Home

Well, I made it home. The trip was uneventful. I had a short layover in Tokyo, which was pretty disappointing. There was a very limited selection of chocolate (e.g. no Cadbury), and the sushi was surprisingly average. The 12 hour flight from Tokyo to Dulles seemed endless, but it gave me plenty of time to finish Anna Karenina, which I had been lugging around since Feb. 1. Spoiler alert: she kills herself.

We landed in DC about 45 minutes early, and I was surprised to see that it was snowing! My conversation with the guy at passport control:

Guy (looking at my arrival card): You were on a vacation to Switzerland, India, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Singapore, and Japan?
Me: Yep.
Guy: How long were you gone?
Me: 2 months.
Guy: Welcome home.

Having survived that grilling, I was picked up by Todd and the boys, who were bearing cold Diet Sprite -- my first in 2 months.

I got home at 5 o'clock, exactly 25 hours after leaving my hotel in Singapore that morning. My first impression on arriving home was how much stuff I have. Having lived out of my relatively modest Patagonia bag -- with 3 pairs of shoes, 5 pairs of pants, etc. -- for 2 months, it was sort of shocking to see all of the clothes and shoes and toiletries and books and cds at my disposal.

Some stats:

Books read: 30
Flights: 23
Other modes of travel: trains, boats, buses, taxis, autorickshaws, tuk tuks, motos, cyclos, bicycle rickshaw, trishaw, bicycle, horse cart, elephant
Items lost: the cap to my moisturizer and 3 contact lenses

I plan to post about Vietnam in the next few days, so stay tuned.

Coming Home

I plan to post about Vietnam too. Especially the food, which was awesome.

I'm sitting at the Singapore Airport, having just had to take off my shoes to go through security for the first time since leaving the US. And they confiscated my toothpaste and contact lens solution. Bummer. But I heard the sweet words, "You have aisle seats all the way."  Yay!  By my count, this morning was the 30th time I've packed my bags. And these will be my 22nd and 23rd flights.

Singapore was a good transition back to the States. We kept remarking on such marvels as:  cabs with meters, stoplights that cars actually stop at, hardly ever having to walk in the street. Also, numerous 7-11s, Starbucks, McDonalds, and other American brands.

The highlight, for me at least, was meeting internet celebrity Belle Waring, with whom we went shopping in Little India and had some dosas. The Asian Civilizations Museum was also great; easily the nicest museum we've seen on the trip.

Take-Out

I know we haven't said anything about Vietnam yet, but I had to share this quick story about how weird Singapore is. This morning I had breakfast at one of the dozen or so Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf shops in the city and before I left I decided to try one of their tea lattes. I was meeting Lara at 9, so I asked for it "to-go" and after a wait, the counter girl brought it to me - in a paper bag. Oh, it was a regular paper cup and plastic lid like you'd get anywhere in the States, but she'd put tape over the sippy portion of the lid and put the whole thing in a paper bag. Now in any other city in the world I'd probably put this down to an odd little cultural difference about what "to-go" means, but in Singapore, known for its martial strictness about littering and gum chewing, I was suddenly paranoid that people weren't allowed to drink in the streets and I realized that of all the commuters I'd watched pass by the windows, not a single one had been carrying a cup of coffee. Being the rebel I am, you know I took that cup out of its bag and risked arrest by brazenly drinking it all the way back to the hotel. It was awesome. And I wasn't arrested.

Cambodia Continued

We're falling farther and farther behind, so I want to quickly catch you up on the rest of our stay in Cambodia. Hopefully, Corina will add her thoughts as well.


On Sunday, after an excellent breakfast of omelets and a baguette from our old friends at the Shanghai Restaurant, we drove from Anlong Veng back to Siem Reap, where we checked into our lovely hotel. We were surprised to run into 6 of the group of Americans we had camped with in Koh Ker. It turns out that the story about the government not letting the trucks up the mountain was not quite true. Actually, the group had been in a car accident. One of their cars had flipped and two people had to be medevaced to Bangkok. They are going to be okay, but it sounds like it was very scary. They were out of cellphone range, and there were no ambulances anyway, but they were lucky to have a doctor in their group who jury-rigged some spinal immobilization boards so that they could be driven back to Siem Reap. It was pretty upsetting to hear about, but we were happy to be able to see them again and hear what had happened to them.


One of the nice things about our hotel is that they had some arrangement with the nearby Sofitel so that we could use their spa, pool, and gym. We both took advantage of this to get (much-needed) pedicures and I used the gym.


Our guide had told us that we should plan to get to the temples early to avoid the rush. We thought we were doing this by leaving at 7:30 the next morning. But it turns out that wasn't early enough. After finding a tuk tuk driver and getting our tickets, our first stop was Ta Prohm, also known as the Jungle Temple. Apparently, this temple was featured in "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider," which you may be surprised to learn I have never seen. You could sort of see how it might be cool because it had not been restored, so it was fallen down in parts, and there were trees growing all over it. The only problem was the 8 billion other people who were also there. And the kids aggressively trying to sell us bracelets (3 for a dollar on the way in;6 for a dollar on the way out).






The next stop was Angkor Wat. It is massive, with a huge moat around it. It was by far the most intact temple we had seen up to that point. And it had really impressive bas reliefs. But we were a little underwhelmed, I think because there were just so many other people and we were used to having temples pretty much to ourselves.




The next morning we did manage to get up before sunrise and made it to Angkor Thom before the crowds. We both really like Bayon, which has dozens of the faces shown here:

















The rest of our time in Siem Reap was spent shopping, eating, getting more spa treatments, watching the premiere of the Amazing Race Allstars, and having tea at the very posh Raffles Hotel.


We left early on Wednesday morning to head to Sihanoukville. This involved a 5-hour boat ride down the Tonle Sap (Great Lake) to Phnom Penh, following by a 4-hour bus ride to Sihanoukville on the coast. The boat ride was not the peaceful journey we had experienced in Burma, mostly because the boat was a lot faster, hotter, and more crowded. But I had a nice talk with my seat mate, who was from Chicago but was living in Taiwan as a Fulbright scholar. The bus ride was interesting because it featured a stewardess who handed out water and all sorts of mysterious snacks. She also served as a tour guide telling us little stories about the things we were passing. Unfortunately, about an hour into the trip, I got an email from the hotel at which we had reserved rooms saying that the hotel was full and they could not confirm our reservation (which they had already confirmed the day before). But Blackie (my blackberry) came to the rescue and after a few frantic phone calls, they offered us rooms in the low rent district of the hotel.


When we got to Sihanoukville, we didn't see any taxis or tuk tuks, so we had to go to the hotel on the backs of motorcycles, with our bags precariously perched in front of the driver. This worked out okay except for the accident that Corina's driver only narrowly averted. The beach was lovely, exactly what had been hoping for in Thailand, white sand beach, clear blue water and not a 7-11 in sight. The hotel was quite nice too, except that we were staying in the "small hotel" across a grass field from the main one. We were sort of wondering what the field was for, but learned the next morning that they land helicopters there. Peaceful!


On Saturday, we headed back to Phnom Penh. We visited the National Museum, and walked around looking at shops. Our hotel was right on the riverfront, and when we walked out to get dinner we were pleasantly surprised to see dozens of people picnicking in the park, catered to by street vendors. (Not so pleasantly surprised to read in Corina's guidebook the next morning that the street vendors are a hotbed of bacteria and Hepatitis A. But we survived.)


The striking thing about Phnom Penh was the tuk tuk drivers cheerfully asking us if wanted to go to the Killing Fields, and when we declined, asking if we wanted to got the Torture Museum instead. We didn't do either.


The next morning was incredibly hot. I went to the Royal Palace and to see the Silver Pagoda. Corina went to drink tea and find an ATM. It was so hot that we both got blisters from shoes we had been wearing every other day for a month. We were pretty relieved to head to Vietnam, where we heard it would be cooler.

Safari Day 3 or Chinese New Year or Pol Pot's Chicken

Still not able to post as myself, so I'm Lara again. Although, as Lara posted earlier, apparently there's no difference as far as Cambodian immigration is concerned.

On the third day of our safari, which happened to be Chinese New Year, the holiday that had been messing with out plans since we left Burma, Lara and I both woke up, independently, and wandered up to the temple to see the sunrise. Anyone who knows either of us knows how unlikely that is, but it was so amazing having this beautiful place entirely to ourselves. Not only were there no tourists there yet, but even the locals hadn't started setting up their stalls selling cold drinks and bootleg CDs. For breakfast we walked across the border into Thailand.  No, that's not a very good description of what we did. We went on a forced march halfway down the mountain to eat noodles in Thailand (where they had electricity! And running water! And western-style toilets! In addition to a paved road that made our trip up the Cambodian side seem even more reckless than it did at the time, and kind of absurd). On the post-breakfast hike back to our camp we had plenty more opportunities to curse ancient Khmer step builders (seriously - rise and run should be consistent and it's nice if more than 1/4 of your foot fits on any one step).  Our huffing and puffing was put a little into perspective  by the Cambodian boys who couldn't have been more than 11 carrying huge bags of ice on yokes across their shoulders back from the Thai market to their families' drink stalls at the top of the mountain. They work so hard.

Once we cooled off and got our breath back, we heard our moto drivers honking; it was time for the ride back down the mountain - both faster and more terrifying than the trip up. But no matter how scary the ride, it's infinitely better than the alternative - we saw dozens of locals hiking up on our way down.

Coming down from the mountain was really the end of the safari portion of our tour.  That we were supposed to be sleeping in a guesthouse in Anlong Veng - the last Khmer Rouge stronghold and Pol Pot's final resting place. The night before we'd read dismal reviews of Anlong Veng's guesthouses, only one being described as "comfortable" by my guidebook. Luckily that's the one we ended up in. If we'd shared that room earlier in the trip, we no doubt would have complained about the lack of hot water (and toilet paper) and the dismal and spartan furnishings, but instead we were completely giddy - it had an air conditioner and we could flush the toilet!  And while the shower wasn't hot, it was a vast improvement over the camp shower.

But before we made it to the hotel, we stopped for lunch, with our guide, as usual, ordering for us since in these areas not exactly crawling with tourists, not many people speak English. I got my usual - fried noodles with vegetables, but Lara got a special treat - we can't be sure, but we think it was chicken necks and fresh ginger. Lara did her darndest to eat some of it, but mainly we shared my noodles. Afraid we'd already offended our smiling and solicitous waitresses with our failure to make a dent in the pile of chicken necks, we couldn't be so churlish as to refuse the ice they kept adding to our glasses of coca-cola. And so in the Shang Hai restaurant in Anlong Veng the last of our diminished stock of food paranoia got swallowed with the ice in our wonderfully cold drinks.

After lunch our guide, who'd seemed increasingly disappointed in our lackluster touring, left us at the hotel and said he'd pick us up at 4:30 so we could see Pol Pot's "tomb" and watch the sunset.  Um not so much. When we went out to the lobby at the appointed hour we found our driver waiting for us alone. I don't think he'd spoken a word to us since picking us up at the airport, so I was a little surprised when he explained in broken English that we were going to pick up our guide at a friend's house.  We found this friend's house and our guide, drunk off his ass, told us we'd llike to go see Pol Pot's tomb and then come back and have a drink with his friend. Lara and I: "[long pause] Um. OK."

The driver drops us off on the side of the road points at a path, indicating we should follow it while he stays with the car, so being obediant tourists we do - and come to a bamboo fence enclosing a grave shaped pile of ash (Pol Pot was cremated), covered by a bamboo roof. There's a chicken carcass at one end, a small blue sign saying "Pol Pot's grave", a scary looking group of children smoking, drinking, leaning on the fence and laughing at us as we stand in the middle of this grassy field at twilight, firecrackers going off all around since it is Chinese New Year. I really can't convey adequately how bizarre the scene was. Lara took a few pictures and we scuttled back to the car and then back to Mr. Ra's house - our guide's drinking buddy. As Lara and I sat there, our guide slurring his speech as he explained that Mr. Ra was a "VIP", the head man of the village we were in, two men involved in a car crash came to Mr. Ra to settle their dispute over compensation. As our guide said - "there are no lawyers in Cambodia. If you're in a car crash and you know the head guy, you may pay only $200 but if the other guy knows the head guy, you'd pay $2000." Mr. Ra used to be a big wig with the Khmer Rouge our guide tells us, but now he's a "general commander" for the government. We ask him why there was a chicken at Pol Pot's tomb, and our guide looks freaked out, hushes us and says he'll tell us later. He never did. But he did say that this small village, where Lara and I elicit more stares than anywhere else on our trip, harbored the Khmer Rouge longer than anyplace else.

And Lara and I watch our guide and our host get drunker and they start offering to take us to Thailand for the night with a VIP police escort, because they can, and we politely say "no" finish our Cokes and say "We really think it's time for us to go back to the hotel now.". We get in the car with our driver, who's looked grumpy since he picked us up from the hotel (in other words since our drunk guide delegated responsibility for the two french ladies), and our guide persuades Mr. Ra to come back to town with us and have some dinner. Um. Great!

Dinner was actually far less awkward than the interlude in the Khmer Rouge stronghold. The owner of the restaurant joined the table, and the three of them showed us how to eat a local delicacy involving fermented fish paste that tasted like blue cheese and then we walked back to the hotel and left them all celebrating Chinese New Year.

I never would have imagined that one day, after wakinf up in a tent on a mountaintop I'd share fermented fish paste with a former lieutenant of Pol Pot's. It was all so unreal. Hopefully Lara will chime in with some of her thoughts on the day. 

Commenting

It's come to our attention that some people aren't commenting because they don't have blogger accounts, or don't want to use their blogger accounts. We've opened the blog to anonymous commenting, so feel free.

Leaving Cambodia -- Now It Can Be Told

We're about a week behind on the blog, so I'm skipping ahead to today. I'm writing this on a plane from Phnom Penh to Ho Chi Minh City. We're flying straight to Danang from there and staying the next couple of days in Hoi An, which is on the coast a little south of Danang.

We're hoping it will be a little cooler. It was brutally hot in Phnom Penh this morning -- I think the high today was supposed to be 99.

Okay. So here's the funny story about our arrival in Cambodia. We didn't get visas in advance because you can get then on arrival at the airport. But you need a passport photo, which I had brought with me but foolishly put in my checked luggage. I was sort of hoping that there would be one of those instant photo booths (as there is in the Bangkok airport), but there wasn't.

Anticipating a huge hassle, I asked Corina if I could borrow one of her extras. (A little back story here: aside from being similar heights, and both having dark brown hair -- with gray streaks -- and fair skin, we don't look anything alike. For example, Corina has blue eyes, while mine are brown. I'm also 7 years older. Nevertheless, people keep thinking we're sisters.)

And it worked! I gave my passport, application, $20, and Corina's picture to the exact same guy Corina had just given hers to. It was then passed down a row of 5 or 6 people who processed it. And then the same guy handed our passports back to us. It made for a couple of tense moments, but I think the moral of the story is that we all look the same to them.

Safari - Day 2.2

Except for a couple of brief excursions to buy postcards and a Coke, we spent most of the afternoon reading at our campsite. This one was much more scenic than the one at Koh Ker. It was right at the entrance to the temple, next to a stone pool that was part of the temple grounds and was still being used for bathing. We could look over and see Thailand. (The temple itself is in Cambodia, but the rest of the highlands are Thai territory. There is a nice paved road on the Thai side that leads right to the base of the temple. Although, as we would learn the next day, this approach involves climbing a lot of stairs.)

Late in the afternoon, we walked up and explored the temple. At the very back of the temple, there is a rocky outcropping where you can look down and see Cambodia. The view was a bit hazy as a result of all of the fires. We sat there to watch the sunset.

Shortly before sunset, a woman came with her teenaged son. Although she looked like she could be Cambodian or Thai, she was speaking English to him, and we struck up a conversation. She was originally from Cambodia, but had left 30 years ago, eventually settling in the US. Her husband was working at the US embassy in Bangkok. She said that she had been to Preah Vihear many times, but couldn't bring herself to go any further.

I was pretty choked up. It was clear that she missed her country so much that she would come all that way just to see it and show it to her kids. But she couldn't actually go there. I think what was even more heartbreaking is that she was so matter of fact about it. We told her a little bit about our trip and she said how brave we were. But riding around on bad roads and sleeping in tents did not seem particularly brave at that moment. (Amusingly, she also told us that the locals had told her we were French.)

Back at camp, I was feeling a little sorry for the guides who had to provide for us in the absence of the truck with all the supplies. At one point, I asked about towels and the guide had this panic-stricken look on his face. About an hour later, two brand new towels appeared, apparently freshly purchased from the Thai market. Likewise, dinner was two takeout portions of noodles from the Thai market, which we shared with the white dog who had staked out our tent.

Safari - Day 2.1

[Google has decided that my password really isn't my password so I (Corina) am being forced to post as Lara. This preliminary note is necessary so you don't think Lara has let all the military juntas and other totalitarian regimes we've been exposed to lately go to her head and started talking about herself in the third person.]

One more word about our camp at Koh Ker:  in case you're imagining Lara and I in some verdant jungle idyll - put that right out of your head. I overheard our neighbors in the next tent name the site "Camp Scorched Earth" and it's a perfect description. Not only is Cambodia in the dry season really dry, broad swathes of it are also burnt to a crisp. I couldn't really get a straight answer from our guide on why this was, whether they were burning the jungle to make way for farmland or doing controlled burns of the undergrowth to prevent wildfires. When he boasted later in the trip that Cambodia never had forest fires, but he didn't know why, I just looked at the "view" of smoke filled air and our still smoldering campsite and held my tongue.

Anyway, the big group got up at 4:30 to climb the pyramid again for sunrise. Lara and I had decided to skip this particular treat, but when the support staff started striking camp around us at 4:45, we had to abandon our plans to sleep in.  Because the caravan of the big group was loaded down with all the camping equipment for both groups, we were able to get a head start after breakfast and toured a few more small temples in the Koh Ker complex before hitting the road for the far north of the country and a mountain top temple on the Thai border called Preah Vihear.   Our guide mysteriously insisted we stop for "lunch" at 11 am to wait for the other group to catch up with us. After waiting for an hour, and several calls on his mobile, he told us that the chief of police refused to let the truck with the camping equipment drive up the mountain and the other group had decided  to head back to Siem Reap. This seemed a little odd to us, but when we pressed him on why, he just said something about money, leaving us to believe that the police were looking for a bribe that the tour company was unwilling to pay.  We were told that we could still go to Preah Vihear, which our guidebook called stunning, but instead of camping in our luxury safari tent, we'd be staying at a local guesthouse. Since the area was without both electricity and running water, the guesthouse would be way more adventurous than camping.  Having sort of settled into our filth, we decided to push on.

It was right about here that the roads, which had been pretty smooth dirt, turned to hell and remained godawful for the next two days. Every once in a while we'd hit a pothole so deep that the jolt would turn on the windshield wipers and everyone in the car would giggle.  After a couple of hours of driving by dusty rural poverty we reached the base of the mountain, and Lara and I were finally made to understand that we'd have to go the rest of the way on motorbikes, and we should pack a small bag of essentials because our suitcases weren't coming with us. So with moto drivers peering over our shoulders, begging us to choose them we hastily sorted through our unmentionables trying to figure out what we'd need for a night in a Cambodian guesthouse. I want all of you to take a moment to picture Lara's reaction to this scene.

Moving on. We chose our drivers and started heading up the mountain. At first it wasn't that bad. Then it was frakking terrifying and I couldn't imagine how our little motos were going to make it to the top without toppling us backward. For days after my shoulders ached from gripping the handle behind the seat for dear dear life.  I still can't imagine a truck making that trip. We made it, obviously, and after we got off the bikes we started trudging up an ancient stone road after our guide in the full heat of the afternoon sun. It wasn't very far but it felt like a mile in the heat.  It turned out that there was a tent for us after all, left by some previous expedition.  Lara and I collapsed in the shade of a little pavillion begging for cold water and disappointing our guide terribly by refusing to budge from the cool cool shade to walk to the Thai market on the other side of the border. There was no way in hell we were walking 30 minutes in the frakking sun DOWNHILL (which meant we'd have to walk back uphill eventually) to look at souvenirs we could have purchased two days ago in Phuket.  Instead, we read, waited for the sun to go down a bit, and felt sorry for our poor friends who because of corruption had been left behind. We missed them, they were the first westerners we'd spoken with since Burma and Lara and I were running out of things to talk about.

Safari!

There is a really funny story about our arrival in Cambodia, but I think it would be wise to wait until we leave the country to blog about it. So stay tuned ....

The first leg of our stay in Cambodia was a 4 day/3 night temple safari -- a tour of various outlying temples -- that Corina had found on the internet. Other than our hotel room on our first night in Yangon, this was the only actual plan we had made before we left.

We were picked up at the airport by our guide and driver, whose names we promptly forgot. After a quick stop in Siem Reap, we hit the road to a temple called Beng Mealea. This temple has largely fallen down and been reclaimed by the jungle. So we sccrambled around on the rocks. Unlike those in Burma and Thailand, the old temples here are Hindu, not Buddhist.

After a lunch of noodles, we drove to Koh Ker (rhymes with "croquet"). This was briefly the capital of Cambodia back in the 10th century, and is now pretty much in the middle of nowhere. There are about 25 old temples here, the main one being Prasat Thom, a 50 meter high pyramid. We walked around the grounds for awhile and then headed to our camp, where we were soon joined by another group of 20 people, mostly Americans. I was a little wary at first, but they turned out to be really nice. I was never entirely clear on how they all knew each other, but the organizers seemed to be a woman who had been born in Cambodia and who had recently made a documentary about it and her boyfriend.  They were on a 2-week trip just in Cambodia.

Later that afternoon, we walked over to the pyramid and climbed up to the top to watch the sunset. This was a little dicey as the Khmer temple builders do not seem to have been big on uniform stair sizes. Or hand rails. We then had an excellent dinner back at the camp and decided to climb back up the temple to look at the stars, but the chief of police nixed that plan. Still, even just a few yards out of the camp, it was pitch black and we could see millions of stars.

Then we went to sleep in our tent. A word about the tent:  It was pretty nice, with beds and everything. And there was a separate bathroom tent with a toilet and camp shower. And there was a generator, so we had light on our front porch until 9:30 or so. But at this point we were not yet resigned to our fate of filth, so there was a fair amount of grumbling about heat, dirt, and bugs which I have omitted. Use your imaginations!

Bangkok

We arrived in Bangkok and settled into our hotel, which was awesome. It was called Reflections, and it's basically the hotel that a bunch of girls who grew up on Hello Kitty would design -- bright pink and each room was individually decorated. The entrance hall to my room was covered with sand and you had to walk across a dock to get to the bed. There was also a hammock. The hotel also had the best selection of cast-off books we have seen on our trip.

After lunch, we headed downtown to Wat Phra Krew, the temple of the emerald buddha. But we sort of fell for a con and ended up riding around in a tuk tuk going to different shops (and one temple). This wasn't too bad because it was a nice way to see downtown Bangkok, and our driver was honest and said he was taking us to certain shops because they give him gas coupons. It was quite a little racket. I had heard so much about how hot, dirty, and crowded Bangkok was supposed to be, and was pleasantly surprised. Yes, it was absurdly hot, but no more dirty and crowded than New York or London. (Of course, we studiously avoided the tourist area, Khao San Road.)

We finally ended up back at Wat Phra Krew, and at this point I should dazzle you with my description of its architecture, but pretty much all I remember is that it was just freaking hot. Actually, it was really beautiful, much more colorful and ornately decorated than the temples we saw in Burma, but also more sterile. Whereas the Shwedagon Pagoda seemed more a part of the city, with families eating lunch and locals bathing the buddha statues, this seemed more like a tourist attraction. Also the "emerald" buddha is actually made of jasper! 

We then stumbled to a restaurant and got ice cream, and once we had recovered, headed back to the hotel. We ended up eating dinner (sushi) at the hotel restaurant, which seemed to be quite the neighborhood hangout. It was Valentine's Day, and the restaurant was packed with people celebrating. We also got the answer to the question that had been plaguing us in Phuket -- do the Thais actually like duos singing cheesy American pop songs, or is it just what they think the tourists want to hear?  Apparently the former.

It was an early night because we had to leave at 5:30 the next morning for our flight to Siem Reap. I checked out the dvd of "Beyond Borders" from the hotel's dvd collection. It was truly bad, and did nothing to assuage my concerns about land mines.

The Cancun (or is it the Tijuana?) of SE Asia

Note:  This is actally posted by Corina.

We arrived at the wonderland of the Bangkok airport full of hope and promise and no real plans. For days, as much as we loved Burma, we'd been listing all the things we could have once we reached the airport - namely cadbury dairy milk bars and internet.  Burma's lovely and all, but 10 days without chocolate and email really wear on one.  We were hoping to get a flight to Ko Samui that day, but the internet let us down, with none of the big search engines listing any available flights.  We quickly abandoned our attempt at independent traveling and headed for the nearest travel agent. Somehow our visions of our own teak and thatch bungalows on a white sand beach on little Ko Samui got lost in translation and we ended up sharing a characterless room at a big hotel a few blocks from Patong beach on enormous Phuket island and were made to feel lucky to get it. Something about how the Chinese New Year, still a week away, meant all the hotels were booked. 

The taxi ride through town from the airport, while not leaving me fearing for my life like the dark drive to Mandalay that Lara described (and by the way, I think my position in that pickup was the more terrifying - from the back Lara couldn't appreciate our driver's strategy of using his headlights only to signal byciclists to get out of the way - half the time we were driving in the dark into oncoming traffic) did leave me a little depressed. Tshirt shops, sunglass huts, photomats in seeming endless profusion, pink skinned Russians and Brits in skimpy clothes.  It was about as far from our imaginings of a tropical paradise as it could be whithout being Siberian disneyland.  What was worse was that we'd paid in advance.so we were here for 4 nights whether we liked it or not.

There's not much to say about our time in package tour hell.  In retrospect, we probably could have arranged for a boat to take us to a slightly less crowded island for a day, but the surroundings, the internet on tap, and the stock of chocolate we'd acquired drugged us into complacency and we spent three days reading by the hotel pool. We tried going to the beach one morning, but it was hot and sort of smelly, and the pool was less crowded so we didn't go back.

On Feb 14 we finally left Sodom for Bangkok.

Burmese Days Continued

In light of our jarring arrival in Mandalay, we decided to cut our visit from two nights to one. That just left us time to eat dinner at a Thai restaurant that could have come straight out of an American strip mall and to stop by the Mahamuni Pagoda on the way to the airport. It is the home of a gold Buddha figure that is slowly assuming blob-like proportions because they add gold leaf to it every day.

From Mandalay, we flew to Heho, took a cab to Nyaungshwe, and took a boat to our hotel, which was literally on Inle Lake. (It was a bunch of cabins on stilts.). The next day, we took a boat ride around the lake, mostly stopping -- involuntarily -- at various markets and artisans shops where we were the worst tourists in the world and hardly bought anything. We also saw more blob-shaped buddhas at the Daw U Pagoda and -- best of all -- cats that have trained to jumps through hoops at the Nga Phe Kyaung monastery. Which was pretty much exactly as touristy as it sounds. But mostly we just gawked at the people who seem to lead a very traditional way of life, fishing, growing vegetables in floating gardens, and getting around by canoe.

We spent two more days at Inle:  one just sitting around our hotel reading (ask me about the North African campaign in World War II) and one in Nyaungshwe, where we ate a really excellent Shan meal -- a potato based curry, fried minced peanuts, and fresh tomatoes.

On Friday, we woke up early and flew back to Yangon. We tackled one of the mysterious sidewalk teashops where we were served noodles and about five different kinds of meat wrapped in dough. We were then utterly defeated in our attempt to walk around the gardens surrounding Shwedagon Pagoda by the ungodly heat. In retrospect, setting out to do this at 1 o'clock in the afternoon was not a good idea. In our defense, we did make it most of the way around and it was cold at Inle, so we weren't acclimated to the heat. Also, we are wimps.

We ate dinner at the 50th Street Bar & Grill, which Lonely Planet billed as an "expat hangout," where we were the only people there for about an hour and a half. We ate pizza and read old issues of the International Herald Tribune. Our first news since Bangkok eight days earlier. We flew to Bangkok the next morning.

Burmese Days

Corina's right. I really do think that everyone should go to Burma. It was so lovely and a nice change of pace from India, which had started to fray my nerves toward the end (more on that in another post). Case in point:  on the drive in from the airport, the driver told us that in Yangon, slow-moving vehicles like bikes, rickshaws, and cows are not allowed in the road. And no horns. So we drove in to the city on silent, empty roads.

We spent Friday in Yangon, visiting the Shwedagon Pagado and walking around the city streets. My impression was that Burmese people must eat out a lot because we passed a ton of sidewalk tea shops and street vendors selling fruit, roasted corn, fried snacks, kebabs, and mysterious bubble tea-looking concoctions. We ate an excellent lunch of noodles at a noodle shop. Also striking was the people with cages full of sparrows that you could buy to set free and earn good karma. (Leading me to wonder if the people who caught them in the first place got bad karma.) 

Later that day, we flew to Bagan. Bagan was the capital of Burma in the 10th to 12th centuries and is the home of something like 4000 temples and pagodas in 42 square kilometers. My friend Jim had warned us that we would want to spend a couple of days there, but we didn't listen. It's not so much that we needed more time to see the temples, because you could spend weeks there and not see them all. But more that it was really beautiful and a nice place to spend time. The highlight:  climbing up to the top of one of the temples to wait for the sunset and looking over the pictures in Corina's guide book with two local kids. The lowlight:  being strongarmed into buying souvenirs from two tiny women who had offered to watch our shoes at one temple.

The next day, we got up early for a 13 hour boat ride up the Irawaddy to Mandalay. This was incredibly peaceful. The Irawaddy is Burma's main river, but is crossed by only two bridges in its 1000 plus mile length. We passed mostly fishing and agricultural villages, and as we got closer to Mandalay, two ancient capitals Sagaing and Inwa, each with dozens of pagodas. The boat was pretty empty, only about 10 passengers, including a couple we had met the day before who told us that they were originally from Penzance -- leading Corina to look at each other and ask under our breath where Penzance was. (England, it turns out.)  We later learned that they were headed to a 10-day silent meditation retreat. The journey came to an abrupt end when we arrived in Mandalay, with a dozen kids invading the cabin asking to carry our bags, followed by a walk through a foul-smelling warehouse and a climb up the unlit riverbank. We got into a cab -- a little tiny pickup truck, with bench seats in the back. I rode in the back and Corina sat up front with the driver and it is debatable which perspective was more terrifying.

Everyone Should Go to Burma

At least twice during the past ten days Lara turned to me and asked, "Don't you think everyone should come to Burma?" and of course I said yes. Absolutely. Everyone should go to Burma. As I was getting ready to leave the states, I had a "what's the point" moment, wondering why the hell I was about to spend insane amounts of money considering I'm currently jobless to go half-way around the world when home is so comfortable. The second day in Myanmar I got my answer, as we were jostling in a horse-drawn carriage down a dirt road in Bagan, 12th century temples and pagodas to the horizon in every direction, brilliant pink acacia blooming at the side of the road and not another tourist in sight. Of course, now Lara and I are sitting at the computers in our hotel lobby in Phuket, with some bad karaoke act singing "Cocaine" in the background. The town we're in looks an awful lot like Cancun. It's depressing. Travel is all about the sublime and the ridiculous I guess.

Anyway, after Lara found me in the Bangkok airport we made our way to Yangon and after 32 straight hours of travel we checked into our hotel where there were blessed blessed beds. We spent most of the next day wandering Yangon, which is . . . fine. Thanks to the military junta, which has banned motorcycles and horn honking in Yangon (though not in the rest of the country, more on that later), Yangon is a surprisingly quiet city. We made our way to the main tourist destination, the Schwedagon pagoda which makes the country look really really rich. That's one hell of a lot of gold. A toothless man calculated our horoscopes. Strangely enough, we both happened to be wearing our lucky colors (mine is pink, Lara's is red for the record). In the afternoon we flew to Bagan, what has to be one of the wonders of the world, which Lara's friend Jim had warned us we'd need more than one day to appreciate. He was completely right, but we gave it only one day anyway. Stupid of us. More on Bagan later.

Radio Silence

Corina and I met up in the Bangkok airport and we're now sitting here -- partially comatose -- waiting for our flight to Yangon. (The Kit Kats were delivered, but no Twix.) We probably won't have much internet access in Myanmar. So, check back on the 10th.

I'm (almost) off!

Tomorrow morning I’ll leave the house, get in a car, go shopping with my mom, and 2 days, 4 planes, and countless magazines later, I’ll be delivering a Twix to Lara in Burma. It’s so fantastic, in the sense of strange, magical, and completely unreal. Who would have thought? Anyway, from all I’ve read, Burma doesn’t really have internet, or at least internet that connects you to any websites you might want to visit, so . . . . don’t expect any emails or posts from me for awhile. (Damn military junta!)

Culture Clash

So I'm on a train (another one) and I was looking for a trash can to throw away the magazines I had been reading. Having no luck, I asked someone and he said that you just throw them out the door. I couldn't do it! 

Tigers!

Sunday was my birthday and I spent it at a really nice lodge outsiide of the park. It is supposed to be modeled on African safari lodges. The room itself (actually its own little bungalow) was gorgeous, and the service and food were fantastic.

There were only 4 other guests. Carolyn and Martin from Vienna. They were on the plane from Mumbai, and I suspected that we were going to the same place, but I didn't see them at the train station in Bhopal. Carolyn is a "TV presenter" and she had been traveling by herself in India for 5 weeks. Her boyfriend Martin is a cinematographer, and he had joined her for the last week of her trip. Ornella from Torino.  She had been on several safaris in Africa and came to India specifically to see the tigers. Paul from London joined us the second night.

The food:   For breakfast, chapati rolls, which are sort of Indian breakfast burritos. Made with a flat bread somewhere between a tortilla and naan, and stuffed with sauted peppers and onions and some sort of mashed potato mixture. For lunch on Sunday, excellent tomato soup, green salad, and chicken kabobs with grilled bananas and vanilla ice cream for dessert. On Monday, my favorite palak paneer (spinach with cheese) and fish curry and a bean salad. Also, a pretty gross buttermilk based drink that is supposed to good for your digestion. Rice pudding for dessert. For dinner on Sunday, fish and chicken cooked in the tandoor oven; yellow dal; many different kinds of bread. For dinner on Monday, chicken soup, a thali with four different dishes (lamb, spinach, some kind of dumplings in a yogurt sauce, and potatoes).

Always on hand:  awesome shortbread-like cookies flavored with either coconut or sesame seeds.

It was nice to be able to eat uncooked fruit and vegetables -- which I had been avoiding -- without having to worry about whether they had been washed in clean water.

The tigers:  in the mornings and afternoons, we went out to the park in 4-wheel drive vehicles. The park has the highest density of tigers in the world, and I saw at least one tiger on every trip. (Although just a leg the first time.)  It was really exciting. The whole forest was on alert for the tigers. Our naturalist taught us to recognize the "alarm calls" of the monkeys and the deer that the tigers eat. When the tigers moved, all of the animals were on alert trying to avoid them and all of the humans were on alert trying to find them. I could sort of see the appeal of hunting, except the killing part.

We couldn't go off road, so in the mornings, the park rangers tracked the tigers and we could ride elephants to get closer to them. This was awesome. Elephants are so cool because the underbrush is nothing to them. They just grab it with their trunks and break it off.

A brief word about my naturalist, Herendra. I had a huge crush on him. We would be driving down the road at 30 kph and he would hear a bird call and say "that's the yellow-wattled lapwing" or "the green bee eater."  I found this very impressive. Unfortunately, he's 22.

Saving the best part for last:  when we got back from the park at night we were filthy with dust from the dirt roads. But we returned to a nice hot bubble bath, already drawn. And a gin and tonic by the tub. All in all, a pretty good birthday.

Night Train

After Mumbai, I headed east to Bandahvgarh National Park in Mahdya Pradesh, where I hoped to see a tiger. My original plan, until December, had been to go to Rajasthan, but I really wanted to go to Varanasi too, and I couldn't figure out an itinerary to do both without being too rushed. So I scrapped Rajasthan and substituted Bandahvgarh and Khajuraho.

To get to Bandahvgarh, I had to fly to Bhopal and then take a train overnight to a town called Katni. I was a little worried about navigating the train system. These woories were not allayed upon arrival at the train station when I saw that all of the signs were in Hindi, which I do not speak. Or read.

I had about 3 hours to kill in Bhopal, so I found the cloak room, where I locked up my bags and wandered out into the streets around the train station to try to find a place to eat. It was dark and there was a haze of dust from the dirt roads. Which is a little unsettling in a town known as the site of a deadly poison gas leak.

I could not have been more conspicuous if I had two heads. Literally everyone was staring at me. I found a small place with samosas cooking out front, and went in and was offered a table upstairs. I could hear them downstairs talking about the "American." They sent a succession of people upstairs to ask me what I wanted, and it took a few tries to communicate that I wanted a coke and a samosa.

After that, I decided to go in search of an internet cafe and ran across a guy who spoke pretty good english and offered to take me to one on his motorcycle. I declined, so he walked with me, and then sat with me while I checked my emal, and then walked me back to the train station and showed me the first class waiting room. Which was nice, but also a little irritating.

So, the train came and I found my cabin by pure luck. I was sharing with an accountant from Jabalpur. And then I started worrying about how I would know when to get off the train. So I didn't sleep that well, although it was relatively comfortable. I woke up early and the porter let me know when we got to Katni. But I still haven't figured out the mysterious system by which people know when to get off the train. Which worries me because I'm on a train right now.

Mumbai

I'm on a train bound for Agra, and so I thought I'd take some time to catch up on the last week.

Mumbai ended up being a bit of a disappointment because the real city is pretty inaccessible to tourists. I mean, I love cities and Mumbai is one of the biggest cities in the world, but I felt like I could only glimpse it through the window of my taxi going to and from the airport. This was true of both the sort of Upper East side looking neighborhoods on the west side of town and the vast, vast shanty towns along the railroad tracks. (Although I did see some places offering "slum tours," which I passed on.)

Anyway, here are the highlights:

*The Prince of Wales Museum, featuring Indian art and sculpture. I don't typically like that kind of flat-looking, highly embellished painting, but this was really beautiful. And Hinduism offers such an extensive array of stories to depict.

*Excellent food, including really good chicken kabobs at an Iranian cafe. (Where I was the only woman and only westerner there.) I have been trying to follow the practice of not using my left hand to eat, but was puzzling over how to tear the bread with just one hand. It appears that there's an exception for bread-tearing. I also had Thai food at a swanky pan-asian place, that was inexplicably playing obscure American country music. (And not good obscure. Deservedly obscure.)

*I saw Babel, which I liked more than I expected to. Brad Pitt was sort of haggard-looking and it suited him. And I love Gael Garcia Bernal, but his storyline didn't make much sense.

*I met a couple of Indian guys (Shail and Sanche) at the Gateway of India and we went and had tea and discussed our mutual dislike of George Bush. Also, I showed them my iPod and Blackberry, and they told me about a serial killer in Mumbai who lures his victims by offering them free Kingfisher. I could not tell if they were serious.

*I found a gym and went for a run. Which was actually pretty pathetic, although it seems like you're going faster and farther when they're measuring in kilometers.

Annoyances:

*Just walking around can be hard.  First, you often have to walk in the streets, which are packed. Second, I felt like I had to study every intersection just to figure out how to cross the street without getting killed. This is complicated by the fact that the traffic seems to operate as some sort of hive mind that will suddenly decide to go against the lights.

*There is inexplicable rubble everywhere. Just piles of dirt and rocks and stones. I have no idea why. Maybe there's nowhere else to put it.

*On Friday, I tried to get train tickets and airline tickets that I hadn't been able to get in the states. Oh my god, what I wouldn't give for the Indian version of my beloved Kayak. First I had to find the reservations office at the train station, which is actually in a differnt building across the street. When I finally found it, I wasn't really sure which line to stand in, and when none of them had moved after 15 minutes, I gave up and went to Thomas Cook. They couldn't sell me train tickets, but informed me that there were no trains between Varanasi and Agra. Which is not true. (I am currently on just such a train -- there are at least 2 every day.)  But then they also said there were no flights to Varanasi. Which isn't true either. In sum, Thomas Cook sucks. In the end, I just went straight to the airline to book my ticket and went back to the train station on Saturday morning, when the lines were a lot shorter. Still, something you could do in the states in about 10 minutes on the internet took several hours here.

As an aside, this sort of echoed my feelings when I was at the Indian embassy before my trip getting my visa. It took more than an hour and a half just to drop off the application. And looking around the room, I had the sense that while the westerners were sort of baffled and anxious about what was taking so long, the Indians were totally resigned to waiting. And this made me a little worried. I know that this is such an American attitude, but I just can't imagine living somewhere where simple tasks take forever. For no apparent reason!

Arrival in Mumbai

My flight to Bombay was about two hours late, so I landed at about 5:30 instead of 3:30. The drive from the airport (about 20 miles) took more than an hour. Bombay is vast. I kept thinking that we were almost there because surely this is downtown. But no.

Rough Guides has led me somewhat astray on the hotel, which it describes as a "smart, international standard hotel."  I have a hard time squaring that with the actual hotel. Sure, it had a western style sit down toilet. But is that all that "international standard" means?  Maybe it is a veiled reference to the fact that every other guest is an Arab?  Which would also explain the two separate channels carrying Al Jazeera (or is it Al Arabiya?  Whichever one has the sort of flame-looking logo.). But "smart" does not compute.

It's perfectly adequate, without being remotely inviting.

Travel Day

On Wednesday, I was driven back to Cochin and got totally car sick because of the winding, bumpy roads. That wasn't fun. Particularly because I was worried that it might be the start of something more serious. But that doesn't appear to have been the case.

At the airport in Cochin, I saw a lot of the pilgrims still in their black dhotis. None of them were wearing shoes.



On the plane I watched Anthony Bourdain's "No Reservations" for Viet Nam, which looked awesome. I wish we had more time there. But we are limited by the Tet holiday.

Kumily

To be perfectly honest, Kumily was sort of frustrating. The plan was to continue on the relaxation/acclimitization front in a slightly less isolated location. The problems were 3-fold.

1. It turns out that more than 3 days of doing pretty much nothing gets sort of boring unless you're at home or someplace incredibly luxurious.
2. This hotel, while perfectly nice, was not home and suffered in comparison to the previous one luxury-wise.
3. The town was sufficiently small and touristy that it was almost impossible to walk around without someone trying to sell you something.

Still, the food was incredibly good (as you would expect in an area called the spice hills), I read two more books, I saw a baby elephant, and then later I saw a herd of wild elephants.

But after six days of relaxation, I was looking forward to Bombay.

Into the Spice Hills

On Sunday, I left the backwaters and headed east into the hills where they grow spices. The road was incredibly scenic, passing first through rubber, and then through pineapple, tapioca, coffee, tea, and spice plantations. The tea plantations in particular were stunning. The tea bushes were all trimmed flat and looked like green mosaic tiles covering the hills.

The towns themselves were ugly. Densely packed storefronts cluttered with signs, and littered with, well, litter. But outside the towns, the houses were quite nice. They seemed to be made of cement covered with stucco and had red tile roofs.

Although I knew that Kerala was religiously diverse, I was surprised at how many christian churches, schools, convents, hospitals, and shrines we passed. Dozens in a three hour drive. There were also a handful of mosques, but hardly any Hindu temples.

About halfway there, we went through a town that served as a staging point for a pilgrimage to the Hindu shrine of Sabarimala. The shrine is only open two months a year, and Sunday was the festival of Makara Sankranti, the high point of the pilgrimage. Only men and women not of child-bearing age (defined -- generously -- as 10 to 55) can go the shrine. We saw only men, dressed in black dhotis (ankle length wrap-around skirts, that can be folded in half to become knee length skirts.)  I don't know how many we saw, but a lot. Including cars and trucks with people literally hanging out of windows and doors. (Sign # 673 that they have different notions of traffic safety than we do.)

Paradise

So Cochin (Kochi) was just a way station on the way to my hotel on the backwaters. It is supposed to have a beautiful old fort and an old section of town called "Jew Town." I had hoped to get over there but a combination of exhaustion and eagerness to get to the hotel prevented me from doing so.

I hit the road at noon for a one hour drive to the boat landing to get to the hotel. This was my first daytime experience of Indian roads. Organized chaos would be an apt description.
Mostly the result of the vast array of vehicles -- bikes, motorcycles, auto-rickshaws, cars, trucks, buses -- sharing the two-lane road, all going at different speeds. Plus, people walking, dogs, cats, and the occasional cow. Complete with a system of honking that seemed pretty effective in preventing crashes. It was not particularly scenic, but we eventually turned onto a back road and drove past some coir plantations and finally arrive at Lake Vembanad, where a boat took me over to the hotel.

A word here about the backwaters. Samantha asked why I chose to come here. Mostly because I wanted to start somewhere sort of resorty to get over my jet lag and acclimate myself to India. The backwaters are a series of interconnected lakes, rivers, and canals, along which are a bunch of small farming and fishing villages. The big thing to do there is to stay on a houseboat and just cruise around. I didn't do that, because the prospect of a three-to-one staff to guest ratio made me sort of uncomfortable.

Instead, I stayed at a really nice hotel in my own little bungalow complete with its own pool and a hammock overlooking the lake. (To give you a sense of how nice it is, Paul McCartney had stayed in my room.) The hotel was on an island so there really wasn't much to do except go on the occasional boat ride to see some of the villages, and go to the ayurveda center for massages etc, and eat. That was perfect for me, as I mostly just read (4 books in 3 days) and slept at odd hours.

It really was beautiful, with lush tropical vegetation and so many birds that it got loud at times.

Welcome to India

We arrived in Bombay at 10:30 pm, which was noon at home. (Eighteen hours after I had left.)  Going through immigration and customs was routine, but then I was supposed to catch a flight to Cochin at 1:45, which turned out to be a little more complicated than I would have liked.

First, apparently Indian Airlines and Air India are two different things. Luckily, while I was waiting at one place with the sneaking suspicion that it had all gone too smoothly, a guy who was walking around selling drinks set me straight, directing me outside and upstairs to domestic departures.

That's where the problems started in earnest. The air outside could charitably be described as sultry (uncharitably, hot and muggy). On top of that, there were dozens of men offering to help me take my bags to the departure area. I declined, only to be follwoed by a young guy, who said it was his job to help and grabbed the cart. Tired of arguing, I gave in. About 50 yards later, he remarked that it would be "nice" if I gave him $20 US for this service. I scoffed, giving him $3, and he left. Then someone else tried to do the same thing. Really annoying. I'm tempted to chalk it up to cultural differences, but really it's just obnoxious.

I finally got to the right place. (Note:  there were no signs at any point telling people wher to go.). And then stood in three lines:  first to have my checked baggage x-rayed; second to check in; and third for security. The second and third lines were the kind that seemed to follow the ordinary rules of lines, and then other people would inexplicably be allowed to cut to the front. Interestingly, there was a separate security line for women.

I landed in Cochin at 3:30 in the morning, and headed to a hotel downtown where I was to stay only until noon when I could get a ride to my hotel on the backwaters.

I was pretty miserable at this point -- dead tired, but even more just disoriented as to time. The hotel was nice, but had that quality of hotels in hot, humid places:  too cold, but still sort of damp, so the sheets were cold and clammy. Then, I couldn't figure out how to turn off the lights. Like I said, pretty miserable. But eventually I figured it out and went right to sleep.

Leaving Home

I have been terribly lax in posting to this blog, and I will try now to get up to date.

I left Washington on Tuesday night. Todd and the boys drove me to the airport. The first leg of my trip was an 8-hour flight to Zurich. The flight was full, but I was lucky to be able to switch from a middle seat to an aisle. (The benefits of arriving early!). It was a strange mix of people -- Europeans going home, and Americans going all over. The woman sitting next to me in the gate area was going to Ethiopia. The woman sitting next to me on the plane was going to Bombay. And the older couple sitting across the aisle were dressed sort of like pilgrims (the woman was wearing a long skirt and a white sort of bonnet). They were going to Kenya to visit their son who was on some kind of religious mission.

The flight was uneventful. I watched The Last King of Scotland, which I had meant to see before I left, and was served the first two of five airplane meals I would get in the next 24 hours.

We landed in Zurich at 8 in the morning. I had a short layover -- just enough time to get through security and once again get switched to an aisle seat. Maybe I'm just unusually attuned to religious people, but there seemed to be a lot of them in the Zurich airport. First, there was a large group of Orthodox Jews praying at one gate, complete with the ear curls and tiny black boxes strapped to their heads. (I later learned that these are called tefillin.). Second, a lot of nuns, especially on my flight to Bombay.

The flight to Bombay was only half full. I mostly slept.

You've Gotta Start Somewhere

This blog is looking pretty forlorn with no posts, so I'm breaking the ice.

So, I'm leaving next Tuesday to head to India for three weeks. I'll meet up with Corina in Bangkok on Feburary 1, and we'll spend the next 5 weeks traveling around southeast Asia. The purpose of this blog is to keep people informed about where we are, and to post pictures, etc.

Stay tuned . . .