Yes, I know how lame that was, but you try rhyming -aos..!
OK: last time I wrote, I was in Northern Thailand, about to cross the
border to Laos and travel down the great Mekong river for two days on
the world's most uncomfortable boat...
Laos was great, although I'm not really sure why; it just blends into
its neighbours in my memory. We saw a wild elephant on the banks of the
great grey-green, greasy Mekong, and Luang Prabang was crazily hot but
had amazing restaurants, and Mischka's questionable monk fetish reached
new heights when she actually got a genuine orange-robed specimen as a
pen-friend... um, what else? Oh, we did an excellent side-trip with four
girls in a minibus to Phonsavan (in the west) to see the Plain of Jars,
which is... well, I'll leave you to work it out.
Despite Laos not being officially involved in the 'Nam War, the Yanks
still dropped staggering amounts of bombs in the Phonsavan area,
basically because they couldn't be arsed to carry them home. This has
resulted in thousands of personal tragedies and a landscape like the
surface of the moon. It also turned me into a bit of a ghoul; I was
embarrassed to find myself doing a quick limb count of everyone we
passed along the road.
Laos' other salient feature is a complete absence of ATMs. Strange,
true, but possibly not that interesting (unless you're there and
cashless). I just thought you might like to know.
People go on about Vietnam being full of scammers, and their Cambodian
neighbours seeem to despise them for this reason, but I really loved
Vietnam. It's got a different vibe to the rest of the region. Although
they're pretty forward-looking (and Newsweek says this, not just me!),
they are also justifiably proud of having kicked America's arse in the
war, and they just seem to have a strength and certainty of their own
identity that contrasts with the 'roll over for the Western tourists'
thing that Thailand has going on. Laos is just very poor and backward,
which makes it a lovely place to visit but, sadly, not to live.
Hanoi was quaintly beautiful, with tree-lined, sun-dappled streets and a
million billion motorbikes which all honk more or less continually. It
was so mental I just couldn't resist hiring a scooter (against the
advice of the hotel and the Lonely Planet) and had a lovely day
literally playing in the traffic! Sadly, I didn't realise you aren't
supposed to leave them out overnight, and woke to find the police had
impounded the damn thing and I had to pay a fat bribe to Chief Wiggum's
oily-haired Vietnamese double to get it back. Thanks to the almighty
pound, though, it only worked out at seven squid. Hurrah!
We just didn't have time to get off the beaten backpacking track, so our
next stop was Hoi An, famous for its bespoke clothing. A significant
percentage of Next's hardback Directory sales must be to these tailors,
as they all have copies and you can just choose whatever you like to
have made. Visiting this place with three other girls was a bad idea, as
we went into a collective feeding frenzy and staggered out of town
three days later having seen nothing except the inside of shops. Oops.
Carrying on south, we did a bit of diving and wallowed in evil-smelling
mud in Nha Trang, where I spent an afternoon scooting off alone to a
beach up the coast. I rode under massed grey clouds, through paddy
fields turned a luminous yellow-green by the late, low sun, past staring
peasants in coolie hats and indifferent, head-tossing buffaloes... and
returned happy, only slightly sunburnt, and with a profound hatred of
bus drivers in general and air horns in particular. It was just
beautiful, one of those memories that'll sustain me when I'm back behind
a desk, I hope.
We finally got to Saigon, where we only had time to visit the American
War Remnants museum and the Vietcong tunnels at Cu Chi. The former used
to be called the American War Crimes Museum, and frankly, that was a
much more appropriate name. From the highest-ranking people involved
(Nixon carrying on the war just because he didn't want to be the first
American president to lose one) to the lowest (grinning GIs holding up
severed heads for the camera, piles of little fat dead babies after the
massacre at My Lai), it was a catalogue of unpunished cruelty and
ongoing suffering; the birth deformities still caused by dropped
chemicals alone were enough to haunt your dreams.
...OK, I feel a rant coming on, so I'll skip the tunnels as it'll only
set me off again... I did skip actually climbing through the tunnels
anyway, as the tiny space immediately became too much for me. And this
is after they've been widened quite a bit in order to allow what our
guide gleefully kept referring to as our 'fat Western arses' through...
God knows how the Vietcong didn't all pass out from claustrophobia.
After those two sobering trips, we almost immediately found ourselves in
Cambodia, scene of Pol Pot's grand insanity. We visited just one of the
many 'killing fields', at Choeung Ek near Phnom Penh, and the prison
that supplied them, notorious Tuol Sleng, where terrible tortures were
perpetrated.
But it's actually impossible to fully comprehend tragedy on such a huge
scale, for me at least. The rows of cracked skulls at Choeung Ek, the
rows of living dead staring out of photographs at Tuol Sleng - I
couldn't really get my head round it. It was the little details that
touch your heart; the young guide telling me he could only work at the
Killing Fields for a few days at a time before being overwhelmed by
sadness, the cheerful, softly-spoken taxi driver still keeping the
little tin that used to hold his family's starvation rice ration, so as
never to forget.
Thank god, the final stop was Angkor Wat, a vast ruined city of temples
in the forest near the pleasingly-named town of Siem Reap. There were no
echoes of past tragedies here, just tumbledown castles and huge stone
faces carved into pillars and giant trees growing up through temples
where ancient kings once prayed. It reminded me of the Narnia stories,
and Atlantis, and Eldorado, and the whole thing was so photogenic that
you'd all be advised to invent urgent appointments if I ever mention
showing you the pictures.
Finally, it was a mad dash to Bangkok to send loads of stuff home and
get ready to fly to Hong Kong. Our last night was a big goodbye to most
of our travelling companions and left me with the worst hangover I've
had since Christmas Eve, but we made our plane. We also brought along
Monica, our little fox-coloured Italian, who made a snap decision to
come and see China with us.
So now there's three of us to be bewildered by the language and startled
by the flying greenies and repulsed by the stench of public toilets
with waist-high partitions and no doors (yes, really). China's going to
be a challenge, but I think I've gone on enough already, so I'll let you
know how we're doing in a couple of weeks.
Just one last thing (honestly) - I haven't had a chance to email much
recently, and may not for a while - it's been a struggle finding
Internet access and will likely get worse. So sorry if I owe you a
reply... but all too soon I'll have loads of time to reply :o( - in
between looking for jobs, of course!
PS I'm not joking about the greenies. Old and young, male and female -
there seems to be an ongoing national competition to see who can hawk up
the loudest, fattest green oyster, and charmingly, one of my neighbours
at a nearby terminal has just spat out a prize entry. Nice.
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