Well, nobody ever reads endnotes, so maybe I should think of a new subject. Anyway, I think the last update on my wanderings was from Kenya. There was a beach with nice sand and Masai warriors selling jewelry, and camel trains and scrumptious food at the hotel. Safari in Masai Mara Park was thoroughly amusing, lots of animals and tourists and the two seemed to be about even in entertainment value. African water buffalos are a lot bigger, uglier and unfriendlier than Vietnamese ones. Lions are lazy and cocky – we saw one sleeping on his back in the middle of the trail, he didn't even wake up when we drove past. So I got out and quietly put ice cubes in his armpits and ran away laughing : )
Anyway, then we flew to Chad. After a few days in the capitol N'djamena we rented a vehicle and driver for the not-pleasant-but-could-have-been-worse 17 hour drive down to Sarh, where my sister lives. I spent nine days in Sahr - that is the longest I have been anywhere from the beginning of June until now. Not that there is so much to see in Sarh - I spent most of my time trying to keep my nephew happy and attempting to recover from a cold which I seemed to have gotten in the airport in Ethiopia between flights. Go figure.
Then I had to leave. This is the long part of this email. There are no airplane flights to Sarh normally. People do charter small planes there sometimes, and luckily there was one of those flying back to the capital the day before my flight out of Chad, so I reserved a seat. Well, I thought I did. We went to the airport at the appointed time, sat on a step overlooking the rather longish field (the airport) for awhile, eventually going home to call the company that was supposed to be flying in but our phones weren't working so we went somewhere else to call and discovered that the flight had been cancelled. Woops.
My brother-in-law’s friends drove me all over town looking for a car that would be going to N'djamena that day. Bad planning! There was a UN car (read that - car with real seats with not much more than one person per seat and real a/c) which had just left, but we were too late. Paying for a seat in an NGO car is the best way to travel around there. I can say that because there were no NGO cars going where I wanted to go, so I paid some paltry fee for a seat (most of a seat anyway) in a 'public' van. It was a smallish Toyota van, with about four feet of stuff piled on top of it and a bunch of bicycles and a couple motorbikes on top of that. Under all the stuff, in the van, was all of us - 24 of us all going to the same place. I got a seat in the back, with my knees in someone else's back and someone's elbow in my kidney and me squashed up against the side of the van - that was the same side of me that was hanging off of the end of the seat.
In the front seat there was some guy toting along his AK47, he seemed to be very helpful in getting us quickly through all the police checkpoints that come up like every 30 kilometers or something. Our trip from the capitol down to Sarh was 17 hrs, so I was trying to prepare myself for a long ride, we left at 1:30 in the afternoon. 40 minutes after we left Sarh, we had to stop at a checkpoint and they said the road was closed due to rain. Rainy season - dirt roads - why do you think that no one takes overloaded Toyota vans to mud bogs? After a couple hours we could keep going - whether or not the road was any drier after a couple hours I do not know. That little process was repeated innumerable times before we got to N'djamena.
The driver eventually collected the tickets after several hours on the road, it seemed that having a pile of little receipts from the transportation company helped us get through the checkpoints with less hassle. At one checkpoint they magically picked me out of the van. It is hard to hide a white face, even in a van that full! The guard, who looked to be about sixteen, took me inside a little concrete building where all his friends were (about five young teenagers with guns - but the one guy with a uniform shirt was the ringleader) and demanded my 'carte d'identite'. Not really caring to dig out my passport packet with my last US dollars in it, I gave them my Pennsylvania driver’s license. After a very long process of examining it, he asked me if that was my ID card. After being assured about that, he asked me if I spoke English (this was all in bad French, before this). Naturally I said yes. He asked me that three times, but that being the only sentence he had memorized I guess, it didn't go much farther than that. Then he asked me where I was from. Upon learning that I was American (the ID card fiasco was just for show since it was rather apparent that he couldn't read it) he promptly gave me back my license and told me to get back in the van and go. I decided at the next checkpoint I should give them my university ID card - it has a nicer picture on it! Fortunately, none of the other checkpoints needed to see any ID from me. We stopped several times for prayers - everybody spread out their mats beside the road. Apparently not everybody agreed about where exactly Mecca was, because they weren't all facing the same direction, but I guess it is the thought that counts.
We had a flat tire, which was changed fairly quickly. Later stopped to fix the first tire, and put it back on. Then it went flat again, and the spare went back on. Later on that one went flat too. There was another spare, but it was the wrong size, so for the rest of the trip every time we hit a big bump (bout every 10 feet) it scraped on the inside of the fender. The fuel filter clogged up a couple times, which involved the driver crawling under the fan, taking it off, blowing through it and I suppose cuffing it under the left ear a couple times, and putting it back in. Eventually he started cursing at it (I can deduce that by the tone of voice even if I don't speak Arabic) and threw it across the road into a field and just hooked the hoses together. He did stop later at a town and got another one.
After dark we stopped at one barricade and I sat under a tree (it was raining) listening to a big uproar around a fire a couple hundred feet away in the village there. Later on the uproar changed and became a drumbeat and everybody started dancing, so I guess they were all friends. The stars are amazing when you are in the bush. We stopped in yet another tiny town after midnight, and everybody rolled out their mats and curled up went to sleep on them. Me being mat-less and unprepared, I went to what I think was a market (in the daytime) down the street and found a table, but the table had leftovers all over it, so I slept on a bench slightly narrower than a Chinese sleeper bus bed, but longer and with plenty of fresh air. There were so many stars the outline of the tree next to me was like a silhouette. Some 'village dogs' came by and sniffed at me cause I smelled funny, but there was enough Chadian dirt on me that they weren't too suspicious. We were there about four hours, then got up and left again before daylight.
We got to N'djamena the next evening, 30 hours after leaving Sarh, and precisely two hours before my flight to Paris took off. I did succeed in getting a room with a shower (no small task in Chad) and cleaning up a bit before getting on the plane. After bribing my way back out through customs, I was directed out to the runway where I went through Air France security (all of it imported with the plane) and found myself inside one of those airport fences, in a little circle on the runway that was designated to be a piece of France for an hour or so. They had Le Monde and Le Figaro on a news rack there, they had chairs that were nicer than anything else I sat on in the whole country, and getting on the plane the stewardess said bonsoir and stepped on a stowaway Chadian cockroach running in the door. So I said goodbye to Chad.
Had a wonderful and comfortable week in Sweden with my friend there, although it was all a bit surreal, then came home. America is such a funny place. And that is the end of my year of collecting stories and experiences from far away - I hope all my friends reading this are well and stay in touch!
Zaijian, tambiet, , kwaheri, au revoir
Monday, August 25, 2003
Friday, June 27, 2003
Phnom Penh and touring Saigon
Catching up from Cambodia, after Siem Reap I took a boat to Phnom Penh, a fast boat across a big lake, not all that interesting. Phnom Penh was just too quick for me to enjoy it. I got there, went to my guesthouse and dropped my backpack, then hurried off to the Tuol Sleng (S-21 Prison) Museum which I wanted to see, after that went for an even more interesting motorcycle ride in the daily downpour 12 km out into the countryside to see the memorial at the Choeng Elk killing fields, after this I was exhausted and feeling rather sick. That was, judging by the symptoms, something that I ate, not from riding motorbike in the rain. Nor from the stomach-churning nature of the only two places I went to see in Phnom Penh, I wanted to see someplace else to bring my experience in the country up to the present, but did not have the energy. So that night I laid in my bed trying to figure out if I had enough energy to ride the bus the next day, which it turns out I did. I took a bus to the border (which was a long and very bumpy ride) and walked across the border to another bus which brought me the rest of the way to Saigon where I got a room and drank great quantities of water and fruit juices and started taking my traveler’s diarrhea pills, which seem to have worked, mostly.
My friends got here fine on Monday. Tuesday we tried to get them adjusted, and took a tour on a procession of three cyclos to some sights in Saigon - a temple, some old French buildings like the Notre Dame Cathedral (NOT the one in Paris...), and the former Presidential Palace. Wed. we took a group tour up to Tay Ninh province and saw the place where the Cao Dai sect started and their big temple, then in the afternoon we toured the old Vietcong tunnels at Cu Chi - where during the war communists just kept popping up out of nowhere and nobody could figure out where they were coming from. Thursday we went to the history museum here in town and the War Remnants Museum. Today we took another tour to the Mekong Delta, rode a bunch of boats, big ones, little ones, and in-between ones, and ate some luscious fruit and saw lots of water and other amusing stuff like a bee farm and our guide walking around with a python around his neck offering to plop it on anybody who wanted a picture (it was a fat python, not very hungry I would judge). They are amused by the downpour that happens most every afternoon, and the geckos you see on every wall, and the way Vietnamese people put pickup truck loads of stuff on bicycles. So I feel old and experienced ‘'cause I had forgotten about all of that stuff. Anyway, it is really fun to hang out together, I have not heard so much about home for a VERY long time. Tomorrow (Saturday) morning we get on a bus to Dalat, in the central highlands.
My friends got here fine on Monday. Tuesday we tried to get them adjusted, and took a tour on a procession of three cyclos to some sights in Saigon - a temple, some old French buildings like the Notre Dame Cathedral (NOT the one in Paris...), and the former Presidential Palace. Wed. we took a group tour up to Tay Ninh province and saw the place where the Cao Dai sect started and their big temple, then in the afternoon we toured the old Vietcong tunnels at Cu Chi - where during the war communists just kept popping up out of nowhere and nobody could figure out where they were coming from. Thursday we went to the history museum here in town and the War Remnants Museum. Today we took another tour to the Mekong Delta, rode a bunch of boats, big ones, little ones, and in-between ones, and ate some luscious fruit and saw lots of water and other amusing stuff like a bee farm and our guide walking around with a python around his neck offering to plop it on anybody who wanted a picture (it was a fat python, not very hungry I would judge). They are amused by the downpour that happens most every afternoon, and the geckos you see on every wall, and the way Vietnamese people put pickup truck loads of stuff on bicycles. So I feel old and experienced ‘'cause I had forgotten about all of that stuff. Anyway, it is really fun to hang out together, I have not heard so much about home for a VERY long time. Tomorrow (Saturday) morning we get on a bus to Dalat, in the central highlands.
Wednesday, June 25, 2003
Friday, June 20, 2003
Angkor and the Bolaven
I am right now in Cambodia, in Siem Reap right next to Angkor Wat. I spent the last two days wandering through ancient temples. It was, well, it was amazing, and it was also an amusing tourist experience aside from being amazing. On the amazing aspect of it, I took I think more pictures than I have ever taken in such a short time, including when my Lao friend commandeered my camera and filled it up with pictures of her and her family in front of Buddha statues...
Anyway, did I tell you about Pakxe? That was in southern Lao, and the most exciting thing that happened there was that I rented a motorbike for a day and went way up to some place called Bolaven Plateau and saw lots of coffee plantations, and ethnic minority villages, and an amazing waterfall called Tat Fan or something like that.
And tomorrow I will take the boat (I still do get to take a boat, only this is kind of a fast boat I think) to Phnom Penh, and I'll probably go the rest of the way to Saigon on Sunday. My boat starts near here, on the Tonle Sap Lake. This lake is weird - in the dry season it is one quarter of the size it is in the wet season. The funny thing is, that is not just because of runoff from around the lake. The Tonle Sap is connected to the Mekong by a relatively long river, and in the dry season the water runs down the river to the Mekong, and to the SEA at Ho Chi Minh City as one would expect. However, in the wet season the level of the Mekong rises and the water says ‘Hmm lets see now, should I go to Saigon or should I go to Siem Reap?’ and some of it decides to go to Siem Reap, and thus the river turns around and flows INTO the lake, taking away some of the extra water from the Mekong. I don't think it gets all that much deeper, but it is really flat here, so the lake just gets way way bigger. All that (and more) I learned in a museum here set up by an NGO that works with street kids.
Another place I went to was the landmine museum. The guy who set this up got thrown in jail for a while because either A) he had dangerous (still active) mines and ammunition in the museum like the police said, or B) the police and the people in charge here didn't want the road to Angkor Wat to be 'marred' by signs for a landmine museum, reminding tourists (like they had forgotten) that Cambodia has more history than the Angkorian period. Anyway, that was interesting and I only went there because the guy I hired to drive me around to all the temples on his motorbike told me about it - there are no signs for it anymore. And the guy who started this museum, really just a big collection of leftover bombs etc, is the same age as me - his parents were killed when he was five, he then worked for the Khmer Rouge and learned to lay mines, then was captured by the Vietnamese (who invaded Cambodia in 1979 and took power from the Khmer Rouge) and worked for their army, then after the Vietnamese left he worked for the new Cambodian army (still fighting the Khmer Rouge) and after the UN came in he stopped being a soldier and worked as a de-miner, which he still does, as well as providing a home for numerous mine victims. All of this in a little shack, really, that serves as a “museum”. So, like I said, that was interesting.
My flight here was uneventful, in spite of all the bad things I had heard about Lao Aviation. It was a propeller plane, but there were maybe 15 people on it with room for maybe 60-70, so we were certainly not overloaded. When I got here I had to sign a paper that said “I really really really honest to my Grandma do not have SARS, and if I do I'll stand in a corner with my nose on the wall all day long” ha.
Oh, that ha reminded me, when I was motorbiking in Lao I had a funny conversation. I got a helmet with my motorbike (rather a novelty in this part of the world, but it made me feel a bit better about my novice motorbiking skills). But they didn't have full face helmets, only the kind with nothing over your face/jaw. So, anyway, I am going along gaping at the forest and being amazed at life in general, when suddenly this fat bug comes sailing up to me and dives into the space between my head and my helmet, and I know he was fat because he got stuck right in front of my ear. That was good, because I could hear what he was saying - first he said “Well what the sam hill was that?” Then he said “Aha, it's a person, just a funny color, I know what to do with these people.” And he proceeded to firmly plant his sharp end in the side of my head. OW. Well I stopped my motorbike very quickly (without flipping myself off the front) and tried to take off my helmet as fast as possible without forgetting to unstrap it. Well, the bug left, ran or fell or flew or something, I don't know. But there was some big piece of him planted in my head. He was a good planter too. In a string of amazing coincidences, I had my swiss army knife with me in my bag, AND remembered that I had it in my bag, AND remembered that it had a tweezers in it. So, in probably the first time I ever legitimately used those tweezers, I got them out to pull out this piece of bug from my head. It was conveniently placed for me to see it clearly in my bike mirrors, and I could see exactly how it stuck in my head and when I pulled on it, my head moved right along with it - it must have had some nasty barbs on it or something. Anyway, I got it out soon, probably like two minutes after it was put in. My head is still sore there - I'm glad it wasn't stuck there too long, or I might not have been able to put my helmet back on! Anyway, that's just a note for anyone who was wondering what the dangers of riding a motorbike with a faceguardLESS helmet were!
I didn't really talk about Angkor did I? Well, there are loads of temples and monuments around here, Angkor Wat (Wat meaning temple, Angkor being the name of the place/kingdom I guess) is just the kind of best preserved/restored one. It's also really big. Most of the stuff was built around 11th - 13th Cent I think. Did you know you can go up in a hot air balloon to watch the sun rise/set over the temples? And the incredible $40 that it costs for a three day pass goes mostly to a Cambodian oil company... go figure. And I should go eat dinner now, I have to get up early tomorrow to get on this boat to Phnom Penh.
Anyway, did I tell you about Pakxe? That was in southern Lao, and the most exciting thing that happened there was that I rented a motorbike for a day and went way up to some place called Bolaven Plateau and saw lots of coffee plantations, and ethnic minority villages, and an amazing waterfall called Tat Fan or something like that.
And tomorrow I will take the boat (I still do get to take a boat, only this is kind of a fast boat I think) to Phnom Penh, and I'll probably go the rest of the way to Saigon on Sunday. My boat starts near here, on the Tonle Sap Lake. This lake is weird - in the dry season it is one quarter of the size it is in the wet season. The funny thing is, that is not just because of runoff from around the lake. The Tonle Sap is connected to the Mekong by a relatively long river, and in the dry season the water runs down the river to the Mekong, and to the SEA at Ho Chi Minh City as one would expect. However, in the wet season the level of the Mekong rises and the water says ‘Hmm lets see now, should I go to Saigon or should I go to Siem Reap?’ and some of it decides to go to Siem Reap, and thus the river turns around and flows INTO the lake, taking away some of the extra water from the Mekong. I don't think it gets all that much deeper, but it is really flat here, so the lake just gets way way bigger. All that (and more) I learned in a museum here set up by an NGO that works with street kids.
Another place I went to was the landmine museum. The guy who set this up got thrown in jail for a while because either A) he had dangerous (still active) mines and ammunition in the museum like the police said, or B) the police and the people in charge here didn't want the road to Angkor Wat to be 'marred' by signs for a landmine museum, reminding tourists (like they had forgotten) that Cambodia has more history than the Angkorian period. Anyway, that was interesting and I only went there because the guy I hired to drive me around to all the temples on his motorbike told me about it - there are no signs for it anymore. And the guy who started this museum, really just a big collection of leftover bombs etc, is the same age as me - his parents were killed when he was five, he then worked for the Khmer Rouge and learned to lay mines, then was captured by the Vietnamese (who invaded Cambodia in 1979 and took power from the Khmer Rouge) and worked for their army, then after the Vietnamese left he worked for the new Cambodian army (still fighting the Khmer Rouge) and after the UN came in he stopped being a soldier and worked as a de-miner, which he still does, as well as providing a home for numerous mine victims. All of this in a little shack, really, that serves as a “museum”. So, like I said, that was interesting.
My flight here was uneventful, in spite of all the bad things I had heard about Lao Aviation. It was a propeller plane, but there were maybe 15 people on it with room for maybe 60-70, so we were certainly not overloaded. When I got here I had to sign a paper that said “I really really really honest to my Grandma do not have SARS, and if I do I'll stand in a corner with my nose on the wall all day long” ha.
Oh, that ha reminded me, when I was motorbiking in Lao I had a funny conversation. I got a helmet with my motorbike (rather a novelty in this part of the world, but it made me feel a bit better about my novice motorbiking skills). But they didn't have full face helmets, only the kind with nothing over your face/jaw. So, anyway, I am going along gaping at the forest and being amazed at life in general, when suddenly this fat bug comes sailing up to me and dives into the space between my head and my helmet, and I know he was fat because he got stuck right in front of my ear. That was good, because I could hear what he was saying - first he said “Well what the sam hill was that?” Then he said “Aha, it's a person, just a funny color, I know what to do with these people.” And he proceeded to firmly plant his sharp end in the side of my head. OW. Well I stopped my motorbike very quickly (without flipping myself off the front) and tried to take off my helmet as fast as possible without forgetting to unstrap it. Well, the bug left, ran or fell or flew or something, I don't know. But there was some big piece of him planted in my head. He was a good planter too. In a string of amazing coincidences, I had my swiss army knife with me in my bag, AND remembered that I had it in my bag, AND remembered that it had a tweezers in it. So, in probably the first time I ever legitimately used those tweezers, I got them out to pull out this piece of bug from my head. It was conveniently placed for me to see it clearly in my bike mirrors, and I could see exactly how it stuck in my head and when I pulled on it, my head moved right along with it - it must have had some nasty barbs on it or something. Anyway, I got it out soon, probably like two minutes after it was put in. My head is still sore there - I'm glad it wasn't stuck there too long, or I might not have been able to put my helmet back on! Anyway, that's just a note for anyone who was wondering what the dangers of riding a motorbike with a faceguardLESS helmet were!
I didn't really talk about Angkor did I? Well, there are loads of temples and monuments around here, Angkor Wat (Wat meaning temple, Angkor being the name of the place/kingdom I guess) is just the kind of best preserved/restored one. It's also really big. Most of the stuff was built around 11th - 13th Cent I think. Did you know you can go up in a hot air balloon to watch the sun rise/set over the temples? And the incredible $40 that it costs for a three day pass goes mostly to a Cambodian oil company... go figure. And I should go eat dinner now, I have to get up early tomorrow to get on this boat to Phnom Penh.
Wednesday, June 18, 2003
My friend and guide, Jook.
Monday, June 16, 2003
"Really hard to get"
The bus ride from Hanoi to Vientiane was longish, the Vietnamese border police were kind of funny in their seriousness about extorting 10,000 dong from everyone 'for the stamp'. Ha. If I ever start bribing people it is going to be for more than 67 cents! Lao mountains are beautiful; the villages looked like northern Thailand. Vientiane was full of temples. Big temples. I went to see a bunch of them, along with a great big golden stupa shaped like a lotus bloom that is the symbol of Laos in general. At one temple, I met a monk who spoke English and talked with him for awhile. I thought I had a quote of the day, then he gave me another one.
#1 – “Enlightenment is really hard to get“
#2 – Regarding a DVD of American pro wrestling, “Now you must answer me completely honestly, is this real?”
Buddha Park is a kind of mixture between an amusement park and a temple. Just a big yard full of big and little concrete Buddhas in various poses, as well as a few elephants and crocodiles, and a three storey pumpkin with heaven, earth and hell inside it (and a lot of cobwebs - in all three, I guess spiders are mortal too).
I rode bike outside of town to where the road went off the bank above the Mekong (that wasn't supposed to happen, I tend to get lost a lot - why do you think I'm in Laos) so I stopped and watched the Mekong, and some tiny fishermen on the other bank for awhile, and some kind person just randomly came up out of nowhere and gave me a big glass of cold water (hopefully it was not Mekong Water because I did drink it). After turning around and trying how many times to ask directions to where I wanted to go (why is it that after a whole year of studying two sort of difficult languages, I still go somewhere where I can't even remember how to say Thank You to people?) I end up sitting in a little restaurant across from yet another huge temple with Buddha the size of the house I visited sitting on the roof, and trying to convince a friend there that I really didn't want to drink many glasses of Bia Lao before pedaling back to town in the heat.
Last night took a 9 hr bus ride. This was a full sized bus barreling through the countryside of Lao to transport, count ‘em up, TWO tourists, and three guys to drive and push buffalos out of the way, from Vientiane to Pakse. Well, at least I had room to sleep, even though I still didn't get much.
I should go back there someday, my friend whose house I visited told me of so many other places to go and see... Anyway, now I am on my way to Cambodia, Pakxe is like the last bit of town (and it is only a bit of town) before the border, which I will cross as soon as I get my passport back with my Vietnamese re-entry visa.
#1 – “Enlightenment is really hard to get“
#2 – Regarding a DVD of American pro wrestling, “Now you must answer me completely honestly, is this real?”
Buddha Park is a kind of mixture between an amusement park and a temple. Just a big yard full of big and little concrete Buddhas in various poses, as well as a few elephants and crocodiles, and a three storey pumpkin with heaven, earth and hell inside it (and a lot of cobwebs - in all three, I guess spiders are mortal too).
I rode bike outside of town to where the road went off the bank above the Mekong (that wasn't supposed to happen, I tend to get lost a lot - why do you think I'm in Laos) so I stopped and watched the Mekong, and some tiny fishermen on the other bank for awhile, and some kind person just randomly came up out of nowhere and gave me a big glass of cold water (hopefully it was not Mekong Water because I did drink it). After turning around and trying how many times to ask directions to where I wanted to go (why is it that after a whole year of studying two sort of difficult languages, I still go somewhere where I can't even remember how to say Thank You to people?) I end up sitting in a little restaurant across from yet another huge temple with Buddha the size of the house I visited sitting on the roof, and trying to convince a friend there that I really didn't want to drink many glasses of Bia Lao before pedaling back to town in the heat.
Last night took a 9 hr bus ride. This was a full sized bus barreling through the countryside of Lao to transport, count ‘em up, TWO tourists, and three guys to drive and push buffalos out of the way, from Vientiane to Pakse. Well, at least I had room to sleep, even though I still didn't get much.
I should go back there someday, my friend whose house I visited told me of so many other places to go and see... Anyway, now I am on my way to Cambodia, Pakxe is like the last bit of town (and it is only a bit of town) before the border, which I will cross as soon as I get my passport back with my Vietnamese re-entry visa.
Saturday, June 07, 2003
Vào Nam
Last week I got to the other end of Vietnam. First flew from Hanoi to Nha Trang, which is on the coast in maybe the southern quarter of Vietnam. It was really hot. Surprise. Nha Trang is probably the best known tourist beach town in Vietnam, but it is an actual town as well, not just a beach. The first day there I rode bike around for awhile. Past all the expensive (relatively) restaurants and the chairs and thatch umbrellas on the beach, over a bridge to find myself in some other part of town where everyone lived in leftover shipping containers and there was no grass or sand, only mud, and where no one came running up to me trying to sell books or postcards or a boat ride to an island or anything, presumably because none of them had any of that stuff. They only looked puzzled to see me, someone obviously belonging to the clean sandy part of town across the bridge, wandering around in their neighborhood.
I went to see some ancient Cham towers - like the ones we saw in My Son, but these were not bombed in the war, and these were not just sitting there but were a quite active worship site. My uninformed observation is that the inside of them looked just like most Buddhist temples here, rather interesting since the Chams were distinctly Hindu influenced, not Buddhist, but anyway, it made visiting them all the more interesting. We all went to a nice seafood restaurant on the beach for one more farewell dinner, went on a boat ride to some islands, where you could snorkel and look at coral reefs, and sit on the beach eating more very good seafood, and visited a 'fishing village' on one island which was one more place where the whole concept of being a tourist seemed really ridiculous.
Aside from that, they have little boats here used to go from shore to bigger boats, and between boats, little round boats maybe 5-6 feet diameter that are just like a big basket. Really, they are made of basket stuff and coated with pitch or something to make them waterproof. Right before we left that village, it started raining really hard. So I put my camera in the driver's cab in the boat (our boat, not the basket boat) which was the only dry place, and sat up on the roof in the driving rain, trying to wash away the feeling that my presence in this place was only disruptive, the feeling that by being a tourist instead of a student I suddenly created this big space between me and what I was trying to see. Well, that's life. Anyway, I got wet and cold and back in town my shower and hot dinner was really good and we left that night on the train for Ho Chi Minh City.
HCM City is the biggest city in Vietnam, economically more advanced than Hanoi, a lot more big bildings. The first day there I had kind of a tour with a cyclo driver - the idea of which raises even more questions, but in any case, I could actually talk to him and use my Vietnamese and I was not with 73 other tourists, so it was a nice day. We went to several pagodas, a museum which was interesting (and in an amazing old French building, of which there are a lot in Saigon), a market selling everything, saw the old US embassy, the new US embassy, the Notre Dame Cathedral and the Post Office (both in the 'amazing old French building' category), and lets see, one more good pho restaurant. In the afternoon we went to visit the 'reunification palace', which was the house of the president of South Vietnam pre 1975, that was big and interesting, and a lesson in bad 1960's color schemes! Then we went to the "War Remnants Museum", which used to be the "American War Crimes Museum". It was rather intense and graphic sometimes, but good to see. They had a bunch of planes/artillery/equipment outside from the US and South Vietnam, and rooms of pictures of the war, and display on the use and effects of Agent Orange, also had a section on Con Lon Prison, which was set up by the French but still in use under the South Vietnamese government, and they also had displays on how Vietnam has changed since the war and some children’s art and more palatable stuff. And, in demonstration of how Vietnam has changed since then (and of our schedule) we went to a mall that night, ate at KFC and went bowling. There are no KFCs in Hanoi. There are a lot in China, so in a funny way eating 'American' fast food reminded me of China.
Anyway, the next day I went to Dalat. Dalat is in the mountains, and is supposed to have the best climate in Vietnam. The best for the French at least, it was a sort of resort town during the colonial period. Still is, really. The nice part, though, was that it was touristy but most of the tourists were Vietnamese. The town was quite hilly, rather astonishing in this country. The place is famous for lots of lakes and waterfalls, green mountains and trees - looking surprisingly like someplace backwoods on the east coast. So we walked around the lake in town, went through a big flower garden there (Dalat - the city of flowers) and just wandered the town the rest of that day. The next day we all rented bikes and went towards a lake, turns out that riding bike in the 'mountains' is not like riding bike in Hanoi, Uyen went back to the hotel by taxi, Lucy and I got to the lake and waterfall, relaxed a little, then decided to go to another waterfall like 12 km away, and it was all down the side of a big mountain. We decided that if we went that far down we could justifiably find some other way up, and still see the falls and not be too exhausted. The falls were nice enough and the surrounding 'park' was truly amusing, and we caught a local bus back up the mountain, with our bikes on top. It overheated, and they fixed a broken radiator hose with inner tube and pieces of wire... but we got back. Then decided that bikes were not appropriate for this place, so we rented a motorbike and wandered around, getting lost in the countryside until it started raining. We came (soaking wet) back to the hotel, got clean and warm, and had a truly fine dinner. Thursday we rode the bus back to HCM, about 6 hours, past a lot of rubber plantations, and coffee plantations as well. Dalat is famous for coffee, and also for wine, although I don't really recall seeing any vineyards.
I went to see some ancient Cham towers - like the ones we saw in My Son, but these were not bombed in the war, and these were not just sitting there but were a quite active worship site. My uninformed observation is that the inside of them looked just like most Buddhist temples here, rather interesting since the Chams were distinctly Hindu influenced, not Buddhist, but anyway, it made visiting them all the more interesting. We all went to a nice seafood restaurant on the beach for one more farewell dinner, went on a boat ride to some islands, where you could snorkel and look at coral reefs, and sit on the beach eating more very good seafood, and visited a 'fishing village' on one island which was one more place where the whole concept of being a tourist seemed really ridiculous.
Aside from that, they have little boats here used to go from shore to bigger boats, and between boats, little round boats maybe 5-6 feet diameter that are just like a big basket. Really, they are made of basket stuff and coated with pitch or something to make them waterproof. Right before we left that village, it started raining really hard. So I put my camera in the driver's cab in the boat (our boat, not the basket boat) which was the only dry place, and sat up on the roof in the driving rain, trying to wash away the feeling that my presence in this place was only disruptive, the feeling that by being a tourist instead of a student I suddenly created this big space between me and what I was trying to see. Well, that's life. Anyway, I got wet and cold and back in town my shower and hot dinner was really good and we left that night on the train for Ho Chi Minh City.
HCM City is the biggest city in Vietnam, economically more advanced than Hanoi, a lot more big bildings. The first day there I had kind of a tour with a cyclo driver - the idea of which raises even more questions, but in any case, I could actually talk to him and use my Vietnamese and I was not with 73 other tourists, so it was a nice day. We went to several pagodas, a museum which was interesting (and in an amazing old French building, of which there are a lot in Saigon), a market selling everything, saw the old US embassy, the new US embassy, the Notre Dame Cathedral and the Post Office (both in the 'amazing old French building' category), and lets see, one more good pho restaurant. In the afternoon we went to visit the 'reunification palace', which was the house of the president of South Vietnam pre 1975, that was big and interesting, and a lesson in bad 1960's color schemes! Then we went to the "War Remnants Museum", which used to be the "American War Crimes Museum". It was rather intense and graphic sometimes, but good to see. They had a bunch of planes/artillery/equipment outside from the US and South Vietnam, and rooms of pictures of the war, and display on the use and effects of Agent Orange, also had a section on Con Lon Prison, which was set up by the French but still in use under the South Vietnamese government, and they also had displays on how Vietnam has changed since the war and some children’s art and more palatable stuff. And, in demonstration of how Vietnam has changed since then (and of our schedule) we went to a mall that night, ate at KFC and went bowling. There are no KFCs in Hanoi. There are a lot in China, so in a funny way eating 'American' fast food reminded me of China.
Anyway, the next day I went to Dalat. Dalat is in the mountains, and is supposed to have the best climate in Vietnam. The best for the French at least, it was a sort of resort town during the colonial period. Still is, really. The nice part, though, was that it was touristy but most of the tourists were Vietnamese. The town was quite hilly, rather astonishing in this country. The place is famous for lots of lakes and waterfalls, green mountains and trees - looking surprisingly like someplace backwoods on the east coast. So we walked around the lake in town, went through a big flower garden there (Dalat - the city of flowers) and just wandered the town the rest of that day. The next day we all rented bikes and went towards a lake, turns out that riding bike in the 'mountains' is not like riding bike in Hanoi, Uyen went back to the hotel by taxi, Lucy and I got to the lake and waterfall, relaxed a little, then decided to go to another waterfall like 12 km away, and it was all down the side of a big mountain. We decided that if we went that far down we could justifiably find some other way up, and still see the falls and not be too exhausted. The falls were nice enough and the surrounding 'park' was truly amusing, and we caught a local bus back up the mountain, with our bikes on top. It overheated, and they fixed a broken radiator hose with inner tube and pieces of wire... but we got back. Then decided that bikes were not appropriate for this place, so we rented a motorbike and wandered around, getting lost in the countryside until it started raining. We came (soaking wet) back to the hotel, got clean and warm, and had a truly fine dinner. Thursday we rode the bus back to HCM, about 6 hours, past a lot of rubber plantations, and coffee plantations as well. Dalat is famous for coffee, and also for wine, although I don't really recall seeing any vineyards.
Friday, May 30, 2003
Đàn Bầu Express
The longer I am not in America the more I appreciate the American postal system. I don't know, guess I've never tried to send big bulky heavy things halfway around the world from America before though either. Anyway, so my dan bau is on its way home. First, via express airmail is the instrument itself. It is not such a big thing, smaller really than my pipa, but it is exactly 1.1 meters, long. The postal regulations (and they did show me the list of regulations) say that it is impossible to send anything bigger than 1.05 meters from Vietnam to America. Hmm. So I scratched my head for awhile, made a couple phone calls, and walked down the street to the FedEx office where it would have cost me 221 dollars to send my dan bau to America. But, it could have gotten there yesterday, I suppose! Didn't do that. The FedEx people kindly told me something that the post office people didn't mention, that if I send something 'express' via the post office, size doesn't matter. So the Vietnam post office airplane is bigger than the Vietnam post office boat... hmm. So I sent it 'express'. No, I don't know exactly how express it will be, I didn't really care at that point. The rickety little stand I have for this instrument, and the speaker and books, were all under the magical meter mark, so I sent them by the boat which will take two months, or three months, or I don't know. Nobody knows.
Anyway, on to other exciting news. Summer is here. I have no more schoolwork. I am getting up WAY early tomorrow and onto a plane and south to Nha Trang and will shortly find myself on the BEACH doing NOTHING. :) My finals week went pretty well, really. Monday a bunch of classmates did class presentations which were really interesting. Tuesday, I studied all day for the history exam which I decided to take in lieu of writing another paper, since I hadn't written the first one yet. Wednesday morning I took the history final - I can now recite the dynasties of Vietnamese history, roughly correctly, since a very long time ago. Not really useful, but I'll find a chance to do it again sometime hopefully soon before I forget them! I wrote nine pages of essay on history in three hours. I impressed myself with that! Wednesday afternoon I studied Vietnamese. Wed night I went out to a nice French restaurant with my tutor and hung out for awhile before coming home to study some more. Thursday morning I took the Vietnamese final which also went well, my teachers were happy, I was happy, hopefully my grades are happy too. Then I started writing my Contemporary Vietnam paper (it was all researched before, just not written). My computer died, 3 times in a row and I got tired of resuscitating it. Then my bike died. So I borrowed someone else's and did find an internet cafe where I wrote a big piece of my paper. I did the rest of it, this morning, wow, it seems like longer ago than that! That was it, no more studying. Wow.
This afternoon I did that whole sending my dan bau thing, and picked up my passport with the Lao and Cambodia visas in it (yippee) and bought books on Lao and Cambodia and drank coffee and went to yet another nice restaurant with my classmates and, yeah, it has been a pretty good week. Way more relaxed than any finals week ever at home!
Anyway, on to other exciting news. Summer is here. I have no more schoolwork. I am getting up WAY early tomorrow and onto a plane and south to Nha Trang and will shortly find myself on the BEACH doing NOTHING. :) My finals week went pretty well, really. Monday a bunch of classmates did class presentations which were really interesting. Tuesday, I studied all day for the history exam which I decided to take in lieu of writing another paper, since I hadn't written the first one yet. Wednesday morning I took the history final - I can now recite the dynasties of Vietnamese history, roughly correctly, since a very long time ago. Not really useful, but I'll find a chance to do it again sometime hopefully soon before I forget them! I wrote nine pages of essay on history in three hours. I impressed myself with that! Wednesday afternoon I studied Vietnamese. Wed night I went out to a nice French restaurant with my tutor and hung out for awhile before coming home to study some more. Thursday morning I took the Vietnamese final which also went well, my teachers were happy, I was happy, hopefully my grades are happy too. Then I started writing my Contemporary Vietnam paper (it was all researched before, just not written). My computer died, 3 times in a row and I got tired of resuscitating it. Then my bike died. So I borrowed someone else's and did find an internet cafe where I wrote a big piece of my paper. I did the rest of it, this morning, wow, it seems like longer ago than that! That was it, no more studying. Wow.
This afternoon I did that whole sending my dan bau thing, and picked up my passport with the Lao and Cambodia visas in it (yippee) and bought books on Lao and Cambodia and drank coffee and went to yet another nice restaurant with my classmates and, yeah, it has been a pretty good week. Way more relaxed than any finals week ever at home!
Sunday, May 25, 2003
Lần đầu tiên ở Việt Nam
Outside Hoa Lu, the first capital of Vietnam
South of Huế
Inside the imperial capital in Huế
Around Sapa, in the northwest
Hà Nội
Vịnh Hà Long
Nha Trang
cả lớp học
South of Huế
Inside the imperial capital in Huế
Around Sapa, in the northwest
Hà Nội
Vịnh Hà Long
Nha Trang
cả lớp học
Saturday, May 24, 2003
Lakes
It costs 27$ to take a bus to Laos. Yes that is more expensive than my bus out of Tibet, so hopefully it will be nicer. With a/c, maybe. Not like the one out of Tibet needed A/C, but anyway. That is not for another couple weeks.
Anyway, I was downtown tonight and I poured down rain while I ate dinner and sat in a cafe reading. And on the way home (on my bicycle, oops) I was back to riding and holding an umbrella at the same time. It works ok usually, but tonight, I guess it rained more than usual I don't know, there were like lakes in the streets. There are a lot of lakes in Hanoi, but tonight there was a lot more. When the water came up over my knees, while I was riding bike, I decided to skip trying to hold the umbrella and concentrate on steering and hopefully stopping if it got too much deeper. It didn't get much deeper. Surprisingly, the little headlight on my bike still worked after all that splashing :) Anyway, it was amusing.
Anyway, I was downtown tonight and I poured down rain while I ate dinner and sat in a cafe reading. And on the way home (on my bicycle, oops) I was back to riding and holding an umbrella at the same time. It works ok usually, but tonight, I guess it rained more than usual I don't know, there were like lakes in the streets. There are a lot of lakes in Hanoi, but tonight there was a lot more. When the water came up over my knees, while I was riding bike, I decided to skip trying to hold the umbrella and concentrate on steering and hopefully stopping if it got too much deeper. It didn't get much deeper. Surprisingly, the little headlight on my bike still worked after all that splashing :) Anyway, it was amusing.
Saturday, April 05, 2003
Miền Trung
I just got back to Hanoi from a trip to Central Vietnam. Funny how I am either coming back from somewhere, or going somewhere, every time I write... :)
We took the train from Hanoi to Hue, a nice neat overnight ride of about twelve hours. Hue (that is with a 'hat' over the 'e' and an up tone... pronounced like /H-way/) is a quite nice town on the mouth of the Perfume River. It has about 300,000 people, as opposed to Hanoi's 3 million. Hanoi still seems pretty relaxed to me most of the time, after China, and well, Hue was positively asleep. Like I said, quite nice! My language tutor came along with us on this trip, so I got to wander the town with him for the first half a day. Then we visited the Citadel, some kind of military thing along this river, I believe built by the French. Behind that, was Vietnam's version of the Forbidden City. Hue was the capital of Vietnam for the whole Nguyen Dynasty (maybe 1600 something to WWII). Most of the Nguyen Dynasty was more theory than actual rule, but anyway, this is where they lived. The gate (which is more complicated than it sounds) and a couple other buildings were restored, the rest was just ruins. This place was damaged somewhat during the war with France, and bombed to pieces during the American War. It was good to see, though, naturally a lot of similarities to the Forbidden City in Beijing.
The next day we took a boat trip up the Perfume River. We stopped numerous places to see stuff, the first being a famous pagoda (they call Buddhist temples here 'pagodas', as opposed to temples, which involve sort of local spirit cults). It had a neat tower, and one of the more interesting things there was an old car that was driven by a high monk when he went to Saigon to burn himself as a protest against the South Vietnamese government in 1968 I think. It got a lot of news coverage. The other three places we went to were all burial sites for Nguyen Kings. These were big elaborate compounds that were pretty amazing, again not really restored (and somehow more amazing because of that), but these places were not as damaged by the war as the place in Hue.
The DMZ is north of Hue not too far. After a rather long bus ride up the coast and then inland and up into the mountains we got to Khe Sanh - an airfield during the war that was the site of a big long extended battle. There was a small building with a couple displays, and you could walk around and look at the old air strip and some bunkers, a rusting tank and a broken airplane propeller. The remaining bits of some massive chaos. The captions in the museum were propagandizing to the extent of being almost funny, but the whole place was just sad. I guess this battle was later seen as representing the whole war in that, both sides kind of took a stand here, lots of people were killed (many more Vietnamese of course, that not even including civilians) and when the battle was all over everybody kind of left and no one really wanted the place, it was just an effort to save face or something. The area was really beautiful; this was quite close to the Lao border, a kind of high drier climate than on the coast. After this we went to Vinh Moc - a little village on the coast, just north of the DMZ, where they give tours through a maze of tunnels that were used to hide and move weapons, and for several hundred people to live in for numerous years. So that was interesting, and I stuck my feet in the South China Sea. And we stopped at a memorial right on the river that was the dividing line between North and South Vietnam. It was a really little river, they said you could walk across - and there were peaceful water buffalos waddling in the middle.
The next day, we rode a bus south to Hoi An. There is a section of town called the 'Ancient Streets'. It was full of shops selling Tet masks and clothes and jewelry and lanterns and whistles and all varieties of everything available, any actual connection with Hoi An or even Vietnam seemed to be peripheral. There was a tourist festival, which involved big lit-up animal sculptures on the river and various sorts of pageantry and crowds of people and merriment in general. And there was a nice beach there, I went and sat in the sand writing postcards and drinking coconut water. Really the most enjoyable part of that place was all the nice cafes that I could go to and practice Vietnamese with people. In spite of there being many tourists, there were many more cafes, and tourists like sheep tend to all go to one place, leaving all the rest of the places for me to find unsuspecting people to practice language on! Most people working in cafes or restaurants in this part of town knew at least a little English, so I could help them and they help me. There were also loads of tailors in town - that is a Hoi An specialty I guess, they can make you clothes in three hours before your bus leaves. So that was Hoi An - fun, relaxing usually, met some really interesting people there, but I wouldn't want to stay too long.
Da Nang is the biggest city in central Vietnam. I guess it is more a sort of industrial place and less touristy. I liked it! We visited a Cham sculpture museum. Champa (kingdom of the Chams) was around in what is now central Vietnam/Laos from maybe the early 1st millenium to about 1400-1500. The sculpture was mostly Hindu stuff, as Champa was strongly influenced by India. The next day we went out to My Son (I know that looks funny in english, but it really sounds like ME SUN), the site of many Cham temples. That was really cool, and also kind of sad because a lot of these temples had been in relatively good condition until the war. The VC used them to hide in, so they got bombed all to pieces... It was super hot, but I enjoyed wandering through the jungle a bit again, and the ruins were really fascinating. There were stones there with writing on them - Champa had the same style of letters as modern Thai/Cambodian - based on Sanscrit. It reminded me of Tibetan, but anyway. As far as Da Nang itself, I wandered through a couple markets, looked at two Cao Dai temples (I'll explain that some other day), sat in the shade, ate seafood on China Beach, made friends with a couple of cyclo drivers who had worked for the South Vietnamese army in the war and thus can't get jobs now, so they drive cyclos... And I found a restaurant with really good hamburgers.
Then I came back to Hanoi. And slept, unpacked, drank coffee, and wrote email. That's it!
We took the train from Hanoi to Hue, a nice neat overnight ride of about twelve hours. Hue (that is with a 'hat' over the 'e' and an up tone... pronounced like /H-way/) is a quite nice town on the mouth of the Perfume River. It has about 300,000 people, as opposed to Hanoi's 3 million. Hanoi still seems pretty relaxed to me most of the time, after China, and well, Hue was positively asleep. Like I said, quite nice! My language tutor came along with us on this trip, so I got to wander the town with him for the first half a day. Then we visited the Citadel, some kind of military thing along this river, I believe built by the French. Behind that, was Vietnam's version of the Forbidden City. Hue was the capital of Vietnam for the whole Nguyen Dynasty (maybe 1600 something to WWII). Most of the Nguyen Dynasty was more theory than actual rule, but anyway, this is where they lived. The gate (which is more complicated than it sounds) and a couple other buildings were restored, the rest was just ruins. This place was damaged somewhat during the war with France, and bombed to pieces during the American War. It was good to see, though, naturally a lot of similarities to the Forbidden City in Beijing.
The next day we took a boat trip up the Perfume River. We stopped numerous places to see stuff, the first being a famous pagoda (they call Buddhist temples here 'pagodas', as opposed to temples, which involve sort of local spirit cults). It had a neat tower, and one of the more interesting things there was an old car that was driven by a high monk when he went to Saigon to burn himself as a protest against the South Vietnamese government in 1968 I think. It got a lot of news coverage. The other three places we went to were all burial sites for Nguyen Kings. These were big elaborate compounds that were pretty amazing, again not really restored (and somehow more amazing because of that), but these places were not as damaged by the war as the place in Hue.
The DMZ is north of Hue not too far. After a rather long bus ride up the coast and then inland and up into the mountains we got to Khe Sanh - an airfield during the war that was the site of a big long extended battle. There was a small building with a couple displays, and you could walk around and look at the old air strip and some bunkers, a rusting tank and a broken airplane propeller. The remaining bits of some massive chaos. The captions in the museum were propagandizing to the extent of being almost funny, but the whole place was just sad. I guess this battle was later seen as representing the whole war in that, both sides kind of took a stand here, lots of people were killed (many more Vietnamese of course, that not even including civilians) and when the battle was all over everybody kind of left and no one really wanted the place, it was just an effort to save face or something. The area was really beautiful; this was quite close to the Lao border, a kind of high drier climate than on the coast. After this we went to Vinh Moc - a little village on the coast, just north of the DMZ, where they give tours through a maze of tunnels that were used to hide and move weapons, and for several hundred people to live in for numerous years. So that was interesting, and I stuck my feet in the South China Sea. And we stopped at a memorial right on the river that was the dividing line between North and South Vietnam. It was a really little river, they said you could walk across - and there were peaceful water buffalos waddling in the middle.
The next day, we rode a bus south to Hoi An. There is a section of town called the 'Ancient Streets'. It was full of shops selling Tet masks and clothes and jewelry and lanterns and whistles and all varieties of everything available, any actual connection with Hoi An or even Vietnam seemed to be peripheral. There was a tourist festival, which involved big lit-up animal sculptures on the river and various sorts of pageantry and crowds of people and merriment in general. And there was a nice beach there, I went and sat in the sand writing postcards and drinking coconut water. Really the most enjoyable part of that place was all the nice cafes that I could go to and practice Vietnamese with people. In spite of there being many tourists, there were many more cafes, and tourists like sheep tend to all go to one place, leaving all the rest of the places for me to find unsuspecting people to practice language on! Most people working in cafes or restaurants in this part of town knew at least a little English, so I could help them and they help me. There were also loads of tailors in town - that is a Hoi An specialty I guess, they can make you clothes in three hours before your bus leaves. So that was Hoi An - fun, relaxing usually, met some really interesting people there, but I wouldn't want to stay too long.
Da Nang is the biggest city in central Vietnam. I guess it is more a sort of industrial place and less touristy. I liked it! We visited a Cham sculpture museum. Champa (kingdom of the Chams) was around in what is now central Vietnam/Laos from maybe the early 1st millenium to about 1400-1500. The sculpture was mostly Hindu stuff, as Champa was strongly influenced by India. The next day we went out to My Son (I know that looks funny in english, but it really sounds like ME SUN), the site of many Cham temples. That was really cool, and also kind of sad because a lot of these temples had been in relatively good condition until the war. The VC used them to hide in, so they got bombed all to pieces... It was super hot, but I enjoyed wandering through the jungle a bit again, and the ruins were really fascinating. There were stones there with writing on them - Champa had the same style of letters as modern Thai/Cambodian - based on Sanscrit. It reminded me of Tibetan, but anyway. As far as Da Nang itself, I wandered through a couple markets, looked at two Cao Dai temples (I'll explain that some other day), sat in the shade, ate seafood on China Beach, made friends with a couple of cyclo drivers who had worked for the South Vietnamese army in the war and thus can't get jobs now, so they drive cyclos... And I found a restaurant with really good hamburgers.
Then I came back to Hanoi. And slept, unpacked, drank coffee, and wrote email. That's it!
Tuesday, March 18, 2003
RRBS
Last weekend we all went to Ninh Binh, where there was nothing, really, and Hoa Lu where there was old temples - it used to be the capital in like 950 or some such year long ago, and to some other town where we rode little boats between rice paddies and mountains and through caves under mountains and it was really nice, and to Cuc Phuong National Park where I walked through the jungle :) and joined crowds of students in the "cave of pre-historic man" who (the students) were seriously more interested in goofy foreigners than pre-historic anything.
That was that. Back in Hanoi we hear about President Bush really going at this war business, and then there is severe acute respiratory syndrome, SARS, or, as I prefer to call it - Really Really Bad Something, RRBS. Doesn't that sound more ominous when you say it? RRBS. Yes, very ominous... Anyway, so from what I know there was one doctor here who came back from Hong Kong, had this disease and a bunch of workers at the Viet-Phap Hospital were infected. From what I read today, there seems to be no kind of new severe cases of it, here or elsewhere, so that is a good thing. That hospital is quarantined now, it is actually pretty close to where I live and go to class, but not right next door or anything. The school has issued the rather cryptic directive to us Hanoi students to 'avoid prolonged contact with people'. Something like that. Obviously the people who wrote that have never been to Asia, avoid people ha! Anyway, they also kind of recommended that we stay in Bach Khoa (this neighborhood) which seems a little bizarre to me but whatever. Anyway, I eat street food every day, and that is probably more dangerous than anything else around here!
That was that. Back in Hanoi we hear about President Bush really going at this war business, and then there is severe acute respiratory syndrome, SARS, or, as I prefer to call it - Really Really Bad Something, RRBS. Doesn't that sound more ominous when you say it? RRBS. Yes, very ominous... Anyway, so from what I know there was one doctor here who came back from Hong Kong, had this disease and a bunch of workers at the Viet-Phap Hospital were infected. From what I read today, there seems to be no kind of new severe cases of it, here or elsewhere, so that is a good thing. That hospital is quarantined now, it is actually pretty close to where I live and go to class, but not right next door or anything. The school has issued the rather cryptic directive to us Hanoi students to 'avoid prolonged contact with people'. Something like that. Obviously the people who wrote that have never been to Asia, avoid people ha! Anyway, they also kind of recommended that we stay in Bach Khoa (this neighborhood) which seems a little bizarre to me but whatever. Anyway, I eat street food every day, and that is probably more dangerous than anything else around here!
Wednesday, February 26, 2003
My weekend in Sapa
Vietnam (in case anybody hasn't seen a map for a long time) is really skinny in the middle with a bigger bit at either end. In fact, if you look at a map of Vietnam by itself and put in some, um, bridges at the south end and an oil rig leaning off the coast at the north end, it looks exactly like a whatchimajigeroo, the kind of thing that has been studied at great length by the venerable Dr. Seuss... Anyway, Sapa is about three inches up and to the left of the ear (if there were an ear) of the, yeah that, in the northwest corner of the top bit of Vietnam.
We took the train from Hanoi to Lao Cai, which is pretty close to the border with Yunnan province of China. From what I read, when China invaded Vietnam in 1979 they came in here and knocked over the whole town of Lao Cai - not that this fact made my three hours in that spot any more interesting, but it was something to think about while waiting for the bus. And sleeper trains in Vietnam are, well, sleeper trains are the same everywhere (except in America where they aren't...). It was kind of funny for me to be travelling with my fellow students, most of whom had never been on a sleeper train at all, after spending half my month of January on trains in China I had almost forgotten how fascinating they are!
So we get to Lao Cai Friday morning at five o'clock or some other dark hour, and take a 'bus' (a van, really) going south, up a lot of hills to Sapa. Spent an hour or two there, eating breakfast, then we start going down what I can only presume to be the other side of the hill. This time I got to ride a Jeep, hurrah! It was a Russian Jeep. You can tell the Russian ones because they say 'Vodka' on the gas cap – ha. Actually, you can tell the Russian ones because they have no AC and the windows don't roll down, not broken just nobody made a crank for them. It wasn't too hot up there anyway, so it didn't matter, but I don't think I'd want to ride one in the summer!
So we go down a long dirt road following the side of a valley full of rice paddies on mountainsides, waterfalls faraway at the bottom of the valley, little villages of bamboo houses and general vast intense green-ness that looked much like a postcard. Eventually we stop and the driver says we can't drive the rest of the way because the road is too bad (some of us were in a van, a van of significantly less stomach than the Russian jeep I was in) so we walked down a path from there to this little village along the river. The walk was nice, amazing views, but it was also down a very steep hill for a very long time.
I noticed something – water buffalos are really ugly! From a distance they look cool, they are the same color as a rock, and have a certain majesty or calmness that accompanies things that don't move much (ie, Buddha, Mt. Rushmore, my VW Van...), but up close they kind of lose that. I guess I've seen too many cows. Con Trâu (yes that would be Vietnamese for water buffalo, see I am learning something) are like cows but they have hair like a pig, horns like, well, a water buffalo, and they can walk on those little paths between rice paddies without destroying them - which I can't imagine a 'normal' Holstein cow doing, in fact I had a hard time doing it myself! They also have pigs here – Vietnamese Potbellied Pigs like I'm told people have as pets in America. They were frankly a bit more unfriendly than the buffalo, and even more ugly.
Anyway, we stayed in a house this village built for tourists I guess, it was pretty cool. We slept in a kind of loft on bamboo floor that bounced whenever anybody walked on it, and our guide showed us around the village - not much to see other than some waterfalls and the bridge which was of the 'sketchy suspension' variety, ok except when somebody led their row of donkeys across it when I was in the middle where the suspension cable is about six inches above the rotting boards - a fine height for tripping. We spent most of the time just kind of absorbing the peace and quiet. It reminded me a lot of the place I stayed in Thailand (Maesuwai, or some such name) only it was in the mountains.
After a day and a half of watching ducks, etc, we hike back up the hill and head back toward Sapa. Saturday night I walked around Sapa, which is just big enough that you can see all of it that you want to see in 45 minutes or so. The last day in Sapa we walked out of town down another side of the hill to a village called Cat Cat - no 'Cat' in Vietnamese doesn't mean cat, I don't know what it means, but 'mèo' means cat, and it sounds like a cat, only with a tone. I don't think cats talk with tones. Anyway, Cat Cat was really just a waterfall, which was cool, and more green-ness, only with more tourists. Sapa itself had a lot of tourists, and a lot of ethnic minority people selling stuff to tourists. The village we stayed in did not have a lot of wandering salespeople, but most other places we went did. That village, incidentally, was ethnic Thai (I tried to theorize about how that was what reminded me of Thailand, but we also went to Hmong village and the houses looked about the same to me, and I don't think I could tell the difference between a Thai person and a Hmong person except for their clothes). I like parenthesis, they make me feel organized! In the Hmong village there were lots of people selling stuff, shirts blankets jewelry bags and, funnily enough, little instruments that are some Southeast Asian variety of the jaw harp. And I met a couple French tourists and got to practice my French, felt all intelligent when I asked if they were French, they said yes and you? I said American, they said - but you speak French! They soon discovered that I didn't speak much French, but anyway that was fun.
In that village there was the cute little girl with a whiny voice who followed me all the way through the village going "You buy shirt you buy blanket you buy music you buy chapeau (they usually spoke a few English phrase but somehow they picked up 'chapeau' which is French for hat, and I didn't hear anyone selling 'hats') you buy from her (not true) why you no buy from me? you American (true) you have million dollars (not true) why you no buy from me? you have money you no buy from me you bad man!" At that point I had to start laughing, which was nice because she kept saying that, all of that, over and over and over until I got back up to the road and into the van and waved goodbye to her.
In Sapa I found a hotel/restaurant with a patio with an amazing view overlooking the valley, and I sat there drinking mango juice and writing in my journal - and borrowed a conical straw hat from the waitress to keep my head from getting sunburnt, and all the staff laughed at me and I felt right at home. I bought a shirt from a nice old lady who was about as tall as my elbow. The funny part about the people selling hats was that they always tried to plant a hat on your head, but usually couldn't actually reach that high.
Back in Hanoi, I have started sleeping through the morning announcements. Oh, the government says that all good citizens should get up at 6:30 am, (I GUESS the government says that, somebody does) and they have loudspeakers all over the place (they even had one in the little village we stayed in, although it was pretty quiet from where we were) and at 6:30 am, as well as a couple other times through the day, they start blasting some kind of propaganda to the world as a whole. It was a bit startling at first but I don't think about it much any more. Not like I understand it - that probably helps me to ignore it! I guess that noise will help me remember Sapa, the quiet place in Vietnam!
We took the train from Hanoi to Lao Cai, which is pretty close to the border with Yunnan province of China. From what I read, when China invaded Vietnam in 1979 they came in here and knocked over the whole town of Lao Cai - not that this fact made my three hours in that spot any more interesting, but it was something to think about while waiting for the bus. And sleeper trains in Vietnam are, well, sleeper trains are the same everywhere (except in America where they aren't...). It was kind of funny for me to be travelling with my fellow students, most of whom had never been on a sleeper train at all, after spending half my month of January on trains in China I had almost forgotten how fascinating they are!
So we get to Lao Cai Friday morning at five o'clock or some other dark hour, and take a 'bus' (a van, really) going south, up a lot of hills to Sapa. Spent an hour or two there, eating breakfast, then we start going down what I can only presume to be the other side of the hill. This time I got to ride a Jeep, hurrah! It was a Russian Jeep. You can tell the Russian ones because they say 'Vodka' on the gas cap – ha. Actually, you can tell the Russian ones because they have no AC and the windows don't roll down, not broken just nobody made a crank for them. It wasn't too hot up there anyway, so it didn't matter, but I don't think I'd want to ride one in the summer!
So we go down a long dirt road following the side of a valley full of rice paddies on mountainsides, waterfalls faraway at the bottom of the valley, little villages of bamboo houses and general vast intense green-ness that looked much like a postcard. Eventually we stop and the driver says we can't drive the rest of the way because the road is too bad (some of us were in a van, a van of significantly less stomach than the Russian jeep I was in) so we walked down a path from there to this little village along the river. The walk was nice, amazing views, but it was also down a very steep hill for a very long time.
I noticed something – water buffalos are really ugly! From a distance they look cool, they are the same color as a rock, and have a certain majesty or calmness that accompanies things that don't move much (ie, Buddha, Mt. Rushmore, my VW Van...), but up close they kind of lose that. I guess I've seen too many cows. Con Trâu (yes that would be Vietnamese for water buffalo, see I am learning something) are like cows but they have hair like a pig, horns like, well, a water buffalo, and they can walk on those little paths between rice paddies without destroying them - which I can't imagine a 'normal' Holstein cow doing, in fact I had a hard time doing it myself! They also have pigs here – Vietnamese Potbellied Pigs like I'm told people have as pets in America. They were frankly a bit more unfriendly than the buffalo, and even more ugly.
Anyway, we stayed in a house this village built for tourists I guess, it was pretty cool. We slept in a kind of loft on bamboo floor that bounced whenever anybody walked on it, and our guide showed us around the village - not much to see other than some waterfalls and the bridge which was of the 'sketchy suspension' variety, ok except when somebody led their row of donkeys across it when I was in the middle where the suspension cable is about six inches above the rotting boards - a fine height for tripping. We spent most of the time just kind of absorbing the peace and quiet. It reminded me a lot of the place I stayed in Thailand (Maesuwai, or some such name) only it was in the mountains.
After a day and a half of watching ducks, etc, we hike back up the hill and head back toward Sapa. Saturday night I walked around Sapa, which is just big enough that you can see all of it that you want to see in 45 minutes or so. The last day in Sapa we walked out of town down another side of the hill to a village called Cat Cat - no 'Cat' in Vietnamese doesn't mean cat, I don't know what it means, but 'mèo' means cat, and it sounds like a cat, only with a tone. I don't think cats talk with tones. Anyway, Cat Cat was really just a waterfall, which was cool, and more green-ness, only with more tourists. Sapa itself had a lot of tourists, and a lot of ethnic minority people selling stuff to tourists. The village we stayed in did not have a lot of wandering salespeople, but most other places we went did. That village, incidentally, was ethnic Thai (I tried to theorize about how that was what reminded me of Thailand, but we also went to Hmong village and the houses looked about the same to me, and I don't think I could tell the difference between a Thai person and a Hmong person except for their clothes). I like parenthesis, they make me feel organized! In the Hmong village there were lots of people selling stuff, shirts blankets jewelry bags and, funnily enough, little instruments that are some Southeast Asian variety of the jaw harp. And I met a couple French tourists and got to practice my French, felt all intelligent when I asked if they were French, they said yes and you? I said American, they said - but you speak French! They soon discovered that I didn't speak much French, but anyway that was fun.
In that village there was the cute little girl with a whiny voice who followed me all the way through the village going "You buy shirt you buy blanket you buy music you buy chapeau (they usually spoke a few English phrase but somehow they picked up 'chapeau' which is French for hat, and I didn't hear anyone selling 'hats') you buy from her (not true) why you no buy from me? you American (true) you have million dollars (not true) why you no buy from me? you have money you no buy from me you bad man!" At that point I had to start laughing, which was nice because she kept saying that, all of that, over and over and over until I got back up to the road and into the van and waved goodbye to her.
In Sapa I found a hotel/restaurant with a patio with an amazing view overlooking the valley, and I sat there drinking mango juice and writing in my journal - and borrowed a conical straw hat from the waitress to keep my head from getting sunburnt, and all the staff laughed at me and I felt right at home. I bought a shirt from a nice old lady who was about as tall as my elbow. The funny part about the people selling hats was that they always tried to plant a hat on your head, but usually couldn't actually reach that high.
Back in Hanoi, I have started sleeping through the morning announcements. Oh, the government says that all good citizens should get up at 6:30 am, (I GUESS the government says that, somebody does) and they have loudspeakers all over the place (they even had one in the little village we stayed in, although it was pretty quiet from where we were) and at 6:30 am, as well as a couple other times through the day, they start blasting some kind of propaganda to the world as a whole. It was a bit startling at first but I don't think about it much any more. Not like I understand it - that probably helps me to ignore it! I guess that noise will help me remember Sapa, the quiet place in Vietnam!
Thursday, February 20, 2003
Dots Lines and Squiggles
I have begun studying Vietnamese. The people who first wrote Vietnamese down in Latin letters were Portuguese, and some French. So, you have all kinds of variations of what we know as english letters - an 'a' and 'o' with a 'hook' on the top right corner, then you have the 'hat' and 'smile' (those are thoroughly unofficial names) above some vowels like in french, only they really change the way you say them, plus tone marks above that. They have six tones, Chinese has four, and the way you mark them is pretty funny - one is a dot underneath the word, then you have a couple that are lines above the word like when writing Chinese in pinyin, then you have something that looks like a tilda in spanish, and you have to kind of make your voice do a little dip, then actually stop the sound for a tiny bit, and go up at the end... (it's not quite as hard as that makes it sound, but takes some getting used to) and another tone with a question mark looking thing (only smaller) above the vowel. Thus most Vietnamese words are surounded by various dots lines and squiggles!
Friday, January 31, 2003
Monday, January 27, 2003
The Road More Travelled
I have now completed my loop (circumbobulous perfection, one could say) in China and am now back in Shanghai. My last note was I believe from Kashgar. After Kashgar I took the train (which is a pretty nice train, really) back to Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang and incidentally, the farthest city in the world from any ocean. Furthest. Most far. Whatever. Why anybody bothered to figure that out I'm not sure - it was probably someone from CITS (China International Travel Service) which throws into grave doubt the accuracy of the figures, but anyway.
From there I wanted to take the train to Beijing. The train ticket office in the hotel didn't actually have any train tickets, (they should just call it "office") so I went back to the station. After pushing in line (one doesn't actually wait in line here in China, one pushes) for 45 minutes, I am told to come back at a later time to buy this ticket which I do; another 45 minutes, I am told to go to another ticket office to buy the ticket, which I do; I am told there are no tickets for the next four days; so the next day I go to the above-mentioned CITS.
I first went to a CITS office in Turpan, where they were closed for the winter, and second in Kashgar, where they told me that it was impossible to reserve a ticket in Kashgar from Urumqi to Beijing and that it would be no problem to buy it in Urumqi… So here they told me that if I couldn't get a ticket at the ticket office they certainly couldn't either. What did I think this was, a travel agency or something?!
So I went next door to the Holiday Inn Business Center where a quite nice person tried for a long time (on the phone, like travel agents are supposed to) to get me a ticket, and in the end got me an airplane ticket (that was all of four hours before the plane left) at almost four times the cost of a train ticket. But, it was like three hours instead of two days and something. And that allowed me to get to the Vietnam embassy in Beijing in time to give them my passport for the weekend to chew on and give back to me Monday, which was all good.
Other than that, Urumqi was just cold, that is about all that I remember: another hotel without a shower head, another hotel front desk lady who wanted to know how to say "luggage room" in orally legible English, a Chinese fast food place called "Best Food" which wasn't best but was complete with the red sign and golden arches serving hot instant orange juice with the value meal, a bakery where the girl who got me my coffee was so excited that a waiguoren came in that she was literally dancing to the music behind the counter, but still too shy to say anything in English or Chinese, and more Chinese concrete highrises... OK, so I did remember some things!
The funny thing in the Beijing airport, after arriving there at ten pm or so, was the guy trying to sell me a hotel room. I asked about a place listed in my guidebook that sounded nice, and he said "bu hao" (not good) I asked why, but he couldn't come up with anything better than that. I asked if his hotel had dorm rooms, and he told me, with a perfectly straight face, apparently expecting me to believe him, that dorm rooms were really quite dangerous and that I should avoid them. Frankly, breathing the air in China (outside of Tibet and Xinjiang) is more dangerous than any dorm room I've ever been in, and I had to laugh at him. Then he gave up on selling me anything and attached himself to some other hapless tourist...
First I went to the embassy to get my Vietnam visa process underway, then I bought a train ticket to Vietnam (which took the rest of the day) and tried to buy a ticket to Shanghai at the same office (which involved waiting three hours while somebody's brother sat in traffic inching toward the west train station with a ticket that turned out to be for the wrong day...) And went to the other train station to the "foreigner ticket office" which was packed with chinese (hmmm) where I bought a soft sleeper ticket because I was too tired to think about spending the next day searching for creative ways to get a hard sleeper ticket.
Instead, I spent the next day searching for creative ways to get money - the 1st ATM was broken, the 2nd ATM was not happy with my card, the 3rd ATM seemed happy enough but said I should contact my bank, the whole idea of getting a credit card cash advance while my passport was not physically on me, but in an embassy, (making me a non-person), made everybody laugh. Actually, the bank manager said I could come back next week when some other office was open and fill out a form to do it. So after the taxi back from the bank, and paying for the hotel until 'next week' I had literally fifty quai in my pocket ($6.20?) and two days to explore Beijing...
The next day, (after eating raisins from Turpan, a leftover banana that was a parting gift from my friend in Kashgar, and a seven quai bowl of chicken and cucumbers which was very good,) the ATM worked. The same one I tried first. I don't know why. And there are no internet cafe's in Beijing. They closed them because last summer there was a fire in one of them and twenty some young people were killed. I'm waiting for someone to set fire to the PSB office to see if they close all of those down too...
Anyway, in Beijing I went to a teahouse/bookstore place to drink tea (this place was really cool) and listen to Chinese classical music - an erhu, a pipa and a 'flute' (I don't remember what they call those in Chinese) player. That was fun. It was also slightly unnerving because there were only a couple Chinese people there, too many foreigners! But still fun, and I was among the only waiguoren who knew how to say anything other than "xiexie" (that is Thank You - with a Louisiana accent).
And I went to the Great Wall (that was my last 200 quai) which involved about five hours of preliminary exercises like a Jade factory and Ming tombs and a Chinese traditional medicine
"yourliverhastoomuchheat-youneedtobuysomeherbs-heretheseareonlythreehundredquai-yesyoucanpayinAmericandollars-thisisthechinesesecrettolongevity-thankyouverymuch-ohyoudon'twantthem?!?!" kind of place.
Lunch was funny, I was at the table with all the other foreigners on the tour (there was some people from Beijing and some Taiwan Chinese), an American, French, and an Egyptian couple - none of whom could really eat anything with chopsticks. It has been a long time since I met a foreigner so foreign that they couldn't eat with chopsticks! We did eventually get to the Great Wall, which was a good place to exercise the lungs. I had a good time climbing for awhile, left most of the other people behind so I had a bit of solitude, and it was really cold so there was not all that many people there.
The next day, after getting my visa, I sat in Starbucks in a happy daze - mostly from my visa and the sudden realization of how soon I am going to be in Vietnam (I have not yet lost my love of going new places, just as long as I don't have to first push through a line for an hour to buy a ticket, and then sit on a hard seat or sleeper bus to get there) and also from the general warmth, the coffee, and the completely unreal atmosphere that places like Starbuck's have in Beijing. Then I walked around Tiananmen Square, and through the Forbidden City, had fun practicing my Chinese with more people who never see foreigners talking Chinese.
The train back to Shanghai was, well, soft sleepers are not worth the money. They have TV, and actual compartments with doors, and only four beds instead of six, but soft sleeper people are snobby... The funny thing is that they aren't really any softer than hard sleeper, just a little wider. And it is good to be back in Shanghai, kind of funny to be done travelling, back 'home' but not home...
From there I wanted to take the train to Beijing. The train ticket office in the hotel didn't actually have any train tickets, (they should just call it "office") so I went back to the station. After pushing in line (one doesn't actually wait in line here in China, one pushes) for 45 minutes, I am told to come back at a later time to buy this ticket which I do; another 45 minutes, I am told to go to another ticket office to buy the ticket, which I do; I am told there are no tickets for the next four days; so the next day I go to the above-mentioned CITS.
I first went to a CITS office in Turpan, where they were closed for the winter, and second in Kashgar, where they told me that it was impossible to reserve a ticket in Kashgar from Urumqi to Beijing and that it would be no problem to buy it in Urumqi… So here they told me that if I couldn't get a ticket at the ticket office they certainly couldn't either. What did I think this was, a travel agency or something?!
So I went next door to the Holiday Inn Business Center where a quite nice person tried for a long time (on the phone, like travel agents are supposed to) to get me a ticket, and in the end got me an airplane ticket (that was all of four hours before the plane left) at almost four times the cost of a train ticket. But, it was like three hours instead of two days and something. And that allowed me to get to the Vietnam embassy in Beijing in time to give them my passport for the weekend to chew on and give back to me Monday, which was all good.
Other than that, Urumqi was just cold, that is about all that I remember: another hotel without a shower head, another hotel front desk lady who wanted to know how to say "luggage room" in orally legible English, a Chinese fast food place called "Best Food" which wasn't best but was complete with the red sign and golden arches serving hot instant orange juice with the value meal, a bakery where the girl who got me my coffee was so excited that a waiguoren came in that she was literally dancing to the music behind the counter, but still too shy to say anything in English or Chinese, and more Chinese concrete highrises... OK, so I did remember some things!
The funny thing in the Beijing airport, after arriving there at ten pm or so, was the guy trying to sell me a hotel room. I asked about a place listed in my guidebook that sounded nice, and he said "bu hao" (not good) I asked why, but he couldn't come up with anything better than that. I asked if his hotel had dorm rooms, and he told me, with a perfectly straight face, apparently expecting me to believe him, that dorm rooms were really quite dangerous and that I should avoid them. Frankly, breathing the air in China (outside of Tibet and Xinjiang) is more dangerous than any dorm room I've ever been in, and I had to laugh at him. Then he gave up on selling me anything and attached himself to some other hapless tourist...
First I went to the embassy to get my Vietnam visa process underway, then I bought a train ticket to Vietnam (which took the rest of the day) and tried to buy a ticket to Shanghai at the same office (which involved waiting three hours while somebody's brother sat in traffic inching toward the west train station with a ticket that turned out to be for the wrong day...) And went to the other train station to the "foreigner ticket office" which was packed with chinese (hmmm) where I bought a soft sleeper ticket because I was too tired to think about spending the next day searching for creative ways to get a hard sleeper ticket.
Instead, I spent the next day searching for creative ways to get money - the 1st ATM was broken, the 2nd ATM was not happy with my card, the 3rd ATM seemed happy enough but said I should contact my bank, the whole idea of getting a credit card cash advance while my passport was not physically on me, but in an embassy, (making me a non-person), made everybody laugh. Actually, the bank manager said I could come back next week when some other office was open and fill out a form to do it. So after the taxi back from the bank, and paying for the hotel until 'next week' I had literally fifty quai in my pocket ($6.20?) and two days to explore Beijing...
The next day, (after eating raisins from Turpan, a leftover banana that was a parting gift from my friend in Kashgar, and a seven quai bowl of chicken and cucumbers which was very good,) the ATM worked. The same one I tried first. I don't know why. And there are no internet cafe's in Beijing. They closed them because last summer there was a fire in one of them and twenty some young people were killed. I'm waiting for someone to set fire to the PSB office to see if they close all of those down too...
Anyway, in Beijing I went to a teahouse/bookstore place to drink tea (this place was really cool) and listen to Chinese classical music - an erhu, a pipa and a 'flute' (I don't remember what they call those in Chinese) player. That was fun. It was also slightly unnerving because there were only a couple Chinese people there, too many foreigners! But still fun, and I was among the only waiguoren who knew how to say anything other than "xiexie" (that is Thank You - with a Louisiana accent).
And I went to the Great Wall (that was my last 200 quai) which involved about five hours of preliminary exercises like a Jade factory and Ming tombs and a Chinese traditional medicine
"yourliverhastoomuchheat-youneedtobuysomeherbs-heretheseareonlythreehundredquai-yesyoucanpayinAmericandollars-thisisthechinesesecrettolongevity-thankyouverymuch-ohyoudon'twantthem?!?!" kind of place.
Lunch was funny, I was at the table with all the other foreigners on the tour (there was some people from Beijing and some Taiwan Chinese), an American, French, and an Egyptian couple - none of whom could really eat anything with chopsticks. It has been a long time since I met a foreigner so foreign that they couldn't eat with chopsticks! We did eventually get to the Great Wall, which was a good place to exercise the lungs. I had a good time climbing for awhile, left most of the other people behind so I had a bit of solitude, and it was really cold so there was not all that many people there.
The next day, after getting my visa, I sat in Starbucks in a happy daze - mostly from my visa and the sudden realization of how soon I am going to be in Vietnam (I have not yet lost my love of going new places, just as long as I don't have to first push through a line for an hour to buy a ticket, and then sit on a hard seat or sleeper bus to get there) and also from the general warmth, the coffee, and the completely unreal atmosphere that places like Starbuck's have in Beijing. Then I walked around Tiananmen Square, and through the Forbidden City, had fun practicing my Chinese with more people who never see foreigners talking Chinese.
The train back to Shanghai was, well, soft sleepers are not worth the money. They have TV, and actual compartments with doors, and only four beds instead of six, but soft sleeper people are snobby... The funny thing is that they aren't really any softer than hard sleeper, just a little wider. And it is good to be back in Shanghai, kind of funny to be done travelling, back 'home' but not home...
Saturday, January 25, 2003
and looking down...
Tuesday, January 21, 2003
Qini Bagh Report
I am in Kashgar, staying in the Qini Bagh Hotel, which was, in days of yore, the British consulate. The primary purpose of the British consulate, I am told, was to spy on the Russian consulate down the street, and vice versa. I guess there was not much else to do in Kashgar! Anyway, at the moment, days of yore are over and the place offers some overpriced hotel rooms as well as really nice 'dorm' rooms for 40 quai - that would be a round 5 dollars a night.
On the train here from Turpan, I met a group of four Uighur students who study in Urumqi, coming back to Kashgar for the New Year’s break. They spoke English pretty well (and Chinese better than the two Hunanese PLA guys who were my hard-sleeper bunk-mates) and were very friendly, and had a guitar with them on the train... Well, that was a good precursor to this place.
After I checked into my hotel, cleaned up and was ready to go out exploring the town, I meet someone right outside my room door who, after a bit of conversation, offers to take me down the street to a Uighur restaurant for lunch, and proceeds to become essentially my tour guide for the last three days. Her English was better than my Chinese, but I still tried to use my language, as well as the three words of Uighur I've learned (I don't know how to spell them though!)
Saturday I walked around, past the Id Kah mosque, allegedly the second largest mosque ever, although I think that is an exaggeration, maybe the 2nd largest in China... And to People's Square, where you find the second largest (and this one I believe) statue of the great helmsman himself - makes me wonder if Chairman Mao ever even came way out here.
Sunday I went to the 'famous' Sunday Market, which was really cool. Big, crowded, I think about a five block radius was totally packed with people, bikes, donkey carts (yes they use those a lot here), and random sellers of dried lizards, sheep heads, and everything else under the sun (mostly not that startling, but always amusing). The place was, well, really photogenic, hopefully my pictures will come out. They sell every kind of dried fruit imaginable, and hats - the Russian kind with ear flaps (everybody wears them around here) along with lots of other varieties, mostly with fleece (real sheep fur) on the inside and mink or something on the outside, and various disappearing species furs hanging all over the place. One enterprising salesman jumped out from his booth, snatched off my nice warm cotton/thinsulate hat and plopped some hairy white/red thing on my head. I have to say that I have never looked so white - frighteningly Siberian (!) - in my life as when I looked in the mirror then, a big furry fox hat with ear flaps and my (currently rather straggly) goatee, with a few stray sheep hairs sticking out here and there! The cloth section of the place was amazing - a lot of silk and so many brilliant colors, it just made you kind of dizzy that so many rich looking things could be sold in a place that on the surface strikes one as so dilapidated and dusty. Plus they had some red cloth up to block the sun, which made all the colors super vibrant. I kind of breezed through the carpet section pretty quickly, having not enough money to buy anything there and not enough umph to carry anything like that anywhere. Also Sunday I went into the Id Kah Mosque, and had kind of a tour which was really cool and interesting, again the guide, who spoke only Uighur and Chinese, made the experience what it was with boundless friendliness that over-rode my bad Chinese.
Saturday night, my friend's friend invited me to her house for dinner, which was incredible. This is back about forty seven little alleys just big enough for a motorcycle, and we go into this room off of a little courtyard that looks like it is straight out of Lawrence of Arabia or something (me not actually having read that, I have to rely on, well, Hollywood or something to fill in the details) with silk hanging on the walls, the floor is of course carpeted (those things were amazing), a big cabinet on one side with ornate woodcarving and inlaid stuff all over it, a very cozy small stove, and piles of food in the middle to sit around and eat. Unfortunately, that experience was kind of cut off in the bud when we had to leave soon after getting there for reasons which I am still kind of unsure about, but in any case I got to see the inside of a Muslim Uighur house, which I am sure that not many travelers have, and it was amazing. I'm not sure how to better describe it, but it deserves a lot more than I can give it here.
Today I went to yet another museum that had to be opened just for me, and the ticket guy followed me around very scrupulously, I guess to make sure that I didn't steal any of the cultural relics (they were mostly all broken anyway) or take any pictures. The only thing that deserved a picture was the three pots they had that were not broken, and were just sitting on the floor, I would say about 800 gallon capacity or so! I wanted to jump inside one and stick my head out and have a picture of that, but, well, since I couldn't very well fit one in my daypack, and the "no photo" sign was right in front of them, well, it didn't work out! And I went to a couple tombs of famous guys, and another mosque - fun places to visit with my friend more for the sake of using (up) my Chinese and her English than for the places themselves.
Kashgar will be well-remembered as a truly interesting travel spot, as well as the place of numerous incredibly friendly people that I have met here. Ironically, my severely limited Chinese is more impressive here, where most people know Chinese as a second language, than it is in China. The rest of China, I mean. Also, English students here appear to learn English way faster than most Chinese students do, I will not ponder the reasons for that, but it seems to be true (based on my, what, three days here...).
Tomorrow I am on the train to Urumuqi, and still don't have a ticket the rest of the way to Beijing, which I expect to prove a really big problem in Urumuqi, since it is New Year’s here, when everybody and their brother (that would be about 1.4 billion people) are trying to get on trains to go places..., but there is nothing I can do about it now, so I'll try to get some sleep instead!
On the train here from Turpan, I met a group of four Uighur students who study in Urumqi, coming back to Kashgar for the New Year’s break. They spoke English pretty well (and Chinese better than the two Hunanese PLA guys who were my hard-sleeper bunk-mates) and were very friendly, and had a guitar with them on the train... Well, that was a good precursor to this place.
After I checked into my hotel, cleaned up and was ready to go out exploring the town, I meet someone right outside my room door who, after a bit of conversation, offers to take me down the street to a Uighur restaurant for lunch, and proceeds to become essentially my tour guide for the last three days. Her English was better than my Chinese, but I still tried to use my language, as well as the three words of Uighur I've learned (I don't know how to spell them though!)
Saturday I walked around, past the Id Kah mosque, allegedly the second largest mosque ever, although I think that is an exaggeration, maybe the 2nd largest in China... And to People's Square, where you find the second largest (and this one I believe) statue of the great helmsman himself - makes me wonder if Chairman Mao ever even came way out here.
Sunday I went to the 'famous' Sunday Market, which was really cool. Big, crowded, I think about a five block radius was totally packed with people, bikes, donkey carts (yes they use those a lot here), and random sellers of dried lizards, sheep heads, and everything else under the sun (mostly not that startling, but always amusing). The place was, well, really photogenic, hopefully my pictures will come out. They sell every kind of dried fruit imaginable, and hats - the Russian kind with ear flaps (everybody wears them around here) along with lots of other varieties, mostly with fleece (real sheep fur) on the inside and mink or something on the outside, and various disappearing species furs hanging all over the place. One enterprising salesman jumped out from his booth, snatched off my nice warm cotton/thinsulate hat and plopped some hairy white/red thing on my head. I have to say that I have never looked so white - frighteningly Siberian (!) - in my life as when I looked in the mirror then, a big furry fox hat with ear flaps and my (currently rather straggly) goatee, with a few stray sheep hairs sticking out here and there! The cloth section of the place was amazing - a lot of silk and so many brilliant colors, it just made you kind of dizzy that so many rich looking things could be sold in a place that on the surface strikes one as so dilapidated and dusty. Plus they had some red cloth up to block the sun, which made all the colors super vibrant. I kind of breezed through the carpet section pretty quickly, having not enough money to buy anything there and not enough umph to carry anything like that anywhere. Also Sunday I went into the Id Kah Mosque, and had kind of a tour which was really cool and interesting, again the guide, who spoke only Uighur and Chinese, made the experience what it was with boundless friendliness that over-rode my bad Chinese.
Saturday night, my friend's friend invited me to her house for dinner, which was incredible. This is back about forty seven little alleys just big enough for a motorcycle, and we go into this room off of a little courtyard that looks like it is straight out of Lawrence of Arabia or something (me not actually having read that, I have to rely on, well, Hollywood or something to fill in the details) with silk hanging on the walls, the floor is of course carpeted (those things were amazing), a big cabinet on one side with ornate woodcarving and inlaid stuff all over it, a very cozy small stove, and piles of food in the middle to sit around and eat. Unfortunately, that experience was kind of cut off in the bud when we had to leave soon after getting there for reasons which I am still kind of unsure about, but in any case I got to see the inside of a Muslim Uighur house, which I am sure that not many travelers have, and it was amazing. I'm not sure how to better describe it, but it deserves a lot more than I can give it here.
Today I went to yet another museum that had to be opened just for me, and the ticket guy followed me around very scrupulously, I guess to make sure that I didn't steal any of the cultural relics (they were mostly all broken anyway) or take any pictures. The only thing that deserved a picture was the three pots they had that were not broken, and were just sitting on the floor, I would say about 800 gallon capacity or so! I wanted to jump inside one and stick my head out and have a picture of that, but, well, since I couldn't very well fit one in my daypack, and the "no photo" sign was right in front of them, well, it didn't work out! And I went to a couple tombs of famous guys, and another mosque - fun places to visit with my friend more for the sake of using (up) my Chinese and her English than for the places themselves.
Kashgar will be well-remembered as a truly interesting travel spot, as well as the place of numerous incredibly friendly people that I have met here. Ironically, my severely limited Chinese is more impressive here, where most people know Chinese as a second language, than it is in China. The rest of China, I mean. Also, English students here appear to learn English way faster than most Chinese students do, I will not ponder the reasons for that, but it seems to be true (based on my, what, three days here...).
Tomorrow I am on the train to Urumuqi, and still don't have a ticket the rest of the way to Beijing, which I expect to prove a really big problem in Urumuqi, since it is New Year’s here, when everybody and their brother (that would be about 1.4 billion people) are trying to get on trains to go places..., but there is nothing I can do about it now, so I'll try to get some sleep instead!
Monday, January 20, 2003
Xinjiang - Kashgar
Kashgar has some truly friendly people
A famous and vibrant bazaar
A famous and vibrant bazaar
And a colossal statue of Mao Zi Dong
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