Penultimate, and ultimate

You know you are tired when you find yourself veering toward the sidewalk handicap ramp because you can't lift your feet six inches to mount the curb. You know your mosquito bites itch when you have given up on your organic tea tree oil and are buying the hardcore anti-itch lotion at 7-11. And you know it's your last full night in Thailand when you are shelling out $15 (in Thailand!) per drink to be at the Sky Bar, on the 64th floor roof of the State Tower, just to have breathtaking 360 degree views of the city and full moon. 

This being SE Asia, there is not really any guardrail or much besides 4 feet of glass between you and the ground 64 stories below, so you get lean over the edge with your drink and watch the lights, boats, and traffic. Maybe not the best idea after 14 hours of walking (over the entire city!) when your balance is not the steadiest. But it was a great close to the day. 

This post is short since I need to go collapse in bed, and my last post, since tomorrow I have Massage School all day, May Kaidee's vegetarian party in the evening, and a 1 AM flight home to NYC via Beijing. Thank you again everyone so much, it was great to get to share this as I went and feel you guys near. Lots of love, Jynne.

All hail the king, including tuk-tuk drivers

So in the end, Phnom Penh really redeemed Cambodia for me. I had great fun buzzing around the city on the backs of boy's motorcycles, who would take me anywhere for $1, so I did a grand tour - the riverside, the wats, the markets - my favorite was the medice market, where stalls sell all sorts of herbal and voodoo cures. Buckets of dried frogs, starfish, wood scrapings, leaf sachets - if I knew what they cured, and proper dosaging, I could've picked some up for back home.

I also moto'd to Phnom Wat on a hill overlooking the city, where Cambodians come to have their fortune told. A nice old man gives you a book of fortunes written on palm leaves, which you hold over your head and insert a pointer stick into at random. Then the old man reads you your fortune. (apparently Cambodians will do the stick over and over until they get a good fortune, though this seems to me against the spirit of things). The old man spoke no english so could only tell me in French that my fortune was "tres tres bon," but I got him to write the fortune in my notebook in Khmer script.

I moved on to the genocide museum, housed in the former public school-turned-Khmer Rouge torture facility, was incredibly grim, understated, and extremely moving. It's a fascinating time to be here in Cambodia because the leaders of the Khmer Rouge are only now finally being brought to trial - the trials literally started just last week so they are all over the papers. There is an unease about all this, maybe as in post-war Germany, as so many people here actually were soldiers in the KR and perpetrators of their own people's genocide, now turned everyday civilians. The museum had a great exhibit room dedicated to this population.

After more exploring, I spent my remaining Cambodia time to Le Hotel Raffles, a super luxurious colonial-era hotel with stunning facilities, including one of those eternal swimming pools, a live piano bar, and guests actually dressed in white linen. With the hope that all white people look alike to them, I put on my nicest outfit, pretended I was a guest, and headed on in all the way through to the pool area, where I got handed a fresh towel and a glass of sauvignon blanc. Oh, and I had one of the bilingual staff translate my fortune: "Whatever it is you want to do, you can do." A great epigraph for the trip.

But that happy confidence felt a distant memory by 6 PM today when I had a second extremely traumatic entry into Bangkok. The best comparison I can make is if you landed in America on the 4th of July, and your airport bus dropped you at the National Mall in Washington DC just as the fireworks were beginning, and you needed a taxi to your hotel on the city outskirts. Not happening.

It's the Thai King's birthday on Saturday, Thailand's biggest national holiday, and tonight kicked off the 3 day celebration. They have closed down the entire downtown to traffic, and millions of people have flooded the streets. This would be great if I weren't carrying 20 pounds of luggage: I was left to walk, for nearly an hour a half, to my hotel through dense crowds, fireworks bursting overhead, live music on all sides. This was at points hilarious though at most points totally harrowing. I even almost regretted taking that huge, heavy souvenir elephant mug that my drink came in at Le Hotel Raffles. Almost.

In which a difficult morning gets even more difficult

Just when your morning can't get any worse here - you've been forced into taking a 6:30 AM bus to Phnom Penh when you wanted (needed!) to sleep in, which means no yoga and worse, no breakfast at all; dust has been blowing in the bus windows coating your face and bags; the bus keeps violently swerving around slow-moving vehicles and animals; nausea setting in as you've had no breakfast, the bus smell is foul, the swerving incessant; the bus has stopped (finally!) after four hours at a "rest stop" for food which turns out to be a filthy, fly-ridden pit at some dusty outpost where you don't dare eat anything from those scary pots besides the rice - just then, when you are really hungry, dirty, tired, and cranky, you feel an itch and look down, and see that Cambodian children have put a dozen live tarantulas all over your tank top and are shreiking with the hilarity of it.

Okay, so it was funny. Even I laughed, after I got done screaming. Apparently this roadside village is famous for eating tarantulas as a delicacy, and, both live and fried, the poor things are everywhere. I tried to explain that being vegetarian lets me off the hook for tasting spiders but the kids were still very disappointed that "nice lady" got back on the bus without having a taste. "Taste so goooood!" I bet.

Two hours later, after a few days of the relentless tourist-touting of Siem Reap, it was a huge relief to finally arrive in the much more cosmopolitan (relatively speaking) Phnom Penh, take a shower, and have an enormous overpriced but delicious $7 veggie sandwich on a home-baked baguette. At this point I didn't care if that's most people's weekly salary here: I desperately needed the upscale nourishment, and to spend an hour in a stable, spider-free lounge chair.

The city is more lush (e.g. less dusty) than Siem Reap, energetic and bustling (impossible, actually, to imagine the Khmer Rouge evacuating this entire city in 1975, and what the scene must have been like) and has some truly spectacular pagodas and palaces. I spent the afternoon visiting several, including the famous Silver Pagoda, so named for the over 5,000 solid-silver tiles laid over the pagoda floor, each beautifully engraved. This being Cambodia, though, what have they done to their priceless 5,000 solid silver tiles? Oh, you know, just packaging-taped them at every single seam so they lay flat. It'd be like if the French duct-taped the Bayeux tapestry to the cathedral walls. Crimminy.

I then headed (of course) for the FCC for a mojito and an afternoon reading editions of the Phnom Penh Post, which included reports on everything from the Cambodian elections to Tiger Woods apparently having some late night car accident, and the Saints MNF victory. Glad to be up to speed! The FCC here (for those who have seen The Killing Fields, it is featured prominently) is a shabbier but more characterful version of the Siem Reap location; here the black leather loungers are all cracked, and the white walls are faded yellow from years of cigarette smoke; but you still have the atmospheric balcony, spinning fans, and sunset over the Mekong River (it's down here too!).

I closed the evening with a massage from a blind person: an NGO down here trains those blinded by landmines to be masseuses. It was an incredibly intense (good intense!) experience, as I could feel how present she was the whole time, having to feel her way around my body, and her knowledge of pressure and touch was outstanding, as you might expect.

Tomorrow, a visit to the actual Killing Fields, and the genocide museum; then I am off on a short flight to Bangkok around 5 PM to close out the trip. And I think today was the memorial for Martin's mom Susi; I am so sorry I missed it and was thinking of you guys today.

The doctor is in, but the freizes are out

Just back from Dr. Fish! What, not familiar? For $2 you lower your legs into a tank full of thousands of pirannha-esque minnows, who descend on your feet and eat away all the dead flesh. You even get a free beer while this goes on, I think to take the edge off the panic. I watched one fish work its way down the side of my foot like it was a corn of cob. The whole scene was prototypical Cambodia: the fish tank "spa" out on the street in front of a noisy Khmer bar, and in front of the fish spa, a band of limbless landmine victims playing those atonal single-string violins we often hear in the subway.

Speaking of which, I should quickly mention Cambodia's horrifically violent recent history. The aftermath is omnipresent: military and police linger uneasily everywhere here, and many people - from babies through adults - are blinded or missing limbs from landmine explosions, which continue to explode all over the country. It is estimated that over 3 million landmines remain uncleared from the farms, fields, and countryside - laid in the 1970's first by the US and then by the Khmer Rouge. I visited an incredible landmine museum run by Aki Ra, a former Khmer Rouge turned humanitarian, who is now the country's leading landmine defuser and also runs a boarding school for children maimed or blinded in recent years from explosions. Most say they picking up what they thought was a toy. The most heartbreaking part of reading all the kids' stories is that they all say how sad they feel when they think of their families - not because they miss them - but because, thanks to Aki Ra, they "eat so much better food and wear so much better clothes than their brothers and sisters and parents." Cripes.

Anyhow, I arrived at 5:30 AM at Angkor Wat (waved through by police) to see the legendary sunrise: the enormous temple and distinctive beehive towers are reflected in the moat as the first pink and red light emerges. Beautiful, yes. What stunning photos of this event don't show you is the 100s of tourists all positioned on the front gate, cameras snapping, and the touts running back and forth pushing coffee, eggs, postcards, water, bracelets, puppets, you name it. Always quick to flee my fellow tourists, I made a long hike to the backside of Angkor, and enjoyed the rest of the sunrise alone save the company of an enormous troop of monkeys, which was much more to my liking. Plus their funny monkey poses silhoutted with the beehive towers, as the blinding sun came up, made for better photos anyhow!

I then made it through 9 of the most famous ruins and temples before officially having my temple nervous breakdown, close to 11 AM. The moment came in Preah Kahn. I'm a fan of Vishnu as much as the next guy, but sometime around the 9th temple's 137th restored frieze depicting the puranas, and all Vishnu's arms started to make me dizzy. I began desperately searching for an exit (in the hot sun, clamboring over huge collapsed temple stones) when an Australian man nearby commentedto his wife "gosh, you could spend 2 days just in this temple alone, couldn't you?" Ahhh! No, I could not! Help me Mr. Kuhn!

Safely rushed to the nearest foot massage parlor, I recovered my strength and decided that for all Angkor Wat's majesty, and the dozens of amazing eight-foot faces carved at Angkor Thom, and the rose jewel of Bantay Srei, none of it holds a candle to Ta Prohm, my favorite temple from yesterday. All the restoration work on so many of these temples has a way of making things just slightly too sterile for me - I know others will disagree, but I prefer the crazy, raw, jungle-eaten lost temple of Ta Prohm. Post-massage I headed back to Ta Prohm to enjoy the enormous tree roots and mysterious tunnels and courtyards once more.

Later this afternoon, Mr. Kuhn took me to the Cambodian idea of a "crocodile farm," e.g. a big wooden box filled with two dozen unhappy crocodiles for tourists to look into and scream. We then headed out to Tonle Sap lake for sunset, which is a wild phenomenon - it's nearly the size of our own Great Lakes but is only a meter deep. Basically, it's an enormous bog. There are entire "floating villages" harvesting fish and fauna of people who live out there year round, and watching the sun set while they all began lighting their lanterns and fires on their small houseboats was beautiful. Apparently this was featured on the Amazing Race so perhaps some of you are already familiar.

The end of the day found me back on the FCC poolside lounger for happy hour, again. What can I say, this is my 2nd of 3 chances to hang at the FCC! And you can be sure I'll be there tomorrow too - except tomorrow at the Phnom Penh location. The six hour bus ride from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh begins at 7 AM tomorrow so I'm off with my freshly nibbled feet to bed.

Oh and last night's crocodile did die. The moral of the fable was something to the effect of "know your place" and "don't be ungrateful." Just the sort of message you hope to receive before bed from your hotel owner!

Post eighteen, which is full of mazes and discoveries

I arrived this morning in Cambodia, which appears to be the Iowa of SE Asia, flat, treeless, hot, rural, a lot of cows, and roadside stands selling root beer - or, cane sugar beer in this case. The only thing missing are my relatives! I was en garde, having been warned so much about the poverty here, and even when my hotel was on hand to meet my 15-minute early plane, for a free ride in a luxury tuk-tuk to the hotel, I was still a bit on edge.

I was greeted by three Cambodian hotel youth who were very concerned about my overheating and insisted I sit down in the lobby before checking in, and enjoy a cool washcloth to the forehead and a glass of what looked like alarmingly dirty drinking water. They smiled and stared, I smiled and stared back, enjoying the washcloth but determined not to touch the cloudy glass. They smiled and stared, and pointed at the glass, and stared, and stared, and finally I caved and drank...oh, lemonade. Whew.

So thank you, Hotel 89 - very little money per night here gets you lemonade, unlimited bottled water, 80 cable channels, free internet, the hottest shower I've had the whole trip, the softest pillows of the whole trip, and a tied scroll containing the text of a traditional Cambodian bedtime story, "The Crocodile and the Six Judges." I'm saving it for bedtime of course, and will let you know what happens to the crocodile tomorrow. It doesn't sound good.

Also $13 gets me a luxury tuk-tuk and private driver Mr. Kuhn for the day, from 5:30 AM onward, at my beck and call. I feel a bit like a colonial queen being toted around in my tasseled tuk-tuk with burgundy cushions and fancy claw armrests, naked children waving at me from the roadside. And Mr. Kuhn, hilariously, refuses to leave my side - I tried to tell him I would walk to get lunch today and meet him in an hour but he insisted on driving me the 2 blocks and then sitting in the tuk-tuk outside the restaurant window...in which I was the only diner, and the waiter likewise just stood next to me while I ate. It must've been exhausting to be royalty, actually; tomorrow I think I'll take my noodles to the bathroom and eat them in there.

Anyhow, today was day one of touring the extensive temples of Angkor Wat (there is only one actual Angkor Wat, like how there is only one Random House imprint, but also exists a greater Random House with many imprints, likewise, dozens of temples from 900-1200 A.D. are spread about an hour apart from the main Angkor Wat complex). I started with one of the furthest afield, Banteay Srei, considered a "jewel" and famous for its rose colored stone and incredible intact, intricate engravings. This was all true, but the temple itself is tiny - just one small main building - and I had a bit of a spoiled "oh, is this all there is to these legendary temples?" moment.

It was the perfect setup for Ta Prohm (google image if you don't know it!), the temple made famous by the A. Jolie vehicle Tomb Raider. Ta Prohm is totally overgrown with spectacularly huge white tree roots, which over the centuries have grown so thick they have prised apart the enormous temple stones. If I had paid attention to my Rough Guide, I would have known in advance that Ta Prohm complex once housed 12,000 people with 80,000 more living on its fringes. Instead I had no idea how enormous it would turn out to be, had low expectations after Banteay Srei, and ended up quite lost deep inside the unending, breathtaking, maze-like courtyards and tunnels.

I can't imagine a better place to be lost: the late afternoon sun sent slanting rays through the palms and overgrown temple doorways, the cicadas and birds shreiked overhead, and the enormous white tentacles of tree roots (enormous! two stories hight!), like so many alien claws, gripped the most staggering temple ruins I have yet to see. Most tourists visit Ta Prohm in morning (I am strategically doing the circuit backwards) and happily it was nearly deserted, so for much of my wanderings I was totally alone in the mysterious temple maze. I stayed till sunset and may go back again tomorrow.

I closed the evening with cocktails in the garden of the Foreign Correspondents Club of Siem Reap, one of the most romantic foreign locales I've been in since the Park Hyatt of Tokyo - too bad this one was wasted on me there alone, with my lonesome notebook and pen. I'd been dying to go here (and even more so the legendary FCC of Phnom Penh, where so much action went down in the 70's) and it met dreamy expectations: the all-white club, shutters thrown open and black ceiling fans spinning, palm trees reaching to a nearly-full moon, white loungers around a reflecting pool, with me on one of them, $5 green fizzy cocktail in hand ("Correspondent's Feast"). All it was missing was some Khmer Rouge violence outside the gates! Maybe next time.

Off to find out the fate of the crocodile, and hit the soft pillow for the night. 5:15 AM wake-up tomorrow to make it to Angkor Wat to see the sunrise over the temple.

Farewell, my lovely Luang Prabang

This was my last full day in Laos, and I am saying a sad farewell to Luang Prabang, the most livable city outside the US save Mexico City that I have ever encountered. The combination of cheap luxury, stunning scenic beauty, spicy food, fresh fruits, monks and motorcycling is all any girl could ask for!

I spent the morning motorbiking to the legendary Kouang Xi waterfalls/swimming holes, which I was a bit skeptical about, since I am skeptical about all destinations mentioned in tourist guidebooks, and also not the biggest waterfall person. It's water, and it's falling, folks! But I am SO glad I went, and SO glad I did the slightly uncomfortable clothing combination of motorcycle gear/swimwear. Plus it was my big laundry day ($1 for all your clothes washed in two hours) so I had very limited clean clothes leftover to choose from already. Let's just say I made sure no photos of me in my outfit were taken today.

Much like how no one photo can capture Amsterdam's endless beautiful rows of 1600's townhouses, no one photo can show you the beauty of Kouang Xi's endless crystal blue swimming holes, descending one after the other, waterfall giving way to swimming hole and again a dozen times, with local Lao frolicking nearby on their Sunday picnics. But I was so happy to have my swimwear and readily jumped on in to join the odd mix of monks, local Lao, and tourists enjoying blue pool after blue pool. I'm not clear on where this water comes from, since ever other Lao waterway I have seen is solid brown mud. Perhaps it is communist government-filtered.

My feet still in pain from my four hour jungle hike two days ago, I biked back to town and indulged in an hour long foot massage in the afternoon, which was phenomenal (Eastern-style with a focus on accupressure points, ahhh) and ran me all of $3.50. A sauna, banana milkshake, jumbo BeerLao, and bungalow balcony nap later ($2 total), I returned to "downtown" Luang Prabang for a fancy dinner to celebrate my final night in town.

I had made a reservation at Les 3 Nagas, Lao's most legendary foodie restaurant (it's even been reviewed in the New York Times!). It's quite expensive by Lao standards (by US standards, about equivalent to Olive Garden) - I had 2 generous glasses of wine and a 4 course Lao traditional dinner for $28. The highlight was the starter soup of tofu and Mekong river seaweed, but the overall lesson is that Lao streetfood (which I had been eating all week long) is just as good as Lao gourmet food, and streetfood sets you back a mere $1. But the 3 Nagas service was extremely sweet, and they did write "Mrs. Jynne" in silver paint pen on a banana leaf, bound to tropical flowers, and tied to a candle waiting for me at my table when I arrived, a personal touch I greatly appreciated. Maybe not $27 appreciated. But oh well.

Tomorrow morning I'll enjoy a final morning market and monk's alms, then board my 10:30 AM plane to Cambodia. I can hardy believe that in 24 hours I will be exploring one of the wonders of the ancient world, Angkor Wat. Internet situation in Cambodia is unclear so nobody (mom!) worry if I am MIA for a bit.

Channeling my inner Steve McQueen

Good news everybody! No footworms. But after that excruciating day of barefoot hiking, I thought my feet deserved a day off: so today became my official first full motorcycle day. $10 for a Honda Dream and a hot pink helmet and I was off on I-13 North toward the China border. (sorry mom, this is all dad's fault, he passed on the DNA).

Looking back on it, Motorcycle Safety School prepared me extremely well for SE Asia motorbiking: I ran over obstacles and handled dirt roads like a pro, and even remembered (and successfully executed!) the technique we practiced for dealing with dog attacks. The only material not covered was 1. Water buffalo - a twofold problem. If sprawled in the middle of the road, veer around it; if a herd crossing, stop motorbike and let them pass. 2. Chicken and elephant right-of-way - the opposite of what you might think. Elephants demurely yield, whereas chickens determinedly run headlong in front of you. This results in them being the squirrels of the SE Asia roadways: splattered twitching feather remains are not uncommon. 3. Goat herds! Okay, so I only encountered one goat herd my whole trip, but I was so thrilled and so busy staring at the goats (my favorite animal! so cute!) that I forgot I needed a strategy for driving through the middle of them until near impact. Happily we all panicked at the same moment, and scattered, intact, in our various appropriate directions.

I'd like to say that motorbiking northern Lao is super badass, but the truth is that animal obstacles aside, it is extremely easy, even on the dirtroads. In retrospect we did vastly harder drills on the Bronx obstacle course for hours on end; whereas driving here in Laos at a consistent speed, on lightly curving open roads, with no other vehicular traffic save the occasional slow moving pickup truck lugging a cow, is no problem at all.

I biked for seven hours to get as deep into northern Laos as I could in a day, following some of the trails I read about on the Biking the Golden Triangle message board. It was a mix of paved and dirt roads, through the beautiful Lao mountains, hugging the curves of muddy rivers, and through all kinds of tiny villages. I see why bikers are so crazy about it - you see, feel, and smell so much more - the hibiscus bushes, the coal fires, the buffalo poop, the laundry soap, the fish grilling on a flame.

I stopped at the Nam Ou caves, where broken images of the Buddha are disposed of from wats all over Lao in ghostly riverside caves, and at a village famous for its Lao Lao Whiskey - they float dead scorpions in it, for flavor or dramatic effect I'm not sure, but the flavor and the effect are equally frightening. Low on gas somewhere deep in the mountains I began to panic having, well, NEVER seen a single gas station here, but eventually figured out that the local village stores sell not only water, grilled fish, and cigarettes, but also buckets of gas. I filled up for $2 and was back on my way.

The only part of driving my bike that was a challenge was, embarassingly, getting it started. Unlike the bikes we drove at Motorcycle School, this had a pump-kick start that I couldn't master for the life of me. So each time I stopped (for water buffalo herds, bathroom, vistas, town visits) I had to flag down a local to restart my bike, much to their amusement. Or maybe it was just a farang in a hot pink helmet making them laugh. Each time I studied what they were doing until finally by mid-afternoon I had it down - shift into neutral, pump the kicklever, give it a little throttle at the sweet moment AND a slight push forward, and, vrooom! It was a relief to not have stopping create such a scene anymore.

Tomorrow: biking to find Henri Mouhot's grave. He died in Luang Prabang when he was only 35 years old, and is buried somewhere outside town. Also by the way thank you everyone who is reading and commenting! It is really nice to feel your presence and support over here on the other side of the planet.

In which thanks is given for computer paper

After this morning's monk alms-giving, I met up with the Big Brother Mouse staff for the best possible way to celebrate Thanksgiving that I can imagine - donating an entire library to a hilltribe village where in many cases the children have never seen a book, much less owned one, and then getting to go with the Big Brother Mouse staff to deliver the donated books to the village, for what they call a "book party." How much does it cost to give a whole Lao village books? $250, folks. Everyone should do this.

Apparently the Westerners who sponsor "book parties" rarely make it out for the actual visit, and in general they apparently go quite deep into northern Laos for the book delivery, so the BBM staff asked me beforehand what degree of trekking I was up for. I said I was a highly fit 32 year old and I would love to go as far as they wanted to take me!

1 van ride, 2 canoe rides, a 2 hour uphill hike, 11 forged rivers (knee to waist deep) and 3 leeches later, I was beginning to rethink my level of fitness. Some of the village children met us at the edge of the Nam Ou river to lead the way through the jungle to their village, and their barefoot pace through the jungle might best be described as "running." Now I've done some epic and vigorous hikes in my time, but they didn't involve being soaked from the waist down the entire time, or being charged by a startled water buffalo.

BBM had suggested I wear flip-flops due to all the wading we were going to have to do (sometimes for entire stretches of the hike we'd just walk upriver, midstream) but if you've ever tried to hike uphill in wet flip-flops I think you'll agree with me that it is totally impossible. I ended up doing most of the hike barefoot which is in fact a lot easier, traction and balance wise, but my feet now are sore, torn up, and have a few weird swollen white spots on them which I hope are just strange blisters but which I fear are some obscure tropical worm that has burrowed into my flesh and will slowly, quietly eat me while I sleep tonight. Only time will tell.

Anyhow it was all worth it (well, if I don't get eaten by footworms) for the once-in-a-lifetime experience of being the honored guest at a village that has rarely/never had a foreign visitor. Seeing the children stand in rows and vigorously clap for me upon my introduction was the first of many moments that made me start to cry, even if perhaps their teacher did just say in Lao "clap for white lady or get no fish stick later!" BBM has an incredible program that they do with the kids (read all about it here) which involves games, singing, storytelling, and special food treats, and the staff is absolutely incredible at putting on an amazing day for the children.

At the end the children find out that they each get their own book of their choice, to keep forever, and 3 blank sheets of computer paper, for writing and drawing their own ideas. I was in charge of handing out the computer paper: to have thrilled child after child bow at my feet, press their little palms together and tell me Khup jai lai lai Jeeeen! for 3 blank sheets of computer paper - well, it was all I could do to not be the crazy sobbing white lady at that point.

Leeches, by the way, don't hurt at all and do seal the wound they make on you shut, as the guidebooks promised. But they do look totally and completely disgusting while writhing, sticking vertically out from your blood vein. Totally. Completely. Disgusting.

In which thanks is given for rice

The most famous must-see event in Luang Prabang is the morning alms giving to the monks. From about 6 AM-7 AM the thousands of monks walk the streets with baskets, and all the locals come out to "make merit" by tucking a little something in their baskets: a ball of sticky rice, a candy bar, a dollar bill, an orange. It's just like trick-or-treating! Except those orange robe outfits are FOR REAL!



Since it is barely light outside, the morning mist is still on the mountains, and smoke is wafting down the streets from all the bonfires I've previously mentioned, it is incredibly mysterious-feeling to be looking down a dusky alley and suddenly see a procession of dozens of the orange-robed monks emerging from the haze. Mysterious, until you make it to the main Luang Prabang drag and there are all your tourists friends with flash-cameras running up and down the street like maniacs. Embarassed for us all, I retreated back to a more obscure dusky alley to watch my monks go past: much more serene and beautiful that way. My favorite aspect was the secondary economy of alms-giving: poor children run alongside the monks holding plastic bags, and any foods that the monks apparently don't like they take out of their baskets and re-deposit it in a kid's bag. I'm going to try that next Halloween and see if I get some Reeses Cups! Or sticky rice.

The monks are satisfied with the state of affairs

Woke up at 5:30 AM to rooster cries and the deep sonorous banging of the monk's drums, calling them to morning chanting. Let me tell you, sound really carries in an otherwise silent river town! I enjoyed the river sunrise on my balcony lounger wrapped in a big comforter - it gets quite cool here at night even though it turns into a blazing, untenable, ferocious 90 some degrees by midafternoon.


The morning plan was to visit many of the town's wats (temples/monasteries) which are all in active use by the monks. I can't say enough about how beautiful it looks to have them in their shaved heads and orange robes peeking out of so many windows and coming out of alleyways! Little did I know, though, that by Noon today I would be fleeing from them. Turns out they all want to practice their english, especially with single lady tour-eests, so I made very little wat-visit progress for five hours this morning, waylaid by excited monks at every turn.


My favorite monk was the first one I met, Sam (perhaps because I still had patience at that point of the morning for an hour-long, highly fragmented conversation). I climbed to the top of the mountain that juts right out of the middle of town, with a beautiful gold stuppa on top and stunning views in every direction of the layer upon layer of mountains and rivers. When I finally hauled myself to the steep top I was alone except for Sam, who was sitting in profile on a marble balcony ledge. The sight of Sam curled up in his orange robe, with the lush green mountains dropping behind him, was one I will never forget.


Sam is 16, from a remote northern Lao village, and was sent to monastery for an education. Boys get this privilege; his sister is still at home, working the family rice farm. Kirsten, any interest? He just passed his geography exam and was anxious to quiz me: I think he was a little disappointed that I did, in fact, know that Canada is the next largest land mass after ROO-SEE-AH (which took me like 5 minutes to understand what country he was talking about in the first place). We then had a very long talk about Chinese and their cabbage, how they have a lot of cabbage in China, more cabbage than any other country, and Sam thinks it is disgusting. Well, who can disagree with that? I agree that there are much better vegetables. Also when the Chinese tourists come to visit his temple, they throw their cabbage on the grounds. Shameful! For awhile I wasn't quite sure why Sam was so upset, until I finally realized we were discussing garbage, not cabbage.


By noon the ferocious midday heat was on, and nearly every single Lao seemed to be curled up on a mat napping, even the ones supposedly on the job (e.g. the hosts at restaurants). Any Laos up and about had an umbrella, including the monks, and adorably, girls holding pink parasols and clinging to the backs of motorcycles, shading themselves and their drivers. I chose to stay indoors and relax Lao style: I had a 50 cent banana shake, an hour-long oil massage for $5 on a balcony overlooking the Mekong (in fact you can just add "on a balcony overlooking the Mekong" to any and all activities for the next week), a glass of authentically French cab sauvignon at Luang Prabang's swankiest joint L'Elephant (palm trees, white curtains, wicker furniture), and another banana shake and 50 cent Nutella crepe off the street to really polish off the indulgence. Any town where $10 gets you multiple fruit shakes, Nutella, massages and a sauna visit is made for me!


By 3 PM it was cool enough to venture outdoors again and I visited the rather lame Royal Palace now turned museum. The best part was the room of objects that have been gifts to Lao from other countries through the past 400 years; when you are a tiny country I guess your gifts all fit in one room without much of a problem. Most countries (Japan, Thailand, China) had given fine china, teasets, and servingware. France gave some beautiful urns, and Burma some exquisite silver sculptures. Australia gave a boomerang, which looked hilariously sad next to all the really nice stuff. But the lamest looking of all was the US - we gave a plastic model of the Apollo hotglued to a silver plate, next to a tatty, tiny Lao flag with a typed note from Richard Nixon that we had taken their flag to the moon. Hey Laos, you're welcome! I presume we did that for every country - in the world? - and it is kind of funny to picture the part of the spaceship that had to house all those tatty little flags, as well as the Nixon staffer who was in charge of glueing the models and putting the global packages together.


Anyhow, off to sauna again of course, and tomorrow attending the morning alms-giving to the monks and then going with Big Brother Mouse to a hilltribe village to deliver a library to kids.

An excess of grandeur

"The Mekong forces its way between the lofty mountains with a noise resembling the roaring of the sea. There is almost an excess of grandeur. The eye rests constantly on these mountain slopes, clothed in the richest and thickest verdure."

So wrote explorer Henri Mouhot in his diary as he journeyed down the Mekong in 1860, becoming the first Westerner to ever penetrate northern Laos and make it to Luang Prabang. From his diaries it seems like little has changed in the past century, including the long wooden banana boat that we crowded onto for the Mekong journey, except that thanks to the invention of the outboard motor my trip took 2 days and his, 7 miserable months. He writes that some days he only made it about 1 mile, which begs the question why travel by boat at all (and/or, why leave Paris in the first place?). Also he seemed to encounter far more crocodile and tigers. Maybe our motor scared them off. We did see a dead pig corpse float past, belly up, if that counts as animal excitement?


The beginning of the boat trip was a little intense - the boatman loaded a basically insane number of locals, tourists, luggage, and other, ah, crap (sacks of rice, cages full of birds, you know, the usual) onto this one small slip of a wooden boat, and all the tourists, myself included, began to have a bit of a type-A freakout about personal space. After all we are going to be on this thing for 16 hours over the course of 2 days, and sitting on a wooden floor for that long is not the most comfortable situation even if you have all the space in the world to sprawl.


But about 30 minutes into the trip everyone seemed to calm down and accept the Zen nature of whooshing down the giant muddy Mekong. I managed to find myself a seat at the very top front lip of the boat, right next to one of the aforementioned cages of birds, my back to a sack of rice, my legs hanging off the front lip and occasionally getting splashed, and many hours passed very peacefully this way. The scenery was nothing short of constantly spectacular - very fjord-like, actually, with the green mountains plunging in dramatic V's right up from the water - and at least every four of five minutes was some interesting form of life on the riverbank, whether it be a herd of water buffalo, a fisherman poling a longboat, or a random small child running naked along the bank. I napped on and off, read my Mouhot diary, and especially in the slanting afternoon light was breathless to actually be on such a stunningly beautiful trip.

We stayed overnight in Pakbeng which is essentially a collection of shacks on the riverbank for the purpose of housing everyone on this voyage. I handed over my $4 for the room and broke out the sleepsack again: the Sheraton, this was not. In fact, Pakbeng only has electricity for a brief period each evening, so late at night and again in the morning I had to grope through the dark, not perfectly clean bathroom....hmm, let's think no more upon that.

Day 2 looked just like day 1 on the Mekong, except that everyone was calmer about space, and we actually left around 9:30 AM instead of departing at Noon as the day before (and to clarify, we were mostly all loaded by 9 AM the day before...the boat just hung around until Noon because, well, I don't really know why. There isn't a strong sense of the concept of time here.) We pulled into Luang Prabang at sunset which looked exactly like photo below (those are our boats!), and is just an astonishingly adorable, beautiful village, at least as close as there is going to be such a thing in SE Asia. Dozens of wats, the orange robed monks, street upon street of red-rooved two story colonial homes, and the intersection of two major rivers, the Mekong and the Nam Ou.

I am staying at what would pass in the US as a luxury spa outside of town for $35 a night, with my own private bungalow in a manicured tropical garden, and a balcony overlooking the quieter Nam Ou River. My hotel even provides a cushy lounger on the balcony and they bring me breakfast at my bungalow in the morning. No sleep sack needed tonight!

Steam, sunset, spring rolls, sleep sack

First things first: I am at an internet cafe in Luang Prabang and it is, as rumored, filled with monks using the internet! There is one in his saffron robe right next to me! Luang Prabang has dozens of monasteries (nearly 100 apparently) so the density of monks is very high, and I heard they frequent the internet cafes, but you just can't imagine the weirdness of it until you are in the moment.

I have arrived from my 2 day wooden boat journey down the Mekong, but let me backtrack my night in the border town. I previously mentioned the Red Cross sauna they were heating up two days ago, and I want to devote this post to the joys and civility of international bathing rituals which we entirely lack in America. The Lao Sauna differs from others in being an extremely heavily steam sauna: you can't even see a foot in front of you, and in my first sauna misadventure I entered, tripped on a bench, then sat down right on top of a Lao woman. Whoops! Nothing is as embarassing as listening to the next five minutes of Lao conversation and only understanding the repeated word farang (white person). I had thought I was the first person into the sauna but apparently whilst writing my last blog post 2 locals beat me into it (one now squashed, one intact).

Anyhow their ritual is 10-20 minutes in fierce steam sauna, then come sit outside on a balcony overlooking the Mekong sunset and drink specially made herbal tea to restore nutrients to your body. Then back to the sauna, back to tea, as many times as you can stand (for me that tops out around 3). You get to wear the most gorgeous woven sarangs whilst you do this, and happily I seem to be the only white person who bothered to research the bathing situation so it's all local (I have already been, right off the boat, to the Red Cross Sauna here in Luang Prabang too).

After my sauna two days ago, I grabbed dinner at one of the dozens of restaurants clinging to an overhang on the banks of the Mekong, and watched a fiercely vivid sunset. They had a phenomenal tom yum salad, my new favorite food - a huge pile of shaved papaya lightly dressed in a fiery hot dressing - sweet and hot and refreshing all at once! And Lao beer is delightfully effervescent and all of like 30 cents.

When I got back to my hotel the power was out, and I cursed myself for picking such a cheap place; but they then explained that the entire town's power was out. Perhaps that was why there were so many random bonfires going in the street? Or perhaps that's just life in a povertous village. I'll never know. When I asked why it was out they said "Comes from Thailand." Kind of hilarious. Not being able to inspect my sheets in the dark for bedbugs (I have not heard any reports while here, but read enough before going on this vacation to feel terrified of the prospect) I unwrapped my sleep sack for the first time, essentially a sewn up sheet, and hit the hay. I wanted to get up early enough not only for my morning yoga but to secure a good seat on the wooden boat, which was going to depart "9 or 12 tomorrow" as though there is no nuance whatsoever between the two.

Spent most of today on a gorgeous but very long (6 hour) winding bus trip through the mountains of northern Thailand to get to the Lao border crossing. JFK customs it is not: a man under a tent on the river beach stamps your passport, you hike through sand to climb aboard a skinny wooden boat, and you get shuttled across the river where on the opposite beach you pay $35 and climb on up to Laos. Apparently liquids and Al Queda are not a problem over here.

The town is among the most poor I have ever been in, save a few real outposts in Ecuador: fighting roosters, random bonfires in the street, and a handful of slightly alarmed looking white people staying overnight so we can get the slowboat down the Mekong tomorrow morning. It wasn't a great first impression but the sun has started to set over the river and it is undeniably breathtakingly beautiful. Also, I have the Red Cross heating up their herbal sauna for me ($1 and it smells delicious!) though without a giant wooden spoon I don't know how I'll splash cold water on myself.

This is likely my last post for about two days as I don't think the Mekong has wireless.

2 dresses, 1 mounted scorpion, 3 fresh orange juices, 12 coconut balls, 1 hipster satchel, and 1 carved elephant later

Sunday night market in Chiang Mai: holy smokes! I almost didn't go, since I had gone to the daily Night Bazaar earlier in the week which is what my dad would call a TTT. It was all farang tourists and crazy overpiced goods (by Thai standards, anyhow) and the same 10-12 items in most booths. But my amazing guesthouse co-owner Moe told me I could not under any circumstances skip the Sunday night market, and freshly armed with my Western Union baht I went on down.

Well at this point I have been to some crazy world markets - the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul, Otavalo craft market in Ecuador, and the Tokyo fish market - and, okay, the Tokyo fish market will probably always rank as the craziest but this takes a close second. Seemingly all of northern Thailand descends on miles of closed-off streets in Chiang Mai and there is endless live music, cooking, fireworks, concerts, and best of all, unbelievably varied goods all for like $1-5.

I was glad to be alone here as I shopped for likely much longer than any other human could've put up with, and entered a perhaps ill-advised shopping hysteria since my bag size has already doubled and it's only day four. The breaking point came around 10 or 11 PM when I was negotiating for a gigantic 3 foot handcarved wooden spoon which I was going to get for the A frame sauna. I had him down to 50 cents before realizing I would be carrying a gigantic wooden spoon for the next two weeks, and decided it was time to get myself out of the market ASAP.

Here is like, 1/1000th of the market:

In which I spend an entire day eating

I already thought Thai cooking was hard work when Toby and I do it, but boy is it ever a workout. I spent the day at the Thai Farm Cooking School getting to intimately know a mortar and pestle but for the first time I appreciate how different the flavors are when you do so (Safko, owner of rarely used mortar and pestle, we now can cook together!), and how to properly do it. Good thai food is a phenomenal combination of flavors - they try to hit every note on the tongue - and they did a great job teaching us how to put ingredients together today. Of course, it also helps if you have access to fresh aubergines, coconuts, papaya, and a staff of four Thai women making your sticky rice for you.

The school was on a gorgeous farm in the mountains with an incredible facility, although I think inhaled a lifetime of smog riding the songthaew (open air pickup truck that serves as a taxi) out of the city. My new favorite dish I had today was, of course, a dessert - coconut sticky rice with mango. We heated coconut cream with sticky rice, added a lot of salt for a contrasting salt bite, and then sliced the most delicious cold mango on top. We had already eaten some half dozen meals at that point (cook for an hour, eat for half an hour, repeat all day!) but I still downed that one fast.

This evening I successfully got my wired money from a Western Union - HUGE RELIEF! - and now off to the Sunday night market to spend it all on elephant statues and toasted crickets. Thank you Toby!

The Dilemma of Modernist Motorcycling

Just a quick post this morning before I leave for cooking school, about traffic in Chiang Mai. Now Chiang Mai is supposed to be the "Boston of Thailand" and with under a million people, it's 1/9 the size of NYC and 1/20 the size of Tokyo. Yet I had read before coming here a tourist talking about how she was always on the verge of being run over and had trouble crossing the streets. I have to admit I felt a twinge of condescension when I read that, thinking oh, she must be from the suburbs, or an awfully slow walker. Who can't cross a street?

In fact, this place may be a smaller city, but it is lawless. LAWLESS! The motorcycle and tuktuk (and wild dog) traffic on the main roads at nighttime is one of the craziest things I have seen (Tokyo was crowded, but at least they respected traffic signals). There are few to no sidewalks, few to no stoplights, and indeed it is a total act of faith to cross a street. You can't wait for a break in traffic - there is none. You just step into oncoming motorcycles and hope they are skilled enough to all miss you, which incredibly, they seem to be. You may as well just close your eyes and walk across the street, for all the control you have over the situation. I actually can't imagine now what Bangkok will be like.

Effects of an Elephant

Watched Good Will Hunting in Thai till midnight last night waiting for the airport delivery of my luggage: but the bag is at last here, intact, with yoga mat, so I got up at 6:30 AM this morning for celebratory yoga on my guesthouse balcony - clean clothes and an hour of stretching felt wonderful, even if I still lack cash.

Thankfully I had prepaid online for today's activity, the Elephant Nature Park. I hope everyone I know gets the chance to go here someday - it was an absolutely singular experience. The park is devoted to rescued elephants (elephant abuse is a major issue here, with most elephants being tortured to perform for tourists, shot up with amphetamines, tamed in terrible ways, etc). It was started 15 years ago by an incredible Thai woman named Lek. Over the years she has expanded her sanctuary and it is a vast idyllic expanse of mountain jungle where dozens of domesticated, formerly abused elephants roam free by day and are fed all 1000 tons of food that they like to eat, massaged, and washed - it's basically like an enormous elephant spa.

When you go, you are on elephant duty all day, feeding them and washing them, which is just an incredible experience. Elephants only sleep 4 hours a day and constantly snack for the other 20 (apparently I am part elephant). To be up so close to those huge animals - to be in the river scrubbing them, rubbing their backs, getting incredibly disgusting slobbery kisses on my toes and cheeks from them - I never imagined I would get to spend so much time with them, even when I signed up for the day at the park. I thought we would mostly be watching from viewing stations but in fact, we spent a lot of the day in the mud and dust with them, and I have the filthy clothes on at the moment to show it. Who knew I'd be doing laundry by day four?

I can't upload my own (um, 600 or so) pictures of me and my new friends but here is someone else's online photo from the park - you can still see wounds on many of the elephants including on this one's trunk in the photo.

Conversations about Baggage

So not only is my backpack - with all my cash in it - somewhere in Beijing airport, but Capitol One apparently has frozen my checking account since I failed to alert them that I was going to Thailand, so this morning I found myself in a stanky three-day-old outfit and nearly broke, on a plane to Chiang Mai. I had enough cash to get from the airport to my hotel (since that is all of about $1) and then thank you, thank you, thank you Toby for emailing my Chiang Mai guesthouse to forewarn them of my condition: Sam and Moe were waiting on the street for me when I arrived with welcoming arms and bows and assurances that they would make sure everything worked out, and a banana milkshake.

On my agenda for today was an all-afternoon trip to the mountainside outside Chiang Mai to meet with a monk named Pongsa. Pongsa had emailed me dubiously cryptic instructions (e.g. "get off at gas station. walk 200 km north. turn down dirt path for 25 minutes walking") so for better or for worse I showed them to the guesthouse owner Sam, hoping he'd point me in the right direction. Sam, being an incredible human being, or afraid of losing an American female in the rice paddies, insisted on going with me, which turned out to take up a horrifying 4-5 hours of his time but was invaluable to me.

Sam and I made a number of errant forays down dirt paths before finding one dirt path where an old man on a bicycle had heard of this Phra Pongsa. The old man hopped off the bike and said he'd lead us to Pongsa because it was complicated - at that point I assumed Pongsa was maybe 10 minutes away, but in fact, we had a near hour walk through rice paddies ahead of us. It was surreal - we tiptoed across irrigation canals on incredibly narrow branches laid across 15 foot ditches, walked beneath banana trees, were chased by wild dogs, and at one point passed the most emaciated man I have ever seen in person, completely naked, squatting on a stump, and smoking a huge cigar. I don't know what I would have done without Sam to initally flag the bicycle man down and explain our errand in Thai - probably I would still be wandering through the rice paddies, waving my computer-printout itinerary at day laborers who were actually wearing triangle straw hats and driving water buffalo.

Miraculously though the bicycle man did take us to Pongsa: and then ensued an amazing 2 hours in which Pongsa, a beautiful wizened monk, 62 years old, former professor, shared all sorts of wisdom in near perfect English. Mind you Pongsa and I are sitting on a straw mat in the middle of a giant banana tree field, with a clothesline strung from which Pongsa hangs an orange sheet to block the sun. In the middle of this nothingness, Pongsa held forth with some of the most beautiful teachings I have gotten to ever sit and listen to.

The very first thing Pongsa spoke to me about was baggage, and what a burden it is. How it ties us to things we don't actually need, and how we get greedy and emotional and panicked if we are faced with losing things. But how the only asset that matters is time: it is the only thing we actually own, and someday when it is running out, we would spend all our money and give all our possessions to have more of it, and how important to be present and use it wisely. It was all I could do not to laugh aloud, hearing this on a day that began with me in tears over not having my backpack or money.

Anyhow Pongsa had many amazing teachings that I can relay in person to interested parties; but it was an incredible afternoon, and as a parting gift Pongsa gave me a giant branch of his bananas to take with me. This might have been a lot to haul back for an hour through rice paddies, but Sam hailed a day laborer and negotiated for him to take both of us on his motorcycle back down the mountain - so already on Day One I did what all the guidebooks say never to do, ride a moto with a local (so dangerous), and even worse there were 3 of us and a giant banana branch to boot on a single motorbike. But the ride was a thrill and, obviously, we made it safely back.

I'm now sated on red Thai tofu curry and my luggage is due to arrive at 11:30 PM tonight. No sign of relenting by Capitol One yet, despite my shoving my ATM card into every machine in this entire city, but thank you Toby for still trying to help me reach them or somehow get cash.

Pseudoreality Prevails

It's 8 AM in the grotto nearby the Bangkok airport, my $20 airport hotel on a narrow alley that is in all ways your cinematic idea of southeast Asia - food stalls with all sorts of frightening looking tentacled things on sticks or in ziploc plastic bags, dozens of motorcycles with families hanging off, wild dogs, weird swampy green canals crisscrossing the street, actual sighting of 2 barefood saffron-robed monks on their way to...temple? work? Paul Simon's "Sound of Silence" currently on speaker for no apparent reason, and importantly, the hotel's internet station right out in the street, directly next to an enromous plastic Donald Duck paddle boat. In another hour I return to the Bangkok airport to fly on to Chiang Mai, which all the teen Thai boys assure me is "vehhy vehhy cold." Considering the heat and humidity here I assume the breezy 70 degrees forecast for Chiang Mai would indeed count as so.

My Air China voyage began auspiciously, as I got an entire four-wide seat row all to myself and stretched out for a delightful 9 hour sleeping pill induced coma, and woke feeling refreshed and already adjusted to the time change. My obsessive over-hydration also paid off as I felt fresh and well hydrated; the only downside was the need for very frequent bathroom trips and Air China users BEWARE! There was a reason for the Olympics the government had to spend a million in propaganda explaining to these people the concept of a "line." The message apparently didn't have legs, because I have never seen such an aggressive free for all at the bathroom cluster. After politely letting some half dozen of them cut in front of me I finally had to give a middle aged man an elbow to get into the stall. It did help that I was a foot taller than him.

But from here it was downhill: the flight to Bangkok was tiny and cramped with spazzy Chinese teen girls who climbed over me every five minutes of the five hour trip, and so I was already on edge when I landed at BKK around midnight to learn that Air China didn't manage to get my bag onto my BKK flight, but not worry, they would get it to BKK by 6 PM Friday night. Only problem is I LEAVE BANGKOK AT 11 AM THIS MORNING YOU $#)*#$)#@$%*)(. They promise to send it on to Chiang Mai late tonight and briefly suggested that I would have to return to the Chiang Mai airport to pick it up myself, since Air China has no representative in Chiang Mai to deliver it to me, to which I said with my crazy-I-have-been-on-a-plane-for-twenty-hours-eyes that they CAN and WILL find a way to get it to my hotel, at their expense, and that it WILL arrive by Friday night, and that is the end of the story.

So, we'll see. I'm equipped with a bunch of Air China, Air Asia and Air Thai phone #s I can't use myself, lots of receipts and carbon copies in curlicue thai and chinese that I can't read, and trusting that both in Bangkok and Chiang Mai someone will find my bag and send it on to the proper destinations. I'm really fine on everything except underwear - unfortunately none of these little stalls appear to sell any. Then again the giant plastic Donald Duck looks happy enough going bare bottomed. Perhaps I'll join him.

The Beijing airport is utopian

Around this time tomorrow I will be on Air China 982 to Beijing, with a 1 hour layover before flying on to Bangkok. Coming back I have a 6 hour layover in Beijing, which I am quite excited about - like my friend Zelimir I am a huge fan of international airports. I love that strange experience of narrowly being in a country that you are not otherwise visiting. Of course, some airports turn out to be disappointments - I venture to say that I never again need extra time in the Bogota airport . Aqueduct Racetrack has more amenities, and more toilet paper. But happily, in researching the Beijing airport I learned that Terminal 3 alone (the terminal I fly into) is as large as all five of Heathrow's terminals combined, with another 17% to spare, including a "global market" with 72 stores. Abacus users will know that gives me a mere 5 minutes per store on my layover, so I'll have to move briskly.

Nature and substance of a packing list

To fit into one backpack: Cipro, sleeping pills, bug spray, suntan lotion, bandaids, neosporin, advil, flor-restor. Conversion chart of dollars, baht, kip, riel, back to dollars. Camera, memory cards, battery charger, electric outlet plug converter. Yoga mat, yoga clothes. Rough Guide Thailand, Rough Guide Laos, Rough Guide Cambodia, Rough Guide Bangkok. Diaries of Henri Mouhot, Alan Watts, John Berger, a novel TBD. Two changes of clothes, two pair sock, lots of underwear. Shampoo, conditioner, soap. Sunglasses, jacket, boots, gloves for biking. Flip flops, swimsuit for bathing elephants. Books and toys for Big Brother Mouse kids. Empty spaces for taking home spices.

From which, remarkably enough, nothing develops

In less than a week I will be on my Air China flight to Bangkok, and from there, immediately moving on to spend a few weeks in northern Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia. I'll be posting updates about my trip here, as time and backwater internet connectivity permits.