We’re so removed from my winter travels now that I will merely hit a few of the higher and lower points in an effort to catch up to the present. (After finishing it, I can’t believe how long it is, but it is just a glimpse; perhaps not the highlights, but the things that first came to mind.)
As we left off, I had become the human belching machine, sans off switch. Bottled water could produce foghorn-like results. Fellow travelers laughed and felt the need to share stories of their own disgusting bodily functions. Most of the locals gave me their best death stares. The only upside I found was that, after using every way I knew to say that “No, I do not want either my sandals or my backpack polished”, a loud belch was wonderfully effective in sending most street vendors on their way to their next target.
Fortunately, one local was not offended. As a matter of fact she found it a bit amusing. I failed to find any humor in the situation and we agreed to disagree on the matter. Since she owned her own coffee shop and was usually free after noon, she became my tour guide. As far as I’m concerned, it’s the only way to see a country. Trang exposed me to parts of Saigon that I would never have seen otherwise, both good and bad. She even nursed me and ran out for supplies when I was limited to either my bed or bathroom for a couple of days. That’s above the call of duty for someone you barely know.
Trang (The best I could do - she hated having her picture taken)
We had some fantastic dinners in very nice restaurants for well under $20 but usually ate at little sidewalk cafes. I don’t know what other word to use, but they were not what you think of when you hear “café”. Picture a dirty, little side street with dozens of little, plastic tables and stools of the sort a four-year old would use for a tea party and you’re pretty close.
Trang would spend some time ordering many dishes and I kept expecting a feast to appear, only to receive a plate of small crab claws and 4-5 plates of various snails, ranging from spicy little black ones the size of a small button to rather bland ones the size of a small lemon. Not what I probably would have ordered, but they were very tasty. The first night, rather surprised to be so content, I leaned back as far as I could without falling off my stool, sipped a beer and thanked her for such a wonderful meal. The smile on her face told me that she was pleased, but as she reached out to touch my shoulder, I realized that she was simply amused by the rat-sized cockroach going for my jugular vein.
Cyclos are a bicycle taxi I’m sure you’ve seen pictures of. You recline in front like a pasha and the driver sits behind you on a very high seat, pedaling while giving a constant commentary on the sights that you can’t possibly understand. They are gradually being phased out by the government and so I wanted to try them while I could. The problem was that every day more and more streets are being made off-limits to cyclos, so they would invariably drop me blocks from where I wanted to go, sending me off with a wicked grin. I came to realize that the grin was related to the directions they had just given me. Language problems or not, basic sign language should have made it clear that I wanted to buy a couple of shirts, not fish guts.
Cyclo
After touring around on a cyclo one morning, I decided to check out the war museum. I knew ahead of time that all of the displays would proclaim the greatness of the war effort and the evil doings of Americans, but I worried about a guilt trip. I was too young to have even been there for the war. That didn’t matter a bit.
As soon as I walked in the museum I realized that I had made a currency error. At 16,000 Viet Nam Dong to the dollar, all of those zeros can get a little confusing. I had just given the cyclo driver $30 instead of the agreed $3. On top of that, I had tipped him another $10 for hauling my fat but all around town. I had just made the guy’s month and was feeling pretty stupid. Just as I was staring at the ground and cursing myself a guy walks up and, in fairly good English says “Happy New Year” and shakes my hand. I was shaking a stump. Kind of caught me off guard.
He spent the next ten minutes trying to sell me guide books and phrase books at sky high prices. Every time his pitch did not produce the desired effect, he would smile and say “Happy New Year” and stick out his stump for me to shake. I felt sorry for the guy. He had lost both hands and one leg. I was feeling guilty, even though I hadn’t done it. And I did not want to shake his arm again. It felt like an athletic sock full of mashed potatoes. I now own a Vietnamese phrase book, never used. He was good.
Just to give you some background, Vietnamese people love American movies. My hotel room had cable television and it seemed that at least one third of the channels were showing Hollywood fare, albeit ten years old. They find it fascinating. What fascinated me was that the dub-overs are all done by one person. I caught an action flick one night and sat there in a stupor. Danny Glover, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Dennis Hopper were all shooting and screaming at each other with a vengeance, but every single word of dialogue came a Vietnamese woman who sounded like she was reading the phone book. (I may have got one of the actors wrong, but you get the idea. I can‘t find my notes and am working from memory. I can never find anything when LD cleans the place.)
One night when Trang and I were in a very nice bar I discovered that, although she loved tequila, she had never heard of a Marguerita. This was a matter that called for the most serious intervention. Some hours later she insisted that we stop at a roadside stand and buy sandwiches. I indicated that I was not very hungry, to which she replied “Food good when you drink! You eat!” She emphasized her point by planting her knee squarely into my favorite recreational equipment.
I was regaining my feet, but not my breath, when she finished buying the food, turned to me and said “I saw that in an American movie.” Apparently the actor had done a very poor job in conveying the discomfort that usually follows such a statement. She thought it was just an effective debating technique. I wonder if I can sue the studio? Of course, the next morning she had no recollection of said incident.
By now I had blown off my plans of traveling to several cities along the coast and had spent ten days with Trang in Saigon. Tet (New Year) was fast approaching and because the country basically shuts down for the week, I had to make a decision. I had to leave or agree to accompany Trang to her home in DaNang for the holidays. Since she was starting to show slightly schizophrenic and definitely pain-inducing tendencies, I thought it best to board a bus for Cambodia.
If you ever find yourself trying to get away from an unpleasant situation, trust me, Cambodia is not a viable option. My belly was now in an uproar, having raised the stakes a little, and the smell of raw sewage wherever I went did not help as much as you might think. One morning I took a tuk-tuk (a small trailer attached to a motorcycle) on the one hour trip out of Phnom Penh to one of the infamous Killing Fields, easily one of the most disturbing and depressing places you could ever imagine. A four story, glass-sided tower of skulls greets you as you walk among dozens of excavated mass graves. Everywhere you look, bits of clothing and human bones are working their way to the surface, especially on the path you’re walking on. It was soul numbing. This was the highlight of my trip. Doesn’t say much for the rest of it.
1-Bones on the footpath
2-Tower of skulls
To make things just a little worse, my tuk-tuk was besieged by little kids as we left. They ran along behind with their hands out, laughing and shouting. I didn’t have any small bills and felt a little guilty, but you simply can’t help every beggar you come across. There just isn’t enough time or money in the world. When one kid, about 6-7 years old, jumped onto the back of the tuk-tuk I laughingly squirted him with a little water (it was a hot day). He hopped off and as we were pulling away I realized that he was begging me for the water. The kid didn’t even have clean water to drink and I had laughingly splashed it around and kept the rest. I don’t think I’ve ever felt lower in my life. As soon as we got back into town, I bought a ticket for the next morning’s flight to Bangkok.
As I sat in a taxi headed toward the airport the next morning, I was still regretting not going to see the temples at Angkor Watt. Prior to coming here they were just about the only mental image I had of Cambodia and I certainly wanted to see them. What I didn’t want to see was the thousands of European retirees that have supposedly make the place feel much more like a theme park sponsored by Geritol (or so I had been told.) I just wanted to relax on the beach and recuperate.
It was then that I had my first encounter with Cambodian marketing. I’m sure I had seen other examples, but none that came to mind, even now. On a billboard proclaiming the wonderful service that you will experience with Royal Cambodian Airlines the most prominent feature is the airline logo, apparently a very ancient symbol of some significance to royalty. That’s all very nice, but the thought of an airline having for it’s mascot a chicken (or any other flightless bird for that matter) can’t really be all that effective. Even Kiwi Air has some type of unidentifiable logo so as not to remind you that kiwis aren’t that hot in the flight department. Would you have a penguin as a logo on your plane?
It didn’t matter. I was flying on a chicken free airline and saw bits of Bangkok from my taxi on the way to the beaches of Pattaya. Two hours later I was sitting in a beach chair, reading a book, drinking a beer and having my legs and feet massaged (I’m very good at multi-tasking.) A few days later my health had finally returned and I realized for the first time that I hadn’t coughed in a week. My normal morning hour-long routine involving projectile phlegm had been absent; I just hadn’t noticed due to other concerns. All of the Beijing air was finally out of my lungs! I decided to celebrate and be adventurous. Elephant safari here I come!
I can honestly say that I’ve never spent much time thinking about elephants and it showed. Yeah, sure I’ll buy a bunch of bananas for my elephant. They’re very small and a bunch has about 30 of them. It doesn’t take long to get fed up with ripping bananas off the stalk every ten seconds so I handed the mahout (jockey) the whole bunch. He was a little smarter than I was and simply gave them to the elephant all at once. That didn’t take any longer for him to process than a single banana and his trunk was soon back in my face looking for more. After a while he decided that smacking me about the legs would convince me to come up with more.
FEED ME!
He eventually gave up begging and just plodded along. I had been a little disappointed to be seated on the lead elephant because it meant that I wouldn’t get many pictures of our group, which I thought would be a little more interesting than simply looking down on small trees. I very quickly came to appreciate that I had been given the seat of honor. Just another thing I had never given thought to: elephant flatulence can be a truly awe-inspiring and fear-inducing phenomena. I was now very thankful to be riding in front.
Just as I was chuckling at my fellow trekkers’ discomfort my elephant made one last plea for a banana, thinking I may have been holding out on him. I still don’t know if it was an expression of dissatisfaction or merely a sneeze, but the effect was the same: I was covered in elephant snot.
After a few days in Pattaya my curiosity had peaked. Every time someone found out that my name was Mike was a cause for laughter. Half of them would mention Mike Shopping Mall, a very prominent landmark and we would laugh it off, “Yeah, same-same!” I didn’t have much luck convincing anyone that I actually owned it. The amount of laughter just didn’t seem justified by a shopping mall though.
I was at an outdoor beer bar one afternoon playing some drinking game with the girls on staff when the name issue came up once again. Apparently not many Europeans are named Mike. Forget about seeing many Americans. I ran across two college kids from the states and they latched onto me for the entire night. They hadn’t seen an American in two weeks. Once the girls stopped laughing and got back on their stools, one of them explained that in Thailand there is a monkey called Mike. Just a little look from me set them off again and soon girls from the next bar (6 feet away) were joining in. I never did figure out if it is a type of monkey or just one, very famous monkey. However, I did end up introducing myself as Mark a good deal of the time.
I knew I had to be back in Beijing by the 17th, since that was LD’s (little dictator, aka girlfriend) birthday. I decided that I wanted to spend at least 4 days in Bangkok and, to tell you the truth, ten days on the beach was plenty so I packed up and left.
I have to admit that Bangkok was interesting but, after three weeks of basically honest people trying to sell me things, I wasn’t prepared for the big-city, simply rip you off attitude I found there. Tuk-tuk drivers will never take you where you want to go, insisting that you first stop off and look at some suits. If you are the slightest bit vague, you’re in a world of hurt. I told one driver that I wanted to go to one of the river docks to catch a gondola ride through the canals. He took me to one, charged me 100 baht (US$3) and hurried off. I found that the boat service charged more than twice as much as I’d been told to expect, so I walked off.
Apparently it’s pretty common. A short ways away, a man was standing beside his personal car and offered me a ride to a better boat service. Fifteen minutes later he dropped me off at a dock where they charged the normal price and refused any fare. He said that the boat service takes care of him. My faith in humanity slightly restored, I jumped on the gondola.
This wasn’t a nice romantic, Venice-type contraption though. It sported a V-8 on a swivel mount and a propeller at the end of a fifteen foot extension. We headed upriver and into the canals. They were an interesting view of Thai water life and I got to see everything from temples to people sleeping on the porch, small kids playing to komodo dragons basking in the sun. The driver stopped at one shack, sort of a drive-up window for boats, and ordered us a couple of beers. I had agreed to buy and it went down well on a hot day. Since we had established a precedent, he pulled up to another twenty minutes later and, before I knew it, I was asked to pay three times as much. Being one of only three people in sight, I paid.
Next stop: another temple. I got out to wander around and take pictures but noticed that the driver was slipping back to the boat. I snuck around another building and watched as he rifled through my backpack, finding nothing but a small notebook and a towel. It was definitely time to get back to civilization.
I spent the afternoon and evening in one of my favorite pastimes, drinking Southeast Asia style. Open air bars are the greatest concept since alcohol itself. You can sit at a bar running the perimeter of the establishment and literally stick your feet out over the sidewalk. You can’t beat it for watching people, and in Bangkok there is no better sport. Souvenir vendors, food hawkers, drunks, hookers, lady-boys and sights that I have yet to classify were in constant parade. Now that’s entertainment!
As I sat there talking with another American about his life in Thailand (as well as a few medical problems that made me permanently take Laos off my to-do list) I felt something grab the beer in my other hand. I assumed it was either an aggressive street vendor or a cute waitress so I hadn’t decided on how to react before I turned around. For some reason I had not anticipated being in the middle of Bangkok and finding an elephant trying to take my beer. It was only with the assistance of my new friend that I managed to stay on my stool. Later I realized that my “friend” has been facing that way and hadn’t said a damned thing. Welcome to Thailand rookie!
The racket in Bangkok is to sell you a small packet of chopped fruit so that you can feed the elephant. The guy gets a markup on the fruit, his elephant gets fed and you get a warm fuzzy feeling. Everybody’s happy. Apparently it works too good. The elephants start to think that everyone has food for them and he had been checking out my hand for food. He wasn’t really all that interested in my beer, which is lucky for him.
I had already experienced what can happen if you don’t give an elephant food and wasn’t eager for a repeat so I bought a packet of fruit. I had learned that it would be easier to give it to him all at once, but this was dozens of small pieces in a plastic bag so it wasn’t very practical. I’d been drinking for a while so I can’t really blame what happened next on the elephant.
The bits of fruit were fairly small and slippery so I was a bit slow in pulling them out for her consumption. She grew tired of waiting on me and started to grab the entire bag. I swear, I really did think “that can’t be good for her to eat” before reacting just as I would with a dog; I smacked her on the nose, or on the trunk in this case. She made a little squeal of surprise, took a step backwards and started flapping her ears. My continued existence may be due to the fact that just then my hand emerged from the bag with a large bunch of sweet, tempting fruit. I just may have been the first person ever to be killed by an elephant while sitting in a bar enjoying a beer.
Thankfully, it was time to go home. My thanks were retracted when I emerged from the airport into 20 degree weather wearing just a sweater.
A week later, I was coughing again.
1-Market outside my Saigon hotel
2-Saigon style house
1-Public service announcement - he sure is a happy little fellow!
2-Now THAT'S Marketing!
1-Phnom Phen gas station
2-Cambodian marketing
1-Apparently Thai Gods are very particular about their soda.
2-I understand completely buddy!
