Madeleine’s Travel Blog

La Chausee/La Rochelle/Paris, France - August 6, 2008

As Evy said, the day pretty much started going wrong from the moment we didn’t wake up.
We were supposed to catch a train to ‘La Rochelle’, a picturesque town on the East coast of France, at the ungodly hour of 6:31am this morning. It was our only option, and as we’d decided that we should take advantage of our Eurail passes to see as much as possible, we booked it. The plan was to visit ‘La Rochelle’ in the one-day travel of the Eurail pass that we’d be using to get to Paris from our relatives’ fort/ruins in western France.
Now that I think about it, I suppose it all really started in the earliest hours of the morning, when we’d stumbled into bed only a couple of hours before our departure time, and slightly inebriated at that (it had been our aunt’s birthday). I think that it was entirely due to our cousin’s girlfriend (who with true German practicality had set two alarms) that we even made it to the depot. Through her, we were woken with a ‘6 minutes to departure’ from my cousin, which resulted in our eventual exit from the house. I would be lying if I said we actually managed to get our stuff together in 6 minutes, nevertheless we did make it to the station in time.
After one switchover, we arrived at ‘La Rochelle’ just after 9 in the morning. This is where we found out that the train station had no left-luggage facilities. Slightly daunted, and still rather sleepily grumpy, we lugged our large backpacks along with our daypacks and made our way to the tourist bureau. Sure enough, the tourist bureau had no idea as to where we might leave our bags. The one option they had was to visit the aquarium (a mere 11 Euros/$20 per person) and leave our bags there for an extra 50 Euro cents a piece while visiting the fishies. Hmmmm.
We’d read about an option to bicycle around the city on free yellow bikes, so decided to go check that out instead. Maybe they would let us keep our bags there while we biked… Having trekked out to the bike rental area, we learned this would not be possible. Evy went to ask at a couple of nearby hotels. No go. We decided to attempt to bike with the bags. Driver’s Licenses deposited, bikes & locks rented, we attached the smaller backpacks to the rear wire racks. I clambered onto my bike, wearing my larger backpack, and promptly sent my carefully attached backpack and water bottle flying. Evy’s backpack and purse performed a similar maneuver a minute later, though her baggage stayed hanging via bungee cord against the bike chain. Perhaps this would not be a successful mission. I biked sans baggage down to the aquarium to see if it would be possible to leave bags without visiting the fish. There was a massive line-up and no possibility of simply depositing baggage. I stopped by a policeman, and was informed, as Evy had been informed at the tourist bureau, that there was absolutely nowhere in town where we might leave our bags for a couple of hours. ‘La Rochelle’ as a potential terrorist target?! All we could see was an immense tourism industry that was being hampered by this lack of left-luggage facilities. So we went to the beach.
Lying in the sunshine by the sea was very pleasant. Then we both eventually got burnt & the tide went out to reveal masses of barefoot unfriendly barnacle covered rocks. So we got dressed again, walked past the semi-nude population that had arrived in the meantime, and made our way to the old part of town. We decided to take turns – each would get a certain amount of time to wander around, and the other would stay with the bags. I went first. I got lost. Half an hour after our scheduled meeting time, I eventually found my way back to Evy. Mission to have found an internet café unaccomplished. Evy went off in the opposite direction from where I’d gone. I waited.
My people watching was eventually interrupted by Evy’s return, which heralded a new disaster. She’d discovered an internet café, and there had received a message from our supposed Paris residence, which claimed not to have received the payment and assumed the reservation canceled. We lugged our bags back to the recently discovered internet café, forwarded a copy of the payment confirmation, and a brief note asking the owners to please figure something out because we are currently scheduled to arrive this evening in Paris, and would really prefer not to have to spend the night wandering the streets.

We are currently sitting on our train, heading to Paris, with as of this moment nowhere to stay. At least in India there were always cheap alternatives. I don’t know that cheap is even possible in Paris, let alone this last minute in August. Maybe we’ll try to channel a little Toulouse-Lautrec or something and stay in a brothel. No favours expected or given. That could be an experience to write about…

Post script (written 6 days later!) –
Re-reading this, I had no idea how foreshadowing my writing would be. We arrived in Paris to two memorable events, besides an email from our bed & breakfast owners saying they would meet us and help us out.
One – a bum who yelled at us for about five minutes (‘Fuck you, yeah you! Fuck you!’) because Evy didn’t want to give him her waterbottle.
Two – the old lady standing on the street our bed & breakfast was supposedly on, our first street we actually walked along in Paris. The old lady who was rather fat, wearing fishnets, and currently facilitating some sort of transaction when we arrived at the street our bed & breakfast was supposedly on - and then of course noticing the fellow middle-aged to old ladies similarly dressed and standing within 15 ft of each other up and down the street, all enacting or hoping to enact similar transactions…
Suffice it to say that after waiting 2 and a half hours at the bed & breakfast address (next to what appears to have been the local pimp cars), after attempting fruitless email communication (via longdistance phone call with my cousin in Germany, who kindly checked our email for us as the nearby places were all closed), and after calling repeatedly and leaving an unanswered phone message, we finally gave up on our bed & breakfast people and their offered ‘help’, and at about 11:30pm got ourselves the last room at a nearby hotel. 70 euros. Rather expensive, but we were apparently lucky to get a room (I suppose especially given our middle-aged competition…). I honestly looked briefly through the room for peep holes & made Evy turn off the glowing red light on the tv. It was just that kind of place.
We left early the next morning.
(Fortunately we found a different place through craigslist and have now been happily living in an apartment that’s quite centrally located. We have a distinct feeling the original bed & breakfast was a scam, and have given up our deposit as lost. An expensive lesson, but a lesson learned.)

Ubud, Bali (Indonesia) - July 16, 2008

We’ve been spending the majority of our time in Bali relaxing. It’s been pretty great. Especially after our recent educational overload of Laos, Vietnam & Cambodia history. We decided however (both for our own mental health and cultural interest), that we should do something a little different than just sit on the tourist trap beach for two weeks straight. Thus we have now come to Ubud, a little artist town centre and I think the capital of the island.
It turns out it’s perfect timing - a huge cremation ceremony for the 1st son of the 10th son of the last king of Bali (or something like that) along with several others, was set to take place on our last day of our Ubud stay. The fact that the cute little bungalow we rented for next to nothing was then abruptly taken away from us without warning (we figure the owner decided she could get more money from someone else in this time of festivity) was a little unpleasant, but other than that our time here has been very interesting. We found ourselves a new place to stay (with great difficulty, because every local who possibly can is coming to the ceremony and everything is full) and have started frequenting a delicious organic food restaurant.
Today we saw the ceremony, and for that the photos/video I took is required. It was pretty insane. To begin with, 4 immense statues had been created. 2 bulls, 1 dragon, 1 phoenix. The bulls were about 25 metres high, the dragon and phoenix about twice the size. Absolutely massive. The dead bodies were apparently put into the bulls, which were then burned. Prior to this burning, there was a long 1.2 km procession through which these 4 structures were carried. No, they were not wheeled, driven, or otherwise transported. 6000 men on rotation carried these immense pieces on their shoulders. It was pretty crazy. We waited 2 hours in brilliant sunshine, packed in like little sardines on the streets, but I think it was worth it. There was a very old-world feeling to the whole ceremony, and not only because we’d been requested to wear the traditional sarong. The masses of people were unlike any crowd I’ve been in, perhaps because I’ve never seen so many people gathered for a death with such a sense of festivity. The streets were jam-packed, to the point that there were police officers who remained 10 feet in front of each structure in order to force people back onto the sidewalks and further. The structures were so large, including their carriers, that they took up the entire street including the edges of the sidewalks. Every time one of the structures would make it’s way up, the crowd would swell back, pressed against the building walls as tightly as possible. Hard to describe, but I’ll try to post some of the video clips if possible!

Cambodia & Vietnam - July 6, 2008

– This man was old and trembling so that he could hardly walk. He looked like he wanted to cry. When I left him I heard two rifle shots.
Life, January 19, 1970 (Quote under picture at the Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam ,War Memorial Museum)

– “Guys were about to shoot these people,” photographer Ron Haeberle remembers, “I yelled, ‘Hold it,’ and shot my picture. As I walked away, I heard M16s open up. From the corner of my eye, I saw bodies falling, but I didn’t turn to look”.
Life, January 19, 1970 (Quote under picture at the Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam, War Memorial Museum)

People have been asking me whether I’ve changed in the past couple of months, now that I’ve been away so long. It’s usually said with a laugh, maybe with a slight question behind it. I too find the whole ‘finding yourself’ concept a little trite, if not pretentious. At the same time, I would dare anyone to learn more about the recent history in Laos, Vietnam & Cambodia and not feel their outlook on the world to be a little altered.

I came here with very little knowledge of these countries’ past…in my head were approximate (weak) definitions – Vietnam War = BAD; ‘Apocalypse Now’; Draft dodgers… Khmer Rouge = Genocide; Civil war; Cambodia… Cambodia = landmines; child prostitution… Laos = little country by Thailand/Cambodia…. That was about it. Embarrassing, yes, but I don’t know that there are that many people in the western world that really have a full grasp of how the past half-century’s events have affected these countries. I certainly can’t claim to have a good grasp on it all, even having spent the past weeks going to museums, reading books & visiting sites to do with this time period.

Vietnam I suppose was to be expected. Of course arriving at a war site and learning more of the gory details makes it all more real. But it does. To such an extent that you wonder how this sort of thing could ever have happened. Not only that but, having happened, why isn’t it discussed in basic high school social studies or history classes? Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos. Little countries on the opposite side of the world from us, yes, but it’s a small world. Shouldn’t their history be acknowledged as part of our history too? We get the same extensive Canadian history rammed down our throats, year after year, but end up knowing little to nothing about much more recent, and in effect more pertinent, events. Montcalm & Wolff are all well in good, we even did learn the odd bit about the second world war (and of course Canada’s part in it), and if you’re lucky you get a brief mention of the Vietnam war (and then only because Canada played host to draft dodgers). Fine, but shouldn’t somewhere, somehow, there be a lesson about how within our teachers’ lifetime the Americans dropped more bombs on little Laos than were dropped on Europe & Japan combined in WWII? That was only 30 years ago, yet somehow I feel a little as though wars in school history classes are sort of treated as if the major ones are over. WWII was the last of the great wars and now we just have ‘little’ ones to straighten out, ‘unimportant’ ones… The Vietnam War Memorial museum in Ho Chi Minh city (Saigon) had some of the most depressing sights I’ve ever seen. 2 days later we learnt of the quarter of Cambodia’s population that were massacred in the Khmer Rouge genocide. ‘Unimportant’ wars? Somehow that doesn’t seem right.

Evy & I weren’t in Vietnam very long, but the War Memorial museum we went to in Ho Chi Minh city (Saigon) was by far one of the more culturally/intellectually stimulating tourist attractions we went to. Perhaps part of the most moving sections of the exhibition were the photographs taken by various photo-journalists, the majority of which had comments like ‘last shot of so-and-so before hit by enemy machine gun’, or ‘last shot before photographer accidentally hit landmine & died’ or even ‘photographer killed in ambush, film roll found later in possession of Japanese soldier’. Then there were the quotes like those I quoted in the beginning, which would be under a seemingly less terrible photo, of a single person or group of people. Prisoners, but not wounded. Or perhaps a group of already dead. And then you’d read the quote.
‘Most were women and babies. It looked as if they tried to get away.’
Life, January 19, 1970 (Quote under picture at the Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam ,War Memorial Museum)
And then you’d wonder what it must have been like to be documenting an event like this. You’d wonder what the photo-journalist must have gone through, what they must have been like. How they could survive in a war day-by-day, living, broaching death, and often dying with the army, purely to attempt documentation for the outside world. And last but not least, how it could become possible to stop the killing of civilians in order to take a photographic shot, and then just turn away.
Perhaps as a sort of explanation, there was this (as posted near the end of the photographic exhibit):
‘Photographs are the images of history rescued from the oblivion of mortality. Long after those who died to take these photographs are gone, long after those of us who knew them & survived them and remember their experience are gone in turn, the images they captured will remain to show generations to come the face of the war in Indochina.’
Neil Sheehan
Very true, and much appreciated. The Vietnam war is no longer a minor headline in my mind, and I would recommend anyone to both visit Vietnam (we found it to be a beautiful & fascinating country) and in particular, visit the war memorial museum in Ho Chi Minh city (for a little historical perspective).

Cambodia
‘To keep you is no gain; to lose you is no loss.’
Khmer Rouge slogan (as seen posted at the Killing Fields)

Cambodia, if possible, was an even more emotionally taxing tourist experience than Vietnam. It’s hard to know where to even begin. On the bus ride from Vietnam I read the Lonely Planet recommended ‘First They Killed My Father’, an absorbing (& depressing) autobiographical account by a woman who was 5 years old when the Khmer Rouge first took over. It gave me a good introduction to the time period, and an idea of what the sights we’d be seeing really meant.
The commonly advertised daily tuk-tuk tour in Phnom Penh, capital of Cambodia, is a trip to the Killing Fields in the morning, with a visit to the Tuol Sleng Prisoner Museum in the afternoon. In our case, however, we’d heard via Lonely Planet that they played a film at Tuol Sleng (in the morning and in the afternoon) regarding the Killing Fields – so we decided to go there & see that first instead.
The original plan was to see the film & visit Tuol Sleng in the morning, and the Killing Fields in the afternoon. This was abolished upon waking up less than half an hour prior to the start of the film. We ended up doing some other touristy stuff and then making it to the afternoon screening at the prison. The Killing Fields were left for the following day.

There are some sights, especially some seriously touristed sites, that lose their impact with the large number of visitors. For us, Tuol Sleng prison is not one of them. Whether because it hasn’t been fully maintained & put together as a tourist site, or because it was a site of such horrible acts, recent enough not to have completely dulled with time, I’m not sure. It, along with the Killing Fields, is one of the most depressing places I’ve ever been to.
The prison is a converted highschool, ie. it was once a highschool but then it was turned into one massive torture location during the reign of the Khmer Rouge. Perhaps that is part of its emotional weight. Hallways, classrooms, it still feels like a highschool, kind of…
Except for the barbed wire criss-crossed through all the windows and exterior walls (criss-crossed so as to prevent suicide attempts).
and …
Except for the presence of long rows of shackles in the larger rooms, used to hold 20 to 30 prisoners (penning them head to foot, and they with punishment-enforced no right to move).
and…
Except for the little one-man prisoner stalls, with barely enough room for a single person, created in several of the classrooms – and each complete with their own individual shackles.

There are rooms with remnants of the prison ‘facilities’. There are rooms that are empty, fallen into complete disrepair since their last atrocious use. And there are rooms with photographs. Hundreds of photographs, of prisoners. Men, women & children alike. And there are signs which request no laughter.
It is not a place where you feel like laughing.
There is even a room with skulls. Skulls of murdered prisoners, at times with descriptions (post-death deduced), of the method of killing.
The Tuol Sleng prison is a must-see museum.

The Killing Fields in some ways had more impact for us after the Tuol Sleng prison visit.

The Killing Fields are the fields outside of Phnom Penh where a vast quantity of the quarter of Cambodia’s population that was killed during the time of the Khmer Rouge were murdered (often transported directly from the Tuol Sleng prison).
The Killing Fields countryside would be a beautiful area, were it not for the deep holes peppering it throughout, each labeled with a sign reading the quantity of bodies discovered within. Some with heads. Some without. Some only children. Some only naked. And then there’s the tower, probably 20 metres high, filled to the top with victims’ skulls.
It is not something I can adequately describe.
And it is not something I will ever forget.
It is something that everyone should visit.
Genocide is a term easy to gloss over until you see sights like this. We ran into after-effects of the Khmer Rouge genocide consistently, and in a vast array of areas. In cultural museums and locations it was to be expected, but to see the result on the actual population was shocking. It was a brain drain – the Khmer Rouge, as an acquaintance of ours working in Cambodia aptly put it, ‘killed anyone with an IQ above being able to tie their own shoes’. From my understanding there has never before been such a systematic killing of one nation’s ‘intelligentsia’ – no matter age, sex or religion. For example? – Little children weren’t permitted to wear glasses, because wearing glasses could be seen as a sign of intelligence…
It was not a good time to be in Cambodia, and the after-affects are still very-much being dealt with.
From restaurant owners to store clerks, we consistently ran into a general lack of education, visible not only in the lack of general knowledge and aptitude (we literally never had a properly added bill) but in basic skills such as being able to think for oneself (a very low-percentage of entrepreneurs or wannabe entrepreneurs). Following orders is the most many can do, and even that appears to be difficult at times. {At our guest house the owner was trying to get several of his staff to do various odd jobs around the yard – every job had to be precisely demonstrated to it’s full extent, even simple ones like painting a piece of wood. It was painful, reminded me of working with really dumb PA’s (film production assistants), except in this case it was more distressing than simply writing it off as a case of stupidity as I would on a film set… We encountered various similar episodes.}
It is also a very young population in Cambodia. Whenever I’d see a middle-aged to elderly person on the street all I could think of was ‘you lived through the Khmer Rouge. You must have crazy stories to tell.’ Unfortunately we weren’t in Cambodia long enough to really talk with a lot of people, but we got a good start.
We also learned of & donated to a local hospital basically started with the help of one guy and the Swiss government – quite a story, which I won’t get into right now. His name was Dr. Beat Richner and it seems mainly through him there are now 4 hospitals in Cambodia which help prevent something like 1000 child deaths per month. He plays the cello every Saturday at a concert hall near Angkor Wat in Siem Reap to help gather money for the hospitals from tourists – a very interesting character & story.

I think I may have made Cambodia sound very depressing, but it wasn’t. Just thought provoking. I would highly recommend visiting the country – very nice people and culturally absolutely fascinating!

PS Angkor Wat was fun to explore too!

June 19, 2008 - Vieng Xai, Laos

Today we visited the caves that were used as hideouts during the war by the leaders of the Pathet Lao (the Lao communist party, 5 of whose 7 leaders at the time have ended up serving terms as president of Lao since). The caves were pretty neat. Due to the excessive bombing in Laos during the war, the leaders, along with 2300 civilians, hid out in these caves in North-eastern Laos for a total of 9 years, much to the Americans’ dismay. Villagers would farm at night, cooking would be done with gas inside the caves if American planes were spotted outside, and generally an entire community was sustained within these limestone cliffs. There was even a massive cave that had been turned into a theatre, complete with cement orchestra pit. Pretty crazy.
At the moment only the caves in which the leaders stayed are open to the public, as well as the theatre cave, but eventually I think they hope to open the ones used by civilians as well.
You really realize at sights like this, which are only just beginning to come together, what a lot of infrastructure goes into making a tourist attraction actually tourist friendly. Here it ranges from the basic stuff (like having signs, explanatory displays, etc.) to potentially life-saving stuff (like clearing tourist sites of unexploded ordnance left over from the war…). They’re making progress, but it’ll be a while yet before the sites here are fully up to westernized expectations. From what we’ve seen so far though, it’ll be worth the wait.

Phonsavan, Laos - June 17, 2008

We went to see the ‘Plain of Jars’ near Phonsavan, Laos, today. We’d spent a day or two in Luang Prabang, the UNESCO protected heritage village between Vang Vieng & coming here, but I actually found this more interesting. Luang Prabang was neat in the sense that we got to see a silk weaving centre and it had tasty food (besides the silkworm poo tea, which we tried but could definitely not be termed tasty), but it didn’t stand out too much from the other semi-westernized towns we’ve visited recently. It was pretty, but not in a particularly memorable way for us. These jars though, they were pretty neat, for all the fact they’re jars.
To begin with, they’re pretty massive. All made out of stone, some were taller than me, while the majority seemed to approximately reach anywhere between my waist & my shoulder. Thick walled, too, at least 5 to 10 inches. There were some sandstone, some granite, some others. Quite a process to make something like that, especially considering they’re estimated to have been created somewhere between 500 BC and 500 AD.
The jars have been found in various areas, some of which are open to the public, some of which aren’t.
The three sites we were able to visit are considered ‘mostly’ cleared of UXO’s (Unexploded Ordnance). There are other sites but they just aren’t safe enough for visitors yet. I found the ‘mostly cleared’ a little daunting, but I’ll get into the UXO issues here shortly. As it was, we just stuck to the path and were fine.
The paths through the jar sites have been what’s-known-as ‘sub-surface’ cleared – teams have gone down into the earth below the paths and cleared out buried UXO’s. Stray off the paths though and you could potentially be in trouble. So far they haven’t had the money/people to sub-surface clear the off-path areas, so while the areas outside the paths have been ‘surface cleared’, in this country that unfortunately doesn’t necessarily mean much. There could be loads of UXO’s still below the surface, and rains can expose more. Thus it was that we were permitted to visit only 3 of the known sites, and made sure to stick to the paths.
The first site had the largest jar, which was easily a foot or two taller than me. Spread around it on the hill and below were various others, all in a relatively grassy area and mostly without their lids. Site Two had a bunch of jars spread out among trees, which was particularly picturesque, but Site Three was even more beautiful as it involved a walk through rice paddies up to a small garden-like area with all sorts of jars, complete with a view of the aforementioned rice paddies. The third site also definitely had the feeling of a cemetery, which is what archeologists think the jars were used for – to bury the cremated remains of the dead. Locals, on the other hand, think that the jars were used by giants back in the day as whiskey glasses… To each his own theory, I suppose. Either way, visiting these massive ancient jars placed seemingly at random in the countryside was pretty cool.

Back to the Unexploded Ordnance, aka UXO’s. In Phonsavan (Northern Laos), after visiting the jars, we went to the museum put together by MAG (Mines Advisory Group), an organization that works to clear places like Laos and Cambodia of Unexploded Ordnance left over from the war.

The big deal with Laos is that it wasn’t supposed to be bombed. Through a very informative display & videos we’ve found out a little more about it:
From my understanding, in the early 1960’s, the US, along with various other countries including Vietnam, agreed & signed compliance with a set of documents known as the Geneva accords. These accords gave Laos a status of peaceful non-involvement in the war. Basically Laos was to be considered off-limits to all sides, it wasn’t to be part of the war and no military personnel were to enter it. Both Vietnam & the US broke this accord very shortly however, the US to the tune of more bombs than were dropped on Europe & Japan combined in the whole of the second world war. All on Laos, a tiny little country in South-East Asia, which happened to be located next to Vietnam.
There appear to be two main reasons for this bombing, neither of which helps much now in terms of dealing with the aftermath. To begin with, the Vietnamese very early on started using Laos as a route for anything from soldiers through supplies – Laos being handily geographically parallel to Vietnam. I think it was called the Ho Chi Minh trail. The US, perhaps obviously, wasn’t too keen on this. So it began what was known as the ‘secret war’, a war it seems American civilians were told nothing about until much later.
In 1964, the US broke the recently signed Geneva Accord and started sending in military to Laos. It had them pretend to be civilians, and told them to claim they ‘got lost’ should they ever be caught. The US also started bombing Laos, both to try to get at the Vietnamese but also to put a stop to a group of Lao communists known as the Pathet Lao who were in effect Laos’ political leaders (Communism being of course the ultimate evil in US ideals at this time). So the bombing started. Lots of bombing. The equivalent of one planeload of bombs every 8 minutes, 24 hours a day, for 9 years. Seem a bit excessive? Perhaps. Why so much? Well the second main reason would be because American bombers flying from Thailand to targets in Vietnam would often encounter bad weather. Under instructions not to land with cargo still intact (also because it was considered ‘unsafe’), the bombs would be released on the way back, on ‘secondary’ targets in Laos… There was a lot of bad weather.
Where do UXO’s come in? Here, UXO’s (unexploded ordnance), are the estimated 30% of bombs dropped on Laos (considered to be approximately 2 tons of bombs per inhabitant at the time) which for one reason or another never exploded and now, deceptively innocent, pepper the countryside. Visibly and not so visibly.
The common bomb in use at the time was the cluster bomb, which is one big canister containing a whole bunch of little bombs known here as ‘bombies’. The small often tennis ball or pineapple sized/shaped bombies contain hundreds of ball bearings, meant to explode out and do serious harm to whoever is within range, be it in war times or now, 40 years later.
As one interviewee in a film we saw said, ‘bombs were not built to be taken apart’. There are major setbacks in the whole bomb disposal process, not the least of which being that now, 30-40 years later, these little bombies can be anywhere from underground to embedded in a tree – and are a whole lot more unstable than they were to begin with.
The people here are very poor, but part of the reason for this is because they can’t expand. There is no way for them to safely expand & create more fields to grow more crops, or build larger villages, because bombies can be anywhere, even in areas considered originally to be safe. We saw a film with a guy who lost an arm & leg when trying to dig a new hole for his bedpost and hit a bombie, in his own house. And one of a schoolchild who, while kicking pebbles on the much used road by the local school, encountered a massive undetonated cluster bomb. Add in the fact that the villagers can make more money collecting money from metal scraps than raising crops, and you have the added temptation of trying to find UXO’s & attempting to self-dismantle without experience. A lot of bombie fatalities occur to kids, for whom bombies can look like interesting toys or fruit (the pineapple-shaped bombies) until they prove deadly.
You learn more about world issues like this and you start to feel like you’re in an inescapable nightmare. Yet we can just fly back to Vancouver and forget about it, if we so wish, because we don’t have bombies littering our backyards (we just have the perpetrators sitting there).
We received t-shirts for our donation of pay for a week’s worth of work by a UXO clearance worker, but somehow will have to figure out a way to continue supporting the project.

Vang Vieng, Laos - June 13, 2008

I milked a goat today. Several, in fact. It was kind of interesting.
While I’ve been editing in Vientiane the past couple of days, Evy’s been staying at this organic farm just outside the backpacker town of Vang Vieng. I joined her here yesterday, and due to my delay will only be spending a day here compared with her week. I got up early to make the most of it, and spent from 7am to 8am attempting to squirt goat milk into a bucket. An interesting experience… As Evy’d said, you kinda wish you could poke more holes into the large yam-like object that is the goat’s udder. The one little pinprick at the end doesn’t do much. But then who’s in a rush, anyway?!
The milking of the goats was my second volunteer experience at the farm (we’d picked it because it offered various volunteer opportunities, and were glad we had).
The evening before, when I’d arrived, I was brought directly to the youth community building (built with assistance from a Korean NGO) that was hosting the daily evening English class for local youth. Every evening, these kids (who I later found out spend the majority of their days cutting grass in fields with a sickle) come in to attempt to learn English. A textbook donated by some organization is the general lesson plan followed by whatever volunteers are currently staying at the farm. Yesterday it involved a dialogue about the Internet. ‘Daniel’ and ‘Andrea’ are talking about how great this new thing called the Internet is (I would guess the text was written 10 or more years ago). ‘Daniel’, it turns out, only uses his computer for letters & reports, and is impressed that ‘Andrea’ is able to look up stuff from sports & cars through UFO’s…
It’s a very brief piece of dialogue, and the class is then meant to go through the unfamiliar words, discuss, and eventually re-read out loud for practice. Now this would be all well and good if this ESL class were in say, Canada. But try explaining the internet to someone who uses a sickle all day to cut grass. Or, say, the difference between a fax and an email to someone who’s never seen, let alone used, either. And UFO’S?! UFO’s was a whole other story. I tried to draw a spaceship with aliens and suddenly realized how engrained certain connotations are in our culture, and how they’re totally non-existent in other cultures. A little dude with two bobble-eyes next to a spaceship tends to mean alien to someone from a western culture. Here, they looked at me like I was crazy. My eventual way of describing a UFO was to draw the world with stars, the sun, & planets around it, and then little question marks here and there. Unexplained Foreign Objects. Thank god for Pictionary.

June 12, 2008 - Vientiane, Laos

There comes a point where you just don’t feel like looking at another temple, eating at another so-so restaurant, staying at yet another mediocre guest house/hotel…
I reached that point somewhere around the end of Nepal. 4 months down, 4 to go. Not exactly a stellar time to stop enjoying traveling, then again you don’t exactly get to pick when you get tired of something. It wasn’t that I wanted to go home or anything – I’d just lost interest in my surroundings.
I suppose it was to be expected, especially given our break-neck Nepal schedule and hectic month prior to that in India, not to mention getting sick and not completely getting over it before that. I’d hoped our weeklong vacation on the island of Tarutao in Thailand would alter my apathy, but the unfortunate weather and lack of interesting food didn’t really cut it. I did enjoy it, as well as Bangkok and taking the Muay Thai classes, etc. but I still wasn’t back to my usual self. Constantly tired and without any desire to explore these new countries, I worried that this state of being might continue indefinitely. Then we arrived in Vientiane, Laos.
Vientiane is the capital of Laos (pronounced Lao – the French added the silent ‘s’ for their own sense of aesthetic – there is no ‘s’ in the Lao language). The city is not one to rave about in any sense of the term, but it ended up suiting our needs perfectly.
To begin with, it was comparatively clean & modern – paved roads, sturdy well-built buildings. Due to being the capital, and at the receiving end of a whack of international aid, Vientiane is also filled with ex-pats (working for embassies, NGO’s etc.). Large quantities of ex-pats means a dramatic increase in demand for westernized lifestyle supports (ie restaurants/grocery stores/entertainment.). This in turn means a dramatic increase in supply of westernized lifestyle supports to fill that demand (in following with basic economics!). I think that for us it was perhaps this that really served to make Vientiane stand out.
We were only supposed to be in Vientiane for a couple of days. Then I decided to try to edit a film in time for the Vancouver Film Festival. I’d spent time logging all the footage from India etc, had the camera fixed, in fact had done pretty much everything I possibly could to ensure a smooth editing process. Nevertheless, as one should always assume but never does, artistic endeavours such as editing tend to take way longer than planned.
We reached the end of our proposed stay and after an all-nighter I realized there was no way I was going to finish the project in time to leave that day. Same thing happened the next night. Evy figured she might go on ahead but couldn’t muster up the energy that day, and the next day ended up feeling so sick she went to the doctor to confirm her own diagnosis of tonsillitis. This was a debacle unto itself, but I’ll let her explain that one (basically there’s no medical system in Laos – Lonely Planet recommends you fly to Thailand).
So we stayed in Vientiane. Day after day after day. And even though I was very shortly completely sick of editing, and even though our hotel room was a very basic room with window facing a restaurant stovepipe (constant grease fumes) I started to feel better. Evy still ended up leaving prior to me, and those first few days (I ended up staying 5 days even longer than our 10 together) I spent sleeping, watching movies, and generally doing what most people do on a Sunday after having spent months working on some project – relaxing. It was fabulous. Resting, together with the amazingly good western-style food, I think ended up being the perfect combination. By the time I left Vientiane I was sick of my computer, but totally ready to start traveling again – which made it all worth it.
As for the film, well, we’ll see. There were a lot of problems, but I can always hope that it was possible to see beyond them and think it was a semi-reasonable piece. I haven’t been able to look at it since handing it in – I figure whatever delusional state I might have been in when I termed it finished was correct at that time and I feel no need to go back and discover how wrong I might have been. Always look ahead, right?!

May 23rd, 2008 - Savannakhet, Laos

It is the evening of my 25th birthday, though oddly enough in Laos time I was actually born on the 24th of May… Maybe that means I can celebrate tomorrow as well!
We took a bus across the newly built bridge from Thailand today, which means that my passport was stamped with all sorts of official stamps bearing my birthdate on it. I was kind of excited by that. Yes, in some ways I am still 5.
In celebration of my birthday Evy had got me a croissant & nutella at the local market, with which she presented me this morning. That was pretty sweet. Also a Hello-Kitty-dressed-up-as-a-mouse candle. You’ll just have to see the photos. We placed it on the cake we went out for (‘kaffee and kuchen’ for those in the know), at a local bakery near our hostel. We also shared a bottle of white wine at a floating restaurant on the Mekong river - Thailand on one side, Laos on the other. You can’t really get much better than that. Especially since wine is a rather uncommon and rather expensive in these parts.
The Hello Kitty candle got another showing on a banana split at our evening restaurant, but unfortunately both times we were lacking in matches or lighters. Oh well. We are now ‘chilling’ on the front verandah style porch of our colonial-era guest house, eating Ferrero Rochers left over from a gift that never got given (meant for Evy’s housemother from her last stay in Thailand, who in the end we didn’t actually get to meet up with). The chairs on this porch are very comfortable. Because we’re on the second story it’s also pretty sweet because it means we can spy on people without them seeing us right away. Did I mention I’m still 5 on the inside?! I’m going to go have another Ferrero Rocher…

May 22nd, 2008 - Khorat, Thailand

We haven’t been up to much in Khorat. I haven’t been feeling well, and I’m also contemplating putting together a film piece in time to apply for the Vancouver film festival. For the most part I’ve been laying around in the room, checking out footage, while Evy’s been meandering around town on her own.
We’re trying to see if we can meet up with some people Evy knew back when she was volunteering near here, but so far it’s been a little more difficult than planned. We did meet up with a former fellow teacher of hers, which was fun - he took us to a night market and out for Thai food. It was her host family that we were really interested in meeting up with though, but they’ve moved in the meantime so we’ll see if it works out.

May 18th, 2008 - Train ride to Khorat

The whole concept of bbq chicken thighs takes on a whole new meaning when they are no longer discreetly separated from their respective feet. Somehow the clawed appendages – fried and neatly skewered on shish kabob sticks – were particularly unappealing to us on the train ride from Bangkok to Khorat today. Though now that I think about it, I’m not sure which was worse, those or the equally neatly skewered squid carcasses (at least, we think that’s what they were). Those came at 5 per stick, a real steal I’m sure, and stunk up the entire train cart immediately upon entrance – even though all the windows were wide open. They and the chicken legs were only a couple of the options proffered by the never-ending stream of on-board food sales agents, each loudly proclaiming their product as they walked by. Back and forth. Back and forth. Back and forth. I of course had an aisle seat, permitting an up close and personal viewing area of goods – like it or not.
Unfortunately for my lust of photographic documentation, the one ultra hip dude who happened to catch my eye (out of the many selling the skewered squid), either didn’t understand the concept of the camera and my question of whether or not I could take his photo, or simply didn’t want his photo taken. I was sorry to miss out. Somehow his hip tapered-leg jeans, (fake) designer shirt, cap & coiffed hair added a certain panache to his ultra casual stroll up and down the aisles, bucket of squidsticks in hand. Too bad.