Rerekuka's Travel Journal: February 2007

Friday, February 16, 2007

Drinkies! New Years! ~ Hoi An, Vietnam (Early through mid February)

We settled into Hoi An, Vietnam for Drinkies and Tet (Vietnamese Lunar New Year).

An ancient, international shipping port, quaint and picturesque to boot, Hoi An is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The architecture and food here are a fusion of Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, and French. Hoi An cuisine claims a few hometown specialties: cau lau (rice noodles, broth, meat or tofu, lettuce, and mint), and white rose (rice noodle rounds with different savory stuffings and chili dipping sauces). The noodles for the cau lau are said to be made by only one family in Hoi An, with the water for them coming from one special well.

White Rose

Cau Lau

Drinkies!

Friends old and new, from left to right: Sheila, Heather, Delice, Bob, Diane, Steve, Eric, and Rene

Drinkies was held in the Sa Long Lounge Bar in Hoi An. We enjoyed some lovely drinkies, then moved on to a restaurant by the canal for din din and bia hoi. Bia hoi is fresh beer, yummy in a Pilsner sort of way, and must be drunk within 24 hours of creation. Sheila can sniff out bia hoi from a kilometer away!

Eric Likes Bia Hoi Too

Ask anyone in Hoi An about Tet (February 18 this year) and you get a huge grin and enthusiastic talk of the festival and time with family. Preparations start a week ahead of time, with shops starting to close, housecleaning, shopping, and cooking, and kumquat trees delivered to homes and businesses on the backs of motorcycles or en masse on trucks.

Kumquat Tree at Tam Tam Restaurant

On New Years and up to a week after, it is considered unlucky to clean house or sew, among other things, such as having an unmarried, middle-aged woman come to your house. Imagine the tailor's horror when I walked up and asked her to size down a bunch of my clothing. She said to wait about ten days. I'm still walking around in oversized clothes! (Yay! actually; Eric and I are doing well on our Southeast Asia diet; still have more to go but we're not quite the Pooh Bears who waddled out our front gate in November.)

The Year of the Golden Pig

The festival reminded me of small-town festivals I'd been to in the past, with a stage featuring local entertainment in drama, traditional singing and dancing, and some pop music. At a game arcade along the canal, you could win prizies for performing various feats. At one stall, a boy of nine years or so succeeded in throwing a plastic basket over a bottle of vodka and happily ran off with his high-proof prizie. At another stall, revelers threw balls to knock down stacks of condensed milk cans. And then there was. . .

...The Dart Board Challenge...

...In Which Sheila Leary Witholds Juicy Strawberry-Creme Cookies From Hungry Vietnamese Children

In a cruel twist of cookie karma, Sheila would later discover there was in fact no juicy strawberry creme filling whatsoever between the biscuits.

The fireworks over the canal and river were magnificent. After that, Eric and I toddled home. On the way we passed a pagoda where Buddhist monks were performing a ceremony. We didn't really understand it but it was cool.

Lanterns at the Pagoda Ceremony

We went with Bob and Sheila to My Son, another UNESCO World Heritage Site and the most important example of Champa civilization ruins in Vietnam. It was interesting, but a good deal of it had been blown away during the Vietnam War. (President Nixon was requested to stop bombing ancient ruins; he complied with orders to leave the ruins alone but hit the targets, duh.)

Field Trip! or, You Kids Keep it Down, Don't Make Me Come Back There...

Champa Ruins at My Son

We were in Hoi An for over two weeks, because it's a cool place and to avoid pre- and post-Tet traffic mania. The fabulous food, people, art, and ambiance made it easy to make Hoi An home. We were really sad to leave.

Here are some photos from various events and handicraft shops in Hoi An.

Sculptures at Chinese Assembly Halls

Dance Performances

Handicrafts

Because Eric Thinks It's Funny

Too Cute Not to Post

Saigon, Vietnam (Early February)

We entered Saigon by bus from Phnom Penh. With me still ill from Cambodia, we didn't see much of Saigon other than the alley across from the hotel when I was able to go down for meals. That alley was really something, though. It was about 30 feet across, lined on both sides with motorcycles parked nose in, cafe tables, and all kinds of vendors pushing carts or carrying poles with baskets filled high with produce. Between all of this ran motorcycles, cyclos, booksellers old and young carrying plastic-wrapped stacks about as tall as they were, monks, and Vietnam vets~alone, with their Vietnamese wives, or with young Vietnamese women. My favorite character from that street was a female Buddhist monk who looked to be somewhere between 55 and 80, short, bald, saffron-robed, snaggle-toothed, beaming blissfully about her as she held her metal alms bowl in front of her, and gracefully walking kirtan (slow walking meditation) barefoot on the hot black asphalt.

Eric had his adventures in Saigon too. When he would go down to eat or bring me something, he was offered different services based on what he wore. T-shirt, grass. Collared shirt, "massage."

We had originally planned to take the 18-hour train to Danang Vietnam, then taxi to Hoi An, but switched to a two-hour Danang flight so I'd be more comfortable (sick, delicate flower that I was). We awoke at 3 a.m. and were down in the lobby by 4:15. Much of Saigon was already awake or hadn't slept, with kids playing soccer in the busy street and the cafe table across the alley full of young women and Vietnam vets discussing politics old and new, with drunken fervor.

On to Hoi An!

Sunday, February 04, 2007

Phnom Penh and the Killing Fields, Cambodia (late January 2007)

The Fertile Mekong Delta

We traveled the six-hour journey from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh by bus, taking rest stops along the way for food from stall shops and lovely squat toilet-age. At one rest stop, a woman was selling fried spiders. Try some! ~

It's never easy for me to say no to beggars and it's harder still, in Cambodia, having some idea about why they often have no education or limbs missing. (Add national guilt knowing it all started with US bombing along their eastern border towns....) The general wisdom with beggars is not to encourage begging by giving them money; finding a reliable non-profit is advised. Also, especially with children, they often have to hand money over to someone else. So it's better to give food. But the dilemma there is you give to one and the rest come running. And then sometimes you just have to do it anyway. That day, at one rest stop, after I had said no, sorry, to a number of people, a bedraggled woman carrying a dirty, naked baby, and with two other moppets in tow, approached me and Eric with her hand out. Initially we said no, but she didn't walk away. She and the moppets stood close together with us, as a group, and I had the sensation/remembrance that this was my family. What I do mostly with my family is feed them. I couldn't not do this. So I went to a nearby stall and purchased two peeled pineapples and four hard-boiled eggs (using up my remaining riel; the merchant wouldn't take USD), and handed them to the mother. She looked deep into my eyes, thanking me profusely, and we bowed back and forth. As I walked away, a man on crutches, missing one leg, smiled big and motioned in appreciation for what I'd done for the previous family, and then pointed gently toward his young son. I was out of riels, the bus was getting ready to leave, and I again had to say no, sorry. My heart broke. When we left, I saw the woman sharing what she had with the man and his son.

Our entry into Phnom Penh was made delightful by meeting friends for dinner at the venerable Foreign Correspondents' Club. Eric's work buddy, Rob, and his fiance Holly, are living in Phnom Penh for a few months. As with us, they are taking time away from work; their approach is to pick a few places and live there for some months. Holly is even volunteering for a non-profit--cool way to get involved and understand the life there.

Phnom Penh From the Foreign Correspondents' Club Terrace

Phnom Penh is Cambodia's capital. Along with Saigon, it was a US headquarters during the American/Cambodian/Vietnamese wars. As other cities and villages were being demolished, Phnom Penh became a (pathetically ill-equipped) refugee center. Shortly after the US pulled out of Phnom Penh, the Khmer Rouge overtook the city, eventually evacuating all of its inhabitants to be tortured, executed, or work in the fields. Because of this, Phnom Penh was virtually empty for a number of years. (I am currently reading Sideshow: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Destruction of Cambodia by William Shawcross. It is well documented and offers good historical and background information into these events. Some of the inane quotes from our (US) leaders during that time and other events sound similar to that of some of our current leaders, or like they were written for Saturday Night Live. And some of the parallels with the war in Iraq, such as Nixon's cowboy stance after watching Patton three times, and his determination to make a big last-ditch troop surge to save face and show that a third-world country can't beat the US, is tragically ironic.) More horrible still, Phnom Penh is the site of the Killing Fields and Toul Sleng Museum (Security Prison, S-21), the largest torture and extermination camps during the Khmer Rouge regime.

Victims were first interrogated and tortured at S-21, then brought by truck to the Killing Fields. Words can't convey my experience when we went to the Killing Fields and S-21, but I'll try. We traveled first by tuk tuk 15 dust-filled kilometers out of the city into pretty farmland of rice paddies, pastures, longan and palm trees, to the Killing Fields. The first stop is the Charnel House, a monument to those who died there. It is a tall, glass building, filled to the top with shelves containing torture implements, the skulls of beheaded victims, and their clothing. Visitors are asked to offer a stick of incense and a prayer for the victims and their families before entering. Eric and I did so. I also sent Reiki to them, for peace. While Reiki practice always feels worthwhile, in this case I felt like I was lighting a match against a glacier.

The Charnal House

The fields contained a bunch of holes where hundreds of people where thrown after they were killed.

The Killing Fields

People were sometimes shot; they were also bludgeoned to death with bamboo poles, sharpened sticks and walking canes, hoes, whatever, to save bullets. Once in the pit, they were covered with DDT to quell the stench and hasten death if it hadn't occurred already. There was also the Magic Tree, where a loudspeaker hung to play music to cover the victims' screams, as well as the Happy Tree, against which infants and small children were thrashed until they died. Children were also sometimes torn apart limb from limb. All around the fields, snatches of old clothing still lay. My hands burned from the energy of the area, which was horribly oppressive and depressing.

S-21 was originally a high school, where the classrooms were partitioned with brick or wooden walls to form cells where prisoners lay chained. The irony of this place is in its initially apparent normalcy; from outside it looks like any high school, white, with a few wings, three stories each, flowering trees, grass, and benches. The interior is painted a cheery mustard yellow, with mustard yellow and white checkered floors. That is where the cheer ends. The rooms that don't contain cells are filled with rows and rows of pictures of the thousands of Cambodians from infancy through adulthood who were imprisoned and tortured here before being sent to the Killing Fields. (Out of ~9000 victims, only 7 from S-21 survived.) Rooms without cells displayed victim and Khmer Rouge portraits and actual torture devices.

S-21 Torture Camp and Genocide Museum

Prisoner Cells

The horrible, sickly, cloying feeling that had been swirling around me felt like it was seeping into by bones when I stepped into one of the smaller cells. I imagined myself and my family going through what these people went through. I also felt strange feeling so bad, like I had no right, since it wasn't us. I was just bumbling my way through someone else's history. Still, it felt like their was no air and I could only remain in there a few moments, then all energy left me, and I started feeling very fatigued. I felt worse and worse the rest of the day, then got feverish and body aches. This all turned into an intestinal flu within a day and I was down for a few more. For days after, I kept imagining people I saw on buses and in the streets being imprisoned like this, or carrying out this horrid mandate.

Victims

This picture held extra poignancy for me as the teenagers in these photos and the high school girls are about the same age, as was I around the time this happened. I remember hearing about the news about Vietnam and being sad and angry, but the extent of my involvement had only been to wear a Vietnam vet's MIA bracelet until he was found two years later. I really had no clue.

This woman holds her baby as their picture is taken. Standing close to the actual picture, you can see tears welling up in the mother's eyes. Prisoners were not allowed to cry, on pain of being beaten or electrocuted.

The last room I visited held current and earlier pictures and statements from some Khmer Rouge who worked at S-21. Their current pictures showed them happy and smiling, with family, working their farms or in their shops, or fishing. Some statements sounded sad but not terribly regretful for what they did. They made claims such as that the Khmer Rouge was better than the existing government, that once they joined they could not leave or they and their families would be killed, and that the people who should be punished are the leaders, not the soldiers who carried out the orders.

Seeing this was the nightmare you want to end, to make it have not happened to these people, to awaken by just opening your eyes wide, only you do and see that it isn't a nightmare, and nothing can change what happened.

To carry out such sickness, and as a society we seem to never learn, one has to create an Other and then dehumanize him or her. We do that on so many levels, carrying out violence large and small over territory, politics, business, and our relationships with ourselves, and those around us. We use war symbology in business and play that makes the extension of such seem less evil. For example, I was once in a meeting where a PowerPoint presentation was being presented to the group before being put on the intranet for internal salespeople's use. The presentation featured a video of real bomber planes letting loose their payload, complete with sound as the bombs hit. This was what we wanted to do to our competition. The presenter thought it was so cool he replayed the video. I did what I often do when affronted by the ludicrous--I laughed maniacally, then objected and was made fun of by a couple of the men in the room. Later, to see if it was just me or if that was really dysfunctional, I ran it by a few other people, including two who I knew had grown up with bombings during their childhoods in Lebanon. They all thought it was sick and were thoroughly disgusted.

There is a poster in the Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City), Vietnam airport, a woman under a white parasol by a palm-lined stream, that says "Look at us now."

What can we do now? Violence is anything that diminishes oneself, another being, or the environment. Our little acts of violence, the ones we call No Big Deal, can breed the insensitivity that causes other acts of violence, large and small. Going through S-21 and the Killing Fields was a reminder that the Other is also me and those I hold dearest, and to be mindful when my actions or words could cause or contribute to unnecessary harm. Few people can be perfect at this, but if everyone made it their practice, I think it would be a better world.

All beings tremble before violence.
All fear death.
All love life.

See yourself in others.
Then whom can you hurt?
What harm can you do?

... Do not make light of your failings,
Saying, "What are they to me?"
A jug fills drop by drop.
So the fool becomes brimful of folly.

Do not belittle your virtues,
Saying, "They are nothing."
A jug fills drop by drop.
So the wise man becomes brimful of virtue.

~ Buddha, as translated by Thomas Byrom in The Dhammapada: Sayings of the Buddha

"You must be the change you wish to see in the world."

~ Mahatma Gandhi

Siem Reap and the Ruins of Angkor, Cambodia (Sometime January 2007)

The border crossing from Aranya Prathet, Thailand into Poipet, Cambodia, and then on to your hotel in Siem Reap, is a hoot. From the moment you leave your taxi in Aranya Prathet, you are swarmed with people wanting to help you with your luggage, find the border (duh), or answer any question, for $. You extricate yourself from that, find the visa processing line, get your documentation and $20 US in order, and a man standing right in front of the front of the line, working along with the actual official behind the desk, staples your documentation and asks you for $5 more for "special processing." (Apparently this is an improvement, since tourists in times past have been conned out of greater sums. In any case, Eric was very firm about saying that the fee is $20 and handing the official just $20 for each of us.) You cross the border and are loaded onto a government truck that takes you directly to the bus/taxi station. (This is a nice service, because you bypass the rest of your walk through Poipet, truly one of those armpit border towns, and according to Lonely Planet, full of thugs and not to be confused with the rest of lovely Cambodia.) We organized one of the taxis to drive us the six hours over dusty, pocked (by meteors, I think) roads into Siem Reap, and reminded the driver that we want to go to Shadow of Angkor guesthouse. No problem. Except that he pulls into a different hotel, at which three people come running out, start pulling luggage out of the car, welcoming us, telling us that the driver didn't know where Shadow of Angkor (which has been operating for decades) was, and wouldn't we like to look at their fine hotel? To which Eric said certainly not, pulled out the trusty Lonely Planet map, and we hoofed it to Shadow of Angkor. (This is one of the ruses used to get commissions from hotels. Another, called the "scam bus," is where on the Thailand side a guesthouse arranges travel for a busload of people crossing into Cambodia to Siem Reap. The bus drives really slow, gets there in the middle of the night, and drops its hapless passengers at the Thai guesthouse's partner-in-crime guesthouse in Siem Reap.)

Our favorite food in Cambodia is Amok. Amok is like a cross between pork, chicken, beef, or fish curry and stroganoff. Creamy, spicy yum!

Siem Reap reminded me a bit of Alleppy in India, with a canal running through the center of the town, which bustles with tourists, tuk tuks, guesthouses, shops, and restaurants. (BTW, if you have to have been colonized or a protectorate, make it be by the French. Cambodia and Vietnam have fabulous coffee, baguettes, croissants, and other pastries, as well as French-influenced architecture.) It's a nice place to hang out and it's the springboard for one's venture into the ancient town of Angkor.

(Real-time broadcast interruption alert: I'm writing this from an internet cafe in Hoi An, Vietnam. The ten-year old Vietnamese boy sitting beside me just lit up a cigarette. His inhalations and exhalations are weak, sending wafts of smoke over my way, and he flicks his ashes on the floor. I hand him an ashtray and show him, mostly through sign language, how to blow his smoke up at the ceiling. What else are you going to do?)

Sadly, but as one might suppose, there are still a lot of landmine victims in Cambodia. The disabled but talented troupe of musicians below play traditional music using traditional instruments along the road in Angkor. I bought a CD of their music.

We took about four days going through the ruins of Angkor. On our last day, our tuk tuk driver was a man named Chea Chengg. Mr. Chea was a farmer who had to hide in a pagoda and eventually joined a monastery during the war. Because he was fluent in French, the government decided he was an intellectual, only in the monastery to hide from them. That's all we got of this story! Shortly after that the tuk tuk blew a sparkplug, Mr. Chea called his son for help, his son arrived on motorbike with his little son in tow, they fixed the tuk tuk, and we got back underway. Mr. Chea is also a poet and a songwriter; some poems he showed us are about his love of his country. As Eric and I walked along a path back to the road, Mr. Chea stood under one of the ancient city gates, operatically belting out one of his songs in Khmer. That's how I'll remember him, along with his beautiful, one-toothed grin.

Here's a picture of Mr. Chea with the gas station attendant. There are some Western-type stations in Southeast Asia, but more typically you find a tiny stand on the sidewalk, holding litre bottles refilled with gasoline. Our litre of the day came from a Johnny Walker bottle.

I looked up Chea Chengg on Google and found that he and some of his stories were incorporated in a book called Vanna’s Dance, written by Maria Almudeva– van Santen . It's a children's book about a little girl named Vanna, who lost a leg in a landmine explosion, and the wisdom she gets from her godfather Chea Chengg's stories. Proceeds from the book go to Adopt-A-Minefield (http://www.landmines.org/). For more info or if you want to buy the book, see http://www.unspecial.org/UNS655/t55.html

"Excerpt
Vanna was sitting on the front step of her house. She was happy. The sun was shining over Cambodia and Chea Chheng, her very good friend was coming to see her. The older man was a wonderful storyteller. When Vanna saw him coming she jumped up, her two shiny black ponytails bouncing as she did so. «Chea Chheng!» she called excitedly. «You are here!» Chea Chheng’s face broke into a big smile. He patted her head, playfully pulling on one of her ponytails. «Your face is like the sun. It matches your pretty yellow blouse,» Chea Chheng said affectionately to the eight-year old girl.«Tell me a story,» Vanna begged.«Don’t tell me you are not tired of my stories yet,» he teased her laughing, his eyes dancing with the happiness he saw on her face.«Oh! Never!» exclaimed Vanna.«Then come sit with me,» Chea Chheng said. They sat down together on the front step. Chea Chheng began his story.The Banyan tree has heart-shaped leaves. Many roots grow down from its branches. If a root is cut, another will grow and dig into the ground. It may be a different root, but it will be just as strong. You cannot destroy the soul of something so determined to live. The Banyan tree, like a person is made of many parts that give a strong foundation. Its heart-shaped leaves look alike but each is different, like the many emotions inside a person’s heart. There was a little boy who wanted to cut down a big Banyan tree growing near his house. He knew it was very strong. He wanted to show that he was stronger. «I will destroy that tree,» the little boy said. «Then I will be the stronger one!»Every day he cut down a root. And every day a new one began growing in its place. Finally, he realized the tree was too strong to destroy, just like a person’s soul.The little boy learned from the tree to be stronger. When one part of him felt weak, he used other parts to stay strong. This is what people must do. Part of you may feel weak sometimes, but other parts will not. You must then look to these other parts. They will help you to stay strong. Just like the Banyan tree.Vanna listened attentively to Chea Chheng’s voice. It was wonderful to enter the world of his stories. They were stories of her people and of their land. To the little girl, they were full of a special magic."