You’ll have to excuse me;
I’m not at my best…
I’ve been gone for a month;
I’ve been drunk since I left.
And these so-called vacations
Will soon be my death…
I’m so sick from the drink;
I need home for a rest.
It’s been a hell of a ride, and at the end of it all, I’m not quite sure how to sum up the last 30 days. When I went to Europe, it was like Pulp Fiction, in which Travolta and Sam Jackson were comparing the merits of French and American McDick’s. Europe and North America are roughly similar; they have the same infrastructure, the same ease of living, the same big-city-and-suburb feel… with a few minor differences.
Of course, I thought Europe was as foreign as the rings of Saturn while I was there… it was not until I got to South East Asia that I felt like I had been transported into a universe so alien that there was nothing in my previous life to which I could compare it- unlike being in Europe. The weather, the traffic, the food, the people… everything. For example, the locals don’t use toilet paper. Instead, they often have a bin of water sitting next to the can. I have never attempted to use this option, and have gone to great lengths to always have a roll of toilet paper in my pocket. But it’s things like that- and a million, billion others.
But here is some of the tings I will most remember about this sun-baked dustpan of a geographic region:
1) “Same-Same But Different” (SSBD)
This is a local slogan. It is on T-shirts, and on the lips of both locals and visitors. Everyone knows it, everyone says it. “Same-same but different” is the perfect commentary on South East Asia. Rendered in proper English, the phrase means: “This ______ is the same as that other ______. But there are a couple of differences that don’t really matter.”
SSBD can refer to anything from T-shirts to temples to hill-tribe villages. Once you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. Once you’ve been to Wat Pra Keung, you’ve seen Wat ______. A Beer Lao T-shirt is the same as a Beer Chang T-shirt. A Karen village looks exactly the same as a Hmong village. One ruin at Angkor looks pretty much the same as another at Ayuthaya. One night market in Vientiane sells the same shit as a market in Luang Prabang. But not exactly… there are minor differences. Different T-shirt colours. Different architectural styles. Different countries. “Different”, in other words. But still “same-same”. It is amazing that the tourist industries of five nations in the Indochinese peninsula can run on exactly similar attractions and souvenir items.
I like the phrase SSBD because it is the perfect commentary on consumerism. I’ll spare you the lecture, once again. But if someone ever tries to sell me on the differences between Firefox and Explorer, or on Adidas vs Nike, I will bellow a blood curdling laugh in his or her face and utter, in a most solemn and contemptuous tone: “Same-same… but different.”
2) Jews- or Israelis?
I found a Chabad House in Bangkok a couple of days ago. Janine and Benny… the Israelis are taking over. So far, I have found 6 Israeli hostels. I’m actually staying at one right now. There are 3 Israeli restaurants I have seen, and even an Israeli tattoo artist. But when I found the Chabad House, that took the cake. I almost died. What the FUCK is a Chabad House doing in Bangkok? Are they going to kidnap a monk and tie tefillim on his head?
Israelis are fun people- I’ve had random conversations with some and they are outgoing people who find it very bad form to talk about their military service. (I didn’t ask them about this; it simply came out.) Most are quite self-conscious of the fact that they know about 15 different ways to kill a person. I also found it quite amusing that at least a couple of Israelis don’t care about Jews… they draw a large distinction between Israeli Jews and American Jews. They don’t refer to themselves as Jews- they refer to American Jews as Jews and to themselves as Israelis. Israelis hang out in large rat-packs and Israeli guesthouses, restaurants, and backpackers have been in every city I’ve been in on this trip.
3) Ruins.
I’m an ancient history kinda guy. I despise the present so much that I find the imaginary glory of the past to be a far greater aesthetic and intellectual stimulant. So wandering the ruins of Angkor and Ayuthaya constituted some of the greatest days of my life… up there with the Roman ruins and the monuments of Paris.
There are other things: the lack of work ethic (Homie Don’t Play That syndrome), the constant scamming, the loud tuk-tuks and the patience-draining border runs, the boat trips on the Mekong and Chao Praya rivers, the cheap, cheap, cheap, cheap, cheap and MOST EXCELLENT food (God bless Pad Thai; I don’t know what I’ll do without it when i get home), and the BEER: Beer Lao is better than most Canadian beers and costs a dollar for the equivalent of two bottles- and the World Cup, which most conveniently plays at 8pm, 11pm, and 2 am every night.
I get on the plane to Shanghai tomorrow, and will then fly to Vancouver. I look forward to seeing you again (alive, of course) and not a day went by that I did not wish that many of you were here to see specific things: the soccer, the temples, the socioeconomic conditions, the weapons, the cheap clothing, etc. Tim and Sandra, enjoy your journeys, I read every one of your emails and will continue to do so with great pleasure. Poli 390-491, if we don’t meet again, remember that the world is ruled by people with Arts degrees. Cheers to you all, home for a rest!
Monday, June 19, 2006
Tuesday, June 13, 2006
Indochina 2006: Angkor WHAT?
The Angkor What? is a pretty kickin’ bar. There are no decorations inside- instead, the white walls are covered wall-to-wall and end-to-end with the scribbled endorsements of a thousand backpackers. A massive, massive projection screen displays every World Cup match. The owner is a bald, tattooed American with fat, meaty arms and a ferocious goatee. He is a Netherlands fan, and is clearly no Bush supporter- last night, he jumped up on his own bar and sang along to Green Day: “DON’T WANNA BE AN AMERICAN IDIOT!”
Last night, by the sheer magical act of God that is FIFA group selections for the World Cup, we were treated to the ultimate backpacker soccer match: Japan vs Australia. Those of you who backpack are familiar with the following. Those who don’t- let me explain.
The Japanese are everywhere. I mean everywhere. There is not a single street, airport, market, temple, or attraction at which large tour buses full of chirping yellow people will not alight, shouting nasally, shrieking piercingly, and waving the V for Victory at flashing cameras. Some are middle-aged, on paid vacation from their parent corporation. Some are teenage girls, on vacation from their universities. Some are shock-haired, chain-smoking, skinny Jappo cyber-punks. They all have one thing in common: they are all annoying.
The Aussies are everywhere. They look like us, only they act and speak brassier and sassier. I have no qualms with Aussies; in fact, they are my favourite people to meet travelling, aside from Canadians. The reason for this is that they are not Japanese. In any case, the Aussies are a nation of backpackers, and anywhere you go in the world, you will encounter one of three nationalities amoung the grungy, unshaven “real travellers” (Jappos don’t count; they are tourists, not backpackers): Canadians, Israelis, and Aussies.
At the bar, there were 20 going on 30 Japs and maybe 6 Australians; possibly 8. The Japs were, of course, annoying. Especially one girl, who wasn’t even attractive, who insisted on shrieking: “NIPPON! NIPPON! NIPPON!” and on howling the name of every Jap player as he was introduced by the announcer.
Japanese names are funny. I wanted to yell at that one chick pseudo-Japanese names like “Ebitempura” and Salmonsushi” and “Aginamoto”.
Oh, the Japs were thoroughly outplayed by the Aussies. I was surprised by this. You’d think a nation of corporate peons like the Japanese would be able to outwork Aussies; a nation of beer-drinking, grass-chewing slack-asses. But no. Japan went ahead on a goal that in hockey, would have been called off due to goalie interference. In the last ten minutes, Australia scored three goals. The Aussies in the Angkor What? went crazy, and as the whistle went, they jumped up and down and taunted the Japanese, who were rather graceful about it, and I saw some Aussie guys chatting up some Jap girls in the aftermath. Perhaps they fucked.
Cool stuff: when the whistle went, the meaty American owner played “We Will Rock You”. One enterprising Aussie took the opportunity to start the “Aussie, Aussie, Aussie! Oy! Oy! Oy!” chant in time to the stamp-stamp-clap beat of the song. It was extremely cool.
Cheers to all. I’m off to Bangkok tomorrow, where it all began. Go England, go Carolina!
Last night, by the sheer magical act of God that is FIFA group selections for the World Cup, we were treated to the ultimate backpacker soccer match: Japan vs Australia. Those of you who backpack are familiar with the following. Those who don’t- let me explain.
The Japanese are everywhere. I mean everywhere. There is not a single street, airport, market, temple, or attraction at which large tour buses full of chirping yellow people will not alight, shouting nasally, shrieking piercingly, and waving the V for Victory at flashing cameras. Some are middle-aged, on paid vacation from their parent corporation. Some are teenage girls, on vacation from their universities. Some are shock-haired, chain-smoking, skinny Jappo cyber-punks. They all have one thing in common: they are all annoying.
The Aussies are everywhere. They look like us, only they act and speak brassier and sassier. I have no qualms with Aussies; in fact, they are my favourite people to meet travelling, aside from Canadians. The reason for this is that they are not Japanese. In any case, the Aussies are a nation of backpackers, and anywhere you go in the world, you will encounter one of three nationalities amoung the grungy, unshaven “real travellers” (Jappos don’t count; they are tourists, not backpackers): Canadians, Israelis, and Aussies.
At the bar, there were 20 going on 30 Japs and maybe 6 Australians; possibly 8. The Japs were, of course, annoying. Especially one girl, who wasn’t even attractive, who insisted on shrieking: “NIPPON! NIPPON! NIPPON!” and on howling the name of every Jap player as he was introduced by the announcer.
Japanese names are funny. I wanted to yell at that one chick pseudo-Japanese names like “Ebitempura” and Salmonsushi” and “Aginamoto”.
Oh, the Japs were thoroughly outplayed by the Aussies. I was surprised by this. You’d think a nation of corporate peons like the Japanese would be able to outwork Aussies; a nation of beer-drinking, grass-chewing slack-asses. But no. Japan went ahead on a goal that in hockey, would have been called off due to goalie interference. In the last ten minutes, Australia scored three goals. The Aussies in the Angkor What? went crazy, and as the whistle went, they jumped up and down and taunted the Japanese, who were rather graceful about it, and I saw some Aussie guys chatting up some Jap girls in the aftermath. Perhaps they fucked.
Cool stuff: when the whistle went, the meaty American owner played “We Will Rock You”. One enterprising Aussie took the opportunity to start the “Aussie, Aussie, Aussie! Oy! Oy! Oy!” chant in time to the stamp-stamp-clap beat of the song. It was extremely cool.
Cheers to all. I’m off to Bangkok tomorrow, where it all began. Go England, go Carolina!
Sunday, June 11, 2006
Indochina 2006: Sir, You Buy?
A conversation between Sean and a small, emaciated Cambodian beggar child attempting to sell him things he does not want:
Cambo Kid: Sir, you buy flute? 1 for 1 dollar.
Sean: (Remains silent, refuses to make eye contact.)
Cambo Kid: Sir, you buy? (Plays on flute.) You buy, sir. How many you buy?
Sean: No.
Cambo Kid: Sir, you buy? Cheap, sir. You buy, sir.
Sean: NO. NO BUY.
Cambo Kid: Sir, why no buy? You buy, sir. 1 for 1 dollar, you buy.
Sean: Go away. No buy. (Ignores kid, continues to walk away at a brisk pace.)
Cambo Kid: Why you no buy, sir? You buy, sir. You buy flute, sir. Sir, you buy. Why you no buy? You buy. How many you buy? You buy, sir. You buy flute, sir.
Sean: (Stops) GO AWAY. (Resumes escape.)
Cambo Kid: Sir, okay, for you. Discount for you, sir, you buy now. 2 flute for 1 dollar, you buy, sir. Sir you buy. You buy.
(Cambo Kid follows Sean for 100m, repeating the same “You buy, sir. Why you no buy?” mantra the entire way. Sean then boards tuk-tuk with Amber, whereupon Cambo Kid finds a new prey and begins again. “Sir, you buy? How many you buy?”)
I will make no attempt to write a treatise on the socioeconomic consequences of globalization and capitalism. I will only say that if I am to be thoroughly dehumanized into a walking wallet by these relentlessly annoying little vermin, I am fully willing to dehumanize them in my turn by treating them like rats to be shooed away, verbally or physically. There is nothing I can do. I have been accosted by beggar women who are clearly able to have four children but apparently cannot go in search of a job. I have had my pants’ legs tugged by small beggar children who will follow me around for a good 5 minutes with their palms outstretched. Other beggar children will shout at me to take their picture with my camera; when I do, they demand money. I have had amputees, missing arms, legs, and sometimes, their entire faces, beg me for Cambodian currency that basically amounts to 5 cents. There is not a thing I can do about this- because if I give money to the first, there is no way I can justify not giving money to the second… and the third, fourth, eightieth, and two hundred and forty sixth.
So here I am, the “typical” arrogant foreigner. All of them, from the beggars to the tuk-tuk drivers to the proprieters of the travel agencies and hostels with their inflated prices and scams… they are all just trying to survive. They need money- as the Thais say: “No money, no honey.” So they dehumanize us and treat us as resource nodes, devoid of respect or humanity, to be mined as expediently as possible. And when we, the foreigners, get sick of it, and tell off a beggar child, shout at a travel agent who scammed us, or refuse to engage the services of unscrupulously money-hungry locals, THEY GET ANGRY AT US. They become utterly resentful of the fact that we refuse to get scammed, and suddenly, we are those arrogant Westerners who think that we are too good for the rest of the world.
Anyway. Scary moment. We were on a bus into Siem Reap, the town that acts as a base for exploring the temples of Angkor. Do you remember the last email I sent, about the cops beating back the tuk tuk drivers who were swarming our bus in Phnom Penh?
Context: when a bus lands in a city, tuk-tuk drivers will swarm the bus, literally surrounding it, shouting at the top of their voices, trying to get the foreigners on that bus to get in their tuk-tuks so that they can earn a fare for driving said foreigners somewhere. Sometimes there are 50 drivers screaming. Sometimes more.
This time, at Siem Reap, there WERE NO COPS.
When Amber and I got off the bus, we were immediately mobbed, grabbed, shouted at, cajoled, pulled in five of six different directions, and basically borderline assaulted. I remember feeling a slight moment of terror; these brown, bestial faces, eyes gleaming and spittle flying, shouting incoherently over the next man; a solid ring of noise and flesh. If someone had decided to rob me, there would not have been a blessed thing I could do about it; I suddenly felt how statesmen feel when mobbed by the press, or how doomed men feel right before they are lynched or stoned by a mob.
Maybe I expected a little bit more respect towards us than can be expected from 50 different men, each of whom needed to mine a little cash from us dehumanized tourists in order to feed his own family.
So I shouted at them- and this is not a big deal in Canada… but in Cambodia it’s a cultural taboo. Maybe you can fuck each other, but you gotta fuck each other with a smile. Calmly. The crowd drew back in surprise, and gave us a berth long enough to grab our luggage, and 20 seconds later, they were back on top of us, screaming and waving placards in our faces.
In the end, we escaped and got to where we wanted, and today, I saw Angkor Wat, a bunch of different ruins, and Ta Prohm, the temple what had trees growing out of the ruins and was last seen in Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life.
Oh, christ. There is a bar here called “Angkor What?” I almost died. I also watched the England vs. Paraguay match at a bar called Molly Malone’s. Beckham struck a free-kick into the center of the box; the Paraguayan captain put his head on it, but it went the wrong direction- deflected off his own goalie’s hand and in. It was the only goal, and I was in a good mood for the rest of the night. Amber and I also relentlessly made fun of Peter Crouch, England’s 6′9 striker. How is a man that tall so quick on his feet? Every time Crouch touched the ball, someone in the bar would yell “Long legs!” or “Gangly man!”. I think they should call him Longshanks, after King Edward I. Maybe that’s too nerdy.
Tonight, Serbia plays the Netherlands. Whoooo, soccer! And tomorrow morning, back to the ruins of Angkor!
Also, please fondle Kevin’s biceps and nipples for me. Make him squirm.
Ok, peace. Buy now! …. I mean, bye now…
Cambo Kid: Sir, you buy flute? 1 for 1 dollar.
Sean: (Remains silent, refuses to make eye contact.)
Cambo Kid: Sir, you buy? (Plays on flute.) You buy, sir. How many you buy?
Sean: No.
Cambo Kid: Sir, you buy? Cheap, sir. You buy, sir.
Sean: NO. NO BUY.
Cambo Kid: Sir, why no buy? You buy, sir. 1 for 1 dollar, you buy.
Sean: Go away. No buy. (Ignores kid, continues to walk away at a brisk pace.)
Cambo Kid: Why you no buy, sir? You buy, sir. You buy flute, sir. Sir, you buy. Why you no buy? You buy. How many you buy? You buy, sir. You buy flute, sir.
Sean: (Stops) GO AWAY. (Resumes escape.)
Cambo Kid: Sir, okay, for you. Discount for you, sir, you buy now. 2 flute for 1 dollar, you buy, sir. Sir you buy. You buy.
(Cambo Kid follows Sean for 100m, repeating the same “You buy, sir. Why you no buy?” mantra the entire way. Sean then boards tuk-tuk with Amber, whereupon Cambo Kid finds a new prey and begins again. “Sir, you buy? How many you buy?”)
I will make no attempt to write a treatise on the socioeconomic consequences of globalization and capitalism. I will only say that if I am to be thoroughly dehumanized into a walking wallet by these relentlessly annoying little vermin, I am fully willing to dehumanize them in my turn by treating them like rats to be shooed away, verbally or physically. There is nothing I can do. I have been accosted by beggar women who are clearly able to have four children but apparently cannot go in search of a job. I have had my pants’ legs tugged by small beggar children who will follow me around for a good 5 minutes with their palms outstretched. Other beggar children will shout at me to take their picture with my camera; when I do, they demand money. I have had amputees, missing arms, legs, and sometimes, their entire faces, beg me for Cambodian currency that basically amounts to 5 cents. There is not a thing I can do about this- because if I give money to the first, there is no way I can justify not giving money to the second… and the third, fourth, eightieth, and two hundred and forty sixth.
So here I am, the “typical” arrogant foreigner. All of them, from the beggars to the tuk-tuk drivers to the proprieters of the travel agencies and hostels with their inflated prices and scams… they are all just trying to survive. They need money- as the Thais say: “No money, no honey.” So they dehumanize us and treat us as resource nodes, devoid of respect or humanity, to be mined as expediently as possible. And when we, the foreigners, get sick of it, and tell off a beggar child, shout at a travel agent who scammed us, or refuse to engage the services of unscrupulously money-hungry locals, THEY GET ANGRY AT US. They become utterly resentful of the fact that we refuse to get scammed, and suddenly, we are those arrogant Westerners who think that we are too good for the rest of the world.
Anyway. Scary moment. We were on a bus into Siem Reap, the town that acts as a base for exploring the temples of Angkor. Do you remember the last email I sent, about the cops beating back the tuk tuk drivers who were swarming our bus in Phnom Penh?
Context: when a bus lands in a city, tuk-tuk drivers will swarm the bus, literally surrounding it, shouting at the top of their voices, trying to get the foreigners on that bus to get in their tuk-tuks so that they can earn a fare for driving said foreigners somewhere. Sometimes there are 50 drivers screaming. Sometimes more.
This time, at Siem Reap, there WERE NO COPS.
When Amber and I got off the bus, we were immediately mobbed, grabbed, shouted at, cajoled, pulled in five of six different directions, and basically borderline assaulted. I remember feeling a slight moment of terror; these brown, bestial faces, eyes gleaming and spittle flying, shouting incoherently over the next man; a solid ring of noise and flesh. If someone had decided to rob me, there would not have been a blessed thing I could do about it; I suddenly felt how statesmen feel when mobbed by the press, or how doomed men feel right before they are lynched or stoned by a mob.
Maybe I expected a little bit more respect towards us than can be expected from 50 different men, each of whom needed to mine a little cash from us dehumanized tourists in order to feed his own family.
So I shouted at them- and this is not a big deal in Canada… but in Cambodia it’s a cultural taboo. Maybe you can fuck each other, but you gotta fuck each other with a smile. Calmly. The crowd drew back in surprise, and gave us a berth long enough to grab our luggage, and 20 seconds later, they were back on top of us, screaming and waving placards in our faces.
In the end, we escaped and got to where we wanted, and today, I saw Angkor Wat, a bunch of different ruins, and Ta Prohm, the temple what had trees growing out of the ruins and was last seen in Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life.
Oh, christ. There is a bar here called “Angkor What?” I almost died. I also watched the England vs. Paraguay match at a bar called Molly Malone’s. Beckham struck a free-kick into the center of the box; the Paraguayan captain put his head on it, but it went the wrong direction- deflected off his own goalie’s hand and in. It was the only goal, and I was in a good mood for the rest of the night. Amber and I also relentlessly made fun of Peter Crouch, England’s 6′9 striker. How is a man that tall so quick on his feet? Every time Crouch touched the ball, someone in the bar would yell “Long legs!” or “Gangly man!”. I think they should call him Longshanks, after King Edward I. Maybe that’s too nerdy.
Tonight, Serbia plays the Netherlands. Whoooo, soccer! And tomorrow morning, back to the ruins of Angkor!
Also, please fondle Kevin’s biceps and nipples for me. Make him squirm.
Ok, peace. Buy now! …. I mean, bye now…
Wednesday, June 7, 2006
Indochina 2006: Homie Don't Play That
When I was in Europe, I relentlessly mocked the work ethic (or utter lack thereof) of the French, Italians, and Greeks. But now I realize that these three peoples, who are probably too lazy to wipe their own asses, have nothing on the citizens of the great nation of Laos.
Some of you will have heard of Homie the Clown, the black clown on the comic TV show from the 80s “In Living Colour”. Homie the Clown was a party clown. His job was to do tricks or little kids. But his response to any requests, whether it was to turn a cartwheel, make a balloon animal, or fart through his dick, was “Homie don’t play that.” Homie was too lazy, apathetic, and unapologetically unbothered to do anything.
Lao is filled with Homie the Clowns, and they don’t play fuck all. In every town and city, you see vast hordes of little brown monkeys (I am referring to the Lao here) sitting on their asses, doing… nothing. Now, in Canada, when we say “I’m doing nothing” we really mean “I’m watching TV”, or “I’m surfing the net”, or “I’m just chillin’.” In Lao, “I’m doing nothing” means
that the person doing nothing is on his ass, staring into traffic glassy-eyed like a cow digesting grass, silent as a jar of ketchup, doing… nothing.
I have never- and I mean NEVER- seen a job that could be done by one person in Canada being done by less than 5 people in Lao. Example. In every city there are taxis. These taxis are actually pint-sized pickups with loud, stuttering engines and two rows of seats in the bed. They are called tuk-tuks.
Everywhere you go, you see rows of tuk-tuks sitting there, doing… nothing. Their drivers are napping in the back. Their friends are napping with them. I have seen tuk-ruks draped with as many as four Lao in various positions of unconsciousness. This brings me to one conclusion (Besides the obvious one that Lao are lazy and can’t be bothered to drive around looking for fares. Homie don’t play that.): about three-four Lao share one tuk-tuk and take turns driving people around.
This boggles the mind. If three or four people share one vehicle, what the FUCK is it sitting there with all of its co-owners snoring on its seats? Shouldn’t they be taking turns with the vehicle earning money to feed their families? But clearly, Homie don’t play that.
This is perhaps an exaggeration. I have been hassled to the point of rage by tuk-tuk drivers whose only knowledge of the English language consists of: “Hey you! Where you go?” Sometimes, they yell: “Hello? Tuk-tuk?” and occasionally, they spice it up with: “Tuk-tuk! Hello?” So even when Homie comes out to play, he annoys the hell out of me.
You just can’t win with Sean, but you all know that.
Oh fuck. At one point, Amber and I were on an island in the south of Laos called Don Det. It was a scorching day, and we decided to rent kayaks and paddle down the Mekong river. When we got to the kayak rental shop, there were two guys snoring it up, stretched out on the ground. It was 11 in the morning.
I yelled at them: “SA-BAI-DEE!” This means “HEL-LOOO!”
Nothing.
I yelled at them twice more, before one of them opened his eyes. He didn’t even sit up. Here were two customers, standing in front of him, wanting to pay him greenbacks, and all he would have to do was get up, haul two kayaks off the racks, and pocket our cash.
But no. Buddy Lao stared at me. I pointed at a kayak. He shook his head, put his head down, and closed his eyes. The message was clear as a summer day: Homie don’t play that.
WHOOOOO-HOOOA. I have so many examples of how lazy these people are that I’m just going to quit.
Anyway, I have been so bombarded with sights and sounds and experiences that they are all blending together. But I have one good one: the Border Run.
A “border run” is a term, one of many, for crossing a border. Border runs are fun, but they are also taxing upon both the wallet and the patience. This is because everyone, from the bus drivers to the customs officers to the “guides” at the borders, conspires to cheat the traveller at the border crossings of as much money as possible.
The logic, of course, is impeccable. In the city, the traveller has his or her bearings. He has a map, he has numerous sources of information, and more modes of transport than he can shoot at (you have no idea how much I’ve fantasized about gunning down a tuk-tuk driver). But at the border, there is limited options for the traveller. He’s entering a new country, he has no
idea how to get from A to B, and there are few sources of info and transport. Those who provide these services know they have a monopoly… so they do what all monopolized markets do. They raise prices.
We took a bus from Pakse, in Laos, to the border with Cambodia. We intended to get to the Lao border town of Vung Kham, but before we could get there, a minivan stopped our bus and told us they would transport us to the border… for free.
This did not appear as suspicious as it now sounds. The bus we were on (a larger tuk-tuk that was packed like a cattle-car with vegetables, Lao peasants, vomiting infants, and a crazy toothless lady) stopped for the minivan and all involved acted like it was a regular occurance at the border.
There were five of us travellers, Amber, I, and three Americans: Katie, Val and Kenny. We got to a tumbleweed outpost on the other side of the border, a Cambodian shanty-shithole called Dong Cralaw, where we had to, of course, bribe the customs officials with a luxury tax. We had already done this on the Lao side, so it was just part of the routine.
Then the minivan-man, who spoke FABULOUS English (of course), after a long bit of primiminary nice talk, produces a swarthy little fuck-face compatriot with equally great English, who turned out to work with him for the same transport company. The offer: they would take us to Phnom Penh, 11 hours away, for US $30 each.
Of course, we laughed at them, and they kept having at us. It was only after a long bit of banter that I realized that we were stranded in the middle of nowhere. We were in a border outpost, surrounded by jungle, with 5 km of potholed road leading back to Laos and 50 km of gravel road going to the next Cambodian town. There were no alternative forms of transportation, as there would have been if THE BUS WE HAD BEEN ON HAD BEEN ALLOWED TO REACH VUNG KHAM.
These motherfuckers had deliberately picked us up BEFORE we reached Vung Kham, driven us to Buttfuck Nowhere, and given us an ultimatum: pay our exorbitant price, or we strand you. And of course, they never said as much. They kept smiling and acting like they were doing us a huge favour, and when Katie and Val got American and started yelling about how they were cheating us- oh, my- you should have SEEN the hurt on their faces. That swarthy man could not have been as sad if I had fucked his mother with a knife.
We got the price down to 25 and started driving. After an hour, they told us that we had to change cars (the pretext was crossing a river… another car would meet us on the other side). The other car, instead of a minvan, was a clanking claptrap of a tuk-tuk half filled with bales of rope.
We had no choice. We got in, of course, and at least had the presence of mind to make an adventure of it. Katie rolled a joint the size of my pinkie, Kenny got out his guitar, and we sang along to Sublime, Tom Petty, and Blind Melon as we churned down the dirt roads. In retrospect, I would not have traded that experience at all.
We got to a town, where the driver swore that there was another minivan waiting to take us the rest of the way. The minivan- I have pictures- was the kind of vehicle that Canadian bums would refuse to sleep in. It was also already full. The back was stuffed with backpacks, and one of the travellers who had been sold a seat on it before the five of us had showed up told us
there were already 10 people sitting inside, with another 4 locals sitting ON TOP of the van. The seats were riddled with holes, there were cockroaches on the floors, and a can of Raid sat prominently on the seat.
Val and Katie got American again and absolutely harangued the people in charge of the situation. In the end, we were granted hostel rooms for that night, and free tickets to Phnom Penh on the bus the next day. As the minivan pulled away, it had to be push-started by four people shoving from behind.
The bus was far better. When we got to Phnom Penh, about 50 tuk-tuk drivers were horded outside the bus, shouting for our business. I suddenly felt like I knew how movie stars feel when assaulted by papparazzi. But- oh MY GOD- the tuk-tuk drivers were herded back by two cops with truncheons, which they used to BEAT the drivers. Oh, it was wild. It was mostly in the knees. I also say a fight between two drivers. Come on boys, you don’t have to fight over me.
Ok, the email is clearly too long. I’m going to see the Killing Fields tomorrow, where they have 8,000 skulls neatly piled up… all victims of the Khmer Rouge.
Some of you will have heard of Homie the Clown, the black clown on the comic TV show from the 80s “In Living Colour”. Homie the Clown was a party clown. His job was to do tricks or little kids. But his response to any requests, whether it was to turn a cartwheel, make a balloon animal, or fart through his dick, was “Homie don’t play that.” Homie was too lazy, apathetic, and unapologetically unbothered to do anything.
Lao is filled with Homie the Clowns, and they don’t play fuck all. In every town and city, you see vast hordes of little brown monkeys (I am referring to the Lao here) sitting on their asses, doing… nothing. Now, in Canada, when we say “I’m doing nothing” we really mean “I’m watching TV”, or “I’m surfing the net”, or “I’m just chillin’.” In Lao, “I’m doing nothing” means
that the person doing nothing is on his ass, staring into traffic glassy-eyed like a cow digesting grass, silent as a jar of ketchup, doing… nothing.
I have never- and I mean NEVER- seen a job that could be done by one person in Canada being done by less than 5 people in Lao. Example. In every city there are taxis. These taxis are actually pint-sized pickups with loud, stuttering engines and two rows of seats in the bed. They are called tuk-tuks.
Everywhere you go, you see rows of tuk-tuks sitting there, doing… nothing. Their drivers are napping in the back. Their friends are napping with them. I have seen tuk-ruks draped with as many as four Lao in various positions of unconsciousness. This brings me to one conclusion (Besides the obvious one that Lao are lazy and can’t be bothered to drive around looking for fares. Homie don’t play that.): about three-four Lao share one tuk-tuk and take turns driving people around.
This boggles the mind. If three or four people share one vehicle, what the FUCK is it sitting there with all of its co-owners snoring on its seats? Shouldn’t they be taking turns with the vehicle earning money to feed their families? But clearly, Homie don’t play that.
This is perhaps an exaggeration. I have been hassled to the point of rage by tuk-tuk drivers whose only knowledge of the English language consists of: “Hey you! Where you go?” Sometimes, they yell: “Hello? Tuk-tuk?” and occasionally, they spice it up with: “Tuk-tuk! Hello?” So even when Homie comes out to play, he annoys the hell out of me.
You just can’t win with Sean, but you all know that.
Oh fuck. At one point, Amber and I were on an island in the south of Laos called Don Det. It was a scorching day, and we decided to rent kayaks and paddle down the Mekong river. When we got to the kayak rental shop, there were two guys snoring it up, stretched out on the ground. It was 11 in the morning.
I yelled at them: “SA-BAI-DEE!” This means “HEL-LOOO!”
Nothing.
I yelled at them twice more, before one of them opened his eyes. He didn’t even sit up. Here were two customers, standing in front of him, wanting to pay him greenbacks, and all he would have to do was get up, haul two kayaks off the racks, and pocket our cash.
But no. Buddy Lao stared at me. I pointed at a kayak. He shook his head, put his head down, and closed his eyes. The message was clear as a summer day: Homie don’t play that.
WHOOOOO-HOOOA. I have so many examples of how lazy these people are that I’m just going to quit.
Anyway, I have been so bombarded with sights and sounds and experiences that they are all blending together. But I have one good one: the Border Run.
A “border run” is a term, one of many, for crossing a border. Border runs are fun, but they are also taxing upon both the wallet and the patience. This is because everyone, from the bus drivers to the customs officers to the “guides” at the borders, conspires to cheat the traveller at the border crossings of as much money as possible.
The logic, of course, is impeccable. In the city, the traveller has his or her bearings. He has a map, he has numerous sources of information, and more modes of transport than he can shoot at (you have no idea how much I’ve fantasized about gunning down a tuk-tuk driver). But at the border, there is limited options for the traveller. He’s entering a new country, he has no
idea how to get from A to B, and there are few sources of info and transport. Those who provide these services know they have a monopoly… so they do what all monopolized markets do. They raise prices.
We took a bus from Pakse, in Laos, to the border with Cambodia. We intended to get to the Lao border town of Vung Kham, but before we could get there, a minivan stopped our bus and told us they would transport us to the border… for free.
This did not appear as suspicious as it now sounds. The bus we were on (a larger tuk-tuk that was packed like a cattle-car with vegetables, Lao peasants, vomiting infants, and a crazy toothless lady) stopped for the minivan and all involved acted like it was a regular occurance at the border.
There were five of us travellers, Amber, I, and three Americans: Katie, Val and Kenny. We got to a tumbleweed outpost on the other side of the border, a Cambodian shanty-shithole called Dong Cralaw, where we had to, of course, bribe the customs officials with a luxury tax. We had already done this on the Lao side, so it was just part of the routine.
Then the minivan-man, who spoke FABULOUS English (of course), after a long bit of primiminary nice talk, produces a swarthy little fuck-face compatriot with equally great English, who turned out to work with him for the same transport company. The offer: they would take us to Phnom Penh, 11 hours away, for US $30 each.
Of course, we laughed at them, and they kept having at us. It was only after a long bit of banter that I realized that we were stranded in the middle of nowhere. We were in a border outpost, surrounded by jungle, with 5 km of potholed road leading back to Laos and 50 km of gravel road going to the next Cambodian town. There were no alternative forms of transportation, as there would have been if THE BUS WE HAD BEEN ON HAD BEEN ALLOWED TO REACH VUNG KHAM.
These motherfuckers had deliberately picked us up BEFORE we reached Vung Kham, driven us to Buttfuck Nowhere, and given us an ultimatum: pay our exorbitant price, or we strand you. And of course, they never said as much. They kept smiling and acting like they were doing us a huge favour, and when Katie and Val got American and started yelling about how they were cheating us- oh, my- you should have SEEN the hurt on their faces. That swarthy man could not have been as sad if I had fucked his mother with a knife.
We got the price down to 25 and started driving. After an hour, they told us that we had to change cars (the pretext was crossing a river… another car would meet us on the other side). The other car, instead of a minvan, was a clanking claptrap of a tuk-tuk half filled with bales of rope.
We had no choice. We got in, of course, and at least had the presence of mind to make an adventure of it. Katie rolled a joint the size of my pinkie, Kenny got out his guitar, and we sang along to Sublime, Tom Petty, and Blind Melon as we churned down the dirt roads. In retrospect, I would not have traded that experience at all.
We got to a town, where the driver swore that there was another minivan waiting to take us the rest of the way. The minivan- I have pictures- was the kind of vehicle that Canadian bums would refuse to sleep in. It was also already full. The back was stuffed with backpacks, and one of the travellers who had been sold a seat on it before the five of us had showed up told us
there were already 10 people sitting inside, with another 4 locals sitting ON TOP of the van. The seats were riddled with holes, there were cockroaches on the floors, and a can of Raid sat prominently on the seat.
Val and Katie got American again and absolutely harangued the people in charge of the situation. In the end, we were granted hostel rooms for that night, and free tickets to Phnom Penh on the bus the next day. As the minivan pulled away, it had to be push-started by four people shoving from behind.
The bus was far better. When we got to Phnom Penh, about 50 tuk-tuk drivers were horded outside the bus, shouting for our business. I suddenly felt like I knew how movie stars feel when assaulted by papparazzi. But- oh MY GOD- the tuk-tuk drivers were herded back by two cops with truncheons, which they used to BEAT the drivers. Oh, it was wild. It was mostly in the knees. I also say a fight between two drivers. Come on boys, you don’t have to fight over me.
Ok, the email is clearly too long. I’m going to see the Killing Fields tomorrow, where they have 8,000 skulls neatly piled up… all victims of the Khmer Rouge.
Friday, June 2, 2006
Indochina 2006: Little Mountain Town
Vang Vieng is this backwater, dirt road Vegas town equidistant from Luang Prabang, where I was a couple of days ago, and Vientiane, the capital, where I am now. It’s a dusty little place, filled with hostels, restaurants, and little hole-in-the-wall joints selling pizzas with chopped-up magic mushrooms sprinkled liberally over the surfaces.
Vang Vieng is dwarfed- and I mean absolutely overpowered- by surrounding limestone mountains that look exactly like the ones on paintings one finds hanging in Chinese households. The sharp contrast between the Wild West atmosphere of the town itself- bars, unpaved dirty-brown dirt streets, peeling paint, tin-sheet roofs, all interspersed by flashing bar signs and
street vendors selling banana pancakes- and the almost mythical, mist-shrouded heights beyond it, gave me, for the very first time this trip, that weird “Hey, Dorothy, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore” feeling.
Firefly fans. It’s one of those Chinese inhabited outer colonies. The spaceship is parked around the corner. Have a pizza and a beer, rob the local bank, and off you go. Looked exactly like it.
Amber and I had met two other travellers who had accompanied us there: Nate, an Edmontonian who didn’t really care about the Oilers, and Brandon, a Chinese New Zealander with a fabulous Kiwi accent. We shared four “Happy” pizzas- yes, that is what they call them here; you can also have “Happy” shakes- and an hour later I was so fucked I could barely talk. My brain was racing at Einsteinian speed, and I, of course, solved the mysteries of the universe, knew that I had solved them, knew that I would not remember it in the morning, and knew that I would resent not remembering it in the morning, and thus proceeded to fantasize about what I would do if I were a god.
I knew that my companions were equally stoned when we started playing cards- Big 2, actually- and Nate dealt about 12 cards face-up before noticing. The rest of us giggled hysterically.
At one point, it started raining, and I swear that clouds in Laos give up the most ground-pounding torrents on the face of the earth. The dirt road outside fairly swam with mud afterwards- but at the time, stoned like St. Stephen, all I could do was watch the rain pound outside as, across the street, dozens of backpackers lounged about and watched TV in a bar that constantly ran and re-ran Friends episodes.
Oh, Friends. There are 2 or 3 bars like this. They have a large number of low tables set up on platforms- think of tables at sushi restaurants- and TVs set up… that ETERNALLY run Friends episodes. I think that if you stayed at Vang Vieng for a week, you could watch the entirety of the Friends TV series.
What a weird little corner of the world.
Other cool stuff…. I swam in a waterfall, went behind the curtain, and had a sweet view of the surroundings through the water.
I also visited Xieng Khuan, or Buddha Park, where a sculptor carved out a number of disturbingly frightening demons and deities from Hindu and Buddhist mythology. Among them were a three-headed elephant mounted by an imperious-looking spearman, numerous depictions of the Hindu goddess of death, Kali, ten arms and all, and what can only be deescribed as the Mouth of Hell.
The Mouth of Hell is this gourd shaped building, with a curious looking stone tree on the top that looks like that hellish tree from Sleepy Hollow, and an entrance that was a demon’s open mouth. Yes. If you can imagine crawling through a demon’s mouth to get inside a building crowned by the Sleepy Hollow tree…
Inside the building are statues on three different levels. The top level has warriors, and gods, ornately decked out- though the statues are crumbling and chipped by now. The second is similar. The third is filled with scenes from hell, with skeletons, demons, and tortured-looking victims scattered about and hanging from the ceiling in various poses of grotesquery.
But nothing fazed me as much as this creepy-little beggar child that accosted me INSIDE the Mouth of Hell. Look, I was fazed by the dank ghostliness of my surroundings, and suddenly, this ragged little child stumbles out of the darkness and FOLLOWS me around inside the Mouth of Hell, mumbling incoherently.
I became quickly convinced that this child was the spawn of Satan. What kind of child lives inside a hollowed out stone depiction of the Hindu hells? In a somewhat crazed flight of imagination, I wondered if he was some capricious little spirit taken human form just to hassle mortals for sport. If was like something out of a Neil Gaiman novel. I’m going to use this in a book someday. I mean, serously. If you were some deity, wouldn’t you turn into a little beggar child, hang out in a garden full of stone mythological carvings, and stare precociously at strangers, creeping them out?
Whoo. I feel like bathing in holy water or something. I just crossed myself for luck.
Alright, I’m off. Cheers to all, and I shall next contact you from ANGKOR WAT.
Vang Vieng is dwarfed- and I mean absolutely overpowered- by surrounding limestone mountains that look exactly like the ones on paintings one finds hanging in Chinese households. The sharp contrast between the Wild West atmosphere of the town itself- bars, unpaved dirty-brown dirt streets, peeling paint, tin-sheet roofs, all interspersed by flashing bar signs and
street vendors selling banana pancakes- and the almost mythical, mist-shrouded heights beyond it, gave me, for the very first time this trip, that weird “Hey, Dorothy, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore” feeling.
Firefly fans. It’s one of those Chinese inhabited outer colonies. The spaceship is parked around the corner. Have a pizza and a beer, rob the local bank, and off you go. Looked exactly like it.
Amber and I had met two other travellers who had accompanied us there: Nate, an Edmontonian who didn’t really care about the Oilers, and Brandon, a Chinese New Zealander with a fabulous Kiwi accent. We shared four “Happy” pizzas- yes, that is what they call them here; you can also have “Happy” shakes- and an hour later I was so fucked I could barely talk. My brain was racing at Einsteinian speed, and I, of course, solved the mysteries of the universe, knew that I had solved them, knew that I would not remember it in the morning, and knew that I would resent not remembering it in the morning, and thus proceeded to fantasize about what I would do if I were a god.
I knew that my companions were equally stoned when we started playing cards- Big 2, actually- and Nate dealt about 12 cards face-up before noticing. The rest of us giggled hysterically.
At one point, it started raining, and I swear that clouds in Laos give up the most ground-pounding torrents on the face of the earth. The dirt road outside fairly swam with mud afterwards- but at the time, stoned like St. Stephen, all I could do was watch the rain pound outside as, across the street, dozens of backpackers lounged about and watched TV in a bar that constantly ran and re-ran Friends episodes.
Oh, Friends. There are 2 or 3 bars like this. They have a large number of low tables set up on platforms- think of tables at sushi restaurants- and TVs set up… that ETERNALLY run Friends episodes. I think that if you stayed at Vang Vieng for a week, you could watch the entirety of the Friends TV series.
What a weird little corner of the world.
Other cool stuff…. I swam in a waterfall, went behind the curtain, and had a sweet view of the surroundings through the water.
I also visited Xieng Khuan, or Buddha Park, where a sculptor carved out a number of disturbingly frightening demons and deities from Hindu and Buddhist mythology. Among them were a three-headed elephant mounted by an imperious-looking spearman, numerous depictions of the Hindu goddess of death, Kali, ten arms and all, and what can only be deescribed as the Mouth of Hell.
The Mouth of Hell is this gourd shaped building, with a curious looking stone tree on the top that looks like that hellish tree from Sleepy Hollow, and an entrance that was a demon’s open mouth. Yes. If you can imagine crawling through a demon’s mouth to get inside a building crowned by the Sleepy Hollow tree…
Inside the building are statues on three different levels. The top level has warriors, and gods, ornately decked out- though the statues are crumbling and chipped by now. The second is similar. The third is filled with scenes from hell, with skeletons, demons, and tortured-looking victims scattered about and hanging from the ceiling in various poses of grotesquery.
But nothing fazed me as much as this creepy-little beggar child that accosted me INSIDE the Mouth of Hell. Look, I was fazed by the dank ghostliness of my surroundings, and suddenly, this ragged little child stumbles out of the darkness and FOLLOWS me around inside the Mouth of Hell, mumbling incoherently.
I became quickly convinced that this child was the spawn of Satan. What kind of child lives inside a hollowed out stone depiction of the Hindu hells? In a somewhat crazed flight of imagination, I wondered if he was some capricious little spirit taken human form just to hassle mortals for sport. If was like something out of a Neil Gaiman novel. I’m going to use this in a book someday. I mean, serously. If you were some deity, wouldn’t you turn into a little beggar child, hang out in a garden full of stone mythological carvings, and stare precociously at strangers, creeping them out?
Whoo. I feel like bathing in holy water or something. I just crossed myself for luck.
Alright, I’m off. Cheers to all, and I shall next contact you from ANGKOR WAT.
Sunday, May 28, 2006
Indochina 2006: Organ Markets and Human Zoos
Some sights have delayed reaction times. You see something, and it passes you by; you go: “Oh, hey!” and keep right on walking. Two nights later, you sit bolt upright in your bed and something in your mind clicks about that previous sight.
In Bangkok, I saw about five different men with white gauze patches over their left eyes. The first time, I thought: “Ah, what a klutz. He walked into a lamp-post.” The second time, I chuckled… but for some inexplicable reason, nothing in my mind made the connection between the first one-eyed man and the second. The third time and onward, I wondered if there was a secret Muay Thai Fight Club in which the favoured finishing maneuver was an Ong Bak knee to the left eye.
It was only last night, wandering the lantern-lit night market in Luang Prabang, laos, fully 8 days after Bangkok, that I realized that these men had sold their left eyes to the black market organ trade.
Does anyone else find this creepy? It’s pretty thinly veiled… you have random men, between 25 and 65, all impoverished, poorly dressed individuals in tattered sandals or ghetto bikes, each with a neat gauze patch on the same eye. I’m not sure why I did not see it before, and I cannot believe that the explanations for these one eyed jacks that kept me unthinkingly satisfied before were so utterly inadequate. I mean, really. He walked into a lamp-post? Got hit by a soccer ball? Muay Thai Fight Club? Come on, Sean… your IQ is higher than this.
But no. There is a thriving organs trade in South East Asia… Asia in general. The poor sell their organs in the backstreets to organs merchants for some pissant amount of cash. They go to a clinic up behind a pawn shop, their eye or kidney gets excised, and boom.
I’ve read about this in the papers. Whoo.
We took a two day trip down the Mekong, and we were surrounded by primieval jungle rolling up fog-shrouded highlands the entire way. The forests in BC are all made up of tall, straight trees…. in ranks like tin soldiers, disciplined like an army on parade. Not so the jungles here. It looks like something out of Jurassic Park- unruly, entangled masses of vines, roots, branches, and lush vegetation, through which you could not see past more than two metres. The pictures we have don’t do it justice, and neither will I- but it would not have looked out of place if pterodactyls swooped out of the heights, or if a big diplodocus crashed out of the trees and bent its long neck into the river to drink. We didn’t see any dinosaurs, unfortunately, but there were little Laotian villages perched on the cliffs and shores as we went by… little thatched huts on stilts inhabited by men and women in stereotypical rice-farmer conical hats.
Also, I now have an idea of what animals at the zoo feel like.
I was at a Karen village a few days ago… the Karen are a “hill tribe” people in northern Thailand. Our tour group went up there to gawk at them and take photographs as they painstakingly put together colourful scarves and tapestries on looms that they, on average, sold for two dollars. Each would take 3 days to make. 3 DAYS, and sold for 2 dollars.
As I watched the Karen go about their lives, which now revolved around growing rice for self-sustenance and making souvenirs for rich westerners, I got an uneasy feeling in my stomach. For a while, I could not put my finger on it. Then I realized that these Karen were like animals in an enclosure. I could almost imagine our tour guide putting on a safari hat and bellowing in a ringmaster voice: “NOW! Observe the Karen in his natural habitat!”
But of course, the Karen were not. They were in as fabricated an environment as a submarine. They were in their lands, of course. They lived in their own houses, bore their children, grew their rice. But their world is changing, and the one in which they live is one of limbo. They are an impoverished people dangling between assimilation in the big city, which they must move to in order to gain a proper education as the traditional terrace-farming life becomes increasingly unfeasible, and remaining in their little mountain villages, which cannot endure.
So now the Karen live in a situation that balances the old world with the new. They have their lands and their rice and their arts. But they must now commercialize their traditional lifestyles in order to get more money- hence, they must bastardize their arts to sell them to white people, and they must allow foreigners to trek through the jungles and tramp through their villages, “Ooooing” and “Aaaaahing” at their children, dogs, huts, and lives, the way small children murmer upon seeing polar bears or tiger cubs for the first time.
Imagine. The Karen operate with the outside world through Thai liaisons- Thai tour guides. They themselves know little of it. They don’t understand economics, and they don’t understand the west. They don’t know why hordes of sweating foreigners would want to descend upon them, but someone important has decreed that it will happen and so it does. And they are told to go about their daily lives so that these foreigners might observe them, but oh, by the way, would you please sell them some arts and crafts, put up a Pepsi drinks stand at the entrance of your village, and let them take pictures of you? Yes, we know you’re breast-feeding your baby. Look, those people with cameras don’t mind. After all, it’s perfectly natural. Go ahead, smile for them.
What would a gorilla say if he could speak? Stuck in an false environment that approximates his original home but is just alien enough to make him uncomfortable, then asked to behave naturally, as if that were possible, while large numbers of visibly different beings (us) disrupt his life with loud noises and strange behaviour.
How is this different from the Karen?
It made me damned nervous, and I was relieved when I left.
Also. Funny advertisement in Laos: “Drink like a fish for the price of water.” My god, I LAUGHED. It’s the kind of witticism that can only be constructed by someone with a poor command of English. But it’s brilliant.
Congrats to all of you who have graduated…you must have had your ceremonies by now. How did it feel chucking your hats in the air? Must have been surreal, eh? I demand the following:
Those of you who graduated in science: Develop faster-than-light space travel, or cure cancer. Those of you who graduated in economics: Go fuck yourselves. Those of you who graduated in engineering: sharks with laser beams. I will also accept flying aircraft carriers, or a device that allows me to read minds. And my fellow artsies: go out and change the fucking world.
Cheers to all.
In Bangkok, I saw about five different men with white gauze patches over their left eyes. The first time, I thought: “Ah, what a klutz. He walked into a lamp-post.” The second time, I chuckled… but for some inexplicable reason, nothing in my mind made the connection between the first one-eyed man and the second. The third time and onward, I wondered if there was a secret Muay Thai Fight Club in which the favoured finishing maneuver was an Ong Bak knee to the left eye.
It was only last night, wandering the lantern-lit night market in Luang Prabang, laos, fully 8 days after Bangkok, that I realized that these men had sold their left eyes to the black market organ trade.
Does anyone else find this creepy? It’s pretty thinly veiled… you have random men, between 25 and 65, all impoverished, poorly dressed individuals in tattered sandals or ghetto bikes, each with a neat gauze patch on the same eye. I’m not sure why I did not see it before, and I cannot believe that the explanations for these one eyed jacks that kept me unthinkingly satisfied before were so utterly inadequate. I mean, really. He walked into a lamp-post? Got hit by a soccer ball? Muay Thai Fight Club? Come on, Sean… your IQ is higher than this.
But no. There is a thriving organs trade in South East Asia… Asia in general. The poor sell their organs in the backstreets to organs merchants for some pissant amount of cash. They go to a clinic up behind a pawn shop, their eye or kidney gets excised, and boom.
I’ve read about this in the papers. Whoo.
We took a two day trip down the Mekong, and we were surrounded by primieval jungle rolling up fog-shrouded highlands the entire way. The forests in BC are all made up of tall, straight trees…. in ranks like tin soldiers, disciplined like an army on parade. Not so the jungles here. It looks like something out of Jurassic Park- unruly, entangled masses of vines, roots, branches, and lush vegetation, through which you could not see past more than two metres. The pictures we have don’t do it justice, and neither will I- but it would not have looked out of place if pterodactyls swooped out of the heights, or if a big diplodocus crashed out of the trees and bent its long neck into the river to drink. We didn’t see any dinosaurs, unfortunately, but there were little Laotian villages perched on the cliffs and shores as we went by… little thatched huts on stilts inhabited by men and women in stereotypical rice-farmer conical hats.
Also, I now have an idea of what animals at the zoo feel like.
I was at a Karen village a few days ago… the Karen are a “hill tribe” people in northern Thailand. Our tour group went up there to gawk at them and take photographs as they painstakingly put together colourful scarves and tapestries on looms that they, on average, sold for two dollars. Each would take 3 days to make. 3 DAYS, and sold for 2 dollars.
As I watched the Karen go about their lives, which now revolved around growing rice for self-sustenance and making souvenirs for rich westerners, I got an uneasy feeling in my stomach. For a while, I could not put my finger on it. Then I realized that these Karen were like animals in an enclosure. I could almost imagine our tour guide putting on a safari hat and bellowing in a ringmaster voice: “NOW! Observe the Karen in his natural habitat!”
But of course, the Karen were not. They were in as fabricated an environment as a submarine. They were in their lands, of course. They lived in their own houses, bore their children, grew their rice. But their world is changing, and the one in which they live is one of limbo. They are an impoverished people dangling between assimilation in the big city, which they must move to in order to gain a proper education as the traditional terrace-farming life becomes increasingly unfeasible, and remaining in their little mountain villages, which cannot endure.
So now the Karen live in a situation that balances the old world with the new. They have their lands and their rice and their arts. But they must now commercialize their traditional lifestyles in order to get more money- hence, they must bastardize their arts to sell them to white people, and they must allow foreigners to trek through the jungles and tramp through their villages, “Ooooing” and “Aaaaahing” at their children, dogs, huts, and lives, the way small children murmer upon seeing polar bears or tiger cubs for the first time.
Imagine. The Karen operate with the outside world through Thai liaisons- Thai tour guides. They themselves know little of it. They don’t understand economics, and they don’t understand the west. They don’t know why hordes of sweating foreigners would want to descend upon them, but someone important has decreed that it will happen and so it does. And they are told to go about their daily lives so that these foreigners might observe them, but oh, by the way, would you please sell them some arts and crafts, put up a Pepsi drinks stand at the entrance of your village, and let them take pictures of you? Yes, we know you’re breast-feeding your baby. Look, those people with cameras don’t mind. After all, it’s perfectly natural. Go ahead, smile for them.
What would a gorilla say if he could speak? Stuck in an false environment that approximates his original home but is just alien enough to make him uncomfortable, then asked to behave naturally, as if that were possible, while large numbers of visibly different beings (us) disrupt his life with loud noises and strange behaviour.
How is this different from the Karen?
It made me damned nervous, and I was relieved when I left.
Also. Funny advertisement in Laos: “Drink like a fish for the price of water.” My god, I LAUGHED. It’s the kind of witticism that can only be constructed by someone with a poor command of English. But it’s brilliant.
Congrats to all of you who have graduated…you must have had your ceremonies by now. How did it feel chucking your hats in the air? Must have been surreal, eh? I demand the following:
Those of you who graduated in science: Develop faster-than-light space travel, or cure cancer. Those of you who graduated in economics: Go fuck yourselves. Those of you who graduated in engineering: sharks with laser beams. I will also accept flying aircraft carriers, or a device that allows me to read minds. And my fellow artsies: go out and change the fucking world.
Cheers to all.
Thursday, May 25, 2006
Indochina 2006: Around The Riverbend
Nothing much to report. In a few hours, I will be on a bus to Chiang Rai, and from there on to the Thailand-Laos border to begin a two day journey up the Mekong river to the Laotian valley town of Luang Prabang. Luang Prabang's architecture is apparently a chaming fusion of French and native design couched into a bend of the Mekong, and I am quite looking forward to seeing it. You will not hear from me until then... it should be 3-4 days.
Yesterday, Amber and I went on a tour of the Chiang Mai countryside. It was a well-travelled tourist route, with a conspicuously touristy itinerary. For those of you who plan on doing South East Asia in the future, some advice:
1) If you want a more "local trek experience", without all the touristy bells and whistles, go up to Pai or Chiang Rai (Chiang Rai and Chiang Mai are different places... it is not a typo.)
2) Having a larger tour group on a well-travelled route minimizes your chances of getting robbed while on the trek.
Our group was seven strong: me, Amber, a prematurely-balding German from Stuttgart with the very German name of Claas Wiesel, three Indian Brits named Risha, Aisha, and Narisha who were utter carbon copies of each other, down to their 'Bend It Like Beckham" accents, braids, and flighty teenage mannerisms, and Rich, a Filipino-American from New York whose very un-New York sunny disposition was most likely due to the fact that he was gay as a basket of strawberries.
Our tour guide was a flat-nosed man named Noi who reminded me uncannily of Zhu Bajie from the Chinese epic Journey to the West. For you white people, this means he looked like a walking pig. He spoke fair English and on numerous occasions, displayed a wit that surprised me.
We did two cool things on the trek.
1) We rode elephants. Elephants are fabulous creatures. In a certain way, they are almost cute, slow, plodding, dum-dee-dum-dee-dum animals. Very Jamaican in their mannerisms- they seem to be on permanent island-time. They eat constantly and methodically, and shit with the same casual ease and regularity. Each elephant had a platform strapped across its back, which sat two people. The handler, or mahout, sat atop the elephant's head with a sharp prong that he used to indicate direction to the beast, while making incomprehensible monosyllabic grunts which presumably meant "Go!" or "Mush!"
We named our elephant Tinker Bell, and the name was strangely fitting. I'm not sure why. Elephants are strangely sure-footed, and have their own practical grace- their hind feet always tread in the spots made by their front feet. The Thais have used elephants for centuries as transports, symbols of their culture, and as instruments of war. When you sit on top of an elephant, you understand why. I mean, really. These boys can flatten trees. I'd totally go to war on one of these guys- although ideally, I wouldn't go to war at all.
2) We went bamboo rafting down rapids. This is sketchier than it sounds, and yet, not all that unsafe. Bamboo rafts are pretty self explanatory. About 10 \ stout 20-ft long poles are lashed together. Two sit in the middle, and two others, each with a long pole for propelling and guiding the craft, stand on either end. The craft goes with the current downstream, so the poles are mainly used to prevent the raft from hitting rocks and going into overly large swells. We had two rafts. Amber and I in the middle of one, with Rich poling at the back and a native at the front. The second raft had the three
Indian Brits in the middle, and Claas ze German at ze back, and ze native at ze front.
We had no life jackets. When I realized this, I sketched mildly. I know a tree-planter who drowned in Prince George when he went canoeing without a jacket. But, what the fuck ever... we ain't come this far, right?
Best decision ever. I have never had that much fun- well, that's an exaggeration, but it was a riot. The raft floated half-underwater, and the swells from the rapids simply blanketed us after a while, so we were completely drenched. On top of that, after a little bit, the sky gave up a torrential downpour. The river was lined with verdant greenery- incredibly
lush- and the water was a suitably murky-brown that got churned into frothy white around the rapids... and when we went through those... It's one thing to do so on a kayak, and another entirely to chance rapids on a sketchy-ass raft that is already half-submerged and propelled by a chuckling guide whose greatest wish is probably to "accidentally' tip the raft and make a group of deep-fried foreigners eat river water.
But the best part about the rafting was the reactions of our fellow companions. Rich was one of the pole-men, and he was inept. I mean, fucking incompetent. I did not begrudge him this at all, as I would likely have done as poorly in his place. But Rich was utterly confused, wondering aloud what he should do with his pole, and gasping every time a branch hit him. Claas was also a pole-man, and he was game; tidily efficient in a very German way- a quick study. The three Princess Jasmine clones were hilarious. They were completely unprepared for getting drenched, and were just so... inappropriately dainty. They screeched and howled in a manner that was horrified in both a genuine and exaggerated way. The two native pole-men had great fun with them, drenching them with sprays of water by slamming their poles into the water next to them.
Well, I'm off. Also, my pee has regenerative qualities. The camera works again. Why? Who understands the ways of technology? The Machine works in mysterious ways.
Yesterday, Amber and I went on a tour of the Chiang Mai countryside. It was a well-travelled tourist route, with a conspicuously touristy itinerary. For those of you who plan on doing South East Asia in the future, some advice:
1) If you want a more "local trek experience", without all the touristy bells and whistles, go up to Pai or Chiang Rai (Chiang Rai and Chiang Mai are different places... it is not a typo.)
2) Having a larger tour group on a well-travelled route minimizes your chances of getting robbed while on the trek.
Our group was seven strong: me, Amber, a prematurely-balding German from Stuttgart with the very German name of Claas Wiesel, three Indian Brits named Risha, Aisha, and Narisha who were utter carbon copies of each other, down to their 'Bend It Like Beckham" accents, braids, and flighty teenage mannerisms, and Rich, a Filipino-American from New York whose very un-New York sunny disposition was most likely due to the fact that he was gay as a basket of strawberries.
Our tour guide was a flat-nosed man named Noi who reminded me uncannily of Zhu Bajie from the Chinese epic Journey to the West. For you white people, this means he looked like a walking pig. He spoke fair English and on numerous occasions, displayed a wit that surprised me.
We did two cool things on the trek.
1) We rode elephants. Elephants are fabulous creatures. In a certain way, they are almost cute, slow, plodding, dum-dee-dum-dee-dum animals. Very Jamaican in their mannerisms- they seem to be on permanent island-time. They eat constantly and methodically, and shit with the same casual ease and regularity. Each elephant had a platform strapped across its back, which sat two people. The handler, or mahout, sat atop the elephant's head with a sharp prong that he used to indicate direction to the beast, while making incomprehensible monosyllabic grunts which presumably meant "Go!" or "Mush!"
We named our elephant Tinker Bell, and the name was strangely fitting. I'm not sure why. Elephants are strangely sure-footed, and have their own practical grace- their hind feet always tread in the spots made by their front feet. The Thais have used elephants for centuries as transports, symbols of their culture, and as instruments of war. When you sit on top of an elephant, you understand why. I mean, really. These boys can flatten trees. I'd totally go to war on one of these guys- although ideally, I wouldn't go to war at all.
2) We went bamboo rafting down rapids. This is sketchier than it sounds, and yet, not all that unsafe. Bamboo rafts are pretty self explanatory. About 10 \ stout 20-ft long poles are lashed together. Two sit in the middle, and two others, each with a long pole for propelling and guiding the craft, stand on either end. The craft goes with the current downstream, so the poles are mainly used to prevent the raft from hitting rocks and going into overly large swells. We had two rafts. Amber and I in the middle of one, with Rich poling at the back and a native at the front. The second raft had the three
Indian Brits in the middle, and Claas ze German at ze back, and ze native at ze front.
We had no life jackets. When I realized this, I sketched mildly. I know a tree-planter who drowned in Prince George when he went canoeing without a jacket. But, what the fuck ever... we ain't come this far, right?
Best decision ever. I have never had that much fun- well, that's an exaggeration, but it was a riot. The raft floated half-underwater, and the swells from the rapids simply blanketed us after a while, so we were completely drenched. On top of that, after a little bit, the sky gave up a torrential downpour. The river was lined with verdant greenery- incredibly
lush- and the water was a suitably murky-brown that got churned into frothy white around the rapids... and when we went through those... It's one thing to do so on a kayak, and another entirely to chance rapids on a sketchy-ass raft that is already half-submerged and propelled by a chuckling guide whose greatest wish is probably to "accidentally' tip the raft and make a group of deep-fried foreigners eat river water.
But the best part about the rafting was the reactions of our fellow companions. Rich was one of the pole-men, and he was inept. I mean, fucking incompetent. I did not begrudge him this at all, as I would likely have done as poorly in his place. But Rich was utterly confused, wondering aloud what he should do with his pole, and gasping every time a branch hit him. Claas was also a pole-man, and he was game; tidily efficient in a very German way- a quick study. The three Princess Jasmine clones were hilarious. They were completely unprepared for getting drenched, and were just so... inappropriately dainty. They screeched and howled in a manner that was horrified in both a genuine and exaggerated way. The two native pole-men had great fun with them, drenching them with sprays of water by slamming their poles into the water next to them.
Well, I'm off. Also, my pee has regenerative qualities. The camera works again. Why? Who understands the ways of technology? The Machine works in mysterious ways.
Tuesday, May 23, 2006
Indochina 2006: Hum Lai! Hum Lai!
Yesterday, I dropped our $300 camera into a toilet bowl of my own urine. It no longer works.
In the aftermath of the incident, I felt like tearing my shirt off, clawing my eyes out, or doing SOMETHING to tangibly express how furiously befuddled I was that I had ruined our camera by dropping it into a urinal. I cursed God and I cursed myself- then I cursed God again. If I wasn’t already bald, I would have torn part of my hairline out. In the end, I settled for being a complete grump to Amber, and fell asleep thinking about how I’m going to get the money to pay rent when I get back to Canada.
The sheer combination of factors that had to take place in order to allow me to drown our camera in piss is almost proof of the existence of God. I had a backpack over my shoulder. One armed. It had the camera and some toilet paper near the top. I did my business, washed my hands, and decided to blow my nose. I reached around for the toilet paper. It wasn’t there. I rummaged further… and as I did so, my body twisted and angled around so that the mouth of the pack dangled above the open bowl.
As the camera dislodged and plunged in ultra-painfully-slow-motion towards the toilet, all I could do, in the immortal words of Turk in Snatch, was “freeze, and pull a stupid face”.
This would never happen in Canada. First, I would have had toilet paper readily available by the side of the cubicle. But in Thailand, you are your own TP supply. Second, normally, the camera is in my pocket. It was only in the backpack because we had been riding the most ghetto penny-farthing bikes around ancient Khmer and Thai temple ruins all day, and I didn’t want the camera to fall out. Thirdly, in Canada, I would not have needed to blow my nose, because in Canada, the particles in the air and water don’t give me the nose-ticklies.
Instead, I must now buy a new $300 camera, and I will never take another piss without becoming unreasonably angry.
So, I will now describe some cool stuff I saw.
1) Bangkok sucks. The Thais call Bangkok “Krung Thep”, which means “City of Angels”. However, unless “Angels” is actually spelt “P-O-L-L-U-T-I-O-N”, the moniker is highly unaccurate. The heat and humidity is oppressive. Tyrannic, even. Reign-of-motherfucking-terror-concentration-camp-tyrannic. It suffocates you like an iron maiden; it bathes your face, your body, crawls up into your clothing and down your lungs where it bitch-slaps your alveoli. The pollution is Agent Orange-lethal. Mexico-City-lethal. Huge caterpillar lines of belching automobiles snake down every street- going NOWHERE fast-
you don’t understand traffic jams untill you have witnessed what I have. On the other hand, it costs me less than a buck to take transit, so why do I care that when the ice caps finally melt due to global warming, they should name some of the floods and typhoons that resullt after the Thais?
2) Ong Bak Reloaded. FUCK. I thought Italian was an irritating language. Thai. I don’t even now how to respond to it. TIM HUCK WANG CHA LONG GO PIM PO LAM WHAT THE FUCK EVER in the most nasal, yet high-pitched fairy-drone you can conceive of. You know that bitch in Ong Bak that screeches “HUM LAI! HUM LAI!” Yeah. Multiply her by 60 million.
HUM LAI! HUM LAI!
3) The Grand Palace and Ayuthaya. Okay, the Grand Palace compound in Bangkok is a straight-up wonder of the world. When I was in Europe, I thought their churches could not POSSIBLY be surpassed. But no. This race of screeching jungle moneys wrote the book on how to decorate houses of worship. The temples are topped by these soaring spires that mimic the coronets worn by their kings and royalty and decorated with patterns of porcelain, gold, and coloured stone that from afar, they look like shattered rainbows poured into the mold of a spire. Flowers, flames, horned ridges, dragon heads, garudas garlanded each spire, and I saw about 20. In one of the temples, the Temple of the Emerald Buddha, a two-ft Buddha made
of jasper sat robed in cloth of diamonds and gold surrounded by a dais so encrusted with gold that in the dark lighting of the temple, the sunlight bouncing off the gold looked like fires in a cave.
Oh. They also change the Buddha’s clothing. He was wearing his summer outfit. They have two other gold-and-diamond wardrobes for him, one for the rainy season, and the last for the winter season. Jesus only gets to hang nearly-naked from two planks of wood in the shape of a plus sign. Who’s getting gyped here?
Ayuthaya is the former capital of the Thais, before the City of Carbon Monoxide became it. This is because two centuries ago, the Burmese came down like a plague and flattened it. Now, around the ruins, a typically filthy Thai city has grown up around it. But the temples remain as a testament that at one point, the Thai people were useful. The gold and ivory has been looted, and many of the Buddha statues no longer have heads. Foliage grows out of the cracks of these imposing brick-red ruins of minarets and temples. Birds nest in the cracks of the walls, and pilgrims still come by to lay offerings to the half-broken remnants of the Buddha statues. We got around Ayuthaya by bike, and I can honestly say that if I had not filled the camera with piss at the end of the day, it would have been one of the most surreal and satisfying days of my life.
Now I am in Chiang Mai, the city of Bookstores. It is not even 12 am and I have seen 5 English language bookstores. Tonight I will go to a bazaar and see if the Thais can bargain any better than the Turks or if my Asian genes will triumph once again in finding sweet bargains.
In the aftermath of the incident, I felt like tearing my shirt off, clawing my eyes out, or doing SOMETHING to tangibly express how furiously befuddled I was that I had ruined our camera by dropping it into a urinal. I cursed God and I cursed myself- then I cursed God again. If I wasn’t already bald, I would have torn part of my hairline out. In the end, I settled for being a complete grump to Amber, and fell asleep thinking about how I’m going to get the money to pay rent when I get back to Canada.
The sheer combination of factors that had to take place in order to allow me to drown our camera in piss is almost proof of the existence of God. I had a backpack over my shoulder. One armed. It had the camera and some toilet paper near the top. I did my business, washed my hands, and decided to blow my nose. I reached around for the toilet paper. It wasn’t there. I rummaged further… and as I did so, my body twisted and angled around so that the mouth of the pack dangled above the open bowl.
As the camera dislodged and plunged in ultra-painfully-slow-motion towards the toilet, all I could do, in the immortal words of Turk in Snatch, was “freeze, and pull a stupid face”.
This would never happen in Canada. First, I would have had toilet paper readily available by the side of the cubicle. But in Thailand, you are your own TP supply. Second, normally, the camera is in my pocket. It was only in the backpack because we had been riding the most ghetto penny-farthing bikes around ancient Khmer and Thai temple ruins all day, and I didn’t want the camera to fall out. Thirdly, in Canada, I would not have needed to blow my nose, because in Canada, the particles in the air and water don’t give me the nose-ticklies.
Instead, I must now buy a new $300 camera, and I will never take another piss without becoming unreasonably angry.
So, I will now describe some cool stuff I saw.
1) Bangkok sucks. The Thais call Bangkok “Krung Thep”, which means “City of Angels”. However, unless “Angels” is actually spelt “P-O-L-L-U-T-I-O-N”, the moniker is highly unaccurate. The heat and humidity is oppressive. Tyrannic, even. Reign-of-motherfucking-terror-concentration-camp-tyrannic. It suffocates you like an iron maiden; it bathes your face, your body, crawls up into your clothing and down your lungs where it bitch-slaps your alveoli. The pollution is Agent Orange-lethal. Mexico-City-lethal. Huge caterpillar lines of belching automobiles snake down every street- going NOWHERE fast-
you don’t understand traffic jams untill you have witnessed what I have. On the other hand, it costs me less than a buck to take transit, so why do I care that when the ice caps finally melt due to global warming, they should name some of the floods and typhoons that resullt after the Thais?
2) Ong Bak Reloaded. FUCK. I thought Italian was an irritating language. Thai. I don’t even now how to respond to it. TIM HUCK WANG CHA LONG GO PIM PO LAM WHAT THE FUCK EVER in the most nasal, yet high-pitched fairy-drone you can conceive of. You know that bitch in Ong Bak that screeches “HUM LAI! HUM LAI!” Yeah. Multiply her by 60 million.
HUM LAI! HUM LAI!
3) The Grand Palace and Ayuthaya. Okay, the Grand Palace compound in Bangkok is a straight-up wonder of the world. When I was in Europe, I thought their churches could not POSSIBLY be surpassed. But no. This race of screeching jungle moneys wrote the book on how to decorate houses of worship. The temples are topped by these soaring spires that mimic the coronets worn by their kings and royalty and decorated with patterns of porcelain, gold, and coloured stone that from afar, they look like shattered rainbows poured into the mold of a spire. Flowers, flames, horned ridges, dragon heads, garudas garlanded each spire, and I saw about 20. In one of the temples, the Temple of the Emerald Buddha, a two-ft Buddha made
of jasper sat robed in cloth of diamonds and gold surrounded by a dais so encrusted with gold that in the dark lighting of the temple, the sunlight bouncing off the gold looked like fires in a cave.
Oh. They also change the Buddha’s clothing. He was wearing his summer outfit. They have two other gold-and-diamond wardrobes for him, one for the rainy season, and the last for the winter season. Jesus only gets to hang nearly-naked from two planks of wood in the shape of a plus sign. Who’s getting gyped here?
Ayuthaya is the former capital of the Thais, before the City of Carbon Monoxide became it. This is because two centuries ago, the Burmese came down like a plague and flattened it. Now, around the ruins, a typically filthy Thai city has grown up around it. But the temples remain as a testament that at one point, the Thai people were useful. The gold and ivory has been looted, and many of the Buddha statues no longer have heads. Foliage grows out of the cracks of these imposing brick-red ruins of minarets and temples. Birds nest in the cracks of the walls, and pilgrims still come by to lay offerings to the half-broken remnants of the Buddha statues. We got around Ayuthaya by bike, and I can honestly say that if I had not filled the camera with piss at the end of the day, it would have been one of the most surreal and satisfying days of my life.
Now I am in Chiang Mai, the city of Bookstores. It is not even 12 am and I have seen 5 English language bookstores. Tonight I will go to a bazaar and see if the Thais can bargain any better than the Turks or if my Asian genes will triumph once again in finding sweet bargains.
Sunday, May 21, 2006
Indochina 2006: Deep Fried Farang
I’ll save the funnies for a couple of days from now. Instead, I’m going to give you a, by my standards, lightly cynical account of the “dark side of travelling”.
Yesterday, I got cheated so badly that even now, the shame and anger I feel over the incident is nearly unfathomable.
Amber and I were walking over to the compund of the Grand Palace, a series of temples and buildings whose spires and roofs were encrusted with gold and mosaic tiles in such intricate and extravagant patterns as to defy belief. More on this another time.
A little gap toothed old lady accosted us on the way. She was dirty, squat as a marsupial, and vaguely reminded me of a side-show attraction- very dwarf-like in her appearance and as about aesthetically pleasing. She was feeding the pidgeons… hordes of emaciated, fluttering feathered vermin- not at all like our plump specimens. She literally threw packets of bird
seed at me, instructing me to feed the birds. A pair of equally grungy street rats accosted Amber and did the same.
Some of you know doubt know what is coming next.
We threw the seed, flinging whole packets into the the air, watching the birds fly up and down. I found it fun, and of course I felt that vaguely nagging alarm in the back of my head… the one that sticks like a thorn in
your mind… that uneasy feeling that something is out of the ordinary. But I did nothing. Humans are quick to react to what they know to be familiar and damned slow to react to the new- and this situation was so novel that I simply scattered bird seed in the most amused and unthinking way.
Afterward, the lady demanded money. I had expected this. She demanded 150 Thai baht. This is about 5 US dollars- maybe less. I did NOT know this at the time… I was unused to the exchange rate and thought it amounted to 50 cents or something… my North American mind simply could not comprehend the possibility that a beggar could have the sheer audacity to demand 5 US bucks for throwing bird seed at tourists.
She saw I had 500 baht in my hand, snatched it, and told me she had change. She gave my 20 baht in return and said smugly: ” Now, you go.”
This is where my brain clicked, and in a slow, almost casual way, my brain said: “You witless son of a whore. You just got swindled by a beggar so low on the social hierarchy that you would not allow her to haul away your garbage.”
I started to bellow at her, demanding my money back. She backpeddled, giving me more and more change back, until she had given me a bunch of smaller notes back that amounted to 220 baht. But my 500 baht note was still in her hand, and I did not have the presence of mind to grab it out of her palm. I was so befuddled and shell-shocked by the entire proceedings that I could not think straight, and was happy- YES, HAPPY- to get out of the whole affair having lost 280 baht for NO REASON.
The worse part is that I retreated from her. Yes. I turned my back on a woman who had CHEATED ME and LEFT. If I told my father this, he would demand that I change my skin colour (probably by ripping it off with his own hands) and disown me. I’m not even sure why. Maybe it was because we were being hounded into utter submission by three filthy street people who kept
demanding MORE money from us. Maybe it was because I thought I had already been robbed, knew it, and decided to fold my cards while I could. Maybe I was afraid of being stabbed or clawed by someone with possible HIV. But I was accosted with an infantile scheme, lost money, and ran away.
Oh. I know a lot of you think I’m rather dreamy and am prone to getting gyped in things like this. Amber fell for it too. She lost 400 baht.
The thing about the 3rd world and the dark side of travelling is this. To the locals, you are a walking wallet. You can allow this to sully your experience of a new culture and locale, or you can deal with it as a simple byproduct of a free-market world where people like us own the machine and people like them turn the cogs. We have turned them into paupers, low wage labour, and souvenir shop owners, and then we come and take pictures of their monuments and dare to object when their climate is too hot or their beggars are too unsightly.
I am slowly getting used to the fact that “friendliness” in non OECD countries means that the people being “friendly” are trying to get your money- often in very unscrupulous ways. When I get back, I will detail the scams that businesses try to lay on you, without a HINT of shame or self-reproachment in their demeanor, just because you have a backpack and therefore are from places with money.
This is something you don’t read about in Lonely Planet travel guides, let me tell you. I hate the locals who constantly try to get me to ride their overpriced taxis. I hate the locals who try to sell me postcards and watches I don’t want or need. I hate the locals who show attention on me before crowds of their gawking peers in the hopes that they can force me to shell out some money to them by the sheer weight of insistence.
At the same time, I understand that by going to work at Moby Dick Fish and Chips, by having an IPod, and by taking this holiday, I have directly participated in a socioeconomic leviathan that has made it impossible for these people to live without trying to cheat me.
Now, I am going to eat some delicious Thai food. In two days, I will be in Chiang Mai, and you will get to hear about some of the mind-blowing shit that has thoroughly shattered my senses over the last few days.
Yesterday, I got cheated so badly that even now, the shame and anger I feel over the incident is nearly unfathomable.
Amber and I were walking over to the compund of the Grand Palace, a series of temples and buildings whose spires and roofs were encrusted with gold and mosaic tiles in such intricate and extravagant patterns as to defy belief. More on this another time.
A little gap toothed old lady accosted us on the way. She was dirty, squat as a marsupial, and vaguely reminded me of a side-show attraction- very dwarf-like in her appearance and as about aesthetically pleasing. She was feeding the pidgeons… hordes of emaciated, fluttering feathered vermin- not at all like our plump specimens. She literally threw packets of bird
seed at me, instructing me to feed the birds. A pair of equally grungy street rats accosted Amber and did the same.
Some of you know doubt know what is coming next.
We threw the seed, flinging whole packets into the the air, watching the birds fly up and down. I found it fun, and of course I felt that vaguely nagging alarm in the back of my head… the one that sticks like a thorn in
your mind… that uneasy feeling that something is out of the ordinary. But I did nothing. Humans are quick to react to what they know to be familiar and damned slow to react to the new- and this situation was so novel that I simply scattered bird seed in the most amused and unthinking way.
Afterward, the lady demanded money. I had expected this. She demanded 150 Thai baht. This is about 5 US dollars- maybe less. I did NOT know this at the time… I was unused to the exchange rate and thought it amounted to 50 cents or something… my North American mind simply could not comprehend the possibility that a beggar could have the sheer audacity to demand 5 US bucks for throwing bird seed at tourists.
She saw I had 500 baht in my hand, snatched it, and told me she had change. She gave my 20 baht in return and said smugly: ” Now, you go.”
This is where my brain clicked, and in a slow, almost casual way, my brain said: “You witless son of a whore. You just got swindled by a beggar so low on the social hierarchy that you would not allow her to haul away your garbage.”
I started to bellow at her, demanding my money back. She backpeddled, giving me more and more change back, until she had given me a bunch of smaller notes back that amounted to 220 baht. But my 500 baht note was still in her hand, and I did not have the presence of mind to grab it out of her palm. I was so befuddled and shell-shocked by the entire proceedings that I could not think straight, and was happy- YES, HAPPY- to get out of the whole affair having lost 280 baht for NO REASON.
The worse part is that I retreated from her. Yes. I turned my back on a woman who had CHEATED ME and LEFT. If I told my father this, he would demand that I change my skin colour (probably by ripping it off with his own hands) and disown me. I’m not even sure why. Maybe it was because we were being hounded into utter submission by three filthy street people who kept
demanding MORE money from us. Maybe it was because I thought I had already been robbed, knew it, and decided to fold my cards while I could. Maybe I was afraid of being stabbed or clawed by someone with possible HIV. But I was accosted with an infantile scheme, lost money, and ran away.
Oh. I know a lot of you think I’m rather dreamy and am prone to getting gyped in things like this. Amber fell for it too. She lost 400 baht.
The thing about the 3rd world and the dark side of travelling is this. To the locals, you are a walking wallet. You can allow this to sully your experience of a new culture and locale, or you can deal with it as a simple byproduct of a free-market world where people like us own the machine and people like them turn the cogs. We have turned them into paupers, low wage labour, and souvenir shop owners, and then we come and take pictures of their monuments and dare to object when their climate is too hot or their beggars are too unsightly.
I am slowly getting used to the fact that “friendliness” in non OECD countries means that the people being “friendly” are trying to get your money- often in very unscrupulous ways. When I get back, I will detail the scams that businesses try to lay on you, without a HINT of shame or self-reproachment in their demeanor, just because you have a backpack and therefore are from places with money.
This is something you don’t read about in Lonely Planet travel guides, let me tell you. I hate the locals who constantly try to get me to ride their overpriced taxis. I hate the locals who try to sell me postcards and watches I don’t want or need. I hate the locals who show attention on me before crowds of their gawking peers in the hopes that they can force me to shell out some money to them by the sheer weight of insistence.
At the same time, I understand that by going to work at Moby Dick Fish and Chips, by having an IPod, and by taking this holiday, I have directly participated in a socioeconomic leviathan that has made it impossible for these people to live without trying to cheat me.
Now, I am going to eat some delicious Thai food. In two days, I will be in Chiang Mai, and you will get to hear about some of the mind-blowing shit that has thoroughly shattered my senses over the last few days.
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