Author: Josh Philip Ross

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Where I’ve Been Where I’m Headed

Sapa, Vietnam

I realize that it has been ages since I last gave an update, so here it is.

Laos and Vietnam

After Cambodia, I spent a few weeks traveling around the north of Laos: Luang Prabang, trekking in Luang Namtha, a trip down the Nam Ou River from Muang Khua to Muang Ngoi to Nong Khiaw, back to Luang Prabang, out to the Plain of Jars, down to Vang Vieng, and finally through the capital, Vientiane. I will (I hope) have more details to provide eventually.

From Vientiane, at the end of March, I came to Hanoi, where I gave a lecture on how Jewish people raise their children, in between visits to Halong Bay, Ninh Binh, and now Sapa. I head back to Hanoi this afternoon.

Thailand

Then it’s on to a weekend at the beach in Hua Hin, Thailand, a couple of days in Bangkok, and then up to Khon Kaen from April 13 to 16 to enjoy Songkran, the Thai new year festival. After that, I’ll have a couple more days in Bangkok, then head south to Phuket — I’m already booked for the Passover seder at the local Chabad on April 22 — and Krabi, and maybe some other beaches too.

Singapore and Indonesia

When I finish up with South Thailand, I’ll pop in to Singapore for a few days, probably around the end of April. From Singapore, I’ll fly to Bali and begin a month in Indonesia. You cannot possibly see all of Indonesia in a month (or ever, really), but I intend to spend a week or two in Bali and Lombok, beginning with the cultural heart of the island in Ubud. When I wrap that up, I want to visit Jogjakarta and some of the historical sites around it, and if there’s time, I’d like to visit Kalamantan (Borneo) as well. Jakarta I can skip, or so everyone tells me.

America

I’ll probably circle back to Bangkok to catch a flight to the US, probably Los Angeles. From there, it’s a quick hop to Phoenix on a local flight, but I might spend a couple days in LA and environs, if anyone wants to put me up and can accept my jet lag. I’m expecting that to happen around June 7, more or less.

I’ll be in Phoenix probably through June, and would like to visit NYC in July. Anyone have a place for me to stay?

Korea and (maybe) Japan

And then? Well, school starts on September 6, so I need to get to Korea before then and find a place to live (and furniture, and Internet, and cable, and, and, and … eep!). But I might spend August touring around Korea beyond Seoul, and possibly even Japan. Again, anyone who has a place for me to stay should let me know.

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Better Vacationing

Van Long Reserve, Ninh Binh Province, Vietnam

Today it was announced that South Korea will host a new sustainable tourism-eliminating poverty (ST-EP) body of the United Nations World Tourism Organization, with forty member states to begin with.

Such an organization is sorely needed. As I travel around Southeast Asia, I see every sort of tourism, from well managed World Heritage sites like Hoi An, to chaotic free-for-alls like Bagan and Vang Vieng, and everything in between. Today I went on a ride in a cement-lined rowboat — seriously — pushed along by a woman who’s lucky if she gets a passenger once every three weeks, because there are too many rowers and not enough tourists at the Van Long Reserve, and because the government hasn’t provided these rowers with the lighter, more durable, more expensive metal boats that they gave to the women down in the more popular Trang An. (In Trang An, though, there are a thousand boats, so the rowers wait just about as long for a turn at some business.) In theory, these rowing jobs are an improvement over the rice farming everyone used to do before the land got turned into tourist reserves, but I’m not sure it quite works out that way.

A new UN body will not fix all of the problems of unsustainable tourism, from overdevelopment to displacement to environmental degradation. But a UN body can set norms, make recommendations, track progress, set benchmarks. It can give sustainable, poverty-eliminating tourism a focal point and become a clearinghouse of information for travelers and governments and developers. It’s a good step (sorry) in the right direction.

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Brooklyn the Brand

Vientiane, Laos

When I talk to people about Seoul, I talk about how much it has changed since I first went there, in 2001. But I suppose Brooklyn — my home ever since that sojourn in Asia — has changed almost as much in that same time. Maybe I noticed it less, being there day to day, whereas with Seoul I didn’t go back until 2009, and then again in 2013, 2014, and 2015.

I first discovered Brooklyn in the late nineties, when my friend Daniel moved out to a place on Sackett Street in Carroll Gardens. His place served as a kind of stoner artists’ collective, with a rotating gallery of roommates and hangers on and a regular habit of ordering in from Zaytoons.

Brooklyn wasn’t much then — certainly not in the brand sense. No one had heard of Williamsburg. Smith Street was just beginning to turn into restaurant row. DUMBO was an eerie, photogenic post-industrial wasteland with a few intrepid artists staking out studios in the ruins. Taxi drivers didn’t much like or even know Brooklyn. There was no Brooklyn Bridge Park, no concerts at McCarren Park. There were no Brooklyn bands. Brooklyn wasn’t yet a thing.

Well, now it’s a thing. NYC has always been a brand, and I see it everywhere in the world, but Brooklyn? It’s a surprise to see the name plastered on clothing and accessories across Asia. Apparently Spike Lee’s ad agency noticed too.  They’ve made a film to showcase the Brooklyn brand that’s being co-opted by companies around the world that have no connection to the actual place. It’s fun to see my town, and to see a couple of people I recognize. It’s not exactly Bitter Sweet Seoul, but it’s a nice little look at some of the cool things about the place I called home for more than a decade.

 

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Don’t Visit North Korea

Vientiane, Laos

Yes, it’s possible to visit North Korea. No, you shouldn’t do it.

As the horrifying case of Otto Warmbier unfolds, it’s clear that North Korea is interested in taking American hostages. Warmbier has been sentenced to fifteen years of hard labor for allegedly stealing a propaganda poster in his hotel room.

It’s unclear whether Warmbier will ever serve that sentence, but if he does, he will not be alone in the labor camps. Hundreds of thousands of North Koreans are there already, in the conditions that upset us so much when we consider an American being sent there, and often for reasons as stupid and paltry.

Visits to North Korea are not really visits to North Korea. They’re visits to a performance of North Korea, staged by the government. Your money for your visit goes to the government. It sustains the same government that is destroying Otto Warmbier’s life without remorse as part of its power games. The same government that holds out the promise of family reunions, only to withdraw at the last moment, toying with the hearts of its own citizens. The same government that has kidnapped teenagers from Japanese beaches. The same government that the UN found has committed human rights abuses “without parallel in the contemporary world.”

If you have a real reason to go to North Korea, like the volunteers at Choson Exchange, then go. Otherwise, don’t.

I realize that by posting this, I am disqualifying myself from going to North Korea. I shouldn’t go. You shouldn’t either. It’s not safe, and it’s not right to support the regime. We are only pawns in their game.

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Cambodia

Luang Prabang, Laos

The first memorable thing I saw in Cambodia was the body of a motorcyclist, lying helmetless in a pool of blood behind a large truck. Two or three men stood around, motionless. There was nothing to be done.

Ghosts and fever

Photos

Phnom Penh was better than I expected. I suppose I was expecting Mandalay, but the Cambodian capital is in decent shape, with some signs of development. It’s sleepy and pleasant, even if most of its major sights — the royal palace, Wat Phnom — feel like lesser versions of similar monuments in Bangkok.

On my last day in Phnom Penh, I visited Tuol Sleng, a high school that the Khmer Rouge turned into a prison. Of the 27,000 inmates who passed through, there were twelve known survivors. The rest were sent to the killing fields, if they survived the torture and starvation inside the prison long enough. Tuol Sleng is just one small piece of the Cambodian genocide — a genocide the nation more or less committed against itself, killing two million people, or a quarter of the population, between the emergence of the Khmer Rouge in 1975 and its defeat by a Vietnamese invasion in 1979.

Later that same night, I stumbled onto a Dengue Fever concert. Dengue Fever is an LA band with a Khmer singer, and they’ve revived Cambodia’s amazing psychedelic rock from the late sixties and early seventies — the years before the genocide. The crowd consisted of just about every white hipster expat in the country, or so it seemed. There were also quite a few Khmers, including my companion, whom I’d met a couple of days before on a Tinder date. She’d never heard of either Dengue Fever or the music they’d brought back to life, but by the end of the concert she was grinning, running up to band members to have her picture taken with them, and declaring, “I love all of them! I love each one of them!”

Special friends and heavy metal pirates

Photos:

The temples of Angkor are famous for a reason. Opened to the public only a few decades ago, they now see more than two million visitors a year. I don’t need to tell you how incredible the temples are, but if you happen to be passing through, make sure you spend time at Bayon, which was my personal favorite. But the temples have their eerie qualities too. They are, after all, the legacy of autocratic military rulers, and their decline the result of a catastrophic series of defeats. There’s something Ozymandian in the many stone faces of the king that gaze down at you from the ramparts of ruined temples long forgotten and overgrown by the jungle. And the haunting Khmer music you often hear drifting through the trees and ruins is played by little bands of landmine victims who sit at the temple entrances and collect a bit of money.

I spent a total of four days at Angkor, the first two with my Khmer “special friend” — her term. On our second morning together, she decided to have bread and butter at the hotel breakfast, and I learned that this was her first time trying it. She had been to the Angkor temples once before, but she had never been out of the country, and once, as a plane flew overhead, she pointed to it and declared that any Cambodian who rides on one is very, very lucky. She makes more than three times the national average income as an au pair for a foreign family, but the national average income is around a thousand dollars a year. She went to school through seventh grade. Not too long ago, she was bitten by a snake. My Khmer special friend isn’t the first person I’ve dated in my travels, or the first local. But never before have I felt so acutely the gap in opportunity between myself and the person I was was with.

The remainder of my non-temple time I spent hanging around a weird little pirate-themed heavy metal bar for expats, well away from Siem Reap’s gruesome Pub Street. I’d met an Australian expat who’d become the bar’s manager — the owner is French — and I found myself sitting with the kind of expat who is happy to have discovered a place where he or she can drink more or less at will and not be bothered. I did meet a music producer who happened to have been responsible for the Dengue Fever visit, but many of the other expats seemed just to be lost, or hiding out, or running away from something.

All in all, despite the wonders of the temples and the pleasure of connecting with my special friend, Cambodia left me off-balance and shaken. After a brief eight days — my shortest visit to any country on this trip so far — I was ready to leave.

 

 

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Fearless

Nong Khiaw, Laos

I was rolling across northern Laos on a bus, looking out the window at the jungle-covered mountains and the rice fields and the little villages, and Pink Floyd’s “Fearless” came on in my music mix. And it felt right somehow. True.

You say the hill’s too steep to climb
Chiding.
You say you’d like to see me try
Climbing.

You pick the place and I’ll choose the time
And I’ll climb
That hill in my own way.
Just wait a while for the right day.
And as I rise above the tree lines and the clouds
I look down, hearing the sound of the things you’ve said today.

Fearlessly the idiot faced the crowd
Smiling.
Merciless the magistrate turns ’round
Frowning.

And who’s the fool who wears the crown?
And go down,
in your own way
And every day is the right day
And as you rise above the fear-lines in his brow
You look down, hearing the sound of the faces in the crowd.

It’s an ambiguous song. Is it calling us to be fearless? Yes, but wait a while. Yes, but maybe fearlessness makes you an idiot.

Maybe what feels true is the call to fearlessness despite the cynicism, without any anthemic grandeur, and without any promise that rising above will free you from “the sound of the faces in the crowd” or “the sound of the things you’ve said today.” The neuroses come with you up the hill. Climb anyway.

But at the right time. And for me, now is the right time for some kinds of climbing and not for others. Laos is a lazy place (if you’re a tourist, not if you’re a Lao trying to scratch out a living), a good place to let go and drift and wander and wonder. To think, or not to. To notice. To rest. For me, that’s a special kind of adventure. I think it’s been a lot of years since I’ve let myself get this relaxed, this open. I feel very Californian. It’s nice.

And then there are hills to climb, but I’m waiting a while for the right day. Living in Korea is one. It’s coming — I can see it off in the distance — but it’s not here yet. I’ll climb that hill in my own way yet.

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You Can Never Leave

Nong Khiaw, Laos

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puHoadtIivc

When Glenn Frey checked out, on January 18, my Facebook news feed was still full of tributes and encomiums to David Bowie, who had died eight days earlier. Frey got hardly a mention. Bowie’s career was long, varied, and complex in a way that Frey’s was not, and Frey was just one member of a group. Still, it was a notable silence, especially if you happen to be traveling anywhere in the world that isn’t England or America.

Wherever I go in the world, I hear Frey’s music. Specifically, I hear “Hotel California.” I’ve heard it sung with Afro-French accents on the banks of the Seine. The Filipino bar band in Yangon played it. Today a Lao trekking guide was noodling around on his guitar at a local restaurant in Nong Khiaw, and inevitably he wandered into “Hotel California.” You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave “Hotel California” for long.

I know we’re all supposed to hate the Eagles, for countercultural reasons long forgotten and because The Dude hates the Eagles, but admit it: you know the words to “Hotel California,” and chances are you’ve hollered along to it at a karaoke night or when it was played by some cover band somewhere in the world. For better or worse, it’s the song that everyone everywhere knows. You can stab it with your steely knives, but you just can’t kill that beast of a song.