So I got invited to spend Tet (Vietnamese and Chinese New Year) with this guy's family out in the cuts. Basically, the plan is to spend the next 5 days on a Vietnamese family farm about 60km from where I am now, and follow them to the beach town of Muine afterward, where I'll get to learn to KiteSurf (for real this time). I think I've done pretty well for myself, anyway. In any case, I'll be completely out of communication for the next week so if you have something to say, say it now.


Thanks, Mat, for the advice about Saigon but unfortunately I already got the hell out of that city so it's a bit late. I guess I was just sick of being treated like a big bag of money, but with all that hustle I can imagine why a New Yorker would like it. Still, from my 4 days in Saigon I'd say Chiang Mai is way, way cooler if you're looking for a new place to teach English. Then again, I only stayed there for 2 weeks...and I guess the whole hippie thing worked there too.

I'm up in this really tacky resort town a few hours north of Saigon called Dalat, which was cool for a the first two days because I look like a cheapskate asshole in relation to all these Vietnamese tourists paying through the nose for the kitchiest things imaginable to give to their families for Tet. But the scenery would be beautiful, if it weren't for all the fucking Agent Orange we dropped on the surrounding area. I got to drive out for about 20km into the countryside, and virtually all the forests are made from identical 30-year old pine trees with tiny patches of jungle in between. To be fair, the US Air Force left some reasonable patches of old growth jungle intact, but the locals cut them down anyway for wood. It's all just depressing no matter how you slice it. Hopefully the farm I'm staying at was far enough from the fire zone to still be beautiful. Happy New Year again!

Enough with this loafing! It's time to try an experiment. I'm out for 8 months and I've been making the exact same first impression on everyone I've met. So the other day I went to a barber shop and died parts of my hair bright, bright red/orange and cut it all short enough to stick up. Thankfully one of clients at the barber shop spoke english enough to translate this request, since nobody could figure out why the hell anybody would want that. In any case, I then went ot the American War market and bought some authentic Taiwanese reproductions of US military clothes (vest, camo shorts, shirt and aviator sunglasses) and proceeded to turn my image around 180 degrees from hippie to war-crazy party GI. I guess the experiment was to see how differently people would treat me.

This goal was accomplished in a major, major way. It might be because the funkiest style these people have seen is a pair of nice sunglasses and a cool shirt, or occasionally you might see somebody with bleach yellow longhair. Or it might be some kind of post-war nostalgia of the G.I. flings (or dads) here on shore leave who must have looked equally nuts. But if people looked at me as another passing tourist before, now they have no idea what to make of me.

I guess the biggest success of this experiment is the reflection of this image back onto myself. In the bars at night, people treat me like a party animal whether I am or not; it's a whole lot easier to be energetic anyway. One night I was tired as all hell, but all it took was a few minutes to round up some people at the local bar and head to Apocalypse now (dressed the way one's supposed to be) and ended up standing on the chairs shouting the lyrics to I Will Survive like it was a war rally song. The music at this club was truly aweful, but for some reason only the guys I was with and I could tell. "If you're going to San Francisco," by the way, is now a horrid techno song that has been following me through every major dance club in Southeast Asia. It's also fun to be a total dick to the really abnoxious tourists for once and, since I'm a bit more intimidating now, I don't get any shit back, yet. In any case, shooting those shotgun rounds at the VietCong tunnels had a whole new meaning.

The pinnacle of success came last night, when I finally gave up any sense of decency about the war and learned the Communist Vietnamese National Anthem from some Vietnamese guy who spoke absolutely no English. At 5AM, after goose-stepping around the pool table singing in aweful Vietnamese for the 30 or so people still in the bar, Charlie took me on his motorbike for a twilight tour around Saigon. It was nice since I had somehow failed to see most of the major sights of the city (aside from the American War museum, where I just felt like an insensitive prick), and they looked so much nicer at dawn while the hordes were sleeping. At some point during our dramatic and brutal reinactment of a VC-US engagement outside some former battleground, I managed to break my digital camera while jumping away from a grenade. Thankfully the rest of me was safe and I managed to shoot the gun right out of Charlie's hand, then shot him twice in the stomach. It was way more fun than Cowboys and Indians, I'll tell you that.

I guess having absolutely no respect for the former conflict is the best way I know how to say sorry. Wearing what I did gave me an instant and undeserved cameraderie with my tour guide of the Cu Chi tunnels (some of the tunnels Charlie dug between Saigon and Cambodia), who had served as a communications officer for the Americans. Today I'm wearing a bright red shirt with a big yellow star in front--the North Vietnamese flag--and still look like an American GI. The kinds of smiles I've been getting from the locals tells me at least some of them get the joke. To the rest, I'm just an excusable tourist.

But the LCD on my camera is still broken. I have pictures up 'till then, and some poorly framed ones after. I might as well burn and send them in the next few days, since I doubt I'll be taking any more photos until I get my camera fixed in Hanoi or Bangkok. I just sent a bunch of pictures the other day, if you didn't get them, email me.




...dogs are chewy.

A few years back, I heard that the best part about Cambodia is leaving Cambodia. While I don't exactly disagree, he failed to mention the method of departure, but more on this later...

After seeing the kids running out of bungalows, dolphins on solitary rivers, and the sun setting over a dirt red sky, I spent the rest of my time in Cambodia doing the tourist business. Angkor Wat, though it cost $20 to get in, was definatley the coolest 1100 year old gigantic ancient Cambodian temple devoted to the four stages of human evolution and the Hundu god Vishnu that I've ever seen. It's really, really, really big. I left my guest house at 5AM, got there with the stars still out, left my friends behind and explored whole parts of its moonlit Tomb Raider tunnels. All I could tell were that there were four big concentric square cloisters defined by a series of tunnels arranged with shrines at each of the four corners. I couldn't see anything else. Each next square is a good 200 foot climb with almost vertical stairs. After seeing a gorgous sunrise over the thick cambodian jungle, I came back through the tunnels to find the places where I felt like Indiana Jones in the dark were actually covered in bas-releif carvings of everything from hindu monkey gods to buddhas to depictions of wars. Then the tourists came in hordes and made the place look like disneyland...

After a full day, we headed to the city that nobody can pronounce, Phnom Penh. 30 years ago when the Khmer Rouge took over, they evacuated this city of 3 million people, killed all the educated people, and brought everybody else to work in the rice fields. I got to see the killing fields, essentially their concentration camp, which was a field of mass graves with bones and clothes sticking out of the ground. They arranged thousands of skulls, all with bullet holes or bludgeon marks, by age and sex, in a giant glass shrine devoted to them. To truly relive the experience, my driver took me to an illegal shooting range, which was disturbingly close to the mass graves. So out here, it costs $200 to fire a rocket, plus $500 if you want to buy a cow to blow up. I'll have to hold out until I can get the package deal for much cheaper, but instead I got to fire an AK-47, the same gun they used to kill the women and children at the killing fields next door, for $15. And no, I didn't realize this coincidence until much later.

But this brings me to the idea of Freedom that's been on my mind ever since Laos. We're supposed to be living in the land of the free, and we're spending billions of dollars and thousands of lives defending Freedom worldwide. When put up next to Cambodia, however, the US looks definatively more like a police state than a land of "Freedom." Out here it's total anarchy. You can do anything and everything (so far as it doesn't directly harm another), and the only cops out are there to line their own pockets, not to enforce any concept of "public safety." For example, there are almost no traffic lights or signs in Phnom Penh (3-5 million people), and you have Broadway-style intersections anyway. And still, people don't get hurt (except with landmines). You can also blow up a cow with a rocket, throw a grenade in the water for fish, do any kind of drugs anywhere you want, drive as fast and crazy as you can handle (on a motorbike while holding a beer in one hand and a joint in the other), and basically fuck anything you want for less than $10 (and no, i didn't, but I did to the motorbike thing). Back home, it's not only that you can't drink in the street, have to obey every single traffic rule, go to prison for harming only yourself with drugs, can't drink before you're 21, can't enter a public park after dark, can't loiter, can't smoke in public, get your phones tapped,
and get taxed on EVERYTHING, but there is always an abundance of hard-nosed police officers out to enforce it all, each of whom would love to add to their CV by putting you away for as long as possible. It only recently stuck me how rediculous it was that it's illegal to sleep on the street, or in the parks, or on the beach in America. The land of Freedom. I'd rather be completely repressed by a regime that does absolutely nothing.

Sorry, I had to get that off my chest. On with the boring stuff:

Basically, everything in cambodia once I got onto the tourist trail was shit. The people were shit, the sights were shit, the prices were shit (i was genuinely pissed off to have to pay $3 for a room). And everywhere, I mean everywhere, were guys on motorcycles trying desperately to be your driver for the day. There's absolutely no work for these people, and they'd be extatic to take you for a full day tour for $10. Gas, by the way, is still $4 per gallon. That makes the 125cc motorbikes in Thailand look like gas guzzling SUVs, since most of them out there were anywhere from 90cc down to 50cc, and 20 years old to boot.

So instead of taking the cheap bus directly to Saigon, I booked a four day tour around the mekong river delta in South Vietnam for about $40. The brochure really looked great, and I was pretty excited. Of course they never came to pick me up from my guesthouse in the morning, so an hour later I walked with my backpack all the way to the travel agent, who put me on a motorbike, who put me on a minivan, who took me to catch up with the tour bus. We crossed the border with everything alright, spent a day boating through a floating village, and borded another bus to take us to the next stop. These villages, by the way, make most of those huge fish you see in restaurant aquariums back home. They live in houseboats, under which they keep a giant cage to grow up to 100,000 fish in the natural river waters. Twice a year, they sell them off to make 10-15 thousand US dollars, a fuckton of money out here.

Anyway, we get off the bus at the next stop to find... absolutely nothing. No tour company, no guide, no representative, just a bus stop with absolutely no English speakers. There we were, 9 of us, stranded. After almost 2 hours of playing tweed-ball hackey sack with the locals, we all decided to fuck the tour and buy a ticket straight to Saigon, so here we are. The Vientamese, by the way, have no problem pointing their finger directly at you and laughing at how different you are. I personally have no problem with this, since I find the situation equally hilarous and laugh right back at them (sometimes even with them), but it almost drove this one guy to tears. That was funny. I can see why Matt likes this place.

That's it for now. I'm off to see the American war crimes museum that has been recently renamed the "War Remnants Museum." Sorry for the Agent Orange, guys, it was to defend your Freedom.

My bus across Cambodia stopped for half an hour for a pit stop, and through the people selling deep fried spiders and ducks I found a stand selling big bags of beef jerky. Without knowing any Cambodian, I bought a half kilo for $4.50, which I did my best to negotiate down but instead of budging in the slightest, they just kept looking at me as if I was only joking about buying it in the first place. They wouldn't sell me any less than a half kilo, but after staring at it for so long I really just had to have it. I take this huge bag of beef carrion to the beat up restaurant table where my friend is sitting, take out a huge piece, and tear into it full force. It might just have been the best beef jerky I've ever had; sun dried and probably no more than a day or two old.

In less than a minute, the whole restaurant was staring at me. Then they tried their best to muffle their laughs. Finally one guy said to me, "no eat!" and then burst out laughing. I spat out what I had in my mouth and gave the big piece to the guy, who took it into the kitchen and DEEP FRIED the fucker for a good 3 or 4 minutes. He served it on a plate for me and said "now, eat."

I tried saying how we eat this stuff raw where I come from, but they just looked at me like I was crazy. I guess out here they have to beef-jerky-ize everything before the flies get to it, without refrigeration and temperatures at 90 degrees during the winter. I guess even then it stands the risk of getting really, really gross so they deep fry it before serving it just in case. Deep fried beef jerky is, by the way, an awesome idea and everybody should do it... you know, for health.

One night in Laos, I was trying to decide whether to snack on squid jerky or deep fried chicken feet when I realized how much my diet has changed out here. Once I managed to eat a whole duck on the bus without any utensils, after watching a Cambodian do it. I guess it must be working, since this delicious beef jerky hasn't made me sick yet. I stopped eating it raw just in case, but now every morning I come out with a huge slab of meat for the kitchen to fry as breakfast.


By the way, replacing the Team America song with the words "Cambodia, FUCK YEAH" makes for a much better song.

Cambodia,

I keep thinking that the only reason I'm here is because of that damn Dead Kennedys song, which has been in my head ever since I crossed the border. This place is kinda like Laos, but with a slightly more desperate tinge to it in the tourist centers. Once off the main drag of any city, the young people turn rediculously friendly, almost to a fault.

The kids here are particularly nuts. We rented motorbikes and headed 15k to go see some freshwater dolphins, which are particular only to the Mekong. The dolphins were pretty cool, but nothing compared to the drive up. Every few seconds for all of 40 minutes, children were literally running out of their tiny houses, both arms flailing in the air, shouting "HELLO!!!!" or "GOOODBYYEEEE!!," neither of which they knew the meaning of. I mean, literally for 40 minutes straight we were accosted by kids, sometimes in packs of 5 to 10, running out to see the foreigners riding on their motorbikes. Luckily my friend ("opium girl") was riding on the back of the bike so she was the designated waver-backer, leaving me to concentrate on holding onto the handlebars and shouting things in English that I knew they didn't understand. We saw the dolphins from a boat, then got back on the bikes and headed another 20k further upriver. The kids from this point on were even worse. If they don't get many foreigners on the road to the dolphins, they hardly knew what to make of us further up.

So we see a big temple and stop to take some pictures. Within 2 minutes, all the kids from the local school come out (maybe 30 total) and we play some haphazard volleyball and try playing this game with a bamboo thatch ball that's basically like kicking around an oversize hackey sack. The pictures will be sent soon.

But there's definately the feeling that some real shit went down 25 years ago. Everybody over 40 has the look of genocide to them, and from just hearing three days worth of stories so far, it sounds like each of them was either in front of, or behind a gun. The Khmer Rouge imposed three years of absolute terror on the country (beginning with ordering all the cities totally evacuated), but they somehow managed to stick around the borders of the country until about 10 years ago. The kids I saw under 15 have this look of absolute joy to them, as if their parents imparted all their optimism to this future generation, while the parents themselves look old and broken.

Now I'm in Siam Reap, the town right next to Ankor Wat. I get to wake up at 5AM to go see the sunrise from the top of supposedly one of the most spectacular temple ruins in the world. The temples here, though I haven't seen them yet, are supposed to be the only reason most people go to Cambodia. That's why they charge 20 fucking US dollars to get in per day (to no benefit of the temples, either). Dicks.

Oh yeah, I got to spend three days in another (completely different) absolute paradise in Laos before I left. I had no idea that a country I had known only as "somewhere in asia" five months earlier could be so peaceful and beautiful. I guess I'm just American. Anyway, it's this place near the Cambodian border where the Mekong river fans out that's called the Four Thousand Islands and no, I didn't count them. Basically, you can only get there by boat, everything is candle power after 11PM, and there's absolutely nothing to do but swim, bike, read, smoke pot, canoe, and walk around all day with your jaw dropped wide open at how cool everything looks. The island we were staying at was big enough a tiny village of locals, but for every Laotian you saw, there must have been 5 chickens, 3 pigs, and maybe another ten water buffalos walking through the rice fields. Oh yeah, and I saw one monkey on the island, chained to a tree, with his tiny little pecker fully erect, looking at me with a really sick little monkey smile. Reiss, I really wish I had a picture of it for you.



Oh yeah, and I haven't seen a single squirrel here... maybe that's the curse of the landmines.


-andrew

I just learned that the five years of Vietnamese and American secret bombings not only made Laos the most heavily bombed country in the world (per capita), but has created one of the largest expanses of protected forest in the world because the shrapnel absorbed by the trees has made them absolutely useless pieces of wood that would break any bandsaw that dared cut through them, and the mines laid throughout the jungle would make the logging too dangerous anyway. Maybe Kissenger was just an ecoterrorist.

Vang Vieng, Laos

So as it turns out, I stumbled into another lost backpacker hideaway in the middle of some random country, only this one hasn't been shut down or overgrown yet. There might be two paved roads in the city, leaving the rest of the place looking like a dusty wild-west movie set among towering cliffs on all sides. The river fans out a bit along the side of the town, and forms an island that's about half a mile long and 500 feet wide. This island, which is only accessible by a creaky narrow bamboo bridge, has been totally taken over by foreigners. There are a half dozen large bars, each surrounded by bamboo thatch huts (with no walls) filled with pillows and mats. Each bar area has a large campfire or two that burns through sunrise, one of which is set in the middle of a bamboo patch with another dozen hammocks strung up on the bamboo. Another bar has a line of huts along the riverside with a string of floating lamps out in the water. Not only can you order opium tea and mushroom shakes, but on our last day when we were eating lunch at this place, the Lao owner gave us a joint for absolutely no reason other than because nobody saw him do it. It sounds like it's a particularly Lao mentality to be happy by making someone else happy. Lao people in Thailand behaved the same way.

While looking for a place to stay on our first day in, we walked by a group of Lao teenagers drinking outside and singing along with Thai music. They, drunk, motioned us over to come drink with them. My group (three other people) were tired and needed to get rid of their packs, so I told the Lao group I'd come back later. Later, I couldn't convince anybody else to come so I just went back to see them on my own, armed with a half case of beer. It's really wierd what these cultures take of modern technology: they don't have many computers or TVs, but for some reason I've almost never seen a stereo system without the attached karaoke component. I mean, these kids brought out a huge speaker and an old, dusty sound system, but they also brought a TV to watch the video feed of their music, which was all in VCD Karaoke format. So we get really drunk in the heat of the afternoon while screaming to the Karaoke English transliteration of Thai songs. One of the guys was Vietnamese, whose dad had fought in with the VietKong, and when I met him he was wearing a US Army camo jacket and had bleached blond hair. That way I spent only 3 minutes of the obligatory 7 minutes apologizing for what my country has done to his. I hang out with these guys for the next few days, until it becomes too obvious that one of them only wanted to get into my pants. Still, in the meantime they took me to the big Lao club in Vang Vieng and requested a song on my behalf. A few minutes later, the DJ announced the next song for "Mr. Andloo" and put on the Britney Spears, which I had no choice but to pretend to really dig, since the guys were so excited about finding an American song for me.

As I'm writing this in the internet cafe, there's a russian lady screaming into a phone inside her "sound proof" phonebooth that sounds to amplify her abnoxiousness.

Anyway, New Year's was spent walking from campfire to campfire among the blacklight neon red and green painted bamboo dens on the island. Fun stuff, though nobody had a watch so there was no countdown. I started one anyway, and everybody went along with it so I guess I was close enough.

Oh yeah, on the two day riverboat trip to Luang Prabang (first stop in Laos), the boat would stop every half hour or so to load or unload some rice for the villagers, and a few poor looking village kids would run to the shore to wave at us. One of these kids, who was about 7 years old and looked extremely bored, not waving and just picking his nose because he probably had no idea why everybody just ran to shore, probably from some village that has never seen 24 hour electricity, had on a bright blue shirt with the words "PUNK'S NOT DEAD." Now that's punk.

We're now in the capital, Ventiane (named that way because the French didn't want to pronounce Wien Chan, seriously), to get our Cambodia visas, use the mail, get some books and relax in a European atmosphere. The whole place stinks of French. Cafes, wine stores, overpriced meals, there's even an Arc Du Triumph lookalike here. But it's a nice place to do some chores before heading off to nowhere. Tonight we take the 12-hour bus ride to the south of Laos, to someplace called the Four Thousand Islands, where there's no electricity after 8. Then through Cambodia into Vietnam. I'm going to love or hate candles by the end of it.