|
SubscriptionsSites I Read
|
|
|
|
| I stand on the corner outside a restaurant in a rural Cambodian town at 6:45 in the morning, traffic swirling by and dust blowing in my eyes as I sip on an incredibly sweet ice milk coffee, my clients inside putting in calories for the big day on the bikes ahead, and ponder on how strange it is, that this is so normal, only a week after leaving my home in Canada!
Days filled with overloaded trucks careening down the highway; choruses of "hello" from wee kids along the road, up trees, n' in ditches catching fish in the mud with their hands; friendly folk cruising up slow beside on their motorbikes to get a closer look at the crazy barang on their flash bicycles with their flashy outfits; stopping frequently for 12 cent glasses of fresh-squeezed sugarcane juice poured over ice; laughing and sharing simple & dirty jokes with the Cambodian crew in my pidgin Khmer; sending love messages on my phone across country & oceans whilst parked in the shade at rest stops; every day averaging 90 km distance and enough speed to keep a breeze that makes a full day in the Cambodian sunshine seem less hot than it actually is!
Nights ending blissfully early, tired out & slightly sore in towns with nothing much going on at night anyways, to wake up and start it all again early the next day.
Now back in Bangkok & appreciating the quietude & bizarreness & lack of 'development' in Cambodia. Here there are fat people again, and more of those with the disgruntled lines on their faces that only well-off urbanites can earn, the power almost never goes out, and ice cold beer abounds. A foreigner is not much special here, even one who can speak some Thai! It's almost enough to make me long for the red-dust broken down goodness of the Khmer street... except that air-conditioned 24 hr 7-11 just down the lane from my 5$ guesthouse is such a luxury I can appreciate!
And although you can't drive anywhere from 5-7 pm but for the traffic jams, nature abounds here! Seeing a 2 meter long lizard monster sliding it's belly with trepidation along a major street beside the democracy monument whilst whizzing by on a motorcycle reminds me that no, I'm not in a western country. Lizards on the road & in the canals, squirrels on the power lines, cats lazing on the rooftops, dogs sleeping on cars & a raven swishing overhead as I walk down the lane... these are some of the things I'm noticing! | | |
|
Sept. 11 2008
I’ve spent the last 12 hours standing on BC highways
listening to music
hackey sacking
in the sun
getting sweet rides,
Starting off with
100 mile morning
cold early crazy-style wake up on the ranch
endless coffee breakfast with Stu & Kate at the Gold Pan cafe
first ride, a small car pulls a dangerous U-ey,
Dave, Shauna & Andy brought me the first 197 K’s, 100 mile into Kamloops
a visit, lunch & amazing conversations with glowing auntie Doris at the mall,
and a lift over the hot hills out to the edge of the Yellowhead highway
where I collected sage
bringing the sweet heat home
and had my longest wait for a ride, 1hr, 3 lanes,
shoulda known better
highway-accidents worker Jurgen drops me on the perfect on-ramp
for getting out of Merrit,
a lucky 88 k
and I don’t even wait a cigarette for the next ride,
somewhere around 250 k’s,
in good company to Langley with a little side trip to pick up a trailer in Surrey,
and after getting the answer in Chinese as to where to get the bus to the skytrain,
less than 2 hours in transit before I’m back in Vancouver.
--
| | |
| These little snippets were written almost two months ago now, to try to encapsulate just some of the experiences had since the bottom of the year at Christmas time… they take me from Laos, working on bike trips and playing on a river trip, to China and Beijing, where I was living for 3 months in a behemoth Chinese apartment block. They’ve been good times and in 3 days I’ll get on another plane and fly back to make another descent, working my way down the east asian continent and perhaps heading more west from there come Christmas season!
No thanks to the Chinese government for blocking my access the site and my inability to find a proxy server that will let me post from the mainland.
Thanks to my sis El for the great idea for a collection of literary snapshots instead of a boring long travelogue!!
-Life’s pretty quiet in Vientiene, the capital of Laos, so at night it’s the Don Chan disco or make your own fun. Like perhaps a sunset trip 40 km’s to the psychedelic Buddha park with Marty Sharples, ripping it up on rented Chinese scooters, stopping along the way back at all the cheesy nightclubs we could find. Can recommend Dodo, in the field on the Mekong across the street from the Beer Lao brewery.
-Kuang Si Falls, Luang Prabang- been there a few times now, pedaling hard out on crappy bikes to this little oasis in the jungle, or in the back of a jumbo with fellow river paddlers and Marty. There’s a pool one has to scale rocks to get to, where one can be dared by the local (fully indestructible) kids to jump off a huge tree overhanging a cliff into a pool of turquoise blue water 35 feet below… you know you’re pushing it when a brown mud stains the water surface after you’ve surfaced, good thing it’s mud and not rocks down there… and if you’ve dried off after the swim then you’re not likely to stay that way on your ride home, ‘cause if it’s around Laos new years the kids will be lining the streets to splash water at you in your tuk tuk and they love to target ‘farang!’.
-The Nam Ou, or Ou river, flows from the northernmost tip of Laos in Phongsali province into the Mekong just before Luang Prabang. Almost 3 years ago I had met some Americans who had traveled by motorboat on this river; with my slight grasp of Lao languange and a love of canoe travel why not do it un-motorised? So I met up with my sister Eleanor and we traveled two days by bus as far as we could reasonably go north on the Nam Ou. An auspicious sign came on the second day’s bus journey just out of Udom Xai, where the driver slammed on the brakes as we were going down a hill, throwing the tightly packed passengers hard into each other, to let a black snake as thick as my arm slowly slither across the road. Then in Hat Sa, a tiny outpost on the north river, we bought a crappy old boat for 50 bucks and started off downstream! How to do it? Tell a few people you’re looking to buy a boat, park your bags and your butts in a noodle shop, drink cups of coffee and eat noodle soup until someone comes along to make you an incredible offer. It was an odyssey suitable for an Asian Huck Finn…. Mango rains, first night our boat leaked and almost sank while we were sleeping in it. Cooking hot ovaltine over a bamboo fire first thing in the morning we traded cups of the hot sweet-milk laden liquid for bananas with a couple of Khamu villagers walking along the riverbank to their fields. El learned quick how to navigate rocks and find the downstream ‘V’ in the frequent rapids, and our languid floating downstream was often punctuated by our mad paddling and shouting through the rapids. We pushed hard and eventually after 4 days made it to a town called Muang Khua, which had a road, and a guesthouse with showers and food! There we met up with four others who would become great friends as they were also paddling the river and starting the next day. Greg, Cecilia, Peo and Lydia were amazing companions, swapping stories and smokes along the way and coming up with creative recipes at beautiful campsites, telling great stories, rescuing baby goats, and Greg and Cecilia even sunk their canoe so El and I got to be closer to them in ours for the rest of the voyage. Insects and birds buzzing in the thick green forest that sometimes came right down to water level drove out the echos of traffic, car horns and cell phones lingering in our minds at ever turn of the river. We were warmly welcomed in the village of Hat Sa (there’s two Hat Sa’s on the river and we visited them both) where we drank rice wine and listened to traditional music with the village elders at 8 in the morning before our departure, and were shown around the village where they still regularly find cluster bombs and other dangerous unexploded ordnance in the forest dropped by U.S. bombers on their way back to Thai airbases during the American/Vietnam war. F*#k the American war machine, screwing things up then as they are now. Laos is the most bombed country per capita in the world, around 3 million tons for what was then about 3 million people, all by the Americans and there was never ever any official recognition of any actions taken by the U.S. of A in Laos. Go figure. We eventually made it to Muang Ngoi, our end destination, exhausted and nearly broke and ready for some hammock-time. After too many home-made billy-hoots on the Vina GH balcony our Berliner friend Lars bought our boat with all the camping gear he could use for the grand bargain of 20$ and sunk it a few days later on his way downstream. Luckily he only lost a flip flop and some beers…
-Song Khran, Laos new years (and Thailand and many Buddhist countries) is perhaps the most fun public holiday I have ever encountered. 3 full days of street fights with water splashing, ash, grease and powder smearing, and copious amounts of alchohol consumed by some. Bouncing truckloads of youths covered in tar and paint, drumming and dancing and throwing water like the fighting Uruk-hai of Tolkien’s universe. Doubling my Montrealer friend Peo home at 5:30 pm on a broken bicycle weaving in and out of back-lanes with Lydia guiding us, him holding tight eyes closed and me just trying to go straight; we managed to get back to the guesthouse and I said “cool lets go out for dinner in an hour” and woke up the next morning naked on the bed recovered and my cell phone and wallet completely drenched, clothes covered in ash and powder. I’m very impressed my friend Marty made his flight that evening since it was him that instigated our crazy state!!
-Another strange night in transit, rushing up to the China border at Boten to get out of Laos on the day my visa expires. After riding north in a private van with a new generation of Nam Ou canoe trippers inspired whilst meeting in Luang Prabang, I am left alone in Udom Xai to wait until my bus leaves in the morning. The cheaper hotel I’ve opted for, the Lin Da, is across from the best noodle soup shop in town, which I discovered after checking in was closed down. I tried to have a quiet night; after the two 13 year old masseuses at the Red Cross massage centre tried unsuccessfully to up sell me for a sexy massage I returned to the hotel to rest up, finish a bottle of wine and watch a DVD on my computer. Not to be, as the hotel is a super sketchy Chinese owned affair, and prostitutes knock on my door repeatedly, and just try the doorknob when I start answering. One in particular, with stunning grey/blue eyes (you’ll note it’s quite rare to meet local se Asians with this eye colour), that I had had a lengthy conversation with in the sunny hallway that afternoon when I moved in, was moaning at me through the window out to the balcony which I had left open. She was moaning because she was deaf-mute, couldn’t speak. We conversed in the hallway for about half an hour using a piece of paper drawing pictures, and utilizing the amazing expressiveness that deaf-mute people can use with their eyes and face. Eventually the movie I was watching ended, the girls stopped bothering me for the most part, I put my earplugs in, and at 7 the next morning I was standing at the bus station with my bag sipping a hot cup of tea and waiting for the cold morning mists to burn off.
-A two week overland journey back up to summer operations base, Beijing, picking up the pieces of my old gypsy life along with gear and clothes that I’d stashed from southwest to southeast china in hotel storages spaces. Fresh air in Kunming, many good friends coming out of the cool wet season in dragon-land Yangshuo, and spending way too much money as usual on a visa run to Hong Kong, and taking the train forever up to the capital of the People’s Republic of China.
-Beijing goodness, living downtown in the often overbearing heaviness of 18 million people living together in one city. Refuge is easy to come by in the form of rooftop cafes, breezy tree-shaded brick courtyards in the one-story hutong neighbourhoods that survive inside the 2nd ring road in the old city. Construction cranes are on every horizon and the character for ‘chai’, destroy, is spraypainted over all kinds of building walls, along with the sounds of ‘chai’ing’ and building as hundreds of thousands of peasant labourers from the coutryside tear down and build up the new Beijing. The bar staff at Nan Jie, an infamous “shut up just drink” watering hole, leave a friend and me to sit singing to each other on the patio, enjoying the early morning quiet in the mad city, while they close up shop and head home on their bicycles, not worrying about us or the glasses left on the table. I ride everywhere on my bicycle, a black racing bike with a few gears that even work, which I bought from a repair man on the street for about 20 $ with free servicing. The bike lanes are incredible in this city, and if it weren’t for the fumes it would be one of the most bike-friendly cities in the world. I live on the tenth floor of a Chinese apartment block, a 5 minute ride away from ‘Gui Jie’, otherwise known as ‘ghost street’, known so for the fact that people come here 24 hours a day to eat at one of the fantastic restaurants along the red-lantern lighted street.
-A darker side of Beijing, the big grimy city, it’s concrete dust and fumes saturate my guts. Here flourishes a freewheeling sexuality, beasts bounding around inside the random concrete and brick of this urban stage, hunting, lurching and bouncing around again, again, around corners through alleyways in rooms drinking drugging and fucking for to explore the confines of our city and body mind.
| | |
|
Picture time! They do look funny... or maybe it's me!
| | |
|
Cruising along the lovely roadside, N. Laos.
| | |
|