School of Hard Knocks

Fairtex Muay Thai Camp, Bangplee, Bangkok, Thailand

 

(Bangplee is a suburb of Bangkok, I think it's in Bangkok district, hence the long ass subject line)

 

On my previous post I don't think I accurately explained why I am doing this.  I did give an explanation, which was because I did it before, but that's pretty half-ass and tautological and I don't settle for that kind of shit.   So the reason why I'm doing this is the same reason JFK said we'd go to the moon and hustled Marilyn in  the back door of the White House - and the same reason why I've climbed mountains and crossed deserts and hacked through jungles for the last five months.  I didn't do them because they're easy, but because they're hard. 

 

Thai Boxing is hard, real hard.  Particularly if you're out of shape and not very good at it.  But I keep at it.  There's nothing as absurdly satisfying as in the one kick out of ten when I hit the pads hard and perfectly and make  a loud slap/bang shotgun blast type noise, nothing at all.  It's a challenge, a big challenge - but I like it.

 

What makes it more fun is that like I said before, what could be an intimidationg atmospeher here is anything but.  The fellow campers, (western guys who are pro fighters in their home countries) are a bit socially dysfunctional (meals pass in punctuated silence) but for the most part are not a bunch of jackasses as one would expect.  There's hulking dutch and hungarian dudes here who are nothing but unfailingly polite, and a couple of Spanish guys from somewhere in the South of Espana where I've never heard of  who don't shut up but don't speak much english either so it keeps a lid on things.  All in all though it's a decent crew, all very helpful.

 

Even better, and I can't express this more, are the Thai instructors.  These guys are all former Lumphini and Radamancheon Stadium Champions (think MSG and Boston Garden in basketball), which in the world of Thai Boxing  is equivalent to the world champs.  Many of them are legends in the sport.  But here I am, an out of  shape, out of work attorney moonlighting as a wannabe fighter, and they couldn't be more happy to see me.  I suppose it's the fact that big money (the top of the line fighters, in top fights, make no more than $2,500 per fight) is nonexistent in Muay Thai and hence egos remain in check.  But still, it's remarkable - the guys training alongside me are world champs, who fight in the main events at Lumpini -- and then there's me.  My own personal trainer, a former world champ named Ruck who's about 3 years and 30 pounds beneath me, thinks I'm the greatest thing since sliced bread, desptie the fact that I'm utterly inept at the sport. (I also informed him that I'm the undisputed beer drinking champ of Lumpini Stadium, which I am)  It's sort of like going to a fantasy basketball camp with Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson as coaches, and training alongside Tim Duncan and Kevin Garnett.   Crazy stuff. 

 

As for the particulars, life here is a bit of routine. I get up at 6:30, down a bottle of Caribou Daeng (Thailand is the ancestral home of energy drinks), go a few rounds from 7-8.  9 Am is breakfast/lunch - then sleep  in till about 1:30, then do training again from 2-4.  It's a bit monotonous, and allegedly if you're a serious fighter you'll run 6 miles before each training session (fat chance, I'm sore as shit), but it's good, still.

First Day of School

Fairtex Muay Thai Camp, Bangkok

So first a little background, Muay Thai (Thai boxing) is an ancient art of self defense practised by Thai soldiers which has evolved into a modern sport, which is by far the most popular sport in the country here and is practiced in various forms around the world.  Muay Thai, unlike Chuck Norris/Jackie Chan/Bruce Lee stuff like  Karate, Judo, Kung Fu, etc, has remained a functional sport for hundreds of years, and it does not have a defining credo/philosophy/mr. miyagi aside from the same general buddhist tendencies and rituals that pretty much shadow all life in thailand.  It's also very brutal, because pretty much anything goes - kicks, knees, elbows, throws, I think the only thing you can't do is hit to the groin, and that's about it.

How I got wrapped up in this is as follows: badly in need of some after work stress relief, one day back in January 2004 I walked into Kru Phil Nurse's gym on Howard street in lower Manhattan.  It was exhausting, grueling stuff.  But I liked it, so I went back 2-3 nights a week for about the following year up until I left.  I enjoyed a lot of it, save for the fact that Phil could never rememeber my name, which kind of sucked. So, long story short and on my quest for further adventure, I signed up for a two week stint of the same here in Thailand at the world famous Fairtex camp.

Needless to say, the training at the Fairtex Camp is a little bit more serious than that at a 3rd floor loft in Soho.  it's kind of just me, a bunch of big, muscular farangs with tatoos who are pro fighters, and a bunch of thais who are also pros, having been in hundreds of fights each, some of whom are legends in the sport.  It's sort of like going to an Advanced Non-Linear Dynamics seminar after having only taken Algebra 1 and getting a C in it.  The scariest part, much scarier than a kick to the head for me, is trying to fit in with all these folks as a weekend duffer.

 

I figured the experience would be sort of like boot camp after the last few weeks of epicurean living, and the published schedule (hour of running, 3 hours of training, lunch, 3 hours of rest, repeat, dinner) looks horrendously grueling,  but when nobody woke me up on the first morning i was a little confused.  Turns out that like everything in Thailand, it's fairly low key, do your own thing.  So that was a bit more intimidating in a sense as I had to make it happen, rather than back in nyc with  Phil shouting out commands and having us doing drills etc in precise sequence.  So I strapped myself into a newly purchased pair of ridiculous looking muay thai shorts from the factory that is right next door (which say 'USA' on the crotch, putting additional pressure on myself) and rolled on up to the trainign area. 

 

The training area consists of about 4 boxing rings and some heavy bags (covered by a roof from the scorching heat, mercifully) and 20-30 thai fighters with 0% body fat.  I didn't have a clue what to do then, but thankfully one of my fellow campers directed me to a smaller kid who spoke some english named "Ruck" (last name = sack? unsure, the thai fighters have real names and nicknames too) and we preceded to a go a few rounds with him holding the pads.  Predictably I was quite rusty but I didn't embarass myself too badly (save when I tried to jump over the top rope at the urging of 'Mitt" and promptly fell on my ass in front of everybody).  And that was it after about 30 minutes, far less grueling than the average NYC class, which is good since I'm starting slow.

 

The following will interest only me, but i'm writing it anyway.  The way they do things here is unsurprisingly very different from the way I was taught back in NYC by Phil and the gang.  Phil, being a former boxer from Manchester, taught us in a more boxing oriented way, so I've got a few boxing habits with regard to footwork, distance, etc. the Thais care more about the kicks than the punches.  They're also willing to take more risks and lean in, simply because they're used to getting bashed in the head and just don't give a rat's ass.  So unlearning may be the biggest problem for me.

 

The other big problem is lack of sufficient options during the downtime, since we're a ways away from central Bangkok.  There's a few really bad magazines (eg the Aussie version of "FHM") lying around the living area (which is a dump, btw). Also there's some bad books.  Yesterday out of sheer boredom, I forced myself through a copy of Dan Brown's "Angels and Demons" that was lying around, with the expectation that it couldn't be quite as mediocre as the Da Vinci Code.  Of course, it was.    Generally when I read a piece of crap like this I root for the bad guy, but he never wins, so I'm doubly disappointed.  Obviously this stupid Robert Langdon character is Brownie's idealized self-manifestation.  He must suffer from low self esteem if he wants to resemble that loser.  Dan Brown always puts a bunch of "FACT"s before the prologue of his book.  I suggest he include the following from now on "Fact: This book will contain stupendous cliches and plot contrivances"  "Fact: the dialogue in this book is so stilted and unnatural  as to explain basic concepts to the masses that it is nearly unreadable'  "Fact: the female heroine will be a ravishing beauty with brains, and Robert Langdon will "unexpectedly" get the girl at the end, using every hackneyed romantic incident possible" "Fact: I am going to sell 8 zillion copies despite the fact that this is trash"   Generally I think that all mass-market paperback authors should be kicked in the head by Ruck, en masse, but that's another story.

Aisanglish

Fairtex Muay Thai Camp, Bangkok, Thailand

 

two random observations that i forgot to include earlier:

 

The other day, when conversing with a local, my friend Alex was like "why the hell are you talking like that?"  What he detected was my, by now, finely honed, Asianglish.  In which I speak with exaggerated thai-ish pronunciations of words and simplyify my grammar often omitting articles, verbs, tenses etc. So the question "So, have you lived in chiang mai for a while?" becomes "So yoU live chiang mai long time ?'  While it sounds like a patronizing westerner talking down to people, I've found it really helps in communication (and it makes sense, as much of  Asian language grammar does away with subject verb agreement, tenses, articles, etc.). So as a consequence I've gotten quite good at it and now do it subconsciously. So I'm worried when I step out of JFK in a few weeks I'll tell the cab driver "I go 49 street yes?"  without even thinking of it.  Actually come to think of it, that will probably be work with NYC cab drivers, so never mind.

 

Another thing that is grown to absurd proportions is the Peninsula/Mandarin Oriental hotel rivalry.  As the two premier far eastern luxury hotel brands, and arguably the two finest brands in the world, they brawl like drunken tuk-tuk drivers on each others home turf.  Example, in Bangkok, the Oriental has it's home base, with the first Oriental hotel ever built, old and famous and the home of guys like Somerset Maugham and Joseph Conrad in the old days.  So obviously, it's tough for the Pen to compete with this type of tradition, so they went the other way, and build a massive 40 story behemoth of a building on the opposite bank of the Chao Phraya that  dominates the views of anybody on the river side of the Oriental.  They both have flotillas of identical looking, yet dueling luxury motor launches that seem to try to ram each other shuttling passengers across the river.  One has a fleet of custom BMW's, the other has a fleet of custom Benzes, etc etc etc.  Not that I'm bitching about any of this, but seriously, those of us who travel in the Princess' private speedboat require a bit more decorum.  I think a duel might be in order, or a muay thai fight.

 

addendum

Bangkok, Thailand

 

some random thoughts from the past week i forgot earlier:

 

The one new thing i did in Bangkok is eat dinner at Chakra-something Villa, which is actually the private residence of some old member of the Thai royal family who spends most of her time in London.  Anyway, for a not small but not too exorbitant fee, you can rent it out for the night and have dinner on her pavillion the banks of the Chao Phraya, right across from Wat Arun and right near Wat Po & the royal Palace, and the Royal Staff is at your beck and call.  Pretty goddamned cool.  Even more cool was her luxury speedboat that we got to take back to downriver.  (compared to the mekong speedboat, it was a ferrari akin to a yugo).  Suffice it to say, when you pull up to the boat dock at the Oriental Hotel in bangkok to have a drink at the bar and everybody points and gawks at your ride, it was one of the top pimping moments of all time for me at least.  (on another culinary note, Bangkok also boasts fantastic German food, as its a popular place for them to both travel and live.  Best sausage I've ever had was last night at a place that apparently maintains its own herd of pigs)

 

Also should note that i'm reticent about starting training tomorrow as the last week I've been partying like it was 1999 with my old friend Alex and have since gained a few lbs.  Highlights included making up fake ridiculous names and back-stories about ourselves to the girls, both working and non, who accosted us (I'm Steve Assoluti, Policeman/Helicopter Pilot/Drummer), the surreal occasion of being caught in a monsoon playing Connect 4 with a bunch of hookers (and that literally means the board game, nothing dirty - Alex got smoked by them owing to his superior math skills, and despite my singha induced handicaps I only managed to beat my adversary 9-8 in a best of 17.  The only reason why i was trailing was because I'd build up a lead and then drink some more and promptly allow a connect-4 whore (c-fo-ho) rally, which would force me to play more games out of pride), and hanging out in a Chiang Mai speakeasy.  Also was regaled by locals with some great stories about drunken tourists and ladyboys - the most incredible of which I won't repeat here, but which led me to walk around with a healthy dose of paranoia about all those pretty girls smiling at me.

 

Penthouse to Outhouse

Bangkok, Thailand

 

I think this is the longest I've gone between updates for a long while, so I'll be very brief with some updates for the last week or so.

 

My best friend Alex and his pere Jack were here and we spent a few days in Bangkok, Chiang Mai, Koh Samui.  Bangkok was good, we did the standard things, (Wat Po, Palace, Shopping, etc.).  The boys loved muay thai at Lumpini as it afforded Jack a chance to catch up on some sleep.  But we did bangkok.  A fantastic discovery that we made last week here came when we stumbled into Jorg Kohler's store (  www.classicmaps.com ) which features expensive, yet exquisite, antique maps and prints of Asia, that are worth every penny.

 

After Bangkok was Chiang Mai, the second city of Thailand and the northern capital.  Not a lot to see there although you can overdose on Wats if you like as some of the best in the country are there.  Also unbelievably impressive (and basically worth the trip) was the Rachamankha hotel - probably the single most aesthetically pleasing hotel at which I've ever stayed, with absolutely gorgeous Lanna style architecture and lanna/burmese antiques furnishings.  I hate to use the cliche but it was very zen, and highly highly recommeded by me and the boys.  Chiang Mai itself, desptie being overloaded by tourists, is a nice spot, very relaxed. It's sort of the "real" thailand without the chaos of Bangkok. 

 

Koh Samui was next - a tropical paradise, that was buried under several feet of rain starting the moment we got there.  Outrageous torrential storms and flooding have ravaged the south of Thailand, killing at least 12 on Friday so we were unable to swim or do pretty much anything you would do in a beach town.  Nor would we be for awhile, as the beaches were destroyed and will require weeks to clean up.

 

So now I'm here at fairtex muay thai camp  outside bangkok, which isn't as spartan as one would believe (they've got a nice pool) but a far cry from the last week.  Thus far I've kind of just sat around and read the paper, but I guess the anectdotes and kicks to the gut will start rolling in soon.  Think of me as George Plimpton playing for the Detroit Lions but just not a weird old freak.

Pause

Vientane, Laos

 

(Pause - because I'm taking a break from updating and so I'm also throwing in some disjointed random thoughts before I forget)

 

I understand why people like the Lao. They pretty nice, friendly, easygoing folks, and they don't try to cheat you or steal from you to the extent that some other indochinese succumb to temptation.  Plus they are very low pressure at trying to sell/hustle you.  Even the hookers here are sort of meek about soliciting you on the street (I would describe them as "laid back" but that's probably a bad choice of words).  The capital, Vientane, is about as unassuming as they are.  Not a lot of traffic, or people, or tourist sights as Vientane has been looted and sacked repeatedly by Burmese, Thai, and Vietnamese invaders until the late 19th c. when the French moved in and stablilized the borders, to the temporary joy of the Lao. (however, it is absolutely overrun with backpack laden travelers coming over the Mekong from Nong Khai Thailand and hence finding a simple guesthouse bed is a real bitch)   

 

This laid back-itude can lead to some complications though, especially since the infrastructure here has simply not caught up with the massive tourist influx due to Lao being the hottest thing going in Queensland these days. Hence my arrival in Vientane was a bit delayed after the express bus ticket I bought was overbooked and U was relegated to the regular public bus.  The public bus  looked like a model that was donated/scrapped/sold to them, as it had korean writing all over the inside - I'm still debating whether it came from North or South Korea, every time we changed gears it made noises like an 18th century blacksmith shop was operating under the drivetrain.  Needless to say it was crammed with every Lao that could possibly fit as it stopped at the first 57 rattan huts we saw in order to load more people (some with AK-47s who I assume (hoped) were soldiers), rice sacks, poultry, furniture, etc.

 

That said the drive would have been pleasant, had it been less excruciating. Mind you, I'm not blaming the Lao here, I'm blaming the 18 zillion tourists that are overrunning the infrastructure, which I am doing my part to limit by getting the hell out in a few hours across my second Friendship Bridge in the past week. This bridge, one of the few across the Mekong was interestingly funded by Aussies, which is no coincidence as they probably use it the most since hordes of them pour over it every single day in search of the cheapest possible guesthouse in which to act obnoxiously.

 

Back to the drive, the scenery is pretty cool, simply because there just aren't many people here, only like 5-6 m for the whole country (compare that with 60m Thai, 70m Vietnamese in areas not that much bigger and 12-15m Cambodians in an area much smaller).  THere's a few huts and small settlements here and there but the off the highway the Lao highlands are pretty much absolutely deserted, just jagged limestone cliffs, lots and lots of vegetation, and clear blue skies (and unfortunately, in the eastern half of the country lots of UXO (unexploded bombs) left over from the war era, courtesy of the USAF and Air America).  Few places that i've been to inthe last few years are as isolated, maybe Mongolia, parts of the Tibetan plateau and the Talamaklan Desert, but even there you're not far from grazing animals and oases - here it's just trees (and tigers, bears, gibbons, etc).  So it's easy to see the appeal of Laos in that sense, and if it were a few months ago and I were less tired and had more time, no doubt I would have bounded into the jungle like Dr. Livingstone in spite of the barely there tourist infrastructure.

 

Tomorrow I'm taking a bit of a breather insofar it's back to the 5-star life with pre-booked hotels, flights etc as one of my best comrades from NYC flies into Bangkok.  WHich is great, because I am really tired of eating alone in restaurants.  Usually I take a book so I will at least not look like a loser, but finding books that don't suck is sometimes a problem here (though that hasn't stopped me from reading so many I've lost track, I believe the number is over 30 by now, I stopped counting after 20 and that was months ago.) The selection of English books usually sucks.  The other night I had to trade in Graham Greene's "The Honorary Consul" (which was very good) for a pirated, xeroxed version of "American Psycho" (which was not but it was the only non-Clancy/Brown book there - it was a book based solely on shock value that droned on with the same schtick for 400 pages when 150 would have done nicely).  The worst thing is they made me  pay an extra 2$ for it - I tried to explain to the Lao bookseller that Graham Greene was a vastly superior writer to Bret Ellis and that the literary value was much higher, but American Psycho had a glossy cover, and the Greene book was an old Penguin paperback, so that didn't really work out. Oh, and on the subject of mass murder, if I hear either the original or muzak version of Richard Marx vomit inducing ballad, "waiting for you" one more time...

 

On French Indochina generally, since I'm leaving it soon - a few thoughts:  It's a profoundly interesting area (moreso, IMO, than mainland china nearby) because of the huge variety of influences here.  Each country has it's majority group (Khmer, Lao, Viet) but that group was profoundly influenced by Indian and Chinese culture and blends both although the degrees vary.  Add in substantial indigenous minority group populations (save in Cambodia), longtime trader colonies, and then on top of that, add in a century or so of French influence (which results in fantastic pastry, btw)  and the results are compelling.  

 

I should also say that the results historically  have been very violent, not just with the last century's bloody wars in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, but historically the states and kingdoms in the region have been invading each other and been invaded by the Chinese, Burmese, Siamese, for centuries.  I have to think it's population pressures and scarece resources that motivate a lot of this more - looking at Laos, it's the most sparsely populated (though very ethnically diverse), and while it too had a violent civil war, the scale of bloodletting afterwards was comparatively mild , there were no mass murders and the transfer of power to the Pathet Lao was peaceful.  Contrast this with more ethnically homogenous (yet far more densely populated) areas like Cambodia and the carnage that ensued. 

 

That said, it's a great place to visit, and I hope to  return before there are 7-11's on every corner like in Thailand.

 

Cambodia/Thai/Laos Pictures

Here's some more pictures. Also check out the movies in the post before this one if you like.

A few Angkor shots below:







These don't do it justice, it's just amazing to see.



Riding the bamboo train! As fun as it looked.



One of many cambodian families living on Tonle Sap, a huge lake/marsh in the center of the country off the Mekong



Sukhothai historical park, Thailand



Kid, if the shoe fits...



Some more Burmese. The stuff on their face is combination sunscreen/buddhist anointment or neither, my guide wasn't all that clear on this part.



Wat Sisaket, in Vientane, Laos.

New Movies!

25 downloads each.  Re-up and re-post in the comments section if you like.

 

Riding the bamboo railroad in Cambodia

 

Burmese schoolkids say hello, or something to that effect

 

Motoring down the Mekong

 

Evening prayers at the Wat in Louang Prabang

enjoy.

High-Lao

Louang Prabang, Laos

 

A few weeks ago, on the way to Cambodia, I said that was going to be last new country to visit.  Of course in the last few days I've been in 3 different countries, so I guess I lied. 

 

I made my way to northern Laos via north central Thailand and the Chiang Rai area, almost entirely by bus.  While the bus system in Thailand is short on legroom, as most thais are short on legs, it works pretty well.  Thais are easygoing in general but the people who operate the bus stations are busybodies who make it their personal duty to get you on the right bus at the right time (and they always wear denim shirts or jackets - it's like the universal bus operator outfit here, strange) and are very helpful in general (and they don't expect baksheeh either).  The buses themselves are clean and efficient and usually air conditioned.  After enduring the hell that is the Indian bus system for a few months it's kind of awesome in a way.

 

As far as going to Laos, I can't say I've harbored a burning desire to ever go there, but I do have to leave Thailand and not cross back till the 15th so as not to overstay my visa, and I was in the neighborhood.  Also, I wanted to see if Lao lived up to the hype - it's gotten lots of coverage as a vacation stop and the euro/aussie backpacker circuit acts like it's the greatest thing since cheap weed.  I've seen smelly Aussies get wistful and teary eyed at the mere mention of Lao.  I crossed over to Laos around the town of Chiang Khong by taking a ferry across the Mekong.  The Lao town on the other side, Houayxai, could be described as a one stoplight, one horse town, but that would be an exaggeration as there is nothing as remotely interesting as a horse or stoplight would be there.  (nb: I'm going to say "Lao" as an adjective and not "Laotian", which is a dumb word that the French made up.  Saying Laotian to a Lao is like saying "Thailandic" or "Thailandish" to a Thai - it's just stupid.  Oh, and if you're reading along in your head, nobody ever pronounces the "s" in Laos, everybody just says Lao, no 's'.).

 

After an extremely uneventful evening there, I showed up at the speedboat pier the next day to go down  the Mekong to Louang Prabang.  Now, over the past 5 months, I have done a lot of traveling, via foot, bike, motorcycle, train, tuktuk, autorickshaw, cycle rickshaw, Air India, bus, taxi, minibus, bas-mini, longboat, junk, bamboo train, etc etc etc.   But when it comes to "most ill-advised travel experiences", the speedboat to Louang Prabang easily takes the prize.  

 

Picture yourself wedged (along with 8 others plus luggage) into a space on a wooden boat about 14 inches long by 16 inches wide, sitting on your ass with your knees held to your chest and your feet crammed into the board in front of you, and a board jammed into your back behind you.  Now, imagine a very, very, very loud outboard diesel engine (they give you helmets to protect against the noise) running right behind you.  Now do this bumping along the Mekong in the sun at about 30 or 40 mph for 6 hours.  

 

Not fun. The river was nice (and very sparsely populated, there's only a few million Lao anyway), but it was hard to appreciate when you're just praying you'll someday regain feeling in your toes. It wasn't cheap either, about 30 bucks, which is a fortune in Lao terms.  Laos overall hasn't been that cheap.  It's not expensive, it's just that the only people who can afford things (like Cambodia) are tourists, so prices are artificially high.

 

Louang Prabang itself is OK.  It's the cultural and spiritual heart of Laos (the actual capital is downriver in Vientane) and has wats, wats, and more wats, and a palace or two, though my tolerance for wats and palaces after 150 days as a tourist in Asia has diminished somewhat.  Otherwise it's your standard french colonial architecture with chinese influences, not unlike northern vietnam.  Nice, but I'm not sure if it lives up to the hype, plus I've already seen this stuff in the rest of Indochina so it's hard for me to see why Mickey Melbourne and Sherry Sydney get so hot about it. Lao food is pretty decent, sort of like Northern Thai with obvious vietnamese influences and a lot of Mekong fish mixed in. The weather's nice, and there's no pollution as Lao hasn't a lot of people or industrial areas (and sometimes no electricity as a consequence)

 

Overall though, there's not much to do here except sit around and have a drink. Beer Lao has a reported 99% of market share here, so your choices are a bit limited but it's good beer.  Southeast Asia as a whole is a pretty good beer making region.  Each country has its own national brew: here it's beer Lao, Cambodia has Angkor Beer (although Anchor Beer is also widely sold there, so whenever you order one, you almost inevitably receive the other, unless you're a wussy brit who says "An-chore, please"), Myanmar has Myanmar Beer, and Vietnam has a regional brewery in each city, while Malaysia/Singapore are dominated by Tiger.   Every one of these beers claims to be the winner of some sort of international beer contest of some sort.  But they are all pretty good.  Also available everywhere, much to my dismay, is Heineken.  Why people drink that shit, when it is both: 1. worse and 2. more expensive than the local brews is absolutely beyond my comprehension. 

 

The last person I saw drinking one was an obnoxious sounding German girl last night who, on observing and visibly disdaining an Australia/England rugby match on TV, pronounced with apparent seriousness,  that "We Germans don't play rugby, we are too civilized!" I almost fell out of my chair.  I thought people like that only existed in movies.  Germans don't play rugby because they're afraid that if they do, they'll enjoy hurting people too much, and they'll seem like a bunch of assholes.  So instead, they are just mind-numbingly boring (civilized), which is a safer alternative.

 

Tomorrow is a 10 hour bus ride to Vientane. That sounds like a long time, but the alternative is a speedboat.

Burma & Back

Mae Sot, Thailand

 

Mae Sot is a Thai border town and hence kind of one of those skanky, ugly yet mildly interesting hodgepodge cities that you get wherever there's a border, a large income discrepancy, and liberal amounts of bribery and lawlessness on both sides.  It's also got a large, old chinese populace (wherever there is a historic trading community in SE Asia, there is always an old school chinese community) as well as a significant population of both ethnic Burmese (generally darker skinned and more likely to be wearing sarongs) and Karen Burmese refugees (a low intensity civil war with Karen separatists  has been raging across the border in Burma for decades, though many Karens are now good, god fearing Anglicans thanks to Aussie evangelists.

 

In order to get to the border (Mae Sot's about 6km away), you take what is the fairly universal mode of transport in Cambodia/Laos/Thailand outside of major cities - not the motorbike or tuk-tuk, but the Sangkaew, which is a pick-up (or flatbed) truck with a roof over the bed and a few (padded, if you're lucky and in Thailand, wooden if you're not) benches set up for cargo/people.  So this morning I piled into a sangkaew with a bunch of returning Burmese and headed for the "Friendship Bridge" over the Moei River to the Burmese town of Myawaddy. (generally every asian border crossing is spanned by a "Friendship Bridge" or a "Friendship Highway", usually between countries that are usually not very friendly historically (Thailand and Burma being no exception - most of medieval thai history deals with various wars and invasions and counter-invasions by and of the rival Burmese.)  Once the border formalities are complete, you acquire a nifty Burmese passport stamp (I'm not one for trophy travel, but it was cool to get it nonetheless, plus there's not much to do in Mae Sot anyway).  Crossing the border, things take an unexpected turn for the poor, even if you expected it to be that way.  The Thai side of the river is run down and ramshackle, the Burma side is paleolithic - pedi-cabs (trishaws) replace tuk tuks, and motorbike capacity increases to about 6 burmans per vehicle, instead of the ubiquitous, plain spoken navy blue & polyester thai uniforms, you get little kids running around in muddy green hand me downs - who ar the lucky ones as they at least get to go to school.   It's not unlike crossing the Zhangmue/Khodari border (also via friendshp bridge) in between China and Nepal - one side is poor and chaotic by western standards - but the side you cross to is exponentially more so.

 

I was met instantaneously by a bunch of tour guide/translator/hustler types as I crossed the border who i positively could not shed.  Also it was raining and I had no map  and was the only westerner in town so was pretty much at their mercy.  I succumbed to my man (Joti or something like that was his name - he just kept calling me "traveler-visitor") and he proceeded to give me a tour.  There's not much to see in Myawaddy aside from a few Wats (which appear more like Indian or Nepalese Wats than Thai ones do, so mildly interesting) and hear about the stnadard episodes from the life of Buddha, which I pretty much know by heart now anyway.  Joti/whatever kept assuaging my initial fears of cross border hustlers by saying "You can trust me, I not tell lie ever, I very innocent, you traveler visitor, I help you, I no do bad things. We have military government here in Myanmar, if I do bad things, they start shooting!" - which sounded honest enough.

 

Afterwards we had lunch (Myanmar food is not unlike Indian food with Thai influences) and Joti told me about how he loved the Czech soccer team and hated the Norwegian team. I'm not sure why, but he felt very strongly about it.  We also had some conversation about Thai women, who he did not like, as they cost too much, I think.  I sort of missed the gist of that, though once again I was complimented as being very handsome.  This seemingly happens to me everywhere I go here, the women (working and not working) of the Lower East Side of Asia react more positively to me than their counterparts in Manhattan, and even some of the men. THere was a gay security guard at the hotel in Saigon who would escort me across to the elevator, holding my arm, every time I walked in.  I double locked my door there.

 

Tomorrow it's northeast towards Chiang Rai and then over the Lao border.  I'm collecting countries like trading cards at this  point.

Thaied Up

Sukhothai, Thailand

Another week, another country.  I arrived in Bangkok for the first time since last year last Thursday, I think (easy to lose track of time), and within a few minutes on arrival, (well, actually a few hours as BKK Don Muang Int'l airport is a madhouse this time of year) I was accosted by several thousand fake taxi drivers (ignored them), screamed "meter, meter, meter" 1000x when my regular driver tried to re-negotiate, and then had to scream at him again for him to take me to the hotel I wanted rather than the fleabag guesthouse that would pay him a commission - and of course this is all sandwiched around the worst most heinous traffic existing this side of the world, in my experience.  So really, there were no surprises - that's just the way BKK is.

 

Yesterday I made my first journey outside of BKK and flew north to Sukhothai, which is the ancient capital of Thailand during the golden years in the 14th c before it moved to  Bangkok much later, though apparently it bears no relation to the Jewish festival of Sukkot, much to my shack-grin.   The historical parts (wats, wats, and more wats, and a stupendous amount of stupas - and boy, I really need to see more of those after 5 months in Asia....) are pretty interesting though it is still hot as holy hell up here even though I am theoretically in Northern thailand.   Sukhothai town isn't much to look at (one of the benefits of colonialism, from my selfish POV, is that cities and towns in colonial spots like Vietnam and Cambodia sport much more interesting architecture, both of the colonizers and the local fusions/variations), but that isn't it's biggest problem. 

 

The biggest problem here is the nightlife.  There's a lot of it, in fact, more than I've seen anywhere yet, it's quite problematic as it's rather distracting.  By this I mean the millions and millions of gnats that come out at night and flock towards anywhere with light (and therefore people).  And it's not just a few gnats, I'm talking huge clouds that gather in front of lights, in doorways - it makes it look like it's raining outside, it's even hard to breathe at times.  As far as pests go, I guess gnats aren't that bad, since they don't really bite, sting, spread disease, or anything like that.  They just fly around, get in yoru face, and then die in the morning - it's still really annoying though.

 

Tomorrow I'm headed west a bit to the mountains that border on Burma and the town of Mae Sot.  Generally, as I've traveled, not sure if I've mentioned this before, but I find that the border/fringe areas of a country tend to be the most interesting for various reasons because you sort of get the best of both worlds - Xinjiang, Tibet, Kunming in China, Ladakh, Tamil Nadu India, Borneo in Malaysia, NW Vietnam etc.

 

 

Back again

Siem Reap, Cambodia

This AM I took the boat from Battambang back up the river here to Siem Reap, where Angkor is, which I plan to make a return visit to tomorrow.  One day doesn't really do it justice.  The boat ran out of gas at one point and it looked like we were going to be sitting for a long time, but a helpful man in a canoe appeared in the right place at the right time.

Day 2 in Battambang meant a little bit of exploring in the area around.  There's one 11th C. Khmer temple (Wat Ek) that is worth seeing, it's not Angkor, but it's cool enough, and it's on top of a hill which makes it mildly impressive just for that.  One of the not-so-cool things about it is that local militant Buddhists have staked their claim to it and charge admission and collect donations to line their own pockets.  The thing about the Khmer buildings is, they're really not Buddhist in origin.  The Buddhists like to pretend they are, and hence demand a cut of admission fees, but anybody with a half a brain cell can tell you that  the pictures of  VIshnu, Ganesh,  the dancing Apsaras and the Shiva Lingams  render them about as hindu as it gets (Indian cham traders contributed this influence to the Khmers").  Of course the official khmer religion eventually became buddhism, but they didn't forget their hindu past.  The whole idea of militant buddhists is probably foreign to most westerners since our predominant buddhist imagery includes cuddly dalai lamas and zen rock gardens.  But they exist.  Particularly in the Hinayana/Theruveda form (the saffron robed guys you see in Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Sri Lanka) which is somewhat odd as the conventional wisdom is that their form is the more low-key form. (denigratingly referred to as the "lesser vehicle"  (that's what hinayana means)  by the Mahayanas - which are Tibetan/Himalayan buddhists found in that region as well as Mongolia)

The other, uh, attraction of Battambang is a chance to ride the bamboo train, which I took, as my moto guy called it the opportunity I would remember for an entire lifetime.   Since the roads were so awful and covered with mines, and the national train service frequently disrupted during decades of war, the Cambodians who lived along the railroads built their own trains, which are essentially bamboo boards with lawnmower engines and iron wheels. It's stil in use today and is a pretty ingenious form of local transit evn though motorbikes (5 or 6 to a bike) and pickup truck beds predominate in the dry season.

The final attraction of Battambang, that I did not see, alas, was its most famous part time resident, Ms Angelina Jolie, who conducts world-saving activities from a villa outside town part of the year.  To her credit, she picked a good place to do so, as it needs the help.  The countryside around Battambang (and pretty much everywhere in cambodia) is as poor as you would imagine it, skinny underfed cattle, scrawny children, naked kids running around.   And everywhere there are people and settlements.  Before here, I would say that Mongolia (and parts of India) were the poorest places I've seen, but this is up there with any of that.  This is pure specualtion, and I'm stealing the idea from Jared Diamond's "Collapse" again (the chapter on Rwanda), but I would not be surprised if malthusian/environmental  population pressures were as much a factor durning the savagery of the Khmer Rouge bloodletting as were politics.  I forewent to see the opporutnity to see mass graves and bones, though my moto guy promised me skulls, I decided I just didn't want to see it.

Despite it all, I must say Cambodians are a pretty friendly lot.  Oh, and the food is pretty good - like you would imagine, it's sort of halfway between thai and vietnamese food.  Also, I should note that the SE Asian obsession with lacquer.  Every damned place you go, from expensive hotels to cheap ones, everything that can be lacquered is lacquered.  Door frames, furniture, whatever.  I'm afraid if I stay in one spot too long I might get lacquered in place.