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.

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.

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.

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:

• 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.

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.

Holiday in Cambodia

Siem Reap :: Cambodia

Things have changed since the Dead Kennedys sung that.

Places: Sihanoukville & Siem Reap.

Coolest thing I did: The much cooler-than-Angkor-Wat temple Bayon, with it's 216 benevolent looking faces.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: Thailand and Cambodia fought several border skirmishes over control of a temple in 2008. You know tourist dollars and temples are intertwined pretty heavily if you're willing to exchange live fire over one.

So after the cracking pace set in the two weeks of Myanmar it was time to get off the plane and directly onto the beach in Sihanoukville, named after the twice King of Cambodia. It's Cambodia's only well known beach resort and it's moved well beyond it's backpacker roots. We met a slightly deranged looking bloke from the Faroe Islands who had been living in Cambodia for a decade and told us even two years ago the main street wasn't paved. Well the beach is still a long white sand marvel, lapped by the warm waters of the Gulf of Thailand, but the back of the main beach from the old backpacker haunt of Serendipity Beach down the length of Ochheuteal Beach is now lined with basically undifferentiated beach bars selling the same mix of Khymer & Western food and selling the same beer for the same price. There is another long beach past the headland called Otres which has claimed the backpacker crown, but even that is pretty much built end to end with combination bungalows and beach bars.

Having said all that, it's still a very nice beach, and you don't have to walk far to find a stretch that doesn't have jet skis or flying boats buzzing you every 5 minutes or so. What I was most unprepared for was just how many middle class Cambodians come down to the beach themselves, even if they do have the bizarre habit of going into the water wearing all their clothes. We saw dudes in dress shirts and jeans coming out and walking up the beach dripping wet. What I will say is they've taken to smartphone cameras as strongly as the rest of us, and you can't get more than a few metres up the beach without some girl standing fully clothed up to her knees in the water taking a selfie. It's nice they can do that, because this is a generation that was born towards the end of the civil war and didn't know the craziness of it all. In case you need reminding you'll be pretty regularly be confronted on the beach by amputees begging for change, usually the result of the thousands of landmines planted and then forgotten about by both sides of the 3 decade long civil war. You simply wouldn't know looking at the country and the people today how truly brutal this country was for the longest time.

The thing you do when you're in Sihanoukville and you don't want to spend all day on the beach is to get on a boat and go to some nearby barely inhabited islands and go snorkelling. The coral and undersea life isn't going to knock the islands of Thailand off the diving map any time soon but the water is warm and clear and you can go through a half hour in the water chasing small fish about the coral pretty easily. The bulk of the day was spent on an island beach, deserted except for the 4 or 5 boat loads of people on similar day trips to us. It was here that our New Years Eve started to go wrong. Mark's ankle didn't survive the end of a beach volley ball game and by the time we got back to the mainland it was the size of a grapefruit. This meant our first brush with the local medical system for the trip.

The international clinic of choice for our Tuk Tuk driver thankfully took credit cards, but only had one wheelchair so Mark had to take it in turns with the girl from Brisbane who came in just before us with a knee stuffed up doing some sport that involved being towed behind a jetski I still don't fully understand the logistics of. Still $54 later Mark had two x-rays of his foot, pain killers, anti-inflammatories and prescription cream that smelled suspiciously like Dencorub. Of course we also found Mark really couldn't walk more than a few metres at a time before toppling over so instead of a big night in the beach bars we drank as much free beer jugs of beer as they'd give us a the function at our hotel and then moved onto duty free vodka as midnight approached. Around midnight the whole place sounds like a bad day in Baghdad circa 2003 with low altitude fireworks that at times sound like ordinance going off. Which, given the recent history of the county might actually be live rounds - lord knows how much live ammo they've still got left lying around the place. Anyway,  I know it was a big night for some as I was down the beach about midday the next day and one of the bars was still full of completely mong-ed out looking kids stretching the very last of what could only be some pretty heavy chemicals. By the time I passed by again about 2pm it was all over, even for them.

Due to my continuing attempts to nurse my belly back to some kind of health my own drinking abilities were not at their best. Despite coming closer to full meals almost as soon as we left Burma my first effort to get more than 4 beers down in one sitting resulted in first me being almost instantly drunk, but then queasy and sick in the street. Really, it was like being 16 again. Between my stomach and Mark's ankle Sihanoukville didn't turn out quite as Rock and Roll as we had anticipated.

So with Mark heading back to Australia and the joys of work I took a short flight to Siem Reap (translated: Defeat of Thailand), the town that owes it's entire existence to the tourist industry built up around having people visit Angkor Wat. If Sihanoukville had seemed normal when compared to Burma then Siem Reap is the on-the-map tourist town that jolted my system back into some kind of recognition. A mix of high quality Khmer food (which is strangely like Thai food but somehow not in a couple of crucial but indefinable ways) and good Western food had got me feeling quite human again and I've felt better than I have all trip. I'm back on full meals, beer and I'm not so tethered to the bathroom as has been recently true.

All that is good, because it allowed me to ditch any idea of getting chauffeured around in a Tuk Tuk or minibus all day, which would have been hell on my ego and allowed me to rent a bike from the guest house for $2 a day and ride around the temples of Angkor myself. The company that puts out the bikes (called White Bicycles) maintains them for local charities so the guest houses just provide space for the bike racks and pass the money on. Which is what I kept telling myself as I rode around on them all day, because the bikes can only be described as character building. Imagine a single speed bike with a self-correcting chain that comes off any time you don't pedal and a seat so hard you feel like orientation week in Long Bay Gaol and you start to get the idea. While the temples themselves are fairly spread out (well at least when compared to Bagan in Myanmar) the whole thing is built on a pancake flat plain so the lack of gears don't really kill you. It's more the traffic.

During the day there are tourists on pushbikes, driving or being driven on mopeds or motorbikes, tuk-tuks, cars, 4WDs, vans, jeeps, minibuses and full blown tour buses all sharing the same narrow, often poorly maintained roads. Which would be fine, except everyone drives and parks like a total dick. There's nothing to make your life flash before your eyes like a moped being overtaken by a van, being overtaken by a bus all barrelling towards you on a road that's half a lane each direction at best. Then you'll find just at the point you pass them some arsehole has parked his 4WD with the hazard lights on 3/4 in the road. You have to be serene and accepting, the alternative would be complete mental breakdown.

Luckily, the sights you came to see are worth it. Angkor Wat is only the biggest of the temples built on the plain during the Angkor empire, which dated from around the end of the Vikings until the Crusades and at the time were top dogs in South East Asia. Like Bagan, with which they overlap somewhat they were in the transition from the Hindu influence brought from Javanese influences to full blown Buddhism and like Bagan they too went a bit temple mad. While Angkor Wat is the single largest religious structure in the world, I found the city sized Angkor Thom far more impressive. Guarded by huge stone gates watched over by giant giant heads with a face on each side and surrounded by a moat there's a whole bunch of restored temples and stacks of assorted temple bits to look at inside. My favourite was the Bayon, which has 216 faces watching out from towers and stupas in every direction, all of which were described as benevolent by the Lonely Planet but I found more smug, or perhaps over confident. Like with all archaeology, most of what's told about Angkor veers pretty quickly into applied fiction writing but the consensus seems to be the faces all belong to the Angkor King that commissioned the temple. That could hardly be reassuring if you were a peasant working the fields nearby, having the hundreds of faces of the King staring "benevolently" down at you while you work. I suppose you'd hold off coveting your neighbour's wife or livestock, just in case the King could see you, which might have been an early version of the NSA.

It's interesting to ride around all day and realise that these Buddhists thought pretty big about building their religious monuments, when you consider most of this was being put up at a time that the big Gothic cathedrals of Europe were going up. You could quite comfortably fit Chartres Cathedral inside the gatehouse of Angkor Wat. Probably throw in Notre Dame too for the hell of it, and those absolutely dwarfed any building in Europe at the time.

The sandstone hasn't all survived the 1000 years intact as you would expect, but the carvings are being restored in places which brings up Ta Prohm. Now I've never actually seen Tomb Raider, and that was shown to be a bit of a problem for the Cambodians who point out at every turn which part of the temple was in which part of the movie and it becomes obvious you have no idea what they are talking about. I didn't even know Daniel Craig was one of the baddies in it, long before he became James Bond. These trips are always quite educational for the strangest reasons.

Ta Prohm, in start contrast to Angkor Wat, which has apparently been in constant use since it was built, has been reclaimed by the jungle, giving you all those cool photos of ancient temples with trees growing out of the top of them. You would like it to stay that way forever, however due to it's fame as being the only temple in a Hollywood movie, Ta Prohm is simply being loved to death and for safety reasons alone it's become a good idea to start propping up the crumbling walls and restoring some kind of structural soundness to the whole thing. When half of Russia and China descend on it in one morning, you can see why. There seems to be no limit to how many people are let onsite and with serious bottlenecks on any spot that is identifiable as somewhere Angelina Jolie stood while everyone has their picture taken. I'm not sure if the Russian women were all pouting in tribute, or if that's just how they normally pose when they have their picture taken.

So after two days of riding around temples it's time for me and bike #5 to part ways. We had our moments where I didn't think we'd make it, but I saw all the main temples in the end, and it allowed me to strut around them feeling vastly superior to anyone who showed up in a minivan. That alone was worth it. It's an early bus tomorrow back to Phnom Penh, an advertised six hours but from what I've seen so far some pointless milling around and then picking up people at the side of the road for no apparent reason will probably pad that out a fair bit.

Shan state of mind

Nyaungshwe :: Myanmar (Burma)

Note: Due to the horrible state of the Internet in Myanmar all of these Burma posts were cobbled together from notes taken at the time and poor memory. I'm currently in Cambodia as I post these but just pretend I'm not.

Places: Nyuangshwe (Lake Inle).

Coolest thing I did: Spend Christmas Day trekking through the hills on the way up to Lake Inle.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: The Kayan Lahwi ethnic women wear brass coils around their necks that cause their necks to appear really long, but apparently it's just a visual trick.

The reason you go to Kalaw in the first place is to replace the last couple of hours on the bus to get to Lake Inle with two days of walking to do the same thing. They call it a trek but it's pretty easy going - mostly you're walking on roads or well defined paths used by the local farmers. You see modern day trial types going about their work, growing stuff and living in woven bamboo huts and trying hard not to have their oxen ram you as you wander past. The first day is mostly rural scenes, which would be a bit of a letdown on their own,  but the valleys you pass through are surrounded by some picturesque (but in no way dramatic) mountains and cliffs. This first day was also Christmas Day so there was some joviality about the shed where they park the various groups of walkers overnight, well at least up until the 9pm curfew where everyone gets told to shut up shop and go to bed. Myanmar certain lives up to it’s reputation of non-existent nightlife at every turn. Tourists amusing each other with beer until the locals make them go to bed probably describes the whole thing. We had two young guides with us, Nye Nye who was kind of the responsible adult and her sidekick, whose name I forgot but that was probably because he had too many Christmas beers and ended up not being able to leave with our group and coming with the very last group a couple of hours later.

Nye Nye was an interesting young woman with passable but highly confusing English. I get the feeling she was much better at speaking English than listening to it, because you could ask her any question but the chances are you would get a long, but completely unrelated answer. I thought the point where here answer to the question of whether there were fish in the lake veering off into a barely understandable thesis on the future use of hydroelectricity in the area was one of her better efforts.

The last day starts in the morning fog but it doesn't take long to climb out of the valley above it into the sun and get a distant glimpse of Lake Inle. Despite it again being fairly flat and easy going the lack of good, solid meals due to the state of my stomach made it really push me and I was shattered by the time we got down to the shores for lunch. That made it nice to spend a couple of hours then running along the canals through towns on stilts that line them to make our way into Lake Inle proper. It is as stunning as you were led to believe and there are fishermen with nets and conical hats who have escaped a postcard right there waiting for you. That and a flotilla of other long-tailed boats ferrying tourists about to take pictures of things. Being the other major draw after Bagan you expect everyone who comes to one to also see the other, so it’s nice to have had a couple of quieter days to prepare by walking up.

My stomach took a particular turn for the worst during dinner on that first night in Nyuangshwe and I went back to the hotel room to recover. Sounds like I missed as big a night as it gets in Burma because Mark had apparently met the Dutch girls, a Swiss guy from our trek and this English couple somewhere and started heavily drinking with them. I know this because he comes back at about 10pm (which is when the last bar closed and they had to leave) in order to exchange antibiotics he'd been given by the English guy (an off duty Army medic) for the two half bottles of duty free we had left and then was off again until apparently they'd been angrily been ejected from the Dutch girls' hotel about midnight by the other guests. I was given 4 250mg tablets of two different substances with names ending in -cin and told that if the first two didn't fix it in 24 hours then I was to consider the other two as the nuclear option. It never came to that for me but as Mark's stomach also went wrong the day after he thought he'd give them a go, and his description of his stomach about an hour later was "dead" as in completely lacking feeling or even numbness.

My theory on why the nightlife will never take off in Myanmar under current conditions is the fact it's so expensive to keep places open after dark due to the completely unreliable electricity grid. Whether you're in downtown Yangon or rural Shan State if you have a business that caters to tourists you have your own generator and there has to be a point of diminishing returns on keeping your place open if the grid has gone out and you're customer's beer consumption is not keeping up with the price of diesel. One of the stranger things about the big cities like Yangon and Manadalay is simply how completely used to not having power at night everyone is.

So Lake Inle was as close as we (and most tourists) got to the ethnic enclaves that the central government in has been trying to keep in line since independence from the British over half a century ago. Like most British post-colonial nations the borders of Burma did not fall at all along neat ethnic lines and the first act on gaining their independence was for the various warlords and factions to rebel against the new central government and start a decades long bloody insurgency. This has left groups who straddle both sides of the Thai border and people who have been living as stateless people for nearly 50 years inside Thailand itself. This wasn't helped by this being some of the more rugged and hard to reach parts of the country, however in the last decade or so the Myanmar government has come to terms of some autonomy with most groups in the eastern half of the country, however they are still touchy about tourists visiting so much of it is off limits.

This may also have something to do with the fact the security situation was not at all helped by the fact the uncontrolled ethic enclaves were for a lot of the 70s, 80s and 90s the largest opium producing area on earth, part of the infamous Golden Triangle with northern Thailand and Laos. During the heroin peak of the 1970s a half Chinese/Shan warlord called Khun Sa was widely considered to be producing most of the heroin being consumed in the western world. At the end of the Chinese civil war the nationalist KMT troops who didn't get the privilege of fleeing the mainland for Taiwan with their leadership retreated into northern Burma, Laos and Vietnam and set up camp with the hope of regrouping and retaking China from Mao's communists. They needed money so took control of the existing opium trade and it was to one of these KMT troops and a Shan woman that Khun Sa was born. During the Vietnam war the Shan warlords found a new market for highly refined heroin with the American GIs, who promptly took the habit back to the States with them and setup the pipelines required to smuggle large quantities of the drug into the US. As time went on the original KMT troops got old and never took China from the communists, but the ethnic warlords had a ready source of funds to help arm themselves against the Burmese army. However, much like the narco-insurgencies of Colombia or Central America the cause tended to get taken over by the criminal element who liked the almost unlimited funds that come with selling drugs by the metric ton more. 

So our first act upon arriving for a hour and a half stop over in Bangkok airport en route to Cambodia was to destroy a couple of Burger King meals after two weeks of studiously avoiding any food that looked too Burmese. I don't know if that helped or hurt our cause but I've possibly never enjoyed a bacon double cheese burger so much. 

I'm not entirely sure if I'd recommend Myanmar to everyone as a travel destination, despite it's highly friendly people and some unique sights that are not yet feeling the full forces of tourism. If you hadn't been to somewhere like Thailand or Malayasia first then I'd be far more likely to say spend some time there as Burma is hard work, mostly due to the lack of tourist infrastructure. The idea of getting off the beaten track is all well and good, but two weeks of if can be quite a grind if you're also sick much of the time. My guess is that Myanmar will develop completely differently to other recently open to backpacker nations in South East Asia based completely on the fact we met only a handful of tourists younger than us. The average tourist was in their 50s, German and in a tour group, and even the independent, backpacker types we met were generally South East Asia veterans in their late 30s or early 40s looking for something completely different. It's unlikely to ever really get the 20 somethings while there is no nightlife to speak of and the vast majority of the key sights are Buddha related. This may change as the beaches open up (this is mostly limited by the still ongoing insurgency in Rakhine state in the country's west) and there is more trekking or outdoor sports allowed. I suspect they won't be serving Mekong buckets while you float around in inner tubes here any time soon. 

Crocodile hat for Xmas

Kalaw :: Myanmar (Burma)

Note: Due to the horrible state of the Internet in Myanmar all of these Burma posts were cobbled together from notes taken at the time and poor memory. I'm currently in Cambodia as I post these but just pretend I'm not.

Places: Nyaung U (Bagan) & Kalaw.

Coolest thing I did: Watched the sun rise over the Bagan plain from the top of Shwesandaw Paya in yet another crack of dawn photography moment on this trip.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: The British installed a whole town of Indians (from India) in the Burmese hills and the result is quite good Nepalese food.

Bagan is probably the site most visited in Myanmar and this is the best view of what the future holds for mass tourism in the country. For the first time I felt myself hassled by hawkers and handing over what seemed like obscene amounts of money for things in a country so poor. Of course, you can’t get away with that without having something special, and Bagan more than lives up to the hype. Around the time the Crusades were happening on the other side of the world the local king had a conversion from a Hindu to a Buddhist and he and his descendants celebrated by going on a 200 year, 4000 plus temple building bender on the plain of Bagan. The biggest and most impressive have, or are being restored, but there’s still lots of little ruins dotting the landscape as far as the eye can see.

We hired bikes and did a massive day of riding between temples over Bagan’s mercifully flat terrain. All the primo temples are within easy riding distance of one another, there’s plenty of places to stop and have a bite to eat or drink along the way so you can pace it out however you want. The only downside is having to wear shoes, which means constantly having to take your shoes and socks off every time you stop and go into a temple, because Buddhists aren’t down with shoes. By about the 18^th time you’ve done it for the day you’re kind of over it.

The end of the day was spent on one of the very few temples you can climb that isn’t on the main road, which involved trudging your bike through a fair bit of thick sand. However compared to the main viewing spot where they ram whole busses full of Korean tourists onto it’s pain-to-get-to factor keeps the numbers well down. We had a fair bit of time to wait so I amused myself by letting the little boys selling postcards and copies of Burma Days by George Orwell try their spiel on me. That soon bored them so I helped them with their Japanese, so they can sell Japanese people more postcards. They had a book with Burmese to English translation and the career list was somewhat baffling: I’m not sure how often they were going to need the English words for “Horse and Buggy outfitter”.

So bike is probably the second best way to get around and see Bagan, the best you have to wait until sunrise for. Having not done my research I didn’t realise it costed $350USD (cash only) to take a hot air balloon over Bagan at sunrise, and that there would be a multi-day waiting list. I guess that will have to wait. Instead a taxi came and got us at about 5am and we drove out to Shwesandaw Paya to watch the sun rise. Devoid of it’s 1000s of people at sunrise (we could see it at sunset from where we were and it looked like there were people hanging off it) it’s one of the more central locations so you get a 360 view of the temples trailing off in all directions. As the sky lights up the dark pyramids rise up out of the mist and by the time the sun breaks the sky the temples are all glowing a stunning deep orange against the background of the mist shrouded mountains. When the hot air balloons then take off and move in a loose pattern between them it’s one of the more amazing sunrises I’ve ever seen.

Our only other day trip was out to Mt Popa, which is a temple dedicated to nat, which are spirits who the Burmese have believed in longer than they have Buddha. The temple is perched on a tall rocky spire and is reached by climbing hundreds of stairs, all barefoot of course. Not such an issue, except this was the first place in Myanmar I saw large amounts of monkeys, who like to chew things up, spit them out and throw the remains on the steps you are trying to walk up. From the very top you can see out across the valley on all sides, and I have a very cool picture of a big male monkey staring out over the valley thinking “One day this will all be mine”, a-la Planet of the Apes.

The bus ride between Bagan and Kalaw on the edge of the Shan State is 8 hours that could only really happen in poor Asia. They start off well, everyone having a ticket and a numbered seat, but you haven’t even left town before the locals are being sold cheaper tickets to squat in the seats that are empty for part of the journey, or more likely to sit in the aisle on kiddie stools, usually carrying all their personal belongings with them. The combination of winding roads, people who can’t see out the window and people who don’t travel in cars that much and you have the perfect recipe for a busload of people looking nauseated and holding a plastic bag of their own vomit. At least we didn’t attempt to have that double as accommodation on the night version of the bus.

Kalaw feels like a completely different country. Being up in the hills the air is noticeably thinner and the Himalayan feel is only accentuated by the fact the British built a hill station here and imported a whole bunch of Nepalese, Indian Muslims and Sikhs to man it. Their descendants are still here, so the people definitely have a Subcontiental feel about them. It was also possible to have a treat and dip into some Nepalese cuisine, which was so noticeably oil free after the Burmese curries.

Our Christmas eve was spent drinking beers in a small cafe overlooking the market with a couple of Dutch girls we'd been bumping into with some regularity along the way. One of them had bought 5 stuffed animal hats for some reason so we got quite a few thumbs up from onlookers as they walked past us, me resplendent in my stuffed elephant hat. The little boy who's parents ran the cafe was taken by the one that looked like a crocodile, so as soon as he had it on and spent the next half an hour pretending to be a crocodile it sort of had to become his. One thing that is a constant joy about travel in Myanmar is that people are almost universally extremely nice and helpful and always on the verge of laughing at whatever you're doing at the time. Like most countries where tourism is about to hit in a big way you know that can't last, but it's nice to be there at that moment in time.

Chick Monks

Nyaung U:: Myanmar (Burma)

Note: Due to the horrible state of the Internet in Myanmar all of these Burma posts were cobbled together from notes taken at the time and poor memory. I'm currently in Cambodia as I post these but just pretend I'm not.

Places: Mandalay & Nyaung U (Bagan).

Coolest thing I did: In another sunset related moment witnessed one of the most commonly photographed scenes in Burma at U Bein's teak bridge.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: Despite writing a book called The Road to Mandalay George Orwell never actually went there, though he was a colonial copper in Burma back in the 20s.

Early morning after the night bus found us in exotic Mandalay. Or rather, it might have if Mandalay seemed at all exotic. It’s most obvious feature is the giant fort the last King lived in, before the British showed up, razed its contents to the ground and replaced the middle with a parade ground. The walls and moat still remain, and today the middle of it is mostly made up for off-limits army barracks for the modern day Army of Myanmar. Except for the very middle bit, which the military junta decided to have reconstructed as a mock-up of the palace just before the British destroyed it. I'm usually more positive about this stuff, but it takes a good 20 odd minutes to walk to (assuming you haven’t already spent over an hour circling the thing looking for a gate foreigners are actually allowed to enter) and it’s not at all worth it.

As a result of the remains of this fort the rest of Mandalay is a strikingly painful place to get anywhere in. Most restaurants, shops, mechanics or whatever open out directly onto the street and most of them do things like unload all their stock blocking half the street and then drive off. The main roads are often 2 or 3 lanes in each direction so crossing is nerve-wracking to say the least, and as everyone drives everywhere because it is so not pedestrian friendly you also feel like you've just smoked 2 or 3 cigarettes by the corner. Cabs are cheap so after an afternoon we learned to not waste any more time that way.

To be fair, like much of poor Asia the very sight of rich white people voluntarily walking along the side of the road baffles the local mind. If you watch them, everyone here gets on the transportation ladder as soon as they can afford it – bicycle, moped, motorbike, truck with a tractor motor bolted to the front, car and so on. Only the absolute poorest people in the cities walk anywhere, and they’re usually begging and carrying all their belongings with them. What city council wastes money on footpaths as a public amenity when it’s a status symbol to not use them? 

So as far as tourist stuff goes, you aren't’t really supposed to stay in Mandalay, but rather go just outside it where there are a few rare gems. There seems to be a basic show-me-what-I’m-supposed-to-see trip every taxi driver who speaks any English will offer you. The bloke who picked us up from the bus station seemed alright, but he couldn't go so his less well spoken but highly amusing brother did it instead.

This is probably the first of two main experiences in Myanmar that will see you completely Buddha-ed out. During the day you see the pagoda encrusted hills of Sagaing, ruins of pagodas on the island of Inwa and countless other stops to see religious stuff. The stranger ones included the morning zoo that is watching 1000 monks at a monastery line up and eat breakfast together. While they were getting into to lines there was literally tourists coming right up to their faces with massive camera lenses and taking a countless photos. It was probably the first time I've thought tourism in Myanmar had reached too far at any point. On the plus side I also found out monks drink Shark energy drink for breakfast, the local knock-off of Red Bull. Even the novices who look about 6 years old. Must make focusing on memorising the scriptures later interesting.

One of the more interesting things about Burma in general is monks are simply part of the social fabric in a way they don't seem to be in other Buddhist countries. There are simply monks everywhere, sitting down to a meal, catching the commuter bus, taking photos on their camera phones of the same stuff you are. The distinctive, one garmet for all weather, purple robes are sprinkled into every crowd to the point you stop noticing them. There's also girl monks, who to my great disappointment are not referred to as chick monks, because you could totally shorten that to chipmunks. They wear pink, probably because when the monks are young and have their heads shaved it's hard to tell chick monks and dude monks apart.

I also liked an early stop to Mahamuni Paya still inside the city, where there’s a giant Buddha who the people just decided to honour by painting it’s reachable bits with gold leaf. There’s now about 6 inches thick of real gold all around the bottom now. While you do wonder how people get enough money in such a poor country to wack a bit more onto Buddha’s kneecap it is an impressive site. It’s probably a sacrilege to consider melting it down and using the money to pay for some roads or schools or something.

The end of the day involves making the trek across the world's longest teak footbridge in order to take pictures of people walking across it at sunset. In the best pictures those people would be peasants, monks and people on bicycles, but as this is one of the more famous sites of Burma what you really get is a crowd from the Chinese tour buses and lots of people with tripods and expensive cameras. What I found most interesting was most of them were standing on the bridge, making it had to take a picture of the bridge at sunset, but that kind of meant there wasn't many people standing in someone's cow paddock below the bridge with me getting better pictures.

There are fields either side of the bridge where guys in conical hats are ploughing nice neat rows in the rich soil and then going right ahead and flattening it out and doing it again. There were suspiciously few crops being planted, so I suspect they just get paid by the tourist boards to look rustic and keep pointlessly driving their bullocks back and forth all day. Who says repressive military regimes don't have an eye for a good postcard photo?

The next day was spent from sunrise to sunset taking the fast boat down the Irrawaddy River to Bagan. Again, I had visions in my head of sailing down through the jungle with tigers peaking out at us, but in reality what you get is the ultra wide, flat banks on both sides and the occasional glimpse of river life by those who still live on and by it. My guess at the reason on why this looks nothing like the Mandalay Bay casino in Vegas told me it was going to had a lot to do with the occasional barge coming past packed with giant logs. I'm not sure if they were teak (one of the reason the British came in the first place) and I'm not sure if the Irrawaddy ever was surrounded by forest or jungle but there certainly isn't any now. The afternoon stretched on and the beers started coming out and though I was a bit soft due to fairly severe food poisoning stalking me the whole time in Mandalay it was a much more enjoyable way to do it than sitting on a bus. 

A word on the Burmese food, because I ended up eating very little of it, due to the fact it was not long after arriving in Mandalay I ended up with some pretty strict food poisoning, including vomit inducing nausea whenever I smelt the local food. From what I had there seems to be one answer for any culinary decision to be made: more oil. The curries are quite tasty despite the oil, and we also had a pretty damn good Biryani at one point but in alltruth I had nearly nothing to do with Burmese food the whole time I was there, so my opinion of it is always going to be somewhat tainted by those bad experiences. 

So onto Bagan.

Golden Era

Mandalay :: Myanmar (Burma)

Note: Due to the horrible state of the Internet in Myanmar all of these Burma posts were cobbled together from notes taken at the time and poor memory. I'm currently in Cambodia as I post these but just pretend I'm not.

Places: Bangkok, Yangon & Mandalay.

Coolest thing I did: Watched the sun go down over the giant gold stupas of Shwedagon Paya.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: The South East Asia (SEA) games happened to be on during our stay in Myanmar. I didn't even know there was such a thing. When Myanmar ended up in a 1 all tie with Thailand in the soccer the whole country had something to be universally happy about.

When you talk about the classic backpacker destinations around the world my generation would always have considered South East Asia to be the original and the best. Each and every place on the Banana Pancake Trail has its own backpacker slum full of cheap hostels and restaurants, but to get to any of them you pretty much have to go via Bangkok, and that made Khao San Road the quintessential example. That was then. I’ve been through the new Bangkok Airport probably half a dozen times since it was built in 2006 but I’ve not been into the city itself since 1998 and to say there’s been development would be a fairly epic understatement. I never went to the old Khao San Road, the tour I was on up to Chang Mai and around put me up in the Shangri-la (the joys of travel to a country in the midst of a currency collapse) and I had no need of it really. But to see it now, with it’s order, it’s paved roads and it’s complete lack of people who have taken too much in (in both sights and substances) wandering about made me think that scene has left.

Due to spending very little time here, really just to meet up with Mark before moving on to Burma (sorry Myanmar) we ended up staying at the very end of the airport train near the shopping district of Siam Square and I have to say this is not Bangkok as I remember it. You can walk for hours without reaching ground level, streets have 4 lanes in both directions and have to be crossed by overhead walkways and there are department stores and multi-level markets that go on forever. My first thought was simply who in this city has the money to buy all this stuff? I don’t think I ever saw a fat Thai person before now but I’m wondering if the fact you can now afford $3 ice mochaccino lattes from Starbucks can’t help explain it. In most Asian countries you visited it was always a small wealthy elite and then the rest of highly poor people, and that’s pretty much everyone you’d come in contact with. You were seen as this otherworldly source of external money so everyone wanted to know you. These days, whether it’s KL or Bangkok there’s a whole section of society that is pretty happy to ignore you, because they don’t see the need to pander to Westerners for their money – they do pretty well otherwise. Perhaps that’s progress.

My trip to Bangkok was fairly uneventful. For the last few weeks the news has been full of crowds of people besieging the Prime Minister’s house, complete with so much tear gas the streets of Bangkok are now shown as stock footage of riots being supressed by tear gas. Right up until I saw a picture of two elderly tourists walking past riot police in the Sydney Morning Herald under an article entitled “Should I got to Thailand for Christmas” I was even a little concerned. Turns out despite taking at taxi not 500m down the road from one of the main protest sites I didn’t see a single Police baton charge. The guys at work that gave me that big ziplock bag to put over my head to protect myself will be disappointed.

Mark’s trip, however was a little bit more eventful. On the ride out from the Airport at 1am the taxi driver kept falling asleep and drifting off onto the hard shoulder of the freeway so Mark made him get out and swap seats, so Mark could drive. He then woke the bloke up at random intervals to make sure they were still going the right way. Drove own Bangkok taxi on bucket list? Check.

While Burma was once a wholly-owned subsidiary of the British Empire it’s only in the old capital of Yangon (which the Brits called Rangoon) that shows the signs of it. The town’s main square is overlooked by both it’s democracy monument and the almost incongruous golden Sule Paya and is surrounded by old colonial buildings in various states of decay. What was most striking though is in a town where street paving with mismatched concrete is a lost art-form the lawn on the square is immaculate. It is still the haunt of the black market currency traders who were once the only way for tourists to get local currency but I suspect their numbers have been thinned by the arrival of ATMs that take Visa and Mastercard. I’d say it’s only a Buddhist acceptance of things is all that’s stopping the old illegal money changers from teaming up at night and pulling ATMs out of the wall for messing with their livelihood.

The highlight of Yangon is to go up to the Shwedagon Pagoda, though my attempts to pronounce that to the taxi driver started with confusion and then turned into amusement on his part. I’m not sure what the link is between Buddhism and gold is, but you certainly see a lot of it around the various temples and pagodas in Myanmar, but nothing like on the scale of Shwedagon. It’s in the order of 30m high and completely covered in beaten gold leaf. Despite it being the most popular attraction in the city and despite sunset being the best time to be there it’s still surprisingly peaceful to sit up there and what it turn from gold to orange as the light changes while purple robed monks climb up and clean it for the day. I guess it’s because even though Buddhism seems to have zero issue with combining commerce and religion in the same site they've managed to keep the hawkers out of the bits where actual worshipping goes on. What we couldn't get our head around is now a lot of the gold or bronze statues of Buddha show how enlightened they are by a glowing halo of multi coloured LEDs flashing around their head in sequence. I guess if there were various kinds of Buddha’s (Lying on Side Buddha, Cross Legged Serene Buddha) then this could only be Disco Buddha. 

We took a ferry over the Yangon river to see a bit of village life, not really sure what to expect. That turned out to involve paying a couple of trishaw (a bike with a sidecart) drivers to take us around for a few hours, a shrunken body of an abbot with a pretty solid looking gold death mask, a trip to the village grave site where a fresh hole had just been dug and then sitting out in a field in a makeshift bar drinking palm juice, eating dried fish and smoking something that looked like a rolled palm leaf filled with cardboard. The fact that we tried all these things caused great amusement to all the locals there showed it’s still novel enough and the trishaw driver that spoke good English was happy enough to discuss everything and anything. Unlike say Cuba, or China, no-one in Myanmar seemed at all worried about telling us their opinions on politics or anything else, and one of the highlights of the country is definitely how friendly the people are. This was probably the example where we spent the most time in one place talking. You also get a feel for it when you see the market stalls selling pictures of the 4 deities, Buddha, Jesus (due to a very enthusiastic missionary movement in the 1800s a surprisingly large number of Burmese are Baptists), Aung San Suu Kyi & Winnie the Pooh.

Apparently the delta region across the river from Yangon is about to undergo serious development in the wake of the cyclone a few years back, with the ferry being replaced by a bridge built by one of the South Korean conglomerates.  It won’t been too long after that before tour buses come over to replicas of these villages to see the local handicrafts and traditional dress no-one was worn for 100 years. So these things go.