Category: Asia

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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)

Vietnam (December 2015-January 2016)

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Myanmar 1: Yangon

Photos

Myanmar is where Asian buses go when they die. You see them trundling down Yangon’s avenues, exposed engines belching, the Korean or Japanese or Chinese route destinations sometimes still visible. I began to think of Yangon as a sort of Buddhist hell realm for buses, like the bottom wedge of a Tibetan thanka painting, where they’re reincarnated as flayed beasts that have to pay for the sins of their past lives. At moments, too, I had the weird fleeting hope that I could hop on one of these buses and leave behind the dusty, crumbling chaos of Yangon for, say, Shinchon Station in downtown Seoul.

Myanmar was daunting. Internet connections were hinky and slow. There’s not yet much of a backpacker scene, travel options are limited, food can be terrible, roads are bad, English speakers are scarce. It was by far the most difficult place I’ve traveled on this trip, though I don’t want to exaggerate the hardship either: I stayed in hotels, rode in VIP buses, went to tourist sites where I met other travelers. Still, everything’s a little trickier and more arduous in Myanmar: getting on a VIP bus means riding for a half-hour in the back of an open truck to get to the VIP bus; staying in a hotel by the airport still results in a half-hour taxi ride over rough roads to get the airport four kilometers away.

And some of what made Myanmar feel like a slog was how I approached it. I was on the move more than I had been in other countries: before Myanmar, I was averaging close to four days per location; in Myanmar, it was more like two days. But also, the travel was physically harder: a three-day, two-night trek that meant a couple of freezing cold homestays on hard floors; an overnight bus; some very uncomfortable minivan rides. By the time I reached the end, I was exhausted and ready to leave.

Filipinos in the synagogue

The heart of Yangon, along the river, is a dense grid of mostly old colonial buildings from the turn of the 20th century. Like Cuba, Myanmar has spent a long time cut off from global capital, resulting in a kind of accidental preservationism, though the old buildings are mostly in terrible shape. There’s a dearth of basic modern conveniences like grocery stores. Done right, Yangon could transform itself into a UNESCO World Heritage city like Melaka and George Town in Malaysia or Hoi An in Vietnam, but on a grander scale. Done wrong, and in ten years Old Yangon will be nothing but cheap, shitty glass boxes and a faint memory of what was and what could have been.

You could feel, walking around, that Myanmar is changing. There are cell phone shops everywhere. Art galleries have sprung up, with explicitly political paintings; one artist cuts up old Myanmar money to make collage portraits of Aung San Suu Kyi. You see posters for Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy in shops, too, and books about her in the book stalls. I was in Myanmar after the election in which the NLD took about 80 percent of the vote, but before they took over parliament at the beginning of this month. You could feel that hopes were running high, though tempered by a long history of disappointment.

I went to the pagodas you’re supposed to go to, and they were OK, though not as beautiful as Thailand’s major temples. What was best in Yangon was the street life. On my second night in town, in one of the open-air barbecue restaurants on 19th Street, I met some expat Filipinos and one Burmese friend of theirs, and we had sort of a party at the table with whoever else happened to sit down beside us. The next night, I took the whole crew to the local synagogue, which has been kept open all through the years by the Samuels family. It was Friday night, and I ended up leading the prayer services for the few Jews there: a photographer, an Australian family, and a Samuels daughter. The Filipinos had never seen a Jewish ritual before, and they applauded after each bit that I sang.

We were all supposed to go out clubbing, but the stomach troubles that had been plaguing me since Malaysia now took a turn for the worse. My new local friends were kind and helpful, taking me to a pharmacy before sending me back to my hotel. It was a long night, and the next day’s trip to Bagan, I knew, wouldn’t be easy.

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Qualifying

Today is my ninetieth day in Asia. If backpacking around Southeast Asia were a twelve-step group, today’s the day I’d be allowed to qualify — to speak at a meeting about my experience, strength, and hope.

Ninety days is a long time. A season. Long enough for something radically new to become a habit, a new pattern, a new way of being. It’s long enough that you have begun to have some idea of what this new experience is about.

That’s certainly the case for me. It feels like there’s a yawning gulf between the initial anxiety and confusion of those first weeks in Bangkok and beyond, wondering how I’d make friends and not spend half a year alone, and the day-by-day exchange of one friend or group of friends for another as I bump along the muddy tracks of southern Myanmar. (It has been freakishly cold and rainy here the last couple of days.)

My moods still swing all over the place, depending on how tired I am and how much companionship I have. But I’m much more aware of how it all works, and what’s just a passing sense of exhaustion or loneliness. I know that the big cities are alienating, that I’ll feel better when I get to the little places with the interesting things to see, that I will meet other travelers on the way, that I have some friends in a few spots around the region who are happy to welcome me back when I need some time with someone I know. I know I can buy medicine when I need it, that there will always be snacks somewhere, that I can still handle the stresses of bumpy rides in tuk-tuks, night buses, weird curries, awkward weather.

It feels like it has been forever, and it’s not even half way. After Myanmar — which has been challenging in a number of ways — I will take some relative ease with a week in Thailand and a couple of weeks in Vietnam with friends. I am looking forward to good Western food, 7-Eleven, locals who speak English, and a general awareness of how service works.

But soon enough, I’ll want to get back on the trail, to head into Cambodia and Laos and see what they’re about. The journey is old enough to qualify, but ninety days is just the beginning. And even if it’s nearly half of this particular trip, it’s still just the first short phase of my new life in Asia.

 

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Something Building Up Inside

You know that Guns N’ Roses lyric, “I got somethin’ I been building up inside / For so fucking long”? I keep thinking of it when my stomach churns and I have to go puke again, which happened a bunch of times tonight in such delightful locales as the Muslim-run Golden Tea, the local synagogue, and a KFC (in their bathrooms, fortunately).

Luckily I met some locally based Filipinos and a Burmese last night, one of whom is a pharmacist, and they took me tonight to get medicine, crackers, and Pocari Sweat. I kept down the antiemetic, and now some crackers. I’ll survive.

And I was well enough to go to the synagogue and lead Shabbat services for the small group of tourists, my new friends, and the one local woman, Dina, whose family has maintained the synagogue all through the years. (Despite all the struggles through the years, thanks Mom and Dad for making sure I can daven in a pinch.)

But now there’s devotional songs and Buddhist chanting going on through loudspeakers out my window. And tomorrow I fly to Bagan at 10 am, which means leaving the hotel at 7 am.

Travel can be rough even when it’s interesting, and interesting even when it’s rough.

“Somtimes it’s easy to forget where you’re goin’ …”

(Also, Guns N’ Roses was, briefly, such an exciting band. Just watch Axl dance!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlA3Fa5bgig

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Vietnam to Myanmar

Saigon, Vietnam

Just a quick note to update you on what I’m doing and where I’m going.

I’ve just spent ten days in Vietnam, mostly Central Vietnam, visiting Da Nang, Hue, and Hoi An. Hue and Hoi An are both lovely, and Da Nang is modern, sparkly, and a bit dull. I passed the new year in Da Nang, then got sick for a few days and got to know the inside of one mediocre hotel room far better than I ever wanted to. But I’m OK now.

No, I didn’t do the lectures on Judaism while in Vietnam. We’re waiting for the book, which we plan to have done by this summer.

I’m off to Myanmar in the morning, and I’ll be there until January 29, when I head back to Bangkok for a short Thailand stay, and then I’ll come back to Vietnam for Tet, and then maybe head into Cambodia and Laos. Something like that. Pictures and blog posts might be sparse while I’m in Myanmar because the Internet connectivity’s not that great, or so I hear. We shall see.

In the meantime, let’s hope the jackhammering outside my window stops soon — it’s now 11:29 pm — ’cause I’d like to get some sleep before I travel.

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Like a Bowl of Laksa

Da Nang, Vietnam

Once you get beyond Kuala Lumpur, peninsular Malaysia offers tourists three things: mountain highlands, beaches, and historical trade cities. I opted for the latter. There are beaches and mountains elsewhere in the region — I’d just spent a good bit of time on both — but what’s unique to Malaysia is the melange of cultures created by its strategic geographical location and its history. Like a bowl of laksa, Malaysia is a mix of cultural influences that can sometimes be a bit sour or strange, but is worth tasting.

Melaka and Penang

In my brief visit to Malaysia, I visited just two destinations beyond Kuala Lumpur: Melaka City, the capital of Melaka State, and George Town, on the island of Penang. Each is a historic trading city that has become a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and each is a mixture of European, Indian, Malay, and Chinese influences, with the Baba Nyonya — the local term for the Malaysian Chinese — leaving the strongest mark in each place.

Melaka (Malacca) (photos) is the smaller of the two, an old Dutch trading port whose importance has long since faded. The old city has been restored and decked out in murals, but there are traces of earlier, less heritage-driven attempts to drum up tourism: a defunct monorail, an abandoned pirate-themed amusement park, an unfortunate thing of overdecorated trishaws — cycle rickshaws — done up in LED lights and Hello Kitty or Doraemon and blasting music. George Town, on the island of Penang, is larger and more vibrant, and there’s still a major working port on the mainland nearby, in Butterworth. But Georgetown, too, shows signs of misguided early development: the highest building, just beyond the heritage area, is a soaring tower, now in a state of disrepair, whose lower floors house one of the most depressing malls I have ever been to.

I enjoyed my time in both cities. In Melaka, it was thrilling just to gaze out at the sea and realize I was looking across one of the most important shipping lanes in the world. The old city is beautiful and evocative, and it came alive with the Friday night market on Jonker Street. And I met fascinating people, like the Chinese Eurasian proprietor of a restored Dutch heritage house, who told me about Catholics he knows with Jewish surnames like Menasseh, and also seemed to believe that though you can’t come into Malaysia on an Israeli passport, there are secretly Israeli advisors at the highest levels of government.

In Penang (photos), I stayed in an elegant bed and breakfast, You Le Yuen, in a restored building on Love Lane, supposedly so called because that’s where the rich Chinese merchants kept their mistresses (I stayed in the North Studio Suite). My arrival happened to be the night of the Chingay Parade, which centered on teams that carried great banners on enormous bamboo poles, which they would toss or kick into the air so that one member of the team could catch the pole on his forehead and run with it for a while.

Penang is known for its food, and everyone says to go to the hawker stalls, so I did. The food was good, and varied, and often delicious, but I’m not sure it’s travel-across-the-world delicious.

Penang is also where I had my most extensive interactions with someone who was Malay, as opposed to Indian or Chinese, which is mostly who I ended up talking to in Malaysia. It was at the mosque, where a young man beside a banner about Muslims respecting Jesus roped me into a theological discussion involving several faiths I don’t believe in. He was gracious if passionate — at one point, he tried to inspire me by beginning a recitation of the Koran — and invited me into the mosque at prayer time. I watched him wash, but when he invited me to pray with him, I declined.

Fruitful misunderstandings

On Christmas, I went on my own to watch a movie (the new Star Wars!) and eat some Chinese food, as is the way of my people. Then, in the evening, my Indian friend took me to his brother’s Christian “open house” gathering, under some party tents in a vacant lot between a highway overpass and an elevated rail line. We ate Indian food that was too spicy even for the Indians, and then dessert was some sort of porridgey thing with noodles and beans, served in a cup. My hosts asked me what I thought of it.

“At first it was weird,” I said. “Then it was OK in the middle, and now that it’s gone, I kind of want more.”

The same could be said for my visit to Malaysia. After the warmth and ease of Thailand, Malaysia was prickly, strange, difficult. But it was difficult in a way that I found compelling on some level. I think Malaysia will stick in my mind. It’s an awkward country, cobbled together out of disparate cultures and in grave danger of exploding, yet it’s wealthier than most of its neighbors. It’s an oil state, and also a palm oil state — so much oil palm is planted that Malaysia has to import coconuts from Thailand — but it has the potential to be much more. Unlike Thailand or Vietnam, it has no real ancient roots; it was created as British and Dutch tin mines and rubber plantations, and its peoples and cultures are immigrants. It’s complex and messy enough that I could imagine staying interested in it, the way I stayed interested in Korea — which I also didn’t love after my first experience there. I wouldn’t put Malaysia at the top of your tourist list, but I wouldn’t put Korea there either, and I plan to live there.

My host told me the story of a Chinese Malaysian woman who got set up with an Australian man for a dinner date. As they were ordering, the woman asked, “Do you like me?” It was a forward question, but the man answered, “Yes, I suppose I do.” Eventually they married.

Except that she was asking, “Do you like mee?” — noodles. Malaysia feels like a country built out of such misunderstandings, a country where the locals have trouble talking to each other but muddle through anyway.

Bonus: What Malaysia gets right that the world gets wrong

At Kuala Lumpur International Airport, you check in, drop off your bags, and then go to the departure gates — and not through security. Instead, your security screening happens at the gate, when the flight is just about ready for boarding. You then wait in a sort of holding pen, for just a few minutes, between security screening and actual boarding.

This system means you’re not on a security line with everyone else coming to the airport, regardless of when their flights are and when yours is. It means that there’s far less time between your security check and your boarding — and far fewer opportunities to, say, slip into the back of a restaurant and get a knife. Your security line is just a part of your boarding process, not a separate waiting period.

Other airports should do it this way. It might require extra security staff, and it definitely requires the construction of secure holding areas by each gate. Not every airport has the capacity. But new airports should adopt the KLIA model.

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Latest Travel Photos

Here are the latest travel photos to get updated.

Malaysia (December 2015)

Back in Bangkok (December 2015)

There are still a couple more Thailand galleries on the way. Also, there are updates to the NEWYORN and STORYstory galleries. But for now, enjoy.

In addition, I have updated The Plan with details of my past and current travels as I now know or expect them to be.

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Truly Asia

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (photos)

Malaysia’s tourism slogan is “Truly Asia,” which is meant to encapsulate the way that Malaysia brings together so many different varieties of Asian life: Chinese, Austronesian, South Asian; Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist. The downside of the slogan is that it can leave you wondering, if you’re already going to other parts of Asia, why you need to come to this country at all.

At times, the ethnic mix works well. It gives you delicious foods and a sense of energy and possibility. At other times, it combines in unfortunate ways: you get the Chinese sense of personal space (none), the Indian approach to salesmanship (yelling at passersby), and the Southeast Asian concept of sidewalks (non-continuous surfaces full of holes). 

The language, too, is a fascinating pidgin. The underlying Malay is an Austronesian language, but it’s full of loanwords from English and Arabic and Hindi, all written in a peculiar romanization that spells everything rationally. So you get words like menara for tower, from the Arabic, and also words like butik and restoran, teksi and bas, polis, klinik, and so on. (Weirdly, the word for eating is makan*, which sounds a lot like meok-da, the Korean word for eating, but I don’t know if that’s a real cognate.)

Muslims and Indians and Ewoks

Today I went to the Petronas Towers and felt a twinge of resentment that this Muslim country still has its twin towers and New York City doesn’t.

This is my first time in a Muslim country. The closest I’ve come is India, which is a secular country with an enormous number of Muslims and some legal recognition of Islamic family law. But this is different. Malaysia is multiethnic and multireligious, a point that official Malaysian tourist information makes repeatedly, and Hindu and Chinese temples are a part of the cityscape, as are endless Christmas displays. Still, I have been warned by several people not to mention that I’m Jewish — always followed by the caveat that it’s fine with the Chinese and the Indians, but just don’t mention it to the Malays. Like all the other Muslim countries, Malaysia has no diplomatic ties with Israel, and Israelis can’t travel here. Walking a side street in the tourist center of Bukit Bintang, I saw a Nazi swastika tank top for sale. Multiethnic, multireligious tolerance has its limits. (It’s also worth noting that though Malaysia is far more tolerant and openminded than, say, Saudi Arabia, it’s still a Muslim country whose most famous emblem is a tower built by the national oil company, Petrolium Nasional Berhad.)

Along with its Muslim side, Kuala Lumpur also has a strong Indian presence, which makes it much more like India than the other parts of East Asia I’ve been to, often in distressing ways: more yelling, more hawking, more beggars displaying horrific disease and injury.

And I keep thinking that the Malay women, short and round-faced in headscarves, look like Ewoks.

KL is just OK

To be fair, there are nice parts of the city. The malls are elegant and vast and there are multitudes of them. Last night I met up with a Chinese Malaysian friend in Bangsar, a stylish neighborhood of cafes and bars for the upper-middle class. And on my first night in town, I was welcomed into a lovely home and fed delicious, home-cooked roti canai and other delicacies by the large Indian Malaysian family of a friend from Landmark in New York.

But I haven’t found KL to be especially appealing. It’s a car city, and I don’t tend to like car cities. The people I’ve met directly have been lovely, but merchants and shopkeepers and passersby have been taciturn. The mix of wealth and poverty, development and decay, is messy and uncomfortable.

It’s also hard to write off the bad vibes that come from the anti-Semitism. I’m lucky to have been born in America at a time when anti-Semitism was rare and socially unacceptable; being here, I’m reminded of how often, and in how many places, casual hatred of Jews has been the norm.

And yes, people are right say that the food is great, but I’m discovering that that’s a thing you say about places where there’s not much else good to say about them (Singapore, I’m looking at you). There’s a lot of good food, but that was true in Bangkok and Saigon and New York too. There’s just more to say about those cities.

On beyond Kuala

Tomorrow I’ll venture beyond the capital, south to Melaka/Malacca, a historic port city. It will be interesting to see how Malaysia feels outside of Kuala Lumpur, and good to give it a chance.

Still, I have already come to the sad sense that whatever possibilities exist for me in Southeast Asia, Malaysia is not somewhere I’ll ever feel wholly welcome.

*Originally I had it as makar.