Vietnam, Part I

The fast boat from Phnom Penh to Vietnam was far faster than any boat I'd been on this trip, but exceeded its 4 hour promise by 3 hours. The Mekong finally looked liked a major river.

After not very interesting border formalities, the boat pulled ashore twice, we turned up a tributory of the Mekong and into Chau Doc. Vietnam looks quickly different from Cambodia. Certainly it is greener. At least here it looks prosperous. Bouncier?

Chau Doc is a fairly small upper Mekong delta town, with a mixed population of Khmer, Cham and Vietnamese. Nearby is a sacred mountain by the name of Sam, which should speak for itself.

The big draw at Sam Mountain is a Godess with a complicated history I do not understand well enough to try to explain. It involves the Thais, somehow, and 40 virgin girls stronger than 100 men.

The Godess is particularly venerated by local women. A couple of men in Chau Doc credit her as the explanation for why the women in town are powerful and the men do as they are told. She is too sacred to be photographed. However, her extensive wardrobe can be reproduced. Each of these many hundred are made to measure for an three meter figure with Viking scale shoulders. There are also douzens of hats and shoes of similar scale. Gifts from women grateful for the boost, or men hoping for an easier go of it (or grateful for the wonderful and wise and powerful wives)?

Another temple of peculiar architecture if filled with wonderfully odd painted wooden sculpture.

Next stop Ho Chi Minh City, where I spent most of three days fighting some kind of flu bug. Got to happen on a trip. I'd had a couple of nice visits to this high energy city before, so I could have had worse places to feel low. I did crawl out long enough to visit a lovely History Museum and get a taste of Cham architecture. The Cham's, as I understand it, were long time sparring partners of the Khmer at Angor, actually capturing Angor in the 11th century. Time and the growing power of the Vietnamese caught up with them. They left some beautiful monuments. Some preserved in part. Some victims of time and old and recent wars.

I took a night train to Danang and stopped only long enough to see Vietnam's best collection of Cham art at Danang's Museum of Cham Sculpture. Certainly one of the nicest small museums I've seen on the trip and a legacy of the French colonial period in major part. Cham art owes a lot to Indian art, and was later influenced by Khmer art. At its hight it was monumental and fluid. This is good stuff.

Having had a load of Cham art I took a taxi to Hoi An, a lovely small town that seems to have survivied relatively intact for a few hundred years. This town was a great sea trading venue until its river silted a hundred or so years ago and business moved to Danang. Its core is now a museum town oddly filled with a couple hundred tailor shops. No exaggeration.

Perhaps some will be pleased to hear that much of the sewing is done by the young men in town. What is the proper designation of a male that sews for a living? Tailor sounds a bit grand. I don't like the sound of "seamster", that gives the image of the guy who gets to try and get a camel through the eye of a needle. I looked in at the "Hoi An Department of Managing and Gathering Swallow's Nests" and found a goodly number of men scraping away at what I took to be swallows' nests. Hoi on also specializes in silk lanterns. Very pretty at night.And they move about the area on sometimes very crowded ferry boats. Hoi An is lovely day and night. It is very much a tourist destination, which meant another shot of performances, making nice use of the antique buildings. I stayed for three lazy nights, once getting up the energy to take a bicycle around the local area, stopping at a local village noted for its clay tiles and pots. The pots are thrown on a curious to me two person wheel. The wheel itself is near ground level, and the potter sits on the ground to work the clay. The second person stands and kicks back with leg to power the wheel.

The clay tiles made in the village are seen on many of the buildings in Hoi An, and were laid out in neat rows in front of homes in the village to dry a bit in the sun. I saw a woman making simple rectangles. A shallow wooden frame was dusted with what I took for fine sand. This sits on the ground. A clump of clay is thrown into its center. Four economical steps with a foot inside each edge of the wood frame form a rough pyramid of clay in the form. A final step in the center to get excess clay off the foot. A jerk with a wire along the top of the frame to remove the extra clay from the frame. The frame is carried a few steps, laid upside down on the ground and pulled away. Another tile joins its mates, presumably waiting to be fired.

The next day took a taxi a round about route to Hue, taking a detour to see a couple of Cham sites. While these sites may not as grand as the decorations the provided to the museums, it was good to see some context. The larger site, My Son, spreads a bit, some of it showing damage from recent wars. The smaller site, Chien Dan, was maybe closed. The gate was shut and latched but no lock was in place. I considered that maybe opened. The three towers were nice and made a bit endearing for their current use as a good place for a farmer to dry rice.

A very nice drive north to Hue over the Hai Van Pass. Dramatic views over the harbor at Danang and some interesting fortifications from the French and the US at the pass summit.

I ended the day in Hue, Vietnam's onetime imperial capital. The weather was misty and cool with a bit of rain. Perfectly lovely sightseeing weather.

Hue is a real city lying on both sides of the beautifully named Perfume River. It has its own present, and a past made of imperial palaces and temples, and it the countryside wonderful imperial tombs. The tombs sit in grounds lovely or formal.

This is a place my guidebook didn't praise enough. I enjoyed three days.

That takes me to April 22, the center of Vietnam, and the middle of my time in the country.

Next stop, Hanoi.

Happy (Khmer) New Year!

Today is the first day of the three day Khmer (and Thai, and Burmese and Lao) New Year. More on that later.

When we last left our blogger, he was nattering on about Angkor. Then next day, back on a boat, this time to Battambang. The boat was a bit smaller, but the voyage was only 7.5 hours with one chance to get off, and more frequent chances to sort of hang over the side of the boat.

It wasn't comfortable, but much of it was scenic and it was improved by its frequent use by Cambodians to actually go from one place to another on their normal business. We peaked at 33 on board. The normal hideous episode of lugging luggage down to and up from the boat. On arrival later in the day at Battambang we were met by an "army," to quote a fellow passenger, of hotel touts to add to the adventure (one of whom recognized me the next day, and asked me why I hadn't stopped to talk).

Water levels were predictably low. We ran aground a number of times. That required a bit of backing up by the engine, some polling by the boat crew and grumbling by the passengers.
But as said, the journey was pretty good. We passed a number of curious floating villages early in the day. At first we were crossing an equally curious lake, Tonle Sap, which is said to double in size from dry to wet season. The villages simply keep moving with the shoreline. The real oddity is that the Tonle Sap River, the lake's exit to the Mekong and the sea, reverses its flow in the wet season as the Mekong floods.
We we on a small river flowing into the lake most of the day, which narrowed as we moved upstream.
Eventually floating villages were replaced with homes on the banks. And kids splashing in the afternoon.

Battambang is said to be the second largest city in Cambodia, though it seems far smaller than Siem Reap now. It is not a big place and has a complicated history as a Thai town for more than 200 years up until 1907 and, in common with all cities in Cambodia, a virtual ghost town during the Khmer Rouge period between 1975 and 1979. As a major rail point, it handled lots of forced refugees from other areas in Cambodia that were being moved internally by the Khmer Rouge, only to be murdered on arrival at Battambang.

Now it is a nice river town with some pretty temples and attractive French colonial buildings.

Next morning after arrival I took off with a guide on the back of his motorcycle to see what was to be seen in the area. Khmer ruins, a local Khmer Rouge killing field (a Buddhist mountain monastery where many are killed, with bones now on display) and lots and lots of steps. I am pretty sure the 1000 mark was met and conquered this day.
These steps came with a small portable fan.
The fan probably is more effective as a sun screen, and its wielder had a hard time remembering what he was about. Chat to me, chat to my guide, run up steps, run down steps, one swoosh of fan, sit down, examine feet, jump up, chat, run off path, point excitedly several directions saying something, one swoosh of fan. Whatever the social politics of this, it was charming.

All that work required laying in a hammock and drinking sugar cane juice for a while (not the young fan wielder, he ran off with his earnings). We were joined by another pair, the tourist being an 18 year old from The Netherlands working on month six of a nine month tour of Asia. Generally on his own. That is something. Setting aside a scout trip to Canada and another with my family to Niagara Falls, I don't think I left the US until I was in law school.

We then two pairs then went to take a ride on a local contraption called the Bamboo Railroad (stopping to look at some fruit bats for about one minute, the time limit at my request). The train is assembled from bits kept by the side of the track - bogies, a bamboo decked wood platform, a little two stroke engine and a rubber belt. I can promise it can carry five adults and two motor cycles.

This is on a spur from the main line between Phnom Penh and Battambang. It is a single track spur. What do you do when you come on a "train" heading the opposite direction? The big boy wins.
Here are three guys, having disassembled their train and low volume cargo waiting for the the five of us and our two motorcycles to move on a full speed. Which seems to be about 15 mph. Which is actually pretty exciting 8"over the rails on misaligned gappy rails.

The next day a bus ride to Kompong Chhnang (spelling seems right to me). The bus was surprisingly nice. Until it passed by Kompong Chhnang. I woke up the attendant (he was asleep on luggage), he got the bus to stop. I got a 30 minute walk back to town. Several nice motorcycle riders volunteered to give me a ride, but good as they are at balancing large bundles, I didn't like the idea of being on a bike with my now three bags.

I checked into a guest house that was hosting a group of evangelical Christians from the US that were helping building a house. I rented a bicycle and road to the Tonle Sap River (the one I mentioned earlier that changes the direction of its flow in the wet season) and hired a boat for another look at floating villages.
I thought the attached outhouses (see far left), which must be a misnomer, particularly noteworthy.

The next day, a completely uneventful minibus ride to Phnom Penh.
I had a great view of the Royal Palace and the river from a deck over my suite. The next day reason to hold and I moved to a more modest room.

Phnom Penh has a great National Museum housing all kinds of nice bits from various Khmer temples (though perhaps the Musee Guimet in Paris has a nicer, albeit more selective collection of Angkor era pieces).
Phnom Penh also has its own Temple of the Emerald Buddha, but it does not make the running list of Emerald Buddha temples I have seen. The Buddha is an impostor! Or more fairly a nice piece of green crystal made by the good folk of Baccarat.
The next day focused on some of the dark events of the Khmer Rouge. About 10 miles out of town there is a memorial to victims of the Khmer Rouge on the site of one of the killing fields. About 17,000 people were thought to have died at this location, one of hundreds that was over 1 in 5 Cambodians killed or starved to death in 4 years.

Many but not all of the bodies have been exhumed at this location.
You walk near some of the areas that were not dug up, and see the bones, teeth and clothing of victims that have been washed to the surface by the rains.
The memorial stupa holds the bones of some 8,000.

I've seen large groups of bones before, some in crypts in Europe. That was a bit macabre. The killing fields are horrible and very sad.

Next stop was the ex-high school turned into torture center by the Khmer Rouge. This was the source of the victims for the killing field I had visited earlier in the day. A fair number of torture devises were on display. Most of these seemed very basic but no less horrible for that.

Then there were wall after wall covered with photos of victims and their keepers. Most of the keepers looked like teenagers. The victims were of all ages, down to very young children. Maybe that is enough for a travel blog.
Today back to seeing the typical things to see in a Southeast Asian cities. Some temples and some markets and street life.
So, as I mentioned, today is the beginning of a three day Khmer (and Thai and Lao and Burmese) New Year celebration. I have hunting for information on what it includes, and spent some of yesterday looking for signs of preparation (beyond "Closed for the Holiday" signs). I've been told that is supposed to involve tossing water on the unwary - but surely not tourists! I have been looking forward to getting splashed.
I had no idea if I was seeing business as normal or holiday preparations, but building sand pyramids on tombs has got to be for special occasions, doesn't it?

Today at breakfast, the waiter said today I should look for:

People burying cash in piles of sand to leave any bad luck from the ending year behind (a ha!): Found it.

People taking food to temples to be blessed by monks, in memory of ancestors: Yes, some of that too.

People playing special games: And that as well. The first game involved two lines of people taking turns throwing their big seeds at the other sides big seeds. You wacked folk on the knee with your big seed before throwing it for good luck. The second game had a circle of folk, with one person walking around the circle with what looked like a sack with some cloth in it. The walking person would leave the sack with one of the people in the circle, who would then leap up and chase the person to his or her immediate right with the sack. I'm sure I have this right.

There was some non-New Year related goings on as well. This is a game of shuttlecock. But unlike badmitton, with its convenient racket, this is done with one's feet. The classy shots seem to be done behind the back.

This is not a Chinese holiday, but I noted the Chinese temple gardians getting a breakfast of eggs and bacon.

That is all from Cambodia. I am off for Vietman.

Best regards,

Sam

Two Borders and a Wonder of the World

Leaving Laos was much more straight forward than the boat crossing from Chiang Khong. Buy a bus ticket. Store luggage under bus and board. Get off bus at Lao border control on the Lao side of the Mekong bridge near Vientiane. Get a couple of stamps in the passport. Back on bus, get off again on the Thai side, fill in a form, get a couple of stamps in the passport. Get back on bus (and drive for three hours with a right side driver in a left side country, but you can't have everything). No one wanted to ask me about Buddhas or look at my luggage or anything. It lacked a certain drama to be frank.

To celebrate this over-easy event, I checked into the cheapest hotel of my trip. Something under $6.00.
It had a bathroom with a shower like item and cold water. It did not come with toilet paper, which made me happy. I had been carrying around a roll for about two month's to no purpose. The room had a fan. It had a very, very large and thin towel for a top sheet on the bed. It had a drape that covered a substantial part of a window that had a screen that covered it, in substantial part. I invested in mosquito coils with some of my under spend on the room.

I was now in Khon Kaen, in the Northeast of Thailand, a region generically called Isan. The goal was to cut across Thailand briskly and enter Cambodia at a spot more or less convenient to Siem Reap and nearby Angor.

But I was in Khon Kaen for the afternoon and enjoyed it. It has a couple of pleasant museums, one of which comes stocked with many young enthusiastic guides. I got led around by a team that varied between two and three in number and could sort of read the English language signs to me, full stop. I enjoyed it.
Khon Kaen has a towering new temple on the edge of a small lake. Most of the lake shore was bordered by park.

I don't know the name of this game, but it is played on a volleyball court with a wicker ball. Hands are out and feet are in (chest and head seemed OK). This was played enthusiastically.

I had a nice dinner at a nice restaurant with live music, played enthusiastically. There was one other franghi there, which was sort of a good change after Luang Prabang and Vientiane. Back at the hotel I spent time packing up Lao loot to mail home the next the morning, and then wandered downstairs and met John (or something else no doubt).

John is a thirty year old from Istanbul but his family used to live in the Balkans and he invested in apartments in Istanbul when everyone was plowing money into stock, and now they've lost their money and he has some, but he studied in China thinking that Chinese fluency was the ticket to a good job but there are no good jobs for Chinese speakers in Turkey so he has lived in Thailand being a hedonist but he'd really like to go back to China but he can't and now he wants to move to Malaysia because he thinks he'll have better luck there with women than he has in Thailand (!!!), except he'd really, really like to go back to China because he is sure that he'd have luck with women in China and they really have souls. That said, he was interested in a woman that lived in the same apartment block in Khon Kaen he did and found out that she worked at a massage parlor, and did I have any advice for him.

There was only a bit more punctuation in his delivery. I said "wow" and thought to myself that I am not enthusiastic enough for this very nice town.

I did not burn the floor with the mosquito coils.

I mailed my stuff the next morning and got a bus to Khorat. I'd thought to wander around a few hours in Khorot but there was no place to store my bag at the Khorat bus station and the staff, in what I am sure was a well intentioned effort to meet my partially understood desires, hustled me on to the next bus out of town. This to Surin in the southern part of Isan. Surin, like the hotel the night before, was probably another reaction to the ease of the border crossing from Laos to Thailand. My guide book said that the nearby border crossing to Cambodia was used infrequently by travelers and existed mainly for Thais to go to a casino in a no-mans land immediately after leaving Thailand and before getting to Cambodian passport control. But, it was an official border crossing and might be possible to find a car to take you deeper into Cambodia, past a mine field infested ex-war zone which had seen heavy fighting as recently as the 1990's. All this on washed out dirt roads. Drama!

Surin was nice. It lacked Khon Kaen's enthusiasm, but as noted that was beyond me too.

What Surin had was some really good things to see. So I took a day and hired a car and driver.

About 13 kilometers from town sits the village of Ban Tha Sawang. This is apparently one of the most famous silk weaving villages in Thailand. I visited a place with maybe a dozen looms and I think anyone would find this fascinating. I don't really understand how looms work, so I am going to struggle to explain it here. However, it is fair to say that it is basic to hand looms that they are one person (OK, woman) machines. These looms required four people to operate. One sat one floor down on a platform, reaching through a hole in the ceiling to manipulate some of the pattern. Two other women flanked the loom performing a similar task. The fourth lady did more typically loomy activities involving thread and pedals and the like. They very slowly (an inch a day, it was claimed) produced cloth of stunning beauty with equally stunning prices. All pieces made to order. Starting price roughly $1,000 per meter. More for the really good stuff of course. I was not even tempted to reach for my wallet.

Surin is also reasonably close to some of Thailand's best Khmer buildings. So this became a warm up for the visit to Cambodia.

It was raining when we got back to Surin from the day's excursion. It was a pretty short walk to the hotel, so who's bothered by a little rain? Dogs. I walked by a parked bus and lots of woofy sounds started up. About 8 mutts charged out from under the bus. I backed up to a tree and tried to remember what the approved action was. Two of the unlovely troop actually nipped me. I was not a happy person. I was a scared person. I was luckily a person that got nipped where clothed and whose skin did not get broken.

Later that very same day I see a mural painting in a Surin temple that exactly captured the moment. Well, there were many more dogs attacking me. And I had a shirt on. And, of course, my nose is bigger. But this mural almost exactly captured the moment. Creepy.

Next day spent getting to over the border at O Smach and on to Siem Reap, Angor's launching pad.

Minibus ride from the bus station next to my hotel. That was easy! My bag, my really big bag, got a seat to itself. When we left the station there were three of us, including the driver. And my bag and two large parcels for drop off.

We stopped to pick up others. We peaked at 18 and my feet couldn't touch the ground after the first 15 minutes of the 90 minute trip. I held someones shopping on my lap.

The Thai side of the border was simplicity itself. I think it is geared for crowds of Thais going to the no man's land casino. No interest in my bag.

The Cambodian side involved getting to pay about $30 in Thai Baht for a $20 visa. The sign right there said "$20". The Cambodian official listened politely to my questions and comments regarding the fee being requested, and repeated the, umm, request for the higher fee. And he got the higher fee.

There were not one but two cars willing to drive me. I picked the one with the windshield. The first 200 meters was a wide smooth concrete express way. Then another passport check. Then the road was rock filled craters dusted with dirt. The sides of the road had all of the land mine warning a person could want. Fields had dead and blackened trees splintered about half way up. No one to be seen. No imagination required.

This ended after about 30 minutes, and for a while the road switched back and forth between pretty good dirt and paved. It settled into paved after another 30 minutes and I was in Siem Reap within four hours of getting in the car. No complaints.

I checked into the nicest hotel I've stayed at since Bangkok, the Victoria Angor Resort, and settled in for six nights. What I expect to be the longest stay anywhere of this trip.

I had a great stay at an area that sees something like 2 million visitors a year. When I was last there, in 1995, there were few places to stay, only a couple of restaurants and I think one paved road. Two comfortably lengthed day trips I took now would then have been too dangerous or taken many days to accomplish.

At night Siem Reap hummed to the sound of music and whatnot from dozens of pubs and restaurants.

But the thing is still Angor. I road a bike, hired a car, hired a jeep and got toured around in one of these little things, a motorcycle pulling a chariot which are called tuk-tuks locally, at least to tourists. I avoided these. Which I sort of regret.

The anchient Angor temples are pretty familiar to lots of people. But I was glad to see them up close again, and to see many I'd not seen before. For something like four centuries the Khmer kings built in increasing complexity, though not always improved artistry. Much of the finest detail work preceeds the well known Angor Wat and Bayon, which made for a good treasure hunt even at buildings not that imposing in themselves. And I got my fill of stairs.

One of the best experiances was at a temple I'd not seen before. Beng Mealea lays well out of town. I saw only a couple of other foreigners while I was there, and the site was large enough we hardly stumbled over each other. The place lacks the roped off areas and direction signs of the major temples closer to Siem Reap. With the help of a local guide I had lots of fun wiggling through openings and climbing up and down tumbled stones to buried passage ways with some jewel of a carving at their end. A boy's own India Jones extravaganza.

The only thorn of Angor was the sales folk. I believe I was asked to buy water 1000 times in 5 days, frequently very insistently by many people at once (I also needed and bought a lot of water, so ....)Most of the temples have these staging grounds for the bandits to prepare to pounce. Much of the pouncing is done by very young children. A couple were frank enough to say, in substance "I am going to keep following you and pestering you until you buy something from me." Others were more delicate. The only out and out childish nastiness came when I bought something from one youngster and not from others standing nearby. In the hot sun and after six hours it gets hard to remember that they are very young and no doubt very poor and, in all likelyhood, acting under the direction of adults. Of course it is right that these folk have a way to profit directly from their heritage. Still, I am surprised that scores of kids are not found tied to trees every night.

There was a second, smaller, group of sales folk. Vastly more calming. Little old ladies, with shaved heads, would be at alters in some temples selling a prayer
for your benefit, and a little incense, and a thread for your wrist.

Best regards,

Sam