Photography

In reverse chronological order:

Istanbul

Beirut

Petra

Giza

Delhi

Rishikesh

Kathmandu

Xi'an

Nanning

Jonesing in Petra and Stumbling Decadence in Beirut

Petra, home of the ancient Nabateans, is a city of buildings hewn from cliff faces. To anyone with even a mild interest in history, architecture, or geology, it's a remarkable place. To fans of Indiana Jones, it's also the location of the "Temple of the Crescent Moon" (called the Treasury at the site) which houses the holy grail.


The rest of the site is just as astonishing, as was the long hike up the Wadi Muthlim ravine which I shared with a pair of Australian cousins I met at the hostel. The ravine is an alternate way to enter the city, which allows you to bypass the Treasury and save it as the finale before exiting Petra. It takes about an hour and a half, with dillydallying, to wind through the narrow canyon. The route is closed if rain is expected: flash floods which tear through the area may have contributed to the downfall of the city, and even today piles of tires, oil drums and other rubbish are scattered over the rocks, doubtlessly swept away by the torrential rains. But skies were clear for Jessica, Adam and me, and we tramped merrily away, stifling exhilerated giggles from the awesomeness of the rock formations.


After a solid eight hours on site, we rallied with our bus and shuttled back to the hostel for showers. I took a load off while Jessica and Adam scouted dinner locations, and returned with not only a recommendation, but an invitation from a friendly pastry chef to after-dinner tea and hookah at his hostel-adjacent home. We dined on roasted chicken, rice, mutable (eggplant) and salad, then watched fireworks from a wedding accross town on the pastry chef Shaheen's roof. His daughter Sara helped bring coals for the water pipe while the younger son Izzadin screamed with glee at the pyrotechnics, and the rest of us enjoyed sweet rosemary mint tea and almond candies.


The Aussies departed for Israel in the early morning, and I bussed up to Karak, a crusader castle further north. After a day in Amman milling about the ancient citadel, I flew luxurious Middle East Airlines over to Lebanon, getting a free International Herald Tribune and in it, my first New York Times crossword puzzle in over a year. After a dinner of tabouleh and hummus on the waterfront in Beirut, I happened upon a Starbucks with decaf (!) coffee, and enjoyed a cup while working on my crossword. Then I listened to Benny Goodman on the iPod and walked to the ABC Achrafiye cinema for the eight o'clock showing of Ben Affleck's "The Town," my first theater movie in two months (I can't remember the last time I went two months without going to the movies).

After a few more easy days in Lebanon, then a few in Istanbul, I'm off to Copenhagen, my westernmost destination yet, the third in this tri-continental tour (excluding home), and hopefully, a computer that will upload photos. Until then, check out the last 20 minutes of "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" for a visual aid.

Across the Sea

If you're like me, many's the time you've smelled a bar of soap/lip balm/fabric softener so sweet that you wished you could eat it. And again, if you're like me, you learned early in life that pursuing this goal never ends well. So you can imagine my surprise upon popping into my mouth a candy that looked for all the world like a toffee rolled in potpourri, only to discover that the Jordanians have conquered man's ageless desire to eat something that tastes as good as good as perfume smells.

This has been just one of the delights that have greeted me in my few minutes on the ground here in Aqaba, Jordan's second-largest city after capital Amman. Clinging to the elbow of the Red Sea, Aqaba is near enough to be able to see Egypt, but between the two lies Israel. Lebanese immigration (who I expect to meet in a few days) will refuse entry to anyone with an Israeli stamp in their passport, so the simple option of traveling through the Chosen People's land was unavailable. Instead, I took a bus from Cairo to Nuweiba on the Egyptian coast, then a ferry from there to Aqaba. It took a solid 24 hours of travel time, over half of it spent killing time and swatting at flies in the Red Sea Port Authority, but having Jordan has already more than made the time spent worthwhile.

I met a friendly Scotch-Gaelic cartoon translator on the boat, and we killed time discussing scuba diving and humanity. At the port in Aqaba, she lit out for Amman to meet her tour group, and I braved the familiar swarm of over-eager cabbies outside the terminal. At first, I took this as a sign that, at least so far, Jordan and Egypt had something in common. "No more bus tonight! Bus to Petra, tomorrow morning. Taxi to Petra, how much?" One driver follows me as I head to the parking lot to see the bus situation for myself. A bus to Petra should be four dinars, my Lonely Planet says, so seeing that he was truthful (gasp!) about the buses being gone, I began there. "No, fifty dinar, five-zero, taxi to Petra." No thanks, I'll take the bus in the morning. "Okay. Seven o'clock, buses start." Really? Just like that? "What's your name?" I'm Ben. "Amben. Nice to meet you. Mahmoud." And the rest of the drive into Aqaba proper we spend in pleasant small talk. "Jordan, Israel, Egypt," Mahmoud points out across the gulf. Three countries in one glance, I exclaim. Mahmoud smirks. And drops me off. And doesn't even grumble about making change for a ten dinar note!

I'm already walking on air as I saunter through downtown Aqaba, poking my head into hotels and inquiring prices. I'll keep looking, I say when the quotes start at 30 dinars, and get a warm smile that seems to say, "no sweat, come on back if you don't find anything cheaper." And as I walk, Lonely Planet map in hand, rucksack behind and little backpack over my chest, not a single tout grabs my arm to direct me into this or that hostel. "Welcome!" a few headwaiters announce as I pass.

After finding a nice, albeit expensive room, I set off on a short wander, picked up a sack of assorted potpourri candies, and poked around a little to more calls of "welcome" and smiles abounding. One kitchen worker, holding two aluminum bowls over his shoulders like trays of h'ors d'oeuvres as he swung through an alley, noticed me peering curiously. He swung one bowl down low and grinned, "hummus!" And sure enough, leveled off at the rims of the bowls like icing on a cake, were what must have been three or four kilos of rich, creamy hummus.

And it occurs to me now that I'm sitting in an internet cafe while there are two huge bowls of hummus waiting for me. Petra tomorrow, seven o'clock, buses start. Thanks, Mahmoud.

Benchmarks in Cairo, or, How NOT to Travel

Continents: 5/7

A notch in my belt for Africa, as well as my first Arabic country (if you don't count the layover in Kuwait city).

I gave a masterclass on how to make a perfect horse's butt out of oneself on my arrival. Not having known that India doesn't like people to take their currency from the country, I debarked onto the tarmac without a single Egyptian pound, but a maharaj's ransom in rupees. The bank wouldn't touch them with a ten foot pole, and neither ATMs before immigration would give me a dime. To the rescue came a Dubai-ite who unhesitatingly forked over the $15 I needed for my tourist visa, and almost ran off before I could pay her back. The peak of my stupidity was not yet reached, though. I found a working ATM and withdrew a few hundred Egyptian pounds, then hit the exchange counter to ask what fifteen US dollars equaled in pounds so I'd know what to give her. Paying no attention to the rate and making no attempt to do the math myself, I accepted foolishly the clerk's response: "fifteen" USD = 287 EGP. The Dubaite was halfway to Luxor before I realized that the clerks misheard my fifteen for fifty, but you couldn't ask for a better person to accidentally repay a loan 300% the original balance. I eventually found an English couple on their way to Delhi, with whom I exchanged my rupees for pounds, taking a 13 dollar loss. I also left my bag behind in a museum cafe for 30 minutes and on a bus station counter for 5.

On the packed bus from the airport to Cairo, I suffered the rolling eyes of the other passengers as I clumsily navigated the aisle with my huge rucksack and apologetic, self-effacing grin. On the streets of the city, I've suffered a barrage of insults from overbearing, limpet-like tour company touts for refusing their service. The transaction usually goes something like:

TOUT: Hey, where you from?/Hey, you look like Egyptian!/Hey, you got the time?
ME: USA/Ha./Two-thirty
TOUT: (having broken the ice, he now follows like a dilligent puppy making small talk) I been to USA many times. My brother/professor/girlfriend lives in LA/Boston/New York. Where you staying? No, that place very dirty, don't stay there. You need tour? Taxi? Shopping? Bar?
ME: (at this point, I refuse to return any conversation, and attempt to wave them away with a palm-outward "no thanks" and a head lowering)

And this continues for anywhere from 20 seconds to 20 minutes, ending in a venomous epithet that could be as tame as "piss off!", or something considerably more colorful, or something muttered in Arabic.

Egypt's wonders, the pyramids, are more than enough to make the follies worthwhile, though. The feeling of my skin crawling from the descent into a 3 foot by 3 foot shaft for minutes on end to reach the inner chambers of Khufu's memorial monument is something I don't think I'll ever forget. Tut's swag, on display at the Cairo Museum, wasn't bad either. And the lamb at Felfela Restaurant, rippling with shiny seams of fat on a bed of fluffy rice and tomato, was enough to ensure my return tonight, upon completion of this post.

Also tonight, my overnight bus to Aqaba, Jordan, and my faithful, if fleeting, return to the continent of Asia. Miss me?

Kathman(over)du(e), Rishikesh

Nepal turned out to be more of a visa-run than a true destination. I stayed in the capital for the whole five days it took me to arrange my India travel documents, wandering around buying souvenirs and eating whatever caught my eye. I got my visa on the fifth afternoon and bused to the Indian border overnight. The Suanuli frontier was a dingy arch over a mud road painted with the words "Welcome To India" where, wandering past the cows and rickshaws, I managed to slip past the nondescript Nepalese immigration office and slip into India unofficially. Once the Indian immigration officials saw I had no Nepalese exit stamp, they simply pointed back to the arch, where I got stamped out of Nepal.

So, technically, I've been to Nepal and India twice.

From the border to Gorakhpur on a three hour bus, I spent the day at the train station and caught a sleeper to Delhi, arriving at 5:55 a.m. I woke up at quarter to seven the next morning, thoroughly befuddled by the freezing air conditioned night after having spent 24 hours on sweaty, jolting buses. By a stroke of luck, the train had only just pulled in to New Delhi Station, and I collected my bags in a daze and stumbled onto the platform. After spending another day stalking around the filth of the station, I caught an evening train to Haridwar and a trampoline-suspension bus from there to Rishikesh, collapsing into a hostel after scarfing down my first non-muesli meal in 48 hours.

The next morning, after a bitterly cold shower, I shouldered my bag and hiked a few kilometers through town along the Ganges to the Anand Prakash yoga ashram. Arriving a few minutes before lunch, I clomped through the door, met Britt in a procession of hugs, got assigned a room and a lunch tray, and settled in for what has become a week of yoga and vegetables.

Rishikesh, being a holy city, is entirely meat- and alchohol-free. On top of this, the ashram cafeteria serves only "satvic" meals, which excludes, among other things, garlic and onions (too "lusty"). In spite of this, the fare is delicious and plentiful, and the communal setting is a welcome relief from having a whole restaurant table to myself.

Monkeys scramble acrobatically across the two footbridges that span the Ganges here, and cows are omnipresent. The power fails regularly, and the afternoon heat is oppressive. But in the mornings, torrents of wind pour down from the Himalayas over the town, and in the evenings, the stars are in full view. It's not a bad place to spend a week, recovering from the harrying anxieties of travel, soaking up masala tea, reading, and swinging into downward facing dog a few times a day.

But Egypt and her pyramids await, so tomorrow I'll return to Delhi for a day of sights, then fly to Cairo early Monday to scratch a fifth continent off of my to-do list.

The Terror-cotta Army

Emperor Qin Shi Huang is credited unifying China for the first time. Two hundred years before Jesus came around, he was hard at work commissioning the Great Wall and other enduring projects. For this, the Chinese generally regard him as a pretty great guy. They acknowledge only as an afterthought that his mercury-addled fits of rage reportedly could end with random subjects being pulled apart by horses.

He also had the idea that a massive army of clay soldiers should be built to protect him in the afterlife, possibly from all the people he had randomly drawn and quartered.

This army was discovered in 1974 by a farmer digging a well. He now sits in the souvenir shop at the end of the tour and grins behind a pair of Ray-Bans, seemingly still bewildered by his luck, three decades on.

Fifteen tourists I were led by Zha Zha (ja-ja), a beaming tour guide whose energy never faltered. On her call of "hellohiexcuseme!" we would rally to her for guidance and info. She punctuated most sentences with a self-assured "hmph" and a quick nod, and after asking the busload of us to say our names and nationalities, introduced herself thusly: "I am Zha Zha, easy to remember, "Lady Zha Zha!" Hmph! 26 years old, still single! (huge grin) I want you all to stick together today! My first day!, I lose one person! This time!, I don't want to lose any person! Hmph! So stick together okay!"

Zha Zha led us around the three "pits," doing her best to speak above the din of the millions of Chinese on holiday for National Day week. The heaving masses yearning-to-stand-in-front-of-your-camera-as-soon-as-you-framed-up-your-shot would have completely ruined the day, were it not for her endless enthusiasm and self-aware humor, and the best part of the experience ended up being her impromptu song on the bus ride back to Xi'an. She suggested a sing-along to pass the time. The group of us immediately requested that she sing a Chinese song to start things off and, after some coaxing, she proceeded to deliver a sweet rendition of a traditional number "Ma," "Mother" in Chinese.

The unearthed terracotta warriors number in the thousands, but it was an exercise in social awareness to see such astonishing numbers of living, breathing, shoving people crowding around the sites. You hear about China having lots of people, but you can't really get the full effect until you turn up at a big tourist attraction during a week-long Chinese holiday.

Pictures will follow when internet speed permits.

Cheating, Pumpkin Eating

After weeks of agonizing about Tibet travel permits, group tours, inflated fees and overbooked trains, I made the healthy decision to remove the plateau from my itinerary. A flight to Kathmandu cost me a fraction of the cost to make the trip overland, and will afford me more time in cheaper destinations (read: India). This will, hopefully, free me from the anxiety of scraping the bottom of the bank account barrel by the time my trip reaches its final leg in costly Europe.

So here I am in scenic Nepal, gateway to the Indian subcontinent, having a fairly easy time figuring out my visa and travel arrangements onward to Delhi and then Rishikesh. There, I'll meet a friend at a yoga ashram and try my hand (legs?) at the ancient art for a few days and figure out my next moves. Fifteen days after that, I'll be on a flight to Cairo.

It turns out I was a little naive to think that most of this epic westward journey would be doable overland. If I had a little more time and a lot more cash, I wouldn't think twice about hiring out a Land Rover and hauling around Tibet, or paying for the 24-hour guide/escort necessary for a U.S. citizen to get an Iranian tourist visa, or chartering an amphibious vehicle to navigate Pakistan's unfortunate Swat valley. For now, those will have to sit on the back burner.

But I take solace in the thought that in 2006 I was sitting in a cramped office in a double-wide trailer-office in Florida listening to the slow, monotonous progress of the scanner copying ancient slide photographs into a computer database. It was then that I would turn to the BBC news website to fantasize of visiting far off lands. I wondered glumly if the Nepal Maoist insurgent situation would calm down to the point that tourism could resume. And now, four short years later, I'm blogging from Kathmandu with a bellyfull of lentil soup and curry.

And my book exchange luck is holding up, to boot.

Nanning High Rollers Club

The hard sleeper was anything but. It's no featherbed, but there is some padding, and they give you plenty of sheets which make the platform even more comfortable. The berths were air conditioned and quiet, and aside from the four monotonous hours clearing customs, the experience was teriffic.

Nanning is a nice change of pace, as I'd hoped, but after the weeklong quagmire in Hanoi, I succumbed to my impatience and bought a $215 airfare to Xian. It will, however, replace a 33 hour train with a two-hour flight, for only about $80 more. The trains are all booked up for the National Holiday week, so I would have been stuck here for a while if I wanted to wait for another hard sleeper. Keeping to the high-end trend, I booked a night in a $21 hotel and actually paid for laundry service instead of washing my unmentionables in the bathroom sink. All of my penny pinching, I think, has been contributing to my anxieties, so I'm trying to loosen up the pursestrings a little.

So far, China's supermarkets are a delight. Full of interesting and intriguing products like "ONION COMPRESSED BISCUITS" and tupperwares full of vacuum-sealed rice and entrees that you heat up using a charcoal-chemical handwarmer kind of thing. The people here are a little friendlier and more laid back. I feel like I'm making progress. I even ran into a gang of Romanians who I impressed by thanking them in their native tongue for offering to show me around if I come through their neck of the woods on my journey (and I hope to).

Onward, Upward

I have in-hand my Chinese visa (kind of drab: I'd hoped for a little more fanfare considering the $170 price tag, at least a hologram or something, but oh well) and a ticket for a hard-sleeper from Hanoi to Nanning tonight. Hopefully the term "hard-sleeper" won't be a double-entendre, but even on the face of it, it's a little daunting. I asked Giang (pronounced 'Zang,' like from "Wayne's World 2" when Wayne inexplicably knows the Mandarin word for 'excellent!'), the daughter of the guest house owners, if she could describe for me what the hard-sleeper was like, and she reached over to the wooden bench I was sitting on and rapped it disappointingly with her knuckles. Pictures on seat61.com tell a different story, but I suspect the company that runs trains from Hanoi to Nanning may not be the same as the companies operating entirely within China.

I also have a secondhand Lonely Planet China guide, which warns that Chinese customs officers sometimes confiscate the guide on the basis that its maps represent Taiwan as a separate country. They reccommend putting a cover on the book to make it "less noticable," but don't specify what the average Chinese customs agent considers noticable. For lack of direction, I've taken my usual approach of reckless whimsy:

Lonely Planet's guide to The Moon: 100% researched and updated! A convincing facade if ever there was one? We'll find out.

Into Nanning by tomorrow morning, I will hopefully have left behind the incessant honk and buzz of motorbikes for a friendlier, more laid-back atmosphere, but in anticipation of more of the same, I have no less than 6 (six!) paperbacks: LPs for 'The Moon' and The Middle East, an exhausting Noam Chomsky tome, and three new aquisitions, Stieg Larsson's "The Girl Who Played with Fire," Howard Marks's "Mr. Nice," and Aravind Adiga's "Between the Assassinations." Book exchanges are one of my favorite kinds of human interaction. Left behind: Pullman's "The Subtle Knife, Chrichton's "Pirate Latitudes," Keillor's "Lake Wobegon Days." If the book turnover continues apace (and this hard-sleeper issue goes well), the many long-distance trains in my immediate future (Nanning-Xi'an: 33 hours) should be very pleasant.

Only three and a half more hours in Hanoi before the migration resumes.

For those interested (mom), I posted a final farewell to Korea in the other blog, to which I'm adding pictures now.

Hanoi Photos and Halong Bay

A few photos from the journey from Phonsavan, Laos to Hanoi via Vinh:

Vietnam countryside from the bus window

The only non-seedy hotel I could find in Vinh: $22

The friendliest porter in Vietnam on the Vinh-Hanoi train. Looking amused to the right is Andreas, an independent tradecraftsman advocate from Hamburg

Random Hanoi buildings

Halong Bay means "Dragon eating to the waters," in the words of our guide. There's a story involving a dragon that kept the country safe from would-be invaders by making the hundreds upon hundreds of limestone karst islands that speck the bay, but it's not as interesting as the islands themselves, which jut up magnificently from the water in such profusion that, when sailing among them, you can lose sight of the coast.

The tour consisted of two days and one night on the boat. We sailed out from Halong harbor at a steady pace and ate lunch as we drifted among the islands. We stopped for a visit to a cave where our guide pointed out the different formations: an elephant, a buddha, a waterfall. After the cave we split into pairs and kayaked around the karsts, then returned to the boat for a swim. The rain began late that night and continued through the second day, relegating the group to a leisurely day of reading and chatting aboard the junk. We headed back to the harbor in the afternoon where a tender relayed us to the shore for lunch and a bus back to Hanoi.

GOOD MORNING VIETNAM

MY ARRIVAL IN VIETNAM WAS SUCH THAT THE MOST APPROPRIATE WAY TO RELATE IT IS IN ALL CAPS. IF YOU CAN IMAGINE ROBIN WILLIAMS SAYING THESE WORDS VERY LOUDLY WHILE JOGGING AROUND YOU IN CIRCLES AND WAVING SPARKLERS, THAT WOULD BE AN ACCURATE IMPRESSION.

MY TRAIN ARRIVED IN HANOI AT FOUR O'CLOCK YESTERDAY AFTERNOON. KNOWING NOTHING ABOUT HANOI, I WANDERED AROUND THE CITY LOOKING FOR A CHEAP GUESTHOUSE OR AN INTERNET CAFE FROM WHICH I WOULD LOOK UP A CHEAP GUESTHOUSE. ONE RECEPTIONIST SAID HE COULD RECOMMEND A GUESTHOUSE AND WOULD CALL TO HAVE THEM PICK ME UP AND TAKE ME OVER. ALTHOUGH I EXPLAINED TO THE MAN BEFORE I GOT ON HIS MOTORBIKE THAT I ONLY WANTED TO SEE THE ROOM AND I WASN'T SURE I WOULD STAY, HE WAS VERY UPSET AFTER SHOWING ME THE PREMISES TO FIND THAT I WANTED TO CHECK OTHER HOSTELS. I MADE MY ESCAPE FROM HIS STEELY GRIP USING A DISARMING SMILE AND A PROMISE THAT I WOULD COME BACK, WHICH WAS A BALD FACED LIE.

I FOUND A ROOM AT A TINY GUESTHOUSE AFTER ONLY A FEW MORE MINUTES OF WALKING AROUND, DROPPED OFF MY BAG AND WENT FOR A WALK AROUND HANOI. THE FULL MOON CELEBRATION BEGAN WHILE I WAS OUT, AND I GOT LOST IN A CROWD OF LITERALLY THOUSANDS OF VIETNAMESE ADOLESCENTS SCRAMBLING AROUND THE OLD QUARTER HAVING A BALL AWAY FROM PARENTAL SUPERVISION. I WITNESSED TWO MINOR MOTORBIKE CRASHES, NO INJURIES. I EXPECTED TO BE MORE FRUSTRATED WITH THE SITUATION THAN I WAS: EVERYBODY IN THE CELEBRATION SEEMED TO BE HAVING THE TIME OF THEIR LIVES, AND THOUGH I WAS DRENCHED WITH SWEAT AND HAD BEEN WALKING ALL DAY, THEIR HAPPINESS WAS CONTAGIOUS. I FINALLY FOUND MY WAY BACK TO THE GUESTHOUSE AND, WARY OF THE STREETS, RESIGNED MYSELF TO A DINNER OF WHEAT CRACKERS AND A CHOCOLATE BAR, WATCHED TWO EPISODES OF SEX AND THE CITY, AND WENT TO BED

My second day has been considerably more relaxed. I have seven more days to kill in Vietnam before my Chinese visa comes through. I've purchased an overnight boat tour to Halong Bay tomorrow, but I'm not sure how I'll fill the rest of the time. Hanoi deserves at least one more day of exploring. We'll see.

After two days of early rising, I drank in the luxury of sleeping in until eleven this morning. Breakfast (lunch) was a bowl Vietnamese "salad," which I mistook for soup, of beef, rice noodles, bean sprouts, crispy fried slices of garlic, lettuce, crumbled peanuts, and an the stems and leaves of an unidentified herb that tastes a little like anise, and eerily familiar. That I falsely thought it was soup brings up a philosophical question- where is the line between "soup" and "salad with a LOT of dressing"? Regardless of its taxonomy, the sauce-dressing-broth was so rich and buttery and good that it made my chest quiver the way it does before you start crying.

I spent the day exploring the Old Quarter on foot with relative ease. In the daylight, without throngs of cheery locals abounding, the city is surprisingly simple to navigate, in spite of the fact that the street names change after two blocks. I took in the Revolution Museum, which covers one hundred and ten years of abuse, and walked off the ensuing depression around the Hoan Kiem Lake. I scored a used China Lonely Planet guide for ten dollars to avoid any more fiascos like the one I experienced yesterday morning. It'll be a nice read while I take in the limestone caves from the deck of my chartered junk tomorrow.

For dinner, at the recommendation of the daughter of my hostel's owners, I had a spread of grilled, marinated pork, fried spring rolls, rice noodles and a huge plate of greens, including the mystery herb from breakfastlunch. And a bottle of Bia Saigon. With incessant motorbike ride offers, hard-bargaining merchants and whiplash-inducing traffic, Hanoi has none of the relaxed atmosphere of Laos, but I'll deal with the pandemonium if my luck with meals keeps up like this.

Caves and Tubes, Bikes and Jars

The mountain view from the guesthouse

Vang Vieng was great. The Englishmen (Matt, Scott and Nick) and I visited a small cave just across the river from our guesthouse. Outside the cave, from somewhere within the mountain, a stream of water was pouring out and had created a pool with a swift current. The movement of the water coming out of the mountain was such that you could swim against it at a leisurely pace and not move forward at all. It was fun until I started to let myself drift under a bridge, noticing the giant spider clinging underneath it only after getting uncomfortably close.

The bridge to the cave

The cave, a quick in-and-out with a Buddha inside

The pool outside the cave

The next day, we rented innertubes and got a lift a few miles up the Nam Song river. Along its banks are bar after bar, employees of which will toss you a line with an empty soda bottle at the end for a buoy. Once they pull you in, you stay for a while and drink a beer, maybe swing into the river on a trapeze hung from a 50-foot post, play a little soccer, then grab your tube, hop back in the river and move on to the next spot.

Entering the river

The first bar

From L, Nick, Matt, Scott

The flying trapeze

It's a pretty fun way to spend the day, but when the Englishmen you're with get distracted celebrating Nick's birthday until after the sun goes down, navigating the river's turns and obstacles becomes more intense. After a mile of clinging to each others' tubes, losing one and scraping the odd log in the middle of the river, we decided to paddle to the next sign of civilization on the banks and try our luck on land. The lights we aimed for were a building still a ten minute taxi outside of town, and Matt decided to carry on tubing without announcing it to us. This decision affected us more than we'd anticipated once we realized he had the drybag with our wallets and flip flops, but a pair of Mexicanos fronted us the cab fare back to the tube rental, where we quickly repaid them from our returned tube deposits.

That was enough excitement for me for a day, but the English were not so easily daunted. I retired to the room for the night and, with Nick's laptop, soaked up the unexpected luxury of watching movies in bed. The boys stumbled in, one by one, after a ferocious Laotian downpour struck at about one in the morning. Nick had had seven or eight too many and aroused some animosity in a taxi driver which neither he nor the driver were able to explain to us, but it was such that the driver wouldn't leave the guesthouse without some reparations. Matt took care of the debt, which had the unhappy effect of transfering the driver's animosity to him, and in the resulting brawl between Nick and Matt, one of the room's window treatments tragically lost its life. Order was restored, eventually, and in the wake of excitement, sleep came fast.

I took that, along with the fact that my Vietnamese visa had reached its effective date, as a sign that it was time for me to move on, and left on a bus for Phonsavan and the Plain of Jars the next afternoon.

The bus made its way after dark through switchbacks up the mountains. The view made up for the rattling back-and-forth motion of the swinging coach: under a nearly full moon, as we ascended above the fog, the Laotian lowlands seemed to be submerged under a sea of clouds with mountaintops forming islands. It was unlike anything I'd seen before, and it kept my spirits high throughout the jostling seven hour ride.

The following day in Phonsavan was lost to anxiety and fruitless skype calls to Visa after discovering the local ATMs had no interest in my debit card. I was resigned to waiting until my bank decided to open again and seeing if they would wire me some emergency money, but one final go at the ATMs turned out to be the magic word, and the Kip has flowed unimpeded ever since.

Today was spent on a rented 125cc motorbike, Fekon (Chinese, from the characters etched on the engine), or Fifi for short, exploring the three Plain of Jars sites outside of town. The jars' purpose remains mystery to modern archaeologists, but each one makes a different noise if you slap them with your palm, so my suggestion is, "giant drum kit." Time will tell. The sites, for all their ambiguity, are wonderfully intriguing. and beautiful to boot. The jars range in size from microwave ovens to walk-in closets, and there are probably a hundred or three scattered over the three sites.

Fifi at the entrance to site III

I found myself inexplicably stuck with different songs in my head at each site. In the order I visited them: Site II- "Let My Love Open the Door," Pete Townshend; Site III- "Sophisticated Lady." Rosemary Clooney; Site I- "I Can't Wait to Get Off Work and See My Baby," Tom Waits. Site III was a few minutes' walk on raised paths through rice paddies, and the visit was interrupted by an hour long downpour, which I waited out at a hut beside the entrance with a bowl of chicken and rice noodle soup with crispy fried garlic, green onion, lots of black pepper and a big handful of unidentifiable greens. The chicken was tough, presumably one of the free-range kin of the hens skittering about outside the hut, but the greens and garlic were phenomenal, and the hot broth was revitalizing after the cold rain.

All of the sites are pockmarked with bomb craters from the 'secret war' the U.S. waged on Laos, secret because it was in violation of the official stance of the U.S. that Laos would be neutral during the Vietnam war. Honeywell, it seems, decided those many decades ago that plain old craters wasn't a long enough lasting legacy, so they designed their cluster bombs to be only 70-ish percent efficient. The remaining 30 percent are spread across the country, waiting to be struck by a farmer's hoe or investigated by a curious child before spreading their "Honeywell Howdy." The "Honeywell Howdy" is a euphamism I have given to the exploding and spreading of ball bearings in every direction at thousands of feet per second. The inappropriateness of the phrase doesn't quite match the inappropriateness of the bomb, but it's a start.

In spite of Honeywell's best efforts, the Plain of Jars remains a stunning archaeological phenomenon that I put on par with Angkor Wat and Macchu Pichu. It's made even more alluring by the fact that I was the only person at sites II and III, which is not a statement I could make for Angkor or Macchu Pichu. But after a day's worth of jars and sunburn, I puttered back into Phonsavan and returned Fifi, the Fekon motorbike, and arranged for a taxi to the bus station tomorrow morning, from where I'll be departing to Vinh in Vietnam.

The Ocean?

Laos is landlocked, and I honestly did expect to do most of my post-work relaxing on a sandy beach. But Vang Vieng is everything I had hoped Thailand would be- the people are relaxed, not chomping at the bit to squeeze a few extra Baht out of the foreigners. The scenery is sublime, verdant cliffs, not garbage and filth. The prices are low, the food is good, and the weather is delightful after three days straight of rain. Four days is probably not enough time here, but I'm in no hurry.

I met up with three North-Englishmen at the border and we shared a cab all the way up to Vang Vieng, a four hour trip over mostly sealed roads and a few flooded spots reminiscent of fording the rivers in Oregon Trail. We're now sharing meals and a guesthouse room for dollars a day, and the company is excellent. There are caves to be explored and rivers to be tubed, and I got a few novels from the book exchange in Bangkok, so I'm ready for maximum vacation.

Back To School

The Longtail Taxi

to the...

Dive boat

Tanks a lot

Divemaster Lee Nightingale with ze Germans

The Galley

The island off of which we dove

Dutch dive instructor Steve with his cat

Ready for action

Diving is fun!

Diving buddies

Step One

Thailand- a little west and a lot south, but a step in the right direction toward home. During an all-airport layover in Guangzhou, I met Tori. There are worse ways to spend 11 hours than playing movie title hangman with an international fashion model. Once the flight arrived and I got gouged by a taxi driver, I collapsed into a dark dorm bed in Bangkok surrounded by snoozing Danes. I woke up at about 10:30 and the Danes invited me along to lunch with them at an alleyway food stand a few blocks down the road. For about 66 cents I got a full bowl of rice with my choice of stews to pour on top. Very little of it was identifiable, but all of it was astoundingly good. And Spicy. We toured the Grand Palace, bought apples, lounged at the plush guest house and parted ways.

Before leaving the guest house, I had them recommend and then book me a bus/ferry ticket to an island in the gulf called Koh Tao (Turtle Island), home to the venerable Ban's Diving Resort. Ban's makes the remarkable claim to have PADI-certified 10 percent of all of Asia's scuba divers. At the rate my certification course is going, I don't doubt it's true.

My class consists of one dive instructor, one dive master/assistant instructor, myself and eight other students: three Brazilian ex-pats from London, two (more) Danes, two Germans and an Irishwoman. We're all getting along like kings, having dinner together and discussing the peccadilloes of cultures worldwide (Danish bike rentals are unimaginably utopian, London's less so, etcetera).

Tomorrow morning are the final two dives before I'm awarded my PADI certificate, after which there will be celebrating.

Click on the pictures for a magnified view.

The Grand Palace

The ferry to Koh Tao

Freedom Bay, south Koh Tao

The view from my bungalow on Freedom Bay

Jelly

The State of the Union

In six days, I'll leave Seoul, Korea for Bangkok, Thailand by way of Guangzhou, China. I've spent a year teaching after-school English classes to burgeoning saints, careless daydreamers, mischievous ne'er-do-wells and brooding malcontents for the earthly rewards of a paid-up student loan bill (sayonara, Sallie Mae of Helena, Montana) and a pretty penny in walking around money.

I intend to spread every thin dime of those earnings over a wide swath of Asia, Europe and Africa.

As it stands, I have a plane ticket and a hostel booking. I've researched visa requirements for dozens of countries. I've bought myself a fancy backpack of steel and nylon and a waterproof camera.

What I don't have are health insurance, vaccinations, or a clean apartment for the next unlucky jamoke who gets saddled with this mosquito-pit. Work remains to be done. It is a race against time.