Jakarta :: Indonesia
What happens when you revisit somewhere a second time, only with an expense account.
Places: Jakarta
Coolest
thing I did: Spent my Sunday mornings walking (that's right, walking) down the main north-south thoroughfare of Jakarta. In the middle of the road.
Coolest thing I didn't know: Jakarta used to have a castle but the north half of the city became so diseased that by the 1800s the Dutch started demolishing it slowly, to use to build another city to the south.
I've been coming to Jakarta on and off for nearly 4 months now but this morning was the first time I felt inspired enough to try and retrace my steps through the city last time I was here. It's kind of frightening that it's been 8 years since the last time I spent 24 hours here, but I wasn't sure I'd remember much anyway. Jakarta only impressed itself on me as the poorest of the Asian megacities and I barely touched it last time.
Like many car-clogged cities in the world Jakarta has taken upon itself to shut it's main north-south street to car traffic on a Sunday morning, so people can walk, run or cycle down it as novelty. The only other place I've witnessed that happening in person was Bogota, but having spent enough time in Jakarta now I appreciate what a big deal it is here. You can't really get anywhere here on foot, and I spend a couple of hours a day in taxis getting to and from the office. You can't actually get into the shopping centers easily unless you're in a car. You can even buy a phone credit top up in a drive through. It's hard to imagine the balls it took to actually say we're doing this, but to judge by the crowds that walk down the street on a Sunday morning, people have embraced it. This is the first and only time I've encountered Indonesian MAMILs.
This morning I got inspired to walk down the side streets to go and find the backpacker slum along Jalan Jaksa where I stayed last time. I remember a hotel with windowless rooms and the usual open bars and direct-sales hawking that you get in all of the backpacker streets around Asia, but even back then Jalan Jaksa was small time. The Indonesian government limits tourists to 30 days and no-one wants to waste any of that on Jakarta, so even as a transit point it was dying a slow death.
Fast forward 8 years to this morning and it's almost sad how little is left. There are two major high rise constructions going on along the short street and many of the bars and travel agents look shuttered for good. Where as Khao San Road in Bangkok has expanded and gone slightly upmarket since the days of The Beach this place looks to be simply fading out of existence. The hotel I stayed at is still there, though I don't recall it being painted hot pink last time, so maybe they're going in for a different market these days.
After my year-and-a-month traveling to Auckland for work I was back in Sydney for a whole week before I found myself sold on to a project in Jakarta. Due to to it being too far to realistically do a week at a time I'm spending two weeks here and two back in Sydney and have been doing so since last November. However I haven't really felt inspired to write about it much, mostly because my experience of Indonesia this time is so very different to the carefree 30 days I took going through it last time.
Working somewhere is a completely different travel experience. You don't have to worry about where you're going to sleep each night for a start, and the room I'm sitting in writing this right now has a window, overlooking the swimming pool. And air conditioning. I didn't care that much back then, but of course I had nowhere to be so it didn't matter if I showed up places sometime after lunch, covered in a thin film of dry sweat. The founder of modern Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew was on record as saying he thought air conditioning was the most important invention of the 20th century and if you're trying to do business as a proper grown-up country you can see why.
You also have to be far more cautious with food and less determined to maintain fitness by walking everywhere. If you're just here traveling around you can eat your bowl of mie goering from the guy with a cart and if you get food poisoning you don't really have much to do anyway. These days it has you stuck in a hotel room working. I live in taxis these days, because even a 5 minute walk in business attire has you carrying your sweat with you. You find things to do, because on a bad day you could between 30 mins and two and a half hours to the airport.
The first time I walked into Plaza Indonesia I had a serious flash back to the last time I was here - the bright white signage of Dior blinding you as you walk in hasn't changed a bit. The difference this time is I kind of look like I belong most of the time now in the high end of Jakarta. I've sat in rooftop bars that are obviously pirated versions of the ones in Bangkok and this time no-one asks me to pay upfront. And they call me "Pak", which is like "Sir", only more so.
You spend most of your life here in taxis or shopping centers and it's a different world to be moving in the circles of the Indonesians with money, as opposed to pressed against the masses out in the streets. There is that certain superiority rich people in the West don't go in for anymore - no-one here pretends to be the Everyman if they have money. I can't get used to the sight of the women with sunglasses perched on their head, tapping away at their phones while women looking either too young or too old to be doing the job, in maids uniforms, look after their uniformly misbehaving children. We simply couldn't maintain the level of income equality where that would even be possible in Australia. I guess there is a certain level of wealth where it becomes uncouth to look obviously wealthy, but people here haven't reached that level yet.
On an earlier trip here this year there was a bombing and subsequent shootout with the police, involving some off-brand Islamist militants or other outside of a Starbucks a block north of my hotel. Today was the first time I've gone and had a look, and they've totally demolished the police post that was partially destroyed by a grenade, killing three officers in the process. What struck me was it was also the first time people in the street were actually saying "Good Morning" to me in English, just to be polite. Even with the grind of trying to be sold things constantly out in the country outside Jakarta it was nice to actually be addressed in a non-subservient way by Indonesians again. With the exception of work it seems like the average worker in places that service both rich Indonesians and white people the clientele go in for scraping and bowing. That makes me kind of uncomfortable.
I haven't been back to what's left of Old Batavia, even if they tell me they keep trying to get money to renovate more of the old Dutch colonial buildings. I guess someone cottoned on that tourists love looking at that stuff. I remember walking there last time but I can't see myself crossing several kilometers of office blocks and no footpaths to look at one square of buildings. Interestingly they are now building a subway down the middle of Jakarta, but there is now some concern it will flood during the wet season. I suggested perhaps they should just embrace that and run submarines through it?
I guess the reason why places like Jalan Jaksa are slowly dying is tourists simply have nothing to come here for. If you have to work here, you kind of make your own fun but it's not a city that lures anyone in with it's beauty or history. There's so much potential buried out there in those old colonial ruins but everyone is too busy working here. I guess a city hasn't ever recovered from using it's castle as building materials to have that kind of mentality.
Sunday, March 06, 2016
Tuesday, January 06, 2015
660hp of serenity
Sydney :: Australia
That's beautiful. Now let's find a way to let people jump off it.
Places: Queenstown, Gibbston, Te Anau & Milford Sound
Coolest thing I did: Finished an afternoon of whitewater rafting by going through 160m of disused mining tunnel directly off a small waterfall.
Coolest thing I didn't know: There's a place called Doubtful Sound, which would also make an awesome name for a karaoke bar.
Imagine landing a plane directly into the set of Lord of the Rings, only with less goblins and more stomach dropping excitement and you start to see how even coming into Queenstown airport gives you a feel for what's to come. The plane rattles between two mountain ranges as it drops down on the elbow of Lake Wakatipu and you are both inspired by the beauty of what you're seeing and also a bit concerned that those mountains do seem very close. New Zealand seems to be so comfortable with it's beauty that it's a country not just content to contemplate it, it literally wants to spend every moment possible getting as dangerously close as possible.
Sitting on the edge of a radiant blue alpine lake and surrounded by pine forest and mountains Queenstown immediately reminds you of similar alpine locations in Canada or Europe and like all those places it's transitioned well from being a town all about servicing the two big ski fields nearby in winter to being a year round resort. Unlike it's peers overseas however, it seems to have created something unique in that it's churns through massive amount of activity every day without you feeling too much like you're on a package tour, having not given up either efficiency or that personal touch in the process. We were there at the very peak of the summer season, over New Years and while the town felt busy, it never felt completely crowded.
Over the course of more than a week we steered a course somewhere between adventure and outright silliness, so there was hiking, mountain biking, jet boats & white water rafting but no bungy jumping. We also avoided getting in a helicopter at any point, which seems hard to do in modern Queenstown, where you can take any activity they already sell and add a helicopter ride to it. Probably our most Queenstown day involved driving up to the top of the Shotover river to the Cornet Ski field in order to go white water rafting. The minibus goes along a single lane road that reminded me very much of the Death Road in Bolivia, only it's also got a trailer with 4 rafts on it to make life more interesting. There a points where the bus hangs over the edge going around corners and it's hundreds of meters of vertical drop right out the window. That gets you to a point where rafts enter the rapids in one direction and jet boats go upriver the other direction, with helicopters dropping off people short of time and long on money to do one or the other. Then on the way down in the raft through class 3 and 4 rapids, guided by a man with a weapons-grade Kiwi accent you come under a point where there's someone doing an upside down canyon swing (kind of like a horizontal bungy jump) directly above you. I guess the next step to up the ante is to electrify the river or something.
Jetboats are something we have on Sydney Harbour but I suspect you really have to come to NZ to get the full effect of what they are designed for. Why bother tearing around big expanses of open water when you can instead be dodging sheer rock walls in a narrow canyon? These days you have to be given a warning by the driver that he's about to flip the boat around in a 360 degree turn so you can brace yourself, but pretty much anything else goes. The boats seem to be able to operate on any water deep enough to get water into the jets, which seems to be measured in low digits of inches and the drivers like pulling away from walls at the last second or spraying water allover the whole boat with sharp fishtail turns. He reckons they run all year round and people come down in their ski gear and have a go when the water droplets snap freeze in the wind chill. I suspect that's a brave, select few.
Queenstown has mountain bike trails forever, however the main one that comes off the Gondola leading directly out of town is closed for the two weeks around Christmas and New Year to keep the numbers sane, so if that's the main reason for coming out it's probably best to do a different time in summer. Instead we decided on a serene 40km bike ride out to drink wine at the wineries and found that even that was more work than expected. Gravel trails wind out of Queenstown in each direction and the ones up to Gibbston and Arrowtown (which we didn't visit) take in lovely stretches of river along the way. There seems to be completely unnecessary hills along the way, but I suspect that's more so if you know what you're doing you can ride up just one of them and then build up enough speed tearing down the other side to keep moving all the way. On the way you cross the Kawarau Bridge, where bungy jumping was born and is still the most popular place to do it. I don't quite get the appeal myself, but it's an awesome thing to behold some massive American unit being smashed into the river waist deep at the bottom.
Our only super tourist day was to take the 14 hour round trip out to Milford Sound, which is pretty much the end of the road and none of us could see ourselves coming back to do it another time. The trip out was in one of the new breed of tour buses, with glass and carbon fibre making up the bulk of the top of the bus you can see a lot on the 5 hour drive out anyway, and though it was unfortunately raining and overcast on the ride out, it did mean you get to see some stunning scenery on the way back. It was a similar story on the boat ride on Milford Sound, but you do get that nice eerie sight of layers of cliff in silhouette gliding out of the fog towards you. The whole thing reminded me a lot of the Fjords in Patagonia. With good reason, apparently Milford Sound is actually a Fjord, not a Sound and whichever fool named it (I'm looking at you, Captain John Lort Stokes) didn't know the difference between a Fjord and a Sound. Amateur.
On the plus side is we did get to see far more waterfalls than otherwise and while we were turning around in the Tasman on for the hour stretch back the rain stopped and we got to see the mountains slowing poking their heads out of the clouds on the way back. This being New Zealand of course they decide the best thing to do is drive the boat right up to the waterfall so everyone on the deck gets soaked. Again, why just look at something when you could add an element of danger to it?
While in Queenstown you do get the sense that it's a party town for kids, and on that front it doesn't disappoint. The couple of days leading up to New Years was mental with young back packers showing off their ill-decided new tattoos or the GoPro video of their Helibiking and it was kind of like being the Ghost of Christmas Future watching them all - I know what your future holds, but it's really important you do all the stupid stuff yourself while your bones still heal. However we did find the range of eating and drinking outstanding. You can either line up for a Fergburger during one of the 21 hours they are open (and that's an experience in itself) or have award wining lamb or steak in a proper grown up restaurant with some of Otago's finest Pinot. You can get smashed on Export Gold and then go fight some dudes outside the kebab shop, or you can try some of the really quite excellent Kiwi Beers (Mac's Sassy Red is outstanding). It's that range that makes the town so interesting - it's caters so well to every taste and budget that I'm scratching my head to think of a town that does this kind of Alpine tourism much better.
I was quite amazed by Queenstown, and the South Island in general, but I think the thing that holds it together so well is just how nice the service industry is there, whether it's the multi-season local Kiwis who hold the more skilled jobs or the transient backpacker workforce. Even during the strain of New Years everyone we came in contact with was really friendly and helpful and only threw minor Aussie barbs our way (the subtle dig about Milford having so much rain because of the hot air rising of Australia was nicely done). It think it's one of the few places I've been recently where I wouldn't hesitate to come back and see a bit more, either outside the Christmas peak in summer to ride some more bikes or even back for the snow, which would add another dimension to it all.
That's beautiful. Now let's find a way to let people jump off it.
Places: Queenstown, Gibbston, Te Anau & Milford Sound
Coolest thing I did: Finished an afternoon of whitewater rafting by going through 160m of disused mining tunnel directly off a small waterfall.
Coolest thing I didn't know: There's a place called Doubtful Sound, which would also make an awesome name for a karaoke bar.
Imagine landing a plane directly into the set of Lord of the Rings, only with less goblins and more stomach dropping excitement and you start to see how even coming into Queenstown airport gives you a feel for what's to come. The plane rattles between two mountain ranges as it drops down on the elbow of Lake Wakatipu and you are both inspired by the beauty of what you're seeing and also a bit concerned that those mountains do seem very close. New Zealand seems to be so comfortable with it's beauty that it's a country not just content to contemplate it, it literally wants to spend every moment possible getting as dangerously close as possible.
Sitting on the edge of a radiant blue alpine lake and surrounded by pine forest and mountains Queenstown immediately reminds you of similar alpine locations in Canada or Europe and like all those places it's transitioned well from being a town all about servicing the two big ski fields nearby in winter to being a year round resort. Unlike it's peers overseas however, it seems to have created something unique in that it's churns through massive amount of activity every day without you feeling too much like you're on a package tour, having not given up either efficiency or that personal touch in the process. We were there at the very peak of the summer season, over New Years and while the town felt busy, it never felt completely crowded.
Over the course of more than a week we steered a course somewhere between adventure and outright silliness, so there was hiking, mountain biking, jet boats & white water rafting but no bungy jumping. We also avoided getting in a helicopter at any point, which seems hard to do in modern Queenstown, where you can take any activity they already sell and add a helicopter ride to it. Probably our most Queenstown day involved driving up to the top of the Shotover river to the Cornet Ski field in order to go white water rafting. The minibus goes along a single lane road that reminded me very much of the Death Road in Bolivia, only it's also got a trailer with 4 rafts on it to make life more interesting. There a points where the bus hangs over the edge going around corners and it's hundreds of meters of vertical drop right out the window. That gets you to a point where rafts enter the rapids in one direction and jet boats go upriver the other direction, with helicopters dropping off people short of time and long on money to do one or the other. Then on the way down in the raft through class 3 and 4 rapids, guided by a man with a weapons-grade Kiwi accent you come under a point where there's someone doing an upside down canyon swing (kind of like a horizontal bungy jump) directly above you. I guess the next step to up the ante is to electrify the river or something.
Jetboats are something we have on Sydney Harbour but I suspect you really have to come to NZ to get the full effect of what they are designed for. Why bother tearing around big expanses of open water when you can instead be dodging sheer rock walls in a narrow canyon? These days you have to be given a warning by the driver that he's about to flip the boat around in a 360 degree turn so you can brace yourself, but pretty much anything else goes. The boats seem to be able to operate on any water deep enough to get water into the jets, which seems to be measured in low digits of inches and the drivers like pulling away from walls at the last second or spraying water allover the whole boat with sharp fishtail turns. He reckons they run all year round and people come down in their ski gear and have a go when the water droplets snap freeze in the wind chill. I suspect that's a brave, select few.
Queenstown has mountain bike trails forever, however the main one that comes off the Gondola leading directly out of town is closed for the two weeks around Christmas and New Year to keep the numbers sane, so if that's the main reason for coming out it's probably best to do a different time in summer. Instead we decided on a serene 40km bike ride out to drink wine at the wineries and found that even that was more work than expected. Gravel trails wind out of Queenstown in each direction and the ones up to Gibbston and Arrowtown (which we didn't visit) take in lovely stretches of river along the way. There seems to be completely unnecessary hills along the way, but I suspect that's more so if you know what you're doing you can ride up just one of them and then build up enough speed tearing down the other side to keep moving all the way. On the way you cross the Kawarau Bridge, where bungy jumping was born and is still the most popular place to do it. I don't quite get the appeal myself, but it's an awesome thing to behold some massive American unit being smashed into the river waist deep at the bottom.
Our only super tourist day was to take the 14 hour round trip out to Milford Sound, which is pretty much the end of the road and none of us could see ourselves coming back to do it another time. The trip out was in one of the new breed of tour buses, with glass and carbon fibre making up the bulk of the top of the bus you can see a lot on the 5 hour drive out anyway, and though it was unfortunately raining and overcast on the ride out, it did mean you get to see some stunning scenery on the way back. It was a similar story on the boat ride on Milford Sound, but you do get that nice eerie sight of layers of cliff in silhouette gliding out of the fog towards you. The whole thing reminded me a lot of the Fjords in Patagonia. With good reason, apparently Milford Sound is actually a Fjord, not a Sound and whichever fool named it (I'm looking at you, Captain John Lort Stokes) didn't know the difference between a Fjord and a Sound. Amateur.
On the plus side is we did get to see far more waterfalls than otherwise and while we were turning around in the Tasman on for the hour stretch back the rain stopped and we got to see the mountains slowing poking their heads out of the clouds on the way back. This being New Zealand of course they decide the best thing to do is drive the boat right up to the waterfall so everyone on the deck gets soaked. Again, why just look at something when you could add an element of danger to it?
While in Queenstown you do get the sense that it's a party town for kids, and on that front it doesn't disappoint. The couple of days leading up to New Years was mental with young back packers showing off their ill-decided new tattoos or the GoPro video of their Helibiking and it was kind of like being the Ghost of Christmas Future watching them all - I know what your future holds, but it's really important you do all the stupid stuff yourself while your bones still heal. However we did find the range of eating and drinking outstanding. You can either line up for a Fergburger during one of the 21 hours they are open (and that's an experience in itself) or have award wining lamb or steak in a proper grown up restaurant with some of Otago's finest Pinot. You can get smashed on Export Gold and then go fight some dudes outside the kebab shop, or you can try some of the really quite excellent Kiwi Beers (Mac's Sassy Red is outstanding). It's that range that makes the town so interesting - it's caters so well to every taste and budget that I'm scratching my head to think of a town that does this kind of Alpine tourism much better.
I was quite amazed by Queenstown, and the South Island in general, but I think the thing that holds it together so well is just how nice the service industry is there, whether it's the multi-season local Kiwis who hold the more skilled jobs or the transient backpacker workforce. Even during the strain of New Years everyone we came in contact with was really friendly and helpful and only threw minor Aussie barbs our way (the subtle dig about Milford having so much rain because of the hot air rising of Australia was nicely done). It think it's one of the few places I've been recently where I wouldn't hesitate to come back and see a bit more, either outside the Christmas peak in summer to ride some more bikes or even back for the snow, which would add another dimension to it all.
Tuesday, January 28, 2014
Dryland?
Sydney :: Australia
Shutdown BKK.
Places: Chiang Mai & Bangkok
Coolest thing I did: Found the source of what looked like all the world's T-shirts.
Coolest thing I didn´t know: It was 15 degrees overnight in Bangkok last week and people died they were so unprepared for it. That 15 degrees, not -15.
I walked into 7-11 to buy a bottle of water and there it was: a sign on the fridge door saying they would not be selling alcohol of any kind due to the election from 6pm Saturday until midnight Sunday. The guy at the counter said it's because early voting for the election in February was on the next two weekends and the government bans shops and bars from selling booze on polling days. I had a bit of a panic. Forget the grenade attacks and shootings during the daytime protests in Bangkok disrupting my travel plans, what if my last weekend in Thailand involved closed bars and a lack of beer? This could be serious. I mean I get why drunk voting is a bad idea, in fact I would go far as to say several elections in Australia could have ended very differently if we banned alcohol on voting day. I just think there is no politician in Australia electorally suicidal enough to pass a blanket, day long ban on selling booze in Australia for ANY reason, let alone something as trivial as a Federal election.
Turns out the good people at 7-11 seem to be almost unique in their attempt to obey the law. I went out to the night market in Chiang Mai for dinner and had zero problems getting a beer to go with my Tom Yum soup (or several more afterwards). Some bars seemed to be closing early, others going to the effort of serving spirits in mugs or tea cups, but generally Saturday night didn't exactly seem like prohibition had been introduced.
So I decided that instead of trying to do a double headed flight from Chiang Mai to Bangkok and then on to Sydney in the same night (ending up spending 8 plus hours in the airport at Bangkok) that I'd ignore our government's travel advice and go to Bangkok for the night anyway. I managed to get on the last minute websites (and try this if you haven't) and got a room in a mystery 5 star away from the main protest sites for $70 a night. Apparently the 5 star hotels often allow their rooms out at cheap rates if they're having trouble filling them so long as the booking sites don't advertise which one it is until you book. Mine turned out to be the Marriott at Sukhumvit, famous for it's 3 story sky bar. How did I know it's away from the protest sites? Due to the work of a fine gentleman called Richard Barrow.
Richard is a travel blogger based in Bangkok and went to the trouble of setting up a Google Map of Bangkok with all the protest sites and keeping it up to date with where violent events have occurred and then doing a good job of explaining the news around it with his Twitter feed. He also has his own camera bearing remote controlled helicopter drone which he flies over the main protest sites and takes pictures to post of them. It's probably the first actual useful thing I've ever seen done with Twitter and despite the hyperbole that usually surrounds the Facebooks and Twitters of the world with how they're changing media, I really feel like this shows the future of journalism. Why on Earth CNN and the BBC treat us to the opinions and ramblings of random viewers who happen to have a computer when they should be cultivating this kind of real time, on the ground journalism is beyond me. What he's doing provides actual, usable information about where to avoid and how to stay safe instead of just saying it's simply too dangerous. DFAT have issued a travel warning telling us to avoid the protests without attempting to say where they are. The media outlets simply state how many dead or injured without any real context to where things happen and why. This is a model for the kind of localised journalism we were promised by digital media but never really saw. I hope the big outlets are taking note.
Blessed with a clear day leaving Chiang Mai by plane gets you a view of Wat Phrathat Doi Suthep, the temple on the mountain that overlooks the city. I didn't visit it this time either, but one of these days I'm sure to. All the way south you can see that nearly nothing between CM and BKK has not been dug, cut or redirected into a straight line with large scale farming giving way to canals and then the factories that have helped to turn Thailand from a poor into a middle income country. The result of that, of course is you can't actually see Bangkok itself on warm days, the pollution blowing down from the factories along the river to the Gulf of Thailand. Riding the skytrain back into town you can make out the silhouette of high rise buildings sticking out from between overhead freeways, but nothing of the detail. The other thing about riding the skytrain instead of getting a taxi is you start to get a feel for how far the CNN view of the protests really is.
People in Bangkok tend to mostly be of the camp that wants to overthrow the government and unlike last time when they adopted yellow shirts (to contrast the red shirts of the pro-government types) they've taken to decking themselves out like they're going to watch Thailand play football. At first I actually thought that what was going on when I saw all the protesters on their way too and from the blockades sensibly using public transport, all dressed in red, white and blue ribbons and hats. You get the feeling this really is a middle class protest movement by just how polite it all seemed to be. As the train passes over some of the main intersections that have been blockaded for nearly two weeks the first question you ask is "Where is everyone?". It seemed like everyone had pitched their tents then gone home, with only a scattering actually doing the hard work of shutting the city down. Really, it all seemed to be operating pretty smoothly.
So my break from the reality of guest houses lived up to expectations, with my room including a bathtub taking in a sweeping view of Bangkok below, an infinity pool and the afore mentioned 3 story sky bar with 360 view of the city. I was to later discover sky bars with 360 views of the city are the thing to build these days if you're a hotel in Bangkok, this being one of only three I'd end up visiting over the course of my final evening. Not only were they all selling booze on election day, but they'd seemed to have also extended their happy hours. At least some people know what's important.
My last dinner in Asia was also a bit of a top notch treat. Controversially run by an ex-pat Australian Chef (who the Thais say has no business cooking Thai food) nahm often makes lists of top 50 restaurants in the world but it was surprisingly easy to get into and an 8 course set menu built up by ordering something from every page on the menu didn't even break $80 a head. In Sydney you could do that on starters. The food itself is a superb take on Thai (none of this crazy fusion nonsense - who wants to eat Tandoori Pad Thai anyway?) but even with 6 weeks in Asia under my belt the last couple of dishes destroyed me for spice. I was warned my last couple of choices might be a bit too much for farangs (white people) but I thought the Chef is an Aussie, how bad could it be? Well he's obviously taken the Thai critics on by bringing the spice up to the Thai standard, which requires an asbestos tongue.
So my last day wasn't going to be spent on temples and Buddhas, I'd done enough of that already. It turned out I uncharacteristically went shopping. I wanted a T-shirt or two but the concierge at the hotel put me on to something a bit special, the Baiyoke garment centre. Strangely positioned at the foot of the tallest building in the city is a ragged looking shopping centre that houses nothing but clothing wholesalers. The ground floor was very unpromising, full of the people who sell crap Thailand t-shirts to the people who sell them to you in the market. However the 4th floor is chock full of original designs, including the source of the now infamous "Eat more rice bitch" T-shirt that has been seen on backpackers down Khao San Road for the better part of a decade. They fully expected you to buy lots of ten minimum of the same design to get their good price (about $3 a shirt) but you can get away with buying them in singles for about $5 a pop. I ended up buying 9 in about an hour. I think people must get carried away because not only are there wholesalers all through the mall selling all different quality clothing, but there is a whole floor of freight forwarders who will send them back home for you. You know it's a global world when an Indian freight forwarder is arguing with two Nigerians over the price to send what looked like about half a ton of polo shirts that probably came from Cambodia before going out of Thailand on a boat.
To get there, I had to walk through the protest site, but I felt pretty safe doing that because there were lots of empty tents and basically only a dozen protesters holding down one of the busiest intersections in the city against possibly 50 policemen who were mostly sitting on their helmets drinking tea. I get a feeling the opposition are going to have trouble maintaining any kind of momentum going up to the election next weekend. In fact there seemed to be more people selling Shutdown Bangkok merch than actual protesters. I think I was most impressed by the guy selling tents, obviously to people who had not realised camping out to block an intersection required actual camping.
The whole thing is hard to comprehend for an outsider. The root cause of the problem is former Prime Minister, Telecoms Mogul, one time owner of Manchester City (call me Frank"), special economic envoy to Cambodia and current Dubai resident (that's the new sunny place for shady people apparently) Thaksin Shinawatra who was overthrown in a coup in 2006 and fled the country facing what he claims are trumped up corruption charges, for which he was sentenced in absentia. The trouble was the north of Thailand, where most of the people live love him, so he or his proxies have been elected in every free election since 2001. Right now his sister, the awesomely named Yingluck Shinawatra (Pu to her mates) is the Prime Minister and is was her cack-handed attempt to pass a law giving Frank a pardon from those corruption charges that set the protests off. Now the jury is out on whether there was any corruption (well, any more corruption than is background level in a place like Thailand) but since then the opposition aren't exactly doing themselves many favours. Lucky Ying has given into their demands to fold parliament and is calling another election, but they weren't happy with that. They want an unelected "wise council" to rewrite the constitution before there is another election, however they don't say who would be on it (though I suspect they'd like a clause that says no-one with the last name "Shinawatra" can be elected) or what it would achieve. The trouble they have is Pu is almost certainly going to smash them at the polls again, like she did last time. I'm not 100% sure they all quite get the concept of democracy per-se, and that if you lose you need to come up with compelling arguments to win, but I might be missing just how persuasive a factor money might be in the whole thing. I'm not sure if it's loyalty of the mostly poor north to the Shinawatras (who are themselves from near Chiang Mai) or money that is the cause of the Shinawatras electoral success, but it seems like they have plenty of it.
So truth be told Bangkok doesn't seem really any different with the protests, it's just much harder to get around by car. I'm not sure if that counts as a shutdown, but I suspect if the election goes ahead as planned and Yingluck wins again there might be more drastic (and possibly more violent) consequences.
So ends my 6 and a bit weeks in Asia. One final word of apology to anyone who I spent any time with in Cambodia and had to listen to me say "Angkor Wat" as "Angkor WHAT?!?!" over and over again. As the Laotians also share the term Wat for temple I had to listen to a bunch of American 20 year olds make similar WHAT? jokes at the next table on my last night in Luang Prabang and my urge to throttle all of them brought home just how annoying it is. I apologise for any hurt or distress I may have caused, but am no way legally responsible for your lost future earnings as a result of one bad joke used repeatedly. It won't happen again.
Shutdown BKK.
Places: Chiang Mai & Bangkok
Coolest thing I did: Found the source of what looked like all the world's T-shirts.
Coolest thing I didn´t know: It was 15 degrees overnight in Bangkok last week and people died they were so unprepared for it. That 15 degrees, not -15.
I walked into 7-11 to buy a bottle of water and there it was: a sign on the fridge door saying they would not be selling alcohol of any kind due to the election from 6pm Saturday until midnight Sunday. The guy at the counter said it's because early voting for the election in February was on the next two weekends and the government bans shops and bars from selling booze on polling days. I had a bit of a panic. Forget the grenade attacks and shootings during the daytime protests in Bangkok disrupting my travel plans, what if my last weekend in Thailand involved closed bars and a lack of beer? This could be serious. I mean I get why drunk voting is a bad idea, in fact I would go far as to say several elections in Australia could have ended very differently if we banned alcohol on voting day. I just think there is no politician in Australia electorally suicidal enough to pass a blanket, day long ban on selling booze in Australia for ANY reason, let alone something as trivial as a Federal election.
Turns out the good people at 7-11 seem to be almost unique in their attempt to obey the law. I went out to the night market in Chiang Mai for dinner and had zero problems getting a beer to go with my Tom Yum soup (or several more afterwards). Some bars seemed to be closing early, others going to the effort of serving spirits in mugs or tea cups, but generally Saturday night didn't exactly seem like prohibition had been introduced.
So I decided that instead of trying to do a double headed flight from Chiang Mai to Bangkok and then on to Sydney in the same night (ending up spending 8 plus hours in the airport at Bangkok) that I'd ignore our government's travel advice and go to Bangkok for the night anyway. I managed to get on the last minute websites (and try this if you haven't) and got a room in a mystery 5 star away from the main protest sites for $70 a night. Apparently the 5 star hotels often allow their rooms out at cheap rates if they're having trouble filling them so long as the booking sites don't advertise which one it is until you book. Mine turned out to be the Marriott at Sukhumvit, famous for it's 3 story sky bar. How did I know it's away from the protest sites? Due to the work of a fine gentleman called Richard Barrow.
Richard is a travel blogger based in Bangkok and went to the trouble of setting up a Google Map of Bangkok with all the protest sites and keeping it up to date with where violent events have occurred and then doing a good job of explaining the news around it with his Twitter feed. He also has his own camera bearing remote controlled helicopter drone which he flies over the main protest sites and takes pictures to post of them. It's probably the first actual useful thing I've ever seen done with Twitter and despite the hyperbole that usually surrounds the Facebooks and Twitters of the world with how they're changing media, I really feel like this shows the future of journalism. Why on Earth CNN and the BBC treat us to the opinions and ramblings of random viewers who happen to have a computer when they should be cultivating this kind of real time, on the ground journalism is beyond me. What he's doing provides actual, usable information about where to avoid and how to stay safe instead of just saying it's simply too dangerous. DFAT have issued a travel warning telling us to avoid the protests without attempting to say where they are. The media outlets simply state how many dead or injured without any real context to where things happen and why. This is a model for the kind of localised journalism we were promised by digital media but never really saw. I hope the big outlets are taking note.
Blessed with a clear day leaving Chiang Mai by plane gets you a view of Wat Phrathat Doi Suthep, the temple on the mountain that overlooks the city. I didn't visit it this time either, but one of these days I'm sure to. All the way south you can see that nearly nothing between CM and BKK has not been dug, cut or redirected into a straight line with large scale farming giving way to canals and then the factories that have helped to turn Thailand from a poor into a middle income country. The result of that, of course is you can't actually see Bangkok itself on warm days, the pollution blowing down from the factories along the river to the Gulf of Thailand. Riding the skytrain back into town you can make out the silhouette of high rise buildings sticking out from between overhead freeways, but nothing of the detail. The other thing about riding the skytrain instead of getting a taxi is you start to get a feel for how far the CNN view of the protests really is.
People in Bangkok tend to mostly be of the camp that wants to overthrow the government and unlike last time when they adopted yellow shirts (to contrast the red shirts of the pro-government types) they've taken to decking themselves out like they're going to watch Thailand play football. At first I actually thought that what was going on when I saw all the protesters on their way too and from the blockades sensibly using public transport, all dressed in red, white and blue ribbons and hats. You get the feeling this really is a middle class protest movement by just how polite it all seemed to be. As the train passes over some of the main intersections that have been blockaded for nearly two weeks the first question you ask is "Where is everyone?". It seemed like everyone had pitched their tents then gone home, with only a scattering actually doing the hard work of shutting the city down. Really, it all seemed to be operating pretty smoothly.
So my break from the reality of guest houses lived up to expectations, with my room including a bathtub taking in a sweeping view of Bangkok below, an infinity pool and the afore mentioned 3 story sky bar with 360 view of the city. I was to later discover sky bars with 360 views of the city are the thing to build these days if you're a hotel in Bangkok, this being one of only three I'd end up visiting over the course of my final evening. Not only were they all selling booze on election day, but they'd seemed to have also extended their happy hours. At least some people know what's important.
My last dinner in Asia was also a bit of a top notch treat. Controversially run by an ex-pat Australian Chef (who the Thais say has no business cooking Thai food) nahm often makes lists of top 50 restaurants in the world but it was surprisingly easy to get into and an 8 course set menu built up by ordering something from every page on the menu didn't even break $80 a head. In Sydney you could do that on starters. The food itself is a superb take on Thai (none of this crazy fusion nonsense - who wants to eat Tandoori Pad Thai anyway?) but even with 6 weeks in Asia under my belt the last couple of dishes destroyed me for spice. I was warned my last couple of choices might be a bit too much for farangs (white people) but I thought the Chef is an Aussie, how bad could it be? Well he's obviously taken the Thai critics on by bringing the spice up to the Thai standard, which requires an asbestos tongue.
So my last day wasn't going to be spent on temples and Buddhas, I'd done enough of that already. It turned out I uncharacteristically went shopping. I wanted a T-shirt or two but the concierge at the hotel put me on to something a bit special, the Baiyoke garment centre. Strangely positioned at the foot of the tallest building in the city is a ragged looking shopping centre that houses nothing but clothing wholesalers. The ground floor was very unpromising, full of the people who sell crap Thailand t-shirts to the people who sell them to you in the market. However the 4th floor is chock full of original designs, including the source of the now infamous "Eat more rice bitch" T-shirt that has been seen on backpackers down Khao San Road for the better part of a decade. They fully expected you to buy lots of ten minimum of the same design to get their good price (about $3 a shirt) but you can get away with buying them in singles for about $5 a pop. I ended up buying 9 in about an hour. I think people must get carried away because not only are there wholesalers all through the mall selling all different quality clothing, but there is a whole floor of freight forwarders who will send them back home for you. You know it's a global world when an Indian freight forwarder is arguing with two Nigerians over the price to send what looked like about half a ton of polo shirts that probably came from Cambodia before going out of Thailand on a boat.
To get there, I had to walk through the protest site, but I felt pretty safe doing that because there were lots of empty tents and basically only a dozen protesters holding down one of the busiest intersections in the city against possibly 50 policemen who were mostly sitting on their helmets drinking tea. I get a feeling the opposition are going to have trouble maintaining any kind of momentum going up to the election next weekend. In fact there seemed to be more people selling Shutdown Bangkok merch than actual protesters. I think I was most impressed by the guy selling tents, obviously to people who had not realised camping out to block an intersection required actual camping.
The whole thing is hard to comprehend for an outsider. The root cause of the problem is former Prime Minister, Telecoms Mogul, one time owner of Manchester City (call me Frank"), special economic envoy to Cambodia and current Dubai resident (that's the new sunny place for shady people apparently) Thaksin Shinawatra who was overthrown in a coup in 2006 and fled the country facing what he claims are trumped up corruption charges, for which he was sentenced in absentia. The trouble was the north of Thailand, where most of the people live love him, so he or his proxies have been elected in every free election since 2001. Right now his sister, the awesomely named Yingluck Shinawatra (Pu to her mates) is the Prime Minister and is was her cack-handed attempt to pass a law giving Frank a pardon from those corruption charges that set the protests off. Now the jury is out on whether there was any corruption (well, any more corruption than is background level in a place like Thailand) but since then the opposition aren't exactly doing themselves many favours. Lucky Ying has given into their demands to fold parliament and is calling another election, but they weren't happy with that. They want an unelected "wise council" to rewrite the constitution before there is another election, however they don't say who would be on it (though I suspect they'd like a clause that says no-one with the last name "Shinawatra" can be elected) or what it would achieve. The trouble they have is Pu is almost certainly going to smash them at the polls again, like she did last time. I'm not 100% sure they all quite get the concept of democracy per-se, and that if you lose you need to come up with compelling arguments to win, but I might be missing just how persuasive a factor money might be in the whole thing. I'm not sure if it's loyalty of the mostly poor north to the Shinawatras (who are themselves from near Chiang Mai) or money that is the cause of the Shinawatras electoral success, but it seems like they have plenty of it.
So truth be told Bangkok doesn't seem really any different with the protests, it's just much harder to get around by car. I'm not sure if that counts as a shutdown, but I suspect if the election goes ahead as planned and Yingluck wins again there might be more drastic (and possibly more violent) consequences.
So ends my 6 and a bit weeks in Asia. One final word of apology to anyone who I spent any time with in Cambodia and had to listen to me say "Angkor Wat" as "Angkor WHAT?!?!" over and over again. As the Laotians also share the term Wat for temple I had to listen to a bunch of American 20 year olds make similar WHAT? jokes at the next table on my last night in Luang Prabang and my urge to throttle all of them brought home just how annoying it is. I apologise for any hurt or distress I may have caused, but am no way legally responsible for your lost future earnings as a result of one bad joke used repeatedly. It won't happen again.
Saturday, January 25, 2014
Euro Disney
Chiang Mai :: Thailand
Where I strangely enough, go bowling.
Places: Luang Prabang, Pakbeng, Huay Xai & Chiang Mai.
Coolest thing I did: Swam in the luminescent blue water of the Kuang Si Waterfalls. Lucky you go in off a rope swing because it's so cold you'd probably chicken out if you went in slowly.
Coolest thing I didn´t know: Monks do everything at the temples and monasteries here - I saw three of them repairing a brick wall dressed in full robes. Felt sorry for the one chiselling away and getting brick dust in his eyes. I guess safety goggles count as worldly possessions and are thus banned. But strangely chisels are not.
Laos isn't a country to be tackled with a short amount of time as I discovered again on the 8 hour minibus ride from Phonsavan to Luang Prabang. Thankfully this is much quicker than the 10 hours taken by the normal bus that picks up strangers every 10 to 15 mins. This is mostly due to the fact the minibus drivers think they're rally drivers and there's about 250kms of beautiful mountain road to cross which they tend to try and do at top speed. Thankfully it's asphalt all the way now so unless you get motion sickness (like one poor Chilean girl who threw up pretty much for 8 hours solid) it's a much better way to travel. You pass along forested roads lined with small villages at break neck speed, so taking pictures is pretty much out of the question because you're too busy holding on for your life. While the driver only stopped once for a food and toilet break he did stop twice to buy fresh chicken (and I mean fresh - the women who sold them broke their necks and put them in a plastic bag for him, which he then just put in the back with our luggage).
So where do you start with Luang Prabang? It's pretty much the premier tourist destination of Northern Laos and if you're heading this way you're going to at least pass through it. It's the old Imperial capital situated on a peninsula formed by the confluence of the Mekong and Nam Kahn rivers, which means it's got a palace and a whole load of temples. It's also been developed in such a way that it's kind of like Disneyland for old French People. Even the cheap guest houses are teak floored, you can get very good croissants & there isn't really anything to do in the town except look at Buddha statues. It gives the whole place a very civilized feel, which made me wonder why I was still seeing a lot of 20 year olds wandering around town in the mid afternoon hung over. That mystery would be solved later.
My first day was spent doing what you're supposed to do, getting up early to watch monks get harassed by camera wielding Chinese tourists while the locals are trying to give them alms, going to see the Palace and looking at a lot of temples. There was a King of Laos living here right up until the Communists got rid of him in 1975 so the palace is full of modern King stuff. What I learned is if you're the king, people from other countries give you heaps of stuff. Our offering of a boomerang was a bit soft when placed next to a cabinet of gold and silver Vishnus from India. I also learned the King had a thing for Cadillacs of the 1950s, but then persisted in driving them well into the 1970s. Compared to the Thai King the King of Laos lived a much less Hollywood lifestyle.
I enjoyed my day of going to see the stuff outside town a bit better. I got up at the crack of dawn again to get on a boat to chug up the Mekong to see the Pak Ou Caves. While it's frigid on the water at 8am (you can see mist rising directly off the surface, like smoke) you get to see the layered mountain ranges that you'd expect from a Chinese watercolour as a backdrop to fishermen casting their nets, rice being grown and Oxen grazing away. The Caves themselves are famous for being chock full of Buddhas of all different sizes, and it's pretty cool to have the boat pull up to some stairs that run from the surface of the water and then climb up into the caves. On the way we stopped at a village whose prime manufactured good was home made rice whiskey in a bottle that contains either a scorpion or a snake (or sometimes if you're lucky, both). I'm not sure what magic powers it gives you, but I assume one of them is drunkenness.
The afternoon was spent going to the Kuang Si waterfalls, which involves another hair raising minivan rive through the rice paddies to falls you could only describe as stunning. I'm not sure if it's the sediment that gives the water it's radiant sky blue colour but after the main drop of the falls there's level after level of smaller cascades all turning from white water back to glowing blue. Towards the bottom there is also a tree with a rope swing you can climb up to and use to avoid thinking about how cold the water is before you jump into one of the pools deep enough to swim in. It's cold enough to knock the air out of you as you go under the first time (or in my case, the only time).
There is a night market that pretty much shuts down half the main street so they can sell the same 3 or 4 items over and over again. It's a novelty at first, but when you actually want to get anywhere the fact the stalls are rammed so close together it becomes a bit of a nightmare to get anywhere. I simply don't understand how so many can survive selling those baggy pants with elephants printed on them the gap year crowd seem to fall in love with the second they leave the airport in Bangkok. I'd set up a stall that sold silly looking baggy pants with tigers on them instead. You need product differentiation to move some units.
Due to the fact that the town is basically being run for old French People and not backpackers they've tastefully arranged all the bars behind the hill (whose name is pronounced "pussy" causing no end of amusement) that divides the town and all of them tend to close down even earlier than the 11pm curfew. I'd been sitting around the fire pit at one bar talking to a couple of Austrian guys who decided that we'd eat a Lao BBQ and then go to the bowling alley. This was an object lesson in the kind of information you don't get when you get too old to stay at hostels. A Lao BBQ is basically where they take the middle of your table away, drop a bucket of glowing hot coals into it, put a cone shaped hot plate on top and then give you a stack of meat, vegies and eggs to cook on it. One the bar closed at 11 we went down the end of the bar street and got in a tuk-tuk with another 5 people which formed a convoy going out of town to the bowling alley.
Apparently it's a poorly kept secret the bowling alley laughs at the mandatory curfew and along with actual bowling you can also buy beer or Lao Lao by the bottle. The Austrians wanted to see if we could get buckets (a SE Asia phenomenon where you buy a 1L tub off booze and soft drink per person) but it turns out if we wanted them we'd have to make our own. So we got the way-to-big ice bucket from behind the bar (though they had no ice) and seeing as our choice was warm 7Up or cold Fanta we ended up with a giant bucket of rice whiskey and Fanta. Needless to say the bowling is secondary and I didn't even score 150 and still somehow managed to win. But I'm pretty sure everyone ended up taking the wrong go, often taking their own second shot and then the next persons first. Much fun had by all. It also pretty much wrote off my last day in LP as well.
So in order to get back to Thailand to come home I decided to take the two day slow boat instead of the 18 hour bus ride to the town of Huay Xai which marks the point of the Mekong where you can cross into Thailand. It's a fairly comfortable trip and again while it's very cold in the morning you get to see lots of limestone mountains, rural scenes and things like a barge carrying a truck, which in turn is carrying two elephants. There isn't much to do but read, chat with people, drink beer and watch the world go by, but it's also a decent way to travel and I'm glad I skipped the bus. The town of Pakbeng is the only large settlement about half way, but it's simply a street of guest houses and places for tourists to eat and drink. There are many more people going downriver the other way and you can tell them because they're all almost universally 21 and not one of them has enough clothes because they've just spent 2 weeks in Thailand wearing shorts and thongs. It also means that if you're coming the other way you're the last boat into town (it takes longer upriver) and you're having to beg and borrow for a room to stay in. One guest house owner let me stay in the upstairs room in her own house, and told me I was lucky because she'd had 10 people in her two upstairs rooms the night before. Seeing as she charged me full price anyway I'd say it's not a bad business running a guest house there.
Hauy Xai is another one street town which you feel has just been choked to death by progress. It was for a long time the only place to cross into it's sister town of Chaing Kong on the Thai side and there was a local industry of small ferry boats crossing back and forth, priced entirely by agreement, however last December a nice new road bridge with proper border controls on both ends opened up and you can now pretty much avoid both towns if you don't end up showing up a night like we did. I'm sure they'll find a new industry, it sounds like they always have. During the CIA's secret war in Laos apparently more Laotian heroin passed over the border bound for Bangkok and abroad in Huay Xai than anywhere else along the border. During the Laotian Civil war (pretty much contemporary with the Vietnam War) the CIA was training minority guerilla armies in the north to fight the Pathet Lao Communist guerillas. Most notable of these ethnic groups were the Hmong, many of who had to flee to America after the Communist won, and then helped form the plot of the excellent Clint Eastwood movie Gran Torino. One of the side effects of this was these various ethnic groups were already growing opium to smuggle into China, and later Thailand and ramped up production in order to buy extra weapons for the cause, which the CIA didn't condone but did nothing to stop. Much of that ended up refined in Northern Thailand and then eventually shot into the arms of Vietnam Vets between Bangkok and New York.
Crossing the bridge into Thailand is a pretty stark reminder of just how much poorer Laos is when compared to it's bigger neighbour. Even the rice paddies you drive through on the way from Chiang Rai to Chiang Mai look more organised. When the driver stopped for us to buy food at 7-11 (I avoided the 7 Baht hot dog - about 20c...) and you see how nice the cars are and note the dual carriageway and the banked mountain turns. you realise things have changed since the Thai economy collapsed in 1990s. Which of course was the last time I was in Chiang Mai, and to tell the truth besides the moat at walls around the city (which are more restored than I remember, but my memory of this place seems to be failing me) I don't recognise much of it at all. While it did cater to all tourists on all budgets I remember the backpacker scene being a bit grungy and disorganised. Now you can only describe it as backpacking on an industrial scale. Backpackers and money go in one end and Elephant rides, Hill tribe treks, plates of Green Curry and elephant pants come out the other. The old city walls are now rammed with hostels, guest houses, motor scooter rental agencies and eateries to suit all levels of backpacker budget, there are endless trekking agencies, massage places, tattoo parlours and completely new to me, gyms for training at Thai Boxing in. There seems to be no end of skinny white guys with fresh tattoos walking out of these places looking like they've been comfortably having their arses kicked for a fortnight or so. Luckily there also loads of places to buy "supplements" if you need to bulk up a bit and Pad Thai isn't going to do it for you.
The idea of tourists who have no training learning Thai Kickboxing seems ludicrous to me. One of my most vivid memory of Bangkok in the 1990s was the tuk tuk driver who after not being discouraged by us not wanting to visit a whorehouse or buy any drugs asked if we wanted to see boxing. So we said yes and about 20 minutes later we're in something that can only be described as a big shed full of Thais (and no white people) gambling on two blokes brutally kicking each other in the head. It was the most out there thing I'd ever seen (this was pretty early in my travelling days) but the idea you'd want blokes that can do that sparring with you after a weeks' training seems a bit mad to me. But I guess I'm not their target market.
So this is pretty much the end. All I do now is fly back to Bangkok and get on another plane to Sydney and Real Life, once again.
Where I strangely enough, go bowling.
Places: Luang Prabang, Pakbeng, Huay Xai & Chiang Mai.
Coolest thing I did: Swam in the luminescent blue water of the Kuang Si Waterfalls. Lucky you go in off a rope swing because it's so cold you'd probably chicken out if you went in slowly.
Coolest thing I didn´t know: Monks do everything at the temples and monasteries here - I saw three of them repairing a brick wall dressed in full robes. Felt sorry for the one chiselling away and getting brick dust in his eyes. I guess safety goggles count as worldly possessions and are thus banned. But strangely chisels are not.
Laos isn't a country to be tackled with a short amount of time as I discovered again on the 8 hour minibus ride from Phonsavan to Luang Prabang. Thankfully this is much quicker than the 10 hours taken by the normal bus that picks up strangers every 10 to 15 mins. This is mostly due to the fact the minibus drivers think they're rally drivers and there's about 250kms of beautiful mountain road to cross which they tend to try and do at top speed. Thankfully it's asphalt all the way now so unless you get motion sickness (like one poor Chilean girl who threw up pretty much for 8 hours solid) it's a much better way to travel. You pass along forested roads lined with small villages at break neck speed, so taking pictures is pretty much out of the question because you're too busy holding on for your life. While the driver only stopped once for a food and toilet break he did stop twice to buy fresh chicken (and I mean fresh - the women who sold them broke their necks and put them in a plastic bag for him, which he then just put in the back with our luggage).
So where do you start with Luang Prabang? It's pretty much the premier tourist destination of Northern Laos and if you're heading this way you're going to at least pass through it. It's the old Imperial capital situated on a peninsula formed by the confluence of the Mekong and Nam Kahn rivers, which means it's got a palace and a whole load of temples. It's also been developed in such a way that it's kind of like Disneyland for old French People. Even the cheap guest houses are teak floored, you can get very good croissants & there isn't really anything to do in the town except look at Buddha statues. It gives the whole place a very civilized feel, which made me wonder why I was still seeing a lot of 20 year olds wandering around town in the mid afternoon hung over. That mystery would be solved later.
My first day was spent doing what you're supposed to do, getting up early to watch monks get harassed by camera wielding Chinese tourists while the locals are trying to give them alms, going to see the Palace and looking at a lot of temples. There was a King of Laos living here right up until the Communists got rid of him in 1975 so the palace is full of modern King stuff. What I learned is if you're the king, people from other countries give you heaps of stuff. Our offering of a boomerang was a bit soft when placed next to a cabinet of gold and silver Vishnus from India. I also learned the King had a thing for Cadillacs of the 1950s, but then persisted in driving them well into the 1970s. Compared to the Thai King the King of Laos lived a much less Hollywood lifestyle.
I enjoyed my day of going to see the stuff outside town a bit better. I got up at the crack of dawn again to get on a boat to chug up the Mekong to see the Pak Ou Caves. While it's frigid on the water at 8am (you can see mist rising directly off the surface, like smoke) you get to see the layered mountain ranges that you'd expect from a Chinese watercolour as a backdrop to fishermen casting their nets, rice being grown and Oxen grazing away. The Caves themselves are famous for being chock full of Buddhas of all different sizes, and it's pretty cool to have the boat pull up to some stairs that run from the surface of the water and then climb up into the caves. On the way we stopped at a village whose prime manufactured good was home made rice whiskey in a bottle that contains either a scorpion or a snake (or sometimes if you're lucky, both). I'm not sure what magic powers it gives you, but I assume one of them is drunkenness.
The afternoon was spent going to the Kuang Si waterfalls, which involves another hair raising minivan rive through the rice paddies to falls you could only describe as stunning. I'm not sure if it's the sediment that gives the water it's radiant sky blue colour but after the main drop of the falls there's level after level of smaller cascades all turning from white water back to glowing blue. Towards the bottom there is also a tree with a rope swing you can climb up to and use to avoid thinking about how cold the water is before you jump into one of the pools deep enough to swim in. It's cold enough to knock the air out of you as you go under the first time (or in my case, the only time).
There is a night market that pretty much shuts down half the main street so they can sell the same 3 or 4 items over and over again. It's a novelty at first, but when you actually want to get anywhere the fact the stalls are rammed so close together it becomes a bit of a nightmare to get anywhere. I simply don't understand how so many can survive selling those baggy pants with elephants printed on them the gap year crowd seem to fall in love with the second they leave the airport in Bangkok. I'd set up a stall that sold silly looking baggy pants with tigers on them instead. You need product differentiation to move some units.
Due to the fact that the town is basically being run for old French People and not backpackers they've tastefully arranged all the bars behind the hill (whose name is pronounced "pussy" causing no end of amusement) that divides the town and all of them tend to close down even earlier than the 11pm curfew. I'd been sitting around the fire pit at one bar talking to a couple of Austrian guys who decided that we'd eat a Lao BBQ and then go to the bowling alley. This was an object lesson in the kind of information you don't get when you get too old to stay at hostels. A Lao BBQ is basically where they take the middle of your table away, drop a bucket of glowing hot coals into it, put a cone shaped hot plate on top and then give you a stack of meat, vegies and eggs to cook on it. One the bar closed at 11 we went down the end of the bar street and got in a tuk-tuk with another 5 people which formed a convoy going out of town to the bowling alley.
Apparently it's a poorly kept secret the bowling alley laughs at the mandatory curfew and along with actual bowling you can also buy beer or Lao Lao by the bottle. The Austrians wanted to see if we could get buckets (a SE Asia phenomenon where you buy a 1L tub off booze and soft drink per person) but it turns out if we wanted them we'd have to make our own. So we got the way-to-big ice bucket from behind the bar (though they had no ice) and seeing as our choice was warm 7Up or cold Fanta we ended up with a giant bucket of rice whiskey and Fanta. Needless to say the bowling is secondary and I didn't even score 150 and still somehow managed to win. But I'm pretty sure everyone ended up taking the wrong go, often taking their own second shot and then the next persons first. Much fun had by all. It also pretty much wrote off my last day in LP as well.
So in order to get back to Thailand to come home I decided to take the two day slow boat instead of the 18 hour bus ride to the town of Huay Xai which marks the point of the Mekong where you can cross into Thailand. It's a fairly comfortable trip and again while it's very cold in the morning you get to see lots of limestone mountains, rural scenes and things like a barge carrying a truck, which in turn is carrying two elephants. There isn't much to do but read, chat with people, drink beer and watch the world go by, but it's also a decent way to travel and I'm glad I skipped the bus. The town of Pakbeng is the only large settlement about half way, but it's simply a street of guest houses and places for tourists to eat and drink. There are many more people going downriver the other way and you can tell them because they're all almost universally 21 and not one of them has enough clothes because they've just spent 2 weeks in Thailand wearing shorts and thongs. It also means that if you're coming the other way you're the last boat into town (it takes longer upriver) and you're having to beg and borrow for a room to stay in. One guest house owner let me stay in the upstairs room in her own house, and told me I was lucky because she'd had 10 people in her two upstairs rooms the night before. Seeing as she charged me full price anyway I'd say it's not a bad business running a guest house there.
Hauy Xai is another one street town which you feel has just been choked to death by progress. It was for a long time the only place to cross into it's sister town of Chaing Kong on the Thai side and there was a local industry of small ferry boats crossing back and forth, priced entirely by agreement, however last December a nice new road bridge with proper border controls on both ends opened up and you can now pretty much avoid both towns if you don't end up showing up a night like we did. I'm sure they'll find a new industry, it sounds like they always have. During the CIA's secret war in Laos apparently more Laotian heroin passed over the border bound for Bangkok and abroad in Huay Xai than anywhere else along the border. During the Laotian Civil war (pretty much contemporary with the Vietnam War) the CIA was training minority guerilla armies in the north to fight the Pathet Lao Communist guerillas. Most notable of these ethnic groups were the Hmong, many of who had to flee to America after the Communist won, and then helped form the plot of the excellent Clint Eastwood movie Gran Torino. One of the side effects of this was these various ethnic groups were already growing opium to smuggle into China, and later Thailand and ramped up production in order to buy extra weapons for the cause, which the CIA didn't condone but did nothing to stop. Much of that ended up refined in Northern Thailand and then eventually shot into the arms of Vietnam Vets between Bangkok and New York.
Crossing the bridge into Thailand is a pretty stark reminder of just how much poorer Laos is when compared to it's bigger neighbour. Even the rice paddies you drive through on the way from Chiang Rai to Chiang Mai look more organised. When the driver stopped for us to buy food at 7-11 (I avoided the 7 Baht hot dog - about 20c...) and you see how nice the cars are and note the dual carriageway and the banked mountain turns. you realise things have changed since the Thai economy collapsed in 1990s. Which of course was the last time I was in Chiang Mai, and to tell the truth besides the moat at walls around the city (which are more restored than I remember, but my memory of this place seems to be failing me) I don't recognise much of it at all. While it did cater to all tourists on all budgets I remember the backpacker scene being a bit grungy and disorganised. Now you can only describe it as backpacking on an industrial scale. Backpackers and money go in one end and Elephant rides, Hill tribe treks, plates of Green Curry and elephant pants come out the other. The old city walls are now rammed with hostels, guest houses, motor scooter rental agencies and eateries to suit all levels of backpacker budget, there are endless trekking agencies, massage places, tattoo parlours and completely new to me, gyms for training at Thai Boxing in. There seems to be no end of skinny white guys with fresh tattoos walking out of these places looking like they've been comfortably having their arses kicked for a fortnight or so. Luckily there also loads of places to buy "supplements" if you need to bulk up a bit and Pad Thai isn't going to do it for you.
The idea of tourists who have no training learning Thai Kickboxing seems ludicrous to me. One of my most vivid memory of Bangkok in the 1990s was the tuk tuk driver who after not being discouraged by us not wanting to visit a whorehouse or buy any drugs asked if we wanted to see boxing. So we said yes and about 20 minutes later we're in something that can only be described as a big shed full of Thais (and no white people) gambling on two blokes brutally kicking each other in the head. It was the most out there thing I'd ever seen (this was pretty early in my travelling days) but the idea you'd want blokes that can do that sparring with you after a weeks' training seems a bit mad to me. But I guess I'm not their target market.
So this is pretty much the end. All I do now is fly back to Bangkok and get on another plane to Sydney and Real Life, once again.
Saturday, January 18, 2014
Whiskey in the jar
Phonsavan :: Laos
One part 2000 year old mystery, one part Vietnam-era carpet bombing.
Places: Vientiane, Phonsavan & The Plain of Jars.
Coolest thing I did: Walked between two of the Jars sites along a ride pock-marked with massive bomb craters. It's amazing to see just how much life returns to normal. And how much never will.
Coolest thing I didn´t know: The ANZ bank is massive in both Laos and Cambodia. They have ATMs everywhere.
My first night in Vientiane taught me a valuable lesson about splurging after days of cold water and guest houses on a nice hotel room all to yourself - first check if your room happens to share a wall with one of the more lively bars in town. Turns out my sunset view of the Mekong was shared by Bor Pen Nyang on the same floor as me in the next building and they played pretty lose with the 11:30pm curfew for all bars. I kind of needed the sleep after the night bus so I ended up simply sleeping in until lunch time and deciding to not fight it but simply go to the bar the next night and stay there until closing time. An interesting mix of young Laotian kids, backpackers, prosti...sorry, bar girls, and the constantly drunk American men in their late 40s or early 50s that seemed to be everywhere in Vientiane. No "dates" like the older German blokes, they simply seemed to be there to get drunk all day and occasionally utter unintelligible nonsense at anyone close enough. I suspect they're too young to be Vietnam Vets, so I was curious about the story of why there were so many there, but not one of them were in any way conversational, so the mystery remains.
The plus side is before going over I could sit on my own balcony and watch the sun turn red as it sunk below the Thai hills just on the other side of the Mekong River. That's pretty cool.
My sightseeing day of Vientiane started late due to my shared wall with the Bor (which is how I hear South Africans saying "bar" in my head) but that's ok, because there isn't really all that much to see. The nations' most important pagoda is a big gold thing called Pha That Luang, but to be honest after Burma a gold stupa has to be pretty damn awesome to impress me at the moment. The twin Wats (which I think means temple) of Si Saket & Hophakaew have a little bit extra, with the former being home to a surrounding wall covered in niches holding 1000s of ceramic or silver mini-Buddha's and the later being the long term home of the Emerald Buddha that now sits in the Royal Palace in Bangkok.
It seems like when Laos was the big wheel in South East Asia they acquired the town of Chiang Mai (now in Northern Thailand) and along with it the Emerald (really jade) Buddha. It sat in their capital of Luang Prabang for years, until the capital was shifted to Vientiane and it sat nicely in a purpose built Wat in Hophakaew. By then however, Thailand (then called Siam) was the new power in town. The Siamese General Thong Duang (who would later be King of Siam) showed up with his army and sacked Vientiane, took one look at the Emerald Buddha and went "I'm having that". It's been in Bangkok ever since, and is now considered the emblem of Thailand. That's got to hurt a bit if you're from Laos. I'm sure it does.
Far more interesting than the ancient history of course is the recent stuff. A 1km walk out of town takes you to the COPE centre, which has the job of providing Laotians with prosthetic limbs. The reason so many prosthetic limbs are needed is also explained in fairly graphic detail, and like the genocide tour of Phnom Penh it will pull you up a bit. Simply put, for about a decade during the Vietnam war the US air force dropped somewhere north of 2 million tons of bombs over Laos (and to a lesser extent Eastern Cambodia), much of that cluster munitions, which are basically big bombs with hundreds of little bombs inside. Perhaps 25% of these did not detonate on impact, so are still out there somewhere. Farmer, fishermen, all sorts of people have been finding them by accident and losing limbs since. COPE is responsible for finding these people (as many of them in rural areas don't know they can get help) and then fitting and building the limbs and providing physio and training on how to use them. Right at the end is a video of the signing of a UN convention against the further use of cluster munitions, in large part to the far more recent use in the former Yugoslavia in the late 1990s. I was glad to see Australia was one of the first to sign it, and perhaps not surprised neither the US or Russia have.
So in the interests of time I decided to take a Lao Airlines flight from Vientiane to Phonsavan to see the Plain of Jars, mostly to avoid a 12 hour bus ride covering the 250ish km to get here. That tells you something about the state of the roads in Northern Laos. It was a 30 minute flight and mostly clear so you can see out the window at the flat red earth giving way to jungle covered mountains and start to see why it might take 12 hours, as you don't see any paved roads up here. There was a fair bit of cloud over coming in to land and there's nothing like being in a turbo prop in a bumpy landing over mountains on an airline you've only heard of because they made international news last October crashing a plain into the Mekong and killing everyone on board to get the heart started. However we did get a glimpse as the hills and forest end and the plain opens up to the horizon. What you can also make out is bomb craters, even now, making it a bit like the surface of the moon.
The town of Phonsavan is a new creation, with the original village of almost completely destroyed during the 60s by carpet bombing, and it has to be said without the sheer luck of being located next to the Plain of Jars it wouldn't be worth visiting. It's basically one dusty street with a few tour agencies, guest houses and Pho places, and not much else. Add to the fact it's bitterly cold this time of year it doesn't really lend itself to hanging around just enjoying the ambiance. After lunch and getting myself booked on a tour the Laotians kept telling me where the market was, so I thought I should go to the market. If you've been to any 3rd world market, it's much the same, with non-refrigerated meat the main smell and a mish-mash of stuff made in China for sale. The only really interesting bit was watching two blokes trying to buy a live chicken from a young woman with wicker cages full of them. The two guys seemed to be saying things along the lines of "This isn't the best chicken, but I'll take it of your hands for a discount", and her going "Crap! This is the best chicken you'll find here. I should be charging you double!" and a lot of back and forth, mostly involving the chicken being poked in ways that it didn't seem entirely comfortable with.
So on to the Plain of Jars, which is a mystery wrapped inside a 2000 year old sandstone jar. Basically for reasons no-one can fathom, some people (no-one is sure of who) carved hundreds of big stone jars (the largest is taller than me) and placed them in clusters in this one part of Laos. Of course there was no Laos back then, and without any form of written history of contemporary ruins it's left to total speculation as to what the jars were for. The most popular are funerary urns (what you put the ashes of dead people in) amongst the egg heads, however the Laotians seem to like the idea they were filled with Lao Lao (rice whiskey) and there were some massive parties up here in the hills. Not sure if it's more likely, but it's a much better story. They're set in the most spectacular locations, even if your guide will spend a lot of time telling you to avoid the edge of the massive bomb craters everywhere.
The local people are mostly from elsewhere in Laos, with most of the originals fleeing overseas as refugees and they've somehow come to peace with the fact they live in a land strewn with unexploded ordinance (UXO to the bomb nerds in the UN). Apparently every now and then cows will simply stray into the wrong spot and (as the guide explained to me) get turned into hamburger. That's kind of seen as a cost of doing business. The wet season sees three months of constant rain, which tend to uncover more buried munitions so each planting season is a new adventure. So what do these people do? They melt the bomb casings down and make cutlery out of them for sale in home kilns. They also made stuff for the tourists, but I was a little concerned if people were going out and looking for scrap from unexploded bombs in order to make me a key chain in the shape of a dove. I don't know if we want to be encouraging that.
While we were in town the Mine Advisory Group were doing a routine inspection of the school for UXOs before the term starts. The mind boggles at how you rationalise that in your mind as a parent. My only thought is living here must be worth it, perhaps the farmland is especially good, or the tourist dollars help otherwise it seems like a terrible compromise, like those people who live on the slopes of volcanoes in Central America.
You look at the fact there was a bombing of Laos on average every 8 minutes for 9 or so years and wonder what mentality allowed that to seem like a good idea, but the consequences are most likely the furthest from the minds of those planning and executing these things. The Vietnam war was going badly for the Americans because the Viet Cong were constantly able to resupply themselves with Chinese weapons and more men via the Ho Chi Minh trail which ran through Eastern Laos and Cambodia, so the obvious military option (if you're a super power who has built the most devastating war machine in human history) is to simply keep bombing it until it stops. It's the same mentality that allowed the CIA to train local minorities inside Laos to fight against it's own Communist forces and to turn a blind eye when those same minorities buy they're weapons and provisions using money made from growing opium poppies. The politicians give you an objective (keep the Communists out of South Vietnam or Laos) and you do whatever you're allowed to under international law to achieve that objective. An Army that wasn't willing to do whatever it took to win wouldn't actually be a very good army. However, when you see the outcomes, you see all the people suffering and then you STILL won't sign treaties banning the use of weapons that would stop it from happening again then the blame goes squarely at the feet of the politicians. At the end of the day, the soldiers follow their orders.
So having diverted myself off track a little bit to see something you'll only see in Laos it's time to start heading back towards Thailand for the final week in time to get back to Bangkok for my flight home. In one short week it all comes to an end for now.
One part 2000 year old mystery, one part Vietnam-era carpet bombing.
Places: Vientiane, Phonsavan & The Plain of Jars.
Coolest thing I did: Walked between two of the Jars sites along a ride pock-marked with massive bomb craters. It's amazing to see just how much life returns to normal. And how much never will.
Coolest thing I didn´t know: The ANZ bank is massive in both Laos and Cambodia. They have ATMs everywhere.
My first night in Vientiane taught me a valuable lesson about splurging after days of cold water and guest houses on a nice hotel room all to yourself - first check if your room happens to share a wall with one of the more lively bars in town. Turns out my sunset view of the Mekong was shared by Bor Pen Nyang on the same floor as me in the next building and they played pretty lose with the 11:30pm curfew for all bars. I kind of needed the sleep after the night bus so I ended up simply sleeping in until lunch time and deciding to not fight it but simply go to the bar the next night and stay there until closing time. An interesting mix of young Laotian kids, backpackers, prosti...sorry, bar girls, and the constantly drunk American men in their late 40s or early 50s that seemed to be everywhere in Vientiane. No "dates" like the older German blokes, they simply seemed to be there to get drunk all day and occasionally utter unintelligible nonsense at anyone close enough. I suspect they're too young to be Vietnam Vets, so I was curious about the story of why there were so many there, but not one of them were in any way conversational, so the mystery remains.
The plus side is before going over I could sit on my own balcony and watch the sun turn red as it sunk below the Thai hills just on the other side of the Mekong River. That's pretty cool.
My sightseeing day of Vientiane started late due to my shared wall with the Bor (which is how I hear South Africans saying "bar" in my head) but that's ok, because there isn't really all that much to see. The nations' most important pagoda is a big gold thing called Pha That Luang, but to be honest after Burma a gold stupa has to be pretty damn awesome to impress me at the moment. The twin Wats (which I think means temple) of Si Saket & Hophakaew have a little bit extra, with the former being home to a surrounding wall covered in niches holding 1000s of ceramic or silver mini-Buddha's and the later being the long term home of the Emerald Buddha that now sits in the Royal Palace in Bangkok.
It seems like when Laos was the big wheel in South East Asia they acquired the town of Chiang Mai (now in Northern Thailand) and along with it the Emerald (really jade) Buddha. It sat in their capital of Luang Prabang for years, until the capital was shifted to Vientiane and it sat nicely in a purpose built Wat in Hophakaew. By then however, Thailand (then called Siam) was the new power in town. The Siamese General Thong Duang (who would later be King of Siam) showed up with his army and sacked Vientiane, took one look at the Emerald Buddha and went "I'm having that". It's been in Bangkok ever since, and is now considered the emblem of Thailand. That's got to hurt a bit if you're from Laos. I'm sure it does.
Far more interesting than the ancient history of course is the recent stuff. A 1km walk out of town takes you to the COPE centre, which has the job of providing Laotians with prosthetic limbs. The reason so many prosthetic limbs are needed is also explained in fairly graphic detail, and like the genocide tour of Phnom Penh it will pull you up a bit. Simply put, for about a decade during the Vietnam war the US air force dropped somewhere north of 2 million tons of bombs over Laos (and to a lesser extent Eastern Cambodia), much of that cluster munitions, which are basically big bombs with hundreds of little bombs inside. Perhaps 25% of these did not detonate on impact, so are still out there somewhere. Farmer, fishermen, all sorts of people have been finding them by accident and losing limbs since. COPE is responsible for finding these people (as many of them in rural areas don't know they can get help) and then fitting and building the limbs and providing physio and training on how to use them. Right at the end is a video of the signing of a UN convention against the further use of cluster munitions, in large part to the far more recent use in the former Yugoslavia in the late 1990s. I was glad to see Australia was one of the first to sign it, and perhaps not surprised neither the US or Russia have.
So in the interests of time I decided to take a Lao Airlines flight from Vientiane to Phonsavan to see the Plain of Jars, mostly to avoid a 12 hour bus ride covering the 250ish km to get here. That tells you something about the state of the roads in Northern Laos. It was a 30 minute flight and mostly clear so you can see out the window at the flat red earth giving way to jungle covered mountains and start to see why it might take 12 hours, as you don't see any paved roads up here. There was a fair bit of cloud over coming in to land and there's nothing like being in a turbo prop in a bumpy landing over mountains on an airline you've only heard of because they made international news last October crashing a plain into the Mekong and killing everyone on board to get the heart started. However we did get a glimpse as the hills and forest end and the plain opens up to the horizon. What you can also make out is bomb craters, even now, making it a bit like the surface of the moon.
The town of Phonsavan is a new creation, with the original village of almost completely destroyed during the 60s by carpet bombing, and it has to be said without the sheer luck of being located next to the Plain of Jars it wouldn't be worth visiting. It's basically one dusty street with a few tour agencies, guest houses and Pho places, and not much else. Add to the fact it's bitterly cold this time of year it doesn't really lend itself to hanging around just enjoying the ambiance. After lunch and getting myself booked on a tour the Laotians kept telling me where the market was, so I thought I should go to the market. If you've been to any 3rd world market, it's much the same, with non-refrigerated meat the main smell and a mish-mash of stuff made in China for sale. The only really interesting bit was watching two blokes trying to buy a live chicken from a young woman with wicker cages full of them. The two guys seemed to be saying things along the lines of "This isn't the best chicken, but I'll take it of your hands for a discount", and her going "Crap! This is the best chicken you'll find here. I should be charging you double!" and a lot of back and forth, mostly involving the chicken being poked in ways that it didn't seem entirely comfortable with.
So on to the Plain of Jars, which is a mystery wrapped inside a 2000 year old sandstone jar. Basically for reasons no-one can fathom, some people (no-one is sure of who) carved hundreds of big stone jars (the largest is taller than me) and placed them in clusters in this one part of Laos. Of course there was no Laos back then, and without any form of written history of contemporary ruins it's left to total speculation as to what the jars were for. The most popular are funerary urns (what you put the ashes of dead people in) amongst the egg heads, however the Laotians seem to like the idea they were filled with Lao Lao (rice whiskey) and there were some massive parties up here in the hills. Not sure if it's more likely, but it's a much better story. They're set in the most spectacular locations, even if your guide will spend a lot of time telling you to avoid the edge of the massive bomb craters everywhere.
The local people are mostly from elsewhere in Laos, with most of the originals fleeing overseas as refugees and they've somehow come to peace with the fact they live in a land strewn with unexploded ordinance (UXO to the bomb nerds in the UN). Apparently every now and then cows will simply stray into the wrong spot and (as the guide explained to me) get turned into hamburger. That's kind of seen as a cost of doing business. The wet season sees three months of constant rain, which tend to uncover more buried munitions so each planting season is a new adventure. So what do these people do? They melt the bomb casings down and make cutlery out of them for sale in home kilns. They also made stuff for the tourists, but I was a little concerned if people were going out and looking for scrap from unexploded bombs in order to make me a key chain in the shape of a dove. I don't know if we want to be encouraging that.
While we were in town the Mine Advisory Group were doing a routine inspection of the school for UXOs before the term starts. The mind boggles at how you rationalise that in your mind as a parent. My only thought is living here must be worth it, perhaps the farmland is especially good, or the tourist dollars help otherwise it seems like a terrible compromise, like those people who live on the slopes of volcanoes in Central America.
You look at the fact there was a bombing of Laos on average every 8 minutes for 9 or so years and wonder what mentality allowed that to seem like a good idea, but the consequences are most likely the furthest from the minds of those planning and executing these things. The Vietnam war was going badly for the Americans because the Viet Cong were constantly able to resupply themselves with Chinese weapons and more men via the Ho Chi Minh trail which ran through Eastern Laos and Cambodia, so the obvious military option (if you're a super power who has built the most devastating war machine in human history) is to simply keep bombing it until it stops. It's the same mentality that allowed the CIA to train local minorities inside Laos to fight against it's own Communist forces and to turn a blind eye when those same minorities buy they're weapons and provisions using money made from growing opium poppies. The politicians give you an objective (keep the Communists out of South Vietnam or Laos) and you do whatever you're allowed to under international law to achieve that objective. An Army that wasn't willing to do whatever it took to win wouldn't actually be a very good army. However, when you see the outcomes, you see all the people suffering and then you STILL won't sign treaties banning the use of weapons that would stop it from happening again then the blame goes squarely at the feet of the politicians. At the end of the day, the soldiers follow their orders.
So having diverted myself off track a little bit to see something you'll only see in Laos it's time to start heading back towards Thailand for the final week in time to get back to Bangkok for my flight home. In one short week it all comes to an end for now.
Wednesday, January 15, 2014
Relaxistan
Vientiane :: Laos
What do you mean "dolphins"?
Places: Kratie, Si Phan Don & Vientiane.
Coolest thing I did: Kayaked down the Mekong River. Even if we didn't see dolphins that day.
Coolest thing I didn´t know: There was a CIA operative in Laos in the 1960s called Tony Poe who was the alleged inspiration for Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. He used to staple the ears of dead Pathet Lao (communist guerillas) to his status reports to the CIA HQ in Bangkok.
Kratie is not the most attractive town you're ever going to visit, but due to the fact it lies just south of a particular bend on the Mekong River where the largest known pod of fresh water Irrawaddy Dolphins still in existence outside the Indian Subcontinent lives you're likely to stop here. While there is a nice sunset over the river to be watched with beer in hand, unfortunately the only tourist style bar that faces the river has it's view of the sunset blocked by the local Port Authority office, which seems to be permanently closed. Still, it's nice to sit there and watch the local Tuk Tuk drivers play kick about with a wicker ball on the river front instead of going home at the end of the day.
There are apparently somewhere in the order of 70 fresh water dolphins living pretty consistently off the shore of the village of Kampi so you either hire a mountain bike and ride the 16km from Kratie to Kampi or you hire a Tuk Tuk to take you there. Seeing as I found it suspiciously hard to find where the bikes came from (I'd ask a guest house that advertised and they'd look at me funny and say they'd have to call someone) I just gave up and got a Tuk Tuk. It was a nice drive through the long stilted timber houses up the river, with kids invariably waving at you and yelling "Hello!" at the top of their voice, whether they were on a pushbike or rammed between 3 other family members on a motor scooter. The height of the houses and the amount of road washed away tells you just how much water must come through during the wet season.
You get a compulsory boat out to see the dolphins, with a proper ticket office and everything which shares the work around. This sounds like a step up from the dolphin boat mafia that apparently used to hold sway over things in Kampi. Apparently anyone trying to see the dolphins from the shore was fairly heavily intimidated.
So the driver I had seemed pretty good, even though he spoke no English he knew his job. He puttered out to a gap in the small islands peppering the river, tied the boat up to a partially submerged tree and pointed out to the general areas he expected dolphins, then he sat there and chain smoked. Sure enough, in about 5 mins time you started to see random fins lazily rolling out of the water, and not too long after groups of two or three sticking their heads out the water. Unlike the dolphins we're used to, these guys have no "nose" so kind of look like friendly versions of the aliens out of the Alien movies. They seem quite lazy, never really in a hurry to show up, but when they do you get the added benefit of them not being too much of a hurry to dive back under either. The only downer was when some clowns showed up with all this film gear, water proof mikes and the like (Americas, of course) and parked their boat directly in front of ours, in the process scaring the dolphins away and then complaining how they weren't seeing any dolphins today. If I was a bit annoyed, my driver was absolutely livid. You could have weaponised the stares he was giving the Cambodian dude driving their boat. I suspect he might be getting a visit from the dolphin boat mafia at some point.
So you could say I've become quite used to the pointless milling around, picking up of random people and open arguments about who sits where on buses in Cambodia, but the journey I took to cross the boarder in Laos leaves them all in the shade. Leaving for Don Det, 20km across the boarder into Laos at 7am in a minibus designed for about 13 people with 21 souls on board didn't bode well. There's nothing like being rammed in a row with 4 people that really should seat 3 on roads so bad 150km takes 3 hours to get you in a bit of a mood, but that was all put in perspective when we got to Stung Treng, the last town in Cambodia in order to join the "big bus" and found for the 12 tourists on our minibus they only had 3 seats left. The bloke tried to gamely convince us that maybe we weren't all going to Laos after all, but we weren't to be swayed. So instead one couple just went and took two seats, and the rest of us decided the older lady could have the last one and the rest of us sat on a roadside waiting for something to happen for about an hour and a half. Eventually another minibus full of Cambodians shows up so they ram 8 of us in the two back rows and the other girl being sat in a row with two Cambodian mothers and their combined total of 6 kids. An hour later we're at the border and are introduced to the $2 "stamp" fee that we each have to pay to both sets of border guards. Then we get to past the Laotian side and there's literally nothing. After sitting around in the sun for about an hour someone works out we've got the number of the guest house in Cambodia that some of us booked the tickets at so it's left to me as the only one with roaming to call a few times and convince the guy that it's not somehow our fault we're stuck at the border while he happily keeps hanging up on me. Eventually he agrees to send someone to get 3 of the 9 of us and some blokes shows up in a brand new van. So new in fact it's got no license plates and the dealership sticker still on it. Credit to the Laotian people, he decided bugger what he'd been told, he was going to play backpack Tetris and fit all of us in the van. So after a 4 hour trip that took around 9 hours, we puttered over the river on a longtail boat to the island of Don Det in Si Phan Don - the 4000 islands.
I think if you had to plan to build a backpacker paradise where everyone sits around an semi rural idyll and does not too much then Don Det would probably come to mind. It's basically an island with two sandy paths named Sunrise and Sunset lined with cheap restaurants on bungalows jutting out over the river. The only real activities are hire a bike and ride out to the bigger Don Kohn and see some waterfalls, swim in the unfortunately-murky-brown-at-this-time-of-year waters of the Mekong or take a full day kayak trip down to look at harder to reach water falls and (possibly) dolphins. I did all these things, with the exception of see the dolphins as the pod here is much smaller and aren't as reliably seen. I didn't mind too much because I'd just seen the dolphins in Kratie, but I felt for those who only were getting this one chance to see them. Still, that was probably my favourite day, with a bit of honest exercise and it ending with us paddling back to the beach at the end of town just as the sun was touching the horizon in the blood red way it does in these parts.
The rest of the time in Don Det generally involves lying about in hammocks or moving from meal to meal and generally getting a bit messed up on a horrible rice whiskey/moonshine called Lao Lao that varies in strength and quality from bottle to bottle. It tends to go best with something strong, like ginger ale, but even then the hangovers will give you nose bleeds. If you want to smoke weed then it's pretty freely available, and there's enough places in town that advertise cookies, "smart" shakes, or quite uniquely, "happy" mashed potatoes. I suspect it's that last part that might be putting the locals in two minds about their tourist money windfall. Don Det is a more laid back version of the once world famous, never ending party that used to happen in a place called Vang Vieng, about 6 hours north of the capital Vientiane. Here the phenomenon of tubing took off, where you take truck tyre tubes up the river and float down through various river side bars with a seemingly endless supply of things that it would be questionable for people who have been drinking heavily and taking a lot of drugs to do, like swings and hastily constructed zip lines. About 2 or 3 backpackers would die a season as a result and the conservative rural community wasn't so hot on people walking around wearing nothing but their swim ware and glowing body paint hopped up on meth. So about the middle of last year the Laotian government stepped in and shut the party down for good.
I thought about that every time I interacted with a fairly unfriendly or unhappy looking local, which was most of the time. There seems to be some Laotians that grudgingly accept the money, or those that came from somewhere else to be part of it, and are generally high or drunk themselves, and I found that a little bit sad. It's a lovely place, and I don't see it going too far wrong due to the fact the crowd is a bit better behaved than some of the party beaches in South East Asia, mostly obeying the 11 o'clock curfew but it must put you in two minds when your kids are growing up around hordes of fairly constantly stoned foreigners, yet the money they pay for bungalows and food is putting those kids through school.
That said, I'd recommend anyone coming through this part of the world they have to stop here before it starts to develop. The 9 of us that shared the horror bus journey were a pretty diverse group of nationalities and ages and kept finding each other for meals (I shared a bungalow with two of them) and all found things to like about the place. It's one that could seriously drag you in for weeks if you let it, seeing as you're paying about $5 a night to sleep and then not quite that again per meal the money wouldn't be much of an issue either.
So reluctantly I left before all the others as soon as the two week-to-go mark hit me and I realised I could be sitting in buses for half the rest of my trip if I didn't get a wriggle on. I spent about 4 hours in the crossroads town of Pakse, which people only tend to end up in on their way to someone else waiting for the 13 hour night bus to Vientiane. It was a strange bus, everyone got a bed instead of a seat, but those beds were designed for stoic, uncomplaining people who are all 5ft tall. During my time in Pakse I took a picture of a cat sleeping in a Buddha statues' lap, and saw a sunset. That was about it.
What I discovered about Vientiane is if you want to get offered a lot of drugs, do what I did:
What do you mean "dolphins"?
Places: Kratie, Si Phan Don & Vientiane.
Coolest thing I did: Kayaked down the Mekong River. Even if we didn't see dolphins that day.
Coolest thing I didn´t know: There was a CIA operative in Laos in the 1960s called Tony Poe who was the alleged inspiration for Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. He used to staple the ears of dead Pathet Lao (communist guerillas) to his status reports to the CIA HQ in Bangkok.
Kratie is not the most attractive town you're ever going to visit, but due to the fact it lies just south of a particular bend on the Mekong River where the largest known pod of fresh water Irrawaddy Dolphins still in existence outside the Indian Subcontinent lives you're likely to stop here. While there is a nice sunset over the river to be watched with beer in hand, unfortunately the only tourist style bar that faces the river has it's view of the sunset blocked by the local Port Authority office, which seems to be permanently closed. Still, it's nice to sit there and watch the local Tuk Tuk drivers play kick about with a wicker ball on the river front instead of going home at the end of the day.
There are apparently somewhere in the order of 70 fresh water dolphins living pretty consistently off the shore of the village of Kampi so you either hire a mountain bike and ride the 16km from Kratie to Kampi or you hire a Tuk Tuk to take you there. Seeing as I found it suspiciously hard to find where the bikes came from (I'd ask a guest house that advertised and they'd look at me funny and say they'd have to call someone) I just gave up and got a Tuk Tuk. It was a nice drive through the long stilted timber houses up the river, with kids invariably waving at you and yelling "Hello!" at the top of their voice, whether they were on a pushbike or rammed between 3 other family members on a motor scooter. The height of the houses and the amount of road washed away tells you just how much water must come through during the wet season.
You get a compulsory boat out to see the dolphins, with a proper ticket office and everything which shares the work around. This sounds like a step up from the dolphin boat mafia that apparently used to hold sway over things in Kampi. Apparently anyone trying to see the dolphins from the shore was fairly heavily intimidated.
So the driver I had seemed pretty good, even though he spoke no English he knew his job. He puttered out to a gap in the small islands peppering the river, tied the boat up to a partially submerged tree and pointed out to the general areas he expected dolphins, then he sat there and chain smoked. Sure enough, in about 5 mins time you started to see random fins lazily rolling out of the water, and not too long after groups of two or three sticking their heads out the water. Unlike the dolphins we're used to, these guys have no "nose" so kind of look like friendly versions of the aliens out of the Alien movies. They seem quite lazy, never really in a hurry to show up, but when they do you get the added benefit of them not being too much of a hurry to dive back under either. The only downer was when some clowns showed up with all this film gear, water proof mikes and the like (Americas, of course) and parked their boat directly in front of ours, in the process scaring the dolphins away and then complaining how they weren't seeing any dolphins today. If I was a bit annoyed, my driver was absolutely livid. You could have weaponised the stares he was giving the Cambodian dude driving their boat. I suspect he might be getting a visit from the dolphin boat mafia at some point.
So you could say I've become quite used to the pointless milling around, picking up of random people and open arguments about who sits where on buses in Cambodia, but the journey I took to cross the boarder in Laos leaves them all in the shade. Leaving for Don Det, 20km across the boarder into Laos at 7am in a minibus designed for about 13 people with 21 souls on board didn't bode well. There's nothing like being rammed in a row with 4 people that really should seat 3 on roads so bad 150km takes 3 hours to get you in a bit of a mood, but that was all put in perspective when we got to Stung Treng, the last town in Cambodia in order to join the "big bus" and found for the 12 tourists on our minibus they only had 3 seats left. The bloke tried to gamely convince us that maybe we weren't all going to Laos after all, but we weren't to be swayed. So instead one couple just went and took two seats, and the rest of us decided the older lady could have the last one and the rest of us sat on a roadside waiting for something to happen for about an hour and a half. Eventually another minibus full of Cambodians shows up so they ram 8 of us in the two back rows and the other girl being sat in a row with two Cambodian mothers and their combined total of 6 kids. An hour later we're at the border and are introduced to the $2 "stamp" fee that we each have to pay to both sets of border guards. Then we get to past the Laotian side and there's literally nothing. After sitting around in the sun for about an hour someone works out we've got the number of the guest house in Cambodia that some of us booked the tickets at so it's left to me as the only one with roaming to call a few times and convince the guy that it's not somehow our fault we're stuck at the border while he happily keeps hanging up on me. Eventually he agrees to send someone to get 3 of the 9 of us and some blokes shows up in a brand new van. So new in fact it's got no license plates and the dealership sticker still on it. Credit to the Laotian people, he decided bugger what he'd been told, he was going to play backpack Tetris and fit all of us in the van. So after a 4 hour trip that took around 9 hours, we puttered over the river on a longtail boat to the island of Don Det in Si Phan Don - the 4000 islands.
I think if you had to plan to build a backpacker paradise where everyone sits around an semi rural idyll and does not too much then Don Det would probably come to mind. It's basically an island with two sandy paths named Sunrise and Sunset lined with cheap restaurants on bungalows jutting out over the river. The only real activities are hire a bike and ride out to the bigger Don Kohn and see some waterfalls, swim in the unfortunately-murky-brown-at-this-time-of-year waters of the Mekong or take a full day kayak trip down to look at harder to reach water falls and (possibly) dolphins. I did all these things, with the exception of see the dolphins as the pod here is much smaller and aren't as reliably seen. I didn't mind too much because I'd just seen the dolphins in Kratie, but I felt for those who only were getting this one chance to see them. Still, that was probably my favourite day, with a bit of honest exercise and it ending with us paddling back to the beach at the end of town just as the sun was touching the horizon in the blood red way it does in these parts.
The rest of the time in Don Det generally involves lying about in hammocks or moving from meal to meal and generally getting a bit messed up on a horrible rice whiskey/moonshine called Lao Lao that varies in strength and quality from bottle to bottle. It tends to go best with something strong, like ginger ale, but even then the hangovers will give you nose bleeds. If you want to smoke weed then it's pretty freely available, and there's enough places in town that advertise cookies, "smart" shakes, or quite uniquely, "happy" mashed potatoes. I suspect it's that last part that might be putting the locals in two minds about their tourist money windfall. Don Det is a more laid back version of the once world famous, never ending party that used to happen in a place called Vang Vieng, about 6 hours north of the capital Vientiane. Here the phenomenon of tubing took off, where you take truck tyre tubes up the river and float down through various river side bars with a seemingly endless supply of things that it would be questionable for people who have been drinking heavily and taking a lot of drugs to do, like swings and hastily constructed zip lines. About 2 or 3 backpackers would die a season as a result and the conservative rural community wasn't so hot on people walking around wearing nothing but their swim ware and glowing body paint hopped up on meth. So about the middle of last year the Laotian government stepped in and shut the party down for good.
I thought about that every time I interacted with a fairly unfriendly or unhappy looking local, which was most of the time. There seems to be some Laotians that grudgingly accept the money, or those that came from somewhere else to be part of it, and are generally high or drunk themselves, and I found that a little bit sad. It's a lovely place, and I don't see it going too far wrong due to the fact the crowd is a bit better behaved than some of the party beaches in South East Asia, mostly obeying the 11 o'clock curfew but it must put you in two minds when your kids are growing up around hordes of fairly constantly stoned foreigners, yet the money they pay for bungalows and food is putting those kids through school.
That said, I'd recommend anyone coming through this part of the world they have to stop here before it starts to develop. The 9 of us that shared the horror bus journey were a pretty diverse group of nationalities and ages and kept finding each other for meals (I shared a bungalow with two of them) and all found things to like about the place. It's one that could seriously drag you in for weeks if you let it, seeing as you're paying about $5 a night to sleep and then not quite that again per meal the money wouldn't be much of an issue either.
So reluctantly I left before all the others as soon as the two week-to-go mark hit me and I realised I could be sitting in buses for half the rest of my trip if I didn't get a wriggle on. I spent about 4 hours in the crossroads town of Pakse, which people only tend to end up in on their way to someone else waiting for the 13 hour night bus to Vientiane. It was a strange bus, everyone got a bed instead of a seat, but those beds were designed for stoic, uncomplaining people who are all 5ft tall. During my time in Pakse I took a picture of a cat sleeping in a Buddha statues' lap, and saw a sunset. That was about it.
What I discovered about Vientiane is if you want to get offered a lot of drugs, do what I did:
- Be white
- Only have cold showers for about a week
- Don't shave or wash your hair
- Get roughly zero sleep on the bus
- Prepare for that bus by drinking too much Lao Lao the night before and have a hangover that just would not end
- Be denied checking into the hotel for several hours because you're too early so wander the streets in a daze
By about the third block from the hotel I'd been offered weed, opium, oxycontin, heroin and most often something called ya ba, which is apparently a literal translation into the Thai for madness drug. Apparently the drug lords of the Golden Triangle were worried about the DEA convincing their governments to comply with opium eradication programs and paying the peasants to grow cabbages instead of poppies so they diversified into making industrial quantities of low grade meth amphetamine in the same jungle labs they were refining heroin in and flooding Asia as far down as the Indonesia with it. I suppose this morning I looked like I either needed it, or had taken too much of it.
So my first real day of looking at Vientiane starts tomorrow, but from what I've seen so far the Laotian elite like the same giant black Land Rovers the Cambodian elite are into and both countries have a strange love for outdoor group exercise. This evening on the water front I saw hundreds of people involved in an open air aerobics class which apparently is free to anyone. Like the Cambodians, they all do it in whatever they happen to be wearing, be it jeans or a miniskirt, further adding to the mystery of whether South East Asians actually sweat.
Wednesday, January 08, 2014
Leave the souls alone
Phnom Penh :: Cambodia
When the "madness" completely took over.
Places: Phnom Penh.
Coolest thing I did: Dropped several quite good mojitos during happy hour at the Foreign Correspondents Club which has a balcony view over the confluence of the Mekong River & Tonle Sap for sunset.
Coolest thing I didn´t know: Comrade Duch, keeper of the Tuol Sleng prison is a skinny little runt of a guy in the photos. Some part of you thinks the face of evil really shouldn't have buck teeth and sticking out ears.
So my main goal of not just passing directly through Phnom Penh was to go and see the two main tourist sites that are still monuments to Cambodia's crazy recently history, those being the prison at Tuol Sleng (also called S-21) and the killing fields at Choeung Ek, about 20km out of town. While the Angkor temples were as amazing as expected, the average Khmer today is about as removed in time from the people who lived there as I do with William the Conqueror. The fact the Khmer Rouge came to power during the year I was born makes the modern history so much more interesting.
So I actually did the sites in the reverse order to the prisoners in 1975, who tended to be sent to S-21 for interrogation and once they'd confessed to whatever they were supposed to have done (apparently the KR never incorrectly arrested anyone...) they were sent out to the killing fields for liquidation. The KR were only in power for 3 and half years, but managed to kill somewhere between 1 and 2 million people in that time so they must have been putting some serious numbers on the board every day. It's chilling to think about how big those numbers must have been, or that anyone you see on the street here older than me must remember the whole thing.
Choeung Ek was once a Chinese graveyard set out in the rice paddies just outside Phnom Penh however for 3 years it became the final bloody resting place of thousands of people. Unlike the industrial coldness of the Nazis, the KR cadres killed these people using mostly farm implements, things like hoes to the head and the like. The site is now strangely peaceful, with a Buddhist pagoda built 3 stories high in the middle of it. You only realise as you get closer that through the glass windows of the pagoda that it's stacked inside with thousands of skulls recovered from the mass graves, and each one of those skulls shows the violent end most of the people received that the hands of the KR.
There's one spot that probably does it for most, and was apparently the point where Comrade Duch, head of the interrogation program at the S-21 building finally broke down and wept at what he had overseen when he was forced to visit the killing fields years later. There is a tree covered with bracelets to honour the hundreds of babies and small children that the soldiers had literally smashed to death against trunk. A parlour game for psychologists after World War 2 was to speculate how the average Nazi death camp operator went about their daily business without completely rebelling against their leaders. The question of how people follow such orders becomes even harder to answer when it involves physically smashing a baby against a tree. It's hard to be any more at a loss for words.
If the purpose of the killing fields was the killing of dissidents, deserters and suspected CIA agents, then the purpose of the prison at Tuol Sleng was to get confessions of the crimes first. The head of the prison, Comrade Duch remains the only high ranking Khmer Rouge leader to have been convicted of his crimes and sentenced - the unfortunate fact that so much time has passed means most of the top leadership have died before their trials were completed. Pol Pot, the head of the whole thing, died in 1998 and far from being kept under glass like Lenin or Mao, he was so reviled at the end he was cremated on a pile of tyres up near the Thai border and his ashes now reside in a highly vandalised grave.
The thing that gets you about Tuol Sleng is not the graphic nature of the torture (water boarding being one of the least extreme methods used) but the rows and rows of mugshots taken by the KR of those who passed through there. In the end only seven people are known to have survived their visit, the rest all eventually confessed to something and went into a mass grave somewhere. The word you hear used to describe all this is madness, but I'm not so sure. A whole country can't go temporarily insane for 3 and a half years and go around in organised groups killing people with shovels to the head. There has to be some kind of organisational dysfunction to make all that possible.
Pol Pot and most of the heads of the Khmer Rouge had been students in Paris and members of the French Communist Party at some point in the 40s or 50s and had all returned to Cambodia to follow the style of the time in South East Asian countries and set up a Communist guerilla army at home. This was, after all, the Cold War. There were already such groups operating in Vietnam & Laos and obviously Mao had been pretty successful with the whole thing in China. However, the KR took Mao's idea of a revolution of peasant farmers taking over and took it to new extremes. Never mind Mao had managed to nearly starve his country to death in the first decade, Pol Pot wanted the same thing for Cambodia. Taking advantage of the weak government of the time and the fact the US air force was bombing eastern Cambodia at the time to cut of the supply lines of the Viet Cong that ran through there it was after a short civil war that Pol Pot marched into Phnom Penh at the head of what was basically an army of heavily armed adolescents and children (like most dictators he knew it's easier to indoctrinate the young) and started a reign of terror not even Stalin or Mao came close to matching.
The starting point was the idea of making Cambodia completely self-sufficient by emptying the cities and sending everyone to the country to grow stuff. Anyone who was identified as an intellectual was immediately killed, along with their families to cut off future sources of revenge. Families were broken up and sent to various agricultural communes in the country, resulting in the death by hard labour of most urban dwellers who were simply not up to the work. This resulted in not enough food and an almost immediate collapse in crop yield, meaning everyone was working harder for less food. This resulted in paranoia in the leadership that they were being sabotaged, so the purges went on, cutting deep into the Khmer Rouge cadres themselves, causing mass defections of their troops across the border into the recently unified Vietnam. This only fuelled the paranoia even further, causing the KR to launch border raids into Vietnam itself and set themselves up for a fall. My theory is not that this was some kind of collective madness, it was simply a very small clique of forceful individuals using terror as a weapon against their own people in such a was as you would be mad not to go along with it. There would have been a descent into the solders thinking they had to carry out the torture and the executions because the alternative was to end up in a mass grave yourself. This is not to condone by understanding, the whole thing is evil, but it's a cop out to call it collective madness.
Unlike China or Russia, there was no post-personality cult figure like Deng or Khrushchev to restore sanity to the system. Instead Vietnam invades in 1979, took control of the basically empty cities and imposed a puppet government. This forced the KR into the hills and Thai border lands and kicked off another 2 decades of civil war. It also resulted in a 17 day war with China, as Vietnam was was backed by Russia at the time and the KR had China's blessing and they thought they should assert themselves.
The only other stuff to really do as a tourist in Phnom Penh is to see the palace and the Silver Pagoda, which was surprisingly not very silver. If you've ever been to the Grand Palace in Bangkok, you can almost skip it, because it's pretty much a mini version of the same thing. There's even an emerald Buddha too, and like the one on BKK it's not made out of emerald either. After the Angkor empire started to lose territory to both the Vietnamese and the Siam (now Thailand) the kings of Cambodia managed to somehow keep some kind of coherent nation together until the French invaded and colonised the place (along with Laos and Vietnam) in the mid 19th century. That actually helped the King, who the French kept in the luxury of emerald Buddhas and so forth in order to keep some semblance of legitimacy to their rule. I guess he must have gone to Siam, seen the palace and told the French he simply had to have one too.
The nightlife I've seen so far in Cambodia in general, but in PP especially borders on the creepy side, much like Bangkok used to be. Not wanting to sit in a bar full of prostitutes and old white men I instead found myself sitting in a kind of beer food court across from the prozzer pubs, still full of old white men and their "dates" but at least they're not like 3 feet away and you can generally have a beer without being propositioned. I guess I'd like to think I'm pretty liberal about what goes on between consenting adults, but there's something completely wrong about old white men with money with these young women (or in a lot of cases, with boys that might not yet be 18...). You probably don't want to peek under the lid and see how these women (or young men) got into their line of work, it probably wouldn't make for a pretty story. That's putting aside the thought that there's probably kids out there somewhere too.
So I'm pretty much nearing the end of my time in Cambodia, tomorrow I'm going 5 hours up the Mekong (in a bus) to a place called Kratie, the break point to make the final push into southern Laos.
When the "madness" completely took over.
Places: Phnom Penh.
Coolest thing I did: Dropped several quite good mojitos during happy hour at the Foreign Correspondents Club which has a balcony view over the confluence of the Mekong River & Tonle Sap for sunset.
Coolest thing I didn´t know: Comrade Duch, keeper of the Tuol Sleng prison is a skinny little runt of a guy in the photos. Some part of you thinks the face of evil really shouldn't have buck teeth and sticking out ears.
So my main goal of not just passing directly through Phnom Penh was to go and see the two main tourist sites that are still monuments to Cambodia's crazy recently history, those being the prison at Tuol Sleng (also called S-21) and the killing fields at Choeung Ek, about 20km out of town. While the Angkor temples were as amazing as expected, the average Khmer today is about as removed in time from the people who lived there as I do with William the Conqueror. The fact the Khmer Rouge came to power during the year I was born makes the modern history so much more interesting.
So I actually did the sites in the reverse order to the prisoners in 1975, who tended to be sent to S-21 for interrogation and once they'd confessed to whatever they were supposed to have done (apparently the KR never incorrectly arrested anyone...) they were sent out to the killing fields for liquidation. The KR were only in power for 3 and half years, but managed to kill somewhere between 1 and 2 million people in that time so they must have been putting some serious numbers on the board every day. It's chilling to think about how big those numbers must have been, or that anyone you see on the street here older than me must remember the whole thing.
Choeung Ek was once a Chinese graveyard set out in the rice paddies just outside Phnom Penh however for 3 years it became the final bloody resting place of thousands of people. Unlike the industrial coldness of the Nazis, the KR cadres killed these people using mostly farm implements, things like hoes to the head and the like. The site is now strangely peaceful, with a Buddhist pagoda built 3 stories high in the middle of it. You only realise as you get closer that through the glass windows of the pagoda that it's stacked inside with thousands of skulls recovered from the mass graves, and each one of those skulls shows the violent end most of the people received that the hands of the KR.
There's one spot that probably does it for most, and was apparently the point where Comrade Duch, head of the interrogation program at the S-21 building finally broke down and wept at what he had overseen when he was forced to visit the killing fields years later. There is a tree covered with bracelets to honour the hundreds of babies and small children that the soldiers had literally smashed to death against trunk. A parlour game for psychologists after World War 2 was to speculate how the average Nazi death camp operator went about their daily business without completely rebelling against their leaders. The question of how people follow such orders becomes even harder to answer when it involves physically smashing a baby against a tree. It's hard to be any more at a loss for words.
If the purpose of the killing fields was the killing of dissidents, deserters and suspected CIA agents, then the purpose of the prison at Tuol Sleng was to get confessions of the crimes first. The head of the prison, Comrade Duch remains the only high ranking Khmer Rouge leader to have been convicted of his crimes and sentenced - the unfortunate fact that so much time has passed means most of the top leadership have died before their trials were completed. Pol Pot, the head of the whole thing, died in 1998 and far from being kept under glass like Lenin or Mao, he was so reviled at the end he was cremated on a pile of tyres up near the Thai border and his ashes now reside in a highly vandalised grave.
The thing that gets you about Tuol Sleng is not the graphic nature of the torture (water boarding being one of the least extreme methods used) but the rows and rows of mugshots taken by the KR of those who passed through there. In the end only seven people are known to have survived their visit, the rest all eventually confessed to something and went into a mass grave somewhere. The word you hear used to describe all this is madness, but I'm not so sure. A whole country can't go temporarily insane for 3 and a half years and go around in organised groups killing people with shovels to the head. There has to be some kind of organisational dysfunction to make all that possible.
Pol Pot and most of the heads of the Khmer Rouge had been students in Paris and members of the French Communist Party at some point in the 40s or 50s and had all returned to Cambodia to follow the style of the time in South East Asian countries and set up a Communist guerilla army at home. This was, after all, the Cold War. There were already such groups operating in Vietnam & Laos and obviously Mao had been pretty successful with the whole thing in China. However, the KR took Mao's idea of a revolution of peasant farmers taking over and took it to new extremes. Never mind Mao had managed to nearly starve his country to death in the first decade, Pol Pot wanted the same thing for Cambodia. Taking advantage of the weak government of the time and the fact the US air force was bombing eastern Cambodia at the time to cut of the supply lines of the Viet Cong that ran through there it was after a short civil war that Pol Pot marched into Phnom Penh at the head of what was basically an army of heavily armed adolescents and children (like most dictators he knew it's easier to indoctrinate the young) and started a reign of terror not even Stalin or Mao came close to matching.
The starting point was the idea of making Cambodia completely self-sufficient by emptying the cities and sending everyone to the country to grow stuff. Anyone who was identified as an intellectual was immediately killed, along with their families to cut off future sources of revenge. Families were broken up and sent to various agricultural communes in the country, resulting in the death by hard labour of most urban dwellers who were simply not up to the work. This resulted in not enough food and an almost immediate collapse in crop yield, meaning everyone was working harder for less food. This resulted in paranoia in the leadership that they were being sabotaged, so the purges went on, cutting deep into the Khmer Rouge cadres themselves, causing mass defections of their troops across the border into the recently unified Vietnam. This only fuelled the paranoia even further, causing the KR to launch border raids into Vietnam itself and set themselves up for a fall. My theory is not that this was some kind of collective madness, it was simply a very small clique of forceful individuals using terror as a weapon against their own people in such a was as you would be mad not to go along with it. There would have been a descent into the solders thinking they had to carry out the torture and the executions because the alternative was to end up in a mass grave yourself. This is not to condone by understanding, the whole thing is evil, but it's a cop out to call it collective madness.
Unlike China or Russia, there was no post-personality cult figure like Deng or Khrushchev to restore sanity to the system. Instead Vietnam invades in 1979, took control of the basically empty cities and imposed a puppet government. This forced the KR into the hills and Thai border lands and kicked off another 2 decades of civil war. It also resulted in a 17 day war with China, as Vietnam was was backed by Russia at the time and the KR had China's blessing and they thought they should assert themselves.
The only other stuff to really do as a tourist in Phnom Penh is to see the palace and the Silver Pagoda, which was surprisingly not very silver. If you've ever been to the Grand Palace in Bangkok, you can almost skip it, because it's pretty much a mini version of the same thing. There's even an emerald Buddha too, and like the one on BKK it's not made out of emerald either. After the Angkor empire started to lose territory to both the Vietnamese and the Siam (now Thailand) the kings of Cambodia managed to somehow keep some kind of coherent nation together until the French invaded and colonised the place (along with Laos and Vietnam) in the mid 19th century. That actually helped the King, who the French kept in the luxury of emerald Buddhas and so forth in order to keep some semblance of legitimacy to their rule. I guess he must have gone to Siam, seen the palace and told the French he simply had to have one too.
The nightlife I've seen so far in Cambodia in general, but in PP especially borders on the creepy side, much like Bangkok used to be. Not wanting to sit in a bar full of prostitutes and old white men I instead found myself sitting in a kind of beer food court across from the prozzer pubs, still full of old white men and their "dates" but at least they're not like 3 feet away and you can generally have a beer without being propositioned. I guess I'd like to think I'm pretty liberal about what goes on between consenting adults, but there's something completely wrong about old white men with money with these young women (or in a lot of cases, with boys that might not yet be 18...). You probably don't want to peek under the lid and see how these women (or young men) got into their line of work, it probably wouldn't make for a pretty story. That's putting aside the thought that there's probably kids out there somewhere too.
So I'm pretty much nearing the end of my time in Cambodia, tomorrow I'm going 5 hours up the Mekong (in a bus) to a place called Kratie, the break point to make the final push into southern Laos.
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