Water, water everywhere!

Mandalay, Myanmar (Burma) is an uneventful city 361 days a year.

But without planning on doing so, we happened to reach Mandalay for its wildest, most invigorating and ludicrous annual blowout: a four-day Water Festival marking the Myanmar New Year.

In the heart of the city are about 5 massive Water Festival stages, each surrounded by massive sound systems and each rigged with hundreds – literally hundreds – of neon hoses. The day we arrived in Mandalay, the officials turned the nozzles on. From that moment, pandemonium erupted.



Hundreds of locals leapt up on stage, grabbed a hose, and began spraying the street below. For every hose that was dousing the street, there were at least 10 more people below, dancing in the showers. There were young people and old people; men and women, drunk and sober. The one trait they shared in common is that they were all really, really wet. The temperatures in Mandalay were forecasted to reach 108 degrees that week, but no one cared. Businesses were closed. Schools were on holiday. The city morphed into a water park. And everyone was dancing in the streets.

Within minutes, the streets began to flood. The water ran off towards the curb and stayed there, clogging the city drains. It stood an inch deep, then two inches, then finally knee-deep, at which point small children decided that it was the closest thing to a swimming pool they’d ever seen, and began hurling themselves like cannonballs into the street water.





People carry empty water bottles, refilling it with all the water pouring from overhead or from the puddles down below, dump it onto the head of the nearest person, and repeat.

Teenagers take the opportunity to punk themselves out. They wear black hoodies with mesh lining. They spike their naturally black hair, then add purple or blue dye to the tips of their Mohawks. They draw dark circles around their eyes. The women wear electrifying red lipstick. The boys drink so much whiskey their bloodshot eyes soon match the girl’s lips.

The teens load themselves into the backs of their friends Jeeps and pickup trucks, packed in more tightly than sardines. Slowly they cruise through the mosh pit, getting soaked to the bone.




The water in the bed of the pickup truck grows ankle-deep. The interior of the open-top Jeeps get drenched. The driver doesn’t seem to mind. He alternately either sits behind the wheel or darts out of the car, grabs another friend on the sidewalk, shakes his hand, chats, chugs a whiskey, remembers that he left his car running in the middle of the road with 25 people in the back, and darts back to the driver’s seat again.

We go out into the street and – as obvious foreigners in a land almost devoid of visitors – become instant celebrities. We feel and act like politicians, always shaking people’s hands, getting photos taken with their babies at their request.

Our initiation begins as we walk towards the city center. We make it about 5 feet outside the hotel door before a young child runs up to us, splashes a bucket of ice-cold water onto us, and runs off. We step off the hotel stairs and onto the sidewalk. Another kid gets us in the face with a supersoaker. We turn left and begin walking. A grown man runs up to me, grabs the collar of my t-shirt, and pours a cup of water down my neck.



And so it continues, every step of the way, for five or six very wet blocks, until we reach the real scene of the spraying.

We know we’re getting close when we begin to see men lying face-up in the gutter, unconscious from too much alcohol. Then the blare of the music hits our ears. It sounds just like the past three decades of American rock music – The Cranberries, The Who – but all the words are redone in Burmese, and everyone’s singing along in a language we can’t understand.

When we get to the periphery of the crowd, locals begin to grab our shoulders and shake us.

“Are you happy?” someone yells into our faces as they shake my friend’s shoulders. “Are you happy?”

“Um, yes!,” she exclaims.

Someone else grabs my arm from behind.

“Happy!” he yells. He’s apparently either forgotten the words “Are you,” or the phrase “new years.”

There’s more of them, surrounding us, shaking our hands, grabbing our elbows. They try to speak but their words are slurred, their accents are thick, their vocab is limited.





“What your office?” someone says.

“Student,” I reply. I know better than to admit to being a journalist when I’m in a country where 1 out of every 10 people is a government spy.

“Wha our office?” he repeats.

“A student,” I say again.

“Wat our of fes?” he says. I piece it together.

“Wat our of fes …. wat-er fes … water fes! Water festival! Yes!”

The crowd around us grows thicks. Their heads wobble. My right hand is constantly being tossed from one handshake to the next. Someone is still gripping our shoulders. “Happy New Years! I love you!” the crowd screams.

And so it goes. We have dozens of conversations like this; maybe hundreds. We watch a man get on his motorcycle, but he’s too drunk to remember how to turn it on. No problem. His friend sits on the bike behind him, reaches around and grabs the handlebars. A third person gets in back and kicks the clutch. A fourth jumps onto the front of the bike. And off they ride, bouncing off the curb, onto the street which is now evenly running 6 inches deep in water.

We inch closer to the stage and water sprays directly in our eyes, our ears. We can’t see where we’re going. We can’t hear anything but the sound of George Michael’s “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” blaring from the speakers. I can feel someone grab my arm. “Are you happy?”



Blinking, we can faintly make out the sight of thick lines of motorcycles inching past us at hairpin-close range. If we move a split-second too quickly, or if the motorcycles misjudge us by a half-inch, we’ll end up with a nasty exhaust-pipe burn on our leg.

(In fact, several days after leaving Mandalay, while trekking through the mountains near Inle Lake, we come across a 22-year-old farmer with a third-degree exhaust-pipe burn on his leg. He hasn’t received any treatment and asks if we’re carrying a basic first aid kit. We wash his wound, clean the pus with some Q-tips, cut the scabs off with a Leatherman knife, apply some Neosporin and gauze, and tell him to go see the medicine man for some oral antibiotics. Then he shows us the gash on his hand. It’s obvious he needs stitches immediately, or he might be at risk of permanent nerve damage or even loss of limb. Already it’s gotten infected and his hand has swollen badly. We’re not equipped to handle an injury that severe, so we tell him to find a doctor; then we ask how it happened. “Water Festival,” he says, but his details are hazy.)



Deciding that being on stage, where there’s no traffic jam, is safer than being on the flooded streets, we snake around to the back fence and, with a smile, charm our way to the top row. Someone hands us neon hoses, and we let loose upon the crowd. I spot a cop trying in vain to direct traffic, and I turn the nozzle on him, spraying the officer full-force in the face. He staggers back, wipes his eyes, then tries again. This time, the woman to my right pegs him with a fire hose.

I start reflecting on festivals in America, where no one could point a fire hose directly on a crowd because of the very real possibility that the water pressure could burst someone’s ear drum. The pressure from a fire hose – for those of you who have never borne the brunt of its wrath – is unimaginably strong when fired point-blank.





Then again, if this were America, everyone would have to wear wrist bracelets indicating whether they were 21 or not. Security would be set up around the parameters. Food vendors would have to follow strict kitchen guidelines and pass a health inspection. A first-aid tent would be nearby. The guys lying unconscious in the gutter would be medically tended to, then arrested. Old ladies couldn’t sell dirt-encrusted unsealed bottles of Grand Whiskey for $1. No one could carry glass bottles into this crowd.

If this were America, this event would require parking. It would have orange cones and trash cans, police barricades and street sweepers.

In the U.S., the streets would have been designed by a road engineer, meaning they wouldn’t flood so unevenly, and the sidewalks wouldn’t have huge chunks missing where people could fall through to their waist. The motorcycle exhaust-pipes would be designed in such a way as to prevent it from burning flesh on contact.

In America, all food and alcohol vendors would need a license. They’d have to rent a booth. Here in Myanmar, anyone’s grandma can carry a pot of noodles to the festival and sell them for ten cents a bowl.

In America, companies would advertise at festivals of this size and scale. There would be corporate booths, raffles, prize giveaways. A sleek new car model would be on display. The local radio DJs would broadcast from the festival. All the beer would be sold in identical cups that bore the logos of the companies that sponsored the event.

At this festival, there was only one place with corporate logos; the stage itself. No where else were there any ads. Nor were there booths, or tents, or “Over 21” bracelets.




But then, Myanmar isn't exactly the Land of the Free.

According to the Web site of the U.S. Department of State:

"Burma (Myanmar) is an underdeveloped agrarian country ruled by an authoritarian military regime. The country's government suppresses all expression of opposition to its rule."

"The Burmese Government has a standing law ... that bans all gatherings of more than five people."

"The military regime carefully controls and monitors all internet use in Burma and restricts internet access through software-based censorship .... access to most “free” international e-mail services such as Hotmail and Yahoo is prohibited .... All e-mails are read by military intelligence."

Myanmar: Access Denied

Note: This will probably be the only time during my 3-week trip to Myanmar (Burma) that I will be able to post to my blog. The heavy-handed government has blocked access to most internet sites, including blogs (even this blog) and most email accounts.

The first 4 times I tried to access this blog, I was met with this message: "Access denied. Your system policy has denied access to the requested url. For assistance, contact your network support team."

Fortunately, entrepreneurial twentysomethings are much more computer-savvy than middle-aged bureaucrats. Some brilliant guys at a cybercafe, using a proxy server, were able to circumvent this firewall.

Without further ado, my take on Myanmar.



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We decide to visit Myanmar (Burma) for two reasons: it’s closed to the world, and the world is closed to it.

Myanmar (Burma) has been ruled by a repressive military junta since the 1960’s, which locks the nation in complete isolation. It outlaws foreign companies from establishing a local branch. It outlaws taking Myanmar currency outside of the country’s borders, thus effectively shutting off all export-import commerce. It won’t allow books or magazines from other nations to come into Myanmar. It blocks web sites and even some e-mail servers. It stopped granting permission (visas) for foreigners to enter the country.

Of course, there are exceptions to all of this. The government DOES allow some foreign mineral-extraction companies to set up shop; high-ranking leaders take a large cut from this, as big as 5 percent, and live like kings. The government also tightly controls exports and imports, though the common people have established a thriving black market, on which they buy cheap Chinese imports with U.S. dollars.



Laypeople are so enthusiastic about getting U.S. dollars that they pay a pretty penny for it. The “official” exchange rate is 1 US dollar to 6.5 kyats. The government-owned banks will exchange 1 US dollar for 450 kyats. And the black market will trade 1 US dollar to 1,050 kyats.

The people of Myanmar led a popular uprising in 1988, followed by democratic elections in 1990. The military junta refused to acknowledge the results of the elections. They locked the leader of the democratically-elected party in house arrest. She remains in house arrest to this day. (She has been awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for her non-violent resistance to the military junta, though she couldn’t go to Norway to receive her Nobel, thanks to the house arrest.)

In response, the U.S. and other developed nations have imposed sanctions on Myanmar, further isolating it still. There’s hardly a nation on earth that’s been as cut off from the world as this one. (Yes, yes, except Bhutan. I know.)



But a few years ago, the Myanmar (Burmese) government, desperate to get dollars flowing, finally started granting tourist visas to those who filled out extensive application forms in advance.

That’s how we found ourselves at the Myanmar embassy in Laos, submitting forms, photos and a scheduled day-by-day itinerary of our trip to a visa application official. (We also signed a pledge that we would not get involved in Burmese politics or social issues in any way, shape or form.)

Thanks to her rubber-stamp of approval, we are now in Myanmar.

After flying into the airport, we started searching for someone with whom to share a taxi to the city center. We found a 50-year-old Dutch man carrying a duffel bag with 4 pairs of roller blades. That’s right, 4 pairs. Plus 4 helmets, 8 elbow pads, 8 knee pads, 8 shin guards. He said he brought the equipment for his kids. But then he said that he was alone. His kids live in Holland. And he flew straight from Holland to Burma (via Bangkok) and that he is flying straight back. So his story makes no sense. But hey, it’s none of our business.




We step outside and this 50-year-old Dutch man bursts into song. He begins singing a Burmese song that roughly translates into “shake your booty, yeah, shake it.” All the Burmese men start singing along, laughing, clapping. This guy can really light up a taxi terminal, even at 8 a.m. after a red-eye in coach.

"What brings you to Burma?" I ask him.

He grins mischieviously.

"I'm here to meet a 21-year-old French girl." He winks.

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Its 102 degrees in the capital, Yangon (Rangoon), with 100 percent humidity. This wouldn’t be so bad were it not for the fact that electricity only stays on for about 4 hours a day. Throughout most of the afternoon, the power fails. This means no fan. No fan! Nothing can cool you down. From 10 am to 5 pm, you feel like you’re living in a furnace.

All we can do is lie on the wooden floor of our guesthouse (the floor is cooler than the mattress) and wave a hand-held paper fan in front of our face.

We stare at our electric fan – a standard little tabletop fan – and pray that it kicks back into gear. (It doesn’t). We also drink water, despite the fact that the water, like everything else in the refrigerator, has turned warm.

Then we realized there’s one place in the city that has air-conditioning. The movie theater! The daily afternoon power cuts don’t affect them. They must own a generator, or maybe an on-site power station.

We clamor to see the 12:30 showing. We don’t care what the movie is. We just want the air-conditioning.

I’m literal when I say “THE movie.” There’s only one screen in the movie theatre. You don’t get a choice of what you want to see. You see whatever’s playing.

Tickets range from 50 cents to $2.20, depending on how good of seats you want. All seats are assigned.

We opt for a mid-range seat -- $1.20 – the cheapest of the balcony seats. Balcony is literally an “upper-class” experience, because it has stadium-style seating. The ground-level seats are on a flat surface.

Before the movie starts, a notice flashes on screen saying that everyone must rise in honor of the nation’s flag.

An image of Myanmar’s flag waving in the wind begins to play. The clip looks like it was shot in the 1950’s. It’s discolored, grainy and sped-up. The sound system crackles to life and begins to play an off-key tune which I can only assume is the national anthem.

The audience gets to its feet, but midway through the anthem, sits down.

The day we went to the movie hall, it was playing The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. But the power was “if-fy,” to say the least. The movie halts in its tracks three times as all the power in the movie hall fails. Fortunately the movie is never paused for long; after a minute or two, the screen kicks back to life. More importantly, the inside air stays cool.

I’ve never been a movie buff in the U.S. In fact, most movies bore me. I’d rather be reading. I don’t mean to sound pretentious. I don’t read Proust. I mean, I’d rather read an issue of TIME. Or Glamour. Or Mary Higgins Clark. I’ll read anything. I’ll read the back of a cereal box. (I won’t read Dickens. I hate Dickens.) Anyway, my point is, I don’t normally care that much for movies.

But here in Myanmar, I can understand the glory of a movie. I understand how, by watching a movie, you step into a magical other world. You receive a respite from the Burmese gruel, from the dogs, from the cracked haphazard concrete slabs, from the guys hanging off the sides of buses acting as human rear-view mirrors and yelling instructions to the driver. You escape it all for 2 hours. And you step into a clean, orderly, beautiful world.

Our world, or at least our immediate surroundings, will be changing again soon.

Today we’re taking a (not air-con) bus to Mandalay, where the temperature is predicted to be 108 degrees, and the air is said to be caked with dust.

Lets just hope they have power. All I want is a standard little tabletop fan.

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So here’s what I’ve noticed about Burma:

•The country has a 1950’s classic feel. The cars are old British ambassador-models. The people are dressed smartly.

•The air smells of beetlenut, and the streets are stained red with beetlenut spittle.

•Sidewalks consist of haphazardly strewn cement blocks jutting every which way.

•The sidewalk has huge gaps between the cement blocks, at random intervals. An inattentive person could tumble five feet down into a gaping hole.

•People crowd the sidewalks selling fried bread, wristwatch bands, umbrellas.

•Dogs are sleeping everywhere. On steps leading up to a store. In sewer gutters. Everywhere.

•Someone is blaring Celine Dion at top volume.

•For an inexplicable reason, a man on the street corner is carrying a baby in a box.

•If I wear a Burmese outfit, I can pass as a local. This gets me into ancient monuments for free.

•If it rains too hard, sewage water spills out onto the street.

•Every man, woman and child wears an ankle-length wraparound skirt.

•The women slather thick chalky yellow cream on their cheeks. It’s supposed to be an extra-strong sunblock.

•We’re staying in the Muslim quarters. There are several mosques nearby and we hear the call to prayer five times daily once again. I realize that in spite of its hardships, I miss traveling in the Islamic world. I miss the delicate curves of Arabic script above doorways. It makes modern Egypt beautiful.

•The mosque across the street has a sign inside that says “Live like Ali, die like Husein.” I have no idea what this means.

•The architecture of the Buddhist temples in Myanmar are a perfect combination of Thai-style and Chinese-style, fringed with a fiery Burmese flair.

•I realize I’ve gotten really good at identifying artistic and architectural styles of individual Asian countries. I can easily spot the differences between Chinese, Thai, Cambodian (Khmer), Indian Mogul, and now Burmese.

Vietnam: A History Lesson Up-Close

Sometimes I feel like life is one giant field trip. Everywhere you go, there’s a fascinating subject to learn or experience firsthand.

I never took art classes in school. The counselors said art classes “wouldn’t look good on a college application;” take a more rigorous set of electives.

Big mistake, but I was lucky enough to discover why firsthand.

It was in Europe that I learned an appreciation for the great artists: Van Gogh in Holland, Botticelli in Italy. And in the halls of the Prado Museum in Madrid, where I’d spend afternoon upon afternoon, I learned HOW to critically look at a painting. This is perhaps the most important art lesson of all.

This “field trip” mentality has stayed with me wherever I’ve gone. Japan was a lesson in haiku, Zen gardens, efficient interior design. Portugal loves to brag about its seafaring history. Laos was a place to connect with the countryside.

Vietnam is a lesson in history. It’s also a lesson in propaganda. The two are inextricably linked.



I began my study of the Vietnam War in by visiting Hoa Lo Prison in Hanoi. Sarcastically nicknamed the “Hanoi Hilton” by the American POWs, this was the prison where former Pres. candidate John McCain endured 5 painful years of his life, back when he was an anonymous, middle-class twentysomething.

The prison – now a museum – begins its tour with exhibits that show how much the North Vietnamese suffered when they were imprisoned at the hands of French colonialists. Display after display showcased the torture devices that were used – iron rods, metal spikes, a guillotine with a rusty blade. Wax figures posed as prisoners inside the cells.



Then the museum turned to its next display: after the French pulled out of Vietnam, and the country gained its independence, the North Vietnamese began using this site to lock up American POWs. But did they display the same torture devices?

Oh no. They showed photos of American soldiers playing basketball, strumming a guitar, reading letters from home. They showed photos of Americans decorating a Christmas tree, feasting on duck, hunched over a chess board. They made no mention of torture or suffering; they only showed smiling pictures of soldiers above placards noting that the Americans made a “temporary stay” at the prison. In their fantasy land, the North Vietnamese prison guards were loving, compassionate angels over the American POWs.




Which is a bunch of lies. McCain, for one, is permanently disabled as a result of the torture he underwent at Hoa Lo Prison. He can no longer lift his arm above shoulder-level. He hasn’t been able to in 40 years. While he was imprisoned there, he grew so desperate to escape that he tried to commit suicide twice. Clearly, his life wasn’t all Christmas trees and turkey.

The language that the museum used was also notable. The placards kept calling the North Vietnamese “patriots” fighting for the “unification” of their country.



History is written by the victors.

In South Vietnam’s museums, the language changed dramatically. They described themselves as “common people” fighting the North Vietnamese “occupiers” and “aggressors.” The Americans, they said, were their allies.



We met a man who was a South Vietnamese soldier and was shot in the leg during the Tet Offensive in 1973. He retired from combat life after his injury and moved to Saigon, where he aided the American troops in offices. After Saigon fell to the grip of North forces in 1975, he returned to his family farm. But times at the farm were tough, and he moved back to Saigon to gain under-the-radar employment. The North Vietnamese rulers required everyone to “register” and “apply” to move to Saigon, in an effort to keep former South Vietnamese rebels out, so he snuck into the city, an illegal alien in his former capital, and pedaled bicycle-powered carriages for a decade.



He still calls Saigon by its original name, refusing to yield to Hanoi’s dictum that the city’s new name is now “Ho Chi Minh,” in honor of the famous North Vietnamese communist leader.

The museums and battlefields in the South, which still show the craters that B-52 bombers dug into the earth, are told in a way that placates the victors, that agrees Vietnam is stonger and better now that it's been unified, North and South joined together, into a large socialist republic. But there still seems to be an undercurrent of rebellion there, maybe reflecting a tinge of that same undercurrent of rebellion that you see in parts of the American South, where people agree that the Union is better united but muse, under their breath, about their lost war for independence.



150 years after the Civil War, the Confederate flag still flies freely in the American South. With that in mind, its astounding how rapidly, and on the surface wholeheartedly, the Vietnamese South has unified with the North. Equally astounding is how swiftly the nation has rebuilt, and turned into a thriving economic power.

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My Two Cents:

After going to Vietnam, I have less fondness for John F. Kennedy and much greater appreciation for Richard Nixon. While I think Henry Kissinger fouled Cambodia, I can sympathize – though I ultimately disagree – with the Nobel Prize committee’s decision to award him a peace medal.

Nixon’s ‘Vietnamization’ withdrawl strategy – take ground forces out, keep scant air forces and non-combat advisors in -- could be a useful model for today’s Iraq quagmire. But there’s a large, biting difference between Vietnam and Iraq.

Vietnam was a straightforward war: if the South lost, it was clear that the Viet Cong would become the new leaders. Who would become the new leader of Iraq, however, is uncertain. And that question, among others, is keeping us in. It’s possible Iraq might fall into the hands of a Saudi-backed, Iranian-friendly puppet government that runs the country and funds its madrasas. Or that a Taliban-friendly power might rise in the political vacuum the way it did in Afghanistan in the early 1990’s. Or – most frightening of all, and most likely – that an American withdrawl could leave behind a completely destable power vacuum without any rule of law and warring factions will compete for power.

If Obama’s team (Biden, Clinton) can smoothly withdraw while creating stability, they’ll be one of the greatest wartime presidential teams and deserving of a Nobel Prize themselves. If their withdrawl plans further the instability, however, their legacy as war leaders will be more bleak than Lyndon Johnson’s.

Ride to nowhere

The bus that’s taking us to Vietnam looks like a 60’s-era VW van: blue, white and rectangular, with vinyl seats. A rock wedged behind the front tire poses as a parking brake. A large sign in its cracked windshield announces the buses’ destination: “VINH,” a city on Vietnam’s eastern coast.

At a bus station in Luang Prabang, the ancient Buddhist city in northern Laos, we meet our new ridemates. First onboard were two Londoners, only 2 weeks into their very first multi-month overseas trip, and not yet cynical. Hannah wore a stylish scarf set off against a grey beer t-shirt; her boy-faced boyfriend, Tom, acted as innocent as he looked.

Broad-shouldered, barrel-chested Dave came on the bus next; though British, he was loud and excitable enough to be mistaken for an Aussie. He took a strong liking to Sally, the elegant, beautiful brunette riding back to her home in Hanoi, where she worked as an English teacher. Sally was polite, good-humored, friendly – in short, a real Minnesotan. There’s just no such thing as an unpleasant Minnesotan.

The cast of characters assembled – Hannah, Tom, Dave, Sally, and of course, Sara and I. Three Brits, three Americans, on a bus packed with Laotian men, all men, all heading for Vinh, Vietnam. We Westerners compared notes on how much we paid for our tickets – “I got quoted 220,000 kip by three different agencies, so that’s what I paid” – “Really? I only got charged 190,000” – and we contrasted how long we had been told the bus ride would take.

“We heard 13 to 17 hours,” Hannah said.

“They told me 22 hours,” Dave replied.

We place bets. Sally says we’ll reach Vinh by 11 a.m. the following day. I guess we’ll get in by 2 p.m.

Two Laotian men edge onto the bus, heaving a washer between them. This is a real, industrial washer – a Toshiba brand top-loader. As in, “washer and dryer,” but without the dryer.

Why they were carrying this contraption onto a bus was beyond me; certainly, I thought, there must be better ways to ship a washer.

The men knocked through the aisles, banging against seats and tripping over loose straps as they inched their way to the back of the bus, washer hoisted at chest level. Then they found the pile of backpacks we had dumped onto a seat and dumped the washer unceremoniously on top. It balanced precariously atop the amorphous blob of backpacks. I prayed the driver wouldn’t brake suddenly and send the washer flying.

Sally got out to have a cigarette and the washer-loading men begin to tease her. “Hey, what you do?” they mock. “What that?” Laos is a country where pretty women don’t smoke in public. They must wonder how she’ll ever find a husband.

The bus driver turns the ignition, forcing Sally to abandon her cigarette and rush back inside the bus. We pulled out of the station, rounded the corner, pulled off to the side of the street, and parked. We were 200 feet from the bus station, and we were stuck.

The Westerners had no idea what was happening, as usual. We did the only thing we could do: crack jokes. Sara looked out the window at a tailor shop across the street and quipped that we could really take advantage of this delay. “Anyone need to take your pants in?”

After an hour (“I think your 22-hour prediction was closer to the mark, Dave,”) we finally figured out WHY we had stopped: we were waiting for someone to load a motorcycle onto the bus.

After an hour of sitting by the roadside, someone pulled up on a 150 cc motobike and a gaggle of men loaded it onto the bus, balancing it in the aisle. The stench of gasoline filled the air. We’ll be riding with this fuel-soaked fellow passanger until someone discovers delivery trucks and towing.

90 minutes after our departure from the bus station, we finally leave the street we had started from. An uneventful hour passed, then another. We jumbled in our seats, vibrating from the shock of every rock and pothole on the road.

I tried to get some shut-eye, but the armrests wouldn’t rise, making for a fitful night’s rest. I looked at a nearby Laotian to see how the locals handled it. He was drinking whiskey through a straw from a plastic bag. Soon he had conked out.

We Westerners, the sober ones, were all awake at 2:30 a.m. when the bus pulled to a stop at a small town near the Laotian border. We had reached a small village, too tiny to have stores, shops or streetlights. All the other passangers were heading inside a private house. I followed them in, entering a bare, furniture-less room that held a gas stove in one corner and a TV tuned to soccer on the opposite wall. A lady was stirring ramen noodles over the gas stove, and scooping it into bowls for each bus passenger who approached.

The Westerners hung back, unsure whether this was included or whether it costs money. We had all spent our last Laotian kip before leaving. Since kip is a non-convertible currency, we didn’t want to carry it to Vietnam; it’s useless once we cross the border. As a result, all of us had empty wallets. We wanted to ask if the noodles would cost anything, but no one knew enough of the language. It’s a situation we get into a lot while traveling. Finally, we accepted the noodles. We were in a private house, after all. (Sure enough, no one asked for payment).

Sally stepped outside the house and lit another cigarette. A Laotian guy approached her and flashed a trading card – like a baseball card – featuring a naked white woman. She laughed nervously, like a polite Minnesotan.

We piled back onto the bus. The driver asked if anyone else wants a turn at the wheel.

Someone begins to drive, but the bus can’t handle the curves and slopes of the mountainous roads that separate Laos from Vietnam, and we chug along at 10 miles per hour. At 6:30 a.m., we make it to the border and everyone troops into the station to get their Laos Exit Stamp. We notice that most of the Laotian men, our fellow bus passangers, are now wearing helmets. Little green helmets.

“Do they know something we don’t?” Hannah asked.

Sara approached one of them and gestured at the helmet. The man motioned back that it keeps him warm.

We get stamped out of Laos, walk 200 yards across the no-mans-land borderplex, get stamped into Vietnam, and embark on our lumbering journey again. Around noon, we pulled into a little town for lunch.

“I think this town’s called Nokia Samsung,” Dave said, looking at all the ads. It was astounding how a place too small for a traffic light could carry so many cell-phone ads.

A bowl of noodles later, we’re back on the bus, and predicting that we’ll reach Vinh within 3 or 4 hours. We were half right. We were 3 to 4 hours from our destination. But the bus driver had no intention of stopping at the correct destination.

Instead, he pulled over about 20 minutes north of Vinh and ordered all the Westerners to get out. “You’re close enough,” he said, and then he got out of the bus himself, joined by a woman who I assume was his mother, a shrill lady with a pushy attitude who corralled us off the bus. Someone else took hold of the wheel and the bus continued north up the highway without us.

The shrill lady pointed us six Westerners, now stranded and penniless, towards a barn across the street. We all followed her in and then waited, unattended, in the barn for 20 minutes. Finally a man emerged, wielding a butcher knife in one hand and a green mango in the other. “Hanoi?” he asked. Sara, Sally and I – three of the six Westerners who intended to continue toward Hanoi – nodded yes. The other three, who intended to stay in Vinh, shook their heads no.

He pointed the knife toward the barn door and shook it. “Go,” he said, leading the way. Sara, Sally and I walked outside and saw that he was gesturing us to sit in his private car. “Hanoi.”

“How much?” I asked. The shrill lady, presumably the matriarch, grabbed my backpack off the floor and began putting it in the backseat.

“No,” I said, and wrested my backpack out of her grip. “How much?”

“150,000,” the guy replied.

“Too much,” I said, and Sally, Sara and I walked across the street and flagged down a passing minibus.

“How much are you paying to Hanoi?” Sally asked in clear Vietnamese to the passanger in the front seat. The man with the butcher knife and mango appeared behind her and said something in angry, rapid-fire Vietnamese to the passanger. The passanger paused and replied to Sally, “150,000.”

“He told you to say that,” Sally rolled her eyes. I distracted Butchie while she walked off and asked the same question, in Vietnamese, to a passanger sitting in the back of the minibus who hadn’t heard the exchange. Thank God we have her around, I thought.

“It’s 90,000,” she called to us. “Get in. I have Vietnamese dong. I’ll spot you until we get to an ATM in Hanoi.”

We loaded in. The man with the knife sat in the driver’s seat and began cruising north. I wondered who had been in the drivers’ seat before. Had he gotten out? Or was he a passanger now? And who would have driven this minibus if we had gone in the private car with Butchie? I just don’t understand the world of southeast Asian public transportation, other than that its filled with cronyism and cartels.

Our bus ambled down the highway, passing motorcycles with live pigs tied to the back, snorting and wheezing as they hung, upside-down, by the tailpipe. We passed a pickup truck with a two-story cat and dog cage filling the truck bed. We knew those cats and dogs were on their way to being someone’s dinner. It’s as common a dish as chicken here.

The three of us chatted all the way to Hanoi, and paused several times to think about our other half – Hannah, Dave and Tom, the three that got dumped only 20 minutes shy of Vinh. We knew they had no money on them, and the highway was too remote to have ATMs. The closest ATM, ironically, was at the bus station in Vinh. We hoped they’d be okay.

That’s the thing about bus transportation in these countries. Even when the ticket you buy is for “Vinh,” and the bus is clearly labeled “Vinh” on its destination sign, there’s still no guarentee it’ll get to where its going. If the bus driver is related to someone along the way, he can force you out of the bus, force you to buy a service from his brother, to complete the journey.

All you can do is note the absurdity of it. Make friends with a few Brits and a Minnesotan. And crack jokes. Anyone need their pants hemmed?

Motorbiking the Laos countryside

The second group of Germans who added adventure to our time in Laos appeared in the form of a 45-year-old curly blonde Lufthansa flight attendant named Maurice, an ex-army man with boundless energy who had managed to phenegal an annual 5-month paid vacation from the airlines, and a 24-year-old medical student named Lydia, a squatter in an East German warehouse-turned-commune who traveled exclusively for the sake of witnessing authentic displays of traditional life in small towns.

Little did we know, when we met them, that this unlikely duo would inspire Bike Trip Number Two.

Bike Trip: The Sequel wasn’t as ill-fated as the first one I did in Spain. Nor did it use a traditional bicycle. No, this bike trip came in the incarnation of a motorcycle, which we rented for $8 a day, threw some clothes and a camera under the seat, and drove across the mostly-empty roads of rural Laos. My friend Sara, who’s confidently powered a motorcycle for 15 years, did the driving; I rode passenger.

These two Germans were staying at the same guesthouse where we lived in Champasak, a World Heritage site of ancient Khmer ruins, though we didn’t meet them until the four of us shared a cramped pickup truck ride out of town. They themselves had just met each other the previous day, when they began chatting in English at the guesthouse and slowly discovered they spoke the same native language.

They were planning on renting motorcycles and driving around the Bolevan Plateau, a rural, fertile crest of rolling hills dotted by small villages where freely-roaming livestock outnumbers the people.




Sara and I had been entertaining the same idea. We heard the waterfalls in the Plateau were magnificent, and we were enticed by the idea of visiting villages that couldn’t be accessed by public transportation.

Of course, we’ve seen plenty of travelers with badly skinned knees, sprained elbows, deep cuts on their face and exhaust pipe burns scarred across their shins. Each one has the same story: they’d never driven a motorbike before and rented one for the first time while in Thailand or Laos, only to skid out on gravel and win a souvenir lifetime scar.

We’ve long made fun of these people. “If you don’t drive a motorcycle at home,” Sara has always said, “don’t drive one on vacation.”

But with three experienced drivers and me as the passenger, the four of us joined forces, rented motorbikes and set off into the sunset. We completed a 3-day motorcycle trip without seeing a single traffic light. We were in far too rural countryside for that.

Biking through the Plateau was like being the superstar of Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. In every village, at all times of day, naked Laotian children (the children under age 10 seem to be allergic to clothing) would race to the side of the road to wave at our passing motorcade. A smile would light up the kids’ face and they’d yell “Sabai Dee,” hello, as our tires sprayed desert dust onto their naked bodies. If we were steering across a curve, or honking at a herd of cows in the middle of the road, or for some other reason had to pass them without waving back, an extremely evident crestfallen look would appear upon their face, as the most interesting thing they’d seen all week breezed past them.

The trip went smoothly for the first two days. The villages all looked the same: sparsely populated ranch-style homes propped up on stilts to avoid the annual flooding. The grounds were covered with boars, chickens, cows, water buffalo, dogs, cats, and goats, and at night in the guesthouses we’d spot dragonflies, large geckos and toads. There were new waterfalls every 10 kilometers, and red dusty road accented by green palm fronds and the scent of wild jasmine.



By the start of day three, our clothes and hair were caked with red dust from the roads, and our stomachs were churning from the incessant bowls of rice-noodle soup, but we felt quite content.

That’s when everything fell apart.

Lydia knocked on my door early that morning. “I have to go to the hospital,” she said. She’d been vomiting all night, and her fever had risen to 38.5 Celsius (normal is 37).

We had been sleeping at a women’s union, the headquarters of a United Nations-funded NGO in which female volunteers travel to rural villages to teach Laotian mothers about public health practices. The ringleaders of the operation happened to be traveling by car that morning to Pakse, the nearest town with a hospital, 150 kilometers away. They volunteered to take Lydia by car; I would be left to power her motorcycle back.

Small problem: I have no idea how to drive a motorcycle. I had been riding in the passenger’s seat for a very good reason.

Next problem: I had to learn, immediately, how to drive one of these beasts, and I had to get us back to Pakse, a 150 km away, by no later than 4 p.m., so we can return the bikes and catch a bus north to the capital, where some friends from Boulder, Colo. were waiting to meet us.

“It’s simple,” Sara said, as she attempted to teach me the reins. “So you accelerate with the handlebar …. and your left leg changes gears … you can brake with your right leg, that’s the back brake … there’s also a hand brake that controls the front wheel ….. be careful not to skid out by applying the back brake too hard …. that’s the one you control with your foot …. and you can start in gear, but be sure not to rev it too much if you do …”

Simple? I needed Cliff’s Notes to remember all these rules. I needed a veritable “cheat sheet” to label all the buttons, bars and pedals. I’m sure that once you’ve learned how to drive, it becomes instinctual; like driving a car. But dammit, how was I supposed to make split-second traffic decisions when I couldn’t remember where the damn brakes are?

I turned the key, set the clutch in neutral and revved the handlebar; popped the bike into first gear and started rolling. Oh crap, how do I stop? And why is it so hard to steer at low speeds?



“You’ll do fine,” Maurice said. “Its easier the faster you go.”

“Great,” I replied as I began driving the 1st of 150 long kilometers. A wild boar scurried across the road, stopping directly in my path, about 20 feet from me. “Um, where is the horn??”

Laotian roads are a little like a video game: you never know what’s going to pop out at you. One minute, you’re in fourth gear, cruising along, feeling fine. The next second – why did the chicken cross the road? A whole pack of chickens crossing the road! You swerve, and try once again to remember where the horn is located. And which of these two brakes controls the front wheel?

Then you think with envy about all your friends who had the benefit of practicing motorbike driving in short spurts before they made their first long-distance haul. Ten minutes of driving feels fine; several hours at a stretch, and the stress starts eating at you.

Then, in the spirit of every long-distance bike trip I’ve done, the inevitable happened: it began to rain. A freezing cold, hard downpour.

Those of you who read this blog last spring remember that on my first bike trip – the one where Kim and I were trying to cruise across Spain on bicycles – we were met with rainy weather. It never rains in Spain, and it REALLY never rains in southern Spain, but when I jumped on a bike, the skies opened and a cascade of water poured out.

Well, the same is true for Laos. It’s a desert climate; cactuses grow and the roads are covered in dust. And it’s a hot, palm-tree lined climate, where people use umbrellas exclusively to shield themselves from the sun. What are the chances of a cold shower?

But of course, it did, and this time, we couldn’t delay our trip: we had to catch a bus from Pakse that night. So we rode through the rain, weaving around puddles, wearing nothing but a tanktop, the only clothing we had. Goosebumps were forming on top of my goosebumps, and I started loosing feeling in my fingers. Twice, we pulled over to warm up our hands by the heat of the engine. We’d park the bike, crouch down, and tap-tap-tap on the hot coating around the oil tank, trying to regain dexterity. At least the chattering teeth and the numb toes distracted me from my trepidation about the motorbike.

Perhaps I’m not meant to be making bike trips in foreign countries. But that’s not going to stop me from trying it again.

Local drug lord

We met Toby in the back of a pickup truck during a 4-hour ride to Laos’ southernmost islands.

“Sabai Di!,” Toby said as soon as he saw us: the Laotian hello. “Where you come from? Where you going?” His black shirt was worn and filled with holes. He twisted his short dreadlocks with one hand. His eyes darted around the truck as he spoke.

We didn’t know it at the time, but Toby would be the first in a string of Germans who’d make our trip to Lao far more fascinating. (The story about the next set of Germans will have to wait until the next blog posting).

He hardly stopped chatting during the scorching hot ride through the red dusty desert. He talked to anyone who would listen. He spoke to all the Laotians in the truck, even the ones who couldn’t speak English (or German), and he hardly noticed they spoke different languages.

When I started snacking, Toby asked for a piece of my donut, which he offered to a young Laotian kid sitting nearby. The little boy looked at him shyly, then quickly looked away, burying his face in his mother’s skirt. Toby handed the donut back to me.



Toby had been in Don Det, the island where we were both headed, for six weeks. He earned a good living in Munich working for a retirement home, but he wanted to leave it. He had fallen in love with the simplicity of Don Det and wanted to live there forever.

“It peaceful man!,” he said with a twinge of an accent. “You can make relax, play with children, talk with locals.”

Don Det, a small oval-shaped island clustered in a group of 4,000 Islands just a few kilometers north of Laos’ border with Cambodia, hasn’t yet experienced the trappings of modern life. Electricity, banks, and cars are a thing of the future. Don Det is one of the few places where locals haven’t yet learned to create a “tourist area” that’s segregated from where the villagers live. On this tiny island, all people live side-by-side.



Foreigners live along the Mekong River in straw-roofed guesthouses built from wooden planks, and spend their days swaying in a hammock on the front deck or floating on an inner tube down the Mekong. Locals live less than 10 feet inland, in single-story wooden houses lifted by stilts to avoid flood damage during the rainy season. The families sleep inside the homes at night and hang out underneath the homes during the day. Laos is the country that seems to have perfected the use of hammocks, which are strung underneath every village home. The front yards all bear cactus, geese, pigs, dogs, cats, and red desert dust. Each house has a small vegetable garden elevated into the air on stilts so that the chickens can’t peck at the crops. There has never been a car on this island.



The one and only “road,” a dirt path too narrow for cars, sees only light bicycle and foot traffic. There are no refridgerators. Boatmen arrive in the morning with deliveries of ice for the coolers. The closest ATM is 4 hours north; Toby was going on a day-long ATM run when we met him. Bugs swarm the night skies, flying into your eyes as you trod down the pitch-black path. You can’t even read by the light of your headlamp without inhaling nostrils full of bugs. So you go to sleep after dusk, listening to the barking geckos and a symphony of insect chirps, whirrs and squeaks, and you wake up at dawn when the roosters crow.



It’s easy to see how someone would love Don Det; much tougher to see how someone could spend six weeks there. We wondered, for the first few days, how Toby was entertaining himself on this small island. We didn’t have to wonder long.

On our third or fourth day there, Toby found me laying in a hammock at night, gazing at a clear, bright view of the Big Dipper. “Get up! Get up!,” he shook the hammock. “My friend is having a birthday. We are making a party!”

“Making a party, eh?,” I said. He was furiously shaking the hammock. He was not going to take no for an answer. I found a candle and began locking the door to my bungalow by flickering light. Toby paced impatiently.

“Come hurry!,” he said. “Wha – you don’t need to lock the door, no one here will take your things! Bho Pang Yan – no worries, this is Lao, no worries. Let’s go!”

We started walking down the familiar dirt path, the only road on the island. He called out to every man, woman and child as we passed. “Eh!,” he’d yell, and then he’d say something in Laotian. The men would laugh. He’d yell out another two or three sentences in Laotian, to more bales of laughter. Then he’d spot someone else, another local, and yell out again. He seemed to know everyone, and everyone knew him. He kept a brisk pace along the path, with me scampering at his heels to keep up.

After this happened several times, his sounds began to take shape in my ears. What first sounded like unintelligible garble began to form as words and sentences. And I started to realize that he was having the exact same conversation with everyone; he was repeating the same Laotian sentences over and over.

“What does supermao mean?,” I asked him, noting the word he said most emphatically.

“It means crazy drunk,” he replied, then kept his burst of speed along the winding pitch-black path.

We reached the “party,” the one and only café on the island that had generator-powered lights. About 8 people were there, drinking wine and smoking. Toby disappeared immediately. I struck up a conversation with an Indian girl, a blue-eyed Gujurati with a great sense of style. From my peripheral vision, I kept scanning for Toby. Something was up; I knew it, I could tell. Why had he been in such a hurry? Why did he disappear so fast? He wasn’t … normal.

I finally spotted him just along the path, deep in conversation with a tattooed Westerner. The guy took something from him, then walked away quickly.

I waited until the next break in conversation, then saddled up to Toby.

“So how are you staying here?” I asked. I didn’t need any pointed questions. He was all too happy to share information.

“You know the red pills?” he said.

I raised an eyebrow. “What pills?”

“You know, the red pills, the new ones,” he said. “People only knowing about them now. Maybe you don’t have in the States yet. Its so cheap in Cambodia! Only 8,000 kip! The pills have been in Cambodia much longer. But no one knows it here, man. So close to the border, 5 kilometers, 10 kilometers to the border. And you can sell it here for 60,000 kip. But don’t let them catch you at the border, man! One pill, one year! It’s bullshit!”

“One pill, one year?” I repeated. It was a stiff penalty, but I knew Lao, like Thailand, has tough drug laws.

“One pill, one year,” he replied. “But such good money, man. I stay in Don Det.”

I did the math. 8,000 kip is $1 US dollar. 60,000 kip is $7.50 US dollars. Toby was sticking his neck on the line for a profit of about 6 bucks. Minus transit fees.

But it made sense, all of a sudden – how Toby knew everyone, and everyone knew him. How he was so fluent at saying the same things in Laotian again and again, conversations that involved getting messed up. And how he kept himself occupied in these sleepy little islands.

I left the islands after 8 days. As far as I know, Toby’s still there. He says he’ll be there for another 5 years, that next time I come back he’ll own a house there.

“But not when they bringing electricity, man,” he says. “When electric come to Don Det, I get out.”

Ode to Bangkok

No other city on earth is as crazy, captivating and no-holds-barred as Bangkok. This mega-metropolis of 10 – 15 million residents hoists skyscrapers to rival Manhattan and sprawl to put Texas to shame. No matter how much you struggle to leave Bangkok, to explore Thailand’s world-famous white-sand beaches and topaz-water islands, the pulse of this urban megacore keeps you locked inside. Bangkok is truly the place where anything is possible, from mango vendors serving you 4 a.m. fruit to hawkers in front of bars holding enormous signs boldly proclaiming “we sell fake I.D.’s!!” (not that anyone needs one, except to take to their home country.) At both noon and midnight, you’ll find people clamoring in the restaurants, surfing the Web, watching outdoor movies or shopping from sidewalk vendors don’t differenciate noon from midnight. Bangkok is the land where street vendors sell everything: the Harry Potter book collection, roasted squid, and corn-on-the-cob. Foreigners come crawling to the city to satisfy their most eclectic desires. Want an affordable sex-change operation? Want a fake press I.D.? Want a Thai wife? No problem – this is Bangkok! Bangkok has it all! You can have your teeth whitened by top-notch dentists before noon, get a new tattoo in time for dinner, guzzle a bucket (literally) of hard liquor by 9 p.m., get your hair cornrowed at 3 in the morning, and then stay up until sunrise at an Israeli-owned internet café, where you eat hummus while downloading Weird Al videos on YouTube with your new Welsh friend, who chain-smokes and has two black eyes.

I love the city for its fashionable $2 streetside clothing racks, its $5-an-hour massages, and its 75-cent plates of pad thai. I recently spent a few days at Ko Samet, a beach with soft white sand, crystal-clear blue waters and perfect cloudless skies, and you know what I said upon returning to the traffic and congestion of the city? “I missed Bangkok!”

The only hint is its “officially” nighttime is when transvestites start roaming the streets. Short men wearing stuffed bras and hip-hugging dresses pose very convincingly like sexy young Thai women. They congregate at the bars and flirt with clueless Western men, who buy them cocktails all night.

I didn’t know this until I had been in Bangkok long enough that I must have unwittingly watched hundreds of them in action. “Look at the size of ‘her’ hands,” someone told me, “and look closely at the neck. That’s a man.” After that, my friends and I started playing a guessing game of “man or woman?” with every high-heeled, mini-skirted Thai we saw. I found myself wrong (or at least, outvoted) about 80 percent of the time.

Perhaps “man or woman?” is a game that’s better lost than won. The winners, who can always guess correctly, show symptoms of having been in Bangkok too long. Stay in Bangkok too long and you may morph into a white-haired aging hippie in the corner of a 24-hour vegetarian restaurant eating kale at 5 a.m. while muttering to himself about how expensive south China has gotten these days. (Yes, this guy is real. We met him at dawn after a red-eye bus ride from Ton Sai back to Bangkok. Which, by the way, was also when we met the Welsh guy with the two black eyes, who kept recommending the Massaman curry. Which, by the way, is delicious.)

After two months in repressive India, where everything shuts down by 8 p.m. and wearing shorts, tank tops or above-the-knee skirts is a no-no, Bangkok is a breath of fresh air. Here, reality turns upside-down, and its good to be on your toes – in this case, toes encased in spiky high-heels which you can buy from a street vendor at 3 a.m. Just remember: the girl shopping for high-heels next to you wasn’t necessarily born a girl. Need a cheap sex-change operation, anyone? I know just the place ….