Tet a Tet
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
A long one, and the pictures aren’t up yet either, but there’s a lot to say.
La Viet en rose
On the first night of the Tet holiday, my Vietnamese friend in Saigon took me to a Latin music club. It’s true that I came to Vietnam for Tet without clear expectations of what it would entail, but this was a surprise.
Even more surprising was how good it was. The entirely Vietnamese band at stylish, candle-lit Carmen Bar — three acoustic guitars, drums, bass, percussion, keys — plays with polish and flair, everything from Latin hits to bachatas to the occasional disco number for a request. They back up a rotating set of singers with different specialties: a sexy chanteuse, a hammy lounge singer type, a trio, a heavyset guy in a sombrero backing two Filipinas until he stepped forward to do a passable Louis Armstrong imitation for “What a Wonderful World.” It could have been merely cheesy, but there was a level of musicianship and a knowingness that made even the silly bits feel sophisticated, cosmopolitan. Maybe it’s just that I don’t know about it, but I never found anything this worldly, this hip, in Bangkok, or anywhere else in Southeast Asia. Vietnamese culture has a certain depth that I find compelling.
Late in the evening, a mustachioed guitarist began to play French rock and pop from the sixties, which resonated with the mostly Vietnamese audience, especially the older people who grew up in South Vietnam when the French influence was still strong. My friend, who is a bit younger than me, knew all the lyrics to many of the songs, though she didn’t know what they meant; they were the records her parents played when she was young. Some people in their sixties got up to dance. An older woman from the audience was invited onstage to sing a rich and rousing “La Vie en Rose.” The club was less full than usual, with so many people gone to their hometowns for the holiday, but that gave the place a kind of intimacy. It felt like a private conversation, like old friends reminiscing over what was and what might have been.
Red envelopes
Of course, there’s more to Tet than Edith Piaf covers. Tet, the lunar new year, is the biggest holiday of the year in Vietnam. From Saigon, much of the population disappears to the countryside, to their home villages and elderly relatives. And they bring flowers with them — yellow flowers, mostly, sometimes whole trees with yellow flowers on them, hauled along on moterbikes from one of the many flower markets that spring up all over the city in the days before the new year. (Buying an entire tree as a holiday decoration and then throwing it out a week or two later seems crazy to me, but I’m Jewish.) Throughout Saigon, shops and buildings, streets and parks are decorated with symbols of the festival: representations of old Chinese coins, flowers, pictures and statues of monkeys for the Year of the Monkey, displays of traditional Vietnamese village life, and especially red banners with the phrase “Chúc Mừng Năm Mới,” happy new year.
In any case, our trip to Carmen Bar was Saturday night, the first night of the national holiday. The following night was the real thing, the last night of the lunar year. My friend took me to her parents’ house, where we ate on the floor because they didn’t have a table big enough for everyone, and we looked at old family pictures: of my friend and her brother as babies and as teenagers, of the aunt who was a movie star, of the French grandfather in his military uniform. Then it was time for the giving of the red envelopes, in which elders give envelopes of money and blessings to younger family members, amid much hilarity. My friends’ parents gave me an envelop too — yellow, which they said was extra special because it’s the royal color — and it contained a series of bills, which my friend’s mother explained: a 1,000-dong note (roughly a nickel), which if you give to a beggar, he won’t say thank you; a 2,000-dong note, which you can give to a beggar to get thanks; 5,000, which can get you salt for ban mi bread; 10,000, which can get you the bread itself; 20,000, which can get you a bowl of pho; and 100,000 (just under $5), which can get you a whole meal.
Later my friend’s brother and girlfriend met me on District 1’s Walking Street to watch the midnight fireworks. There I learned of the ancient Vietnamese custom of resting your arm, weary from holding up your iPad to video an empty sky, on the head of the foreigner standing in front of you. At last there were fireworks, and they were pretty good fireworks — “good, but not Sydney good,” as I heard an Australian say behind me — and then it was over, and the crowd broke up, and we went our separate ways into the Year of the Monkey.
Bác Chio
The next day, like everyone else in Saigon, I left town. Along with my friend and her two daughters, aged ten and five, I headed for the beach on Phu Quoc, a charming resort island just south of Cambodia that once held South Vietnam’s largest prison and was briefly captured by the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s.
It was fun to hang out with kids at the beach. The older one speaks English pretty well, though she’s shy about it, and the younger one understands a great deal, though she was happy to chatter away at me in Vietnamese most of the time. As the days wore on, though, she began using more English with me, starting with the moment at the beach when she held up a bunch of wet sand dripping from her two hands and declared, “It’s so yucky!” The older one called me “Uncle Josh” — “uncle” is a common term of respect for an older male, as it is in Korea — while the younger one turned that into “Bác Chio,” pronounced as something like bah jaw. We went on a snorkeling tour, and I reassured the skittish ten-year-old that she could in fact learn to snorkel in five minutes, that the coral would not slice her to bits, that there were no sharks. She and I bonded over our shared seasickness on the long boat ride. We spent a day at the beach, and then another day at a water and amusement park called Vinpearl Land, which was cheesy and ridiculous and good fun, and the bruise on my elbow from that one twisty water slide is healing nicely, thank you.
War remnants
Back in Saigon, we decided to take a tour of the Cu Chi tunnels. Cu Chi was a jungly crossroads not far from Saigon that became a Viet Cong stronghold. It became a free-fire zone, and a place where US bombers returning from sorties to the North would unload any remaining bombs before landing on aircraft carriers.
There were people down there.
The Vietnamese response was to develop a system of tunnels and booby traps as a means of survival and to continue to challenge and ensnare the enemy close to its capital in Saigon. The Cu Chi tunnels are presented as examples of the hardscrabble genius of the Vietnamese fighters and villagers — the distinction is blurry — who survived and fought there. That’s accurate as far as it goes. They turned bomb fragments into metal spikes for ingenious, terrifying booby traps that would ensnare and mangle the bodies of those who stepped on them. They sawed open unexploded bombs to get the materials to make anti-tank mines. They dug tunnels, some as much as ten meters deep, all by hand, and created bamboo breathing tubes that they camouflaged under fake termite mounds. They dug special tunnels to dissipate the smoke from cooking fires. They made sandals out of old tires, and for the rainy season, when their steps would leave tracks, they devised backward sandals that made it look like they were going the opposite way.
It’s all very impressive and very clever, and if I were a GI sent into that jungle to look for VC, I would have been terrified all the time: every step could mean agonizing pain or death, and VC could pop out of a hidden hole just about anywhere and shoot you in the gut or face or slash you with a hoe. But then you realize that this was a response to massive aerial bombardment, and that the US soldiers came in with hand grenades and rocket launchers and flamethrowers and teargas canisters and sniffing dogs, while the Vietnamese hid in holes in the ground and hoped the bombing would stop before they ran out of air.
The Cu Chi experience is made all the more vivid by the rattle and pop of gunfire from the attached shooting range, where you can try out some of the weapons that were used in the war. I took the opportunity to fire an M-16 and an AK-47, just to feel what it’s like to use them. They’re both easy weapons to fire, with a soft trigger and not too hard a kick.
A couple of days later, I went to the War Remnants Museum in Saigon, which presents the war from a Vietnamese Communist perspective, propaganda and all. The displays accuse the Americans, rightly, of counting any dead Vietnamese as Viet Cong and ignoring civilian casualties, but they tend to count any dead Vietnamese as patriots. There is, of course, no mention of any North Vietnamese or Viet Cong acts of torture or aggression, which can lead to odd gaps: a prison display that includes tiger cages used by the South but never mentions American POWs; an odd gap between the peace agreement establishing a North and South Vietnam and a war in which America was defending southern “puppets,” the actual term the museum uses for the government of South Vietnam. There’s a display aimed at branding Senator Bob Kerrey a war criminal — he probably was — that suggests he confessed, which he never did. (It was good to have Wikipedia on my phone as I walked around the museum.) There’s a reference to the Bertrand Russell Tribunal as if it were an important international body rather than an informal gathering of leftist philosophers in France in 1967.
The propaganda is unnecessary: the accumulated evidence of American stupidity and brutality is overwhelming. It’s hard to look at the accumulated evidence — the tonnage of bombs dropped, the pictures of victims, of suffering Vietnamese, suffering GIs — and not see that this was something the US created. I am not sure that anything could justify the kind of bombing we did in Vietnam, incinerating whole communities. I think the bombing we did against the Nazis and the Japanese in World War II went well beyond what was right or justifiable, but at least we were doing it as part of a larger war that had purpose. Even in Korea that was more true than not. but our strategy in Vietnam never made much sense. We were defending first a terrible, unpopular, ineffectual regime, and then no regime at all. And we were fighting in a place of minimal strategic importance — unlike Korea, which was sandwiched between Mao’s China, the Soviet Union, and Japan. There was no one brave or wise enough to see that Vietnam was more like Angola or Afghanistan, less like Korea or Berlin — and that was because McCarthy’s witch hunt had driven all the China scholars from government, blaming them for China’s fall to communism, as if the failure of the Kuomintang were somehow the result of biased academic writing.
Yes, the US was probably right to try to block the spread of communism in Vietnam, but not through full-scale military intervention. Yes, the US was right to fear that its failure there would send a worrying message of weakness to our allies around the world, in Taiwan and South Korea and Japan and Greece and West Germany, which is the US should never have staked its reputation on Vietnam in the first place. The US should have done what it did in China, which was to recognize the absence of any viable counterweight to the communist forces and give up. But that was politically impossible in post-McCarthy America. The suffering we inflicted on the Vietnamese people in the name of a flawed geopolitical strategy is unconscionable, as is a lot of what we did in the process: My Lai, Agent Orange, Napalm, ignoring torture in South Vietnamese prisons, and much more.
These are old debates, but maybe worth thinking about if you haven’t done so in detail. The issues are still relevant. “It became clear then,” said Robert McNamara, the principal architect of the war, speaking in 1995, “and I believe it is clear today, that military force — especially when wielded by an outside power — cannot bring order in a country that cannot govern itself.” Is he right? If so, what does that tell us about how to deal with Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan?
What stays with me, though, are the pictures of American GIs, muddy and terrified and miserable. Yes, what the Vietnamese endured was far worse, but like it or not, the GIs are my people. My father could have been one of those GIs, but he engineered a way out of the war. My ex-girlfriend’s father went to the front, and he spent the rest of his life waking up screaming at night.
A holiday in Cambodia
In speaking to my Vietnamese friend about the war, we could agree that for all their flaws, the major leaders on both sides — Ho Chi Minh, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon — had been trying, in their flawed ways, to do the right thing. And we agreed that the same cannot be said for Pol Pot, who was just batshit insane and about as evil as they come, and who managed to make enemies of the United States and communist Vietnam both. Tomorrow I will be on a bus to Phnom Penh, the capital of what was once the Khmer Rouge’s nightmare state of Kampuchea.
No, I’m not in Southeast Asia on a war-and-genocide tour. But I want to understand this part of the world as I travel it, and these things, as much as the mountains and temples and culinary traditions, are part of what has shaped these nations and their people today. So I’ll go, and I’ll see the height of Khmer genius at Angkor Wat, and I’ll see the depths of Khmer depravity too. The world is a complicated place.
Back to Backpacking
I’ve had a bit of an interlude away from backpacking: first a stay in Thailand, relaxing and seeing very little, and then a long visit with a friend in Vietnam over the Tet holiday. It’s not that I haven’t done any touring — I will have a blog post soon about Saigon on Tet, Phu Quoc Island, the Cu Chi tunnels, and the War Remnants Museum — but it’s different when you’re hanging out with a local who handles the logistics.
I’ll be back to solo travel tomorrow. I’m headed to Phnom Penh for a couple of days, and then Angkor Wat for pretty much as long as I feel like staying. Cambodia will get a short stay so I can have more time in Laos, which seems like a lovely place to chill, maybe trek again, enjoy nature. Then it will be time for Northern Vietnam, and I’ll finally be giving that lecture on how Jews raise their children on March 27 in Hanoi. Let me know if you want to come. And after that, I plan to visit Thailand again for Songkran in mid-April.
It has been nice relying on locals and taking a break from the backpacker trail. I’m a little apprehensive about getting back out there. But I know it will be great. I will meet new people, see new things, have new experiences. That’s what I’m here for.
Master of Arts
As of yesterday, I am officially a holder of the degree of Master of Arts in East Asian Languages and Cultures from the Columbia University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. (For those who are interested, you can read my academic writing.)
It was a long road, fun most of the way, and a great experience studying with brilliant, distinguished professors and thoughtful, bright, passionate fellow students. Among those who helped me the most:
- Professor Charles Armstrong, my thesis advisor, who read and commented on many drafts and helped me to shape my thesis into something coherent.
- Professor Laurel Kendall, whose insightful, humane, funny work on Korean shamans was a primary source of inspiration, whose insights and suggestions helped guide my own work, and whose introductions to Korean scholars helped immeasurably.
- Professor Morris Rossabi, who let me audit his introductory course and supported me in becoming an MA student.
- Professor Sue Mi Terry, whose excellent courses, energy, political insights, and general badassery shaped my first year at Columbia.
- Professor Michael Como, whose course Ghosts and Kami opened my eyes to hidden worlds, changed the direction of my studies, and demonstrated what real devotion to pedagogy can accomplish.
- Professor Tomi Suzuki, who stuck with me through a tough but necessary semester of critical theory that gave rigor to my academic work, and who, to my delight, exclaimed with real enthusiasm that my thesis topic was “so interesting!” (and also artist Gina DeNaia, whose deep knowledge of critical theory was a huge help in making that semester worthwhile).
- Professor Dongkyu Kim, whose research provided invaluable background for my own work.
- Hendrikje Lange, the principle subject of my thesis, whose patience and generosity cannot be overstated.
There are many others, of course. I am grateful for the many friends I made along the way, for every professor who taught me, for everyone who granted me an interview, for the departmental staff that helped me find my way through bureaucratic mazes, for the summer language programs at Ehwa University and Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, for all the Korean tutoring I received.
Myanmar 5: Hpa An and Kyaiktiyo
Hpa An: Guess what’s in this cave
On the road to Hpa An, something smashed into the side of our bus, damaging the window enough that the crew — there seemed to be five or six people involved in running the bus — determined that we could go no further. We were stuck in a small bus station about 50 kilometers from our goal, and no one spoke enough English to let us know what was happening. We saw the bus crew wander off down an alleyway and then reappear. We saw them make many phone calls. We saw them get into a car, then get out of the car. For a while one of the drivers amused himself by opening and closing the bus door with a remote control.
I had made plans to meet Myoungsun for dinner in Hpa An — she’d gotten there a day ahead of me and was leaving that night. Our bus was supposed to arrive by three, but it was now getting on towards four, and any attempt to find out when we might be going — pointing at my watch and shrugging, for example — just led to smiles and nodding. I’d gotten to talking with an older Dutch woman who’d come outside to smoke, and eventually we decided to share a taxi, if we could find one. Somehow she negotiated our way into the back of a truck, and we rode that way into Hpa An, enjoying an open view of the mountains shrouded in mist. Later on, as I went to meet Myoungsun, I saw our bus pulling into town. The driver waved and grinned.
Hpa An itself is a shoddy little town, but you go there for the sights in the surrounding countryside, and you see those sights by booking a tuktuk tour with Soe Brothers Guesthouse. And if it happens to be cold and rainy on your one day in Hpa An? You go anyway. The sights consist mostly of caves full of Buddhas — the same limestone karst formations that created Batu Caves in Kuala Lumpur — and they’re pretty cool, but by the time we’d passed through the largest of them, waited for the driving rain to ease, ridden on rowboats through yet another cave, and hiked back to the tuktuk on muddy, shoe-sucking trails and the rain picked up again, we were all ready for the day to be over. But, of course, there was one more cave. Guess who we found inside?
There comes a point with any sort of sightseeing where you’ve hit your limit. I met a guy once who’d traveled across Africa, south to north, and he told me he got to the point where he was, like, “Oh, good. Another fucking giraffe.” I’ve hit that point with maharajah’s palaces in Rajasthan, with Buddhist temples in Thailand, and in Hpa An we all hit it with Buddhas in caves. In fact, I was nearing my limit with Myanmar as a whole, with the exhausting pace I’d set myself, with the mediocre hotels and mediocre food, with the uncomfortable transport, with the sights that were supposed to blow me away but kind of didn’t. I even kind of wished I didn’t have to go on the next day to the Golden Rock. But I’d already booked a pricey hotel room up on the mountain close to the rock, and I’d made plans to travel with two Japanese women I’d met on my Hpa An tour, and really, what else was I going to do?
Kyaiktiyo: Golden Myanmar
There is no easy way to get to Kyaiktiyo. No matter how you get to the town below — we went by bus, then by truck taxi — you have to ride up to the pagoda, perched on a mountain, in the back of a giant open truck tall enough that you have to climb a platform to get in and out. The ascent is vertiginous, and it involves multiple long stops to listen to Buddhist pleas for money. You get dropped off in the middle of a temple bazaar, where porters hound you for the opportunity to put your luggage in a basket and carry it to your hotel for you.
But the moment I stepped out onto the balcony of my hotel room and took in the vast panorama of mountains and the plain below and the Golden Rock itself in the distance, I was giddy.
As with similar sights — the Taj Mahal, the Statue of Liberty, the Eiffel Tower — it seems smaller at first than you’re expecting. But then the wonder emerges. Crowds of devotees light fires of candles and incense, they kneel and pray, they take selfies, they apply bits of gold leaf to the rock. For all that Kyaiktiyo is a tourist destination for foreigners, the overwhelming majority of visitors are Burmese pilgrims. They take selfies too, but they’re there for the spiritual power of the place, which they recharge through their devotion.
At our first approach, the rock was shrouded in mist, but that soon lifted, giving us a clear view in the shifting light of the sunset. I came back again alone to see it at night, all lit up, and then we returned in the morning, before dawn, to see the breakfast offerings and warm our chilled feet by the offering fires and catch pilgrims waking up from a cold night spent on the tiles of the temple grounds, open to the elements.
At last the sun crested the peaks behind, and the rock caught fire, gleaming in the first light. Here at last I felt like I’d found the magical Burma I had heard so much about. Here, even more than in the long-dead temples of Bagan, I felt the presence of something unique. I lingered through the morning with the monument and its surrounding temple site, and then it was time to go.
Myanmar 4: Yangon again
The night bus
I wanted to go back to Yangon to see my Filipino friends on a Saturday night, plus the next places I wanted to see were all to the south. I could have flown, but that would have cost close to $200 when you factored in taxis to and from airports plus the overpriced flight itself. I opted for the $15 “VIP bus” instead.
The way you ride a VIP bus is you get picked up at your hotel and squeezed into the back of an open-air truck, which takes a half an hour to go to a bus station where you stand around for another forty minutes waiting for your bus, while other buses come and go, and everyone surges forward waving a ticket to see if this is the right bus. When my bus did finally come, though, I was pleasantly surprised: I got a wide reclining seat, a blanket, and even a neck pillow.
I was also surprised when we stopped somewhere for dinner and the curry was edible. Burmese curry, as a rule, is oily and upsetting, and there were too many times when I walked past a restaurant and wasn’t sure if what I was smelling was the food or the toilet. I ate well in Shan State, while trekking and around Inle Lake, but the rest of the time, Myanmar’s food ranged from passing to terrible. The worst meal was on the road to Kalaw. The woman at the bus stop restaurant asked, “Chicken rice?” When we asked for a menu, she said, “No menu. Chicken rice?” So yes, chicken rice. What arrived was a plate of plain rice, a foul-smelling broth, and the saddest chicken legs we’d ever seen: the foot cut off but the nub still visible, and a drumstick and thigh that somehow had no meat on them. I peeled off some leathery strips before giving up on what we came to think of as the zombie chicken. Where these old chickens that were killed when they stopped laying eggs? Were they roosters? Whatever they were, they were horrible.
Yangon again: the Filipino bar party
As you travel, you sometimes make chains of friends. In Nyaungshwe, Myoungsun had introduced me to a Korean girl she’d met in her dorm; we met for dinner in Yangon, where she introduced me to a Vietnamese guy she’d met on her bus, who walked into the restaurant, spotted some women he knew — two Asian-Americans and a white girl, all doing NGO work in Southeast Asia — and we all ate together. Then the two Asian-Americans joined me for the Filipino party.
The party, thrown by my Filipino friend for a colleague’s birthday, was at Ice Bar in the posh Sedona Hotel, which is described on its website as:
Bespoke for the music and party enthusiasts. Features live band performances amidst white large-blocked walls, mysterious ice sculptures, transparent modern furniture and dim blue lighting for a cool igloo-like effect.
This may be overstating the case. But there were walls, and blocks, and furniture, and it was dim.And the igloo effect was amplified by the TV over the bar, which was tuned to CNN’s wall-to-wall coverage of the blizzard then engulfing the Eastern United States. By the time we arrived, there were several tables of drunk Filipinos, and a bar band was doing passable covers of classic rock songs. Now and then they’d break, and four girls in pleather would come out and do semi-coordinated dances to Top 40 and Kpop medleys.
The next day, I tried riding around on the circle line train, but I gave up after two stops. I was exhausted after a night on a bus and another night out at a bar party. What I really wanted to do was hide in my hotel room and eat KFC for dinner, and that’s pretty much what I did. I went out to watch the sunset from the Yangon River ferry, and then I had me some fried chicken and a sundae before getting up early to head to my last two destinations: Hpa An and Kyaiktiyo, the Golden Rock.
Half
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
Today is my hundredth day in Southeast Asia. By the arbitrary notion that I will stay in Southeast Asia exactly two hundred days, I’m at the halfway mark. Chances are good that I’ll actually be hear a bit longer, but it’s still a good moment to take stock, especially since tomorrow is Tet, the Vietnamese (and Chinese and Korean) new year, a time of assessment and renewal. Happy Year of the Monkey!
By the numbers
In the past hundred days, I’ve slept in 29 different towns in four countries, for an average of 3.45 days per location. The longest was a seven-day stretch in Bangkok, which is also the place I’ve spent the most days total. Some locations were repeats. I have returned to a town I previously visited on thirteen separate occasions, or once every 7.69 days. There have also been thirteen one-night stands. The net result is that I have moved on to a different town, on average, once every 2.44 days.
I have stayed in 37 different hotels (which also includes three homestays and one night on a bus). There are more hotels than towns because I have sometimes returned to town and stayed at a different place, and in Kuala Lumpur I somehow ended up jumping from hotel to hotel almost nightly. On 42 nights, I have gone to sleep in a room (or, once, conveyance) that was not the room (or conveyance) where I slept the night before. In other words, I’ve switched from one place to another — sometimes in the same town, sometimes going from one town to another — once every 2.38 days.
Not including the flight that got me to Asia, I have been on six flights, four of them international. I have also traveled by private car, rental car, taxi, tuktuk, truck taxi, train, bus, VIP bus, minibus, scooter, ebike, horsecart, river boat, canal boat, long-tail boat, ferry, raft, rowboat, tube, bicycle, and my own two feet.
Lost and found
Since my arrival, I have lost one Uniqlo undershirt that I mostly used to cover my eyes when I slept, one plastic turquoise bead bracelet that I got at a temple in Korea, a bathing suit, and a pair of Uniqlo underwear. I have abandoned my Thailand and Myanmar Lonely Planets and a pair of Banana Republic pants that were a bit tight to begin with and had begun to tear at the seams. I gave away my Nexus 5 to someone who was happy to have it.
I have purchased a small painting on cloth, a “Bike for Dad” polo shirt from Thailand, a hiking T-shirt from a Lopburi department store, a replacement bathing suit, a T-shirt that says “Baaa Baaa Bangkok,” a really nice thin cotton shirt from Malaysia, a wooden bead bracelet from Hue, a longyi that I needed to cover up my shorts so I could enter Shwedagon Paya, an awful pair of hippie pants that I needed in Myanmar because all my other pants were filthy, a cookbook I got from a cooking class in Thailand, Lonely Planets Cambodia and Laos, two new pairs of Uniqlo underwear, and some cheap plastic water shoes.
I have 63 new Facebook friends, only some of whom are people I’ve met in my travels. Most of them I will probably never see again.
I have purchased and then abandoned an ugly sweater, a winter coat, a winter hat, two terrible pairs of cheap Burmese underwear, and a fluffy pair of socks.
I have also left with a friend in Vietnam a number of items that I want to keep but wasn’t using: a nice shirt and vest, a Chromecast, a box of business cards, the painting and the cookbook and maybe some other things I’ve forgotten about.
I am at last losing my sandal tan.
Myanmar 3: Kalaw to Inle Lake
Kalaw: Cheap everything
From Mandalay, Myoungsun and I made our way to Kalaw, a scruffy but likable mountain town that serves as a base for treks to Inle Lake. It was cold enough that by evening, wearing my sweatshirt and my new Burmese sweater and hat, I still felt the need to go to the marketplace and buy a heavy coat with a hood.
Everything in Kalaw was cheap. I got a haircut for less than a dollar, a bowl of delicious Shan noodle soup for less than 50 cents. Even trekking gear was cheap: a midsize knapsack for $10, a headlamp with batteries included for a buck. We went to a video game shop boasting a PlayStation 2, and we played the soccer game Winning Eleven because it was the only game they had, but hey, it was about 25 cents an hour.
Our trek, which we arranged at Uncle Sam’s — the place for treks, judging by the crowds there coordinating various groups and plans — was also cheap, at just $35 a head for three days, two nights, a guide, a chef, two homestays, seven meals, and the boat across Inle Lake to the town of Nyaungshwe. Myoungsun and I were joined by Leo, a young German jazz drummer; Sophie and Edouard, a finance guy and an animator from Belgium; and Jorg, a retired teacher from Switzerland who was avoiding his Filipina wife’s visit home to her mother. That Jorg was trekking at all was remarkable: some years earlier, he’d developed a fistula in his brain that led to extensive paralysis. He’d had to relearn how to walk, and now he was trekking in the Burmese mountains, keeping up with a group of people in their twenties and thirties (and, yes, one in his forties).
On our last night before the trek, we stopped in at Hi Snack & Drink, the best (only?) bar in Kalaw. It’s a warm, dark, inviting little hole in the wall, free of the usual Burmese fluorescent lighting, with groups of locals grabbing the available acoustic guitars and belting out local pop songs. Soon it drew a crowd of backpackers as well. I got to talking with the owner about the political changes in Myanmar, which he said would have been impossible just a few years before: there was a military security guy who used to come and sit in the bar to watch everyone.
I asked the barkeep the same question I’d been asking everyone, which is why the military government decided to relinquish absolute control, and he gave the best answer I heard. He explained that the generals, as they looted the country, tucked their money away in American and European bank accounts. Then came targeted sanctions, and they lost access to their money. The political opening has been designed so that the military maintains economic and some political control. There will be no trials for past wrongdoing, and there’s no state seizure of assets controlled by the generals: the banks, the mining companies, real estate holdings, etc. But the sanctions will be lifted, the bank accounts unfrozen, and Burmese generals will once again be able to send their children to the UK for school and their wives to Paris for shopping.
From Kalaw to Inle Lake: Village life
Photos: Trekking from Kalaw to Inle Lake, Inle Lake
Trekking has been good for the villages around Inle Lake. It brings in money and contact with the outside world, and we felt welcomed. There are lots of new brick houses, which are what people prefer over wood or bamboo-mat-sided houses, and almost all the thatched roofs have been replaced with corrugated metal. The villages were mostly off the electrical grid, but many people had solar panels that they used to charge LED lightbulbs — tricky in the monsoon, we were told, when the sun won’t shine for days — and a few had car batteries for the same purpose. In some ways, these villages were in better shape than some of the villages I saw in Northern Thailand. They also still had their populations of young adults, who haven’t gone to the cities to look for jobs because there are no jobs in the cities.
One shouldn’t glamorize the poverty and stresses of rural village life. On our first night, after dinner, we were taken to meet a family that was staying in a small house for a visit. There was a fire going in the middle of the room, with no stove, and a young child coughed quietly from her bedroll. The matriarch shocked us all when we asked her age and she said she was fifty-four (Khinkhin, our guide, translated); she looked older. Working in the rice and ginger and pepper fields every day is hard. Carrying water from the village tap is hard.
I was also reminded how little privacy there is in villages. Showers happen out in the open. Houses have one or two rooms, and everyone eats and sleeps together. Toilets are outside and shared. If you have a fight with your wife, or if you run to the bathroom too many times in the night, or if you sneak out to meet your boyfriend, everyone knows. Mirrors are not common. You look at yourself less and everyone else more. The whole concept of the self as I know it — as an American who had my own bedroom from the day I was born — is foreign to village life.
The cultural lines were striking when we arranged the beds on the first night. Khinkhin and Nanda, the chef, lined up some mats and blankets for us so that we’d be sleeping next to each other all in a row, two people to each mat. It would keep us close and add warmth, which made sense. The Westerners looked at this arrangement, thought better of it, found an extra mat, and spread things out so we’d each have our own personal space (except for the Belgian couple). As for Myoungsun, she’d confessed back in Mandalay that she actually preferred hostel dorm rooms to private hotel rooms. She’d grown up sleeping in the same room as the rest of her family, and she likes a certain amount of ambient noise. When we arranged our beds for the second night — no extra mats this time — she was happy to flop down somewhere in the middle, while the German and the American took the ends.
And it was cold at night. I woke up in the middle of the first night after dreaming that I was wandering Times Square on New Year’s Eve, looking for a place to warm up. I put on my coat and got back under the covers. Later, near dawn, I went out to the bathroom and was amazed by all the stars I could see. The moon had set, and the nearest electric lights were beyond the ridgeline.
The trek was mostly through villages and farmland rather than through wilderness and forest. It was the season for ripening pepper, and I was struck by just how much global effort goes into growing and picking and drying and grinding and packaging and shipping was is essentially just a flavor additive without much caloric value. People were also hard at work watering and washing their buffaloes, which are used for labor, and also as “buffalo banks,” places to store value for when you need it later. Once again, it was Myoungsun who had the bridging experience between the Burmese and the Western: she was the only one among us who’d ever done a day of labor on a pepper farm, as part of a youth volunteer program in Korea.
At last we came to Inle Lake and took the boat across to Nyaungshwe, where we said goodbye to our guides and went our separate ways, though we reconvened for dinner. The next day, Myoungsun and I joined the Belgians for a boat tour of the lake, which was both touristy and interesting. The lake is dotted with villages on stilts, and life is lived on the water. We visited a boat factory, a weaving shop, a silversmith, and a shop where women from the famous long-necked Karen tribe served as a kind of human zoo, which felt creepy. We also visited temples, because you always visit temples.
Next up: a night bus back to Yangon.
Myanmar 2: Bagan and Mandalay
Bagan: Koreans in the sand
I’d decided to fly to Bagan rather than attempt a 12-hour bus journey while sick, but even flying was hard in the state I was in. Hell, packing was hard. All I wanted to do was sleep. In Bagan, I finally had the good sense to ask for a doctor. He arrived, wearing a longyi, checked me out, and gave me antibiotics. Thank goodness for Cipro.
By morning I was well enough to head out into Bagan’s wondrous landscape of desert sands and old temples. There are thousands of temples and pagodas scattered across the area, some of them enormous and well populated with tourists, others abandoned and alone in the fields. I got around on a rented ebike, which is a scooter that runs on battery power.
As I cruised around, I noticed a surprising number of Koreans, and I fell into conversation with some ajummas on a group tour at one of the temples. Toward sunset, after abandoning a crowded temple just before the sun went down, I was scooting along on a sandy trail when I ran across three young Koreans who were struggling with a single ebike and looking for the famous sunset spot. We got to talking in Korean, and I gave one of them a lift back out of the Central Plain, and we all had dinner together. For the next couple of weeks, I would travel with Myoungsun, a journalist, and intermittently with Hyesun and Kihoon, two students who had come to Myanmar together.
Bagan really has a magic about it. You can go off by yourself and climb around a 900-year-old temple and climb up to see dozens more from the rooftop. There’s no one monument that stands out, but all of them together create a strange environment. At times, I would look out at the miles and miles of temples and think, what a colossal waste of government money. I suppose poor governance is nothing new in Burma.
Mandalay: A wall and a tour
Mandalay is a dump. It’s a big, endless grid of wide streets, many of them crumbling to dust. I found no districts with distinctive character, except for a very small area that is Mandalay’s poshest mall — not that posh — plus some new apartments. There’s not a lot to see or do in Mandalay. The character of the city is summed up in its central monument, which is a very, very long wall that just repeats and repeats, enclosing a military base and a poor-quality reconstruction of the old royal palace.
What you do in Mandalay is leave Mandalay and go outside of it. Hyesun arranged a taxi tour for us, and we spent a day zipping from place to place: a giant heap of bricks that was supposed to be the world’s largest pagoda but never got finished; a hill with a bunch of temples; a town you see by horse cart. It was all mediocre. After Bagan, it was going to take more than a pile of bricks to impress. For sunset we went to U Bein Bridge, which is famous for being long, wooden, poorly built, and lacking in handrails (it looks rustic in photos). It was packed with tourists, of course, but it was pleasant enough to descend from the bridge and watch the sunset from a small island river, where there are bars set up for the tourists.
In some ways, though, the most interesting day in Mandalay was the one where we didn’t do anything much, other than go to the city palace and decide it was boring. Hyesun and Kihoon had gone ahead to Kalaw, while Myoungsun and I lingered for another day. We went to an optician to replace Myoungsun’s lost glasses, and we got to see the way that they used a case full of different lenses and a pair of test glasses to work out the prescription strength; we went to a mall, where I bought a sweater and a knit cap at the grocery store in preparation for the cold of Kalaw and trekking. It was a brief experience of Myanmar as a place to live in rather than tour across. It wasn’t appealing exactly — I have zero desire to live in Myanmar — but it was illuminating in its way.
Next up: Kalaw and the trek to Inle Lake.
Travel and Vacation
There’s travel, and then there’s vacation.
After a long stint of travel in Myanmar — buses, trucks, taxis, boats, trekking, and hotels with odd flaws like bathroom odors, water that pulses hot and cold, wheezing pumps near the room, etc. — I’ve been on a bit of a luxury vacation in Thailand, first at Cape Dara in Pattaya, and now for a few days in Bangkok at the trendy and spot-on Aloft Hotel. On Monday I didn’t even leave my hotel until evening. I had lunch in the hotel restaurant and sat in the rooftop pool for a while. These are not backpacker joints. They’re fancy hotels, pleasant and stylish, and a bargain for the price.
Heaven. For a while, anyway.
Tomorrow I’m back on the road, to Saigon for Tet. I don’t know what it will be, but I am hopeful it will be something. I needed some nothing for a few days — a chance to catch up on my writing and blogging and photo posting, to lie around, to feel zero pressure to go be a tourist and see the sights — and now I’ve had my fill.
The second half
I suppose this is a kind of halftime lull, even if it’s a few days before the midpoint. Plans for the second half are starting to come into focus:
- Vietnam for Tet and then a little beach time until mid-February.
- Cambodia, Laos, and Northern Vietnam from mid-February to mid-April.
- Back to Thailand for Songkran in mid-April, with maybe some South Thailand beach time before or after.
- May in Singapore and Indonesia.
Now’s the time to get in touch if you want to join me for any of those places.
Housekeeping
Myanmar and Vietnam galleries are up. There will also be a trickle of Myanmar blog posts over the next few days.
Myanmar (January 2016)
- Yangon
- Bagan Day 1 of 3
- Bagan Day 2 of 3
- Bagan Day 3 of 3
- Mandalay and Environs
- Kalaw
- Trekking from Kalaw to Inle Lake
- Inle Lake
- Yangon Again
- Hpa An
- Kyaiktiyo (Golden Rock)
Vietnam (December 2015-January 2016)