jesus. well it's raining like double fuck and still every living person is in yer face 24-7 trying to get you into their cyclo, moto, taxi, whatever, buy this fan, (xeroxed) book, cigarrettes, marihuana, opium, "very young girl one hour sex massage"(?), hey i'm just looking for a decent cup of coffee. and i happen to like walking, ok? khong, gam on. ok.
well i don't think i've ever experienced more difficult riding. couple hundred km to the mekong delta was great, but getting back to HoChiMinhCity (Saigon) is like one of those video games where things are flying at you in all sizes and you have to fly smoothly between all of them. say you drive through a "town" sometimes there are speed bumps in the road as you enter the town, so of course the oncoming trucks just drive into your lane to avoid slowing for their own speed bumps. ok, i've seen accidents! and i've seen white boy with road rash after a night of drinking, here on the pham ngu lao (an area where there are lots of cheap-o tourist hotels, hence lots of cheap tourists. And lots of scam.) Well, i'm outta this city, never liked cities much to begin with, and the music ain't here anymore anyway. nobody has time or money for it i guess. on an island in the mekong i heard a great little traditional group singing in the coconut monk's temple, that was great.
so here's the deal with the coffee (i know you were wondering as much as i was) vietnam grows as much coffee as indonesia, we knew that. but i always wondered why we never saw it anywhere (besides normal commie trade rules, other things get exported). so here's the statistics: 99% of the coffee in the world is cafe arabica, those aromatic beans that we love so much, 1.5% caffeine. 99% of the coffee grown here is cafe robusta, 2.5-4% caffeine,not as flavourful, it's bitter, it's gnarly. like bustello times 10. that's why they use that sweet milk...
ok, onward and upward. ann arrives today so i'll have somebody to speak english to again..
well i was going to try to write about our motorcycle adventures in northern vietnam but i have to start by saying southern vietnam sucks. i mean it's beautiful and all, there are lots of cool places and historic and archeological sights to see, but when the viet cong were coercing the peasant kids way back when, they used to tell them that the people in the south didn't want to unify the country because they loved the yankee dollar more than their own ancestors ...and they were right. it's really disheartening to be looking at a bird in a cage outside somebody's house, listening to it sing and have the owner come out and ask if you want to buy it. what the hell would i do with a bird? but a white face is money, and that's all you are. that coupled with the fact the the government is arguably socialist means the the double standard of pricing is everywhere (though not as bad as the former PRC, where there were two scrips) and it's very difficult to get from place to place unattached to some tourist bus system or to visit anything without a "tour guide" attaching themselves to you and then demanding money, money to park your bike, money to watch it, money to get it into the boat, money to get it across the river, money to get it of the boat. etc. etc. it's just sad. my impression, south of Hue, of Vietnamese people was that if anybody spoke to you, they were trying to figure out how to get your money, or there was that little percentage that needed to practice english so they can get a better job and get more money.
The obsession with money was never more obvious to us than in the area along the central coast, the cities of Nha Trang, Hoi An, Danang and Hue, and to a smaller extent in the mountains about Nha Trang. However, one interesting thing was that once we left Saigon where the moto-choice is always a 100-110cc honda, we started seeing some interesting bikes: in Dalat there were tons of little Simsons, another 2 stroke mini wonder. In Nha Trang we started seeing Minsks and MZs, remnants of VietnamÕs communist comradery (and antagonism toward fellow communists in China!). The further north you get, the more Russian made vehicles you see, including Lada cars and Kamaz trucks and buses, and Ural BMW clones with the sidecars, used by police.
But Nha Trang is a tourist spot, it has been for the Vietnamese for ages, and thus had lots of opportunities for the locals to develop a tourist industry. Mostly here it's based on boat tours of the surrounding islands. There are two major competing companies, Mama Lihn and Mama Hahn. Lihn, as it turns out, was someone that Ann had interviewed in 1990 for her documentary on the country of Vietnam for Japanese TV, and although she had since moved to Philadelphia (!) she had built her drink-stand-on-the-strand business into a tourist service, then sold it, leaving it in the capable hands of some sleazy buinessman, since she got most of her family into states. Her nephew is the manager. He was more than happy to treat us not only to a crazy boat trip complete with musical performances by the crew, but also to the most amazing dinner afterwards, where we overate as usual, but this time on eels, fish and porcupines. I was forced to sing for my supper, after they had asked if anybody on board wanted to sing a song and i did, they realized that i could sing a song, so i had to play guitar all night. When we finally left the bar/restaurant, patrons from other tables came over to thank me! They must be starving for entertainment.
Hoi An is a lovely little town, like Santa Cruz. Lots of artists. And tailors, amazing silk clothing can be tailored for you for cheap. I bougth several shirts for about $7 each. It rained HARD the whole time we were there, no out of town travel was possible, which is a drag as My Son is nearby which is the biggest Cham Temple site in central Vietnam.
Hue was the capitol of Vietnam for nearly 1000 years... now itÕs a tourist trap. There are lots of cool temples, palace ruins, emporer's mausoleums, etc. To see, but after navigating to each one you discover that the further and harder it was to get therem the more they are demanding for the entrance fee. Our bike in this area was a Honda 110, basically a scooter, but that didn't stop us from dirt trails, bamboo-rope bridges, boats, etc. We followed what serves for maps and only got lost a few times, but with a huge river (the Perfume River in fact) nearby there was little chance of losing complete touch with reality. We made it to the riverside where the Temple of Hung Chen was across the way, unfortunately a week too early for their biannual ritual where they make the Chau Van music which is really rhythmic and bluesy, and here we started to discover the process of being nickel-and-dimed to death. It cost to park the bike, it cost to get a boat across, and it cost to get back and it cost to get into the temple. Later down the road, we had to pay to get the bike into a boat, and by the time we got to Minh Mang's Tomb, we didn't have the $5 per person that they were charging for entrance! We barely hads enough to get the bike back across the river again to try to get home.
Sickened with the Vietnamese tourist industry, we decided to go out to the beach, which was relatively easy to find. A cold day, though, and rain pending, so we mostly spent some time looking through a cemetary nearby where we discovered that many Viet Khieu (the overseas Vietnamese, mostly those that left the country during 1975) had purchased burial plots here to be buried in their homeland.
After this we rented bicycles in Hue, and i spent my time recording street musicians or getting in arguments with the local tourist restaurant hawkers about the Vietnamese's attitude toward tourists. (we got some of this on tape Š it all started between two lonely planet-listed cafes that are side by side, one with more customers than the other, that one having a louder hawker. So we ate at the other, but the hawker got kind of sullen when we were leaving and asked why we didn't go there and i said that sometimes you can't tell quality by the number of people that are buying the product. She responded with the usual english phrase, "maybe next time" and i smailed an said yeah, but one of the other workers their mumbled "don't smile like that.." so i couldn't let it go at that point and confronted them on their treatment of tourists like meat with money instead of people, it went on...ok i admit it i have a strange sense of what's fun...)
i came looking for music, but art in general has been forgotten in favor of creating small artificial versions to prepackage for foreign viewing. still i was able to find some street singers (and one guy especially was fucking excellent, like the jimi hendrix of the dan bau) and get lots of good sounds. anyway, that was all up to Hue. then a 20 hour bus ride over the worst roads ever brought us to hanoi. On the way we vainly attempted to sleep, and in the morning at about 10am we had to stop to repair a punctured tube. The standard roadside automotive shops deal with this all the time, they take the tube out and find the rip, get an old piston in a c-clamp and light a little wax fire in it and vulcanize the rubber patch right on there. I guess it even works on bus tires.
While we were stopped in this rural shack, we started talking to the locals, and after a few minutes of realization that we were now in northern Vietnam and the accents are way different, we understood the normal questions (where you from? How old are you? 37? No i'm 37, you must mean 27? No?) and they invited us in for tea and bong hits. Well, ok. The other guy with us from New Zealand had some shots of clear liquor with them as well, i stuck to tea, but took the first hit off the pipe. Well, i lost control of my body right off, massive headrushing and arm flailing. I guessed immediately that this was no pot, tobacco with something-or-other... i knocked over my teacup trying to get it to my mouth. Ann by this time realized that i wasn't fooling around, but i knew eventually i'd be ok. About then i vomited all over my feet! Yeah, that's the way to make an impression on your host. Lucky for me i had actually eaten something i guess, a pear. All over my sandals. I realized also that i needed to void my entire body then, so i went out back to the pit toilet and cleaned up. By the time the bus was ready again i was ok, a little dizzy, but definitely the laughingstock of the village, who all previously seemed to believe that all americans were huge sturdy people (i'm no bigger than they are!) The new zealander had no such reaction....hmmm...
ok i like hanoi. people have a life. they have things to do, music to listen to, food to eat, books to read, they don't give a shit about you. which is just how i like it. (except of course for the ubiquitous postcard mongers and xichlo drivers in the tourist areas.) we saw lots of water puppet theatre, i found good musical instruments, stayed in a shitty hotel in the old town across the street from master mechanic Cuong's shop, Motorcycle Adventure. Needless to say the first thing i did was get a bike from him. He's legendary, among techno luddites like me, he deals in Minsks. the Minsk is a 125cc 2 stroke Russian made dirtbike, looks like 70's design. i could rebuild the entire thing with a leatherman. just the way i like it.
So let me tell you a bit about driving in hanoi. we stayed there for about a week, taking day trips in and out. the traffic is dense like saigon, but not as bad - probably because there are fewer cars, but that means more bikes. imagine an LA traffic jam of only 100cc bikes. like being on a crowded dance floor at a metallica concert, but all on bikes. there are stoplights, and people do actually heed them to a certain extent, but it's still very much law of gross tonnage as to right of way. if you need to make a left turn you just go into the oncoming traffic when the light turns and either hope you have enough others with you to hold off some of it, or wind your way through it! and we got caught in one jam that was stop and go. on bikes!
well, when we felt suffienctly used to that, we were venturing out to national parks and temples and such, lots of pavement around the capitol of course, they want to make it look good, but still many unsurfaced roads. nothing too gnarly. although the little minsklet had some trouble with two people on some of the mountains. and one day we hit a dirt road for about 8km to the Master's temple, Chua Thay, and when we were there it was sudden incredible rain like we had been having in southern vietnam. (we didn't get much riding done along the coast, only a few days rental bikes, and those were barely scooters. it's pathetic, they should get a clue from thailand, at least they know what can be done with a 200cc limit Š mini sport bikes, 125cc dirt bikes... Vietnam seems obsessed by the Honda Dream or Wave 110 scooter-type thing.) so that was a little tough to find our way back to Hanoi, luckily it didnÕt get dark until we were getting into the city. We had to stop once when the rain got so bad i couldnÕt see through the ratty-ass visor on the helmet, so we waited a little while in a bamboo hut where the people tried to sell us rain slickers. The normal Rain pncho idea here is that the rider wears it, the front goes up over the headlight (so the headlight shines through blue, red or whatever color the plastic pancho is) and the passenger is entirely underneath the pancho on the back, oblivious to the outside world, which may indeed be easier for them to deal with given some of the drivers... anyway, then we set out for a longer trip, to Cat Ba island. headed up to Bac Ninh to the smaller road, and it was ok for a while, but then they started the revitalization program, which seems to be happening on a lot of roads in northern VN, and the road basically dissapeared for sections. lots of dirt and rocks. for a hundred km. actually it was kinda cool, the bike was great on that sort of thing. when we finally got to the coast we had to find a ferry pier on one side of the river to get the ferry pier ont he other side where they take us to the island, but the road was gone. just big dirtclods and rocks. over this little mountain and then down, i was a little worried about direction at this point, but i haven't lost north yet in VN, so navigating hasn't been tough, even in cities. a few wrong turns here and there, but hey...
got across and were desperately searching for the ferry pier cuz alledgedly the boat left at 12:30, of course when we get there it's a different story. the boats won't go to Cat Ba city, only Phu Long, which is on the other end of the island, and misses the big spectacle of the east side of the island in halong bay, which is all those limestone islandlets like in southern china and souther thailand, like all those James Bond villian fortresses. regardless, we went and the views were amazing anyway, but when we got to phu long and drove off to the other side of the island, man... i thought we'd seen bad roads. you know those roads that are only rocks in death valley? like those. except pointy rocks. i swear i thought we'd burst our tires. occaisonal patches of dirt and smaller rocks, some hills. yeah. never fellonce. it was great, that little bike was excellent. we finally made it to pavement near the national park entrance and from there was some of the best riding ever, curving mountain roads in these beautiful tropical mountains, nobody around, just bliss. eventually down to cat ba city (where i have been warned there are parts stealers, the island is full of minsks.) went walking and saw the beaches nearby, beautiful crescents of sand...
ok but then it all went to shit. it started with a case of Uncle Ho's revenge that kept me in bed with fever chills or on the can for the next 24 hours. at least ann got to go to the beach. the next evening i was feeling a bit better but still couldn't eat or anything, just read and slept. our problem was that we had decided to lengthen our stay in northern VN to avoid travelling south again and just fly (one reason is the roads from Hue to Nam Binh, they are all being rebuilt day and night which is why our bus up was so horrid), so we got our cambodian visas and plane tickets to saigon before we left and now i fucked it all up by being sick, so we had to change flight times without tickets. in VN. oh yeah. and call Cuong to tell him i won't bring his bike back when i said.
so that's all worked out and we set off to the national park in morning, go hike up a mountain. didn't see and Voocs, the protected monkeys that are there. afterwards we are headed up to the north end of the island and i came around a corner to see there was a guy riding in the wrong side of the one lane road! so since he was there, i went from center to left to avoid him, but he suddenly realized he should be on the right and swerved right into us, knocking us off into the hillside. we are ok, ann has a bruised leg, so i get the bike up cuz it's leaking gas and go to see if the guy is ok. he hit us on our right, with the front right of his bike and bounced into the road, then i see he had his old mother on the back, and she's lying in the road! oh shit. and the guy's pretty rashed on his hands and feet (no protection) so i go over to see what i can do and the guy gets out a sickle and comes after me!
ok i have some ideas what to do about a knife, but how the hell do you protect yourself from a sickle attack? i couldn't figure a parry without getting cut so i did a lot of backing up til he cooled off, but then he came again swinging that thing, until ann and his mother got it away from him, but then he went for the keys to my bike, which i was not about to let happen so i had to use some physical force then, just a little wrist twisting. nonetheless, other people arrived and then more, and they all sat around making threatening gestures with their knives and drinking the sickest snake wine out of a jar where the snake had fallen apart long ago, until a local policeman arrived. i guess he was village deputy.we filled out some forms while people, realizing we were americans, made pantomimes of warplanes being shot down over the island. by this time i was bored and tired of this sort of shit, especially since i hadn't actually eaten anything in two days and had just climbed a mountain, so i just sat there and stared at them. eventually two cops came from cat ba town and after measuring everything, took my bike and me and the guy and left ann to walk! (she eventually hitched a ride after refusing one from the guys who were hangin around, who wanted 50000vnd for a ride.
so. at the police station, they got an interpretor (as such) and found out my hotel, got the guy and my passport, took my statement ("the guy's brain damaged officer, he drove into me!") and had me write it and draw pictures, etc, and then go home and come back tomorrow.
the next day was court day. sort of, really it was just going through socialist police paperwork and the guy's doctor's statements. but i was adamant about lack of fault (i think they expect foreigners to just pay up immediately) and made sure they knew what happened. ok, so they got me on a couple things anyway: despite that the guy hit me, i had gone to the wrong side of the road technically, despite driving rules of the cities, which i had cited, and i didn't have the bike's reg paper's because it was a rental. so i got fined and had to pay for the repairs, whcih the police made sure got done so they knew how much i would have to pay. plus i had to pay some to the old woman, whcih i had no problem with, she got some scrapes and she was pretty darn old. despite the fact that her son or whatever is brain damaged. it's an island, you know. so all told, $120. but then we had to catch the first ferry out to hai phong to get back intime to make our flight the next morning. typical ferry ticket nonsense with the bike fares and all, loading and unloading, and then trying to get a back in haiphong to cash a travellers check, and then the FREEWAY. as such. it's a straight shot back to hanoi, divided highway. i made 90kph until nightfall. then i could not see shit, people are burning shit by the highway, there's oncoming high beams, vehicles with no tail lights, vehicles without lights, tractors, oxen, it's all there. i just kept counting down those kilometers, home home home to our little hotel in hanoi.
we made it! we have survived sickle wielding maniacs, the toughest dirt roads ever, driving at night with no visibility, SE Asian Police, and lived to tell. made it to the plane, made it back to saigon, bought our tickets to cambodia for tomorrow. get me the hell away from here.
noe let's see if i can rent a bike from phnom penh to angkor wat..... before i forget, a few things missing from part one
when we happened to have that bike mishap on Cat Ba, we were in the process of recording the Minsk (of course) so i have a pretty funny recording that has 2stroke engine, then squealing tires and a loud krack where it suddenly ends! no doubt that will have some use in the audio travelogues.
just to get it out of the way, we did leave phnom penh before shots were fired: i did not hire any "construction workers".
also i wanted to point out that our agenda for vietnam was different from our agenda for cambodia: in vietnam while i was trying to find music in the streets and generally music that was really existing in the culture, the filmed portion was to act as addenda to ann's film doc of vietnam from 10 years ago that she made for japanese public tv. in this regard, mostly we were trying to get people to speak about the difference in the country from 1990 to 2000, and where they thought the country was heading. one of the people that we had spoken to in saigon before heading north was Kim Tran of Kim Cafe, which is one of the cafes that has a tourist business, oneof the big ones. she's obviously rich, comparitively, and she started the business in 1990. we asked her to set up and interview for when we returned from cambodia.
we took the bus to phnom penh with a mr. binh, who told us a very interesting story of working for the US troops in the 70s, and remaining behind after drivign the boat with refugees out to meet the leaving ships in april 1975, then returning to saigon and of course the reeducation camps. became a bus driver after that, but if the bus system is run by a socialist government, nobody takes care of its maintenance (oh, the state will do it.) so he was also a general mechanic.
we crossed the border on foot, to meet the cambodian bus. instantly things were different, different people and architecture. i thought roads in vietnam were bad, let me tell you... there are three kinds of bad roads here. 1) those that were once paved 2)those that are in the process of being paved and 3)dirt roads whose surface is rutted by bombs, mines or water. in general regular unpaved roads are fine. fun in fact, especially on bike.
the definition of road in cambodia seems to be "that narrow dry strip in between the wet parts" regardless of surface. the road fromt he border was type 1 bad, rutted by bomb groups and then destoyed by water. flooding of the mekong had also caused us to abandon the bus after a while in favor of a snall boat, then back to road in a trailer pulled by a motorcycle, then a ferry boat over the actual mekong, then another bus thing into phnom penh.
a note on cambodian history.
i am going to assume that most of you have paid attention during your lives, but to recap: Prince Sihanouk was head of the country in the 60s, a long line of monarchs acting in collusion with the french as an unspoken protectorate, despite the fact that he was friendly with Mao! the US had of course been in Laos since 1960 (maybe the first US military troops in the war) and in the late 60s they were trying to bomb the ho chi minh trail where it went into cambodia from bases within the countrym so the CIA performed a coup and placed LonNol into power. this of course precipitated the takeover by the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot (with help from china again, although Sihanouk and entrourage got out of Khmer jail into beijing also.. it's always complicated isn't it?) Pol Pot got big headed and tried to take southern Khmer, the mekong, and the vietnamese, not really understanding how to run a peacetime economy anyway, decided to take those border incursions as war and invaded cambodia in 79, and remained there for 10 years. nonetheless with the khmer rouge deposed, the country tried to regain some of its art and culture, and the university of fine arts was started in 1981, with the dance, music and theatre splitting off in the early 90s. Sihanouk came back in the 80s, abdicated in favor of his dad, later became king anyway, and the country is run by a 3 party system now, Sihanouk's FUNCINPEC, Hun Sen who is the rightest prime minister and the sam rainsy party which is fairly commie butnot maoist.
so phnom penh is, well... lacking infrastructure. not much in the way of public works. the big streets are paved, but all the others aren't. garbage is garbage, it's in every canal. the city is built where the mekong and tonle sap stung confluence is, lots of lakes in town too. they are obviously trying to get it together, but most of the wealth of the country is in this city, and a lot of it seems to be in the NGOs, the Non governmental organizations, or non profits that are cleanign up the world. they are the ones driving around in $30000 4x4s, which could have purchased 3 schools. decades of war and malnutrition have left a massively wounded populace to gather here. one big problem of malnutriion that isn't normally addressed is brain damage- malnourished kids end up like crack babies, lots of attention deficit disorder and worse... then there's the number of maimed people, land mine victims. limblessness is rampant. beggars are pimped at the markets by older guys, some just grotesque. since i'm here for music primarily, i only give money to street musicians, most of whom are blind, but to make up for this we gave blood to the kantha bopha children's hospital (it was a sterile procedure) which not only seemed much more constructive but they gave us kantha bopha tshirts, which in my opinion are way cooler than "danger: mines!" that the tourists buy. i thnk those things just feed the problem where the cambodians think that since the westerners think mines are cool and dangerous that they play it up. lets face it: mines aren't cool. nor are guns. nonetheless, the "travellers" nowadays are not the leftist hippies of 20 years ago, they are more the young rightists from the world trying to see rather than experience so they can notch their belts with where they've been. lots of young english and new zealanders at the $1 a night guesthouses drinking and getting high, going out to the shooting range where they can shoot ak-47s for a few dollars, or to see the killing fields. maybe they are fascinated by guns because they don't have them in their countries, but it's feeding a form of tourism that will have negative effects on the locals culture, especially when it is battling to destroy what guns there are in the country anyway. there's a beautiful statue on the north side of the city of a huge pistol with the barrel tied in a knot.
ok so you can see i don't get along with other tourists. but we were there to document khmer music and dance, so we spent alot of our time at the university of fine arts where our friend moni mao teaches dance. they were preparing for the water festival that weekend, boat races celebrating the end of the rainy season and when the river flow changes from favoring one river of the confluence for another. plus jiang the president of china was coming to visit and they were preparing to perform atthe royal palace.
i'm out of time here, i have a meeting to go to (i am in tokyo after all). i will try to get get back to this soon, because it gets interesting. ok back from toshiba-emi and on with the story.
getting back to what we were doing there at all, the point is that Khmer music and dance very nearly disappeared during the pol pot regime and it has taken great efforts on the part of existing artists to restore it somewhat. our self-appointed tasks were to interview the heads of the dance school and the music school (who is mao pheung, moni's father) about their art, life, direction and where khmer art will go. the week we arrived, like i said, was the week of the water festival, so mostly we ended up shoting rehearsals of dance and interviewing mr chhieng, the dance school head. he had been a dancer in the royal court in the 70s, ended up travelling with sihanouk to china, but since they were having there own cultural revolution and weren't very interested in artm he went on to korea before coming back to cambodia to start the school of choreographic arts. while in china, though, he had learned some chinese dance and was teaching a group that was to perform for jiang when he visited. a crew from singapore was also filming a tv series on se asia and we kept running into them at the university.
we had a free day before the start of the three day festival, waiting to find out if moni could get us into the royal palace for the performances, so we rented a bike to get out of town. luckily the bikes aren't limitied to 200cc like in vietnam, so we got a real motorcycle, a honda 250 xl degree. with actual rebound damping in the forks, unlike any bike in vietnam. a fairly nice 6speed dirtbike. perfect. we decided to head south to phnom chisor and angkor borei, temples from the time of early angkor wat temples, 9th-11th century. a note on cambodian brain damage: in vietnam, while the traffic is intense and every which way, they are fairly orderly wth the unspoken rules, namely, if something is moving somewhat perpendicularly to you, you try to go behind it to allow smooth motion all the way around. of course this means you have to watch because whoever is ahead of you may move out of somebody else's way and it's your job as the person in back to ge out of the way of the person swerving to avoid whatever is moving in front. there are no mirrors, or at least none that show what's behind you.
in cambodia they have no such rule. people will try to drive in front of anything moving near them, even perpendicularly to them. around the front of every guesthouse, bar, restaurant, market etc are groups of moto drivers, with their 100cc honda dreams scooters. they stop on the street when you are walking (whoever heard of a westerner walking?) and say "moto?" to the point where it's truly fucking annoying. since i am generally the problem tourist, i hate to have anybody do something for me that i would rather do myself, especially driving. laundry, ok. and cooking, i like other people's food. but i don't liketo be a passenger. and i do like to walk. as a result i ended up occasionally hangin out with the moto drivers gathered around the front of our guesthouse by the lakeside to find out why they drove motos and it turns out that most of them were ex-army from from when the government fired 2/3 of the army or they were country orphans of the pol pot regime, post work camp. interesting, but it still didn't make me want to ride on their bikes like it seemed all the other travellers liked to.
as a result it was extremely liberating to drive a real bike out of town. the roads weren't so bad (class 1, had once been paved) and the bike was maneuverable to get around the potholes. although after a while we were still drivign byt he river and the road was getting worse and i realized that we could not be where we wanted to be. Khmer language is written in a script that is like a gothic version of thai, there are some 35 consonants and 25 vowels, and i can't read a lick of it. when there were signs, that is. so we stopped to ask what town we were in and it eventually turned out that our map was wrong of course, the town was on the map but named something else and the name they said was (Srang) some 40km away on our map, anyway it meant driving back a ways and switching roads. so we did, went further south passing some interesting roadside entertainment including a strongman and a midget and some children doing kung fu (!?). where we were driving was flat so when we finally saw a hill we knew it had to be phnom chisor (phnom means hill). and indeed, a dirt road led off to the mountain, then after a local attached themselves to us to guide us, up 412 steps to the ruins of the temple. very interesting, apparently bombed besides just dilapidated. to the east (all the temples except angkor wat open to the east) was the road to the outer temples, although as we looked down it we saw it go past the first one, then directly into the overflowing river. further southeast was phnom da where borei is, obviously we weren't gonna get there by motorcycle. plus it was getting on in the afternoon and i had no intention of trying to get back to phnom penh at night, so no more temples that day, we left and drove back to the city.
a couple notes: the mekong is extremely flooded, lots of problems everywhere. lots of drowned fruit orchards, drowned people, homes etc. there has been a lot of rain, but what is not mentioned so much is the clear cut and otherwise illegal logging practices going on upriver which just happens to be in china. as a result there is more runoff every year resulting in more flooding every year downriver. but this isn't the sort of thing they talk about when jiang comes to visit. you would think that vietnam would bring it up (despite their communist socialism, they don't get along with china. just an example of their paranoia: when nixon went to china in 72, the vietnamese believed that he was making a deal with them that they could have vietnam when he withdrew the americans, they would look the other way. of course this was backed up by the fact that when vietnam invaded cambodia, china invaded vietnam in the north, but china got it's butt kicked fast. vietnam was looking for that fight.) so after the getting lost bit, plus the roads and the drivers, plus the fact that i had to leave my passport as collateral, i decided not to rent a bike to drive to angkor wat the following week. so we walked around phnom penh mostly. we did get invited to the palace for the beginning of the water festival, but only for the rehearsals, not the evening show. the princess herself used to be a dancer, so she oversaw the rehearsals herself, showing up att he university with her 7 little dogs trailing after her one by one, pissing and shitting on the floor of the school leaving their little royal poops where dancers may step on them. at the rehearsals at the palace i got to shake her hand, but i really didn't have anything to say to her..."uh, i'm glad to see that there is interest in the arts.. uh,.." whatever, i'm barang anyway (that's khmer for haoule, pelangi, farang, guailo, etc...) mr chhieng knew her from way back and obviously they got along on some level and he allowed her to kibbitz the dance except for the chinese one.
the festival itself meant that boats from every province came into the city, along with people from all over. the city started to fill up, which meant huge crowds by the river, but that meant lots of street musicians for me to record, plus some classical music practice in wat phnom. a huge number of street musicians are blind, and most of them seem to play the tro, a two string fiddle. but a few played some sort of three string guitar and lots sang. i gave out lots of 100, 200, 500 riel bills. it's about 3900 to the dollar, but the dollar is used as am alternative currency. not like vietnam, where mostly they give you change in dong if you use a dollar, but here everyone uses dollars. you end up getting the most ratty-ass dollar bills as change. there must be a million dollars in US currency in use in phnom penh, mostly ones and fives. lodging is cheaper than vietnam, like $1-2 per person for backpacker lodging, but the foodis more expensive (and not quite as good.) unfortunately the backpacker set seems to reward the sorts of behaviour that will make the guesthouses cook western food and why the hell would i want to travel all the way to cambodia to eat a hamburger or bangers and mash? so we ate at street stalls mostly, i only got sick once. the fish is all lake fish, so it's kind of fatty, the birds are skinny and there's a lot of worship of pig magic ( that is to say, the magic that pigs perform - they turn garbage into pork!) but with the festival going on there were foods from everywhere - deep fried little finches, unknown fried cakey things, fried spiders, fried crickets, worms, freshwater eels and shellfish. ugh. i asked one hawker if i could take a photo of her bowls of fried insects but she said no! well.
anyway, it was getting dense so we decided to head out to angkor wat for a while to get away.
the boat from phnom penh takes 5 hours across the tonle sap ("big lake") to siem reap. costs $22. we got picked up by moto drivers from a guesthouse allied with the one where we had been staying, from whom we bought the boat tickets. it's all tied up. it's a racket. these guys here in siem reap wanted to take care of everything. they said that at their guesthouse laundry was free (yeah) and the pot was free too. ok then. the deal with pot in cambodia is strange. when we got the visas at the embassy in hanoi, there were lots of photos outside of them destroying pot plantations. but as it turns out this is mostly due to pressure from the international community from whence the toruists come, and the fact that cambodia has an army but no war so they have to do something. see, marijuana is a normal ingredient in classical khmer cooking, so they obviously can't get rid of it. in fact if there is a restaurant with the word 'happy' in the name, you have the option of ordering your food happy or not. well, we got there and a spanish guy rolled a joint and i smoked it and thank god it wasn't too strong, just right (for me, i'm a wimp). so we got on the local's motos and went ot get tickets to the angor wat complex, because you can start the afternoon before your ticket date to see the sunset. it's $20 for one daym, $40 for 2 or 3, $60 for a week. are you starting to get the impression that it's the most expensive place in southeast asia? you'd be right. the drivers warn about renting the $10/day motos without drivers because they don't get watched when you are in the temples and then you'd be liable for damages...are you sensing a racket going on? uh huh....
anyway, that afternoon we headed into the area, bought three day passes and, granted i was stoned, but i finally saw just how big the fucking place was. we turned left around the moat that goes around angkor wat, it's huge, it's really impressive. amazing. we stopped and phnom bakheng, they had elephants you could rent to climb the hill, we walked up and there are musicians at the top of the hill in front ofthe temple ruins playing endless melodic loops, i recorded for about 20 minutes, but then had togoup to see thesunset. there were a lot of tourists from everywhere, including cambodians that had come for the siem reap water festival. we did time lapse filming of the tourists.
the following day our strategy was to see the outer loop temples, the ones overgrown by the jungle for the past 1000 years. our driver guys agreed to my route plans, but were a little miffed at not having us follow some normal tourist's routing i guess, and they made that clear. like i said, i don't like being driven anyway, so these guys got on my nerves. and we weren't here to see the temples anyway, we were here to experience them. that means lying on some rock and listening to the sounds that the birds and geckos make and watching the trees that took hundreds of years to root around the walls of the temples and sometimes this could take an hour or more. which was my reasoning for our route. the driver guys weren't into this obviously, they like tourists who look at the thing and then say let's go. besides i don't like other people near me when i am inside the temples, in fact i don't like other people in general, that's what it's likebeing the problem tourist. when you get to the front of one ofthese temple ruins, children who speak 10 languages attach themselves to you to be the tourguide, tellng you nothing you couldn't read for yourself in the book, and demanding money later. we experienced this sort of shit in vietnam and it pisses me off to no end. i like scaring children anyway. they wait and follow and try to sell tshirts, flutes (whcih i did buy one eventually) sarongs and mostly, "mister you buy cold drink! you buy coca cola! you buy postcard!" no i don't. later i found out that these kids are the families of the policemen that guard the temples! they arrest others and take their wares... super corruption, yeah, it's the third world.
which reminds me, the US election was happening and guess what? the guy who actually got more votes lost, the guy whose dad was dictator before, (who was head of the secret police), wins, with the election problems in the province run by his brother - no one was the least bit surprised. totally business as usual around this part of the world. nobody even blinked.
ok so along day later, we get home and the driver guys are a little edgy at us. fuck em. i say we want to rent bicycles the next day and they are a little more pissed that they don't get the $6 the next day, so they say they have to get the bicycles for us. i argue a bit about their bikes, cuz i saw people with mountain bikes, so they agree to get us mountain bikes. we compare notes with another barang-ken-stein couple that are actually ok, a british journalist guy and a mexican translator who is mistaken for an indonesian woman mostly. they have been travelling in china and mongolia and indonesia. they're good people. they have mostly the same things to say about the people running the guesthouse tour services stuff, i begin to see that angkor has been a tourist area for long enough for the locals to begin to hate the tourists. in the rest of cambodia people said hallo for real. not here. they're over it, jaded. tourists have been here for 60 years!
anyway, the next day we get the bikes and they suck. chinese made, form of a mountain bike but cast from pot metal. squeaky and bent. i had to oil the chains before we left, but still. uncomfortable. but it's only about 9km to the angkor complex, and we planned only the two biggest temples, angkor wat and angor thom, both fairly close. we spent most of the morning at the bayon, part of thom. it would be a scary place to trip, there are some 200 huge faces carved into the towers. it's amazing. and bas relief outside ont he walls that goes on forever, stories and stories from khmer history and the ramayana. amazing. lots of apsara. (apsara are those round girls that dance all over that carvings. they are goddesses that have "boundless amorous desire". the classical dance has a lot of apsara dance, which is why the dancers like Moni are so hot. hot apsara.)
the afternoon was at angkor wat itself, which is, well... big. and well preserved, or reconstructed. actually, i liked the overgrown temples better, but i can see how europeans would like angkor wat, it's the most cathedral-like. ann made lots of time lapse of clouds near the towers at these two temples. at the end of the daythere were monks practicing music ata monestary nearby so i went to see and they made me sit in the middle of them as they played, a form of the classical music but in straight time. they were practicing because they would perform the nextday for sihanoulk and jiang who were visiting the wat complex and the temples that the chinese government was paying to restore.
so the next day's plan involved renting a real motorcycle, again a honda 250XL dirtbike and heading up to banteay srei and kobal spein. banteay srei is the women's temple, it's a ways away, made of pink sandstone and ornately carved. the bikes here were $14/day! full of suck. i probably should have ridden a phnom penh rental there, but even so ann would have had to take the boat. she doesn't like riding on t he back all that much. even so, we went out together this day and discovered that the road to banteay srei was the worst of the worst of the type 2 bad roads - on its way to being paved. after getting around the crowds waitig for the arrival of sihanouk and jiang, we made our way into angkor. here we drove over kilometers of stones that they had laid down to (hopefully) later bulldoze and surface? it was like drivign over spiky cobblestones, for miles. painful, to say the least. eventually the work stops and it's a beautiful dirt road, water carved, we had a good time posting the whoops with two people on the bike, we got pretty good at it. at the temple i heard music so i pretty mush went straight through to the musiciansint he back, a good large ensemble of once again, crippled musicians, missing arms legs or eyes, maybe 8 guys with enough limbs for 5 of them. 3 fiddles, a drum, a mentally retarded guy playing spoons, a hammer dulcimer, a guy withour an arm who had a prosthetic thing with a pick attached playing a flat three stringed thing, and best of all, a guy playing a leaf off a tree. they rocked. the leaf guy sounded like a high kazoo, but he kept in tune with the melody, holding the leaf with a hand that had three fingers. i recorded them for awhile, and then when they stopped they said a guy from america had recorded them before and thay had had some cassettes but they ran out. so i have to write to this guy in new york and tell him to send more cassettes to these guys.
then we watched a japanese photo crew order people around trying to get some hrooid glamour shot of a state int he temple with a flower in front of it. it was horrendous, we filmed them. the director was a prime example of why we cannot let the japanese have an army - it would be like giving a glass of whiskey to an alcoholic.
from here we continued up the dirt road (not paved ever, the best surface we had driven on probably!) to kobal spein, which i nearly missed because I was passed (hey, i had a passenger) on this excellent dirt road by two guys in motocross gear (which is rare to see, riders with gear) who had HALO patches on their shoulders. (HALO is the biggest remaining landmine clearance outfit, now that CMAC has been revealed as having been funnelling money into an ex khmer rouge general's pepper farm.) This kind of shook me a bit, because if they are there working it means mines are still there. I nearly missed the side road to Kobal Spean. We did see lots of signs in this area with pictures of the 5 or so types of mines that you may find and the 20 or so types of potentially unexploded ordnance that you should stay away from, kids!
Again, however, we lived to tell. No explosions, and only one front wheel washout on a sandy trail (bruising AnnÕs already tenderized right shin, of course. She was a little pissed.) Kobal spein is a carved river bed, lots of lingams, the penis of vishnu which appears to be a lump, in patterns in the rock. plus other carvedpeople. a hike up to the riverbed itself, a nice waterfall... i guess the idea is that the water flows over all these linga and is made holy and fertile so that it fows in the siem reap river and is good for diverting into the rice fields etc. to give you an idea of this civilisation, one of those temples downriver like angkor thom supposedly had 80,000 people attending it. this was a huge city 1000 years ago. the area is near a pass. there were landmines everywhere, supposedly cleared out now, but like i said we were passed by mine clearers. a note on the khmer rouge: everybody says they dislike the khmer rouge, everybody here has a horror story. they were complete idiots, it's true. they were described to me in this area as being drunken teenagers with guns. but here's the thing: the khmer rouge were just cambodians. and they still are. when pol pot died in 1998, they didn't stop being cambodians. the government has had this amnesty deal where they could turn themselves in and trade in their beret for an army uniform, but then they let go of 2/3 of their army so alot of those moto driver guys are probably ex khmer rouge. the khmer rouge idea was like militant philistinism, mixed with the normal paranoia of ll the socialist reform movements. i hate to say it, because i agree with socialism in general, but the twentieth century proves that human nature overrides socialism in two ways; people will always try to get an edge on other people, and people will always try to not let anither get an edge on them. hence all the socialist/communist countries have had huge problems with blackmarket economies and corruption. and repressive governments because the people want more than they get and so the people remain paranoid of the government and each other. the khmer rouge's idea of agrarian reform was no different, they mined ricefields that weren't the ones that their work camps worked, because if you weren't with them you were against them, and if you were tryign to grow something yourself you weren't part of their plan. so that is why there are so many maimed people around cambodia.
especially here. we wanted to go to beng melea, a temple as big as angkor wat but completely overgrown forever, but the banteay srei guards toldus that the road was closed due to river flooding. there is another road, but it's a ways away, not reachable in daylight left that day, so we went to another outer temple. back down the horrid road, toward the main temple complexes. on the way out of this one, we washed out on the sandy road and crashed, ann got another bump on her shin and i twisted my knee, no big deal but i broke the brake lever and the guy charged me another $4. most expensive bike rental ever.
i tried to get back to phnom bakheng to record the musicians again but got caught up recording these cicadas that rang like bells and some geckos and then the sun already set.
our angkor passes were up, we decided to go to beng mealea 40 km away the next day. the other cool couple, also fed up with the other travellers who were drinking and smoking pot all over siemreap, wanted to go too, so after all that money, what's a little more, we decided to get together and rent a 4x4. of course the guesthouse drivers said they would find one but we told them to fuck off and found one outside a bigger hotel,miriam tried to bargain the guy down from $60 (she's from mexico city) but he wouldn't budge. he was the driver, sophiak. said he knew the way. i looked at the car, it's an isuzu trooper with nearly street tires, but whatever, he knew the way. it turns out he was insane of course, despite his nice clothes. we set out past the roulos group, the oldest of the angkor area temples (9th century) and got to the highway, road 6. i see now that it would have been folly to drive from phnom penh on this road, they said it was ok for the first 150km, then then next 150km was "a bone jarring mess". this road has been destroyed by bombs, mines and tanks, then eroded by water and rains, making what asphalt is left the worst of the obstacles to drive over. it is perhaps the worst of the worst of the worst roads i have ever been on. being on a motorcycle would not have helped. being in a 4x4 just made me carsick going up and down. eventually we got off that road onto a dirt road. which went on for hours, with a few water crossing. sophiak said it looked different than when he was there a couple months ago. about noon we got stuck in the mud, so we got out to try to get thecar out, but there were no rocks to put under the wheels, we had no sand ladders. and the mud is like playa dust mud, but deeper, like quicksand. getting the jeep out took two hours and alot of local help. ok, this is kind of funny, no big deal, but a little ways down the road we come to a river. there is no way to drive across, so we gt out and say we'll walk, bu sophiak is nonplussed. his white shirt is mudstainedand he takes it off and walksinto the river to see that it's about three feet deep where the road crosses. he decided to drive into the river, we try to stop him, get our things ot of the car and sure enough he drives into the water and the car dies and it's stuck. ok, then a japanese guy comes by on a bike with a cambodian driver, and takes pictures of our drowned car, he says beng mealea is only about 6 or 7 km down the sandy road and worth it. so we are hours away from siem reap, the sun sets at 5:30, might as well walk the rest of the way. sophiak gets out of the wet jeep and doesn't seem at all bothered byt he fact that his jeep is underwater, so we realize that he is insane now. we leave.
the road is surrounded by mined ricefields, some of which are cleared. children along the way keep saying "bye bye" to us like they know something we don't. there are signs everywhere with pictures of the 5 or so kinds of landmines that we might find and the kinds of unexploded ordnance that might be around. and don't touch it, children! later a couple guys drive by on motos, so we flag them down to give us a ride the last km. of course when we get near the beng mealea area, a guy who speaks some english says he's the tourguide and that the policeman wants $5 per person! yeah, right. i've heard this one before. so we say fuck off and walk to the temple but these guys won't let go and they follow us in. the japanese guy hadn't mentioned any $5, but i figure he got in under the barang radar, like ann does when she's not with me, being of japanese ancestry. "same same but different" they always say to her, they think she's some hill tribe person. "you like vietnamese same same". i dyed my hair black in august and got a sidewalk haircut in saigon so they all think i'm local from behind, till they see the nose.
this temple is amazing, it's heaps of fallen walls within walls, surrounded by a thousand years of jungle growth. i climbed to a spot and tried to record the birds echoing within the jungle and the walls, but the tourguide finds me and talks to me to ask what i'm doing. ruining the recording. and what i want to do is sit still in this place and enjoy it and nowi'm surrounded by the tourguide guy, the drivers and two guys who claim they are policemen, wearing incomplete green uniforms (army. the police are khaki. guess where they got the uniforms? my guess is it involved a trade for a beret...) ok so i'm pretty pissed at having this entire day lead up to being bugged by guys who want $5, and besides we have a an hour before sunset to get back to the jeep (to go where?) so we decide to go back. miriam again does the bargaining, telling these guys that we know that this is a free temple and they aren't gonna get $5 from us, we gave them a 10000 riel note ($3) and tell them we are leaving. they want to drive us then, for the $5 per person so i can't handle it anymore and flip them off and tell the fuck off and we walk away. they think we're nuts i guess because we're miles away from anywhere.
sometime before sunset, sophiak rides up with anohter guy on motos and they drive us back the last 2km to the jeep, now out of the water but running badly of course. i guess he had the brains to dry off the air filter and the distributor, but shit. the seats are all wet. what an idiot, but he doesn't seem bothered so whatever. i can sit in a wet carseat if i get home someday. we left for phnom penh the next morning, another $22 boat ride. once again i'd like to point out that angkor wat is the most expensive place in se asia.
the newspapers in phnom penh reported a statement from a former khmer rouge higher up that "china had never approved of the pol pot regime's methods" in some way trying to let jiang off the hook while he was there. meanwhile, clinton was in hanoi, and senator kerry promised a side trip to phnom penh to try to shore up ideas of war crimes trials for khmer rouge blood brothers #2 and 3 who are still alive and untried. when sihanouk and jiang were in siem reap, their portrait (and their wives') were painted large near the royal residence and people lined the streets when they arrived with pictures of them and chinese and cambodian flags. they seem to love china...hmmm... each temple in angkor that is beign restored has some specific country backing it, and to be honest, china's is pretty pitiful. but it's that communist thing, alledgely the communist party is strong in cambodia. which of course means absolutely nothing in terms of the people's well being. phnom penh has all the money. there are a lot of cars there, more percentage wise than saigon.. it's really pretty stupid.
when we went back to phnom penh it was to interview Moni's father Mao Pheung. he is and old musician, their family survived the pol pot regime because, while he was a studied musician who had spent years at monestaries learning as much of the classical music as he could, his day job was workign at the post office, so he pretended that was all he did. the common khmer rouge method of dealign with businesses or factories was kill the managers and instate the lowest workers into the highest positions. gosh that really works, those guys really knew how to run things. and i am guessing that they didn't really keep a workign post office anyway.
anyway, their family was sent to battambang province and split up into work camps, children here, women there, men there. they did this all over the country. they had five kids (Moni was 5 years old, the second youngest) and three made it through. Moni said that the youngest couldn't keep up and died and the oldest worked too hard and died. they came back to phnom penh after the vietnamese took over the capitol and set to trying to bring some art knowledge back. Pheung, over the course of the past 15 years has remembered about 400 melodies, most of which they recorded for a musicologist form berkeley (but who never gave them a tape!) and has written the first part of a 3 partbook about the music, the part about all the instruments. i have a copy now to take to the cambodian community int he US looking for translators. see, this whole family is very interested in properly documenting khmer music and dance. Moni is a powerhouse, we met her while she was at the asian pacific performance exchange in LA last summer, wiht another cambodian dancer, Sophea Souer, a guy who is an expert on dancign the part of the monkey hanuman. he overstayed his visa afterwards, which means he won't get to leave cambodia for ten years after he returns, but he stayed to work in his uncle's doughnut shop ont he 400 block of california street in SF. (cambodian doughnuts are the equivalent of vietnamese nail shops, or korean liquor stores or wig shops. they gravitate toward these things i guess...) go say hi for me (when he gets back from visiting relatives in minneapolis for thanksgiving - can you imagine what a south east asian must think of winter in minneapolis?)
anyway, moni is determined to get most of the dance pedagogy on tape somehow (we filmed a lot of the teaching of the young girls, they teach them moves but also stretches to hyper extend their elbows a nd hands, agh!) and her father is determined that people not only know the forms of the music but the stories behind it and whay it is what it is. the filmed intervews with him were, to me, the most important part of the cambodian segment of this trip. although i don't know how to put it all together. yet.
after all that, i was pretty sick of where we were staying so we left back to saigon, to meet bill clinton there.
a couple days later, anti-communist insurgents picked up a bunch of day workers, drove them into phnom penh and gave them guns and they attacked the defense ministry and killed 8 people, injured some more, includign an ex pat. the worst disturbance in phnom penh since 1997 when Hun Sen (presently prime minister) assumed power. the situation is going to get really bad when sihanouk dies, i think, cuz he is keeping hun sen in check to a certain extent. at the peace cafe a few days before, drunken ex pats told us not to portray phnom penh in a bad light because the cambodians had enough troubles and their biggest income proposition was tourism....
ok. back to vietnam. i convinced ann to come to vietnam while i recorded music because she had gone there in 1990 and made a film for japanese tv about the people and where they thought the country was heading...
we attempted to do a follow up while we were there, but it was a bust mostly. most people we had talked to were basically just after our money, and evasive to our questions. we had arranged interviews with Kim Tran before we left, but it proved difficult when we got back. she pawned us off on some of her drivers, like the mr binh that we had spoken to before. he had had alot to say about VN and the US, but as clinton arrived the day we did, people were especially paranoid. i think the most telling analogy is that the government had cleaned the streets near where he (and we) stayed, but in clearing the garbage, the rats had nowhere to hide anymore so the roamed the streets...
what we wanted to know was: why did many people emigrate? why didn't you (to the drivers, etc..)? how do you feel about Vietnam, and where it is heading? but the same people who had given us interesting answers and stories while drivign wouldn't talk to the camera. apparently the government is watching them. kim kept sayign she had dinners to go to and also pointed out the government worker in their tour office who checked their tourist books to make sure they were accurate and watched whot hey interacted with among the foreigners. eventually she set up a talk with us, but she never showed up. she had been really nice to us every time we were in saigon. typical business woman.
one of the things that confused us was how socialist exactly this socialist/communist country was, because we encountered a lot of people begging, sayign that they couldn't afford school or food. apparently there is socialized medicine, but nobody trusts it...(?) and school is free through high school, but they have to pay for the books! and the uniforms... and then there are virtually zero scholarships to college, so college draftees are the wealthy and those with relatives int he government. so the party is still corrupt. and hte business owners told us that taxes amounted to a straight 10% for everybody. either they are misinformed or the government is insane, especially as to allowing foreign investment with the trade agreements that clinton was there initiating. they don't seem to realize the ideas of exploitation when they see the face of employment. they have been allowing internal business competition for ten years and it's proving to be good for the economy in general, but it's making classes int eh culture... the twenty year olds are slghtly informed by the world, but they want money and freedom like they think the US has, but whenever quoted, they contradict themselves, like "we want to be able to have relationships that are free, but too much freedom can be bad too" (i read that in the hanoi paper). on top of this, the communist government is livign in the twentieth century. the refuse to understand that in the post-modern, post-watergate, post-eastern bloc, not to mention post many south american military dictatorships, people don't trust anybosy who want to lead them, and that propaganda is laughable. especially that 20th century glory of the state stuff, which they are still touting, it's fucking collectible now. Bill, a president who protested the war with VN and was the first to go there ofiicially, claimed the war a tragedy, but the official vietnamese response was NO! it was a great victory for the freedom of the vietnamese people! (who are still suffering from the effects of agent orange, etc....)
i actually wanted to go talk to bill to tell him that all things said and done, he did a pretty good job despite being stymied by people about things that weren't political business anyway, and he was a far sight better than either of the idiots trying to get into that office now. but of course they blocked the streets where he drove and i didn't get to see him.
so we ate more pho, which was extremely rich and tasty after the cambodian food (whcih wasn't that bad, when we found places that served cambodians instead of those that had menus. we may be the only people to not lose weight while travelling through southeast asia.)
a couple days later, we left the country, a few hours in singapore and onto tokyo where i promptly got a cold (it's fucking cold here. relatively. it was 90 or so in cambodia. it's in the 50s here). i've been trying to access the two years of japanese language study from several years ago, it's very difficult. meetings with people at record stores, distributors, trying to get somebody interested in carrying our cds here, in what they claim is a depressed economy, but i swear, maybe it's coming here straight from Vietnam, but i think tokyo may be the wealthiest society i have ever seen, scandinavia and germany included. conspicious consumption is everywhere. it's a little weird. ann has 4 screenings of a film she made here about immigrant workers who had overstayed their visas in order to financially survive, so our whole trip here is different kinds of promotion... i'm typing away in a office of a film magazine today while she interviews, yesterday we were at a NGO organization. and a meeting for me at toshiba-emi. it's a little unreal. later this week we head south to osaka and kyoto.
This year... South America! (maybe. Ann's got a job in Peru, started March - also she's an election observer! But sheÕs not into riding betty to Buenos Aires for some reason....)
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Web sites: The Minsk Club is a definite boon to travellers in northern VN. They have info on bikes, rides and beer. Good Hanoi-area rides and pubs are listed on their site:
another Vietnam-Biking tour site is:
there are plenty of Thai-based motorcycle sites, including the Golden Triangle Rider Thai/Asia site.
and tour guided trips.
and this guy, Graham Rogers who lives in Bangkok who rides a BMW R-80 G/S around and writes about his rides.
Grant Johnson's Horizons Unlimited Bulletin Board is a good place for questions and answers for world bike travellers:
as of course is Chris Scott's (though bigger on Africa and Middle east info:) Adventure Motorcycling
and the Adventure Motorcycling Message Board.
some info on shipping bikes: shipping.
General info on these areas can be found at:
the WWW Virtual Library Vietnam and Cambodia Sites (they have lots of info on every country in SE Asia)
The Internet Travel Guides:
The Vietnamese Embassy can give you some information, but to get a visa, go to the Consulate in San Francisco on California St. by Van Ness.
It's easy. Or email them: Vietnamese Consulate General
The Cambodian Embassy is absolutely no help. HereÕs an example, i wrote them to find out about whether or not i would need a carnet to cross the border with a bike and they wrote me back eventually (from a hotmail address!) saying "You sound alot like the adventurer Indiana Jones, but you should remember that Indiana Jones was in a movie and the jungles can be very dangerous in real life."
Get your visas in Vietnam or Thailand. Cheap and generally simple in the big cities, and most tourist agencies can do it for you.
of course always look at the US State Dept. Site, just in case thereÕs a war you didn't know about.
but you don't have to don't always believe them. I mean....
© 2005 MAGNETIC