gave me this Christmas tree,” I told Kristin, showing off the nearly discarded effigy of a past time. I had left it in a box next to our driveway for years. It had been rained upon and knee deep in snow for years before I noticed it and retrieved it from its exile.

“How could I have abandoned this?” I demanded of myself as I rescued the discarded item and brought it inside, still not sure what to do with it. “It’s just a piece of junk from the 50’s, after all,” I thought. But still.

It had a pull all of its own. A gravity that nostalgia bequeaths to its siblings. One which is the daughter of memory and the son of what must not be forgotten. And I remembered.

I repaired the lamp cord. The old one was a cloth bound wire that was probably still serviceable, but I figured a new, more modern cord was a sensible investment. Bulbs come and go, of course. I made sure it had a 15 watt incandescent, just to insure it had that Nicola Tesla glow at the tips of the glass. “I like Christmas lights to be warm, after all,” I thought. “LED’s are just too cold.” And all was well with the world.

“Is this as old as you are?” Kristin asked me. “No, actually older,” I answered. “This was a Christmas present to your Grammy and Grampa on their wedding day on Christmas, 1945. In September of 1946, a barely legal nine months later, your uncle Mike was born. It was a good time to be alive,” I thought and said. And it was, indeed.

And it still is a good time to be alive. Merry Christmas to all. May your Christmas lights shrine brightly.

 

Angkor Wat

Day – The Start

I bought a ticket and am on my way to a place where I could have gone for free once upon a very different time, though at that time there was no guarantee it would be for a round trip. At least not coach.

That place is Viet Nam and my previous gratis ticket would have been courtesy of the Selective Service System, SSS Form 7 to be precise. Fortunately, courtesy of President Nixon and unprecedented and vocal opposition to the war from an irate citizenship, the draft had been cancelled. My classification was 1H. It still is, technically. I can’t believe I ever weighed 155 lbs.

I have landed in the Noi Bai International Airport, Hanoi, Viet Nam and am now in line to have my visa stamped. God only knows if it’s the right line.

Hanoi is definitely a different place. The airport was busy and efficient. Actually, it was mobbed and efficient. The last thing I needed was bureaucracy in a foreign language after 43 hours of airport waiting rooms, check-ins, and nestling between two sleeping passengers from Chicago to Doha for 13 hours being certain I had requested a window seat the whole way and even certainer I wouldn’t make it out alive and wasn’t sure that I wanted to, anyway. That is, having left Tampa on a Wednesday and arriving at Hanoi on Friday with only cat naps and the sweet release of snacks and airline meals to comfort me. That, and a Terry Pratchett Discworld novel.

Vietnamese Immigration

 Arrival glanced at my visa, scanned my papers, checked the computer, put an archaic rubber stamp imprint in my passport, and waved me on. Customs just waved me through. I was in the, ‘Nothing to claim, not even my genius,’ line, after all. Other people were running their luggage through scanners and answering annoying questions, but they just looked at me and said, “Meh. He’s harmless,” and let me through. “I’m honored, I guess,” I thought and scurried through the now non-threatening checkpoint.

The ride was waiting. He took me to the wrong hotel, but it was sorted quickly and I was here at last.

Hanoi is a strange city. Viet Nam is a strange land. The ruling party is, and always has been, communist. That doesn’t seem to bother anybody, though. The people seem to have adjusted to it all and just get on with it.

Through sleep depraved eyes I viewed the city, a cacophony of 60% motorbikes, 40% cars and trucks by volume, with a corpuscle stream of humanity surging wherever there’s an opening, the sidewalks having been all commandeered as parking for motorbikes. It all seemed to work.

Friday afternoon in the Old City of Hanoi, or Hà Nội, as the signs declared. TripAdvisor had gleefully provided me with tickets to a water puppet show that afternoon. I walked through the city a bit, bought something to eat at a street vendor, not actually a restaurant. I sat at a low table on a sidewalk and ordered a bowl of pork soup and noodles with a salad and kumquat tea. I’m sure it had a name and it certainly was delicious. The options were limited but the portions were grand and, well, that’s what street food is all about, anyway. All those years of being cool at sushi restaurants by using chop sticks paid off! I hardly dropped anything in my lap and even less on the pavement.

Ha Noi at night

Weeks before my trip I reserved a seat through TripAdvisor at the Thang Long Water Theater for a Water Puppet show. The puppet show was amazing. There was an orchestra divided on both sides of the ‘stage,’ if that’s the right word. This was the only stage I’ve ever seen where the actors can make their entrances through the floor. Trap doors don't count. Clever.

The đàn bầu

There was an instrument in the orchestra I had never seen before. It had a single string on a sound box attached to a wooden cup on one side. The cup had a wand attached to it and the musician played it with a guitar like pick. Pulling the wand tightened and loosened the string, thus producing a dreamy oriental melody associated with old Fu Man Chu movies from the 30’s and opium dens from forever. ‘Rhapsodic’ came to mind.

Google and its propagandist, Wikipedia, say it’s a đàn bầu or gourd zither. It was certainly exotic and beautiful, and everything hypnotic and captivating about the far east.

By the end of the show I could barely keep my eyes open and immediately started to nod whenever they fluttered away from me. I was in the second row and didn’t want to join the performance, as bracing as that might be.

Bridge to the Buddhist Shrine

Back on the street I checked with Google maps to find the way home to my hotel, the Dal Vostro Hotel and Spa. It was not far, I knew, seeing as I had only walked around a pond in ‘The Old City’ of downtown Hanoi, but I wasn’t sure where around it I had walked, exactly. To my annoyance and eventual consternation, the Internet was spotty. I started jumping around between TripAdvisor, Google, and Google Maps, and the documentation of my trip hoping one of them would scrape up enough Internet to give me rough directions. Or at least a street address. I finally found that I wanted to find the Hanoi Old quarter Địa chỉ: 12 Ngõ Bảo Khánh, Hàng Trống, Hoàn Kiếm, Hà Nội.

Great. On it.

So, through some groggy internal navigation and ‘trying to remember how I got here from the hotel in the first place,’ I looked up and saw a street sign for Ngõ Bảo Khánh, street. “Hey, that looks like someplace I want to be!” and so it was.

My first night in Hanoi had been a challenge rewarded.

Day 1 Nov 4

I was met in the lobby of the hotel after breakfast, which was a kind of oriental version of the European breakfasts I am used to on excursions like this one. There was an omelet station and a buffet of local fruits and rolls, stir fried vegetables and soup with noodles, sausages and bacon, probably there for western taste buds, juices, coffee with sweetened condensed milk, cereal, yoghurt, and et cetera.

My guide, Chen, I think his name was, though it definitely wasn’t pronounced how I am spelling it. It sounded somewhat like John but not really. He met me and escorted me to a van with 4 other adventurers already there. We drove about 60 km outside of Hanoi into farmland. One couple, a bother and sister named Bob and Bonnie, were from Orlando and we had both gone through the same travel agent, Tourradar. We compared notes and we were scheduled to have some events coinciding and some different, so we kind of crossed paths throughout the next 14 days.

Unpronouncable Chen was very interesting. He talked a lot about history, colonialism, the French, the Americans, the Cambodians, the Khmer, the war and its untidy aftermath; the Vietnamese call it the American war; local customs, and demographics. Viet Nam is a communist state, which means there is one party with one leader of everything, like its Big Sister in Communism to the North, China. 

There were land reforms which gave land to the farmers, with stipulations, of course. A farmer might have only 100 meters square, about 2 and a half acres, on which they might grow rice, corn, tea, or yams, according to season. It goes to their children, sons preferentially but daughters can inherit the family farm.

Of course, farming has never been easy or profitable. For something so essential on a life or death level, you would think that farmers are revered as gods bringing life in their pockets and abundance wreathed over their heads. But it’s never been like this anywhere. Not since the start of farming. Not in any civilization ever. Why is it that the most essential to the welfare of our hearth and home are marginalized while the aristocrats who barely know we exist are the most renowned and rewarded?

The communist state provides primary and secondary education, but advanced education requires a student to pass exams. You can go to college or just inherit the family farm. You can go into the army and two years of service allows you tuition in a trade school, but you remain a reservist all your life. I didn’t think to ask what happens to educated parents who left the farm but then had children who didn’t pass the advancement tests. Where do they fit into the communist utopia?

I asked Chen if they were afraid of losing farms as more people flee to the cities? He said it’s a concern since life is easier and richer in the cities, no matter what job you get, and he expects the farms will be bought up by big concerns and streamlined, whatever that will entail.

Sounds like Rome before its fall. Things were so bad that sons didn’t want to take up farming and the government had to enact laws forcing boys to take up their fathers’ livelihood. In the end the small farms were bought up by rich landowners who consolidated them into what today we would call Industrial Farming. That was one step away from feudalism and we may be headed that way today. They will still need workers, though. Where will they come from? I’m afraid to ask. Maybe all those aristocrats will all decide to make an honest living for a change? Ha, who am I kidding?

Rice Wine. Bob and Bonnie are the two on the right

 Our first visit was to a man who made rice wine. His house was basically one big brewery and distillery. Don’t let the ‘wine’ in ‘rice wine’ fool you. It is made from fermented rice, so far so good, which is then distilled to 40% alcohol. Rice whiskey would be more apt.

Moonshine's got nothin' on rice wine

It had a very nice flavor, almost nutty. Our host gave us a Vietnamese beer first, as a chaser I suppose, which was also quite good. Almost like a Budweiser but better, followed by shots of rice wine. It was called ‘333’ which means it’s half evil, I imagine. But as they say, one is delicious, two is an inspiration, three is a warning. I just sipped mine.

We visited a woman who makes tofu for the village. She gets up early, around 4:00 O’clock, to make enough to bring to the market. Then does it again in the afternoon for the evening meal. Tofu is just like the farmer’s cheese my grandmother used to make, except with soybeans instead of cows’ milk. Everything else is pretty much the same.

We had lunch where they put us to work. We were in a small farming village, after all, and most things are done by and for the villagers. They showed us how to make spring rolls and fried them for our lunch. We also had soup and noodles and fruit and tea. 

They say if I pick 20 kilos I can have a bowl of rice

Next stop was to a tea farmer who had also fought in the war for the north, first against the US, then against the Khmer rouge. He was 70 years old, just 2 years older than me. I don’t think they had classifications on their draft cards.

We saw how the tea was harvested and processed, which understandably is labor intensive. He works with his wife and his daughter, who will inherit the farm. His two sons became a pharmacist and a lawyer, I think? Maybe. I don’t remember. But they were able to advance in the communist hierarchy.

After the tea is harvested it’s roasted, rolled up to release oils, and roasted some more. The finished tea is bagged and picked up periodically by someone who packages it for wholesale.

Our guide told us that the farmer had no ill feelings toward Americans, even during the war. They all knew that there were antiwar protests in the US and the war was not popular among the American citizens. That was a common sentiment I heard more than once.

Our bus brought us to the rest of the party’s hotel first. Unpronounceable Chen said his motorbike was nearby and he could run me to my hotel. I said fine, but could he recommend a good place to exchange money? He brought me to a good place to exchange money on his bike. I got to see the Hanoi street shuffle from the scooter side, if just for a few blocks. He was shocked when I told him how little I had gotten in the airport in Tampa. 

Oh, I forgot. I stopped at a money exchange booth in the international concourse of Tampa airport and exchanged one hundred dollars for dong. When I got it I realized, “Hey! That’s not anywhere near the exchange rate! But I had taken the money and assumed that changing money in the US would yield a decent rate. I don’t know why I would think that.

From the Latin letters I know I'm still in Viet Nam, but I don't remember where

 He said he could bring me to a place that would be much better, especially for large bills. I said my money was in my hotel, so I walked there while he got his bike and then picked me up. For my crisp, new Franklin, I got a whopping two million four hundred fifty thousand Vietnamese dong. Twice as much as at Tampa airport. Talk about cursed money changers. Where’s a pissed off messiah when you need one?

He asked what I was doing for the rest of the evening. I said probably walk around the old city and then get something to eat. I asked for his recommendation, and he not only recommended a place but brought me there. The place was terrific. I don’t remember the restaurant’s name, but I got the bun cha dac kim. Maybe that was its name. Anyway, I had to go up three flights of anything but fire marshal approved stairs and was seated in cafeteria style tables, only more congested. The menu had three items. A woman across from me pointed out what I was trying to repeat from memory that Chen had suggested, and soon I got an enormous plate of salad, soup with pork, a bowl of noodles, one order of spring rolls, and a Viet Nam beer. It was heavenly.

After dinner I paid my one hundred something thousand dong tab, about five bucks, and puttered on my way. I danced among the Saturday night Hanoi mob of motorized-pedestrian hybrids, aimlessly and reflexively avoiding catastrophe. That could be the motto of my life.

Ha Noi street food

There was a concert going on downtown so the traffic was routed around it. That left us pedestrians blinking in the open like fish when the sea goes suddenly absent anticipating a tidal wave. We had to resort to dodging around each other haphazardly and going ‘Beep, beep’ with our mouth horns, otherwise it just didn’t feel like street traffic.

Light show!

There was a very beautiful shrine on the lake. For 30,000 dong, just over a dollar, I visited it. It was beautiful, of course. I was surprised at how many people stopped and bowed their heads in reverence, young and old, to the Buddhist shrine. I don’t know if they pray in Viet Nam or what a Vietnamese prayer would be like. 

All I could film of the Buddhist shrine.

Not being a deity myself, I can’t imagine what it’s like to he prayed to. Uplifting, I should think. If I ever become a god, I’m sure the experience will be a shock. It’s best to leave the worshiper and the worshipped to their own mysteries.

Back to my hotel and juggling charger cables. And tomorrow… a cruise on the Halong Bay at the entry to the Gulf of Tonkin. Ya, that Gulf of Tonkin.

Day 2-3, Nov 5-6

Now that was exhilarating. I got a WhatsApp message last night instructing me for today’s adventure. “Wait in the lobby and they will be there around 7:55,” it quote. “Ok,” I thought in its direction. “I can do that.”

Around quarter past, traffic, you see, my guide appeared. “Are you Djanatin?” The hotel clerk asked with who I assumed was my guide in tow. “Yes,” I agreed.

He took my bag and I packed up my backpack and followed him out to his…motorbike? “Hop on,” he said.

“Ah, Oooh-Kayyy,” I thought. “Are we scooting to the boat?” I hesitated. I assumed he was taking me to a bus somewhere nearby, but couldn’t but wonder… I had been warned about checking credentials, being wary of cons, don’t get in a car with just anybody, and whatnot. Still. I had heard stories, or maybe they were movies, where some innocent above board had been taken for a ride by some street shyster and then robbed and dumped somewhere. Maybe I’m thinking of, “The Freshman.” But I did have a reservation and he asked for me by name so it must be OK. And what did we do to them, anyway? Except to invade their country and bomb-never mind.

He took me a short way around the block and pointed to a full-sized bus across an intersection. “Ah,” I realized, divining the absurdity of a tour bus in anything called, “The Old City,” anywhere on earth. Of course, they couldn’t drive a bus down my street, which had a particularly sharp bend in it. What were those fourteenth century people thinking?

I hopped off the bike in the middle of the street at a red light-well, reddish light since nobody takes them seriously-got my luggage and wove across the busy intersection like it was nobody’s business. I’m getting the hang of this, ‘We’re all gonna die, anyway, so why not just step out in front of a car while we’re waiting?’ thing. Being beeped at is a badge of becoming a Ha Noi-ence.

The bus I was on was mostly full and was taking us to Le Journey boat tours. Le Journey was the name of the cruise ship, which must be Le tribute to Le French, which had about 24 cabins on two levels. I was in cabin 111.

Welcome Dragon

The day was pretty busy, once we got underway (Underway. How nautical.) The ship brought us into Halong Bay, which is populated with hundreds of craggy islands, some sheltering oyster beds for cultured pearls and numerous sights to see.

My cabin

Gondolas to the Monkeys!

I can't believe we evolved from them. Though they do bring good bananas

Some spectacular caves

Sunset from the top of one of the islands

Our day’s activity was pretty packed. Halong bay is a popular tourist spot, so the marina we arrived at was a madhouse. But the tour company was efficient and courteous. They conveyed us to a tender boat and ferried us to our cruise ship. Ship? Boat? What’s with these nautical synonyms?

Once checked in and installed in our cabins; rooms are called cabins on boats for some reason; mine was on the bottom deck, which is also called something other than what it is. Floors are for buildings, you see. On floating hotels, which is what a ship/boat is, they have decks. We got our itinerary, which is sometimes called a schedule, for our trip, which is sometimes called a voyage when you’re at sea, which is also called an ocean on which we sail because people travel on land but they sail upon the sea, wa-da-do-da. And that’s important. And let’s not talk about what they do with semen on a ship.

After we stared blankly at our tour guide for a while, he said the itinerary was on a podium and we could just photograph it. Just be here for lunch while we sail- ah, trav-, er, move out to our destination, which is usually a port.

We sailed through a bay, which really doesn’t have any other name, that was littered with islands, about 200 of them. Actually, they were more like craggy boulders dropped into the sea by a bored Poseidon than your typical pancake tropical island with a palm tree sticking out of it at a sexy angle. Our two days/one night cruise on the bay consisted of exploring some caves, climbing to an observation pagoda to view the sunset, I reached the top just as it set, swimming, rowing out to an inlet bay to commune with monkeys-bring bananas-sunrise tai chi, and a wonderful time sitting on deck, taking pictures, eating great food, and all around enjoying the sea, the air, the company, and the nautical synonyms.

The trip back to Hanoi took two and a half hours. I had an hour before my ride to the airport to fly to Ho Chi Minh City arrived, and there was something I wanted to get…

Our tai chi instructor that morning wore a magnificent silk outfit that looked wonderful. I thought that might be a good item to bring home. I can tai one on with the chi of them, I thought. I strolled around the neighborhood of the hotel and found a store that sold silk items. They looked nice, not cheaply made, but were they overpriced? I checked and it was quite reasonable for silk. I told the sales clerk what I was looking for and she brought out several. A green one looked very nice but I settled on one that was blue. My favorite color.

 Now I can tell people that I have a suit that costs millions!

Day 4 – Nov 7

The flight to Ho Chi Min City, nee Saigon, was uneventful, which is everything I want in a flight. The plane was a Boeing 787, which is a monster. Along the way I bumped into Bob and Bonnie. “Ah, how nice!” I said. “What did you do yesterday?” “We went to the bay.” “The Halong bay? So did I. I was on a ship-boat-thing.” “We were too.” We compared notes on our trips, which were similar.

I checked in, got my boarding pass, and read my seat no. 49G. 49? I’m in row 49? I used to think that if I got row 24 on a flight it was in a different time zone from the cockpit. Row 49? This puts me in a different growing zone. There must be a separate cockpit for the rear of the plane like a dinosaur’s tail brain.

Weather forecasts must come from different countries. They need quantum entanglement to communicate with each other. Arrival times are based on Greenwich Mean Time in the cockpit and back-of-the-plane time everywhere else.

Speaking about travel inconveniences, let’s talk about electricity. You know, Ben Franklin playing fly a kite with his son, William, in a lightning storm? No wonder the little bastard, Ben’s words, hated his father. But we’re talking about electricity, not Ben Franklin’s failed family life.

Thomas Edison? Nicola Tesla? Between the three they created Frankedsla’s monster. Many/most hotels outside of the US have this trick, really a prank, where you have to put your room key in a reader before you get any electricity in your room. You see, in America we just squirt electricity all over the place whenever we want to.

Why, I say fie on your electro-fascism! In America we have lights to illuminate our light switches and electrically operated, computer controlled, AI window dimmers to shut out the electric billboards outside our bedroom windows. You know, what used to be called, ‘curtains?’ That’s America, Buddy.

Over here, if I want to leave my portable defibrillator plugged in over the day so it will be available in the evening for an emergency jolt, no can do.

I have three gadgets that need regular fixes of AC when I travel. My cell phone, my camera, and my tablet, the last I use as a backup computer. It’s really only there so I can charge the battery, which I do with a variety of gadgets and adapters.

You see, the electric grid was simultaneously developed in the US and Europe. The US shorted out at 120 volts and Europe went to ground at 240. The frequency was different too. That’s what they call hertz. Not hurts. Hurts is what happens when you stick a fork into a toaster.

The US uses 60 cycles per second while most people use 50. They also like the Metric System. This causes great fun when you have an alarm clock that relies on wall current for its timing. When your clock says it’s 8:00 AM and it’s time to get up because 8 hours have passed since Cinderella left the ball, it’s really only 6:40 because she had an American alarm clock and this is Bavaria.

And the outlets are all different, too. Some have two prongs, some have three.  Some have rounded prongs, some flat. Some prongs are parallel to each other, some perpendicular.

And some are clever. They don’t give you any juice until the plug is totally plugged in. That’s for people who wrap their hands in tin foil before they plug in their razors while taking a shower. Talk about Frankedsla.

Fortunately for me, all of the gadgets I use don’t care. 120 volts, 240; 50 hertz, 60; communist, capitalist; free market, you’ll-be-serfs-and-you’ll-be-happy? It's all the same to them.

“I don’t care,” they say. “Just give it to me straight up. And serve it to me in a dirty wire.”

But for some reason the electricity is slow outside of the states. At least it has been here so far. I charged my camera battery the other night and it wasn’t completely charged in the morning. Same with my phone. I plugged it into a wall socket the other night, being careful to keep the tin foil tucked under my fingernails, and it said 2 hrs, 32m to fully charged. I came back later and it said 4 hours to fully charged. 

“How come you went from 2 hours to 4 hours?” I asked. “Because I can,” it said, “Because you can?” I said. “Ya, that and you left me in Airplane mode all day, so I did it out of spite.” Cheeky bastard.

Oh, look. My ride is here.

Kaths, that stands for Katherine and sounds like ‘Cats’ because the Vietnamese don’t like the ‘th’ sound, was here for her today’s boy scout troop. We are going to see the Mekong River and several islands it engulfs. On our way there Kaths talked about stuff. Some history, the French and the American war come up a lot, Vietnamese culture, vocabulary.

The word for mother is Ma. The word for hot is Ma. Now, the word for spirit is Ma and the word for Young Rice is Ma. The word for tongue? Well that’s Ma, too. So a sentence in Vietnamese could parse into something like this, “Your Ma said, ‘Be careful eating the Ma. It might be too Ma on your Ma and trouble your Ma.’” Ya. That meant something in some universe.

She pronounced them as if for a class in the Vietnamese language for tone deafs and they sounded kinda, sorta different, if I squinted my ears. That’s how the Vietnamese swings, it’s an economy of letters.

There are many more intonations in Vietnamese that change, not just the tone, but the very meaning of a word. It’s not just the difference between saying ‘fire’ and saying ‘FIRE!’ for emphasis, and yes, the emphasis of the word is as much a letter as any other. It would be as if the word ‘fire’ meant ‘chocolate,’ the word ‘Fire’ meant ‘life savings, and the word ‘FIRE!’ meant incineration.’

I always wondered why Oriental languages have such winsome qualities to them. The pitch and timber will roll and breathe, grow loud or soft suddenly, swirl around the canyons of the skull, turn nasal, then cut off abruptly like the audible finger painting of a well-played gourd zither: The enchanting đàn bầu.

Vietnamese don’t speak to you, they sing to you.

It was hot today. Hot hot. I don’t know how hot but the humidity was there to sing me a weather forecast. And humid. South Viet Nam is over a thousand kilometers from the north. Where Hanoi was comfortable in canvas pants, Ho Chi Minh city demanded shorts. Too bad I forgot to bring some. Well, I put a pair out but didn’t pack them. Duh.

Our first stop was at a Buddhist monastery known for its depictions. There’s the laughing Buddha, sitting there like a generous helping of mashed potatoes on a thanksgiving plate, grinning madly. There’s the sleeping Buddha, stretched out and probably dreaming of infinite improbable worlds, some of them like ours, or where he left the remote. And there’s the Lady Buddha, a Vietnamese innovation. She represents the feminine side of life. We have our virgin Mary and our Holy Spirit, they have their enlightened feminine soul in the Lady Buddha. I love it.

Lady Buddha

What's he laughing about, huh?

The Standing Around Buddha

The Snooze Control Buddha

“Oh, look whose here?” said a voice. “Oh, Bonnie! Bob!" I said. "Good seeing you.” We chatted and found out a little more about each other, since it looked like these encounters would become a thing. They are from Orlando. Both retired. Used to live in Minnesota… Nice people.

Later in the day I asked Kaths where I could buy one of those cone shaped hats, the ones the farmers would wear, not the decorated, touristy ones. I like to get something authentic when I visit one of our many holy lands. She said those hats were just for women. Only women would wear them. They were introduced by or are associated with the Lady Buddha and represent women’s power and special role in the world. And keeping the sun and elements out of your eyes.

It was beginning to become obvious that there was rain in our enlightened future. Last night I awoke to the sounds of a deluge outside. “Get it out of your system,” I thought. “Just be fine tomorrow,” and dozed off again.

It looked like it heeded my plea. The morning was a bit overcast but dry with blue sky and sunlight brushing by the clouds and passing on like the endless motorbikes that were becoming familiar to me.

We arrived at a little marina on the river. The Mekong is one of the world’s largest rivers, having its birth in China and sluicing through Laos, Thailand, and Cambodia, finally cutting off shards of Viet Nam just below Ho Chi Minh City in the splayed fingers of the Mekong Delta.

A little boat that barely held the seven of us adventurers, plus guide, ferried us across the river to one of the four islands in this part of the river: Unicorn Island, Phoenix Island, Turtle Island, and Dragon Island. I didn’t see any of those. Well, maybe one dragon. Our experiences from this point on were quite intense. We saw wildlife and fruit growing everywhere.

Cutting coconut candy

hors d'oeuvres

I'll stick with my bee pollen tea, thanks

 

Crocodiles, papayas, coconuts, layers of mud held back by dikes of bamboo and concrete forming dozens of boat landings for hundreds of power boats smaller than the one that brought us over from the mainland and gondolas smaller still. They traveled through canals cut in the island mud, surrounded by dense overgrowth. 

We listened to folk songs and music played on the enchanting đàn bầu and other enchanting Vietnamese instruments. Saw plastic tubs of broken coconut husks and fibrous chunks that were oddly pulsing.

“These are Coconut worms,” said Kaths. She poked around the fibers until were revealed these fat little squirms that looked like a creature from Alice in Wonderland.

“You pick them up by the head when you eat them,” she said.

“When you do what, now?” I asked, not sure if I wanted an answer.

“You eat them! They use them to make a fish sauce.”

“Well, that’s not too bad,” I thought. “At least you don’t have to…”

“And you take one and dip it into the sauce and bight its body off at the head.” One end of the worm had a little black spot that was apparently its head. “The heads taste bad.”

“I would think so!” I thought. “Must be all the rage from having its body bit off.”

This round's on me!

The 'Nón lá' or cone hat.

The next stop, hurriedly fled to, was a table for a refreshment. A sip of tea with local honey and bee pollen plus a squeeze of what looked like a lime the size of a marble. “You can buy some honey, bee pollen, royal jelly…” we heard from our host. I bought a little jar of royal jelly.

And they brought out a frame of bees we could look at. They were a bit smaller than the Italian bees I used to raise, sadly they don’t survive in the part of Florida where I live-due to spraying for mosquitoes-a hobby I miss.

“And you can buy a worm, if you like.” We just can’t get away from those worms.

Unbelievably, two of our party were game. And I mean ‘game’ in the sense that they were willing to try eating a live, wriggling worm. Not that anybody was actively hunting them. Though I was not sure of anything about now.

They haggled a bit about how many they sell at a time. It’s a minimum of two worms with fish sauce, then they brought out a small bowl of an amber liquid and a dish with two fat bundles of blissful wormy  ignorance in them.

One fellow picked one up and dumped it in the sauce. Then he squeezed it at the head between chopsticks and proceeded to bite off the undulating part that stuck out. At least it was quick.

“How was it?” someone asked. “Juicy,” came the answer. “And slightly coconutty.”

Sounds like a cereal commercial from the 1950’s. New from Capt’n Crunch, Worm Wonders. They squirm when you eat them and they’re slightly coconutty!

The second man, it’s always a guy who tries these shenanigans, didn’t fare so gracefully. The worm kept falling out of his chopsticks and his intrepid friend had to assist.

“Urmph!” I thought at a chemical level and smiled greenly. At least I didn’t have to eat any bees to enjoy my tea.

We next saw a demonstration of processing coconuts. “Ok, there can’t anything to get Anthony Bourdain excited here,” I thought.

They use various clever tools to break open the coconuts, extract the meat, press it, boil it, reduce it to a taffy type substance for candy, and, what else do humans do with anything that contains sugar? Ferment it.

“Oh, and we put snakes in it. Poisonous ones,” said Kaths. “Of course we do,” I thought. And there it was. Bourdain’s beastie. What I’d call, ‘Eve’s Revenge.’

Mexico has its tequila with a worm. The Vietnamese do them one better. Coconut wine, actually whiskey, that’s bottled with a live poisonous snake drowning in it!

“The Vietnamese believe that poisonous things are good for you when taken in the right way,” said Kaths. Yes, I had heard that. Getting stung by bees and injected with venom is supposed to be good for arthritis, I heard. But what is the right way? Well, what doesn’t kill you…

We had a taste of the snake liquor. Alcohol is pretty good at masking other flavors. And it was just a fraction of a shot. Really just enough to taste it and wish you hadn’t. Maybe I wasn’t feeling manly because I hadn’t proven my worth Mano e Wormo, so… down the poison hole.

It wasn’t bad. I didn’t taste much coconut, or snake for that matter. After a few minutes, though, there was an aftertaste that refused to go away. It was hard to describe, just a kind of distilled unpleasantness. I was glad when Kaths offered us a taste of the plain coconut liquor. “There isn’t anything in it, you know. Unnatural?” I wondered. “Only pure ingredients,” whatever that meant.

The Coconut Liquor was cleaner. More pallet cleansing. Still not a real coconut presence. And it dispelled the essence of snake. I liked the rice wine better. Still, anything to get rid of the taste of drowned serpent.

Meanwhile, Mr. Worm Man was asking how much a bottle cost. A million VND, which he thought worth it since he bought a bottle. “And when it’s empty you can pour more alcohol in and let it sit for six months and have some more,” said Kaths. Good to know. “Oh, and don’t eat the snake.” Even better to know. Don’t worry. I won’t.

It had started raining, as is good and proper in a rain forest. Or jungle. Is Viet Nam a jungle or a rain forest? So we hung around the pavilion with the coconuts and the snake schnapps. I was sure they were looking at me.

We bought disposable ponchos, I had brought one from home, but had left it in the hotel room, of course, where it was safe and dry. A new one was 10,000 VND, or about forty cent give or take. Once you get over the conversion, and assuming you got a good exchange rate, cough, cough, things are pretty cheap here, for a visitor.

Lunch was standard stuff with the addition of an elephant ear fish. A free Coconut worm to whoever guesses what it looks like. By now it was drizzling pretty steadily. We were supposed to go on a bicycle ride around the village but even if it cleared up it would be too slippery. Instead, we took a short rowboat ride on a canal through the rain forest.

Our gondolier gave us conical, not comical, hats to wear in the rain. I guess they are not, strictly speaking, female anymore. Traditions change. Even ones delivered by an enlightened woman/saint/goddess.

That concluded our introduction to the Mekong Delta. We took a skiff back to the mainland drinking coconut water out of coconut shells, sans worms and snakes. Those are extra.

Day 5 - Nov 8

Today was a short day. It started a little later, so I didn’t have to rush through breakfast. About 8-ish my ride showed up at the wrong address. Luckily, he was just across the street. Lucy, the trip coordinator on the Vietnamese end, called me on WhatsApp. I should mention that I was asked to use WhatsApp (Doc?) to communicate, so I downloaded it at the Internet Bazar.

It’s a little flaky. OK, I’m a little flaky, so it took a few false starts to figure it out. Unfortunately, the ‘false starts’ included not knowing how to answer the talkie feature-I kept trying to answer my Phone phone, not the WhatsApp phone-and kept missing the messages. I assume it uses some flavor of Voice Over Internet Protocol. Well, the Internet here, even in the cities, is legend: Wonderful and Unhistorical.

Also, once I get safely on the bus, coracle, ferry, steamship, horse, transporter, or whatever, I turn on airplane mode. Questing for Phone and Internet service takes a lot of power and I still want to use my phone to jot down notes as I travel.

Today was to be a somber experience. But first, our guide, Little Dave-he told us his name and it was hard to remember, something like Maur, maybe? My profound apologies for mispronunciation. Tour guides will take on Western names to make it easier for us to remember. Yesterday, our guide told us, “Call me Kaths (Cats) and I’ll answer with ‘Meow’.”

Little Dave was taking us to the Cu Chi tunnels, about an hour and a half from Saigon. They still refer to it as Saigon sometimes, the ‘gon’ in the name means ‘cotton’. We’ve all had tee shirts made from Vietnamese cotton, I’m sure. Before that he gave us another history and grammar lesson. The history was becoming all too familiar. War, exchange of land and culture, the French, the Chinese, the Americans, the Khmer. Oh, and the Vietnamese use a Latin alphabet, which they got from the French. Empires always give and take, always in unequal measure, of course. It is only at the decline of an empire that they only take.

And do be careful how you order dinner. Phở, pronounced like ‘Ma,’ means beef soup. Phò, pronounced like ‘Awe’ means… How can I put this delicately? As Terry Pratchett would say, A women of negotiable affection. You can have either one on a table in a restaurant, but one might be more manageable. Not to mention more socially acceptable. So be careful what you order. You may get a bowl of soup instead of what you really wanted!

We had a rest stop about half way through our trip. There were no phòs present, or phởs for that matter. It was an art shop where the artwork was made by victims of the mass defoliant called Agent Orange. The people damaged by this hideous substance weren’t just damaged in themselves. They were damaged in their futures, their genetics and in their offspring. These people could not work properly, but many were talented in other ways. They gathered chicken and duck eggs and used them to make works of art, quite beautiful works of Vietnamese scenes in mosaics of shell fragments and paint. Women working in rice paddies, sunsets, the Buddha, a three-quarter profile nude woman, all exquisitely painted and lacquered. All lovely. The proceeds go to help the victims of the chemical cruelty of Agent Orange.

Little Dave asked us what we knew about the American War. Why was it fought? I said it was about containing communism, at least that was what we were told. “The domino effect,” he said. “That’s what they told everyone. But if you look at a map, you will see India to the west and China above us to the northeast. A lot of trade goes right where? Right by Saigon.” “Just like the straits of Malacca,” I thought. “Follow the money.”

Invisible entrance

The old AK47

We got to Cu Chi. There is a monument at the entrance to the women who fought here. Many women, girls actually, fought long and hard in every capacity, from digging tunnels to killing Americans, and were awarded the Hero of Viet Nam status. They are honored here and elsewhere. They fought and they farmed. An AK47 in their hands by day and a plow by night.

Speaking of AK47s, there was a shooting range where you could shoot blanks from Soviet era rifles. I shot 5 rounds of amo-Bob was also on this trip and he shared his 10 round magazine with me. They were loud and the gun jammed, but the venerable AK47 is synonymous with guerilla fighting. After, I bought us drinks to thank him and Bonnie for the shooting session. You gotta do something for a buddy who shares his last clip with you.

I remember hearing about the tunnels, even during the war. They were terrible places tens of meters below ground, extending zig zag and even below enemy bases (that would be us.) They included kitchens, hospitals, living quarters, shafts for ventilation and cooking smoke, workshops and anything needful for the war effort. The ‘soldiers’ who manned them were just as likely to be women as men. And when above ground they all looked like farmers. In the eyes of the Vietnamese, the enemy Americans shot at everything: men, women, children, dung heaps, statues, trees, animals-anything that moved and anything that stood still.

They had a mockup of a tunnel entrance we could try out. It looked like a hillock of dried leaves next to a tree, until you pried up an iron door, barely 10 X 12 inches in size. They invited us to drop ourselves about four feet through it and cover it over again. The average Vietnamese soldier was stunted and malnourished and quite probably a teenager and easily fit through the needle’s eye entrances. I tried but couldn’t get my rib cage through. It’s damaged from the motorcycle accident I had ten years ago and my back is held together with screws and wires, so I didn’t want to push it. I was afraid I might get in but not get out!

There were examples of booby traps and sniper holes. They used dogs to sniff out entrenchments and the North Vietnamese, they don’t like the term, ‘Viet Con’, would place clothing from dead soldiers in them so the dogs would smell something familiar and ignore it. That and pieces of unexploded bomb clusters rigged as land mines. They had workshops for taking apart unexploded mines and bombs and turning them into booby traps.

Sections of the ground would swing open and reveal a pit of sharp bamboo stakes or a clever machine that propelled spikes at sensitive body parts, sometimes smeared in shit to promote infections all too prevalent in the tropics. It was a brutal war.

We climbed, I crawled, through 10 meters of tunnel carved in the packed clay. I couldn’t help thinking that this clay may someday, in the distant future, be compressed into marble and that a future Michelangelo might create the next David, or Buddha, or whatever hero or god we will honor in that time and age.

I hope they know they stand on hallowed ground.

Day 6 – Nov 9

I'm sure it was Hanoi Jane

Last day in Saigon. Can’t say as I liked it. Not as much as Hanoi. This morning after breakfast I went out to try and find something to buy. I wanted something, anything that I could bring home. I’ve got some VND left, about a million, and I wanted to buy something. I didn’t feel comfortable straying too far from the hotel. The streets look the same, it’s not a stereotype if it’s true, and the Internet is spotty at best. If I get lost Google maps isn’t going to be my Sherpa guide. I was afraid if I went more than a few blocks I wouldn’t be able to find my way back. In Hanoi I quickly made out where my hotel was in relation to the big lake in the middle of the old city, so I could walk around the lake and several blocks away on all sides and still find my way home. I was starting to make a little sense of Saigon, but not as quickly and here it was time to go already.

I was hoping to find a silk store open. I found a few yesterday and wanted to get a pair of silk slippers, to match the suit I bought in Hanoi and as a nod to Sherlock Holmes’ tobacco pouch. I couldn’t find one that carried slippers, though plenty that carry tobacco. Today I thought I might buy a silk scarf for Kristin, but the silk stores are all closed at this time in the morning. Pity. Had I thought of it earlier I could have bought one yesterday. Or at the same time I bought the suit.

The majority of stores here are as follows: Restaurants, spas, travel agencies, hotels, convenience stores, and a few shops with tourist items. Oh, and nightclubs. I can buy something at the airport. Or exchange the cash for Cambodian.

There is a park across a main street outside my hotel but I never got there. That would have been a good reference point and landmark. Not enough time this trip. I can’t believe it’s Thursday already.  Last week Thursday didn’t happen. I left Tampa on Wednesday and arrived in Hanoi on Friday. No Thursday required. Or remembered. I had a lost midweek.

I am now on an Airbus something. 351, maybe? It’s not a big plane and we’re not on a long flight. Just over an hour. I bought a silk scarf at the airport in Saigon. Not what I really wanted to do. It cost about 500,000 VND. I might have gotten it cheaper somewhere else but I wasn’t somewhere else and I was headed to some entirely different else and I had some money burning a hole in my pocket. Loose ends tied, a little. Loose ends snugged, at least.

Now I am in Siem Reap, Cambodia. The flight took an hour. They only had time to give us a cup of water-always take the water-before the, ‘Prepare for landing,’ announcement was given. Nothing is scheduled and I will probably just walk around. Siem Reap is much smaller than either Hanoi or Saigon. I’ve given up calling it Ho Chi Minh City which is too much to say or write. Sorry, Ho Ci Minh City. You’re not going to win any, “Roll off the tongue,” awards.

Cambodia relies heavily on tourism. Immigration and Customs were a snap. They gave us forms to fill out on the plane, in deliciously bureaucratic duplicate, of course, plus I had applied for a visa on-line. It didn’t save any time. I still had to fill out the same customs forms as everybody else. The luggage carrousel delivered my luggage quickly and my ride was there waiting for me outside with a bottle of water-always take the water.

Actually, our ride in Norway last year just left the airport when Kristin, Seeth, and my flight was delayed by no more than about a half an hour in Tromsø.  Half a stinken hour and we had to get a cab into the city. At least the travel agency refunded us the limo charge, so we made out better. Here everyone was pleasant and helpful. The trip into town took about an hour, the airport was new and located kind of far out of town, "In the expectation of growth," my guide said. Good planning.

The Cambodian riel is about 4,000 to the dollar. I asked my guide from the airport to recommend a place to change money and he brought me there. I got a good rate and I asked him to ask for small bills. They’re easier for tipping. I got a huge wad of mostly old bills for my Franklin, which I had to sort out later. One was so ratty a stall salesperson downtown refused to take it. “Too old,” she said. Money is never too old for me. I just put it in a tip jar the next morning. “See, it still works,” I thought.

Cambodia uses a different alphabet entirely, including the numbers. The money is hard to interpret. But at least there is a decimal value printed along with the Cambodian numeral. I tipped the guide what I thought was fair, though I’m not sure now.

No, I’m OK. I just counted my cash and I have about 400,000 riel left after giving him 10,000, which is about 2.50. I’m good.

I’m starting to notice something. A lot of the prices are in dollars. At least in the hotel. I probably could have just paid for everything in Yankee dollars. Well, that’s OK. Money’s money, no matter how old and ratty, and I got a very good rate so it’s not as if it matters.

A quick walk around Siem Reap revealed a lively city. I got a plate of vegetables with pork and a Cambodian beer, prices in riel and dollars, at a sidewalk spot, not exactly a restaurant. It was more of a picnic table on a sidewalk with a carnival gas cooker at the back and an entire family working the floor. Works for me.

Siem Reap is a city of about 200,000. Surprisingly the Internet was available wherever I walked downtown and the layout was quite tangible, in that there weren’t many tangents I could stray off on and get lost. The people were only moderately overbearing. I only had to say, “I said, ‘No, thank you!’” to one person who persisted after, well, after I had said, “No, thank you.” Though in the shop merchants, sometimes children, would just follow me around, maybe offering suggestions and pitches for merchandise, but mostly…just watching…and following…and standing…right there…behind you… It was kind of disconcerting, especially when it was a creepy little girl with doll like features. But the stalls are crowded and the racks overflowing with easily palmed items, so they have a right to keep an eye on their goods, I suppose. Even if it means being watched by M3gan.

There are several places that rent motorbikes. There were several in Hanoi and Saigon as well, but here I felt like I could actually survive the trip. Unfortunately, it was almost sunset and the places were set to close soon. The Angkor temples are close, less than a 20 minute bike ride, about an hour and a half walk. Maybe I’ll get a chance to rent a bike tomorrow. I would really like biking around the countryside here, I think. Even if the temples are closed. It looks beautiful and highly accessible, the people friendly and accommodations reasonable and convenient.

Day 7 – Nov 10

And now I come to the driving force behind this adventure, the coup de vacation. My reason for being here. Not my reason for being here on earth. That reason is still hotly disputed, er, debated. I’m talking about the reason I am in Cambodia. 

When I first arranged this trip three years ago, when my doctor cautioned me about this virus thingey that was going around, I said, “Oh, I’m not worried. It’s March and my trip is next November. I’m sure all the hoopla will be over by then. It’s just a flu and they burn themselves out eventually, right? Remember the Swine Flu during the Ford administration? Neither does anybody else. Nor do they remember the Ford administration. Remember two weeks to flatten the curve? The 1918 flu only lasted a couple of years and that was a hundred years ago. It’s not like we’re gonna live with this forever, right? Nothing is forever, right? No one is going to exploit this for personal or professional gain or anything? 

Right?

At that time, I had a trip planned for just Cambodia, beginning and ending in Phnom Penn. And, yes. The 1918 flu revisited, that still hasn’t killed nearly as many people as the one in 1918 did when the earth had a fraction of today’s population, was still a thing when my plans knocked at the door and said, “Ride’s here!” and I had to cancel the whole thing, twice, because I tried again the next year and 1918 redux was still reduxing.

But I digress.

The reason I am here today is to explore the temple of Ampere Watt! OK, that’s a Firesign Theater reference from their Hemlock Stones album in the 1960’s. Which in order to understand you have to know who the Firesign Theater was. And what the 60’s were. And be stoned.

 

God's have the coolest hats

Set from Tomb Raider

Anyway, I am here in Siem Reap, Cambodia, to visit the temple complexes including the most famous one, Angkor Wat. After a delightful sleep and an even more delightful breakfast, I met my tour guide at 8:15. He led me out to the bus but got a bit ahead of me. The front of the hotel is directly on the street and it was crowded. In addition to the motorbikes and pedestrians everywhere there were tour vans picking up eager tourists. I saw a group getting into a van, but it wasn’t with my tour guide. Then over to the left my guide called to me.

“Oh, there he is,” I thought. I scooted around the group blocking my way and joined my group which consisted of, me. That’s it, me. Just me. A knowledgeable guide, a competent driver, and one curious Indian. Talk about intimate.

I believe the driver brought me here from the airport yesterday. My guide was called, ‘Saron,’ pronounced like SA-rone. Or maybe it was pronounced, ‘Sauron.’  He didn’t look evil. He wasn’t a giant, flaming eye or anything, so maybe Sauron is a common name in Cambodia. You know. It’s a fad, like when all the boys were named Sauron and all the girls were named Shelob? Anyway, they ushered me into the van and gave me a bottle of water-always take the water.

Maybe I should get this out of the way once and for all. Whenever anybody offers you water, take it. And whenever you have a chance at a bathroom break, take it. That is 50% of health and hygiene on a trip, especially in a jungle. Actually, you should take anything anybody ever offers you. If it’s no good you can always just pour it into the house plants and smile sweetly.

Saron was very informative. He said that Angkor, Ang-Kor, means King’s City and Wat means Temple. Angkor Thom, a complex nearby, means King’s City Large, and it contains more than a temple and a lot more real estate. In the modern city of Siem Reap-I never heard what that means-buildings cannot be any higher than the tallest temple, which is Angkor Wat. This is why you don’t see any skyscrapers in Siem Reap. And the new airport was built as far away as it was to insulate the fragile buildings from all the air traffic, which could further damage the ruins of the city.

Around Angkor Wat is a very small channel which was put there by the builders. You could call it a moat, but it is a moat you can step over. This is always monitored and kept full of water. The water is there to regulate the water table which is necessary to keep the foundation of the temple waterlogged so it doesn’t dry out and crumble back into sand. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere. Always water your karma?

 

 

This is a very, very fragile environment. One that is amazing in its engineering. The building material used here is sandstone, which is just barely above marinated and baked beach. It’s also marinated and baked beach that is steamed in dank air and basted in mildew. With moss and lichen frosting on neglected walls and tree roots wrapping every wall and tower that wasn’t looking for five minutes.

Angkor Wat was built as a temple to Vishnu in the twelfth century by a Khmer king. He insisted it be built in his lifetime, so they built a village outside the walls for the human and technological machine that must be assembled and employed in every great building project in history and populated it with as many laborers, family, cooks, farmers, cobblers, brewers, butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers as are required to keep it functioning. These were celebrated on the walls of some of the secular buildings in Angkor Thom. We saw depictions of workers eating and drinking, working with elephants and water buffalos, farming, fishing, men and women engaging in happy tasks-stuff you usually don’t see in murals depicting the life of a great empire. There were also depictions of wars and scenes from the Hindu classics. The temple was completed four years before the king’s death.

 There are carvings everywhere. Very beautiful and delicate carvings. On every door frame are carvings of dancing women, at least one for every woman in the upper-class household. They are all holding something in both hands, flowers, jewelry, scarves, and they wear hats with tall spires on them. Hindu depictions employ spires and peaks symbolizing mountains, symbolizing heaven. Closer to the sky, closer to the heavens, closer to the gods. The number and height of the spires indicate the wearer’s rank. They are all smiling and one of them is grinning. Most have their eyes open, some closed. They all look happy.

Later, around the fifteenth century, it became Buddhist. Buddhist architecture is flat topped. There was a lot of defacing of the statues, a lot of the women had their noses broken, a mutilation that was supposed to render them ugly. But their serenity and grace remain, affirming their dignity and disdain for the vandals. Some carvings of Vishnu were hacked out and replaced with depictions of the Buddha. Culture wars rage in art and stone.

As we walked through the temple complexes, there are several here, Saron explained the meanings and the stories carved into the sandstone, defaced by later converts to other religions, mutilated and stolen by still more to come, sold off to rich collectors, in some cases reverting back to the original, revived religion, and now protected as a World Heritage Site.

Carvings also celebrate Shiva and Vishnu, two of the Hindu gods, and how they fight with each other while representing opposite sides of the same life; god and monster, saint and demon, life and death, growth and decay. How they finally came together in negotiation and compromise, recognizing each other’s right to exist. Both unavoidable aspects of life. How epic battles were fought. How Vishnu became Krishna, or was it Shiva became Rama? Maybe both. And fought demons in great cataclysms on earth. Read the Mahabharata. There is a very approachable edition in English. It is fascinating.

I had heard some of these stories already. From the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, the Upanishads, the ancient foundation stories of India. These stories sounded somewhat different from what I had read. Saron said that there are variations from culture to culture. Each has its own spin and each supports its own life philosophy. I had heard the Indian versions and here now I am seeing the Cambodian versions.

I said we had our own foundation stories in the west. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and the Judeo-Christian scriptures form the basis of western thinking. Whether we realize it or not, we rest on our own waterlogged superstructure in the soggy foundations of our history. Where are our protector moats?

I told Saron I looked into renting a motorbike last night but it had been too late. He said I could get one tomorrow afternoon and he’d come with me on his bike and show me some of the villages around town. The people here really are that friendly. It’s almost like Angkor Wat really is that much closer to heaven.

 

 

 

Wedding pictures. Isn't she lovely?

Always clean your temple

 Day 8 – Nov 11

Today was a pretty laid-back day compared to yesterday. How does one top heaven? We went to a floating village. Now, when I hear that something is floating I think ‘lifted up.’ Like the hanging gardens of Babylon, or optical illusions of ‘floating cities’ in the mountains or desert mirages. Nope. This village is actually floating. It consists of buildings on pontoons floating on the Tonle Sap Lake, the largest lake in SE Asia and part of the Mekong River system. It’s called the heartbeat of Cambodia since it rises and settles with the rains. The monsoons ended about a month ago here, so the lake is still high but receding. In a few months it will be so low that the Mekong River will start flowing back into it, hence the heartbeat.

Saron said that China is building hydroelectric plants up stream and it’s affecting the whole river dynamic. “Things change,” he said. Indeed, they do.

That is a major theme around here, one that I have heard over and over again since I got here, first in Viet Nam, then in Cambodia. The big, dragon flanked, 800 pound Panda in the room: China. This comes up as in, “The Chinese are doing this,” and, “The Chinese are building that,” where ‘this and that’ are not just roadside roast cricket stands. They are majorly disruptive and hugely impactful engineering projects tied to their Belt and Road initiative.

Informally called, “The New Silk Road,” the B&R initiative aims to completely rebuild and modernize Asia. It was inaugurated ten years ago by Emperor, I mean Premier, Xi. They are building high speed rail systems, mega-ports and whole cities, electric plants of every variety, and high-speed Internet going from China, Indo China, India, the ‘Stans,’ the Mid-East, Russia, Africa, and they would even hook up Europe if the west wouldn’t keep disrupting the whole project whenever and wherever they can.

There was 20 years of ‘bringing Democracy’ to Afghanistan, building over 800 military bases around the world, mostly surrounding Russia and China, wars for control of the South China Sea and the Straits of Malacca, coup d’états in places like Ukraine and Kosovo, irritations like sand grains in an oyster in Nogorno-Karabakh and Syria, uprisings in Niger, bombings of major gas pipelines to keep unruly ‘allies’ (Read: Vassals) in line, the discovery of invisible weapons of mass destruction in countries just dying to be invaded, and all-around dirty trickery everywhere.

Things change. Things stay the same.

We could have had something like this over 100 years ago. After the Trans-Siberian Railroad was complete there were plans to continue it across the Aleutian Islands, through Alaska, Canada, and to Chicago, hooking up with the North American rail system. It would have been possible to get on a train in Paris and travel all the way to New York. There was even backing. Money raised, plans in place, sponsorship assured, palms greased, governments on board, contractors ready. All we needed was to leap for the clouds in the sky. Instead, we plunged into the flames of revolution and war.

Things change…

The floating village is filled with incredibly poor people. There is some electricity brought in, a few power lines, and a water treatment building. The locals can fill up large stainless-steel barrels and bring them back to their floating houses, and they can collect rainwater during the monsoon rains. They also have solar panels. Schools, churches and shrines, restaurants, and markets bob amongst fishing boats and tourist cruises. People have open air river markets like their city cousins have street markets. I never saw any gas stations. I wonder how they fuel their boats?

Like everywhere they have poachers with fast boats

After a boat ride around the village, I was accosted by a little girl with a plastic plate with my picture on it. “Where did she get that?” I puzzled. No-one had taken my picture today. I had my picture taken for my pass to the Angkor temples yesterday. I doubt they’d have access to that. I didn’t remember standing for a picture in the boathouse. Saron got our tickets. Weird.

I didn’t really want a goofy picture of myself on a plastic plate. The little girl was particularly persistent. She just kept following me around, showing me the offensive self-portrait. Even when I said, “No, thank you.” Even when I walked away. Even when I walked across the parking lot to the van. Even when I got in. Even when I sat looking out the window waiting for the driver to gas it and leave.

She was still there. Just looking. Just holding up her plastic plate with the photo of the rich tourist Xeroxed onto it. Just saying words I could not understand in a language I could not understand, though I could understand it. I could understand her and what she was saying. “Mister, will you buy a meal for me?”

I can’t hate people like that. I try not to hate anybody, even those who make it their life’s goal to make me do so. People are people. People live their lives according to what karma and catastrophe gives them. And they survive. Or they don’t. It’s as simple as that.

On the way home we stopped at a museum, training school, and gift shop for a group that makes artwork. They had people working on statues, tapestries, carvings in stone and wood, items in silk and lacquer. They train them and then they can go back to their homes and earn a living. Hotels will buy statues which are reproductions of temple originals. I’d seen that. Buddhas, gods, busts on concierge desks. I never thought about where they came from. Well, someone, some craftsman, makes them.

I bought a Vishnu statue in rosewood. I am a firm believer in keeping whatever god is handy happy. You know what they say: Happy god, no apocalypse.

Again, according to custom, I found myself followed around by a store clerk, eager to explain to me what I was looking at. “Do you have any silk slippers?” I asked, wanting her to feel appreciated. I wanted to get a pair to match the suit I bought in Hanoi. “Slippers? Yes, here,” she said and brought me to a display. “Do you have any in blue?” “No, just these.” Next week I’m going to a silk farm. Maybe I’ll find something I like there.

We got back to the hotel late in the morning and Saron would return at 2:00. That gave me a little time for lunch and mischief. I found a convenience store and bought a pen. I meant to bring one-I knew I would need it to fill out immigration forms on the airplane-but forgot to pack it. Then I walked around the city.

There’s a river running through town. I had crossed it last night looking for a place to buy a pair of shorts, since I had also forgotten to pack those, as well. Note: I found them eventually. They were in a pocket of my luggage which I forgot was there. As we all know, the best way to find something is to buy a replacement.

I crossed the river and found a Buddhist school. It was not as serene as you would imagine. There were a lot of small dogs, feral, I suppose, and they seemed to take it as their karma to bark and growl madly at anyone out of place. The monks and children didn’t faze them. Maybe if I had saffron robes.

At 2:00 I rented a motorbike from the Ratha Motorbike Rental in Siem Reap. For twelve dollars, American, I got a motorbike with automatic transmission, including a helmet and most of a tank of gas, and could keep it until the next morning. It was much like the motor scooter I had when I went all Cirque du Soleil on Rt. 6 ten years ago last May, so I was comfortable with it, though the left brake didn’t work so hot and I kept almost running into things for the next hour or so.

Motorbike rental

 

Ya, these are worms

We biked out of Siem Reap and to the country. The rule of thumb here is: If you have enough room to get through wherever you are going, go. Never mind who’s heading to the same place. If you won’t intersect in space AND time, go for it. Just go. Don’t stop. What are you waiting for? That counts for pedestrians, too, who dominate at least 20% of the mobile state space. When you come to a red light, stop sign, or other obstacle, see the rule of thumb. As long as no-one gets hurt too badly, it’s considered safe driving. Really. As the Buddhists say: If a pause falls in the intersection, is the light still red? 

 

Saron took me by the old airport, down back roads, to what I’d call a country faire at a Buddhist monastery. It’s on a lake and there were boat races going on this day: row boats for adults and metal tubs for children. 

He brought me to his village and I met some of his neighbors. They are all really poor and I didn’t know if I should give them anything. That can be considered insulting since they were friends and neighbors of Saron and I was a guest. They gave me a beer and some peanuts. I got the feeling they would have given me dinner, but I wanted to get back to the hotel and they didn’t press it. 

Actually, I was a little uncomfortable. I had not expected to meet anybody. Saron invited me to his house for a beer. OK. Sure. Then we arrived at his neighbor’s house. A little boy, maybe two, ran up to him. Saron introduced me. 

“He has chicken pox,” he said. “Oh,” I said. “I had it, too when I was twenty-five.” “That’s an unsafe age to have a childhood disease,” I thought. 

We sat down at a picnic table outside of the incredibly small house under an awning. I was given a can of beer and a bowl of peanuts. I little girl, about five years old and completely naked, came out of the house. I really didn’t want to be here.

I sipped my beer and nibbled peanuts. I didn’t speak Cambodian, so I just looked around and smiled, wishing I could just get on my bike and get back to Siem Reap. Saron said his friend said I looked like I was distracted. That I was looking around, at the palm trees… at the house… “Oh, I’m just tired,” I said. I was tired. I was up at 3:00 this morning, not unusual for me, and had done a lot of walking around yesterday. But what I really thought was that I don’t speak your language and can’t communicate and what do you expect?

Thankfully, Saron must have gotten my drift. After our beers he showed me his house on our way out. It’s literally a single room on stilts with a tall roof thatched in actual thatch, maybe made from bamboo. Below it were some items strewn about including a washing machine he was repairing for a neighbor. I never felt so much like a rich American in someone else’s country before now. I’ll be sure to give him a big tip tomorrow.

Day 9 – Nov 12

I checked out of the Hari hotel and met Saron in the lobby. It was about an hour’s drive to the airport. Saron was in a chatty mood. Mostly he wanted to talk about Buddhism and his philosophy of life. I think he just wanted someone to talk to and commiserate with. He told me about his family, he is a divorced man with two daughters, one who lives in some sort of ‘camp,’ and no, I don’t know what that means and I didn’t ask. And one is married with one child.

He said that the poor Cambodians in villages like his have more of a sense of community. “When one farmer’s fields are ready to harvest, every man in the village helps in the fields. And we also help our neighbors in return,” he told me. “And during Covid there was no work and no help from the government.” What do you say to that? If someone needs something, they make it, make due without it, or rely on their neighbors for a workaround. It’s a forced Socialism.

I learned about a concept called the Dunbar number, about one hundred fifty, in Anthropology classes at UConn. That’s the largest number of people the average person can keep track of and know with some degree of intimacy: the Village. Consider it a scratch pad we use to keep track of our family, neighbors, friends, and acquaintances. Everyone we interact with and form a relationship with. More than around 150 and we get confused. 

Villages above a few hundred become assemblies of villages containing enclaves. My grandfather lived in the Ukrainian section of Lower Manhattan when he first arrived, a teenager from Russia, at Ellis Island around 1900. Above that are cities with their own hierarchies. The well off live in high class sections, the poor live in ghettos. The rich have apartments. The poor have tenements. Both have their own rules, their own customs, and their own religions. And often each one thinks they’re better than the other, as they should. It’s called community pride and once that’s gone you have nothing.

Communism and democracy only work, when they work at all, with a Dunbar number of people living on top of each other. Stray above that population size and you get mindless governments, faceless bureaucracies, well-meaning but severely restrained politicians, all too many corrupt aristocrats, war lords, barons, fascism, monarchies, oligarchies, the monied merchants, and aristocracies. 

Aristotle thought that democracies always tend toward oligarchies in the end, if he knew about communism he probably would have thought the same. Our democracy certainly has, though strictly speaking we were never a democracy. We were a republic, "if we could keep it," according to Ben Franklin. We use the word, ‘Democracy’ like other people use words like Chosen People, Master Race, or Holy. The belief in Democracy is part of the American religion, along with our Exceptionalism, American Dream, Manifest Destiny, and Inherent Goodness. None of those things mean anything. Down deep, we are still only citizens of Dunbar.

With the social organization called civilization you also get technology, economics of scale, grand projects for the public good, rat and people infested cities, rat races, alienation in a crowd, slavery, crime, violence, a ruling class and the many ruled classes. I remember coming out of the Sanai Dessert after a nine-day camping trip in the 70’s and seeing civilization from a Bedouin’s perspective. Well, a well fed, medically cared for Bedouin’s perspective. The city just looked filthy.

He talked about the Buddhist truths, the belief that life is an illusion. “All is energy,” he said. “We only perceive it as real.” I’m sure we’ve all had a primer in Buddhism. It’s a religion of the matrix if ever there was one. “Everything you know is wrong,” said those buffoon sages of the 1960’s, the Firesign Theater. I’d like to believe it, but then again, I’d like to believe a lot of things.

Being from the west, things like this are just too foreign to me, too hard to grasp and difficult to accept, though I think the same about Quantum Mechanics, which also teaches that energy is the basic unit of existence. Do they teach Quantum Mechanics in Buddhist schools, I wonder? But my life’s mantra has always been, ‘Peace Through Understanding,’ so I plod along on this straight and narrow dharma of curiosity, understanding, and respect. And history just keeps on recycling itself.

I can’t help but wonder if Buddhism might be the necessary belief of the extremely poor like Saron and his neighbors? I’ve noticed that people talk about their villages with reverence. Or at least respect. We create our belief systems, our religions, our responsibilities, and our social structures as a response to our living conditions. We make god in our own image. I coined the phrase, “The Lie we Live By,” to describe all of the cultural and social artifacts people have invented over our history. It’s a lie in that it is not factual or scientifically falsifiable. Not that anybody is being dishonest, that is. It’s a lie in that we make it up then slip into it like a protective shell or a vehicle that helps us navigate through time, space, and life itself. Our spiritual tuk tuk. It is the social program that we execute daily to make sense of the world and our part in it. If you want to know someone’s religion ask them a question. Just one. “What do you live and die for?”

The gods comfort us, enrage us, distract us, entertain us, drive us, inspire us, revolt us, and at the end, welcome us.

At a wedding every groom is Eros and every bride is Psyche. In war every general is Ares. During the harvest all venerate sweet Demeter. In death we all pay Charon. The poorer the people, the nearer their gods.

There was no Garden of Eden, no snake, no god, no devil. We made these things up to make sense of the world, we believe them to live in the world and we trust them to build societies that work in the world. The first thing that goes when a civilization falls are its myths. After that it’s a slow haul to Hades, even if we stopped believing in hell a long time ago.

 Days 10  to 11 – Nov 13, 14

Thailand is much richer then the two countries I already visited, which are more like the Appalachia of Indo China. Not that there is anything wrong with Appalachia. It’s just poor. And the poor, like the post Civil War south in the US, are degraded economically and humiliated culturally by the not so poor.

The cars and motorcycles drive on the left side of the street in Thailand, too. One guess which colonial power reigned supreme here? And the currency exchange has more parity, about 35 baht to the dollar. Two hundred dollar bills got me 7 thousand 1 hundred 33 baht and 3, um, cents?

Of course, exchange rates are meaningless. How many loaves of bread you can buy for your bongo buck means less than how many bongo bucks you have and how many of them you must spend to get that loaf of bread. A nation’s GDP means less than its CPP, Consumer Price Parity, which is a ratio of weighted income to essential goods and services. That’s why economists would rather talk about GDP. It’s a meaningless statistic with religious connotations in the Temple of Money and it makes economies look stronger than they actually are. 

Foreigners generally make out good here. Food, coffee, stuff like that is reasonable. And real valuable things, artwork and silk, can be very affordable, if you have a guide to help you.

Bangkok Street Art

I met my guide, Rosy, this morning. There wasn’t a whole lot of activity today and none planned for tomorrow, so I had booked a food tasting tour for Chinatown tomorrow morning. When I told that to Rosy she said she could bring me around anywhere

Chinatown

Bangkok Flower Market

A park a few blocks from my hotel

A Battery of Buddhas

Five ton gold Buddha

I went on a private tour for $80.00. I was able to cancel the tour through TripAdvisor with a full refund and she will take me to Chinatown this afternoon. She’s taking me on an excursion further out of town tomorrow, too.

 “Just don’t tell the tour company I did that,“ she cautioned. “They don’t like people having private tours without them being involved.” ‘Ah. Black market tours,’ I thought. “Mum’s the word,” I said. And that’s the Buddha’s cardinal truth.

Reclining Buddha

Today we only visited a few places. A shrine to the five ton solid gold Buddha and one to the reclining Buddha. Along with the sleeping Buddha, the Laughing Buddha, and the Lady Buddha I saw in Viet Nam, he/she is really into posing.

The second shrine, the one with the Texting Buddha, the Filling Out Tax Form Buddha, and the Hit Thumb With Hammer Buddha, also had a cemetery where the remains of some kings were kept. One housed the remains of the King of Siam of, ‘Anna and the...’ fame.

Oh, when I found the short pants I thought I forgot to pack, I also found the pair of flip flops I also bought for this trip and thought I had left behind. You must remove your shoes before entering a temple, and flip flops make it easier. So I donned my respectful long pants and my flippy shoes and a’templing we did go.

Rosy left me around 11:30 at the hotel and said she’d meet me here at 2:00. We took a bus to the riverfront, about a 45 minute ride. I got sticky rice wrapped in bamboo leaves from a street vendor. We visited some indoor markets including a flower market and took a couple of rides on the river, which brought us to Chinatown. It was like every other Chinatown I’ve even visited, there is only one China, after all. Taiwan notwithstanding.

Neo-Ruin architectural style

Not sure where this is...

The food was great. I had some skewered grilled chicken, a dessert of fruit and lotus root in ice, soup, a coconut sweet thing and some Pad Thai.

The second day we went about 70 km out of town to a train market. She drove the whole way, though originally she had wanted to have me ride the train to the market that it’s named after. The schedule wasn’t convenient. I got to see the train when I got there which looked like an antique out of colonial times. I believe it was.

After that we visited a floating market. Unlike the floating village in Cambodia, here the customers are the ones floating. There is a network of canals here, we are close to the Gulf of Siam, and stalls have been built on either side of them. You ride in gondolas and the gondolier will stop wherever you wish to buy things. Mostly touristy stuff. “Offer them half what they ask for,” said Rosy. Bartering. I was never good at that. She did most of it. OK, all of it.

It was a great day, Rosy was a great guide. I asked her to bring me to a silk store that would have better quality items. I’m still looking for my slippers. She sure did. I could have had a silk suit tailor made for me there. But they didn’t have any silk slippers. I got a couple of scarves and that was all.

Maybe I’ll see something in Laos.

Day 12 to 14 – Nov 15 to 17

Mekong River from my plane window

Today is a day of travel. I leave the opulence of Thailand and the bustle of Bangkok behind. Laos beckons… At least for a day. In the airport who do I bump into but BoBonny! I don’t think I saw them anywhere in Thailand.

And here I am in Luang Prabang, Laos, or Lao as it is sometimes spelled and pronounced here. Pronunciations are always a shooting match. I am told that Luang means old capital, Pra means Buddha, and Bang means a loud noise caused by an explosion or impact… I might have gotten that last bit wrong. But it once was the capitol of Laos. Like many countries here, their history is tied up and dragged around by the Khmer, the French, the Thai, the Vietnamese, the Communists, the Americans, and now the Chinese.

Street Market

Luang Prabang airport is small, as is the city. I met my guide, Lee, after a febreze through immigration. He brought me to my hotel, the Villa Chitdara, which is in the middle of the city, which means it is on the middle of three roads. Lee recommended a restaurant to me, the Tamarind. He says it’s popular, so get there early. Otherwise I’ll need a reservation. He filled me in on my itinerary, which is flexible.

“Tomorrow you can throw sticky rice balls at monkeys,” I thought he said. “I can throw whose balls at what sticky monkeys?” I thought in reply.

What actually transpired was that he said I could partake in an old ritual of alms giving that is still practiced here. The monks walk around the city with their rice bowls and people give each one a bit of sticky rice. The beggar monk parade starts around 6:00 O’clock. “Sounds good to me,” I shrugged. “Fine. Meet me in front of the hotel at 5:45.

My hotel, Villa Chitdara, is nice. Not sure how many stars. Three, maybe? Three and a half? Good enough for me. Too many stars and I start putting on airs. Or breaking wind. I can’t remember which.

The Mekong River is a block away from the hotel. Luang Prabang sits on the confluence of it and the Nam Khan River. I spent my evening walking, taking pictures-it’s pretty much impossible to get lost here-and ate dinner at the Tamarind restaurant. I got there just as they opened at 5:30 and they were able to seat me. “You will have to finish by 7:30,” I was told. Not a problem.

Don't push! There's plenty for everymonk

Pretty young for a monk

The next day Lee met me as agreed upon at 5:45. He led me up the street to a place prepared for me, with a rug, a chair, and a bamboo basket full of rice. Rather sticky rice.

“Take off your shoes and sit,” he said. “They will come to you. Just pinch off a bit of rice and drop it into their bowls. Don’t touch them, just drop it in.”

After a while the monks appeared. They came in stages, five or ten together, then a lapse, then another group. I pinched off a small bit of rice and dropped, no. Threw, no. I flicked it off my fingers like a nutritious booger.  Sometimes it flicked back at me. Or just stuck on my fingers and refused to flick while the monks flew by-these monks had no time for amateurs. ‘Flick or get off the rice bowl,’ is their morning mantra. ‘Monk! Yes, monk!’ is my reply. I ran out of rice before the street ran out of monks. The last monk surge was about fifty of them and they looked hungry. Hell hath no fury like a monk scorned of sticky rice.

Actually, they made off pretty well. Many of them had candy bars and other treats as well as barely seasoned rice with who knows what was sticking to it. After that we continued on our trip, which was very interesting.

We visited local temples, the origins of the hungry, hungry monk-o’s. Lee took me to a morning market. This consists of a few designated streets that are blocked off each morning. People come and set up awnings and spread out produce and merchandise on blankets. Some have gas grills and sell grilled meat or vegetables on bamboo skewers. 

The plastic is to keep them from hopping, crawling, or scurrying away

The locals buy their food for the day here. Cuts of meat, vegetables, live frogs, crabs, moles, and birds, various insects and spices. Anything you could want and quite a lot you wouldn’t if your life depended on it. The market is finished by around 9:00 O’clock. Everyone shuts down, packs up, and vanishes like rice from a beggar’s bowl. The streets are returned to the local pedestrians, the well riced monks, and the curious tourists.

After that we went out of town to a waterfall on the Mekong River. It was quite glorious. The water picks up Calcium Carbonate from the underlying rock, which makes it a lovely turquois blue. There’s a pool for swimming. The water was cold and bracing. 

A business on a Bangkok street nearby

“Look! It’s an American Tourist!” I blurted out. Bob turned around from admiring the river below the waterfall and smiled. I snapped his picture. Bonny was somewhere, she didn’t want to walk all the way up to the waterfall, she has mobility problems.

An American abroad

We walked back to our ride from the parking lot. On the way we passed a bear preserve. A number of creatures are provided refuge here, but poachers are always a problem. Bears that were rescued or injured are taken care of here. I noticed in the airports in Thailand and Laos a lot of posters warning about contraband. They depicted graphic cartoons of someone buying ivory, taking it into the airport, and then behind bars. They are serious about poaching.

On our way back to Luang Prabang we stopped for buffalo ice cream, I got the lemongrass flavor, and sat overlooking the Mekong River.

Cambodia and Thailand are still monarchies, but they are ceremonial. I think they both have prime ministers. Don’t quote me.

Lee said the economy of Luang Prabang mostly exists for tourism. The tourist season runs from November to May. Nobody wants to visit in the monsoon season, so people have to make as much as they can during this season and ration it out. The Muong (sp?) People live out in the hills outside of Luang Prabang.

He brought me there where the villagers have a walk of shops where he led me and every other tourist that comes here past booths with cheaply made items. I bumped into BoBonny there. A girl, no more than three or four years old, held up a colorful yarn bracelet. “Buy? One dolla. You buy?” she chirped. Toward the end of the walk several men were loitering around watching a cock fight. “Cock fighting is a big thing around here,” he said. I said nothing.

I asked Lee about the Chinese Belt and Road initiative. Is it having an effect on them? He said it’s not coming here. There is a high-speed railroad in the larger cities of Laos. I asked him if he thought it was a good idea or not? “It’s what China wants to do,” he said like a small, multi-generational farm owner watching a big developer roll into town. “They take more than they give?” I suggested. “Yes. China will always get more out of it.”

Empires always do. He said that it is very difficult to get ahead here. Everything goes into subsistence. When he heard I was from Florida he said he had friends who immigrated there to work and save up some money. He would like to do the same. If he could get a job, any job, and live frugally he would put away one hundred dollars a month. After a few years he could come back to Laos and have enough to start his own business.

“But it’s expensive to get there,” he said. “I need to have someone I know to go there.” “A sponsor?” I volunteered. “Do they have any Laotian organizations that can help people like you?” “Yes, some,” he said. “But it can cost as much as $10,000.00 to get them to help. For $10,000.00 I wouldn’t need to go to Florida. I could just start my own business here.”

Lee told me a lot about Laotian history. I’m afraid I don’t remember much. When the Communists won the American war in Viet Nam, Laos also suffered a Communist takeover. Long before, like Thailand, they were overrun by the Khmer. Rosy, my guide in Bangkok, had said that her village, which was a Laotian village outside of Bangkok, had been brought to Thailand from Laos as slaves 200 years ago. That's History's Churn.

I asked about their language. I know they have separate languages but are they at all similar? “The Taiwanese and Laotians are very similar people," said Lee. “We are like sister people. I can understand 60% of what they are saying.” “That sounds like my grandparents,” I said. “My grandfather was Russian and my grandmother was Polish. When we asked if he understand when Grammy was speaking to her brother in Polish, he said, ‘Yes, but they talk funny.’”

Our last stop was at the Museum of Luang Prabang. This is located in the palace of the last king of Laos, who was exiled by the Communists after his overthrow in 1975 and his palace turned into a museum. The same fate happened to the Winter Palace of Tsar Nicolas, the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg is breathtaking. But exile was not good enough for Lenin. He had a different caliber of plans for the royal family.

The walls of the Laotian palace are decorated with glass mosaics depicting scenes from Hindu classics. They are very delicate and beautiful work. The throne room was stunning and there was one room displaying gifts from other countries to Laos.

The gift from China was incredible. It was an ivory globe with nested globes inside it, carved from a single piece of ivory through several small holes around the globe in each nested level; the globe within it, and the globes within that. It was incredible. Sadly, no pictures were allowed.

With that I went back to the hotel. I walked back downtown, I had a lot of Laotian money left and wanted to buy something with it, maybe a brass Buddha. The morning market was long dispersed, but in its place the night market sprang up just around the corner.

This was a different market, entirely. There were no vegetable stands, no live eels. There was a lot of textiles, brass, and wood carvings. One street had a lot of carts selling grilled food. I decided on dinner.

I selected two sticks of skewered meat, one looked like chicken and one like pork, and placed them on the tray. The cook took them and put them on the grill. “Take ou aw ea heea?” she asked. “Eat here, please,” I answered. “You sit. I bring you,” she said, indicating a picnic bench across the alley. I bought a Beerlaos and sat down. Soon my grilled meat on a bamboo leaf along with a bowl of sauce appeared.

One of the meats looked funny. It was kind of an hourglass shape with flattened ends that I hadn’t really noticed before. I picked it up with my chop sticks and dipped it into the chili sauce. It tasted kind of tough. Well, there were soft bits and stringy bits. Parts that were gristly and almost like cartilage. The other serving was just single lumps of something that looked whole, not cut from a larger piece of meat.

“Maybe I got organ meat?” I puzzled at myself. “Or whole organs of some small critter?” One of the other stands on the street sold grilled squid, complete with tentacles. Who knows what I had bought?

“But what were those two lumps?” I chewed another. It didn’t have any particular taste, not even like chicken. It had to be an organ of some sort, but which one? The gristly bits were inedible, at least by me. I chewed some more and chewed figuratively on what it might be…

“Wait… I didn’t…” I thought, suddenly realizing. “I didn’t… Could it be?” not wanting to answer my own question. “Did I order the testicles?” 

Hmmm. Which shall I try...

I'll take all of them!

Don’t answer that. Don’t even think about answering that. Or before not answering, don’t shift your feet and go, “Ummmm,” looking embarrassed, which would be an all too positive answer. I finished my beer. It didn’t help.

“I need something to get the taste of testicles out of my mouth,” said I in a sentence I never thought I would ever say.

I found someone selling pastries in the next street. “They’re not made of bugs or anus or anything, are they?” I wanted to ask. I decided that they looked like normal pastries you’d find in a French pastry shop and besides, they had to be better than penis breath.

I bought one. It was a sweet pastry so dense and filled with custard that it fell apart lifting it out of the plastic box. “Ah, that’s better,” I thought as semi liquid cake spread around my mouth.

I decided that the stuff on the skewers was made of tofu. Just say it wasn’t. Then I bought a few items in the bazaar, as a distraction. It was really delightful, dietary disaster notwithstanding.

At the moment I am writing this, I am in a park back in Bangkok, Thailand. This morning in Luang Prabang I went for another walk through the morning market, which had reappeared like a magic marketplace in a Neil Gaiman novel. There were probably some mystical cult items in stalls down hidden alleys, secret alleys you have to know how to look for and where to walk exactly to get there. And who to ask and how to turn the right way while you are doing so, otherwise you will never find it. I never found any such stalls.

Instead, I bought a regular, not at all mystical, jade Buddha, the laughing one.

The flight here was quick and uneventful. I am now spending what I call, An Unchaperoned Night in Bangkok.

Sounds like a porn movie. I wonder if my last night’s dinner has invigorating powers?

Day 15 – Nov 18

I’m back in the park I was in yesterday, this time after breakfast. It is really lovely here. As I walked in from the busy Bangkok street a woman in front of me turned and bowed to the Buddhist shrine at the entrance to the park. There is one in front of every house, business, shop, and government building.

In the park I found people jogging, walking, doing yoga, exercising, children playing. Just enough birds walk the paths and fly around to be pleasantly picturesque-the ‘Don’t Feed the Birds’ signs seem to be obeyed just enough to keep the pigeons properly in check yet still picturesque.  The grounds are nicely kept, the sidewalks clean, and the surrounding skyscrapers fold gently into the background.

The fountains are not on and there are these weird, rock shaped things on poles around the pools hiding lights. I don’t remember seeing them on last night, but I was only here just around sunset and they weren’t on then, either.

In a couple of hours my ride will take me to the airport, about a 45 minute drive, traffic willing.  Then I will have an eleven hour flight to Zurich, followed by an eighteen hour layover. I have a hotel booked by the airport. I’ll have to go through customs, so I can’t take anything forbidden on board.

I had wanted to buy a small bottle of rice wine in a bamboo wicker covered bottle I saw in Luang Prabang airport, along with Bob and Bonnie, but I had already gone through security and couldn’t put it in my luggage which was already checked all the way to Tampa. The same applies here in Bangkok. I can’t buy anything like that in Bangkok airport since I will get off in Zurich and my checked luggage will spend the night at the airport in luggage hell. From Bangkok Bob and Bonnie are flying to Doha. They are going to try getting an earlier flight instead of spending the night in Bangkok. Even if I could get an earlier flight out, I'd probably still have a long layover in Zurich, so I saw no sense in trying.

Things are complicated when you are an international hobo.

Day 16 - Nov 19

Yesterday I flew from Bangkok International Airport. It’s a much bigger place than I remember from last week. Almost JFK big. When I arrived at the airport then, I just went through immigration, got my luggage, exchanged some Vietnamese dong for Thai baht and met my tour guide in the lobby.

This time my driver dropped me off at the gate, which was very busy. The lobby was mobbed. I just needed to check in. I had already checked my luggage in Loung Prabang in Laos and had all my boarding passes, as I already mentioned. Next, I checked in at an on-line kiosk and got duplicate boarding passes. I think that wasn’t necessary, but I checked in again, anyway.

Then commenced the running of the security checks. First, I followed the signs to International Flights. I scanned my boarding pass and entered another line. This time for an opportunity to strip off shoes, belt, egadgets, spare change, watch and wallet, spectacles and sunglasses, fingerprints and bad vibrations, and send them through the scanner, darkly. After this it was my turn in the walk-through Radar Range. I had to put up my hands like a mugging victim. Joke’s on them. All my money is in my carry-on in the X-ray machine.

And then to my gate? Nope. I followed the signs for Foreign Passports, which brought me to a room full of supplicants, all waiting to have our passports and boarding passes checked, scanned, and stamped, our persons photographed, and our fingers scanned and digitized, glad I got my fingerprints back from X-ray. And then got checked once again before I could walk down the ramp to the actual gate. Three cheers for three tiers of security. I’ve been one of those drippy, green Matrix people for so long I feel like a Citizen of the Singularity. Forget planes. I might as well just travel by Internet.

There were so many passes to pass through I began to feel like the Angel of Death at the first Passover, only this one doesn’t happen just once. It happens each time I travel out of the country. Plus, they make you show your boarding pass again as you board the plane. This one at least makes sense. That’s in case you morph into a different person at the food court, of course. Who says you couldn’t? It happened to that creepy Agent Smith in the Matrix and we're all digital now, anyway. I heard later he turned into an Elf Lord.

12 hours later I was in Zurich. The airport was practically empty. I only had to show my passport once and answer three questions demanded of me by a sphinx at Immigration:

“WHERE ARE YOU GOING IN ZURICH?” “Just a layover at the Hyatt hotel until my connecting flight tomorrow afternoon."

“WHERE ARE YOU GOING NEXT?” “Tampa, Florida.”

“WHERE DID YOU COME FROM?” I resisted making a crack about the Stork-Airport Sphinxes are notoriously literal, and wisely just said, “Bangkok.”

Stamp, stamp. “Enjoy your stay," he said. "Um, I mean, ENJOY YOUR STAY,” and the lights faded on the sphinx, mysteriously.

 And I was on my way, just like that. It was as if I belonged here or something.

What, nothing to declare? Not even my genius? Not even Oscar Wilde’s genius? They must know already. Probably from the biometrics in our passports. Nothing to photograph, finger scan, or carousel surf? No scanning the crowds for someone with a clipboard with my name on it?

My luggage is in mail forwarding mode and I’m on my own for the night in Zurich. I forgot to bring any Euro from my horde of leftover legal tender, but I’m in luck. Switzerland doesn’t take Euro! And I had had two meals and snacks on the plane and just wanted to go to sleep, anyway.

I had made reservations at a Hyatt while I was still in Bangkok waiting at their boarding coral and avoiding the electric security probes. The hotel is across a shopping mall 100 meters from the airport, which I walked to easily.

Oh, look. My room has one of those cool Keurig gadgets! Ah, Europe.

Day – The Last

Swissair Flight 8004, via Edelweiss Airlines, brought me safely to Tampa International Airport after a twelve-hour flight, a rewatching of Guardian of the Galaxy 3, and a reread of the Neil Gaiman novel, Neverwhere. It seemed appropriate. My luggage lugged around the carousel sometime after and I slogged my way through customs, which were uncustomarily accommodating. No questions to answer, no papers to fill out, no stamp-stamp, click-click, no passport even. I just had to hold still for the camera and a computer screen informed the immigration man, “Ya. He’s one of ours. He's harmless. Let him in!” and I was waved through. It was almost disappointing.

Almost.

This has been an eye-opening trip. I’ve been through Europe, across Russia, to Peru, lived in Israel, camped in the Sinai Desert, and, of course, been across America numerous times and a few times in Canada. But never have I seen the Far East this way. The grinding poverty, the exquisite beauty, the ruin in advanced stages of decay, the modernization yearning to mimic the west but carrying along, held fast like a baby bird fallen from the nest, the echoes of the past. A past that never relents its dignity. And the history. My God, we think two hundred years is historical.

The Chinese Belt and Road Initiative, nostalgically dubbed, ‘The New Silk Road,’ belts and roads across the Global South, what I grew up calling, ‘The Third World,’ and learned about in children’s picture books and view master viewers in the 1950’s. I remember viewing them, Jasmine and Aladdin on a magic carpet. Jim Hawkins finding treasure on South Sea Islands. Mary Poppins in midflight. Brightly colored and three dimensional pictures of adventure scenes frozen in time.

Back then the rest of the world seemed wondrous, caught in time and remote in space. A place I thought did not exist and never did, or maybe it did in thought and emotion as flowers, flowers of history now remembered while the reality is ashes under our feet. I’ve had an enduring love of the exotic and the unique ever since.

Ashes rise, the past stands mute, the future beckons. And we are all swept along. Enjoy the ride.

A Reflective Aftershot