Siam I Am

Gringo Jingo

2007-05-17T12:31:00.000-07:00

http://gringojingo.blogspot.com/

The life and times of an executive monkey in Shytown.

Siam Chronicles 26 - Beijing in the Spring, an End to the Thing

2006-05-28T18:34:00.000-07:00

In Xiahe on the Tibetan Plateau ...
... it was one AM, and a group of Tibetan nomads were camped outside our window drinking and singing. The man's voice was shoddy and raw, the woman's full and cascading, a waterfall. Both were wild and ululating like birdsong. I was trying to sleep. At two AM a man whom I pictured to be old though I didn't bother to look was practicing his whistling on the doorstep of our hostel. He imitated birds, but mainly he tried for a certain high note again and again, a series of shrills. I was still trying to sleep. At two thirty AM a couple crashed through the dark, freezing hostel and had a blowout in Tibetan. They adjourned for a quickie then resumed the fight, cawing for hours. I gave up trying to sleep. At five AM I was up preparing to take a taxi to the bus to the train. The bathroom was covered in blood and cigarette butts smeared into the grout overtaking a blue tile floor. There was a black bird on the window ledge, hiding in the dark before dawn, but the naked lightbulb cast a glint across his beak, a pallid streak over the long, thin instrument, orange with a cruel curve. I was washing my hands in water like ice, fingers numb, thinking about the sky burial grounds ringing the town and this bird, its beak, and the purpose it had evolved to fulfill.

The Train through the Gobi to Beijing...
... was long and our car was host to a refluence of businessmen in sheer gray socks jawing at their cells in loud tones. We were assured it would be an interval of between 21 to 27 hours, it evened out at a middling 24. We got into Beijing groggy, unfocused, and flowed along to an unknown locus, automatically keeping my elbows on point and my teeth bared to gnaw through flesh. It turned out to be a taxi stand. Huzzah. We got in, showed our printout of unintelligible filigree to the driver, who grunted and made a gesture with his head, half nod yes, half shake no. We were headed for Paul, a friend from college whom we'd lived with in SF. After many attempts at dialing him with a Zimbabwe country code on our cell, I corrected my error and handed it to the cab driver, heard some tinny slants of directions being delivered, and settled back into the pleather seat to watch people in red sashes sidelined by rush hour waving flags with smiles like lunettes in their sooty faces. I thought that they were some sort of Communism pep squad, but it turned out they were the new bus courtesy bashaws, teaching passengers to wait in line, let people off, and keep a cool head while stepping onto the vehicle instead of trampling each other in a mad squash like crazed rhinos which is the usual procedure. I applauded both their effort and their optimism with a golf clap from my removal. We were eventually let off at a gate in an apartment complex. NYC has 8 million people, Beijing has 15 million at a conservative estimate. So when I say apartment complex what I mean in this context is a city the size of Luang Prabang, filled with its own markets and zip codes. We called Paul and handed the phone to the baffled but bemused security guard, between the two of them they ascertained where in this plentitude of population we were and Paul shuttled out to collect us. Seeing one of your best friends after three years is a moving experience. Seeing them loping down a street in a loud Polynesian shirt to rescue you from Beijing is even more so.

Paul's 29th Birthday ...
... was the very next day. We had stayed up the night before with his good friend whose finacee had dumped him, drinking until the unhappy fellow puked under the table. I felt this was a solid step in his recovery process. Paul and I retired to his dusty apartment and continued drinking excellent scotch. When I say dusty, I mean it here. I don't know if you've been keeping up on China and its peripatetic grime, but if you haven't let me tell you that there are toxic yellow dust storms blowing in from the Gobi that leave four inches on a car an hour. This is reality for Beijing.
Enough of dust for us, let's move on to the next day. It is Paul's birthday, we've not enough sleep but adequate. We go to the Forbidden City, Tienammen Square with its hundred paper kites streaming in lines, then out for sushi with a big group of expats, who are lively and interesting. The restaurant is covered islands in slick honey wood built over a koi pond, linked by arcing bridges. Afterward, we walk to a bar to sit under umbrellas in the rain and drink bourbon. We again stay up until dawn talking.

The Summer Palace ...
... is a sprawling complex with a marble boat, a lake made by many men with many shovels, and an endless parade of buildings, each with a grandiose name. The "Temple of the Purple Dragon Cloud with the Seven Heavenly Attributes" looks exactly the same as the "Chamber of Harmonious Aroma Perfection" which is suspiciously similar to the "Palace of Eastern Dawn Rising over Serpent Mountain." In fact, when we reached the "Bronze Pagoda" we were almost disappointed to see it was in fact a pagoda built out of bronze.

At the Foriegner's Hospital ...
... the doctor was saying that in all his years of practice he had never heard of anything like the symptoms I was relaying. He said with a thoughtful moue that he had no answer, and that when I went back to the states I'd be pounced upon by some eager thing who would try to make their name by identifying an affliction wrought by living in the jungles of Laos PDR. He tented his fingers under eyebrows that fanned out like palm trees and said his advice was to just pretend nothing was wrong and to tell no one, especially not a doctor - just hope for the best. This is always comforting to hear from someone in a lab coat.

The Great Wall, Mu Tian Yu, ...
... is our last stop on our last full day in Asia. We are at a secluded section of the Great Wall that plashes through mountains pouring into the sky, the fat bumblebees hum and bump lazily into my head, the flowers are blaring roulades of white with a sweet clean smell. Alex is contemplative, ready to mull over the magnitude of our stay and its implications. The pinfold of hawkers lining the path up to this solitude has obliterated my ardor. I am not festive, the uneven steps slicked into the ground look like nothing more than traps for my ankles, I kvetch until Alex whips around, perched on the wall at the top of the world, and says he wants to reflect on his last year and this is a great place to do it - the Great Wall after all.
I remit but can still think of nothing but going home, not home to Paul's dusty flat, but home to America, to a home I don't have. I entertain visions of a kitchen with an oven. In this fantasy I have a paper delivered to my very doorstep that is in a language I recognize with alacrity. I can turn to anyone and say "Those jeans look awesome with your butt," or "Do you happen to know where I can find a 24-hour woodworking hotline?" and get a response I can decipher, if not understand. In this fantasy there are burritos and chihuahuas. I am at a wonder of the world and all I can think about is leaving it. Small steps - get down the mountain, get past the people who grab you and throw you into tables, get past them. Get to the parking lot. Find that lady who insisted on driving you. Find that lady, get in her car, wait as six people are piled into the car with you. Smile politely at the 40 kilo man on your lap. Make it to the bus stop. Extricate yourself from the car. Pry yourself from the claws of the woman who is suddenly charging more money for no reason and jump onto the bus as it lurches off. Breathe in through the nose as the rest of the passengers laugh and laugh and laugh at you for over an hour. I just never get old. I'm like Peter Pan.
I pack when I get back, I do it calmly and with great care. I don't betray myself. My desire to return to the oblivion of custom and courtesy is checked like a greyhound at the starting gate.

The Flight Back ...
... was unthinkably tedious, taking a full day and a half. There were three layovers, I got no sleep. When we got into JFK I felt I was stumbling through Eden - everyone I passed had a different ethnicity, it was a spectrum of shades and sizes. And they were so damn nice. Yes, go to China for awhile and then NY seems like Jollyland by comparison. Even when our flight was delayed and we were rerouted through LaGuardia, everybody was so kind about it I could've kissed each of their many hued toes. I almost cried. Really.

An End to Things ...
... I guess happens now. We're in Cleveland OH, after a stint in Charlotte NC, Washington DC, Philadelphia PA, Boothbay ME, NYC, Boston MA, then onward through the midwest, and then the west coast. I don't have the culture shock I thought I would, I only have three boils bubbling up on my consciousness.
First, the people here are more amicable than I had remembered, and this is absolutely true when put into the cultural centrifuge. We may be a bunch of dolts as a whole, but at least we're a friendly bunch of bumblers.
Second, this is a super rich country and everything is way more expensive than I had considered possible. Even the squirrels are fat and complacent; I picture them twining together SUVs out of sticks and running up their credit card debt on pointless appliances and extravagant coffee drinks.
Third and finally, the grass IS greener but on both sides of the paddock, and after listening to a hundred drifted conversations that I can actually interpret, I realize that I'd much rather not know and make it up as I go along.

Siam Chronicles 25 - Mongolia by Plane, Gobi by Train

2006-05-16T03:56:00.000-07:00

Zombie City

We arrived in Chengdu, and everyone was staring at us. We made our way with testudinal aplomb to the hostel right next to the bus stop. I thought we must make a sight, though we carried less than other backpackers, our burden still took on comic proportions. But after we had dropped off our things, showered away the dust that makes your hair snap under your fingers like a bundle of twigs, and changed into more urban attire, they were still staring. I couldn't understand it, we'd just come from the remote south and no one afforded us more than a bored glance. But here, the capital of Sichuan, a huge humming city, people just couldn't get over us. When we stepped forth the crowded street ceased all motion like someone hit the cosmic pause button. It was super weird. I had previously reserved this level of scrutiny for a ten foot albino in a tutu or someone whose face was half elephant. But even stranger was the intensity of the fascination, they'd be bustling by, a hundred things to do, then sight us. They'd stop to gawk a half an hour, an hour, two, as if they had nothing better to do, all prior commitments forgotten. Perhaps many babies were born without the presence of a father because two seedy capitalists were in desperate want of monitoring. That night we cozied into a traveler's restaurant in the rain, it was cheerful with posters of Jazz greats and leather seats. We were both a bit weary of the spicy tofu that had been our fare for days, it was the only thing out of the phrasebook that was not all chicken bone with bits of vein and fat. We ordered burgers and beer, there were rats that displayed a marked affection for people and an obese cat snoozing who seemed to have a truce with the vermin. It was alright. I noticed with interest a fellow whom I took to be an American as he was wearing a baggy sports jersey from some Florida team - I can't imagine why anyone would willingly advertise the state that elected Dubya unless they were from there. He was a gorgeous man with ebony skin, features cut into fine angles, clean shaven, tall, hair cut close. Alex and I both had the simultaneous thought that if our level of scrutiny was uncomfortable, for him it must be unbearable - he was only the fifth person with very dark skin I have seen in my year in Asia. As he paid for his beer and got up to go, a woman in a business suit on a bicycle did a double take and almost crashed into a dumpster. I went back to my book, after a while I was mulling over a passage, so I glanced out the window to the churn of the city. Sheer terror. A sea of faces pressed against the slick glass, gawking with open mouths. It was literally like being in a zombie movie.
This dread was intensified the next morning when we took the bus to Huanglongxi, a riverside village from the Qing dynasty that looks like it was sucked out of time in a state of perfect preservation. We were set to spend a few hours, but curtailed that notion as soon as we got off the bus. It was a city of zombies. And they were all wearing floral wreaths around their heads, like fat chain-smoking zombie fairies. They performed that synchronized cessation of sound and movement that by now was both so familiar and so disturbing, then followed us, shuffling slack-jawed. We took up evasive action, darting through cobblestone closes to dodge the horde, but then everyone in the alleys would literally drop whatever they were doing, their mouth would go slack, their eyes would widen until they bulged, and they'd come shuffling after us too. I've had this nightmare before, many times. Circular streets that go nowhere, houses leaning so far forward on spindly strands of wood that look like they've been woven by spiders closing in, and a zombie horde at our backs. They're moving slow, but there's nowhere to go. We looped and plunged through the old town and ran up as the bus was pulling out again, jumped on, and were safe with just the six zombies on the bus, who spent the whole hour and a half clustered around us, not saying anything, just staring, staring, staring, unblinking.

The Outer Edge of Inner Mongolia

Urumqi
We got a plane ticket. We flew from Chengdu to Urumqi, which is half a continent away, equivalent to flying from Kansas City to New York or from Prague to Moscow. Why? I had my reasons.
Urumqi is one of the poorest parts of China, and certainly the most remote, bordering what Alex calls the Stans: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. It is mainly Moslem, with a populace called the Uigar, largely coming from the Stans and speaking their own unique language, which is like a mix of Arabic and some Eastern European dialect - I could make out some from my deplorable Czech. Urumqi is also in the middle of the great Taklamakan Desert, and a few hours from Jiaohe, an extensive ruined city that was one of the great centers of the silk road. I wanted to see Jiaohe, I wanted to see the Uigar, I wanted to take a train through the Taklamakan desert into the Gobi. So we went.
We hadn't intended to stay in Urumqi, which by anyone's standards is a as appealing a week dead skunk. But it was the biggest city we were likely to see for awhile, and it had real hotels and banks and stuff. We'd been getting up at five AM for over a week, and the real reason we stayed a night is we were just plain tired. We needed some rest. So we stayed. Urumqi was like Mos Isley on Tattoine, a crazy mixture of cultures with a feeling that anything might happen, in the middle of a vast desert on the edge of another even vaster desert.
Urumqi looks like God spent a few hours vomiting up cinderblocks. We ate at a Pizza Hut, the second time we've had fast food in a year, only it wasn't fast food. It was a real fancy restaurant, with waiters and tablecloths and mood lighting. It was like stepping into an alternate fast food reality. We made our way from there through blocks of people selling an endless variety of raisins and nuts out of stalls to the Islamic quarter and the mad bazaar. Men with non-Asian faces in round white caps, flowing robes, beards and round glasses debated with animation on the steps. Women with non-Asian faces wore head scarves and covered their mugs with a pound of band-aid colored foundation, so thick it cracked like mud in the desert and huge chunks fell off and shattered into the pavement. Their eyes were covered in black gunk, like a raccoon, and their lips were universally bright red. There were beggars everywhere, wearing burlap sacks over their heads and hands. A few women had a wheel-barrow with them containing a child draped from head to foot in gauze like a mummy, except over a massive suppurating wound, glistening red and full of pus and flies. These were pulling in the most money, and I wondered if they inflicted these wounds on purpose. They had fists full of yuan, it is the custom of beggars in Inner Mongolia to display the day's take. For whatever reason, I found the huge piles of money discouraging for my donations.
The signs were all in Arabic, Cyrillic, Chinese, and Mongolian. Some had befuddling English insertions crammed into them too, but few speak English in China. After growing up in DC and mocking Japanese tourists in America, I now get why they go in huge tour groups. I now have much more sympathy. Going into a bus station where your language is totally foreign and pointing at a word you've carefully crafted onto a napkin can not substitute a conversation, especially if there is any complication, like the bus is full, cancelled, delayed, or there are no longer any buses going anywhere ever again because the bus station has been renovated into a full time brothel. Or perhaps the attendant is just having an unfulfilling day - we've all had those moments even in America where we have to cajole, whinge, flatter, truckle, and finally tease out a ticket from a surly agent. This is difficult when the gamut of your conversation is "Hello" "Thank you" and "I like beer." Luckily for me, I married a man with a sense of diligence, and he has been learning Mandarin at an accelerated rate. He usually pulls us through most scrapes, and has the added benefit of a beguiling smile. When his three weeks of Mandarin fails and his shy grin doesn't do the trick, I am ready to step up to the plate with my sheer donkey-headed obstinacy, willing and ready to divert everyone in the district to my indefatigable purpose. Language or no, I can make myself perfectly clear. We make a good team.

Turpan
It was a strange night, this far north the sun sets at eleven PM or so - we didn't stay up to see it, going to bed in full daylight. We woke up the next morning at six AM to full daylight and got on a bus to Turpan. I've seen a number of deserts, one in Spain, the rest in America, and each was utterly different from the other. When I was a kid I was a voracious reader of novels, and I have held a romantic candle for the wasteland my whole life. I had expected every desert to be the same - I guess I thought they would all be the Sahara, a beach of massive dunes without water. I've never seen the Sahara, and I've never found this ideal. But none have disappointed, and the Mojave with its yellow flowers and purple mountains still tops my list with Donjana and Death Valley a close second.
The Taklamakan is an atrium of gray pebbles under walls of granite crusted with snow. Although entirely natural, the grayness of the rock seems almost industrial. But the way to Turpan was full of round buildings like breasts, yellow sand structures with a window slotted into the daub, marking cairn graveyards. It has its charm.
When we arrived in Turpan we were immediately overtaken by the garrulous hospitality of a Uigar man named Mama John. His features were Russian, but his hair burnished a flick of red, and his big face held the tan of the desert - Turpan is the hottest spot in all of China. He drove us to our intended hotel, modeled in Arabic arches and curves, smiling and laughing as he demonstrated his command of six languages - Uigar, Mandarin, English, Japanese, Korean and Russian. He asked nothing for the ride to our hotel, and I commissioned him to take us to Jiaohe later that day. Until the designated hour we walked through the grape-vine arbors of the city streets, taking delicious mutton pastries sublimely spiced from the carts and devouring them until I got one the special one filled with gristle and rancid grease. We made our way back and entered the white coupe to Jiaohe. There was a TV show in Uigar playing on a tiny flat screen embedded in the passenger seat sunblind. I had never seen anything like this before, but my attention was quickly diverted to our surroundings. When I finally noticed that our driver was watching the show, no eyes on the road, while he was simultaneously talking on his cell, no hands on the steering wheel, I ferreted out the seat belts from the black pile of gunk and strapped myself and my husband into the macramé cushions.
I felt like I was back in Turkey, with massive mountains and vineyards to each side, and people in full white Islamic robes walking under the sun. But the streets were packed with donkey carts. My favorite animal, my totem, is the donkey, the ass, a cross between a horse and a bunny with big fluffy ears and a singularly irascible disposition. I love the few that can never submit. In my past, present, and future, I am an irascible ass, this is my pride, this is my downfall. But a perfect existence if I can get a few choice head kicks in before I'm put down. Jiaohe was like a huge sandcastle city.
Yellow on cliffs between palm shaped rivers, the whole place was built of sand, water and hay. Although the signs told me not to touch in comical terms that required a certain amount of inference, the empty expanse of Flinstones style structures left me at the great temple pushing my thumb into the five hundred year old wall. It crumbled under the slight pressure, agreeably, as if wanting you to go to work on the rest of it, pressing the ruins into the ground. I wondered with real interest how this city of sand and hay could have stood for so long, how I could be walking through perfect arches set in such a friable medium. I thought the striations of rich tan sand so delicate in the fine blue ether might plummet into lumps at the merest sniff of rain.
We left after a bit, not running the whole gamut of the empty sand town on top of the cliff because I was feeling lazy. We eschewed the aqueduct agricultural theme park, and ended our journey at the Minaret. It seemed very new, elaborate but simple in classic Arabic design, true to religion no grand center point, and ours was just to wander and not offend. I risked offending when we found a ridiculously massive hand-made broom in a corner, and I inveigled Alex to grab it and pose for a photo. He did, its tines were long as a hog, this was truly a Minaret sized broom.
When we got back there was some consternation, as we asked to be dropped off at the only place in town that the guidebook prognosticated English fluency and travel advice. We ate there, spicy lamb that was mostly fat but delicious nonetheless, and sesame seed flat bread. They told us how to make our train, it was simple. We should just go there in the morning at our leisure, there would be no problems. Fantastic. As we were finishing up our meal, I noticed that Mama John was waiting for us, suddenly vulpine in his white coupe, and I couldn't eat any more. I felt a bit sick, we were such pigeons. Overall we had done an adequate job of not being pigeons and our whole year had cost us about a hundred twenty dollars total in stupidity levy for being cozened by shysters. But the truth is that we were sick of it, and the sight of this new vulture made me incredibly weary. As we walked out, he folded into a wall of shining flesh, and we told him that we just wanted to use the internet. This had been a problem for days, there is no functional internet in much of China. He ferried us from one place to the next, not taking no for an answer, until we found a dingy corner that was semi-online. At this he left, taking a fallacious promise from Alex that we would call him tomorrow for further excursions. But really we soon left, children swept singing in our wake, walking back to our seamy hotel at the ready to leave at five AM for another bus to the train to take us east to the Gobi.

Nameless Town
We took the bus as promised, no problems. Our problems started at the train station of an entirely Islamic burg in the middle of nowhere. When we got to the train station, after much jostle and feints at complete nonchalance we achieved the ticket counter. True to form, everyone coming in swarmed up and tried to push us out of the way. We had time, we waited until there was none about when Alex made his gambit. It didn't help. I don't care what anyone has to say, China is an incredibly rude country as a whole. There is a line in the sand where a single person waits at a lonely ticket booth in an empty station. The drive that pushes a man in a shabby suit with folds for a face to cram on and push this person out of the way mid-transaction is the divider between that which is reasonable and the fantastic sprigs of psychosis. So the patient discourse of Alex was continually interrupted. When Alex finally achieved some breadth and dearth he found that the next train left in ten hours. We had to wait in this nameless town for ten hours. Alex was tapped, it took all of his strength to jockey for interlocution. I was drained just watching him fight in that cavernous station, all squeaky shoes and echoes, but I took the lead, and forded to a close hotel where we could drop our bags for the long wait for the train.
We watched two movies entirely in Chinese, and I made up my own dialogue, read a few hundred pages of my refrigerator-sized novel, we ate even more spicy tofu. Those hours were introspective.

Gobi Express
The train through the Taklamakan and Gobi took 22 hours, 18 of which were awesome. We got a private car with soft beds and flowers. Out our window the biggest sand dunes in the world whizzed by in tan and red. The dining car was full of just staff, who all crammed in the booth with us to exchange English and Chinese lessons. This included the cook, who was incredibly dirty, with sooty hands and nails fulsome with filth. He was super drunk the whole time, and around midnight, after the sun had finally set less with color than in a slow drain of light, he and the assistant cook got into a wrestling match. Then a man came in, making a big scene, screaming and hitting the tables with his fists. The staff had to drag him away. We decided that was enough for one night, and turned in.

Xiahe

The Labrang Monastery at Xiahe is the third most important Tibetan Buddhist site in the world. The town is chock-a-block with Tibetans, wearing their hair in braids and their robes bundled over one shoulder, belted in piles with brass circles. The smell of yak lard is all pervading and Alex and I are learning Tibetan. We're staying in a traditional house with a big common room, and last night I got to drink too much whiskey and talk to a young man who was born here. He told me that this whole area used to be Tibet until 1959, when the Chinese came and murdered everyone, destroying all the temples as they went. He himself had fled a decade ago, going 48 days over the Himalayas to India on foot with a group of monks, eating nothing but barley flour in water. They had to walk only at night, the way is lined with corpses, they barely made it. Once he got there he studied with the Dali Lama. He comes back to see his family, and he's been thrown into a Chinese prison four times, each time tortured. His open face turned thoughtful, his eyes dimmed a moment, and he said that this may be the last time he comes back, his body has gotten so weak from the electrocutions that his nose bleeds almost constantly. He looked away for a moment then laughed and invited me to breakfast - barley flour in water.

Siam Chronicles 24 - Through the Window Pane, Busing the Tibetan Plain

2006-05-12T03:41:00.000-07:00

We've spent 36 hours on a bus in the last four days. Alex has drunk Lama spit. We've eaten every part of a yak. We've braved our way up the backbone of the Tibetan plain from Shangri-La to Chengdu by bus.

Wednesday
8am: The cab taking us into town from the airport smells of stale cigarettes and is adorned in prayer beads jangling from the mirror and pictures of the Dali Lama plastered to the windshield - not a good sign. We book past sky burial grounds on the yellow reach of flatland, colorful prayer flags whip in the wind, under the purple shadow of spreading mountains shouldering the cobalt sky. White stupas bellow incense clouds ringed by innumerable cairns, and I shiver in my thin sweatshirt as the tangy smoke claws through the ill-fitting window, borne on a wild wind shrilling the chill from the snow cambering down the peaks.
9am: I am trying to stay warm in the belly of the local youth hostel in Zhongdian. It is full of flags and covered in graffiti on the dark stained wood. The central fire is close with smoke and fleeting heat, the windows shuddering in the artic blasts. Alex is cradling a tall clear glass filled with hot water and chamomile flowers - fresh yellow blooms floating on top exhaling a sweet smell, their petals drifting like snow through the steaming liquid, refracting a lovely slip of white light on the worn wood table. I am eating a thick slab of homemade bread, it is sweet and flaky, dipping it into a fried egg and spearing a dab of salted ham. Occasionally I stop to savor a sip of warm milk, freshly squeezed from the yak tree, rich and thick on my tongue.
12pm: I am wandering through old town, which is under massive renovation. Workers in tribal garb carry stones big as a mule between them on a rope in a swirl of wood chips. The streets are close and circular, with rough hewn cobblestones thick and irregular under my feet, slick with wear, it is difficult to tread. The buildings are immensely beautiful, rich amber or chocolate wood, all intricately carved figures and patterns on lattices, painted in primary colors at the seams and overhung with thick curtains in bold black and white designs from which the scent of wood smoke tendrils out into the sharp mountain air.
3pm: I am in a honey wood room, warm by the fire, the floor is covered in vivid rugs, the walls are strewn with reckless bolts of deep color. Through the window pane I can see the gray cobblestone road tilting crazily up and down the hills like an Escher painting. I am taking my first bite of yak. I have yak dumplings in yak soup, Alex has yak stew. It is rich, indelibly unique, and delicious. We glut, then sit and read in the blue winter light that never leaves this altitude. After a while Alex notices that the remainders of our dishes have congealed into hard yak lard. We poke at the white heaps, and my stomach does a pirouette.
8pm: After searching for two hours for a working internet connection, we find a quiet bar with a doyen named Barry from Shanghai. He instructs us to bring our own computer, we do, he sets us up. The bar is traditional Tibetan in dark wood, with a central fire coughing up pine wood fumes, dim lit. It is cozy, there is no one else there. The connection works, we are online. Barry brings us tea and fresh strawberries, we savor the saturation of comfort.
2am: I am running through the freezing courtyard in a t-shirt and long underwear to use the hole in the dark. I notice there are many stars, and that it is cold and dark.

Thursday
10am: I am walking up the central stairs through an ancient city that is one big monastery. There are temples hidden in every corner, each different. The monks wear scarlet, they contrast vividly with the deep blue sky and wispy dragon clouds. An eighty year old monk, sunken and toothless, is easily beating me up the steps. He laughs, and keeps saying "Hello" in a thick accent, deep and phlegmatic in the thin air.
12pm: The temples are exquisite. They are like nothing I've ever seen. The murals are so intricate in the dim light and blur of incense and yak tallow votives that my eyes hurt. We travel from the bottom to the rooftops of each temple, wondering that the clouds are different every time, sometimes huge white billows, sometimes winding wisps, sometimes a fringe of fish scales. Sound travels further in these mountains as well, there is always the low descant of the long horn and the reboant flange of polytonal chanting from somewhere in the sprawl.
8pm: I thought at first the dancing was a singular event. Not so. Every night, presaging the darkling, a few old women and men down from the mountains start a circular dance on the main square around a dented boombox on a wooden chair. The sky is now a deep sapphire, fringed in a shimmer of aquamarine behind the mountains. Everyone is now dancing in concentric circles - the whole town - shopkeepers, tribes, tourists, everyone. It is simple and joyous.
2am: The rats in the rice sacks that line the ceiling are keeping me awake. Every movement causes the fabric to billow and crinkle, perfectly outlining their squirming shapes. I can't see them anymore, the night is very dark, but I can hear them as they waltz and converse in high notes of query. I get up to use the bathroom, and once again slip down the steps that have been worn over time into a veritable wooden slide, stripped and gleaming in the starlight, and tread through the irregular courtyard in the cold to the hole in the ground.

Friday
2pm: The yaks are watching, I know they are, as I get naked on top of the mountain. It has taken a good deal of effort to find the hidden hot springs, but find them we did. I try to pull on my swimsuit as quickly as possible, I feel incredibly exposed as the wind tears into my flesh. All the people here have cheeks that are permanently red, like dolls, from the wind, some have ears that are forever black from the same. The view of the green mountain carapaces huddling together under that intensely vast sky while we soaked in a cauldron of chartreuse slime would be worth it.

Saturday
4pm: Mountains. There is an unbelievable amount of nothing but mountains for ever and ever and ever and ever as I loll my head on the cool window pane of the bus and rub my feet together for the illusion of warmth. The gawky guy in front of us thinks he's the Marlboro man, chain smoking in a Stetson. I turn back to the endless panorama and try to enjoy it - the golden valleys with rocky streams folding up crisp like satin into yellow hills, backed by green mountains of pine, speckled with purple wildflowers, framed by massive monoliths of blue rock, topped in snow. The clouds are ever changing and lovely. The Marlboro man is still chain smoking and the ashes coat my face.

Sunday
9am: Mountains. There is an unbelievable amount of nothing but mountains for ever and ever and ever and ever as I loll my head on the cool window pane of a massive freight semi - the bus was full - and again rub my feet together for the illusion of warmth.
10am: It is snowing.
2pm: The old monk is named Songdu, we're up on the top of the mountain in Litang, which is already situated at a stupidly high altitude. Every prolonged motion leaves me weak and sets black spots swimming through my vision. Songdu's face is lean, bony lineaments outlined in deep wrinkles, around a smile sweetly curving up from long teeth stained saffron. He does not speak English, we do not speak Chinese, but he is full of good humor and is willing to caper about pantomiming his meaning. He is teaching us about Buddhism in this way. We're on the top floor, it is warm and heaped in piles of tapestries and devotional scarves. It is the final stop in our impromptu tour, and he picks up an old Sprite bottle. He says "Dali Lama" and acts out spitting into it. He passes it to Alex, who drinks some as instructed. I defer. Alex will later claim that Songdu acted out breathing into the bottle, but I will maintain that the spitting motion is universal and that Alex drank Lama spit.

Monday
5pm: Mountains. I never thought there could be so many mountains. As we go through the passes, prayer flags are flung from the windows. They catch in mid-air, bright against the gray rocks, green pine and purple rhododendron, then do cunctatory somersaults through the sky. We pass villages that span space and time - some straight from the pueblos, pink or white stucco boxes, small windows, big internal courtyard, some from ancient Greece, with yellow brick and big external courtyard, some pure ancient China, big wood squares, all slanting roof, a tiny smudge of wall, houses piled one atop each other in a convoluted mass. We pass countless tent villages of nomads herding yak, the tents are made from piled rock and tarps, and each grouping has a pool table set out in the front, in pride of place, with the mountains for walls in these singular pool halls.

Tuesday
1pm: Mountains. Green now, trellised and stout like ziggurats. The mist swallows the tops, and roiling clouds rill through the valleys like vats of boiling milk. We've left the Tibetan plain, this is the "Chinese" China now. No more roughs in long hair and blanket sarongs, no more women with braids about their brow with bright fabrics woven into the pleat and handmade clothes in saturated hues. There are instead factories, cars, mines - drips of progress falling as steadily as the thin drizzle over the mountains.
4pm: We've made it to Chengdu. We celebrate by immediately buying a plane ticket to Inner Mongolia. But that's a story for another time.

Siam Chronicles 23 - Jinghong and Kunming in a Falling of Wings

2006-05-01T07:13:00.000-07:00

A Border of Dead Things

We had expected troubles at the Chinese border. This is natural, it is common. We got off the bus and were herded into a series of lines. The first was a disease checkpoint, wherein you were to "regard the machine" which I did. It was strange with many buttons. It was not turned on, but I fully inspected it anyway, attempting to ascertain its purpose. This passed the time up the first line, until we filled out a symptom card. On the list was "snivel" - I suppose they meant "sniffle" - and I was strongly tempted to check it because I was feeling tetchy.
We were released to the next checkpoint, and I found it interesting that the ground was littered with dead things, some birds, a few large beetles but mostly huge moths, dead or dying. They were brilliant, their carcasses were everywhere. The grass was a riot of yellow spots, red beading on brown wings, orange stripes. I don't know why they were all suddenly dropping out of the sky to die, I imagine it must be the change on the border from nature to insecticide and contamination, but I can't be sure. All I know is that the creatures of flight were falling to earth and sticking there, their pinions pinioned.
The final checkpoint was not easy to clear. The power had just gone out, so the line became massive, and soon deteriorated into a tumbling tide of groin-high elbows. The two persons behind the counter looked on the unruly horde with a removal like they were contemplating a shadow lengthen on a white wall. Things worsened as a half an hour ticked by, we were stuck in a riot and being pushed forward into an immovable object.
When the power finally switched back on, I had made mortal enemies with a girl in a frizz of dyed red hair and tight dressings. She had come on a much later bus, and had butted in before us, looking at my sour face and laughing in it, high and shrill, as she put her diminutive figure to use as an eel. She then started collecting a pile of passports from on-lookers as we sat, powerless, and I was considering how that puff of hair would make a great handhold and that bony body would give up a satisfying snap as she again gave me an ugly sneer. But at the pivotal moment I pitched Alex forward with a knee-jerk in his spine, and he fell against the desk, our passports falling into the hands of the young customs officer. He took them, and the face of my new nemesis fell like an underdone pound cake. It was immensely gratifying - I may not speak any Chinese, but I am conversant in some Asshole. The young customs officer looked at Alex, and after a time asked if he was secretly Russian because his middle name was Yaakov. Alex answered truthfully that he was not Russian, and his passport was stamped, one down, me to go. But with great misfortune, the clocked moved a minute on and it was time for the shift change. This took a good five minutes, as a new customs officer, a lady with glasses and copious acne, settled in with great care at the chair. Alex had been expunged from the throng by now, like a poisonous frog from the gullet of a snake, and I was a few heads back, unable to get closer. When she was good and ready, she leisurely flipped my passport open. I know by heart the picture that greeted her - a faded square of a lanky girl with white-blond hair, short and up in spikes, with a hungry face, round glasses and a septum piercing shot almost ten years before. She regarded this image for a while, a minute or so, just thinking on it and what it could mean. Then she lifted her eyes and scanned the crowd. There were only two westerners left in the tide, me and a teacher from Vientiane with a new beard - neither of us matched this description. She didn't look confused, she looked wary, cagey. She called out my name, and I popped up, prairie-dog like, from the tussle. "Me, it's me." I think I said. She called me in, the elbows let me pass until we were face to face. "YOU?" She said . "This is YOU?" She regarded again the photo I knew so well and compared it with the face I knew so well from the mirror: stout, brown hair, no noticeable piercings, a matronly sort even. The picture was that of something long gone a decade ago, a dead thing in a paling frame. I tried to explain. "Ten years ago. Look at the date." I said. She still didn't believe me. She showed the picture to a slew of military men, there were large gestures involved - they had to decide if I was the same person. I could have told them I wasn't.
There was apparently nothing they could do to preclude my entrance on the score of not being who you once were, and the legion left. But my troubles were compounded by the fact that my passport had run out of pages, I had traveled so much in the last decade, so I had sent it to the American embassy in Vientiane to have more added. I could see her considering the 1-20 pages covered in stamps and stickers, and the A-Z pages stuck in between, relatively clean. She flicked the tattered, frayed book back and forth under her glare again and again for a good fifteen minutes. She did not want me to enter China, she was desperately thinking of something that would prevent me from crossing the border. I would have naturally hyperventilated, but I was doing so anyway as the crowd crushed me against the desk, squeezing the wind from my lungs as I watched her contemplating at length a reductive story of my twenties in stamp form.
Finally she sighed, pianissimo, and gave me a paper to sign. I did so, I couldn't breathe, I flicked the pen quickly across it the thin surface and shoved it back. She looked triumphant. The signature did not match. I realized that ten years ago, I had a different signature, a closer approximation of my appellation. Now, I just sign my initials in a cursory scrawl - I may as well just make a big X. I realized my mistake, and snatched the paper back, tried to remember who I was once, what I felt, how I wrote, and tried again, impersonating myself. I didn't do a good job at it, but it was good enough, and she finally released me. Her deliberation on this point took over a half an hour, but it was almost worth it to see the murderous look on the frizzled dyed redhead as I finally passed into China, masquerading as a dead thing.

Another New Jersey

Crossing from Laos into China was like going from the Appalachians straight into the slag heaps of New Jersey. Everything was rubble, trash, everything smelled like dead fish. The people on the bus were chain smoking and chain spitting, and the small track through the mountains was all sharp turns and big bumps. As we went further along and I relied on my miniscule fortitude to prevent motion sickness, I noticed that what I had considered to be mountains became hills, and real mountains began. They were trellised with farmland and concrete arches to prevent erosion, and striped in winding mist.
We finally stopped at the city of Mengla, and immediately decided we wanted to leave the city of Mengla. I really felt like I wanted to turn right around and head back, back to SE Asia, back to anywhere but this industrial sinkhole, but I persevered. The next bus was to Jinghong, and it was to leave in an hour. I left Alex at the bus station with the screaming hordes of people trying to be his new best friend, and set forth to find a bank where we could exchange our Lao kip.
I had wended my way through six blocks or so, noting the incredible filthiness of the place, the restaurants with sagging vegetables on counters and blackened pans before the concrete inlets of the anorectic interior, when I heard my name keening across the hubbub of the traffic. I looked back to see Alex gesturing madly. I ran to him. It was an hour later here in China, we had forgotten this and were about to miss our bus. Somehow Alex had run with two massive backpacks and two heavy bags belted about his person, like an ant with a substantial crumb, just to catch up with me. The fact our bus was leaving was suddenly of no consequence, although I really did crave expedient exodus. What was of import for me was how Alex had managed to run for six blocks with all those bags. I stood there on the filthy street, squalid men squatting in the gutter smoking and spitting, and I queried him, time against us, as to how he had done it. He said in jagged breaths that he just had to, so he did, and I took a precious moment to look at him with admiration. Then I donned my baggage and on the way back everyone was cheering, a group of lovely girls even percolated out of a shop to chant a motivational doggerel as we sped on. Alex was a hero, the man who had run with a mountain on his back.
We made our bus, only just, and spent the next five hours on more industrialized mountain tracks on the way to Jinghong. It was slower than needed because the whole country is being razed, top to bottom, and the small road was filled with big trucks ferrying stone back and forth over the blasted countryside. They were so massive that they couldn't even fit the width one way, and it was a two way road. So there were innumerable traffic jams where we would stop, get out of our van, and everyone would navigate the trucks through the track. The substructure just wasn't big enough for this sort of incredible destructive industry. I could imagine the scenery as having been amazing, this once remote, once pristine, once green Southern Yunnan, but it was lost to strip mines, factories and refuse dumps - just another dead thing.

Jinghonging Along

We got into Jinghong in the early evening, and instead of a taxi engaged an old lady in a floral print dress with a bicycle hooked to a flat trailer. She pedaled us to our intended hotel, wheezing and puffing her way through the small city, slower than a toddler's walk. So it was we arrived at a hotel after taking two buses and an old lady.
We got settled and set out into the small city, teeming with hill tribe peoples, and I got a small dose of the culture shock I had been saving for America.
There were cars everywhere. It was loud. It was polluted. People didn't look at you - and when they did and you noticed they dropped their eyes. They were rude, shoving and cursing. They came in different shapes and sizes - some were fat, some slim, some tall, some short, some had wide heads, some small, some had huge ears, some had glasses. They were all Asian, but they were all radically different. Every Lao is unique, but they don't comb the genetic spectrum like the Chinese. I was in a thrall to find men with big noses or women with wide-set eyes. And everybody dressed differently, most in designer clothing expressing their consumerist individuality except for the hill tribes, showing their traditional stripes. It was wild. And men and women were touching in public. They were kissing even. There were advertisement galore, and some of these featured women who were extremely scantily clad. I was agog.
We had a great time in Jinghong, the food was incredibly good - the dominant ethnic group are the Dai, ethnic Thai-Lao from the old Siamese empire, so it had a leisurely gait. I even got to ride an ill-tempered afghan camel. I don't think he liked me very much.

Kunming is the Sting

We liked Jinghong, but left on a ten hour VIP bus to Kunming because this was unavoidable. Kunming is where the railway starts, and it is a big bus route. We had to go.
It was a long trip, longer still because the "bathrooms" en route were concrete trenches were you squatted with everyone, no running water, no sinks. I was again glad that I have no shame, crawling past elderly piddling grandmothers crouched over a stinking pit for the opportunity to go pantless in public yet again.
We stopped for lunch at a dingy set of tables. I pointed at a dish, and discovered at my first mouthful I had at long last found the liver and intestines I had so been pining for. I let Alex finish it off, and succored myself with candy until we got into Kunming at five.
The bus station was madness. Men were sucking opium out of bazookas converted into bongs, hill tribe peoples were running up the luggage stacks like ants, their bright geometrical clothing shocking in its intensity, the fume from the buses was thick as a steam bath and coated everything in a yellow pall, and in and out of the haze dirty women were running up screaming at us in a language we didn't understand. We made haste out of the dreamscape, and found a cab to take us to a hotel.
More cultural shock. I had forgotten about rush hour. We sat for twenty minutes a block, just waiting - so many cars. This was a city. A city, I had forgotten what a city was like. It was raining, it was crowded, it was noisy, it was noxious, it was even chilly. It was full of billboards and neon shop fronts, featuring demented westerners in insipid pink jackets on a golf course. Do we all play golf in aggravating pastels? I don't know anymore. Do we?
We got to our hotel. I took a freezing shower and immediately got a voracious cold. It came on quick, but within an hour I was a font of phlegm, and it was worsening. We went out into the night for dinner anyway, and found an agreeable restaurant to pass the time - warm and cozy. We spent a long spell there reading and drinking Chinese brandy, which isn't nearly as bad as it sounds, before we went out into the rain to walk the long way home. We were impeded in our traverse by a cultural parade. It was midnight on a Sunday and Kunming was having a cultural parade. It featured all the hill tribes in full garb doing their native dances and a bunch of balloon teddy bears. Ok. We stopped to observe and take horrible photographs, but I was literally upended by one tribe, swagged in scarlet bolts shagged with silver coin kickshaws, who started springing up synchronized in turns and singing together, singing one of the most beautiful songs I've ever heard. I was leaning down low, in the dim light trying for a picture by stabilizing the camera on my knee, and I was transfixed. I listened through the drizzle to this lilting siren song as they all upped and turned, swiveling through the darkling, wishing I could fix the melody into my mind forever, that I could hear this song as I wanted, whenever I wanted. But they went on through the rain, on beyond me into the dim, and as if out of a trance I tried to stand up to follow them on. It didn't work, my legs were atrophied from squatting, I went sideways instead of up and managed to fling myself across the sidewalk. I was a grimy splatter pattern in the wake of greatness.
The next day I was well on sick, and it was still cold and raining. I had brought nothing but a few ragged tees and flip-flops. We forded through the grey city slick for a few blocks, until I broke down and bought a pair of shoes. This was the first time I had worn shoes, not flip-flops, but shoes, for eleven months. They threw in the socks gratis, it cost me five dollars. It was strange to feel my toes in a new found acquaintance to each other, and I hoped that none held a grudge though after a day I realized my pinky toes were disinclined to such proximity with the rest of my feet, and were staging a protest. We walked forever, trying to find the "old town" street - it was hilarious in its way. Everyone we asked pointed in a different direction. We wandered in circles in smog and rain, through shopping malls and fast food chains, wondering where we were and what were where doing there.
For more culture shock and to get out of the cold I insisted we go into a mall - a shopping mall. This is a ginormous structure where they sell vast amounts of manufactured commodities. It is sanitized and has a permanent smell of new cloth and plastic. It is not an old woman with a wooden table slicing up a chicken who smells like ginger and is spitting betel nut juice onto your shoe. They have these structures all over the US, a happy place where I still qualify as a "medium" or sometimes a "large." But in this antipodean parallel I could fit into no size but XXL, and even then only by unbuttoning my bosom region. It caused no end of merriment for the group of tittering saleswomen trying their best to fit me into their largest clothes. I was like a sad giant in dwarf town, doing my best to fit in and failing exceptionally. Afterward we stopped in a Chinese fast food restaurant - more culture shock here - where Alex managed to order slabs of dog food on gooey rice mush. Even looking at it made my stomach try to crawl out my ear and run for cover in a dimly lit corner. But my goat-bellied spouse downed it all, and after this grueling ordeal we sought refuge in a quiet bar where I ordered more Chinese brandy, picked up my mystery novel in the soft grey light through the drizzle, and let the afternoon fade.
The next two days I was truly sick, feverish, in full flush of bronchial infection and sinus impaction. But somehow I managed to hike through the Great Stone Forest. It was bright, light and warm, but I was lost in a thick fog, removed, faded, like a shadow falling on the stones. Then both of us got lost for real, in an endless series of steps and circling through caves, karsts and chasms. After a few hours Alex used his hunter-gatherer skills to navigate a way back by sighting a lone bus across a desolate plane. On this trek we noticed we had somehow discovered and thoroughly explored the "Forbidden Zone." I've seen better Forbidden Zones.
We got made our bus, got back to the hotel, and faced the eerie elevator with total exhaustion. Every day they change its bright red carpet so once the doors snick open you are faced with the huge words "MONDAY" or "TUESDAY" in dingy red shag. It is somehow incredibly disturbing. I walked up to the elevator to depress its shiny rectangular button and found I just couldn't do it. We turned around and there was a travel agent before us. We walked in and bought two airplane tickets to Shangri-la for 7am the next morning.
So here we are on the edge of Tibet in a honey wood house etched out of elaborate tiers and lattices under a cobalt blue sky, warmed by a pot-bellied stove. The air is thickened by wood smoke and old Tibetan men in women in bright clothing are dancing in a circle outside on the slick cobblestones to a simple melody crackling out of a radio. Today is "WEDNESDAY" and suddenly I'm feeling much more alive than I have in a long, long time.

Siam Chronicles 22 - Some Confusion in Conclusion

2006-04-25T02:02:00.000-07:00

Goodbye Peoples Democratic Republic of Laos. In respect to the longest and most cumbersome moniker, you top the list of countries I've lived in. It would be far easier for everyone if you just named your country "John" so I could start this, "Dear John, I am leaving you because…" instead of "Dear People's Democratic Republic of Laos, I am leaving you because…"
Think about "John." It's a good name, one that spanks of communism.

Alex and I are in the far north of Laos now, and after two days of flat bed truck rides through the mountains where everyone was puking but us en route to towns I can't spell and couldn't even find when we were dumped in the center of them, we're already lambasted. Today we spent five hours going forty miles, and another hour trying to get into town because the Lao, true to form, had decided to close off every single road for concurrent construction. So it was we were bumping through driveways and goat tracks just to make it here. I am not feeling overly optimistic about our long, long journey through rural Southern China.
But now is not the time for the future. It is the time for a cantankerous rant about the present - it's Monday night in a miniscule popsicle-stick hamlet, and there is a wild party going on a few blocks away. Jejune pop in high decibels and screaming bleat through the smoky amethyst sunset over the mountains. I wish I had a rifle to chase those damn kids off my lawn.
Now is also the time for the past, the time for an elegiac litany. I'm leaving Laos tomorrow, my home for the last nine months. It is time to write the "Dear Laos" letter.

Dear Laos, I am NOT Leaving you because…

1) The Lao
The Lao are all smile and "Bo phan nyang" - no problem. They are curious about everything. I even had a guy crushed into my shoulder in the bed of a truck don his reading glasses so he could enjoy my novel with me as he breathed into my eyeball.
A close, friendly people, they look after themselves and everyone else. Your business is their business.
The Lao feel deeply, with heart. Although the sexes can't touch in public, men walk down the street hand in hand with their male friends, and women walk with their arms tight around each other.
The Lao never, ever hurry, things happen as Buddha proscribes, Buddha cannot be rushed. It is leisurely, and I appreciate this.
They Lao laugh easily, they are painfully open. I have been told many times that I am very fat by cheerful faces - it is not an insult here where food is scarce. People always ask how old I am - age is a gift in this poor society. When Alex and I divulge that we are married, there is the inevitable query of where our baby is - what, no baby? When will we have a baby? Alex looks at his watch and scratches his head, that's our answer. But here babies are blessings, and the children are gorgeous and happy.
The Lao are like honey - natural, slow-moving, and sweet. To generalize, they are the nicest group of people I have ever met, the most loving, laughing and compassionate.

2) Lao Food
Some of the best food I've ever had was Mekong fish roe curry or fried garlic pork and sticky rice. The cooking is amazing, all fresh organic vegetables and herbs because pesticide and processed foods are too costly. I will miss it.

3) Lao Transport
I love getting in the back of an open-air tuk-tuk and gunning my way through town, the wind blasting my face. I love the fact that getting into the station late means I am still an hour early for my bus.
I will in a weird way also miss the tuk-tuk touts, who at night ask if I'd like to engage in some nefarious scheme with kissing noises, the universal signal for devious intent. It was always interesting to see what they would pitch at us - my favorite was when they offered Alex a kilo of cocaine. That's enough contraband to shunt anyone immediately into "drug baron" status. He declined, I laughed.

4) Living in a Tropical Climate
A spectrum of butterfly clouds, sprays of flowers with heavy fragrance, rare wild orchids blooming in drizzles of color in every crevice, birds with gaudy plumage, lush dripping jungle - living here has been a non-stop fauna on flora peepshow. Plus, there are monkeys.

5) Being Unemployed
It's been awesome to write, paint, drink, laze, meander and glaze with no stipulations on my time. Thank you Laos, I've always wanted to do this. I've had a job since I was twelve and I when I graduated from grade school into high school I listed my intended career as "dilettante." One dream realized.

Dear Laos, I am Leaving you because…

1) The Lao
The Lao are all smile and "Bo phan nyang" - no problem. This is true even when there IS a big problem, like a two foot spike of rebar sticking out of your forehead. It is difficult to get them to take anything seriously even when it is in fact serious.
A close, friendly people, they look after themselves and everyone else. Your business is their business. The only problem is that I rather like having a private life that is in fact private.
The Lao feel deeply, with heart, but this doesn't seem to extend to animals. It isn't so bad, it will be worse in China, but I will not miss the sound of puppies screaming. There was one time when I actually saw a guy beating a dog with another dog, yes you read that right. He had a small poodlish mutt, and was whamming it against a larger dog in the street. This at least was efficient. Tonight I saw two men shocking a small family mongrel for fun with an electrified tennis racquet used to kill mosquitoes. They hit it again and again, it blazed blue and made a sizzling sound, and the little yellow dog pitifully tried to push it away with a paw. I almost cried. They laughed and laughed, it never got old.

2) Lao Food
Some of the worst food I've ever had was Lao "western" style dishes. Like pizza that is blackened ketchup on a baguette, a "fried" egg that is still dripping in excretory puddles over the rim of your plate, or spaghetti that is a tangle of starch adrift in an ochreous sea of oil, topped with sugar and a green tomato.

3) Lao Transport
I will not miss sitting on a bus meant for eleven with fifteen plus people, all of which much stop every five minutes to perform a complex extrication of their live chickens from the roof-rack, at which point twenty more people will cram on. Everyone will immediately start vomiting. I have wondered why the Lao are so weirdly susceptible to any form of motion sickness, but it is beyond my purview.
I will not miss being in constant fear of my life anywhere near a road. There are no driver's licenses, there are no rules. The Lao drive on the left, on the right, they drive on the sidewalk, they do not stop for pedestrians and they swerve to hit dogs. Driving dunk is not an offence, and seems to be actively encouraged. There are occasional cross-walks, but they are meaningless, simply bait to lure the uninitiated into the bloodbath.

4) Living in a Tropical Climate
Bugs. Big bugs, little bugs, stingy bugs, bitey bugs, sucky bugs, many legged, winged, colorful or dun, so very many bugs makes for very little fun.
Heat. I never want to be hot ever, ever, ever again.
I respect the Lao for their fortitude, but defer in weakness.

5) Being Unemployed
I get bored and languorous when I am unemployed. I'm not a good candidate for dilettante. Now I know.

The Moral of the Story

The moral of this story is that Laos is a beautiful gem, sparkling in its facets, I love this country that is so gorgeous, I love the people who are like honey on dry toast.
The moral of this story is that although I can run away from my life, I always find a new one waiting, with new problems, be it a plague of locusts (this is the newest swarm, I don't want to talk about it) or falling into the same volute spin I left. Every place is different and the same because I am the same, although I try not to be.
But mostly, the moral of this story is that a crocodile should never ride an elephant with a bunch of grapes because, after all, a fox is just a fox.

Siam Chronicles 21 - Hello and Goodbye Pi Mai

2006-04-20T00:19:00.000-07:00

It's my third to last night in Luang Prabang, it's 2am and I'm staying up with the monks. Unlike me they don't have a glass of whiskey, but they do have both a gamelan band and a raucous game of bingo to keep them company. I'm unemployed, I don't have to do a damn thing, but I'm waiting with the monks anyway. I guess it's my way of saying goodbye. I suppose I also need some time to ruminate - it's been a strange couple of weeks, even by my standards.

Warming, Storming and Swarming

It all started two weeks ago when the storms hit. The couchant front has caused floods and mudslides in Thailand and China, and has brought early rain to Laos. Two weeks ago rain sluiced through the swelter in the middle of the day. I enjoyed the respite and was maundering down the Mekong when I noticed a lake of raisin-sized frogs in a spectrum of colors hopping madly through the street. There were hundreds of them, and I trod like a drunkard to avoid squashing any. When I was clear of that herd, I stopped to admire a lovely red beetle, flat and square, bedizened with black slats and yellow sides. I bent down gazing at it for a spell, until I realized it was one of a multitude, many of which were dropping onto my person from above. I hadn't considered that they were equipped with stinger bits, but they were. I ran through the unruly fester of glinting cerise, brushing myself like mad until I was free. I made it home, dodging the squadron of carmine wasps drilling down from the tree tops. That night I thought it was safe to emerge and write, with only the standard mosquito attachment in sight. That's when the termite queens came for me. They are like dragonflies with stumpy bodies, and I learned that once a year on the first rain they flood the city, so thick that they are everywhere, they are the air, they blacken all the lights with their flimsy crush. This torrent started with a slow trickle, banging into my laptop screen, alighting on my body, until I shut everything down to watch them multiply into epic dimensions, attracting cascades of lizards including a shockingly vivid species I'd never seen before. The lizards were efficient, they averaged a bug every seven seconds, but they were soon severely outnumbered and I retreated to a dark corner with a case of the willies in the shrill thrum of wings. My upstairs neighbor, the Belgian architect, came home laughing to find me huddled in his doorway, his slim red face covered with insects, his feet crunching on our newly lain carpet of wings and exoskeletons an inch thick. He said it was like this all over town, a black monsoon of suicidal queens. We shut off all the lights and I scurried indoors, but all night long the whap whap whap of bugs banging on our window screens filled my dreams, and for the next week all the lizards in town were unnaturally fatted and slow moving, dragging their bloated bellies with supreme hebetude.

Expected and Unexpected

The rains continued, but in the dead of night so the weight of the sun was unalleviated. According the British weather service index, the average heat and humidity of Luang Prabang for April is registered as "high," with it clicking over to "extreme" as May closes in. Our concrete bunker of a bedroom soaks up the heat of the day. At night it is a good ten degrees warmer than it is outside, and that is … well, if I could curse freely I could describe it to my satisfaction, but instead I will just say it is very, very hot. I am acclimated, I move little during the day, I am not uncomfortable. But at night, tumbling into a bed baking in a hundred degrees, I sleep fitfully, if it all, churning the sheets into a puddle of sweat. It is worse since the power has been going out with the storms, usually all night long, so there are no fans for aid. It has been hot, it is hot, I cannot think of a time when it wasn't hot.
Laos has four New Years, four chances throughout the calendar to make those resolutions you will so cleanly break. They celebrate Hmong and Western New Year in December and Chinese New Year in February with a week of drunkenness. But they also have Lao New Year, and this is when it happens. SE Asia doesn't have cold, snowy winter with the hope of spring, they have drought and searing atmosphere with the hope of water. The Mekong and Nam Khong are so low now they have become stagnant ponds between sand banks. This is their worst time, death from thirst turning to life from rain. They celebrate the onset of their temperate season with fire, and they celebrate the hot New Year not with kisses and champagne but with water.
So a week ago kids started throwing water at us, little kids, toddling up with their parents encouraging, and we would stop to let them dump a bit onto our pants. But they were tiny, and they always seemed to go for me, so I was walking around town looking like I'd wet myself. The official celebration wasn't supposed to kick in for another few days, but this is Laos, it is Lao time, and things get going when they do and stop when everyone is too spent to continue.
We got word from our newly married San Francisco friends Zack (http://www.xzackly.com/troublonia/) and Madhavi (http://www.bartlebee.blogspot.com/), out seeing the world, that they would come and visit us mid April. We didn't hold our breath - many have pledged the same and many have reneged. Luang Prabang is the third largest city in twentieth poorest country in the world. Communication is unreliable so we sent by email a map to a guest house owned by a friend, and directions to our home. They gave us a general timeframe. I still didn't reckon they would make it - as I write this there are fist sized beetles and spiders much, much larger scurrying around my feet and some sort of winged ants setting up a home in my clothing - it's not exactly Paris.
I was shocked to see them on our doorstep. It turned out they had serious second thoughts at Bangkok, but they made it, unbelievably, braving the two days of bus rides through the serpentine track through mountains just to see us.
We had last met in San Francisco, at Emmy's Spaghetti Shack in the outer Mission. Since then we had moved to the center of nowhere and they had gotten married, traveled through Africa, Israel and Sri Lanka and were about to move to New Zealand. I think we all didn't know what to say. They asked a few times what it was like to live here, what it was really like, and I couldn't respond. I made lubberly attempts. I tried describing my routine of walking, painting, penny whistle playing, and writing, but it fell flat and flaccid on the ground like dreck. I didn't know what to say, my life here is not easily validated.
That night they turned in early, and my upstairs neighbor, the Belgian architect, came home late and we spoke about it. He has lived here for years, and he said it was impossible to convey, it is beyond trying. And I think that is true. Not that people wouldn't get it, not that they wouldn't understand - it's just so simple that it's incredibly complicated. When I lived in Prague I was doing so much, I had a hundred stories for every day so a year stretched to ten, time stretched. When I lived in San Francisco I had a few choice stories per week but I was busy, motivated, and four years folded into a good two years of memories. Then there is the People's Democratic Republic of Laos. Time here ceases to exist entirely. I've written a lot, painted a lot, learned a lot, but it all seems like wildflowers on an overpass, an occasional pertinence. I've become quiet and observant, and this is inherently difficult to convey.

Then There was Water

Any initial fumblings were quickly extirpated by the fact that Zack and Madhavi had coincidentally arrived just in time for Lao New Year. Laos has less people in the whole country than there are in the city of New Orleans, but Pi Mai (New Year) is no less raucous than Mardi-Gras. It's an all-out massive water-fight for three days, with parades, street parties, and people smearing your wet face with white flour, black charcoal goo, red lipstick muck, yellow poster paint or green questionable substance. None of these things except the flour is easy to remove from your person, and impossible to eradicate from your clothing. It's anarchy. It's a city-wide melee. There is nowhere to go outside your house where you won't get doused again and again and again so you are dripping all day, a nicety in the saturating heat, with people with paws covered in something smeary running up to you and rubbing them all over your face saying, "Kiss from you, kiss from you."
We went to the waterfall in the morning, unaware that it is tradition for all Lao peoples to go there for Pi Mai and saturate themselves in the pools for luck. On the way we got drenched by village kids flinging buckets of water into the tuk-tuk. We squirted them with our woefully inadequate water guns, it was wet, it was fun. Once we got there we admired the tiger, Phet, in her acre wide cage, and she came out to consider us, breathing tufts of rancid buffalo meat five inches away. I had also noted her keeper, with his claw-raked face. I kept my distance. We walked on and up the mountain to the hidden pool, and flopped in, submerging in the crisp azure palliative. I swam to the edge of the cliff and watched the water tumble down through three pools into a wide lake that shunted off into the jungle. I proclaimed my intention to never leave, that Alex should just bring me food until I died from old age, pruny and happy, remembering at last what it was like to not be hot.

Stupas in the Sand

The next day the Mekong road was shut off for a street party. Alex got crotch-grabbed, Zack was kissed by a man in a Saddam Hussein mask, trucks packed with people singing went rolling past, drenching us with buckets of water. It was awesome. Everyone went across the diminutive rivulet to build a sand stupa (representation of the Holy Mountain, Mount Meru) on a drought spawned island.
We made it across the trickle of river and built our stupa out of sand and trash, and declared it stupendous. Everything and everybody was covered in water and flour, drifts of flour were glissading through the air, it was like we were winding through a cloud. A loud, drunken cloud. Zack got freaked by some incredibly soused British blonde, Madhavi hung back with infinite tolerance, and then we all danced to bad Asian pop under a beige army tent. It was a good day.
Things petered out at dusk, the party ends at twilight as it always does here. I appreciate that, no one gets stupid or inconsiderate in an all-night beer binge. They get started early and end early, rising and setting with the sun.

She-Sponge

The next day was more of the same, and at this point our friends and Alex were all getting a bit tuckered out. I should have thought I would be the first to capitulate. The others when they saw the bucket brigades were fleet of foot like gazelles, but with my slippy flip-flops I could harness no more than a shoddy trot, so I got the full blasts. My celerity impediment was augmented by the fact that they used my trenchant mass as a shield. I was sad to discover all three could easily hide behind me. But even when this wasn't the case, Madhavi said the water would arc from the rest of them onto me. I said I was secretly a sponge twisted into woman form with rubber bands. But I courted this, I walked up to children with my head down so they would whelm me with water and their shrieks of laughter, I was willing. I was less willing to be covered in staining red dye that smelled funny, but it was a small price to pay.

Parades, a Prostitute and a Pugilist

There were even two parades. They were fun, especially since you got to dump water on monks and soldiers, which really I think you should be able to do every day anyway.
In the last week I have witnessed two singular events on our way home from dropping Zack and Madhavi at their guesthouse. The first was the vendition of a Lao prostitute - I've never even seen a Lao prostitute before, much less witnessed the deal being struck. I will spare you the details, but will say that her pimp was a transvestite and the British backpacker john had to keep saying (well he was screaming actually, in a drunken slur) that he wanted consort with the girl, not with the pimp. I can't recount this conversation accurately without profanity, which was all the drunk Brit seemed capable of formulating, so let's leave this seedy scene.
Two days ago I got another first, also while leaving Zack and Madhavi's guesthouse on the way home. It was a Lao street fight. In Laos it is law that to hit anyone will automatically incur a fine of five hundred US dollars. That's a lot in America, but in Laos, where the average salary is twenty bucks a month, that's two years wages - the equivalent of sixty thousand dollars. I was told by the expats that it is a rare year when there is even one fight, when the men are drunk enough to delve into penury. This fine is very effective. So while walking back from a night of talk and cards on the porch of the guesthouse, Alex and I were surprised to discover a semi-clothed man wreaking havoc on the main strip. He couldn't hit anyone, it was too costly, but he was screaming, pacing across the road and whipping his beer soaked shirt at the curious onlookers - there was a crowd of Lao encircling him on their motorcycles, not intervening, just observing. He ran up to the motorcycles shouting and beating his fists on the chrome, he snapped his shirt, he was very angry and stunk of liquor. We waited with the crowd, watching, until he was so keyed up that I thought he might splurge on a good drumming at the expense of two years salary, and we hastened off. But that is as bad as it gets in Laos, people walk around with big plastic sacks of money and leave their stores untended on the honor system, it is in its way an idyll.

One Part Insomnia, One Part Bingo, Two Parts Buddha

After two days of doing as little as possible we said goodbye to Zack and Madhavi tonight, and I feel that I didn't know them well until they got here though I've known them for years. Heat, beer, water and being covered in some sort of sticky gunk makes you remarkably candid. On the opposite side of the world we met in the middle of mayhem, and parted again. I will miss them.
The monks are staying up all night at the wat outside our door, as they will for the next three days. Things are dry and quiet now, and there are piles of flowers everywhere. The air is sweet with night blooming jasmine, plumeria and the smell of approaching rain. Every Lao makes the journey up here to bathe the Buddha in water with flowers and scented oils. And play bingo. So the monks keep a vigil all night, and I keep watch with them, as the pilgrims come and pray.
I am leaving the day after tomorrow to head up to China, after putting it off for two days. I am on Lao time, I do what I want when I am ready and stop when I am spent, and I am happy.

Siam Chronicles 20 - What She Learns as the World Burns

2006-03-26T00:56:00.000-08:00

The world is burning. Everything is on fire. It is the hot dry season. This is different from the rest of the year in that it is hot enough to roast live chickens on your forehead, and there is not a cloud, spot of shade, or rain for relief. This month, March in English, is for the Lao the month of fire. Some say it is simply the timing of the seasons, with the slash and burn agriculture of the surrounding hills needing its start now to be ready for the rainy season approaching in three or four months. It may have started with that, certainly the mountains are suddenly dim with disemboguing a flood of smoke, obscuring the yellow flash of fire below. But it has become over time something more atavistic, a ritual. Every house is burning trash instead of depositing it into the communal bins, plastic bottles and wrappers melting into bonfires, or raking together leaves and torching them, or holding huge barbeques of whole animals with their sightless eyeballs boiling and dripping into the flaming oil-drums the people use instead of ovens - everything is on fire.
I walk every day for an hour or two, along the rivers and into the depths of the sprawl. It is so hot that I walk at dusk now, when the sky is bright red behind the blurred blue smudge of mountain. The air pollution from the smoke is so bad that the sun is scarlet, slipping into the Mekong in red waves, searing its way through an angry crimson sky in the heat. The sunset has no direction, the whole sky is inflamed - the world is on fire from beginning to end. As I walk there is flame on every side, people burning their lawns, their refuse, just burning - a pulsing corridor of orange and smoke. The sky is thick with black bits from the incineration, like slow snowflakes dancing on the current of the bloody ether, and soon you are covered in them as they settle, until you are suited in soot, dark as night. I walk, and have asthma attacks though I don't have asthma. I'm in a fever dream though I'm not sick. My eyes expunge black tears and are red as stop-signs. I walk until the moon rises, huge and carmine refracted in the smoke, like an inferno mirroring the earth below.
I've been in my own personal hells on a few close-kept occasions, and I've lived many places with a multitude of lives, but this is the first time I've encountered the hallmark idea of hell. The burning sky, the columns of fire, the intense heat, the choking smoke leaving you gasping, drowning but yearning for water to cool your skin… my own hells were much more intense so I am left in ashes crying black tears, wondering what the tourist should make of a holiday in Dante's imagination.
I wonder this each day as I walk, suppressing the desire to catch the black snow flakes on my tongue. But this is not hell, there are donuts. But the donuts are dry and tasteless, maybe it is hell. I am feverish and bleary.
I walk past the many wats emitting drifts of incense, more smoke sucked into the already saturated haze. Some feature elaborate paintings of a Christian hell across the entryway - men with the heads of goats dancing in fire and pulling out tongues or testicles, flaying flesh and bone. I had wondered about this since the SE Asians consider Laos to be the high cathedral of Buddhism, with Luang Prabang as its holiest tabernacle. Hell is a Christian idea, antithetical to the Buddhist teachings as I understand them of reincarnation in Samsara, the cycle of suffering - basically if you don't behave you come back as a rat, there is no interstice of a plane of pain. They also believe adamantly in Hinduism here, and mush it into Buddhism without qualm, and in Hinduism what wrongs you do will come back to you in this life via karma - again no hell dimension. I was incredibly curious. I generally avoid monks myself, especially the big cheeses, since it is proscribed that women should be physically lower than them. Since they are all four feet tall, and the city has more monks than mosquitoes, to respect this I'd have to crawl around on all fours like a dog all day. I'd slouch about, but that would still leave me with a good foot to go. So instead of offending, I cross the street, and try to hide my height in the trees. I acquire a good amount of massive spiders and biting red ants while I am doing this, so don't think I don't make an effort. But Alex teaches everyone in town, everyone, he's a local celebrity (not the least because we had our picture taken on an elephant, which became the front of a brochure for the biggest local travel agency), and he teaches a great number of monks. So I sent Alex as my emissary to inquire about how fire and brimstone stir into their religious stew.
He reported back to say that they shrugged their shoulders, said that this is what would happen if you were a bad person, and asked him if he would like to hear them chant the Buddha. These pictures of hell share wall-space with a depiction of the cycle of Samsara, and Hindu deities. This is Laos. This is what I have learned - that although Christian ideals are in direct opposition to Buddhism or Hinduism, the Lao take all into their religion seamlessly with respect. If the idea of coming back as a cockroach holds no impetus to behave, then maybe karma will. If karma doesn't then maybe hell will. It is simply a means to an end, a flip and easy thing to say, but for me the idea of an entire devout populace practically applying this platitude to religion is staggering. The incongruities of dogma do not concern them. These are people who are still animist, even the monks, a beautifully simple religion like that of the Native Americans wherein we are all spirit living from the land and vice versa. Buddhism was a graft, Hinduism was a graft, Christianity was a graft, but hold no contradictions for them. The only thing that is important is the intersect, the limbo of their ancient religion mingling with the upstarts, and this is what they are taught, this is what they believe. There are three laws for the layman and three hundred for the monk that are tenants of all major world religions. They exist happily this way, and theoretical arguments on differences are non-existent, as is their bloodshed in the name of religion.
I have learned while I walk through the inferno that our beliefs and our actions become more empirically kind, more essentially sanctified, when they are not tied down too tightly to one path, but when they instead become a crossroads. When you live in the center of the a crossroads amidst the fires of an apocalypse, the man from the north, the woman from the east, the boy from the south, and the girl to the west are all the same, each just human, equally hazy in the pall of smoke.

Siam Chronicles 19 - Fulminant Toys for Girls and Boys

2006-02-24T00:03:00.000-08:00

The Mekong and the Nam Khan have receded to such low levels during the dry season that the town is now an island entwined in sand bars, snaked into sections by thin trickles of water. It's weird to think that a few months ago it would be dangerous to try swimming across either of these monster rivers, which are now just the tiniest sprig of stream that can be forded by any four year old at its most dangerous depths.
This taming of the tide has made someone rich renting out two seasonal wares: beach umbrellas and inner tubes. The rainbow bumbershoots lance into the sand at lazy angles where the river once was, and tiny children dandle in the smooth tubes soaking up the sunshine in calf-deep puddles. The shouts of their laughter echo up the tiered gardens bolstering the green banks of town.
I was once a dapper beaver bustling in the busy toy biz, and the kids of SE Asia have teamed up to defy my training on what constitutes a successful toy. Here's the top ten list of toys delighting happy imps on this hemisphere:

Inner tube (per above)
Rusty machete (these can be used to chase a sibling, or hack off branches which can then be carved into sharp sticks that can be used to chase a sibling)
Plastic bag on stick (this can be a kite, or a butterfly-net, or be utilized to reach up into trees and abscond with precious mangoes)
Banana-leaf dolls (these are quickly twisted together by beleaguered parents in situations of critical boredom)
Mud (oh most versatile mud! It can be shaped into food, housing or transport)
Flip-flop (This is necessary for the most popular sport for the under 12 set. It's like horeshoes, only with flip-flops, and somehow involves gambling for a wad of bills placed at the end of the run)
Baby animal (any type will do, as long as it is pliable and doesn't mind overmuch being used as a projectile)
Basket ball (literally a rattan basket woven into an orb - used for idle kicking and throwing, or volleyball and soccer but NOT basketball)
Toilet paper (this can be unraveled for comical effect or used for the ever-popular "Look! I'm a Mummy!" gag)
Younger sibling (these are the BEST toys, and are to be used in the second most popular sport for the under 12 set, Hide Behind a Tree and Push my Younger Sibling into Traffic)

The kids here are tops, and if I ever breed and the spawn ask for an X-box, I'll be that annoying parent who gets their hopes up then presents them with a plastic bag on a stick.

Siam Chronicles 18 - Nine Days with a Baa and Two Mays

2006-02-01T22:53:00.000-08:00

"Hi hon, I'm covered in monkey piss so I'm headed for the shower," I said as I walked in the door today. I felt truly Lao now, christened anew.
But I get ahead of myself.

Two weeks ago my Aunt, Mom, and Mom-in-law staggered off a prop plane that was decorated to look like some sort of horrible parade float and onto the Luang Prabang pittance of airstrip.
Mom in Lao is "May" and Aunt is "Baa" but as with every Lao word, these have multiple meanings dependant on the nuance of your intonation. So it was that I got to announce my family about town as my wives, my goats, my fishes and something else that was too scrofulous for the folk to let me in on the joke.
I also got to introduce them to three of our most colorful characters here in the tiny dusty burg:

1) The Drunken Midget - Bachelor number one is a friendly fellow, short in stature and prolixity, who enjoys drinking lao lao on a marble bench and doing odd jobs for cigarettes. Beneath the blue ball cap he sports brown eyes, swimming in a tumid red sea of burst blood vessels, and an easy smile.

2) Shaky Guy - Bachelor number two is a man of no words and fewer teeth, but many endearing eccentricities. He enjoys begging by approaching a foreigner and shaking wildly, which is purely a hobby as he owns a large house and many vehicles left over from the Vietnam War. His other hobby is changing his clothes several times a day, draping his skeletal form with either a striped loincloth, full seventies military regalia, or a fetching green sweat suit. He can often be found running through the streets wildly waving a pair of machetes or a gun at everything that moves or doesn't.

3) The Invisible Monkey - Bachelorette number three is a baby monkey whose pet peeves are dogs and diapers. She can often be found in a homemade turtleneck chained to a table. She only appears when I am alone, and has thus gained status with my family as a figment of my imagination. I see her more and more on my daily ambulation and this may be a bad sign. She enjoys stealing spectacles, eating flowers, and piddling on shirtsleeves.

Our family has gone and it made me miss them more. Today I passed Shaky Guy doing a slow dance in the middle of the road, crouched down on his haunches, gumming a silent song to the sky. I gave the drunken midget a big smile which was quickly tossed back, then flitted off to play with the monkey. She bit me a few times and rummaged through my bag as I thought on my last three more months here before heading into China, then back to the US. I kicked into a fantasy of cold martinis and a meal that was not forcibly extracted from a musk ox. I came back into focus on the banks of the Mekong petting a monkey, thinking how I'd miss the butterflies.
Then I started home to boil myself and my belongings.

Siam Chronicles 17 - Great Joy in Muong Ngoi

2006-01-07T00:15:00.000-08:00

A Very Buddhist Christmas

There are Evangelical Christians loose in the village. There is no escape. I had hoped to leave them busy with the daunting task of running the United States of Evangelica, but they are far too crafty to be outmaneuvered by an airplane and an evasive hegira through the sprawl of a vast jungle. The emissary of Evangelica, a man they call “Dubya,” plunked through Asia a bit back to pan for something better than enmity. Every day he issued statements condemning human rights offences of countries abiding within said continent. This is always a smart idea on a good will tour, like telling your dinner host their children are truly ghastly.
These daily invectives were contemned as so much hypocritical buffoonery by the local press, who had a field day with the thousands of prisoners being held for years without trial back in Evangelica, and Dubya’s serious consideration of using his first veto to overturn an anti-torture act. There was snide mention of how Dubya’s own personal God said something once about the inadvisability of casting stones.
One bright morning over a croissant I was delighted to discover that he had finally run out of countries and had at last turned on the People’s Democratic Republic of Laos. The writ in question decried the lack of Evangelical Christians in what is the only non-secular communist country in the world. The only problem with this accusation is that they ARE here. In supernumerary plenitude. It’s a regular ecclesiastic orgy, an excrescence of Evangelicals, a froth of the faithful fighting to convert the heathens.
They swarm out of the woodwork come Christmas, bearing freakish plastic trees that spin and shriek tinny pinged carols. Their scheme is simple – buy businesses and force the employees to attend church and listen to preaching and wear elf costumes. Or they’re fired. Sort of the “my God writes a paycheck better than your God” principle.
The only glitch in this system is that Buddhism inculcates the implicit respect for all other major world religions, which are each seen as another valid view of enlightenment. In Malaysia, the Buddhist residents bow in passage before a mosque, Hindu temple, or church (and hypothetically synagogue if they had any), and here the unmitigated expanse of wats are full of paintings and sculptures of Hindu gods hanging out in Nirvana with the Buddha and Bodhisattvas.
So with good humor the Lao have turned the forced Christmas infusion into a new myth, one of a mad dwarf from Finland named Santa, who has long white braids and brings candy to foreigners once a year. They drink, they feast – for the Lao possess an admirable attitude that there are no bad holidays and having another occasion to celebrate is in itself an occasion to celebrate.

We spent the Christmas holiday and the first night of Hanukkah outside town in a posh bungalow seamed into gardens and freezing swimming pools. There was a bottle of moonshine provided on check-in, compliments of the mad Finnish dwarf. For both days the sky was a numinous blanket of pure white, which gave the illusion of snow and winter evaporating the expanse of field flowing into mountain.
Alex and I lit the first candle and opened presents. He got a jar of peanut butter – pickings are slim. I don’t know what myth the Lao would make from Hanukkah, a celebration not yet forced into their culture, but I’d be interested to find out. Assuredly though, it would have something to do with drinking and karaoke.
On the second night of Hanukkah I hung out with some older gents from Israel, and received a standing invitation to come there and fly planes for the military. I tried to explain that I flew once and was singularly bad at it, but they assured me I’d learn quickly or die just as fast. Although the memory of the ground rushing to meet the upended plane was difficult to dismiss, they presented a compelling argument.

Thing Unseen Revisited Beneath a New Moon

Laos’ New Years is in April, and it’s two weeks of drunken water flinging and then dousing the unwary with a sack of flour. But true to form, the Lao have adopted the Western New Years as another excuse for taking a week off to assiduously study drinking and all its possible permutations.
We headed up to Nong Khiaw in the chilly northern mountains for New Years Eve, and were stuffed into a minivan for the journey. Everyone in Laos is sick right now, with some sort of terrible respiratory affliction. Instead of nose-blowing, the accepted way for man, woman, and child to expunge is to hork, hork, hork and whack out a big loogie. For four solid hours I got to experience what it would be like to be crammed into a kennel with a coterie of camels, and was feeling ill by the time we stepped off the gooey bus. We made haste to sniff our way to a truly excellent restaurant and compendium hostelry jutting across the Nom Ou River.
That night, while we waited for over three hours for banana-leaf garlic mok, we were sidled with a festive throng of Frenchies. Alex was drawing up a hostile coup of the kitchen on a napkin and sharpening his fork on his spoon in preparation for attack when our dinner finally appeared around eleven o’clock. The full restaurant cheered for our good fortune. We dealt with the mousse and headed off to bed in the river cabin, to the consternation of our companions. Though the French didn’t understand, we had a plan. A beautiful plan. To spend New Years ensconced in blankets burrowed in a river cabin by candlelight. As midnight struck, I was in the bathroom photographing a huge slug sliming his way through the shower. It was the best New Years ever.
Around 2am we were woken up by the rave raging on across the river. At 3 by wolves baying close to the cabin, insistent and invigorating. At 4 by someone chucking suspiciously large objects off the bridge into the river. At 6 by the strangely synchronized sound of a hundred roosters sounding the yawp all at once. I’m used to Luang Prabang roosters, which scream constantly and are uninterested in the hour. Perhaps they are not provided with adequate timepieces.
The next day we fled to the smaller village of Muong Ngoi, surrounded by twisted rock mountains of black veined in red, overrun with folds of trees like moss. The mist lies low on their peaks, and the streams and creeks bisect the region into plush wedges.
More bombs were dropped on Laos in the Vietnam War than were dropped in all of World War II, and Muong Ngoi is constructed out of old mortar shells with “Made in Arkansas” or “Made in Oklahoma” stamped across the drab green bellies. When we arrived, the whole village was drunk and rolling through the single dirt street, spraying each other with beer. I had never seen an entire village drunk before, and it is an interesting experience. All the restaurants were closed and abandoned except for old women weaving in tipsy time and belting out toothless karaoke. The guesthouse proprietors were snookered beyond redemption, but with much cajoling we were finally able to secure a $2 room in a house full of insensate backpackers.
The next day the party raged on, as it would for another week at least. Alex and I hiked through the mountains to caves and quiet plains. We passed a group of boys fishing with a live giant centipede, squirming red between chopsticks, and another group bringing a muskrat home for dinner.
That night under a new moon as the generators growled to a halt I was forcibly reminded that the sky has stars in it. Lots and lots and lots of stars. Venus was so big and orange it was clearly three dimensional and the Milky Way spiraled dizzyingly between the black curtains of the mountain crags.
The next morning we boated and bussed our way back to Luang Prabang, passing mountains in chiaroscuro of red and yellow behind the banana trees. I thought there must be a plague of some terrible leaf blight, until it dawned on me that Laos has deciduous trees and what I was seeing was the flush of fall. It even looked like Appalachia, minus the banana trees. I’d been living for four years in the land of mist and perpetual spring, and the sudden sight of fall foliage filled me with a desire to forage for apples and throw them at squirrels.
And joy. Lots of joy.

Siam Chronicles 16 - A Day of Thanks Between River Banks

2005-11-30T04:07:00.000-08:00

A Vacation of Extreme Brevity

On a vacation of extreme brevity there is a simple formula that I espouse to ensure the maximum RPM (relaxation per minute) and the minimum OSI (overall stress index). First, I do as little as possible, followed by doing less and less each hour until I reach a sublime syncope, preferably while submerged in water.
Our furlough was well-timed. I had reached my threshold of annoyance at two vociferous roosters, the daily purgation of six-legged giants auditioning for the role of pet, the limits of the local cuisine, hard beds as a general rule, being the token American for all amounts of vitriol target practice, and our sorry spigot with three drool drips doing double time as a shower. Although Bangkok would not be my first choice of places to vacate to, our hiatus was successful by strategizing to spend as little time in the smog and swarm of the city as possible.
Instead we were medicated by the muffle of a western resort. There was a bed both clean and soft, a real shower, my Aunt on call for affection allocation, and tons of non-rice based food types. We stuffed our craw holes until we gagged. I even took a bath.
It was perfect.
The room also had a package the size of a refrigerator waiting for us on arrival. The Laos post office is run primarily by donkeys and goats being cycled through the penal system on probate, and after four packages were expensively digested en route we were forced to give up on this mysterious and beautiful natural process. So my Mom had availed herself of Thai mail, which has a weird knack of reaching its intended destination. She had dumped in all their leftover Halloween candy which melted in transit, coating each item in a fine layer of solid chocolate like an Easter egg. We had a capital if messy time excavating the contents, which interestingly enough included a jar of mayonnaise the size of small dog, two boxes of bacon, a large salami, and a ham-sized hunk of Velveeta. We were rich as trailer-park sultans.
We did sally two forays, first to a nature park that featured wrestling crocodiles and jigging elephants. There was even a magic show, which was much like any other except that the magician kept whacking his lovely assistant in the head, just to add that special savor of the profoundly disturbing to the timeless Colored Scarf From the Great Beyond enigma. The elephants roved free and were a bit frisky - one even gave me a sloppy kiss. I was told returning the favor would bring me luck, but I'm a married woman and I don't need to get lucky with a pachyderm. We called it a day when we were all appropriately anointed in elephant snot and toddled back for a shower, swim, jacuzzi, then another shower for good measure.
Second we walked all of three steps to a cozy dinner boat, modeled after an antique junk in honeyed wood. This propelled us lazily down the river for a sterling view of the illuminated barge fiesta that we had coincidentally arrived just in time for. There were fireworks.
For a brief moment, Bangkok was beautiful.

A Little Feathered Holiday

Presently we were returned to our quiet village to feed the starving mosquitoes that had been locked in our bedroom. A few days later I was thrilled to discover that ants had infested our towels, so after drying myself with an eggy dishrag we set out for a Thanksgiving stuffing at one of the only restaurants in town with a real oven. Although turkeys grow in nimiety here (as do the rest of the feathered pantheon)*, they are accorded the title beloved family member instead of a nutrition label. So we settled on steak and a bottle of wine, distinguished primarily by the absence of a wrestler on the label.
It was perfect.

*Note: Although the "Global Pandemic” light may be flashing, in a place where people use macaws as pillows at night and brush their teeth with the first readily available chicken come morning, it's best just not to think about it.

Siam Chronicles 15 – Monktion at the Junction

2005-11-06T02:17:00.000-08:00

monk·tion (mungk shun), n.
1. an action undertaken by an aggregate of monks for which there is no seeming purpose or explication.
2. any activity which is too complicated to explain.

Full Moon, River of Fire
The festival was coming, that much was clear by the preponderance of frenzied monktion cincturing the city into an undulation of orange cassock. Boats in the shape of nagas, twined together in palm or paper and titivated with a pendantry of flowers, popped up in front of every house. Paper lanterns in a rainbow of gem-like color swagged the streets and temples, and candles camped out on every available surface.
Neither the monks nor the secular denizens were able to inform us when the festival was to be or what it was commemorating. Further inquiries at the library were less than illuminating – the section on the Full Moon Festival read like a free-association poem authored by a three year old. We were able to cull with effort that it had something to do with the end of the rain, and letting all the bad things wash down the river in purification.
Days later, the fireworks and singing were a dead giveaway that the festival had commenced. We ran down to the street and were embraced by a city steeped in a corona of colors, thousands of paper lanterns spinning above the Hephaestian glow of row upon row of candles. The heavy orange moon slung supine over the brightness of the night. Children were running with sparklers, laughing and luminous. Each major wat had contributed a large hand-made boat to the parade, thin paper glowing from within as the wick of lamps flicked the floats into an aureole of light and beauty.
The transvestites had dressed in the soigné garb of the royal dancers, and were leading a group of fat drunken men in a lissome ballet. Young scallywags were chucking explosives at the fleet of feet. The drums thrummed and the people sang proudly, pumping their hands into the air and dancing with abandon as we flowed with the floats through the town and down to the Mekong. Each reveler had an oblation of a small lotus-shaped buoy or boat, crested with candles. As the monks set the floats into the river, thousands of these devotionals flooded the water with fire. The Mekong was magma.
It was one of the most magical things I have ever seen.

Special Cauldron Potions
I had forgotten about Halloween completely until one day a hay witch appeared on a sidewalk corner near our house. “Glah!” I screamed in shock, as is only natural, and jumped into the street. Regrettably, like a horse, every day I forgot about the hay hag and every day her deformed silhouette startled me as it lurched into the periphery until I started to take personal umbrage against the inanimate object.
Halloween is an American holiday. Why it is celebrated here, of all places, especially since there are only three Yankee expats including us, is beyond my understanding. However, it DOES coincide with giant centipede mating season, so the atmosphere just tingles with terror anyway.
Alex and I dutifully scrimshanked finding a costume until the last possible minute, but, never one to forego inebriated trumpery, I rummaged some latex gloves and gauze from our first aid kit, donned them and proclaimed myself Herr Doktor. Alex put on a superman t-shirt under a half-open button-down and khakis and went as a disheveled Clark Kent.
The gay bar was having a show, so we set our course. I immediately got into the Special Cauldron Potion. It DID make me feel special, but it also made me feel very, very drunk. As the show began, I realized I was the only person born female in the establishment, excepting a small girl with eyes as big as tomatoes clinging to the doorway, entranced. I surreptitiously patted the chair next to me and she snuck in with a smile.
The show was a prosaic lip-synch dance act to American hip-hop divas. The pinchbeck Marilyn Monroe was convincing except for the big shiner that even the inch of geisha-white foundation couldn’t quite conceal. Sham Celine Dion was less so, as no amount of lace can conceal the shoulders of a line backer.
After a few more bars and a few more cauldrons, I managed to lose my gloves, only to spot them again atop a Canadian clucking around as a chicken. When I started listing to port it was time to call it a night, and Superman whisked me away and saved the day. Again.

Siam Chronicles 14 - Now We're Lao

2005-10-21T05:35:00.000-07:00

Two from the Vault, A Postscript to the Six-Legged

Touching Family Reunion, Phnom Penh
We had met before, oh yes. Those beady eyes and that stretch of antennae were unmistakable. The first skirmish occurred on Rabbit Island. The roach in question introduced himself informally, after being unmasked in an attempt at stowing away in our dirty laundry sack. Emitting a shriek like a baby pig being trussed up was my first line of defence, followed by a prolonged bout of the heebie-jeebies and no small amount of arm flailing, as I extricated him from the salt-encrusted under shorts of my bathing outfit. Each time I lobbed him clear I would start to refold, repack and reload but there he’d be again, blitzing up from under the cracks between the bamboo on the porch and launching onto the bikini bottom once again. I called in for backup. Alex succeeded in the procedure through swift evasive maneuvering. He then deftly double tied the top of the sack and imprisoned the cargo inside, under protective guard.
(Days pass)
We had broached Phnom Penh again, when we commenced Operation Stinky Sink Laundry. Many secrets were divulged that day about our enemy. He was more inventive and tenacious than we had given him credit for, and further, he was a family man.
I surveyed Mama roach on defensive atop my swim trunks, fronting the cantonment entrenched in my bikini bottom. The porcelain pestle of sink was puddled in blue fabric which teemed like a watering hole on the Savannah.
Meanwhile Papa roach had taken the offensive and the loud reports of the mano a mano conflict in the bedroom accentuated my acute attack of the jim-jams.
After the commander succumbed to his injuries, the army was easy to overcome. Drowning a hundred babies is actually easier and far less of a moral strain than it sounds.
War is war, after all.

Night of the Drunken Moths, Koh Phi Phi
Who knew moths like beer? This is not a fact that my bio teachers ever mentioned, and yet this seemingly spurious allegation proves to be true. I have photos, you see - proof.
The squadron solidified while Alex was out obtaining provisions. I was toasting the sunset over the rock-ringed bay with the brown bottle, an amber tear tipped over the flare of pebbles floating through fire, when the whisper of wings predicated the onslaught. Suddenly the single porch light pulsed into a zoetrope of fluttering shadows, larking through the lintels like blurred angels of ascension. They had come for the beer. Brown with yellow spots, these were a typical breed of bar-brawling moth, dead-set on daring their drunk on. Swarming over bottle and glass their tortile tongues unfurled and began to suck up the nectar. Stultified, I let them have at it. One enterprising wino dived right in and was baptizing himself in the brew with bonhomie, a transverse of inter-species communiqués.
When Alex returned he was horrified that I’d let a legion of moths become insupportably squiffy, and his face was refulgent with concern for their safety. He tried to prize them from their increasingly erratic toeholds about the rims with the gentleness of a yearling ewe. I warned him that drunken moths get surly and are not interested in intervention. He discarded this information until they flew at his face and wavered away through the pall of the bay, off-kilter and surely screaming curses at his mother.

Now is Lao
We left the 4,000 islands with reluctance, watching the paddy fields patched in intermittent shade band into emerald and jade, fading into the gullet of lightning storms as we headed north to pitch base camp.
On the way we went through Champasak, Savannakhet and Vientiane. I have nothing of interest to report about this except that in Champasak Alex returned from forage with two bottles of lao lao (break through the clouds moonshine) instead of beer by mistake, so the rest of our visit to the comically named Wat Phou is a bit of smudge, and that Savannkhet is penurious and directly across the river from Thailand. This means in layman’s terms that the Thai writhe over the river for a cheap good time in droves. We were fortunate in our choice of accommodation in that we found ourselves stationed directly across the street from the Rose House, a brothel tended by transvestites. Its French colonial facade sparked a neon symphony of hot pink at night, and the sound of the clientele puking into the street kept us company as we tried to dream it all away.
With one more stop at Vang Vieng, a place where anything’s available for two bits a gander, and one more halcyon tube down the river, we were back in Luang Prabang.

Looking for an apartment in the People’s Democratic Republic of Laos is An Undisputable Experience. My favorite prospective was a twenty five room ex-guesthouse, with a bathroom in each cube, please understand. We told the broker, a “Mr. No” that we were but twain, and the amount of space was too much for our needs. With a smile like snagged leather he explained patiently that we would have our relatives come over and live with us, and our friends. While I was imagining my parents trying to navigate Laos PDR in their retirement I had a lingering nightmare of keeping twenty five bathrooms tidy, and a further sort of Shining flashback that made the whole effluent enterprise unacceptably unsavory.
The rest were all actually inhabited by families, who were generously vying to give up their homes for an exorbitant rent to move in with their moms for a year. These domiciles were not clean and the prospect of removing the insect population from their ensconced curtilage filled us with dread. One even possessed a full sized loom (eight feet by four) wedged into the kitchen. Again another fantasy of inexpertly weaving shoddy materials anointed with the aroma of garlic and onions blurred my vision, but this was quickly abandoned.
It was not to be. We settled for a westernized flat smack dab in the middle of the little town, across and adjunct to two major wats, with ample room for my studio, and started to settle on in.
The bartering in earnest and had only just begun.

Siam Chronicles 13 - Beware the Khmer

2005-10-08T00:35:00.000-07:00

Phnom Penh Again
On the way back up north from the islands we blundered back to Phnom Penh. We went to S-10, the Khmer Rouge torture facility manned by fourteen year old sadists that served as a terminal for thousands before an irremediable omega at the killing fields. I will write no more about that place, except to say it gives a small clue to the living nightmare the Khmer are still shaking to wake from.

Beer and Loathing in Kratie
“I was planning on staying for a month but it ended up being two weeks,” was the ominously similar sentence solicited from everyone we met who had been to Cambodia. “Why?” was of course the pursuant query. The hesitant, “You’ll see,” combined with a certain shifty look, comprised the inevitable response.
We now understood completely. We had disembused at the midpoint town of Kratie. Laureate for a small population of rare fresh-water dolphins, further attenuated by the dynamite decimation under the Khmer Rouge (not for food but for fun, as the signs comically read, this damage was done by “unconscious hunters”), it now scrubs a hub to routes up north and is a natural stopping point for an immanent ascent into Laos through the unofficial border.
The long and short of the point is that we were swarmed tendon to joint in a sudden mesh of flesh yearning to be the conduit from which our money flowed forth. The fifteen fellows vying to wend us by the elbows to this guesthouse or other chanted as a Grecian chorus, “Where you go? What your name? Where you from?”
We attempted to answer politely, prompting the antiphon “You nice people, we see that.” This meant functionally that we were totally unable to shake the horde which snowballed at each footfall until we were suffocating under a landslide of auditioning guides.
We gave up after a few blocks and agreed on the closest place just to flee the flock. It was leaky and the walls were gummed with dirt. We hid out of sight of the windows as the serenade of mendicants continued their cant from below the balcony. We sneaked out again, sticking to the shadows, when we surmised it was safe.
But they were waiting. We skedaddled into the nearest noshery and demanded beer. Enough beer to get drunk. After a pleasant interlude in the cups we fought to upright and see the sights.
But they were waiting. Amidst pleas and cries we scarpered back to our mingy birdcage. Our resolve ossified into a single goal - leave Cambodia. But unfortunately this required a ticket to exodus. So again, we girded our coins and set out with the sun, an amber refulgence minnowing up from the Mekong.
But they were waiting. Alex tried speaking in Russian, a language he does not know, to discourage the jostle. Predictably, this did not work.
At a “ticket counter” things got worse. The details steamed the entourage into screaming.
“He a huckster, a charlatan!” How do they know the words huckster and charlatan? The day was rife with mystery. Meanwhile, the crowd was surly and tending to violence. The shyster in question hollered over the hubbub that the bus was broken, we’d have to go “by taxi” and that the fee would thus go up. In point of fact, it did indeed go up every second by five dollars until we were forced to agree with our Grecian chorus and edge elsewhere for an end to our misery.
Finally the deal was done, and at a respectable rate, but the fact that the bus was broken was indeed no prevarication, and we would have to travel by “taxi” to a boat to get us back to blessed Laos – and even then all would depend on the mood of the self-appointed “border gaurds.”
Anything, anything, you want a foot or perhaps an eyetooth? Extract it, just get us out of here and with the celerity of a flaming bunny, man.

Escape from Cambodia
At 6am we met in a formica café with a gang of farangs who were also desperate for escape. “I was planning on staying for a month but it ended up being two weeks,” they all said. We smiled at each other over our eggs on grease, served with a side of drowned ants.
The “taxi” arrived an hour or so later, it was a beater of a loamed white four door coupe. Now came the clown car fun part. There were eight of us. Four were serried into the back, Alex and I shared shotgun and the driver sat literally on the lap of some guy with a briefcase and aviator glasses who did not speak.
We weathered a couple of hours before the car broke down. It was a stick, and I noticed the driver’s arm was lingering longer and longer on my bosom between shifts, so I was game for the abeyance.
We spilled out in front of two twee huts, plenary with a big-eyed child flaunting flounces manning each door, but were afraid to wander off to piddle because of latent landmines. While the driver changed the tire the children multiplied until the doorways were soon stuffed with illimitable eyes, and a creepy singsong chant started up, bouncing between the huts, that made my skin go all clammy.
But finally the car was fixed, and Alex and I swapped spots. I noticed the driver’s arm stayed well away from his hairy bosom. Thankfully.
An hour or so later, after umpteen chicken fights with water buffalos who are both intractable and none too bright, we finally materialized to greet our boat. It was what I think is referred to as a “cigar boat,” tindered together with detritus that could seat three. There were of course six of us making the many hour journey, so again the wish for smaller hips and the quash of contortionists.
I was now well used to the depredation of having my neighbor’s appendages implanted into my organs, so this bit was actually rather fun and scenic. And the boat only broke down three times. The first was notable in that we were adopted by a luminescence of jewel scarabs, a kind I’ve never seen in any book or reference guide. The size of a dime and silver-gold burnished into a verdant fringe, I melted and motioned to a settled specimen, murmuring “How beautiful.” Looking at the submerged islands ripped by wind and river sparking with the whiz and flash of platinum wings, I felt right.
“Not so pretty anymore,” the brittle bark broke the caesura, and I looked to find that the lad from Manchester had ground the dazzling beetle into the planks. I thought perhaps he might also enjoy dynamiting some dolphins.
The third breakdown was also notable, as we were nearing what the locals affectionately call “Corruption Border.” The driver used this hiatus to secret a sack that stank of long dead fish under our bags, with a wink and a point at the machine-gun toting guards swaying in hammocks in front of a shack. I didn’t know what he was smuggling and I didn’t care. What I did care about, most adamantly, was that now all of our bags would be a malodorous saturnalia of revenant fish guts.
We breached the shack to find the guards at the amicable stage of inebriation. They let us pass for an evenhanded bribe. Now our Charon plunged into his final gambit. He would require more money to ferry us across the river to blessed Laos, or we could take up residence here, or perhaps try our luck with swimming. A final scam, a swansong to sweet Cambodia – our stay would not have been complete without this act of closure.
Reaching Laos felt like liberation. Just another small bribe, a tuk-tuk to a ferry and there we were at the 4,000 islands, a pure paradise on earth. We languished in love with the land for days and said our sincere “I dos” to a protracted stay in the gem of South East Asia.

Siam Chronicles 12 - Step by Step, a Falter to Kep

2005-09-27T04:28:00.000-07:00

Houses of Trash and Trashed Houses

Tacking South on the Siroccos
I was rubbernecking rapt as the bus mapped a course to the Southeastern tip of Cambodia. Steadily, the huts became enshrined upon great piles of trash, a jumble of bright colors tumbling into dun ponds where the children dove and bathed, the moms swished laundry into tumescent billows, and the dads schlepped sickly fish up from drop nets.
Before long the houses themselves were cobbled from the dross, erupting seamlessly from the family landfill at jaunty angles. My favorite had availed itself of a highway sign fallen into desuetude, which was cut to size and installed as a wall. Unbeknownst to the occupants inside, the left side of their domicile now bore the single word “HELL” in red ten foot letters.

The Lost Resort
The chateaus had been shelled and gutted as oysters of decadence, twisting with rebar which spindled into the sky like withered trees. The view was still the sea, the melody was still the ceaseless chunnering of the waves, but it was a last conceit for the extinct elite, for the miles of bombed out buildings belonging to the bygone best of the best. The effete resort town of Kep had been a bright beacon of the capitalist west. Now it was a jeremiad to how the Khmer Rouge had been able to tyrannize a destructive power comparable to a meteor shower.

Marooned on Rabbit Island
Rabbit Island does not have any rabbits. It does not look like a rabbit. I want to be clear on this, in case the nonsensical cognomen invites the fantasy of a flowering of fluff-balls roistering fetchingly round the left ear of a dyad of pointy volcanic outcroppings.
The plan was to get a feel for what island life was like without any of the tidy assiduities of rampant tourism. The family hosting our short stay commenced the circumvolution upon on our soggy arrival, during which I almost flipped backward into the sea with my ever-present grace and aplomb until Alex’s steadying hand averted the aquatic acrobatics.
This is tiny Rabbit Island, encompassed in a gesture.
Those are the purportedly uninhabited islands rounding into the horizon, which are actually infested with Vietnamese squatters, promulgating rifles, who give the expression “get off my lawn” more than the usual amount of emphasis.
This is our little room with the charming oil lamp and hugely necessary mosquito net.
These are the three sticks of bamboo doing a shabby job of screening a hole, politely referred to as the bathroom.
This is the shower –a large blue drum of green scum indented by a ladle so dirty that it might have been carved directly from the earth itself. Rustic, charming.
We swam, we got salty and stuck to things, unwilling to substitute salt for slime in the “shower,” and I drew until dusk closed curtain.
The single generator that fed the three flickers of fluorescence was to cut out at ten sharp. So when at 9:40 the light went out right as I was about to upset a comeback win at rummy 500, it was far from good. It was an atramentous night, the clouds covering the stars and moon, with the sporadic frisson of lightning far away foretelling impending deluge. The flashlight had been smartly secreted to a place so secure and impenetrable that it was probably playing poker with the grail and Bush’s DWI records. That left only the oil lamp, which was of poor construction. Any attempt to touch it made it triturate into tiny pieces, anointing the wicker of the walls and floor with highly flammable fluid but doing nothing whatsoever to produce a utile light.
At this juncture I attempted my blind gambit for the “bathroom.” What I did not know is that the five diseased dogs casing the joint come alive at night, and they are not friendly. The white of their teeth whipping at my retreating posterior was the one thing I could see through the portiere of darkness. Our bungalow was an island amidst an eddy of circling canines, endlessly yelping their sanguinary plea to the sea.
So it was that we peed off the balcony and crawled into bed, deciding to leave first light. And we did indeed leave the island, but took some part of it with us - in our hearts and in our undershorts - but that's a story for another time.

Siam Chronicles 11 - When to Say When to Phnom Penh

2005-09-16T06:21:00.000-07:00

Cambodian Pajama Party
It was the middle of the day and all the women in sight were wearing pajamas. Pink bunnies, teddy bears bursting with the will to live, explosions of hearts and bows - these bromides blurred by as the women jounced through the muck on their motorcycles to buy a slab of catfish and a twist of leek at the huts arrogating the gutters. The foul smelling intestines and rapidly browning vegetables poised on poles and cardboard boxes over the sluice of open sewer weltered together into an odor of enormity. One illustrious diva bicycled off sporting a pink button down number replete with puffy sheep, topped with a towel twining loosely round her head.
I wish this style would pendulum into vogue in the west – just think of swinging into work secure in the emotional armor of well-worn PJs and a towel over your head.

The Lubricious Old Codger’s Club
On the bad side, The Last Home Hostel had roaches, loads of them. On the good side, it had a wall-sized oil of what appeared to be Asian Vikings in thongs battling a dragon, which was unremittingly hilarious. On the bad side, the bathroom for the extended family unit was separated from our quarters by half a plywood partition. On the good side, the food was unexpectedly excellent. On the bad side, and even worse than the roaches or the caroming cacophony of bodily functions, was that The Last Home Hostel was the designated meeting place for a singular type of old boys club.
Every day as the light presages dusk these withered vampires shamble up from the depths, to debouch catarrhal baritones from a crumple of lipless mouth, framed in white hair tufting from ears, nose, chin, around the shiny pate, as they camber across the table to catalogue their conquests.
“She SAID she was sixteen, and that’s good enough for me… (laughter follows)”
“The girl I keep in Vietnam is real young too, she’s got a good heart but she brought over this other girl the other day and the little slut stole my credit cards… (rest of story omitted as sickening)”
The conversations are always the same, every night they drill and drone about divorcing their Californian wives and moving to Asia to keep harems of juvenile girls in each country with impunity. The youngest of these men couldn’t be less than sixty five and looks like a hirsute albino toad – and he’s obviously the looker of the group. Later we learn from a young British couple starting up a bar that Phnom Penh is lousy with these lechers, to whom they’ve bestowed the appellation “sexpats.”
Across the street a bizarre street festival is blasting through the half-light, a group of youths in white jumpsuits caterwaul eighties tunes off-key in front of huge pink hearts. There are fireworks. Meanwhile, the conversation has lurched into the appanage of love, and the leers sift to smiles as the raconteurs speak of the girls’ immense ardor for them, so touching. At The Last Home in the watered down twilight these rheumy men drown in phlegm and the delusion that they could actually be loved by anyone.

Siam Chronicles 10 - The Long Shot to Angkor Wat

2005-09-06T05:31:00.000-07:00

Objective: Get to Angkor Wat before August 14, 2005 – our 1st Wedding Anniversary

2.5 days before 8/14
Bangkok
“You wan go Cambodia, right, Angkor Wat? The easiest way is Koh Chang,” she served up this skullduggery raw as a kaleidoscope of claw clacked through the keyboard, “Koh Chang is easiest, you jus take a boat.”

1.5 days before 8/14
Koh Chang (reputed to have the largest King Cobra population in the world)
“No way to get there from here,” lisped the transvestite behind the palm frond kiosk, with a dribbling of smile. “BUT we could work something out maybe – a moto to the ferry then a bus to a minivan?” with a long green fingernail he furrowed the gut flouncing unfettered beyond a weariness of hot pink half shirt.
Hours later after ten more futile inquiries, the verdict was in - we would in fact have to back-track all the way up to Poi Pet. There was an incendiary storm that night. The waves strafed the stilts of the bungalow and aptly reflected our acidulated mood.

20 hours before 8/14
A punt on the Pacific Ocean
“It’ll be a long haul, but we’ll be in by five a find someplace fancy for our anniversary.” Alex patted my back, the lack of sleep and chuff of the waves was incommoding my intestines. “So, what do you want for breakfast – cricket on a stick or salt-encrusted fish head?”

12 hours before 8/14
Poi Pet, Cambodian Border
The man looked half-starved as he stammered over the pitches of the dirt track that his name was Richard and he would be our “guide to Cambodia.” The crowd was pressed into an ancient minivan, which was missing both doors and windows and tilted alarmingly to the right. I had a soiled foot in my ear, belonging perhaps to one of a pair of hippies clutching bongos to breast somewhere in the compact mass, so the voice was intermittent. “… fifty kilometers … the road is bad, so it’ll take maybe seven hours… arrive at seven … drop you off in the center of town...”
“Did he say SEVEN hours???” I heard my husband say through the din.

8 hours before 8/14
Outside Battambang, Cambodia
A riptide of commination greeted the newest pronouncement. “It take twelve hours from here,” the man who called himself ‘Richard,’ had sallied to the assemblage pitched outside the gas station. Time, it appeared, was surging backwards. Silted red with dust, we seemed to jut directly up from the road like despondent cairns, keeping our helpless invigilation as the cohorts of our 'guide' scuffled through our stuff in the decrepit apparatus as it plied up on petrol.

4 hours before 8/14
Seedy Restaurant, Middle of Nowhere
The girl had not stopped screaming, and there was nothing but respect registering on the faces of the crowd for both her stamina and loquacity. Even though it was a rapid logorrhea of Italian, we all understood EXACTLY what she was saying, and mentally each one of us was hugging her, awarding her with a medal, and wrapping the laurels about her pulchritudinous brow. Our ‘guide’ evinced no emotion, stating again that the bus had mysteriously broken down and another form of transport would be arriving in “ten minutes.”
“Goat or bicycle?” Alex asked.

2 hours before 8/14
Parking Lot of Seedy Restaurant, Middle of Nowhere
“You’ve GOT to be kidding me,” the Brit spat helplessly, “there is just no WAY we will all fit on that thing.”
The 25 of us were surveying the tiny pickup truck, which was dwarfed by the mound of luggage piled beside it.
“You wan go or you wan stay here?” Our ‘guide’ said with a disingenuous smile.
With quick thinking Alex deposited me into the cab and thus secured a precious spot of safety, and with a kiss was gone to fare for himself by clinging onto the bed down the tortuous track. Fragments of argument as the squeeze began whistled through the window.
“Do you at least have any ropes to tie us on to the side?” implored an Aussie, followed by Alex’s riposte, “I think the more pertinent question is do you have any morphine.”

Midnight, 8/14
1.5 Hours West of Siem Reap
There were six of us compressed into the cab, and the driver seemed to be suffering an acute bout of ADD, fumbling with knobs, playing with dials, looking anywhere but ahead as we bucked and crashed into the road, which resembled nothing so much as a washboard used as BB target practice. My limbs fell asleep, my hearing rapidly diminished due to the screeching high-decibel onslaught of an Asian diva, and I was mad with fear for Alex, perched precariously on the back in the rain.
“Happy anniversary,” said the young constable from London who was glued into my forearm as the clock flashed midnight.

4 pm, 8/14
Luxury Bungalow, Siem Reap, Poolside
We clinked vodka tonics in toast while reclining otiosely in the garden enclosure. The day had been a clamber and dive through a stone sprawl, crowned with a bocage of impromptu arbor. Angkor is, of course, a sight of magnitude (twice the size of present New York with over a million inhabitants when London had but 50,000), but more germane, a place of powerful symmetry and symbolism. Or perhaps, even more to the point, a preserve of beauty, and an admirable backdrop for a truly memorable first.

Siam Chronicles 9 - Our Parlay with the Malay

2005-08-24T02:46:00.000-07:00

24 hours in Penang

Morning
“It can’t be up that way,” Alex shook his head, a definitive no. We were seeking the path to Kek Lok Si temple, and the stretch of stalls that tunneled up the hill, crushed and suffocated with hawkers and gawkers, garlanded with all the gumboils of garishness, seemed a most minatory ascent. But there is always a test a before the temple, of course it was up that way, the gauntlet must be tholed by the bold.
Clawing and kicking, we swam the crowd. Voices exploded from the insensate clot around us like landmines, and these shamans of hokum were through asking.
You WANT ice-cream. No, but if I could get one of those spinning crystal pagodas that emits ear-piercing Asian pop, I’ve got a nephew with a birthday coming up whose been nothing but bad.
You WANT t-shirts. No, but you’ve got fifty hectalitres of dried cephalopod in every possible flavor assortment, and I’ve got a great hunger for all things suctiony.
You WANT puppets. Perhaps, but I’d rather try my luck with smuggling those sacks of scorpions and endangered tiger’s paw through customs.
You WANT tapestry of dogs playing billiards. Yes, actually, you augur my heart’s desires. How much and will you throw in that psychedelic Ganesha clock to seal the deal?
In short anything and everything you’ve never wanted limned our path while we coerced our way over the heaped masses swathed in saris, passionately perorating for a good price for these atrocities - hopefully to gather them together and lovingly burn them in a ceremony commemorating the continuance of global good taste.
Let’s not dwell on that tortuous journey any longer. Let’s just lie and say we achieved the temple quickly and easily, in good spirits and not at all despising our fellow cows.
We mumped our devotion to the sacred turtles who were thronging the pagoda in piles with all due diligence, we skulked the garden grounds with the monitor lizards, we browsed the solemn explication of the swastikas from another time adorning the statuary.
Then we dreaded going down again.

Afternoon
Snake temple was slithering with pit vipers, black with yellow stripes and eyes bisecting the blood red walls. Legend has it that incense keeps them drugged and docile, and, fact or fiction, as homage to this most poisonous of snakes they do in fact employ the largest sticks of incense I have ever seen in all my life – fully five feet tall and four inches around, hot pink and blowing enough smoke to knock a giant cross-eyed into a mountain.

Night
The city outside burbled and clamored like loose change in a washing machine as Alex and I sat sessile, playing gin rummy and drinking something called Buccaneer’s whiskey in the echoing expanse of the hallway. An octogenarian labored up the staircase, “There’s going to be a storm,” he adumbrated, smiling in creases, “A big storm,” then padded off into the penumbra of the receding vaults.
As if on cue, a blast of wind blew open the wormed wooden shutters with a bang, carrying heat, the smell of dust, rain, disinfectant, and a brief blue view of close cluttered streets, alive with rain, running, and cantonese characters pulsing in neon coruscation, scumbled soft in gloaming and storm. Our cards caught in the current to prang and lodge into the curious mixture of massive art deco armoires and plastic lawn furniture that so uniquely characterized the hundred year hotel. The thunder and rain with their peal and douse puddled the marble floors in moments as we slipped to grip the shutters and brace them fast against the island storm.

Kuala Lumpur or Armeggedon?
“It’s the burning in Sumatra,” the businessman explained with a tidy gesture of dismissal, “900 fires and counting. Until it clears up, well…” he shrugged and held his portmanteau close as the elevator pinged open, wishing us luck as he made his escape. In the lobby, sardined with an Indian family of epic proportions, the smell of fire was already penetrating into our clothing and hair. The front doors slid open with a hiss, revealing a vision of the apocalypse.
It was a bit like a major US city - clean, full of sky-scrapers, ultra-modern. It was a bit, in fact, like San Francisco, under a scrim of a heavy fog - if you had a packet of smoldering matches stuffed securely up each nostril and a roaring hair fire in your lungs. We came and left when the toxicity was designated “very-dangerous,” a few days before it ticked over into “deadly.”
But, on the upswing, Kuala Lumpur has both a monorail AND a spaceneedle.

A Moment in Malacca
I was running under a swarm of dragonflies on the hill of St. Paul's church and the city flared out below in a patchwork of color. It was an oneiric whirl of images - the orange of the insects, the blue of the sky, the green of the field and the red brick of the ruin cascading into the city's labrynth of cobalt, carmine, and saffron, ringed round merrily by the turqouise sea. The light and color, dizzying in that moment, were scrimshawed on my psyche, like a secret map to sunshine for days of murk and grays.

Siam Chronicles 8 - The Headless Trees of Koh Phi Phi

2005-08-03T05:20:00.000-07:00

A Pocketful of Stumbles in the Dark

The turbulent shouting began to mizzle through the midnight streets just as we were luffing into a most welcome bed. Within seconds the whole town was pullulated with commotion - my first irrational thought was that a massive brawl had broken out. I began pulling on some clothes, but Alex instead threw the blanket over his head with a well phrased imprecation. Then a strange quiet fell outside, I paused to listen. Suddenly the shoddy door came alive with concussive knocking. The shaky messenger was short in stature and words, dropping a quick "Tsunami alert, get out now," before he sprinted on to the next dimly lit doorway.
In less than a minute we were out the door, entrained in the wake of a shadowy aggregation of grim locals flowing silently up a dark crevass via an extemporaneous ladder. The weathered rope in question was not a welcome sight. I never had to climb the Fabled Gym Class Rope, and if I had I would have assiduously failed - possibly with unbecoming gusto. But with the help of brave souls who were staying behind to shepherd the less agile up the incline, in a heave I was up and scambling to the top of the mountain, scraping through the jungle's dark reticulum of thorns and branches, often on my hands and knees. Flashlight! Why didn't I bring a flashlight? I thought, as I slipped or tripped and fell on my butt again and again. This was apparently a common oversight, as the dull blue glow of LED lights from sporadic cell-phones, casting sickeningly swaying shadows through the muffled corridor of leaves, were our only fleeting guides in an acclivous headlong dash through the brush, stumbling over pits and stumps, and up, up, up.
I have never climbed a mountain so fast in my life.
At the top a huddled group hummed with terrified whispers - there had been a 7.3 earthquake in Phuket. The mosque's loudspeakers had been converted into an alarm system, issuing the official government warning with calm and unnaturally tinny tones that threaded through the hushed and heavy air in that aphotic clearing. The only movement, the only sound in that stifling well of trees, were the mosquitoes, thick as fog, obscuring the bleak gibbous moon framed in the fuliginous branches, their termagent whine implacable.
After an unknowable amount of time the first drained bits of chatter began. It was all locals up there, survivors of the tragedy, and a Dutch couple, very young, very afraid. I began an asinine colloquy with them about god knows what to keep their mind from their fear. The pallid red-headed girl was fairly quaking with it, teeth chattering in the heat, I heard myself talking spewing some drivel about Amsterdam's museums, but it seemed to be working.
Over an hour later the unceremonious all's clear came, and we made our halting way back down, helping each other, taking our time. At the bottom the sentinels of Koh Phi Phi were waiting, a handful of headless palm trees, grosgrain pillars to the sky, a lingering reminder amidst the palimpsest rubble swath of the destruction and tragedy of the waves.
No one slept that night, horrifying memories flooding some, blossoming élan vital pulsing through the rest - Alex and I and the young Dutch couple ran laughing through the dark waves, and pulled up a rough-hewn bench amidst a sea of candlelit faces to drink overpriced beer and speak of future plans.

Siam Chronicles 7 - Shark Bay? Okay!

2005-07-23T04:05:00.000-07:00

Things You Don’t See in San Francisco, Part I:

Cockroaches
Even more disconcerting than finding a swarm of black ants immured in your toilet at three in the morning is the rebarbative omnipresence of kamikaze cockroaches attempting to end the Kafkaesque nightmare of their own existence by plunging pell-mell under your trammeling hooves. Or at least skitter up your leg to parse out the pain and get a good laugh in. Their quashed carcasses litter the streets come morning amidst the chicken bones and fruit parings, a somber memorial to the die-hard death-drive of the world’s most ubiquitous beetle.
It’s something I never fully understood - some claim it’s the constant chill, others aver direct divine intervention – but one of San Francisco’s greatest benisons is to be somehow roach-free. The lucky bastards.

Huge Lizards
In our peregrination I’ve become accustomed to the wee speckled ones that wiggle through the sugar packets at breakfast, or the quotidian skinks and geckos a hands-breadth across that officiously divest your bedroom of moths, or even the larger iguanas whomping their way through the rushes of the roof. But it was a close-call to a coronary in Koh Phangan when I nearly trod on a moniter lizard protruding its long snaky neck from under a step, it’s sharply elongated talons gripping the stone below, a saturnine beast balefully basking and fully two arms across. As luck would have it, this was a rare moment when I left my camera in the bungalow but take my word for it, it was THIS BIG and it looked hungry for toe.

Family Danger Mobiles
Although there are souped-up ghetto-sleds aplenty in SF that may risk imminent threat of spontaneous combustion, something you will never see is a full family of five crowded onto a single rusted motorbike, sans helmets and carrying a six-pack of live geese strung up by their feet and slung over the handle-bars. Another thing you will not see is a pack of eight year-olds invidiously tearing their way through town on motorcycles, also sans helmets but plus big buggy smiles.
This is common in South East Asia, where, like L.A., walking is viewed as an atavistic past-time for the less evolved - sort of a coprolite litmus test. Even before a child takes their first steps they are taught to bike. I even witnessed a lady letting her poodle drive one through the crowded streets of Haad Rin - my husband can attest to the veracity of this claim - it happened although we both wished vehemently that it had not.
This mentality is evidenced all too clearly in the circular side-walks constructed as mandalas that go nowhere, or end abruptly at busy intersections with no possible cross-way. This leaves the intrepid constitutionalist with two viable recourses: to scurry over concrete barriers and dodge merciless motorists, or turn around, go back and try again with at least a unicycle. These ersatz walkways are purely meditative exercises, allowing the fatuous wanderer who would willingly walk and eschew the wonders of the wheel to ruminate over the immortal question: do you cross the street or does the street cross you?

Turtle Island, Shark Bay, Tiger Temple
It takes balls of brass and a head of lead to elicit another sunburn on an all day snorkeling extravaganza after finally healing from a second degree toasting. All the expense for covered boat and super fancy all-day waterproof sunblock (reapplied every hour on the dot) went for naught and I fricasseed my fanny but good. Luckily, this was a regular run-of-the-mill burn, different intrinsically from it’s savage cousin, and has amenably achromatized to a swarthy sienna.
It was worth it.
Koh Tao (Turtle Island), according to local lore, was recently rich in turtles but no more. There is apparently one courageous fellow who pops up every once in a while, but given the concupiscent native need for sucking up turtle flesh, I believe this plucky survivor story to be outright mendacity. We were beginning to think the same about Shark Bay, as we snorkeled through the crackling of the castellated coral reefs, emblazoned with bright anemone plumes and outrageous clouds of variegated prismatic fish, kinds I thought just grew in aquariums from seed. We had already surveyed the susurration of the still and cold blue depths, waiting patiently for a stealthy shape to swiftly coalesce out of the tenebrous murk, but with no luck. We finally decided to pack it in. While waiting for a French matron saddled with acute embonpoint to waddle up the rickety ladder, I felt a something banging insistently against my leg. I refitted my mask to sneak a peek, and lo and behold, there was a baby black-tip reef shark, two hands from fang to fin, head-butting my leg over and over again. I dubbed him Fortesque, the Moron Shark of Koh Tao, and wished him some much-needed luck.
Soon we were off to shabby Krabbi, and, following the advice of the illustrious Alyssa Hamel, made our way to Tiger Wat, which (like Turtle Island) no longer has any tigers. But there are many, many crazed monkeys.
The big draw is a mountain-top wat reached by an hour-long hike up a steep set of friable steps, totally irregular in shape and 1,300+ in number. At first I ignored this obviously grueling ordeal, as the pitiful penitents who came sopping down the torturous track, gasping and clutching trees for support, were proof enough for me to relinquish any delusion that it may be a fun time. Instead we opted for a circular hike through the dense jungle of the valley caves.
This turned out to be an unprecedented entomological cornucopia. I didn’t even mind being eaten alive by, well everything with six legs or more, as I gaped slack-jawed at specimens I’ve handled with reverence at the Smithsonian Insect Zoo ruling their dark and irriguous world. There were spiders big as your hand, brightly bedecked in crimsons in golds, waiting watchful in huge spiraling webs trimming the path. We even found a walking stick over two hands across – this tricky relative of the preying mantis is almost impossible to see usually but propitiously this one chose to station itself on a case that was (inexplicably) displaying a human skeleton at the mouth of a cave. I took photos anyway but - of course - it just looks like a stick. Huge black pollinator beetles clumsily banked through the trees with a low drone as their small fire red cousins stood out starkly on the slick green of the dense undergrowth. It was a radiant dazzle of elegantly animate jewels inset into the hushed lush of dripping jungle.
The prehistoric forest explored, we found the tiger cave and listened to the mellifluous monotone of the monk's incantations. This left only the steps, and I succumbed to the pernicious temptation to try them. Around step 600 I felt strongly that it was time to turn around and go back. At step 1000 I was dizzy and doused, but like an automaton up, up, up, the legs moved, and I wondered in high dudgeon why everything interesting is always at the top of a mountain.
It was worth it.
The newfangled temple was ringed round by the soaring vista of farmland receeding into a brume of onrushing rain one side, the glittering etiolation of the sea, harboring dark banks of islands on another, and armies of tall jungle-coped mesas filled the third. Lack of oxygen and latent vertigo helped contribute to the swooping certainty that this was a heiratic and sanctified place, the home of light and wings high above all things, with scattered songs rushing with the wind and a hint of plumeria from far below fulsome and fine in your exhausted lungs.
The monkeys were also cool.

Siam Chronicles 6 - The Hop Began in Koh Phangan

2005-07-15T04:40:00.000-07:00

Thong Nai Pan Noi
Being forbidden from going into either the sun or the sea while shacked up on a tropical island is akin to being allergic to butter and sugar while walled up at a confectioners. I’d picked up the parlous prohibition at an immaculate Bangkok hospital, which was replete with gimcrack oils of a blond and hortatory Jesus assisting doctors in various operations and also, oddly, in tabulating patient’s bills. I’d been forced to go – the blisters from the burn bloated so badly that it appeared to my gimlet eyed fellow man (while slipping willy-nilly over themselves to put distance between their persons and mine), that I was wearing a double-layer of bubble wrap for socks. I still felt this move may have been precipitate, but the pallid look of panic on the doctor’s face as I hiked my hem revealed I had indeed chosen the most salubrious course.
I was harangued into waiting a week off my feet, all hammocks ahoy and docked in sick bay. I made it five days before I succumbed to my prurient thirst for the cooling tincture of the azure ocean and I was romping rubicund through its welcoming waters. I was a lambent, laughing waterspout until I noticed we had splashed into a dollop of exquisite carmine jellyfish covered in white polka-dots. They were stunning, I got stung. I slugged sheepishly back to shore and so ended my premature nautical peccadillo.
The previous five days had been long and hot - reading, sketching, voyeuristically watching other people swim and skip and kick each other repeatedly in the head (accidentally witnessing Muay Thai, or Thai boxing, is unavoidable it seems, even if you really, really try). I also got to see an English expat held at knife-point by two toddlers - he assured me this happens regularly and is their normal way of expressing their boyish enthusiasm. This display of affection was accompanied by their impressive farrago of obscene gestures, culled from around the far points of the globe, in time to one phrase bleated over and over: “big boobies.” Kids just do the cutest things.

Bottle Beach
This small sandy stretch was filled with naked European families. The babies were fevered and covered in sores, screaming and sick, the parents totally unclothed and even more unconcerned as they smoked their cigarettes and lolled about in all their flabby over-tanned splendour. My muttered imprecations at their deplorable comportment did not prove to be useful.
As dusk fell I rapidly learned how to say in Thai, “there are many, many mosquitoes here” (Hyung MAH-mah). Although true, this phrase also turned out to have a limited range of use. I slapped myself silly and ran for cover under a nice fort of netting.

Haad Rin Nok
Climbing into a hammock four feet off the ground requires the sacrosanct integrity of the true believer. Lummoxing into position, the aged ropes creaking their antiphonal alarm, I wiggled my toes at the bay and swaddled in to reminisce.
Six years ago I was here - not in this shabby new bungalow, a blue plywood gewgaw set high over the ocean, surrounded by trees teeming with butterflies and the occasional pack of sleek gray monkeys, sitting Buddha style munching leaves, watching us watching them – but in a beautiful tree-house style bungalow sculpted of curling natural boughs red-stained and raddled together in symmetry, using the rock of the mountain for walls.
Things have dramatically changed for this place since then - no longer a glut of huts several stones in diameter, but instead a hard concrete slab town, ramshackle and rubbished, trendy and distrustful, distinctly unlovely.
Things have dramatically changed for me since then – I hear my darling husband’s deep voice at the back of the porch. Feeling the acute temporary loss of our coddled special-needs Chihuahua, he has adopted the local lizards. I hear him soothing a friendly gecko, saying supportive things as it chirps its calisthenics on a sun-blanched stone, communing in a nurturing murmur.
But here I swing as this place and I mirror each other again, both more capitalist and expansive than when we last plumbed depths. The clouds wading over this same weary bay, watched by the same eyes wearing a few more creases, still and stall in thrall of a brief elegiac interlude and buying respite for mottled legs sporting a shiny new coat of sterile white gauze.

Siam Chronicles 5 - Out With a Bang in Ban Farang

2005-07-06T03:56:00.001-07:00

A Litany of the Unlikely
In retrospect, the stunning sunburn was ineluctable in the circumstance. I had carefully cultivated it four days before, directly after disembarking from the atrabilious elephant that was ruefully resigned to cavort my copious bulk through the jungle preserve. At this pivotal juncture, in the least likely event that has ever occurred in the history of creation, I willingly wobbled into a kayak for a four hour haul down the Nam Khong. Besides my eminent mistrust of physical exertion, my malaria meds were positively plastered with exhortations to stay out of the sun for the love of god - but god was spiteful, the sun was strong, the sun block was in the bus, the bus was long gone, and there was nothing for it but to row, row, row.
In the second least likely event in the history of creation I was discovered to my chagrin to have a natural knack for the kayak. The guide gladly sat back, put up paddle, and sang a simple Hmong love song while I jolly well put my all into it. I was alive with angelic afflatus get that damnable dingy downriver as we flew over the protean swirls and past cascading crags while I noted that my legs began to radiate angry red heat of their own accord.
At the end of the day, dreggy and doused with encomiums about my hereto nonexistent but suddenly superlative strength, I realized that my legs were so badly burned that the bones ached.
I liked the elephants.

The Road Less Travailed
The bandanna Brit in back was apparently attempting to regurgitate his lower intestine - again. The dainty Dane to the right was more demure, vomiting quite as capaciously but much more quietly. The tiny Thai family guy in front was genteel enough to run to the “bathroom” at the back of the bus (read: hole in floor) between goes. At this moment, with total and complete impropriety, I reveled in my rare fortitude over my fellow man, took a strong sniff of tiger balm and watched with wonder as the drenched protuberances of erratic peaks paraded past the sickeningly snaky road. The occasional village of thatched huts on stilts, some with massive satellite dishes stuck precariously to the side (making one wonder how it kept from toppling down the mountain with a sigh), kept time as we lolled and lurched our way to Vang Vieng.

Black Sock a Go-Go
The sheer severity of the sunburn precluded me from going whole hog in Vang Vieng, called Ban Farang (foreigner’s town) by the locals as it swells and shrinks temporarily based on the tides of the tourist trade. My crimson husk had taken on the cracked texture of an avocado, adorned with numerous fetching fallals of gleaming blisters. Abjuring the local nostrum of scorpion in whiskey, I parted with an over-exorbitant ten-spot for a tube of questionable cream that I kept thick and drippy over the injured legs. I felt pretty.
We did make it to a vaulting cave and sacred spring where the fish found my boils beguiling bait. The daedal butterflies thronging the bushes were quite the sight, and I stalked them mercilessly with my camera, capturing the souls of the more fearless for a later date with brush and paint.
Armed with the winning combination of thick black socks and sandals, I bravely assayed a tubing foray the following day. The least graceful of all water sports, tubing involves throwing oneself into the river and drifting peacefully past stunning vistas until you reach one of the riverside bamboo bars. At this point, the proprietors will push a pole at you and the real flailing begins, wiggling with all your might in your over-sized inner-tube. In recompense for the hilarious wounded musk ox impersonation it takes to reach shore in the high fast rapids of rainy season a bottle of lao lao is planted at your table with a shot-glass made from a sawn-off plastic bottle, along with a slew of fresh lychees and of course the ever-present beer. At this point you can opt to be flung from rickety swings off dizzying cliffs into the river - ostensibly for fun - or amble over to the cool caves and immerse into the still pools hiding hugger-mugger behind the warding stalagmites. There are also volumes of voluble bronzed backpackers flitting about sporadic bonfires, sharing in the comic observation that you are the only one wearing wet calf-length black socks.

Tomorrow we leave Laos until September, and migrate south in search of a beach-side bungalow in a soul-searing delve for all possible meanings of that most magical of words: "gadabout."

Siam Chronicles 4 - There's a Song in Luang Prabang

2005-06-25T20:03:00.000-07:00

Bubblegum Butterfly and Badmitton - Bring on the Nightlife
"THIS? THIS is a GAY bar???" The Australian sybarite slurred. He appeared surprised. Perhaps it is because I was fresh from frisky San Francisco, but I had failed to miss the panoply of more obvious signs. The cocktail list read like a roster at a cabaret (including concoctions called "orange funny," "bubblegum butterfly," and "pink gay"), the back was bedecked with rainbow banners, the crested emblem of two men embracing emblazoned both marquee and menu, and finally, there was the most tell-tale indicator of them all - the simple fact that we were surrounded by transvestites.
But his surprise was fugacious, and he quickly opted with a wink to risk sleeping in the gutters for an opportunity to get to know the clientele just a bit better.
Luang Prabang has an 11:30 curfew and everything shuts shingle by 11, so we left him to his imbroglio and headed back with all due celerity fearing a hostel lockout. Outside it was the usual late-night street badmitton mania, as we passed a plethora of players batting the birdie back and forth on the pitted streets. Reaching the guest house, I banged on the glossy green doors until an accusing eye peeped out followed by a pejorative "Where have you BEEN?" I had three minutes to go before curfew, easy, but I still felt inundated with guilt as I slunk across the slick stone floor to a very hard bed.

A Skein of Convoluted Yarns
The figurines are undeniably hideous, red-faced, leering and covered in full-length body hair, as they festoon the fairy-lit street market. While otherwise identical, Grandfather sports a beard, Grandmother goes without. Remnants of an ancient animism, they were the Adam and Eve of the East until Buddhism subsumed them like a steamroller a toad. Now the most decipherable version of their tangled tale that I could tease from the local argot has something to do with a big, big, tree:
I. Something About a Tree
Back before people knew light there was a tree so tall and so wide that night hung eternal underneath its tessellated branches. Grandmother and Grandfather, seeking the stars and suns and the clouds and all the furbelows of the sky above for their kin, hefted their axes and hewed in harmony. They hacked and hacked at the back of the tree, paced and patient, knowing when their task was complete the tallest tree would fall on them and not the village below. And so it was with a keening crack Grandmother and Grandfather, hands hasped tight, gave their life for light. In this way they proved themselves to be agents of enlightenment, each part of a whole, together comprising the Buddha of Luang Prabang, who is not in this way unlike Voltron.
This story is unique in Luang Prabang in that it does not culminate with the protagonist giving his wife and children away to a gruesome demon. Like the following emblematic representative, culled from the congealed core of a baffling ballet we attended in the royal concrete bunker:
II. Take My Wife, Please…
A giant comes to pay respects to the Holy Mountain. In a cavalcade of hilarious etiquette gaffes, the great serpent thinks the giant has forgotten to offer obsequience to the West after completing his devotions to the other three directions, when in point of fact the giant was just about to offer obsequience to the West. Well, we all know how that is, so we cheer for the giant when he slays the serpent with a standard suite of sneaky double-jointed pointing. But now the Holy Mountain is goofily tilted from the power of pointing, so the giant slinks away never to ballet again. This prompts a suspiciously green sage to offer limitless reward to anyone who can right the wronged mountain. A great tusked demon comes and accomplishes this quickly with more frenzied gesticulating. But the reward the demon demands is the sage’s own wife! The sage cheerfully agrees to this cheapest of bargains, and then first the demons then the monkeys emerge to dance for joy amidst great tintinnabulation and rhythmic stomping.

Never Eat Off the Street and Other Remarkably Good Ideas
Things had been going rather swimmingly, after all. My innards had been on their best behavior for days, and the clean mountain air and cheerful Lao disposition was having a meritorious effect on my constitution.
There is the music for one thing. The people here sing everywhere they go, heavily accented American pop, ululating traditional tunes, made-up melodies meandering in monotone circles – happily heedless of a watery voice or an unfulfilled arpeggio. I find this egalitarian idea of music most refreshing. They are also heavily enamored with the truly massive drums hog-tied horizontally before the wats that throng two or three to a block, and at least thrice a day the thunderous, teeth-chattering booms reverberate around the corners and roll down the mountains resetting the rhythm of your heart.
There is also a certain amount of unrestrained optimism in the Lao – for example, we biked to the royal weaving village yesterday (through rutted mountain roads on bikes proudly labeled "City 1 Speed" - story of my life), where they were using unexploded missiles from the Vietnam War as planters and macabre yard gnomes. And then there’s the incontrovertible pace of the swarm of brick-layers outside our guest-house – they lay one a day like clockwork and retire in the shade to chat cheerily. They have the utmost faith in the process, strong in the certainty that one rosy day far away the street will somehow be complete.
And finally there was Alex’s job offer – a teaching position that doesn’t start until September (and even then it would be part time to start) - but it’s a beginning. I met an older lady from Pennsylvania the other day who had been told by god to come to Laos, so she abandoned her teenage son and spent five months hungry and sleeping in the gutters until she was out of the blue offered a position as manager of a bakery – a position which for some reason included a house, maid, butler and motorcycle as part of the benefits. I was puzzled why god would need a bakery manager in Laos so desperately, but a deal’s a deal, and it gave me some hope that there are more opportunities here than at first meet the eye.
So, my faith restored, my stomach strong, and looking to cut the costs of our stay we finally agreed to Alyssa’s suggestion of trying the street vendors that stuff the fly-filled alleys come sun-down. Here you can purchase squid on a stick and other things that smell far, far worse amidst a colorful collection of disapproving dowagers and deformed dogs. And for fifty cents it’s all you can eat in this grizzled gastronomic galleria of glee.
Needless to say I was up all night and all day clinging to my bed ruefully, loathing myself for ignoring that age-old adage about not eating off the street. But there is a song in darkening Luang Prabang and it will sing me soft to sleep, perfectly off-key and resplendent in it’s enthusiasm.

Siam Chronicles 3 - A Quick Note About a Very Slow Boat

2005-06-20T22:55:00.000-07:00

Yesterday
I puffed up the mountain with all the grace of a leprous hippo. I don’t have a good track record hiking up mountains, and the macerating heat and biting red ants aided a revival of my oft-made vow to abnegate this activity completely in the future. We bungled down boulders and stumbled through streambeds in search of the waterfall that Alyssa promised lay high above the soughing turquoise pools and dense green jungle like a panacea for the saturating heat. And finally there it was - just a few dangerous drops away – leaping like lemurs we crumbled into the cool waters. I take a moment to pause because though beyond my powers of description this moment was a cheesecake slice of pure bliss.We swam through other pools and waterfalls on the way back down, but none like that hidden pool high above that felt like floating through clouds over the mountain tops on the roof of the world.

2 Days Ago
“Those g-damn Canadians,” Alex spat vituperatively from the back of the pickup. His face was red, wet with sweat, uncharacteristically angry. It had been a slow, slow boat ride. There had been nothing but mountain and jungle and the occasional thatched village and the hammer of the sun for seven long hours before running aground finally, finally at Luang Prabang.The goateed lads in question had roomed across the rattan screen from us the night before in our duplex hut in the remote village of Pakbeng, loudly regaling the known world with their numerous close-encounters with casual sex. Now as they clotted the doorjamb of the French colonial guest house before us, we were enjoined with the prospect of reliving the experience.Fortunately for us, they shuffled on to find a better rate, and we had the place literally all to ourselves - so a shower then and off to explore what we hope will be our new home.It seemed almost natural to run into Alyssa Hamel (an MVP, Punk Rock Kickball 1 & 2) within 30 minutes of our arrival. Although I’ve known her for 11 years (since Hampshire College) she has a peculiar penchant for the chance encounter. After months of tsunami relief work on the Thai islands and kicking through Cambodia, Sunday found her on an unplanned trip to Luang Prabang to receive rabies treatment and reconnect with two hapless travelers from her past.

3 Days Ago
Pakbeng, a mountain town on the Mekong, was exploding into bi-level wooden houses with no electricity or plumbing, and looked exactly like a snapshot of the old west. The sticky night was filled with candlelight, and the cresting cacophony of the jungle. A young mother and her son cooked us the best food we’ve had in ages with a mortar and pestle and a Bunsen burner as we watched the promenade on the dirt road. First a crippled child limped down the street, beating a cur with a crutch, followed quickly by a motorcycle collision, which was followed even more quickly by a high-speed motorcycle chase.Replete on exquisite curry, we watched with fascination as the proprietress of our guest house beat lizards from the walls with a broom, only to fling kittens at them, who would of course lazily kill them as is their want.

4 days ago
I love this mountainous jungle. To be clear, I love driving through it in a comfortable van, the spicy scent of flowering vines shunting through the windows interspersed with the smell of fire, of trees burning. I don’t pretend to possess the internal fortitude to have my ardor undiminished by routine leech incinerations or galloping jungle rot or any of the other myriad botherations to be found on foot.We pass nothing for hours but lush green mountain after lush green mountain, and the occasional denuded one, red with embarrassment. That and the sporadic emaciated cow, picking its plodding way down the roadside, heavy horned head dragging in the dirt.We stayed the night in Chiang Khong, and while nothing to moo about architecturally, it is a place singularly abounding in spectacular butterflies – wisps of cerulean and scarlet and a flutter of green swallowtail like a snow globe filled with whirling confetti.

Now is Now – A Personal Aside
Alex is out again looking for work, on initial survey the prospects for employment are grim. My stomach problems have not subsided even with treatment, and I have begun to chalk it up to total gastronomic wussification brought on by too many years of clean Cali cuisine.But I am in love with this beautiful city, with its carious paths and moldy mansions snug between two great rivers. This is where I want to stay, this is what I had hoped, but this is not going to be a place where finding a job will be easy for Alex, with three schools only and all state run. So we cross fingers and toes with thumb on the nose…

Siam Chronicles 2 - Goodbye, Chiang Mai

2005-06-16T02:35:00.000-07:00

Under no circumstance should I have drunken that herculean quantity of malt liquor. The rain, a tease of chiffon cloud for so long, finally broke the heat over Chang Mai last night. Euphoric we dashed through the drenching waves in search of conversation and drink. In retrospect the phrase "unthinkably stupid" is apt, but at the time it was natural to huddle conspiratorially over the great brown bottles of Chang brew piled high like some archaic hecatomb descanting politics, semiotic philosophy, and the punk movement in America with a motley medley of fellow farangs amidst the anodyne hum of torrential rain.
So it was that this morning found me in a whirl of regret and whizzing through yet another novel, while Alex pounded the pavement in search of gainful employment. A pity, I like Chiang Mai, an expansive corrugated shanty town fringed by jungle in full flower set at the base of a great green mountain. Innumerable orchids grow everywhere, I recognize a few varieties that I had shamefully killed with care in San Francisco flourishing untended in tin cans in the gutters. I've spent the majority of the last few days dripping my way through the endless wats - more crumbling and less ostentatious in general then those in Bangkok, they exude a quiet simplicity that is most alluring.The city seems mainly to be a hub for "trekking," wherein tourists are firmly strapped to the top of an elephant and banished into the jungle to gawk at the hill tribes. This is reputed to be quite enjoyable, though I should warn any Victorian poets peering at this through frilled sleeves that, as an Aussie mournfully disclosed last night (with tangible regret), they no longer dispense mandatory opium infusions at the pit stops.
We're headed to Luang Prabang on what is ominously deemed "the slow boat" tomorrow, which will appropriately take a number of days. We're restless to get there and settled in, although there is some thought that perhaps we'll chuck it all and head down south to Phukket where there are plenty of teaching gigs to be had and also a beach to recommend it. Our power converter mysteriously self-destructed, taking the surge protector to hell with it in spite, so it may be a while before I can get pictures posted...

Siam Chronicles 1 - Let's Get the Rock Out of Bangkok

2005-06-14T02:19:00.000-07:00

We were stranded at the Golden Mountain. I cursed the tuk tuk driver silently, wondered what on earth induced him to flee without payment, and started slogging past woodworkers carving swirling teak posts on the sidewalk thick with sawdust, over the mephitic canals, in search of another of the hopped up go-carts. We didn't have to wait long before a leathery fellow with a suppurating neck wound agreed to schlep us back to our concrete bunker for a dollar. It is a Buddhist holy day today, and the reverberating chanting of the monks steeps the stinking streets in a deep puissance.
It can be argued that the most distinctive thing about Bangkok, more than the garish swirl of life or even the panorama of the crenellated wats, is the overwhelming and pertinacious odor. Those who are familiar with the miasma of a Parisian alley or New York in July would gladly flee for solace back to the more familiar and tamer reeks of simple urine and garbage when faced with the sheer eye-stinging enormity of Bangkok brand stench. It pervades everything - lurking under the spices of the food even, oiling your tongue as it lies heavy and still in your nostrils. It clots your pores and drips through your sweat, and no amount of water or militant scrubbing will keep it from waking you in waves come first bleary blink of morning. But it is not just the stink that whacks you sideways like a blunt instrument while staggering through the street - the sulphurous exhaust from the buses and traffic leave you swimming in an acidic caliginous fishbowl and woefully bereft of any bronchial cilia to speak of. And then there are all the old women with creased faces and dirty flower print dresses that barricade off the sidewalks, searing rotting shellfish in homemade woks (trays beaten concave) emitting great blasts of spicy steam that makes your eyes water and your throat retch into spasmodic coughing. The stink, the fumes, the spice - a city of tears then.
Not as I remembered it quite, but almost assuredly my perception is tainted by whatever stomach malady attacked me as soon as I hit the tarmac from Tokyo and led me to a few days of bed rest and crackers. But if you have a mania for oversized golden buddhas in copious quantities, then certainly this is the city for you.
We're leaving now to race the rainy season and take the night train to Chang Mai. It's about time to get the rock out of Bangkok.