Phnom Penh, Cambodia

After a while in Saigon, I needed to find a way to renew my visa and a 3-day trip into the former kingdom of Cambodia was just the ticket (re-entry means a new visa, it's like pressing reboot on an old computer.)
Phnom Penh is smaller than Saigon, and different for many reasons, the obvious historical one being the rule of the Khmer Rouge and the Cambodian-Vietnamese war which ended it only 27 years ago. Meaning the entire country still has a good excuse for feeling a little shell-shocked. Despite this, it was actually a great place to be. (um... great place to be a rich tourist, anyway. Awkward.) The obvious cultural reason is the Hindu influence which is so obvious in Cambodia and so not in Vietnam, at the eastern border of the former Cham and Khmer empires. I spent most of my time walking around as much of the city as possible. An entire evening was spent playing guitar with the street kids. They proved more teachable than the Saigon kids, actually. I actually got them doing some hand percussion and a couple of them learned to strum on the beat. Ate Indian food twice. Andhra Pradesh food, specifically. In tourist parts of town everybody's hawking something, but they don't mind you not buying it if you play them a song. Everyone requested "Imagine", which seems fitting, although I'm sure it's just a clichéed coincidence. The hostels on Boeng Kak (lake) are gorgeous. Lastly, it's a little nauseating to be asked over and over if you want any "beautiful girls". Although speaking of beautiful girls (in a non human-trafficking sense) I spent some time with two cool Chilean sisters and an equally cool Brazilian (here).

Cao Daism and the Cu Chi Guerillas

Pictured is the temple of the Cao Dai holy see in Tay Ninh, near Saigon. The link above is a synopsis, their official page is here, but the most interesting bit is this: it's a religion founded in the 1920's that recognizes three saints (I kid you not): Confucius, Lao Tse, and SAINT VICTOR HUGO. Yes, the same Victor Hugo. After visiting the temple with some lovely English ladies I met on the bus, we went to see the Cu Chi Tunnels. Long story short, during the 1st and 2nd Indochina wars, the Cu Chi locals supported the Communists, and built a huge network of tunnels in the forest in which to travel around and hide from the huge amount of bombs that were dropped on them. 'Hardcore' really doesn't begin to describe it. 'Tiny tunnels with lots of booby traps' does, though. Picture.

The Heat is on in Saigon

For anyone who was ever in a highschool production of "Miss Saigon", the real thing is not quite the same. And since the war ended, it's "Miss Ho Chi Minh City" anyway. I spent almost a week here, split up with a trip to Cambodia to get a new visa.
-I'd read The Quiet American at Brendan's suggestion so it was fun to see landmarks from the book, like rue Catinat (now Dong Khoi) and the piers in Cholon.
-Cholon, a.k.a. District 5, a.k.a. Chinatown, is the absolute coolest for my money. I rode down there one evening from District 1 where I was staying (along with all the twentysomethings of Europe) and found a small and generous Chinese vegetarian restaurant which pretty much blew me away. Why?
-I had three recurring annoyances in Vietnam.
a) I couldn't speak the language (I hate that)
b) Unlike Chengdu, it seems to be an unavoidable Vietnamese custom to swindle tourists for all they're worth.
c) Where was all the vegetarian food?
So this restaurant was the answer to my prayers. Vegetarian delights, everyone spoke Chinese, and when they found out I did too, they straight up took away the English menu (complete with english prices) and gave me the real deal. Wonder of wonders, I was in District 5 heaven.
-Beautiful mazes of alleyways. Particularly in Cholon. you can walk in and just twist and turn past doorways in a meter-wide passage without hitting a real street for 10 minutes. I did though, get eventually kicked out by a Vietnamese guy (from Philadelphia but visiting family) who told me (in Philadelphia terms) that it wasn't exactly safe to be back there.
-I played some guitar with a lot of street vendor kids, which was great (picture). They weren't too disciplined, and preferred posing with it, but they were as enthusiastic as you could ask for. Later one evening, they saw me and offered me some of the snack they were eating, but the woman that sold it wouldn't sell it to me for the same price, so we left, and ran around the corner, and tried to send one kid back with some money to buy a piece. She saw through the ruse and yelled at him, though. Finally, they sent their sister and she pulled it off perfectly. Discount snack!

The pictures here are, in order: Benh Thanh Market by night. Barbers by a wall in District 3. The old Cathedral Duc Ba next to the new "Diamond Plaza". Street scene near rue Dong Khoi.

Nha Trang

Nha Trang is a black hole. In a good, you-don't-want-to-leave way. Some guy warned me about this, and while I got out of there yesterday, I really wanted to stay at least a couple of more days. It's supposed to be a big party town, lots of foreigners because of the good beaches and diving, and I suppose it is, but I didn't party at all, and I was loving it for entirely different reasons. Firstly, I bought a new guitar when I got there, so I'd have something to play while travelling, and suddenly every Vietnamese person in all creation wanted to be my friend. That's not necessarily a non-annoying thing, but it did gain me entry to some cool places, like the houses of some nice people, and some music-making with new acquaintances. the point is, Nha Trang may be known for lots of foreigners coming to scuba-dive and party, but that doesn't mean that's all there is there, nor does it mean that the people of Nha Trang aren't still keeping it real. Plus, I got to swim in the ocean.

-I saw a cock-fight in a back-alley. Eww. they looked like vultures. And one guy was trimming all the feathers off his champion bird's chest and telling me he was the Mike Tyson of local cock-fights.
-Went to the Cham towers (Hindu-Buddhist, see picture.) Here again, I snuck in for free, but I more than made it up for it in the donation box, no worries.
-Lots of gambling. You put three dice under a cup, shake it around, and people guess what numbers come up. Sophisticated entertainment, I know.
-Went exploring in the harbour, with the help of the boat-man pictured below. Took lots of pictures and smelled the (mostly bad) smells of the harbour. The fishing fleet was all moored because they work at night here. On the night horizon the fleet looks like another city out over the water. -I didn't go to the big Lonely-Planet-recommended pagoda here, because in exploring the back city, I found some stairs which led me to a smaller Buddhist temple. No tourists whatsoever. No one, except the grey abbott, two very young apprentice-monks, a man in brown robes who was may have been a servant, and two women, occupation unclear. And a dog who barked at me, then the abbott smiled and asked "le chien?" It seemed to be the only French he knew. They taught me to sing a chant in Vietnamese. It was a ball.

Catburgularama in Vietnam

Since my last post, I've been either on buses or waiting for buses, on my long long trip from Hanoi down to Saigon. I'm not even sure what day it is now, although no doubt it says on this computer somewhere.

The one respite from bus-o-rama was an 8-hour layover between buses in the city of Hue. In the Vietnam-U.S.A war, Hue was the centerpoint of the Tet offensive (see top picture and this one) but long before, it was the capital city of imperial Vietnam. So guess who scaled the walls and snuck into the imperial palace! Yeah, it was totally me. It was very Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Here's how it went down. I got off the bus and went to check out the palace. Strolling around the citadel wall, away from the main entrance I found the secondary entrance, a big and ornate doorway. Locked. The wall was old, though, and there were big chinks in the brickwork, so I figured that for fun I'd climb up a bit. I was expecting to be yelled at any second by someone from the street over across the moat, but when no one seemed to notice me, I figured I should just keep climbing. This is where my Quebec city training came in handy. And then I got to the top, and still no voices yelled, so I peeked over and saw.... AN ELEPHANT ON THE OTHER SIDE! That's right, I totally scaled the palace wall and came face-to-face with an elephant. It took me a minute to to realize he was tied up, but no time at all to realize "This is awesome". Then, as surruptitiously as I could in broad daylight, I snuck along the top of the wall and found a ramp entering the palace grounds. Some figures were coming down a path towards me, but I hid before they could see me, until I could tell they were just tourists. After that, it was explore-the-palace time with everyone else. Nice place. It's very big and very run-down, but you can see that it must have been the cat's pyjamas back in the day. I left through the front door, like I was the cat's pyjamas, and then it was back on the bus.

Other trip updates: At the suggestion of Brendan, the only Badinhologist I know, I'm reading Graham Greene's The Quiet American. Also, you'll have to forgive me for typos since I'm doing these posts under an internet-cafe time limit. But then, you probably like finding them. You just love the typos, don't you? ...You disgust me.

Lastly, for those who do or don't remember last spring/summer when I was in Quebec city, you can check out the original catburgularama.

Hanoi and a sideways picture

I'm in Hanoi, sports fans. For those of you with maps of China/Vietnam on hand, follow this sequence:
Chengdu (Sichuan) to Kunming (Yunnan) by plane (1 hour)
Kunming to Hekou by sleeper bus (12 hours, overnight)
Hekou to LaoCai by 10-minute shuttle (10 minutes)
LaoCai to Hanoi by hard-seat train (10-11 hours)

Despite several annoyances, small and large, I made it to Hanoi by the seat of my pants and the skin of my teeth (eww, teeth-skin) quicker than I expected.

I missed my plane on Thursday night. Cons: I slept on the cold airport floor that night. Pros: I paid nothing for the ticket change and I learned a valuable lesson about how hard it is to find a taxi to the airport during Chinese Spring Festival.

I arrived in Kunming hours before the Vietnamese consulate was about to close for a week (Spring Festival stikes again) but convinced them to give me visa that same day. In 5 minutes. And I only had to pay double! Oh wait... that's a lot. Note to self: "next time try not to pay double."

After consulate-party-time I took an overnight sleeper bus to the sleepy border town of HeKou. that trip can be summed up as "violent". A regular bus has passengers sitting near the floor. A sleeper bus has them stacked lengthwise on rickety bunks up to the ceiling. So as we lurched violently (there's that word again) on the dirt road with dim headlights in the dark, let's just say I was scared like a little scaredy-baby contemplating his crib rolling over into a rocky ravine.

Then came the border crossing, no sweat, then came the train to Hanoi. Trains where you can stick your head out thewindow are the best. I met some Chinese travellers and some German travellers on the bus. Everybody spoke a little English, but more often stuck to either Chinese or German, so I was stuck in the middle a little.

Hanoi is beautiful. I don't know whether I've exceeded my self-imposed 300-word limit yet, but I probably have, so I'll just say: I'm going to Ho Chi Minh city tonight. And: Vietnamese is harder to learn than Chinese. Totally. Or I'm an idiot. And "Hello, picture of the catholic church in Hanoi? Could you not be sideways?"

Ciao to my players and haters (I love you all)
Matthew

Pandas and Poo!

I won't post for a little while, not out of laziness now, but because I'm trying to get out of Chengdu and visit Hanoi (the capital of Vietnam, for our geographically-challenged readers) before my vacation is over (February 20th). Also, I have to go a little earlier than planned because I'm clearing out tonight and crashing at Douglas' place until I go, due to the "rat problem" at my place. I know, eww, whatever. It's being taken care of. I went rat-hunting (non-lethal) last night, and discovered one of their nests in our heating unit. Complete with dead rat. But enough about that.

Saturday I went to Wolong, 4 hours west of here, to see the giant panda reserve and research base they have there. And so, you'll find my flickr has 10 adorable pictures of young pandas gamboling and the like, around the research base. The scenery was beautiful, as Wolong is in the mountains, and halfway up they were winter wonderlands. We also saw wild monkeys on the way. Obviously wild, cause they were afraid of us instead of mugging us, like some places. Now, I don't eat meat, but for some reason it makes me even sadder than seeing animals killed to see the way some people treat wild animals, zoo animals too, throwing food at them, yelling at them like they're at the circus... I'm not pointing any fingers, but it's gross. Those pandas in the research base are going to grow up dysfunctional fo sho. (The next day).

I'm leaving you with a song for my friend Sal, about poo (not rat poo). Written by a camper named Charlie the summer of 2001. The summer at camp Sal and I (and Molly) saw like 35 moonsets together. A beautiful summer, a beautiful song (sort of).

QingCheng mountain after an all-nighter

I'm no longer in school and I don't have a crazy job (more like a manageable and often enjoyable job) yet I still pulled an all-nighter on Wednesday night! Why? Cause of a beautiful thing called unexpected freelance contracts. Translating. My brother Nicholas hooked me up with a contact, and so I spent all night translating a power-point presentation about how GrossCola-X can make lots of money if they market to kids on a cool new program on TVnetwork-Y. Sweet! Marketing is all happy bunnies and love! So after that all-nighter (I got it in, self-respect almost intact) I went straight over to QingCheng Mountain... you guessed it: the birthplace of Daoism. I went with Robbie, a 15-year old I'm tutoring. His dad drove us and paid for me, as a way of getting his son a full day of English for the price of a day trip.

First we went to Dujiangyan, the place where the mighty Min river was tamed. I adored the town, although perhaps it was partly first-time-out-of-the-city-in-3-months euphoria. Then to QingCheng Shan. Being winter, the mountain paths were almost deserted and so, more peaceful than usual. Not non-action peaceful, but still peaceful. We ascended the mountain, smelled the sickly-sweet incense, which smells good at first, but close-up, more like poison candy, saw a lot of Laotzu-esque monks, and temples, and it was quiet and great. See picture captions for more. Mountain: beautiful. The Dao De Ching: sometimes inscrutable, beautiful. Religious daoism: ritualicious.

Today's song is the only song I could think of about climbing a mountain and religion. "Abraham and Isaac" by Leonard Cohen. Or, if you're Muslim, "Abraham and Ishmael" (Eid mubarak, yo.) It's not Daoism, but if you know any songs about non-action and eternal changeableness, you're welcome to teach me them.

For Lizzie Loomis and West Virginia

I have lots of stories to tell, starting from Christmas. So I'll be posting again soon, but first, I wanted to put up a song for West Virginia. Most of the readers here are American, and I was thinking this morning about the Sago mine tragedy and the 12 miners and this is the song that came to me. It's "The Hills of West Virginia", by Phil Ochs.

Also relevant, Lizzie Loomis requested a long time ago that I play the hymn "Lead Kindly Light". It took me a long time to learn it, but here it is, too. For Lizzie and for Tallmansville, #2, "Lead, Kindly Light".


The pictures are mine. The seagull is from Lake Chapala in Mexico, and the tombstone from Quebec city. It's the oldest graveyard in the province, full of sailors and soldiers' wives who were often just in the New World for a season or two. It's downtown though, so people use it as a hangout, picnicking on the tombs and peeing on the trees. Lame