a long delayed wrap up from my trip to cambodia and vietnam.
first, let me start by lauding the selfless devotion to God and others exhibited by my hostesses SEA. i can’t imagine the sacrifice that comes with uprooting your life and moving to a place such as that. i think of what we learned of mother theresa last year in the book “come be my light“. it talked of the depression and doubts she had. at times, it seems that giving of yourself to others leaves you yourself empty. it’s difficult, even for the short times i’ve spent as a “tourist” to others oppression or poverty to know what to think or how to feel. any attempt to help seems like a drop in the ocean. so, to A and J, i am impressed by your courage, selflessness and ability to proceed in spite of the times of doubt or anguish.
for me, the one thing that struck me profoundly was the sense of loneliness and isolation i had as a traveler in a place where the world was so different. i hadn’t noticed it as much in africa, as things were a little more “faciliated” AND there was a bit more english spoken there than in SEA. one begins to feel existential when you can’t communicate with ANYONE around you. when something as simple as water is impossible to pronounce in a way that has meaning to a freakin waitress. you feel like you’re in a sensory deprivation tank or something. add in a little sleep deprivation from scooter horns and being 11 hours out of your time zone and it can get TOUGH. there were certainly a couple of times i wished i was already home with lillis, and others where i couldn’t believe how lucky i was to be in such an amazing and beautiful place.
thankfully, one thing that is universal is the smile. i was greeted (and greeted others) with numerous smiles. showing children their pictures was another great way of “communicating” (as it were).
the pace of life was so amazing. inside saigon or phnom pehn, a madhouse. panhandlers, horns honking, crowded streets. in the mekong delta, people reclining on mini-barges full of bananas or palm fronds, families mending nets or washing pots in the river. there was a tranquility in certain areas not to be found anywhere near a civilized area of america. a stillness and a timeless quality to life. fortunatley, there are places not yet touched by tourism, b/c i become more convinced everyday, that anything we touch (as american’s) has a butterfly effect. it is MUCH more difficult to give or help correctly than to do it incorrectly. handing money to a child salves self-consciousness about one’s own wealth, but seals the fate of children doomed to walk the streets selling knockoff dvd’s and sunglasses or bottles of water.
outside of the child vendors, i think what bothered me the most was phnom penh. any time you walked out of a building, there were 15 tuk tuk or moped drivers chanting at you with a chorus of “killing fields?” “i take you killing fields?” to think that a human atrocity that is not yet 30 years old would be sung out as if by a peanut vendor at a baseball game really set me back. either the people are that desensitized to a holocaust that certainly hit all of their families or they push it aside as an economic necessity. either way, it felt creepy, particularly later as i walked those grounds and saw femurs, fingers, and bits of cloth still left lying on the ground. so many things happen in this world with us barely noticing. seeing a moument with 2000 skulls stacked is impactful. seeing pictures of children in the very rooms in which they were tortured and killed is traumatic. it is tough to think of now without wondering how anything such as that could ever happen, let alone knowing that it is going on right now in parts of africa.
the amazing thing, i suppose, though, is the resiliency of the people. the acceptance of people in the mekong delta who not too long ago were not as comfortable having americans cruising along their shores. far and away, though, it was the beauty of land, and the slow rythmn of the lives of the people in the countryside that i enjoyed the most. it was a strange and wonderful experience. as with africa, i can’t say for sure it was fun, but it was meaningful and i’m glad i did it.
ultimately, i have never been more glad to see anyone than i was to see lillis upon my return. there is nothing like being gone for a long time to make you glad to see your home again.
anyway, the links to the right will take you to my picasa web albums for cambodia and vietnam which may or may not overwhelm you with what my trip over there was like. or, alternately, you can choose to look at a subset below. a third option is to use your browser’s backbutton to go back to whatever you were doing before you opened this link.
we’ll start with just a pic of a random woman in the street. for a few days, just the site of the older women in their conical hats shuffling along the streets is enough to captivate you.
here, a woman has baskets of fruit for sale….they just walk around all day long selling the fruit off of their backs.
we went to visit the cu chi tunnels, and on the way back passed by this family on their houseboat preparing their nets.
view from the balcony of a small town along the mekong river.
a kid watching his mother cleaning the boat.
paddling down the mekong
we stopped at this girls house for a bit and they let us come ashore. they were preparing fruit to take to the floating market.
we walked along until we came to this little guy’s house. his mother let us try some of some weird fruit she was cutting up. it was awesome. also, they had a basenji puppy who was totally cute.
i loved the spiky red fruits
another girl standing on the end of her boat
more pics from our ride down the mekong
this young gentleman was there to greet us when we got back from the floating market.
this guy rickshawed our luggage from one hotel spot to another. this second hotel is the one that turns its sign of late at night making it next to impossible for me to find it as i wandered the streets for about 45 minutes or so at 11 o’clock at night…..good times!
this is the woman who made the bananas covered in rice hotpockets. they were the bomb.
these two were either laughing with or at me. not sure, but that has frequently been the case with me and the ladies throughout my life.
here we are near china beach outside danang. this guy is mending the trap before he goes back out on the water.
a line of their traditional round boats along the shore.
i really was intrigued by the boats….nobody makes round vehicles anywhere, well, except for china beach
this woman (at a buddhist temple on the marble mountain) had teeth that were black from chewing betel. (it’s a plant, not a bug)
this one is from a cave within the marble mountain
hoi an was picturesque (if well touristed) but was a fabulous spot for getting custom made clothes. i got my manly pink button up handmade (same day) for about $17
a few more from hoi an
on the way to hue (and that is a homonym) we passed by these nets.
and this little girl who made every effort to try and get atop the water buffalo, but he was not interested in obliging.
and these kids were fun…..it would have been so nice to even be able to throw out 15 or 20 rudimentary phrases, but alas, vietnamese is a tonal language and it is not something you can pick up on the fly.
boats in the little village where the kids lived
hue was a traditional emperial center and there were many many tombs (which were basically walled castles) built for the great emperors from the 1700’s and 1800’s)
on the way back, we passed a water buffalo parade.
and another pic from the trip back from hue
a kid sleeps on the sidewalk in saigon.
this little guy was on the phnom penh (cambodian) welcoming committee. he’s wearing a gold chain…..he’s from the southern part of cambodia
here’s the national museum of art. it had a really fabulous terra cotta facade.
and this is inside the royal palace.
this is from inside a classromo at tuol sleng. tuol sleng was a school that pol pot took over and used to house and torture political prisoners before (usually) sending them off to the killing fields for slaughter. they took pictures of their prisoners and currently many of these pictures hang in the very rooms they had been imprisoned and next to some of the devices used, standing as they did back in 1979. their eyes are haunting. 17,000+ cambodians were held here between 1975 and 1979 and almost all of them were ultimately killed. add in that his forced agrarian collectivization program led to the death of 1 to 2 million cambodians (a quarter of the population) and it’s amazing to learn he lived in exile until he died in 1998.
skulls and letter at the memorial at the killing fields
here is what i was referring to above. for some reason, the government has chosen not to “clean up” the killing fields. ultimately they left the remains of many of the victims more or less where they were. it is extremely creepy.
on the way back i stopped by one of the little “streets” that jut out over the water and met these kids.
as you can see here…basically the cambodian build wodden bridges out over the water and then have their little one or two room houses on either side of it.
and here are more kids from this one little “street”
this guy was eating an egg or something
i rented a car with two people i met on the bus across the border to take us to siam reap (angkor temples) along the way we passed this vehicle which set a record for most people+supplies i’ve ever seen in one pickup. imagine what they could do with a suburban.
so, now on to angkor. at this temple, it was phenomenal to see how the trees had overtaken the ruins.
here along the side of one of the smaller ruins, a girl takes a break from selling water to tend to her sick brother
when i took this one, i was basically at most most dehydrated and delirious moment. i nearly fell over backwards climbing up this temple.
a kid in the hallway of one of the smaller temples
this buddhist statue was decked out and i dug his sartorial splendor.
now we get to ankor wat, the greatest of all the temples and the “heart” of all that is cambodia. the place was built in the 12th centure and covers over 200 acres of land. it even has an honest to goodness moat!
most of the sandstone surface is covered in carvings.
with one of the trademarks being the faces that look out in every direction to protect the inhabitants from evil.
the next day, back in siam reap, a couple of monks peruse the menu….that kind of stuff just cracked me up
this girl was eating something i coudn’t identify
that’s a brief???? overview of what i saw in my 2.5 weeks abroad. hopefully the pics convey what an amazing and awe-inspiring experience it was. one of my real takeaways was that outside of the big cities, you had families who all lived together in tiny little one room houses on stilts. they lived in relative squalor in some instances, but they were happy. their culture had order and structure. there was no one yelling, no parents chasing kids, and (i suspect) not a whole lot of complaining about what they did not have. i can only hope that these more remote places stay free of the influence of our culture in a way that allows them to maintain that purity.
btw, if you’re looking for a fun (in a nerdy way) to help feed kids in asia and all over the world, play this game…..my score was 45….top that! : )
