The Scribbler's Blog

A Weekend in Small Town America

2009-10-12T10:09:00.000-07:00

A wooded hill on our left, a glistening Mississippi River on our right, and the road stretches out before us.

I am in the car with Alicia, a friend from way back, come to visit her in Minnesota. We’re in Wisconsin at the moment, though, and on our way to the family cabin where her mother lives on 200 acres of woods and apples and crops of soybeans.

The day of our trip south, US President Obama is at the Target Center to talk about his plan for health care reform. It’s a big issue in the States right now and NPR radio broadcasts the speech.

Sleepy towns drift by as Obama tells the crowd about Americans who have trouble with health care coverage –coverage that is cancelled, too expensive, or simply not enough to keep up with medical need.

We’re headed up a gravel road, now, named after Alicia’s family and the grandfather who bought this property to get away from his life in the city. I can see why he did: the land is a sunlit picture, beautiful and silent. Our car finally stops, as does the radio.

Built with full electricity and plumbing, the cabin is the one modern thing in the wild. It has settled in amongst the trees, looking across at green mountains, and stops at the edge of an embankment that continues on down to be swallowed up by animal noises.

Alicia’s husband and her mother come out to greet us. Hand shakes and smiles all round, and I get the tour of the place. Later, there’s drinking beers, grilling burgers and chatting around the fire pit. We hear the occasional chestnut clatter and skip through the trees to remind us that we’re outside and tell Willie the dog that, no, the nachos aren’t for her.

We stay there until the fire is no longer warm enough, then play cards inside until it’s time to go to bed. This first full day away from home has helped me along to full relaxation.

Next morning, the health care issue reappears on TV. Four suits argue about government costs and who’s doing what to whom and, during commercial breaks, attack ads take up the fight. President Obama’s health care plan will raise taxes and explode the deficit, says a silky smooth voice.

We turn off the television and head outside for a Sunday meal. Scrambled eggs, bacon and toast crowd our plates and conversation comes around to squirrels and their need to raid the deck. They keep getting at the bird feeders, which is very troublesome and leads to much discussion about just how to foil the buggers.

After breakfast, we head out on a rambling tour of the property. Alicia and I jump into a golf cart; Sean and Willie the dog, tail beating at miles per second, leap onto a six-wheel ATV and gun the engine. I can see why the dog is excited.

The crops of soybeans are impressive. I never thought they could be but there they are, growing, existing, doing nothing special, but looking impressive nonetheless. They stretch on to the end of my eyesight, yellow as the sun in the full light of day. We bump along the uneven track, circle home and head into town.

Stockholm, Wisconsin (population 97) is a quiet artists’ community. Among other small businesses, it has a café and a little pub, a small insurance company and two art galleries, one of which houses the post office.

I notice the slow pace to everything here. Alicia’s mum chats idly with store owners about the weather, upcoming social events and, because this is the US, church. The weekenders sail along Lake Peppin, really just a wider stretch of the Mississippi, in the warm September weather. There isn’t much more to do, nor would anyone want there to be.

This impression of small town American life is not a façade; the people are far more relaxed that their urban counterparts. They do have their concerns, however, which struck me while I wandered through Stockholm’s pottery store. The woman behind the counter, having discovered that I’m Canadian, asks me a question.

“You wanna trade health care systems?"

Couched in Success

2009-07-12T10:59:00.000-07:00

I found a couch the other day. My new apartment had seemed kind of bare without one, but being back at work I hadn’t had the time to fill the space. So I was glad when my neighbourhood stepped in to solve the problem.

Fernwood is a community of murals on walls, of posters searching for lost pets and unwanted furniture left on the sidewalk. Walking home from the pub one evening, I found a couch being moved onto the grass outside a house. It was worn but okay, small but comfortable and not possessed of a cat pee smell.

“Is that a couch?”

“Dude, yeah. Do you want it?”

“Dude, yeah.” We had a deal.

This all seemed so far from Asia. Furnishing an apartment?! Going to work and wearing a tie?! What happened?

I’ll tell you.

My flight from Hong Kong arrived at the end of March in rain that spat out of a midnight sky; a familiar chill burned my ears. Welcome to Victoria the Puddle, I thought.

Apart from narcolepsy and oddly-houred food cravings in the first two weeks, life had been waiting for me. I got right back into hanging out with my friends, frequenting all my favourite restaurants, coffee shops and bars.

I found a new apartment a month later, then returned to work.

As these things happened, the bits and pieces from my trip faded to memory. Places I’d been turned to pictures; all but the most important people I’d met on the road drifted out of existence.

The pace of change frightened me: a backpacker and travel writer in March; a civil servant in June. Would I lose touch with the traveller?

Nope. I have an incurable need to see the world, even have a plan to keep travelling. I’m also not the same guy who left the job he’d been in for 4 years. Witnessing poverty has a way of making one grateful for what he’s got.

So I’m back and having fun – working, but having fun! I can be both travel writer and civil servant, and you'll hear from me again.

Through New Eyes

2009-03-25T21:41:00.000-07:00

Dad stumbles again. He's busy looking at China for the first time and not watching where his feet are going.

My parents arrive in Hong Kong, the first stop of a trip to visit their youngest son on the mainland. The first stop ever in Asia; they will see a different world. My plan to loiter here and visit friends coincides with their vacation and Justin decides to join us from Guangzhou for a day, so we have a mini-family gathering across the world from Canada.

Except that this isn't an ordinary family gathering. At home, parents are the venerable and wise hosts, to be respected. They invite us to their house and have us around their dinner table. Here, Justin and I are the ones with experience and the roles are reversed (except for the food. Mum and dad pay for dinner on their first night in town).

I notice the difference between us right away. I get off the escalators and start walking, part the crowd. The parents move at a snail's pace, turn their heads upwards, get stuck behind the masses.

"I'll always remember this street as my first glimpse of Asia," says my dad. The street is Lockhart Road in Causeway Bay, all lit up with signs and storefronts and crowded with vendors, an anywhere street in urban Asia.

Later, he stops my mum on the Mid-Level Escalators and says, "Look at those roof-tops." He points to the overlapping, haphazard, seemingly temporary shelters erected over the noodle stalls below us - a standard sight throughout the continent.

We take a bus to Stanley on the south side of the island and dad complains about the air conditioning.

"It's freezing!"

"Of course," I reply. "It's Asia." Bus drivers here take a perverse pleasure in blasting cold air onto the heads of their passengers. I've just learned to ignore it.

"Oh don't be so...!" and he smacks my arm. He doesn't appreciate my dismissive tone, which has been common for me in the past few days. Five months in Asia and I don't think about how culture and business and infrastructure are different from North America. I have just gotten used to how things work.

But my parents' insistence on being new gets me thinking. I shouldn't be dismissive. I shouldn't be jaded. I should walk off the escalator with my head up, looking.

So I stroll the streets, not with wonder - I've been here too long for that - but with an appreciation for what's there. From the southern hills, I see the majesty of the lights in a nighttime city. I see the sweat of a man holding a loaded-down push cart from rolling down the hill, one slip from certain disaster. I see the hysteria of a food stall.

I see marvellous Hong Kong, and all I need to do is look through the new eyes that my parents brought with them.

A Dose of the Familiar at the End of Asia

2009-03-25T04:14:00.000-07:00

This blog has not been updated for three weeks. The reason: I traded in my backpacker label for the more relaxed one of house guest. I've been enjoying myself.

My transformation from rugged adventurer to sedentary lump resulted from increased sentimentality for Canada. February and the beginning of March saw bits of home sneak up on me, grab me by the throat and not let go. A memory popped up, other travellers had their tireless what-will-you-do-when-you-get-home conversations, or a piece of Canadiana would be adapted for local use and I would be temporarily obsessed.

An excellent example: my reaction to the presence of gravy at a Singapore food stall. The young woman behind the counter poured it all over a basket of fries and cheese and I got excited.

ohmygodOhMyGodOHMYGOD!, I thought. "Is that poutine?" I asked. She nodded.

Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! "How much is it?"

"$4.90 [about $4 Canadian]."

"Well, I've just bought these fries from another stall - crap! Stupid damn sweet potatoes! - but I'll be back tomorrow."

And I was back. I planned the entire next day in Singapore around buying an order of fries, cheese and gravy. I paid my money and ate the first poutine I'd had since last September. Months and months of rice and noodles and I didn't know that the stuff was missing from my life until it showed up at a food stall: a basket of grease; the promise of home.

Incidents like this one told me that I had to change my method of travel for the last month of my trip. Changing countries, changing currencies, changing languages: I needed something different than constant change. I couldn't travel alone, either; the solo routine wouldn't work anymore. I needed a dose of the familiar and an escape from my backpack.

That escape came from acquaintances in the region.

I first visited a friend in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, where he had taught English for more than a year. The high speed train from Taipei, modelled on Japan's bullet train, took me south at a top speed of 300 kilometers per hour and, in the darkness of an evening arrival, only chunks of blurry neon told me where people lived.

Chris picked me up from the local metro station on his scooter - the two of us doubling on that little bike was reason for locals to comment and look again. Five minutes from the station, Chris opened the door and I found a home and a dog and a place to stay for a while.

I played tug-of-war with Toby, the white lab. He pulled and yanked and jerked the chew toy and galumphed to the corner where I threw it. He climbed onto the couch and stood over me to show that I wasn't winning, not really. He played in a way that the feral dogs of Asia never could.

I went out on the town with Chris and his Czech roommate and his roommate's friends. They lived in town and went to the local bars. They knew how to avoid tourist trap restaurants. They showed me how local ex-pats and Taiwanese lived.

Chris and I watched television shows and movies. North American humour got me laughing and the bright lights of Hollywood made sense to me.

I lived more like a real person here, not like someone who stayed for a while then moved on to see the next thing. I dropped my backpack in the back room and forgot about it.

This life didn't end with Taiwan; my next flight took me back to Hong Kong, where this whole thing had begun.

My best friend, Dennis, seemed determined to reintroduce me to the life of a working, settled person and, that first Saturday in town, he took me out to party with his co-workers on their weekend at the bars of Lan Kwai Fong and Wan Chai. We hit Balalaika with its bust of Lenin, its freezer room full of vodka and its fur coats; an Italian restaurant where Ravi, the bar manager, served me a waterfall shot, which nearly singed what remains of my hair; and Agave where we had margaritas better than I've had.

We talked about issues that matter to working people: politics, jobs, families. We avoided the standard, machine gun traveller questions of where-you-from, where-you-been, where-you-going. Well... I didn't avoid them but my point is that I got to talk about those other topics too. I didn't have to limit my conversation to one-word answers and lists. "Canada." "I've been to Mainland China, Vietnam, Cambodia." "I'm going to the rest of Thailand, Laos, Malaysia and Singapore." I was grateful to spend time with these civil servants.

As I chatted and laughed, I began to realize that the benefits of living a stable life in Taiwan and now in Hong Kong ran deeper than simple novelty. I would go back home in a handful of days to be faced with North American culture and more white people than I ever remembered being in one place. I would be faced with serious culture shock.

"It was harder for me going back to Canada," said Dennis of his own trip through South East Asia a few years ago. "Give yourself extra time to adjust."

Perhaps, though, spending time outside the transient world of a backpacker would save me the difficulty. Someone last night referred to Hong Kong as "a good departure point" at the end of Asia. This town is a hybrid of west and east. The crowds and open-air markets and Chairman Mao knick knacks remind me that I'm in Asia, but the caucasians in business suits and the almost limitless North American and European cuisine also give me a taste of home.

To start, Taiwan and Hong Kong were only meant to indulge a fancy for friends and the familiar. To end, they might have become essential to move me from the road to home.

A Real Fine City

2009-03-03T03:04:00.000-08:00

Air conditioning hits me full in the face as I enter a souvenir shop across from St. Andrew's Cathedral. I find the flag I'm looking for , but there's also a coffee mug that catches my attention. It reads "Singapore is a Real FINE Place."

The mug is blue and carries a list, pictures circled and crossed out in red, of the various offences in the city and their associated fines. No Spitting, $500; No Chewing Gum, $500, No Urinating in Lift, $500. Though there are more, these examples get to the heart of Singapore: it's a place that likes rules and order. One piece of tourist kitsch has summed up an entire municipal attitude.

At least they can laugh about it, I think to myself.

I leave the shop and get to thinking about what I'll find on my day's walk. My route goes through Chinatown, a place the world over that evokes very specific sights and sounds and smells. The clatter of humanity. The grunge of not enough time in the day. The stink of deregulation.

Will all of those things be there in a city where littering is punishable by a $500 fine? I catch the metro to get my answer.

Outside of Outram Park station, I turn onto Eu Tong Sen Street and know I'm in Chinatown. A big red arch with Chinese characters rests over the passing cars - that's about it. Otherwise, I am on a street like any other in Singapore. There are multiple lanes of traffic, office buildings and department store, coffee shops.

I find my way to the incongruously named Smith Street and think, this is better! Shops are crammed together and filled to overflowing. Red lanterns string their way overhead from one side of the traffic to the other.

Something, however, is still not quite Chinatown about this Chinatown. A monolithic office building stares across at the Chinese merchants; Oriental Plaza is just around the corner, full of niche clothing stores. I have yet to smell anything that requires me to re-straighten my nose hairs.

I duck into one of the shops, hoping. Lots of places in any other Chinatown - Hong Kong's, for instance - will have dried birds nests and snakes on sale, among other things. Not here. Vitamin C and Calcium are on offer in sterile glass cases. The place is brightly lit. Dinge is nowhere.

I keep walking. My feet take me to the pedestrian haunts of Trengganu and Pagoda Streets. The path between the stalls allows four or five people to pass and not once do I have to say, "excuse me" or use my elbows to get anywhere. Tables and chairs at restaurants do not have that ragged, abused look; they're all new and shiny. There are still no stinks to report.

I buy a pair of chopsticks and three silk ties just to say I got them in Singapore's Chinatown, then walk a few blocks and have a coffee in another crisp shopping mall. It's called China Square Central. The cappuccino is very good and I sip slowly, then catch the metro back up-town.

That night, I read about the area of town where I'm staying. Bugis Village, on Rochor Road near Victoria and New Bridge Streets, used to be full of "rowdy sailors... transvestites and prostitutes", which ran contrary to the country's image. The current version opened in 1991 and, along with the Bugis Junction Shopping Centre, provides a cleaner alternative, glistening and exact.

My next day takes me to Little India. At the shopping arcade, the first shop I see is 7-11. Despite the encouraging fog of incense from somewhere in the back, the floors are covered in bright linoleum and the walls give shops here a contained look. It is more of the same, a striking uniformity.

Thinking over everything later, I realize that citizens have had to adjust their way of living to meet a common expectation in Singapore. Business attire and casual street clothes walk the streets far more than head scarves and fezzes and saris. Shopping malls satisfy the public need to purchase and push little knick-knack corner stores to the sidelines. Singaporeans live in a world of polished commercial pursuit and urban cleanliness.

People here have conformed to the rules. The city - and its expectations - defines them; they do not define the city.

I'm not complaining. Services and amenities that meet Western standards are wonderful. Clean streets are great. I just wish they didn't come at the cost of being able to buy a bird's nest in Chinatown.

The Jungle Train to Jerantut

2009-02-23T23:38:00.000-08:00

Every now and then, it's important for a traveller to remind himself that he's in a foreign country.

This is more necessary than may be outwardly apparent; a trip abroad can very easily become one big opportunity to socialize with the western world. Travellers, particularly those who carry a backpack, go to see all the same sights and stay in the same places. English is the chosen lingua franca and one rarely has to step outside of it to be understood.

Locals, too, stay in the background. They bring a plate of food, accept a thank you in their words and mumble a return you're welcome, turn and walk away. They sit in the front, drive the bus and rarely do more than point or gesture in answer to a question.

They're also terminally self-effacing about language: their English is always "bad" or "not very good". Mostly, locals in South East Asia don't talk to foreigners.

And why should they? There's often a large group of us and we have a good grasp of English. We're intimidating.

So meeting locals, or at least seeing what they see, is a challenge and an opportunity not to pass up on.

My opportunity came from the Jungle Train. I saw that its track ran from the border with Thailand to the south where it joined the coastal line that carried on to Singapore. For most of the day, the train would rattle through the jungle and villages at the western edge of Taman Negara (literally "national park" in Malay).

My guidebook also explained that, for residents of the area, "the railway is the only alternative to walking." Perfect!, I thought and booked my ticket to Jerantut, a gateway to Taman Negara.

The train carriage was a grubby, rundown affair. Fabric on the seats was faded and dusty; a spring poked out of place and told me not to sit there - I didn't. Food trays from the seat backs and sometimes the toggles that held them in place were missing, though I could see where they'd been. Windows, dirtier than they had any right to be, were permanently opened inwards at a forty-five degree angle from the bottom of the frame.

But I didn't care. Malaysians in fezzes and head scarves crowded aboard and made themselves at home. Leaving from the Wakaf Bharu station at 6:33am, I could sleep knowing that my day would be full of the sights that locals see.

When the sun lifted its head about an hour later, a landscape appeared that was worth the price of admission - roughly $3.50 Canadian. Palm fronds and tree leaves swept at the sides of the train. Now a gap in the foliage and a field full of fog, quick as a flash bulb or a photographer's trigger finger: there suddenly and gone. Then a river, glistening and curled.

There was village life in between jungle scenes. At stations like Marek Urai, Bukit Abu and Dabong, men sat, elbows on knees, working the end off a toothpick with their teeth, and watched. Women watched, too, though only a little, and chatted or kept an eye on stray and possibly delinquent children.

Not many people got on the train. They often stayed in their seats as we pulled into the stations and out again, which suggested that they waited to meet people from this train or that one, or to get on a train going in the other direction. Or maybe, and very delightfully, it suggested that the Jungle Train's arrival was a major event in the village day.

Or perhaps the station was just a convenient place to sit and worry at a toothpick.

Families were in the seats as well as out the windows. The children were generally good, though one little boy discovered that I spoke English and decided that I was entertainment.

He thumped up to me, shouted "Hello!", smiled with his gawky and uneven teeth, and thumped off down the aisle.

"Hello," I said and waved, but he was already gone.

Thump, thump, thump, and he was back. "Hello!" Thump, thump, thump.

"Hello." I didn't wave this time.

Thump, thump, thump. "Hello!" Thump, thump, thump.

And so on.

Looking up after the last time he came past me, the boy's mother was talking to him. I smiled, remembering when I was a kid.

She was probably saying, Calm down! And leave that man alone. You're bothering him.

He chattered back, breathless and excited. But mum, he speaks English! And why do I have to leave him alone? He likes me! (He shot me a grin after this last part.)

Mum got her way in the end and he stayed at the front of the carriage.

Thinking about the scene later, I realized that it was like hundreds of versions of the same conversation I'd had with my own mum. The why-do-I-have-to-stop-doing-that conversation. I never found my mum's point of view that pursuasive, always asked why, and never got a satisfactory answer. I had to stop what I was doing, though.

It was funny because I'd come to South East Asia, taken this train, in search of the local experience and found more of the things that were familiar to me. That kid, having that conversation with his mum.

Sure the train rattles through the jungle, which doesn't happen anywhere else in the world that I know of. But looking under the skin of the local experience in foreign countries, peeling it back, people are more similar from place to place to place than perhaps is evident at first glance.

We all have the same conversations, though we have them in different languages.

Articles of Faith

2009-02-17T23:43:00.000-08:00

Under a sweltering sun, I learn about faith.

The Batu Caves are home to Kuala Lumpur's (KL) celebration of Thaipusam, a three-day Hindu festival in honour of Lord Muruga. It occurs in January or February each year and I am there for this year's event.

I arrive on the last day, a Sunday, and the festivities are in full swing. Though the caves, in the distance and up a long flight of stairs, are where devotees make offerings to their lord, people also bear their burdens along the street below.

They are burdens to be certain. This is a festival of doing penance, of washing away sins, of being blessed. The burdens are the penance.

Some Hindus support kavadis, large platforms built with a metal framework that is attached to head, shoulders and waist. They are ornately decorated with different colours, feathers and religious figures. They bob in the heat, lifting then falling into themselves.

Other Hindus are pierced. To say that they are pierced doesn't exactly hit the point if only because the piercing, in most cases, occurs in an all-over-body sort of way. It's not permanent, either. People don't walk around the everyday streets looking as they do; I have the distinct impression that their adornments have been done very recently and will be removed at the end, which makes the effort even more impression.

Many of the pierced have hooks running through the skin of their backs, up and down in rows. Some hooks hold apples; others are attached to ropes held by other Hindus who hold back their charges when they strains too much. The skin pulls and stretches.

The piercings also include metal rods, spears and tridents running through cheeks and horizontally through the upper lip. There is no blood. All the pierced Hindus have the dazed and holy look of the penitent, but there is no blood.

Those who don't carry burdens of penance, carry burdens of a beat. Thaipusam is a celebration and drummers make music so the devoted can dance. To the crack and thunder of a drum, they dance. They dance and they dance and they dance.

One woman twirls and stumbles in the middle of a circle of people. She sticks out her tongue, eyes wide and wild and seemingly senseless to the world around her. She stops, takes a breath and keeps going. The sun beats down.

Away from the crowd - I am wilting in the heat - a Hindu man asks me what I think of all this. He is the one who explains about penance and washing away sins.

"For me, coming from the West, I have no context for this," I say. "It's madness."

The west coast of Canada is not an overtly religious place. There are probably pockets of faith to be seen, spaces for belief. But they're not very obvious and one would have to go looking. Largely, these places stay out of the light and the public spaces.

But in KL, articles of the people's faith are there to be seen: on heads, in backs and cheeks. Faith, here, is not Paul Simon's "island in the setting sun."

Faith, here, is to be celebrated and worn on the body, a badge of belief with no blood.

Snow Wash?

2009-02-17T19:11:00.000-08:00

On the road, one expects to see things that require explanation. One hopes for foreignness. Curiosity and a need to know about other places are the reasons to leave home in the first place.

So it was with mounting interest that I saw a word I never expected to see in South East Asia: snow. There, repeatedly on signs leading to the east coast town ofKota Bharu, were the words "snow wash".

SNOW WASH. Snow Wash! SNOW WASH.

In different letters, different colours and different sizes, here were words I could not explain, advertising who-knows-what that I couldn't explain, either. And as Theroux wrote in his latest book, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, travel writing is about jumping to conclusions.

So, my conclusions...

A man ordered a snow wash, just because he was curious. Out came men dressed as elves and treated him to one. Those nasty little midgets took the man out at the knees and dragged him to a snow bank, which was carefully preserved in the back. They tossed him in, pulled him through and left him standing on the other side, shivering and miserable. He was no longer curious.

A man ordered a snow wash, just because he was curious. Out came five lovely Malaysian girls, dressed in robes of white and iced blue, to dance a ceremonial snow fall, or what they imagined one to be. They twirled and swayed and drifted around the man. He left thoroughly enchanted and ready to move his entire life to Malaysia.

A man ordered a snow wash, just because he was curious. A Malaysian stepped from out of nowhere and pasted him in the back of the head with a snowball. The man had snow trickling beneath his shirt collar. He was no longer curious.

Sadly, the facts were a lot less exciting than my conclusions dictated.

I fell into conversation with Kisham, a restaurant owner in Kota Bharu. His English was rather good so I asked the question.

"I gotta know. What's a snow wash?"

"It's a car wash," he laughed. "They have a big tube [Kisham here braces his hands as if holding the tube] that shoots soapy foam. It looks like snow."

Oh. All of my imagined explanations - the elves, the lovely girls, the snowball - and I end up with "it's a car wash."

Travellers like to feel that they're experiencing something new, seeing something that nobody ever would at home. They like to feel they're having an adventure and living to tell about it. The explanation of snow wash was something of a disappointment, entirely lacking any sense of drama.

That said, I satisfied my curiosity and learned something new: Malaysians describe foamy soap as snow.

Little Pieces

2009-02-12T00:42:00.000-08:00

Kuala Lumpur (KL) challenges for the top of my Favourite Cities list.

Edinburgh, for sentimental reasons, is at the top. I lived there and remember its beauty and easy accessibility. I remember the grease that passed for food in the chippy stalls and the rough exterior of the people who ordered pints of beer from me. I remember my flat on Cornwall Street, whose kitchen window looked onto the stage door of the Royal Lyceum Theatre. Edinburgh was my first home abroad.

Barcelona, another favourite, was my best taste of Spain. Though in the minority for the first time and working hard to communicate, I had enough attention left to notice the variety of things to do. The plazas and cafes and people could keep a traveller occupied for weeks. Las Ramblas alone was worth days for its markets and hawkers and tourists.

The cities that impress me, then, provide a lot of different ways to keep busy: little pieces of people-watching and sight-seeing and good food all in one place. KL is certainly up to this requirement.

On my first day, the melting pot makes itself apparent. A man of Malay descent sweats over chicken satay and his grill pushes smoke onto the street theatrically so that passers-by seem to emerge from a thick fog despite the clear sky. Indian faces appear for the first time this trip, hawking shoes and watches and carpets and selling tandoori and masala and finger-scorching nan.

Sitting over noodles in Chinatown, I ask a question of the staff. "Do the Chinese people here speak Cantonese or Mandarin?"

A mute old man, whose small face is sunk inside puffy cheeks, answers with his pen. 95% Cantonese in KL, his note reads.

I sit back and consider and watch the different faces that walk by my table.

The next day, I walk to the gardens in the west of town. They offer flowers, serene little ponds and, from the hill, nice views over the city. There isn't the clatter of streets and markets, which are just a couple of kilometres away; only a park bench and my book.

My path to get there goes past the open and stately Merdeka Square, its fountain. I look up near the National Mosque and see skyscrapers super-imposed without controversy on the antiquated towers of the train station. It's a pleasant mix of old and new.

My last day sees a trip to KLCC. Here, servers in crisp uniforms navigate through tables of white linen and polished cutlery; the restaurants have clever names written in ornate letters. In the Petronas Towers mall, designer labels like Versace, Luis Vuitton and Calvin Klein keep cash entrenched in my pocket. I find a pond and a patch of shade behind the building and relax with everyone else.

This isn't an area for me to spend a lot of time, I reflect, but it's interesting nonetheless. From the centre of the mall, one can see, all at one, the six or seven levels of store names and commercial enterprise. The walls and walls of polished displays, the cash changing hands. Everything is available right here and people will pay for the convenience.

The Petronas Towers, their glitz and sheen, and KLCC are a long way from the rest of town. They do, however, add to the ambience of KL. They are a piece of the larger whole.

All of these places - KLCC, Chinatown, Little India, the gardens and Merdeka Square - are little pieces of occupation that entertain in their different ways and make KL a city of endless interest.

I'll be back in a few weeks to see what else I can find.

The Waiting Game (with Peanuts)

2009-02-05T17:57:00.000-08:00

Peanuts are a good food for waiting.

Trapped in their cases, they are difficult to extract. I attack them with thick, lumbering fingers and a piece of shell comes off. Not enough, alas, to allow the insides to come free. I apply pressure once again and lose half the contents on the floor.

Crunching away on what's left, I have a go and the next one. There's a lot of focus in getting enough to eat from a bag of peanuts. Head bent, neck cramped, fingers worrying away at the little details, it's a couple of hours on the clock before the bag is finished. Time has wandered away.

I mention this because, of late, I have been doing a lot of waiting. A period of blankness has hit my travel: no sights to write about; no cultural events to observe. Just the waiting.

Everything started with a transition between countries. I travelled from Laos to Thailand in the space of three days, from Si Phan Don to Pakxe, from Pakxe to Ubon Ratchathani (Ubon) and from there overnight to Bangkok.

Great masses of time existed without anything to fill them.

The idleness really hit home in Ubon. Having eaten at the station, what was there to do in the five hours before my train departed? I did what any bored traveller would: grooved to the tunes in my head.

In a sweat-stained white dress shirt, hat perched - barely - on my head at a crooked angle, my head started to bob to the Red Hot Chilli Peppers. Sooner or later, I don't know when, my arms got into the act and I was rocking out on a train platform.

The dog that had been begging at my feet cocked its head sideways and took a step back. Two little girls - watching, gaping - stepped behind their mother. Who is this guy?

I ran out of songs and started people watching. A little boy had decided to pop the cap off a plastic bottle using only his feet. His first stomp sent a flip-flop flying. Retrieving it, he tried again. Success! The cap came off with a staisfying pop and he looked up, wide-eyed. Did I do that?!

When the people got boring, I wandered off and bought some peanuts. They were a revelation! The train started and with hours before sleep I spent my time emptying the bag: fumbling, cracking, tossing upwards, cursing, cracking again, looking on the floor, eating the rest.

Then the peanuts were gone and I could read my book for a while before curling up under my Thai Railways blanket.

With arrival in Bangkok, I sprang into relative action. A tuk-tuk took me into the centre of town and a guest house. From here, I booked onward travel to Malaysia and started another waiting game.

Waiting defines cultural experiences on the road. The trip to get from place to place, the hauling bags, the hanging around gives the people and places and sights their importance. They wouldn't be nearly so exciting without the work to get there, without the waiting. It's only a matter of filling the time, which is helped, ably, by peanuts.

Travel is nothing without its mundanities.

Polite People, Encroaching Tourism

2009-02-03T19:39:00.000-08:00

Laos is a relatively untouristed country. The Rough Guide to Southeast Asia says that the People's Democratic Republic only opened up to foreigners in the 1990s and that many areas of the country are not much different to what they were when the French first arrived.

Indeed, the smaller towns and villages still live a very pared-down existence. Both Don Det and the village of Pakbeng get electricity from generators, which shut down at 10 or 11pm. Outside of Luang Prabang and Vientiane, most dwellings have a roof of corrugated tin or bamboo thatch. Most of the population still lives in the countryside.

Compared to the rest of Southeast Asia, tourists' needs are not accounted for and visitors have to adjust their expectations to the lifestyle around them, like water running around rock formations or islands in a stream.

One can see that Laos is new to having visitors, too, in the guilelessness of its people. They say sabaidee without prompting and never deny a visitor the chance to talk. Particularly in the villages, locals will nod and wave their greetings.

Even the language is friendly: the words for hello and I'm fine are the same. The result, during introductions, is polite, if repetitive conversation.

"Sabaidee," I say to a girl out front of her restaurant.

"Sabaidee."

"Sabaidee baw?" I ask.

"Sabaidee. Sabaidee baw?"

"Sabaidee!"

We grin and nod our heads vigorously, knowing that this is as far as the conversation goes. I sit down at a table and order food, pointing at what I want.

But even when the conversation stops, the courtesy doesn't. While I'm waiting for the night bus out of Vientiane, the guest house staff is having their evening meal. They invite me over and I politely decline. They insist and insist and insist and I drag a chair over.

The meal is do-it-yourself spring rolls. Plates of grilled fish, peanuts, rice noodles and fresh herbs crowd the table. Spicy hoisin sauce sits off to the side. Lettuce and cabbage leaves are there for wrapping.

We dig in. The Laotians laugh and say who-knows-what and laugh some more. They make sure I get enough, pile my leaves with fish. They ask if I like the food. Yes very good, I say.

I do my best to fulfill the requirements of their invitation: eat enough to be polite but not too much. My ride to the bus comes by and I am able to make my excuses without giving offence.

Even though this is likely the only food they'll have all evening, these people have no problem sharing with a stranger. It's the polite thing to do when the stranger is sitting off to the side, just waiting for his bus. Of course it is.

But Laotians are starting to deal with strangers in a different way and the signs of a changing attitude are everywhere.

Tuk-tuk drivers work their other jobs, like other Asian countries, though they ask their questions in a hesitant undertone, knowing that they're not supposed to ask them at all. Restaurants in Vang Vieng, an aberration in the country, play American sitcoms all day, everyday. The smaller towns are in the midst of major construction projects, setting up new guest houses and bungalows to meet the increasing demand of tourism.

On Don Det, a girl sees an opportunity when she returns a tourist's laundry.

"32,000 kip please [about $4US]."

"But yesterday, you said 20,000."

"Please mis-ta, my sister has to go to school." The line comes straight from the vendors of Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand.

The man shows no sign of backing down. "You said 20 and that's what you'll get." He hands over the money and walks off with his laundry.

The girl stands, open-mouthed and staring for a moment, then begins chattering to her friends and looking in his direction. This is the first and only time that I see conflict between Laotians and their visitors in two and a half weeks.

So tourism is having its effect. Like water running down a river, it wears on its surroundings over time, changing them, etching in new shapes and patterns, molding them to fit the current and flow of the people who come to visit.

Laos is an island in the stream, whose banks are wearing slowly away.

The Pastoral Life

2009-02-01T23:29:00.000-08:00

The sleeper bus down from Vientiane got my visit to Si Phan Don, the 4000 Islands, off to a rough start.

"Sleeper bus", for any traveller, is a term that holds ugly associations. The bunks on these buses wage war on arms and legs, on joints and muscles, on sleep. They're very short, you see. I had managed to survive many nights staying in them without serious injury, though others hadn't been so lucky.

"I have a bruise right here that's the size of your face!" said Khas, a 6-foot Australian in Hue, as he pointed to his hip. He limped over to pay his restaurant bill. "We'll take the train to Saigon."

I had high hopes for the trip to southern Laos. The bunks, if not long, were luxuriously wide. Hooray!, I silently exclaimed. Too soon, alas, and my hopes were dashed, nipped in the travelling bud. It seemed the width was to allow for two people's residence.

My bunk mates were an elderly Laotian and his cane. They had the inside half by the window; I, the outside. My legs stretched into the passageway searching for a kind of comfort.

The two next to me got up to use the toilet, right across from us, several times during the night. Without the commonality of a shared language, they resorted to physical gestures. Poke, poke. Oh, sure. Poke, poke. Okay, alright. Poke, poke. Again?!

I now know what it is to sleep with a 70-year old man.

After such an up-and-down, though confining experience, I spent my first full day on Si Phan Don in pursuit of exercise. The southern island of Don Khon was supposed to have a number of waterfalls and dolphins. I walked from my home on Don Det past dried fields and cows picking at trees and a solitary hut here, there. Trucks full of tour-goers charged ahead and covered me with dust.

An hour or so of walking found me at Somphamit Falls - somewhat of a misnomer. They were not so much cliffs that dropped water from a great height, as they were a collection of large rapids. Water crashed through jagged chunks of rock and, without settling for an instant, crashed again. At the very bottom, the falls became a stream that sang along as if nothing dramatic had happened.

I carried on and found where dolphins were supposed to make an appearance. None did, but the Laotian boys who swam and dove off the rocks and played made for a charming scene. Sunlight sparkled on the Mekong. They laughed. I stopped wading, put on my shoes and headed back.

My legs, the next day, complained about their exertions and insisted on spending time hammock-bound. Bread, cheese and fruit settled with me into a day of literary pursuit.

I read The Little Drummer Girl. There was Gavron the Rook in his castle on the hill. There was Kurtz running the thing for everyone to see, but for no one to know about. There was Charlie: sacrifice and willing participant. And Joseph. Oh, poor Joseph.

Flip, flip, flip, and Charlie had saved the world for some. I looked over my bungalow railing to see a farmyard fight in the making. A dog had a piece of bread at its paws; a rooster eyed him up, weighing his chances. The bird decided against certain death and retreated to look for other food. To scratch his claw in the dirt. To brood. Bugger.

These two were part of a larger country life. Two women rumbled a wheelbarrow by, stacked with bamboo. A group of men carried their picks and hoes down the track. Children played in the dirt or splashed each other in the river, and old women lounged in the shade, chewing their betel nut. It was a window on a pastoral world.

That, I suppose, is the point of travel: to see sights, people, ways of life that one wouldn't at home. I live in a city. I work in an office, occasionally wear a tie and take coffee breaks. I don't live in a hut, never use a pick or a hoe and wouldn't know how to fix the lack of running water in a shower - we lacked running water in our shower one morning.

I am not a country boy. Nor, I would imagine, is anyone else in Canada by Laotian standards. So it's interesting to see people who live completely different to me and other Canadians.

The waterfall was cool too.

Vientiane, Meet Paris

2009-01-28T01:41:00.000-08:00

The cities of Laos have managed to adopt the culture of their former European master more completely than anywhere else in the region.

Vietnam's north tries and doesn't quite succeed. Hanoi possesses colonial buildings, a propensity for stately sidewalk vegetation and a love of cafes, it's true; but the manic traffic, the wall-to-wall motos take away from the ambiance in the end. The Old Quarter, too, is a place where Asia lives alone, full shops and stalls running themselves in lanes sometimes big enough only for one full-grown person to pass.

And Saigon? Well. Saigon looks more American than anything.

In Cambodia, local culture drowns out French influence. The Silver Pagoda and the Royal Palace take architectural pride of place in Phnom Penh; the downtown markets lend the haphazard feel of Asia, spilling into the streets. Angkor Wat and the other temples near Siem Reap are a reminder that The Khmers Were Here.

Laotian cities, in comparison, embrace a little more of their colonial past. I look for a guesthouse in Vientiane and walk down a street marked Rue Nokeo Koummane, cross another labelled Rue Sasenthai. Trees, spaced evening down the sidewalk, stretch languidly above, giving the impression of a carefully manicured urban jungle, a green canopy for people in the cafes.

Ah, the cafes. In Luang Prabang and Vientiane, many of them go by French names: Croissant d'Or, Le Banneton to name two. In shaded courtyards, they provide little tables that are tidy and meant for two. They serve coffee, not too thick and bitter as in Vietnam or Cambodia, that approximate and surpass the best European blends; the milk, steamed, comes in a precise, miniature metal carafe. Croissants butter and flake on a just-big-enough plate. Proximity with France is as much presentation as it is the food.

Imitation also comes in one of Vientiane's biggest landmarks, the Patouxai. It's the Laotian Arc de Triomphe. Up Rue Lane Xang in the northeast of town, this version is more top-heavy and has thicker pillars than what I remember of the original on the Champs Elysees, but gets the gist of the idea. It also offers a pleasant view of greater Vientiane from the top.

None of this - seats in the shade, meals of just the right size and presentation and mimickry of French architecture - is to say that Laos does not have its own culture. To the contrary: monks, usually in pairs, stroll up and down in their orange robes; Buddhist temples are everywhere; markets, smaller than in other Asian towns, sell their knick-knacks and roasted meat skewers. This is definitely Asia and not Europe.

It is only to say that towns here seem to hold onto pockets of distinctive Frenchness, which has not been adapted in any way for the local culture.

Even the Laotians get into the act. A man outside Kosilo Books addresses me in soft, effeminate French. The bookstore will re-open later, he lisps.

I turn away, smile and think, Welcome to Vientiane, the Little Paris of Laos.

The Slow Boat to Laos

2009-01-20T21:50:00.000-08:00

Long-distance travel used to take a long time.

Mongol hordes conducted wars over years, partly because they took weeks to get as far as Russia or China or the Middle East. Marco Polo travelled from Italy to Khublai Khan's court in the space of months. Europeans needed similar amounts of time to arrive in distant lands and administer their little pieces of empire. It was all very time-consuming.

In the modern age, the world is more easily accessible. My friend can get married in Hawaii and I can leave Canada the day before to be in time for the ceremony. I can plan a trip to Asia and expect to arrive in hours, not days or weeks.

The western world, in these days, the, expects instant gratification from travel. It has lost the patience for lengthy trips. It wants to get there now.

So what is it like to take one's time? What is it like to set out for a destination and not arrive in mere hours?

For answers, I took the slow boat from the Thai border to Luang Prabang in Laos, several kilometres down the Mekong River. The trip would take 2 days and roughly 14 hours of sunlight.

The first day saw me and 90 of my closest friends crowd onto a large, flat-bottomed boat. For seats, we had narrow and very upright benches. Good thing I bought a cushion from vendors on the dock, I thought. The lot of us got settled and the boat was underway by 11:30am.

The travel agents who coordinated our trip had offered the last-minute alternative of a bus to Luang Prabang. Either they had over-sold the boat or they were just trying to score an extra few dollars. Or both.

Whatever the case, I refused and was glad I did. The banks of the Mekong showed off vibrant green jungles and lush mountainsides. The shore alternated between craggy grey rocks, some that popped right out of the water, and powder white beaches.

The wind whispered across the tops of our heads. The sun shone, then disappeared as we navigated a kink in the river. We lounged and sometimes slept.

We were, however, also modern travellers and looking at scenery could only entertain for so long. Some people stood and paced. Some broke out cards and started a game. Others retreated within their iPods. I was without any kind of entertainment, having finished my book, American Gods, just before the boat launched. Generally, I sat and looked over the railing.

On the second day, though, after a stop in the village of Pakbeng, Rob sat next to me. He's a lighting technician from Vancouver and has a history of travelling. His parents had taken him all over Europe as a child and he's been to almost forty countries in twenty years of going overseas.

We chatted about travel and found another form of entertainment when that subject finished up.

Two English girls, Kim and Zoe, were sitting in front of us. I pulled the hood up on Zoe's sweater and looked off to my right, suddenly engrossed in the scenery. Zoe turned and looked straight at Rob. He froze, a deer in the headlights.

"It wasn't me - hey, where'd you get those earphones?!" He stared straight at her and hoped she didn't notice the change of subject. A smile pulled at the corner of his mouth.

"That was great! What a distraction!" I doubled up, laughing.

"What?! I'm really interested in her earphones!" But he'd lost it too.

Zoe still stared, never having said a word, now trying to figure the two of us out.

The three of us proceeded to have a conversation about earphones, for my part through laughter and with tears in my eyes, then went back to watching the scenery.

Little kids climbed along the rocks and waved hello - sabai dee! Cows grazed where there was enough grass. Huts rested among the trees. What were they there for? Who lived there? Our boat passed on without any answers.

Rob and I read in the travel guide about caves near Luang Prabang and kept an eye out for them.

"Look, is that a cave?" asked Rob.

"No man, that's a boat."

"Oh. Right." He looked at me out the side of his face.

The caves were important, being very near our destination. We saw them near the end of the afternoon, marked by a number of boats and a staircase cut into the mountain.

An hour later, at 5pm, we docked and heaved our packs up the stairs. Hotel owners greeted us and, choosing one, we took off down the streets of Luang Prabang, finally there after two full days.

Long-distance travel, over days not hours, is no different than short trips but for the need of increased occupation. People who will be passengers for a long time need to focus on keeping themselves busy: with music, with books or with talking to friends.

There's nothing to surviving travel on the slow boat but laughter and a conversation about earphones.

The Taste of Thailand

2009-01-15T21:51:00.000-08:00

The taste of Thailand: a splash of coconut milk; a dollop of curry paste; stir-fried chicken; eggplant, lime leaves, asian basil and chilies; fish sauce to taste.

These are the ingredients for a traditional green curry I leaned at A Lot of Thai Home Cooking Class in Chiang Mai.

A girl named Welcome - "My parents were hippies, what d'you want?" she asks - recommends the course. She's been volunteering in Thailand and speaks the language; I figure she has a better idea than most about experiences that get at genuine Thai culture and keep her advice in mind. In Chiang Mai, I get the last space for a Tuesday class.

Our teacher, Siripen Siryabhaya, whom everyone calls Yui, is full of energy and keen to ensure a positive experience for her students. She hands over her recipe book with a smile as I step into her beat up green sedan. It has all the recipes for that day's class and more.

When we arrive at her home, which doubles as a classroom, I see that the woks are already set on their burners, the kitchen utensils and ingredients already placed at the ready. We will spend most of our time with demonstrations and our own cooking, not preparing our workspace.

Demonstrating the safe way to light a gas element, Yui shows herself to be a demanding cook and a joker. "You burn hair, no problem," she says. "You burn garlic, you fail the course." We smile and crowd around for the initial cooking lesson.

First up: phad thai. Tofu, garlic and spring onions fly into the wok and we learn how to tell the difference between too much and not enough oil. Chicken, noodles and egg come next, added separately, combined effortlessly, cooking all the while, and we have the final product.

A ladle of water over dry noodles to stir-fry them and the use tamarind paste in, well, anything are particular revelations for me and I go confidently away, prepared to make my noodles.

I burn the garlic. The element is too hot and stir-frying is a lot quicker than grilling a piece of meat or simmering a stew. My noodles turn out okay, though, and we carry on with the course.

The class proceeds to make spring rolls, green curry, hot and sour soup, stir-fried chicken and cashews, and sticky rice with mango. Yui watches us go through each recipe after her demonstration, giving instructions when necessary.

"You need more oil; see the pan? It's too dry."

"More water here."

"Your element is too hot. You'll burn the garlic."

She even show me how to wrap my spring rolls and helps me re-wrap when I try one on my own. As the day progresses, there are fewer mishaps: not so many burned ingredients; less smoke rising off the woks. The cooks chop faster and learn they can't look away from sizzling food. All the dishes turn out tasty.

We go to the market at the end of the day. Yui shows us all the foods from the recipes and tells us about a whole lot of others. I learn that galangal is a similar idea to ginger and that vendors sell types of rice that sometimes differ only in how long ago they were harvested.

Our guide also takes questions.

"Is oyster sauce here different from the stuff in China?" asks Eugene, from London.

"No, same same... but different," smirks Yui through our guffaws. We just got her to utter the biggest English-language cliche in South East Asia and she knows it.

Oyster sauce, like any other sauce of course, has the same ingredients but a different mix of them depending on the brand or the country.

We continue on, smelling different varieties of basil, asking about morning glory, eyeballing huge tubs of curry paste. We see the different kinds of rice noodles - this kind for soup, that one for phad thai. We learn that some restaurants use citric acid, sold in baggies one would expect to see a goldfish in, rather than lemons or limes for flavour in some dishes.

I have always loved strolling through markets, though never really know what I am seeing. Now I do.

About an hour of learning to shop like a local leads us to the end of our day. We stand around thanking Yui for her trouble. She thinks of the effort as nothing at all.

"I enjoy cooking. I want everyone to enjoy it too."

We have, and all of us now have more cooking skills and a taste of Thai culture to bring home with us. Hopefully, I've learned not to burn the garlic.

Small Town Mountain

2009-01-14T21:20:00.000-08:00

I'm a small town boy. Might live in a city now, but I ain't from there. No sir.

My memories started in a community called Blueberry Creek, just off the highway that runs between Castlegar and Trail. Maybe 1000 people lived in the town; we didn't even have a grocery store or, after my grade 1 year, a school of any description. When my family moved, it was to the slightly larger centre of Cranbrook then to the northern metropolis of Prince George, roughly 75,000 people at the time.

I remember the sense of community from those years. There weren't so many restaurants or clubs or bars, so my parents would have friends over for parties, or they would have us, kids and all. We would also go to one of the many lakes, or tobogganing in the winter. People got to know each other. They had to because they lived in the same small town together. They were neighbours.

My fond memories of little communities like those ones is probably the reason I liked the town of Pai, tucked into the folded mountains northwest of Chiang Mai.

I liked the town despite the drive up to it. The road curved and wound, yet we drove in a straight line for most of the time. Our driver laid rubber on hairpin turns, caused pieces of the bus to shake and squeal. People sitting together constantly knocked legs, knees and arms. Hands got sore from holding on.

"Jesus!" That was me. A silver sedan going the other way and passing on the right only just managed to slip back into its own lane before we got there.

Concrete beneath my toes had never felt so nice as it did at the end of that ride.

Equilibrium restored, I found a small town around me. The town centre lacked street lights. A walk one day got me outside the city limits in five minutes and many of the lanes to get from here to there were not big enough for cars to pass. One of the bridges that took visitors out to the surrounding countryside was made of bamboo and thatch, for pedestrians only.

The pace of life was slower too. Maybe the people knew that nothing would happen in any great hurry but would happen all the same. Most shops were mostly empty most of the time. Clerks looked over when I strolled in and wondered if they should get up - they didn't. There were no tuk-tuks, no people shouting to get my attention. They waited for me to come to them and sometimes I did.

The lack of constant activity, though, meant that the town had to have great scenery to keep visitors busy during the day and Pai did. A dirt path took me past fields of farmers working away and a stream burbling next to me. The trees on the hill off to my right were frosted red on top of green. Sunlight crested the ridge and brightened everything. It was something from a Wordsworth poem, that scene.

The intended destination for my walk - a waterfall, going to which involved walking across a small river several times, climbing fences and rocks and mingling with grazing cows - did not happen. My boots did not fancy getting soaked.

Instead, I wandered up to the ancient town of Vieng Nur. It was sleepy little village of one main street and the occasional yappy dog. A town like that one is never about the place itself: there wasn't much to see except little shops and locals sitting in the sun. A town like that one is about the walk past mountains and rivers and forests on the way. After finding a bite to eat, I headed for home through that same scenery.

Back in Pai, I saw that the streets had gotten busier - vendors seemed to save their energies for tourists who had finished their day trips. People strolled up and down the main street and bought shish kabobs, cheap noodles and stickers that said Hippies Smell. Women from local hill tribes, their mouths stained red from betel nut, sold colourful fabric hats and bags. Portable lamps caught smoke wafting into the night and bargains going down.

A smaller town, a slower life, nothing to do but go outside: reminders of childhood are always nice. That said, Pai is a beautiful place no matter who you are or what you remember.

Everything to Do, Nothing to See

2009-01-09T00:51:00.000-08:00

The hub of northern Thailand, Chiang Mai is a centre for activity, not a place to look at or to watch.

It's quiet and lacks urban aggression. Locals lounge outside their shops, just waiting. A sprite of a woman floats from the back of her restaurant and notices that I and two English guys, Paul and Scott, have arrived. She brings us menus and floats back. It's a while before we can order.

Later, down a lane dappled by sunlight, a man rolls past on his bicycle at the speed of his afternoon.

The three of us walk to the ends of the old town, see a little of the city outside the walls. Enough to know what the place is about. I realize that I've seen all I want to.

There are the temples, of course. They mark the city like a spoonful of sugar spilled onto a coffee table. But by now I'm templed out.

Temples are South East Asia's response to European castles and churches: one can find them anywhere in the region. Vietnam has temples and ruins and Buddhas scattered up and down the coast. In Cambodia, Phnom Penh boasts the Grand Palace and the Silver Pagoda and, not to be missed, Angkor Wat lies just outside Siem Reap. There's a lot to see.

It is Angkor Wat that finally gets me. Seeing such splendid stonework, and on such a scale, lessens the brightness of all the other lights and I cannot be bothered once I hit Bangkok and its pile of temples.

"It's no good to have the peak in the middle of your trip," says Paul. "You have nothing to look forward to."

So I take my travel guide's advice and look into the activities in and around Chiang Mai. It tells me that there are any number of day trips outside the town and many courses available to give me a taste of Thai culture.

Paul and Scott find a trip out to a national park. Doi Inthanon sports a number of waterfalls, a hilltribe village and "the highest spot in Thailand", 2565 metres up. The tour company will drive us there and back, take us to the various sights and provide lunch. I say yes.

The choice is a good one. Our tour guide lets us see the sights at our own pace, doesn't hold our hand. At the falls, water crashes from a great height, wets the stones under our feet. When we get closer, it mists our clothes and camera lenses. The Karen hilltribe, in their village of basic huts, weaves gorgeous silks and serves locally-produced coffee, dark and smooth.

"The highest spot in Thailand" is the only mild disappointment, providing no view to the bottom, but we get some amusement. The souvenir shop sells bottles of oxygen to combat altittude sickness. Sniggering ensues, which we try to suppress with so many Thais around wearing scarves and mittens and toques.

Over the next couple of nights, I hit Chiang Mai's night bazaar. Blankets, pillow cases, place mats, scarves and shawls: all can be found in the stalls, beautiful examples of Thai craftsmanship. Not normally a shopper, my wallet empties rather quickly then.

The last full day is a cooking class. I learn how to cook traditional dishes like phad thai and green curry. The teacher demonstrates each recipe, warning us not to burn the garlic all the while, and takes us to the market to see the ingredients she uses. I finally see galangal in the flesh and learn that it is similar to ginger.

I head to Pai the next day - Paul and Scott have already departed for Laos - but sit down to breakfast first. As I sip my coffee, a Swiss woman says hello and confirms my suspicions about this city.

"I went for a hilltribe trek and, yesterday, I did a cooking class. Today, I start a 2-day foot massage course," she says.

She has been in Chiang Mai a week already and still isn't bored. Hiking, visiting hiltribes and taking courses - this woman spends her time doing a lot but not seeing much of the city itself.

Over four days here, I have done the same. There is everything to do and nothing to see.

The Madness of Khao San

2009-01-01T00:04:00.000-08:00

Khao San Road. Tourist trap. Locals' money maker. People watcher's fix. With constant activity, this little strip of pavement at the centre of Bangkok is a sight to behold.

The first thing I notice on the Road is that sounds bleed into each other. Here's one of the suit sellers, a well-dressed Thai man, hair slicked back, one big smile asking his question. Here's the bootlegged music store playing a piece of its baseline. Here's the woman at her stall hawking noodles on the spot.

"My friend!boomboomphadthai!want suit?" But the sounds fade in and out, people change and the next minute I get a mix of tee shirt vendor-bar-fabric merchant. "Tee-shiiiiiirt!Youwantbeer?bag?cocktail?"

Once I sort through the noise enough to see what's happening around me, I notice the signs above my head. Mr. Yai's Tattoo Parlour confidently proclaims, Professinally New Needle Every Time Open 11:00am. A banner advertises the local police force: Meet Our Men in Brown, We Know This Town! The one-person drink boards promise cocktails and beer that are Very Strong. One adds, We Don't Check ID.

Then there are the tee-shirts. Bangkok is filled to bursting with them and has designs for everyone. I see the standard shirts for Chang and Singha Beers, the strange but tourist-friendly phrase, Same Same But Different. I see the appeal to backpackers: If Lost and/or Drunk, Please Return to... with an address block below. I see the stick figure bride and groom above the words Game Over. An American who's getting married in Thailand tells me he is going to buy that one.

"I'm going to wear it when I meet my fiancee at the airport," he laughs, "but I figure it gets one use and then goes away."

At night, I go down to the Road for the crowd watching. I can sit in the same place night after night, a collection of plastic stools on the sidewalk called Kim's Cocktails, and never see the same thing twice. Hundreds of people shuffle by in minutes, thousands in an hour. Many have heads that are set to a permanent swivel, eyes that barely blink. It's only the people who have just arrived in town who don't look around; once the bags are gone, they'll look up and see what they missed the first time.

Tonight, there's a tourist, all dreadlocks and grunge, who's peer-pressuring other travellers to drink at Kim's. He's even picked up on the basic advertising tactic: get in front of the intended target, place drink board - Very Strong Cocktails - innocently at their eye level, and just keep talking. The aw shucks grin doesn't hurt either.

The flower sellers are here too, combative little girls who slip in and out of tiny gaps in the crowd. One calls me a loser and sticks out her tongue when I refuse her a thumb war. A loss would cost me 100 baht and she's banking on too many beers in my system. I'm banking on the same. With a poke to my side and a mock pout, she skips off into the noise to challenge someone else, roses towering above her head.

What's next?, I think.

Next is Mr. Thailand, who seals Khao San's fate. He wears cheaply made sunglasses that cover his face and a knee-length jacket that would be zebra-striped except for the butterfly pattern. Normally, he's also on a massive bike, which is covered in advertisements for every business in Bangkok and plays pop music from forty years ago. Tonight, though, he's on foot and gazes at the crowd like any other tourist.

The place is that shocking: even locals can be impressed by it. One does not simply go to see the sights and sounds of Khao San Road. One goes to stare, to gape, to blink and gape again. One goes to see Khao San Road happen. Welcome to the madness.

Island Life

2008-12-29T19:44:00.000-08:00

Islands are a getaway. They are an opportunity to move at one's own pace. They are a liberation from the tyranny of sightseeing.

Ko Chang gave me a break from temples and the fast pace of big cities, which is why I spent Christmas there.

About the only thing that didn't move at my pace were the taxis, a fleet of pickup trucks, all with black canopies, that acted as the island's public transit. They flew down hills, seemingly without control or brakes, and climbed with difficulty up the next ones only to fly down them again.

All of this happened with a dozen people crammed inside and hanging off the back. On the downward slopes, internal organs moved at their own pace, slammed to a halt on the subsequent climb. They kept going for a split-second longer than our bodies, just long enough to turn a few somersaults. Leaning now towards the road behind, we gripped the iron rail above us, hands sore with the effort.

If the canopy had a hole, we could have thrown our hands up and screamed for joy and sheer panic.

The pace of life was mine again once I reached Lonely Beach. There were a number of restaurants and bars. There was the cool of my room and my books, Leonard's Cuba Libre and Le Carre's The Russia House. There was the beach and any number of outdoor activities. It was all my choice.

My first choice was fishing. I had these Old Man and the Sea visions of struggling against the odds and pulling in the big one. But imagination so often lead us astray; the fish weren't biting.

Shades crooked on his nose and a smoke dangling from his lip, one of the Thai crew, with his fishing line in the water, sang along to a now-mournful Bob Marley. "No fishy, no cry!"

Our boat pulled in three medium-sized fish for the day - I got one. Though my epic visions didn't pan out , the trip got us out in great weather to see the islands that surrounded Ko Chang.

Next day was the beach, an eccentric little walk from the village. Down a dirt track, I faded right past the rocky waterfront and a couple of bare-bones huts set among sparse trees. I arrived at The Treehouse, one of the local bars, discovered the sandbag path across a patch of deep water and continued down the rocks and dirt to the sand.

The walk became even more jungle-like when the Treehouse staff inexplicably erected a barbed wire fence across the path. I and everyone else had to climb through the trees to make the beach.

The beach was lovely. Sand stretchd out in a rough crescent shape, backed up by bungalows and bars. The Gulf of Thailand was warm. I spent a few days removing my tan lines.

While I was finding new ways to relax, the Thai locals moved at their own pace too. They mostly chatted with each other and waited to do business with us tourists. Sell a sarong, do some laundry, book a tour: there was a lot of money in just waiting.

The staff at my guest house, however, entertained themselves with a monkey. He showed up once a day, sent the Thais scurrying. He hissed at them. They edged back to their seats but left a big space underneath his tree and cast suspicious glances upwards.

Sometimes they threw things at him. Balled-up paper, garbage, elastic bands and left-over food all went up and I watched their eyes to determine success or failure. The gleam of pride and cleverness. Wide and beady panic. They hustled past me and my lunch again, screaming and yelling.

The monkey, meanwhile, went back to his apple in the tree.

With very little to do, island life was a getaway to the simpler things. On Ko Chang, I had fishing and the beach. The locals had their waiting to make money. The monkey had his apple. We all got to relax.

Border Crossings: Cambodia-Thailand

2008-12-20T23:43:00.000-08:00

I broke the rule. I broke the rule and flew into Thailand.

Travel must, according to a strict, though unwritten rule among backpackers, occur overland. There are a couple of basic reasons. Obviously, cost is a factor: backpackers live on limited resources. The other and more important thing, however, is pride. Budget travellers want to say they have seen all the people and places and cultures from A to Z, to trace an unbroken red line on a map and say they've been on those roads. Yep, I've been there. Where have you been?

We also get bonus points when the mode of tansport is the cheapest available. That way, we can tell the hardest of hard travel stories. To date in South East Asia, I've done quite well.

There was the local bus to the China-Vietnam border. The creep and dip through road-sized potholes, around village livestock and stray dogs. The driver and his dirty, sweaty towel. The chicken that nearly gained flight only to be silenced with a kick and a shove under the seat.

There was the doomed bus from Nha Trang. Up the hill and down the hill, up and down, up and down - no up again. Much darkly-worded talk, beside the dead vehicle, about the driver and his driving. The savior of a beach town.

And there was the local bus to Chau Doc. The low ceiling at the back, which made introductions with my head on the bumpy roads. Bump. *%^$! Bump. *%^$!! The rice sacks considerately jammed under my feet, knees now up at my chest. The vendor ladies who would have got a smack had they tried to sell me anything - "I make good price just for you!"

There was my unbroken line, that beautiful string of red on a map. I had gone overland all the way from Hong Kong to Siem Reap. On the roads and the rails and in the water, my feet had been firmly planted on the planet - until now.

Backpackers are also a deeply gossipy bunch. They talk about what they've done and where they've been and how they got there, and I had heard them say that the trip to the border and on to Bangkok was not a good one. The roads were hell. Poipet, the border town, wasn't much better. I formed an impression of pain that was not worth the effort and decided to break the rule.

I knew what I was getting myself into. Only a few weeks ago, a friend took a plane to Vientiane and was ridiculed by others. High-roller! Big-spender! I still booked a trip from Siem Reap to Bangkok, 55 minutes instead of half a day travel.

When I got there, the airport was a ghost town. Even then, ghosts may not have been there because they had no one to haunt: no one at the airline desks; no one at customer service; not one person inside the terminal. Airport staff showed up and lineups formed an hour later and the nice lady at the counter gave me the exit seat. Long legs, she said with a smile. Oh, bless you!

By 1:00 in the afternoon, we were in the air. The Bankok Airways attendant came by with in-flight meals and offered drinks - all for a one hour trip!

"Coffee, sir?"

"Yes, please."

So I broke a rule. Okay. I still made Bangkok in record time and in style. Now it's on to the rest of my trip.

Cambodia's Ozymandias

2008-12-17T02:45:00.000-08:00

"'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."
- Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias

The ruins outside Siem Reap are huge. They are spectacular. Their architecture is without equal.

Angkor Wat, Angkor Tom and all of the outlying temples are what remains of the Khmer empire, a tribute to its greatness. These works began with the Khmer belief in the god-king, started by King Jayavarman II and continued by his successors. Furtherance of this divine cult involved reverence of royal ancestors, which led Jayavarman VII to build even more extensively than before.

Cambodia, then, possesses a collection of works in stone, each one of which took tens of thousands of Khmer people to maintain.* Angkor Wat alone, wrote Norman Lewis, could hold "all the monuments of ancient Greece".

More impressive, perhaps, than the size of each temple was the detail and scope of carvings in each one of them. Doors, pillars and walls depicted the Buddha, royal figures and scenes from daily Khmer life - and the carvings were different for each temple.

These works were marvellous to look on. They were, however, also subject to the relentless pressures of nature.

Starting on my first day, I noticed the no-longer-subtle creep of nature's dominance. At Ta Som, a giant tree, growing from the top of the outer wall, draped itself all over the entrance to the temple grounds, roots strangling life out of the stones. Everywhere, the wind and rain and sun had worn away at carvings, faded them almost from existence. Some stones had cracked with decay, laying waste to the face of a forgotten monarch.

In one temple, a pillar lay broken and strewn across the ground. Half a face began at the top, as if the other half had been buried by the dirt and the grass.

"What do you suppose this place will look like in 500 years?" asked Paul, the English guy who had come with me to see the temples.

It was a good question. In 800 years, nature had waged a pitched battle against the stonework here and started to win. In another 500 years, a rock sticking out of the dirt may be all that's left of the great Khmer empire.
___________________________________________________________________

* Ta Prohm, built for the Queen mother, involved the service of 79, 365 people, where Prah Khan, built for Jayavarman VII's father, required the involvement of 97, 840 people (Norman Lewis, A Dragon Apparent).

Happy Times in Cambodia

2008-12-16T20:08:00.000-08:00

Cambodia is a very happy country. It is peaceful and laid-back. Indeed, Norman Lewis, in his excellent travel narrative of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, A Dragon Apparent, writes that Cambodians are, "by their own design, poor, but supremely happy."

The first person I meet really sets the tone for the entire country. A round Cambodian with an open face checks me into my Phnom Penh guesthouse. He always has time to say hello.

"Mi-chael! How are you?" he says with a big handshake and a bigger smile.

"Good, good."

"Where you go today?" He's a moto driver and still has to look after himself.

"Oh, just hanging out today." The response doesn't kill his smile, but he doesn't press me either.

The guesthouse adds to the relaxed feel. In the area known as Lakeside, it has a patio that looks out over the water. I take my breakfast there in the early morning sunlight and look across to the opposite bank. Backpackers routinely fall asleep in the hammocks that are strung up just behind me. They sway and creak in the shade. Other travellers relax over a movie or a game of pool.

The Happy Guesthouse is so quiet that monkeys occasionally drop by to munch on the plants and watch us.

So Lewis is right in his assessment. Cambodia is relaxed, happy. Except for some of the vendors in Sihanoukville, its people do not react angrily, do not get stressed. Even some of those vendors, despite being refused a sale, stop and chat amiably with beach-going tourists. They wave hello when they walk by later on.

But Cambodia is also a Happy country and tuk-tuk drivers are the de facto dealers in Happiness.

"Tuk-tuk?"

"No."

"Smoke?"

"Uhm, no." They still smile despite the refusal.

Every sandwich board on the beach at Sihanoukville advertises Happy Shakes and Happy Pizza. In Siem Reap, I can make my pizza More Happy for a little extra cost. The guesthouse owner lets me know that I can ask for a smoke with no problem at the roof-top bar. Happiness is readily available and no one, not the tuk-tuk drivers, not the restaurants or guesthouses, seems to get any trouble for it.

But can a person be too Happy? It's one thing to be relaxed, to remain peaceful and calm as a way of life; it's quite another to be Happy in a responsible manner. Can Happiness be excessive? As usual, the people I meet on the road are instructive.

An English girl I meet in Sihanoukville says she and her friends had a bad experience with a Happy Shake. "We were like this." Her eyes go wide and beady, her kness come up to her chest and her head twitches back and forth.

In Phnom Penh, I come into the morning sunshine and see a French-Canadian who seems to be having difficulty. Quite tall, he slouches so that his neck rests against the back of his chair and he keeps one hand over his eyes. A bottle of water is never far from his lips. I introduce myself and ask how he's doing.

"I was supposed to go to Battambang today but I moved my ticket. I had a Happy Pizza last night," he explains.

Locals, on the other hand, seem to have an easier time. The Cambodian moto driver in Phnom Penh, who asks if I smoke as soon as I had drop my bag, often seems to have a larger smile than usual. The bartender at the guesthouse in Siem Reap is always mellow and happy. He introduces himself with English that sounds like it comes from a private school in Britain and says, "You need anything, just call."

Later, when I order a pizza, he asks, "More Happy?"

"No thanks." He goes back to the other table with a smile on his face and lights up.

These examples identify a difference in how locals and travellers respond to Happiness. To be fair, I think the difference is mostly one of tolerance. The English girl and the French-Canadian seem to be taken aback by the strength of the shakes and pizzas; they are not used to the contents. For locals - or at least the ones I meet - Happiness is a daily event. They have no difficulty partaking.

Tolerance, though, may distinguish between the outlook of travellers and locals.

Many of the travellers I meet in South East Asia are here to party. Their stories centre on going out in the evening, waking up with a hang-over and doing the same thing the next night. While travellers can afford to go out here, the western world is too expensive and they can't indulge nearly as much at home. This trip is their chance to let go the responsibilities of their daily lives.

Cambodians, though, are laid-back and happy as a matter of course. It's they way the live their lives, as Lewis suggests. They don't get streesed, don't seem to worry about much of anything. If they indulge, they indulge to relax. The indulgence is routine.

So Happiness is here, which may put some people off of coming to Cambodia, but it's also an extremely happy country and would be a shame to miss.

Round Mass of Food: Vietnamese Basics

2008-12-10T20:46:00.000-08:00

Vietnam does ordinary food extraordinarily well. There isn't anything complex or delicate about it: no hint of this or dash of that. The best dishes are straight-forward, simple.

Let's start with breakfast. The French left behind them an appreciation of good bread in the morning. Fresh baguettes are a staple, either as a stand-alone dish or as an addition to the main meal. Their insides are light and airy, while their crusts are flaky and crunchy. These baguette should be ripped and torn. They should be pulled apart - slowly. On little side plates with a sliver of butter, they are event in themselves.

Bread, though, is only the beginning of the food available on the breakfast menu. Vietnam offers fruit shakes made from mouth-popping banana and pineapple and mango, fried eggs that sometimes come, marvellously, with soy and chili sauce on top, and thick, rich coffee in the sun. It's easy to let temptation win on a Vietnamese morning.

After a few hours of seeing the sights, I sit down for lunch and, more often than not, choose spring rolls. There are the greasy rolls from a roadside stall in Hanoi, perfect for insatiable munching. There is the lovely mix of bean sprouts and ground meat from a cafe near the war museum in Saigon. There are the chunky and dense rolls from the Banana Split Cafe in Nha Trang. Meat (or vegetables) wrapped in rice paper and lightly deep-fried: a simple Vietnamese food that tastes good and fills a gap.

For dinner, I favour pho and my favourite bowl comes from Hanoi. An old woman, stooped and toothy, sits on her stool and stretches a portion of fresh rice noodle from the pile. She throws it with green onion and cilantro and either chicken or duck in a bowl and ladles boiling hot water over everything. On the table, slices of chili peppers and mini-oranges provide extra flavouring. The old woman sits on her stool and makes the perfect bowl of noodle soup day after day.

(Here I pause for a minor indictment. Farther away from Hanoi, and particularly in Saigon, many cafes have a disturbing habit of using instant noodles in their pho. Bowls come out with the noodles still breaking out of their blocky posture. Pho is better in the north.)

There are other dishes, of course. Vietnam has its share of fried rice and fried noodle and stir fry dishes. But this country has most success with the basics. Basic ingredients, basic preparation - put noodles, greens and meat in a bowl with hot water and serve; place a baguette on a plate and bring it to the table. Basic food, wonderful taste.

Sihanoukville: A Review

2008-12-05T22:40:00.000-08:00

Most of my posts come out sounding like stories. To change gears and practice my travel writing a little more, I thought it might be an idea to do a proper review of a city. So, here's a review of Sihanoukville based on my visit.

Sihanoukville is the perfect chance to relax.

Only four hours by bus from Phnom Penh, this beach town in the south of Cambodia is close enough to the capital for weekend visitors to catch a piece of sun and a quick dip. It also has enough to do for bone-weary travellers to enjoy a long stay.

Serendipity Beach, to the south of the city centre, has gorgeous beaches and clear, warm water. Sunbathers can lounge in a beach chair the entire day for the cost of a drink and a meal - roughly $5 (all figures in USD) - at one of the many restaurants.

Such inexpensive living means that the beach can get crowded. Most visitors don't venture too far from their guesthouses and vendors stroll up and down, hawking bracelets and massages and fruit. At night, beach-front bars offer happy hour specials and big plates of barbequed meat and seafood from massive grills.

One of the bars, the Dolphin Shack, employs a local who twirls fire, two ends of a big staff lit and flaming, to the delight of everyone on the beach, while other party-goers crack the night with mini-fireworks.

This is a place to have fun into the wee hours.

People who want a quiet vacation, however, away from the party, won't have trouble relaxing. They can walk down the beach, or catch a moto for $1 or $2, and find solace in a wider, emptier beach. There are still restaurants and bars that poke out onto the sand but they are fewer and farther between, as are the people and the boats in the water.

If the beach becomes tiresome, there are plenty of other distractions. Top Cat Cinema, just up from the beach, airs four movies a day at $3 per show. Guesthouses and travel agents in the area also organize trips to the nearby national park and the islands just off the coast.

Staying near the beach is very easy. The Monkey Republic offers inexpensive bungalows with fan and cold-water showers for $5-$10 per night. Their bar also does a well-priced mix of Western and Khmer food.

Just across the street, $15 a day at the Beach Road Resort is good for the addition of cable TV and a warm-water shower while $5 more will get a room with air-conditioning.

The Golden Sands Hotel, in the up-market range, has a standard room with a double bed for $30 and an executive suite for $70. These rates apply to the high season, from October to December, and are subject to a %10 increase for international guests. Breakfast will be included for $4.50.

Sihanoukville is also an excellent stop-over for travellers continuing on to Thailand. Buses go to the Thai border and beyond, to locations like Ko Chang, Pattaya and Bangkok, for very reasonable prices. Guesthouses will most likely be able to book a ticket for the trip.

So come down to Sihanoukville for a little fun. It's full of relaxation and partying, by turns, and may even set the stage for an upcoming journey. It's worth a stop.

Border Crossings: Vietnam-Cambodia

2008-12-02T23:23:00.000-08:00

Borders are a strange invention.

The landscape across a border, from one side to the other, does not change, nor do the people. Trees and streets and fields stay the same. Ethnic groups mix for kilometers on both sides. To the naked eye, difference does not exist.

By crossing a border, however, travellers are technically in a different place, with a different official language, different institutions and laws. Everything formal says that they are no longer in the country they once were.

This oddity - technical, but no tangible difference - demonstrates the relationship between the line drawn on a map and the people and places that exist on either side of it. It is the marvelous contradiction of a border.

The contradiction has always made me delight in borders, and crossing them, and I took great pleasure in entering Cambodia on a speedboat up the Mekong River.

The day started early. I was up and out of my room by 6am to board the boat for a 7am departure.

A throng occupied the dock in early morning sunshine - passengers ensuring the sanctity of their luggage, hotel staff clattering the bags this way and that and chattering at each other in their native language. Many boats from different travel agencies would all make the same journey.

Once bags and people had settled, our driver pushed off from the dock, ran us past the other still moored boats. He folded himself in behind the steering wheel and kicked the engine into high gear. The stocky, round-headed man who served as our guide went over our day's agenda. One hour to the border and five overall, including the time to satisfy immigration officials and their stamps.

We started close to the muddy, reedy riverbank, saw river people go about their day. A old woman poked her head out of a small shack, haphazardly perched on the water, to see about all the engine noise. Fishermen worked in their low-lying boats, untangling nets.

At the first border post, the Vietnamese made our exit official. Thump! You have exited Vietnam at this place at this time. Have a good day. Next. Red ink dried on the pages of my passport.

Our progress was not that simple or quick, however. Money-changers, the last of the Vietnamese vendors, lay in wait for us as we arrived at the dock. These little girls jumped aboard, crowded down the two-foot wide aisle and waved huge stacks of American currency under our noses. "Change money?"

There was conflict among the passengers: did the girls offer a good deal or not?

"I don't know the rate," complained one Auzzie as he handed over his dong.

"Don't do it," nagged his wife from the front seat. "Don't do it!"

We worked out that their rate was extortionate. "Give me back my dong!"

The girls tried for the sale a little longer, then gave up. There were other boats just behind us.

With Vietnamese exit stamps now in hand, we moved down the river to meet the Cambodian border guards. We had left one country but had not officially entered the other. For ten minutes, we were travellers without a current location, on a boat somewhere in between Vietnam and Cambodia.

We hit a new dock and our guide sprang into action. He leaped onto dry land and sprinted to hand our passports to the authorities. We strolled up the path to wait; no vendors impeded us. The other boats had also arrived, though, and guides flitted back and forth to arrange the travel visas. The one who could get through that step the quickest would also get entry stamps for his passengers first and avoid any long wait at the border. The race was on.

Fortunately, I had arranged my visa at the consulate in Saigon and got to go first. The officer filled out an entry card for me, stapled it into my passport and stamped everything four times - one stamp for the place of entry, one for my latest exit date in my passport and repeat for the entry card. I was in Cambodia.

Meanwhile, our man seemed to be winning the battle of the guides. He handed out passports to his remaining passengers and they queued to get their stamps. They all got through in minutes. We walked back down the path while the passengers from other boats began to line up, stretching on forever.

"Some people wait one, two hours at the border," said our guide. I was glad of my seat and the wind beating across my forehead.

It was another three hours to Phnom Penh and the crack-of-dawn wake up call began to catch up with everyone. The tour group that had been so boisterous and full of jokes at the beginning went quiet. One or two dozed in their seats. The man next to me read a magazine article about the Australian Prime Minister.

I looked out the window. Narrow strips of green spread out on either side of the river. Trees towered over the banks. Cows grazed.

Temples and office blocks, those markers of antiquity and progress in the same spot, soon faded into view on the banks ahead of us. We cut through the water for half hour more and landed. As the passengers disembarked in the Cambodian capital, I heard a familiar question.

"You need tuk-tuk? Moto?"

"No man, I'm gonna walk. But thanks."

"You gonna put tuk-tuk drivers out of work."

It might be a different country with a different language and different laws, but a border can't change everything.

Blog Addition

2008-11-28T23:15:00.000-08:00

Just a quick note to let you know that I've updated this site with a link to the Bangkok Post (on the right side of the page).

I've been using the Post's website to track the political protests in Thailand. My original plan was to travel through Cambodia, fly from Siem Reap to Bankok and spend Christmas on a Thai island. With the closure of Suvarnabhumi airport, the plan is still possible though without the flying part.

We'll see how the situation progresses!

A Vendor's Delight

2008-11-27T03:51:00.000-08:00

Vietnam is hard to like. It is a country where everything is for sale all the time and where the people all have just the right price.

My first experience of Vietnamese capitalism comes early, on the night train from the border to Hanoi. I purchase a hard sleeper, which entitles me to a top bunk and mere inches above my head, but I take the wrong one in the wrong cabin. The righful owner eventually comes along and the conductor kicks me out. He leads me down the hall, barely stops to show me the proper place and brings me to another empty compartment.

What are we doing here?, I think.

Sitting down, he taps the long bottom bunk with a big grin and writes 70,000 VND (Vietnamese dong) on his palm.

"No," I turn without further conversation, take my top bunk with no head room.

This is just the beginning. In Hoi An, famed for its silk merchants, I shop for a suit and get the same response from most vendors.

"It your lucky day, I make good price for you!"

They even get upset when I make to move on. "Why you not buy from me?! I make good price!" Comparison shopping must be a foreign concept here.

In the end, the woman who gets my business charges much higher than the average rate for a full suit, but the product is higher quality and fits like a glove. I visit her store before all the others and she lets me go only with "I hope you'll be back." Turns out, I am.

She is the exception, not the rule and Nha Trang sees more of the same. Brad, a bulky Australian with Elvis hair and tatoos all over, and I head for the big, white Buddha in town and avoid vendors all the way. Brad has a way with them, especially motorbike drivers.

"You need motorbike?

"No, but d'you want my sandals? They're crap."

"Where you go?"

"To China, we're walking." And we keep walking.

At our destination, an Italian couple and kids selling postcards join us. While Brad tells a girl that he can't buy from her because he's an alcoholic and has no money, I am faced with a little boy, maybe 2 or 3 years old. He has big, round eyes, a downturned chin and a pudgy hand that asks a silent question. He barely looks at me as he stands there. I also notice that he wears Adidas flip-flops.

"No."

The kids work out that there is no money here and go back to their game, a version of hop-scotch, in the dirt. We watch and listen to their high-pitched screams. Brad says off-hand that he wants to take a picture of the sunset.

"I bet we could get you one," says the Italian girl and motions to the kids with a grin.

"Good price?"

"Yeah, just for you."

A fit of hysterics ensues. It's true: the kids will offer the best picture if we ask, bring us to the best spot in Nha Trang to take it - for a price. Only the sale matters. If these kids think they can make money off the sunset, they will come in with the hard sell no matter the cloudy day.

I begin to think that this behaviour is reserved for tourists. I sit over my meals and conclude that the Real Vietnam, the one where people have kids and talk to neighbours and live their lives, is beyond my grasp. I determine that commerce for the average Vietnamese person is a stately affair, a polite give-and-take.

But it isn't. On a local bus to the Cambodian border, vendors get aboard, thrust products under local noses and disembark at the next stop. One industrious salsman brings a portable loudspeaker and a microphone to say his piece. The only difference is that the language is Vietnamese, not English. At least they do the same for everyone, I think.

The thought is small comfort, though. Vendors here walk by and offer a product and then again five minutes later as if they didn't hear no the first time. They come right aboard the bus. They stand next to a restaurant table. They ask and they ask and they ask. "I make good price just for you!"

By the end, I have had enough. I arrive in Chau Doc and pay for a room at the most expensive hotel in town. I shave, put on a white dress shirt and smooth out the wrinkles. I flash a smile in the mirror, go down to the bar and delight in spending all my remaining Vietnamese dong on service with a smile.

"Your drink, sir."

"Thank you very much!"

From the patio, lights across the Mekong twinkle and blink. Palm trees wave in a thick, slow breeze and cars honk at each other in the street. I stand up to go. It is time to leave this country.

A Different Kind of Vietnam

2008-11-23T00:29:00.000-08:00

From the top of the Rex Hotel, one cannot see across Saigon (officially, Ho Chih Mihn City or HCMC). Not to the river, not even to the downtown core. The hotel is not high enough and there are too many buildings in the way. A shopping centre spreads out across the street; skyscrapers poke up all around.

One can see, however, a thing that makes Saigon unique in Vietnam: an intersection that is gratuitous in its length and width. Le Loi has eight lanes of traffic that run northeast away from Ben Thanh Bus Station. Nguyen Hue, running northwest to southeast in the direction of the river, has four. Both roads are divided by large, long islands of greenery and palm trees.

This isn't what I've been used to over the past three weeks. Streets in Hanoi's Old Quarter were roughly four meters of actual road, with maybe an extra meter or so of sidewalk on either side - just enough room for motorcycles to park there. My bus from Hoi An to Nha Trang couldn't pick me up at the hotel because the street was too narrow. All throughout Vietnam, there hasn't been enough room for all the cars and bikes and people all at once.

Except here. Back at the same intersection, the sidewalks in front of the department store across the way are at least four meters wide. Motorcycle drivers - "you need bike?" - can lounge, parked, until they find a suck, er, customer and still allow for other people to walk by, four or five across.

Even the storefronts are broader. The vendors and silk merchants of Hoi An could have probably won the prize for commercial density - greatest amount of capitalism per square centimeter. But the retail shops and restaurants on this corner would not look out of place in Europe or North America. They are spacious.

I do not suggest that Saigon is the City of Excessive and Eternal Space; there are still tiny places. My hotel is on a little alley about three meters wide and I've noticed shops in other areas of town where the owner's home is tucked in the back or up a narrow set of stairs. I have had to step out onto the street to get around bikes and noodle stalls.

Some places, though, like the intersection at Le Loi and Nguyen Hue and the positively imperial roundabout at Ben Thanh, are exceptions that are unique to Saigon.

Saigon's website notes that, during the late nineteenth century, the French administered the south of Vietnam differently from the rest of the country and poured a lot of money into city. They made Saigon "the Pearl of the Far East". So history seems to account for the difference.

But whatever the reasons, Saigon has come a long way from its beginnings as a small Khmer fishing village to become a cosmopolitan city. It's just different from the rest of Vietnam.

Failing in the Clutch

2008-11-22T20:41:00.000-08:00

The difficulty, you see, was the bus driver. He should have learned to drive standard before getting aboard.

It was a morning bus out of Nha Trang, headed all the way to Saigon. Normally, I would have taken a night bus to save on accommodation but the weather was not pleasant the day before. It rained buckets. Puddles at the curb almost met in the middle of the road. If the next day would be that foul, why kill time in the rain and then spend nine hours on the road? At least this way, I stood to have a nice evening down south.

We started at 8:30. Rice fields, roadside shops and palm trees rested in the sun. The bus stopped for a break and humidity dropped on me like a blanket in a stuffy room. Not an hour later, we pulled off the road again and I looked up, confused. The door opened to the smell of burning.

"Smells like he's burnt out the clutch," said Steve, a burnt-out Brit.

Off the bus, we looked at the wood shacks that housed who knows how many people. Locals peered out of the gloom at us. A little boy played in the dirt.

"We should start looking for houses here," said a huge Nigerian with a laugh. "Maybe I live here!"

The bus got going again, then broke down and most of us found refuge in the shade of a roadside cafe. The glasses of beer were cold, the ice in them just perfect.

An older and very round German strolled up. "They say we'll be here for a couple of hours."

With help from the mechanically-inclined passengers, our delay was not so long. The driver gave a short, sharp shot on the horn and we snatched up our bags and climbed aboard. The general consensus was that our bus was patched together well enough to get as far as Mui Ne down the coast where we would have to switch to other transportation.

But eternal hope was no mechanic and we would not get there. At every hill, the bus slowed down, stopped, rolled backwards and crept forward again - Steve was of the opinion that we would eventually have to get out and push. The gears gave a metallic scrape every time the driver shifted.

Tyler, a Canadian, was the first to lose patience. "First time driving stick?!"

"We should have dropped this driver a long time ago," grumbled someone else.

The bus gave up the fight for good on a shallow hill. The bald sun beat down, sparse shrubs and rocks no cover for us. Horse dung lay dried and smeared on the road. We kicked a soccer ball and avoided traffic.

The driver, seeking cover from the wind, leaned under the engine hood to light his cigarette.

We waited.

A replacement bus arrived an hour later. Coming from Mui Ne, it passed us going in the other direction, turned around and came back. The driver's assistant, leaning out the door, got a wide, toothy grin on his face.

"Byeeeee!" The bus accelerated as it passed us, then pulled off the road. I laughed.

"Where? Saigon or Mui Ne?" the driver's assistant asked.

"Mui Ne." We would get to the little beachside town by four in the afternoon and, with Saigon a further five hours away, I couldn't fathom getting off the bus at 9pm. The sun and sweat and waiting to go had beaten me. I needed to stop.

We drove the last forty-odd kilometers down narrow roads flanked by pristine, blue-watered coastline and smooth sand dunes and fishing villages. After an hour, the new bus pulled into a quiet resort with little bungalows for rent. I stayed, along with Steve and Tyler and another Canadian from Edmonton, Jackson.

"We're heading for the water straight-away," said Steve.

Good idea, I thought. The sun shone and the beach chairs were plentiful. I changed and dove right in.

Crossing the Street

2008-11-17T02:06:00.000-08:00

Crossing the street should make for a mundane blog topic. Then again, crossing the street in Vietnam is anything but mundane.

As opposed to the Western world, where there is an order to things, where everyone waits their turn, Vietnam drives headlong down the street and waits for no one. Pedestrians either pick their spots and go or wait forever on the curb.

Hanoi's Old Quarter was a baptism by chaos. Masses of bikes pouring down a street no more than ten to fifteen feet across would flow by with only the barest of seams evident between them. Where a crowd of vehicles had stopped at a street corner - there were traffic lights on certain streets - I always looked around me. It was possible that a bike would come flying through a left or right turn. Right of way didn't exist here.

Alright, uh, just go, I thought.

After several painstaking, stop-and-go trips across various streets in the capital I came to a conclusion: Vietnamese drivers expect pedestrians to walk into the middle of traffic - they don't wait, so why should people on foot? But in keeping with this logic, drivers also expect pedestrians to keep walking.

They don't expect walkers to scurry or dodge or shoot into gaps; that behaviour leads to accident and injury.

The trick was to walk normally. Pick a spot, step out and walk normally. I had to act like I owned the pavement that I walked on. I made eye contact with the driver bearing down on me, made him move around me.

Of course, there are caveats to the rule. I wouldn't walk in front of a car or bus. If I saw locals stopping at a curb, I wouldn't walk either (this rule applies to eating food as well). But I just walked. The traffic moved around me, fit itself into the space that I had left.

"I'd never think to cross like this at home," said an Australian I was with in Nha Trang. We had just walked into a roundabout with five streets feeding into it. We had no crosswalk, nothing.

"Oh yeah," I said, lifting my head and looking around me.

I hadn't thought about what I was doing. Stepping into a throng of motorbikes and cars had become a matter of course. It was second nature.

Just hold me back from certain death when I try to cross the street against traffic at home, okay?

Land and Legend

2008-11-16T21:56:00.000-08:00

I have a reproduction of a Ted Harrison painting at home with the following caption: "The Land Here is Greater Even Than its Legend." With its contrast of reds and yellows and blues and a trail that stretches on to the sun, the painting makes the natural world seem bigger, too big to capture or overcome.

It came to mind when I visited Ha Long Bay. Everyone said that I couldn't miss this piece of coastline east of Hanoi, so once over my cold, I booked a cruise through my hostel and went.

The journey to the coast, down highways that ran past a Red River made taller by rain, had all the banter typical of a group of people who were only a group because they were on the same tour. The boys at the back of the bus tried to one-up each other with horror stories from the road; I shocked them with my experience of Chinese toilet etiquette.

"So this little girl steps off the bus, rips down her pants and lets fly right there at the steps!"

"Awwwwwww!"

Later, everyone sang along to Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody. A mass of people crammed together on a bus to start, we were now a group of friends ready for anything.

Except that we weren't. Drifting beyond the other boats - a virtue of being on more than a day cruise - the landscape took over. Rocks that stood over us, rose out of nothing but water, great angular things, silent and hard, dotted the water.

There was silence, but for the click and flash of cameras.

After kayaking and swimming, the party began. We backpackers, the young and invincible, played drinking games. We sang to Oasis' Don't Look Back in Anger: Stand up beside the fireplace / Take that look from off your face / 'Cause you ain't ever gonna burn my heart out. We laughed and danced surrounded by stones, imposing shadows in the night, on still water, under light rain.

A kayaking injury forced me to take it easy the next day - a blessing in good weather and beautiful scenery. I baked in the sun and swam. I loafed on the beach. I took pictures that would never do justice to the rocks that rest, straight and thick and full, perfect pieces against an empty blue sky.

We ended our tour the following day. As we entered the city-limits, I was disappointed by the closed-in feel of Hanoi and wondered if the stories, the legends of Ha Long Bay could ever possibly live up to its land.

Bon Cafe

2008-11-11T20:54:00.000-08:00

Tea is nice. It can be flavourful, aromatic and calming. The Chinese, in particular, do a wonderful job of making tea a variety of tastes and experiences. But for the coffee-drinker, China, with its teas and instant coffees, is a caffeine wasteland.

I am a coffee drinker and China was a trial.

Crossing the border from Hekou to the Vietnamese town of Lao Cai meant not only an end to a long, horrible day of travel, but also better prospects for satisfying my caffeine addiction.

After changing Chinese yuan to Vietnamese dong, I bought a ticket for the night train to Hanoi and went in search of food. I ended up at a restaurant in the square just across from the station and ordered pho, a soft drink - and a coffee.

I had encountered Vietnamese coffee before: a place in Victoria, Le Petite Saigon, does a very nice cup. A single shot of espresso sweetened with condensed milk, this one was glorious. I let the bitter-sweet roll through me. The thick and rich and slow liquid eased my wait for the train. The trip to Hekou didn't matter anymore.

But the experience wasn't just the flavour; it was the process of making the coffee, too. Though some places will pre-mix the drink, this tiny spot in Lao Cai did not. They did it right.

Out came a clear glass cup with a layer of condensed milk at the bottom. A metal filter rested on top of the cup and passed boiling hot water through a portion of tightly-packed grounds. I watched the water become a shot of espresso before my eyes. Drip, drip, drip. When it finished, I removed the filter, stirred and drank. Bliss!

Coffee-drinkers: welcome to Vietnam!

Tourism, Elections and Flood Water

2008-11-09T20:25:00.000-08:00

The United States of America elects a new president and Hanoi lies under water. The hostel bar is open and backpackers raise a glass.

The centre of town, where a traveller can find the French Quarter, the Old Quarter and many of the tourist sights, is not flooded, though there is rain. The hostel is here too along with most of the city's affordable hotels and guest houses. We are relatively dry.

I am glad not to be under water. A cold has knocked me down and I spend a lot of time relaxing with a tea or a coffee, waiting for better health - occupations that would be infinitely worse if accompanied by streams and puddles.

With a lot of sitting around, I talk to the Vietnamese staff at the hostel. "The water at my home is up to here," says one, levelling her hand out at the shoulder of her five-foot-nothing frame.

"Really?"

I've seen the news with everyone else: cars half-driving, half-floating through puddles that really aren't; locals polling their rafts down major streets. But this girl doesn't look wet. She doesn't look like she nearly drowned getting to work.

The images of disaster are stuck on the TV screen. An old woman down the street is selling pho with green onions and chillis and duck. A stall around the corner lays out pork and onion fried in thick, greasy batter. It's happy hour at the hostel: two beer for 20,000 dong - $1.30 Canadian.

The usual suspects enjoy a drink. The English football fan, red-faced, stumbles as he goes for a smoke. The angry Australian, who speaks like a piece of propaganda, stabs the air and sips her beer when she makes a point. The newly-graduated university students make the most of cheap drinks.

I join some of them for sight-seeing in the morning. Under mostly cloudy skies, we see the Ho Chi Mihn Mausoleum and the Hanoi Hilton prison - both very interesting. We stop at the war museum for a bite to eat and a drink, where the trees send water down our backs as we look at the day's photos.

Next day, the 5th, I sit with a guy from New York and watch Americans decide who will lead them. There are no surprises early on. We get reports, between election results, of continued flooding in Hanoi and rain throughout the region.

Other backpackers join us and Pennsylvania tips in Obama's favour; we suspect something special will happen. A cheer hits the ceiling and we order a round of beer when CNN declares a winner just as results from California come in.

In his speech, Obama says that America has voted for change. I turn and head into the noon-day sun that has just begun to peek through the clouds. It is time for some fresh air.

Left is Bad

2008-11-04T14:10:00.000-08:00

Left-handers write funny. They're demanding, too, and ask for all kinds of exceptions, like special scissors, from the right-handed imperialist oppressors (I've been reading my Little Red Book). Plus, they're sketchy: they use their left hands.

Being left-handed, I know all these things. I was, however, still taken aback by my encounter with the Chinese education system and its take on left-handedness.

To set the scene: I had met two Chinese girls, Jesse and Lemon, from the English language college in Yangshuo; they were eager to chat with a native English speaker and brought me back to their classroom.

When I got to class, Jesse and Lemon showed me a section from their workbook, which happened to be about left-handedness. I've struggled with exactly how to write this and have concluded that I should let a few of the better quotations speak for themselves. Here goes...

The section title: "A Clumsy World for Lefties".

"Employers have begun to think in earnest about the needs of lefties."

"Farmers can get left-handed tractors."

"Wives can get left-handed refrigerators."

As before, I will let these statements stand on their own, though I will say that a few Chinese got very confused when I didn't use chopsticks with my right-hand and were very shocked to see me use my left-hand for writing.

I will also leave you with a essay question. Is there anything inherently left- or right-handed about a refrigerator? Discuss.

Border Crossings: China-Vietnam

2008-11-02T16:42:00.000-08:00

The difficulty, you see, was the bus. It shouldn't have taken so long to get to the Vietnamese border.

I had taken similar trips over my last few days in southern Yunnan. Local transport had gotten me from Tonghai to Jian Shui in two hours, from Jian Shui to Gejiu in two hours. We zipped along the highways, made good time.

Gejiu is about 150 kilometers from the border station of Hekou and my travel guide indicated that the border would be open until 5pm. Leaving on the local bus at 10:30am, I saw no reason to think I wouldn't make the border by then; there was lots of time.

I sat back and watched the scenery change in front of me. The early morning had damp streets and a low-hung fog nestled in the mountains. As we got farther south, though, the air got thicker and palm trees took over from vegetation that looked vaguely alpine.

Then I looked down and noticed the road, which had become nasty and rough. The driver wound us through large potholes and dirt roads-turned-mudpits from the rain. He avoided livestock and other drivers. He mopped the sweat from his head with a grubby towel.

I began to re-think my travel estimate for Hekou. It was 12:30, two hours into the journey.

We could have gone so much faster, too. About three hours in, a concrete lane appeared above us, which was supported by great stone pillars. The highway!, I thought. Surely we'll get on the highway!

We did anything but get on the highway. We drove next to it. We drove above it. We even passed underneath it - several times. We did not get on the highway!

Instead, the bus continued down muddy dirt roads and the signs that told me the distance to Hekou gave cause for concern. It was 1:30pm and still 80 kilometers to the border.

A half-hour later, the bus stopped in a village to let army officials inspect our identification. "Ca-na-da," said one. "Canada!" She rushed to tell her co-workers so they could see my passport.

I took the opportunity to stretch my legs and caught the driver's eye. "Hekou," I said and tapped my watch.

"Three," he said and pointed. Great: either we get there in an hour or it's going to be a long afternoon.

Even the Chinese passengers seemed concerned about the journey's length. When we started up again, I caught the word Hekou during one sharp exchange in which the driver's assistant held up two fingers, then four. There were yet more numbers to obscure our arrival time.

Eventually, the roads cleared up and became paved, semi-flat. It was 3pm and I thought, if we make good time the border will still be open.

At just after 4pm, the bus rolled into the Hekou bus station - five-and-a-half hours to go 150 kilometers. I found the border and crossed it.

Round Mass of Food 2: Yunnan's Revenge

2008-11-02T01:15:00.000-07:00

My favourite cookbook, Hot Sour Salty Sweet, follows the authors' culinary adventure down the Mekong River. It includes recipes from Laos, Cambodia and Thailand but also has entries for Yunnan province in the south-west of China. The trip to Vietnam took me through Yunnan where I found food deserving of being in a cookbook.

My first experience of the cuisine came at a Kunming noodle stall. With Chinese characters and no pictures, one of the staff picked out a plate of noodles with thick, spicy sauce. I could see the chili peppers. There was shredded chicken, sliced pork, a soft goat's cheese and tiny, crunchy croutons. The variety of flavours and textures filled the hole in my stomach and cleared out my sinuses.

Down the road in Tonghai, I found the street of flaming woks. The entire lane on one side had open flames and coal-fired grills. The stall where I stopped laid out various meats and vegetables with bowls of noodles; they sat next to a big pot of steaming broth, the ingredients for noodle soup. Beside the grill lay piles of skewered and spiced meat: pork and beef and seafood.

I stuck with bao dzu. The girl put a wok over the fire, then a metal stand with a hole at the centre into the wok. She ladled water in and placed a tray of uncooked bao dzu over the stand's hole. Another girl covered the tray with a bamboo teepee. It was a tower of metal and fire and wood to steam my pastries.

When the finished product came, I was given the standard condiment in Yunnan: a bowl of chili sauce with green onion and cilantro. The spice and freshness of this sauce turned bao dzu, a Chinese standard, into a regional specialty. I munched away and stared into the night while noodles stir-fried to my right.

Farther south, Gejiu provided equally great food. Shown around by a local who worked at my hotel, my first meal came at a stall down an alley. The two of us picked ingredients from a slotted, cafeteria-style window. Ground beef came in a rich, tomato-y sauce. Mushrooms kept their fungal flavour in amongst the chili peppers. The steak arrived with the texture of jerky and a slow heat. Roast cashews and spinach in a piping hot broth provided a counterpoint to spice.

I next got a taste of Yunnanese barbeque. An old man with wide eyes, a toothy grin and strict, but sparse grey hair manned the grill. Wielding scorch-tipped chopsticks, he handed over slightly darkened potatoes and pastries. We dipped them in a sauce, spicy and salty and sweet all at once, our knees to the low wooden table, the flies circling on a warm afternoon.

The following day, I headed for Vietnam and wished I could take the food with me.

Out the Window

2008-10-30T06:16:00.001-07:00

When do we get there?

That question earned me a lot of "Be quiet!" in my youth. I was a horrible traveller: couldn't sit still; didn't keep quiet; fidgeted until my parents went mental. I wanted to be there!

Now that I'm in another country, the landscape is a destination in itself. Here's a little of what I've seen out the window in China.

The Kowloon Express

The trip from Hong Kong to Guangzhou was a study of opposites. As the train left the city, the New Territories flew by; the trees and hills greened out the view. Farther along the track, I got my first taste of China's driving force: buildings poured out smoke, obscured themselves in a brown haze; ghosts of present industry.

The approach to Guangzhou gave no hint of the urban civility I would find. There were grimy manufacturing buildings and rundown apartment blocks. Faded brick and mud-puddled potholes in back alleys blighted the outskirts.

Fly-by-Night

The fly-by-night bus took me from Guangzhou to Yangshuo.

I fell asleep only to be awakened by China's poorly maintained highway system. Two hours into a trip that would last ten, the uneven pavement stopped and started until I reached my destination. I wouldn't sleep, except in snatches, for the rest of the night.

This was the point that I made two discoveries about Chinese driving habits. First, provided nobody is coming in the other direction, drivers will go wherever there is space. Chinese drivers know the exact length and width of their vehicles; tailgating and passing cautiously have no meaning here.

Second, the Chinese use their horns to communicate, though not frustration or profanity. Horns convey warning and action. Honk, honk: don't cross the street; I'm driving and may run you over! Honk, honk: don't walk there; I'm behind you and want to get by! Honk, honk: don't swerve out; I'm passing you on the left and don't want to get crushed!

A bus rumbled over uneven, narrow roads at speed, sometimes on the left, sometimes on the right; it ran up the back of lorries and other buses, passed where there was enough space to squeeze by, honked all the while; tucked itself back into the procession when lorries and buses came the other way, undertaking the very same process.

Welcome to the fly-by-night bus!

The Sleeper to Kunming

Paul Theroux, one of North America's better-known travel writers, is a great advocate of trains, but I've always considered him a bit of a wimp. Though he does these massive trips, he's often in first-class sleeping quarters and complains when he's not. During his trip in The Great Railway Bazaar, Theroux whined when the conductor told him, at one point, that his ticket was not good for a first-class berth. I thought he should just get over it and take his seat.

Then I took the sleeper train from Guilin to Kunming.

My sleeper train was a marvel of comfort and luxury. It made the ordinary difficulties of long distance travel - stiff joints, cramped quarters, the person next to me sleeping on my shoulder - a thing of the past. I stretched out to full length and relaxed under a quilt. I read my book, Ian Rankin's Mortal Causes. I slept for nine hours of an eighteen hour trip.

I was in a completely different part of China when I woke up. The limestone mountains of Guanxi were far behind me and, looking out the window, the hills rolled more and did not impose on anything. There were rock formations on them, which looked like tree trunks carved out of a larger, jagged stone. I popped my ears and got ready to leave, rested.

So, a change of heart: sleeper trains are a wonderful way to travel.

Vegetable Sack Travel

2008-10-27T19:06:00.000-07:00

This is the story of how a vegetable sack and a gas can got me to the top of a mountain.

I had planned to visit Longji, the Dragon's Spine Rice Terraces, and do some hiking. The plan included taking piecemeal buses north from Yangshuo to Guilin to Longsheng, a grubby little pockmark of a town. I was to stay in Longsheng and see the rice terraces as a day-trip.

Arriving in Longsheng, I came right up against my lack of Mandarin. My brother had guided me around Guangzhou and Yangshuo was about the most Western-friendly town in the whole of China. This was different. Very few people spoke any English and I had to use my Tall White Guy Power to get anywhere. The girls I smiled at happily led me to a hotel, where the proprietor was confused about my planned adventure.

"You don't stay at the rice terraces?" She frowned, asked the question again, and proposed a different course. "I have hotel at the rice terraces, you stay there. Nice girl runs the hotel, she speak English, will meet you at the bus." The price was right too.

But what's the catch, I thought.

"I run get vegetables, be back, put you on the bus." Ah. So I was to be an errand boy.

I agreed to the plan, mostly because the hotels in Longsheng were over-priced and I couldn't see enjoying my time there. She ran off and came back twenty minutes later with a bushel of vegetables and a local bus ready to head up the mountain. I got on.

"Hey, I have two things here," she said, pointing to the vegetable sack and a gas can, "get off at the last stop!"

Local buses in China are an experience. Glorified Westphalia vans, these things get crammed to bursting so that locals can get themselves and their goods between villages. I'm pretty sure that our bus housed most of a grocery store and its customers at one point: 22 people, several egg cartons and many baskets of fruits and vegetables. We only lacked a contribution from the meat section, livestock, which I'm told can occasionally make an appearance.

My bus wound its way upwards on a narrow piece of mountainside concrete. We made slow progress until a parked truck and a warning sign stopped us; a road crew was laying ashphalt up ahead. Perched on a cliff in the middle of northern Guanxi province, I got to watch a mechanic fix a couple of leaf-blowers while I waited. Mechanics, grease and oil smell the same in China.

The road crew eventually let us pass and we drove up to the rice terraces' parking lot. The promised meet-and-greeter was there. He grabbed the supplies, affixed them to a bamboo pole and started on our mandatory walk up to the village. Thing is, the hotel wasn't at the first village; it was at the second one almost at the top of the mountain. I got to do a thirty-minute hike with twenty kilograms strapped to my back.

The journey that day started at 9am in Yangshuo and ended sometime after 6pm in Tien Tou village, Longji. After a day of disjointed travel, I was glad for a shower, a hot meal and a bed. The hotel proprietors were glad to see their vegetable sack and gas can, too.

Tourist Trap, Traveller Paradise

2008-10-24T21:58:00.001-07:00

Never has "hello" sounded so insidious as during my trip to Yangshuo.

"Hello, you need bike to rent?!"

"Hello! Water, cold water?!

"Hello, DVD?!

"Hello," with a hand on my arm.

"Hello!"

The hawkers and vendors of this small mountain town in Guanxi province were everywhere. They appeared at my dinner table. They blocked my path. One old woman chased me up a mountain. I just reached for that cold, dead spot in my voice and said bu - or, in the case of the old woman, used my long legs to put her out of breath!

Even my introduction to Yangshuo was poor. Arriving before sunrise, I found myself face-to-face with a crowd of people. One flashed a Hostelling International card and said he had space available. I said "okay", went with him. As he kept taking me to small hotels, though, not hostels, I knew something was wrong. I knew I was being sold something. But I put down money on a room, anyway. Perhaps I wanted him to stop talking. Perhaps I wasn't thinking.

Worn thin and grumbling, I walked into the brightening streets and looked up. There were the mountains. They reclined above Yangshuo, green and soft and easy. They were big, too, bigger than a picture or a painting. I had to stand back and turn around to see them. The sun, finally risen high enough, kicked off the water in front of me.

I actually said it aloud: "Look at where I am."

The next few days were full of hiking and some of the most gorgeous views I've seen. Hills in Yangshuo Park saw over the stalls and vendors to the Li River. At the top of Moon Hill, I looked out over everything with students from Guangzhou.

This town deserved to be hated - "Hello!" - but the beautiful scenery saved it. I just had to get (most) of my money back from the hotel owner-cum-used car salesman and find better accommodation.

I just had to say bu, keep walking and look up.

Guangzhou, Part 3: English Lessons

2008-10-23T03:18:00.000-07:00

What would it be like not to speak English？What would it be like to look for the English words to something you know how to say very simply in another language? What would it be like not to find those words？

To answer my questions, I went to my brother's classroom. He teaches for a private organization, English First, so the kids who show up there are high-school or university students. They come for extra instruction and homework on top of their regular studies.

After introductions and Question Period with the new foreigner, Justin moved us along to storytime. A student would start the story with one sentence and each student after would add one more to move the story along.

Our second story was tabloid-perfect: it had family conflict, violence and lust. According to the boys in the class, my brother and I were walking down a street and came upon a pretty girl. The girl had eyes only for me; as a result, my younger-not-smaller brother laid a beating on me (jerk - what am I to do if the girl likes me better?). By this time, the story had come 'round to the girls, who put an end to our strife. My brother and I made up. I finished storytime with the girl and a black eye.

Once we'd had a break, the students played games. They had to determine the missing words in a sentence, find synonyms for some words and spell others. What struck me in all of this was that, despite the odd blank look, these kids threw themselves into the language. They tried.

It was fun to see students work so hard to learn another language. Made me want to improve my high school French, which I'll do just as soon as I've mastered "please" and "thank you" in the half-dozen languages I'll need on this trip. One thing at a time!

Guangzhou, Part 2: No Big Smoke

2008-10-19T23:03:00.000-07:00

I came to China with an idea of what I would find. Books told me that cities here were dirty and overcrowded. Pictures showed me people on littered, coal-black streets, surgical masks in place. The image: the British industrial towns of the nineteenth century - the Big Smoke.

Guangzhou didn't fit this image. Full of green spaces, open squares and shaded walkways, this city had planned for the recreation and health of its citizens. It had given them a place to live in, to enjoy.

That first day, my brother and I went to Yuexiu, one of the many parks in the north of the city. We strolled the pedestrian paths and stayed off the grass like the sign told us to - Don't Hurt Me For Your Pretty! We enjoyed a seat in the shade while mothers pushed baby strollers and old men shuffled by with wide eyes for the two huge white guys on their left.

Later, we lounged at Chien Jia Square, an expanse of precise concrete, surrounded by manicured bushes and flowers and trees. The square gradually filled with people: badminton players; girls from a department store in their crisp pink uniforms, on a dinner break; a man taking his bird for a walk.

In these places, the park and the square, the people of Guangzhou enjoyed their leisure - a sharp change from Hong Kong's go-go atmosphere.

The relaxed pace continued the next day with a visit to Sun-Yat Sen University. The campus had close but breathable lanes and a green canopy, very much like the University of Victoria at home. The environment was mellow, which was also true of a walk along the Pearl River. A wide boardwalk provided enough room to walk in the sun, sit on one of the many benches or play the Chinese version of hacky-sack.

But the river was still brown and Guangzhou was still a city. Streets smelled of something that should have been thrown out. A woman held her child, bare-bottomed, over the root of a tree, hoping. The threat of being over-run by dirt was constant.

Not every city had succeeded in dealing with this threat. Other travellers told me that Beijing and Shanghai were just as polluted as the books and pictures made out. Industry and pollution had run rampant in the streets.

The same was not true of Guangzhou. My preconceptions dashed, I could not describe that city as the Big Smoke: the sun shone in a blue sky.

Guangzhou, Part 1: Round Mass of Food

2008-10-17T18:21:00.000-07:00

Today, I start a series on Guangzhou. It's a city that enjoyed immensely thanks, in large part, to my younger brother, Justin. He showed me a lot, but made sure that I ate well, too. So, to begin, a note on Guangzhou's food.

I could eat my way through hundreds of restaurants in Guangzhou and still find more to sample. From steamy hot bao dzu at a corner stall to crispy, fried seafood to spicy, fresh-made noodles, this town has food for every palate. It more than lives up to its reputation for being serious about eating.

First stop, on a evening that poured warm rain, was a Buddhist vegetarian restaurant. We met my brother's co-worker, Leo, who stalked into the restaurant under his arch-villain eyebrows, all angles and bones, wearing a shirt that read "I'm not lovin' it" in English and Chinese. Through conversation about China and teaching English and American politics, we filled ourselves with cabbage in coconut milk, noodles, beans, pretend chicken with button mushroom - they served a bunch of meats that weren't, actually - and faux-fish in a sticky sweet sauce. We stayed away from the Burn Round Mass of Food, the Steam Turnip Pill and the Joss-Stick Frailty Duck.

Next morning, my brother treated me to dim sum. I've been for this type of meal before: sit at your table and order course upon course upon course of Chinese delicacies. But here was different; on Up Down 9 (Shang Xia Jiu) Street, this restaurant, this meal had ceremony to it. Take the tea: before we were even permitted to drink it, the server used the first pot to wash our bowls, our cups, our chopsticks. She poured water over the tea leaves and, from there, into two small cups. Using her own chopsticks, she ran all of our eating utensils through the weak tea and then poured it off into an ornate wooden receptacle. Everything had been cleansed; we were now permitted to eat.

The brothers dove into the menu. We ordered steamy shrimp dumplings, meat wrapped in thick rice noodle and pork with shitake mushroom in a savory soy-based sauce. When we ran out of our own ideas, we took suggestions and got dumplings stuffed with minced pork and soup and a very light, sweet pastry that rather looked the fossilized root of a tree. That was fun with chopsticks! But it was another fine meal.

That evening, my brother took us to a seafood restaurant in an alley - an alley where the words "no activity here at night" were written on the wall across from us. Two of my brother's other co-workers joined us to gorge. Susan was a shy Chinese girl with a round face, a smile and a good grasp of English. Ben, next to me, was an American with a slow drawl and a shaggy head. On plastic chairs, we sat and munched fresh fried squid, green beans and shrimp in a syrupy sauce that ran river-like down our hands and arms, diverted by knuckles and sinews. That last dish, the tangible nature of eating it, abandoning chopsticks, tearing off the shrimp heads and sucking our fingers afterwards, made the meal a particularly memorable experience.

The other food encounters that made Guangzhou great happened just around the corner from my brother's flat. For breakfast one morning we stopped at a corner stall and ordered bao dzu, which surprised me with juice and meat and steam when I bit in, and grilled flat bread with subtle hints of green onion and sesame. We did dinner that night at a Muslim restaurant down the street, where the owners made their own noodles, tossing them and stretching them and, finally, serving them in a rich, spicy sauce. It was wonderful!

These are only the highlights. I could go on and tell you, blow-by-blow, what I ate for every meal, but I suspect you're no longer listening. If I've done my job well, you're too hungry to continue. Enjoy your trip to the refrigerator.

An Introduction to Asia

2008-10-15T03:22:00.000-07:00

Where a land and its culture are completely new to an observer, to slip into the place by degrees, to slide ever so slowly into the differences, is very nice. In Looking for China, Judy Schultz titled her chapter about Hong Kong "The Land Between" and she was right: it's a place of neither here nor there, permanently lodged between the West and the East; and the perfect place to start a trip to Asia.

Arriving in Central, the business district, on that first morning, I couldn't have told you that this was Asia. There were people in suits, both dark- and light-skinned, hustling everywhere, crowding onto the metro, managing their Blackberrys. There were Starbucks storefronts with customers reading newspapers over expensive coffees. There was a polite voice announcing the stops on the subway. This could have been any city in North America, except that the subway voice spoke with a mild English accent and cars drove on the left side of the road.

Then I realized that all the signs had Chinese characters on them. Up the hill towards Queen Street and Hollywood Road, other signs of Asia appeared too. Narrow alleys replaced broad streets. Wide storefronts receded and stalls crammed with anything that could be sold filled the hole. Overhead walkways simply disappeared and the pedestrians fit themselves in where they could. Vendors leaped from piles of knick-knacks, jewelry and little red books - surprise! - to harangue the unsuspecting passer-by. Space was at a premium.

Even the smell changed. Gone was the sharp divide between pristine, air-conditioned office buildings and the urban odour of everywhere - engine exhaust and litter and industry. Here was the pungency of food for sale. The nosy-ness of fresh seafood flopping around in shallow water and of fishmongers cleaning a purchase right on the spot. The heavy waft of a natural medicine shop - dried birds nests available here! The sticky sweetness of a noodle stall.

I loved watching these pieces of a foreign world. They went right on with their day, a little China, as if the English never arrived. But the English did show up and I was glad. The western influence on Hong Kong gave me time to get comfortable with Asia; it also gave me access to the comforts of home and I made sure to get my fill. I even went to McDonald's before I caught the train from Kowloon's Hung Hom station.

After my hashbrown, I was ready for mainland China.

The Trip to Get There

2008-10-10T16:41:00.000-07:00

Travel is about the people you meet along the way, and the places you see. But especially at the beginning of a trip, it’s just as much about bus tickets and boarding passes and bags in transit.

The day of my departure, I started at 5am with a mad dash for the door. Despite all the planning – I neurotically went through my bags and could tell you where everything resided – the exit from my parents’ house seemed breathless. All the lists in the world wouldn’t have slowed me down. Even the stick-it note on my door, the one that exhorted me not to forget my passport and wallet, barely got a read. And I only just remembered my watch.

I slept my way through most of the morning with eyes wide open. It was enough simply to get there: to hand over my ticket, to board a bus.

There was plenty of time to spare at the airport, which was okay. I could watch this bizarre little city, retentively clean and sterile, and listen to what its transient citizens had to say. A gentleman behind me, for example, had this to say on gender roles:

“Guys have got to take responsibility by the age of 35. They can play around a little bit but, by then, they have to plan their lives. Girls mature earlier, but guys are just... weird.”

Well. Weird or not, I seem to have 6 more years of irresponsibility on my hands.

I finally boarded the plane and took off at 3pm. A lot of things make 14 hours of flying very comfortable: the exit seat with lots of leg room; passable food; movies; music, and; good company in the next seat over. Cathay Pacific provided most of it, but the company came courtesy of a very nice woman whose name escapes me, and who works as a consultant in Hong Kong. We chatted about who we are and what we do, and she told me all about my destination.

The flight was full of fitful sleep and we arrived, bleary-eyed, at Hong Kong International Airport (8pm local time). The simple logistics of travel had given me a focus. Buying tickets, tagging bags – arranging the onward journey – put all the planning and preparation into practice. But now I was tired and very glad to see my friend at the airport. He got me the rest of the way, just for one evening.

Right Here

2008-10-02T16:57:00.000-07:00

I’m off to Asia and this is where you’ll hear about it. Right here: frenetic, steamy noodle stalls; claustrophobic crowds; language barriers and charades; hill tribes and city-dwellers; hopefully, a beach or two.

There are travel resources too. You’ll find links to travel guides, tourism agencies and news on the right-hand side of the page.

If you’re news-obsessed like me, you can read the Xinhua News Agency and China Daily, find out what China thinks and feels day-to-day. They’re an interesting counterpoint to western media like the Globe and Mail and BBC News.

I’ve included the Rough Guides and Lonely Planet websites too, both for different reasons. I like the content on Rough Guides better: it’s more detailed and gets off the beaten track more. But Lonely Planet has a really great bulletin board for users, the Thorn Tree. You can read opinions from people who have actually been to the places you’ll be going. Plus, Lonely Planet includes maps on its site. Maps are good.

The tourism sites for the countries I’ll visit are here, and the Government of Canada’s travel reports as well. They’ll give you tips on accommodation and health and travel.

But you want to hear about my adventures; these are just helpful resources if you’re interested. I leave for Hong Kong on the 7th and spend some time getting to know the city before heading to mainland China and perhaps the most challenging travel experience of my life.

I’m excited and scared all at the same time – it’s not every day that one heads to a country and a region whose culture is different from his own. I’ll see people and places and events that no one ever would in North America. And you get the blow-by-blow account. Right here.

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