Saturday, August 30, 2008

The Road (and River) to Saigon

Day 41, August 25th, 2008 (No Malaria)


After bringing everyone down with Phnom Penh, I’ll write about my trip traveling from there to Saigon which you should enjoy for the ridiculous nature of every part of it and the level of insanity that it caused me.

I have been backpacking around SE Asia for many weeks now but I have not really been a true backpacker. Most of the people that I meet who are doing similar trips are staying in dorms every night, not private air-conditioned rooms. They are busing it or training it between destinations, not flying. For Vietnam, my final country in SE Asia, I decided to rough it a little more. I’m not staying in the dorms, of course (I haven’t sunk that low) but I did decide to use some less airborne forms of transportation to get around the country. My first big overland route was from Phnom Penh to Ho Chi Minh City (formerly known as Saigon).

The day started with a few hour bus ride from Phnom Penh to a small port on the Mekong River. This was a port if you consider a few half-sinking fishing boats parked in someone’s back yard a port. I was with about 9 other backpackers all of which were European. They were all experienced with overland travel and were even surprised at the woeful state of the boat that we were suppose to take down the Mighty Mekong.

Joining us on our voyage were a handful of villagers from downriver who were returning from selling their goods somewhere near civilization and obviously haven’t had much contact with white people. For the few hours that they were with us, they gawked at us, open mouthed, the entire time.

As we are pulling out of “port,” I begin to take some short movies on of the river and the people on the boat. As I’m about to get a shot of the captains son bailing water out to keep us afloat, the engine stops. I have this moment on video and will post it, along with many others, as soon as I can. Frantically, the captain tears into the engine compartment and starts tinkering away while the entire time, his son bails. He got the engine started and we went back to port for some more repairs. Underway again, it was a few hours to the Vietnamese border in a slowly sinking, mechanically unsound boat in the middle of nowhere.

The Vietnamese immigration station at this border crossing looked like it was a roadside hotdog stand in Pigsknuckle, Arkansas. It was a series of shacks in the middle of nowhere. The picture does no justice to how isolated the area is. We were detained in quarantine for about an hour to make sure that we weren’t carrying SARS. Also, while we were waiting, a motorbike hauling about 2 tons of ice almost overturned onto half of my group. Thankfully, I was out of the way buying water about 20 feet away and tried to snap a picture of the incident.
After our quarantine, we were put on another ferry for the remaining trip to the port city of Chou Doc, Vietnam. This was another few hours in this smaller, slower boat. The accommodations (lawn chairs) were great, though, and this boat didn’t seem to be sinking as much. This was actually pretty cool as we were traversing a portion of the famous Mekong Delta. We passed clusters of houses that could only be assessable by boat. It is so desolate that I often felt like we could have driven right off the edge of the world.

As we approach Chou Doc, the heavens open up. I have never seen rain like that in my life. Luckily, while we were in the boat, we were mostly covered but still seemed to all look like we had just showered with our clothes on. It got so windy and rainy that the captain had trouble docking. We almost swamped a family fishing on their small wood raft. We did eventually dock and the rain let up for a few minutes to allow us to get off of the boat and all figure out our next steps.

I got to Chou Doc with no clue how I was going to get the additional 7 hour bus ride to Saigon. I was told in Phnom Penh that I could go to the bus station in Chou Doc and get an express but that leaves several times a day. When we got off of the boat, there were several cab drivers and, fearing more rain, I ran to the first driver I saw and asked him to take me to the bus station. As I’m in the back of his rickshaw, the heavens open up again. At that moment, all I wanted to do was to get under the shelter of the bus station. The driver drops me off at a restaurant near the harbor that doesn’t remotely look like a bus station.

Looking for a little reassurance from my driver, I ask him, “This is the bus station?”

I get back is a quick, “Yes.” At this point, I am questioning our ability to communicate.

I tell him that I don’t want a meal but a bus and he says, “Yes. Bus.”

It’s still pouring and the restaurant is dry, smells good, and does have a small picture of a bus on the sign in front so I decide to take my chances. Inside, I learn that this is a stop for a private bus company. The rickshaw driver probably gets a small kick-back for bringing me but at this point I’m wet, desperate, and don’t care what kind of bus I take to Saigon as long as I get there. A few minutes after I arrived, two German guys that were on my boat showed up on another rickshaw. I knew that they were trying to get to another place in Vietnam and this made me a little more confident that I had reached an actual spot where I could get a bus. I found out that it was $10 for a minibus to Saigon and the bus was leaving in 5 minutes. Sure enough, 5 minutes later, a large, empty 12 passenger van arrives to take me to Saigon. At this point, I think that I’m going to get to ride the entire way with a little room to stretch and maybe even take a nap. I was wrong.

Within one hour, I was in the same 12 passengers van with 17 other people, three child-sized bags of macadamia nuts, and not a soul that spoke a work of English. Also being wet, dirty, and cramped, I was not in the most positive mood and vowed that from that moment on, it was trains or airplanes…no more buses or ferries…ever.

I have seen some crazy roads and driving while over here but for 5 or the 7 hours of this bus ride, we were on horrifically bumpy dirt and gravel roads. The road is often not even wide enough for two cars side-by-side and if two cross, one has to swerve off onto the shoulder…if there is one. Add to this hundreds of motorbikes, bicycles, pedestrians, and our constant 50 mph speed and you can begin to image why that will be my first and last Vietnamese bus ride. It was terrifying, I didn’t get my nap, and spent most of the trip with a 70 year old Vietnamese woman half on my lap. A big regret of mine is that it was so dark and cramped; I took no pictures the entire ride. On second thought, maybe it’s better I just forget it.

Honestly, with the lack of communication, I really didn’t even know if I was on the right bus or headed the right direction. Wherever I ended up, though, I was going to find a hotel and be happy to be off of the bus ride from hell. I did eventually make it to Saigon and was ready to collapse immediately upon arrival.

The trip from Phnom Penh could have been a $50, hour-long flight and ended up being a wet, cramped, dirty, and sorrowful 16 hours of my life. It does make for a good story though.


Phnom Penh, Cambodia

Days 39-40, August 24-25, 2008 (No Malaria…or mad cow)

There is no smiling allowed in Phnom Penh...at least some places.


I enjoyed Siem Reap, Cambodia so much a few weeks ago that I decided to adjust my itinerary and swing through the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh for a few days.

I flew from Chang Mai with a short layover in Bangkok. Only one more short lay-over in Bangkok and I am done with that city…at least for this trip.

Phnom Penh, like most of Cambodia, is still recovering from Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime. Immediately after the Khmer Rouge took power, they instituted a city wide evacuation sending the entire civilian population to state run farms in the countryside. They wanted to abolish commerce, money, industry, family life, transportation, or anything else that was deemed a foreign influence that could disrupt their farming utopia. Phnom Penh went from a city of 2 million to a city of less than 40,000 literally overnight. Anybody left living in the city were officials of the government. It took the city until 2006 to recover its pre- Pol Pot population. Phnom Penh is one of the most developing cities I have seen yet. Every SE Asian city has a lot of construction but Phnom Penh would make Donald Trump proud. There is bamboo scaffolding everywhere.

When I arrived in Phnom Penh, my hotel was supposed to have a driver waiting for me at the airport. There was a driver from my hotel waiting there but he was not waiting for me. He was waiting for three other girls on my flight were also staying at the hotel so they let me tag along with them to the hotel. Actually, they let me tag along for the next few days. It was good to have some travel companions in Phnom Penh. There are some locations there that provoke a lot of thought and it was good to have some people with which to discuss the Khmer Rouge atrocities. I’ve never been to any of the Nazi deathcamps but I imagine that those also have to evoke similar reactions by any sane human being. Also, it was just good to have some people with which to have a few meals, beers, and solid English conversation.

By the time we got to the hotel from the airport, it was already getting late and nobody felt much like seeing Phnom Penh after dark much due to its reputation as being one of the more dangerous SE Asian cities (which I disagree with after having been there). The hotel had a TV and DVD collection and one of their titles was the Killing Fields which is a mid-80’s movie chronicling the Khmer Rouge regime from the eyes of one American and one Cambodian journalist based off of very real characters and very real facts. It was a good thing to watch to set the context of what we would be seeing the next morning.

Our first stop the next morning was Choeung Ek or what is commonly referred to as the “Killing Fields.” Is really, though, only one of dozens of sites around Cambodia in which the Pol Pot regime used to execute innocent Cambodians. I am not going to write again about how most of these people were selected for death but if you are interested, you can go back to my Siem Reap blog or read about any of this on wikipedia. This location is the main one visited because of its proximity to Phnom Penh and the sheer number of people that were executed here. In two years, a staff of 10 at this site killed over 20,000 people most of which are still interred where they were murdered. The bones that have been exhumed have been placed in a monument in the center of the park. It is grisly to see all of the skulls with the very visable head wounds. Prisoners had to dig their own graves, kneel next to them and were then executed with a blow to the head. Bullets were too expensive.

As you walk around the park, you can see all of the excavated graves that look like bomb craters one after another. Between the graves are pathways on which I really didn’t want to walk. There are so many bodies still buried here that there is evidence of them literally everywhere you walk. During every rainy season, like it is now, the rain erodes bits of dirt and exposes the bones and clothes of murdered people still in shallow graves in the ground underneath your feet. Everywhere you walk, you can see the white of bone peeking out from the paths. I even saw a tooth just lying in front of me on the path at one point. It is a terrible, terrible place. As bones and clothing become exposed by rain, they are usually placed in piles near the trees. I have a picture below of my guide explaining this while standing next to a pile of bones.

The next place we went to was the S-21 prison. S-21, before the Khmer Rouge took power, was Tuol Svay Prey High School, a public school in the heart of Phnom Penh. A society, though, in which you don’t want anyone educated, schools have little value. So the building was converted from a place of learning to a place of torture. Again, it is gruesome. One of the exhibits is a collection of thousands of mug shots of former inmates. Most of them are too young to vote in the US and some are only toddlers or younger. As I was looking at the photos, I realized that most of these people are now buried in the grounds of or displayed in the monument of the Killing Fields that I had just left. I probably walked right over several of their remains. Trucks left S-21 every few days, with whoever survived their torture, bound for Choeung Ek just outside of town. The instruments of torture are displayed everywhere and you can walk through the closet sized cells where prisoners were stuffed.

We saw several other sights on that day but I will remember none as much as the prison and killing fields. It is a shame, too, because, Phnom Penh is a great city with a great future and I’m sure that all anybody remembers upon leaving is darker side of its history. Living in the US, I think that we are sheltered a lot from some of the terrible things that go on in the world. Seeing a place like Cambodia really makes you realize how terrible human beings can be to each other. To me, Phnom Penh is either proof that Satan exists or God doesn’t.

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Chang Rei and the Golden Triangle

Days 36-38, August 21-23, 2008 (No Malaria)

I am sorry that I haven’t updated this in a week. I have not had very good internet access and have also had some pretty long days that have prevented me from having the chance to type. I will be providing several updates over the next few days. So back into it…

The day after the elephant park, I took advantage not having anything specific planned and explored Chang Mai some more. Chang Mai is an 800 year old walled city. Well, the original part of the city is still walled, at least. It is also surrounded by a moat around the entire perimeter. I walked around the entire “Old City” and then crisscrossed the streets for hours finding some used book shops and stocking up. The more that I walked around Chang Mai, the more I enjoyed the city. It is such a friendly, laid-back place that I don’t know how anybody couldn’t like it. As a matter of fact, the more people that I meet traveling around, the more that I realize that it is almost everyone’s favorite. People seem to be drawn here and then drawn back.

The next day was my excursion to a city farther north called Chang Rei and an area called the Golden triangle. Chang Rei (along with Chang Mai and several other “Chang” cities in the area) was once part of the powerful Lanna empire which existed at around the same time as the Khmer Empire farther south in Cambodia. They were both at the height of their power in the 12th and 13th centuries. It is another charming little city tucked in the hills of northern Thailand. On the way, we had a few stops. The first was a natural hot springs just south of Chang Rei. Call me crazy but when it is already over 100 degrees, the last place you want to be standing is next to a boiling pond or geyser. I sweat enough already.

We also stopped at a place called the white temple in Chang Rei. It is the completed part of what will one day be a large Buddhist complex. I have seen too many Buddhist temples all over SE Asia but this was, by far, the most beautiful. It is all white to begin with (as the name would indicate, I guess) and is also covered in thousands of tiny mirrors. This has the effect of making the entire temple look like it is covered in ice and snow which is really odd and out of place considering the heat. It is truly gorgeous though.

Our guide for the day, Tassa, was very good. She was extremely knowledgeable and helpful at every location. More importantly, she was very funny. Humor is something that often doesn’t translate well when one learns a language and even if one is funny in their native language, it is difficult to be in another. At one point, we stopped for a roadside “pit stop.” Before we got out, she was explaining how even though the Thai’s are Buddhists, they still hold onto some animistic beliefs from deep in their past. Animism is the belief that every object hold a spirit…every home, plant, rock, or tree. These spirits need to be kept happy in order for day-to-day life to go well. So while on a roadside pit stop, it is customary to ask the forest or tree for permission to take your liberties. She says, “you have to ask the tree for permission…but don’t have to wait for the answer. If you hear an answer, run.” OK, maybe my telling isn’t as good as hers but we all got a good laugh out of it. She had several good one liners throughout the day.

The Golden Triangle is the area along the Mekong River in Northern Thailand in which Myanmar (Burma), Laos and Thailand all come together at a point. It is called “golden” due to the fact that is was once one of the largest opium trading posts in the world and the only currency that was allowed in trade was gold. The opium traders used to sit out in little island in the Mekong River between the countries that would be exposed during the dry season and do their business just out of the reach of any government authority. Our guide told us that when a bust did occur, most often the evidence would disappear from the local police offices anyway. The traders most often avoided prosecution and the police had a few happy weeks to smoke their evidence.

Since the three countries come together here, it is possible to visit the two others in one day. We took a boat to a market in Laos and walked across a bridge to a market in Myanmar. In Laos, we drank king cobra whiskey. It is a giant vat of homemade whiskey that just happens to have a giant snake adding to the already tasty goodness. It is supposed to increase virility. Lucky me. I’m stuck on a Laotian Island in the middle of the Mekong River and my virility is being increased. What the hell good does that do me? They should start serving that stuff at the bars in Chicago.

The Myanmar visit was very short and really just an excuse to get the passport stamp.

To compare the attitudes of the two countries towards tourists, Laos didn’t even check our passports until we forced them to for the stamps. Myanmar granted us 30 minute visas under the supervision of armed guards. Myanmar also charged $10 US for the border excursion but would only accept clean, new $10 bills. I had several US bills in my security belt but none of them were good enough for the immigration officials. I thought that a dollar was a dollar but the Myanmar officials were more picky than a vending machine. Finally, one of the girls in the group traded me a clean, new dollar for one of mine that was equally as clean and new but for some reason was not good enough. The other thing that I discovered about the Myanmar officials was that the only thing that makes them as touchy as an old $10 bill is when you cross the border and don’t buy anything from their market. I don’t think they were not sad to see us go.

On the way back to Chang Mai, we made our last stop at a tribal refugee camp. There are several ethnic tribes that live in the hills of Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, and Myanmar and, to this day, try to maintain their lifestyle, customs, and traditions. One of these is called the Karen Tribe and is originally from Myanmar. They are one of the last peoples in Myanmar who are consistently fighting the military government there and many have taken refuge, illegally, in the Thai hills. The camp that we went to has been there for 8 years and tolerated by the Thai government. The biggest distinction of the Karen is that their women elongate their necks. They wear snug, heavy rings on their shoulders which push their shoulders down and neck up. They survive on tourism and off of the land. They were very kind to us, welcoming, and also enjoyed seeing the pictures on the camera after we took them. Like typical women everywhere, if they didn’t like the picture, they wanted it erased…I’m not kidding you.

In the tradition I have started of meeting some great people, I met a very nice couple from Trinidad on the bus. They names were Kenrick and Stacey. They are currently living in London and were fun to hang out with for the day. One of my new goals is to chalk-up as many international invites as possible while I am abroad…so far, so good.




Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Chang Mai, Thailand (Elephant Nature Park)

Days 34-35, August 19-20, 2008 (No Malaria- best odds of contracting yet, though)


After the nightmare that was Bangkok, I knew that Chang Mai couldn’t be worse. Luckily, it took me about 10 minutes after I left the airport to decide that I loved Chang Mai. It is, by far, my favorite place in Thailand. I got into my hotel in Chang Mai at about 4 PM local time. My hotel was amazing. It was clean, friendly, and even has a pool. After walking around the charming town for a few hours before dark, I was happy that the friendly and welcoming residents of Chang Mai had earned redemption in my mind for the people of Thailand.

Chang Mai is a small city located up in the mountains of northern Thailand. It is actually Thailand’s second biggest city but only a fraction the size of Bangkok. It is laid back, friendly, manageable, and beautiful. No wonder it also has the densest concentration of backpackers of anyplace I’ve seen yet. People looking for an out-of-the-way place to see the real Thailand are drawn here from all over. This city is what I pictured in my minds eye when I read about Thailand in the guidebooks. I am very happy with my decision to forgo any more time in Bangkok for another day here. I am also doing a few excursions while I am here. The first of which, I am in the middle of right now.

Right now, I am in the middle of the jungle again about 75 kilometers outside of Chang Mai at a place called Elephant Nature Park. Elephants, the most revered symbol of Thailand, are in severe decline here. In the last 100 years, the population here has gone from over 100,000 to under 4,000. Most of those are domesticated animals left are used by indigenous tribes as beast of burden or by the tourism industry to haul people around on jungle treks. There are less than 1500 wild elephants left and are all relegated to Thailand’s small national park system. Even though the wild elephant is severely endangered here, there are no laws protecting domesticated elephants. They are considered livestock and are often treated brutally by their owners. Elephants have strong wills, stronger bodies, and most owners feel they need to be “broken” to be effective workers. All of the adult elephants at the park bear multiple pink scars on their heads from owners “hooking” them during training, over their backs from carrying too heavy of loads on their backs, and their legs from overly tight chains.

Elephant Nature Park is a unique place in Thailand (or probably anywhere for that matter). They take in broken and abused domesticated elephants or orphaned wild elephants and give them a place to live out their years. They train and control the elephants through positive reinforcement in which none of them need to be “broken.” It is really an amazing place. I am here to learn and interact with the elephants for two days. Day one has been completely unbelievable. Earlier today, we got introduced and comfortable with the elephants by feeding them fruit which they happily accepted.

The elephant’s mahmoots also helped us by showing which foods their elephants liked and disliked. A mahmoot is and elephant keeper. There is one mahmoot per elephant and it is a long-term arraignment often lasting several years. Strong bonds form between the elephant and the mahmoot and most of the mahmoots talk about their elephants with the pride of a father speaking about their child.

After the break-in period, we followed them down to the river and helped to give them a bath. They kneel down in the water (if they still can) and the humans scrub and rinse them. Right after they get all clean, they immediately go roll in the mud. I know it seems futile but they love it. The mud keeps the sun and bugs off their skin.

The afternoon consisted of another feeding session and bathing. After dark, we ate dinner, had a Thai lesson and learned the elephant song. I’ll put the video on you tube when I have a chance. Now it is am early bedtime in the very dark jungle. I am in a private hut and some of the dogs are scratching at the door looking for a softer, cooler place to sleep. Dogs are dogs everywhere.


Day 2 at Elephant Nature Park

This morning, I woke up to two elephants grazing behind my hut.


After, I was in a group of three that got a 3 hour tour of the entire park. I got to interact with most of the park’s elephants and hear their stories. Of the 33 elephants in the park, it is safe to approach most of them. Some are so traumatized, they trust no one except their mahmoot and nobody else can or should get close. Most of those don’t stay around the people anyway.

The stories of the elephants here, like any animal rescue, are filled with triumph and tragedy. One of the elephants, Jokia, is totally blind. She was used in a logging camp and the loggers killed her baby as to not slow down her work. She got so depressed she stopped working. The loggers shot one eye out with a sling shot to try to motivate her to work and when that didn’t do the trick, they stabbed the other one out with a knife. When the park’s owner, Lek, brought Jokia here, she didn’t know how the other elephants would respond to a blind newcomer which is something none of them had encountered. The oldest elephant and matriarch or the herd, Mae Perm, was the first to walk up and inspected Jokia’s eyes with her trunk. Mae Perm immediately accepted her into the herd, took responsibility for her care, and they haven’t left each other’s side since. The staff has even put a little wood clapper around Mae Perm’s neck so Jokia doesn’t lose her in the crowd.

Another elephant, Maximus, is the largest elephant in Thailand and almost as big as his African cousins. When Maximus was younger, he was used by his owner to beg on the streets of Bangkok and was hit and severely disfigured by a 18 wheeler truck. Maximus doesn’t move very well these days but seems to be the ladies man of the herd.

Meadow was severely disfigured after being hauling huge loads as a young elephant and has suffered a broken backs and hips.

Malai Tong had half of her back right foot blown off by stepping on a landmine while working as a logging elephant in Burma.

Hope is one of the only elephants in the park that was originally wild born. His mother was shot and killed while eating rice from a field. He is a total hell raiser. As a general rule here, if an elephant is walking directly at you, you move. The elephants don’t like to be the ones to have to make a course correction. Hope doesn’t walk; He runs everywhere. If he’s running in your general direction, you get the hell out of the way. Actually, he is the only elephant here that has to wear a bell around his neck so everyone, including the other elephants, knows when he is around. He is constantly egging on the other elephants to try to get them to play. Most of them just ignore him or put him in his place. After bath time today, however, he got on another elephant’s nerves a little too much and they had a fight. It moved down the river and we couldn’t get close but I got a few good zoom shots.

All of the young elephants are a little rambunctious. At bath time, the routine is that all of the young elephants bathe, swim around the river, get chased by their mahmoots (elephant keepers), and then all charge out of the water to roll in the mud. When you hear the cry, “Babies, babies,” you also get the hell out of the way. A young elephant is nowhere the size of their parents but they are still a ton or more.

It is funny how much the elephants are like us. While the young one’s wrestle during bath time, the older ones just want to relax, get a scrub, and not have to deal with the juvenile’s nonsense. Also, at feeding time, they all have their favorites. One of the elephants was eating pineapple. For each pineapple, she was biting off the leaves at the top and dropping them on the ground. The elephant next to her was eating the entire pineapple, including the leaves, and even reaching under the first one to eat the discarded pineapple leaves as a snack.

Beyond elephants, the park adopts any pathetic creature that shows up (which may explain why they took me in so readily). There are a herd of water buffalo, cows, cats and dogs. Some of the elephants liked the dogs but most of them just tried to kick them when one ran by. This morning, an elephant tried to kick a dog and got my leg instead. Damn dog.

If you can’t tell, I absolutely loved this experience. It was truly one of a kind. I would love to go back one day. I learned a lot and met some very interesting people. I would recommend this to anybody.