Pan-Asian Gallivanting

sorry for the delay….

Update…I’m now in Laos.

After Angkor Wat I made a couple stops in Kampong Cham and Stung Treung before crossing the border into Laos. Once there I stayed on the island of Don Khone in Laos’ “4000 Islands”. But wait Adam…I thought Laos was land locked? Yes, it is. But, there is a section of the Mekong River in Southern Lao where 4000 islands are dispersed within its banks. While there I read some books, slept on some hammocks, went for a swim, and viewed some beautiful waterfalls.

Following my stay in Don Khone I ventured up to Champasak to view Wat Phou, a pre-Angkorian Khmere Temple. There was a festival going on to celebrate the visitation of a famous monk…quite interesting and fun at the same time.

Now I’m in Pakse. I don’t know how long I’ll be here. Maybe one more day? Maybe not?

So I think I’m going to change the format of this blog a little. Instead of telling you the details of every place I visit I’m going to only update you on my location. Only when a site/event is of great significance to me will I include further details. I’ll let the photos speak for themselves. So, what I’ll include as far as content for this is what’s on my mind. Maybe that will keep my readers awake?

So I’ve been in Southeast Asia for almost four months. I’ve seen some sites, drank some beers, and observed numerous cultural habits. One of which is the fact that women do ALL the work here.

When I was in China, who do you think was constructing all of the roads, reducing boulders into pebble size gravel, or cooking and serving all of the meals in the restaurants. Women. In Lao, I’ve noticed that women tend to wake very early in order to get all of their tasks completed by the end of the day. Washing clothes, cooking meals, serving foreigners, gathering fruit, tending to the garden, and taking care of children. The men on the other hand tend to live a much more leisurely life. They sleep in, boss the women around and drink most of the day away. Maybe once in awhile they’ll get off their asses to go catch some fish or drive a tuk-tuk around. MAYBE…

So, even though women’s rights in the west are still not as they should be (i.e. women deserve equal pay for the same jobs that men do, better absence packages for those on maternity leave, and less stereotypical images of uber-thin, anorexic women as the epitome of beauty) compared to S.E. Asia women have it easy.

I just added more photos of Angkor Wat and its surrounding temples to my smugmug.com account. I would post them here but I’m in a rush to catch a bus which is leaving very soon. Please click on the link to the right to view more of my photos. Once there navigate to the Angkor Wat subcategory…which is located in the Cambodia category…which is within the Travel master category. Enjoy!

(these are not all of the Angkor photos….check smugmug for more)

you meet some interesting characters while on the road…

Enough said….enjoy!

More to come….

I was here for one and a half days. On my full day I hired a moto driver to take me to the attractions around the city. The first stop was a killing cave where Pol Pot’s regime killed thousands of Cambodians and then threw them in the caves like trash. Today the bones of those victims have been collect and a series of temples and Buddhist statues mark the site allowing for the soles of the dead to reach heaven.

After the cave we went to a prasat (ancient Khmer temple). While there I stumbled upon the shooting of a music video. Apparently the artist is very popular with the tweens because there were many there following his every move.

I wanted to see the real side of Cambodia so I decided to stop off in this rural riverside village. There’s not to much to comment about here besides the fact that there was a charming floating village on the riverbank. The pictures say it all….

Cambodia is poor. Cambodia is corrupt. Cambodia is littered with land mines.

Cambodia is friendly. Cambodia is resilient. Cambodia is beautiful!

My first experience of Cambodia was the bustling capital of Phnom Penh. Before I go into detail on the sites that I visited I think it’s important for you to know a little about the genocide that occurred in Cambodia during the 1970s at the hands of Cambodia’s communist leader Pol Pot.

No religion. No education. No freedom of speach. No food. No money. These are just a few of the circumstances that developed during Pol Pot’s regime. During the beginning of his campaign he ordered the evacuation of all cities, moving educated and prosperous members of society into the countryside to work the rice fields. Anyone who wore glasses, spoke another language besides Khmer, or showed any opposition to the government were jailed and most likely murdered. By the end of Pol Pot’s regime 1/4, 1/3 by some estimates, of the Cambodian population was killed; roughly three million people. Yet no one really knows about this genocide…including myself. Maybe it was because the Vietnam War was preoccupying everyone during the time.

One of the sites where Pol Pot’s regime interrogated, tortured, and murdered their prisoners was at Tuol Sleng Prison in Phnom Penh. A former school, the cluster of buildings forming Tuol Sleng Prison house the pictures of those murdered as well as prison cells in their original state. To be honest it was quite erie and moving walking the grounds and into numerous cells knowing that thousands upon thousands of innocent Cambodians were brutally tortured and murdered exactly where I stood. Even though it was quite disturbing, I’m glad that I did see it. This trip is not only about experiences and seeing new places, but it’s also a sort of education. Cambodia….now I know.

Hmmm….what is there to say about HCMC? It definitely is the bustling capitalistic heart of the country. While Hanoi is quite charming with colonial architecture, HCMC is a bustling metropolis with museums, skyscrapers and traffic…lots and lots of traffic. I ended up staying in HCMC for only a couple days. After being in Vietnam for about twenty days I was quite tired of the persistent heckling from touts and moto drivers EVERY STEP that I made. So, I felt it necessary to see what needed to be seen in HCMC and then move on to Cambodia.

While there I saw the War Remnants Museum which really shed light on the atrocities which our government carried out during the Vietnam War. The most disturbing aspect of all were the hallways and rooms lined with pictures of those effected by Agent Orange. If you’re unaware of Agent Orange and its effects I strongly encourage you to do a little research on it to understand how inhumane it was for our government to use this chemical weapon.

I stumbled into a tourist trap…eeeeeek! Hoi An has got mass tourism by the balls….and rightfully so. The small town is dotted with French colonial buildings which house tailor shops, book stores, restaurants, and souvenir bodegas. Although it was quite charming I ended up only staying one full day….mass tourism isn’t really my cup of tea. But hey…while I was there I had a jacket and a dress shirt custom tailored for $36!

After a little case of traveller’s diarrhea, which kept me in bed for 2 days, it was quite a relief to have energy and get back into the groove of things.

Following Ninh Binh I ended up in Hue, a quaint town with numerous pagodas and historical sites dotting the surrounding landscape. On the second day there I opted to rent a bike and pedal my way to all of the numerous attractions. However, once I reached my first destination I met an extremely friendly moto driver named Tran Van Thinh who offered me a tour of everything that intrigued me for $10. Since the bike rental only costed $1 I opted for his service. Boy was I glad I did.

Our itinerary for the moto tour included: Thien Mu Pagoda, Ancient Elephant and Tiger Fighting Pit, Elephant Tomb, Tu Hien Pagoda, American War Bunker, Trung Tam Van Hoa Huyen Tran, and Thanh Toan Bridge. Of course all of these sites were interesting and worth the visit. But what really made the day was the insight I received from Tran.

Despite losing his father, at the age of 11, during the Vietnam War he was very accepting of his circumstances and even humble towards how it shaped his life. Not once did he claim that his father’s death was the fault of the American’s. Rather, he emphasized that people’s preoccupation with greed and anger during the period was what caused his loss. Furthermore, he has accepted his fate and moved on with great strength and courage; much like the rest of the Vietnamese.

If you spend a good deal of time in Vietnam, one of the first things that you will realize is that the Vietnamese are mentally strong. Your first experience with this might be the aggressively weighted approach that moto drivers and shopkeepers take during a transaction. But if you look past that then you can see it in their faces and how they interact with others. There’s almost this stench of passion and devotion towards their country which trickles off of their bodies with every twitch, bead of sweet, or smile. Maybe it’s because they’ve been fighting various foreigners for the past couple centuries and now that Vietnam rests in the palms of the Vietnamese…they won’t give it up!