Siamese Twinge

The final chapter

noreply@blogger.com (Justin Richards) — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 22:40:00 +0000

Bangkok revisited

Between the week I stayed in Bangkok before heading to Bang Saen and my final week after leaving Pattaya, I spent about two weeks in Thailand's capital city, where we had first landed on October 17.

In that time, I learned to use the skytrain and metro without a map, I met beautiful and dangerous people, and I became well-acquainted with the vast city, from the tourist ghetto in Banglampu to the Silom drag show, from the yaa-dong whiskey stand to the ultra-high-so supermall utopias.

Banglampu

Also known as the Khao San Road district, I think an easy shorthand to describe this area is a list of the most common streetside shops: electronica CDs, Jimi Hendrix/Radiohead/Scarface T-shirts, pad thai, swimwear, banana roti, day-glo velvet art, tuk-tuk sculptures made from crushed Chang beer cans.

I'm not going to lie and say that I liked this place. I spent most of my time trying not to judge everyone, not to assume they were just vacant stoners who were only there to get drunk with other hippies and buy a token of (fake) Thai culture as a joke or something. Meanwhile I was walking around in sandals, khakis, and a Bob Dylan T-shirt, eating spring rolls and roti, and by appearances could have easily evoked the same sort of disdain from myself.

While Mike and Jeremy were still with me, we stayed across the road from Banglampu, on a little canal. One thing that did interest me about this part of town was the uncanny presentation of trash. Thailand at large had garbage issues, but in parts of Bangkok there was so much of it that it became not an obstruction but its own sort of artifact.

I remember one collection in particular, an abandoned lot between two streets. The ground, high with rubble, was strewn with fliers, bottles, and everyday trash of all sorts. In a way the lot seemed like an authorless, self-conferring sculpture with a hive-life all its own.
The maw of an old vacuum cleaner gaped after a bitten pear, wasted bamboo leaned lattice-like against a half-wall, and transparent snack wrappers whirled together in a little twister. I almost felt like I shouldn't walk across it.

Chinatown

The sky overhead is so polluted that stormy weather seems imminent all the time. Through its veneer the sun looks like the moon.

The streets are lined with produce stands, clothing outlets, and gadget shops. Great vertical signs in red Chinese characters advertise warehouses and restaurants. Smoke rises from squid grills. The sidewalks crash with people, but human shouts are tinny under the noise of the motorway.

There, trucks, taxis, and jalopy motorcycles fight for forward motion, and I don't think Thailand has any kind of muffler standard. The raucous tuk-tuk, whose name is onomatopoeic, clamors over all the rest.

The sound is constant and everywhere, so that you look down the street and the whole cityscape -- buildings, people and the space between them -- seems to rumble and thrum and growl like a restless monster.

Center World

A flute melody charms me along its wispy path, through sets of glossy black couches accented with chrome furnishings, beyond an array of plasma screens on which wild horses run through vivid meadows, and past beautiful women with impossibly smooth faces holding jewels or perfumes. At the store's exit, a man from Panasonic is demonstrating the first battery-powered personal car.

I emerge onto the fourth-floor concourse, where a curtain of huge green pearls hangs from the ceiling three floors above, catching golden sunlight from the western window. I feel lighter than air. I feel non-existent. This place is designed to ease the pain of shopping, but, like morphine for the unafflicted, the effect on the penniless is plain bliss. No one knows that I’m not here to buy anything! While part of me is worried that I’ll be found out and ousted – or worse, jailed – another part is mourning the passage of time, because with it comes night and the closing of Center World. Its big sister, Paragon, shuts down just an hour later.

I try not to think about this as I drift toward the glass wall behind the escalators, where the newest Lamborghinis, Maseratis, and Ferraris are on display. In my travels so far, it’s been the lowest of everything – the barest room, the cheapest restaurant, the darkest bar – but when I arrived at the Silom Center shopping district, I was flung straight to the top. Maybe that’s why this is so overwhelming. The best of the modern world, all being presented to me as though I deserve it.

And the scale of everything. I feel as though I’m in the presence of some vast, cutting-edge, superficially good deity. An ivy-strewn waterfall covers seven floors of the northern wall. In the atrium, three towering, orange-glowed letters spells out “ZEN.” And outside, the glossy face of a Thai girl smiles down from a screen in the sky.

---

During my last stint in Bangkok, I finally got to be around money. I made some high-so friends who changed my clothes, took me to posh restaurants, and bought me cosmopolitans. One was the owner of a Silom nightclub and a modeling agency. Another was the former Miss Thailand. The most imposing was champion strongman and action-movie star Nathan Jones. He was General Boagrius in Troy. Thais know him as the foreigner in the hit martial-arts film Tom Yum Goong. He is enormous.

Walking around the movie theater with Nathan, or standing in the elevator with him, something seemed incorrect. Art often imitates life, so that movie scenes blur with our personal memories, but there are certain things that you know exist only in cartoons or special effects: dragons that breathe fire, steamrolled faces that blink twice, and human behemoths. Yet there he was, bumping his head against the ceiling of the elevator, making movies seem all the more lifelike or reality seem all the less real.

Coming home

One of the most striking things about arriving at Dulles Airport in Washington, D.C., was the American conversation happening all around me. In certain parts of Thailand, English speech was normal – that was how Europeans often spoke with each other or with Thais. I even overheard an American accent every now and then. But they were speaking about Thailand, or speaking about home as a place that could be abstracted. It wasn’t the verbal exhaust of everyday life, as natural as breathing.

I wrote down a scrap I overheard soon after arriving, a Virginia mother talking on her mobile phone: “Band teachers are saints. They’re all saints. They should all be sainted…Okay. Yeah. Oh I’m having a Valentine’s Day potluck on the fifteenth.” People cursing to themselves. Thoughtless exchanges with service personnel. Black people talking. I’d seen almost no black Americans in Asia, and now I was in Washington D.C. There were even sorority girls, twittering away at a speed that would be inaudible to foreigners.

There was a downside to this. In Thailand, the sound of other people’s conversations, of PA announcements, of song lyrics, had about the same relevance to me as the sound of distant hammering. Ambient speech was a sort of silence, in the sense that I could remain absorbed in my reading or in my own thoughts because my brain never processed the words. Even if they were in English, the accents were often thick enough that the words did not have easy passage to my listening center.

At the airport, everyone was having American conversations in American English all the time. When I sat to think or read, I was surrounded by what I now recognized as a frenzy of meaning, a patternless web of expression that my unconscious was curious enough to get tangled in.

---

Because United Airlines screwed me over, they put me up in a D.C. hotel on the night that I was supposed to fly to Miami. It was a Holiday Inn, but damned if it didn’t seem like a palace. I was used to a closet-sized room with a hard mattress and a table fan.

I sat down on the hotel bed and my bottom sank for what seemed like forever. I had two pillows, and they came with a menu that offered extra pillows in four consistencies. There was cable TV, body wash, climate control, a razor, a blowdryer, hot water, and a shower head that let you select from six different spray shapes. I drank the tap water!

---

So now I’m in Gainesville, and I spend most of my time in disbelief that I’m actually here. At times I feel like I’m in a dream that I had while I was in Thailand, a dream about home, because I had many towards the end. Or I feel like Jan. 31, 2008 came right after Oct. 16, 2007, and I’ve been here the whole time. I have a very hard time reconciling the two lives. I fear this present life burying the other under mounds and mounds of time.

I don’t have any final thoughts. When people ask me what my trip was like I just say something meaningless. Pretty soon I’ll start to look for a job. Maybe if I was smart I would just wrap myself up in my arms and do as Beckett said: “Sleep now, as under that ancient lamp, all twined together, all tired out with so much talking, so much listening, so much toil and play.”

Alone!

noreply@blogger.com (Justin Richards) — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 02:02:00 +0000

Yes, it's been weeks since this stuff happened. But I can't write a conclusion until I catch up to the end first. Besides, this one's short.

A vacation on holiday

Mike and Jeremy abandoned me on Jan. 9. My American friend returned stateside, a homecoming I was already dreaming about at night, and Jeremy went to Cambodia. I stayed one more day in Bangkok, then took a bus to Bang Saen.

Bang Saen is a popular beach getaway for Bangkok Thais. The sand is moist and clumpy, the surf pushes up litter, and artificial light hangs over the ocean like smoke.

As I paced the beach one night, I was ensnared by a group of dark-skinned sirens huddled on a mat. A less lonesome traveler would have jeered at their crude seduction tactics, but they winnowed one hundred baht in beer money from me. I remember being kissed in the dirty sea, flailing my arms about indignantly.

Pattaya, a family kind of place

It's possible that life on Earth -- that is, across most of the globe -- is inherently good. In this scenario, one can imagine that there are certain epicenters from which spread all the madness, pestilence, and perversion in the world. Cities like Las Vegas, Rio, and Pattaya, Thailand.

I arrived in Pattaya in the middle of the afternoon, and nearly everyone was asleep. I approached the first inn that showed signs of life. An older Thai woman and a pale Swedish man were chatting across the Thai woman's desk in a junky garage below the rooms. I asked them if they had any vacancy.

"How long you stay here?" the Swede asked.

"Maybe a day or two," I said. "I just arrived. I was going to sort of feel it out."

"How many time you come here before?" asked the Thai woman.

"None. This is my first time in Pattaya."

At this they began to laugh, and they went on long past what seemed normal. I chuckled, bit my fingernail, craned my neck around in surveyance of the garage. They were still laughing when I told them I was going to look at another guesthouse.

The ground floor of the next place was white and flaky, but tidier. I asked the young man behind the counter about a room. He just shuffled toward the staircase, sniffing and rubbing his nostrils. I thought back to this when I learned about yaa-baa, the drug that etches Pattaya's neural framework. Its name means "crazy medicine," and it's ingested by snorting.

I followed the man into the building. Dark, withered women hunched behind crumbling doorways, watching me with nervous eyes. One of them crept toward me reptile-like. "Would you like to see my room?" she said vacantly. Some sort of cream-colored ooze showed between the scattered follicles on her scalp.

After missing the doorknob a few times, the young man inserted his key and opened the door to a vacant room. Facing me was the open bathroom. I determined this after my eyes identified a cracked toilet amid all the rubble. I looked to the rest of the room. There were no windows, even though we were at the building's edge. Insects moved on the unmade bed.

I told the man thank you, I was going to look around some more, maybe I would come back later. It was the first time I'd turned down a room that was cheap enough for me. I descended the stairs and emerged onto the bright street. The next room I checked out became my home for what turned out to be a long and strange six days.

[omitted]

Pat Pong show, Bangkok

noreply@blogger.com (Justin Richards) — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 05:45:00 +0000

Important disclaimer: If you're ever disturbed, whether easily or with difficulty, you might not want to read this post. It covers a certain show involving certain talented ladies working off a dark road in Bangkok. The experience was interesting, and our curiosity was satisfied, but we were made to squirm -- first in our guts, and later, at the final act, in our souls.

(This disclaimer is directed explicity at our parents and other relatives. If you're one of our necessarily perverted friends, please read on, and I'm sorry for the delay.)

We sat down in the front row and a couple of working girls, their parts barely covered, sat beside us and tried to siphon away our money. The room was small, and the rest of the crowd was mostly European. About forty percent of it was female. On stage, a woman lay on her back, puffing excitedly on a cigarette with her vagina. I never saw her face.

The bargirls deserted us quickly. Apparently, our boyish charm did not make up for our frugality. A new woman took the stage and began slicing bananas into chunks. "Banana Boat Song" filled the room. She propped her feet up on a pole and, with a wet "thwuk!" each time, she launched the chunks into the air, sending them over her head behind her reclined body. To my disappointment, she made no effort to time her shots with the exclamations of the song ("Six foot, seven foot, eight foot, bunch!/thwuk!").

She then pointed to someone in the room and indicated that he should open his mouth. He refused, and she tried several others to no avail. I pointed to Jeremy, who was sitting to my left. She prepared to launch, and Jeremy dove behind me, clutching my shirt, which is all stretched now thanks a lot. The banana went behind us somewhere.

The next act was a younger girl, and her expression invoked a high school sophomore reluctantly at band recital. The crowd was becoming rowdy and self-involved. The girl looked around insecurely, then seemed to get a cue from somewhere. She itched at her labia and from between them produced a string of bright-pink flowers.

The girl scanned the room again, and I saw disappointment strike her face as she observed that no one was watching. She continued pulling on the string, which yielded a rainbow of day-glo colors. Still no response. She waved her hand like a magician and quickly left the stage.

A taller, meatier girl came on next, carrying two bottles of soda water. My first thought was, "How is she going to open those bottles? I don't see an opener anywhere," and my second thought was, "I am far too delicate to be here."

The fifth act began curiosly. She held a folded piece of paper in one hand, and with the other, she pulled from her vagina a string that was hung with charms. Dido sang from the speakers: "My tea's gone cold, I'm wondering why-yy..." The girl took one of the charms between her fingers and I saw that it was in fact a razor. With the boredom of a schoolgirl, she began cutting the folded paper into a snowflake. Mike still has it, which means that it's somewhere over eastern Siberia right now.

Next was the girl who, using a small pipe to direct the puffs, blew out twelve candles one by one. This was impressive, but not so much as the last of the solo acts, performed by the oldest and most wizened member of the crew.

After laying out her drawing paper on the stage floor, she inserted into herself the butt of a blue dry-erase marker. She was waiting for a cue from another woman, who was taking drink orders from a group in the back of my room. Wearing an expression of pained impatience, she barked at the girl in Thai. I couldn't understand the words, but I imagine it was something like, "What's the holdup? I'm clenching a fat marker in my goddamn vagina."

Finally, the other woman gave her the okay. "What's your name?" the performer called out to a man at our left.

The man was wearing a white linen suit with a pink handkerchief in the pocket, and his head was tortoise-like. Beside him sat a young and polished blonde, whose bejeweled hand lay on his thigh. In a thick Mediterranean accent, the man croaked out a response that even I couldn't understand. The Thai woman asked him to repeat several times, then decided to go with what she heard.

Supporting herself with her hands, she moved in midair like a gymnast, the fat of her buttocks brushing against the paper. When she was done, the second girl looked at the paper and said something in Thai, which I can guess was, "I can't read this shit. This isn't even English." This girl approached the old man and asked him to write his name down. Then she took the message back to the performer, who began to write again. When she finished, she showed her work to the crowd. We all applauded. The paper read, in perfectly formed English, "Welcome to Thailand Vittorio." Two girls brought the paper back to Vittorio. He accepted with a little nod, then handed it to his beautiful girlfriend.

After this act, the lights dimmed, and a romantic air began to play. A man walked out in briefs and started rubbing his crotch, glancing here and there. What now? I asked Mike. We hadn't heard anything about a man. Murmurs of uncertainty filled the room.

Then his partner came out wearing lace, and they both undressed. Quickly he took her in his arms and laid her down on the floor. I first mistook their speed and fluidity for that of ballet dancers and not, say, professional movers.

The man was paunchy, and the woman was sickly-looking, with prominent ribs and pelvis. They moved through every major sexual position: her leg vertical, he standing behind her, and at the end, the two of them hanging from rings on the ceiling. It was like an instructive demonstration of sex, though entirely passionless. They changed positions every three measures if you counted four beats per. Once or twice I saw her fidgeting her hands, touching his chest maybe. At first I thought it was actual female pleasure or an imitation of it, then I realized that she was just making false starts before the time to rearrange.

I consider myself pretty blase about things like purity, sanctity, blasphemy. I believe, maybe naively, that anything powerful enough to be sacred is too powerful to be marred by a little abuse. Still, I found myself diverting my attention when the sex demonstration began for the second time. I think that was silly now, but I'd never watched other people having sex before, and I'd imagined my sex life henceforth changed after seeing the act reduced to begrudged choreography, thick slapping sounds, and the restrained grimace on a face whose cheek is pressed against the floor.

Sun of the beach photos

noreply@blogger.com (Mike) — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 11:36:00 +0000

Koh Turatao was overrun with monkeys, I caught this one in the act of stealing a girls sandal.

Cooking crabs on our driftwood fire.

Arriving on Koh Turatao, the water is crystal clear.

A monk finding solitude in the still water.

The island-scape of the Andaman Sea and Turatao Marine National Park.

The port in Pakbara.

I couldn't decide which of these two I liked more.

A man bathes in the Andaman Sea.

This area was hit hard by the tsunami and now there are many signs telling you which way to run if you see a wall of water.

One of the brothels that fronts as a karaoke bar in Haat Yai. This was the view from our hotel room.

Justin tries to decide what size cobra he wants to eat at the snake restaurant.

Caged song birds for sale.

Justin and Jeremy, seen in the mirror, try to decide if they want a massage.

Street food for New Years in Haat Yai.

Sun of the beach

noreply@blogger.com (Justin Richards) — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 10:26:00 +0000

We had just finished a few drinks at an open-air restaurant, the night was ripe, and Jeremy announced that he wanted to spend some money on a lady. This southernmost city, Haat Yai, had at least one brothel on every block, usually under the marquis "Karaoke" or "Ancient Massage." There were a few prostitution supercenters, like Pink Lady Complex and Turkish Bath, which had numerous floors and rooms, each specializing in a different service.

The first place we tried was Piano Bar. Here, the girls sat on a tiered platform behind a glass wall, brightly adorned like tropical fish. They preened aloofly or winked at us while patting their bodies.

Each wore a number, and you had only to tell the manager which number you would like to order. The three-digit girls were about $30, and the two-digit girls were about $25.

We visited several shops with a similar layout. Others had no aquarium; instead a bevy of girls greeted you when you walked in. They tried to win your favor while the manager discussed business with you. To keep up the ruse, someone often sang dischordant karaoke in the back of the room.

At each place, Jeremy would ask the manager an assortment of questions. "What for all the presents?" when there were large gift boxes stacked behind the girls in one aquarium. "Why I cannot have for all of one day?" because he had heard this offer earlier that night.

He would haggle over the price stubbornly, then back out when the manager finally agreed on a discount. When we showed him our puzzlement, he would wrinkle his nose and tell us he didn't like any of the girls.

We literally visited every shop in town. It took hours. We knew we couldn't go back to any of these places, or walk by them without shading our faces.

It had been the same when I went shopping lady with him in Mueng Laa, China (fruitlessly, if it matters to you). I think the thing is that he wanted a girl, but he didn't want to go through the disreputable process of paying her and following her away into some dim and overly efficient room. It was enough to look and be on the brink of the actual event, or to be fawned over by the girls and enveloped in their auras of guaranteed sex.

Once, though, at one of the aquariums, he came very close. She was an absolutely stunning girl in a coral-colored dress, seated with her legs crossed at the edge of her row. She had lustrous black hair, cream-colored skin, and lively, smiling eyes. Her number was fifty-eight. Its clunkiness seemed to make her more accessible, which was some trick considering the fine liquidity of her contours and the grace of her gently nodding leg, of her blithely turned head and the swish of silken hair that followed it.

Jeremy had the sense not to duck out this time, and he ordered her. I'm sorry, the manager said, she has already been requested by that gentleman. He pointed to a Thai man sitting at a table and drinking a cocktail. Why he hadn't taken her yet, I'm not sure. Perhaps he was savoring this anticipatory gaze, which was sure to be better than the necrophiliac automation to follow.

New Year's Eve, new ways to party

Do you remember on Curb Your Enthusiasm, when Larry has a whiskey-and-coke in a coke can, and he tells this guy to try his coke because he thinks it will be funny, and the guy is like, "What is this?" because it turns out the guy is Muslim and forbidden from drinking liquor? No? Oh right, that was just my life.

We were on the top floor of our hotel, which we shared with a group of teenagers from Satun province, close to the Muslim nation of Malaysia. Most of them looked like emo kids in America, but grungier and meaner. Their T-shirts promoted bands like Nirvana and the 80's hair-metal sensation The Scorpions.

They were pious about liquor, but they joined us in throwing crude Chinese explosives out the window for New Year's, they tried to steal my T-shirts, and the girl among them tried to seduce me into buying her a Fanta.

For the actual crossing into 2008, we went to Blue Kiss Disco. It was so hip that at the back of the club there was an ice bar, a room where Thais could experience actual cold temperatures. In the anteroom they put on parkas and woolly boots. The room is made to look like it's cut from ice, and vapor comes from your mouth and rises off your skin. Thais venerated Mike when he told them that his hometown was like that all winter long.

The room was mostly empty though the club was packed. We wore our short sleeves and let the cold air feast on our skin as we danced in the new year.

Solitude

After Haat Yai, we took a minibus to the coast and then a ferry out to the island of Ko Tarutao, a large and still-pristine island in the Andaman Sea.

At the pier, there was a visitor's center, a small restaurant, and a shop that sold supplies. We stocked up on food, then hiked about four kilometers to an isolated beach. To our left was a large rock formation whose jungle trees shook with monkeys, and to our right stretched endless sand and sea. We took rest for a moment, then went exploring.

The day was clasped in the arms of what some would call poor weather: a low bank of clouds, grey light, and cool, electrostatic wind. A fine rain could be felt but not seen. After walking through the interior Ko Turatao, we followed a white path out onto a bright green peninsula, an island of lucidity amid the dream of grey water and drizzly haze. Likewise, our stark waking minds were ringed all around by the drone of cicadas. The sound cleared for us a silence in which we sat side by side between the palms.

We reflected on Ko Pha Ngan, on what some call the "laid-back" or "anything-goes" environment of southern Thailand's traveler culture. You can dance how you want to, you can compose paragraphs outside the 7-Eleven, you can go around with whatever guy, girl, or body part you fancy. Nothing is strange or taboo. At the full moon party, for example, no one looks twice at sex on the beach, berserk dancing to no particular music, or at a lone man weeping in hunch.

We began by talking about societies, how any society, as well as any frendship or relationship, is characterized by commonality, and commonality breeds conformity, which entails restrictions on behavior. At Ko Pha Ngan, there were literally hundreds of disparate societies mixed together. Commonality, and with it restrictive conformity, broke down.

Survival

It was late into sunset when we returned to the campsite, and we set to work. Jeremy and I found a broken crab trab buried in the sand. We unburied it, stitched it up, and fixed weights to the outside.

Meanwhile, Mike had sharpened a stick and gone hunting for crabs beneath the rosy sheen on the water. He caught three. We smashed the shells of the small ones and put them in the trap. The third we steamed over the fire. Mike and I shared the meat because Jeremy didn't think it was "comestible."

Jeremy and Mike made their beds on the sand, by the fire, and I hung my hammock in a cluster of trees farther inland.

By the afternoon of the next day, it became apparent that the food we had purchased -- rice and canned fish -- was not only insufficient for three nights but was no longer appetizing even to a very hungry boy. So, I collected a potful of snails, and Mike caught a few more crabs. There was even one in the trap. Jeremy fashioned a bow-and-arrow for hunting monkeys.

This was something to watch. He would approach the family of monkeys, and they would scamper to observe him from behind trees or from a safe distance on the beach. Then Jeremy would hurry toward them in jaunty French leaps and launch his arrow, which veered quickly like a Nerf dart into the sand.

Jeremy also helped us catch minnows from the river with a mosquito net (I fried them in the oil from mashed peanuts.). He was keen on making weapons and hunting animals, but he never wanted to eat them. He would take one look at what we had in our pot -- rice or snails or whatever -- and say, "Okay I go at the restaurant now."

I suppose I could mention here that on the other side of the rock mountain that blocked off our beach, there was a small and overpriced bungalow complex with a restaurant. By the inland trail, it was about three hundred meters. Jeremy made this trip regularly.

By nightfall on the second night, we had no water left, so Jeremy and I made an expedition to the restaurant. We carried heavy, flaming sticks because Jeremy claimed to have been chased back by wild boars the last time he went.

When we arrived, all was black, and the restuarant was closed. The lock on the cooler, though, was unhinged. Jeremy went in, using his lighter for illumination, and I waited on the sand.

When he returned, we went down to the coast and surveyed his booty: one can of Coca-Cola and two cans of beer Chang.

"There's no water!" I exclaimed. "We need water."

"One person, I cannot take my fire for choose all what I want."

"Okay fine, let's go back."

We went back and, as quickly as we could, grabbed some more items from the cooler. "Don't be stupid," I hissed at him. I took two bottles of water and left a twenty-baht note on the railing. On the beach, Jeremy lit a flame and we took inventory again. It appeared that Jeremy had taken another beer and a Pepsi.

"What the fuck?" I said. "You didn't get any water."

"It's okay," he said. "You want to go back?"

"No," I said. "Let's just go."

We scurried down the path in the dark. When we were almost clear of the last bungalow, from which a silhouette appeared to be watching us, Jeremy said in a harsh whisper: "Are you sure you don't want to go back? More Coca-Cola, more beer."

"No," I said. "You're crazy."

"You don't want to have this beer?" he said.

"Okay, yes, thank you," I said. "But let's get out of here."

When we returned to the campsite, we had soda pop and beer, but still only modest portions of food. After a pot of noodles, we sat watching the water in unsated silence. Boat lights, or just the glow from them, dotted the horizon. Closer to us, a long boat was shining a light into the water. We watched the boat and it's pool of lit ocean pace back and forth.

The other two figured it was a squid boat, so they sent me swimming after it with a plastic bag and thirty baht. When I arrived, the men invited me on. They were pulling in crab traps, not catching squid, and the crabs were the same size as ours.

Like most Thai people, they had a fearful respect for sub-tropical temperatures, including that of the sea at night. They seemed to think that I had endured great hardship to reach their boat, so they filled my bag with crabs and wouldn't accept my money. I bid them good luck in the new year and swam back ashore. We ate three steamed crabs each.

Voting ourselves off

The next morning, Jeremy leapt from his sleep blubbering in terrified French. He thought he had rolled into the fire. He had not. It was the air itself which was on fire.

We stayed in the shade for the next several hours. When I went into the light for some errand, my skin would shrivel and peel back before my eyes. Finally, at around three o' clock, some cloud could watch no longer and stepped in front of the sun, probably to be dissipated in anger by our torturer.

By that time, we had but one hot beer between the three of us. I boiled two bottles worth of river water in the pot, which I cleaned as best as I could. Still, my water was spicy and sooty to the taste, and clouded with food bits.

"But I don't understand," Jeremy said. "The restaurant is just 'eer!"

Soon after, we hiked back to the port. According to Jeremy and the other Europeans we met at the restaurant there, our behavior at the camp site was distinctively American. Frontiersmanship, et cetera. I don't know. I'd say that smacks of Euro-condescension. Personally, I didn't think the food at the restaurant was that good.

Muay Thai boxing and island life: photos

noreply@blogger.com (Mike) — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 16:04:00 +0000

The scenery of Ko Pha Ngan

The port in Surat Thani

Thai boxing in Chiang Mai

Traveling by tuk tuk through the city

Muay Thai boxing and the Full Moon Party

noreply@blogger.com (Justin Richards) — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 14:21:00 +0000

We're at the Muay Thai stadium in Chiang Mai, waiting for the fight to start. Our seats are in the front row, and we expect to be sprayed with blood, especially during the heavyweight match. For this main event, an American fighter is pitted against a Thai.

Muay Thai is a nightly happening here, so the small arena is filled mostly with foreign spectators. Most of the Thais are just there to gamble. They're clamoring and laughing in the corners while the westerners fidget in their seats. Music comes from the speakers, a non-stop needly meandering punctuated now and again by a honk.

Muay Thai kickboxing, if you don't know already, is one of the most powerful martial arts. Fists and feet are used from a distance, but the strongest blows are usually delivered with knees or elbows. Thai people have told me that every Thai male, since childhood, is well acquainted with Muay Thai technique. Like soccer is for the English or whoever, Muay Thai is just part of their motor memory.

The music in the arena has swelled to fill the room. Judges and spectators tap in time on hard surfaces, watching the empty ring. In flecks and pulses, violence slowly populates the air.

FIGHT 1: Baby-boy beat-down

Finally, the loudspeaker crackles on with some garbled but excited announcement. The first fighter enters the ring. He's a child of about seven, slight in build, wearing a green robe. He bows to the four sides of the ring and takes a seat in the red corner.

The next fighter is a full-sized brawler, about two hundred pounds of hard muscle. Grinning broadly, he rotates in the center of the ring and sweeps his upturned hands toward the crowd.

Just kidding. The next fighter is a child of the same size, maybe lankier. Unlike red, who is compact and expressionless, he is awkward-looking, with a long face, wet eyes, and a slack mouth. He wears the blue gloves.

The boys do this routine in the middle of the ring, a sequence of movements that appear half spiritual rite and half showmanship -- down on one knee, twiddling the fists, moving in lunges. This sequence is meant, in part, to honor the fighters' lineage of Muay Thai teachers and also to allow each fighter to gauge abnormalities in the floor of the ring.

The fight begins. Red dominates early on, driving blue around the ring with kicks to his midsection. Blue is able to parry some kicks, but then red wraps him up. He whirls blue around, lifting knees into his ribcage. Blue's face as it passes me seems to plead with the crowd.

The bell rings and the fighters go to their corners. Their coaches pour cold water over their legs, massaging and slapping the muscles. Here blue's abuse turns to a seed of strength which he nurses during the break.

In the second round, he makes use of his longer reach to keep red at bay while keeping his feet in red's face. He launches a foot thrust at him, and red tries to catch it but the foot goes right through to his diaphragm.

Blue keeps this up in the third round, and in the end the ref raises his glove into the air. He's dripping with sweat. He looks more than anything like a kid who just got out of the wading pool.

FIGHT 2: Bloody

The fighters are young adults now. Blue looks dangerous from the beginning. His posture is low-slung, and his deadly eyes watch red from under lazy lids.

Still, these two fight more tentatively than the children. A kick from one of those long, lean legs is not easily absorbed. They feint for a while before blue connects a swift kick to red's mouth. Red tries a midsection kick, which blue grabs, holds against his hip, and returns with a roundhouse to red's chest.

Blue follows red into the corner, and they wrap each other up. They strike with knees until the ref separates them. Immediately blue kicks red over sideways with his right leg, then knees him in the face with his left. Red totters, blood flowing from his nose and dripping off his upper lip, and falls to the floor.

FIGHT 3: Worth the admission

At the beginning of the fight, the fighters bob their fists and knees to the music, moving like some sort of killer dancers. The opponents are well matched this time.

Blue makes the first attacks because his kicks are longer and quicker. At first he connects quite a few, and seems to be dominating the fight. As his opponent retreats, he takes gazelle-like leaps across the ring, with lifted knee, moving midair into a flying kick.

Red dodges the next one and lands a coil-and-release kick into blue's gut. Blue puckers, then comes at him again. But red catches his momentum and slings him against the ropes. He wraps blue up, and the two exchange knee blows to the ribs, red hitting the lowered side of blue's bent ribcage. With each blow, opposing crowds of Thai bettors alternately cry "Oi!" from their respective corners.

As the fight goes on, the fighters gain respect for each other. Red dodges back, his body forming a crescent around the blur of blue's swinging foot. Blue responds by raising a glove in the air for red to tap. The crowd starts to get disappointed as more and more often the fighters high-five each other when they could be striking blows. At the end of the match, they throw an arm around each other's shoulder. All the fighters have done this, but these two are both grinning.

FIGHT 4: Is America ashamed or enraged?

The American steps into the ring. He's a big black brawler, covered with tattoos. A German man behind me reports, "He's from the Bronx, I know it."

His Thai opponent comes out, and no one can believe it. He's a big white marshmallow. Rolls hang from his belly and thighs. Either this is the only heavy Thai person they could find, or something is amiss.

A man comes to our section holding a fistful of bills and, for the first and only time that night, tries to take bets. I decline because it seems too easy to work.

The fight starts, and the American comes at him like a mad street fighter. He's winning, but the Thai marshmallow is certainly making him work. His kicks seem frightened but still more measured than the American's. When they entangle, the American throws a few knees up, almost formalistically, but he's mostly punches.

They're separated, and they exchange a few kicks. The American ducks and the Thai kicks him in the head with a strong one. He's bent over. The Thai drops two hard elbows onto his back and neck.

The ref steps in between them. He waves his hand in front of the American's face a few times, then brings the marshmallow to the middle of the ring and raises his fist. The crowd erupts with boos. The American looks confused, but in a lucid way, as though he expects to be fighting and can't understand why he's not. A tall, lean American, the fighter's coach, steps toward the ring shouting to the ref, "Get the fuck out!"

The announcer tries to calm the crowd, explaining why the fight was called -- something about the American's mouthpiece. The booing shrinks to a grumble, then to a hard leer across each of our hearts.

Imagine there's no countries, just one blasted day-glo hive

The bus from Chiang Mai brought us to Bangkok at 2 a.m. Three hours later, we took a bus to Surat Thani, a small town on the Malay peninsula in southern Thailand. At these latitudes, foliage covers every surface like the blob would have if it weren't for human intervention, and if the blob was dark green and leafy.

Our destination was the beach, though. From Surat Thani, we took a midnight freight boat to Ko Pha Ngan, the prime spot for Thailand's famous Full Moon Party. We arrived at 6 a.m. the day of the party and checked into a bungalow on the beach.

We hung around on the shore, kicked a soccerball, tried to make up for three sleepless nights by sleeping in hammocks, essentially killed time before what was to be the biggest party in the entire solar system that night, the biggest that December for that matter, and possibly all year because this month drew especially big crowds.

At around 10 p.m., I got separated from Mike and Jeremy. I wandered around our bungalow complex, wondering what to do. A Thai woman, middle-aged, dark, and meaty, with a shock of yellow hair over her scowly face, asked me where I was going. I said I guessed it was time to get ready for the party. Do you know where I can do that? She said, you come with me.

I got on a motorbike with her, and we rode deep into the dark, mountainous interior of the island. At the top of the highest hill, we pulled over by a side road in the jungle. Up the road were a few small huts and two large elephants, fidgeting in their shackles.

The woman woke a man from one of the huts. Groggy but pleasant, he sold us a bag of food which we used to accent our two bowls of noodle soup. The woman had prepared the soup -- packets of Ramen from the 7-Eleven -- with fresh lime juice and spices. It tasted like an expensive meal. When I return to America, I will prepare my Ramen noodles the same way.

It had been about an hour, and I urged the woman to bring me back to the bungalows so I could find my friends. But she insisted on another bowl of soup, for she was getting ready for the party tonight, too.

I paced back and forth, stepping over huge dollops of elephant dung. Elephant dung is similar to cow dung, with a lot of the same organic properties, except of course that it is greater in quantity and potency. It stinks, all right.

"Do you mind, lady?" I said. "Can we go now?"

She looked up at me with big round pupils.

"Let's get out of here!" I said.

We got back on the motorbike and set off down the hills. Down the third curve, the view opened up to the sea below, whose horizon was lined with lights and whose waves wore capes of moonlight. She wound around and brought me back to the bungalow, but not before she tried to fellate me in a dark meadow. I told her we should go directly to the bungalows instead.

Back at the beach, Mike and Jeremy were still nowhere to be found. The party was ten kilometers down the beach, and there was no finding each other once we were there. Did they go already without me? Did they pass out somewhere down the beach? I was feeling pretty low, as we had been talking about this party for the last few weeks. That's not to mention that Mike had my debit card.

I went into the room and tallied my assets. After the trip to the elephants, I had 170 baht. The taxi ride to Haat Rin, site of the Full Moon Party, was 100 baht each way. I didn't expect to return for at least ten hours. I set off walking.

A motorbike taxi pulled over and offered to bring me to the party for 200 baht. I told him my sad story. I think speaking Thai helped because eventually he accepted my price of 50 baht, which barely covered gas for the trip to Haat Rin. That left me with 100 baht for the return trip and 20 baht for water.

Once I arrived, I fought my way through the barstrip's throng of people, which is what I imagine the gates of Hell to be like if all the madmen and demons were fighting their way in instead of out, and I walked out to the marginally less crowded coastline.

Rolling up my pants, I waded out into the water to be alone and survey the strip. At ground level was the gradient of human bodies, condensing away from the coast and toward the line of bars, DJ booths, and whisky-bucket stands. Above each bar there was a light display bigger than the bar itself. The highest was an abstract form that looked like a peacock's plumage or a weird blue hand. The flames of a fiery sign on the beach spelled out "Amazing Thailand." The strip was about one kilometer long, flanked by two cliffs. Orange orbs floated up from the northern cliffside and disappeared into the air. This Internet cafe is closing soon, so please take these details as just an indication of the whole, as if I told you a pineapple had a couple of spines and maybe a leaf on top.

As I often do, I'd missed what was right in front of me by gazing into the distance. An endless line of drunk men and one black dog was pissing into the water from the shoreline. I darted back inland.

I tried dancing to the music -- mostly psychedelic trance beats -- but I wasn't in the mood, so I went wandering. On the beach right outside the bars, the crowd was as thick as it could get with Europeans, Africans, Indians, Arabs, Israelis, East Asians, Latinos, Australians, Canadians, and here and there maybe an American.

On the seaside fringe, there were people whose dancing was too frenzied, or too personal, to mesh with the crowd; there were people who walked around like zombies; and there were those who just sat in rapturous wonder, who were, say, sinking their hands into the moon-shone mud and watching them with mouths agape. (I had heard before that some tourists, probably those from mainland Europe, take hallucinogenic drugs before coming to the Full Moon Party.)

On the fringe of this fringe, there were the desperate ones, the flotsam of the Full Moon Party. They had lost their money, their friends, or in the case of those who were ill-suited to party drugs, their minds. These were the ones who interested me, for just hours ago I had found myself with no money (almost), no friends, and no comfort. I slipped into the persona of possessionless, wandering Samaritan, or smiling monk what have you. I couldn't offer them food, water, or money, though in my current state I would have given them half or more, but I could tell them my story and listen to theirs.

There was the Canadian who had gotten on a two-way boat from Ko Samui but blacked out before waking up here. His money and return ticket were with his absent friends, and the ticket woman wouldn't hear his pleas. I kept him company as the boats left one by one. There was the drunk Australian, sitting head in hands, whose pockets had been picked clean after he strayed from his group. It seemed that I heard the same stories again and again.

I went back inland and danced for a bit, but I couldn't help that I felt more lured by the dark sky and dark sea. I went looking for a quiet place where I could comfort the swollen night, and maybe vice-a-versa. I walked out along the rocks at the edge of the beach. Here there were more sad cases. And the music from a dozen DJs, which as I got further away overlapped into a mad clamor, ebbed and blared as I ducked behind and moved past broad boulders. A ways out there was a stony ascent and atop it, a rim of rocks by which some ladyboys lurked.

It can be exceedingly difficult to distinguish a ladyboy from a handsome or even a lovely woman, but on this jetty I figured out how. You can't tell by the body or the face, but from the way they look at you. Thai girls are shy, but ladyboys stare with an aggressive gaze that tries to hook you by the eyeballs.

I nodded to them as I passed, then stopped to rest on a rock. A young Thai man sitting close by spoke up to me in a mincing voice.

"I'm scared of there. I see people going in. It's so dark. I don't know what's inside."

"What happens in there?" I asked.

"I don't know. I think bad things."

He wore a striped T-shirt, two earrings and had a high pomp of bristly hair. His name was Nai. He too had lost his friends. He said he was scared, and he wanted to tag along with me until his boat arrived at 8:30 a.m. We returned to the beach, danced at a few of the bars, then walked by some food stalls. It was about 5 a.m., and I was starving. Nai offered to buy me something, and I could refuse only half-heartedly.

"What's that?" I asked, pointing to some sort of big egg rolls.

"This Chinese food," he said, worried. "I don't know what's inside."

I ate one anyway, and we sat against a fence watching fights break out. Then Nai picked up a shell and drew intricate, precisely carved images in the sand -- a dragon, a bird, and some naked lady parts that he tranformed into a cat.

We walked to the middle of the beach and observed the sky. The moon and its party were making a pretty impressive showing in the western sky. But in the east, the sun had had enough of sleeping, and waiting. It was preparing a quieter but admittedly more glorious celebration of its own.

We climbed across the rocks at the edge of the beach, rounded the corner of the island, and took rest on the eastern face of a boulder. I beheld in the sky all the colors of the spectrum, with the saturation turned up as high as human rapture can handle. In the rusty shadow on the horizon, I could make out the craggy forms of distant islands. Then the sun rose like a fireball from the sea.

"Do you like the sea?" Nai asked.

"Yes, I do."

"I don't like the sea."

"Really?"

"Yes, I think Thai people, about fifty percent don't like the sea."

"Why don't you like it?"

He seemed to taste something disagreeable. "It's salty," he said, "and so dark. I don't know what's inside."

After that, Nai left the rock to catch his boat. I took some journalistic-style notes on the sun's presentation, then returned to the strip. I don't know what it was, but I felt much more like partying. I mixed in in front of Zoom Bar and danced like crazy. With my sandals off, I danced a circular pit into the beach. I wondered whether Ko Pha Ngan has any problems with dance erosion.

After an hour, I took to walking laps across the strip. In the light I could see that the bordering cliffs were covered with jungle and punctuated by stone outcroppings. I met Tom, the Australian who was stranded earlier. He was dance-walking around, having had a nice sleep, and we went together to one of the hillside bars. From that height I could see that the water encircling beach boulders was perfectly clear and turquoise.

I bought a bottle of water and went back to the beach for one last stroll. It was late morning now. The drunks were waking up in the sand under the powerful sun. Still without full use of their bodies, they flailed about in discomfort and confusion. Others were leaping about to the music, taking strangers by the hand.

At 11 a.m., I finally got on a song-thaew and headed back to my bungalow. My wallet was empty, which seemed so mathematically perfect. I rode among punch-bloody Englishmen and two lovely Swedish girls, and I couldn't help smiling because it had been a most beautiful Christmas morning.

Or are we? photos

noreply@blogger.com (Mike) — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 11:33:00 +0000

This is how you get back into Thailand from Laos, Bhoteo to Chiang Kong.

In Luang Namtha we were surrounded by these ganja women who sell cheap jewelry as a cover for their illegal trade.

Some construction seen at dusk during a bicycle outting in Luang Namtha, Laos.

A cart flipped over and stopped Chinese traffic for miles. Hundreds gathered at the scene and our brave bus driver drove us around the wreck, coming dangerously close to falling off a cliff. Justin and Jeremie tried to organize the crowd to lift the cart but that would make far too much sense.

A baby evacuates itself in the streets of Jinghong, China.

Guess what I'm doing...

If you guessed peeing on a bus, you win!

Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province. It is clean, modern, and home to over 4 million people.

Kunming again.

Obligatory photo of Chinese people riding bikes and scooters.

Incredibly, a man who is almost certainly an outcast in China shows affection for a dog.

Or are we?

noreply@blogger.com (Justin Richards) — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 10:42:00 +0000

We left Dali for Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province, then returned to Jinghong for our departure. Here are some final notes on China, our mumbled dreams as we slept through the last few days in the country.

Our effect on the children

A baby boy in Kunming, walking hand-in-hand with his father, stretched his parent's arm as he veered toward me to stare. I held his gaze as he walked by, slowly rolling out my lower lip as I did so. Eventually he began to cry, and his father picked him up.

Afterward, I replayed this scene from the boy's perspective. There squatting on the sidewalk was a man like none I'd ever seen before, with a pale face, big round eyes, and a long proboscis. Among the throng of people on the street, he's staring at me and me alone. I watch in fear-torn curiosity as his already fat lips enlarge further and further. What this is leading to, I do not want to know.

In the next post, we'll really try not to include anything about prostitutes

We were eating at a noodle shop when a Chinese man sat at our table and told us that he'd seen us before, crossing the street. He was a skinny man with close-cropped hair, furtive eyes, and a mucus problem. His name was Gao San, but his self-styled English name was Mike. He invited us to visit a tea bar with him when we were finished eating. This was our first meeting with an English speaker in Kunming, so we took him up on it.

We left the noodle shop, rounded a corner and crossed a dark parking lot to get to the tea bar, which was small, shabby, and empty of customers. Some baby supplies were piled on the floor. The first thing Gao San did when we entered was take the bar owner aside and speak with him. Then he returned to us.

"The boss is my friend," he said. "I speak with him not about you. Just business."

We took a table in the next room and ordered a pot of tea, and Gao San filled our three teacups every minute or so. He was still finishing a paper cup of Japanese wine that he had been carrying when he first approached us. He tried to gauge our interest in some prostitutes he knew, and we asked how they looked.

"Some ugly and some beautiful also," he said. "Ugly lady, pay ugly price. Beautiful lady, pay beautiful price."

What price?

"Make love one time, one hundred yuan. Two hundred, make love two times. Three hundred, make love three times. Four, five hundred, maybe more, can have all night."

We were only in China for a few more days, but we had a question for cultural learnings to make benefit glorious blog.

"A Chinese lady who is not a prostitute," I asked, "does she make love with a man?"

"Oh, you want --" he leaned to the side and dragged a great load of mucus over the ridges of his trachea. "You want first blood. This is three thousand, four thousand, maybe five thousand Chinese money. Too expensive for you. Too expensive for me."

"First blood for very rich man," Mike said.

"Yes. But I can get for you," he said.

"No thank you," I said. "That's not really what I was asking about."

"The mamasan...mamasan, what is English word?"

"Pimp?" Mike offered.

"The mamasan, he give me commission --" he leaned over and sloughed out another load -- "commission one, two pecks--"

"What's a peck?" Mike asked, for the man spoke very slowly.

"Maybe three packs Chinese cigarettes," he continued. "Oh. Excuse me. I go wash hands."

He was gone for about five minutes when we heared him speaking excitedly with the bar owner in the next room, which was divided from ours by a curtain. After this, he returned to our table and refilled our teacups.

"What were you guys talking about?" I asked him.

"Drink tea," he said. He swallowed his cupful and implored us. "I tell you honestly. From my heart. You must believe me."

"Okay," Mike said.

"If you believe me, I happy." He leaned over, coughed like a floundering swimmer, then faced us again. "I smoke Chinese cigarettes. I have a little bit cough," he said, pinching a little bit between his thumb and forefinger. "I sorry."

"It's okay," I said.

"If you believe me, I happy. If you don't believe me, I happy also. Drink tea." He poured and swallowed again, then began his story. "I was drunk. I was drunk. I walk straight. I see Chinese lady. I say, 'How much for fuck?.' She say, 'One hundred yuan.' I say, 'OK, that is good price for me,'" he said.

"That's pretty cheap," Mike said. One hundred yuan is about thirteen dollars.

"I follow her away," the man continued. "Then, someone say, 'Come into the office.'" A grinding cough, then he moistened his throat with another cupful of tea. "Come in the office. I go in the office. The man tell me, 'I am policeman. You pay me one thousand two hundred Chinese money."

"Oh no," I said.

"That's a corrupt policeman," Mike said.

"I am not a rich man. I have paid the policeman one thousand two hundred yuan. I tell you from my heart. I have no fuck. I have no make love." He did a sort of dry, one-note gargle. "I smoke Chinese cigarettes," he said again. "I have little bit cough. I sorry."

"That's okay," I said.

"I have paid that policeman. But tonight I drink tea. I happy. I do not make I die. I can pay money. I have Chinese salary."

"From the bus station office," I said.

"Yes. I can pay. But I am very angry that policeman."

I recommended he report the incident to a newspaper or TV station. I told him that in America, sometimes a corrupt policeman can get in trouble if you tell a higher authority.

"Yes. I go to the police station. I tell to the boss, 'I pay one thousand two hundred yuan.' He tell me, 'Come back three days, I will give you paper,'" he said.

"Paper?" Mike said. "A receipt?"

"Yes."

"What will you do with that?" Mike asked.

The waitress came, and Gao San had what appeared to be an argument with her in Chinese. She left the dining room, and Mike repeated his question.

"I don't know," he said. "I think maybe I go take paper, then go show newspaper." He turned to cough, but there was a hard mess of stuff in there that he couldn't get past. He refilled our tea and drank his down. "Drink tea," he said, then coughed. "I am very angry that policeman. Just put one thousand two hundred yuan for his pocket."

"Yes," said Mike, "not for build roads or hire more police. Only for his pocket."

"For he go buy nice Chinese cigarettes," Gao San said. He poured more tea and said in a reassuring tone, "I am a good boy. I am a funny boy. I drink tea. I happy. Or else maybe I drink medical, I go die."

"No no, don't do that," I said.

"I am happy boy," he said to us. "I believe, life is like a poem --" a coughing fit -- "Life is like a beautiful song. Life is like a dream. It is too fast. I like life. But some things I hate. There is so many fail. Like I pay Chinese policeman one thousand two hundred yuan."

The waitress brought the check. Gao San looked at it and told us that we could split the check three ways. He added nobly that if we didn't have money, he could cover the whole thing.

"We can pay, no problem," I said.

"How much is it?" Mike asked.

He handed us the paper, on which was written, "100 yuan." The average meal in Yunnan province costs about eight yuan; for a well-rounded dinner with several dishes we might pay sixteen each. It had been obvious from the start that some scam was amiss, but we had waited curiously to find out what.

"I don't think this is right," I said. "A pot of tea does not cost one hundred yuan."

"This tea," Gao San said, "one hundred yuan. You pay thirty, I pay thirty, he pay thirty."

"I think they are trying to trick you," Mike said diplomatically.

For whatever reason, Gao San had let us see the menu before we ordered the tea. The prices listed under a character that resembled a teapot ranged from fifteen to thirty yuan. I told him I could read Chinese, and this tea was no more expensive than thirty yuan. The argument raged on for a while. Again and again we cited the prices on the menu.

"This tea green tea," he attempted.

"Green tea is very cheap," Mike said.

At this rather pathetic point he tried to say that the sunflower seeds at the table, free everywhere else, amounted to the other seventy yuan. We got up from the table and approached the bar owner. We told him that we would pay ten yuan each. Appearing rather bored with things, he had the waitress show us the paper again. We told Gao San that we were not going to be swindled.

"The boss is your friend," I pointed out to him.

He smiled sheepishly and bowed his head. "No. I know him, but he is not my friend."

Mike and I paid the barman ten yuan each, and he sent us away disinterestedly. As we walked out, we heard Gao San protesting to the owner in Chinese that we each needed to pay thirty yuan.

We continued away through the dark parking lot. Mike and I had fought the scam less so for money's sake than for pride. I wondered whether we should have gone ahead and paid the one hundred. Gao San was sickly, he was stolen from when he sought love, and he was doomed as a scam artist.

I sent a prayer for him into the night: Don't go drink medical. Stay here among us. China's nights are alive with prostitutes, and the freedom that you've gathered here, hustling and drinking tea, can survive a few blows to the gut.

Cultural observations/racism

I recently learned that, in contrast to the genius of the colony, one ant is nearly helpless. He may attempt to pick up a morsel, drop it after an instant because it is too heavy for him, then continue to try indefinitely without progress. I was reminded of this at the post office in Jinghong during our first stay there. The worker brought a box out of the back room, found that my rolled posters did not fit inside, then continued to bring out one box after another of the same size. Needless to say, he failed every time.

Whenever I handed a Chinese person a map and asked where we were, he would trace his finger all over the map, corner to corner, before giving me a non-answer such as pointing to the sky. When we pulled the motorbike over and showed a woman our empty gas guage, she turned up her wristwatch and began to compare the two. Yet similar to the colony whose anthill can withstand rainstorms or be resurrected in only hours, the Chinese as a group have managed to build the largest economy in the world. Ants, in kind, are the most succesful species in the animal kingdom.

The precision of this analogy continued to impress me as we left China. Traffic was stopped for miles on a cliffside road because a tractor had overturned in the street. There was a crowd of about one hundred around the blockage. Instead of trying to move the small vehicle, though, they were watching cars and buses drive around it, often clipping a side mirror on one of the cliffside trees. Here I was reminded of the line of ants which, when you block it with a bottlecap or something, will scatter in confusion until the ants finally reorganize in a new line that bulges around the object but makes its way to its destination nonetheless.

Chinese people and Asperger's Syndrome

My ex-girlfriend Kendall once told me she thought she had a disease called Asperger's Syndrome, whose checklist includes looking around the room and responding, "No," when someone calls and asks "Is John there?" even if John is home but in another room.

All Chinese people appear to have this syndrome. If you go to the dining room of an inn and ask, "Can we sleep here?" they will shake their heads only to tell you later that there are rooms available upstairs. When the bus stops in Jinghong and you point to the floor to ask, "Is this Jinghong?" the other riders will laugh and tell you that no, this bus is not Jinghong. In Dali I visited the small office of an English-speaking travel agency and indicated that I needed to withdraw money from an ATM. "No," they scoffed. "You can't do that here."

Travel note: We left China by bus, traveled through Laos, and now we're in Chiang Rai of northern Thailand. Next is Chiang Mai, Thailand's second biggest city, and then we work our way south along the Burmese border. We met a young French artist named Jeremie on the bus from Kunming to Jinghong, and now we're travelling as three.

We're not dead: photos

noreply@blogger.com (Mike) — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 06:27:00 +0000

I had to poop, but the restroom (two holes in a concrete floor) was occupied, and there were no dividers. I waited for the men to leave, entered, and assumed the position. Soon after I began my business, a man in a nice suit joined me and urinated only inches away. I quickly handed my camera to Justin, who snapped this photo of the cultural experience. He is only a novice photographer.

We were reduced to a crawl, stuck behind irate dump trucks and elderly shoppers at a crowded bazaar, so I took advantage of the slowed pace to snap this photo.

One of the smoothest sections of our route. There was no stopping to take pictures when the roads got bad.

Even the oldest villagers carry huge loads on their backs.

The one western gesture that everyone uses with us.

This old woman needed a rest from the fast pace of the market, so she sat on the curb between some fruit vendors.

A herder marches with his diverse troupe of livestock. Cattle, pigs and a goat.

The dentist sets up shop streetside, where he gives a woman a new tooth. A gaggle of curious observers quickly forms.

Villagers beat sun-dried corn with sticks to seperate the kernels from the cobs.

A cow licks its lips, hungry for Justin's fried-dough snack. He eventually got to try a bit.

Tibetan stupa and prayer flags.

On the southbound leg, snow-topped peaks gave way to desert valleys reminiscient of the American southwest.

A kind woman prepares our noodles.

Sunburned, dusty, and seven days without shower, I greedily savor my yak meat.

Rather than making a sign, the restuarant proudly displays their collection of yak spines, entrails, and furs.

Socializing with the villagers after helping load the last bags of beans onto the truck.

The children of the village we stayed at. They loved having their pictures taken.

Young men gather at a small town where we refueled the bike.

Our bike in all its glory, having navigated Tiger Leaping Gorge and forded the base of a waterfall. The rear basket was destroyed in this stunt, but that only lowered the center of gravity and made us more aerodynamic.

A herder urges his goats down the vertical face of Tiger Leaping Gorge to munch plants off of the cliffside.

Tiger Leaping Gorge Town

A farmer, and our first glimpse of arctic mountains.

Fields we passed after leaving Jianshuang, the distant mountains obscured by cold morning haze.

Oh how our bottoms would come to long for such smooth and straight roads.

"Land Exploitation" is so beautiful from far away.

Every city we visit has numerous replicas of this fellow.

The trucks are piled dangerously high, and everyone rides on top.

Workers fare the thick clouds of white dust as a truck delivers rocks; these they will break and pour into a fiery pit.

We aren't sure if these mysterious buildings were being built or demolished.

The lights of "Old Town" Dali.

The choose-your-own-adventure style restaurant. You point to the ingredients you want and they are quickly stir-fried over an open flame.

An old man waits on the side of a Dali street.

The quintessential Chinese tree.

We're not dead

noreply@blogger.com (Justin Richards) — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 04:20:00 +0000

Prelude

It's a cliche that Eastern culture is collectivistic and Western culture is individualistic. We'd seen suggestions of this already: coordinated workouts in the street to promote workplace unity; matching cyclists pedaling in unison; and Thais' uniform and devout love for their king.

But it was on the sleeper bus from Jinghong to Dali that I really recognized America as a place that respects idiosyncracy and fragmentation. We were stacked in beds three wide and two deep. The lights over each bed could only be controlled up front, in unison, so after dark no one could read himself to sleep. Instead, a video played that was supposed to sedate us -- mountains, lakes, an empty canoe phasing in out of nowhere.

It would be one thing if they played it the whole time, but fifteen minutes was supposed to be the exact dose for every rider, one and the same. God forbid anyone might be in his own private prison or funhouse. I thought again about how Shuo San was more western than the average Chinaman. He was divorced, he was Christian, he sang "Love Me Tender," and he had insomnia.

The nighttime ride was eleven hours of white fog and phantom trees. After that, I phased in and out of consciousness. So, for the sake of democracy, diversity, and the nauseous feeling produced by my writing, here are a few words from Mike:

The judaisos and storefronts of old China crumble, disassembled. The hand-carved stones of their foundations are hauled off to the new cities of neon and commerce where they're broken up and poured into empty spaces, supporting office parks, sports complexes, and hydroelectric dams.

I watch through the bus window, camera out of batteries. Switch to memory--unreliable. Pencil and paper. A mountain, stripped for minerals and paved over. The next mountain, still green. An old house on top keeps watch over a pile of ancient tombs and the souls within. Maybe they will let the man in the doorway die before they pave it all over with highway.

The other riders in the double-stuffed bus busy themselves with ringtones, curtains drawn. Dali is their destination. On arrival they will pour into the streets, cameras fully charged, ready to reproduce the pictures they saw in the brochure.

They throw up frequently, wishing the new highway was ready.

Preparations

Eventually, we arrived in Dali and rented a room in "Old City," which has mostly been torn down and re-erected for tourism purposes. Most of the tourists are Han Chinese from other provinces, but there is one street with several bars and cafes for foreigners. It's very easy to picture Dali Old City -- just think of Disney's Epcot Center, if you've ever been there, and imagine the China section of the world tour.

We bought hats, gloves, and long johns, and we rented a motorbike from, real name, Jack Office of Dali. The bike came with one pair each of yak leggings and knock-off North Face gloves. We wore all our clothes and consolidated our things into one bag, which we strapped onto the plastic box at the rear of our bike. Our plan was to go as far north as we could stand and then return to Dali via the Lancang (Mekong) River valley to the west. Elevation rose drastically as you went north, and Lonely Planet describes winter temperatures in that area alternately as "arctic" and "glacial."

DAY 1: MOTORCYCLE DIARRHEA

The land was already mountainous, but it took us a while to get out into the country. As Mike described earlier, the countryside consists of natural wonders, ageless villages, and the third element, the off color, massive "land exploitation projects*."

One of our first side trips was up a rising zigzag road alongside rows of rectangular structures, grey ghouls of tumbledown stone, where workers were taking white stones from a quarry that happened to be lined with ancient tombs. Other workers would smash these into smaller bits and dump them into some sort of sulfuric fire.

After this was a high rock face, pale with those bloody smears of rust, and beyond that were the green hills receding away in great round waves.

We descended into a small town where we rode through a golden corridor of late-autumn leaves with the sun at our backs, catching starbursts from the mirror of the bike ahead of us. Then our road sliced into the side of a mountain and dragged along that way for several kilometers. Crowding us the whole time, close enough to touch, was the lumpy brown face of the opposing mountain.

*The only English sign explaining one of these projects read, "Land exploitation and construction project of blah blah county district etc." The Chinese official who authored it must have been unaware of its subversive connotation.

This section reveals whether or not we crashed the bike

As we began to wind our way up the mountains, the driving first got fun. I was always either turning, recovering from a turn, or preparing for a turn. I hunched over the handlebars, connecting the elbow of one turn to the armpit of another, gliding through the S's, taking the sharp ones at a delicate, high-speed lean. Through a valley as we turned west, I could see the hulking shoulders of four stone mountains, like soldiers standing in diagonal formation.

I cut back south going downward, leaning into the turn, feeling happy amid the rush of cold wind, the ground-ward pull and backward thrust of physics, the high young growl of the motor, and oh yeah the backpack perched way up on the storage box.

The wheels' forward roll suddenly went sideways and then I was watching the bike skid on its side down the hill and skidding down after it. I rolled to a stop, stood up, and inspected myself, expecting to find some jutting bone or bloody swath that I was too shocked to feel. But I had nothing more than a scrape on my wrist. Mike was fine, too. I told him to double-check, and yeah, he was fine. Then we checked out the bike. The turn-light behind a side mirror was smashed out, the left front fender was cracked, and a piece of chrome piping was scraped up, but drivability was unaffected. Did I mention that we were turning, as always, on a cliffside?

At that point in our Asia trip, I had this image of an aging wizardess who had been charged with protecting us but was increasingly disgusted with the absurdity of her rescues. She was sure to give up on us soon enough.

Dismal picnic

Do I have problems in my life? Maybe, sure, but not really, I thought to myself as I watched two yaks at this agro-industrial complex where we had stopped for lunch.

They wore canvas blindfolds over their faces and were being made to sludge around in a small circle of their own shit. If one got tired, or just paused to mourn for his own life, a man beat his legs with a long bamboo pole. The yak would jerk his neck up and trudge on through the thick muck.

Desperate times

We were low on gas as we approached the nearest town, and luckily there was a gas station up ahead. We weren't sure why there were dump trucks parked on the side of the road for several kilometers leading up to the gas station.

We headed toward one of several vacant pumps, but a policeman stopped us. He pointed to the back of the line -- oh, the line -- which stretched even farther in the northward direction. The pumps were vacant because they were empty, and only one of them was operational. In Jinghong, I'd heard about gas stations closing down in China because they could not meet the demand.

We squeezed our way up the road, between the double-row of trucks, until after about twenty minutes we were free. Mike made a dark suggestion about the two strongest, most economically aggressive world powers and their growing desperation for oil.

Luxury

We checked into a hotel in Jianshuang, only ninety kilometers north of Dali, at about 5 p.m. It was a nice room with a television and hot showers right down the hall. From there we went looking for a good place to eat. We filled ourselves up with well-seasoned dishes from every food group, then returned to the room.

"I have to admit," I said to Mike, "this isn't exactly what I had in mind."

"How so?"

"Restaurant hopping, hot showers -- this is the same stuff we've been doing everywhere."

Mike shrugged.

"This isn't very rugged," I said. "Rugged should be the word on this journey."

"I think spontaneity should be the word," Mike said.

"What about suffering?" I said. "And hardship, and struggle."

"I'm not especially into suffering," Mike said.

Not into suffering? I worried -- unnecessarily, it would turn out -- for the severity of our journey.

DAY 2: Big country

On leaving town, we pulled over near a towering silver factory -- complex of tubes and tanks and coils -- because we saw a shop with steaming pots. Workers were outside warming their hands over some coals. Inisde, they were serving a sort of gruel, noodles and potatoes and such. It was hearty if not delicious.

From here on, northward motion was also upward motion. It got colder, and trees thinned on the brown hillsides. Again we left the city for the country.* We saw figures in the mist hacking at the frozen ground with bent shovels and breaking piles of rocks with sledgehammers.

Here we noticed a certain optical effect that happens when you've been watching the rushing road for a few hours. When you look up at the massive brown haunches of some distant mountain, it appears to be zooming away, shrinking from pitiful you and your noisy advance. Mike recognized this effect from playing too much guitar hero.

We stopped for fish and rice cakes beside a brook that ran through the red clay. The western view across the road was of a vast slope of green-gold pines, down which farmers had paved a strip of variously brown patchwork that spilled out into the valley and then rose up again in the south, mingling with occasional trees and those black-roofed, two-horned homes. Above all this, a ghastly band of clouds split the mountains heighthwise.

We rode on, a dark-bodied, white-winged Chinese bird bouncing in flight alongside the bike, until we came to the Yangtze River crossing. At the river's edge, wrappers of every color were piled up by the bridge supports and then strewn like confetti down the brown bank, which rose up to the street in fine striations of mud.

Indeed, the Chinese are unoffended by garbage. In most towns we visited on this journey, garbage was piled in the streets and matted under our feet. People were always amused by my efforts to throw something away in a basket.

*On these country roads, we first noticed the brutal warning signs that appeared periodically throughout our journey. One was of a huntsman aiming at a bird with a rifle. A Chinese guard was approaching from behind him to blow his head off with a handgun. The other depicted a peasant, caught in the act of cutting a power line with a pair of hedge clippers, doubled over the swift knee of a uniformed official, who also had his club raised over the peasant's back. All of these signs were riddled with bullet holes.

May some god have mercy and release him

We stayed that night in Tiger Leaping Gorge Town. We arrived with light to spare, so we went climbing on some stepped farm terraces. We had seen a narrow waterfall, which seemed from a distance to move in slow motion, streaming high above the farmland. To get to it, we crossed the terraces and then bushwhacked our way up the steep bank of the river that the waterfall fed. There was some sharp, sickening smell that thickened the further we ascended.

When the going became impossible, we emerged from the brush and back up to the flatland to find the site of some ill-fated character's grim livelihood. The source of the smell, a garbage incinerator, rose phallically from a bare lot of ground. One man was filling it with a shovel. The pile he drew from was high and wide, and the line of garbage leading up to it was endless. He apparently lived in a brick hovel a few meters away.

Below him was the rushing river and its cool breath; high above was the thin, downward-hopping stream of a mighty waterfall. But he was bound to the garbage, and always would be, for it would never stop coming. We were reminded of Sisyphus and his relentless boulder, and of the buzzards who endlessly ate at Prometheus's guts. So now was this man to live in garbage vapor, endlessly shoveling, while he couldn't help but gaze at the clean clear water that glinted sometimes even through his haze.

DAY 3: Now is not the time for fleeting thoughts of suicide

Everything but the narrow, rocky and sometimes muddy road beneath our wheels, was terrifyingly remote. Tiger Leaping Gorge, believed to be the deepest gorge in the world, is a long canyon that plunges from the tops of two crowding cliffsides to the Jingsha River below. In the middle of this height, a road is granted a thin strip of space, although the emptiness to the east and the rock face to the west don't hestitate to make incursions into this parcel.

The only English road sign we came upon was posted early on our drive through the gorge. It read, with a casualness that both amused and frightened us: "Be careful! Here's the section of falling stones."

I leaned back and shouted to Mike, "What could possibly they mean by 'be careful'?"

Soon we came to a great dip in the road, which was especially rocky and narrow at this point. Some sort of dump truck was barreling toward us. I pulled over to the gorge side and prayed that the truck would clear our bike. I guess we had abandoned the leeward side of the mountain because a great gale of dust was blowing down into the canyon. We leaned into it with the bike and closed our eyes to the dust as well as the denser cloud that the truck made as it roared by.

It was at this point, about nineteen kilometers from the beginning, that we remembered the words of the guard at the beginning of Tiger Leaping Gorge road. He had told us that one could not take a motorbike any farther than nine kilometers into the gorge.

Next was a waterfall that splashed down onto the road, where it had eroded the concrete and now streamed over jagged rock. I bored through it on the bike, and as I did so we heard a loud, bad noise, so we got out to check. The rear basket had cracked in several places as the backpack bounced on top of it. It was useless now, so we left it by the roadside and strapped the pack to the metal piping. This would have certainly happened eventually, and anyway the pack's new location lowered our center of gravity. We prepared to move on.

"Whoa, that shit's crazy," said Mike, pointing to some whisps of cloud by the highest peak. Due to some sort of weird high-altitude currents, the clouds were swirling cylindrically and quickly, like some deep-space nebula.

We continued until we came to a small bridge, and Mike walked around taking pictures. I took rest in a cave formed by an outcropping, under huge hanging droplets of stone. A green squirrel scampered behind the black rock. It was the first really Chinese animal I'd seen, for those blue birds with the long, magnificent, white-tipped tails had not yet flown across our bike's path.

I went to have a look over the mountain side of the bridge. I watched a stream that, with a bravery I could not imagine, cascaded hundreds of meters down the black rock, roaring and frothing all the way. I walked to the other side of the bridge to see it slowing below the towering crags and waving cliff-grass. Some of the water rested in a blue-green pool, tiny below me, where it rippled concentrically and dreamily. After its respite, the stream went on to meet the Jingsha River. The river looked from my height like shale except for its morphing, surging motion.

We got back on and rode through what I guessed was the last and deepest section of the gorge. Though it was late in the morning, the way was still darkened by ours and the opposing cliffside, which was utterly monstrous. Deep furrows, shadowy and white with the bone-dust of ancient rivers, ran the entire impossible height,

A more perceptive person would have trembled at this or any of the other sights on this journey. For me, such things just made my self feel kind of lost, unhomed from its dwelling place. It wasn't a bad feeling, it was like a sigh that never found its way to a finish.

At noon, the sun finally clambered over the top of the eastern cliff, panting its hot breath down into the canyon. A few hours later, and it filled the canyon with yellowish haze.

As we came to the northern mouth of the gorge, we stopped for a snack in what is likely to be the most amazing place that I'll ever eat fruit. It was as though the earth had two floors. On the first was the milky olive river and its bands of white streamers. As for the second floor, on one side of the gorge was us, sitting on an outcropping and biting into succulent round fruit that we had no name for. Across the canyon, at eye level, were circular brown platforms that looked as though they'd been carved out of the ground and then pushed up from underneath. On these platforms huddled masses of glimmering villages. From the flatlands behind them rose a set of green mountains, thick ropes of land snaking down their sides to the bottom.

We room with some villagers, help boost production, and freak out the children

Before we were ready, we had passed through the gorge, and it was back to regular old mountain splendor. For some time we had been tracking our progress by gauging the size of a black-and-white peak that was visible between and above the other mountains. Now the view had opened up, and between the wider gap between hills we could see several of these snow-veined summits growing up from a bed of thick clouds.

The sky was bruising, and we knew we were nowhere near a major town. As we passed through the next village, occupied by some ancient minority group like any village in Yunan, we nosed around for who might be best equipped to accomodate us for the night, for we didn't want to impose on someone with scarce resources. One set of homes was set off by a wall, so they seemed pretty well-to-do. We pantomimed sleep to them, and they invited us through their gate and into a living room filled with yolky light. Some ratty couches were situated around an iron cooking furnace. We put our things down and tried to pay them. For the time being, they refused any money or food.

There were about eight men, two women, and two little boys. The children's faces were all sooty except for a shine between their nose and upper lip. At one point I tried to give one of the boys a tissue, and he used it to wipe his snot all over his face. Possibly he was imitating the men, wiping the sweat from their faces after a day of work.

We communicated with them a little bit, explained that we were Americans and used our map to show our progress so far. They taught us to count to ten, and they pored over my copy of Dubliners and Mike's copy of Lolita. I explained with a crudely drawn map that Dubliners comes from Ireland.

Then the men went outside to work. They had a field of bean sacks arrayed in the yard. One person would turn his back to the beans, and two others would heave the sack onto his or, in one case, her back. This person would carry the sack up some planks that had been leaned into the back of a truck.

After some pushiness on our part, they allowed us to help. It soon came to me that by lifting more sacks, we weren't just proving ourselves as good laborers, but as good communists. I got the other Chinese guy to lift with me at the end of "One, two, three!" I'm not sure they got the meaning, though, because we heard them yelling it at each other over at the truck, as though "wuh-toon-tree!" was just an impetus to do work. The kids were going wild with it, shouting the phrase and throwing themselves into the sacks.

Mike suggested that decades later linguists might visit this village and note "wuh-toon-tree" as an idiom meaning, "Work diligently and with a strong heart," finding themselves befuddled as to where this phrase might have come from.

We went back inside and had a dinner of eggy soup and dough balls. After having worked together, they accepted our offerings first of cigarettes (no Chinaman is too polite to turn down a smoke), then of beef jerky, tea leaves, canned fish, and candy.

Again and again, I found myself the only one trying to protect the children from imminent harm, until I felt like the resident den mother or something -- "Don't let them play with those red-hot fire tongs!" " Stop trying to eat whatever's in that tube!"

We went outside to check out the night sky, which was all a-glitter. I've never seen so many stars in my life. And it wasn't just their number but their brightness, and their activity. Twinkling is far too feeble a word. I don't know if it was the altitude or what, but the stars were shimmering, flashing almost, like disturbed bits of liquid light. This was especially true of the stars near the horizon, which as it happens I'd never seen stars at the horizon before.

When we came back in, the men were playing mahjong, and we were left with the two kids and a woman in traditional clothing who seemed to be their mother. She was entirely unresponsive to us, and soon we figured that we weren't supposed to speak to her because she was a woman.

Since Mike didn't have any pictures of America on his camera, I showed them the cowboys and landmarks on the visa pages of my passport. When he saw the picture of a locomotive, the older boy started tottering from side to side and singing this one-line song: "A troi ee ga go." The smaller boy picked it up and kept going long after the older one had stopped. I could shout at him or poke his belly, but he wouldn't stop or respond.

At this point I had one of those instants where I pulled back and observed this as a self-contained moment. Here I was on a cold mountainside in the middle of the night, a hundred miles from any city and much farther from anyone from my own civilization. A baby from some Chinese minority tribe, his face covered with filth and crust, was swaying back and forth before me in some sort of trance, singing this chant. The lightbulbs strung across the room kept dimming and brightening on their own. I wondered what it would have been like to get a vision of this moment two years ago to the day, when I was in class or at work or on a date or something.

DAY 4: Thrills and chills

We rose and got ready to leave the village as the mountains slowly donned, from head to toe, their casts of amber light. No one else was awake, so we left them a pictographic thank-you note. It looked something like this.

We left the houses behind, and I wound the bike up the mountain for a long time, clenching and unclenching my fingers to keep the blood flowing. The peaks were all snowy now, and the descending streams were frozen and spilled out onto the road. Icicles hung out with waterfalls. The wind on us -- if the air was completely still, which never was -- was always at least 35 kilometers per hour.

After an hour or so, I heard myself thinking the following: Look at those pine trees. They're doing fine, and they don't have any coats on or anything. The cold must not be that bad. After I had this thought, it struck me as a sort of delirium. Pine trees are not animals, nor are they warm-blooded, nor do they need to maintain homeostasis at 98.6 degrees.

I kept the bike in second gear, despite its protests, because no matter how fast I was going when I shifted to third gear, the speed would slowly decline. At this height, the morning sun was blinding. I steered the bike so it was behind the pines, but still it flashed at me relentlessly.

Pines were replaced by firs, and some kind of pale arctic moss hung from their branches like a wraith's garments. We ascended further and came to a plain of sorts, and there there were no more trees, only a silent brown tundra dotted with shrubs and crooked bone-arms. From this plain we could see many peaks below us, and the sky presented to our eyes a strange grade of blues: an arctic glow around the mountaintops, green-tinted, then a bright gemtone, then cloud-fleeced indigo overhead.

We descended from the plain down the winding road until buildings again passed before us. When we saw smoke coming from a small shop, we ditched the bike and went straight to the cooking furnace. We greeted the matron and stuck our hands over the coals. I couldn't feel the heat, but my hands were filled with a pulsing pain that I'd never experienced before. Same with Mike's toes. Frostbite was becoming too real a possibility, and we decided that when we woke up the next day, we would head south.

The inn matron threw some eggs, potatoes, rice, and vegetables into a grease-filled pan. We ate greedily, then went on our way.

We saw one other motorbike rider during the stretch from Tiger Leaping Gorge Town northward, and it was a Haba Snow Mountain park ranger on his motorcycle, with its big coiled shock absorbers, making the short jaunt from his headquarters to the nearby town.

As we neared Shangri-La (former name Xongdjian; it had been renamed, along with the claim that it was the paradise written about in "Lost Horizons," in order to attract tourists), we saw snow on the ground for the first time. I hadn't seen snow in years, so I got out and rubbed some of it against my cheekbone, which was my only exposed skin. Mike (Asheville, N.C.) was unimpressed.

In Shangri-La we withdrew money from an ATM and lunched on some yak-meat stew. An Italian moto-master we met on the sidewalk informed us that motorbikes have trouble with combustion at oxygen-impoverished altitudes, so that explained why we had to make the bike wail up the mountain roads in second gear. He also told us that the yak meat was a-so good because of the succulent grass they ate, which he had a-tasted himself.

The zenith; the lessons of the Tao

We rode on to the apex of our journey, a cluster of buildings at the intersection of our northbound road and the road that would begin our southward stint. It wasn't even really a town, but it wasn't too primitive either, and people wore fashionable clothing. This was sort of a mild introduction to the string of weird towns that we would sleep in.

We rented a room at an inn for 20 yuan (about $2.75). It wasn't so much a room as a bed storage area. There was nothing but five beds, two of them larger and on a raised platform. To stay in the larger beds cost 30 yuan. The door closed and locked, and we were the only ones in there. I took the blankets off of one of the larger beds to stay warm, and it occured to me that they might see that bed disheveled and think I had stayed in a bed I hadn't paid for. We had been in Asia for almost two months now, but this situation still struck us as absurd.

The bathroom was across the street, which didn't strike me as a problem until I woke up to pee in the middle of the night. The way was freezing cold and the bathroom was pitch black, so I just walked behind the building and peed beside a wood pile. It probably froze and would break some poor farmer's neck the next day.

The following morning, we reflected on the many bathrooms we'd been afforded on this journey. At first we were happy to have a bathroom in our room. Then we were happy if the communal bathroom had hot water. Then we were happy if it had plumbing. Then we were happy if the bathroom was lit or in reasonable walking distance. In bed-storage-room, we were happy that there was a bathroom that we could potentially use.

We think this has something to do with the Tao, but it's been years since I took world religions, and Mike remembers little of the paper he wrote about it.

DAY 5: Thawing slowly; will we sleep in a cave?

That morning, I watched the mother and daughter who ran our inn preparing chickens for breakfast. The daughter walked out to the front of the building carrying a bloody bucket full of breathing white forms. Then the mother took a big cement block and crammed it down into the bucket, prompting spastic kicks from underneath. The daughter poured boiling water, one jugful after another, down over the block. The chickens kicked some more and then slowly stopped. The women dumped the chickens out into a large bowl to strip off their feathers, and I couldn't help but notice that one of them was still heaving.

We had breakfast somewhere else and then began to travel south. As we did so, we passed more and more Tibetan-style farmers and buildings, with their aura of snowiness and white magic. It seeemed that at every turn there was one of those white stone stupas, multicolored prayer flags strung radially in the wind from the central structure to far ledges and trees.

The landscape was still semi-arctic, but with hints of warmer seasons. The opposing cliffside was like a vertical desert, pom-pom shrubs growing on the face and stone pillars rising up from the side like coral. Our hillside was more foliated, though, all red, yellow, and green.

Every face said: 'What the hell are you doing here?'

It was getting dusky, so we looked out for the next town. The symbols on our map matched those on a high blue sign, which pointed us down a rugged dirt road. At every turn, we expected to see the bright lights of a city (the place we sought was a big dot on our map), but we saw only the rough surface of our road stretching on until the next turn. We bumped and jarred and splashed, rocking too hard even at six kilometers per hour. The road's condition rapidly declined.

"This isn't even a road," I noted to Mike. "This is just rocks and water."

"This can't be right," he said.

Eventually, we saw a cluster of village homes up a side road to our left, and we got off the bike. Vicious dogs were snarling at us, so I grabbed a heavy stick, and we approached a woman and her two obviously frightened children. We showed them our map, and she signaled, we figured, that the town was eight more kilometers down the "road." The sky was already dark purple, and we considered begging to stay at this village, but they didn't seem like the sort of people who would have blankets to spare.

Night fell as we rode away from the village, and the temperature sank. My headlamp for some reason dimmed out whenever I eased off the throttle. We wondered, of course, what the hell kind of town this could be. After riding for an hour, we speculated that it may not exist, and so made note of caves that might make suitable shelter.

We did finally arrive at about nine thirty, and we found a town that was strange indeed. Only farm vehicles -- no cars or bikes -- rested on the unlit streets. At the base of our hotel was a convenience store, and cluttering the second and third floors were all sorts of industrial materials -- coils, gasoline drums, broken machinery. At the fourth floor, oddly, were fancy hotel rooms. We found a cheap one, but we could sneak into the room across the hall, which had both a bathtub and a western-style toilet.

After we put our bags down we went into a sort of garage and had a dinner of yak stew. At a later lunch stop, the only English speaker we met on this stretch (he told us he spoke English "half") told us that foreigners come through that valley only once every three years or so. As far as this town, I feel safe assuming, probably never. As we ate, a crowd of men circled us and tried to ask us questions in Chinese. They fed us rice liquor so strong it would probably have killed me if I drank it fast.

DAY 6: Crash course in motocross; fabled white long-face; lost city of disco highlanders

We left town via a different route that was really no better. I made quicker use of it, though, reflexively doing the motocross thing where you stand up on the footrests when things get really rough. We came to a ledge where we could see down into a valley. First a slope of combed-back pines, then the rippled descent of the farm terraces, then the clustered black roofs of village homes. Crisscrossing it all was the jagged topography of our road, continuing as it was for several kilometers.

Here, unlike on the paved roads, our agile motorbike was able to pass the bulky motorcycles. On the whole trip, I was continually impressed with the bike's ability to cut sharply in front of one pit and behind the next, to follow a narrow strip of mud as it wound around huge puddles, and to speed over even the most severe humps without breaking apart.

As we neared the bottom of the valley, Mike exclaimed, "Wow! Look at that."

"It's like porcelain," I marvelled.

Up ahead, our dirt road faded into smooth pavement. We bounced one final time and then eased into a swift glide that stilled our shaking bones.

Making funny faces

We stopped for lunch in a town that seemed to center on a busy roundabout. On the streetside, a woman had paid to have a tooth glued into one of her gaps. Mike took some photos, but was shooed away from the crowd that watched the operation. To our dismay, we also saw a pair of pliers on the dentist's table.

As we sat on the sidewalk eating ice cream, we observed the way the head of every passing Chinese person turned to look at us until his neck would not allow it any longer. Children observed us from behind obstacles, and when they were spotted they ran and hugged their mothers' legs. The bolder ones would come right up to me and watch, but when I said hello, or turned my eyelids inside out, they ran away squealing.

What?

We left town, and that evening the road declined beyond its morning condition. It was at its worst yet, in fact. The scenery was reduced to land exploitation sites and massive transport vehicles. This was where the Lancang/Mekong River, brown where it flowed in Thailand and Laos, first appeared brown in China.

Occasionally we came across dead-eyed, slack-faced villagers carrying large scythes or sledgehammers. They showed no response to our calls or beeps.

It grew dark, and again we thought we would never find the town that the map said we were nearing. We started ascending sharply. Last night we had been able to ride in second and third gear exclusively, but this time I had to keep it in first all the way up the rocky hills. Could those farm trucks even make it to this town? Who lives here?

The sky became pitch black, and with my frail headlamp I could see the pits and rocks only a half second before I was over them, so I was constantly yanking the bike back and forth. This went on for an hour before we saw, high ahead of us, a bright star system of many colors. We had expected to find some sort of workers' stronghold like the last town, but this was something else.

As we entered the town, we checked into its first hotel, whose bottom floor was a bike repair shop. This made sense because if you made it into town, odds were you needed to get your bike fixed.

We dropped our bags and went walking. The town was overrun with young people and hair salons. Teenagers wandered the streets like outlaws. Motorcycles and trucks were the only vehicles. People stared at us from within streetside shops where they were huddled around a TV.

We heard from a three-story building the pounding of syncopated techno. No, it couldn't be. We climbed a rickety metal staircase at the base of the building; at the top were dank hotel rooms on either side. Behind a half-hinged door was another staircase. We climbed this to the rooftop, and there, sure enough, was the red-lit doorway of a disco.

The dance floor was shot at with real infra-red laser beams, the kind that burn your eyes, and also attacked all over by frenzied green squiggles. One Chinese guy sat in a chair in the middle of the small room, spinning and waving his arms all around. His two friends danced on either side, grinning down at him.

We got out of there and continued to walk the streets. There were streetlights, but none of them were on. The town was built on a steep slope, and streets ascended and descended in tiers as in a parking garage. At the top of one long, dark ascent was a lone building, green-lit and arch-roofed. When she saw us outside, a girl opened a rusty side door and sat back down by the TV. It was a fancy but empty restaurant, run by a few young girls and one grown woman. After we ordered, a crowd slowly collected in the dining room.

"Where did all these girls come from, might I ask?" inquired Mike.

I stood up to get something, and they surrounded me. The grown woman sighted her forehead to my chest. They brushed the hair on my forearm. Then they approached Mike and felt his rosy, sunburned cheeks.

They asked if I had a girlfriend. I told them that we'd broken up, and they asked her name. They repeated it over and over again, like a charm, not quite in unison: "Kandah, Kandah."

After dinner, our walking took us to a stone wall behind a building. We were at the edge of town, supposedly looking down on a valley, but all we could see past that wall was total blackness. Maybe, Mike said, that was where our minds stopped creating. Our best theory to explain where we were was that we had crashed the bike many hours ago, and this place was Mike's or my comatose dream.

DAY 6: Hard and fast through industrial wasteland

After we descended from biker outlaw town, we were really deep in the valley, nearly to the bottom of the cliff that had menaced us before. (It still did, but now it left open the possibility of paralysis.) Across the valley was a brown wall that stretched high into the stratosphere.

As we traveled down this way, we witnessed the seasons changing in reverse. On the first day down from the apex, the afternoon sun melted the snow on the hillsides, and they looked as though they'd been flung at with a white paintbrush. The road was still lined, though, with the black skeletons of fractallated trees.

Then we left the tundra behind, and fall colors once again burned down the hillsides. A few hundred kilometers later, and we pulled over for lunch deep down in the Lancang River canyon. The opposite cliffside was green with a moss-like covering of plants. At the base of the cliff, the quick green river had pulled down its underpants to expose smooth, flesh-colored lumps of stone.

In my country we have problem/And that problem is transport
~ Borat Sagdiev

I've already begun to describe the general condition of the roads that we drove on, but there are more specific hazards that I also want to mention.

Chunks taken out of the road that expand the territory of the ever-present cliff. Falling rocks, ice, rivers to ford, piles and piles of burning trash. Crowds of goats, donkeys, and pigs being herded through the streets. A lone horse galloping toward us at full speed. And Chinese drivers, a special kind of madmen that pass other vehicles around blind cliffside turns, but who, in buses, are unresponsive to your honking and edge you toward the cliff even as you try to pass, so that you must find a hump of road shoulder that they can't cover and speed up to the driver's window shaking a fist, then maybe they'll move over.

A paragraph about Dong Feng dumptrucks. These are massive blue monsters that occupy the whole road and cover the way behind them with a dense black cloud. They fill your mouth with dust and your eyes and lungs with smog, so that at night your eyes burn and you wheeze out gobs of dark mucus. They have no drivers; instead they are all controlled remotely by one heartless industrial master-brain. When you try to pass them, they are ordered to discharge an extra-concentrated burst of filth, and you must winnow your eyes and hold your breath for several minutes if you ever hope to escape them.

Seriously, though

The everpresent trademarks of land exploitation projects -- huge clouds of smog, mud everywhere, cascading rocks from the cliff above, constant roaring noise, vehicles too big for the roads, tunnels in the mountain, industrial waste strewn about -- made for an intense obstacle course for two guys on a motorbike. But there were villagers who had been there before and are there now, and that was the environment they were forced to live in.

I don't think that China shouldn't industrialize, but from what we've seen, and from what we heard from an American photographer in Dali sent here by an NGO, there is little if any regard for the environment and the people being affected by the projects. For example, the need for emissions standards was never so real to me as it was on this leg of the trip.

DAY 7/8: The slow decompression

As we neared the final stretch, the going eased considerably. The road into Dali was essentially a highway, affording us an uninterrupted cruise. I could barely tell I was driving.

I thought back on the last half of our northward leg, Tiger Leaping Gorge and beyond. I remembered looking ahead to the paved notch in the rock that followed the contours of the cliff, seeing it disappear around the bend. Sheer crags shot down from it for a thousand meters. Unbelievably, that was the road we were following on our miniscule bike. That section especially, but certainly our journey as a whole, was the most perfect union I've known between modern technology and the offerings of the Earth.

Fixing the bike

We found a bike repair shop in Dali New City. They installed new side mirrors and a new rear basket. They superglued the fender crack and spraypainted the tarnished piping. I used the glue to fix my broken chinstrap.

Whenever they needed a part they didn't have, they made a phone call and someone rode up on a scooter bearing the part within minutes. None of that "wait a week for the manufacturer to send the part" bullshit. They fed us lunch and tea, and the total came to 140 yuan, less than $20 between the two of us. We washed the thick coating of mud off at a nearby shop for only 5 yuan.

When we brought the bike back to Jack of Jack Office, he was happy with his new basket. As far as I know, he didn't find out about the body damage, nor that the bike stalls whenever you stop it in traffic.

More fun with prostitutes

Before we brought the bike back to Old City, we stayed at a hotel in New City. It was a relatively expensive place. Mike paid the extra cost because he wanted to take a long hot bubble bath.

He was doing this, and I was watching some bizarre television show, when I heard a faint but insistent knocking at the door. I opened it to find a small woman in a yellow jumpsuit standing in the hallway. She wedged her way through the partially opened door and looked up at me with the wide eyes and taut face of a space alien.

"Let's go to the bed," she said.

"Oh my God," I said. I tried to close her out the door but she squirmed in, whereupon she wrapped one of her large hands around my testicles.

I told her that she must go, my friend was here, we wanted to have a quiet evening alone eating ice cream.

"Oh, two," she said, her wide eyes shining like oil. She held two fingers in the air and danced them back and forth.

"Look," I said, "I'm impotent, you beast. Now goodbye."

She searched the room, saw the two disheveled beds, then heard sounds from the bathroom and opened the door. She found Mike wet and naked, and at that point she must have assumed we were gay because she went out into the hallway and was gone.

What lies in store for our tweedy heroes? Tune in next time.

noreply@blogger.com (Justin Richards) — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 00:47:00 +0000

We've bought food and woolly garments, and we've arranged for a motorbike. This morning we embark on a seven-day journey through northwest Yunnan, near the Tibetan border. Be sure, we will live to post on this blog again.

Into China

noreply@blogger.com (Justin Richards) — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 13:31:00 +0000

We woke up in Vang Vieng at 6 a.m., ready to return to Ventiane for our Chinese visas (in processing) and head north. Such optimism, such chipper, knowing so little about the interminable journey that would end in first delirium, then panic, and finally vomiting.

It was five hours to Ventiane, where we found a bus leaving in one hour for Udom Xay, a northern city that was close enough to the Chinese border. That was to be a thirty-hour bus ride through the Lao mountains, often on unpaved roads, during which time was measured by the pendulous motion of the bus and the corresponding swishing between our ears. Straight ahead, all we ever saw was either dark forest or the land's martyrous plunge. The road itself dodged to the right, left, or backward as soon as it escaped our headlights.

In Udom Xay, a bus was leaving in thirty minutes for Mueng Laa, the first major city in China. The ride was ten hours. At the border, Chinese officials pored over our passports, plucking at the binding and peeling back the paper. We finally arrived in Mueng Laa and checked into a hotel for 40 yuan (~$5 U.S.). That was all we had, though, so we set off to find an ATM, dipping and swaying as we walked. After checking a dozen banks that wouldn't take our cards or our Lao kip, we found a woman who spoke a little English. She told us that there was only one place nearby that would take foreign cards, and she wrote the name down for us.

The first person we showed the characters to pointed us back in the direction of the bus station. We walked past it and asked another Chinaman for confirmation, and he pointed us back in the direction we'd come. We bounced back and forth this way, making shorter and shorter runs, for a half hour until we asked someone in the center of our pattern, the bus station. She pointed to the schedule on the wall.

So Mueng Laa was the problem, there were no foreigner ATMs there. We had to go to Jinghong, five hours away, and the tickets were 33 yuan each. We got our money back from the hotel and begged pitifully with the bus ticket people. A stranger finally came to our rescue with 10 yuan, one minute before the last bus to Jinghong was leaving. We made it on board, and once there we discussed the other options we'd had, all of which could have become very real if we were short one benefactor. First, we could try to hitchhike with people we couldn't speak with. If that didn't work, we could sell Mike's watch and my mobile phone. Still no, then we would have torn our clothes, left our shoes, and posed as beggars. As a last resort, we could have sold our exotic milky bodies to Chinese businessmen.

Milking our ignorance

Needless to say, Mike puked in his sleep that night.* So as not to anger the hotel matron, whom we had already had a charades argument with, he stuffed the sheets away in the corner of the room. We kept the "do not disturb" light on so no one would find them until we left.

A few days later, we came back from a day trip, and the girls in the lobby were giggling at us, speaking Chinese and tugging on their shirts. Ah yes, they must have found the drying apparatus. We had washed our clothes in the tub and strung them up in zigzags throughout the room. We found our clothes dried and folded on Mike's bed. What's the point of a "do not disturb" light anyway? we wondered. Just then two hotel girls, who didn't speak a word of English, knocked on the door.

They came in waving some sort of a fee chart that was all in Chinese, jabbering unintelligibly. I covered my mouth and then my ears to express my confusion. They shook the paper, on which one set of characters was underlined, more emphatically. I tried to join in the argument.

"You and your friend are both really pretty," I said, jabbing an angry finger at them.

Mike kept telling them he didn't understand, for some reason using the Thai phrase. One of them rubbed the bedsheet and then pointed to the number 70 on the paper. I thought I'd figured it out. I pantomimed vomiting and pointed to the bedsheet. They threw their hands up and nodded with relief.

"You keep quiet," Mike said to me, "and don't try to show them that you understand. I'll take care of pretending I don't know what's going on."

He tried to tell them we had paid for the room already, four nights, they should check the books. I wondered why he was trying to fake this particular manner of confusion, when there were worlds of insults and anecdotes that would have had the same non-effect. The girls stomped their feet and yelled harder.

"Why don't we just make out and forget about all this?" I bellowed at them.

Eventually they left, but they came back with reinforcements. We ended up giving them some money, but we had exhausted them into accepting a third of their asking price.

These people had treated us coldly for the past few days, and we felt like we had finally won them over. This is because arguing is a traditional Chinese pastime. When judging the length of a taxi ride in Jinghong, you have to account for the driver stopping to have several arguments along the way.

Travel brochure

Jinghong is the capital city of Xishuangbanna, the southernmost district of Yunnan province. To quote from our district map: "Virgin forest, rubber forest, fruit forest, banana forest, tea mountains, and etc, form the pictures of green sea, and it seems that the green wave will just come into your heart. There are many pretty Dai girls who have slender figures and beautiful hair."

Jinghong itself is an illuminated city. Everywhere are varicolored lights pulsing, gliding, fading to black and then awakening with a start. Azure-lit ferns and purple-gilded roofs. Worst is the Supercenter Skycity Shopping Vortex, madness of spins and counterspins, flashing spacegate, towering logos, like a hundred prostitutes pulling back garments to incite your consumer's member.

Zoom out now, quickly, and see the outlines of wooden huts and shivering rice fields at the edge of the radiance. Further still and see Jinghong as a pulsar in vast black space.

City of lawless children

Here in Jinghong, babies live the lives of thrill-seeking libertines. Dangling from the arms of their pliant parents, they defecate on the sidewalk at whatever spot pleases them. We've seen them release their spoor from the edge of a high balcony, the torn bottoms of their little pants flapping in the wind. Outside the mini-mall, they gather around a wading pool full of fake dinosaurs and real fish, jabbing their nets in the water and shouting curses. They fill their buckets with fish and stegosaurs, then dump the helpless creatures onto the sidewalk. At the river's edge, they climb into giant plastic spheres and are tossed into the water, whence they tumble about the ball drooling in their abandon.

As far as older children, ages four to six, we often see them in the alleys, setting fires to cook found turtles, or chasing each other with BB guns. Today we watched a toddler pursue a chicken while flailing a cable whip. Another boy was standing in the middle of traffic (often going both ways in one lane) and playing with his yo-yo.

And the din I hear from my fourth-floor window, that says something. From the blurred rabble that rises up from the streets and markets -- think amusement park, or Colosseum, maybe both -- one sort of sound escapes intact, and it's the ringing voice of a Chinese child, demanding, singing, or laughing like a pirate.

One hundred cups of tea in three days

We were out walking in Jinghong when diarrhea struck Mike like a mud torpedo. He hurried toward home, and I spent the rest of the day in a Western-style cafe with books I could read. I returned to the hotel to find that Mike had made friends with a man named Shuo San, an artist, writer, singer, and former policeman who belonged to the Akha minority. This province, Yunnan, has supposedly been difficult to govern throught China's history because of not only its rugged terrain but its disparate ethnic groups, including Shuo San's. He was the first person we met in China who spoke English well, and though I enjoy shouting "Poop!" at the supermarket, it was a relief to speak with him.

Mike told Shuo San that he comes from North Carolina, but this was received blankly. He saw that Shuo San's cigarettes were "Virginia-style" and told him that he was born in Virginia. Shuo San's face lit up, and he sang "Take Me Home, Country Roads," from beginning to end.

We hung out for the next few days, and always sidling in and out of the picture was Shuo San's driver, a big Mongolian who was quiet and removed until things needed to get done. He would decide on the restaurant, inspect the kitchen, and order all the food, but he never paid. Shuo San evaded most questions about him, including those about his other job. On the third day, Shuo San had no car because his driver had to pick up an imperiled friend in Burma (currently a serious danger zone). The driver laughed heartily, drank heavily, and seemed to do whatever he wanted to. When we went out to eat the other night, he wanted to hear a basketball report, so he pulled the car up to the edge of the dining room and blasted the stereo with the doors open. No one dared say anything.

While his driver was in Burma, we rode a bus with Shuo San to his brother's village and tea factory. We walked on trails among the tea fields and the high stepped terraces. As we walked, Shuo San plucked a leaf from a branch and blew into it, making it sing a high and hopeless song. He pulled another leaf and gave it to Mike as a cure for his chronic and powerful diarrhea. Then he showed us how to drink nectar from a banana flower. We ate several other fruits and leaves from the trail before we arrived at his brother's restaurant.

The decor was polished, but all made of wooden poles, and Mike noted that it would make for a top-notch theme restaurant in America. The food was diverse and satisfying. Fried fish from the mountain stream, rice pudding-soup, some kind of non-peanuts that made peanuts taste like sand, and lots more. The elder member of the family was smoking tobacco from a bamboo bong the size of a chimney. Mike tried it, but his narrow Western face was too small to form a seal. As usual, the women served us and cleaned up. They were friends, but food-servers are otherwise addressed coarsely in southeast Asia (Girl! Where is my food?). At this outing and elsewhere with Shuo San, we were constantly moving from one place to another to drink tea.

*Mike did end up thoroughly sick, with a fever and sudden explosions from both ends. At our stopover in Ventiane two days before onset, our friend had Chid shaken Mike's hand and creased his brow: "Michael, you are very ill. You are too hot."

Mike recovered quickly, but recalling Chid's perceptive touch gave us pause.

Jinghong China photos

noreply@blogger.com (Mike) — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 12:45:00 +0000

We found these children cooking their pet turtle in a fire they built on the street.

Hei Piao, Shuo San's older brother, a retired Akha village teacher. Shuo San cannot utter his name in his presence.

Chinese people smoke tobacco out of huge bamboo bongs.

Justin tastes a spider.

Having tea right at the farm where it was grown.

Shuo San poses in front of the mural he painted at his family's tea farm and factory.

Cards, blocks, dominoes - people are intensely involved in street games at all hours of the workday.

Steps leading up to a furniture store.

Some Lao homes seen on our way to China. These are a bit more upscale than the average.

Note: Check the top of the previous photo post for new pictures of bridge crossing and Lao landscape.

Happy Thanksgiving

noreply@blogger.com (Justin Richards) — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 05:17:00 +0000

Just a quick note before our next post: Our blog is censored in China! It looks like we can create a post, but we cannot view the page. More on the communist experience later.

Edit: I would also like to direct you to the comments on "Last days in northeast Thailand," where Tong, Som-o, and Aim left us a message. This shit is real, folks!

Young entrepeneurs in a communist nation

noreply@blogger.com (Justin Richards) — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 15:19:00 +0000

We were sitting under a parasol on the bank of the Mekong, sipping cold drinks and reading books. It was low tide, and a wide strip of mud split the river in two. This sector of Ventiane, Laos's capital city, was dominated by lounging Europeans and their exceedingly pleasant Lao service people.

I noticed walking our way a family of two women and two children. The first woman carried a baby in a sling, and the second child, a little girl, tottered along without any pants on. They were all barefoot, and they walked in a sort of daze. I nodded to Mike that these must be villagers come into town to gather supplies. Then I yawned like a lion. They walked past a Lao family and the second woman, beautiful if filthy, approached our table. She started doing something like praying, moving one prayer hand up and down her body, then back and forth. She obviously wanted money. We gave her 3,000 kip, about 30 cents American but a pocketful for her. It wasn't the first time, but I feel like any such encounter is really just a rare and unseemly revelation of the western presence here in Laos.

Someone from a food stand chased the women away so they wouldn't disturb any more of the foreign customers. I watched my empty glass; the flies were hurrying to absorb the bits of smoothie that i'd ignored in my voraciousness. Then I hated myself for that analogy. Curiosity, then pity, condescending by accident, then hating ourselves for it, then protesting is it our fault anyway. That was our psychology when it came to these things.

And then afterward I sat there writing about it in the breeze while someone did my laundry, putting a pen to my teeth, all ponderously, because I don't actually have to work. There's no escaping the guilt. Or there is, you can ignore it, but I mean there's no thinking it through.

History lesson

It was several days since we arrived in Ventiane, and we were beginning to feel like those Europeans who sat outside our guesthouse all day smoking cigarettes, unaware of how long they'd been there or what their plans ever were if they'd had any. We arrived from Nong Khai via the Thai-Lao friendship bridge across the Mekong River, and we found a higher concentration of travelers and expats than we had anywhere else so far. Restaurants included Swedish Bakery and Pizzeria, Nazim's Indian Dining, Kitchen Tokyo, and other international varieties. The city itself was partly French in design since Laos used to be a French colony. There were French architecture, sandwiches, and cafes -- we stayed on Rue Francois Ngin.

Laos has always been a slow, rural region as far as I know, but for the last few hundred years it has been pummeled by countries from all over the world. Its history is really worth reading about on Wikipedia or something. It includes the Secret War, conducted by the U.S. military in the 1970s, in which the U.S. was not constricted by Geneva conventions. Laos is supposedly the most bombed country, ever. Now the country is communist, and some say that for the last thirty years it has been trying to build a nation for really the first time.

We visited the National Museum in Ventiane, where the photo displays included captions like, "Example of the grueling labor that Lao people were forced to undertake under French imperialist rule" and "A U.S. imperialist smiles over the bodies of Lao villagers." The modern-day portion of the museum seems meant to show that Laos has the basic infrastructure of a real country. There are photos of the women's club, a doctor's office, mining operations. Beneath a picture of a mentally handicapped girl singing karaoke, the caption reads, "Disabled children are well take care of." A case on the floor holds over-the-counter drugs and a basic prosthetic foot. The foot didn't belong to anyone important, it was just there to show that Lao health care can indeed provide prosthetic feet.

Go shopping lady

At our guesthouse in Ventiane, I befriended the guy who worked at the desk. His name was Chid, which means "forethought." He was 26, wore trendy clothes, and spoke softly. I told him that before I came to Asia, I knew nothing about the U.S. Army's "Secret War" in Laos. He was surprised about this, and also that most Americans didn't know about our support for the French war there. I did explain to him, though, what a protest was, and that protests were part of the reason the Indochina War ended when it did.

Going bowling was our only definite plan for Ventiane. Later that week, we invited Chid to join us for a few games, which also meant that he gave us a ride to the bowling alley, showed us where it was, and told us how to pay. The bowling alley was located inside a vast athletic/shopping complex. Lanes were modeled after the rugged terrain of northern Laos, and the balls were shaped like coconut shells. Chid's friend Nit (small), an expert bowler, scored a 111 in his best game.

After bowling, we told Chid that the night was up to him.

"I think maybe we go small shop," he said, "drink small beer, go shopping lady."

"Go shopping lady?" Mike said.

"Yes, for a long time I don't do this."

"Okay, but I don't want to go away in the night. Don't want to pay for lady," he said.

"No, don't have to pay. Don't have to go away. Can sit with us. Maybe you can kiss."

"Pay for drinks only?"

"Yes, pay drinks."

"Okay, same America," Mike said.

"Yes, same. I think maybe we find some lady fourteen, sixteen years."

"I don't know, maybe sixteen okay."

"Okay, sixteen okay."

We arrived at small shop, a cozy wooden two-story restaurant near central Ventiane. Upstairs, we ordered our drinks and food, and Nit invited four of the waitresses to partake with us since we were the only customers.

The one they seated next to me was by far the best-looking. I forget her name, but lets call her Ting, which means "girl who would be so much more aloof in America." She had a beauty mark just above her tender jawline and just below the corner of her full and mocking mouth. From there her cheekbone rose softly to her eye, forming the squint in her sly, squinting smile. None of the girls spoke English, and Thai wasn't working very well with them though the language is similar to Lao. Ting and I exchanged some basics --hometowns, etc.-- but communication was pretty garbled. Sometimes we laughed together, but it was probably at different things. After a couple of beers I assumed a position of chin in palm, eyes studying Ting.

We drank Lao style, which means that we each had a glass of beer and a few more were passed around to be drunk in turn. Laos can drink much more than Thais.

"Jissting," Chid said to me solemnly, "I not happy same this for long time. Not drink beer have funny time like this."

"That's because you had that girlfriend for a year."

"Yes. Not fuck-boom for one year already."

Chid's girlfriend never had sex with him. This is part of a weird dichotomy we've noticed so far in Southeast Asia, which should become obvious in this blog post.

Chid was fine waiting for marriage, he loved her very much, but he had reason to think she didn't like him. So he told her parents he was breaking up with her and then he took a hike, without a word to the girl. I told him that in America things are much different; there must be a great war for independence. At this he nodded.

Meanwhile on Mike's side of the table, he was joined by a girl who said she was 16 but looked about 13. [CENSORED] His face looked like a Basset hound's.

"Seriously," he said, "every time I set my drink down, somebody fills it with beer when I'm not looking." (See last entry's "Notes on Disco.")

The girl beside him was named Nawy, which means "little." She looked like she might cry.

"What's wrong with her?" I asked Chid.

"I tell her 'fuck-boom,'" he said.

Mike wasn't interested in Nawy, who would only laugh at him anyway. Eventually Chid got her to sit next to him, but she squirmed at his advances.

"Jissting," he said, apparently deep in forethought, "this one I don't think she like me. I only take girl who like me. When we go back and I pay, then maybe I can see if she really love me. In the middle of the sex, I can see if she love me, maybe. If it's good, I pay up to her. If it's not good, I pay up to me."

"That's a good plan," I said, or something. I turned to Ting and tried to talk to her again. "Do you like any American songs?" I asked in Thai. Lazily she unfurled her confusion.

"Seriously," said Mike, his face now dangling over his plate, "who just refilled my beer?"

"Jissting, what you think about?" Chid said. "You will take her home with you?"

"Gee, I don't know," I said. " She's real pretty, but I mean she's a big girl, she'll do what she wants."

I should insert here that I've in the past been unbelievably oblivious to something in a social setting. Soon, Mike shuffled back to the guesthouse so he wouldn't have to drink any more. I hung back because it was only ten-thirty.

"I think this one, she will go home with me," said Chid, who was now sitting with a slightly fatter girl who looked about 17, taken from Nit's side of the table. "Tonight I very happy."

It came time for everyone to get up, and Ting started talking with Chid in Lao. Chid's girl stood up smiling with her hands clasped at her waist, sort of murmuring to herself.

"Jissting," Chid said, "you don't take?"

"What do you mean?"

He and Ting spoke again. "How much you pay for her?"

"What?" I looked back at the girl. "That's what she's saying to you right now? I just thought..."

He nodded. They talked some more.

"Okay. You want only short time or all night?"

"No, it's, I mean [pleh--fleh--prostitute? Me no know? So pretty. T-shirt, no high heels. But then quiet. I see.]." I approached him. "Look," I said, "I don't do that, don't pay. Besides, I only have 30,000 kip ($3 U.S.) left after dinner." I looked back at her -- "She shouldn't be--" and almost said something that dumb.

"Okay," Chid said, and spoke with her again. "She say $25 American. Thirty thousand kip is --"

"No I know. Twenty-five dollars is a very fair price. It's such a fair price. Just will you tell her that I think she's a very sweet and pretty girl but I don't pay, and if I did I don't have the money anyway."

He spoke to her, and on hearing it, she looked disgusted at having wasted so much time. I approached her to say something, and she recoiled.

The next morning I talked to Chid, whom I found sleeping in the lobby of the guesthouse. Apparently he paid the girl $10.

"Boom boom," he said, "but not good."

"Why?"

"Her not good. Just sleep."

"So, pay up to you?"

"Pay up to me."

Massage brutality

On our second day in Ventiane, we got massages at a place called Holiday Massage, where in the ad photo all the massage girls wore Santa hats. We ordered a "traditional Lao massage," not knowing at all what that would entail.

Mine was going fine until the girl started jabbing her finger at my butthole. She would do it at various stages of the massage, giggling merrily. Mike told his girl that he had a bruised tailbone, so please be careful, and she started pounding on it with her fists. She told him she thought he was a homosexual and that he had the HIV virus. I saw her spank him when she thought he was sleeping.

Meanwhile, mine had cooled down with the anal business, and everything was going well, then she put a gob of menthaledum in my eye. I was half-weeping. That was it, I returned the favor. Without depth perception, I think I poked her pretty hard. I spent the rest of the hour in contrition: I'm so sorry. Do you want to take a break? Here, hit me in the face. She would pretend to cry, then burst out laughing when I tried to comfort her. Mike's massage girl had put menthaledum in his eye as well, and he bodyslammed her for it, but he couldn't bring himself to put the gunk in her eye.

After our time was up, we went downstairs and they served us tea. I'm enough of a sucker that I still tipped her for the massage.

There was a chihuaua playing by the receptionist's desk. "He look like you," Mike's massage girl said to me.

"Goodbye," we said, and walked back out into the street to begin our evening, bleary-eyed and sore.

One country's poverty, another continent's playground

I was writing the previous section on the bus ride from Ventiane to Vang Vieng, and I had to stop several times because it was making me sick. The mountain roads that took us there were just one switchback after another, so the back of the bus behaved like the tip of a puppy's tail.

Vang Vieng is essentially a few dozen bars, guesthousese, and massage shops, huddled together in the flats among jagged terrain. Thus the sky is rimmed with mountains, strange mountains that seem to have been hacked out in spasms by a lovesick god, he shutting his eyes and swinging his hammer-axe downward, diagonally, and sideways, then in and out of the formed shapes, long after he should have stopped. The result is a monster of a landform, a hundred hills in all, with steps and buttes and peaks jutting out at all angles.

The town itself is full of mostly Europeans and Australians taking advantage of the ready supply of drugs. Here in the middle of nowhere, they lie in little comfort pads at an outdoor restaurant and watch Friends on a single TV, each of them as high as the nearest mountain. Shrewd Laos take them on long "treks," where they can alternately tube under waterfalls and peer academically at village poverty. Oh yeah and there's this tubing thing we went on where you go to a bunch of Bob Marley bars and jump off high swings.

Many restaurants and bars in Vang Vieng have a special section of the menu labeled "Happy and Fun for you." At Smile Bar we ordered a couple of mushroom shakes which, upon consumption, were pretty obviously just weed shakes.

We played a few games of bocci ball--big there--then we swam out into the river to lay down on a shoal of stones in the middle of the water. Mike lit a joint and we sat there quietly for about twenty minutes, watching the swift motion of the water between our spot and the shadowy riverbank. That and the huts on the town side, the infinitely shrinking river ahead, the hushed cool shade behind us, the wet smooth stones, the sun glare in the clear sky, the swift water, the grass between stones. It was all perfect and everyone's heart was full blah blah blah.

We crossed the rest of the way and started to investigate the trails on the other side of the river. They turned out to be cow trails, but we found an area I really liked. We came to a circular clearing where the low western trees let in a great gout of late light. An aperture in those trees showed two overlapping mountains, near and towering. Best was over to the right on the northern side, two rows of arching bamboo stalks, a tunnel leading away into dark. I wanted that tunnel, and I knew I would go in later, but I preferred to stand a moment on the threshold, in the light, where I could see how dark it was.

We dove back into the turquoise river and let it pull us downstream to where a bridge crossed. There we swam cross-stream to the bridge's out-of-town end. Mike went back for his camera, and I went into the cowtrails, which were really much too overgrown. Fifteen minutes later I emerged, dirty, bloody, half-naked and stoned, into the company of a young German couple who had just crossed the bridge. I was first drawn to a stream, home to many small creatures. I cupped my hands in the water and lifted some of them out. "There's so many tadpoles," I called to the Germans. "Ah, yes," one said. There really were a lot, some with little legs growing already. Isn't it strange how tadpoles are one of the very first things you learn about in school?

Gone fishin'

We rented a motorbike from our guesthouse and headed north, Mike sitting behind me and swigging from a large bottle of Beerlao, the official brew of the People's Republic. We were a couple of kilometers outside Vang Vieng when we pulled onto a sandy turnoff to investigate.

Recall this classic film scene: Our heroes are fleeing their enemy when they come to a long, swaying rope bridge with broken and missing planks. They attempt it only because they have to; it's a choice between certain doom and likely doom.

When we got off our bikes at this turnoff, we came across this very bridge. Now, I've done some exaggerating on this blog, but believe me when I say that this bridge was fucked. It was skinnier than you might be picturing it -- the width of four bamboo poles -- and more irregular. The ropes were instead metal wires, and the planks were old, old strips of bamboo laid vertically across very scant lateral boards. It must have been a long-defunct bridge, or some kind of joke bridge. It lay high in the air, across a river and its rocky banks. Why we tried to cross it I don't know.

As per usual, Mike sent me on ahead of him. The beginning was the worst.

"In the movies, it always breaks," I said to Mike as I started going. "Every single time."

Except that in the movies, they're able to swing on the broken bridge, eventually to safety. Here, the bridge was longer than the fall, so when it broke we were rock food.

"There's no way I'm doing this. Why am I doing this?" I said.

Mike watched curiously. Squatting, I held the cables and tried to shuffle lightly along the flimsy shards of bamboo. I pushed down on the cables to take some weight off my feet. "Why do I let you talk me into these things?" I said to no one in particular.

Mike started when I was about a third of the way across. Presently, we turned around to see a small crowd of Lao villagers perched at the start of the bridge, laughing at us.

"This is no working bridge," I said to Mike. "It's out of order or something. They're watching to see us fall."

One of them waved his hand and shouted the words for "go on." So they weren't gawking. This was their morning commute!

On wobbling legs, I at last reached the savior tree at the end of the bridge. Then, behind me, I heard a terrible crunch. Mike had put his foot through some bamboo planks. Shaking, he lifted himself back up with the cables and hobbled on.

On the other side, we found a single-file line of children carrying diving masks and some sort of spears -- bayonetted toy rifles, they looked like. We followed them through a maze of trails in the rice fields to another bank of the river. There they would dive underwater near the shore and occasionally come up with small fish stuck to their spears. These they put in baskets. Then they made a fire, singing and shouting, and cooked their fish.

Having finished our requisite ogling of the villagers, we collected our badges and rode on down the road.

We got about forty kilometers out of town before we turned around. In the remote villages, people who saw us stopped what they were doing and stared. Children would all shout "Sabai dee!" their greeting, with big smiles. Between villages we would stop on the shoulder and stare in turn at their mountains, admiring the serpentine way the road descended away from us until we could see it was the crux of a pattern that was too big to view when we were among it -- a deeply-layered "V" of gnarly slopes, paling and paling as the layers receded.

The landscape really was something to behold, and I could fill the whole Internet writing about it if I could describe it, so I'll turn it over to Mike with the photographs.

Vientiane and Vang Vien Laos: photos

noreply@blogger.com (Mike) — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 14:11:00 +0000

The scenery during our Vang Vien motorbike outing.

The bridge.

These kids showed us how they dive and catch fish with spears.

A young monk rides his bike through Vang Vien.

Relaxing by the river at Vang Vien.

Sunset over the Mekong as seen from Vientiane.

Getting the dough ready for our banana roti.

Lao police.

The morning market, Vientiane.

Last days in northeast Thailand

noreply@blogger.com (Justin Richards) — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 05:59:00 +0000

Nam Nao National Park is set in mountainous jungle, about two hours south of Chiang Khan. After arriving, we hiked about five kilometers up the mountain and set up camp in a cluster of bamboo. We slung our hammocks across the stalks and tied a tarp up overhead.

Whenever the wind blew, the bamboo would creak high overhead. Thick stalks rubbed against each other, and the sounds ran up and down the whole register. As we hiked over elephant dung on the trail, it sounded like the animal's trumpet. At night in our hammocks, it sounded like a stalking tiger. Later still, the cold had kept us from sleeping, and we heard in the creaking the jingle of an ice cream truck.

We stayed up late that night contemplating a tiger attack. We knew that tigers lived in that jungle, and they were no rarer than the elephants, whose tracks and droppings gave shape to the hiking trail. The fire would die out while we slept, and we would be unconscious prey hanging from a tree, wrapped up like burritos.

"If a tiger killed me tonight, I wouldn't be that upset about it," I said. "It would be a return to the natural order of things."

"You wouldn't think that way while a tiger was eating you," Mike said.

"Yeah but, when you're in a situation like that you don't really have the capacity to suffer. Your body just goes into panic mode."

"I don't think so. Not while he's eating you and you're still alive."

"He wouldn't. They go right for the neck and it's over in a few seconds."

"No way, I've definitely seen that shit on the Discovery Channel where a tiger takes down a gazelle while it's obviously still alive, and the tiger is eating its intestines for thirty minutes."

Not thinking to question that they'd occupy half of an entire program with this scene, I believed him.

"Okay," I said, "but he's not likely to attack humans anyway. We're probably too difficult of prey."

"We'd be so easy."

"I guess so."

"Haven't there been a lot of mountain lion attacks in America recently?"

"I don't know."

"I know that in California, mountain lions have been attacking a lot of people. They interviewed this guy whose face was chewed off by a mountain lion."

"His face was chewed off?"

"Yeah."

"Okay but don't you have any concept of not talking about this stuff when we're trying to go to sleep?"

"No, because then when it happens, I can say that everything happened just the way I said it would. I'll be like, yeah it's so weird, we were just talking about this exact thing happening just like this."

"Who are you going to say that to?"

"The media."

"Okay," I said, rephrasing, "how are you going to say it?"

"Well the tiger's not going to eat both of us."

"So you're just going to run away?"

"Well, yeah," said Mike, who was wrapped up in a sheet with his hands in his sleeves, "by the time I got out of this hammock you'd already be dead."

"If the tiger attacked you, I'd pull one of these sticks out of the coals and burn its eyes or something."

"Yeah, I mean that guy who got higs face eaten off said that when he was being attacked, this woman hit the tiger on the head with a stick a few times and it ran away."

"Really?"

"Yeah, but his face was still eaten off. I mean he definitely looked like Tom Cruise in Vanilla Sky."

We went on to talk about the most distressing aspects, if there were any, of our dying that night. Then we curled up in our hammocks and tried to sleep. Soon after that, space-time forked, and in one direction a tiger visited our camp and ate my face off. Mike hit it on the head with a stick a few times, so it ate his intestines for thirty minutes while he was still alive. I told the newspapers that Mike had been sort of wrong about what was going to happen.

In the other reality, we lived through the night, if you can call this living. Okay,whether we live or not I do not know, but we maintain the ability to blog.

That morning we descended to the visitor's center with the intention of setting up camp off one of the other trails. You were supposed to stay at this cheesy campground next to the visitor's center, but we'd noticed that none of the rules were really enforced.

As soon as we emerged from the jungle we were accosted, as we so often are, by a group of drunk Thais. Airport workers they were, accompanied by their one-armed attorney. They asked us to eat chicken guts with them and drink some of their morning whiskey. They informed us that we must not camp off the trails because it is very dangerous. There are tigers, they said, and elephants. Worse still was the double king cobra, as wide as your thigh and as tall as a tree, which eats tigers and elephants both.

This warning was repeated to us at the visitor's center. The tiger possibility did it for me. For Mike, it was the snake. We stayed on the campground that night. We call this setup "ice cream camping" because there was ice cream for sale a hundred paces away from our campsite. I guess that when your home bathroom consists of a hole and a bucket, you don't have a great urge to rough it when you go to the woods.

Though we were lower in altitude, it was still very cold at night. November is the coldest month at Nam Nao, and it often reaches zero degrees Celsius. That night I put on every pair of clothing I had, including four pairs of boxer briefs, the discomfort of which didn't set in until later.

We managed to sleep, but it was strange. If sleeping is like plum pudding, with dreams scattered throughout the thick custard, then sleeping out in the cold is just plums. Oblivion can't survive in the low temperatures, so what you have is just closing your eyes and entering a dream, then later being roused by a dream gunshot or something.

Thai fever: The mystery of the Thai lady

We hitchhiked from Nam Nao to Khon Kaen, which has the largest university in northeast Thailand. We met in a bookstore a couple of university students , Som-O (superhot) and Tong (superfruity), whose names mean "pomelo" and "correct."

The next day we visited them at their campus, where the male and female dormitories are set behind high walls, and conjugal visits are forbidden. I asked Tong about this, and he said that Thai students do not have sex until they are married.

Tong, Som-O, and many lady friends took us out to the temple, parks, and markets around Khon Kaen's big lake. We rode a song-tiaew from place to place. The girls were still wearing their school uniforms -- black heels, black skirts, and flimsy white button-downs that only come in XXS because there's no use stocking any other size here. Besides the dark hair and apricot skin, each was striking in her own unique way, Beauty in her seven different aspects, and all of them apparently virginal. But to them, we were the objects of desire. Yes, these girls got a special thrill from big noses and long lanky bodies. If you were into this sort of thing, you might think that such a scenario only takes place while you're sleeping, and your mind culls together various elements of desire for a meeting that waking life would never allow. Except in my dreams, the molecule is never stable, and soon the bus would roll over and dump us into the oceans of Saturn, or the bus driver, a barbarian, would put all the girls in his sack and run through me with a broadsword.

But here, in real life, and now preserved among the Internet's innumerable crystals, we hung out for three days. For two nights we went to Rad Pop Society, where the bouncers searched and ID'ed all the Thais but let waved us in with a smile. On the third night, we all climbed into a box and sang our hearts out to a television. With Asian karaoke, it's easier to cut loose because the crowd comprises only the friends you rented the room with.

By the last day, Aim, who usually spoke to Mike through a third party even though she had a basic use of English, told him in the same fashion that he needed to learn Thai so he could meet her mother. We remain baffled by this. Mike and Aim didn't hold hands, let alone kiss. Though the girls go clubbing all the time, they did not "dance close," and Mike was Aim's first in this regard. Som-O, my date, seemed slightly more experienced, but that seemed to us like the difference between sixth grade and seventh. The girls were terribly shy, contributing only scant phrases to a conversation, but now and then one of them would drop a line like, "Sweet dreams...I will dream about you." The dating scene in Thailand seemed to consist of traditional Asian prudence with a veneer of imported sexy romance.

That's not to say that we didn't have an awesome time with Aim and Som-O. They were both extremely sweet and highly attractive, and unlike other Thai girls we've come across they were wholly sincere in their motives.

As for our sociological research, we concede that our sample group so far is absurdly small, but we also had some consultation.

In a drunken and clandestine interview, Tong told that to kiss a boy was right up there with "to go away...with a man...in the night." Good Thai girls did not do it until some sort of serious ritualized moment, and sex was held off until marriage. We gave Tong's perspective creedence because here was a guy who groped us to no end and who grabbed every male buttock that passed him at the disco. He would not kiss one of these guys, though, no way.

He went on to tell us that all Thais have always been pious in romance, and that going away in the night was brought over from Europe. Harder to believe. Were ping-pong shows brought over from Europe, too?

A few notes on Thai disco, as experienced at Loei's Disco Robot and Khon Kaen's Rad Pop Society

There is no dance floor. Everyone waits until midnight and then just stands up from their chairs to dance.
Music alternates between a DJ and a live house band, which plays the same songs every night. Most of the house band songs were in Thai, but sounded a lot like music from either Fall Out Boy or Reel Big Fish. The one English song they played was "She Has a Girlfriend Now" by Reel Big Fish.
Rather than buy beer or mixed drinks, most people buy a bottle of liquor and share it at the table. It is the girls' responsibility to keep everyone's drink brimming at all times.
Thais cannot drink. They made us seem like alcoholic sailors. To illustrate: With one regular-sized bottle of whiskey, the bar staff brings out ten bottles of soda water.
I've taken to closing myself in the toilet stall when I have to pee. If you go at the urinal, someone will spot you as the farang in the bathroom and give you a massage while you urinate. That's great, except when you turn around the guy will ask for 5 to 20 baht.

Thai words of the day

Fry the bridge -- This is supposedly a translation of a Thai idiom, and it's colloquially spoken in English. It means that someone is trying to snare you by flirting, but we have no idea how this meaning is derived. Obviously there is no way to fry a bridge.

Kuai -- Weiner. Women are not allowed to say this. We asked if there was a female counterpart, but either no one would speak it or the word doesn't exist.

Mai bau -- Fuck you.

Your bow has rice -- You have accidentally put your elbow in rice that was on the table, and now rice is stuck to your elbow.

Last days in the northeast: photos

noreply@blogger.com (Mike) — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 05:44:00 +0000

Cross-dressers in a traditional Chinese style parade in Nong Khai.

A parade in Nong Khai. We awoke to fireworks and loud music right outside our guesthouse.

Tour boats on the Mekong river.

Light and colors inside a Khon Kaen temple.

Thais put the Playboy logo on everything.

A statue of an important monk at the temple in Khon Kaen

Lights outside a hotel.

Our campsite in Nam Nao national park.

Along the Mekong River

noreply@blogger.com (Justin Richards) — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 08:38:00 +0000

Disregarded ruins

We headed east of town on the motorbike, toward the far hills showing under cover of blue clouds. Eventually we came across an alluring mountain with one balded stone face, and we turned off the highway. On the farm roads, wet from yesterday's rain, we skidded and stopped and skidded again. A sign -- the only one in English -- pointed to "Big Cave." We looked up at the mountain and saw a jagged mouth in the rock, clamoring for dinner. At this point we were deep in the papaya fields, getting wary looks from farmers. We dodged the gravel showers poured by a group of road workers and rode on toward the cave.

We were pretty certain we were lost when we came upon what might be the entrance to big cave. It was obviously a long-defunct attraction of some sort. A sign, which meant much more now than it had originally, read "We apogize for pore conditions of our facitily." Another read "Toarch FOrent." There was a monk living in a sort of tree fort at the base of ruined stairs. We climbed these until we came to a small, pitch-black cave entrance. There we found what centuries ago might have been a torch, and we brought it back to the monk for a guesstures-and-broken-Thai routine. He gave us a candle and a box of wet matches. "Antalai," he said. (See last entry's words.) He pantomimed a slow ascent and quick descent of the mountain.

"Con tok, mai?" I asked ("People fall?)

"Haha, yes," he sad.

Back at the cave entrance, we got our candle lit and went inside, holding the flame to the ground so we could see that at least. A short climb up and then something caught our candlelight. It was a golden Buddha, smiling in the dark. We did some motions that we'd seen others do before a Buddha. Deeper still, and we emerged through a hole in the roof.

The going from here on was a steep climb up slabs of rock, all wet with rain that started while we were underground. I put the candle in my teeth and we started to climb, though our shoes were coated with slick mud. The candle wick was being rained on. Like so much of my life, it was cautionary tale in the making.

"Proceed carefully," I said to Mike. "If we fuck up, they'll say it was our own fault."

We came to a ledge, and on the ledge was a bamboo cot. Maybe the monks came here to fast, we figured. There was an opening in the rock wall, roughly dog-sized, shrouded in spiderwebs. "Next we have to go through there," I joked.

We continued on a sort of trail until it was blocked by boulders. There was no getting around them. Below us, a thorny drop. We returned to the mini-cave, and I went in alone in case Mike needed to call for help. I moved in hunch, mindful of the squeaks, the scurrying, and the bigger noises as well. I came to an open chamber and tried to get my bearings. My eyes had adjusted, but the faces of the cave changed in time with the active flame.

I waved the candle along the wall. Here and there were drawings -- one of a walking monk -- and Thai lettering. I feared calling to Mike because the sound waves might cause a collapse. I went back to retrieve him. Using his camera flash and the LCD display, we could map out our surroundings. Thus we stepped up to a platform at the back of the chamber. Bats flew through Mike's hair. The photos showed another passage after a rocky fall. But there was no exit in sight, and our candle was getting stubby. After a short debate, we decided we would go no further. We got out of there and tumbled back down to the base, having seriously abused the protection of some deity.

A streetbike called Metallica

We proceeded on the motorbike alongside the Mekong River, which was milky brown and feathered by the breeze. The Metallica sticker at our prow broke the wind. Our bike had originated at ban Pee-Noi, the home of a matronly English teacher with a shock of white hair over her dark face. We'd spent the previous day with Pee-Noi, her niece, and an English teacher friend. They were entertaining a class of students, and we toured the city with them so they could hear the tones of native speakers. Pee-Noi has fed us at least five meals and lent us her Internet connection and motorbike. Our guesthouse hostess was hospitable in kind.

Chiang Khan, the town we're in now, has been a comfortable cushion to collapse into and soon to rise up from. It's quiet and idyllic, not much happens here. The town sits on the bank of the Mekong, and across the river, right outside the window of our $6 room, are the mountains of Laos.

We headed farther east after Phu Quai Ngun, the mountain that guarded Big Cave. We took side roads into small villages that we explored in low gear. Open doors or absent doors exposed living rooms to the street, and we could see people laying in hammocks, picking their toes and watching a royal parade or something on TV. Villagers sprawled on steps and ledges, swatting flies, or not swatting them. Or they dragged their gnarly bare feet along the road to some awful job in food service. Boiling fish heads on the roadside or whatever. I wanted to scream at them: "Don't you people have any ambition?!"

One thing we noticed was the prevalence of Coca-Cola marketing in these villages. On a chicken-wire food cart, or tacked to a leaning wall, there would be a bright Coca-Cola poster featuring a thirsty babe. Who was making this happen? How? I made a mental note that when my Thai improves to interview capability, I should write an article about this.

A couple of times we found what seemed to be a meeting of lively people, some kind of party to lift them from the stupor. Was this the first village bar we'd seen? We tried to join, but they shooed us away, telling us either by morbid gestures or with the English word "death" that this was in fact a funeral.

Anything is food

At the market that evening we met an Isan family and were invited over for dinner. Isan Thais hail from the northeast, and they're regarded sort of like countryfolk. Their culture is closely related to Laotian culture.

This Isan family lived off a dark road in Chiang Khan proper. We sat on the floor in the living room, and the first thing they did was tie these white strings around our wrists for good luck. Each elder family member tied two -- there were I think eight in all. They were chanting at us, patting and stroking our arms. They put some flowers in our hands, then later moved them to our pockets. We understood very little of what was said. I just sort of went limp in a general sense, gazing at the tube coming out of grandfather's shorts, until it was over. Later we learned that each string is for a beneficient spirit who normally comes and goes but whom the string is meant to contain.

The dinnertime. The first dish they showed us was striking because it was not inert like most food. Little shrimp jumped all over the bowl. I was nervous because I had never killed anything with my teeth before. Nothing macroscopic.

The rest of the food was interesting, but nothing I could fill up on. Frogs, bugs, etc. I sought refuge in a bowl of chicken soup, but that turned out to be chicken feet. Though I tried everything, try was all I did. The food was quite good, don't get me wrong, I just wasn't ready to eat a whole lot of it.

In transit

Today we left Chiang Khan on a song thiaew, headed for Nam Nao (Cold Water) National Park. The truck broke down halfway there, and we had to change over. I should mention here that any time we've ridden anything anywhere, it's broken down. Bus, train, song thiaew, they all give up halfway through. On the way out of Pitsanulok, the bus broke down, and every passenger piled into the back of a pickup truck. I don't know where the truck came from. We noticed at this point that when you don't have an itinerary, and you don't value one destination over another, there's no such thing as being held up. Riding on the back of the truck, speeding through seams in the mountains under a blaze of stars, was just a destination that happened to be moving, which anyway it wasn't really moving any more than it was sitting still while the earth whirled beneath, bringing with it a rush of chill mountain air.

Thai words of the day

cahn moi -- pubic hair

tam yai -- big cave

men-men -- smelly

ai -- brother

sehhhhp sehp -- delicious (Isan)

Along the Mekong: Photos

noreply@blogger.com (Mike) — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 08:08:00 +0000

The cave walls were marked with ancient script. We burnt the end of a stick and added: "USA J & M 2007."

Foreground: Our bike, Metallica. Background: Big Cave Mountain.

Implements around the temple grounds.

The eye of a dragon, seen on a temple wall in Chiang Khan.

Rice farmers, shot from the back of the motorbike.

Chicken organs for sale at Chiang Khan market. Yum.

Pig faces for sale. We tried to imagine two people sitting down to eat, a pig face staring at each of them. It seems strange.

Watching, we figured out this was street chess. The players slam their pieces down with each move.

This guy sold a variety of tasty drinks, including iced coffee, iced tea, iced green and iced red.

Phu Soi Dao National Park

noreply@blogger.com (Justin Richards) — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 12:44:00 +0000

After the last blog post, we left Bangkok for Pitsanulok, a city about halfway between Bangkok and the northernmost border. We've spent the last few days without seeing any other farang.

What happened this week started on the train from Bangkok, but there was an incident at the train station that deserves mentioning.

We saw a woman carrying a large snake, and when she spotted us she ordered the creature to fondle me. As it slithered through my armpit, Mike and I noticed that a small crowd had formed around us. The woman then handed me a smaller snake, coiled into a disk, and I accepted it. It appeared to be very sick if not dead. Five hundred baht, she said. I tried to give it back, but the crowd started yelling at me. I made out, "hai cuhn," "give to you." An old man tried to explain to me -- "No money," he shouted. At that, another man snatched the snake from my hands and ran across the street. The crowd started to disperse. After a few moments, the snake woman ran after the man who had taken her snake. I watched from a distance as she retrieved the snake, kissed it, and lifted it up in the air. Meanwhile, a man had approached Mike and given him an arm massage, by force, and then demanded payment for it. Mike gave him five baht so he would go away.

A few hours later we got on the train, where we met Chet, a Thai college senior who was headed to Phu Soi Dao National Park for some mountaintop camping. We wound up invited, although due to the language barrier I'm not sure whether he invited us or we invited ourselves.

The train arrived several hours late, and no one seemed to care about the "broken engine" that delayed us in the dark country. We got off in Pitsanulok with Chet and took a bus to another city. The bus riders were mostly cleaner and more professional-looking than the sad rabble on the train.

At our destination, Chet helped us buy hammocks and rations in the market. Then we got on a Song Thaew, sort of a protected flatbed truck, and rode through the mountains and rice fields. Mike remarked that it was nice to finally see green. To say the very least. The other colors peeked through in flecks, but otherwise our view was overwhelmed by the brightest and greenest hue of green.

We arrived at the Phu Soi Dao visitors center about 20 hours after we'd boarded the train. Chet and the park staff tried to convince us to pay someone to haul our bags up the mountain. As we refused repeatedly, they exchanged "stupid farang" smirks. The hike was 6.5 km, Chet said, and very steep. Little did he know that for us, 6.5 kilometers was only 4 miles.

We set off on the trail, which alternated stretches of uphill hiking with six steep climbs that Chet translated as "steps." It was quicker but more difficult than an American trail, which usually winds up the mountain.

Step one, the second toughest, broke us in. Then the trail declined again, taking us through crowds of thick bamboo. Chet named things for us along the way. He was sort of a poetic soul, and no flower was too meek to halt his path. Each sighting would elicit a sort of bewildered moan, as though he had just been run through with a katana. At camp, we would hear this same cry whenever a cold wind blew, or when the rice was cooked just right.

By step two we were deep in the jungle, and Chet was starting to pant. Great insects screamed at us from all sides. We felt no past and no future, only the deep green heat, the screeching of the insects, and the slow advance of the red clay at our feet.

Step six has earned a Thai nickname meaning "death." We completed it on all fours, long empty of water, long past the point when we could make speech sounds. Chet, the packless one, had given in and sent us ahead to set up camp, as the light was waning.

We reached the top and looked around. The moon glowed in a mauve sky above us, and below the land plummeted into the valley between ours and the opposing mountain. A green abyss, green-furred, with lone birds swooping back and forth across its depth. We paused a little while and admired the rounded striations in the hillsides, all rough love for the one who would latch on and lurch up, step by step astride the uncertain slope, to roll around euphoric on the once-lonesome peak.

We walked a few hundred meters more to a campground and ate Thai-style camping food -- rice with chili paste, spicy sardines, and tiny canned clams. We would continue to eat well at the campsite. A man who lived in a cabin was always cooking something with fresh vegetables, meat, and plenty of spice.

Having arrived too late to set up camp without frustration, we were invited to sleep on the cabin floor on the first night. Mike was a little indignant that night when Chet joked with another Thai about Mike declining a shower. We've gotten used to being mocked, but we wondered how they could laugh about the shower thing when their drinking water came from a river dammed with garbage.

The next day, one of the Thais at camp took us walking around the mountaintop. We reached the small obelisk that marked the Thai-Lao border. The ruins of bunkers were obscured by high grass. Thai and Lao mountains loomed on either side of us, staring each other down, themselves not parties in the peace the two countries made in 2002.

We got back and set up our hammocks, about 20 yards away from the main campground and across the river. As day turned to night, the air at our campsite went from bright red to icy blue. We got in our hammocks and tried to sleep. I'm convinced that the windchill was below freezing, and we hadn't packed for this, to say the least. Chet, who was terrified of cold weather, was missing from his hammock. I went to the cabin, thinking I'd steal his idea, but our friend had locked the doors behind him. Mike and I put on every item of the warm-weather clothing we'd packed. I had t-shirts and shorts stuffed into the hood of a rain jacket, covering my ears, and I buried my double-socked feet into my backpack. Mike wore a towel around his knees, and he wrapped a T-shirt and sheet around his head. We dreamt, but didn't sleep.

In the morning, Chet greeted us sheepishly. We told him we hadn't slept so well in days.

At 9 o' clock, we said our goodbyes and skidded down the mountain. We returned to Pitsanulok, where the food is charmed so that we cannot stop eating it.

Mike remarked recently that the trip has exceeded all his expectations. I feel the same way, except in the area of toilets. I expected them to be somewhat toilet-like, with some reasonable method for cleaning oneself. There are sometimes spray-hoses, which we enjoy, but these are few. What there usually is is a bucket beside the toilet-hole, and some kind of bowl floating in the bucket. Mike and I always talk about it conspiratorially. Have you found out what to do with the bucket yet? No, and this time there were two huge tanks of water beside it. We disagree on whether the grooves in the floor seat are for your feet or your buttocks. Nonetheless, I've come up with a working method, which may or may not be culturally acceptable.

When we were camping, Mike was too afraid to use the toilet facilities on the mountaintop. So far it seems like going to the bathroom outside is not kosher in Thailand, so Mike crossed the border and pooped in Laos, keeping his eyes peeled for armed border guards.

Thai words of the day

bon cow -- mountaintop

an-ta-lai -- dangerous

cow (rising) -- mountain

cow (falling) -- rice

cow (high) -- he/him

cow (normal) -- into

ban -- home

Note: I've bought a Thai phrasebook, but the words of the day will continue to be words that we learn by experience.

Phu Soi Dao National Park

noreply@blogger.com (Mike) — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 12:23:00 +0000

A rare instance of a Thai human tolerating a dog.

Warming up.

Shots of beautiful Phu Soi Dao National Park.

Justin likes to smell everything.

Our Thai friend and ad-hoc guide, Chet, in one of his near-constant moments of rapture.

View from the back of a song-thaew.

The all-night train puts its riders in a strange fugue.

A crowd gathers, a snake sniffs Justin's feet. This whole event was pretty much nonsense.

Apartments in Pitsanulok.

Bangkok III

noreply@blogger.com (Justin Richards) — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 05:10:00 +0000

We passed a milestone on Sunday, when we were derided for America's politics for the first time. The critic was a cranky man with few teeth who wanted to take our money.

He approached us on the street and spoke in malformed pidgin English. He said he fought with the South Vietnamese in the Vietnam War, the American government abandoned him, and now he has no money. He showed us some battle scars.

Americans are very cold, he said, meaning insensitive. And always bombing (pronouncing the 'b'), all over the world.

I started to speak up, "That's my president, you mongrel!" "Let it go," Mike said.

The old man told us we should give him money. Mike offered him 5 baht if we could take his picture. He scoffed and said that would be 20 baht. There was nothing in the Lonely Planet book about bartering with beggars. I gave him 10 baht -- enough for two skewered squid or a pineapple -- and we were on our way.

Forgive us for being cynical, but we've started to mistrust anyone who approaches us with the common exclamation, "My friend!" We figure his story had about a 50 percent chance of being true.

Shop good time good feeling

That day we moved south, toward new Bangkok and into a more middle-class sector of the city. Our room went from ~$4/night each to $10/night each, but we got our own bathroom with hot water, air con, free breakfast, and there were no goddamn dogs or roosters outside our window all night long.

As we roamed around that part of town, we came across Bangkok's new eight-story shopping mall, MBK, or in English, The Leviathan. We walked in and immediately started to swoon, then were propped up by a kind of frightened daze that carried us through the mall. We had some sort of purpose here, or were we lost, no reason, no, a reason, DVDs. We had to buy DVDs to burn photos onto.

On the fourth floor we found an electronics store. Store? The western electronics store is based on the old timey general store. You walk in, old man Jones says hello, and you peruse the shovels or whatever. The Thai model is the street market, which should never have been united with modern technology. You walk in and suddenly there are no walls or exits, only an endless grid of kiosks, buzzing and flashing. Arrays of mobile phones and TV screens, glare from glass cases, people shouting gibberish at us, and it all runs together every time you turn your head or the room spins, which happens every few seconds in order to disorient the shopper.

"There's no way we're going to find DVDs here," Mike says. We turn around and there they are, as though someone heard us and whipped out a makeshift display. Mike hands the woman all his money, and we keep walking. Mike thinks he might throw up. "Can we find a way out of here?" he says. I lead him away by the elbow, into the lesser chaos of the mall proper.

Tony from Nigeria: On ladyboys, "coping," and his scam operation

We sit down on the edge of the mall's open center. A pretty woman beckons to us from a third floor shop. Is that how things happen here? Tony the Nigerian speaks up from the adjacent bench. That's no woman, he says. He tells us about his many misadventures in learning to identify Thai ladyboys.

Then he goes on to tell us about the lives of many Thai women. They outnumber men in Thailand. Often, he says, a woman has a baby with her boyfriend and he leaves her in a couple years, then she has few real skills and has to go fend for herself. Tony said they call it "coping," when Thai women go out and either sell their sex or try to find a Thai or more often farang (foreigner) boyfriend who will provide for them in exchange for devotion. We've met some Thai women who do pretty well for themselves, so we know that not all Thais live this way.

What is Tony doing in Thailand? Well, he finds Thai people with valuable ideas or crafts but little business sense, and he gets a copyright for himself, then sends the plans to his people in Nigeria for mass production. This being the case, we couldn't feel too sorry for him when he told us the story of the Thai girl whom he took back to his hotel only to have her make of with 40,000 baht while he was in the bathroom.

Chong Kao! I take care you

That night we made some great friends at a sidewalk...restuarant? There's no real word for it. Anyway, there was a policeman, Aew, a computer engineer, Namsom (orange juice), and Kare, who worked at the restaurant but drank with us anyway. There was also this little kid, wearing a plastic bag over his face, who kept running into the street and climbing onto the roof of this truck. They just called him "ling," monkey.

Namsom spoke decent English, and she helped lubricate the conversation. Many people, like Namsom, are introduced to us with a "nickname" that denotes an actual thing. The day before we met Phone, whose name means rain!

Between our broken Thai and their broken English, we could only express simple statements, which made for a sort of jubilant and innocent conversation. "Drink whiskey with you, make happy, we friends!" "American people no like war, no like army!" "Thai police drink whiskey, law good, Thai army send police shoot gun. No! Drink whiskey. Thai army bad. Police good." "I like you!"

We want to smuggle this kind of directness back to America with us. It cuts through the shit and you become friends a lot faster. "I like you. We drink whiskey

Complete and total surreality

On Monday, Kare from the night before invited us to meet up with her at MBK. She brought two of her friends and told us we were going to a restaurant on the sixth floor. We said MBK is insane, let's go outside. Mai chai, she said, we stay MBK.

Unlike orange juice, these girls had the English vocabulary of a retarded baby. I don't really konw if any medium, short of a total virtual reality experience, could render what that dinner was like.

First they ordered duck and green noodles. Kare kept putting the food in my bowl, but when I tried to put it in her bowl she usually wouldn't let me. Same with Mike and a girl named Aaa(SP?). Every few minutes they would give us each a tiny napkin. Lots more food came, course after course--black ear cloud mushrooms, squid, fish ball and fish roll-- and they put the food in this boiling pot in the center of the table.

The conversation was absolutely exhausting. We began to settle for just expressing anything that we possibly could. There was corn on the table, and Mike asked me to tell them that corn comes from America. I managed something like, "In American, eat corn first."

Comprehension was extremely taxing, and at certain points I just collapsed mentally and answered chai (yeah sure) to everything. They laughed at every single thing Mike said in Thai. Often we'd ask a question and they'd answer a different question.

Mike and I could talk to each other in code -- which I'm sure they did as well -- without their understanding. "These tricks gone stick us with the check." "Fo shizzle."

Sure enough they did, and even though we looked like high rollers paying for it, the total bill amounted to about $20 U.S. for five people. We walked around Siam square with them for a while, having more lobotomized exchanges. Time came to go home, and they tried to get us to take a cab with them, so we could pay, obviously. We said we'd be walking home, see you later.

Thai words of the weekend

Hua lok -- funny (the girls thought everything normal that we did was hilarious)
Chung kao -- cheers!
bao/bek -- white/black
ja rang kiat mai thaa ja hai nom luuk thii nii -- Do you mind if I breastfeed here?

Travel note: Today we leave by train to this other town whose name we can't remember at the moment.

Bongkok III Photos

noreply@blogger.com (Mike) — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 04:59:00 +0000

View through a partition in the wall on a narrow street.

Old Thai market culture lives in the underbrush of American commercialization.

Black Family! Most of the actors in this movie are just dark Asians. We drank whiskey with some Thais that night, and they all knew the movie and made the face that scared Thais make in the trailer. They pointed to their dark-skinned friend and said, "Black Family!"

Ultra-colorful Bangkok traffic below the new Skytrain.

MBK made Mike feel queasy.

His majesty the king lords over his shopping subjects.