Angkor's Away

Battambang, Cambodia

 

So this is sovreign state number 6 on this trip, not counting HK/Macau, and for the 6th time  I am sitting here sweating like a banshee in a stuffy building.  Thank god for climalite fabric.  Yesterday and the day before I was in Siem Reap (and would have written about it contemporaneously if not for the frequent blackouts) which is the home base for all things Angkor. 

 

As for Angkor, simply put - holy shit.  Absolutely incredible and exceeded expectations.  It is a truly massive collection of sites - I spent one hot sun beaten day but am going back in a few days to check it out again, but you could spend a week there and just scratch the surface.  It's loaded with tourists of course, but for things like that, it really should be, and it doesn't detract from the grandeur too much as the sites and buildings are simply so huge that people only serve to make it look bigger.

 

Some of the signature buildings (angkor wat and the Bayon of Angkor thom) have undergone pretty extensive restoration work - and in many cases complete rebuilding.  There is a fundamental difference between western and eastern approaches to archealogical preservation/conservation/restoration - with the eastern (mostly japanese funded and trained) approach focusing on rebuilding things the way they would have looked, even if it means using non-original materials, and the western approach being more on preserving what's there and letting the fallen stones gather moss in Ozymandias-like tragedy. (for the japanese, allegedly, the idea of the temple/building supersedes the individual stones, etc.) 

 

For my money though, some of the most impressive ones are the outer "minor" (although they are so massive it is hard to call them minor) buildings that exist on the fringe of the jungle, some with massive 200 foot trees literally growing right in the middle of the buildings as the Khmers used soil as filler under the limestone and sandstone blocks.   They're covered with lichen and moss and bas-relief rubble lies everywhere - the whole thing has a spooky Indiana Jones quality that I haven't encountered anywhere else yet.  Worth the trip.

 

THis morning I took a long hot boat ride down the river to Battambang, in Northeast Cambodia.  THe boat ride itself was hot, long, and filled with groundings and collisions, as it's not so much a navigable river as a series of muddy mangrove swamps filled with punting fisherman and the occassional sampan.  Battambang itself is described as a charming french colonial administrative town, of which I'd say at least the "administrative" part is still apparent.  It's not horrible, just not that great.  It's also, along with most of the NE, a former Khmer Rouge stronghold, though things are fine on that front these days, and like any population center in Cambodia, the dominant force is that of the NGO.

 

--
http://mavillarreal.blogspot.com

Vietnam photos

I have the time, so here goes:



Hanoi Opera House, epitomizes the french colonial period.



And aren't flowers usually pretty too, right?



Yup, I'm still alive, here I am near Cat Cat village forcing enthusiasm at my run of the mill surroundings.



Black Hmong farmers near Cat Cat, near Sa Pa.



Market day at Bac Ha....



....which is the home of the flower Hmong






...because of the way they dress.



Ha Long Bay. I wonder if these guys know where my mp3 player went?



The gateway to the Emperor's palace in Hue, lovingly restored and obviously very chinese influenced.



and an altar to the monkey god from the Japanese Covered Bridge in Hoi An. Even monkeys need gods.

Mister Saigon

Saigon, Vietnam

 

I've been here in Saigon for about 5 days now, having decided to forego Phnom Penh, capital of Cambodia and head for Siem Reap (home of Angkor Wat) directly, reason being that everybody who's been to PP say that it sucks and all the guidebooks warn how it's dangerous after dark, so I traded in my Phnom Penh ticket for today for one for Siem Reap on Friday, and am resigned to watching the Astros cough up another World Series game early in the morning tomorrow.

 

I think the last time I posted I was in Hue, the old capital Vietnam.  Since my travels first stopped in Hoi An.  Hoi An was nice enough, nicer than Hue, and was sort of the Vietnamese version of Melaka/Melacca.  In other words it was an old coastal/riverine city with a lot of foreign influence from traders (primarily Chinese & Japanese, but a lot of Indian & European mixed in) so it was interesting to look at and a decent break architecturally from the standard vaguely French-Vietnamese fusion that is everywhere else.  Plus good food too.  Also like Melaka the Chinese parts of town manage to be more chinese than most of the stuff in China, which happens a lot in expat areas.

 

Saigon isn't so much to look at, and is the most expensive city in Vietnam, though still cheap as hell by western standards.  It is where the motorbike reigns supreme, and more annoyingly, the cry of "Hello Sir! Moto-Biiike!" reverberates in a cascade as I saunter down the street (sweating, it's still hot and humid here).  Again, not a lot of obvious tourist attractions aside from the War musuem although some of the old french stuff (Notre Dame, Hotel de Ville, like any big French city) has been well restored.   The rest of the city is sort of concrete and not all that interesting as it was rebuilt recently after the war took a heavy toll here.  There's a huge expat/tourist population here though.  Again, mostly aussie, but I've met a few decent ones who could carry on a conversation without them accusing you of being an idiot for having George W. Bush as a president regardless of who you voted for or donated to and regardless of the fact that Johnny Howard is no great shakes himself, the most interesting one being a lawyer from melbourne who was sort of doing the same thing I am - we stick together, us common law boys.

Half Hue home

Hue, Vietnam

 

So I've recovered a bit from the Ha Long Bay caper and spent a few days back in Hanoi in expat hangouts comiserating.  I met some fairly interesting folks - generally the expats are more interesting to talk to than the fellow travelers (with the exception of a kilt wearing scotsman I ran into on saturday), at least for me, and my tale of from the concrete jungle to the real jungle arouses a bit more interest than the standard backpacker lonely planet "I just graduated college..." BS song and dance.  Included among them were old vietnam hands (again, predominantly aussie, one of whom, for some reason, explained to me that he "know exactly what [my] problem is.  You don't know who you are! I can tell it just by looking at you! You don't even know who you are!"  That may have been a fair assessment, but my real problem is that there are too many loudmouth wallabies every single damned place I go.) and even a few random russians left over from way back when.  Regarding the others, many of them, even the long termers, shared the same feeling of tiredness of having to remain guarded a bit more here than in some other spots in SE Asia.  On that front, later that night as I was cruising home a moto-hooker...sorry, I mean "masseur" (I must have looked really stressed) who was peddling her wares found time to pick my pocket while I was walking down the street.  On the plus side, I figured it out after a few seconds and simply turned around and said "give me my fucking wallet back", and she handed it over with no fuss- of course it wasn't till later till I figured out the cash I had inside (not more than 20 US$) was gone, but that seemed like a small price to pay for not losing my credit, atm cards, etc, and for whatever reason that wasn't as upsetting as when I've gotten cheated and robbed before.

Today I'm in Hue, which was the imperial capital of Vietnam during the 19th c, and features your standard, heavily chinese influenced forbidden city/palace type citadel.  It's nice enough, and the restored parts are well done, though a lot of it has been destroyed in various fires and wars (the siege of Hue was a major battle of the Tet offensive in 1968, memorably depicted at the end of the movie Full Metal Jacket). Accordingly much of it is just ruins in overgrown fields and crumbling walls pockmarked with bullet holes, which gives it a spooky quality, though not as disquieting as the woman's shoe store/internet cafe I'm in right this second.    After this, it's Da Nang, Hoi An, then Ho Chi Minh City/Saigon and off to Cambodia, which will be a bit of a relief.

Sorry Charlie

Ha Long Bay, Vietnam

 

Ha Long does it take for the honeymoon in Vietnam to last? About two weeks. So stuff took a turn for the not so awesome starting yesterday AM after the night train back from Sa Pa, where I left my fanclub of 4 nd a half foot teenaged Hmong girls and barmen after a week. The night train itself wasn't the issue, but as soon as it ended stuff went downhill.  Groggy and half asleep at 5 AM arrival, I made the mistake of jumping in a fake taxi with a fake meter - which I recognized as such as the ride back to the Hanoi Hilton cost twice as much as it should and they were trying to hustle me into some fleabag hotel of theirs.  So controversy ensued.  Normally I would have paid the extra 1$ that they were screwing me with without complaint.  However, I've been on the road for 4 months, and overcharged, swindled, and screwed over so much that I can no longer take it.  So I screamed at them and cursed them out and generally made a scene which they did not like. I didn't resort to physical violence because my bags were too heavy and I was too tired, but it was an option. Now months ago I would have deplored such conduct - but fuck it. If somebody wants to steal my money, then that is the price they will pay.

 

So things took a turn for the even worse on arrival at the Hilton - they had booked me for a room on the 12th (the night I left for Hanoi) instead of the 13th as I had requested, and even upgraded me to a suite - which I had the choice of using for a full five and a half hours before being kicked out.  I declined this generous offer without profanity and took my leave for Ha Long Bay, which is the other highlight of North Vietnam, a day before I had initially planned. I traveled via bus - interesting to note that as in India, bus conductors hustle all the way up and down the road to the destination to pick up more passengers.  Unlike India, however, where the bus slowly ambles through the bazaars and the conductors shout the destination, as the bus slowly sardinifies, the Vietnamese techique is for the conductor to point and scream  and the small number of pedestrians as the bus honks its way down the highway at 50 mph, an approach that seemed a lot less successful.

 

Ha Long Bay is kind of unimpressive resort town, full of chinese style hotels as it attracts chinese tourists by the boat and bus load from across the border about 30k away.  The primary attraction is the bay itself, which is loaded with thousands of giant limestone islands and outcroppings which basically form a giant maze. These things are a dime a dozen across the south china sea but the ones here are the most in one place, and I have to say they're impressive in spite of the Coney Island atmosphere that surrounds them.

 

So earlier today, I set off on a boat trip arranged by my hotel.  At 8$ an hour for 6 hours, I thought this trip was outrageously expensive by vietnamese standards, but was too dazed to decline when I scheduled it.  When I got to the jetty this AM, my fears were allayed by the fact that my 50$ bought me a junk with a 3 man crew, and seating for 29 of my closest friends.  Say, where the hell were you guys anyway? I always come to all of your stuff except when I don't. 

 

We set off for a gilliganesque tour of the bay and some of the islands. The first stop was a series of limestone caverns, which after seeing the ones in Borneo, were not that impressive.   Making them less impressive was that the Vietnamese subscribe to the Chinese school of tourist site development, which is to put tacky colored lights and railings and generally make things as awful looking as possible in order to attract crowds of custom hat wearing, guide flag following chinese tourists.  Their efforts were an unmitigated success.

 

Lunch was mildly interesting, as it was purchased off one of the various floating seafood markets, and the rest of the cruise was largely uneventful.  The major event happened 15 minutes after I left the boat, and discovered that Giligan or the Skipper had taken the liberty of stealing my mp3 player out of my bag while I was on deck, me having forgotten it was in there. I hauled ass back to the pier to create a scene with hopes of somehow getting it back, but the boat was long, long, gone.  I thought about going to the police, but with me having scant few details and not really knowing where the police station is, I'm thinking the chances of them finding anything by tomorrow am are slim.  So I'm just going to bitch to the hotel staff who arranged it about how their countrymen are thieves.  Again, I don't really give a shit about the mp3 player - it was a cheap one and I haven't used it in months because I'm sick of the songs.  I'm just tired of being swindled, stolen from, and most of all of being constantly targeted for it, and therefore always having to be guarded.  It makes it reallly hard to be nice to people in a country who actually are being nice to you when their countrymen smile while robbing from you.

 

Vietnam, I loved you, and your beer, and your pork, but you are making things very difficult.  With only south Vietnam to go, which few people on the tourist trail are as impressed with as the North, and with Saigon being regarded as kind of a pit, I'm thinking of cutting my time here shorter than anticipated. 

Killing Time

Sa Pa, Vietnam

 

OK, I've been here for 7 days and counting and am finally out on the night train this evening.  I have had literally nothing to do except consume cheap beer and cheap internet access while exchanging the same "where you from/where you going/etc."conversation with fellow travelers that I've had about a thousand times - so I'm just kind of writing this to fill space that would otherwise be filled with bowls of pho and cheap bia.  I've become a fixture at the local bar here and much beloved by the staff as I hand out thousands and thousands of vietnamese dong as tips (which are generally unheard of here, and not forthcoming from shoestring Aussie and Israeli backpackers that populate this place).  On the Aussies there was a brief light in the Oz darkness when, for the first time, I talked to Oz traveler who was ashamed at both 1. the number of Aussies there were everywhere, and 2. how incredibly annoying and obnoxious most of them were.  So, wallabies, there is hope for you after all - recognizing there is a problem is the first step.  In their defense, I will say that of the few Americans out on the trail, a lot of them are complete idiots as well, that I would never hang out with in a million years except for the fact that I had to a few times, though the US-expats I've met aren't so bad, and generally aren't as in to finding opium or getting free drinks from you. The locals I have no problem with though, the hmongs and I are tight, my private montegnard army outlook is positive so far.

 

Since the premature end of my motocross career, I've exhausted the local cultural opportunities.  Last Sunday I went to Bac Ha market (home of the flower hmong, a little different tribe from my sort of- hometown Sa Pa hmong as far as costumes at least).  Mildly interesting, and a great place to get chicken flu.  Also we visited a flower-Hmong village, complete with a patriarch inebriated with traditional 100 proof corn wine, who danced, sang, and gleefully poured shots of jet fuel in gleeful anticipation of his cut from the tour company.  The countryside is beautiful, though the vistas are frequently ruined by the haze from fires due to the swidden/slash & burn agriculture that is prevalent here. 

 

A lot of the agriculture is of cannabis plants, which they use for hemp and for smoking as well.  While it's technically illegal, the cops don''t seem to care very much at all even though it's a police state, and are even less inclined to arrest tourists for dabbling (there's a strict "hands off" policy from Hanoi regarding that golden goose).  The only problem for the tourists is that the mj product here is not exactly knock out strength.  The other night at the Tau Bar, my home away from home, there were two french backpackers, with a huge bag of marijuana, an ashtray full of joints, and just rolling joint after joint in a Le Cheech et Chong-ish display, trying desperately to get high but not succeeding.  I'll miss you Sa Pa.

Easy Rider

Sa Pa, Vietnam

So this is day 4 out of 7 in Sa Pa (my train doesn't leave for a few
more days) which will make it the longest I've stayed in any one spot
since I left New York 4 months ago.  I've been here long enough that
the Hmong street hawker women don't even bother with me anymore when
they see me coming, which is a small victory.

Among the most rewarding things in Sa Pa is not the town itself, which
is at least functional for tourists if not pretty, but the countryside
and the Black Hmong, Flower Hmong, Red Dao, and Giang villages within
day tripping range.  The best way to see these is by auto, which here
means either renting a jeep (expensive) or taking a motorcycle.

Having never ridden anything two wheeled other than a Huffy Dirtbike I
got when I was 10, I figured that the motorbike was the best option.
Yes, it's dangerous, but my taxi on the way in from Hanoi airport
smashed into a road sign so I figure it can't be worse than being
driven.  And anyway, for somebody with zero motorcycling experience, I
figured that the best way to learn would be the rugged mountains of
Northwestern Vietnam around Fan Si Pan, with piss poor roads covered
with potholes, falling rocks, puddles, mudslides, insane motorists,
schizophrenic weather, and loads of "HALLLOOOO" ing village children
running after you whenever you slow down. (Actually the twisty
switchback roads were as traffic free as anyplace I've been recently,
and the heightened danger keeps you from opening it up like Evel
Kneivel so speeds are low and most drivers somewhat cautions - and yes
mom, I wore a helmet).

My mount of choice was a not intimidating looking white Honda.  It
actually wasn't my choice, and I would have preferred the cooler
looking Russian Minsk that is the other popular choice around here,
but they are apparently real pieces of shit, so image loses out.  My
plan was to rent it for three days, to use today to learn how to
become a road warrior and then take on some longer haul day trips.  It
started off lousy as I  teeter-tottered down the main drag here
without striking a pedestrian (miraculously).  Then the open country
started up, and while the weather was good here for a change and the
scenery of the villages & fields was beautiful (and for a change you
saw Hmong not trying to sell you stuff), the road got difficult very
quickly which demanded more of my concentration than I would have
liked - "wow great vie, now don't die you idiot"  For whatever reason,
whenever I saw a rock or pothole, despite all my efforts, some
supernatural force would pull me right towards that rock or pothole.
I think I hit every single one without fail. Plus changing gears was a
bitch, the gear thingy was made for small asian feet, so I kept
missing the damned thing and hitting the ground, which is a bad idea.

My nadir came at one of the nasty waterfalls.  In mountainous
undeveloped highlands in Asia you always get the phenomenon of
waterfalls at the roadside, which are kind of cool looking unless you
are crappily driving a motorcycle through them.  But they make it
difficult to motor through because the water, which is sometimes deep,
obscures rocks and cracks and potholes and bumps and you pretty much
just roll through and pray you don't hit anything nasty --the worst
thing is to go too slow cause then you get stuck, it's delicate.  Well
I did the worst thing and got stuck, and then trying to extricate
myself from the predicament, managed to slip and have my chariot fall
over on its side (and necessarily dumping me in the puddle).  I was
uninjured, save for my pride which was devestated insofar as this took
place in front of two intially bewildered, then laughing hysterically,
teenage Hmong girls walking along the road. The ride went on for
another few hours without incident, again, gorgeous if somewhat
repetitive countryside vistas - so I got the gist of what 2 more days
of it would be like.  But the fact that I looked like a such a tool
due to my extreme suckitude at motorcycling(though I rapidly improved
towards the end) kind of ended my desires to take on anymore ambitious
routes.  I mean, death, danger, who cares - that doesn't bother me at
this point as I've been spitting in the face of the grim reaper with
aplomb for four months now in mountains, deserts, jungles, Indian
buses, etc -- but looking uncool, well there's just a limit  to what I
can put up with. So no mo moto for me for now.
 

Among Hmong

Sa Pa, Vietnam

So yesterday I took the night train from Hanoi to the far northwestern side of the country, right on the Chinese border.  The night train taking process itself was a bit complicated, as the state railway service runs three trains a day out to the border town Lau Cai (or Cau Lai, I always get it confused), each of which leaves within 10-15 minutes of each other, making it a trial and error process as to which train you should get on (third time's the charm)

 

After that it's a short bus ride through the mountains to Sa Pa, the tourist hub.  It's famous for its mountain scenery (the highest peak in vietnam, Fan Si Pan (3000m), is a short bit away.  You know I was going to climb it, but apparently it's a miserable wet climb and the view is only good if the weather is (it's been overcast since I got here), so I think I'm going to honor my Borneo pledge and not bother.  Of course, it's probably going to gnaw at me incessantly that I'm right next door, and I could theoretically take down Malaysia, Vietnam, Cambodia & Thailand's highest peaks in the span of a few months, so I may think it over.  (of course, the peaks, like the people, aren't exactly towering giants, but still....)

 

Sa Pa and the northwest region generally is the  home to the minority peoples, who I plan on visiting and fashioning into a private army with myself as their god-king a la Col. Kurtz in apocalypse now.  Or just buying some handicrafts, as if I don't have enough of those after 4 months here.  You actually don't even have to go out of the city of Sa Pa to do so, the place is loaded with ethnic Hmong in exotic traditional dress selling stuff up and down the street.  Of course the first one I ran into yesterday tried to sell me opium, some things are not so exotic.

 

Speaking of such, let me say life as a lone traveller is somewhat boring, but damnif I'm not offered drugs or women every 15 seconds, far more than I could possibly ever hope to consume - I would have to bring in John Belushi, Jim Morrison, and the young George W. Bush for back up and still don't think we could do all this stuff.

 

On a few more general things: the "hello, moto-bike" call is as persistent here as it was in Hanoi, and even less useful insofar as the town is the size of a postage stamp.  Another thing I noticed is that when a moto driver wants to get your a attention, he usually hoots with a "whoo!" which I guess is like a Vietnamese "Hey!"  It took me a few days to figure it out, I kept hearing the "whoos" thinking that Ric Flair was goingto jump out of an alleyway and start forearm chopping me.

 

I'm unsure as to wheteher I've written on the next subject before as things tend to run together after awhile.  But in Asia, especially in hotels/restaurants/airplanes with delusions of/actual grandeur aimed at upper crust travelers and local wannabes, there is an unhealthy obsession with blaring Muzak.  Really unhealthy.

 

I think there's like one set of tracks for all of Asia, which was playing the day I walked into the first hotel in Beijing and will no doubt be playing BKK in December when I leave.  There are some subtle regional variations, for example here in Vietnam, Micahel Bolton has won more hearts and minds than LBJ and Gen. Westmoreland could have ever dreamed of (and with his luscious locks and soulful lyrics, I would think it is more hearts than minds).  I'm not sure what to make of this anomaly, and whether to blame us for exporting it or them for importing it - suffice to say that the next time I hear an instrumental version of "Take my Breath Away" I'm going to stick a chopstick in my eye.

 

new movie/general thoughts

this should be Kathkalai dancers in Cochin/Kochi

 

http://s27.yousendit.com/d.aspx?id=05KMHPO6926G82G32ER5BQISBN

 

and here's a low res movie of the atmosphere around the Indo-Pak border flag ceremony on India day:

 

http://s27.yousendit.com/d.aspx?id=335W6TP0JRZPZ1ZV7EQ7JID0BW

 

A few general thoughts on Hanoi and miscellaneous stuff I meant to write but haven't yet (everything of tourist interest is closed on Mondays here, which is why I've been updating all day)

 

Hanoi is probably the best preserved colonial city I've seen yet.  Very pleasant.  Not intensely exciting, but almost no damage from the wartime air raids or anything like that.  Central Hanoi is smallish and eminently walkable, if you don't mind dodging thousands of motorcycles (which I can do in my sleep after 4 months in Asia) , though you will seldom see any Vietnamese walking anywhere rather than riding other than poor laborers.  As a consequence, it's pretty much impossible to walk down the street without some guy saying "Hello! Moto-bike!" to try to ferry you along every 10 seconds.  Mildly annoying but they're not that persistent.  The motorcyclization of Hanoi is as complete as I've seen anywhere in Asia.  Even the great east Asian proletarian mode of transport, the bicycle, is a vanishing sight.  Even the hookers now try to take you for a ride via moto, no kidding.

 

Oh, and I should say that the currency here is the most confusing yet. Due to a bout of hyper-inflation towards the end of Viet-socialism in the late 80's, the Vietnamese Dong is currently going at about 16,000 per US$. Which pretty much makes it hard to make an ATM withdrawal without the vaguely disconcerting scenario of becoming a cash millionaire on the spot, and makes for some complicated long division when pricing.

One thing about Asia generally which has totally annoyed me is that whenever I order food remotely spicy, the waitstaff always expresses a scornful "oohh, very hot, spicy!", as if I'm Johnny Bull from Liverpool who takes two lumps of sugar with his tea and will break out in hives if I taste any bit of capsacin.  And then I'm often served something that's greatly toned down.  For god's sake, where do these guys think the chili came from? Hint: not from this hemisphere.  When their ancestors were eating bland lentils, mine were pounding out chili powder, and drying jalapenos and stuff even worse.  I suppose I can't blame them, as there's approximately zero latin americans traveling the circuit in my experience, but....

 

Unrelated item: last week I was talking with Peter, my Ibon tribesman/jungle guide in Mulu out in Borneo.  Sarawak, where he's from, did not open up to tourists, and hence become remotely developed, till the late 80's, so he grew up killing his own food.  Talking with him about the way things were before and the way things are now, he expressed a great preference for the pre-development Sarawak.  "Things were better before", was exactly what he said if I recall correctly.  But, when asked him about his family and such, he wanted all of his kids to go to school and get an education and then get a job in an office.  I've found this type of  somewhat contradictory view to be pretty universal in all of developing Asia, from the steppes of Mongolia to the Tibetan plateau to the Malabar coast to the deserts of Xinjiang and here in the jungles of Borneo - things were better before, but they want their kids to become westernized.  At first glance you would say that it's the "you can't beat em, join em" effect but I'm not so sure if that's all it is.  While the Borneo rainforest is shrinking at a dizzying pace, it's not impossible to live the old lifestyle, as we encountered a number of spear wielding hunter gatherer types.  In the same vein, most Tibetans, while they hate the Chinese, care just as much about having a TV set or a good vehicle as they do about attaining nirvana.  So I don't know if progress really corrupts people in the way that its often portrayed, I mean there is something universally attractive about it, which is the point I am half-assedly making.

Upriver in a longboat

this video might not work, so this is just a test. If it works I'll upload a few more.

 

http://s20.yousendit.com/d.aspx?id=38XCAMJGZUI6D1K30OLTB5M3AY

 

25 downloads is the limit, if you DL you can help  re-up it using www.yousendit.com and post the link in the comment box, thx.

 

MAV

Edit: it works for me! well, if you turn your head sideways that is, I forgot you can't rotate movies like picture. Will put some better ones up later.

S. India & Malaysia photos

Sorry if this is up twice, this computer is stuck on japanese so I'm having some trouble.

Here's the shore temple in Mamallapuram. THat's the heart of the tsunami zone.



One of the cool things about South India is the street painting, here's two examples from Pondicherry:





Even in Pondi - French India- Cricket is king of the streets.





The temple complex at Madurai, one of the coolest things I saw in all of India:



Who goes to Kerala without seeing kathkalai? Nobody:



...or fishermen on the backwaters? Nobody:



On the way back down Mt. Kinabalu in Sabah, Borneo:



In the heart of the jungle in Mulu, Borneo:



Ugliest mammal ever, the Malayan flying fox, world's biggest bat. This thing is like a flying cat and even nastier looking in person. Big and ugly, but cool



And here's a picture of Melaka, Malaysia, simply because I felt like I had to put one in. A nice city, thoguh not a great picture. That's the dutch/portugese church of St. Francis X, which the Brits ruined by putting the ugly lighthouse in front of.

Fortunate Son

Hanoi, Vietnam

 

So after Borneo I spent a few more days in Peninsular Malaysia before flying into Vietnam yesterday.  As for Malaysia, Melaka (Molocca/Melacca) is an interesting place, a former Dutch/Portuguese settlement on the straits (near Indonesia) with a large Baba-Nonya (old school straits Chinese mixed w/Malay/Indonesian) populace dating back to the Melacca Sultanate and before.  Not a lot to do there, but it's got character stemming from cool architecture.  Interestingly, if somewhat predictably, the chinese parts of Melaka are better preserved and more interesting in many ways than the stuff in the mainland, simply because 1. the communists didn't destroy it, and 2. being expats they cling a bit mmore to the old ways.  Also interesting, and not as predictable, is that giant, ferocious looking 6 foot long or longer monitor lizards patrol the riverbank in the middle of the city.

 

Not as interesting was Singapore, which essentially a string of offices and shopping malls with a few old colonial buildings sandwiched in between.  Singapore as we know is an Admonishocracy, where visitors and residents alike are frequently chided about their list of "dont's" such as gum chewing, peeing in public, and even worse, peeing in a public elevator.  Of course, the whole place was loaded with hookers openly plying their trade under no threat of caning (at least not without paying) so it's kind of paradoxical.

 

Yesterday I flew into Hanoi and don't have much an impression yet, other than that it seems nice enough.  Future visitors to Vietnam be forewarned, the importation of toys that contribute negative influences on children (Barbie?) is strictly prohibited by Vietnam customs.

Oh yeah, and I just edited the settings to try to minimize those spammy bitches. Let's see if work.