Toilet Tabu 29.03.10

I’m going back to some earlier notes. . The two blogs I have ‘in the can’ are a bit raunchy so bear with me and we’ll see if we can find the road back to fun and funniness. I do try to amuse... is that evident? My brother says I have knocked out some Colinisms, I like that word. I make up a LOT of words of course. I think I should include a dictionary or my own vocab. I never use a thesaurus or dictionary or, with the exception of the name of some crazy ass curveball pitcher, gone to Google for factoids. I keep hoping that my sister Nancy will volunteer to clean up my writing but, ?Nancy? Got enough on your plate?

This instalment is a bit ripe. If you are of a sensitive nature please pass this one by as it is about a subject that is all too common to travelers – but it will be difficult to be delicate. I will endeavour.

Of late I am oft reminded of that Etta James classic; ‘What a Difference a Bidet Makes’ she really says it all when she sings ‘How I adore the little showers’. So that is the launching point for these thoughts. All through Vietnam, Laos and Thailand we have found wonderful little hoses with spigots next to the toilet (except with public toilets that are usually squatters with a bucket and a pail without a handle). Wow! What a thrill those puppies are. I have vowed to install one the second I get home. Terrifically useful.

Digestion and its corollaries are always top of mind when one is travelling. On the input side we are warned about tapwater, lettuce, fruit and vegetables that touch the ground etc. Ok. Who can live that way? Failure to maintain the strictest hygienic code will result in terrible things so we are told. But if one is travelling on a budget that is less than Midas-like one will soon have to make a decision. It starts so simply – the waiter touched the neck of the purified water bottle – yes or no. C’mon, grow a pair.

Today’s topics include: Woeful Washrooms, The Telltale Fart – a Po classic, Irresistible Objection, Tom Trot and His Friends, The Joke of the Butt and 4 Decrees of Preparation. Anyone who has travelled outside of their own hometown will have experienced one or more of these.

Woeful Washrooms

There is a sort of ratcheting up of anticipation when one approaches a new WC. One feels a tightening in the temples akin to MSG poisoning. It is a given that one will have to drop into a public facility more than once a day when one is on the road. Will it stink, will it have toilet paper, will it flush, will I slip and fall down the hole, will i be able to hover above the battlefield and still hit the target with my ordnance? If you weren’t feeling any intestinal distress when contemplating the use of the facility you certainly will just before you turn that grimy knob. Dirty hands down - Vietnam was easily the worst so far; from an olfactory perspective I have experienced more ‘colours’ in the 4 weeks that I was in Vietnam than in my entire life thus far. From whiff of vestigial four-day-old corpse to 2x4 across the brow Who Flung Poo, I have discovered an entirely new lexicon of grossitude. Laos probably doesn’t count because I was in a sort of yuppie Mecca called Luang Prabang – and the Laotians are reputed to have extremely high standards in that regard – but I didn’t really dig into the countryside so we’ll have to call that a wash. I have seen extremely high standards in Thailand and some faintly nauseating – so Vietnam is to be avoided by the squeamish and weak-of-heart. I have already submitted my report on the WC on the sleeper train and I am pleased to add that I was able, on a subsequent trip from Ninh Binh to Hanoi, to record an exact duplicate of that original hellhole on my camera. In order to do it justice I will have to create a Hockney-esque composite because my wide-angle lens couldn’t get the whole thing in one shot. I don’t have the time or software to do it correctly here.

The Telltale Fart

Sometimes it is just a fart and sometimes it isn’t. When one is at home and everything is finely tuned and in excellent order it is usually quite safe to roll the dice. But when all your money is down at the craps table you’d better have said your prayers the night before. I am sure there are prophylactic ablatives one might employ to guard against the shame but the prospect of valving off a little methane when the engine is running fairly hot is always a risky gamble. Extra pair of undies? Without a doubt.

Irresistible Objection

It can happen anywhere and at any time but the feared and familiar wrench of gut that pre-empts all thought processes is one of the most daunting features of travel. Suddenly the landscape shifts, through the miasma of confusing signage and traffic one must locate a depository. Failure to locate same will lead to discomfiture, embarrassment, possibly exile by your partner(s). Likely triggers are Vietnamese Coffee, what looked like a red pepper but was in fact a thermonuclear chilli, the waiter handled that damn water bottle – should have gone for door number 3. Once familiar with the experience you will be able to anticipate the launch date of your package. 3 minutes, 10, 20 seconds – what do they call Kegels of the hind?

One of the strange phenomena I have observed with respect to this is the body’s uncanny reflex to give a green light to evacuation once the goal is within view as opposed to the eminently more desirable moment when one is in fact in conjunction with the porcelain receptacle. One of the perversities of the human species I suppose. In my experience, without putting too fine a point on it, It has led to minor disaster resulting from an activated release aperture pre-firing

Tom Trot

Travelers diarrhoea – damn that’s a tough word to spell, but you can be illiterate and still get it. In fact, it’s all too common at the outset of many peregrinations to foreign lands. There’s not too much to say about this affliction except that it tends to keep one close to quarters until it has been resolved and it can be dangerous if not treated. Fortunately we have Azithromycin – an amazing drug that works a charm as they say. Old Monteczuma probably had a bathroom cupboard full of those babies for visiting dignitaries. I don’t know what my intestinal flora look like these days but I suspect they resemble the blackened, smouldering slash and burn hillsides we see hereabouts. Yogurt is fairly common in Southeast Asia. One might be well-advised to bring a small vial of probiotic capsules just to give the chute the old leg up.

I have never experienced this next one so I’ll tuck it into Tom Trot. It is, in fact, the opposite. I was once travelling with a young woman who had not had a BM of any kind for three weeks! She reported this uncomfortable fact to a native physician; he spoke Greek and a little French, she spoke English and French. If memory serves the conversation went something like. Dr: ‘Trois semaines? Impossible, Trois
jours!’. She: ‘Oui, trois semaines!’. Dr: ‘IM-POSS-IBLE!’. She was successful in convincing him that she was a tad stuffed up and he prescribed for her the most powerful suppository ever invented. It had to be handled with lead gloves and molybdenum tongs. After administering same – and I assure you this is all second-hand information – she waited patiently for the magic. With great anticipation she felt the urge but to her bitter disappointment and frustration, produced a turd the size of a rabbit pellet. Luckily the rabbit pellet was the mass and density of a neutron star and it chipped the squatter going down.

The Joke of the Butt
For the youngsters at home I thought I should write a short preamble about how, as one ages, the integrity and tensility of one’s nether tissues becomes more and more paramount. What one took for granted in the halcyon days of youth become a fixation among many as they enter their later years.

I am here today to sing praise in honour of St. Bidet, a clever 16th century hotelier whose incalculably valuable contribution to mankind was a valved hose with sufficient pressure to gently Karcher one’s exhaust manifold free of all offending material. Blessings be upon him and his progeny.

When delicately showered, the article under discussion remains happy and healthy – greatly improving one’s disposition and sense of well-being.

From a Service-to-Mankind perspective Bill Gates could steal a page or two from M. Bidet’s book; though Mr. Microsoft has no prospects for future hagiography as his station will probably be somewhere on the third or fourth level of Mr. Dante’s terrain.

Four Decrees of Preparation

I only write this last because there may be one or two readers who have not yet worn out a sandal on the cobbled road of discovery. It is always important to expect the unexpected but it has been too many years since I launched my ship on the seas without a wrangler or a fixer so it took a few days to get my gear together.

1. Toilet paper – shockingly few public facilities have it. Even the user-pay ones. Be prepared to put the used stuff into a little bin with a swinging lid so practice scrunching it at home to keep the good faces facing out for aesthetics. Learn origami with one hand. Also, if you like good quality stuff (they sell 80 grade sandpaper here) then buy it at home and pack an extra suitcase. You can sell it at great profit at TP Black Markets everywhere. And do remember, because the call of duty can happen at any time you will appreciate it if you are off-roading and the trumpets blare.
2. Hand Soap – sure, just take the little chips from your guesthouses and hotels but they vanish faster than a holy wafer on Satan’s tongue so maybe pack a little liquid soap as well. Ditto shampoo. In the cheaper guesthouses the proprietors refill their liquid containers so have a heart and pack your own shampoo. Besides, who knows what scalp-scorching fluid is in those vials.
3. Moist towelettes – right now all the males are thinking I am a complete pussy. Guilty as charged - but I can tell you that there have been several bus trips where these guys have paid major dividends. So don’t take ‘em, but be prepared to eat with questionable organisms clinging to your fingertips. I recently cleaned a restaurant menu with one – it was so unspeakably grimy that I couldn’t stand to think of the next diner contemplating the kitchen of the establishment based on the plasticized menu. The food was quite good and fresh. Spread the love, not the contagion.
4. Hand sanitizer – kind of second-best to #3, just another possible protection against narsty stuff. On airplanes where there is stuff floating around that would make an Ebola germ weep you might as well improve your chances.

I’m not a squeamish man, nor am I ultra-fastidious in my hygiene. I would suggest that my Constitution Index resides near the ‘moderate’ level. I can no longer stay out all night drinking and carousing but I generally do see a star or two peep out and I may veer towards the reckless when making a decision to starve or to eat because it is 8.30 PM and all the fracking restos are closed up. Please take my advice. Be Prepared. You will have a better experience for it.

El Dorado of the Authentic 28.03.10

Know the personal,

yet keep to the impersonal:

accept the world as it is.

If you accept the world,

the Tao will be luminous inside you

and you will return to your primal self.

The world is formed from the void,

like utensils from a block of wood.

The Master knows the utensils,

yet keeps to the block:

Thus she can use all things

Fragment of the Tao te Ching Chapter 28

Return to your primal self...Paul, I need Marshall McLuhan right now. Like that scene in Manhattan when Woody Allen conjured him up to substantiate his argument while he stood in line to see a movie I need some interpreter to help me understand what is occurring when a place with soul is ‘discovered’. We’ve all witnessed the phenomenon- an idyll is found and certain individuals gather together in that place because they share like values and aesthetics. Soon the sensually-parasitic wolfpack who raven after the false Gods of Cool and Unique descend like a horde of locusts, consuming the soul and altering what was unselfconsciously precious to some sort of simulacrum of middle-class ideal.

I imagine that Pai in northern Thailand must have been such a place about 15 years ago with its benign climate, beautiful geography; surrounded by villages of indigenous peoples with complex and various customs and practices. There are possibly places within 100 klicks of here that haven’t seen the farang boom that turns authentic pulchritude into postcard verisimilitude of that once-and-forgotten way of life. The minute the lotus-eaters descend the real reverses to false (I’ve forgotten the tetragram Marshall, this is where you step in). In its pre-Disneyfied past it must have been charming.

An apocryphal aside: Mr. McLuhan is said to have taken over 25 takes to speak his two or so lines in the movie. The man could lecture extemporaneously for hours but on camera he couldn’t stand and deliver. What was happening there Marshall?

Pai (Pbeye) is still pretty and quasi-bucolic but something here has been irreparably broken. The old locals don’t like the changes (but they need the eggs). You can faintly hear the ghosts of ages past murmuring their stories of tradition, belief, life, death, suffering and bliss but they are wraiths, unable to exist in this spiritually myopic present. The river is crowded with mock-authentic bungalows, like some sort of Potemkin village of an unspoiled time. There are 8 foot high signs screaming the names of the hotel, they reflect in the river like fractured fictions.

The locals compete with banal t-shirt wagons and ubiquitous juice stands. There are five or six service sector responses: guesthouse or hotel, coffee house and boozery, restaurant (baken and egs for breakfast), gewgaw and knickknack shoppe, massage parlour or tour service (‘See the longnecks in their villages, just 300 Baht!’).

In our travels we are still getting it wrong. We seek the unspoiled but our guide is the (anything but) Lonely Planet. That means we are treading a path flattened and buffed by the sandals of tens of thousands of others. We all sit in cafes poring over the instruction manual. Gluing our compasses to ‘fun’ and arriving like cattle in the next stockyard of dreams (ok Colin, time to play another tune).

We meet people all along the way; usually expats and vagabonds who know the less trammelled places but we typically learn of their Shangri-la as we are sitting on a bus, leaving the potential jewel , traveling toward the next trinket. We keep saying ‘next time’ or ‘ let’s just head off here or there’ but we end up playing it safe. Time is too precious to waste it getting lost (wrong, wrong, wrong). We find blitzkrieged Goa instead of leafy Elysium.

Pai is haven for tatted and rasta’ed Japanese and American middle class youth. It’s still cheap and funky but the signs of rot are all there. Condos springing up like mushrooms on the outskirts of town, tourism-obsessed service operators jostling cheek by jowl for a the meagre Baht in the low season, looking like spent dogs, glaring murderously at tourists who pass them by and select the establishment next door.

In a few years this place will be a mecca for chubby-cheeked, triple jowled Billy Bunter Senior – clamouring for their waffles with whipped cream, mocha lattes and AC – another Starbucked wasteland. The hip youth will leave to seek boho elsewhere and the vagabonds will dig deep into the dirt roads and dangerous countries to enjoy their off-grid Eden.

Ad Nauseum.

Sophie thinks I’m REALLY negative in this posting. I’d have to agree with her. Maybe it is the sticky rice mangoes with coconut cream sauce. Really, the trip is mostly fun, I’m just feeling a bit more cynical today. Frustrated maybe. Tomorrow none of this diatribe will be true and the world will be a perfect, shiny place.

Reflections on northern Thailand 26.03.10

Sitting in a simple guesthouse in Chiang Rai, about 4 hours third class bus ride into Thailand from northern Laos. A young French man in an emerald green t-shirt is sitting on a lime green piece of concrete lawn furniture. The walls of the establishment are painted a startling shamrock and we are surrounded by many lush plants. It’s a study in green. He’s noodling on a classical guitar – Nick Drakeish tunes with a soupcon of gitane perhaps. He has a lovely percussive technique. Very pleasant. Fred has dry, rough looking hands with frog-spatulate fingertips but he plays beautifully – descending cascades of Joni Mitchellesque minor 13ths add K – I don’t know many of his chords. He plays a Nepali lovesong by request from me. It is sort of generic and sweet in a Mexi-pop way but lovely because of the unusual sounding vowels and tonalities.. He is from a town near Champagne. He is wrapping up a 2 year stint teaching music to Nepali street kids. Very pleasant fellow. His music seeps easily, like warm coffee, into the heavily lepidopterated garden, deepening its restfulness.

This part of Chiang Rai is like a carnal Newcastle. We are close to the bus station and, pro-forma, every third establishment is a massage parlour featuring former beauties in semi-recline, limbs piled on one another. They smile invitingly and call entreaties as we pass by (?). The farang here are mostly male as you might expect. Sad cases; pot-bellied Mr. Smithers types in too-tight shorts and universally uncool socks in sandals. They walk almost en pointe for some reason. We also see the proto Mr. Burns characters to complete the 'Simpsons' picture. These are Gecko-eyed caiphotic geezers with crepey pursed lips and preying mantis arms. Probably dropping two Viagra a day. Imagine them licking their lizard-thin lips with long, dry tongues. They sit, as still as iguanas, in coffee bars in cyan Hawaiian print shirts, staring into space or idly taking in the passers-by. Who is the audience and who is the zoo spectacle?

We leave on a bus to Chiang Mai. Purportedly a mecca of beauty and interest. At the bus station we meet a verbose young American man from Vermont. He speaks in a stentorian voice in our little Sawngthaeu - which is a small communal taxi made by welding two hemorrhoid-inducing benches into the bed of a small pickup and dropping a roof on it - while we travel from the central bus station to the main station outside of town. The Thais wince at his volume and intensity. He gushes a great percentage of his life story to us and then turns his beam on a young foursome from Colorado, repeating much of the same stuff. He tells us about malaria, dengue, types of rare tropical woods that people traffic in and methods for cheaply extending one's visa in Thailand. He has spent four years part-time here so he is a veritable fount of useful information. I’ve got a theory that for all his squeaky cleanness he is in the drug-running business. He has a property a stone’s throw from the Myanmar border. By his accounts he has led an interesting life with his life-experience pedal to the metal. He shows little sign of letting up. Remarkable fellow.

One of the wonderful things about traveling is the conversation with strangers one meets, however briefly. Whether it is trading stories like collectible cards or riffing on semi-parallel on-the-road experiences or sharing chunks of life stories, most people have interesting tales.

We haven’t met any philosophers yet. Perhaps the wise ones wait for others to arrive at their doorstep. When I refer to today’s Tao te Ching this idea seems to be confirmed, thus:

The heavy is the root of light.
The unmoved is the source of all movement.

Thus the master travels all day
without leaving home.
However splendid the views,
She stays serenely in herself.

Why should the lord of the country
flit about like a fool?
If you let yourself be blown to and fro
you lose touch with your root.
If you let restlessness move you,
you lose touch with who you are.

Babel 20.03.10

This one is out of order. I couldn't quite find my way through it when it occurred.

English is the lingua franca on the road. From time to time I’ve tried on my broken French and my Spanish has failed me altogether. Sometimes one acts as translator between two people of different nationalities who are both speaking English but can’t understand each other. For me it is one of the great pleasures; having a conversation about some simple or difficult subject, navigating through hand gestures (fish swims like this), smatterings of other language, pidgin construction and best-guess. Sometimes it is hopeless but often it is wonderfully rewarding. Even accidents can be fun if they don’t lead to death or dismemberment.

Food-pointing at street stalls is a relatively easy means of selecting a meal but occasionally the sauces and additives of the featured foodstuff render the dish sufficiently ambiguous that one resorts to onomatopoeic verification E.g. “Quack, quack?”(is it duck?). Response (with a smile that is either amused or evil) “Cock!”. Hm, is it cooked? Rooster? Penis of some animal that is hopefully not a higher primate than, say, John Wayne Bobbit? Or is that a Thai word for pig’s brains? Discretion is the better part of indigestion; move on .

When in doubt descend on a white or black passer-by. If they don’t have a recommend they will usually have a discrecommend. Old Brits will seek crepes and steaks so give them a pass. Germans are usually negative about everything. French are very reliable – they know good food when they taste it and communication is usually not too broken telephone. Everyone loves to tell about their trophies - great hotel finds or marvelous excursions or fantastic guides or fixers.

When taxi, tuk tuk or minibus drivers are silent and one can’t communicate a single word it can be a concern. Almost all of them understand ATM and one can be reasonably sure that a hotel or casino is nearby.

Familiar-looking words read from guide books can provide blank or angry stares – the tonally expressed tongues of these countries are heavily mined with the potential for international incident They will giggle when you stagger through 'thank you' but don’t try too much or you will become one of the legions of disparacido(sp?).

As difficult as it was in Vietnam with respect to communication, most of the language was written in Roman characters on street signs and address slabs. The moment we landed in Laos we realized we were in hot lemongrass soup. To my eye, the alphabet is not parseable – still, some signs had English translations and we survived. Thailand has quite a lot of English translation but it is unreliable and buildings rarely have an address on their sign. You can travel blocks with no clue of what street you are on. And we have. We got lost briefly in a walkabout in Luang Prabang but by watching the moon, dropping crumbs and tossing coins one is usually able to divine the proper route.

I’ve probably revealed my xenophobic nature by all my projections on nationalities. (and I’ve got a few more in the bag) After all, what is a Canadian like? Surely we are all individuals, but somewhere there is a sort of pattern that people discuss and foreigners like to explore. When a hotel in Hanoi didn’t keep our reservation despite a healthy prepayment I went ballistic in the foyer. I was yelling and requesting the owner of the hotel and threatening to talk to my friend who is an author for Lonely Planet (they didn’t buy that one either). Very un-Canadian I knew – so I apologized the next morning to an Aussie woman who was in the audience. Very Canadian.

We haven’t had any really awful communication breakdowns but I hope to capture a good tale or two along the way. I am reminded of the time when JO Saunders and I were wandering through the spiderweb alleys of Mykonos looking for a pensione back in the late seventies. A bent old fellow was following us along the cobblestone maze swinging his cane and shouting ‘Stupid, stupid!’. ‘Why is that guy so rude?’ I asked Owen. With the copyright flex of eyebrows and upward gaze to Zeus that Owen uses to express his reaction to such inanity he laconically replied, “He is saying he has two beds (you moron).”

Nic e ones too.

Today's image: For three days I was convinced that playing the bugle in Laos carried the death penalty.

The Long and Winding Road 22.03.10

I’m still working on some notes on Luang Prabang in Laos so please excuse the chronological drift. We visited Laos much more briefly than we had intended. We were geared for some eco-touristic escapades but Soph soured on the idea of ziplining through the canopy so we’ve reworked our sked.

The bus trip up to Huay Xai, which is the border town between northern Laos and Thailand was another classic. In fact it starts to read a lot like the nailbiter from HCMC to Dalat except this one was worse in all respects. Instead of eight hours we were in the bus for thirteen. The driver opted to stop once at the halfway point – at the side of the, what we will for storytelling purposes, call a road. There was no building, we just squatted and squirted into the blackness.

It started well enough but within about half an hour the legendary roads of Laos were fact for us. There are more curves on this highway than a Marilyn Monroe calendar. There are more curves on this road than a no-hitter pitched by Mordecai "three-fingers" Brown. Based on a count on a typical stretch I guesstimate that there were in excess of 4000 hairpin curves. It was like watching a bullrider’s trip through the eyes of the bull – except the bull never tires and the cowboy never tumbles off. It is like experiencing what a butterfly must see when it flits through a garden except it is through inky black ravines and defiles with the occasional glimpse of a sheer brown wall or a fathomless abyss of space past sheer cliffs. Thank God we couldn’t really see what we nearly hit or nearly missed. Within an hour several occupants were retching their guts out. We were feeling ok until that point but it brought our attention to our own internals. In the end neither of us lost our food. Bonus round!

As you might imagine, thirteen hours straight of driving the crankiest arcade game ever invented has a soporific effect on the operator. After slapping himself in the face for a while he started sponging cold water on his neck. Soon the tourettish ticks started showing up: cocking of head, twitching and jerking his hands on the steering wheel. At about hour 9 he stopped the bus and went outside. There were few others awake on the bus. I saw him pick up a little kit of something and disappear behind the bus for a moment. He returned sniffing and knuckling his nose, miraculously brighter looking. I was glad for whatever he had inhaled because he was more intense and focused for a while. He repeated the routine about an hour later and soon thereafter the sun rose and he seemed more relaxed. The death-by-bus soundtrack this time sounded like an Asian take on Rush. Maybe played backwards. Discordant and arrhythmic, it seemed the perfect theme music. I was remembering though that drug use carries the death penalty. I guess it’s a crapshoot – die driving or die using. Roll the dice.

I am going to go out on a limb here and suggest that no one reading this blog has ever travelled on a road like this. Most of the trip was on potholed gravel and dirt. Huge piles of dirt and rock litter the roadway that, at best, is only a narrow two vehicles wide. The bus driver has to swerve not only to navigate the curves but also to avoid the rock obstacles, truly a gamer’s wet dream. The bus, from where I was sitting seemed more like POV an insect sitting on a compass needle in an iron mine. The driver was spinning the wheel like a mad Ahab or the way we did in bumper cars when the steering wheels had virtually no effect on direction - while illuminated jungle and torn bush, pampas and bamboo and corridors of small thatch houses elbowing up to the highway seemed to whirl and reverse like an arcade experience. But the funhouse operator left the ride on and I couldn’t get off. Scary as hell. Again. Ever since I had my Iboga experience I have been able to feel a short way into my future. I knew, absolutely, that we were going to be ok but objectively it did not look good folks. Did I mention that for about an hour we were in a peasoup fog? Icing on the cake. After the fog disappeared he started really driving fast. I couldn’t decide whether I preferred the uncertainly of a grey curtain or the hellish wrack bursting out of the stygian dark.

Kayla, pretend I just wrote that the trip up was really fun.

I recommend the river ride to or from Luang Prabang. That would take two days but it would probably be quite relaxing.

When the sun rose we could see the countryside. The road improved somewhat, the piles of rock were less frequent and they didn’t rise suddenly out of the dark. The houses are mostly rush walls and thatch roof on six or seven foot log supports. Some houses had board and batten walls but all were dirtcaked and sunbleached. Occasionally a glimpse of an unlikely looking solar cell on a post. The locals were performing their morning ablutions, squatting, combing their hair or washing their face - an ancient sitting by a small cauldron while a charcoal fire burnt under her steaming iron pot. All this takes place outside the home within large unwalled rooms defined by heavy logs. Some of the house stilts were terribly akimbo. The bungalows looked like stiff-legged insects about to launch into a race.

The people in northern Laos are darker than in Luang Prabang, quite beautiful, with strong cheekbones, mahogany skin and dark eyes. One fellow by the roadside was wearing a black balaclava, looking like a modern day Pathan. A group of dusty labourers, already tired, looking at the break of day - in a wagon towed by a motorcycle. But during the entire journey I never saw a grader or a caterpillar; I did see dumptrucks but no heavy roadbuilding equipment – were the entire hundreds of kilometres being built by manual labour?

It is very dry here. The ubiquitous hills are sere and brown. The rice paddies are fallow and straw-coloured; the land looks cracked and parched. There are signs of logging everywhere, hillsides denuded and burnt. Only 10% of Laos is old-growth but they say they have a strong ecological mandate. Hard to say, we saw so little. The Nam Khoung (?) River is almost dry, the shores are exposed to sandbanks many feet high. We saw a photo of a flood dated December 2008 that placed the river level maybe 50 feet higher!

Tonight we are in Thailand. An uneventful border crossing and a short ride in a large jitney type bus to Chiang Rai because we missed the bus to Chiang Mai. Off to seek noodles.

I’m thinking of you. Please write if you have time. I miss the connection.

past and future 19.03.10

We travelled by what qualifies as a junk through a portion of Ha Long Bay near Hanoi. The mountainous formations are familiar to 007 fans. Similar to Ninh Binh, these tiny islets are limestone fragments that are remnants – left behind by erosion and tectonic activity. The islets are home to some birds – practically the first songbirds we have heard in Vietnam, which leads me to believe that they’ve eaten all the rest.

We saw a group of men tucking into a plate of roasted sparrows back near Ninh Binh. They looked like bird that are victims of an explosion or a gunshot in a Merry Melodies cartoon, glossy, brown, crisp and naked with bulging eyes and a bulbous head. The gentlemen were crunching on those heads as we were enjoying our meal at the next table. The only other birds we see and hear are in dusty cages sucking in unburned petrol fumes at street level in toxic cities everywhere. Oh, and roosters.

Out on the quiet and contemplative South China Sea the chaos and cacophony of Hanoi washes away. One has to have one’s antennae fully out all the time in Hanoi or risk being run over or ripped off. It’s probably not as bad as I have made it sound but we are first-timers there and everything is new and unfamiliar. The sidewalks are the parking lots for motorbikes so pedestrians have to share the road with motorcycles, buses and automobiles, rickshaws, street vendors and other pedestrians – it has depleted my spirit a bit and this side-trip is a good respite.

Ha Long Bay is an embarrassment of beauty with gravity-defying upthrusts of rock layered in subtle atmospheric perspective. I had always thought those exquisite Japanese and Chinese brush paintings of vertical mountains with bonsai trees and pendant vines were some sort of cultural fiction but they are everywhere here. The junk we are on is a modest one with only 6 other guests, like us, they have opted for a more personal experience. They are all pleasant; Aussies, an American who teaches in Korea and a couple of Welshmen who are scouting out adventures for their small exercise-oriented Tourism company back in Cardiff.

Ha Long requires a selective attention. The landscape is very beautiful but there are many other junks out on the route. They tend to travel in a file so the view from either side is unspoiled but when we seek anchorage for the night we are in a veritable parking lot of junks. There are at least two dozen in a relatively small cove. As dusk falls the effect is quite lovely, the other boats lights reflect on calm seas creating a rich, glassy effect with dull steel grey water and burnt-umber boats with tawny sails and cadmium yellow and orange lights from staterooms.

In the morning I rose early and took photographs of the bay. A lighter was tending a ship nearby, grey-white plumes of smoke drifted from its exhaust as its engine pock-pocked away. Other tenders were sailing from junk to junk – the scene at once romantic and kind of eighteenth-century crude.

Before returning to the mainland we were taken to a cave in an island nearby the anchorage. There are a series of three caves within. The last was preposterously large; it could easily have held a ballpark. Folds and dripcastle blobs abounded.

As we descended into the caves I could see fossilized sea creatures in the limestone. It brought me to think of geological time and how mankind is such a blink in the cavernous amount of time that the earth has existed. The mountains are all sedimentary – castles of fossilized coral and the debris of sea life many hundreds of millions of years ago. Each centimetre represents perhaps a thousand years of life. Maybe more. The billions of billions of lifeforms that accreted in the Devonian(?) period have become stone; have been eroded and fragmented by the forces of water and geological stress.

Who could fail to consider the immensity of time and how insignificantly small mankind’s epoch has been. Now our oceans are taking up the excess CO2 from the atmosphere, the water is becoming warmer and more acidic. Coral reefs around the world are bleaching, suddenly dying – the magnificent reefs that are one of the primary nurseries of life on Earth are disappearing. The reefs are a bellwether of environmental stability. There is no known technology for reversing the effect.

This is a familiar internal conversation with me – the end of the age of mankind. It sometimes ends up with Bach. Particularly today. Bach, for me is elemental stuff. He pursues themes with variations and fugues that make me think of species selection; improvement, refinement, evolution. I am saddened to think that at some future time there will be no ears, no minds to perceive Bach. The gothic architecture of the caves would be a fantastic place to hear some of his grandiose organ works.

This may sound like two conversations but for me it all fits together. Because I am a dark one I spend a lot of time mourning things. I mourn the suffering that we are visiting on one another and the abuse we are subjecting our physical environment to. I am not unaware that my travel has a negative impact on the environment. I am burning a lot of fossil fuel to get my thrills.

I think that humans won’t perish altogether from the Earth. I believe that we will find a way to adapt to an entirely different and more hostile environment. It might be through the intervention of genetic manipulation or the agency of technological hybridisation – combining humans with silicon and carbon materials to modify our physical needs and resources – but I do believe that humankind is in for a bumpy century and I would bet against our entering the 22^nd century behaving and living as we do now - as natural evolution has designed us for this nearly-perfect world. But that's just one opinion.

The upper photo is the grand cavern. The little dots you see on the bottom are people. can you zoom in? The lower photo is a morning shot with a smoking lighter serving a larger junk.

Four Senses 16.03.10

Breaking from tradition I’ll do a little accounting of experiences in the last 24 hours.

Smell

• Passing through drifts of smoke ripe with the smell of burning sugar cane. Heady smell of burnt sugar, dark and bittersweet mixed with woody overtones
• Viet tea in the north. Grassy and oolong, bitter and strong.
• Water Buffalo dung smells a lot like cow dung.
• Burning paper money: acrid paper smoke, sharp and irritating to the nose. Prevalent at places of worship. Went to a huge pagoda today with giant cauldrons filled with smouldering ‘money’.
• Rice liquor – kerosene and hoochy vapour with a strong rotten tone.
• Tropical woods in bungalows have a heady Catholic smell. Reminds one of confessional booths. Memories of guilt and sin and all that good stuff.

Taste

• Ultra sour unknown fruit, shape of giant olives, brindle orange and green skin with a very flocked with a hairy surface. Rub off the fur and bite, the flesh is gelatinous and puckery, flavour is grapey and faintly citrus. The seed is supposed to be chewable but I don’t think it’s worth the trouble. Used by old women for stomach problems.
• Greens for enhancing pho. The Muong serve up a mixture of cilantro, banana flowers (faintly anise) and dill. Quite a combo.
• Dang – a medicinal leaf used by locals for stomach upset. Ultra bitter.
• Special rice – the Muong grow 5 different qualities of rice. We sampled a few, the best rice is nutty and sweet and with a woody smell.
• Broth of morning-glory and crabmeat. Buttery, faintly fishy and, well, yummy.
• Fresh tofu is creamy and a bit sour, funky with a mildly sour taste.

Sight

• Limestone cave with beautiful crenellated stalactites that look like crepey tofu but, like, big.
• Two six-year old girls, long glossy black hair - walking along road, holding hands like little girls used to in Canada
• Woman working in a rice field. Dwarfed by enormous billboard advertising shampoo. Backdrop a shockingly beautiful landscape of distant blue sugarloaf mountains.
• Two dogs locked in post-coital distress. They couldn’t unlock. They are struggling butt to butt, male pushing female with his hind legs, she is yelping in agony. Twas ever thus.
• Enormous gilt-covered 20m tall Buddha, one of 8 or nine similar scale figures. Towering 40 feet high in cavernous pagoda filled with hundreds of Viet tourists. Smoke-filled space with rich lateral light seeping in.
• Young boy, eight or nine flailing stream with a seven foot stick. Three men waist deep in narrow brown stream holding a net, waiting to receive the fish that he is frightening.
• Five year old boy beating the bejeezus out of a large yellow plush duck while his amused friends look on.
• Drunk weaving tipsily in tourist market with a clot of thick black hair on his neck, like a fun-fur goitre.
• Elegant young Muong woman in a psychedelic pink track suit walking behind water buffalo.
• Infant wearing bright orange crocheted elf hat with two yellow dongles.
• Woman climbing up into rice fields with a gait designed to avoid slipping and tripping like I was. Sort of like watching those super-marionettes on Fireball 5 or whatever that puppet series was called. Loose hips and knees, feet slightly splayed, back erect, arms relaxed.

Sound

• Sweet tinkle of water running through rice paddies. Trickling from plot to plot over stones, through bamboo pipes and gurgling through rubber hoses. Makes one want to pee every 10 minutes.
• Thin quacking bleat of Water Buffalo – at first I thought it was a bird making the sound.
• Snap and crackle of welding torches all along the highways and byways - manufacture is taking place.
• Groan and whine of sugar cane juicing machine.
• Cacophony of every kind of honk, beep, WAAAAH and tootle you can possibly imagine and six more you can’t imagine.
• Faint piping of frogs in the paddies. Very northern Ontario familiarity.

Today's photo is of brown cane sugar bricks. They measure about 4" x 8" and contain enough calories to power a small country